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The fact that ProZD sounds exactly like Jason Alexander disturbs me greatly.

thought this was an odd choice for the new trailer

Original post by airlesscell

In my mind, this is the main theme for the late-’90s modern-fantasy real-time strategy game that depicts Kuvira’s campaign to unify the Earth Kingdom.

Legend of Korra - Kuvira theme song | cover by ForTiorI

download mp3: http://www.mediafire.com/file/p8blrdko8tgbb2n/The+Legend+of+Korra+-+Kuvira+theme+song+%28cover+by+ForTiorI%29.mp3 download multitracks: http://...

Jeremy Zuckerman forwarded me this badass, modern metal cover of his Kuvira theme by ForTiorl. I’m confident a certain badass, modern metalbending militaristic dictator would dig it too.

Tullio Crali’s Nose Dive On The City, 1939 (via here)

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’ve had those dreams too (I usually end up getting to the exam without having taken any classes), and so does my dad, who’s a good three-four decades older than me. If I had to guess, I would say that the life-or-death importance many of us attach to our education, combined with being in such a state for several years, is so intense that it seeps into our subconscious and stays there long after we graduate. I’ve heard stories of personal assistants having dreams about their bosses calling for them, so it isn’t just limited to people in uni.

I keep having this recurring nightmare that I’m in college, but somehow have either forgotten or otherwise blown off all my classes. And it’s getting near the end of the term when I suddenly realize I haven’t gone to class at all, and have missed all of the tests and assignments and I’m going to fail everything. 

It’s been ten years (!) since I graduated college, and back then I think I skipped class no more than one or two times total, so I have no idea why my subconscious is so fixated on something that never happened. Brains are weird. 

ME when I see wasted character arc potential

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

Daily Kuvira #205

When there’s nothin’ else to do in prison. You might as well try some meditating.

She’s probably meditating along with one of the greats.

The X-Files is interesting in this context, since even though Mulder and Scully are our heroes and we love them, they are still FBI agents, actual official representatives of the greater American monoculture who are tasked with going to the backwaters and forgotten places and dealing with the strange and deviant for the good of the whole. To their credit, the people writing The X-Files recognized this, and there’s plenty of episodes where they depict their monsters-of-the-week with some sympathy, or handle Mulder and Scully’s incursions with a note of ambivalence.

Old tv shows where the hero visits the 'town of the week' and identifies then solves a unique problem before moving on are so weird to watch now. "Route 66" to "Touched by an Angel" and etc. Any town in North America that still actually has a unique local culture wouldn't be receptive to an outsider pushing their nose into the local affairs.

Who even still thinks of turning to a pack of kind-hearted outlaws when the bank comes to foreclose on their orphanage?