Zarf Updates

I have blogged every previous Cyan Kickstarter, so the foolish hobgoblin demands this post. Cyan is now crowdfunding the Myst Trilogy "Guild of Writers" Deluxe Collection.

These are the three Myst novels originally published 1995-1997, "by Rand and Robyn Miller with David Wingrove". (But, everybody understands, really written by David Wingrove -- then a new and modestly successful SF writer -- based on story ideas and concepts by the Millers.)

The paper editions have been out of print since the 90s, except for a short on-demand run of the Book of Atrus in 2023. Ebook versions have been in and out of availability.

This Kickstarter is for a new super-fancy edition. "Foil-stamped, faux-leather cover" with all the trimmings. Slipcovered if you back at a high enough level. "Contextual D’ni footnotes," ooh, nice.

The text of the books has been updated to fit better with the "modern" lore, meaning Myst 5 and Myst Online. Most of these are minor adjustments. (The epicenter of the D'ni cavern has been shifted from the Middle East to the Midwest; mules instead of camels; that sort of thing.) However, the Book of D'ni has been more seriously updated by Cyan veteran Harrison G. Pink:

In fact, about 1/3 of the third novel has been re-written, and the book is now approximately 15% longer than it was! We’ll go into more detail about the changes and the motivations for them in a future update, but rest assured, the stories and characters you know and love will remain recognizable.

(In case you were wondering: yes, a fourth book has long been hoped for. But Cyan put the kibosh on it at this year's Mysterium panel. A partial outline exists but it's incomplete and doesn't match up with the "modern" lore. So the Book of Marrim will not be appearing any time soon, and not at all from that story concept.)

Here's a talk I gave this weekend at Roguelike Celebration.

Mazes: Are We Lost Yet?

It's basically half an hour of me going off on cool mazes.

• The talk in text form
• The slides, in the big layout I used for the talk. (Not actually useful for browsing, but people laughed.)
• The video is not yet posted; I will update when it's available.

One of my readers mentioned that eblong.com is now showing a "restricted website" warning for some UK users when browsing with iOS.

If you try to modify the "Allowed List" preferences, you find an iOS notice: "To change these restrictions, the UK requires you to confirm you are an adult."

I want to be clear that I didn't do this. It's a restriction built into iOS. It apparently popped several months ago:

Apple is rolling out age checks for iPhone and iPad users in the UK that will ask them to verify if they are adults to access "certain services" such as 18-plus apps.

After customers accept the latest iOS 26.4 software update, they will be asked to verify their age, which they can do by providing a credit card or scanning their ID, according to an Apple support page.

Those who do not confirm how old they are or are underage will have web content filters turned on automatically.

-- BBC News, 25 March 2026

It is true that I added UK content restrictions to the IF Archive. That is an IFTF policy, set up on the advice of IFTF's lawyer. However, eblong.com is my personal web site, not an IFTF service, so it is not subject to that policy. Same goes for zarfhome.com, which is more player-facing but still run by me personally. Ditto the Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog and the Visible Zorker (both hosted by me on eblong). And this blog (on zarfhome).

Obviously (a) I am unthrilled about this but (b) there's nothing I can do about it. Apple does not, to my knowledge, offer a "solemnly swear my website is not evil" button. But I only know what I'm reading in this article and Apple's support page.

It seems clear from the lack of public screaming that most UK users have been silently "verified as adult", probably due to having a credit card tied to their Apple account. (App Store, Apple Music, etc.) (But "Debit cards aren't eligible" according to the support page.)

There's alternate sources for some of my stuff. My games are on the IF Archive, but as I said, that has server-side content restrictions.

The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog is mirrored on the Internet Archive. (No connection to the IF Archive!) You can pull my Visible Zorker pages off of Github.

As for the rest, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine may provide a browsing path. ("The dead past is the living present," thank you Isaac.)

eblong is my record of everything I've done in the past thirty years. It's more than half my life. The point is to provide context and an anchor. Erasing that -- erasing that for children -- is an enormous disservice. You don't need me to tell you that. I just wanted to get it in writing, for those who can still see it.

I am not particularly interested in apportioning blame between Apple and the UK government here. I don't have an inside view and I'm biased. As are you. The result is the same, regardless. This crap is not done getting worse.

(This post is mirrored on Github in case you can't see the original.)

Planetfall was yesterday's public release, but of course I've spent the past few weeks concentrating on Infidel. A couple of days I came across the most egregious bug I've yet seen in an Infocom game.

This bug is extremely difficult to detect by playing the game. I must the first person to notice it, just because I'm the first person to play the game with (the equivalent of) a memory-level debugger.

So why do I call it an egregious bug? Most people would call it a "trivial" bug, since it almost never impacts gameplay. But look you: it's a wild pointer bug which scribbles over memory in an unintended way. As a C programmer, I am legally required to regard memory corruption as the worst of all possible sins. On top of that, it's a compiler bug!

October's offering is Planetfall, Steve Meretzky's first title.

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license. In addition, I've posted high-resolution scans of the original folio manual and feelies.

I wasn't blogging in 2006, but I was a regular commenter on the Nielsen Haydens' blog Making Light in the year and on the morning that I read "Mike Ford is gone."

I found the comment which I posted twenty years ago today:

I saw him just one or two times, at conventions. I never spoke with him. I admired him desperately and furiously.

I started with reading Just the Planet in a Crown Books, because I couldn’t justify spending my allowance on it. After a while, I started to worry they’d throw me out — not for finishing a book in the store; for laughing too loudly.

I finish, as a lot of us have, by waiting for Aspects.

-- me, that thread, Sept 25, 2006.

Aspects is available, such as it is. The Dragon Waiting and The Scholars of Night and Growing Up Weightless have been reprinted. Web of Angels has been reprinted, just a couple years ago -- ancient time; I forgot that edition was on my shelf. The Trek novels have remained in print, ironically, because they were work-for-hire and not subject to the long weird story of Ford's publication rights.

I also own The Last Hot Time and The Princes of the Air and The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues (a Paranoia module). I have the Tor Double that includes "Fugue State". I have the two short story collections and the Bordertown story collection. I hope those get reprinted. I have a tiny small-press collection of Ford's poetry. It includes "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station", which Ford legendarily wrote as a Christmas card and subsequently won a stack of awards.

(Camelot Station, under its Mittel-modern barrel-vaulted glass roof, comes 'round again as the Grand Terminus of Aspects.)

I need to reread the lesser-known stuff. I've been rereading Aspects recently, piecewise out of order, as I have now and then since 2021. "Comfort reading," my spouse diagnosed correctly. I can't spend all my time in the comfort zone, though.

A few years ago I wrote an essay about language in Aspects. I thought about writing another essay, as a twenty-years' memorial, but I don't have enough pieces. Or too many, incomplete. What did happen to the Moon? How does the book's Book (its Tarot deck) echo the plot? The rules of Battleboard? Goddess, her aspects and consorts? The way Silvern and Edaire's telepathic conversations are always perfectly transparent to the reader? The omnipresent and unspoken theme of "Every story can be told two ways"?

All of that is in there, but none of it is finished and I don't see how it works. Teresa Nielsen Hayden (the book's editor) described it as having "(was going to have) (damn it) a fiendishly complicated plot." I don't even know what the plot was! I don't know if she does!

I have figured out a few things about Aspects, and since I'm not writing an essay, I'll just list them.

Three mysteries... or games which are mystery-shaped, at least. Plus one which doesn't fit the theme but does fit the symmetry group.

• The Mermaid Mask
• This Bed We Made
• Cognition Method
• He Who Watches

Back in April I took a look at the Hugo Award finalists, with an eye to seeing how the votes might divide up. I did this because the 2025 Best Game voting showed an interesting split between "indie" and "big company" voters (in some sense of those very subjective terms).

Well, the 2026 Hugo Awards were announced this weekend, and the results are... boring. No! I don't mean boring; we got a great lineup of new works across SF media, and I was excited to see them. But as statistics, there's not much to say.

(The 2026 Hugo Full Statistics report can be found on the LACon Hugo Award site.)

September is upon us, and with it that least regarded of the early Infocom games: The Witness.

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license. In addition, I've posted high-resolution scans of the original folio manual and feelies.

I am always happy to see another Rusty Lake game. It's not a high-velocity studio, but they're reliably high-quality and enjoy experimenting with their chosen form. (Co-op gameplay! Short film!)

I am also always happy to see another Rusty Lake knockoff. These are pretty common; creepy-haunted is not a complicated vibe. I've got a whole folder on these on my iPad. The Strange Case series; Hotel Orpheus; Forgotten Hill...

...My folder is labelled "Submechanical", because when I first played a Rusty Lake game -- or "Cube Escape", as it was titled back then -- I decided it was a Submachine knockoff. It turned out to be a speciation event instead; but of course that's hindsight. My point is that there's nothing wrong with being a knockoff, especially at three bucks on the mobile store.

Now I have played both the new Rusty Lake and a new batch of "if you enjoyed that, why not try...?"

• Servant of the Lake
• Hidden Town (series)