NEW MEDIA: Hypertext

Feels strange and yet so normal, working on a project that makes tomorrow appear a deadline and makes me hope for snow.

Just the skeleton of this, the Poetics/Cannery Row essay, would be better and more easily planned out perhaps in Macromedia, or Powerpoint, but who has time to learn these timesaving devices.  I love the learning; but it just takes so long to learn the simplest things and then remember them when not required again immediately.  And I really should clarify that it is not fully learning–especially when not retained–but rather the figuring out, the solving of the immediate mystery, the dig around and click this thing or that and thank-God-for-the-Undo-button game of it all.

And here, while the software would help tremendously in the planning and the writing, the power of hypertext as in Macromedia FlashX particularly in the way this is laying out would be the perfect medium for the presentation.

Likewise, I design a banner yet can almost but not quite get what I want.  I learn the Illustrator tools–of likely stumble upon it; only to forget where and what it was an hour later.  A cockeyed website banner I need to move.  I play and play with numbers, press the buttons look again–it hasn’t moved a pixel.  Coming off Adobe Illustrator, working with a selection arrow, how very badly I want to simply click on it and move !

As soon as I am able, I will seek out an online course perhaps that will more quickly teach me the direct paths to answers for the questions. The side trails take not only time but disturb the pattern of the thought process when we wander off and double back and crisscross over needlessly, until the sense of where we’ve come from has been lost, and the most direct route then, never truly found.