Entry into EndMaster's 2024 Prompt Contest! 

The Faceless Knights uphold divine law, crushing mutation and degeneracy whenever they encounter it. When the young lord of a recently-conquered territory calls for a true servant of God, you must answer. 

This game has a sequel.

A short, silly, high-octane ride through a cyberpunk future where your bullets are few, your friends are fewer, and the long tentacles of the law are slithering up your pant legs. 

I am aware that technically, writing a sentence in all capital letters is gramatically incorrect. I did this on purpose, several times, for stylistic effect. If you point this out in the reviews, a team of hit-apes will kick in your door. 

Winner of EndMaster's 2024 Crisis Contest! 

This is a sequel to A Prayer for Destruction. It is highly recommended that you read that work before beginning this one.

The North, that frozen-over land of fanatics and heathens, has suffered a great and mysterious calamity. The Sultan bids you raise your banners and ride in his name to investigate.

Winner of EndMaster's 2020-2021 Grimdark Contest!

Take the role of Lord Winter, an aspiring sorcerer and the scion of a noble line that has fallen into obscurity. 

Contains scenes of intense gore, brutality, and sexual violence. 

Cover art by the talented MadHattersDaughter.

"Death is struck and nature quaking;
All creation is awaking,
To its Judge an answer making.
Lo, the book, exactly worded,
Wherein all hath been recorded;
Thence shall judgment be awarded.
When the Judge His seat attaineth,
And each hidden deed arraigneth,
Nothing unavenged remaineth."

-- Dies Irae

Ultimately, the fate of life is to destroy itself.

Note: This was adapted with express permission from a friend's "Creative Nonfiction" project for ENG223: Journalism in the 21st Century at Toronto Metropolitan University. Footnotes added by me to add clarity when needed. 

this is so fucking stupid

It's a quote from a famous dark fantasy game you ninny  

Well, if it comes down to it, I'll run it for just you and I if I have to. 

I can also increase the pace if people are burning through it at a crazy rate. I wanted to keep things nice and achievable to begin with though. 

Hello friends,

In 2025, I am planning on hosting an Iliad book club. Everyone is welcome to participate: the more people we have, the more fun. Helpfully, there are 12 months in a year, and 24 books of the Iliad. That breaks down to two books a month, which is an extremely manageable pace. 

When we begin, I'll start a thread for discussion, and a new subthread every two weeks. I'll try to produce discussion threads. Also, I have institutional library access, so I may post some optional secondary readings if you guys like. 

We will be using the new Emily Wilson translation. I will try to find PDFs and distribute them on Discord to anyone who wants one, but if you would like to acquire your own hard copy, that would be good. I think it's best if everyone goes off the same translation. 

I'll post a thread on every second Saturday. If you'd like to join in, have Book 1 read by January 11 2025, and come to the thread armed with your opinions and observations. 

Buddy, you're a grown man who is into MLP. I'm only giving voice to what every nervous person in your life is thinking as they discretely text your picture to an emergency contact. 

Yeah, I think the problem here might be that you're a pink clopping ponyboy who can only engage with media if it's giving you explicit and didactic lessons about Right and Wrong. 

Also "there are no good characters in GoT" is such a common and stupid take and I have no idea where it comes from. Jon Snow, Sam Tarly, Brienne of Tarth and Davos Seaworth are all pretty noble and selfless characters who survive. There are even more if you stop being a show onlycel and get exposed to Septon Meribald, the most virtuous man in the Seven Kingdoms. 

All I'm hearing here is that you don't have the courage of your insane convictions. 

No, you can't actually reject the reality where "a conclusion follows premises" and substitute your own. 

You told me in the other thread that a society is not acoustic just because most of its members are illiterate, because the mental structures associated with literacy apply even to illiterate members. I specifically named ancient Greece as an example of an oral culture, to which you deployed the following argument. I've tried to reconstruct it as charitably as I can, because you're kind of all over the place. 

P1. There are only literate and acoustic societies. 

P2.  A society is not acoustic if it has members who can read. 

P3. Ancient Greece had members who could read. 

P4: (P2+P3) Therefore, Ancient Greece was not an acoustic society. 

P5: (P4) Therefore, Ancient Greece was a literate society.

Calling hybrid animals a characteristic of acoustic societies doesn't make sense, because, as you've said, literate members of a society influence illiterate members. It's a contradiction of your own terms. 

"One of the things that I've noticed about the internet is that people tend to use it to pick large narratives and things apart with all these sorts of little arguments about all the small details." 

Attacking the supporting arguments that lead to what you consider a false conclusion is literally one of the most ancient forms of argument. 

NRSV is the best one. It was translated by an ecumenical team of scholars so it doesn't have the kind of sectarian bias you get with some translations, and it is a more accurate take on some of the "juicier" verses that translators are occasionally tempted to put a spin on. 

Compare and contrast Isaiah 7:14 

NLT: "All right then, the Lord himself will give you the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel." 

ESV: "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel."

 NRSV: "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel."

The treatment of this phrase is important. NRSV is the most accurate to the Biblical Hebrew, and is engaged in what I think is a more honest scholarly attempt at grappling with the text. The next line is taken from the same passage, but in the Westminster-Leningrad Codex: הָעַלְמָה הָרָה וְיֹלֶדֶת. This is the section translated variously as "the virgin shall conceive" or "the young woman is pregnant". 

The first word, ha'almah, has the lexical sense of meaning "the unmarried woman", almah, with the Hebrew definite article, ha. An almah would be incidentally a virgin, probably, in the context of the Hebrew Bible, but that's not what the word means.  The next word, hareh, is a feminine adjective that agrees with the noun almah. In most of its use in the Hebrew Bible, it means "pregnant".  According to BlueLetterBible, the are four instances (including this one) where it has the lexical sense of a verb mean "conceive": crucially, however, never in the verbal form it appears here. 

However, this is a theologically important line for Christianity: the virgin birth, and all. So the translators of some texts are comfortable bending the text to make it fit. This is why the NRSV, which included Jews and secular scholars in its publication, is a more faithful attempt at translation in a lot of cases.