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Wyattsalazar - Blog Posts
Even more than Betterman? How is that possible?
It’s taken me 30 minutes to take down notes on like 2 minutes of this scene happening. I don’t know that an anime has affected me as much as this has.
I’m a touch surprised you didn’t know about the Red Army in BF1. When DICE released the “In the Name of the Tsar” DLC, they added “Tsaritsyn” and “Volga River” as maps explicitly set during the Russian Civil War. Kinda wish we could have done some fighting along the Trans-Siberian railroad line, but I suppose it would be harder to justify the inclusion of armored vehicles en masse.
i didnt know battlefield 1 had the red army in it so i was pleasantly surprised when i quickmatched into tsaritsyn on the red army side. i took a horse from the camp and ran around a tank and threw grenades at it until it exploded, then got caught in level geometry and watched a dude leisurely deploy a mortar and turn me and my horse into gravy. on my next spawn i threw gas grenades into a house and choked out 4 dudes, and got into a shooting match across a hill with my extremely comically bad fedorov-degtyarev against a sniper. good game.
I am so goddamn excited for this, and I eagerly await the return of Punished Akira.
we recorded anime club today. it should be up in the next few days. it’ll be an incredibly raw episode with lots of hollering, and some more, Madiha Lore
So it would seem that the only place we could go after season 1 was “to hell.” I am frightened, yet wait for the podcast with bated breath. (At this point, I’m half expecting that Hitoe has developed a wicked morphine habit to overcome her curse and have friends again.)
spread wixoss went from 0 to kakegurui level demon lesbian horny in no time
Dream big, Madiha. In the meantime, take a look at an old Charles Stross called Missile Gap. Something very strange happens to the Earth in the early 1970s and the Soviet Union builds ekranoplans to explore its new neighborhood. He also has an older story called A Colder War, which has no ekranoplans, but the Great Old Ones are weaponized by the superpowers during the Cold War and Oliver North becomes the death of worlds.
someday im gonna write a battle where ekranoplans are the key to victory
Just to jump on the bandwagon, “thot” is actual title used by the Breen, but it’s not certain if it’s a military rank or a political title. In DS9′s defense, they came up with it in 1999, long before thots were ever a thing. The Breen also dress in Leia’s Ubese bounty hunter disguise from RotJ, and their speech is an electronic riff on Metal Machine Music. They’re the weirdos of Trek.
one of my favorite tropes of all time is when the author tries to replace curse words with a more ‘family friendly’ alternative or invent new words for worldbuilding purposes but they use existing words that make the whole thing unintentionally hilarious out of context
Following on from Esther’s little goof, For Honor technically could add “eastern Vikings” if they added the Varangians, Norsemen who moved and settled across central and eastern Europe, and who eventually formed the nucleus of the Byzantine army’s famed “Varangian Guard” and spurred the formation of Kievian Rus, the first Russian state. Of course, if you just want a group of teeming hordes from somewhere that isn’t Europe, you might as well use the Mongols. Hell, the premise for For Honor is so loopy that they might as well toss in the Maya, the Ghanaians and the Mississippian mound builders and just make game a big toybox full of medieval-era action figures.
Topics include: Gamer holiday EVO; Punchboy Punchfights; Smash Brothers at breakfast so we do not have to watch it; The Switch Bastard; respect Melty Blood, disparage Arcana Heart; disrespect Mortal Kombat; finals Elphelt; the 12 year old who killed Daigo; watching EVO; Tencent bringing culture to games; why it’s fun to watch DBFZ; He Came, He Saw, He Fursuited; Esther is back with the Shin Megami Tensei; the character Madiha likes; Press Turn on your phone; a 50% joke Lesbian character; Madiha played Metal Gear Solid 5; attention to detail; playing as a girl in a bodysuit; how to get a cold in MGS3; America delenda est; SEND US QUESTIONS; games we like that are bad; the most anime club anime. PLEASE SEND US QUESTIONS FOR NEXT TIME.
Send us questions and game jam submissions!! Rate us on iTunes!
Email us at transmediacrity@gmail.com! Check out our TUMBLR and TWITTER.
SUPPORT US ON PATREON! Or donate directly to Madiha for hosting costs.
Check out our YOUTUBE CHANNEL. Subscribe, and like our videos!
Special thanks to Velt for our cover art! Check her art here. (Not worksafe.)
You can find us at:
Madiha: Twitter, Tumblr, The Solstice War.
Esther: Twitter, Tumblr.
Wait, what happened to episode 26...OH I GET IT!
Esther is back from the battle of the Trinary Star System. Now the course of history can resume.
Topics include: the state of liberal propaganda on television; the GameGriper; shitting on the sidewalk to own the libs; my first move since I became a full grown idiot; Esther kept playing Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse and she’s here to say; which society sounds best; Dagda; SMT Scathach vs dope baedysuit queen; Dagda’s mom; there’s still the Abrahamic god; WHY DON’T THEY PUT PERSONA ON THE ~SWITCH~; Madiha beat Doom 2016 and she has Feelings; FPS raid boss; strafing enemies across the entire room; worth $60; overwhelmed by SNAPMAP; game development teams are a mini Ship of Theseus; Millennial John Carmack’s “Woke Doom”; Madiha is still reading HAKAIOU ~ GAOGAIGAR VS. BETTERMAN; Somnium lore; eldritch horror; our listeners should really listen to Betterman Anime Club; Madiha deep Betterman lore cuts for 20 minutes; WE STAN MICATEAM; WE WILL SHILL YOUR GAME FOREVER; Girls Frontline is good; team 404 is good and strong and my friends; Esther played the Shin Megami Tensei mobile game; steampunk patrick klepeck; gun otaku girl; brand new assets; the comments on the demons; Madiha sends hatemail; if you have more sentience than Madiha, who is turing incomplete, send us that mail; Kizuna Ai poppin’ the biggest bottles.
Send us questions and game jam submissions!! Rate us on iTunes!
Email us at transmediacrity@gmail.com! Check out our TUMBLR and TWITTER.
SUPPORT US ON PATREON! Or donate directly to Madiha for hosting costs.
Check out our YOUTUBE CHANNEL. Subscribe, and like our videos!
Special thanks to Velt for our cover art! Check her art here. (Not worksafe.)
You can find us at:
Madiha: Twitter, Tumblr, The Solstice War.
Esther: Twitter, Tumblr.
Cecilia: Twitter, Tumblr, Video Game Hell.
Me too, Madiha, me too.
i feel like my tastes are so bizarre and inhuman that i can never share things with anyone or be part of a fandom without feeling like the biggest weirdo
I believe it was both, in a way. The story I heard was that Pluto started life as a study to determine if it was possible to build a strategic bomber that was powered by a nuclear reactor. However, after they found the shielding that was necessary to keep the plane’s crew from dying added too much weight to the plane, someone asked the obvious question of “what if the plane didn’t have a crew?” Ironically, once development started on Pluto, it was eventually decided that its reactor didn’t need any shielding anyway, and would just vomit reaction products out the back as it flew across the Soviet Union, just to make sure they got everyone. (Given the projected flight path Pluto would have needed to take to get from its holding pattern at the North Pole to the Soviet Union, large parts of Europe would have been doused in Pluto’s exhaust, which feels like a metaphor for American-European relations, somehow.) While some prototype ramjets were built, the project was eventually canned by the early 1960s due to improvements in conventional rocket engines for ICBMs, the Partial Test Ban Treaty, and the fact that even the nuke-happy generals and eggheads in the Defense Department thought the whole concept was a bit much. (While I have no confirmation on this, I have also heard that another nail in Pluto’s coffin came when someone working on the project was asked what the United States could do if the Soviets built and launched their own version of Pluto. Their precise answer is unknown, but it boiled down to “die, mostly.”) Also, with Orion I believe that there were early phases of the project where the vehicle was intended to be launched from the ground with its own nuclear drive, but again the Partial Test Ban Treaty put an end to that idea.
So @wyattsalazar, I was listening to the first part of the first episode of Book Hell and I couldn’t help but notice you guys trying to remember the name of a book that had weird human-monkey people from the future in it. As it so happens, I know exactly what you were talking about.
The book you were looking for was called Man After Man, by the British paleontologist and author Dougal Dixon. As it so happens, Man After Man is the last of three books he wrote playing with the concept of “speculative evolution.” The first (below) was After Man: A Zoology of the Future. Published in 1981, it was an overview of life all around the world 50 million years from now, long after our extinction. If memory serves, there were a whole lot of rabbit-deer and rat-wolves running around.
The second was 1988′s The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution. The premise for that was that the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction of 65 million years ago never occurred, and the dinosaurs (and a whole bunch of other critters) were allowed to survive and evolve in peace to the present day. Personally, I think it’s the best book of the three, but then again I have a pro-dinosaur bias, so interpret that as you will.
Man After Man came out in 1990, and it’s something of the black sheep of the trilogy. According to Dixon, his original idea for the book was to write a sequel to After Man in which humans, using time travel to flee the dying Earth of the modern day, arrive in the new world of 50 million years hence, and proceed to rebuild civilization and muck the planet up all over again. For whatever reason the idea fell through (though it did get reused for a space-colonization story that was only ever published in Japan), and Dixon wrote Man After Man instead, despite having no real desire to do so. I don’t like the book myself, partially because I feel it it delves too deeply into stock sci-fi tropes, chief among them telepathy, for a “serious” work of biological extrapolation, but also because I find the idea of creatures who wear the faces of humans but have the minds of animals to be...deeply unsettling. Still, it did give us a few good memes.
Esther, speaking as a big ol’ Star Trek fan, your friends were right. Season 1 was rough. A lot of the time it comes off as an attempt to make a 1960s-era Trek show in the 1980s, and it does not work at. all. Production was also a nightmare, to the point where the TNG writers’ room gained the reputation as one of the worst places a writer in Hollywood could work at. There’s a documentary called Chaos on the Bridge that discusses some of what went on, but it has its own biases and axes to grind. Still, Season 1 TNG did give us this incredible moment. (cw: more gore than you’d ever expect to see on an episode of Star Trek) If you ever want to give the show another shot, I’d recommend just watching any episode whose summary sounds cool. TNG was made with an eye to syndication, so the writers were discouraged from any heavy serialization. Anyway, great podcast, and I hope Madiha has recovered from finally seeing the Super Best Friends stumble their way into one of the worst (in all senses of the word) endings for Detroit: Become Human.
Please do not listen to this episode on full blast volume earbuds, there’s A Thing.
Topics include: Heart to heart about being depressed all the time; Madiha reads HAKAIOU ~ GAOGAIGAR VS. BETTERMAN; 2017, a year of closure for Betterman; the story of GGG vs Betterman; a brief, confused summary of GaoGaiGar; combining the tones of GaoGaiGar and Betterman; Linker Gel Dyalisis; THE POWER; Esther is back into Shin Megami Tensei Apocalypse; masters of reusing assets; god’s toilet; sexy nun; it all sounds like a doom level; SMT Mobile, why the fuck would I play that; did you get the dick chariot; CAN’T ESCAPE FROM CROSSING FATE; BACK IN to Honkai Impact; but first the masocore gacha hell of Bang Dream!; 29:00 warning for volume; this is like hell; NOT EVEN A FREE ROLL; thank you Honkai Impact; Sakura Samsara, the open world content; Theresa, the old small nun; Mihoyo storytelling; FGO is a demon monster gacha game; PUT HONKAI ON STEAM MIHOYO; honkai impact is warframe for lesbians; warframe anxiety; impossible to progress; FUCK DAVID CAGE. Send us timestamped suggestions for the Transmediacrity podcast sampler for newbies!!!
Outro theme is “Ashura-Kai Authorized Shop” from the Shin Megami Tensei IV OST.
Email us at transmediacrity@gmail.com! Check out our TUMBLR and TWITTER.
SUPPORT US ON PATREON! Or donate directly to Madiha for hosting costs.
Check out our YOUTUBE CHANNEL. Subscribe, and like our videos!
Special thanks to Velt for our cover art! Check her art here. (Not worksafe.)
You can find us at:
Madiha: Twitter, Tumblr, The Solstice War. Esther: Twitter, Tumblr.
Madiha, the truth is...you never stopped watching Betterman. You’ve been watching Betterman this whole time. You’ve been in your room since March watching Betterman. Your family misses you. Please wake up. Please.
im reading a light novel literally called gaogaigar vs betterman. idk whether im blessed or deeply cursed by this
Well, Madiha and Esther called me out in this episode, so here’s my thoughts on Hitoe’s fate: Thought #1: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Thought #2: Even though I’m a guy who’s never touched a Wixoss deck, even I am not immune to having my wishes turned against me in a cruelly ironic manner. Thought #3: Why do we play customizable card games? Just to suffer? Thought #4: Given how there are probably a bunch of LRIGs out there who were once human (and how I suspect Tama was one), there’s a sliver of a chance Yuzuki got her memory wiped, and as such might be a less awful person as an LRIG.
Thought #5: Even so, someone please get Hitoe off of Mari Okada’s wild ride.
And finally, I want to thank you two for plunging into the depths of animé hell to entertain us biweekly. You two are the troops in my book.
Topics include: Video Game Hell doesn’t do anime so we win there; these episodes of Wixoss are dire; once again, relevant trigger warning for Incest because Yuzuki sucks; foreshadowing The Scene; a quest to stop the marketing; Yuzuki marauding the streets for card duels; Ruuko overturning the tables; hey Mari Okada weren’t you hired to sell cards; Takara-Tomy what happened; does Executive Man know what he is doing; DONT LOOK AT THE WIXOSS WIKI; our whitehouse.gov petition to get fan wikis regulated; Ullith the Horny LRIG; two girls doing it; thirst for battle; It’s A Wedding; Iona strategies; Wish Crisis; Yuzuki ruining lives; Kakegurui crossover; addicted to booster packs; dubbed Akira; Guy Fawkes Mask; the First Malformation of Akira; chuuni scar; Alt Girl turn; somebody sponsor us for $15 to keep this podcast solvent; quasimodo scare; Akira ninja; elite friendship moves; the most angelic girl; we’re gonna dox Ruuko’s brother; best Grandma; impressed by my fake deep sister; The Final Duel; The Wrath of Buns Girl; my friends who spread incest rumors; peeling some beans; girls are terrible, except for my sister; The Incest Scene; cool genes bro; bio-horror dialog; Mari Okada’s intentions; we nearly quit the podcast but we talked ourselves into continuing; Madiha’s Nebula-Brained Galactic Genius Analysis; returning to Hitoe; Hitoe, situation improved, or fate worse than death? You decide!
Outro theme is “Battle – Why Not Eliminate The World?” from Selector Infected Wixoss’ OST.
Send us questions and game jam submissions!! Rate us on iTunes!
Email us at transmediacrity@gmail.com! Check out our TUMBLR and TWITTER.
SUPPORT US ON PATREON! Or donate directly to Madiha for hosting costs.
Check out our YOUTUBE CHANNEL. Subscribe, and like our videos!
Special thanks to Velt for our cover art! Check her art here. (Not worksafe.)
You can find us at:
Madiha: Twitter, Tumblr, The Solstice War. Esther: Twitter, Tumblr.
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. :|
@nesterov81 depending on your point of view, for Hitoe things either improve, or enter fate worse than death territory, in these episodes of the show
get hype for the podcast
Oh God, the show’s not done with Hitoe yet? What could they do to her that worse than what’s already happened? OH MARI OKADA, WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO SLAKE YOUR THIRST FOR ADOLESCENT MISERY?!
hey, same
Well, as it turns out, I managed to pick the right ship.
This big beautiful girl here is the U.S.S. Madiha Nakar, NX-122030. While she is what Star Trek Online calls a “science command battlecruiser” (even though she’s bigger than the Enterprise-D, she’s a “battlecruiser”), her appearance is a kitbash of the saucer and neck of the Geneva-class science CBC with the engineering hull, nacelles, and pylons of a Presidio-class tactical CBC.
As the name implies, her main role in battle is to command and support the rest of the fleet. To that end she has a hangar deck full of runabouts to harass and hinder enemy ships, three types of automated turrets to deploy around the battlefield, and the ability to give massive bonuses to other ships in her team if she survives in combat and uses a lot of abilities. (She could also be further optimized with bridge officers with specialized command abilities, but I prefer to be a space wizard and throw science magic all over the place.)
As for loadouts, I’ve kitted her out with a whole pile of Romulan endgame gear (hence the green), which means that in battle she spends most of her time spraying firey green death plasma in every direction. She’s not my favorite starship in STO, but whenever I need to throw a lot of damage at something and I’m not sure what’s waiting for me, she’s the one I go to and she’s always served me well.
Stupid-serious question: if Madiha Nakar was a starship, what kind of starship would she be?
Some kind of flagship with a lot of battlefield analysis and C&C equipment.
Befitting my WWI obsession, I’d kill for a chocolate cake in the shape of a British Mark V. I want a goddamn rhomboid prism of cake, and I want it now.
I want a T-14 cake for my birthday sometime. I think the T-14 is among the more cake-like modern tanks, and also I am a Russian nationalist,
Not only that, but if you don’t enjoy the podcast you’re probably a prokaryotic organism.
If you’ve never listened to an anime club podcast please try to listen to the Wixoss podcast. I know Betterman was definitely a hard sell, but Wixoss rules.
But also go back and listen to the Betterman podcast sometime. If you don’t I guarantee your T-Cells are fucking weak,
You can’t fool me, Madiha, you’re clearly a Belarusian bot, here to tempt us with pro-tractor propaganda.
we did it guys we caught all of them. mission accomplished. now nobody can call me a russian bot. we have a list theyre all there
Speaking as someone who does a fair bit of reviewing and occasionally writes for an ezine filled with people steeped in academia, I often feel the same way. I'm always worrying that I'm not being "insightful" enough or that I don't know the correct language to properly discuss a particular theme. I find it helps to remind myself that, at the end of the day, I don't really want to be an academic or write in that environment (or have to force myself to learn that unfathomable prose), and that it's far better to work on something I enjoy doing rather than making myself miserable slaving away on something just to sate my insecurities or gain the approval of some imaginary person I don’t care about.
i feel dumb because i write fiction instead of theory or critical work
Honestly, you’re actually one of the most interesting people I know, and I’m glad I got to know you.
i know im not very interesting but i try so hard that you should all humor me
I may not understand any of what’s going on in the show, and I may still believe that Algernon is a kind of furniture polish, but hearing you guys talk about Betterman always brightens my day.
I feel not good but I did manage to record Anime Club with @plumerium
This has become something of a critical issue for sf/f writers in the past few decades. Way back in the early 2000s, when blogs were still a thing, the British author M. John Harrison caused something of a tempest in the online genre community criticizing the concept of “worldbuilding” as detrimental to the creation of literature. The original posts are long gone, but there is a Reddit post copying Harrison’s final summation of his thoughts on the matter.
Even though I’m not a “proper” writer yet, this is an issue I’ve worried about over the years. While I don’t have the philosophical background of Mr. Harrison, my own objections to the primacy of worldbuilding stem from a key complaint Harrison makes: the idea that worldbuilding “literalizes the act of creation.” The essay talks about Harrison’s interpretation of the matter, but here I’ll quickly over my own.
The problem with believing that worldbuilding is all is that it changes the reader’s relationship to the text. If a reader believes that the mechanics and details of a setting are the most important part of a story, they will end up seeing stories not as stories, ambiguous creatures of metaphor and meaning, but as documentaries of alternate worlds. When this happens, the reader both forgoes the suspension of disbelief required to make any story work and unknowingly imposes their own worldview on the story under the guise of “objective reality.” Rather than developing a symbiotic relationship with the story wherein the story is accepted on its own terms, the reader instead becomes an anthropologist in a duck blind scanning the story from afar, compiling a list of points observed. This is how you end up with situations where people complain that characters don’t act “logically” without considering the thematic reasons for their motivations. Obviously no one will ever be able to suspend their disbelief for every part of every story, but some level of acceptance is always required. Without it, the forest just becomes a big bunch of trees.
This attitude also poses problems for the writer, who is no longer expected to be a storyteller, but a God who dreams up and fashions every aspect of their creation from the wings of an aphid to the greatest supergiant stars. Needless to say, this is an awful attitude to have as a writer. Rather than having the reader accept your story and go along for the ride, the entire burden of creating the world falls on you, and the sad fact of the matter is that most of us aren’t God. A few of us out there are polymaths and Renaissance men that can shoulder the burden, but most of us, myself included, aren’t. What happens with most of us is that we develop the belief that we must understand everything before we can create something, which often leads to writers putting their stories off to research things they don’t really need. I’ve been guilty of this myself with things like starting work on a fantasy novel by working out the layout of the solar system and worrying about getting myself up to speed on introductory economics (so much economics in fiction these days...I’m sick of it). Some of this would have been important thematically, but my problem was that I was doing in first instead of figuring out what I actually wanted to tell a story about. I’m sure many of you have similar stories to share.
In short, if you’re the sort of person who loves creating all this intricate background for their fantasy settings, knock yourself out, but just remember that for the sake of both you and you reader that they can’t be everything.
(As a final note, I have actually seen some people drop traditional narrative entirely and write what are essentially fictional textbooks. It’s something you tend to see in the online alternate history community, where the primary attraction is seeing the raw mechanics of historical change play out over centuries across nations filled with millions upon millions of people, the scale of which the human-focused modern novel has some difficulty capturing. They rarely appear on bookshelves because they don’t fit in with the publishing industry’s classifications of genre, but you sometimes get odd anomalies like Robert Sobel’s 1973 work For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga.)
I think the best writing tip I can give (this is untrue, I can probably give many writing tips, but this is the writing tip foremost in my mind at the moment and I needed a good hook to start this post) is that not everything that is read as Lore needs to be important or explicable to what you’re writing. Often times you need a detail or a character to appear to make another detail or character sound more convincing or to appropriately place it in the world, people will latch on, but maybe that’s not the story you’re telling or what’s actually important to you. For me, for example, it’s not important to detail say, the histories of Nochtish tank design bureaus. It’s enough to know that they exist and what they’re making, but the staff and position of Rescholdt-Kolt are not actually crucial to the story.
I think because of wiki culture and general curiosity we want every capital letter noun to be drawn out to us, but some things just exist solely to be a cool name.
Oh my god @wyattsalazar, I was just bouncing through deviantArt and I found this amazing piece by glucosefiction. I don’t know if you commissioned this or it was just fanart but I had to show it to you. Consider it a belated birthday present of a kind. ;)
I’m actually almost through the campaign right now and...man, you weren’t kidding. As I always say, if a Wolfenstein game has a more nuanced portrayal of mass murder than your story does, you need to sit back and reassess a few things.
At least the guns look neat, tho.
There’s tomfoolery brewing in Squad 7! Bigoted tomfoolery! In this episode Madiha sticks up for the little girl, struggles to drive a tank, and goes looking for a bridge. Who wins, 5 scouts, or 1 speedy girl? Check out our Patreon!