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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

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Ryan North's 'How to Take Over the World'

There’s a certain kind of Internet Person who makes the world a better place every day, just by showing up. People like Ryan North, whose many accomplishments include his daily, long-running, brilliant Dinosaur Comics:

https://www.qwantz.com/

The secret to Dinosaur Comics is the simplicity of the bit, coupled with the lengths that North takes it to: it’s the same six stock-art panels of a T-Rex, a Utahraptor and a, Dromiceiomimus, discoursing on some funny, bizarre or philosophical topic. Three times per week, every week since 2003, Ryan North has written new dialog for these three dinosaurs, as T-Rex crushes a log cabin (panel 3) and a tiny person (panel 4), while pondering the imponderable.

Thinking up three different gags per week for the same six panels for nearly 20 years has meant that North has had to go to some very weird and amazing places, really push through all the obvious riffs, and take us beyond the obvious bounds of the imagination.

Now, Dinosaur Comics is all the more amazing in that it is basically a side-hustle and passion project. North has several other careers he pursues, like producing improbable, delightful, wildly popular crowdfunded books. His choose-your-own adventure version of Hamlet was the most successful publishing Kickstarter when it funded:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/breadpig/to-be-or-not-to-be-that-is-the-adventure

And then there was “Machine of Death,” a pair of CC-licensed theme anthologies and a card game North co-created, about a world in which people know the exact time and manner of their deaths.

http://machineofdeath.net/

Not only are these great books, they also destroyed Glenn Beck’s 2010 book launch by beating it to the top of the charts, causing Beck to conceive of a bizarre, long-running feud against the “culture of death.”

http://blog.serindu.com/2010/10/28/glenn-beck-thinks-i-celebrate-destruction/

North’s wide-ranging interests and deeply nerdy outlook (he’s also an accomplished computer scientist) makes him perfectly suited to writing superhero comics, and his runs on several Marvel titles are distinguished for their humor and inventiveness:

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Ryan_North/Writer

But beyond the comics, the webcomics, the science fiction and the Shakespeare-inspired remix comedies, North is also an accomplished science communicator. His first book-length foray into the field was 2018’s “How to Invent Everything,” which addressed itself to time-travelers stranded in the past and explained how to bootstrap a technologically advanced civilization as a frame for stripping away the layers of knowledge and art underpinning our everyday lives:

https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/

Now, North has published a sequel of sorts: How to Take Over The World, a popular science book that tours a wide-ranging set of technological ideas by means of explaining how to realize the supervillain plots so beloved of Marvel comics:

https://supervillainbook.com/

HTTOTW is full of extremely funny, extremely informative riffs that make for a engrossing frame for very deep dives into knowledge that is esoteric, interdisciplinary, and damned interesting. For example, if you want to build a supervillain lair, you want to be beyond the reach of state authority, and that’s a jumping-off point to recount the history of nation-states, the deeply flawed nature of seasteading and other “libertarian exit” projects, and, finally, a triumphant exploration of Antarctic treaty law and Buckminster Fuller’s plan for vast, floating spheres, with a detour into carbon nanotubes and other exotic new materials.

HTTOTW gives the same treatment to immortality, bringing back dinosaurs (so you can terrorize your enemies from atop a ferocious thunder-lizard), controlling the world’s weather, traveling through time, switching off the internet, and sending information forward in time to the heat-death of the universe.

For each of these, North presents the hilarious and often terrible histories of previous attempts, the current state of the art, and the outer speculative edge of science. Each one is a way to talk about biology, physics, sociology, and politics — and each one sneakily introduces the book’s main theme, which is that the supervillain’s true, inevitable downfall is their belief in their singular genius and desire to ignore or trample the agency of others.

That message emerges inexorably through North’s expert scientific explanations and often laugh-out-loud humor: supervillains are, basically toddlers who would like very much for everyone to simply let them decide how everything should work, without complaining about their own wants and needs.

At a moment when selfish assholes have decided that the pandemic is over, and other people have no right to demand that they consider how their actions harm others, HTTOTW is a timely reminder that we all have intertwined destinies, and that science and reality have an anti-hyper-individualist bias:

https://twitter.com/mattblaze/status/1515329047785574404

#pluralistic

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squarebracket-trickster · 10 months

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Make Me Write Tag Game

@forthesanityofstorytellers with this post, and @words-after-midnight with this one...

Well. Well. Well. Your timing is impeccable, both of you. I am taking a break from WIPVII until August 1st and I have three other WIPs I want to work on in the meantime. I guess I'm making a poll to decide which one to work on first!

Rules: Make a 24hr poll listing the titles of every WIP you want to work on. (It’s fine if you only have one, still make a poll for the vote count). Whichever WIP title gets the most votes, write 1 sentence for every vote received.

(if you are unsure if you are doing it right you can refer to this post I made about tag game guidelines in general. Of course, they are just guidelines. You can do your own thing if you want and no one can stop you.)

Ever so delicately tagging: @olivescales3, @tea-and-mercury, @avocado-frog, @avidink, @aziz-reads, @quintonli, and @marzipan-corner, and, you know what? This is a pretty cool idea. I'm gonna leave an open tag for anyone who wants to do it too.

Descriptions of each WIP are under the cut.

WIPXIV (WIP 14) is brand-spanking new. I thought up the idea while researching medieval clothing for WIPVII. I don't really have a plot yet but something... something... puesdo-sciencey time-travel shenanigans but the equipment is telescopes, mirrors, hand-cranked projectors etc. etc. and our main cast are a ragtag group from the 1450s who have to travel to various points in the past and future (including our present-day. sort of. there are dragons in this version of our world) to save it from a yet-to-be-determined impending doom. The most important part of this WIP (according to me) is that I make a point of showing how futuristic Elizabethan ruff-collars and how old-fashioned those 1100s style girdles would feel to these characters. I am tired of pseudo-medieval worlds that act like ruff-collars and butterfly veils and floor-length pigtail braids co-existed at the same time.

WIPXII (WIP 12) was a project I started for NaNo last year. I wrote 25k words and then realized I had no idea where I was going with it so I left it to simmer for a while. It is a magic school story, and it is undeniably a response to a favourite childhood author of mine who turned out to be a bigot. This is a project for me to steal the things I loved from the story I grew up with, but write something that I can actually enjoy without getting an icky feeling. My main character is a fat, Jewish, bisexual trans-girl named Shiri and the themes of this story are anti-capitalist and highly critical of the school system. The story is about the magical subcultures and student-run intellectual and activist clubs who are fighting against censorship, gatekeeping of magical knowledge, and the authoritarian government that has a terrible track record of human rights abuses.

WIPIV (WIP 4 or How to Take Over the World). One of my few WIPs with an official name, HtTOtW is the story of an invisibly disabled 20-something who is sick of being underestimated and feeling like she is immature, undisciplined, and a failure for not being as far along in post-secondary and her career-path as her peers. To shut up the voices in her head (and those of society) once and for all, she plans to do the most impressive thing she can think of: take over the world. I've put this project off for a while because it will require an insane amount of research and RIP my search history. The Canadian Secret Service is gonna have a file on me after this. But I do have some ideas for a character study and the mc is such a self-insert ohmygosh. This is my catharsis project.

#wipxiv #wipxii #httotw #make me write tag #tag game

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squarebracket-trickster · 7 months

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Happy Storyteller Saturday!

A question about your writing process this week: when you start a new project, do you do it with a word goal in mind? How strict is the word goal and how close to you get to it? Are you an over- or under-writer?

Oooh I like this! Thank you!!

I always know how many books I want to get out of a WIP before I start. Like, WIPVII was always meant to be a standalone, I want WIPXII to stretch seven books, WIPIV HtTOtW is going to be two trilogies plus a prequel and an epilogue novel--so eight, and WIPIII is going to be a trilogy. This helps me direct the idea in the development process I can either expand it to fill the number of books without worrying I will run out of ideas later or reign the idea in so I don't get overwhelmed.

As for a word goal, I typically write to the word counts that most debut books in the genre query at. For WIPVII, I picked the debut YA fantasy word court which is 80 000. I find not writing with a word count can be overwhelming because my tendency is to overwrite.

I am not too strict about sticking to the word count in a first draft though. That's what second and third draft revisions are for. I write with the word count in mind first draft but if I go over by 32 000 words, so be it.

In later drafts I tend to be more strict about sticking to the world goal, within about 5000 words. If my goal is 80 000 words, I will accept 75 000 or 84 999 but nothing outside that range.

My first draft of WIPVII was about 112 500 words but I trimmed it down to 77 049 for the second draft.

#sts #wipvii

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