iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 08/08/2026

Experimental feature for Visible Zorker: search bar in the source pane. eblong.com/infocom/visi...

Part of the ZIL source code for Zork 1. A search box in the top right displays search results for “axe”: the AXE object, the AXE-F routine, and a bunch of game messages that mention the troll’s bloody axe.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 30/07/2026

At last, my arm is complete again! (Been trawling used-game sources and filling in holes in my collection.)

My hand holding up the Infotator(tm) feelie from Infocom’s Sorcerer.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 15/07/2026

That is a weird-ass color for the sky. No television has ever been that color. My camera is not exaggerating this color shift.

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 13/07/2026

This is the matchbook that came in Infocom's _Witness_ package. (My original copy, saved all these years!) What the heck is the fake Chinese "prosperity" symbol on the matchbook front? Anybody know? Is that trying to hide the letters "SA”? Or maybe “CA" or “EA”? Why?

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 22/05/2026

Book! My problem is that the series has been so spread out that I've completely lost track of what Ingold is doing. I’m going to have to re-read from the top. Oh dear. (Also I never learned Ancient, but I don’t think the series is *completely* brutal to us monolingual sods.)

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 09/05/2026

Sometimes you just need higher-res versions of some icons.

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 26/04/2026

Trying to come up with a Neat Layout for the Starcross map is turning grouchy. (I'm not using this one.)

A cylindrical layout of boxes with red, yellow, green, and blue rows running up the sides of the cylinder.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 11/04/2026

Updated version, now with proper attributions and Creative Commons tag.

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 11/04/2026

Sneak preview for Visible Starcross, which I haven't started yet except for this image. I couldn't find a really high-resolution scan of the Starcross mass detector chart. So I redrew it myself.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 23/03/2026

I grabbed a Blue Prince Basement Key from the iam8bit table at GDC. (I suspect they sold out of those fast.) Now it's hanging in my hallway and I am genuinely happy to see it every day, you know? Not often that a game object hits exactly that sweet spot of *thing*-ness.

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 22/03/2026

Random image from GDC week: "The Point Is", a lecture by Brian Moriarty, given at CGDC 1996. The Proceedings had a typographical version which went on for several pages in this Discordian/Brunner-esque style. (From the MADE game history collection.)

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 21/03/2026

This will always be the best joke.

>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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 11/03/2026

The text/plain segment of GDC's feedback reminder email has been wrong for at least a decade. (Yes, way longer than since 2024.)

Screenshot of an email message: “Hello Andrew, How was your day at Black Hat USA?”

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 11/03/2026

And here’s the Visible Zorker!

A machine running the Visible Zorker (Zork 1). We’re in the Atlantis Room, juggling inventory.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 11/03/2026

IFTF is set up at GDC in the Commons area. Next to a sign that confusingly says “Indie Arcade”, but it’s actually the space for nonprofits and indie dev community groups. There’s our machines demoing Twine!

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 06/03/2026

Not gonna say this was my *proudest* moment, but I felt good about it. (Yesterday, March 5th.) Was knocked down to fifth place by the end of the day. Still good. (Friedemann Friese’s _Finished!_)

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 07/02/2026

New project in my office: the Beacon. blog.zarfhome.com/2026/02/the-... An LED strip running a homebrew pattern language. Uses the Pixelblaze LED controller, but I didn’t like the Pixelblaze pattern language so I came up with my own.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 25/01/2026

This is not helping me figure out the grammar stuff for Visible Zorker. (Steve Meretzky writing ZIL documentation circa 1989. "Stu" is Stu Galley.)

[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.]

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 25/11/2025

@mtrc.bsky.social @wadjeteyegames.bsky.social Okay, Dave, take a deep breath and stop spooking the incursion alarms

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 03/11/2025

They made me this nice promo image… Coming this week at thinkygames.com/events/think... !

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 06/10/2025

I have mastered the MPMediaItemPropertyArtwork property.

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”.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 31/08/2025

Kinda curious what burningman.org/countdown/ will say in ten minutes. Spoiler: it’s wrong by three hours. Time zone error — I’m in Eastern. Time zones are hard but not *this* hard.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 25/06/2025

In Philadelphia, I took the opportunity to visit mathstodon.xyz/@bathsheba 's “Eltanin”. bathsheba.com/gallery/comm...

A long view of a geometric sculpture at the corner of an academic building patio. A passer-by is glancing up at it.

Looking up at a geometric sculpture. The sculpture is angular, made of flat polygons of weathered metal, welded together. It has chiral tetrahedral symmetry.

Me standing next to a geometric sculpture. The sculpture is angular, made of flat polygons of weathered metal, welded together. It has chiral tetrahedral symmetry. I am wearing a jacket with a fluorescent green pattern like a space-time diagram, and a green t-shirt with an octahedral design. It’s geometry all the way down, really.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 10/06/2025

mathstodon.xyz/@bathsheba/1... "Binder-jetted steel with bronze infiltration” is this 3D-printed metal composite.

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 05/05/2025

Dug these LEFT/RIGHT signs out of a drawer. I made these in high school. They're transparent plastic, so I could put them in my car windshield, in the bottom left and right corners. (I am not very good at telling "left" from "right" when someone shouts driving directions at me.)

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 18/03/2025

Lotta Godot being mentioned on big banners here at GDC.

Moscone West lobby. A large Jetbrains Rider display mentions Godot support as a feature. In the background is a banner saying “W4 Games / Godot”.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 19/02/2025

Test of paragraph transition effect. Sketched up in Godot. (I hope the screen recording works sensibly...)

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 26/01/2025

Making screenshots... Jason Shiga's _The Beyond_, coming to the iOS App Store... er, pretty soon. A couple of weeks probably. Depends how fast I transcribe the captions for VoiceOver mode.

A zoomed-out view of the map of "The Beyond".

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 23/01/2025

Pretty good for less than a day! It's nice having a well-tested framework.

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 23/01/2025

There was a moment in about 2011 when I said "I don't need an array, no panel in Meanwhile has more than three outcomes except for that one special case. Which I'll just do some cut-and-paste for." Two books and several special cases later...

An ObjC class constructor with 98, I am not shitting you, 98, arguments.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 13/01/2025

This is a rough month but you can make a food. I made a pile of macaroni and cheese and, as you see, ate a lot of it. Not pictured: a very nice asian-pear/carrot/arugula salad. I believe in vegetables, I just didn't think it came out photogenic.

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 01/01/2025

This morning's discovery: Zork parser bug dealing with the word ZZMGCK, which is in the game dictionary but attached to a placeholder object. (Previously noted by Nathan Simpson: www.microheaven.com/InfocomBugs/... )

The opening of Zork 1 (r88), with the command "EXAMINE ZZMGCK" and the response "There's nothing special about the gmigthat fouito als."

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 25/12/2024

I wound up comparing the room connection properties to identify the maze rooms one by one. "If TROLL-ROOM is EAST, that's [30 102], so this must be MAZE-1..." Felt like 1980 all over again!

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 24/12/2024

Today's progress: “Hang on,” you say, “we've had an in-browser Zork interpreter since 2008. What progress?” Quite right! This is... part of another thing. Wait for it.

The opening screen of Zork 1 (r88, serial 840726) running in a Safari window.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 10/12/2024

Woke up this morning, said "What if IF tools were more purple?"

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 06/12/2024

By the way, I dug through my photo folder for image fodder for Jimmy's post. I didn't pass this one along because it's not IF-relevant, but here's me in 1992 -- I suspect I was home for the holidays shortly after graduating from college.

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.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 05/12/2024

React progress. Working on a Blorb editor tool. (It doesn't edit yet, but displaying the structured data is working pretty good.)

Screenshot of a pretty-printed Blorb file, showing five chunks on the left and a detail view on the right.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 05/12/2024

Been a while since I hung out at one of these.

The Chiso Preniv library in Myst Online. Dozens of players are sitting around listening to Doobes introduce a new Age.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 29/11/2024

Met a blue heron. (Huron River, Ann Arbor)

A heron standing just offshore, slightly concealed by leaves. A swan is swimming nearby, poking at the water.

Heron standing just offshore, seen through branches.

Heron wading along the shoreline; it appears dark in silhouette.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 22/11/2024

"You've read it, right?" she asked. I have never read it. Guess I will.

The cover of "Maus" by Art Spiegelman. Two anthropomorphic cartoon mice huddling under a banner with a swastika and stylized cat.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 22/11/2024

New Apple mouse -- time for my most enduring hardware hack! The way I rest my hand on the mouse, this really is necessary. (PS: You don't have to mention the stupid port location. That's been done to death. Anyhow I can't fix it with tape and foil.)

An Apple Magic Mouse. Two strips of aluminum foil are taped to the upper left and upper right corners.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 18/11/2024

Spicy chicken hotpot with basil. Came out good.

A wide saute pan with chicken, vegetables, and sauce. You can smell szechuan peppercorn and fermented black bean paste.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 10/11/2024

My favorite time of year for my kitchen window. (No, this isn’t on the photo page yet. Like I said, I update that in batches.)

Red maple leaves outside my kitchen window, which has a sheer blue curtain.

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 07/11/2024

Please note that the AdventureX sale is headlining on Steam today! I just saw _The Beyond_ scroll by the Featured pane! This is very exciting! That's why I am using punctuation! Seriously, this is a great showcase of exhibitors: www.adventurexpo.org/exhibitors-2... . Please shop.

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%”

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com · 05/11/2024

Took a long walk today and here’s the design document for my next game. (Okay, maybe not _next_ game. There’s some spreadsheet balancing left to do, after I make a spreadsheet, which I might not do for a while.)

Tea curdles in an empty cup
Clouds boil above, and lightning --
Thunder! The porcelain cracks.

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