Eric: 00:00 Welcome authors, implementors, builders, players one and all to the Titans of Text podcast. We are your hosts Eric Oestrich. Danny: 00:18 And Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld. Eric: 00:18 And we have with us today, Jason McIntosh, the president of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation and Jacqueline Ashwell, the chair of the IFTFs annual competition. Ifcomp. Welcome to you both. Jason: 00:32 Thanks. Jacq: 00:33 Thanks a lot. Eric: 00:34 So we usually start off by asking guests to sell whatever they're in charge of, normally a mud, but sometimes it's whatever project they might be working on. So this might be a bit of a weight to carry, but I'd like you to sell the audience on interactive fiction itself. Why should anyone in these modern times be paying mind to IF, whether it has graphics or not? Jacq: 00:53 Yeah, no, I think the thing that I love most about interactive fiction is that anything you can imagine and describe, you can create and you can invite other people to come explore those imaginings you've had. So, you know, I've been a fan of interactive fiction and since I was about eight years old and some of my really, it sounds odd, but real formative memories are of exploring interactive fiction worlds. It's how I learned to type. It's how I picked up a ton of weird vocabulary when I was a kid. And you know, now these days I have the joy of also being on the author side of it and having the challenge of trying to anticipate everything a player might want to do in the worlds that I create and try to code in a response for everything. And it's just fun on all sides. And now I've been doing competitions, organizing them for a number of years and I love doing that because it encourages other people to create. Jason: 01:56 I've been enjoying text-based games since I myself was a kid in the 1980s. And my appreciation for them has been growing and changing as the medium itself has been. And I think I'm playing off on one of the things that Jacqueline was just saying is the accessibility of interactive fiction is very important to me. Not just in playing it, but also in creating it such that with a very well done IF game. If you can read and if you can do basic interactions with a computer or a computing device, then you can appreciate one of these games. And similarly, and this becomes more true with the passage of time and with the creation of a new and larger variety of creation tools. Anybody who can write and anybody willing to learn, you know, there's always going to be a little bit of coding involved. Jason: 02:45 But to make a very basic work of interactive fiction, you have to be able to write and you have to have the will to try to make an interactive experience of some kind and the tools will meet you there and you'll be able to make something and you can take it from there and be able to share that with people. That's certainly also true with other kinds of video game systems. Not necessarily text-based, but that's true with text systems in a way that I think your your audience of MUD fans will be able to appreciate. It's rather similar to the experience of logging into a mud and exploring what people have built there. And then learning, Oh, I can just type dig and make rooms of my own and now I can make objects and link them together. It can be similar to that. Jacq: 03:32 Yeah. And I think what's been even more kind of fun lately is that there've been a lot of group projects that have, have happened. Crange Manor happened last year. It linked together, 80 authors, some of them I don't think had really written any interactive fiction before. But the organizers of that Jenny and Ryan encouraged people who had no background in coding to just, if you had an idea, you could write it down. They code it for you. They, you know, so it's just this, it's an accessible medium and I think it's becoming more and more of an inclusive community as well. Jason: 04:11 Yeah, community's a big part of it. And just to expand on what Jacqueline was just saying, she was talking about how did you pronounce it just now? Crange Manor. Some people say Crag-nee. This is a project led by Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna last year and it is spelled C R A G N E Manor as in a Manor house. And it was a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Michael Gentry's Anchorhead, which was an amazing Lovecraft-ian text adventure game, which has a special edition on sale, on steam and, but there was a fan project that these two people put together, which brought together dozens and dozens of people to create this amazing intentionally ramshackle game where you explore this space. And with each room was made by a different person or team of people and they all connect together through some miracle. That's an excellent example of a recent amazing community effort that is available only through the medium of text games. And you can trace the lineage of this wonderful weird thing all the way back to the first text games of the 1970s and eighties which again is something of interest to the MUD crowd, I think. Danny: 05:33 So you basically, you founded the IFTF, is that correct? Jason: 05:37 I am one of its five co-founders. Yes. Danny: 05:42 So how did the impetus to make the IFTF come to be? What was the the reason for being? Jason: 05:50 The casus belli? Danny: 05:51 Yes. Jason: 05:51 I can give you the most literal answer because it's the most fun story. So in 2013 Stephen Granade had been running the annual interactive fiction competition for 13 years. I think he was its third organizer. It had started in 1995. And knowing that, so I had been a previous entered in it myself. And I had, you know, like a lot of people who were active in that community had made various mutterings about some changes I'd like to see. And he was thinking of passing it along to somebody else. So he approached me and said, do you know anybody who would be able, who'd be interested in taking over IF comp? Jason: 06:32 And I said, yes, I will. Thank you Stephen. So I spent much of 2014 looking to sort of revitalize and re-examine IF comp and take all the assumptions that it took from the 90s about like what an IF game is. For example, at the time, interactive fiction was specifically a parser based game in the style of like an old Infocom game. But that had expanded and changed quite a bit in the years since then particularly in latter years with the development of Twine and the ease and accessibility of creating hypertext based fiction. So while I was in the process of building a team to help with my own organization of IFComp Stephen who is, you know, instrumental in helping with this transition process suggested that I speak to another, a friend of ours in the community Flourish Klink who is very active in the fanfiction community and has a lot of knowledge about copyright law as it applies to fanfiction because one of the thorns in the side of IFComp for a long time was its relationship with copyrighted works and how welcoming it should be to fanfiction. Jason: 07:47 So I talked to Flourish and said, I know a lawyer who is an expert in this, you should talk to her. So I talked to this lawyer and the lawyer said, tell me about this, tell me about this this competition. And I did. And she said, okay, hang on. Oh, this is a loose organization that's been running. This is an arts event that's been running annually for 20 years and has no legal organization at all and it has no way to collect funds from the community to do I understand that, right? And I was like, yes. And she said, why you really need to, or you really need to make a nonprofit around this. And I said, okay, we'll get back to you. That put a seed in my mind about, hmm, maybe this deserves a little more organization. And then later in the year, one of the longstanding traditions of IFComp is its prize pool, which continues to this day. Jason: 08:41 And this allows members of the community to put up prizes of various sorts that get awarded to authors at the end. And they can be, they have been things from like snack baskets to expertise. Like I copy edit some work of yours or I'll make it a short musical composition based on your game and sometimes people will donate money. And that year in particular, a lot of people who donated, wanted to donate like very large amounts of money to the, to the extent that I was a little concerned that this would be not really in the spirit of the prize pool, which is just sort of like nice little tokens. And someone else on the IFComp committee at that time in 2014 said, you know, it's almost as if people want to give money to interactive fiction itself, but there's just no way to do it. Jason: 09:26 And I said, okay, fine. I'll make a nonprofit. So that's what happened. That's, that's basically the spark that started it was acknowledging that this community which had been made of many disparate volunteer projects, IFComp being only one of them that had been operating in this sort of wonderful Sargasso sea across the internet, around the world. For the last 20 years, really, it felt like it was time for them to come together in some official legal way that would be able to use some sort of legal framework in order to make them more organized and to make it better funded and to make sure that it's preserved and kept into the future. This art form that we all cared very much about. So that was basically where IFTF got it start. And from there I convinced four friends from the Boston-based IMF community where I was active at the time. Jason: 10:21 And also Chris Klimas who is the inventor of Twine and who we knew from the community to become it's co-founders and it's first board. And that all happened starting in 2015 we launched in 2016 and we've been active since. Danny: 10:38 So is that is that how the IFTF became the stewards of twine? Essentially? I mean, he was, he was one of the founders, so I guess that makes legal sense. Jason: 10:49 Yeah, correct. Of course, you know Chris would be the best one to describe this, but if I can speak for him. Yeah. He was thinking about doing something like this anyway. And he was very open with his concern about he wanted Twine, which is a very successful free and open source project to not be tied to him personally. And he wanted it to basically outlive him, to put it one way. Jason: 11:13 And that meant making some sort of legal structure that was greater than his own person. So this was very much on his mind when we approached him and said, what would you think about joining this community or this nonprofit of which we would invite Twine to be a major program of. So that was just as far as we were all concerned. Very good timing. Yes. Danny: 11:33 How did you come to be a part of the IFTF Jacqueline? Jacq: 11:37 Well it's interesting to hear the story about how Stephen went to Jason and said, do you know anybody who might want to run this? And Jason was like, yes please. Cause there was a similar but different thing that happened for me. And that is, this'll be interesting to tell this story with Jason listening and then he can like give his side of it. Jacq: 11:55 I have been running a competition for about 10 years called the intro comp and it was similar but different, much smaller competition that encouraged predominantly new artists, new authors to just write the beginning of something and see if people liked it. So you didn't have to write a whole game, you could just write like the first scene or whatever, but it meant that I'd been running an interactive fiction competition of a different sort for a while and I think Jason was looking to to take on a different role in the interactive fiction competition. And probably it had, I'm guessing had a lot to do with running the IFTF. But yeah, he approached me and said some people have been discussing who might be a good steward, the next steward of the competition and that my name had come up and would I be interested in after I picked myself up off the floor and got over I guess a little bit of impostor syndrome. We started, I started thinking about it more and like Jason, I'd had a lot of ideas about things related to the community and I knew that this was a way that I could have an impact and help move things forward and help keep them thriving. So Jason what's your memory of that conversation? Jason: 13:12 As far as I'm concerned that that is accurate from my point of view. So yeah, Jacqueline has been the the organizer of the competition since 2018 I believe, and was sort of vice organizer in 2017 which was a transitional year. So I was the organizer from 2014 through 2017 and Jacq's been organizing it since last year. And I remain on the team as it's tech coordinator in so far as I'm the person who coded up the whole web application that is currently running and one of the conditions for Jacqueline taking on the organizer role is that she would not be stuck with having to run this website. So that continues to be my albatross to wear, but everything else is on her plate and she's been doing a fantastic job. Jacq: 14:01 It's actually not just my plate, I spin all the plates, but there's, that's kind of one of the joys of moving from the intro comp where it was all me and I didn't have a legal structure or basis or anything like that. And the prize money came out of my bank account too. Working with IFComp and you know, suddenly there's this amazing team of volunteers. Jason has a team that runs the web application, but I've also got a lot of other help in terms of people checking all of our entries to make sure none of them give your computer a virus or violate copyright law or any of our other rules and somebody else that helps with prize distribution and somebody else that helps with fundraising. And it's just a, it is definitely a group effort. Jason: 14:46 And intro comp is still an active competition? Speaker 3: 14:48 It is. It is, yeah. So Xalavier Nelson, I approached him when you approached me. Okay. I thought, well, I can't run to competition so I've got to give this one away. And he has been doing a great job and has taken that to new levels as I knew he would. So, yeah, very much still a thing. This kind of sparks the idea that I, and I don't know what the segue is here, but there's sort of a seasonality to interactive fiction these days where the dates kind of shift around a little bit for some of the competitions, but we just wrapped up the interactive fiction competition. And so there's the results are on our website. We finished up in mid November. You can watch the awards ceremony on our YouTube channel. You can like go play 80 something games that were in the competition and see how they all ranked out next will be the Xyzzys season. Speaker 3: 15:41 And that's sort of the grammys of interactive fiction where we look at all the games that came out in 2018 and there's two rounds of voting to first nominate games. And then people play those final nominees and decide which of the best games in various categories like, Oh, best setting best overall story, best protagonists, things like that. Then we've got the spring thing, which boy I should've thought about this before I went into explaining them all. The spring thing is sort of the cousin of the interactive fiction competition. It came about I believe because people wanted to be able to explore longer works of interactive fiction and just have some fewer constraints I guess. Fewer rules and more room to just stretch. And so spring thing, it comes out in the spring and then intro comp usually hits in the summer. So yeah, the seasons of interactive fiction, Jason: 16:36 I'm a big fan of spring thing. That started out by Adam Cadre I think in the, in the late nineties, as specifically just an antipode if you will, to IFComp and just being like, well, you don't have to wait a whole year. Now you just have to wait six months and you get another competition. And Aaron Reed has been running it more recently and he basically turned it into like an anti-competition and in the best sense of the word that he changed the focus of it less from ranking and competition and voting and giving things a numeric rank, which I have found still does. And more just an encouragement and just making it more of a festival and encouraging people to enter in works of any kind. And you know, there's like, it's sort of like a state fair and like a few works that get a lot of positive attention, get some ribbons, but it doesn't make everyone stand into a line. It doesn't, it doesn't put them in into a giant ranking. So it's a different way to encourage and celebrate a new work, which I think works really well. So the, the, the competition and the spring thing, which is not a competition in the same sense, compliment each other very well in the, in the in the annual cycle. Eric: 17:40 That's really cool to hear about all the different competitions going on. But yeah. Okay. So the next question. So what did you both of you think about the public release of the ZIL, the Zork Interpretation language earlier this year? Jason: 17:57 I always love to see that these technologies that have their roots, they have their roots right at the very beginning of making a computer do something fun and interactive and all of the games you play today, whether it's something on your PlayStation or on your phone or coming through a direct lineage of the, of the technology itself so that you still have people hacking on these, you know, these original creation tools and these original machine languages. I just love to see that all of that is there. Someone is still keeping those ovens warm and someone is still keeping them active concerns. But I have not paid close attention to that otherwise, other than just being a general fan of the fact that people are still doing that to me as well. Danny: 18:47 So you guys have a convention, Narrascope. IFTF runs that, correct? Jason: 18:53 Yeah, that is correct. The very first Narrascope happened last year in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the MIT campus. I'm going to have to look at our own blog. Danny: 19:06 The next one's in may. I know because it's in it's on somewhere close to me. It's in Illinois. Jason: 19:17 Yup. It's at yeah, the university in Urbana. Danny: 19:20 So I'm besides the fact that I'm absolutely jealous of the name, it's a beautiful name for a narrative game convention. How did last year Narrascope go and what does the IFTF do to foster community among IF fans and IF authors? Jason: 19:38 How did it go? It was a smashing success. It's the first time we had run a convention, so we didn't know what to expect. It was interesting in that initially we expected around 500 people to come based on our experiences attending similar events and independent game events in the Boston area. The attendance ended up being half of that. So we tempered our preparations appropriately. And then I don't suppose either of you attended that. Danny: 20:08 I did not. I was not aware of it and it would have been outside of my travel range. Eric: 20:12 I think it happened before I found out about it. Jason: 20:15 So therefore you will have to go by my word, but I will say that it was an amazing time and that's my summary of that. It was the sort of thing where we went into it and we're like, well, let's try this and if it works, if it seems to work pretty good, maybe we'll do it again next year. And by, I would say the halfway point, we were all 100% convinced that we would absolutely be doing this again the following year. It was a two day event. It was at MIT. Like I said I was able, I was lucky enough to be able to attend and go to many of the presentations, several of which are online and on YouTube. Jason: 21:03 Yeah. It was it was just fantastic and amazing. We had so many amazing speakers. It was great to see the community being able to come together and and share stories and ideas in a way that being in the same space can, can really occasionally can really help with. And yeah, I'm just really proud as the president of IFTF to see this program come together. And as a side note, something I really enjoy mentioning about IFTF is that I know that it is becoming more successful as a nonprofit because I, myself, it's president and cofounder had absolutely nothing to do with running Narrascope. Like I was, I was able to just like ride along and then show up and say hello to everybody at the beginning and then sit down again. But the Narrascope program is one of several programs. And IFTF, that is essentially an independent, like the board has veto power and ultimate oversight of all the different programs in the way that is typical to American nonprofits. But otherwise they have their own charter, they have their own budget and they do their own thing. And boy did, they do their own thing last year and I look forward very much to them and doing their own thing again next year. Danny: 22:15 So you mentioned the, the whole point of, of essentially their subsidiaries that have their own charter, they have their own budget. So if you're donating to IFTF itself, does that money get distributed among the chartered pieces of it or is that solely used for what you guys need? Jason: 22:33 That is a super good question. And again, I am not the best person to answer that, but I believe, you know what, I'm going to hit our own donate button right now and see what happens because I know that this is one of those things that our treasurer, fine tunes as time goes on. So I know that as far as I know, we do have a general fund and that is what you were describing in the latter case, which is a, that just goes into our, our fund for spending wherever that money is needed. When you do donate, you can earmark there is space for a note to say like, I would, I would like this to be applied to Narrascope specifically, or I would like this to be applied to Twine specifically. And if you do add that note, then we will earmark that money and say like, okay, this is for that. But otherwise, and this is the case for most donations, it goes into our general fund and we allocate that money as needed. Danny: 23:31 Sounds good to me. I, it's kinda like a, it reminds me of way humble bundle does thier thing where you choose, you know, the split between the people that wrote the games, the charity, that kind of stuff, that giving people that, that kind of that kind of control is, is I very important especially to building trust with people with their money. Jason: 23:49 Yeah. And this, this is one of those areas where, you know, if I sounded uncertain at the beginning, it, it does speak to the fact that we're still a baby nonprofit and in in things like making it easier to donate, making it more clear to which program you need to you, the donor, wish to apply money to. I mean these are all things that we are learning as we go as an organization. And I hope I'm improving as time goes on. Danny: 24:18 I've got one question here and this might be more for Jason than overall. Of course on the Titans we mostly cover muds and I imagine most of our audience is into muds. There's probably a little bit of people we've picked up here and there and I have been stalking you a bit on Twitter, Jason and at some point you were tweeting about IFMud and you know, I, I'd be hard pressed to call most of what we had as muds in the 90s as interactive fiction. It was definitely interactive. There wasn't a whole lot of fiction in the hack and slash games that gave birth to, of course, you know, the EverQuest and the World of Warcrafts and the Runescapes. But a good number of muds have a lot of story writing and a lot of role playing these days. So my question to you, Jason, is where are the muds in the IFTF? Where's our representation? Huh? Jason: 25:07 Here's my answer to that. I would invite you all the mud fans to to show up and self represent. At our forums which is an IFTF program that is a discourse based public forum for discussing all things IF. If a contingent of mud fans shows up and wishes to to work with the interactive fiction community, we would very much welcome that. And I would also point out the existence of IFMud. Jacq: 25:48 Yeah, that's where I was going to go. We've got, ifIFMud goes back, God I don't know, to at least 1995, right? I mean that's kind of, I'd have to go back and look, but I've been on it since 2002 and have made some of my dearest lifelong friends up to and including my husband off of the interactive fiction mud. It's a different type of mud. It's we do have some mudders who log in cause they just randomly come across it and then they're like, well, where's the roguelike battling stuff? And we're like, Oh, we're more of a narrative type of mud. But there are there are entire sections that people have, have written with quests and things like that. Although mostly it's just a place where we hang out and talk about interactive fiction and just the world in general. But if my, it doesn't have a legal structure and background similar the conversation that we were having having earlier. But it is supported by the interactive fiction community. There's one person who like runs the server and another person who does a lot of the hosting. And I, you know, we use Patreon to make sure that those folks are getting what they need to be able to keep the server and all of that going. So I think it's mostly that it's been running nicely on its own kind of on autopilot for a long time. And so IFTF there's just never been a conversation about IFTF helping to support it cause it's doing okay. But if that time ever came, I'm sure that I can't speak for the board or the president, but I'm sure if that was ever needed, it'd be a, a thing that would be explored. Eric: 27:28 So I, I myself haven't played too much interactive fiction. Like what's a good way to find the first game that I should try out? Or is there any like specific or recommendations that I should like go for? Jason: 27:40 I know that that one answer that is near and dear to both my heart and Jacqueline's is you can always go to the interactive fiction competition website at IFComp.org and browse the list of recent competition entries and recent competition winners as well. Each results page, which there's a results page that goes all the way back to the beginning of the comp in 1995 and each one has a link to that games entry on the IFDB, which is the interactive fiction database website run by. MJR Mike Roberts. And so yeah, that's, that'll list some games that are sort of chosen by the community as some of the best works of IF available going back to my own roots in the Boston based IMF scene. Jason: 28:33 There is a so the Boston based IF community is called the People's Republic of interactive Fiction. Their website is pr-if.org. And if you go to their website, there's a big red play button which links to some starter games that the community chose as good introductions to IF that you can play right in your web browser. I would note that this is a list that was constructed at the start of the current decade, so it's all parser based IF it's sort of before Twine based games showed up, which is a whole different galaxy of wonderful interactive fiction games. But that gives you a good survey of parser based IF that dates from the late seventies to you know, circa 2010 if you, if you're looking for a historical to semi-recent work. Finally, I would point to other podcasts that cover interactive fiction and one that comes to mind is The Short Game, which is about short video games. So it's not just about IF but they do cover IFComp every year and they have a few episodes about that. And that's one of their annual events that I, myself enjoy listening to. They will also cover interesting IF games from time to time there. That's just three sources. There's many more besides that, but I guess it would come down to find some games that the community has already picked out as gems and start there. Jacq: 30:03 And you know, another really great way for people who have never played interactive fiction before to just kind of come to dip a toe in the water, especially if they're into muds is I host a weekly gaming group. It's on Sunday mornings. Well it's Sunday morning in Hawaii where I'm at, I believe we're at 2:00 PM Eastern and basically it's a group of people that get together and play a work of interactive fiction every Sunday. So if you don't know how to play, it's cool cause there's other people there who can show you how I love it because it's forced me to play games that otherwise I might not pick up. And thus like, like I play a lot more scifi and I've explored a lot of good games because I play with this group. So yeah, come join us. Danny: 30:48 So you guys have a Narrascope of course, a convention coming up in may, and you have many competitions. Is there anything else on the horizon for the foundation? Jason: 30:59 Good question. So one of the things that we're working on right now at, like I said in, in our role as a baby org that's trying to figure out how a real grownup nonprofit works is I'm actually having an annual calendar and sticking to that. So we're, we're in the process of building that right now and like figuring out which things happen cyclical for us. So this, this is a question that we're asking ourselves right now. So it's, it's, it's funny you'd ask that. Obviously the things that come to mind as far as what's on the calendar next are the very ones that you just mentioned. Jason: 31:37 There's the, the competition and competition, like event schedules that Jacqueline mentioned. So as she mentioned, yeah, I have comp 2019 just wrapped for the year, but that means that the Xyzzy awards will be coming around and then spring thing. And then intro comp I should note that these are not, IFTF programs, these are all you know, independent community things, but they are certainly IFTF adjacent insofar is IFTF is a member of the IF community as far as things that are IFTF itself. I'm going to jog my own memory by going to our website, which I suppose I can plug at iftechfoundation.org and I'm going to click on current and past programs. And look at, let's see. Competition. Yes. That's it. That's certainly is annual. That is, yeah, that was more of a one time thing that that was actually our first and so far only ad hoc committee rather than a standing one. Jacq: 32:35 Maybe talk about the accessibility project. Jason: 32:35 But that's what she was referring to that one of our launch programs, which was an investigation into the accessibility with the capital A of interactive fiction for players with disabilities. That was a project that a lot of people worked on and I had the privilege of being its chair for its final year and the author of its report. And you can find that link from our programs page and yeah, that, that was basically a report to the community of recommendations to make text-based games more accessible. And I would certainly be thrilled to hear what the MUD community in fact thinks about this because when we, when I talk about IF, I'm thinking of like, well, twine and like our focus is on this, just to keep it in scope, was games made with twine and games made with inform, which is one of the more popular parser based tools. If the, the mud playing and the mud construction community wanted to weigh in on this report, I would frankly be thrilled to hear that. Danny: 33:42 We, we definitely have a number of muds and people that run muds that are very interested in especially visually impaired accessibility. We did an episode of, I think it was early on what was it, our sixth or seventh episode about accessibility with a mud staffer and one of the players that is visually impaired. There was a Genesis mod or, or is it Materia Magica that attends a visually impaired conference on that, the conferences and visually impaired, but it's a conference for visually impaired people and accessibility and, you know, tech and other things that they use to improve their lives and, and allow them to, to live in modern society. But it is a big concern. I mean, when we interviewed Richard Bartle and asked him, how do we get more people to muds, one of his off cuff answers was, we'll go find some blind people because, you know, a MUD is for blind people. His irascibility there of a, of the way he talks. But yes, it's, it's definitely a big thing for us. And specifically us at the Titans. We're planning on doing a round table at some point with, with more than two people. Like four or five other other guests where we specifically discuss ways to make muds more accessible to the visually impaired community. Jason: 35:08 In that case, I just reminded myself of my own URL. So our report accessibility.iftechfoundation.org, and that is the entire results of our findings, including the games that were created for testing the survey results from the the, I think the three dozen people players with disabilities who played these games and reported on their experiences and the names of the community members including players with disabilities who were on the committee that developed this report themselves. So yeah, I would encourage listeners of this podcast interested in this topic to look that up and I feel free to give us feedback or follow up because this is, this is a report, but it's a report that in order to be meaningful depends on followup work and I invite further conversation on this. Eric: 36:05 All right. Thank you Jason and Jacqueline for being on Titans of Text. Jason: 36:09 Well, thank you very much for inviting us. Jacq: 36:12 Yeah, thanks. It's been a lot of fun.