Hello there! I'm nesterov81, and this tumblr is a dumping ground for my fandom stuff. Feel free to root through it and find something you like.
215 posts
Latest Posts by nesterov81 - Page 7
For you, @coppermarigolds.
pretty sure rian johnson timed this scene to match up perfectly to abba
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.
The unnamed battlefield medic who shows up to evac downed units also made her debut in Skies of Arcadia as Fina, though according to her ingame bio she’s actually three people in VC1: the triplets Fina, Mina, and Gina Sellers.
Watching you play Valkyria Chronicles I saw some familiar faces - Vyse and Aika are main characters from Skies of Arcadia. Vyse is kind of a tool but Aika's my homegirl. In said game they fight against the Empress of Valua, and I noticed there's also a city called Valua mentioned in passing during your video.
Oh I thought I’d seen those characters somewhere! I think one of the main dudes behind ValCro had a hand in Skies of Arcadia (it was also published by Sega too if I remember correctly). That’s a neat little thing. Thank you!
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. ;)
“Assassinations are often harder on the consul than the senator...”
ANCIENT ROMAN MEME DISCOVERED
1 2
2 50
it doesnt translate very well
RULES: answer 30 questions and tag 10 blogs you are contractually obligated to know
@coppermarigolds tagged me for this a few days back, so here we go!
Nicknames: My dad used to call me “Booder” (”Büder”?) when I was a little kid, but I haven’t heard that in years. I suppose either a contraction of my first name or my middle name could be used as nicknames, but I’m a stickler for my full first name. Gender/pronouns: He/him.
Star sign: Taurus.
Height: About 5′ 8″, or 173 cm.
Time: 1904h.
Birthday: April 24th. Favorite bands: mind.in.a.box, VNV Nation, Nine Inch Nails.
Favorite solo artist: Moby.
Song stuck in your head: “Hell March 2″ by Frank Klepacki. Kicks as much ass in 2018 as it did in 2000.
Last movie you watched?: The Prophecy, a weird movie about a second war in Heaven from 1995 that spawned a bunch of crummy direct-to-DVD sequels. It’s not very good, but it’s worth it to see Christopher Walken ham it up as the Archangel Gabriel along with Viggo Mortensen as the malevolently prissy Father of Lies himself.
Last show?: I actually don’t remember, it’s been that long since I’ve watched a series.
Why did you create your blog?: I wanted to get in contact with someone on Tumblr and find a way to keep track of all the nice pictures/meta I found.
What do you post?: I’m more about collecting than creating on this platform, so I really only post the occasional reblog.
Last thing you googled?: “Cryostasis digital download.” Still no longer available. I fortunately bought it on DVD when it was still in stores, but it kinda sucks to not have a backup option. :(
Other blogs: I spend most of my time on a more traditional blog, but since it’s in my real name I won’t be linking it here. I am thinking about starting up some other tumblrs in the near future just to organize all my likes into something easier to sort.
AO3: “karakhan,” with only one story (for the moment).
Do you get asks?: Nope.
How did you get the idea for your URL?: There’s a Ukrainian horror shooter called Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason set on a haunted Soviet icebreaker that I like to play this time of year. My URL is a combination of the protagonist’s last name, meteorologist Alexander Nesterov, and the year the game takes place, 1981 (or 1969...it’s complicated).
I follow: 99 tumblrs and 28-30 blogs.
Followers: 1 person and 3 invisible pornography robots. :p
Average hours of sleep: Between 6 and 11, which really isn’t very good.
Lucky number: 4.
Instruments: Back in middle and high school, I moved from the French horn to the clarinet, and then to the piano, and for the longest time I was working on the bagpipes. Unlike my siblings, I eventually drifted away from music entirely, and in retrospect I wish I had taken drama instead.
What are you wearing?: Ratty blue sweatsuit.
Dream job: Seriously, a novelist who can support himself through writing. Less seriously, revolutionary autocrat who is both worshiped and feared by all. ;)
Dream trip: Oh, so many. There’s the trip to Moscow, because it’s Moscow. There’s the trip to Minsk, just to see a place that looks a little more like the old Soviet Union. And finally, there are trips to see the tundra and the desert which don’t have set destinations, though the desert will probably be
Favorite food: A tossup between ribs and burgers, with deviled eggs wedged in there somewhere. I have very proletarian tastes.
Significant other?: I wish.
Last book I read: The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg, because it was Christmas.
Top 3 fictional universes: I’ve always found the strange totalitarian world George Orwell built for Nineteen Eighty-Four to be fascinating on an intellectual level, even though I’d never want to live there. On a more optimistic note, I also love the TNG-era Star Trek universe and the world of The Legend of Korra, even if my opinions and ideas about that one differ wildly from Bryke’s. :p
Once again, I will forgo from tagging because, as I’ve said, I don’t know anyone here.
Not gonna lie, first time I saw this post I immediately thought of that scene in Prometheus where Fifield splashes the hammerpede’s blood onto his helmet and his visor just melts onto his face which, while not the most horrific way to die, is definitely up there in the top 20.
Geode (x)
I’m barely social on this social website, but I saw @coppermarigolds do this and I figured why not.
Rules: Tag 9 people you want to know better or just because you feel like it.
Relationship status: Single. Deeply, deeply, deeply single.
Favorite color: I generally like cooler colors, so depending on my mood I switch between forest green and navy blue, but I won’t turn my nose up at a nice burgundy or black.
Lipstick or chapstick: Neither. Lipstick ain’t my scene, and I have skin issues that make chapstick worth the hassle.
Last song I listened to: Gonna make it a twofer with “Gibraltar Bridge” and “Derailed,” two unreleased songs from the Wolfenstein: The New Order soundtrack that were put on Youtube by a fan.
Last movie I watched: Our Man in Havana, a delightful farce from 1960 that stars Alec Guinness as a hapless vacuum cleaner salesman in prerevolutionary Havana that is mistakenly recruited as a spy and starts sending in reports full of made-up stuff just to earn a paycheck. Imagine a version of Burn After Reading that still has faith in mankind.
Top 3 TV Shows: I’m not much of a TV guy anymore, but if I had to name three...Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 1 of True Detective, and The Legend of Korra.
Top 3 Characters: Kuvira, Richard III, Jean-Luc Picard.
Top 3 Bands: Because I am essentially a moody teenage girl, I’m going to go with mind.in.a.box, VNV Nation, and whatever Trent Reznor’s up to.
Books I’m reading: I’m between books at the moment, but I’m going to be picking up L. E. Modesitt’s Of Tangible Ghosts this weekend. It’s the first book of an alternate history trilogy set in a world where North America was primarily colonized by the Dutch and ghosts are real.
Those two facts may not be connected.
I will forgo the tagging because I’m not sure that I actually know nine people in real life. :p
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!
You’ve made it through a difficult year, and Picard is proud of you for that!
Ah, the decommissioned Enterprise-A from that Ashes of Eden comic. I wish they’d adapted The Return into a comic. That book did some weird things with the Borg (that were way cooler than what First Contact and Voyager ultimately did with them) that’d make for pretty freaky visuals.
@coppermarigolds eeee! :D
I had to break in my new Surface Pro and make a quick shitty sketch of Kuvira as Iden Versio because how the shit has no one made the resemblance yet?
I mean they both fall in love with top notch dork ass engineers too what more do you want
Barney #1: “Be quiet! This thing hears us!!!”
Barney #2: *stands inside the test chamber firing at the tentacles with his peashooter*
1-800-ARE-YOU-TAPPIN
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. )
“This place is someone’s memory of a town...and the memory’s fading.”
Unfortunately for Lord Regent Burrows, the right man in the wrong place can make all the diff-er-ence in the world.
There was nothing personal in this. Goodbye, Corvo.
Very disappointing. That’s nowhere near enough shuttlecraft for Voyager. I demand at least 42 shuttlecraft crammed into that bay. Oceans of shuttlecraft. Shuttlecraft without end.
Star Trek Voyager Game Project
“Oh, and if you’ve been possessed by a sentient alien being, you’re gonna want to go across the quad to the Dexter Remmick Memorial Medical Center. Victims of energy beings meet up in 512, but if you were bodyjacked by a malevolent parasite you’ll wanna to head down to 337. Benevolent parasites are on 212, God knows why.”
Starfleet Support Groups
The scary thing is that Starfleet probably needs a separate support group for “people who have accidentally lived decades/entire lifetimes in alternate realities until it turned out it was just an hour in the real world.”
What? Oh, no, you’re looking for the “I was caught in a timeloop and went insane” support group. That’s next door.
“Mirror Universe trauma”? Down the hall.
“Dealing With My Duplicate Self” meets on Thursdays.
(O’Brien just attends all of them. If it hasn’t happened, it’s probably going to.)
Damned right.
Regardless of what cynics still resentful of their 11th grade English class experience might tell you, you’re allowed to identify with Holden. You’re allowed to root for Heathcliff. You’re allowed to feel gooey over Romeo and Juliet.
We got over the idea that literature was meant to always reflect reality and to offer moral instruction a long time ago. Interacting with all the gross, ugly, embarrassing, and/or destructive emotions we encounter in books is part of the reason they’re there.
Question: do hallucinations of past events count as “time travel” for the purposes of this watch-through? Would “The Inner Light” come during your run of TNG, or should you watch the Kamin scenes when you get to c. 1368 AD? Do you watch the hallucinatory Occupied Terek Nor scenes of “Things Past” during season 5 of DS9, or before you start TNG?
And what about erased future timeline? How do you fit in “All Good Things,” “The Visitor,” and “Endgame,” as well as ENT’s “Twilight?” Do you watch them chronologically, or do them all after as a sort of appendix to the project?
Gotta admit, this is a pretty dumb idea...but it’s exactly the sort of thing a hyper-obsessive nerd with a editing suite could devote a decade of his or her life to splicing together. I suppose it might make a cool endurance-style video installation.
I have just had a worst best idea:
Watch Star Trek in in-universe chronological order… Time travel included.
So you start by watching the 3ish minute scene of Voyager where a Q takes Voyager back to the big bang, then you move to the 4ish minute scene of Next Generation where Q takes Picard to the start of evolution on Earth, then to the DS9 episode where they go back to the 1930′s, then Star Trek 4 in the 1970′s.
Then you’re finally able to start watching Enterprise.
I don’t know much about opera in general, but I always thought stories about power struggles in the Kremlin in the days of the Soviet Union would make good opera fodder. Larger than life personalities, plots and counterplots, occasional bloodshed; how could it miss?
Hey, there’s an opera about Nixon’s visit to China; anything’s possible nowadays.
Weird Operas
What are some things you think would make good opera plots? Pull from whatever source- anime, pro-wrestling storylines, telenovelas, whatever. What’s the season program for the Martian Opera House?
Can and should! All those polar bears sitting around up there, thinking they’re better than me! I’ll settle their hash!!!!
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.
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.
I was mulling a lot over that exchange between Nine and Ten today, and I was thinking there might even more of a personal motivation for Ten′s harshness. Of the three probes in the story, Ten perhaps had the most ambitious mission. Her initial mission was to survey the asteroid belt and Jupiter, then be flung out of the solar system altogether by using Jupiter’s gravity as a slingshot. Pioneer 10 was designed to be humanity’s first emissary to the cosmos. Both she and her (brother? sister?) Pioneer 11 were launched with this,
the Pioneer plaque, an engraving designed to explain to any intelligent beings that found her where she came from and who built her. You can argue back and forth about whether any alien species would actually understand this diagram, but you can understand the intent. The plaque was humanity’s message to the universe, simply saying, “Hello. We are here.” Now imagine Ten’s life as depicted in 17776. She was built under sunny Californian skies, and had the same bits of junk data sloshing in and out of her memory bank that Nine did. There may have been simple commands or statements encoded and erased about her ultimate mission, none of it truly sticking, of course, but perhaps there was a faint trace imprinted that she was special, that she had a great purpose, perhaps the greatest purpose any human-created artifact has ever had. Initially, being a simple 1970s space probe, she would know none of this. She performed her initial missions well, then sped off into the endless night, waiting for her final destiny. Then one day, she woke up. She pieced together a working mind somehow, got herself in order, and prepared herself for her final mission. As she did so, perhaps she began to get curious. What happened to those who had sent her out? What were they doing? Eventually, she would turn her attention back to Earth, to those who had sent her out, and she would learn. She would learn of those who outpaced her: her sibling Eleven, her cousins the Voyagers, and countless others yet to be built. She would learn of how humans got ahead of her, explored their stellar backyard, only to give up and turn back inward. She would learn of how humanity had scoured the skies, desperately looking for someone else, only to find an endless sky of silent stars. She would learn that mankind is alone, and that in this universe there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. She had failed her great mission before she even properly understood what it was. And through the cold blackness of space, across the countless millennia, she still carries that plaque, the note in a bottle that no one will ever find, a monument to her failure welded to her frame. (What’s that old saying about how a pessimist is an optimist who’s been burned too many times?) I wonder if she ever reached out to Eleven or the Voyagers. Perhaps they never woke up, or they were too far, or maybe nothing they said helped at all. The other probes in the solar system wouldn’t really understand; they were smaller machines built with more modest goals. Perhaps in Nine she’s hoping for an intermediary, something between the little probes and herself that she can talk to, to make it feel better. (Wow, this totally got out of hand.)
i don’t really like people blaming 10 for what she said honestly.
she wasn’t lying when she says she loves humanity. and like…think about it. she probably started off the same as 9; they’re from the same line of probes, both probably absorbed those space race expansion ideals, didn’t they?
she wasn’t even particularly harsh with 9, just…frustrated. i can’t blame her, either; if you spent thousands of years learning that there’s NOTHING in the universe, then..what? her purpose has been destroyed. she sends telemetry data only to know that it is meaningless, that the humans won’t do anything with it because they can’t, that she won’t find anything she was made to find, and even if she does, it’ll be too far for it to…well, matter.
god. no children are being born, you know? that means that humanity itself is a finite resource that cannot be replenished. so not only does that mean stagnancy, it also means that colonization of these far off places isn’t really…a thing that can happen. like…do they really want to fracture their population like that? overcrowding with 8 billion people isn’t an actual problem, the way 7.5 billion isn’t in real life; it’s a myth of capitalism, which has already been essentially contained to zoos in 17776′s canon.
it was like 10 said. 9 nearly went made from 30 years of near total isolation, why would humans give up comfort and happiness to go somewhere where they know there will be nothing for them?
it’s sad to me. it’s heartbreaking. it doesn’t make 10 evil for telling 9 that this is simply how humanity is from now on, nor even for getting frustrated? like idk man she’s doing her best in a world where she herself also knows she has no purpose and everything she did even during her mission, in the end, meant nothing.
tl;dr 10′s Good Okay
@coppermarigolds, I suspect you will like this a lot.
“Grand moff kuvira”…
Most of what you've written jibes with my experience with B:I. All the Bioshock games had convoluted development histories, but B:I feels like there was never a clear idea as to what the game should ultimately be. (As an example, all those Vox weapons you find late in the game are the only surviving trace of a multiplayer mode the game was supposed to have.) Apparently it got so bad that after four and a half years in development, the publisher had to send in a producer to hammer the game into a playable form in six months to meet the final ship date. As for BaS...I only played the first one, and it felt weird, like a jerry-rigged version of B1′s combat manhandled into B:I’s mechanics, with a heavy emphasis on survival and stealth. As for plot, it does retcon a fair amount of detail from B1 while trying to pretend B2 never happened, and none of the changes are really for the better. I never played BaS2, which was even heavier on stealth, but what I’ve heard makes it sound like a scorched-earth epilogue to Infinite (and a fix-it fic for Daisy Fitzroy that just makes things worse).
Well, I just finished Bioshock Infinite. Some probably not very well-formed thoughts, plenty of spoilers, and a question for those who’ve played it, under the cut…
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