Kischkatscha für dich (01/28/2012)

 

Well, it seems I successfully „broke through” into the new year. Still at least my right leg: moreover at three places at once (just exactly in New Year’s eve, a so-called complicated fracture); at present it is fixed together with some funny little metallic implants (seven screws and three pieces of metal plates), which is very trendy, although no one suspects that I actually tried to anticipate the fashion trends of next year by this: also we can say that bone piercing.

According to this, I predominantly spent my first one or two weeks of the year by lying at a hospital (and the first months in gypsum beds, with two crutches etc.); the „components” will stay inside for much longer time. Since it all happens in Linz, the above sentence quoted by the title gains a strange and special meaning by the light of the scientific method applied in such cases, when the „produced” „goods” must be given to the very lovely nurses from time to time, while quietly murmuring that „Ein Kischkatscha für dich” (that fortunately they don’t understand…). (It is really an untranslatable pun: „kiskacsa fürdik” is a Hungarian folk-phrase meaning „little duck bathes”, that’s distorted into half-German approximately as „a hospital duck for you”. Sorry…)

However, we have to „always look on the bright side of life” that now means: I have got much free time again to spend away by editing this homepage. (I gladly report now that in regard of its space reservation on the server, the website has just already reached two psychological limits at once: 300MB and 10.000 files in all…)

I have quickly added a lot of poems, songs, and other lyrics into here (as they were already at hand on a USB flash drive, and the pictures, too). Besides, I have set to a large-scale material collecting for my next (and very large-scale) series of articles. I had already planned it for a long time that I should make a comprehensive and colourful line of writings about Interactive Fiction theme, which – as being a rather ambitious venture – must probably last for several months (or years) again.

Its title, eventually I had got for years: The Castle of IF – hopefully and soon it even may be more… I would like to go along a lot of more or less differentiated themes and topics within that (as a matter of fact, I would have drawn the detailed discussing of my own former games to here already, too, but I felt that it would have been still too personal); probably a first piece will be Once There Was an Input Line – an articulate essay in which I would like to summarize the history of Hungarian IF in a nutshell. (Or, as we used to mention it before, the history of „text adventure games”, albeit that’s a rather obsolete, and not even exact, too limited and bounded expression… Fortunately – or, far more rather, unfortunately! – the corpus is not too large, so it is easy to review.) Later I shall further broaden the scope towards the international waters, e. g. comparing the worlds of „classical” and „modern” IF, partly looking into some of the applied development systems, perhaps the inner worlds of particular authors etc.

Just recently (not wholly a year ago, that’s in the first half of 2011) appeared a very interesting and long-drawn book (a few chapters of which were still written in the 1990s, while others are up to date and fresh), called IF Theory Reader. Since it is only in English at present (available as paperback, but also can be read online in PDF for free), I decided to make a Hungarian translation of that step by step. It is guaranteed to be a long working, namely the book is 432 pages. (Maybe I shall only reach this point next year – maybe never… At least I shall try.)

Archives (2012-2013)