This morning the Tools of Change blog published my post on collaborative online fiction, highlighting some interactive fiction projects.

I’ve been enjoying getting back into the Processing language by using the threepress books to create movies. For the subsequent projects I want to play with NextText, which looks like a fantastic library for working with text in Processing. And then there’s the astonishing Processing.js port of the entire language to JavaScript.

Let me say how bizarre it is to see my site in someone else’s screenshot.

The fun part’s almost over, though, as it’s getting to be time to hit people up for real jobs.  As long as I can still take the dog to the park every day, I can deal.

I was this close to setting up the blog on a hosted service like blogspot rather than installing WordPress directly on my own subdomain. Then I recalled that the main point of threepress is to illustrate my technical skills, and not my laziness.

My first post is on the sexy topic of ebook file formats.

You might notice from my biography on the TOC blog that I appear to have quit my job to be an independent consultant. My first day with no paycheck is International Workers’ Day.

Its only flaw is that I can’t use it for my own projects and I was dreading trying to find a free one that was just as austere. I could write one, obviously, but even with a rapid-development stack like Django it’s still a lot to implement — not so much the bug tracker itself but the underlying user accounts and access control. Plus I have to host it somewhere.

Enter Google’s sort-of-proprietary hosting and development platform AppEngine.

There’s a lot to say about it, but for me as a developer the key point is how close this (and similar services) get towards making software applications completely disposable. AppEngine uses Python, which I know, and supports Django, which I know, and Django/Python enable lightning-fast web development. AppEngine gives me access control and identity via Google Accounts for free. I get hosting for free. I get one-click deployment (possibly the only thing I would miss from a Java/Eclipse/Maven/Cargo stack). I have to install one thing — Google AppEngine — and after that, nothing.

So instead of wasting 4-6 hours downloading different bug trackers and their dependencies, getting them running, trying them out, and (at best) putting up with the ways in which they aren’t quite right for me, I’m spending, max, 10-12 hours writing exactly what I want, for free.

If in a few weeks I decide my software sucks, or I find a better bug tracker, I can just throw mine away. Nothing lost but a little time, and that’s time I spent learning a little more about Django and AppEngine. The next time I want some kind of tool, I’ll build it in even less time, and maybe throw that away too. It’s just bits.

“I never was at his house; but they say it is a pretty sweet place.”

I imagined for a moment that Sir John lived in a rent-controlled penthouse featured on Apartment Therapy.  It was disappointing to re-read it correctly:

“I never was at his house; but they say it is a sweet pretty place.”

If you fail to follow steps #2-5, I won’t bother unsubscribing. I will simply mark you as “spam” in Gmail.

Note that this increases the likelihood that other people receiving your marketing materials will instead have them delivered to their spam folder.

The project is subtitled “Digital Fiction”, which immediately brings back memories of dreary academic “hypertext fiction”. Those projects often amounted to “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style short stories with multiple endings, where clicking on words to move through a branching plotline was deemed sufficiently interactive to be interesting.

Film critic Roger Ebert famously doesn’t see the appeal of videogames, but he’s astutely observed that a story with multiple endings really has no ending at all: as soon as he (the audience) realizes there are multiple endings, he’ll want to experience them all, and then loses the pleasure of knowing what “really” happened. Interactive fiction has grappled with this too, and as a player I generally side with Ebert. Once I’ve “won” a game by achieving an obviously acceptable ending, I lose interest in finding any other good or bad endings. I’m ready to move on the next story, not traverse the whole plot tree. (Admittedly I’m also the kind of player who wants every modern videogame to be twice as easy and half as long as it is.)

Some blogs are calling the first We Tell Stories episode “interactive fiction”, but The 21 Steps is not really interactive at all. It’s a linear story told through new medium: short text overlaid on the Google Maps interface. It’s an interesting idea that, like many kinds of experiments, could be compelling once the novelty wears off and an author really dives into the medium. Unfortunately the actual “story” behind Steps is pretty thin, with an ending that reads like a clever high school writing project, and the plot didn’t feel like it truly made use of the map paradigm. Conceptually, co-opting a straight information-based API for use in storytelling and gameplay is definitely intriguing — I’d love to see what someone could do with Google Street View. No doubt stories told in short blurb-bursts are here to stay, given all the attention that mobile phone fiction has been receiving.

I imagine the Google Maps component does work well when combined with the story’s alternate reality game, but the ARG requires one to be in the UK. I’ll be interested to read reviews from people who’ve played it through.

The next episode of We Tell Stories comes out tomorrow, March 25th.

The Commodore’s bartender Scotto Moore performed his “digital fairy tale” called Intangible Method. It’s short, watch it.

Also as part of the Ignite series, Matt Web’s Science Fictional Tour of the Solar System, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything:

Two good talks that I don’t have video for:

Las Vegas: Behind the Scenes. What Sensors? What Privacy? What Anonymity? The Whole Story

Jeff Jonas

Presentation [PPT]

Open Source Hardware

Phillip Torrone (Maker Media), Limor Fried (Adafruit Industries)

Presentation [PDF]

Note: This was a review copy I received for free

I’ve done a bit of writing and editing for O’Reilly on the programming side which means I’ve come to expect a certain dry, technical style. That’s rarely a bad thing, though, as any developer who has suffered through someone else’s cutesy variable names can attest.

But this is a manual for a web site — already an inherently ridiculous concept — and what’s more, it’s a manual on Facebook. Currently on my Facebook home page:

• J– is now a fan of Fall Out Boy
• T– received a “fluff gift”
• Oh and Southwest airlines is apparently having a fare sale

These are not likely to be the subjects of the next Knuth book.

So on the lighter topic of Facebook.com and Facebook apps, it’s appropriate to interject some personality and wit:

Facebook lets you join only one regional network at a time. If you try to add a second, Facebook simply replaces the first with the second. That’s kind of annoying if you’re a multiple home owner, but on the bright side, you own multiple homes.

Plus, I’ll admit it, I learned some things. Facebook has an annoying habit of renaming concepts that already have names, so for example I had no idea that Notes were actual blog entries, and could be imported from external blog sources (I use a third-party app for that). I was also inspired to finally figure out how to get added to the network of my college alma mater, and start a new network for my company. So hey, useful.

The book has sound advice throughout in terms of the fuzzier aspects of Facebook: how to maintain a modicum of privacy, how to use the system to promote yourself or your employer. (The author also recognizes that the first thing everyone does is look up their exes, and provides helpful tips for that too.)

I hadn’t seen any of the Missing Manual series before so the layout was new to me. For me, a tech book just needs some text and an animal woodcut but for a popular “technical” book it’s pretty nice — lots of useful callouts in soothing colors and no incomprehensible icons or annoying cartoons. I don’t know if I’d recommend this book to any of my friends who are clearly all-too-capable of using Facebook already, but I totally recommend it for your boss who wants to know what this “MyFace” thing is he keeps hearing about.

This is the second year of the New York Metropolitan Opera’s HD simulcast project, in which live performances are beamed to hundreds of movie theaters running digital projection.  This one was Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. I don’t know squat about opera but it was kind of awesome, both from a logistical standpoint and because it annoys a certain strain of opera purist.

The local Boston showing was sold out so instead we got Clive to drive us to Showcase Cinemas.  There were some expected culture clashes (”IS THIS COFFEE STARBUCKS?”), and the signal glitched out for about 30 seconds, but overall it went smoothly.  In addition to the performance itself the Met ran additional programming on Britten and the opera’s background, and the live cameras moved freely around backstage before the program and between acts. There was something especially charming about interviewing the sweaty performers who’d just come off stage (”Hi mom!”).  The bonus material was hosted by French soprano Natalie Dessay, who had more enthusiasm (”Now let us enjoy Britten’s sad and ‘orrible opera!”) than skill (”So you are Scottish, and Britten was British…”). Not everybody can be good at everything.

As much as I liked this, I am not disappointed to be missing next week’s five and a half hour simulcast of Tristan. For one thing, the last opera I saw was also in German. The next one will be in Sanskrit.