This year I got a Raspberry Pi, which happens to be exactly what I wanted...
For those of you who aren't in the know, the Raspberry Pi is a low cost single board linux computer, and it is very popular in hobby electronics circles.
I haven't figured out exactly what I wanna do with it, but for the time being, I'm gonna load upo Raspbian onto an SD card and hook it up to my television.
My miners are still carving out bedrooms and removing a few surface ramps. I'll take the time to start beautifying the fortress. And as admiring a tastefully arranged statue goes along way towards improving a dwarf's mood, I have asked my manager to have twenty rock statues constructed. Later these will be place in various high traffic areas.
Now, which of my idlers should I set to engraving duty?
I set two unemployed hunters to engraving duty and designate a section of the bedroom wing to smooth. Soon one of the two loafers show up and gets to work, but to my surprise, so does my broker. And he smooths FAST. Investigating, it turns out that he is a legendary engraver. Nice.
Ghosts are cool.
I look around to see what else is going on... It seems on the surface I've gotten a chunk of the ramps dug out (finally) and a series of walls underway (again, finally). And I spot... a ghost!
My sprawling catacombs.
Who am gonna call? Nobody at the moment. But if it does become a problem, I'll just call my engraver and have a memorial slab carved. But that does remind me, what ever happened to that plan of mine to put in some catacombs?
There's my catacombs, and they need some work. But, that'll have to wait until my miner finished digging out the bedrooms. Otherwise, I'll never get anything done.
I let things run for a while- I make sure my workshops are still operating. I set one of my jeweler's workshop back to encrusting furniture, my engravers continue smoothing things, and my farmers complain about being out of plump helmet spawn again. Then I get the following notification:
It seems a bunch of troglodytes have arrived, too. Anyone wanna bet it's a troglodyte werelizard?
The Werelizard Akul Icgasom has come! Who the heck is the Werelizard Akul Icgasom? It'll find out next time (I promise, it'll be less than a month till the next update). Seeing as it's almost Christmas, I figure I'll upload a copy of my save game for any readers who wanna pull Akul's tail off to see if it'll grow back...
Near the end of World War 2, a team of Russian soldiers find themselves battling an army of reanimate corpses turned into horrific killing machines built by the deranged descendant of Victor Frankenstein.
Actually, the plot is simpler than that, it's basically a slasher film where the killers hack their way through soldiers rather than fornicating teenagers. With the added bonus of a mad scientist ranting towards the end. Plus, the monsters are actors in costumes, which unfortunately feels like a novelty these days.
If you love all things horror, then this movie is pure fun with a side order of imaginatively scary monsters. If you like plot and story however, it's a bit thin in those departments. Even worse is the film's use of shaky cam. It doesn't make the movie feel any more real, as if it was footage released from old Soviet archives. No, it just gives me flashbacks of playing Wolfenstein 3D as a teenager. Filmmakers who may be reading this please take note: skaky cam is a perfectly fine filmmaking technique that should never be used again. EVER.
What's that? You say "But I have a legitimate reason to use shaky cam..."
No. No you don't. No Shaky Cam.
Despite these shortcomings, I enjoyed this movie. It's the perfect type of movie to watch late at night with a bunch of friends with the lights out. Or if you can't decide between watching Enemy at the Gates or Hellraiser.
A diplomat has left unhappy. Well isn't that too bad. Maybe if my expedition leader/legendary miner wasn't still recovering from being mangled by that troglodyte last season...
But thanks to the bronze and steel bars I traded from the caravan last season I can finally forge some real weapons. Now my militia happily chiffonade troglodytes with real battle axes rather than use the cheap wooden ones they used on the troll.
Now, all I need to do is.... wait, what?
#@&%, he was legendary, too!
That does explains why he wouldn't meet with the outpost liason. Ineth was found dead in the public barrack where he had been recovering from his injuries. Who the heck was on give food & water duties? I suppose it's time to build some catacombs before we get ghosts.
I'll have my new miners get right on that. Just as soon as they finish digging out my bedroom wing.
And, I'm greeted with another announcement. My mayor (I've got a MAYOR? When did that happen. Did you guys know I have a mayor?) has mandated the construction of a crown. The dwarves sure didn't waste any time electing a new leader, did they?
I wonder what she's making with all that?
Yay! My weaponsmith has been taken by a strange mood, and was last seen carrying some silver bars to the forge that she just claimed. I hope to have a legendary weapon soon... I haven't had one of those since I had got a goblin bone ax in the 2d version.
After a little bit of waiting and a draltha reverting to a wild state and mauling a baby to death, I have:
Finally! An artifact that's not useless!
Rabed Melist, a silver spear! Now I might just train up a speardwarf.
Tomorrow marks the start of the most magical month of the year, National Novel Writing Month, where each of us are challenged to produce a short, hastily written piece of fiction! The guidelines calls for writing a 50,000 word novel between November 1st and November 30th. That may seem like a bit, but it works out to just less than 1700 words a day.
I've dabbled in fiction writing before, but this year, I've decided to take up the challenge with a short hastily written novel of my own: Roller Disco of the Damned, where a masked wrestler must save a town from the curse of it's abandoned (and evil) roller disco.
My valiant militia commander and her subordinates are fighting the troll who had taken up residence in my pastures. But with three of them being unarmed, they are taking their sweet time at it. Perhaps that's for the best, my raw recruits need the practice, the fact that one of them managed to loose their trousers mid battle is evidence of that.
Strangely, I seem to have acquired 2 axedwarves during this battle. On inspection, I discover that my dwarves are armed with wooden training axes. No wonder that troll is taking so long to die.
And having repaired my legendary miner's compound fracture, my chief medical dwarf is now a dabbling surgeon! When my miner recovers, we'll celebrate by building a hospital!
Hear that, our works are LEGEND!
Even better, the dwarven caravan has arrived. For some reason, their wagons refuse to travel over the cage traps at the fortress' entrance, but I still have a line of mules laden with goods heading into my fortress. Hopefully, one of them will bring me the metals that I have been longing for.
Oh, and as the caravan begins unloading their goods and my broker makes his way towards the depot, my militia has finally hacked the troll to death.
In exchange for a handful of highly decorated trinkets, I manage to acquire all the metal bars the caravan brought, miscellaneous weapons, a mountain of leather and cloth, various food items, and a broker with the appraise skill. Not a bad haul, if I might say so myself.
The immigrant waves I've had have all been large, I'm probably two immigrant waves away from seeing my first goblin ambush.
Plenty of flux, but no ores on my map.
Obviously, my most important concern is getting my fortress able to defend itself, both from goblin invaders and from the cave full of troglodytes that have killed two dwarves and a blue peacock.
My plan to secure Overguilds consists of two parts, first to construct a danger room and begin training a military to be equipped with weapons and armor made from metals acquired from the caravan.
The other part of my plan is to remove most of the stairs and ramps on the surface so I can force hostile creatures and invaders into cage traps. I also plan on walling off my above ground pastures.
The second part of my plan is where I ran into my first problem with that plan, while my legendary miner was removing the slopes near my bee hives, he was accosted by one of they previously mentioned troglodytes. You might think that an legendary dwarven miner armed with their trusty pickax would be able to kill a troglodyte with ease, I know I thought so.
My wounded miner.
Well, now I have a wounded miner on resting in bed waiting for my newly appointed chief medical dwarf to diagnose his injuries.
My militia commander (the sole armed dwarf in the fortress besides my woodcutter) is dispatched and makes quick work of the troglodyte.
Her first kill... I hope it's the first of many.
But my militia commander only commands one other dwarf. For her to be a true militia commander, she'll need to actually have dwarves under her command, so it's up to me to see who I can assign to her command...
But what's this? A dwarf has been possessed and has claimed a workshop. Just when I was occupied by more important things, too. Typical of Dwarf fortress, really. Degel Tashemolin, for your sake, you had better make a diamond axe in that jeweller's workshop you just claimed. Degel immediately runs to the gem stockpile across the hall and grabs some rough amethysts before beginning construction. Looks like I am gonna be saddled with an amethyst earring or sock... And it's an earring, big surprise! It'll go well with my other artifact earring.
Now back to setting up my militia. I've added a few useless dwarves to my militia and now I set up a barracks for them to train in...
Let's hope he's just here to say irritating things.
What's this? A TROLL is harassing the masons who are trying to wall off my pastures. Well, I guess I'll dispatch my militia again....
I'm back home from my trip to Oklahoma City where I visited my sister's family. She has two young children and while I enjoyed seeing them it was very exhausting trying to keep up with an infant and a toddler. One of the highlights of my trip was getting to see a three legged jaguar at the Oklahoma City Zoo.
Upon returning to work (I work in retail), a random creep tried to pick me up. Which happens fairly often, but this one was a random married creep... He was staring at me over his wrap-around sunglasses and asked if I had a phone number (which I don't give out as a rule). And he casually explained that he was "married but curious". Ugg. But he did take "No I won't give you my number" as an answer. I just feel sorry for his poor wife...
And at least I don't have that blind trucker with a dent in his forehead after me still.
Oh and seeing as how I am home now, it would seem that I owe you that Overguilds update that I promised last week....
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Out of town this week. (I hesitate to use the word "vacation", since I have been spending it in a house with two small children!)
So, my next Overguilds update will have to wait until I get home, but i did manage to find time to make this red and white striped sock monkey for my three-year-old nephew. I'm sure he will hug it and squeeze and love it forever... then pull it's arms off.
Well, I hope he waits for a few days to pull it's arms off! And I made extra sure to reinforce the stitching on the arms and tail, so here's to hoping...
Sword and Sorcery films were popular for a short time in the early 80s following the release of Conan the Barbarian, and there were many low budget films made to cash in on that popularity. This film by Italian horror filmmaker is one of those movies, although with the low production values and mist shrouded sets, it feels more like a depraved version of Krull than Conan with it's much better production values.
It starts with a young man named Illias being given a magic bow that creates it own magic blue arrows by an old man and is sent off to become a warrior. Shortly after this, the villain, a woman wearing a golden mask (and only a golden mask) sends her minions (they look like wookies) to kill everyone in Illias' tribe, which they do with glee. They cut the top of the old man's skull off and tear a naked woman limb from limb. (One of the places this movie seems to free up costs is by having all the characters run around naked. Seriously nobody in this movie is fully dressed. The other way they save money is by having all the sets pumped full of too much fog.)
I told you there were wookies in this movie.
The wookies return to Naked Gold Mask Lady's cave where they all snort hallucinogens. While she is lying on the floor wrapped in a giant python and stoned, Naked Gold Mask Lady has a vision of being murdered by Illias. So once again she send her army of wookies out on a murder spree, this time with orders to kill Ilias. Which they almost do, until Ilias is rescued by a man named Mace. Mace likes to wear fur and fights with a set of nunchucks made of stone. He also likes animals.
Zora, Ilias' head, and Naked Gold Mask Lady
Ilias and Mace hit it off and do plenty of male bonding while killing humans, wookies, and mud encrusted zombies. At one point Mace is crucified on a big wooden X and tossed in the ocean by what I think might be a frog man, only to be rescued by dolphins (liking animals pays off, apparently). Topping off the fun, Ilias gets decapitated by Zora, a creature made of little metal plates. That would be the sad part of the movie... but Mace does absorb Ilias' power by rubbing his unwashed body with the ashes of Ilias' poorly cremated body.
Mace kills Naked Gold Mask Lady, and learns that she was really ugly underneath that mask, and the audience asks themselves "What the hell did I just watch?" while the credits roll.
If you wanna start watching Fulci, I'd start with The Beyond. And if you liked the Conan films and wanna see more, I'd suggest watching Krull before this. But if you wanna see a depraved movie with lots of violence and nudity and don't care if the plot makes sense, put this on your list right below Mountain of the Cannibal God.
The cheesemaker's rotten corpse has been found down in the caves. I figure that's Armok's way of telling me that it's time to start building catacombs. I have another pressing problem, a blood
New Pastures. Will require walls.
soaked troglodyte loitering on the surface scaring all my dwarves. On closer look, it's no wonder he's scaring people, his belly is cut open with his injured spleen and intestines on display. But not to worry, the militia has been dispatched.
It has been brought to my attention that a calf has starved to death! Starved! What moron has been managing the livestock. I designate a series of new pastures and make sure all grazing animals are assigned.
And my farmers keep insisting that they don't have seeds to plant with when my bookkeeper insists that I am sitting on hundreds of seeds. Something's wrong here...
Gleeris the Thief. Standing in the doorway.
But at this point I am interrupted with the news that a thief has been found in my fortress. Gleeris, the kobold thief. It seems it is way too easy to get into this fortress.
Back to my seed problem- For their insolence, I have decided to force the dwarves to gather plants from the surface, like elves, while I track down the problem.
Speaking of problems, I have almost run out of surface trees to clear cut. I think it may be time to breach the caverns and build an underground forest.
And what to do with my collection of caged troglodytes (including one who killed two dwarves and a peacock)?
As promised, I am finally getting around to reviewing this movie...
Four of the Apocalypse, a spaghetti western by Lucio Fulci and based on two short stories by Bret Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of Poker Flat. who would later go on to make The Beyond, City of the Living Dead, and The House by the Cemetary. Most of his movies very violent, and this one is no exception. If you decide to watch this movie, it's less a movie with a plot, than a movie about a series of depraved things happening to bad people.
Stubby Preston, a gambler finds himself tossed in local jail soon after arriving in town. There he meet up with the pregnant prostitute Bunny O'Neil, town drunk Clem and madman Bud. They don't remain in jail long, as vigilantes descend on the town and kill everyone but them. The four of them escape into the Utah wilderness where they run into the gun toting bandit Chaco. Despite the fact that he apparently shoots everything he sees, they welcome him into their band at first.
They have such a "fun" time with Chaco... he shoots a huge pile of small game for them to eat, he saves them from other marauding bandits, forces them to watch as he tortures aforementioned marauding bandits, forces them to take hallucinogens, rapes Bunny while the others are forced to watch, shoots, Clem in the leg, and steals Stubby's razor before leaving them in the desert without any supplies. If the other four are metaphorically the four horsemen of the apocalypse, then Chaco must be Satan himself.
Never trust a homicidal madman, kiddies.
The Utah desert is such a small place when forced to share it with Chaco. Fortunately Chaco is apparently easily distracted and looses interest in them when he stumbles across a band of Mormons to shoot. Not since Yosemite Sam, has the wild west seen a villain so evil. While cradling the corpse of a child randomly murdered by Chaco, Stubby swears that he will kill Chaco. The story has given us no indication thus far, however that he can actually pull that off...
During a torrential rainstorm, they take refuge in an abandoned mining town and wonder aloud why it was abandoned. I know why it was abandoned, it's because it never stops raining there! Seriously did nobody Fulci that it rainstorms out in the desert last for something like five minutes? Despite being rained in, the four of them are happy there, Stubby and Bunny are happy because they get to lay around naked, Clem is happy because he dies and no longer has to be in this movie, and Bud is really happy because he gets to run around the cemetery talking to the dead people and because he gets to feed Clem's left butt-cheek to Stubby and Bunny... Wait, what?!
So it's time for Stubby and Bunny to leave Bud behind with his dead people and move on. They soon run into a traveling minister, who happens to be an old friend of Stubby. Now, we all know that some sort of misfortune will befall the minister just because of his association with him. But what sort of misfortune will that be, exactly?
They end up in the snowy town of Alderville. It's located high in the mountains and is populated solely by men for some reason. It is here that Bunny goes into labor. The whole town gather around while Bunny gives birth and promptly dies, (thus returning Alderville to it's previous all male population). The men of Alderville get together and decide to name the boy "Lucky".
So Stubby leaves Lucky, the minister, and the men of Alderville behind and returns to the road armed with a bottle of whiskey and a gun given to him as a going away present. He rides off into the desert with the soundtrack playing a 70s folk rock tune when he stumbles onto Chaco and his gang sleeping in a barn. Stubby shoots them all, taking his sweet time with Chaco. And he got his lucky razor back.
That's right, Internet people, I've got a little puzzle for you today. This one is attributed to Einstein, it's his Neighbour Riddle. It's claimed he said 98% of the population couldn't solve it, but I'm certain that if you can solve a Sudoku puzzle, you can work it out.
Here it is:
There are five houses, each one is painted a different color. The owner of each house has a different nationality, smokes a different brand of cigarette, drinks a different beverage, and keeps a different animal as a pet.
The question is, who owns the Batman-eating Tiger?
Hints:
The Brit lives in the red house
The Swede keeps dogs.
The Dane drinks tea.
The green house is on the left of the white house.
The green homeowner drinks coffee.
The person who smokes Pall Mall owns a bird.
The owner of the Yellow house smokes Dunhill.
The man in the center house drinks milk.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The man who smokes blends lives next to the one who has cats.
The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhill.
The one who smokes Bluemaster drinks beer.
The German smokes Prince.
The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
The man who smokes blend has a neighbour who drinks water.
Alright, I'm a sucker for sock monkeys, this is the third one I've made. They're so easy to put together on as a spur of the moment project that it's almost hard not to amass a collection of them. It doesn't hurt that the drug store around the corner from my house has some brightly colored knee socks on sale for cheap.
This one is a bit of an experiment, as I knew that I wouldn't have enough polyfill laying around, I decided to use plastic grocery bags to stuff it instead. I find that it works reasonably well with a few caveats. First, it doesn't have as much spring to it as polyfill, so it doesn't bounce back as much when you squeeze it. Second, the bags are visible through the socks I used, which you can see in the photo below of it's arm seam. And the finished monkey weighs noticeably more than the ones I stuffed with polyfill. Finally it took a lot more bags to stuff than I expected. I ended up using all but a handful of the plastic bags I had on hand. All said, plastic bags do work for filling stuffed animals, but I'm gonna keep using polyfill.
I also tried a different approach to stitching the arms and tail on. In my previous sock monkeys, I stitched a flap to the body, ending up with a seam that looks a bit like a hinge. With this one I figured out I could sew the end of the limb to the body then hide the seam by stitching the circumference of the limb to the body. The end result looks much prettier.
Previous Attempt.
Notice the ugly seam attaching the arm.
The arrival of summer brings a newly appointed bookkeeper and a nasty rotting mess in my butcher's workshop. Perhaps it was unwise of me to designate a small refuse pile next to the butcher's shop to minimize the distance he has to go to get a butcherable corpse.
As I go to check on my miner's efforts at digging out a series of future bedrooms, I am interrupted with a message that my armorer has been interrupted by a giant olm! "What?" I ask myself, as I haven't breached the caverns yet. I zoom to the location and find that my dwarves have been playing in the cave (I had forgotten about the cave.)
I found my armorer facing down two troglodytes, one dead and in a pool of it's own blood, and the other very much alive. No bother, my militia can fix that. And judging by the giant cave spider web behind my armorer, it seems my cave is home to giant cave spiders. I wonder how I can trap one so I can begin farming giant cave spider silk.
The militia has been dispatched, but not soon enough to prevent my armorer from meeting a painful death at the hands of an irate sub-human. Soon after, I am alerted with the news that Ingzig Istanmudib the Cheesemaker has been missing for a week. And I have a bluepeacock missing. It's time I do something about that cave.
I also receive happier news, the births of two dwarf babies. Somebody get these two bottles full of dwarven rum before they're eaten by troglodytes.
Overguilds now has an artifact and a legendary metalcrafter. Etnardarud, crafted from bronze and decorated with bands of amethyst. Okay, so I have an incredibly boring artifact. But at least Sigun is a legendary metalcrafter for having made the useless thing. To bad she had to use one of my two bars of metal. And I know the elven caravan that just showed up at the edge of my map won't be bringing any metal either.
Much as I expected, the elves didn't bring me any metal (no surprise there) or even any sunberries. But the pointy-ears weren't totally useless, they did bring me a leopard. I have ordered my animal trainers to train it as a war animal.
Speaking of my animal trainers, I am alarmed to be greeted with the announcement that a giant toad has reverted to a wild state:
On closer inspection, it appears that the giant toad in question is still caged up, so- crisis averted. Right?
Now, which of my idlers should I set to engraving duty?
Near the end of World War 2, a team of Russian soldiers find themselves battling an army of reanimate corpses turned into horrific killing machines built by the deranged descendant of Victor Frankenstein.
Actually, the plot is simpler than that, it's basically a slasher film where the killers hack their way through soldiers rather than fornicating teenagers. With the added bonus of a mad scientist ranting towards the end. Plus, the monsters are actors in costumes, which unfortunately feels like a novelty these days.
But thanks to the bronze and steel bars I traded from the caravan last season I can finally forge some real weapons. Now my militia happily chiffonade troglodytes with real battle axes rather than use the cheap wooden ones they used on the troll.
I've been a way for a while so, for a refresher:
But what's this? A dwarf has been possessed and has claimed a workshop. Just when I was occupied by more important things, too. Typical of Dwarf fortress, really. Degel Tashemolin, for your sake, you had better make a diamond axe in that jeweller's workshop you just claimed. Degel immediately runs to the gem stockpile across the hall and grabs some rough amethysts before beginning construction. Looks like I am gonna be saddled with an amethyst earring or sock... And it's an earring, big surprise! It'll go well with my other artifact earring.
As promised, I am finally getting around to reviewing this movie...
That's right, Internet people, I've got a little puzzle for you today. This one is attributed to Einstein, it's his Neighbour Riddle. It's claimed he said 98% of the population couldn't solve it, but I'm certain that if you can solve a Sudoku puzzle, you can work it out.
I found my armorer facing down two troglodytes, one dead and in a pool of it's own blood, and the other very much alive. No bother, my militia can fix that. And judging by the giant cave spider web behind my armorer, it seems my cave is home to giant cave spiders. I wonder how I can trap one so I can begin farming giant cave spider silk.
I also receive happier news, the births of two dwarf babies. Somebody get these two bottles full of dwarven rum before they're eaten by troglodytes.
Overguilds now has an artifact and a legendary metalcrafter. Etnardarud, crafted from bronze and decorated with bands of amethyst. Okay, so I have an incredibly boring artifact. But at least Sigun is a legendary metalcrafter for having made the useless thing. To bad she had to use one of my two bars of metal. And I know the elven caravan that just showed up at the edge of my map won't be bringing any metal either.
Speaking of my animal trainers, I am alarmed to be greeted with the announcement that a giant toad has reverted to a wild state:
