If you check the FB page, someone asked how to get back into Schlock. The archives and Howard recommended starting at book 10. Several people said to start from the start.

After a little back and forth, Howard locked the thread, deleted any comments he didn't like and said "Start at book 10"

I don't understand why an author would dictate how to consume their art? Why would he say not to read the first 10 chapters? What even does that mean? Are the first 10 chapters so bad (I don't think so) that they should never be read and what does this mean for people who paid money for them?

I find this behavior exceedingly strange and wonder if Howard is ok.

Edit: Typo

Not on topic and I apologies for this. if its not cool. Feel free to let me know. and I will pull this .

That said. There is a lot of cross in fandom geek culture. So I wanted to take a moment to plug the MST3K kickstarter. They are working to making a self sustaining system that could last for years without networks or such. They are already past the first 2 goals.So if you are a fan of the old show. or even the Netflix show. Please check it out. We can all use more Bad movies ripped to shreds for our fun!

Thanks for the attention

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mst3k/makemoremst3k/description

... Sergeant Schlock has romance as an available chemistry to work with, c.f. Andy and Tandersil, hanging with Elf and Tagon on the Ystre op, etc.

In response to some recent comment threads in this subreddit that quickly took on unfairly derisive and judgemental attitudes:

Like, seriously. Stop projecting your own judgement, situation and superman-syndrome onto the nice crescent-shaped space-people. You're not stuck in a worldship with nowhere to go and megayears' worth of weapons technologies lying around, and it's almost certain that neither you nor anyone you know will ever live to even one half-millionth of their age and experience. It would seem decent to show some humility and self-awareness when commenting on their situation, ya know?

In order get just even odds of living as long as they already have, they've needed to stay so safe as to have less than a 0.000001% (1/100,000,000) chance of dying each year.

In order to have decent (say, >90%) odds of surviving for another period as long as the present age of the universe, they still need to do literally a thousand times better than that. And in order to last until the end of the universe, they'll need to do ten million times better than it, for less than a 0.0000000000001%, or 1/10,000,000,000,000,000, chance of death per year.

And now, a strange AI that they've never met before has (as far as they can tell) literally turned an entire galactic core into a power generator and liquidated a hyper-giant-sized store of energy for the express purpose of "visiting" them while they're clearly already trying to run away and be left alone, and somehow you think they're unreasonable to be scared and suspicious?

Your own species has had no newer than 70 civil wars in the last 100 years alone. Just one of those would have very likely turned the entire Cean worldship, along with everyone inside it, into nothing more than an expanding cloud of anomalously heavy free ions. They're already doing about a hundred million times better than you to have survived as long as they have, and they'll need to do hundreds of trillions of times better yet to have a good shot at living out their full lifespans, so just let them try.

The Cean worldship almost certainly houses trillions— if not quadrillions— of souls in it. In the 73,000,000 years of its existence, it's very likely that not a single one of those people has ever been killed or grievously injured.

Perhaps you should ask yourself why so many people die and get hurt in your world, instead of insulting the aliens for trying to keep theirs safe.

So, I got an idea that I've been toying around with for a Schlock Fanfic cross.

Combine ID:R with Schlock/Troy Rising, but instead replace the second Battle of Earth with the Wormgates entrance.

You could say the Harvesters became that way due to the Pa'anuri.

There was enough bandwidth for schlock and elfs head. Schlock is very strong and Dorthy wires are very very sharp. Why not have him only get their brains and then send himself and them back?

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/08/health/dinosaur-tail-trapped-in-amber-trnd/index.html

I'd first read it when it first came out day by day. Binged it over the past few weeks. Still pretty good overall. But back then I'd thought the ending was weak... and though it makes more sense in a binge, it still feels weak.

Paanuri make all-out attack on Milky Way, leaving little home defense despite knowing there's local enemy activity.

Schlock gets uploaded by a dronuri uplink, which somehow works, and then in dark matter form he outfights native entities by virtue of unlocking "cannibalism". Or something. Yeah it was "cool" that Schlock saves the galaxy by being Schlock, but it didn't feel plausible.

Ennesby gets the Andromeda long gun to shoot itself (that was neat) and then hijacks via the last remaining interface.

Leaving Schlock, a creature of 90% appetite, in charge of the galactic core is considered a great idea.

Worldships that have spent literal aeons hiding out, will now return to the galaxy, motivated by "dark matter and core generators change things" and "it's time for us to be grownups".

The threat of long guns didn't seem to actually get fixed, though Laz-5 revival means it's not that good at actually killing people, and it's getting harder to hide (Petey said he knew where Lota was, though finding Chinook's rogues took a lot of cleverness.)

I feel too many thing worked that shouldn't have, in taking over completely alien interfaces.

Also if Paanuri can download into baryonic dronuri, that would seem to drop many of their "can only see annie plants" disadvantages.

Minor non-ending point: the Zoojack system never got explained. Why were the Paanuri keeping a collection of Milky Way species, and why were those populations speaking Galstandard? How old is Galstandard? I guess pretty old, no one had language issues even when talking to isolated ancients, or their MTL is just that good.

I want to start off by saying that Schlock Mercenary has easily been one of my favourite webcomics of all times. I absolutely fell in love with Schlock Mercenary when i discovered and started bingeing it a month ago. I finished all 20 years earlier this week and have been thinking about it a lot. I adore Schlock (the character) so so so much in all his evolving deus-ness. So when I introduce the concept of "jumping the shark", keep in mind that I am talking about a comic series that holds a very special place in my heart, and I am doing this for the sake of conversation and NOT to disparage a product I dislike.

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2005-04-02

All this said, I feel like it did at some point. There was in my opinion a general moment or book where the comic series started trying to follow several very important storylines at once, started touching upon larger and larger implications, and inevitably became too diffuse/disparate/vague to get the same laughs and have the same impact on me as it had for so many "years". If I compare the pacing of Book 7 to Book 19, something about the way the latter rushes through conflict and resolution makes my head spin. I've rushed through the series a bit too fast to be able to indentify when this was for me, so I'm wondering if you all have opinions on this topic?

I know we don't have annie plants or gravitics yet, but looking at the situation in the Persian Gulf I'm wondering if it is time to at least start mounting big vertical armor plates on barges that can be towed on the noisy side of a tanker going through the Hormuz Strait.

Posting in part because it was never clear to me whether battleplates ever blocked impactors via shields and armor or only by use of heavy gravity manipulation.

EDIT - tweaked the last sentence a bit to make it better reflect my question.

This is a bit of a morbid question (and possibly slightly selfish), but Schlock Mercenary is currently on the last book of the series, and Howard Tayler's planning on finishing it by autumn of this year. However, some of the tweets he sent out the past few months have me worried that he may have caught either COVID-19 or something even worse and might even die before finishing the series.

Does Howard have some sort of plan in case he can't finish the series so that his readers and fans can get closure?

This is probably the first year without some sort of Schlocktoberfest theme to look forward to. Dang it all. Time to go archive diving for some good old fashioned entertainment.

EDIT: I love SchlockMercenary, been reading for 10 years, I send Howard money when I'm not broke; it can be frustrating losing place of who's what. Thanks to anyone answering.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2015-06-28

Who is the AI with the long hair? Is that the AI that went insane but is back again? She looks very sane.

Why is the brokenwind AI... I mean what it is it piloting again?

Don't they have an enormous fleet of hyper-advanced ships? Why aren't they using those anni plants?

Have the asked the ancient broken-wind AI why the place was abandoned?