Published on the Web (individual site)

A western con with your choice of ending.

(Source: https://webyarns.com/the-shootout-2016/)

Alan Bigelow's "The Shootout" is a wonderfully fun and interactive western tale with poetic language, immersive sound, and a surprisingly modern ending that you won't see coming. It seems, no matter where technology goes, we cannot help but love stories and puzzles. We just find new packages for them.

(Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/17Fall/editor.html)

An adventure game about a wander's attempts to return home, involving imagination and chance.

Work on We Descend began in 1984, when five words came unbidden into my mind: “If this document is authentic…” I had no idea what the phrase signified: Who’s saying this? What document? Why wouldn’t it be authentic? How would it be authenticated? By what authority? How would that authority be established? Where did the document come from in the first place? As I pondered these questions, a clutch of fragmentary writings began to appear under my hands — via the standard tech at the time: fountain pen, notebook paper, clipboard.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/we-descend/)

“Stromatolite” is a dream/delusion/poem/shallow grave of language. As I say by way of introduction:

I was carving up _Was_, Michael Joyce’s “novel of internet,” feeding phrases to Googlemena, savage goddess, to see what she might throw back. Results fell mainly in three piles: interesting resonance (e.g.,”the lost what was” evoking notes on circumcision); incestuous loops (quotations from the novel in reviews, etc.); and most marvelously… THESE REALLY WEIRD HEAPS OF WORDS

(Source: https://thenewriver.us/stromatolite/)

Nothing captures the experience of 2020's pandemic like making a video conference call. Be it for work or personal reasons, most of us opened our domestic life to the online world via these platforms; Zoom probably rising to the top of the list. Personal space became public in our desire or requirement to connect, and these platforms became a new room in most of our homes. This piece, Room #3, engages these ideas by presenting a peculiar Zoom call by me and a set of copies of myself to question these kinds of connections: always alone in the physical space, but always connected in unexpected ways to a multitude of known interlocutors and unknown human and non-human agents.

Room #3 is a cross-over piece between two projects, The Offline Website Project (TWOP) and Corporate Poetry. Originally an HTML website meant to never leave my home computer, it now circulates as a video documenting the experience of one of my interactions with my own website. Thematically, as part of the larger Corporate Poetry, it explores how corporate language relates to that other corpora that is our bodies. The piece includes a short 40-second introduction to TOWP and then it moves to a Zoom conversation between 4 replicas of me who experience traditional Zoom issues such as audio problems, turned off cameras and so on. This goes on loop for a bit, until the supposedly private conversation with myself expands onto the realization that this conversation, like millions of others (also depicted into new screens with violent and uncensored content), is being recorded, and all their information analyzed to serve Zoom’s unselective data gathering purposes.

(Source: Author's description)

There have been many specialty programming languages for writing interactive fiction. The programming directory of the IF Archive holds some fifty different languages and systems. Of them, Inform is one of the best known. Since its release on April 30, 1993, Graham Nelson's IF programming language has arguably become the most popular one.

There has been little change in Inform for nearly a decade. Inform 6, the last major update, was released on April 30, 1996. Changes since then have been incremental, with the language itself remaining stable for a decade.

That changed on April 30, 2006, when Graham Nelson released Inform 7. Inform 7, or I7, is a dramatic departure from what has come before. IF languages such as Inform 6, TADS, and Hugo are procedural, C-like languages, familiar to most any modern computer programmer. I7 doesn't take that approach. Instead, its language is based on English.

The Web site Circulars was founded on January 30, 2003, to provide a focal point for poets’ and artists’ activities and reflections on the impending inva- sion of Iraq along with the politics of the media and civil liberties issues. Its format is a multiauthor weblog, or “blog.”1 The HTML design was based on a generic Movabletype template with customized coding added for the com- ments and archives sections. Original elements of the design included an unambitious header graphic and a Flash insignia—a vertical cylinder of rotat- ing cogs that, when individually clicked, adopt different angles and sizes, courtesy of the freeware Flash site levitated.net—which I superimposed over Guy Debord’s collage map of Parisian flows, “The Naked City,” in reverse black and white (figure 3.1). Circulars was housed as a subsite of my Web site www.arras.net, devoted to new media poetry and poetics, though as a distinct entity. (Indeed, for the first several weeks, www.arras.net did not even contain a link to Circulars.) (Description from first paragraph of Stefans' book chapter "Toward a Poetics for Circulars" (2006).