random stuff

[Representing_Tromba]

 

[Representing_Tromba]

 

[Representing_Tromba]

 

[Representing_Tromba]

 

[Representing_Tromba]

 

[melchi]

 

[Tempokai]

A bedtime story about elections:

Spoiler

The day had finally arrived. Election Day. For our dear friend Anon, this was the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and his first child’s graduation all wrapped into one. Except, let’s be clear, Anon doesn’t have a first child because he’s spent his adult life nurturing his beloved political opinions instead. He had set up camp in front of his television, armed with four different streaming services, multiple electoral map trackers, and a vat of coffee that could reasonably fuel a mid-sized nation.

At 8:00 a.m., Anon was cautiously optimistic. The polls looked decent enough—if by “decent,” one could overlook the razor-thin margins and historically unreliable data that had led to previous heartbreaks. But no, Anon had seen “solid” poll numbers for his candidate, and in his mind, that meant destiny was practically hugging his candidate on the finish line. He sipped his coffee with a satisfied, smug little smile. Oh, today was going to be fantastic.

9:30 a.m. The polls were closing in certain regions, and “solid” had somehow morphed into “tight race” on all the live updates. Anon’s left eye twitched. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” he muttered to himself like a man hearing footsteps in a horror movie. “There’s still time.” He nervously switched over to another news channel, certain they’d have better news, but instead they were hosting a panel of “experts” who all agreed that this was anyone’s game. Just great. So now Anon was tense, but hey, it was still early. Surely his guy would pull through once the real numbers started rolling in.

11:00 a.m. Panic. Abject, suffocating panic. Anon’s favorite news analyst had just announced that the opposition had made “unexpected gains” in key states. Unexpected gains? Anon hadn’t factored gains into his scenario. He’d spent months crafting a mental roadmap to victory, and nowhere on that map was there a road named “opposition gains.” Was it possible the polls had been wrong? Impossible! Anon muttered to himself, hands twitching around his phone, where he was frantically refreshing every social media feed he knew. If he lost service now, that would be the universe actively working against him.

12:30 p.m. Relief. Blessed, temporary relief. A new count had come in, and his candidate had clawed back to an even split in the numbers. Anon exhaled loudly, his face going from ashen to jubilant in the time it took a headline to flash across the screen. He pumped his fist, feeling once again like he was riding the fates of political destiny. “I knew it,” he whispered to his dog, who had already taken refuge in another room. “I knew we were going to pull through.”

2:00 p.m. Paranoia. Absolute, all-encompassing paranoia. An “insider report” hinted at possible irregularities in ballot counting in a key district. Anon’s mind immediately spun off into conspiratorial whirlpools. “This is how they’re going to do it. They’re stealing it right in front of us!” he hissed, fists clenched. He hopped onto social media to post his thoughts, which, naturally, took the form of a 27-tweet rant that no one would ever fully read. But for Anon, this was war now. This was the Alamo, except with hashtags.

4:00 p.m. Confidence, renewed yet delicate. Another update, another swing. His candidate was back on top. Not by much, mind you, but by enough for Anon to taste victory again. This back-and-forth had started to feel like a sick game of tug-of-war, except it was his sanity being yanked back and forth. Anon allowed himself a few moments of optimism, pacing back and forth in front of his TV, nodding approvingly at every inch his candidate gained. Oh, he could almost see the victory speech now!

6:00 p.m. Desperation. It was slipping. Again. Another district had turned against him, and once again, the numbers were hanging in that torturous, existential no-man’s-land of 50/50. Anon had devolved into something less than human—a primal beast glued to his screen, capable only of low grunts and mutterings about the system being “rigged.” His hair, once carefully styled, now hung in a chaotic mess, and his tie was twisted and loosened around his neck like some tragic noose.

8:00 p.m. Numbness. Utterly, bleakly numb. The swings had become absurd at this point, and Anon couldn’t keep his emotions at this high pitch forever. His brain had reached what experts call “burnout”—that special state where every new swing in the election numbers was met with a hollow, dead-eyed stare. He’d stopped refreshing his feeds, stopped responding to texts from equally manic friends, and just sat there, blankly watching as commentators filled airtime with meaningless speculation. At this point, he could be watching a blank screen and feel about the same.

11:00 p.m. Delirium. He couldn’t even tell if he was awake anymore or if he was simply watching a highlight reel of his worst fears. Anon had entered that stage of exhaustion where he was, at once, wildly over-invested and completely detached. He thought briefly about taking a nap but dismissed the idea as “too risky,” as if his mere presence on his couch was somehow influencing the vote count. He began to talk out loud, giving a slurred, running commentary that made sense to absolutely no one.

3:00 a.m. Rock bottom. A new “last-minute” batch of ballots came in, shoving his candidate just a hair’s breadth behind. Anon had gone into a zombie state, staring into the screen with the vacant, haunted look of a man who’s seen the edge of reality. He had half a mind to throw his TV out the window, half a mind to smash his phone with a hammer, and, regrettably, only half a mind left in general.

And then, mercifully, the sun rose on a new day, and with it, the final counts rolled in. His candidate lost by a razor-thin margin, and Anon, exhausted beyond any human limit, just sat there. Numb. Broken. His dreams shattered like a cheap snow globe. He wanted to cry but was too tired. He wanted to scream but was too hoarse. So he just sat, empty, the victorious opposition’s cheers echoing in his ears as his spirit finally, completely gave up.

With the flick of the remote, he turned off the TV. “Maybe next time,” he whispered. But both he and his dog knew he’d said that before.

 

[NotaNuffian]

 

[Tempokai]

A bedtime story about peasant railguns:

Spoiler

Ah, yes, the grand Demon King of the Abyss. A title dripping with dread, corruption, and a faint whiff of sulfur. Or, well, it used to be dripping with dread. These days, dread in the middle realm was a bit hard to come by. Adventurers had become insufferably cocky, demons were practically going out of style, and don’t even get him started on the new hobby of adventuring influencers. Every second dark lord wannabe thought they were the next big thing, flaunting flashy horns and "emo abyssal" vibes on whatever magical platform had the most eyes. The true Demon King, though? The Corruptor of Wills, Engager of Chaos, Eternal Keeper of Angst? He was the real deal, a millennia-old force of nature so feared that even shadows trembled. Or at least they used to.

So, in a rare bout of "fine, I’ll remind these mortals who’s boss," the Demon King emerged from the boiling, sulfurous pits of the Abyss. It was time for a little public relations tour in the middle realm, one that would have mortals screaming, peasants groveling, and a trail of chaos that could make even the most jaded lich raise an impressed bony eyebrow. And if a few villages got corrupted, leveled, or lightly scorched along the way? Well, that was just brand synergy.

Unfortunately for the Demon King, the timing of this ego-boosting rampage could not have been worse.

---

Enter Ogsworth, a village so spectacularly dull, its annual highlight was the mayor’s third-best chicken getting loose and terrorizing the populace for five whole minutes before getting tired and falling asleep in a cabbage patch. Ogsworth’s peasants were the type to wake up every morning, sigh deeply, and accept that they were destined to hoe fields, milk reluctant cows, and bury the occasional adventurer who mistook their well for a dungeon entrance. In short, Ogsworth was the perfect place for dreams to come, suffer existential dread, and die.

That all changed when the book arrived.

Dusty and leather-bound, it appeared in the town square one windy evening, carelessly dropped by an isekai schmuck who’d barely survived a dragon encounter. Its cover read: “Dungeons and Dragons: A Basic Rules Handbook.” And to the peasants, who didn’t have libraries, magic schools, or the faintest clue about structured imagination, this book was a sacred text of unimaginable power. The kind of thing that could transform oats into awe.

Within days, the villagers were enraptured. Farmer Bodrick, who’d spent most of his life losing staring contests with rocks, proudly announced himself as a “level 2 rogue.” He began sneaking around with the subtlety of an ogre tap-dancing but, in fairness, no one had ever tried sneaking in Ogsworth, so it was still kind of impressive. Gilda the goat herder practiced “sleight of hand” by lifting onions from her neighbors’ baskets and throwing them back just to show off. Even Old Man Jebediah, who had one foot in the grave and the other dangling off the edge, started giving impromptu lectures on “spell slots” while vigorously shaking a turnip.

By week two, everyone understood that combat occurred in rounds, each lasting six seconds, and actions—like passing objects—could be performed freely. “Free actions” became a village obsession, transforming everything from passing salt at dinner to flinging rocks at raccoons into a communal experiment in game mechanics. This, of course, meant that the Demon King, when he arrived to wreak havoc, was about to stumble into a perfect storm of rule-bending, boredom-fueled madness.

---

The ground cracked open with a boom as sulfurous fumes billowed into the sky. Villagers paused mid-hoe, mid-chat, and mid-goat herding. There, emerging from a pit of fire and shadow, was the towering form of the Demon King. Ten feet of pure malevolence, wrapped in darkness, his eyes burning like molten coals. “MORTALS!” he thundered, his voice shaking the air, causing birds to drop dead from sheer fear. “PREPARE TO—”

“Oi, oi, cut that racket,” interrupted Bodrick, nonchalantly munching on a twig as though this was the least interesting thing he’d seen that day. “Everyone line up. Time for a ‘free action’ drill.”

The peasants nodded, moving with the eerie synchronization of people who’d just invented bureaucracy in the form of a game. Within moments, 300 of them stood in a perfect line, mud-stained, rag-wearing, and deeply serious. Each carried their own interpretation of a “weapon”—sticks, rakes, a few sharp rocks—but for today’s purposes, they’d elected a spear, the village’s one and only “fancy” weapon, as their projectile of choice.

The Demon King watched, eyebrows drawn low. Was this…supposed to intimidate him? Did these mortals think standing in a line would somehow…?

Bodrick raised his hand. “Pass it on, Jim.”

The spear began its journey. Peasant 1 handed it to Peasant 2, who handed it to Peasant 3, and so on, down the line. In the D&D-inspired mechanics they’d absorbed, a round was six seconds long, and a free action was just that—free. Time had no real meaning when the rules themselves were bent over backward to accommodate the whims of peasants with too much time on their hands. By the time it reached the last peasant, the spear had accelerated to such ludicrous speeds that reality itself protested.

The Demon King, who had barely completed the inhale for his next “fearsome” proclamation, suddenly found himself pierced by a sound-barrier-breaking, Mach 7 spear. The force shattered his imposing armor, splattered his shadowy essence across the terrain, and carved out a perfectly flat plain where once a jagged mountain had dared to stand. Boom. Gone. Just like that.

His last thought before his form disintegrated? “Bested by peasants?”

The villagers, meanwhile, gathered around the massive crater now decorating their countryside. Bodrick scratched his head. “Reckon that was worth a few levels, yeah?”

“Pfft, you wish,” sneered Old Man Jebediah, waving his turnip like a wand. “I did the final pass. That’s the real deal.”

“Hey, I was in the middle!” protested Gilda. “Bet none of you could speed-pass like me.”

And so they argued, turning their backs on the massive crater and the flattened terrain. To them, the seventh “victim” was just another reminder that the game was everything. The Abyss could wait; they had XP to argue about. Meanwhile, in the abyssal depths, the Demon King reformed, his shattered dignity barely holding together.

Next time, he vowed, there would be no villages. No peasants. No… free actions.

 

[Conqueror_Quack]

 

[Alski]

A bedtime story about peasant railguns:

Spoiler

Ah, yes, the grand Demon King of the Abyss. A title dripping with dread, corruption, and a faint whiff of sulfur. Or, well, it used to be dripping with dread. These days, dread in the middle realm was a bit hard to come by. Adventurers had become insufferably cocky, demons were practically going out of style, and don’t even get him started on the new hobby of adventuring influencers. Every second dark lord wannabe thought they were the next big thing, flaunting flashy horns and "emo abyssal" vibes on whatever magical platform had the most eyes. The true Demon King, though? The Corruptor of Wills, Engager of Chaos, Eternal Keeper of Angst? He was the real deal, a millennia-old force of nature so feared that even shadows trembled. Or at least they used to.

So, in a rare bout of "fine, I’ll remind these mortals who’s boss," the Demon King emerged from the boiling, sulfurous pits of the Abyss. It was time for a little public relations tour in the middle realm, one that would have mortals screaming, peasants groveling, and a trail of chaos that could make even the most jaded lich raise an impressed bony eyebrow. And if a few villages got corrupted, leveled, or lightly scorched along the way? Well, that was just brand synergy.

Unfortunately for the Demon King, the timing of this ego-boosting rampage could not have been worse.

---

Enter Ogsworth, a village so spectacularly dull, its annual highlight was the mayor’s third-best chicken getting loose and terrorizing the populace for five whole minutes before getting tired and falling asleep in a cabbage patch. Ogsworth’s peasants were the type to wake up every morning, sigh deeply, and accept that they were destined to hoe fields, milk reluctant cows, and bury the occasional adventurer who mistook their well for a dungeon entrance. In short, Ogsworth was the perfect place for dreams to come, suffer existential dread, and die.

That all changed when the book arrived.

Dusty and leather-bound, it appeared in the town square one windy evening, carelessly dropped by an isekai schmuck who’d barely survived a dragon encounter. Its cover read: “Dungeons and Dragons: A Basic Rules Handbook.” And to the peasants, who didn’t have libraries, magic schools, or the faintest clue about structured imagination, this book was a sacred text of unimaginable power. The kind of thing that could transform oats into awe.

Within days, the villagers were enraptured. Farmer Bodrick, who’d spent most of his life losing staring contests with rocks, proudly announced himself as a “level 2 rogue.” He began sneaking around with the subtlety of an ogre tap-dancing but, in fairness, no one had ever tried sneaking in Ogsworth, so it was still kind of impressive. Gilda the goat herder practiced “sleight of hand” by lifting onions from her neighbors’ baskets and throwing them back just to show off. Even Old Man Jebediah, who had one foot in the grave and the other dangling off the edge, started giving impromptu lectures on “spell slots” while vigorously shaking a turnip.

By week two, everyone understood that combat occurred in rounds, each lasting six seconds, and actions—like passing objects—could be performed freely. “Free actions” became a village obsession, transforming everything from passing salt at dinner to flinging rocks at raccoons into a communal experiment in game mechanics. This, of course, meant that the Demon King, when he arrived to wreak havoc, was about to stumble into a perfect storm of rule-bending, boredom-fueled madness.

---

The ground cracked open with a boom as sulfurous fumes billowed into the sky. Villagers paused mid-hoe, mid-chat, and mid-goat herding. There, emerging from a pit of fire and shadow, was the towering form of the Demon King. Ten feet of pure malevolence, wrapped in darkness, his eyes burning like molten coals. “MORTALS!” he thundered, his voice shaking the air, causing birds to drop dead from sheer fear. “PREPARE TO—”

“Oi, oi, cut that racket,” interrupted Bodrick, nonchalantly munching on a twig as though this was the least interesting thing he’d seen that day. “Everyone line up. Time for a ‘free action’ drill.”

The peasants nodded, moving with the eerie synchronization of people who’d just invented bureaucracy in the form of a game. Within moments, 300 of them stood in a perfect line, mud-stained, rag-wearing, and deeply serious. Each carried their own interpretation of a “weapon”—sticks, rakes, a few sharp rocks—but for today’s purposes, they’d elected a spear, the village’s one and only “fancy” weapon, as their projectile of choice.

The Demon King watched, eyebrows drawn low. Was this…supposed to intimidate him? Did these mortals think standing in a line would somehow…?

Bodrick raised his hand. “Pass it on, Jim.”

The spear began its journey. Peasant 1 handed it to Peasant 2, who handed it to Peasant 3, and so on, down the line. In the D&D-inspired mechanics they’d absorbed, a round was six seconds long, and a free action was just that—free. Time had no real meaning when the rules themselves were bent over backward to accommodate the whims of peasants with too much time on their hands. By the time it reached the last peasant, the spear had accelerated to such ludicrous speeds that reality itself protested.

The Demon King, who had barely completed the inhale for his next “fearsome” proclamation, suddenly found himself pierced by a sound-barrier-breaking, Mach 7 spear. The force shattered his imposing armor, splattered his shadowy essence across the terrain, and carved out a perfectly flat plain where once a jagged mountain had dared to stand. Boom. Gone. Just like that.

His last thought before his form disintegrated? “Bested by peasants?”

The villagers, meanwhile, gathered around the massive crater now decorating their countryside. Bodrick scratched his head. “Reckon that was worth a few levels, yeah?”

“Pfft, you wish,” sneered Old Man Jebediah, waving his turnip like a wand. “I did the final pass. That’s the real deal.”

“Hey, I was in the middle!” protested Gilda. “Bet none of you could speed-pass like me.”

And so they argued, turning their backs on the massive crater and the flattened terrain. To them, the seventh “victim” was just another reminder that the game was everything. The Abyss could wait; they had XP to argue about. Meanwhile, in the abyssal depths, the Demon King reformed, his shattered dignity barely holding together.

Next time, he vowed, there would be no villages. No peasants. No… free actions.

did you ever read the Two Year Emperor?

 

[Tempokai]

did you ever read the Two Year Emperor?

no, but synopsis I just read looks fun.

 

[Alski]

no, but synopsis I just read looks fun.

I believe their pesant railgun equivalent used held actions (because passing shit isnt a free action :P)

 

[theInmara]

 

[Tempokai]

A bedtime story about cliche done right:

Spoiler

It all began as most Saturday afternoons did in the Griswold household: with the steady, rhythmic clickety-clack of a mechanical keyboard and the droning hum of an overworked gaming PC. The machine, clearly a veteran of countless gaming campaigns, spun its cooling fans with a determination that suggested it was ready for whatever digital warzone it would be thrust into next. And this particular Saturday? It was about to bear witness to yet another marathon of father-son bonding masquerading as a video game session. The father, Tom Griswold, had hauled his 12-year-old son, Mikey, away from his deeply important Saturday business (consisting mainly of aimlessly channel-surfing and inhaling bags of chips) with the kind of wide-eyed enthusiasm typically reserved for lottery winners.

“See, this game is called Factorio,” Tom announced with all the gravitas of a medieval herald, gesturing at the Steam interface like it was a sacred text. “We’re building a megabase, Mikey. And you, my boy, are on material routing duty. First things first, we’ve got to organize these iron plates.”

Mikey’s eyes glazed over slightly as he stared at the screen, where pixelated factories sat in a desolate alien wasteland, waiting for some poor sap to breathe life into their tangled mess. “Uh, sure, Dad,” he mumbled, already feeling a sinking suspicion that the words “material routing” might involve, well, actual thinking. But there was no escaping his dad’s enthusiasm. So, with a reluctant shrug that was meant to seem cooler than it was, Mikey agreed.

The first session of father-son Factorio was, in a word, chaos. Conveyor belts crisscrossed the screen like a deranged toddler’s interpretation of modern art, with copper plates colliding into iron, iron jamming up circuit paths, and resources backing up until the whole system looked ready to combust. Mikey, sweat forming on his brow, wrestled with the controls while Tom chuckled like a villain who had rigged the whole game against him. After about twenty minutes, Mikey threw up his hands in despair and declared that this wasn’t fun—it was punishment. Worse still, he threatened to return to homework, which was about as desperate a plea as any child could make.

Tom was undeterred. “Nonsense!” he declared, arms folded in mock seriousness. “This is what separates the men from the boys. Megabases aren’t built in a day, and certainly not by anyone who gives up at the first sign of a jammed conveyor belt. Now, let’s reroute that iron ore, or I’ll demote you to Coal Monitor.”

Grudgingly, Mikey pressed on. He learned that logistics wasn’t just about moving things from Point A to Point B—it was a delicate, often infuriating ballet of order, efficiency, and several dozen screaming conveyor belts. Every misrouted copper wire became a minor catastrophe; every backed-up output was a personal affront to the gods of factory design. Most importantly, Mikey learned that his father, despite his warmhearted demeanor, was an insufferable snark lord who’d laugh hysterically whenever Mikey’s conveyor belts looped back on themselves in a hellish Ouroboros of wasted time.

Time, as it always does, marched on. Mikey grew taller, sharper, and increasingly tired of his father’s endless parade of Factorio quips. The Griswold Megabase transformed from a ramshackle mess of belts and machines into a sprawling digital metropolis that rivaled the grandest of industrialist dreams. Conveyor lines stretched across the screen like the world’s most confusing spaghetti junction, but now there was order—if you squinted hard enough. Tom was insufferably proud, and never missed an opportunity to remind Mikey of the “good old days” when everything was chaos. “Remember when you built a loop that sent everything into itself for six hours?” he’d say, tears of laughter streaming down his face.

Eventually, Mikey left home for university, studying engineering because, as he liked to tell anyone who’d listen, “I spent my childhood being micromanaged by a logistics dictator.” He specialized in industrial processes, honing his skills in efficiency, optimization, and the avoidance of endless, resource-wasting conveyor loops. He landed a job as a factory supervisor—a cruelly ironic twist that would’ve made teenage Mikey groan—but life has its own conveyor belt of fate, it seemed.

One crisp autumn day, thirty years after that first Factorio session, Mikey stood at the window of his office, staring out at the tangled web of conveyors and machines that hummed in the factory yard. His thoughts drifted back to those Saturday afternoons, to the sound of his father’s cackling laughter at Mikey’s early, incompetent designs. Tom had passed away five years earlier, leaving behind an old gaming PC with Factorio still installed and logged into the Griswold Megabase. Mikey had opened it exactly once since then. It took him two hours to fix one of his dad’s so-called “innovative” belt designs, which turned out to be a swirling monument to inefficiency. He’d laughed, and he’d cried, and then he’d let it be.

“Still messing up the logistics, huh, Dad?” Mikey murmured softly, a bittersweet smile spreading across his face. Somewhere, in the vast megabase of the universe—or at least in the recesses of Mikey’s memories—Tom’s laughter echoed, bright and unyielding. It was loud, unapologetic, and full of life, just like it had always been.

With one final glance at the factory yard, Mikey turned back to his desk. Life, after all, was a series of conveyor belts—some perfectly aligned, some tangled into near-unrecognizable knots. You built what you could with the resources you had, laughed at the inevitable bottlenecks, and tried not to loop yourself into oblivion. And, in the end, even if every line wasn’t perfect, Mikey knew one thing for certain: somewhere, his father was still laughing. And for the first time in a while, Mikey laughed too.

 

[NotaNuffian]

 

[Representing_Tromba]

 

[Representing_Tromba]

 

[Representing_Tromba]

 

[Nevafrost]

View attachment 32728

I would love to have just one