Billhook Blog

OSR Food, an Oral History

Note: there are many screen-shots in this post that do not have alt-text, I have provided links to the original posts in the hopes that will be helpful.

One day in December, Chris P. Wolfe responded to a thread from Luna P. and Helicity Boson with the statement "Hell yeah OSR for food". Little did he know, he was about to inspire something momentous. #osrfood

(1) Origin Story

I was outside smoking and avoiding cleaning my kitchen and I was struck! Here was another way that I could delay my chores. I pulled a carrot out of the fridge and spent some time carving, and, behold!

(2) Dagger

A few people fed my ego, so I went back to the fridge, and found a mushroom. A few knife strokes later and Lo! Non other than Paolo Greco responded to my new post.

OSR Food Mushroom Shield

Later that night I had drunk a decent amount of whiskey and was feeling myself. Also, carving things out of vegetables is surprisingly fun, so I decided to try my hand at potatoes. I also included testimonials, because it amused me.

OSR Food spudarms

Paolo reposted this one, which gave me my first opportunity to mention Luke Gearing. I honestly have no idea why I did that.

Paolo Repost

The following morning people were re-litigating what the "OSR" is, and I took my first opportunity to turn my art into a social commentary. When my initial attempts to induce browning using sodium bicarbonate failed i turned to food color, which at least is edible.

OSR Food Apple dice OSR Food Apple Tools OSR Food Apple Dice Bonus

dumb response 2

After that I took a poke at the various generations of OSR.

Defining OSR Food

Two days later I declared the death of #osrfood, as is tradition.

OSR Food is dead

And immediately made a new post, this featuring an old canard of war-gaming strategy.

Bow and Arrow

At this point a few people were engaging with my brilliant creations so I did what any burgeoning movement within the sub-sub-culture would: I turned to Yochai Gal

OSR Food Yochai appeal

!! Yochai has since left Bluesky and suspended/deleted his account. He can of course be found myriad other places around the internet. He did respond to this post, IIRC it was something to the effect of "I saw that the other morning and I thought to myself 'It's the children who are wrong.'" My response was well reasoned.

Yochai Response

At this point #osrfood took a brief chudly turn. Yochai responded that tankie was a refreshing insult.

OSR Food Chud

Inspired by my buffoonery Izzy P.(I believe their commissions are currently open) made a delightful rendition of a torch bearing rutabaga adventurer "Rutabagavin"

Rutabagavin

I responded with some torches of my own.

osr food torch

My last, finest food carving/joke made me laugh about 3 different times while I was thinking it up. I'm still not sure I believe in differentiating between OSR and NSR, but if you do I guess I actually prefer the later.

NSR Food

Finally, some text only #osrfood posts.

I hope you've enjoyed this act of complete self indulgence, I promise that if I continue posting on this blog I'll actually write things instead of just collecting social media posts. Unfortunately Luke Gearing hasn't reached out to me yet.