Choice inflection points in gamebooks/interactive fiction/CYOA come in many varieties. There a few standard storyline options in "finite-state" interactive fiction, where you don't keep track of changing statistics, or otherwise do anything other than make choices. Branches and bottlenecks are fundamental to choice paths in these things. Note that spin-off interactive fictions are sometimes belabored with extraneous factors that influence the work's structure. Aspects of making interactive fiction have appeared on the site before (green, greener; blue; bluer).

"It is possible, thanks to the magic of the internet. In 1960, five years before her death, Shirley Jackson recorded readings of "The Lottery" and "The Daemon Lover" for an outfit called Folkways Records—the only time we know of that she ever recorded performances of her own work."

The history of gelato is long. There's also a timeline over at a Gelato-Inspired Resource. Gelato can ostensibly be made at home. Yelp has you covered with 10 Best Gelato Near Philadelphia, but for finding the good stuff in Italy, ask over at National Geographic, Rick Steves, or chronacedigusto. Note that gelato is not ice cream. Hit up Gelato Festival for world rankings. You can eat your gelato like the Romans do it, or you can adorn it with seasonal fruit or other accompaniment.

"AppealMod: Inducing Friction to Reduce Moderator Workload of Handling User Appeals" and "Controlled, In Control, and Out of Control: The Effects of Different Forms of Vocabulary Control on the Subject Indexing and Subject Tagging Processes" have appeared in the last year or so. The 2009 "Exploring the dynamics of blog communities: the case of MetaFilter" is not recent, but it has been cited in many past works in the Metafilterological Sciences. Previously.

Atreja, S., Im, J., Resnick, P., & Hemphill, L. (2023). AppealMod: Inducing Friction to Reduce Moderator Workload of Handling User Appeals. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.07163. Holstrom, C. (2023). Controlled, In Control, and Out of Control: The Effects of Different Forms of Vocabulary Control on the Subject Indexing and Subject Tagging Processes (Doctoral dissertation, University of Washington). Silva, L., Goel, L., & Mousavidin, E. (2009). Exploring the dynamics of blog communities: the case of MetaFilter. Information Systems Journal, 19(1), 55-81.

"The Environmental Defense Fund will finance research into technologies that could artificially cool the planet, an idea that until recently was viewed as radical but is quickly gaining attention as global temperatures rise at alarming rates." [Archive]

The BEST Pound Cake Recipe in the South is one way to go, and another is How pound cake became a Southern classic. You can dip back into history, or you can go the encyclopedic route. Perhaps you prefer Old-Fashioned Pound Cake, or The Best Pound Cake? The Vintage Recipe Project has you covered with the Duncan Hines Lemon Supreme Pound Cake. Note, also, that important pound cake research is happening in the 2020s.

Orange is one flavor that is not infrequently incorporated into pound cakes, as witness the Orange Creamsicle Pound Cake, the Orange Pound Cake, the Orange Cream Cheese Pound Cake, or Giada De Laurentiis' Toasted Pound Cake with Citrus Cream. [This post brought to you by an unanticipated and intense longing for pound cake on a day that will probably feature no baked goods whatsoever. .]

Earlier Tuesday, Chomsky was trending on X as false reports of his death abounded.

"Dismantle All of This Stuff: A Conversation with Noam Chomsky," from back in 2021, when he was also still alive. " One Planet, One Language: How Realistic Is Science Fiction Linguistics?" is from 2014, when Chomsky was still alive, prior to 2021.

"When Ms. Jones began her career in publishing in the 1950s, cookbooks and food writing in general weren't taken seriously, often lumped in with technical manuals and textbooks. Their editing focused on the recipe instructions, without thought to point of view, cultural context or the beauty of language." [Archive]

Rebekah Peppler on Julia Child and cooking in the south of France: "The kitchen remains as one imagines it did when Julia Child built it. Tart rings, copper pots, measuring spoons, and whisks line the four walls, with outlines marking a designated spot for every single item. Market baskets pile high in a corner; the screened door bangs shut in a way that feels like many have entered through it. And many have."

Julia previously, previously, previously, and so on.

English Heritage's Properties Curator, Win Scutt said: "These finds reveal a fascinating insight into the lives of those at Tintagel Castle more than 1,500 years ago. It is easy to assume that the fall of the Roman Empire threw Britain into obscurity, but here on this dramatic Cornish cliff top they built substantial stone buildings, used fine table wares from Turkey, drank from decorated Spanish glassware and feasted on pork, fish and oysters." 2016 excavations report. Guardian article about a truly extraordinary window ledge inscription from the 7th century. More about Tintagel for folks who've never heard of it.

This post brought to you courtesy of the Secrets of the Dead 2019 episode on 5th-7th century Britain. Arthur previously.

Edward Hopper - Haskell's House - 1924. The house IRL. Haskell's House at Hopperhead. Haskell's House for the Hopper fan. Hopper previously.

"Storytelling has been a social activity since the dawn of time. Board games can add another level to it with nuanced strategies for decision-making and objectives with epic stakes."

People like to make lists of storytelling board games. Designing a narrative board game is a distinct form of game design. TV Tropes, weirdly, covers Narrative Board Games. There are, of course, books about the stories built into boardgames. Board games have a robust history of recreating and validating imperialism, genocide, and slavery, which David Massey takes on in "Slave Play, or the Imperial Logic of Board Game Narrative." [SLPDF] Flanagan and Jakobsson take on the future of the board game in their book Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games. Storytelling has, of course, appeared on MetaFilter previously.

"Lissyelle is a photographer and art director based in Brooklyn, New York and Los Angeles, California. She grew up in rural Ontario where her interest in photography began at the age of 12, spurred by an obsessive fear she would one day forget her entire life were she not to document it. Her body of work is often still inspired by this compulsion to photograph, as well as by the vivid colors of early childhood, reoccurring dreams, the blurry way we see things when we are either too happy or too sad, and the soft hands of the high renaissance." [NSFW]

"In terms of sheer kinetic wow factor, the most impressive Gundam to date is the full-scale moving one at Gundam Factory Yokohama..."

"Gundam Factory Yokohama has closed as of March 31, 2024." More about the life-size Gundam. More about construction of the life-size Gundam. Previously, on Not A Gundam But Damn, Girl

"We took it to the streets and asked both hardcore and novice tabletop gamers." Meanwhile, on another forum... A loosely related blending of physical and digital. Some feel that It's The Apps That Are Wrong. A D&D-focused list of dice apps. There's also Elmenreich's "Game Engineering for Hybrid Board Games" [SLPDF]. Previously

Research article citation: Elmenreich, Wilfried. "Game Engineering for Hybrid Board Games." W: F. Schniz, D. Bruns, S. Gabriel, G. Pölsterl, E. Bektić, F. Kelle (red.). Mixed Reality and Games-Theoretical and Practical Approaches in Game Studies and Education (2020): 49-60.

"Bias occurs in many algorithms and AI systems — from sexist and racist search results to facial recognition systems that perform worse on Black faces. Generative AI systems are no different. In an analysis of more than 5,000 AI images, Bloomberg found that images associated with higher-paying job titles featured people with lighter skin tones, and that results for most professional roles were male-dominated. A new Rest of World analysis shows that generative AI systems have tendencies toward bias, stereotypes, and reductionism when it comes to national identities, too." CW: stereotyping of peoples, nations, cuisines, and more

This October 2023 article by Victoria Turk was shared at a library instruction conference I attended over the last couple days.