Fergus Doyle

@mrfergusdoyle

Brittunculus. A frightful hobgoblin stalking throughout Europe. Something Yorkshire in the state of Denmark. I write games and sometimes I put them online. Narrative Designer, Sea of Rifts: Website:

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Bluesky

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Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Jul 7

Even in between varieties of English; a quick search for crypto stuff with the word "nonce" in is always good for a laugh

A social media banner proclaiming "THE NONCE EXCOSYSTEM IS LIVE" with subheaders for "NonceMiner" and "Noncex"

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Jul 3

Fell down a rabbit hole about the 2004 North East devolution referendum and found a timeline from the (pro-Yes, Darlington based) Northern Echo, which is fascinating in how it presages the Brexit campaigns 12 years later, tragedy & farce www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/6972646...

September 14

The Electoral Commission announces that Mr Elliott's North-East Says No will be the official campaign group against the assembly ahead of Mr Herron's group and the British National Party. Mr Elliott's group now features many Conservative supporters. It also has the backing of the UK Independence Party (Ukip). Professor John Tomaney, of Newcastle University, will lead the Yes group, backed by Labour, the LibDems and the unions.

October 4

No claims an assembly would create "a culture of high salaries, expenses and spin". Yes says it would only cost the average council taxpayer 5p-a-week.

Opera singer Suzannah Clarke appears beside the Bottle of Notes in Middlesbrough as she steps up her bid to become the most photographed personality of the campaign.

October 20

AN official No information phone line turns out to be a Ukip call centre in Preston, which is telling callers that an assembly would be in a purpose-built building in the hamlet of Littlethorpe, near Easington, North Yorkshire - a palpable nonsense.

October 26

Yes unveils "Tory Boy", a suited, braying caricature wearing a Michael Howard mask, which apparently shows how No is being run by southern Tories.

October 27

The low point. No exposes Yes rat as a southern public schoolboy and Ray Mallon turns up in Durham to shout at the No office. "Children, children, purlease..." says The Northern Echo.

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Jun 26

A fun recent discovery - the time a French Occultist tried to create an instantaneous "snail telegraph" because he believed that they created a telepathic link once they mated. Mollusc quantum entanglement. Includes the phrase "etheric escargotic fluid". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasilal...

An illustration of the globe. Two men are sitting on the north and south poles, both cuddling human-faced snails.

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Jun 24

Someone holding a metal and glass water bottle. There is a large, purple quartz/crystal set into the base of the water bottle

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Jun 1

So the easy one is fajita/fascist both come from the Latin word for bundle. Nacho and Nazi are related to the local nicknames for Ignatius, nachos after the supposed inventor and Nazi because it was a (kinda anti-austrian, it seems) insult

The 24th edition of Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (2002) says the word Nazi was favored in southern Germany (supposedly from c. 1924) among opponents of National Socialism because the nickname Nazi, Naczi (from the masc. proper name Ignatz, German form of Ignatius) was used colloquially to mean "a foolish person, clumsy or awkward person." Ignatz was a popular name in Catholic Austria, and according to one source in World War I Nazi was a generic name in the German Empire for the soldiers of Austria-Hungary.

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· May 29

Writing item and equipment descriptions is always a struggle between doing Serious Lore exposition and making a stupid joke. In this instance the stupid joke won.

Sea of Rifts equipment tooltip for the Carronade. Description reads:

A light cannon which fires a short-ranged spray of shot. Originally advertised to merchant adventurers with the baffling slogan "When life gives you carrons, make carronade!"

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· May 21

Even aggregated data can paint the picture of a smut writer suddenly worried that their story is getting too repetitive

From Merriam-Webster's live "Top Thesaurus Lookups":
1: buttocks
2: rear end
3: praise
4: adjacent
5: backside
6: good
7: important

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· May 18

Back home from @amazefest.bsky.social after a bit of Deutsche Bahn drama - a lovely time as always, great to catch up with old friends and met lots of lovely folks! Didn't take many pictures, so here's a visual representation of me before the festival to me now

A new A Maze poster on a pillar, in pretty good condition

Another a maze poster, rather distressed

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· May 13

After 18hrs of travel and passing through 4 countries, Ive arrived in Berlin for A Maze 🐻

The station sign for Berlin Hauptbahnhof above a platform. The sky is grey.

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· May 1

Done Dune. Dune done.

A stack of the six dune novels in ascending order with bent spines

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Mar 3

On the one hand, I agree with @rangedtouch.bsky.social's point that these tech psychos haven't necessarily misread the Lord of the Rings in naming their companies, but on the other it's very funny that they call Palantir employees hobbits since a Palantir famously did this to Pippin

Pippin from the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films screaming as he touches a magic orb

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Jan 29

Just saw this graffiti in a Copenhagen pub, loosely translated as "yer da works at Boots"

Graffiti reading "DIN FAR ARBEJDER I MATAS"

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Jan 27

The picture itself looks to be taken from in or around the Kings Arms, which has a plaque inside showing how high the floodwater has got in the past (you can tell this picture is old since it's a Sam Smith's pub and doesn't have all the NO PHONES and NO SWEARING signs everywhere)

A vertical wooden beam in a pub with a brass line running up it. Along the line are date markers, showing how high the water got in those floods

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Jan 20

Oh aye, the decorum stuff is silly, but my point was that Vistisen is a DF representative so he gets this at best

Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Jan 18

He should have stuck to Stevenson's vision

"You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these." From Snow Crash

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Jan 2

Stephenson predicted no legs in the Metaverse

Chapter 7
The Black Sun is as big as a couple of football fields laid side by side. The decor consists of black square tabletops hovering in the air (it would be pointless to draw in legs), evenly spaced across the floor in a grid. Like pixels.

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Dec 29

Just reminded me of this wild license plate I saw a couple of years ago

A blue 80s/90s Mazda with the license plate LOLITA

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Dec 3

If deezer's payment model is to be believed, it might have been easier for me to just send Viagra Boys a fiver every month this year

A screenshot of my top artists from my yearly review on Deezer.

1: Viagra Boys
2: Four Yet
3: Yard Act
4: Sea Power
5: Teleman
6: Getdown Services
7: Rival Consoles
8: Andrew Prahlow
9: Little Simz
10: Kneecap

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Nov 13

We're at G-Star! Come and see our booth in the indie showcase if you are, by some chance, in Busan

A smiling bearded man in a yellow hat standing in front of an exhibition booth for a game called Sea of Rifts

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Oct 30

I also bought a danish copy of B S Johnson's The Unfortunates, a "novel in a box" made up of 17 loose chapters which you're supposed to shuffle the order of each time you read it. Proc-gen by way of 60s experimentalist literature

A brown book called De ulyksalige by B S Johnson

The inside of the box, with several leaflets fanned out on top. The top leaflet is titled FØRSTE and the rest have prose in danish

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Oct 27

We had a fun one on Sea of Rifts where the player character could have a Disco Elysium moment and abandon their own ship

Crew Leaving

You find you with their bags packed disembarking the marble empress. They tell you that they have had enough of serving under you and are leaving your crew

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Oct 24

What's it like inside your head?

A computer with a piece of paper taped on the screen. "Virker ikke! (Not working!)" is printed on the paper

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Oct 15

Saw this one the other day - made me laugh that they'd also taken the logo off the back

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Oct 8

Sea of Rifts, my current gig, is very much a sickos game and this quote is a much better worded version of how I describe my narrative design work on it (I usually say I get the player to do the hard work of constructing a story for me)

Kitfox community organizer Alexandra Orlando said that the interactions and outputs of those systems invite players to take on the role of storytellers themselves.

"These games force you to sit with what you're seeing. Whether it's because the graphics are lo-fi or Dwarf Fortress' feed being very non-descriptive, it allows you to fill in those gaps in an interesting way," Orlando said. "The heart and soul of it is sitting with your dwarves and figuring out how you see their personalities interact with each other and different situations. That's where the player stories come from."

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Sep 30

Decided to take the "Big Switch" prompt for #inkJam literally and make a game with... A big (light) switch. Took some time implementing it in Godot, but happy with the tech - now to write the damn thing

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Aug 28

Fajita & fascist both come from the Latin for bundle, which makes sense, but the other pair is a bit weirder

The term "nazi" had been in use, before the rise of the NSDAP, as a colloquial and derogatory word for a backwards farmer or peasant. It characterised an awkward and clumsy person, a yokel. In this sense, the word Nazi was a hypocorism of the German male name Igna(t)z (itself a variation of the name Ignatius)—Igna(t)z being a common name at the time in Bavaria, the area from which the NSDAP emerged.

After tasting the snack, Finan asked what it was called. Anaya responded, "Well, I guess we can just call them Nacho's Special."[14] In Spanish, "Nacho" is a common nickname for Ignacio.[14]

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Aug 26

Also found a book by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, real name Cyril Hoskin, a white English guy who claimed to be the reincarnation of a Buddhist Lama and did things like write books from the perspective of his cat

Living With The Lama
BY MRS. FIFI GREYWHISKERS, P.S.C.
translated from the Siamese Cat language by
T. Lobsang Rampa

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Aug 26

One of the canonical Ancient Aliens texts for 20kr

The cover of Zecharia Sitchin's The Twelfth Planet

Blurb of the same. Big pull quote reading "In whose image was Adam made?"

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Aug 26

Love the headline from when they announced they were cancelling letter deliveries that just says "POSTSHIT"

Danish newspaper headline reading: "Slaughtering the letters and firing 1500
POST SHIT
Is hitting you"

Fergus Doyle@mrfergusdoyle· Aug 1

We love an acrostic folks. My favourite: