So there’s this company in the UK, right. They brand themselves on producing fancy free range eggs and as part of that they have breed information written on the carton.
I did some snooping and found that every miracle news story of a supermarket egg hatching in the UK traced back to duck eggs, specifically the Braddock White duck eggs produced by this one company for the supermarket Waitrose.
And one day my mum brings them home and says “I bought these to eat but aren’t they the ones that hatch?”
And it’s spring and I’m hatching a ton this year so in they went.
On candling we had three fertile eggs! That’s a fertility of 50% – the same as shipped eggs from a breeder!
Hatch day comes and we get 2 ducklings, Curie and Becquerel. Sadly, Curie contracts duck septicaemia from an infected navel and doesn’t make it, but Becquerel is a healthy bird and growing like a weed.
I had put 4 breeder eggs in a week after them in case just one hatched, so Becque now has two Khaki Campbell cross friends called Tsuki and Hoshi so she isn’t lonely.
And as of today’s 7am Quacking – Becque is a female! Which means she’s capable of laying eggs and therefore I have pirated a duck.
You wouldn’t download a duck
Tags:
#food #ducks #adorable #death tw? #fun with loopholes #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(I did laugh at the ”pirated a duck” line‚ but‚ like‚ they *did* pay for the egg) #(I guess it’s more like DRM stripping)
It doesn’t get talked about enough, but This Discord Has Ghosts In It is a rad example of how you can adapt game design to your surroundings.
Basically, This Discord Has Ghosts In It is a digital larp. It’s Phasmophobia played by chat. Your group creates a discord server to function as a haunted house, then you all explore it, building new ‘rooms’ out of channels as you go.
Some players take the roles of ghosts, and are muted but can affect the environment in the haunted house.
Other players take the roles of explorers, and can talk, but the ghosts are all listening.
Discord wasn’t built to be gamified this way, but that doesn’t matter.
As long as you can guarantee consistent behavior from a thing, you can build mechanics off of it.
Anything in your environment can be turned into a game.
And in this particular case, it’s a really good one!
The mechanics lend themselves well to the kinds of pacing, limited communication, and untrustworthy setting that any good ghost story needs.
If I had a dollar for every time someone told me I’m a scheming bastard, I would pay someone a dollar to tell me I’m a scheming bastard twice, repeating this process until both of us are filthy rich, splitting the gains 50/50
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #fun with loopholes
my quality of life has improved tenfold ever since i was introduced to breezewiki, a site that exists solely to remove the bloat from fandom.com wikis. no more ads, quizzes, random autoplaying videos, popups, recommended pages from other sites, or discord server member lists. just the wiki. these things are finally readable again
BreezeWiki is SOOOO good! they even have an instruction manual on their site for adding an extension to your browser that will automatically redirect you to the BreezeWiki version of any Fandom link you happen to visit, which has been an absolute game-changer for me. i’ve literally already forgotten what regular Fandom pages looked like, it’s beautiful.
i just discovered today that they ALSO have a function (if you install the auto-redirect extension) that will usually stop you to let you know if a Fandom wiki you’re visiting has a non-Fandom alternative you can visit instead. for example i was trying to look up a Zelda thing today and was greeted with this message:
so yeah, love the work they’re doing over there! can’t recommend BreezeWiki enough. i wish an inevitable and humiliating death to Fandom and i’m very grateful for intrepid heroes like these folks.
Tags:
#ooh #fun with loopholes #the more you know #(prolific UBlock Origin element blocking can make Wikia *usable*‚ but BreezeWiki’s formatting is definitely a step beyond that) #I’ve added this to my redirector extension
can the fish CHOOSE to go in there or not?? who decided to empower them with a fish-wizards tower so that they may gaze out onto the realm of humankind????? this is too much power for any aquatic vertebrate to hold!!!
they can totally leave and swim around in the pond if they want to. this is considered a form of enrichment even, which half-answers question number 2. i can assure you though that the knowledge of the air-world they can gather from the observatory will not be used for evil nor good, as the noble quest for more pellets overshadows such trivial affairs.
what are the man-made concepts of good or evil, what is a false dichotomy, in the face of the one true power in the universe: PELLETS
Two identical infants lay in the cradle. “One you bore, the other is a Changeling. Choose wisely,” the Fae’s voice echoed from the shadows. “I’m taking both my children,” the mother said defiantly.
Once upon a time there was a peasant woman who was unhappy because she had no children. She was happy in all other things – her husband was kind and loving, and they owned their farm and had food and money enough. But she longed for children.
She went to church and prayed for a child every Sunday, but no child came. She went to every midwife and wise woman for miles around, and followed all their advice, but no child came.
So at last, though she knew of the dangers, she drew her brown woolen shawl over her head and on Midsummer’s Eve she went out to the forest, to a certain clearing, and dropped a copper penny and a lock of her hair into the old well there, and she wished for a child.
“You know,” a voice said behind her, a low and cunning voice, a voice that had a coax and a wheedle and a sly laugh all mixed up in it together, “that there will be a price to pay later.”
She did not turn to look at the creature. She knew better. “I know it,” she said, still staring into the well. “And I also know that I may set conditions.”
“That is true,” the creature said, after a moment, and there was less laugh in its voice now. It wasn’t pleased that she knew that. “What condition do you set? A boy child? A lucky one?”
“That the child will come to no harm,” she said, lifting her head to stare into the woods. “Whether I succeed in paying your price, or passing your test, or not, the child will not suffer. It will not die, or be hurt, or cursed with ill luck or any other thing. No harm of any kind.”
“Ahhhhh.” The sound was long and low, between a sigh and a hum. “Yes. That is a fair condition. Whatever price there is, whatever test there is, it will be for you and you alone.” A long, slender hand extended into her sight, almost human save for the skin, as pale a green as a new leaf. The hand held a pear, ripe and sweet, though the pears were nowhere ripe yet. “Eat this,” the voice said, and she trembled with the effort of keeping her eyes straight ahead. “All of it, on your way home. Before you enter your own gate, plant the core of it beside the gate, where the ground is soft and rich. You will have what you ask for.”
Brinens and Things 