It’s Time For Another AD Rant
Phyllis Sterlin
Empire and Ashes story realm 1: If i want to go to war with everyone, you won't be able to get outside your own cities.. most of all city states will keep pumping out stacks of units, infestations will pump some phoenix (fcking cheap unit btw) stacks towards you, the main factions already have an advantage compared to you and as soon as they set their sights on you they're relentless (even if they have a war with eachother most of the focus is towards you) and to finish you have a progenitor golem spawning from time to time one turn away from your units.
A few months ago I had a firewall in an HA pair go offline. Go on site, console in to the firewall and I'm at the failsafe boot loader. Disk is probably dead, time for an RMA. No big deal, right? Oh how wrong I was.
Just... why? Why is their TAC so useless? I could justify TAC being a bit dim for some vendors, but for what is effectively the industry leader for firewalls? It's unacceptable. My lowest helpdesk tech could have figured out what was going on, and he's never been in a firewall in his life. I've dealt with SonicWall's support several times in the past, and even they are way more useful than Palo's. They at least know their products. Is it just because Palo knows your next best option is a Cisco ASA, which is pretty-much hot garbage now? Because as soon as someone can make something as good as Palo but with useful support, they are going to be eating Palo's sales with a quickness.
By the time I had finished venting my spleen the driver looked at me and agreed with every word that I had said. I cannot remember exactly what I said, it went along these lines. Arriva do not have a good track record in looking after disabled people, their quality of service is appalling and there should be facilities for disabled people on every bus.
The timetable shows the next bus leaves Aylesbury at 17:55, after that there are no more buses back to Berkhamsted. I knew that the buses leave every 30 minutes but I was exhausted and I wanted to get home.
Chet is Green and not Green at the same time because he is a product of a different timeline. This particular timeline started when Green went back in time to tap his great grandmother Hattie. Thus, Chet is someone unique though physically indistinguishable from Green and Rant.
I mean, if Rant had no chance to save his mother because as Irene recounted, that person from the past failed to save her from Green, then why did Chet bother to ask Rant to hurry back and save his mother when the time comes?
And who is the girl who crawled out of the train wreck? Why was she 100++ years old? Did she travel back in time and killed her family in the train wreck thus making her immortal? Did she just appear? From the past or the future?
When I read it last summer, I assumed Chester was Rant after he went back to save his mom, but after that their timelines changed because Chester was raised by his dad (or possibly without one) and Rant was raised by Chester. I think that makes sense. I might just be confusing myself more.
So I agree with you. The rabies in this story is definitely more important than the technicalities of time-travel. This whole story is a metaphor and a criticism of everyday life. It should be read that way and not just in a very literal manner.
i need a clearup on some things in the book. i couldnt completely wrap my head around all this crazyness. i think, but im not so sure. that to go back in time you needed to enter a liminal/(liminoid?) time, you had to crash your cars. the pulse is what they called it when it slowed down time. but to reach a liminal time did you need the rabies to fuck with your head to get there?
this is where my understanding is most hazzy so please pardon anything wrong with it:but most importantly i dont understand GTS motive. if you are trying to reach an immortal status would you not try and prevent others from reaching it? to stay powerful? if everyone reaches immortality and inherits a lot of money you dont seem so powerful anymore. he was stoking himself into a better him, but he never reached immortality because he didnt kill his parents. i thought he wanted to be the strongest, wealthiest person on earth. why is he telling rant he can reach immortality? i know he wants rant to murder irene but why couldnt he do it himself? it seems the choice of time to murder them is kind of radom aswell.
oh and in the scenario where rant succeeds in saving irene but fails in stopping the rape it is obvious that gts does not become immortal and rant, too, does not become immortal. and ALL VERSIONS OF GTS (chet and rant) are still preserved physically, and in memory.
The importance of rabies: it breaks the things in their necks that allows them to boost a peak, which is what seperates them from reality. Arguably, that means people dont need rabies to time travel, they just need to be fully in touch with reality. So if those engineers werent capable of boosting, or were fully in touch with reality, they could time travel just fine.
On another note, i think that if you follow the logic of the book and Ned rewriting history so that boosting never happens, i think he also somehow creates the stigma around incest in our world so that nothing like what happens with Rant ever happens again.
I now also think that the rabies IS vital to time travel, though i didnt before, becauss that would explain no time travel in our timeline. No one would willingly infect themselves with a deadly virus (especially if they know what happens at the end) so time travel is effectively impossible in our world.
Rant goes back to the moment when his maternal grandmother was fated to first meet his maternal grandfather. He steps in and foils the introduction, thus preventing his own birth. This action places him outside of physical time and space. Leaving him immortal.
What I enjoyed about finally learning the truth about what happened is that I always assumed Rant had gone back to approximately the same moment in time that Chet had, only a few minutes early rather than late. Providing Rant enough time to stop Green Taylor Simms from raping Irene. Understanding and now actually knowing that Rant went way further back in time (about 40 years or so) than I ever imagined and just interrupted his bloodline completely by foiling the initial introduction of his grandparents, thus leaving him immortal, is just brilliant! I wish more people knew the truth! Spread the word!!
As chronicled in "Not A Game," a 2015 Iverson biography by Kent Babb, the player and his coach had a shouting match outside of the team facility that only abated when Brown told Iverson he wasn't going to trade him -- that the two would remain in Philadelphia for at least another year.
Instead of getting the opportunity to announce that everything was all right, that he and Brown were staying to make another title run, Iverson found himself on the defensive as journalists questioned his dedication to practice -- one of Brown's frequent and public gripes about his star player.
Some were amused, and others watched the trainwreck unfold -- knowing from experience that Iverson was drunk. "He was lit," said [Philadelphia Daily News' John] Smallwood, who attended the conference. "If he had been sober, he would have been able to get himself out of that. He never would've gone down that path. Maybe you had to have been around him all the time to know the difference, but we all knew."
The other part few remember from the practice rant is the raw and lingering wound Iverson still suffered from the death of his best friend. Rahsaan Langeford was shot and killed seven months earlier, an event with which Iverson struggled to cope. All throughout the '01-'02 season, Langeford's death hung over Iverson, and just days before his interview, the murder trial for the man accused of killing Langeford began.
Lets take the hand as an example again, how far do you think it is from one join to another? - Make a guess, take a pen and paper, or photoshop/paint, whatever, and draw a hand seen from the top without looking at your own hand.
Then spend a good couple days just playing with the different tools. Take a sphere, or any primitive shape, and just sculpt on it with no goal in mind, just to learn how the tools interact with the mesh. When sculpting, you should not spend any time figuring out what stroke to make to get the result you want, you should by this time know what each brush and setting does to your strokes, and you should now be able to focus 100% on anatomy and proportions.
This is not the first time Adams' strip has been dropped. Last year, The San Francisco Chronicle and 76 other newspapers published by Lee Enterprises reportedly dropped Dilbert after Adams introduced his first Black character. Quinn noted that the move was "apparently to poke fun at 'woke' culture and the LGBTQ community."
To anyone who has lived through the Kyrie Irving Experience before and has had to watch their favorite team navigate that situation, I can't say it's all that surprising. Things usually follow a blueprint when it comes to Kyrie. He shows up on a new team, says all the right things, has some massive individual scoring performances and things seem great. Then, the losses start to happen and he hops on the internet to rant/avoid any sort of accountability. Wash, rinse, repeat.
I have to admit, I did not see stuff like this coming just 1 month into his Mavs tenure. Usually, you're still in the honeymoon phase at this point. These types of videos from Kyrie usually come after some playoff shortcomings or half a season of underachievement. As is tradition, Mavs fans will attempt to spinzone this rant because that's what you have to do when Kyrie is on your team. Your brain leaves you no choice, we've all done it.
Sadly though, deep down they know that this is probably just the beginning. The possibility that Kyrie could leave this summer is still very real, and I wouldn't exactly say the experiment is working at the moment. Add in some more unneeded Kyrie drama that is sure to now exist, this is just another distraction. He's going to be asked about this, the players and coaches are going to be asked about this, and none of that helps.
aa06259810