This is a weirdly encouraging article in that it’s a rare case of anticipating and acting on a potential disaster before it occurs, and then getting to watch the actual disaster be harmless rather than a massive loss of life.
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#101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #our home and cherished land
The most popularly mentioned symptom of hypersensitivity is thinking or feeling that things are polluted when they aren’t. But it’s not the only one. Many hypersensitives also have “obstructed melioration”, where – especially if something is actually polluted or actually has something on it – they are so paralyzed by their feelings of disgust that they can’t take actions to clean.
You can be diagnosed with some forms of hypersensitivity even if you never make a mistake on a test of pollution identification. If you can’t touch the dishes so you can’t wash the dishes; if you can’t stand the smell of dust so you never jack up the couch to sweep it up; if something spilled in your fridge last month and you haven’t been able to open it since then even though it was only ketchup at the time, so now it’s a mold ecosystem you’d need to go after with bleach? If you have a meltdown every time you visit the bathroom and spend two hours sitting there panicking and procrastinating on cleaning up because that would mean thinking about it? If you can’t wash your hands because you’d notice the slightly less clean water rinsing off them? If you haven’t shampooed in six weeks because whenever you wash your hair it accumulates in the drain catch and then you’d have to pick it out? If you have any trouble explaining what needs doing to a professional cleaner because the words taste bad? Then you’re (insofar as you can be diagnosed online) hypersensitive.
If something is so gross that you can’t clean it – not because there aren’t enough gloves and masks and chemicals, just because you can’t stand to think about it that hard, engage with the existence of a mess that needs to be cleaned up – then that’s hypersensitivity, and it’s a disability.
Anyway, how do you all feel about cleaning reds?
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#Amenta RP #unreality cw? #yet also‚ at the same time‚ very true #I think about this post every fucking time I flinch away from cleaning my fridge #(today’s reblog brought to you by my brother finally throwing out the ~month-old corn that was‚ in his words‚ ”no longer yellow”) #(I soaked the bowl with lots of soap for a day or so and managed to clean it after that) #(…now I just need to clean the *other* moldy food container‚ currently sitting beside the sink with its lid on) #(……maybe I will wash the other dishes first) #unsanitary cw #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #domesticity
I’m sorry, sir, if you don’t renovate your summer keep and live in it at least one month out of the year, we’ll have to charge you with Negligent Dungeonization of Property. The old cellar laboratory might have belonged to your uncle, but if you aren’t going to use it, something will.
The players are a squad of government investigators, trying to prevent monsters from claiming new habitat. It’s mainly negotiation but sometimes people have an interest in attracting dangerous entities for their own purposes.
Evil accountants, hired by people who hate you surreptitiously adding gold to your treasure rooms, increasing your wealth incrementally, until the day the Dragon Event Horizon is passed and you’re ruined.
The group hired to stop the evil accountants are called Robin Hoods. They’re oftentimes nearly too late and end up having to pull some elaborate heist to distribute the gold over a wide enough geographical area that the dragon looses the scent
Let a building fall into ruin, but every year, go back there and add a bunch of gold
If you get it just right, the Dragon Event Horizon will be reached at the same time as the necromancer moves in, and then you get to sit back, eat popcorn, and take notes on what happens so you can write an article and get published in Mad Artificer Weekly
Concept: metroidvania where upgrades are gained by dying. Every time something kills you, you reincarnate at your most recent save point with an adaptation that grants a. a new movement or interaction ability, and b. immunity to whatever got you this time. The trick is that all of the obvious ways to die will quickly be exhausted (granting you your bread-and-butter toolkit in the process), so in order to stay on the upgrade treadmill you have to search out increasingly esoteric ways to get yourself killed off.
I assume that dying to novel enemies won’t cut it?
The premise would make it tricky for the game to be combat-focused in the first place. If present, enemies would probably function more as obstacles than threats; any that do have the ability to kill you only get to do so once each, and then you’re immune to that attack form – like, maybe there’s a robot that kills you with a giant laser, and when you come back you can turn invisible (and will in fact do so reflexively when shot by giant lasers in the future, regardless of source, allowing them to pass harmlessly through you).
Death to impact definitely makes you bounce. You could potentially make that two different version for fall damage vs. someone hitting you very hard with a baseball bat, but that’s logic vs. what feels right, so I’ll leave it undecided. Maybe some kind of subdual procedure, and you need to find the one bot that’s overclocked by a few hundred newtons.
If they were different, it’d make sense on the grounds of them being subtly different forms of mobility (i.e. how you use them)
You could potentially do it as, like… a containment breach game? Sort of an Aperture Science dubious science institution? Or maybe a bit more SCP.
Either way, you’d definitely be up against people with a vested interest in keeping you contained and alive. (probably because they know what you’re capable of.)
So… Knockout gas, and if you want to pass it, you have to be able to just, not breathe, which you probably get by finding a way to drown yourself.
The invisibility you get from diving into their Science Laser also lets you sneak past their security grid, letting you avoid more guards.
The problem I’m noticing here is that there’s a lot of passive stuff, and it feels like it’s hard to justify a lot of active abilities because you the player or you the character could choose to just… not use them.
The trick to avoiding having the player character simply accumulate a laundry list of passive invulnerabilities is to have whatever mechanism is responsible for their repeated resurrection come up with extremely weird adaptations to whatever killed them. The “killed by a laser, become invisible” example should not be an outlier!
Other examples could include:
Death by fire seems to grant the expected basic heat immunity, except you’ll quickly discover that if you heat up too much, you’ll explosively vent the accumulated thermal energy shortly after leaving the hot environment. This could be used to destroy obstacles, but it could also be an obstacle in itself, if whatever’s on the other side of the hot environment would react poorly to being blown up.
Death by falling might make you bounce; alternatively, it might make you shrink, thereby reducing your terminal velocity and rendering the impact with the ground harmless (i.e., by the same principle that insects and small rodents can fall long distances without harm). If you want to be a real bastard about it, this one can’t be triggered voluntarily, so if you need to fit into a small space you need to figure out how to fall near its entrance.
Death by acid? Secrete a neutralising base! The effect of the two substances cancelling each other out is purely cosmetic if you’re just, say, walking through acid rain, but if you manage to fully immerse yourself in the stuff, the resulting vigorous chemical reaction can be used as a makeshift form of propulsion.
Being killed by the claws of an animal-like monster grants the ability to emit a very loud, annoying noise, scaring them off. This would figure into sound-based puzzles later on, of course, but it also triggers automatically on proximity to threats similar to the one that granted it, which might be exploited to create stealth challenges.
Assuming that the game has bosses (which is by no means a given), there are lots of games where the final boss fight’s primary failure state isn’t “the boss kills you” – designing a final boss around an unkillable player character probably requires less outside-the-box thinking than designing regular enemies around the same.
I truly am obsessed with how Knives Out was like. Hello Daniel Craig, man who has spent the past two decades of his career being alternately beaten up and objectified playing an action hero with no personality. Would you like to please put on a shirt and an incomprehensible vaguely Texan accent and flex your character acting dark comedy muscles as well as your pecs for a while. And he’s like BOY WOULD I and they made a work of art. Also love that they put Chris Evans in sweaters. Get your beefcakes then dress them nice make them soft and give them some bonkers character work to do it’s what cinema needs more of
I love that several people have responded to this with “op I forgive you cause you’re Scottish but that’s not a Texan accent” which is fair thank you I appreciate it but no two people have agreed on what accent it is which is also Absolutely fair and hilarious as a reaction to this film
Cannot stress enough that I do not know what the fuck a foghorn leghorn is but literally a hundred people have said it to me so far so I’m assuming it’s important to, like, Americans
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#accents #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog
RPG with one of those “humans can’t use magic” settings where the party consists entirely of human magic-users, each with an increasingly strained explanation for why they technically don’t count as human.
A spell backfired on me and I started growing feathers on my arm. I am not a featherless biped.
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#story ideas I will never write #fun with loopholes
One of my favorite tricks for designing alien species/cultures is to take a real animal with an interesting lifecycle and think about what that biology would translate to if they had human intelligence
Example: silk moths as a base species
Because the moths themselves don’t eat and only live long enough to mate and then starve to death, the entire culture is made up of children and adolescents. The older children raise the younger ones, with families being made up of hatchmates from different years.
Because molts and eventual transformation into a short lived adult happen on a set schedule, families have a cycle— when your oldest set of siblings cocoon to become adults, you wait at the mating grounds and try to adopt their newborns after they pass. If that fails, you take any ‘orphans’ you can find.
Because death and birth are nearly simultaneous, they have a religion based around reincarnation, and infants with markings similar to a parent are often given their name. Claiming the offspring of a beloved family member is vitally important, because you want to be able to protect their soul and keep them close.
Because it’s hard to track the offspring of your male family members, there are sometimes major fights when a family sees an infant with familiar markings in another family’s clutch.
Between mating seasons, their culture is extremely food-oriented, because everyone is growing and silkworms eat nigh constantly. They spend most of their lives outdoors but sleep and shelter from bad weather in large family dwellings made from wood and the remains of the silk cocoons of prior generations.
everyone is really vibing with the silkworm aliens I see
And then I suppose the obvious episode plot hook is, “they’ve just figured out how to deliver fluids and nutrients intravenously, or equivalent, and they’re about to start finding out how long their bodies can last into adulthood without that limitation.”
Or, some advanced alien species dropped by, analyzed their biology, and said, “thanks for ‘letting’ us examine a few abducted specimens, in exchange, here’s how you can get nutrients without eating“, and then just fucks off.
Brinens and Things 