some minor geeky stuff
First of all, it's worth mentioning that IFComp 2004 just announced the winners of its annual short interactive fiction contest. I can't really play interactive fiction because...well, because I tend to suck at anything even remotely puzzlelike.
But the idea, the idea I love. For those of you who don't know, Interactive Fiction is what used to be called Text Adventures, which were the height of video game technology back in 1980 before graphics were really cooking on computers yet. Many people have at least heard of Zork and it's ilk. A place is described, as in a narrative:
You are in a plain room with doors to the north and west.
And you say you want to "go north" or "hand the owl to the dwarf" and the game responds, for better or for worse.
Only nowadays, since there's not a dime to be made from it, some real fiction artistes have taken a crack at it, making some things that truly live up to the name Interactive Fiction. It's fiction where the interaction is as rich as the narrative in many cases. And if making a linear story is hard work, imagine what it's like to make a story along with responses to everything a person might do.
Some of them are puzzles, and some are more like stories where you can sit on the sofa and such. They are all free, but usually you need some kind of "player" for them, depending on what tool they were used. I could go into detail, but really there's other places to tell you all about it.
And, for my own reference, here's a bunch of people who wrote reviews of this year's
competition games:
JoshuaH, inky, maga, Bishop, Ander, Merk, zarf, ctate, ShihTzu Jacqueline,
Ferret, and
DavidW.
Then also, I took a couple of pretty low-res pictures on my batphone for your viewing disaster.
Comments
there's more photography in your future
Love, Dad
I wish you could do some photoes of the cafe.
Posted by: dad | December 1, 2004 2:29 PM
Hey, why isn't it letting me comment on your broken-wrist-white-brotha entry? arg.
Posted by: Gina | December 1, 2004 6:11 PM
Well Gina, it's cause I installed a movable type plugin to automatically close old or inactive comment threads, since there's really other way as effective to block comment spam. It obviously needs some tuning however, as it's supposed to leave comments up on everything that's on my main index.
I'm really going to have to write a post about this, cause I've really had to do a lot to secure this and the webform on my site, and the webform spammers are wily. They just go for the scattershot approach and it's difficult to find the time to combat them.
It was quite a while before spammers found the tinyblog...loverzan got hit badly much earlier. But now the naive days are gone, and I have to buckle down.
I will try and make the comments close a little less restrictively though.
Posted by: Daniel Talsky | December 1, 2004 9:28 PM
Very impressionistic... hee. Really quite nice yo.
Yeah it's a drag, the comments are closed on loverzan too, I couldn't reply to the ones on my paintings or comment on your lovely fracture...
:)
Posted by: Zan | December 1, 2004 11:25 PM
Comment spammers should be chemically castrated to ensure they can't spread their evil to another generation.
The chemical I'm generally thinking of using for that is concentrated hydrochloric acid
(grumblebitchpissmoan deletin' 70 spams a day grumblebitch)
Posted by: Graumagus | December 1, 2004 11:38 PM
HAAY MENSm, NEED larger PONIS???
NEW EXCITING MEDICAL breakthru!!!
Hope you're doing okay over there...I likes your pictures.
*throws baby into lake*
*burninates self*
Posted by: SJ | December 3, 2004 10:25 AM
LOL! What's scary is that I'm getting more spam from insurance companies and refinancing sites than pr0n.
Yeah, I feel sooooo secure entrusting my home insurance to a company that needs to use spambots to infest blogs...
Posted by: Graumagus | December 4, 2004 9:25 PM