Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 86: Dwarves and Podcasting, with the A Strange Mood podcast

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

Kristen and Drew join us for chaos and conversation as we negotiate technology like a blindfolded dwarf walking up the ramp of that mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A Strange Mood – The Couple's Dwarf Fortress Podcast (astrangemoodpodcast.com) Settlement Survival The Sawbones Podcast

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. Every couple weeks or so, your hosts gather to talk about our favorite game, Dwarf Fortress. So let's join your hosts, Roland. Oh, so you mean if you don't pay, you don't get your audio tracks. Tony. It's really disruptive. Yeah, I think we've got to go back to Real Audio. And Jonathan...

It's like if I drop a glass and have a break on the floor and I record it and use that. As they present insightful, irreverent, and often incorrect analysis. Joining the Roundtable today from the Strange Mood podcast are Drew and Kristen. Well, you do a lot of fully work. No, but yeah, I think that's what you mean. And always remember, losing is fun. Welcome to Dwarfortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. We are welcoming into the podcast today.

Kristen and Drew from the A Strange Mood, a Couples Dwar Fortress podcast. Welcome to the Roundtable, folks. Hello. Should we tell them what happened? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we might as well. So we actually recorded a full episode last week, and technical difficulties happened. It was.

It was. It was. It was. It was. And you hear most of that. We usually don't talk about our Patreon thing during the episode. But we did post the audio that we were able to recover to the Patreon channel. So if you really want it, you can do that for as short a time as you want.

But we are going to do our best to recreate the excitement and joy that we had from our first meeting of Kristen and Drew. Drew and Kristen, if you didn't already know this, run the 8. a strange mood, a couple's dwarf fortress podcast. So when you folks talk about it, do you use the entire title? We do not, no. No, we stick with a strange mood. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, I was feeling kind of bad for you having to say that twice. It's kind of a mouthful. Yeah, it's awkward to say, but when we were first kind of doing the SEO of starting up the podcast and stuff, I was like, we kind of do need to get the actual dwarf fortress name in the podcast name somewhere. I also like the fact that it is a couple's podcast. It's kind of neat. It is a different take on it than most podcasts you have like that.

It's most gaming podcast. Yeah, I think we were channeling sawbones a little bit. Sawbones. Do you tell more. Oh, it's a, what is it, a marital tour of misguided medicine. You brought me here to do advertising for the McElroy family, right? No, it's just a doctor and her husband, who is a funny guy, and they talk about weird medical stuff. And we were like, well, I guess we can talk about Dwar Fortress, and that's weird and funny.

So it's totally the same, right? Well, they do have diagnosticians and bone stitchers and things like that in Dwarfors. It's true. There's medicine. Sort of. Sort of. I'm not sure how good it is. No.

I'm a lot of injured dwarves around. Yeah. Yeah. So let's start with you, Kristen. Can you tell us your Dwarfortran origin story? Yeah, I can. Well, you can tell them together if you'd like. Well, I mean, it's kind of the same because Drew was playing Dwarf Fortress in like 2017,

2016, somewhere in there. And he would tell me about it. And I would be really into these stories of these dwarves doing crazy things. And just the story generation elements of it were really intriguing to me. I really wanted to play it. And then he showed me the ASCII mode, and I noped out immediately. Pretty hard. He's really hard.

What's you talking about, Drew? Exactly. And she then said, you know, I think I'll be happy enough if you just kind of tell me about the stories as they go out. And I will play a much easier to use colonies.

And this was even with the lazy nude pack and that sort of stuff, showing her that stuff. The UI, you know, the UI and the ASCII mode was just a little bit too challenging. It was unintelligible to me. So I take it that you didn't care much, Drew, for the graphics packs that they had, the tile sets?

Well, yeah, the graphics. I like them. I normally played them with those graphic sets, but... Apparently, he didn't want me to start playing, so he gave me to ask you a lot. That's tough stuff. He's trying to keep it all to himself. I suggested it to you, but you were like, no, I want to play my games without mods. I want to play it the way of that. No, I don't think that's true. See, we're just going to be salty everyone toward each other, so... It's the magic of a couple's podcast, everyone.

Exactly. But to be fair, if you can play it in the Aski mode, you can play it in any mode. There is that. It's true. Still doesn't apply to me. One of these days, now that she's been playing it for many, many hours in V-50, I'm going to make her try to actually start a fort in Aski mode. All right.

Some of our listeners have been challenging me to do that, and I'm very excited, as you can tell. Yeah, that's always been. an interesting thing. It was that the tile set versus Askey and like, what's purism and like what, I don't know, man, I just think it's a game and you play it however it works for you. That's always been my philosophy. It's like if you love looking at

one-fourth as the symbol to represent roots, awesome. And if you don't like that, you've got options. Some people still do horse and buggies, but I prefer a... Hey man, there's some people still making tin-type photos, you know,

whatever. It's cool. It's your heart. So before we came on the podcast here, I went back and actually listened to your guys's first episode, so Jonathan and Roland. And yeah, I just, I had been, I had actually gone back and I had listened to that, you know, after I started with 30 and then got caught up to wherever you were at that point. I did go back and listen to the, you know, back catalog as well and all that. But I hadn't gone back and listened to that probably for two, two and a half years, something like that. I'm trying to remember my timeline here.

But, yeah, that was just really interesting to me, like that you guys, that you guys didn't even know each other before you started this, that you just found each other on the Dwarf fortress on Bay 12 forums. Yep, yep, yep. Or actually, yeah, or subreddit. Subreddit, yeah. Yeah, the subreddit, my bed.

Yeah, in any case. Yeah, I have trouble going back and listening to those. Oh, yeah, no. I know what you mean. I'm really scared of listening to that because I personally want to believe that my German accent was kind of faded out over the time and I got better speaking.

But I don't think that's true. My German's always been really good, I think. My German is always good, actually. That's what I think you too hard on yourself. It's excellent. Excellent German. I don't think that it is any thicker the accent is any thicker

than it is now. So I think that you spoke more deliberately then. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. Do you think that your English has improved since doing this podcast?

I have become more accustomed to just speaking what I want to say, meaning that I also do a lot more mistakes, but I'm okay with doing more mistakes. because back then I was mortified of doing mistakes to the point where I would sweat on the podcast because I was really trying not to make mistakes. But Dwarf Fortress is already such a niche game.

So I believe that just making a Dwarf fortress podcast but then having it in the German language would be too much of a customer area or whatever. Two few people would listen to both a podcast about Dwar Fortress that is only in German. A niche of a niche. Yeah.

We would, Jonathan and I would have felt really, really out of place in an alternate podcast on Dwar Fortress. It would have been really... Every once in a while I would interject and say, I recognize that word. Oh, yeah, I can't.

Yeah. Oh, I know that one. How would you, oh, sorry, I kept talking over you there, but how would you say Megabeast? Would you just say it English or would you try to, would you try to render it? I mean, we can say mega, so there's that.

But beast may be monster, so mega monster. That doesn't sound better, actually. I kind of like that. It sounds like Godzilla. Mega monster. Mega monster. A mega monster. Oh, we need t-shirts.

Oh, I love it. And I want it to be a wear squirrel. Oh, hell yeah. As recounted by the esteemed minstrel potato bomb, Lowe and Joy, the liaison had arrived at Newtower of showing. But alas, it was not a mere messenger, but a terrible affliction in the form of a Wermose. And the full moon shone upon him.

And the dwarfs of the outpost locked their doors and barred themselves inside. Alas, they were not able to save their precious yak breeding pair, as the Wormoose claimed them as his own. The residents of Newtower was spared, but the Wermus tragically claimed the lives of his fellow dwarfs before his curse wore off with the failing moon. He then wandered off in a haze, leaving behind all of the valuable cargo that the merchants had been guarding. Elder Bim was left to ponder the fate of the abandoned goods. Were they now rightfully the property of New Tower?

The other dwarfs seemed to think so, and swiftly collected the cargo as their own. So it has been sung by the barred potato bomb, whose tales will be told for generations to come. So Drew, Kristen, before you two sit down to record an episode, do you get butterflies still? You're what, 11 episodes in? A little bit. Yeah. Yeah. And we typically will sit up here and start recording three times before it becomes an actual episode because I'll be like, hello and welcome.

Wait, what are we doing? Who am I? So, I mean, it's getting a little easier, but we did weekly for a while, which was great for building up a back catalog, which I don't necessarily recommend because the sound quality was crap for some of it. But now that it's every other week, we have more to say, but it's also harder to get into the groove. Yeah, I think that's definitely the case. We also have started trying to do a little skit at the start of each one, which are terrible, but they're really only there. Like, you think they're there to entertain the audience, but they're really there to just kind of get us through the yips.

Yeah. Yeah. We have a similar thing that happens here. We, I actually, I don't know if it's a advantage or disadvantage. We don't have the option, really, since we're all remote of, you know, stopping and starting completely over. So all that gets done in post for me. So what do you, what do you use for your audio editing tools for your, when you're, you edit the podcast.

I use audacity. So do I. Yeah. I've heard people complain about it. It's fine. I definitely get what you pay for. Yeah, it's well worth the price.

Exactly. Yeah. Can't complain. It's maybe got a steep learning curve, but also I don't use like 95% of the features in it. Yeah. Well, I have a license for Raper, which is another, it's an actual, you know, digital audio workstation. And I have used that to do a couple episodes.

And there are some things about it that are good, but really it's way, way overkill for just doing four tracks of an audio podcast. And there are some features that are in audacity, like the loudness normalization that don't exist. At least I haven't found it in the same way on Reaper. Oh, man. So how do you look about it?

Yeah. So you use the loudness normalization as well? Yeah. We still struggle a little bit because we record on one mic, and we always joke that I have a tiny little mouse voice, and Drew has this nice, like, rich speaking voice, so we have to, like, set the microphone closer to me just because I cannot seem to project enough to be heard.

We've got a little mark on the table here, like where we put our chairs and then where we put the mic. Yeah. Well, I recommend if you're looking for one, I recommend the Scarlet 2I2 for a podcast. It's got two mic inputs. and it sounds pretty else. It's what I'm using right now.

I'm going to write that down right now. A lot of the Zoom mics are stereo and have two separate, you know, left and a right channel mic. Yeah, I've heard that. And mostly, like, just have not wanted to invest in another tool because I bought us quite a nice microphone that then is faulty. And I have yet to get a replacement from the company that made it. So, you know.

How much background noise removal do you use in Audacity? I use the noise gate. I will do each track individually. I'll find whatever background noise, a particular track is making. So Tonys will be different than Rollins will be different than mine. So I'll do them individually. I'll find the general spot that I think is representative,

and I will run the noise gate on that. and it will cut out all the sound below that level. I don't have to do the noise reduction very much because it's not really very much hiss in these recordings, so that's nice. I make Kristen do all of the podcast editing. Yeah, I do the podcast editing and the social media. I mean, it was kind of a project for me, for my portfolio,

and then it turns out people actually wanted to listen, so it worked out well. we bowed out of the social media thing pretty early on we did have a Facebook page for the podcast that was attached to my account and we uh we do we still have a well actually it's my Twitter that the announcements go out to but that's pretty much it I don't know do you call YouTube social media I don't I guess yeah I should think about that in in broader terms because like we we have a Facebook group I don't know I've already abandoned it because I don't want to be on Facebook. I quit Twitter a while ago, but I make our Twitch schedule and I put things on YouTube. Yeah, and then our Discord.

Our A and running our Discord, which is small. So this episode is turning out to be very meta. Yeah, this is what I was going to say. Welcome to our podcasting podcast. Should we talk about Dwar Fortress? But I actually had something, and again, I don't want to step on your toes, Jonathan, if you've got an outlet.

Oh, step away. I don't mind. That's enough. So both of us. you know, both of us, you know, on this podcast here, we both make a podcast for Dwar Fortress that is audio. And, you know, so much of the rest of the content is kind of video. What challenges do you think that, like, does that present slash how did you guys decide to do an audio instead of a video YouTube podcast?

At the very start, I just noted that there is a little bit of Dwarf fortress content, but there seems to be little to no podcasts. There are quite a few that pop up here and there, but they never seem to run long. And the big podcast that everybody knows, Dwarf Orters Talk, is already old at that point when we started. And I wanted something new. You know, I wanted new content. And I realized that if I want new content on the market, I kind of have to make it on myself. And that is why I ultimately asked on the subreddit and Jonathan reached out.

to me and then we just kind of started it you know and um my feeling was i i wasn't even sure where i wanted to go in the podcast direction i just wanted to make something about dwarf fortress because i played it a lot i felt fairly strongly about it and i just had the feeling that something was missing and we had already like YouTubers that were doing an amazing job we have streamers that are doing an amazing job and I was like, you know, maybe I can do some kind of podcast

and then I don't have to show my own face. Everybody wins. You know, I think there's I think it's just different. I think YouTube and the video things require maybe more time and attention or just maybe a different kind of attention.

And you know, I think you know, like for me personally and maybe I'm weird in this way, but I'm not much of a stream watcher because I don't know if I'm impatient or I just value editing. I'm not sure what it is, but like, you know, a three-hour stream,

I'm just not going to do it. If I'm going to spend three hours, I'm going to play the game myself. But I totally get that there's a market for it and that people love it. That's awesome. And there's great people doing it that meet that need. I think for me, I'm just usually doing other stuff

or just inevitably have to not necessarily be in front of my computer and podcasts are great for that. So I feel like there's probably enough to talk about where, you know, you can have somebody, I don't know, washing the car, doing the dishes or whatever people do when they listen to podcast. Driving, I guess is another thing people do. Yeah, I mean, like, I hope you guys don't take it as an insult, but I've listened to a lot of your episodes. Wow, this is going great, man. Oh, yeah. Love it. Love it. Bring on. I think I'm distancing myself a little bit. I'm so curious, but this is going on.

let me get to the punchline I've listened to a lot of your episodes while cleaning the bathrooms So toilet humor Exactly A lot more pleasant So thank you Well we've talked about Roland's toilet

Before his Dwarven toilet Trademark That's been a thing So I also want to I want to chime in to that subject matter Whenever you have a YouTube stream of a dwarf fortress subject matter, it is almost always playing the game, not talking about the game. You're watching someone stream a fortress, and, you know, that's fine, but they're not actually doing analysis.

They're doing, you know, play by play. Yeah. So I think that's what a podcast can come in. Yeah. I mean, that's where it gets me is, it feels like, I mean, I can kind of see if somebody's playing, I don't know. Apex Legends or, you know, Valerant or whatever. Like, there's a lot of action and it moves really quickly. But Door Fortress, I mean, I love it.

Don't get me wrong, but like watching somebody else play it, to me is kind of like watching paint dry. You know, but I love what some of the really creative folks are doing. Like, obviously, Krug Smash. Oh, wow. I said it. But he spends a lot of time, you know, like he really, you know, he's really trying to do something different with it, which I think is pretty cool. And then, you know, some of the content, like the tutorial guys, like, well, Tech, it does an amazing job. And that'stastic, I think.

Is that how I say it? Also, excellent. It's just, like, really no nonsense. Like, oh, okay, so you want to build a well. Here's how you do it. And it's not a lot of the, like, you know, where they go through and they're like, and the B option. The B option, you can build a bakery. You can build a house.

You can build a tree. You can build a car. You can build. You know, it's like they just don't tell me what every option is. does just tell me how to build a well, you know, and those guys are so good at that. So, you know, I think those are the other kinds of content that I really, that I really vibe on. And you can kind of do that in a podcast as well. The problem with tutorials, of course, then is that as you become more experienced with the

game and sort of thing, you're like, yeah, no, I get what you're saying. And now I've got 15 more minutes of this video I picked out without. Right. That's why you need the shorts. We have, I mean, Door Fortress, I think has creators who are really, really good about that, about like here's a two and a half minute video about how to avoid an aquifer or whatever and it seems like a lot of the video niche is filled like we have some really fantastic storytellers out there uh streaming it is rough like i have done quite a bit of door fortress streaming at the stage and it i will be privately horrified because i'm just like sitting there waiting

for something to happen and i'm like so you where you come here often what are you up to you today yeah so roland do you find that that too while you're streaming? Sometimes, yes. I hate to say it like this, but I do have ADHD and that might help because there's always something bouncing through my skull, like a Windows screensaver, and I just talk about that. And then I hop from like area to area to area.

And the last stream I did was the bloodline stream. And in the middle, my game crashed. and ultimately the entire stream is like six hours long. Oh, my gosh. And you notice that I'm losing energy, but I would say that I managed to constantly talk for like almost the entire six hours. Wow.

I know that finding something to talk about is hard, but I just, I stop thinking in my head and just I say what I think. And I, so. I need to Kristen. I say to Kristen that Dwar Fortress is a little bit of either an ADHD simulator or an ADHD stimulator. Yeah. Yeah, because there's always something going on and you sit down and you're like, you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to focus in on my mayor this time and I'm going to make him happy and build his stuff and all of that. And then two hours later, I'm like, what the hell was I doing again? Yeah. The game that I was calling out is Settlement Survival, which is a fun, also a colony sim. And I streamed that a couple of days ago. And I was like waiting around for stuff to get built or anything to happen. And I was like, I'm this door fortress. Yeah, I find myself impatient even when I'm playing solo or I'll use the DFHack fast door for whatever.

Like, I don't have time to watch and build the bedrooms again. I can build lots of bedrooms. Just build and be done with it, please. I can break the realism. As recounted by the illustrious bard, David Eltsroth, the lifeless bodders of the unfortunate merchants began to emit a foul odour, prompting the elders to take action.

Though the task was unpleasant, the dwarfs worked tirelessly, carving out a magnificent resting place in the depths of the outpost. It struck them as curious that their first three losses were not among the fortress's own residence, and that the deaths were not caused by the fortress itself. Nevertheless, the dwarfs continued with their solemn work, adorning the burial area with intricate carvings and statues.

Each fallen soul was laid to rest with utmost reverence, their names etched in stone and their deeds remembered in song. The dwarfs knew that these departed merchants would forever be a part of their history, a reminder of the dangers that lurked beyond the safety of their fortress walls. And so, the burial area of Newtower became a place of both mourning and remembrance, a testament to the resilience and honor of the Dwarven people. So Saryth, David Eltsroff, Bard of Newtower. Do you folks think that the community is large enough for regional in-person meetups?

to some degree yes we have some listeners who are really really engaged with us and they like it seems like they're really hungry for people to talk to and hang out with and just share this hobby but it's so it's such a small community at the same time that it seems harder to justify i bet like places like gdc or packs i could i could see there being meetups in those kind of places um yeah but those are in cities usually in before COVID times we had a a programming meet up here locally that happened I think it was every other week maybe it was once a month that it happened and I was very disappointed with the turnout that it was you know sometimes there would be the host and one other person I know that there were sometimes where nobody but the host showed up so I with the you know the internet is such a wonderful thing that it will it will concentrate well this is double-edged sword, of course, but it will concentrate people of

like ideas and like minds and you will have a community that may seem larger to the people who are in it than it might actually be. And I wonder if you went to New York or San Francisco or L.A. or Tokyo or one of those places, like you're going to find a lot of people that probably

play the game and I bet you could do some kind of an in-person meetup there. You might be surprised because we lived in Hayward outside of San Francisco for a while. And, you know, they had AI meetups in San Francisco. And I went to a couple of them and the same thing sort of happened where you usually had kind of the same crew of three people out of something you think would have a large group. And sometimes it was, well, you know,

sometimes I didn't go. So I don't know if the guy was just sitting there on his own. And sometimes the guy was, sometimes the organizer was the only one there besides me. Yeah. I mean, you know, you're in a big city. There's going to be a load of different types of meetups. And, you know, I think it's like anything, like an AI meetup or whatever, like that's going to, you know, there's going to be cool kids AI meetups and not cool kids AI meetups. And some of them are probably going to be better attended because you've got, you know, Timit Gibru or somebody speaking, and that's going to draw a lot of people. I, you know, I think it just, it depends. I just think Door Fortress is so small. Like, if word got out, everyone who played it that felt like

doing something social would probably be, you know, would probably be into it. I mean, I don't know if you guys ever watch an HBO show. But there's, there's one. It's how-to with John Wilson. It doesn't really matter, but he is in New York City and happens into a meetup for people who like the first Avatar film. And I'm not talking the Airbender one. I'm talking the Blue People one. And this is pre-the-sequels.

So, you know, there's a little bit of everybody. If you go to the cities, it's just getting a wrangle and get the word out, I think, is a problem. Roland, have you ever attended any kind of tech or interest me? ups in Berlin? Well, tech and interest meetups, this is a broad word. Yes, I guess so. Yeah.

Yes, we do have like a technology mess, but that is so broad. You see everything ranging from screens to microwaves to smart fritches. They follow you around. Really creepy. Oh, God, a fridge that follows you around? Terrifying.

Yeah, yeah. It's like a small fridge on wheels. and you have a like a tracker and the fridge just follows you around if you press on the tracker. And it's like a small fridge and it beeps at you, it just follows you around. It's super weird. Who's the market for that? Who's in the appliance shop saying, you know, I love this fridge, but it just doesn't follow me around the house. Football fans, man.

Football fans. This just feels like somebody was high on the toilet and came up with that idea. Yeah, but if the fridge were, like, self-refilling, you know, it had arms, and it would pack itself with beer and Coca-Cola. Oh, God, this just gets worse and worse. We could talk about it, right? But I have to fill the fridge. What if it was like that movie, Her, and I could develop an attachment with it, and it became my soulmate, and it gave me a Coke? If my fridge looks like Scarlet O'Hansson, I want one.

I mean, well, it could, you know. this is not a couple's podcast but um for example I talk to people about dwarf fortress because I play it all the time and all my friends know that I do but they don't really get it and I have yet to meet anybody in real life

that actually knows what dwarf fortress is I was going to ask do you tie them to a chair to talk to them about it or I have never had someone who recognized my Dwell Fortress T-shirt. I have never talked to anyone who I wasn't already part of the Dwar fortress community who really even knew of the game

besides that they heard that was this impossibly hard game to learn. Drew, Kristen, have you found anybody outside of the community that you have, um, knows about Dwar fortress outside of your Dwar fortress hobbies? No, but I've converted some people. I have to. I actually, because I work in a tech company, I'm not sure all of us do, or yeah, so I work in the tech industry.

I think all of us are tech or tech adjacent type stuff. And out of my company of 100 people, because they're very friendly people and they have, you know, like gaming slack and that sort of thing. two people when I posted about Dwar Fortress one time because the V-50 dropped two people there actually had been playing the Aski version and also were excited about V-50

and I never really thought to mention it before so I got two but that was two out of like 120 very technical people It's pretty good hit right Yeah it's not terrible I go skating in a nearby small city

and any time that I go ice skating I will wear my Dwar Fortress T-shirt and no I'm always looking for someone to come up to me and say hey look at that that's pretty awesome you play Dore Fortress but it still hasn't happened. I did have it happen

for me once with I wore a Tux the Penguin T-shirt one time and I was at a gas station and someone asked me if I ran arch Actually, this week, I had to get a blood draw for before the travel and all of that. And the phlebotomist actually recognized my shirt that was a Warhammer 40K t-shirt. Like, you didn't say Warhammer 40K on it or anything.

It was just the Eldar, the Space Elves group. And she recognized that and was like, oh, do you play Warhammer? And I'm like, yes, actually, I do. I have a funny story about that too because my tattoo artist collected orcs and I annoyed the whole room and everybody in it

by talking to her about orcs and collecting orcs and the Warhammer in general there's a nice community actually I think that that community I think is really cool when I was in Stockholm once I went to the games workshop one in the central business district area of Stockholm

and for some reason it was open at like 8 in the morning and we were out and they were super friendly and nice and chatted and explained how it all worked and showed us the miniatures and I mean they were just they just seemed like really nice people had good experiences with Warcraft or with Warhammer people yeah whenever I meet them in real life

it is great The community online can be a little bit iffy at times, but I don't know. It's online, isn't it? Yeah, I feel like that it's, man, we are so far from Dwarf Fortress. Well, we haven't talked about NFTs yet this time. Yeah, you guys have to. Yeah, so you guys are launching an NFT campaign for your podcast. True, yeah.

And it's like you get two NFTs per thing since you're a couple's podcast. Rangling it back in. This is really nice of you. I have found the Dwar Fortress community, and I've said this before, but I've found the Dwar Fortress community to be incredibly friendly, silly friendly. We have done, we're recording episode 86 right now, and I don't think that there has been a single instance of people telling us that they disapproved of something that we did. We have only had a couple of them say that the audio quality was poor, and early on our audio quality was, was really bad. I mean, it was a friend that told me that our audio quality was bad, so. Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, that's something that's fixable. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah, the online community for Dwar Fortress is so great. I think the online community is so great because I think that everyone realizes in Dwar Fortress by and large, there aren't really experts. Like even, you know, Zach and Tarn would probably say that they're not experts at it. right like it's it's not that sort of game in quotes and so no one can really do the thing you can't gate keep something when you know you're kind of bad at it yeah um looking at other games uh for example i mean elden ring let's take elden ring for as an example even though i don't believe the community is too toxic in there as well but you can you can be good at elden ring like objectively just good

you hit the boss you don't get hit you build your character you level up blah blah blah and if you are bad at the game you get hit all the time you die all the time or you skill your character weird then you get comments about like why is a character skilled weird

but there is no failure scenario in dwarf fortress other than what happens to everybody and we don't have much influence about that. Sometimes your attack, the goblin attack, just succeeds. Sometimes you forgot about a hole in the ceiling and now you have some kind of forgotten beast in there or whatever. And living with

that, knowing that you have little to no influence about what is going to happen in the next few days in your game, you come to realize that, you know, this person, has problems with goblins, but I don't have to be mean to them. They already have enough on their plate. Like, they're already trying to play this game, so we'll just give them a break. Yeah, exactly.

That's fair. Yeah. I think it's not competitive also, which I think helps. I think the games where there's a competitive element, and there's rankings, and there's, you know,

there's like brackets and tournaments and stuff. I think that, I don't know, I'm not very competitive. There is no player versus player at war fortress. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think the multiplayer aspect of it would be kind of a downer.

I think the fact that everyone gets so, you know, your fort does always eventually fall apart. That really just forces everyone to accept some humility. And also, if you're the type of person who can't accept that humility, you bounce off the game. Yeah, true. Welcome to psychology today. Today we're talking about how Dwar Fortress imitates real life. It is a ephemeral experience, and it will, end it'll it'll it'll it'll ego check you the game because i remember when we first started doing the

podcast and i would play a lot of things and i'd be like you know what i can survive on an art and i i sheet i can survive anything and i made it like you know a year and i was like right yeah oh this the hubris fort okay so go ahead and tell the go ahead and go into a little more detail about that that that that's a great story and it hasn't been told in quite some time in our um in our podcast so let me let me let me set it up so So Tony was playing this fortress that every time, any amount of time went by, he would suddenly have, was it zombies? Yeah, it was to be an undead invasion, like within the first year. Like, before you could even get the walls up, then it would be like a hundred undead.

It wouldn't be like a little exploratory committee of like, you know, Devlin's hand and, you know, Roger's uncle or whatever. They come in and then they leave. it was it would be like a hundred full of animals and like ghost elephants and it was just like what in the hell is going on here yeah i don't remember whether this was 44 12 or 4704 um uh i don't know if it's uh version 44 40 or 447 i think this was still 44 yeah it was it was it wasn't the it was the i think the second to last of the old school releases and it was some world that had and i don't even think it was that old is it like 500 years or something. something maybe it was older maybe it was like a thousand years and for some reason every the whole thing was just all towers and so like it was so densely packed by that used to happen in that version right like uh um there one definitely happened in that one yep like they just had they just had the uh the slider bar for uh the you know undead a little too strong and over time it would just all tend towards that.

Yeah, it was brutal. Yeah, I think every world that ran long enough would eventually succumb to the undead was pretty much the way it worked. Yeah, it was pretty rough. It was like my current world. I think the best thing that I was able to do is just like survive if I went off to the tiniest corner

in the edge of a map and immediately just built a wall around the wagon, then maybe I could survive. But it was ridiculous. But it was a nod your ground only for it. Like you couldn't have any, no trade caravans, no migrants, nothing. It was a little broken. So I may have this wrong. You have to correct me if I do, Tony.

But so Tony got proficient with this world and decided that he was going to build a fortress. What was it in an Arctic region? Yeah, it was ice sheet in an evil biome. And I was like, oh, my gosh. Because you get you just, you know, it was like I figured out a way. Like, you could build the wall, and then, you know, there are, like, ways you could channel them in and build little traps to kill the zombies or at least keep them running in circles for long enough to let your migrants in or whatever. Yeah, so I thought, oh, I know what I'm doing. I'm so good at this game.

I'm going to start on the ice sheet. Nothing can stop me. Yeah, that was humbly. Don't mess with the ice sheets. That's my theory. And what killed your last dwarf on the ice sheet? I think Alt F4. This is one of the most vicious deaths, and then the delete key.

Bye. No, I've still got that port if anyone wants it. I think I've got it saved on my NAS or something. Oh, did we want to talk about the Imager apocalypse happening? Oh, right. We did talk about that last time. Oh, yeah. Imagers decided to tank themselves by getting rid of all of the content that people use it for.

Isn't that basically what the gist is? What happened to Microsoft Buy them? We hate this business. We're going to tank it by getting rid of all of our customers. Sounds good. Work out for Tumblr. It's like the faulty tower is the way of doing this. This hotel would be so much better if it wasn't for all the people staying here.

So let's give a little background if people don't know what's going on with that. So Imager has decided to delete all content. for for images that do not have an associated account. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah, including past uploads. So, and apparently that is the go-to for Reddit, right? Or has been?

It was their Reddit's alternative to the, to whatever photo bucket and all the other ones before that have run this exact same trajectory. turns out letting people upload pseudonymous content to your image network is not a good idea. Get in trouble with Mr. Policeman, apparently. Was it illegal thing? Is that what drove it? I don't know. You never know what's going on behind the scenes. But usually if you're trying to build in some sort of KYC into your business,

it's because you don't want anonymous people doing things because they're, doing bad things. But in this case, it could just also be a way to try to monetize it. If you can create accounts, then you can start figuring out how to serve ads better to people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So who knows? Who knows? Porque knows those dust, though. Christian Drew, did you guys ever use it? Not super much, but I am in the Dwar Fortress subreddit and in Bay 12 games, like I know a lot of the content there that I consumed back when I was first starting playing Dwar Fortress and kind of the stuff that got me over the hump of this is actually a fun game if you if you spend the time and learn what the hell's going on I think a lot of

that was Imager is hosted on Imager and so it would be really sad to see so much of that go away yeah we'll have to talk to twisted logic gaming about that because he it was Twisted Logic Gaming that ran the uh the Dwarfortress memes or at least was a moderator on the Dural Fortress Memes channel, right? Yep. Okay, yeah. So I suspect that this is impacting him probably quite a bit. Yeah.

You know, it's interesting. I think there's a couple problems with it because first you've got the links to the content that are embedded everywhere, like in all of those historical Reddit posts. And I think most people find Reddit really useful in the fact of I've searched for something and a thread from seven years came up. and it turns out to solve exactly what I needed and it's great. I think Reddit's just been amazing for that. And I think that breaks with this because so much of that old content had Imager baked into it.

And then I think just because of the way it was linked, it kind of negates any impact like Jason Scott's text files.com could do to try to back it up because you would basically just be backing up volumes of content, but then it would all be completely unstructured data. And how do you then, like, how do you true it up? You can't, I don't think. So I feel like it's going to be a huge hit that is going to be a bit of a bummer. Well, we back up that unstructured image data to GPT, back it up and then feed it into GPT4.

And GPT4 can then answer your DeWar Fortress meme question. at which point because it doesn't actually know what it's saying you know like it's just spouting nonsense so you're saying that soon my fridge will be able to follow me around and stock itself and teach me about Dwarfurtress that's correct isn't that amazing

and push you into a magma pin there you go it's magic yeah it's just magic I still don't think we have figured out what to do with the internet and in situations like that if you look back in the 1930s, 1930s, 1940s, you can still see, although they're deteriorating, you can still see newspapers, magazines, printed stuff of mundane information that is very interesting

to read 100 years later. But now that we're putting all of our text and data on the internet, that is not a permanent medium unless we do something to make it a permanent medium, because it leaves when the person paying for that hostess. website leaves. Yeah, and that's text files. Like, that's what Jason Scott's trying to do with the Internet Archive is just trying to back up all the stuff because, you know, the point of, like, they did GeoCities

and worked with a few other people to try to back that up. And, I mean, you could argue GeoCities was crap, but there's interesting stuff there. Like, there's still stuff that I think... It was a slice. Yeah, it's a slice of life. And I think with things like Image You're going dark and I think when Flickr did its monetary conversion, you know, like that break stuff. to, and I get that businesses have to make money.

Like, if there's people working at Image aren't working for free. So I totally appreciate the problem that they have, and I also see the problem that it creates when they have to take these bold moves or these drastic moves to try to monetize, which is assuming it's all about. Yeah, I mean, from a business point of view, like, or not from a business point, but from a governmental capitalism point of view, you know, we've really kind of taught people that the way to make money for your company is to, to make something indispensable for free and then flip a switch and start charging money for it.

And that just keeps running into the same issue. And like if you've used the fact that your stuff is free... We can hear you. Yeah. We can... Shall we stop and hear you? Yeah, we can stop and restart. Okay.

We're sorry. We seem to have experienced another interruption in our community. communications systems. A team of dwarfs are working on addressing the issue. And now, this important message. In the annals of New Tower of Showing, it is recorded that a migration of seven dwarfs arrived on the 6th of timber in the year 106, as chronicled by scribe Justin Lothamer. Elder Bim, beholding the unfamiliar faces among the new arrivals, mused upon the implications for the future of the settlement. With the influx of these new settlers, the population of the hamlet grew to 21, yet the spirits of the dwarfs remained high. However, with the possibility of conflict looming,

the need for a defensive squad became apparent. And so, Elder Bim realised that a hospital must be constructed to heal the wounded that such battles could bring. The dwarfs toiled mightily, their hammers ringing through the depths of the earth. Soon enough, the House of Healing was completed, a sanctuary for those who suffered injuries in battle. The elders were pleased. The ancient scribe, Justin Lothimer, did record this tale for posterity. Okay, we are back and apologize for the abrupt cutoff that happened there, but we had another bit of a technical failure that we were going to have to address before we were trying to

record another episode. Oh, whoopsie. So, Kristen, Drew, how do people access? your podcast you can find us on pretty much everywhere so that's spotify uh iTunes I don't know wherever people listen to podcast and it's at a strange mood we're on YouTube at a strange mood um we have separate Twitch channels that um everything from those goes to YouTube so that's probably where to find us all right well thanks everyone for tuning in and listening and we look forward to having you two on again

to talk about Dwar Fortress and podcasting and next time we'll try to actually stick to the stick to Dwar Fortress instead of metapodcasting but it's just been so great to talk to people who are kind of trying to, you know, doing the same thing that we're trying to do as well.

I mean, talk about niche. Yeah, we're Fortress contractors. Exactly. And now there's a lawnmower right outside my window. There you go. It's the sign from the universe. I know, right? All right, everybody, before the program stops working again,

we're going to wrap this one up and tell everyone that we hope you have a wonderful week and get out there, play Dwar Fortress. Good luck, dig deep. Yeah, thanks again for inviting us on. We advise you guys make a great product. Thank you very much. Yeah, see you next time.

He'll have that out. This has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast. You can find a lot. all our past episodes at DFRoundable.com. Stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. You can find video content on our YouTube channel, and you can send us an email at Urest at DFRoundable.com. That's UR-I-S.T at DFRoundable.com.

Please consider donating to the creators of Dwarfortress at Bay12 Games.com. If you'd like to help support this podcast, you can find us at patreon.com slash df roundtable. This is a conversational podcast. Allcraftsworship is of the highest quality. Thanks, Delphonzo.