poetry

From mush. Starling suggested that to write poetry, "Write prose, run it through gzip. Really. It's all about compression."

I figure one there can be better advice (though for much modern poetry, it's hard to do better at approaching its comprehensibility than via gzip). I suggested this more practical tactic:

"Write prose, remove all the articles, turn the verbs into gerunds, then put linefeeds after every phrase. Presto, it's poetry."

Really. It works:

Writing prose
removing articles
turning verbs
into gerunds
putting linefeeds
after every phrase
presto, poetry.

Pick up: toy?

I now create items around the dungeon (all objects, so far, are exactly the same; they all do nothing and are all named 'toy') and can pick them up, list inventory, and drop them -- and all the piles and lists work perfectly.

I also turned on save-and-restore, which Just Plain Works -- this being the intent of the module I spent January writing. It'll break each time I change the size of a class during development, but that's only to be expected.

Next is combat... which in the first pass will be the basic basics: bonus to hit, bonus to defense, bonus to damage, bonus to armor, hit points.

And after that is differentiated objects... the repository of object templates, and objects that can be wielded/worn or used/consumed: potion, scroll, wand, ring, armor, weapon (first pass will be one of each, just to make a table of different classes of fx to be filled in later).