HELL YEAH HATS

i think it could be interesting to have Taylor interact with a Mark who’s early in their career and only just starting to learn Taylorisms to see her as what he might end up as.

Like Cecil has Taylor working for him cause Contessa saw the only way for her to stay put was if she had a job and so she gets put on babysitting duty when Mark first starts to work for Cecil and Mark see this woman with some sort of mysterious past who’s sorta a vague mentor figure who says things he’s been thinking in the back of his mind which scares him and makes him wonder about the role he’s going down

Hey so, thought exercise, how do you think Taylor would fare if she got dropped into the invincible universe? For the sake of mechanics let's say she literally gets dropped in via doorman portal or something.

So one thing about Invincible is that I think it's setting is protagonist-centric in a way that Worm's isn't. To the extent that Invincible's setting has worldbuilding- worldbuilding that isn't, like, ported in from the books's early association with the confederated Image Comics shared universe- it's worldbuilding that exists to convey the impression of a big-two-flavor universe. Here's our spin on the undersea kingdom, here's the riff on the Martians, here are our riffs on SHIELD, on Gotham, on Themyscira, on 70s blaxploitation-adjacent heroes, and so on. This is the entire ethos underpinning the Guardians of the Globe in particular- piggybacking on pre-existing audience affection for the Justice League to convey that it's a Big Fucking Deal when the guardians get blendered in issue 7.

You have flashbacks demonstrating that there was capital-S Superhero Stuff going on in the seventies and eighties, or as far back as the thirties with Immortal, you create the impression of a status quo, a big pond in which Mark is a little fish. And to Kirkman's credit, some effort clearly went into making sure that the non-Mark capes are sufficiently fleshed out that you can believe that they've got other stuff going on in their lives. But at the end of the day, it's the Invincible universe. You don't see a lot of people talking about the Guarding the Globe spinoff. Many of the most interesting characters- Cecil being a big example here- are interesting because of the ways in which they bounce off Mark specifically, the ways in which he chooses to deal with them. The universe is less of a character in the story the way that Earth Bet is- it's just the place where Mark's story, specifically, is happening. If there's a codified setting bible, I'll eat my hat.

Now of course the world of Worm is, in many ways, equally Taylor-centric, because that's what it means to be the protagonist. But owing in part to the themes of the story, and in part to the sheer number of false-start protagonists Wildbow played around with before settling on Taylor, it's very good at conveying the idea that there are many stories happening in this setting and Taylor's is just the one this particular work happened to focus on. There's an actual point to doing OC worldbuilding for what the superhero scene looks like in Wormverse Denver or Seattle or whatever- whereas you can come up with superhero teams for Invincible-verse Denver, but what actually ties them to that universe? What are you getting out of putting them in Invincible specifically, that you wouldn't get from whipping up a barebones MASKS setting to support your OCs? Anyway. This is a really long way of getting to my real point, which is that I think the question is less "how does Taylor bounce off the Invincible setting" and more "How does Taylor bounce off Invincible the character, around whom the setting orbits even when it pretends not to."

This I'm unsure of, because where do you stick her in his life where you get an interesting dynamic? One thing that's interesting here is that Mark's overall character arc already involves learning a lot of taylorisms- the strategic ruthlessness, the shift from a good-evil dichotomy to a helping-not-helping dichotomy-so what about his arc is going to change if they spend time together? Why would they spend time together? Given the different power levels on display, what would differentiate her, in his experience, from the dozens of filler capes that exist for him at the level of "vague acquaintance?" This is assuming she's active as a cape at all, which she might not be if this is Post-GM. Mutual association through Cecil and the Global Defense Agency might be a hook- maybe they're paying for her new arm or something- but would she latch her cart to Cecil's wagon in the first place, barring some obvious crisis situation? Hard to say. If she's depowered, and present in his life somehow in a civilian context, well, that's a fast-track to not being part of the story anymore either, given how Mark's civilian connections slowly fading away was kind of a quiet plot point.

There's some configuration of these pieces that could be interesting, but I'm not quite sure what they are. Soliciting input here.

I know it’s not hard to point out reactionaries hypocrisy when it comes to like safe spaces or hug boxes or whatever but genuinely how much of an echo chamber do you have to exist in for you to think this is a reasonable thing to say

Storage is the defining problem of our age. Two hundred years ago, our ancestors had fifteen or twenty things in their houses, max. And one of them was "bed." Now, we have a lot of clutter. Sure, it's down from the peak of the 1970s, when we needed thirty-six different pieces of electrical equipment just to listen to racist people in our general area, but we still have too much stuff.

Self-storage companies have exploded. Not literally, although that did happen to the one near me from some dude cooking shatter, but they are immensely profitable. If you receive a bunch of heirloom furniture from Crazy Aunt Ethel, you won't have enough room for it in your single bedroom basement apartment. You shove all of it into a self-storage bay, and keep paying the monthly bills, waiting until you can have a house big enough to place some heirloom furniture in.

The storage companies know this. They'll give you a low "sucker" rate at the start, and then start cranking up the fees. And you'll keep paying them. It's cheaper to kick in $5 more a month, than it is to ask your friend Ted to borrow his pickup truck so that you can drive all your shit across town to a competing storage unit, who will do the exact same thing.

How do you fight back, ideally without having to throw away a bunch of coffee tables from 1953 and incurring the eternal wrath of Aunt Ethel's shade? You have to let the storage unit make money for you. The obvious way is electricity. With electricity, you can run all kinds of things, from a seedy cryptocurrency mining operation, to an illegal online betting parlour. And the storage folks know this, which is why they don't provide power to your unit, and wrap the unit's lightbulb in an impenetrable steel cage. They are used to dealing with your average, run-of-the-mill cheap scumbag.

Don't let that stop you: despite what your neurochemistry is telling you, you are an exceptional cheap scumbag. You don't need their electricity; you can generate your own. The answer? Rats love running on little hamster wheels. You can make thirty, forty cents a month, per wheel. That's money in your pocket, and all it will cost you is a bit of expired cheese and a lot of old Subaru blower motors. Sure, it's not going to be great for any couches or clothing that you leave in the unit, but who ever heard of a heirloom sofa bed? Throw that shit out, ideally by leaving it in a unit and no longer paying the bill. You don't need to cling to memories: you're rich now, atop your rodent power empire.

okay this is really cool, does Bioshock Infinite with its multiverses and lighthouses fit into this idea, and if so, how?

I interpret the first two Bioshock games as a cosmic horror story that the protagonists are just glancing off the outer edges of. Slugs don't do that to your genetic code, for one thing, and genetic code has very little bearing on pyrokinesis or teleportation or the ability to grow swarms of bees inside yourself. It's also mighty convenient that Ryan happened to have picked the one spot in the ocean that happens to have The Slugs That Can't Do That- it's obviously part of the mythmaking of Ryan Amusements that they put such a fine point on where he abruptly stopped the boat and declared that he was going to put down the foundations of Rapture, and there's a dash of narrative anthropic principle on top of that, but it's still very convenient. And In terms of aesthetic and narrative outcome Rapture from 1960 onward is certainly checking all the boxes; madness, mutation, moisture. Impossibly grandiose societies brought down by hubris, science run amok, "look upon my works ye mighty", horrible familial truths, the whole shebang. And of course you have that brilliant light below Persephone.

The story doesn't necessarily parse as cosmic horror immediately because it fronts the impression that there's a grounded explanation for every insane thing that happens. You're supposed to just take it as part of the premise that they can build something like Rapture with human technology in 1945. You mostly hear about plasmids from professionals doing practical research and development with them, so you get the impression that there's a well-understood body of science here that just happens to be outside of your personal understanding. But for every Professor Armitage who understands the whole shape of the Dunwich Horror, there are a hundred Massholes who just saw a barn explode for no reason and now have to cope with the very real invisible something laying waste to the countryside regardless of the full truth of the matter. And from within the exploding barn of Rapture it doesn't matter to Jack or Delta whether the foundations were laid down atop Rl'yeh or whether ADAM is actually the extracted blood of a Great Old One or whatever the fuck. Maybe there's someone down there who understands the deep lore and went mad from the revelation in the genre typical way. But nothing about the situation requires you that you dig that deep to develop a working understanding of what's going on. Rapture's downfall is totally legible as a mundane death spiral of bad leadership, shoddy ideology, economic pressures and bog-standard human greed. Impossible weapons swung in careless arcs by human hands.

Scion=What if Superman was a murderous space whale instead of immigrant?

Superman= Superhero who is coded as an immigrant/alien that is the subject of controvery because he supposedly 'doesn't belong'.

Brightburn= What if Superman's people were evil and despite growing up with a loving family, found out about his origins and relented to his nature?

Homelander= What if Superman was evil, and didn't grow up with a loving family but rather seen as an experiment and weapon and not as a person or individual?

Omni-man= What if Superman was raised on his home planet and was a colonizer and supremacist, rather than an immigrant?

Relistening to wolf 359 is weird because there’s so much foreshadowing

Okay, so, Pactverse Peter Pan. Neverland is a knotted place, Tinkerbell is a High Summer fae in the process of succumbing to Winter, and Peter is her Bright Eyed companion. Tinkerbell created Neverland as a flailing last ditch effort to remain engaged in the Stories rather than fall to the winter court, and towards that end, acquired Peter to be an instigator of Narrative. The dynamic between them is responsible for their home becoming knotted. Captain Hook is a practitioner who seeks to claim the vast stores of plot power stored there for himself.

Well now I want to see someone experience “eldritch horror” where they just go “ooooooooh it all makes sense.” And that’s it, everyone else is freaking out and screaming but they’re just going huh yeah sure

People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.

An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…

It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.

This is madness.

chuck tingle

just fucked an abstract concept