Cyclic Fruition Number One

The selfposession required of selfreference is to avoid seeming so selfevidently selfinterested, which is gauche, when we’re all quite vogue, thank you, perfectly selfaware. The characters are stuck in a loop, but never you worry, they’re tying themselves in knots to prove their agency: “Chalgrove: Human action is repetitious. We establish a routine and it propagates to others. / Broadstairs: Yes, and the vocabulary evolves accordingly. New words are created, or older ones get repurposed. / Appleby: But here we’ve encountered a semantic token with no apparent reference. Which implies an entire process of action which hitherto we’ve been unaware of. / Chalgrove: So I’m classifying this as a Phantasm. For the moment, at least. / Appleby: OK, and whatever else we encounter will simply accrete. Until we glimpse its nature. / Broadstairs: Then our own vocabulary will adjust to explain it. / Chalgrove: A new case then? / Broadstairs: A new case. Top priority. Happy now, Appleby?” A reciprocus structure cycling over and over, and “With every repetition we precipitate new meaning.”

Do we? New meaning requires a first meaning, some germinating core which roots whatever proves straining this point to structure fruitful. So very well, who are our interlocutors to localize all this interlocution? Some characters are sketched promisingly: “To consult with Broadstairs is to discover a beneficent uncle. To engage him awakens a mighty foe. His letterhead crowns only solemn undertakings. His monogram makes most weighty the deed. / He is sincere in every syllable. So he will spare you the details. You will be unable to recall exactly what was promised. And when he gives his Word, his Word comes not with a word. The Word of Broadstairs is a nod. An affirming smile. An intoxicating handshake.” A dutiful but ambiguous operator, certain of his authority, affable uncertainly along the banks of a ruse, excellent, but where is that in the actual dialogue? “Broadstairs: Pie and chips? Or Welsh Rarebit? / Some place where we can smoke and sit. / A pint nearby, my pipe well lit. / And these two sitting opposite.” Whatever ambitions you might have had for this man to fulfill all go up in smoke, alas. Each turn you take through the looping draws up more and more of the blanks, which is great for Russian Roulette, but in a story the mirror of the soul is made a meta vanity. The structure of the text is structuring the text, every reincursion blunts the borders dully unporous, suffocation in the selfsame: “Broadstairs: Do we have a stable representation of our situation? I’d like us to agree on some sort of interpretation. / Chalgrove: OK, here’s what we know. A new word has appeared. And it is propagating everywhere. / Appleby: No, we need to think in terms of processes. Language is action. / Chalgrove: Action by whom? / Appleby: I don’t know. But forget where you think you are. If I’m right we’re experiencing some sort of poietic fruition. / Broadstairs: This is becoming a three pipe problem. I need to reflect for a few minutes.” So’s the issue with dialogue ultragained to white noise, we think only in the terms of processes.

A mention is made here, I cannot imagine idly, of a Winograd matrix, and like a lot of Eastgate era hypertext, the text is the hypertext, so it’s an inconvenience to be dragged back to the text. I blame all of this, of course, on Samuel Beckett, whom I’ve never forgiven. Beckett in the past tense is perfect, you see, so many negative constructions all minimus arrayed, any presumption pops to plummet you voidnausea, voila. The problem is that, at some definite point in time, you’re engaged in reading it to have eventually have read it, and precisely then the gap between you and the nothing drones nonzero, which I insist it is, still, it’s spring outside, there’s got to be a world out there, somewhere…

Anyway, this is a satisfying sentence: “A glissando of crimson minims on identical white staves chain the undulating frontages in linking measured intervals.” Sorry for complaining! I’m always complaining. Oh well. Thanks!

Hard to put a finger on this one...

Let's get the obvious out of the way first: this is a demo for a new IF authoring tool called Spiki, presumably developed by the author themself.

Spiki looks like Chapbook from Twine. Like, really similar. I would've thought it was a modified version of Chapbook if I didn't read the blurb first.

The only notable difference is that Spiki has a chapter index, containing all story passages, available from a menu at the top left. Cool, but pretty useless, in my opinion, and practically speaking, since the ordering of passages is static, without any indicator for what passages you've already visited, and with the only differentiator of passages being their names, and a number or letter.

There's a ton of passages and you're likely not remembering what all of them are titled, so navigating with the chapter index is infeasible. So, ignoring that, it's just Chapbook, then.

But this is all secondary. Though it's offered as just another demo, the story's actually really interesting.

Without giving too much away, you follow 3 friends as they look for 'temporal anomalies'. A certain Latin word keeps popping up again and again, and it's driving them crazy. Depending on your choices, you can either leave the site early, or eventually happen upon the real purpose of this story.

Which is, that it's a demo for a dialogue system. A really really complicated dialogue system (to my untrained eyes). You'll get a link to the author's blog where he explains it all. There, you'll find explanations for many of the unexplained terms in the story, like Florean Winograde, and the name origins for our trio (I was like, "OOOh, Aaai get it" when it finally clicked).

All in all, a pleasure to read. The writing teeters just on the edge of too abstract and sheer brilliance. I'm leaning towards brilliance, here. It's honestly way over my paygrade. I had only vague ideas of the setting at any given point in the story. Walking down the river, I conjured, unbidden, an image of a quaint town by the Thames, 19th century. No clue if that is in any way accurate.

Also, I love the trio dynamics. My favourite is Appleby. He's the one who actually gets things done. B and C are inseparable, though, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Would definitely read more of these guys. CFN 2? Here's hoping.