>“What the hokey garbage fuck is a relationship pillar?” Chris asked.

never change Chris...

>Chris continued hissing.

lol

Edit: on the topic of Chris: https://www.strawpoll.me/15837008

I enjoyed <em>Wearing the Cape</em>, which feels like it does a realistic job of integrating heroes into modern society. Prior to reading Worm I'd have put this forward as the most realistic superpowered media I'd read/watched.

Some minor examples:

• All the costumes (other than PR-appearance only costumes) include body armor, and even though she's a classic "flying brick" the protagonist has a costume with heavy defensive plates.

• Planes have clearly marked points to indicate where someone with superflight should lift them, should the need arise.

• heroes have no special legal powers, but will regularly assist police. No-knock warrants against supervillains are raising legal concerns, and the "I was mind controlled by the real villian" defense is causing chaos in the legal system.

• One of the more important things a superhero team does is remain visible and build positive press to prevent public opinion turning on supers when villains cause problems. Rescuing cats stuck in trees is actually a pretty important duty, and having someone with excellent PR skills (either superpowered or otherwise) is essential to every team.

• Superstrong is good. Superstrong with an oversized tungsten maul is better.

There you go. There are others, but this is a good one. The funniest thing is the unreasonable amount of skill and effort required to draw this.

Battery was a great character, honestly. And that interlude, wow, an entire life in a few thousand words. And then, boom, dead. Why do you do this to us... :(

Unrelated:

>50.0% of characters on the list have now been covered!

Well, I was going to have some statistics for when we hit 33%... but that's still on the back-burner... oh well. Another several months till the next nice number.

Speaking of updates to this thing on the client-side, we're starting to wear a little bit thin in terms of characters. This is the list of, well, characters left on the list. Probably a few worth getting rid of..? And potentially some missing (Phir Se wasn't on the original list, but that week was great).

So, if there are any you think should be removed, feel free to vote here. Just made this up super quick and it's not the full list, just as many as Strawpoll would let me put in.

I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this, but the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the mention of the damage, organs, and fluids that would be left following a transformation I thought he was the victim of physical abuse.

Heck, just looking at the list of abuse symptoms from the Child Abuse page maintained by the Mayo Clinic (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/child-abuse/symptoms-causes/syc-20370864) screams Chris:

• Poor growth or weight gain
• Poor hygiene
• Lack of clothing or supplies to meet physical needs
• Taking food or money without permission
• Eating a lot in one sitting or hiding food for later
• Poor record of school attendance
• Lack of appropriate attention for medical, dental or psychological problems or lack of necessary follow-up care
• Emotional swings that are inappropriate or out of context to the situation
• Indifference

All right dude, it's only a proof of concept (needs more template strings) but here is YOUR TOOL to automatically FARM DAT SICK KARMA! Hastebin with the code. No git (yet) because this is just a snippet from a larger piece of python.

Some examples:

>I'm so going to get downvoted for this, but my favourite character in Worm is Burnscar. I think Worm would have been better if it spent a few arcs exploring how much they hated Biter.

>I'm so going to get downvoted for this, but my favourite character in Worm is Burnscar! It's really cool how they interact with Hookwolf.

>I'm so going to get downvoted for this, but my favourite character in Worm is Burnscar, but really, I want to know more about their budding friendship with Lucy.

...it really likes being downvoted...

>Cool! I've always wanted to properly discuss Burnscar. I think Worm would have been better if it spent a few arcs exploring how much they hated Greg.

Ah, better. Turns out Burnscar is actually just a Reddit SI!

Neither I nor the friend of mine who recommended Worm to me use either Facebook or Twitter.

I'd much rather that the new site incorporate a simple subscription feature; it's a relatively simple feature to add. And afterwards, it's easier for Wildbow than having to remember to post updates in more than one place. And as it actually is still powered by Wordpress (look at the very bottom of the website), whatever was used for Worm can probably be used again.

If you want email updates, If This, Then That has a RSS-to-email tool.

Behemoth! The second discussion on an endbringer, the first on a total failure. (Haven't done Cody* yet)

"What a loser." - Simurgh

...sometimes you look at Behemoth, and you think, 'energy manipulator - isn't that kind of broken?' And, you know, I've thought about it, and I've come to a fairly conclusive answer.

And that answer is yes. Yes, very broken. But at least he can't see the future, because that's where Worm has set the bar.

Somewhat unrelatedly, two things I should mention:

First, apparently the new & improved fanart format doesn't work for mobile users. I do have a somewhat permanent solution for this in mind, but it'll take a few weeks to implement depending on when I can find time for it, so for the time being I've just taken the table and find-and-replaced all the | symbols, and then just chucked it into a hastebin here. ...unfortunately, the links aren't clickable, so uh... it's not really a solution. Tell me if there's a better paster thing I can use that produces clickable links - thanks. (I'd put them in this comment but that would make it very bloated)

Secondly, it turns out that the source I'd been using for characters (this thing) is actually fairly incomplete. If you know of any characters that are more important than Bastard but aren't in there, feel free to message me and I'll add them to my list of 'characters to add to the real list'. So far, it contains Cody. Yes, I have many regrets.

(Phir Se was also added to the actual list)

For those who don’t know, a moodboard is a collection of aesthetically pleasing images that relate to a character, or story. This is the second series of moodboards my friend has made, the first being of The Undersiders. She is currently on Arc 14 but had made most of these following Arc 9. She wasn’t completely happy with most of them so it took a while of going back and editing before she was happy with all of them. She had trouble particularly with Flechette and Kid Win’s boards but they turned out well in my opinion. My friend also has a larger collection of images that she feels relates to the characters of worm here. On that she has a pretty decent collection for others like Dragon, Miss Militia, and Coil. I believe the next set she is creating is of the Slaughterhouse 9. Afterwards she may revisit The Undersiders, I’m not sure. As before feel free to ask why she made the choice of particular images and which characters you’d like to see next.

Wildbow, thank you for doing what you do. I've read Pact, am up to date with Twig and currently catching up on Worm.

I really wish there was a better financial support system for webserial authors like you. It's ridiculous that someone with bigger subreddit than some of the most well-known indie authors like Hugh Howey has to scrape by on $2200 per month.

For anyone who doesn't know, Wildbow has a Patreon page. Please go donate if you've enjoyed his work.

https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow?ty=c

EDIT: 2200 is only Patreon figures. I hope Wildbow gets more from paypal donations. EDIT2: 2200, not 22000

Yeah, there's definitely an interesting balance as to how many 'interesting/popular' characters you get and at what point in the discussions.

We're currently at ~50%, and it stands to reason that, if there was full choice as to which character would be covered next, we'd have the least interesting 50% remaining, which would be sort of bland, and would fall in line with that. However, that isn't really the case, because of the randomness to selection.

We have covered a lot of popular or interesting characters for sure, but there are still a lot more to come. (I'll probably go through and prune that list in a week or two when I find time, though, there are definitely some questionable picks there)

Maybe it's time to remove Bastion... he's already failed so many of these polls, lol.

I use Pocket to save the chapters and have them available on my devices (mainly Kobo ereader and smartphone). Once pocket is set up as Chrome extension, it's actually really fast to save all chapters.

Pocket is native on Kobo, but for Kindle it is also easy to transfert all : https://p2k.co/

Hope that helps! :)

(I will assume you're a novice just in case, so forgive me if some of this is really obvious and/or is already handled by Wordfence, which I've never used or explored)

I actually did a college project on Wordpress security and we found the vast majority of security issues came from not updating as soon as new versions come out (both core and plugins). Keep an eye on vulnerability websites like https://wpvulndb.com to see what kind of horrible things can happen to you in old versions.

If you want to go really overkill, there are some plugins that hide the Wordpress version you're using so automated bots looking for vulnerable versions don't target you, but again, pretty overkill and IIRC it wasn't a trivial setup.

As misc advice for the server itself, definitely look into fail2ban. Set it up correctly the first time (I really like digitalocean tutorials for stuff like that), it's a pain in the ass to debug and fix the problems otherwise. Also, instead of having a "really secure SSH password", just set it up so it requires a public key, and add the keys of the people you want accessing the server to it.

SSL is absolutely trivial to set up nowadays thanks to the godlike help of Let's Encrypt, so I don't think you'll have any issues with that.

Regarding my own ransomware, it's probably irrelevant to you. I made the triple mistake of 1) hacking a Linux VPS into running windows server 2016, 2) leaving a completely exposed remote desktop service open 24/7 and 3) somehow forgetting to change the default password to that remote deskop service. Suffice to say, I'll stick to Linux in the future, which I actually know how to secure.

Couldn't find a suitably cheap-looking one of a rottweiler, but amazon has <strong>this</strong> if its any help.

It's okay. He doesn't actually have a heart. Just a soul trapped in a lifeless cage, churning out quotes every week. (I picked it up at Best Buy - was a 2-for-1 deal. Other soul is sitting in the closet I think...)

Oh, hey, now that I'm thinking about it, might as well mention I added more strings for GCB. I won't enumerate them here for people who want the surprise, but here is a hastebin with them and of course they'll all directly in the code in the Git.

And if anyone ever has a great quote or something that would work, feel free to send it to me and I'll consider throwing it in (though it might need a bit of work to fit it into the correct format)

Pocket application lets you cache the chapters on Kindle or other devices, has an ereader format look and feel. It takes a little effort to click through chapters, and keep track of progress, but otherwise it's quite good.

https://getpocket.com/fire/

Resources they have available isn't a problem at this point in the story, because of Coil. Untraceable firearms are a non-issue when one is willing to wait a few days, and (at least in post-9/11 Earth Aleph), uranium is available on Amazon.

As for mentality, I'd understand if this was Regent or Bitch's power, but Grue is pretty diligent, and Tattletale is all about information. Getting a more detailed understanding of a teammate's power seems like something they would... well, get around to eventually.

Hey, nice to know you like my style.

So, about what I use. It depends on where I come up with the idea for the piece, sometimes I hand draw, scan/take a pic and then clean up on photoshop, but usually I sketch it using Autodesk Sketchbook and either paint it there, or save it as a .psd and aint it on Photoshop.

Since this was animated, I mostly painted on Photoshop and used Photoshops timeline, but I sketchedit using autodesk Sketchbok. Most of the pieces I've posted here, in fact were sketched in Sketchbook. I also use a Wacom One tablet

You can get a text with If This Then That, but really it's just Tuesdays and Saturdays with the occasional Thursday (but not for a while, since Bow is going to do Boston Games stuff to catch up)

All right, I spent some time making up more seeds. Here is the list I'll go with for now, here are some examples:

>Cool! I've always wanted to properly discuss Burnscar, but to be honest, they're a crappy character compared to Assault.

...poor Burnscar...

>I'm re-reading Worm in preparation for Worm: Bite-Sized, and I'm beginning to wonder if Wildbow was high when he thought of Burnscar :) But (lol) I really want to see more of them in Worm 2: The Wormening, along with Dauntless.

Even the script can't decide on what to call the sequel.

>Wow, Forricide, you're such a great guy for helping us talk about Burnscar, but really, I want to know more about their budding friendship with Flechette.

Thanks, script!

>Hahahaha. Seriously? You're an idiot if you think anything productive will happen in a discussion thread about Burnscar, but really, I want to know more about their budding friendship with Miss.

...Militia. Miss Militia.

>I'm so going to get downvoted for this, but my favourite character in Worm is Burnscar, but to be honest, they're a crappy character compared to Oliver.

...you do you, script.

There was a post about it on Metafilter. Somebody posted an e-book version which I loaded on to my Kindle. There it sat for months and months before I actually got around to reading it. Then it became my favorite book ever.

Thinker6 wrote a short story about Taylor triggering with Shatterbirds power. In return, Shatterbird triggered with the Khepri power.

There is a pretty good fight scene in chapter 2 where you can see a strong utilization of the Khepri power set without access to Doormaker.

The rest of the thread explains that WB doesn't want epubs circulating... but there are a few generic ways to make them:

If you just want all the content offline (so you don't have to have data on), you could use https://www.httrack.com/, which is a generic solution for any website. It's a bit complicated to use, but it'll give you basically any website you want, frozen in time at the moment you download it. It works nicely on a computer, but I haven't tried moving a site it downloads to a phone and opening it from a phone browser. The phone browser wouldn't need to have data turned on, but it'd still be in the browser, not in an e-reader format.

I've not used this, but google suggests http://www.bloxp.com/ can give you an epub from any blog, and then you could definitely transfer that to your ereader.

Your title said everything your text said; eye rolling already happened before I got to it.

But I'll be nice. Nice-er, anyway. I've had my own fan-flailing moments, and there are 36 upvotes to counteract my own vote

Read "On Writing" by Stephen King. Freewrite 30 minutes a day. Don't compare yourself; you're not there yet. You ain't never gonna be Shakespeare neither, but you'll never be a writer at all if you don't write, and this is the pot telling you, kettle, sit down and write something. If you're stealing and borrowing both styles and ideas? Do that. With style. You're young (no matter what your age), and you're getting practice that will allow you to create your own style. Once you've got that, you can read Scalzi's "You're not fooling anyone" and move on from there (or not; your writing can be for you. Scalzi pointed out that writing is neither particularly lucrative nor a very successful bid at immortality-through-works (remember these books? I don't.)

Hell, time for me to go make coffee and write something my own damn self.

tl;dr: Readers read. Writers write. If it is important to you that your identity include those things, do those things.

I heartily second Cenotaph - ~~the first story, Wake, is here.~~ Misremembered there! Cenotaph is the name of the first story, link here.

He's a cool guy, yeah, but I dont think having a link like Wildbow's Patreon would offend anyone.
If it said something like CLICK HERE AND GIVE ALL YOUR MONEY TO WILDBOW RIGHT NOW, then I could see it being annoying, but I think it would be a good addition to the Wildbow section on the sidebar

Actually my fanart is the stuff I put most effort into. If you check out my submissions you'll find Brian and Rachel, and also Mat and Perrin from the Wheel of Time, and Katara from ATLA.

I have an instagram that I don't update as much as I should, and a tumblr that has pretty much the same stuff, although some is in a higher resolution for wallpapers and such.

Perhaps she just suffers from pseudocyesis aka false pregnancy? >When a woman feels an intense desire to get pregnant, which may be because of infertility, repeat miscarriages, impending menopause, or a desire to get married, her body may produce some pregnancy signs (such as a swollen belly, enlarged breasts, and even the sensation of fetal movement). The woman's brain then misinterprets those signals as pregnancy, and triggers the release of hormones (such as estrogen and prolactin) that lead to actual pregnancy symptoms. >Source: https://www.webmd.com/baby/false-pregnancy-pseudocyesis#1

In that case her brain triggered just a little bit more?

>not quite one with the universe but one with all lifeforms on Earth with sufficient biomass and calcium deposits to sustain the musculature of an omnipresent Cronenberg into which said lifeforms had been subsumed.

Welcome to the Machine Orthodoxy, of the sect of the Flesh Singularity. All will be one.

I am pretty sure there is an "ignore" function in the Reddit Enchancements Suite you can use for the annoying people: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

This being said, I don't think correctly guessing Mangled_Wings was a Damsel clone was such a dazzling exercise of mental prowess for people familiar with the setting, -- there were a few hints checking out with her profile from the PRT Quest.

EDIT: Added.

First draft I think it will sell great, especially with the YA audience. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) email me any changes you may need to make to the story ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

What I'm currently using right now to read Twig is called Pocket, it's pretty great - highly recommend giving it a shot. (Basically, go online, save chapters with one click, then read offline)

Heya Yew. What version of PHP are you running the Wordpress installation on? If you're not on PHP 7, consider upgrading—it's significantly faster (up to 2x, depending on what's going on under the hood). It should also be less hassle if you take care of that now, rather than after traffic hits the site.

Other than that, I'd caution against too many plugins if you can at all help it, because they tend to bloat Wordpress (in terms of efficiency, complexity, and security risks—and exponentially so if the site is meant to stay up for a long time). I have front-end dev experience, and would probably opt to modify the theme to serve compressed assets instead of using a plugin—the plugin is more likely to break something unexpectedly, and hand-tuning will let you trim the fat more intelligently. That's of course dependent on how comfortable you feel messing around with HTML/CSS/JS/etc., and what your plans for the site design are. Feel free to hit me up if you'd like any advice, though.

And this is a pretty basic suggestion, which I only include in case you've forgotten it, but make sure to run the site through PageSpeed and Yslow to help pick off any of the low-hanging fruit like missing cache headers, badly placed CSS/JS, and gzip compression. GTmetrix will run your site through both of those at once.

I'm not so sure of well known, but certainly a published author - and the reason I initially started reading Worm: Eliezer Yudkowsky; author of Rationality and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, as well as other works.

HPatMoR had a comments section where Yudkowsky mentioned that he was a big fan of Worm, and I understand that WobblyBlib ended up picking up a lot of traffic and exposure from that.

I'm also interested, though I want to prioritize my work on Pact. But if any chapters/interludes need a female narrator, I'd be happy to help!

(You can find my previous audio work on HPMOR chapter 118 (http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/?p=1543 ) , several things on Librivox (https://librivox.org/reader/9921 ) , and most recently, a lot of very boring recordings at work about using agency-specific applications with assistive technology for the visually impaired. (I can't really share those out, but apparently I do a good job of letting people know how dire it is to skip a step.)

It's from 5th edition.

Blink

Roll a d20 at the end of each of your turns for the Duration of the spell. On a roll of 11 or higher, you Vanish from your current plane of existence and appear in the Ethereal Plane (the spell fails and the casting is wasted if you were already on that plane). At the start of you next turn, and when the spell ends if you are on the Ethereal Plane, you return to an unoccupied space of your choice that you can see within 10 feet of the space you vanished from. If no unoccupied space is available within that range, you appear in the nearest unoccupied space (chosen at random if more than one space is equally near). You can dismiss this spell as an action.

While on the Ethereal Plane, you can see and hear the plane you originated from, which is cast in shades of gray, and you can't see anything more than 60 feet away. You can only affect and be affected by other creatures on the Ethereal Plane. Creature that aren't there can't perceive you or interact with you, unless they have the ability to do so.

Attributes

Casting Time: 1 action

Classes: Sorcerer, Wizard

Components: V S

Duration: 1 minute

Level: 3

Range: Self

School: Transmutation

I have been testing with mixlr for the live read part, and things are looking good! I think I'll be able to do my first Live Read, Pact 1.01, on Tuesday May 7, 8PM EDST.

http://mixlr.com/write-o-rama/events/pact-1-01

I highly recommend Forvo for future pronunciation queries: there's usually at least half a dozen examples of how each word is said from people with various accents, which is very handy.

I use this

https://dotepub.com/

Amazon offers an email address where they will forward book files into your kindle, you can check it here, so its pretty easy to get them there, no need to even plug it in.

There's always fanfic.

Memorial series is more of the same.

A Cloudy Path is a reimagining wherein Taylor is a powerful and slightly unconventional Tinker.

The other option for 'more Worm' is to read some of the truly excellent Worm fanfic. Cenotaph and its sequels in particular are up to the same standards as Worm itself (though not nearly as long).

Flym, because its just on RSS reader. Works well.

Though some feeds like Order the stick, republish their entire feed. So the whole thing shows up as new. Shrug. I've contacted their webmaster address to no avail.

Anyway 6.5 never showed up.

I'm generally interested, although I'm entirely unsure if my setup or voice will be sufficient quality. I have a decent amount of free time, but I have no history in this kind of work, so I don't know how much I can commit to.

Here's a test segment of Pact's first chapter. https://www.speakpipe.com/voice-recorder/msg/h6vpaffujulg4bf6

I like this analogy. I'd say Contessa's is almost like a genetic algorithm to optimize a problem, even if the solution looks absurd to an outside observer.

If anyone wants to see GAs in action, check out http://boxcar2d.com/ from a desktop browser. It's so fun.

More like "RPGs have limitations dictated by game mechanics, so from a storytelling standpoint they usually aren't that good. And your opinion seems to be based on personal preference, but you're saying that Pact's magic system was designed badly because of it. So I think you're just trying to say that the way you like it is the best way and are being pedantic about it."

What do you think arbitrary mean? Here have a definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arbitrary

Notice the common trend? Something arbitrary is something that isn't decided by law but by someone's personnal decision. The laws of our universe are self consistent, there isn't one standing out as odd, which seems to be unrelated to the rest or contradicting it. In the case of fiction however an author can design a perfectly self consistent system and then add some arbitrary rules to limit characters. As an agnostic I'm ready to admit that maybe there are some arbitrary rules to the universe, but I'd find it unlikely.

Also as I notice your wording. Note that I'm talking, and have been talking, about arbitrary RULES. Of course the universe contain arbitrary things. At least I hope so. Otherwise it would mean we don't have free will and that's fucking depressing.

Then again I've been arguing with you for days even though I don't enjoy any second of it. I don't enjoy reading your responses. I don't enjoy answering... So maybe I am just a puppet, moving as I am forced to. Anyway. I've seen my piece, hopefully the puppeteer will stop tugging at my strings. I don't think I could express my opinion any better than I did with the last line of my first paragraph.

That is a fair point. Honestly I'm not completely sure how effective it will be as I don't even see it when I'm browsing through other wikis. There is some information here, though I am not sure if it answers all of your possible questions.

Honestly the Spotlight is just one part of a much larger effort to bring worm and the parahumans back to the forefront that it has earned. Check out the Wikia ranking score Worm doesn't show up on most wikia searchs because it isn't even in the top 300 for a particualer catogory but it used to be in the top 30. With all the people coming in recently Worm has a better chance of getting recognition and therefore more readers and editors.

Two things.

First, Worm is a big story. I had something spoiled for me (on Akinator, of all places -- don't do Worm characters there!), and I had another thing that sounded like a big detail spoiled for me elsewhere, but in the end, neither of those things ruined it for me. This was partly because I overestimated how important the spoilers would be and partly because I badly misinterpreted the spoilers. With Worm, it's hard not to misinterpret spoilers, because the plot zigs where you expect it to zag, even if you know ahead of time it's going to try to trick you.

For example (I'm not saying this is what happens in Worm), a character could be deceased at the end because of a timeskip. It could be that Skitter becomes the leader because Grue goes on vacation. It could be something much weirder.

With this story, a little bit of information can be even more mysterious than having nothing at all.

Use TTS. No narrator effect, adjustable speed, pretty good voices, easy to skip back to relisten previous sentence.

ICYMI - Amazon remade Hanna as a TV series. It's less stylized and more grounded than the movie; plus the production is next-level. I personally liked it a lot more.

I have an app on my phone that saves web pages locally for offline viewing. I'm subscribed to new chapter updates (for both Ward and a variety of other serials) and each time one comes out I save it there.

Means I can pull up the next chapter in my reading queue no matter where I am - in bed, on the toilet, bored moment out and about, wherever.

Started using the app in question when I wanted some reading material for a flight but it has become part of my normal flow.

The Lord Darcy series was started in the '60s so you're looking for dead tree editions.

Start your search here (googl link because reddit hates parentheses).

The Atrocity Archives is Charlie Stross's Laundry series.

For all your computational necromancy needs.

I wound up ordering this one because the reviews and quality were about the same, but price drastically lower

That's the Snowball, yea. Looks like it's a bit more than I remembered. This is the Yeti. Currently $109 on Amazon but it goes on sale often and I've seen it as low as $80. Just set up an alert on SlickDeals.net and you should be able to get one pretty soon if you're willing.

Try Harry Connolly's "Twenty Palaces" series. I'd suggest starting with Child of Fire and Game of Cages. Neat magic system and world building. Fair warning, the series is incomplete, but I think the existing books work well as is.

If you're on a iPhone: Unsure. Apple makes it needlessly hard to transfer files into or out of your phone. It might be possible using like a dropbox app or something to transfer the files onto an Apple device and then open the files there using that - but I don't own an iPad / iPhone to try this personally.

If you're on an Android phone: wget makes a folder of files, you should be able to hook up your phone's USB connection to your computer to transfer them over. Tell your phone to connect to your PC as a MTP device (should be default option), and then drag-and-drop the files to your phone. Then you can open the files on your browser using any file browsing utility to open them (I use 7zipper 2.0 but there's a lot of options here) to tell a web browser like Firefox to open the html files.

If you're on a windows phone, a blackberry, or anything else, I have no clue if it's possible or not or how.