Dark Harvest by Will Jordan aka The Critical Drinker. Just finished it, overall solid but not quite what I expected. Next up will be Shadow of the Conqueror by Shad. Wanted to support some content creators that I enjoy so got their books.
As far as adapting 40k goes, it would be hilarious to see 'If the Emperor had a TTS Device', but that would basically never happen. More realistically, it depends on what they have rights to adapt and what GW's primary goal is with the project. I assume that any and all Black Library stories are fair game to adapt, but maybe some of the authors had/have contracts that specified compensation that GW doesn't want to pay out to do an adaptation.
GW's goal with the adaptation is the real sticking point, though. If they just want something that will drive people to purchase books and models, then some adaptation of one of the various Astartes stories (retconned to include Primaris because fuck you buy biggerer and betterer new marines) would probably be the way to go. Cool and flashy, combat heavy, makes people want to try out the game(s) this is based on is the route there. There are a number of stories but one I always liked was the Space Wolves series about Ragnar Blackmane... and I just looked it up to make sure I was remembering the name correctly and FUCK ME SIDEWAYS THEY TURNED HIM INTO A PRIMARIS?! SO fucking dumb.
Anyways, if they instead want to make something that's a bit more understandable to ease a wider audience into 40k and something that can stand alone a bit better, several of the stories about the Guard would make for reasonably relatable military sci-fi. Gaunt's Ghosts would be a nice pick for something serious, and for something perhaps a touch more lighthearted (insofar as one can do that adapting 40k) adapting Caiaphas Cain would give opportunity for a bit of levity and help introduce some of the other Imperial institutions and Xenos factions since Cain's encountered a wide variety of both.
I'm fairly certain you're wrong. Equity means getting an equal outcome, aka communism, and it's why D.I.E. initiatives use equity for the 'e' instead of equality.
It's a distortion of language because the equity cult assumes that any disparity of outcome must be due to biases: personal, systemic, or even a combination of the two. If blacks statistically perform worse in academia it's because the schools are racist, not because their community is rife with single-mothers as a result of bad choices (single vs. dual parent homes being possibly the single biggest factor in how well a person will do in life). Therefore to achieve equity we need to mandate racial quotas for college, looking only at adjusting the outcome and not at the cause.
Harrison Bergeron is a short story that encapsulates this idea very well, and it's over 60 years old at this point. Vonnegut calls what the Handicappers pursue in that story 'equality' only because I think he didn't forsee the attempted ruse the equity cult would use by twisting language as they have. I could expound at length, but I fear I've already rambled too long. Hopefully that made sense, and I am doubly hopeful that I didn't misconstrue your original point and basically preach to the choir here.
I do like your proposed modification a lot. Making the gyms scale to you would be appropriate, and I'm pretty sure I remember that even being referenced in the anime at one point. A world where the areas closest to each town are generally pretty easy (because it would make sense that people would work to drive away more dangerous pokemon from their homes) while more remote areas have rare and powerful pokemon that don't appreciate intruders.
Let the gyms scale based off how many badges you have and you could absolutely make a believable and enjoyable open world pokemon game. You could even let players pick their starting town in such a scenario, and perhaps that would change what starters are available or give other starting perks/bonuses.
If by that you mean what I think you mean (which I believe is that in the new games an area that spawns lvl 50+ pokemon will do so whether you just started the game or you have a full team of lvl 100s) then this is a good thing to me. The idea that reality warps around the pc to ensure things are neither too easy nor too difficult is terrible open world design to me. Give me a Dark Souls-esque pokemon world where going to the wrong area can see your level 5 squirtle facing down a lvl 40 gyarados. Makes the world feel more real if it's not warping around you for no good reason.
While not Imp's take, the non-feminist negative take I have seen about this basically is a mix of accelerationism and drawing attention to that screenshot that's been floating around about the powers that be walking back a little bit of the woke stuff in preparation for trying to get more men (and especially straight white men) to sign up for the military and die in the next round of forever wars. So since this would appear to match that idea, this alimony change is bad because it lulls men into a false sense of security.
At least, that's my understanding of the non-feminist negative take.
The trick is figuring out what scripts you have to enable as a bare minimum for the site to work, and then don't allow any others. Kinda clunky for the first time visit to a site (or if a site changes up their backend) but once it's done it's usually smooth sailing.
To answer your questions in order:
- Enough
- As bottomless as their supplies for the money printer, so long as the dollar maintains any value.
They either enact what they want with infinitely printable currency or crash the economy and use the ensuing chaos to rebuild the world as they wish. Heads they win, tails we lose. (And in this metaphor landing on the edge would be the slim chance that they get guillotined by angry revolutionaries after they push things too far.)
I'd say there's a grain of truth there. To my knowledge we as a nation are one of the top spenders on 'education', but the lion's share of that goes to administration; useless bureaucracy and middle-management types looking to justify their existence who therefore come up with ever more bullshit for the actual educators to deal with. Simultaneously the teachers get rather shit pay for the amount of bullshit they put up with, from admin, parents, and students alike.
So if you're competent in your field, you have little incentive to get into teaching besides the goodness of your heart... or activism. An activist will put up with low pay to achieve their goals. An activist will almost certainly idealogically align with the overpaid, overeducated administration. An activist knows the value of getting to the kids early while their minds are still forming and poisoning them with D.I.E., Marxism, and all the rest.
I don't think that, at this point, throwing more money at it could fix the issue. I think education needs to be further decentralized: more homeschooling, private schools, even pooling resources and hiring a good teacher to 'homeschool' the kids in your neighborhood could work. Just make it easier to not be stuck in the government school system.
Well I'll second Girl Genius. It's a solid comic with lots of content, a solid story, and is about as far from woke as any content can be I think, despite what some might assume from its name. It's been going for about twenty years I think, with M-W-F updates. Some 'filler' strips here and there, but overall a lot of good story to dig into. Since you brought up FMA in the main post, I can say there are some similarities for sure. Just replace 'Alchemy' with the 'Spark' which gives some people an ability to concduct physics-defying 'Mad Science'.
If you ever read the old Dragon magazines back when those were a thing, you might recognize the art style. Girl Genius is made by the same people who did What's New with Phil & Dixie back in Dragon.
I'd like to some day get Rippaverse's stuff, and I'll have to look into that comic you mentioned. Want to keep supporting alt media and creators.