Adrian Hon

Getaways With Murder (Published 1992)

And here's the 1992 NYT piece it references about the growing murder mystery craze!

Fun New Yorker piece about the 50th anniversary of Mohonk Mountain House's Mystery Weekend, a multi-day murder mystery.

Its first scripts were written by Donald E. Westlake and his wife Abby, who collaborated with Stephen King, Edward Gorey, and Isaac Asimov! archive.is/1QiuR

also this essay was obviously written by an LLM but what else is new?

Me but getting back to my PC to harvest crops in Farmville in 2009

Yep, so it seems! And VUP is very much an academic term apparently, not that I have seen it in many other books

VUP = viewer/user/player. Who knew?!

The case studies of this dissertation were reconstructed with the help of both primary (still accessible sites in the post-mortem phase) and – in a sense – secondary sources (meta-sites such as wikis on the subject, witness accounts, etc.). The Internet Ar- chive had partially archived the sites of The Beast ARG; however, it should be noted that a lot of the sites’ visual contents (such as the flash animations) did not remain accessible for the scholars of the present. But, again, with the support of the Internet Archive’s initiative, an in-depth chronological overview can be accessed. One of the VUPs wrote this document during The Beast’s active phase, Adrian Hon. The reconstruction of the sites and paths of EMH relied heavily on the wiki page writ- ten and edited by the VUPs’ community.419 One of the most useful pages is the chron- ological overview of almost every interaction and fragment in the EMH transmedia storytelling system. However, it was far from complete. Fortunately, social media profiles, sites, and other online sources are accessible. Only a few videos were re- moved from YouTube due to copyright issues, but those could also be found on other websites: they were reuploaded by the fans of the narrative.

A 100,000 word walkthrough I wrote 25 years ago was used for a thesis on ARGs and transmedia networks – I love to see it! www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Aha, good shout!

I'd guess the Fruitmarket would cost well over £1500 for a 100 person event, without any frills – it's a little too nice

Yep, it's a struggle. I'm always on the lookout for decent places that can hold 50-100 people – happy to pay a reasonable amount – but have struck out mostly...

Yep, the escape room (Secret Solstice) has a decent sized cafe area that can hold about 30 people, which is great, but obvs not 100! Plus it's not really their main thing

Not the university (who wanted to turn it into something completely different), not BAFTA (who ghosted me), not a bunch of other orgs. It’s absolutely maddening.

I ended up doing a smaller event at an escape room company that has a fraction of the resources of big orgs, but actually *cared*.

My jubensha convention is happening in London, so you might say “well that’s just London” but I cannot tell you how long I spend trying to organise a games/immersive event in Edinburgh.

*No-one* was interested, and I had a lot of good contacts.

Spaces that can host conventions – even small ones – have practically vanished in much of the UK. It is an honest to god tragedy, and it makes me so angry to hear politicians lament the loss of third spaces without doing anything about this.

So we just can’t put these things on.

I think we could have solved the capacity issue, one way or another. But we couldn’t solve the space issue, not at £15 per ticket.

Maybe I should’ve charged more, but I wanted to keep it maximally accessible, and even if doubled it would’ve have made much difference, because…

And capacity, because jubensha games can only have six people at a time and we would run out trained hosts.

BUT English-language jubensha are scarce, so there is a really high demand for an event like this!

We sold out all 100 tickets, at £15 each, in about two weeks; we could probably sell twice that if we really wanted to, but then we would run into space and capacity constraints.

Space, because we’re running talks and it’d be hard to find a venue big enough for 100+ people…

As someone who is in the midst of organising a 100 person jubensha convention, this post was laser targeted at me

I hope to god my editor doesn’t remove this line:

“For these knights, the action was the juice.”

About a third of the way into writing I was just like, I really need to start doing this properly as I go otherwise future Adrian will be mad, lol

I’m doing the good thing by referencing “book sections” where possible, but it adds so much time!

This is one of my favourite parts of my forthcoming book on immersive experiences and may have the greatest density of new info in it, largely because the scholarship on which it is based is extremely new!

But I probably got carried away writing it, hence all this work now…

I’m using Zotero, which is great, but I have *one thousand* references so it’s starting to crawl…

Me writing about four centuries of role play in medieval tournaments: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yeah!!

Me adding all the references in while proofreading: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

Take your relationship to next level with video game, Spanish bishops tell couples Church launches marriage-themed computer game for Valentine’s Day aimed at enticing more couples to the altar

It Takes Two: Origins

There are many things to dislike about Silicon Valley's writing style, but here's another one: their overuse of footnotes.

I just read a one page resignation letter from an Anthropic staffer that had three footnotes. Three!! It's pitiful stuff. Ask Claude how to write better, you dweebs!

Also, turns out Netflix limits downloads to 15/mo on plans with ads, rising to 100/mo for ad-free plans – who knew?

It would have to be absolute dogshit to be worse than NowTV tho... mandatory 40s ads before each episode, even if you've bought the "no ads" option!

Thanks!

Thanks!