Hypercompendia

Black Clouds Gathering

Well you know, hypertext doesn’t necessarily mean there have to be alternate pathways.

This story could have been another of my conversation with background but yet because of its nature, it needed to be conversational only to avoid giving away the ending. So it’s not a good representation of hypertext technology and yet I believe that the hypertext form of presentation, that is, one page at a time, greatly adds to the impact of a story such as this. One’s eyes cannot slip down the page to the end sentence nor flip to the last page in the book; one must follow step by step.

Just had an image of a giant screen full of map, where with a finger you can read the space as if picking out pages. Navigation based on visual concept of the story rather than textual links. Or is that no longer “hypertext?”

I’ve done images in spaces, but not considered the story map view as the total navigational force before, though of course it’s what I use and view as I’m writing. Interesting.

Ashbella and The Criminal

Couldn’t quite get Steve’s story but I knew it likely went a lot deeper than what I was getting from it so I sort of took the idea of a criminal and matched to it an antagonist that I shamelessly named Ashbella (cinders, you know?). What’s neat about this story is that at the get-go each character developed a need and the story was that naturally they had to meet.
So I played tricks again with the Title and that allowed two beginnings. The middle can be a direct route of five links, or it can weave around to give more details and run maybe a dozen spaces. There are four endings to this one, though in real life, a single click can bring you into infinite possibilities.

One thing that made me laugh just as I exported this and ran a quick check: The ‘back home’ and ‘back to start’ code was not available on all four end spaces. It took me a few minutes of checking code to realize that the problem was in the css sheet. I’d coded the color of the background of the box as the ‘visited’ link! But that is something to keep in mind for use in future stories.

The Game

This was the second attempt at a story; the first is neatly filed away for a more focused day to untangle. This is taken more directly from Steve’s story as far as an old man and a game of chess. It is a gentle story, short, and interpreted completely by the reader.

This time I’ve used the hypertext to allow no backtracking via looping. What this in effect does is keep a story to a single thread of five spaces. However, there are at least a dozen different paths by which to follow the story to one or the other ending. What you read then is a version of a single character’s life in the example of a day. I like it.

This only happened once before in 72 days, but this hypertext story went terribly awry.

There was a plan, there was as story, there were characters. I had dialogue, I had conflict, I had drama. No, wait a minute, I didn’t have drama. I had a situation. By the time I got around to creating a pinpoint of action, the story was out of my hands, sprawling like butter on a hot August afternoon, impossible to mold back into a recognizable story.

Back to the drawing board.

Names

This one just kind of got away on me. It started with the idea of names and how a person is often prejudiced by prior experience with a person of a particular name and is wary–or enthusiastic–towards meeting new people with that name.

Is it a story? Yes, there’s a single story in here. There are also lots of stories in here.

Just Words

Another marital conversation that has deeper meaning underlying the words. A storm as metaphor. A narrative arc that circles back onto itself, but this time, with a completely new meaning to the words spoken.

The links are specifically geared to allow the reader to choose to follow the story by dialogue alone, or with the interjections of action and scenario.

I think that this, next to #51 Snakes and Snails, is one of my personal favorites. With the simple words “I thought you said it would stop,” from Steve’s story, the implication immediately came to mind of what “it” might be. While there is still some tweaking to do here, I think that even in its simplicity it does use the hypertext form well.

Symbols

A strange little boy, unearthly you might say, and a couple who go about their normal routine. In this case, the couple is visiting a museum as the boy observes them.

The mapping of the story is rather simple, allowing the reader freedom to move about the museum watching the boy watch the couple.

An Enth of A Degree Out of Whack

What inspired me here was the concept of when the best laid plans get messed up by a matter of a decision, or a minute’s delay. How does a sudden change affect what some believe is destiny?

This is another group of short-short stories, three spaces each (although four of the stories of two possible endings) when an extra minute is slipped into the space of time.

Revenge of The Kilobytes

Steve’s story implied computer technology that opens up to questions of more intimacy with the user. This inspired me to going a bit beyond the scenario to a more Hal-like computer personality.

I thought of the Windows De-Fragmentation screen where all those little colored boxes are rearranged and bytes of material are sent back to stand alongside their relatives. I thought of networking. I thought of all kinds of cooperation among the kilobyte community and came up with a few pranksters in the group.