Wade's Spring Thing 2022 reviews, continued

My sixth review is for Phenomena by Dawn Sueoka:

-Wade

9 Likes

My computer, a 2010 Mac Pro, has just died. So I doubt I’ll be doing any more Spring Thing reviews this year, or at least not during the festival. Happy rest of Spring/Autumn thing/jumble.

-Wade

9 Likes

My condolences. May it descend into the Collosal Cave for eternal adventurous wandering. Crowther bless its bits.

8 Likes

Well, thanks for doing the ones you did. A really good set of reviews that I enjoyed reading.

6 Likes

Ugh, that’s too bad – I too have enjoyed your reviews. Good luck getting a new/resurrecting the old computer!

4 Likes

I hope this will not impact your writing too much! I’m looking forward to seeing new things from you and I suspect a broken computer might interfere with that.

3 Likes

I just got around to reading this review – I’m sure you’re deep in the the needing-a-new-computer woes, but if you have time or inclination to revisit Phenomena, it sounds like you missed the hypertext element: each line of each poem can be clicked to rotate through half a dozen or so different choices, which does a lot to flesh them out (this isn’t really signposted according to the conventions of choice-based IF or hypertext literature as I understand them, so it took me a while to realize you could do this !)

3 Likes

Thanks Mike. Yeah, I discovered this when I read Mathbrush’s review on IFDB. This means as my review stands, it’s poor as a consumer guide :slight_smile: When I get a chance, I will add a note to it.

I’ve actually sprung back quickly on the computer front. I got a new one. And the blood transfusing is 90% done; my previous mac was a tower with three hard (5.5 tb) of data. My new iMac has a a 1 tb drive and no hard drive bays, but I have an external two-drive dock. The new machine has no USB type A sockets so I had to sort out a bunch of adapters. I reinstalled everything except some of my music software that doesn’t run natively on Silicon Macs yet, and entered a string of license numbers. Suddenly my old printer was able to run on wi-fi. And the time required to compile my Inform WIP has dropped by about 75%. So ultimately, this was a good time for all this to happen. It’s certainly much better to become new and shiny before switching on a Kickstarter campaign than to break down in the middle of one.

If anyone’s reading, my advice on recovering smoothly in this kind of situation is that before it happens, you should have a physically separated backup of everything important, or just everything. I had an 8tb backup drive that did not live in the computer. You could have something like that, or use cloud storage, or both. But since my boot drive was not what broke, I was able to access its contents anyway with my dock, from the new computer.

-Wade

9 Likes

I always compile my games to and work off a cloud drive for this exact kind of thing. I’ve used Dropbox and iCloud. I actually pay 99 cents/mo for 50 GB of iCloud to store photos and documents and it feels worth it.

I’m repeatedly shocked at how if you have iCloud set up on a Mac correctly how well it actually manages to be nearly painless to switch to a new computer. I replaced my Mini earlier this year, and logging into iCloud gave me access to pretty much everything after it synced - it remembered my website passwords and favorites so it felt like starting at 90% rather than zero.

3 Likes