New liveblog alert!

Cedeelbe, a.k.a. Chris, is doing Twig over on Tumblr! Go check him out if you like liveblogs and Twig. 🙂

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Last night I dreamt I was Coil.

I’m pretty sure I, or rather Coil, was having the same issue I had last night, about having to get up in the morning in spite of an absolutely horrendous sleep schedule (I actually succeeded at shifting my sleep hours from 06-14 to 23-07; let’s hope that sticks for a while).

Apparently this went wrong in the timeline the dream focused on, but to erase that timeline and use the other instead, apparently Coil needed to die? So he hired someone to kill him, some assassin who fully intended to take his stuff after the job was done.

Problem was that after being incapacitated by a poisonous sting (from a ring or something, not Skitter’s work), Coil couldn’t seem to die properly.

It got to the point where the hired assassin was (by request, I think) holding an active blowtorch to Coil’s back for a while and he/I still didn’t feel much more than some light pressure.

(Also at one point during the wait for Coil to die by the poison, a couple of YouTubers I don’t watch showed up – Pewdiepie and someone I didn’t recognize – and briefly talked to him/me.)

I suppose I did say it was out of character for Coil to die.

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Kill Six Billion MS Paint Fanventures

[ask]
I pulled the first six pages of the original KSBD thread from the Wayback Machine (most after that are missing) and (crudely) compiled them into a single page for your convenience! bitly/mspa_ksbd If any images don’t work, try the links to the original WM copies at the top.

Ooh, neat!

Looks like Allison and Zaid might’ve gotten a bit further in this version.

Although I don’t know if I can expect Zaid to even exist in this version. Weren’t there only a few characters who carried over?

…let’s bullet point this.

• The formatting here really screams MSPA fanventure.
• I’m skipping most of the Daemoniac for now, but I did read the first few. Allison’s entry is fun.
• Ahh, she’s by a pool when it starts.

You tell yourself again you are a fun and peppy girl.

• Early showing of the trait of hers where she’s trying too hard to fit the college role.

One more thing. Your first name is Allison. But what is your last?

• Half of a classic opening. Enter name!
• Heh, someone tried to name her Allison Zach.

• I think I was shown this image out of context back when I was first told about the MSPA origins of the comic?
• Maybe go for girls instead?

• Definitely leaning harder into the whole “trying hard to keep up the image” trait here.
• I love how that’s three layers. She’s not just hiding her true reading material inside a magazine, she’s hiding that inside another magazine for good measure!

Morphimus: > Screw the books! CANNONBALL!

• Morphimus, you are officially my enemy. Oh wait, you probably meant she should leave the books behind, not cannonball into the pool with them. Sorry, you’re in the clear.
• Probably.
• What is it with things I liveblog and starting out with girls going to the bathroom for non-bathroom purposes?
• Oh, huh. Weird demonic mark in a far less convenient spot, but also fairly easy to cover up under most circumstances.

Um, you totally don’t know what sleuthing means because you’ve never read the complete Sherlock Holmes including the extended commentary and introduction edition which you got totally cheap off Amazon because you are fun and peppy and not some introverted nerd. But you check out the dripping sound anyway.

• I’ve got a spare Audible credit, maybe I should add some Sherlock Holmes to my to-listen.

It was the faucet. Duh.

But now you turn it off, there’s something else that appears to be a bit louder, coming from that stall you were pretty sure was occupied. And now you’re pretty sure it’s occupied by two people because the sounds coming out of it are something you totally know about because you are totally NOT A VIRGIN.

Well this is awkward.

Um. How are you going to approach this one?

• > Don’t.
• Got some nice suggestions there.

• Someone who hasn’t read K6BD MSPAF edition, please explain this picture

Unfortunately your body, as it has been consistently doing since the 7th grade, betrays you again by flinging you right at the door in a futile attempt to combine all three of your bizarre and seemingly random impulses.

• This strikes me as the best way of handling a tie in a fanventure. 😛
• Yeah, about all that BLOOD. Why is there all that BLOOD.

PersonPerson:

Do a taste test to see if it’s really blood.
Look up dramatically.

• BLUH.
• I like how there’s a “CALM YO TITS” suggestion immediately followed by a “Flip out.” and just an outright scream.
• And naturally Allison follows the latter two first.
• Allison’s character shines through so much in all of this, despite the more unpredictable (to the author) mode of storytelling. The shades are something I could see her doing in the comic proper.
• She actually did do the taste test, but without the somewhat expected reference back to Homestuck.

Sleuth FURTHER INTO IGNORANCE

• Hah!
• Apparently the author is a cat.
• Ahaha she’s not the first to die in the horror story because she’s not really blonde
• Also hi Melissa
• Oh fuck, more itchy marks.
• Oops, everyone else is demonic too now.
• Is this an allegory for the monstrosity of social pressure?

Oh god no, everyone would judge you like CRAZY (despite being all tentacley and squirmy) and you would never live out the rest of your admittedly short life with a reputation as a dye job. NATURAL BLONDE. FUN AND PEPPY. ALL THE TIME.

• Allison has her priorities in order.

You are now the EYE OF GOG-AGOG.

• “I WAS WORKING ON THAT EYE”
• So we’re playing as some kind of parasite or other symbiote on Allison now.
• The Eye is not impressed.
• So, Eye, if Allison is just “some dumb bimbo with a literature fetish” to you, why are you here rather than attached to more of a hero?
• Interestingly, the Eye kind of implies the cacodaemonia are “interstellar star gods”. Not sure if it was intended to read that way, though.
• Would the pool work as a mirrored surface for whatever you can do with that, Eye?
• Or the shades, for that matter?
• By the way, “gog” is a Homestuck thing, a misspelling of “god”. Might explain the name.
• I like how Lurkmeister attempts to issue a command for Nietzsche to kill an interstellar star god.

ohgodohgodohgod

you have a strange compulsion… You don’t even know what’s going on anymore, but all you know is you totally HAVE TO GO OUT IN STYLE. YOU DIDN’T SPEND $300 ON THOSE FUCKING SHADES TO NOT SWAG SUPER HARD WHILE YOU DIE.

YOU LUNGE.

One tricky thing about the audience participation style is justifying your characters following metagaming commands. It can lead to ridiculous and hilarious characterization. 😛

• Time to follow a way earlier command and > GTFO.

You might die instantly.

And at some point.

You will probably have to

• Considering these lines come with an apparent metatextual near-reset on the other side of the dimensional translocation, I suspect dying might be used for a strategic rewind.
• Apparently the real title was withheld up until this point, meaning the cover was presumably added to the first post later.

Morphimus:
> Allison: Fondly regard the title above your head.

• Come on, Morphimus, “the title above your head” doesn’t sound anything like “creation”.
• Now if you’d said “> Allison: Fondly regard capitalization.”, that’d work.
• HAH NIETZSCHE’S HERE WITH AN AMAZING MUSTACHE

Varkarrus:
Nietzsche: Turn into a crocodile with the head of an ostrich then go MEEP MEEP MEEP MEEP MEEP and implode.

• I see we found Discord’s MSPAF account.

Mibbs:
Nietzsche: hit on allison

• Now that’s a ship I never considered.
• Though a little weird on the age front. Nietzsche here looks to be in his fifties, and Allison is something like 19-20. (Her stated age of 21 was heavily implied to be false.)
• Oh fuck, now we get to be Nietzsche.
• Gog Agog appears to be male in this version, unless Nietzsche is referring to the Eye when he describes someone as “an unusually cruel but particularly resourceful fellow”.
• And of course his first words to here are “God is dead”. Then again, Allison hearing about that is something that carried over, and it’s a big part of the worldbuilding in the comic proper.
• At least if you believe the angelic telling of the story.

But the real question, you say, and this is the real ringer, is what happens to God’s house after he dies? Do the mice and the rats and the pitiful insects take over? Who keeps all the clocks running? Who cleans all the windows and oils all the door hinges? Who makes the tea?

Who is living in our poor deceased God’s house now, my young friend?

• This is a good metaphor here and a good metaphor in the comic proper. It has the air of a thought that may have spawned the entire thing, actually.
• Hiya, Schrödinger’s cat.

LOADING […]

in the process of LOADING you cycle through INFINITE ALLISONS. The process is quite disconcerting.

• Flicker.
• References aside, I do like the gif of the alternate Allisons (not quoted here because seizures). I think my favorite is steampunk Allison.
• And that’s the end. I assume this stopping point was chosen because after this it gets a bit too deep into the story and potentially spoilery.

This was a lot of fun. I love seeing where things I like started, and this thing started in a territory and style I’m familiar with and fond of, adding an extra layer of enjoyment.

I particularly love how while it’s very different because of its chosen medium, it’s still easy to see how this could turn into the comic proper. Allison is just about her same ridiculous self, Nietzsche dropped the whole “who rules God’s house after his death” allegory on us (in a way that felt like it would be foreshadowing), the name Gog-Agog was around already, and the art style is simpler but still very recognizable.

The Eye of Gog Agog was a fun character, too.

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Asks

Also, per your idea of a team with one Groundhog Day member, UQ Holder! has just such a character (though she has to manually set her save points), and at one point includes the line “Those are the eyes of a jaded gamer who’s stayed up all night trying and trying to beat an impossibly hard game on a ridiculously high difficulty level!” in a fight scene.

(Wasn’t my idea, that came from a Tumblr post.)

And yeah, that’s a fitting analogy.

I actually watched a recent Miraculous Ladybug episode that is kind of relevant to this, yesterday. It featured the ability to set a specific moment that the wielder can, at will, rewind to as long as it’s within five minutes after the save point was set (from the perspective of the timeline, not you, so you can do it indefinitely).

I think Imp’s power has a maximum range, which is why cameras work on her. Coil had people watching through the laptop at a distance past Imp’s range.

Seems reasonable.

Here’s a neat thought by a deleted redditor:

[Reddit]

That final Coil scene, when he is held down at gunpoint while the Undersiders have a nice long chat about the moral implications of murder and what it means to be a villain?

He tried to escape a hundred times. He grabbed for the gun and got shot. He jumped and got shot. He tried to talk, bluff his way out, and Tattletale told Taylor to shoot him. He crawled and got shot. He ran and got shot. He tried to twist so the bullet only hit his shoulder, but the second bullet got his head. He ran and got shot. He reached for the gun and got shot. He reached for the gun and got shot. He reached for the gun and got shot. One time he managed to disarm Tay Tay and got killed by Grue. He ran the other way and got shot.

Every second he tried something new, he got killed, and he split the timeline again, to try the impossible. Until the bitter end. And nobody knew, not even Tattletale stopped to think about it.

Unlimited rolls with advantage won’t do jack shit when the DC is too high.

(I really like this.)

And that is the chapter I’ve been waiting for you to get to. So how do you think cold blooded killing will affect Taylor? Did you at any point forget that she’s currently blind? Do you think she’ll get medical care anytime soon? Will she ever slow down and take a break? What’s next for Brockton Bay, since the guy trying to trying to take it over is dead, his minions don’t have all his resources, and someone who scares Tattletale is loose. Also, what will TT do with soldiers?

I’m gonna need subheaders.

So how do you think cold blooded killing will affect Taylor?

I think she’ll find herself to be chillingly okay with what she did, perhaps to the point of being less okay with how okay she is, than she is with the act itself.

It’s also the next step in her slippery staircase down to villainy, her latest sacrifice of her moral code. And with each step she takes, the next is covered with more ice. She has crossed the barrier once. What’s one more time?

Did you at any point forget that she’s currently blind?

Not as much as one might expect me to, I think, but given her abilities while blinded it’s honestly fair to let that detail slide into the back from time to time.

Do you think she’ll get medical care anytime soon?

For her eyes? No. I fully expect the blindness to last for at least a few Arcs, if not forever.

For the rest, maybe. She does kinda need to be able to do… something, anything at all, in the upcoming Arc, and at the moment she’s really close to just collapsing and she’s got no time to take a full rest.

Will she ever slow down and take a break?

What?

This is Taylor.

What’s next for Brockton Bay, since the guy trying to trying to take it over is dead, his minions don’t have all his resources, and someone who scares Tattletale is loose.

Well, the obious answer is Noelle is next, but after that… I don’t really know. Before 16.13, I had kind of figured the next step after would be figuring out how to run the territories without Coil’s resources, before the next threat showed up, but now, especially with Noelle’s Arc being titled Migration and most of the parahuman characters having already died or skipped town, I’m not sure there’s much left for Brockton Bay.

Maybe Coil’s attack on the debate and whatever Noelle turns out to be capable of will force the politicians’ hand into condemning Brockton Bay after all? If there will even be a Brockton Bay left to condemn. Then again, Noelle is a bit easier to contain than an Endbringer, so she’s more likely to harm people than property.

It’s also possible we’ll eventually be dealing with other threats from the Real Nasty List, like an invasion of Nilbog (with or without Rinke) or one of the other Endbringers. Or maybe something about Cauldron needing Coil to succeed causes a threat of some kind from their end of the plot.

Also, what will TT do with soldiers?

Oh, I’m sure she has some dastardly plans already. Perhaps she’s got her sights set higher than Coil ever did, even?

Or perhaps she’ll just use them to enforce the Undersiders’ stranglehold on Brockton Bay.

I can’t believe Coil deleted your unsaved liveblog progress as a final act of spite!

I know right? Such a douche.

It really does suck that it had to happen with that section, but you did an excellent recap despite that! Thanks again for the effort you go through to record your thoughts for us in the first place!

Thank you, for the encouragement!

(Seriously though… just had to be the one section that had been built up to throughout the entire story so far.)

I’ve been waiting for you to get to this arc for like ten arcs now. This gon be gud.

👀👀👀

After what we just learned in 16.13, it might be worth having another look at the numbers from 14.1. Back when that chapter took place, Tattletale was already actively working on her plan to beat Coil by buying out his mercenaries. She would have been as good as dead if Coil – or by extension, the Travelers – had found out what she was up to before she was ready.

…oooh, that’s really good. And she was the one who suggested the Travelers leave the room because she had the power to imply she knew the 325 was one of them and it wouldn’t apply if the other Undersiders were the ones to find out.

Well played.

sorry your post got Simurgh’d

Coil and the Simurgh were in cahoots

CAHOOTS I SAY

Thank you. *dramatically wipes a tear*

🦀🦀🦀 COIL 🦀🦀🦀 IS 🦀🦀🦀 GONE 🦀🦀🦀 AGAIN 🦀🦀🦀

I dunno, guys, what if… and hear me out here… what it was a body double?

“It just had to happen with that chapter section. *sighs*” Believe me, we all acutely feel your pain.

Yeah, I bet some of you guys have been waiting for me to blog that particular section for years.

Given how 16.13 ended, now might be a good time for any last minute speculations or guesses as to what exactly the deal with Noelle is, and what her power is (and relatedly, what the Traveler’s backstory is).

I feel like I covered the first thing to the best of my ability in the Arc Thoughts.

As for what her power is, it seems like some form of transformation or invisible alternate form (like a mutable forcefield shaped like a monster centered around her)? Whatever it is it’s super deadly and seems to allow her to take sustenance by eating people in some way.

For the Travelers overall, I can’t seem to come up with anything better than the idea that they’ve been on the run from someone who might be Cauldron, perhaps for having broken some rules or failed to pay or stolen their powers or something. Cauldron, of course, presumably knows exactly where they are and they are where Cauldron wants them (or were until Coil died), but they don’t know that.

Do you think Coil was taken down too easily from a writing standpoint, i.e. easier than he should have been based on his established powers & tactics? That’s kind of what I thought on my first reading. Was hoping for more temporal timeline bullshit.

That’s fair.

I suppose the problem is it’s difficult to show that, when not in his POV. Maybe he should’ve put up a bit more of a fight that we could see, but the Undersiders did trick him into erasing his pre-fight save, so that’s something at least.

I’d totally read a short POV switch fic for that scene, though. Maybe even write one?

Aww, I’m so sorry Krix. It’s exausting, always having to pay attention to saving. Maybe look into an alternative editor which handles WordPress code and has a non-busted autosave? There should be some. Also, I think it’s better if you paste that section of the story anyway, for those of us who are rereading Worm from here.

I don’t know where I’d find something like that, but I might look into that.

Re: pasting the section, that’s a fair request, but my copying the full text is dodgy enough as it is without me doing it to sections I’m not commenting on as I read it, like I usually do. So it might be better to just use the link at the top of the post to read on the original site.

So how did you feel about Taylor killing someone (and arguably in cold blood, or at least not in self defense)? Which things do you think would Taylor allow herself to do or what is she as a person capable of doing in the in the future? We had the dick rotting, eye carving, lying about the presence of innocents, consciously deciding to not help a dying man and now killing. What could come next when Taylor “decides she has to do something necessary”?

I’ve been waiting for this, though I expected it to come in the form of a situation forcing her to do it. I’m very pleased with the form it did take, though, and in retrospect this was the better outcome.

The difficulty now is to find the next step without necessarily taking her past the moral event horizon. Maybe the situation where she’s forced to kill someone who doesn’t, in her eyes, deserve it like Coil did, is coming up next?

…Noelle?

That seems a little soon, though. Might not want to end two Arcs in a row with Taylor killing the antagonist.

serellia just posted a bunch of Worm fanart, and i’d like to send Krix all of it except the one that implicitly spoils jub wbvaf gur haqrefvqref

Sharks: Tell them “send it later or send it now and i’ll try and remember to post it now”.

send it later or send it now and i’ll try and remember to post it now

I’m not entirely sure what that means but yeah

Someone may have already told you this but some months ago we got the confirmation that coil was black.

Oh, alright. I wouldn’t have called that, but good to know if you’re gonna draw him or write about him.

“We’ve got Noelle up next. This time we’ve got to get some answers. Roll over, for presumably the last time!” – Pour one out for this prediction, whose time has finally come.

Should old predictions be forgot
And never brought to mind
Should auld predictions be forgot
And days of Arc Thoughts blind

Right now, it’s really looking like the biggest contributor to the slow downs is the lack of consistent #next posts. Your schedule sped up A LOT back on tumblr once you started doing the #next posts there. Looking over your recent twitter feeds, it looks like almost all of the big gaps between posts (including this one) happened after you forgot to give a #next post after finishing a chapter. It gets a lot easier to procrastinate things if you don’t even set yourself a vague goal to aim for.

That… sounds about right, yeah. You’re probably onto something.

Ironically, I was originally reluctant to start doing #next posts because of this pressure, but given the way my brain works, it has been really helping. I really have to get back into the habit of setting clear dates to shoot for, especially now that I’ve got much more time to blog than I did for a while there. Ideally I’d get back to the way it was for a while where I consistently took one or two days off between chapters and then came back to it.

“Duel of the Fates” by YunYunHakusho

I love the way this highlights the way these two act as foils to each other. Also, it’s a very dynamic image, despite them both having static poses. 🙂

[meme dump ask]

These are absolutely beautiful. I especially love the Jack Slash baby and the Siberikitty. 😛

BenswFrenefits on /r/WormMemes/ is doing a 30-day “The entirety of Worm retold using decade-old memes”. Obviously it’ll get into spoilers at some point but so far so good. Here’s week 1.

Fantastic stuff. 😛

I like how that last one gives us an uplifting message about how everybody has something to contribute with… 🙂

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I somehow ended up on the Wikipedia page for agnosia at 4 AM, and damn, there are a lot of variants of that, with varying degrees of debilitation.

The kind of agnosia Bonesaw’s miasma inflicted is most consistent with associative prosopagnosia, but this is fertile ground for AUs where it inflicts a different kind of agnosia instead.