My La grew up. If you see her around, can you please help her get the space beluga pelt, handprint mask, and monarch antlers? Just spell spam her if you get a chance.

Unfortunately I am rarely able to find a decent web signal to play in the forest.

Rut Stuff: Right now, she's got the default antlers, but she's a doe and the whole rut thing is a little confusing (La's species won't rut until november to december) but she may hang out with the does if she feels lonely. She's not in it to mate and isn't feeling the feelings. Stag or buck advances will probably confuse her and make her run off.

As a character, not much with La has changed, although it is a tad ironic that she grew up a few days before my fall quarter of college kicks off. My focus of study is forensics and criminology, so I may not have time for La's reports in addition to my own real life reports. She is/I am working on a "Forest Flora" article now about the plants in The Forest.

My deer La collects knowledge the way some people collect shot glasses, post cards, or shampoo bottles shaped like fish (or is that just me?). She is using “The Pit” in The Ruins and a magical book to save things she has learned for other deer. She thinks of this little cache as 'La's Library' and is always adding to it.

The purpose of La's Library is to act as a collection of resources for all deer in The Endless Forest. She hopes that by bringing everything to one place and sharing it with everyone, life in The Forest will improve.




Anyone who has some knowledge to pass along to La is welcome to do so. La loves poetry and prose and will eagerly consume any information with which she is presented. Please share your knowledge with La and others' knowledge too. I add lots of things that I have read to La's Library. When submitting, please give the node URL so that the thread won't get lost if you change the title.

La also respects everyone's wishes. If someone does not want La to share their knowledge, La will not share it. If you see something of yours in La's Library, I will gladly remove it upon your request.

La likes
+Poetry- things that players have written about life in The Forest. A lone poem is generally not accepted because if La accepted each individual poem, her library would quickly become full. Please pass along only threads that collect poems, unless the author has only written the one poem.
+Art collections- things that players have made about life in The Forest. As with poems, please only submit collections (such as art blogs) unless there is only one picture you've made.
+Musical collections- things that players have composed about life in The Forest, or have collected from The Forest itself.

For those who haven't seen this yet. I don't know if this has been posted on here yet, but I haven't seen it here.

The best part of the video is definitely the "Agh!" noise the man makes at the end. Sounds like "NOT AGAIN!"

Most of us have talking deer of one kind or another. Except for people who have deer that were formerly humans, I think it's safe to assume that Endless Forest deer speak their own language or some variation of a real-world language. What I'm interested in doing here is collecting things Endless Forest deer might say in conversation--deer idioms, proverbs, and turns of phrase. I've come up with a few to start this off, but I would love if people would help me out by contributing deer wisdom to the thread.

Basically, anything an Endless Forest deer might say that a human probably wouldn't is fair game.

SAYING: ... to The End of The Endless Forest
MEANING: Analogous to "to the end of time" or "to the ends of the Earth."

SAYING: [name] has their pictograph in a jumble
MEANING: [name] is having an identity crisis or is behaving out of character. The pictograph is an individual symbol, and if it is changed, then so is the individual.

SAYING: [name] has shed many/few antlers.
MEANING: [name] is old/young. Because deer shed and regrow antlers annually, the number of antlers shed would indicate age.

SAYING: [name] has a thorn between their toes.
MEANING: [name] is behaving grumpily. A thorn between the toes of cloven hooves would be very uncomfortable, probably worse than a pebble in one's shoe.

Post your ideas here!

It's been a few days since I've done one of these so I picked something from the forest to study. This time, La went to De Drinkplaats and did quite a bit of shapeshifting while I wrote down the animals and their animations. I decided to look at these animals in myth (particularly Christian and European myth, although other places' legends were considered).

Most of you probably know a lot about these animals, so I'm trying to write only the things that are interesting or that you might not know, and I only have so many books.

I have also decided to add some anecdotal evidence, as I have had more than my fair share of animal dealings and I really enjoy bragging. For instance, I have held a three-toed sloth (it was like a backpack--it just grabbed me and stayed there), untangled a hawk (my falconer friend was out of town so I fed his hawks. One had tangled itself up, so I untangled it) and been attacked by a playful leopard cub (zoo camp).




I'm sure most of you looked up stuff about deer when you joined the site. I sure did, so I'll keep it brief.

The earliest Cervid lived almost 16 million years ago. Notable prehistoric Deer are Megaloceros and Eucladoceros. I think we have a few living in The Endless Forest, though they no longer inhabit the human world.

Deer meat is called venison, and it is delicious. I do not hunt deer myself because I have generally had good dealings with them, but I have a friend who hunts one deer every year and eats the entire thing. I have a dislike for hunters who kill for sport, but I have no issue with people who hunt for food.

In the united states, there are about one and a half million deer-car crashes every year. Deer kill about 150 humans per year and do over a billion dollars in property damage. My grandmother has issues with deer sneaking into her yard to eat her plants.

My deer La is in the beta and doesn't get to encounter others very often. As a result, I don't get to interact with you other players, and that makes me kind of sad--especially when I see all the bios for awesome deer that I want La to meet. Anyone who wants to RP with La is welcome to jump in because I'm so lonely we'll have a lot of fun!

[This is currently categorized under "Miscellaneous" because I'm not sure where else to put it.]

My deer La has been cataloging individual glyphs (ie components of pictographs) since she (I) wrote about the importance of names.

Later, Unplugged shared brilliant knowledge that has been instrumental to La's glyph catalog. I highly recommend reading what Unplugged has to say because I use the system she explains to identify specific glyphs. Each glyph ID is given as a number and a letter (or number in some cases). The first number is the position in the URL of the symbol.swf, the second letter (or number) is the character required for the glyph.

I have given arbitrary names to the families based on things the glyphs resemble. If you have better names, let me know.

Each pictograph has exactly four glyphs in four positions. The total number of possible pictographs is 101250 (The equation is 2*15^4). PLK217 pointed out that if individual glyphs were not confined to certain spaces, there could be as many as 11,703,240 pictographs per generation (he solved using factorials; the equation can be written as 60!/(60-4)! or more simply as 60*59*58*57). PLK217 added that that would be enough pictographs for every person in the Czech Republic to have an Endless Forest account.

As of now, consider all of this INCOMPLETE.


Generation one seems to be characterized by a lack of triangles. Most angles are 90 or 45 degrees. PLK217 has provided a plethora of images for glyphs.

Angle, Greater: two line segments connected at a right angle. At least one of the line segments runs across the entire pictograph.

I (and by extension my deer, La) had so much fun researching stuff in the forest that I (we?) decided to do another project.

This entry will focus on our pictographs. I'm going to call each component in a pictograph a glyph. Keep that in mind because I mention glyphs a lot. I want to study the glyphs and eventually I plan to catalog them.

This idea was inspired by Hereticrick's House of O idea. Hereticrick's fawn Ohn has chosen to identify with other deer in the forest who have pictographs similar to his own, which is dominated by a large circle—an O.




It's very nice to have a name, don't you think? I wouldn't like it if I went through life without my own specific name (even though I've met other Alisons and a Robin or two here and there). People would still recognize me if I didn't have one, but what would they call me? “Girl with short hair” and “Awkward glasses girl” are not great names, no matter how accurate they are (very).

Names are a convenience that we take for granted. They are a special kind of sacred, a symbol of self and something in which we can take pride. Giving names is a great responsibility over which caregivers can spend a long time agonizing. It is usually agreed that there is a “right” name for an individual baby, but the trick is finding it. Before I was born, my father lobbied for naming me Wendy. I have nothing against the name, but I don't think it would fit me. My middle name, Robin, is a nod to A. A.

I know a lot of people like to roleplay and write stories about The Endless Forest. It's also clear that there isn't a lot of creepy stuff in the forest, and creepy settings can really add to an RP or a story. Here's an alternate way for your characters to look at The Old Oak, if you want.

Shaku told me that her deer Vodun was playing with a friend around The Old Oak and the friend vanished. Shaku wrote a poem about her experience (read more of her poetry on Vodan's bio page):

Keke~ You came to play, yes?
I have a fun game.
After the sun sets,
We can play hide and seek.
Hide in the Old Oak...
You'll never be found again~

Now, most people are thinking “big deal, the other person's internet was funky” and you're almost certainly right—but what would a deer think if they saw someone go into a tree and vanish? That would be terrifying! “Hide in the Old Oak... / You'll never be found again” really sounds like something fawns might chant to each other, and in the dead of night a young stag might hear it echoing in his ears as he walks past that tree.

To make Vodan's experience even weirder, I found a Celtic story about oak trees acting as portals between worlds (not sure which worlds, but it was definitely a plural). The Oak was the sacred tree of Thor, God of Thunder, and of Zeus, also a God of Thunder. A Christian Legend says that Saint Boniface destroyed a tree that some Germans had devoted to Thor, and by doing so converted them to Christianity.

According to the Book of Genesis 35:4, “And they gave unto Jacob all the strange gods ... and Jacob hid them under the oak … .” That particular translation is from the King James version of the bible.

I haven't said this yet in TEF, but my mother is an Art History teacher. What this means is that, as a child, I was surrounded by textbooks, essays, and an overwhelming amount of knowledge regarding ancient art. As a result, every time I see old-looking art, I try to figure out where it's from. It's a game to me. This time I decided to look at the sculptures in The Endless Forest and see what they look like from The Human World.

We all know that the mythos of The Endless Forest has deep connections to early Christianity and the conversion of Pagans, so I'm looking carefully for connections to those.

My deer La wants very much to be an archaeologist in The Forest, in part because I think it would be a fun job and in part because it seems like something that hasn't been done before. Consider this La's research rather than mine.




I don't often go to The Playground, but one thing I noticed when I got there was the scattering of megalithic standing stones. I haven't counted them, but am reminded of the Carnac stones—a collection of around three thousand standing stones in France. The Carnac stones are arranged, unlike the Playground megaliths.

There is a Christian Legend that says that a small army of Pagans chased Pope Cornelius and he turned them to stone.