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2015? You mean we're in the future?

In one of the landmark movies of cinematic history, Back to the Future Part II, the protagonists travel from 1985 to the distant future, October 21st 2015. That date, which marks the beginning of The Future, is next Wednesday.

You mean we're in the future?

Next week we'll celebrate the occasion with a whole series of more or less thematically appropriate posts, one each day, ranging from narrative theory to musings about the past, present and future of parser interactive fiction.

Here's the lineup:

  1. Biff, what a character
  2. What if we don't succeed?
  3. Shark still looks fake
  4. Where we're going we don't need roads
  5. Clint Eastwood never wore anything like this
  6. Where'd you learn to shoot like that?
  7. Please excuse the crudity of this model

Sources for these articles include We Don't Need Roads: Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy by Caseen Gaines, the Tales from the Future documentaries, commentary tracks of the films' Blu-ray releases, and Futurepedia.

Now excuse me, there are some movies I need to re-watch.

Comments are dead. Long live discussion!

From here on commenting on new posts is disabled and the following text is displayed after each post:

Comments? Start a discussion at the intfiction.org forums or tweet to @JuhanaIF!

If there's already a directly related thread on the forums the link points there instead of the main page.

The blog has seen generally three types of comments: discussion about the post topic, tangential comments about IF in general from people new to the community who might not know about the forums, and congratulatory "I like this" comments. And spam. A lot of spam.

Blog comments aren't really suitable for conversation. The system is built for individual comments, not for discussion threads. They attract spam and replying to other comments is cumbersome. Commenting on something that's more than a couple of days old guarantees that apart from the blog author only a handful of people will ever see the comment, and starting a discussion about a post that's several months old is pretty much always a dead end. Furthermore people participating in the conversation are unlikely to keep returning to that single post to see if their comment has generated any additional comments.

All in all it's better to direct discussion to someplace that's designed specifically for conversation, especially since the topics here are more likely than average to spark general discussion that works better with a wider audience.

As for the congratulations, they're always personally appreciated but don't really bring any extra value to the blog post itself. Twitter is the best way to send a quick and short personal message.