Spring Thing 2023

It's time for another interactive fiction competition that's open for judging, and now it's the turn of Spring Thing. This is the other huge IF competition every year, in addition to IFComp that runs in the autumn. This year there are nearly 30 games entered into Spring Thing, a mix of web/choice based and parser. A huge range of genres. I've played and reviewed 4 so far, and especially enjoyed a Victorian Holmes-esque detective hunt and a spoof Star Trek TOS word puzzle game. Anyway if you like text games do check Spring Thing 2023 out. Here is the link: https://www.springthing.net/2023/

New Wheel of Time reading strategy

I’m part way through a spread out read of the massive 14-book (or 15 if you count the later prequel) series of epic fantasy books by Robert Jordan. Now onto book 6, The Lord of Chaos. The current one and recent ones have been some of the very longest in the series, over 1000 pages long. And it’s been getting a bit overwhelming at times with the mass of names to remember and different points of view. However I now have a new strategy, and it’s going brilliantly. I picked up this idea from a fellow backer of a book tuber I back on Patreon. She said how she was skimming chunks. Which I initially thought sounded terrible - I have to read it all! But now I’m into book 6 I’ve found myself skimming through some of the written bits, and also focusing more on dialogue. Also not worrying about dozens of new characters being introduced in the first few hundred pages in the latest book. Reading them, but not stressing over remembering. If they’re important they’ll be back. And I’m gobbling up the book and loving it. I’m expecting to finish this book pretty quickly. I’m still rather bamboozled by the mass of different places. But not worrying about remembering everything is helping hugely.