(This is another Interactive Fiction Competition review .)
April in Paris is about April. In Paris. You want to know anything else, you can get spoilers past the link. Continue reading IFComp 2008: April in Paris
IFComp 2008: Recess at Last and Violet
(This is another Interactive Fiction Competition review .)
Here we have two games about not being able to write. One of them is good. It isn’t Recess at Last.
There are spoilers this time, so I’m including a “read the rest” link. Continue reading IFComp 2008: Recess at Last and Violet
IFComp 2008: The Ngah Angah School of Forbidden Wisdom
(This is an Interactive Fiction Competition review .)
This one’s a mystery.
The Ngah Angah etc. is an ALAN game. It’s a little-used system. In the folder is a game file, and a tantalizing jpeg showing some sort of hieroglyphs. I opened the file in Spatterlight, the Swiss army knife of MacOS interactive fiction interpreters, and got this:
As you enter the twilight zone of Adventures, you stumble and fall to your knees. In front of you, you can vaguely see the outlines of an Adventure that never was.
SYSTEM ERROR: Checksum error in Acode (.a3c) file (0x22aac5 instead of 0x22aa94).
Apparently it’s not just me.
So… is this a joke? We get a couple every year. But the 120k game file seemed big for two paragraphs. On a whim I opened it in TextWrangler… and it turns out that ALAN games don’t encrypt their text at all. And so I can confirm that, no, this is not a joke. It’s an intended game involving a secret valley, tests of some kind, butterflies, tigers, and warriors who seem to want to kill the player. There appear to be multiple solutions to at least one puzzle, and some intriguing images, like this:
“Now, let the second test begin,” he says without further ado. He sounds his gong and the three men suddenly give out a shout and spread their cloaks wide open. From the inside of their cloaks, hundreds of black, brown and grey butterflies take flight and fill the air!
And this:
Diridu gives a shout and the tiger makes a leap. Running in the air, it rises higher to the sky and heads out of the valley between two high mountain peaks. You feel the rush of a cold evening wind against your face as you cling to the fine animal’s fur.
It’s also an intended game that was clearly not beta tested at all. As a result, nobody’s going to play it. And that’s a shame.
Here’s a prediction: the number one lesson of this year’s competition will be the same as last year’s. You want to write interactive fiction? Beta test your game.
IFComp 2008
The 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition has begun. This is a competition held every year for the makers of text adventures–the kind of games Infocom published back in the 1980s. Interactive fiction games are still being written by hobbyists, and since the days of Zork the best of them have taken the genre into new and strange territory.
I reviewed most of the 2007 games on this blog, and I plan to do the same again this year. Last year’s introductory post explains why I find this stuff interesting, and makes an equally good introduction now. The first reviews will probably appear in a week or two.
Who is Walter Schnackenberg?
Jeffrey Ford’s blog led me to A Journey Round My Skull‘s amazing collection of surrealist drawings by an unknown-to-me German artist named Walter Schnackenberg. 
Actually, he seems to be unknown to the internet in general. A Journey Round My Skull came up with a one-paragraph biography–apparently Schnackenberg worked on poster art most of his life and didn’t get into surrealism until late in his career. Googling the guy turns up nothing helpful. Amazon.com turns up a couple of books on posters and some volumes by a historian of the same name.
But the drawings are amazing–done in pen, ink, and watercolor, they’re populated by grotesques yet seem to have a surprising sympathy for their subjects. As one of the commenters at the site points out, Schnackenberg’s drawings are reminiscent of Mervyn Peake‘s. I’m also reminded, just a bit, of Maurice Sendak and Jim Woodring. I’d love to know more about him.
What’s Going On
There’s a story going around that the economy imploded because the government wanted to encourage minority home ownership. This story is the purest of high-grade manure. Minorities are not somehow inherently unable to afford stable thirty-year mortgages. Google “redlining” and “sundown towns” if you want to know why they might have trouble getting them. There are people who want very much for you to believe that forced loans to minorities caused this collapse. These are the people who want to bring redlining back.
No, the crazy mortgages went to everybody–people of all races, classes, and economic strata. A lot of them went to smart, responsible people who just didn’t understand every little thing about loans and trusted their bankers to tell the truth. (And that’s normally okay! Most of us don’t understand every little detail about medicine, so we trust our doctors. We don’t understand everything about our cars, so we trust our mechanics. We can’t personally inspect every poultry plant, so we trust our FDA inspectors. This kind of trust is the thing that makes modern civilization possible.) A lot of these mortgages went to people who could have coped with a stable 30 year mortgage. A lot of them went to buy McMansions that now sit abandoned in suburban cul-de-sacs turned to slums.
The mortgage mess is more complicated than that, and, as with everything else in life, if you really want to understand it you’re going to have to (gulp) *think*. Mark Chu-Carroll’s Good Math, Bad Math has the best explanation I’ve seen.
First, read “Economic Disasters and Stupid Evil People”:
The situation is both very complicated and very simple.
The simple version? People made lots and lots of stupid loans that couldn’t be repaid.
Of course, it’s not really that simple.
(Like I said: complicated.)
Then you might want to read his explanation of a normally sensible practice called “tranching” and how the Wall Street dingbats perverted it to squeeze out a little more fast cash.
You can follow up by reading “Bad Probability and Economic Disaster; or How Ignoring Bayes Theorem Caused the Mess”:
One of the big questions that comes up again and again is: how did they get away with this? How could they find any way of taking things that were worthless, and turn them into something that could be represented as safe?
The answer is that they cheated in the math.
And “How Mortgages Turned into a Trillion Dollar Disaster”:
What really created the disaster is a combination of leverage – that is, borrowing money to amplify an investment, and derivatives – fancy investments that are really nothing more than bets.
Truly understanding this mess takes more time and thought than blaming minorities. But it’s worth putting in the work.
Sarah Palin Notices Something Funny
That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and, on our other side, the land-boundry that we have with Canada. It’s funny that a comment like that was kinda made to ”¦ I don’t know, you know ”¦ reporters.
When asked for clarification, Governor Palin explained she had understood that, as the candidate for Vice President of the United States, she would be providing comments to “mostly trained chimpanzees, or maybe if things went well some ski instructors and Latvian yak herders.”
And You’re Looking for What, Now?
Right now my site statistics list the current top search query as “fairy bowling ball.”
Here you go, guys! Happy now?
Bailing Out Dombey
I’ve been thinking lately about the last Dickens book I read—Dombey and Son. The news brought it to mind.
Dombey is the head honcho of Dombey and Son. He thinks this makes him a Great Man, and just to make damn sure he’s out to suppress all threats to his Greatness. This can get time consuming. See, all you actually have to do to threaten Dombey’s Greatness is contradict him. So Dombey spends half the 900 page epic picking up sycophants so oily you could run a Hummer off their bodily secretions, and the other half methodically alienating anybody who cares enough about him to tell him the truth.
The truth is: Dombey is a moron.
That name, “Dombey and Son?” Our Dombey’s the son. He’s like the third or fourth generation of son. He didn’t build the business. His dad didn’t build the business. Everything he has, he inherited from somebody else who also inherited it. Dombey and Son started without him and continues through inertia while he warms the chair in the big office. And he has no idea how to run it. He has no idea, for example, that sycophant numero uno Carker has for years been using shady accounting to siphon off gobs of funds. And when Carker runs off with the cash, Dombey has no idea it might be time to do something differently. He has no idea he could do anything differently. He’s Dombey, dude! The top of the heap is Dombey’s natural place. That’s how the world rolls. So he coasts placidly along as he always has, and bankrupts the firm.
This is where the news comes in. And as our fearless leaders discuss handing a $700 billion blank check of taxpayer money over to the guys who created this interesting situation, I can’t help but remember what happened to Dombey.
He, himself, personally, went bankrupt.
This was not an oddity in Dickens’s time. It was standard operating procedure. Business owners in 19th century England were personally liable for business debts. (It was a better deal than ordinary debtors got. They ended up in prison. See Little Dorrit.) But Dombey’s attitude is striking:
‘The extent of Mr Dombey’s resources [says Mr. Morfin, one of his middle managers] is not accurately within my knowledge; but though they are doubtless very large, his obligations are enormous. He is a gentleman of high honour and integrity. Any man in his position could, and many a man in his position would, have saved himself, by making terms which would have very slightly, almost insensibly, increased the losses of those who had had dealings with him, and left him a remnant to live upon. But he is resolved on payment to the last farthing of his means. His own words are, that they will clear, or nearly clear, the House, and that no one can lose much. Ah, Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess! His pride shows well in this.’
The vices of our current class of economic honchos are probably not virtues carried to excess.
I don’t mind bailing out the little guys. If this $700 billion were going to rescue struggling people who got suckered into crazy mortgages, I’d consider it money well spent. But before we hand our tax money over to these companies? I’d like to see their CEOs and boards of directors sell off a few private planes and summer homes. Then we’ll talk.
New Adventures Reviews: Lucifer Rising
In their first couple of years the New Adventures covered surrealism, cyberpunk, high fantasy, space opera, a Quatermass pastiche, and even a right-wing religious authoritarian mystical horror novel (The Pit, which arguably took Doctor Who into places it should never have gone). Lucifer Rising was the NAs’ first Big Dumb Object novel.
Big Dumb Objects are one of your standard SF tropes—what Rudy Rucker calls “power chords,” the ideas that are to SF what the hooks are to a pop song. BDOs are the coolest gadgets in science fiction—both artifacts and environments. Rendezvous With Rama’s vast wandering starship is the canonical example. (And one of the blander ones, to my mind”¦ although it’s been years since I read it and if I went back I might have a different experience.) My favorite is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (from Solaris, natch). It might be stretching a point to class a living planet as a BDO, but Solaris does the same thing: injects Sense of Wonder straight into the novel’s jugular and gives the characters something mind-blowing to explore and react against.