The talks at this year’s XOXO were really, really good. It’s hard for me to stop myself from writing about every one as they’re released.

But there were two in particular that I wanted to mention, from two of my favorite people in the world.

The first is from Jenn Schiffer—the coder/artist behind Make 8-Bit Art, Vart Institute, and other internet weirdness. At XOXO, I asked her to talk about her hilarious tech satire on Medium and the reaction to it.

It’s very funny, but also an insightful case study of the humorlessness and self-seriousness of the tech industry, and how many men react when trolled by a woman online.

The second is from cartoonist Lucy Bellwood, in a brave and vulnerable discussion of money and the costs of perceived success online. This talk left many in the audience in tears, earning her a standing ovation.

If you enjoy these talks, pass them on! We don’t make money from any of these videos, and because the festival is perpetually sold out, they have little marketing value for us. They take a lot of time and money for us to produce, edit, and caption, but we think they’re all worth preserving.

If you like, you can subscribe on YouTube and click the little bell icon to get notified when they’re released, or follow @xoxo on Twitter.

Inspired by National Novel Writing Month, Darius Kazemi started National Novel Generation Month in 2013, with the goal of writing code each November to generate a novel of at least 50,000 words. The entries are often surreal and playful, and occasionally profound. (See this year’s entries so far, 2015, 2014, and 2013.)

Several of my favorite past NaNoGenMo entries are by a single creator: the multi-talented Liza Daly, the Boston-based software engineer behind World Writable and former CTO of Safari.

In 2014, Liza’s entry was Seraphs, a procedurally-generated codex inspired by the Voynich Manuscript, using a randomized corpus from Voynich, a Voynich-like typeface, the Flickr API, and the Internet Archive’s collection of 18th century illustrations.

Last year, she created SAGA III, a reimagining of a 1961 MIT computer program that generated scripts for TV westerns, which were then filmed by CBS.

This year, she’s submitted two entries so far.

Her first was Trapped in the Q, an infinitely long story styled after the scene in every James Bond movie where Q shows off a series of new inventions and weapons, complete with bad procedural wordplay. (Eventually, Bond dies of thirst while an oblivious Q keeps introducing new gadgets.)

Very clever, but Liza’s second entry absolutely blew me away.

Blackout generates pages of text from a book or newspaper in the style of Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout Poems.

Using Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as its source, the Blackout code generated The Days Left Foreboding and Water, a 45 page book of blackout poetry. The results are pretty amazing.

You can download the full PDF here (145 MB). Or, for the committed, the full NaNoGenMo entry—a 9.3GB PDF that’s nearly 10,000 pages long. As Liza says, “You almost certainly do not want to download it.”

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One side note: Austin Kleon first started making newspaper blackout poems in 2005, originally inspired by redacted FBI files, but once he started putting them online, he started getting emails and comments arguing that his work was completely unoriginal.

In his TEDx talk from 2012, Austin traced the 250-year-old history of people finding poetry in newspapers. In the 1760s, Caleb Whitefoord started reading across newspaper columns instead of downwards, joining fragment sentences from two different stories into something new. He published the results:

The comet is now on it’s return to the sun—pursuant to a decree of the high court of chancery.

At the meeting at Newcastle, Sir B. F. D. was in the chair—and appeared like a dull, faint nebulous star.

Yesterday there were violent disputes in the common-council—For some time past the volcano has been extremely turbulent.

Which, bringing it full circle, reminds me of Darius Kazemi’s @TwoHeadlines Twitter bot, but made with 1760s newspapers instead of Google News.

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There’s still a week left in November. It may not be enough time to write a novel, but plenty of time to generate one. Good luck!

A few weeks ago, I was rummaging through the Internet Archive’s computer magazine collection and stumbled on these cover illustrations from the Midnite Software Gazette, a Commodore user newsletter that ran from 1980 to 1987.

Now, I think about them every time I’m up too late, like tonight, working on my computer well into the night.

We’re almost done releasing the talk videos from the first day of XOXO 2016—including Mystery Show’s Starlee Kine, rapper/producer Sammus, Yelp whistleblower Talia Jane, and the brilliant Neil Cicierega. They’re all great. You should watch them.

Today’s talk is from John Roderick, the frontman and songwriter for The Long Winters and the bearded half of the Roderick on the Line podcast with Merlin Mann.

Roderick talks about a trap I see creative people fall into often, which he calls “the myth of no effort”—the damaging lie that creative work should feel easy if you were any good, while simultaneously feeling that anything that feels easy and natural to you is, by nature, worthless.

When making anything feels challenging, you feel inadequate. But when it feels easy, you feel like a fraud and the work is illegitimate.

This talk was a little polarizing. While I heard many attendees say this was one of their favorite talks, I saw some people who really didn’t like it. As far as I can tell, they thought Roderick was saying that only hard things are worth doing.

But I think it’s pretty clear he’s trying to debunk that idea. Some things will feel easy for you and some will take incredible effort, but you shouldn’t let that reflect on you or the quality, value, or significance of what you’ve made.

Making Roderick on the Line is, as he said, the thing he’s most proud of that he’s ever done. But it felt illegitimate because it was so easy to do. Writing music is incredibly hard for him, but it’s also meaningful and important to him, and something he’s returning to—fighting the feeling that just because it takes effort doesn’t mean you’re not meant to do it.

This year’s Interactive Fiction Competition is over, and for the first time in its 22-year history, the winner can be played without a keyboard.

IFComp is run by and for the interactive fiction community, a group of hobbyist writers and programmers making experimental art with prose and code. It’s free to enter, and anyone can judge it.

It’s an oasis of joy and experimentation and creativity right now, for me and others.

For most of its history, IFComp was dominated by parser-based interactive fiction: games navigated with keyboard commands like “NORTH,” “READ BOOK,” “TAKE BUCKET,” “UNLOCK DOOR WITH BRASS KEY” and so on.

But the last few years have seen a dramatic shift towards other experimental forms that don’t require a keyboard: choice-based and hypertext games, played with a mouse, mostly by clicking on links in a browser.

Tools like Twine, Texture, and Inklewriter made it possible for many, many more people to make interactive fiction without learning to code. These stories were also more accessible for players, played entirely with a mouse and without learning the conventions and syntax of parser-based games.

This year, more than two-thirds of the 58 entries are non-parser games played without a keyboard, most made with Twine. (This led to some predictable hand-wringing from some corners of the interactive fiction community, but it seems to have been embraced by most.)

On Thursday, the IFComp 2016 winners were announced.

For the first time ever, the winner isn’t a parser-based game.

Detectiveland is a tongue-in-cheek noir game that retains many of the features of traditional parser-based gameplay—inventory, interactive objects and NPCs, puzzles, and scoring—all playable in the browser entirely with a mouse. Robin Johnson built his own homebrew Javascript engine for it, nicknamed Versificator 2, which he plans to release publicly.

The third-place winner, Cactus Blue Motel, is a Twine game by Astrid Dalmady, telling the story of three friends on a road trip through the American Southwest, stopping off at a roadside motel with a unique past.

A special shout-out to Amelia Pinnolla’s widely-misunderstood TAKE. (Read Emily Short’s post for more context.)

I’ve loved interactive fiction for years—I even made a community for people to write their own. To me, it represents a beautiful fusion of art and technology, and it’s achievable by a single person. Seeing people push the genre forward with new tools and platforms is a bright spot in an otherwise-dreary year.

Go play.