The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

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

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Wednesday, September 23, 2020. Zarf, kay  (Eaten by a Grue), nickm, Kyle Aulerich, joshua grams, anjchang ,Richard Lamb, David C Thompsen attended. Note: These notes were compiled by Josh Grams. 

Zarf mentioned a PDP-10 emulation project that can now run Zork and the Crowther Adventure and Crowther/Woods Adventure, shared his screen for a bit of that.

Also that the PDP-10 Zork (?) that we have is a binary version, not
compiled from any of the MDL sources: there’s a project to get an MDL
compiler working.

Nick talked about his class and the challenges of virtual teaching: it’s
harder to play interactive things together and takes longer. 9:05, rat
chaos (https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=7wip22dpvlzil83), something
else I can’t remember?

There’s an Italo Calvino jam (“If on a summer’s night a game designer”)
that ends September 30th, Zarf showed a little of his entry, a 360-view
explorable of his newly-unpacked library with some interactive text and
inventory bits.

Nick’s mind chained to Robin Camille’s 2016 NaNoGenMo project _If on a
winter’s night a library cardholder_

Kyle Aulerich is one of the founders of Mythion Adventures (Nick shared
details on the mailing list). He’s been talking with Nick but this is
his first time checking out a PR-IF meeting.

Eric talked about the Saugus Ghost Stories thing briefly.

Richard Lamb talked about the challenges of trying to procedurally
generate dungeons on old hardware with very limited resources.

Inkle Studios’ new game Pendragon (board game/strategy game inspired
thing with narrative intertwined, of course?) came out maybe yesterday?