The hilarious thing is, this letter is absolutely intended humourously. It's from the comic Viz, and the "Letterbocks" section regularly contains jokes and letters mocking the letters sent into newspapers.
The books of The Commonwealth Saga, by Peter F. Hamilton, have humans in the mix. They are neither the most advanced, nor the least, and the balance changes over the course of the books
Einar Solberg, lead singer of Leprous, has a unique voice. It can sound almost fragile at lower registers, very expressive.... And has incredible range.
I saw them supporting DragonForce a few years ago, and had never heard of them before - they are fantastic live, and properly won the crowd over!
I also quit with vaping, but in a roundabout way. I used to smoke, but my wife would not have me smoking indoors, and my office was likewise no smoking, so I was on perhaps 10 cigarettes a day. I switched to vaping, and still couldn't vape in the office, but my wife didn't mind me vaping at home if I restricted it to one room.
Then COVID happened, and I ended up working from home. So... Even though the amount of nicotine I was using in the vape was low, I had nothing stopping me from vaping all the time, which is what I did. I actually began feeling just as bad in terms of lung capacity when vaping as I had when I was smoking, largely because I was vaping pretty much constantly whilst awake.
One day I just had a flash of self control, and. chucked my vape, batteries, coils and all the paraphernalia. That was late 2020, and I haven't vaped or smoked since.
Weirdly, even though I ultimately went cold turkey, I do think switching to vaping from smoking helped me to quit. There was a marked improvement in my lung capacity and ability to smell during that time, and that gave me hope.
Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about it... But I somehow instinctively feel that a human being "inspired" by other works is different to a neural network being trained on a novel. I don't know that I can articulate specifically why one feels okay and the other doesn't... But that's how it feels to me.
The Speak With Dead scene I thought was well done, and the heist and sneaking into the carriage I thought was a very D&D plan...