Made a thing

Posted by F1ak3r on July 26, 2012, 1:26 p.m.

Inklewriter is quite a fun little toy to play with. It's a very simple, intuitive tool for writing choose your own adventure stories, but also gives you the ability to use markers, counters and paragraph run-ons to far outstrip any of the CYOA or Give Yourself Goosebumps books you may have read as a kid.

I just spent the last hour or two messing around with a little story I call Your Dog has Been Abducted by Aliens, and it was fun. Not sure how fun it would be to play compared to how fun it was to make – it's a little silly. Time well spent procrastinating doing any actual work… and maybe I'll expand it later.

I ended up toying with Inklewriter after visiting my Google+ account for the first time in ages on a whim. Poor G+ is the butt of a lot of jokes, but it's really not a bad site. I've always loved the design and the circles thing. Of course, no-one's really going to stop using Facebook any time soon, so I'm not entirely sure why Google bothered. Facebook's the World of Warcraft of social media – everyone uses it because everyone else uses it, and that's worth more than all the pretty designs and nice features in the world.

A guy from Google gave us a talk on the company and how amazing it is to work there1, and mentioned that Google+ had apparently "succeeded". So maybe there are places where Facebook isn't as ubiquitous as in my personal circles. Odd to imagine. It's probably the most successful "Facebook killer", at the very least.

Out of interest, I'm typing this from the Ubuntu package2 I installed this morning. It's certainly very customisable and feels friendlier than Windows, but it also feels like you have to fire up Terminal every time you want to do anything3 and I could really do without that thing where it asks me for my password all the time. Nonetheless, a bare install of Ubuntu at least comes with an Office suite – it could be a real money saver for a lot of people if we could just get them used to it.

I'm busy typing up another blog about what I did over the holidays, 'cause I figure some of that might be a little interesting. See y'all then.

1. We got free sunglasses and shirts that say "I'd +1 that".

2. 10.10, which then bizarrely updated to 11.04 and now wants to update to 11.10 – why the incremental nonsense?

3. While that may have a certain hackery appeal, it's something that takes getting used to.

Comments

panzercretin 12 years, 5 months ago

Quote: everyone
Finally, a proper outlet for that choose-your-own erotica thing I was thinking about!

F1ak3r 12 years, 4 months ago

=/

colseed 12 years, 4 months ago

Quote:
Inklewriter is quite a fun little toy to play with. It's a very simple, intuitive tool for writing choose your own adventure stories, but also gives you the ability to use markers, counters and paragraph run-ons to far outstrip any of the CYOA or Give Yourself Goosebumps books you may have read as a kid.
Sounds like it would be rather useful for writing branching game stories and such.

I find stories can get kinda complicated like that when you give the player the option to kill any one character at any time… ._.'

svf 12 years, 4 months ago
F1ak3r 12 years, 4 months ago

@colseed: Oh, most definitely. It's a combinatorial explosion.

@svf: That was pretty funny (props for even including an image)! It's just you have a strange habit of starting words with capital letters when you shouldn't. Only do that with the beginnings of sentences, with names and with "I".

Charlie Carlo 12 years, 4 months ago

I wasn't even on the good part of the moon. :C

This is funny; I enjoyed it.

You've got a few typos not worth looking for.

pounce4evur 12 years, 4 months ago

I'm using that site to write my story, thank you so much for including it in a blog. You have saved me from writer's block.

F1ak3r 12 years, 4 months ago

@Charlie Carlo: Thanks!

Didn't even proofread, so I guess that's what I get.

@pounce4evur: It's my pleasure! I know how writer's block can be, so I'm glad to help save you from it.

svf 12 years, 4 months ago

@F1ak3r Yeah… I need to fix that about my typing. :\

Cesque 12 years, 4 months ago

Your story is too safe. I remember the main rule of CYOA books being the reverse of the main rule of cRPGs: "if you explore too much, you DIE."

I mean, I did randomly die in a very stupid way, but still. I had to attempt a couple dangerous-sounding things before it happened.

In conclusion,

[Announce conclusion proudly.]

The worst part? It's not even the conclusion with a flag.