The evening was great on the whole. 10 different projects were showcased for the gathered crowd of writers and technologists. We learned a lot about the field, from the beginnings of hypertext, represented by the leonine Michael Joyce, author of Afternoon, to cutting-edge projects like Stuart Moulthrop’s 3-D landscape-cum-random text generator narrative thingie, Reagan Library.

This here’s Bill Bly. He’s one our favorite hypertext people. He’s not only smart, he’s also mellow to the point of zen, plays a mean guitar, and has a certain joyful glow about him that calms everyone in whatever room he’s in. He was showing off his hypertext We Descend, which he wrote several years back and is now updating with new tools.

Scott hung out with Bill at the Cybermountain conference a couple months after Brown, and while sipping a beer on the porch in the twilight against the background of the front range, Bill said that, to him, five things are important in life:

Sex

Falling in Love, and caring for your children (if that’s your thing)

Taking care of your elders and anyone else who needs help

Teaching

Making beautiful things

This fellah here goes by the name of Stuart Moulthrop. He’s real smart and influential both on the theoretical and on the writing side of hypertext—or cybertext, he’s calling it now. Moulthrop showed off this kind of crazy VRML piece called Reagan Library, the latest in his decade-long series of experiments in digital literature. Stuart also recently wrote a very lucid and engaging online keynote address for the Cybermountain conference, in which he takes what, from an academic perspective, is a fairly courageous stance, telling the writers of the future to learn from comic books and video games as they create in this new medium.

The lady looking up at what appears to be an empty screen (interesting thing about hypertexts, they don’t want to be photographed) is Deena Larsen, a very energetic and innovative hypertext writer. She was showing a hypertext short story she got published in the Iowa Review called "Ferris Wheels."