Ruse You Can Bruise for 2004 February

Hamlet Interactive Fiction.

A good long while ago, I talked to Sumana and Leonard phonewise on the same night. We all three discussed Qwantz, which, I think, is rapidly becoming the darling of the whole entire Interweb. Sumana pointed out how their creator hides further punchlines in both a title tag for the comic image itself and in the subject line (sometimes even the body!) supplied by the "comments" email link. Leonard and I talked about the idea of hidden content in general, and other ways to put Easter eggs into web pages.

The title tag (formerly the alt tag) shows up in several other webcomics--Achewood, for example, and until recently Scary Go Round. I know there are more out there, I just can't remember which ones. Homestar Runner (warning! Flash!) includes at least one hidden hot spot in each of their weekly updates, as did the now-defunct animated comic Boomslang. The latter originally inspired me to start adding the occasional hidden rollovers to my own comic.

Lore Sjöberg, formerly of the Brunching Shuttlecocks and now of many distributed sites, announced once that he was going to use stylesheets to completely hide some of his href tags as a way of making his blog more interactive. I'm not sure if he ever did it, as I've never found any, but then I haven't really searched that hard. Similar to this is the "include a clever or didactic title for every hyperlink" meme, which I, for one, picked up from Kevan of kevan.org. It's both highly contagious and strongly persistent, and it's been interesting to watch its spread.

The logical extension (or perhaps origin) of all this hidden stuff is code comments, especially in HTML. One of the better examples of this is last year's great Crummy entry on "concave" in Chinese, which prompted my unnecessarily clever complementary entry; I'm pretty sure that that, in turn, is what got me on the RYCB author list (as the only alternative was allowing me free to roam the streets).

The reason I like searching for all this stuff is the same brief, pointless sense of achievement that's kept people playing computer RPGs and watching Scooby-Doo for so long. The reason I like creating it is uncomfortably close to the clue-sending instinct that drives the more interesting serial killers. All together, though, it does actually provide an interesting goal: in the same way that hyperlinks allow for richer expanded context, hidden material increases the density of content in the same amount of real estate.

What other methods of hiding stuff are out there?

Given the likely dissolution of the Fellowship of the Guest Blog, and in the interest of moving my albatross of a huge post off the front page, I present to you Stephen Heintz's Acid Zen Wonder Paint. If you like Pokey the Penguin, but only because you hate anti-aliasing, this is the comic for you!

It's also very funny, and is one of a very few webcomics I can claim to have inspired. That's me on the right in the very first one.

At the moment, Leonard is at Brendan's place. In the growing guest blog tradition, before you go I'll urge you to read stuff. For now: Spam As Folk Art.

AI 20 Questions. It asked, "Can it be dried?" I said no. But I guess you can dry kittens... I imagine they'd make a tasty jerky if seasoned properly.

I seriously had to reread this article and the headline twice before I figured it out.