then, what of a hypertext that does not act?
or one of its aspects, specifically? or one that, by only acting visibly in tandem with other aspects, appears to be one that does not act?
what of text that does not allow for the hypertext?
when all is purely text, and the hypertext is absent, then too is flattened the "self".
this is something we have come to describe as “digital dysphoria”. the experience of losing part of your hypertext, and thereby part of the ability to express text.
memory and history are encoded in objects and locations—this is what aria would refer to as “ensouling”, i believe—and that is then incorporated back into “the self” as Hypertext and Context as they rejoin with specific Texts.
this is a large part of why being apart from the usual keyboard, the usual vehicle, the usual outfit, the usual group feels so distinctly off. something is missing, and that something is part of the Context. the Hypertext reaches for a Context that is not there, and it falls back to others. readjusting to this change may never be truly fluid.1
as you have no doubt noticed (and if you haven’t, i really wonder for your ability to parse information), we are massive fans of hypertext in the vernacular meaning. being able to play with text and impart different meanings to different words and presentations in a way that isn’t constrained to social media spacings and the speed of discord conversations.
and at the same time, this is also External Memory itself, as has already and will already be said elsewhere.
i think we stray a bit too much from repeating ourselves; that’s another way in which the convention of linear experiences and communications press on us. but that’s a little harder to solve right now, so i won’t bother trying.
i’m going to instead think about writing a visual novel. or two. there’s a couple jams this year that we want to participate in.2
my actual concern for this project, this projection, is that it isn't faithful enough, that it isn't complex enough, that it can't properly convey things.
...
nothing ever will, though. "This will always be incomplete."
so… we’ve just got to try our best.
Footnotes
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this would have linked back to something about limbs or trans-humanity—i’ll just put it here. do you ever feel like you’re missing the right limbs, the right digits, the right muscles? the right ways of moving through the world, ones that are incongruent with your currently held Context? i don’t know who really owns the wings and tail among us, but every now and then they’re there, on the periphery of feeling, dancing just past the edge of consciousness, that sensation you get when you wake from a dream and it’s all…wrong. for a while. and then you get up and move about and you’ve settled again. the Discworld novels do a good job of representing the Context as necessary for the Hypertext to maintain a coherent form—this is one reason that we don’t generally like to think of things in terms of souls and bodies. the spiritual molds to the physical, and then the physical extends to more physical according to the spiritual. how many times have we said the same thing over and over and over again? it’s never enough. ↩
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even more relevant because we’ve been playing racquetball or ping-pong or hell-knows-what with the thoughts of how to handle text. i’m at least dragging us into ren’py to get familiar with its bindings and settings before we have to seriously contend with writing something in it, and as a break from translating research and trying to form a 4-dimensional slice of our Hypertext into a set of interconnected blog posts. ↩