![]() There are disappointingly few possible paths, but perhaps that’s fitting for a service that allows you disappointingly few possible words. Last week, an ingenuous Twitter user began a Twitter Choose Your Own Adventure, filled with spies and North Koreans, red wires and blue wires. As an amazingly exhaustive Web site on the books shows, they were, in fact, like early versions of the Internet. You could erase your tracks or track your history. With the Adventure books, you could role-play or game-play you could hyperlink from one page to another, distant page in an instant, like a "Star Trek" character teleporting to another planet (one that, in many instances, held aliens of a dangerous nature). Bantam dropped the Choose Your Own Adventure line in 1998 (it has since been revived by Chooseco), but the ideas behind it, good and bad, persisted in another medium. You can test your wile by exploring a Web version of the book’s maze online here.) Put out by Henry Holt in 1985, it offered $10,000 to any reader who could solve its riddles it took three years for anyone to collect the prize money. (Nothing chilled the cold fires of my childhood mind like the gorgeous, sinisterly engrossing adult sibling of the Adventure books, " Maze: Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle" by Christopher Manson. But the more (literal) dead-ends I met, the more cruel and frightening the world of the books seemed, like a Darwinist labyrinth in which I was terrified to make any movement. You could flip back to front (the best way, in fact, to find the winning paths), or return to the road not taken. Not only was there no foreordained story, but there was no predetermined physical path for your hands to wander through it. As a child in the eighties reading the books, this could be a blessing (was there a god watching on, dictating your actions? No! Could you eat ice cream out of the carton when no one was looking? Yes!), or a curse (if there was free will, then were you morally responsible for the series of bad choices you made along the way? The books may not have promulgated the idea of fate, but, judging by most of the endings I met, they certainly believed in fatality.) At first, for me, the series inspired the joie de vivre of complete release. The unlabeled door - fact, the most comforting and most terrifying thing about the Choose Your Own Adventure books—awful, and awe-full, in all senses of the word—was that they flew in the face of this idea of fate. Thinking its odd that a girl would go in the men's door you now have a decision to make. As you try to decide which one to go in you, a girl, probably about 13 runs through the door you just came in and sprints into the men's door, you try to stop her but she looks back and says "Have fun with it!". ![]() Inside I find four doors, One labeled "Women", another "Men", one other "Animals" and the last has no label above it (that seems odd to you). I nervously walk through it, taking one last glance back through the door, thinking this day will change my life. He just looks up to me and points to the door on his left. I walk back up to the desk and hand him the paper back, expecting him to say more or give me instructions. I quickly fill it out, Age:20, Height 5'11", build average and so and so on. ![]() "Ok, fill out this form and then you can be on your way, and no need to call me sir", he grabs a clipboard and hands it over to me with a pen and a paper on it. "Uh-uh, first time sir" You blurt out nervously hoping no one saw you blubbering about. He looks up at you, he looks quite bored "You been here before, or is this your first time?" ![]() You arrive and look around, the place is packed! Walking through the front doors you see a man at a simple desk (seems odd for such a busy place right?), but you approach it nonetheless. You get up, grab a bite to eat and throw on some clothes and hop in your car and head to Transcending Gravity. People have said it's quite the experience, with some people coming out completely different or just the same. It's finally Saturday and you get to go try out this new place that opened up that everyone in town has been talking about, Transcending Gravity. Waking up, you feel the anticipation of the day ahead of you.
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