After a long hiatus, Star Trip appears to be updating regularly again, which is not only great news for me, but an excellent opportunity for me to recommend it to my followers! It starts here. Ah, someday I really should make a masterpost of all the comics that I read and think people whose interests overlap with mine ought to read as well…
Two Jenny Stories!
Scot Sanford is back again with two new Jenny stories (and a little bonus bit). The first is "Bat Country" while the second is "A Morning In".
There's also a bonus passage called "Employee Training" because it's Jenny Everywhere Day and why not.
More of Scott's work can be found here.
Jenny and Oblivion
Lupan Evezan is back with another Jenny story. Check out the ominously named "Jenny and Oblivion".
Fun Jenny Everywhere Day fact:
Jenny Nowhere Day is celebrated on the 8th day of the 13th month - the opposite of Jenny Everywhere Day!
I love that “robot” and “detective” are both stock characters and that they have hybridized into a new stock character, “robot detective”
it makes sense when the hybridization is between the subspecies of detective stock character that’s like, a superhumanly intelligent and competent Sherlock Holmes type, which is basically a human computer to begin with and naturally compatible with an android
but you ALSO see it with the noir subspecies of private investigator, which is usually just an ordinary guy with work/life balance and psychological problems. robots can mope around in the shadow of Venetian blinds drinking heavily and ogling dames too, I guess.
deletes you forever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! [you still exist as metadata]
Do I need to say it?
pet peeve is when fantasy characters say shit like “oh my gods”. all of them? really? why bother having a pantheon if you’re just going to invoke the whole thing indiscriminately at random? it’s like your whole religion is just an awkwardly-transposed secular Chri—oh wait lol
“but I say ‘oh my gods’” yes but are you a pagan who grew up within the framework of cultural Christianity and are borrowing verbal shorthand or did you grow up as part of an established polytheistic religion with its own specific religious expressions?
Surely that’s the difference between “my gods” and “by the gods”? If you say “my gods” you’re just invoking the gods you specifically have a kinship to, not the whole pantheon. Depending on context you might even be invoking your specific household gods, not any of the big ones!
Happy International Asexuality Day!
Believe it or not, if you look past that random public domain illustration of a Bird I stole, you'll see that I'm actually somewhere around asexual!
So yeah, this has sort of influenced how I write - around 2 years ago I tried to write a romance novel and... yeah, didn't go well. This experience actually inspired me when I started writing a more successful NaNoWriMo project "The Most Tragical History of Captain James Hook" where, like any good tragic backstory, I had to give the villain a tragic Romance life. Since this book was a parody, I ended up just really leaning into the stilted quality of my previous writing for the sake of comedy.
Anyway time for some #InternationalAceDay shilling!
"The Nine-Two-Five Universe" is a workplace comedy series I write, featuring way too many cameos from public domain characters (including the main trio). Also, due to a series of unintended writing choices, most of the main cast ended up being Ace (hence why I can shill here) - https://archiveofourown.org/series/2955447
(Art by the fabulous @aristidetwain)
Surprise new Faction Paradox book?!
Some news from Stuart Douglas on GallifreyBase:
> It seems that it was released early.
Yeah, ¤¤¤¤ up on my part. It is at the printers, but the Product page on the website was supposed to be hidden in order to allow a handful of people who helped with the book get in early! You'd never believe I work in I.T. during the day!
And as we do with all the Faction and Iris A5 size books ,there is a small run of hardbacks coming out first (this is for historical reasons, because when I did the first Iris book back in 2009 it was intended to be the only book I published, and a hardback looked cooler — and Who fans like their books to match, so when we did more…)
Anyway, too late to take the book back off sale now — so if you want a hardback, now is the time to buy it! (For the avoidance of doubt, I have never reprinted a hardback in the — bloody hell — 14 years I've been doing Obverse :) )
The paperback won't be out for a while yet (and the ebook will be out later this month).
Surprise new Faction Paradox book?!
We have an absolutely incredible announcement today, this April 1st! Arcbeatle Press has unearthed a previously lost collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, and we're giving them out for you to read. For the first time ever, enjoy "The Cosmology of Sherlock Holmes" you'd be foolish not to ;)
Featuring my own The Adventure of the Golden Bull, and several contributions by other neat people. I even have it on good authorities that there are a few more surprises coming in the later, definitive edition…
Happy Trans Day of Visibility!
Today I'm officially announcing my new webcomic that will launch on April 10th. (My birthday)
It's a reboot of The Marvelous Land of Oz retooled as a trans coming out story with a romantic subplot!
Check it out at yellowbrickramble dot com
Source: yellowbrickramble.com
Ring-Master
In 2007′s Last of the Time Lords, Russell T. Davies drew our attention to the Master’s distinct signet ring, inset with silver Gallifreyan writing, which was plucked from his funeral pyre by the hand of a mysterious woman who, in 2009′s The End of Time, would turn out to be one of the ‘Disciples of Saxon’, a cult formed by the Master in expectation of his death with the aim of enacting a ritual to resurrect him, still in the same incarnation at that.
This was a pleasant twist, and a fun tip of the hat to the method of Count Dracula’s resurrection in multiple Hammer Dracula films. (This is only fitting: as per The Book of the War, the Time Lords adapted their powers of regeneration from the Yssgaroth’s…)
However, I think there are two startling facts about this plot point which have been just-as-startlingly under-discussed in canon-welding spaces.
Follow me after the cut to find out the truth about the Rings of the Time Lords — or should I say the Time Lords of the Rings? (This was terrible and I do not apologise.)
Anonymous asked:
Thoughts on the Vashta Nerada? In general I mean. I think they’re interesting. Though probably very hard to write for. In my mind (that hasn’t stopped Big Finish from trying, idk). What do you think?
If I wanted to write a story about living shadows accompanied by spooky people with skeleton faces, I'd just do another Faction Paradox!
In The Ghost Monument, there's a scene where the camera focuses on a normal-looking pool of water and the Doctor explains that it's full of "flesh-eating microbes, millions of them." This line may have ruined "microorganism swarm" villains for me permanently. Come to think of it, it's the same as midichlorians (The Phantom Menace's intracellular organisms which explain Force sensitivity). Something was undeniably lost when the Force stopped being – to abuse a term – ontologically simple: understood as a monolithic entity rather than something composed of parts. To give George Lucas some credit, I do believe that he would have redeemed midichlorians if the overwhelming fan backlash hadn't prevented him from elaborating further.
But I digress. In Silence and Forest, Moffat stops just short of "flesh-eating microbes". He's too much a poet for that. The Vashta Nerada are "microspores", an "infestation", a "the dust in sunbeams." He's combining ideas here, multiple angles for the old childhood terror / "familiar made uncanny" attack.* And – okay, he also says they're a "man-eating swarm". You can't win them all.
From a purely materialist perspective, a shadow isn't a thing in and of itself. It's the product of an object and a light source, and it cannot exist independently of either of those things. You might say that your shadow is "holding" something, but really that's just shorthand for "I am holding an object, so the shadow I have cast appears to be holding the shadow cast by the object in my hand." It's literally a trick of the light.
But in Peter Pan, shadows are objects in and of themselves. In that story they function not as they exist in material reality but as humans understand them: entities in their own right. Not a "light-object-patterns", a shadow. And in this lens, nothing stops them from existing separate from ourselves. This pivot from reality to the mind's understanding of reality – so to speak, from territory to map – is how ritual works across human societies, and it's what Faction Paradox is all about. In the territory, there were no days between 2 and 14 September 1752. In the map, there's enough to build an Empire.**
Even within the constaints he's built for himself, Moffat can't stop himself from having it both ways. On one hand, Vashta Nerada are allergic to light and hide in the shadows; on the other hand, they can actually encroach on the light and cast shadows themselves for spooky effect. The Doctor tells us, "Count the shadows" – a line straight out of Peter Pan. Or Interference. I know which side I'm on!
He lit a match, but although it burned brightly, it lit up nothing of their surroundings. Puffing it out, he produced a torch from the pocket of his frock coat instead. “Less Gothic,” he apologised, “but never mind...”
Dead Time by Andrew Miller in More Short Trips
…
…ah, an electric torch.
At first pass I had simply accepted that he had pulled a lit burning torch out of his pocket, which, although it wouldn’t make sense of this following line, would certainly be a certified Eighth Doctor moment in its own right.
Cwej: Down the Middle established itself as a unique journey in science-fiction, and now it’s back in a new and updated edition from Arcbeatle Press on March 21st, 2023. Featuring new art and corrections to the original edition, this is the definitive version of the story. “It’s how I always wanted Cwej: Down the Middle to be experienced,” said the book’s editor and creative force, Hunter O’Connell.
Jenny Over-There In: Who Laws the Lawyers?
Jenny Over-There receives a call asking for someone she can't find -- and she can't find the caller, either! Things spiral out of control from there.
The Multidimensional Finders Service: a place you could call if you wanted help finding anything. And by "anything", they meant "anything". No matter who you were, no matter where you were, no matter what universe you were calling from: if it existed, they could tell you exactly where to find it.
This was mostly all owed to one employee.
In the head office in Wales, at a desk with a red telephone, sat a young woman with scruffy reddish-brown hair and a bored expression. Her name was Jenny Over-There, and she was endlessly scrolling through her phone. Not through social media — she did her best not to succumb to that sort of doomscrolling. Well ... most of the time. But no, she was browsing through the app store, in the hopes of finding a game which didn't have a predatory business model, wasn't an ad-ridden mess, didn't deliberately try to cause gambling addictions, or some combination of all three.
She was just downloading the seventh or so Solitaire app when the Red Interdimensional Telephone on her desk rang. Jenny put down her smartphone so she could answer. "Hello, Multidimensional Finders Service."
The Guardians of the Edge from Power of the Doctor, but with the missing classic Doctors poorly spliced in using audio clips from public information films.
Fun With Time Loops
One of many entertaining incidents in Who Is Doctor Who?, the collaborative series of sightings of the Ninth Doctor on the old whoisdoctorwho tie-in website. (It’s recently been confirmed that we owe this proto-Moffat lark to Andrew Blossom.)
i’ve had this faction paradox sketch hanging out for over a year and i wasn’t confident enough to try painting it until now
the best part is it that the armor doesn’t have to make sense because everything they do is for the aesthetic anyway