The Chupa Media Collection

E05 in Error Messages, Jijack

2007-04-27T21:17:00.000-07:00

E05 in error messages, or Jijack

This one requires a bit of an explanation.

In its infantcy, Jijack was a short story called "The Creature", which was told entirely through pop-up messages. As the hapless and innocent reader attempted to read through an e-version of War of the Worlds, they would be constantly bombarded by flashing text and cheesy effects that would eventually make the intended text unreadable.

Unfortunetly for the world, "The Creature" possesed the one flaw that makes an short story unreadable. It wasn't finished. And so the idea was scrapped.

Without an idea, but full of wimsy and frustration with Stockton (for one reason or another), I decided that I would keep my hijacked website plan, but replace the story with quotes that my roommates and I heard around campus and loved so much that we would eventually use chalk to make them part of the permenant decoration for our apartment.

Because I was so mad at Stockton (and being able to remember why would make this story so much better) I decided that if a site was going to be ruined, even in a simulation, it was going to be the homepage.

(Viva la revolution!)

Eventually, the name was shorted to Jijack, simply because "H" and "J" are dangerously close to eachother on the keyboard.

Jijack also marks the third occasion that the Ordon Sheep has made its way into a Stockton project.

It's also interesting to note that I'm not longer mad at Stockton. In fact, I'm a bit sad that the semester is over, because now I have nothing better to do than read a lot of Nabokov and play a lot of videogames. Somehow, this makes the entire project just a little bit ironic.

Flash: Six word short story

2007-04-19T20:27:00.000-07:00

Six word short story

You would think that with such a dreamy image and graceful font that I would have written something beautiful and eloquent. You would be wrong.

Hypertext

2007-04-14T13:34:00.000-07:00

The Secret Sharer

The hypertext site was originally designed to be different everytime the reader visited the main page. The background image would change, the text would change, and things would be added or removed. Because the story it tells deals with secrets, I wanted the site to give the reader the feeling that they weren't getting the whole story.

Because of the complexity of my orginal plan, I was forced to simplify the site and remove the aspects of the fiction that were randomized. Rather than letting the reader choose where they wanted to go, I made it so that the reader could only choose one link, and would be directed through the story in a linear way.

Dreamweaver site: Ordon Sheep Pong

2007-03-12T08:51:00.000-07:00

Ordon Sheep Pong!

Ordon Sheep Pong started out as a very different website with a very different concept. Originally, the site started our as Bolero of Fire, and featured unique and creative advertisments gathered from around the internet. Technical problems, however, forced me to scrap the Bolero site and rethink my concept. I decided to go with something more fun, and replaced the advertisments with photographs of tattoos, specifically tattoos based on popular, and not so popular, videogames. In keeping with this theme, I named the site Ordon Sheep Pong, a joke that has it's root in videogames.

For the main Sheep Pong logo, I scanned in a hand-drawn image from a whiteboard and adjusted the light and contrast until the lines were black and the background perfectly white. As for the font, I chose Bradley's Hand, which matched the image almost perfectly.

Full text .pdf

2007-03-11T13:04:00.000-07:00

Linked below is the full text .pdf of The Goat Herder. Depending on your browser settings, you may need to to adjust the document to show at 100%.

The Goat Herder

Editor's Introduction

2007-03-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

In the history of writing and publishing, the internet has given birth to a strange new phenomenon: the spontaneous publishing and abandoning of personal writings. All across the world, amateur writers sit at personal computers, writing memoirs, science fiction and literature that will eventually be hosted on private or commercial websites at no cost to the reader. These stories, however, are rarely ever posted in their full and complete forms. They are published in pieces that range from three pages to more than a dozen at a time. Chapter by chapter these stories appear on the internet, sometimes gaining huge fanbases that watch and wait for each new update to the story. The quality of these stories often varies from phenomenal and nearly publishable, to incomprehensible and littered with webspeak. All of these stories, however, have one thing in common. More than seventy-five percent of them will be abandoned before their completion.

I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count. For reasons that are often unknown, a creative and talented writer will abandon a promising story without ever completing it, leaving it to fade into the background of the internet. Authors themselves also often disappear, erasing all of the files on their blogs or websites and leaving fans wondering why they left and where and when they may resurface, possibly under a new name and with a new style.

As I prepared to leave my current archive and start a new with a fresh site, all of these issues came to mind. When I deleted these stories from the internet, what would happen to them? They
would never be completed, but did I really want the unfinished fragments to disappear forever? Not a single one of them was perfect the way it was, but nonetheless they were important. No writer should ever allow anything that they write, regardless of quality, to vanish. Every single one of them is an important landmark in my progression as a writer, and even if only for a day, they were the most important things in my life.

With this in mind, I decided to compile all of the unfinished novels and short stories that I had written between May of 2005 and November 2006. Although they would disappear from the internet, they would not vanish. There would always be proof that they existed, if only briefly.

The book you hold in your hands is that proof. The stories within it are in their original, unedited forms to preserve the characteristics that made them either memorable or easy to forget. They are complied in no specific order, unfinished novels followed by short stories. Although some of the short stories were intended to stand alone as they are, several were written with the intent of using them as stepping stones for longer works that never came to fruition.

Some of the stories contained in this book are my personal favorites that I was forced to abandon for a variety of reasons. Zanzibar, which ends abruptly with the introduction of a cat, was abandoned after my own cat became ill and passed away, which made the cat plotline too sensitive a topic to continue. Others, such as Evil Breeds and Braille Penthouse were put aside to make time for academic and collaborative work.

Even though they are unfinished and of questionable quality, the stories in this book are important reminders of a stage in my life and in my writing, when humor was the most important aspect, and the world was easy to exaggerate. From a personal standpoint, these works are important reminders of people and places, and each and every one has a story behind it. They may not be the best stories you will ever encounter, but just like those who read and heard them before, I’m confident you will find at least a few of them enjoyable.

Lulu book cover

2007-03-09T08:42:00.000-08:00

My bookcover, low quality only because most image hosting sites won't let you upload a 300 dpi, 6x9 image. In fact, this particular image caused my roommate's laptop to freeze because of it's sheer size. How I managed to create it on my 256 RAM computer is beyond me. Small miracles.

Cool webpage

2007-03-08T09:05:00.000-08:00

This is one of the coolest 3D navigation menus I've ever seen. I have no idea what the site itself is about, but the front page is amazing.

http://www.screenvader.com/root.html

Progress is slow

2007-01-22T08:25:00.000-08:00

The good news is that I have roughly 53 pages gathered for the book. The bad news is that a bunch of those pages are blank spaceholders for content that I still need to write.

The biggest BIOS screen ever