What Do I Do For Fun?

Whatever keeps me going. I have many, many hobbies and interests. I am rarely idle.

Several years ago I did about a dozen photo stories using the 12-inch GI Joes I collect. I have over two hundred of the figures and some of them have featured in various photo stories from short one-pagers to a long 8-chapter Doctor Who homage that took 2.5 years to complete.

Mainly I collect toys. I have thousands of them. I could start a toy museum.

I have always loved Interactive Fiction and have always wanted to write more than that one BASIC program I did in 1985. I discovered INFORM 6.0 while browsing the web doing some nostalgic searching on INFOCOM games.

For years I played them on my old Visor Edge. When I recently got a Palm TX I found CellarDoor by Jeremy Bernstein, which is an excellent Z-Machine interpreter for Palm systems, and I am currently playing through some older INFOCOM games using that. Most recently, I got an iPod Touch, and I can play on that using Frotz, written for the iPhone.

In 1997 or so I met Steve Meretzky at what was then CGDC in Santa Clara, CA. He was giving a lecture on humor in computer games, and it happened to be his birthday. No one but I had a camera, and when he was presented with a cake, I took the pictures. I sent him the photos when we returned home later that week.

I've met Steve several times since then, as he runs Post Mortem, the Boston-area game developers' meeting. One night, Steve was kind enough to autograph several of my old INFOCOM games that he wrote, and he even autographed my copies of the Planetfall and Stationfall novels, though he didn't write them.

Some time before that I attended a Douglas Adams lecture at M.I.T. and was lucky enough to get Adams to sign my copy of Bureaucracy for me. Adams was signing one item per person and I brought both Bureaucracy and Hitchhiker's Guide, and when confronted with that dilemma, Adams suggested, and I agreed, to take the road less traveled, and have Bureaucracy signed. Sure. I'd get him to sign the other one next time I saw him speak.

He died not long after, and I've never been the same since. What a sad loss to the world.

I was there when Steve Meretzky did a talk for the Post Mortem on his experiences working with Adams on Hitchhiker.

I'm incredibly grateful to have met both men.

I also met Brian Moriarty when he came through Turbine on a tour once with our CEO.

I also draw cartoons for fun. For a while I was producing a daily strip for practice, all of which are visible on my web site, which also highlights some of my other activities.

I also write toy reviews in a column called Cool Stuff on the Sci Fi Channel's web site.

I'm a huge science fiction fan, and love Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, The Iron Giant, the works of Pixar, and just about anything else in the genre that's quality.

I'm also a fan of Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Robert B. Parker.

Yeah, I like to stay busy.

Piracy ©1985,2008 Sean Huxter