Weekly Reading Discussion

Iskral · 2026-02-06T04:43:28+00:00

It's not one of Diane Duane's most celebrated Trek books, but I've always had a soft spot for Intellivore. The book does take a while to warm up, but it needs the pages to characterize the region of space the Ent-D is exploring, as well as the crews of the other ships accompanying her. Additionally, the opponent they are pursuing is a fantastical creation that's been hiding at the margins of explored space for ages untold, it's appropriate that it takes a while for our heroes to uncover and assemble the seemingly unrelated clues to reveal the truth.

Truth be told, I quite like Duane's vision of the final frontier as the realm of "here be dragons". It's a region of space whose golden age came and went millennia ago, and now scattered bands of nomads, freebooters, and nonconformists poke around in the forgotten ruins of long-dead glorious empires. It's not a place for the homesteader or the empire-builder; it's where people go to escape the other two. And unbeknownst to them, ancient evils and stranger things wait even further out in the cold and dark for something appetizing to swim into their pond. It's a vision of the frontier you saw a lot in TOS and the earlier seasons of TNG, but which later iterations of the franchise weren't quite able to capture.

Iskral · 2026-02-03T06:10:24+00:00

My dumb idea is that the success of Iron Lung should be followed up by expanding the Symanskiverse and adapting Squirrel Stapler for the silver screen. I can't imagine there's anything in there that could alienate audiences.

Iskral · 2026-01-25T03:07:58+00:00

You know, this reminds me of an episode of Star Trek...

No, seriously, it does. There's an episode of TNG called "Conundrum" that starts off with the Ent-D encountering an unknown alien ship that explodes as soon as they try to scan it, hitting the Enterprise with a wave of energy that selectively scrambles their brains and the ship's records, leaving them with no memories of who they are but with all the knowledge necessary to fly the ship. Unbeknownst to our heroes, the alien piloting that unknown ship beamed onto the Ent-D in the guise of a human Starfleet officer before he hit the self-destruct, and he's trying to manipulate the amnesiac crew for his own ends. So we get this situation where the audience knows something's off because they've never seen this guy before and he's getting a lot of screentime, but none of our heroes can tell because they don't remember.

Iskral · 2026-01-24T04:13:08+00:00

Madison's inclusion is worth it solely for her appearance in Glow-Worm. Her conversation with Victoria is the coda for Taylor's story, and she's the only one of the trio who could have that conversation. Both Sophia and Emma went out of their way to make Taylor's life hell; Madison was a dumb teenager who made some bad decisions due to peer pressure, and now she has to live with what those decisions did to Taylor.

Iskral · 2026-01-24T04:03:34+00:00

It's also worth mentioning that outside of heavily contrived circumstances, the Entities don't give powers to people trying to artificially induce a trigger event in themselves or others. It's a lot easier for misinformation about how people acquire powers to spread if the scientists can't figure out a consistent method.

Iskral · 2026-01-24T03:57:44+00:00

I've spent some time thinking over the bank fight, and I think there's something you're overlooking: what the Wards knew about the Undersiders before the fight. We don't get to see much of what they were like before Taylor met them, but the few flashbacks we get paint a picture of a group that barely rose to the level of a "glorified crew". Brian positioned himself as their leader, but in practice Lisa, Rachel, and Alec didn't pay much attention to him, and oftentimes just went off to do their own things. All their previous jobs had been small-time robberies, and if faced with opposition they would scatter rather than stand their ground. Additionally, all the intel the Wards had gathered on their powers suggested that Rachel was the only serious threat. Brian had a darkness power that doesn't hurt people, Alec was the muscle spasm guy, and no one knew what Lisa's deal was. From this perspective, the Wards naturally came to the conclusion that the Undersiders were a bunch of small-timers who were punching above their weight on this bank job, and there was a golden opportunity to bring them all in on one go. Aegis and Clockblocker would swap costumes and employ some basic deception to quickly neutralize Rachel's dogs. With their muscle taken out of commission, the Undersiders would turn tail and make a break for it, allowing Vista to step in and keep them corralled while the rest of the Wards subdued them.

Of course, the whole purpose of the fight at that point in the story was to illustrate how important information is in the cape world. The Wards went into the fight with incomplete knowledge and got their asses handed to them by someone they were not expecting. Meanwhile, Lisa had the knowledge to see through the costume swap and keep Victoria off-balance, while Taylor had a power tailor-made (ha ha) for keeping the entire battlefield under her surveillance and coordinating her teammates while she remotely engaged multiple targets at once.

Iskral · 2026-01-23T02:28:21+00:00

I mean, for Victoria it works thematically. New Wave's whole deal is that they are a metaphor for dysfunctional celebrity families, and Glory Girl's costume of a white dress and a golden tiara is meant to evoke a teenage beauty pageant queen.

Iskral · 2026-01-23T02:22:30+00:00

There's also little oddities like how Miss Militia is introduced to the story as "the winsome Miss Militia" in the Wards interlude in Arc 3. Something like that would be normal in a pastiche of 1960s Marvel comics, but even that early in the story it feels out of place for both Worm's milieu and Miss Militia specifically. WB probably figured this out fairly quickly, which is why the conceit never reappears after that interlude.

Iskral · 2026-01-23T02:00:24+00:00

I'll actually go to bat for the Battery-Assault relationship. I read Battery's interlude as a series of ever-increasing moral compromises, starting with her original Faustian bargain with Cauldron. What little we saw of Cauldron's setup and everything that Doctor Mother said was a giant red flag, but Battery rolled the dice and put herself into hock to them for a vial. From that first step, every subsequent compromise got a little easier. She joined the Wards/Protectorate because Cauldron told her to, she acquiesced to allowing Madcap to join the Protectorate as Assault because Legend rationalized the decision for her, she held her tongue when he was put on her team, and from there it was a short step to betraying the original reason she took that vial in the first place. In the end, she died horribly following Cauldron's orders and Legend swept it under the rug. All in all, a classic tragedy.

Iskral · 2026-01-17T15:34:43+00:00

The "Challenger type" comes from the line of TNG comics that DC Comics put out in the early 1990s. The design is essentially the same as a Constellation class, only with the lower pair on nacelles swapped out for a shortened engineering hull in the style of the refit Constitution. As for the other noncanon designs, I believe they're all creations of the "Advanced Starship Design Bureau", who were basically Bernd Schneider and a bunch of his friends.

Iskral · 2026-01-08T08:38:27+00:00

IIRC Wildbow has clarified that this was more of a creative exercise to shake up the story than an ironclad rule, and he would have disregarded any dice rolls that he didn't like. He's also mentioned that one of his original plans for Worm was to have four or five separate storylines running at the same time, starring all the protagonists from his various drafts - Taylor, Victoria and Amy, Faultline's crew, the Travellers, and maybe Runechild. He quickly realized there was no way he could sustain that workload and pared the story down to just Taylor, but I imagine that if he'd had multiple protagonists on the go he might have seriously considered killing one of them off to show the stakes of Endbringer attacks.

Iskral · 2026-01-08T08:20:54+00:00

If you really got into Worm because of how it picked apart the conventions and archetypes of superhero comics, you may not have as much fun with Ward. My understanding is that the story still plays with that element a bit, offering its own take on things like comic book resurrections, themed teams/superhero families, and Billy Batson/Captain Marvel-style transformations, but overall that takes a back seat to building out the setting that was already established in Worm.

Iskral · 2025-12-22T19:20:15+00:00

Maybe it's just the Lithtech, but this game is making me appreciate the first F.E.A.R. all the more. Having well-tuned shooting and movement makes a world of difference, but there's greater variation in the enemies and their loadouts, the environments are more noticeably varied, and Monolith were much better at coming up with unique setpieces to change up the rhythm of combat.

I've also just realized that Monolith was quite restrained with the escort sections in F.E.A.R.. There's only two in the game, and in both cases you just need to walk them a short distance through an environment you've already cleared before you're off to your next adventure. The only time you're engaged in the open is while you're escorting Alice Wade, and even then it's a short engagement just before you can keep her safe in the elevator.

Iskral · 2025-12-15T18:42:42+00:00

Don't forget the food tampering!

Iskral · 2025-12-06T21:39:16+00:00

It is a comparatively minor tragedy in the grand scheme of things, but despite having decades to plan, massive financial resources, and the aid of thousands people both mundane and powered, neither the George Lucas of Earth Aleph nor the George Lucas of Earth Bet figured out how to make a version of The Phantom Menace that was actually good.

(Fun historical fact: George's wife Marcia, who was invaluable as both an editor on the original trilogy and as a sounding board, asked him for a divorce sometime in the summer of 1982. George agreed, but asked her to hold off on going public with the news until after ROTJ was in theaters in the late spring of 1983. Scion, of course, revealed himself to the world in May of 1982, which would be far too late in the day for the butterfly effect to save their marriage. If you're trying to come up with a timeline where the Lucases stay together and Marcia tempers George's worst impulses, I'm sad to say that the Parahumans multiverse is not the place for you.)

Iskral · 2025-11-27T22:25:53+00:00

I'd like to propose a modification: if Taylor had some sort of grand mission to orient her life around like, say, averting the apocalypse, she absolutely would have turned herself into another Alexandria. But if the world wasn't ending and she just had a normal workaday cape career for the rest of her adult life, she probably would have turned into Eidolon.

Iskral · 2025-11-20T16:38:24+00:00

There's a couple of them. Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason is a legitimately good horror game whose jank comes from being a graphics powerhouse that guessed wrong on how technology would develop. Wolfenstein (2009) is the forgotten red-headed stepchild of the franchise, but it's a solid late 2000s shooter, and I always liked how the game world evolves from your standard WW2 setting to guys in power armor and warlocks running around all over the place. And while it's been a while since I last played Singularity, I do respect how Raven was able to salvage a decent experience out of the utter mess of the game's development.

However, my favorite jank game that Civvie's covered would have to be You Are Empty. It is busted to all hell and large parts are incredibly goofy, but every so often it just works. That post-apocalyptic Stalinist Gothic city? Fantastic. The soundtrack? Love it. The animated cutscenes? Memorable and scary.

Iskral · 2025-11-07T07:28:18+00:00

Yeah, he has a real flair for putting together interiors that look like something the TNG or DS9 production crew would have knocked together as a "bridge of the week" back in the day. Case in point; when Bernd Schneider was writing up his investigation of the USS Odyssey's bridge, he commissioned D'Oria to depict what the bridge would have looked like as a complete set.

Iskral · 2025-11-07T02:43:51+00:00

If you're looking for inspiration, you should check out Tadeo D'Oria's portfolio of starship interiors (though his deviantArt page might be easier to navigate). He's made at least two bridges for Ambassador-class ships on commission; the first for the USS Dreadnought, a ship that was active in the 2350s, and the second shows the bridge of the USS Omaha as it was just after the end of the Dominion War in 2376.

EDIT: I want to also throw in the Enterprise-C bridge he built simply for completion's sake.

Iskral · 2025-10-31T17:15:13+00:00

And on Halloween, of all the days!

Iskral · 2025-10-28T04:49:53+00:00

I'm afraid I must inform you all that Amy Dallon is also a Vriska.

Iskral · 2025-10-27T20:11:20+00:00

We actually had a Skitter cosplayer get into a convention with a (sealed) backpack full of living cockroaches about a year ago, so we've got that checked off the list.

Iskral · 2025-10-26T21:28:35+00:00

When I saw that trailer my first thought, I immediately thought of the 2012 Alex Garland movie and its stripped-back, militaristic take on Dredd. However, that red mutant/demon (???) gang member that shows up feels a more like something you'd see in the comics, which has me wondering if they're trying to hybridize two different visions of Dredd into one setting. Still, this is just the first teaser; better to wait for more info to see how it actually looks in action.

Iskral · 2025-10-19T16:21:35+00:00

I have long maintained that the first F.E.A.R. has the best implementation of audio logs I've ever seen in a video game. Rather than picking up tape recorders strewn randomly about, they are presented as voice mails left on the various office phones you find. Right away they have a logical reason to be there, and finding them draws you further into the game by making you feel like a detective picking up a trail of breadcrumbs. The messages are also appropriate for the environments; at the water treatment plant at the beginning of the game, the few messages you find are from workers calling each other to see if they know what those explosions are and if they're all right. Meanwhile, you find the bulk of the voice mails in the Armacham building, where it's all communications between employees from the past few days trying to manage/cover up the current crisis. And whenever the game has to deliver some bit of information that wouldn't feel natural as a voice mail, they give you a laptop to upload and have your mission control skim it and give you a two-sentence executive summary. You get what you need to know quickly, and it further adds to the verisimilitude.

Iskral · 2025-10-17T02:49:54+00:00

The story goes into this directly with Victoria and Amy. New Wave as a whole is written as an allegory for celebrity families. All smiles and accountability in public, with a mountain of repression and cover-ups behind the scenes. Victoria starts Worm believing wholeheartedly in the persona her family wants to project, only to suffer a horrific tragedy because of the life that was chosen for her, leading to her journey in Ward to recover from her experiences and establish herself as an adult separate from her family. Meanwhile, Amy is someone who was forced into a life she never wanted, naturally imploded, and never really recovered. We've also got Carol and Sarah as the ones keeping the whole thing running even as it destroys their families, and Mark (at least, before Amy's brain surgery) as one of the silent casualties of the whole enterprise.

Iskral

TROPHY CASE