One theme I had in my blog posts was external or personal connections to our class material. Four of my blog posts or comments focused on these connections. In my first blog post titled, “Why would you read a book twice?”, I wrote about Choose Your Own Adventure books and my personal experience reading them as a child. I attributed my obsession with them to their competitive, adventurous qualities. In another blog post called, “Combinatory Tweets: “Slotted” Technique vs. Markov Chain”, I wrote about an external connection to combinatory writing. The external connection was a Markov chain called Automatic Donald Trump. In my post, I described Automatic Donald Trump as a “site that allows you to generate a realistically fake tweet by Donald Trump with just the click of a button.” This external connection was also a personal connection because a friend showed it to me. The third post, which focused on an external connection to our class topics, was a comment replying to a classmate post about COVID-19 and its sublime qualities. This is entirely an external connection to the topic of sublime. I recalled a personal experience from my trip home from Davidson, “When my friend and I crossed the George Washington bridge last week, there was no traffic. What normally takes us an entire hour took under a minute.” Lastly, in my most recent blog post titled, “Texting: Careless or Purposeful”, I made multiple connections with the outside world and the game, Bury Me My Love. The game Bury Me My Love has the format of a text conversation. In the post I explained how when you’re playing there is distance between yourself and the character you’re playing which reminded me of cat-fishing. The one post that didn’t revolve around external connection was a comment I made on a classmates post about Shade by Andrew Plotkin. I wrote about this game’s frustrating aspects and that I preferred hypertext pieces that are easier to maneuver.
After reviewing all my posts or comments, I saw a clear positive progression in my blog posts that was spawned by a larger understanding in digital literature. While this might seem like an expected shift as class progressed, it was especially evident in my blog posts. By a positive progression, I mean that I felt my blog posts improved in content and writing style as time went on. Especially in my last post, I felt a comfort in my writing in the topic of Bury Me My Love that wasn’t present in the CYOA book blog post. This progression came from developing a better understanding and appreciation for the class material we covered. Coming into digital literature, I had no idea what I was getting into. I recently explained the class to an outside friend and they asked if we read books on kindles, and that is exactly what I had assumed when I entered the course. Not to worry, I was able to set them straight on digital literature and its intriguing qualities beyond kindle books.