Interactive Fiction In The Wild

General Off-Topic Discussion
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One of my favourite hobbies is clicking around on random websites, especially the older .edu ones that have been mashed up sometime in the mid 2010’s or earlier and kind of left alone for the most part- I think it’s because some professors had fun putting together some odds and ends and kind of forgot about them. Take for example, one prof’s really long fanfiction about Brother Gregor Mendel, you know- the sweetpeas guy.

While attempting to find the name of someone or the other mentioned on a Zoom call, I ran across some guy’s resume website-y thing that had a link to his overseer for a degree. I clicked on it, as I’m prone to doing when given new .edu links, and stumbled across this prof’s page on interactive fiction, of games he’s played and enjoyed and intends to, (as well as a delightful series of pages including: a dinner club that is attempting to eat at every eatery put into the Yellow pages in Toronto, and some frankly hysterical drawings) that mentions Photopia! Apparently he even wrote a TADS game way back when. Very fun running into interactive fiction in the wild.

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As opposed to safely in the confines of their cells in the IF Archive dungeon?

There’s a lot of great classics on his list. Reminded me that I still have to play Lost New York.

I think the lion drawing is fantastic by the way!

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Wherein they’re all neatly catalogued for nightly count, yup! :stuck_out_tongue:

It’s kind of unfortunate wherever he was linking them from (wurb?) seems to be broken, but it’s nice that the names are preserved.

The lion especially has some whimsical charm, but that portrait is sort of terrifying. Then again, the reference image does have a lot of likeness captured in the drawing, haha.

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Professor John Blamire’s Meet Brother Gregory has me strangely transfixed. I’m open-mouthedly clicking through the pages and footnotes. Wondering about… well, I couldn’t tell you yet…

I’m bookmarking this one for further reading. Thanks for linking.

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I know, right? It was so startling when I ran across it while tiredly writing up a lab report on cannibalistic fruit fly tendencies, but was sort of charming to think of someone devoting so many years to writing fanfiction about… Mendel, of all people.

Cheers! Hope you have fun reading through it, haha.

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Oh… my… gosh… me too!

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