#fucking origin

[pudding-parade]

Y'know....

I was going to fire up TS3 today because I feel like building some shit. But! Origin did a "critical update" yesterday. And now it won't load. It just keeps erroring. Which means I can't play TS3 until I figure out why the hell Origin won't start, and I'm just not in a forensic mood right now. So...Fuck it. Back into the RimWorld I go...

Talking about a RimWorld colony (and lots more cursing because I am a pottymouth) behind the cut. Maybe someone else who plays/has played that game will find it amusing.

I started a colony with two pawns on a planet with a permanent solar flare, which means electricity doesn't work. (Because apparently no/limited electricity has to be a thing in all games I play.) My intention was for it to become a colony of druglords. Not drug-users themselves, but people who become fabulously wealthy via making and selling drugs to other people. (Basically, I wanted to play with all the drug mods I've downloaded because I now have more fucking mods for RimWorld than I have for TS3.) That was my plan. I had it all envisioned and figured out. I had even partially drawn a layout for the settlement I'd eventually build.

I don't know why I bother. My plans never work out in this game.

In this case, about 10 days into the colony, with a few food crops and a large patch of smokeleaf happily growing away, Randy gave me two tamed male muffalos that joined the colony. Which I gotta admit is better than when Randy gave me 12 tamed cobras that I had to figure out how to feed when playing a vegan-by-ideology colony. LOL (On the plus side, since I have a mod that allows all animals to be trained in everything, I turned them and their progeny into attack cobras so, essentially, they fed themselves.) I also have this mod that adds various genetics to animals (and human pawns) so that you can do selective breeding/eugenics.

So I decided, what the fuck, I'll add some selective animal breeding (specifically, breeding muffalos for better wool production, much like I do in real life with alpacas) to my little drug operation because why else would Randy send me muffalos? Muffalos would also be helpful to have around once the colony graduated to caravanning to sell their wares rather than having to wait for traders to show up. So, all good. 

My map happened to have a herd of wild muffalos, so I had the one pawn who had good animal skill go out and tame one of the pregnant females (because I have a mod where the wild animals procreate) with good wool genes before the horde of grizzly bears ate them all. (More on that in a minute.) The female birthed a female calf, fortuitously, who had even better wool genes than her mother, so now I had my little muffalo wool operation going, along with a side operation of breeding an army of wild boars for speed plus melee damage, so that they are becoming supersoldier-esque killing machines. (Because wild boars are awesome that way; they're my favorite RimWorld animals, and I always tame at least a pair whenever I have them on my map. Why deal with a pack of manhunting chickens -- or dumb raiders armed with primitive weapons -- when I can just release the attack-trained boars and let them have at it?) So the druglord thing? Pretty much forgotten, at least until I get some more pawns with plants skill to handle growing the raw product and pawns with crafting/intellectual skill to process the raw product. Because while my original two had those skills, they became busy with taming and maintaining animals, among other things.

Basically, it's as RimWorld always is, at least for me: I go into a colony with an idea, and the storyteller (usually Randy because he's my fave) fucks everything up and I end up doing something completely different. This is why I love this game. So yeah, I go from druglords to...weird ranchers who breed murderous boars and mutant hairball muffalos.

The fly in my ointment? The fucking grizzly bears. 

I don't know why, but for some reason this map is obsessed with fucking grizzly bears. At the start it had one megasloth, one cougar, a little herd of wild boars (from which I tamed my progenitors), a sizeable herd of deer, three rhinoceroses, a small herd of muffalo, a handful of boomrats, smaller predators/prey like rabbits, foxes, mink, rats, and squirrels...and EIGHT FUCKING GRIZZLY BEARS. EIGHT OF THEM. They eventually ate everything except the rhinos, the megasloth, and the boomrats. And more of them kept coming, either by migration or by breeding. At one point, there were 26 grizzly bears on the map. Whenever anything else would migrate in, it wouldn't last long. Anything non-predatory? Dead. Other predators? Dead. Sometimes they attack each other, usually ending up with one dead bear and the other fatally injured. So I have a map full of hungry grizzly bears, rhinos (because nothing messes with fucking rhinos, though at least they breed slowly), a seething mass of boomrats (which by programming won't be attacked by predators), and one lone megasloth just doing her thing off in a corner.

And here's me, with my small ranch of muffalo and boars plus a boomrat that tamed itself. Basically, my colony has the only prey on the map. Now, I don't usually bother with hunting in the game. It's not just because I'm a gigantic softie who doesn't like killing even sprite animals. It's more that, to me, it's more efficient to concentrate on fishing and growing crops, especially since I have some meat-substitute crops and especially since, because I play without electricity, meat and meals made from it tend to rot faster than I can use them, unless it's winter and/or I have one or two pawns that just make pemmican all their waking hours. But now I have no choice in the matter. The fucking grizzly bears keep coming after my animals, so I have to keep killing them, though I still only kill them if they come too close. If they stay on their side of the river, I’m happy to leave them alone, but if they come over to my side...they’re fucking done. 

Here's one twenty-four hour period of errant bears:

Yep, had to kill four of them, and on that day, two more fled off the map and one was bleeding to death on the other side of the map. It's insane. And when I kill them, the game just brings in more, usually two at a time. But on the plus side, 1) My pawns' shooting skills are through the roof, and they can reliably take raiders out with one headshot now and 2) I can clothe all my pawns in bearskin apparel, which is great for the cold weather, and the excess sells for a good amount of coin when I have a trader come by.

But, I do have a plan to end the bear attacks and subsequent bear carnage. I'm in the process of building palisade walls around the settlement, but it takes time to cull enough lumber to build them (because they can only be built out of wood and each tile takes eight wood as opposed to five for regular wood walls), especially because I'm constantly being interrupted by bears hunting me and mine. I need to enclose a large space for the muffalo operation alone. But eventually I'll get it done, even if I have to set up a lumber operation on another map (to escape the bears and to have more trees) once I have more pawns. (Right now, I only have three, plus a prisoner I’m trying to recruit because she has good plant skills.) Once I have that done.....

I'm worried about the boomrats. There are dozens of the little fuckers, because they keep breeding and they won't ever be attacked by predators. There is a mod that allows predators to attack boomers that I'm considering adding because the horde of fucking grizzly bears will certainly attack them, but that means there'll be a lot of fires, and since palisade walls can only be made out of wood and I've only got three pawns right now so not a lot of firefighting manpower...yeah. I dunno. I keep thinking they'll migrate away, but they don't seem to want to. I've decided that I'm just going to turn off boomer spawning because they just tend to clog up my map due to the wild animal breeding mod, plus I don't ever use chemfuel anyway, so it's not like I need to have a herd of tamed boomalopes to provide it. But that doesn't solve the problem of all the boomrats I have already...

[mayhemchicken-artblog]

in the hour or so it took me to draw this op turned reblogs off

EDIT: reblogs are STAYING OFF. op was right and correct and i have never regretted making a post as much as this one. if you want to reblog my art you can reblog something else from my blog. or commission me, lord knows i deserve financial compensation for the nightmare this post has put me through

[vivi266]

[nonebinary-leftbeef]

DEVASTATING the lyric you've been mishearing is better than the real one

[littlemizzlinguistics]

Studying linguistics is actually so wonderful because when you explain youth slang to older professors, instead of complaining about how "your generation can't speak right/ you're butchering the language" they light up and go “really? That’s so wonderful! What an innovative construction! Isn't language wonderful?"

[renthony]

Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.

People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"

Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.

I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.

[egophiliac]

bring back zooterkins, the best 17th-century swear word

I don't normally do Just Characters Swearing, but. ...this kind of wrote itself and then wouldn't leave my head. it comes from both a piece of character-writing advice that has always stuck with me, and also my conviction that Leona is 1000% funnier as a character if his dialogue has to stay G-rated. let Kalim say fuck, but don't let Leona say bastard.

(I'm sorry)

[raytorotits]

ray toro and gerard way kissed did you know about this

[blueskittlesart]

i hope everyone in nintendo’s management department dies and goes to hell no matter what and i’m not kidding

[pudding-parade]

Annnnnnnd now Origin has magically decided to work. I don’t know why. I didn’t do anything that I hadn’t done yesterday while trying to get it to load. Maybe EA pushed an update to the update. Whatever.

Buuuuuuut I’m now invested in this RimWorld colony anyway, so that’s what I wanna play. There’s an update about it behind the cut, if anyone cares. I do still want to build some shit in TS3, though, so I’m sure I’ll do that in the next day or two. Assuming that Origin continues to behave, that is.

Anyway, my silly RimWorld colony.

I’m up to five colonists now, all female except for one of the originals, who’s a man that’s married to the original woman colonist (who’s now pregnant). This is thanks to the prisoner recruitment that I was working on plus a shuttle crash that gave me two pawns with skills relevant to my interests. So, with that, I’m able to get the actual drug operation that I had originally intended to have up and running a bit more, since now I have two animal-and-construction-focused pawns, two plant-and-crafting-focused pawns, and one to cook and do all the little miscellaneous tasks like cleaning and refueling, though I could definitely use another pawn for the miscellaneous tasks so that the other can just be a cook. I could also use a dedicated fisherman. And a researcher. We’ll see what Randy deigns to give me.

Mother Nature to the Rescue: My boomrat and (for the moment, at least) bear problem was solved by...a heat wave. Two-and-a-half days of temperatures above 130F/55C drove all the wild animals off the map. My colonists were fine (albeit a little hot and sweaty) because of devilstrand + bearskin clothing (which has good heat and cold insulation) plus having some rooms dug into rock (and further cooled with passive coolers) thanks to one of the new colonists (the cook) being an Undergrounder with awesome mining skill. I was worried about my animals, who couldn’t all fit in the cave rooms, but they all pulled through OK. So yay! No more boomrat horde. (There were 44 of them when the heat wave hit!) I stopped playing not too long after the heat wave ended, and at that point all that was on the map were a few small prey animals and a garter snake. (SNEK! ❤️) We’ll see if the bears come back. Or if they’ll be replaced by wargs or some other monstrosities I have via animal-adding mods. (Ancient giant spiders, anyone?)

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em: Or have them join you, as the case may be. My two animal-focused pawns each got an inspired taming, one right after the other. So I said “fuck it” and tamed two of the grizzly bears, a young male and a female who is pretty old but is pregnant, so hopefully she’ll have a female cub or three before she dies. They both have good melee damage and speed genes, and both will be trained in everything: guarding, attacking, rescuing, hauling, and hunting, the latter via another mod. So...supersoldier grizzly bears AND supersoldier boars. Raiders be fuuuuuucked, man. LOL

My New Colonists Are Rad, Part 1: The prisoner recruitment, the only survivor of a three-person primitive cannibal raid who seemed to think they could take on my selectively-bred boar army. (This was before I had bears, too.) They were dead wrong. I didn’t even have to get colonists involved. Two of the three were almost instantly eviscerated while only managing to lightly bruise their attackers with their clubs. The third, my recruit, was merely downed. By a baby boar with excellent melee damage genes (152%, the best of the bunch so far), though to her credit she did manage to cut off one of the boar’s ears with the very crappy knife she was carrying before it downed her. (Perhaps that was foreshadowing...) So, she’s 14 years old and has the really skinny body type. Fortunately for her, she has good plants skill, so I didn’t just leave her for the boars to eat like her compatriots. As it turned out, she also has the trigger-happy trait. So, once converted (just to get rid of her cannibalism; I don’t usually bother otherwise unless I’m playing bigoted proselytizers) and recruited, I gave her a small, light machine pistol that I had acquired from raiding a pirate farming settlement, and she is fucking lethal with the thing. The gun is short-range but, being a machine gun, it fires many bullets very quickly, and combined with the trigger-happy trait’s increased firing rate, she’s a killing machine. It doesn’t even matter that the trigger-happy trait also decreases accuracy, given the weapon she has. And at the moment she only has 3 shooting points. Can’t imagine what she’ll be like when she has 10+ and is armed with a better machine gun. I kinda wanna rename her “Joanna Rambo,” though I don’t know if it’s possible to rename pawns. Anyway, a tiny, skinny, 14-year-old killing machine...who also enjoys growing things and has the kind trait, so she regularly gives other pawns positive buffs by saying nice things to them. Like a little ray of sunshine toting a machine gun. LOL  

My New Colonists Are Rad, Part 2: One of the shuttle crash victims. A 37-year-old woman who has excellent animal and medical skills because of a veterinarian backstory...and is also fucking lethal. I gave her a masterwork recurve bow made by Original Colonist Dude, even though she has better melee skill. (Because the ideology of the colony reveres ranged weaponry and despises melee weaponry, Original Colonist Dude is a master craftsman who makes amazing bows now and who will no doubt make amazing guns once there’s time to research machining.) Anyway, during one of the bear attacks when the bear was coming for a newborn boar, the first shot from one of the other colonists hit its foot and turned it into a manhunter, but since this colonist was closest, it went after her first, not the colonist who shot it. It wasn’t far from her, so I thought she was a goner. At best I hoped I could get someone to her to save her if I could distract the bear away from her and her rescuer. That wasn’t necessary. She fired a single arrow at it and destroyed its brain. Dropped dead instantly. It usually takes 8-10 bullets from a colonist with 10+ shooting skills and a rifle to bring down one of these things, but she did it with one fucking arrow. I thought it was a fluke. It wasn’t. She subsequently went on a raid (which her ideology likes, so raiding and killing people gives her positive mood buffs) and killed two defenders with single shots to their brains from her bow. From across a river, no less. I don’t know what it is about her, but she is fucking scary and is now, unofficially, named Wonder Woman. And she only has 4 shooting points! Can’t wait to see what she’ll be like with more shooting skill and a masterwork/legendary greatbow. Gotta do the research for that first, though. 

[glumby]

I love the concept of exile. like dude just get out

[homestuckreblogs]

[montanabohemian]

if i see a single one of you pissed that your faves canceled an event or a con appearance because they're striking for fair wages then imma come for you in your sleep 🔪🔪🔪

(direct that fury where it belongs: AMPTP and the execs)

[vmkhoneyy]

“People are inherently terrible” no!!! Have you ever seen a child wait for their friend while they tie their shoelaces? Have you ever known someone who would bring hurt squirrels and rabbits and mice to the nearest vet just so it doesn’t suffer? Have you seen someone grieve? Have you ever read something that hit your heart like a freight train? Have you looked at the stars and felt an unexplainable joy? Have you ever baked bread? Have you shared a meal with a friend? Have you not seen it? All the love? All the good? I know it’s hard to see sometimes, I know there’s pain everywhere. But look, there’s a child helping another up after a hard fall. Look, there’s someone giving their umbrella to a stranger. Look, there’s someone admiring the spring flowers. Look, there’s good, there’s good, there’s good. Look!!!!

[ahahnopenope]

here's the picture i couldn't get out of my head

[staffs-secret-blog]

Fuck me I misread that as tumblr is shutting down