my existentialism professor once showed us this meme and then said softly “reintarnation” and started laughing for about 5 minutes straight but he was laughing so softly we thought he was crying and didn’t know what to do about it
A quick history:
- In 2014, the developers at Monolith Productions created Shadow of Mordor, a Tolkien game, where you played as a random ranger (the guys Aragorn ran with for a while) who gains the power to revive from death by Celebrimbor.
- The game featured a brilliant game mechanic called the Nemesis system. If an orc killed you, not only would that orc remember you, they'd be promoted within Sauron's army gaining new abilities and commanding their own squads. If you defeated an orc but failed to kill him, that orc would remember you and seek personal revenge. Some promoted orcs would gain rivalries with others and infighting could occur.
- Shadow of Mordor became famous for the Nemesis system, as players saw the rest of the action game as a distraction from the real game: operating from the shadows to build the career of their favorite orc nemesis and create a true archenemy to have a proper showdown with. Sabotaging other orcs, purposely dying to their nemesis to hone the ultimate enemy, etc.
- Shadow of Mordor was a resounding success. Monolith returned 3 years later with Shadow of War, featuring an even more complex Nemesis system that allowed players to recruit and train their own orc army and even send them to infiltrate Sauron's orc army. Enemy orcs with experience vs the player also start learning the player's habits and attempt to counter them in battle.
- Shadow of War wasn't received as well as Mordor, but the improved Nemesis system carried the game. At the time, many were convinced the Nemesis system would be a major step forward for enemy AI in games when more developers would learn how to replicate it.
- That doesn't happen, because parent company Warner Bros filed a patent for the Nemesis system in 2016, two years after Mordor, and was granted the patent in 2021, making it legally risky for other game developers to attempt to create their own Nemesis system equivalent.
- Instead of funding a third game with the Nemesis system or doing literally anything with the patent, Warner Bros killed Monolith (and two others) on February 25 2025 and canceled their Wonder Woman game. They still keep the patent though.
- they killed Monolith for this
reading a textbook for class and i’m going insane. why is this just poetry. what. this is a STEM class what’s going on.
HELLO????? HELLO?????
The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry. - Rachel Carson (1952)
no one can write truthfully about evolution and leave out the poetry, etc.
“ExcUSE me?!”
the thing i love about social animals is they necessarily have a concept of manners which means that you can be rude to them. not threatening, but rude. and they’ll be annoyed at you for it.
"Don't let the internet turn you into an asshole" didn't mean "find an acceptable minority of people to be mean to so you can continue being a bully" it meant. As a general rule of thumb. you should not be a dickhead to strangers on the internet
You can also be annoyed by a specific type of person and make the conscious decision to not relentlessly shit on them for being kind of annoying in a completely harmless way. And, in point of fact, that's generally the adult thing to do. You really don't have a good reason to make fun of "theater kids" because a 14 year old was kind of annoying on your post
"Violence only leads to more violence" TRUE! The thing is tho, a lot of people in power seem to think the start of the violence was the CEO getting shot, but they're wrong. The start of the violence was that very CEO running a company that turns immense, endless human suffering into money.
Violence did lead to more violence, decades of needless death and suffering willfully enacted by millionaires so they can make just a little bit more money, that was the start of the violence. If they didn't want it to escalate eventually, they should have maybe not made killing people the core functionality their entire company hinges on.
The people being tortured and killed by the health insurance industry are not the ones who started the violence, and tbh I don't really think it's on them to end the violence, either.
I just think maybe the people who's entire job is sitting in an office and pressing a button labeled "get 10 million dollars but 100 random people you don't know die" as many times as they physically can are the ones who should be examining their behavior here, not the people who think they shouldn't be allowed to get away with that.
You ever been in a state where you physically have no energy, but you're bored and socially understimulated so you kind of wish you could just invite people to come over like this:
commission for @ganelon57... a folkloric beast
I was reading something about Whitestown, Indiana and my eyes nearly popped out of my head thinking it was one of THOSE comically racist towns. Nice to know, at least the name, wasn’t that.
Racisttown, named after the abolitionist Stopbeing Racist,
That's nothing. Check THIS shit out
“omg peoples mental health is so bad they don’t shower??” girl some people have such bad mental health they kill themselves
my rule of thumb for this, for any behavior that you look at and go, "god, how can you not (X)?" is to ask myself: well. how bad would it have to be, for me? how bad would it be before i would stop doing that thing? how bad would i have to feel?
what would have to go wrong in your life, and how wrong would it have to go, for you to stop bathing? to stop eating? to let the garbage pile around you until you can no longer see the floor?
how bad would you have to feel, and for how long, before you would stand on the street screaming at anyone & anything? beating your fists on your head and crying? how bad would it need to be?
do you think there's some fundamental difference between you and people who suffer until their lives are unrecognizable to you? can you face the knowledge that if things went badly enough, you would be just like them? just like them? just like
US citizens of jury age go ahead and absorb this into your memory centers real quick
I am not joking we need to take a page out of the Luddites book.
thing is, the luddites are so misunderstood and we learn a very simple revisionist version of their story. people are called luddites for simply going against technological progress but that's not what the luddites were actually about.
(i know i have some historians as followers who will probably want to chime in on this and please do as i am not a historian.)
the luddites weren't exactly against technology. they would have happily used the new machines being developed at the time if they could've owned them. who wouldn't want their lives to be made easier? but they couldn't own the machines. the machines were big and expensive and took a lot of energy to run. this meant that only wealthy industrialists who owned factories and mills could afford to own and run them.
the luddites realized they were losing their craft and their way of life to wealthy industrialists who were only willing to pay them a tiny fraction of what they were making before. not to mention that going to work for an industrialist meant being told what to make, when to make it, when to make it by, how much to make, etc. and all for a massive pay cut. it was a loss of income and freedom. (the machines produced a lower quality product too btw which was also a concern by craftspeople who actually gave a shit about what they were producing.)
the industrialist took the vast majority of the profits from skills and knowledge they never learned out from underneath the people who actually had the skills and knowledge—all because they could afford the machines and factories. sound familiar?
so the luddites took it upon themselves to protect their way of life from wealthy industrialists. this led to organizing and direct action like sabotage and stuff. unfortunately, the luddites lost their battle and their name went down in history as a pejorative against people who are afraid of technology.
it's a very interesting story and if you want to know more about it i suggest listening to margaret killjoy's podcast “cool people who did cool stuff.” she has a two-part series (i think it's in two parts if iirc?) on the luddites that is fascinating. can't recommend it enough.
