Events
IF Comp is nearly finished, so keep an eye out for results!
ICIDS, the academic digital storytelling conference, is in progress as we speak, in Funchal, Portugal.
New Releases
Robin Johnson’s classic Detectiveland is now available on Android.
Crowdfunding
Kate Compton presents this set of ideation cards to help with the design of generative art. Some really cool ideas in here.
Articles and Reviews
I wrote about some of the IF Comp games for RockPaperShotgun.
Bobby Lockhart proposes five unusual and novel dialogue mechanics. Some of these look like they’d require a lot of additional content in order to function in an interesting way — NPCs who have to be able to answer what you didn’t pick as well as what you did might require a bunch of extra content, possibly. And methods that involve putting together strings of words from a possible selection could be needlessly frustrating or slow for any extended conversation, so it would have to be something where there was expressive power in a fairly short space.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
Thanks for the links!
The Bobby Lockhart one was especially interesting. The trees-of-trees approach seems like what Ultimate Flirt-Off did; I guess the reason this was practical is that the higher-level trees are very short, with the overall dialogue being about throwing up little disconnected mini-conversations rather than making discreet progress. (And the awkwardness of the interface is suited to the situation.) Free text parsing of an indirect language is almost what 10pm from IntroComp does, except that the parsing didn’t seem to be free text.
OTOH the magnetic poetry option seems like it would be really bad to implement unless it was combined with Mad Libs so you could actually work out the parsing. “Luckily, English grammar is pretty restrictive (not as true of other languages like Russian), so the number of possibilities which actually make sense will be relatively small” seems, um, optimistic.