Adage myth wreathe kid

I've reviewed IFComp 2011 entry Awake The Mighty Dread on IFDB, with review tagline

'Something like an Alice in Wonderland that's hard to get at/into/through.'

Click this sentence to go to the review.

Let Sleeping Dreads Lie

I'm writing this post in a Mac program called Focused. It's one of those 'no distraction' writing apps. It gives you a blank window with a nice large font, an obvious cursor, no icons, no sidebars, no title bar, no sidewindows, no sidebottoms, no grotesquely nested MS-Word ribbons of chaff.

When you turn it on, a random quote about writing sits in the middle of the blank page until you type something. My quote tonight was:

'Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.' – James Norman Hall

This was apt (they're usually pretty apt) as I was about to write about how I'm waiting for a really good idea for the most basic of my Inform CYOA extension examples to come to me. I spend a lot of time thinking about it in pockets of each day. It's taking a surprisingly long time to come, given that the ideas for the other five examples didn't cause me much struggle. They involve such entities as talking rats, a quiz show, ye olde Cloak of Darkness, a glass basket and a dragon.

After fiddling with other peripheral IF busywork – like updating my review tags on IFDB – I felt like playing something. I've been reading Mathbrush's nifty intfiction posts about past XYZZY Best Game winners, in which he often goes sideways to talk about the corresponding IFComps. I realise his posts have had the side-effect of engendering nostalgia in me for some of the games from the first two IFComps I participated in. So it seems it's taken me about five years to develop this particular nostalgia.

In terms of acting on nostalgia for 2010/2011 IFComp games, I find my typing fingers are restless for some of the one-shot games which had mixed receptions and whose authors didn't return. Things like 2011 game Awake The Mighty Dread, which has no reviews on IFDB. And that's why I'm going to replay and review Awake The Mighty Dread while I continue to wait for this idea I'm waiting for. Of course doing this review won't take as long as all that, and then I'll return to the waiting, but you can't force creativity all the time. Sometimes you must even deign to loaf.

News about ME (Clash of the Type-Ins)

Experience a leisurely, digressive thrill at least once every two minutes for probably considerably too many minutes as I chat, jest and otherwise interact in various novel ways with Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna, the sometimes wacky, sometimes soulful hosts of podcast Clash Of The Type-Ins.

In episode 34 we play my award-winning™ IF Six from 2011, about little kids playing hide'n'seek tip in the park.

If you never heard the audio from Six before, I cut it all into the podcast, though Ryan didn't cut out me also verbally describing what was being heard in each case (which I had to do for the hosts, who couldn't hear it) resulting in a delivery of information that some would describe as 2 X POWERED UP! but which cynical members of Generation X like myself might describe as Redundant.

There's a decent number of digs at Millennials in this podcast, so be ready for that if you are one.

Clash of the Type-Ins can be got here.

Thanks Ryan and Jenni for having me.

An important reinforcement of news not about ME

People who know and have done a lot of IF, and who either love organisation and oversight, or are highly driven by cause, and/or who exhibit a mixture of all of the above qualifications, have formed the non-profit Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation

Its homepage is http://www.iftechfoundation.org/

Its facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/iftechfoundation/

The way I read it, the foundation's plan is to help look after the tools, services and culture of IF in a way that should take the pressure off a random collection of individuals to have to do so. In this light, I'm reminded of how all the individuals have done pretty stellar jobs holding the structures aloft to date.

I guess most people involved in making IF, including myself, have pointed their attention at the bits that interest them and tried to help keep those bits going, or contribute to them or maintain them. And sometimes there have been bits You are interested in personally, but which you don't have the skills to help with. At a low level, the do-what-you-can and hope-for-what-you-want experience has probably been a bit frustrating for everyone involved. I don't expect a pile of instant solutions from the new foundation, but I'm glad and grateful that the IF folk who feel they can or want to or must address such issues are thinking about the long term.

I like helping people with things I can help them with, but I hate organising stuff. Just thinking about itARRRRRRRRGHHH!