Robin Sloan

Fin­ished my cup of cof­fee, blew away Eurus.…ok I can start my day now.

Phew! Reread that for the sec­ond time… this time I had my sound all the way up so I could hear all the sounds! AWESOME. Best for­mat ever. Love the intrigue, love the pic­tures, love it all.

o my my! seriously! 

but why didn’t the audio work for me? *frown*

tanushri: Good ques­tion! Which browser are you using?

Fan­tas­tic! Re-​​tweeted the link. Keep ‘em coming.

safari. and tried fire­fox too.
huh.

The audio files don’t work for me either. The link to them is a self-​​referring link to the page instead of an audio link. Dunno.

Here’s one thing; I need the page needs to load all the way (gigan­tic images included) before the Flash clicks in. So keep an eye on that. Also, I’ll mon­key w/​ it & see if I can fix that.

I can see why it was impos­si­ble to move on to oth­ers things before you got this one down. For­mat = Wow, Story = Delight­fully Wow, Imagery = I am on Olympus.

Soooo glad I just got a lap­top speaker bar!

Nice revi­sions. Enjoyed the expanded back­ground to the pro­fes­sor. Loved the lit­tle “PS” at the end about buy­ing the greek myths book. Maybe I’m just spoiled from the Scheme expe­ri­ence, but any chance you could post some of the com­ments you received from the Fri­day Night Club? :)

Shaun: Absolutely! Good idea. I’ll do a post later this week.

“When the flood came, they were ready. They had an ark. I mean, of course they had an ark. They were rich.”

hahaha–nice one.

Great story. But a cou­ple of thoughts on the pre­sen­ta­tion…
I loved the scroll, except for the times (espe­cially early in the story) when I wanted to eas­ily go back and scan for a name that had come and gone too quickly for me to remem­ber exactly who he was. It might be nice in a story pre­sented in this way to find a way to have a per­sis­tent side­bar that scrolls with you, or a way to high­light words and see a basic definition/​reminder pop up. 

When I was lost in the story, the scroll was won­der­ful (and the images lovely). But because the words are sparse and the Greek names many (and because not all of us were clas­sics majors or any­thing close to it), it would be nice to have a sec­ondary ref­er­ence sys­tem that doesn’t require seri­ous up-​​scrolling.

Nina: That is SUCH a super awe­some idea. A story with a float­ing side­bar glos­sary. I’m going to have to try that.

Nice work Robin! I enjoyed read­ing this over break­fast. Love the lay­out. And I was also a myth buff when I was a kid; but my vol­ume was Tales of Greek Heroes, by Roger Lance­lyn Green.

Love it. The audio def­i­nitely gave it the right mood. I actu­ally went all the way through the source code look­ing for more good­ies etc. Why does the find more sto­ries link just link back to the story? 

Any­way, great work.

Loved it still. Looks like you changed the cover page from the ini­tial one I saw. Don’t know, I just remem­ber it look­ing dif­fer­ent. Love how the scis­sors get pro­gres­sively closer together, good effect. As far as adding a scroll bar, i think it would muddy up the clean look of it, and lose some of the child­like sim­plic­ity. Thanks for the story! It was great.

Wow! Sucked me in a sec­ond time. Couldn’t stop scrolling down as the pace and ten­sion increased. 

Although it feels like there are more words than the Fri­day Night Club ver­sion (I wish there had been a real time chat room /​ book club we could hang out in) it doesn’t slow the pace in any way — makes it feel richer and deeper … a great balance

I agree with Michele — I loved the visual impact of the scis­sors as the story pro­gressed … it’s like the music build­ing to a cre­sendo as the cli­max is revealed

Kept see­ing the story as a col­lage style 2D stop-​​motion ani­ma­tion … still got Annabel Remix ideas bub­bling in my brain I guess :)

I really enjoyed this. I spent a lit­tle too much time on Wikipedia after­words though.

Hav­ing a kin­dle has dras­ti­cally increased my inter­est in short sto­ries for what­ever rea­son and if the sounds and pics were trig­gered by the next page but­ton on the kin­dle that would be pretty awesome. 

The iphone seems too small for this experience.

This story would be absolutely per­fect for the iPad, if only said iPad sup­ported Flash.

Hey Robin,

What­ever hap­pened to post­ing the com­ments? I know that whole get­ting a new job can get in the way. :) We should do the Fri­day night club again some­time (when you can catch a breath). 

OBM’s idea of some sort of chat room for that would be awe­some with one caveat, you had to have read the story already and filled in your com­ments. I think you’d need to make this caveat or else you risk los­ing some of that ini­tial “AHA” that you get read­ing a story (you men­tioned some­thing about this in the Anabelle Scheme edit­ing process). Maybe do pre and post chat room feedback?

Sparse, bril­liant, engag­ing writ­ing. I like the idea of a pop-​​up or side­bar for the var­i­ous names to remind the reader who/​what is being ref­er­enced. This story reminded me some­what of Small Gods by Terry Pratch­ett — in con­cept obvi­ously. I am seri­ously going to hunt down a pro­jec­tor to deliver this from my lap­top onto a sheet or screen while sit­ting beside a fire pit in my back­yard. It used to be a fam­ily tra­di­tion that we’d tell scary sto­ries at night dur­ing the sum­mer. Your work is a prayer answered and to my mind a clear path to reviv­ing a won­der­ful tra­di­tion — only the story teller herein is you. Yes I’ll be read­ing it aloud to my nieces, nephew and son but until text-​​to-​​speech can do it jus­tice my voice will have to suffice.