Elm

In which the author, faced with a wet October and a wall he refuses to put a screen on, borrows a colleague’s good idea and builds a Heath Robinson machine to answer one question twice a day.

In which the author, in need of cheering up, explains Elm to web developers by way of a Ruby interface he has secretly loved for years.

In which the author, asked by his youngest for help with a cleric, finds the official character sheet wanting and resolves, with some indignation, to print a better one.

In which the author, defeated by a fifteen-letter anagram, builds a solver that is fast, plain and deliberately unhelpful, and then discovers that zip is cleverer than he is.

In which the author explains why Elm gives him joy, confesses to a memory that once won a national competition but cannot manage a shopping list, and learns a bit about how his mind works.

In which the author admits to a nagging feeling that computing has gone wrong somewhere, points at a tiny algebra that maybe gets a part of it right, and starts building yet another programming language. Sorry.

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.