Phantasy Star choose your path book

This is awesome for any Phantasy Star fans out there. I just discovered that @yumpoplala did a full translation of the Phantasy Star gamebook Alisa's Adventure. It's a Fighting Fantasy-type gamebook from 1989.

Definitely check it out:https://t.co/aUyK25JKbn pic.twitter.com/mOElnJBSmr

— John Harrison - Mega Drive Shock (@MegaDriveShock) April 5, 2024

The wizard and orb illustration comes from a choose your own adventure-style Lord of the Rings gamebook

My favorite takes on the meme, including one that was way ahead of the curve:

pic.twitter.com/klTb2EmQMP

— g̷̼̈́l̵i̴t̵ςђ єгเร (@GlitchHeaux) November 30, 2021

you're just PONDERING the orbs meanwhile I'm out here like pic.twitter.com/ziwdhNZQtp

— G.P. (@mousefountain) November 30, 2021

(Heavy Metal May 1982.)

Good morning, this was an iPhone and now it is a cursed orb pic.twitter.com/cbua3oPiSK

— Ingrid Burrington (@lifewinning) October 9, 2018

Friday night in Berlin: @lifewinning grinds down an iPhone, restructuring “one all-seeing object of divination and control into another.” First image from @jamesbridle’s AGENCY opening at @NomeProject. Process images from via @lifewinning. pic.twitter.com/OzXlV1gfKM

— Elise Misao Hunchuck (@elisehunchuck) October 28, 2018

There will probably be more orbs made in the future, please give me your old phones

— Ingrid Burrington (@lifewinning) October 9, 2018

And the art:

For me 2021's most surreal flourish has come right at the end where I keep seeing this Saruman off one of my old Lord of the Rings choose-your-own-adventure books all over the god damned place pic.twitter.com/ZctuCrw0VG

— Y Ddraig Gawl (@MaiaFranklyn) November 30, 2021

(Available at Amazon and ebay, but steep.)

Dungeons and Dragons Romance novels; How Roger Deakins uses color in "Skyfall"; Nightmare mushroom

When it comes to paperbacks, I love a good gimmick. These 1983 Dungeons & Dragons romance novels have gorgeous stepback covers and choose your own adventure narratives. Thanks @BGSU_PopCultLib @stegan for introducing me to these! See thread for more... pic.twitter.com/gUjBKSHiP0

— Rebecca B (@arkhamlibrarian) December 2, 2019

And of course each heroine must choose between two lusty love interests... pic.twitter.com/Rom6DBJeG2

— Rebecca B (@arkhamlibrarian) December 2, 2019

My mother wrote this. The heroine Chandelle is named after my sister. She wrote all of her other 200 books as Jean F. Blashfield but TSR insisted she write this under the more feminine “Jeannie”. She hated it.

— Dr. Black's Medieval Remedies (@WinstonEBlack) November 10, 2021

(I saw a few at Amazon and ebay.)

And how does the Shanghai sequence close? With a foreshadowing of the palette of the following sequence in Macau! pic.twitter.com/8FvuQevEAu

— Devan Scott (@SadHillDevan) November 11, 2021

(From a long thread.)

A member of one of the mushroom ID Facebook groups I’m in shared a photo of a porcini he found that is literally the length of his backpack and the diameter of my bicep at its base, I know I say “literally” a lot so I asked if I could share the photo, and pic.twitter.com/Zcn6FxqiYl

— Jeeyon Shim 심지연 (@jeeyonshim) November 9, 2021

#gbbo free from week is a cake inspired by the graph that gave me hope we could be free from covid (from the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine trial). Things are still complicated, but we would be in a much worse place without vaccines. pic.twitter.com/4crgxFW7hJ

— Dr Emily Thornton (@emilyethornton) November 9, 2021

Ten funny tweets

oh no I panicked and said my hero was ANOTHER candidate’s wife

— Alexandra Petri (@petridishes) June 19, 2019

Using science to open the gates of hell pic.twitter.com/PaDy1BAjOa

— Ronny Chieng (@ronnychieng) June 20, 2019

“This is fine” pic.twitter.com/N1rQFI8UPf

— Alex Villegas (@llegaspacheco) March 30, 2019

Carsen Edwards always gonna be my guy for this alone pic.twitter.com/LAur4H0Ehy

— Paid man gets bored (@cjzero) June 21, 2019

pic.twitter.com/4rIm3KDHJP

— Josette Torres (@JosetteTorres) June 21, 2019

Bol Bol dressed like a sidequest boss who drops potions and a wizard robe with +5 defense against spider venom pic.twitter.com/BGM9a1dkVP

— ☕netw3rk (@netw3rk) June 20, 2019

Eccentric Millionaire: I’ve invited you to my private island because I crave the deadliest game...

Me: (nodding) Knife Monopoly

Eccentric Millionaire: I was actually going to hunt you for sport, but now I’m really interested in whatever Knife Monopoly is

— Alex Blechman (@AlexBlechman) June 21, 2019

The 2 sides of my personality are colliding in this image pic.twitter.com/imjgwsHM5u

— Ned Jacobs (@nedjacobs3) June 21, 2019

The Polish historian & political scientist Jerzy Targalski remained completely unruffled during our interview when this happened👇🤨🤷‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/4dLi16Pq1H

— Rudy Bouma (@rudybouma) July 7, 2018

Being Beyoncé’s assistant for the day: DONT GET FIRED THREAD pic.twitter.com/26ix05Hkhp

— Green Chyna (@CORNYASSBITCH) June 23, 2019

*More funny posts.

The 7 Most F***ed Up Real 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Books

Cracked:

Perhaps most unsettling are the shark and octopus storylines: The octopus path ends when a shark doesn't fall for your ink-spewing trick, and it finds your calamari body delicious. Alternately, while inhabiting a shark's body, you can eat an octopus who ineffectively tries to use ink to escape.

Are ... are you eating yourself?

Yes, you're almost certainly eating yourself. That's some serious multiverse-level mind-screwing for a book aimed at 10-year-olds.

Play Choose Your Own Adventure in Twitter

Start here. My first two deaths:

All that glisters is not gold. The detonation rips you in half. They feast on your remains.
— There is always hope (@wnd_hope) January 11, 2015

The battery stutters into life. A weak light illuminates their bared fangs. Your screams are quickly drowned out.
— They've all gone (@wnd_help) January 11, 2015

You can read about the project here. Via.

The Choose Your Own Adventure cover for Neil Patrick Harris's autobiography

Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography is available for preorder at Amazon.

Link roundup

1.  A Redditor claiming to be a cruise ship worker:

if you're suddenly on the brink of death while in port, they're getting you off the boat. Doesn't matter if that port is a small Alaskan fishing village or Caribbean shanty town with no medical facilities. The point isn't to save you, it's to avoid a death on board. We often have far more advanced medical facilities on board. Often times the towns and ships will throw a dying person back and fourth instead of helping. Nobody wants to acknowledge the statistic. 

... 

If you aren't completely inside your room or the restroom, you're being watched. You may not see the cameras, but they're there. 

Why? Because people do odd things. A few years ago a teenage girl met a boy she liked on a cruise and found by some stroke of luck, he was next door. She was invited over to his room but she couldn't open to main cabin door without disturbing her parents. So what does she do? Tries to jump from her balcony to his. It was only a short way, but it's slippery. She fell from damn near the highest level, hit the water and nobody saw her again. 

Later her family wanted to sue with a claim that the safety railing was the issue and they deserved compensation. It sounds terrible, but all the CL did was tap into the footage. It was all on film, every second of it. Her jumping right over the rail, slipping, and silently disappearing into the dark below.

2.  Wired looks at the origin and morality of Choose Your Own Adventure books:

“Packard was a lawyer, and he was making up bedtime stories for his daughters, and they wanted different things [to happen], and so he’s like, ‘Oh, I could do a book like this.’ … And then he saw an ad for a small children’s press that R.A. Montgomery had started, and he sent them this idea … Montgomery’s story is way more fascinating … He was working for a company that did government contracts to come up with role-playing games and social psychology tools to use in American diplomacy and defense applications. And so he was coming up with these games that Peace Corps volunteers were using to deal with Vietnam War protests when they were stationed in Southeast Asia

3.  Why you never see relevant replays at live baseball games:

MLB limits replays to once, at real speed, but not during an argument over the play and not in a way that might start an argument or create a negative reaction from the crowd.

4. "Marie Curie Had Two Duels Fought Over Her After She Had an Affair."

Love in the Time of the Large Hadron Colliders

From a SciFi books theme at Something Awful:


Love in the Time of the Large Hadron Colliders



Choose Your Own Adventure: Pale Blue Dot

"Choose Your Own Adventure – Most Likely You’ll Die"

A flowchart.