the new adventures of positron
Yeah, so there's this neck-and-neck Senate race in Minnesota, and yeah, there's a Green Party candidate whose tiny percentage of the vote might be enough to swing the election and possibly the balance of the whole Senate, given how close things are. One can email the Minnesota Green Party and ask him nicely to drop out. (Apparently the Democratic candidate, Paul Wellstone, is as progressive as they come—Winona LaDuke urged his endorsement.)
They made antihydrogren. And extremely vivid out-of-body experiences have been triggered by stimulating the right angular gyrus. Is it just me, or did we learn everything we know about the brain by giving electric shocks to epileptics?
I have been browsing interactive fiction here and there. So far Photopia is the standout; it's one of the only games with prose that wouldn't cause Frank Conroy to lose his lunch, and the premise and execution of the story are rather neat. There's even a bit of bona fide character development. The tradeoff seems to be that there's less of a game aspect to it; everything has to come in a certain order, and there's not too much variation in what you can do at any given point. This essay on the nature of interactive fiction by one of its better-known practitioners inveighs against puzzles for the sake of puzzles. More thought is required.
Yes, I'm still writing what I'm supposed to be writing—but Song of Roland has reached a stopping point until I get back from next week's research trip to Seattle, woo woo. Right now it's the fun game where you put stories in manila envelopes and put the manila envelopes in your mailbox. Everyone loves this game.
