#i'm scatterbrained and going through a depressive episode

[thewildones]

clarice + appalacian cryptids + wendigo's = a possible arc for this blog ?

yes .

[ilikemartletfromuty]

A resounding creak broke the otherwise deafening silence of Martlet's bedroom, a thin streak of light searing through its unlit pallet and illuminating the bird's nest bed, which had remained untucked and untended since Martlet left it hours earlier. The door, as doors tend to do, opened further with the press of Martlet's feathers against it.

Martlet had always been an untidy person, this was obvious to anyone who met her. It wasn't uncommon to see spare tools strewn about her present work area, sometimes forgotten in a rush to move to the next task. Lately, however, this has evolved into her supplies being buried beneath a small buildup of garbage.

Especially in her room.

Like a wave, the light from Martlet's hallway cascaded across the floor of her bedroom. Darkness gave way to a minefield of wrappers, papers, and the occasional tool or screw that she'd dropped and swore she'd get the next day, something she knew fully well was a lie.

It had been a month since the funeral, a moment that signaled a wish to move on; her wish was ultimately unfulfilled. Jobless, Hopeless, and Cloverless, she quickly found herself with less and less will to leave her house, and often resorted to sleeping away the pain.

The pain never did go away though, that was the frustrating part. It was as if it was mocking her, always hanging in the back of her feathered head. She spent hours, beak buried in her pillow, pondering ways she could have done something different to change the outcome of Clover's decision. Not leaving Clover in the Wild East, or following them into the Steamworks, was it because she never stuck with them that they didn't listen to her? Maybe if she hadn't been so scatterbrained...

She shook her head as she stepped forward, her dexterity allowing her to weave past the trash she'd graciously left for herself. From the moment she met them, she knew that Clover was selfless. They cared about her, sure, but Martlet's needs paled in comparison to the needs of monsterkind.

The crackle and pop of the wrapper of a chip bag startled her out of her grievous thoughts. She looked down, the bottom of her left talon covered in the sticky dust of cheap monster food. She didn't care, it wasn't like anyone was around to judge her appearance after all.

With a sigh, she flopped into her bed, feathers old and new soaring upwards with a rare breath of fresh air. They might as well have been the only things alive at that moment. Martlet wrapped herself in her blankets, sighed deeply, and shut her eyes. She pondered every possible 'what-if', and criticized everything she did wrong. As every night proved, this did nothing for her.

Clover wasn't coming back.

It is 1:50 AM and I'm writing a sadfic about Martlet coping with losing Clover.

It's not my best work tbh, but I hope some people enjoy it.

Also, one of the biggest signs of depression/grief is failure to keep up with basic tasks. This is actually something I've struggled with when having month-long depression episodes where I can't keep up with my bedroom.

If you know someone who's struggling with grief or depression, please check on them. If you're personally struggling, things will get better, it's okay.

[kobblefort]

Rushsly: Into the Depths 3

Here is my arena again, and the stats up top are looking good - check it out, no completely miserable kobbles!!!! This episode is going to begin with an absurdly long, totally irrelevant, mildly insane and kind of depressing rant so feel free to just skip to the next image because that's when I will start talking about the game again.

I don't know if you know this, but something happened in 2020. Well, obviously something happened in 2020, but I think what I'm thinking about might not be the thing that immediately comes to mind when you think about 2020, though it is probably a knock-on effect of it. You see, in 2020 a lot of people went Online who were just not supposed to be Online. Don't get me wrong, everyone was already on their way Online, whether willingly or by a kind of zeitgeist coercion - Boomers had finished terraforming Facebook from a clunky but quirky place to find out about parties and join groups for making esoteric image macros with other drug addicts who you would eventually just sort of meet at parties into a place for 30-comment family-shattering arguments to rage over an article your uncle found on TotallyTrueNews.RealWebsite about how public schools are forcing their students to say "I'm gay" over and over instead of the Pledge of Allegiance by 2018 at the absolute latest - but this was a more immediate event. Stuck at home with no other viable avenues for social fulfillment, a lot of people who shouldn't be on Twitter downloaded Twitter, a lot of people who had previously brushed it off started viewing and eventually making TikToks, started spending more than 48 seconds a day looking at Instagram (a rookie mistake, especially before reels) and though I'm not actually too familiar with this site we're on right now, I'm sure at least one 53 year old just showed up here and acted like they belonged while completely failing to accept or assimilate into the culture - not like, a fujoshi 53 year old, that's always kosher, I mean like owns a frozen yogurt store and listens to NPR 53 year old - again these aren't inherently bad, okay, so let's say a specifically not sexy 53 year old. (There is so much more to being sexy than being attractive, I NEED to clarify this, but this paragraph is already far too scatterbrained for me to get into it.) And because of this, something really bad started to happen. The veil was cut through between "the real world" and "the internet," all the way. Sure, you could argue this happened all the way back with the first Amazon sale, or the first time someone got a PayPal Business account, but we're talking about when the merge became complete.

A very long time ago I was a sheltered child, gravitationally anchored to a two-story house in a suburb that was closer to the country than the city, shuffled around schools every two years as part of some poorly-thought-out program for "gifted" kids where we got the same exact curriculum as any other kid in the district with twice as much homework, half as much socialization, and one particular teacher so miserable and cruel that I still find myself hoping she dies in some kind of "stepping on Legos forever" incident some twenty years later. (She seemingly went out of her way to make sure every student in our cohort broke down crying in front of the entire class at least once. I think I might actually be the age she was when she taught us now, and I can not imagine being okay with making a child cry, let alone intentionally trying to make it happen.) I certainly had it better than many in a material sense, the middle class really used to exist before 2008 and I was there in it, but my home life was actually pretty awful in the non-material senses, and in so many neglected hours I was able to take solace in one place. First over dial-up, then through DSL, and finally via glorious cable connection, I was able to leave the real world. On forums, on chatrooms, in game lobbies and Flash cartoons, I was specifically somewhere else.

Digital cameras were expensive and rare. Webcams... existed, I guess, but a 144p image on a CRT screen over AOL Instant Messenger's awkward protocol hardly made for a seamless connection, and I never had one anyway, because what the fuck did I or anyone else care what I looked like in real life? My Furcadia avatar was the real main event, or even better, my Graal Online character - an obscenely obscure game now, but it seemed bigger than the whole world when I was 9 - I was not bound by the name my parents chose for me but instead liberated by the handle I dreamt up for myself. There was no image or shape of me to weigh me down, only my thoughts and the way I managed to translate them. And there was another quality of this place that would inform my later disdain for capitalism, though I didn't know it yet: that everything was free. Though they could never find their way onto the Animal Crossing Forums or Starmen.net, and especially not Hell Is A Forum (thank god) even my parents could figure out Napster and the CD burner on our beige old Gateway desktop, and would boot me off to go play with my Dreamcast or my Genesis ever so often to burn a mix for the car or their workout - though they were trolled by that one Bill Clinton MP3 more times than any of us would like to admit, and I'm sure at least two or three of the many viruses that eventually did that old machine in came from there. Still, this was not a point of controversy, did not upset anyone besides, well, Metallica and the RIAA - it was just how the internet worked. If you could digitize something, turn it into data, break it down into a series of machine-interpretable binary bits and hexadecimal bytes, then it could be shared completely freely; there was no way to stop it from being shared completely freely. Once a thing was on the internet, it belonged to the internet, and this was not some dystopian AI-corpus financial instrument, but a worldwide triumph of human connection, a bastion of culture available to anyone with a machine and a modem. Learning things, finding things, talking to people was all so free and so easy, and connections were so beautifully earnest. Forums built around mutual interests made fast friends out of people who simply wouldn't meet in the real world, would otherwise just feel alone in their hobbies and pastimes and artistic ambitions, let everyone experience the joys of sharing in mutual passions without the aches and costs of travel, the gross fleshy trappings of physical life. You were free to just download Christian ska songs and roleplay as being an evil wolf with angel wings and talk about anime for crying out loud - which was really not normal at all yet for an American in, let's say, 2003.

My heart is warmed by younger people rejoicing in digital nostalgia, but I really wish they could have been there for the whole thing. "Y2K" was so much more than an aesthetic, it was a way of seeing the world, of experiencing the present and envisioning the future. It is truly ironic to have "digital millenium," two of the most hopeful words in the world to me when I was a kid, be the first two words of "DMCA," one of the most soul-crushing. On some level, we must have known it couldn't last forever, but the decay creeped in so slowly that you almost couldn't notice it, not unless you really looked. Paywalls went up, copyright takedowns went out, messageboards went down. Little by little, even the concession of "shareware" became corrupted by the wrong kind of perverts - coin-counting suit-wearing fun-hating puritans that, trite as it is, really did want to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. Rent-seekers claim-jumped domain names by the thousands and asked exorbitant fees to let actual creators use them, the definition of "spam" grew looser and looser until it became normal for a total stranger to E-mail you a fucking advertisement, and all the SheezyArt's and VCL's were either crushed underfoot or congealed into the same all-encompassing grey goo of Social Media, a more Accessible internet not to the people who needed it, or even particularly wanted it, but who saw it as a resource to exploit.

But for a long while, the internet was still ultimately the domain of people who wanted to be there. The Facebook boomers barely ever breached containment, and anyone with any sense knew how to keep their paths from crossing. Twitter was still overwhelmingly weird, Facebook still at least had safe pockets that made it worth logging on every couple of days. But 2020 ended this completely. The trends of the last few years reveal it so plainly: a lot of people who genuinely don't belong on the internet are on it and just stuck here now. NFT guys were never even supposed to exist - people like that are supposed to just try to one-up each other at consumer-goods conventions with luxury watches or elaborate decorative rugs. The people crying out "Mister King Elon, Sir, my Blue-Check has improved my Reach, but people still aren't liking my Tweets! What's going on!?" should be harassing each other in country clubs. Televangelists should not even physically be able to access e621 but they do, and after they finish jacking off to femboy foxes with giant cocks in striped socks like everyone else does, they feel compelled to go online and tell a crowd about how "Liberals are putting litterboxes in classrooms because the teachers make kids identify as pansexual nonbinary catboys, we need to start kidnapping endocrinologists," a crowd that should not be following for-profit parishioners on Twitter, they should be in a La-Z-Boy yelling at the TV and buying the world's shittiest kitchen knives off the Home Shopping Network.

And I mean, what do we do, right? Is this just the new cycle? Something cool comes around and we get to have fun with it for a few years until the boomers come shit all over it? How long can we go on like that? I'd say quite a while longer, actually. The truth is that a new cool thing will arise, we will have a place again for the actual weirdos and outcasts who make everything of any sentimental and cultural value to coalesce together, one that the Finance Fuckers and the Status Seekers and the hate-spewing freaks can't figure out how to get on, don't even want to get on. I don't know what it will be or where or how, but this all comes in waves. In nature, the prey population rises, then the predator population does too, then the prey population falls, then the predator population falls. There is summer and there is winter. In the human world we have made things markedly more complex, but we still operate on the fundamental principles of nature, there is still a morning after every night no matter how long. Somewhere, somehow, a new world is coming. It has to be. And somewhere in this world, something is waiting for you.

I think things like the greatest simulation game of all time, Dwarf Fortress speak to what the internet and computers really are, really can be, really should be. I think the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress is not just a relic of a more optimistic time but something that keeps the spirit of the old internet alive. Tarn once said that people who actually play the game are simply beta testers, and it is only by sharing our experiences with it to others that you get to actually "play" it. I really like that, I feel as though that concept contains the very "collaborative spirit of giving freely" from the old internet. So how about I get back to beta testing the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress for you.

New problems are often just old problems. On the left we see that more food has been left to rot on the floor, because of course it has, at this point I think they just like doing it. On the right we see that, well, I didn't really designate anyone to throw out the forgotten beast corpse or its associated parts, so... that's kind of just stinking up the place. Right at the main stairway, too! Well, down a hole on the surface it goes.

We needed more flux stone for steel production, so I went to dig into the dolomite wall of our church/main tavern floor, but it turned out to be hiding a massive iron vein. Well, there's still enough dolemite to be worth it, and it's not like more iron is bad, it's just not particularly good.

Chief Acl himself, apparently quite a religious man lately, takes the task of throwing the ratfolk necromancer down a very deep hole, cage and all. It's a quick and merciful death, which the other ratfolk will surely come to envy in time as it's now their turn to be chucked down. Well, that plan kind of has a hitch.

Only the first ratfolk is actually successfully thrown down the pit - the next two see the pathetic fate that awaits them and immediately make a break for it. And then...

Ace Steel, the Beast Slayer, catches one, beheads them, and then...

chops the other one in fucking half. Jesus Christ

And in the background, just as a little aside, our bird towers spot three ratfolk thieves trying to break in. It's too bad they haven't been able to send any survivors back to warn them about all the traps. Well, they won't get the chance now, either. These particular ratfolk are just going straight down the garbage pit because, well, I dunno, the "arena" feels like a shit idea after all.

Hey, Nillians are here! I've never seen these folks before. Hope they aren't squeamish like elves, because they got here just in time to see ratfolk thrown down a fucking garbage chute. We'll give them a nice warm welcome, and also I feel like getting some special quarters set up for the Beast Slayer. I don't want her to feel as though her hard work isn't being appreciated. Of course, she's not the only member of the military...

Dralas Containedbanded, a fine crossbowbold in his own right, has fallen asleep right in the middle of the main tavern as a party rages around him - another member of his squad, Almda Smileurn, snoozes away in the lower one. I take it they're enjoying their leave to the fullest, as they should. It'll be right back to training soon enough.

The trading post is absolutely run at this point - we seem to be popular, despite the fact we really haven't been exporting much. And oh god they're doing that thing with the wagon don't do it don't do it don't crunch it don't smush it. Okay. I'm better now. I traded with the Nillians for their instruments; we're almost completely self-sufficient now, so nothing else they have is particularly interesting.

In political news, we're a Realm now! Which means Acl's lodgings are no longer good enough, and has also inspired Alsrta Moltenend to enact a ban on the export of iron anvils. Which... yeah, sure, whatever. They're not exactly our money-makers. In fact, I don't think we've ever sold one. So yeah, sure, who cares.

Ace Steel now has a grand bedroom to share with her husband Zolr Fatvenoms (cute name) that includes satinspar furniture (her favorite rock) and pig iron walls (her favorite metal - she's worth slowing down the steel production for...) right next to the tavern. It's also around this time that I discover the population cap was set to 50; I figured we just weren't getting a lot of migrants because we weren't creating or exporting a lot of wealth, but...

That's pretty obviously not true. So I crank it back up to 200 and set about digging out some more apartments. We've been eating through vertical space pretty quickly, but as far as horizontally, there's still tons of room, and while it's obviously more efficient to just stack them instead of spreading them out, I don't particularly want bedrooms any closer to the caverns than they are, so instead I make the aesthetically questionable decision to just smush them all onto elevation -5 with the other 3-tile bedrooms.

In between all their stairwells, we create a grand mausoleum for Acl, who is apparently no longer content with just a platinum sarcophagus in a crystal glass chamber up where the proles get buried. I'd say royalty really changed him, but it kind of didn't.

There he is, putting together some random pauper's bedroom.

We got another live one! This one's a bit more worrying than the last - I can't imagine it having fire powers will bode particularly well for us.

A floor below, the hatches are locked, and both squads are set to patrol the point where it could feasibly break through. We only got a glimpse of it before it disappeared into the fog of war, but it seemed to be climbing along the walls if not outright flying, so once again the whole "don't open up the caverns on the ground level" thing turned out to be meaningless.

God she's so badass. I shouldn't even be scared. But I am, precisely because she's so badass. Losing such a great kobble would be a death blow to the fortress' morale, much less my own. The beast appears every now and then on the map, swimming around just at the edge of our revealed look into the caverns. Just now I got up from the computer, walked over to the fridge, uncovered a pan of spaghetti I've been saving since last night, and ate two handfuls with my bare hands. I just sort of tilted my head back and lowered them into my mouth. I don't know why I'm like this, my fork is clean (I only own one) but I didn't want to eat a forkful of spaghetti, I wanted to eat a handful of spaghetti. And I did, and I liked it. I don't know. Maybe that early image-generation AI was on to something. Eat spaghetti with your hands some time, just give it a try. Why not? What are you afraid of? Anyway, as we wait with bated breath...

i just wanted to sneak the horse soap into this picture because i think it's funny, it has nothing to do with anything. The year changes. 254, the start of our fifth year in Rushsly. It's certainly cause for celebration, even if this isn't the time. For now, with the beast still far enough away to remain hidden but close enough to remain a potential threat, the best we can do is let the soldiers off patrol for a little bit to calm their nerves - weapons and armor still at the ready, of course - and try to have a few more normal days. Sure, they could be our last, but really any day could, and at least we know what's coming. And in real life I'm tired but want to try a bit of Shadows of Doubt before bed so I'm going to have to cut it here. It seems like as the complexity of the fort increases, so does the length of these posts, but yet the in-game time spent only decreases. Maybe by the time we're at 100 kobbles I'll only even get through a season or two per session. Oh and sorry about that rant back at the beginning. If you actually read it then wow lol, thanks. If you didn't, don't worry, you didn't miss anything. I just don't have anywhere else to do long-form thought organizing like that right now. This may be a Dwarf Fortress Let's Play tumblr but it is also my blog. Probably not going to go on a tangent that long again any time soon but I'll warn you and tell you where to skip again if I do. I deeply appreciate your patronage take it easy thanks