I’m playing around with a browser text replacement script, and I made one for “arms” to “arse” without realizing that it would affect, well…

arsemaster spoke, authoritative, less impassioned, but confident,

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[Discord]

Probably the Actual Fucking Vriska:
Hey @Nerd Avalanche of Disappointment
Sharks has deigned to allow me to show you one of my proudest meme accomplishments, appropriately redacted of course.
Wanna see?

Nerd Avalanche of Disappointment [me]:
Well, if Sharks explicitly allowed it, sure

Probably the Actual Fucking Vriska:
In this case, I shall give you… this.

endsomthings_MENANCINGREDACTED.png

Nerd Avalanche of Disappointment:
Haha, nice

Probably the Actual Fucking Vriska:
You have not unlocked the rest of the image yet.

Alma:
awaken my endbringer

Djoing:
need to pay for rest-of-the-image DLC

Alma:
shakes hand at sky
EAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Nerd Avalanche of Disappointment:
I’ll just have to keep grinding the liveblog
Possibly for more than 40 hours

[art by @rexlupin, here named “Probably the Actual Fucking Vriska”]

Hehe.

I’m not going to pretend I fully get it – as far as I can tell, it seems to be a Jojo reference, and I’m not actually familiar with Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure beyond what I’ve picked up through osmosis. Still, I can appreciate some of the silliness.

If I were to guess, I’d say the redacted portion was one or both of the other Endbringers. If that’s the case, it’ll probably take way more than 40 hours of grinding before I unlock even one of the characters.

Battlefront players have it easy…

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For the benefit of archival readers, in case the controversy I was referring to in the previous post has been forgotten by the time you read this, or for serial readers who are out of the loop:

(Skip to 8:22 for the relevant segment.)

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raabr:

If you had to rename the undersiders with different titles than what they already have, what would you choose?

Presenting the Mozart Gang:

• Darkskull
• Talkalot
• Trippin
• Woofwoof
• Antmangirl

…alright, joke answers out of my system, let’s take another crack at this. In the same order:

• Delighter
• Do You Want To Hear That Again >Yes No – I said out of my system
• Nevermore
• Impulse
• Cerbera
• Worm

I think Wildbow is better at naming than me, but I do really like “Nevermore” for Tattletale. Ravens are clever, there are associations to Norse mythology (I went via Huginn and Muninn before settling on this one), and most importantly, Edgar Allan Poe’s famous Raven is known for breaking a man simply by talking.

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“I wonder if Wildbow is a juggalo.” Nothing would shock me more. I have no concrete evidence for or against; he just doesn’t seem to have the personality for it.

Fair enough.

I did have a reason for saying that, though: As far as I’m concerned, a juggalo is simply an Insane Clown Posse fan (I’m kind of a juggalo under that definition, though a selective one), and ICP music actually has some things in common with Worm. They both focus a lot on dark themes, shitty people and unfairness in society, with a sense of “look, this is a fucked up thing that happens, we can’t keep ignoring it”. The main difference is that the ICP puts a more comedic spin on it most of the time, and emphasizes that the world is beautiful (but we also can’t forget that shitty things happen in it).

But of course, sharing worldviews doesn’t necessarily mean Wildbow is bound to like the music the ICP makes to convey their message, let alone identify as a fan.

(#also worth noting: gamzee is not a juggalo under this definition
#even if what we’ve seen of his own raps is a poorly concealed paraphrasing of the same icp song that would later enrage him)

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sablonus:

Holy Hell, some of the people here. You guys know he’s one of, if not the only Worm Liveblogger, right? I’m not saying bow down and worship him, but whining about how he won’t put down his social life to entertain us turds will only further postpone chapters.

+

A. That person’s comment was rude, and indicates they may be a jerk. B. Many, many, many of us have been looking forward to your reactions to Arc 8 from the very beginning.

(About this ask) [here, second last one]

To be fair, this was actually the first such ask I’ve gotten.

I don’t actually mind people asking when I’m going to liveblog, but this ask was more demanding it. The entitlement in it kind of hit on a thing I’ve been specifically taking measures to avoid. I would’ve elaborated back when I answered the ask, but I could feel myself getting worked up about it and decided it was best not to, lest I said something I’d regret.

What I did mention was that this was the reason I originally didn’t schedule my liveblogs. The thing is, when I started out, I decided to avoid a couple things that I knew from a previous project could kill my enjoyment. One of those things was the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough, that I was slacking, that my audience was entitled to more. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely do want to give you more, but I need to take it at my own pace in order to keep enjoying it (which is vital to doing a good job of it in the first place), and for the same reason, I need to avoid feeling guilty about it when that pace is slowed down for whatever reason. This is why I rarely apologize when I postpone liveblogs, too – another conscious choice to avoid being weighed down by guilt until I stop enjoying the liveblog.

(The only reason I’m doing #next posts in the first place is because it was requested, so you guys could have more of a sense of stability. Essentially, they started out more as “this is roughly when you can expect it” than “this is when I’ll do it”. I’ll admit that I do get a comforting sense of stability from it myself, though.)

Ultimately, I’m doing this because I want to. I’d like to keep it that way.

(#by the way #i know a lot of livebloggers
#and i’m one of the most active ones i know)

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Fix Trainwreck/Roadblock by adding a parenthetical note.

Hmm, yeah, that might work out nicely.

[Not that I ended up actually following through on that.]

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aberrant-eyes:

“I keep thinking it’s Roadblock. I’m not even sure where I got that name from.” There was a “G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero” character with that call-sign. Wikipedia confirms that Dwayne Johnson played him in the recent live-action films.

Hm, I doubt that’s where I got it from, given that I’ve watched at most ten minutes of G.I. Joe, but it’s possible I picked it up by osmosis.

---

I know a bit about quantum mechanics, and unfortunately it’s not that simple. You’re positing something called a “hidden variable theory”. The problem is that the only possible hidden variable theory that hasn’t been disproven is “nonlocal”, meaning it’s impossible to predict the behavior of even a single electron without knowing the state of every other particle in the universe.

That would undermine the foundations of physics, since it means you can’t ever perform a controlled experiment without the potential for unknown factors influencing your results. Basically, experimental results have been proven to violate something called “local realism”, which is a combination of determinism and locality. One or the other must be false. That’s not something that can change with a new theory, even if we had another Einstein.

Ahh, I see.

That said, doesn’t quantum entanglement already (seem to?) violate locality? Or am I misunderstanding/missing something here?

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edust-assassin:

I’ve been waiting for your reaction to Kyushu and Newfoundland for a long time. It was what made me realise what kind of story I was reading 😛 (Also I was the one responsible for the determinism thing. Sorry about that. I guess I should learn not to be careless with spoilers. Hope it wasn’t too bad)

Yeah, learning that two major islands like that had just kinda been wiped away by a single person really helps to set the tone! 😛

As for the determinism thing, don’t worry about it. It was never a major spoiler (I think), even before I got an ask arguing against it, and I got the sense that you weren’t expecting me to be able to read that in the first place. 🙂

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thats-rough-buddy:

An afterimage or water echo as in that thing anime does where a guy moves and you see many of them moving behind the real one. But in water form, being created directly out of him. And hard as concrete. And as fast as leviathan moves, which grows exponentially the more water there is around. Rinse repeat.

Yep – it became a lot clearer what it was the moment I saw it in action. 🙂

It could potentially cause a lot of trouble, like everything else Leviathan is doing.

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Important notes: the biggest natural catastrophe in our world were the China floodings of 1931, which had up to 4 million deaths which took place over 5 months. Leviathan did more than that in a day. Newfoundland and Kyushu aren’t just “islands” in the simplest terms. They are continental chunks. Look them up. Also, maybe check back on some of that Canary Interlude, where she has arrived to the Birdcage? Her talk with dragon specifically. Just some nice foreshadowing for this moment.

+

Canary mentioned that Dragon has a Newfoundlander accent, and that it’s a rare accent to hear nowadays. Now you know why.

+

In Interlude 6, Canary identified Dragon’s accent as ‘Newfoundlander’, and thinks to herself that that’s “Not an accent one heard very often, these days.” Now we know *why* that accent isn’t very common anymore.

Jeez, this guy is deadly as fuck.

I was familiar with Newfoundland already, and I did look up Kyushu (but didn’t see anything I found reason to comment on). In both cases, that’s quite a significant landmass full of people eradicated by Leviathan.

As for Dragon’s dialect, that’s a really neat detail. Not only is it excellent foreshadowing, but it also puts a personal spin on this battle for Dragon: Leviathan destroyed what was almost certainly her home, probably killed a lot of Dragon’s family, childhood friends and community.

I wonder if it’s her first battle against him since then.

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“Also I guess Godzilla isn’t really associated with natural disasters.” I beg to differ! Kaiju movies have a long history of being analogues for natural disasters and/or the consequences of humanity damaging nature through pollution and the like.

True. But I was talking specifically about Godzilla, and there’s a reason I emphasized the word “natural” – I may not have seen the movies, but I know that Godzilla specifically represents nuclear weaponry, with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks (as well as an incident where the crew of a Japanese fishing boat were contaminated by nuclear fallout from American testing at Bikini Atoll in 1954) fresh in Japanese consciousness when the first Godzilla movie was made.

So kaijus in general are often associated with natural disasters, but Godzilla in particular is tied to a distinctly man-made one.

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Someone spoiled it a bit, but… this is what most of us have been waiting for you to reach. Do you remember back in Arc 3 receiving a comment that people find out whether they love Worm between that arc and a then-unknown future arc? Well, Arc 8 is that arc. And now you can see why. We were laughing about you feeling like you didn’t get a satisfying fight in Arc 7. Now you get an [redacted] fight of all fights!

I do remember that! Yeah, Act 8 has certainly upped the stakes a lot. It’s going to be interesting to see how this is resolved.

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half-man-half-lime:

Stealth reference in Worm: The Hoenn region in Pokemon is based on Kyush, Kyogre is based on the myth of Leviathan. Leviathan sunk Kyushu, Kyogre almost sunk Hoenn…

Heh, nice!

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If anyone’s disturbed by morbidity they shouldn’t be reading Worm (or a Worm readthrough).

Hah, yeah, that’s fair.

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Leviathan isn’t called a weather manipulator because that’s not a distinct power he has. It just falls under hydrokinesis – at the scale where he can create tidal waves and sink islands, making stormclouds is easy.

I suppose, yeah. When I first started questioning it, I didn’t know just how powerful his hydrokinesis was, but now that I do, it makes a ton of sense.

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Holy crap it’s exciting to finally see you tackle this. (Also, morbid humor is fine by me. It’s how I deal with things too.) I’d send you The Best Leviathan Fanart by Sandara, but I’m sure someone else already has. ^_^

Good to hear you’re enjoying it! 😀

And yeah, I appear to have received that at least twice – I’ll get to it in a bit.

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Happy Thanksgiving from the U.S.! I’m certainly thankful that Krixwell is doing the liveblog and Sharks is screening these messages.

Happy belated Thanksgiving to you and all my other (especially American) readers!

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lastthingsfirst:

brockton bay is not brockton MA, i used to live in that area. the terrain’s all wrong. wildbow has said that he didn’t base brockton bay on any real city because he didn’t want to be constrained to real-world geography, but comparativelysuperlative.tumblr.com/post/163833155646/ has the most compelling argument i’ve seen

+

[the Tumblr post linked in the ask]

I was at Gondolin yesterday, and some fantastically nerdy soul had posted a map like this one on a living-room wall:

Wait. Zoom, enhance.

I know what you’re thinking. This was a map of the principal aquifers; there could be smaller of the same elsewhere. Nope. New England gets its water mostly from crystalline-rock aquifers, which from the description are not a lot of water and you have to work to get it out.

Eyeballing it and guessing, our alternate-history coastal city on an aquifer would be maybe a bit east of where we have Bridgeport.

So move over, Providence. Portsmouth was fake from the start. Brockton Bay is in Connecticut.

“Brockton Bay, this location, is a soft target. The city was originally founded at this location because of the proximity to the coastline for trade routes and an aquifer that provided the first settlers with access to fresh water. This aquifer, essentially an underground lake beneath the city, is our weak point. From the moment Leviathan shows

(link to the post by @comparativelysuperlative)

Hmm… and a little east of Bridgeport, we do find a city with a bay, New Haven, which seems to line up with the aquifer marked that map.

The one issue I have with this is that it’s always seemed like the coast of Brockton Bay is aligned north-south, whereas this location would imply an east-west coast.