8.4. Furniture

| Chapter 8: Vehicles, Animals and Furniture |

| 8.4. Furniture

Most domestic furniture consists of supporters and containers of one size or another. This means that the simplest furniture needs no elaborate instructions:

> The candlestick is on the dining table. The dining table is fixed in place.

> The silver salt cellar is on the serving trolley. The serving trolley is pushable between rooms.

> The pillow is on the bed. The bed is enterable and fixed in place.

The examples below are therefore mostly ways to get around the usual restrictions on containers (that they only have one interior) and supporters (that they cannot simultaneously be containers as well).

Yolk of Gold provides a set of drawers, that is, a container with multiple interiors.

U-Stor-It provides a way to have containers with a lid which is also a supporter.

Swigmore provides a supporter which holds up the player, but has no top surface as such, and cannot hold up anything else. Kiwi demonstrates a kind of high shelf, whose objects cannot be seen or used unless the player stands on a ladder.

Princess and the Pea shows how a pile of supporters, each on top of the last, could be managed.

Tamed demonstrates furniture large enough to get inside, or on top of.

Circle of Misery demonstrates a conveyor belt, which can hold multiple items but only brings one of them within the player's reach at a time.

See Position Within Rooms for a box that can be positioned and used as a stepping stool

See The Human Body for letting the player take different postures on furniture or on the floor

See Room Descriptions for tables and other furniture whose content listing is suppressed or modified in a room description

See Entering and Exiting, Sitting and Standing for making the player automatically rise from a seat before leaving the room

See Clocks and Scientific Instruments for a grandfather clock

See Kitchen and Bathroom for a mirror the player can look into

83
| Example Yolk of Gold Set of drawers where the item the player seeks is always in the last drawer he opens, regardless of the order of opening. |
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172
| Example Princess and the Pea The player is unable to sleep on a mattress (or stack of mattresses) because the bottom one has something uncomfortable under it. |
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57
| Example U-Stor-It A "chest" kind which consists of a container which has a lid as a supporter. |
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393
| Example Swigmore U. Adding a new kind of supporter called a perch, where everything dropped lands on the floor. |
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347
| Example Kiwi Creating a raised supporter kind whose contents the player can't see or take from the ground. |
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12
| Example Tamed Examples of a container and a supporter that can be entered, as well as nested rooms. |
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423
| Example Circle of Misery Retrieving items from an airport luggage carousel is such fun, how can we resist simulating it, using a list as a ring buffer? |
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The only point we need to be careful about is that the carousel is simulated twice over, in the following text: once in the built-in way that objects are inside other objects, so that the luggage items are objects contained in the carousel object; but then again by the "circle of misery" list, a ring buffer keeping track of what order things are in. We need to be careful that these two records do not fall out of synchrony: anything put into the carousel must be added to the list, anything taken out must be removed. (In fact we forbid things to be added, for simplicity's sake.) "Circle Of Misery" Luggage item is a kind of thing. The blue golf bag, the leopardskin suitcase, the green rucksack and the Lufthansa shoulder-bag are luggage items. Heathrow Baggage Claim is a room. The carousel is a container in Heathrow. "The luggage carousel, a scaly rubbered ring, does for the roundabout what Heathrow Airport does for the dream of flight: that is, turns the purest magic into the essence of boredom, only with extra stress. [if the number of entries in the circle of misery is 0]For once it stands idle. Perhaps it's broken.[otherwise]The baggage approaching you now: [the circle of misery with indefinite articles]." The circle of misery is a list of objects that varies. When play begins: now all the luggage items are in the carousel; add the list of luggage items to the circle of misery. The list "circle of misery" is our ring, in which entry 1 is considered to be the position of whichever bag is currently frontmost. And here it goes, round and round: Every turn when the number of entries in the circle of misery is not 0: rotate the circle of misery; let the bag be entry 1 of the circle of misery; say "The carousel trundles on, bringing [a bag] to within reach." After taking a luggage item (called the bag): remove the bag from the circle of misery, if present; say "Taken." Before doing something with a luggage item (called the bag) which is in the carousel: if the bag is not entry 1 of the circle of misery, say "[The bag] is maddeningly out of range. You'll have to wait for it to come round." instead. Instead of inserting something into the carousel, say "In recent years, the authorities have tended to frown upon depositing bags in random places at airports." Test me with "get suitcase / get suitcase / get suitcase / get suitcase / look / get golf bag / look / get golf bag".

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