The Knights Of Ren

“Congratulations son, you’ve reinvented Romulans.” (Actually I imagine most Romulans would find these guys incredibly tedious to be around.)

Thanks for the answers!

Kudos and questions!

Hello there! I’m yet another person who found out about your series through Night Mind, and I have to say that I’ve really enjoyed all of what I’ve seen. You picked a great concept, and you’ve organized things such that you can keep the narrative going with little risk of it ballooning beyond your ability to handle, something that tends to happen a lot in Slenderman-based series. I also think you’ve done a great job with all your monsters; all of them are threatening and off-putting in some unique way, and they all seem to be thematically for your story.

All that said, I do have a few silly questions for you:

1. Are the same forces keeping the house filled with food and water also taking away Mary’s garbage, or will an upcoming episode reveal that the dining room is packed to the roof with trash bags? ;)

2. Are all of the humanoid monsters female? For that matter, is the amorphous shadow female?

3. In “goodnight?” there were a couple instances of the shadow’s left hand disappearing and reappearing in other parts of the frame. Was that intentional?

4. This is more of a comment, but I found it interesting that “DO NOT TOUCH” seems to be the first time Mary tries to confront the monsters. From what I’ve seen of the series, it appears to me that Mary has been placed into a situation where she is made miserable, but both the house and the monsters are making an effort to avoid killing or physically incapacitating her. However, rather than trying to put her captors and tormentors on the defensive by putting her own life in danger or making a concerted effort to escape the house, Mary has instead curled back into herself and “chosen” to endure their tortures. I know part of the reason for this is that your parents aren’t terribly keen on you starting fires or digging a hole through their basement wall, but would I also be right in assuming there are thematic reasons Mary has taken her particular course of action?

( First off, thank you! I’m glad you’re appreciating the story!

1. So far, trash is treated the same way that food and water is. Everything just clears, restocks, and resets

2. The veiled monster yes, mirror monster yes, and the other two are up to interpretation!

3. The left hand disappearing was a real rookie editing mistake that I didn’t notice until I uploaded… and proceeded to feel bad about for a week lol. The other hands appearing places were intentional.

4. Big thematic reasons. Very big, thematic reasons. And yeah also I can’t blow up my house hahaha. )

I think your best bet might be the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which has mountains of bibliographical entries for obscure and forgotten sff authors. The SF Encyclopedia is another good source, but that's more focused on SF in general rather than solely authors. There's also the SFE's sister work The Encyclopedia of Fantasy; it hasn't been seriously updated since the turn of the millennium, but if you're looking for an old fantasy author, you might get lucky.

the peril of reading old scifi/fantasy is i’m left trying to navigate author websites that were clearly hand coded in html 20 years ago and haven’t been updated since when i just want a nice neat list of all their books that they somehow don’t seem to have 😭

To steal a quote, it’s called “girl power”, not “girl ethics”.

Do you think Col. Cassandra Moore effectively utilized Girl Power when she funneled an extrajudicial paramilitary mailman towards several nominally-hostile-but-perfectly-diplomatically-tractable factions in the Mojave Wasteland

As someone who has an interest in sf/fantasy depictions of WWI, I’ve been puzzling for years as to why authors dabbling in steampunk have been reluctant to tackle the conflict. My own theory is that steampunk is, at heart, an American creation, and the Great War is an event that has mostly vanished from the American consciousness. For most American writers, steampunk is a fantasy world set in an imagined version of 19th-century Britain or America which draws more from other stories than from reality, and the question of international politics and war doesn’t really come into it. That said, I have found British authors working in steampunk to be far more willing to broach the subject of World War I, both because the war had such a huge impact on the British national psyche, and because it ties into the greater question of what Britain is, its relationship to the empire, what role Britain has in the world after empire, and so on. As for examples, two authors stand out to me. While a hard sf writer by trade, Stephen Baxter’s steampunk excursions always seem to be haunted by the war. His 1993 novel Anti-Ice is for the most part a romp about a 19th-century excursion from the Earth to the Moon thanks to the titular substance, an exotic form of antimatter. However, by the end of the book the use and exploitation of anti-ice has led to Britain, France, and Germany locking themselves into a Cold War-style nuclear arms race. His 1995 book The Time Ships is a sequel to the The Time Machine that riffs in all manner of ways on HG Wells’ work, but the middle third of the book is set in an alternate 1938 where the First World War has dragged on for decades, transforming Britain into a dystopian state influences by Wells’ most pessimistic views. (While I haven’t read Baxter’s 2017 followup to The War of the Worlds, entitled The Massacre of Mankind, some of the elements I’ve seen, like a police-state Britain and a bloody Russo-German war in Eastern Europe, suggests that the Martian invasion of the original book has become the Great War of the sequel’s world.) For something a little more literary, Ian R. MacLeod’s Aether duology, The Light Ages (2003) and The House of Storms (2005), is set in an England where a magical substance called “aether” has locked the country (and by extension the rest of the world) in a sort of static industrial revolution for centuries in some ways reminiscent of Keith Roberts’ Pavane (1968). Change does eventually come to this static eternal England, sadly in the form of a civil war whose depiction draws heavily from that of the Western Front.

I didn’t include it in the list of favorite stories because I like it more in idea than in execution, but Caitlin R, Kiernan’s story Goggles really hit me hard.  She says it was her idea of where all steampunk is leading, but most authors don’t want to admit: the conflict that became World War I in our world destroys the steampunk world in technologically advanced nuclear fire.  I read it yesterday and I can’t get the concept out of my head.

I’m ashamed to admit that it was only after I finished watching the new Venture Brothers movie that I realized that Distributor Cap was a riff on the ‘66 version of Mr. Sparkplug.

Reading the wikipedia entries for minor Batman villains is like, “Mr. Sparkplug was introduced in 1969. He wore a rectangular costume that resembled a sparkplug, and had power to make electrical outlets stop working. After the Infinite Crisis event, he was reimagined as a serial killer with a fetish for electrostimulation. He had a cameo on Batman the Brave and the Bold where the Joker shoved him into a locker. In the New 52, the Riddler killed him and hung his costume over the mantlepiece as a trophy. He is now on the Suicide Squad.”

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!

it’s the 21st day of the 21st year of the 21st century.

you can only reblog this today.

Willem seems so disappointed in this fact...

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.