My next playthrough post is going to be another one from Nona’s playthrough, and I am super behind on her in particular. I left off in the middle of running Carved Brink with her.
Y’all may recall that I put up a review post about that mod, as well. But here’s the thing: since I ran Carved Brink originally with Nona, I have since run it a few more times as Tuxborn has continued to develop its builds, and since I’ve been doing playtesting for Tuxborn, that by definition included re-running Carved Brink. This led me to discover some additional things about it that I’d missed the first time, and which honestly made me enjoy playing it more.
So at this point, I’m rather more kindly disposed to it than I was on the first playthrough. And I felt it was appropriate to put up an addendum to the original review.
Most of the commentary I gave in the original review still applies, and I’m not going to recap points where my opinion hasn’t changed. But I do have some additional stuff I like about Carved Brink, and which I want to note here.
The big update this release is making City of Seattle street labels legible when printed. This was a pretty big project, for several reasons, and involved patching many parts of the map by hand. This project is one of the reasons there are many small corrections in City of Seattle this release.
While yes, I can edit their PDF directly and change sizes that way, they use an $1850 typeface and I do not have that money, at least, not for this project. Also, their PDF is optimised… presumably for something… but whatever way in which it might be optimised, it’s in a way that makes it a nightmare to edit. So the hard way it is.
Additions and changes since 1.8:
ADDED: The abovementioned font embiggening. I only enlarged street names which are directly or indirectly related to bike routes; others, I left small, if they were present at all. I also added a lot of street names left out in the original. If you would find other absent or small street names useful, please let me know and I will add and/or enlarge those, too (Seattle)
ADDED: Bell Street improved bike facilities (Seattle)
ADDED WARNING: Construction underway for new bike lanes and sidewalk improvements on 61st Ave/Place (Kenmore)
RECONSTRUCTED: The north side of University Bridge in the U. District is a mess in real life, and I was asked to rework their map to at least try and make it more comprehensible. I tried. Feedback WILL be considered (Seattle)
WARNING: The East Thomas to Elliott Bay Trail bridge over the railroad tracks is closing for construction THROUGH AUGUST. Estimate for re-opening is September 3rd (Seattle)
WARNING: Cross-Kirkland Connector trail will be CLOSED due to construction at 85th Street until May of 2026. There will be signed detours (both ADA and not), but they’re out of your way (Kirkland)
CORRECTION: A major maps error in Lake City still present in Seattle 2025 has finally been corrected here. This involved one bike route off a cliff and another down a multistorey stairwell. You’re welcome. (Seattle)
Several other small Seattle 2023/2025 errors corrected – mislabelled streets, things like that (Seattle)
All permalinks continue to work.
If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because honestly it doesn’t.
I got Ashoshah started as a character on ESO nearly a whole year ago at this point, and have I posted about her more than once since then? No, no I have not. So here’s a post to try to get caught up on what I’ve done with that character.
I gave up on the classic Teen Titans because the ‘hip’ lingo was too much. I lost all interest in New Teen Titans after George Perez left. Roy Harper put me off revisiting the Devin Grayson Titans by being a massive ass. Let’s hope I stick with this version for longer.
Pareidolia is related to patterns, echoing this three-years-in Batman maxi-series' subtitle.
It's also related to perception, echoing the motifs of the two previous stories. We Are The Wounded concerned tactile feeling, and The Voice In The Tower was audial - it'd ended on the rejection and acceptance of guiding voices.
Pareidolia opens on the acknowledgement of another motif that occurred in those two stories: ' [Gotham City, y]ou have always suffered fires. '
On the surface, Ultimate Spider-Man: Incursion is a story about Miles Morales returning to a very different Ultimate Universe to rescue his sister. Looking at how the story plays out, it's a promotional showcase for the various Ultimate comic titles, with Miles visiting each one in turn in the hopes of getting a reader to try out a new title. See how cool Spider-Man is in issue 1, check out Wakanda in issue 2, look at these funky X-Men is issue 3...
What's most interesting to me though, is that issue 2 is where we get a little more insight into what's up with 6160 Hank Pym. We get Killmonger saying:
and we also get Hank monologuing over "What do we do for the people we love?"
This is a bit like if The Book of Ash had a massively repeating time loop and was explicitly anti-fascist, and clocked in at almost exactly 300 pages.
So...not a lot like The Book of Ash actually. Ah well. It does have a scholar/historian, it does have examination of the legends of the past and how they serve the goals of the present. It does have complicated human relationships, and it does have about as much blood as something this full of swords should by rights have.
There's a love story at the heart of this, possibly more than one depending on how you read it, but structurally it is definitely not a romance. It might be the older kind of romance, with knights fighting for their honor, with strange and wondrous events. Time loops certainly qualify, I should think. But the characters have a real tinge to them--they are explicitly not the stained glass icons some of them see from time to time in the text. If I had one complaint it could be my common one with time loops: that it's hard to get the balance right so that repetition and change are harmonized in just the right way. But I'd still recommend the way Harrow is determined to examine how the stories we tell serve ends that may not be our own--and what we can do about that.
It came out over 2016-2017, several years after that'd finished - part of what Dynamite Entertainment was doing with Battlestar Galactica then.
It's a comic of something that wasn't originally a comic where the script and art aren't " This should've just been a photoplay. "
It's very neatly spliced into its source series - issue #1 opens on the " Blackbird ", the stealth Viper built in the season 2 episode Flight of the Phoenix.
Colonial Fleet-wide news echoed the note on which that'd ended - the Blackbird's construction as a reminder that " We can accomplish miracles. "
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annathepiper) wrote2025-07-14 05:08 pm
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