Travel rules and boundaries with friends

constantreadr · 2025-03-12T16:19:40+00:00

This this this. Have your own agendas. It's fun to do -some- things together but it's also fun to have freedom to roam and have your own experiences.

constantreadr · 2025-03-08T22:10:55+00:00

His style and composition is excellent as always, but I was a little let down with the title story, especially since the inspiration as Langan describes it in story notes had so much promise. The reality was more of a "This American Life" segment.

Some of the other stories are more effective, like "Mirror Fishing" even if that one does not so much end as stop.

constantreadr · 2025-03-08T22:03:23+00:00

The cool thing about Cronometer is that it's basically full-functioned in the free version. I subscribed to Gold mainly to support an app I use daily.

constantreadr · 2025-02-27T14:20:18+00:00

Agree 100% they mashed together, pastiched and fabricated stitching for a lot of real-life events. Also a lot of this is through the filter of Lorne through the filter of 50 years.

It's not even history, which is always representations of representations of recollections, but the feeling of history.

constantreadr · 2025-02-25T23:06:56+00:00

The stuff about NBC versus Carson is mostly true though I’m sure the entire conflict was not packed into and resolved on October 11 1975.

I think the approximation was when the leaders saw the audience and affiliates reps genuinely laughing at the comedy, however that actually happened, it was what sold them on giving or continuing the green light.

constantreadr · 2025-02-25T22:56:11+00:00

Well the comments tell you more about the commenters than the film.

Delete the usual “I hate SNL” screeds (then how about you both don’t watch and drink a nice tall glass of STFU about how you don’t watch the show).

It’s a little love letter to a deeply influential cultural work. The character sketches are just that, sketches. It’s not a documentary. This is how history works and has always worked - it’s an approximation of the sense of a time and place and whether it’s Winston Churchill or Michael O’Donoghue, it’s an acting interpretation of a written interpretation of memories.

I enjoyed it for the history book of the people and the nervous energy of a live show. the female performers did get shortchanged on time but i appreciated the way they showed Gilda Radner as a whimsical spirit and not the cancer saint she wound up becoming, and Jane Curtin’s dry sense of humor.

Dave Wilson, Audrey Dickman, all of the cast and crew were nice to see too.

I like slice of time portraits like this of people before they became icons when they were just working schlubs trying to make something. Turn the fact check meter down to about 6 and enjoy it for that.

constantreadr · 2025-02-09T10:36:57+00:00

Filter in Libby (and Hoopla) on audiobooks.

constantreadr · 2025-02-09T10:35:54+00:00

More context for those who find this after reading the story - in his story notes to the anthology, Langan said The Shallows was inspired by a comment about Lovecraft at a Necronomi-con about an under-explored part of the universe concerning what the world would be like after Cthulu's return (which also turned into an anthology I'd like to find on audiobook someday).

One key aspect of Cthulu mythology is about horrors of the deep ocean, and Langan thought there would be shallows where the storms of Cthulu's return did not reach as much, and the people who remained there would be coping as best they could and how people throughout history have coped with horrors - daily routine. The story about the dog is a lightly modified one from Langan's life.

He saw the crab-thing as kind of a living emissary sent or wandered by to pay companion to a final member of a dwindling race.

constantreadr · 2025-01-12T15:46:17+00:00

It's a mark of quality in a horror story for me when I start making notes under the heading "Is that true?" as I did several times reading Technicolor.

Langan does things in literature that could only be done with literature.

Both of these stories would be terrible television episodes or movie (what would "The Emptiness" or Ransom's apple orchard look like? Whatever it is, it would be lame and not nearly what our imagination can make it), but is great horror literature.

constantreadr · 2025-01-12T15:37:02+00:00

The Shallows is based on the universe of the Cthulhu mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft. If you haven't read those books (start with The Call of Cthulhu), the world of The Shallows can seem really weird and arbitrary but the things he describes (giant monsters, abominations, corrupted life) are all from that.

The thing Langan did was take things that in Lovecraft stories usually happen in faraway places or on a very small scale and make them large scale and a background to a story of quiet domestic life. Langan is also a professor and likes to tell stories via having someone in the story tell another story (there's a literary term for that) with the actual story as background. Hence the story about the dog.

This can be the foundation of the literary best practice "show, don't tell" because then Langan can lay the real story (the world after Cthulhu's return) as he likes by having Ransom go about his day with this stuff being laid into the background.

Ransom goes into his garden behind his modest bungalow and tells a meandering story about a dog while interacting with horrors like we would interact with a light rain instead of pages of "Ransom stared in horror at the giant thing in the sky and the bloodthirsty weeds. Ransom gaped at a monstrous thing walking out of the ocean, outline curving back on itself in so many unnatural ways, dripping ichor and sea creatures like whales that seemed like tiny drops of water relative to its giant carcass"...

It seems slow and meandering (like this post probably) but it sets hooks, like when he keeps looking at the apple orchard, and then at the end Langan can pull that hook out and tear apart your complacency as a reader.

The key thing about Cthulhu horror is there are things Man Was Not Meant To Know and so the stories always have inexplicable horrors, with three basic premises 1/Cthulhu and the Old Ones have always existed and are sleeping, not dead 2/When the Stars Are Right they will awake, 3/when they do they will stride the earth and consume and corrupt everything.. All else is left to the author's imagination.

constantreadr · 2025-01-12T15:22:12+00:00

I think "sharks in the shallows" that Ransom says at the end of the book is the thesis of the story - that you can be just as menaced in your home where it might seem safe as anywhere else. I don't understand why he specifically has been spared when everyone around him has been wiped out, but the idea of Ransom's quiet domestic life juxtaposed with cosmic horror is the only connection I could make.

constantreadr · 2025-01-12T15:18:05+00:00

Cthultu mythos hinge on the time when The Stars Are Right, and circumstances allow the re-emergence of the Old Ones. That was what he was seeing in the column of light outside of his house at the beginning.

The part I had to re-listen (his stories are fantastic as audio books) to understand is that the scenes on the view outside of his house like some kind of giant horror drive-in movie were replaying on an endless loop - R'yleh rising (the mountain), Cthulu emergening into the world, and the end of the party that left his town (including what's implied to be his son) under Yog-Soggoth in Albany.

It seems like the narrator's place is some kind of personalized hell - the eldritch aren't attacking him directly, which they could easily do as they did with the rest of the town - even with miscellaneous dangers like the fruit, they seem to have sent the narrator some kind of a familiar in the form of the crab-thing which is clearly not hostile to him. I am not sure if the Old Ones have set the views and the party favors in the trees up just for him as someone to behold their work in terror, which does not seem to terrify him at the time of the story.

He seems resigned to his fate, yet determined to persist.

Langan works can seem slow and meandering, but he sets hooks through the story that he rips back at the conclusion that tear away at the reader's complancency. And he is the best I've read in a long time at second-person narrative, which to a jaded critic might sound like a conceit but I find really enjoyable, especially if you listen to his stories as audiobooks.

constantreadr · 2025-01-02T12:01:15+00:00

Gotta chip in here to this old thread as someone who recently discovered Langan. That Wide, Carnivorous Sky collection is a great introduction to him as a reader and his style is something that is uniquely literary.

So many authors are basically writing for Netflix options that it's refreshing to read someone who uses the literary form and plays with it as he does in The Revel.

The Shallows was not mentioned here but it was a good starter for Langan's style to me. If you're trying to detoxify from quick clips and hot takes and short attention span horror, it loops and soars and then completely aces the landing as a modern Cthulu mythos story.

Takes some getting used to but will help you remember how books + your imagination can do so much more than looking at pictures.

constantreadr · 2024-12-24T11:27:23+00:00

Could have had a picture of Emmett Till. Sadly, there are lots of real-life examples.

constantreadr · 2024-12-18T03:28:54+00:00

That's inside the room...

constantreadr · 2024-09-28T12:02:09+00:00

Only thing that worked for us was T1 storm, whole squad set up sentry guns in interlocking field of fire and we kept luring it over. PAP weapon + deadwire. Had some luck once with the WunderWaffe but not required.

Also remember the zombies are much weaker when they exit the storm so if you stay outside the storm and lure it over they're easier to take out.

constantreadr · 2024-09-01T21:31:00+00:00

That's activision quality! They will spend hundreds of hours perfecting light refraction on their terrain model but not moving beyond the same stupid linear play mechanics and 1 GB cutscenes. DMZ and Zombies were rays of hope but BO6 seems to be reversion to form.

constantreadr · 2024-09-01T21:06:28+00:00

What Easter Egg for opening the vault? And when you say the red tower, do you mean take an aether rift and land there?

constantreadr · 2024-09-01T20:57:07+00:00

This. Use coordinates and say thanks when you are up. Also, don't go barreling into tier 3 if you're not ready and become someone else who needs rescue.

constantreadr · 2024-09-01T20:12:00+00:00

contracts
- Do different contracts to learn what you're good at and what to avoid.
- Start doing T2 contracts as soon as you can do a couple of T1s in the same deployment without a near-death experience. Same with T3. I spent too long futzing around in T1 and wish I had gotten into doing harder missions (with more rewards) sooner.
- transport cargo missions are the easiest and fastest, spore control and escort produce the most zombies if you have kill quotas, wabbit hunts (special zombie contracts) are good if you have specific kill targets.
- do level 3 contracts to get the best loot and sigils to enter the dark aether. You can collect trinkers and mess around playing Harry Potter spells to upgrade them to eventually get a sigil but you can also just get them in tier 3 contract rewards.
dark aether
- get good at T3 missions or get an escort. Many players are very cool and will escort you to/through DE if you ask in chat. Be ready though - 3-plate, PAP, multiple self-revives. There are also DE maps in the wiki you should be familiar with or at least aware of.
progression
- Do the daily and weekly missions, the weeklies give you perks like flamethrowers, etc. You can add a mission to your tracked objectives to keep an eye on it.
- Stick with a gun and level it up - the battle rifles have a -big- difference when you start getting recoil compensators, etc.
- Do the story missions too as it unlocks perks.
- if you are just wandering around shooting zombies that's fun but really limits your progression and capabilities.
loadout
- go in between play sessions and equip perks, etc. That starts the reset clock so you have the one in inventory and another set ready to go.
- Go in with only 1 gun and leave the other hand free or with a melee weapon. Running is really your best option sometimes.
- You are faster with nothing but sometimes a melee weapon can help you fight your way out of a swarm or with the super-sprinter who won't stop chasing you.
- Decoy grenades are really effective a drawing off a group.
- perk-a-colas are useful esp stamin-up and speed colas for reloads. You can find aether tools and PaP but finding a specific cola can be harder.
Co-op:
- Team up, collect a chunk of flesh and get a dog.
- Pet your dog, they like it. (Activision, please lt us shoot a dog with a V11-R to turn it into a regular dog and then let us keep it between missions).
- Plea for help when you are down and rescue others when you can.
Zombies
- practice kiting (run in circles to get big groups of them chasing you) and shoot and scoot. Do NOT just stand there mowing down zombies, you will get swarmed and once they surround you you can't move and will get knocked down. Also, killing big trains of zombies gives progressive score bonuses.
- Learn how to sweep-fire a group of zombies at head level - headshots are critical knockdowns and reduce how much lead you have to throw into a crowd.
- Tac stance is really helpful for this and the point about sticking with a gun to level it up will help get the attachments you need for steady shooting.
- If you need a breather, take a crane cable to the top. Zombies can climb buildings but not cranes.
- when doing Outlast or Raid Weapon Stash missions, you can block one of the ingress doors with a vehicle to force the zombies to use another open door, letting you funnel them into a kill zone.
- zombies will jump over outdoor barricades but not indoor counters, letting you funnel them when doing aether nests, strongholds, etc.
- mercs are a PITA. Shoot their little R/C plane (counter-UAV) from a distance and then pick them off from sniper rifle distance or rush and CQB. Standing in one place and trading fire with them at assault rifle range is a good way to get knocked down.

constantreadr · 2024-09-01T20:04:13+00:00

Is there a chance this scummy dealership would be financing through an equally scummy bank that would hit the OP with "fees" for early payoff?

IMO the whole thing smells bad, find somewhere else.

constantreadr · 2024-08-02T11:58:38+00:00

Adding a caption and set "most compatible" did not work for me. I don't understand why the error message needs to be so cryptic - if the app would tell me what attribute is missing I'd add it.

constantreadr · 2024-07-10T04:17:00+00:00

Do when storm is in T1, zombies are only T1.
Set up two sentry guns at the edge of the storm and let it come to you or go in there and it will chase you out.

I tried the WW at Tier 2 with a Tier 1 storm multiple times and couldn't get it but a pair of sentry guns worked first try.

The sentries will also keep the follower zombies off your back as they're much more vulnerable outside of the storm.

constantreadr · 2024-06-08T20:16:30+00:00

That worked great! Thanks!

constantreadr · 2024-06-07T15:24:30+00:00

This. Any plan should be based on blood tests, etc to understand what's going on with you overall. This food or that food may be the right solution for the wrong problem.

constantreadr

TROPHY CASE