: >> : Shelley Jackon's PATCHWORK GIRL
: >> : is among the most eagerly-awaited hypertexts of the year
: >
: > There are more than one?
: Actually, yes. Eastgate publishes about a dozen new titles each year.
: Voyager publishes quite a few fine electronic editions. You can find
: interesting hypertexts from Penguin, Yale University Press, Simon and
: Schuster, Chicago, and doubtless other publishers I've overlooked.
: In addition, there is some fine netborne hypertext, and some shareware IF
: that really is closer in spirit and aspiration to literature than to
: gaming.
It's good to hear, actually. I'd just come fresh from 'having a word with
some of the users' about content, and (in)appropriateness re several dozen
unsenet advertizing posts that they had generated (and, more to the point
the fact that my mailbox (in my postmaster hat) had expanded suddenly to
(count them) 11,325 items (as at this date). More are flooding in, and every
person deserves an individual response. This sort of complaint to postmaster@
I heartily encourage (even though it was one of the users here, at fault, this
time).
However, it left me in a fairly odd mood, with my sarcasm on overdrive. My
response was not actually intended to be critical of the product (I haven't
seen it, after all), but was more along the lines of a humorous poke at the
language and form of the art-subculture, and at the language and form of
advertising, both of which I find excessively humorous subjects. :)
: >> : Editions of PATCHWORK GIRL are available for Macintosh
: >> : and for Windows
: >
: > The rest of you are out of luck, of course.
: The Macintosh version should run on the Amiga mac emulator and on the UNIX
: MAE environment.
That doesn't exactly expand the user-base in this direction, however. Oh, we've
_got_ mice here. Several of them. I must get all the paperwork off mine and see
if it needs dusting. I haven't touched it in months.
I'll take a moment out to add two cents on the language/machine requirement
debates. (Assuming there's anyone with the patience to stick with me this
far). Sure, if you _do_ come up with a piece of IF that needs an 80986,
math-co-pro, and a MoreMagic(tm) card, then by all means, DO IT! It's
part of how we advance.
Funneling clientelle so that they _must_ use a PowerAssimilate with a Vertical
Blitz Graphic Card, or a 666Mz BorgBox running BorgSoft2001 seems the wrong
way to do it. If that had been happening in the '70's then there would only be
one or two computer companies around now, and neither of them would have been
IBM or Apple. Look at the drive towards all the major hardware and software
advances (even then windows/icons/mouse environment). What spurred them to
life was _portability_. They were portable to damn near everything around,
what wasn't portable died. Microsoft managed to gain a significant marketshare
on the industry originally, because they wrote software that would run on
virtually any machine about (ATFS2, for example ran on 40 different machines,
IIRC).
So, what if I can run SparcMGR on my machine (I can), or X11 (tight, but
possible). So what if I can't run Netscape (I can't). If you have an IF
system that _can_ run on half-of-everything, by all means _do_it_. If your
system requires something higher-spec than most people have, but it's the
only way to make your idea a reality, then so be it. Better to make it a
reality, than have it fall fallow. Just don't alienate people when
portability isn't so tough.
D