Hansel and Gretel is famous for its notoriously bad parenting. However, the smart kids find a cabin of candy and escape for the perfect ending. In my version, it’s the kids who misbehave and act so greedy when it comes to candy that they might not deserve a happy ending. When you come upon a “take one” cauldron of candy on the night of trick or treat, do you take one?
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Author: anonymous
Reflective Blog: External and Personal Connections
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.
Texting: Careless or Purposeful
After starting Bury Me My Love, I was intrigued with the text conversation format. Texting is something that I take for granted and experience every day. Often when I’m texting I don’t think twice about a message that I’m sending. Since most of my texts are mindless it was interesting to see how texting can be used to tell a story. The interactivity also made me think deeper on what I was texting and how it was going to affect the story. One quality that stand out to me about texting is the carelessness of it. The carelessness of texting made me think of the connection to cyber-bullying. It is extremely bold to say something negative to someone’s face. However, is only takes a few seconds and very little consideration to send a hateful text. And if the sender regrets it, they can just delete it from their phone and erase the memory. It is also easy when texting to not realize how someone could interpret a text.
Another connection I made from the text conversation style of this interactive fiction game was how texting can make you feel so close to someone you might have never met face to face. In the game you are playing the role of the husband who is texting his wife. On online dating apps or chatting apps, people often talk to people they only know through one picture if that. The show Catfish became popular because of how many people were faking who they were on online dating sites. The victims of cat-fishing never suspected anything because their relationship was built from texting.
Why Wouldn’t You Save the World?
Why Wouldn’t You Save the World? forces readers to see the facts. Climate change is real. It also comments on how big businesses haven’t taken any initiative on climate change even though they are in the best position to do so. Why Wouldn’t You Save the World? puts the decision in your hands, but is it the right one?
Combinatory Tweets: “Slotted” Technique vs. Markov Chain
I’ve enjoyed learning about combinatory writing more than previous topics in class because I have a better understanding of the code that produces them and because they are somewhat familiar to me. In a previous class I learned about artificial intelligence and natural language processing which are intertwined in combinatory poetics and have had major influences on them. As we dove into discussion in class this week and viewed Don’t Drink the Water by Dr. Sample, I was immediately reminded of a possible combinatory writing example that one of my friends showed me last year. The piece my friend showed me is called Automatic Donald Trump created by Filip Hráček. Famous for his twitter presence among other things, this site allows you to generate a realistically fake tweet by Donald Trump with just the click of a button. As I read further into the code and explanation, I found that this generator was created using a Markov chain. The author explained a Markov chain in simple terms. He comparing it to how an autosuggesting keyboard works on an iPhone when you’re texting. After you text one word, the keyboard supplies you with options based on common sentence structure and based on what you’ve texted before. This specific Donald Trump tweet generator used all of Donald Trump’s previous tweets as the information bank. Therefore every word you generate has already been tweeted by Donald Trump, just most likely not in the same combination.
I compared the Markov chain style to the random “slotting” technique that we are using for our tracery projects. Both of them have random aspects but the tracery project is more random since the next generated word does not depend on the previous one. It would be interesting to see if there was code that allowed us create a dependence for some slots on our projects.
Why would you read a book twice?
I’ve never been someone to reread books or re-watch movies. The main reason is because if I try to reread a book I will almost always remember the ending before I finish the first chapter which spoils the whole book for me. However, when I picked up my first choose your own adventure book (CYOA) as a child, I read it multiple times. I spent much more time on a single CYOA book than on a traditional book. I loved that instead of having to go out and choose another book, you can reread the same one over and over and never really know what ending you’re going to get. Another reason I was driven too reread CYOA books was the idea that there were multiple endings and that maybe I could find the BEST ending. It became a game for me to see how long I could last or if I could complete all the quests and come out on top. In the article “Standard Patterns in Choice-Based Games” from These Heterogeneous Tasks, the author Sam Kabo Ashwell describes various patterns that can be found in CYOA books including one called the gauntlet. The gauntlet proves that my childhood goal of correctly navigating to the best ending could’ve been reachable. The gauntlet is a pattern that has one clear thread but many side branches that can lead to abrupt death. The clear thread, if followed correctly, will lead the reader to the finale. However, this is not the only pattern that CYOA books can take. Ashwell describes patterns like open map, sorting hat, loop and grow, and time cave. While some of these also have one “best” ending, many have multiple viable endings or many different paths to the same happy ever after. I loved choose your own adventure books because in a way they are competitive, addicting and consuming. These qualities ensured that I didn’t put my CYOA book down even during dinner as a child.