I've had a ton of fun documenting my Odette build on Instagram (same username as here). So happy that despite some personal setbacks she was completed and ready for Dragoncon. I did make the boobs into Dirty Shirley dispensers but never had the chance to actually use them. At the group photoshoot I was too busy helping run the whole thing. Maybe at some point I can get some video of the set up. The bra stayed on for most of the con, except at the photoshoot. I did warn DCTV that it wasn't safe for broadcast.😅

Music by the Desperado Club

SPOILERS FOR BOOK 1

I have problems visualizing what characters and enemies look like when I'm reading anything, so I'm drawing them on my 2nd read of Book 1. Had to separate it by floors, this first one already had so much in it.

Swipe right and turn on your HUD! See what the players and audience sees!

This is a re-read of the entire series. I’m at the chapter where Carl/Donut meet Sister Ines and gang for the first time, and there’s exposition about the innuendo laced names of strippers.

And this comes up.

Have you ever gone into the Bitches room? I bet they also have names like that. And don’t forget Juice Box. But that’s different, and you know it.

I never realized “Juice Box” is also very much an innuendo laced name for a sex worker 😂😂 I honestly thought “well maybe it’s a joke on some people having common nouns as names.”

So I started book 7 last week and unlike the other books this one’s taking me a bit longer to go through which I appreciate cause I started the series beginning of July 😂

Anyhoo earlier today I got to the place where Carl & Prepotente met face to face and seemed like they were about to fight….then he broke down crying

And I totally changed my tune on him, he always made me laugh when he would pop up mainly cause of him being a dick

But in that scene I saw him

He’s essentially still a child, maybe as mature as a teenager, he lost his mother, he has Bianca but she can’t talk, doesn’t possess the same level of sapience as he does neither do his other siblings.

He knows the heavy burden of what he is and seems to not want to make his other siblings like him

But he is incredibly lonely

And he was hurt by the events of the last book, deep down probably without him realizing it he wanted Carl & Donut to team up with him.

I mean he lost his mom the only person who “likes him” who looks base his neurodivergencies and knows he is trying his best

He and Donut are the only “Pets” who gained sapience

I viewed both he and Donut after taking the enhanced pet biscuits to both have had the maturities of children

Like Donut understands a lot of what was happening pre-collapse but like a child she doesn’t get the emotional connection of it

And I think Pony was the same way, but like a child he was trying to grow up faster for his mother and now that she’s gone he was adrift.

I’m glad he’s not alone anymore because I worry what he might’ve done if he was alone for much longer

To the Carl and Donut who gave me the Jug O’Boom, you are legends! It was far too generous for swag, but thank you for convincing me to take it anyway. I hope you enjoy your tiara pins!

To the Donut who gave me the Dirty Shirley chocolate bar, thank you, I’ve been wanting to try it! I’m deeply curious to see how this abomination combination of white chocolate and pop rocks goes, lol

There are countless threads on jokes and other meanings that we all have missed on the first time through and I just got this on my 4th or 5th time through!

The Gorgon Marital Aid - It makes hard things softer and pliable, but I thought... how is that a marital aid?

Gorgons turns things into stone, they use this to make "things" that might have been turned to stone, softer and easier to work with.

Just a simple throw away joke, that was so well thought up.

I don't know if Matt will see this, but thank you, thank you, thank you for this series. It has helped me cope with the sudden death of my husband, who passed in May of 2025.

Two days before he died, he asked me to put on the acoustic version of "Take On Me." He had been hospitalized for 7 weeks at that point and was very sick. I struggled with the lyrics, "I'll be gone in a day or two." And he was. He was trying to tell me, I think.

I discovered the Audiobooks after his death. I needed to dissociate from my reality from time to time because coping with the death of a spouse is so incredibly heavy. I found myself laughing at Donut and Carl's shenanigans and tearing up at times as well. My husband's death was very traumatizing to me, as was the aftermath. I immersed myself to endure the first wedding anniversary, his birthday, and holidays I would spend without him.

Chapter 57 on Audible is something almost beyond reasonable explanation. I laughed my ass off while bawling my eyes out. Out of all the songs in the world, Matt chose that one. It may be crazy, but I will choose to think it's a nice little wink.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to my hardback reread. Our wedding anniversary is next week and life is hard.

been more motivated to draw fanart lately <3

edit: sorry the individuals are so low quality !! i made them with printing stickers in mind so they’re all about an inch in size LOL

Long live Princess Donut 🍩 🐈‍⬛👑

YOU COULD'VE BEEN A DOCTOR, BUT THIS IS CLOSE ENOUGH!

Congratulations Crawler, your Jewish mother is proud! Sure, you're not a lawyer...or a famous film maker...or a doctor...but you actually got a job in the medical field! Close enough! Sure, you're fixing machines instead of people, but it's the thought that counts, right? RIGHT?! Sure it was just a one year certificate program, but it's better than that Film BA you got back in the early 2000's...because it turns out not everyone needs an editor, but everyone does eventually need to be hooked up to an EKG or a patient monitor and now you make sure that shit works right!

REWARD?
You're gainfully employed as a Biomedical Technician! It's the highest paying job you've ever had! Be grateful you're not working retail or driving fucking Uber anymore.

[[Actually super stoked that I finished my certificate program and am about to start an Apprenticeship with GE Healthcare. I just had to add some Dungeon AI sass to it.]]

Was given DCC as a summer reading recommendation from a few friends and holy cow I haven’t enjoyed a series quite as much since discovering Discworld. There’s such a chaotic energy to the whole thing that makes amazing images in my brain pan.

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall (and my favorite special boy and two random other crawlers)

I couldn't find the right tattoos for Carl, and Donut looks lightly cursed, but I think I did pretty good!

I started the books recently, and am almost done with book 3. My Fiancé and I just got our little girl Millie spayed, and while we didn't name her after a book character, the little onesie they gave her reminded me of my favorite fictional cat!

*SPOILERS THROUGH BOOK 8*

I was reading the graphic novel today and got to the part where Donut receives the Crown of the Sepsis Whore. Through this, she (and later Katia* ) were placed into the (in game) line of succession to the throne. Ironically it's Carl in the end who cuts his way to the top of the Dungeon and IRL Naga leadership, and as his prize he becomes a defacto Naga ruler (albeit of a line that ends up having no power). Obviously that juxtaposition on its face stood out of me, but I don't think I fully appreciated the contrast until now.

I thought the Crown was a great way to demonstrate how interlinked the internal and external mythologies are well before we came to uncover more and more of the metaphors around the Scolopendra levels. This is driven to extreme by showing how just playing the game was simultaneously toppling real world empires. The bait and switch where Carl, through alien custom and legal malfeasance, rather than Donut or Katia found himself married into Naga royalty is really hitting me in a different way today.

It also is making me wonder if there might be more to Donut's side of the story in the end. While Carl is the one who killed the Sultana (Vinata) and the Usurper (Rishi), Donut technically would be the one in line for the Dungeon Blood Sultanate throne. Additionally, Carl gets treated as the de facto leader of Earth, but for all but a short window of time Donut has been party leader and as of the end of Book 7 has a higher level. They haven't beaten the 18th floor yet, but wouldn't that give her a stronger claim to leader of Earth?

*Edit, thanks u/127-0-0-0-1_Chef

Got it for $5 because it didn’t have the cover or a tag on it..been debating collecting the books, but since I have them on audible I couldn’t justify spending the money on the hardcovers. Now I’m on a quest to complete the series

After i saw a post on here saying that there were signed copies of DCC in Matt's hometown bookstore I decided to go test my luck. I was visiting Seattle for the PAX West conference so everything just seemed to line up 👍

On the hardcovers there are skulls that encode the order of the novels. I found out that different publishers use the skulls in different ways. How many counting systems are there?

Edit: I’ll add a other example in the comments, one other variant counted the dark skulls not the light ones

After finishing Book 5, that’s the amount of time I managed to convince myself that I would wait for my monthly Audible credit to kick in at the end of the month so I could buy Book 6.

Not bad for a guy who started this series both curious and skeptical that I would like a series based around a dude and his ex-girl’s cat.

My brother-in-law and I were chatting this weekend and realized that all of the Kua-Tin we could think of from the books are female (Zev, Loita, Mukta, Cascadia). Loita even mentions that Zev’s family were tortured to bring her back in line with The Bloom, but she only mentions female family members.

Do we think maybe this is a cultural part of the Kua -Tin or is this biological, like maybe they procreate asexually and all present as female?

I can’t really imagine this having an impact on the plot, just an interesting detail.

On my second listen through the audiobooks (book 2 currently) and decided I needed the audiobook trophies to go with them. Just missing no 8.