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Jul. 3rd, 2004 07:56 pmyou can read the first chapter of sean stewart's new book, perfect circle at salon right now. upon reading that, i got a little nostalgic about how i first ran into mr. stewart's work...
[cut to early summer of 2001, when i was just mostly-washed-up as a physics major but well on my way to fleeing the country...]
one day, my co-worker mary and i were playing around with the alice-bot on the official a.i. website. (hey, it was that or fortran... and for gimmicky marketing, it was pretty cool.) she remembered hearing that there was a pretty neat game connected to the movie... and next thing you know, we're finding it. presented as a set of webpages from the future, linked together with increasingly complex puzzles and a good murder mystery underlying them. we got terribly, terribly addicted, obsessively waiting until lunchtime on tuesdays when all the new updates would be up, scrambling to see if we could find any solutions before the many geniuses in the yahoo group dedicated to solving all the riddles...
and then, one day, not long after the movie opening, "the beast," as its creators dubbed it, came to an end. no more puzzles, and all the "puppet masters," as they called themselves, revealed their identities. sean stewart was the guy writing most of the story, teamed up with a computer team mostly from microsoft; i was impressed enough to pick up a couple of his novels... as time passed, most of the fancier webpages disintegrated, and i couldn't really show anyone what on earth i was capable of rambling on so much over.
but in my fit of nostalgia today, i happened to stop by the cloudmakers site today. and just for fun, tried a link. turns out, they've got pretty much the whole thing mirrored in the links down the left side of their front page. i got sucked in for a couple hours again without even noticing... so yeah, there it is, if i've ever tried to ramble at you unsuccessfully.
[cut to early summer of 2001, when i was just mostly-washed-up as a physics major but well on my way to fleeing the country...]
one day, my co-worker mary and i were playing around with the alice-bot on the official a.i. website. (hey, it was that or fortran... and for gimmicky marketing, it was pretty cool.) she remembered hearing that there was a pretty neat game connected to the movie... and next thing you know, we're finding it. presented as a set of webpages from the future, linked together with increasingly complex puzzles and a good murder mystery underlying them. we got terribly, terribly addicted, obsessively waiting until lunchtime on tuesdays when all the new updates would be up, scrambling to see if we could find any solutions before the many geniuses in the yahoo group dedicated to solving all the riddles...
and then, one day, not long after the movie opening, "the beast," as its creators dubbed it, came to an end. no more puzzles, and all the "puppet masters," as they called themselves, revealed their identities. sean stewart was the guy writing most of the story, teamed up with a computer team mostly from microsoft; i was impressed enough to pick up a couple of his novels... as time passed, most of the fancier webpages disintegrated, and i couldn't really show anyone what on earth i was capable of rambling on so much over.
but in my fit of nostalgia today, i happened to stop by the cloudmakers site today. and just for fun, tried a link. turns out, they've got pretty much the whole thing mirrored in the links down the left side of their front page. i got sucked in for a couple hours again without even noticing... so yeah, there it is, if i've ever tried to ramble at you unsuccessfully.
