I finally got around to making some Nancy Drew 'screenshots' using this Instagram border here. I have a ton of pictures that could be good for this, but because most of them are on an external drive, I just decided to use ones that I already had on my computer. (That, and otherwise I would have been going through them FOREVER). I also have a lot of pictures from my job at a museum, but I don't want to post photos of my workplace online for privacy reasons.

All photos were taken by me in Alberta and British Columbia, Canada. I feel like this hypothetical game would be a mix of Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake, Danger on Deception Island, and a little bit of White Wolf of Icicle Creek if it took place in summertime. Maybe I'll make another one later with more of a "historic buildings" vibe.

Found this piece of art in the parking lot of a grocery store a few days ago. No idea who made it, though we have a lot of children's summer day camps going on around here so it could be from any one of those. I've never watched Digital Circus but I know this character is called Jax and they're (?) insanely controversial among fans.

Books like this fueled my love of dinosaurs as a very young kid in the 90s/early 2000s. This one is so well-loved that the front and back covers are completely gone. It's a compilation of short stories, each centering on one dinosaur, with art by different artists dating from 1981 to 1986. Of course it's all very outdated and scientifically inaccurate (even for the 80s, tbh) but it definitely has a lot of character and charm to it, in my opinion.

I have quite a few more books from this era, so I could post more art if people are interested (assuming it doesn't violate any rules).

Captions:

1. Title page, tyrannosaurus rex and pteranodon - David Transue
2. Dilophosaurus and plesiosaurus - Andrew Howatt
3. Dilophosauruses - Andrew Howatt
4. Dimetrodon - Bernard Long
5. Allosaurus and diplodocus - Doreen Edwards
6. Plesiosaurus - Andrew Howatt
7. Plesiosaurus again - Andrew Howatt
8. Protoceratops, nemegtosaurus and opisthocoelecaudia - Roger Payne (for some reason this drawing made nemegtosaurus one of my favourite sauropods as a kid, I loved how curvy and swan-like the neck looked)
9. Protoceratops - Roger Payne
10. Protoceratops and nodosaurus - Roger Payne (I was in love with the foliage and flowers in this scene)
11. Protoceratops in a storm - Roger Payne
12. Chingkankosaurus and velociraptors scavenging a tarbosaurus carcass - Roger Payne
13. Pteranodon - Doreen Edwards (I was OBSESSED with the landscape in this pic, so beautiful)
14. Stegosaurus and brontosaurus - John Francis
15. Stegosaurus mated pair, with the 'loser' walking off in the background - John Francis
16. Tyrannosaurus, 'duckbills,' and some anachronistic flamingo-like birds - George Thompson

I found this in a keepsake box after visiting my parents' house recently. When I was 7 or 8 in 2001-2002, I wrote this "screenplay" for a hypothetical Jurassic Park 4, which turned out as goofy and childish as you can imagine. You can see the influence of the JP3 logo in that I wrote the '4' with four dino claw strokes despite that not being how Roman numerals work. Also featuring appearances from the obligatory giant sea predator that every kid who watched Walking With Dinosaurs loved, a random Canadian city that I've never even visited, and a nondescript "bad guy" with zero motives other than wanting to murder a mother and her children.

I also remember wanting to include a scene where they use a fruit roll-up like a rope to scale a cliff. Thankfully my inspiration fizzled out before that.

What do you guys think? Would it have had the same box-office success as Jurassic World?

------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Transcript in case it's hard to read/for screen readers. Typos included)

Jurassic Park 4 ////

1. Grant visits a campfire with his friend's wife, Sandra, and her children. Sandra, thrilled by how much he knows about dinosaurs, asks him if he can visit the next day. But Grant explains about his job to study dinosaur fossils and that his manager said, to have enough money to continue his studies he must study the lives of real dinosaurs. He explains Jurrassic Park and his encounters with dinosaurs - times when creepy velocoraptors had haunted him in old, deserted buildings, when terryfing t-rexs had effortlessley crushed cars with their huge mouths, and when compsognathus had chased him through dangerous forests. He had to go back to this haunting place. He had to return to Jurassic Park.
2. Grant asks some other dinosaur hunters to go with him. They say yes, and they meet at the airport the very same day Sandra and her kids are supposed to go to Winnepeg!! A bad man arrives wanting the kids to get lost on the island of Jurrassic Park. So, he rings the alarm for a false emergency and knocks over a baggage car to keep the pilots busy. Then, he ran to their computer and typed down that Sandra and her five daughters and 1 son are going to Jurassic park! Now, a pilot new that it was Sandra's turn to board a plane next and he did not want to keep her waiting. So, he read she was going to Jurrassic Park, and shoved them into Grant's plane. Sandra was so busy counting her kids that she didn't notice he plane was taking off. When she calmed down, it was too late. They couldn't go back. They were off to Jurrasic Park.
3. Egnoring Sandra, Grant lets the plane land on the water. He says he will first study sea life. He gets into a shark cage with Sandra and the men, with the kids and one man in the plane. Suddenly, a huge liplerodon attacks the cage, seperates it from the plane and splashes! Everyone in the cage is worried. Then Sandra spots a huge chunk of meat. She throws it to the liplerodon to keep it busy. Then, she opens the escape door that faces the air and the shore and ties a rope to the cage and the other end to the shore. Now, the humans can scramble ashore.
4. Sandra sees her kids and the man coming. They say that the liplerodon wrecked the plane. Now how will the humans get back? Then, they realize that a kid named Harriet is missing. They see her fearlessley facing three compsognathus. Grant knows how dangerous these small killers can be. But when Harriet escapes, the whole gang of compsognathus start chasing them! The people climb a cliff and get away.
5. They are in a prairie. Sandra sees parasauralophus, ankylosaurus and brachiosaurus. Then, some gallimimus rush by. They are worried. Why? A t-rex crashes through the trees, snapping up a gallimimus! The humans run. Grant and the children are seperated, Oh, no!
6. Meanwhile, Sandra and the men have

(The story stops there, the end of this thrilling saga never to be known...)

I recently replayed this game for the first time in years and was surprised when I came across this random conversation with an old man on the HAM radio. I can't remember ever encountering it before, though I very well could have when I was much younger. Does anyone know if it's a reference to anything, like one of the ND books or some other literature (I know most of the people you deliver telegrams to are references to books and movies). Or is it just to introduce the player to how the HAM radio works?

(I'll feel really stupid if this is something that always happens in the game, but I know this is one of the nicest subreddits/fandoms I've ever been in so please no one chew me out for it!)

Video on Instagram, here

I don't have the energy atm to put these inside the game screen border thingies like you guys have been doing, but I visited Prince Rupert last weekend and got major DDI vibes from it. It was the game that inspired my love of the Pacific Northwest atmosphere/landscape. Now if only I could see a real live orca, I'll have achieved my lifelong dream.

The last few pictures were taken at the North Pacific Cannery, a national historical site that recreates life in a fishing village from the late 19th to mid 20th century. It's a hidden gem and I highly recommend anyone check it out if you're ever in the area! Definitely a place Nancy would love to explore.

I decided to make an analysis of the tier list posts on this sub to see what the community's favourite game is, and it turned into a WAY bigger (and more fun!) task than I'd imagined.

Rules: only tier lists since the start of 2026 counted (this already took me several days so I didn't want to go back any further). Sample size was 32. For each tier list, I assigned a score of 1 to the games in the bottom row, 2 to the games in the second-lowest row, 3 to the games in the third-lowest, etc. I did not count any games that were in a "haven't played yet" row. Since not all the tier lists had the same number of rows, the highest score for each one varied, between 4 and 7.

I used two different ways of coming up with the final scores. Firstly, I simply added up all the points each game has. This is the ranking that's in the first two slides above. However, I thought this might give an unfair advantage to games that more people have played, so I did a second ranking by calculating the average score (between 1 and 7) that each game received. Therefore, the games aren't ranked by how many people have played them, but by how much the people who did play them liked them. Overall, the two lists are pretty similar.

Interesting things I noticed:

• A lot of the totals were extremely close, ex. CUR winning first place by only one point.
• The top 5 games are the same in both lists, albeit their order is changed up. 8 out of the top 10 games in both lists are the same, with the first method (total # of pts) favouring the older games (TRT and DOG), and the second method (average score) favouring the newer ones (GTH and SEA).
• There isn't as much of a bias in favour of the old games as I'd thought (see slides 7-8). Every era has highs and lows. However, the run from MHM-TRN does have consistently high scores.
• I always felt that DDI-SHA-CUR was the strongest three-game run the series had, and it looks like that's reflected here.
• For some reason, some games are always in the same place no matter the method of scoring: DDI at 5th place, MHM at 8th, ICE at 18th, CAP at 23rd, SPY at 24th, DED at 27th, original SCK at 31st, and KEY at 35th.
• The two dossier games always rank near the bottom, but fare worse in terms of how many people have played them than how well people like them.
• I've realized my tastes in these games are really, really mainstream lol. "I'll have CUR, TRN, SHA, DDI, TRT, and MHM in my top ten." "How original." "And I don't really enjoy CRE, RAN, TOT, MED, or MID." Daring today, aren't we?"

Total lists for screen readers:

By # of points:

1. Curse of Blackmoor Manor – 142 points
2. Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon – 141 points
3. Secret of Shadow Ranch – 139 points
4. Warnings at Waverly Academy – 134 points
5. Danger on Deception Island – 131 points
6. Treasure in the Royal Tower – 129 points
7. Shadow at the Water’s Edge – 125 points
8. Message in a Haunted Mansion – 123 points
9. Legend of the Crystal Skull – 122 points
10. Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake – 118 points
11. The Final Scene – 116 points
12. The Phantom of Venice – 114 points
13. Sea of Darkness – 111 points
14. Secret of the Old Clock – 108 points
15. (TIE) Secret of the Scarlet Hand / Ghost of Thornton Hall – 106 points each
16. The Haunted Carousel – 105 points
17. White Wolf of Icicle Creek – 104 points
18. Haunting of Castle Malloy – 103 points
19. Danger by Design – 101 points
20. Alibi in Ashes – 96 points
21. Stay Tuned for Danger – 90 points
22. The Captive Curse – 89 points
23. The Silent Spy - 88 points
24. Trail of the Twister – 73 points
25. Tomb of the Lost Queen - 71 points
26. The Deadly Device – 69 points
27. Labyrinth of Lies – 66 points
28. Creature of Kapu Cave – 65 points
29. Secrets Can Kill (Remastered) – 57 points
30. Ransom of the Seven Ships – 50 points
31. Secrets Can Kill (Original) – 48 points
32. The Shattered Medallion – 38 points
33. Midnight in Salem – 27 points
34. Mystery of the Seven Keys – 23 points
35. Resorting to Danger – 21 points
36. Lights, Camera, Curses – 18 points

By average score:

1. Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon – 4.55
2. Secret of Shadow Ranch – 4.48
3. Warnings at Waverly Academy – 4.47
4. Curse of Blackmoor Manor – 4.30
5. Danger on Deception Island – 4.23
6. Shadow at the Water’s Edge – 4.17
7. Legend of the Crystal Skull – 4.07
8. Message in a Haunted Mansion – 3.97
9. Sea of Darkness – 3.96
10. Ghost of Thornton Hall – 3.93
11. Treasure in the Royal Tower – 3.91
12. Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake – 3.81
13. The Phantom of Venice – 3.80
14. The Final Scene – 3.63
15. Stay Tuned for Danger – 3.60
16. Haunting of Castle Malloy – 3.55
17. Secret of the Old Clock – 3.48
18. White Wolf of Icicle Creek – 3.47
19. Secret of the Scarlet Hand – 3.42
20. The Haunted Carousel – 3.39
21. Danger by Design – 3.37
22. Alibi in Ashes – 3.31
23. The Captive Curse – 3.30
24. The Silent Spy – 3.26
25. Tomb of the Lost Queen – 2.84
26. Labyrinth of Lies – 2.75
27. The Deadly Device – 2.65
28. Resorting to Danger – 2.63
29. Trail of the Twister – 2.61
30. Creature of Kapu Cave – 2.41
31. Secrets Can Kill (Original) – 2.40
32. Lights Camera, Curses – 2.25
33. Secrets Can Kill (Remastered) – 2.19
34. Ransom of the Seven Ships – 1.92
35. Mystery of the Seven Keys – 1.77
36. The Shattered Medallion – 1.58
37. Midnight in Salem – 1.35

Lastly, this is only intended to represent a portion of the fanbase's opinions at a snippet in time. I think it's a pretty good general consensus on how the games are perceived, but I wouldn't say it's definite in any way.

Encouraged by u/Existing_Ocelot1633, I decided to make my own Nancy Drew games tier list. My ranking is pretty much the same as how it's always been, though I haven't actually made a tier list since around 2020/2021 and I've never posted one here. I checked back through the sub's history to make sure this isn't the millionth tier list posted here recently, but it looks like you only get around 1-2 a month, so hopefully this isn't annoying/repetitive to anybody.

The tiers:

This Game Raised Me: (great title btw) Message in a Haunted Mansion, Treasure in the Royal Tower, Curse of Blackmoor Manor, Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon. My GOATs. I put all the games in each tier in release order so I wouldn't get stuck overthinking the ranking, but I'd say my #1 is and will always be TRT, followed by CUR, MHM, and TRN.

Absolute Classic: Secret of the Scarlet Hand, Danger on Deception Island, Secret of Shadow Ranch. I'd say I like them in reverse order of that (SHA first, then DDI, then SSH). Honestly Scarlet Hand might be below a few in the 'Great' tier, but I felt I had to put it in Absolute Classic since it's the first one I ever played, over 20 years ago now (which seems CRAZY).

Great: The Final Scene, Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake, Secret of the Old Clock, Haunting of Castle Malloy, Warnings at Waverly Academy, Shadow at the Water's Edge, The Captive Curse.

Good: (I changed it from 'Mid' because honestly even a mid-tier Nancy Drew game is still very enjoyable to me) The Haunted Carousel, Danger by Design, White Wolf of Icicle Creek, Legend of the Crystal Skull, Phantom of Venice, Alibi in Ashes, Ghost of Thornton Hall, The Deadly Device.

Boring or Impossible: Creature of Kapu Cave, Ransom of the Seven Ships, Trail of the Twister, Midnight in Salem, and Mystery of the Seven Keys (which I basically gave up on finishing ... idk what to do with the stupid astronomical instrument thing in the museum!)

Haven't Played or Finished: Both Secrets Can Kills, Stay Tuned for Danger (original SCK and STFD didn't work on my computer as a kid, and I tried the remastered SCK but found it boring - maybe I should've put it one tier higher), Tomb of the Lost Queen, The Silent Spy, The Shattered Medallion, Labyrinth of Lies, Sea of Darkness.

I won't deny there's a pretty clear nostalgia bias here lol. This also makes me realize how many Nancy Drews I still need to finish. I'm currently replaying Alibi in Ashes for the first time ever (I think?) and after that I'm going to move through the rest of the games chronologically.

I'm so glad there's a community online for us ND fans!

I've only ever seen hummingbird moths a handful of times. I almost didn't believe it when I saw it randomly sitting on the floor inside Shoppers Drug Mart. I thought it was dead at first but it fluttered when I picked it up and crawled around on my hand a bit. It kept waving its front legs in the air. I didn't know what to do with it, so I brought it outside and put it on a flowering plant nearby as I think these guys drink nectar. Hopefully it ended up okay.

I found this beautiful moth just inside a Shopper's Drug Mart, underneath one of the windows - probably got trapped inside and exhausted itself trying to get out through the glass. I picked it up and it was alive but weak. It crawled around on my hand a bit and waved its front legs in the air. I put it outside in a flower bush, though I had a bit of a challenge detaching it from my finger! I don't know if it survived or not, but I hope so. It was adorable.

I was so floored, motivated, and inspired by the outpouring of support I got last week that I decided to do an update. It's all still a work in progress, and the rest of my house needs to be cleaned/reorganized too, but at least I managed to keep the kitchen relatively clean throughout the week.

I really wanted to get more done this long weekend, not only in terms of housework but also exercise, work from home, and hobbies - but as usual that didn't happen. I worked part-time on Saturday and also did some extra work from home all 3 days. I didn't stay in bed past 3 p.m. any day so I count that as a win!

I appreciate all of your support more than words can say. You are all SO caring, thoughtful, and considerate. I'm going to see if there's a way to download all Reddit comments so I can keep them for the future. Also, I'm sorry I didn't get around to responding to all the comments on my original post, there were just so many of them! I honestly feel a little guilty that my post got so much more attention than other people's. Best of luck to everyone here with their household un-fucking!

Link to original post

Every week I try to get my kitchen under control and every week it comes back to this. Few/no clean dishes so I order delivery. Recyclables all over the place because I hate the gross feeling of cleaning them out. Rotting food in the sink and fridge. I have loaves of bread in bags in the fridge that are completely green with mold and pumpkins that have been in there since Halloween.

I try to make a dent in it but I just look at it and despair. At most I do a load or two of dishes and then it gets awful again. I don't know what's wrong with me other than just being exhausted and worn out from work and daily mundane stress.

I ordered a little filing cabinet for all the paperwork spilling off my desk (not pictured) but it's just sat there in pieces for a week unassembled.

Fuck, it's past 6 p.m. and I haven't even changed or gotten out of bed except briefly.

I'm tired of feeling like an incompetent worthless human being. It has to be able to get better than this, right?