Andrew Plotkin @zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a micro-talk on John M. Ford's _Aspects_ as part of a panel at an SF con.

I have now expanded this to a full-length essay:

"Language, Languages, and Dialect in _Aspects_"

https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/aspects-language.html

(That's not the real title, but let's get to that in due time.)

Not very spoilery, but probably only interesting if you've read the book first.

Quick thoughts on season 1 of Severance. (Spoilers, obviously.)

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2022/07/severance-and-prisoner-of-tomorrow.html

I want to connect it to The Prisoner, but actually more to the 2009 Prisoner miniseries that nobody liked.

I see people starting to pick up https://cohost.org/rc/welcome as a twitter replacement.

Is there an explanation posted of what makes it better than twitter? (Aside from "just launched so it hasn't had time to fill up with poison or pivot to ad revenue.")

The intro page is long on good vibes and short on explaining how they will avoid twitter's mistakes.

(Yes, I am asking this on Mastodon, it's not irony.)

Aaron Reed has a crowdfunding page up for a _50 Years of Text Games_ book.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aaronareed/50-years-of-text-games

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2022/06/aaron-reeds-50-years-of-text-games-is.html

Speaking of Cragne Manor source code, I've started a web page collecting as much as I can. Which is to say, as much as authors have given me permission to post.

https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/cragne/

More on this project: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2022/05/cragne-manor-source-code-some-of-it.html

If you wrote a Cragne Manor room and you want it included on this page, send me the source! Or a link. Thanks.

I was reminded that I never posted my Cragne Manor source code. So here it is!

https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/cragne/cragne-src.html

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, Cragne Manor is described here: https://bavarianrobotdiner.itch.io/cragne-manor

Satoshi said Eureka
You're gonna love this deal
The offspring of a scam and
Libertarian ideal!
The market crashes weekly
The blockchain doesn't work
Japin' apes, man, that's why I'm a jerk!

Patricia McKillip (1948-2022)

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2022/05/patricia-mckillip-1948-2022.html

https://locusmag.com/2022/05/patricia-a-mckillip-1948-2022/

Everyone has to sit down tonight and spend all night riddling with a ghost until one of you runs out of riddles.

I found this transcript of an Infocom Implementors reunion chat (Feb 1992). It doesn't seem to exist anywhere else on the Internet, so I uploaded it:

http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/info/infocom-reunion-conference-feb-1992.txt

I think it took place on the CompuServe Gamers forum.

Funny looking back on a time that thought that Infocom was ancient history, because everybody had left two or three years ago.

The next thought after that was to write a game that passes itself off as Borges fanfic but it's actually _Book of the War_ fanfic.

You know how the rooms in the Library of Babel are all hexagonal? Slap a hexgonal console in the center of one and you're golden.

Found a copy of _Labyrinths_ on the curb and started re-reading it. Oh yeah, Borges really was good. Everybody knows that but you can go twenty or thirty years without checking in.

(You can't believe how pretentious I'm being by firing up the ol' mastodon account with Borges stanning. I know. I know.)

Okay, I have logged into this account again and looked at the dust bunnies. The dust bunnies have gazed back.

NarraScope went really great. https://narrascope.org/2019/06/done.html

Also, their Z-machine spec documents: http://frobnitz.co.uk/zmachine/infocom/

More complete collection of that Infocom stuff: https://eblong.com/infocom/

Finally got my thought on _Heaven's Vault_ posted. I go on for a while. https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/05/heavens-vault-design-ruminations.html

Registration for NarraScope closes tomorrow night. This is the IF conference I'm helping to organize in Boston. https://narrascope.org/pages/registration.html