A Dwarven Child Drowned In The River And I Didn't Realize Until A Year Later When I Launched An Expedition

Cool thing about this is that it is almost a completely outdated idea in that it isn't really necessary anymore, but you can't easily move a whole city. It was originally because when those areas flooded and then receded it would leave far more fertile soil, the Nile is the most famous example. So when people started farming they needed to stay in one place and the place where all the fish and yearly refertilised soil and a body of water for irrigation are is really nice. Later trade was a lot harder over land so coastal cities near rivers were important trade hubs, so there were more jobs, so more migrants, so more people and bigger cities. Nowadays overland logistics networks are efficient enough that inland cities have a lot easier of a time existing. So that's cool.

Where we put Cities

Just discovered that I have to hunt vampires in Dwarf Fortress. He killed my axelord and I immediately go to the wiki because there is no way I can deal with a (literally) goddamned vampire. After the mandatory rabbit hole, I did manage to find out that this is a very common issue that I've somehow never experienced.

Anyway, I found the vampire (unfortunately they killed another dwarf and somehow no one saw despite being in a 5x10 burrow with the victim and murderer, and for whatever reason the vampire traumatized themselves) but I am keeping the rest of the suspects detained for investigation because now I'm paranoid.

There is a scientific study that has the words "Age of Empires 2," "Elite Teutonic Knight," and "Two-handed Swordsmen."

This is an actual study on non-human warfare.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217973120

Playing Dwarf Fortress, I think dwarves might actually be able to make communism work. Pretty much all of them like their job, they're able to handle autonomy of taking resources when they need them with very little to no issues, and they are fine with working for the good of the Fortress rather than personal gain (even in pretty bad conditions).

In fact, they are kind of practicing it already. They don't really use money and private ownership is pretty low. The only thing really left to do is get rid of or never instate the nobility and go on a communist revolution of the rest of the kingdom.

The last death of WWI I can find information on was in 2014, although there could be a more recent one. 2 Belgian construction workers were killed by a shell around march of that year.

The problem with WWI in particular is that they sat for four years on roughly the same lines, the shells were often duds (1 in 4 to 1 in 3), and 1.5 billion were fired on the western front alone. In addition to that you have the possibility of gas shells which are still very dangerous if the gas gets released. There are some areas of France and Belgium where 99% of plants will die.

And then there are all the other conflicts and the later you go the worse it tends to get, with mines and cluster munitions.

So, uh, yeah. War is bad but you probably didn't need me to tell you that. Some estimates say it will take 300-700 years to clear out the WWI battlefields.

Follow for the same picture of a rock every day

[ image id: a picture of a grey and white rock on a white background, with a stock photo water mark overlaid on it end id]