Tag Archives: love

student blogs

E-lit Final Project: When Love Becomes a Click

I want my e-lit project to explore what happens to love when it exists mostly through screens. Not just the social media version, but the kind filled with missed calls, delayed responses, and the quiet anxiety of time zones that never quite line up. My idea centers around building an interactive fiction about a long-distance couple trying to survive the distance while still learning how to love each other in a digital world.

At the beginning of the experience, the reader would choose the characters’ love languages: words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time, physical touch, or gift-giving. These choices don’t just act as personality traits, they shape how the story unfolds. A character who values quality time might struggle more with distance than one who values words of affirmation. The story would unfold through text messages, voice memos, short poems, and shared music links. The reader wouldn’t just read the relationship; they’d participate in maintaining it.

Each chapter would present the reader with choices: Do you send a poem or a playlist? Do you wait to respond or call immediately? Do you confront immigration issues directly, or avoid them out of fear? These decisions lead the couple down different paths. Some endings might show diaspora love surviving systems designed to break it. Others might show how distance, lack of intimacy, or family pressure slowly tears them apart.

Visually and structurally, I imagine the project looking like a chat interface or message thread, where timestamps, loading dots, and unsent messages become part of the narrative something like “Hana Feels” or “Writers are not Strangers.” There would be moments of silence built into the story, blank spaces where users have to sit with the absence, simulating what long-distance actually feels like. Music and poetry would function as emotional artifacts, love letters in digital form, showing how intimacy adapts when touch isn’t possible.

This project matters to me as a person that had had to navigate a failed long-distance love, it isn’t just about romance. It’s also about borders, migration, cultural expectation, and emotional survival. By making it interactive, I want readers to feel the weight of choice,  to understand that love online is not passive consumption, but active, fragile construction. Every decision becomes political. Every message becomes evidence of care or neglect. In the end, some relationships will survive. Others won’t. But either way, the reader walks away understanding that love, like electronic literature, is shaped by systems, interfaces, and the emotional code we choose to write within them.

student blogs

Two Doors, Two Worlds

In exploring digital literature, few experiences have contrasted as strikingly as Welcome Home and Façade. Both works invite us into intimate spaces, a home, an apartment, a world that feels alive, and yet what unfolds inside those spaces couldn’t be more different. One pulls us into the comforting embrace of nostalgia and imagination, while the other confronts us with the messy, unpredictable emotions of adulthood.

My experience with Façade was mostly through YouTube videos, yet it still managed to pull me in. It’s strange how something so minimal in design can feel so human. Watching Grace and Trip argue, confess, and crumble felt invasive but also deeply real. Every interaction carried emotional weight. You could say one wrong thing and the whole night would fall apart. Even as a viewer, I felt tense, caught between wanting to help and knowing I couldn’t really fix them. It was comical at times, but underneath the humor was something uncomfortable; the quiet truth that sometimes, love doesn’t feel like home anymore.

Then came Welcome Home, and the shift was immediate. Suddenly, I was surrounded by color, warmth, and friendship. Wally Darling’s cheery voice and the gentle community around him felt like a return to childhood, a simpler time where kindness mattered and everyone had a place. It reminded me of Sesame Street, where every character, no matter how quirky, was loved and accepted. There was something comforting about that, especially after the chaos of Façade.

While Façade showed me the cracks that can form in relationships and communication, Welcome Home reminded me why those connections matter in the first place. It’s about understanding, patience, and finding joy in togetherness. Even knowing that Welcome Home exists now only through restoration efforts, there’s something beautiful in the way people are coming together to preserve it. The anonymous team behind The Welcome Home Restoration Project isn’t just saving a piece of media—they’re saving a feeling. That’s what art does when it’s loved enough: it lives on through the people who care about it.

Experiencing both works side by side made me think about how important it is to preserve not just art, but the emotions it carries. Façade captures the complexity of adulthood; the frustration, miscommunication, and longing, while Welcome Home keeps the child inside us alive. In a world that often feels heavy and divided, we need both kinds of art. One helps us face our reality; the other helps us dream beyond it.

For me, Welcome Home isn’t just about restoring a show, it’s about restoring a part of ourselves. It’s proof that love, joy, and imagination never really disappear. They just wait quietly, like Wally Darling, ready to welcome us back home.

student blogs

“High Muck a Muck”

I’ll begin by acknowledging the helpful instructions on the opening screen. No, they don’t tell you exactly what to press, but provide the reader an expectation point. I found this much more intuitive in comparison to “Twelve Blue”.

Some may argue that the lack of direct instructions feeds into the message of the form, but the instructions provided by “High Muck a Muck” are done artfully. They look like they belong on the screen, and they are thematically relevant.

The poetry throughout the piece is meaningful, beautiful, and impactful—not overshadowed by the intricate layers of media woven together to make “High Muck a Muck” what it is.

Image layering is an important component of the introduction. Behind the English text appear Chinese characters, and water droplets appear over specific characters as the poem describes someone crying.

We are here with someone, someone who is interacting with this text in the real world as we look on from the digital world. I moved forward to the image of a body, one I have to click on. There’s music playing, Chinese music.

Each part of the body has a different title.

This type of symbolism is not possible in traditional text. The implications of bearing witness do not feel as real when you are not watching someone’s tears hit the page, or engaging with someone’s story by touching different parts of them.

The utilization of multimedia creates a new avenue for storytelling. One that allows us to engage parts of storytelling that died with many traditions of oratory storytelling.

student blogs

“Twelve Blue”

I can sense I’m going to have a little bit of a difficult time when it comes to navigating electronic literature. Navigating anything, in general, is a bit of a problem for me.

You could probably put me on the opposite side of my home-town and I wouldn’t be capable of finding my way back home. I like directions. I like order and a path. I am capable of making my own path, but I am slow and bumbling. I make mistakes and get confused easily.

My memory is about the size of an almond, maybe two if we’re being generous. It makes a lot of sense why I like to read, it’s straightforward and you can’t really mess it up all that much.

When you make a mistake when you’re reading, you flip back a few pages.

When you make a mistake reading “Twelve Blue”, good fucking luck.

The text is haunting, poetic, and electric in the way the reader gets to practically touch the texts themselves and move them about. But, there is no way to go back once you’ve moved forward.

There is no clear path that shows you want to click, and much of the discovery process is trial and error.

This brings the story to life, making it dynamic, a new experience for each reader. The story resembles navigating real life in the confusion and discomfort that comes from a lack of direction.

The process of learning how to effectively navigate electronic texts without the daunting fear of a mis-click will be a huge challenge for me. In both study and practice I’ve proven easily frustrated by exploration based learning.

I am nervous for how this bodes for my presentation, but hopefully with enough time to practice, I will be able to navigate Welcome Home properly for my peers.