Bats In The Shadows

Also, no wonder Lestat made an ass of himself at the de Pointe du Lac family dinner in season one, he has no home training and a family dinner table is a PVP enabled zone in his mind. He is used to it being a WWE SmackDown and not the site of quiet and deftly targeted advanced psychological warfare tactics like in a normal dysfunctional family.

scrolling through a ship's ao3 tag like a world weary detective scanning through hundreds of hours of CCTV footage in search of clues that just aren't there

Oooh! My husband once run a ttrpg adventure with a similar premise: the heroes were Harad(?) independence fighters, and there was a local Numenorean lord, and at one point they decided to murder him (thrown poison knife), and, umm, it didn't end well. (Fade to black + the next day they finish their panicked running away and the city is burning or worse. I don't remember much of it, but… @steenan could you elaborate please? No gory details, just the story... iirc there were no gory details said anyway)

Summoned, I arrive. The adventure in question was run using Cortex Prime system. PCs were a part of resistance against Numenorean oppression. At this point in the adventure they were trying to rescue their friends, captured by Numenorean soldiers and held in the lord's palace. But they encountered the lord himself and decided - for some of them, against the values they held - that they can murder him and solve the problem once and for all. They already knew that the lord was meeting with a mysterious stranger who gifted him some kind of beautiful jewelery and taught him dark secrets. They also had reasons to suspect that it was the same figure that visited one of the PCs, motivating them to violence against the Numenoreans. An important part of the Cortex system is a "doom pool". It's a pool of dice that the GM rolls for opposition that is not named NPCs. Dice in this pool grow when players roll 1s and when 2d12 are available, the GM may spend them to simply narrate how a scene ends badly. So we have the PCs deciding to solve problems with murder, the lord who most probably is being mentored by Sauron and the doom pool with high dice already. PCs strike. Dice are rolled. PCs win and the lord dies - but at the same time, the doom pool gets to 3d12. It wasn't planned, it comes from random rolls, but the timing is perfect. So I narrate how they slit his throat or put a dagger through his heart (I don't remember exactly), he stumbles, gets pale, but instead of falling down and dying begins to laugh. How they hit more and the wounds do nothing to stop him; how he grabs one of the PCs and throws them like a rag doll. How they run away and he simply walks through the palace and the town it was in, killing everybody who gets in his way, Haradrim or Numenorean, slave or soldier, merchant or laborer. And a ring shines on his deathly pale finger.

important reminder that most people you follow online are significantly lamer than you think they are including me. and if you feel insecure comparing yourself to someone online: DON'T. theyre probably also lame and weird. most people on the internet are

“You know what a protogen is?”

i think that half the reason spiderman and batman movies are so popular is because they never do this, even if the movie itself is bad you still get at least one freak that chews the scenery and has a silly costume

”university is turning all of our beautiful girls into UGLY transgenders!” I ☝🏾 for one ☝🏾 think it’s super fucking awesome that these guys are moving out after being held in such a tight chokehold for the majority of their developmental years and finally getting to taste freedom for the first time in their lives. and I think it’s even MORE fucking awesome that the first thing they do upon tasting said freedom is turn into men. Good for them!

this trend of shitting on peer-reviewed academic studies in favor of tweeting “we already knew this was happening” is so soul-crushing. not to be an elitist cunt, but we have got to open the schools again. people genuinely seem to have forgotten that their personal lived experience isn’t indicative of the larger population, AND IF IT IS…… then you need researchers to support these assertions from a relevant data pool instead of a blog post from 2013 💀

"Believe women and the marginalized" does not replace the value of empirical data.

I’ve gotten sooooo spoiled by Murderbot Diaries fandom. TMBD fandom if you have a cool idea about SecUnit physiology or Preservation planetary worldbuilding or Corporation Rim political organization people are generally willing to go “oh cool! That’s a neat idea.” I s2g every time I post about Project Hail Mary and Eridian worldbuilding ideas I get someone going “um sweaty Andy Weir said that Erid has no problems and Eridians are perfect and anyway we don’t know how Erid works so your idea is wrong” yeah that’s why it’s called fanwork

Listen I love Andy Weir's writing as much as the next person but I think we can all agree that he just didn't put that much thought into building Erid at all. I'm pretty sure that he knows exactly as much about the place as he thought absolutely necessary to put on the page to make them seem sufficiently alien-like. "He didn't write about their complex social problems" no shit the story wasn't about that. I firmly believe that Andy Weir has no clue whatsoever about how Eridian resource distribution works or the details of how their clusters operate beyond 'seminar that's also sort of a hivemind and Reaches A Decision' or how social roles and social status operate or anything. Eridian problems being absent from the story doesn't mean 'Erid is a utopia', it means 'this story is not about Erid'.

IIRC I read once that if humans became extinct tomorrow (in the geological sense) all evidence of civilization would be erased within 50-60 million years. So, if there was some Permian era civilization of hyper-advanced crustaceans or something, is it possible that we would not and could not know anything about it, that it's all been reduced to its component molecules at this point?

On one hand, Deep Time is immensely destructive, and even oceans and continents have a limited lifespan; on the other hand, sometimes we find extraordinarily delicate traces from the ancient past. Sometimes we can count the bristles on the back of a soft-bodied worm, even though the mountains of its time have already eroded to the roots!

there is nothing a corporation hates more than having employees, but a close second is having to provide a good or service in order to make money. these two reasons concisely explain is why the ai bubble formed in the first place.