Zarf Updates

My ThinkyCon 2025 talk is now posted!

Towers of Pen: puzzle experiences that zoom out and out

• The talk in text form (link)
• The slides by themselves (PDF, 13 Mb)
• The recorded video from November 6th (via ThinkyCon's Youtube channel)

The video includes a couple of audience questions, but it also includes me saying "um" a lot. Take your pick, take your chances.

By the way, I've now written this talk twice. When I wrote it up to present live, I wrote my notes in spoken English. For the web page, I rewrote it all in written English.

Of course the spoken version was a bit improvised. But even if I'd read directly from my written notes (which I never would, that sucks) it wouldn't have been identical to the text essay. Because nobody speaks written English.

A sample comparison:

Spoken Zarf:

Which reminds me of the metroidbrania moment of “I didn’t realize I could do this, but it was there all along, hidden in plain sight.” Not the same structure, but the same feeling. Which maybe explains why I am obsessed with both of these tropes.

Written Zarf:

The feeling is analogous to (though not identical to) the “metroidbrainia” moment: “I didn’t realize I could take this action, but it was always available -- hidden in plain sight.” This might explain why I am obsessed with both of these tropes.

When I'm talking, I happily string together sentence fragments. It moves the paragraph along and nobody cares. When I'm writing, okay, I'm still pretty loose about sentence structure. But I think a lot more about paragraph structure, because I'm thinking about the text in larger chunks -- and I expect you-the-reader will too.