Khrux @ Khrux @ttrpg.network Posts 0Comments 488Joined 2 yr. ago
This isn't a perfect example but Cormac McCarthy has been my favourite author for years now, and his first major work Suttree was from '79.
My all time favourites novel is Blood Meridian from 1985. If you're familiar with metamodernism, which is basically very modern works that have their cake and eat it when it comes to modernist ideals and postmodern critique, you'd clock that practically every western is either a modernist white hat western or a metamodern "the west is grim and hard, but also fucking cool" western. The only straight postmodern takes on the west that I know of are either Blood Meridian or pieces of work that take direct notes from it, such as the films Dead Man from '95 (except maybe the Oregon Trail video game from. 85'). Blood Meridian otherwise is a fantastic novel which meditates on madness and cruelty, religion and fate, race, war and conquest and so many other themes. It also has one of the best antagonists ever written in Judge Holden, a character who I would have called a direct insert of Satan if not for the fact that his deeds and the novel as a whole are closely inspired by true events. I feel the novel takes inspiration from Apocalypse Now, specifically the '79 film and not Conrad's 1899 novel Heart of Darkness. If you enjoy that film, you're likely to enjoy this book. The opening and closing chapters are fantastic, but I often find myself re-reading chapter 14. It has some of the best prose and monologues of the entire novel, and encompasses in my opinion the main turning point of the novel.
His other legendary work is The Road, a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel. I'll talk on this one less but as our climate crisis grows and our cultural zeitgeist swings more towards this being the critical issue of our time, the novel fantastically paints itself as both a fantastic warning to our 21st century apocalypse and the unresolved 20th century shadow of nuclear winter. Despite this, it hones in on a meditation of parenthood and could be considered solely about that, with other themes of death, trauma, survival and mortality being explored through parenthood. Of course the unsalvageable deatg of the world that make the setting also makes this theme extra tragic. There is an adaptation into a film from 2008 but it isn't anywhere near as potent as the novel and I'd suggest should only be seen in tandem with reading the novel. The prize of this novel has really evolved to fit the novel too. McCarthy is renowned for his punctuation lacking prose, but where Blood Meridian is practically biblical in its dramatic and beautiful prose which juxtaposes the plain and brutal violence, The Road sacrifices no beauty in it's language but is so somber and meanders from mostly terse to so florid, while also always perfectly feels like how the protagonists are seeing their world.
I suspect this is a partner of some kind considering they have access to nudes?
I have no sympathy for the people who are being scammed here, I hope they lose hundreds to it. Making fake porn of somebody else without their consent, particularly that which could be mistaken for real if it were to be seen by others, is awful.
I wish everyone involved in this use of AI a very awful day.
God I love these top 4 responses. I'd say yes myself but you can probably trust yourself on this since your own appearance and wider aesthetic will influence this more than if these two items alone work together.
I mean we can basically justify the law keeping faction to act and respond in whatever way suits the story.
Perhaps the police are a mercenary company paid to guard the local clergy, so reporting their misdeeds is moot.
Perhaps as you said it's that the law keepers are an order of paladin's who must uphold their oath of enforcing the law or lose their magical connection.
Perhaps the closest to a guard force up to that point has been the ruling warlord's loyal warriors, and to your party, they're the enemy.
If the party become too over reliant or too wary of the police, have them reform in plot, for better or for worse.
I made them all up except Pitbull who definitely is not this kind of artist it's all good. I'm the same as you I've not heard of any so I was recreating the feeling I had reading the first comment.
Charles has previously lobbied the UK government to decrease funding to known functional treatments in favour of alternative treatments with no scientific backing. I believe he's actually put his money where his mouth is and is sticking to the crackpot treatments for himself so I don't believe he'll have rich people immunity at all. The man is likely going to Steve Jobs his way into the afterlife.
Mad max without mad max but you gotta get the branding.
He was a good but very different type of villain in Bad Times at the El Royale, although that's a pretty mediocre film.
Peter musicey? The big zoop band? Mooose? Spider-Man 2? Donny and the fridge raiders? Pitbull? Shani Block? I can't believe you haven't heard of these guys.
Yeah as a doctor with a PHD in this exact topic and a huge dick, it's not really in my interests to misrepresent myself.
The third one down almost certainly intentionally has the numbers 14 and 88 as a reference to a nazi dog whistle.
I can't decide if this makes it more likely to be satire or less.
I've been using this for years>
.It's part of my phone's overall aesthetic of lock screen, home screen and keyboard.
As for where I found it, I believe somewhere on Reddit 5 or so years ago that I changed to my phone screen resolution. I also made a version with animated twinkling stars and moving waves but ithe waves were less pretty so I dropped it eventually.
The only silly thing is that all my friends and my partner all have eachother as our lock screens in a cute way, but I am too committed to my lock screen to change.
People have ripped this image apart for it's AI use. I believe Kate's entire face is also just copied from a vogue photoshoot or something too.
The photo is absolutely true. Not just are there several AI artifacts but her face in the photo is identical to a photo from a photoshoot that came from vogue, meaning it's very likely that she wasn't at this photoshoot at all.
Honestly, particularly as someone who only married into the royal family, my heart goes out to her for whatever is going on. It's clear that since that operation she's been out of the public eye, whether she's just recovering, in a coma or as some believe dead, it's still sad.
What I don't understand is the cover up and mystery, particularly when it comes to the wife of the future king after the massive amounts of drama and conspiracy around Diana.
I've had a (probably wrong) take on the ridiculous direction modern GPUs have gone, that isn't just because of crypto mining, ridiculous profit margins and machine learning. From when I got into the hobby until the release of the PS5 and whatever Xbox competed with it, if you built a PC at a similar budget to a console, it would consistently outperform it. The PC I built 8 years ago has started showing its age but in its prime was about 1½ times the cost of a console for triple the power, now 1½ the cost of a console more or less gets you a console.
Part of that is the horrendous inflation of PC parts, particularly the GPUs, but also that the hobby has shifted away from being competitive against consoles to having no chance of being cost competitive. When they stopped being in competing fields, the cost of PC parts just exploded.
Some people have mentioned that some people with foot fetishes have a habit of trying to get people they find attractive to talk about their feet which makes everyone uncomfortable, to the point that it's kinda of the main reason I think a stigma has formed against it.
If I met someone who for some reason I suspected was into feet, I'd be a little wary until I felt they weren't gonna be weird about people's feet, but I think if i met a knee fetish person, I'd be so surprised they exist that i wouldn't think about this aspect even though it's just as likely.
I also assumed the swooper still decelerates you a little even if not by much. If you're falling at 50m/s as you are trying to slow your fall by taking a skydiver pose, and a superhero caches you midair, you could decelerate over half a second and stop moving within 12 meters while still only experiencing 10g.
12m is pretty tall but not insane in a superhero style piece of fiction where people may be dropped out the sky or from tall buildings. If you want to increase that g-force to the maximum survivable limit of near 100g (in theory), you'd only need to go from terminal velocity to 0m/s in 1.5 meters. Being reasonable, being caught 5 meters above the ground would be enough for most people to survive without major reprocussions, and is always better than hitting the ground.
Unfortunately I suspect we'll get third party 'consoles' that are basically the equivalent of the handhelds from nthe console market, potentially locked to set stores.
The only reason we currently don't have any prevalent under TV consoles that are glorified steam deck competitors is because anyone interested in that market is tech savvy enough to see you may as well have a PC doing the same.
I don't see consoles dying out for a decade yet but I suspect the next step is this. That or they'll embrace cloud gaming, where people are just streaming games of their servers, making them much harder to pirate, easier to charge a subscription for and easier to maintain and release smaller hardware changes. This has 99 downsides although does come with the upside of basically not requiring the larger tech companies to hold back innovation by generation, which may accelerate the the gaming tech industry slightly. I saw an article back when the PS5 was releasing that was basically about how a huge field of graphics tech has a boon on a major console release and stagnates with it, which is caused by so many of the people making content for high end graphical tech being people making games for consoles and there is little reason to outpace what they can perform.
All of that is my speculation from absolutely nowhere in the industry, so take it all with a big swig of salt.