Queen of the Rats

Illustrations/Collages by Eric Carle

This is a cranberry bog (unflooded) it’s how cranberries grow. Once they’re ripe, the blog is flooded and the cranberries harvested.

His farm was on the leading edge of kinda using organic/sustainable pest control methods, and one of the things that they did to keep insect damage down was that they encouraged wolf spiders to live in the cranberry field, to eat the bugs. 

This was all fine and good until they flooded the bog. Now, you don’t just like flood the bog and then go around it in a boat or whatever. No, you use hip waders to get in there and put the big floaty things where they go and get all the berries and such.

Well when you’re in the bog in hip waders, that makes you the tallest thing. Wolf spiders can swim a bit, but they don’t like it, so they’re, quite understandably, looking to climb out of the water onto a tall thing.

So yeah the first interview question he always asked potential cranberry bog harvester hires was “are you cool with spiders?”

so this has been simmering for a while but i didn’t know how to put it into words.

ive built up my island too much and it would take too much time to redesign the layout and it will look shitty during that period. but the biggest problem is that i dont feel like i have enough of the items in the colors i would need, and the decent ones are few and far between and a hassle to get too.

i seriously dont get how people use certain items to make their island look good idek what items they use ???? how the fuck. i feel like there are 10 items that look good anywhere and all the other items in the game are highly situational.

like that Brine Shrimp Aquarium in a gross clashing purple color being more common than house necessities that look nice and go with anything like a single plain old table with a cloth is the problem. and then theres not enough chairs/benches that match that table style like in a normal household so you make some out of logs or bamboo and it just looks hideous until you can find one that looks decent... if it even exists at all.

with cyrus and reese in acnl you can just customize almost ALL your furniture, and make it really fit together even if you dont have all the items in a set but in this game its like tough luck. this game is also missing a lot of items that function as nice-looking household items like the marshmallow chair, hanging chair...i mean like a LOT of stuff.

having custom design slots feels like a necessity now more than anything if you want to make your island look good because what the game itself offers so barebones. take the greenhouse box from acnl from garden set that is missing in this new game and here’s what people have to do now

it’s pretty bad. the fact that we have to use those stalls and panels for everything is....bad.

not to take aim at the people doing these because they’re working with that they got, and sure, this brings out some artistic creativity, but there’s a limit to it. 100 slots for patterns isn’t enough to make this game look as good as acnl, and not to mention about half of them go to road patterns or indoor things on the walls that are only used once. and it’s even worse because this is the first mainline animal crossing game in HD. why don’t you want to show off all the best looking furniture from the previous game in HD?

some of the finest full furniture sets and series in acnl are gone from new horizons. rococo, alpine, minimalist, classic, regal, sleek, gorgeous sloppy... all gone from this game. this leaves us with some of the plainest trash you can ask for that almost doesnt go well with anything because its series (if it even has one) is so tiny. the cabana series (now rattan) has shrunk by one and just feels lifeless now because there’s no matching wallpaper. actually, there’s almost no wallpaper and flooring to match a series and almost all wallpaper that exists...doesnt have a series. except for the countless seasonal series. how about that.

of the ones that did remain, there were like 3. and one of them was not a favorite (the lovely series, renamed the cute series and having its colors inverted) and the one that was good, the mermaid series, is INCREDIBLY tedious to get. it’s literally a game of chance—a 1% chance at that—for a single pearl. at least on tortimer island it felt like your effort of earning coins to spend in fun minigames pays off.

every good interior you see in acnh is almost always the same with a little switch up. the iron/ironwood series (if you can even call it that) wooden, and log series (almost always in birch). the leather couch in either white, brown, or black, and the box sofas (usually white or black, rarely other colors). maybe a fire place or that one desk backwards. plants in the house to fill the empty space and always the same plants on the walls

if you don’t want your house to look like this, but you still want it to look good, good fucking luck buddy.

in new leaf people were going absolutely ham with the variety of series and sets they had and it still looked excellent no matter what they were going for because there was enough variety and choice in furniture!

look at my fucking basement in acnl from back in 2019 (sorry for bad quality on the first one)

i only have a 10 picture limit and trust me i would post more if i could but there is so much more self-expression in acnl even if our custom design slots were smaller

so not only did acnl have MANY different sets that had enough items in them to feel complete, you were also able to customize them!! they came in a color you didnt like? no problem! go to reese and cyrus!

but now? if you want anything on your island to have a coherent color scheme because sets are basically are nonexistent outside of the shitty plain DIYs that are, let’s face it, pretty ugly and tend to stick out like a sore-thumb even with customization.....if you dont have anyone to trade with, the variant you have is what you’re stuck with. and some of these can be butt ugly and clash or just not what you have in mind. and its like, no problem i’ll just trade! orrrr what about since there’s LITERALLY A NEW CUSTOMIZATION KIT ITEM YOU CAN JUST CUSTOMIZE IT YOURSELF TO ANOTHER VARIANT? and not only that but trading needs to be seriously coordinated and can take a lot of your time and energy? and waiting? you have the idea in mind and you have the item, just not the specific variant you need. and you can’t customize a store-bought item despite this game having customization kits. how utterly stupid is that

there are very limited options for necessities like chairs and tables that look like they properly belong in a house. i know we’re building from the ground up on a new island but honestly i don’t see that as an excuse to overthrow like almost the entire furniture sets in the series that gave you variety in what you wanted to go for that all looked GOOD. why was this a good idea when transitioning into HD? why are flat pixel drawings with limited space the only way we can make stuff that used to exist in past games but not anymore? on one hand, the fashion department was GOATED in this game. but the furniture department is hot garbage. why is that gross neon purple brine shrimp aquarium or a hamster wheel or a kettlebell or protein shake more common than a fucking nice looking couch, table, chair, or bench that is a part of a bigger series. where am i going to put those accessories if i have nothing nice to put them on?? what the hell dude

20 years of animal crossing