Patchy-work Girl February 18, 2009
Posted by dunemethane in narrative, structure, visual culture, writing.Tags: patchwork girl, Shelley Jackson
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At first I was really intrigued by the idea of reading a story that if I clicked on any word would take me to another page like those old-school choose your own adventure books. I started to read and clicked on words and kept going until I realized that I just kept going in circles eventhough I clicked on different words everytime. WTF? I tried this for about a half hour when I eventualy just gave up and accepted that this hypertext business is not as cool as I thought it would be. But I guess it makes sense since it starts with talking about embryo’s and ends talking about the same exact thing (literally).
Animating the Cyborg 
I also have found Patchwork Girl to be a difficult read. For one thing, it does not appear to work on Vista. I have tried changing the compatibility settings, but it still hung for me. Luckily I do have another computer that runs XP, but it has a CD ROM drive that is in desperate need of repairs. It did end up running Patchwork Girl to a certain extent, but it did crash once.
The story itself I find to be rather cool, but I have had a hard time determining whether or not I have read the entire story or just a few lines. The narrative of the Patchwork Girl’s creator called to mind what I wished would have happened in Frankenstein. The acceptance of the “monster” as human, even as superior, was something that definitely did not happen in Frankenstein.
I also liked the idea of Patchwork Girl as a continuation of the lives of other people. Attributes of her body are associated with their original owners and yet, as the creator notes, they also belong to the Patchwork Girl.
I’m interested in exploring this story further, however my hope is that I will be able to figure out how much of the story I have actually read and how much is still somewhere else on the disk.
I thought that the idea of patchwork girl was a really good one, however I found the actual patchwork girl to be pretty confusing. I found it very hard to navagate to the point where I’m not sure if I found everything that there was to find. Maybe I did who knows. The stories were interesting for the most part, but my favorite part about it was the drawings, especially the one of the head from a side view with each category as different parts of the brain.