The visual quality of set and costume design in general has been getting really fucking cool for a while now. But the writing attached to whatever adaptation they're butchering this year has rarely kept up with it.
Perhaps as the guns that make it so easy will never be controlled and the social care will not be funded, there must instead exist a constant baseline terror of other people. So the people need to be controlled instead. They need to be kept in line. And the more they need help, the less they deserve - the victim is the threat.
Not that I think there's any actual conscious intention there, per-se. More of a general structural disinterest in making healthy people (capitalism being antithetical to the health of the masses) that has various specific manifestations.
I've read the book years ago, and I don't really remember there being much by way of that (could be wrong of course). Most of humanity dies, and then the survivors... just find each other and build lives again. None of the zombie apoc stuff where "humans are the real horror" and it's actually happy they're dead, felt like it was more about the appreciation of human resilience (and the excellent public infrastructure that keeps ticking along for years post-disaster).
Assuming I remember correctly, it'd be a slooooow TV series. Not surprising they'd fuck around to make it deeeeep - adaptations of such old sources are super susceptible to being hollowed out to wear as a flesh suit.
Just started watching it due to this, and saw that episode - it was so nice! She was basically being harassed by the Serious Cops who have no time for Silly Emotions like grief and pushed out of the room to let them do Serious Work, and he catches up and actually listens and shows care and has her smiling a bit by being an earnest and harmless lil' guy who makes a mean omelette.
...probably a good thing I didn't watch this when I was younger, or I might have assimilated a lot of this character. Hmm, might not have appreciated it as much back then though.
Been playing some Skyrim - namely some mods that were recommended here, VIGILANT and The Forgotten City so far. The later was fine, nice concept that doesn't work well in Skyrim - might check out the indie game version of it.
VIGILANT however... Now that's a diamond in the rough, a heavily Dark Souls inspired Skyrim story that reinterprets a lot of the background material - and has genuinely engaging in-universe books. The strongest parts were where it went beyond either Souls or Skyrim's style - the cryptic in-setting books that are actually relevant, the memory sequences of ancient souls' greatest triumph or torment - a1nd the weakest were the various expy armour sets from other franchises stopping it from really settling into its own aesthetic (not that I didn't collect them all). A near railroad of a story, but the different choices made really do dramatically change the details, if not the end result (which itself is part of the story of reclaiming something from a vast and uncaring cycle of time and powerlessness... I think).
Just started Glenmoril, the sequel, which takes a different tack by having the prologue establish important ties to a few characters before getting all Bloodborne-ey. The mod maker's clearly experimenting more with it, and it's cool to see.
He'd be a great DM (Dungeon Marx) - I just wanna play a tabletop RPG game without the default feudal/capitalist anachronisms.
My level 3 Flaxman casts Thresh the Chaff and- wait, I also want a Magical Labour Theory of Value addenndum, because that was something that came up while discussing a rather interesting homebrew setting elsewhere which is trying to hash out a basically-democratic mageocracy with an economy that isn't just Wizard!.
Reddit speculation was going wild over the idea of it being an expensive and easily traced welrod, so I wonder if the police just got the idea from them...
Something that may be of interest to you, my partner and I just acquired a Chinese Electric Nut Milker. Which I am referring to that way because the reactions from others have been amusing (the Chinese Joyoung model had more functionality than the western, and they were the same price).
It's basically a heated blender with some complex pulsing going on, the fancier models of which can filter and self-clean. Price-wise, they range from not really cheap to quite expensive, but the actual running costs should easily compensate for it.
Plus it can make soup and all sorts of nifty grain milks you just couldn't find otherwise - the recipes in the (Google translated) instructions are things like "dragon plum milk", "five bean milk", "??? flour", "draft of Canadian woman's policy", and "spicy fish soup". The western-model recipes are too dull to mention.
Just made some plain ol' cashew nut milk (approx 1:4 cashews to water), and it was excellent.
The entire field of popsci business insight is just a stream of Jabberwocky, in hopes your connections sell a ton of garbage to some of the most credulous and desperate rubes on the planet - mid-level corpos. The place that I work in, uses the Net Promoter Score idiocy, which didn't even work for the niche it was intended for, but they now misapply to customer ratings.
Some of that is possibly from the functional use of invalid metrics - as they invariably produce "underperforming" results which can be used as a whip against stores and store management. A single "detractor" causes a tick up in baseline stress and overwork.
Well, it isn't an actual language (and thus is very easy to do), but it's been useful to learn Elian script (just an alternate way of writing the alphabet) so I can write random ideas at work without anyone being able to read them... they must never see my stupid notes...
Virtually the opposite happened to me - during a bit of a depression (ADHD fucking up my first uni attempt), moved from the UK to stay in my mom's basement in Canada for a year, then had to get the same procedure as you.
...the dentists were sooooooo nice as they asked for all my savings. I'd been quite proud of actually working a job (Starbucks, and hell, I was a coffee-like-product assembling machine - not that that's good, yadda yadda) and earning a pittance.
Ah well, nowadays I'm back in the UK, and public dentistry has pretty much collapsed anyway.
The best? worst? blurst? part of it being that the LLM isn't even close to self aware or alive. It isn't even really appropriate to talk about how it lacks consciousness, in the same way that one doesn't talk about the sand on a beach having a soul(Wealthy).
It's just everywhere, and Very Serious (Wealthy) People are saying it's alive, and if you don't believe in it either then maybe you're not being productive and don't deserve a job where they give you a free* wire in your head.
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The visual quality of set and costume design in general has been getting really fucking cool for a while now. But the writing attached to whatever adaptation they're butchering this year has rarely kept up with it.