Grand Text Auto

It’s 2014. Do you know where your New York Times is?

If Suck.com were reanimated, had its sense of humor removed, and made a PBS-history-documentary style Flash animation about Googlezon taking on the New York Times in an ecstasy of customized, micropayment-based, indie-news-making frenzy, it would be this one.

Today’s Times has an interesting article, “When the Sous Chef is an Ink Jet” about Homaro Cantu, a chef in Chicago who serves edible photos and sushi prepared on an inkjet printer. The restaurant serves edible menus. Cantu is also looking into levitating foods and innovative ways to utilize class IV lasers in food preparation. Of course this makes me think of what type of edible story I might like to tell, a novel that you could really sink your teeth into.

The WWW@10 conference looked back on the Web’s first decade – and, of course, inevitably invited thoughts about the next decade. Now, on the conference site, you can see video of heavyweights from different eras offering their thoughts. Ted Nelson, for example, speaks on “The Metaphysics of Structure and the Future of Literature.” Cory Doctorow asks “Web 2.0 = AOL 1.0?” and goes on to explain “how the forces of darkness are conspiring in smoke-filled rooms to break the Internet – and you’re not invited.”

Doritos has some new ad campaign with some sort of AIM tie-in (I couldn’t stand to spend more than five seconds on their adversite, so I couldn’t exactly tell) and with posters that are written in some dialect of leetspeak or hax0r (one of which I noticed this morning). Or maybe they’re just encoded using some variant of the Prince compression algorithm.

Promoting unhealthy snack foods to the downtrodden, computer-bound population does rather smack of intensively marketing malt liquor in the hood. But, on the other hand, maybe that is a sign that one day, someone will be trying to communicate with a pasty, bespectacled passenger in seat 13C, and I’ll be able to say “oh, stewardess – I speak leet!”

Just a quick note to try to convince you: please please please stop using those “under construction” icons on your home pages! They are stupid, pointless, take up unnecessary bandwidth, and can sometimes be silly. They belong in a museum. At the very least, use an alternative icon that won’t make people bust out with some Village People song. I mean, really – get with the program. And whatever you do, please don’t use an animated GIF.

Our 60-minute fandango on interactive story at the Game Developers Conference this March suddenly promises to be double fine, now that we’ve wrangled Tim Schafer to join the fray. Tim will either speak full throttle about the past, present, and future of adventure games vis-à-vis interactive stories — or just sit back and laugh at us oh-so-serious pontificators and casually plug his new game, which by the way is now available for pre-ordering. Well, hopefully he’ll do a little bit of both.

For those unable to make it, I’ll take notes, and report back here.