nesterov81

[nesterov81]

Moore drives the point home in the penultimate issue with the cabbie fighting with her girlfriend. Despite being either distant acquaintances or complete strangers, all the civilian New Yorker characters come together to help break up the fight. Meanwhile the superheroes, who had originally justified themselves as community-focused police force, are all down in Antarctica embroiled in their dumbass drama. And of course, the issue ends with the squid alien Adrien created to avert WW3 materializing in the middle of New York City, killing all of these civilian characters with horrific psychic visions. (It's also implied in the news bulletins from just before the event that the US and the Soviets were also going to back down from the brink in Pakistan as well.)

A friend of mine who I lent Watchmen to was somewhat surprised to learn that Moore was an anarchist, since anarchist principles aren't really represented by any of the superheroes in a main cast where almost everyone embodies some kind of ideology or moral philosophy. This is, of course, something of a diagram-of-a-plane-riddled-with-bullets moments, since one implicit thesis of the book is that if you shared Moore's moral philosophy you wouldn't become a superhero.

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Deathloop is a weird one because it takes place in "a possible future" of the Dishonored series. The game is set about 130 years after the first two games on an out-of-the-way island outpost that's been completely cut off from the rest of the world via time nonsense, and while there's enough incidental detail for a Dishonored fan to make the connection, Deathloop itself goes out of its way to avoid namedropping anything from the earlier games.

More games should do the Disco Elysium/Deathloop thing of pretending that they're in our world before gradually revealing that it's a constructed world that has fuck-all to do with our world

[nesterov81]

There's another Worm connection in No Man's Land with Poison Ivy. As the rest of Batman's rogues' gallery carve up Gotham, she ends staking out a derelict city park and caring for a bunch of kids who were orphaned or otherwise abandoned after the earthquake. Rather than rousting her out, Batman agrees to leave her alone for the time being, provided she uses her powers to generate produce for the rest of the surviving citizens to eat. While Ivy was less than pleased about having to go along with this, she still held up her end of the deal.

In his own discussion of Ivy's history on Twitter, Exalted_Speed has argued that No Man's Land is really where the interpretation of Ivy as an antihero (ahem) took root. The connection with Worm is obvious; however, Taylor's tenure as urban warlord feels like a more refined version of that concept. As noted in the thread, the attempts to turn Poison Ivy into an antihero often stumble on both the sheer amount of carnage she's caused over the years and on with her original characterization of "vicious plant-themed Catwoman" which is still a major element in her modern portrayals. By contrast, it's much easier to offer apologetics of Taylor's conduct on the Boardwalk, since she was explicitly written to fit the role that Pamela Isely was awkwardly retrofitted to play.

Got a Worm meta question for you. I'm starting on the early parts of Taylor's warlord era - I'm about to leap into Arc 13 - and the general concept of a ravaged American city being divided up by various supervillain groups is reminding me a lot of that Batman story arc No Man's Land from the late 1990s. Unfortunately my comics knowledge is rudimentary at best, and I haven't been able to any discussion comparing the two stories, so I was wondering if I could pick your brain on the subject. Was it just convergent evolution, or was Wildbow engaging with the Batman story in some way?

I myself have only read about half of No Man's Land- and several years ago to boot- so I've got limited ability to do a direct compare and contrast. No Man's Land is absolutely the sort of status-quo-shattering, history-book-making upset that, within Marvel and DC, nonetheless always inexplicably heals and loses salience until you can barely tell that it's still in continuity. Worm is heavily informed by Wildbow's irritation with that sort of thing, so I think it's totally reasonable to view the warlord era through the lens of "What if No Mans Land had no editorial escape hatch." Alternatively, I think it kind of makes sense to view it through the lens that it's working backwards from the premise of No Man's Land- In what kind of setting would it be plausible for the Federal Government to write off a sufficiently-damaged American City? In what context would the legal infrastructure have been established for that, in what context would that even fall within the Overton Window? What muddies my opinion on this is that the general concept of a ravaged, atmospherically-apocalyptic American city torn up by superpowered gang warfare is something that's kind of just been in the water in superhero comics since the mid-eighties at least, and it was a relatively common thing to see during the Dark Age- they were choice prey for all those overpouched musclemen with their poorly rendered firearms. I'd be surprised if Wildbow wasn't at least aware of No Man's Land, but it's definitely not the only cape book from the late 90s or early oughts where you could pick up that idea from. Ultimately this leaves me unsure if No Man's Land is the specific referent or if it's just part-and-parcel with trying to do an involved, thoughtful take on what cape comics were like at the time.

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I think your best bet might be the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which has mountains of bibliographical entries for obscure and forgotten sff authors. The SF Encyclopedia is another good source, but that's more focused on SF in general rather than solely authors. There's also the SFE's sister work The Encyclopedia of Fantasy; it hasn't been seriously updated since the turn of the millennium, but if you're looking for an old fantasy author, you might get lucky.

the peril of reading old scifi/fantasy is i’m left trying to navigate author websites that were clearly hand coded in html 20 years ago and haven’t been updated since when i just want a nice neat list of all their books that they somehow don’t seem to have 😭

[nesterov81]

Oh, you just reminded me of my second-favorite Shakespeare adaptation: Rupert Goold's 2010 film adaptation of Macbeth, with Sir Patrick Stewart himself as Macbeth and Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth. It's based on a production Goold put on in 2007 with Stewart, and it sets the play in a nebulously-modern setting with a "subterranean Soviet" aesthetic. It's not quite what anon was looking for, but it's in the ballpark. Oh, and in this adaptation the witches take the guise of WWI-era war nurses.

Having seen the 1995 version of Richard III, I am now convinced that there needs to be an adaptation set in the dying days of tsarist Russia, if only for the red-white symbolism. Just like, the ostentation, the moral ambiguity/amorality of literally everyone involved, the end-of-an-era vibe, except the era definitely needs to end. Also, Elizabeth Woodville in a kokoshnik? Elizabeth Woodville in a kokoshnik.

DUDE YOUR MIND

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The question I've been asking is why Sandra Newman decided to go with Julia instead of Winston Smith's ex-wife Katherine. Julia has the much bigger part in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I've come to find Katherine interesting precisely because her presence in the story is so minimal. Winston describes her as a conformist who just recites whatever doggerel the Party puts out, but the stridency of this depiction makes me wonder if Winston himself was engaging in his own little bit of historical revisionism and narrative framing. Additionally, while Katherine and Winston are still technically married, by the beginning of the novel they are for all intents and purposes separated, and IIRC Winston's narration makes it fairly clear she was the one who did the separating. Perhaps there's room there for a story of the contradictions, complexities, and compromises of a true believer.

What do we think of the feminist 1984 retelling? Am I being kneejerk eye-rolling for no reason?

[nesterov81]

To steal a quote, it’s called “girl power”, not “girl ethics”.

Do you think Col. Cassandra Moore effectively utilized Girl Power when she funneled an extrajudicial paramilitary mailman towards several nominally-hostile-but-perfectly-diplomatically-tractable factions in the Mojave Wasteland

[nesterov81]

TNG still had a fair number of godlike energy-based or “sufficiently advanced” beings outside of Q. Off the top of my head there’s the extradimensional god of the Edo, Nagilum, Kevin Uxbridge, and “Isabella”. Beyond TNG, I do think you’re right; there really weren’t any in DS9 outside of the Prophets, and VOY and ENT avoided the trope entirely. There are other ways the consolidation of the Trek universe under TNG changed the types of stories that were told. There was a recurring trope in TOS of fellow captains who suffered some sort of horrible tragedy and ended up going off the reservation in some way, and the only time that plot comes up in TNG is with Benjamin Maxwell and the Cardassians. @abigailnussbaum also made the point in her old TNG critique that as the show went on, the planets-of-the-week Picard and co. visited were increasingly worlds that had preexisting relations with the Federation rather than being new discoveries. While this didn’t really change the types of stories that were being told, it had the effect of making TNG more about maintaining the Federation than exploring strange new worlds.

One of Star Trek: The Next Generation's missions was to give coherence to a world originally developed as a frame for the one-off episodes – completely disconnected SF stories using the same stock cast and setting – of the original series.

There's an abortive first season plot about corruption in Starfleet that's dropped once it's established Starfleet isn't interesting enough to bear more weight than as a plot device telling the Enterprise where to go this week.

Something underappreciated as a success though is that the original series had scads of godlike but trickstery or inhuman beings because individual writers (the Trek franchises were famously full of episodes by published SF writers and continued to take freelance episode pitches well after this had been widely abandoned in TV) kept finding the notion of the Enterprise dealing with one a solid premise.

And in TNG we instead get Q, this type condensed into a single recurring character, introduced in the pilot, getting 6 episodes to himself and then blessing the finale, going on to appear in other Trek shows across multiple galactic quadrants (also, basically My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, as the John de Lancie-voiced season 2 big bad Discord)

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I’m ashamed to admit that it was only after I finished watching the new Venture Brothers movie that I realized that Distributor Cap was a riff on the ‘66 version of Mr. Sparkplug.

Reading the wikipedia entries for minor Batman villains is like, “Mr. Sparkplug was introduced in 1969. He wore a rectangular costume that resembled a sparkplug, and had power to make electrical outlets stop working. After the Infinite Crisis event, he was reimagined as a serial killer with a fetish for electrostimulation. He had a cameo on Batman the Brave and the Bold where the Joker shoved him into a locker. In the New 52, the Riddler killed him and hung his costume over the mantlepiece as a trophy. He is now on the Suicide Squad.”

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What happened? I haven’t been following the show, but I’m vaguely aware they did something with Spock in the latest episode.

Wtf, Strange New Worlds is making me hate Star Trek

[nesterov81]

Pour one out for all the stories you'll never find again, that you barely remember in totality, but that left an impression on you that you'll never forget.

The short stories from standardized tests that you only had a few minutes to read, but those minutes will last a lifetime.

The books on the library display shelf you used to occupy time until your mom could come pick you up from school.

The graphic novel you picked up when you were first getting into comics and could never find again.

The single lines or themes from stories you otherwise don't remember, save for the one thing that you saw and internalized as a new part of your personality.

Let's pour one out for the books that built us, even if we never could find them again, and couldn't of we wanted to.

[nesterov81]

Forgive my bluntness, but isn’t the Myers-Briggs system based off of a deeply simplified interpretation of Jungian psychology that mental health professionals (Jungian psychologists or otherwise) consider littler better than a horoscope? Are companies actually using the test as a way to judge candidates? (Mind you, we could probably say the same things about IQ tests.)

Study Myers-Briggs and learn to fake out the test to thinking you’re an “SP” or “SJ”, preferably extroverted type, depending upon the job that’s giving you a personality test. I suspect that lots of non-professional jobs and non-tech jobs are specifically weeding out people who would map to Myers Briggs NT or NF types, and using iNtuitive Thinker traits as a proxy for autism. Make sure you can fake the test out to your cisnormative personality type expected of your gender; that will be T if male and F if female. I highly suspect that iNtuitive (Thinker or Feeler, but especially Thinker in any retail setting) personality traits are being mapped to unemployable neurodivergence by employment related personality tests.

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The important thing to remember about the Star Trek universe is that the formula for Coca-Cola was lost during the Eugenics Wars, while PepsiCo was forcibly nationalized in the 2050s by Colonel Green, who dismantled their bottling plants and had much of the workforce executed on the grounds that they produced, quote, “an impure beverage”. (RC Cola still exists in the 24th century, but nobody drinks it.)

The most unrealistic part of Star Trek Deep Space Nine is the idea that root beer is exceedingly popular. Root beer is gross and a hyper-advanced humanity isn't going to embarrass themselves by drinking that in front of the aliens

[nesterov81]

There was also the Tox Uthat, the MacGuffin from the third-season episode “Captain’s Holiday”, that could perform the same trick. No explanation is ever given as to how the device works, beyond the Treknobabble description of “quantum phase inhibitor”, so beyond “piece of alien technology from three centuries after TNG that works by Trek science rules”, there isn’t much room to speculate as to how it shuts down stellar fusion reactions.

In Star Trek Generations, the bad guys had a substance which could stop the fusion inside a star, making it collapse and produce a solar-system-obliterating shockwave. This is actually somewhat feasible compared to your average Star Trek science: for various reasons I don't think it could actually exist in the way it does in the movie, but you could conceive of a substance that acted as "fusion poison", producing more of itself when it collided with energetic hydrogen but was not itself able to be fused further. Even the bit about the shockwave was really plausible: it's pretty much exactly what happens in an actual core collapse supernova.

The one really unfeasible part was that it couldn't happen instantaneously like it did in the movie. Even in the core of starts, most hydrogen atom collisions don't result in fusion - they can't overcome the Coulomb barrier. If you introduced a self-replicating fusion poison into the core of the Sun, it would grow only very slowly, at least at first. You could imagine a fusion poison produced almost no notable effects for centuries or millennia, then maybe a one-lifetime period of noticeable effects, then the Sun went out and everyone died.

Which I actually think would be a better story. Suppose you knew that there was a fusion poison, but not exactly when the Sun would collapse, since astrophysical time scales are immense and imprecise. It's going to be in the next 10,000 years, but beyond that you're not certain. Would people try to escape the Solar System? What would life be look in an era of certain doom but highly-uncertain timing?

[nesterov81]

And in another parallel with Disco Elysium, Kathryn Janeway’s psyche is also composed of 24 self-aware archetypes, 18 of which are actively trying to drive her to destruction.

from what i can gather Disco Elysium is about this guy

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“Now tell me which is better: three...or four? Three...or four.” “Three...or four.”

Do you see your little red house?

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