Word of the year (Germany) Puns

Things like (2 Dutch examples) klompen! That's shoes. Bloomengarden. That was the flower market.

So if we were going down stairs... "DownValking"

Perhaps you’ve come in thinking: “I remember that game! I fed a vicar to my singing plant!” or maybe more likely: “A browser game that’s still going after ten years? What? How? Why?”

Fallen London is a text-based browser game set in a subterranean city inhabited by Victorian Londoners, talking rats, and people with the faces of squids. In the last decade, it’s grown from a handful of stories to a 2.5-million word epic with tens of thousands of monthly players. We think it might have been the first commercial RPG to include a third gender option, and shares a setting with Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, which might be a bit better known on this subreddit!

We’d like to think that it’s remained popular for the kinds of stories we offer. Not just the weird, inventively horrifying world, but the fact that you get to act on fantastically bad ideas, from publishing horrendous poetry to feeding your soul to a cat.

We’re going to celebrate the birthday with a host of stories, events and activities, including the conclusions of the long running Ambition storylines, beginning this coming Tuesday.

We’re excited to take your questions about anything to do with Fallen London, storytelling at an immense scale, making games without crunch, indie game development, or any of our other areas of expertise!

Answering your questions today are Hannah Flynn, Communications Director, using u/failbettergames, and:

Adam Myers, CEO - u/wastebooksPaul Arendt, Art Director - u/Paul_ArendtEm Short, Creative Director - u/emshortifJames St Anthony, Writer - u/jamesstanthonySéamus ó Buadhacháin, Programmer - u/gallmarchChris Gardiner, Narrative Director - u/ChrisGardiner

Edit: Alright delicious friends, we're done for now. We'll try and pop back tomorrow and pick up any questions we missed! Thank you so much for all of your insightful questions, and we hope those of you who've been away will drop back in on the Neath when your Ambitions conclude! Cheers!

So in 2012 the renown Robert Koch Institute, an independent federal agency that is directly subordinated to the German Ministry of Health and responsible for disease control and prevention, did a risk assessment on behalf of the German government, which included the assessment of a hypothetical scenario of a virus outbreak that results in a global pandemic. The virus used in the fictional scenario was a SARS-like corona virus, called "Modi-SARS".It was published on the 3rd of January 2013 and can be found via the official document and information publishing platform of the German government:https://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/120/1712051.pdf (source is in German, starts on page 55)

Disclaimer

• This is not supposed to be fearmongering. It is good to know that presumably all of our governments conduct such risk assessments and run simulations to prepare themselves.
• The numbers presented in the document are obviously exaggerated. – Take them with a grain of salt!
• The numbers can not directly be applied to the current scenario with 2019-nCoV as a threat. I personally do not think that the number of 7.5 million casualties is realistic for the current threat, because I have high hopes that a treatment and vaccine can be found faster than in the next three years.
• Please be aware that in this risk assessment certain assumptions had to be made, such as in regards to the R naught, the lethality, the incubation time and the time it takes for a vaccine to be developed.

However, Robert Koch Institute did their best to pick estimations and make assumptions that were somewhat reasonable and realistic. Their sources and reasoning is also appended to the assessment (pp. 81-84).

In 2012 they obviously could not know about 2019-nCoV, it's reproduction number, incubation times and lethality ... yet, the parallels are uncanny.

Main parallels

• The fictional virus "Modi-SARS" was a new, unknown SARS-like corona virus, just like 2019-nCoV is.
• It originated from wildlife in Southeast Asia. Zoonotic transmission to humans happened on markets.
• The outbreak started in Asia in February and was undetected for two months, just like 2019-nCoV, where first cases can be backdated to end of November/beginning of December 2019.
• Infected cases appeared in Germany before the WHO released official warnings.
• 2 infected Germans returned back to Germany. One was a student returning afte