I just want them to go hang out in the woods and have like 50 dogs and be happy, is that not too much to ask?

Since I needed to log back into my very dusty dA account to opt out of the AI dataset training, I found some very old (2013-2014) Worm fanart that never got crossposted to tumblr.

So is Worm good from what you have read

"Yes" doesn't begin to cover it but yes. Worm is a brain-rewiring mobius strip disguised as a bible disguised as a superhero web serial that either cured your cancer or shot your dog or both depending on who you ask, and it has many extremely dedicated, brilliant scholar priest surgeons publicly dissecting it on this platform on the regular to the point I don't think I have much to add to the conversations surrounding it, even if I do have some The Thoughts about it. I had never even really seriously thought about superhero prose before and Worm isn't a thing I go back and reread frequently but it did a complete and total 180 on the way I think about superheroes and even fiction, and I've never stopped thinking about it since I've read it.

It is a monumentally impressive story with completely absolutely incredible characters that I cannot stop thinking about. No matter where it was going, even past stretches that were less interesting or more of a slog to read or worse, I could not put the story of Taylor Hebert down for one minute. Tattletale fascinated me every step of the way, I had to keep up with her. Rachel Lindt was a character I feel like I'd been waiting my whole life for. What was I gonna do, not see them through? I feel like Worm easily loses you if you don't particularly connect with the characters enough to justify to yourself the amount of time you'll spend with them, but man, I could not unglue my eyeballs from these people enough (I love all the core Undersiders, to be clear, I'd say it's Rachel > Taylor > Tattletale > Aisha and Alec and Brian, there are very small gaps between these, I just don't go berserk for the last three like I do for the first three, I'm taking Bitch and Skitter to the grave I'm dead serious)

Worm irreparably destroys your ability to engage with superhero fiction the same way ever again, as evidenced by the fact that it destroyed the author's own ability to engage with his own superhero fiction ever again. And everybody who read it has one or several gripes with it with some major dealbreakers in the mix. Tumblr's kinda the only place online where you can really talk about them at length without the spectre of John Wildbow hanging over the discussion, which enables discussion to the point where yes, maybe it does look like to outsiders that nobody can agree on whether Worm is good or what is it even about or whether it even has worms in it (it has at least one, although it's a very big one).

And it is good, it has the Undersiders in it and the Undersiders are one of the greatest groups of characters ever put together, but everyone has at least one major point of contention with Worm whether it's the timeskip or the length or the racism or the gross fatphobia or aspects surrounding the Dallon-Pelham Torment Nexus and etc. I'd say it has maybe the most racist vision of Latin America I've ever seen in a superhero text a hair short of pro-colonial tracts in Golden Age comics and that is a tall fucking order by any metric (part of why I started WEON4 as a project was motivated by spite, to try and make my own stories about non-American superheroes even if just as practice). It is Complicated, and that winds up making it so fascinating to talk about.

Worm has self-sustaining ecological systems of posts up here, far away from the Spacebattles and Reddit battlegrounds where it has different ones and that's not getting into Weaverdice or the sequel or Wildbow's larger body of work, which I haven't gotten to and probably will not any time soon because Worm was enough of a commitment as is. Do I recommend Worm to everyone? It is certainly not to everyone's tastes and I personally find it difficult to describe it simply enough to make it sound appealing or not like a pyramid scheme. But yes I do think it's good, in fact great, in fact, amazing, except when it isn't, and except it Plainly Sucks, but then something like Taylor vs Mannequin or Kevin Norton's interlude or "You needed worthy opponents" happens and it fucks harder than anything has ever fucked before and you don't walk away from it the same, so yes I guess "good" will have to do now.

It's certainly a lot but I definitely found it worth my time to read and then read the texts written about it here. You'll have to take my endorsement of Worm as proof of it's quality and proof of how deranged it makes it's readerbase, they're not mutually exclusive. If you can make it, Worm and the wormosphere has layers and layers to wade through and talk about and enjoy, despite how we're all so very small in the end *gunshot*.

hey so... everyone knows Kabru is the opposite of Laios, but nobody talks about how the rest of their party members are also opposed,

scab criminal Mickbell against unionized worker Chilchuck

dogboy against catgirl

Rin the outlaw mage who hasn't actually done anything wrong against Marcille the highborn upper class mage who's secretly a necromancer

Dia the dwarf who distrusts dungeons against Senshi the naturalist who's lived in dungeons for decades

Holm the support mage who uses other creatures as a shield against Falin the cleric with a martyr complex

Well alright then

Venture into the deep past of the cosmos with Crash Course Pods: The Universe. In episode one, John Green and Dr. Katie Mack start at the beginning -- the first 60 seconds of the universe 13.8 billion years ago.

Episode one is out now! Listen on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts!

in honor of my having finished worm, here's that one scene in speck that gut-punched me (jk that was every scene in speck)

"Tell me what we see--"

This is probably a favorite piece of mine right now that was done as a collab with bluejayblueskies as a journal cover and piece!

[You can also find it as a print here!]

[ID below cut!]

[ID: A painting of a depiction of John Doe and Arthur Lester from Malevolent. Arthur is a faired skinned man with freckles, russet hair with gray streaks, wearing a white button down shirt, looking defiant. He stands holding a silver lighter in his right hand that illuminates him and the figure behind him. John Doe is a large, masked figure cloaked in golden yellow and a large white mask with golden eyes and one broken horn on the mask. He has coal black skin and a monstrous hand grasping Arthur's shoulders and neck, claws poking against his shirt. Both of them are cloaked with black and gold smoke circling around them with colored shadows cast on them from the flame of the lighter. The logo of the artist is in the lower left hand corner. Finished March 6th, 2024. /End ID]

lol, he can't hide his joy at finding out all this drama

The agonising feel when a character tag is full of shipping that you Simply Do Not Vibe With. The solution is, naturally, to keep scrolling. But the wince, the WINCE.

To a homophobe, even the most chaste kiss on the cheek between gay people is exactly as disgusting and degenerate as a hardcore BDSM orgy hosted in the town square, so you may as well ally with the BDSM orgy enthusiasts to throw bricks at the cops who are going to try and arrest all of you together anyway.

when did this happen???

rachel, i wish you were born a boy

columbia administration is threatening to call in the national guard tonight

Something about the idea that voting for president only matters if you live in a swing state, and that all the people in blue states or red states can indulge themselves in principled nonparticipation because the outcomes are preordained, strikes me as akin to playing with fire.

Is it really coherent to say "both sides are awful, write in Mickey Mouse or burn your ballot or just stay home and get drunk, unless you live in Pennsylvania, in which case maybe consider taking one for the team and compromising yourself by voting for the lesser evil?" Is that really the message that will lead to a preferable outcome?

What it sounds like to me is a sign that 1) you take your local electorate for granted, and 2) you see avoiding the worst case scenario as somebody else's problem.

I remember when Florida was a swing state. I also remember when Pennsylvania wasn't.