A couple of weeks ago, I installed the firefox addon Tumbarumba. This app randomly embeds fragments of stories into ordinary web pages. When you spot them, you click on them to slowly unravel the rest of the story.
I installed the app and pretty much forgot about it until today, when I was reading a Wikipedia article with an overview of Jorge Luis Borges story, “The Aleph.”
I’m reading along and reading along and I hit this total nonsequitor, something about “she being detail oriented” and I’m like, WTF there weren’t any women in this story. I went back and re-read the stuff leading up to it twice.
Then I realized what was going on. I clicked on the weird sentence.
And another sentence was revealed.
Another click another sentence, in this fade-in magical webbiny way that gave me that awesome sense of awe you get when you slowly discover/uncover something previously hidden. Isn’t there a word for that?
Then another, and another, and then you click on it and there’s Greg Van Eekout’s story, The Temp, sitting there in a faux Wikipedia skin.
It was like… it was like something weirdly magical. Like uncovering some secret thing. Super web magic.
It was spectacularly cool.
I love this app idea, but I’m shortly going to run out of stories (there’s only a handful to get through, really).
It’s going to need more stories to really kick butt, and they should be even a bit shorter to cater to internet audiences, but man… wow, that was neat. What a spectacular idea.
Sign up for Tumbarumba! It is full of goodness.
