Sunday: day 3 of the 2025 NarraScope conference. With the continued heat, I decided to wear shorts and my green short-sleeve button-up shirt. I had a slower start, so I got in and got my new wristband maybe ten minutes before we filed in for the morning keynote. Here's my schedule of the day's activities:
09:00 Welcome and thanks - NarraScope Conference Team
09:30 Local Keynote Change Reality: Fighting Futurelessness with Interactive Storytelling - Dain Saint
10:30 Preview for the day: Sunday
11:15 Help! I Accidentally Wrote A Sequel - Rebecca Slitt
12:00 Absurdly Elaborate Tools & Techniques For ChoiceScript Development - Benjamin Rosenbaum
12:30 CONFERENCE LUNCH
13:30 Like the last 20 minutes of a movie: adapting the falling action of cinema for games - Everest Pipkin
14:15 Social Democracy: A postmortem for an alternate history - Autumn Chen
14:45 COFFEE BREAK
15:45 Meet the IFTF Board
16:00 Democracy, Now!: Participatory and Co-Creative Design for Collective Liberation - Space Opera team: Daniel Park, Dr. Ari Glass, Dain Saint, Matthew Armstead
17:15 Farewell and Postmortem
I got a little carried away with attending panels that I found less immediately relevant to the kind of work I'm interested in doing today, but I still enjoyed these presentations. The first two were focused on the development of particular works in the Choice of Games catalog, and while I was interested in learning more about developing with ChoiceScript, I had very little familiarity with any of the works discussed. Everest's "Like the last 20 minutes of a movie" talk centered on the value of endings and the creation of a system-agnostic tabletop supplement called World Ending Game. I liked the subject matter and the materials; I wish there'd been more time for this slot. Likewise, Autumn Chen's postmortem on Social Democracy fascinated me. My last two panels were the IFTF Board introduction and Q&A and the Space Opera team discussion of their democratic theatrical roleplaying experience. I picked both of these out of a sense of wanting to support my community (digital in the former case; physical in the latter).
I continued to hang out with Phil when I could; during lunch, we were seated at a table opposite Chris Klimas, but I couldn't really hear anything he was saying. Instead, we mostly spoke with Dylan Ogden, whose panel on deliberate boredom had been a particular treat yesterday. The closing wrapped up with a lengthy feedback session, followed by a farewell sea shanty. After bidding folks farewell, I came home.
Julie had made buffalo chicken with rice and mozzarella. I got cleaned up and treated the cats; I also caught up and followed random attendees on itch.io and IFDB. I also also spent too much time updating my website and writing this post, so I have to go to bed.
Saturday: spent a lot of time catching up on emails and chat messages today, and while I should have had plenty of time to do my work projects, I kept looking at big groups that were locked and couldn't be opened. Hoping that I'll be able to anticipate that issue tomorrow and screen the groups I pick up a little better. We're struggling to get our programmable thermostat to actually stay engaged; for some reason it keeps going idle and the apartment warms up. Julie made that broccoli and sausage casserole, and we watched another pair of Poirot episodes. I liked the episode about the twin-studying psychologist, but "The Big Four" didn't hold my attention much, aside from being excited to see Japp and Miss Lemmon and Captain Hastings again. Kinda thought I might go to bed early (since I want to wake up around 3 AM on Friday, and it's not a bad idea to start shifting my schedule forward to accommodate that), but after watching a video of a guy struggling to complete GTAIV missions when most cars have been cursed with maximized speed values, I'm energized to resume doing some prep work for MMO accounts tonight.
Thursday: another mercifully slow workday. I listened to Extrasode 9 of this podcast when I had breaks in my work, and after work, a Disco Elysium playthrough I've been following on Twitch resumed. Got kind of a late start on dinner, which was just more scalloped potatoes. I've been trying to decide how I feel about the Adrift format for interactive fiction. My first reaction to every non-Glulx or non-Inform format is to be dismissive, and it's pretty unfair. The Adrift games I've played have tended toward bigger blocks of text, almost CYOA-like in their structure, but that might not actually be representative of the form. I don't have many conclusions at the moment: the formatting conventions kind of throw me off, but otherwise I'm sure Adrift games are fine.
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World of Warcraft:
Extinguishing the Broken Isles - Completed on: 6/22/2019, 1:03:00 AM
Flame Warden of the Broken Isles - Completed on: 6/22/2019, 1:09:00 AM
World of Warcraft:
Legion Medic - Completed on: 6/22/2018, 1:48:45 AM
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World of Warcraft:
Got My Mind On My Money - Completed on: 6/22/2016, 12:37:14 AM
Taming Pandaria - Completed on: 6/22/2016, 12:35:00 AM
Taming Azeroth - Completed on: 6/22/2016, 12:35:00 AM
Taming the World - Completed on: 6/22/2016, 12:16:00 AM
I Choose You - Completed on: 6/22/2016, 12:35:00 AM
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Saturday: we got into the hotel at like 4:49 AM. After sleeping off the trip, we figured that as long as we're in Houston, we should try Whataburger for lunch. Neither of us were impressed. After that, we hung out at the Holiday Inn Express & Suites pool while preparing for the Kesha concert. To celebrate, we each got a temporary Pokemon tattoo, though I'm not sure why we picked Pokemon, exactly. We enjoyed the concert! Dancing eyeballs performed on stage during one of her songs. We did end up getting a little sunburned.
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World of Warcraft:
Ice the Frost Lord - Completed on: 6/22/2011, 3:42:50 PM
Burning Hot Pole Dance - Completed on: 6/22/2011, 5:30:33 PM
Torch Juggler - Completed on: 6/22/2011, 5:35:14 PM
1500 Quests Completed - Completed on: 6/22/2011, 4:40:31 PM
Explore Dustwallow Marsh - Completed on: 6/22/2011, 3:52:19 PM
Flame Warden of Kalimdor - Completed on: 6/22/2011, 5:26:13 PM
Extinguishing Kalimdor - Completed on: 6/22/2011, 5:00:55 PM
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Monday: still pretty sunburned from yesterday's sailing trip.
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