Hey Everyone!

We made it to the end!

I am happy to report that my project is about 70% done. I am very excited about it.

The whole project takes place inside Google Sheets. It starts with a sheet with two links. One takes you to a website that allows you to generate scrolling text from the opening of Star Wars. The text is a suicide note from the protagonist. After that, you go back to the sheet to continue.

Next is the iceberg. There are x’s inside the boxes in the iceberg. When you click on one, it takes you to another page in the sheet. The things above the iceberg are things that are out in the open and the things below the iceberg are hidden by the protagonist.

There are different elements that I have used. There is prose about the protagonists life before their suicide. There are song lyrics that have been made into blackout poems with links to Youtube videos of the song. There are clips from anime. If you don’t know the source material, the clips seem out of place. For example, one clip is from an anime where the protagonist kills themselves and wakes up in a new world where everyone has wings, yet people who commit suicide have black wings.

I’m going to include one hidden thing. I am going to make a box behind the moon that links to a sheet. It will take all of the songs that are included in the piece and put them in order. There will be a note from the protagonist telling the reader that when they die, this is the playlist for their funeral.

The piece is meant to be confusing, maybe a little disorienting, and not fully understood in a narrative sense. There is no one reason why the protagonist commits suicide and I want the reader to see that. I guess the reader is going through the life of someone who committed suicide and trying to put all the pieces together.

Writers Are Not Strangers

‘Writers Are Not Strangers’ has many stories, and at first, the stories did not make much sense, so I had to rate them as well. Then, as I read further, the stories started to make sense. It was like a game where, at the end of each story, you had to either answer a multiple-choice question or fill in the blank, and then the story would add the name or word you placed in the blank, which was very interesting. Each story was different, covering assorted topics that took Alix on a personal journey with her friends. I found it to be long and sometimes hard to follow and understand.

Alix is a young YouTube-style content creator and writer whose mother is hospitalized and nearing death. Alix’s stories reference classics like Middlemarch and games like Space Invaders, providing a layered commentary on derivative creativity and originality. They blend fiction, game mechanics, and critical theory into compelling digital experiences. Again, I found that at times it was hard to follow and confusing. It is all about Alix’s journey in her life with her friends and family.

Retrotas Vivo de Mama

Carolina Lopez Jimenez is a Colombian writer and artist working across different disciplines. “Mom Living Portraits” was published online in 2015 and is still being updated. It is a documentary, hypertext narrative, and autobiographical electronic literature. Inspired by Lopez’s mother’s prolonged illness and passing, it explores mourning and memory within an evolving digital space. “Retrotas Vivo de Mama” is a scrapbook of Lopez Jimenez’s mother, beautifully created in Spanish, where her mother’s voice narrates various stages of her life and her family. The scrapbook is filled with family photos that tell a compelling story; it was beautifully made. It feels as if her mother’s voice is speaking aloud throughout, telling her story. I lost my mother a year ago, and I am thinking about creating an online digital scrapbook for her, highlighting our family and her life’s various stages. This has inspired me to make a digital scrapbook with photos of my mother and our family, which I believe is a wonderful idea and could serve as a heartfelt tribute mother.

By: Lareice Weeks-Bigelow