They really desecrated Dungeon Keeper. IIRC it was so filled up with mobile game, microtransaction garbage you couldn't even dig blocks of dirt more than once a day without buying "gems".
I always liked the Salem's Lot vampires for this reason.
Repelled by the faith in the power of good behind the symbols, not the symbols themselves. Catholic priest who is a broken man tries it with a cross but his faith fails and he gets rekt.
Must be invited in, but really good at hypnotizing people especially if they are asleep. Also, once they become vampires they go after their own family first, who are more suggestible ("I had a dream our boy was still alive...").
I live in the middle of nowhere in Eastern North America. Saw some growing all by itself in the middle of the lane. It never came back in that spot and I've never seen any other plants. The seed pods are really spiky and light, they must hitch a ride on stuff.
I decided not to try it after reading a few "trip reports".
Something I've noticed is when untraveled people in the USA try to contextualize themselves with other countries they pick the worst examples they can think of. Favelas in Brazil or slums in South Africa for example. We do this to the point where our entire conception of countries (or in the case of Africa, continents) is the worst imagery we can think of. I think they genuinely don't believe that, for all their troubles India, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, etc also have smartphones and big buildings and libraries and universities and laboratories, and educated people living decent lives.
They also can't see how the overcrowded jails full of pretrial prisoners, the barefoot children carrying buckets for water in Appalachia, the rundown schools full of illiterate kids, the impunity of rich private interests, the corrupt sheriffs and judges, and on and on, puts us in the company of the "third world countries". Yes we have nice places too, but SO DO THEY. A broken society in the 21st century isn't people living in mud huts, it's children shitting in the street next to a glass skyscraper with LEED Platinum certification.
Blows my mind someone will leave the enshittified capitalist slop trough because it sucks, which is directly attributable to systemic reasons, and then come to the place Marxists made on a volunteer basis specifically to overcome the shortcomings, and then get mad because there's Marxists. So they make "Marxist free" instances which inevitably enshittify because of systemic reasons....
Yeah, Zip disks suuuucked. I always had to carry two for redundancy because they failed to read so often. Even having every second or third CD burn fail, because you looked at it wrong, was more reliable than Zip disks.
Pre-COVID. I wonder what it's like now. Anecdotes from people who work in education seem to say it was pretty devastating for child development, but it's hard to tell if it's above and beyond the perennial "this new generation is totally fucked" sentiment.
Firewatch. I liked the visual style but everyone raved about the writing specifically and I thought it wasn't great. I don't want to shit on them too hard because they did try, and you can't control how other people hype your work, but I found the characters really flat.
The Great Male Renunciation is the historical phenomenon at the end of the 18th century in which wealthy men of the Western world stopped using bright colours, elaborate shapes and variety in their dress, which were left to women's clothing.
They could have just pushed them into the ocean instead of changing a flat tire because it's faster, or some shit. It's like the Adeptus Administratum.
I think it's possible that Robert Trump, Donald Trump's younger brother, was an early victim of COVID. He died suddenly and was "very ill" but no specific cause was ever mentioned AFAIK. I think this was covered up because it was politically inconvenient for his brother.
I have nothing to really base it on except the timing and reaction was suspect.
Every town around me have installed these fucking things, covering every major route. In order to get out of my local area without being tracked I have to drive on some serious hillbilly roads. It's exhausting.
According to Mr. Thornebrooke, reporters are not permitted to review final versions of articles before they are published, contrary to standard practice in most newsrooms. In many instances, he said, top-ranking editors “would suddenly be taking accurate information out of my stories and putting in false info.”
My guy, you work the Falun Fucking Gong newspaper.
Huh, found a source from 1683 where a guy named Edward Tyson presented his research on the worm to the Royal Society, and he called it the "joynted worm". He also refers to it by its Latin name Lumbricus latus which AFAIK just means "flat worm", and Lumbricus teres Intestinalis which I'm guessing means "round worm of the intestine".
This is actually a great paper because he's arguing against spontaneous generation of insects from rotting meat by pointing out that these worms are only found within the bodies of living animals and therefore must be the product of these animals eating eggs or body segments of the worm.
The first Underworld from 2003 is like this, but it's painfully early 2000s. It's from that era when every action movie was ripping of The Matrix as hard as possible.
They really desecrated Dungeon Keeper. IIRC it was so filled up with mobile game, microtransaction garbage you couldn't even dig blocks of dirt more than once a day without buying "gems".