#advanced anti-aging technology

[pharmaciopy217]

Pharmaciopy’s Eneo Classic: Powerful Anti-Aging Technology

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Why Pharmaciopy’s Eneo Classic Stands Above the Rest

When it comes to anti-aging devices, Pharmaciopy’s Eneo Classic sets a new industry standard. While competitors rely on gimmicks and temporary fixes, this FDA-cleared device uses proven red and infrared light technology to deliver visible results that last. It’s hypoallergenic, safe for daily use, and designed with a smart temperature control chip for comfort and precision. Unlike bulky skincare tools, it’s lightweight, portable, and effortless to use. For those who value results, reliability, and simplicity, Pharmaciopy’s Eneo Classic is the smarter skincare investment.

What Is the Pharmaciopy Eneo Classic?

Pharmaciopy’s Eneo Classic is an advanced, FDA-cleared skincare device designed to reduce visible signs of aging through red and infrared LED light therapy. It works by stimulating collagen production and improving skin texture without the need for invasive procedures. Suitable for all skin types and tones, this non-invasive tool targets fine lines, wrinkles, discoloration, and sagging skin. With clinical approval and dermatologist recommendations, it offers an effective, pain-free alternative to traditional anti-aging treatments from the comfort of your home.

Benefits of the Pharmaciopy Eneo Classic

Using Pharmaciopy’s Eneo Classic comes with a host of long-lasting benefits, including:

Uses red and infrared light to reduce wrinkles and fine lines

Detox blue light offers powerful anti-inflammatory effects

Medical-grade applicator for safe, gentle contact with skin

Clinically tested temperature control for consistent results

Enhances skin clarity by reducing impurities and imperfections

Promotes long-term collagen production and skin elasticity

Safe for all skin types and tones

Non-invasive, easy-to-use device with visible, lasting results

How to Use the Pharmaciopy Eneo Classic

Begin with clean, dry skin or apply over your favorite serum or moisturizer

Turn on the device and let it warm up for a few seconds

Glide in slow, upward V-shaped motions across your face or target areas

Treat each section for 4 minutes using gentle, consistent pressure

Finish with moisturizer for best results

Clean the device after each session and recharge it for next use

Use daily or as part of your weekly skincare routine

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[irregularjohnnywiggins]

Reading through my old Woman of Truth stuff, and by far the funniest joke is that for most of Steve's sections of the first episode, there's a lot of fuss being made about this top-of-the-line stealth jet, fresh from Ferris Aircraft, cost the US millions, potentially billions of dollars, full of advanced technology...

...And after Steve crashes it on Themyscira, in the High Council chambers, Io calls it 'horrifically primitive'. 'I mean, it still uses combustion engines, for Hestia's sake! Do they still not have anti-grav?'

[the-d-wave]

The Science | QGEN Phyto Stem Cell Technology | The D Wave QGEN Phyto Stem Cell Technology at The D Wave targets at a cellular level for long-lasting effects. Get true skin renewal and barrier repair with our skin care products.

[metropolitant]

UNVEIL RADIANT YOUTH WITH MICRO HIFU AT MIIREN AESTHETIC CLINIC

[the-soliloquies-of-sadists]

#381

“Wakey wakey.  Time to wake up….  Don’t try to move around too much.  As you are realizing, you are in a predicament.  You are lying in my basement, buck naked, tied up, gagged, collared, with a fuck pillow under your pelvis.  You ain’t going anywhere, anytime soon….

“We’ve never met, but we know each other.  We both do the same thing for work, but we are nothing alike.  This is what’s happening.  I am part of a nameless organization that takes faggots, trains them to be slaves, and sells them to buyers from around the world.  From what I’ve been told over the years, the faggots delivered to me want to drop off the grid and sold into slavery.  They turn themselves in to a collector, who then has them delivered to me.  I don’t know if that’s true as I don’t let any of the faggots talk other than to say, ‘Yes Sir!’ 

“Now for you, I was told your backstory.  It seems that you are a collector for a different kind of group.  I train fags who offer themselves up for the taking.  You seem to prefer the non-consensual abductions of twelve- to fifteen-year-old girls.  I don’t care that you prefer pussy over dicks, but I do draw the line with their age.

“As I said, I was told what you are.  That never happens.  Ever.  But it appears that you approached the ten-year-old niece of one of higher ups in the organization, and he recognized what and who you were.  That stupid move brought you here. 

“I have no idea who the higher up is nor do I care.  Hell, we don’t know any of the men that are in the other parts of my organization, let alone hear from them.  So I found it surprising to get a call from a higher up—who I haven’t heard from in a few years—that I am to train you personally.  You better fucking believe that I’m going to train the fuck out of you.

“I have been training faggots for nearly forty years.  This is my farm you are on.  Twelve hundred acres.  Twelve hundred acres with some of the most advanced surveillance and anti-escape deterrents.  I know of every person who steps foot on my property, and I know if a slave is ten feet away from where it is supposed to be.  The ankle cuffs, wrist cuffs, and collar have tracking devices in them.  The collar can deliver a shock to keep you in line at a moment’s notice.  And the ankle cuffs are set up that if you go beyond a certain perimeter, a numbing agent is injected causing your legs to go numb and become useless.  Escape is not possible.  In my twenty years at this location, I have only had one slave make it off property, but it was collected within three minutes of doing so.  That slave was brought back and tortured in front of all the other slaves as a deterrent.  And that was before all the tracking technology was put in.  So keep that in mind if you decide to do something stupid.

“Now,… for the past five minutes, I have been telling you the predicament you find yourself in.  I have been watching your reaction.  Being gagged, you can’t say anything, but your body language says it all.  You seem too calm and not surprised at the description of my organization.  No reaction really.  That tells me that you are familiar with an operation like this.  When I tell you that you were collected for stalking that niece, you don’t look shocked by that accusation.  That pretty much confirms what I was told,… not that it matters otherwise. 

“No, the only reaction I saw was when I tell you that I am going to do your training.  You looked panicked.  Your eyes went right to my bulge.  Oh yeah.  I noticed.  You are straight indeed.  I should say, ‘were straight.’  From this moment on, you will never go back to that life.  The only cunt in your future is the one I’m about to make out of this hole between your legs.

“You have a great ass, so flawlessly smooth.  On any other slave, this ass would be a huge selling feature.  But for you, it’s a source of pain.  I need to put out my cigarette somewhere.  Your asscheek is the best place to do it….  Scream motherfucker scream.  Your perfect ass is going to go through some changes, from being daily whipped to being used as an ashtray.  You are going to be scarred up for sure.

“For the next part, I need to take off my boots and get out of these overalls.  You are going to get acquainted with Otto.  That’s what some of the fag slaves and some of the trainers call my dick.  Otto, it means ‘eight’ in Italian.  I’m actually closer to nine inches, but nine in Italian is ‘Nove’ which doesn’t sound right.  It doesn’t roll over the tongue as nicely as Otto.  Hehe.

“Look up at me.  Look shithead!  Here’s Otto.  Look at the cock that is going to own your life.  Half hard, it’s bigger than yours.  Keep staring at my foreskin.  Otto needs to piss.  You will be trained on drinking piss.  That’s all the liquid you will be given.  And if you are wondering if that means that you will be trained on becoming a full toilet, let me say we stopped training our slaves on that a while back.  It was too time consuming, and the buyers weren’t interested in that feature.  But for you, the higher ups want you trained.  But that will have to wait.

“Are you…  you are…!  You’re crying!  About time!  Hold still.  Let me wash away those tears for you.  Piss is the best antidote to tears.  There’s no feeling in the world like starting to tear down a once proud man by simply pissing on his face.  It’s getting me hard.  Otto likes what he’s doing to you.  But he wants action.

“Normally, you would be sucking the last few drops out of my foreskin.  But I ain’t ungagging you yet.  Besides, Otto needs to turn a virgin ass into a gaping cunt. 

“Your hole is perfectly displayed, like it’s ready to be destroyed thanks to that fuck pillow and how wide your legs were spread and secured.  Oh look.  Your cock and balls are just hanging there,… exposed,…

“…Damn! Even with my bare feet, I can deliver one hell of a ball kick.  Ha! Ha!  Your screams mean everything to me.  You know, each and every one of my personal slaves are kicked in the balls every morning.  They need to be reminded of their place on a daily basis. 

“Now, you will be spared that daily torture.  And that’s not because I would never have you as my personal slave, and don’t worry I wouldn’t own such trash.  No, I’m going to castrate you, in one of the most painful ways.  I haven’t decided how yet.  I do know that I will leave your empty sack intact.  We have a urologist that will make changes to your dick so that you lose all ability to get hard and with a few snips to the nerves in the area, all physical sensation will be gone.  Essentially your dick will constantly just hang there and be utterly useless… other than to piss out of.  Every time you reach down there, you will only feel the shell of what you used to be.

“Awww you’ve done full on sob.  Here let me collect some of your tears.  Tears of cunts are the best lube. 

“Do you feel Otto at your hole?  Feel his weight in your crack?  He’s ready to go.  Can you feel his leak.  Lucky for you, you really got me leaking.  Feel that wetness?  That’s all you.  Virgin cunt meets wine bottle thick dick.

“Don’t fucking start resisting.  Your cherry is going to be popped.  Here goes. 

“Don’t fucking fight me.  It’s only going to be more painful for you.  You are making my dick even harder.

“LET ME IN!  I’m coming in.  Oh, you got my head.  You are really starting to piss me off.

“Urg!  There.  Normally I would let a cunt relax before I begin, but you don’t fucking deserve that.  Right to the… goddamned… root!  Fuck, you’re tight.  By the end of tonight, you will be a gaping mess. 

“Not only have I been lucky to have such a big dick, but I can cum multiple times a night.  My first load is always quick, but the second one goes on for hours.  Then I have a gang bang lined up for this cunt. 

“I’ll let someone else pop the cherry in your throat.  There’s no way I’m going to let Otto near your mouth, at least not while you still have a mouthful of teeth.  Oh yeah, those will be coming out as part of your transformation.

“Keep crying.  Oh man.  Oh fuck.  I’m getting close.  You ready to be bred?  You ready to make your transformation to cunt complete?  Here it cums.  Here it goddamned cums!  Ahh! Ahh! Fuuuuck!

“Holy shit!  That was… fuck. 

“Your cunt has one of my biggest loads in it.  That should help lubricate you up a bit for round two….  Don’t try to push me out.  Otto will come out when he wants to.  Right now, he just wants a minute to catch his breath.

“Cunt, you have nothing but hell ahead of you.  There will be no let up.  Today is about breaking you in.  Tomorrow will begin your life of pain.  We have a shitload planned for you.  I don’t know how long it will be for you to with us, but each day we will strip away what made you a man, a human. 

“You know, when we put a slave up for auction, we have transformed the fag into the best slave it could be.  We don’t do it for its wellbeing.  No, we want top dollar.  And we get top dollar.  That’s our reputation.

“But for you, I was given the instruction that your transformation should be so extreme that when you are put up for auction, without a reserve price, that you are so repulsively distorted that you are sold for the lowest amount we ever had for a slave.  That shouldn’t be a problem with all the branding, scarification, tattooing, deteething, and so on.  Your previous profession will be shared with your new owners so that they can keep up your hell. “Oh fuck.  All this talk of your pathetic life is getting me hard again.  I’m ready to begin round two.  This should last a few hours.”

[bethanythebogwitch]

My favorite magic system from a game I haven't actually played is from Mage: the Ascension. It kind of fits as both a hard magic system and a soft magic system at the same time because there are some hard rules, but its mostly very open. To become a mage you have to realize that reality is not what it seems. In MtA, reality is whatever the majority of people believe it is, known as the consensus. The consensus in modern days is pretty uniform everywhere, with small variations based on where you are, but it used to be wildly different based on the cultural beliefs of the local people. A mage is a person who realizes that the consensus isn't true reality and gains to power to act outside of its rules. Any given mage's abilities come from their own personal view of reality, known as their paradigm. A mage's magic can do basically anything, as long as it is accounted for in their paradigm. So a mage who's paradigm includes the classic Aristotelian elements can perform magic based on that, but if their paradigm doesn't include animistic spirits then they can't commune with those spirits even though other mages could based on their own paradigm. The problem with this is that the consensus doesn't like it when you go around breaking its rules and will punish mages by slapping them with an effect called paradox. Paradox can be anything from a spell failing to getting shunted into your own personal pocket universe. Nothing generates paradox like being seen doing magic by sleepers (people who are not mages and still live fully within the consensus). Most mages either only use magic around other mages or, if they need to cast around sleepers, will disguise their magic as a mundane effect. Someone throwing a fireball from their hands will generate major paradox because the consensus is that people can't do that. However if a mage holds a lighter up to a spraycan before casting their fireball, the sleepers can rationalize it as something that exists within the consensus and not as much paradox will be generated.

In the dark ages, magic was part of the consensus and mages could openly rule over the sleepers because everyone believed in magic and therefore magic was part of the consensus. In response to the tyranny of the mages, a group was formed called the League of Reason, who wanted to introduce a new form of magic to the consensus that everyone could use. This form of magic was based on logic and reason and was called science. This led to the ascension war, where the League of reason sought to remove magic and superstition from the consensus and a very loose coalition of mages called the Council of Nine Mystic Traditions want to keep magic in the consensus. And the League of Reason won. A mostly rationalistic, scientific worldview has become the consensus worldwide, forcing the Council into operating underground. The League of Reason has become the Technocracy, a worldwide secret organization ruling the world from the shadows and trying to stamp out magic and any other form of "reality deviants" to keep humanity safe, even if they have to suppress basic human imagination to do so. Notably, the earliest books for the game very much said "Traditions good, Technocracy bad", but later books went for a much more grey approach to the conflict between them, making it clear that both sides really are doing what they think is in humanity's best interest even if their ideas for how to do so are fundamentally incompatible.

What's really interesting is that science and technology really are a form of magic and technocrats are mages, even if the Technocracy would vehemently deny this. Technology is a form of magic that everyone can use because its part of the consensus and science doesn't discover new facts about the world, It creates those facts and applies them to the world. The Technocracy's super-advanced technology creates paradox just as much as magic does because personal anti-gravity suits and mass-produced clones violate the consensus just like throwing around fireballs and conjuring demons does.

Mage: the Ascension is a super fun setting because just about any fantasy or sci-fi trope can exist here. Classic pointy hat and wand wizards can battle cyborgs armed with self-replicating nanotechnology. Anti-authoritarian punks can hack your wallpaper to spy on you because they believe all reality is part of a unified mathematical whole that the internet gives us access to. A group of spacefarers can ride the luminiferous aether to mars only to encounter Aztec shamans who asked the spirits to carry them there thousands of years ago. A powerful mage can create a time loop by convincing their younger self to obtain enlightenment through the power of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Two people can have an argument over whether the guy they just met was an alien from Alpha Centauri or an elf from the Norse nine realms and both of them can be right. Animistic spirit-callers can upload themselves to the internet to combat spirits of malware. And an angry mage might just teleport you into the sun because they believe distance is just an illusion and therefore have the power to make anything go anywhere with a thought. It's a wild ride.

[districtfourmermaid]

I never knew I needed to hear about gale-sokka parallels until coming across your post. I'd love it if you could elaborate, but if not, I still wanna thank you for the mind worms cause I'm thinking about it too 🙏🏽

Thanks for asking! You're so welcome for the mind worms!

Culture/Setting

First point just for being indigenous-coded.

Deeper than that, the Southern Water Tribe is a relatively poor part of the Avatar World. Earlier in the century-long war, probably around when Gran-gran and Hama were young, they were cut off from the Northern Water Tribe, which is richer and technologically advanced thanks to having more water benders. It's an artificially imposed poverty, as the Southern Tribe's benders were exterminated by the Fire Nation. Similarly, Twelve is the poorest District in Panem, and that comes from the Capitol's control of the economy and their low-profit industry.

Family

Dead parent: Sokka's mother was killed by the Fire Nation, while Gale's dad died in a mine explosion.

Younger sister: little different, since Katara is only 1-2 years younger than Sokka, while Gale has three younger siblings ~7-14 years younger than him. But both of them are very protective of those younger siblings.

Different but similar is their absent fathers and the roles of their mothers. Gale's dad is dead, and his siblings are so young that he is more like a father to them, forced to take on that role. His mother, Hazelle, is alive and supports the family, but that is almost like how Katara, being closer in age, is also adultified by her circumstances and takes on a more motherly role in the Tribe. Sokka and Katara are both siblings and parent-like to each other in different ways. So, despite Sokka's mom being dead, he has Katara and Gran-gran to lean on in the way that Gale still has Hazelle.

With all the Southern Water Tribe men gone to war, Sokka steps up as the primary warrior in the village and protects his people, similar to Gale needing to step up and be a provider and defender of his siblings, especially Posy.

Warrior-Hunters

Sokka seems to do a significant amount of the hunting/fishing for the Tribe, like Gale. He and Gale are also warriors who rise against oppressive forces when still relatively young, though Gale is 2-3 years older than Sokka. Both of them fight from a place of justice and anti-tyranny, freedom for their people and the people of other Districts/Nations who share a common enemy.

Both are also relatively resource-oriented, responsible, and realistic. When the Gaang is traveling, Sokka is the one to ask people they meet along the way for material support and keeps them all on schedule. It's sort of like Gale in Thirteen sticking to his schedule and attending training sessions more than Katniss does. They both stay focused on what it takes to reach the end goal.

Inventors

From the early episodes, Sokka shows a knack for tinkering and making his own traps, weapons, and tools. Once he has the means, Gale is also able to employ his trapping knowledge to develop new weapons.

For both of them, this takes a darker turn. When the Gaang finds the people in the Northern Air Temple, Sokka is excited to meet the Mechanist and learn about his inventions. However, things get complicated when they discover that the Mechanist is developing weapons for the Fire Nation in exchange for safety. In this way, the Mechanist may be a little like Beetee. He reworked the Capitol's communication system about 10 years pre-canon, and that is what allows the rebels to take over the airways for propos. He is also involved in one of Gale's ideas being used in a way he had not originally intended. Gale had an idea for a double-exploding bomb, and Coin (with Beetee's help) used it against the rebels' own medics and framed the Capitol for it. Similarly, Sokka is the one to help the Mechanist edit his balloon design to work as a mode of transportation. When their prototype crashes after defending the Northern Air Temple, it is discovered and replicated by the Fire Nation. Having an idea co-opted by enemies (or enemies who look like friends) is something Gale and Sokka share.

Silly Guys

Underneath the struggles, when able to relax, Sokka and Gale are funny dudes. Sokka is much of the comic relief of the Gaang, the self-described "meat and sarcasm guy," and Gale is Mr. Dad Jokes, proudly showing Katniss the loaf of bread he shot in his introductory scene.

Romance

They've both canonically kissed girls. Gale pre-canon, but not Sokka: "I've kissed girls! You just haven't met them!" / "Who, Gran-gran? I've met Gran-gran." Gale is described by a few characters as being a looker, and apparently, the girls of Twelve were about him. Sokka also gets hit on by multiple characters, including Suki, Ty Lee, and Toph.

Sokka's first girlfriend, Yue, turned into the moon to save her people, and he loses her. She also could not be with him because she was engaged to someone else, and that was an arranged marriage for political reasons. Gale's best friend-turned-crush, Katniss, is engaged to Peeta in something like an arranged marriage for political reasons. She then becomes the Mockingjay to save Panem, and in the complexity of their story, he loses her.

After that, both of them move on. At the end of Mockingjay, Katniss assumes Gale is in Two "kissing another pair of lips." While Sokka will always have feelings for Yue, he does move on with Suki. In the Serpent's Pass, he even expresses some over-protectiveness of Suki and mournfully looks up at the moon (won't kiss Suki with Yue watching). By the end of that episode, Suki reveals that she came along to protect the Gaang.

I love them <3

[luaitl]

Pluto in Aquarius

Pluto entered Aquarius last year, and with it came many assumptions about what could happen — including the belief that Pluto in Aquarius represents a massive technological leap: an era of conscious artificial intelligences, the fusion of human and machine, brain implants, automated cities, and algorithms that predict humanity’s every move. It’s an imaginary fed for decades by science fiction, neoliberal governments, and corporations profiting off the promise of 'progress.'

But Aquarius is not linear. Aquarius does not promise constant advancement as if history were a straight line toward the peak of modernity. Aquarius is rupture. It is disobedience. Pluto is death and rebirth.

When Pluto enters Aquarius, it doesn’t strengthen what Aquarius represents — it destroys what has already become corrupted within that archetype. And what could be more corrupted today than technology itself?

We are surrounded by promises of digital freedom, yet we are more watched, manipulated, and isolated than ever before. Technology has become a tool of surveillance, emotional dependence, and hyperproductivity. The machine that once symbolized innovation now traps us in addictive cycles of dopamine, information overload, and alienation.

Aquarius cries out for freedom — not control. And Pluto, in this sign, might remind us of that in the most radical way possible: not by evolving technology, but by dismantling its current form.

The point isn’t to deny advancement — it’s to ask: Who is benefiting from this so-called “progress”? Who profits from sustaining this digitalized system that disrespects human rhythms and exploits our data?

Pluto in Aquarius might carve out space for another vision of the future, one where liberation doesn’t come from perfecting machines, but from critically stepping away from them. This Pluto could mean:

The collapse of Big Tech as models of power;

A rebuilding of natural, spiritual, symbolic technologies;

A deep critique of the myth of progress, efficiency, and the capitalist logic of “always more.”

After all, Aquarius is also the sign of anarchy, of anti-order, of the vision that shatters expectations. And the greatest shattering of expectations today might be exactly this: that instead of becoming a humanity glued to screens and brains wired to the cloud, we choose a new way of living.

What if the Aquarian spirit realizes that technology has already served its purpose? That it has become a prison? And Aquarius — cannot stand any prison.

That’s why Pluto in Aquarius may very well mark the end of the digital age as we know it — not as a regression, but as an unexpected revolution, a call to true freedom — the opposite of what we expect (which is, in itself, deeply Aquarian).

[felassan]

Dragon Age: The Veilguard settings details - Display and Graphics

This post is under a cut due to length.

This information comes directly from the game.

DA:TV menu 'pages': Display, Graphics, Audio, Controls, Gameplay, Interface, Accessibility, Other.

For some of the settings, additional detail on a specific one (the one that was selected at that particular point during the video, e.g. "Window Mode" was set to "Full Screen") is given after the general explanation/definition of the setting itself. These are in italics at the end of an entry.

DISPLAY

Display Mode

Active Monitor: Select the monitor for game display. Window Mode: Switches between full screen, windowed, and borderless windowed modes. You can press ALT+ENTER at any time to switch between full screen and windowed modes. In full screen mode, the game will play on the entire screen. Screen Resolution: Changes the game's display resolution. The game's level of on-screen detail is determined by the number of pixels it contains. Higher resolution increases the number of pixels displayed, which will result in a clearer image. This comes with a potential cost to performance. Refresh Rate: Sets how often your display will refresh game visuals. A higher refresh rate means a smoother picture, depending on your computer's hardware. Frame Rate Limit: Sets the maximum framerate for the game. VSync: Synchronizes the game's framerate with the display's refresh rate to prevent screen tearing.

Calibration

Brightness: Adjusts the intensity of the game's visuals. Makes all visuals lighter or darker. Contrast: Adjusting the contrast will change the difference in color and light between the brightest and darkest parts of the screen. Enable HDR: HDR (High Dynamic Range) mode provides enhanced color and contrast ranges. This option can only be enabled on supported displays. HDR must also be enabled in your operating system. Use the HDR Calibration option below to adjust. HDR Calibration: Launches the HDR calibration tool which adjusts the HDR settings to best match your display. The maximum brightness level should generally be adjusted to match what your HDR display will support. Measured in nits. This is only available when Enable HDR is turned on.

Upscaling

Unsample Method: Improve performance and visuals by rendering the game at a smaller resolution, then "upsampling" to a larger resolution for display. The pixels that make up the difference between the two resolutions are generated using advanced algorithms. Unsample Quality: Select the desired quality level for the upsampling method selected. DLSS Frame Generation: DLSS Frame Generation can generate additional frames that boost your overall frame rate. In order to use Frame Generation, you must have an NVIDIA RTX 40-series graphics card. NVIDIA Reflex: NVIDIA Reflex is a technology that helps reduce input latency while playing the game. In order to take advantage of NVIDIA Reflex's feature, you must have a supported NVIDIA graphics card. Anti-Aliasing: Anti-Aliasing smooths out pixels along the edge of objects that can look sharp or jagged in certain situations. Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) uses information from current and past frames to address aliasing issues. The high setting uses a large range of frames and will result in a higher quality anti-aliasing effect, but with a higher performance cost.

Resolution Scaling

Render Scale: Controls the resolution the game is rendered at relative to your display resolution. Settings below 100% may decrease visual fidelity, but can improve performance. Settings above 100% may increase visual fidelity, but can negatively impact performance. Dynamic Resolution Scaling: Automatically lowers the game's resolution in real-time to maintain the target frame rate. Target Frames Per Second: Determines the target frame rate for dynamic resolution scaling. Minimum Resolution Scale: Determines how low the resolution can be scaled when Dynamic Resolution Scaling is active.

GRAPHICS

Graphics Preset

Graphics Preset: Graphics presets are predefined configurations that simultaneously adjust multiple graphics settings to achieve a balance between visuals and performance. Restart required for setting change. Maximizes visual fidelity by setting most graphics options to their highest values. Recommended for the Ultra hardware specification tier.

Textures

Texture Quality: Selects the level of detail and resolution for textures applied to objects in the game. Higher settings will result in more detailed textures, potentially at the cost of performance. Restart required for setting change. CPU - Moderate. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Major. Texture Filtering: Adjusts the appearance of textures at varied angles and distances. Higher settings will increase texture quality, though potentially at the cost of performance. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Minor.

Light and Shadow

Lighting Quality: Adjusts the appearance of shadows, reflections, and light-scattering. Higher settings increase the visual fidelity of light effects. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Major. Contact Shadow: Contact Shadows improves the appearance of shadows when objects are close to one another. It fills gaps between objects and shadows that can occur with static lighting. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Minor. Ambient Occlusion: Ambient Occlusion is a technique to simulate soft shadows where objects are close together or where surfaces meet. This makes the scene look more realistic. Disabled when Ray-traced Ambient Occlusion is enabled. CPU - Minor. GPU - Major. VRAM - Minor. Disables Ambient Occlusion. This potentially increases performance at the cost of visual fidelity. Screen Space Reflections: Screen Space Reflections simulate reflections of objects and light on visible surfaces. Enabling this will result in high-quality reflections. Disabled when Ray-traced Reflections are enabled. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Moderate. Volumetric Lighting: Adjusts the appearance of volumetric lighting effects. This simulates how light interacts with atmospheric elements like fog, smoke, dust, and clouds. Higher settings increase the quality of these types of elements. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Minor. Sky Quality: Adjusts the appearance of the sky, clouds, and celestial bodies like the sun and moon. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Minor.

Ray Tracing

Ray-traced Reflections: Enables the use of Ray-Tracing to simulate realistic reflections of objects and light on reflective surfaces. This is a more advanced technique and requires specialized Ray Tracing compatible hardware. CPU - Major. GPU - Major. VRAM - Moderate. In selective mode, the game will only enable Ray-traced Reflections in specific areas that can best take advantage of the feature. Ray-traced Ambient Occlusion: Enables the use of Ray Tracing to simulate soft shadows where objects are close together or where surfaces meet. This makes the scene look more realistic. This is a more advanced technique and requires specialized Ray Tracing compatible hardware. CPU - Major. GPU - Major. VRAM - Moderate. Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion is always on. Ultra Ray Tracing: Enables the highest level of ray tracing effects, which provide better quality visuals at the cost of performance. This setting is available on the Ultra and Custom graphics presets and is only recommended for high-end graphics cards.

Geometry

Level Of Detail: Adjusts the distance at which objects are visible and the level of detail as they get father away from the camera. Higher settings increase the visual quality of objects at distance. Restart required for setting change. CPU - Major. GPU - Major. VRAM - Moderate. Strand Hair: Strand hair simulates the appearance and movement of individual strands of hair. Enabling this will result in more realistic and natural-looking hair. CPU - Major. GPU - Major. VRAM - Moderate. Terrain Quality: Terrain is the natural landscape and ground surfaces. Higher settings will increase the detail and overall quality. CPU - Moderate. GPU - Major. VRAM - Moderate. Terrain Decoration Quality: Adjusts the appearance and detail of terrain elements like rocks, vegetation, and other environmental objects. Higher settings will increase the quality and density of the terrain elements. CPU - Moderate. GPU - Major. VRAM - Moderate. Visual Effects Quality: Adjusts the quality and detail of visual effects throughout the game. This includes particle effects, decals, and screen effects. Higher settings will result in higher quality effects. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Moderate.

Camera Effects

Depth of Field: The Depth of Field effect causes some elements of the scene to be in focus, and others to be out of focus. This effect is generally only used in cutscenes and conversations. CPU - Minor. GPU - Minor. VRAM - Minor. Depth of Field is only enabled in cinematic sequences. Vignette: The vignette creates a subtle darkening of the image towards the edges of the screen during cinematics and gameplay. This is generally used to enhance the atmosphere of scenes. CPU - Minor. GPU - Minor. VRAM - Minor. Motion Blur: Motion Blur slightly blurs fast-moving objects. This helps make motion appear smoother and more natural. CPU - Minor. GPU - Minor. VRAM - Minor. Post Processing Quality: Adjusts the overall quality of the post process effects above like depth of field, bloom and motion blur. Higher settings will result in higher quality effects. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Minor. Field of View: Adjusts the field of view, which changes how much of the game world is visible during gameplay. A higher field of view allows you to see more of the game world. CPU - Major. GPU - Major. VRAM - Moderate.

[source]

[bnhaobservation]

Technological progress in BNHA

So, this post was inspired by how, in replay to this post @donquixotehomura said:

And the fact that it was stated that the appearance of quirks had caused society’s science to be slowed down due to the chaos “we would have been able to take interstellar trips/travel by now” or something among those lines, yeah the initial chaos would have caused that but then using quirks and such science should have been catapulted into very advanced levels, like with the damn technology for hero support and the science fiction technology levels in UA (honestly they can move buildings, have force fields, the robots etc).

There are people with intelligence quirks, people with technology quirks, and many quirks that could seriously advance science really quickly, I guess no one thought of it cause… We have super powers now… Ig

Also like the century or two is a long enough time for technology to advance fast if we use the same rate technology advances in our modern day world (the more science advances the easier/faster it is for more science to advance) then yeah in this amount of time there should have been much more science and most certainly much more quirk based science…. What I’m saying is someone would have invented a way to nullify quirks if even temporarily on top of putting regular science back on track.

Like here I’ll reference the meta dampeners from the Flash TV series (Arrow Verse, CW) the meta humans appeared only in one city, and while we’re never given a solid count of how many there are we know that there are about 200 give or take that choose to become criminals and about 10 or 20 of the revolving door of meta heroes that work with the Flash, all that and Cisco and the Government (well ARGUS) invented a ton of shit to counter Meta Humans, Meta Dampeners that can be put all over facilities, the “boot” a device Cisco invented, basically a meta cuff bazooka (I can’t really explain it but you can look it up), the meta cuffs that were a thing given to the Flash in star laps from like, basically month one, Meta Prisons I mean there is the repurposed Pipeline for the Particle Accelerator in Star Laps that was used but then apparently Iron Heights now has their own Meta Wing with Meta Dampeners in the walls, cells and everything.

Yeah I know the writing in that show is also fucked and in need of divine help at this point but the in the show it all takes about a YEAR OR TWO!!! for all the anti meta human weapons and devices (I’m pretty sure I missed a few, like some energy guns that basically shock the metas, the specific ones such as speedster weapons etc)… Like… Two years…..BNHA world had 100x that amount of time and NO ONE CAME UP WITH A QUIRK DAMPENER DEVICE?!!!

I do remember the ‘Maidens’ but there are just glorified cuffs

So many things to say...

Let’s start with the Doylist explanation for why Horikoshi had characters claiming that without Quirk age starting they would be enjoying interstellar travels.

It’s clear Horikoshi wanted his story to be placed in the future but, at the same time, he wanted the future to look like present time so people dress like we do and use technology that we use.

For him it’s practical as he doesn’t have to create a futuristic setting and it helps readers to better identify with the characters in the BNHA world because, apart for the Quirk, they’re like them.

Only... he could have just said it wasn’t the future, the characters were also in 2014 but the one OF A PARALLEL REALITY in which, instead than world war 2, humanity had to deal with the birth of Quirks.

Why this would have been a better option?

Because the birth of Quirk wasn’t the equivalent to a worldwide nuclear war sometime in the 1990s has resulted in the destruction of most of civilization like in “Hokuto no Ken”, no it was merely the equivalent of a civil war.

And an ongoing war has NEVER slowed up the technological progress, it has HURRIED it up because both parties try to use improvements in technology to win over the other party. Hell, even in middle age people would invent new things when a war was starting, even if it were just a siege, even in ancient Roman age.

We even see it in the story after Japan becomes nobody’s land and the coffin in the sky and All Might’s armor are created.

Of course the losing/minority side might have had more trouble to access technology but the idea all of sudden progress is halted is ludicrous because it would require humanity to lose access to technology, as in scientists, energy sources, machineries and this doesn’t happen.

Short after Yoichi was kidnapped with see AFO in a building and all around there are artificial lights, a sign electricity is working. Bruce can run a computer and tell Kudo he now has two Quirks, meaning he also has some freshly invented machine that can tell him so.

On the other side, progress continuing doesn’t mean in 100 years we’ll enjoy interstellar travels like we do with a fly between America and Europe.

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) had plans for the plane and the helicopters but the first heavier-than-air flying machine, considered the invention of the airplane, occurred on December 17, 1903, while the first manned, free flight of a helicopter occurred on November 13, 1907. The first man went to space on April 12, 1961 but currently we’re at around only 721 people him included who managed to also travel in space.

Progress doesn’t happen simply because time passes by but because someone discovers something that allows it to happen.

Men had to depend FOR CENTURIES on fire only to light their houses until someone came up with a way to use electricity, FOR CENTURIES we had mails and messages that needed to be carried from a place to the other, then someone came up with the telegraph and the phone and now we’ve email and video calls.

So no, Quirks wouldn’t halt progress, but we’ve no way to know how far progress would have gone. Maybe it would have never been to the point of granting interstellar travels because humanity would have still missed the key invention/energy source/material needed to archive them.

So the best Watsonian explanation we could offer to the words of that ‘important guy’ Midoriya speaks about in chap 59 is that he’s a misinformed moron or that aims to spread discontent toward people with Quirk, so maybe he was one of those guys who were racist toward them.

The Doylist explanation though is that Horikoshi didn’t plan well his past which is something that occurs way too often in the story.

Now… why no one came up with a Quirk suppressing device and would it be possible to come up with one?

Quirks are fictional, it’s possible to create a Quirk suppressing device only if Horikoshi says it’s possible to do so.

It’s not a matter of science, it’s a matter of fiction, fiction that allows drugs like Trigger that give a boost to a Quirk regardless of the type of the Quirk or Quirk erasing bullets or a Quirk that erase Quirks, or a Quirk that steals Quirks but doesn’t allow for suppressing Quirk cuffs, so that people with strong Quirks once arrested are wrapped in bindings and then closed in tubes (the Iron Maidens) and then they’re kept always tied and immobilized in Tartarus with machine guns aimed at them and ready to shoot if they do so much as scratch their back.

THIS IS A NARRATIVE CHOICE, it’s not something that had to be done because there was no other way around it. I’ve a hard time thinking it never dawned on Horikoshi to create such devices (true, storywise it would have stopped a jailed AFO from communicating with his other self outside of prison but did we really need that?).

And it’s hard to explain it in a Watsonian way because we can’t claim people/governments wouldn’t be interested in having Quirk suppressing cuffs as it would be much easier and much more human to manage Villains with them… and Villains too would likely be interested in a way to suppress other people’s Quirks, and since we’ve drugs that boost Quirks, it’s hard to think they couldn’t come up with a drug that has the opposite level but can only keep people unconscious or tied.

[cucumberteapot]

Ugh! I love how so unapologetically punk this film. Obviously, there's Hobie with his battle jacket and electric guitar, and his whole Vibe™ immediately comes to mind, but the subgroups of punk are so deeply entrenched throughout the entire movie.

Like Hobie's style, in particular, reminds me so much of how British punk fashion is accumulating old, worn, even ugly pieces of clothing and turning it into something cool. It's thrift stores. It's hand-me-downs. It's customisations. It's momentos from friends. Maybe even piercings done by friends. It's about taking things from different places and making them your own - which is exactly how Hobie ends up making the dimension travel watch. Another thing is Hobie's blue laces, which I've been told is punk-code for having killed a police officer. We as audience members can go back and forth on whether ATSV is a copaganda film or has its themes, but I believe that tiny detail about Hobie is huge for a film distributed from a country that often values authoritative institutions more than it citizens.

Gwen is implicitly trans and shaves half her head, which is, from my understanding, HUGE for trans women who experience gender dysphoria. A lot of Gwen's fashion and prom dress especially reminds me of Hayley Williams in the late 2000s-early 2010s. It's very experimental, which I feel matches her age and uncertainty about being Spiderwoman, her dad, and Peter's death.

There's also a lot of concept art for Gwen's hair where her side-cut becomes an undercut and she wears it in a pony tail or bun and I just think they're so cool - D especially.

Miles G Morales' design is so heavily inspired by alternative goth fashion and techwear - a mix of combat attire and hip-hop streetwear. It's loose yet slick with it's own customisations in the crown-cut collar and the spray-paint insignia, and incorporates high-advanced technology in the mask.

It's futuristic. A what-could-be. And specifically what Miles could've been if he wasn't bit by the spider. Another cool thing, I don't know if this is related but worth pointing out, is that Prowler wears a modified (leather, bomber, varsity??) jacket. That's kinda crazy for an superhero/anti-hero suit if you think about it. Most of the time you'll see Marvel or DC characters running around in a spandex suit or (for women) almost nothing at all. But like Hobie we see how Miles G styles himself even when he's disguised. Like I wouldn't be surprised if his outfit change was just turning the jacket inside out like a sukajan jacket.

ATSV has so many characters with the own specific styles and it's really nice to see where most franchises are all or nothing when it comes to character design aesthetics.

[pharmaciopy217]

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[vivianwrite]

A Summer with the Immortal is out!

[Image description: A book cover. It’s mostly light green. In the centre is a red daylily with six petals and a long stamen shaped like a three-pronged radio antenna. Title: A Summer with the Immortal. Author: Paris Vivian. End ID.]

The Tachytelozoic Era is an age of constant change. New species appear every day. Advanced biotechnology, floral telecommunication and fungal computing and algal engineering, is everywhere. The country of Kenor, where it all began, is now home to the Verdantland - a brand-new rainforest full of altered plants and animals. Taryn Viato, a biology student at Kenor's most famous university, has been entrusted with an important task over her summer break. Acacia, the city's resident celebrity-turned-recluse (who also happens to be biologically immortal), has asked her to find the reason why his radio-lilies have been wilting. As she investigates, her own life starts changing faster than the organisms around her. An expedition to an ancient ruin site, a brush with the growing anti-Verdantland movement, and a spark of new romance all await. The mystery of the wilting lilies may not be the only one Taryn solves this lively summer. Nor do the problems she has to solve remain so small-scale. As the current of transformation rushes ever onwards, sweeping her to shores beyond her imagining, she is made to reckon with the natures of change and changelessness themselves.

After four long years, my debut novel A Summer with the Immortal is finally out! If you like:

Science fantasy

Living technology

A developing F/F romance with a meet-cute

Ancient ruins holding strange sights

An autistic MC and LI written by an autistic author

Environmental politics

Stories about the search for surety in an ever-changing world

this book is for you!

Link to purchase:

[metropolitant]

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[alethianightsong]

Atlantis: the Lost Empire subverts the "White Savior" trope so well and here's my Ted talk tangent

Atlantis: the Lost Empire is just Avatar but with a smarter story. Both films feature a young white man discovering a foreign culture, falling for the culture's princess, and saving the natives' way of life. Both films commentate on the exploitation of indigenous people for their resources. The biggest fundamental difference between Avatar and Atlantis is how the white male leads approach their scenarios. Milo Thatch is a wide-eyed scholar who just wants to learn; Jake Sullivan is a soldier infiltrating the culture so he can exploit them. Milo never had any intention of hurting/exploiting the natives but the people around him did; Jake knew the end goal was exploitation and only changed his alliance when he fell in love. Kida comes to Milo for help and he approaches her with respect not condescension; Jake has to learn the planet and its people are worthy of respect. Milo is attracted to Kida but he doesn't save her so he can get the girl; he saves her to save her people (getting the girl was a luxury and even then, it's obvious they'll take things slow cuz there's more important things than romance like reconnecting the Atlanteans with the lost parts of their culture). The Atlanteans are also not harmless, primitive natives. They had super-advanced technology ie the Leviathan that took out a modern submarine in like 2 minutes while the Navi are overtly primitive, their simplicity treated as a virtue. The Atlanteans were so advanced that they sent themselves back to the Stone Age with their war tech. This little detail keeps the Atlanteans from being hippie-dippie natives who need rescuing and make them a cautionary tale; they used to be greedy, hyper-advanced warmongers and that hubris leaves their race and culture on the verge of extinction. Both the Navi and Atlanteans have spiritual, mystical aspects to them, but the Navi are anti-tech while it's only the rediscovery of their tech that allows the Atlanteans to save themselves. The primitive life we see the Atlanteans lead is not presented as ideal; it is the death throes of a culture, a fatal stagnation at the bottom of the world. When Kida and Milo meet, it's not the typical "more advanced culture taking from the weaker culture" that has come to define first contact between societies. It's quid pro quo: we both answer, we both listen, we both come away with more not one party coming away with less. No one is humbled or talked down to. As for the antagonists of both films (Avatar and Atlantis) the antagonists of Avatar are just cardboard cutouts. The antagonists of Atlantis are just disinherited individuals coming together for a treasure hunt. There's a gag where Milo asks what each character seeks and they all say "Money" but that's not it. They each want to pursue goals unique to them and they need money to do it. When the chips are down and it's either money or NOT dooming an entire lost tribe to death, they choose saving the tribe. The main big bads, Rourke and Helga, have just spent a day walking through a ruined city where people live in the remains of their greatness and think, "Yeah, we are so stealing their technology so we can reenact the fall of their civilization on our OWN civilization. Why? Cuz capitalism." Why am I talking so much about Atlantis but not Avatar? Because Avatar lacks depth. I've watched Atlantis a thousand times on my cheap 2000s-era TV and get pulled in each time but Avatar's just a pretty screensaver playing in the background.

[mariacallous]

When the writer Amanda Hess was twenty-nine weeks pregnant with her first child, her doctor, looking at an ultrasound, “saw something he did not like.” He suspected a rare genetic condition; Hess underwent an amniocentesis and then an MRI. She sought out a second opinion—which augured catastrophe and, it turned out, was completely wrong—and a third, steadying one. Her son was eventually given a diagnosis of Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, which puts babies at higher risk for hypoglycemia and certain cancers and makes their little bodies grow fast; often, their tongues become too large for their mouths, requiring corrective surgery.

Extensive testing showed no genetic or environmental cause for her son’s condition, yet Hess felt somehow culpable. “I worried over what I had done to trigger it, over the dark secret of my body that had determined his suffering,” she writes in her memoir, “Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age” (Doubleday). Her apprehensions were reinforced by her medical chart, which logged ominous-seeming F.Y.I.s that included “Advanced maternal age” (she was thirty-five), “Teratogen exposure” (owing to a tablet of the anti-anxiety medication Ativan, taken at the six-week mark), and “Anxiety during pregnancy.” These facts revealed nothing about her baby’s prospects, yet they followed Hess around like a misdemeanor rap sheet. Immediately after her son’s birth, by C-section, a labor-and-delivery nurse turned to her—“the paralyzed, split-open, twenty-second-old mother”—and asked, “When did you stop taking the Ativan in pregnancy?”

“Second Life” is not mainly a medical odyssey but, rather, a mordant contemplation of the many screens—from ultrasounds and pregnancy-tracking apps to baby monitors and children’s TV—that reflected and mediated Hess’s experience of pregnancy and early motherhood. Through the porthole of her phone, she encountered the “freebirth” movement, made up of mothers who are skeptical of prenatal screenings and tests, hospital births, and pediatric vaccines, referring to conventional pregnancy care as “birth in captivity.” Hess developed a queasy fascination with these women. “If I had had a wild pregnancy, dismissed prenatal care as a scam, I never would have received that terrifying ultrasound,” she writes. “But I also would have denied myself the information that I needed to protect my child after he was born.” The diagnosis fortunately led Hess and her husband to a physician who specialized in Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, and to a hospital with a suitable NICU.

Hess’s book arrives at a historical moment—post-Dobbs, pro-natalist, techno-dystopian—in which both pregnant bodies and the stuff of reproduction itself have come under an extraordinary degree of scrutiny, judgment, and control. Some states routinely charge women with child neglect or endangerment for drug use during pregnancy (and even prescription medications have raised alarms). In Nebraska, a teen-ager and her mother both served time in prison after the girl took abortion drugs and delivered a stillborn infant. And many patients, including those who receive tragic prenatal diagnoses, cannot access abortion care unless they travel long distances out of state, often at great expense and even at legal risk.

Meanwhile, on the other side of what Hess calls the “reproductive technology gap,” a number of startups are touting their powers to select for maximally optimized offspring. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, is an investor in the biotech company Genomic Prediction, which offers the LifeView Embryo Health Score® Test. It claims to evaluate I.V.F. embryos for a host of polygenic conditions, including propensity for developing diabetes, certain cancers, or schizophrenia; Stephen Hsu, a co-founder of Genomic Prediction, has said that the company’s technology can also predict I.Q., but that “society is not ready for it.” A similar company, Orchid, has backing from Anne Wojcicki, the co-founder of the genetic-testing company 23andMe. “Sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies,” Orchid’s founder, Noor Siddiqui, has said. (Creating true designer babies using gene-editing tools such as CRISPR is still largely forbidden.)

In recent years, the term “snowplow parenting” has come into vogue to describe a certain strain of affluent, vigilant child-rearing, one that works to smooth an offspring’s life path at every turn. Polygenic embryo screening may represent the snowplow driven to its logical extreme: the kind of parent who can drop six figures on Ivy-feeder preschools or comprehensive college-admissions counselling might happily intervene at the embryonic stage if she can boost her future kid’s I.Q. The ascendance of such technology, and its prohibitive expense, is a boon to the Nietzschean wing of the Silicon Valley overclass, which has long suspected that all its money makes it special. Perhaps now its genetically advantaged progeny can remove all doubt.

But most parents-to-be don’t breathe that rarefied air, which swirls with false expectations and, for some, carries a whiff of eugenics. Hess, who is a critic-at-large at the Times, takes an ambivalent view even of the more ordinary, in-utero technology that offered such widely diverging predictions about her baby’s health. Her prenatal diagnosis let her create a safe harbor for her newborn, yet the question of when or whether to receive such information remains an unsettling one. When a scientist tells her that, someday soon, a test that screens for Beckwith-Wiedemann and related disorders may be available much earlier in pregnancy, Hess writes, “I wasn’t sure that I wanted it to exist. I thought about the expectant parents who might jump, scared, at an early chance to prevent kids like my son.”

The “dark secret” that Hess ruminates on, one that can haunt the pregnant body and its progeny, hearkens back to a pre-Darwinian concept known as “maternal impression”—broadly speaking, the belief that a woman’s ideas, fears, and experiences during pregnancy leave an adverse physical mark on her infant. “Early modern medical manuals understood the mother basically as a psychic inscription machine,” the historian Hannah Zeavin writes in “Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century.” “If she ate, thought, or did the wrong thing, it would be recorded in and on her developing child.” The maternal mind and body, Zeavin argues, was, historically, the ultimate transmission device, “the literal medium through whom the ‘message’ of the child had to pass into life.”

This idea, Hess writes in “Second Life,” “pitched forward through the centuries until it made its way to me.” She sees vestiges of maternal impression in how that single tab of Ativan—along with the anxiety it was meant to treat—was enshrined in her pregnancy records. “Teratogen exposure” refers to a substance that may cause malformation of an embryo; Hess notes, with dry horror, that the root “terato” means “monster,” and the suffix “-gen” is “thing that produces or causes.” “The online medical chart was supposed to be modern and scientific,” she writes. “But when I decoded its medical terminology, it said that I had created a monster.”

A largely unscientific hypervigilance about the blameworthy habits and behaviors of pregnant women is, as Hess discovers, a place of convergence for the medical establishment and the fringe-medicine crowd. At an outdoor retreat for freebirthers, she comes across a chiropractor-influencer who professes that most illnesses are created by “conflict shock”—some distressing life event that the patient has not resolved. When Hess later asks for “clues to why and how to treat” her son’s enlarged tongue, the influencer responds, in part, “The tongue is needed for speaking, sucking, and swallowing. During pregnancy did you experience a self devaluation related to one of these things? Did you need to ‘bite your tongue’?”

Although the reproductive-technology enthusiasts of Silicon Valley and beyond are not necessarily immune to such junk science, they are relatively sanguine about maternal impression. Elon Musk, who has fourteen-ish kids and has called declining birth rates “one of the biggest risks to civilization,” has fathered several of his children using surrogates and seems generally unfussed about where his sperm may roam. One of Orchid’s investor-clients told The Information that Siddiqui suggested she use a surrogate for her children, just because: “She was, like, ‘Well, this is nine months of your life, and it’s not that expensive.’ ” There is also the looming possibility of artificial wombs—which could eliminate the need for human labor altogether, bringing DOGE-like efficiency to the business of breeding.

It might come as a surprise that this tribe of biohacking control freaks is so blasé about outsourcing the work of gestating a human being to other, presumably less optimized vessels. And in fact the venture capitalists Malcolm and Simone Collins, who are the unofficial First Couple of American pro-natalism, have not used gestational surrogates for their children. Otherwise, though, they exemplify a hyper-rationalized faith in genetic determinism: that the message, in the form of DNA, trumps the medium. The Collinses have enlisted Genomic Prediction to run background checks on their embryos and another DNA-testing company to assess the data and then rank ideal candidates for onboarding according to criteria such as potential I.Q. and risk of developing anxiety or “brain fog.”

Within this paradigm of preselection, the work of raising children is, to some extent, completed upon implantation, and allows for what Malcolm calls “intrinsically low-effort parenting.” As depicted in a viral profile of the family in the Guardian last year, this parenting style accommodates unlimited iPad time at age two and the occasional smack across the face.

The Collinses demonstrate how advances in reproductive technology are resulting in unexpected political, social, and even aesthetic realignments. In many respects, they resemble the neo-Quiverfull, self-isolating, homeschooling families who populate so much of the Christian-MAHA sector of social media, and who overlap with the freebirthers who command Hess’s attention in “Second Life.” But the couple’s embrace of avant-garde science and medicine, Simone’s C-section births, and their autistic identities—Simone and two of their children have autism diagnoses—put them at odds with the same group, which rejects the medical establishment and fetishizes maternal impression and “natural” birth, and whose antipathy to vaccines is rooted in an irrational fear of autism.

The collision of these stridently individualistic ideologies is manifest in an online homeschooling platform that the Collinses developed, Parrhesia.io, which sounds like a disease in a Pynchon novel, and is, per an introductory video, “Using AI to Create a Free Alternative to the Education System.” The online marketing includes a few photographs of what we can take to be young homeschoolers using the platform, and, aptly, they all appear to be alone at their screen, as if they’d been programmed from conception for self-sufficiency.

As techno-oligarchs increasingly supplant the democratic state, its functions, and its elected representatives through undue influence and brute force, a Silicon Valley brand of carefully curated pro-natalism can begin to look like top-down social-genetic engineering, in which the children themselves are abstractions. In an illuminating suite of reporting on the frontiers of fertility for the Times, the journalist Anna Louie Sussman summed up the tech world’s view of family as one “in which children are often spoken of as a means to something else—staving off population collapse, an optimization project, a data-driven experiment—rather than an end in themselves.” But what should that end be, ideally? And what means, technological or otherwise, are allowed in reaching it? When you close your eyes and imagine your future children, what is it morally permissible to see? What should a person want when a person wants kids?

The vast majority of expectant parents in the United States don’t have access to the extreme-screening services provided by the likes of Orchid and Genomic Prediction, and thus don’t have to personally confront the ethical questions that the technology raises. But, in the last decade, first-trimester blood tests that screen for a host of chromosomal anomalies have become increasingly routine. These tests, when they detect lethal anomalies, can be a mercy for pregnant people. But Hess observes that, among the sunny promotional materials for the biomedical company Natera and its prenatal genetic-screening blood test, Panorama, “there were no pictures of babies or adults who appeared to have any condition screened by the test.” The unspoken assumption is that a patient who receives a positive test result will not want to become the parent of a child with a genetic disorder, however mild or compatible with a happy life it may be.

In “Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World,” the disability activist Jessica Slice posits that embryonic testing is a eugenic practice, and that the decision to end a pregnancy owing to an in-utero diagnosis is often “strongly influenced by medical and social ableism and misconceptions.” Like Hess, Slice supports abortion rights, but she emphasizes the intertwined histories of the reproductive-rights movement and the early-twentieth-century eugenics campaign. Eugenics, Slice writes, is essentially capitalistic in its aim to eliminate those who are perceived as a drain on the collective; as she puts it, people with disabilities “are the weakest links of capitalism.” This framework applies to how companies such as Genomic Prediction and Orchid create futures markets for babies, helping prospective parents to manage risk and calculate return on investment.

From Slice’s line of reasoning, one might infer that fewer fetuses with serious anomalies are aborted in countries where the ruthless logic of markets holds less sway over everyday life than it does in the U.S. But that does not seem to be the case in Denmark, for example, which has one of the most comprehensive and generous welfare states in the world. It also provides universal prenatal screening for Down syndrome, and more than ninety-five per cent of patients who receive a diagnosis decide to end their pregnancies (in the U.S., it’s between sixty-seven and eighty-five per cent).

This silent consensus on Down syndrome, at least in some cultures and communities, might be seen as a consequence of “velvet eugenics,” a term used by the bioethicist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson to describe “the enterprise of genetic technology and other medical interventions aimed at bringing all humans to a standard, ‘normal’ form and function.” The coinage is vivid, useful, and flawed; deluxe I.V.F. for rich people and non-invasive prenatal testing for everyone else is a matter of choice, and not comparable to the legal violence of, say, Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court case that, in 1927, upheld the state of Virginia’s right to forcibly sterilize people who were deemed intellectually disabled.

Perhaps inevitably, some critiques of velvet eugenics enfold a soft, muffled doubt about abortion rights. In 2022, a couple of months after the Supreme Court delivered its decision in Dobbs, Garland-Thomson published a paper with the philosopher Joel Michael Reynolds that seemed to endorse at least some aspects of “fetal personhood,” or the legal concept that would give a fetus constitutional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The co-authors’ nomenclature aligned with that of Clarence Thomas, who has written that abortions based on prenatal diagnoses “constitutionalize the views of the 20th-century eugenics movement.” By this logic, ending a pregnancy because of a prenatal test result might violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.

One can reject the supposition that establishing fetal personhood could be a boon to people with disabilities and still feel that there is something eerie and terribly sad about the near-unanimous verdict on Down syndrome in some countries, especially given the isolating and demoralizing effect it has on people with Down syndrome and their families. At the same time, the overwhelming result at least bespeaks equality of access to reproductive-health technology in those countries. The state of affairs in the U.S. is different. A rich mother-to-be may get to have exacting input on whether an embryo meets her standards for becoming a person; if a pregnant woman is poor or in the wrong state, she may have none at all.

Both the ancient dogma of maternal impression and the emerging ethos of Silicon Valley baby-coders offer the promise of control. But parenting is not a programming language, and a child is not an engineering problem or a structure to be built to exact specifications. If that’s what you want, you should design a night club or clone your dog. Becoming a parent, Hess writes in “Second Life,” does not comport with the desire “to control and optimize every aspect of life. Babies don’t work like that, and that’s part of what makes parenting meaningful: you do not get to choose.” What’s more, the higher and more narrowly prescribed their expectations for their children, the more unmoored parents will be once their children inevitably outgrow and defy those expectations.

The moral and emotional wreckage of these thwarted conjectures can be witnessed in Musk, who has repeatedly made the appalling quip that his daughter Vivian Wilson, who is trans, was “killed by the woke mind virus.” Most of Musk’s children are boys, which has prompted speculation that Musk is engaging in sex selection; Wilson was assigned male at birth, a designation that she likened to “a commodity that was bought and paid for” in a recent Threads post. “So when I was feminine as a child and then turned out to be transgender,” she went on, “I was going against the product that was sold.” The commodity was found to be defective, perhaps falsely advertised, but not eligible for return. The only option, it seems, was to discard it. Unfortunately for Musk, there is no genetic test to predict whether a fetus will become a trans person, or if she is at pronounced risk of contracting the woke mind virus.

Reproductive technology may assume the chrome-and-glass form of an existential time machine, zipping frictionlessly into the future to retrieve high-definition images of a premium-grade child. But we can only presume so much about a child who is not here. “Second Life” is foremost a mash note to Hess’s firstborn son, who is a complete and ongoing joy, and much of the book’s charisma is rooted in its mood of droll astonishment. “The act of photographing him was a compulsive expression of my wonder at his existence,” Hess writes. “It’s him: tap. He is here: tap. He remains: tap.” The wild fact of her son installs an epistemological brick wall between the before and after of his being, and hers: “Past-me saw a prenatal diagnosis as a tragedy; present-me knew that no tragedy had occurred.” Despite the oracular hubris of the genetic-screening vanguard, the story a parent wants has only one primary source, one reliable narrator. You have to wait for him.