I remember the dining room at the location I visited as a kid not looking like a public school room with a stage on one side. Actually, I think the characters were all completely (shitty) animatronics that popped out of different boxes/columns set up on one wall. And the room had a theatre look to it, with a dark carpet and walls.
The pressure would be spead out among them all, but you still need to suck to create that pressure. If you take a normal drag, it just takes a tiny bit from each of them. You could suck in more with the same force, or increase the force to get even more, so I guess it’s not like it’s doing nothing at all. But I realize now my first post was based on the premise of “why would you want to get more smoke, one cigarette is enough or too much”, which is the whole point of that thing, so maybe I’m the idiot for thinking too much about it.
There’s several GB of it sitting in my home directory, which unfortunately my admin limits to several GB, so now my vim search buffer doesn’t update anymore until I delete code’s cache again.
Semirhage from the Wheel of Time. She was a torture specialist who would use the one power and her knowledge as a top healer of the body and mind to use both pain and pleasure to turn her victims to the dark or send them to attack their loved ones. She was effective enough that they tended to either succeed or fail because they were found out, rather than the person deciding against it once they were free. Even those who had turned and were restored using age of Legends mind restoration techniques lived in constant fear of ever being in her hands again. They had to take special precautions to prevent prisoners from committing suicide after finding out they were being put in her charge. She was a sadist who would cause unnecessary levels of pain during her healing even before the bore was drilled and joined the dark because she was caught and offered the choice of oath rod vs violence or being severed from the source.
Though some of the other Forsaken give her a run for her money.
Graendal with her mind slaves that she would use for pleasure or just furniture.
Sammael who, when told that he was giving his prisoners of war half the food they needed to survive, immediately ordered half to be executed (and generally just fed them to the trollocs even when they had enough food).
Aginor who joined the shadow because they wouldn’t let him do the experimentation on animals and people that he wanted to. He then created the trollocs and other shadowspawn and took 10k people per day for experiments and fodder from the start of the war power to the end of it, potentially doubling that number in the last 5 years of it.
Moghedian who ran evil schools that had children at first informing on their loved ones and later carrying out their executions themselves. During the breaking of the world, these children caused chaos that seemed like they were racing against male channellers going mad to break the world.
Balthamel established breeding camps for humans to be fed to trollocs. He also had a temper that almost got him oath rodded before the war of power.
Plus just general genocide, terror, manipulation, war, and oppression by all 13 of them. These ones stand out a bit more in their cruelty. Ishamael ultimately didn’t want to be reborn anymore, Lanfear was obsessed with Lews Therin, Asmodean wanted to live forever and be a well known composer. Demandred, Be’lal, and Rhavin were jealous of Lews Therin’s success. Mesaana wanted to be a researcher. They all did evil shit and didn’t care about the people they hurt, but the ones in paragraphs above seemed to do it as the ends, rather than a means to an end.
I don’t know if any exist. They are technically possible, but it would just be another arms race because a blocker would need to use names or patterns to detect those floating boxes, but there’s infinite different ways they can be named or implemented.
Oh yeah, extra tidbit about Semirhage: she discovered that 13 channellers and 13 myddraal could be used to turn a channeller without torture required. But she preferred the torture way.
It stops them from automatically playing in most cases (though there is a bit of an arms race there just like with ad blockers), but it doesn’t stop the video container from floating. And some sites start the video when you click to close the floater, then you have to scroll back up to shut up the video, and some interpret scrolling up to video as “oh I want it to float again”, so you need to close it a second time.
For me it was pretty much meat cuts like steak or pork chops. My parents erred on the side of making sure it was safe, so the steak was medium well or even well done and the pork chops would have little internal moisture left. I grew up thinking I just didn’t like those meats. I’m still not a big fan but I do understand that they can be cooked better now.
Though to balance it out, my mom was Italian and we had enough good pasta that I took pasta being good for granted.
Though to balance the balance, her tortiere was also very dry and she’d get offended if we wanted to add any sauces.
I miss her risotto with turkey giblets. Thanks to that (and maybe a lack of having it in other forms), I grew up liking organ meat.
Also learn to make white sauce instead of using canned cream of mushroom soup.
Here’s a ham casserole: In a casserole dish, layer cooked noodles (any pasta though better if it’s not one of the long tangley ones, just cook it al dente), ham (cut into small cubes), frozen peas, chopped onion, white sauce, shredded cheese. Then repeat those layers. Top with breadcrumbs and paprika. Then bake at 350 for about 40 mins uncovered. It was a staple growing up on any night after having ham for dinner. These days I’ll make it without bothering having just ham the night before.
Corruptible assumes they weren’t started for that purpose in the first place.
I wish there was a way to know what the mix of true believers and opportunists involved in each of the religions’ founding. Like the story of Constantine includes elements of both (he wanted a way to increase the unity across the Empire because it was getting hard to convince Iberian Romans to take up arms for wars in the middle East, but there’s also a story that he dreamed about having a cross on this shield leading to winning a battle). That wasn’t the founding of Christianity, but it is the reason Europe adopted it.
Or looking at the old testament, it seems to be a combination of general living advice/laws, events based on actual historic things (like David and Solomon were probably real), and stuff likely made up after the fact (like Genesis). I’d say the ones who made up Genesis weren’t likely true believers (of what they were writing), but it’s hard to say if they believed in the rest of it and just wanted to fill the gaps in good faith, or enjoyed the clerical power and filled in those blanks because not filling them in would have threatened that power. Or some combination of the two.