I feel I owe you something special this week, denizens. I’ve been flaky enough as it is for the better part of this year…but then I didn’t even show up last Friday for our now weekly meetup here. Mea culpa. <\/em><\/p>\n

So what have I brought to make up for this unexcused absence? Something special, indeed. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing…well, that’s something that you’re going to have to decide on your own. <\/p>\n

A little history: When I was one of Testudo’s minions, I had the pleasure of being one of the first English majors to take part in a new concentration one of the tenured professors was working on, based on the spark of potential he saw for us in the steadily growing online world. <\/p>\n

Yes, I know how old that last paragraph makes me sound. Shut up. <\/p>\n

He was an awesome professor, and one of the few I encountered while at the University of Maryland who wanted more than just his own words parroted back to him. He wanted creativity. He wanted different, weird, strange, provocative, pensive, funny, angry, querulous, bewildering, bemused…he wanted original and unhinged and reaching and odd. He wanted us to climb into the spaces of this new world and see what we could build. <\/p>\n

This was one of the most enjoyable classes I took the entire time I was in college. No syllabus, no textbook, no rules, no limits. He had two major assignments, both involving our own creativity and steadily increasing familiarity with HTML coding and graphic design programs. The first project involved designing an online space, with different “rooms” into which visitors could enter in whatever way we deemed most appropriate. We needed a theme…everything else was up to us. Basically, he wanted us to show him how we could take the power of words and combine them with the power of code to create a whole new, interactive reading experience. <\/p>\n

I called my project “Tongue: Hypertextual Experimentation.” I based the themes of my “rooms” on the different taste bud groupings: sweet, bitter, sour, and salty. I even built little “hallway” pop-ups that blended the various taste groups together in short little vignettes as you transitioned from one room to the next. And I had Steven Tyler be my visitors’ guide: <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I was a long way from Shop-Fu in those days. But I had way more time and creative energy, which was what really mattered. I also had a blast doing this project. I loved each of the pieces that I wrote for the different rooms, but I think “Bitter” was my favorite. Surprise, right? <\/p>\n

I named the piece I wrote for this room “Diatribe,” with the tag line “Because Bitter Is A Better Way Of Life.”<\/p>\n

I really haven’t changed much at all, have I?<\/p>\n

Needless to say, it is an incredibly bitter bit of writing, even for me. Lots of bitterness bubbling just below the surface for that young little wolf. But, embedded as one of the many links I used to make my rooms truly “hypertextual,” was this little gem, which I called “When Frat Boys Attack”:<\/p>\n

\nI had often heard about the fabled “Frat Boy” but I had never actually seen one up close and in action before. After all, the ones who had been in class with me in the past usually only made it in once every week or so and when they did show up, they’d be sleeping off a hangover in the back of the room. And it would be an easier task to get me to hang glide off the Empire State Building than to drag me to a Frat Party at any university (and if you knew how scared I am of heights, this statement would mean a lot more to you than it does right now).<\/p>\n

My inexperience with Frat Boys was destined to end, however, in a most bizarre fashion.<\/p>\n

I suppose I should let you know this<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I feel I owe you something special this week, denizens. I’ve been flaky enough as it is for the better part of this year…but then I didn’t even show up last Friday for our now weekly meetup here. Mea culpa. So what have I brought to make up for this unexcused absence? Something special, indeed. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12518"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}