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Anime News

2011.03.01 07:36 ChingShih Anime News

A sub-reddit for anime, games, and cultural news of Japan.
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2024.05.16 07:38 Mountain_Counter929 Making Aliens based off every pokemon type combination (Fighting)

Fighting/Normal: OHKO (One Punch Man but instead of one effortless punch it’s a touch of death combo he has to )
Species: Mugen
Planet: Sonof
Appearance
Powers and Abilities
Weaknesses/Drawback
Species/Planet Fact: The Mugen started as semi-organic creations by a long dead civilization who sought to try experiments designing different types of warriors. Eventually the planet will be inhabited by foreign researchers. These researchers have been working on enhancing them with various effects to increase their capabilities, and give them more movement and combat options. But during testing it was discovered that watching the Mugen fight with or without enhancements is incredibly entertaining resulting and a strong source of combat study. This discovery redirected their experiments being used for sports instead of warfare even preventing what would’ve been an interplanetary war by turning it into a competitive sport, exploding the planet in popularity. During this explosion there was the discovery of a single fight between two Mugen that have went on for centuries before the first immigration and has been fiercely protected from interruptions since its discovery.
Fighting/Grass: Doungwun Nemetrix predator of the Chunwin (See Kung book in Grass Types)
Appearance
Hunting Method
Planet/Species Fact: Despite the Doungwun seemingly biologically engineered to beat Cunwin on one to one combat, countering their various techniques. They rather take less ‘honorable’ tactics whenever possible. In populated areas they’d quickly overwhelm their prey with high numbers and quickly attack before the Chunwin gets a chance to swing. If there are aren’t any others nearby it’ll try to ambush its prey from hard to reach angles in the air. Only when it’s alone and has caught the attention of its prey, will it attach itself and engage its prey in close range combat. Most Chunwin societies simply use traps, or other tools to protect themselves from these predators. But a predator that chooses to engage in a one on one duel is more respected and results in a more respected death (for either one). So some Chunwin warriors leave themselves open to solo Doungwun attacks as some form of test.
Fighting/Fire: Racaln the Nemetrix predator of the Clabestro (See Firing Squad in Fire types)
Appearance
Hunting Method
Planet/Species Fact: Racaln only prey on the Clabestro when they’re split up and small. They don’t do any harm when they’re merged on one bigger body. But since most Clabestro combat (which happens very often) has them in their small split up forms. This makes it common for Racalns to be collected from the wild or bred in captivity to be utilized as excellent traps, and denying area. This practice would also be used as a mark to safeguard places from violence, to prevent Clabestro from splitting to engage in combat. This practice has spread to official gatherings like courts and diplomatic meetings.
Fighting/Water: Ultimate Slush (See Original in Water Types)
Appearance
Powers/Ability
Weaknesses/Drawbacks:
Fighting/Elctric: Ultimate Fightning Rod (See Web Work in Electric Types)
Appearance
Powers/Ability
Weaknesses/Drawbacks:
Fighting/Flying: Ultimate Fight and Flight (See original in Flying Types)
Appearance
Powers/Ability
Weaknesses/Drawbacks:
Fighting/Ice: Giengar Nemetrix predator of the Ashe (See Burrzerker in Ice Types)
Appearance
Hunting Method
Planet/Species Fact: Giengar are omnivores. In cold seasons they eat large predators with their primarily skill of inducing hallucinations that tire out its target before having its body frozen over for it to consume with its teeth designed to crush frozen objects. They gain this power by consuming mushrooms from warmer, jungle biomes that contain spores which has a similar effect to targets that breathe them in (though less concentrated and ends with less fatalities). Giengars are immune to these spores so during the warmer seasons they migrate to the jungle to consume high amounts of these mushrooms to expel their spores in large concentrations during hunting season. Normal Ashe that occupy these jungles stay away from the dangerous arctic biomes the Giengars hunt in, so to them the Giengar are seen as harmless. Since even if the Giengars try to use the spores against them, the conditions aren’t lethal and the lack of the Ashe’s adrenaline won’t inhibit their ability to recognize their condition and react accordingly instead of wasting their energy fighting.
Fighting/Ground: Ultimate Mudripper (See Original in Ground Types)
Appearance
Powers/Ability
Weaknesses/Drawbacks:
Fighting/Rock: Ovivine Nemetrix predator of the Sabter (See Mountain Goat in Fighting Types)
Appearance
Hunting Method
Planet/Species Fact: While Ovivine can talk and mimic sentient emotions its only purpose is to gain the trust of prey as a mere predatory mechanism, their brains aren’t capable of deeper introspective thought or sentience when alone. Sabter are worn of the Ovivine though largely they are seen as myth with how very few sightings they are and how little the Ovivine are actually active due to their slow metabolism. Ovivines cover their prey on the floor and slowly consume it whilst morphing its body to appear as a mere lump of ground covered in grass, which is another factor into how little they’re seen. Occasionally they encounter some Sabter who are very much aware of them, and their tricks so in those cases they simply push them off the cliff side. Though this method relies on the element of surprise since their physical strength is much weaker than the average Sayter.
Fighting/Bug: Ultimate Float Stinger (See Original in Bug Types)
Appearance
Powers/Ability
Weaknesses/Drawbacks:
Fighting/Psychic: Muscle Memory (Alien Taskmaster)
Species: Reffox
Planet: Arbeitar
Appearance
Powers and Abilities
Weaknesses
Planet/Species Fact: Due to the fact that all Reffox are all physically the same and that any unique skill that are developed is quickly assimilated by one another. Reffox populations share a yearning for a sense of identity. So many Reffox head off to other cultures/planets to use their learned skills to be able to make an identity of themselves, whether it be an athlete a performer, a warrior, a hero, or in some cases a criminal or ruler. This feeling is felt through all Reffox and when two of them meet, they silently agree to not show their skills to each other to keep their identity. Though if they do want to share they return to Arbeitar to tell their stories or inspire new skills for the next generation who would tell their story.
Fighting/Poison: Biolence (Fist of the North Star Powered by drugs, and can weaponize their own explosions )
Species: Gomane Planet: Omawoshindyu
Appearance
Powers and Abilities
Weaknesses
Planet/Species Fact: Eons ago a large vapor of toxic alien pollutants was mysterious dropped on Omawoshindyu mutating all inhabitants and killing off massive amounts of life, however life stiff have adapted and eventually evolved resulting in the modern Gomanes. By the time their own society has formed, the pollutants have been absorbed into the earth or dissipated from the atmosphere allowing fertile greener life to grow. Ironically most of Gomane society promotes healthy activity like proper diet in exercise, for it allows them to control their cyst development more effectively even when there sped up, which they use in hunting and combat sports. However crime activity is still noticeable involving addiction, violence, and gang activity. Mostly originating in highly polluted/deserted wastelands. As various poisons are being produced and mines
Fighting/Ghost: Body-structor (Havik from MK1 with hints of Water Law from One Piece)
Species: Rankensain
Planet: Taxodoom
Appearance
Powers and Abilities
Weaknesses:
Planet/Species Fact: Body parts are the Rankensains main currency. While most body parts are gathered from hunted animals on their world. Rankenstains have developed interplanetary transportation to gather valuable alien body parts. Often by nefarious methods like warfare, grave robbing, or even homicide, making them a disdained and feared species across multiple planets. There are labs made to create clones of existing limbs to replace active hunting to remove the need for travel, but with how often exploration is used and how slow the cloning process is, Rankensains still commonly hunt aliens for their limbs as part of a darker slightly underground culture. To get around their negative reputation, Rankensains would remove their own brains and implant them into other bodies to disguise themselves.
Fighting/Dragon: Medisnake (Combat Snake with Street Fighter Chi abilities)
Species: Ansatryu
Planet: Chakrenin
Appearance:
Powers/Abilities:
Weaknesses
Planet/Species Fact: Initially Ansartyu were seen as pets of another more human-like species called the Shotogun and as intelligent as their owners. However, eventually the Shotogun would discover their ability to tap into their own personal well of the same chi-like energy and start practicing it for various means. However back then only a handful of masters would be able use it, and only at a very basic level. Until one Shotogun prince discovered that his treasured Ansatryu was able to tap into and unlock further levels of mastery. With this knowledge the prince learned from his Ansatryu and developed a closer bond with it, even teaching his pet higher levels of intelligence as he was taught further mastery of chi. Later he would teach others how to learn from their Ansatryu and his own Ansatryu will give intelligence to others of his species, leading to the point where Ansatryu are now partners living in the same world as the Shotogun in relative harmony.
Fighting/Steel: Weapon Blaster (Tank Knight with hand guns that shoots bladed weapons) Species: Arthmo
Planet: Palawar
Appearance
Powers and Abilities
Weaknesse
Species/Planet Fact: Arthmo is an artificial species created from a combination of alchemy and engineering by a master at both, commissioned by a great king. They were meant to be used as weapons of warfare and even companions. However an enemy army raided the kingdom, and killed both the lord and creator after the first Arthmo woke up. So the lab was well hidden so the Arthmo followed the instructions of its creator and created more of it, and slaying the enemy army. Now they defend the remaining members of their kingdom to allow it to rebuild. However, rumor has it that a surviving enemy found the original Arthmo lab.
Fighting/Dark: Spotshot
Species: Dalmate
Planet: Cerberence
Appearance
Powers/Abilities:
Weaknesses/Drawbacks
Species/Planet Fact: The spotted biological materials that generate the Dalmate’s projectile “spots”, is a shared trait amongst a handful of different Cereberence animal species and even some plant life. Those species has a spot of a different color that was meant harm all other species/subspecie for predation or predator avoidance. Other species that don’t have this projectile ability do have spotted patterns on them to warn predators, or even create similar marks on objects to protect territory by intimidation.To weaponize their own “spots” Dalmate tribes would farm different animals and use them in different methods that changes their spot markings to battle other tribes with their own spot slinging skills to prevent it from being simply absorbed into its targets body.
Fighting/Fairy: Best-O Change-O (Magical Girl/Boy Recruiting Bunny)
Species: Usegin
Planet: Lunakessho
Appearance
Powers/Abilities
Weaknesses
Planet/Species Fact: Lunakessho is a magical planet where all the inhabitants would practice magic, protected by an order of Usegin knights. However dark forces used by villains and monsters would arise practicing this dark magic and almost threatened to corrupt the universe. The Usegin order managed to fight them off but with a threat on that kind of scale and some remaining presence of their enemies they decided to seal of the planet into another realm. However, now there is an occult group mages summoned the order on various points of different moons using a ritual that was meant to be used in case they’re needed. While the Usegin heroes did manage to get involved in their traditional hero work. They’ve learned too late that this ritual will eventually corrupt them once all the full rituals is complete, and they’re powerless to stop them. So they now go to various planets and recruit and train other magical warriors to stop them when the time comes.
submitted by Mountain_Counter929 to Ben10 [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:07 supernovaontherye Road rage incident (S. Lamar + Barton Springs Road)

I wasn’t going to post this because I ended up evading the raged-out man but I genuinely have never had something so terrifying happen + want to see if anyone has had a similar occurrence?
Last week, I had a late spray tan appointment (10pm). I first noticed a man with long black hair driving a small grey/silver car aggressively weaving in and out of traffic about 2 mins after I pulled out onto South Lamar. The light where you’d turn onto Treadville St was red and I had to stop—this is when I knew something was wrong. He was one car behind me at the light but I could see him flashing his lights.
Once the light turned green, he gunned it around the car behind me and caught up with me. I’ve never had someone tail me so closely—if I would have even slightly tapped my brakes, he would’ve been in my backseat.
We then were stuck at the light at South Lamar. I was watching him in my rear view and noticed he was leaning down into the floorboard of his passenger seat, clearly searching for or something which terrified me. The light turned green, and I gunned it, but the light ahead of us by Starbucks was turning red, and he was getting into the lane where he would be to the left of me and I could see him roll down his window and flailing his arms at me with something in his hand. I waited until he got almost right up next to my car before I gunned it down the road to Starbucks and back up to South Lamar and made an escape back to my house.
I have no idea why it happened. I wasn’t driving recklessly, I didn’t cut anyone off, and there was hardly anyone on the road. I would describe him as late 20s to early 30s with long black hair and he was driving a small silver car, either an old Toyota or Camry model.
submitted by supernovaontherye to Austin [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:01 EUGsk8rBoi42p "Just check out Eugene’s Reddit section any day, but don’t say I didn’t warn you."

Admitting we have a problem is the first step in solving it! Author is a Eugenean talking about her experience with rising crime in the city, never saw this story but hey, still relevant today. Found this little gem by random chance. Title is a hopefully relatable quote from the article. You can agree or disagree with the author, but it's actually pretty well written with sources included. (just including the whole article, for people who don't want to click links!)

I Caught Two Men Stealing From My Home. The Aftermath Was Absurd—and All Too Typical.

This experience crystallized Oregon’s deeper problems.

BY REBECCA SCHUMANJUNE 21, 20225:40 AM
Typically, guys wearing power-company vests don’t leave the houses they’re working on laden down with backpacks—let alone power tools, a scooter, and a Nintendo Switch. But that was the scene I happened upon at 6:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in mid-April when I puttered into my driveway in Eugene, Oregon, my 7-year-old ensconced in the back seat.
For a second, my brain tried to normalize the incident: This is just my daughter’s dad stopping by—except there are two of him, and they’re dressed as electricians for some reason? Then, a second later, everything whooshed into place: Oh, wait, I’m being robbed. Or, rather, I was being burgled. I would get reminded of this distinction later, when I made the dubious choice to join the chorus of aggrieved buttinskies on Nextdoor, where my well-meaning post to warn the neighborhood would turn me into an accidental vigilante hero for a day.
Unfortunately, it’s true: My reaction to this burgle was the lived-out fantasy of many who have been on the business end of a property crime. As the two goons took off on foot down my street, I went into fight-or-flight mode—and I chose fight.
“Well,” I said to my confused child, “let’s go see if we can get our stuff back.”
I peeled my 2005 Subaru back onto the street and easily overtook my two targets, who then hurtled themselves into an alley, whereupon I cornered one by the driver’s side window as the other made haste across the adjacent parking lot.
“Just give it back, bro!” I yelled out my window. “Just give it back! I’m a single mom! Just give it back.”
I repeated this until either I reminded him too much of his meanest teacher or he realized he’d been caught in broad daylight. “Fine,” he said. “Just fucking take it.”
He shoved a backpack through my driver’s side window. Inside it was both my laptops and my daughter’s iPad from school. Back at home, I would discover these guys had used channel lock pliers to force open the back door, but that the general chaos of my home had prevented them from locating my passport, jewelry, or sole item of irreplaceable value: the Montblanc fountain pen that my father, who died in a bicycle accident two years ago, had gotten for his law school graduation. My cat was unfazed.
I can honestly tell you that this little caper of mine was thrilling and deeply satisfying. It was also the exact wrong thing to do. Even this fanatical open-carry gun website implores: “Don’t chase criminals.” What if these two dipsticks had been armed? As unlikely as that was—property crime in my town is often driven by addiction, and weapons are worth money, which can buy drugs—I put myself and my child in potential danger. And for what? Three grand worth of electronics. As any reputable expert will tell you, you’re never to give chase to a thief, because human life is not worth possessions. As much as I admit to enjoying being called a “badass” by everyone I told this story, plus the listeners of KLCC Oregon, I should not have done this.
I did call the police, on the nonemergency line, because the dudes were long gone and nobody was hurt. I declined the dispatcher’s offer to send two officers to fingerprint a bunch of stuff I’d already touched. At best, that would have just added two more sets of prints to my town’s burgeoning roster of perennially at-large property criminals.
There are larger issues here, issues much more important than my would-be cool story. First, it’s an example of how in Eugene, small-scale property crime is now de facto legal. It is largely nonviolent, so it’s rarely seen as worth police resources to track down the goods. At the same time, it is so prevalent that any time one vest-wearing bozo gets nabbed, three more spring up in his place. This was my house’s second break-in in six months, and my fourth property crime total in the three years I’ve lived here as an adult. Eugene is my hometown, so I can also add the four times my childhood house, where my mother still lives, has been burgled since the early 2000s. When I was little, we left our front door unlocked so regularly that I wasn’t aware front doors had locks on them until I was much older. By the time I turned 30, however, every door in my parents’ house had been pried open at least once. (“Time to finally get that alarm system!” said my dad for three straight decades.)
Still, it’s a mistake to treat this trend solely as a vexing crime problem. Eugene’s descent into its property crime epidemic has been concurrent, unsurprisingly, with two addiction epidemics: First, the methamphetamine nightmare of the 1990s—when pseudoephedrine pills were still unregulated—hit Oregon and other Western states particularly hard. That wave segued all too naturally into the opioid and fentanyl crisis of the present. Meanwhile, not only did meth never really leave, but its use in Oregon also surged with the pandemic, with three Oregonians per day currently dying a drug-related death.
Since our conversation was necessarily brief, I don’t know the housing or drug situation of the guys who broke into my place. But local statistics point to them as two more casualties of these plagues. (Granted, those statistics are from nearby Portland, and they are police-sourced, so take them how you wish.)
For all the ambivalent empathy that the opioid epidemic has engendered, the local property crime scourge has set off a fierce public backlash. My incident brought out an unsurprising chorus of bloodlust on Nextdoor and elsewhere, when I shared it because I wanted to give my immediate neighbors a heads-up: “You should have kicked their asses,” they wrote. “We need to rise up and defend our property.”
This town’s petty crime is often attributed, at least in the national conservative press, to our West Coast government’s decision to temporarily allow urban camping during the pandemic. (That policy has now officially ended, for what it’s worth.) Towns like mine have often been characterized in the popular imagination as unlivable crime-addled hellholes. I will be the first to admit that our tent cities are sometimes blatant open-air drug markets, but this is the case even as our property values inflate to absurd proportions—and our crime is actually on the decline. Still, Oregonians like me currently have about a 2.7 percent chance of being burgled, which, at almost 30 percent higher than the national average, is very high. I learned very efficiently how anecdotes like mine get around (I can’t help it if I’m a dynamic storyteller!) and attract the righteous indignation of other former victims, so many often feel, incorrectly, like we few honest vanguards are awash in a sea of riffraff.
This atmosphere, in turn, inspires my locality’s equally unreasonable political extremists to put forth and exacerbate their own untenable solutions. Even in a hyperpolarized American environment, Oregon is more polarized than most. For decades, our liberal enclaves have made Portlandia look understated, while our conservative areas make Texas’ look progressive.
For example, during the heyday of Eugene’s recently dismantled and infamous Washington Jefferson Park tent city, a larger break-in at a bicycle store was traced at least partially back to the encampment. The police swept the tents and made a flurry of arrests. Some of the bikes were found. This resulted in part in outrage over using resources to hassle the city’s most impoverished residents: “A stolen bike, yes, that sucks,” an advocate for the unhoused told a local news outlet. “But what are your priorities? And I’m sorry, but a stolen bike isn’t the priority.”
Well, trust me, in this town, it definitely isn’t. Recovering those bikes was an anomaly; in Eugene, most of these burglaries go unsolved. In fact, 87 percent of burglaries in the whole country do, too. The get-tough-on-property-crime proponents assert that statistically, this sends a message that stealing is fair game, and sure, that is a message I do not condone. But I also agree with a somewhat less rabid version of the opposing view: Property is replaceable, these crimes are nonviolent, and everyone currently rifling through houses and dealing drugs out of tents in my town is human. They deserve a chance to get their lives on track.
So, what should be the town’s priority? Fixing the addiction epidemics is a perilously long way away from happening, for reasons that are as polarizing as addiction’s consequences. In the sobering and excellent Dopesick, author Beth Macy goes into painfully exacting detail about opioids’ near-inescapable hold on the human brain. Macy argues that the true way out of this epidemic is “low-barrier treatment,” which includes supportive housing and medical interventions such as safe injection supplies, fentanyl testing strips, buprenorphine access, and supervised consumption sites. All of these options, however, are a tough sell even in a “progressive” town like Eugene, where supervised consumption sites are what NIMBY nightmares are made of, and low-barrier treatment can run up against deeply held moral stigma: Gas is $5 a gallon, and my taxes are going to some junkie?
In the meantime, while some admirably advocate and vote and wait for those breakthroughs, what should we do about the burglaries themselves? Should we pursue more law enforcement, or more compassion toward the burglars? More arrests that allegedly might deter this, or policies that might alleviate income inequality? Does—as approximately 83 percent of the suggestions from my Nextdoor thread contended—every house in town need a tripwire that handcuffs trespassers on sight? Or should all businesses be taxed at 500 percent, and the proceeds used to furnish every fentanyl dealer in town with a nice apartment and mad cash? The debate has degenerated such that these are the sorts of cartoonish positions each side believes they’re fighting—and, in fact, are the only available choices. Just check out Eugene’s Reddit section any day, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The actual blight on small American towns like mine isn’t property crime. It’s that any tenable solution to it has been swallowed up into a churning abyss of extremism and perceived counterextremism. No one seems to have a convincing answer to the most basic question: So what should we do? What should I do?
Burglaries don’t have to be largely unsolvable, and more property criminals could be apprehended. But while I don’t want those dudes or any of their buddies to come back to my house, I also don’t want them in an American prison, where their “rehabilitation” will consist largely of learning better ways to commit even bigger crimes when they get out, and their options for alternative forms of acquiring money will be even more limited than they are now. Lacking any meaningful restorative justice program for petty thieves in my town (which would, in turn, necessitate locating and apprehending them), I decided my own problems could be solved, for now, with a padlock on my back gate.
And then, not long after the break-in, a Nintendo Switch appeared on my town’s Craigslist. Its included components and color combination were identical to the set stolen from my house. I debated, briefly, bringing my vigilante justice alter ego Super Annoying out of retirement, answering the ad and showing up to shrill my wrongdoers into returning what was mine. But this time, I thought better of it. My life is not worth much, but it’s probably worth more than Mario Kart. I can only hope the console’s new owners enjoy it as much as my daughter did—at least until someone steals it again.
submitted by EUGsk8rBoi42p to Eugene [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 06:53 Aggressive-Jelly-180 Changes I'd make for the Super Smash Bros. Playable Fighters part 1: Smash 64

Welcome to the series of Changes to be Made to the Super Smash Bros. Playable Fighters. First, we are going with the playable fighters of the original game, Smash 64. Now this topic has been done before, though it'd to make my own version. Plus, while some did get some proper changes, the original 12 are still the biggest offenders when it comes to bad or outdated choices of Movesets, animations, aesthetics, etc. Here is a list of them.
Mario:
Donkey Kong:
Link:
Power Suit Samus:
Yoshi:
Kirby:
Fox:
Pikachu:
Luigi:
Ness:
Captain Falcon:
Jigglypuff:
And, there you go. This took a little while, though i hope to hear your feelings about these changes (as long as your reasons for your feelings are good). Any changes that you want to see to the original 12 that i didn't mention and did i misplace some moves? or did i add a change that was unnecessary? It'd be cool to see what other people can come up with.
submitted by Aggressive-Jelly-180 to smashbros [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 06:20 PositiveCollection95 HELP

Can someone help me?! I’m tryna find this game I used to play the art style was anime ish and I used to play it years ago,the main character bestfriend was a girl with orange hair and I think a pony tail and red jacket there was also 2 love interests I think one was blonde one ahd black hair and like the black haired one wa swirling for some company or something and had files he wasn’t supposed to I think and the main girl we play as wanted to be a detective, I’m not sure about this but I think it said her dad was before he died or smth please help
submitted by PositiveCollection95 to otomegames [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 05:55 Pathometer Immortal Set Combos

Immortal Set Combos
Just gonna drop a bunch of set combos that I think work best with immortals on various heroes. These are all mixed set in some way shape and form and all of the skins shown should be relatively affordable (ranging from $3-$15 on any given hero). Please feel free to let me know if there are any better set combos you found or what you think of these.
Earth Spirit (immortals: Jade Reckoning) (other pieces: Vanquishing Demons Ornaments of Annihilation, Ritual Headgear, Earthcore Belt, and Arm Guard)
Treant Protector (immortals: Stuntwood Sanctuary and Symbiont) (other pieces: Arms and Roots of Eldritch Gnarl)
Death Prophet (immortals: Mask of Mortis, Fluttering Mortis) (other pieces: Dark Realm Oracles Armor and Belt, Outland Witch's Tatters, and Spirits of the Mothbinder)
Arc Warden (immortals: Wraithbinder) (other pieces: Cosmic Wanderer Back, Arms, and Head)
Clockwerk (immortals: Rabid Watchdog, Paraflare Cannon) (other pieces: Cap, Gear, and Cog of the Keen Commander)
Enigma (immortals: World Chasm Artifact and Geodesic Eidolon) (other pieces: Jewels and Armor of Endless Stars)
Jakiro (immortals: Pyrexeac Floe, Flux, and Forge) (other pieces: Tail of Elder Convergence
Nyx (immortals: Latticean Shards and Hierarchy) (other pieces: Sovereign of the Menacing Guise, Deviant Shell)
Oracle (immortals: Alluvion Prophecy, Sagas of the Cymurrin Sage) (other pieces: Armor and Adornments of the Crystal Path)
Nature's Prophet (immortals: Fluttering Staff, Monarch of the Sapphire Glen) (other pieces: Primeval Horns, Beard, and Bracers alongside Shoulders of the Eternal Seasons and Bonsaiko)
Crystal Maiden (immortals: Yulsaria's Mantle and Glacier, Ice Blossom) (other pieces: Glacial Gardens - Back, Roost of the Winter Raven - Arms)
Shadow Demon (immortals: Mantle of Grim Facade) (other pieces: Plate of the Summoned Lord, Wake of the Stygian Maw, and Tail of Depraved Malformation)
Timbersaw (immortals: Rectifier, Controlled Burn) (other pieces: Style, Joints, Core, and Shell of the Raucous Gatecrasher)
Keeper of the Light (immortals: Prominence, Wings of Daybreak) (other pieces: Repose of the Defiant, Robes of the First Light)
Enchantress (immortals: Virga's Arc, Flourishing Lodestar, Flutterstep, Harborblossom) (other pieces: Song of the Solstice Arms)
Lifestealer (immortals: Golden Dark Maw Inhibitor, Golden Profane Union, Golden Dread Requisition) (other pieces: Belt of the Transmuted Armaments)
Slardar (immortals: Fin of the First Spear, First of the Flood) (other pieces: Pike and Arms of the Breach Warden)
Zeus (immortals: Righteous Thunderbolt, Tempest Revelation, Immortal Pantheon) (other pieces: Symbol and Belt of the King Restored) ps ideally you have infusers for this but infusers expensive
Silencer (immortals: Glaive and Aspect of Oscilla, Dam'arakan Muzzle) (other pieces: Shoulders, Armguards, and Robe of the Silent Edict)
Tusk (immortals: Piscean Pulverizer) (other pieces: Mace, Helm, Cape, Tusks, Harness, and Sigil of the Weathered Storm)
Wraith King (immortals: Unbroken Fealty) (other pieces: Helm, Pauldrons, Scabbard, Gauntlets, and Armor of the Sundered King)
Dragon Knight (immortals: Draconic Divide, Kindred of the Iron Dragon) (other pieces: Sword, Helm, Tassets, Cuirass, and Armlets of the Eldwurm Crest with Executioner style) ps helm was accidentally not executioner style in the screenshot
Legion Commander (immortals: Baneful Devotion, optional Almond the Frondillo) (other pieces: Lineage Lance, Banners, Mantle, Bracers, and Legs of Desolate Conquest)
Lich (immortals: Shearing Deposition, Glare of the Tyrant, Perversions of the Bloodwhirl) (other pieces: Robe and Cloak of the Rime Lord)
Lion (immortals: Horns of the Betrayer) (other pieces: Scepter, Gauntlet, Mantle, and Shoulders of the Infernal Rambler)
Doom (immortals: Zeal of Omoz Arkash) (other pieces: Whispers of the Damned Sword, Head, Pauldrons, Wings, Belt, and Tail)
Centaur Warruner (immortals: Infernal Menace, Chieftain, and Cavalcade, optional Almond the Frondillo) (other pieces: Belt, Bracers, Plate and Tail of the Vicious Plains)
Lycan (immortals: Bloodmayne Avenger) (other pieces: Winter Lineage Pauldrons, Armor, Claws, Belt, Form, and Companion of the Grey Ghost)
Storm Spirit (immortals: The Lightning Orchid, Mandate of the Stormborn) (other pieces: Robe of the Raikage Warrior)
Terrorblade (immortals: Scythes and Span of Sorrow) (other pieces: Collar, Horns, and Form of Eternal Purgatory)
Night Stalker (immortals: Crown, Span, Strap, and Sweep of Black Nihility, Shadow of the Dark Age)
Batrider (immortals: Ghastly Nocturne) (other pieces: Firestarter Gas Mask, Fuel Cannister, and Gas Pump)
Clinkz (immortals: Maraxiform's Fate Bundle) (other pieces: Lineage Mask, Gloves, and Kit of the Hunt Eternal)
Bloodseeker (immortals: Maw, Main. and Off-hand Thirst of Eztzhok) (other pieces: Winter Lineage Shield, Tattoo, Gauntlets, and Belt of the Primeval Predator)
Meepo (immortals: Everglyph Goggles, Colossal Crystal Chorus) (other pieces: Blade, Armguards and Tail of the Fractured Order) ps ideally you'd get the blade infused but Fall 2016 Infusers are a bit above budget
Razor (immortals: Severing Lash and Crest) (other pieces: Armor, Braces, and Skirt of the Revenant)
Troll Warlord (immortals: Scale of Bitter Soil and Bitter Lineage) (other pieces: Head and Armor of the Icewrack Marauder)
Sniper (immortals: Muh Keen Gun, Full-Bore Bonanza) (other pieces: Cyclopean Helm, Heavy Plates, and Lucky Bullet of the Keen Machine)
Pugna (immortals: Chalice and Eye of Ix'yxa, Draining Wight) (other pieces: Cape, Belt, Sleeves, and Armor of the Narcissistic Leech)
Weaver (immortals: Crimson Pique and Cyrridae, Skittering Desolation) (other pieces: Limbs and Stinger of Entwined Fate with Scrambling Limbs and Pointed Stinger respectively)
Winter Wyvern (immortals: Iceflight Edifice) (other pieces: Aurora Pyre's Back)
Viper (immortals: Malefic Drake's Hood and Strike) (other pieces: King of the Corrupted Nest Back)
Sand King (immortals: The Barren Crown and Vector) (other pieces: Tunnel Raider Shoulder, Legs, and Back)
Templar Assassin (immortals: Focal Resonance, Golden Seclusion of the Void) (other pieces: Pauldrons and Armor of the Timekeeper with Golden style selected)
Riki (immortals: Golden Edict of Shadows, Golden Shadow Masquerade, optional Almond the Frondillo pet) (other pieces: Golden Siblings Dagger and Offhand with Heir's Gift and Step)
Leshrac (immortals: Tormented Crown and Staff) (other pieces: Shards, Cluster, and Tail of Chronoptic Synthesis)
Spirit Breaker (immortals: Savage Mettle, Iron Surge) (other pieces: Tail of the Ironbarde Charger alongside Pauldrons, Bracers, and Belt of the Elemental Realms)
Ember Spirit (immortals: Apogee of the Guardian Flame) (other pieces: Main Sword, Off-hand Sword, Cap, Armguards, and Belt of the Smoldering Sage)
Luna (immortals: Twilight Schism, Moonfall) (other pieces: Helm, Armor, and Mount of the Winged Sentinel)
Chaos Knight (immortals: Chaos Arbiter and Fulcrum) (other pieces: Head, Shoulder and Mount from Melange of the Firelord)
Naga Siren (immortals: The Bell of Meranthia, The Order of Cyprin) (other pieces: Main and Off-hand Infused Blade of Prismatic Grace, Winter Lineage Dress of the Allure)
Anti-Mage (immortals: Main and Off-hand Basher of Mage Skulls, Origin of Faith) (other pieces: Hood of the Clergy Ascetic alongside Bracers, Belt, and Shoulders of the Witch Hunter)
submitted by Pathometer to dota2fashionadvice [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 05:47 chers_left_knee ID Dennis

ID Dennis
He’s about 3-4 I adopted him almost 2 years ago :) from the pound. You can’t really see it but he has a black tip on his tail
submitted by chers_left_knee to IDmydog [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 05:45 larki18 [DUMMY MAGAZINE, 2006] "The people who criticise us for being too poppy don't get it. People are afraid to write a song any more, or they can't...The best bands ever have all written great songs. You can still do it and do it intelligently and it can be original."

Cigarettes and rebellion have always gone hand-in-hand, and in an age of cigarette packet-sized health warnings, now more than ever, smoking a fag says: 'I do not give a fuck.' But if Brandon Flowers is hoping to strike a seditious pose by sparking up at the start of the interview, it's not going according to plan. The Killers' frontman is on all fours rooting through the junk that carpets the anteroom at the band's rehearsal space. "Has anyone seen my lighter?" he asks, rocking back on his heels. The question hangs in the air while Brandon cocks his head, waiting for an answer like a meerkat listening for a predator. Twenty-five years old and with a delicate bone structure, there's something almost dainty about him. Receiving no response, he returns to his search. "Oh, Jeez," he sighs. "I had it just a minute ago."
It's a scene that emphatically does not suggest a rebel without a cause. The mess isn't helping. The Killers' HQ - an industrial unit sandwiched between a construction supplier and the offices of a housing development just off Dean Martin Drive in West Las Vegas - is ankle-deep in designer clothing. A Dior Homme suit lies crumpled by the door; there's a pile of shoes topped like a sundae by a pair of Marc Jacobs trainers; and anyone wishing to enter the shoebox room the band use as an office must negotiate a mountain of discarded jeans. Many items are identifiable as coming from the wardrobe of Hot Fuss, The Killers' hugely successful 2004 debut album - triple platinum in the UK with two weeks at Number One and five million sold worldwide. Look! There are the shirts, ties and suit jackets they wore when they thrilled Glastonbury 2005 with indie rock anthems Mr Brightside and Somebody Told Me. That was the crowning moment of a two-and-a-half year tour that finally concluded in October of last year. It seems that after playing that final date in Miami, they returned to Vegas and shrugged off their image onto the floor of this bland white box.
Now a fine layer of dust covers the dead clothes. The Killers have no further use for white tuxedos on their second album, Sam's Town. Today, Brandon wears a black polo shirt, black pin-stripe waistcoat, black jeans and black boots. Where there used to be a layer of foundation, there is now a beard - an untrimmed beard at that. Dave Keuning (30, guitar), Mark Stoermer (29, bass) and Ronnie Vannucci (29, drums) all echo Brandon's black ensemble. Ronnie has added Aviator shades and a handlebar moustache for a dash of motorcycle cop, Dave's frizzy bubble of hair gives him a Marc Bolan-ish air, and there's something very teenage about Mark's scuffed Vans.
Short of walking around wearing sandwich boards saying, "Our new record is a bit heavier than the last one," The Killers couldn't hope to communicate that message more effectively. And they have gained some musical girth on Sam's Town. The pop hooks that made Hot Fuss so irresistible survive intact - see the ringing guitar riffs on first single When You Were Young - but there's a newfound punchiness, coupled with an epic sweep. The minor-to-major uplifts on Bones are fabulously dramatic, the coda to Why Do I Keep Counting? thrillingly intense. Comparisons to Bruce Springsteen have been made. If they overstate the case a little, they are at leaset qualitatively accurate. The Killers are back and this time it's serious - they've got the bootlace ties to prove it.
"Hey, it says here that Springsteen's headlining Glastonbury next year," shouts Ronnie, who's flicking through the NME. He nods sagely at the page without looking up.
"Really?" asks Dave, nicknamed Crazy Dave on account of his alledgedly volatile nature.
"The Boss is headlining one night, we're playing second on the bill the next night and Kylie's headlining the Sunday," says Brandon, charging like a bull through Michael Eavis' as-yet-unannounced line-up with what subsequently proves to be a characteristic gaucheness.
But that lighter is proving elusive. This being America, none of the people hurrying to-and-fro prepping the world for the release of Sam's Town smokes. Manager Robert Reynolds - Bobby Rey to the band - barks into his mobile, booking his band onto eye-wateringly demanding tours. "We're going to make a lot of money," he cackles to himself before switching calls to make a series of stern pronouncements on legal matters. Dave, Mark and Ronnie disappear for a jam session. Artwork is approved, B-sides are decided on and schedules are hammered out.
"I can't find it," Brandon says, finally. But he's not going to be denied the opportunity to underline The Killers reinvention with a puff of smoke. "Let's go to the gas station. I'll have to buy one. It's too busy to talk here anyway."
+
Brandon's black (of course) Volkswagen Touraeg four-wheel drive is barrelling down West Flamingo Road into town. "I was a bell boy there," he says, pointing out of the driver's window at the stucco facade of the Gold Coast casino. "I was working there when we were signed."
Coming from Las Vegas, it is perhaps inevitable that casinos play a big part in The Killers' story; not only is Sam's Town named after one, it was recorded in one, too.
The band began writing songs while on the road with Hot Fuss, turning up early for soundchecks to run through new ideas. On a trip home to Vegas, George Maloof, a hotelier known for cultivating famous friends, invited them to record the album in the new studio he'd built at The Palms, his flagship hotel-cum-gambling den. When the tour finished in October 2005, they returned to Vegas and spent five month finessing the songs they'd sketched out on the road. Then, in February, they decampled to the third floor studio at The Palms and recorded Sam's Town over 11 weeks.
Producer Flood (U2, Depeche Mode) encouraged them to experiment. They overdubbed, fiddled with synthesizers and played with new equipment. It took them five weeks to get the backing vocals right. The band sang the harmonies, then double-tracked them four times. The end result recalls Queen wondering, "Is this is the real life? Is this just fantasy?" When Ronnie, a trained classical percussionist, brought some kettledrums down, eyebrows were raised; but the fabulously bombastic coda on Why Do I Keep Counting? vindicates his indulgence.
"That's kind of the Ben Hur of the album," he says. He's not wrong. Sam's Town is a record on an epic scale. "Yeah, it has drama," he continues. "But, at the same time, I think it's a little more exposed than Hot Fuss. It's a little more naked. Last time it was about a lot of fictional things." By "fictional", Ronnie means that Hot Fuss wore its predominantly British influences for all to see. Brandon's taste in music is rabidly Anglophile - he constantly references The Smiths, The Cure and Joy Division - and it showed. By contrast, Sam's Town is an unequivocally American record. The lyrical imagery is pure American dream - cars, girls, wide-open spaces and escaping to a better life. "We're burning down the highway skyline/On the back of a hurricane that started turning/When you were young," sings Brandon on When You Were Young. That's the basis of the Springsteen comparisons then, though the lack of pathos more closely recalls another blue-collar rocker from New Jersey - Jon Bon Jovi.
The phrase "this town" recurs throughout the album, and it's always receding into the distance as The Killers escape to a new life. "This town was made for passing through/I never did get along with everybody else," sings Brandon on This River Is Wild. On Read My Mind he "never really gave up on breaking out of this two-star town", while on the title track he offers something of an explanation: "Nobody ever had a dream round here."
"With the first record, there was this feeling that there was this world out there that we didn't know," says Mark later in the day. Before The Killers, he studied philosophy: now he's their quiet one. "We wanted to get out and away from this and be somewhere else. We hadn't had a lot of experience - hadn't travelled much - then we were gone for three years. We didn't sit down and say that we wanted to make a record about how we're glad to be home, but that's what happened naturally."
It's not an angsty record. The Killers have already escaped with Hot Fuss, and, having done so, they view the experience fondly now they're back. There's a mistiness to Brandon's eyes as he explains how the album got it's name.
"Sam's Town is a casino on the edge of Vegas," he says. "I grew up in Henderson, which is out on the way to the Hoover Dam. My mom and dad lived in a trailer park, and my dad used to hitchhike up and down Boulder Highway, which is the only way you could get to Vegas. Sam's Town was the first thing you saw on your way in to town. So, when you're driving down Boulder Highway from Henderson, I always thought you finally knew you were getting somewhere when you saw Sam's Town. It was kind of like a beacon."
"It's not a completely American album," contines Brandon. "We still have our English influence, but we're also from the Wild West. Somehow we've managed to unify all that on this album. it's just such a perfect resemblence of what we are."
At the petrol station, Brandon rummages through the glove box looking for change to buy a lighter. "This is a great album," he says, pointing at Highway Companion, the latest from iconic American rocker Tom Petty. "I've always been a big fan of his. He's such a great American artist."
Yes, Brandon: we get the point.
+
When Brandon finally lights his cigarette, he smokes it awkwardly, like a child mimicking something he's seen the grown-ups doing. However, when he cheerfully admits that, "I feel the same mentally as I did when I was 12," it's not a knowing nod to the fact that he sometimes behaves like a loveably precocious child, but a reference to an unusually comprehensive grounding in pop music at an early age.
When Brandon sings about "this town", he doesn't mean Las Vegas. He means Nephi, Utah or Henderson, Nevada, where he spent his childhood. His parents are Mormon and he is the youngest of six children. "I was a surprise," he says. "I've got a 42-year-old sister." If he was issues about his "surprise" status, he chooses to gloss over them. "It turned out perfect because my brother was a teenager when I was a kid," he says. "He would bring home things like Rattle And Hum by U2 and I would watch it. I remember he bought Live In Dallas by Morrissey. It was always him watching these things, or his door was shut and you'd hear The Head On The Door by The Cure blasting through the house and rattling the walls."
The Killers were formed when Brandon answered an advert Dave had placed in a local paper in late 2002. Dave cited Oasis as a big influence; Brandon had seen them play recently and responded; and, as Dave has said in previous interviews: "He was the only person to reply to my ad who wasn't a complete freak." However, the band was born in Brandon's brothers bedroom.
"His room was like a shrine," enthuses Brandon. "It was a holy place. I wish I could show you a picture of it. It was covered in posters. There'd be a big picture of Elvis wearing a bow tie that just said 'The Smiths' [the artwork for The Smiths 1987 single Shoplifters Of The World Unite]. You had The Cure wearing face paint [the artwork to The Cure's 1985 single In Between Days] - all that kind of stuff. I remember Morrissey being on the cover of the NME, with the halo [from 1985] - stuff like that. You just wanted to know about these people 'cause they were so cool. My brother seemed like such a cool person. But he was a teenager, so he wasn't going to be that nice to me, a kid."
Brandon was fascinated by his brother's collection of music, magazines and posters, but he was denied access to them - officially, at least. "I would sneak in," he says. "I knew he'd be angry if he found out, but I would go in as soon as he left the house." For a long time Brandon was too scared to actually play anything. "That didn't come 'til later. I just used to go in there because I liked it. Then I got to the point where I'd actually take a tape out and put it in. It took more guts to do that."
It was a life-changing moment. "I was ten and the first song I played was Sing Your Life by Morrissey. I remember dancing about to it."
The lyrics to Sing Your Life include the lines, "Sing your life/Just walk right up to the microphone/And name all the things that you love/All the things that you loathe." It's intriguing to wonder what Morrissey makes of the neophyte he inspired with these lines.
Eventually, Brandon inherited his brother's tape collection. "It was around the same time CDs started coming out in a big way. He started buying CDs and gave me his tapes. And that was it: it took off from there. I got a hundred of the best albums - all the New Order, all the Morrissey, all The Smiths, The Beatles. I started buying posters. I went to see The Cure in concert. It was just kind of a continuation of my brother. And it was nice because, though my parents were strict, they were already used to it from him. There was no, 'My dad doesn't understand me,' or any of that kind of stuff. My mum likes The Smiths."
Brandon was 13 and his favourite band was late-'70s/early-'80s American new wavers The Cars, and particularly their jaw-droppingly catchy 1979 single Just What I Needed.
"I wouldn't exist without that song," he says. "That was the one. I remember driving around with my mum when I was 13, and we're living in Nephi - a really small town - and I felt so cool when I put that song on. Like: 'I have something that none of these kids I'm going to middle school with tomorrow have.' That excitement is what music's about, isn't it? That's why I understand the mentality of people that don't like us because we've sold so many records. I used to like it when no one else knew about a band. So I get that - I do."
+
Brandon's first band was called Blush Response. It was never going to work out. Not because he refused to move to Los Angeles with them, but because he is utterly - comically - shameless. He's given to making outrageously boastful statements like: "It's not like the '60s, '70s and '80s now. There are only a few bands around that are really good, that just do it. I mean, there's what, five or six of us?"
For the record, in Brandon's estimation, those bands are Franz Ferdinand, Razorlight, The Strokes, The White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and, of course, The Killers.
"I don't want people to think I'm lumping myself with other people just to make us sound cool," he says. Really? It sort of sounds like you are. But he just steamrolls through it. "Yeah, but you know what I mean," he says, grinning at his own cheekiness. He's so disgracefully forward you can't help but laugh along with him - Oh you are awful, Brandon! But joking aside, The Killers are the most commercially successful of all the bands he mentions.
Later, back at the rehearsal space, the band run through Sam's Town at deafening volume in preparation for the forthcoming tour - first the US, then the world. The infectious, almost contagious, chorus of When You Were Young sounds fabulous, as do the U2-like guitars and Twin Peaks synths of Read My Mind. Meanwhile, Smile Like You Mean It and Somebody Told Me benefit from the newfound harder edge.
They somewhat heavy-handedly underline the new direction by playing Paranoid by Black Sabbath and Get It On by T Rex. That's the thing: The Killers are not a subtle band. Their songs are like a wet kiss from a girl who's a bit too drunk. They are big and brash, and not everyone loves them for it. Mr Brightside and Somebody Told Me might go down as well at hip nightclubs as they do on the festival circuit, but the DJs play them with the same guilty look they wear when playing a pop record.
"I hate that," says Brandon. "Like writing a song you can hum somehow cheapens it? It makes me think of this quote by Morrissey. Everybody knows how he read Oscar Wilde, Keats and Yates when he was growing up and that he wanted to be a writer. He was talking to this journalist who asked why he hadn't become a writer, and Morrissey said: 'What I do is more powerful than what you do because I can write down these words and you get it to a melody. How can you beat that?' I'm of the same opinion. I don't understand why a good melody that's memorable is a bad thing."
Being dismissed as pop particular aggrieves Ronnie. "When we first came out we got compared to Duran Duran all the time. Jesus Christ! We got a keyboard player now all of a sudden he's Nick Rhodes! Come on!"
"The people who criticise us for being too poppy don't get it," agrees Mark. "I think that's the problem with a lot of rock music. People are afraid to write a song any more. Either that or they can't. And that attitude hurts music in general. The best bands ever have all written great songs. You can still do it and do it intelligently and it can be original. This isn't a studio creation with a producer writing these songs for us. We're not Avril Lavigne, or something like that. We're a real band writing real songs, just like a punk band would do, except that we write pop songs."
You get the impression that The Killers knack for showboating pop hooks that border on vulgar is inextricably tied up with the brazen side of Brandon's personality. But while his ebullient charisma, not to mention the songs themselves, mitigates his outrageousness, there is a less attractive side to his ego. He has a combative streak. He can't resist taking pot shots at emo bands, notably Fall Out Boy, whith whom The Killers share an A&R man.
Has he heard how many emo kids it takes to change a light bulb? "No." None. They just sit in the dark and cry. It's a full 30 seconds before he stops laughing. When he does he admits: "Yeah, we've had problems with other bands. You know, when you walk in the room it's like..." He whistles the theme to The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. "We're like gangs."
And while the other members of the band are diplomatic on the subject of Brandon, you don't have to read too deeply between the lines to conclude that there have been internal issues, too.
"Some people will think Brandon's the big genius," says Dave, visibly bridling. "There are songs, such as Why Do I Keep Counting?, where he's written every note. But there are others, like When You Were Young, that were more of a collaboration - like Mr Brightside, where I had some of the music and Brandon came up with the lyrics. We always have arguments about who wrote what. The truth is that we all help in that process."
When asked how success affected them, Ronnie says: "There were certain things that needed adjusting. When you're on tour for two years, people can get a little needy. It doesn't help that you're surrounded by yes men and everybody's working for you. At times we've had to say, 'Who do you think you are?' to people. No one wears the trousers, but some people would like to. I think if it wasn't for the people in the band kicking each other in the ass... Let's just say there was some ass-kickin'."
It doesn't take a genius to work out whose ass needed kicking most often.
+
It's the following day and The Killers are back at their rehearsal space. The topic of discussion is what to wear in the video for Bones, the second single. It's a big deal: the director is Tim Burton. "I feel like Frank Sinatra when I sing it," announces Brandon. "With maybe a little bit of Morrissey and a little bit of Elvis, too."
Of course he does. But if securing the services of Tim Burton tells you one thing, it's that The Killers are about to get even bigger, perhaps even make the leap to the same level as Coldplay et al. Already stars, they are about to become superstars. Brandon can hardly wait.
"Do you know that Rolling Stone didn't want to put us on the cover last time," he says indignantly. "They didn't think we were stars. We sold five million albums! What more do they want from a band?"
Whatever was required, Brandon would be happy to do most things. "I'll do stuff that some people don't want to do, 'cause I want people to hear the music," he says. However, even he has limits. "The Rolling Stone thing made the record label think: 'What can we do to make them stars?' If I go on vacation with my wife, do they have to send somebody to be there to take pictures of me? Is that how you become a star? I don't want that. I walked down the red carpet one time and I realised I don't like it. But you don't have to walk down the red carpet for people to hear your music. We do still have some of that indie blood running through our veins."
He heads off at a tangent: "When you walk around Liverpool, you think of The Beatles, or you go to Manchester and you think of The Smiths or Oasis. I want you to come to Las Vegas and think of Sam's Town. And I think we've started to capture that, which is a truer version of The Killers, 'cause that's where we're from."
He pauses.
"I used to live across the street from Sam's Town. Maybe it'll be like our Abbey Road where people go to take pictures."
Is that what he'd like?
"I wouldn't mind it," he says, desperately hoping it will come true.
He puts a cigarette between his lips, looks down at his trouser pockets and pats them in search of the lighter he bought yesterday.
"Hey, I don't suppose you've got one?"
submitted by larki18 to TheKillers [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 05:15 AllenXeno122 Her Little Light… story be me

“…. Hmm….” The thing ponders the sight before him. A world in flame, icons of chaos destroyed and their followers laying dead before them. The souls of the damned cling to the earth, their whispers hanging in the wind. He can hear them, all of them, and he listens to them all, taking in their hatred into his own being. He can feel his power grow ever so slightly with their hatred, and it serves to bolster his own, forging it into a weapon to use against Them.
“My Lord…” A voice sounds behind him, he turns to see a Astartes, his armor half black and half white, with horns adorning his armor. He wields a power axe in one hand and the other is encased within a power fist.
“…. Speak Asher.” The thing says, turning to look at the Astartes. The thing stands about ten feet tall, his body covered in what looks like fur, but upon a closer look appears to be a mass of countless individual tendrils. He has a massive tail with a gaping maw of teeth at the end, and his face was an elongated skull-like visage, with four hours adorning it.
“We have gathered up the individuals you requested, the sorcerer and his retinue.” Asher said, brushing some ash off his shoulder. “Zion was injured but other then that there were no casualties, they were already quite injured from our initial bombardment on this planet, our Librarians are keeping the sorcerer in check at the moment.”
The thing gave a nod to Asher, his face unemotive. They walked into the ruined Chaos fortress, the iconography of the ruinous powers lay defiled and defaced throughout the fortress, and symbols of a half black half white skull now stood in their place. When the thing and Asher made their way to the dungeons, the Chaos sorcerer was being held down by two librarians using psychic chains, his red armor and hooded helm shaking in pain. “You may stop. Leave us.” Without a word, the librarians dismiss their psychic chains and leave with Asher, leaving just the Sorcerer and the thing in the cold stone room. “…. So, how’ve you been?” The thing asked, just as a blast of warp fire was shot into his face by the sorcerer.
“You blasphemous fool! Who do you think you are?! Do you know who I am?!! I-“ the sorcerer is interrupted by the thing gripping the hand casting the warp fire, his mind barely having time to register the movement before the pain of his arm being torn from his body sears through his body. The sorcerer yells in agony, as the thing stands before him, the last of the warp fire wisping away from his unharmed head.
“I see you are still impulsive as always Serviel…” the sorcerer almost froze at the mention of his name, and in the voice of the thing before him he felt a twinge of familiarity. “It’s why you lost your arm that one time, you told me it was from a duel with an ork, but every knew you got hit by a rocket. Looks like you got that arm thing fixed though…” The thing dangles the arm he just tore off, tendrils sticking out from the stub and wiggling around, trying to find its host. He tosses the arm onto the ground and snaps his finger, igniting the arm in black flames, burning the thing into ash as it slowly dies. “… Now, I have a question for you Serviel…”
“Y-You… who are-“ the tail of the thing slams into Serviel, collapsing one of his three lungs and making him cough up blood.
“You’ll get your chance to speak, for now, shut up and answer me…” the Thing’s tail opens it’s maw and picks up Serviel, sitting him upright as the Thing gets up close to Serviel’s face, looking him in the eyes. “Where is Vashtorr heading?”
Serviel looked surprised, like he expected maybe something else to be asked, but he grit his teeth through the pain and answered, “Ghh! I… I don’t know… we were sent here to gather resources for the Wyrmwood… we… we weren’t told anything else….”
The Thing lets out a growl of frustration, another dead end. Either he isn’t acting on leads fast enough or Vashtorr is actively messing with him. As he thinks about his next steps, Serviel looks at him questioningly. The Thing notices and looks at him. “… Well? Out with it.”
“… So you’re alive…” Serviel says, and the Thing just shrugs.
“Sort of.” He says, putting a hand around the nape of Serviel’s neck. He has had this conversation many times, this is the part where they insult him and belittle him. He used to pull them apart slowly and painfully before but he just wanted to kill him quickly and be done with it.
“You… you know she’s still looking for you…” Those words make the Thing stop for a moment, his hands loosening slightly around Serviel’s neck. The memories of her are still bright in his mind, her voice was that of an angel’s, her beauty was nothing but serine, and her kindness knew no bounds…. That’s how it was long ago, the woman she was is now long gone….
“… Yea… I know she is…” the Thing breaks Serviel’s neck with a flick of his wrist, too fast for Serviel to have felt it. He drinks in his soul, absorbing it into his being, where the ruinous powers will have hold of him no more… The Thing leaves the dungeon and makes it to the command room of the fortress, where Asher and his second in command wait for him. “Asher. Argal.” The Thing says, addressing them both. “This planet is ours now, I can assume you’ve already pacified the local populace?”
Argal Tal steps up to the Thing, he is more mutated than most of his brothers but other than that he wears untainted armor custom made to fit his bulkier form, and he stands almost eight feet tall, with every bit of the nobility he had during the great crusade. “It is done my lord, we have successfully convinced them we are servants of the emperor, the indoctrination plans are already in place, we suspect within a few generations this planet will be devoted entirely to you.”
“On top of all that…” Asher says, “We have collected any and all equipment usable to us. Our ammo stockpiles are at maximum capacity, as are most of our other requirements.”
The Thing looks at Asher, nodding in approval. “Good. Even if we aren’t any closer to Vashtorr, we are at least better off now than before.”
“No luck with the sorcerer then, eh my lord?” Asher ask, his voice unsurprised.
“Nope.” The Thing says flatly, slightly annoyed by Asher’s tone but knows he’s just being the sarcastic individual that he is. “Now, leave me. Take care of what needs taking care of out there…” He orders as he steps out onto the balcony of the command room, the sound of ceremite armor clinking and then stomping off soon growing distant and leaving only silence. A few minutes of this pass by, the Thing thinking back too a time before all this madness. A time when humanity was on the upswing, when things like daemons and the gods were the furthest things from the people’s mind, a time when… when he had her.“….. Still here Argal?” He says, aware that Argal Tal hasn’t left the room.
“…. Your thinking about Mother again, aren’t you?” Argal ask, and the twitch from the Thing’s shoulders tells him he’s right. “…. We will save her Little Light, we will free her from the forces that have broken her.” Argal says, walking up next to the Thing he called Little Light, a title of endearment that his Gene-Mother gave to him. “And you are the key to that, you are the reason why I am here and able to aid you in this mission… all of us, we are your sons now, and we stand with you.”
“… I know… I know…” Little Light says, appreciating Argal Tal’s faith in him and his goals. “… We have much to do, and I fear time may be running out… make sure your brothers are ready for when the time comes for us to move…”
Argal Tal bows, “It will be done… Lord Malal….”
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2024.05.16 05:11 tristanfinn Bolerium Books – The San Francisco Bookstore Where the Revolution Ends up – By Lucy Schiller

There is great benefit, these days, in having a name unlike any other: you float to the top of Google searches. Bolerium Books, in San Francisco, knows this well, although it wasn’t a consideration when it first opened, in 1981. Bolerium’s co-owner, John Durham, runs through any number of explanations for the name, depending on whose leg he wants to pull and how hard. “It was an ancient road in Roman times,” he intoned recently, “large, funny, and sluggish,” while another co-owner, Alexander Akin, roundly mouthed, “Not true.” (The word is a Roman one for Land’s End, in Cornwall, England. The bookstore was once a bit closer to the ocean.) Fittingly, there is no other place like Bolerium, not on the Internet nor in the province of the real. Similes come steadily, none of which really seem to fit. Perhaps Durham’s is best. “We’re like a platypus,” he told me recently, “ugly as fuck and all sorts of parts.”.
This moment of serious American protest against Trump has led to one of Bolerium Books’ best sales years ever.Photograph by Thor Swift / NYT / Redux.
At last count, the store contained 67,385 single titles in stock. Estimates of the time that has elapsed since the last deep cleaning ranged from a jokey “twenty years ago” to a hemming “define ‘clean.’ ” “Nature abhors a vacuum,” Durham quickly noted. A store map gestures at the sheer amount of stuff, with sections labelled as “Reef of Flotsam” or “Onset of Confusion” (right by the entrance), or, in one cramped corner, “Hell.”
The semi-barbed humor protects something serious and deeply essential. Few people walk in (“the door is locked to keep out the unworthy,” Durham wrote in response to a negative Yelp review, though he made sure to mention the password, “swordfish”). Those who do manage to enter find, three floors above one of the Mission District’s busiest intersections, a vast and quiet space populated by seven staff members, thousands of books about and from social movements, densely packed rows of pamphlets and ephemera, and, in the adjacent storage room, great snowbanks of paper. These snowbanks, or “midden heaps,” as Durham calls them, are from attics, basements, personal archives, and libraries across the country. They have all been sold or donated to Bolerium. In them, evidence of the past is to be found, possibly reckoned with, and then, hopefully, sold.
From Bolerium’s snowbanks have come copies of On Our Backs (a lesbian erotic magazine put out in response to the anti-pornography publication Off Our Backs), century-old postcards of pacifist Doukhobors protesting in the nude, intricate Black Panther posters and handbills, an issue of Lumberjack (“with appendix on musical saw”), and the famous inter-commune Kaliflower newsletters from early-nineteen-seventies San Francisco. But with a staff so expert that they can translate a Mongolian treatise on traditional Oirat law using a handmade cheat sheet, classifications like “famous” and “obscure” begin to blur. So do “past” and “present.” Rather than a platypus, maybe the store is more like an estuary: the disparate holdings mingle, rolling in and out according to murky tides. (If you visit the Web site and browse the digital catalog by date, the tides begin to feel more explicable; one week, for example, carries a huge wave of Alan Watts-related material. The next week brings a crush of gay romance novels.) At Bolerium, for better and worse, you can wade around in what Durham calls “the primary source material for history.”
Here is an 1838 publication by the American Anti-Slavery Society and a brochure arguing for the Equal Rights Amendment. A pamphlet from a 1928 speech by Marcus Garvey sits not far from a publication on “incidents in the Life of Eugene V. Debs” written by his brother, Theodore (once, before an important speech, a piece of barbed wire tore “a great rent in [Debs’s] trousers . . . the flap of which hung down like the ear of a Missouri houn’ pup”). Among many other small, sheeny pins is a button from the 1990 AIDS Walk in San Francisco. Here are fliers that passed from hand to hand at protests, meant to convince, assuage, and inflame, and here’s a lump of coal from a miners’ strike in Alabama with tiny chicken-scratch wording: “never forget.” Notably, this year of serious American protest has been the store’s best sales year ever.
Not marked on the map is that other part of American history that has, this year and every other, raged—a section that Durham loosely calls “the White Problem” and keeps behind the locked door of a different room altogether. Accessible to scholars and those who know to ask, the spindly bookcases contain titles like “Gun Control Means People Control” and “Fluoridation & Truth Decay,” as well as several publications by the John Birch Society. “You can’t understand American history without understanding the far right,” Durham told me. “What it’s done, its justifications, its tropes and idiocies.”
It was to the deepest corner of the storeroom that the archivist Lisbet Tellefsen was drawn one afternoon. (Tellefsen visits Bolerium as a “treasure hunter,” and has amassed the largest collection of Angela Davis-related material in the world.) One time, she idly tugged out an issue of The Bayviewer, a magazine that once served the historic black neighborhood that James Baldwin characterized as “the San Francisco America pretends does not exist.”
.
The magazine fell open to a page bearing the face of Tellefsen’s father, whom she had not seen since she was two, in an advertisement for his Oldsmobile dealership. That led to an ongoing saga of tracking down half-siblings and cousins found on Ancestry.com. “There is so much history there,” Tellefsen told me. She visits Bolerium once a month, wary of buying back her own consigned material. “It’s so rich with connections. We have an understanding of history, but places like that hold so much.” Bolerium’s official motto, “Fighting Commodity Fetishism with Commodity Fetishism since 1981,” does not quite distill the feeling of holding some of these discoveries between your fingers, or explain the way that ephemera can work to vivify history, very often through its ordinariness. A bit of light browsing recently unearthed a flier from a class reunion of Florida’s first accredited African-American high school, as well as an Electrolux manual from 1933 listing Pope Pius XI as a famous customer.
But history is ongoing, and the present moment needs its collectors. During the Occupy Movement, the store paid a dollar for each flyer or poster that people brought in, then put together a sweeping collection for the British Library. Holdings from contemporary social movements are fairly small, since so much planning, discussing, and arguing takes place on Facebook and Twitter. “Occupy was the last one to have lots of leaflets,” Akin told me, somewhat sadly. Currently, he is collecting material from what he calls the “shock-and-disbelief period” following the 2016 Presidential election. Only from “marinating in the sauce of time” do these things begin to accrue both value and interest.
.
Recently, in one snowbank, Akin found a sketch done in creamy pastel of a basalt mountain and drifting clouds. Tiny guard towers dotted the background. It was a drawing of the view from Tule Lake Segregation Center, the largest of the incarceration camps that held Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, and the one which held those people deemed by the government to be “disloyal.” The artist was a man named Tomokazu, surname unknown, who resided for over thirty-five years in Plumas County, California, before being imprisoned at Tule Lake. The piece of paper sat among countless others all bearing dispatches of one kind or another from the past, which is not a foreign country, really, but a place hovering just under our present, and made of paper and ink, buttons, and voices.
https://xenagoguevicene.wordpress.com/2020/08/12/bolerium-books-the-san-francisco-bookstore-where-the-revolution-ends-up-by-lucy-schiller-the-new-yorker-20-sept-2018/
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2024.05.16 05:06 MirkWorks Excerpt from The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch (Changing Modes of Making It: From Horatio Alger to the Happy Hooker)

III. Changing Modes of Making It: From Horatio Alger to the Happy Hooker
…
From “Self-Culture” to Self-Promotion through “Winning Images”
In the nineteenth century, the ideal of self-improvement degenerated into a cult of compulsive industry. P.T. Barnum, who made a fortune in a calling the very nature of which the Puritans would have condemned (“Every calling, whereby God will be Dishonored; every Calling whereby none but the Lusts of men are Nourished: …every such Calling is to be Rejected”), delivered many times a lecture frankly entitled “The Art of Money-Getting,” which epitomized the nineteenth-century conception of worldly success. Barnum quoted freely from Franklin but without Franklin’s concern for the attainment of wisdom or the promotion of useful knowledge. “Information” interested Barnum merely as a means of mastering the market. Thus he condemned the “false economy” of the farm wife who douses her candle at dusk rather than lighting another for reading, not realizing that the “information” gained through reading is worth far more than the price of the candles. “Always take a trustworthy newspaper,” Barnum advised young men on the make, “and thus keep thoroughly posted in regard to the transactions of the world. He who is without a newspaper is cut off from his species.”
Barnum valued the good opinion of others not as a sign of one’s usefulness but as a means of getting credit. “Uncompromising integrity of character is invaluable.” The nineteenth century attempted to express all values in monetary terms. Everything had its price. Charity was a moral duty because “the liberal man will command patronage, which the sordid, uncharitable miser will be avoided.” The sin of pride was not that it offended God but that it led to extravagant expenditures. “A spirit of pride and vanity, when permitted to have full sway, is the undying cankerworm which gnaws the very vitals of a man’s worldly possessions.”
The eighteenth century made a virtue of temperance but did not condemn moderate indulgence in the service of sociability. “Rational conversation,” on the contrary, appeared to Franklin and his contemporaries to represent an important value in its own right. The nineteenth century condemned sociability itself, on the grounds that it might interfere with business. “How many good opportunities have passed, never to return, while a man was sipping a ‘social glass’ with his friends!” Preachments on self-help now breathed the spirit of compulsive enterprise. Henry Ward Beecher defined “the beau ideal of happiness” as a state of mind in which “a man [is] so busy that he does not know whether he is or is not happy.” Russell Sage remarked that “work has been the chied, and you might say, the only source of pleasure in my life.”
Even at the height of the Gilded Age, however, the Protestant ethic did not completely lose its original meaning. In the success manuals, the McGuffey readers, the Peter Parley Books, and the hortatory writings of the great capitalists themselves, the Protestant virtues - industry, thrift, temperance - still appeared not merely as stepping-stones to success but as their own reward.
The spirit of self-improvement lived on, in debased form, in the cult of “self-culture” - proper care and training of mind and body, nurture of the mind through “great books,” development of “character.” The social contribution of individual accumulation still survived as an undercurrent in the celebration of success, and the social conditions of early industrial capitalism, in which the pursuit of wealth undeniably increased the supply of useful objects, gave some substance to the claim that “accumulated capital means progress.” In condemning speculation and extravagance, in upholding the importance of patient industry, in urging young men to start at the bottom and submit to “the discipline of daily life,” even the most unabashed exponents of self-enrichment clung to the notion that wealth derives its value from its contribution to the general good and to the happiness of future generations.
The nineteenth-century cult of success placed surprisingly little emphasis on competition. It measured achievement not against the achievements of others but against an abstract ideal of discipline and self-denial. At the turn of the century, however, preachments on success began to stress the will to win. The bureaucratization of the corporate career changed the conditions of self-advancement; ambitious young men now had to compete with their peers for the attention and approval of their superiors. The struggle to surpass the previous generation and to provide for the next gave way to a form of sibling rivalry, in which men of approximately equal abilities jostled against each other in competition for a limited number of places. Advancement now depended on “will-power, self-confidence, energy, and initiative” - the qualities celebrated in such exemplary writings as George Lorimer’s Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son. ” By the end of the nineteenth century,” writes John Cawelti in his study of the success myth, “self-help books were dominated by the ethos of sales-manship and boosterism. Personal magnetism, a quality which supposedly enabled a man to influence and dominate others, became one of the major keys to success.” In 1907, both Lorimer’s Saturday Evening Post and Orison Swett Marden’s Success magazine inaugurated departments of instruction in the “art of conversation,” fashion, and “culture.” The management of interpersonal relations came to be seen as the essence of self-advancement. The captain of industry gave way to the confidence man, the master of impressions. Young men were told that they had to sell themselves in order to succeed.
At first, self-testing through competition remained almost in-distinguishable from moral self-discipline and self-culture, but the difference became unmistakable when Dale Carnegie and then Norman Vincent Peale restated and transformed the tradition of Mather, Franklin, Barnum, and Lorimer. As a formula for success, winning friends and influencing people had little in common with industry and thrift. The prophets of positive thinking disparaged “the old adage that hard work alone is the magic key that will unlock the door to our desires.” They praised the love of money, officially condemned even by the crudest of Gilded Age materialists, as a useful incentive. “You can never have riches in great quantities,” wrote Napoleon Hill in this Think and Grow Rich,” unless you can work yourself into a white heat of desire for money.” The pursuit of wealth lost the few shreds of moral meaning that still clung to it. Formerly the Protestant virtues appeared to have an independent value of their own. Even when they became purely instrumental, in the second half of the nineteenth century, success itself retained moral and social overtones, by virtue of its contribution to the sum of human comfort and progress. Now success appeared as an end in its own right, the victory over your competitors that alone retained the capacity to instill a sense of self-approval. The latest success manuals differ from earlier ones - even surpassing the cynicism of Dale Carnegie and Peale - in their frank acceptance of the need to exploit and intimidate others, in their lack of interest in the substance of success, and in the candor with which they insist that appearances - “winning images - count for more than performance, ascription for more than achievement. One author seems to imply that the self consists of little more than its “image” reflected in others’ eyes. “Although I’m not being original when I say it, I’m sure you’ll agree that the way you see yourself will reflect the image you portray to others.” Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
<The American Religion by Harold Bloom (California Orphism)>
The Apotheosis of Individualism
The fear that haunted the social critics and theorists of the fifties - that rugged individualism had succumbed to conformity and “love-pressure sociability” - appears in retrospect to have been premature. In 1960, David Riesman complained that young people no longer had much social “presence,” their education having provided them not with “a polished personality but [with] an affable, casual, adaptable one, suitable to the losing organizations of an affluent society.” It is true that “a present-oriented hedonism,” as Riseman went on the argue, has replaced the work ethic “among the very classes which in the earlier stages of industrialization were oriented toward the future, toward distant goals and delayed gratification.” But this hedonism is a fraud; the pursuit of pleasure disguises a struggle for power. Americans have not really become more sociable and cooperative, as the theorists of other-direction and conformity would like us to believe; they have merely become more adept at exploiting the conventions of interpersonal relations for their own benefit. Activities ostensibly undertaken purely for enjoyment often have the real object of doing others in. It is symptomatic of the underlying tenor of American life that vulgar terms for sexual intercourse also convey the sense of getting the better of someone, working him over, taking him in, imposing your will through guile, deception, or superior force. Verbs associated with sexual pleasure have acquired more than the usual overtones of violence and psychic exploitation. In the violent world of the ghetto, the language of which now pervades American society as a whole, the violence associated with sexual intercourse is directed with special intensity by men against women, specifically against their mothers. The language of ritualized aggression and abuse reminds those who use it that exploitation is the general rule and some form of dependence the common fate, that “the individual,” in Lee Rainwater’s words, “is not strong enough or adult enough to achieve his goal in a legitimate way, but is rather like a child, dependent on others who tolerate his childish maneuvers”; accordingly males, even adult males, often depend on women for support and nurture. Many of them have to pimp for a living, ingratiating themselves with a woman in order to pry money from her; sexual relations thus become manipulative and predatory. Satisfaction depends on taking what you want instead of waiting for what is rightfully yours to receive. All this enters everyday speech in language that connects sex with aggression and sexual aggression with highly ambivalent feelings about mothers.
In some ways middle-class society has become a pale copy of the black ghetto, as the appropriation of its language would lead us to believe. We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition, the most important feature of which is a widespread loss of confidence in the future. The poor have always had to live for the present, but now a desperate concern for personal survival, sometimes disguised as hedonism, engulfs the middle class as well. Today almost everyone lives in a dangerous world from which there is little escape. International terrorism and blackmail, bombings, and hijackings arbitrarily affect the rich and poor alike. Crime, violence, and gang wars make cities unsafe and threaten to spread to the suburbs. Racial violence on the streets and in the schools creates an atmosphere of chronic tension and threatens to erupt at any time into full-scale racial conflict. Unemployment spreads from the poor the white-collar class, while inflation eats away the savings of those who hoped to retire in comfort. Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security. The propaganda of death and destruction, emanating ceaselessly from the mass media, adds to the prevailing atmosphere of insecurity. Far-flung famines, earthquakes in remote regions, distant wars and uprisings attract the same attention as events closer to home. The impression of arbitrariness in the reporting of disaster reinforces the arbitrary quality of experience itself, and the absence of continuity in the coverage of events, as today’s crisis yields to a new and unrelated crisis tomorrow, adds to the sense of historical discontinuity - the sense of living in a world in which the past holds out no guidance to the present and the future has become completely unpredictable.
Older conceptions of success presupposed a world in rapid motion, in which fortunes were rapidly won and lost and new opportunities unfolded every day. Yet they also presupposed a certain stability, a future that bore some recognizable resemblance to the present and the past. The growth of bureaucracy, the cult of consumption with its immediate gratifications, but above all the severance of the sense of historical continuity have transformed the Protestant ethic while carrying the underlying principles of capitalist society to their logical conclusion . The pursuit of self-interest, formerly identified with the rational pursuit of gain and the accumulation of wealth, has become a search for pleasure and psychic survival. Social conditions now approximate the vision of republican society conceived by the Marquis de Sade at the very outset of the republican epoch. In many ways the most farsighted and certainly the most disturbing of the prophets of revolutionary individualism, Sade defended unlimited self-indulgence as the logical culmination of the revolution in property relations - the only way to attain revolutionary brotherhood in its purest form. By regressing in his writings to the most primitive level of fantasy, Sade uncannily glimpsed the whole subsequent development of personal life under capitalism, ending not in revolutionary brotherhood but in a society of siblings that has outlived and repudiated its revolutionary origins.
Sade imagined a sexual utopia in which everyone has the right to everyone else, where human beings, reduced to their sexual organs, become absolutely anonymous and interchangeable. His ideal society thus reaffirmed the capitalist principle that human beings are ultimately reducible to interchangeable objects. It also incorporated and carried to a surprising new conclusion Hobbes’s discovery that the destruction of paternalism and the subordination of all social relations to the market had stripped away the remaining restraints and the mitigating illusions from the war of all against all. In the resulting state of organized anarchy, as Sade was the first to realize, pleasure becomes life’s only business - pleasure, however, that is indistinguishable from rape, murder, unbridled aggression. In a society that has reduced reason to mere calculation, reason can impose no limits on the pursuit of pleasure - on the immediate gratification of every desire no matter how perverse, insane, criminal, or merely immoral. For the standards that would condemn crime or cruelty derive from religion, compassion, or the kind of reason that rejects purely instrumental applications; and none of these outmoded forms of thought or feeling has any logical place in a society based on commodity production. In his misogyny, Sade perceived that bourgeois enlightenment, carried to its logical conclusions, condemned even the sentimental cult of womanhood and the family, which the bourgeoisie itself had carried to unprecedented extremes.
At the same time, he saw that condemnation of “woman-worship” had to go hand in hand with a defense of woman’s sexual rights - their right to dispose of their own bodies, as feminists would put it today. If the exercise of that right in Sade’s utopia boils down to the duty to become an instrument of someone else’s pleasure, it was not so much because Sade hated women as because he hated humanity. He perceived, more clearly than the feminists, that all freedoms under capitalism come in the end to the same thing, the same universal obligation to enjoy and be enjoyed. In the same breath, and without violating his own logic, Sade demanded for women the right “fully to satisfy all their desires” and “all parts of their bodies” and categorically stated that “all women must submit to our pleasure.” Pure individualism thus issued in the most radical repudiation of individuality. “All men, all women resemble each other,” according to Sade; and to those of his countrymen who would become republicans he adds this ominous warning: “Do not think you can make good republicans so long as you isolated in their families the children who should belong to the republic alone.” The bourgeois defense of privacy culminates - not just in Sade’s thought but in the history to come, so accurately foreshadowed in the very excess, madness, infantilism of his ideas - in the most thoroughgoing attack on privacy; the glorification of the individual, in his annihilation.
<…>
Standing-Reserve.
Note a lack of the “Greek” in Lasch.
Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 by Georges Bataille, Edited by A. Stoekl, Translated by A. Stoekl, C.R. Lovitt, and D.M. Leslie Jr.
<…>
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2024.05.16 05:02 reegeck Mad Max acquired!

Mad Max acquired!
Really impressed with this set shipped from Amazon UK. Nice slip cover and full size boxes with good internal hinges. Although I prefer original art I like how well they all match.
  • Mad Max includes 4K, Blu-ray, and "The Madness of Max" special features DVD.
  • The Road Warrior includes 4K with special features, and Blu-ray.
  • Beyond Thunderdome includes 4K and Blu-ray. No special features.
  • Fury Road includes 4K, the Blu-ray with special features, and "Black & Chrome" edition on regular Blu-ray.
Would've liked to see a 4K master of the Black & Chrome edition but in reality I'd probably just watch the regular edition anyway. Can highly recommend this set for fans!
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2024.05.16 04:44 Wide-Illustrator2906 Black pill youtuber Wheat Waffles quits youtube after The Sun magazine interviews his parents and they label him a "dangerous incel.

Black pill youtuber Wheat Waffles quits youtube after The Sun magazine interviews his parents and they label him a
The title says it all. Wheat Waffles has quit youtube and gave his own explanation on why he's quitting youtube
https://youtu.be/-8gGs7qdoMU?si=qWkOGvHCV3Au3q8W
What are your thoughts?
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2024.05.16 04:17 Quirky-Mastodon-6923 Complete Vinyl Collection

Complete Vinyl Collection
Heilung complete Vinyl collection + Lifa Blu Ray.
Ofnir Lifa Futha Drif. Transparent Black Smoke Edition Lifa Iotungard - Red Rocks Red Edition
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2024.05.16 04:00 joanarcherknight MerMay - Nebula

Light reflected off the scales, reflecting a shimmer of rainbow colours. Even the sand that clung to the scales couldn’t dim the intricate swirl of light that the sunlight revealed on the black scales.
Water was spilled over the scales, washing away the sand to reveal the colours more clearly. There was no movement from the tail, nor the rest of the body.
“What is it?” He whispered.
“Some kind of fish.” His friend whispered back.
“It’s got a face.”
“Everything has a face.”
He gave his friend a look and lifted the seaweed from the head of the creature. “Does this look like a normal fish face to you?”
“I never said it looked normal.”
“It’s got arms.”
“So… it’s an otter. Otter fish… Fish otter…”
Laughter exploded from the two boys. They fell back in the sand, distracted for a moment from the thing that had washed up on the shore. The mix of animal was just too funny for them to ignore.
“A otter fish. What is wrong with you?”
“So many things.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Well, if you’re so smart, you tell me what it is then.”
They leaned back over the thing, studying its form. Scales ran from the end of the tail to the upper torso. There were two limbs from the top of the torso, but they didn’t reach very far. And a head.
It looked too close to a human shaped head for them to be comfortable, but the face was flat and grey, like the skin that wasn’t covered by the scales. No nose that they could really see, and seaweed was the only covering where hair was supposed to grow.
“Hey, open its mouth.”
“Excuse me?”
“Open its mouth. I wanna see if it has teeth.”
“You open it then!”
“I’m not touching that.”
“And you think I will?”
“You’re a lot braver than I am. You touch weird stuff all the time.”
“How about no one touches the weird thing’s mouth?”
The new voice startled them. They straightened, looking up and down the empty beach. It was still totally empty. And it would be for a few more months until the icy fingers of the wind were warmed by summer’s return.
“Down here.”
The eyes were black pools, no iris or pupil to be seen. They stared down at the creature, and the creature stared up at them. There was a scurry of movement from both the boys and the creature as they rushed away from each other.
It was ungainly on the shore and the boys reached the dunes before the creature was halfway to the water. They crouched in the sand, watching the creature struggle. Its arms didn’t extend fully, and it had to drag itself bit by bit across the sand.
“Should we go and help it?”
“Did you hear it talking?”
“I mean… Yeah. That was the… thing, right?”
“I can’t talk in a voice that low. Can you?”
The boy shook his head in response.
“And it’s moving. Really… really slowly. Do you think it needs help?”
They turned to look at the creature, still dragging itself across the sand in agonisingly slow progress. Together, they made their way back down the beach, hands grasping at each other’s clothing.
“Do you need help?” They called out.
The creature stopped and twisted to look at them with the black pools that served as its eyes.
“We could see how slowly you were moving.” One of the boys said haltingly.
It turned back to its slow path to the waves, dragging itself forward again. Now that they were close, they could see that the arms were partially fused to the torso, stopping them from extending all the way.
The forearms were the only part that could move unencumbered. A trail was being carved in the sand by the creature’s tail, a clear marker of where it had been.
“Are you sure you don’t want help?”
Much like a wolf or dog on land, the creature’s lips curled back from its teeth, baring a row of sharp teeth. The boys scrambled back, struggling to stay upright in the sand.
“We don’t want to hurt you.” The braver boy snapped.
“How can I trust that?” The creature hissed, voice like a rumble of thunder.
There was a moment of hesitation before the second boy spoke up. “If we were going to hurt you, we would have done it while you were unconscious.”
“Some monsters like to hear the screams.”
He stepped closer and crouched down. “Please let us help you.”
“If you must.”
The skin was cold and clammy, like chicken that had gone slimy with age. The boys shuddered as they touched it, grasping the creature’s fused upper arms. There was so much weight.
They staggered through the sand, chasing the leaving tide. Wet sand grasped at their boots and water had begun to seep into their socks when they finally laid the creature back down on the sand.
Little rippling waves caressed her webbed fingers and she pulled herself eagerly forward, hissing as the water surrounded her. The boys scrambled back from the water, remembering tales of sharks in shallow water that could still whip round and take prey.
“We helped you.”
“And I won’t kill you.” The creature hissed.
And then it was gone. A flick of the tail and the beach was empty but for the two boys, and the trail that had been carved by the creature’s tail. The boys exchanged a look and continued their walk along the deserted sands, silence laying heavy between them.
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2024.05.16 04:00 joanarcherknight Nebula - MerMay

Light reflected off the scales, reflecting a shimmer of rainbow colours. Even the sand that clung to the scales couldn’t dim the intricate swirl of light that the sunlight revealed on the black scales.
Water was spilled over the scales, washing away the sand to reveal the colours more clearly. There was no movement from the tail, nor the rest of the body.
“What is it?” He whispered.
“Some kind of fish.” His friend whispered back.
“It’s got a face.”
“Everything has a face.”
He gave his friend a look and lifted the seaweed from the head of the creature. “Does this look like a normal fish face to you?”
“I never said it looked normal.”
“It’s got arms.”
“So… it’s an otter. Otter fish… Fish otter…”
Laughter exploded from the two boys. They fell back in the sand, distracted for a moment from the thing that had washed up on the shore. The mix of animal was just too funny for them to ignore.
“A otter fish. What is wrong with you?”
“So many things.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Well, if you’re so smart, you tell me what it is then.”
They leaned back over the thing, studying its form. Scales ran from the end of the tail to the upper torso. There were two limbs from the top of the torso, but they didn’t reach very far. And a head.
It looked too close to a human shaped head for them to be comfortable, but the face was flat and grey, like the skin that wasn’t covered by the scales. No nose that they could really see, and seaweed was the only covering where hair was supposed to grow.
“Hey, open its mouth.”
“Excuse me?”
“Open its mouth. I wanna see if it has teeth.”
“You open it then!”
“I’m not touching that.”
“And you think I will?”
“You’re a lot braver than I am. You touch weird stuff all the time.”
“How about no one touches the weird thing’s mouth?”
The new voice startled them. They straightened, looking up and down the empty beach. It was still totally empty. And it would be for a few more months until the icy fingers of the wind were warmed by summer’s return.
“Down here.”
The eyes were black pools, no iris or pupil to be seen. They stared down at the creature, and the creature stared up at them. There was a scurry of movement from both the boys and the creature as they rushed away from each other.
It was ungainly on the shore and the boys reached the dunes before the creature was halfway to the water. They crouched in the sand, watching the creature struggle. Its arms didn’t extend fully, and it had to drag itself bit by bit across the sand.
“Should we go and help it?”
“Did you hear it talking?”
“I mean… Yeah. That was the… thing, right?”
“I can’t talk in a voice that low. Can you?”
The boy shook his head in response.
“And it’s moving. Really… really slowly. Do you think it needs help?”
They turned to look at the creature, still dragging itself across the sand in agonisingly slow progress. Together, they made their way back down the beach, hands grasping at each other’s clothing.
“Do you need help?” They called out.
The creature stopped and twisted to look at them with the black pools that served as its eyes.
“We could see how slowly you were moving.” One of the boys said haltingly.
It turned back to its slow path to the waves, dragging itself forward again. Now that they were close, they could see that the arms were partially fused to the torso, stopping them from extending all the way.
The forearms were the only part that could move unencumbered. A trail was being carved in the sand by the creature’s tail, a clear marker of where it had been.
“Are you sure you don’t want help?”
Much like a wolf or dog on land, the creature’s lips curled back from its teeth, baring a row of sharp teeth. The boys scrambled back, struggling to stay upright in the sand.
“We don’t want to hurt you.” The braver boy snapped.
“How can I trust that?” The creature hissed, voice like a rumble of thunder.
There was a moment of hesitation before the second boy spoke up. “If we were going to hurt you, we would have done it while you were unconscious.”
“Some monsters like to hear the screams.”
He stepped closer and crouched down. “Please let us help you.”
“If you must.”
The skin was cold and clammy, like chicken that had gone slimy with age. The boys shuddered as they touched it, grasping the creature’s fused upper arms. There was so much weight.
They staggered through the sand, chasing the leaving tide. Wet sand grasped at their boots and water had begun to seep into their socks when they finally laid the creature back down on the sand.
Little rippling waves caressed her webbed fingers and she pulled herself eagerly forward, hissing as the water surrounded her. The boys scrambled back from the water, remembering tales of sharks in shallow water that could still whip round and take prey.
“We helped you.”
“And I won’t kill you.” The creature hissed.
And then it was gone. A flick of the tail and the beach was empty but for the two boys, and the trail that had been carved by the creature’s tail. The boys exchanged a look and continued their walk along the deserted sands, silence laying heavy between them.
submitted by joanarcherknight to JAKnight [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 03:59 computer_salad Karen Read summary and analysis- first few weeks of trial.

I’ve been following this case pretty closely for almost a year now, but I haven’t had time to really watch the trial live (how are some of you watching every minute?!). I was looking for a post that was basically a run-down of the highlights and important revelations so far, but I haven’t really seen any, so I wrote one myself based on what I have been able to discern from the press coverage. Will you all tell me if I’m missing anything? I’m also gonna add some of my own analysis for discussion.
The “I hit him” testimony
A lot of people heard Karen say some version of “I hit him,” or “did I hit him?”, but the defense is doing a good job poking holes in their testimonies. It seems like a number of the people who claim she said “l hit him,” only recorded this several months later. Officer Saraf, for instance, only added the fact that KR said “I hit him” to his testimony several months later. Katie McLaughlin also agreed that her story had “evolved” since the original event. That particular witness was also interesting because she initially claimed to have no relationship with Caitlin Albert, which was later proven to be untrue; Katie McLaughlin was, as photos showed, quite close with Caitlin Albert at one point, which prompted the defense to acccuse McLaughin of perjuring herself. Firefighter Anthony Flematti also claimed Karen Read said “I hit him” but apparently never told anyone this, which was readily highlighted by the defense.
Of the people who testified that Karen Read said she hit O’Keefe, the only person who didn’t get absolutely obliterated by the defense seems to be Timothy Nuttall, although the defense made it clear that his memory of the day was pretty faulty as well.Lots of people heard her say different things: Stephen Mulanney testified that he heard her saying “Is he dead,” “that’s my boyfriend;” Jason Becker testified that he heard Read say “did i hit him?” And Matthew Kelly even said he explicitly did not hear Read say “I hit him” repeatedly.
Honestly, I’m not sure it matters whether or not Karen Read said “I hit him,” or “did I hit him?” It’s clear that she was worried about her own responsibility in the matter, which seems…. Not great but possibly innocuous? She was obviously insanely drunk the night before, and hangxiety/hangover guilt is famously a terrible combination with tragedy. I know I tend to assume the worst when I wake up after a night of heavy drinking. Even when I haven’t been drinking, I tend to blame myself when things go wrong. And I think it’s kind of telling that It doesn’t seem like any of these witnesses really thought that she had a clear, certain memory of hitting him. Except, that is, the officer in the McLaughlin testimony, who I guess summoned a sergeant when he heard her say this.
Anyway, most of this is stuff we already knew. We already knew she expressed that she felt guilty at the scene, and we already knew
The Sloppy Crime Scene & Responding Police Officers
Responding officers were super, uhh, carless when it came to the crime scene. They used solo cups to store the frozen blood found at the scene, which eventually led the blood to dry up. And they used a leaf blower to scan the scene for evidence, which somehow didn’t turn up any broken tail light. Basically, this testimony showed us that it was a super haphazard crime scene that could easily have been tampered with, and that there just wasn’t much care put into the storage and collection of evidence. This is important, because it sets the stage for the defense to say that forensic evidence from the scene cannot be trusted. Paul Gallagher admitted that “nothign about the scene was standard” and that he had never processed a crime scene in the snow before, which led them to improvise in a number of ways.
The other thing we got from these officer- witnesses was that Michael Lank, the canton police lieutenant who responded to the scene, had once been in a physical altercation in order to defend Chris Albert. For the defense, this is relevant because it shows not just the deep ties, but also the extent to which this group of people will go to cover up for their own. And the fact that this tight-knit circle are brutish and violent.
The Bartender
The testimony from the Waterfall bartender appeared to be marginally important. She confirmed that the Alberts were important, powerful people in the town, and that everyone knew who they were. She also said that nobody in the party appeared to be intoxicated.
Brian Albert getting rid of his phone
Brian Albert’s testimony basically just stuck to the party line. The phone thing, though, did remind me of how nuts it is that he got rid of his phone, and I’m assuming it’s not the last we’ll hear of it. I guess we already knew that he got rid of his phone right as it was supposed to be subpoenae’d, but it was still kind of crazy to hear him try to explain away that he got rid of it a single day before he received the order. He basically claimed that he was due for an upgrade so he traded it in. But he and Higgins both happened to destroy their phones right before they were subpoenae’d, which isn’t not suspicious.
Julie Nagel and the Black Blob
Julie Nagel, friend of 23y/o Brian Albert Jr, was inside the house that night. She testified that “I did notice ... something out of the ordinary, like a black blob in the ground by the flagpole,” as she was leaving. The defense didn’t like this, because it refutes the idea that JO was only placed on the lawn later. And they cast doubt on this testimony during the cross examination by pointing out that if she actually saw a body, she would have responded really differently. They also pointed out that she never really mentioned this until now.
The Ryan Nagel & co testimony
Ryan Nagel is Julie Nagel’s brother, who came to pick up his sister right around the time that Karen Read arrived, and left right as she was leaving. He never actually picked up his sister, because she ultimately wanted to stay.
Basically, he and the other people in his car said they saw Karen Read arrive at 34 fairview road. His sister came out to talk, at which point he was focused on his sister. He said he did not observe anyone enter the house, but the cross-examination made clear that this could have happened while he was talking to his sister. When he looked up, he saw the SUV brake lights come on, as if to start driving away. As he pulled up and drove past this car, he saw someone that fit Karen Read’s description in the driver’s seat, alone. He did not observe any damage to the vehicle.
This testimony is important, because this witness saw KR arriving and being alone in her car, which means JO would have left the vehicle at that point. It seems like it could be good for the defense, because he’s saying that she was alone in her car, and that he didn’t see JO outside, which could mean that he was inside. He also said her car didn’t have any visible damage. And it seems like he was a decently observant witness. But it also could just mean that JO’s exit from the vehicle was as unremarkable as his death, which would explain why nobody saw him.
Allison McCabe
Jen McCabe’s daughter, who claims she picked up Colin Albert that night. She testified that she arrived to pick him up at 12:10 or so, and she shows a screenshot of text messages to prove it. The Free Karen Read crowd thinks these are doctored, and I admit the screenshot looks really weird. There are some rumors floating around somewhere that there’s cell phone data that proves he was in the house much later than that, but I haven’t seen it. I also think the hyper focus on Colin Albert is weird, because it seems to me like a million different people could have ben responsible for JO’s death.
The Veterinarian Specialist
Testified that no dog DNA was found on swabs of John O’Keefe, but they did find pig DNA. Jackson’s cross exam reminded the jury that the collection of evidence was highly improper. The vet did concede that the pig DNA could have come from a dog treat.
Thoughts?
I’m hearing a lot of people characterizing this as a bloodbath, but honestly I don’t feel like anything so far has been, like, a crazy bombshell for either side. I would imagine there will be some during the defense’s turn to call up witnesses. Apparently that’s when trials tend to get juicy.
I also don’t really understand why the defense is so obsessed with the Colin Albert story. It seems like it could be easily disproven and then their whole theory falls apart. If I were in charge of Karen Read’s defense, I’d lean into the possibility that there are a million ways John O’Keefe could have died that don’t involve Karen Read. Maybe he slipped on the ice, hit his head, cut himself on his broken glass while he was trying to get up, and crawled quietly to the middle of the lawn where he was too incapacitated to call for help. Maybe he passed out in the gutter and someone else hit him— it seems like a ton of drunk people were coming and going, after all. And hit and runs are super common! Or, if we are to believe that John O’Keefe and Brian Higgins had a common romantic interest in Karen Read, couldn’t Brian Higgins have been equally likely— and have more motive— to bludgeon John O’Keefe? Honestly all those guys seem like the type to get angry and end up in a bar fight.
submitted by computer_salad to KarenReadTrial [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 03:50 Ultima_8 Bloodborne - Prologue 5 - TW: Blood, Gore

“Beasts all over the shop…You’ll be one of them, sooner or later…”
The strange Hunter turned around and exhaled. His breath was visible against the night’s air.
He’s bloodlusted. Aegis, I hope you have a plan.
Shimmer saw Elpis step back slightly, with a shocked expression on her face. She shakily raised a claw and pointed at something on the ground.
No. It… it can’t be.
That’s… horrible.
A shattered red jeweled necklace lay strewn across the ground, beside the mangled corpse of the Silkwing.
The Hivewing in front of the three swung his axe to the side. As it was a trick weapon, he was able to change its form on command. The axe had two forms: a shortened form that acted sort of like a sword, and an extended form specialized in crowd control and reach.
He extended his axe and Shimmer heard a low snarl from his throat.
“Do we kill him?” Elpis asked, a hint of fear in her voice.
“We don't have a choice. Steel yourself.” Aegis muttered and brandished his silksabers. The blades gleamed in the soft light of the three moons.
The hunter was taller than all of them, one head taller than Aegis and two taller than Shimmer and Elpis. Black tattered robes clung to him, marking him a Shadowhunter. Blood from tonight’s hunt stained the black fabric, showcasing his expertise and experience in the hunt. He wore a rounded dark-gray hat, and bloodied bandages covered his eyes. Shimmer wondered if he could even see.
Corpses of both beasts and dragons were scattered about the square-shaped courtyard, an equal amount of gravestones breaking up the open space. His teeth were uneven as if he had been eating and chewing rough bones. Blood dripped from his mouth down his neck, and his Hivewing stingers flexed in anticipation.
“Be careful,” Aegis started, “He’s going to use magic. Elpis, don’t use any of yours.” He told the hybrid dragon beside him, and she nodded.
The hunter walked slowly around them, searching for a weakness in their structure, and then spat out a lump of coagulated blood.
“That stench of squalid blood. No beast will be spared.” He half-muttered and half-growled. He tipped his hat respectfully, before lunging at Elpis. She dove to the side, and tried to retaliate with her scythe, but just slightly missed.
This hunter was agile, surprisingly so considering how old he looked. Shimmer gripped the handle of her silkhammer, knowing it wasn’t the time to strike. She stepped backward, seeking cover behind a grave, while Aegis leaped forward with the intent to pierce the frenzied hunter’s heart. Once again, the hunter rolled to the side and sent his axe hurtling towards the smaller Silkwing. Shimmer felt fear grip her heart, but Aegis avoided the blade. He fell back and motioned for Elpis to stay back.
“A sporting hunt. But alas, I’ve forgotten to ask your name.” Aegis growled, and the hunter laughed a sick, disturbing laugh.
“The name’s Gascoigne.” He shot back, and jumped into the air, slamming his axe down where Aegis was a split second ago. Shimmer’s ears rung from the sound of the impact. Her antennae subconsciously curled in defensively.
“Gascoigne. That’s a nice name. I’ll tell Ludwig you were a proud hunter till the end.” Aegis replied and sent his twin blades slicing into the hunter’s thigh. He recoiled, and a gleeful laugh escaped his bloodied mouth.
“Hehe… the sweet stench of blood. Just… just marvelous!” He exclaimed and raised his off-talon towards Aegis.
“Aegis! Get down!” Shimmer called, and a burst of flame erupted from the hunter’s claws across the courtyard. The limited magic the Hivewing had that he was willing to use in this hunt.
Aegis fell back, hissing in pain as a few stray flames singed his tail. The hunter chuckled under his breath, and Elpis took advantage of the opening he had presented her. She thrust the blade of her scythe toward him, opting for its sword form as of now, and the hunter knocked the blow aside. He countered with a kick to the Ice-Hivewing’s ribs, and she was sent to the ground. She coughed up a spurt of blue Icewing blood, and the hunter lifted his axe for a finishing blow.
Shimmer roared out and swung her hammer toward the hunter. The silk connected it to her wrists as it flew through the air, and it hit the hunter square in his side just as his axe was falling. He was sent into the opposite side of the courtyard, coughing and sputtering, but with a faint smirk on his face. Shimmer was in disbelief; how was he not dead?
“Ooh, what’s that smell… the sweet blood, ooh, it sings to me! It's enough to make a dragon sick.” Gascoigne laughed hollowly. He raised his talon, and Shimmer quickly rolled to the side as a ball of flame soared past her horns.
He’s going to turn at this rate.
Shimmer hid under a gravestone as a tree behind her erupted in flames, and Aegis jumped into the air. He beat his four wings ferociously before diving into the hunter. He caught both of Aegis’ horns, and he twisted his head. Aegis fell to the ground, and Gascoigne slashed his axe down across the Silkwing’s leg. Aegis cried out, and Shimmer’s heart ached. She pushed herself up, ignoring the raging fire around her, and she threw her hammer up in the air and aimed it towards the hunter. He narrowly evaded the heavy impact of the stone before Shimmer heard a metal clang behind her.
Elpis, scythe in one talon, approached Gascoigne. She had the little music box in her other.
Elpis played the music box and a song of eerie notes filled the courtyard.
The hunter stumbled back, clawing at his face, and Elpis shot Shimmer a look, her face telling her to make sure Aegis was okay.
Elpis advanced on the struggling hunter, and Shimmer leaped over to her Silkwing partner, who was injured on the ground. She felt tears welling in her eyes, but she knew this wasn’t the time to cry.
“Aegis. Look at me. Look at me.” She repeated, and he lifted his head weakly. His leg had a massive gash in it, but he could probably still walk, just with a limp.
“Ah, Shimmer. I’m alright. I’ll be back in the fight. Go, help Elpis. I’ll join back soon enough.” He groaned, and the pair heard a roar behind them.
Elpis was locked in a duel with Gascoigne, and the hunter’s stray fireballs met with blasts of frostbreath. For the first time in the battle, the hunter had a slight look of fear on his face. Elpis was relentless, her burial blade swiftly countering and stopping any attempt Gascoigne made at advancing. Aegis crawled back and attempted to stand, using a grave for support.
“Shimmer! I can’t hold him for long!” Elpis called, and Shimmer nodded. She took the hammer in her claws and swung it around her side, and in a clockwise circle in the air. It was the perfect counterweight to her body weight. She hoisted it up further into the air and then brought it crashing down onto the hunter.
It struck Gascoigne directly on the spine, and he fell to the ground.
He screamed in pain.
And then, a bright light flashed from his body.
His screams deepened in tone, morphing to be more animalistic. His posture fell forward, and his muscles rippled through his body. He grew in size, and more of his bloodied garb ripped from the size change.
Fur sprouted from seemingly random places on the Hivewing’s body, and his claws extended. His face shifted, his features becoming more and more distorted. His black hat fell to the ground.
The bandages around his eyes stayed, as well as the black-tattered garb that marked him as once a Hunter.
He was no longer a Hunter. Moons above, he wasn’t even a dragon anymore.
He was now a beast.
Shimmer’s heart pounded in her chest. She stared at the transformation for a split second, before reeling in her hammer. She took it in her right talon and dove behind a gravestone, wary of the spreading flames.
Elpis, on the other claw, held her blade in front of her. Shimmer heard a rasping cough escape the Ice-HiveWing’s throat, but she didn’t break her stance.
The beast that was once Gascoigne whipped around toward Elpis, and launched himself at her, with a ferocity Shimmer had never seen even in beasts.
Elpis sidestepped quickly. The beast slammed into the wall with a loud roar, and Shimmer spied Aegis in her peripheral vision struggling to stand. He winced as he stood on his injured leg, but didn’t cry out. He brandished his two blades as the beast charged at him.
“Aegis!” Shimmer cried.
He’s going to get hit. That beast will kill him.
Aegis ignored her, and as soon as the beast was within a wingspan from him he twisted his body in such a way that he narrowly avoided the savage charge. He elegantly sliced his twin blades across the beast’s hide, and the creature howled before rapidly turning to face him.
Shimmer flew into the air. “Get away from him!” She yelled before bringing the weight of her hammer down on the beast. It flattened part of his ribcage, but it seemed impervious to the pain. It did knock him to the ground, though, giving Aegis a moment to cut through what was once two of the hunter’s wings.
The beast quickly got back on its claws before sending a flurry of swipes towards Shimmer. She dodged to the side and readied her hammer for another strike.
That was before the beast kicked her square in her chest, its sharp, ravenous claws digging in and tearing her scales. Shimmer fell back, a slight gasp escaping her mouth, and she stumbled back into the wall. She lost her footing and fell to the ground, and gazed up at the beast locked on her.
“Aegis! Help!” She yelled, and not even a second later her Silkwing partner crashed into the beast. They fell to the ground, grappling with each other before Shimmer heard a familiar song fill the courtyard.
Elpis was cranking the music box, its ominous lullaby breaking up the noise of the fight. The beast stopped attacking Aegis and instead clawed at its face. It growled and screamed in pain, drawing blood from its very own fur and scales.
“Now! Kill it!” She yelled through the song, and Aegis nodded before driving his two blades through the beast’s skull.
They stuck, and the beast roared before throwing him off. It crawled and thrashed about on the ground, clearly not dead, and the two new blades stuck to his head pointed out like new horns.
Now’s my chance.
Shimmer stumbled to her claws and wound her hammer up into the air. With every last bit of her strength, she brought it down on the flailing beast.
It crushed what was left of the hunter.
Silence filled the courtyard, only broken by a few stray notes from the music box, the pained breathing of the three hunters in the area, and the howls and screams from other places in the Hive.
Shimmer breathed a sigh of relief, before collapsing.
I did it. We did it.
Gascoigne was free.
…
“I brought you water.”
Shimmer opened her eyes and found herself in her familiar hospital room.
The morning sun’s rays lit the room, and Shimmer felt very little pain from her chest.
It had been three days since that night.
Shimmer fixed her gaze on the purple-orange Silkwing sitting beside her and smiled.
“Thanks. I’m feeling much better, we should get going to Bloodworm soon. It’s today, remember?” Shimmer asked, and he nodded. Of course, he remembered.
The summons for every hunter to come to Bloodworm Hive. Ludwig, The Holy Blade had requested them all. He no doubt planned an attack. A shame really, the hive was only newly rebuilt. And now it was going to be the site of a horrid, savage warzone.
“I remember. Are you sure you’re feeling okay? Ludwig would understand if you couldn’t come,” Aegis asked, and she spied a hint of worry on his face.
“I’m fine. I need to make sure you don’t do anything stupid. I’ll come.” She sighed and took a sip from the canteen that Aegis had brought. It tasted wonderful, he had put something in to flavor it.
“Honeydew?” She guessed, and Aegis smiled.
“Yep. It’s your favorite, right?” He asked, and she nodded. She opened her arms, and he hugged her tight.
“I love you,” Shimmer whispered in his ear.
“I love you too. I pray to Clearsight that we’ll both be safe today. I can’t bear to lose you.” Aegis replied. He pulled away and gazed out the window.
Shimmer quickly drank the rest of the honeydew-flavored water before getting out of bed. She joined him at the window and was slightly surprised by what she saw.
Almost all of the hunters of Jewel Hive were preparing, some of them already flying in the direction of Bloodworm. They were all sharpening their trick weapons, mixing poisons, or saying goodbye to loved ones.
“We should get going. It’ll be midmorning when we get there, I don’t want to be late.” Shimmer suggested, and Aegis put a wing around her.
“Now? I need to get my stuff, and you do too. Join me at the workshop.” He asked, and she slid her head in the curve of his neck as he led her out of her sick room.
…
Shimmer beat her wings strong and fast against the morning savanna winds.
She saw what looked to be several hundred, maybe even a thousand dragons gathered around a hill. All of them had a colored garb fluttering proudly from their neck. Around ninety percent of the garbs were white, and the rest were black.
They were all different tribes and a fair amount of hybrids were scattered about as well. The gathered hunters were mostly Pantalan, but a good few were from Pyrrhia as well.
Shimmer and Aegis landed a short distance away from the hill, and all around them the sounds of dragons conversing and laughing with each other.
The sun was high in the sky, but it wasn’t quite noon yet.
“You see anyone you recognize?” Aegis asked, and Shimmer shook her head.
“There’s too many dragons here. It’s too much.” She whimpered, and Aegis pulled her close. He knew she didn’t do well in crowds. That was partly why she became a Shadowhunter. To work alone or with no more than a few other dragons.
“You’re safe with me.” He comforted her, and she leaned against him.
She had always hated being with a lot of other dragons. Aegis said it sounded like she had anxiety, which made sense. It didn’t do much to alleviate that fear, though.
None of them are thinking about you. They’re all busy with their own stuff.
Just take deep breaths.
“Do you want to move away? There’s fewer dragons over there,” He asked and pointed a claw across from them.
“…No, no I’m fine.” She whispered, and Aegis sighed.
“Alright. If you want to move, don’t be afraid to ask. I don’t mind it.”
Shimmer shook her head quickly, before the pair heard a loud voice from the top of the hill. They both looked up and saw the legendary hunter himself: Ludwig.
The menacing Nightwing stood proudly, his holy silver sword slung across his shoulder. His partner Memoria stood beside him, her tail twined around his. She had a bored look on her face as she stared at the crowd. The voices of the dragons fell silent, and Shimmer felt like she could breathe again.
The Nightwing’s loud voice echoed through the plain. “Dear Hunters.” He paused, his heroic voice inspiring pride and triumph in Shimmer, even though he had barely started.
“I’m sure all of you know why we’re here. Behind me, Bloodworm Hive stands proud against the horizon. Yet I am more than certain you all know what lies inside.” He paused and pointed his sword toward the dark shape of the Hive.
“Beasts. A few thousand. I think it’s time we put them out of their misery. That is why we are here. A battle of the ages, one that will go down in history. We, the brave heroes, fighting against evil. We will be reveled, we will be honored. We will protect the dragons we hold dear to our hearts, and save those we can yet save.” His speech roused the crowd, and Shimmer felt herself stand a little taller.
“The plan is simple. The Hunters of the Sun will lead the charge from the front. I have already talked to the leaders of the charge. The Shadowhunters will pick the stray beasts off from behind. We will attack at dusk when half the sun is hidden from the eye.” He gestured with his sword at the rising sun, and he extended his wings. His massive wingspan seemed to fill the sky, and Shimmer's heart swelled with pride.
He held his sword up to the heavens, and it transformed. It grew larger, into the shape of a claymore, and it turned a shade of sacred jade. It glowed with an otherworldly light, and the crowd was enamored by the display.
“Now, hunters. Spend the rest of today preparing. The hunt is on tonight. Ludwig, The Holy Blade will be with all of you in spirit.” He bellowed, and the crowd erupted in applause and cheers.
Shimmer saw a proud, triumphant look in Aegis’ eyes, and she felt the same. Ludwig’s blade captivated her. The blade of legend, inspiring all who lay eyes on it.
Ludwig would be with them tonight. The best, the greatest, the strongest hunter ever.
Tonight, the hunters would not know defeat.
Nor would they ever, with Ludwig alive and at their side.
May the good blood guide your way,
Ultima_8
submitted by Ultima_8 to WingsOfFire [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 03:41 Tc-matt88 First HK pistol and I had to make it a USP.

First HK pistol and I had to make it a USP.
Found this on gun broker last month and I wasn't disappointed. I originally wanted an all black 40cal since it was the OG of all USP's but I couldn't say no to a 1996 stainless steel slide. Came with an aftermarket barrel, 5 13rd magazines, and 2 10rd magazines.
submitted by Tc-matt88 to USPmasterrace [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 03:09 smaug259 4K movies Sale: Buy 3 For Just $33

Amazon's Massive 4K Blu-Ray Sale, Dune (4K UHD) ,Blade Runner 2049 (4K UHD),Barbie (4K UHD) ,1917 (4K UHD),Godzilla vs Kong (4K UHD) ,Black Adam (4K UHD),Parasite -4K Ultra , and more
submitted by smaug259 to boutiquebluray [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 03:09 Eelums86 [WTS] DESIGNER DISCOVERY SETS (DECANT)

DESIGNER DISCOVERY SETS for those interested in buying decants from specific lines. Current sizes I offer are 2ML 5ML 10ML and include everything listed under a brand. (I have many more brand lines to add soon) Any questions or mix matching feel free to reach out. ILL HELP YOU FIND WHAT YOU LIKE. (I may be missing some from each set but I am on the hunt. If you have one I am missing chat me I’m looking to buy or trade for it) $$$ SHIPPED CONUS $$$
[COLOGNE PHOTOS PT.2]
[COLOGNE PHOTOS PT.1]
[COLOGNE PHOTOS PT.3]
[COLOGNE PHOTOS PT.4]
[COLOGNE PHOTOS PT.5]
Please check the list below as there are some colognes added that are not in photos. ⬇️
1 MILLION - OG, Parfum, Cologne, Intense, Elixir, Lucky, Prive, Royal
x8 -2ML $50
SPICEBOMB - OG, Extreme, Fraiche, Night Vision EDT, Night Vision EDP, Infrared, Infrared EDP
x7 -2ML $42
INVICTUS - OG, Intense, Aqua, Aqua 2016, Platinum, Victory, Legend
x7 -2ML $42
AZZARO WANTED - OG, Tonic, Night, Most Wanted, Most Wanted Parfum, EDP
x7 -2ML $42
PRADA LUNA ROSSA - OG, Eau sport, Carbon, Extreme, Ocean, Sport, Black
x7 -2ML $42
YSL Y - OG, Fraiche, EDP, Parfum, Live
x5 -2ML $32
ACQUA DI GIO - OG, Profondo, EDP, Absolu, Profondo Lights, Profumo, Absolu Instinct
x7 -2ML $42
DIOR HOMME - OG, Intense, Cologne, Parfum, Eau, Sport
x6 -2ML $40
MERCEDES-BENZ - OG, Silver, Intense, Cologne
x4 -2ML $20
MONT BLANC LEGEND - OG, Night, Spirit, Intense, EDP, Red
x6 -2ML $25
LE MALE - 2008 OG, Elixir, Le Beau, Navy, Stimulating Body Spray, Ultra, Fleur Du Male, Terrible, Cologne Tonic, Fraicheur Intense, Parfum, Essence De Parfum, Fleur Du Male Cologne, Summer Spray, On Board, Aviator
x16 -2ML $102
PASHA DE CARTIER - OG, Parfum, Noire, Sport, Fraicheur Menthe
x5 -2ML $25
GIVENCHY PI - OG, Extreme, Neo, Air
x4 -2ML $24
VERSACE PH - OG, Dylan blue, Oud Noir
x3 -2ML $12
DIOR FAHRENHEIT - OG, Aqua, 32, Parfum, Absolute
x5 -2ML $40
BURBERRY - London, Brit, Rhythm, Rhythm Intense
x4 -2ML $16
MONT EXPLORER - OG, Platinum, Ultra Blue
x3 -2ML $12
BVLGARA AQVA - OG, Toniq, Marine, Amara, Atlantique, Marine Toniq
x6 -2ML $30
BOSS THE SCENT - OG, Intense, Absolute, Pure Accord, Parfum, Private Accord, Le parfum
x7 -2ML $36
COACH MEN - OG, Blue, Platinum, Green
x4 -2ML $18
A-Men - OG, BMen, Malt, Havane, Shot, Urban, Tonka, Wood, Chili, Ultimate, IceMen, Kryptomint, Coffee, Leather, Zest
x15 - 2ML $105
Parfums De Marly - Herod, Sedley, Goldolphin, Percival, Darley, Kalan, Layton, Greenley, Pegasus, Layton Exclusif, Althair, Perseus, Haltane, Pegasus Exclusif
x14 - 2ML $108
Kilian - Angels Share, Apple Brandy, Roses On Ice, L’Heure Verte, Intoxicated, Bamboo Harmony, Vodka On The Rocks, Back To Black, Moonlight In Heaven, Black Phantom, Gold Knight, Sacred Wood, Dark Lord
++RARE ADD ONS++ Cruel Intentions , A Taste Of Heaven
x12 - 2ML $106
John Varvatos - OG, Artisan, Dark Rebel Rider, Artisan Blu, Oud, Dark Rebel, Artisan Pure
x7 - 2ML $35
Drakkar - Noir, Intense, Essence, Horizon
x4 - 2ML $14
Diesel The Brave - OG, Street, Spirit, Wild, Sound, Spirit Intense
x6 - 2ML $24
Bad Boy - OG, Parfum, Cobalt Parfum, Extreme
x4 - 2ML $20
Gucci Guilty - OG, EDP, Cologne, Absolute, Parfum, Elixir, Black
x7 - 2ML $42
Mancera - Cedrat Boise, Tonka Cola, Red Tobacco, Lemon Line, Lemon Aoud Mint
x5 - 2ML $30
Valentino - Uomo, BIR, Coral Fantasy, Acqua, BIR Intense, Uomo Intense
x6 - 2ML $40
Armani Code - OG, Absolu, A-List, EDP, Colonia
x5 - 2ML $30
Guerlain Ideal - OG, Cologne, Intense, EDP
x4 - 2ML $26
Diesel - Green, Green Parfum, Fuel, Fuel L’Eau, Masculine, Plus Plus
x6 - 2ML $30
Prada L’homme - OG, Intense, Water Splash
x3 - 2ML $20
Chanel - Allure Homme, Allure Cologne, Allure Sport Extreme, BDC EDT, BDC Parfum
x5 - 2ML $35
Calvin Klein One - OG, Platinum, Gold, Shock, All, Be, Summer Daze, Everyone
x8 - 2ML $32
YSL L’homme/ La Nuit - OG, LNDL OG, Frozen Cologne, Libre, Cologne Gingembe, Jean Nouvel, Parfum intense, Le Parfum, Libre Cologne Tonic, Sport, Ultime, Cologne Bleue, LNDL Bleu Electrique, LNDL Le Parfum, LNDL Intense, LNDL Eau Electrique
x16 - 2ML $120
Versace Man - OG, Eau Fraiche
x2 - 2ML $10
YSL Kouros - Silver, Body
x2 - 2ML $12
D&G The One - OG, Parfum, Sport, Grey, Gentleman, EDP
x6 - 2ML $32
Terre D’Hermes - OG, Eau Givree, Parfum
x3 - 2ML $18
Bentley - Intense, Black, Silverlake, Absolute
x4 - 2ML $18
Dior Sauvage - OG, Elixir
x2 - 2ML $14
Clones - Khamrah, Asad, Ramz, Futura Parfum, CDN Intense, CDN Milestone, The Tux, Ameer Al Oud Intense, Fakhar, Badee Al Oud, Najdia, Ejazzi Silver, Tres Nuit Lyric, Hunter, L’aventure intense, Amber + Leather
2ML $4 Each
Miscellaneous - Boy Toy, Voyage, HIM, The Dreamer, Rogue Man, Star USA, Rochas Man, Deseo, Scandal, Light Blue, Light Blue Forever, Amber Intense, Phantom,
2ML $4-6 Each
submitted by Eelums86 to fragranceswap [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 02:58 sirteddybanks Should I reblue this Lightweight Commander 1911 from 1951-2?

Should I reblue this Lightweight Commander 1911 from 1951-2?
I inherited this pistol, found it in its holster and it was way rusty. I oiled it and it fires like its never been used. Even the semi rusted bullets worked. Must have been locked in that closet since the 50's. The magazine is pretty new, shows almost no wear.
Id really like to get it re blued, albeit it is complicated not being in the US to do it. I cant find the papers either.
submitted by sirteddybanks to Colt [link] [comments]

http://rodzice.org/