The Grim Reader

She hardly expected the visitor. She was in good health with good doctors, and she wasn't old. But there it was, interrupting her a quarter of the way into Ancillary Justice: the Reaper. "Listen," she said, "just let me finish this book and I'll go quietly, okay? You don't want me to throw a fuss, do you?"

Death shook its head and beckoned.

"Now? Okay, how about a deal. I hear you like those. So, read the first thirty pages of this." She pulled the Game of Thrones off a shelf and handed it to Death. "If you can put it down without finishing it after that, fine, I'm yours. Otherwise, I get to finish my book."

Death sat and read silently. She went back to reading. She was getting hungry when she realized Death was still reading.

"Here," she said. "I have to go out. If you finish that before I get back, here are the rest."

A week later, Death came to her while she was working on Ancillary Sword. "All finished?" she said. "If you liked those, try the Wheel of Time. Here." She pulled another stack from her bookcase.

She lived another forty long, healthy years.

You Will Hate Buffalo: Super Amazing Wagon Adventure Turbo

Someone took Oregon Trail nostalgia and asked, "How over the top absurd can I make this?" "Very," this person said in reply, and was correct. Super Amazing Wagon Time Adventure Game Turbo is a retro-graphics side-scrolling shooter starring a covered wagon heading west, three people you can name after your best friends, worst enemies, pets, or politicians, and a mixture of random and scripted events that will have you laughing.

Unless you're in one of the handful of on-foot sequences, you're shooting wildlife and bandits as you race your wagon across plains, mountain passes, and deserts. You'll pick up limited-ammo weapon powerups such as shotguns, airstrikes, and magic wands and possibly trade your trusty pistol for a magic sword or a trained falcon you find in an underwater treasure chest. You'll choose between fording a river and leaping it, in a decision that could lead you to fighting a satellite in low earth orbit or fighting off angry bears.

And you will kill buffalo. You will slaughter your way through a horde of buffalo so thick you will never want to see another. You will fight buffalo en masse. You will fight them in the sky. You will fight them on fire. You will hate these lumbering, flaming beasts that mercilessly ram your wagon to shreds and innocently traipse through your entrails. Even more than the bandits who choose to shoot at you, you will hate buffalo.

Play unlocks survival modes that let you dodge snakes, murder piranha, and fight off zombies. You can play an infinite travel mode. You can unlock unique wagons, each with their own special weapons (offering great and interesting choices for gameplay). But there is no mode that lets you get your vengeance on the hateful buffalo that now haunt my dreams.

Thanks, Super Amazing Double Wagon Time Adventure Game Turbo Ultra. I am a broken man.

Super Amazing Buffalo Murder Wagon Adventure is available for $2.99 on Steam, from Desura, or from solo developer sparsevector directly.

One to the Left

Armin benefitted throughout his life from a condition that caused him to look at the next person to the left of whomever he was addressing. When a policeman ticketed Armin's car just as Armin was running up, he yelled at the bewildered woman next to him on the streets, avoiding a greater charge.

He once explained an esoteric element of physics, completely wrongly, to the person at the next table instead of his conversation partner. The woman went on to patent a very successful product on her misunderstanding of the principle, and gave Armin half the credit and the profit.

Meeting Armin's future wife was a matter of trying to ask out the woman he desired and getting a date with the surprised woman next over. When they had a child, the maternity ward nurses frequently corrected him as to which child was his.

In a consulting job, Armin tried to fire an extraneous employee for "inappropriate use of company resources." The next employee over demanded to know how Armin had discovered her peculation.

And naturally, when Death came for him, Armin made an eloquent argument to prolong his life... to the child beside him. Death took him without delay.

Slightly Intimidated

"Arneson," Dr. Umbre leaned into view through the doorway, "I need help." "Reeeeallly," said Dr. Arneson. She leaned back in her chair. "You haven't asked me for help since I was failing you in Modern Galactic." Her eyes crinkled as she smiled.

"Yeah, and if you fix this with me, I'll let you tell that story wherever you want." He tossed a manila folder on her desk. "This is freaking me out."

She raised an eyebrow, but started to flip through the data and photos. A few minutes in, she flipped pages faster and faster, then stopped partway through. "What was your final count?"

"Twenty-four in the habitable zone, all earthlike."

"That can't be natural," said Arneson. "So, what? Someone put them there?"

"God?"

"I was thinking aliens, but God has to pay the same cost. He just has a bigger wallet. What would it take to kick a planet into a new solar system?"

Arneson scribbled on an envelope, but Umbre got there first. "Roughly four-point-five time ten to the thirty-two joules, he said. "Assuming roughly our solar system, and a precise enough push that it doesn't need course correction."

"What about slowing into new orbit?" asked Arneson.

"Oh, shit. Okay, double it, so ten to the thirty-three joules?"

"Okay. What if alien-God used direct energy to mass conversion?" Both went back to their calculations. This time Arneson was first. "Five times ten to the forty-one."

"Um," said Umbre. Both looked at the sketch Umbre had made of the data, exoplanets arranged in a maximally efficient pattern around a star.

"Well, I quit," said Arneson.

"Quit what?"

"Astronomy. If someone out there can do that, they've done all the science we're gonna do for the next century. My research? All been done. By an alien fifteen light-years away."

"What if it wasn't aliens?" asked Umbre. "What if it was God?"

Arneson looked Umbre in the eyes. "If God made that system and our system, which one is his favored land? I hope to Heaven that that was aliens and not God, because if it was God, we are his forgotten bastards and we might as well all give up now."

In a small, confused voice Umbre asked, "Maybe we don't have to tell anybody…"

"No," said Arneson. "We tell everyone. We drop this bomb on the scientific world, and maybe everyone else will notice. Maybe we'll pick up the pace and learn what we need to match this in the next fifty years instead of a hundred, or five hundred years instead of a thousand." She put a hand on Umbre's shoulder and shook him. "We can shake the pillars of the world.

"And then I'm going fishing and never looking through a telescope again so long as I live."

This great post inspired this story. Enjoy!

Find a Stick, Build a Nest: Bird Song

Bird Song is a charming, simple game. You are a bird, a squat, pixellated bird, and your goal is to find sticks and use them to build nests, while jumping over pits and dodging spiky barriers. You pick up powerups that let you jump higher or jump off walls or I'm not sure what else, because I only got so far in the game. Whatever nest you built or passed last is your save point, and you can use that to try again whenever you die.

The simple graphics are charming, but perhaps the most intriguing thing about the game's appearance is the way it shows you the world map. Imagine the entire game map fit onto a single screen, as if shown from very far away. Naturally, you can't see your character or your surroundings to play. So the game distorts the map around your little bird, like blowing up a giant bubble on the surface of the screen, so your immediate surrounds are clearly visible, and it flows into the rest of the world map in a distorted way. Even as you play, dodging spikes and pits, you can see roughly where other things are on the map.

In the end, it's a bit too repetitive for me to want to finish. After finding a few powerups and expanding my exploration range with them, the amount of backtracking I'd have to do to check out new spaces exceeded my threshold. It's possible that adding some smaller victories might have kept me engaged. Respawning enemies for me to bop on the head as I crisscrossed the map, providing the opportunity for small wins while I was doing something less engaging, might've kept me engaged longer.

Bird Song, by the same creator as Roguelight, is available for download on itch.io.

Yes, I Got Some Stuff Wrong

From Chaos begat Ouranos, the sky that breathed across the water, and Gaea, the water flowing beneath the sky. For an epoch, this is all that was. “Hey, baby,” said Ouranos.

Gaea was quiet.

“How you doing, girl?”

Gaea tried to flow nonchalantly, but there wasn’t a moon yet, and it was kind of hard without a tide. “What do you want, Ouranos?”

“Jus’ wanna get to know you, baby. Let’s talk.”

“What’s there to talk about? It’s not anything happens around here.”

“So let’s make something happen, girl.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah, girl, I’m ready.”

“I mean, really? That’s your line?”

“What’s the problem, girl? You don’t like what you see?”

“What, the infinite horizon? The pale blue? They’re nice, sure, but-”

“Then what’s wrong, girl? Let’s mix up a storm.”

“Do remember the beginning of the epoch? Both of us begat by Chaos? We’re practically siblings. And frankly, you’re coming off like an asshole.”

“Hey, girl, I’m sorry, okay? No big. Let’s just hang out for a while, forget about this little thing, yeah?”

“Okay, fine.”

The wind blew over the water for a while.

“Am I wrong, or does having me on top of you make you wet?”

A Message from the River

A beautiful woman walks out of the river. Her hair is a rich mud-brown, her eyes a river-water blue. She is naked as the day she was born, a meaningless phrase because this was the day she was born. She walks until she finds civilization: a fisherman’s cabin by the water, fisherman included. Approaching him, she asks, “Please help me. The river has made me to bring a message to humanity. Will you help?”

Finding his voice, the fisherman says, “Ah, sure, I’ll help if I can, miss. What can I do?” He puts down his pole.

“The river has been misused and is on the verge of catastrophe. She has sent many messages without change, so she has sent me. I need your help to tell the world.”

He clears his throat. “I’ll do what I can.” He leads her to a van parked by the cabin. “Let’s see about getting you some clothes, then we can tell folks about your message.”

“Thank you,” she says, accepting his hand up into the back of the van. “Your wisdom will save our world.” He closes the back of the van. He locks it.

“They never get any smarter,” he mutters.