#( which i believe turns the next 5* into a 50/50 between the two limited weapons but i could be wrong )

[daybreakrising]

i dropped a small amount of £££ and got neuvi his weapon finally. thank fuck for early 5* pulls

it is now however almost time to take the dog out so i haven't managed any writing yet, but i'm gonna dive into it later \o/

[eschatologyguy]

SEQUENCE OF END TIME EVENTS

(An alternative exigetical view of the Eschatological timeline)

1. "Birth pains" (rise of lawlessness, wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, famines, pestilences, etc.), which will get worse and worse as the day approaches. We are already in this stage of the timeline.

2. Suddenly and without warning, the Resurrection of the dead in Christ, which is shortly followed by...

3. The Harpazo or Rapture, simultaneously, of all those who are alive in Christ, to meet the Lord in the air. These two events happen at an indeterminate time prior to the unveiling of the identity of the Antichrist. These two events may happen prior to, some time during, or at the conclusion of the Psalm 83 War. It comes without any warning.

4. The Resurrected and Raptured saints are brought to the Bema Seat Judgment, where rewards are apportioned by Christ to the saints, according to their works.

5. The Psalm 83 War or the pre-false peace war between Israel and the surrounding nations, where Israel is treacherously attacked by the surrounding nations despite their having a peace covenant with the Jewish state (Oba 1:7). Israel will initially be overwhelmed, but will turn things around so that the entire Arabian peninsula falls into Israel's hands. It is at this where the burning of "rivers of pitch" with their smoke "rising forever" in Idumia (Saudi Arabia) takes place (Isaiah 34:9-10). Remember that the surrounding nations are no longer participants in the coming Magogian invasion. This is when the destruction of "mystery" Babylon and the whore which rides the beast in the wilderness happens.

6. The sudden and utter destruction of Damascus (likely nuked, rendering it uninhabitable - Isaiah 17:1), which I believe will happen during the Psalm 83 War. The reason why I believe this is because Syria is no longer listed among the participants in the Magogian invasion.

7. The unveiling of the identity of the Antichrist, who will neither be a Jew nor a European nor a Russian. He will be an ethnic Assyrian (Micah 5:5-6), just as the first world leader Nimrod was an Assyrian, who will be possessed by Satan himself (Isaiah 14). He will uphold a peace covenant "with many" for seven years (Dan 9:27). There is only one entity on the planet that consistently engages in limited time period peace treaties, and that is Isl am. In Isl am they have what is called the "Hudna", which loosely translates to "ceasefire agreement". And it, without exception, is always treacherously violated or broken before it ends. Another important thing to be aware of is that Isl am also has its own Eschatology. In their end time teaching, Muh ammed returns as the Mahdi, who becomes the leader of the entire muslim world. He will enforce a Hudna with Israel for 7 years and in the middle of it he violates it because "the trees and the stones will cry out 'there is a Jew hiding behind me; come o mu slim and cut his head off!'" Mu slims are also taught that they can capture Jewish women at this time to be their sex slaves, that is why we read this in Zechariah 14:2: "For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women RAVISHED; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city."

8. The Wormwood prophecy is fulfilled (Rev. 8:11). If this is indeed the near-Earth asteroid Apophis as Thomas Horn says he saw in a vision and heard the name "Apophis" spoken to him, then it hits the earth (April 13, 2036, the next flyby after 2029) in the first half of the last of the 70 weeks of Daniel. According to NASA, the energy released is several thousand times the yield of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukes combined. Projected kilometer-high tsunamis are expected. No wonder the CCP is desperate to annex Mount Everest by bribing the Nepalese government to redraw their map. Bunkers on Mt. Everest will be safe from these tsunamis. And no wonder Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and every other country who can afford it are scrambling to get to Mars.

9. The Antichrist is assassinated and loses an arm and an eye in the process. Through "lying wonders" he is resurrected (Zach 11:17). Imagine the AC as a swashbuckling Moshe Dayan (remember him?), minus one arm.

10. The construction of the 3rd temple, likely during the first half of the 7-year false peace. Although the role of the AC in the temple reconstruction is not mentioned in the bible, Jewish tradition holds that the "messiah" they are expecting will be able to deliver global peace and that he will be responsible for the reconstruction of the 3rd temple.

11. The prohibition of the use of the Torah among Jews, and the bible among Gentiles (Amos 8:11), likely in the first half of the 7-year false peace, when the AC will start to cruelly assert his authority over "infidels".

12. The "abomination that causes desolation" event. Likely to be a televised event, as Jews in Judea can see it as it happens. I believe this is where the 144,000 young Jewish evangelists are sent out into a dangerous world. None are lost. They are later recovered by being Harpazoed together with the Tribulation Saints at the end of the Great Tribulation.

13. Simultaneously with #12 is the gassing of the "Palestinians" in Judea by their co-religionists from the North, and the deed blamed on Israel (Isaiah 14:31), thus the warning by Jesus to those in Judea to flee posthaste to the mountains when #12 occurs. Based on the distance of their flight, the fleeing Jews will head for Petra (in Jordan, already part of Israel as Jordan will be annexed by Israel during the Psalm 83 War). There they will be protected and fed by the Lord until the end of the Great Tribulation. Some time later the antichrist's hordes will attempt to chase them to Petra, but they will be slaughtered by the Lord's angels before they can reach Petra (Rev 14:20).

14. Exactly 30 days after #12 event, enter the two witnesses written in Revelation 11:3. These would be Moses and Elijah returning in the flesh (Matt 17:3), resurrected into their mortal bodies for this special purpose of convincing the Jews to put their faith in Jesus. They will both be killed and their bodies left unburied in the streets of Jerusalem. After 3 and a half days they will be raised up to heaven already in glorified bodies, seen by people the world over. Their resurrection will likely be seen globally on television.

15. Half of Jerusalem is conquered by the antichrist and his forces. A stalemate between the "residue" of Israel and the Antichrist's forces takes place. Many among the Jews are captured and are sold as slave labor. The stalemate continues up to the end of the Great Tribulation.

16. Nearing the end of the Great Tribulation, when the final attack is made by the Magogians (later called the Scythians, and much later called the Turks) and her allies against Israel, their will be less left to defend their own countries. Which their long-time enemies the Medes (now known as the Khurds), the Chaldeans (yes, they still exist) and the other disenfranchised nations in the mountains (pl) of Ararat who were robbed of their territories at the redrawing of the map during the dismantling of the Ottoman empire in 1924. These disenfranchised nations will take this as their opportunity attack the reistablished actual Babylon (which become the new capital of the revived Ottoman empire) with smart weapons (Jer 50:9).

17. Likewise nearing the end of the Great Tribulation, the Antichrist's forces will be harassed by "ships from Chittim" or Cyprus (Dan 11:30). But Cyprus is not a Naval power!

Background: Europe already has tens of millions of Mu slims within its borders as part of the Isl amic hijra against the West. Turkey has unleashed waves of "refugees" that overflow (Dan 11:10) into Europe (research "Hijra" or Isl amic stealth invasion through immigration). Many countries' governments shall be overthrown this way (Dan 11:41). I can imagine these countries' admirals ordering their Navies to leave port to avoid being boarded and taken over by human waves. And where do they go? To a defensible island nearby: Cyprus. The Antichrist is vexed, turns around and puts his attention against these "irritants", buying Israel, who is already starting to lose the war, time. Hosea 5:15 gets fulfilled here. Note: Mu slim North Africa and Egypt will be allied with the Antichrist's Northern alliance.

18. Given this route taken by the Magogian invaders, they will have to pass through Megiddo and the Valley of Jezreel. There they are met with unceasing strong rains, winds and Hailstones (Ezek 38:22). They get bogged down, buying Israel more time to call upon the Lord. Meanwhile...

19. The unreconciled Jews undergo a Harpazo of location and are brought to the Judgment Of The Nations at Megiddo (Luke 17:34-37). They will join the Resurrection of the damned at the end of a thousand years. This Harpazo of location to judgment is soon followed by the Rapture of the Tribulation saints from the four corners of the earth to join the resurrected and Harpazoed saints at least seven years prior. It is conceivable that there will be another Bema Seat Judgment for them as well.

20: The "strangers", the "terrible of the nations" (the world's non-isl amic military powers) finally take action and are able to capture and neutralize the antichrist (Isaiah 14:16, Ezek 28:7; 31:12). The antichrist's troops are nuked (Zech 14:12). It is at this point where Satan is bound for a thousand years.

21. The "strangers", the "terrible of the nations" turn on each other. Sadly, it will be a war with no holds barred, where WMDs are used (Isaiah 29:5).

22. "The sun turns to darkness, and the moon will not give its light" heralds the return of Christ with His saints to stop the carnage. https://eschatologystudent.tumblr.com/post/628945248693960704/i-was-startled-by-how-the-sun-looks-like-as-viewed

Personal appearances would likely be made by angels to world leaders to convince or order them to desist from waging war, as was with ancient Egypt's pharoah Necho (2Chron 35:21-22), who was paid a visit but for the opposite purpose. Swords will be turned to plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. The Great Reconciliation of Hosea 6:1-2 is fulfilled. The Lord's Millennial Reign commences. "Sheep and Goat Judgment" likely takes place in the heavenlies at this juncture.

23. 7 months after the last shots are fired, a massive cleanup effort takes place, by professionals trained in the handling of Nuclear/Biological/Chemical weapons-tainted materials and bodies (Ezek 39:14) and bury them downwind East of the Dead Sea (Ezek 39:11). If they miss some bodies, travellers who find them will not touch them, but will mark their location (GPS coordinates?) for the professionals to take care of.

24. Leftover weapons (likely nuclear) will supply the energy needs of Israel for seven years (Ezek 39:9).

25. The Lord's Earthly Kingdom steadily expands as more and more nations choose to join it. This goes on until His Kingdom encompasses the whole earth. People live to be as old as trees. Those who die at a mere 100 are considered accursed. These would be those who hide their sins instead of confessing them, and will be resurrected among the damned. But it will be an age of peace and plenty. No Pride marches and BLM riots allowed 👍 👌 🙏 The prophecy "the older shall serve the younger" referring to the surviving descendants of Esau serving the descendants of Jacob gets fulfilled starting at this point.

26. At the world's end and at the closing of Christ's Millennial Reign, a repeat of the process of separating the wheat from the tares takes place (Matt 13:37-43). Satan is set loose, and the Resurrection of the Damned takes place to join the recently uprooted "tares". Satan will quickly have the resurrected damned re-arm to fight the King in Jerusalem.

27. The final war takes place, where none of fighting saints are lost (Joel 2:1-11, esp v8). Great White Throne Judgment follows.

28. The New Jerusalem comes down from heaven, and it's "all aboard!" to our true home, to our eternal state.

29. The old heaven and earth are burned up.

30. The new heavens and the new earth are created. And all the sons of God shout for joy. Repeat 😊

[notpreparedblog]

Introduction and Story

The further I get into my life, the more apparent it is that I can’t pass by any Action-RPG in hopes of recreating my experience with Diablo II. After my somewhat disappointing experience with Wolcen, both pre-release and post-release, the next attempt at a new game is Last Epoch.

As a general heads up, Last Epoch is also currently in Beta Release and is incomplete. You can check out the details at their website or on Steam for purchase.

The story of Last Epoch is unfortunately not that important in its current incomplete state. The one thing that should be known (and happens in the first ten minutes of playing) is the realization that you are basically playing through the same maps/areas in different time periods  ala Chrono Trigger. This brings up interesting ideas when it comes to time travel and seeing the same characters across multiple ages, but it also means that unless repeat locations are drastically different, it can get a bit boring. I felt that some of the repeat sections were just not varied enough to really feel like I was playing a new map area.

There’s also a reliance on highly coincidental decisions on the part of the NPC’s you are interacting with. At one point in the story, which I’ll show a screenshot for below, you are traveling with a companion to acquire an item. Before stepping into an obvious boss room, the NPC stops and, well, you’ll see below.

My opinion of story telling going into an unlikable direction.

Some instances are a bit funny and I wonder if there’s just limitations on the back end that we aren’t seeing. There is one story beat where you save a NPC on a boat with the goal of jumping off the boat to escape. Instead of just freeing the NPC and having him follow you, he says he will wait until we are ready to jump off the boat before following. You have to go to the side of the boat, click jump off, then you both appear at an island after a loading screen. The game allows NPC’s to follow you at other points, but situations like this do happen often enough to stick out as being strange.

Skills and Specializations

Last Epoch looks to have five characters available, eventually. Right now, there are four; Acolyte, Primalist, Sentinel and Mage. Each of these character types will eventually have three different master class specializations to choose from. The Mage for example has Spellblade, Sorceror and Runemaster as master classes however, only Spellblade and Sorceror are currently available. That being said, there is a lot to check out in its current state.

Here’s where things get a bit more interesting. Each character has a default passive skill tree which you’re able to put points into either from leveling up or from set quest rewards. To go along with that, each of your characters skills are planned to have a skill tree. And finally, on top of that, opening up the master class of your choosing opens up those passive skill trees for you to put your points into.

Example of what the skill tree for Hammer Throw looks like. Each skill gets 20 skills points to distribute within their trees.

The end result for setups like this should involve a lot of customization towards how the player wants to play, and in some ways I see that succeeding. Early on, I attempted a Sentinel with Hammer Throw as the main attack. Initially, hammer throw shoots in a straight line outward, then comes back to the player. Within the skill tree, you can have the hammers spiral around the player, or shoot out in a nova around the player. You can also opt to skip these skill nodes entirely and head for a more stun orientated hammer. The point is that there are options to change the way you are playing.

Items and Crafting

Items are set up in a similar way to what you may already be used to. You have your white base items without any affixes, blue magic items with 1-2 affixes, rare yellow items with 3-4 affixes, unique gold items and green set items.

Throughout your game time, you’ll inevitably pick up tons of shards. These shards are the affixes that appear on item drops. The idea with the crafting setup is to use these shards to put specific prefix or suffixes onto items (two of each for a total of four mods on an item).

Each of these item affixes are ranked between Tiers 1-5. So tier one of ‘Elemental Protection’ may be a ranged value between 25 – 50, while tier two may have a range of 50-75. You can’t just find shards and rank every affix up to tier 5 though. Each item has stability attached to it. The more unstable a weapon is from crafting, the more likely it is to fracture (can’t upgrade any more mods). This becomes a risk/reward system where you’re more than welcome to attempt a low % upgrade, but the risk is not being able to upgrade it any further.

The crafting screen in Last Epoch. This example shows Increased Health % at Tier 4, Increased Mana % at Tier 2 and Chance to Chill Attacks at Tier 1. You can add one more prefix to this item as well as upgrade the Tiers of current affixes.

Along with finding shards as item drops, you also have the ability to shatter items with desirable affixes on them to potentially receive shards of those affixes. Towards end game, this turns into a sort of mini game of knowing what rare affixes are on items so that you can pick those up, shatter them, get shards of desired affixes and put them onto your item of choice later.

You also have the ability to gamble rare items. It wasn’t uncommon for me to decide I needed new gloves for example, then gamble gloves and hope for at least 2-3 good affixes that I can work with.

I don’t dislike this system, but it also feels a bit cumbersome. There are over 100 affixes in the game and it felt impossible to really understand what is needed for the character I was playing due to tool-tips not currently being included in the game. One way you can tell is by throwing a picked up item into your crafting window. This will automatically bring up the affixes on that item to the top of your screen so that you can upgrade them. Here, they show you how many shards you have of that affix. It’s just not realistic to do that for every item.

Selling items is also awkward because they do not hold much value at all. I could pick up an entire inventory of weapons and armor only to make 1000 gold. For reference, gambling one pair of gloves could run me 1400 gold. The incentive to pick up items is to shatter them for affixes, but the act of knowing what to save outside of memory is too time consuming.

Enemies and Game Balance

Enemy types are typical for ARPGs. You have regular white mobs, blue magic mobs, gold rare mobs and then unique/named mobs or bosses. More often than not, you’ll see yourself facing down a combination of all of the above at the same time.

An interesting aspect that I noticed, was that you can’t really get away from any enemies. In most…if not every other APRG I’ve played, if you want to skip a group of enemies that have an immunity you don’t want to deal with, or a pack of stronger mobs that have an unfortunate set of affixes attached to them, just run by and eventually you don’t have to worry about them anymore. Last Epoch seems to entirely remove that idea.

The reality of this game is that you just won’t be that strong against stronger enemies until much later into the leveling process, and even there, you need to make sure your build is cohesive enough to do any real damage and make progress into the current end game.

To a certain degree, I feel like enemies can be placed into a few different categories; fodder, B-Tier, A-Tier and S-Tier. Fodder are typical filler mobs that will die within one or two hits. B-Tier include more complicated enemies with some sort of more notable mechanic like healing or shielding other enemy types. A-Tier are what you would think are the strongest mob types in the game with high health, high damage output and massive AoE attacks that must be avoided in fear of death. Lastly, S-Tier are everything that A-Tier mobs are, but multiplied.

The affix’s that mobs are given can be both interesting and frustrating. You have your basics like ‘More Health’ and ‘Higher Chance to Critical Hit’ but Last Epoch also has some that I don’t believe I’ve seen before like ‘Revives After Two Seconds’ and ‘Summons a Twin at Half Health.’

Now, I’m all for variation and difficulty in games like this. I think that my greater issue is that enemy placement when looking at these tier lists just doesn’t make sense. There are two different ways I was looking at this; story and end game.

While you’re going through the current story, difficulty seems to progress at a normal pace with spikes once you reach certain areas. Not a problem in itself, but I noticed a pattern. A large portion of the maps were turning into ‘small pathway leading to large opening’ where the large opening had a few fodder mobs, a few B-Tier mobs, and multiple A or S Tier mobs. This typically meant that for every sort of room you go into, you can be there for 20-30 seconds just burning down one of these higher tiered mobs. Once that is complete, you move to the next small path and large room where you repeat the process. It became noticeably formulaic. On my first character going through the last Act of the game, I really just felt burnt out by the time I defeated the boss and got to the end game.

I’ll go into end game a bit more soon, but for these purposes, I felt like it was the bigger offender. End game areas can be quite a mess. I’ve hit brand new monolith maps where the first large room I get to has 8+ A-Tier mobs with massive health pools and massive AoE attacks. At that point, it’s better to just die and get a new monolith map than to struggle for 5+ minutes trying to kill every one of those mobs.

Now imagine all of these things combined. You have multiple A or S tiered mobs in one location, they have affixes such as ‘More Health’ AND ‘Revives After Two Seconds’ which revives that mob at half health, and you can’t get away from them because of how mobs are attached to the player once they see you. Yikes. The experience reward for defeating one of these mobs isn’t worth the time it takes to defeat them.

Endgame

The current end game features two different aspects, arena battles and monoliths.

Monoliths: This is where you will spend the majority of your time in Last Epoch once the story mode is complete. Once you reach end game, you can click on a giant monolith which will send you to a different timeline to defeat monsters. These maps are varied and include most of what you have already seen in the main game and as far as I can tell, contains random combinations of enemies.

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Once clicking the monolith, you have the option to choose from one of two enemy modifications. One example could be ‘For the next two timelines, enemies have +25% critical strike chance’ and ‘For the next two timelines, enemies deal 12% increased damage and have 100% increased critical strike chance.’ The former is obviously better, but the latter actually gives the player higher item drop chances and higher experience earned. There is also the option to re-roll these two mods once every time you choose a timeline. This can become a gamble though as you get further along and you could be giving up a bad enemy modification for a terrible one.

As you complete more timelines, things can get hectic very fast. Early on, enemy mods may stay for two timelines then disappear, but then these modifications stay for four timelines, then seven timelines and so on. The result ends up being a giant mess of increased issues for you to deal with with the idea of more risks involved, more rewards for tackling it.

Arena Battles: Arena battles require you to first find Arena Keys from Monoliths and is exactly what it sounds like. You are in a large room with waves of enemies that come rushing towards you. Every five waves you are given access to your stash, minor item rewards and the ability to choose to end the arena or continue for another five waves.

Joining an arena battle with a found Arena Key.

Overall, this end game setup is decent. Monoliths have enough variety to not get boring too fast. Wolcen had a similar setup but lacked variety to the point to where you really only got a few different maps and a few different bosses/enemy combinations to take on.

I do wish there was another objective here besides simply leveling your character and trying to find decent items with Tier 5 affixes on them. While Wolcen’s end game is boring, the city building aspect was at least an interesting idea. Path of Exile has maps which do get redundant, but having the map Atlas gave an overarching goal to work towards while completing those maps.

Other Thoughts

Pathing: The pathing can be quite strange in Last Epoch. What I mean by that, is how your character moves to certain locations based on where your are pointing with your mouse. There were multiple occasions where I thought I was in a large open hallway and directing my character forward when he would abruptly turn around and head in the opposite direction. This also become a more noticeable issue because my character with the most investment was a Warpath using Forge Guard which seems to increase that behavior.

Bugs: Last Epoch is in Beta, there are bugs and that shouldn’t deter you from giving it a shot if you do enjoy APRGs. If the idea of being locked out of an area and needing to reload does bother you, just skip it for now. There were a few times I had entered a side area just to be locked out from returning. I would have to portal out and use the nearest waypoint to head back to where I originally was.

Harmless graphic bug that you might see while playing.

Damage Tool-tip: As it stands, besides one obscure DPS number on your character sheet which I believe is only attached to melee attacks, there’s no real damage tool-tips for your characters or skills. This leaves you guessing when trying out new items or points on your skill tree. After experiencing Wolcen and it’s skill tree nodes that were just not working, I wanted some reassurance that I wasn’t wasting piles of skill points into skills that were not benefiting my character. I’m sure this feature will be added into the game at some point.

Global Chat: Right now, Last Epoch is a single player game. However, global chat is attached to the game so that you can converse with your fellow players. My experience was a hard mix between Barrens chat from Vanilla WoW and players that genuinely want to help. Any mention of Diablo 3 meant likely crucifixion. Mention of Path of Exile meant that it was no longer stream lined enough. Wolcen, well, is still Wolcen.

Yea, global chat.

Quest Rewards: One thing that I had noticed is that quest rewards that do not result in extra idol slots or passive skills are largely a waste of time. You will receive gold and experience, but they are so insignificant that they just don’t matter. At the very least, the rewards should be increased.

Shrines: Last Epoch includes shrines that actually last for a decent amount of time and have some unique properties. Included in the shrine pool are ones that cause every attack to be a critical strike and another has a unique item drop once clicked.

One example of a shrine in Last Epoch.

Final Thoughts

I had a lot to say about enemies earlier, but I do feel that small tweaks can fix my overall issues. Some affixes need to be adjusted, some experience rewards need to be increased and damage output/mitigation needs to be looked at. All of these have numbers attached to them and I believe they are fixable and necessary to reach more of a balance.

Outside of that, I enjoy that individual skill trees have customization built in to them. You can spec into Hammer Throw and decide between your hammers coming out in a line, nova or spiral. You can spec into ‘Volcanic Orb’ and choose to instead make it a ‘Frozen Orb’ akin to Diablo II. Choices around the skills matter. One skill with one specialization tree, can seem like two or three different skills.

The trick here is to then have Unique/Set items play off these different specializations and increase the variety of things that you can do while combining all of these aspects. I didn’t see a lot of that from the thirty or so Unique/Set items that I had found. More often than not, rares with higher tiered specific mods were much better than any Unique or Set that I had found. I think that’s good for crafting, but there should also be worthy items on the other side to consider.

At the end of the day, and after playing for around 70 hours, I felt that Last Epoch is fun and worth the time to play. There’s a lot of good here, a lot more than I’ve seen out of Wolcen and a lot more user friendly than the current state of Path of Exile. I will definitely keep checking out updates to this game and see what the final product eventually looks like in comparison to now.

  Thanks for reading. I’ve written a bunch regarding Action-RPGs on this site, the following are a few of those times;

Path of Diablo: Part I, Part II, Part III

Median XL: Sigma

Wolcen: Beta Release, Full Release

First Thoughts: Last Epoch (Beta Release) The latest Action RPG that was on my list to check out. Lot of good vibes from Last Epoch and looking forward to the full release. #lastepoch #steam #arpg #wolcen #diablo #torchlight Introduction and Story The further I get into my life, the more apparent it is that I can't pass by any Action-RPG in hopes of recreating my experience with…

[thisisheffner]

Austerity, gentrification and big tunes: why illegal raves are flourishing | Music | The Guardian

It’s an hour after midnight on New Year’s Day 2020, and a stream of revellers is gathering in an alleyway next to KFC on London’s Old Kent Road. They pass between piles of car tyres and through a gap in a gate where a group, wrapped in hats and scarves, are taking £5 notes from each person who enters the yard of a recently abandoned Carpetright warehouse.

Inside, the lights are on and groups of partygoers are huddled in groups talking, waiting and smoking as a behemoth sound system and makeshift bar are constructed against one wall. Next door, in a larger abandoned warehouse that was formerly an Office Outlet, an even bigger sound system is being built.

There’s a sense of anticipation as the warehouse fills up with mohawked punks, tracksuited squatters, crusties, rude boys, accountants, graphic designers, students, and grey-haired veteran techno heads. Everyone has come together looking for the same thing: a night of loud electronic music and dancing without the constraints of a regulated night club. No closing time, no dress code, no age limit, no searches on the door.

In recent years, unlicensed underground raves like these, which are run by decentralised networks of soundsystems and party crews, have flourished across the UK as legitimate night clubs have foundered in the face of tighter licensing requirements and a population of young people with less disposable income.

In September, the drum’n’bass producer Goldie, who was awarded an MBE for his services to music in 2016, singled out illegal parties such as these as a key pillar of the UK dance music scene amid struggling clubs and increasingly corporate festivals. “Culture ain’t a thing you can put in a weekend festival,” he said. “Rave culture is thriving, but on an underground level. People want to go to fucking raves, people want to go to illegal parties.”

I played an illegal rave in a forest last night in Blackburn those kids are brilliant,there love for the music is pure! #dropjaw 🔥⚡️🙏🏼

Bryan Gee, another British hall-of-fame drum’n’bass DJ, started playing reggae at south London squat parties in the early 80s, when he was 16. Today, he is in his 50s and still plays occasionally at unlicensed raves despite regularly DJing for crowds of over 7,000 at legitimate commercial venues. “I’ve turned up to unlicensed parties over the last couple of years and been shocked by the numbers,” he says. “Some club nights spend a ton of money on advertising and can’t pull in anything like the numbers these events get.”

“Since the 80s the illegal rave scene has always been active on some level,” says John (not his real name), a member of a prolific London-based free party crew. “It’s no coincidence that the original boom in acid house free parties took place after a decade of Tory government headed by Margaret Thatcher. It’s still here now and the current political climate is one reason why it’s healthier than it’s been for a long time.”

The last couple of years have seen scores of unlicensed events across the country, from 5,000-strong mega-raves in Bristol warehouses, to three-day breakcore soundclashes on south coast beaches, to intimate psytrance parties in the woodlands of Lancashire, and multi-rig “teknivals” on Scottish wind farms. Like John, many of those involved in the free party scene believe that these events are becoming more important than ever amid the widening social divides, ongoing Tory austerity and creeping gentrification.

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The free party veteran and acid techno innovator Chris Liberator says that unlicensed raves are a way for people to take back control of their local areas, even if it is only for one night. “We are culturally in a place where normal people can’t control their environment at all,” he says. “I’ve seen the best pubs in my area turned into Starbucks – homogenous, big corporate high streets all with the same shops. There’s no space for people to live – let alone to throw events and have some fun on their own terms. There is very little cultural representation for anyone apart from the mainstream, and even the mainstream clubs are struggling to stay open.”

Police, though, maintain that these events pose “a significant risk to public order and public safety”, in the words of Metropolitan police service commander Dave Musker, who is the national lead for unlicensed music events. He describes them as “illegal, dangerous gatherings that encourage antisocial behaviour and are linked with serious criminal activity” and adds that organisers are changing the “structure” of their parties to “counter police tactics” (understandably, he refuses to detail these tactics on either side).

By 3am, hundreds of people have filled the dimly-lit warehouse. The giant sound system is thundering out a gut-shuddering set of bass-heavy jungle, and the walls are covered in an increasingly dense patchwork of graffiti tags. A heaving mass of ravers are thrashing and embracing on the thickly carpeted dancefloor in front of the speaker stacks. Around them are signs that say “20% off 1000s of carpets”.

People are risking arrest to create a space where people can come together, no matter who they are, in a country where social divides are increasing

In a era of austerity, the unlicensed rave scene offers people a low-priced alternative to legal clubs. But that’s not the main reason people attend, according to Sophie Duniam, one half of underground electronic music duo My Bad Sister, which started out MCing at illegal events. “It offers people a place where they can come together as a community without prejudice and without intimidation,” she says. “People are risking arrest just to create a space where people can come together, no matter who they are, in a country where social divides are increasing. What the Tory government, and all governments, want to do is to isolate people so they can control them. When communities are united they are stronger and they can’t be pushed around.”

Duniam says that the ability of clubs and festivals to provide a similar space for free expression has been curtailed in recent years due to more stringent attitudes towards licence requirements. Drug-related incidents have led to the closure of several clubs in recent years, including The Arches, which used to be located in Glasgow and had its nightclub licence revoked in 2015, after the death of an underage clubber. In 2016, London superclub Fabric also saw its licence taken away for five months, following the death of two 18-year-olds after taking drugs on the premises. It reopened in 2017 with stricter security regulations. “It’s like 1920s prohibition in America,” Duniam says of the legal clubbing scene. “When we perform at Fabric all of the punters are searched and have their passports photocopied before they are allowed into the club – and you can get chucked out for having a vape.”

Many believe the rave scene is filling a void left after a decline in grassroots venues, defined by the mayor of London’s office as those that focus mainly on music, and play an important role in local communities or as a hub for musicians. In July, figures revealed there were only 100 grassroots music venues in the capital, 30% fewer than in 2007. It’s representative of a nationwide decline: a government select committee report published in 2019 warned that the “closure of music venues presents a significant and urgent challenge to the UK’s music industry and cultural vibrancy”.

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The Bristol-based DJ, producer and record label owner Mandidextrous, who started her career DJing at free parties in the early 2000s in Buckinghamshire, says “the innovation that happens in the underground is what fuels the commercial scene”. She also believes that the UK’s squat party scene offers a unique space for people to come together. “As a transgender woman, I’ve been two different people in the rave scene, and I have been openly welcomed throughout the whole thing. You get every single walk of life.”

It’s 10am on the Old Kent Road, New Year’s Day. A flood of new people enter the former Office Outlet warehouse from another unlicensed event, which took place in an office block on the South Bank and was shut down after police seized the sound system in the early hours. As the pale morning light streams through the skylights, hundreds of ravers are dancing to a hardtek remix of DJ Nehpets’ Bounce, Ride. A man with a wild head of grey hair is cutting intricate lines through the peripheries of a crowd of a pair of roller skates, swooping inches away from a teenager asleep on the floor wrapped up in a large yellow “Store Closing” sign.

Since the original boom in acid house parties in the late 80s, the unlicensed rave scene has been the target of media scare stories about drug overdoses and violence, but many of those who regularly attend say they feel safer than when they attend legal club nights. “Parties take place without a problem every weekend,” says Duniam, comparing them with licensed events where “people are kicked out at four in the morning, or earlier if they have done something to piss off the security. If you are a teenage girl and you haven’t got money for a cab, and the trains don’t start running until six or seven in the morning, being thrown out can leave you in a very vulnerable position. This would never happen at most illegal raves where, because no one is getting paid to look after anyone, everyone is looking out for each other as a community.”

The police claim this utopian vision is false. In 2017, two people were shot when gunmen wearing masks let off semi-automatic weapons at an illegal party in Leyton, and over the course of 2014 two teenage boys died after taking drugs at separate unlicensed raves in London. The Met’s Dave Musker says: “The obvious public risk comes from unsafe derelict buildings, overcrowding and youths being exposed to alcohol and illegal drugs in an environment which encourages excess. The revellers at these events are often unlikely to report crimes, including serious sexual assault, due to the culture of taking part in an illegal activity. Young people under the influence of alcohol or drugs are also at risk of being victims of crime or violence as they leave the venue.” He maintains the police’s priority is “to protect vulnerable people”.

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This is all a gross misrepresentation, according to Mandidextrous. “I’ve been attending illegal raves for more than 20 years, attending hundreds of illegal parties, and I have hardly seen any violence,” she says. “Any I have seen has actually come from the presence of police. If you go down any high street on a Saturday night you see bar brawls and fights on the streets; if you go to a rave, no one is fighting. Everyone is there to have a good time. Occasionally you get a few bad people – but nine times out of 10 they are marched out of the rave as soon as they do something wrong.”

The rave in Carpetright at least passes off without incident: by 9pm, the last of the equipment is being packed into vans while a handful of remaining partygoers sit around a small fire in the yard of the warehouse. Some are discussing the Tory campaign pledge to change the law on trespass and give police new powers to arrest and seize the property and vehicles of those “who set up unauthorised encampments”. The plans have been seen as an attempt to criminalise Gypsies and Travellers, and could also have ramifications for the free party scene. “Even if the laws get changed raves will carry on in some form,” says one person. “There are too many crews and too many sound systems.” As if to illustrate their point, another white van pulls up, and another crew get out to clean up the venue ahead of their own party the following weekend.

This content was originally published here.

[mobilelegendsfreediamonds-blog]

History of Video Games - The First Video Game Ever Made?

As an avid retro-gamer, for quite a long time I've been particularly interested in the history of video games. To be more specific, a subject that I am very passionate about is "Which was the first video game ever made?"... So, I started an exhaustive investigation on this subject (and making this article the first one in a series of articles that will cover in detail all video gaming history).

The question was: Which was the first video game ever made?

The answer: Well, as a lot of things in life, there is no easy answer to that question. It depends on your own definition of the term "video game". For example: When you talk about "the first video game", do you mean the first video game that was commercially-made, or the first console game, or maybe the first digitally programmed game? Because of this, I made a list of 4-5 video games that in one way or another were the beginners of the video gaming industry. You will notice that the first video games were not created with the idea of getting any profit from them (back in those decades there was no Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Sega, Atari, or any other video game company around). In fact, the sole idea of a "video game" or an electronic device which was only made for "playing games and having fun" was above the imagination of over 99% of the population back in those days. But thanks to this small group of geniuses who walked the first steps into the video gaming revolution, we are able to enjoy many hours of fun and entertainment today (keeping aside the creation of millions of jobs during the past 4 or 5 decades). Without further ado, here I present the "first video game nominees":

1940s: Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device

This is considered (with official documentation) as the first electronic game device ever made. It was created by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. The game was assembled in the 1940s and submitted for an US Patent in January 1947. The patent was granted December 1948, which also makes it the first electronic game device to ever receive a patent (US Patent 2,455,992). As described in the patent, it was an analog circuit device with an array of knobs used to move a dot that appeared in the cathode ray tube display. This game was inspired by how missiles appeared in WWII radars, and the object of the game was simply controlling a "missile" in order to hit a target. In the 1940s it was extremely difficult (for not saying impossible) to show graphics in a Cathode Ray Tube display. Because of this, only the actual "missile" appeared on the display. The target and any other graphics were showed on screen overlays manually placed on the display screen. It's been said by many that Atari's famous video game "Missile Command" was created after this gaming device.

1951: NIMROD

NIMROD was the name of a digital computer device from the 50s decade. The creators of this computer were the engineers of an UK-based company under the name Ferranti, with the idea of displaying the device at the 1951 Festival of Britain (and later it was also showed in Berlin).

NIM is a two-player numerical game of strategy, which is believed to come originally from the ancient China. The rules of NIM are easy: There are a certain number of groups (or "heaps"), and each group contains a certain number of objects (a common starting array of NIM is 3 heaps containing 3, 4, and 5 objects respectively). Each player take turns removing objects from the heaps, but all removed objects must be from a single heap and at least one object is removed. The player to take the last object from the last heap loses, however there is a variation of the game where the player to take the last object of the last heap wins.

NIMROD used a lights panel as a display and was planned and made with the unique purpose of playing the game of NIM, which makes it the first digital computer device to be specifically created for playing a game (however the main idea was showing and illustrating how a digital computer works, rather than to entertain and have fun with it). Because it doesn't have "raster video equipment" as a display (a TV set, monitor, etc.) it is not considered by many people as a real "video game" (an electronic game, yes... a video game, no...). But once again, it really depends on your point of view when you talk about a "video game".

1952: OXO ("Noughts and Crosses")

This was a digital version of "Tic-Tac-Toe", created for an EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) computer. It was designed by Alexander S. Douglas from the University of Cambridge, and one more time it was not made for entertainment, it was part of his PhD Thesis on "Interactions between human and computer".

The rules of the game are those of a regular Tic-Tac-Toe game, player against the computer (no 2-player option was available). The input method was a rotary dial (like the ones in old telephones). The output was showed in a 35x16-pixel cathode-ray tube display. This game was never very popular because the EDSAC computer was only available at the University of Cambridge, so there was no way to install it and play it anywhere else (until many years later when an EDSAC emulator was created available, and by that time many other excellent video games where available as well...).

1958: Tennis for Two

"Tennis for Two" was created by William Higinbotham, a physicist working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. This game was made as a way of entertainment, so laboratory visitors had something funny to do during their wait on "visitors day" (finally!... a video game that was created "just for fun"...) . The game was pretty well designed for its era: the ball behavior was modified by several factors like gravity, wind velocity, position and angle of contact, etc.; you had to avoid the net as in real tennis, and many other things. The video game hardware included two "joysticks" (two controllers with a rotational knob and a push button each) connected to an analog console, and an oscilloscope as a display.

"Tennis for Two" is considered by many the first video game ever created. But once again, many others differ from that idea stating that "it was a computer game, not a video game" or "the output display was an oscilloscope, not a "raster" video display... so it does not qualify as a video game". But well... you can't please everyone...

It is also rumored that "Tennis for Two" was the inspiration for Atari's mega hit "Pong", but this rumor has always been strongly denied... for obvious reasons.

1961: Spacewar!

"Spacewar!" video game was created by Stephen Russell, with the help of J. Martin Graetz, Peter Samson, Alan Kotok, Wayne Witanen and Dan Edwards from MIT. By the 1960s, MIT was "the right choice" if you wanted to do computer research and development. So this half a dozen of innovative guys took advantage of a brand-new computer was ordered and expected to arrive campus very soon (a DEC PDP-1) and started thinking about what kind of hardware testing programs would be made. When they found out that a "Precision CRT Display" would be installed to the system, they instantly decided that "some sort of visual/interactive game" would be the demonstration software of choice for the PDP-1. And after some discussion, it was soon decided to be a space battle game or something similar. After this decision, all other ideas came out pretty quick: like rules of the game, designing concepts, programming ideas, and so forth.

So after about 200 man/hours of work, the first version of the game was at last ready to be tested. The game consisted of two spaceships (affectively named by players "pencil" and "wedge") shooting missiles at each other with a star in the middle of the display (which "pulls" both spaceships because of its gravitational force). A set of control switches was used to control each spaceship (for rotation, speed, missiles, and "hyperspace"). Each spaceship have a limited amount of fuel and weapons, and the hyperspace option was like a "panic button", in case there is no other way out (it could either "save you or break you").

The computer game was an instant success between MIT students and programmers, and soon they started making their own changes to the game program (like real star charts for background, star/no star option, background disable option, angular momentum option, among others). The game code was ported to many other computer platforms (since the game required a video display, a hard to find option in 1960s systems, it was mostly ported to newer/cheaper DEC systems like the PDP-10 and PDP-11).

Spacewar! is not only considered by many as the first "real" video game (since this game does have a video display), but it also have been proved to be the true predecessor of the original arcade game, as well as being the inspiration of many other video games, consoles, and even video gaming companies (can you say "Atari"?...). But that's another story, arcade games as well as console video games were written in a different page of the history of video games (so stay tuned for future articles on these subjects).

So here they are, the "First Video Game" nominees. Which one do you think is the first video game ever made?... If you ask me, I think all these games were revolutionary for its era, and should be credited as a whole as the beginners of the video gaming revolution. Instead of looking for which one was the first video game, what is really important is that they were created, period. As the creator of "Spacewar!", Stephen Rusell, once said: "If I hadn't done it, someone would have done something equally exciting or even better in the next six months. I just happened to get there first".

[sleepymarmot]

MEA liveblog #7

Spoilers!

Multiplayer

This interface is a mess. I move my mouse onto "exit lobby" and it turns into "kick player". Buttons just jump around and transform all the time.

And the APEX mission shit needs to be fixed. When you select a mission to play, don't direct me to lobbies who play the same enemy/map/difficulty but not as the mission! Join lobby, see "custom", exit lobby, select "custom game", re-select mission, join, end up in the same lobby, rinse, repeat...

At least I can end up second when I join on wave 5 as a human vanguard lol

F Human Vanguard card!

Tempest

Non-custom weapons of different rank shouldn't exist as separate items in the inventory! Unlocking a higher rank should upgrade the old item like in ME3! This stupid inventory system exists solely because of crafting! If you need inventory limits so much, let them apply only to the crafted items! I've already complained about rewards being lost with no warning if the inventory is full and it's still bullshit! 

I crafted the N7 chestpiece! 25% shield on kill (of course), 5% damage resistance, 2% shield restoration, 2% health&shield regen speed, 2% max shield. I called it "N7 Slayer X". And turns out, it was dad's armor...

Oh right, it needs a new color scheme!

Havarl

I like this ex-STG, he's talking properly.

I don't like the sound effect from Annihilation -- it's like water in my ears!

Hey Peebs, how do you immediately know where the next piece is as soon as we pick the current one?

Kadara

Here's the bar fight. Animation is not bad but has no energy.

Told the asari dancer that I'm done here and she needs to talk to the dude herself, but the quest still sends me back to him -_-

Tempest

So, Kesh was adopted?

Okay, Kalinda is 100% Marjolaine. Peebee's personal storyline is even more copy-pasted from Leliana than Drack's is copypasted from Wrex.

Aya

So many sidequests again!

The Moshae's words about the definition of victory! That's the smartest thing I've heard in this game in hours.

It's really weird to hear her talk so sweetly to me... When we first met she didn’t seem to like me.

When Vetra said people were staring at her, I couldn't resist suggesting they're just all in love...

I suggested taking people who sold their Aya slots onto the Nexus. That's not even charity -- the same ambassador gave me a task to convince angara to come there anyway! So this would kill two birds with one stone.

For the visitor who wanted contact with his family, I had to reload. The options didn't even seem too different... Got it right for the other two: gave an honest professional answer about health issues, and a confident casual answer about finding work.

Great, now I have to head back into the city to buy stuff... This is literally a fetch quest lol

Eos

Omg, the Architect is in orbit now!

The Roekaar fight in an old settlement was very chaotic and fun with Flamethrower/ED/Lance, though it'd probably be easier to just charge

Tempest

Aaaand Jaal gives me his loyalty mission. It's funny that I'm going to do my own love interest's mission last...

Jaal's LM

I continue to be unimpressed with the Roekaar being pure antagonists. :/

Didn't shoot the guy, told Jaal he was badass.

Why are loyalty missions so short?

BTW Ryder just looks wrong in N7 armor... She's not Shepard, that's not her allegiance or her story.

Tempest

Jaal, just as we're leaving Havarl you decided to invite me for a visit down there?

Turian ark

Avitus has very stylish armor

For fuck's sake, Bioware, why do you hate gay men so much?

I convinced Avitus to take the mantle. It was a very sentimental decision for Ryder -- because her situation is very similar. Her SAM and the connection he had with her father are unique, but she didn't think of that in that moment.

Nexus

"Better to find your wings as you fly" Easy for you to say, Sarissa, your predecessor wasn't a loved one

Tempest

I'd agree with Peebee about relationship and baggage, but of course I felt obligated to take the romantic option

(I don’t think there’s an option to agree with her, though, so it’s only for the best)

Voeld

Liam, Vetra, don't fight!

Whoops, sorry for leaving you to die in the purification field, Vetra

...I liked the old color scheme better. Green light looks more alien, but less pretty.

Nexus

Final memory -- here we go!

My theory was that the Archon was somehow Ellen, but that made so little sense I didn't even write it down :D This is simpler.

BTW there's finally Shepard's gender we had to select in the beginning -- in translated subtitles :D Didn't hear it even once in the audio -- could it be Bioware actually took their foreign audience into consideration? :O

Honestly, it's weird that the Reapers info is so secret... From the OT I got the impression that Shepard was yelling about it to everyone at every opportunity...

Fine, fine, you made me emotional with Liara's message.

Shit, I was expecting this decision...

I feel pretty sad now. That's all?

Peebee's LM

Oh, so that's why she lives in an escape pod :D I thought this was only a characterization thing, not a Chekhov's gun!

I said I wasn't mad, though I was a bit. But I mean Ryder *is* mad but also having the time of her life so...

Shit I just shot Kalinda instinctively lmao

Ok I replayed the entire sequence and Idk. This is really the hardest choice in the game...

I'm tempted to say "Yes, literally" :D

Since it's so hard to reaload, it's fair game to watch videos before deciding for myself. Okay, "Yes, literally" is way too harsh.

Alright, this Ryder is not going to make Peebee sad, but I've already planned a Renegade-ish playthrough with a Ryder who values knowledge over everything, so... :D

(Btw, I love that MEA's brand of a more ruthless protagonist is not "uncontrollable brute" but "intellectual snob". As tedious as this game is, I'm already super eager to play character who has those values & takes urgency of tasks seriously.)

This mission is enjoyable and the choice feels maybe the most meaningful... But it has all the classic Mass Effect problems. Kalinda sends a shitload of people to murder us, we murder them, but when she's helpless and we have a finger on the trigger all of that suddenly doesn't matter. Sidonis all over again. Sure, murdering people begging for help is bad in a lot of ways, but she did just try to kill us, a lot of times... Plus, why the fuck can't Ryder jump over and catch the Remnant thing?! That needed to be a second, Paragon interrupt after the Renegade "shoot her." And Ryder is a goddamn biotic, as is Peebee, as is Kalinda! Peebee, Pull is your first goddamn skill! It'd actually be completely plausible if the artifact had shields and/or armor and therefore immune to Pull or Singularity -- but not giving the characters even an idea to try is just stupid!

Tempest

Inviting Peebee to live with together made me revisit my room and inspired me to make some changes. You know what, I'm going to play music in my quarters and change into the short-sleeved pajamas. It's my own ship, why do I walk around it in street clothes? The jacket is stylish but too much to wear at home. I wish we had a "formal" outift for Nexus/Aya/other hubs in addition to the "casual" clothes we wear on the ship.

Shit I went to read someone's post about Peebee's LM and caught a spoilers about the romance post-LM

Addison is right, getting pregnant in that situation was irresponsible

Ah the continuity in this game. "Found more outposts"? I have every possible outpost and all planets at 100%!

"On hold: Place an outpost" bitch where

Voeld

What, there's still a cold hazard?! What was the point of the vault, then?!

Whoa, so the angara believe exaltation not just kills their people but destroys their immortal souls? Wow! That should have been said by a major character during the main story, not by an easily missed NPC!

Oh great, I died and the game refuses to load the last autosave

Dear game. Why did you create four autosaves for the same second. All glitched. Half hour of gameplay lost... God please let the last manual save work. I was sure I saved in between, but just now my PC decided that we still have daylight savings clock change when we do not, and the timestamps on all recent saves are messed up. This especially sucks because I'm trying to rush Peebee's romance because I don't know when the sex scene comes up but I want to make sure it's not when my mom is home while I play it on her PC lol

Tempest

Fuck, that was cute! And Peebee did tackle Ryder, as promised! :D I wonder what she says through Zap in the platonic version...

Addison please don't say the baby screams "like a banshee". I fucking jumped.

"Before you say anything: no PDAs" :D

Level 50! Time to craft myself a powerful new Dhan. I've been running with rank three all this time...

I love that whenever you ask about Kalinda and then return to the general dialogue tree you say "Let's talk about something else" and Peebee responds "YES. Please."

Voeld

Alright, so: the kett leaders are dissatisfied with the Archon because he hasn't reported to them recently, the communication with the kett homeworld(?) might be disrupted in general and the Scourge might be to blame.

Tempest

Damn, SAM has a pretty insightful speech about death! The only thing that can't be rationalized after experiencing it, which is why it fascinates. I actually haven't heard it explained this way before.

My movie night quest hasn't progressed since I brought Jaal his device...

Eos

Ryder watching and playing football with two giant guns floating near her hips... omg

Elaaden/Kadara

What? I'm completely confused by all these identical salarians.

I don't understand this choice. He promises to give us the intel if we let him go... what proof do we have besides his word? And how would arresting him stop us from getting intel from his computer etc?

Reloaded to see both options, chose to arrest him

Havarl

I'm not hugging Jaal's mother wtf

Ryder has surprisingly good facial animation when Jaal shows his mementos

In theory Ryder should like Jaal for being such a nerd but the only thing he makes me feel is mild irritation. His interest in "taking things apart" is an informed quality just like his supposed emotional openness. It's not reflected in his dialogue or storyline at all.

And now I'm finished with all quests in the ally category. I wanted to finish the game asap, but now that we know the patch is coming on Thursday, I'll wait for it.

Multiplayer

Extracted from Silver for the first time as Human Vanguard (level 8, rank IV)! It was against Remnant, so Observers and Destroyers were the only problem. Nullifiers are ridiculously easy for a melee character -- like Ravagers, but without acid.

Got Krogan Vanguard from a pack. Will I have to tolerate the Rage overlay?

The first game with Kroguard was going well, he's got a stong melee even though he's slow... and then wave 6/upload/Kett killed us all :(

Completely unrelated to anything, but I just realized that if you pick the romantic option in the escape pod with Peebee, they don't actually have sex. Call me stupid because that's what Peebee's initial condition is, but I thought Ryder's response changed her mind! When Ryder said "Let's not rush things" I interpreted and meant it in the emotional sense, as "It'd be dishonest to hide that I have a crush on you, but you don't owe me anything, and if you don't ready for a Serious Relationship and Grand Romance yet that's fine because I'm not either, so let's just hook up and leave reflection for later" -- which I thought was pretty sweet and interesting? Because this whole relationship to me was built on the fascinating contrast between Peebee's emotional reservations and casual/flirty attitude, and conversely, on Ryder very consciously respecting Peebee's emotional space. Maybe I just fundamentally don't understand sex and romance lmao. But if character A propositions character B, character B says they have feelings for character A, and the scene promptly fades to black, I assume they do the do because that's how these things are filmed? Only in comparison with the other option, which is actually pretty explicit, it became obvious to me that's not what the director meant. I'm pretty disappointed because I thought it was a good subversion of Jack's "either sex or romance" thing in ME2. And it messes with my headcanon/characterization... I guess I'll have to retcon it into one of the two options. I'll probably go with casual, not romantic in that case. But I just read that Peebee will tell you she's glad you said no, so... :/

Multiplayer

Failed a Silver APEX mission agains the Remnant as a human vanguard :(

Got an asari sentinel!

The patch is here, but I can't launch the game now :( This needs some work.

Ugh, I stop playing for two days and have no motivation to pick the game up again...

[ciathyzareposts]

The Legacy: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

                   The Legacy

United Kingdom

Magnetic Scrolls (developer); MicroProse (publisher)

Released 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 3 June 2020 Date Ended: 17 June 2020

Total Hours: 25 Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5) Final Rating: (to come later) Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

           Summary:

A first-person adventure game set in a haunted house, The Legacy tries to blend point-and-click adventure gameplay, with inventory-based puzzles, with the tiled movement, real-time combat, and character growth of an RPG of the Dungeon Master line. In the end, some design choices make the game not work very well as an RPG, and it has a frustrating interface. I still slightly recommend it for the satisfying story.

            *****

          For me, adventure games usually start out fun. They tend to have more immersive settings than RPGs (at least of this period), so I enjoy absorbing the backstory and lore. I start exploring and mapping. I solve a few light puzzles and begin to feel good about myself. But there almost always comes a point in which I start to find the game increasingly unwieldy–a point where it has too many rooms, too many objects, too many puzzles, to the extent that even if I’m not technically blocked, I still start to feel mired.

I reached that point with The Legacy shortly after the last session. I can point to nothing technically wrong that the game did. It just kind of exhausted me. In particular, knowing that I was going to have to travel to other dimensions started as a mildly interesting prospect, then an annoying one, then an (illogically) enraging one. I mean, this mansion is already the biggest goddamned mansion in the entire world. Seven floors of it weren’t enough?           

By the end of the game, Irene was wearing a skirt, samurai armor, and a demon mask.

         I don’t often get the same feeling with RPGs, which is why I’m tending, towards the end of my experience, to think of The Legacy as more an adventure game with RPG elements than a true hybrid. The problem is that while The Legacy does feature experience and the associated development of skills based on that experience, none of the skill-building seems to really matter. Enemies don’t get notably easier as you increase your skill with weapons. As for other skills, there’s rarely a threshold above which you must build a skill to accomplish a task. Instead, each task has a slightly higher chance of success the higher the skill. So doubling your “Mechanical” skill means you only have to try five times to unjam that weapon instead of ten. RPGs tend to feature characters that grow more markedly in power. Aside from having more resources, my Legacy character didn’t seem that much stronger at the end of the game than at the beginning.   There is one exception to that statement, and that is in the area of spells. The spellcasting system in The Legacy is so flawed that I can’t believe the developers let it out the door. The basic problem is that they’ve populated the game with about 20 interesting and useful spells, and then they make you paranoid about casting any of them by making spell power a precious resource, reclaimable only (or almost only) through the use of a limited number of magic crystals.

There are times in the game that it seems like you have way too many crystals to ever worry about running out. But then you reach the lower levels of the basement and find a dozen or so magically-locked doors that will only open to “Key of the Shadow Lord”–and not just one successful casting, but sometimes multiple castings at the highest power. There were times that a single door wiped out my entire magic bar. The paltry two crystals that I’d saved “in reserve” turned out to be laughably inadequate when I started encountering these doors. Soon, I was wishing that I had never cast a single spell the rest of the game–that I had saved all my energy for those damned doors, and all my experience for improving my skill with the spell. When I ended the game, I didn’t have a single crystal remaining–that’s how close I came to not being able to win at all, despite your warnings and despite playing (I thought) conservatively with magic.    The annoying thing is that there are some great spells, offensive and defensive, that would have been useful throughout the game. A few tweaks would have created an adventure game with an excellent RPG-style magic system, such as allowing spell points to regenerate over time, or allowing the character to rest more often to recover both health and spell points. Instead, they made a game that would put a large percentage of players in a “walking dead” situation in the last tenth of the game.       The resting system is so bizarre, in fact, that I think it must be bugged. In 25 hours of gameplay, I only got explicitly tired once, and was only able to rest twice. It’s like there was no difference between game time and real time. Similarly bugged is the food system: I was able to eat maybe four or five times, leaving a dozen or so unopened food items. I didn’t particularly want to have to eat more often (especially since food is finite), but resting is a key method of health and mana recovery in most RPGs, and a true hybrid would have been more lenient.

The story didn’t develop a lot from the summary I gave last time. The builder of the house, Elias Winthrop, made a deal with the dark god Belthegor to bind his family to service. Over the centuries, descendants of Elias, mad or evil, expanded on the house, made deals with lesser gods allied with Belthegor, and ensured Belthegor’s return to the material plane every 50 years. This event was meant to be special, with the last descendants of Winthrop’s slated for sacrifice so that Belthegor could enter the plane permanently.             

The areas of The Legacy

            The game ultimately consisted of ten 20 x 20 areas, a reasonably sized “dungeon” even for an RPG. You have a lot of latitude in the order of exploration, and given that you find items in all areas useful in others, I don’t suppose there’s a single “right” order except probably to clear the ground floor and upper floor first. In short:            

The Ground Floor introduces you to the game and its conventions, including your first crude weapons. Zombies roam the corridors; they’re easy to kill, and you find a fetish that allows you to walk past them with impunity.

The Upper Floor starts to deliver more information about the setting and its story. The area is crawling with ghosts, who can be addressed individually or en masse through the burning of the painting that binds them.

The third floor is somewhat nonsensically an Asylum with sterile hallways and padded cells. You encounter a lot more trouble with locked and secret doors on the level, which is prowled by blobs of fire, giant floating two-headed leeches, and an insane relative in a straitjacket.

The fourth floor is a Museum (though not public) of powerful artifacts. You learn here the rituals that you need to banish the dark gods, and you acquire some of your most powerful equipment. There are many puzzles that must be solved by returning plaques and items strewn about the mansion to their proper places in the museum. Enemies are floor slimes (almost impossible to step around) and these disgusting crab things, the latter of which can be destroyed en masse with a ritual involving statues.

          Returning plaques to the museum pedestals allowed me to take items on those pedestals.

            The Mausoleum is full of secret doors and has the bodies of former residents of the house, most alive and animated as skeletons. Kill one, and it rises again the next time you trespass on its bones unless you use “coffin dust” (which is in limited supply) to destroy it permanently. You have to kill all the enemies to get the Golden Torc, an artifact necessary to win the game.

              Cutting into a skeleton with a chainsaw.

            The Egyptian Tomb is full of magically-locked doors. The primary goal is to summon and destroy the Karcist–the transformed spirit of the house’s builder, Elias Winthrop. You have to fight your way through “sonic mummies,” capable of damaging you even through doors. You have to summon the Karcist with the “Chinese Coins” you find on the Asylum level, and once summoned, you can kill him in regular combat or by first finding his heart and destroying it in front of him.

            Old Elias changed his tune quickly once I showed him his heart.

         The Basement has a variety of demons and supplies you with information and weapons necessary for the lower levels. One important chamber lets you create an artifact necessary for the final level.

           Making the Eye of Agala in a basement room.

          The corridors of the Sub-Basement are patrolled by the dark god Alberoth. You have to use an astrolabe (from the museum) in an observatory in the Egyptian tomb to banish him. There are also burrowing worm creatures to kill.

The Sea Demon Caves are the home to walking fish creatures that demand human sacrifices, and their humanoid “servitors.” You have to get past the dark jellyfish god Melchior (I don’t believe you can kill him, but you can get him to ignore you with the Golden Torc). There are a number of teleporters, including an annoying one that takes you all the way back to the ground floor, but ultimately you find the exit to the Astral Plane and the final battle.

          One of the sea demons, which hopefully you can see better than I can.

            It’s notable that the game gives you several approaches for conquering each level. I adopted a more classic RPG approach and insisted on killing every enemy that could be killed, and this wasn’t much of a problem after the first half of the game. I ultimately exhausted the ammunition for most of the firearms, but on a lower level, I found a chainsaw that never seemed to run out of gas (I was mindful to turn it off after each combat, which helped)–and there are three or four gas cans in the game. The chainsaw got me through almost the entirety of the mausoleum and museum. I then followed some instructions in the museum to perform a ritual that made the ancient spirit of a samurai appear and embed his two swords with magic. His katana served me the rest of the game; few enemies survived more than two hits with it. On the same level, I also found a suit of samurai armor that served as my primary protection from then on, plus a demon mask that made me look like a lunatic but also strengthened my attacks.           

A little ritual provides the best weapons in the game.

        But the game also gives you a way around most enemies. Sometimes, they can simply be avoided, as in the sonic mummies, which will leave you alone if you find and carry the “boom box” (remember those?). Sometimes, there’s a puzzle you can solve to destroy them all at once, and sometimes there’s a weapon to which they are uniquely vulnerable. For instance, the worms in the sub-basement die quickly from blasts of rock salt from a modified shotgun. But by the time I reached this area, my katana was cleaving through everything so nicely that I barely bothered.             

Instead of fighting this servitor, I can make myself look like him by wearing his robes and putting a squid on my head (seriously).

         While you get some experience for killing individual monsters, you get more from solving puzzles, so the game doesn’t encourage you along an RPG mindset.

I misunderstood the nature of the Ethereal Plane until almost the end of the game. While I’d been seeing doors to it throughout the house–and you can open more by casting “Dimensional Portal” wherever you see a glyph on the wall–I wasn’t sure what its purpose was. I wasn’t even sure that all the portals went to the same place. I assumed it was some place I’d have to visit for a penultimate or ultimate showdown. Instead–although it has some monsters and one NPC–it’s more a method of fast travel around the game. If you take time to map the exits (which look like cubes), you can quickly get from, say, the sub-basement to the museum without having to find all the stairways. I was only an hour from winning when I realized how the plane worked and I thus missed its benefits for most of the game.         

The Ethereal Plane with one of its monsters and a portal to its left.

          A few notable encounters and puzzles:      

A “Magician of the Right Hand Path” named Charles Wenlock approached me in the Ethereal Plane. His “inner self” had been trapped there, and he needed to draw on my energies to escape. I said yes, even though I didn’t exactly have a surplus of magic power. In return, he gave me some advice for surviving the Astral Plane and the final confrontation with Belthegor, plus a spell. The spell was automatically “implanted in my mind,” so I didn’t notice which one it was.

            One of the few “role playing” choices in the game.

      In the Sea Demon caves, there was some kind of altar on which a stone was surrounded by a glass shield. Fiddling with the shield produced a message that it resonated with a particular note. This was a clue to use a flute that I’d previously found to play the same note, shattering the glass. It was still difficult to take the stone; electric tendrils going up and down two columns zapped me if I didn’t time it just right.

          Something feels Lovecraftian about this level.

        A juicy diary entry indicated that Josiah Maitland (grandson of Elias Winthrop) was poisoned by his wife for somehow “tricking [her] into marriage vows.” 

A note indicated that an entire Boston Police squad was killed when they tried to investigate the sea demon caves in the 1920s.

              The final confrontation takes place on the Astral Plane. Fire blobs are back, and you probably don’t have a fire extinguisher by this point. Even worse, teleportation cubes roam the hallways and transport you to other levels if they hit you. There are also energy barriers that require an artifact called the Eye of Agala, which you have to make in a ritual in the basement. Finally, Belthegor himself is behind an illusory wall. My magic was so low that I couldn’t explore the entire level. I had to take a save at the beginning and keep staking out in different directions, reloading if I didn’t find anything interesting, until I finally found the way to Belthegor.           

From the Sea Demons’ caves to the Astral Plain.

         Belthegor can kill you instantly if you don’t have the Golden Torc from the mausoleum. Even with it, you want to load up on all the magic resistance items and spells that you have before you enter. I don’t know if he’s immune to regular weapons or just extremely resistant, but I was only able to kill him with spells. Fortunately, the final battle is otherwise easy because your mana bar suddenly becomes inexhaustible. You just need to keep casting offensive spells (I alternated “Flames of Desolation” and “Obsidian Shards of Annihilation,” which is perhaps the greatest spell name ever) and pound away at “Elixir of Health” if your health gets low.         

I ended up fighting Belthegor three times because the game kept crashing during the final cinematic. This was the easiest of the battles. I didn’t even have to cast “Elixir of Health” once.

          Once Belthegor is defeated, a brief cinematic brings the game to a close. A storm gathers over the mansion, and its ghosts are freed or sucked up into it, depending on your interpretation.       

This is the brightest shot I could capture.

          Demonic eyes and skeletal faces appear in the clouds. Lightning bolts and tornadoes pummel the mansion until it is all destroyed or sucked away. A newspaper front page closes the game, suggesting the character was able to sell the property and finance a lengthy cruise. As the DOS prompt appears, you’re given instructions to give a special name to the final save, perhaps anticipating a sequel.

        I think that’s a little unfair to the police. It’s not their responsibility to explain the noncriminal destruction of property.

                 When I was done with the game, I reviewed some walkthroughs for what I missed. I never finished returning all of the items to the museum, including a plaque for a shuriken and a demonic skull, but it doesn’t appear that would have done me any good. The “Hand of Glory,” lit like a candle, would have kept the slimes from attacking me on the museum level. Oh, well. On the Sea Demon level, I could have gotten the servitors to avoid me by dressing like one of them, and I could have gotten the sea demons themselves to avoid me by burning an incense. I actually intuited both of these puzzles from the available clues, but by this point I was having fun just slashing everything with my katana.

          I wasted a lot of time reloading on the Astral Plane because I forgot to put on the crystal glasses Charles Wenlock gave me; they would have prevented random teleportation. There are rooms on both the Upper Level and Asylum level that I never was able to enter. I never found the spells “Iron Fist of Agatta” or “Swift Limbs of Mercury.” And I didn’t unlock most of the glyphs with “Dimension Door.” I think it’s a measure of a good game that you can skip some content and still make it.

        In a GIMLET, I give the game:

      6 points for the game world, perhaps the best part of the game. The mansion is suitably creepy, the backstory (while a bit derivative) suitably detailed. I like the way that you slowly learn the mansion’s history through scraps of notes, diary pages, letters, and so on. 

           The game’s epistolary revelations never get old.

            4 points for character creation and development. The mechanics are sound. I like that you can choose among multiple defined characters or create your own. I like that you can spend your experience directly on skills. I don’t like that the latter stages of the game require magic and thus punish you for not having invested heavily there, nor that development in other skills isn’t well-reflected in the game. This is not Quest for Glory, where you can choose your strength and role-play that type of character. With just a few tweaks, it could have been.

            Irene’s skills at the end of the game. Very few reached 50% on their bars and a couple never did anything.

           4 points for NPC interaction. Again, the mechanics are good, and I appreciated the dialogue options, but there are only a few people with whom you can interact.

          Dialogue options with an explorer in the Ethereal Plane.

          6 points for encounters and foes. This was another strong part of the game. I particularly liked that you could intuit the solution to most puzzles, but if you had trouble, some document or NPC dialogue would eventually spell it out for you. The puzzles were varied and fun, though not as much as some other adventure games I’ve enjoyed. The monsters are well-chosen for the setting and have their own strengths and weaknesses you have to figure out.

3 points for magic and combat. Combat is nothing special–hit or aim. The magic system could have been special if it hadn’t been so suppressed by the game’s miserly approach to magic points. 

          Slashing mummies on the Egyptian Tomb level.

        3 points for equipment. Most of it is puzzle-solving. You get two pieces of armor, a couple of magic upgrades, and far too many possibilities for weapons. I would have preferred the game content itself with one firearm than to lead so much specialized ammunition scattered around.

0 points for no economy.

3 points for a main quest with some side areas.

            Attacked by the dark god Melchior.

        5 points for graphics, sound, and interface. It gets almost all of those for graphics (good enough for what the game was trying to achieve) and sound, including (though I rarely rate it) a decent music score that accompanies the game rather than overwhelming it. The interface was mostly awful. Half the time you go to click on something, the game either ignores you or clicks on something else. The act of putting down a gun and equipping a spellbook sometimes took several minutes of fruitless clicking, often while an enemy was attacking. The limited inventory discourages carrying alternatives to most weapons or armor. Ideas like “document wallets” are only good if there’s enough space for all your documents. Having movable/resizable windows isn’t a bad idea, though I didn’t make much use of it. Really all I liked from the interface was the automap.

5 points for gameplay. It’s about as nonlinear as a game with “levels” could be. As with most adventure games, I’m vaguely curious to play it a second time as a speed run, but otherwise I don’t see it offering rewards for a second pass. The challenge level (aside from the magic thing) and length were just about right.

      That gives us a final score of 39. That seems about right. I definitely recommend it for its story, atmosphere, and encounters, but in the end it’s hard to call it a true “hybrid.” Its RPG side is simply too underdeveloped, and some key choices that would otherwise mark it as a good RPG turn out to be illusions. 

               There is nothing corresponding to that lower screen capture in the game.

            Andrew Greenberg (not the Wizardry co-creator) covered The Legacy in the October 1993 Computer Gaming World. His review is mostly positive, though his conclusion is an unremarkable statement that some may like it and some won’t. If you get a chance, take a look at his review (starts on Page 30). It strikes me as an example of awful writing, but the kind where it’s hard to explain exactly why it’s awful. Every sentence has an awkward or uninspired word selection, an awkward use of the passive voice, a joke that doesn’t quite work, or more words than are necessary. I don’t know; I may just be in a mood. The bigger issue is that Greenberg clearly isn’t as familiar with genre conventions as Scorpia and thus somewhat misses the point of The Legacy, which is that it’s a hybrid that manages to be a hybrid better than, say, B.A.T. but not as well as, say, Quest for Glory.

         European magazines rated it in the 70s and 80s. The best review from the conventional selection of magazines comes from the December 1992 PC Joker, which praises the interface, the sound and spell effects, and the overall attempt to hybridize the two genres. A few magazines compared it favorably to Elvira, which I would agree is probably its closest “competitor.” One German review (April 1993 Play Time) argued that too many items are scattered randomly in the house, hurting the game’s realism. I hadn’t thought of that, but in retrospect I agree. The point was made well in a more recent review by blogger Roland Zarate on “Late to the Game”: “The mansion makes [little sense] as an actual house. There are hundreds of rooms but no kitchen, the only bathrooms are on the east side of the second floor, and a fair portion of the rooms have literally nothing inside them.”

        MicroProse bought and closed Magnetic Scrolls the same year that The Legacy was released, so there was no sequel. The manual credits Jim Bambra for the “RPG system design” of the game; he later co-formed Pivotal Games and worked on mostly action titles, his credits ending in the early 2000s. Stephen Hand is given credit for the “plot design” and “adventure design.” His further credits, from several companies, are mostly action and racing games, with the notable exception of design credits on Warlords III: Reign of Heroes (1997) and Warlords III: Darklords Rising (1998). Just a few years ago, Magnetic Scrolls founder Hugh Steers co-founded Strand Games, which has re-released several Magnetic Scrolls titles for mobile devices, including The Pawn, Guild of Thieves, and Jinxter. Whether The Legacy is on their list is anyone’s guess.

          As for my list, we move on to Amberstar while I devote occasional time to finishing Final Fantasy but most of it to finishing The Black Gate. A Japanese eroge titled Mad Paradox just appeared at the bottom of the list, bringing us ever closer to finally finishing 1992.

     source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-legacy-won-with-summary-and-rating/

[kansascityhappenings]

Why are Star Wars droids so loveable? It’s science

In November 2014, a little orange and white ball named BB-8 rolled across the screen in the first “The Force Awakens” trailer, the next generation of plucky droids in the Star Wars universe.

In the short scene, the unique droid is rolling as quick as he can across the sands of Jakku. His body looks like its spinning in a million different directions, while his head somehow stays in place, antenna aimed forward like an English Pointer.

His big central eye and childlike movements and sounds evoked the same emotions we have toward babies and cute animals. BB-8 was designed to be loved.

And when they first saw him, fans thought BB-8 was a completely digital rendering. But then a practical, robotic BB-8 rolled across the stage at Star Wars Celebration in 2015. The sight, much like watching R2-D2 roll through the desert, caused another wave of wonder: Could this ever be possible in real life?

In the Star Wars universe, droids are part of everyday life. They pilot and repair ships (unless they belong to the Mandalorian), translate, navigate, hunt bounties, perform medical procedures, cook food, tend bar and act as weapons and armies during times of war.

But they also have personality. They talk back, get their feelings hurt and care for their human counterparts. Some are downright sassy.

As enamored as we are of R2-D2, C-3PO and BB-8, these kinds of droids are not part our reality. Robots assist us differently, and usually behind the scenes. If your Roomba gets stuck under the sofa, you don’t have the same endearing feeling toward it as though it were a squeaky mouse droid zipping around an Imperial Cruiser.

“At this stage, depending on what you want your robot to do, we can create an R2-D2 that can roll around and make beeps and bloops with a universal probe that can interface with things,”said Patrick Johnson, physicist and assistant teaching professor at Georgetown University. “Can it stop a trash compactor on command? Not necessarily at this time.”

Johnson, author of “The Physics of Star Wars,” cited the ease of robotic mobility from companies like Boston Dynamics, known for its lineup of robots that can act as pack mules, move boxes, sense and inspect, and even a humanoid robot named Atlas. And regarding a universal translator like C-3PO, our current analogs resemble machine learning-based services such as Google Translate and language modeling software like GPT2 that can create believable text. Google Assistant’s AI can make reservations and uses speech patterns with hesitations or “umms” to sound natural.

“These are very basic things right now, but take GPT2’s language algorithm, combine it with Google Assistant and put it in a Boston Dynamics robot and you’re dangerously close to an actual droid we would see in the Star Wars universe,” Johnson said.

However, personality is another thing altogether. At the Star Wars-themed Galaxy’s Edge portion of the Disney parks, guests can build their own droid and determine its personality by inserting a specific chip.

And the droids in Star Wars are powered by people.

Metal parts, human hearts

The legacy of Star Wars droids and their memorable personalities were forged by actors Kenny Baker and Anthony Daniels, the real people inside the droid-like suits of R2-D2 and C-3PO respectively.

C-3PO, Human Cyborg Relations, was initially supposed to sound like a New York taxi driver.

The Star Wars droid was envisioned as a fast-talking, wise-cracking robot. But when British actor and mime artist Anthony Daniels first saw a concept sketch of the golden droid by artist Ralph McQuarrie over the shoulder of George Lucas, he got a different vibe.

“Over George’s shoulder, I saw a painting. And the most extraordinary thing happened,” Daniels said in an interview for “Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy.” “It just struck me. I looked at this face, and the face looked back at me and we had this extraordinary eye contact. He’s looking right out of the picture and seemed to be saying, ‘Come be with me. The vulnerability in his face made me want to help him.”

On the set of the original “Star Wars” film also so known as “A New Hope,” the slim Daniels suited up as C-3PO and used his natural voice, which he expected it to be dubbed over by the outrageous accent Lucas wanted.

But after auditioning a number of voices and showing clips of Daniels to his friends, including Francis Ford Coppola, they all said the same thing: Keep Daniels’ voice. Free to embrace the C-3PO he had brought to life, the actor refined the voice. The result was a dramatic, easily offended and oft-stressed overdone British butler.

Similarly, Kenny Baker’s three foot, eight-inch frame was encased in R2’s metal body and he was tasked with making the droid look alive and happy. He would bounce from side to side, making R2 look animated and effervescent. Slight head turns resembled that of a child looking from fascination point to fascination point.

Ben Burtt, sound designer, recalled in “Empire of Dreams” that R2 actually turned out to be the most difficult problem to solve in the sound design for “A New Hope.” He used a small synthesizer to stand in for R2’s dialogue at first because the script only referred to R2 making a sound or beeps, but it didn’t sound alive.

As the sound team talked about R2, they realized he was a bit like a developing toddler. They made baby talk recordings, sounding out beeps and boops, and married the tones with the synthesizer.

“R2 is 50% machine and 50% organic sounds coming from the performance of a person,” Burtt said in the documentary.

Bringing up BB-8

There are many versions of BB-8. He can be animatronic, digital or practical. The one seen in that first teaser trailer is a practical effect with two puppeteers who brought BB-8 to life: Brian Herring and Dave Chapman.

“That first shot was me running behind a camera car with Dave lashed to the back of it, hanging on for dear life,” Herring said. “Dave was bouncing around on the back controlling the head, I was running like mad moving the body. And it’s one of my fondest memories.”

BB-8 looks like he’s spinning impossibly fast because Herring twisted the body slightly left and right as he moved — something animatronics wouldn’t be able to do.

Much like the legacies of Baker and Daniels, it took the quirky personalities of Herring and Chapman to bring BB-8 to life. They suited up in green onesies so their performance would be digitally removed later, leaving only BB-8 behind on the screen.

Chapman and Herring had worked together before, but 15 years passed before they were hired for their dream job together in 2013.

BB-8 was a new droid and welcoming a new generation of kids to Star Wars. Like creatures, the droids often function as comedic relief. Director J.J. Abrams and Neal Scanlan, head of creature effects, told the duo to bring ideas, gags “and be as good as you can possibly be — it will be watched for many, many years.” The pressure was on.

A metal droid has its limits — they wanted BB-8 to be likeable, but not human. Chapman was in charge of the droid’s head. Herring controlled the body. Much of the time, they had to work together as one brain.

“We keep them robotic, small, sharp and snappy,” Chapman said.

Chapman and Herring had a short amount of time with the script and the BB-8 puppet before filming began to figure out his vocabulary of movement. They had to figure out how he looked happy, sad, angry or quizzical. And it needed to fit his unique shape.

Herring studied the droid and realized it was the size of a dog and he began to shape the droid’s personality as though it was a tenacious Jack Russell Terrier. He realized that BB-8 was like Poe Dameron’s dog, which Rey rescues and reunites with his owner.

By the end of their 10 days with the droid, “we knew how that puppet worked, backwards, forwards and sideways. Between us, its two brains doing one character,” Herring said.

“BB-8 is all about precision, especially of his eyeline,” Chapman said. “Once that eye is looking at what it needs to look at, it looks like he’s in the moment. If it’s 5 centimeters off, it looks terrible.”

Tiny head movements are key because he’s a small droid, especially next to R2-D2. Large movements would make him look “wacky.” But a head tilt helped him look curious. And rattling the rods at the back of his head gives it an excited shake.

They also developed a bizarre “breathing” for the droid. When puppets stop moving, they look dead, Herring said. He used the rods that puppeteer BB-8 to keep the body slightly moving at all times — like he’s constantly correcting to keep from rolling over. If BB-8 was upset or excited, the movement would be a little faster.

Digital effects were added to some of the scenes, like the thumbs up he gives Finn. And the sound team gave him a distinctive voice, including a kind of “purring” for his breathing. BB-8 doesn’t repeat any droid beeps heard in the Star Wars universe before.

The puppeteers cited the scene in the Millennium Falcon (between Rey, Finn and BB-8) as their favorite to shoot and perform. In the scene, Rey is fixing the ship, Finn is trying to help and BB-8 is determining where his allegiance lies. BB-8 does multiple double takes and rapidly flips his gaze between Rey and Finn.

Chapman hits every eyeline, angling it just so. BB-8’s movements suggest his inner turmoil over trusting Finn.

“I think it’s our best team work,” Herring said. “And it got the biggest laugh in the movie.”

A human’s best friend

A droid with a personality is a science fiction trope that some want as a reality. But as Johnson notes, just the idea raises ethical issues. Social and chat bots have turned into the worst versions of the internet because that’s how people communicated with them.

“I feel uncomfortable when people are rude to a digital assistant, like shouting at Siri or Alexa,” Johnson said. “When would a C-3PO need to have legal protections put in place? Is it a piece of property, or an entity that has a personality? It’s not alive, so it wouldn’t have same protections as human being, but that line gets gray.”

But even something as simple as podcasts could help an AI.

“There is so much content in this world we could feed into machine learning or AI,” Johnson said. “They could learn how to speak by listening to podcasts because there is so much audio content from so many people.”

Until that complicated concept becomes a reality, the droids of Star Wars reveal what human and robotic partnerships could be like in an idealized galaxy.

When “The Rise of Skywalker” premieres this week, we’ll meet another droid: D-O. He’s made of spare droid parts, looks a bit like a rolling hairdryer, and by all accounts, becomes buddies with BB-8. And foreshadowing in the trailer makes C-3PO’s nine-film run look like it’s coming to some kind of end. In a recent trailer, he says he’s “taking one last look” at his friends. Daniels is in the gold suit again, reprising his role 42 years after it began.

“Lucas wrote a great script for these guys, but Anthony made the droids human,” Herring said. “You had this fussy English butler with a foul-mouthed plumber as his best friend. They set the mold for everything that came after, like BB-8. It’s the human qualities of the droids in the Star Wars films that make you believe them and they’re the grounding for the audience to come into those movies.”

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2019/12/17/why-are-star-wars-droids-so-loveable-its-science/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2019/12/17/why-are-star-wars-droids-so-loveable-its-science/

[dine-on-nervine]

lactated Ringer’s solution

1) Sexuality? Straight but not narrow.

2) If you could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be? Elon Musk.

3) Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 23, give me line 17. Since no electricity or batteres are used, it is shockproof, harmless to the smallest child. (Advertisement for a $7.99 pocket radio that supposedly does not require batteries, Feb 1954 Science and Mechanics magazine)

4) What do you think about most? Titties.

5) What does your latest text message from someone else say? ”which”

6) Do you sleep with or without clothes on? Without.

7) What's your strangest talent? Music trivia.

8) Girls.... (finish the sentence); Boys.... (finish the sentence) Girls are considered amazing perfect creatures but trust me, they poop and fart and pee themselves and smell sweaty and have stale breath just like you. Boys are less straight than they want you to think.

9) Ever had a poem or song written about you? Yes! T² wrote “A Fragile Wounded Hawk” and Chad wrote ”I’m Very Breathless.”

10) When is the last time you played the air guitar? Probably last night at work. Cuz that’s what we do.

11) Do you have any strange phobias? I have reasonable phobias.

12) Ever stuck a foreign object up your nose? Every one of them.

13) What's your religion? I say United Methodist but I practice something more animistic.

14) If you are outside, what are you most likely doing? Walking at the park, getting my head on straight.

15) Do you prefer to be behind the camera or in front of it? Behind, because I am not photogenic.

16) Simple but extremely complex. Favorite band? Simple because it requires no explanation: Depeche Mode.

17) What was the last lie you told? Probably “Glad to see you!” to all but one of my customers.

18) Do you believe in karma? Absolutely. Do not cross it.

19) What does your URL mean? Nervine was a sedative created in 1889 by Dr Miles of Miles Laboratories, one of the original “Mother’s Little Helper” OTC chill-outs, which was produced until 1999 -- but reformulated to remove one ingredient and then was called a sleep aid in the 1950s due to the FDA. “Dine on Nervine” rhymes so...

20) What is your greatest weakness; your greatest strength? My greatest strength is that I believe in others. My greatest weakness is that I don’t do enough to make myself more awesome.

21) Who is your celebrity crush? I won’t claim to have one but I’d really enjoy some private time with spokesmodel Jan Brehm from the local car dealership ads. Before she moved to BMW Northwest, she was the Korum Whorum.

22) Have you ever gone skinny dipping? Many times. That was the thing when I worked at the local fair, after they closed for the day I’d hop in the hot tubs with whomever was available.

23) How do you vent your anger? Used to be driving backroads with loud music.

24) Do you have a collection of anything? I have a collection of everything, and not enough storage space for it.

25) Do you prefer talking on the phone or video chatting online? I don’t video chat, so it’d have to be talking on the phone.

26) Are you happy with the person you've become? This is a work in progress but.. yeah, I’m doing better, thank you.

27) What's a sound you hate; sound you love? Sound I hate is Trump supporters echoing lies; sound I love is when my awesometastic girlfriend tells me I have nice eyes (or anything else).

28) What's your biggest "what if"? I’ve made allusions to it in the past but that blog is gone, so a very swift version: When I was 15 at camp I was in the arms of the girl I wanted to get something going with, and then her rival shoved a note in my back pocket that swayed my attention. What I’d do to go back and ignore the distraction.

29) Do you believe in ghosts? How about aliens? Both exist but not in the ways that we like to think of them.

30) Stick your right arm out; what do you touch first? Do the same with your left arm. Right... Epson scanner.  Left... my cereal bowl.

31) Smell the air. What do you smell? A fresh fart competing with a sweet sandalwood incense.

32) What's the worst place you have ever been to? The KeyBank call center in Auburn, WA. Management bitches will cut you.

33) Choose East Coast or West Coast? No question. Left siiide!

34) Most attractive singer of your opposite gender? Cia Berg of Whale or Annette Strean of Venus Hum.

35) To you, what is the meaning of life? To make others happy.

36) Define Art. That which makes you feel something when it enters your brain.

37) Do you believe in luck? I believe that statistics are no match for random good.

38) What's the weather like right now? Raining on and off.

39) What time is it? Nine minutes after eight post-meridian.

40) Do you drive? If so, have you ever crashed? I drive and I have had an accident or two.

41) What was the last book you read? How To Be A Badass by Jen Sincero.

42) Do you like the smell of gasoline?| A little.

43) Do you have any nicknames? I might. Other people call me whatever they call me. Like my high school computer teacher called me Inski, and my ex called me Piss-Ant.

44) What was the last movie you saw? In the theatre, Deadpool. At home as a torrent, Star Wars VII.

45) What's the worst injury you've ever had? Not really sure. Some pratfalls but nothing severe.

46) Have you ever caught a butterfly? Yes.

47) Do you have any obsessions right now? Apple box labels?

48) What's your sexual orientation? You asked this question as the very first item.

49) Ever had a rumor spread about you? Constantly. A few might even be true.

50) Do you believe in magic? Stage magic, yes. White magick, in limited amounts.

51) Do you tend to hold grudges against people who have done you wrong? Ask my parents, they’ll say yes. Anyone else, I try not to most of the time.

52) What is your astrological sign? Libra.

53) Do you save money or spend it? My goal is to save. But my present budget does not allow this.

54) What's the last thing you purchased? Hotdog at Costco. Before that, two ranuncula.

55) Love or lust? You’re going to have to give me more direction. What are you asking?

56) In a relationship? Yes. :-D <3

57) How many relationships have you had? There have been several.

58) Can you touch your nose with your tongue? Better, what else can I touch with my tongue?

59) Where were you yesterday? Wednesday: stayed in bed until like 9am, did some stuff around the house, went to work, got home before 9pm, eventually went to bed.

60) Is there anything pink within 10 feet of you? The pricetag on a 12x12 frame behind me.

61) Are you wearing socks right now? Not just socks, they’re SmartWool.

62) What's your favorite animal? Kitties!

63) What is your secret weapon to get someone to like you? Mad oral skills.

64) Where is your best friend? I assume that since it’s a Thursday night and his car is in the shop, he’s at home watching movies while ripping vinyl to CD.

65) Spit or swallow? (; “the difference between like and love”... It’s rude to spit.

66) What is your heritage? I don’t claim to have one.

67) What were you doing last night at 12 AM? I think I was still on the computer at the time, but if I wasn’t I was nestled in my bed.

68) What do you think is Satan's last name? Drumpf. But he changed it when he got into the States.

69) Be honest. Ever gotten yourself off? Damn straight, erry day sometimes. And you can be next.

70) Are you the kind of friend you would want to have as a friend? I definitely try to be. I am kind and generous and knowledgeable and fun.

71) You are walking down the street on your way to work. There is a dog drowning in the canal on the side of the street. Your boss has told you if you are late one more time you get fired. What do you do? Wonder why the hell I was in Sunnyside, since if I’m on the opposite side on the Cascades will I be making it across the pass and to work on time?

72) You are at the doctor’s office and she has just informed you that you have approximately one month to live. a) Do you tell anyone/everyone you are going to die? b) What do you do with your remaining days? c) Would you be afraid? I would tell no one because I like the element of surprise. I’d be liquidating my cool stuff to good homes because I never want to be a victim of Storage Wars, plus I would be throwing all caution to the wind and act hedonistic... “live like you were dying”, literally. Afraid? Petrified. But if I gotta go, sitting at home bawling about it ain’t gonna fix shit, I gots stuff to do.

73) You can only have one of these things; trust or love. Not sure how you get love without trust. Just love me.

74) What's a song that always makes you happy when you hear it? Latest one was “Just Can’t Get Enough” by Depeche Mode. That came on the radio and I was all over it.

75) What are the last four digits in your cell phone number? WROQ! \m/   (In high school my phone number was BIT-0-FaRM.)

76) In your opinion, what makes a great relationship? Trust, understanding, fidelity, humor, fun, honesty, mutual interests, compassion, and a mutual desire to be happy together in all ways.

77) How can I win your heart? Well, take off that shirt, for starts, and show me your heart.

78) Can insanity bring on more creativity? It definitely drops some artificial barriers. However, periodic mental illness such as bipolar rather than insanity is what brings a lot of creativity.

79) What is the single best decision you have made in your life so far? To let go of the past and invite in the present. (Thanks, Cara.)

80) What size shoes do you wear? Eleven and a half, roughly, depending upon manufacturer.

81) What would you want to be written on your tombstone? Remember this as you pass by As you are now, so once was I As I am now, so you will be Prepare for death and follow me Variants of this were popular for two centuries, with few examples seen before 1750 or after 1950. If I had a headstone, I’d keep people awake.

82) What is your favorite word? Oaf.

83) Give me the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word; heart. Myocardial infarction.

84) What is a saying you say a lot? Plumbing, you have a call holding on 1804. Plumbing, 1804.

85) What's the last song you listened to? Eisenfunk - Pong But on the way to finding that song, this one happened too: Suicide Commando - God Is In The Rain 86) Basic question; what's your favorite color/colors? Purple.

87) What is your current desktop picture? The trestle over the Little Naches River at Lake Bergstrom, Yakima WA.

88) If you could press a button and make anyone in the world instantaneously explode, who would it be? The guy who is trying to get us blown up by North Korea. You know the one.

89) What would be a question you'd be afraid to tell the truth on? Who the hell are you?

90) One night you wake up because you heard a noise. You turn on the light to find that you are surrounded by MUMMIES. The mummies aren't really doing anything, they're just standing around your bed. What do you do? Well, after assessing that they’re just standing around, I’d be polite since that matters as I get my clothes on, and then bid them farewell after requesting that they move along because I’m not sticking around to chat.

91) You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what's even cooler is that they endow you with the super-power of your choice! What is that power? Invisibility.

92) You can re-live any point of time in your life. The time-span can only be a half-hour, though. What half-hour of your past would you like to experience again? One comes to mind from when I was 13 that I would do differently, but the other I could speak more freely about is from the moment that hug at camp was requested to twenty minutes later when I was still standing there with her... as said in #28, I’d fix one of my biggest regrets.

93) You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be? I won’t go into detail, I will just say that there was an experience in 1990 that could have been avoided and should have been learned from... but wasn’t.

94) You have the opportunity to sleep with the music-celebrity of your choice. Who would it be? Let’s go with the folks listed in #34.

95) You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart right now. Where are you gonna go? To Craigslist to sell it.

96) Do you have any relatives in jail? Not that I am aware.

97) Have you ever thrown up in the car? Not that I am aware. My three sibs were subject to carsickness but not me.

98) Ever been on a plane? Yes, twice; have flown to Tucson and to Las Vegas.

99) If the whole world were listening to you right now, what would you say? Take your country back and impeach.

[toolsforthejourney-blog]

June 2017 Boundaries

June 2017

BOUNDARIES

To my family, friends, fans and seekers…

 I would like to write about boundaries.

  Language is an ever-changing practice. Whether spoken or written, English has been evolving (some would say “devolving”) for centuries. There are a lot of words used today that didn’t exist 50 years ago. Most of these are buzzwords, or turns of phrase, which are now used commonly.

 Take the Middle English words, “Hale, and well met!” Today we would say, “How are you doing? Hope you’re well…,” or some similar form of greeting. Hale, and well met has nearly been forgotten.

 With the rise of therapy and behavioral expertise, the term boundary has entered the vernacular. It’s not just spoken by those who professionally practice some form of counseling, but the word is being used by nearly everyone.

 What is a boundary?

 In family therapy BOUNDARY is a term used liberally and has many applications. It can establish the autonomy of a person from those they come in contact with, like family, coworkers, fellow students, neighbors, lovers and so forth. A boundary can be used to keep a person emotionally safe in a relationship of any kind, or used to define the intricacies of a romantic relationship. And while technically a boundary is meant to establish and maintain a healthy relationship, all too often they are erroneously applied as a barrier of entry for a person on the receiving end of its misapplication.

 While I’m sure that most therapists mean well and have an intrinsic love for people (no doubt this love for people caused them to enter the field in the first place), they can’t possibly oversee or govern the installment of the boundaries they recommend to their clients. They can’t even determine the veracity of their client’s testimony in their office. They most often hear a one-sided account. It’s tough to get to the truth that way…

 Back to boundaries! The word boundary is spoken so freely in society today, as though people were familiar with them and their proper usage. In looking at a number of therapists’ blogs, it seems clear that boundaries are meant “...to regulate relationships, while maintaining them in a more emotionally healthy way,” but that is seldom the outcome — I have observed.

 Please remember as you read this, that I am largely writing to Christians, believers and followers of the Way: the way that Jesus lived by example for us and commanded us to emulate in our own lives. He set the high watermark for doing life, and every idea, word and deed must come under His authority for those who follow Christ.

 The question I raise is this: did Jesus set boundaries with people?

 Many people today speak of Jesus meek and mild, as He is often depicted in paintings holding a child, surrounded by puffy white sheep, or touching someone lovingly with healing hands. These examples of Jesus are at best insufficient, and at the worst misleading. The following are quotes from Jesus’ own lips, as He addressed some religious control freaks, known as Pharisees –

 Matthew 12:34 “Brood of vipers! How can you, being evil, speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”

Matthew 23:33 “Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell?”

John 8:44 “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.”

Matthew 23:27   “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”

 Jesus meek and mild? I think not…

 His response was always perfectly measured and applied to the situation that He faced. When He spoke to someone who was unloved and maltreated by society, He spoke affirming words. When He spoke to someone in need of forgiveness, He spoke reassuring words. But when He spoke to religious hypocrites, His tone was decidedly confrontational.

 But one thing He never did, was deny someone access to Him in the name of a boundary.

 Everyone was welcomed, whether or not they were in agreement with Him, meant Him good or evil, wanted to do for Him or take from Him. He was completely accessible, and still is today by faith alone. My only knowledge of Jesus ever setting a boundary was with the great Deceiver and Accuser, satan.

(See Matthew 4:10) 

What was originally meant by therapists to be beneficial within a relationship, has morphed and been contorted into a weapon; a barrier; a wall. It saddens me to see how easily we give up on each other, in families, in places where we work, in neighborhoods, in ministry and even in marriages. One day two people are building a life together, dreaming together, making babies together, and the next they are filing for divorce. The boundary becomes the justification for NOT doing life with their former friend, family member, neighbor, spouse.

 I must add that any sort of legal action against someone you supposedly love(d) can easily become a tool of a personal war, a bludgeon of retribution. Jesus commanded us to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us.” A boundary that doesn’t work for both parties, and concurrently toward reconciliation between them, is a farce. Legal actions taken against a mate places a “boundary” between two former lovers; relationship ceases as a legal barrier is erected. 

I would ask every modern Christ-follower to take a close look at Jesus’ life and response to opposition. He truly loved the people that opposed Him and wrongfully treated Him. And yet He still allowed them access, all the way to the cross where He died for the sins of the world.

 2Corinthians 3:6 …who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

Boundary indeed…

 The next time you hear her speak of the boundary she needed in order to protect herself, think back to Jesus’ style of openly relating to everyone, no matter who they were. 

I am further amazed at how we have allowed the behavioral science model of family governance to permeate the church. This 75-year old fledgling practice has supplanted pastoral care and true commitment to families that has existed for 2,000+ years, which is described at length in the living Word of God. There are even churches who sponsor boundary-setting seminars and other misguided responses to people they should have loved.

 Why do people feel the need to erect a barrier between them and someone else?

 Here are a few of the reasons given by therapists who I researched on line –

·      To keep from being hurt

·      To protect ones’ sense of self and autonomy

·      To instruct someone in their behavior

·      To limit someone from acting inappropriately

·      To create healthy respect within a relationship

·      To identify the parameters of how a relationship should work

·      To demand respect from the disrespectful

·      To define and control the expectations within a romantic relationship

·      To advocate for feminist ideals

 Notice that none of these end the relationship.

Besides the flippant use of psycho-babble (for that’s what the word boundary has devolved into), I perceive boundaries to be mostly protecting ones’ own self-interests. It becomes, “...what I’m comfortable with, what I’m willing or not willing to do, to give or not give, to be or not be, to suffer or not, etc....,”and always defined exclusively by the user.

 Jesus style of relating might be characterized as unassertive or co-dependant by modern society. Yet boundaries seem to be the opposite of the following –

Matthew 5:5 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

Matthew 10:39 “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.”

Matthew 20:16a. “So the last will be first, and the first last…”

Luke 6:27-29  “But I say to you who hear: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you. 29 To him who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other also. And from him who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either.”

 I could offer many more such examples of NOT defending one’s self-interests with so-called boundaries. Is it not enough to know that Jesus Himself turned His other cheek toward those attacking Him as He practiced non-resistance?

 He did it out of love, which is ALWAYS the opposite of self-interest.

 I now speak prophetically to every Christian reading this blog: “If your relationship ends because of the “boundary” you have set, then its walls are too high, and the LORD would have you take it down, brick by brick, in order to reestablish the relationship, for we have been given the Spirit and ministry of reconciliation.”

2Corinthians 5:18 Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.

Out of the love in His heart for everyone, Jesus would rather have allowed Himself to be abused than judge or condemn someone for his shortcomings. In the end, the all too common misapplication of a boundary is simply a way to control someone that you dislike or disapprove of, and with the boundary in place, a person can obtain power over the relationship.

 Love is many things, but it always requires risk. To put up walls to keep people out requires no risk at all, and is NOT fundamentally in agreement with the Way. 

Conversely, if someone breaks the law with their behavior there is always a legal consequence for that.

 Paul the apostle wrote these words about what real love looks like, and we Christians would do well to reexamine our motives surrounding boundaries in light of them –

 1Corinthians 13:4-7   

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, DOES NOT SEEK ITS OWN, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 BEARS ALL THINGS, BELIEVES ALL THINGS, HOPES ALL THINGS, ENDURES ALL THINGS.

 In other words, love doesn’t quit on people...

If we loved like Jesus, we would not be so easily provoked, instead we would forbear one another’s weaknesses; we would be able to bear up under whatever was done or said, even if it were a daily occurrence. We would believe the best in our people, no matter where they were currently in their life. This is the only way God can love us, for we, none of us, have arrived yet. And our attitude towards those who wrongfully abuse us, would be to expect and believe for an upward trajectory of improvement in them, while we endure their present state. This is real love, love costs us something; love demands something from us; love demands a sacrifice.

 If we would simply love one another, the practice of boundary-setting to self-protect would fade away, like most of the buzzwords in language that come for a season and are soon forgotten.

  As always, you can respond to this essay to my email address, calcio.christopher@gmail.com, or at my website, Innocente.us under the blog button in the pull-down menu, or simply at tumblr.com/blog/toolsforthejourney

 Remember in everything, Father will have the final say.

 Keep it out of the box,

 Innocente