Hollow Voice

At times, I'm just terrible at holding up my end of a correspondence. Gifts may languish for months before I send out a thank-you note. And while I never mind taking on freelance work, writing and sending the invoice at the end is a chore I constantly dread.

That's why I owe David Dyte such a debt of thanks for all his help with preparing and sending out the prizes for the winners of the 1997 XYZZY awards. He researched prizes for the winners -- we considered trophies before deciding on medals -- then coordinated everything from finding a vendor to do the work to having the medals designed and inscribed to actually mailing out the medals to all the winners. All I had to do was write a check -- and even that took me forever and a day! :-) So I'd like to take a moment to publicly thank David for his invaluable assistance; there will certainly be a seat of honor for him at next year's online ceremonies!

One other interesting note I wanted to point out in this issue's introduction is a cute Unix shell that I understand has been around quite awhile but that was new to me -- the Adventure Shell, available in C source code by John Coker. This custom shell makes using Unix a real adventure; you need to search for and locate magical items that in turn enable you to run programs and execute the other commands you want to perform. Best of all is the "xyzzy" command that returns the user to the home directory -- if that's not intuitive, then I don't know what is. :-) A big thanks to Urpo Lankinen for sharing this!

Until next issue, happy gaming!

Eileen Mullin
eileen@interport.net

Contents

• Legalese / Contact Information
• Top 10 Picks for IF on the Web
• Letters
• Tales from the Code Front: Parlez-Vous Nalian?
• Book Review: Game Developer's Marketplace
• Reporter's Notebook: International Game Developer's Network (IGDN) Conference
• Game Review: Spider and Web
• Bulletin board: Readers helping other readers

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