The Vienna Game by @paratactician

My finished contribution to the @fandomtrumpshate craft bazaar! Honestly, this may be my favorite typeset I've done to date, combined with one of the more elaborate cutout designs I've made in a while. (I learned the hard way that it's time for me to change the blade on my Silhouette cutter, lol. Protip: if it's chewing up the paper/cloth on skinny elements like the pixellated raindrops + puddle here, get a new, sharper blade!) It included all the 80s cyberspace nonsense/vaporwave aesthetic I could cram into one book, some intensely sparkly decorative paper that popped against the black bookcloth exactly how I hoped it would, and yet another excellent last-minute endpaper find courtesy of the Renegade Retreat.

As I've gotten more proficient at typesetting, I've found I really love creating visual markers for POV swaps -- in this case, changing the drop caps and scene dividers depending on whether the chapter was from Sollux or Terezi's POV:

And of course, I have to give a huge shout-out to @isozyme and @roach-works for letting me include their art! (Alas, I forgot to snap a picture of roachpatrol's art before sending off the book, but it's this A+++ piece right here.)

As always, thank you so much to beanutbutter for their incredible generosity during FTH, and to the whole FTH team for running the auction! If you haven't had the chance to read "The Vienna Game" yet, you can at the link above.

fanbinding is SO cool! this one turned out dope as fuck

O C4PTOR! MY C4PTOR!

First stanza by urbanAnchorite, second and third stanzas by me. Apologies to Walt Whitman, Andrew Hussie, and everybody else.

O C4PTOR! MY C4PTOR! OUR F34RFUL FL1GHT 1S DON3 TH3 M3T3OR GOT S4F3LY TO TH1S SM3LLY L1M3Y SUN OUR HUM4NS N34R TH3 B1G GR33N SPH3R3 W1TH K4RK4T ST1LL UPCHUCK1NG 1 WORRY TH4T, THROUGH L4CK OF COOL, OUR M33T1NG 3NDS UP SUCK1NG; BUT O SN1FF! SN1FF! SN1FF! L1K3 B4N4N4 P13 OFFLO4D3D, UPON TH1S ROCK MY C4PTOR L13S, 4 MUST4RD POT 3XPLOD3D >:[

O C4PTOR! MY C4PTOR! R1S3 UP 4ND SN1FF TH3 SC3N3 TH3 COOLK1D SM3LLS L1K3 STR4WB3RR13S, H1S S1ST3R’S T4NG3R1N3 TH3 HUM4NS DON’T KNOW WHO YOU 4R3, YOU ST4Y3D OFF P3ST3RCHUM BUT S1NC3 YOU JUST SAV3D 4LL OUR BUTTS TH4T S33MS UNF41R 4ND DUMB - O C4PTOR! YOU 4SSHOL3! STOP LOLL1NG ON TH3 FLOOR! 1 H3R3 D3CL4R3 TH4T B31NG D34D 1S NOW 4G41NST TH3 L4W >:]

MY C4PTOR DO3S NOT 4NSW3R, H3 W1LL NOT MOCK OR SCOFF 1 DRUB H1M BUT H3 M4K3S NO MOV3, NOR T3LLS M3 TO FUCK OFF TH3 SUN 1S GR33N 4S 4C1D POPS, 1T T1NGL3S 1N MY SNOUT, K4N4Y4 BLUSH3S GR33N3R Y3T, 4ND K4RK4T’S FR34K1NG OUT; SO FL1RT, O BRO4DS, 4ND HONK, O CLOWNS! BUT 1, W1TH DROOP1NG H34D, ST4ND S3NTRY WH3R3 MY C4PTOR L13S, F4LL3N COLD 4ND D34D.

“I hadn’t got much further than don’t kill everyone, to be perfectly honest. That’s why I called tech support.” – Scarlet and Bible Black by paraTactician

> Rose: Fall in love.

> Sollux: FREEZE YOUR GODDAMN BULGE OFF FUCK.

“Nothing that’s forced can ever be right; if it doesn’t come naturally, leave it.” That’s what she said as she turned out the light and she may have been wrong, and she may have been right but I woke with the frost, and noticed she’d lost the veil that covered her eyes

Adventure Log: ARE YOU NOT EDUTAINED

There was no Adventure Log last week because I spent the entire week ploughing through a huge pile of essays. As compensation, this week I have hired a professional. Sit back and relax as urbanAnchorite and I take you on a tour of the early-90s edutainment software ‘scene’, a scene which turns out to have had a greater influence on both of us than previously suspected.

Below the cut: Granny’s Garden, Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, L: A Mathemagical Adventure, Stickybear Math Town, Hazard/Rescue, Treasure Mountain!, and a couple of runners-up.

Keep reading

Adventure Log: Fallen London (browser-based, 2009-)

Now, when I were a lad, all of this was fields, you could still get a pint of beer for £1, and Fallen London was still called Echo Bazaar.

When you made an Echo Bazaar account, you hooked it up to your Twitter. Then, when you took actions in the game, you had the option of letting the game post a Tweet – a tiny snippet of narrative, summarising whatever it was you’d just achieved. This was called an ‘echo’. So if you had friends on Twitter who were playing the game, every so often you’d see something like:

This is an excitingly risky reproductive strategy (for the game, not the player), because it’s balancing intrigue against irritation. If people get sick of #ebz Tweets sprouting all over their timeline like mushrooms, it’s going to actively prejudice them against the game – so you have to hope that, before irritation sets in, they’ll have been sufficiently tantalised to click on a link and get ensnared.

I was using Twitter in 2011, and several of my friends were playing Echo Bazaar. I could very easily have developed a Pavlovian antipathy to the very words ‘London’, ‘bats’, and ‘delicious’. And, honestly, if you’d tried to elevator-pitch me on the whole concept, I’d have wrinkled my nose. ‘A dark and hilarious Gothic underworld’? Dear God, it sounds whimsical. I bet it’s got flippy-floppy skellingtons like a Tim Burton movie, and the kind of arch, pallid humour that used to characterise about 70% of fandom’s Rose Lalonde dialogue. I bet everyone wears hats.

But I was curious. I clicked a link. Three years later, I was using Echo Bazaar (now hight Fallen London) to plan my wedding.

Keep reading

Adventure Log: Unreal Tournament (PC, 1999)

Like Spelunky, I don’t know why I started playing Unreal Tournament. I must have been about fifteen, and I remember discussing it with some of my friends at secondary school, so maybe one of them convinced me to try it out. Again like Spelunky, it’s not a kind of game I’m normally drawn to. I’ve played a few first-person shooters in my time – it was kind of hard to be a young man in the 2000s and not end up playing first-person shooters, since GoldenEye and Halo were both so fundamental to adolescent male social interaction – but it’s always a genre I’ve enjoyed with friends in the same room, rather than as a solo pursuit. (To this day, I think the closest I’ve ever come to playing and completing a solo FPS is with the Mass Effect games, which are party RPGs clad in a very thin FPS veneer.)

UT, though, I played all by myself, and not even against strangers on the Internet. I have never once entered a UT match against another human being. I played UT exclusively against robots.

Keep reading

Adventure Log: Shadowrun Returns trilogy (PC, 2013-15)

There’s a bit in one issue of Sandman where Lucien, the Librarian of Dream, is giving the reader a tour of his library – which contains every book ever written. He comments that he’s even got your books. What’s that? You haven’t written any books? Yes you have, here’s one: The Bestselling Romantic Spy Thriller I used to think about on the bus that would sell a billion copies and mean I’d never have to work again.

I never actually had that book. Everyone has a novel in them, but I’ve never found mine. (My romantic spy thriller did very well and I’m proud of it, but here I am, still working.) What I did absolutely have, for years and years, was the bestselling video game that I used to think about on the bus that would sell etc. etc.

And oh, that game! What a masterpiece it was. A party-based RPG, with a strong narrative, characters you could care about, a flexible build system so you could be the kind of PC you enjoy being, big dramatic set-piece battles, and – crucially – grid combat. No dull JRPG auto-fights where you hammer the boss with your strongest spells for eighty turns until he finally switches to his second form and becomes immune to poison; no irritating real-time-with-pause compromises where you queue up a bunch of brilliant manoeuvres, hit space, and watch your party completely fail to execute any of them. Real, proper, granular, transparent, beautiful grid combat. Tank holds the bottleneck while the mage charges something cataclysmic in cover and the rogue patiently circles to the higher ground, and you know when you’re in range because there’s a bunch of fucking squares on the floor that tell you so. Exquisite. Oh, this is my stop.

Then it turned out someone had actually made that game, and it was called Shadowrun Returns.

Keep reading

Adventure Log: Spelunky (PC, 2013)

I started playing Spelunky – the ‘enhanced edition’, not the lo-fi original – in March 2014, during the last Oxford vacation I ever spent at my childhood home in Birmingham. I don’t know why I bought it. It was cheap in a sale on GOG, but even so, it’s a famously hard platformer and I am famously bad at platformers. I never honed those nerves and thews on Mario. I miss jumps; I get stressed. I think I lasted half a level in Meat Boy. I ought to have bounced off Spelunky after my first handful of deaths.

Instead, I got hooked. I’d play it a few times (which doesn’t take very long; early in one’s Spelunky career surviving for five minutes is a significant achievement) and then decide it was too hard and not for me. The next day I’d fire it up again, wondering if I’d somehow magically got better at it overnight. This lasted for the rest of the vacation, until I went back to work and lost all my free time again.

Keep reading

The platformer where I threw all our bombs to get out of all our problems and pT used all our ropes to get us out of poverty, culminating, every time, in a dead gold god squashing us to death

‘Do you know, Crenshawe, I think that blighter paraTactician has disappeared off the Internet for g - ’

SURPRISE!! That is not dead that can eternally provide thirst-quenching refreshment on the go

uA and I have been locked in a structurally unsound and weirdly tiny pyramid for the last six months working on our books, but hers has, on balance, turned out a lot more fun. Let’s run the numbers:

HERS: - bone magic - swordfighting - lightless crypts - gay

MINE: - no bone magic - very limited swordfighting - I do actually propose a rather neat emendation at line 264 - Martin Litchfield West read the draft and died almost immediately afterward

For real though: I venture that no-one on Earth except Taz is quite so familiar with the morbid intricacies of Gideon the Ninth as I am, because I’ve been married to it for the last year, and therefore no-one is in a better position to tell you that it’s really, really good and you’re going to enjoy it when it lands in late 2019. There are scenes in this thing where she got me over to look at them and said ‘Do you think this bit works?’ and I said ‘Fuck!!’. And I’ve been picking holes in her writing since 2011, so I am no longer very easy to impress.

This book is sort of like if Utena had been made by Evanescence, sort of like if The Last Jedi had actually followed the plot of the Mountain Goats’ ‘The Ultimate Jedi Who Wastes All the Other Jedi and Eats Their Bones’, sort of like if Temperance Brennan had gone to Hope’s Peak Academy, and sort of like everything else Taz writes, i.e. funny and horrible. If you’ve enjoyed her past stuff, you have a treat in store. Unfortunately the treat is bones

Game Review: Zero Time Dilemma (2016)

Taz and I played Zero Time Dilemma and ended up burning dinner very badly because we couldn’t stop playing Zero Time Dilemma. Here we attempt to explain why, while steering gingerly around c. 8,000 game-ruining spoilers.

WHAT GENRE IS THIS GAME?

T: Nightmarish pregnancy simulator.

M: It’s kind of like being in an undergrad philosophy lecture, only the rest of the audience is being killed off one by one.

Really, I guess I’d have to say ‘room escape crossed with traditional VN’, but that’s not a very helpful description. Room escapes are not known for their plot, and VNs don’t usually take time out to have your childhood best friend indulge in some ruminations on the Monty Hall problem. Or… I mean, maybe they do, but if so I haven’t seen those ones on Steam.

T: I am also obliged to note that the room escape puzzles aren’t “move this table, find this key”, it’s all coked-up Usborne Puzzle codes and non-verbal reasoning. It’s like playing a fun IQ test, and then you get out of the room and your best friend explodes.

Keep reading

Link applies for a mortgage

“Your records show you’ve been out of employment for… one hundred years. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“I see. And what’s your current main source of income?”

“I find some of it under rocks, or when I kill people. But mostly I get it from treasure chests in ancient ruins and dungeons.”

“So you… loot archaeological sites.”

“Well, I mean, technically. But a lot of them were specifically configured in the first place so that only I could get inside. Like, when they were built. So it’s not like I’m… it’s not like anyone else could get that money.”

“I’ll put it down as ‘inheritance’. You don’t have any kind of regular paid employment, though? That’s going to be difficult to get around.”

“Um… I suppose I made a bunch of money the other day selling meat.”

“Meat?”

“Yeah, you know, wolf meat, rhino meat, stuff like that. I turn it into kebabs. They sell pretty well.”

“Ah! OK. I’ll list you as working in the food service industry, that should keep them happy for now. Let’s talk about outgoings. What would you say are your major expenses? Rent, bills?”

“I don’t really have any.”

“But you must spend money, surely. Think back. What was your biggest purchase over the last month? Look, your statement says you spent 1,000 rupees, uh, ‘near Lake Akkala’.”

“Oh yeah! I gave that to a huge woman hiding in a flower so she’d improve my trousers.”

“…”

“I know, it’s a lot, right? But they’re pretty good trousers now, check ‘em out.”

“Uh… and this other purchase here, 1,000 rupees in Rito Village? Was that also…?”

“Oh no, I was just buying a thing for my hair.”

“For your hair.”

“Yeah. Like a little ornament thing. I needed to climb a mountain, and it’s really cold up there.”

“Right. Okay. Let’s… let’s just say ‘miscellaneous expenses’. Now, we should really get you set up with some life insurance. Do you have any ongoing health problems?”

“No.”

“Good! That’s… okay, that’s good. Uh. Injuries. Have you sustained any injuries recently in your, ah, work?”

“Not r… oh, I guess I got killed the other day, yeah.”

“You got killed?”

“Yeah, a big robot shot me off a cliff. It’s fine, though! My dead ex-girlfriend brought me back to life with her magic elephant.”

“I’d like you to leave my office now, please.”

we are playing Breath of the Wild

I was nearing the end of a long journey for which I had been woefully underprepared. I had spent the last fifteen minutes skidding down wet rocks in a thunderstorm while being pelted with exploding arrows by snipers concealed in the trees. I had been shot, stabbed, zapped with electricity, knocked flat on my ass, nearly crushed by falling boulders, and generally kicked around. Most of my good weapons were broken, and I was rapidly running out of kebabs.

Then I saw it. An unsuspecting enemy loitering by the edge of a cliff, a little way ahead. The rain and the darkness had turned visibility to shit, so I couldn’t even tell if it was a Lizalfos or a Bokoblin or what, but it was right in my line of sight and it had no idea I was there. Finally, a chance to turn the tables, to change the operational tempo, to take something back. Time to start showing these guys that my patience could only be pushed so far.

I crouched down atop a rock and drew my bow. Silently, I nocked the arrow that would pluck this vile creature from the clifftop as neatly as I’d pick a flower, and send its black soul down to Hell. I drew up, zoomed in. Dead in my sights; the perfect shot. The Hero of Hyrule says hi, motherfucker. I paused.

uA, gently: “That’s a radish.”

Anonymous asked: anybeast crossing oh my goddddd

(in reference to this post)

This is how I always imagine Alternian working: heavily synthetic, heavily agglutinative. 

Alternian is like Japanese in having two writing systems: one alphabetic, which is the mirror-Daedric we see in the comic, and one logographic. Mirror-Daedric is used for proper nouns, including personal names and things like ‘Trollian’ and ‘sylladex’, and also by young trolls learning to read and write. The other system is used for everything else. The reason most animal names on Alternia get rendered in English as ‘hoofbeast’, ‘musclebeast’, etc. is because they’re written with two logograms: ‘hoof’/’muscle’ + ‘beast’. So the general class of living creatures other than trolls is indicated by combining the indefinite morpheme, ‘some/any’, with ‘beast’. The Alternian for ‘foal’ is ‘young’ + ‘muscle’ + ‘beast’. It’s an incredibly compact language: ‘look at that dog!’ in Alternian would be written with two sign-units, [look at + imperative suffix] [demonstrative prefix + bark + beast + accusative suffix]. It also means the language’s core pool of vocabulary is relatively small, since most of the lexicon is formed by sticking base units together, which works well for a conqueror species not all that interested in expanding their linguistic horizons.

This explains a bunch of other stuff. Weird periphrases like ‘nutrition plateau’ are literal representations of the Alternian [food/nutrition + flat object]; you could combine the same ‘flat object’ morpheme with the ‘furniture’ morpheme to get ‘table’, or with the ‘mountain’ morpheme to get the actual English plateau. Terezi coins names for her scalemates ([scale + sentient creature you do not want to kill or have sex with], the latter roughly equivalent to English ‘friend’) by combining [berry + breath], [lemon + snout], etc. Karkat’s distinctive speech pattern is actually that, rather like Dave, he loves long agglutinative chains: ‘worthless crotchstained barfpuppet’ would be a single sign-unit in Alternian, [negative prefix + value + groin + stain/smear + vomit + puppet]. It’s not really clear how any of those relate to each other, and you could equally well translate it as ‘worthless puppet whose crotch is stained with vomit’; Karkat just piles words on top of each other for effect.

Terezi thinks Dave is a [troll between the stages of grubhood and full maturity + cool/radical/awesome].

EDIT:

ceruleanvulpine asked: I really like that headcanon, but how would you fit in the more straightforward terms the higher-blood trolls use?

Archaism. Assume that the pool of core meaning-units has actually reduced over time, on the principle that all languages eventually simplify down. Old single morphemes got phased out and replaced with the easier-to-remember compounds. There was once a single dedicated morpheme for ‘large vessel you wash yourself in’, Eng. bath, but it was much easier just to say ‘[washing + container large enough to hold a non-dismembered troll]’, hence ablution trap. As such, using the old single morphemes is a mark of fancy, flowery diction. Think of how in English we actually have special words meaning ‘from where’ and ‘to where’, whence and whither, but using them now makes you sound like you’re in a 19th-century novel because everyone’s switched to the isolate forms.

Please do not ask me about load gaper. It gets kind of biological at that point.

putting delicious xenolanguage meta back on my blog

anyway this came up before but for those just tuning in i for one am still not over how lattimore translated οὐλομένη as “sluttish” when it refers to clytemnestra.

it means “accursed” or “destructive” and it’s the same word that famously describes the wrath of achilles in the second line of the iliad

but no, he didn’t think “oh cool, the ghost of agamemnon in the odyssey describes his murder at clytemnestra’s hands as if she were as destructive as achilles’ wrath! let’s make that clear to the reader by using the same word!”– on the contrary, he apparently thought “the murderer is a woman, so there’s only one option here, she’s a slut.”

shame him.

The last time I saw this on my dash it was someone having fun with Achilles’ ‘sluttish wrath’, which I enjoyed, as I have occasionally regretted some of Lattimore’s word choices myself. But this is unfair. Whatever was going through Lattimore’s head when he chose the word ‘sluttish’ here, I’m fairly confident it wasn’t ‘oh, she’s a bad woman, she must be a slut’.

Homer uses οὐλόμενος fourteen times, four in the Iliad and ten in the Odyssey. It describes Achilles’ wrath (I.2), Athene (V.876), Agamemnon (XIV.84), Ate (XIX.92), Clytaemestra (iv.92, xi.410, xxiv.97), Circe’s pig drug (x.394), the armour of Achilles (xi.555), hunger (xv.344, xvii.287, xvii.474), Antinous (xvii.484), and Penelope’s impending marriage to one of the suitors (xviii.273). It’s from the verb ὄλλυμαι ‘die, perish’, which was used in Greek as an insult: ὄλοιο ‘may you die’ is probably the single closest Greek equivalent to our ‘fuck you’, as a catch-all thing to say when you’re angry at someone. So  οὐλόμενος basically means ‘something swearable-at’, ‘something it’s worth saying ὄλοιο to’. This is why it’s often rendered as ‘accursed’ in polite English; I’d argue that a solid rule-of-thumb equivalent is actually ‘fucking’, used as an adjective.

οὐλόμενος in Homer is always spat. When it’s used of Achilles’ wrath, it’s not a term of respect or awe: mighty Achilles’ all-powerful rage! It’s Achilles’ fucking temper, that great disastrous liability that caused thousands of unnecessary deaths. Ares refers to Athene as οὐλομένη just after she gets Diomedes to stab him in Iliad V: that’s not ‘powerful Athene who has conquered me’, it’s ‘fucking Athene!!’. Odysseus is so furious with Agamemnon in XIV that he calls him οὐλόμενος to his face, which is politely turned into ‘accursed fellow!’ but should of course be ‘you fucking idiot!’.

When Agamemnon and Menelaus refer to Clytaemestra as οὐλομένη, they are absolutely not calling her powerful, destructive, ‘strong’. They’re swearing. So why ‘sluttish’, rather than some more gender-neutral term?

Well, Lattimore was clearly alive to the possibility, because when Menelaus calls her οὐλομένη in IV, it’s translated as ‘cursed’. Only Agamemnon calls her ‘sluttish’, and that’s in the Underworld when he’s comparing his homecoming (murdered by his deceitful wife) with the much better homecoming that awaits Odysseus (welcomed by his brave and faithful wife). Lattimore made the calculation, I think, that Agamemnon - a nasty piece of work throughout the Iliad, and arguably that poem’s most genuinely misogynistic character in a not-terribly-inspiring line-up - is exactly the kind of man who would bitterly characterise his wife as a slut for sleeping with somebody else. It’s an unpleasant thing to say, from an unpleasant person. When the much nicer Menelaus talks about the woman who murdered his brother, of course he calls her cursed, because what would you call someone who murdered your brother? ‘Sluttish’ is Lattimore very carefully bringing out the misogyny and pettiness so fundamental to Agamemnon’s character, making sure that even in the Underworld we can’t forget what a dick he is - and perhaps even implying that he’s more upset Clytaemestra cheated on him than that she stabbed him to death. In a more modern translation, ‘that bitch Clytaemestra’ would have a similar effect. It reminds us why Agamemnon had it coming.

psa

I’ve been enjoying a soothing end-of-year break from the Internet in general, tending to the wounds of 2016 with PG Tips and XCOM, but once the New Year arrives I aim to recommence shovelling a nutty slack of ruined buildings and outdated memes into the roaring furnace of my Tumblr queue. I hope you’re all healthy and happy as we finish another trundle round the Sun.

Everyone in my XCOM squad goes to war in muted urban camo and lightweight, practical body armour. Everyone except Feferi.

bugger

I was in Ireland for a few days visiting family, with no Internet, and of course that was when my queue chose to run out.

I may not get a chance to restock it until after the 25th, but normal posting will resume in the next few days. In the meantime, a very happy Christmas to all of you! uA and I plan to spend the day playing Terraria and eating the heavily discounted chocolate truffles that she was strongarmed into buying by an enthusiastic Italian.