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| Take all the effort and entertainment out of Google-Whacking
with this automated result-checker, replete with high-score tables.
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| An odd text-adventure
Upsideclown from Dan; it seems to play on the novelty
of a text adventure being well-written and having meaningful
characters and relationships, but reads like a simple hybrid of
the work of Simon
Brown and Andrew Plotkin.
And is dimly frustrating for its not being interactive, for
it not having greater asides and detail in the same style. Hm.
I've been writing a
text adventure very slowly for the past couple of years - it's
a very author-friendly medium, prose
being written and rewritten in disparate little fragments, the
focus more on the quality of paragraphs than their flow (which
can't be predicted, and isn't an expectation of the medium). And it's
oddly satisfying from the programming perspective - as soon as you've
written something in, even if it's just a sentence in a room
description, that's as much as it can possibly exist. A
fully-implemented, stupidly-intelligent Burgerdroid is no more
or less solid than the checker-tiled floor it stands on; detail and
interaction is left to reveal itself in subsequent turns.
Related drivel: a walkthrough
for a rather long-winded text adventure I wrote on the Atari ST some twelve years ago,
and the unimaginable horror of Infocom adventures on a Gameboy.
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"Roll D20 to determine hurt. Divide past, present, future by four. If your ENEMY’S LIFE POINTS equal zero, than you have vanquished! You still exist in the pathetic mortal world!"
Mind your corners, it's Timecube :
the role-playing game.
[via Raak@MCiOS]
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| Human natural selection is going to be at a dead standstill until we start being startled by the side effects of bio-engineering,
says Steve Jones, sounding as if he's being quoted out of
context rather heavily.
But Africa's very likely
to be trimmed back to the AIDS-immune unless something dramatic gets sorted,
and teenage pregnancy continues to become more genetically fashionable. We'll
be keeping the two legs and front-facing eyes for a good while, I'm
sure, but births and deaths are always affected by the environment to
an extent. And who needs bio-engineering for dramatic side-effects,
anyway?
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"The litter drone pedals its ten woodlouse legs against the sky, slower and slower. It is a piecemeal twenty-sixth-generation Model Twelve-C, constructed from fragments of the refuse it has been programmed to collect; a functional copy of whichever twenty-fifth-generation Model Twelve-C assembled it."
My words at the Upsideclone today, the
nailing down of something that's been buzzing around my skull for twelve months.
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| Forget the Changing Rooms / Randall and Hopkirk crossover
fan fiction - the BBC should sort out a spectral sidekick for
business editor Jeff Randall; someone to snoop through office walls when Enron are refusing to comment, to blow
critical documents from open briefcases.
[fanfic via the Ruin]
| Ways to accidentally credit an overheard college-student conversation
with intelligence, number one: Mishear Johnny Vaughn as Jeremy
Vine. "Did you see that interview, last night? Fucking brilliant."
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"The job is doing everything I used to do by choice - I sit in comfortable chairs, sleep in luxurious beds, watch movies, play games, and then I give my opinion and reasons. At first it was as good as it sounds."
Raven's found the Perfect Job, through Upsideclone, neatly
crystallising too much of work, miscellaneous and, perhaps, the other.
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| Either United Biscuits have suffered some sort of
corporate merger with the insane, or they're deliberately
trying to freak out the 2am garage crowd - Penguin
wrappers now appear to bear, in place of simple antarctic-related
puns, surreal mantras such as (quoting verbatim)
"Make your Penguin last longer... refuse to eat it
until it has learnt algebra." Maniacal laughter
really isn't a thing that you want food manufacturers to
be doing.
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