calling all IF writers.
NSF
consider myself a decent writer of non-interactive fiction, I am
having trouble working in this medium.
So, this is an open thread to all writers of both regular and
interactive fiction. The questions:
What are your thoughts on the differences between the two mediums?
How do you go about writing regular fiction, and is it significantly
different from your approach to IF (or vice versa)?
I have tried various methods that I found on this group and in
assorted articles, including:
Starting with a sample transcript
Starting with an outline
Starting with a character
Starting with a problem that needs solving
Starting with a map
While all of these work to create a decent story (though nothing I'm
proud of) when I turn them into games, they fall flat. Has anyone
else had this problem? How do you deal with it?
If you remember a game that gave you trouble, and provide your method
for overcoming that trouble, please consider linking to the game (if
it is in the archive or online).
Thanks, NSF.
Amzin
N> Greetings, I'm new to writing interactive fiction, and while I
N> consider myself a decent writer of non-interactive fiction, I am
N> having trouble working in this medium.
N> So, this is an open thread to all writers of both regular and
N> interactive fiction. The questions:
N> What are your thoughts on the differences between the two mediums?
IF is an instrument for creating good living background - no more and no less.
N> How do you go about writing regular fiction, and is it significantly
N> different from your approach to IF (or vice versa)?
Well, I published about 20 non-interactive sci-fi stories and wrote some unpublished yet books. Regular fiction is much easier. :)
N> I have tried various methods that I found on this group and in
N> assorted articles, including:
N> Starting with a sample transcript
N> Starting with an outline
N> Starting with a character
N> Starting with a problem that needs solving
N> Starting with a map
N> While all of these work to create a decent story (though nothing I'm
N> proud of) when I turn them into games, they fall flat.
It's the _rule_ of game-designing.
N> Has anyone else had this problem?
I had. But not with If. When I didn't knew 'bout IF, I've tried to create a world ("project betaworld") and my companions desired only to code *something cool* as they stated. So, we abandoned project, because its system and architecture were not done on the moment of serious coding.
N> How do you deal with it?
Trying to write done all techniques we'll need to build game world. Realise all techniques. Bring them together.
It works even in regular fiction. Big things you can describe only on large time-scale. In different situations. You don't need to think about each of such situation, but you need to create world in your mind - using _something_ that helps. Tolkien used map.
But I don't think that Shakespear did it too. ;)
[I recommend to study common law, btw, because it'll easily set-up links between people, things and all these concepts...]
N> If you remember a game that gave you trouble, and provide your method
N> for overcoming that trouble, please consider linking to the game (if
N> it is in the archive or online).
Every game _is_ a trouble.
--
WBR, Al Amzin,
politicial technologist of "Saise kebati"
[Anonymous Amnesians]
A.P. Hill
Text Adventures started as a game, and I'd like to think that it is a
form of amusing entertainment. I think if you try to pull away from
the game part of interactive fiction, then you are left with a medium
that is far less superior to real fiction. I would much rather read a
book about how to change oil in a GPz750 Kawasaki, than have to parser
my way through it in an interactive fiction environment. And I use
that with fiction as well, I'd rather read a book that moves through
the story rapidly if it's about a dull parrot named Magnus, than parse
through it.
So, once you define it under the game category, then you can
understand why some don't stand up well. You have to tailor your
story with open ends to allow the participant freedom of imagination.
I've never had formal training on writing, but I owe a great deal of
mild success to a long period of role-playing with many types of
people of all ages. As referee, you have to have the ability to
fore-read a story. Split the story into two groups, known and unknown
for the players. Then 'move' the players along this story path making
sure not to devulge too much information. You have to 'predict' what
actions the player may do prior to you discussing events. You have to
moderate arguments between players, be fair, and try at all times to
amuse the participants. You have to be quick and decisive when
players approach any given situation with far more talent than you
could ever had imagine. (Remember to jot down those ideas), and parry
with something equally as wit, or if all else fails, amusing. Comedy
always wins.
Your stories of fiction should be written using the notes you have
taken since you were ten. If you haven't been taking notes, then you
are out of luck. I would suggest taking notes now. If you are 43,
then maybe when you are about 74, you can write a good piece. Were
you not informed that you were suppose to be taking notes?
A.P. Hill
Tads
Penner Theologius Pott
Keeping in mind that I've never successfully written a piece of
interactive fiction -- I have like so many others merely dabbled -- it
strikes me that part of your problem may be that you're approaching
the process backwards. Instead of having a story and thinking, "Hey,
this would be perfect to tell in an interactive way!", you're
thinking, "Hey, I would love to write a piece of interactive fiction.
Now I just need a story!"
Just a thought.
Emily Short
sillyq...@mail.com (NSF) wrote:
> Greetings, I'm new to writing interactive fiction, and while I
> consider myself a decent writer of non-interactive fiction, I am
> having trouble working in this medium.
>
> So, this is an open thread to all writers of both regular and
> interactive fiction. The questions:
>
> What are your thoughts on the differences between the two mediums?
>
> How do you go about writing regular fiction, and is it significantly
> different from your approach to IF (or vice versa)?
>
> I have tried various methods that I found on this group and in
> assorted articles, including:
> Starting with a sample transcript
> Starting with an outline
> Starting with a character
> Starting with a problem that needs solving
> Starting with a map
>
> While all of these work to create a decent story (though nothing I'm
> proud of) when I turn them into games, they fall flat. Has anyone
> else had this problem? How do you deal with it?
I tend to start by asking myself, "What does the player do in this game?"
Choose conversation choices? Solve puzzles in a specific way? Move
through looking at objects and exploring the environment, gradually
piecing together knowledge?
Once I've defined the range of action available to the player, I find it
easier to design a game that will take advantage of that range, without
introducing story elements that are impossible to implement well.
Suppose, for instance, that I have a game in which two characters are
*mostly* going to talk, but there's going to be a bit where the player
character gets into a fist fight with the non-player character, and I want
to have that described in great detail too.
At this point, my options are:
1) do the action sequence in a cut-scene, perhaps introduced by "ATTACK
NPC". This may or may not feel satisfactory -- in general, cut-scenes
tend to feel like a bit of a cop-out.
2) implement some fighting commands, but make them work only in that
section of the plot. This can feel *really* awkward; they may also wind
up shoddily designed, since the conversation is going to be taking most of
my attention.
3) design a vast integrated fighting-and-talking system. This requires a
lot of extra writing, though, that I might not have originally planned to
include.
Unless the fist fight is vital, then, I'll try to think of another way to
handle this piece; when I offer the player a certain way of interacting, I
generally try to keep that mode of interaction open for the whole game.
Take away that freedom, and you generally wind up with something that
feels artificial.
A lot of narrative-light, puzzle-heavy games go totally in the other
direction, of course -- having a lot of set-piece puzzles tends to mean
that you want to include special verbs for handling specific situations;
diagrams in ASCII graphics; points where you are asked yes-no or other
questions with a non-standard prompt; puzzles that require you to enter
coordinates or other non-standard sorts of data; and so on. This is okay
if the player's involvement is coming primarily from involvement with the
content of the puzzles -- if he basically views the game as a string of
challenges which he meets individually on their own terms. If your
purpose is storytelling, it doesn't serve you so well, I think.
On the same note: where you have particularly important plot points --
things with a big set-up and pay-off -- you usually want those to be, if
possible, triggered by the player's actions. There are some exceptions,
especially if you're writing a story the point of which is that the player
character is incapable of action, or disinclined to it. (See Stephen
Bonds' Rameses, http://wurb.com/if/game/922.) But otherwise, it is good
if the player takes a definitive action, and better still if he realizes
what the result of that action is going to be in advance. For examples of
this played to its maximum effectiveness, see the first few scenes of
Graham Nelson's Jigsaw (http://www.wurb.com/if/game/117), and play the
entirety of Andrew Plotkin's Spider and Web
(http://wurb.com/if/game/207).
Other antidotes to flatness include a rich atmosphere (cf. Michael
Gentry's Anchorhead [http://wurb.com/if/game/17], or the beginning of
Colin Wilson's Hey, Jingo! [http://wurb.com/if/game/1802]) and/or an
interesting narrative voice (the above-mentioned Rameses; J. Robinson
Wheeler's Being Andrew Plotkin [http://wurb.com/if/game/911]), which make
the game world an engaging and memorable place to be. The latter you can
invent when you come up with your player character: if he or she is the
sort of person with strong attitudes to things, those can come through in
every description, every event. The former is harder to design for
specifically, in the sense that atmosphere tends to come from many small
details. But here too, you can have an idea for the feel you want for
your game. In this respect the process may be fairly similar to the
process of writing standard fiction, with the distinction that in IF you
*have* to describe all the locations; places you might drop or ignore in
standard fiction all have to be fully envisioned and contribute to the
flow of the game. (Maybe in that way IF is more like a movie, where all
the sets have to be fully designed.)
> If you remember a game that gave you trouble, and provide your method
> for overcoming that trouble, please consider linking to the game (if
> it is in the archive or online).
Having said all that -- I still have a fair amount of trouble with this,
and have a couple of WIPs wasting away on my hard drive because I've not
managed to get enough of a handle on them. I know the plot; I like the
plot; I don't like the way they play as IF. The main reason for this
seems to be that I haven't figured out how to make the important parts of
the plot flow naturally from the player's actions, and/or the player
spends a lot of time doing fairly boring things in order to receive the
plot, and hasn't much motivation. Most of my *finished* games have come
from having a type of interaction in mind before finalizing the plot
details.
-- Emily
--
Emily Short
http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/index.htm
Nikos Chantziaras
> What are your thoughts on the differences between the two
> mediums?
Regular fiction requires writing skills, while interactive
fiction requires both writing as well as programming
skills. You have to be a good writer to make a good story,
and you need to be a good programmer to make the game
playable.
An IF author needs a lot more imagination then a novelist.
In regular fiction, the plot is in the novelist's hands.
He decides how the story evolves. In IF however, the
player decides how the story continues. Here's a quote
from Graham Nelson's "The Craft of the Adventure":
The author of a text adventure has to be schizophrenic in
a way that the author of a novel does not. The
novel-reader does not suffer as the player of a game
does: she needs only to keep turning the pages, and can
be trusted to do this by herself. [...] Thus, the game
author has continually to worry about how the player is
getting along, whether she is lost, confused, fed up,
finding it too tedious to keep an accurate map: or, on
the other hand, whether she is yawning through a sequence
of easy puzzles without much exploration.
> I have tried various methods that I found on this group
> and in assorted articles, including:
> Starting with a sample transcript
> Starting with an outline
> Starting with a character
> Starting with a problem that needs solving
> Starting with a map
>
> While all of these work to create a decent story (though
> nothing I'm proud of) when I turn them into games, they
> fall flat. Has anyone else had this problem? How do you
> deal with it?
I think most authors start with a map. Why? Consider the
following quote:
If you're going to have a complicated story you must work
to a map; otherwise you'll never make a map of it
afterwards.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
Starting with a map has the advantage that you always know
how to proceed with the implementation. And once you have
a working (solvable) game, you can start filling in the
details.
> If you remember a game that gave you trouble, and provide
> your method for overcoming that trouble, please consider
> linking to the game (if it is in the archive or online).
The TADS 2 Author's Manual provides information about the
mistakes made while implementing "Deep Space Drifter" and
how to avoid them (Chapter Nine). Search through the
IF-archive.
Graham Nelson's book "The Craft of the Adventure" deals
with this in great detail. Another helpful source of
information regarding these issues is G. Kevin Wilson's
"Whizzard's Guide to Text Adventure Authorship". You can
find both in the IF-archive.
Also, take a look at Brass Lantern
It has some very interesting articles (and links).
D. R. Porterfield
> consider myself a decent writer of non-interactive fiction, I am
> having trouble working in this medium.
>
> So, this is an open thread to all writers of both regular and
> interactive fiction. The questions:
>
> What are your thoughts on the differences between the two mediums?
I've written a good deal of "static" fiction and I'm currently working
on an IF story. One of the main differences I've noticed is that as an
author of IF, you have to be prepared to relinquish some control of
the story to the player, and that means developing a much more
flexible plot. When you write standard fiction, you're in complete
control -- you decide exactly what the protagonist says and does, and
how the plot progresses. And your goal is generally to write a "tight"
story, where every action and description serves to advance the plot
or deepen characterization. In IF, on the other hand, you can never be
sure what the player/protagonist will try to do, so you have to
anticipate as best you can, and make allowances for even the most
unlikely courses of action. For example, in a standard fiction story
set in a city office building, you don't have to worry about your
protagonist suddenly going off his or her nut and deciding to throw
office equipment down a stairwell just to see what will happen. In IF,
you do -- and you have to make sure the player gets an appropriate
response if they try it. Either that, or you have to come up with some
believable reason why they *can't* do something that they normally
could do, without undermining the believability of the model world. I
find that close to half of the code I'm writing deals with responses
to unlikely actions that do nothing to advance the story -- but
they're actions that someone, somewhere might try, given the
circumstances and the objects available.
The flip side of this is that in IF, different courses of action can
lead to different conclusions, making it possible to "play through"
the story a number of times and have a somewhat different experience
each time -- something not possible in static fiction, which remains
exactly the same each time you read it.
Another factor is the complexity of coding necessary to realistically
depict certain types of objects. Liquids and fire are particularly
tricky to deal with. (My current IF WIP was originally going to
involve both. It still involves liquids, unavoidably, but the fire is
right out -- it wasn't a vital enough element to warrant the enormous
extra trouble of including it.) Ropes and sharp objects can also
present complications. Say I want to have the protagonist rescue an
NPC who's tied to a tree by cutting the rope with a machete. That's
not too hard to do in and of itself. But what if the player takes the
rope and starts trying to tie it to other objects? Or cuts the rope
into two or more ropes? Or, for that matter, decides to go around
hacking on everything in sight with the machete? The point is,
sometimes you have to modify your story a bit to avoid having to write
disproportionate amounts of code for minor story elements. (This of
course is not to say that you shouldn't try to implement every chosen
element of your world as fully and realistically as possible. Just
choose wisely regarding what you include.)
A third major difference is in the use of person and tense. Most
(though not all) static fiction tends to be written in the third or
first person, past tense (e.g., "He was..." or "I was..."). Most
(though not all) IF tends to be written in the second person, present
tense (e.g., "You are..."). I've found that this makes more of a
difference when I'm actually composing than I initially would have
thought. Whether we're consciously aware of it or not, our writing is
influenced by what we've read -- and most of what I've read in the
second person present tense is, not surprisingly, other IF (mostly
Infocom games). Most of the regular fiction I read, on the other hand,
is somewhat more "literary" (for lack of a better word). It took some
adjustment to adapt to writing in the second person present while
still retaining my own style, rather than being overly influenced by
the "adventure game" style.
There are undoubtedly other differences as well, but these are the
three that first sprang to mind when I read your post.
>
> How do you go about writing regular fiction, and is it significantly
> different from your approach to IF (or vice versa)?
Apart from the differences noted above, IF involves significantly more
time and effort, because you not only have to write the story, you
also have to code it. And you have to approach it from the perspective
of a protagonist with free will, more or less, so it's harder to keep
the progression "neat and tidy". In regular fiction, the story may
move from Point A through Point B to Point C. In IF, you also have to
take Points D-K into account. All of these things affect the writing
process.
On the other hand, my approach to both kinds of writing is similar in
that I do my best work first thing in the morning, with a clear head,
a cup of coffee, and ideally a cat on my lap. :)
>
> I have tried various methods that I found on this group and in
> assorted articles, including:
> Starting with a sample transcript
> Starting with an outline
> Starting with a character
> Starting with a problem that needs solving
> Starting with a map
>
Of these planning devices, I personally have found the transcript and
mapping to be most helpful. But that's just me.
> While all of these work to create a decent story (though nothing I'm
> proud of) when I turn them into games, they fall flat. Has anyone
> else had this problem? How do you deal with it?
This is perhaps one of the most difficult issues. In static fiction,
you move the action along yourself, supplying the elements of
conflict, protagonist motivation, etc. All your audience has do is
read. In IF, you have to motivate your audience to become actively
involved in the progression of the story by creating a world that they
will want to explore and interact with. Since different types of
stories (and worlds) appeal to different people, and there's no way to
please everybody, the best advice I can offer is to look at elements
of IF that *you* find enjoyable and try to incorporate those elements
into your interactive story. (I'm talking about abstraction and
synthesis here, not just lifting ideas verbatim.)
Hope this helps. This is a very interesting topic.
-- David
D. R. Porterfield
> consider myself a decent writer of non-interactive fiction, I am
> having trouble working in this medium.
>
> So, this is an open thread to all writers of both regular and
> interactive fiction. The questions:
>
> What are your thoughts on the differences between the two mediums?
I've written a good deal of "static" fiction and I'm currently working
>
> How do you go about writing regular fiction, and is it significantly
> different from your approach to IF (or vice versa)?
Apart from the differences noted above, IF involves significantly more
time and effort, because you not only have to write the story, you
also have to code it. And you have to approach it from the perspective
of a protagonist with free will, more or less, so it's harder to keep
the progression "neat and tidy". In regular fiction, the story may
move from Point A through Point B to Point C. In IF, you also have to
take Points D-K into account. All of these things affect the writing
process.
On the other hand, my approach to both kinds of writing is similar in
that I do my best work first thing in the morning, with a clear head,
a cup of coffee, and ideally a cat on my lap. :)
>
> I have tried various methods that I found on this group and in
> assorted articles, including:
> Starting with a sample transcript
> Starting with an outline
> Starting with a character
> Starting with a problem that needs solving
> Starting with a map
>
Of these planning devices, I personally have found the transcript and
mapping to be most helpful. But that's just me.
> While all of these work to create a decent story (though nothing I'm
> proud of) when I turn them into games, they fall flat. Has anyone
> else had this problem? How do you deal with it?
This is perhaps one of the most difficult issues. In static fiction,
Jim Aikin
> What are your thoughts on the differences between the two mediums?
Looking at conventional fiction (a.k.a. static fiction, a.k.a. CF) as a
single beast is probably a mistake. Granted, the medium is always the
same, but it's equally true that Star Wars and a Three Stooges short
share the same medium. Ditto for IF; does Galatea have anything in
common with Zork? Doubtful, though both are IF.
This preamble lets me off the hook while I indulge in shameless
generalizations. For instance:
In IF, the player is the protagonist. Thus the work needs to be
structured so that the fiction "engine" -- which consists of conflict
and rising action -- moves the player forward.
Current IF development systems do not facilitate much in the way of
sophisticated character development. Conversely, setting is easy to do
(though not easy to do well). If the plot and pacing are uncontrollable,
and character development awkward, setting assumes a higher profile in
the work as a whole. The ramifications of this fact have not yet been
fully explored.
William Carlos Williams once said (of his poetry), "No ideas but in
things." This motto suggests a poetics of IF, if anybody is interested.
IF is preeminently about things. Things whose nature and uses are
unknown, things that obstruct, things that surprise the reader.
> How do you go about writing regular fiction, and is it significantly
> different from your approach to IF (or vice versa)?
How do you go about swimming, and is it significantly different from
your approach to cooking? I'm not being sarcastic. I just don't see that
my work habits have anything to do with the difference between the media.
I've written a _lot_ of conventional fiction and not nearly as much IF.
One difference is that in IF, you can only include stuff if you can
figure out an effective way to code it. This constraint doesn't apply to CF.
In CF, you can control the pacing. In IF, you can't -- but there are
things you can do to at least VARY the pacing. I'd recommend it.
Don't worry about branching plots, that's my advice. Create one good
strong plot, and make the player FIND it.
> I have tried various methods that I found on this group and in
> assorted articles, including:
> Starting with a sample transcript
> Starting with an outline
> Starting with a character
> Starting with a problem that needs solving
> Starting with a map
>
> While all of these work to create a decent story (though nothing I'm
> proud of) when I turn them into games, they fall flat. Has anyone
> else had this problem? How do you deal with it?
Start with an IDEA. Want more specific? Okay. In CF, the protagonist has
a PROBLEM. The problem, whatever it is, is important to the protagonist,
and it's difficult to solve.
I suspect that most good IF follows this pattern. Certainly my one
released game (Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina) adhered to it very
strictly. I'm not saying it was a great piece of IF, though I've gotten
some nice compliments on it. All I'm saying is that I found it very
useful to give the protagonist (a parent) a specific, important problem
(how to acquire a specific, hard-to-find Christmas present for his or
her beloved daughter). Download the game
(http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXzcode.html/ballerina102.z8)
and read the prologue. You don't even have to play the game if you don't
want to. The prologue says it all.
That-there's mah two cents.
--Jim Aikin
Penner Theologius Pott
> Current IF development systems do not facilitate much in the way of
> sophisticated character development.
Y'know, this is something I've been hearing a lot, and it makes me
wonder. There's this real focus, less so in this particular community
than within video games in general, on technology: people talk about
games being capable of more now than they were in, say, the eighties,
because technology has improved.
Is this really true?
I mean, silent films, as an obvious example: some real cinematic
masterpieces came out of that period. And I don't know that it's the
case that they would have been better if they had had color or sound.
Sometimes, limitations can encourage artists to produce better work,
no?
I'm a mime teacher, and one the greatest illusions I have to push my
students past is that "mime is like theatre, only without talking."
Well, no: take nearly any production, remove all of the dialogue, and
the play has lost something. Mime, therefore, is not some castrated
art form, but something entirely different.
Sometimes I think there is the tendency to view IF as a castrated art
form.
Why do we see character development as limited? Because we can't
produce a response to every question? That's right, we can't: but in
static fiction, we don't even have that option.
We often talk about IF as something that we want to be accessible --
something a random person could just sit down in front of and start
interacting with. I think it's a good goal, but an impossible one.
It's a demanding medium. Books are demanding, because they demand at
the very least the ability to read: IF demands not only that, but also
the ability to recognize the limitations of the program itself.
I'm also doing some work and design right now and discovering that I
dislike realism (obviously, because that's what I'm having to work on.
No matter: this is useful information for me). The reason? Because I
feel like when you set that up for an audience, that "What you are
looking at is reality," then you're constantly being tested. Checked.
The audience is always poking at the corners of that reality, looking
for places where it doesn't hold up. And, really, I'd rather that they
just focused on the story. What I'm doing isn't reality. If I pick up
an apartment building and plunk it into the middle of a stage, it's
not reality, it's a building on a stage: the audience can't escape
from the fact that it's surround by emptiness, or that they're sitting
on a raked surface surrounded by other people who are apparently
invisible.
This is hard for a lot of people who aren't accustomed to sitting
through plays. The same way I think it's hard for people who just
start playing IF: they don't know what the limitations of the world
are. The solution, then, is not to try to create a perfect simulation
of reality, but a world that allows the audience\player to focus on a
story, no?
Tarage
to attain the "voluntary suspension of disbelief." Once you have that, the
audience is mesmerized by the story; they have this feeling that the pages
are just whirring by. They look up and realize, suddenly, that it is three
hours later. IF can also achieve this affect, which does prove the point
that it's not the art form itself (movies, silent pictures, mime, IF), but
rather the quality of that art to draw the audience in -- to make them
forget the cover, the seats, the grainy film -- and make them believe that
they are elsewhere, swept along with the story.
~Tarage
In article <7333d18e.02070...@posting.google.com>,
Tarage
an artform is on the basic, hardwired perceptual levels -- the more the
creators of that art rely upon those characteristics than upon quality.
That is why people will rave about Duke Nukem 2495...but discard it as
soon as Quake 293 comes out. True art engages the mind...not just the
glands.
~Tarage
In article <7333d18e.02070...@posting.google.com>,
Fool5...@aol.com (Penner Theologius Pott) wrote:
Jeffs
"Penner Theologius Pott" <Fool5...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:7333d18e.02070...@posting.google.com...
> Jim Aikin <kill_spammers@kill_spammers.org> wrote in message
news:<3D23C822.2090502@kill_spammers.org>...
> > Current IF development systems do not facilitate much in the way of
> > sophisticated character development.
> I'm a mime teacher, and one the greatest illusions I have to push my
> students past is that "mime is like theatre, only without talking."
> Well, no: take nearly any production, remove all of the dialogue, and
> the play has lost something. Mime, therefore, is not some castrated
> art form, but something entirely different.
I think all mines should be castrated in a theatre without talking.
Penner Theologius Pott
Har de har har. These jokes never get old in this profession :b
Just kidding, though. Usually I'm pretty good-natured about this kind
of thing...one has to be. I will observe, however, that everyone on
this board also indulges in a pastime which is pretty widely derided.
Eytan Zweig
By which I assume you mean posting on usenet, given that the other two
things that unite most people on this board are:
A - Programming (Which I don't think is widely derided)
B - I-F (Which isn't widely derided for the simple reason that it isn't
widely known about).
Eytan
Peter Seebach
Penner Theologius Pott <Fool5...@aol.com> wrote:
>Just kidding, though. Usually I'm pretty good-natured about this kind
>of thing...one has to be. I will observe, however, that everyone on
>this board also indulges in a pastime which is pretty widely derided.
Yeah, which is why we need to find *someone* to look down on. You're it,
face-paint boy!
:)
-s
--
Copyright 2002, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / se...@plethora.net
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