Hello everyone! I just wanted to share the story of my brothers transformation into a dwarf. It started about a year and a half ago ,a little while after I started playing DF. Me and my brother get together every few months to play videogames and catch up and every time for about a year I had tried to tell my brother about Dwarf Fortress because I was sure he would like it. I never could catch his attention with it though because of how hard it is to put how awesome it is into words, and the one time he wanted to see it I made the mistake of running vanila. I forgot how little sense ASCII makes to untrained eyes.
Anyways after about a year of that nonsense I decided to force him into a crash course on DF, it was for his own good. I made him watch (and collaborate) as I played a fortress, this time with Genesis (praise be to Deon!), for 5 years while I explained everything starting with a 15 minute tutorial on what he was looking at. After the first 5 minutes of gameplay (I had already explained material properties and combat) he was hooked.
This is the part that gets me all teary eyed. After a few months I went to visit him again, I had totaly forgotten about showing him the game. The first thing he says is "come look at my fort!". I was expecting something akin to my first forts. What I saw amazed me, it was a dwaven metropolis second only to the dwarfiest of mega projects. Now he has the benefit of having a $2300 liquid cooled demon to run this on. His population was just under 400 and it had been running for 230 years. It was his first fort. He had 150 masterpiece steel (everything except engravings and random crap was master) clad *weapon*masters.