OneWetSneaker

Get a Free Short Story Mailed To You!

Conrad Cook — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 22:52:03 +0000

I am delighted to announce I am starting up a free short story service here at One Wet Sneaker. I’m always digging up great old stories online, and want to learn to use an certain automatic email program, so I thought I’d combine them this way. These are the best short stories I can find. […]

Can You Castle Out Of Check? — And Some Basic Strategy About Making Trades

Conrad Cook — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 13:28:33 +0000

No. You cannot castle through check. You cannot castle into check. And you cannot castle out of check. Since that makes for a short blog post, I’ll also say– The opening is when knights are most valuable. This is because they do well when the board is cluttered, but it takes them a long time […]

Organizing Written Description of Place

Conrad Cook — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 22:49:08 +0000

This was useful to a few people over on intfiction.org, so I’m quoting it from that thread. Jamespking wrote: Quote: The immense magma river flows below effortlessly, although slow and patiently. The whole cave is lit by its fiery belly. From here you can see the broken pillar rising from the flames like a finger […]

Timelines

Conrad Cook — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 03:59:12 +0000

I had a funny dream where I was looking at a tree that was a family tree. But it was a physical tree in the real world. Then I looked at it again and it was a branching diagram of _homo sapiens_. I’ve often regretted that Homo sapiens can never really know Neanderthal man, or […]

History Class

Conrad Cook — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 02:55:10 +0000

backdated Is what you want, looking at the past, to have no worst day? I have a worst day. I hope and pray I won’t have to trade it down for an even worst one. I have been thinking: Looking back, you’ll have a worst day. Almost undeniably. But to focus and dwell on that […]

“Marriage isn’t Contract Law — It’s Partnership Law”

Conrad Cook — Sat, 12 May 2012 19:26:00 +0000

I’m told that marriage isn’t actually well described as contract law, but as partnership law. Partnership law is the same area of law that governs the establishment of corporations. Does that mean that a marriage is a legal person?

Weird Hamlet — retranslated from the French

Conrad Cook — Sat, 12 May 2012 18:44:30 +0000

Back when I was researching Hamlet for something I would later write up in Hypnotized by Hamlet, I came across reference to a French translation. The translation of Shakespeare’s play was written by Dumas — yes, the same one who wrote Count of Monte Christo and Three Musketeers. Since Count is a classic revenge story, I figured it would be worth […]

review: The Blue Death (by Otto Grimwald / in Ramus)

Conrad Cook — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:50:10 +0000

http://anamnese.online.fr/site2/textallion/showcase/the_blue_death/the_blue_death_ramus.html A nifty little game I’ve played through a few times. It’s puzzling, in the way CYOAs often are. Parsered IF tends to force the game to focus on a specific scenario, and therefore situational coherence is to some degree enforced. Not so with CYOA, as we all remember from the old playbooks: go through […]

Play _Unicorn Story_ online!

Conrad Cook — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 00:06:26 +0000

I wrote a little online text game available for you to play online (written with Ramus)!

The blurb goes–

"Unicorn Story –

A lyrical piece by Conrad Cook, hosted here for your pleasure. Not only it looks gorgeous, it also uses the medium in a fairly intriguing way."

Many thanks, Felix, for the kind words and for supplying a web space for the game!

This game is also mirrored, so you can play it here. Ralphmerridew hosts the mirror — thanks too!

(I'm reposting this from a comment in the Ramus post after it came to my attention it was effectively hiding there.)

Introducing Ramus! — a very nice dynamic document creator

Conrad Cook — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 02:55:21 +0000

Ramus is a nifty little document creator, created by Felix Pleșoianu, that allows you to start with a paragraph-long document and keep adding text, almost as if it were being written in front of you. It’s designed to be an Undum lite (or a Vorple lite): fewer features, but much easier. And Ramus is very easy. There […]