Pliny’s Opinion on Beta-Testing

“That man is spoiled, and no better than a stranger, who prefers to hear his friend’s book in its final, polished form rather than to help him polish it.” (Pliny the Younger, Letters 8.21.)

A meta-post

There are various good ways to announce projects and cool stuff to the IF community, such as:

• Posting to rec.arts.int-fiction or rec.games.int-fiction — these get a lot of posts daily and are the main point of contact in the community. If you’re not an IF regular but you want to get the word out about a contest, program, or event to people who are, your best bet is to post there.
• Sending an announcement to SPAG (which comes out every few months and includes community news) or Brass Lantern (which runs an RSS feed updated much more frequently but with briefer content)
• Having your own blog which you arrange to have picked up by Planet IF
• Listing events, tools, or projects at ifwiki
• Listing new games at IFDB

I mention this because I kinda want to discourage the trend of people asking me to mention/promote things on this blog.

I hope this doesn’t seem curmudgeonly, but there are already places to keep track of IF news. I’d prefer to keep this space for (a) stuff I’m working on myself or (b) stuff I have an opinion about and think is worth sharing. I’m not going to post announcements without looking at what they’re announcements for, but I don’t always have enough time to immediately check out everything that winds up in my inbox. And of course sometimes I look at something and don’t think it’s that interesting. (Bad judgment on my part, I’m sure.)

So… yeah. If you want to email me about something you think is cool, that’s terrific, but you should realize there’s a fair chance that I won’t have time to look it over right away, or that I won’t be moved to talk about it here.

Too Many Things! (Or: in which Emily takes a little vacation)

I get lots of email about IF. Lots. And lots. This is flattering. However: the amount of time it takes to get through my inbox is becoming unworkable, and I need to get some other things done. So I am taking a break from some of it; specifically:

If you have bug reports or feature requests for Inform 7, they should go to Graham. That’s where they always wind up anyway, so you’re not missing anything by sending them there.

If you have coding support questions about Inform 7, they should go to rec.arts.int-fiction or to the #I7 channel on ifMUD. These days there are a fair number of people who have written complete I7 games and are competent to help with most requests. (We will still be monitoring the extensions-development thread.)

If you have hint requests about one of my games, they should go to rec.games.int-fiction.

If you want to comment on a review I wrote about your game, or give feedback on one of my games, that is terrific. I’m still interested, but I don’t promise to answer immediately. Please don’t feel snubbed.

If you have an I7 extension, you should go ahead and send it to me; I don’t promise that service will be instant, but this is one area where I don’t have a great substitute for me, so I will try to make sure any new material gets posted at least once a week. Please give your email a sensible subject line, such as “[I7] New Extension”.

If you want beta-testing, design guidance, help tracking down the URL of something you think I posted 5 years ago, etc., this is not really the best time.

Oil God

Only a liberal would find this game remotely interesting and even then not for long.

Mostly Frivolous

One of the curious things about having moved my website to WordPress is that I can now see what people are searching for when they wind up here. I regret to say that many of these searches were in fact futile, but here, perhaps I can answer a few of the questions after all: