Intermezzo

Sirocco wrote :-

Gemclod sat in the depths of the swamp, shattered and in ruins. A terrible demon had risen from the pits of hell and murdered almost every inhabitant before eventually falling itself.

In the wake of the disaster, the survivors had little to do but memorialise the dead and move on. Daeren, crippled overseer, pays his respects to his predecessor...

'Hey, hey. A bit closer.'

Daeren's bed was pushed a few more inches towards the grave.

'Closer!'

'I've only got one hand, sir.'

'Fine, Mortuus, fine, this is close enough.'

Daeren looked at the grave solemnly and, without quite knowing why, a song came to him...


(Click here for lyrics, tablatures and other versions of the song.)

Silence.

'Sir, permission to ask a question?'

A grunt.

'What the FUCK?'

'I... I dunno.' Daeren stroked his beard irritably. 'Um. Just don't tell anyone, alright?'

'Who would I tell?'

'Good point.'

Daeren wrote :-

It has been years since I've tried making any poetry so this is probably awful and should be replaced with somebody else's effort.

BALLAD OF YEAR 272

"A woman's job is never done
With foolish men around!"
Of course, it was Bene who had
The refugees all drowned

A plague claimed her before she could
Do much at all, it's true
Atomikus and Tyskil then
Were those that we looked to

Armies tried to besiege our fort
We barely survived it
Soon grumbles began rising up
And simply would not quit

Baron Commatoes said "We need
A new overseer!"
And so it fell upon my head
To lead you bunch of queers

*YEAR BREAK*

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU
YOU'RE IGNORING THE TREES
DAMN IT ALL IF I COULD WALK
I'D PURGE THEIR FOUL DISEASE

HOLY SHIT THERE'S GOBLINS THERE
PULL THE GRIZZLY ALARMS
LET'S SEE HOW WELL GOBLINS FIGHT
WHEN THEY'RE MISSING THEIR ARMS

OH GOD THIS PLAN WAS AWFUL
SLITHEREDLOW GOT INSIDE
YOU LOT GO DISTRACT THE BEAST
WHILE US CRIPPLES ALL HIDE

*evisceration solo*

*calmer, music dies off bit by bit as the song finishes*

How the hell are we alive
Slitheredlow has been killed?
That's great and all but we're stuck
With no way to rebuild

SirPenguin wrote :-

Inkedsteam, a merchant fortress, requesting the king's presence to foster peace negotiations.



Request denied. Lack of roads cited.



Oakentrade, a small settlement, asking for the capitol's assistance to help relieve them of a 164 day siege.



Request denied. Its architecture was far below the standards of Tradition.



Treatystones, a defenseless fisherdwarf fortress, faced with full compliment of Arrogant Ones riding beasts of unimaginable horrors, pleading for the royal guard to save them



Request denied. Very little in the way of exported goods.



The appeal of Inkedsteam, the claimant stating that the invaders were still pillaging their settlement decades later.



Appeal denied. Did they not see the notice about their roads?



Gemclod, a barony, requesting aide to deal with goblins, Arrogant Ones, elves, kobolds, demons (dinosaur), demons (winged), demons (snow), demons ([redacted]), plagues, starvation, dehydration, phantasms, and floods (magma & water). The king's direct involvement is desired.



Request approved

TildeATH wrote :-

I put up a bulk text of all the overseer updates up to Daeren on ManyEyes. I think we all saw this coming:



And also ran a count on the actual size of each update (in text):





I haven't played with ManyEyes for a long time, and I may or may not bring some NLP into this at some point in the future, but go take a look at the datasets and have some fun. Somebody should throw all the journals up there, as well.

Text of all Overseer posts for text visualizations
Size of Overseer Posting Over Time

markus_cz wrote :-

So apparently, the chart TildeATH posted was for "word 1" AND "word 2", ie. there must have been an AND between the two words. Now this is showing words that occur directly next to each other:



And this is just a cloud showing word frequency, but not relationships:

TildeATH wrote :-

Yeah, ManyEyes has lots of fun ways to play with the data. I didn't want to pick all the low-hanging fruit. With the word connections, you can specify any connector, for instance:





I have to say that in my career of making interesting data visualizations with a wide range of novel sources, I haven't ever created big effmaps.

TildeATH wrote :-

I will not be coarsely manipulated like this. And so rather than F5 like mad, I will continue to examine the posting statistics of our overseers. I suspect JP will end up acquitting himself quite well, despite the short amount of time and subject matter allotted him.



What's this mean? It's the amount of text posted by each overseer over the course of their year. Different overseers had different numbers of posts (Boing and Minty had the most, with 29 posts each) and so someone like Vile, who only posted 9 times, will max out very early in the graph. I stacked them because it's just so pretty.

Percent of all Gemclod text by overseer:

Minty 15%
Boing 13%
Leperfish 12%
Yeol 11%
Munki 10%
Vox 9%
Pozzo 8%
Markus_cz 6%
Daeren 5%
Bene 4%
Vile 3%
Charlie72 3%