tomkatt

@tomkatt@lemmy.world

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tomkatt ,

I really like Marion G. Harmon’s Wearing the Cape series for this. Hero teams are governmentally regulated, and state or federally mandated, and have to work with local authorities whenever possible, often acting as first responders specifically regarding super villain events. They’re required to plan and mitigate collateral damage. Heroing is literally their job and they have standard and on-call hours, as well as patrols and the like.

Socially heroes and villains are treated kind of like celebrities, and there are sort of unwritten rules about no killing, and no going after civilian identities or people’s families outside of costume as that’s grounds for both villains and heroes to look the other way regarding the aforementioned “No killing” rule.

With the knowledge that villains are hard to impossible to fully stop, emphasis exists on imprisonment and rehabilitation, and over the course of the series some villains and heroes end up changing sides.

There’s one hero in the series who is a federal agent with the ability to replicate clones of himself and is embedded in most hero teams, as well as being secret service, generalized security, and informant as all clones have the knowledge of the rest. Nobody he works with outside of the President of the U.S. even knows how many of him are out there.

On top of this, besides the typical hero teams, there are more “B grade” teams that are not specifically super heroes but act as emergency responders and construction crews for both hero events and fights as well as generalized incidents, and things like heroes without borders that act as global humanitarian aid on a volunteer basis, similar to Doctors Without Borders.

Vigilantes are frowned upon, and can end up liable for crimes as they’re not sanctioned to use their powers to fight.

It’s a very interesting series, and deals with a lot of “real world” consequences of super heroics, including long term injury and death, PTSD and other trauma, and the impact of things like super powered terrorism and extremist groups, as well as anti-super sentiment.

——

Besides that series, I’d also recommend the web serial “Worm” by Wildbow (John McCrae), but that one’s a doozy, both in terms of content (it only goes from bad to worse and things never really get better) and length (it’s absurdly long, maybe equivalent in length to 15-20 full length novels, broken up into fairly long chapters and sections).

tomkatt ,

Worm is exactly the kind of chaos that would exist with supers. Attempted mitigation and control, but those with selfish interests and villains often coming out on top, much like those in power and wealth in the real world. WtC has a lighter perspective to tell its story, but Worm is straight up “what if the most horrible person you can think of could also kill with a glance/touch/etc. With no consequence?” And worse. Here there be monsters, quite literally, and humanity is losing the battle.

It’s an absolutely incredible series and I’ve read the whole thing twice at this point, but it’s often very depressing, and the bad can be really bad.

If you want to read Worm there are web scrapers online that can convert it to an ebook format for easier reading, rather than needing to browse the parahumans site.

tomkatt ,

Thanks, had no idea. I initially read it so long ago that “shadow libraries” weren’t much of a thing (if they existed at all yet?) and actually wrote my own scraper in Python to download it.

tomkatt ,

But Snyder is an artiste! 🙄😒

tomkatt ,

Last time I worked fast food, my manager was a cokehead and didn't care if anyone took extra free food for their lunch break. She also let people place orders near end of shift as "oops" meals and take home whatever food they wanted so long as it wasn't insane (anything up to like $15-$20 was fine, mind you this was like 2001 so that was a decent amount at McD's).

Times have changed.

tomkatt ,

Dude, these same folks flipped their shit when the default main character in Crackdown was black, way back in 2007. These idiots don't quit. I mean, we're talking about a game where you're a genetically engineered super-cop and had multiple choices of character race but their fragile egos were shattered because the default choice wasn't the white guy.

It's pathetic.

Mind you, I'm sure they were all fine and nodding their heads when Tom Cruise did the whole white savior thing in The Last Samurai.

tomkatt ,

Yeah, was a blast. Shame Crackdown 3 didn’t recapture the magic.

tomkatt ,

I've seen the movie multiple times. Despite my comment, it's a decent enough movie. But the entire situation that led to Cruise's character not dying initially (where he's taken prisoner instead of executed) was kind of absurd, and then for him to actually be allowed to meet with the emperor at the end, after essentially engaging in a rebellion and convincing Katsumoto of the same instead of committing sepukku (and then him doing it anyway???)... The whole thing would have been considered shameful, and just stretches belief generally. And Algren (Cruise) was basically the pivot point for the whole thing.

When I refer to the "white savior" thing, he didn't save an individual, he saved "Japan's honor." It's kind of bad in that regard.

Oh, and he wins the heart of the widow who's husband he killed in that first battle. Woo.

tomkatt ,

These days it's actually the screech of the yellow bellied, tail tucked misogynist.

tomkatt ,

Seagull... E-gull....

Hmmm...

tomkatt ,

Generally underscore _ works best for this, and should be viable for both OSes.

tomkatt ,

I'll just leave this here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CORANvT8l9A

tomkatt ,

You’re not likely to do that for $150. You might be able to pull an old Dell Precision T5500 tower with a weak Xeon on eBay for cheap and refit it with more ram, better CPU and cheap non-redundant storage for $200 - $250.

For sake of power requirements though, seriously consider your use case and needs. You can get by pretty well with cheap mini-PCs like Intel NUCs or AMD minis like Beelink for pretty cheap and just cluster them with something like Proxmox to scale out instead of up when you need additional resources. This will be reasonably priced and keep the power bill and noise levels down.

tomkatt ,

Don't worry, they'll surrender to the union this time too eventually.

tomkatt ,

What "good old days" exactly are you describing? I expect it wasn't as good as they think, and was especially bad for many who weren't white, hetero, and male.

tomkatt ,

I can blame them, yes. Because they want their comfort and well being at the expense of, and without regard for others. If they get their way they’ll drive our country back to a dark age for a short bit of expected (and likely not received) comfort, then die, leaving all of us still around to suffer the consequences.

I won’t hate them because the reality is they are just fools being taken advantage of by those in power. But that doesn’t remove their culpability. The old are meant to plant trees, not burn them down.

tomkatt ,

The Vagrant. Fast paced fantasy pseudo post-apocalypse involving a mute knight protagonist and a baby. Fascinating book, very enjoyable.

I’d also recommend the Licanius Trilogy, it’s utterly brilliant.

Might want to hold off with Licanius until you’re in a better place mentally though. It’s well paced but has a lot of characters and a ton of interweaving connected plot points that involve both magic and time travel.

tomkatt ,

I found the trick was to steal spells from the enemies and then run away. Get a bunch of water spells, link to your attack and you’re a monster at like… level 3.

What do you use to track your reading?

Hello all! I mostly use StoryGraph (my name is creadstoomuch if you wanna be friends), but I was wondering what other options y'all have found that work for you. There are many things I like about it (the fact that it is not an Amazon product, the design, the stats, the currently reading tracking abilities) but there are also...

tomkatt ,

I just use goodreads and my “finished” collection on my eReaders.

tomkatt ,

My only complaint with Dell is they use shit fans that sounds like jet engines.

tomkatt ,

I bought one of these mini PCs (Beelink SER5) a while back to use as a low power desktop and the first thing I did was nuke the default partitions and install Linux. Never trust preinstalled OS.

tomkatt ,

Just use OSCAR to get the data locally from the SD card.

https://www.sleepfiles.com/OSCAR/

Learn more about the machine and do your own management as well. It’s very easy to get into the machine settings to control your air flow, temperature settings, and so on. Take the time to learn what the data from the machine means.

tomkatt ,

I currently use a Resmed Airsense 10 and can’t recommend it enough; best sleep I’ve ever had.

Just avoid anything by Philips Respironics. They’ve been messing around hard, class action suits and recalls and haven’t really made anyone whole from the debacle (myself included, I came out of pocket to replace my old Dreamstation).

tomkatt ,

Hey, check out the resmed airsense 10 autoset card-to-cloud version. It’s a lot cheaper and has no cellular connectivity, no wireless module. I just found out about it tonight, thinking of buying one as a backup machine. Looks like it ticks all your boxes.

CPAP.com has a starter bundle for it right now for $400.

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