miscellany

The end of Daylight Saving Time on 2009 November 1 got me thinking... you know how most of the world cheats a little where time zones are concerned, so that even during standard time the sun rises and sets later than it technically should? What would a map of time zone deviance look like? Answer: like this. (Or this, if you're colorblind.)

My newest PHP toy was inspired by a game I've been playing with Elizabeth: imagine you land at a random spot on Earth. What might you find nearby? How long would it take you to reach civilization? (Hell, how many tries would it take you not to land in the ocean?)

One of the most popular things on this site is the Lyttle Lytton Contest, which has run annually since 2001. The basic idea is this: the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenges entrants to pen the world's most atrocious first line to a novel. The problem is, most entries are so long that they're not amusingly bad — they're just flat-out unreadable. So the Lyttle Lytton Contest forces entrants to keep their masterpieces down to 30 words or less. It now runs year-round so check it out.

For ages the only picture of me in any kind of circulation was the photo on my book jacket from November 1999. But eight years later I was interviewed for a documentary about interactive fiction, and apparently this clip from that movie is now the first image that comes up if you do a web search on me. As you can see, I look massively different.

Speaking of movies, here's a list of some of my favorite films... and another list of some of my favorite bands and a list of my 121 favorite songs. (It goes to eleven eleven times.) (updated 06 May 2009)

Gull is a guide to Glulx Inform, which is used to create interactive fiction. It is also mentioned on the IF page, but I figure it can't hurt to mention it here as well.


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