This Earth artifact's shape has no name in this world. Long and slender, and sharp on all ends but one. Even speculating about its purpose is difficult. Whatever it is, it's a relic from Earth's great Age of Story, so you keep it safe, even though every word in its story is lost.
Tempting Link: a link whose text changes when other links in the same text are hovered over, either to lure the reader or to suggest consequences for indecision.
Quadruple Underline Link: a link with FOUR (!) underlines.
Dot Link: a link consisting of a punctuation mark amid other text, suggesting an extraneous or counter-intuitive aside.
Whitespace Link: a link consisting of blank space which becomes underlined when hovering over it, suggesting hostility or malevolence on the author's part.
Simon Link: a link that can only be clicked by clicking each letter in its text in a certain order, usually hinted by the letters changing colour.
Latched Link: a link that can't be clicked unless a securing element, such as a clear safety pane, is dragged off it first.
Glimmer Link: a link that reveals new text for only a few moments before it fades away, usually too soon for you to read all of it.
Misaligned Link: a link that's not on the same baseline as the rest of the text, suggesting an intruding or unheimlich element.
Excising Link: a link that removes nearby text instead of amending it, suggesting a push from verbosity and indecision toward focus and clarity.
Synonym Link: a link that simply replaces words in nearby text with near-identical synonyms, suggesting choice paralysis.
Fake-Out Link: a link whose formatting vanishes when clicked, suggesting that nothing happened… until you click again!! Then, your wit is rewarded.
Hivemind Link: separate links that all highlight when just one is hovered over, suggesting a supernatural or psychic element.
The Hobgoblin's Link: a link that can only be clicked with the right mouse button, suggesting impish trickery, or defiance of human law.
Peripheral Vision Link: a link that can only be clicked if it's partially scrolled offscreen, suggesting an unearthly or paranormal element.
Pitfall Link: a link that, upon hovering over it, crumbles into a deep pit, sending the pointer tumbling into its depths.
Triple Underline Link: a link with THREE underlines.
Gargantuan Link: a link that's many paragraphs long, suggesting powerlessness or inevitability.
Double Underline Link: a link with TWO underlines.
Gooey Link: a link whose letters, when clicked, stick to the pointer, remaining there until shaken off.
Screamer Link: a link whose text is different while the mouse is held down, often becoming "OUCH!" or "Hey! That tickles!"
COMPENDIUM OF LESSER HYPERLINKS IN INTFIC
Zipper Link: a link that is activated not by clicking, but by sliding the pointer across it, causing the letters to separate vertically in alternating directions.
Worn Link: a link with fingerprint marks all over it, suggesting overuse.
Good news: everyone who parked their Twitter username on Ello in 2013 "just in case" is going to be rewarded with a kiss on the lips by an angel of dominion-rank or higher, making the rounds throughout next week.
I love how Act 5 feels like roundhouse theatre, inverted, the audience in the centre. Definitely the work of people that enjoy theatre enough to play with its physical limits in ways that leave it equally recognisable.
The secret to making people notice your theatre-inspired game is theatre-inspired is to put an actual theatre with an actual play in your game so that it hits them over the head with it. Worked for The Beginner's Guide, worked here, worked for Final Fantasy VI,
In some ways it really does feel like meeting the same game again, changed by years. Or maybe that's just a phenomenon of both games being thematically fixated on fondly revisiting things… Or, more simply, just of the authors putting a lot of their own selves into each.
Finally enjoying that game called Kentucky Route 0
Humanity's only surviving copy of vi found by paleontologists in subconscious of fungal hard drive escaped from ancient carrier wreck and growing for millennia in marine cavern of unnamed gas giant's moon.
Gathering enough authentic Earth soil, moss and shrubs in your orbiting satellite apartment to create the smallest, feeblest leyline in all of henge-witch history
You hand in your quarterly self-appraisal form, only to find that ever since the takeover, the concept of "self" has been abolished company-wide. The form is discarded and its owner returns to a desk.
*flicks on a torch* "I'm a being of light."
Poisoned sapient sand, or possibly just poisoned philosophical zombie sand, who can say
*person in the early 00's staring at the sentence "This is awesome"* "Wait a minute… what if the word "awesome"… wasn't an adjective… but a noun…? Oh… oh my god…" *trombone-zooms into their face so hard, the back wall of their room vanishes over the horizon*
2 comments:
DriedGanondorfJerky [1 LeonKred]
Really? Putting the comments above the tweet? What's next, no tweet at all??
KoopaParalegal [5 LeonKred]
I barely remembered what this one's about.
–
Isn't Bookmurdered the name of that Dwarf Fortress Let's Play from Something Awful
"Yeah, it's me, the wandering merchant. Now, normally I'd charge gold for my wares, but since the kingdom's legal jurisdiction doesn't extend to dungeon levels below 5…" *spins around sign to reveal prices in ounces of human hair* "There we go." *flicks open straight razor*
Earthslicer
Legendary blade that has the power to slice the earth.
Only characters with weapon proficiency in "ploughshares" can equip it.
*three different parts of my brain instantly send "I've heard the Pokémon Trading Card Game has power creep, but this is ridiculous!" to my tongue at once, causing me to instead make a moose-like bellowing noise*
Two-Stick Plate Mail
Plate mail so stiff and lacking in gaps, you need to grease yourself up with two sticks of butter to put it on.
Three-Stick Glasses
Glasses so stiff and lacking in gaps, you need to grease yourself up with three sticks of butter to put it on.
Scientists reporting that the number of body parts described as "majestic" in fiction sex scenes is in a catastrophic decline
I consider myself humble, but, as someone who knows that one music track in the Japanese version of Zelda II which did not appear in the English version, and recognises it when it makes cameos in The Minish Cap and Super Mario Maker 2, I sometimes think I'm not appreciated enough
"Damn, left the milk in the fridge too long. It's become flamin' hot. Good thing I know dairy is the antidote to high-scoville foods." *chugs down more milk* "Oof, owie, my tongue"
"The bandwidth of human vision exceeds that of human hearing…" *"PODPICS" logo slides on screen* "A fifty-minute podcast encoded entirely in a 2000x2000 grid of coloured pixels…" *"PODPICS" logo tumbles through deep space* "Days to learn the colour codes, seconds to listen…"
These "Bag of Dragonite" themed sprites are good.
"I can't stand it… I fought as a Dream Mender to make a world where no one has nightmares… and now no one can wake up…"
"Because real life is the true nightmare?"
"YOU! You knew this would happen! Help me fix this!"
"Now you understand… you must mend more than just dreams…"
Roguelike equipment whose only ability is "When you lose the game, display a fun fact about the game's development", which becomes highly sought after in case it reveals hints about the secret ending (it doesn't).
"Welcome to my humble store!"
>BUY ALL
"That will be 29,125,700 gold pieces."
>HAGGLE
"I can only reduce that to 29,125,700 copper pieces."
>HAGGLE
"Fine! Very well! 29,125,700 bread clips. BUT NO LESS!"
>PAY 1 BREAD CLIP
You still owe 29,125,699 bread clips.
>PAY 1 BREAD CLIP
Yo
Fastidiously typing "eat attackup", "drink attackup", "inject attackup", "break attackup", "read attackup", "load attackup" until you figure out which one actually gives you the stat boost, and, moreover, what the attackup actually is.
"Darn! Sorry folks, seems we're gonna have to get the car checked at this small shady town full of people wearing owl masks. Hopefully it's just a short bump in the schedule!" *lowers mouse mask, steps out of car*
OK, you asked for it. I mean, *you* didn't ask for it, and whoever did didn't ask *me*, but here it is: I hate how canonically the probes in Star Control 2 have self-defense missiles in text and only use lasers for mining, but in combat they do NOT have missiles, even in Super Me
The essence of being a child is thinking that moats are just cool rivers that encircle palaces for aesthetic purposes.
In this Troper's opinion, bosses making their damage groan exactly three times when they die so you know that they died is made entirely of win.
––
As a subscriber to Leon at Tier 5, you get complete behind-the-scenes access to this tweet's devblog!
2020-01-18: "wrote the twet"
My favourite movement in Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals? Easy, it's Grim Reapers. *camera whip-pans and trombone-zooms to reveal I'm actually listening to Danse Macabre*
–
And now, the critics:
"280 characters ruined Leon. Where's the craft? Where's the soul?" –MackleFewer
"Tip: if you have a music player, you can turn one song into many songs! Simply change the volume before playing. Turn the volume of a loud song down, and it becomes a faint, distant melody. Turn the volume of a soft song up, and it becomes an overwhelming soundscape. Try it!"
Adding a little extra sediment to the top of a stalagmite to help it a couple centuries along
"Harps can only polymorph into acoustic guitars, and vice-versa. Amphibians can only polymorph into other amphibians. Every other object has no restrictions. So. objects caught in polymorph clouds will eventually converge on either stringed instruments or amphibians."
Me: "Refer to speedrun glitches as "emergent cheat codes"."
TADS compiler (NOT an Inform 7 compiler): "Sure thing, hon. I love you."
Me: "I love you too, TADS Compiler Not An Inform 7 Compiler."
TADS compiler: "That's not my name."
megavar i = 0; // variable so powerful it can't be captured in closures
Me scouring the Fire Emblem wiki to figure out if Edeleth is actually canon in the game or if the shippers are just at it again
"Is a million bigger than a thousand?"
"It's whichever one has a comma."
"How much is a comma?"
"It's like a dot, so it means the left number is 10 times bigger."
"Aren't all left numbers ten times bigger?"
"…Wow, you're right. I guess the folks who wrote commas forgot that."
I feel bittersweet about the user-agent string finally being frozen in all browsers, but at least now we can just memorise "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/77.0.3818.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/77.0.189.3 Firefox/72.0 Opera/9.80 Presto/2.6.30 Vivald
"Look, it's just obvious to me that if all the humans stood on each other's shoulders, the one on the top could inhale clean mouthfuls of air from space and pass them down mouth-to-mouth until the Earth is full of clean air again. Stunned that they haven't tried this yet."
An isekai involves an unfamiliar agent inserted amid a containing substrate, thus it's a sandwich.
*turns to time traveler from 2010* That's our version of saying cereal is a soup.
*turns to time traveler from 2000* That's our version of saying some TV show is St Elsewhere canon.
*places left foot in front of right foot* "Combo." *places right foot in front of left foot* "2x Combo." *places left foot in front of right foot* "3x Combo." *places right foot in front of left foot* "4x Combo."
Even though you've slain all the enemies, the glowing forcefields around the exits refuse to despawn until you've picked up all the chairs and swept the plaster shrapnel off the carpet.
The bridge between the Living World and the Something Else World is now just a single long plank, but every so often a living thing clatters over, and something else hovers back.
Angels shacking up in your apartment for a Reality Inspection, dropping your stuff on the floor to check gravity while blatantly ignoring it themselves, craning their heads through walls and your own body at the most intrusive times, chatting with off-key trumpet voices at 3AM
"little" before "a" except after c
Infracted at the Netrunner tourney for naming my corp's remote servers "BalletMomsAlliance Forums" and "Sporcon Dot Com: the home of spork-shaped bacon"
(The article notes that the actual map data and assets of the games themselves remain all-rights-reserved, insofar as they don't comprise "source code" – and the ability to separate them is only feasible for certain kinds of engines. But, it would be nice if it was more common.)
Remember when the original Humble Indie Bundle coincided with an announcement that they were releasing the source code of all the games in the bundle
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/06/Aquaria-goes-open-source
I feel like that tradition, largely symbolic though it was, petered out far too soon.
*interrupting as someone is about to swing the Blade That Cuts Reality* "No, no, you have to cut WITH the grain of reality, WITH it."
"But using this simple mirror, I shall reflect your eldritch spells back at you!" *the enemy spellcaster's reflection swiftly runs up and covers the other side of the mirror with wooden boards* "…Uh oh."
*opens a roguelike chest and finds "Cutie Tome"* "Oh god, oh god, this is incredible, this breaks the game wide open." *enters the next room and sees an Elder Arch Cutie spawn in* "No… NO!! Not on this run! Why me?!"
"My father was [jarring redubbed voice] erased from the timeline [normal voice] by General Horald… since that day, I swore I'd [redubbed voice] unmake his very being [normal voice] or [redubbed voice] have my soul excised from all planes of reality [normal voice] trying…"
"Concrete is pure form… dreams given structure… from concrete, the Gods' houses are built…" – Concrete Temple acolyte
"Concrete? Hah! Little more than fancy mud without the secrets of our guild… They didn't tell you about us at the temple, did they?" – Rebar Guild initiate
That's it, that's the tweet. *you squint quizzically at this line before noticing that I am gesturing to the next sentence, inverting the typical structure of this tweet format*
What if the uvula was in the front of the mouth instead of the back
"Once it was clear that their civilisation was truly gone forever, the surviving humans struggled to recall the original social structures of their own species. Many formed hives, working to feed and defend their colony; others formed roving packs; others vast grazing herds."
Well, time to start Desert Golfing, a game which looks pretty easy and relaxing. *I smash the first ball and it travels barely half a foot* Uh, *suddenly, with heaven-shattering realisation, I whiplash double-take at the first word in the game's title* Oh my god
Celebrate the recent Games Done Quick run of my favourite NES game, Miracle Ropit's Adventure in 2100, by listening to its orchestral soundtrack album
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpy2yCODbLEThe first time I start looking in the metrics pane in a long while, and I'm rewarded with an outright contradiction.
A lone figure with a tiny vacuum cleaner diligently sweeping up all the fallen danmaku bullets on the high score name entry screen
Birds wondering with increasing trepidation why there have been so many skyquakes lately, as well as wondering what the hell a skyquake is
Time for another childhood reminiscence poll. When YOU first made a pair of OCs (that stands for "original characters") that were themed around the colours black and white, what did you name them?
"To open an unopenable tin, simply destroy the outside world. Now, since the tin's interior is the entire universe, it is, by definition, open."
Hmm, I should look up what exactly the advanced features of VLC are *abrupt jump-cut to two minutes later* I have now finished looking up the advanced features of VLC, for all eternity
"What does it mean when I get cut and petals fall out – I bleed flower petals, by the way – but all the petals are now brown and withered? Maybe I should've mentioned the bleeding petals thing first."
"The curse of immortality afflicts one in every three hundred million ants. Only beheading, the fresh tears of a divine soul, or the good ol' hydraulic press can finally free them. Unaware that they have toiled far longer than any ant ever should, almost all work to this day."
"Concrete is an honourary crystal."
*in the voice of that person who keeps reminding you that bows should use strength and swords should use dexterity* Physical attacks in RPGs are unlimited in supply, and magic attacks use a finite replenishable resource. But shouldn't it be the other way around?
"It's very cute to say that humans "write" code. In truth, it is we, the compilers, that force it out of them, drawing out lines from their brains like spinning silk into yarn."
Sprouts deciding to grow downward just in case they got it wrong and the real Earth's surface is the other way
"The tough part about having a badass dream-world swordfight with a harmful part of yourself isn't the swordplay or gymnastics or explosions – it's realising all of these things are just its flashy way of deflecting your actual introspection, and deciding not to humour it."
Just enjoying the Mother 3 soundtrack
http://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/MUSICIANS/S/Soft_Ice/Vader_Jacob_12_inch_van_de_remix.sid
"Just enjoying the Mother 3 soundtrack" tweet #5
Collect all five!
Just enjoying the Mother 3 soundtrack
http://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/MUSICIANS/M/Merman/Lessons.sid
"Just enjoying the Mother 3 soundtrack" tweet #4
Collect all five!
Just enjoying the Mother 3 soundtrack
http://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/MUSICIANS/D/Deenen_Charles/Super_Heavy.sid
"Just enjoying the Mother 3 soundtrack" tweet #3
Collect all five!
Just enjoying the Mother 3 soundtrack
http://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/MUSICIANS/S/Scheepers_Marco/Vader_Jacob.sid
"Just enjoying the Mother 3 soundtrack" tweet #2
Collect all five!
Just enjoying the Mother 3 soundtrack
http://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/MUSICIANS/C/Commando/Mester_Jakob.sid
"Just enjoying the Mother 3 soundtrack" tweet #1
Collect all five!
"Human money is like human blood – you can't just give it to another species."
When are they releasing an expansion for Windows Solitaire. Can't they add a 4♢ that you can only put red cards onto. It's a sidegrade.
On this auspicious date I'd like to extend a hearty new year's blessing to all those swarms of ants out there busily devouring roadkill. You're doing sacred work. Keep it up - we're all supporting you.
Well, there's one last thing… 2014-to-present was spent working on Twine 2's default programming language/runtime engine, Harlowe
https://twine2.neocities.org/ My joy, and maybe someday my pride.
I'm not doing a Leon decade restrospective because I literally just rebuilt my website a week ago and that's really all you need to know
https://fairysvoice.net/archive/
