Not that this was anything approaching an all-work-and-no-play type of arrangement. Socialization is important for community-building, and all, and, in certain scenes of the hypertext, we’d established a mystique that we felt a certain team-oriented necessity to fulfill in person for the only group of people we’d likely ever encounter who were actually fans of hypertext (our actual lives are, in fact, normally quite tame). So Dirk cashed in the remainder of his student loan at a liquor store in Kentucky before the trip, and we partied like rock stars.

We spent a lot of time there in the Brown Graduate Bar. They’ve got their own bar on campus that’s better than the off-campus bars, man, they’ve got pool tables and great beers on tap. It was an ideal atmosphere for the Unknown.

And then there were the bottles of expensive liquor back in the suite. Our mission was to ply publishers’ representatives with liquor to make them like us so they would publish The Unknown, the anthology, or the hypertext, or some variation thereof. Well, we haven’t seen the contract yet, but we did get some folks drunk. We tried to keep quiet but a couple folks woke up anyway. Weeks afterwards, we would agonize that we woke up theorist Jay Bolter’s wife. We’re not really sure, anyway, sorry about that, if that was you, Mr. and Mrs. Bolter, but we were trying to talk about the future, and, you know, the future can’t always wait until the morning.