(Playing Card Game Rules) How to play Castle Walls

In this post, I will detail how Castle Walls, a playing card game invented by myself, is meant to be played. The idea for this game has been lying around unattended for years, and during and before that time the game's rules have been cemented and uncemented and cemented again. This was done mostly by actually playing the game with friends and family. The rules are about to be set in stone.

The Game

Castle Walls is a card game - similar to certain anime card games, which you've probably played before - where you battle with your opponent to make them run out of Life Cards, at which point you've won.

The game is kind of basic, and relies on luck, but also gets quite nuanced and advanced, starting to be about reading your opponent more than mere luckiness. Even card-counting has a bit of a strategy to it in this game. If you can count cards, don't be afraid to do it in Castle Walls, especially if it's being played competitively.

At the time of this writing, Castle Walls is only designed to be played between 2 players, 1 VS 1.

How to Set Up Castle Walls

To play Castle Walls, you will need a standard deck of playing cards. The ones that have four suits and a bunch of numbers. You know what playing cards are, I will spare you the explanation. That makes this game cost only about $6 to play.

All playing cards - other than weird spares that aren't even a part of playing cards - will be used. All 54 of them. You do not remove either one of The Jokers. The Joker is actually part of a major situational strategic play, which can potentially happen during a playthrough.

Dealing the Cards

This may sound like Captain Obvious, but you need to shuffle the deck first. Believe me, not every game I ever make is necessarily going to do shuffling at the start. Hindbodes will find a way.

There are two places per player where cards go when the dealer is dealing. One is the player's stack of Life Cards, and the other is the player's hand.

First, the dealer puts one card face down in the opponent's life card pile. Then, the dealer does the same for their own life card pile. This repeats until both piles have exactly 6 cards each. Nobody is meant to see which cards they are while the dealing is done. The Life Cards are to be placed in neat stacks.

One of the most important points about the life card pile - and something that everybody eventually notices - is that it effectively removes cards from the playthrough, selecting which cards you don't play with randomly and secretly. In this effect, you don't know how many Jokers are in the game of Castle Walls that you're playing until well into the game. Unless you luckily draw both of them on turn one. Such draws are rare, but they can happen. All face-down life cards remain a secret to both players until they are taken off the stack by combat.

Second, the hands are dealt. Pretty simple, really. The first card goes to the hand of the person who is not the dealer. Like the previous stage, each player gets one card for their hand in turns. So the other player gets one card, then the dealer gets one card, then the cycle repeats. Once both players have three cards for their hand, the rest of the deck is placed face down to the middle-left or middle-right of the playing field, and the game is nearly ready.

When The Game is About to Start

Before the game begins, the players must decide who has their turn first. This can be done with either a round of Paper Scissors Rock, a coin flip, or simply what both players agree on. Then, the game begins.

The Hierarchy of Cards

The level of a card in Castle Walls is very important. Put basically, from highest to lowest, the cards in a list of power levels are:

• Ace
• King
• Queen
• Jack
• 10
• 9
• 8
• 7
• 6
• 5
• 4
• 3
• 2

The Anatomy of The Game's First Turn

Castle Walls is about using cards on the field to "attack" your opponent's field cards, and ultimately your opponent's Life Cards. However, on the first turn of Castle Walls, you can not attack.

Other than the inability to attack, the first turn is very much identical to all other turns. So I will go over the anatomy of all following turns now.

The Anatomy of The Game's Second and All Following Turns

Every turn of Castle Walls, you must draw one card from the deck in the middle, exactly at the start of your turn. If the deck has run out, simply flip the entire graveyard and use that as the new deck. You do not shuffle the deck when you do this. Meta strategies - based on card counting - could certainly emerge from this mechanic. As the creator, I welcome that.

After you draw a card, you may choose to play a card face-up, or face-down. If you already have a card face down, you can place one face-up card on top of it, maximum. There are three places on the field, side-by-side, where you are allowed to place a card. You may not go any further than the three slot limit, meaning at the absolute most your field card count is a total of six (three cards face-down, and one face-up card sitting on top of each face-down card), and having six cards on the field this way is extremely unlikely during regular play.

You are not required to play anything or attack on your turn, you are only required to draw a card and discard any excess cards as ruled by the End Phase.

You are not allowed to place The Joker on the field like the other cards. The Joker is a rare card that has special innate abilities in this game. The nature of that play will be covered later in this article.

On your turn, after you draw a card, you are in what is called the Main Phase. You can only enter the Main Phase once per turn, and only after the instant that you've drawn your card.

In the Main Phase, there are things you can do, and things you can't do.

Things you can do in the Main Phase:

• Play one face-up card OR play one face-down card.
• Use the special straight discard (will be detailed later).
• Use The Joker, if appropriate (will be detailed later).
• Flip one or more of your face-down cards face-up, if there is no card above it. A face-down card can't be flipped if it was put face-down during this same turn.
  

During the Main Phase, you can not attack with a card.

When you want to attack with a card, you may enter the Battle Phase.

In the Battle Phase, you can attack with as many of your face-up cards as you choose, but each of them can only attack once per turn. Once you are in the Battle Phase, you can not return to the Main Phase until you've drawn a card on your next turn. Naturally, face-down cards are not able to attack. Any face-down cards you want to attack with must be flipped face-up first, during the Main Phase. This means you can not flip a card face-up right after attacking.

When your turn is ending, and you've already had your Draw Phase, Main Phase and/or Battle Phase, you observe an End Phase. The only purpose of the End Phase is to siphon off any excess cards that the turn player has. If you have more than six cards in your hand during the End Phase, all you have to do during the End Phase is remove cards from your hand and put them in the graveyard until you have exactly six cards in your hand.

 

Attacking Basics

When you attack with a card, you "nudge" it in the direction of your opponent if the opponent has no cards on the field, or pick it up and point it at the targeted card on the field they do have.

An attack can resolve in many different ways. In this section, we will be focusing on attacks to opposing Life Cards and on what happens when a card attacks another face-up card. All cards that attack are, naturally, face-up. The game would be impossible to balance well otherwise. However, cards that receive an attack may or may not be face down. Face-down cards act as Walls or Traps. See the respective sections for more info on them.

If you attack when your opponent has no cards on the field, it will make your opponent's number of Life Cards decrease by 1. Multiple attacks (logical maximum of 3) can do this in a turn, as long as there are enough offending and unspent cards with which to launch said attacks. For example, if your opponent has no cards on the field when your turn starts and you have three cards on the field at the end of the Main Phase, you have the ability to attack your opponent's Life Cards up to three times.

When a life card is attacked, it is removed from the original pile and placed face-up on a newer, face-up pile. This shows how close your opponent is to losing, and it additionally and importantly reveals which cards were removed from play when the game started. As the game goes on, it gradually becomes more and more clear what sort of cards were absent. Sometimes you will find one or both of the Jokers in the Life Card piles before the game is over.

However, if the opponent has cards on the field, the attack becomes more complex in nature, and has more rules to adhere to. For this section, it will only be face-up cards in a battle that I cover.

One: if a card attacks a face-up card of equal or lower power value, the attacked card is destroyed, and sent to a face-up pile called The Graveyard. The Graveyard is located beside the main deck.

Two: A card can not attack a face-up card that has a higher power value on it.

Attacking Walls

When you attack a face-down card, you don't typically know what will happen. It could be this, or it could be a Trap.

A Wall happens when your card attacks a face-down card (which is then flipped face-up), and the flipped card happens to be of a power equal to or greater than that of the card that attacked it.

When a card on the field attacks a wall, neither card is sent to the graveyard. The turn of whoever attacked will automatically end.

An Ace is the most powerful attacker in the game, and the only thing that can wall an Ace in Castle Walls is another, face-down Ace. This can lead to some scary aggressive strategies. A face-down ace that gets attacked can ultimately, on the next turn, strike back at anything that hits it. If you attack a face-down Ace with your own Ace, you can expect to lose your Ace next turn.

Cards of the power 2 are special because no matter what they attack, if it's face-down it will wall the attacking player. This ends the turn of whoever attacked using the power 2 card, but this play can directly lead to a strategic advantage.

Attacking Traps

When you attack a face-down card, you don't typically know what will happen. It could be this, or it could be a Wall.

A Trap happens when your card attacks a face-down card (which is then flipped face-up), and the flipped card happens to be of a power lower than that of the card that attacked it.

When a trap is flipped, the suit of the card determines where your turn goes next in a fork in the road. The difference here is whether your card attacked a red suit (Diamonds or Hearts) or a black suit (Clubs or Spades). Traps intend to destroy one card on the opposing side of the field, once attacked by that opposing side.

If a trap is activated and it is a red suit, it will immediately and automatically go to the graveyard, while the card that attacked it goes to the graveyard immediately after it.

If a Trap is activated and it is a black suit, the owner of the trap must choose one opposing card on the field that is not the attacker, if there is one, and send that to the graveyard right after sending the Trap to the graveyard.

Special Technique #1: Discarding a Four Straight

During your Main Phase, if you have a consecutive straight in your hand of four cards, you can send all of them to the graveyard to target and destroy one card on your opponent's side of the field, unless it is one of those face-down cards that has a face-up card above it. Any one face-up card can still be sent to the graveyard by this technique. When your straight goes to the graveyard, your straight goes first - before the card it's targeting, in order from highest to lowest power.

Special Technique #2: Discarding The Joker

During your Main Phase, if you have more Life Cards removed from your life card pile than your opponent does, you can discard one Joker from your hand to the graveyard. After this, you must take every single one of your opponent's field cards and add them to your own hand. Then your turn continues as normal.

Final Thoughts

That is pretty much the entirety of the rules for Castle Walls. It is a simple game compared to say, 500 or what-have-you, but it can take a while to explain and has as-of-yet uncharted potential depths. I took a lot of inspiration from a trading card game, but I also did everything I could to make it something of my own creation. No plagiarism is to be found here, unless of course somebody tries to plagiarize me again. Lots of people like to plagiarize me, it's a historic feature of being Hindbodes.

(Hallways) Cockroach Communication Antennae

Late in the cycle of light, standing opposed to gravity on the wall, a cockroach unit named Lepia twiddles the antennae. They are equipped to receive broadcasts. Lepia stands, scanning, listening, hoping. Lepia waits for the signals.

It's out there. The truth is out there. The world will understand what happened, and this cockroach will be the hero they sorely needed. One day they will be surprised that Lepia did what always needed to be done, finally.

Lepia will find it. Until then, it's wait, wait, wait...

Things You Can't Say At An Airport

Airports are impossible to separate from the style that civilization as we know it is presented by. Or at least, they are for the time being. With the struggles that society currently faces, who knows how much longer we can afford to run international planes? But everybody alive today either knows what an airport is, or has been isolated from universal knowledge somehow.

But did you know that there are a lot of real, common phrases that you do not have the freedom to say in an airport? Join Figment Area as we go through this list of Things You Can't Say At An Airport.

 

This Movie Is Going To Bomb

Imagine this: you're in an airport waiting for your friend to arrive back home, you're on your phone, and you're watching the trailer for the upcoming live-action adaptation of Frogger (1981). It's directed by somebody nobody's heard of, the plot focuses on the titular frog setting up a beauty cosmetics company, and the script resembles the one from Spy Kids. Then suddenly you turn to your idiot friend who's genuinely convinced that this movie is fundamentally a good idea, and you say to him "Mate, this movie is going to bomb."

Believe it or not, this moment can get you into a lot of trouble! Airport security will be asking you a lot of questions and otherwise bearing down on you at this point, and it's not a good way to go.

If you find yourself in this situation, try using phrases like these instead:

- This movie is going to squash!

- This movie looks like a dumper down!

- This movie eh? No way, hosé!

- I think the trailer says it's going to be a failer!

 

 

That's A Real Bombshell

 

Sometimes when you're at an airport, a family member says something to you that's truly serious. But if this ever happens to you, you must be careful to not make this one mistake. Hundreds of people a year are detained by security guards for saying "That's a real bombshell" after their mother in-law says that her Flemish Giant rabbits died.

 

Be aware of yourself and your surroundings when your exo-family says something about Flemish Giant rabbits dying, or you will run serious risk of airport guards acting on the thought that there is a REAL BOMBSHELL in your bag. Airport guards are extremely hostile in the face of Unexploded Bombs coming into their domain, so be careful when the rabbits are deadful.

I'm going to inject all of your fucking babies with needles full of nitroglycerine and use my explosives to blow this whole place to smitheroons.

 

(I hope my friend Miss T doesn't read this one. It would not be pleasant for her.) Imagine it. You're at an airport, and you have a lot of hypodermic needles full of liquid nitroglycerine, and you've just generally had a really bad day. 1 in 17.5 people report that they or somebody they know has been in such a situation and not gone very well with handling it, proceeding to threaten the other airport customers with an accidental outburst or twenty-five. If you find yourself in such a situation, with any amount of nitroglycerine needles, try to imagine that the airport is inside a cube. This might help to save your life.

People Keep Zero-Bombing My Posts

 

In the modern days of the web, digital built-in button features to criticize content are at an all-time low. But surprisingly, in some places it is still possible to be critical of media that comes out without being forced to leave a comment. Oh no! We can't have accountability for poorly-done shovelware going on!

At this point, there are still some places where you can post a piece of entertainment online, and have it be rated zero stars, which is known in some places as "Zero-Bombing".

If you are online in such a place and happen to suddenly realize that there is a colossal infrastructure of airport walls and people around you, be wary of what you might say when your media is judged by the click of buttons. This can get airport security to accuse you of carrying entire weaponized historic World War planes on your person!

Some day the right to criticize posts will be helpfully removed, and people will be able to post any legal content with absolutely zero quality safeguards for putting it under scrutiny, leaving the average Joe at an airport to enjoy a much safer time.

I'm going to cut the person who runs this airport open.

 

About 60% of people believe that the phrase above is very justified, and that we should be allowed to say it in airports. However, in this world, it is not yet a safe place to do so when you're in an airport.

 

 

 

Fuck you all! It's time for the cleansing fire of all wretched civilization!

 

Don't say that at an airport.

 

 

 

Bombs Away!

 

Don't say that at an airport. I don't care how big the swimming pool is.

 

 

I LOVE YOU, YOU LOVE ME, I REALLY LOVE YOU SO LET'S DIE TOGETHER. I LOVE YOU, YOU LOVE ME, LET'S JUMP ON A PLANE FUCKIN' [censored]!

 

To end on and wrap this article up in a neat little bow, we have our final point in the list. The phrase that this article refers to is the phrase that is above our paragraph here.

It is a profound and cerebral smash hit 2019 song by three friends in a room in a humble town of Australia one night, a state in a country where plane disasters are historically a serious issue. Putting their brains together, they made a song that would change the entire world.

As beautiful as it may seem to reference and honour this song in an airport by singing it out loud, that is not something that you want to do. There are other spaces where it can be better discussed with more safety and care, and less intrusions from airport guards.

 

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Thank you for reading this important announcement from the Figment Area public service.

(Complaints) Go Live in a Dried Up and Disgusting Boot, Wordpress - I Am Done With Your Pathetic Ways

Those of you who paradoxically were early enough in Figment Area's run to see my blog on Wordpress - or just those of you who looked deeper in the archive - are probably wondering why I moved from Wordpress to Blogspot after only two posts.

Yeah I could tell you. Oh, you want to know? You'd like to know why? Great! I'll tell you!

Well, you see, basically it's... well yeah, Wordpress is a fucking piece of cow shit! There you go buddy. I didn't talk like this in the title only because I've never been quite certain about the safeness of swearing in your Internet creation titles. Believe me, I wanted to make a title that was harder on the place.

I'll go into more detail, but first, a bit of backstory would help us out, here.

In 2011, whenabouts, I was using Blogspot. It was my only choice and only choice I even considered, and then I stopped using it because I wasn't into what my old blog was doing, as a series of writing pieces, just in terms of what the content could be. It was called The Alternate and Crappier Science, and it was fundamentally a bit hamstrung by its own core concept, which I guess is sort of why I gave up on it.

 

That's fine. The problem was, later on I somehow got into my head the idea that Blogspot was bugged out, not well designed, and able to screw me over. Formatting automatically getting tangled and confusing because of What-You-See-Is-Blah-Blah editing was certainly an issue at one point, even if just in my head. But I honestly think it would be too hard for me to explain to you what the origin of that assumption was, and that I'd only be giving theories. Theories that are too hard for me to articulate.

So in the 2020's, or The Dire 20's as I like to call it, when I got to the point of wanting to make Figment Area, I changed my current writing home to Wordpress, as I'd spent years anticipating.

Oh boy, was I tragically fucking wrong in doing that.

I thought Blogspot would glitch out, be hard to format, and make writing hard. Choosing Wordpress was ridiculously ironic, because that's exactly what Blogspot seems to hardly be doing at all right now, and what Wordpress did to me instead.

Writing the Tom and Jerry post on Wordpress was a fucking nightmare. I don't remember how hard the Wawoo one was, but the Tom and Jerry one definitely must have been a fucked up experience. Instead of going over that, I'll try to describe what happens when you - as a hypothetical thought experiment subject - try to write a blog post on Wordpress, and you try to make it designed your way.

After finding the new post button in a long, gross, annoyingly-animated sidebar with buttons hidden inside buttons, you get a fucking piece of shit interface where the amazing present-day team has thrown out those archaic, old fashioned boxes that "indicate where stuff's boundaries are and where you're supposed to click" and give us this new, modern, slick piece of shit that I'll redraw for you here.



Now, just in case you have some concerns about me, and how I decided to draw all that because I don't know how to take a screenshot, you should know that this thought is not true. I deliberately opted for drawing the picture instead of just copying a screenshot over because I thought it was a good idea. I'm not Wordpress, I'm actually pretty smart.

So that right there is a pretty big red flag. A red flag I don't know how I ignored when I was starting out with it. Not only are the boundaries you can use to have a frame of reference imaginary and the graphic design obviously full of itself, but apparently the text writing interface is made of "block oriented writing". That's the name I've given it.

You have to make a new block when you want to add content to the writing. Every time. Whether it's a paragraph, an image, or "a quote". Can I explain to you what this means? No. Is it fucking annoying to use by design and breaking all the time, possibly not by design? Hell yes it is.

And I still hadn't quite yet realized how bad of a place I was in.

Wordpress' interface here is one of those annoying editors where the actual formatting buttons - like, if you want some of your text to be bigger, italicized, bold, aligned to the right, etc. - are not constantly visible. They are hidden until you're writing something and have... highlighted it or something. It was irrelevant and a waste of time on Tumblr, and it's like that on Wordpress. And it's way worse on Wordpress. Thank you, Blogger, for not being this way, which is a grace I thankfully experience the very minutes I write this angry open hate letter. Seeing those buttons stay up there at the top of my post editor feels like a blessing.

It's going to get worse, if you're not convinced. This post will go further and show more horrendous problems. Earlier on in this post's development, I followed that previous sentence with "That are more horrendous." I no longer, in 2023 (this post took ages to be finished and published) believe that is the case. The post editor is the worst part of Wordpress, though yes there are other issues with using the website that haven't been reached by the expected line of reading yet.

 

I will still be talking about the post editor for a while, but it goes beyond that. I pity your soul if you thought I was going to rip into the editor for posts and that was it. The crap virus on Wordpress runs very deep, from how your website's appearance unexpectedly and uncontrollably turns out all the way down to navigating the dashboard menus.

 

Back to the awful block oriented writing, let's assume for a minute that you want to have more of a theme going on with the formatting of your writing. Maybe you want to make it the right size because it doesn't start off at the right size. Now let's imagine this crazy idea that you want the sizes to be the same as each other, or as a critic would call it, consistent. Good fucking luck, buddy. Block oriented writing is a bitch when you can't rely on the other mechanics to let you control everything at once, or even decide on the default for what formatting you get every time you make a new block. And these blocks? To the reader they're just paragraphs. Paragraphs as in "<p>" and "</p>" if you know about markdown. You can't make a line break without risking making a new one. Paragraphs that can't be moved around or merged back together easily. Paragraphs that have a rigid border that makes itself both unnecessarily important and hardly visible and difficult to find.

 

It's absolute bullshit.

 

I'm sick of talking about the editor now, so let's move on to what's outside the editor.

One of the most audacious examples of bullshit about Wordpress is what happens when you're trying to get an archive system that links to all of your older and newer posts in a convenient and logical way working. Wordpress has "Next" and Previous" buttons at the bottom of its posts - obviously meaning they only let you skip ahead or backward by one unit at a time, and apparently they think this is enough. Let's have a look at the archive that I manually - yes, manually - put together on the Wordpress version of this blog.

I'm going to break down why this thing is so fucked up over the course of two or three paragraphs. First, the more noticeable thing to a casual reader is probably the big rectangle next to "EARLIEST", unnecessarily low-reaching and asymmetrical with its counterpart on the right, beside "LATEST". I couldn't do anything about that, even though this is a technical custom extra page, not a main section regular old blog post. It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure that's a compromise I did by sacrificing a vertical line character that is found on nearly any normal keyboard, which the site then automatically enlarged because it's trying to do that thing that happens at the start of some books, not an actual HTML rectangle div. Wow, so fancy! I looked up the name of this keyboard  character for the first time in my life while writing this very paragraph, and according to Wikipedia it's only been uncreatively named "vertical bar" this whole time. I dislike that and know a lot of stuff about programming, so let's just call this one "Char124". If not for the fact that I was forced to sacrifice a Char124 to the fanciness goblin, this manually-maintained nightmare page might actually look good.

Now, about those Earliest/Latest buttons... I typed out those words and hyperlinked them manually. The dates next to the post titles are filled in manually. The post titles are typed and hyperlinked manually. If I kept using Wordpress today, and had more and more posts coming out on it, I would have to be going back to this page and manually updating the list once and the hyperlinks twice every time a new post came out. I don't imagine that the editor on this would be particularly co-operative either.

For some reason, right now I have a manual index of articles on the Blogspot version of this site too, but it looks better, isn't necessarily required, as there's already an automatic post list on every post page, and at least it'll actually edit properly if I keep it around.

This is a minor point in my mind at this stage, probably just because I've forgotten just how far this thing went, but the wideness and emptiness of a standard Wordpress page is uncomfortable. There's just kind of a distressing and anxious broadness to everything that makes me feel lost. I got a bit paranoid and checked, but nope - the site design on my Blogger one isn't as bad as that. It's always been nicer to look at and doesn't feel like walking on a plank high above a perilous pit void while wind is blowing at you, even if maybe the Blogspot version I made still looks a little weird.

As well as all that, it's too hard to find CSS options and other options when designing your site, according to older records. I don't want to try testing it again now. I don't remember what going through these hoops was like, but I trust my past self on this one, who started writing the Wordpress hate into a Blogspot post during a time that may now be about two years ago. That's the other point, it's been really long, I want to wrap this up now and not suffer Wordpress experiences much longer.

Finally, getting posted previews for your Wordpress links when you post one in something like MeWe or Discord to play nice is way too hard. The first times I checked, it just brought out these white rectangles of nothing, with support giving no real solution to people after I looked it up, I am damn sure of it. Well, it was like that at the time - I just tested it on Jan 7 2023 now, with no obvious error still showing - which I guess was a bug they fixed, but Wordpress had its chance even way more months before I was having problems with that, so it's way too late for redemption now. I don't want this company trying to make me feel crazy just because I remember something that doesn't happen now, either.

So that's Wordpress, a shitty blogging website that I hope I never use again. What messes with me most about this whole thing is that other people actually use Wordpress somehow. People can write on Wordpress and say "Yeah, this works! I'll keep using this for my blog!" In fact, two of the people in this situation are people I know, people from my family.

But I don't envy these people. I'm just a bit disgusted with them. As in nausea, not something like actually believing in someone being reprehensible. Now, I would be disgusted in that sense if certain people tried to actually convert me.

 

With the people I know who use Wordpress, or anybody really, I don't know what they did to tolerate Wordpress, but I don't want to try to tolerate it ever, and I get the feeling that potentially I'll be hearing things like "Oh, you can fix that" or "there's a way to turn that off". No. Just no. I don't care. It would have taken me months to figure those things out on my own. I severely doubt the intentions and lasting quality of a service that hides the good answers so well and would make me go through heaps of hoops just to get a good experience because terrible decisions are the default experience. I don't give a fuck. I don't give a fuck if Wordpress bans me, either, that's like being banned from using a horrible public toilet complex that you don't need and absolutely hate. Naturally, this makes it blatantly obvious that I won't be taking kindly to suggestions that I can pay for a better version of Wordpress, either. At this point, even if Wordpress gets improved massively one day and all my problems with it have technically been fixed, I will not forgive it. It put me through too much.

 

Use your shit website if you want, but don't try to convince me to come sauntering back in to that hellhole. I won't try to sell you on switching to Blogspot, but for everybody's sake and the nature of supporting the best competitor in a competitive market where it's easy for a bad place to become the next Tyrannitar, I hope you would use Blogspot in the extreme hypothetical case that Wordpress is your best other option. Otherwise, I don't really feel fond of the idea of saying "This place sucks, but I can recommend this other place that blah-!" Who knows how well that would age, or if I'd be the one being annoying? It's easy to imagine such a recommendation being annoying. For the time being, Blogspot is a decent place for me to call my current vein of written content's home. In this new age where it's all Figment Area and no TAACS, so far it's given me minor trouble at worst.

 

All I can say is, don't use Wordpress. I don't want people to suffer through it or support it. Wordpress is a garbage titan that does evil and gets more reward than it deserves, on par with Facebook, Quora, and YouTube. Wordpress, you can suck on an expired eggplant.