My IF history book, Learning from the Best of Text, has been released

General IF Community Resources
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I’ve updated my history book Learning from the Best of Text to include acknowledgements and have released it on Github here:

Due to popular demand, a ‘chicago’ version has been added in pdf, epub, and docx formats that uses that author name and year for citations. The original version with superscript APA-style citations is also available.

Thanks to everyone who helped this!

This was funded by a grant from the IFTF:
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I realize that IFComp is still ongoing, so I don’t expect anyone to drop everything and check it out now, but I’m so grateful to the funding of the IFTF (and to those who donated), and to the many proofreaders. I wanted to publish it now to fulfill my responsibility to the IFTF in a prompt manner.

I did most of the fun parts 5 years ago but dreaded the large amount of work left to make this publishable, so this would not have been completed without the community assistance I received.

While I’m not planning any changes any time soon, I’m happy to record any typos or errors found.

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Yay! Congratulations, Brian.

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Thanks, I appreciate the support!

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Congratulations!

Curiously, are you planning to update in 4 or so years with the newer IFComps and XYZZYs? (Speaking of which, I know it’s IFComp but I haven’t heard much about the XYZZYs recently…)

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That’s a good idea, maybe I could update every time Ryan Veeder has a birthday or so.

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Wow! Looking forward to it!

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Was Ryan Veeder @Afterward born on leap day?

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I don’t know if it’s real or a bit, but his exposition he does every four years is leap year related

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My mood once I searched for my name first thing in the book...

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Seriously, though, great job with this. It’s cool you got a grant to do this and you earned every penny of it.

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I have the ePub version loaded on my Kindle. Thank you!

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Goodness, I need to open my eyes and ears more; I’d missed this announcement. I don’t know when I’ll have the time to read this tome, but I’ll certainly try. Fwiw, I recently replayed The Magic Toyshop (1995) and geez, that game didn’t age well. I did catch the Curses ref when it showed up, but only because I remembered enough from my walkthrough of it. I did NOT pick up on every Trinity ref I needed, even though I’ve also written a walkthrough for that game too.

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I will read it carefully and slowly. Thank you for this great book.

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Downloaded :+1:

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I’ve started reading, but the section on the first IFCOMP made we want to test some of the games, so my reading of the book has now stalled :sweat_smile:

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I wanted to check something in this book and found it really hard to find online, so in addition to Github I’ve posted it here:

I haven’t made any changes. I have been sent some changes to make but haven’t actually made them yet, since I’m waiting to build up a larger set of changes.

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Let’s all five-star it in itch.io to make it more visible in itch’s algorithms.

Review comments can be nice, too.

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Hi @mathbrush, I haven’t been checking in here much lately so I somehow missed this. What an amazing achievement! Thanks for the mention, and I look forward to reading the book in full!

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Thanks for the mention of the IF Art Show and Carma.

Marnie aka that Doe Person :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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Hi, David. Thanks for my pages on the IF Wiki. :blush: Hope you are doing okay.

Marnie aka that Doe person I played that collect plant game on Facebook until it died. The one who took over couldn’t keep coding if for free.

For years now I have been playing Word with Friends on Facebook. Seems it was the only game that survived. Some of those people recently helped me.

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Just a little addendum to this – reviews on itch can’t be seen by anyone but the creator. Seems bizarre to me, but I’m saying, don’t bother writing a review that might help someone other than @mathbrush… because the only person who can read your review is mathbrush :slight_smile:

I discovered this after writing a review. And I could only do that after I used Brave browser’s ‘force paste’ feature to overcome a bug in the comment text entry window code that prevents you from pasting anything. A bug people have been complaining about for years :roll_eyes:

-Wade

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