Imaginary Realities volume 7, issue 3 is out!

The latest issue of Imaginary Realities is now available for reading.  Volume 7, issue 3.

It features the following articles:

• A text MUD with a working ecology system
• Dispelling the gloom
• How integral are letters and text to ASCII gaming?
• Legend and the lore
• The bonds of mudding
• The mercurial temperament at the end of the world
• Where do I begin?

With one article related to roguelikes, another to interactive fiction and the rest to mudding, it should provide our most diverse collection yet.

PDF and EPUB e-books are not currently available.  The new website generation creates these automatically, rather than manually as they were made before.  But unfortunately, getting them to look nice enough to be worth distributing requires a little more work.  They'll be added back to the website before (or with) the next issue hopefully.

Announcements have been made on:

• Twitter.
• Reddit: /r/roguelikes, /r/roguelikedev, /r/mud, /r/interactivefiction.
• Forums: MUDBytes, Top Mud Sites, The MUD Connector, intfiction.org.

Enjoy!

Imaginary Realities website updated!

I've finally found the time to give the Imaginary Realities website a more updated look.  The main change is that it's now generated by Jinja2, a Python templating library which I'd thoroughly recommend.  It made everything simple, up to and including picking out and including the featured article.

There's always more to do.  The next steps are likely to be taking advantage of the Reddit and Disqus Python APIs to make discussion of articles more readily discovered.

There's a whole lot of shenanigans with Disqus and something I think they call "Discover." At first you could opt out of it showing on your website, now you can kind of opt out of having your own posts discoverable.  It's unclear whether this means that you  will one day wake up and find giant rows of thumbnails of various trashy thumbnails and links to "top 10 celebrities who benefited from an all cabbage diet" and so forth.  I googled for ages trying to work this out, and they don't seem to appear at the moment, so fingers crossed.  The license for this site is Creative Commons non-commercial, so we'd have to look for a Disqus replacement if this started happening.

Imaginary Realities article submission deadline reached

With the start of June, and coincidentally with it the start of Winter, we have passed the article submission deadline for the next issue.  Seven articles have been submitted, and are in the hands of the editors and proofers, for them to work their magic.

A loose deadline for publication is set for the end of the month, specifically July 1st.  But this of course requires the publication process to run its course.  Once the editing and proofing is done, then a draft version of the site will be put together by myself, and provided for authors and editors/proofers to give the thumbs up.  And at that point, the new issue will go live and will be announced.  There may be some delay, if things take longer and require a little extra time to get things done.

We will be replacing the Imaginary Realities subreddit with Disqus comment sections at the bottom of articles, unless something goes wrong.  The framework is in place for this to be done, it just requires the articles to be published for it to come into place.

Write an article for Imaginary Realities volume 6, issue 2

Are you involved with text-based gaming?  If so, whether your involvement is in mudding, roguelikes, interactive fiction, gamebooks, browser games or maybe even something else, please consider writing an article for Imaginary Realities.

Imaginary Realities is an online journal which originally ran from September 1998 to December 2001, primarily focused on mudding.  It has been revived, and had published a new issue just recently, which you can find here:

http://journal.imaginary-realities.com/volume-06/issue-01/

If you’re interested in the older issues, you can also find them here:

http://imaginary-realities.disinterest.org

Find more details about suitable article topics here:

http://journal.imaginary-realities.com/volume-06/issue-01/request-for-content/index.html

Please email me before writing an article, to confirm that the topic you are interested in writing about, is both suitable and within our range of coverage at this email address:

richard.m.tew@gmail.com

Articles should be in the range of 1000-4000 words, and need to be received by May 31st, 2014.  Longer articles are possible for serialisation, with approval required.