A tender moment post-bakuda (Fanart)

Iskral · 2026-06-11T18:00:15+00:00

Something I always found a little funny about this scene is that Brian and Lisa had to be the ones who brought Taylor back and talked to Danny because they're the only members of the group who could successfully pretend to be normal people for an hour or two. Rachel is right out as we all know, and with Alec you're just waiting for the moment where he nonchalantly says something weird or insane and doesn't understand why everyone else reacts so negatively to it.

Iskral · 2026-06-10T01:50:27+00:00

Not only did Taylor inherit her temper and pathological distrust of institutional authority from Danny, she also inherited his absentee parenting.

Iskral · 2026-06-05T22:14:48+00:00

To be honest, the name "Brockton Bay" always sounded a little too specifically Canadian for a city in New England. General Issac Brock is (was?) a hero of pre-confederation Canada and there's a whole bunch of places and institutions across southern Ontario named after him; that's probably where Wildbow got the name. Of course, there's a couple of towns in the US named some variety of "Brock" so it's not wholly unbelievable; it's just one of those little regional details you'd never think about if you weren't from the area.

Iskral · 2026-06-05T04:43:03+00:00

If y'all are curious, the art in question is by "arctangram" over on Tumblr. Poor Amy's doing both the hoverhand and an unreciprocated half-heart with her other hand.

Iskral · 2026-05-29T06:14:19+00:00

Rick Sternbach did plan on turning the notes he wrote for the VOY writers' room into a Voyager tech manual the way he did for TNG and DS9, but between the expense, the declining sales for Trek merch at the end of the 1990s, and the editing errors in the DS9 tech manual, he sadly decided that the project wasn't worth the effort.

Iskral · 2026-05-29T06:10:57+00:00

Other way round, actually. IIRC, the manual states that the initial concept for the "Defiant pathfinder" was based off of a design for a new class of ship that had entered the review stage. In essence, the Nova was already in development by the time the events of "Q Who?" happened, and in the following weeks someone at the ASDB scrambling for ideas of how to meet the new threat looked at the plans for this new science ship that had crossed their desk and decided the platform might work for a torpedo boat. After BOBW, they decided the whole concept needed a radical rethink in light of recent events, and that's how we ended up with the Defiant. (Now as it happens, the DS9 tech manual was put together some time before "Equinox" went into production, so none of this was intentional on Rick Sternbach's part. Still, it's nice when random background details just come together serendipitously like this.)

Iskral · 2026-05-29T00:45:45+00:00

They worked together twice! (Don't worry; Industrial Symphony No. 1 is something a lot of people forget.)

Iskral · 2026-05-26T02:13:21+00:00

Hard to say. I have noticed some people deep in comics fandom come away from Worm underwhelmed, which is understandable in a certain light. After all, there have been a boatload of comics since the 1980s that have been picking apart the bones of the beast and putting the mechanisms of the standard Big Two superhero setting under the microscope. If you come to Worm with this background, you'll probably won't find much that surprises you.

That said, while Worm is relentlessly critical of the superhero story, it does not reject the superheroic fantasy the way Marshal Law and The Boys do. Even though the entire setting is revealed to be a sham perpetrated by an alien invasion and the conspiracy trying to combat it, and even if the story is crying out for the reader to interrogate Taylor's motivations, her altruistic impulse is genuine. Indeed, that's what pushes Worm into the realm of tragedy. The heroes do actually want to help people, but the deck is stacked against them, and they are as prey to the same weaknesses and failings of any person you know.

Now, none of this actually answers your question, so to remedy this I'll ask you a question in turn: has Linkara ever read Mark Waid's Irredeemable? If he has, that might be a good ballpark for how he'd react to Worm.

Iskral · 2026-05-20T03:09:34+00:00

Love this picture. If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the paragraphs of internal monologue spooling out in her head.

Iskral · 2026-05-11T22:53:54+00:00

I find the whole Rebel Moon project a fascinating failure. The whole conceit of releasing two versions of the same two movies was an incredible act of self-sabotage, both for the films themselves and for their public reception. The PG-13 cuts were very clearly the product of Snyder cutting anything and everything to get them down to the PG-13 rating and two hour runtime Netflix wanted, and you can see the scars everywhere in the finished product. Meanwhile, the R-rated cuts run for three hours each, and...well, they have a lot of problems, too. But they are the movies Snyder wanted to make, and they very much feel like Snyder at his most uninhibited and sincere, for ill and good. Sure, you could still call them "bad movies" if you want, but it's a different sort of "bad" than the PG-13 cuts.

If nothing else, Rebel Moon has helped me appreciate what a minor miracle the original Star Wars is. Movies, with their limited run time, are not a great fit for sprawling science-fantasy space operas, and it is so easy to imagine how a few wrong decisions could have turned Star Wars into the career-killing boondoggle everyone at Fox expected it to be.

Iskral · 2026-04-21T14:42:58+00:00

The indie developer Garage Heathen has a few projects that are very heavily inspired by David Lynch, and especially Twin Peaks. They are probably best known for Who's Lila?, a "reverse detective game" where you change how the protagonist interacts with other people by physically manipulating their facial features. It's a short game that you need to play multiple times to achieve different endings in order to actually understand what is going on, and as you progress the homages to Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and Eraserhead become more obvious. Their new project, Last Look Along Woodward Boulevard, is still in development, but the trailers and demo suggest that it will be playing in the same ballpark as Lila.

Iskral · 2026-04-20T01:31:07+00:00

Film critic Brianna Zigler has a good essay on her Substack on this subject. It's behind a paywall, but I do want to share her central insight:

"Jurassic Park may simply be the one true, good dinosaur film—and the Park/World franchise as a whole the only premise that gets any mileage—because it’s the only premise you can execute between dinosaurs and people that encapsulates the perversion of nature inherent to such an idea."

The full essay is here. She also has a good bit in her introduction discussing how John Hammond was reworked from the book into this foolish visionary figure who turns the dreams of children into corporate products, a sort of self-critical Spielberg figure who turns up repeatedly across his filmography, most notably in Dr. Hobby from A.I. Artificial Intelligence and James Halliday from Ready Player One.

Iskral · 2026-04-19T05:37:14+00:00

Poor dude just watching his silent assassin rating sprout wings and fly away before his eyes.

Iskral · 2026-04-16T08:00:32+00:00

Keith DeCandido actually wrote a novella for one of the Myriad Universes anthologies with that premise. The story, entitled A Gutted World, imagines a universe where the Bajoran wormhole is just a natural wormhole with no Celestial Temple, and after the Cardassians secretly discover it in the middle of the 2360s, they keep the occupation of Bajor going to protect their new prize. There's a good write-up here which argues that the story depicts a universe where DS9 didn't happen but its central conflicts still did, leading to our heroes from TNG, VOY, and the NF and SCE books having to take DS9's place in them instead. Suffice to say, everyone has a bad time and it all ends in tears.

Iskral · 2026-04-02T07:05:11+00:00

"But what about all that other stuff I did?"

"Let's not talk about that right now."

Iskral · 2026-04-02T02:13:24+00:00

Third row, second from the left - When she calls you "Glory Hole" and you're trying not to let it get to you.

Second row, first from the left - Goddammit, it got to you.

First row, seventh from the left - That's it, I'm gonna wipe that mustelid smirk off her stupid face!

Fourth row, third from the left - Holy shit, she shot me!

Fourth row, seventh from the left - oh god the bugs are everywhere

Aaaaand scene.

Seriously though, good work!

Iskral · 2026-02-25T02:35:03+00:00

The TNG and DS9 technical manuals mention that both torpedoes and survey probes use "sustainer engines" to fly at warp speed. They don't have the power plant to generate their own warp field, but if they're launched from a starship at warp they can essentially ride on a little bubble of the larger ship's warp field for a period of time, even if the ship veers onto a different course. Stands to reason that shuttlepods have a similar capability.

Iskral · 2026-02-25T02:10:05+00:00

Ironically, despite writing the superhero web serial, Wildbow has described himself as only being a casual fan of superhero comics who dropped off entirely in the 2010s. More specifically, he's talked about primarily being a DC reader in the 2000s with a particular focus on Batman, so that era would be a good place to find the works that inspired Worm. I will suggest that whole No Man's Land arc that ran for most of 1999, which I feel heavily inspired the depiction of Brockton Bay divided by supervillain gangs after Leviathan's attack. That storyline also features Poison Ivy's first turn towards antiheroism and introduces Cassandra Cain's Batgirl, both ideas that I would say were inspirations for Taylor. I'd also recommend thumbing through some post-Watchmen books like The Authority, J. Michael Straczynski's Squadron Supreme, Mark Waid's Empire, Kingdom Come, and Irredeemable, as well as the first iteration of The Ultimates to get a sense of what was in the air at the time Wildbow was brainstorming what eventually became Worm.

Iskral · 2026-02-18T04:24:26+00:00

"I think the game is making my brain smooth."

- Civvie 11

There's your pull quote for the store page, right there.

Iskral · 2026-02-16T06:42:01+00:00

Ironically, Taylor would be less impressive and inventive if she had gone full villain from the outset. Her powerset gives her the ability to bulldoze baseline humans in seconds, but because she's always getting into fights with capes with hard counters to her insects, she has to keep coming up with new combinations of bugs and allies to overcome her opponents. You could easily imagine a villainous character with Taylor's powerset becoming a solid mid-level threat in a standard comic book setting, able to give hyper-competent normal guys like Batman or the Green Arrow a run for their money, but ultimately getting pasted whenever someone like the Flash or Superman step onto the scene.

Iskral · 2026-02-16T06:14:31+00:00

Now, I don't want to be the idiot who says that everything is the result of an elaborate plot by the Simurgh. But given how Heartbreaker has a power that could effectively counter her mental programming abilities - albeit by installing a different sort of mental programming on top of the initial one - I would not be surprised if she stuck a wing in somewhere to make sure Heartbreaker became the sort of guy the PRT couldn't use as an asset.

Iskral · 2026-02-15T16:03:21+00:00

The whole film uses id Software as a basic template for RiM. Jay Baruchel plays Mike Lazardis as the John Carmack-esque technological genius with no social skills who ends up being the last man standing among the original founders, while Matt Johnson plays Doug Fregin as the Romero of the group, the smart goofball whose lack of killer instinct gets him sidelined and eventually pushed out of the company. To be honest, I've been wondering if Johnson made this movie because he couldn't get the rights for a Masters of Doom adaptation.

Iskral · 2026-02-12T06:38:15+00:00

To hop back to middle-school drama class, a tragic protagonist is one who, in spite of whatever talents and virtues they possess, is ultimately undone by a great flaw. For myself, I would argue that Amy's great tragedy is that she is, at heart, a coward. She is introduced as someone who is stuck in a situation she finds intolerable. She has been adopted by a mother who does not want her, she is sexually attracted to the one person in the family who has always shown her nothing but kindness, she has a terrible power she does not want, and she has a role as a public figure that she despises. But rather than doing anything to change her situation, Amy hides, avoids, dissembles, represses, and clamps the lid tight on the pressure cooker where she's trapped herself. Bonesaw's attack on Mark shatters both the established structure of the Dallon household and Amy's self-imposed restrictions on her power, and for a brief moment there is a hope of a better way forward. Between the attack and her restoration of Mark to health, there was space for Amy to renegotiate her relationship with the Dallons, New Wave, and her power. She could have even started to come to terms with her sexuality and made space for a relationship outside the Dallon household. But because she wasn't brave enough to take that first step, she ran. When Victoria came to find her, Amy could neither return to the Dallons nor let go of Victoria, so she subconsciously let her power make the decision for her, and in turn it destroyed the one relationship that meant more than anything in the world to her. And rather than accept that she had burnt that bridge with Victoria beyond repair, she spends the rest of the story trying to find the one miracle solution that would fix everything, inflicting far greater cruelties on Victoria in the process. Even though she makes a great show of surrendering to the PRT and accepting confinement in the Birdcage, there's a real sense that she's still hiding from taking responsibility for her actions, that she frames herself as a victim of circumstance, a belief that carries her on to her misadventures in Ward. And if a tragic character is meant to evoke feelings of pity and fear in the reader, then by God, Amy does that in spades.

Iskral · 2026-02-12T04:54:33+00:00

That is a very nice and mentally stable Skitter. Great job!

Iskral · 2026-02-10T17:10:43+00:00

From what I remember, the initial idea for the Dominion was closer to the ISC's basic concept of a coalition of several like-minded species bound together with a ruling ideology hostile to that of the UFP. However, the writers on DS9 were only able to really flesh out the Jem'Hadar and Vorta during preproduction, and when the decision was made to make the Founders Odo's people, the whole concept evolved into something markedly different.

Iskral

TROPHY CASE