Zarf Updates

A couple of months ago, I wrote:

I was replying to a comment by Charlie Stross, who noted that LLMs are trained on existing data and therefore are biased against recognizing new phenomena. My point was that in tech, we look forward to learning about new inventions -- new phenomena by definition. Are AI coding tools going to roadblock that?

Already happening! Here's Kyle Hughes last week:

That's not even a new language, it's just a new major version. Is C++26 going to run into the same problem?

Hat tip to John Gruber, who quotes more dev comments as we swing into WWDC week.

We all know that the Web is currently under attack by AI companies trying to turn scraped data into venture capital. I'd link to the early article I saw sounding the alarm, but I can't find it because there are hundreds of search hits on "ai bot scraper problems". I guess this article (arstechnica, March) was a big one.

This hit home for me when IFWiki started to show intermittent errors from server load. The server admins for IFTF and IFWiki are currently looking into solutions for that, so I will say no more about it. (I'm not the IFTF tech guy any more!)

However, I am still the IF Archive guy, so I took a look at its logs. Turns out the Archive is getting hammered in the same way. It's just not causing any problems. The IF Archive is entirely static files (except for the search widget). Cloudflare over Apache on static files can handle this load without breaking a sweat.

But I spent a bit of time analyzing the log data. Here's 15 hours of user-agent strings from yesterday:

A quick reminder: today is is the last day to register for NarraScope 2025 if you want to attend in person. (Remote attendance will be open until June 18th.) If you want the conference rate at the University City Study hotel, you need to grab that today also.

Friday workshops are up on the schedule, too. As always, workshops are free, but you must be registered for the conference (remote or in person) to sign up for the workshops.

See you in Philadelphia in, yikes, four weeks!

It happened that I was looking back on my old game reviews, and I hit a link to a game web site, and the site was gone.

Not a shock. Web sites vanish. It made me sad, though. I like those single-game, single-message web sites!

I doubt anybody loves building them. There's this sense of capitalist obligation. If you're shipping a game, you need to grab a vaguely suited domain name and put up (a) screenshots and (b) links to all the store platforms and (d) a press kit in case a journalist notices. Once the game ships, you go back and fill in (c) adulatory press quotes. That's how you get any google juice there is to get.

I did this for Hadean Lands, and now every time I mention Hadean Lands on my blog I can link to hadeanlands.com. That's great. Search engines dig it.

But of course I am on board with keeping my web site alive over decades. I registered eblong.com in 1997, I believe. It will run as long as I pay the bills. When I registered hadeanlands.com in 2010, I put it on the same hosting service and the same bill. No extra effort.

(Yes, my will allows my beneficiaries to keep my web sites running. I said decades, I meant decades.)

Not everyone can; not everyone does. How many sites have we lost?

Here's a bunch of reviews that have accumulated! Gotta push them out before the stack falls over.

There's no common theme here except I played them all since GDC.

• South of Midnight
• Old Skies
• The Horror at Highrook
• Lab Rat

A few weeks ago, Guillaume Lethuillier posted "The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst":

Upon reflection, Myst has long been more analogous to a graph than a traditional linear game, owing to the relative freedom it affords players. This is particularly evident in its first release (Macintosh, 1993), which was composed of interconnected HyperCard cards.

It is now literally one. Here is Myst as a graph:

The second part of his post digs into his findings, including unreachable states which were left in the game.

That was awesome, and I twooted about it at the time. Now Guillaume has posted a third article, describing how he did it. Also the source code of the tool he used to make the graph!

Worldcon is the apex annual convention for a certain stratum of science fiction fandom. My stratum, to be precise. It's also the conference whose members vote the annual Hugo Awards.

Sadly, Worldcon the conference is becoming less notable than the semiregular scandals and political kerfuffles that happen at Worldcon, or around it, or around its organizers.

Ten years ago there was the "Sad Puppies" mess. (Basically GamerGate for sci-fi awards. I wrote a bit about that in 2016.) There were arguments around the Hugos and their ceremonies in 2019 and 2021 as well. Then in 2023, Worldcon was held in Chengdu, China, and that year's Hugos had a deeply suspect nomination process. (I didn't write about that, but I sure read a lot.)

The 2024 Worldcon seemed to go smoothly, and fandom breathed a collective sigh of, well, optimism if not relief.

Last week the Cloister Bell thrummed ominously:

Shouting erupted.

That statement was followed by a rapid clarification:

The further explanation dropped just a few minutes ago. (After I started writing this post!)

I am about to sit down and read that, and then I'll get back to writing this.

A many years ago, the IF Archive existed, and it was an FTP site. It lived at ftp.gmd.de. That was a long time ago. (1992, but who's counting.)

Slightly less long ago, the World Wide Web existed, and I said "I bet there could be a web mirror of the FTP site." So I (along with my co-conspirator Paul) built that as a holiday break project. It was just a static mirror of the files, with HTML index pages. I announced it on the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup.

A few days later, someone posted "How Do You Find Anything?"

Fair question. The favored answer was "Download the Master-Index text file and search through that." Nobody even mentioned the idea of a web search engine.

It wasn't a very complicated archive at that point, though. If you were looking for a game, you went to games/zcode or games/tads or whatever and all the games were listed. Hierarchical folders; you probably knew where you were going.

More files and more folders were added over the years, but people still mostly knew their way around. Then Google turned up and that helped a lot. And then in 2007, Mike Roberts launched IFDB, which was an extremely searchable database of IF games -- with links to the IF Archive. So that solved the problem completely!

Mostly. Ish.

IFDB is very comprehensive for games, but it doesn't try to cover interpreters, zines, articles, or the rest of the eclectic material which the Archive has collected over the decades. Google is still okay for this purpose (with the "search web" option and site:ifarchive.org). But the idea of a locally hosted search tool kept coming up.

Last weekend I finally said, "Eh, how hard could this be?" Answer: not hard at all! I had a first draft working in about two days. Don't I feel silly now?

Behold: the IF Archive search page.

A few days ago, Kate Willaert wrote:

Kicking at fuzzy genre boundaries is one of my favorite things in the world, and indeed I had some thoughts there! Let me expand them into a blog post.

First up: genre boundaries aren't defined. I mean, they're not created by definitions. It's a "what I mean when I say X" game. No, worse: it's a "what this community means when they say X" game, and who's the community, anyhow? But I'll lay my own tracks; you can decide whether to follow.

I did not play Metroid or Castlevania because I didn't have Nintendo. My first console was a Playstation. Okay, PS1 had Symphony of the Night, but I didn't play that. I played Soul Reaver, which is where I encountered the gameplay model that people would later start calling "metroidvania".

When Apple shipped the first ARM ("Apple Silicon") Macs, they came with Rosetta 2: a tool which allowed existing Intel apps to run on ARM.

One day, Rosetta 2 will go away, and Intel apps will die. (Just like 32-bit apps died in 2019.) When?

This is a boring question. You don't need to read this post. I'm only writing it because I've put together this chart at least twice. Maybe three times. Next time I wonder, I'll just re-read this post.

TLDR: The answer is probably 2028 or 2029.