It may instead have filled him with rage and a renewed sense of purpose!
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A round of applause for the Challenger, the Chef, and the judges, all of whom made their entrances with style!
As we know from her semi-autobiographical work, How to Make Eggplant Lasagna (With Cats!), N. Cormier’s kitties have unusually refined culinary tastes for carnivores. It makes me wonder, did she bring them all the way to Keyboard Stadium so that they, too, would have the chance to sample some true masterpieces of IF cooking?
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They did come with me (I can’t bear to part with them!) but are locked firmly backstage. Who knows what shenanigans they might get up to were they to escape?
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Oh, that’s why the door was locked!
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Hmmm…
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And you unlocked it, which means…
meowing and scampering sounds are heard in the distance
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I would say more like “indiscriminate”, but they’re certainly interested in tasting an unusually wide variety of things for obligate carnivores.
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This is a tangent of a tangent, but…
About the Four Horsemen
I’ve always found eschatological literature (prophecies about how the world will end) especially interesting. And one of my favorite things about the Four Horsemen is that their names are never actually given in Revelation.
I watched as the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals. Then I heard one of the four living creatures say in a voice like thunder, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a white horse. Its rider held a bow, and he was given a wreath of laurels, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest.
When the Lamb opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make people kill each other. To him was given a large sword.
When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a black horse. Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “One person’s ration of wheat for a day’s wages, and three people’s ration of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!”
When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a pale-green horse. Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine, plague, and the wild beasts of the earth.
(New International Version, with some edits by me to be more explicitly literal.)
Death is named outright (Thanatos in Greek), and War is pretty clear, but there’s been a lot of disagreement over the millennia about who the last two are. Pestilence and Famine are a common interpretation, because of that last line: a quarter of the earth will die by sword, famine, pestilence, and wild beasts. But another interpretation is Conquest (the laurel crown is a symbol of the Roman Emperors) and Inequality (a poor person needs to do a full day of manual labor to afford enough wheat to feed himself for one day, but the rich are hoarding plenty of oil and wine). Or maybe all four of them are actually Jesus, switching from one horse to another as the apocalypse progresses.
In other words, if we’re going with War, Famine, and Pestilence based on that last line, maybe the fourth one is actually leading a scourge of omnivorous Wild Beasts…
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Or of course there’s Grevious Bodily Harm, Cruelty to Animals, Really Cool People and People Covered in Fish[1].
aka Treading in Dogshit, aka All Foreigners Especially The French, aka Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them A Good Thumping, aka No Alcohol Lager, aka Embarrassing Personal Problems ↩︎
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There’s at least some circumstantial evidence leading me to believe there will be a sequel to Lasagna With Cats :
Peasant Mob Stew with Feral Kittens
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I was impressed with @Zed 's overview of Inform. I use Inform every day at the moment, so making me re-see how fundamentally impressive it is something. I’m talking about the elaboration of the bubbling beaker:
-Wade
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Fantastic overview of I7! I’m also going to note here how much of a debt the other parser systems now owe to I7. Dialog, for example, is approximately I7 crossed with Prolog; it doesn’t have the natural language syntax, but it has the same rule-based structure, the same focus on text variations and substitutions, and it copied the [one of]...[or]...[at random] syntax outright. I think it’s fair to say it wouldn’t have existed if not for I7’s popularity.
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And still, it still strive to read like natural language by allowing predicates to have arguments in between words!
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A fixture of my WIPs and experiments is a jab on Graham Nelson and natural languages or inform 7 (choose your own priority between the and and the or 
) and a reference to Curses, e.g. properly in Inform 7:
when play begins:
say "Wellcome to PG's attempt to do something worthwhile with the seventh, and most questionable, iteration of Inform. perhaps in the end some polished game can be cooked, if that cursed (allusion to the maintainer intentional) so-called 'natural language' can be tamed...[br]
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Wait, the door unlocked all this time? Is that why everyone’s so up to date on the competition? Well, I’ll be damned: Ryan Veeder and Lucian Smith? Exciting!
That also brings up the point: are Encorm’s cats Garfield’s vegetarian cousins?
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They’re not vegetarians, no matter what they tell you. Also, neither of them is orange. But one of them loves a cruciferous vegetable and the other, more worryingly, desperately wants to eat nightshades.
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Obligatory shout-out to 'Steading of the Hill Giant Chief.
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I’m very fond of the ingredient this game, because it can be made as big or small as you want and is vague enough that you have lots to do with it but enough to spark inspiration…
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Looking forward to a game where scrolling up and down with the scroll bar affects the game world.
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What’s obfuscated about it? It sticks to Inform’s simplest rules - none of those complicated relations of action patterns to worry about - and does exactly what it says on the tin!
(Ok, maybe having game logic toggle on terminal whitespace in a printed name could be seen as slightly confusing. But when I look at the cookbook book second best second-best cauldron ingredients ingredient vial vials shelf tome grimoire feather ostrich leaf leaves autumn autumnal poppet eel eels mustard seed sting stinger bee potion in my pantry, I wonder why most games are so bad at modeling real life)
I’m excited to see the challenge ingredient - this is definitely one that could go in a more traditional, but ambitious, direction, if our competitors do decide to go the magic-system route. But I’m intrigued by some of the other possibilities being thrown out, from looking at larger-scale changes to the world to more metaphorical understandings of “change”. Or heck, “scroll” - isn’t that what we do on our phones all day?
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