Today, IF is probably the best-preserved cross-section of video game history we have. Every game, from Zork through Infocom's latter-day output, through every game made with Inform from the 90s until today, is playable and runs on any machine you could name; there are almost as many ports of the z-machine as there are ports of Doom.

A fantastic historiography of interactive fiction from its inception to today, written by Bruno.

IF has long had an arms-length relationship to video games at large. It is a genre and a surrounding community that is insistently noncommercial, relentlessly critical-minded, insular (and at times, though not so much today, exclusionary). It's more like a (large, unruly, eccentric) extended family than anything that could be described as a "fandom."

Of course, as would be expected from the title and from... recent history, this also touches on the increasing and disgusting practice of the use of generative AI in interactive fiction. Not only does this feel creatively insulting, it feels particularly galling in a small, bespoke scene like intfic.

AI sells the promise that you don't even have to imagine something; that your vague impulses, half-formed ideas, or just the result of a delusional conversation with a machine can become productized for an audience of none. The effect has been immediately toxic to all sorts of institutions that take submissions from all comers—from literary magazines like Clarkesworld to open-source code hosting service Codeberg.

The good news is that people will always want to create things, and will always create the best things. Better things than AI will, and ever could.

US Marxist-Leninists have sought to manage the contradiction — between the goals of Marxism and the petit-bourgeois fear of workers power — not by confronting it, but by adopting a tailist strategy. [...] No revolution has ever succeeded in this way, but this strategy has the benefit of keeping the masses (and their troublesome contradictions) at a safe distance.

Park Jee-hoon highlights various issues that caused and escalated the Ukraine crisis, including NATO expansion, neo-Nazism, and mistreatment of Russians and Russian speakers living in Ukraine.

A very exhaustive detailing of the current situation in Ukraine and how it relates to the material concerns both of Russia and Ukraine. It's a thorny subject in the broader West to talk about Ukraine without being completely engulfed in pro-Ukraine angled propaganda, so I found this a breath of fresh air.

I found myself in a conversation with a friend recently about the nature of Russian far-right agitation and how that relates to the broader Rightist upturn globally these days, and it is complex how the anticommunism of the United States (and the post-Soviet Russian state) has contributed to the building-up of right-wing forces within modern Russia. But that doesn't change the material realities at play here -- NATO/the EU threatens Russia militarily on the regular, and Ukraine's swing toward those powers (as part of a broader right-wing upswell in the region) makes it a very fragile situation for Russia's survival as a state.

Peace in Ukraine can only happen if Ukraine and Russia agreed to coexist without war under the UN system. That does not mean a state of friendship between the two countries. It is impossible to imagine that any time soon and it would take a generation to restore any normality in relations.[...] Rather, it would mean an agreement by both sides to settle future disputes through dialogue and diplomacy — a situation that has not pertained in Ukraine since 2015.