vivdunstan

Just starting the second Eleventh Doctor boxset with audio companion Valarie. The Doctor isn't played by Matt Smith, but Jacob Dudman is doing a good job. And the first story is awesome.

Onto another in this pivotal season of Big Finish's Bernice Summerfield audios spun out from 1990s Doctor Who novels, and it's definitely into spoiler space for this one.

( spoilers )

Belatedly browsing the schedule for Oxonmoot 2025 in Sched, and wondering how anyone with colour blindness can cope with the colour scheme Sched uses to differentiate between in person, hybrid and online events. Luckily not a problem for me, but seems like a core thing Sched should be doing better.

Meanwhile after wondering that, I am now speeding through the Oxonmoot programme, seeing which events I hope to watch. Probably watched after the Oxford event, using the wonderful catch up streaming the con organisers have honed over the years. I am very likely to sleep through the whole live event.

... quite a bit later ...

And that's seemingly 31 events in the Oxonmoot 2025 programme I'm especially interested in and hope to watch, probably after the event. Marvelling as always at the range of talks and events. Phenomenally grateful to the Tolkien Society and Oxonmoot organisers for making this event accessible online.

A guest blog post from Martin on my academic musings blog.

Taking stock of my latest parser interactive game writing progress. Much to do, but encouraged can finish in time for IFComp 2026. And can see a way forward in the short term. Happy to share that it's episodic, and historical, but otherwise spoilery details redacted in the attached progress summary!



Thinking about what needs to be tackled/finished, I'm thinking I'll code the rest in order of chapters 2, 5, 6, 4, 1, 3 and 7. The first three are ones I'm currently most excited to tackle. Coding 4 from the existing plot design should be fairly mechanical. And finishing 1, 3 and 7 ought to be be easy.

Of course "ought to be easy" is a very risky thing to say when it comes to writing and coding up computer games, including interactive fiction! But I also know they're the sections that need the least amount of work still done on them. And almost certainly best tackled late in the day.

Starting my reread of The Return of Sherlock Holmes with this story.( spoilers )

Watching this recent documentary on the BBC. Is on the iPlayer for UK folks.

Another casualty of the UK Online Safety Act: all interactive fiction (including traditional parser text adventures) games stored at http://ifarchive.org are currently geoblocked to UK users. The IFTF folks are trying to work out a solution, but there is no current clue to how long that might take. The archive holds 30+ years worth of generally amateur/free IF games - a vast number. Including my own. Which I can't play online right now. Not that I want to, but it's rather ironic! Meanwhile the intfiction forum where this might usually be discussed is still down 36 hours later, after a Linode cloud server outage.

And IFComp is also likely to be affected, including the next competition opening for judging in just over a month. IFTF folk are currently urgently reviewing that. I wonder if I'll be able to play *any* IFComp games this year.

This is a bit of filler, as the arc plot approaches a critical point. Benny, Brax and another person are on their way back to the Braxiatel Collection, and the whole story is set during their journey on a mysterious space ship.

On plus there are some superb scenes between Benny and Brax, who understandably have major issues.

Also the story is extremely imaginative, which will either work for the listener, or be too wacky. I liked it.

Yet at the same time much of it is very confusing, especially very early on. And it feels like it would have been better trimmed more.

In today's modern era of sometimes more sympathetic views of various gender identities there's also a rather clumsy and prolonged "Is it he or she?" section. This would ideally have been handled with more nuance today.

But an interesting experiment, and I'm glad that I listened to it.

Best quote: "You might very well think that." From Irving Braxiatel, played by Miles Richardson, son of Ian Richardson, who memorably said exactly the same thing in his most famous role in the BBC's 1990s House of Cards. Father and son have incredibly similar voices.