Mostrando resultados por autor "Stephen Donald" en Todas las categorías

Tabloids invite us to gorge ourselves on tales of epic personal failures, and so many of us eagerly oblige. Guilty pleasures, we savor these stories most satisfactorily with a garnish of sex scandal, a dash of fiscal malfeasance, and a generous dollop of social corruption. Cup your ears and shade your eyes now. Peer into the gloom of your neighbor’s windows to eavesdrop. Such twisted threads weave life’s strange tapestries. Of tragically flawed characters, here find deplorable examples, and of losers, legions.

1943. World War II. The U.S. government drafted him out of his life of normalcy and complacency into the life of a United States Marine Corps officer. After intensive training, he would serve during some of the bloodiest assaults of the war. The violent rigors of combat would teach him the rules of long-term survival amid the most lethal fighting in human history. Those who failed to learn these lessons would not return home to their families.

In a utopian future, humanity divides itself into two kinds. The vast majority of citizens represent the first kind, and they are as physically flawless as they are psychologically perfect. Second-kind live apart, confined to the Deviant Compartment. They are the last damaged remnants of a primitive past defined by genetic ambiguity and reproductive anarchy. They are also humanity's last hope.

Matriculating across that stage, nothing betrayed the Texas sand behind his ears, though his stiff, high collar hid a neck roasted red by long hours spent laboring beneath August sunshine. Despite his best intentions, family and friends irrationally perceive this success as betrayal and they shun him when he returns home, the prodigal son made good. Yet his life will ultimately depend upon the true loyalty of these same vital people from his past when his research unearths The McCormick Network.

Simian Wynwood opened Simian’s Gate by recording first contact with alien intelligence. Within weeks, civilization rapidly changed. Renewable energy, resolved. Global pollution, remediated. Cancer, cured. Eighteen months later, six-and-a-half billion people lay withered in death, victims of a technological Trojan horse. In the aftermath, survivors divide, hunter and hunted. Extinction looms. No one will survive Simian’s Way.

The worst of the worst, he is notorious even within a notorious system. When the most violent prison riot in the history of human corrections threatens to bring down a prison’s walls, this consummate gangster will trade inside information for removal of his tattoos, one image at a time. Afterward, he will become a different man. Only a clean skin can provide the key to his cage.

The plight of the village is desperate and dire. Once protected by a powerful shaman, their savior has grown old and decrepit, perhaps too weak to save them from a violent storm brewing on the horizon. Though dying, one last time he must perform the ritual that appeases the storm. When she comes, the devil.

He is the worst of the worst; a perverted deviant and an elusive killer who presents himself as an old-fashioned country preacher. She is the distraught widow of a man who successfully embezzled a fortune. With her two young children, she lives amid the dilapidated ruins of a declining estate named Slate Gardens, where rumor insists three million dollars remains hidden. Beguiled by the preacher's psychotic manipulations, the widow takes him into her home as her second husband and a malign father to her vulnerable son and daughter. She longs for companionship and love. He craves only profit.

Insomnia is a special kind of torture. Its short-term effects are something everyone experiences from time to time, but its long-term effects are known only to an unfortunate few. After months of restlessness, a chronically sleepless man loses the ability to differentiate between nightmares, daydreams, and reality. Then, while wandering a slumbering city in this dysfunctional condition, he discovers a sinister secret.

During his service as an intern at the SETI Project, Simian Wynwood fatefully records “first contact” with an alien intelligence. Within months, this so-called SETI-Tech seizes control of nearly every aspect of civilization when humankind foolishly opens Simian's Gate. Perversely efficient in the aftermath, an alien-incepted Terminus Signal drives roving clans of homicidal lunatics to exterminate Immune survivors to a last number. During the course of their apocalyptic odyssey, one such band of desperate survivors must form life-and-death bonds strong enough to withstand Simian's Walk. ...

Spoken aloud, poetry is the ultimate masochistic mouthwash. Used regularly, it will sponge your brain and fire your breath. So, crack these covers, sip, swish, and rinse. In time, your silly sense of well-being will slip away, and your brain germs will never feel the same way again.

If the trials of childhood form the adult, then Stanley Newberry is growing into a grotesquely misshapen lump of a thing. All the popular people tell him so. Since he first met his classmates in grade school, Fat Stanley has singly borne the brunt of their endless insults, taunts, and abuses. This school year, his dedicated torturers have fabricated their most elaborate ruse to date. Fat Stanley will not survive it and in the aftermath a guilty few will envy the dead.

Quickly and easily learn to create vibrant, believable, durable and reproduceable images, videos, music, and voice tracks using textual prompts for artificially intelligent generative systems! This brief guide includes a list of basic rules of composition accompanied by an illustrated instruction manual that will teach the curious reader how to create outstanding multimedia content using any generative AI system (such as Aitubo, MS Designer, etc...). This quick study includes everything the novice needs to know to get started and then progress to the creation of award-winning images, videos...

Declared missing-in-action while serving in Afghanistan, her eldest son's disappearance leaves a massive whole in this mother's life. Her misery cannot be assuaged by human sympathy or the keepsakes of memories. Many refuse to believe that a mother's love for her children can transcend time. She and her son know the truth.

On a lonely plot of land in the middle of a desolate night, a forlorn man sits drinking and smoking on his porch as he watches a sinister shadow slowly crossing the abandoned rows of a forgotten farm. While a damaged siphon pump works rhythmically in the distance, he ponders the nature of destiny and fate. Welcome or no, some visitors never knock.

Not everyone in war-torn Europe believed in bigotry and hatred. A few human beings remained, hidden and camouflaged within the guise of Nazism and fanaticism. This is the story of one such old man, a railyard, and tiny scraps of paper drifting on the wind, each bearing a desperate last message from the dead. This really happened. It didn't have to happen, but it really, really did.

In this vision of the future, the most prestigious vacation money can buy is a trip to a corporate planet overgrown with a jungle wilderness. There, wealthy tourists gird armor and fantastically powerful weapons to hunt strange chimeras through an endless forest. These beasts are all genetically engineered to be fierce, bloodthirsty, and difficult to kill. On a shout of "RECOM!", instinctively turn to fight or run for your life!

In a dystopian future, humankind has lost its love of violence. Peace has so long ruled the land that we have lost all means of confronting the resurgence of a genocidal revolution, which threatens to reduce human society to a state of chaos and anarchy. Only one defense stands between safety and oblivion. They are genetically modified warriors, bred and born to fight. They are Reapers.

A thousand years ago, stoic Norsemen built resilient longboats from wood and iron. Through four centuries of conquest, in these robust vessels countless Viking adventurers set forth from homelands of ice and snow to claim victory or Valhalla along far western horizons. Cast into a vast, hostile ocean aboard a small longboat, a handful of stoic Norse mercenaries gamble their lives in pursuit of freedom and fortune. All are bound for horizons of history, inevitably destined to find their eternal home among sagas of the never seen.

Song is either the progenitor or most favored partner of poetry; either may be spoken or sung. For better or worse, the vast bulk of it is scat, the fodder of time, which already stacks miles deep beneath our feet. One day, it will inevitably pile high above our rotting bones.