Wednesday, December 12, 2007

You Should Be Ashamed of Myself

Alright, so I'm pretty sure these things were due this morning, weren't they?

But I'm the only one that's actually posting anything.

hmm...Bonus points?

Anyway, I'm as done with this fucking thing as I'm gonna get, so I guess it's time to turn it over to you gentle and not-so-gentle readers of the internet.

http://alex.benevent.googlepages.com/

Go nuts.

4 comments:

Joy said...

Excellent Project.On the first page i was confused briefly, until i clicked on the first underlined word. I was so impressed with the time it probibly took to write all of this and to connect these pages to oneanother. It must have also been hard to be as open as you were about it.

Adam Johns said...

I have a sort of stock critique all prepared - the sort of canned thing that can work for lots of papers. It goes something like this: "You're skirting the edge of just being interested in form here - your character is familiar, too familiar maybe - an echo of _Less Than Zero_ or _Fight Club_."

That's a slightly less polite version of what I said about the draft. The reason I'm being slightly less polite it I don't really mean it any more. That isn't to say that these critiques aren't technically true - this is a perhaps too familiar character, screwed up in perhaps too familiar ways.

The thing about emphasizing form over content, though, is that it can _work_ if you do it well enough. In pure prose, this would have read as a rehash of a certain kind of contemporary novelist. In hypertext, it works for me - the invocation of documents, real estate adds, journal entries, strange visual queues, the branching form which makes us wonder where we are exploring different stages of someone's life or alternative paths on this life (is this a CYOA of sorts) - you start out with what I see as a problematic idea, but attention to detail, especially visual detail (the film major at work one more time) makes it work.

I've struggled with how to incorporate hypertext fiction into this class. Honestly, if you don't mind keeping this active, I may be tempted to just use this.

Adam Johns said...

Oh, I thought the French Foreign legion link was hilarious.

A. Benevent said...

Yeah, I was pretty tapped creatively this time around, I will definitely give that up right now. I was trying to reference Danielewski as well as some other, cooler webpages that I'm not good enough at flash or HTML to do (the donnie darko page would be way cooler to teach in class, in my opinion), but I don't want to sound too pretentious here.

The "twist" ending was cheesy as hell, too. I just thought it was funny. If you really wanna use it in class you're more than welcome to, I'll polish it up a little bit more here or there for you, too, as time permits.