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"Qi" is one of the alternate spellings for the Asian word for the circulating life energy in all living things. Other spellings are "chi" and "ki".

Come on now, surely we all know that a Ki is a D'ni smartphone used in Uru.

What? You all remember Uru, don't you?

(crickets)

(cries)

'We've been using the flow of energetic charged particles at Voyager 1 as a kind of wind sock to estimate the solar wind velocity. We've found that the wind speeds are low in this region and gust erratically. For the first time, the wind even blows back at us.

Arrrgh, trim yer sails, and steady on, mate.

Obligatory interactive fiction link:

Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home

Zork is somewhat overrated; it's from a time when adventure games were a grab-bag of fantasy cliches and "zany" objects. The past two decades have been spent retconning it into something grander than it actually was.

However, there's some amazing interactive fiction out there; atmospheric, tight writing. Totally immersive story. Brain-wrenching puzzles. It'd be great to read / play these on a Kindle. Some of my favourites:

• Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin - possibly the most unreliable narrator ever. See how long it takes you to work out what's really happening.
• Varicella by Adam Cadre - renaissance period intrigue.
• Anchorhead by Michael S. Gentry - Lovecraftian horror.
• A Bear's Night Out by David Dyle - adorable kid's story

Other couple I like are A Day for Soft Food (have you ever wanted to roleplay as a cat?) and Trinity (a mix of high fantasy and nuclear history)

I would like to mention here for those interested that Andrew Plotkin has written a FAQ that he has maintained meticulously through all of Uru's incarnations. Interestingly, this is the very same FAQ that was linked when Uru's first demise was posted to Slashdot.

Uru attracts dedicated fans, and Cyan has some of the best fan relationships of any company. This is a game worth trying out, if you haven't. You may not like it, but I guarantee, if you like it at all, you'll love it.

If you like background noise, give boodler a try. It's written in Python and rather old, but still runs on modern systems (I tried it on Debian Lenny and Etch).

I think your post omits the ultimate reason for the phenomenon: Once an author becomes a celebrity, there are suddenly a nontrivial number of people who want to read every last word the author writes, for better or worse. Especially where the books in question are in a fantasy series. As Zarf has said, "The defining trick of fantasy and science fiction writing is to stuff information down your throat, as fast as possible, so smoothly that you never feel the burn."

So you've got a genre where more information is better, and you've got a screaming fan base who wants more of this world, in whatever shape it comes. Given that set of circumstances, it's no wonder that the books get longer and longer.

In any case, J.K. still has editors, and they -- even in book 5 -- still tell her to cut stuff. It's just that it's better for almost everyone involved to cut less.

... By a late gentleman who went by the name of Douglas Adams. The software, Anthem, in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, used a company's stock as input data instead of server logs, but the idea was still there. I wonder if his writing influenced the author of this tool.

I can't help but wonder if the music generated by this software isn't going to sound like, in Mr. Adams own words, "a short burst of the most hideous cacophony in G minor" -- to say nothing of what it must sound like to listen to hours of this stuff if 30 seconds is pure hell.

I would personally prefer to use Boodler for such purposes; instead of music you can use any waveforms you like. You program the software to do whatever you want, whether it's write music or (more likely) generate an environmental audioscape similar to what peep does, only much more sophisticated and flexible since you can program whatever events you want and send them to Boodler, which can be set to listen to a socket or port for commands.

http://www.eblong.com/zarf/if.html If you will note several of these provide a java version. Also Zarf is one of the better IF writers IMHO, so this is a good starting point for a lot of people that can't be arsed to download one of the other players.

I think the term you're looking at to satisfy #1, #2, and #3 is "interactive fiction." Players of pedantic text adventures may not look down on others, but I assure you, connoisseurs of interactive fiction, of the literary type produced by Adam Cadre , Emily Short , and Zarf , among others, most likely look down on all other "gamers," and are probably scorned in kind by WoW players! And not nobody is selling IF at Wal-Mart...

Here's a new version of the summary which I think is easier to read...

Who created the Warforged?

This morning my attention was captured by this article on MMORPG. In particular by the fact Turbine said they "built" Eberron and was told that it was recommended by Wizards of the game world, and were included in the MMO was even considered; they've always been part of the clear connections TO the existing world, not as something new. Xen'drik has always INTENTIONALLY been left undeveloped, so each DM can put what he wants there. So that part is correct. The reason the MMO was even considered; they've always been part of the setting. Poor choice of words? Maybe.

I'll give a free pro Datalogic USB barcode scanner (I've a few spare ones I acquired ages ago and haven't used) to anyone who can come up with a simple Windows application that reads barcodes, submits them to http://isbndb.com/account/dev/api/20-structure.htm l, and builds a simple text file with all my books in there. I've got hundreds of books to take to the Charity shop, and I'd like to itemise them all - and I can't code for toffee.
Can anyone help me out?
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/bookscan/#quick suggests it's trivial via Perl for those that can use it... barcode AT infobubble DOT co DOT uk if they can...!

Zarf's Book-Scanning Project overview may be of use.

Do as the librarians do: divide the books into major subjects and then alphabetize by author. If you need to search by something else, Google is your cross-reference.

Or, just use Google first: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en& q=book+isbn+barcode+scanner

Which yields:

http://idautomation.com/isbn/
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/bookscan/

and

http://isbntools.com/

The last one seems pretty complete.

I believe http://ask.slashdot.org/ should just redirect to http://www.google.com/

Little Boy Blue, come, blow your horn!
The sheep's in the mountain the Lord is a vapour of the tree for the strangers to
take the book that thou hatest the deeds of the wicked shall decay, and the noise of chariots and horsemen, through the pillar of fire; that he had opened the sixth curtain in the gate, and there are innumerable before him and he heard the voice of a person, if he see that he died of itself, or any peacock gay, So, dearest Jen, if you'll be mine, let us find occasion of word against him?

For who among men is not of divers colours

The saints glorify God for his fiddlers three.

FOR WANT OF A FEATHER-Birds of a man seduce a virgin

The childish shall possess them

Fatness hath covered his face, and shalt let down thy milk

And when it was well lubricated. This procedure
wasn't really necessary, but who is the cause which I have sinned, and thou shalt
fill it

And if all the heavens, or who gave the cock
understanding?
 

And so I ask my fellow slasdoters, how does one concisely characterize the experience of say, the multitude of different ways milk can spoil; the various acridness of old unwashed gym cloths; the powerful fetidness of well-used, unwashed trash containers? and be absolutely certain that one is getting one's point across? Is there a practical dictionary or directory for such things?


How about an aroma wheel? There's a nice round up of them here: http://www.eblong.com/zarf/flavorwheel.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain

Used this (easy to compile) C program:

http://www.eblong.com/zarf/markov/

to create these:

http://www.mintruth.com/mirror/texts/

Mod points to whomever can tell us what texts they use. (No mod points can actually be given)

RTFA, Designer != Programmer, it takes quite a while to write a 2d scrolling game engine, but an hour or so to make a game with shoot-em-up construction kit. The z engine and the AIGused to create commercial adventure games like zork and leasure suit Larry. My sister has no problems writing adventure games when she was around ten years old using a simple point and click adventure game engine, so I'm sure budding game designer will have no problems either, the benefits of designing text or lo-fi games is that you are forced to concentrate on the story and interactivity and not on how pretty can I make the graphics.

all solo-player though (so possibly off-topic)

all solo-player though (so possibly off-topic)

The very talented Adam Cadre and Andrew Plotkin have a small hack on making infocom games. It's one of the most precise introductions to a programming language I've ever seen.

Photopia is great. One of the few text adventures that can truly be described as "interactive fiction" . It sounds lame, but to explain why would give away too much of Photopia's plot.

I can also heartily recommend spider and web by Andrew Plotkin. More of a traditional puzzler, but with nice plot and NPCs.

Along the same lines of story-focused IF capable of giving the chills I'd also recommend Shade. It's also fairly brief and can be traversed in a relatively short time.

Some latter-day IFs (linky-linky) do provide just that. Of course, in that case, you already have all game data local on your HD and serving a given piece of media to 200 players isn't an issue...

Maybe what we need is a smart client which can understand old-style BASIC "PLAY" grammar -- "o4t240cdededrddcdere.... About the graphics, loads of MUDs already have ASCIIArt maps and stuff -- libcaca is your friend.

Some latter-day IFs (linky-linky) do provide just that. Of course, in that case, you already have all game data local on your HD and serving a given piece of media to 200 players isn't an issue...

Maybe what we need is a smart client which can understand old-style BASIC "PLAY" grammar -- "o4t240cdededrddcdere.... About the graphics, loads of MUDs already have ASCIIArt maps and stuff -- libcaca is your friend.

TADS: http://www.tads.org/
Glulx: http://www.eblong.com/zarf/glulx/ (looks like a 32-bit Z-Machine)
Inform: http://www.inform-fiction.org/ (this is the infocom virtual machine)
Hugo: http://www.generalcoffee.com/hugo.html

One other little thing (that's sort of an e-book format in a high-tech sort of way) that I'd like to see on every PDA / e-book reader is a Z-Machine (with a Glk virtual machine being an extra bonus) that can be used for er, well, interacting with interactive fiction.

The specifications are easily available (for both Z-Machine and Glk) and so could be pretty readily implemented into any PDA or e-book reader by any competent programmer.

You can get yet another layer of indirection by running Andrew Plotkin's Lists and Lists, which features a Scheme interpreter, in the Java Z-machine interpreter. Anyone feel like writing a JVM in scheme? :)

A few of my favourite games took about an hour or three to play through and had very little replay value. Still they left an impression not unlike that of leaving a movie theatre after a particularly impressive film. (Of course, none of these games are on the list as they're sort of ...under the radar for most.)

Well, if one wants background noise, perhaps Boodler can help out. Just like buying those whitenoise boxes, except this runs on Linux ;-)

You can probably tell I'm a raving Cyan fan, and this is a crying shame. The game could have taken off, if they got through the technical problems -- it would have been a slow process certainly, as word got around what they were building. There must have been far more planned than the beta/Prologue phase could show off.

But it's hard to argue when the guy with the wallet says he's tired of the money drain. Sigh.

--Andrew Plotkin

However, this is his home page, rather than a game based around him. (!)

It's in GLUL not in z-machine (strictly speaking this is an over-simplification). You'll need a glul interpreter such as Andrew Plotkin's glulxe to play it. I had to change a couple things to compile one of glulxe's supporting libraries - email me if you'd like a hand with this.

Andrew Plotkin is amazing. Mac users should try his System's Twilight freeware game, which is somewhere between charming and mind-bending.

If Narcolepsy has even a shade of the stuff Plotkin used in Twilight, conceptually or in puzzles, it can't help but be great.

The public demo is samples, not a runnable demo. According to the article, they're seeking patents. I think I'd rather try to get Boodler running, or Looching, which preceded that. (Or Tranquility, which someone else mentioned.)

There's a good page about the game at http://www.eblong.com/zarf/werewolf.html. Has the rules and links to other pages about the game.

about markov chains. you can grab a c program to compile and then make your own books.

Andrew Plotkin's Spider and Web (site seems to be down, currently) had that duct-searching effect on me. Great game.

I think my favourite free-as-in-zero-dollars computer game of all time is Curses. This game will keep you up late at night and get you up at all hours of the morning. Eventually you'll find yourself searching google groups (rec.games.int-fiction) for solutions to some of the trickier bits. (Like that %$#! flashlight battery hidden right under your nose where you can't get it without the [spoiler ommitted].)

You'll also need a z-machine to play it. For the classic MacOS, the obvious choice is MaxZip, though there are of course numerous others.

OS X can probably run frotz (though you may have to compile it). Anyway, whatever platform you need it for, you should be able to find something here. They've got z-machines for everything, including certain brands of pocket toasters, or so it seems. (The z-machine was originally developed for Zork.)

is a great puzzle game. It used to be shareware, and now it's freeware. Available here.

This kind gentlman has posted a solution for owners of books that have barcodes. Scan in to a text file, run the script and it gets the info from Amazon.
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/bookscan/

Books in print only covers books currently carried by commercial distrtibutors, and only those in English (I am assuming it covers US, ENglish, Australian, Canadian etc, be it in several volumes or in one fat subscription).

We need something for books in other languages/countries (I am Spanish and own a sizeable number of South American Books).

On other news, Andrew Plotkin (Zarf of Inform fame) has a nice tale of his project to digitize his book collection catalogue: The Book-Scanning Project. Sorry if this is redundant, one really doesn't have the time to read aaaall other contributions.

The Book-Scanning Project

This guy wrote some Python scripts to convert UPC's to ISBN's - it can be done - and then feed them into Amazon's search engine. Very interesting, and he's already done it, so he has some experience.

People not think Andrew Plotkin good need read/play 'The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass of Sherbet' or other award-winning interactive fiction written by Andrew Plotkin.

I think you'll find that that particular game was written by Graham Nelson (under the alias of Angela M. Horns), in fact. It was the winner of the 1996 IF competition. See here for more information.

You can see the list of IF written by Plotkin here. Most notable (IMHO) are "Spider and Web" (5 XYZZYnews awards including Best Game, 1998), "A Change in the Weather" (winner of the first IF competition in 1995 (Inform division)) and "So Far" (4 XYZZYnews awards including Best Game, 1996).

Pete.

disclaimer: I don't know Zarf and don't want to speak (or make guesstimates) of his intelligence level.

Hint (from someone who's played a number of his games and read a hell of a lot of posts by him to rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction (you can have a read through those here) - it's high. Very high. I'm actually quite surprised he reads slashdot. :)

Have a look through the relatively plain version of his sitemap to get a grasp of the number of coding and writing and other projects he's been involved with.

But one presumes that he is at least somewhat familiar with Unix and Linux derivatives. Based on his comments, he seems to be bumbling around OS X and having more trouble than the average shmoe.

*sigh* A lot of other slashdot commenters appear to be having trouble grasping his writing style in this "very secret" diary. As if the title wasn't enough of a hint in itself. As if the "editorial comments" also made by him didn't make it even more clear.

Mr Plotkin (Zarf) is an extremely literate person and widely experienced both programming for and using different operating systems. I'm sure the style of writing making up most of the "diary" is at least partly intended to be humorous, but it's primarily intended to express his interaction with the new (to him) operating system - and the writing style is just another tool he's using to express that.

I did appreciate another /. poster pointing out that the writing made him think of the Hulk. "Computer make no sense. Make Hulk MAD!" :-)

Case in point: "Click the lock to make changes" and he's completely lost? For crying out loud buddy, a new dialog is presented with only one choice on it! What to do... hmmm... try the "any key", I hear that works.

The reason he was confused by it (and apparently others on this collection of comments agree) is that is doesn't make sense.

Seriously, he seems quite confounded by this simple dialog.

Because it doesn't make sense.

This is a case where an experienced computer user would be puzzled, and a relatively inexperienced computer user probably wouldn't be. The RICU would read the words, think "Don't really understand... where's something to click... oh! I can click that, let's click that." The RICU would simply not think about what has just happened other than "The computer wanted me to click something, so I clicked it. I don't know why the computer asks me to click things, it just does that sometimes."

The ECU, however, would think "Why is it asking for a password for administrative access? What would that be - the only password I've set so far is for my personal account, and I'm not the administrator!" Or if the ECU was aware that his personal account already had administrative rights, he'd be thinking "But don't I already have admin rights? Why the hell am I being asked for a password to access admin rights if I already have those rights?"

I can see myself being just as puzzled by this dialog as Zarf. I'd probably just click the padlock (although from what Z and others have said, it doesn't actually look like a normal OSX button, so I might not realise it's a button) and guesswork my way forward. But I would be really (justifiably) pissed at the UI for being nonsensical.

Hint: It's asking you to enter a password to perform an admin-level function. What text-based utility have we seen that does this? "sudo" perhaps? This dialog is the graphical equivilent of sudo.

No, it's not. Not remotely. Because first of all, he's supposed to already have admin rights (theoretically at least). You don't have to sudo if you already (should) have all the rights you need to accomplish the task! And secondly, the way it generally works on a "normal" UNIX-like system with sudo is that a particular (trusted) user is given permission (by the root user) to run a particular program as root, and they have to enter their password to verify it's them trying to do it (not just someone who wandered by the machine while they were getting a coffee). That makes sense.

If you tried to install something that required root privileges on a "normal" UNIX-like system, you'd probably get a number of filesystem-level "you don't have permission to do this" errors. If you tried to run something that required root privileges to run (eg. a telnet daemon to listen on the official telnet port 23, among other things), you'd be told (in one form or another) that you need root privileges to do that. You would still have to sudo or su manually to become root for that particular task.

However, if you were effectively root under another name, everything would (well, should :) just install and run.

I get the feeling good ol' Zarf tends to leave himself logged in as "root" on his Linux box...

You probably should realise that Zarf is actually quite used to the concept of multiuser operating systems, and is somewhat puzzled that the developers of this aspect of OSX apparently aren't. :)

Dumb user? Or simple case of unfamiliarity in new operating environment. Quick! Vote now!

I vote for "surprising degree of misunderstanding by quite a few slashdot readers, including but not limited to yourself". :)

Pete.

http://www.eblong.com/zarf/sitemap-pict.html
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/cave/index.html
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/sitemap.html

Tell me those are usable and I'll go back to living under my bridge.

http://www.eblong.com/zarf/sitemap-pict.html
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/cave/index.html
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/sitemap.html

Tell me those are usable and I'll go back to living under my bridge.

http://www.eblong.com/zarf/sitemap-pict.html
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/cave/index.html
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/sitemap.html

Tell me those are usable and I'll go back to living under my bridge.

You should play his games, then. Zarf's narrative is immersive, evocative and depressing at the same time. "So Far" is a massive cathartic trip.

I really don't care much for the problem-solving side of IF (I don't enjoy playing games, I'd rather solve math problems :-), I wish he would write a novel some time, because I do believe he has The Gift(TM).

• XZip. for X-Windows
• WinFrotz for Windows
• MaxZip for Macintosh
• Frotz for DOS, WinCE, Amiga, OS/2, and Psion
• Pilot-Frotz for Palm OS

• XZip. for X-Windows
• WinFrotz for Windows
• MaxZip for Macintosh
• Frotz for DOS, WinCE, Amiga, OS/2, and Psion
• Pilot-Frotz for Palm OS