IFComp!

The games are up and available for download. "Only" 40 titles; that's fewer than half the intents, as well as a reversal of the more-games-every-year trend that the comp has seen since it started, seven years ago. It's slipped back to 1999 levels.

Of course, one can hope that more people have learned that submitting a broken and buggy game to the comp won't score you points, and the percentage of actually playable (and maybe even spellchecked and beta-tested) games is higher this year. (I recall that the bottom third of the entrants in 1999 -- that is, everyone who scored lower than Calliope -- were buggy in some way, often unfinishable. I think 2000 and 2001 saw the same proportion.) There also seems to be a consensus among rec.arts.int-fiction posters that, since Adam Cadre has started to host his own annual springtime competition, if you have any doubts about the readiness of your entry, it's better to hold it back for another six months, rather than rushing it in.

FJ

Today's random name-from-the-past Googling is for FJ Gallagher, celebrated editor of The Maine Campus, 1994-1995. By all indications, he has returned to his roots and become a staff writer and columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. Good for him, actually. Hmm, and he's in the same fine form I remember with these columns, too, pouring buckets of acid all over every local political personality he can reach. Go, Frank.

Amusingly, the number-one Google hit for his name points to this record album, whose first track's title contains an unmistakable reference to the same FJ. (One of the first things he did at the helm of the Campus was break a story about how the Bangor International Airport was storing high-explosive materials where they shouldn't have been. I got to create the concentric-circle-over-a-map graphic of the potential blast radius. Ahh, back in the day.)