In the purple November twilight, the abomination rising on the east side of Interstate 95 looked to Jim Larman more like the familiar silhouette of his youth: a great sombrero atop the 200-foot tower of the roadside attraction formerly known as Nico’s Natural Wonderland. But then, inevitably, the rosy pink neon and spotlights switched on,…
Quick sketches of some of the many characters I’ve portrayed in real-time online roleplaying (on OtherSpace and elsewhere) over the years:
Zork was my gateway drug. Using a relatively basic command parser, this text-only computer adventure game by Infocom allowed a single player to explore a grid of rooms, solving puzzles and gathering treasure, all the while trying to avoid being devoured by a grue in dark chambers. I had no idea when I first played Zork, back…
Few things get my eye twitching like I’m Chief Inspector Dreyfus in “The Pink Panther” than a lead in a newspaper article like this: “Fifty people gathered together at GreenSpacePark on Saturday for the Shiny Happy Music Festival.” It’s not that an opening sentence such as this is technically wrong. The problem instead is that…
