Whitebeard’s Realm

In which an unexpected Christmas gift reveals the quiet delight of a rotating bezel, and the author wonders why such useful timekeeping is dressed up in such macho clothing.

In which the author extracts a library from his interactive fiction app, and walks the curious reader through the making of their own Z-machine player in around 100 lines of Elm.

In which the author at last unveils a quiet corner of the web for playing classic Infocom adventures, and reflects on the peculiar inhumanity of an AI that cannot quite abide pure play.

In which the author hunts through virtual memory for a player whose whereabouts the machine no longer remembers, and settles on a layered heuristic that is almost certainly good enough.

In which a 1980s virtual machine for text adventures is reimplemented in a pure functional language, against all better judgement, and somehow emerges working.

In which an old text adventure is rediscovered with the help of an enthusiastic, slang-slinging AI companion, and a z-machine yak awaits its shave.

In which the daily cryptic crossword becomes a source of frustration, and a solution is fashioned from an old Elm project dusted off.

In which we discover that a half-an-entity can be something like a prosthetic for the mind.

In which we introduce a comely new tool for new roleplayers who find themselves suddenly called upon to act.

In which we observe that the worst GM at any table and the current President of the United States share, with uncanny fidelity, the very same qualities.