[a series of screenshots from my blogging of Gestation 1.1]

Since the start of the semester, I had been looking forward to the part of Mr. Gladly’s World Issues class where we’d start discussing capes.

I realized after a few moments that this would be about capes by the sea, but it’s more fun to think about the protag wanting to learn about the garment’s effect on world politics.

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and had ‘fun’ assignments like mock trials.

Mock trials? Maybe the topic is capes as in the garment then. I’ve got to admit I’m a bit unsure of what the subject of World Issues entails.

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“Let me wrap up here,” Mr. Gladly said, “Sorry, guys, but there is homework for the weekend. Think about capes and how they’ve impacted the world around you.

Capes are important, unless you’re a superhero.

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I was thinking I would spend as long as I could on Mr. Gladly’s assignment before reading, because I wasn’t enjoying the book.

Thinking about capes. Thinking about capes. Capes are cool. Thinking about capes. Unless you’re a superhero. Thinking about capes. No capes. Thinking about capes.

Throwback to the time before I realized what the word “capes” meant in this story…

(#hey look i found a liveblog)

Interlude 7. Dragon says Weld is a Case 53, Hannah asks if he has the mark, and Dragon says it’s branded into his heel.

*looks back*

Oh yeah, there it is:

“He’s a good kid with a good record,” Dragon chimed in from the computer, “Ferrous biology, absorbs metals through his skin. Strong, tough, good grades across the board, high marks in the tactics simulations. Likable, and a scan of the web shows feedback for him is higher than average, which is impressive, considering he’s one of the Case 53s.”

“He’s got the tattoo?” Hannah asked. “The mark is branded into his heel, not tattooed, but yes.”

Apparently I also understood what this meant, because I responded with “Ahh… Upsilon. We meet again.”

And then I managed to forget it by the time 9.1 rolled around.

Clockblocker’s description is exactly right, judging by what Tattletale said, he just got the Changer part wrong since she’s not actually there. SOLID projections, creations, with their own abilities.

Right. I guess what got me confused was exactly how real those own abilities of the creations were.

I wonder what sort of limitations there are to what she can do.

Kid Win doesn’t seem to see any specialty he has, but do you have any idea what it could be?

One of the more obvious, loophole-y solutions would be the “specialty to not have a specialty”, making him a jack-of-all-trades, but I don’t really think that’s what’s going on here.

Let’s see, what do we know he’s good at… officially, anti-gravity and guns. The guns we’ve seen him using have more specifically been energy guns, such as the spark gun, laser rifle and the Tiro Finale / Alternator Cannon.

Maybe his specialty involves manipulation of energy? That would probably cover whatever mojo is needed for antigravity, too.

I’m 100% convinced Greg is on the autism spectrum. He has so many similarities to various people I’ve known on the spectrum, even to myself, it’s uncanny.

Nice! Always nice to see yourself represented.

When I first met Greg, you may recall that I immediately pegged him as an ADHDer. I’ve long suspected that ADHD and autism are closely related, so it’s not far-fetched that some of the traits that made me see him as having ADHD are equally well or better explained by him being autistic.

Incidentally, how do you guys feel about autistic Weld (unless that’s too spoilery to answer)?

You mention enjoying the representation for ADHD in Worm, compared to other media. What are the problems that occur in other ADHD characters, and why would it be wrong to assume that many kids have been misdiagnosed? (I’m not trying to say that you are wrong for stating such, I am genuinely curious.)

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“But seriously, if I see indications that Wildbow himself thinks ADD diagnoses are illegitimate more often than not, I will take back that “well-handled”. We’re trivialized enough as it is.” At least in the states, the diagnosis is way over-used for things that are perfectly normal kid stuff, things every single kid in the world does. And that diagnosis has them taking pills they don’t need for years, with punitive measures on parents who don’t put their kids on unnecessary drugs.

I may have been a little too harsh in that moment.

More often than not, ADHD is treated in fiction as a joke trait, on par with “ditzy”. We’re treated as people who are just all over the place to an exaggerated degrHEY LOOK A SQUIRREL, while the more serious troubles with having the disorder – such as the executive dysfunction, which makes it incredibly difficult to get started doing certain things even if you want to do them (or to stop, sometimes), or the sensory processing issues (auditory being most common, I think), or the social ramifications, or the hits to one’s self-image that living with ADHD can bring, or the predisposition to depression and anxiety – are glossed over.

In short, we’re treated more like Greg than like Kid Win. Seeing Kid Win actually talk about dealing with some of these issues meant a lot to me, and my outburst when Kid expressed his concerns about not actually having the disorder was motivated by a short-lived fear that Wildbow was about to take that away.

In retrospect, it was probably more intended as a commentary both on the fact that yes, there is a case to be made for ADHD being overdiagnosed (in boys, primarily; girls tend to be underdiagnosed, if I’m not mistaken) in some countries, and on that yes, a lot of ADHDers probably do worry about their diagnosis being a mistake – or hope so.

Overall, I am very pleased with the handling of Kid’s (clearly legitimate) diagnosis, and I’m glad Wildbow decided to include us.

I don’t think Wildbow has ADD (could be wrong thought) but he does have experience leaving projects unfinished. Before he started Worm he spent year writing beginnings of stories in multiple universes. Worm started as an exercise in keeping a single project going, and he used lots of idea from earlier attempts (Amy and Victoria used to be the central characters in a story called “Guts & Glory”). I believe he’s more aware of handicaps in general too, because he’s deaf in one ear IIRC.

Fair enough. He does have a history of handling various topics well without necessarily having personal experience with them, and doing incredibly thorough research… to the point where some of you guys actually seem to get kind of offended whenever I insinuate that I think Wildbow might not have done enough research, and that is something you’ve proven me wrong on every single time.

So if there’s any author I can believe would be able to handle a disorder like ADHD this well without having it or being a trained ADHD expert? It’s Wildbow.

Any predictions for the Slaughterhouse Nine so far?

So far, here’s what we know for sure: The Fellowship of the Meat is brutal. They’re among the really dangerous ones, and nomadic. They follow a similar pattern to the Endbringers of attacking places that are already weakened – sometimes by actually following in the Endbringers’ wake.

There are nine members (duh), or at least nine high-ranking members, each of whom have their own style of killing and desecrating people. Here are the results of three of their antics:

On each of the three interior walls of the older building was a body, twenty feet above the ground. Each had received a different kind of treatment. To their left was a corpse that had been flayed, the gender no longer identifiable. Directly opposite their group was the corpse of an obese woman, charred black. Completing the scene was the body of what appeared to be a homeless man, or one of the people who’d been rendered homeless by the recent disaster, judging by the layers of clothing he wore. His limbs had been severed at each joint, then reconnected so each was joined by a short, foot-long length of chain. Nails placed through the chain kept him in position, head hanging, a macabre puppet with an overlong body. The chains jangled and swung in the wind.

We’ve got one who’s into flaying, one who’s into charring (possibly with some sort of pyrokinesis), and one who’s into… puppetry, I suppose.

Presumably the rest of them are similarly… creative. If you want your body to stay safe and sound, stay away from these guys.

As for their motivations, I have no idea. Maybe they’re out to spread misery, but this seems too targeted for that. Maybe they just want to have fun with some corpses?

*Girls Just Wanna Have Fun starts playing in the background*

I don’t know, but whatever they want, it’s probably supremely fucked up.

Happy birthday to you / Happy birthday to you / You insulted the ABB / Now they’re gonna kill you

Thank you so much for this
Thank you so much for this
The Alternative Birthday Boys
Can just come my ass kiss!

(#thank you!

#btw it was yesterday but due to time zones i didn’t receive this until 3:55 am today)

Y’know, for all that extra detail we’ve been talking about the story giving us recently…

…we still don’t know what Taylor’s art project was.

So I’m rereading my own liveblog and I just noticed something:

Due to the comment about Lung being more dangerous than 50 people with guns, I sort of assumed that there were around 50 people in the gang. However, it turns out I missed a wording from chapter 1.4 that gave some insight into how many people were actually present in Gestation:

I could have fit a cell phone back there. With a cell phone, I could have alerted the real heroes about the fact that Lung was planning to take a score of his flunkies to go and shoot kids.

“a score”

So Lung had about twenty of his followers with him. We do know Oni had a portion of the gang with him elsewhere, but if I remember correctly, that was a smaller portion. In other words, we’re probably looking at a number closer to 30 members than to 50.

Of course, this number went up quite a bit when Bakuda was put “in charge”, due to her recruitment practices.

[reblogging the above post]

…

A car pulled up, and another three guys dressed in gang colors got out and and joined the crowd. Shortly after, the group – twenty or twenty five in total – started walking north, passing below me as they walked down the street.

Oh. Right.