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Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 10:26:05 -0400
From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
Organization: No Conspiracy Here...
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BlindBat wrote:
[...]

> And the company, Interdata/Lacegem, conveniently
> enough sold the 'The Lost Treasures of Infocom' ...on a big pile of
> floppydisks and with printed manuals at the time (and to my surprise,
> still seem to be in this business to this day...)

....and still selling Treasures II, as far as I can tell.

[...]

> -Q- Talking about those games, has any (non-American) managed to
> actually make Head or Tail of Nord and Bert??? That game was so far
> out there...

I'm not sure if I'm embarassed or proud, but I went through "Nord and
Bert" in two sittings without touching the hints.  I guess my brain is
just that far broken...

[...]

> -Q- Are you happy to come to r*if as it is now, small and comfy, sit
> down on the porch, kick up your legs and watch the latest flamewar
> light up the newsgroup sky (often involving one Jaz:)?
> Or would you rather be interested in getting in more people to enjoy
> the author's efforts, and even try their hands at some perhaps clumsy
> authoring themselves?

Honestly?  I think these two are almost the same thing.  Or, rather, it's
hard to have one without the other.  In any case, it's a rather
comfortable group (mostly) that I'm rather happy to be a part of.


> Did you ever try to lure people into the hidden
> world of IF?

I use Inform to display object-oriented features in my course on
programming languages every year.  Does that count?

[...]

> -SN- One thing that hasn't come up a lot is the educational value of
> IF. I personally learned a lot of my typing skills and especially
> English by playing those Infocom/Magnetic scrolls games, looking up
> words I didn't know (a slightly different 'hunt that verb/noun') and
> it was fun all along. Unlike school, where when I started out at 12,
> it was all 'Arthur and Mary stand in the garden. Mrs. Harrison calls
> her cat. ad nauseum' booooring. One reason I'm doing all this
> introductory writing is to warm up my English skills, which is, I
> guess, my fourth language, and the last I started to learn (If you
> feel like pointing out grammar and spelling mistakes, please go ahead)

Uhm...I would have pegged you as a native (American) English speaker,
actually.  If there are mistakes, they're subtle enough that I'm missing
them or ignoring them as idioms (and not noticing).  Unless you're editing
your posts very well, I'd say you have "warmed up," and that your
self-education was excellent.


