Looking back at my own writing (and doing additional lipography)
I was dumb to call that last part "Re: writing with constraints" originally, not "Pri: writing with constraints" (la i-a lingvo's word for "about").
About plays and such: I saw a film in which a woman wants to find who owns a particular IP no., so that woman runs "whois" and stuff. But this thing our protagonist is trying to track down is "172.16.a.b", it's from RFC 1918, nobody could actually do things, obviously not "hacking/cracking", with such an origin! It's just as silly as "555-" in films: "Call him up at 555-2923!" and so on. It adds a touch of falsity, in that an actual IP wizard would know, or ought to know, offhand that "172.16..." is imaginary. This woman saw it in that film and (as far as I know) didn't think anything was odd about it, didn't say "Imaginary blocks from RFC 1918! I am plainly not working on this in our world, I am in a film, no doubt". No, a film account of an IP wizard may omit any tidings of RFC 1918; a protagonist who works on this for a living is still ignorant of significant facts about how it works in our world.
Similarly, in traditional films, nobody will shout "My God, that's Uma Thurman!" or "Look, look, it's Tom Hanks!" or "Say, it's Ms. Fonda!" or "Gosh, that's a man who's 0 hops from Bacon", or any such thing. Protagonists probably could turn out as film buffs, and still would not know about any famous actors, if such famous actors co-star in that particular film. (Actors who don't co-star still show up; if Fonda isn't acting in a film, you could allow an actor in that film to point out Fonda on TV or in print.) Odd, that -- for what actual film fan would not know Uma Thurman if said Uma wound up as having him as a husband?
I do think I saw a film in which a man said "Ah, I was told to call you at 555-8291, and that man said 555- and so on too, and all of what I can say, or you can say, I think, starts with 555. Look, I think I am in a film!" and that man was right in thinking this, for in fact that man was in a film. And a film, Truman Show, which talks a lot about fourth-wall topics, is said to show a bunch of similar things: "Look, you can't say this, and I can't say this, and look, all of this is just what you would find in a TV studio, all this has a quality of TV props... aha, so possibly I am in a TV show, or in a play."
I should add ISBN 0-671-65363-6 to my discussion about naming magic. You can find that book's most famous story at this location, and without paying for it.
Copyright violations abound; this book, though, was out of print for many, many, many months, and is still out of print -- so think about what I said not long ago about copyright and works going out of print, so that you can't obtain a work at all.
Accompanying that story is Marvin Minsky's discussion which also talks about UI a lot, and which was not what I thought that story was about. (I admit that Minsky has a good, important tip for your mythical running-into-djinn situations: to ask simply, as a first wish, to know "what is it that I want [...] most".)
But any writing allows many ways of discussing it, many ways of noticing what it is about or what it contains, and many things within it or facts about it you could point out.
