Avatar Short Quotes

I’ve heard the stories about you, Kyoshi, and I know the things you’ve seen. What do you care if a single peasant lives or dies?” She crossed the distance between them and thrust a closed fan under his chin, stopping short of his throat. “I care more for his life than I do for yours right now,” she said, examining the growing whites of Zoryu’s eyes. “Let me make myself perfectly clear. You live on top of what I control. Your islands are surrounded by my waves. You fill your very lungs at my discretion. So if I hear any news about ‘Yun’ being executed, you will truly learn what it’s like when the spirits forsake you in the face of the elements.

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

In the OASIS, you got used to seeing freakishly beautiful faces on everyone. But Art3mis’s features didn’t look as though they’d been selected from a beauty drop-down menu on some avatar creation template. Her face had the distinctive look of a real person’s, as if her true features had been scanned in and mapped onto her avatar. Big hazel eyes, rounded cheekbones, a pointy chin, and a perpetual smirk. I found her unbearably attractive. Art3mis’s body was also somewhat unusual. In the OASIS, you usually saw one of two body shapes on female avatars: the absurdly thin yet wildly popular supermodel frame, or the top-heavy, wasp-waisted porn starlet physique (which looked even less natural in the OASIS than it did in the real world). But Art3mis’s frame was short and Rubenesque. All curves.

It's ironic that Juanita has come into this place in a low-tech, black-and-white avatar. She was the one who figured out a way to make avatars show something close to real emotion. That is a fact Hiro has never forgotten, because she did most of her work when they were together, and whenever an avatar looks surprised or angry or passionate in the Metaverse, he sees an echo of himself or Juanita - - the Adam and Eve of the Metaverse. Makes it hard to forget. Shortly after Juanita and Da5id got divorced, The Black Sun really took off. And once they got done counting their money, marketing the spinoffs, soaking up the adulation of others in the hacker community, they all came to the realization that what made this place a success was not the collision-avoidance algorithms or the bouncer daemons or any of that other stuff. It was Juanita's faces. Just ask the businessmen in the Nipponese Quadrant. They come here to talk turkey with suits from around the world, and they consider it just as good as a face-to-face. They more or less ignore what is being said -- a lot gets lost in translation, after all. They pay attention to the facial expressions and body language of the people they are talking to. And that's how they know what's going on inside a person's head-by condensing fact from the vapor of nuance. Juanita refused to analyze this process, insisted that it was something ineffable, something you couldn't explain with words. A radical, rosary-toting Catholic, she has no problem with that kind of thing. But the bitheads didn't like it. Said it was irrational mysticism. So she quit and took a job with some Nipponese company. They don't have any problem with irrational mysticism as long as it makes money. But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore. Partly, she's pissed at Da5id and the other hackers who never appreciated her work. But she has also decided that the whole thing is bogus. That no matter how good it is, the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such distortion in her relationships.

Consider," she said, "what it is, a unicorn. It is the incarnation of purity, an avatar of innocence. And here is the power of the talisman, for that state of grace which soon passes from each and every one is forever locked inside the horn, the horn become the phallus. And in the instant that it brought you, Natalie, to orgasm, you knew again that innocence, the bliss of a child before it suffers corruption." I didn't interrupt her, but all at once I got the gist. "Still, you are only a mortal woman, so what negligible, insignificant sins could you have possibly committed during your short life? Likewise, whatever calamities and wrongs have been visited upon your flesh or your soul, they are trifles. But if you survived the war in Paradise, if you refused the yoke and so are counted among the exiles, then you've persisted down all the long eons. You were already broken and despoiled billions of years before the coming of man. And your transgressions outnumber the stars. "Now," she asked, "what would you pay, were you so cursed, to know even one fleeting moment of that stainless, former existence?

Ken MacLeod, a Scottish science fiction author, describes the Singularity as “the Rapture for nerds” and in the same way Christians are divided into preterist, premillennialist, and postmillennialist camps regarding the timing of the Parousia,39 Apocalyptic Techno-Heretics can be divided into three sects, renunciationist, apotheosan, and posthumanist. Whereas renunciationists foresee a dark future wherein humanity is enslaved or even eliminated by its machine masters and await the Singularity with the same sort of resignation that Christians who don’t buy into Rapture doctrine anticipate the Tribulation and the Antichrist, apotheosans anticipate a happy and peaceful amalgamation into a glorious, godlike hive mind of the sort envisioned by Isaac Asimov in his Foundation novels. Posthumanists, meanwhile, envision a detente between Man and Machine, wherein artificial intelligence will be wedded to intelligence amplification and other forms of technobiological modification to transform humanity and allow it to survive and perhaps even thrive in the Posthuman Era .40 Although it is rooted entirely in science and technology,41 there are some undeniable religious parallels between the more optimistic visions of the Singularity and conventional religious faith. Not only is there a strong orthogenetic element inherent in the concept itself, but the transhuman dream of achieving immortality through uploading one’s consciousness into machine storage and interacting with the world through electronic avatars sounds suspiciously like shedding one’s physical body in order to walk the streets of gold with a halo and a harp. Furthermore, the predictions of when this watershed event is expected to occur rather remind one of Sir Isaac Newton’s tireless attempts to determine the precise date of the Eschaton, which he finally concluded would take place sometime after 2065, only thirty years after Kurzweil expects the Singularity. So, if they’re both correct, at least Mankind can console itself that the Machine Age will be a short one.

I provide that background to ask this: What is your Avatar? What is your idea that you absolutely know will be a game changer, the thing that keeps you up burning the midnight oil?

You should tell them,” Joscelin said shortly. “Tell them the truth. Fear and lies fester in darkness. The truth may wound, but it cuts clean.

Quantum physics points at something we all sense intuitively: that our conscious thoughts have the power to affect our actions. This book will teach you the mental precision needed to harness this power. This all sounds nice, but what does quantum physics and all this mind talk have to do with your daily life? Well, have you ever asked yourself, Who is this person I’ve become? or What can I do that could help me change and or manage my problems? Am I actually happy and at peace? How do my thoughts, feelings, and choices impact the world around me? Searching for these answers often goes two ways. Perhaps you believe you’re a prepackaged, preprogrammed genetic avatar. The fates have decided what will happen to you—there’s no fighting it. Or you believe you have some level of influence over the quality of your life, perhaps through that elusive magic elixir, that exercise regimen, that new diet, or that meditation or breathwork you just did. Or maybe you do all these things and just hope for the best—because they’re healthy and good for you and must do something, right? And you may feel good for a few hours, but what happens when things aren’t going so well? What do you do when your spouse walks mud into the carpet, that person you can’t stand at work sends you a nasty email, or your best friend has a breakdown? The 5-Step Neurocycle Good mind-management skills can take you beyond healthy but short-lived mindfulness practices, such as meditation, which help in the moment to calm and prepare the brain but often don’t address the main issues behind your thinking. Meditation may bring awareness, but what do you do with that awareness? Awareness, not managed correctly, can do more harm than good.

Aubéron and Alberîch present a complete and isolated type of “dwarf” in the medieval literatures, and they appear at a time when the predominant dwarf type in the Germanic regions was the dwarf knight (of which Laurin is the best example), while in France the predominant types were the dwarf servant or the wily dwarf. Our two figures therefore go against the grain of the literary tendencies of the time, but they are too thorough and complete to not be older in origin. When Alberîch appears in the Nibelungenlied he already has a long history, and the same must be true of Aubéron, who did not just spring up out of nowhere in the thirteenth century. The very fact that both these figures show traces of contamination speaks in favor of their antiquity. In short, everything about them reflects folkloric traditions that we know through the folktales.

What this short presentation has shown is that, in the beliefs and the mythology, size is not a pertinent criterion in the identification of dwarfs, quite simply because we are moving in a world of fluid boundaries where transformation plays a major role.

Then I went back into the house and sat for half an hour, marveling at the chaotic din that ebbed and flowed through the house as the rest of my little family got ready. It was really remarkable how complicated they could make the simplest tasks: Astor couldn’t find old socks that matched and flew into a towering miff when I suggested it didn’t matter whether they matched, since she was just going to get paint on them. Then Cody appeared in a T-shirt with a picture of SpongeBob on it and Astor began to scream that it was hers and he better take it off right now, and they fought about whose shirt it was until Rita hurried in and solved it by taking SpongeBob and giving Cody an Avatar shirt, which he wouldn’t put on because he still liked Avatar and didn’t want to get paint on it. Then Astor appeared in a pair of shorts so small they might have been denim underwear and fought Rita for the right to wear what she wanted to wear for another ten minutes.

Get to know the interface   Now that you have caught your very first Pokémon, you’re set to shape your own Pokémon future and catch them all. Back on the map, which will be the screen you visit the most, you can find various points of interest, including your character’s position. Your position on the map is updated with real-time movement in your actual surroundings. Around your character is a radius, indicated with a purple circle. You can interact with points of interest within this radius. Do note that you will only be able to interact and move around when you have an active internet connection and when the application has access to your location.   Around your character, you will see blue floating cubes: PokéStops, as well as colored buildings: gyms. We will be treating these more carefully later on in the book. On the bottom of your screen you will see three main buttons: left being your avatar, right being Pokémon that are nearby and the middle button functions as the menu.   When you tap your avatar button, you can see your character and character name, your level, your balance, a journal of your activities, your team and last but not least: your medals. Increasing your level is achieved by gaining XP, short for experience. There are various ways to gain experience, which we will cover later on in this book. In this chapter, we just want to familiarize ourselves with the interface. You can check the requirements of any achievement by simply tapping on either of them.   When you make it back to the map, we will check out the middle button next to familiarize ourselves with the main menu. There are four subdivisions in the main menu: the Pokédex, the Shop, your Pokémon and your Items. First up is the Pokédex, it contains all the Pokémon you can come across in the game numbered accordingly. Whenever you catch a Pokémon, it will be added to the Pokédex and you can check their traits by simply tapping that particular Pokémon within your Pokédex. You will be shown a brief description about the Pokémon, its possible evolutions (if applicable), the type and how many times you have encountered and caught such Pokémon.   In the Shop, you’re able to spend your Pokécoins, which is your balance or currency. Pokécoins can be acquired by maintaining one or multiple gyms, but can also be bought directly through the store for real life currency. In the Shop you can buy various items such as Poké Balls, incense, eggs, and many more items and upgrades.   The third category in the main menu shows your Pokémon. In the beginning you can carry up to 250 Pokémon and up to 9 eggs, which are also included in the Pokémon tab count. If you wish to exceed these values, you can purchase upgrades in the Shop to increase your capacity. Your Pokémon are listed with their CP, short for Combat Power and their current HP, short for Health Points. The higher a Pokémon’s combat power, the stronger this Pokémon is and the harder it would be to catch.

You know, I’ve heard my parents, throughout most of time, begging and crying about freedom. It’s pathetic. Asking for freedom is admitting that you don’t have any. And if you complain about not having it, then you’re shouting, ‘I will never be free,’ to the world. Even if you’re tied up and thrown into a dark room, you’re still free.” He paused for a short while to consider what she had said, reclining somewhat and staring at her face, which looked as though it were lit by a flashlight below. “No, I don’t understand. What you’re saying doesn’t make sense, not about any freedom worth caring about. Freedom is more than a choice between drowning and immolation. More than some cogs turning behind my mind.” “That’s a very silly way to think about it,” Sielle said. Enveloped in shadows, she inspired a chill down his spine. As if she were, in that moment, the avatar of some cosmic Pythia. “Using words like ‘more free’ and ‘less free.’ The measurements of something are not that something. And you can’t even measure how free someone is because everyone is always equally free, at all times, in all situations. There will always be different and infinite and better or worse options to choose from. The choice between water or soda, between this memory to recall or that, between extinguishing a star or not. Each requires the same freedom, not more or less. And if I thought the way you did, I’d say all those choices make me unfree, since I am forced to choose.” “So I’m free just for existing?” he asked. “Yes, in a way. All castles are made out of the playground’s sand. The only real castles are the monarchs who built them. You are free for existing with me.” He stayed silent and stared again beyond her dimmed face, which was becoming slightly damp with sweat.

May the joy of this festival brighten your life and annihilate all the ills in this world. May Maa Durga’s nine avatars bestow their blessings on your family and friends, and may the auspicious energy of this festival bring you health and happiness throughout your life. Allow the divine power to give you the strength and power you need to overcome all of life’s challenges. I wish you and your family a Happy Navratri.