Damn: wasted an entire day

Greetings!

I ran into this title as Link Of The Day on the User Friendly web site. It is a work of non-linear fiction, converted to the web by the author. It has consumed a rather large chunk of my work day. Not that anyone passing my cubical would notice - me sitting staring with a glazed look at the monitor for hours on end is not unusual...

While it does not have the gameplay / interactive aspects of the InfoCom genre, the concept and execution are (in my opinion) quite good. Especially for its age...

Damn you! Now I'm doing the same thing. I've never read one of these and I think I might have been reading out of order. Once I got to Day 1 i just started reading everything linked on the left. Sort of a creepy story.

Glad I could help.

I'm sucked in too - might need to wait until I get home for most of it!

Not sure how it would work in the full sense of "interactive" - I tried, but found running through each one in sequence is the only way that makes sense to me.

Pretty cool. Still on Day 3!

I actually owned a copy of that when I was a kid. Never finished it, though. Found it irritating, as I kept waiting for there to be something for me to do other than wander around to different computers until I found the right one that would tell me the next bit of the story. Seemed like it took the worst aspects of both print and computer storytelling and wove them together into a sum less than its parts; You had to wander around and wait to get more story, but you also didn't get to affect the story. It was like the missing useless member of the novel/Infocom/Choose-Your-Own-Adventure set.

Now, again, I never finished it, so maybe my assumptions were wrong, but I have the feeling that they're not. In other ways, it's kind of an immediate predecessor to hypertext, but, then, almost no one does anything literary with hypertext these days, and few ever did.

Was it just my browser(s), or did some of those pages contain only the first fragment of a sentence? Was I missing some text? Did the shorter, few-paragraph pages also have more text?

Still, it's kind of an interesting story, though I'm clicking through one page at a time. I guess I could do it interactively, but I've always been one for brute force.

<edit> Haha, this page is funny.

I know!!! I was laughing at that too. Sadly, the only IBM - AT&T alliance was for outsourcing large amounts of jobs. Ah well...