BEWARE: beyond these words lies a tale of stupidity and newbishness. You have been warned
So, a few days ago I discovered DF, watched a few tutorial videos, and decided to start a fortress. The beginning was fairly tame, with digging out a fortress, cutting down trees, discovering you could direct your military to kill random wildlife, etc. It all started to go downhill when 1. Some keas snuck into my fortress and 2. My butcher left on break and left a corpse to rot in the fortress. Dwarfs could not eat or drink because they hung around those stockpiles. eventually, a dog ripped it apart but not before the damage was done, and I experienced my first tantrum. Yay. Some idiot dwarf decided to walk into the sealed off butcher room and unleashed miasma and flies into the fortress, and I got to witness my second tantrum. Double yay.
I managed to recover, until I saw this message:
Random dwarf interrupted by donkey head hair/ ox left ear hair.
I don't know why dwarfs were terrified by random undead hairs, but they were. I then looked at the unit screen and saw several kea corpses moving around, as well as a mutilated raven corpse. After several HOURS of searching and attempting to kill undead hair, I found the necromancer who was apparently also a trader in one of my cadge traps. I sic'd my military on him and tried to restore order to the bedroom level, where a mutilated undead raven was giving people nightmares. What I didn't notice was that the military couldn't kill the necromancer through the cage, and several died of hunger/thirst. I then looked at the looming tantrum spiral, then at my shoddily designed fortress, and abandoned it.
You may now make fun of my newbishness.