It’s a colony sim in a somewhat standard fantasy setting, with the twist that nearly everything is procedurally generated in unnecessary detail. Town names? Procedural. Instruments? Procedural. The history of the world you’re in? Procedural. Ancient horrors sealed deep below the world? Procedural. The gods themselves? Procedural. Your job is to help your horde of alcoholics survive whatever meticulously simulated nonsense the game decides to throw at you. It ranges from pretty standard, like invading armies, to fantastical, like vampires you have to solve criminal cases to catch, to deranged, like that time I dug up a demon made of fire that was effectively invincible in combat because everything’s pathfinding was too messed up by the smoke it gave off to fight back. For a general idea of how strange it can get, read Boatmurdered, an old written Let’s Play still beloved by the community.
So the Developers are Playing God playing god
In addition, virtually everything is simulated, which has led to some hilarious bugs in the past. To get a good idea of the level of detail, the tears in a dwarve’s eyes are tracked, and can be theoretically spread onto other things (though granted im not sure if it has been tested, hard to get them off the eyes i imagine), these ‘other things’ (any part of any creature/object in the game) would then be stained with those tears, which is itself tracked, and those tears will remain there until removed.
Wasn’t there also the issue with cats just turning up dead in someone’s tavern, and then it turned out that when a dwarf decided to do something while in the middle of drinking, they would just toss their alcohol on the floor, and then cats would walk through the tavern and get the alcohol on their paws, and so when they later groomed themselves, they would technically ingest the alcohol and immediately die of alcohol poisoning?
Unforeseen Consequences, The Game
A classic way for a new player’s fortress to fall is by failing to make new clothes. After a couple years the old clothes start to rot off the dwarves bodies and then the sight of naked children causes a huge negative mood spike for the whole fortress. This causes what is called a “tantrum spiral” fortresses rarely recover from a tantrum spiral.
Once I had a vampire problem. Vampires are hard to find, but you’ll know when you have one due to the dead dwarves with bite marks that show up. Eventually I found out what happened: the very first vampire had fallen down a well and died thus tainting the fort’s water supply with vampire blood. So the entire fortress was vampires. They fed on incoming migrants with the new members of the fort living or dying based on whether they drank from the well before one of the other vampires got to them.
Dwarf Fortress is a game where things just sorta happen.
WARNING do NOT start reading books and comics or watching movies or looking at art!!! you will start wanting to create art yourself. or god forbid. writing.
I know this is the website where we talk about artists and writers doing anything other than making art or writing, but man, we REALLY undersell how good it feels to actually work on your stuff.
Like you hit your word count for the first time in a week and its like
Lowkey we should create a giant manmade blood device to attract ticks away from humans and its a giant blood container that pumps like a heart and emits phermones that attract ticks and mosquitos and we should call it Mother
so last night i was struggling with a difficult section in a game, and when i woke up this morning i got it on my first try. this reminded me of a documentary i saw as a kid about how mice have maze-exploration brain activity in their dreams after a maze task, and have better performance after, so dreaming is maybe “practice” of daily activities.
anyway, i mention this because i noticed myself conceiving of this sleep-skill-benefit as a “mouse ability”, and feeling gratitude towards Mouse (the abstract spirit of mice) for granting me this boon. this is the gator’s aid all over again
It’s a colony sim in a somewhat standard fantasy setting, with the twist that nearly everything is procedurally generated in unnecessary detail. Town names? Procedural. Instruments? Procedural. The history of the world you’re in? Procedural. Ancient horrors sealed deep below the world? Procedural. The gods themselves? Procedural. Your job is to help your horde of alcoholics survive whatever meticulously simulated nonsense the game decides to throw at you. It ranges from pretty standard, like invading armies, to fantastical, like vampires you have to solve criminal cases to catch, to deranged, like that time I dug up a demon made of fire that was effectively invincible in combat because everything’s pathfinding was too messed up by the smoke it gave off to fight back. For a general idea of how strange it can get, read Boatmurdered, an old written Let’s Play still beloved by the community.
So the Developers are Playing God playing god
In addition, virtually everything is simulated, which has led to some hilarious bugs in the past. To get a good idea of the level of detail, the tears in a dwarve’s eyes are tracked, and can be theoretically spread onto other things (though granted im not sure if it has been tested, hard to get them off the eyes i imagine), these ‘other things’ (any part of any creature/object in the game) would then be stained with those tears, which is itself tracked, and those tears will remain there until removed.
Wasn’t there also the issue with cats just turning up dead in someone’s tavern, and then it turned out that when a dwarf decided to do something while in the middle of drinking, they would just toss their alcohol on the floor, and then cats would walk through the tavern and get the alcohol on their paws, and so when they later groomed themselves, they would technically ingest the alcohol and immediately die of alcohol poisoning?
Unforeseen Consequences, The Game
A classic way for a new player’s fortress to fall is by failing to make new clothes. After a couple years the old clothes start to rot off the dwarves bodies and then the sight of naked children causes a huge negative mood spike for the whole fortress. This causes what is called a “tantrum spiral” fortresses rarely recover from a tantrum spiral.
Once I had a vampire problem. Vampires are hard to find, but you’ll know when you have one due to the dead dwarves with bite marks that show up. Eventually I found out what happened: the very first vampire had fallen down a well and died thus tainting the fort’s water supply with vampire blood. So the entire fortress was vampires. They fed on incoming migrants with the new members of the fort living or dying based on whether they drank from the well before one of the other vampires got to them.
Dwarf Fortress is a game where things just sorta happen.
It’s definitely not “do whatever you want bc nobody cares” it’s somewhere between “people don’t care as much as you think they do” and “if you want to truly do what you want you have to not care about how much other people care”
since mrs, ms, and mr are all descended from the latin word magister, i propose the gender neutral version should be mg, short for “mage”
some people think this is a shitpost so i want to clarify that i am dead fucking serious. make mage the official gender neutral honorific NOW. i want it on my passport. i want it on my bank account. i want doctors and judges to use it for me. i don’t care if it sounds a little silly. people thought “missus” sounded crass at first. call me mg.
benefits of mg:
easy to pronounce, even for children (though kids 4 & younger may pronounce it more like “mayd” or “maygh”)
ONE SYLLABLE!!! (“individual” is too goddamn LONG.) you have to be able to say it quickly and casually
ends in a soft vowel sound, so it’ll flow right into the next word (“ind” halts the whole sentence)
fits neatly into the existing structure as a relative of master/mistress that can be abbreviated down to an m and one other letter
distinct enough that it can’t be mistaken for either gendered term (if you call me mix I’ll kill you. it sounds like miss with extra steps)
wizard.
drawbacks:
there aren’t any
yes, i know about milligrams and magnesium. i don’t give a shit. ms can also mean microsoft. who cares.
easy to pronounce, even for children (though kids 4 & younger may pronounce it more like “mayd” or “maygh”) ONE SYLLABLE!!! (“individual” is too goddamn LONG.) you have to be able to say it quickly and casually
i think too many people operate under the assumption that emotions are some frivilous fantasy of the mind and have no impact on the physical world, which is a cute thought when Humans are an animal that can die from being kinda stressed out
forever thinking about how Ink is canonically not his original name, which implies that he went through a whole ass self discovery journey just so he could name himself after a liquid. amazing
Ok but imagine if Gabriel turned into a prime soul…
This is not supposed to be anything serious or detailed, it’s just an idea that has been on my mind for a while now. I hope my design still resembles him 😭
In my head, he would be so fucking fast and annoying, shit talking and mocking the player but in reality he’s having THE time of his life
His wings could also serve as blades and as a shield, but I didn’t put much thought into it-
i made a character sheet. free to use as you wish, feel free to change whatever you want XD open source ass thing. spent all of ~maybe an hour on it.
Credit: the text in the insert-image box comes from this video, and the text for the top three lines (intense, complex, fruity) comes from this post. The actual image was made with the free NBOS character sheet creator, which is a sort of dated but free and solid text-layout sheet maker intended for ttrpg style character sheet creation.
this is GENUINELY one of the best character development sheets I’ve ever seen. Cuts right to the core of what you and your readers will glom onto, doesn’t waste time on details that don’t directly affect the narrative. Stupendous. Effervescent. Finally, some good fucking food
All pages are in the same style: mostly coloured in black, each letter is in a white box. Page one has a planet with a ring around it. It reads: "There is a part of you that wants to devour".
Page two has three rings in orange and pink. It reads: "Is it hunger that drives you? Or fear?". Page three is framed by a set of teeth. It reads: "Power is exerted between the teeth".
Page four has a winding, intestine-looking thing. It reads: "Digest destroy and conquer". Page five has pressed flowers in bright warm hues. It reads: "Do you expect this to nourish you?".
Page six has a pink, ribcage-like pattern. It reads: "Do you think you are safe from what lies within your body?". Page seven has cuts of meat. It reads: "Your flesh and blood will always betray you".
The last page is hectically coloured in black like the others, save for a white spot left in the middle with sharp edges. It reads: "There is a part of you that wants to be devoured".
Talking of disability aids, I did get this cool spoon recently which you can use without any grip at all. It has a long handle which can be bent to fit on your arm and once you get it right it’s really quite effective.
At the moment it lets me about half a meal without help (apart from putting it on) in certain situations with my arm supported, and I can even use it with my hand splints on
ID two photos showing an adaptive spoon with a long, curled grey handle. In the first Photo it’s is lying on a tray next to a bowl of rice and an adapted mug. In the second it’s been around echos wrist while they eat rice sat in bed with their arm supported by a pillow / end ID
( the company I got it from it’s called Active hands)
Okay just checked this website out and ily op!! They have so many good aids omfg!!
Active Hands is one of my favourite sources of disability aids!
They specialise in aids for people who have upper limb impairments and have an incredible range of stuff. It was started by a quadriplegic guy who found it hard to find quality products online/ even know what products exist and it’s like a treasure trove of useful things. I’ve never had a bad product from them.
The range is incredible too: they have things for hobbies (including gym equipment, fishing gear, playing card holders, gardening equipment, kayak equipment), personal care stuff (like tabletop nail clippers, things to make aerosols easier, one handed hair ties) cooking and eating stuff (one handed chopping boards, adapted cutlery of all kinds, jar and bottle openers).
I want to write a book called “your character dies in the woods” that details all the pitfalls and dangers of being out on the road & in the wild for people without outdoors/wilderness experience bc I cannot keep reading narratives brush over life threatening conditions like nothing is happening.
I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.
Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.
Babes she would not MAKE it to that inn.
Are there any other particularly egregious examples?
This book already exists, sort of! Or at least, it’s a biology textbook but I bought it for writing purposes:
It starts with a chapter about freezing to death, and it is without a doubt the scariest thing I’ve read in years (and I read a lot of horror fiction).
This book can be downloaded for free on Researchgate, posted there by the author himself:
I’m sure someones already said this but I often see Tumblr described as a hellsite. This is fundamentally incorrect.
Tumblr is the faesite. Everybody is super confused and lost, you keep running into random places. Somehow you end up stuck there forever after interacting a couple of times. The people are all strange, everybody simultaneously seems to be from the future and the past as if time is meaningless.
YES
also technology breaks at random, and sometimes you just suddenly feel a thousand years old
everybody has a half dozen names and none of them are their “real” name.
which name(s) you know gives you different powers over them.
there are Rules but you mostly have to figure them out for yourself.
getting the Rules wrong or breaking them can cost you more than you ever even knew you had.
Maximum Horny at all times
be careful what you wish for or you just might get it
Gift Of Prophecy
Illegal Use Of Bones
Holidays are unusual but important and have very specific rites attached
There are curses. Hooboy, are there curses. There are also cursed artifacts, which compel you to inflict their horrors on the rest of the world while going IT’S THE ORIGINAL!!!
ALT
ALT
