I love being such a deadbeat blogger, but everybody’s gotta be forthcoming some time. I’d like to say I’ve learned a lot since my last post, but that’d be pretty optimistic. I do however, have quite a few more ideas than last time. First off, I’d like to give a belated shout-out to my former audio group, Audrey, Ako, and Eric, who all admirably worked through the difficulties we encountered and were all a pleasure to collaborate with. The quality of recorded vocal tracks was a chronic problem for me, and none of the microphones I used seemed to abet my situation, but we tried to do the best we could, given the equipment immediately available to us. Next order of business, for my web story, I took my inspiration from somebody who can’t seem to escape public scrutiny, Mr. Carlos Estevez. Basically, I imagined a future where Charlie Sheen, saturated by attention and arrogance, is relegated to wander the universe in purgatory. Without further ado, Charlie Sheen’s Ghost’s Twitter. As far as video goes, I will be doing an extraction/discussion of the Coen Bros’ Burn After Reading as soon as possible. Finally, as mentioned tentatively in the previous post, my final project will be a piece of interactive fiction, for which I have been getting the hang of Inform 7. I don’t know if this requires explication because I don’t know how archaic the gaming knowledge of my classmates are, but by “text adventure,” I’m referring to a style of gaming that is essentially a digital Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, usually based around the manipulation of items and people to solve puzzles. Simply making a text adventure seems pretty wimpy to me, though, right? The setting of this game will be our fair City of Fredericksburg, a place I have heard my peers bitching about the boringness of so often that I decided to find the hidden and not-so-hidden corners of, which I will capture as faithfully as possible in pictures and maybe a bit of sound too (old Jazz guitarist or hippy bongo band on Caroline St?), which will then be placed into the game. In this combination, I will be be striving to expose the history, soul, and simple beauty of this social space, packaged in what I hope to be a fun and somewhat-humorous game. I have a modest world created so far, and I believe I’ve found a way to display the game in a browser, which I will definitely release as they come. I also have some crappy preliminary “box” art as an ineffective teaser. Now, you might want to ask me (although it’s incredibly unlikely), “Why the hell would you want to make a text adventure?! Those ain’t been hot since Duran Duran, you tosser!” To that, I say, a medium is only dead when you stop finding cool ish to do with it. Text adventures, to me, represent an interesting cross-section between the traditional storytelling medium of printed text and the next generation aspects of interactivity, variability, and visual implementation, and I’ll do my best to artfully aggregate all of the above into something that someone might enjoy playing. Maybe. Peace out!