#combining these two with the differences in immersion and worldbuilding is hilarious actually | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shadeswift99 · 2 years

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Hey yo so what if I made the most crack-filled crossover fix-it AU for both Hermitcraft and Empires at once. I bet there's a way I can smash em together so all of their individual problems literally just cancel each other out and all we're left with is ridiculous amounts of fluff and chaos, one draft no edits let's gooooooo -

- Instead of each of the server's individual endings happening the combination of dumbass science and magical nonsense just breaks reality completely and the two worlds hurtle into each other at interdimensional warp speed. Everyone's Hermitcraft bases are now on top of/beside/inside/under everyone's empires, it's pure aesthetic chaos incarnate

- Hermatrix Octa Beats Exor's Ass because I say so. Aeor fights the Moon and wins. (Please ignore the fact that I know next to nothing about 3/4 of these entities just let the gods fight it out I don't care about the details)

- Alternatively: fWhip and Jimmy still do the salmon/cod reactor thing but it happens in just the right place so the explosion pushes the two worlds away from the Moon by pure coincidence

- It takes exactly 1.37 seconds for Sausage to start sacrificing stuff to the Boatem hole

- Pix is there and Pixandria isn't actually splorked onto any other bases, but he shows up to meet with the others Exactly Once and then they basically don't see him again for months because he's booked solid making Vigil candles for Scar

- Eventually Joe finds him (tried to use that desert to mine sand for new green hotbar glass) and they have a conversation about philosophy, death, and epic pranks that I would absolutely pay to see while Joe helps him craft all those candles

- Cleo tries to sell them Hive-dr8 for the Vigil but Pix doesn't think that would be very respectful of the dead (he will take several for himself though because that desert is approximately Dry As Fuck and also this high fantasy rp man probably hasn't had an energy drink in his life)

(lots more under the cut, also very interested in extra ideas!)

- Whenever there's two of anybody they have to fight each other. That's the rules. Wizard Gem assumes she'll win the fight easily but HC Gem is a Canadian moose hybrid and absolutely runs her over a la "counterspell THIS, casual" so that's that decided (Gem respawns just fine with nothing harmed but her dignity)

- Pearl v Pearl ends up with Empires Pearl winning, of course, but it's a good fight and they agree to spar lots more afterwards for practice

- Scott and X talk and decide to just swap evil brothers and have done with this already. Scott takes Evil X aside to gently talk about his crippling abandonment issues and EX just decides to quit bothering people before the gay elf man makes him cry in front of two whole servers

- Xisuma lays eyes on our favourite demon Xornoth for 1 (one) millisecond and immediately remembers why he's wearing all that Doomguy armour. Rip and tear. (Whether he gets some kind of a redemption ending or not is really up to people who know and care more about that lore than I do)

- After EX Forcible Therapy Arc he runs across Evil Sausage and they try to go in together as business partners. It's an absolute disaster. Dark!Sausage keeps gleefully murdering all their customers and the place goes bankrupt days after opening. At least they're having fun though!

- Optional: after X uppercuts the corruption directly out of Xornoth he joins the Evil Business Trio and actually makes it halfway make sense (he is now the least evil person there and also the proud owner of at least one braincell which I find hilarious under the circumstances)

- Joel figures out that he's exactly 0.5 inches taller than Bdubs when they stand perfectly level with each other. His complete refusal to let Bdubs forget it has started 17 wars already. (In reality they get along great still though, because Bdubs does things with terracotta that would make any builder weep tears of joy and also he's wearing moss -)

- Zed's mountain is now home to zWhidaph's Laforgeboratorylands and he is NOT happy about it, this is not in keeping with his antisocial habits at all, there's this guy with wings running around unionizing all his villagers and there's weird deepslate redstone spikes everywhere and - OOOO wait he can study that stuff! Everything is perfectly okay now. Zed is in science heaven

- Gem's dragons make friends with False's giant eagle

- Grian keeps challenging Scott to increasingly risky flying challenges and Scott keeps ending up head-first in a tree in a very un-kingly way

- The number of deaths in Boatem meetings + the number of deaths in WRA meetings...they have a combined meeting Exactly One Time before Pix says that if they ever die that many times at once again he's holding candle making classes at swordpoint for the whole group

- Wormman and Poultryman get brought back just so they can be a superhero trio with the Codfather

- Lizzie and Cub become the next villain duo through sheer force of pun alone (they try to teach the axolotls to dig through the mole tunnels but they don't seem to want to cooperate)

- Ren and Sausage hit it off immediately because of course they do (also Bubbles loves the big friendly dog man, he smells like sticks and gives good scritches)

- Most importantly of all, Joel, Sausage, and Zedaph come together to host the greatest game show Hermempirecrafts has ever seen: Is That Blood Sheep Looking At Me!

That's all the ideas I have for now! I lied about no edits, I'm actually probably going to quarantine this in drafts for a couple days after the finale so the irreverent tone doesn't get me Seven Million Unhappy Replies for posting during the grieving period, but I'm personally really liking the break from all the seriousness to just fling wild ideas at the wall and see what makes the most good brain juice. :] I'll probably come up with more later!

#hermitcraft x empires #Hermitcraft crossover #empires smp crossover #i don't know how to tag this but it just makes my brain happy #combining these two with the differences in immersion and worldbuilding is hilarious actually #the Hermits are used to living alone or with friends but now there are millions of random citizens wandering around and Wanting Things -#plus I think the culture shock is so funny to think about #just all of the emperors trying to figure out how this place is even RUN，who's in charge here what's their government where are the borders #meanwhile the Hermits are all wondering how this crew gets anything done at all when they're hopping from alliance to war and back again #but they can't figure out at all who actually dislikes each other and who's just bored and loves a fight #so much fluff potential with group sleepovers while everyone sorts out where they're living...#all the storytelling....#yeah I'm for sure coming back to this #feel free to ask me questions to jog my inspiration or suggest stuff if you want #this isn't a super serious Actual AU or anything but i just feel like tossing heartwarming thoughts back and forth #(speaking of which Yeah there's a lot of angst potential here too but i probably won't do anything with it)#fluff and crack zone #maybe some sappy hurt/comfort #combining my interests just makes me so happy :)#hermempires #<that's my official tag now

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kelasparmak · 3 years

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hello! might i ask for podcast recs? literally anything ! i trust your taste xxxx

Awwww, you! I’ve kept the descriptions short because there’s a LOT, but I’ve given you genre/vibe because I’m not sure which aspect of my taste you like. Also it’s still very long so sticking it under a cut.

Campaign Podcast: Always my number one rec. Improv comedians play a TTRPG and chaos predictably ensues. There’s two campaigns, Star Wars and Skyjacks, the first one is complete and the second one is ongoing – they have slightly different vibes (think TAZ Balance vs Amnesty, I guess). VERY funny and will occasionally punch you in the heart.

Wooden Overcoats: Very funny, frequently heartwarming, excellent acting. Easy to get through (there’s 3 seasons with ~8 episodes each) and even though the characters are usually very stressed and in ridiculous situations, it feels pretty low stakes to listen to so it’s a fun one for if you’re stressed.

Caravan: Western/fantasy which I don’t think is actually a comedy but is still frequently very funny. Great acting, very fun and relatable protagonist who just keeps on choosing compassion over violence. Thoughtful coverage of mental illness, being brown and queer, and sexy vampires. 18+ but not super smutty and has content warnings.

The Strange Case of Starship Iris: Sci-fi drama about revolution and found family. The plot is pretty serious and involves galaxy-level stakes, but/and the series is very much driven by very well-written and realistic human connection right from the start – it’s very good at making you-the-listener genuinely invested in what happens. Loads of queer characters and the crew has two South Asian women, an East Asian woman, a trans Jewish man, and a nonbinary character. I probably don’t need to tell you this, but the world of popular audio fiction is Pretty White, so it’s nice to see podcasts where that’s not the case esp in genre fiction.

Victoriocity: Drama/comedy set in an alternate universe London. Feels very Discworld – really inventive worldbuilding, fun twisty plot, political intrigue, hilarious deadpan narrator, great acting.

In Strange Woods: Musical about grief, trauma, and how small and powerless humans are compared to nature. Really, really good. You’ll cry. It’s a quick listen – 5 episodes, all less than an hour long.

Oblivity: Sci-fi drama comedy, very funny, very found family. You’ll be surprised how much you care about the characters given how stupid it is.

Alice Isn’t Dead: You’ve probably been recommended this already but it bears repeating. Really well-written, acted and produced. This one’s not got a lot of humour in which isn’t usually my preference, but it’s really good. It’s got a lot of the Something’s Not Right energy of Nightvale, but goes full creepy with it. Really immersive but maybe not one you’d binge or listen to right before bed...

Greater Boston: Drama more than comedy but also deeply funny. Lots of apparently separate stories converging, clever writing (really good at giving a massive cast of characters distinct personalities), really emotionally impactful coverage of topics like grief, racial inequality, addiction, classism and more, doesn’t try to give easy answers but is also very focused on community power and optimism. Also there are cheese robots.

We Fix Space Junk: Sci-fi drama comedy, very anticapitalist, big found family feelings. Lots of fun, job-of-the-week episodic format makes it a relatively low-focus thing, even when the stakes are high it feels very safe to listen to, and the characters are v likeable (even the ones you really wouldn’t have expected).

Girl In Space: Sci-fi drama, found family and revolution, you may be noticing a pattern. It’s a lot of fun, the protagonist is super likeable and draws you in from the start. For Vorkosigan Saga fans, if you liked Shards of Honour, you’ll like this. Deals with fraught parental relationships, grief, loneliness, anti-imperialism, and more, but even though the stakes are high I didn’t find it stressful to listen to.

Death By Dying: Dark surreal drama. I don’t know if I’d call it a comedy per se but it’s very funny. Big Nightvale vibes. Deals with grief and mental illness pretty prominently, but in a very reassuring way.

The Prickwillow Papers: Fantasy drama. Lots of fun and incredible voice acting. Deals with the difficulty of letting yourself be helped, coping with guilt, and not being ‘special’. Features the most cantankerous fae you’ve ever encountered. I love her.

Middle:Below: It has GHOSTS it has CATS it has a PICARDIGAN. What more do you need to know? It’s a lot of fun to listen to, often funny and sometimes genuinely spooky (which hits all the harder for how chilled out and cosy it feels most of the time).

Mabel: Dark fantasy drama. Really poetic, well-acted, really good at suspense. Very cool modern take on changeling/fae mythology. Not much humour and very intense, which is not my thing at all, and I’ll be honest I didn’t find it an easy listen, so it took me a long time to get through it. But it’s really good and it’s definitely worth checking out, I did enjoy it, it’s just not necessarily one you’d want to de-stress to at the end of the day.

The Amelia Project: Drama/comedy about an agency that helps people fake their deaths. Great voice acting, very fun, and I really enjoy how international it is. Uses the episodic ‘client of the week’ format in combination with big picture plot in a really engaging way. Feels a bit Leverage-y especially because of how clever/absurd the plans are.

Harlem Queen: Drama set in the Harlem Renaissance. Another serious one, and deals explicitly with heavy issues including racism and violence, without much reprieve in the form of soft moments or humour. But it’s very well-made and worth a listen, and there’s not a lot of it.

The Orphans: Sci-fi drama. Expansive space opera type show with mindblowing amounts of worldbuilding. Revolution, ethics of cloning, anticapitalist, etc. Not a comedy but has some really funny bits. You’ll need to pay attention especially because it starts off with a pretty big cast of characters who don’t refer to each other by name super often and many of them have similar voices. But don’t worry too much about that – you’ll still know what’s going on even if you can’t tell them apart for the first few episodes, and you’ll be able to tell at least some of them apart.

Midst: I’m only a few episodes in but I’m enjoying it so far! Cool worldbuilding, really interesting collaborative narration/storytelling, not a comedy per se but often funny.

I Am In Eskew: Surreal horror, mostly psychological. It’s another Nightvale-y one but again without really any of the humour. It’s really good, but I’ll be honest, I’ve only listened to about 10 episodes so far, even though I started it ages ago.

….and probably lots more that I’m forgetting? I listen to less stuff at the moment because I’m working pretty much all the time, so anything I need to really focus on or that’s emotionally challenging is p much out of the question.

#anonymous

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theglintoftherail · 7 years

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Review: The 1972 Annual World's Best SF

For years and years, I’ve been collecting editions of the Annual World’s Best SF anthology series edited by Donald A. Wollheim, which ran from 1972 to 1990. A couple of years ago I decided to commit to reading or rereading every single one of them - and to reviewing every single story in each of them on Goodreads. As of now, I’ve gotten through 10 of them and reviewed a total of 107 stories, which can all be found here!

I’m doing this partly to expose myself to a wide range of SF in order to grow as an SF author, and partly because there are so many great SF authors whose work didn’t just stick around in public consciousness for one reason or another. I’ve found so many authors that I absolutely love and had never heard of before. (And because those authors are not widely read, it makes me feel like a total SF hipster, which is perversely enjoyable.)

Here are the reviews of the stories from the 1972 edition:

The Fourth Profession, Larry Niven

Well what do you know. I’ve read a few things by Larry Niven and straight-up disliked most of them, but this one was very fun. A few mysterious aliens have landed on Earth, and a bartender happens to get one of them way too drunk and is given pills that essentially give him superpowers. It’s well-paced and funny, with likeable characters and surprisingly high stakes. The ending didn’t quite live up to the rest of the story, but I still liked this a lot.

Gleepsite, Joanna Russ

The editor’s intro to this one recommended reading it twice or even three times, and I’m glad it did, because it’s pretty much impenetrable on the first read – but once I figured out what was going on, it was really cool and fairly chilling. It packs a huge amount of worldbuilding and characterization into about five pages. I’d hate to spoil it so I’ll just say, it opens on a woman with bat wings pedaling dream machines in a polluted dystopian wasteland where most of the men on Earth have died, and goes all sorts of even weirder places from there.

The Bear with the Knot on His Tail, Stephen Tall

Eh. Maybe it’s just that this story is closing in on 50 years old, but it was really just a bog-standard ‘humans discover the first alien life and oh no they’re in trouble’ story. I really thought there was going to be an interesting twist at the end – I even thought I could see how they were setting it up – but nope.

The Sharks of Pentreath, Michael G. Coney

In the near-ish future, overpopulation has resulted in a system where at any given time, two-thirds of the population is kept in Matrix-style tanks and can interact with the outside world via tiny robots, and people swap out on regular schedules. The story’s about an innkeeper at a popular tourist destination who is currently in non-Matrix-mode and who is kind of a dick. I always like SF where the speculative part is just a backdrop to a character-based story, but there was something about the whole concept that just didn’t feel quite right to me - and honestly, the main character was just too much of an asshole for his ‘I learned a lesson’ moment to ring true for me.

A Little Knowledge, Poul Anderson

Three human criminals stranded on a planet of extremely pacifistic aliens kidnap an alien space pilot so that they can sell forbidden technology to a warrior race. I loved everything about the premise, the characters, the worldbuilding, the plot resolution, etc – but the pacing was bizarrely bad, particularly when compared to how strong everything else was. Huge exposition dumps, lengthy scenes that were interesting but have little plot importance followed by rushing through much more significant events, more exposition, etc. Still worth reading, but man, somebody should have taken a scalpel to this thing.

Real-Time World, Christopher Priest

A group of research scientists in an enclosed space station are secretly being manipulated by the people who sent them there, via carefully controlled feeds of news and information personalized for each of them. I loved this at the beginning, but then a bunch of additional SF concepts and twisty plot elements were added in, and then more, and then more. Which could have been cool, but in practice it just wound up making kind of an incoherent hash of what could have been two or even three good stories.

All Pieces of a River Shore, R. A. Lafferty

Perfect from start to finish… almost entirely. An eccentric Native American collector of Old West and Native American artifacts has run across a few impossibly detailed, several-foot-long paintings of the banks of the Mississippi River. He has a theory that there are even more of them out there, and that they might actually depict the entire span of the river when put together. I loved everything about this – but the final cymbal-crash line that explains the mystery pretty much requires you to have had personal experience with 1970s information storage technology. I had to google the story to figure out what the hell was going on, and once I did, it was like “Oh! I see, awesome!”

With Friends Like These . . . , Alan Dean Foster

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, there was a galactic war in which the humans, fighting on the side of the good guys, destroyed the enemy so thoroughly and terrifyingly that the rest of the galaxy forced them all back to Earth and barricaded them in there. But now the bad guys are back, so the other good guys plan to free these mythical monstrous warriors. I wasn’t mad at this, but I personally dislike the trope of ‘humans are the most exceptional race in the galaxy.’ (Also, in general I feel like 70s SF throws a lot of psychic abilities shit around when there’s no real need or justification for it, so that aspect was also annoying.)

Aunt Jennie's Tonic, Leonard Tushnet

A research chemist interviews his old-country hedge-witch-style aunt in order to discover the secrets of her medicines. There was a lot I liked about this, but the main character was just too much of an idiot for me to be fully immersed in it. ��I’m purposefully not even writing down the parts of these processes that I think are bullshit, even though there’s no real reason not to” plus “I didn’t make any backup copies of my notes on this incredibly valuable medicine recipe” equals how the hell did you ever manage to become a research chemist in the first place.

Timestorm, Eddy C. Bertin

Did you know that changing the past in a way that you’d think would be beneficial might actually cause something terrible to happen? A guy gets transported to a future place where aliens are doing things to Earth’s past that seem bad, he stops them, oh no they were actually helping. Like the third story, this was either unoriginal at the time or feels unoriginal now that we’ve seen it a million times. And the collection of things that the aliens were manipulating was weirdly arbitrary – stopping the birth of Hitler and the birth of… the Marquis de Sade? Really? And of course, since this was written in 1971, it opens on the assassination of JFK.

Transit of Earth, Arthur C. Clarke

Ok, well this almost made me cry. A Mars exploration mission is doomed and they’re going to run out of food/oxygen, so everyone but one man takes suicide pills early in order to give the man enough time to record a rare astrological phenomenon before he dies. The story is written as a combination of his notes of the transit of Earth plus his personal reflections on life and death. It’s really great. (There is also an almost completely throw-away suggestion that maybe just maybe there are also aliens on Mars, which added absolutely nothing to the plot and probably should have been edited out.)

Gehenna, K. M. O'Donnell (aka Barry N. Malzberg)

This was gorgeous. It’s three vignettes about characters with intersecting lives – all of them go to the same party, and their meeting there changes their lives in various ways, but each story also takes place in a just slightly different world. It uses parallel universes as a metaphor for how everyone’s experience of the world and their conception of themselves is totally different from what other people see. The fact that the stories are taking place in parallel universes is established at the beginning of each vignette by a device that I thought was really cool – each character takes the subway down from Times Square to get to the party, and the stations they pass are all numbered differently. (I looked up another review of this and the reviewer described it as ‘funny’ and ‘an amusing puzzle,’ which is hilarious to me – I thought “how could we have read it so differently” and then realized that that’s exactly what the story is about…)

One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty, Harlan Ellison

Earlier in this project I read Jeffty is Five, also by Harlan Ellison, and this is so similar that I would have known immediately that it was the same author even if I wasn’t already aware. You can never go back to your lovingly-described childhood which specifically involves a lot of comic books and radio dramas and delicious no-longer-produced candy, but you desperately want to because your adult life is boring, but if you try to, it will have terrible consequences, because childhood is delicate and precious. This story is good on a technical level but that theme just doesn’t do anything for me at all, so I didn’t love it.

Occam's Scalpel, Theodore Sturgeon

The mysterious head of a shadowy criminal organization is about to die, and his personal doctor is worried about the right-hand man who is primed to replace him, so he goes to his brother for help… but what kind of help? There are a couple things in this story that are awfully convenient, and it does rely on a super-genius being tricked in a way that an actual super-genius would almost certainly see right through, but I liked the concept enough to overlook those things.

Favorites: Gleepsite, All Pieces of a River Shore, Transit of Earth, Gehenna

#science fiction #sf #classic science fiction #classic sf #Larry Niven #Joanna Russ #Stephen Tall #Michael G. Coney #Poul Anderson #Christopher Priest #R. A. Lafferty #Alan Dean Foster #Leonard Tushnet #Eddy C. Bertin #Arthur C. Clarke #K. M. O'Donnell #Barry N. Malzberg #Harlan Ellison #Theodore Sturgeon

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