Listening to the NASA stream, I realized that I'm hearing a lightspeed lag with the crew Q&A. About 2.5 sec round trip. I have never heard a real lightspeed delay before in my life.
(I was two years old during Apollo 17. I might have heard astronaut voices on the radio but not so I could remember.)
I have therefore gone looking for Cornerstone “game files" and added them to my Infocom Catalog page. You can run Cornerstone 5.1 or 5.20 now. To some extent. (Bugs remain.)
This week, Tara McGrew released an open-source interpreter for Infocom's Cornerstone VM.
(Yes, on April Fool's Day, but the interpreter *works*. Correct joke management.)
blog.zarfhome.com/2026/04/corn...
github.com/taradinoc/li...
New IFTF Blog Post!
2025 Grant Report: “Interactive Fiction Workshop for Theatre Practitioners” (Katy Naylor)
One of the projects in the 2025 class of IFTF grants awardees was led by Katy Naylor from the Voidspace. Learn about the project here!
blog.iftechfoundation.org/2026-04-03-2...
New IFTF Blog Post!
2025 Grant Report: “Critical Essays On Interactive Fiction” (Grace Benfell)
In 2025, as part of our micro-grants program, IFTF funded a project from Grace Benfell, co-editor in chief of The Imaginary Engine Review. Read about it here!
blog.iftechfoundation.org/2026-04-03-2...
The NarraScope 2026 schedule is out! Including our keynotes from @sharangbiswas.bsky.social and @meredithgran.com!
Every time I see the Artemis 2 Earth-Moon orbit graphic
I hear the Outer Wilds “oh no” music in my head
Sorry
Quite right. Conversation systems are a huge area of opportunity for this kind of extra modifier, in parser IF and out of it.
Heh.
A brief excursion on adverbs in IF and why we don't use them, except that Deadline *does* use them.
blog.zarfhome.com/2026/04/curs...
Moon colonies are awesome and have amazing 1960s-deco architecture and costumes.
Also, you know, good spot for a birthday party.
slop is something that takes more human effort to consume than it took to produce. When my coworker sends me raw Gemini output he’s not expressing his freedom to create, he’s disrespecting the value of my time
🎶 Oh we got a new computer but it’s quite a disappointment
’Cause it always gave this same insane advice:
“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is nice!” 🎶
He's dead as the dickens, I'm afraid
Make Subcutean the Movie dammit
This is a collection of interviews with lots of people on the broad topic of *play*. Two versions: order and chaos! Available as a free download or you can buy it off Lulu.
I'm in another game-studies collection:
Ludic Narrans, Stories of/by/for the Field of Play:
Drew Davidson, Emily Matheny, et al.
blog.zarfhome.com/2026/03/ludi...
playstorypress.org/ludic-narrans/
Everyone Cheering The Social Media Addiction Verdicts Against Meta Should Understand What They’re Actually Cheering For
First things first: Meta is a terrible company that has spent years making terrible decisions and being terrible at explaining the challenges of social media trust & safety, all…
I say "one of the first" reflexively because there's always some damn earlier example, but Roottrees and Golden Idol exist because people played Obra Dinn and said "holy crap this works".
Obra Dinn was one of the first database-as-formal-puzzle games. Earlier cases came out of interactive novels and hypertext (Portal, Sam's stuff) or visual novels; Obra Dinn really crystalized the idea of going straight from the DB to the exam questions. (Strong narrative, but not as the gameplay.)
Separate problem! Separate problem! If you can't afford space industry (and US policy has been clear that it can't, even before the economy was kicked full of holes) you launch probes for a fraction of the cost.
If you can, you launch probes and also other stuff.
*That's* what I want to see. "Birthday party on the moon" is shorthand.
That means infrastructure and thousands of long-term residents are already in place. That means industrial-scale activity in LEO with a steady stream of Lunar landings. That means regular heavy lift in use. That means truly reusable launchers.
I do still genuinely say "I wish I were rich enough to have a birthday party on the Moon."
This is precisely phrased. Having a birthday party means my friends can come. That means that space tourism is on the economic scale of "a trip to New Zealand".
I look back at being 12 and think "Playing space games in the back yard was fun, but obviously I didn't have a clue about anything back then."
They look back and think "Money makes obstacles go away."
Some folks on Anglican Twitter may actually not know that I am an OG Harry Potter fan. What do I mean by OG? I had a fanfic on the first page of Harry Potter fic on ffn. I was the webmaster for the first ever Harry Potter fan convention.
Then you have the opportunity to geek out about Venusian aerostat cities, the more awesome planetary colony plan in the history of the Space Age.
(Feel free to play "count the nerdinesses” in the background…)
(Most memorable game items are large, so if you get one you're playing with a scale model. But this is exactly as it was in my hand in the mansion.)
The end of my apartment hall, between two doors. An ornate but stylized key, decorated with gears and a red gem, is hanging on the wall. Above one door is a wooden plaque engraved “Abode of Zarf”. Through it you can see a desk with a two-monitor Mac (all windows are minimized, no spoilers). A bookshelf and a couple of pieces of geometric art are visible. The analog clock on the far wall appears to be mirror-reversed.
I grabbed a Blue Prince Basement Key from the iam8bit table at GDC. (I suspect they sold out of those fast.)
Now it's hanging in my hallway and I am genuinely happy to see it every day, you know? Not often that a game object hits exactly that sweet spot of *thing*-ness.