[GUEST ACCESS MODE: Data is scrambled or limited to provide examples. Make requests using your API key to unlock full data. Check https://lunarcrush.ai/auth for authentication information.] #  @SandyofCthulhu Sandy Petersen 🪔 Sandy Petersen, a renowned game designer, recently expressed pride in having contributed to bringing H.P. Lovecraft's works out of near-obscurity and into fame, with many fans crediting his games, particularly Call of Cthulhu, for introducing them to Lovecraft's works. He also made light of his involvement in the gaming industry, joking about his role in creating content for Dungeons & Dragons and other games. Petersen's tweets showcase his interests in gaming, history, and pop culture. ### Engagements: XXXXXXX [#](/creator/twitter::900868190/interactions)  - X Week XXXXXXXXXX -XXXX% - X Month XXXXXXXXXX +119% - X Months XXXXXXXXXXX +267% - X Year XXXXXXXXXXX +19,762% ### Mentions: XXX [#](/creator/twitter::900868190/posts_active)  - X Week XXX -XXXX% - X Month XXXXX +19% - X Months XXXXX +324% - X Year XXXXX +1,485% ### Followers: XXXXXX [#](/creator/twitter::900868190/followers)  - X Week XXXXXX +2.70% - X Month XXXXXX +9.60% - X Months XXXXXX +37% - X Year XXXXXX +312% ### CreatorRank: XXXXXX [#](/creator/twitter::900868190/influencer_rank)  ### Social Influence **Social category influence** [countries](/list/countries) XXXX% [gaming](/list/gaming) XXXX% [celebrities](/list/celebrities) XXXX% [musicians](/list/musicians) XXXX% [finance](/list/finance) XXXX% [travel destinations](/list/travel-destinations) XXXX% [technology brands](/list/technology-brands) XXXX% [fashion brands](/list/fashion-brands) XXXX% [automotive brands](/list/automotive-brands) XXXX% [stocks](/list/stocks) XXXX% **Social topic influence** [age of empires](/topic/age-of-empires) #17, [the first](/topic/the-first) #1461, [movies](/topic/movies) 1.72%, [the world](/topic/the-world) #2014, [if you](/topic/if-you) 1.72%, [germany](/topic/germany) #790, [all the](/topic/all-the) #2966, [pearl harbor](/topic/pearl-harbor) #51, [age of](/topic/age-of) #449, [level](/topic/level) XXXX% **Top accounts mentioned or mentioned by** [@duckbilledtweet](/creator/undefined) [@brettg09002618](/creator/undefined) [@orthodox_slavic](/creator/undefined) [@desertdahwg](/creator/undefined) [@e_considine](/creator/undefined) [@kyrtuck](/creator/undefined) [@mcleanben](/creator/undefined) [@denethorhurin](/creator/undefined) [@jimmyja40397308](/creator/undefined) [@frmrrd](/creator/undefined) [@airraidsrevenge](/creator/undefined) [@lolno1375409](/creator/undefined) [@drunkenalpaca](/creator/undefined) [@scottprevett](/creator/undefined) [@darthshadow25](/creator/undefined) [@thealthype](/creator/undefined) [@tfmonkey2](/creator/undefined) [@simontmn1](/creator/undefined) [@blackwolftwo](/creator/undefined) [@grok](/creator/undefined) **Top assets mentioned** [Trex Company, Inc. (TREX)](/topic/$trex) ### Top Social Posts Top posts by engagements in the last XX hours "For the languages of the Conquerors (spoken by the units when you commanded them) we tried to get the actual speakers. Spanish and Korean were easy. I used Brigham Young University for obscure languages - they have a really big language department because of all the LDS missionaries who go to far-off lands and learn Bulgarian Quechua Laotian and so forth. I asked the university if they had a Mayan speaker and found there are like XX extant Mayan languages. So I picked a random one. Aztecs speak Nahuatl so I asked for a Nahuatl speaker but apparently we got diddled because I've since been told" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995914529226776863) 2025-12-02T17:54Z 54.7K followers, 53K engagements "I was really suspicious when I heard Peter Jackson was doing the Lord of the Rings. I loved Bad Taste & Dead Alive but they were not enough to convince me he could do Tolkien. When I heard the first movie was X hours long I lost hope. Super-long movies are almost always a sign of self-indulgence (Heaven's Gate Lone Ranger Pearl Harbor). Friends dragged me to the movie kicking & screaming and against my expectations it was amazing. The number one thing that won me over His orcs. I was worried about the orcs. I wanted orcs to match the books. I wanted orcs to be smaller than humans and really" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997816440951566748) 2025-12-07T23:52Z 54.6K followers, 76.1K engagements "My junior high teacher told me that when he was a G.I. in Italy in WW2 he was thirsty. His sergeant told him "don't fill your canteen from the stream" so he didn't. A couple hundred feet upriver he found a dead German rotting in the stream. This story kept me from drinking out of streams for decades" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998451401513734655) 2025-12-09T17:55Z 54.7K followers, 42.1K engagements "When Hitler declared war on the USA in December 1941 he said that the Axis would destroy the "capitalist nations" and he accused Roosevelt of being one of the "ten thousand rich plutocrats" who ruled the world. A reminder that the Nazis were not capitalists. (image: a doomed and evil nation)" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998464162213802088) 2025-12-09T18:46Z 54.7K followers, 106.2K engagements "I find it depressing that the most popular Real Time Strategy game (according to the ever-reliable Reddit) is still Age of Empires X which we released in 1999. There's been updates yeah. But NO huge improvements in RTS for XX years" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1933557673817223479) 2025-06-13T16:10Z 54.5K followers, 78.5K engagements "Also don't take a katana. The main advantage is it's sharp and easy to get (America's lousy with them). But they have a short reach for their length. A typical XXX lb katana has an overall length of about XX inches compared to a XXX lb European longsword overall XX inches. So you can either get a lighter European sword for the same length or a longer one. The sharpness is indeed useful as you can lop off limbs & heads comparatively easily but the less-sharp European sword will still crack skulls and break spines & bones. More to the point the complex construction of katanas makes them highly" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1975593477481341301) 2025-10-07T16:06Z 54.5K followers, 23.7K engagements "When I was set to design Age of Empires II: The Conquerors the main task was of course to add new civilizations. A secondary task was to add a little something to every existing civ so they'd feel special. And the third task was to add new features to improve the game. This third task was based mostly on feedback we'd gotten in the last few weeks of tests where we found problems we would like to fix but more important tasks got in the way. So now that we were able to take a short breather as it were we could put these new features in. The first and most glorious feature that everyone loved" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1978928289839485328) 2025-10-16T20:57Z 54.4K followers, 19.4K engagements "I don't see how a game can be "satanic" in which you spend the entire game trying to destroy demons" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1986865523586703411) 2025-11-07T18:37Z 54.4K followers, 27.5K engagements "I urge everyone to ruin the Black Cauldron movie for yourself by reading Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series. Also this is a great series for kids to read both boys & girls" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1987989793532457457) 2025-11-10T21:04Z 54.4K followers, 23.5K engagements "Christ didnt break Roman law. He didnt even break Jewish law. He was condemned illegally because of feelings & people being offended. Sound familiar" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1990155057845989769) 2025-11-16T20:28Z 54.4K followers, 776.5K engagements "I have deep fried turkey many times. Follow the instructions and its safe as can be" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1993799692828987771) 2025-11-26T21:51Z 54.5K followers, 2808 engagements "This is what spawned ultimately Age of Empires" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1994133582194073885) 2025-11-27T19:57Z 54.5K followers, 9607 engagements "Its fun to be a keeper in Call of Cthulhu" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1994787988442943618) 2025-11-29T15:18Z 54.5K followers, 1986 engagements "On our trip to Texas the high point generating cheers from the granddaughters was that we stopped at Buc-ees" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995209028973343112) 2025-11-30T19:11Z 54.5K followers, 2575 engagements "Why Lovecraft was brilliant: one of the reasons. When youre writing a fantastical story you are faced the readers suspension of disbelief. As soon as you bring in a ghost or a magic spell or interdimensional geometry the reader KNOWS its not true to life. One easy way out is to set your tale in the far future or a fantasy realm. No one cares that orc armies or sandworms don't really exist so long as you are consistent within your world's rules. But what if you're writing a horror story Set in the present day You can't just handwave away the readers natural instinct to disbelieve. 1/4" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995237216784953620) 2025-11-30T21:03Z 54.5K followers, 73.4K engagements "One of the testers at Ensemble Studios wanted to be promoted to a designer. Note: he was XX years old hired at XX and had not been to college. Not that we cared. We applauded his goal and all of us got together to discuss how he could achieve it. We suggested the following steps: 1) learn the design script & start making scenarios. 2) learn the game engine machinima for cut scenes. 3) organize and run playtests. A few months of this and he'd be ready for more responsibility. He balked. He said "I don't want to learn that stuff. Can't I just be the idea guy" I guess he thought he would be best" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995245760036933837) 2025-11-30T21:37Z 54.5K followers, 98.2K engagements "My firm belief about orc women. Orc females are as flat-chested as chimp females and are the same size as the males. Orcs breed rapidly. A pig gives birth to a 2-3 lb piglet in about X months and I see no reason an orc can't do the same. Orcs are smaller than sows so they wouldn't have a litter probably just 1-2 kids at a time. The kids are weaned rapidly and kept in underground warrens with a few caretakers. The females externally look just like the males so humans elves and dwarfs can't tell the difference. You'd have to take off their pants to be sure but ugh. Orc babies grow rapidly fed" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995547902320803990) 2025-12-01T17:37Z 54.5K followers, 221.9K engagements "my white ancestors have lived in America for more than XXX years (some were on the Mayflower). That's longer than the Sioux have been in the Dakotas or the Comanches in Texas. What do we have to do to be native" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995603768881344536) 2025-12-01T21:19Z 54.4K followers, 46.1K engagements "Game Companies can of course be cheated like anyone. In 1999 I befriended an artist and felt he'd be a good fit for Ensemble Studios. I got him an interview. The other Ensemble folks liked his work and even gave him a $5000 signing bonus. He accepted and started working. TWO WEEKS LATER he moved away to California where he had a totally different job waiting for him. He took the job with us only to pocket the signing bonus I was livid because not only had I recommended the interview but also the guy actually attended my church. I feel it hurt my standing at Ensemble to a degree and I don't" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995905692046340186) 2025-12-02T17:19Z 54.5K followers, 35.8K engagements "One reason Call of Cthulhu is highly convenient for new players is because it is set in the real world. Let's say you're running D&D. The newbies have their character sheets and you say "Okay you're in the Yawning Portal tavern in Waterdeep. A merchant from Mulhorand walks in and makes a beeline for your table." Now you have to explain what Waterdeep is what Mulhorand is like and this leads to more questions. But in Call of Cthulhu you can say "You're in Dirty Dick's bar & grill on the New York waterfront and a middle-Eastern-looking guy walks in and makes a beeline for your table." No" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996260665007489203) 2025-12-03T16:50Z 54.5K followers, 7088 engagements "Pacific Rim is beyond good or bad. From the giant monsters to the hokey dialogue to the predictable plotline its just all fun comfort food for a guys soul. Like an old-time Western or a 60s monster movie. We know whats coming and anticipate it with joy" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996318106873102555) 2025-12-03T20:38Z 54.4K followers, 21.4K engagements "This is my favorite review of Mortal Kombat Annihilation. "It was 1997 and your script was so bad even Christopher Lambert said no."" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996326291147227627) 2025-12-03T21:10Z 54.5K followers, 1554 engagements "Who wouldn't want $300000" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996623375444451826) 2025-12-04T16:51Z 54.4K followers, 24.2K engagements "The whole "blocking roads" thing seems so misguided. When MLK marched for rights or college students rioted against the war the American people saw cops beating firehosing and fighting them and it swayed public opinion into favor for MLK and the anti-war protestors. But I've never heard anyone express sympathy with protestors blocking roads unless they were already on that team. It angers foes and turns neutrals into new enemies. Completely counterproductive" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997001913771151409) 2025-12-05T17:55Z 54.5K followers, 56.5K engagements "Wilco means "Will Comply and was originally only used by a responsible officer (such as a ship's captain) to mean "I understand. I am in control of my unit and will do what you ask." I always thought it was Roger's last name" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997007414131073267) 2025-12-05T18:17Z 54.5K followers, 1417 engagements "A high school kid told me he aced his history test because thanks to Age of Empires he was the only student who knew who the Hittites were" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997339509160399222) 2025-12-06T16:17Z 54.5K followers, 6151 engagements "A meatball sub always sounds like a good idea but every time I get one my bites are evenly split between "the meatball is so big my jaws can't get around it" and "dang no meatball in that bite." It seems too . episodic to make a good sandwich. Is there something I'm doing wrong or shall I stick to Italian sausage & pepper subs" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997714642530087191) 2025-12-07T17:07Z 54.5K followers, 5203 engagements "France is XX% smaller than Texas and has over twice the population. Yet Texass GDP is on track to exceed France by years end. Texas has 130000 km of road. France has 11000. Texas airports handle more traffic. The port of Houston BY ITSELF has XX% more traffic than all of Frances ports. Yes its possible to pick out statistics in which France is superior. I love France. But there is a bigger picture here and I feel France needs to step up its game" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1993365979137442204) 2025-11-25T17:07Z 54.6K followers, 1.1M engagements "Countries that dont like another country: China -America China - Japan China - India China -Vietnam China -Philippines China -South Korea China -China China -Ukraine China -Israel China -Czech Republic (its true) China -Australia" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1993697479091683749) 2025-11-26T15:04Z 54.6K followers, 22.3K engagements "Its terrific. The whole LSD trip lasts about XX minutes. Later on its used in a successful murder" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1994796033872990637) 2025-11-29T15:50Z 54.6K followers, 1521 engagements "So I would order my cavalry squadron LTC to check out a hill I saw on the map and then Sid told the squadron what they saw and the LTC would get back to me with something like Theres a whole regiment of T-80s Were taking heavy fire X Bradleys KOed pulling back Then Id have to figure my next action. Meanwhile the Soviet player with the tank regiment was alerted hed been spotted by ground units. You may ask what about air recon Well the opening of the battle was about a thousand Scuds hitting our airfields (props to the Russian player for thinking of this). We still had helicopters but they" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1994817683783876612) 2025-11-29T17:16Z 54.6K followers, 31.4K engagements "Most of us at MicroProse were pretty hip to modern warfare. Wed done Gunship Red Storm Rising F-15 Strike Eagle F-19x and so forth. So you can imagine we got pretty involved. I wasnt our division commander - but I was on his staff so we were in the same office. It helped to have two of us coordinating our efforts. When I asked for helo recon he told me he was using our X UH-1Hs on something else so I sent in the cav on my own initiative. I then asked the commander for artillery on that hill. He called the corps (represented by Sid) and made his case. He got something like 20-30 MLRS targeting" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1994817693741191460) 2025-11-29T17:16Z 54.6K followers, 31.1K engagements "Every nation under the wise and kindly Japanese rule suffered thousands of cruel deaths at the hands of their occupiers. Every Nation. Nations which had been enemies before (Philippines New Guinea) suffered even worse so I doubt San Francisco would have been that safe" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1994840449941713207) 2025-11-29T18:46Z 54.6K followers, 108.3K engagements "Its fun for game masters" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1994849600440865049) 2025-11-29T19:23Z 54.6K followers, 1987 engagements "Eggs were $XXXX a dozen at Target today" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995000490506235917) 2025-11-30T05:22Z 54.6K followers, 12.7K engagements "The very best character introduction I can think of is Sonya in Mortal Kombat. She shows up in a crowded nightclub screaming "Where's the son of a bitch who killed my partner" and punching her way through thugs and partygoers in her way. The scene lasts maybe XX seconds and you learn the following: 1) she's a tough-as-nails cop 2) she's out for revenge You don't need to know anything else. You don't need the partner's touching death scene. You don't need her home life. You don't need her to be a reluctant hero. She doesn't even know she's a hero. She's just there to kick ass and take names." [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995241878510616825) 2025-11-30T21:21Z 54.6K followers, 12.5K engagements "When someone talks smack about how the USA "stole land" from Mexico know this: 1) Mexico declared war on US not the other way round. 2) Santa Ana who thought he was Napoleon's equal felt he would easily win. 3) Mexico had a larger army interior lines knew the land and he had a much simpler supply situation. 4) Our own forces had political problems because President Polk (a democrat) didn't want a Whig general winning the war but his only two good generals were both Whigs. So whenever one general started winning too much he'd switch over to the other one. We won anyway because it turned out" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995243555154252271) 2025-11-30T21:28Z 54.6K followers, 189.3K engagements "In my upcoming boardgame I have this rule: "We know how keys work from video games. Any key opens any door. The key is destroyed when the door opens and that door can never be locked again." I have never had a player argue with this rule. It is such plain truth" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995544169918636418) 2025-12-01T17:23Z 54.6K followers, 3846 engagements "I play Call of Cthulhu in the modern age not the 1920s. I've had people ask me how to make enemies scary nowadays. There is a sort of assumption that with cell phones the internet guns and airplanes the bad guys have no chance. But this looks at things backwards. The cultists have cell phones internet guns and airplanes too. Even more to the point modern technology is far more horrific and dehumanizing than anything from the 1920s. I'm sure the King in Yellow has a TikTok feed. Our easy communication is a means to doom humanity. In The Shadow From the Steeple Robert Bloch makes it clear that" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995575692059430989) 2025-12-01T19:28Z 54.6K followers, 62.1K engagements "Castles had surprisingly small garrisons. We get this idea from movies of hundreds of warriors on the walls but in reality a garrison might be just XX men at arms plus a sergeant. I got this from personal conversations with two different experts on the topic. Now when the Welsh or Scots or Vikings raided the castle's population surged as local peasants ran to it. So the actual defense would be several hundred untrained peasants women and children being directed by the men-at-arms. The women could heat water or hand up rocks to the walls' defenders to pour on attackers. (They used boiling" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995577655698358402) 2025-12-01T19:36Z 54.5K followers, 113.5K engagements "A sword isn't a weapon. A sword PLUS a fighting style is a weapon. This is why there is no objectively "best sword". A sword seller told me about a time he was at a Ren Faire selling his wares and a shirtless guy (cosplaying a barbarian I guess) walked up and admired one of his Italian-style schiavonas. The guy picked it up and the seller said "Be careful. It's sharp." Shirtless Dude said "No need to worry. I'm an expert." And immediately started doing Japanese katana-style moves. The seller moved to stop him but before he could Shirtless Dude slid the schiavona over his shoulder (like you'd" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995583068317646953) 2025-12-01T19:57Z 54.5K followers, 154.2K engagements "As I've stated before orcs clearly drink coffee. They give the captured hobbits a "black bitter" brew which also gives unnatural energy. So that's obvious. Coffee. The question is then what does Lembas map to My wife says "dark chocolate" but I have doubts" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995904553087369586) 2025-12-02T17:15Z 54.6K followers, 28.1K engagements "This is a recipe from the 1960s. The entire recipe contains a quarter-teaspoon of tabasco. Call the Fire Chief My dad to this day has almost this level of sensitivity. He has told me several times how the Mild Taco Bell sauce has "quite a kick"" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995904977420911067) 2025-12-02T17:16Z 54.5K followers, 1884 engagements "The password to the playtest room at Ensemble Studios was "gamera". Dave Lewis and I told the bosses it stood for "gamer A". But it didn't" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995915328627638540) 2025-12-02T17:57Z 54.6K followers, 5266 engagements "Sauron and Diablo look a LOT different than in the movies and video games" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995959117509525919) 2025-12-02T20:51Z 54.6K followers, 1958 engagements "My favorite fact about the Spanish Civil War is that the anarchist faction (on the Republican side) was absolutely useless. They constantly begged for supplies and never ever organized an attack. They were almost a parody of anarchy. My second favorite fact is that Franco was 3rd in command of the Nationalists. The 1st and 2nd in command each died in separate plane wrecks. shrug "What a coincidence." My third is post-Civil War when Franco gathered up his most anti-communist fanatic falangist and organized them into the Blue Division then sent them to the Russian Front to fight for Hitler" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995963195069219153) 2025-12-02T21:08Z 54.6K followers, 195.7K engagements "B can lose weight. A is stuck with her baggage" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995970766895284520) 2025-12-02T21:38Z 54.6K followers, 11.3K engagements "This is the true purpose of AI" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995971120114401690) 2025-12-02T21:39Z 54.6K followers, 3012 engagements "So from the very start this video is wrong because have you been to east Washington state" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996210984088907949) 2025-12-03T13:32Z 54.6K followers, 5937 engagements "Neither communism nor capitalism existed within the time period of any Age of Empires game. However a crude proto-capitalism was starting to appear during the Industrial Age of Age of Empires X. So keep your politics away from my real time strategy" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996245071692464623) 2025-12-03T15:48Z 54.6K followers, 19K engagements "Unlike some D&D campaigns Call of Cthulhu almost never starts with the team meeting up in a tavern. I would make an exception for this tavern however" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996245483711525319) 2025-12-03T15:49Z 54.6K followers, 3076 engagements "A friend who is a big comic fan explained to me that Superman is REALLY Clark Kent. But that Bruce Wayne is REALLY Batman. He said that's how to understand both characters. Other fans more knowledgable than I can now weiogh in and edumocate me" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996256746978099427) 2025-12-03T16:34Z 54.6K followers, 16.8K engagements "One feature of Call of Cthulhu that emerged after publication is that it's perfect for one-shot adventures. I never even considered that advantage while creating it. Yes you can play campaigns too but if you're normally playing D&D and some key person is missing you can whip out Call of Cthulhu for a single night's run and it works fine. Making this even easier in Call of Cthulhu it's fast to create a character. Just roll stats and allocate skill points. Done. You don't have to worry about character class levels etc. And in a one-shot who cares if you survive The goal is to have fun. In fact" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996258477711425611) 2025-12-03T16:41Z 54.5K followers, 2566 engagements "In Age of Empires the Asian art was based on the style of the Benihana's down the street. By Age of Empires X I was there from the start and I provided the artists with actual reference books. I took them to the gigantic Half-Price Books a couple mile aways and went nuts with big picture folios" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996332750744461574) 2025-12-03T21:36Z 54.5K followers, 13.1K engagements "Tip which came form a dedicated sports fan and a friend. Dont watch the big teams. Watch the minor leagues. The tickets are way cheaper. Seats more accessible. And the games are actually more entertaining because the players make more mistakes. Scoring is higher. Everything you love about your game is there and the players arent colossal overpaid jerks" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996363601653977385) 2025-12-03T23:39Z 54.5K followers, 4479 engagements "My son texted to say he was showing his two older kids (13/9) Its a Wonderful Life for the first time. They were ambivalent at first but then 3/4 of the way in it turns into an episode of the Twilight Zone and they are riveted. Then he texted to say Woah I forgot the guardian angel BITES A COP I still remember the first time I saw that film. Wow. How about yall" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996605499094233372) 2025-12-04T15:40Z 54.6K followers, 310.9K engagements "Some years ago I was attending my yearly convention in Germany (The Kraken Yay) and my German friend asked me to cook a meal for the attendees (there's less than XXX so it's possible). Something Very American. I pondered for a while. What would be American but that Europeans would not have encountered Perhaps that only rarely shows up in restaurants but every American has eaten. Then it hit me -- Sloppy Joes. We've all had sloppy joes and loved them. It's hard to find them in restaurants. And it's easy to make a gigantic batch of the meat then just spoon it onto buns so feeding XXX people is" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996683064945320335) 2025-12-04T20:48Z 54.6K followers, 16.1K engagements "Been working hard on how to figure out a money system for my science fiction universe and I've finally hit upon it. The challenge is that the humans in my universe don't have a gigantic space empire that is under a single government. Instead every planet is virtually independent. Also there is no faster-than-light communication though there are FTL ships. So information between star systems is generally done via couriers. So the issue is how can I have a money system which will work across multiple systems And I've got it I think. First the value of a credit (the symbol is "") is defined as" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996702993983709233) 2025-12-04T22:07Z 54.6K followers, 18.1K engagements "The term "white" is used to describe the subgroup of Caucasians with pale skin. This group is now about X% of the global population which makes it the second rarest of major human groups (Bushmen being the rarest). By definition this means pale Caucasians and particularly the part of them which is blonde and/or blue eyed are the most "diverse" possible people to show in media. So I am happy with more of them. Plus we need more Bushmen" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996970670673342482) 2025-12-05T15:51Z 54.6K followers, 80.3K engagements "When I was tasked with designing Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors one obvious civilization (civ) to include was the Spanish. They rose rapidly to pre-eminence post 1500 and so I wanted to show them off. As always I wanted to give them economy military and late-game bonuses. For their economy I gave them two perks. First was that their trade units generate extra gold. I started them out with +33% gold but this was nerfed by MicroProse to +25% gold. This boost is nice but it doesn't help the Spanish in the early game. Also it's no good in non-team games. So it's kind of specialized. For their" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996980240472752231) 2025-12-05T16:29Z 54.6K followers, 26K engagements "My name has always kind of been one of my banes. I mean I love that it is unique and unusual but as a kid I hated that I got mocked because I had a "girl's name". There were several other "Sandies" in junior & high school who were of course girls. Naturally I could never date any of them (that's on me not them). Also the fact that my last name is spelled in the correct Danish Petersen style means that it is constantly misspelled as "PetersOn" by imperceptive bureaucrats. It gets misspelled on my own advertisements and occasionally on my own game boxes. There're people worse off than me I" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996982934809825439) 2025-12-05T16:40Z 54.6K followers, 7204 engagements "Public Service Announcement I made a bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich using garlic toast so you don't need to. While it was edible it was not as good as either a BLT or the garlic toast separately. Forewarned is Forearmed. The whole was less than the sum of the parts like a movie with a big ensemble cast" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996990475077931319) 2025-12-05T17:10Z 54.6K followers, 1249 engagements "Grammar tip from Popeye the Sailor" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996991729476772101) 2025-12-05T17:15Z 54.6K followers, 1167 engagements "Hollywood is economically and financially retarded. In the Netflix show "Mr. Robot" their awesome plan is to use their cyberhacking to save the world by "destroying all debt." They think it's obvious that this would be great. But of course this would destroy the world financially. No one would ever again loan money. There would be no car loans no mortgages no student loans. Yeah being in debt sucks but not being able AT ALL to get a car a mortgage or an education would suck worse. The poor wouldn't even own appliances. Only the rich could own anything. Post other examples of screenwriters Not" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996992726701953326) 2025-12-05T17:19Z 54.6K followers, 35K engagements "I never thought of "redneck" as an insult just a descriptor. I'm sure there are rednecks who are meth-smoking violent a**holes. But most of the rednecks I've known I'm proud to be friends with. I was in Texas less than one week when a redneck saw I was cold on a hike and gave me the coat off his back. My car busted a tire on a road and it was a redneck that stopped and helped me fix it. Is "redneck" an insult" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997005838645711162) 2025-12-05T18:11Z 54.6K followers, 3053 engagements "Here are statistics you NEED TO KNOW before you run your science fiction game. In Star Trek (TOS): XX redshirts were killed X gold were killed X science were killed In Star Trek the Next Generation: XX goldshirts were killed XX redshirts were killed X science were killed. However the meaning of red & gold shirts were switched between the seasons so the same guys (Operations/Security) were still dying just with a different shirt color. Also since the Next Generation was XXX episodes cf. TOS's XX episodes you were more than twice as likely to get killed under Captain Kirk as Captain Picard. I" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997023838786539531) 2025-12-05T19:22Z 54.6K followers, 50.5K engagements "It's Pearl Harbor Day Imperial Japan inflicted monstrous evil upon everything it touched. One reason it could do so was because its men were so incredibly brave. Winston Churchill said it best "Every nation talks about fighting to the last man. Only the Japanese actually do it."" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997721316557021272) 2025-12-07T17:34Z 54.6K followers, 3560 engagements "In commemoration of Pearl Harbor day I'd like to talk about the hardest-fought campaign of WW2. This was in my opinion Guadalcanal. The battle of Midway the month before had brought the Japanese carrier force down to near-equality with the USN. But they were obviously still a deadly force. During the six months of Guadalcanal a fact not everyone realizes is: 1) the Japanese had more troops available. Most were veterans. The American soldiers were all green as grass. 2) the Japanese had more airplanes available. Their airplanes were arguably superior and their pilots definitely first-rate. 3)" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997764775628198117) 2025-12-07T20:26Z 54.6K followers, 5426 engagements "I sometimes think my greatest contribution to gaming is the fact that people talk about making "sanity checks" who have never played Call of Cthulhu" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997803652556419548) 2025-12-07T23:01Z 54.6K followers, 3678 engagements "One of the things that I'm exceedingly proud of our navy for is that we hunted down and sank every capital ship that was at the Pearl Harbor raid. We also sank almost all of the cruisers (the few we didn't sink were crippled sitting on the bottom of harbors). Just one destroyer on that raid the Ushio survived the war. Here's a picture of it because of course a Japanese hobby company made a model of it" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997805513346855133) 2025-12-07T23:08Z 54.6K followers, 9323 engagements "Video games have taught me that when I kill a bad guy he spits out a clip of ammo that exactly fits one of my guns" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997810505550078159) 2025-12-07T23:28Z 54.6K followers, 1593 engagements "Cthulhu Wars has two random elements. The Elder Signs range from 1-3 points each and are drawn randomly. And the combat is dice-based. There's a faction of Eurogamers who hate randomness so I was immediately besieged with suggestions to "fix the game". Like making all Elder Signs worth X or replacing the dice with a fixed sequence of results. This was urged upon me as though of course I couldn't possibly object to this wonderous improvement. But the fact is I am excited by the random element. By not knowing exactly what's going to happen. I naturally think my way of playing is the best but if" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997814313910976851) 2025-12-07T23:43Z 54.6K followers, 2807 engagements "My wife's most hated Hollywood thing is when a woman wakes up in the morning and has a faceful of makeup. I never noticed it before she pointed it out. Now I see it all the time because Hollywood thinks we're idiots" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997814528772546566) 2025-12-07T23:44Z 54.6K followers, 5410 engagements "You're not a fan of 80s music if you can't name this band" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997814977512747356) 2025-12-07T23:46Z 54.6K followers, 3833 engagements "We need to have movies with stuff like this return" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997815979158712367) 2025-12-07T23:50Z 54.6K followers, 1574 engagements "Here is my new suggestion for roleplaying games. When a player has a bad roll he can pay to adjust it. Who does he pay The DM directly. The DM is happy. The player gets his success. It's all voluntary. Now let the hate boil within you" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997818771051069882) 2025-12-08T00:01Z 54.6K followers, 1474 engagements "In Roleplaying games if you don't have gold as XP then Gold becomes its own different reward with different purposes and uses" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997832521715998910) 2025-12-08T00:56Z 54.6K followers, 3523 engagements "See if you play Call of Cthulhu THIS is the caliber of magic items you'll be getting. Isn't that cooler than some dumb +4 sword of holding or the toe of Vecna" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998071601561239848) 2025-12-08T16:46Z 54.6K followers, 2081 engagements "I too hate this truth" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998072156887077133) 2025-12-08T16:48Z 54.6K followers, 2261 engagements "Fantasy gaming worlds. All fantasy worlds have some setting. In Call of Cthulhu it's Earth but with monsters. If you play D&D your game is possibly set in someone else's pre-built fantasy universe (Forgotten Realms Ravenloft etc.) A lot of gamers (including myself) create our own fantasy worlds to play in. There is no "right or wrong" here. If you make up your own world you might feel proud of yourself. The way I see it we only have so much time to spend away from jobs family and obligations. If we don't create our entire fantasy world then we can focus in on making adventures" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998073378398511229) 2025-12-08T16:53Z 54.6K followers, 4154 engagements "Second in Call of Cthulhu I can threaten to destroy stuff. At the high end the whole world can be at stake but a scenario might be threatening a locale a town or a nation. Almost every Call of Cthulhu scenario is reactive - the players get hints about some dark secret and as they investigate they discover the awful truth and Must Stop It. In my little throwaway scenario "The Haunting" the threat is that the Thing in the house has been killing people for generations and will keep doing so. In "Edge of Darkness" a terrible being is about to manifest and if not stopped then far-reaching but" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998082704936673361) 2025-12-08T17:30Z 54.6K followers, 9671 engagements "My final tool in getting my players to feel something is at stake is Sanity. This may seem petty after mentioning saving the world but madness is terrifying because you lose control of yourself. In Call of Cthulhu Sanity costs you your character which can be worse than death. There are degrees of it - you might just go into hysterics or need to be locked up until you "get better". But there is always that ultimate threat - Sanity drops to X and your beloved dilettante becomes a non-player-character under the control of the Keeper. Every keeper has stories about how they tormented the party" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998082707189031257) 2025-12-08T17:30Z 54.6K followers, 9403 engagements "I watched the movie War Pigs a few weeks ago and noticed that the German halftrack & Panzer III in the film looked like the real deal and also they were clearly not CGI. I've been slur is for a ww2 fan since I was XX so I was impressed. I then did a test comparing Grok and ChatGPT. I asked ChatGPT how War Pigs did the vehicles and it outright lied. It said the halftrack was a modified American M3 and the tank was a kitbash. Both are obviously false. The M3 is WAY bigger than a German Sd Kfz XXX and the one in the film had the weird sideways folding rear doors of the German vehicle. Also the" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998129990865711408) 2025-12-08T20:38Z 54.6K followers, 4584 engagements "This was the first computer I ever worked on. We bought our Osborne IIs just a couple of weeks before Osborne went out of business. (I understand this was because the founder was out murdering people while wearing a goblin costume.) Many of my Chaosium works were created here. It had a XX meg hard drive" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998132927612510278) 2025-12-08T20:49Z 54.6K followers, 1770 engagements "American English - "cookie" British English - "biscuit" Ever wonder why It's because the American word derives from the Dutch word "koekje" While the British like many British words is derived from Orkish: "bukh' cakh"" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998137399738773712) 2025-12-08T21:07Z 54.6K followers, 12.9K engagements "Found in Germany. 1) the chocolate imagery on the left isn't "chips". 2) there is patriotic American bunting on the sides of the package. 3) they are chocolate "chips" cookies because I guess for a German pedant there is more than one chip in a cookie. 4) they tasted okay. As you know store-bought chocolate chip cookies are always worse than fresh from the oven with the little pockets of chocolate molten" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998138043400917210) 2025-12-08T21:10Z 54.6K followers, 6226 engagements "I love fried chicken" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998138122643837290) 2025-12-08T21:10Z 54.6K followers, 1879 engagements "This is my favorite Cthulhu statuette" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998237931014934848) 2025-12-09T03:47Z 54.6K followers, 4901 engagements "Great Moments in History: when Barbara Walters interviewed Miley Cyrus her crew overused the facilities and clogged every single one of Cyrus's toilets. So if someone tells you the media is full of sh*t there is actual proof for this" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998445337829368053) 2025-12-09T17:31Z 54.6K followers, 1423 engagements "I read a recent British murder mystery in which some thugs decided not to dump a corpse in the Thames because the government had been working so hard to clean the river" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998449238418833581) 2025-12-09T17:46Z 54.6K followers, 1646 engagements "One day I would like to see a logo redesign that made it look better instead of soulless and terrible. Can anyone give a counterexample" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1958262177229606982) 2025-08-20T20:17Z 54.6K followers, 29.5M engagements "For those doubting Thai commercials are the best in the world. Possibly the entire solar system" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1969408326623773059) 2025-09-20T14:28Z 54.6K followers, 2M engagements "Comic artists will never draw a cooler image than Watterson's T-Rex in an F-15 Strike Eagle" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1975204450148274360) 2025-10-06T14:20Z 54.6K followers, 1.4M engagements "A fun fact is that the worst writing "system" in the world is Japanese and it's not close. Even the Japanese know this. My best friend works as a translator from Japanese to English and tells me dire stories all the time. Below is an image from Spirited Away in which by removing the second syllable in her name "Chihiro" is somehow changed to "Sen". My friend told me of a civil court case in America in which the attorney asked him how to pronounce a certain name and he had to say "I don't know." The attorney started to mock his translation skills and my friend explained that for a lot of" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1986104888456265757) 2025-11-05T16:14Z 54.6K followers, 1.4M engagements "Please don't have sex with monsters. Most of the Greek myths are devoted to explaining why this is a bad idea. Jail your bard if he tries it" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1986890685094764787) 2025-11-07T20:17Z 54.6K followers, 81.7K engagements "For the record I have not put AI art into any of my products. Not promising this can never happen but it hasn't yet" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1990841241337319920) 2025-11-18T17:55Z 54.6K followers, 1.2M engagements "So is driving this full circle a thing Totally would be in America" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1991930919859703817) 2025-11-21T18:05Z 54.6K followers, 5M engagements "Once I had a really long lecture from a guy about Call of Cthulhu and then he told me he didnt read or watch horror. I think you need to love a genre in order to build a world in it. If you dont read heroic fantasy your D&D world will fall flat. If you dont read space opera your Traveller game wont work. You need to love what youre creating. If you are building a game setting or adventure in order to expose or fix that setting you will fail. And I think a lot of the risible stuff weve seen lately is from fixers and re-interpretations. Which is why no one likes them" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1993056933662564419) 2025-11-24T20:39Z 54.6K followers, 143.9K engagements "Lets imagine what would have happened without Stalin. Either Russia would be ruled by some other communist wed still have a Czar or the Mensheviks would be in charge. In all three cases Russia is still able to fight. And in all three cases we wouldnt have had Stalins purge of Russian officers including the genius theoretician Tukhachevsky. So the Russian army would be stronger. Also there is at least a chance that one of the other leaders wouldnt have allied with Hitler for the first two years hugely helping him establish his grip. Id say Stalin made the war harder and gave Hitler a better" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1993773545244250195) 2025-11-26T20:07Z 54.6K followers, 384.2K engagements "When I was at MicroProse Sid Meier ran an after hours game that worked like this. We all stayed in our offices which had terrific intercoms. Sid & a pal were the referees. The rest of us were officers in either NATO or the Warsaw Pact in a division- level action in the Fulda Gap. Higher commanders had to use the com to tell their underlings what to do. The underlings actually did things and the refs gave them results or information. 1/" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1994816146990678229) 2025-11-29T17:10Z 54.6K followers, 161.9K engagements "My awesome friend Ken Rolston helped craft the Elder Scrolls" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1994851129038155777) 2025-11-29T19:29Z 54.6K followers, 1712 engagements "I pumped gas for XX a gallon as my first job in high school. The high point was when Stephanie the cute tanned blonde whod just moved from California drove in for a fill. I was embarrassed that she would know I had such a menial job but instead she seemed way friendly - apparently impressed that I HAD a job instead of just living off my folks like most boys our age. That is the day I learned never to feel awkward about my job and never to feel superior about someone elses job. Anyone who works is deserving of respect. Except game journalists of course" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995143904031899754) 2025-11-30T14:52Z 54.6K followers, 2.5M engagements "What's the worst job in gaming It's "playtester". I know you're thinking that being a tester must be the dream job. Get paid to play games all day Woohoo It's not like that. Here are six reasons why not to be a tester. Reason One - you are the lowest tier. You're not part of any team but just an adjunct temporarily added to the team. You're not an artist a coder a designer or a producer. Everyone knows anyone could do your job so you're regarded as about on a par with a day laborer. 1/4" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995251195364209022) 2025-11-30T21:58Z 54.6K followers, 2.7M engagements "In 1994 at the Game Developer Conference I was asked at a panel why Doom was all about targeting and shooting and asked why it couldn't be more restrained. Like why couldn't Doom have alternatives to shooting demons. So I asked him "Would you play Doom if it was toned down like that" He honestly said "Probably not. It's not my kind of game. I like things like Populous and King's Quest." I hear this a lot - someone doesn't like something I worked on and wants me to change it even though they themselves won't play it. I guess they can't stand the idea of someone enjoying something different" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995266931214221370) 2025-11-30T23:01Z 54.6K followers, 587.7K engagements "I think it's kind of depressing that the very top selling Real Time Strategy games of all time are still Age of Empires X (1999) and StarCraft (1998). Has there been no huge improvements in real time strategy in XX years" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995539078683787756) 2025-12-01T17:02Z 54.6K followers, 591.7K engagements "Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek movie and it's not close" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995551765010547091) 2025-12-01T17:53Z 54.6K followers, 10.2K engagements "In 1997 I got hired at Ensemble Studios. My first task was to create a magic-based RTS game to be a sister product to Age of Empires. Tim Deen was my lead programmer and Scott Winsett my lead artist. They were (and are) great devs. We had other artists and later on a few more programmers. I named it Sorceress based on the plot (which I won't go into here) and here is how it worked. You'd design your own sorcerer outside the game and put him into a stable of sorcerers. You'd then load up one of your sorcerers when you started a game. You got 4-6 points to customize him. A point might purchase" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995593302482321430) 2025-12-01T20:38Z 54.6K followers, 7125 engagements "There were animals in Eden. Adam namesd them all and no doubt was observant. This also explains how Guinea Pigs got misnamed so badly. Adam didnt know much geography. On the other hand its impressive he got Baltimore Oriole right" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995881007757881417) 2025-12-02T15:41Z 54.6K followers, 4198 engagements "My wife lived in Chile from age X to XX. She was super-popular among the other kids because she was a tiny blue-eyed blonde girl. When she returned to the USA her main language was Chilean Spanish. She thought that a "burrito" was a little donkey and a "taco" was the heel of a boot. She still speaks Spanish pretty well but as she says she has the vocabulary of a XX year old" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995961666866172163) 2025-12-02T21:01Z 54.6K followers, 352.6K engagements "why play Age of Empires See below" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995964123595899194) 2025-12-02T21:11Z 54.6K followers, 20.4K engagements "The Germans get a lot of praise during WW2 for their army but their effectiveness changed as the war progressed. They were probably 10x as good as the Russians in 1941 but by 1944 they were only a little better. This was partly due to the German army deteriorating and partly due to increased Soviet skill. Americans went the same way. We were clearly inferior to the Germans in 1942 and 1943 but in 1945 a German general watching an American combined-arms assault said he'd never seen a better one even by his own troops in Russia 1941" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995964883003924574) 2025-12-02T21:14Z 54.6K followers, 264.6K engagements "A couple years ago I went to the Texas State Fair and they had an exhibit of "Historic Texas Video Games". I'd actually worked on most of them. The armed guard did not believe me. shrug Also my daughter wore a t-shirt to high school that said "DOOM. My dad wrote it." and was harassed by non-believers" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1995966338414903491) 2025-12-02T21:20Z 54.6K followers, 18K engagements "Spears are the best melee weapon ever and they weren't invented by Homo sapiens. We inherited them. With a spear a human can take on a lion or a cave bear with a pretty good chance of success. Remember the XXX dudes vs a gorilla challenge How many dudes would you need if they had spears Two Three One The Masai tribe at one time required every single youth to kill a lion with a spear to become a man. Lindybeige on YouTube has a longish video titled "Spears are better than swords (longer version)" in which he does the experience. He has a bunch of guys who have never used spears fight a group" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996253663556505792) 2025-12-03T16:22Z 54.6K followers, 116K engagements "This is the greatest description ever from a bootleg video in China" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996259725512753584) 2025-12-03T16:46Z 54.6K followers, 83.5K engagements "Doom X was basically a cash grab. The idea is that we'd use assets from the first game and give the designers something to do while the programmers built Quake. Don't get me wrong - we still wanted to make Doom X fun but there's a reason that it didn't add X new weapons and XX new monsters X new skins and a new player mode. We did it all on a shoestring. Also Quake was well worth it" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996334921888231762) 2025-12-03T21:45Z 54.6K followers, 356.1K engagements "Three things I learned after XX years in the game industry. 1) if they say "we don't need a contract" you need a contract. 2) if they say "don't you trust us" don't trust them. 3) do NOT let a man in a suit see a game with unfinished art" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996336930494234660) 2025-12-03T21:53Z 54.6K followers, 28.1K engagements "Once you start apologizing on behalf of fictional characters or races you've pulled the plug on your brain taking it off life support" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996338592680235503) 2025-12-03T21:59Z 54.7K followers, 22.8K engagements "In an interview with Christopher Lee he said that after he was in Lord of the Rings the people doing the Harry Potter movies found an awesome role for him in it. But the British producer said "We can't have him play a wizard in Harry Potter. He's already been a wizard in Lord of the Rings." Christopher Lee said basically that's why the British movie industry can't have nice things. He added an American producer would have said "Oh yeah he's perfect He was in Lord of the Rings"" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996348855580045398) 2025-12-03T22:40Z 54.6K followers, 718.7K engagements "Recently I mentioned that Doom X was a "cash grab" and there is an attempt at a community note saying this was debunked. But it's not. Look here's the facts: 1) John Carmack & Michael Abrash & Dave Taylor were working on the Quake Engine. For the first few months of this there wasn't a lot for myself and American McGee (the level designers) to do. John Romero was mostly helping the level design at that point - not only creating his own awesome levels but creating powers and abilities for us to place into levels and keeping the database and all sorts of other things. Plus he was also involved" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996413580712051181) 2025-12-04T02:57Z 54.6K followers, 49.8K engagements "Goblins are a great addition to a fantasy game. But only if they remain toxic cruel & petty. If you "rehabilitate" them then you need something else to be the vicious little monsters in your world and you haven't solved any problem. If orcs or goblins or beholders become potential good guys in a world that heroes who must stand up to evil then who will be the evil they stand up to Something else presumably. At some point you realize that the people whitewashing goblins & orcs are hoping that you'll make humans - your own species - the bad guys" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996416378551873815) 2025-12-04T03:08Z 54.6K followers, 866.5K engagements "Recently I pointed out that McDonald's burgers suck big time. Worst value-for-money of any fast food. BUT I MUST SAY: I've been to McDonalds in Germany and in Spain and they were actually pretty good. Still pricy but everything in Europe is expensive. I assume it's because either gummint regulations force it or Germans/Spanish won't stand for eating garbage. In the USA McDonald's seems to rely on fame to sell its product and no longer cares that that product is objectively awful. This is why every other fast food joint is better - they have to be better than McDs to exist. And if you are" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996622799004488126) 2025-12-04T16:49Z 54.6K followers, 5394 engagements "Anti-Roleplaying Activist: "The 'dungeon master' has complete control of everything and the players are forced to act out his dark fantasies." Real Dungeon Master: "Please just swim across the river or use the rope bridge. You've all tried to seduce the catfish and it didn't work." starts sobbing" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996687467001618615) 2025-12-04T21:06Z 54.6K followers, 76.4K engagements "There is a spider in your house right now. It works hard every day to destroy your insect enemies to save you and your loved ones and your food from contamination and disease. Do you thank it No" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996691665906815239) 2025-12-04T21:22Z 54.7K followers, 16.1K engagements "This is a vinegaroon. They live in the southwest United States. They look like they can tear you limb from limb but are pretty harmless. They can spray a XX% solution of acetic acid from their hind end. This is pretty terrifying if you're a bug because it blinds & irritates and softens your chitinous armor. But for humans it just makes us smell like vinegar hence their name. You can keep them as an interesting and weird pet if you don't mind your bedroom smelling like pickles all the time. Giant ones make GREAT monsters for roleplaying games. Huge claws acid spray and super-senses so it can't" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996693286002872523) 2025-12-04T21:29Z 54.7K followers, 30.8K engagements "In 1571 all Mediterranean Christendom combined to meet the Ottoman fleet in the battle of Lepanto. The Ottomans had XX% more ships a robust naval tradition and 30000 skilled naval archers (better than arquebusiers in almost every way). The battle was a stunning but hard-fought Christian victory. The Christians lost 10000 and XX ships. The Ottomans lost 40000 and XXX ships. 15000 Christian galley slaves were freed from their cruel Turkish masters. The interesting thing to me is that the Ottomans replaced the entire fleet the very next year. So why was the battle decisive Because the turks lost" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996743243837698248) 2025-12-05T00:47Z 54.7K followers, 33.6K engagements "Welp I tried the Grok challenge which celebrity would I be And failed utterly. It said: Sandy Petersen you're not just dipping a tentacle into celebrity watersyou're already a full-blown legend in the gaming and horror realms. Youre the grizzled elder statesman of nerd culture. You've shaped entire genres: birthing *Call of Cthulhu* RPG monster-mashing *Doom* and empire-building *Age of Empires*. That's not "aspiring influencer" territory; that's "the guy who made us all afraid of our own shadows while handing us the shotgun. You're already a celebrity for anyone who's ever rolled a sanity" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996798791090164004) 2025-12-05T04:28Z 54.6K followers, 6524 engagements "Most mammals have eyes in which the entire eye is dark because the iris reaches out to the lenses. Its even true for our closest relatives the apes. But humans have a highly visible eye white. Its generally agreed that the purpose of this is specifically so other humans can see where were looking. Its a social interaction feature. Its so important that dogs have begun to demonstrate it a bit. So the poster below yearns to be an asocial throwback to prehuman times" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996960695083323491) 2025-12-05T15:11Z 54.6K followers, 417.7K engagements "This is an elephant skull. It teaches us two things. 1) it's obvious where the cyclops legend came from. 2) we now know how big cyclopes were - their heads were the size of elephant heads which means that if they were proportional to humans they would stand about XX ft (9m) tall" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1996984914349380094) 2025-12-05T16:48Z 54.6K followers, 109.3K engagements "Anyone playing Age of Empires 3" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997065394725834778) 2025-12-05T22:07Z 54.6K followers, 5180 engagements "What will YOU do when you get the Call of Cthulhu" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997069006050881759) 2025-12-05T22:22Z 54.6K followers, 10.7K engagements "In case you're not aware Thailand has the best commercials in the world and it's not close" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997069374839275660) 2025-12-05T22:23Z 54.6K followers, 7127 engagements "Some animals have more fluid genetics than others. For instance dogs wolves coyotes dingos and jackals can all crossbreed easily creating a wealth of hybrids. Humans are not like this. There is a persistent rumor that once a chimp-human hybrid was attempted but it's clear we can't breed with any other creature. We know that we cross-mated with Denisovans and Neanderthals but they were particularly closely related. In general humans must stick to humans. This is important because it means Game Freak's crazy fiction about people breeding with Pokemons is completely implausible" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997071271163826435) 2025-12-05T22:31Z 54.6K followers, 274.4K engagements "My grandkids elderly dog dies. He stayed in the yard & the laundry room with occasional excursions into the rest of the house. The kids said that the laundry room is now haunted so I need an adventure idea for The Haunted Laundry Room. Help" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997105921923994074) 2025-12-06T00:48Z 54.6K followers, 4000 engagements "I made a post about how humans cant breed with Pokmon and got several people defensive about it. So now I need a slur to call people who want to romance Pokemon. Suggestions welcomed" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997142164078514473) 2025-12-06T03:12Z 54.6K followers, 56K engagements "The computer AI in Age of Empires II was in two parts. The more difficult part was how the units marched gathered resources assembled into formations and so forth. This was entirely done by the coders bless their hearts. But there was also a simpler scrip which determined which buildings units and upgrades an enemy chose. Mario Grimani created the scripting program and I wrote all the scripts. The scripts were ENTIRELY "If Then" statements. Like "If Food XXX Research Feudal Age" or "If Feudal Age Researched Build Barracks". Stuff like that. I originally only had 1000 If-Then statements" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997343450480640122) 2025-12-06T16:32Z 54.6K followers, 109.3K engagements "Me running a Call of Cthulhu game: Keeper: "You enter the hotel room. Looks like they left in a hurry." Players "We search the room." Keeper: you find a page torn from a calendar - Friday 13th is circled. Also there is a used bus ticket from Long Island. Players: we empty the trash cans. Keeper: there is nothing more to find here. Players: we toss the couch cushions. Keeper: There Is Nothing More To Find Here. Players: we sniff the fried chicken containers. Keeper THERE IS NOTHING MORE TO FIND HERE. Players: We peel off the wallpaper. Keeper: bangs head on table Players are the best" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997350845902639532) 2025-12-06T17:02Z 54.6K followers, 59.2K engagements "Here is a Nazi poster for the Dutch made in 1944 attacking America because we're capitalist. Next time some idiot tells you the Nazis were capitalists think of this. There are plenty of other proofs. They hated capitalism" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997355039958991337) 2025-12-06T17:18Z 54.6K followers, 14.3K engagements "Here is an important fact and yet another reason we need to get to Mars. Trebuchets have exactly the same range on Mars as on Earth (except for minor air friction) because the gravity that affects the shot also affects the counterweight. But catapults & ballistas have a much longer range on Mars because their mechanisms aren't based on gravity. Thus when we are sieging a medieval castle on Mars catapults and ballistas are correspondingly better vis-a-vis trebuchets. But obviously we need to investigate this in person" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997359707112272250) 2025-12-06T17:37Z 54.6K followers, 88.9K engagements "Annie Oakley married at XX years old. She stayed happily married till she died X decades later. Her husband who was also a sharpshooter died a few days later. The media hated her and she won lawsuits against over XX newspapers. She was pretty cute" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997423187756556393) 2025-12-06T21:49Z 54.6K followers, 13.3K engagements "Lovecraft makes it quite clear that cats are one of the cosmoss dark forces on a par with Cthulhu & the Crawling Chaos" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997454798778716423) 2025-12-06T23:55Z 54.6K followers, 3380 engagements "Why Civil War Generals are the most interesting of any war to study. (Spoiler: it's because they have the widest range in quality from best to worst. WW1 generals all sucked. WW2 generals were mostly decent. But American Civil War were all over the place.)" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997720540170305817) 2025-12-07T17:31Z 54.6K followers, 79.9K engagements "At MicroProse Software me and my buddy Lawrence Schick once realized it was Pearl Harbor day so we pondered how to celebrate it. We decided the best way would be to lock one of the producers - who was of full Japanese descent - in a closet for the day. But we chickened out" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997720962129920181) 2025-12-07T17:32Z 54.6K followers, 6290 engagements "In 2009 the car shop near my house posted a special deal on its marquis: Free Nobel prize with lube job. For those living abroad that might give you an idea of how most Americans felt about it. Note: Obama himself agreed When he was asked in an interview why he got the prize he answered Im not really sure" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997725377142337925) 2025-12-07T17:50Z 54.6K followers, 77.3K engagements "Worst Christmas song" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997803392404726050) 2025-12-07T23:00Z 54.6K followers, 5945 engagements "Westerns and Superhero movies have both had deconstructions since almost the beginning. Destry Rides Again (1939) and The Big Country (1958) are both deconstructions. The original Spiderman comic was a deconstruction of superheroes. Unforgiven and Deadpool were more modern deconstructions. But these were clearly done in love for their genre and did not hurt it. To me The Boys Watchmen and V For Vendetta while also deconstructions don't feel like they were done in love. They feel like attacks tearing down the very concept. And they succeed. Compare Unbreakable to Watchmen. Unbreakable loves" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997807073686700510) 2025-12-07T23:14Z 54.6K followers, 23.2K engagements "How to be a Yankee: a guide. If you're not an American then a Yankee is an American. If you're an American then a Yankee is a Northerner. If you're a Northerner then a Yankee is a New Englander. If you're from New England then a Yankee is from New Hampshire. If you're from New Hampshire then a Yankee is from Maine" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997807437404123528) 2025-12-07T23:16Z 54.6K followers, 142.4K engagements "Circa 1994 I was on a panel with representatives from Steve Jackson Games and TSR. Both of them boasted that their company was releasing a deckbuilder like Magic the Gathering. I knew Richard Garfield and stared at them. Then I called them out. "Richard Garfield offered his game to BOTH of your companies and both of you turned it down as impractical. Now you're clinging to his coattails" They had the good grace to look abashed on behalf of their bosses. When WotC bought TSR I kind of thought "serves them right". This doesn't mean I'm on WotC's side" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997808351099658426) 2025-12-07T23:20Z 54.6K followers, 17.2K engagements "Can confirm this for the four states in which I lived - Utah California Maryland and Texas. My son who lives in New Mexico also confirms it for his state" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997809863347540065) 2025-12-07T23:26Z 54.6K followers, 2174 engagements "Remember this next time someone tells you how Breaking Bad is an indictment of the American health system. When White is diagnosed with cancer he is told he has X years to live. He then makes millions and gets every single treatment they have to offer. Then he lives . X years. So there is no indication that if the treatment had been free he would have lived any longer" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997811332599648653) 2025-12-07T23:31Z 54.7K followers, 630K engagements "Who agrees with Sophia Narwitz I can see her point but feel that one answer is to introduce difficulty levels. Literally every digital game I made had difficulty levels. Are these obsolete or something" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997813510865309948) 2025-12-07T23:40Z 54.6K followers, 8929 engagements "While I loved the movies I am not really a huge Lord of the Rings fan. Yeah Tolkien's fantasy world is solid but he also has a knack for making exciting things sound dull. He doesn't really understand romance and he pines for an England that never existed in which no one seems to need a job. You can berate me for not loving Tolkien enough but I did read the trilogy and liked it so be kind. I loved all the hobbits except Frodo whom I felt was snooty & self-centered. I'm not saying I "hated" Frodo but I liked Merry Pippin and Sam much more. I admit I liked the movie's Frodo more" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997818030391451968) 2025-12-07T23:58Z 54.6K followers, 87.1K engagements "I've heard enough about how Stalin "beat the nazis". Look if there had been a decent Russian leader he wouldn't have allied with Germany the first two years purged and crippled his military and left himself wide open" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997831612890055151) 2025-12-08T00:52Z 54.6K followers, 10.6K engagements "In 1940 the US Army standards for new conscripts were: at least X feet tall 105+ lbs 12+ teeth no flat feet or hernias. XX% of candidates failed this test. That's how harsh the Depression was" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1997833142254830067) 2025-12-08T00:58Z 54.6K followers, 885.4K engagements "My best friend from Germany is from Hesse so I look up slurs and accusations against the Hessians from the Revolutionary War when I visit to regale him with. He in turn tells me that random Hessians were just out plowing or whatever when a band of soldier would come by forcibly conscript him and ship him off to America. They were technically mercenaries because they were paid for but none of the soldiers got the money - all the cash went to the Landgraves pocket" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998053351683182690) 2025-12-08T15:33Z 54.6K followers, 190.7K engagements "In Central America there is an Olmec site that has X tons of hammered iron implements and ornaments. Iron-working vanished later on. Iron doesn't preserve well in subtropical environments so we don't know how widespread it was at one time. But across the New World metal working seems to have been known once and then lost" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998066086923878455) 2025-12-08T16:24Z 54.6K followers, 28.5K engagements "We were terrible at keeping secrets in the US military back during Operation Torch (the invasion of North Africa). Ice cream vendors met the troops when they stormed ashore during practice landings on the Carolina coast. Walt Disney sent a letter to the admiral in charge offering to design a logo for Torch. Somehow the Vichy French still didn't figure it out. Or more likely their command was so dysfunctional it didn't get passed down to the troops on the shore" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998070986478845962) 2025-12-08T16:43Z 54.6K followers, 3419 engagements "Try this on Loki Draco Malfoy Hannibal Lector and Killmonger and you'll instantly see how correct the DeVito rule is" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998071883380789656) 2025-12-08T16:47Z 54.6K followers, 18.6K engagements "Was Clark Kent an illegal alien He was taken in as a foundling by the Kents who were US citizens. According to ICE rules a foundling under the age of X from an unknown origin is considered to be an American citizen if the child's guardians are citizens. This does NOT require the child to be formally adopted nor naturalized. So Clark Kent (and Superman) is an American citizen. This can be disputed if the actual parents showed up to claim guardianship which seems highly unlikely" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998075141734195644) 2025-12-08T17:00Z 54.6K followers, 37.5K engagements "On the very first date I ever went on with the woman I eventually married we saw Jaws in the theater. But I had a plan. You see I'd already seen Jaws with a different girl. But everytime Jaws had a scary scene I was scared too. But with Wendy I knew where the scary parts were and so when one came up I was all prepared to protect and comfort her with a nice arm around her shoulders and a squeeze of her hand" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998076293989171496) 2025-12-08T17:04Z 54.6K followers, 633K engagements "I would never defend any slavers - it's a monstrous evil that has plagued mankind for millennia and I long for the day when its last vestige is eradicated. But approximately XX% of the trans-Atlantic slaves made it to the New World alive and approximately XX% of the slaves taken to North Africa and Arabia died en route. Walking through the desert was hard and the Arab and Bedouin slavers killed those who couldn't keep up. Also a lot of the slaves taken to the Near East became eunuchs. This is why despite the vast amounts of slaves taken by Muslim slave traders there is almost no trace of" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998077001878635006) 2025-12-08T17:07Z 54.6K followers, 102.7K engagements "Despite what you see below the South Korean army would absolutely devastate North Korea's in a fight. They have better training better equipment actual air support better allies are in better physical condition and have way higher morale given that their families aren't literally starving back home. The average North Korean male stands about X inches shorter than the average South Korean male and we all know why" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998077770984009933) 2025-12-08T17:10Z 54.6K followers, 40.6K engagements "I wrote Call of Cthulhu which is usually claimed to be the "deadliest" roleplaying game. (I think Paranoia is actually it though.) So I will now defend the concept of character death. Games are more fun if players think something is at stake. If the only difference between success & failure is they get less treasure the players are enervated. In Call of Cthulhu I have three main weapons to get players to feel "something is at stake". First obviously they can die. This is universal among roleplaying games. Yes the deaths in Call of Cthulhu can be gruesome but getting eaten by rot worms or" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998082702386544946) 2025-12-08T17:30Z 54.7K followers, 129.4K engagements "Fun fact: no violent crime existed anywhere in the world before American factories started to make guns" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998087642387529775) 2025-12-08T17:49Z 54.6K followers, 4952 engagements "In the 1980s I encountered a roleplaying game. Sadly the name I do not recall now. But it had charts for you to roll up your hair style and facial hair style. I remember thinking "Surely this is something the player can decide for himself within reason."" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998128212032081924) 2025-12-08T20:31Z 54.6K followers, 5487 engagements "A friend of mine lived by a lake in the early 70s. The next house over was rented by Alice Cooper for the summer. It was like a half-mile away because it was a rural area. He was able to hear Alice Cooper's practice sessions echoing over the lake and loved it. So he got to hear the next album before it was released. Sweet. One day his not-rock-savvy folks made him go and ask Alice to turn down the volume since a visiting baby was having a nap. He dragged himself over terrified beyond belief and Alice Cooper himself answered the door. My friend explained and Alice was super nice about it. A" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998133948363464932) 2025-12-08T20:53Z 54.6K followers, 188.6K engagements "This is my pick for worst movie title ever. "KRAKATOA EAST OF JAVA"" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998135022185001107) 2025-12-08T20:58Z 54.6K followers, 3000 engagements "In 1988 I interviewed for a job at Coleco to work on Colecovision and Adam computer games. 1) I was left alone with a free-to-play arcade version of Dragon's Lair for X hours. So I finally beat it. 2) the entire design staff was fired X months later. One guy had just bought a house" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998135787037335909) 2025-12-08T21:01Z 54.6K followers, 10.2K engagements "When id did Wolfenstein for the Super Nintendo Nintendo required two changes. First the blood spatter had to be changed from red to white (which I thought looked really perverse - shoot a nazi & white goo shoots out. Ick). Second we couldn't have the police dogs so we replaced them with giant rats who barked and otherwise behaved just like the dogs. I had to modify every level of Wolfenstein to fit the super-Nintendo and I had to play every level multiple times looking for bugs. Yay me" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998136878588145793) 2025-12-08T21:05Z 54.6K followers, 25.2K engagements "id Software sold the Wolfenstein engine for the Super-Nintendo to a small Christian company. They made a Noah's Ark game in which you had to shoot fruit and food at animals to "subdue" them while collecting animals for your ark. Just like it says in the Bible. I had to play every single level of their game for some reason. I guess id's owners wanted to make sure there wasn't something libelous in it and Lord knows THEY weren't going to play it" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998137022490570966) 2025-12-08T21:06Z 54.6K followers, 32.7K engagements "A friend of mine in 1980s California owned a Chevrolet Caprice. He said it was the greatest car ever. Other drivers always drove super careful and obeyed traffic laws around it. Everyone let him pass them. Drug dealers scattered when he pulled near. It was awesome. IYKYK" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998180652009832794) 2025-12-08T23:59Z 54.6K followers, 5269 engagements "Let's take a sample. Would YOU eat elephant Not raw like in the picture but actually cooked properly. Perhaps cooked like a steak or sauteed into a stew I certainly would" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998184470080618536) 2025-12-09T00:14Z 54.6K followers, 155.5K engagements "The fact that there is a non-zero chance for the Japanese carrier Kaga and the soon-to-come USN carrier Enterprise to sail into battle against a common enemy is really exciting to me" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998185733954429075) 2025-12-09T00:19Z 54.6K followers, 4803 engagements "@taddyfife Elephants are not endangered" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998202306622537840) 2025-12-09T01:25Z 54.6K followers, 11.6K engagements "Correct. Which is why he did something about it. Usually Santas only intervention is when I get coal & switches in my stocking but Rudolph got to lead the sleigh You Santa-deniers and -haters dont have a leg to stand on" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998415055126487420) 2025-12-09T15:30Z 54.6K followers, 4823 engagements "This poster was also true in Henry VIIIs realm under the Nazis under Stalin and Pol Pot. EVERY regime no matter how evil allows speech it approves of. Heck it often compels it. Not saying there arent anti-X arguments Europeans can make (data harvesting or whatever) but the illegal speech is plainly dystopian" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998419109424558432) 2025-12-09T15:46Z 54.7K followers, 20.3K engagements "I gave one of the players a sentient sword in 1975 and I had it be a complete jerk. It constantly nagged him about wanting a nicer jewel in its hilt a better-quality scabbard and so forth. It was also cowardly and panicked when they were about to fight a monster it thought was too tough for it. "No I don't want to lay around in a filthy giant's lair for the next century Run away" It was heaps of fun for me the DM and the players said they liked it too" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998439542639227047) 2025-12-09T17:08Z 54.7K followers, 46.8K engagements "When I was in Madrid a couple of years ago I found this awesome "Ham Museum". I went inside hoping for memorabilia and maybe wax figures of Jessica Alba Nick Cage and the like but all it had was cured meat" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998440338042794482) 2025-12-09T17:11Z 54.6K followers, 1184 engagements "When I was X it was 1863 the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. My dad who was a buff brought home a copy of the Avalon Hill game "Gettysburg". Almost instantly we lost the rules. So all I had was the game board and the oblong cardboard counters. I was fascinated. I'd push the counters around and try to figure out what the rules might be. I pondered the existence of the game's mysterious "0-8" counters named after the generals. When I turned XX my dad took me to a hobby store in a town XX miles away and lo and behold THERE WAS A COPY OF THE GAME I begged pled and promised anything for him to" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998443161149125102) 2025-12-09T17:22Z 54.6K followers, 13.8K engagements "Tyrannosaurs are more than just a large carnivore. A lion's bite is 1000 newtons and a hippo's is 1800 newtons. The Giganotosaurus which is bigger than a tyrannosaur had a bite force of 6000 newtons. The Tyrannosaurus rex had a bite force of 35000 newtons which is astonishingly more than anything else and basically means it was superpowered" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998443675148599416) 2025-12-09T17:24Z 54.6K followers, 6773 engagements "Public service announcement: "Cachalot" is a much better term than sperm whale and we should all switch back to it" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998448930884038904) 2025-12-09T17:45Z 54.6K followers, 4276 engagements "The entirety of Call of Cthulhu was written in a year while I attended school full-time. It was all done on a typewriter" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998449497266065603) 2025-12-09T17:47Z 54.6K followers, 1227 engagements "Why game sequels suddenly drop off in quality. The process: 1) Dev team makes a killer game. 2) Publisher wants more of the same. Dev team obliges for a sequel or two. 3) Publisher decided the devs are too expensive now that they have a hit game in their CV and farms the IP out to a worse team. 4) the worse team doesn't have their heart in the game because it's not theirs. You'll see this again and again" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998451114468118564) 2025-12-09T17:54Z 54.6K followers, 40.8K engagements "We don't hate game journalists enough" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998451526919139553) 2025-12-09T17:55Z 54.6K followers, 20.9K engagements "During the later years of my time at MicroProse (1988-1993) the company president was as insecure as an 8th grader. At one all-company meeting he poured a large 32-oz cup of Coke over the head of his newly-hired VP because he was jealous that the VP was already more popular than him. He tried to pass it off as a joke but we did not laugh. It also did not make him more popular. That's when I realized MicroProse as an independent company was doomed. Someone told me that we need "crazy devs" to make great games. While this may be true the president was not a developer in any sense of the word." [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998463322027655450) 2025-12-09T18:42Z 54.6K followers, 9348 engagements "Before world war II the Imperial Japanese Navy knew it could not take on the USN but it kept its gigantic budget by claiming that it could. Just before Pearl Harbor the Navy got cold feet and said that maybe the USN was too much. So Hideki Tojo asked them if 300000 tons of steel would be enough for them to take on the USN and they said yes. This is how the IJN sold its soul" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998463817484034338) 2025-12-09T18:44Z 54.6K followers, 9569 engagements "These are witch stairs. Supposedly witches cannot climb them" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998464827577020640) 2025-12-09T18:48Z 54.7K followers, 14.1K engagements "My friends had an e-mail thread of "what if this author wrote that book". My son suggested The Hobbit by Dr. Seuss and I have to admit Gollum's riddling game by Seuss would have been fire. My other pal said "Cat in the Hat" by Lovecraft which would be another big win" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998466643811512332) 2025-12-09T18:55Z 54.6K followers, XXX engagements "What's the best cryptid for a roleplaying adventure" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998471632575492199) 2025-12-09T19:15Z 54.6K followers, 1112 engagements "In the book Dracula Van Helsing's wife is hopelessly insane. She is only referred to. He stays married because he is a strong Catholic which intimates that he is Flemish not Dutch" [X Link](https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1998472153793257565) 2025-12-09T19:17Z 54.7K followers, 26.2K engagements
[GUEST ACCESS MODE: Data is scrambled or limited to provide examples. Make requests using your API key to unlock full data. Check https://lunarcrush.ai/auth for authentication information.]
@SandyofCthulhu Sandy Petersen 🪔
Sandy Petersen, a renowned game designer, recently expressed pride in having contributed to bringing H.P. Lovecraft's works out of near-obscurity and into fame, with many fans crediting his games, particularly Call of Cthulhu, for introducing them to Lovecraft's works. He also made light of his involvement in the gaming industry, joking about his role in creating content for Dungeons & Dragons and other games. Petersen's tweets showcase his interests in gaming, history, and pop culture.
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- X Month XXXXXXXXXX +119%
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- X Month XXXXX +19%
- X Months XXXXX +324%
- X Year XXXXX +1,485%
Followers: XXXXXX #
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- X Month XXXXXX +9.60%
- X Months XXXXXX +37%
- X Year XXXXXX +312%
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Social Influence
Social category influence countries XXXX% gaming XXXX% celebrities XXXX% musicians XXXX% finance XXXX% travel destinations XXXX% technology brands XXXX% fashion brands XXXX% automotive brands XXXX% stocks XXXX%
Social topic influence age of empires #17, the first #1461, movies 1.72%, the world #2014, if you 1.72%, germany #790, all the #2966, pearl harbor #51, age of #449, level XXXX%
Top accounts mentioned or mentioned by @duckbilledtweet @brettg09002618 @orthodox_slavic @desertdahwg @e_considine @kyrtuck @mcleanben @denethorhurin @jimmyja40397308 @frmrrd @airraidsrevenge @lolno1375409 @drunkenalpaca @scottprevett @darthshadow25 @thealthype @tfmonkey2 @simontmn1 @blackwolftwo @grok
Top assets mentioned Trex Company, Inc. (TREX)
Top Social Posts
Top posts by engagements in the last XX hours
"For the languages of the Conquerors (spoken by the units when you commanded them) we tried to get the actual speakers. Spanish and Korean were easy. I used Brigham Young University for obscure languages - they have a really big language department because of all the LDS missionaries who go to far-off lands and learn Bulgarian Quechua Laotian and so forth. I asked the university if they had a Mayan speaker and found there are like XX extant Mayan languages. So I picked a random one. Aztecs speak Nahuatl so I asked for a Nahuatl speaker but apparently we got diddled because I've since been told"
X Link 2025-12-02T17:54Z 54.7K followers, 53K engagements
"I was really suspicious when I heard Peter Jackson was doing the Lord of the Rings. I loved Bad Taste & Dead Alive but they were not enough to convince me he could do Tolkien. When I heard the first movie was X hours long I lost hope. Super-long movies are almost always a sign of self-indulgence (Heaven's Gate Lone Ranger Pearl Harbor). Friends dragged me to the movie kicking & screaming and against my expectations it was amazing. The number one thing that won me over His orcs. I was worried about the orcs. I wanted orcs to match the books. I wanted orcs to be smaller than humans and really"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:52Z 54.6K followers, 76.1K engagements
"My junior high teacher told me that when he was a G.I. in Italy in WW2 he was thirsty. His sergeant told him "don't fill your canteen from the stream" so he didn't. A couple hundred feet upriver he found a dead German rotting in the stream. This story kept me from drinking out of streams for decades"
X Link 2025-12-09T17:55Z 54.7K followers, 42.1K engagements
"When Hitler declared war on the USA in December 1941 he said that the Axis would destroy the "capitalist nations" and he accused Roosevelt of being one of the "ten thousand rich plutocrats" who ruled the world. A reminder that the Nazis were not capitalists. (image: a doomed and evil nation)"
X Link 2025-12-09T18:46Z 54.7K followers, 106.2K engagements
"I find it depressing that the most popular Real Time Strategy game (according to the ever-reliable Reddit) is still Age of Empires X which we released in 1999. There's been updates yeah. But NO huge improvements in RTS for XX years"
X Link 2025-06-13T16:10Z 54.5K followers, 78.5K engagements
"Also don't take a katana. The main advantage is it's sharp and easy to get (America's lousy with them). But they have a short reach for their length. A typical XXX lb katana has an overall length of about XX inches compared to a XXX lb European longsword overall XX inches. So you can either get a lighter European sword for the same length or a longer one. The sharpness is indeed useful as you can lop off limbs & heads comparatively easily but the less-sharp European sword will still crack skulls and break spines & bones. More to the point the complex construction of katanas makes them highly"
X Link 2025-10-07T16:06Z 54.5K followers, 23.7K engagements
"When I was set to design Age of Empires II: The Conquerors the main task was of course to add new civilizations. A secondary task was to add a little something to every existing civ so they'd feel special. And the third task was to add new features to improve the game. This third task was based mostly on feedback we'd gotten in the last few weeks of tests where we found problems we would like to fix but more important tasks got in the way. So now that we were able to take a short breather as it were we could put these new features in. The first and most glorious feature that everyone loved"
X Link 2025-10-16T20:57Z 54.4K followers, 19.4K engagements
"I don't see how a game can be "satanic" in which you spend the entire game trying to destroy demons"
X Link 2025-11-07T18:37Z 54.4K followers, 27.5K engagements
"I urge everyone to ruin the Black Cauldron movie for yourself by reading Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series. Also this is a great series for kids to read both boys & girls"
X Link 2025-11-10T21:04Z 54.4K followers, 23.5K engagements
"Christ didnt break Roman law. He didnt even break Jewish law. He was condemned illegally because of feelings & people being offended. Sound familiar"
X Link 2025-11-16T20:28Z 54.4K followers, 776.5K engagements
"I have deep fried turkey many times. Follow the instructions and its safe as can be"
X Link 2025-11-26T21:51Z 54.5K followers, 2808 engagements
"This is what spawned ultimately Age of Empires"
X Link 2025-11-27T19:57Z 54.5K followers, 9607 engagements
"Its fun to be a keeper in Call of Cthulhu"
X Link 2025-11-29T15:18Z 54.5K followers, 1986 engagements
"On our trip to Texas the high point generating cheers from the granddaughters was that we stopped at Buc-ees"
X Link 2025-11-30T19:11Z 54.5K followers, 2575 engagements
"Why Lovecraft was brilliant: one of the reasons. When youre writing a fantastical story you are faced the readers suspension of disbelief. As soon as you bring in a ghost or a magic spell or interdimensional geometry the reader KNOWS its not true to life. One easy way out is to set your tale in the far future or a fantasy realm. No one cares that orc armies or sandworms don't really exist so long as you are consistent within your world's rules. But what if you're writing a horror story Set in the present day You can't just handwave away the readers natural instinct to disbelieve. 1/4"
X Link 2025-11-30T21:03Z 54.5K followers, 73.4K engagements
"One of the testers at Ensemble Studios wanted to be promoted to a designer. Note: he was XX years old hired at XX and had not been to college. Not that we cared. We applauded his goal and all of us got together to discuss how he could achieve it. We suggested the following steps: 1) learn the design script & start making scenarios. 2) learn the game engine machinima for cut scenes. 3) organize and run playtests. A few months of this and he'd be ready for more responsibility. He balked. He said "I don't want to learn that stuff. Can't I just be the idea guy" I guess he thought he would be best"
X Link 2025-11-30T21:37Z 54.5K followers, 98.2K engagements
"My firm belief about orc women. Orc females are as flat-chested as chimp females and are the same size as the males. Orcs breed rapidly. A pig gives birth to a 2-3 lb piglet in about X months and I see no reason an orc can't do the same. Orcs are smaller than sows so they wouldn't have a litter probably just 1-2 kids at a time. The kids are weaned rapidly and kept in underground warrens with a few caretakers. The females externally look just like the males so humans elves and dwarfs can't tell the difference. You'd have to take off their pants to be sure but ugh. Orc babies grow rapidly fed"
X Link 2025-12-01T17:37Z 54.5K followers, 221.9K engagements
"my white ancestors have lived in America for more than XXX years (some were on the Mayflower). That's longer than the Sioux have been in the Dakotas or the Comanches in Texas. What do we have to do to be native"
X Link 2025-12-01T21:19Z 54.4K followers, 46.1K engagements
"Game Companies can of course be cheated like anyone. In 1999 I befriended an artist and felt he'd be a good fit for Ensemble Studios. I got him an interview. The other Ensemble folks liked his work and even gave him a $5000 signing bonus. He accepted and started working. TWO WEEKS LATER he moved away to California where he had a totally different job waiting for him. He took the job with us only to pocket the signing bonus I was livid because not only had I recommended the interview but also the guy actually attended my church. I feel it hurt my standing at Ensemble to a degree and I don't"
X Link 2025-12-02T17:19Z 54.5K followers, 35.8K engagements
"One reason Call of Cthulhu is highly convenient for new players is because it is set in the real world. Let's say you're running D&D. The newbies have their character sheets and you say "Okay you're in the Yawning Portal tavern in Waterdeep. A merchant from Mulhorand walks in and makes a beeline for your table." Now you have to explain what Waterdeep is what Mulhorand is like and this leads to more questions. But in Call of Cthulhu you can say "You're in Dirty Dick's bar & grill on the New York waterfront and a middle-Eastern-looking guy walks in and makes a beeline for your table." No"
X Link 2025-12-03T16:50Z 54.5K followers, 7088 engagements
"Pacific Rim is beyond good or bad. From the giant monsters to the hokey dialogue to the predictable plotline its just all fun comfort food for a guys soul. Like an old-time Western or a 60s monster movie. We know whats coming and anticipate it with joy"
X Link 2025-12-03T20:38Z 54.4K followers, 21.4K engagements
"This is my favorite review of Mortal Kombat Annihilation. "It was 1997 and your script was so bad even Christopher Lambert said no.""
X Link 2025-12-03T21:10Z 54.5K followers, 1554 engagements
"Who wouldn't want $300000"
X Link 2025-12-04T16:51Z 54.4K followers, 24.2K engagements
"The whole "blocking roads" thing seems so misguided. When MLK marched for rights or college students rioted against the war the American people saw cops beating firehosing and fighting them and it swayed public opinion into favor for MLK and the anti-war protestors. But I've never heard anyone express sympathy with protestors blocking roads unless they were already on that team. It angers foes and turns neutrals into new enemies. Completely counterproductive"
X Link 2025-12-05T17:55Z 54.5K followers, 56.5K engagements
"Wilco means "Will Comply and was originally only used by a responsible officer (such as a ship's captain) to mean "I understand. I am in control of my unit and will do what you ask." I always thought it was Roger's last name"
X Link 2025-12-05T18:17Z 54.5K followers, 1417 engagements
"A high school kid told me he aced his history test because thanks to Age of Empires he was the only student who knew who the Hittites were"
X Link 2025-12-06T16:17Z 54.5K followers, 6151 engagements
"A meatball sub always sounds like a good idea but every time I get one my bites are evenly split between "the meatball is so big my jaws can't get around it" and "dang no meatball in that bite." It seems too . episodic to make a good sandwich. Is there something I'm doing wrong or shall I stick to Italian sausage & pepper subs"
X Link 2025-12-07T17:07Z 54.5K followers, 5203 engagements
"France is XX% smaller than Texas and has over twice the population. Yet Texass GDP is on track to exceed France by years end. Texas has 130000 km of road. France has 11000. Texas airports handle more traffic. The port of Houston BY ITSELF has XX% more traffic than all of Frances ports. Yes its possible to pick out statistics in which France is superior. I love France. But there is a bigger picture here and I feel France needs to step up its game"
X Link 2025-11-25T17:07Z 54.6K followers, 1.1M engagements
"Countries that dont like another country: China -America China - Japan China - India China -Vietnam China -Philippines China -South Korea China -China China -Ukraine China -Israel China -Czech Republic (its true) China -Australia"
X Link 2025-11-26T15:04Z 54.6K followers, 22.3K engagements
"Its terrific. The whole LSD trip lasts about XX minutes. Later on its used in a successful murder"
X Link 2025-11-29T15:50Z 54.6K followers, 1521 engagements
"So I would order my cavalry squadron LTC to check out a hill I saw on the map and then Sid told the squadron what they saw and the LTC would get back to me with something like Theres a whole regiment of T-80s Were taking heavy fire X Bradleys KOed pulling back Then Id have to figure my next action. Meanwhile the Soviet player with the tank regiment was alerted hed been spotted by ground units. You may ask what about air recon Well the opening of the battle was about a thousand Scuds hitting our airfields (props to the Russian player for thinking of this). We still had helicopters but they"
X Link 2025-11-29T17:16Z 54.6K followers, 31.4K engagements
"Most of us at MicroProse were pretty hip to modern warfare. Wed done Gunship Red Storm Rising F-15 Strike Eagle F-19x and so forth. So you can imagine we got pretty involved. I wasnt our division commander - but I was on his staff so we were in the same office. It helped to have two of us coordinating our efforts. When I asked for helo recon he told me he was using our X UH-1Hs on something else so I sent in the cav on my own initiative. I then asked the commander for artillery on that hill. He called the corps (represented by Sid) and made his case. He got something like 20-30 MLRS targeting"
X Link 2025-11-29T17:16Z 54.6K followers, 31.1K engagements
"Every nation under the wise and kindly Japanese rule suffered thousands of cruel deaths at the hands of their occupiers. Every Nation. Nations which had been enemies before (Philippines New Guinea) suffered even worse so I doubt San Francisco would have been that safe"
X Link 2025-11-29T18:46Z 54.6K followers, 108.3K engagements
"Its fun for game masters"
X Link 2025-11-29T19:23Z 54.6K followers, 1987 engagements
"Eggs were $XXXX a dozen at Target today"
X Link 2025-11-30T05:22Z 54.6K followers, 12.7K engagements
"The very best character introduction I can think of is Sonya in Mortal Kombat. She shows up in a crowded nightclub screaming "Where's the son of a bitch who killed my partner" and punching her way through thugs and partygoers in her way. The scene lasts maybe XX seconds and you learn the following: 1) she's a tough-as-nails cop 2) she's out for revenge You don't need to know anything else. You don't need the partner's touching death scene. You don't need her home life. You don't need her to be a reluctant hero. She doesn't even know she's a hero. She's just there to kick ass and take names."
X Link 2025-11-30T21:21Z 54.6K followers, 12.5K engagements
"When someone talks smack about how the USA "stole land" from Mexico know this: 1) Mexico declared war on US not the other way round. 2) Santa Ana who thought he was Napoleon's equal felt he would easily win. 3) Mexico had a larger army interior lines knew the land and he had a much simpler supply situation. 4) Our own forces had political problems because President Polk (a democrat) didn't want a Whig general winning the war but his only two good generals were both Whigs. So whenever one general started winning too much he'd switch over to the other one. We won anyway because it turned out"
X Link 2025-11-30T21:28Z 54.6K followers, 189.3K engagements
"In my upcoming boardgame I have this rule: "We know how keys work from video games. Any key opens any door. The key is destroyed when the door opens and that door can never be locked again." I have never had a player argue with this rule. It is such plain truth"
X Link 2025-12-01T17:23Z 54.6K followers, 3846 engagements
"I play Call of Cthulhu in the modern age not the 1920s. I've had people ask me how to make enemies scary nowadays. There is a sort of assumption that with cell phones the internet guns and airplanes the bad guys have no chance. But this looks at things backwards. The cultists have cell phones internet guns and airplanes too. Even more to the point modern technology is far more horrific and dehumanizing than anything from the 1920s. I'm sure the King in Yellow has a TikTok feed. Our easy communication is a means to doom humanity. In The Shadow From the Steeple Robert Bloch makes it clear that"
X Link 2025-12-01T19:28Z 54.6K followers, 62.1K engagements
"Castles had surprisingly small garrisons. We get this idea from movies of hundreds of warriors on the walls but in reality a garrison might be just XX men at arms plus a sergeant. I got this from personal conversations with two different experts on the topic. Now when the Welsh or Scots or Vikings raided the castle's population surged as local peasants ran to it. So the actual defense would be several hundred untrained peasants women and children being directed by the men-at-arms. The women could heat water or hand up rocks to the walls' defenders to pour on attackers. (They used boiling"
X Link 2025-12-01T19:36Z 54.5K followers, 113.5K engagements
"A sword isn't a weapon. A sword PLUS a fighting style is a weapon. This is why there is no objectively "best sword". A sword seller told me about a time he was at a Ren Faire selling his wares and a shirtless guy (cosplaying a barbarian I guess) walked up and admired one of his Italian-style schiavonas. The guy picked it up and the seller said "Be careful. It's sharp." Shirtless Dude said "No need to worry. I'm an expert." And immediately started doing Japanese katana-style moves. The seller moved to stop him but before he could Shirtless Dude slid the schiavona over his shoulder (like you'd"
X Link 2025-12-01T19:57Z 54.5K followers, 154.2K engagements
"As I've stated before orcs clearly drink coffee. They give the captured hobbits a "black bitter" brew which also gives unnatural energy. So that's obvious. Coffee. The question is then what does Lembas map to My wife says "dark chocolate" but I have doubts"
X Link 2025-12-02T17:15Z 54.6K followers, 28.1K engagements
"This is a recipe from the 1960s. The entire recipe contains a quarter-teaspoon of tabasco. Call the Fire Chief My dad to this day has almost this level of sensitivity. He has told me several times how the Mild Taco Bell sauce has "quite a kick""
X Link 2025-12-02T17:16Z 54.5K followers, 1884 engagements
"The password to the playtest room at Ensemble Studios was "gamera". Dave Lewis and I told the bosses it stood for "gamer A". But it didn't"
X Link 2025-12-02T17:57Z 54.6K followers, 5266 engagements
"Sauron and Diablo look a LOT different than in the movies and video games"
X Link 2025-12-02T20:51Z 54.6K followers, 1958 engagements
"My favorite fact about the Spanish Civil War is that the anarchist faction (on the Republican side) was absolutely useless. They constantly begged for supplies and never ever organized an attack. They were almost a parody of anarchy. My second favorite fact is that Franco was 3rd in command of the Nationalists. The 1st and 2nd in command each died in separate plane wrecks. shrug "What a coincidence." My third is post-Civil War when Franco gathered up his most anti-communist fanatic falangist and organized them into the Blue Division then sent them to the Russian Front to fight for Hitler"
X Link 2025-12-02T21:08Z 54.6K followers, 195.7K engagements
"B can lose weight. A is stuck with her baggage"
X Link 2025-12-02T21:38Z 54.6K followers, 11.3K engagements
"This is the true purpose of AI"
X Link 2025-12-02T21:39Z 54.6K followers, 3012 engagements
"So from the very start this video is wrong because have you been to east Washington state"
X Link 2025-12-03T13:32Z 54.6K followers, 5937 engagements
"Neither communism nor capitalism existed within the time period of any Age of Empires game. However a crude proto-capitalism was starting to appear during the Industrial Age of Age of Empires X. So keep your politics away from my real time strategy"
X Link 2025-12-03T15:48Z 54.6K followers, 19K engagements
"Unlike some D&D campaigns Call of Cthulhu almost never starts with the team meeting up in a tavern. I would make an exception for this tavern however"
X Link 2025-12-03T15:49Z 54.6K followers, 3076 engagements
"A friend who is a big comic fan explained to me that Superman is REALLY Clark Kent. But that Bruce Wayne is REALLY Batman. He said that's how to understand both characters. Other fans more knowledgable than I can now weiogh in and edumocate me"
X Link 2025-12-03T16:34Z 54.6K followers, 16.8K engagements
"One feature of Call of Cthulhu that emerged after publication is that it's perfect for one-shot adventures. I never even considered that advantage while creating it. Yes you can play campaigns too but if you're normally playing D&D and some key person is missing you can whip out Call of Cthulhu for a single night's run and it works fine. Making this even easier in Call of Cthulhu it's fast to create a character. Just roll stats and allocate skill points. Done. You don't have to worry about character class levels etc. And in a one-shot who cares if you survive The goal is to have fun. In fact"
X Link 2025-12-03T16:41Z 54.5K followers, 2566 engagements
"In Age of Empires the Asian art was based on the style of the Benihana's down the street. By Age of Empires X I was there from the start and I provided the artists with actual reference books. I took them to the gigantic Half-Price Books a couple mile aways and went nuts with big picture folios"
X Link 2025-12-03T21:36Z 54.5K followers, 13.1K engagements
"Tip which came form a dedicated sports fan and a friend. Dont watch the big teams. Watch the minor leagues. The tickets are way cheaper. Seats more accessible. And the games are actually more entertaining because the players make more mistakes. Scoring is higher. Everything you love about your game is there and the players arent colossal overpaid jerks"
X Link 2025-12-03T23:39Z 54.5K followers, 4479 engagements
"My son texted to say he was showing his two older kids (13/9) Its a Wonderful Life for the first time. They were ambivalent at first but then 3/4 of the way in it turns into an episode of the Twilight Zone and they are riveted. Then he texted to say Woah I forgot the guardian angel BITES A COP I still remember the first time I saw that film. Wow. How about yall"
X Link 2025-12-04T15:40Z 54.6K followers, 310.9K engagements
"Some years ago I was attending my yearly convention in Germany (The Kraken Yay) and my German friend asked me to cook a meal for the attendees (there's less than XXX so it's possible). Something Very American. I pondered for a while. What would be American but that Europeans would not have encountered Perhaps that only rarely shows up in restaurants but every American has eaten. Then it hit me -- Sloppy Joes. We've all had sloppy joes and loved them. It's hard to find them in restaurants. And it's easy to make a gigantic batch of the meat then just spoon it onto buns so feeding XXX people is"
X Link 2025-12-04T20:48Z 54.6K followers, 16.1K engagements
"Been working hard on how to figure out a money system for my science fiction universe and I've finally hit upon it. The challenge is that the humans in my universe don't have a gigantic space empire that is under a single government. Instead every planet is virtually independent. Also there is no faster-than-light communication though there are FTL ships. So information between star systems is generally done via couriers. So the issue is how can I have a money system which will work across multiple systems And I've got it I think. First the value of a credit (the symbol is "") is defined as"
X Link 2025-12-04T22:07Z 54.6K followers, 18.1K engagements
"The term "white" is used to describe the subgroup of Caucasians with pale skin. This group is now about X% of the global population which makes it the second rarest of major human groups (Bushmen being the rarest). By definition this means pale Caucasians and particularly the part of them which is blonde and/or blue eyed are the most "diverse" possible people to show in media. So I am happy with more of them. Plus we need more Bushmen"
X Link 2025-12-05T15:51Z 54.6K followers, 80.3K engagements
"When I was tasked with designing Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors one obvious civilization (civ) to include was the Spanish. They rose rapidly to pre-eminence post 1500 and so I wanted to show them off. As always I wanted to give them economy military and late-game bonuses. For their economy I gave them two perks. First was that their trade units generate extra gold. I started them out with +33% gold but this was nerfed by MicroProse to +25% gold. This boost is nice but it doesn't help the Spanish in the early game. Also it's no good in non-team games. So it's kind of specialized. For their"
X Link 2025-12-05T16:29Z 54.6K followers, 26K engagements
"My name has always kind of been one of my banes. I mean I love that it is unique and unusual but as a kid I hated that I got mocked because I had a "girl's name". There were several other "Sandies" in junior & high school who were of course girls. Naturally I could never date any of them (that's on me not them). Also the fact that my last name is spelled in the correct Danish Petersen style means that it is constantly misspelled as "PetersOn" by imperceptive bureaucrats. It gets misspelled on my own advertisements and occasionally on my own game boxes. There're people worse off than me I"
X Link 2025-12-05T16:40Z 54.6K followers, 7204 engagements
"Public Service Announcement I made a bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich using garlic toast so you don't need to. While it was edible it was not as good as either a BLT or the garlic toast separately. Forewarned is Forearmed. The whole was less than the sum of the parts like a movie with a big ensemble cast"
X Link 2025-12-05T17:10Z 54.6K followers, 1249 engagements
"Grammar tip from Popeye the Sailor"
X Link 2025-12-05T17:15Z 54.6K followers, 1167 engagements
"Hollywood is economically and financially retarded. In the Netflix show "Mr. Robot" their awesome plan is to use their cyberhacking to save the world by "destroying all debt." They think it's obvious that this would be great. But of course this would destroy the world financially. No one would ever again loan money. There would be no car loans no mortgages no student loans. Yeah being in debt sucks but not being able AT ALL to get a car a mortgage or an education would suck worse. The poor wouldn't even own appliances. Only the rich could own anything. Post other examples of screenwriters Not"
X Link 2025-12-05T17:19Z 54.6K followers, 35K engagements
"I never thought of "redneck" as an insult just a descriptor. I'm sure there are rednecks who are meth-smoking violent a**holes. But most of the rednecks I've known I'm proud to be friends with. I was in Texas less than one week when a redneck saw I was cold on a hike and gave me the coat off his back. My car busted a tire on a road and it was a redneck that stopped and helped me fix it. Is "redneck" an insult"
X Link 2025-12-05T18:11Z 54.6K followers, 3053 engagements
"Here are statistics you NEED TO KNOW before you run your science fiction game. In Star Trek (TOS): XX redshirts were killed X gold were killed X science were killed In Star Trek the Next Generation: XX goldshirts were killed XX redshirts were killed X science were killed. However the meaning of red & gold shirts were switched between the seasons so the same guys (Operations/Security) were still dying just with a different shirt color. Also since the Next Generation was XXX episodes cf. TOS's XX episodes you were more than twice as likely to get killed under Captain Kirk as Captain Picard. I"
X Link 2025-12-05T19:22Z 54.6K followers, 50.5K engagements
"It's Pearl Harbor Day Imperial Japan inflicted monstrous evil upon everything it touched. One reason it could do so was because its men were so incredibly brave. Winston Churchill said it best "Every nation talks about fighting to the last man. Only the Japanese actually do it.""
X Link 2025-12-07T17:34Z 54.6K followers, 3560 engagements
"In commemoration of Pearl Harbor day I'd like to talk about the hardest-fought campaign of WW2. This was in my opinion Guadalcanal. The battle of Midway the month before had brought the Japanese carrier force down to near-equality with the USN. But they were obviously still a deadly force. During the six months of Guadalcanal a fact not everyone realizes is: 1) the Japanese had more troops available. Most were veterans. The American soldiers were all green as grass. 2) the Japanese had more airplanes available. Their airplanes were arguably superior and their pilots definitely first-rate. 3)"
X Link 2025-12-07T20:26Z 54.6K followers, 5426 engagements
"I sometimes think my greatest contribution to gaming is the fact that people talk about making "sanity checks" who have never played Call of Cthulhu"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:01Z 54.6K followers, 3678 engagements
"One of the things that I'm exceedingly proud of our navy for is that we hunted down and sank every capital ship that was at the Pearl Harbor raid. We also sank almost all of the cruisers (the few we didn't sink were crippled sitting on the bottom of harbors). Just one destroyer on that raid the Ushio survived the war. Here's a picture of it because of course a Japanese hobby company made a model of it"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:08Z 54.6K followers, 9323 engagements
"Video games have taught me that when I kill a bad guy he spits out a clip of ammo that exactly fits one of my guns"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:28Z 54.6K followers, 1593 engagements
"Cthulhu Wars has two random elements. The Elder Signs range from 1-3 points each and are drawn randomly. And the combat is dice-based. There's a faction of Eurogamers who hate randomness so I was immediately besieged with suggestions to "fix the game". Like making all Elder Signs worth X or replacing the dice with a fixed sequence of results. This was urged upon me as though of course I couldn't possibly object to this wonderous improvement. But the fact is I am excited by the random element. By not knowing exactly what's going to happen. I naturally think my way of playing is the best but if"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:43Z 54.6K followers, 2807 engagements
"My wife's most hated Hollywood thing is when a woman wakes up in the morning and has a faceful of makeup. I never noticed it before she pointed it out. Now I see it all the time because Hollywood thinks we're idiots"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:44Z 54.6K followers, 5410 engagements
"You're not a fan of 80s music if you can't name this band"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:46Z 54.6K followers, 3833 engagements
"We need to have movies with stuff like this return"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:50Z 54.6K followers, 1574 engagements
"Here is my new suggestion for roleplaying games. When a player has a bad roll he can pay to adjust it. Who does he pay The DM directly. The DM is happy. The player gets his success. It's all voluntary. Now let the hate boil within you"
X Link 2025-12-08T00:01Z 54.6K followers, 1474 engagements
"In Roleplaying games if you don't have gold as XP then Gold becomes its own different reward with different purposes and uses"
X Link 2025-12-08T00:56Z 54.6K followers, 3523 engagements
"See if you play Call of Cthulhu THIS is the caliber of magic items you'll be getting. Isn't that cooler than some dumb +4 sword of holding or the toe of Vecna"
X Link 2025-12-08T16:46Z 54.6K followers, 2081 engagements
"I too hate this truth"
X Link 2025-12-08T16:48Z 54.6K followers, 2261 engagements
"Fantasy gaming worlds. All fantasy worlds have some setting. In Call of Cthulhu it's Earth but with monsters. If you play D&D your game is possibly set in someone else's pre-built fantasy universe (Forgotten Realms Ravenloft etc.) A lot of gamers (including myself) create our own fantasy worlds to play in. There is no "right or wrong" here. If you make up your own world you might feel proud of yourself. The way I see it we only have so much time to spend away from jobs family and obligations. If we don't create our entire fantasy world then we can focus in on making adventures"
X Link 2025-12-08T16:53Z 54.6K followers, 4154 engagements
"Second in Call of Cthulhu I can threaten to destroy stuff. At the high end the whole world can be at stake but a scenario might be threatening a locale a town or a nation. Almost every Call of Cthulhu scenario is reactive - the players get hints about some dark secret and as they investigate they discover the awful truth and Must Stop It. In my little throwaway scenario "The Haunting" the threat is that the Thing in the house has been killing people for generations and will keep doing so. In "Edge of Darkness" a terrible being is about to manifest and if not stopped then far-reaching but"
X Link 2025-12-08T17:30Z 54.6K followers, 9671 engagements
"My final tool in getting my players to feel something is at stake is Sanity. This may seem petty after mentioning saving the world but madness is terrifying because you lose control of yourself. In Call of Cthulhu Sanity costs you your character which can be worse than death. There are degrees of it - you might just go into hysterics or need to be locked up until you "get better". But there is always that ultimate threat - Sanity drops to X and your beloved dilettante becomes a non-player-character under the control of the Keeper. Every keeper has stories about how they tormented the party"
X Link 2025-12-08T17:30Z 54.6K followers, 9403 engagements
"I watched the movie War Pigs a few weeks ago and noticed that the German halftrack & Panzer III in the film looked like the real deal and also they were clearly not CGI. I've been slur is for a ww2 fan since I was XX so I was impressed. I then did a test comparing Grok and ChatGPT. I asked ChatGPT how War Pigs did the vehicles and it outright lied. It said the halftrack was a modified American M3 and the tank was a kitbash. Both are obviously false. The M3 is WAY bigger than a German Sd Kfz XXX and the one in the film had the weird sideways folding rear doors of the German vehicle. Also the"
X Link 2025-12-08T20:38Z 54.6K followers, 4584 engagements
"This was the first computer I ever worked on. We bought our Osborne IIs just a couple of weeks before Osborne went out of business. (I understand this was because the founder was out murdering people while wearing a goblin costume.) Many of my Chaosium works were created here. It had a XX meg hard drive"
X Link 2025-12-08T20:49Z 54.6K followers, 1770 engagements
"American English - "cookie" British English - "biscuit" Ever wonder why It's because the American word derives from the Dutch word "koekje" While the British like many British words is derived from Orkish: "bukh' cakh""
X Link 2025-12-08T21:07Z 54.6K followers, 12.9K engagements
"Found in Germany. 1) the chocolate imagery on the left isn't "chips". 2) there is patriotic American bunting on the sides of the package. 3) they are chocolate "chips" cookies because I guess for a German pedant there is more than one chip in a cookie. 4) they tasted okay. As you know store-bought chocolate chip cookies are always worse than fresh from the oven with the little pockets of chocolate molten"
X Link 2025-12-08T21:10Z 54.6K followers, 6226 engagements
"I love fried chicken"
X Link 2025-12-08T21:10Z 54.6K followers, 1879 engagements
"This is my favorite Cthulhu statuette"
X Link 2025-12-09T03:47Z 54.6K followers, 4901 engagements
"Great Moments in History: when Barbara Walters interviewed Miley Cyrus her crew overused the facilities and clogged every single one of Cyrus's toilets. So if someone tells you the media is full of sh*t there is actual proof for this"
X Link 2025-12-09T17:31Z 54.6K followers, 1423 engagements
"I read a recent British murder mystery in which some thugs decided not to dump a corpse in the Thames because the government had been working so hard to clean the river"
X Link 2025-12-09T17:46Z 54.6K followers, 1646 engagements
"One day I would like to see a logo redesign that made it look better instead of soulless and terrible. Can anyone give a counterexample"
X Link 2025-08-20T20:17Z 54.6K followers, 29.5M engagements
"For those doubting Thai commercials are the best in the world. Possibly the entire solar system"
X Link 2025-09-20T14:28Z 54.6K followers, 2M engagements
"Comic artists will never draw a cooler image than Watterson's T-Rex in an F-15 Strike Eagle"
X Link 2025-10-06T14:20Z 54.6K followers, 1.4M engagements
"A fun fact is that the worst writing "system" in the world is Japanese and it's not close. Even the Japanese know this. My best friend works as a translator from Japanese to English and tells me dire stories all the time. Below is an image from Spirited Away in which by removing the second syllable in her name "Chihiro" is somehow changed to "Sen". My friend told me of a civil court case in America in which the attorney asked him how to pronounce a certain name and he had to say "I don't know." The attorney started to mock his translation skills and my friend explained that for a lot of"
X Link 2025-11-05T16:14Z 54.6K followers, 1.4M engagements
"Please don't have sex with monsters. Most of the Greek myths are devoted to explaining why this is a bad idea. Jail your bard if he tries it"
X Link 2025-11-07T20:17Z 54.6K followers, 81.7K engagements
"For the record I have not put AI art into any of my products. Not promising this can never happen but it hasn't yet"
X Link 2025-11-18T17:55Z 54.6K followers, 1.2M engagements
"So is driving this full circle a thing Totally would be in America"
X Link 2025-11-21T18:05Z 54.6K followers, 5M engagements
"Once I had a really long lecture from a guy about Call of Cthulhu and then he told me he didnt read or watch horror. I think you need to love a genre in order to build a world in it. If you dont read heroic fantasy your D&D world will fall flat. If you dont read space opera your Traveller game wont work. You need to love what youre creating. If you are building a game setting or adventure in order to expose or fix that setting you will fail. And I think a lot of the risible stuff weve seen lately is from fixers and re-interpretations. Which is why no one likes them"
X Link 2025-11-24T20:39Z 54.6K followers, 143.9K engagements
"Lets imagine what would have happened without Stalin. Either Russia would be ruled by some other communist wed still have a Czar or the Mensheviks would be in charge. In all three cases Russia is still able to fight. And in all three cases we wouldnt have had Stalins purge of Russian officers including the genius theoretician Tukhachevsky. So the Russian army would be stronger. Also there is at least a chance that one of the other leaders wouldnt have allied with Hitler for the first two years hugely helping him establish his grip. Id say Stalin made the war harder and gave Hitler a better"
X Link 2025-11-26T20:07Z 54.6K followers, 384.2K engagements
"When I was at MicroProse Sid Meier ran an after hours game that worked like this. We all stayed in our offices which had terrific intercoms. Sid & a pal were the referees. The rest of us were officers in either NATO or the Warsaw Pact in a division- level action in the Fulda Gap. Higher commanders had to use the com to tell their underlings what to do. The underlings actually did things and the refs gave them results or information. 1/"
X Link 2025-11-29T17:10Z 54.6K followers, 161.9K engagements
"My awesome friend Ken Rolston helped craft the Elder Scrolls"
X Link 2025-11-29T19:29Z 54.6K followers, 1712 engagements
"I pumped gas for XX a gallon as my first job in high school. The high point was when Stephanie the cute tanned blonde whod just moved from California drove in for a fill. I was embarrassed that she would know I had such a menial job but instead she seemed way friendly - apparently impressed that I HAD a job instead of just living off my folks like most boys our age. That is the day I learned never to feel awkward about my job and never to feel superior about someone elses job. Anyone who works is deserving of respect. Except game journalists of course"
X Link 2025-11-30T14:52Z 54.6K followers, 2.5M engagements
"What's the worst job in gaming It's "playtester". I know you're thinking that being a tester must be the dream job. Get paid to play games all day Woohoo It's not like that. Here are six reasons why not to be a tester. Reason One - you are the lowest tier. You're not part of any team but just an adjunct temporarily added to the team. You're not an artist a coder a designer or a producer. Everyone knows anyone could do your job so you're regarded as about on a par with a day laborer. 1/4"
X Link 2025-11-30T21:58Z 54.6K followers, 2.7M engagements
"In 1994 at the Game Developer Conference I was asked at a panel why Doom was all about targeting and shooting and asked why it couldn't be more restrained. Like why couldn't Doom have alternatives to shooting demons. So I asked him "Would you play Doom if it was toned down like that" He honestly said "Probably not. It's not my kind of game. I like things like Populous and King's Quest." I hear this a lot - someone doesn't like something I worked on and wants me to change it even though they themselves won't play it. I guess they can't stand the idea of someone enjoying something different"
X Link 2025-11-30T23:01Z 54.6K followers, 587.7K engagements
"I think it's kind of depressing that the very top selling Real Time Strategy games of all time are still Age of Empires X (1999) and StarCraft (1998). Has there been no huge improvements in real time strategy in XX years"
X Link 2025-12-01T17:02Z 54.6K followers, 591.7K engagements
"Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek movie and it's not close"
X Link 2025-12-01T17:53Z 54.6K followers, 10.2K engagements
"In 1997 I got hired at Ensemble Studios. My first task was to create a magic-based RTS game to be a sister product to Age of Empires. Tim Deen was my lead programmer and Scott Winsett my lead artist. They were (and are) great devs. We had other artists and later on a few more programmers. I named it Sorceress based on the plot (which I won't go into here) and here is how it worked. You'd design your own sorcerer outside the game and put him into a stable of sorcerers. You'd then load up one of your sorcerers when you started a game. You got 4-6 points to customize him. A point might purchase"
X Link 2025-12-01T20:38Z 54.6K followers, 7125 engagements
"There were animals in Eden. Adam namesd them all and no doubt was observant. This also explains how Guinea Pigs got misnamed so badly. Adam didnt know much geography. On the other hand its impressive he got Baltimore Oriole right"
X Link 2025-12-02T15:41Z 54.6K followers, 4198 engagements
"My wife lived in Chile from age X to XX. She was super-popular among the other kids because she was a tiny blue-eyed blonde girl. When she returned to the USA her main language was Chilean Spanish. She thought that a "burrito" was a little donkey and a "taco" was the heel of a boot. She still speaks Spanish pretty well but as she says she has the vocabulary of a XX year old"
X Link 2025-12-02T21:01Z 54.6K followers, 352.6K engagements
"why play Age of Empires See below"
X Link 2025-12-02T21:11Z 54.6K followers, 20.4K engagements
"The Germans get a lot of praise during WW2 for their army but their effectiveness changed as the war progressed. They were probably 10x as good as the Russians in 1941 but by 1944 they were only a little better. This was partly due to the German army deteriorating and partly due to increased Soviet skill. Americans went the same way. We were clearly inferior to the Germans in 1942 and 1943 but in 1945 a German general watching an American combined-arms assault said he'd never seen a better one even by his own troops in Russia 1941"
X Link 2025-12-02T21:14Z 54.6K followers, 264.6K engagements
"A couple years ago I went to the Texas State Fair and they had an exhibit of "Historic Texas Video Games". I'd actually worked on most of them. The armed guard did not believe me. shrug Also my daughter wore a t-shirt to high school that said "DOOM. My dad wrote it." and was harassed by non-believers"
X Link 2025-12-02T21:20Z 54.6K followers, 18K engagements
"Spears are the best melee weapon ever and they weren't invented by Homo sapiens. We inherited them. With a spear a human can take on a lion or a cave bear with a pretty good chance of success. Remember the XXX dudes vs a gorilla challenge How many dudes would you need if they had spears Two Three One The Masai tribe at one time required every single youth to kill a lion with a spear to become a man. Lindybeige on YouTube has a longish video titled "Spears are better than swords (longer version)" in which he does the experience. He has a bunch of guys who have never used spears fight a group"
X Link 2025-12-03T16:22Z 54.6K followers, 116K engagements
"This is the greatest description ever from a bootleg video in China"
X Link 2025-12-03T16:46Z 54.6K followers, 83.5K engagements
"Doom X was basically a cash grab. The idea is that we'd use assets from the first game and give the designers something to do while the programmers built Quake. Don't get me wrong - we still wanted to make Doom X fun but there's a reason that it didn't add X new weapons and XX new monsters X new skins and a new player mode. We did it all on a shoestring. Also Quake was well worth it"
X Link 2025-12-03T21:45Z 54.6K followers, 356.1K engagements
"Three things I learned after XX years in the game industry. 1) if they say "we don't need a contract" you need a contract. 2) if they say "don't you trust us" don't trust them. 3) do NOT let a man in a suit see a game with unfinished art"
X Link 2025-12-03T21:53Z 54.6K followers, 28.1K engagements
"Once you start apologizing on behalf of fictional characters or races you've pulled the plug on your brain taking it off life support"
X Link 2025-12-03T21:59Z 54.7K followers, 22.8K engagements
"In an interview with Christopher Lee he said that after he was in Lord of the Rings the people doing the Harry Potter movies found an awesome role for him in it. But the British producer said "We can't have him play a wizard in Harry Potter. He's already been a wizard in Lord of the Rings." Christopher Lee said basically that's why the British movie industry can't have nice things. He added an American producer would have said "Oh yeah he's perfect He was in Lord of the Rings""
X Link 2025-12-03T22:40Z 54.6K followers, 718.7K engagements
"Recently I mentioned that Doom X was a "cash grab" and there is an attempt at a community note saying this was debunked. But it's not. Look here's the facts: 1) John Carmack & Michael Abrash & Dave Taylor were working on the Quake Engine. For the first few months of this there wasn't a lot for myself and American McGee (the level designers) to do. John Romero was mostly helping the level design at that point - not only creating his own awesome levels but creating powers and abilities for us to place into levels and keeping the database and all sorts of other things. Plus he was also involved"
X Link 2025-12-04T02:57Z 54.6K followers, 49.8K engagements
"Goblins are a great addition to a fantasy game. But only if they remain toxic cruel & petty. If you "rehabilitate" them then you need something else to be the vicious little monsters in your world and you haven't solved any problem. If orcs or goblins or beholders become potential good guys in a world that heroes who must stand up to evil then who will be the evil they stand up to Something else presumably. At some point you realize that the people whitewashing goblins & orcs are hoping that you'll make humans - your own species - the bad guys"
X Link 2025-12-04T03:08Z 54.6K followers, 866.5K engagements
"Recently I pointed out that McDonald's burgers suck big time. Worst value-for-money of any fast food. BUT I MUST SAY: I've been to McDonalds in Germany and in Spain and they were actually pretty good. Still pricy but everything in Europe is expensive. I assume it's because either gummint regulations force it or Germans/Spanish won't stand for eating garbage. In the USA McDonald's seems to rely on fame to sell its product and no longer cares that that product is objectively awful. This is why every other fast food joint is better - they have to be better than McDs to exist. And if you are"
X Link 2025-12-04T16:49Z 54.6K followers, 5394 engagements
"Anti-Roleplaying Activist: "The 'dungeon master' has complete control of everything and the players are forced to act out his dark fantasies." Real Dungeon Master: "Please just swim across the river or use the rope bridge. You've all tried to seduce the catfish and it didn't work." starts sobbing"
X Link 2025-12-04T21:06Z 54.6K followers, 76.4K engagements
"There is a spider in your house right now. It works hard every day to destroy your insect enemies to save you and your loved ones and your food from contamination and disease. Do you thank it No"
X Link 2025-12-04T21:22Z 54.7K followers, 16.1K engagements
"This is a vinegaroon. They live in the southwest United States. They look like they can tear you limb from limb but are pretty harmless. They can spray a XX% solution of acetic acid from their hind end. This is pretty terrifying if you're a bug because it blinds & irritates and softens your chitinous armor. But for humans it just makes us smell like vinegar hence their name. You can keep them as an interesting and weird pet if you don't mind your bedroom smelling like pickles all the time. Giant ones make GREAT monsters for roleplaying games. Huge claws acid spray and super-senses so it can't"
X Link 2025-12-04T21:29Z 54.7K followers, 30.8K engagements
"In 1571 all Mediterranean Christendom combined to meet the Ottoman fleet in the battle of Lepanto. The Ottomans had XX% more ships a robust naval tradition and 30000 skilled naval archers (better than arquebusiers in almost every way). The battle was a stunning but hard-fought Christian victory. The Christians lost 10000 and XX ships. The Ottomans lost 40000 and XXX ships. 15000 Christian galley slaves were freed from their cruel Turkish masters. The interesting thing to me is that the Ottomans replaced the entire fleet the very next year. So why was the battle decisive Because the turks lost"
X Link 2025-12-05T00:47Z 54.7K followers, 33.6K engagements
"Welp I tried the Grok challenge which celebrity would I be And failed utterly. It said: Sandy Petersen you're not just dipping a tentacle into celebrity watersyou're already a full-blown legend in the gaming and horror realms. Youre the grizzled elder statesman of nerd culture. You've shaped entire genres: birthing Call of Cthulhu RPG monster-mashing Doom and empire-building Age of Empires. That's not "aspiring influencer" territory; that's "the guy who made us all afraid of our own shadows while handing us the shotgun. You're already a celebrity for anyone who's ever rolled a sanity"
X Link 2025-12-05T04:28Z 54.6K followers, 6524 engagements
"Most mammals have eyes in which the entire eye is dark because the iris reaches out to the lenses. Its even true for our closest relatives the apes. But humans have a highly visible eye white. Its generally agreed that the purpose of this is specifically so other humans can see where were looking. Its a social interaction feature. Its so important that dogs have begun to demonstrate it a bit. So the poster below yearns to be an asocial throwback to prehuman times"
X Link 2025-12-05T15:11Z 54.6K followers, 417.7K engagements
"This is an elephant skull. It teaches us two things. 1) it's obvious where the cyclops legend came from. 2) we now know how big cyclopes were - their heads were the size of elephant heads which means that if they were proportional to humans they would stand about XX ft (9m) tall"
X Link 2025-12-05T16:48Z 54.6K followers, 109.3K engagements
"Anyone playing Age of Empires 3"
X Link 2025-12-05T22:07Z 54.6K followers, 5180 engagements
"What will YOU do when you get the Call of Cthulhu"
X Link 2025-12-05T22:22Z 54.6K followers, 10.7K engagements
"In case you're not aware Thailand has the best commercials in the world and it's not close"
X Link 2025-12-05T22:23Z 54.6K followers, 7127 engagements
"Some animals have more fluid genetics than others. For instance dogs wolves coyotes dingos and jackals can all crossbreed easily creating a wealth of hybrids. Humans are not like this. There is a persistent rumor that once a chimp-human hybrid was attempted but it's clear we can't breed with any other creature. We know that we cross-mated with Denisovans and Neanderthals but they were particularly closely related. In general humans must stick to humans. This is important because it means Game Freak's crazy fiction about people breeding with Pokemons is completely implausible"
X Link 2025-12-05T22:31Z 54.6K followers, 274.4K engagements
"My grandkids elderly dog dies. He stayed in the yard & the laundry room with occasional excursions into the rest of the house. The kids said that the laundry room is now haunted so I need an adventure idea for The Haunted Laundry Room. Help"
X Link 2025-12-06T00:48Z 54.6K followers, 4000 engagements
"I made a post about how humans cant breed with Pokmon and got several people defensive about it. So now I need a slur to call people who want to romance Pokemon. Suggestions welcomed"
X Link 2025-12-06T03:12Z 54.6K followers, 56K engagements
"The computer AI in Age of Empires II was in two parts. The more difficult part was how the units marched gathered resources assembled into formations and so forth. This was entirely done by the coders bless their hearts. But there was also a simpler scrip which determined which buildings units and upgrades an enemy chose. Mario Grimani created the scripting program and I wrote all the scripts. The scripts were ENTIRELY "If Then" statements. Like "If Food XXX Research Feudal Age" or "If Feudal Age Researched Build Barracks". Stuff like that. I originally only had 1000 If-Then statements"
X Link 2025-12-06T16:32Z 54.6K followers, 109.3K engagements
"Me running a Call of Cthulhu game: Keeper: "You enter the hotel room. Looks like they left in a hurry." Players "We search the room." Keeper: you find a page torn from a calendar - Friday 13th is circled. Also there is a used bus ticket from Long Island. Players: we empty the trash cans. Keeper: there is nothing more to find here. Players: we toss the couch cushions. Keeper: There Is Nothing More To Find Here. Players: we sniff the fried chicken containers. Keeper THERE IS NOTHING MORE TO FIND HERE. Players: We peel off the wallpaper. Keeper: bangs head on table Players are the best"
X Link 2025-12-06T17:02Z 54.6K followers, 59.2K engagements
"Here is a Nazi poster for the Dutch made in 1944 attacking America because we're capitalist. Next time some idiot tells you the Nazis were capitalists think of this. There are plenty of other proofs. They hated capitalism"
X Link 2025-12-06T17:18Z 54.6K followers, 14.3K engagements
"Here is an important fact and yet another reason we need to get to Mars. Trebuchets have exactly the same range on Mars as on Earth (except for minor air friction) because the gravity that affects the shot also affects the counterweight. But catapults & ballistas have a much longer range on Mars because their mechanisms aren't based on gravity. Thus when we are sieging a medieval castle on Mars catapults and ballistas are correspondingly better vis-a-vis trebuchets. But obviously we need to investigate this in person"
X Link 2025-12-06T17:37Z 54.6K followers, 88.9K engagements
"Annie Oakley married at XX years old. She stayed happily married till she died X decades later. Her husband who was also a sharpshooter died a few days later. The media hated her and she won lawsuits against over XX newspapers. She was pretty cute"
X Link 2025-12-06T21:49Z 54.6K followers, 13.3K engagements
"Lovecraft makes it quite clear that cats are one of the cosmoss dark forces on a par with Cthulhu & the Crawling Chaos"
X Link 2025-12-06T23:55Z 54.6K followers, 3380 engagements
"Why Civil War Generals are the most interesting of any war to study. (Spoiler: it's because they have the widest range in quality from best to worst. WW1 generals all sucked. WW2 generals were mostly decent. But American Civil War were all over the place.)"
X Link 2025-12-07T17:31Z 54.6K followers, 79.9K engagements
"At MicroProse Software me and my buddy Lawrence Schick once realized it was Pearl Harbor day so we pondered how to celebrate it. We decided the best way would be to lock one of the producers - who was of full Japanese descent - in a closet for the day. But we chickened out"
X Link 2025-12-07T17:32Z 54.6K followers, 6290 engagements
"In 2009 the car shop near my house posted a special deal on its marquis: Free Nobel prize with lube job. For those living abroad that might give you an idea of how most Americans felt about it. Note: Obama himself agreed When he was asked in an interview why he got the prize he answered Im not really sure"
X Link 2025-12-07T17:50Z 54.6K followers, 77.3K engagements
"Worst Christmas song"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:00Z 54.6K followers, 5945 engagements
"Westerns and Superhero movies have both had deconstructions since almost the beginning. Destry Rides Again (1939) and The Big Country (1958) are both deconstructions. The original Spiderman comic was a deconstruction of superheroes. Unforgiven and Deadpool were more modern deconstructions. But these were clearly done in love for their genre and did not hurt it. To me The Boys Watchmen and V For Vendetta while also deconstructions don't feel like they were done in love. They feel like attacks tearing down the very concept. And they succeed. Compare Unbreakable to Watchmen. Unbreakable loves"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:14Z 54.6K followers, 23.2K engagements
"How to be a Yankee: a guide. If you're not an American then a Yankee is an American. If you're an American then a Yankee is a Northerner. If you're a Northerner then a Yankee is a New Englander. If you're from New England then a Yankee is from New Hampshire. If you're from New Hampshire then a Yankee is from Maine"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:16Z 54.6K followers, 142.4K engagements
"Circa 1994 I was on a panel with representatives from Steve Jackson Games and TSR. Both of them boasted that their company was releasing a deckbuilder like Magic the Gathering. I knew Richard Garfield and stared at them. Then I called them out. "Richard Garfield offered his game to BOTH of your companies and both of you turned it down as impractical. Now you're clinging to his coattails" They had the good grace to look abashed on behalf of their bosses. When WotC bought TSR I kind of thought "serves them right". This doesn't mean I'm on WotC's side"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:20Z 54.6K followers, 17.2K engagements
"Can confirm this for the four states in which I lived - Utah California Maryland and Texas. My son who lives in New Mexico also confirms it for his state"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:26Z 54.6K followers, 2174 engagements
"Remember this next time someone tells you how Breaking Bad is an indictment of the American health system. When White is diagnosed with cancer he is told he has X years to live. He then makes millions and gets every single treatment they have to offer. Then he lives . X years. So there is no indication that if the treatment had been free he would have lived any longer"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:31Z 54.7K followers, 630K engagements
"Who agrees with Sophia Narwitz I can see her point but feel that one answer is to introduce difficulty levels. Literally every digital game I made had difficulty levels. Are these obsolete or something"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:40Z 54.6K followers, 8929 engagements
"While I loved the movies I am not really a huge Lord of the Rings fan. Yeah Tolkien's fantasy world is solid but he also has a knack for making exciting things sound dull. He doesn't really understand romance and he pines for an England that never existed in which no one seems to need a job. You can berate me for not loving Tolkien enough but I did read the trilogy and liked it so be kind. I loved all the hobbits except Frodo whom I felt was snooty & self-centered. I'm not saying I "hated" Frodo but I liked Merry Pippin and Sam much more. I admit I liked the movie's Frodo more"
X Link 2025-12-07T23:58Z 54.6K followers, 87.1K engagements
"I've heard enough about how Stalin "beat the nazis". Look if there had been a decent Russian leader he wouldn't have allied with Germany the first two years purged and crippled his military and left himself wide open"
X Link 2025-12-08T00:52Z 54.6K followers, 10.6K engagements
"In 1940 the US Army standards for new conscripts were: at least X feet tall 105+ lbs 12+ teeth no flat feet or hernias. XX% of candidates failed this test. That's how harsh the Depression was"
X Link 2025-12-08T00:58Z 54.6K followers, 885.4K engagements
"My best friend from Germany is from Hesse so I look up slurs and accusations against the Hessians from the Revolutionary War when I visit to regale him with. He in turn tells me that random Hessians were just out plowing or whatever when a band of soldier would come by forcibly conscript him and ship him off to America. They were technically mercenaries because they were paid for but none of the soldiers got the money - all the cash went to the Landgraves pocket"
X Link 2025-12-08T15:33Z 54.6K followers, 190.7K engagements
"In Central America there is an Olmec site that has X tons of hammered iron implements and ornaments. Iron-working vanished later on. Iron doesn't preserve well in subtropical environments so we don't know how widespread it was at one time. But across the New World metal working seems to have been known once and then lost"
X Link 2025-12-08T16:24Z 54.6K followers, 28.5K engagements
"We were terrible at keeping secrets in the US military back during Operation Torch (the invasion of North Africa). Ice cream vendors met the troops when they stormed ashore during practice landings on the Carolina coast. Walt Disney sent a letter to the admiral in charge offering to design a logo for Torch. Somehow the Vichy French still didn't figure it out. Or more likely their command was so dysfunctional it didn't get passed down to the troops on the shore"
X Link 2025-12-08T16:43Z 54.6K followers, 3419 engagements
"Try this on Loki Draco Malfoy Hannibal Lector and Killmonger and you'll instantly see how correct the DeVito rule is"
X Link 2025-12-08T16:47Z 54.6K followers, 18.6K engagements
"Was Clark Kent an illegal alien He was taken in as a foundling by the Kents who were US citizens. According to ICE rules a foundling under the age of X from an unknown origin is considered to be an American citizen if the child's guardians are citizens. This does NOT require the child to be formally adopted nor naturalized. So Clark Kent (and Superman) is an American citizen. This can be disputed if the actual parents showed up to claim guardianship which seems highly unlikely"
X Link 2025-12-08T17:00Z 54.6K followers, 37.5K engagements
"On the very first date I ever went on with the woman I eventually married we saw Jaws in the theater. But I had a plan. You see I'd already seen Jaws with a different girl. But everytime Jaws had a scary scene I was scared too. But with Wendy I knew where the scary parts were and so when one came up I was all prepared to protect and comfort her with a nice arm around her shoulders and a squeeze of her hand"
X Link 2025-12-08T17:04Z 54.6K followers, 633K engagements
"I would never defend any slavers - it's a monstrous evil that has plagued mankind for millennia and I long for the day when its last vestige is eradicated. But approximately XX% of the trans-Atlantic slaves made it to the New World alive and approximately XX% of the slaves taken to North Africa and Arabia died en route. Walking through the desert was hard and the Arab and Bedouin slavers killed those who couldn't keep up. Also a lot of the slaves taken to the Near East became eunuchs. This is why despite the vast amounts of slaves taken by Muslim slave traders there is almost no trace of"
X Link 2025-12-08T17:07Z 54.6K followers, 102.7K engagements
"Despite what you see below the South Korean army would absolutely devastate North Korea's in a fight. They have better training better equipment actual air support better allies are in better physical condition and have way higher morale given that their families aren't literally starving back home. The average North Korean male stands about X inches shorter than the average South Korean male and we all know why"
X Link 2025-12-08T17:10Z 54.6K followers, 40.6K engagements
"I wrote Call of Cthulhu which is usually claimed to be the "deadliest" roleplaying game. (I think Paranoia is actually it though.) So I will now defend the concept of character death. Games are more fun if players think something is at stake. If the only difference between success & failure is they get less treasure the players are enervated. In Call of Cthulhu I have three main weapons to get players to feel "something is at stake". First obviously they can die. This is universal among roleplaying games. Yes the deaths in Call of Cthulhu can be gruesome but getting eaten by rot worms or"
X Link 2025-12-08T17:30Z 54.7K followers, 129.4K engagements
"Fun fact: no violent crime existed anywhere in the world before American factories started to make guns"
X Link 2025-12-08T17:49Z 54.6K followers, 4952 engagements
"In the 1980s I encountered a roleplaying game. Sadly the name I do not recall now. But it had charts for you to roll up your hair style and facial hair style. I remember thinking "Surely this is something the player can decide for himself within reason.""
X Link 2025-12-08T20:31Z 54.6K followers, 5487 engagements
"A friend of mine lived by a lake in the early 70s. The next house over was rented by Alice Cooper for the summer. It was like a half-mile away because it was a rural area. He was able to hear Alice Cooper's practice sessions echoing over the lake and loved it. So he got to hear the next album before it was released. Sweet. One day his not-rock-savvy folks made him go and ask Alice to turn down the volume since a visiting baby was having a nap. He dragged himself over terrified beyond belief and Alice Cooper himself answered the door. My friend explained and Alice was super nice about it. A"
X Link 2025-12-08T20:53Z 54.6K followers, 188.6K engagements
"This is my pick for worst movie title ever. "KRAKATOA EAST OF JAVA""
X Link 2025-12-08T20:58Z 54.6K followers, 3000 engagements
"In 1988 I interviewed for a job at Coleco to work on Colecovision and Adam computer games. 1) I was left alone with a free-to-play arcade version of Dragon's Lair for X hours. So I finally beat it. 2) the entire design staff was fired X months later. One guy had just bought a house"
X Link 2025-12-08T21:01Z 54.6K followers, 10.2K engagements
"When id did Wolfenstein for the Super Nintendo Nintendo required two changes. First the blood spatter had to be changed from red to white (which I thought looked really perverse - shoot a nazi & white goo shoots out. Ick). Second we couldn't have the police dogs so we replaced them with giant rats who barked and otherwise behaved just like the dogs. I had to modify every level of Wolfenstein to fit the super-Nintendo and I had to play every level multiple times looking for bugs. Yay me"
X Link 2025-12-08T21:05Z 54.6K followers, 25.2K engagements
"id Software sold the Wolfenstein engine for the Super-Nintendo to a small Christian company. They made a Noah's Ark game in which you had to shoot fruit and food at animals to "subdue" them while collecting animals for your ark. Just like it says in the Bible. I had to play every single level of their game for some reason. I guess id's owners wanted to make sure there wasn't something libelous in it and Lord knows THEY weren't going to play it"
X Link 2025-12-08T21:06Z 54.6K followers, 32.7K engagements
"A friend of mine in 1980s California owned a Chevrolet Caprice. He said it was the greatest car ever. Other drivers always drove super careful and obeyed traffic laws around it. Everyone let him pass them. Drug dealers scattered when he pulled near. It was awesome. IYKYK"
X Link 2025-12-08T23:59Z 54.6K followers, 5269 engagements
"Let's take a sample. Would YOU eat elephant Not raw like in the picture but actually cooked properly. Perhaps cooked like a steak or sauteed into a stew I certainly would"
X Link 2025-12-09T00:14Z 54.6K followers, 155.5K engagements
"The fact that there is a non-zero chance for the Japanese carrier Kaga and the soon-to-come USN carrier Enterprise to sail into battle against a common enemy is really exciting to me"
X Link 2025-12-09T00:19Z 54.6K followers, 4803 engagements
"@taddyfife Elephants are not endangered"
X Link 2025-12-09T01:25Z 54.6K followers, 11.6K engagements
"Correct. Which is why he did something about it. Usually Santas only intervention is when I get coal & switches in my stocking but Rudolph got to lead the sleigh You Santa-deniers and -haters dont have a leg to stand on"
X Link 2025-12-09T15:30Z 54.6K followers, 4823 engagements
"This poster was also true in Henry VIIIs realm under the Nazis under Stalin and Pol Pot. EVERY regime no matter how evil allows speech it approves of. Heck it often compels it. Not saying there arent anti-X arguments Europeans can make (data harvesting or whatever) but the illegal speech is plainly dystopian"
X Link 2025-12-09T15:46Z 54.7K followers, 20.3K engagements
"I gave one of the players a sentient sword in 1975 and I had it be a complete jerk. It constantly nagged him about wanting a nicer jewel in its hilt a better-quality scabbard and so forth. It was also cowardly and panicked when they were about to fight a monster it thought was too tough for it. "No I don't want to lay around in a filthy giant's lair for the next century Run away" It was heaps of fun for me the DM and the players said they liked it too"
X Link 2025-12-09T17:08Z 54.7K followers, 46.8K engagements
"When I was in Madrid a couple of years ago I found this awesome "Ham Museum". I went inside hoping for memorabilia and maybe wax figures of Jessica Alba Nick Cage and the like but all it had was cured meat"
X Link 2025-12-09T17:11Z 54.6K followers, 1184 engagements
"When I was X it was 1863 the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. My dad who was a buff brought home a copy of the Avalon Hill game "Gettysburg". Almost instantly we lost the rules. So all I had was the game board and the oblong cardboard counters. I was fascinated. I'd push the counters around and try to figure out what the rules might be. I pondered the existence of the game's mysterious "0-8" counters named after the generals. When I turned XX my dad took me to a hobby store in a town XX miles away and lo and behold THERE WAS A COPY OF THE GAME I begged pled and promised anything for him to"
X Link 2025-12-09T17:22Z 54.6K followers, 13.8K engagements
"Tyrannosaurs are more than just a large carnivore. A lion's bite is 1000 newtons and a hippo's is 1800 newtons. The Giganotosaurus which is bigger than a tyrannosaur had a bite force of 6000 newtons. The Tyrannosaurus rex had a bite force of 35000 newtons which is astonishingly more than anything else and basically means it was superpowered"
X Link 2025-12-09T17:24Z 54.6K followers, 6773 engagements
"Public service announcement: "Cachalot" is a much better term than sperm whale and we should all switch back to it"
X Link 2025-12-09T17:45Z 54.6K followers, 4276 engagements
"The entirety of Call of Cthulhu was written in a year while I attended school full-time. It was all done on a typewriter"
X Link 2025-12-09T17:47Z 54.6K followers, 1227 engagements
"Why game sequels suddenly drop off in quality. The process: 1) Dev team makes a killer game. 2) Publisher wants more of the same. Dev team obliges for a sequel or two. 3) Publisher decided the devs are too expensive now that they have a hit game in their CV and farms the IP out to a worse team. 4) the worse team doesn't have their heart in the game because it's not theirs. You'll see this again and again"
X Link 2025-12-09T17:54Z 54.6K followers, 40.8K engagements
"We don't hate game journalists enough"
X Link 2025-12-09T17:55Z 54.6K followers, 20.9K engagements
"During the later years of my time at MicroProse (1988-1993) the company president was as insecure as an 8th grader. At one all-company meeting he poured a large 32-oz cup of Coke over the head of his newly-hired VP because he was jealous that the VP was already more popular than him. He tried to pass it off as a joke but we did not laugh. It also did not make him more popular. That's when I realized MicroProse as an independent company was doomed. Someone told me that we need "crazy devs" to make great games. While this may be true the president was not a developer in any sense of the word."
X Link 2025-12-09T18:42Z 54.6K followers, 9348 engagements
"Before world war II the Imperial Japanese Navy knew it could not take on the USN but it kept its gigantic budget by claiming that it could. Just before Pearl Harbor the Navy got cold feet and said that maybe the USN was too much. So Hideki Tojo asked them if 300000 tons of steel would be enough for them to take on the USN and they said yes. This is how the IJN sold its soul"
X Link 2025-12-09T18:44Z 54.6K followers, 9569 engagements
"These are witch stairs. Supposedly witches cannot climb them"
X Link 2025-12-09T18:48Z 54.7K followers, 14.1K engagements
"My friends had an e-mail thread of "what if this author wrote that book". My son suggested The Hobbit by Dr. Seuss and I have to admit Gollum's riddling game by Seuss would have been fire. My other pal said "Cat in the Hat" by Lovecraft which would be another big win"
X Link 2025-12-09T18:55Z 54.6K followers, XXX engagements
"What's the best cryptid for a roleplaying adventure"
X Link 2025-12-09T19:15Z 54.6K followers, 1112 engagements
"In the book Dracula Van Helsing's wife is hopelessly insane. She is only referred to. He stays married because he is a strong Catholic which intimates that he is Flemish not Dutch"
X Link 2025-12-09T19:17Z 54.7K followers, 26.2K engagements