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Interactive Fiction Competition 2001
Matchstick writes: "In the spirit of last year's article: The seventh annual Interactive Fiction competition is underway. This year there are 52 entries, each a bite-sized two hours long, and you only have to judge at least five for your votes to be counted. Winners from previous years are easily as high-quality as the classic Infocom games, and in many cases surpass them. Judging started October 1 and runs to November 15. The interpreters run on all major platforms (and many minor ones). It's late! Get started!"
my name is omg!
how's it going?
CowboyNeal was walking into the laboratory,
when suddenly a shot rang out!......
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
can lick my balls.
Who Refused to Fly
By Arthur Cohen
Originally published on March 21, 1974
The target area is bugged in advance of the raid. At night the electronic sensors make only a slight rustle in the trees as they drop and then begin transmitting immediately upon impact.
Now they reveal the sounds of the jungle night life and the guard pacing back and forth on the gravel path; in the morning they will record the routine sounds of an American B-52 bombing raid.
"I heard about 10 or 15 minutes of those sounds on the tape. We were dropping cluster bombs at the time. I could hear people screaming as the bombs hit."
"After I got home on March 1, I sat watching West Side Story on television. At the end when I saw Tony die, all I could think of was bombing missions. I couldn't talk for half an hour, not even to my wife."
Captain Donald Dawson was out of the Air Force just about a week when I talked with him. Although his tour of duty was scheduled to end in August of 1974, in June of 1973 he refused to fly any more combat missions over Cambodia and requested a discharge, claiming he was a Conscientious Objector. Instead he was confined to base and accused of refusing the lawful orders of a superior, for which he faced a court-martial.
Working through civilian lawyers in New York, he finally managed to have his C.O. application accepted in February, and formal charges were dropped shortly afterward.
He and his wife were still settling into a new apartment in Agawam, and ex-Capt. Dawson still looked very much the military man, mostly because of his regulation haircut; but there was the demeanor of a military man about him. He was polite, formal and eager to please. I could hardly think of him as a contemporary of mine although he was; his experience with Vietnam had been so different from my own.
He graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1969 and then from pilot training in August of 1970. He began flying his first B-52 missions, mostly over Laos and Cambodia, in November of 1971. He stopped flying missions on June 19, 1973.
"I've always been sort of a dreamer. I wanted to fly and I wanted an education. I figured the Air Force could teach me both... . I planned on making the Air Force a career. It wasn't until my first tour of duty in Southeast Asia that I began to seriously consider getting out.
"I had begun to feel bad about the killing. I had studied some international law at the Air Force Academy and thought the rules should be followed, but I thought I could stay in the Air Force long enough to change things. I liked the Air Force and never minded following orders."
Dawson's Air Force career was a gradual coming to terms with himself and with the military. He realized that advancement within the Air Force to a position where he could affect things would be difficult if not impossible because he couldn't get behind the basic ideals of the organization.
"At first I thought that nuclear war was so unbelievable that I didn't think anyone could take it seriously. The SAC program appeared to be almost a flying club between the Russians and ourselves. But then I found out how serious the officers were. I didn't understand how anybody could be so "gung-ho" about nuclear war."
In October of 1972 while he was stationed at Westover Dawson began thinking about applying for C.O. status. It wasn't only the Bombing that was bothering him or the incompatibility he was beginning to find with Air Force ideals and his own, but he had also begin to notice the fundamental deceit about the war on the home front.
He described watching Melvin Laird on television before a Senate committee in March of 1972 while he was on leave: "Laird got mad and lost his temper. He told them the Nixon Administration didn't start the war, and the bombing was only designed to support U.S. troops in the field and get us out. But I knew some of the stuff we had been bombing had nothing to do with American troops. We had been bombing Pathet Lao troops and North Vietnamese in Laos."
Captain Dawson said he began to think about applying for C.O. status as early as October of 1972. He was stationed at Westover at that time and hadn't done any flying since his first tour which ended in February. After speaking with the chaplain at Westover he felt he didn't qualify as a C.O. He also requested a transfer to a transport plane instead of the B-52, but within a week found himself retraining for combat missions in Southeast Asia.
That was about the time Henry Kissinger was saying peace was near, but Capt. Dawson found himself back flying missions after the peace agreement was in fact signed in January, 1973.
"By April of '73 I was flying missions over Cambodia and each mission was getting harder and harder. I wrote letters to people like Pete McCloskey and George McGovern. Then I heard about a mass gravesite of 600 people in Cambodia resulting from B-52 raids and then I heard about a wedding party that had been hit by one of our bombs."
It was while writing to Congressman McCloskey about the immorality of using B-52s in Cambodia that Dawson realized the necessity of doing more than just writing a letter. He realized he had to stop flying missions he couldn't condone, taking personal responsibility and risking official sanctions.
What happened after that is an interesting story for which there is no room or time as my deadline approaches. Suffice it to say that on June 19, 1973 Captain Dawson refused to fly any more missions and applied for C.O. status.
We all have to reach an accommodation with war in our own way. Captain Dawson's action in refusing to fly further combat missions makes him a greater hero to me than anyone who ever risked his life in combat. He risked a lot more than he would have by continuing to fly B-52s, which except for the brief period during the bombing of Hanoi, were extremely routine flights.
He risked the condemnation of a society that has come to thrive on war, both economically and spiritually.
Fiction Dump
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
(_*_) you like mah ass?
Well friend, i do respect your views on this subject. Your little piece on cambodia was nice. Oh by the way, we are not bombing Cambodia anymore. So you can be happy now.
Now it's my opinion time: More Carpet Bombing.
I don't know how i feel about obliterating people because they are communists. but i do know a few other things.
1. when you hijack and slam four jumbo jets full of innocent americans into things. then we will kill you.
2. when two of those things are the tallest buildings in our largest city. we will kill you
3. when those buildings collapse and take a huge chunk of lower manhattan and 5000+ lives with them. we will kill you.
4. attacking the pentagon is fair game. but we are still going to kill you.
5 anthrax is flowing like cocaine in hollywood. we are going to kill everyone.
Americans are not that special. there are a lot of things we do not do well, but one of the things we do well is this: homocide. We are spledid slaughterers of human life. we rock at it. we like it. we look for reasons to engage in it.
do not ever play america in a game of "i bet you won't come over here and kill all of us!" because you will loose.
we are a country that dropped atomic bombs, twice... remember that. america had exactly two atomic bombs in our arsonal. so how many did we use? both.
it is a shame that people can't seem to understand how much we love the killing. we get high minded and swear to god we won't kill the same way an alchoholic swears off gin, and then some assholes give us a reason to attend a mardi gras bender.
so anyway the only problem with the current b-52 attack on afghanistan is this: not enough carpet bombing.
i thank you for your attention.
What shall my "custom mood" be today? Decisions, decisions...
Manuals, tech books, websites, and much other info I can handle (although I still regularly print out long tech docs), but novels? I dont think I could ever get used to it. Perhaps the next generation will like 'em.
Bucket, not cage.
Floyd is awesome.
Maybe he hasn't had enough time to grow on you. See what you think by th eend of stationfall.
I wish he were here now; I'd really like to play hucka-bucka-beanstalk right now...
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(does the DMCA cover text adventures?)