Asks

I follow your blog and from your mentions gathered that you live in a small town in Northern Norway. I’m very curious what it’s like. If you feel like it please share your experience:)

Well, it’s a nice little place. It’s got about 6000 people, I think, so not a tiny village where everyone knows everyone, but not super busy and impersonal either. Just the right size for someone like me, I think. Not a whole lot to do around town, admittedly, but I was never the kind of person who needed that anyway.

I work at one of the smaller grocery stores in town, so I get to become familiar with some of the friendly faces who seek to a more local shopping experience while not being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of people and stuff to take care of around the store. There’s plenty to do, of course, but we only need about 2-4 people on at a time to do it.

And I do mean friendly faces, by the way. Retail is nowhere near as hellish here as it seems to be in the States, largely due to a culture that promotes actually respecting people even if they’re behind a counter. Aside from a couple non-violent conflicts with a recovering drug addict, the worst I get is customers who seem quietly grumpy.

When we do need something you’d find in a bigger city, such as a hospital or an airport, there’s one not too far away. A little under an hour’s drive. So it’s not on top of us, but it’s reasonably available when needed. From the village I spent my first few years in, it’d be a three hour drive, so that’s a step up.

I live north of the Arctic Circle, so the seasonal difference in the daylight cycle is pretty extreme. Right now it’s autumn, of course, so it’s fairly reasonable, but a few months from now “daylight” will refer to like two hours of twilight around noon. Meanwhile in the height of summer, the sun never fully sets. Is it any wonder I can never get my brain to sleep at the right hours, having lived with this my whole life and having ADHD on top of it? There’s very little reason for my brain to go “oh, it’s dark, time to sleep”.

Temperature-wise, it’s pretty varied. We’ve got summers ranging from +5°C to +25°C (41°F to 77°F), occasionally up to 38°C (100°F) max on particularly hellish days, winters more like -25°C to +5°C (-13°F to 41°F). Add rain, snow and ice into the mix and you get pretty used to dressing for the weather up here. We have a saying that there’s no bad weather, only bad cleather clothes.

Personally, I disagree. Anything above 30°C (86°F) is bad weather.

If the twitter setup for the #next posts isn’t working well for you, you could go back to posting them directly on the wordpress site. That might help make things more like they were on tumblr. If you’re worried about cluttering up the blog with them, you can always delete them after you post the chapter. I agree that consistent #next posts would probably help a lot, so it’s worth trying to find a setup that works for you, if twitter isn’t working out so well.

Hmm. I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that one.

Another thing to consider, in the interest of making things more like they were on tumblr (which seems to have been a setup that worked much better for you than the current one) would be to post partial chapters – along with a #next post – whenever you don’t finish a chapter in one session. If you want to keep things to one chapter per post, you can always cut and paste 2 or 3 partial chapters into one post once you’re done. This might help with the week-long gaps between sessions.

I think I’d prefer to keep them collected, especially because the lengths of sessions varies so much, but it is true that one part being out already used to help motivate me to get back to a chapter more quickly.

Usually, though, the week-long gaps between sessions within a post are because I don’t have time or energy on account of work-heavy periods. That might happen with the next post, actually, if I do the first session tomorrow (Saturday the 17th), but don’t finish the post on Sunday, because I have work every day next week except Wednesday and Sunday.

Everyone knows Brockton Bay is really New Bedford. It has a bay and everything. Or, you know, Providence. It has a bay and everything.

Brockton Bay is my hometown. It has a bay and everything.

(All three of these locations have the same problem: The main bay is oriented the wrong way. Though New Bedford does have a large river outlet that sticks into the land along the north-south axis, with an island in the middle…)

It just occurred to me to wonder if there might have been invisible contestants.

Hm. An interesting idea, but wouldn’t those invisible contestants be given away by the question round? For one thing getting to ask questions, and for another showing up on the list of sponsors and the map of pickup locations (I think Wesley would have noticed there being more dots than people)?

It only makes sense if the implicit rules of the Box were being broken to hide their presence.

You know, I just realized that Battery “discovered” the location of Cauldron in her interlude, but according to them in Alexandria’s interlude, it’s claimed Cauldron is based in another dimension. Was the place(s?) Battery visited just a decoy, the equivalent of a film set? Or was Doctor Mother lying to the Triumvirate about where they’re located?

I think Battery just never thought to ponder “hey, maybe this isn’t my reality’s version of the place”. Cauldron’s locale seems to be earthlike, just otherwise uninhabited by people, like an alternate earth where humanity never became the dominant species.

Krixwell, fun little thing about these chapters, check the character tags at the bottom and see if there is someone you don’t recognize. Who might they be? Trick question they’re (SPOILER BLOCK if you want to see if you figure out on your own it really isn’t much of a secret SPOILER BLOCK), all the clones have their own cape names and it’s fun seeing them.

That’s pretty cool! Must’ve been hard to come up with that many variations that still fit roughly the same power.

I think I’ll hold off on actually seeing what those names are until the tweaks to their powers have become clearer, but it’s cool knowing that Wildbow went to that effort.

>Hmm? Why the reaffirmation that Taylor is in charge in front of the heroes? Tattletale never wants to be seen as the leader, she wants to set someone else up as the leader. You’ve seen this already with Grue, Coil, even the staff at her shelter. It’s more of the same.

Right, yeah, that makes sense.

I don’t think you caught it, but the Undersiders left out Chariot when listing the “other isolated parahumans in the city that [the authorities] aren’t aware of”. Any speculation on what makes him different from Uber/Leet/Circus? Also, you misformatted the line ‘I felt a chill.’

Oh yeah, it didn’t occur to me that he was still around too.

I believe the last we heard of Chariot was that he backed away at gunpoint alongside Über and Leet, during 16.13. He’s all about mobility, though, so if he wanted to leave town he might have done so quickly… Alternatively, maybe he’s hanging out with Barker and Biter??

I saw your comment on KSBD that you like it when Characters have to tell the truth/ cant lie even when they are being shifty and I wanted to ask what you know about Pact and if there are any plans to read it in the future

That magic users have a restriction like that is pretty much all I know about Pact, and it’s enough to make me want to read it. I’d love to see what Wildbow does with that trope. Among Wildbow’s non-Wormverse stories, it’s top priority.

As the plan stands, I will probably be deciding — likely with a poll to help gauge reader interest — after / towards the end of Worm whether I’ll go on to Ward directly or take a detour into Pact first (after some bonus side things I’ll be reading in any case, such as Guts & Glory), as a break from Earth-Bet and the superhero stuff. There may also be a third option, like some serial by another author.

All of this is of course assuming I actually finish liveblogging Worm and still feel up to liveblogging another story. This is legitimately the longest-term plan I have in my life, so things are open to change.

…you can feel a bit less bad now about the problem with that chapter where Coil dies, because Wildbow just had the same problem with a chapter of Pale and had to rewrite a chapter from scratch close to what was supposed to be its release time.

Ouch, RIP.

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Here’s a thing I made!

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And, as sort-of-promised, here’s another thing I made!