I'm rather pleased with the new manuals. I see Inform now as a gauche young adult, having got past the stage of growing out of his shoes every few months.

For a fortnight nobody at all emailed me, or posted a follow-up. Doesn't anyone care, I thought? It turned out my newsreader was broken, and hadn't posted at all.

The most frequent complaint is that it's hard. True. it's a hard game to win Also, many people ask me how to use the secret debugging commands, apparently under the impression that I'll tell them.

I don't really believe in 'directions' in art; the rope twists as you follow it, that's all.

Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.

Players very widely disagree with me about what's hard and what's easy. and in a way, 'I won, but it was a fight' is the best compliment a game can receive.

I like to employ a form of repetition, in which the same elements recur but in different and unexpected ways. rather than being discarded as soon as they are understood or passed over.

At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups.

The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.

Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.

This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell.

Self-esteem is not a luxury

I am too much in love with my lies and hypocrisies not to confess them fervently.

Style is the outcome of constraint.

Prayer means lovingly contemplating the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, allowing our hearts to be enkindled to praise and adore the love and omnipotence of the most blessed Trinity.

I have a lot of albums yet to do.

The new social landscape is rich with emotion.

All great contemporary artists, schooled or not, are essentially self-taught and are de-skilling like crazy.

Socrates thought and so do I that the wisest theory about the gods is no theory at all.

When our commitment is diminished for any reason, part of the solution is repentance. Commitment and repentance are closely intertwined.

I will fight to the death for one's right to be able to practice in their temple, their mosque, or in their church, even if they have a different belief than I do.