Andrew Plotkin

@eblong.com

1203 Followers 244 Following

An interactive fiction guy. https://zarfhome.com, https://blog.zarfhome.com, https://eblong.com/zarf/home.html

The roof of a house, an adjacent tree, and the sky above it. The sky is an evil yellowish sepia from high-level wildfire smoke. Foliage looks washed-out and barely green at all.
A matchbook from “The Brass Lantern” (a fictional Chinese restaurant in 1938 California). The phone number “ADeline 1308” is printed on it, and “Chandler 1729” is hand-written inside.
THE MOVING CURSOR HAVING WRIT CAN ERASE OR COPY ANY OF IT
The cover of Heaven’s Vault 4: The Rising Light by Jon Ingold. A sketched outline of a human (or projected robot) head, with a scarred eye, and wearing a cravat. Ancient writing is visible in the background.
Six circular black-and-white icons, representing the six robots in Infocom’s Suspended. They depict, in order: an eye, a plug, an ear, a pair of quotation marks, an oscilloscope, and a mechanical grasper.
A cylindrical layout of boxes with red, yellow, green, and blue rows running up the sides of the cylinder.
A chart from the game Starcross. The title is “M. C. S. Starcross, mass detector output.” Orange and magenta symbols are shown on a polar coordinate grid, each giving a location in R, Theta, Phi coordinates.
A chart from the game Starcross. The title is “M. C. S. Starcross, mass detector output.” Orange and magenta symbols are shown on a polar coordinate grid, each giving a location in R, Theta, Phi coordinates.
The end of my apartment hall, between two doors. An ornate but stylized key, decorated with gears and a red gem, is hanging on the wall. Above one door is a wooden plaque engraved “Abode of Zarf”. Through it you can see a desk with a two-monitor Mac (all windows are minimized, no spoilers). A bookshelf and a couple of pieces of geometric art are visible. The analog clock on the far wall appears to be mirror-reversed.
YOU ARE ABOUT TO TAKE PART IN AN EXPERIMENT. AN EXPERIMENT IN GROUP ATTENTIVENESS. FOR THIS EXPERIMENT TO WORK, IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU NOT LOOK AT ME WHILE I AM SPEAKING. I HAVE EXTINGUISHED THE HOUSE LIGHTS TO DISCOURAGE YOU FROM WATCHING ME. INSTEAD OF WATCHING ME, OR ANYTHING ELSE, INVITE YOU TO CONTEMPLATE THIS POINT ▲ OF COHERENT LIGHT. FIX YOUR EYES ON THE POINT ▲ AS YOU LISTEN TO THE SOUND OF MY VOICE. THE POINT ▲ WILL NOT MOVE WHILE I AM SPEAKING. BUT IF YOU GAZE AT IT STEADILY, EXPECTANTLY, IT MAY APPEAR TO WANDER. THE POINT ▲ WILL NOT CHANGE COLOR OR SIZE. BUT IF YOU FIX YOUR EYES UPON IT CONCIENTIOUSLY, IT MAY APPEAR TO OSCILLATE IN DIAMETER OR HUE. THESE ILLUSIONS WILL OCCUR ONLY IF YOU STILL YOUR MIND AND FIX YOUR EYES UPON THE POINT ▲. REGARD THE SPACE AROUND THE POINT ▲, AND TOGETHER WE WILL SHARE AN ILLUSION. THIS IS NOT AN ATTEMPT TO HYPNOTIZE YOU. I AM NOT A HYPNOTIST. I AM AN ENGINEER OF ILLUSIONS THAT CAN BE SHARED. WE ARE ALL ABOUT TO BECOME ENGINEERS OF SHARED ILLUSION. THIS PARTICULAR ILLUSION HAS BEEN ENGINEERED TO FASCINATE YOU. TO FASCINATE YOU WITH POSSIBILITIES. THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE INTERNET AND THE WORLD WIDE WEB. ENGINEERED TO SUSPEND YOUR SKEPTICISM. TO TRANSFIX YOUR ATTENTION. ATTENTION. THE POINT ▲ OF THIS EXPERIMENT IS TO ACHIEVE ATTENTION.
>read book (Taken) The book is a novelization of DEADLINE. You start to read it, and it seems oddly familiar, as if you had lived it. >read ending You thumb to the last page and start to read the ending, in which the protagonist reads the plot of the story and kills himself in disgust. Disgustedly, you reach into your pocket, remove a gun, and end your life.
Screenshot of an email message: “Hello Andrew, How was your day at Black Hat USA?”
A machine running the Visible Zorker (Zork 1). We’re in the Atlantis Room, juggling inventory.
A large blue-lit banner reading “GDC Indie Arcade”. Behind it are two computers set up running Twine: one editing a game, one playing a game.
A game daily leaderboard riffing on the style of a 90s computer. “erkyrath” (my handle) is listed first, at 1112 points and six cups of coffee. The next best score is johannes2704 at 1094 points and five cups, so I’m significantly ahead.
Green pulses moving, merging, and diverging on an LED strip.
[The other four tokens—ON-GROUND, IN-ROOM, HELD, and CARRIED—are incredibly confusing, and no one really understands them except Stu, so he should probably write this bit.]
Promo for my ThinkyCon 2025 talk: “Towers of Pen: puzzle experiences that zoom out and out”. There’s a photo of me looking very much as if I’ve hiked halfway up a mountain in New Hampshire.
Screenshot of an iPad running Pocket Storm, with the Now Playing media widget showing. The widget shows the Pocket Storm weather phase, stylized clouds and a bit of rain, labelled “Approaching storm”.
A long view of a geometric sculpture at the corner of an academic building patio. A passer-by is glancing up at it.
The mulberries melting in the pavement cracks, the scrape of dust when you skinned your knee – palms hurt worse than the knee – the air moving wet and breathless. Summer came at you hard. It bowled you over and shouted a laugh and ran.
Two brass-colored metal objects. On the left is a curved geometric abstraction with tetrahedral symmetry. On the right is a Myst marker switch. Each is about three inches high.
The cover of “Heaven’s Vault 3: The Flood” by Jon Ingold. An illustration of a holographic projection of a woman’s head, projected over Ancient hieroglyphs.
Two small sheets of transparent plastic with the words LEFT and RIGHT imprinted in black letters. The words are an ambigram; that is, each word is the mirror-image of the other. But the words are a bit hard to read, so it's not a perfect ambigram.
Moscone West lobby. A large Jetbrains Rider display mentions Godot support as a feature. In the background is a banner saying “W4 Games / Godot”.
The cover of "Output: an anthology of computer-generated text, 1953-2023" edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort
A zoomed-out view of the map of "The Beyond".
Screenshot of _The Beyond_ on iPad. Mario is deciding whether to buy a ticket for Blake's Roller Coaster (5 dollars) or Earl's Roller Coaster (50 cents). The color scheme is pale orange with the title in steel-grey.
An ObjC class constructor with 98, I am not shitting you, 98, arguments.
A big baking dish of macaroni and cheese with rigatoni noodles. It has some blue cheese and parmesan in there, plus cream cheese for creaminess, so it smells sharp and aromatic and cheese and bubbly and golden.
The opening of Zork 1 (r88), with the command "EXAMINE ZZMGCK" and the response "There's nothing special about the gmigthat fouito als."
A list of numbers mapped to strings. 70 is MAZE-1, 69 is MAZE-2, 68 is MAZE-3... The MAZE rooms are in reverse numerical order but not consecutive: 66 is DEAD-END-1.
The opening screen of Zork 1 (r88, serial 840726) running in a Safari window.
A screenshot of BlorbTool, showing the contents of Emily Short's "Bronze" game file. The contents list includes "Resource Index", "Game file - Z-code", "Metadata", "Frontispiece", "Image - JPEG". The Metadata chunk is highlighted, showing the nested iFiction data on the right. The color scheme is pale lavender and pink with bright magenta highlights.
Zarf, age about 22, sitting on a rather nice striped couch. I'm wearing a vivid green t-shirt (it says "Musikanten" although you can't read that). A couple of books are lying next to me, along with a very 90s boombox (just visible). In the corner of the room is a rack of cassette tapes and a (musical) electric keyboard. There's also an abstract ceramic art thing next to the couch.
Screenshot of a pretty-printed Blorb file, showing five chunks on the left and a detail view on the right.
The Chiso Preniv library in Myst Online. Dozens of players are sitting around listening to Doobes introduce a new Age.
A heron standing just offshore, slightly concealed by leaves. A swan is swimming nearby, poking at the water.
Pie with raisins, currants, and a bit of apricot submerged in browned custard. Smells like browned butter and caramelized raisins with a sharp tang.
The cover of "Maus" by Art Spiegelman. Two anthropomorphic cartoon mice huddling under a banner with a swastika and stylized cat.
An Apple Magic Mouse. Two strips of aluminum foil are taped to the upper left and upper right corners.
A wide saute pan with chicken, vegetables, and sauce. You can smell szechuan peppercorn and fermented black bean paste.
Red maple leaves outside my kitchen window, which has a sheer blue curtain.
A screenshot of the Steam store, showing “The Beyond” at the top in the “Featured & Recommended” pane. Below it is a banner: “AdventureX: The Narrative Games Convention — save up to 80%”
Tea curdles in an empty cup Clouds boil above, and lightning -- Thunder! The porcelain cracks.
Anti-morris dancers lined up before the Reaper.
Screenshot of a browser window showing a Google search result: “Turn on JavaScript to keep searching. The browser you’re using has JavaScript turned off. To continue your search, turn it on.”