The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

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Feb19

January Meeting Post Mortem

by Angela Chang on February 19th, 2021 at 7:09 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized
January 2021 PR-IF attendees

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, January 19, 2020.  Zarf, kaysavetz and Carrington (Eaten by a Grue), Stephen Jablonski, Mark Pilgrim, nickm, Hugh Steers, Dave Thompsen, and anjchang welcomed Michael Verdi,   Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

Kay shared faxprices.com
Carrington to Everyone (6:34 PM)
https://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/sorttable/

Carrington – Twitch & Sniff Along- https://tasa.jasbrooks.net
series on twitch where people do a play-through of games with scratch and sniff\

Zarf- MIT Mystery hunt happened -There was one Inform 7 puzzle, carefully engineered to fetch the spoilery responses from server so you couldn’t decompile the game file.
Mentions of Ryan Veeder’s Lurking Horror text puzzle
VCV Rack, Synth pack simulator
Instrument pack from Popcorn song
Lurking Horror II:

Kay and Carrington are still playing Arthur.
Carrington is an Earl. Kay is still a serf. Really enjoying it.
Much better than Shogun. Feels like a Zork game. Mark mentions the DIgital Antiquarian review of Arthur.

Mark P mentions Easter Egg in Thaumistry

Pitch Dark update– Pitch Darker. Non infocom text adventure, like Pitch Dark but volume 2.

New Z3 games — John Wilson made 3 new games compiled in Z3. Works well on 8-bit machines.

http://www.zenobi.co.uk/

Star Wars Episode IV IPv6
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Zork – check out the Binary from original ITS Mainframe without sword. You can try the ITS environment online! Telnet to its.pdp10.se, port 10003 (telnet its.pdp10.se 10003). When it says “Connected…”, hit ctrl-Z. Then type :login yourname. (Any name will work.) Then type :zork to play.
https://eblong.com/infocom/#zork1

diff r88 to r119: https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/commit/87a3b787d166a441cab8d89d87f9a3753d40daa8

Mark does work with classic infocom grades ported to harddrive, lots of apple2 “Pitch Dark” Collection

Narrascope 2021 is taking a break. IFTF is in the process of trying to expand. Michael Verdi reported that he attended virtually and had good feedback.

This past week was Boston Independent Gamed Festival
ARESIA , Readercon SCIFI convention

Maybe a Boston Game Jame
Aresa

XYZZY Awards planning under way.

Spring Thing is coming along.

Parsercomp Competiton for Parser Games
https://intfiction.org/t/parsercomp-2-0-gauging-interest-level/48995

Stephen mentions his archive of Mac Plus games
archive.org
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_mac

http://taper.badquar.to/5/about.html#submit

 Comment 
Feb13

February meetup (online)

by zarf on February 13th, 2021 at 6:11 pm
Posted In: Meetings

The Boston IF meetup for February will be Friday, February 19, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

└ Tags: meetings
 Comment 
Jan16

December Meeting Post-Mortem

by Angela Chang on January 16th, 2021 at 10:25 am
Posted In: Post Mortem
PR IF Meeting 2020 Attendees
PR-IF December 2020

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, December 22, 2020.  Zarf, kaysavetz and Carrington (Eaten by a Grue), Josh Grams, Stephen Jablonski, nickm, Hugh Steers, anjchang and Dave Thompsen attended. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

Talked about keyboards https://fusion.durgod.com

IF comp wrapped up, Tie for first place this year , check it out https://ifcomp.org/comp/2020

In 1995, there were multiple first places
Nanogenmo happened- https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2020/issues
A lot of GPT2 based projects last year
This year, not as many entries
Nick made use of Kay’s apple 2 bot for his one line basic program
1001 Basic
https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2020/issues/73

Kay threw in something for NanoGenMo
51300 baby names
https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2020/issues/69
165 days of christmas
https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2020/issues/70

Other Nanogenmo:
Alices Adventures in Run-On land
https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2020/issues/81
replaces . with ‘, and then’ and also replaces gendered pronouns with non binary words.
Leonard Richardson’s Alices Adventures in the Whale… InDialogue

Many entries are just length, not actual stories:
https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2020/issues/71

Self modifying basic program possible on AppleSoft but not C64

Carrington and Kay started playing Shogun on their podcast (Eaten by a Grue), http://gallery.guetech.org/shogun/shogun.html
Using the manual https://www.mocagh.org/infocom/shogun-manual.pdf
Like infoCom’s “The Hobbit,” it’s better if you have read the book.
Do people enjoy recreating the book?
Talk about rocky horror picture show and re-enactment.

Book adaptation discussion:
Journey Infocom
Arthur Infocom
Tom Snyder Infocom games
Mines of Titan
Lost Treasures of Infocom
Adaptation of “Animal Farm” by Emily Short
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/game/orwells-animal-farm/

Question from Steve – Anyone know how to make MFS disk images read/writable? Carrington uses AppleCommander for Apple 2 stuff.

Question from Nick – Do people have positive experience taking video from CRTs without using GenLock? Kay suggests iPhone live mode, clears up stripe.

Question from Kay – Someone took Apple 2 Eamon wiki and ported to Atari ST and uploaded to Genie online service. A person wrote four orginal adventures to Aventure’s Genie file library. Have you heard of Oasis in the Desert or The Proving Ground?

Nick got to talk about Amazing Quest at Seattle.
https://nickm.com/if/amazing_quest
https://2234.play.ifcomp.org/content/index.html
Posted the Q&A about Amazing Quest, a 12-line program for C64.Trick: no need for closing quote at end of BASIC line, representing decimals with .
Currently 2 ports of the game to Python.

10 Line Basic Contest ideas to prepare for
Last year Nick Entered with Jesper Juul
https://gkanold.wixsite.com/homeputerium/2020

Nick’s amazing quest is actually 12 lines https://nickm.com/if/amazing_quest

256 byte IF by Nick
https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=f0dpgg80motlhs42

Nick has a blog post about it
https://nickm.com/post/2020/12/amazing-quest-qa/

Demoscene discussion
Some band used a twitterbot to tweet out that they were awesome
https://twitter.com/ninjasexparty/status/1218335379989942272

Taper #6: A Throw of the Dice Open Call for Submissions of Interactive HTML5 Works under 2Kb due Feb. 7th. http://taper.badquar.to/5/about.html#submit

From a random hacker “: I found a gem!”

 Comment 
Jan07

January meetup (online)

by zarf on January 7th, 2021 at 1:57 pm
Posted In: Meetings

The Boston IF meetup for January will be Tuesday, January 19, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

└ Tags: meetings
Comments Off on January meetup (online)
Dec22

November Meeting Post Mortem

by Angela Chang on December 22nd, 2020 at 6:03 pm
Posted In: Post Mortem
PR-IF November 2020 meetup, Photo Courtesy of Kay Savetz

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, November 24, 2020. Zarf, kaysavetz and kgagne (Eaten by a Grue), Richard Lamb,  Mark Savage, anjchang , and nickm welcomed newcomers Stephen Jablonski and Dennis Allen (former Editor-in-Chief of Byte Magazine, now at emax).  Briefly attending were distinguished pets: Kay’s pugs and Mark’s dog. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

Kay playing Shogun after his move (Yay Kay & Ken duo together today!)

NIST tours …atomic clocks. National bureau of standards
2017 Leap Second festival convention – 148 participants and residency.
Leap seconds decided six months on advance
Unpredictability of leap seconds

Biennale.no Works that don’t exist
AppleSoft typing one line program
Kay’s Twitterbot does laundry and needs a tumblr account
Someone entered a compo entry that was all Twitter bots
Applesoft hooks in ROM
One liner program discussion
Complaints by nickm, an error messages program
searching for lice riddle, similarities between proofreading– nitpicking

Academic paper on checking dryer status

IF Comp in the last week, 7 days to play 103 games
Stephen recommends magpie game sequel Magpie Takes the Train:
Clothes changing game.
Zarf working on inform manual proofreading
errata to inform user’s manual

Internet Archive Flash copy protection
RUFL maybe can emulate server
https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/
circling butterflies

nanogenmo procrastination
bad words in rap lyrics
Joseph Conrad’s N word of the narcissist book
We can’t say “avoid like the plague” anymore

Zarf’s drag and drop project demo
containers, doors, the sun & supercontainers
Idea of containers George Lakoff in cogsci
and experimental realism as fundamental to understanding of human experience and language
path image scheme
my front door – led to a room that contained everything outside the world inside it

Nick will talk about Amazing Quest in Seattle Area IF Meetup

Comments Off on November Meeting Post Mortem
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Next PR-IF Meeting

March, TBA

6:30 pm Eastern, online

(The Republic gathers monthly. In these plague times, we meet online. Note our Event Policy.)

Other Upcoming Dates

Mar 1: Spring Thing registration deadline

Mar 28: Spring Thing submission deadline

Mar 31: Text Adventure Literacy Jam submission deadline

Apr 1: ParserComp registration begins

Recent Posts

  • January Meeting Post Mortem
  • February meetup (online)
  • December Meeting Post-Mortem
  • January meetup (online)
  • November Meeting Post Mortem

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