I finally identified my resident vampire. He was a migrant bone doctor that came in my second wave. After the hammerer refused to carry out the beating he was sentenced to, I locked him in his room. D'oh, vampires don't eat or drink. Oh well, I'll dig a pit above his room and fill it with water bucket by bucket. D'oh, vampires don't breathe. Fine, I'll crash the damn ceiling in on his head.
After ensuring that there was no one below my hastily-constructed crushing platform, I designate the support to be removed. It's physically impossible for dwarves to fit under the crusher. Yet three of them managed it somehow. Two died. The last, a mother with a child, survived the three-floor fall.
Oh, and I took out the vampire.

In the year 1051, the dwarven fortress known as "AncientCats" was established by the order of dwarves known as "The Fondled Rack", no seriously, that's their name! Things went well from the very beginning and there was much prosperity for all. Masterful crafts made from the finest rocks and bones fueled the young fortress's growing economy, though in the early years the trade broker was rather aggressive and many traders left in anger. But with time comes experience.
The Fondled Rack survived many sieges by the local goblins and the captives were used to build a strong army of three squads. Little did they realize it wasn't the goblins they should be fearing.

It never fails, 10 minutes before passing out last night, an invasion force arrived at the fortress. Not even a small one, about 100 attackers made up of trolls and goblins. They snuck us good too, took out just about every dwarf outside the main wall. The main drawbridge has been raised and I was forcing them through a cage trap tunnel but the trolls broke the hatch on that entrance so there's really no stopping them now. I managed to trap all the trolls so now it's just goblins. I'm hoping as they slowly work their way down the hallway I'll be able to pick off the ones who don't get trapped in cages. So far so good, I actually saw one brave dwarf carrying her child in one arm and shooting her crossbow with the other, and she was actually kickin ass, but there's a lot of goblins so it may not go well. This may be the end of the Fortress of Chaos, that is unless the vampire is released...

Dwarf Fortress is like blissful drugs. You get caught up in hours, days, weeks of hopeless euforia and new discoveries, all while your personal life crumbles around you. You can do nothing to stop it. You're hopelessly caught. Only a little further. I only need to finish this room. This tunnel. Ooh, shiny!

The peasant asked me to kill the spouse of the shadow monster. The lair was a little disgusting, but I managed to pick around and find a few coins from its human and goblin victims, minted by the Nation of Rabbits and the Tick of Constructs respectively. The spouse itself was dispatched with relative ease. I went straight to the castle overlooking the river to report my deeds. The lord there sent me off to kill the dark creature bridegroom, and I took a swordsman with me.

Now, here’s the thing about dwarves: they’re not like you and me. We wake up, we shower, we get dressed, we go to work, and while we’re doing all this, sometimes we get an idea. “I should write a cookbook that focuses on pomegranates,” we think, and then we get out of the shower and towel off and we don’t write the book. “I should create a mosaic depicting Washington’s terrible defeat at Fort Necessity,” we think, and then, almost always, we reach our bus stop, we step off the bus, and we go on with our lives.