The term ‘Development Hell’ isn’t necessarily reserved for things like this, but, for the past week, our project has been stuck in wherever that term suggests.

The content is all good — our interviews went well and worked towards achieving modularity (this sounds way too much like reaching singularity) better than previously anticipated. But Korsakow is a tricky beast, and hard to tame, and maybe not ideally meant to be used in the way we’d like. We’ve got a few too many interfaces that aren’t having a great time linking together, but alas, those are the challenges you must overcome when working with this smaller kind of software.

Visually, most of our thumbnails look nice and the project is more or less accessible. It may not pop like Seven Digital Deadly Sins but it’s got the same heart. Last week’s in-class musical chairs of a consultation with all the other groups validated our ideas in the project — everyone seemed to understand where we were going and what it’d look like once we passed around our mindmap-looking plan. After seeing how other groups had branched out into other software, we partially considered making a move to something like eko but a lot of that content looked more conventional (linear??) and appealed more to fiction.

In wrapping things up, I thought a lot about Johnathan Harris’ work and how it pays to have some technical, web-design-based skills when you’re trying to make these projects. I feel like some of the limitations of this stuff involves simply not knowing how to put your ideas into a given software — having a really great idea but being unable to translate it technically. As I’ve previously mentioned, Korsakow seems to work in favour of smaller things (deconstructing certain ideas, films) and other groups (the ~super erotic~ hands!!!!!!!!) have really made strides in using the software to its full potential. When struggling to program our interfaces together, I had the thought of transposing our work to something like a blog, moving everything to hyperlinks. Hypothetically, it’d work — so how much does our project benefit from using Korsakow? Have we done it justice?

Something like Balloons of Bhutan does some part of what our project does in a much more expansive and cleaner way. I think in some way this inspired our work.

That’s the dream.