I was gonna mention fast and easy Mac-specific ways to crop, but I'd rather talk about vanishing technologies.
In 1794 (fifty years after it had been empirically proven, but that's a different story about society and technology) the British Royal Navy solved its scurvy problem: fresh lemons and limes were provided to all sailors on extended voyages and scurvy vanished entirely. This is one of the reasons Britain was a dominant force at sea for the next hundred years; they could sail further without setting in to port, and blockade longer, than anybody else, because they didn't get scurvy.
Then in 1867 they switched to lime juice because it was cheaper. But while fresh limes have the vitamin C needed to prevent scurvy, lime juice (especially the way they stored it) doesn't--it has enough to delay scurvy, and their ships and tactics had changed by that point so that sailors didn't stay at sea so long.
Lime juice was sufficient for their particular needs, but they didn't know that. They thought lime juice was just as effective as fresh limes and lemons, because they didn't account for the mitigating circumstances of not staying as sea so long anymore.
So when arctic and antarctic explorers took lime juice on their years-long expeditions... they got scurvy and nobody could figure out why. Because in less than a hundred years Britain had developed and then entirely lost a crucial medical innovation.
The ability to prevent/cure scurvy was rediscovered entirely by accident in 1907 during some experiments with guinea pig nutrition, and that led to the discovery of vitamin C thirty years later, which codified the knowledge in a way that made it harder to lose.
@G.Moylan correct. I initially assumed they meant blocking it out with a white square in paint. I was gonna talk about editing html, but I saw someone else had discussed that
@G.Moylan No, because fresh fruit couldn't be kept on board for the years those expeditions took, and they genuinely didn't understand the difference between fresh fruit and juice--because the juice worked in every other situation.
(Where "every other situation" is an extremely broad but very shallow sample set.)
@BESW Was this a factor at all for the Erebus and Terror or do we know enough about them to say? I know they suffered from spoiled food and lead poisoning, and I'm sure scurvy eventually played into that, but idk if it came earlier than expected becasue of the juice
@G.Moylan Not as much as you might think, especially the Terror because it used lemon juice, which was more expensive but had more vitamin C. And they rationed it by using it as a cure rather than a preventative (which is... fine... because if you're eating fresh organ meat you're less likely to get scurvy in the first place).
However, the fear of scurvy, which was still poorly understood despite having developed an effective cure, was a major psychological factor for both expeditions.
The thinking at the time was that it was the acid in citrus which provided the cure; but as acidic lime juice was proven ineffective in some circumstances, other theories returned: it was often thought of as a bacterial plague, because whole ships would come down with it together (since everyone on board had similar diets).
It's wild to look back at things we find obvious now and see all the hoops they jumped through and wild conclusions they arrived at in the past. It's often based on all the information they had at the time, but still
The situation was further complicated by upper-class children starting to get scurvy in the decades immediately following the shift to lime juice on the sea; because kids were getting pasteurized milk (which cooks off the vitamin C), and the solution they came on (provided in part by sympathetic First Nations) was onion juice.
There are accounts of First Nations people encountering colonial explorers suffering from scurvy and going "What? You're.... [sigh] Here. It's an onion. Eat it."
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@G.Moylan For a thousand years the great texts of Western scientific and philosophic thought repeated the unquestioned fact that garlic, if rubbed on a magnet, would remove the magnet's attractive properties.
It was so obvious to them that clearly nobody actually went and tested it, just the same as it's so obvious to us that nobody here is likely to go and try it before ridiculing the idea.
This is because humans think of things in categories. For the Greek-derived philosophers, garlic and lodestones are both in the category of "things which attract and repel," but on opposite ends of the category's spectrum. So one of them will naturally cancel out the other.
For us modern thinkers, we place garlic and magnets in unassociated categories and so --just as naturally-- they will not affect each other.
(source: "Tropes, Facts, and Empiricism" by Daryn Lehoux)
But what fascinates me about the scurvy thing isn't that they were wrong about why lemons worked, it's that they lost a working technology without even noticing, until the knowledge had shifted to the point that they didn't know how to restore it.
This is probably the same process which led to the loss of cement, Greek fire, cataract surgery...
Technologies aren't just lost in cataclysm like the Library of Alexandria, extinction like silphium, or family secrets like the Stradivarius. They can be lost through the grinding of time and practical concerns. The lime juice shift was trying to make a cumbersome process more efficient, and complicating factors obscured the fact that the new process failed for so long that when the failure was noticed they couldn't attribute it directly to the change they'd made.
Basic Rules, pg. 307:
Underdark Cities. The dark elves build fantastic cities in enormous caverns where food and water are abundant...
etc.
I realize we don't have settings books for Dragonlance, Greyhawk, etc. yet, but some published books do reference them (e.g. the Sword Coast Adventurer's G...
@BESW yeah, what you've touched on is basically what happens when you don't have effective management-of-change processes (it's a repeat bugbear in many industries)
"Itchfunding"A list of games that have used Itch.io to crowdfund.
@Shalvenay Aye. A lot of people think that "lost knowledge" happens due to some specific cataclysm or due to a lack of use, but often it's the use of knowledge itself which can deform the knowledge.
Itchfunding: Cozy Town by Jamila R. Nedjadi. A Sweet Community Building Game. "With your help we can funding a final version of Cozy Town to pay for art, editing, bring in extra collaborators, and cover my investment so far."
Saker Tarsos wrote a twitter thread about "the plan for the Discord Bot I am making for @momatoes' ARC rpg."
Momatoes announced on twitter her next live discussion on twitch (Saturday 9AM US/New York) about "how symbiosis between mechanical and graphic design can help make a stronger game."
The Echo Knight can create an echo of itself, which can then be used to attack:
When you take the Attack action on your turn, any attack you make with that action can originate from your space or the echo's space. You make this choice for each attack.
Suppose an attack originating from the echo...
Basic Rules, pg. 307:
Underdark Cities. The dark elves build fantastic cities in enormous caverns where food and water are abundant...
etc.
I realize we don't have settings books for Dragonlance, Greyhawk, etc. yet, but some published books do reference them (e.g. the Sword Coast Adventurer's G...
The Echo Knight can create an echo of itself, which can then be used to attack:
When you take the Attack action on your turn, any attack you make with that action can originate from your space or the echo's space. You make this choice for each attack.
Suppose an attack originating from the echo...
