iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

...now there's an autocorrect for "salad" that I haven't seen before "Pint tomatoes and quarter pound satanic please thank you"

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Reposted by Joshua Grams

Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Check out this banger of a game-poem analysis! lavieenmeow takes a 6.4K-word deep dive into the stylistic habits around the text of text adventures, and how Drew Cook manipulates those expectations as a poetic form: the-rosebush.com/2026/06/pars...

the-rosebush.com

Parser poetics in Portrait With Wolf – The Rosebush

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

the-rosebush.com

Parser poetics in Portrait With Wolf – The Rosebush

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

I'll just keep having fun implementing obscure quarter- to half-century-old algorithms by hand, thanks.

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Reposted by Joshua Grams

lit_patches @litpatches.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne v0.22: Added special mechanics for infiltrating piloted mecha.

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Reposted by Joshua Grams

Florian Beijers @zersiax.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

When indie game developers put #blind protagonists in their #games, it's always good to have an #actuallyBlind #gamer check it for accuracy. Exactly what I did in this #youtube #react video www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE81... #blindness #disability #accessibility #representation #gaming

youtube.com

Blind Gamer Reacts to Blind Protagonist in Cane & Able: Accurate or Not?

YouTube video by ViewpointUnseen

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

How about some more cheerful stuff? The Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction is open, with 22 new games to play. www.springthing.net/2026/play.html

springthing.net

The 2026 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction

Spring Thing is an annual online festival celebrating new interactive fiction from all kinds of people.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

Made a quick bookmark for the case when "was I on the left page or the right page, and which paragraph was I looking at?" is a relevant question...

A strip of bright red card-stock with a white band around it. The band has with two leftward-pointing arrows cut out so you can see the red showing through. It's lying in an open book with rather small text.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

OK, this is very clever (source from the Game Narrative Kaleidoscope ebook).

HTML showing a phrase (with some words split up) formatted as 12 separate links: "Or open at a ran dom pla ce and read from there!" linking to articles 16, 85, 105, 39, 27, 42, 48, 81, 76, 95, 101, and 125.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

I'm only a quarter of the way through, but what a banger of a book. Dense academic prose interspersed with everyday examples for understanding, amusement, and surprise. Bravo. Pity it's > $100, but I that's academic publishing for you.

The cover of Priority & Prejudice: The Epistemology of Salience & Attention, by Jessie Munton. Looking almost like a nebula, I assume it's a network visualization: a nearly black background with clouds of colored points of light. The title is centered in a black box with an orangey-gold border. I was doing an art project so I made some white paper "flowers" as a contrast against the color of the cover.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Finally did #EnigMarch day 2: color (just after the day 3 prompt is up, huh). Haven't fixed any of the rough spots in the puzzle player; hopefully tomorrow. Some of the interesting deductions fell apart with the last couple clues, but oh well. Same URL: joshgrams.itch.io/enigmarch-2026

joshgrams.itch.io

EnigMarch 2026 by JoshGrams

Logic grid puzzles, probably

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

I made a half-baked logic-grid puzzle editor a while back and keep meaning to finish/polish it, so... #EnigMarch day 1: Season. joshgrams.itch.io/enigmarch-2026 I don't expect these'll be anything to write home about but eh, practice. That's the main point anyway, right?

joshgrams.itch.io

EnigMarch 2026 by JoshGrams

Logic grid puzzles, probably

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Outside vs. inside. Also, ugh, 2 inches is such an annoyingly small amount of snow.

A path in the foreground, with piles of plowed snow pushed up against trees: the latticed shadows of their branches texturing the snow. in the background, an open snowy field sprinkled with tufts of dry brown plant stalks.

Pea shoots under grow lights: shallow black plastic trays, longer than your forearm, with dirt and a nearly solid covering of yellowy-tan pea seed. They're starting to form a thick carpet, shoots maybe the length of your thumb, still yellowy-green and with their leaves mostly folded and just starting to open out. On the shelf below you can see more trays with just the seed, no shoots starting yet.

Small tomato seedlings in a tray of soil blocks: they make me think of a troupe of dancers, long thin cotyledons reaching out from purplish stems like arms out for balance, feathery true leaves nodding above.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

This is why I basically never review; I'm almost entirely interested in what doesn't work, or how they could be better. And when buying, I know if I'm interested; I'm asking if a game does things that hit my pet peeves: so positive reviews are almost 100% useless and I only read the negative ones.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

Congratulations to Drew Cook's *Portrait with Wolf* for winning first place in the #InteractiveFiction Short Games Showcase! A lovingly crafted piece of interactive poetry (?) that plays with a bunch of aspects of the form of parser IF. kamin3ko.itch.io/pww

kamin3ko.itch.io

Portrait with Wolf by Drew Cook

a rendering

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

Ugh. We're supposed to get freezing rain and wintry mix tonight into tomorrow ...at 20F/-7C. Weird weather. Also man, that last snow storm: sounds like southern Maine got 2 feet. By the time it got to us we got less than 7 inches. Not that I'm complaining too hard, but... c'mon, winter!

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

The farm takes most of my interest in reliability and responsibility, so my hobby time is usually chaos, but... I've been self-indulgently tempted to make an #InteractiveFiction engine for at least 15 years now and I'm hoping to focus on that for the last three months of the year.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

I did extensive Twine gardening on William Rous's Type Help, finally putting timecode on the y-axis and intended deduction progress on the x. Pretty cool how it's almost like a gauntlet structure, but for a totally different purpose (give some freedom while controlling the possibility space).

A bumpy diagonal spread of boxes representing the "files" in Type Help, slanting down from the top left to bottom right. They're linked with curving arrows representing possible deductions. In some places there are vertical sprays of boxes extending upwards where someone tells us about a bunch of past events.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

‪@philippawarr.bsky.social‬ I *just* realized that this is the year the book amnesty took place (hopefully you're not utterly fed up with people pointing this out already). Thanks for all the delightful captions!

Messy stacks of books on a museum plinth on a painterly island in the middle of the ocean, with a plaque reading Unread Books: To ease their collective angst, humans held an I-want-to-be-the-kind-of-person-who-reads-this-but-it-turns-out-I'm-not-and-I-feel-bad book amnesty in 2025. The move freed up 9.38 square kilometers of bedside table surface space. (from the game A Monster's Expedition through Puzzling Exhibitions).

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