Loop uses EMACS in the garden ----------------------------- One sunny May morning, when the birds were chirping, the sky was blue, the sun was out, and the trees were singing, Sodacan's thoughts turned to pruning. "Oh, Loop," he called merrily, "time to get out and trim the garden. The shears are in the shed." Loop, still in bed, grumbled. Sodacan (with an edge on his cheeriness) announced, "If you don't haul your ass out of bed RIGHT NOW I will come up and fry your fingernails in hot fat." Loop, suddenly not in bed anymore, leapt down the stairs and into the gardening shed (which, indeed, was at the bottom of the stairs.) Collecting the deleting shears, he headed out into the tangled mess of garden to attempt to make some order out of it. Just about a month ago, the local Gardener's Collective (read:Loop) had planted a whole mess of sprouts. Now it was time to thin them out. "Half of the sprouts should be trimmed, or the plants will fight each other mercilessly as soon as they grow old enough," read Loop (reading seed packages being the pinnacle of his literary accomplishments.) Standing beside one plant, he said: "Shears, rubout." This, of course, weeded out the plant to the left of him. He then moved down two plants and repeated the process. Suddenly, he (simultaneously) heard Sodacan coming to inspect his conspicuous lack of progress, and noticed the plant he was standing on. "Oops...Shears, control-D!" This, of course, deleted the plant he was in front of, instead of de- leting the plant next to it. Loop and Sodacan interface with EMACS ----------------------------------------- As far as moving around in EMACS is concerned, Sodacan and Loop are basically cursors. In default mode, when they move around, they don't change the things they walk on, like wood floors or record players; but often they overwrite too. For instance: < Loop walks somewhere, spills something, Sodacan cursors at him> other ideas ----------- When Sodacan attempts to do a ^X^F (find world) he addresses a world not in the buffer. 'Of course not, I'm trying to switch buffers!' Oh, okay. World Not Found? if so, they have to go netting again, uh oh. The end of the world -------------------- As far as world stability is concerned, Emacs is a pretty mild country. It doesn't go out and pick on other countries too much, it's not too rich, nobody really bothers. Its Improbability Index is pretty high, but its destiny does not (currently) involve being called up on the rug for that. However, some of the other countries are not so temperate. A few countries over, there is a fat Samoan dictator who has psychically linked the well-being of his country to the well-being of his corpulent body. This, of course, insures his subjects' loyalty, as they are either too stupid or too patriotic to think of starting a country of their own. However, someday somebody will nudge that butterball just a little too far off balance, and he will topple... But that's not what I came here to tell you about. The country next door is a bit more relevant. It is a world straight out of a D&D game. In fact, given the amount of interference in this world by nosy bastards like me, it may very well BE a D&D game. It's got monsters, gods, horrible creatures out of myth, legend, and the dawn of time, and natural geography that changes radically every hex. None of this, alas, can even touch the strongest adventures; in fact, they regularly use the God of Butterball Turkeys to play ping-pong with. They have suffered no damage greater than one broken fingernail, inflicted by Odin, Zeus, and all the Elder Gods combined. Any magical items they do not have, they have thrown away. The commerce of the country is largely dependent upon where they go to dinner. In short, it has become a Monty Haul campaign. And this, alas, has attracted the attention of the . Ripped straight out of Dragon magazine, (and boy is it pissed about THAT!) it . And although it only gives hours' warning to the Monty Haul world, its coming is painfully obvious (due to a bad case of anchovies) to Sodacan and Loop a few weeks in advance. "Well, my boy," said Sodacan wearily, "there is only one thing I can do to save our country. I have never told you about this spell before, as it is too dangerous almost for me, and you would fuck something up irretrievably. It is very difficult, so I will need lots of carbohydrates for the next two days. Start cooking." The next two days are a steady stream of pasta. Loop dreams at night (as opposed to his dreams during the day) about thousands and thousands of fat Italian women (bra size 68-triple-Q) yelling at him to "eat some more! Cook that better! " This disturbs him greatly until Carl Sagan wanders through and tells him about the 'billyuns' more in the wings. He screams, gets up, and cooks an anchovy pizza for breakfast. Finally, Sodacan decides that he is ready. Loop sets up the alembics, algorithms, potations, protections, braziers, and beer. "First, Loop, we must make sure that we have a world to go to," said Sodacan. Taking a deep breath, he immediately choked on the thick eau d'anchovy that had been so pervasive of late. Taking a smaller breath, he called out, "Control-X control-F control-W!" (Note: Obviously this Emacs is somewhat different from Sodacan's Emacs. In his Emacs, ^X^F defaults to 'find file', but can take an additional argument for different searches. Other options will be revealed later, as I make them up.) A single word appeared, wreathed in the smoke from the brazier, reflected in the potations and beer, and encoded in the algorithm: Searching... Everything remained very still for a few moments. Finally, the image of a universe appeared in the various s, and it commenced scrolling away. Whole galaxies scrolled by, then galactic arms, stars, more stars, an occasional system or two. Finally, the universe came to a stop at a small, unprepossessing planet, which looked vaguely Unix-like. <"This wasn't just plain awful. This was fancy awful. This was awful with raisins in it."-Dorothy Parker>