The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

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!”

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