This is a cool concept, and I like your stream of consciousness!
Showerthought: this would be a good reference for authors looking for a realistic voice of “character reacts to learning new information and narrates their conclusions”.
I’m glad you’re enjoying it!
And yeah, liveblogs in general are probably a good source if you want to study how people react to learning new information from a narrative. 🙂
[Reddit]
I really like Krixwell. I’m at the part on 2.2 where he talks about not being able to imagine people not having computers, then mentioning he lives in Norway, and his family, and most in Norway, are well to do by American standards so he should check his privilege.
Then we get to the description of the computer teacher, a part I cringed at during all three readthroughs (four now, I guess). His description of that part (not aging well) was really accurate. Now I don’t think Wileyboyote meant anything by it, and he’s proven to be woke as fuck, but I hope it’s something that gets removed during edit.
First off, don’t feel bad for adding political or social commentary – in many ways, Worm was made for it, and as many of the readers are from America, I think it’s great to see an outside perspective. Second, though, I think I saw Wildbow mention once that he was planning on revising the Mrs. Knott thing – it was apparently meant to show that Taylor was a 15 year old girl not particularly concerned with that sort of thing, and… well, it can come across as author commentary instead.
Hey! I’ve been enjoying your experience so far, and was mildly dreading your reaction to this chapter’s description of Ms. Knott. I wanted to let you know that those are not the authors views being described. He has stated before that Taylor can be a bit of a bitchy teenager, and that this is one of those cases.
Yeah, that bit… kind of caught me off guard. Good to know that it’s not Wildbow’s own views.
Suffice to say I would’ve much preferred her looking like Minerva McGonagall.
[Reddit]
Very enjoyable.
I think he needs his friend SharksPwn to kidnap him and make him read the whole thing in a compulsive cant-stop-reading-this mode like most of the rest of us did.
One problem with that: I don’t think Sharks knows exactly where I live…
That said, I usually do binge things. But when liveblogging, it takes a lot longer to get through a single chapter – usually most of my evening, which is one of the reasons I don’t liveblog every day; I’d like to have some of the evenings for other activities so I don’t burn myself out.
I can relate to wanting livebloggers to pick up the pace, though. 😉
thirdfloorgreg:
English also has words for “be good enough.” Suffice, do, and measure up (phrasal verbs basically count as a single word in my book) come to mind.
Ooh, those are good ones. I think “suffice” works best in this context:
“Without food and drink, the hero doesn’t suffice.”
The reason I went for “be good enough” is actually because I ended up resorting to Google Translate for that one word. It’s not something I do often, but I had a hard time thinking of a good translation at the moment.
Hey, don’t worry about making comparisons to where you live! It’s your liveblog after all, and for me personally it’s interesting to see the setting examined through the lens of a different culture 🙂
Good to know 🙂
thats-rough-buddy:
While the Arc names have many meanings for themselves, Wildbow, most of the times, doesn’t use them in a literal and/or obvious sense. MOSTLY. Coincidentally I just read online an interview he gave, where he clarified the logic between his arc naming convention, but basically you could have an Arc called… idk, “Fishing”, and be called that because of the expression “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day… yada yada”. And turn out to be about teaching someone to be independent.
Ooh! That’s a kind of naming convention I can get behind – I’ve been known to name things through double or even triple associations myself.
Or even translated puns. For example, there’s this thing going around on Tumblr about how the Norwegian phrase “rare pupper” translates to “strange tits” (I was asked twice in one day to confirm that, and yes, it’s true), so I named a puppy in Minecraft “Strange Tits”. That might seem like a bit of a tangent, but it’s sort of the same concept – it takes a couple of layers of associations to understand it.
Anyway… hm. I’ve already discussed how Gestation can refer to the beginnings of Taylor’s life as a super, and I don’t think this really changes much for that one.
The title Insinuation, though, could still have some hidden depths. I’m usually rather decent at associations (a side effect of ADD is that you get a lot of practice on that front), but I’m stumped for now. Maybe I’ll get it in retrospect!
thats-rough-buddy:
The fact that Taylor would even consider the fact that a pyrokinetic would NOT be fireproof says a lot about the type of super powers one can get in this world. This is all world building, not Taylor being sassy/dumb
Yeah. I didn’t mean to imply anything else, though I can see how my comment could be interpreted that way.
The world of Worm seems to have some versatile, inventive and somewhat unusual power sets, which is why I so readily discounted the possibility of Grue having only superstrength. As such, I can absolutely imagine some of the characters not having all the required secondary powers.
However impractical that might be!
danielmote:
I really do enjoy reading about the differences between your culture and experiences and the culture and Taylor’s experiences represented in Worm. Also, during high school my “homeroom” was just a short period where the teacher took attendance, we heard the announcements, said the pledge, and maybe voted on something. We still went to different classrooms for different classes. That was in the American South, but I think it’s a pretty common system all over the U.S. for high school.
Oh, huh. That makes sense, I suppose.
We have a somewhat similar thing in the form of “the class’ period”, which is for the contact teacher to check in on us and for us to discuss and vote on things if needed, but these days that only happens once every few weeks if even that often.
Certainly no daily pledges, though. I mean no offense, but that part is honestly a tad creepy.
Without food and drink, the hero sinks.
Ooh, that’s a nice way to put it!
Longtime Worm fan, lovinh this so far. I have just one question, how do you mentally pronounce Azn in ABB- Asian, A Zen, or A Z N? Gotta know for science. Again this is great and I hope you like Worm as much as I did. 🙂
Glad you’re enjoying it!
As for the Amplified Banana Blasters: I sometimes pronounce Azn as Asian, but mostly I end up using a short “Az’n”.
mugasofer:
I vaguely remember Wildbow saying that Grue isn’t actually named after the game monster?! It’s also the old English word for “creepy”, from which we get “gruesome”.
Oh, nice. It’s a fitting parallel, at least!
mugasofer:
Are you ~12? I’m a little surprised, since Worm seems to generally attract an older audience, but some of your talk about the school system implied you were younger than Taylor. (I have a couple things to say but I’ll split them up in case you don’t want to answer this one.)
Nope, I’m 19! A few of the things I said about the school system were about my past, which might not have been entirely clear at some points.
However, I was thirteen at the time the story is set, and Taylor would be ~21 by now, so I guess I am younger than her in that sense.
mugasofer:
I read Taylor as talking about the STEREOTYPE of a trans person, not an actual trans person, if that makes sense? Like, I would never call someone a “bimbo”, but I might reach for the phrase “looked like a stereotypical bimbo except…” to describe an aesthetic. (Obvs. I can’t say whether that makes sense in retrospect.)
It makes sense, yes, but I’m not sure that makes it much better. Especially when she also used the now outdated (and sometimes considered transphobic) term “transvestite”.
(It technically refers to cross-dressers, but it causes confusion and conflation. At least I think that’s why.)
I’m not holding this against Wildbow, though, as other askers have informed me that it was intended as characterization and he himself doesn’t have anything against trans people. It’s mostly just… unfortunate.
Krixwell Liveblogs 