Friday, May 29, 2026

Slushpile 19

Slushpile Index

Almost enough to do a random table of these.

  1. Qlm Hogii - Random pocket-text and fantastic name for a Star Wars OC
  2. Xeno’s Arrow: near-light speed ramming maneuver
  3. Graffiti: "FREE CUDDLES" - headless squat humanoid, torso dominated by fanged vertical mouth. arms outstretched
  4. God wiping sweat from His brow looking with pride at a whiteboard labeled "companion for Adam" that just has a bunch of crossed out scribbles surrounding a circled and underlined "big-bazonga goth gf" in the center
  5. Gemstones are the crystallized residue of the spirits of the dead that form as they descend into the underworld
  6. You know what would be a really easy way to get celebrated war hero Anakin Skywalker in your pocket? Promise him that once the Separatists are done, the Republic will turn its sights on the Hutts. Offer him the chance to lead the charge that destroys the galactic slave trade. 
  7. Summoning “demons” actually querying uploaded minds stuck in bot-controlled hellscape cyberspace
  8. “There never was a fucking squid. That would be too great a mercy.”
  9. Found inside a corpse: 16 marbles
  10. Found inside a corpse: Sandwich baggie of liao
  11. Found inside a corpse: Bright blue stomach tumor
  12. Seas of anoxic acid
  13. Dream: I go back to my elementary school music classroom, where all my old classmates and teacher are already there practicing the choral parts of Lawrence’s boss theme from Bloodborne. Someone, not sure who, points out the ghost of a nun exiting via the door to outside. She disappears from view for a moment then returns to view and gives us a friendly wave. Short, kinda fat, glasses, round face. Weather is very nice outside, but that also might be part of the apparition, it looked somewhat painted.
  14. The spirits of the dead are angry because they, unlike the living, have both perspective and solidarity. With all divisions stripped away, the dead are keenly aware that history is a millstone grinding down the struggling masses of humanity beneath the endless violent whims of innumerable petty tyrants: of course they’re angry. 
  15. Media that Doesn't Exist: Anime movie about a bunch of convenience store workers plotting and carrying out the murder of the main character’s neighbor 
  16. Using Identify spell to jumpstart germ theory by tagging diseases according to origin.
  17. The cosmos is but a dream of MANA YOOD SUSHAI; at the center of the cosmos is AZATHOTH, the shadow of the dreamer, the roiling subconscious chaos from which the dream is made; walking the countless worlds one finds the Speaker in its million masks, messenger and nightmare.
  18. “You would think either he’d run out of fingers or we’d run out of pies.”
  19. “Most of the world’s suffering, statistically speaking, is generated by a pair of dangling nodules and crippling anxiety regarding them.”
  20. “We could have stopped this. Inevitability would be too great a mercy, and I refuse to believe that the universe would leave a single avenue of human agony unplumbed.”
  21. A rocket bound for Ganymede launches from the South China Sea, carrying six hibernating benthoi, seven thousand fertilized roe, and a shoggoth constructor ganglia.
  22. MoSh idea: nationalized online casinos for tax collection
  23. Solo game about going to an anime convention - deciding where to go, what to do (get # ribbons?) while juggling energy (reduced by going without food or having too much junk or negative encounters or doing too much)
  24. Of all the dead peoples in the universe, the ability to Dream with such clarity is rare. One in millions.
  25. Essay for another time: monsters don’t need HP
  26. Real-world inspiration: the Running Madonna of Sulmona
  27. Alternate Roswell Incident: A downed Soviet spy plane, hastily papered over by the dissemination and subsequent retraction of a story about a crashed flying saucer.
  28. The drug liao, which grants its users visions beyond the time and space that they know, breaks onto the world stage in the late 60s. Then come the Hounds, those things that live in the angles beyond the world, ever-pacing and ever-hungry.
  29. Dream: I am visiting a fancy manor; there’s extremely good pizza and beer, and also one of those not-necessarily run-and-jump-away-from-something sequences. Very floaty jump, moving forward fast but falling slow. First person. Also there’s a woman wearing something like a plastic skin suit of another woman, though I don’t think she was related to any of the above.
  30. Adventuring parties as a combination of seasonal workers / traveling circuses / monster hunters.
  31. Indo-European language with click consonants
  32. Story idea: A pulp author’s litigious estate makes it impossible for the protagonists to get a hold of the book he wrote that describes how to banish the monster.
  33. Thelemic Babalon, except it’s the Red Queen Hypothesis instead of an excuse for Crowley to get laid.
  34. There are a considerable number of predynastic pharaohs known from a single inscription and nothing else.
  35. Idea: Fantasy world with only American wildlife. Pleistocene megafauna is in, of course, we gotta have the sloths.
  36. Endoparasitic echinoderms = facehuggers
  37. If anything is emblematic of Star Trek’s fading relevance, it's the lack of  even a lackluster attempt to capitalize on Big Lady Mania with a Klingon. It’s free real estate, people would go absolutely feral.
  38. Idea: culture where coming of age entails undergoing a pale blue dot moment via astral projection
  39. “March of progress” painting but modern man has turned around and is tearfully embracing his ancestors
  40. Star Trek Hard-Sci Reboot: Vulcans now methane-breathing ice-shelled land squids. Klingons are Alex Ries style alien hippos. Ferengi are collectives of centipedes wearing skin suits that talk like crypto-bros. Centrifugal gravity, delta-V budgets, interspecies cooperation in the death void 
  41. “Everyone fantasizes about being able to stare right into the abyss and say ‘you didn’t win’, but I’ve yet to hear of someone pulling it off.”
  42. Dream: I am reading a Delta Green supplement titled FREENDSHIP, which claims on the back to detail 10 species of alien parasites. There’s a conspiracy web of NPC mugshots, and multiple art pieces of women in burgundy kimonos; they have stone blocks with kanji on them for heads.
  43. Overheard on a walk: “I don’t think you have room for a gazebo.”
  44. “I am a daughter of the bear, a follower of the path of dogs, and servant of the queen of night; why would I fear any blade held by men?”
  45. Paleolithic names: Doqu, Hlunggua, Chirwan, Ngo, Tamo, Tatang, Yavuu
  46. Artificial solar system with black hole + stable red dwarves (or k-stars), with planets arranged in resonant orbits with each other to prevent full total locking. 
  47. Christian rock band thrown out of their music circle with the release of their 18 track death metal power ballad about the harrowing of Hell.
  48. In the hierarchy of harmful spirits, a spirit of hunger is more immediately dangerous than a spirit of gluttony.  
  49. Yithians from opabinia, rather than tullymonstrum 
  50. I like when DG scenarios play into the "people dragged into the orbit of the greater powers and irrevocably changed by it" aspect. 
  51. After the dissolution of the soul into its component parts on death, the shadow is particularly vulnerable to outside influence. Accumulated sin and trauma, in sufficient quantities and unreleased by premortem catharsis, will transform shadows into demons, who then feed on and reproduce via further negative emotions.
  52. “This is an ember of the flame imperishable, stolen from the heavens by the Watchers of old when they saw that mankind was cold and afraid: it is the very last of it on earth.” 
  53. Prospero’s Dream, █509 - The AI mascot of a vat-meat barbecue joint, no matter how many times it is reset, keeps switching to the 'heavyset' appearance preset and flirting with and/or unsettling patrons.
  54. How to identify a Mythos tome as the real deal? Look for how little sense it makes when compared to normal occult traditions; magical circles in a grimoire that works are actually renders of a hypersphere 
     

**


Spam from “Florence”: 

WARNING: DON'T FALL FOR THE ELON MUSK CRYPTO SCAM THAT ALMOST BROKE ME
I'm still reeling from the shock of losing a staggering $64,000 to a fake Tesla investment platform that used realistic deepfake videos of Elon Musk to lure me into a trap….
I don't know, I appreciate the madlibs of an old-school spam comment. This format was around long before genAI and it will endure long past the collapse of the thinking machines.

**


The benthoi clans of the [NESSIE-BESSIE] spawning dyad, reeling from catastrophic defeat in their wars with the [DAGON-HYDRA] and [ABAIA-JUTURNA] kin-groups, can see the writing on the wall. Earth is no longer safe for them; Tulu is stirring in the deeps and they fell out of its worship long, long ago. The least-bad of their options is escape from Earth entirely, but benthoi are not a species or civilization given to space-faring. They will need help…

**

Your people have lived in these mountains since the Great Winter. Alone among all the tribes, you survived when the ice retreated and the herds were no more. You learned of planting and tending from your neighbors among the valley people, and by those teachings you have endured.

But now the age might grow too great to bear. For many years now, each summer has seen the Sky-King’s riders strike closer and closer to your home: now they are at your door.

They wield weapons of bronze, have made the wild horse tame. Where they ride, they slaughter, rape, enslave, bring sickness in their wake. They tear down the sacred places and put the elders to the axe; they kill both god and language, destroying history itself.

The wise folk of your people have gathered together, to see what may be done. Each in turn enters their trance, and one eye in the spirit world each in turn says that there is nothing that may be done. All omens point to death; there will be no escape. To fight will invite slaughter, to flee will merely delay it. The spirits are weakened from the destruction of their holy places; many have handed themselves over, fearful of the riders’ great bloody-handed god.

But the last of the wise says differently, and tells all gathered there of her vision of a great signal fire on a distant peak. Our prayers have reached the land of the gods, she says. They hear us and send their aid. Endure but a little longer, make ready for their arrival.

The elders grumble among themselves and say that she is too young and bull-headed, that she sees what she wishes to see and says what the people wish to hear. She says the same of them, that it is easier to accept death than the pain of hope.

There is no telling who saw the truth until the horsemen come. 

 

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

Dan Plays Games 11

Index 

The Apothecary of Trubiz

A cute little three-dollar cipher-puzzle game that’s three dollars worth of puzzles.

TR-49

Research and deduction games are taking off as a genre, and this one’s a solid entry into the roster. You’re given a computer terminal and the task of finding and identifying one specific book in the database, and it sends you right down the rabbithole of an alternate literary history. There are a solid number of aha moments, I never felt like the path forward was too obtuse to stump me for long, and I was able to 100% it in a reasonable 7 hours. Nice and satisfying.

Scarlet Hollow (Episode 5 update)

I can’t remember if I’ve written about Scarlet Hollow in this series before, so here’s the precis just in case I haven’t: Slay the Princess devs, southern gothic horror VN, it’s fuckin’ good. Unicorn Meat is probably happening the next holler over.

Where Slay the Princess is a line diverging into a fractal, Scarlet Hollow is a bowl of recursive spaghetti. Events connect to each other in unexpected ways, older episodes are called back to, choices you made hours or episodes ago can compound in ways you never saw coming. Moments with a clearly-signposted binary choice will often lead directly into a second similar choice, or add a third option because of something you did two episodes prior.

Playing through on both my old save and a new one from the beginning (as a refresher) was an excellent choice. If you’re not patient enough to wait for the final story update, it’s a great excuse to play it twice and make different choices.


Hell is Us (update)

Having now finished the game, I can say that it’s mostly solid, succeeds at most of the things it set out to do, and is let down by the most “we ran out of money and / or time” third act I’ve seen in a long, long time. Honestly, calling it a third act borders on falsehood: it’s a hallway, a large room, four elite enemies, four switches and a cutscene. The narrative ties itself off in a burst of action movie shlock that poorly suits the story that’s been woven together so far. I can’t say that it ruins the game, because it feels so disjointed from the previous ~27 hours that it doesn’t feel like it’s part of the game.

Removing Act 3 from the equation, there are still some pretty substantial issues: after nearly 30 hours the fights do become pretty tedious from the woefully limited enemy variety, and upping the difficulty doesn’t really stop you from being able to face-tank your way through the game. The plot of act 2 spins its wheels a bit and fizzles out after a while, losing the strength of the opening hours and becoming more median video-gamey, and the attempts at deep lore only really get to shallow depths.

Still: on the whole the game was engaging, and I played through till I hit credits. It won’t go down as a favorite of all time, but it was worth the playing and I hope it inspires some people to make something like it. 

Dorfromantik

Hoo buddy this is a dangerous one in terms of the feel-good brain chemicals. I can easily lose hours in it, even when the gameplay solely consists of rotating hexes so their edges match. Pattern-Seeking Brain is pleased; Time-Management Brain is horrified.

The Seance of Blake Manor

An extremely Irish sleuth-em-up with great visual style. You’ve been summoned to a manor-turned-hotel in western Ireland, to find a missing attendee of a multi-day seance. Everything you investigate ticks time a minute forward, and you have to juggle everyone’s schedules along with your own. The cast is a wonderful gamut of folks you’d find in a Call of Cthulhu module; everyone has their own plot, sometimes connected to each other, sometimes not. It feels excellent to make a breakthrough and have a new crop of clues pour in, especially if you stumble on it by chance while exploring.

While the mystery itself isn’t going to change on repeat plays, there’s enough stuff in the game that I think it’ll be worth a second run-through to clean up things you’ve missed.

Lingo 2

Never played Antichamber but it’s got the same sort of hyperminimalist visual vibe and obtuse puzzles. You’re running around collecting letters, and then plugging those letters into consoles scattered around the world. Each console has a word, you need to transform it into another word, but you also need to decode the function you need to use (since the transform commands are all clusters of symbols).

There’s often a lack of feedback when you solve a puzzle - you get a tone and the console turns green, but it’s not always clear what has changed in the world when you do so.

Sol Cesto

I was sold on this just from the visuals, and was not disappointed. “Weird” is accurate but insufficient. “Fever-dream (positive)” is closer, but still feels somewhat reductive.

The sun is gone, and you need to get to the bottom of the dungeon to find it. Each layer in the dungeon is a 4 x 4 grid of squares filled with monsters, treasure, & traps; you select the row, but the exact square you land on is random, and the crux of the game is a combination of pushing your luck and managing the odds of getting a given square type.

Once you really get a hang of it you can break the game wide open, which I think is nice; it’s not a forever game. It also manages to sidestep the issue of running out of metaprogression unlocks before beating the game; you use the same currency to buy progression unlocks and in-run items (sending coins back up to the surface via a bucket on a rope), so once you have nothing left to unlock you don’t have to worry about saving for the next bucket room or sending part of your winnings back home; you can spend it all on items, which is secretly the best upgrade in the game.

Scriptorium

A paper-doll style art studio featuring the best weird little guys medieval marginalia can provide. Comes with a sandbox mode where you can just do whatever you want, and a campaign where you fulfill requests for clients and gradually increase your library of sketches. It’s a wonderful time, definitely has RPG applications.

Blue Prince

Late to the game, but I’ve been mostly unspoiled - (having forgotten most of what I glimpsed my partner do when she played it last year). I’ve hit credits, gotten 4 trophies, and begun digging into the deeper puzzles. So far I’ve managed to squeeze out a little progress every run, even if it’s just checking out a new room or finding one minor clue or something like that, but even then the spectre of getting repeatedly fucked over by RNG remains a consistent threat and I can already feel the frustration setting in on occasion. Half the game is puzzle solving, the other half is mitigating the game fucking you over, and your enjoyment will be contingent on how well you can mitigate that. So far I’ve found having multiple goals is the best defense, but that's just a defense, not a solution to the tension. I legitimately don't know if this game should be a roguelike - being a roguelike certainly was part of what elevated it to popularity, but I don't know if the roguelike elements are good for the game, exactly. But they're not exactly wholly bad either, I like the sense of increasing familiarity you get with the manor and its systems so shrug.

I have, by my count so far, cheated on four puzzles, one of which I absolutely would never have gotten on my own and one that I probably could have gotten only after a massive flaming crash out. take that for what you will.

 

Gameable Material Section

Steps = Exploration Turns

There's no reason to count exact time when you're already counting turns.

In OSE, an 8-hour day is 48 exploration turns and costs 2 flasks of oil. Erase the "8-hour day", no more hours, hours are fake. (Not bumping it up to 50, because 48 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 and 16. Easy clocks.)

Each step (exploration turn) = 1 new room. Going through a room you've already been in is 1/2 a Step, going through it a third time reduces it to 0 (stopping to re-examine costs a full Step).

If you run out of Steps, you need to make camp and rest or you'll start taking penalties to everything from exhaustion.

Combat encounters count as 1 Step. Not because they take long, but because they exhaust you. 

A party member can avoid getting hit in combat at the expense of Steps (probably according to hit dice of enemy? Unsure)

Certain interactions (room mechanisms, sickness, magical effects) can decrease Steps; potions and some rare magical items can increase Steps.

You can pay a Step to secure a location from ambush. 

Doubtlessly there are other applications. 

 




Sunday, May 24, 2026

Dan Plays Games Index

Micro-reviews of video games I've played.

Last updated 05/26/2026

** 

Dan Plays Games 1 (03/14/2022)

  • Psychonauts
  • Gris
  • Scourgebringer
  • Little Nightmares
  • Bloodstained Ritual of the Night
  • Lobotomy Corporation
  • Remnant: From the Ashes
  • Kingdom: Two Crowns
  • SUPERHOT
  • Cross Code
  • Horizon: Forbidden West

Gamepost Special: Elden Ring (07/04/2022)

Dan Plays Games 2 (05/04/2023)

  • Warframe
  • Sundered
  • Roadwarden
  • Spiritfarer
  • Vigil: Longest Night
  • Blasphemous
  • Chained Echoes

Gamepost Special: Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom (06/05/2023) 

Gamepost Special: Fear and Hunger 2 (02/26/2024) 

Dan Plays Games 3 (03/26/2024)

  • Balatro
  • Symphony of War: the Nephilim Saga
  • Limbus Company
  • 20 Minutes Till Dawn
  • Chants of Sennar
  • Path of Achra
  • Otxo
  • The Dungeon Beneath
  • Blasphemous 2
  • Wildermyth
  • The Forgotten City
  • Grime
  • The Fermi Paradox
  • Book of Hours
  • Roboquest
  • Moonring
  • Brutal Orchestra
  • Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood 

Dan Plays Games 4 (07/27/2024)

  • Black Mesa
  • Darkest Dungeon 2
  • Coromon
  • Civilization 6
  • Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
  • Void Stranger
  • Quester
  • Baldur's Gate 3 

Dan Plays Games 5 (12/05/2024)

  • Tactical Breach Wizards
  • The Pathless
  • Potioncraft: Alchemist Simulator
  • Halo CE (MCC)
  • Halo 4 (MCC, Spartan Ops only)
  • Terra Nil
  • Vampire Survivors (replay + Castlevania DLC)
  • Potionomics

Dan Plays Games 6 (03/01/2025)

  • Buckshot Roulette
  • Epigraph
  • Mouthwashing
  • Katana Zero
  • Selaco
  • Shadows of Doubt
  • Quester | Osaka
  • ABI-DOS
  • Gods vs Horrors (demo)
  • The Roottrees are Dead
  • Caves of Qud
  • UFO50
  • Rift of the Necrodancer
  • Sorry, We're Closed 

Dan Plays Games 7 (05/22/2025)

  • Pyrene
  • Pokerogue
  • Spiritfarer (follow-up)
  • Path of Achra (follow-up)
  • Sorry, We're Closed (follow-up) 
  • Ender Magnolia
  • Time Wasters
  • ENA: Dream BBQ
  • Gods vs Horrors (release build)
  • Slay the Princess
  • Promise Mascot Agency

Dan Plays Games 8 (08/14/2025)

  • Elden Ring: Nightreign
  • Odallus: The Dark Call
  • One Finger Death Punch
  • Rift of the Necrodancer (follow-up)
  • Binding of Isaac: Repentance
  • Date Everything 

Gamepost Special: Expedition 33 (09/15/2025) 

Dan Plays Games 9 (11/25/2025)

  • Date Everything (follow-up)
  • Islanders: New Shores
  • Silksong
  • Hades 2
  • Binding of Isaac: Repentance (follow-up)
  • Decktamer
  • Hell is Us
  • Peak
  • Picto Quest: The Cursed Grids 

Dan Plays Games 10 (01/24/2026)

  •  Forward Escape the Fold
  • Asbury Pines
  • Dungeon Encounters
  • Nuclear Throne (10 year replay)
  • Ye Guild Clerk
  • Neon White
  • Stackflow
  • Monsters are Coming!: Rock and Road
  • Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop 

Dan Plays Games 11 (05/26/2026)

  • The Apothecary of Trubiz
  • TR-49
  • Scarlet Hollow (Episode 5 update)
  • Hell is Us (follow-up)
  • Dorfromantik 
  • The Seance of Blake Manor
  • Lingo 2
  • Sol Cesto
  • Scriptorium
  • Blue Prince 

 

Sunday, May 17, 2026

50 More Alternate History Divergence Points

First installment

THE TROUSERS OF TIME HAVE SPLIT AGAIN

  1. Aleister Crowley successfully summons his guardian angel at Boleskine House; it immediately reduces him to constituent atoms and irradiates over a hundred square kilometers of Scottish countryside by presence alone.
  2. A confederation of eastern hunter-gatherers and surviving neanderthal tribes successfully blocks Yamnaya migration into Europe.
  3. Brief but peaceful contact is made with a team of alien academic observers in Australia c. ~14,000 BCE.
  4. The excavation of Troy is handed off to literally anyone besides Heinrich Schliemann.
  5. Five volumes of Emperor Claudius’ Tyrrhenika are discovered in a Lombard monastery, April 1378.
  6. H.P. Lovecraft is drafted into the US army and dies on March 29, 1918 during the Battle of St. Quentin.
  7. The Indian Plate migrates slower than in baseline, and has not yet collided with Asia by the time humans evolve.
  8. Basque sailors discover a chain of islands west of the Azores in the early 1400s, which is swiftly called Atlantis by continental scholars.
  9. Some absolute mad bastard of a Soviet linguist spends 40 years documenting Siberian languages in exhaustive detail, providing much firmer support for the Dene-Yeneseian hypothesis.
  10. An anonymous Spanish clergyman, by some miracle of conscience, squirrels away 15 Maya codices that remain untouched until 1954.
  11. A relatively small and relatively slow meteor hits the northern Atlantic Ocean in 1701, causing relatively catastrophic tsunamis.
  12. Catherine Eddows fends off her attacker in the early morning of September 30th 1888, fracturing his skull, collarbone, and three vertebrae with a brick in a stocking; “Jack the Ripper” is found dead later that day.
  13. A few clades of trilobites make the jump to land and/or freshwater and survive to the present day.
  14. OH JESUS CHRIST SEA SCORPIONS NEVER WENT EXTINCT EITHER
  15. Han dynasty scholars mostly-accurately reconstruct several dinosaur species.
  16. Jimmy Hoffa’s body is found in 1990, having been stuffed inside the freezer of a Wendy’s franchise in Jersey City.
  17. The Rosetta Stone is never lost.
  18. The United States forgoes the use of nuclear weapons on Japan.
  19. The 1998 Copyright Extension Act fails to pass.
  20. Pre-Socratic philosophers devise a preliminary germ theory as an offshoot of atomism, where sickness is caused by harmful atoms entering the body.
  21. Percival Lowell doesn’t jump to conclusions.
  22. Mongol invasion of Japan finds initial but unsustainable success.
  23. Alexander the Modestly Accomplished dies to an errant slingstone in 330 BC, toppling his Persian campaign.
  24. Early church fathers are somehow persuaded to approve the practice of same-sex unions, on the grounds that it’s technically not called a marriage and the participants definitely promised to remain celibate.
  25. Queen Victoria dies of tuberculosis in 1839.
  26. Star Wars isn’t saved in the editing room, and achieves only modest success; its sequel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, flops hard enough to shutter the franchise.
  27. Tolkien ends up finishing and publishing that sequel novel to LotR.
  28. Constantinople remains Constantinople, and does not become Istanbul.
  29. Old New York remains New Amsterdam, and does not become New York.
  30. Henry VIII decides it’s easier to just institute inheritance by adoption.
  31. CPR invented by Abbasid physicians c. 900.
  32. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms fail to establish the Commonwealth; Ireland and Scotland remain independent.
  33. Someone slightly to moderately less bigoted than John Campbell serves as early science fiction’s tastemaker.
  34. Christianity flounders in the Mediterranean and survives primarily in central Asia and India.
  35. Sino-Soviet split never occurs. 
  36. Monotremes make up ~1/4 of all mammal species on Earth.
  37. Alien transmissions are detected nearly as soon as radio telescopy is introduced.
  38. Major eruption of the Yellowstone hotspot in 1803.
  39. Hawaii remains an independent kingdom.
  40. Publication of Malleus Maleficarum is banned by the Church.
  41. Elder Thing arcology detected during Artemis II lunar flyby.
  42. USAF pursues 2003 “Rods from God” satellite weapons program.
  43. A semi-successful IAL takes off through connections to the various early 20th century New Age movements.
  44. Piltdown Man is immediately clocked as a hoax and gains minimal publicity.
  45. Robert E. Howard dies of a stroke in 1982.
  46. A series of mass shooting in the 1970s lead to a semblance of American gun control laws.
  47. Common Brittonic isn’t displaced by Old English.
  48. Augustine of Hippo remains a Manichaean.
  49. Penicillin is discovered decades later.
  50. Hokkaido maintains independence.

Or all of them at once, as usual.

Saturday, May 9, 2026

Wikipedia Links from my Notes 3

Slushpile index 

Part 1, Part 2

These posts accumulate quite fast. 

1. Dictionary of the Khazars
A 1984 novel by Milorad Pavić that tells its multi-headed century-spanning alternate-history story through dictionary format. I’ve not read it but I really should, since it sounds 110% like my kind of shit. Though right now it seems my bets are either borrowing the low-quality scanned pdf from Internet Archive or snagging it through interlibrary loan.

2. Quinametzin
From Aztec mythology via the Codex Mendieta; six giant sons of Mixcoatl, who survived the flood that destroyed the world of the Fourth Sun and then founded the cities and peoples of the Fifth.

3. Ḫulbazizi
“Evil be gone” or “the evil is eradicated”; the final phrase of Sumerian and later Alkkadian exorcism incantations. 

4. Ofuda
Wood or paper talismans used in both Shinto and Japanese Buddhism.

5. Haida Manga
This is predominantly the work of Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, and while the article doesn’t have any visual examples a quick google search brings up some striking comic work.

6. Esplumoir Merlin
A hut / cottage / tower / castle etc where Merlin transforms into a bird or back into a human.

7. Barlaam and Josaphat
A popular medieval saints’ tale about a prince who escapes the seclusion of his father’s palace for a life of ascetic piety that, by the time Caxton printed it, would have been an English translation of a Latin translation of a Greek translation of a Georgian translation of an Arabic translation of a Middle Persian translation of a Sanskrit text about the early life of Siddharta Gautama. So the Buddha is canonically a saint in both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, though I don’t think either would admit to it.

8. Menocchio
A miller executed by the Roman Inquisition in 1599 for a sundry list of heresies, including:

  • The only sin is harming one’s neighbor.
  • Blasphemy only hurts the blasphemer.
  • Mary wasn’t a perpetual virgin.
  • The pope has no special spiritual privilege beyond an ordinary righteous man.
  • As the afterlife is God’s domain and fully outside of human influence, there’s no reason to pray for the dead and the living should focus on helping the living.
  • Sacraments are all human inventions to make money; God gives baptismal grace to everyone directly at their birth.
  • Marriage was established by men, not God; an exchange of vows is all that is needed and anything more is just business.
  • Anyone can become a priest through study (the practice of ordination being just another business)
  • The use of Latin in court trials is a way for the rich to oppress the poor, since the accused usually don’t know what they’re being accused of or how to defend themselves.
  • “God has given the Holy Spirit to all, to Christians, to heretics, to Turks, and to Jews; and he considers them all dear, and they are all saved in the same manner.”
  • The universe started as an undifferentiated coagulation of the four elements in a state similar to a block of cheese, and that God and the angels emerged from it like worms (from said block of cheese).

Dang, Menocchio, leave some wins for the rest of us.

9. Al-Wakwak
An island from medieval Islamic literature, supposedly located in the seas east of China. The inhabitants are all women who grow on a tree like fruit, and while I can’t say this is directly related to Elden Ring it certainly feels appropriate.

10. Youdu
Capital city of the underworld in Chinese mythology; I think there’s a fun contrast to be made here with Pandemonium as rival cities, dual cities, or even the same city in different periods or under different administrations.

11. Alyoshenka
I fucking love this article. It’s just some Russian creepypasta that has somehow had a dedicated wikipedia article for 20 years, with all the vague, unsourced, unverifiable claims that this would entail. you could easily use it as a case study of how to spot bad information and spurious claims while doing online research. It reads like a bad first attempt at an SCP article and annoying as that can be, you can develop a certain fondness for the really impressive flops. It’s the sort of bad shortform horror fiction that makes me go “oh man I could probably make a good version of this”.

12. Category: Yokai
An inclusion that requires no justification; everyone should have a list of yokai on hand.

13. Dionysiaca
A late-Classical epic poem about the life and accomplishments of Dionysus, including his military expedition to India, written in Greek sometime in the 400s AD. It’s the longest surviving poem in Greco-Roman literature at over 20,000 lines in 48 books, survives in what appears to be its completion, and somehow no one knows or talks about this. There are only two English translations that I can find, with the oldest still being from 1940. 

14. Caribbean Shaktism
The British system of indenture in India saw a sizable population of Tamils deported to the Caribbean. They brought their religious practices with them, which have developed on their own into a syncretic tradition that holds Kali-Mariamman as the primary manifestation(s) of Shakti. A historical curiosity that I never even considered, and a good reminder that the world is a big mixed-up bag of stuff.

15. Lake Uniamési
An enormous apocryphal lake in east-central Africa, believed to be the source of the Benue, Nile, Congo and Zambezi rivers by European missionaries for a brief period in the mid 1800s. Was most likely a misinterpretation of the African Great Lakes.

16. Pas-ta’ai
A festival held by the Saisiyat people of Taiwan to commemorate and appease the spirits of a tribe of dwarves who had feuded with the Saisiyat’s ancestors. Has had something of a modern resurgence, though that has come at the cost of disruptive tourists.

17. Herxheim (archaeological site)
Archaeological site in Germany and former home of a neolithic cannibal death cult. 

The Herxheim mass-grave is estimated to hold the remains of at least 500 individuals, with many of them originating a noteworthy distance from the site; recovered bones display cuts and fractures in consistent enough patterns to indicate methodological killing, post mortem butchering, and consumption. Skulls were converted into vessels, long bones were cracked open and scraped clean of marrow. With so many foreigners among the dead, they had to have either travelled there intentionally or brought there by force.

And all of this is packed at the tail-end of Herxheim’s history: after about 300 years of habitation and a further 50 years of human sacrifice, the site was abandoned and never reclaimed.

18. Temagami Magnetic Anomaly
A magnetic anomaly in eastern Ontario generated by a large geological structure of unknown composition and origin (though it’s probably from a meteor impact depositing  a shit-ton of iron). I like the name, it's got an excellent ring to it.

19. Huang Bamei
You win at piracy by retiring with your head still on your shoulders: “Two Guns” Huang Bamei not only did that, but did it so recently that she’s got a photograph on her Wikipedia page. She died in 1982! Got her start smuggling salt with her father, then worked up to running her own operation, got caught, dodged execution, got recruited by the Nationalists to fight the Japanese, went back to piracy, got cornered by the government again, got pardoned, the Nationalists recruited her again to fight the communists, and then finally retired from piracy in Taiwan. Turned down the CIA’s attempt to recruit her and successfully sued Shaw Brothers Studio over a film depicting her as a collaborator with the Japanese. 

20. Zapam Zucum
Goddess of carob trees in the folklore of the Aymara and Diaguita people of Argentina / Chile / Bolivia. Looks over infants laid down in the shade while their mothers work. Described as having dark skin, hair, and eyes, white hands, and - the article seems keen to point this out - big ol’ gazongas.

21. Zaqqum
A tree at the center of Hell in Islamic tradition; its fruit is shaped like demon heads and boils sinners from the inside when eaten. I’m honestly surprised that “inverse of the Tree of Life” took this long for me to find, it’s a natural mythic extension to Eden.

22. Eglė the Queen of Serpents
A figure from Lithuanian folklore; Eglė is a human woman who marries the king of serpents and together they have three sons and a daughter. After completing some impossible tasks (as is tradition) Eglė leaves the serpent’s palace to visit her family, at which point her brothers gang up, learn the means of summoning the serpent king from Eglė’s daughter Drebulė, and kill the serpent to prevent Eglė from returning to the sea. In grief Eglė transforms her children into oak / birch / ash / aspen trees, and then herself into a fir.

And also she’s a character in Elden Ring, I guess. I don’t really see the resemblance, there’s nothing remotely applicable between the two stories. It’s not like Elden Ring has a character who probably fucked a snake and is associated with a big tree that generates a considerable amount of sap / resin like a pine tree would and oh…

23. List of Hoaxes on Wikipedia
Since everything on Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA, all of these hoaxes have inadvertently been added to a sort of shared alternate history, and I think that’s neat. Most of these are stubs or minor blurbs, but there are probably a few that could be expanded into a bit of nifty flash fiction.

24. Chinese Characters of Empress Wu
A series of alternative Hanzi characters that saw some use for a time during the reign of Wu Zeitian, though the mandate evaporated as soon as she died. They’re all in unicode, as is right. Most of them are for fairly important words (sun, monarch, person, etc), which fits with their invention as a sort of linguistic show of force.

25. Medieval Runes
The descendent of the Younger Futhark, used throughout Scandinavia up until the early modern period even after the introduction of the Latin Script in the 1200s. Would be a great pull if you want a script for a game; it’s recognizable but not just copying Elder Futhark because Tolkien did it, and there are more letter variants to work with (to handle the historical development of new sounds)

26. Manungal
Sumerian goddess of prisons, name translates to “great princess”. Felt like an interesting dichotomy. The article points out that, given the place and time, the goddess of prisons would be pretty merciful compared to the mutilation and / or summary execution you’d normally get in the era of Hammurabi.

27. List of Aesop’s Fables
And these are just the ones with Wikipedia articles! The Perry Index has 725 of them, and I honestly had no idea there were so many. They’re so ubiquitous as a thing people just know about that it fades into the cultural background radiation, which is certainly a shame I should remedy. While odds are good that Aesop might have been a character stories were attributed to out of convention or convenience, that’s useful inspiration in its own right. 

28. Matilda Joslyn Gage
A woman with one hell of a resume. Abolitionist, feminist, suffragette, journalist, author, critic of religion, campaigner for indigenous rights, etc etc. Also the mother-in-law of L. Frank Baum.

29. Zana of Tkhina
One of those cases where it feels like reality is copying some of my notes.

It’s the mid 1800s: A strange woman is found wandering the woods of Abkhazia: tall, dark-skinned, covered in thick reddish-brown body hair, and seemingly unable to speak. She’s captured, sold as a curiosity multiple times before, and ending with Edgi Genaba of Tkhina. She lives outdoors on the Genaba estate until her death in the 1880s, survived by four children; anything more than general details is lost to time. 

The locals at the time considered her an abnauayu (a wild-man); Soviet cryptozoologists Alexander Mashkovtsev and Boris Porshnev thought she was a surviving neanderthal or some other relict hominid. Their excavations of the Genaba family cemetery in the 1970s exhumed the body of her youngest son Khwit (d.1954), and a woman's body that had been buried without a coffin. That body was not conclusively identified (via DNA analysis) as Zana until 2021. Modern scholars think the most likely explanation is that she was Afro-Abkhazian (a diaporic community descended from east African slaves brought to the region by the Ottomans) and had congenital generalized hypertrichosis, causing both her body hair and apparent intellectual disability. 

Khwit and Zana's skulls remain in Moscow; the rest of Zana's body was stored in the Sukhumi Museum of Natural History until it was destroyed during the 1992 war in Abkhazia.

It’s not a happy ending. I doubt the middle or beginning were particularly happy, either. The article says that Zana's four children were born under “unclear circumstances”, and while that doesn't necessitate the worst possible outcome I don't think the odds are in favor of history cutting her a break. 

Still. In my mind's eye I can see the neanderthals wander out of the woods one evening when no one was watching, and Zana slips away with them to live happy and free in the mountains till the end of her days. It’s bullshit, but sometimes you need a bit of bullshit to get through the day.

A toast to Zana; she deserved so much better than she got.

 

The Commons Section


1. Titan Sea Map
CC-BY 2.0 (Peter Minton)
Solid campaign world map right there, maybe slap a few islands down and you're good to go.

2. World Map with Separatist Movements
CC-BY-SA-4.0 (Vojtěch Pokorný)
A map of the modern world if every entry on the Wikipedia list of active separatist movements (as of Jan 2023) succeeded. Excellent fuel for some alternate history scenarios even if you just pick a couple. 

3. Historical map Orkneyar 
Public Domain (Unknown artist)
Map of the Orkney Islands for Adventure magazine. Terrible resolution, basically unreadable, but would be easy to blow up and trace over.

4. Creature hyena
CC-BY-3.0 (David Revoy / Blender Foundation
I love how much this absolutely isn't a hyena and yet feels the most hyena it's possible to be. Bet it has an absolutely fucked up laugh.

5. Wooly mammoths near the Somme River
Public Domain (Charles Robert Knight)
A mural for the American Museum of Natural History. knight has loads of other great vintage paleoart, I went with the mammoths because of course I did. 

6. Font de Gaume
Public Domain (Charles Robert Knight)
Human paleoart gets graded on a pretty sharp curve, but this is a solid one.

7. Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs
CC-BY-4.0 (Álvaro Fernández González)
Now I'm not entirely certain where CC fanart falls on the spectrum of yea or nay, but this is a nice menacing balrog.

8. Sigmund
Public Domain (Arthur Rackham)
Used this one for my PDLOTR project. Leave it to Rackham to make some incredible art of some truly godawful subject matter. 

9. Setebos
Public Domain (Joseph Urban)
Design work for a 1916 performance of the masque Caliban by the Yellow Sands. That's a dungeon if I've ever seen one.

10.Warrior
CC-BY-4.0 (David Revoy)
The boob plate isn't going to pass armorer's muster, but you can do far worse for anime-vibe art.

11. Lia Turtle
CC-BY-4.0 (David Revoy / Blender Foundation)
If it's not obvious yet, David Revoy has a lot of CC art on Wikimedia Commons.

12. Maastricht Book of Hours, BL Stowe MS17 f200v
Public Domain (Unknown artist)
Nun with animal legs, bigass sword, and a no-nonsense expression. Figure that will be of interest to the readership of this blog.

13. BlankMap-Philippines-noborders
Public Domain (Howard the Duck)
Certain someone can find a use for this.

14. Ekko (Echo)
Public Domain (Theodor Kittelsen)
All of Kittelsen's work is PD and all of it is fantastic. His main page has a gallery.