Author: ssewasty

While I suppose Jason Nelson could be considered somewhat of a creative genious, I think that the way his head works is completely unique from any sane person on this planet. While we have worked with multiple pieces of his work, I am still drawn back to the Bomar Gene. Normally hypertexts like this that  are seemingly so abstract are unappealing to me. I don’t want to have to draw insights on human romantic relationships from a hypertext of a wagging dog’s tail. While the Bomar Gene had some abstract genes, It also had genes that really appealed to me.

The stories on the side of the window gave the hypertext a personal and more meaningful appeal. They were all stories that were strange accounts of what we can assume are actual documented incidents that left me with an eery empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. The genre of the stories made me feel like there was something I wasn’t quite getting, that I could feel a meaning in the pit of my stomach but I just couldn’t figure out what it was., or I hadn’t quite reached it yet, or maybe I just wasn’t looking at the work collectively enough, or maybe there was riddle behind the gene names that would make the meaning less evasive. I was particularly fascinated with the Felton Color Gene, I remember telling all of my roommates and people I talked to that week about it. It was just so strange, morbid, and peaceful all at once. That someone would take that authority into their hands in order to save a girls life. That someone would be gifted enough to understand another so unlike her mentally. It just really struck a cord with me.

I was really disappointed when we watched the viedo of Jason Nelson as he tried to explain, or rather mess with us, fool us, tease us about his work. I don’t think he was even remotely genuine in explaining his genes. They seemed too simple and from what we’ve seen from him throughout the class, it seems as if he likes to hide his deepness behind simplicity. His video showed us that he’d rather make jokes and make fun rather than make deep evocative and insightful points. But the quality and genre of his work just makes it unbelievable to me, and perhaps the only person that it is meant to have meaning for is him anyways.

I believe this online database of thoughts is very much like We Feel Fine.  I feel like they could have tried a little harder to make it one of their own. I think even if they had changed the color scheme it would have made it slightly more unique. Ok I’m done with that for now. I like this database slightly less than the We Feel Fine, but I believe that is just because We Feel Fine blew my mind in all sorts of “Sarafriendly” ways.  Twistori expands its thought database to include not just the feeling “feel” but hate, love, think, believe, and wish as well. It also includes the sentance in which the feeling is stated, but instead of just displaying what is stated after the feeling, it will sometimes display the beginning part of a statement if  the feeling is towards the end, something that We Feel Fine limited itself against.

Surprisingly enough, as I observed the website I noticed that the Love and Hate feelings tended to be the most arbitrary. At first I found it slightly ironic since Jonathan Harris’s other website we were to look at (Love Lines) was formulated strictly on a set of statements ranging from love, like, to hate. Most of the feelings in these two catagories in Twistori were statements made nonchalantly such as “I love weekends” or “I love when my teens are snarky”, “I love shopping”, etc.

I found that the Believe and wish were two of my favorite feelings. While all of the sections tend to have a fair amount of both arbitrary thoughts and evocative feelings, I tended to find myself more intrigued and pesonally drawn to these sections. “I believe things ultimately balance themselves out. That simply recognizing something as a problem doesn’t obligate one to solve it”,  “Missing the one
I wish who was there for me. Wait who is that?”, “i wish that i didn’t try to fight things so hard, that i could just accept other people’s stupid senseless rules a lot easier. ” These both tend to be a collection of people’s battles with emotions.

I really like these sort of databases. I was all about We Feel Fine and this is so much like We Feel Fine that I can’t help but love it. I love the stark contrast in colors between the black back drop and bright lettering. It really helps signify the different emotions. I also love the idea of gathering feelings and thoughts. Websites like this I feel really bring a sense of humanity out of the world wide web, which is constantly being attacked for breaking us a part and nullifying emotions and important personal feelings and actions. I have probably spent years looking for websites like this without even knowing that this is what I wanted to find and now I have a plethora of them right in front of me. I think it was a great idea for twitter to come up with this variation of We Feel Fine and give its users and others an opportunity to see the collective impact of their 170 (?) something lettered blogs.

“Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs” was a breath of fresh air to me amidst so many hypertexts that stretch your mind and vision to the peripheral. It was a relief to find that I was more in control of this hypertext than any of the others we have recently done. It could hardly be considered overwhelming in the face of Young-Hae Chang’s fast-paced works that leave me feeling as stressed as finding out all my financial aid had been revoked or something. The hypertext games just had so many other distracting features I found it difficult  to get past the first level without getting stuck in my own frustration about the “deeper” meaning of the task at hand.

The foreward of “Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs” is very informative and you can see right away that there was a lot of thought, consideration, and research involved in the creation of this hypertext. I like that this explanation is given and we are not left to fend for ourselves as is the norm with Nelson. I like that this hypertext is not meant to confuse you, but instead wants you to appreciate the art and techniques themselves. The texts that fly across the page correlate with the bird sounds you chose to play. It is perhaps a much more soothing form of Young-Hae Chang’s use of music and pace of words. But this is instead formatted to move across and around the screen in a more artistic, peaceful, and correlating way. The sounds and texts rely on each other, the bird sounds being altered as the text bumps along with other bird sound text. You can see how some bird calls remain in form, only being altered by the inclination of sound within its fixed form, while others flow from chaos to be merged together, and even others fall a part with the clickclucking of sound. It is interactive in that you get to chose which bird songs are being sung, how many are sung and overlapped at once, and when and if you want certain songs to stop.

I tend to not like the fast pace of Young-Hae Chang’s hypertexts. The constant flashing of words at such rapid speeds and the black and white block lettering leave me feeling as if I am asking for a seisure to be granted to me. I find these hypertexts leaving me feeling stressed and anxious. Although there is slightly more going on than in “Bust down the Doors!” which only adds more strain to my being, I do tend to prefer All Fall Down over “Bust Down the Doors!”. The music gives it a much more cheery feel and instead of being entirely stressed out about the text the music aids in giving the hypertext a more “game-ish” feel. I want to be able to read as much as possible more as a competition for myself than out of music instilled fear which I found as one of my main motives when studying “Bust Down the Doors!”. Flipping the colors of the text and the background also gave the text a more positive feel and helps in understanding what the text is actually saying better. Upon first viewing it in class I was included in the group that had to watch this top part. It felt almost as if the text was lyrics to the music playing. The text moved with the music and it seemed as if it had the same amount of syllables as notes in the music. The structure of the text and the way it flashes, moves, and disappears at such a rapid rate gives off a sense of chaos, the inability to gain control, at the hands of the elements presented to you, and confusion.

Originally, I thought that the text was lyrics to the music I pictured a little banjo band sitting outside a stoop clapping their hands to the music, with the “Ah, Yah, Yup, Right, uh-huh’s” being sung words of agreement to the main lyrics/singer. Then I got the little banjo band image out of my head and I thought that the black background with white text seemed to be a commentary on what the phrase proceeding it in white background and black text was saying. The text starts out playful but as it became a little less light-hearted and instead kind of crazy and weird, the image of a crazy person saying these things popped into my head. The phrases were all so nonsensical yet still correlated in some strange way. You always hear about how crazy people sometimes have extraordinary mental capacities and can process some things in ways that no other human can and that is kind of the feeling I got from what I imagined the speaker of the text to be. I finally came to the conclusion after sifting through all of my initial guesses that it seems as if it is one speaker blaming himself on mistakes he himself has made, and humanity as a whole has made.

Rather quickly though the text begins to take on a different tone. It gets kind of mean and vulgar. It says something positive or cute, reminiscent of playfulness  or cute eye catching phrases like “beautiful town”, but then follows it with things such as “too damn late”. The text mentions some girl looking drunk and good in red lipstick, her looking good even as she falls down drunk and how “you” never even spoke to her, “you” fool.

It gets faster and faster to the point where really it becomes nearly impossible for me to read the black background white text, and instead only the white background black text. the text continues with negativity and talks about emails falling down, servers falling down.. everything that could possibly fall down is mentioned to do so. Basically, the demise of everything humanity puts its trust in is just falling down. No sunshine, lose your mind, flame out… these are few of the phrases that make me think of nothing but the end of hope and complete loss of faith.

So then I went back and read the bottom part of the page as it scrolled at a soft and steady pace across the bottom of the scene. The text is much more poetic and thoughtful and you can see the speaker is distraught and deeply emotional over the loss or being unable to obtain this women. He writes about her thoughtfully and carefully about the way he longs for her and the things he notices about her.  But he also writes about himself as well, “have you ever felt if you be youself just like they tell you and it isn’t good enough”. This section seems to be the logical stable side of the speaker that gives some explanation to what it was that ticked him and sent him in the crazy uncencored downward spiral we see in the text above.

This is one hypertext that I thoroughly and truthfully enjoyed in the midst of many hypertexts which have evoked little, if any, emotional or insightful recognitions for me. It was so powerful and meaningful to me to read a woman that is so thoughtful about her body. It is interesting how she recounts specific memories about the parts of her body that I myself have experienced yet would have hardly have considered them as memories, or even experiences for that matter, until i read sections of her hypertext. I don’t think I ever even really thought about it as it happened, but as she tells the story of her arm hair standing up against the friction of the seats at school I can distinctly remember the yellowed crayola colored chairs of elementary school and the shocks the friction sent through my arm hairs.

I can see through her memories that there is a confidence in her being and the way she views herself that is near impossible to find in a woman. when she talks about the hair on her legs she tells the audience how she liked the hair on her legs and didn’t care about her friends reprimanding looks at her hairy legs. As a girl approaching or even beginning adolensence, she portrays a confidence, nonchalance, and sense of free spirit that practically no girl raised in a public school would exemplify. I remember as a lifeguard, just through being finished with puberty, seeing little girls running around with golden fuzz on their legs and thinking how cute it was and why I had become so mortified at something so, well just cute.

This woman shares experiences that almost all women, and most men can relate to having experienced. She writes about these body parts and memories in a unique and thoughtful way. Her eloquent writing skills portray a sense of cherished-ness about such simple aspects, beautifying things such as sexual exploration, feet, hair, etc, that society teaches us to feel ashamed or embarrassed about.

The format of the hypertext adds to this sense of unique ness and cherish towards these memories and body parts. She lends each aspect of her body its own individual section with its own thoughts and memories. She connects them by allowing her audience to click on key words that lead to other memories. This adds a sense of unity to the piece and relates the tone of each individual page, to her work as a whole.

My eyes are blue. I’ve always been told how striking the shade of my eye color was, ever since I was a little girl. Ever since I was in first grade I’ve worn glasses that have covered up my striking blue eyes. In sixth grade I finally convinced my mother I was mature enough for contacts. I sat in the optomotrist’s office for 2 hours trying to put my contacts in. The concept of touching my eyes and feeling their gooey wetness sent shudders down my spine. I wore contacts over my eyes for eleven years. Every morning and every night I would cleanse my contacts with solution and put them in and take them out. This summer I got lasik eye surgery. I worried that I would finally be able to wake up and see, but I wouldn’t recognize my own striking eyes.

I remember spending library time in elementary school reading tons of Choose Your Own Adventure books and not following any of the rules deemed necessary in them. I was however completely unaware that there was more than just the CYOA books out there and that interactive fiction was an entire genre fueled even more so by the web. Just as with the CYOA books, I find the genre as a whole interesting to a point, but beyond that annoying. I don’t get the endings I want so I switch it around. Although with hypertexts like Photopia I could not break the rules with a simple flipping of pages like in CYOA. I found the interactive fiction on the web to be frustrating and annoying. With these I could not simply make a choice and go with it. I had to work with the programmer and the text to find proper ways to word commands that would agree with the hypertext or continue. It was frustrating having to gain a feel for the program before I could really progress into the story which I think could either encourage or discourage a user depending upon their type of personality. I couldn’t simply create a command. I had to retrain myself to think in a different way which perterbed me. It was a tedious task considering that only one out of every three or so commands would provide me with a continuance of the plot, although I suppose I did find it satisfying when I finally got the hang of the program, but by then I was ready to be done with it. Mainly, I’d be more satisfied if we could go back to CYOA, only with a little more added difficulty to the text and choices.

Through mapping out my Choose Your Own Adventure book I obtained a stronger grasp on how these types of books are set up. Although these books are obviously an easy read, it seemed like creating one would have been a daunting task for an author. With the formation of my concept map I learned certain techniques the authors used to format these books. I remember as a child always running into the same plots over and over again, but through mapping my book, Deadwood City, I realised just how many possible endings the authors had to create (my book alone having 38 seperate endings). Although there were quite a few stories that connected together, I was also surprised at how many seperate plots there really were in this barely-over-one-hundred-page book. It’s intriguing how simple and yet so complex these books tend to be.