I'm writing web code again, embarrassingly enough, and it isn't the goodreads-for-ttrpgs thing. If anyone was waiting for that... sorry. Instead I'm writing the most self-indulgent thing possible, and I'm writing it in what some would call a self-indulgent way.
Okay, so here's what's up. When I was in college thirty years ago I was fortunate to stumble across this thing called Storyspace, by way of the homie Michael Joyce who was teaching there. I won't go deep into that because I've already started making a zine about all this in Decker, which is an app I'm pretty sure I learned about on here? that was inspired by HyperCard, which was 1) my obsession when I was 13, 2) the way I found out at that age what a memex was and what Ted Nelson's Xanadu was supposed to be about, and 3) unsurprisingly, also in play in this web app I'm making.
I'm calling it Textplex. It is not solely a middle-aged man on his bullshit. I think.
The real reason I'm doing this, besides web-development reasons that are yet another post, is that both Storyspace and its publisher's other, more recent jam Tinderbox are commercial software: $150 for Storyspace, and $300 for the more current and more broadly useful Tinderbox. It's not about any sort of grudge against the publisher/designer, a guy named Mark Bernstein who's written a lot of smart stuff about hypertext, or commercial software in general - I am kind of glad that paying money for an app is coming back into fashion (oh god the spectre of happening to re-like everything you liked in college comes back, and I don't re-like it), although free suits me better.
Bernstein's thing is obviously the visual dimension of hypertext, what spatial relationships add to a text or to a database. I still remember Michael (he had us students all call him by his first name, still unusual back then oh god why do I get so much older in parentheses) saying in some talk or paper that he was proud of slipping into some encyclopedia of literary-theory stuff the claim that hypertext was primarily a visual form, which he felt was a radical idea. Anyway Michael was more into the less-explicitly-visual computeriness of hierarchical structure, shot through with interesting ways to cut across and undermine that structure. That was Storyspace all over (he co-designed it). He made lots of use of a feature called guard fields, a cryptic, regex-like syntax for putting limitations on where a link would take you, based largely on what other pages you'd seen in that reading, other links you'd followed, et cetera. He used them to make loops of re-reading, where you'd come back to a page (screen? The official name for a text-unit was lexium, which didn't catch on, go figure) many times but the links, all layered up with different links that had different guards, would have new paths.
Honestly I was never all about the loops. My ADHD wanted novelty and my autism wanted to understand the whole structure, to know when I was finished. But I was, and am, still enchanted with the Storyspacey genre of hypertexts, despite being a somewhat shallow reader of literature in these and other ways. The space part was my jam. I wanted to traverse a story, walk around a world. Michael was also passionate about online textual worlds, introducing us all to MOOs, which are another another post. Let me rein this in a little.
I'm making a web-based tool that can do the spatial arrangement and hierarchy from Storyspace - which is basically just a weird outline with links - plus the highly visual types and databasey extra-attributes aspects of Tinderbox. Sprinkle that with some HyperCard - as little as I can manage because the scope of this is already nuts - and you have Textplex.
I read this piece by Robin Sloan recently about the current moment in web (and hypertext) history, and how it is very much a time for "experimentation and invention." I want to make a first-class hypertext environment that is also connected to the web, and just... keep trying to make it more powerful and interesting until cool shit starts to happen. I've got these skills, and I'm fresh off a decade-long detour into fucking React and ready to use them again.
And I'm wary of expending a lot of energy talking and thinking about the project instead of putting that will into making it. So I'll shut up for now.