Eaten by red.

Volkspolizeikaserne Blankenburg / East Germany 

Summer 2023 riding to see mortician deterioration Lt. Dan and putrid Stu

Squats in Chicago and Cleveland and Jersey

Shout out da jalapeño Jawns yuppppp

Whump Prompt #1083

Your non-human caretakers protectively take the sick/injured human to their lair to help them. However, their limited knowledge on humans means that they are accidentally doing more harm than good... how long until they finally cave and take them to a hospital/healer/other humans for help?

You say I m important to you and you don't want to loose me but I see you are not doing anything to win me ,make me stay or not even giving me a commitment.

How can I stay ?

Figure 15.21 shows the development of the ozone hole in the Antarctic spring from 1979 to 2010.

"Chemistry" 2e - Blackman, A., Bottle, S., Schmid, S., Mocerino, M., Wille, U.

Alto contraste • High contrast

Oops indeed. The textblock on this book was in two pieces, split down the middle. But not because of any poor handling, just the inherent vice of old glue on an adhesive binding (a book whose pages are held together ONLY by glue, without any sewing).

Is it just me or are mobile games just getting worse?

I don't necessarily mean that the stories and gameplay itself is inherently worse, but over the last decade or two I've noticed certain trends.

First up, it used to be a game would prompt you for a MICRO transaction in order to, f.ex., stop getting shown ads. It used to be a one time payment of anything from one to maybe ten dollars (rounding up the stupid 99 cent bullshit). Nowadays comparable games will sell you tickets, skip-its, to skip a certain number of ads, or charge you a monthly subscription fee, and even then these may not rid you of All ads, just some of them, the ones that are otherwise unskippable.

On the subject of ads. False advertising has always been a bit of an issue with mobile games, but I feel like it's grown steadily worse. Every other ad I'm shown is for games I have previously played and thus I can say with 100% certainty that the ads do not represent the gameplay.

I'm also seeing basically the same ad, over and over, which is apparently for 4-5 different games, despite those games being listed as different types of games. A bubble shooter, hidden object, match 3, other puzzle games all showing the same ad, solving the same exact puzzles in each, none of which are the kind of puzzle game that revolves around the puzzle shown.

This used to be the "pull the pin" sort of ad, but now it's these interlocking circles you're (apparently) supposed to detach from one another.

Same puzzles, several different games, all of it fake.

And again, on the subject of ads. There have always been shitty, poorly made, cheap looking puzzle games that were never really "games" but ad farms, where what they were farming were ad watches. Your phone, you, being tricked into essentially being soil in which they grown their profits. The companies that make these make tons of them, the first 20-30 minutes of gameplay is mostly ad free, and then it ramps up, attempting to trick you into sticking it out, trying to make use of your sunk cost fallacy to maximize their ad revenue.

And that's not the only mass produced game out there. There are companies that re-use the same assets, same images, same level designs, same gameplay, same code essentially, only released in increments and with a slight environmental design variety to imply this is a new game being actively created as you play it despite being the exact same game as the last one, two, five, made by the same group of people. The company may even use multiple names to pretend to be new so that you can't just check what else they've made and find the same game over and over.

And then there's the prices.

They've really gotten well out of hand.

For approximately 15 usd a month I can subscribe to a massive online role playing PC game with active player support, a vast variety of activities, and so on. For the same amount of money I can maybe buy a medium pack of resources in one mobile game that won't last more than an hour of gameplay, won't give any lasting benefits, won't do anything really.

Multiplayer mobile games are very often war games where the winner is inevitably whoever can spend the most money on it every month, and those are in no way affordable to most people. They also mostly advertise themselves as games of exploration or of building when in reality the gameplay requires you to amass the largest army possible and invest several hours and hundreds of dollars to prevent your base from being raided frequently enough to make any exploration or building functionally impossible.

The micro-transactions have gone macro.

In short, it feels like mobile games these days are sold to you with false advertising, absolutely stuffed full of ads, and so unreasonably expensive you're better off putting the equivalent money in a jar for a couple of weeks and buying a whole ass PC setup instead.

Being that it's not a heavily regulated market, can this not be used as an example of how capitalism breeds neither innovation nor excellence?

(Yes, exceptions exist, but finding them in the very, very, very, very, heavily saturated with trash, marketplaces, with their absolutely garbage user interface is it's own pile of excrement.)

The London theatres then presented a spectacle which ought for ever to put to silence the foolish outcry against progressive deterioration of morals, - foolish even from the pen of Juvenal, and still more from the lips of a modern Puritan. Vice is always nearly on an average: The only difference in life worth tracing, is that of manners, and there we have manifestly the advantage of our ancestors.

Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

I wish I could be at this

deterioration (from 2020)

lonely days ahead

The natural state,

deterioration spills

onto the fabric

of time, a toxic black mold

an unwinding of thread sewn.

.

D W Eldred

Gawthrop — Deterioration (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Deterioration by GAWTHROP

South Korean bum-out specialists Gawthrop work in the sonic overlap between death doom and sludge, with serious emphasis on the excoriating horror of that latter subgenre. There’s more charred fervor in the six tracks on Deterioration than there is intestinal yuck, but as is often the case in death doom, the sluggard pace of Gawthrop’s playing—and the vibe of constricting pressure — feels peristaltic in action. And while singer (if that’s an applicable term here) Sunggun, stage name of one Jang Seong-Geon, hollers more often that he growls, he can also summon some downright alarming tones from deep in his gut. The overall effect of songs like “Blowtorch” or the divertingly titled “Rabbit” puts one in the mind of the scene in Tobe Hooper’s lovably horrendous film version of Stephen King’s The Mangler (1995), in which poor old Mrs Frawley is completely pulverized by an industrial steam-ironing machine. Gawthrop sucks you in, ruthlessly. Charring, constricting and alarming, for sure.

It's not music that leaves you guessing. But still, you may find yourself wondering, “Why ‘Gawthrop’?” So far as this reviewer can discover, it’s an English surname, signaling ancestry from areas in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Those parts of the world can be cold and rainy and dismal, but aside from the vaguely grim atmospherical notes, the reason these guys from Seoul have selected the word as their band name is the most mystifying thing about Deterioration. Perhaps it’s the poetical qualities of the two syllables, in and of themselves, as sounds. There’s an esophageal quality to “gaw-,” suggesting a bolus of gristle stuck in one’s gorge, and “-throp” is close to comical: the sound of a big, upended bowl’s worth of pudding slapping the linoleum. It’s a sludge word, if anything like sludge words exists. 

Those semiotic mysteries cease to matter when you get to the last nine minutes of the record. “Odynometer” and “Moth” are merciless mechanisms, engineered to pummel and raze all matter in their path. It’s fearsome music. “Moth” has an especially powerful presence, a nearly gravitational force created by the density of Gawthrop’s downtuned riffage. Sunggun does his best imitation of Ethan McCarthy, which isn’t quite successful — whose could be? But the song lumbers along, and you get caught by its pull. You start thinking about moths and flames. The riff is still churning, crunching, implacable. You’re sweating now. Are you enjoying this? Better spin the record again. Moths and flames. 

Jonathan Shaw