Ever hear of the book Futility, by Morgan Robertson? It was about an indestructible, lifeboat-deficient ocean liner that hit an iceberg and sank. Fourteen years after Futility was published, the Titanic went down.
On a similar note, as the Bush Administration draws to a close it seems a good time to observe that E. C. Segar could have warned us, if only we’d listened:
It’s like he knew.
You know what’s interesting about Shadowmind? It turns out I’d never read it before. I skipped it when it came out due to a limited teenage book-buying budget and mediocre reviews. Much later I decided I wanted an obsessive-compulsively complete New Adventures collection, picked up a copy at a used bookstore… and immediately forgot about it.
You can’t blame me. By that time I was all too familiar with Christopher Bulis. Among Doctor Who fans the Bulis name is synonymous with “meh.” As I’ve mentioned before, Bulis’s trademark move is to take a really amazing, ass-kicking central concept and surgically remove the fun. I’ll bet his novels sound wonderful in outline–Space marines meet Dungeons and Dragons! A steampunk expedition to the moon! I imagine Bulis working far into the night on his outline. Sweating over it until it gleams. With sweat. Finally he holds the precious document to the light. It’s perfect. “This is the most brilliant idea I’ve had so far!” exclaims Bulis. “Now… how can I make it suck?”
You learn something new every day. Today I learned that the Democrats’ 1852 campaign slogan was “We Polked you in 1844; we shall Pierce you in 1852!”
If these guys had written the ads last year, the 2008 campaign would have been much more fun.
When writing an article, it’s important to remember that some pairs of words are not equivalent and cannot be substituted for one another. Like “held” and “strangled.”
Last February, somebody at the North County Times learned this the hard way.
(Found via Criggo.)
(This is another Interactive Fiction Competition review .)
Piracy 2.0 and Nightfall bring up interesting issues regarding player knowledge vs. PC knowledge. Spoilers past the link. Continue reading IFComp 2008: Piracy 2.0, Nightfall
(This is another Interactive Fiction Competition review . I’ll try to have something else soon for readers who don’t care about this stuff at all.)
Trein, The Ananachronist, and Cry Wolf are well intentioned but have not been tested and should not have been entered in their present form. Spoilers past the link. Continue reading IFComp 2008: Trein, The Ananachronist, Cry Wolf
(This is another Interactive Fiction Competition review .)
I don’t have a lot to say about Opening Night—not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because, for whatever reason, I find myself not particularly voluble on the subject. It’s good, though. Spoilers past the link. Continue reading IFComp 2008: Opening Night
(This is another Interactive Fiction Competition review .)
You can guess what Channel Surfing is about from the title. Spoilers past the link. Continue reading IFComp 2008: Channel Surfing
(This is another Interactive Fiction Competition review .)
Magic is the work of Geoff Fortytwo. I’d assumed this was a pseudonym but it appears to be his actual legally-approved name. Spoilers past the link. Continue reading IFComp 2008: Magic
(This is another Interactive Fiction Competition review .)
Mark Hatfield’s Berrost’s Challenge agressively resisted my attempts to enjoy it. Spoilers reside in a magical spoiler land entered by passing through the link. Continue reading IFComp 2008: Berrost’s Challenge