The story Ethan is reading to the kids is “The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb” (“Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher” or “Historien om tommelsugeren”) from Heinrich Hoffmann’s “Der Struwwelpeter” (which Wikipedia tells me is known in Norway as “Busteper”). The non-elective amputation of a child’s thumbs isn’t even the worst thing that happens in these little ditties.
Well, they sound like perfect stories for Brockton Bay children.
I wonder how many superpowered kids they have resulted in.
Battery’s interlude is a tiny bit less than 9500 words. Canary’s, which took you three liveblogging sessions to finish, has a word count of less than 7700. I was shocked to see you finish the former in one take, how exactly do you decide when to stop?
It’s a complex formula involving the phases of the moon, the distance to the nearest butterfly, the number of stars visible through the closest window, the current date in the Eternal September calendar, and a frankly excessive amount of cheese.
Alright, actual answer: It varies. Sometimes I set myself a limit, a time to stop near, specifically to avoid cases like what happened with Battery’s Interlude. This is the healthiest option. Other times, I go by how I’m feeling in the moment and how late it’s getting. And sometimes I get stuck in a loop of “I can’t be far from the end now”, which is a leading cause of extra long sessions.
“And herself” The Doctor is not white. “A woman stood there, dark-skinned”
Wait, did I imply she was white at some point? If I did, that must’ve been an accident, since I did catch the bit about her skin color (and later brought it up in the context of Cauldron’s location).
Wildbow did start out with a buffer of prewritten chapters. I think when he started he had arc 1 written, and arc 2 mostly written. However he ended up burning through the buffer pretty quickly. He used up the last of it some time during arc 6 or 7. Since then, most his chapters were written the day they were posted. Despite this, he’s manged to go 6.5 years without ever missing one of his regular Tue/Sat updates.
Damn.
No wonder he had some choice words about my early schedule. This is clearly a guy who’s good at sticking to his own while still producing high-quality content.
Re: Crystal Gems having Manton protection from Shatterbird, remember Weld has certain power immunity: (from 9.1) “In addition, his biology fell into some optimal middle ground between organic and inorganic. For those whose powers affected only living things, he counted as inorganic. The opposite was also true.” So it depends on how the powers see their gems.
That is a good point, though it’s worth noting that in SU canon, Gems are explicitly inorganic life (which hits a weird spot with the Manton effect, since whether it operates on “organic vs inorganic” or “alive vs lifeless” seems to vary). But who knows if the power will see it that way?
By the way, while we’re on the topic of SU and the Manton effect: I think it’s in effect
along the “alive vs lifeless” axis for one of Steven’s powers, but the characters don’t realize it.
Steven has the power to heal, but for a while he’s presented as having “lost” this ability due to lack of confidence in it after Greg pretended it didn’t work. I think that’s bullshit and conclusion jumping on the characters’ part – his healing power not working for a while is far better explained by him not trying to use it on anything he perceived as alive between “losing” the power and “regaining” it, nor have we seen the reverse outside this period.
It didn’t work to heal a crack in a giant stormy rock that wasn’t a living being like the Gems and humans are (the power works on both Gems and humans, so it’s not an “organic vs inorganic” thing), so he concluded it had outright disappeared.
(He does discover that “it’s back” by way of accidentally healing a teddy bear, to which you could argue that it isn’t alive, but I think MC Bear Bear is alive to Steven.)
I think what rubs me most the wrong way about the whole thing is that if I’m right about this and Steven couldn’t heal lifeless things in the first place, taking away the healing power he only unlocked three episodes earlier didn’t even serve any narrative purpose beyond the (mediocre at best) episode it happened in.
</rant>
As of Jack’s interlude, you’ve read 500,000 words of Worm. On a somewhat related note, Ward is almost 7 months old and is closing in on 500,000 words soon.
Nice! Only 1.34 Homestucks to go!
Also damn, that man is productive.
I really need to stop doing single-session chapters… Man, no wonder it felt like that scroll bar was going way further down than usual. :p
Wildbow does not write the chapters well in advance. I understand why you would think so, given how well-written, thematically consistent and thought out they are, but it turns out he’s just ridiculously fast and talented.
Huh, wow.
In retrospect, I’m torn between being surprised it took you, an actual Norwegian, so long to quote “Dinner for One” and being surprised there wound up being an appropriate place to do so.
Hehe, yeah, and I ended up doing it almost as far from Christmas as I could get, timewise. :p
Honestly, when I wrote it, I could’ve sworn I’d referenced it earlier, but I can’t find anything, so I guess not. Maybe I just considered it at some point.
…a bit of context for those who have no idea what we’re talking about:
Dinner for One is a sketch (British script, German TV production in English) about a duchess hosting her 90th birthday party with four guests… who are all deceased. The butler, James, has to pretend to serve and then be each guest as he circles the table repeatedly. This includes drinking for everyone in the frequent toasts, so as the sketch continues, he gets more and more drunk (amusingly, the actor never drank a drop of alcohol in his life). Add in a tiger rug for James to keep stumbling over and some memorable catchphrases, and it becomes a hilarious classic – though it’s largely unknown in most English-speaking countries.
In a fair number of countries, including Germany, Sweden and Denmark, it’s a New Year’s Eve tradition to air Dinner For One. In Norway, we do it on December 23rd, “Little Christmas Eve”. Thanks to this treatment, the sketch is (or at least used to be) the world’s most repeated TV program ever.
In other words, by airing Dinner For One in December, we follow the same procedure as every year, James.
(More that Cherish maybe remarked “Huh, that’s probably one of your lower kill counts, Shatterbird.”
“Why?”
“The Worm,” Cherish replies, pointing in a direction.
Jack looks to Mannequin, who leaves without a word.)
– Wildbow, explaining why Mannequin attacked.
That makes sense. I like the ambiguity on whether Jack looking at Mannequin was a wordless order, or an acknowledgement of the fact that Mannequin would want to go do something about that anyway.
Speaking of wordless, I love that Wildbow used “leaves without a word” about a guy who can’t speak anyway. :p
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