> [Alex]: “And c’mon, it’s Amos. Everyone on Earth dies and he’ll probably stack the bodies and climb up to Luna.”
>
> “Last man standing,” Holden said.
I don’t know how much of the books they had planned out in advance, but damn if that didn’t turn out to be true.
In Days of Future Past, Mystique morphs into Bolivar Trask, who is played by Peter Dinklage. So clearly she has a lot of leeway in terms of ignoring conservation of mass.
But how far does that go? Presumably she’s not [Odo,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odo_(Star_Trek\)) she can’t morph into objects. We only ever see her become other people.
Could she copy Andre the Giant? What about the Hulk? Could she copy a child?
This is a game I like to play with myself on bus rides. I try to find famous names—celebrities, historical figures, fictional characters—that can “chain together” such that each last name is the first name of the next person in the chain. I’ve never made a chain longer than 5 names.
EXAMPLE:
(Pope) John Paul + (musician) Paul Simon + (actor) Simon Pegg = John Paul Simon Pegg.
Here’s how it’ll work for the thread. Comment one full name (first and last). You can use people with longer names (e.g. Neil Patrick Harris), in which case only the last name is part of the chain.
If you reply to someone else’s comment, you MUST reply with a full name where the first name is the same as the previous last name. Minor deviations in spelling are allowed if the pronunciation is the same (e.g. Sam Neill -> Neil Patrick Harris).
Variations are NOT allowed. For example, Evan Peters does not chain together with anyone named “Peter” because of the “s” at the end.
Celebrities, artists, historical figures, and even fictional characters are all allowed, but they must be genuinely famous. If you need more than a quick note like (pope) or (from Star Wars) to remind people who you’re talking about, the name shouldn’t count.
As of 2:20 CT, the chains so far are:
John Paul Henry James Dean Martin Cody Hall Caine (x8)
John Paul Henry Clay Aiken (x4)
Michael (Clark) Duncan Hines Ward Bond (x4)
Jan (Michael) Vincent Mason Rudolph Wolf Blitzer (x5)
Teyana Taylor (Jenkins) Reid Scott Colton Haynes (x5)
Teyana Taylor (Jenkins) Reid Scott Kelly (x4)
I went to the Randolph Street Market on Saturday and got some really great fudge from a vendor in the indoor portion. They were on the first floor near the entrance. They gave it to me with no packaging in a plain brown paper bag. I would love to go get some more, but I have no idea who they were! I'm hoping someone else here might also have gone, and might have been smarter than me and actually paid attention to the name.
I see a lot of people talking about the Great Enemy and how the big reveal of TFoB is that humans are simply pawns on both sides of the war, and the Livesuit humans are also just a client race of some larger enemy. But I took Clae's conversation with Dafyd to mean something different: there is no Great Enemy.
The Carryx have been fighting the "Deathless" for eons, and they view it is their counterpart. Another species, or entity, or whatever that uses other forms of life as tools against them. So humans are really just a client race on both sides. But that doesn't fit with the human PoV we get in Livesuit. The lack of any mention of a "superior" race is very conspicuous. It also doesn't fit with the starfish things, which were called the "five-fold captives" in the first book. It's explicitly stated that the Carryx noted a genetic similarity between them and the Humans of Anjiin. If the starfish were just another client race of the Enemy alongside humans, there would be no reason for this to be the case. It's far more likely that they are purpose-built human-derived organisms, designed by humans.
It really does seem from all the information we have that humans are an independent and widespread race, with hundreds if not thousands of colony worlds, fighting the Carryx entirely of their own volition.
The only two things that conflict with this are 1) the fact that they weren't expecting the message from the Swarm, so presumably they did not create it, and 2) that the Carryx accounts of the Deathless predate humanity by thousands of years.
I think what this all means is that the Deathless Enemy is not any specific race, nor is it exactly the borg-like nanovirus that Clae proposes, nor is it in control of humanity. The Deathless Enemy is a technology.
The Swarm and the Livesuits may very well be expressions of the same biotechnology developed independently by different species. It works a lot like the Protomolecule, in the way that it hijacks molecular biology for its own purposes. The Carryx believe they have been fighting a singular enemy for millennia, and that this enemy has been using hundreds of client races the same way the Carryx do, when in reality they've been fighting hundreds of individual wars against species that have all developed the same bioweapon. After all, their philosophy fundamentally does not distinguish between lifeforms and tools. If a species can be a tool, then a tool can be a species. Like in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when Ford first arrives on Earth and erroneously assumes that cars are the dominant form of life.
That's also why they call it the Deathless--not because individual soldiers are hard to kill, but because they can never seem to find or get rid of the enemy itself. They've probably had long periods where they've wiped out or conquered every species who used the technology and thought they had defeated the Deathless, only for them to pop up somewhere else 500 years later when some other species figures out how to make a Livesuit.
I understand roadway hierarchy in principle, but I can't seem to put it into practice. Every single time I play I can't seem to avoid having a single "entrance" to the city, at least for the early game when tiles are so expensive. This causes massive traffic backup at that single interchange. How do you guys build out your early game areas on vanilla maps to avoid this?
I definitely make it harder for myself because I can't play without "No Vehicle Despawn," so with vanilla settings the traffic isn't as bad, but it's still bad enough that I know I'm doing something wrong and it could work a lot better.
I'm on to like my 7th or 8th city and every time I get caught in the same trap:
I've never even unlocked high-density buildings. Please give me your best tips.
Movies and TV shows love to show just how cool and skilled a character is by having them win a big important Poker game. But almost every time, the character wins not because they're actually good at the game, but because they just got stupidly lucky, drew an incredible hand, and didn't play like a complete idiot.
This is fine when the scene is a casual game that just happens, but usually the game is part of a plan, and the plan hinges on the character winning. So the writers will tell us that a character is great at poker--great enough to know they can win--and then have them win by 90% luck.
To me, this makes the "Poker Scene" just another violation of "show, don't tell." We're not actually being shown a character's competency or skill in any way, it's just "he's competent because he can win poker, now watch him win poker."
I read TMoG when it came out and loved it. I also read Livesuit. My memory isn’t great so I wanted to read both again before I start TFoB (NO SPOILERS FOR THE NEW BOOK PLEASE). I know the intrigue doesn’t really matter after the Carryx show up, but I just don’t like being confused and I keep getting stuck rereading part 1 trying to understand what’s going on. I don’t recall having this much trouble the first time.
It’s probably because I have ADHD and use audiobooks, so I’m probably accidentally zoning out during the important explanations.
How did Dafyd know with such certainty that something was going on? I don’t understand what his aunt or that guy from astronomy said that tipped him of so hard.
How did they find out so quickly exactly what was happening RE: the project being split up?
Who is Samar Oustad and where does he fit in to the conspiracy?
Why did the swarm decide it was so important to help them and keep their lab together, when it knew they were all about to be abducted by the Carryx anyway?
Again, can’t stress this enough, PLEASE DON’T SPOIL THE FAITH OF BEASTS FOR ME