#people also say to only really care about artifact farming later in game so my ar 32 ass is relying on that excuse rn

[luckbucket]

looking at genshin builds like wowzers! those sure Are Numbers! Percentages even!

[lazyevaluationranch]

I was wondering if you would be willing to share the titles of your resilience-inspiring lesbian farm books? My google search led me to a book titled “Attack of the Lesbian Farmers” which, while certainly inspiring, is not exactly what I was looking for.

Here are two very different books in the Farm Lesbians Write Honestly About What Went Wrong And How They Got Through It genre. Hopefully at least one is to your taste.

It's nearly fifty years old now, and can be hard to find, but Country Women: A Handbook for the New Farmer is deeply important to me. Country Women was a black and white xeroxed magazine written by a collective of woman-run farms in California in the 1960s. (There are some issues scanned at the Lesbian Poetry Archive). Each issue was half articles about feminism and half articles about small-scale farming. In the 1970s, the how-to articles on farming were expanded and organized to make the book, along with some scattered journal entries, lovely hippie-style line drawings and poetry about wood splitting, bees, and gazing at one's beloved while fixing the tractor on a summer day. The contributors have names like Jean and Ruth Mountaingrove, Ellen Chanterelle, and Sam♀ Thomas. 

It's written in an informal and pragmatic style, mostly organic hippie farming, but using pesticides or conventional medications when necessary.

This afternoon the Anderson brothers began teaching me how to graft fruit trees - the careful joining of life with life. Even more than I loved gaining a new skill, I loved learning from two old men who have so very much to teach me. I admire the audacity of eighty-three-year-old men setting grafts that will not bear fruit for years: the total involvement in a process they love. Those trees will stand and live; I doubt whether Jake or Fred even stop to wonder if they'll pick the fruit. I want to live my life with that kind of harmony and purpose. I want to be planting seeds the day I die.

The first lamb was born today. Premature and dead. Olivia, the mother, seems to be all right though. I had a dream a few weeks ago that the lambs were born tiny (like mice) and pink. And that I struggled to save them, but they were too small to feed. The lamb today was small and pink, its fleece plastered against its body, thin and sparse. For a moment it was nightmareishly like my dream... This is my first animal death. The beginning of a long cycle. It seems even harder to have death come before life, than to have an old one die giving birth. Hopes for the future stillborn.

Driving home today, I suddenly realized that this really is going to be a sheep ranch, that I have done, and am doing, and will do it. That I'm making my livelihood from the land. The canyon is fenced now. There are  sheep out there on pastures that were open hillsides two years ago. 

The very act of building this place, the simple actions of tamping dirt, stretching wire, dumping hay in feeders, has profoundly changed my sense of self. I'm doing things I never dreamed I could do, and I'm doing them easily without even considering whether I really can. Last night I was talking with Susan about fencing the front meadow for feeder calves, and I realized that I could say that realistically, no fantasizing, no bragging: I can fence the front meadow as soon as I get done with the hay barn and get a little more money.

Like almost every other farmer in America today, I'm in debt and hoping for a good season. I'm only at the beginning now, and I know there are many struggles to come and overcome and come again: Someday I too, like my neighbours, will be counting carcasses killed by a marauding dog or watching the spring oats be wash away in an "unheard of" late storm. No matter how prepared I am, there us always that vulnerability - to the weather, other animals, disease - that seems to strike when things are finally going smoothly. But inside me there is also this incredible joy: This life is real and good, and it has made me strong and real and good too. 

I gotta stop or I'll type the whole book into this post. One more: 

My father is here this week ... working on the truck whose engine has been alien to me. I am learning now what I could have learned at 7, 11, 15. Beneath my truck, side by side, lie his seven-year-old son and his twenty-five-year-old daughter, both of us learning for the first time how bearings fit together, how to remove pistons. And here beneath this truck the patriarchy stops: he has passed his knowledge to his daughter, and from me  it will pass to sisters, from sister to sister to sister. 

That's this book. The things women weren't supposed to know in the sixties. They found people to teach them; they taught each other; they learned through bitter loss. The book says: we have gone before you and you are not alone. Here is what we have learned, and here is how we have learned it. We have failed, and we have wept, and we have gotten up and gone on, and it was alright. Here is the fire, passed from hand to hand to hand. Here is the light that will never be put out. 

The week after we first got goats, we received a package in the mail from my coolest relative, a veterinarian who was the first woman to graduate with a specialization in large animal medicine at her school. People thought that women just weren't physically capable of handling large animals. (Hint: the bull weights 1100 kilograms. It doesn't much matter if the veterinarian weighs 50 kilograms or 150 kilograms.) I remember staying with her a child, in summer, laying on the stainless steel operating table in the barn; it always felt cool when the heat was unbearable.

The package, of course, contained Country Women. An old well-loved copy, with notes on long-ago calving dates penciled in the margins, and random scraps of paper with sketches of possible gardens and goat sheds as bookmarks.  A light passed from hand to hand, a light that will not go out. It was like receiving a video game quest artifact.

Country Women is rooted in second wave feminism, which is not everyone's cup of tea. For something more modern and story-focussed, consider Hit By A Farm or Sheepish by Catherine Friend. These are collections of short, funny autobiographical essays about farming and relationships. Their tone is honest and wry, self-deprecating. You can see Catherine Friend's blog here and decide if you like her writing style. She wanted to call Hit By A Farm "Sheep Sex and Other Disasters" but her editor didn't think it would sell. 

In Hit By A Farm, Catherine - a professional writer - goes along with her partner Melissa's lifelong desire to ranch sheep, and describes the results from the perspective of the slightly reluctant farmer's wife as they start a farm in Minnesota.  Sheepish is written fifteen years later, when they're thinking about quitting the farm, after all the shiny newness of farming and the relationship has worn off. There are different mistakes then, different sorrows, and new joys. 

From Sheepish: 

We rarely pay attention to middles. Perhaps we ignore them because they're problematic. The middles of our beds often sag. The middles of our bodies sag. The middle of a long story told by your brother-in-law is likely to sag, and so you'll need another beer to stay focused. Everyone needs a reason to keep going when they're in the middle. 

And:

Don't expect a farm to fix your life, for once the romance dims, you must still muck out the barn and stack hay bales and give that sick goat an enema...Although there are tons of stories about starting something new, there just aren't that many about how to keep doing something, about how to slog through the middle when the going gets tough.

The quotes are all from Sheepish; I can't find our copy of Hit By A Farm:

My spinning wheel continues to torture and confound me. I realize I'm not interested enough in the craft to really commit to learning it. After a few more tries, I tuck the wheel into a corner of our living room and turn it into what Melissa likes to call a Dust Accumulation Research Project. Clearly our wool market will continue to be the wildly unlucrative wholesale warehouse.

The patron saint of spinners is, interestingly enough, Saint Catherine. She was a Christian martyr in Alexandria. In 307 AD, she was condemned to be torn apart by the spokes of the wheel.

Well. No wonder.

Spoiler: things get pretty rough, there’s illness and hard winters and financial issues, but they do not, in fact, give up the farm or each other. 

The book says: We made it. You will too.

[rimebane]

About Warcraft

I felt this was only fair, just elaborating a little more on why I’m no longer as active/ quite WoW.

Big text post under cut, you guys already got the TLDR over here so if you are looking for an afternoon read, here we go.

I keep getting messages from people asking why I left the game still despite answering, but to be honest I gave a pretty washed over answer in response and thinking back on how much fun I had with the game I owe people a lot more than that considering how involved I was with it and how much it impacted me as a person.

For starters, as previously mentioned before my time was becoming more thinned out and I was starting to work more. I know a lot of you will argue ‘-but Rime, you work from home’ and yes I do, I live off of commissions but the way I played WoW vs the way I’d have to play it differed greatly and started to interfere with that.

For some background I got into the game because of my ex, and I stayed in the game even after we broke up because of the people I met along the way and my fondness for my characters. It was a form of escapism for me being single at the time and RP was the perfect outlet for inspiration along with having some sort of semblance of a relationship with someone. I wasn’t always into RP but the people I met through the community slowly got me into it, and helped me come to appreciate it.

Like any relationship, friendship, RP, whatever the exchange it has it’s hard parts and communication issues arose. I was always fairly quiet but I got dragged into a lot of messy situations just by association that I normally wouldn’t find myself in of my own accord.

On top of that I was a hardcore progression raider in a guild with a leadership so tough and stressful that raiding nights gave me anxiety despite how I managed to work my way through it. I had trouble coping with the GM’s leadership style, a wonderful person but a tough leader while juggling growing issues in my friend circle and then work to top it all off.

I realized that my happiness was the most valuable thing I could have in a game, afterall if I wasn’t having fun then what was the point? A good few months before I quit the game I went to a smaller/ local guild with some lovely people, friends I met from tumblr and in real life and it was great! But it didn’t push as effectively as the competitive guild I was in prior.

Raid nights dragged out, I wasn’t able to keep up with my weekly artifact quotas in favor of focusing on work and on top of that I’d lost a lot of people who were very close to me due to a falling out with a very good friend. And it wasn’t because those people outright decided to ostracize me, but there really wasn’t any way of carrying on some sort of regular contact/ friendship with these mutuals without it just feeling… strange, due to a split in the social group.

Gaming times would conflict with the others despite them telling me, they were more evasive of joining calls with me just simply because it would be more one-on-one rather than the usual group calls and people sometimes don’t feel comfortable in intimate settings as they do in groups. I ended up just dropping contact respectfully with most of them and I left it up to those that wanted to reach out to me to determine who I kept in contact with.

It wasn’t a month later until I took leave of my raid group. We were slowing down in progression on Nighthold at the time and I found myself signing out of raid nights because I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to keep up with the artifact system and I knew I was holding my team back as well by not farming. I’m incredibly competitive in the game, but I also care about my work and hitting weekly quotas with my earnings - and the things I wanted to do in game I just didn’t have the time for if I wanted to do the things I wanted in real life. There was this dichotomy of conflicting emotions so I just decided to put the game down and focus on what mattered to me the most.

I do have to thank those people I met afterwards though. I made another attempt to get back into RP with some lovely members of the Sunguard who were so encouraging despite me not even being in the guild.They did some one-on-ones with me to start and were pretty much with me every step of the way until I left. I left some open ends story wise with some of these people, and I’m sorry about that, but every time I tried to write, it was a reminder of stories I could no longer work on and my interest was just not there.

So there. As much as I don’t play the game anymore it is far from meaning I’ve left the fandom. Sure you won’t really be seeing as much personal activity from me but I go out of my way to take commissions specifically from you guys for fun every now and then to keep things going. I do see myself getting back into the game in the future despite how I say I won’t ever go back, if (Biiiiiig fat IF) Blizzard gets rid of these appalling grinding systems like mythic + and artifact weapons.

The Warcraft fandom is as much a part of my life as it is to the people who remember me and appreciate my work. Sure it’s not going to be the same, things can never be as they once were. But I’m still here and I have every one of you guys to thank for keeping me here who follow and support me.

Thank you.

Rime,

[entergamingxp]

Fort Triumph Review — A Pyrrhic Victory

May 6, 2020 12:00 PM EST

A functional blend of fantasy-themed XCOM battles with Heroes of Might and Magic strategy, Fort Triumph replicates their concepts but without the depth.

Fort Triumph is a tough one for me to review. It does everything it set out to do and has some rock-solid ideas conceptually. Imagine a strategy game like Heroes of Might and Magic, but replacing the massed army combat with fantasy XCOM. The combination works well, and Fort Triumph borrows strongly from both parts to make something reasonably complete. But when all was said and done, I just found myself completely unable to particularly care for it. It should’ve been something I adored, on paper, and I suspect that others will get more from it. I just found nothing to cling to, though.

“But when all was said and done, I just found myself completely unable to particularly care for [Fort Triumph].”

Tactical battles are the heart of Fort Triumph. You’re presented with a grid-based field to which your party of heroes are deployed, then take turns moving your armies. Each character gets three action points which can be used in any order and combination. Moving will cost one point up to your range, but you can spend more to move further. Most abilities and attacks will cost two to use, barring a few exceptions. So you’ll move, attack, etc. until all your characters have expended their action points, then your turn is over and the enemy moves. Fairly straightforward.

The physics are the most unique draw to Fort Triumph’s battles. Much like XCOM, standing next to objects of various heights can give either half or full cover from attacks in that direction, making you tougher to hit or damage. In Fort Triumph, every character has at least one “physics” ability that can directly interact with objects, whether they be units or cover. If an object or unit gets moved by these and strikes something else, it’ll do damage and stun them for the next turn, making them unable to use abilities. This quickly becomes the best way to manage enemies and keep them from overwhelming you.

This definitely makes for a less defensive approach to battles than XCOM. Cover is now a weapon that can be turned against you, so hiding behind a pillar will usually see it falling on you for huge damage instead. As such, I tended to play fast and direct, setting up chain stuns by pinballing objects between each other and controlling the field of battle. It’s a pretty neat idea, and definitely a good way of differentiating Fort Triumph from the crowd. This also makes sense, given that it was one of the key features of the original Kickstarter.

“Cover is now a weapon that can be turned against you, so hiding behind a pillar will usually see it falling on you for huge damage instead.”

Throughout the course of a game, you’ll build a party from any combination of four character classes: Mage, Paladin, Archer, and Barbarian. They play largely to their archetypes, gaining skill points as you level up. These skill points can be spent either learning new abilities, or upgrading the existing ones. Choosing a new ability will give you a choice out of three, with the order in which skills appear being random (and occasionally cross-class skills being an option). In theory, this keeps your characters varied in between playthroughs or squads. In practice, I couldn’t help but feel like my characters were becoming a homogenous blob. There were other factors to that though, like the story; we’ll get to that.

Between battles, you’ll be presented with a map that’s lifted almost directly from Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Parties have a set amount of movement per turn, which you can use to traverse across the map and interact with the objects you’ll find there. Some grant you items or resources, others are battles with treasure stashed behind them. Ultimately, it serves as a means of getting into more fights and accumulating experience before throwing your parties at the enemy team, who is doing exactly the same.

Bolstering this are the cities and “farms” you’ll find. Claiming a city lets you spend the resources you’ve accumulated on buildings, upgrades, and new heroes or parties. You can maintain up to three parties, but this is a risk, as the encounters on the world map won’t respawn. It can be hard to effectively level up all of them. As for buildings, you can construct up to one per turn, and space is limited so you can’t gain everything. These will generally grant your units some kind of bonus, increase your resource generation, produce more defenders if the city is attacked, and so on.

The buildings you have available are determined by your faction. There are four available, but as each of them have the same hero classes, these building abilities (and aesthetics) are the only real difference. I didn’t encounter any faction-specific skills for the heroes, so this seems to be a fairly minor feature at best.

Unfortunately, I found the overworld map to be fairly lackluster. The encounters are numerous and are usually only there to grind levels on. Challenge is minimal for most, unless you’re trying to level up a secondary party. Some of the items that can be found can change up your party capabilities quite extensively, but those are few and far between. Without the variety of units, armies, or options that something like Heroes of Might and Magic provided, Fort Triumph’s maps feel like little more than a shallow homage.

This is made all the worse by the enemy AI seemingly not playing the same game as me. They seemed to have no problem spawning pre-leveled enemies without regard to the cost. Did I beat up one of their roaming bands? It’s fine, they’ll deploy another a turn later. Losing my main party could seriously slow me down or see all my progress grind to a halt. If I’d already cleared the easy battles on the map, good luck to me.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen often because the AI also doesn’t seem to utilise the physics system well. There’d occasionally be minor attempts, but nothing like the coordinated map manipulation and stun locking I was doing. Maybe this would change on higher difficulties, but given that I was already disadvantaged in resources and party spawns, I didn’t care to find out.

Fort Triumph’s campaign will start you with a party of three adventurers — Mage, Paladin, Archer — and your first objective will be to meet the Barbarian. From there, you’ll travel the map as new objectives are placed on it, culminating in you defeating the opposing group in their city. Act completed, and on to the next. You can keep the leveled “story” units and a single artifact or boon to the next stage.

“Without the variety of units, armies, or options that something like Heroes of Might and Magic provided, Fort Triumph’s maps feel like little more than a shallow homage.”

Story in Fort Triumph is extremely lacking. Most cutscenes and moments are little more than a chance to apply some tongue-in-cheek humour that, for me, missed more than it landed. The notion of pointing out the fantasy stereotypes and then subverting them or laughing about them doesn’t make them less cliched. In fact, a lot of mid-budget fantasy games seem to use this instead of actually telling their own story; just try and evoke Dungeon Keeper’s humour but do little else, to the point where such attempts seem more common than the stereotypes.

In fairness, Fort Triumph did start making an attempt in Act 2 and onward. It started interspersing the jokes with attempts at moral quandaries, cynical statements on the way the nobles mistreat their peasants, and so on. Still, it was delivered amidst all the humour that made it really hard to want to take anything seriously.

This was even further hampered by the realisation that cutscenes specifically require a representative of each class to be present. They don’t need the individual characters, mind you; any old class member will do. Say the primary Paladin in your group was split from the party (or killed) prior to starting a story mission. No problem: the game will throw a level 1 Paladin into your party to fill in their lines. At that point, it’s kind of impossible to feel for said Paladin’s crisis of faith at learning of their order’s corruption when they aren’t the same character who discovered it. There was no attachment from that point onward for me.

There’s not much to say about Fort Triumph on the presentation front, either. The graphics are colourful and crisp, but don’t really have anything to make them stand out. Sounds are generic but effective, while the music is very limited and started growing repetitive extremely quickly.

Aside from the campaign, you can set up skirmish matches against the AI, or set up hotseat local co-op against them. There’s no online functionality, though Steam’s remote local play is enabled for it.

“Fort Triumph is a perfectly serviceable game built on an interesting blend of concepts.”

So to summarise, Fort Triumph is a perfectly serviceable game built on an interesting blend of concepts. It just ultimately feels too shallow and uninteresting for me to find anything worth attaching to. Battles are entertaining, but quickly become grindy. There’s a lack of variety in the hero classes, even with their skill customisation; there’s no real cosmetic customisation beyond colours and gender, either.

  I almost feel bad that I walked away from it with such a negative sentiment. This clearly meant something to the team, but I just found it dull before too long. Perhaps there’s someone out there who will absolutely adore this game and praise it as a hidden gem.

Still, when you’re based so heavily on a fusion of two very good games, you really need to iterate on those ideas. There has to be something about the combination that stands out; otherwise, people will just compare you to your inspiration and end up going right back to those games. On that note, I just want to play more XCOM now.

May 6, 2020 12:00 PM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/05/fort-triumph-review-a-pyrrhic-victory/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fort-triumph-review-a-pyrrhic-victory