Tootfinder

Day 26: Emily Short
If you know who Short is, you know exactly why she's on this list. If you don't, you're probably in the majority. She's an absolutely legendary author within the interactive fiction (IF) community, which gets somewhat pigeonholed by stuff like Zork when there's actually a huge range of stuff in the medium some of which isn't even puzzle-focused, and Short has been writing & coding on the bleeding edge of things for decades.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Short's work in graduate school, where we played "Galatea" as part of an interactive fiction class. Short uses a lot of clever parser tricks to make your conversation with a statue feel very fluid and conversational, giving to contemporary audiences a great example of how vibrant interaction with a well-designed agent can be in contrast to an LLM, if you're willing to put in some work on bespoke parsing & responses (although the user does need to know basic IF conventions). While I didn't explore the full range of Galatea's many possible outcomes, it left a strong impression on me as a vision for what IF could be besides dorky puzzles, and I think that "visionary" is a great term to describe Short.
If you'd like you get a feel for her (very early) work, you can play Galatea here: #30AuthorsNoMen

Back to the Future Museum -- Speculative Design for Virtual Citizen-Curated Museums
Richard Rhodes, Sandra Woolley
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06472 https://

Back to the Future Museum -- Speculative Design for Virtual Citizen-Curated Museums
This forward-looking paper uses speculative design fiction to explore future museum scenarios where citizen curators design and share immersive virtual reality museums populated with tangible heritage artefacts, intangible virtual elements and interactive experiences. The work also explores takeaway 'asset packs' containing 3D artefact models, curation assets, and interactive experiences, and we envisage a visit to the future museum, where the physical and virtual experiences interplay. Finally…

Day 10: Stacey Mason
Another academic, but this time one of my compatriots; we overlapped at UC Santa Cruz as advisees of Michael Mates, and even collaborated on a Twitch stream called ScholarsPlay for a bit, although we never coauthored any papers. We did chat about our research, and I had many good discussions with her about agency in interactive fiction, a topic we both published on. Her paper "On Games and Links: Extending the Vocabulary of Agency and Immersion in Interactive Narratives" (#20AuthorsNoMen