The Loom of Fancy; or, A Carpet Wide Enough to Cover All of England

Note I • A Bemused Inspection of the Rollers Look What Behemoth Our Loom of Fancy Has Wrought

When Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace first committed to paper the system of Operation Cards and Variable Cards by which the Analytical Engine might compute the numbers of Bernoulli without the intervention of human hand or head, it was natural to suppose that mechanical calculation would encourage a certain severe parsimony. One strings together the requisite cycle of cards; the Mill performs its additions and separations; the Store receives the tabular result; the attendant locks the cabinet and goes home to tea.

It was less easy to foresee what would transpire when the descendants of that Jacquard apparatus were entrusted to tabletop gamesters and coupled to a sleepless, statistical card-punching automaton. Look upon the chronological diagram below—both in its natural linear stature and under the logarithmic glass—and behold what behemoth our loom of fancy has wrought between the eighth of August and the eleventh of November. We sat down to weave a gentleman’s pocket handkerchief for tallying dice at a tavern table; the shuttle caught the bit between its teeth; and the rollers have since discharged 64,711 lines of non-blank, non-comment instruction—a brocaded algebraic carpet wide enough to cover all of England, with sufficient fringe left over to upholster the House of Lords.

Note II • The Handkerchief & The Stereopticon Of Three Hundred and Eighty-Four Immortal Stitches

Let us first pay our respects to the green thread running flat along the floor of the chart at /dice/. Woven on the eighth of August in 364 lines, furnished that same evening with a small offline memory (385 lines), and relieved of a single redundant semicolon on the fifth of September, it rests forever at 384 lines across three files. It has since been sealed beneath a cryptographic SHA-256 bell-jar in the monorepo linter so that no over-zealous improver may lay a finger upon it. One presses a button; black, red, and white six-sided dice explode according to their proper probabilities; the sum is rendered; not a single drop of whale-oil is wasted.

Why, then, does the amber line of /dice_3d/ spring upward on the twenty-fifth of October? Because the modern gamester, it appears, harbors a philosophic skepticism toward arithmetic unless he can first watch an illuminated polyhedron clatter across an imaginary baize table and carom off a wainscot. The first-party choreography of this stereopticon parlour trick is itself a civil 1,803 lines—barely four-and-a-half handkerchiefs in length—though candor compels me to point out the rose-colored dotted line hovering at 29,146 lines, which betrays the 27,343 lines of vendored LittleJS physics and WebGL bobbins smuggled beneath its petticoats to persuade the eye that brass and ivory possess momentum.

Note III • The Character Sheet That Swallowed the Mill Anatomy of a 64,711-Line Tabletop Apparatus

It is when we turn our lorgnette upon /ohcs/—the Oath Hammer Character Sheet (though the initials OHCS are already held in reserve as the Open Heroic Character Sheet, against the day when the engine must also reckon the cybernetic street-samurai of Shadowrun or kindred rulesets)—that mild amusement gives way to a species of reverent vertigo. On the sixth of September, this instrument was a humble 437-line slip of foolscap designed to record whether an imaginary dwarf carried a hand-axe or a lantern. For seven weeks it comported itself like a sensible parish register, lingering near 2,894 lines.

Then, on the twenty-fifth of October, the backing-drums were engaged in earnest. In little more than a fortnight the shuttle had multiplied the fabric twenty-two-fold, and today the edifice stands at 64,711 lines of code—some 169 times the bulk of the 2D dice roller that sired it. Consider the measure of that parchment: the entire Authorized King James Bible of 1611, from the first verse of Genesis to the final amen of the Apocalypse, numbers 31,102 verses across sixty-six books (23,145 in the Old Testament and 7,957 in the New). Our character sheet now surpasses the complete verse-canon of Holy Writ by 33,609 lines—some 2.08 times every verse in Scripture. Where, the astonished mathematician must inquire, did more lines than the Old and New Testaments combined conceal themselves inside a piece of paper meant to track hit-points and iron rations?

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.”
— Ada Lovelace, Note G (1843)

Therein lies the whole comedy of our predicament: we knew how to order the Engine to perform far too many things, and the Engine, possessing neither fatigue nor a sense of irony, obliged us to the last comma. As the anatomical ledger below demonstrates, the tapestry is divided into three great provinces:

First, the Client Mill & Store (45,284 lines, 70.0%): what began as a static table of attributes is now partitioned across fifteen modular operation-card files in src/*.js, housing a six-stage character creation wizard, a declarative custom-rules compendium with ARIA fuzzy comboboxes, a two-pane encounter combat deck, monochrome SVG iconography, a two-page print typesetter, and an encrypted local vault guarded by a seven-word mnemonic cipher, Google Drive mirrors, and WebAuthn hardware passkeys.

Second, the Ecclesiastical Store in the Cloud (10,085 lines, 15.6%): because adventurers are notoriously careless with their manuscripts, the sheet is backed by eighteen PostgreSQL tables under strict Row-Level Security, atomic transactional procedures (save_ohcs_vault_tx), and a protective database trigger (before_write_ohcs_user_vault) so solicitous of heroic posterity that if a player accidentally overwrites a named character with a blank “New Hero,” the database secretly squirrels away a pre-overwrite backup revision within the same transaction.

Third, the Mechanical Examiners (9,342 lines, 14.4%): nine Gherkin behavioural punch-card suites, unit harnesses, and seven parallel headless Chromium automata that catechize the sheet before every commit—enforcing V8 coverage floors, auditing the WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility tree, verifying keyboard focus rings, simulating combat rounds, and rolling back PostgreSQL transactions under pgTAP.

Note IV • Valedictory from the Gallery On Keeping One Handkerchief in the Drawer

I do not write these lines in censure. There is a strange, gothic grandeur in watching a loom weave a cathedral bell-rope out of yarn originally spun for a darning-sock. Every one of those 64,711 lines answers some real contingency of the gaming table, some edge-case of armour encumbrance, or some defence against a clobbered cloud roster.

Yet I admit to a quiet relief whenever my eye returns to the bottom of the chart, where /dice/ sits imperturbably at 384 lines—ignorant of cloud databases, indifferent to passkeys, weaving its modest flowers and leaves on three small cards. When the sixty-four-thousand-line carpet has quite covered the shires, we shall still have something left with which to blow our noses.