Where I’d Set a WW3 Story

If I wrote a conventional WWIII story, it’d probably be in…. Southern Europe. In a comment on a post depicting said theater in the WWIII 1987 TL, I described it as “an uncomfortable sideshow in rough terrain”, similar to the Italian front in World War II.

It’s not in spite of but because of this that the setting appeals to me.

• It’s different and I like less-traveled locations.
• It means I can slow the battles down, thanks to the terrain and the lower-tier forces. The CentFront is a little too er, fast. Not to mention deadly.

 

Two Fictional Baseball Teams

Having just gotten Action PC Baseball, I have, once I get the hang of the more complicated mechanics, the means to bring two of my longstanding fictional baseball teams to life.

Connecticut Corsairs

The Corsairs (named for the F4U) are the archetypical “billionaire’s toy”, with a classic degree of “bought talent”, especially pitchers, since in-universe they pioneered the now-standard “many pitchers throwing all-out”. They’ve won several World Series and consistently do well. I’d stuff the Corsairs full of good players.

New York Owls

The New York Owls are the opposite. They are the baseball equivalent of the Sterling-era Clippers, existing purely to leech off big-market revenues. In only one season have they not finished last. I’d stuff the Owls full of bad players. Really bad players.

 

 

Plot Device Characters

Some characters in stories are obvious devices to make the plot go in a certain way, instead of being actual characters. They serve as a very interesting example of how personal taste matters-people who agree that the characters are there simply as plot devices can still disagree on whether or not that damages the actual story or not.

In my opinion, I view an overabundance of plot device characters as a big problem in Worm. Without spoiling anything, there’s one character notorious for having the most blatant and ridiculous plot-device power imaginable, but most of the others still have it to some degree or another.

Then again, because I never got into the immediate prose of Worm, I notice small issues like that in outsized terms. So it’s back to personal taste, I suppose.

Paint The Force Red is out

My newest ebook, Paint The Force Red, is now released on Kindle. It can be purchased here.

I’ll admit this “e-pamphlet” was one of the most challenging to write. While my past ebooks have been written solely on my own whim, this was intended as a (somewhat) serious guide. I struggled with how much to add, and how rigid I should be. In the end, I settled on a cheap, brief guide to hopefully guide readers with the basics-after all, every country is different.

So, enjoy.

The Tank Crew

Tank crews can make for an underappreciated fictional niche. There’s enough of them to be more than an individual (ie, pilot), yet not enough to get out of hand. You get between three and five crew to a tank (again, barring the edge cases), and there’s less need to perspective hop.

“Crunchy”

I’ve found myself using the word “crunchy” a lot to describe settings with a lot of detail. I could think I read it somewhere, but haven’t been able to find someone else using it in that way. As for how I took to the word “Crunchy”, I think it might be two things.

• A derivative of “number-crunching”.
• A metaphor for density-it’s dense, “solid”, and thus crunches when you bite down.

A use of it in context could be “Worm has a lot of crunchiness to it, making it a favorite on a board [Spacebattles] that likes such things.”

Time to filter

When I write, there comes a time when I have to filter out the excess world-building, the kind that I think is neat but not really relevant to a story. At best, it’s just excess stuff. At worst, I think it gets in the way of characters and plot.

Though I don’t subscribe to the fallacy of “every day spent on worldbuilding research is one less day on writing”-sometimes inspiration strikes and sometimes it doesn’t.

The TO&E Paradox

Here’s one of the most interesting paradoxes.

-The TO&E of a unit tells a lot about what the unit is, what it’s capable of, and what it does.

-Any unit that has been in the field for even a slight amount of time will NOT be matching its on-paper TO&E. So, if a unit’s paper strength is 51 tanks and 173 APCs, even a bit of experience in the “rough” will reduce that, if only to mechanical breakdowns. So it’s one of those “use a bit of common sense” deals.

Worm’s Appeal and My Growing Distaste

So how did a minor but incredibly long story about a superheroine end up dominating Spacebattles to the point where it needed its own forum? (NOTE: I’m being a little vague and general due to the desire to avoid spoilers-I may go more in-depth later if I feel like it)

Well, even I can think the concept is interesting enough, and I think it could be due to some other factors:

• This is not anything having to do with Worm itself, but rather its rivals. Big two superhero comics have the bar set so low that you need a microscope to see the gap between it and the ground. For all the many problems with its own structure and worldbuilding, Worm has a massive advantage in that it’s a contained narrative written by one person.
• Unconventional superpowers. This is where I think Worm shares an unlikely fandom with the infamous Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. The characters have unconventional superpowers and use them, and the appeal is there.
• A sort of “crunchiness” where people like the mechanics. Of course, as someone who dislikes excessive “crunchiness” where it doesn’t matter, this is not the case for me. But people do like it, especially on a place like Spacebattles.

So that’s what gets the appeal of Worm going.

However, I’ve found (and must say that this is my personal opinion), as I’ve read more of it, that Worm is worse than I thought at first. At least, later Worm is. Early Worm (which I define as roughly up to Arc 8) is still in the “not for me” category. Later Worm, well…

• The powers get more and more contrived.
• The stakes get raised far too much.
• The story gets less believable and focused.

And then there’s the final plot twists, which when I saw them, I thought “you’d slog through a million and a half clunky words for this?”

 

An unusual villainess

I changed my avatar on some sites to a strange villainess. That would be Limstella, the second-to-last boss of Fire Emblem [7] for the GBA.

To be honest, although I played the game as a child and loved loved loved it, at the time I only saw her as one boss among many. Now, I’ve grown to like her more. I think it’s the character design applied in greater detail by both official and fan artists giving her the semi-androgynous, creepy look with more justice than a 16 bit portrait.

As a deliberately almost emotionless drone, she doesn’t match her “sister” Sonia in terms of pure evil. What separates her from being just another speedbump is her death quote:

“I am not human. This body and this heart are constructs. Yes, as is this sorrow.”

Whether that’s a “why was I programmed to feel pain” quote, or an instance that there was something there that wasn’t in a mindless morph like Denning is up to the audience, and gives her (possibly unwarranted) attention. Still, she works as a minor villainess. (I even had a “Rosetta Stone” for a weird conlang by translating her name as “Starlight” in whatever language she was named in)