I was getting pretty fed up with links and generators with very general and overused weapons and superpowers and what have you for characters so:
Here is a page for premodern weapons, broken down into a ton of subcategories, with the weapon’s region of origin.
Here is a page of medieval weapons.
Here is a page of just about every conceived superpower.
Here is a page for legendary creatures and their regions of origin.
Here are some gemstones.
Here is a bunch of Greek legends, including monsters, gods, nymphs, heroes, and so on.
Here is a website with a ton of (legally attained, don’t worry) information about the black market.
Here is a website with information about forensic science and cases of death. Discretion advised.
Here is every religion in the world.
Here is every language in the world.
Here are methods of torture. Discretion advised.
Here are descriptions of the various methods used for the death penalty. Discretion advised.
Here are poisonous plants.
Here are plants in general.
Feel free to add more to this!
Slim Fit Double Breasted Leather Neck Belt 12 Button Wool Coat
Film Noir Movies
People think that Film Noir is a reaction to World War II. Not true. Most of the great hard-boiled and noir pulp fiction came out during the 30’s, as a reaction to the great depression. Film noir didn’t become a big thing until after the war (post 1945), because the powers that be didn’t want to release pessimistic, down-ending films that would lower the country’s morale.
This could be a very loooong list. Hundreds of films in fact. So I am just going to list the films that I heard mentioned specifically in various film noir documentaries and books, as examples of great noir.
Film Noir Era 1945-1958
The Letter (1940)
The Stranger on The Third Floor (1940)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Glass Key (1942)
This Gun For Hire (1942)
Shadow of A Doubt (1943)
Double Indemnity (1944)
To Have and Have Not (1944)
Laura (1944)
Murder My Sweet (1944)
Phantom Lady (1944)
Detour (1945)
Fallen Angel (1945)
Leave Her To Heaven (1945)
The Lost Weekend (1945)
Mildred Pierce (1945)
Scarlet Street (1945)
The Big Sleep (1946)
Black Angel (1946)
The Blue Dahlia (1946)
The Dark Corner (1946)
The Dark Mirror (1946)
Decoy (1946)
Gilda (1946)
The Killers (1946)
Notorious (1946)
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
The Stranger (1946)
Body and Soul (1947)
Born To Kill (1947)
Brute Force (1947)
Crossfire (1947)
Dark Passage (1947)
Dead Reckoning (1947)
Desperate (1947)
Kiss of Death (1947)
Lady In The Lake (1947)
Nightmare Alley (1947)
Out of The Past (1947)
Ride The Pink Horse (1947)
T-Men (1947)
The Big Clock (1948)
Call Northside 777 (1948)
Cry of The City (1948)
Force of Evil (1948)
He Walked By Night (1948)
Hollow Triumph (1948)
Key Largo (1948)
The Lady From Shanghai (1948)
The Naked City (1948)
Pitfall (1948)
Raw Deal (1948)
The Street With No Name (1948)
They Live By Night (1948)
Act of Violence (1949)
Border Incident (1949)
Criss-Cross (1949)
Impact (1949)
The Reckless Moment (1949)
The Set-Up (1949)
Thieves’ Highway (1949)
The Third Man (1949)
White Heat (1949)
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
D.O.A. (1950)
The File on Thelma Jordan (1950)
Gun Crazy (1950)
In A Lonely Place (1950)
Night and The City (1950)
Panic In The Streets (1950)
Side Street (1950)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Where Danger Lives (1950)
Where The Sidewalk Ends (1950)
Ace In The Hole (1951)
His Kind of Woman (1951)
On Dangerous Ground (1951)
The Prowler (1951)
Strangers On A Train (1951)
The Bad and The Beautiful (1952)
Clash By Night (1952)
Kansas City Confidential (1952)
The Narrow Margin (1952)
Sudden Fear (1952)
Angel Face (1953)
The Big Heat (1953)
The Blue Gardenia (1953)
The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
Niagra (1953)
Pickup on South Street (1953)
Crime Wave (1954)
Human Desire (1954)
Rear Window (1954)
The Big Combo (1955)
The Desperate Hours (1955)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
The Night of The Hunter (1955)
The Killing (1956)
While The City Sleeps (1956)
The Wrong Man (1956)
Sweet Smell Of Success (1957)
Touch of Evil (1958)
Vertigo (1958)
Neo-Noir Era 60’s-90’s
À bout de soufflé/ Breathless (1960)
Shoot The Piano Player (1960)
Underworld, U.S.A. (1961)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Harper (1966)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Dirty Harry (1971)
The French Connection (1971)
The Long Goodbye (1973)
Chinatown (1974)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Body Heat (1981)
Blade Runner (1982)
Blood Simple (1984)
To Live and Die In L.A. (1985)
Blue Velvet (1986)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)
The Grifters (1990)
King of New York (1990)
Miller’s Crossing (1990)
New Jack City (1991)
The Silence of The Lambs (1991)
Basic Instinct (1992)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
True Romance (1993)
Natural Born Killers (1994)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Devil In A New Dress (1995)
Heat (1995)
Se7en (1995)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
Fargo (1996)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Payback (1999)
My favourite Game Changer quotes in no particular order:
“Take my points, you twee bitch, take my points away!”
“TIMBS! TIMBS, BITCH!”
“I haven't been able to since the HRT.” / “That's so interesting; I have the opposite problem.”
“He wanted to see his son fall, fall from the sky, oh how CLOSE to the SUN he FLEW, but Daedalus our little master craftsman over here had some WAX WINGS OF HIS OWN–”
“The lady said butthole, Sam.”
“Beardsley left this for me.” / “But you voted them out!” / “I am aware of that, yes.”
“Call your dad! Call your dad!” / “Call his... Dad?”
“I'm hungie :(”
“My period started during the break and I am in immense pain right now. This is not a bit.”
“Hey! Timothy! You're not allowed on the street anymore, and you know why?” / “Why?” / “On account of the crimes!”
“Can I solve it? Can I solve the thing?” / “WHAT?” (...) “That was a real Jewel moment right there, to go to so far at the top from so far at the bottom.”
“If Ally Beardsley comes out with a crown on their head I'm going to lose it.”
“Yes, of course I flinched. I'm not gonna stand here and pretend I didn't flinch, that was terrifying.”
“Just give it to me now, we all know I can do this.”
“You're gonna get Josh Ruben in here and not give him a seagull to do? Okay.”
“There is a big difference between walking into an escape room and finding yourself inside one.”
“Zac is running down the street? Jacob is driving home, and Ally is on their way to the airport.”
“Byoooouh.”✋😐✋“Did you factor in the antlers?”
“I am also 31. It's important to know there are three men in their thirties here today.”
“I think... You did this, and you're a bad man.”
“Was it writing Katie's name down and letting everyone think it was the art department?”
“The dungeon master is now my prisoner, it's Brennan Lee Mulligan!”
“There's gonna be a loop-de-loop.”
Remember this girl? This is her now, feel old yet?
so weird how in english some words are really just used in expressions and not otherwise… like has anyone said “havoc” when not using it in the phrase “wreaking havoc”? same goes for “wreaking” actually…
reply with more, i’m fascinated
as a welsh person i want you all to accept that W is a vowel because honestly it makes pronouncing acronyms so much easier. wlw becomes ‘ooloo’, wjec becomes ‘oojeck’, love yourselves and stop giving us shit when we tell you welsh has 7 vowels. english actually has 15 vowel sounds but because y’all only use 5 letters you have to rely on a spelling system devised by satan
Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love
also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!
Literature + Writing
Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag
The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*
Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*
A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi
How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik
Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone
Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman
Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom
The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*
The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes
Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*
Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*
Why I Write - George Orwell*
Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*
Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)
Looking at War - Susan Sontag*
Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz
Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker
The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews
In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*
On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*
On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*
Kalighat Paintings - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri
Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past - Maël Renouard
Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel
Cities
Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash
Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*
Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur
The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*
Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur
From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective - Andrew Harris
The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay
The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel
Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan
A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp
The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne
The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*
The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour
Philosophy
The trolley problem problem - James Wilson
A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram
Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*
Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer
The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*
The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape
If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood
Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart
The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*
The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*
History
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan
The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*
From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*
All By Myself - Martha Bailey*
The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder
The sea/ocean
Rim of Life - Manu Pillai
Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery
‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*
The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*
Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti
Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*
Assorted ones on India
A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *
Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash
Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee
Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu
The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*
Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta
Our worldview is Delhi based*
Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)
‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*
Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh
When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger
Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*
Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha
MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*
Music
Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo
Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder
The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*
Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*
How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield
Concert for Bangladesh
From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen
Gender
Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane
The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin
Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*
Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe
Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*
Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack
Food
How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)
Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee
Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu
Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*
From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*
The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*
How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*
Pav from the Nau
A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes
Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)
Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)
Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*
Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua
The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*
Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*
Travel
The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism
Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan
On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose
On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*
More random assorted ones
The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*
In El Salvador - Joan Didion
Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee
Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell
Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*
What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*
The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith
Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*
Credibility and Mystery - John Berger
happy reading :)
V.F.D’s Codes (Happy bi visibility day!)
all of those funeral options like the tree pod or mushroom shroud or urn with seeds that "feeds" the tree are uhhhh, bullshit. unfortunately. if you want to be a tree when you die, be buried in the ground without a francy casket or embalming, and have a tree planted above you. this is the same thing as any of these hypothetical "tree pods" but it's skipping the scammy cash grab companies trying to capitalize on grief with fake ass science.
cremated remains will not "feed" anything, either. they'll probably impede growth, tbh. cremated remains are non-organic. what's left over after a cremation is hollow, dry, brittle bone fragments that someone like me sweeps up and puts in a big metal blender to create the smooth "ashes" one expects. By all means, go ahead and scatter ashes in nature, but don't expect anything to grow from them.
If you want your body to return to nature after death, go for a green burial or an at-sea burial. there are many dedicated green burial sites in the world, and one also has the option of simply being buried in a more traditional cemetery that allows for simple wicker caskets w/o a vault around them, and the body left unembalmed. If the tree thing is really your jam, go for burial in a dedicated green cemetery that allows your family to plant a sapling above you, or if it is available where you live have your body composted and use the soil to grow plants.
tldr; there are options for green funerals out there, and options for "becoming a tree," but I would not recommend going anywhere near products offering this such as tree pods, etc. as they are expensive scams preying on people's grief for their dumb start up. get composted or green buried 💚🌲 source: I'm a mortuary scientist and provider of both traditional funerals/cremations & green burial/at-sea burial.