#10 nuclear missiles drop on my head

[pinkalliums]

chara after you do a no mercy run multiple times ina row

[thespamman24]

So, I know this is really long, but I worked very hard on it and I think that it might just be the best thing that I have ever written, so I would really appreciate if you read it, thanks.

I wish that I was a dog.

If I was a dog then I would sneak into my owners fridge and eat all of their bananas. All of them. I would keep doing it, over and over again. They would have to start keeping their bananas in secure places, but I would always find them. They could put the bananas in a locked safe and store it on the highest shelf, but somehow I would still manage to get those bananas into my big dog mouth. They would probably take me to the vet and ask the vet “Why does our dog keep on eating bananas?” but the vet would have no answer. The bananas didn’t seem to be making me ill, in fact I was more healthy than ever. Despite being a corgi, I had the strength of a rottweiler.

Eventually, they would just stop buying bananas. But that wouldn’t stop me. I would break into neighbors houses and steal their bananas. My hunger for bananas would consume my every thought, my every desire. I would grow and grow until I was twice the size of an English mastiff. Eventually, they would tie me to a stick like one of those naughty dogs but that wouldn’t stop me. I would still manage to break free, and then in a mad rage I would destroy the entirety of my owners furniture. 

My owners would have no choice but to take me to a pound. “It’s such a shame.” they would say “He used to be such a good boy, but then he just got really into bananas for some reason.” But no pound could be able to hold me. I would escape, and run all of the way back to my owners house. I would smash right through my owners door. My owners would scream as I snarled and raged and dashed across their house. Then I would plant myself in the middle of the living room and snarl. 

What could they do? They would rush off to the grocery store and grab as many bananas as they could. But that wouldn’t even be enough to satisfy me. They would have to start getting bananas in from the truckload. Spending thousands of dollars shipping in hundreds of bananas in, just to feed my appetite. I would get bigger and bigger, till I was 5 feet tall. “Surely, he’ll get sick of them. “ they’d say “either that, or he’ll die.” But I wouldn’t die, I would just consume and consume. Eventually, my owners money would start running dry. They would have to move out as my appetite grew. They would have to sell their house, which they worked so hard to afford to a woman named Patty so she could turn it into a thrift store. But I wouldn’t mind, all I wanted was bananas. Eventually, they couldn’t afford a home at all and they had to move to a large junkyard where they slept by snuggling me for warmth. It was in this junkyard that I would spend the entirety of my days, consuming more and more bananas. I would grow and grow till I was 8 feet tall. Then 10 feet. Then 20 feet.

Eventually, my owners would run out of money. “Please,” they would say “please buttons” (buttons would be my name of course) “We can’t get you any more bananas, don’t you think you’ve had enough?” but that would not sway me, and in a fit of rage I would swallow my owners whole. Then, I would leave my home city of San Francisco and make my way South, stopping at grocery stores to get my fill of bananas. I would sleep seldomly, with my only stops being to consume more bananas. I would run and run till I arrived in Costa Rica. 

Oh, what a sight that would be. A group of poor Costa Rican banana farmers toiling away, when suddenly from the horizon appears a 25 foot tall Corgi. “?Que Carajo?!” They would say “!El Perro Es Gigantesco!”

Then I would snarl and they would run away in fright and I would gourge myself on the bananas. I would gorge myself on all of the bananas that Costa Rica had to offer till I was 40 foot tall. I would indulge myself ina  feat of bananas never seen before and then eventually the government would hear of this and they would be enraged! They would send helicopters to shoot me down but I would bat them out of the sky. They would tanks and planes and all sorts of weapons of war but I would squanch them without hesitation. 

Eventually, the american banana companies would get worried, because their sales were dropping, so they would lobby for something to happen. They would obviously be successful, and then for the first time in history the united states government would declare war on a single dog. They would send the finest weapons that the world had to offer, all sorts of fighter jets and helicopters. They would send wave after wave after squandron of men and machines armed to the teeth. They would launch missiles and drop bombs and rain down everything they could on me save for a nuclear bomb. They would throw all of their military might at me, but they would fail. 

 At this point I would have become almost a hundred feet tall. I would tower over buildings and skyscrapers. People all over the world would begin to worship me as a god. The banana workers of Costa Rica who had slaved for so long began to see me as a savior, someone who had come down to rid themself of the oppressive yoke of the banana industry. But, I would be no savior, I would just be one big corgi that wanted bananas.

I would gorge myself on all of the bananas that Costa Rica had to offer, until there was no more. Then, I would move to Nicaragua, then to Honduras, then to Belize,then back to Nicaragua, then to El Salvador, then back to Costa Rica, then to Panama. I would scour my way through all of Latin America, devouring every bananas I saw till I was 150 feet tall and growing.

Eventually, the U.S. government would have no other option then to build a giant robotic mecha corgi.

This mecha corgi would be deployed, with some sort of trained pilot inside and me and this mecha would have the fight of the century- possible even the decade. We would pounce and fight and tear at each others throats- and then- we would lock eyes and something would take over me. Something that I hadn’t felt in a long time. My owners had previously neutered me but all of my banana eating had them grow back. Next you knew, the mecha would become pregnant with my son- a half corgi- half mecha corgi. A cycorg, if you will. 

But, I would not be around to see his birth, because I left my mecha girlfriend. I loved her, but I loved bananas more and so I left. I journeyed to Colombia and Venezuela and all throughout South America, always on the hunt for bananas, no amount of that sweet yellow fruit could ever quinch my eternal hunger.

The U.S. government would send more mechs after me, and I had some close encounters but, whenever things got to bad I would run. Eventually, things got so serious that I had to dog paddle my way to Africa. Thankfully, I managed to end up in Cote D’Iviore which was a country that the U.S. didn’t have any treaty or whatever with. I was safe. I gouged myself on bananas for many years sometimes I would think about that one true love I had, but my bananas kept me destracted. I didn’t even know that I had a son, or that he was growing up in a  secure facility in Nevada.

I grew and grew. At first, the government tried to stop me, but then they stopped. Eventually, they started to like me, they would bring me bananas and in return I increased tourism by 2,000%. In fact, I actually helped the economy of Cote D’Iviore. This allowed for many schools and hospitals to be buildt, massive reforms were passed in the government, infrastructure improved massively. Eventually, Cote D’Iviore became one of the most successful countries in the world and all it took was one giant dog. 

People would come from all over the world to see me, but I didn’t care. All I cared about was bananas. When I wasn’t eating bananas I was sleeping or killing people who were trying to kill me. Sometimes I would eat them, but people didn’t taste as good as bananas.

Cote D’Iviore started to run out of bananas so they had to ask Ghana and Cameroon for help in exchange for economy. This eventually lead to all three countries becoming one country, and this country became a prosperous nation. I quickly became the national animal of this nation. I was on the state flag and all of the coinage. Massive statues were buildt of me and the countries name was Terre De Chien Geant (land of the big dog). I payed no notion to this. After all, I was a dog and I didn’t even understand politics. All I understand was bananas. And now, the country was working very hard to get me as much bananas as I could eat because the tourism money was huge. I feasted on bananas until I became 400 feet tall. 

However, across the sea storm clouds were brewing. The United States government had no interest in killing me anymore. However, my Cycorg son was a rarity and of great interest to them. They figured that they could use him as a weapon to take on foreign threats. They got people to pilot him. I don’t know how it worked but the Cycorg needed a pilot.

Many years passed. Eventually, I grew till I was over a thousand feet tall. My Cycorg son did the same. 

My Cycorg son gets deployed on his first mission, destroying a military base in Libya. However, the U.S. government was foolish in thinking that they could control him. He turns away from the military base and instead goes in search of me. The pilot that is inside my Cycorg son is helpless to control him as he moves through Africa in search of me.

He eventually catches on the hiff of corgi and bananas and follows it through the Sahara desert till he arrives at the Northern tip of the country I live in. There he travels East, till he finds me. I’m laying in the field I usually am in when I hear the sound of extremely large paw prints and cock my giant corgi head. Then, I meet his gaze. He growls at me. I am the man who abandoned him. His worst enemy. He leaps forward and pounces on me.

Needless to say, I kick my dumb furry sons butt. I stand over him, my paw pressed on his metal exoskeleton. Then I sniff him and I realize who he is. And in that moment, I realize I was fighting my son! I have a son! I never even knew! But… I don’t care. All I care for is bananas. Why? I do not know. All I know is that I crave bananas, and I am a two thousand foot tall corgi so no one gets to challenge my authority.

I pick him up by the ear, and in a feat of corgi strength I carry him to the ocean and drop him in.

My son paddles away, ashamed.

 Then the Romulans show up. “Oh shit! It’s the Romulans!” Says everyone.Then the Romulans leave because the only reason why they were there was because they got their directions wrong. 

 Anyways, I go back to my usual resting place and my son, ashamed, dog paddles away. But, this feeling of shame quickly turns to anger and this anger quickly turns to rage. And so, when the U.S. helicopters show up to collect him he swats them down. My Cycorg son then goes berserk. He swims over till he reaches Florida. There, he goes ona  mad rampage.

First he arrives at Orlando, where he rips through the city. He reaches Disney World and Mickeys and Snow Whites turn to bloody pulp within his jaws. He journeys to Miami, and to Jacksonvill, and to Tampa Bay, and to Inglis. All fall before his wrath. Millions of people are slaughtered and billions of dollars are lost in property damage and thousands of cheese shops are destroyed. Mozzarella and blood lines the streets of multiple major metropolitan areas, and it’s all because of one kaiju cyborg corgi.

 The U.S. government throw everything they can at my Cycorg son, but they do not succeed. Eventually, they realize the only way to defeat him is me. But, how do they get me to come over to the U.S? First, they try a massive dog whistle. This does not work. Then, they figure it out.

I am chilling out in my field. When, suddenly in the sky I see the most beautiful sight that I have ever seen. A giant cat, made out of bananas. I leap up and run after it. Truly, this must be the most delicious thing ever created.

I dog paddle after it till I reach the coast of Florida, only to then realize that it was not real, but actually just one of those Macy's thanksgiving day parade floats. This enrages me immensely. I am about to go back to my home when suddenly I am tackled from behind. It is my Cycorg son! I don’t even have time to react before my Cycorg son chomps me directly in the paw. We tussle, and I could easily win but he has grown stronger and one of my paws is hurt. 

We fight and fight, our fight taking us out of Florida, to Georgia, and then to South Carolina. Eventually, after 78 days I stand over my son. I have won. But, right before I am about to make the killing blow, I hesitate. This is my son after all. And, in that moment of hesitation my furry son does a hecking chomp. I fall off a cliff and into the Atlantic. 

 I float through the Ocean, till I eventually reach the South pole. There, the water around me freezes and I am trapped in an iceberg, still alive.

 Meanwhile, my furry son has won. He howls victoriously. And then continues his rampage, going north. He knocks over the Empire State Building and shits on the Washington memorial. He humps the leg of the statue of liberty and pees on the white house. He demolishes the Sears tower and destroys Cleveland, Ohio. All fall before his wrath. All is helpless before my massive Cycorg son. Millions upon millions are killed. The U.S. lies in ruins. Meanwhile, I am literally chilling inside a block of ice.

My Cycorg son continues West, and some strange desire compels him to go to Los Angeles. He arrives there and moves towards Hollywood. There, right in front of the Hollywood sign. He digs. He digs and he digs till he reaches an underground chamber. There, in that chamber he finds Al Capone, the inventor of movies. 

Meanwhile, at this very moment I am being discovered by scientists. They find my body and put it on a plane. They then take my body and put in a giant truck. This truck is currently carrying me to a museum, which just happens to be in San Francisco, the place where this all started.

 My son finds the body of Al Capone, spread on a massive movie projector. He then picks him up in his jaws and bounds out of the chamber with Al Capone in tow. However, this ends up causing The Job Apocalypse, where people become abstract representations of their jobs. Lawyers turn into law books, doctors turn into medicine, and politicians turn into the flags of countries that they represent. And, the driver of the truck that I am on, turns into a truck. This leads to the truck I am on having a massive truck sticking out of the driver's seat, with one of it’s wheels on it’s pedal. This causes the truck to keep on moving forward, towards its destination of San Francisco, with me in tow.

But, my Cycorg son doesn’t have a job, so he is unaffected. He takes Al Capone's form and bounds up North. Eventually, he makes it to San Francisco, where he lays down Al Capone and lays down beside him. He then falls asleep, Al Capone right beside him.

Meanwhile, the truck I am in enters San Francisco from the East while my son sleeps soundly by the side of Al Capone.

Then, in the middle of the night comes Patty. Patty was there when it all began. She was the one my owners sold their house to, and thanks to that she turned the house into a thrift store. So, when The Job Apocalypse came she turned into a whole bunch of knick knacks in the shape of a human form. Patty makes her way towards my son and Al Capone. Then she sticks out what could be called an arm, and wacks Al Capone. But then, right as she does it she gets run over by the truck that is carrying me.

Or, in other words: knick knack Patty wacks EVA dog's Al Capone, his old man's come rolling home.

[introvertguide]

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964); AFI #39

The most recent movie for the group to review was the Kubrick dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove (I am not writing out the whole title each time). This film has some of the most legitimately funny lines of bewilderment, with some occasions involving an actor playing across from himself. For most film goers, this will be Peter Seller’s most famous role since he plays three main characters, all with different accents, appearances, and quirks. The film was nominated for 4 Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor) but did not take home any trophies. The film did win best picture at the BAFTAs. This film was definitely in the style of Kubrick, but it was in a genre that I don’t believe he delved into again. I want to review the plot before discussing further, so let me get the usual out of the way:

SPOILER ALERT!!! I AM ABOUT TO GIVE AWAY THE WHOLE PLOT OF THE FILM!!! IF YOU WANT TO WATCH THE FILM ON YOUR OWN WITHOUT HAVING ANYTHING SPOILED, STOP NOW AND WATCH THE FILM!!! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!

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At the start, we are introduced to United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) who is commander of Burpelson Air Force Base. This base houses a group of B-52 bombers armed with hydrogen bombs that are constantly in the air. The planes are constantly within two hours from their targets inside the USSR in case of nuclear war. General Ripper orders his executive officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake of the UK Royal Air Force (Peter Sellers), to put the base on alert and to issue "Wing Attack Plan R" to the patrolling bombers, one of which is commanded by Major T. J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens). All of the aircraft commence an attack flight on the USSR, and set their radios to allow communications only through their CRM 114 discriminators, which was designed to accept only communications preceded by a secret three-letter code known only to General Ripper. Mandrake discovers that no attack order has been issued by the Pentagon and tries to stop Ripper, who locks them both in his office. Ripper tells Mandrake that he believes the Soviets have been fluoridating American water supplies to pollute the "precious bodily fluids" of Americans. Mandrake realizes Ripper has gone insane.

In the War Room at the Pentagon, General Buck Turgidson (George C Scott) briefs President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers again) and other officers about how "Plan R" enables a senior officer to launch a retaliatory nuclear attack on the Soviets if all superiors have been killed in a first strike on the United States. It would take two days to try every CRM code combination to issue the recall order, but the planes are due to reach their targets within hours. Muffley orders the U.S. Army to storm the base and arrest General Ripper. Turgidson then attempts to convince Muffley to let the attack continue, but Muffley refuses. Instead, he brings Soviet ambassador Alexei de Sadeski (Peter Bull) into the War Room to telephone Soviet Premier Dimitri Kissov on the "hotline". Muffley warns the Premier of the impending attack, and offers to reveal the positions of the bombers and their targets so that the Soviets can protect themselves.

After a heated discussion in Russian with the Premier, the ambassador informs President Muffley that the Soviet Union had created a doomsday machine as a nuclear deterrent; it consists of many buried bombs jacketed with "cobalt-thorium G", which are set to detonate automatically should any nuclear attack strike the country. Within two months after detonation, the cobalt-thorium G would encircle the planet in a radioactive shroud that would render the Earth's surface uninhabitable. The device cannot be deactivated, as it is programmed to explode if any such attempt is made. The President's wheelchair-bound scientific advisor, former Nazi German Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers one more time), points out that such a doomsday machine would only be an effective deterrent if everyone knew about it; Alexei replies that the Soviet Premier had planned to reveal its existence to the world the following week.

Meanwhile, U.S. Army troops arrive at Burpelson, and General Ripper commits suicide. Mandrake identifies Ripper's CRM code from his desk blotter and relays it to the Pentagon. Using the code, Strategic Air Command successfully recalls all of the bombers except Major Kong's, whose radio equipment has been damaged in a missile attack. The Soviets attempt to find it, but Kong has the bomber attack a closer target due to dwindling fuel. As the plane approaches the new target, a Soviet ICBM site, the crew is unable to open the damaged bomb bay doors. Kong enters the bay and repairs the broken electrical wiring while sitting on a H-bomb, whereupon the doors open and the bomb is dropped. Kong joyfully straddles the bomb as it falls and detonates over the target.

Back in the War Room, Dr. Strangelove recommends that the President gather several hundred thousand people to live in deep underground mines where the radiation will not penetrate. He suggests a 10:1 female-to-male ratio for a breeding program to repopulate the Earth once the radiation has subsided. Worried that the Soviets will do the same, Turgidson warns about a "mineshaft gap" while Alexei secretly photographs the war room. Dr. Strangelove declares he has a plan, but then rises from his wheelchair and announces "Mein Führer, I can walk!" as the Doomsday Machine activates. The film ends with a montage of many nuclear explosions, accompanied by Vera Lynn's rendition of the song "We'll Meet Again".

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This is a pretty weird film, but it has some of the funniest lines in cinema. Discussions of not letting a Russian envoy into the war room because he will “see the big board,” the president announcing there is no fighting in the war room, a crazy general constantly talking about a plot to steal American bodily fluids, and a discussion about how the high ranking officials and generals would be hidden in shelters with a 10-1 ratio of hot women to men with the expectation of constant impregnation which everybody suddenly favors: it is all absurd. But I really love it and laugh every time I watch.

The three roles of Peter Sellers is especially noteworthy, as all of his characters are so different. He plays a very British foreign exchange officer (I am not sure this exists), an absolutely whacky former Nazi scientist, and the straight man of the film in the form of the US president. Since Dr. Strangelove was an advisor to the president, there were many scenes in which Peter Sellers was acting across from a stunt shoulder or the back of a head that was supposed to be him. He did a fantastic job of making light of total world destruction during the cold war.

One very notable thing about the acting of Peter Sellers was that he had a couple of ad libs during the movie. Stanley Kubrick is not a director that particularly cares if he gets along with his actors, often times demanding dozens of takes for even the simplest of background scenes. Long dialogue scenes are repeated over and over to the point that many actors did not want to work with Kubrick. And still, the director seemed to like Sellers quite a bit and kept a couple of the takes that were ad-libbed, specifically for the character of Dr. Strangelove. Perhaps the crazy former Nazi character was so unpredictable that random whacky outbursts (like the scream for “Mein Fuhrer” at the end) seemed appropriate.

A little side note is that this was the first film appearance of James Earl Jones as one of the bombardiers on the B-52. He was known for his work in the theatre at the time, so of course he had a bit part in which he was mostly covered in a flight suit and said very little. Now that is a misuse of talent. 

A point about the movie that I was unaware but was pointed out by a follower of the group was that the promotional material for the film shows that the plane was named “Leper Colony” (thank you @themightyfoo). This implies that this group was actually a bunch of screw ups, which is part of the overall joke that this group was given access to world ending bombing capabilities. Maybe it was assumed that the order to drop the bombs would never be given and this group was just given this detail to get them out of the way.

So does this movie belong on the AFI list? Yes, but maybe not ranked so high. It has a lot of name recognition, but I think that is more due to the very distinct naming and the titular role. Maybe the notoriety is also due to the subject matter and the time it was released. It is a fine film with great acting, but I find it hard to put above Jaws, Rocky, or Taxi Driver. I guess that is more my humble opinion, but I agree the list would be lacking without this film. So would I recommend it? Absolutely. It is an interesting story about how red tape allowed one high ranking individual to literally destroy the world. And it is a joke. It is such a well told story that they had to put a disclaimer at the front. A great lesson, even today. 

[anangelicday-mrwolf]

Wolfsbane : Noblesse Fanfic (post-ending)

(previous chapter)

Chapter 68 – The Secret of Resurrection and the Outing

“Greetings to you, O Lord of the nobles. Pardon me, for I cannot rise from my respite.” 

“Have no concern. We are all aware of the state your body is suffering.” 

Lascrea raised her hand in a salute-reply to Lunark. 

When Rael learned from Seira that the werewolf who was as immobile as a corpse finally opened her eyes, he scurried back to the Lord's Hall, which he had emptied for less than 10 minutes, to share the news with Lascrea. 

Lunark also requested to the Central Knights stationed at the ward that she must speak to their lord, and their meeting was scheduled shortly afterwards. 

And they were not the only participants for today's meeting.

“I pray for your patience, although this room is not big enough to allow all of us. Our speaker must not leave her bed.”

“Have no concerns, my lord.” 

“We are alright.” 

Kei and Rosaria were standing next to Lascrea, rendering Lunark's room rather crowded. 

Her room may be the best that Lukedonia can offer, but it was designed for a single occupant. 

And the room felt even smaller because they also had virtual guests for this meeting. 

<May we begin?> 

Lunark flinched at Frankenstein's voice, transferred through Lascrea's phone that was switched to the speaker mode. 

No one would have missed it, yet no one pointed it out, for none of them paid attention to anything other than what Lunark was about to unleash.

“I believe all of you would know by now with what power I defeated the Dark Spear.” 

“We all happened to be shocked and perplexed. How did a werewolf like you got to wield power that was most certainly begotten by Raizel?” 

Everyone solemnly focused their sights and hearings upon Lunark.

Even she was still trying to wrap her head around what happened.

Upon accepting the mysterious power that offered its hand to her as she sunk deep into the sea, her abdomen punctured by the Dark Spear, Lunark realized the oh-so-familiar-for-some-reason power was none other than Raizel's power. 

As of now the power was rinsed off her like snow met with summer sun, but her psyche had been etched with memories that had connected to her during her carriage of the power. 

“This would be a long story, for I must start off from the Noblesse's disappearance into slumber 820 years ago.” 

The nobles surrounding Lunark implied fluster with their eyes. 

They knew discussion on Raizel is a must, considering that he is the source of the power Lunark made use of. 

However, they did not expect her to wind back at least six books on noble history, to land right onto Raizel's slumber that took place 820 years ago. 

“Noblesse, sir, you fell into sleep immediately following your duel against my lord, didn't you?” 

<...I did. I chose dormancy as I was stranded upon the oceanic spot not far from Lukedonia, and the zone of water and salt directly beneath became my sanctuary.> 

“Actually, I fell into the sea nearby after I was fallen as the result of my first showdown against the Dark Spear. Geologically speaking, it was near a human city called Miami, stationed in United States.” 

<Miami...? It happens to be one of the three vertices composing the Bermuda Triangle, at the center of which Lukedonia lies.> 

Lunark coerced her voice to activate, painstakingly shifting her attention away from the now-automated wince in her heart in reaction to Frankenstein's voice. 

“As you were recovering in the ocean for 820 years, your power was leaking from your coffin little by little. And after 8 centuries, the underwater domain centering on your ex-sanctuary came to absorb your power.” 

“What? You mean... Currently there is a submarine area not far from Lukedonia that holds power from Raizel?” 

“Correct. And that happens to be one of the three reasons why you, the Noblesse, and two of your heads of clans could return from death. During the nuclear missile incident, the three of you stood in defense of your homeland right above the Noblesse's ex-sanctuary. Which also served as the vessel of your remains from the clash. There the three of you absorbed the power of Noblesse teeming within, to rise back to life. Speaking of which, don't you feel there has been an increase of your power?” 

Silence heavily dawned upon the chamber as Lunark spoke; the three nobles knew she was absolutely right, their awareness of the phenomenon prevalent within them, unbeknownst to them. 

Once they defeated death, in contrast to their resolve, they could feel their powers have become somewhat more durable, more invulnerable. 

Which was forgotten momentarily due to series of huge events that promptly tagged along the nuclear missile incident, such as the downfall of Union and the QuadraNet Project. 

Hence the question regarding the resurrection of the three of the five affiliates of the nuclear missile incident was gone, but their curiosity was yet vivid. 

No, it has gotten vivider. 

“I beg your pardon, but I need more details regarding what you mentioned earlier. Now I understand how my lord, I, and Kei could return to life, but... Are you saying the return of Noblesse is also related to the place where we met our temporary eternal sleep?” 

No one emitted a breath at Rosaria's question-slash-accusation, for she touched on the spot that had been itching ever since Lunark held in her lips the “three factors” that had brought Raizel, Lascrea, Kei, and Rosaria back to the world of the living. 

All ears grew keen on Lunark's mouth, waiting for her words to water their thirst for knowledge. 

“Yes, but it wouldn't have been possible without the other two factors, one of which happens to be the half of Ragnarok that you yielded to the Noblesse.” 

Lascrea's, Kei's, and Rosaria's mouths turned agape, for they did not expect to hear the name of the noble lord's soul weapon from a werewolf.

No sound could be heard past Lascrea's phone, an evidence that Raizel and Frankenstein would look no different from them. 

“You permanently forfeited the half of your soul weapon to the Noblesse, did you not?” 

“...I did. It was left behind for Raizel by my father the lord, which Raizel gave back to me upon his return to Lukedonia after 820 years. Nevertheless, I handed it to him in order to replenish his life force.” 

“The power that used to compose the half of the Ragnarok would have by now changed into Noblesse's life energy, fully absorbed into his body. But it's not completely gone. Its remains must be there. Even though it is only half of its original form, Ragnarok stemmed from the bloodline of the noblest nobles in the lead of your kind, therefore forged with might beyond any mortal understanding. I'm sure you, O Noblesse, would have felt the weapon flowing within you ever since you received it.” 

Raizel spoke no confirmation, which in turn served as a confirmation.

It was his habit of speech; whereas he does not necessarily confirm what is right, he will deny anything that deserves his denial. 

<...Okay, so what's the final factor?> 

“...The fact that the four of them met eternal sleep, albeit only briefly, on the same day, at the same hour.” 

That was when Kei and Rosaria exchanged glances, their eyes flickering precariously, and Lascrea failed to conceal confusion marred with inquisitiveness from her face. 

“The key is that you, O lord, and the Noblesse fell into eternal sleep at the exact same moment. As your remains dropped into the Noblesse's ex-sanctuary, the power of the Noblesse embedded in the area created a reaction with the remains of the Ragnarok, its power not far behind the former. And this reaction reached out to its twin - yes, it reached out to the Noblesse, now a biological container of the half of the Ragnarok.” 

The three nobles listening to her gaped at her, looking as if they were hammered in their heads. 

“The point is that the bond between the two parts of Ragnarok still exists as we speak, even though a half of it now pulses through Noblesse's blood and soul. As the two Ragnarok's caused a chain reaction of resonation with the Noblesse's power under the sea, there formed a temporary spiritual bond between you and the Noblesse.”

<...So are you saying the resurrection allowed by the power from my master's ex-sanctuary managed to apply to my master as well?>

“...Precisely.” 

As Lunark's speech was closed, no one did not as much as mumble, too starstruck by the elements that felt so much like part of destiny, in joint with coincidence like fate. 

At then Lascrea's eyes gleamed in remembrance. 

“That reminds me of the tale I picked up from the human reporters who used to be short-term tenants of Lukedonia. There is this marine zone near Lukedonia dubbed as 'Bermudan Treasure Chest' among humans, flaunting innumerable number of rare marine species, its individuals much bigger than those from the identical classification inhabiting other areas. However, recently there have been mysterious shifts in the ecological system of this zone, such as mass deaths of marine species, including the blood-red corals exclusive to this zone.” 

“True. This place you speak of happens to be a favorite dining spot of mine, where I would often drop by to feast on the fish.” 

“...Now I am reminded of how it all began upon our homecoming.” 

<...I see. That zone must have flourished thanks to the power from my master's ex-sanctuary, which is not surprising. It has been bearing the greatest force of life on Earth for more than 8 centuries. But now its power is lost to you, two of your heads of clans, and my master, thanks to this spiritual bond thing, resulting in the end of the golden age for its marine population.>

“...Don't forget that I received unimaginable amount of power from that spot as well. So things can only take the worse turn for the natives of that zone.” 

Kei started to speak as soon as Lunark finished her mutter. 

“Quick question - how do you know all this? And how come none of us remember this?” 

“...The ex-sanctuary of the Noblesse absorbed along with his power the psyche he had harbored. I'd say the power that is held there is basically semi-animate. So after the nuclear missile incident, the entire process of spiritual bond and resurrection that touched on your lord and the Noblesse was engraved into the power within the ex-sanctuary. I managed to absorb all this when I accepted this power. But the reason why none of you remember this is because... I'd compare it to the rupture of glasses that could not stand the multiple resonance of sound waves. What you had gone through was a miracle that transcends life and death. So it'd be no wonder that it left an unseeable scar upon your memories.”

Kei was not the last one to fling questions, and Lunark answered all of them. 

The meeting was closed following Frankenstein's offer that Raizel might be able to gain more life if they are to make use of the power that is left in Raizel's ex-sanctuary (and they sort of saw it coming).

Lunark was left alone, and only then someone approached her. 

“Lady Lunark.” 

“You...? What are you doing here? Your lord and your fellow heads of clans are gone.” 

Lunark's pink pupils were sketched with puzzlement as she recognized Rael. 

“There's something I must tell you.” 

The werewolf warrior tensed, in understanding that Rael chose to confront her after Lascrea, Kei, and Rosaria at last went away. 

On the other hand, Rael was fairly calm, for there was no trouble that required his presence. 

It was but a small reason that he requested the Central Knights from the ward to notify him as soon as she awakens, even though they share nothing in common except for the QuadraNet Project. 

It was but a small but legitimate reason. 

When Lunark awakens, relay her a gratitude from me, I pray. 

That was the concise yet packed-with-meanings request from Raizel, as he sent Rael away to Lukedonia. 

That was supposed to be the sole reason why Rael was waiting for the moment Lunark opens her eyes, but lately things have changed a little. 

During the course of arrest of Deneb, the Central Knights confiscated the walkie-talkie he forced away from Yuhyung's bag. 

Which was passed on to Rael, before it can return to its rightful owner.

The QuadraNet Project may be on a hold, but everyone knew it would be on a hold only for the time being. 

When the project is to commence again, the chances are high for Rael to reassume the ambassador of Lukedonia. 

So it would be logical for Rael to keep the walkie-talkie for now, though no one can certify until when he must keep it with him. 

So Rael had no idea the walkie-talkie dropped right onto his hand would spill Frankenstein's voice all of a sudden. 

I decided to bet my hopes on Mr. Jang's walkie-talkie just in case. Boy, am I glad it didn't turn out to be a fool's hope. 

S-sir...? What's going on...? 

I need a favor. And don't fret. It's nothing huge. 

Back then Rael was busy trying to think of a favor that Frankenstein could possibly ask from him. 

He knew Frankenstein was a man of reasons, but he could not help getting anxious, in consideration of the speaker.

When Lunark wakes up, tell her to go back to her homeland as soon as she becomes mobile. 

Sir...? What do you... 

Tell her not to even think about sticking around Lukedonia and go back as soon as her body becomes good enough for her to move around like usual. 

Frankenstein did not assume any coldness in his words, but Rael could not ask what is the matter, due to the just-deal-with-it attitude he wore at the time. 

Nonetheless, Rael presumed there was no misfortune or problem that Frankenstein had in mind that had urged him to make such delivery to Lunark. 

But please tell her that she doesn't have to run back home right as she opens her eyes. Please. 

He could feel generosity, not at all feigned or halfhearted for the sake of the least of the courtesy he could pull off, as Frankenstein added one more “please.” 

Retracing his experience, Rael finally started off with his job as a messenger. 

*****

Few days later, KSA 

“And that's it for the whereabouts of the remaining lots of the Union.”

A series of nods and regards from the table headed to Tao, who had been making his laser pointer busy with the satellite images from the beam projector. 

Seoul at last regained its daily life, thanks to KSA and RK's joint administration. 

All boxes on the to-do list of treatments and examinations were checked off, and the protocol on media management and operation in case of national crisis met its closure. 

And today, the key personnel of KSA, the RK, 3rd Elder, and Yuigi were gathered at the meeting room for the briefing on the progress up-to-date. 

First of all, Yuhyung was officially discharged, permanently expelled from the registered catalog of KSA employees and staff, imperatively relieved from all his duties and privileges. 

At the same time he was charged, with the recent case in Seoul, as a result of the internal investigation on the matter.

His true crime will never be printed on the public document housing the details of his charges, but he will be legally punished in one form or another, via the man's request. 

I don't care what or how. I want the heaviest penalty you can throw upon me. 

They have yet to decide on the exact what or how, but Yuhyung's career and life are now as good as over. 

And the Union agent who was captured at the end of the calamity at Seoul was eliminated the day before. 

Before which came the interrogation on the location of and the melee force possessed by the remainder of the Union, which provided a basis for Tao to plot a satellite map. 

“The international summits over the globe are not yet very cooperative, which means we are the only manforce we can hire for this job. So my opinion is that in terms of efficiency, it'd be much better for us to select and dispatch people for extermination and shutdown, rather than to have us travel back and forth for the job.” 

“So you're saying the said people must live as wanderers until the Union is completely gone, keeping in touch with us for the sake of communication and progress report.” 

“Which is why we need someone equipped with the energy and combat abilities that will allow them to cope with years-long travel and non-stop combats, as well as flexibility in improvisation against the unexpected. And thorough knowledge in the a's-to-z's of the Union would be a plus.” 

The second Tao, Yeonsu, and M-21 finished their speech, a hand was raised in the air. 

“I'll do it.” 

The hand belonged to none other than the 3rd Elder, gaining a dozen spotlights from the spectators' wide-open eyes. 

“I'll join him.” 

And Yuigi was the second to raise a hand. 

“W-what do you mean by that?” 

Takio - obviously - posed a question in alarm.

“I'm the perfect candidate for the requirements you just listed, M-21. And unlike you and your team, with duties to protect this place, I have no requisites that will bind me from travels.” 

“Same could be said of me. Since the 3rd Elder has lost his power, he would need a bodyguard to carry on with his mission against the modified humans potentially as powerful as Helga.” 

Their logics were without a flaw; in fact, they made an appeal that was only essential. 

The results for 3rd Elder's check-up revealed that his power did not altogether vanish; however, now he has become weak, no longer capable of firing an impact on par with that from a tank upon a single glance. 

Not to mention they learned through Helga that Union was still armed with combatants including her teammate named Sol. 

A proof that it will take a miracle, not hope, for them to bypass any physical collision during their mission. 

A proof that the 3rd Elder and Yuigi are basically candidates sent from above for the job. 

And they knew they would not need to be apprehensive for another betrayal, as the two ex-agents were the ones who supplied the key solutions for the catastrophe at Seoul, thereby earning themselves virtual badges that will certify their allegiance. 

The briefing took itself through the introduction, body, and conclusion without a haste, until the 3rd Elder and Yuigi were classified into a special team to search and destroy the hidden survivors of Union around the world. 

Partially because Frankenstein curiously hurried with the briefing.

“Now, I shall take my leave. You guys stay here and... Do whatever you need to.” 

“What? Where are you off to, boss?” 

“Outside.” 

“Outside? You mean outside Korea?” 

“Yup. But don't worry. I'll make sure I'll be there to say good-bye to the special team as they leave.” 

The three men of the RK could only tilt their heads in confusion, staring as Frankenstein hustled away without even telling them where exactly he was headed to. 

“But is it just me, or... Is he kind of excited?” 

“Thought I was the only one.”

“Well, you weren't.” 

The three men felt their curiosity stacking up by the end of their chat. 

Just what could urge the blonde human to leave in urgency, with a face in full bloom with such roseate excitement so very pronounced? 

(next chapter)

There you have it - the secret behind the four nobles’ return from death. As a reminder, in this fic Muzaka was not dead during the nuclear missile incident, which was mentioned in chapters 1 and 2. It took more than 60 chapters for me to finally unleash the secret for the remaining four. XD

This is part of the reason why I wanted to write this fic. I wanted to talk about Frankenstein and Lunark’s relationship, which was never officiated or portrayed in further depth in the original webtoon, and also attempt my take on the why’s and how’s on the nobles’ resurrection. As I was coming up with theories, I was reminded of the half of the Ragnarok that Lascrea gave to Raizel, and then I remembered how Lascrea, Kei, and Rosaria stopped a missile headed to a human city. The name of the city was left unknown in the webtoon, but I decided it’s Miami, since it didn’t take that long for them to stand upon the ocean to stop the missile (meaning it’s nearby Lukedonia and stationed at the coast of the continent, which would meet the demands to describe the American city that happens to be one of the three vertices making up the Bermuda Triangle). Thus I could come up with the grand secret behind the nobles’ return from death. This “Bermudan Treasure Chest” that I created was in a way a huge spoiler, and the blood-red corals that inhabit this zone was also a hint, in a way. And of course, none of this is canon; this is purely my theory, my creation.

At last I revealed the secret behind the return of the four nobles from the nuclear missile incident, and the two villains of this fic - Helga and Yuhyung - made their official exit. And you also know what will become of the 3rd Elder and Yuigi, and now all that remains is the relationship between Frankenstein and Lunark & the reason why Muzaka’s body moved on its own for survival during the nuclear missile incident. Which means that once these two are settled as well, this fic will be over. There are only 2 more chapters to go, and I can’t tell you how thankful I am to you for staying with me all this way. I’ll see you next week and the week after that with chapters 69 and 70, respectively! Thank you so much! :)

[am-i-right-marines]

Prompt: Ambush

December 24th, 2532

New Vancouver, Road to New Halifax

“-o I said to the guy: Don’t waste your money on a locksmith, I’ve got a pack of C12.”

Corporal Elliot Reynolds chuckled. As did Private Vetras and a couple of other Marines. “You’ve told that story a thousand times. It gets less funny every time, and it was never funny to begin with.”

“Hey, it’s a good story.” Private Gideon Tyler Winters grinned, punching Elliot in the shoulder. “You definitely laughed at it when Wendy was around. You got the hots for my sister or something?” He raised his eyebrows and smirked at the Corporal.

Elliot sputtered for a second before chuckling. “In your dreams, city boy.”

“Ohhhhh!” The other Marines riding on the Scorpion tank with them laughed, even the tank’s gunner and driver.

In Third Platoon, being from the city was an automatic contract to get teased relentlessly.

Gideon turned to look at the driver and raised an eyebrow. “How about you Waters? Any good stories?”

The woman smirked, rolling her eyes behind her visor. “None that involve you. Last time you tried to pick me up you mixed up your line, dropped your drink, and then face planted.”

“Oh? I didn’t hear about that one.” The gunner turned around slightly from his position at the 50. Caliber machine gun, smiling inquisitively.

Gideon laughed. “Hey, at least I tried, Mr. ‘I’ll wait until we’re back starside’.”

Elliot rolled his eyes playfully, looking between the two. “Ladies, ladies, you’re both pretty.”

Waters snorted. “Always with the.... woah.”

Everyone turned to see what had made Waters stop.

And there sitting in a crumpled and burning heap in a cluster of collapsed trees was a warthog with the sigil of the United Rebel Front on its hood and five bodies scattered around.

“Heh. Fuckin’ rebels got what they deserved.” The gunner scoffed.

“Hey, that’s somebody’s son!” Elliot snapped.

“Reynolds is right.”

Everyone snapped to attention. “Lieutenant Price.”

The platoon leader nodded at them as he walked by. “They’re not all bad. I—“

“Hey... you hear that?”

The sound of hover engines. Covenant tech.

Waters suddenly pointed skywards. “Banshees! Inbound!”

Half a second later, plasma bombs dropped from the alien fighters as they whizzed overhead, slamming into the forward vehicles in the convoy and showering the rest in heat, shrapnel, blood, and gore.

Plasma fire started coming out of the trees, cutting down countless unsuspecting Marines. A white line of plasma from a Covenant Focus Rifle shot out of the trees and slammed into Private Vetras’ head, utterly destroying it and covering Elliot in blood. “Shit-!” Vetras got out before he was silenced forever.

“It’s an ambush!” Someone shouted.

“Clear the tanks!” Elliot roared, leaping off the tread of the Scorpion and landing in the mud.

“Enemy armor!” Gideon warned, shouldering his MA5 and pouring fire into the trees as two Covenant Wraith Tanks emerged from another direction.

“Get off the road! Get off the road!” Lieutenant Price shouted, sprinting towards a side path in the grass. “Move! We’ll hit ‘em from the side!”

“You heard the Lieutenant, double time it Marines!” Sergeant Parker. The guy was a hardass in every sense of the word.

Gideon rolled his eyes, patting Elliot’s arm as the pair booked it into the trees.

“Find cover!”

“Grena—!” BOOM.

“Open fire!” Hundreds upon hundreds of 7.62mm bullets tore through foliage and wood.

The duo somehow ended up with Lieutenant Price, Sergeant Parker, and Airman Piper. He still had no idea why they had a comms liason from the fuckin’ Chair Force.

“Lieutenant! Just picked up a transmission from Sector Command. They want us to push up and capture the ford at grid 3-by-4-by-9. Apparently a second convoy is supposed to catch up with us.” Piper called.

“How the fuck are we supposed to do that when we’re being slaughtered?!” Gideon shouted over the din.

“Quiet!” Price barked. “We have our orders. Let’s move!”

The five man adhoc fireteam emerged from the trees and cut down a squad of Grunts with combined fire.

A resounding boom behind them followed by an explosion indicated that Waters had turned her tank’s canon on the Wraiths.

“Through the trees! We can’t get pinned here! Move!” Sergeant Parker roared.

“Frag out!”

Through the already deafening roar, the familiar woosh of an M57 Pilum Assault Weapon being fired sounded. A cluster of trees were engulfed in a bright purple and orange fireball, followed by the sound of half a dozen plasma grenades cooking off from the heat.

The surviving tank, Waters’ tank, plowed through the trees and into a field on the other side, followed by two M12 Warthogs and about fifty Marines. Five miles straight ahead stood their objective. They’d escaped the ambush.

—————————

“So now the objective is to destroy the bridge, not capture it?”

“Affirmative, Corporal. I just got out of a meeting with the other platoon leaders. A high-strength Covenant Force has been spotted by Air Force SIGINT Specialist Naiya Ray making for the bridge. It’s a tactical location in this sector. Command wants it gone. We’ve been given a HAVOK-Class Tactical Nuclear Warhead to ensure the job is done, and to enforce Cole Protocol.”

Gideon glanced at Elliot, who shrugged, then they both refocused on the briefing. “Specialist Ray estimates we have an hour max to complete our objective. As such, we will be commencing an all out assault on the bridge with 2nd and 4th Platoon. We’ve been allocated one CAS asset, callsign TAU-5. Now, we’ll be assaulting from the South side of the Covenant defenses. 2nd Platoon the North, and 4th the East. Any questions?”

“Sir! No sir!”

“Oorah.” Price nodded.

“Mount up!” Sergeant Parker boomed.

Elliot patted Gideon’s shoulder as the two climbed into the back of an M12 LRV Troop Carrier model, more commonly known as the ‘TroopHog’. “Hell or high water.”

Gideon slapped his friend’s back in return. “Funny this planet doesn’t have any icecaps.”

Elliot smirked. “‘Atta boy.”

A few more marines climbed into their TroopHog before it reved its engine and ripped off into the grass towards the bridge with the rest of the convoy.

Maybe three minutes later there was plasma fire flying all around them and they had to duck low in the seats to avoid being hit. As their ‘Hog bounced roughly over the ground, Elliot looked out to the side, and watched as another ‘Hog caught a Fuel Rod blast to the hood and was engulfed in a fireball. “Standby!” Parker barked.

The Hog drew closer. “Standby!”

Closer. “Standby!”

The plasma fire was immense.

The vehicle swerved in a circle to swing its back around and allow the marines out. “Go! Go go go!”

The couple dozen marines in the vehicle jumped out and raised their weapons, “Go go go!”

Gideon and Elliot both both jumped into a crater created by a plasma mortar shell and used it as a foxhole. “This is the single worst idea I’ve ever seen!” Gideon shouted as he put a five-round burst into the chest of a Jackal.

“No kidding!” Elliot shouted back.

Farther back in the Covenant lines, they saw a cluster of Grunts collapse under a hail of rifle fire. Apparently 2nd and 4th Platoon had arrived.

“Push up! Keep the pressure!” Lieutenant Price barked, lobbing a fragmentation grenade overhead and sprinting forward.

“You heard the man boys! It’s time for some hazard pay!” Parker added, following behind him.

“Go! Go go go!” Private Harper shouted, darting from his own foxhole.

Then the ground started to shake.... and over the hill emerged a Covenant Scarab Tank.

“Reynolds! Get on the horn with CAS! Double time! We need that thing dead!”

“Sir!” Elliot replied, blinking in to what limited HUD marine helmets had and connecting to the local channel. “TAU-5, Bravo 2-7. Request danger close. On our location. Trailing south. Commence 6 seconds. Target is a Covenant Scarab. Over.”

The radio crackled. “Understood. ETA 10 seconds. Standby.”

“Reynolds! Where the hell is it?!”

“Bravo 2-7, TAU-5. Positive I.D. on the target. Danger close. Guns, guns, guns.”

“Reynolds!?”

“Get to cover!”

A pair of F-41 Broadsword strikecraft emerged from the clouds at supersonic speeds, loaded for bare with missiles and autocannons. The Scarab frantically turned its dorsal cannon around, but it was too late.

The two human pilots absolutely unleashed into the enemy vehicle, cannons spitting 35mm rounds into the tank by the hundreds. Just as well, each pilot launched one M6088 ST/MMP Medusa Anti-Vehicle missile into the offending target before pulling up back into the clouds as the Scarab detonated in a wash of purple fire.

Of course, not before it got off one final shot and sheared the wing off one of the Broadswords. The pilot, who happened to be the one on the radio, was heard screaming as his fighter spiraled out of control....

..... and then slammed cockpit-first into the Scorpion tank driven by Private Sarah Waters.

“Waters!” Gideon exclaimed.

“There’s nothing we can do! Focus on the battle!” Price ordered.

“Harper, where’s that bomb?!”

“Here Sergeant!” The man tossed a briefcase to the Sergeant. Just goes to show how advanced civilization was. A Nuclear bomb in a briefcase.

“Alright, le— ah!”

“Lieutenant!”

Elliot whirled around to see Price collapse to the ground with a smoking plasma hole in his stomach. “Lieutenant!”

But Price wasn’t listening, he clasped Parker’s forearm. “You- you gotta get our boys outta here. I can complete the objective.”

“No! No one gets left behind!” Parker replied, voice cracking as more Covenant appeared.

“Goddamnit Joseph!”

“Ryan!” Parker shouted. Then he turned to Elliot. “Reynolds. You’re Sergeant now. I’m not leaving him behind again. Get our boys outta here.”

Elliot nodded, “Fall back!”

Gideon on the other hand, started panicking. “Sergeant! No!” Elliot grabbed his arm and started dragging the Private away. “No! You can’t do this! No! No!”

“I said fall back goddamnit! That’s an order!” Elliot fell into the leadership roll easily, dragging the panicking Private away.

“Sir! Second contact!” Harper barked, pointing at the sky.

Sure enough, a flight of three Pelican dropships descended from the sky and the radio crackled with a female voice. “Raider Flight to Bravo 2-7, you boys look like you could use a hand.”

“You have no idea Raider. We could use a ride.”

“You got it.” The pilot replied.

And the three descended, landing in front of the retreating Marines. “Load up!” Elliot boomed.

And as they all loaded in, Gideon looked back to the bridge where Parker and Price were still positioned. “Sergeant!”

“Mission first! Go, now!”

—————————

And, that’s that!

[tomeandflickcorner]

Umbrella Academy Recap 2x01

1x01 1x02 1x03 1x04 1x05 1x06 1x07 1x08 1x09 1x10

Season 2 is finally here.  And I’ve decided to continue on with my viewing of this series, with a new episode recap being posted each Sunday (unless RL stuff gets in the way, of course.)

Of course, we start off with a reminder of how, on April 1st, 2019, Vanya’s uncontrolled power burst out of her and collided with the moon, causing it to break apart.  The large chunks of moon debris then rained down towards the earth, which resulted in a planet-wide conflagration that quickly incinerated everyone in its path.  However, the Hargeeeves Siblings, who pretty much all played a role in causing the apocalypse to occur in the first place, attempted to go back in time with Number 5′s ability to time jump in the hopes that they could figure out how to prevent this disaster from happening.

But somehow, during the time jump, the Hargreeves Siblings all got separated.  While they all ended up in the same alleyway in Dallas, Texas, they got dropped off in completely different times.  Klaus and Ben end up in 1960.  Allison comes out in 1961, and is met by a less than warm welcome as she tries to enter a ‘Whites Only’ diner.  (Because racial segregation was commonplace in 1961).  Luther emerges in 1962, and he briefly has to deal with some homeless guy latching onto him, with the homeless guy joining in when Luther tries to call out to his missing siblings.  Diego and Vanya both arrive in 1963, but on completely different dates  Diego arrives on September 1st (where he immediately comes to the defense of a woman getting mugged before witnessing a television broadcast of President Kennedy’s famous ‘ask not what your country can do for you’ speech), and Vanya appears on October 12, where she ends up stumbling out into traffic and gets hit by a car a la Marty McFly in Back to the Future.  It’s also important to note that some mysterious man had managed to observe each arrival, as he secretly takes pictures of the Hargreeves Siblings from the shadows.  

Finally, Number 5 arrives on November 25, 1963.  However, he isn’t greeted by the same peacefully idealistic street that his brothers and sisters witnessed when they emerged from the time vortex.  Instead, it’s a completely war-torn area with tanks rolling down the street and a group of soldiers all speaking Russian.  After a moment, Number 5 catches a glimpse of a discarded newspaper, with the headline announcing that the Soviet army have invaded the United States.  Number 5 looks around in shock as U.S. troops arrive to try and fight the Soviets, and he verbally wonders what they’ve done now, realizing that the staggered arrival of the Hargreeves Siblings in the 1960s must have somehow caused this to happen.  

No sooner does he ask this, the other Hargreeves Siblings appear on the scene, joining the fight against the Soviet army.  And it seems that, during their separation, they’ve all managed to further develop their individual powers.  For instance, Vanya is able to stop and destroy a missile fired from a Soviet tank in midair.  Klaus has managed to master his new ability to make ghosts solid by summoning up a small group of dead soldiers (and a few civilians) to attack the Soviet soldiers, with Ghost Ben also joining the fight by taking out a few more Soviets with his power.  And Allison, who clearly got her voice back, uses her power to cause three enemy soldiers’ heads to explode.  Luther and Diego are also there, but they don’t really do much, as Luther is only shown protecting Klaus from getting shot by blocking the projectiles with his own body and Diego manages to dodge a bunch of flying bullets.  Upon seeing Number 5 standing there, Diego yells at him, asking where he’s been.  Before Number 5 could respond, however, someone else suddenly appears on the scene.  It’s Hazel!  Only he’s now an old man.  The now elderly Hazel tells Number 5 that he can’t explain what happened now, as they have to get out of that time quickly.  To emphasize his point, Hazel points overhead at a group of missile smoke trails in the sky.  Hazel tells Number 5 that the smoke trails are from nuclear warheads, which will go off in a few moments.  Number 5 hesitates out of concern for his family, as they’ll all surely die in the imminent explosion.  To this, Hazel states ‘you can’t help them if you’re dead.’  At this logic, Number 5 accepts Hazel’s hand, and they teleport off to some other time, leaving the other Hargreeves Siblings behind to watch as the nuclear explosion overtakes them and the mushroom cloud begins to form.

Hazel brings Number 5 back in time to November 15, 1963, stating that 10 days should give them plenty of time to restore the timeline and prevent this other apocalypse from taking place.  Number 5 asks what they’re supposed to do, though Hazel informs him that he’s on his own.  After all, he’d quit The Commission.  Hazel states he only came back to give Number 5 a hand this one time, out of respect for Agnes.  Here, we’re sadly informed that Hazel’s life with her was tragically brief as Agnes ended up dying from cancer.  (Well, that’s a huge kick in the teeth!  At least they had a good 20 years together..  Suppose we should be grateful for that, at least.)

Unfortunately, Hazel’s conversation with Number 5 doesn’t get much further than that.  As they were talking, three white-haired men, all wearing trench coats and backpacks, emerged from a bus parked across the street.  The moment Number 5 notices them walking towards them, the three men pull out machine guns from beneath their coats.  Hazel quickly shoves his time-traveling briefcase into Number 5′s hands and pushes him out of the way, instructing him to run.  At the same time, Hazel also discretely shoves an object into Number 5′s pocket.  Number 5, heeding Hazel’s final instruction, teleports away to safety as Hazel is unceremoniously gunned down by the white-haired men.  Number 5 manages to get away, but he has to abandon the briefcase, as it got pelted by the gunfire.  The time-traveling briefcases aren’t bulletproof, it seems.

Interestingly, as the white-haired men walk off, one of them makes eye contact with a milkman who just happened to be passing by.  Wasn’t sure what that was about at first, but it’ll be important later on.

As Number 5 makes good his escape by leaving the scene down an alleyway, he notices the curtains in a nearby window moving, as if someone had just closed them in a hurry.  This, along with the sight of a camera tripod set up on the roof of the building (among other things), arouses Number 5′s attention and he immediately decides to investigate.  This leads to him encountering a man called Elliot, who freaks out a bit when Number 5 teleports himself directly into Elliot’s apartment.  Elliot seems like a bit of a conspiracy nut as he doesn’t hesitate to ask Number 5 if he’s from the Pentagon or the CIA.  Number 5 doesn’t acknowledge these questions, simply helping himself to Elliot’s coffee.  (Because as the show has well established, Number 5 is a coffee addict.)

As their interactions continue, it’s made pretty clear that Elliot believes Number 5 is an extraterrestrial alien.  Number 5 doesn’t contradict this and decides to simply go along with it.  Which leads to Elliot revealing that he was that mysterious cameraman who took pictures of the other Hargreeves Siblings appearing in that Dallas alleyway throughout the past few years.   With this information, Number 5 is able to confirm his brothers and sisters are all alive, but realizes that he pretty much stranded them there, however unintentional that was.  He turns to Elliot demanding his help in finding them, as he only has 10 days to reunite with the Hargreeves Siblings and prevent the turn of events that would lead to the nuclear holocaust he’d previously witnessed.  So Elliot gives Number 5 an excerpt from a newspaper, which features Diego’s mugshot.  Because Diego went and got himself arrested.  (Typical.)

With the information he got from Elliot, Number 5 is able to track Diego down to a mental hospital.  He wound up there because he was trying to prevent the Kennedy Assassination, which was scheduled to occur pretty soon.  Naturally, nobody believed his declarations.  He finally got locked up when he got caught trying to break into Lee Harvey Oswald’s house in order to kill him before he got the chance to assassinate President Kennedy.  When Number 5 meets with Diego, he informs him of this new apocalypse that is set to occur in 10 days.  At first, Diego seems to be on board with Number 5, but he really has a one track mind, believing that he absolutely has to prevent the Kennedy Assassination, and that succeeding in that would save the world.  Diego admits he is also thinking about going back in time to kill Hitler as well.  As you might expect, Number 5 is not impressed with Diego’s intentions, informing his brother that he has a hero complex.  He then decides to leave Diego where he was, also informing the mental hospital orderlies nearby of Diego’s plan to escape by cutting through the bars on his cell window.  With that, Number 5 leaves Diego behind as the nurses sedate him.

As Number 5 leaves the mental hospital, whispering to Diego that he’ll be back for him later, we see where the other Hargreeves Siblings are.  Vanya now has amnesia and has been living on a farm with a small nuclear family that consists of a businessman named Carl, his wife, Sissy, and their son, Harlan.  Harlan, it seems, doesn’t talk.  I think the implication is that he has some form of autism, but I could be wrong.  As he leaves to go back to the office, Carl tells Vanya that he placed another missing person notice in the paper, stating someone must be missing her enough to come looking for her. 

Klaus, it seems, has been living in San Francisco for the past three years, but has now decided to return to Dallas.  Ben isn’t happy about this as he wants to go back to San Francisco.  Ben eventually admits he has some unfinished business he wanted to take care of back in California and he asks Klaus if he really expects him to continue following him everywhere.  An argument breaks out between them, with Klaus pointing out that Ben doesn’t even have a physical body without him.  Therefore, Klaus clams that, while he doesn’t need Ben, Ben needs him.  To this, Ben states nobody needs Klaus’ crap, and that is why he’s always alone.  Immediately, the two brothers began a physical fight.  (Which leads to an amusing moment when some random guy drives by and sees Klaus seemingly wrestling with nobody.)  Eventually, they tire themselves out and proceed to start walking, as their car engine overheated and therefore had to be abandoned on the side of the road.  An undetermined amount of time later, they make it to this roadside bar.  Klaus asks when the next bus to Dallas will arrive, with the bartender telling him it’ll come tomorrow at 3:00 sharp.   While he settles down to wait, Klaus gets invited by some other bar patrons to join in a game of poker.  Of course, Klaus believes he has the advantage as Ben could let him know when someone is bluffing, and he therefore coerces one of the men to use the keys to his pickup truck as a gambling chip.  But it turns out Ben was deliberately lying so Klaus would lose the game. (He was still angry at Klaus for earlier and wanted to prove a point to him.)  Klaus, however, tries to make off with the keys to the pickup truck anyway, but failed to be sneaky enough as the pickup truck’s owner noticed.  But in the end, Klaus is able to make a getaway in the stolen pickup truck.  (Though the police end up catching up to Klaus en route to Dallas and arrest him.)

Meanwhile, Allison has ended up getting married to a Black man named Raymond, who is clearly excited about President Kennedy’s plans to make a stand for the rights of Blacks in America.  Allison is unable to completely join in with his excitement, knowing that President Kennedy will be assassinated in a few days time, though she obviously can’t tell Raymond what she knows.   We can see she also is feeling a bit melancholy when her husband gives her a pre-anniversary gift- a copy of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon.  Which obviously reminds Allison of Luther.

And speaking of Luther, he’s now working in some sort of underground boxing ring.  You know, the type where the winner of the fight gets prize money. Although, most of his proceeds from winning the fight end up going to a man that I guess is supposed to be Luther’s manager, Mr. Ruby.  Anyway, they seem to have set up this whole ploy where Luther pretends to be losing his fights, only to turn things around at the right moment. Not sure how Luther got involved with this, but it makes sense given his obvious amount of brute strength. 

Anyway, as the episode continues, we see Allison and Raymond are involved with a group of other Black people who are fighting against segregation and racism, with them holding their meetings at a hair salon that Allison now runs.  At present, their group is planning a sit-in five days before President Kennedy is to arrive in Dallas.  Although, the leader of their group makes it clear that it is imperative that nobody behave violently in any way during the sit-in.  Whatever happens, they all must maintain dignity and honor.  Otherwise, the media will have an excuse to dismiss them as a group of thugs.  Of course, the meeting is interrupted when some racist jerk called Mr. Mason pokes his nose into their business, interrogating them on what they’re all doing there after hours.  Allison and Raymond are initially able to handle things as civilly as possible.  Until Raymond moves to shut the door.  Mr. Mason, seemingly deliberately, moves his foot into the way.  Which gives him the excuse he needs to accuse Raymond of assault.  But when Mr. Mason makes a threatening move towards him, Allison steps in, utilizing the fighting skills she’d developed during her time in the Umbrella Academy in defense of her husband.  Mr. Mason then slinks off with his tail between his legs, but you’re left with the feeling that he’s not going to just let this go.

Back at the farmhouse, Vanya can’t sleep and ends up heading down to the kitchen, where she catches Sissy smoking.  However, she doesn’t seem bothered by this in the slightest, and Sissy asks her if she wants a cigarette as well.  They then head out to the barn to smoke.  Which doesn’t seem like the smartest place to smoke, especially with all the hay lying around.  As they sit and talk, Sissy confides in Vanya that she has a secret stash of money hidden in a coffee can that Carl doesn’t know about.  It seems that, while Sissy thinks Carl is a good man, she knows he’ll eventually leave or die.  And when that happens, she’ll need to be able to fend for herself.  Sissy also confesses that, before she married Carl, she wanted to work as a counter girl at some big department store, as she always had viewed those counter girls as the height of elegance and she’d wanted to be that elegant, too.  Vanya responds by telling Sissy that she’s plenty elegant.  Which is a rather sweet thing for Vanya to say to her new friend.

Elsewhere, Diego has woken up from being sedated and finds himself trapped in a padded room.  However, he manages to get out of his straitjacket and picks the lock with a pen the orderlies had neglected to confiscate from him.  However, his escape attempt his interrupted when those white-haired men show up in a milk truck.  Apparently the same one the hapless milkman we saw earlier had been driving.  It seems that there WAS some significance to the milkman and one of the white-haired men meeting each other’s eyes in that earlier scene.  The white-haired men must have killed the milkman and stole his uniform, like in The Terminator.  The white-haired men, who we can now conclude were sent by The Commission, proceed to make their way through the mental hospital, killing the hospital’s administrator and two security guards in the process.  They manage to locate Diego as he’s trying to escape with the help of Lila, another patient at the mental hospital that he’d interacted with a few times.  After a prolonged chase scene, Diego and Lila manage to escape and give the white-haired men the slip.

We then wrap the episode up with Luther, who is at some nightclub.  He’s now filling the role of Mr. Ruby’s bodyguard, I guess.  While there, he strikes up a conversation with some cigarette girl called Autumn.  Through this conversation, Luther learns that Number 5 was also at the nightclub, having tracked down Luther there somehow.  So Luther heads over to where Number 5 was sitting, not hesitating to voice his anger at his brother, as he was stuck in time for a year and had believed everyone else was dead.  At this point, Luther notices that it looks as if somebody is going to start something with Mr. Ruby, so he starts to head over to fulfill his duty as Mr. Ruby’s bodyguard.  Number 5 stops him, telling him that he understands how hard it is to be stuck in time, not knowing if they’d ever see the people they loved again.  Which makes sense, as we know that’s the situation Number 5 was in for a number of years.   But right now, Number 5 says they have to focus on finding the others, as another apocalypse is coming.  Unfortunately, Luther isn’t swayed, stating that he doesn’t care.  He then walks off, leaving Number 5 sitting there.

Closing thoughts/questions:

I wonder if we’ll see Elliot again.  Is he going to play a larger role in this season?

Same with Lila.  She’s clearly nuts, but is still sane enough to possibly be an ally.  Also, I kinda like the dynamic she has with Diego

I wonder what Ben had been up to in San Francisco to make him want to stay.

Vanya seems a lot happier with Carl and Sissy’s family than she did before.  I can’t help wondering if it would be kinder to her for her to remain with them.

Does Harlan have autism?  If so, I hope they present it in a respectful way.

I feel so bad for Hazel!  He deserved so much better than he got!  I guess it’s good that he’s with Agnes again, but still!

Luther’s still a little snot.  Guess that hasn’t changed much.

Diego is kinda dumb.  I realize his intentions are good. But come on!  Did it occur to him that stopping Kennedy's assassination might lead to a lot of negative consequences he’d never be able to predict? Maybe he should watch some Doctor Who sometime.

Which reminds me, nice Star Wars reference from Diego. Too bad nobody will get it for a while yet, as the original movie won’t come out for another 14 years, and would be another 3 years before moviegoers will learn who Darth Vader is.

I’m really interested in what Allison’s going to do.  Obviously, she can’t stay with Raymond as she’ll have to go back to her own time.  Especially since she has Claire to think about.  But she seems to have something good going on with him.  And if it gets her away from her incestuous relationship with Luther, I’m 100% for it!

[monsters-conquer-the-world]

10 Games

For Jack’s 10th birthday, Will got him a RetroPie.  Pretty cool, especially since it’s so easy to just dump a zillion games in there and let the kid go nuts.  But that’s a one-way ticked to analysis paralysis, so Will had a a super sick idea.  He asked me and Jess and some other friends to put together a list of 10 must-play classic/retro games and write a little bit about why we chose them.  As someone who loves video games and writing and lists, I was ALL ‘BOUT THAT.  

Now that Jack’s birthday has come and gone, I can share all the junk I wrote about these ten games that mean so much to me!  Check it out:

I love this idea.  I know the initial prompt was just "pick your favorites" but I couldn't help but impose a bunch of additional caveats. I know where this list is headed (and I have a pretty good idea of what games will pop up on the other lists)!  I could have easily listed off 10 Super NES games or 10 N64 games, but I wanted to hit a variety of consoles and franchises.  I would have liked to have hit a variety of genres and studios too, but I can't lie: I love platformers, and I love games by Nintendo.  It was challenging but rewarding to shave this list down to ten--a lot of old favorites and recent discoveries couldn't fit on the list, leaving these few.  The ones I've always treasured, the ones that stuck with me, the ones I memorized the music and sound effects to, starring the characters I love, exploring the worlds I wanted to live in.  Maybe you'll dig 'em too.

NES

Super Mario Bros. 3

I had spent some quality time with our Atari 2600 well before we ever had an NES in the house. I have fond memories of playing but not really understanding Pac-Man, Haunted House, and the bleak nuclear apocalypse masterpiece Missile Command.  But the first game I really wrapped my head around was Super Mario Bros. (and Duck Hunt, but that's not as relevant!).  Mario and Luigi's multi-screen adventures under a friendly blue sky expanded my concept of what a video game could even be--plus it was super fun, and Rochelle and I could both play it together! Super Mario Bros. 2 was technically more impressive, but so weird (and flanked by so many similar games) that it didn't rock my world like Mario 1 did (though I of course have a huge soft spot for it anyway).   Then Super Mario Bros. 3 came along and Mario had learned how to fly.  It was bigger, more beautiful, and stuffed to the brim with secrets and surprises! It was so exciting even Mom and Dad would play it with us.  Super Mario World is maybe the bigger, better, beautifuler game (and you can ride a FREAKING DINOSAUR), but I'll never forget the day I woke up to find my dad and sister playing this in the living room because we finally owned it.  It was too good to just keep renting! Kid Icarus

I didn't catch Kid Icarus the first time around.  I didn't even play it until high school, but I was inspired to track it down because of my love for Greek mythology and the Metroid series.  Kid Icarus takes place in a world heavily inspired by (but still distinctly different from) the swords, sandals, and sorcery epics of ancient Greece!  It's considered a "sister game" to the original Metroid, released around the same time by the same team, and the game shares a lot of the core elements that make Metroid so unique and awesome: eerily lonely, dangerous worlds to explore, a challenging beginning, player-empowering character growth, and a focus on exploring vast, often vertically-scrolling worlds with satisfying run'n'gun'n'jump gameplay. Kid Icarus borrows all the best stuff from Metroid, but tempers it with a slate of unique design choices: instead of one sprawling world, KI is split into discrete levels.  The first world is an ascent out of Hades with vertically oriented levels, the second world is a horizontal trek across the surface world, the third is another vertical ascent into the sky, and the finale is a horizontal, forced-scrolling shoot-em-up to reclaim the heavens!  Every fourth level is a sprawling, maze-like, Metroid-ish dungeon, capped off with a frantic boss fight!  Plus, Eggplant Wizards, credit cards, and RPG-style character upgrades!  They don't make 'em like this anymore!! Duck Tales

It's not as groundbreaking as Super Mario Bros. 1 or as innovative as Super Mario Bros. 3, but that doesn't change the fact that Duck Tales could possibly be my favorite NES platformer of all time. You don't need to know anything about or even like the original cartoon (or the comic books that birthed it) to appreciate the challenging charms of this hop'n'bop classic.  Duck Tales only has a handful of levels, but they're huge, full of hidden treasures, packed with alternate paths, swiss cheesed with secret passageways, and just gorgeous translations of Disney's lush cartoon worlds.   Getting to choose your own path through Duck Tales' roster of big beautiful worlds is reminiscent of the Mega Man games (also by Capcom). What really sets Duck Tales apart is controlling Scrooge.  He's spry for a septuagenarian billionaire, but his real talents lie in swinging and pogo-sticking off his cane!  It's delightful cartoon nonsense, but if you get the hang of it, it's also incredibly satisfying, allowing you to make some wild, death-defying maneuvers.  If you dig this and find yourself hungering for more bounce-centric gameplay, Shovel Knight takes Scrooge's cane, turns it into a shovel, and builds a deeply satisfying modern classic around it.  Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze finally gives Cranky a chance to shine as a playable character, and he straight-up jock's Scrooge's style, cane and all.  It rules.

Super NES

Yoshi's Island

The first thing you'll notice about Yoshi's Island is that it looks like it was drawn with crayons, markers, and colored pencils!  The second thing you'll notice is that Mario is a freaking baby!  It's an odd premise, but it all comes together in perhaps the best sidescroller ever made.  With Mario mustache-less and diaper-clad, this game puts you directly in control of Yoshi, and he is a joy to play as.  Hovering to extend his jump power, turning enemies into eggs and chucking them, and butt-stomping are Yoshi's primary tools of the trade, and they mix things up nicely.  This doesn't feel like "just another Mario," but it also feels right at home in the Mario pantheon. Beyond the Yosh-man's most basic maneuvers, there are some wild power-ups that turn Yoshi into a helicopter, a train that zips along in the background, a mole-tank, and more, plus special areas where Baby Mario gets superpowers and runs up walls and stuff!  Yoshi's Island is another magical micro-world, jam-packed with extremely clever and fun level design and very possibly the biggest and best boss fights of all time.   Ya gotta play this one.

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong-Quest

I know I just talked about Yoshi's Island maybe being the best platformer of all time, but Donkey Kong Country 2 is right behind it, nipping at its heels.  DKC2 has a wildly different aesthetic, dropping you into beautifully computer-rendered pirate shipwrecks, janky-but-glitzy night time carnival rides, endless bramble patches, a skyscraper-sized beehive, haunted forests, and more!  They're not just beautiful to look at, but beautiful to listen to, because DKC2 features one of the all-time greatest video game soundtracks.  Maybe the greatest.  But this game ain't just another pretty face!

DKC2, like Super Mario Bros. 3 and Duck Tales, is stuffed to the gills with tricky little secrets and hidden areas and surprises.  This game doesn't just have secret levels, it has a secret WORLD.  This game doesn't just have a secret world, it has an entire secret ENDING.  The classically solid platforming is accompanied by a wealth of mine cart challenges, awesome animal buddies, mini-games, and enough level design variety to keep you coming back for every last hidden treasure.  

Super Metroid

Super Metroid doesn't just have secrets, it has mysteries.  This was the first game to ever actually scare me. The first one to ever creep me out.  And that just made me want to play it even more.  It feels lonely and dangerous.  Unlike the games earlier on this list, it is one HUGE and continuous world.  It is a world of incomprehensible alien horrors, ancient moldering ruins, and high-tech space-faring bio-terrorists.  This world, named Zebes, is a world where the sky continuously rains acid and almost every living thing inhabiting it wants to kill you.  Good thing you're Samus Aran, the toughest, smartest bounty hunter to ever clean up Space Pirate scum!

Samus explores this acid-drenched nightmare planet by running, gunning, and jumping... but also by solving puzzles and thinking her way out of traps.  With each power up she gets a little stronger, and can find her way deeper into this gnashing alien hellscape.  It's a game that is sadly beautiful just as often as it is ghoulish.  The story, simple and sketched-in as it is, is also deeper and more moving than you will ever expect. The boss fights are as massive, memorable, and epic as the ones in Yoshi's Island, but about a thousand times more intense and frightening.  The music perfectly sets the dark, burbling mood of each region of Zebes, and by the end of the game you will feel like the most powerful hero in the galaxy.  This mix of sci-fi, horror, and adventure isn't just a must-play, it's a life-changer.

Gameboy Color

Wario Land II

I love the Mario series, but I'm also absolutely crazy about Wario.  He's a fat, greedy, chaotic, prideful, disgusting, bull-headed oaf.  He's the polar opposite of Mario... and that's why I love him!  He's not exactly a villain, but he's a definitely a troublemaker, and it is hilariously fun to walk (or stumble!) a mile or three in his shoes.  The game before this, Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land is a ton of fun (as is Super Mario Land 2 before it!), but Wario Land II is the first one that truly feels like a Wario game.  What makes this game so different?  Wario can't be killed!

You read that right, there's (almost) no way to actually "die" in this game!  No way to lose lives.  That might sound too easy, or boring, or both, but it's not!  Wario might be unkillable, but all KINDS of bad stuff can and WILL still happen to him.  A LOT.  He'll get flattened, set on fire, trapped in bubbles, fattened up, frozen, drunk, zombified, and more!  And here's the kicker: those wacky conditions are required to solve the puzzles and challenges of each level!  On top of that ingenious and perfectly wacky set of game mechanics, the story branches off in wildly different directions: you'll blow up the annoying alarm clock in your castle, play street basketball against a giant bunny, be nice to a chicken, visit Atlantis, race through a weird world of mouths, noses, and eyes, and more!  There are multiple endings, multiple hidden exits, and multiple secret treasures and minigames to find and conquer.  Almost all of the Wario Land and Wario Ware games are oddball masterpieces, but WLII is the perfect balance of weird, smart, funny, and challenging.

Nintendo 64

Super Mario 64

This is it.  This is the game.  In 1996, when I was in sixth grade, Super Mario 64 was the only thing I cared about.  I begged and wished and hoped for a Nintendo 64 that Christmas, but it didn't come.  I was crushed.  Occasionally I was able to rent an N64 and Super Mario 64, and I'd lose whole days to this magical, miraculous game.  When I couldn't rent it, I'd bug my classmates about it endlessly.  "What level are you on?  What's that level like?  What stars can you get?  What secrets have you found?"  They'd answer a few of my ravenous, bug-eyed questions before getting uncomfortable and leaving to do something else.  What was the big deal? Why was I (and still am) so obsessed?

The leap from Super Nintendo to Nintendo 64 was like the leap from console and computer games to virtual reality.  But instead of short, funny minigames, it is a huge, sprawling world where anything seems possible.  A magical, secret garden full of surprises, wonder, challenges, and secrets.  Where the sun always shines in a cloudless sky... except when you plunge into the death-defying Bowser levels or the inappropriately terrifying Big Boo's Haunt.  Oh Mario can definitely fly in this one like he did in Super Mario Bros. 3, but just the simple act of running around in circles and jumping through 3D space felt like a joyous miracle... one that puts 2-dimensional flight to shame.  Each world (accessed by jumping INTO paintings in Princess Peach's sprawling but empty castle) is colorful, full of possibility, and chock full of distinct personality.  Adventuring through 3D space for the first time ever was incredible on its own, but doing it in such richly detailed, lovingly crafted worlds made me want to play there forever.  I still do. 

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Take everything I just said about Super Mario 64 and multiply it by ten!  Well, sort of.  Ocarina of Time took the lessons learned from Super Mario 64 and applied them to the dungeon-crawling, puzzle-solving Legend of Zelda series.  The result was an incredibly groundbreaking game that I cherished almost as zealously as Super Mario 64.  I don't think it's aged as well, but I don't care.  Ocarina of Time is a grand story, spanning seven years (!!!) and the entire fantastical country of Hyrule.  As Link, you jump forward and back through time, meet strange and wonderful new friends, discover hidden kingdoms, face the blood-soaked evil of Hyrule's past, save its future, outwit cunning puzzles and traps, steal and ride a magnificent horse, challenge towering, Super Metroid-style end bosses, wield magical weapons, break hearts, play beautiful music, and go fishing.  It's an entire, epic fantasy life in one little cartridge. 

This was the first Zelda game I ever spent SERIOUS time with, and the fact that it plays like a fantasy-fueled hybrid of Super Mario 64 and Super Metroid means I've lost entire days to it.  I've played it start to finish at least 8 or 9 times.  It never gets boring. Like Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time invented how we make and play 3D games.  This was the first 3D game where you could lock onto enemies and points of interest, plus a bevy of other camera controls that come standard in 3D games now (or at least they did for about a decade after Ocarina's release). The story is surprisingly cinematic and even gripping at times.  You'll want to live in this world.  You'll be sad when you see the end credits.  Not because of the ending itself, but because there's no more game for you to play... until you start it all over again on the next save file.  

Star Fox 64

Star Fox 64 was a life-changing event for me, just like Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time.  So is Star Fox 64 a slow-paced, exploration heavy adventure into beautiful and fantastical solitude like those other two games?  N O P E.  It's a guns-blazin', fast action, dogfightin', barrel rollin', rock'em sock'em intergalactic action epic in supersonic spaceships!  Piloted by talking animals!  That actually talk!  YES!

Instead of the wide-open freedom of Super Mario 64 and  Ocarina of TIme, Star Fox 64 either puts you on (invisible) rails in a forced-scrolling attack run or in a contained 3D arena.  Here's the kicker though, the levels are all so perfectly designed and the action is so expertly paced that you never feel restricted.  You're too busy racking up kill combos, saving your wingmen, and navigating through flying, burning space debris and buildings and asteroids and terrain to think about what you can't do.  And even on rails, Star Fox 64 gives you ways to explore!  Most levels have multiple exits and there are a whole mess of different, branching paths through the entire, war-torn Lylat system.  The game is designed to be played start to finish in a single sitting, but experimenting with repeat playthroughs is the only way to experience everything this laser-blazing action classic has to offer.  On top of all that, it's got a great story, iconic, meme-worthy dialogue, and an absolutely banging soundtrack.  It might not have changed the face of interactive entertainment like Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time, but it delivered the ultimate shoot'em up space adventure.  

[weareinstrangetimes]

This Day In History - Jan 20, 2021 |  a work in progress...

Immediately after the inauguration of Joseph R Biden as the 46th President of The United States of America, the Republican Party, along with the right wing disinformation network and their allies abroad and whatever nook and cranny they can be found in will attempt to re-write history. They will point the finger of blame for everything they are responsible for including their complicity in the corruption, deceit, atrocities, breaking of all norms, denigrating the Constitution, insurrection and attempted sedition based on the lies and conspiracy theories by their nice leader and traitor-in-chief.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A post from October with a lot of research, graphs, and links, topped with a video from Meidas Touch

The Trump Depression: The Economy Does Better Under the Democrats

One of the rare occasions when DJT has told the truth.

https://weareinstrangetimes.tumblr.com/post/633392690647711746/the-trump-depression-the-economy-does-better

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The National Debt.

Trump’s most enduring legacy could be the historic rise in the national debt

COVID-19

One Year, 400,000 Coronavirus Deaths: How the U.S. Guaranteed Its Own Failure

Cremation Limits Lifted In LA Due To 'Backlog' As COVID-19 Deaths Skyrocket

~~~~~~~~~~~~     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I continuously see posts in FB, and shared from one person to another, in many edited forms, that are to be their “reminder” of where we are currently, for posterity. Most of them will have some personal points of fact in them such as the current price of gasoline in their area. Most of them contain the usual false or misleading talking points used by the GOP and the right wing disinformation circles. They aren’t outrageously nonsensical enough to have come from the duck pond people, so they mostly are just the usual disinformation from the Republicans. Case in point: Facebook post I am making this post so it will show back up as a future memory on my timeline:Today is Biden's Inauguration ...Gasoline is currently $2.17 per gallon in Checotah OK. Interest rates are 2.25% for a 30 year mortgage. The stock market closed at 31,188.38 +257.86 (0.83%) today even though we have been fighting COVID for 11 months. Our GDP growth for the 3rd Qtr was 33.1 percent. We had the best economy ever until COVID and it is recovering well. We have not had any new wars or conflicts in the last 4 years. North Korea has been under control and has not been testing any missiles. ISIS has not been heard from for over 3 years. The housing market is the strongest it has been in years. Homes have appreciated at an unbelievable rate and sell well. Wood prices are high with 2x2x8' going around $5.66/stud at Home Depot... And let’s not forget that peace deals in the Middle East were signed by 4 countries—unprecedented! Unemployment sits at 6.7% in spite of COVID.

Point - Counter Point

My reply: The 33% gain in GDP is true. That is still 10% below the Q1 level after the 31.4% drop in Q2. And even farther below the Q4 2019 level. The reason for the 33% gain from a 31.4% loss is due to the stimulus pumped into the economy from the Cares Act that Nancy Pelosi worked so hard on getting. https://www.brookings.edu/.../dont-let-flashy-3rd.../ 

Below is a running tracking of the GDP from 1947 to the latest data. There are two major drops in the GDP. One starting in Q3 2008, and another dramatic one beginning Q1 2020.

   Reply to me: plus adding manufacturing that was outsourced to offshore manufacturing, lowering tax rates on business, and a multitude of other things. If you think this new stimulus bill they passed will benefit us we'll see since they seem more interested in sending money to other countries including enemies.

My Response:

Which manufacturing jobs were those? I know there has always been a lot of "talk" about it. Many corporations took advantage of their tax windfall to buy back their own stocks. Some who did upgrades added automation which resulted in loss of jobs for human workers, that robots could do. Some of those high profile corporations that were on display at the White House who gave out $1000 bonuses (to high ranking employees) laid workers off and scaled back which more than made up for it. Many CEOs and upper management received raises and very little went to the working class employees. There were a few companies that actually did increase wages and benefits to their employees, and Kudos to them. But I think they were in the minority.

The money going to foreign countries is not anything new and it was also included in the previous years budgets. It was part of the annual budget, in the defense portion, and was not part of the stimulus bill. They combined voting on them to try to get them both passed. The House voted on them separately and the Senate was to vote on the combined bill. The talking points are merely political, knowing full well that the majority of the population were not going to do any research.

N Korea? While exchanging love letters they were continuing their nuclear war head development under the cloud of a love affair. They had already perfected and tested their long range missiles within the last 4 years. Missiles that could reach the Western United States.

Peace treaties between non-warring countries? A nice political ploy. Bebe was returning the favor for the previous administration's help with his re-election. The two peoples still at odds are Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinians were left out. The Palestinians want the same thing that Israel has always wanted and rightly so. Their own homeland/country and recognition on the world stage. The conflicts in that region, aside from with Iran, were with Qatar, (where we have a strategically shared air base and thousands of troops, and the other strategic partners in the region. Why? Because Jared Kushner got turned down when he was asking Qatar to bail out his failing 666 5th Ave property. It was revenge. So, that's like throwing gas on a pile of wood, lighting it, and then offering water to put the fire out. Those "peace treaties" were nothing more than normalization and cooperation agreements with some promised "deals" thrown in.

Point - Counter Point Another post being passed around in FB.

I've heard everyone else's hatred, rhetoric and blatant lies for the past four years, so now I'm expressing my opinion. If you don't like it, you know where the delete button is. Let me be clear, I'm not a Biden fan. I think he's corrupt, a liar, a racist fanatic, he's in bed with China and probably suffers dementia. He has done nothing to improve anything in his 47 year political career. But what has Trump done in the past 4 years?The ′′ arrogant ′′ in the White House negotiated four Middle East Peace Accords, something that 71 years of endless political intervention and war failed to produce.The White House ′′ buffoon ′′ is the first president to not involve us in an outside war since Eisenhower.The ′′ racist ′′ in the White House has had the biggest impact on the economy, bringing jobs and reducing unemployment among the black and Latina population of ANY other president. Never. Ever.The ′′ liar ′′ in the White House has exposed profound, widespread and long-standing corruption in the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Republican and Democratic parties.The White House ′′ White Supremacist ′′ turned NATO around and made them start paying their debts.The White House's ′′ dumb ′′ neutralized North Koreans and prevented them from sending missiles to Japan and threatening the Western US.The ′′ xenophobic ′′ in the White House changed our relationship with the Chinese, brought hundreds of businesses back to the US and revived the economy.This same ′′ clown ′′ reduced taxes, increased the standard deduction in his IRS statement from $ 12,500 to $ 24,400 for married couples and prompted the stock market to rise to record levels, positively impacting retirement accounts of tens of millions of citizens.The ′′ idiot ′′ in the White House accelerated the development of multiple COVID vaccines that are now available or will be soon. And yet we still don't have a vaccine for SARS, bird flu, ebola, or a number of diseases that emerged during previous administrations.The ′′ orange man ′′ in the White House rebuilt our military, which the Obama administration paralyzed and fired 214 key generals and admirals in their first year of term.Got it you don't like it. Many of you hate and despise him completely. How special of you. He is serving you and the WHOLE American people. What are you doing besides insulting him and laughing that he got the China virus Some of you even expected COVID to be the cause of her disappearance. (Ah, the left. The party of ′′ tolerance ′′Please re-educate me on what Biden has accomplished for America in his 47 years in office, as well as enriching the entire Biden family. BTW where's Hunter?I'll take the ′′ clown ′′ any day versus a corrupt, hypocritical, racist, fork-tongue liar. I want a strong leader who isn't afraid to kick butts when necessary. I don't need a father figure. I don't need a liar. That's what Hollywood, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS and The New York Times are for.Call me dumb, racist, super diffuser or part of the basket of deplorables. I don't care!God bless Donald Trump, the best and least appreciated president in US history.

Reply:

Counterpoint part 1: I realize you are not the author of that post. I have seen this post re-posted many times in various forms here in FB including by friends and I didn't respond. But since this is my post I will. I have also seen it at a site where gamers, musicians, music enthusiasts and creative folks hang out. It did not originate from there. The origin I believe is in part anyway from the same conspiracy theorist group that also makes up wild and crazy claims of former heads of state and officials being arrested, that never are. And people dying, who are still alive. And a dead person secretly being alive and running a crusade, who is still dead. And pizza joints having basements with trafficking rings, that have no basements. And miracle cures for COVID that are not proven and can cause more damage if not used for what they were intended for, even if you have a really cool pillow and a clean aquarium. And, and, and ... 5G, windmills, George Soros, Bill Gates, Forest Gump, Mr. Magoo, and voodoo doctors doing it with little green men in their dreams. 

Do they ever question why everything they believe is bunk? Do they ever get angry for being deceived? Do they ever feel foolish for looking foolish for posting such foolish nonsense? No. They just pass it off and wait for the next wild tale to spread and swear by. 

There are those who praise so-called Peace Treaties between nations that are not at war, leaving out the 1 culture that is affected and wants their own sovereignty and homeland, in every one of those so called "peace treaties". They suggest he should get a Nobel Peace Prize, and some even think he has been awarded it because he puts a fake facsimile of the medal in some of his posts. Those "peace treaties" I don't think were any more than cooperation and normalization agreements, and in some cases containing agreements to make financial transactions. 

The guy they tout as not having involved us in any wars has brought us very close to nuclear conflicts with his loud mouth and nasty tweets. The one guy who was the most imminent danger learned quickly that he could dupe the the mad Tweeter by giving him praise. In turn, he received what his father and grand father, also dictators before him, could never get from a U.S. President. What they got, with very little in return, was their most coveted prize, an audience with the Tweeter which gave them credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of their own subservient population. And they got an end to our annual readiness maneuvers with their Southern neighbor and our other strategic allies which was their second most coveted prize. Then while exchanging love letters with the mad Tweeter, they were able to secretly continue with their nuclear warhead development. And since they already have long range missile capability to reach the United States (tested during the mad Tweeter's reign) they are not only a major threat to our allies in the South Pacific, they are an imminent threat to the mainland U.S. 

The "buffoon" (referenced in the list of fables) in question also abandoned our allies that were instrumental in fighting ISIL (who is not completely eliminated) leaving them to be threatened with genocide (our betrayed allies) by another despot whose country hosts real estate developments the mad Tweeter has his name on (Trump Towers), and another crazed dictator who has been guilty of genocide and using chemical weapons in his own country on his own citizens. Those allies were also guarding the prisons that the ISIL prisoners were housed in, and they were allowed to escape. In fact his claims of completely eliminating ISIL himself 100% can be debunked by his own State Department. https://www.factcheck.org/.../trumps-isis-claim-goes-to.../ That was in 2017 and 2018. So, if ISIL (ISIS) was 100% defeated by 2018, why were we still fighting them in late 2019? Trump walks back claim of defeating ‘100% of the ISIS caliphate’ https://www.rollcall.com/.../trump-walks-back-claim-of.../ The claims by the right wing propagandists and Trump regarding unemployment for Blacks, and Latinos can be corrected by simply doing some research. AP FACT CHECK: Trump on unemployment for blacks, Latinos https://apnews.com/article/e1afa3f19a054540a7c34ca193bdd9ae Quote from the fable: "The White House ′′ White Supremacist ′′ turned NATO around and made them start paying their debts." What he did was weaken our alliances, playing right in the hands of one of our most dangerous adversaries, the guy who helped him to get into office. Something he has done throughout his term. And, his alt-facts and those of the right wing deceivers are easily fact checked. FactChecking Trump’s NATO Remarks https://www.factcheck.org/.../factchecking-trumps-nato.../ Trump made many claims about bringing jobs back to the U.S. and creating new jobs. Many of those things he was taking credit for early on were things that were already in the works long before he was helped into the White House. 2017: https://www.factcheck.org/.../trump-jobs-returning.../ 2020: We can reshore manufacturing jobs, but Trump hasn’t done it https://www.epi.org/publica.../reshoring-manufacturing-jobs/

There are a lot of claims around the GOP tax cuts. Sure, the standard deduction was increased. So has the cost of living due to illegal trade wars and prices sky rocketing. And many deductions for those who itemized were eliminated. Many are still waiting for their "post cards" so they can file their taxes. Those who really benefitted were those who are not in a month to month struggle to make ends meet. The corporate tax cuts that the Trump and GOP promoters said would trickle down and benefit the working class family wage earners was not realized. Corporations used their GOP granted socialism to buy back their own stocks. And many of those who touted handing big bonuses out in turn laid other workers off or eliminated jobs which more than made up for it. 

The stock market has been used by Trump and his mouthpieces as an economic indicator. While some people do benefit with returns on their retirement plans and stock portfolios, it is not a barometer of how working families are getting along, many who have to work multiple jobs just to pay rent and eat. And not everybody dabbles in the stock market. There have been ups and downs in the market. There was one period in March of 2020, where all gains in the market were wiped out back to February 2017. What happens in that type of situation? Those companies that can wrangle it buy back their own shares at lower prices which artificially gives the market another instant boost.

Counterpoint part 2:>>> Let's talk about infrastructure week. Still waiting on that one since February or March of 2017. We'll have to wait until real President-elect Joe Biden takes office. 

How about Operation Warp Speed and vaccine development. Accelerated vaccine development is a good thing, and because there were decades of research behind it and technological advances it was possible to accomplish. Joe Biden even acknowledged Trump, or at least Operation Warp Speed as a positive move. We can at least give him credit for that, since he botched the response with delays, denial, disinformation, and creating a herd mentality to push back on safety and mitigation in order to recklessly reach herd immunity through infection and death.> It should be noted that the first vaccine that was approved was from Pfizer, and they did not participate in Operation Warp Speed where the others received funding. They funded themselves although Trump deceitfully takes credit. And those 20,000,000 vaccine doses that Trump, Pence and the Trump administration were promising by the end of December 2020? As of January 8th, 6.6 million initial doses have been administered according to NBC News MAP Covid-19 vaccination tracker across the U.S. https://www.nbcnews.com/.../map-covid-19-vaccination...

After Trump "wanted to play it down" the U.S. as of Friday, January 8 2021, has surpassed 22 million COVID-19 cases, with a record 269,420 new cases, and over 372,000 deaths (Jan 9). https://www.nbcnews.com/.../u-s-covid-19-cases-hit-22...

Trump and his enablers and apologists often talk about how he rebuilt the "depleted military" that he inherited from President Obama. As with most Trump claims, it is Mostly False. Quote from the fable: "The ′′ orange man ′′ in the White House rebuilt our military, which the Obama administration paralyzed and fired 214 key generals and admirals in their first year of term. "Regarding the firing of the Generals, I saw another figure, 197, that was posted in a publication for retired folks in The Villages in Florida. Others have said it first appeared in the alt-right fake news Breitbart site. As with most things that roll around like a marble in an empty box in the right wing disinformation arena things are just made up, or facts spun and twisted like a taffy pretzel. In 2010, President Obama did replace his top Afghanistan war commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal due to in-bickering in his national security team. He replaced McChrystal with his boss and mentor, Gen. David H. Petraeus. https://www.nytimes.com/.../24/us/politics/24mcchrystal.html There have been other firings, replacements, and retirements. Most absences are for good reason and there is no wholesale purging as the right wing conspiracy theorists would lead you to believe. https://skeptoid.com/.../24/president-obama-purge-military/ Quoted from Snopes: "The U.S. national defense budget was slightly reduced during Obama's second term, in large part due to efforts by Congress to limit government spending and the withdrawal of troops from the Middle East. "Who controlled both the House and Senate? The Republican Party. https://www.snopes.com/.../trump-inherit-depleted-military/ AP FACT CHECK: Trump's Overblown Boasts About Military, Vets https://www.usnews.com/.../ap-fact-check-trumps-overblown... General Michael Flynn was also fired in 2014 from his position as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Obama. Too many connections with RU it seems. And something I didn't previously know, was after he was fired he became a contributor to RT (government funded, Russia Today). https://themoscowproject.org/collusion/flynn-fired-dia/ I had always thought he was fired due to his overt Islamophobia which didn't sit well with some of our allies. He was advising Trump in 2016 on foreign policy and national security and subsequently during his campaign transition. Then he was appointed National Security Adviser in the administration (despite warnings not to), and he brought much of his baggage with him. It was discovered that he had previous contacts with the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. and was accused of trying to undermine U.S. policy. He was also accused of being a lobbyist for the same country where Trump's name is licensed on the Trump Towers Istanbul (that's 2 of them). All this while receiving classified briefings. He was fired or asked to resign just 3 weeks into Trump's term. https://apnews.com/article/ce90066b4e20483da79adf21910da0c7

Another quote from the fable list: "The buffoon in the White House has exposed the deep, widespread, and long-standing corruption in the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the Republican and Democratic parties." While there have been some procedural errors and some ethical issues, most of them are small compared with the real issues at hand. Now, the "buffoon" has not exposed anything. All the noise is to cover up and deflect from the corruption and high crimes and misdemeanors of said buffoon and his accomplices, enablers and apologists. That is the way the GOP does things.

"47 years" seems to be one of the fall backs when they run out of any other fables, or simply can't think of anything else to say. That would bring us back to 1973 making him 31 years old at that time. Joe Biden was a U.S. Senator representing Delaware from 1973 to 2009, re-elected several times. He was Vice President in the Obama Administration from 2009 to 2017, two full terms. He ran for president in 1988 and 2008.He has been on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In his early years he worked on consumer protection, environmental issues, and greater government accountability, arms control. He has worked as a public servant most of his adult life. He has probably done a lot more in his 47 years since being elected U.S. Senator than most people asking what he has done. While some of his views and policies in the past were controversial at the time, like most people, he has evolved and adapted to the changes in culture and public opinion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden...

The person who wrote the fable list states he will take the ′′ clown ′′ any day versus a corrupt, hypocritical, racist, fork-tongue liar. The Impeached "clown" in fact is all of the above and has been identified as a pathological liar and probably the most documented liar in history. The "clown" is also labeled as racist, corrupt, a con-artist, a xenophobe and a bigot among other things too numerous to list. Many people have said that. Also, unindicted co-conspirator, Individual 1, in crimes another person is serving prison time for. Individual 1 was only ‘not indicted’ due to Justice Department policies on not indicting a sitting president for crimes committed.

to be continued....

[orbemnews]

George Carruthers, Whose Telescopes Explored House, Dies at 81 George Carruthers constructed his first telescope from a package in 1949, when he was 10 and dwelling in rural Ohio. Fascinated by area, he devoured journal articles about area journey. If the unknown was going to be explored, he needed to be part of it. 20 years later, as an astrophysicist and engineer — one of many few on the time who had been Black — he would design a complicated telescopic machine that was used throughout the Apollo 16 mission in 1972 and produced ultraviolet pictures of the geocorona, Earth’s outermost ambiance, in addition to stars, nebulae and galaxies. “In March 1610, Galileo Galilei reported the primary use of a telescope to view mountains and maria on the moon,” Dr. Carruthers and Thornton Web page, his collaborator on the challenge, wrote in a NASA report in late 1972. “On April 21, 1972, the Apollo 16 commander positioned a considerably extra advanced optical instrument on the Earth from the moon and obtained a number of outstanding pictures exhibiting atmospheric reasonably than floor options.” Dr. Carruthers, who went on to design much more telescopes that flew aboard NASA spacecraft, died on Dec. 26 in a hospital in Washington. He was 81. His brother Gerald stated the trigger was congestive coronary heart failure. A slight, reserved man who typically rode his bicycle to work, Dr. Carruthers began at the US Naval Analysis Laboratory in 1964 and dropped at it his fascination with telescopes. He headed a staff that designed a telescopic equipment that amplified pictures from area by changing photons to electrons, which may then create electron-sensitive movie pictures. The machine built-in telescopic optics with a digital camera and a spectrograph, which disperses gentle from objects into its element wavelengths. In 1970, considered one of his telescopic creations, despatched into area on an unmanned rocket from the White Sands Missile Vary in New Mexico, proved the existence of molecular hydrogen between stars and galaxies. Molecular hydrogen, which is important to how stars are shaped, had till then been notoriously troublesome to detect. By then, Dr. Carruthers was engaged on the Apollo mission and main a staff that constructed the light-weight, gold-plated Far Ultraviolet Digital camera/Spectrograph, which the astronauts John Younger and Charles M. Duke Jr. would deploy on the Descartes Highlands. On every of their moonwalks throughout their 71 hours on the moon, Mr. Younger and Mr. Duke switched the telescopic machine on. “As soon as the astronauts set it on an object, they may transfer away and work, then come again and alter the route of the digital camera,” the area historian David H. DeVorkin, senior curator of the Nationwide Air and House Museum, stated in a telephone interview. The machine was left behind when the astronauts departed. Presumably it’s nonetheless there. “He was a terrific device builder who utilized himself to scientific questions,” stated Mr. DeVorkin, who’s writing a biography of Dr. Carruthers. “He didn’t give you new questions, however he and his science had been very sensible.” In 1973 Dr. Carruthers obtained the Helen B. Warner Prize from the American Astronomical Society because the 12 months’s excellent astronomer below 35. In 2013, President Barack Obama introduced Dr. Carruthers with the Nationwide Medal of Expertise and Innovation, the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement. When Dr. Carruthers was honored by NASA throughout Black Historical past Month in 2016, Charles F. Bolden Jr., the area company’s administrator, stated, “He has helped us have a look at our universe in a brand new method by his scientific work and has helped us as a nation see ourselves anew as properly.” George Richard Carruthers was born on Oct. 1, 1939, in Cincinnati. His father, additionally named George, was an engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Pressure Base, close to Dayton, Ohio. His mom, Sophia (Singley) Carruthers, was a postal employee. The household moved northeast to Milford, a farming neighborhood, within the Forties. “Once I was about 8 or 9 years previous, I obtained a Buck Rogers comedian guide from my grandmother, and that was, in fact, lengthy earlier than there was any such factor as an area program,” Dr. Carruthers stated in an oral historical past interview with the American Institute of Physics in 1992. “Because it was science fiction, no one took spaceflight significantly in these days, again within the late ’40s, early ’50s.” His father died when he was 12, and his mom moved the household to Chicago, the place George took telescope-building courses on the Adler Planetarium and located inspiration in articles concerning the way forward for area exploration in Collier’s journal written by consultants just like the German-born grasp rocket builder Wernher von Braun, the science author Willy Ley and the astronomer Fred Whipple. Dr. Whipple’s suggestion that there might be benefits to astronomical work from area confirmed George’s curiosity. “Many of the astronomers on the planetarium,” Dr. Carruthers stated within the oral historical past interview, “thought that was nonsense, that astronomy is completed with ground-based telescopes, and also you shouldn’t waste your time fascinated about going into area.” In October 1957, throughout his first semester on the College of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the primary synthetic earth satellite tv for pc. He and different members of the college’s astronomy membership watched Sputnik because it handed overhead. Extra essential, Sputnik’s success legitimized Dr. Carruthers’s want for a profession in spaceflight engineering. After graduating from the college in 1961 with a bachelor’s diploma in aeronautical engineering, he continued on the college, receiving a grasp’s in nuclear engineering and a doctorate in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. In Dr. Carruthers’s first eight years on the naval laboratory, his more and more subtle telescopic gadgets flew on quite a few unmanned rockets. However his Apollo 16 telescope was his most vital; he was on the Johnson House Middle in Houston throughout that mission. “We may really hear them speaking about our instrument,” he informed an interviewer for an area middle oral historical past in 1999. Mr. Younger, he recalled, “was utilizing a sight on the facet of the digital camera to level it on the Earth with a view to set the reference for the entire different targets that we had been going to be utilizing, and he verified that he had sighted the Earth and it was within the middle of his discipline of view.” Dr. Carruthers’s gadgets flew on varied different missions. One in all them noticed Comet Kohoutek in 1973 from Skylab, the primary United States area station; others flew on varied rockets, together with one which unexpectedly captured a meteor disintegrating in Earth’s ambiance; and one was aboard the Spartan satellite tv for pc that was launched by the area shuttle Discovery in 1995 to hunt the fabric from which new stars and planets type. Dr. Carruthers retired from the naval laboratory in 2002. Along with his brother Gerald, he’s survived by his spouse, Debra (Thomas) Carruthers, and one other brother, Anthony. In retirement, Dr. Carruthers taught earth and area science at Howard College, the place he had been concerned because the Nineteen Nineties as an evaluator for the college’s NASA-funded Middle for the Examine of Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Atmospheres. At night time Dr. Carruthers introduced college students to the college’s Locke Corridor observatory to take a look at stars and planets from a telescope. He additionally helped highschool college students construct telescopes in a summer season outreach program on the college. “He had a really reticent persona, and also you’d have to attract him out to make him discuss,” Prabhakar Misra, a professor of physics at Howard, stated by telephone. “However when he interacted with college students — which was his ardour — he grew to become a special individual.” Supply hyperlink #Carruthers #Dies #explored #George #Space #Telescopes

[lastsonlost]

The Ultimate Differential Theory of US Armed Forces (Snake Model)

I don’t know the first thing about the military but this is made laugh my ass off.

Upon encountering a snake in the Area of Operations (AO)...

Airborne: Lands on and kills the snake.

USAF O-6 and above: "Get that damned snake off the fairway!"

Armor: Runs over snake. Never knows it,as well as where the tank and the snake is on the battlefield. Continues directly ahead wondering what all those new buttons in his turret do.

Army Aviation: Has GPS ten digit grid to snake. Stands off at a range greater than any other weapon system and destroys snake with precision fires at a cost equivalent of one Mercedes 350SEL. Returns to base for fighter management and a "cool one".

Army Shrink: Attempts to get snake to explain its sexual feelings about its mother.  

Army Chaplain: Tries to get snake to attend services, mend its ways.

USAF Combat Controllers: Guides snake elsewhere.

Combat Engineer: Studies snake. Prepares in depth analysis based on obscure 5 series FM about how to defeat snake using counter mobility assets. Complains that maneuver forces don't understand how to properly conduct doctrinal counter-snake operations. (Engineer School tries to hide the fact that M9 ACE proves ineffective against snakes).

Field Artillery: Kills snake with massive Time On Target barrage with three Forward Artillery Brigades in support. Kills several hundred civilians as unavoidable collateral damage. Mission is considered a success and all participants (i.e., cooks, mechanics and clerks) are awarded Silver Stars.

Infantry: Snake smells them, leaves area.

Military Intelligence, G-2: Snake? What snake? Only four of 35 indicators of snake activity are currently active. We assess the potential for snake activity as LOW.

Judge Advocate General (JAG): Snake declines to bite, citing professional courtesy.

Force Recon: Follows snake, gets lost.

USMC Infantry: Kills snake by accident while looking for souvenirs. Local civilians demand removal of all US forces from Area of Operations.

Army Mech Infantry: Runs over snake, laughs, and looks for more snakes.

Military Intelligence, S-2: Reports to ground troops that snake is a non-combatant. Six Infantry wounded. MI states that if the ground forces would have read the nesting diagram provided in the 24 page enemy intel report, they would have known the snake was a possible threat.

Military Police, Criminal Investigation: Handcuffs snake's head to its tail, reads it its Miranda rights, then proceeds to beat snake to a pulp with night stick.

USAF Missileers: Lays in target coordinates to snake in 20 seconds, but can't receive authorization from National Command Authority to use nuclear weapons.

Military Police, Field: Snake safely infiltrates rear area of operations.

Navy SeaBees: Build snake elaborate rec room, complete with secret still.

Navy SEAL: Expends all ammunition and several grenades, then calls for naval gunfire in failed attempt to kill snake. Snake bites the SEAL, and dies of salt water poisoning. Hollywood makes film in which SEALS kill Muslim extremist snakes.

Navy, Surface Action Group: Fires off 50 cruise missiles fro several ships, kills snake and makes presentation to Senate Appropriations Committee on how Naval forces are the most cost-effective means of anti-snake force projection.

Ordnance: IDs snake as having improper scales. Deadline snake and order parts against snake. Parts come in 15 days later but the snake has been upgraded to FMC due to scrounging of parts through improper channels.

USAF Para-Rescue: Lands on snake upon descending, thereby injuring it, then feverishly works to save the snake's life.

USAF Pilot, A-10: Has Global Positioning Satellite coordinates to snake. Can't find snake. Returns to base for refuel, crew rest and manicure.

USAF Pilot, B-52: Pulls ARCLIGHT mission on snake, kills snake and every other living thing within two miles of target.

USAF Pilot, F-15: Misidentifies snake as enemy Mil-24 Hind helicopter and engages with missiles. Crew chief paints snake kill on aircraft.

USAF Pilot, F-16: Finds snake, drops two CBU-87 cluster bombs, and misses snake target, but gets direct hit on Embassy 100 KM East of snake due to weather (Too Hot also Too Cold, Was Clear but too overcast, Too dry with Rain, Unlimited ceiling with low cloud cover etc.) Claims that purchasing multimillion dollar, high-tech snake-killing device will enable it in the future to kill all snakes and achieve a revolution in military affairs.

USAF Pilot, Fighter, Generic: Mis-identifies the snake as a HIND and engages it with missiles. Crew Chief paints snake on airplane.

USAF Pilot, Transport: Receives call for anti-snake equipment, and delivers two weeks after due date.

Army Pilot, AH-64 Apache: Unable to locate snake, snakes don't show well on infrared. Infrared only operable in desert AO's without power lines or SAM's.

Army Pilot, HH-53 Jolly Green Giant: Finds snake on fourth pass after snake builds bonfire, pops smoke, lays out flares to mark Landing Zone. Rotor wash blows snake into fire.

Joint Security Area (JSA) Korea: Puts on Class B uniform and stares snake down for 40 years. Snake dies of old old age, but son of snake assumes staring contest.

Army Cavalry Troopers: Shoots near snake to prevent it from crossing FLOT because their mission is "Screen" and Not "Destroy." Put in for Silver Star, but is downgraded to ARCOM w/ "V" Device. Cav is successful in not becoming "Decisively Engaged"

NTC O/C: Shoots snake with Godgun, tells it to take off its fangs and wait for Medivac. Other Snakes berated in AAR for not knowing their 9-Line Medivac.

Military Intelligence (Tactical): Puts Rubber Snakes around Snake as "Battle Field Deception." Junior MI Soldier left near to make hissing noises because sound system is deadlined.

Retired SGM working at CIF: Gives snake a statement of charges for not having the same skin it was issued. Snake goes and kills other snake; Tries to turn in other snakes' skin. Spends 8 hours in CIF parking lot washing skin.

ROTC Cadet: Cadet dies of Snake Bite after asking Snake how he did at "Advance Camp"

SFOD-D: Deploys 2 man SR Team to maintain "eyes on" while squadron prepares for deployment. $2.1 M. worth of "Discretionary" funds are used to contract a company to produce a .50 cal subsonic round whose weapon effect closely resembles a mongoose bite. FBI's HRT is deployed to stand around while an Operator shoots the snake with the "Mongoose Round" while wearing an HRT Jacket. SFOD-D Cooks and Clerks expend a total of 1.7 Million Rounds of ammo back at Bragg so that it looks like SFOD-D was never deployed...

Army or Marine Quartermaster: Encounters snake, then loses contact. Can not identify who owns snake by hand receipts. Orders new snake through supply channels. Request is denied by higher authority; issuing the unit a snake will bring the manager to a zero balance; one snake must remain on hand at all times as per their boss' guidance.

Ranger: Plays with snake, then eats it.

USAF Ground Crew:  Runs back to truck after sighting snake, then after a half hour, sends lowest ranking airman out to beat snake to death with a set of wheel chocks.

USMC Band, "The President's Own": Oboe player charms snake into a saxophone case, which is then presented as a gift to former president Bill Clinton.

Army Band, "Pershing's Own": Snake's head crushed with a mallet by bass drum player. Snakeskin turned into cool sash for drum major.

Signal, Enlisted: Tries to communicate with snake . . . fails despite repeated attempts. Complains that the snake did not have the correct fill or did not know how to work equipment a child could operate.

Signal, Officer: Informs the commander that he could easily communicate with the snake using just his voice. Commander insists that he NEEDS to videoconference with the snake, with real-time streaming positional and logistical data on the snake displayed on video screens to either side. Gives Signal Corps $5 Billion to make this happen. SigO abuses the 2 smart people in the corps to make it happen, while everybody else stands around, bitches, and takes credit. In the end, GTE and several sub-contractors make a few billion dollars, the two smart people get out and go to work for them, and the commander gets what he asked for only in fiber-optic based simulations. The snake dies of old age.

Staff Judge Advocate (JAG): Swear they saw something like that on the Discovery Channel . . . spend weeks arguing if it was a snake or not.

Special Forces: Makes contact with snake, ignores all State Department directives and Theater Commander Rules of Engagement by building rapport with snake and winning its heart and mind. Trains it to kill other snakes. Files enormous travel settlement upon return.

Supply: (NOTICE: Your anti-snake equipment is on backorder.)

Transportation Corps: "Snake? What snake? We were sleeping in the truck."

US Congress Representative (D):  After initially voting in favor of anti-snake military action, suddenly realizes that the snake can never be defeated. Goes on TV and describes current operations as 'failed' before they begin and the calls the leading herpetologist in the world 'incompetent'. Pleads with snake not to hurt us. Then introduces legislation to re-deploy all military forces to Okinawa where they can more effectively engage snakes, world-wide. Then heads overseas to attempt to negotiate our surrender to the snake. Takes intern for 'support'.

Embed Main-Stream-Media Reporter: Decides snake is patriotic nationalist agrarian reformer being molested by imperialist U.S. forces, asks snake for directions to nearest bar. If bitten by snake, charges U.S. troops with neglect of duty to protect freedom of the press.

Public Affairs Officer: "We cannot comment on any snake-related activities, and anyway that would be up to the snake's chain of command to provide comments, if any are applicable. Be sure to check out our website on 'How to handle snakes in your AO' for the current command guidelines on snakes."

Naval Aviator, Jets:  Lobbies Congress for new funds to buy "Snake-seeking ordnance," while pressing the point that blue-water ops are the only effective way to display American might to the snake and have a psychological effect on it. Gets funds, then launches strike. Can't drop on Snake due to targeting pod being "bent." Has to jettison multi-million dollar Anti-Snake Bomb into ocean. Comes back to boat and traps on pitching deck in dead of night while bitching about how "Snake gets ten-thousand feet of solid runway to do this $%!T on." Proceeds to blame maintenance chief for bent pod. Chief goes out to jet, pulls tapes, finds that pod was never switched to "ON" position.

[womenandfilm5]

Great Women Animators, selections: http://greatwomenanimators.com

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John and Faith Hubley

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The Short, The Hole (1962) records the dialogue between two construction workers in New York City. One white, one black, they discuss an array of things but the overarching theme of their discussion is about accidents. Whether or not accidents are possible and the possibility of an accidental nuclear attack. During this time period there were high tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union known as The Cold War. Many were fearful of a nuclear missile attack and a possibly world-ending nuclear war. This film was animated and produced around the same time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) when the United States discovered Soviet based ballistic missiles in Cuba which resulted in a 13-day confrontation between the two world powers. This improvisational film won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1962 and was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant”.

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The Hole follows an improvised conversation between two fictional construction workers of different races. This conversation is respectful and interestingly enough, race was not discussed between the two. Instead, they discussed accidents, why they happen, and if they even exist. The black character, voiced by Dizzy Gillespie, mentions that the other day he was washing the dishes and he accidentally dropped a glass, shattering it. He mentions that his wife theorizes he dropped the glass because he was not thinking about the glass. The white character, voiced by George Matthews, cuts him off exclaiming that he hadn’t dropped the glass because he wasn’t thinking about it, rather, he dropped it intentionally because he did not want to do the dishes in the first place. This interesting take on intention and “accidents” was meant to be applied to the political climate at the time of the Cold War. In other words, any move made by the United States or the Soviet Union is an intentional action with malicious intent behind it. This is further explained by the next statement made by Dizzy’s character “If I am walking down the street with a pistol in my pocket and someone accidentally steps on my toes I am going to ask him why he did that” then he continues to say that he would confront the person because he had the pistol. He states that if the person is far bigger than him and he no longer has the pistol, he wouldn’t choose to confront the man, he just would not say anything at all. This is an interesting narrative that can be applied, once again, to the political climate at the time. Both the United States and Soviet Union have theoretical “Pistols” or in other words; nuclear weapons. These tools allow the countries to confront one another, however, no one wants to be “shot”. Due to the fact that both countries equally have nuclear weapons they are at a stand still; hence the cold war. Neither country is saying anything to the other and they are simply assuming nothing is accidental, rather they are threatening the security of the other. 

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The Short film Moonbird (1959) is based off of a secretly recorded conversation between the Hubley’s two sons Mark and Ray in which they make a story about capturing the “Moonbird” and bringing it back home. The story takes place in their backyard, the two boys set out in the middle of the night to capture this mystical bird, they set up a cage with bait and wait nearby in a hole for the bird to arrive. The two children bicker, sing, eat candy and eventually capture the bird and bring it home. 

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This experimental film was awarded an Oscar in 1960 for best short subjects. In the film the older brother tells the younger brother what to do, for example the younger brother was told several times to lower his voice or he would “scare away the bird”. By the end of the film, however, their singing is what attracted the Moonbird and allowed the boys to catch it. The improvisational tone of the dialogue between the two young boys puts a unique insight to the domestic side of the Hubley’s life. Staying in and creating made up stories, using the abundance imagination from their young sons to create an animated short. This approach was revolutionary and very interesting to watch. The animation of the story fit perfectly with the dialogue, which requires a lot of careful thought and understanding of the storyline. Essentially, with this film the Hubley’s translate a child’s imagination into an enjoyable animated short film.  

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Ana Perez Lopez

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Amarillo and A Frog Fried Me

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The short film Amarillo supplied a short history of the banana. At glance, you often times do not think about the origin of something so simple such as a banana. The animation showed men and women, with black mask like coverings on half of the face, just enough to shield the features of the face, as well as animations of the banana spinning. In the opening, she calls the banana, “a candy that melts in the hand,” giving the fruit qualities that you would not attribute to a fruit usually. The dialogue offers a short history of the banana, from pre-WWII when the original natural form of the banana, or the ‘gros michelle,’ became extinct, to the banana ban that occurred during WWII that completely wiped out the gros michelle. The common banana that we have today is in fact not related to the gros michelle, but is completely manufactured from genetic modification, and within the next 10-30 years, the banana we know now will be completely replaced by a fruit with no trace of any original ancestry. The concept of replication and extinction was the main focus of the film. Something so simple as a fruit can be completely erased and then replaced by something that relates nothing to the original. The background sound of the film made it seem as if the narrator was placed underwater, as the figures of people swam through the timeline of history. She also included snippets of film and TV from the mid 20th century, in small bubble like televisions, which made it easier to connect the time periods that were mentioned. 

  A Frog Fried Me displayed more of the experimental aspect of Lopez’ work. The opening animation showed patterns of koi fish circling in and out, until they dissipated into themselves. The main focus was a scene of human bodies with heads of animals such as elk, and cows, reclining in chairs, and seated upon bar stools. One elk-human ran into the middle of the room, and was stopped in a spotlight of red light. Frozen in time, the other animals seated in the room began to exchange conversation, through bubbles of speech that instead of dialogue had geometric shapes. The screen then went black, and showed a tree frog, illuminated by white, and then back to the man running, but this time simply in the same black and white that was paired with the image of the frog. To decode the symbolism of this film was difficult, however I was able to connect the imagery of a tree frog to the title itself, with the existence of a hallucinogenic tree frog. The kambo, a hallucinogenic tree frog, is used for psychedelic experiences by extracting the venom, burning a small hole into the skin, and placing the venom on the wound. This creates a hallucination that some use for treatment with addiction, and also just for the pleasure and experience (VICE). The title, A Frog Fried Me, may relate to the imagery by depicting a scene that could very well be experienced as a hallucination. The people sitting in the room were mostly human, but had animal heads. The scenario could have almost been realistic had the people been fully human, but with the colors, the red flashes of light, and the nature of the creatures sitting in the room, it is safe to say the entire experience could be a replication of a trip.  . Arisa Wakami .

Blessing and chibico . The film blessing was a stop motion film of a baby laying upon a mattress in the middle of a floor, with boxes and bags opening and spilling out items that then moved around the child or put themselves on the child. A box of socks opens up and circles the baby, a bag with a onesie in it moves across the baby vertically but never is put on the baby, bags of blocks and toys spill onto the baby who plays with them until they move away, and the baby sleeps surrounded by the blocks, dressed in a hat and a bib left behind by one of the bags. When the mother picks the baby up, the hat is left behind, and then slowly slides off the bed and out of frame. This closing scene of the hat moving off the bed was symbolic to me. I believe that the theme of the film was to show that material objects are superficial and can be replaced and forgotten about so easily. From the time we are born until the time we die, we are given so many items that we use and discard, to never be used again. As we grow as humans, we have different needs that have to be catered to in the moment, but are then forgotten about as we move on and continue to grow. The baby is being given so many different gifts, that cycle through and then are never seen again. Wakami’s work is centered a lot upon children, which is shown in the other film chibico. A young girl who lives on a hill is standing on a stool, peering out of her window at the red sun, who extends a hand out to her. She immediately gets off the stool, and a hat and shoes are placed on her body. She gets in a car, looking very shocked, and is brought to either school or a daycare. As the kids play, she is somewhat lonesome, standing by the door. As the children dance, she is off beat and cannot keep up with the other children. As the children eat food, a girl cries next to her as she sits, quietly, with one bite of her meal taken. As the children get picked up from school, she sits alone and is the last one to leave. The sky changes from it’s bright blue of the daytime, to a light pink that indicates the sun is setting. She bathes with her family, is excited to eat a meal when she is seated at home, and when she finally gets into bed, she steps back onto the stool to look for the sun. Instead, she finds a dark night sky with the moon above, and the scene is very transient and dream like, of a human like apparition that is very difficult to describe. Contented, she goes to sleep. The background images of the credits are of children’s drawings. As a filmmaker who focuses upon themes of childhood, I assume the theme of this film was to express the curious nature of children. The little girl in the film expected to see the sun when she finally ended her day, but was still content to find that the sun was gone, and replaced with the moon. The entire time she was at school, she seemed to not be focused upon what was going on there, but was eager to look out of the window when she finally had the chance. In japanese, “chibico,” means “small child.” Wakami’s focus upon the nature of children provides an inventive style through picture to display the mannerisms of children in a way that is not often times analyzed. . Dahee Jehong .

THE EMPTY trailer and Reflection Type .

The film style of Dahee Jehong is to take poetry and metaphors, and translate them into visual imagery that is calm, yet powerful. THE EMPTY trailer was a very short and basic film, but had very somber overtones that were created in the span of less than one minute. A door with a painting is shown on a blank wall, and suddenly the door begins to rotate, letting people in from all angles to bring in furniture and objects, and then when the door finally reaches full circle, the last individual grabs the painting from the wall and exits through the door, leaving a translucent shadow of what was once there. The screen then pans to black with the subtitles, “everything is gone. I’ve been left alone again.” The imagery of people moving in, circling around, and leaving through the same door they entered resonates with the same way that individuals move in and out of transitional periods of their life. The people start by moving all their objects in, they are not seen, then as they leave, they take something with them that was not theirs to begin with. In cycles of bringing an individual into your home or life, it is never certain how long they may reside there. Everything is inevitable, and nothing can be avoided. The narrator ends the film having less than they started with, being alone again. A simple and quick film was able to capture a function of life that everyone experiences, and sometimes in cycles. On the opposite end, Reflection Type was very experimental, as it begins with a mirrored image of a women meeting herself, and then falling into herself. It is not apparent until minutes later that she had formed the letter A with the reflections of her body. The entirety of the film is Jehong creating each letter of the alphabet by using cut techniques of multiples mirrored images to form each individual letter with her body. The background is simply a concrete tan wall, and she performs the same routine over and over, but to produce a different image each time. This film acted as more of a creative lens of the work of Jehong, and reflects the creative nature she has especially with her animated film. . Jane Geiser . Ghost Algebra and The Red Book . Jane Geiser is an experimental film maker that uses objects that have been once abandoned or forgotten about to bring life and movement back into them, while also creating symbolic value. In both of the films, the subject was a female figure, focusing upon the female form and the experiences of the woman. Ghost Algebra used plant matter, perforations, light and color, the concept of time through clock hands and molds of pocket watches, diagrams of birds and anatomical drawings, with sounds of cars moving and nature in the background of the film. The subject of the film was a worn out plastic figurine of a girl with blonde hair, that was shown moving across areas through shadows underneath the perforations, as well as travelling through the drawings of birds and anatomical figures. It seemed almost as if she was lost, looking for the meaning of everything arounds her. The diagrams of birds were all missing heads, that were punched out of the diagrams. Eventually, the sounds in the background transition to children screaming, and the holes where the bird’s heads should be fill up with a red paint, that overflows and seeps into all of the crevices of the diagrams. The female figurine moves across all of the sceneries, looking as if she is whispering in the ears of the anatomical figures and the images of the birds. It is never known what exactly she could be saying, but it is apparent that at some point things went awry, as the red paint resembles blood. Film of this expanse is not meant to have a singular meaning, but instead be subject to interpretation. The female subject is travelling around, trying to make sense of her surroundings, but eventually finds that nothing is the same as what it originally seemed to be. The types of  medium Geiser uses when combined as a whole reflects an environment subject to change, but also hovering in a great amount of unknown by the viewer as well as the subject of the film. Perhaps, the idea of the film is to express the functionality of a woman in society, trying to understand the perils of life that are not outwardly apparent. . In the animated film The Red Book Jane Geiser opens her film with the sounds of crickets which translates to feelings of tranquillity and nature. The first thing the viewers see is hands writing in the dirt. After that it flashes to a woman lying naked on a table, throughout the film she is dissected, her mind is opened up, she becomes altered in some ways. Made to fit within a house, looking out at the industrialized world through the windows of her home. This, to me, is a clear parallel to how women are manufactured in our patriarchal society. Much like the woman on the table, women in our society are dissected as well. We manufacture women only for the domestic realm, when they do not fit we simply alter them so they do. The woman in the film does not have any clear agency over her own body and is subject to the will of the people around her. They attempt to “fix” her so she fits, but what they consider “fixing” is what we consider domestication. There is also clear imagery of natural scenery versus industrialized scenery. Much like natural elements the woman is harvested, manufactured and processed to make a product. Whether the product be infrastructure or a domesticated housewife it is all the same to those who are processing her. She is no longer an individual, rather a cog in society’s machine. Through this film Jane Geiser expresses the way we as a society view women. 

Joanna Preistley . Bottle Neck and Split Ends  . Joanna Preistley’s focus in film is solely on the experimental type of film that explores what boundaries can be crossed. The animation Bottle Neck had two sides of the screen that eventually merged into one image. The left side had constant moving geometric patterns, whie the right side had individual patterns that went from abstract drawings, into shapes of bottles and vases. Not one image could be focused upon at once; either your attention is drawn to the constant moving patterns, or your focus is drawn to each individual drawing that moved slower, yet was easier to decode. In Split Ends, the geometric patterns were either very plant like and resembled the motion of growing. A scene that I found particularly interesting was a set of steps that filled the entire screen, and a ball rolled down the steps and as each step disappeared, the ball eventually fell straight down into the void. The work she creates is simply is an appreciation of the art form of animation, while embracing the freedom that accompanies creating art. The titles of each film respectively reflect what the imagery seemed to be, but an open mind may interpret the motions and visions in an array of perspectives. – SA .

REFERENCES:

https://filmfreeway.com/joanna@primopix.com   https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gqkxa9/kambo-ceremony-alcoholism-purging-uk   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonbird   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_Hubley   https://www.zippyframes.com/index.php/interviews/dahee-jeong-makes-the-empty   https://www.fandor.com/filmmakers/director-janie-geiser-1234  

VIDEO LINKS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGB3eudJwOU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIGlX0iVy1Y https://vimeo.com/165069458 https://vimeo.com/165823831 https://vimeo.com/161456257 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUPh1exMKWc https://vimeo.com/158120311 https://vimeo.com/85528988 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK9aP9GKU4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZWv_UBXx8k https://vimeo.com/184923964 https://vimeo.com/64678851

[mistergothlord]

What are the top 5 weirdest dreams you’ve ever had?

Holy bloody jack, I didn’t even know this was in my ask. I don’t know what’s up with my inbox, but if you’re readin’ this, I got your message and I apologize if it was late!

Who’s ready for some acidic, bizarrest, and very nonsensical dreams you have to witness? I sure am.

5.) Bombing Barbecue

This particular dream was recent, and even though I had been reluctant to put this up, I also cackled about it the whole day.

In the dream, I happened to be featured as the new judge for “Shark Tank,” upon getting that much exposure for making music (I wish I did make music, ehehehe). As a judge, I had shown no mercy to any contestant, only doing so for anything involving art and art only, and I had reviewers calling me a “tsundere” because of that. Bloody jack, one of my famous quotes in the show was, “Those millions of dollars would be used to buy myself Cuphead. I’m out.”

One day, two certain owners from a dead-end company that was infamous in a Kitchen Nightmares episode appeared, introducing us a whole new way to get your barbecue to be cooked even faster. Of course, I immediately eliminated myself from the situation, because I was literally frightened from such a sight. In agreement to what I had to say, they did the same. 

Want to know why we did as such? The two owners basically fired a ballistic missile in an empty area that has a plate of raw meat on it, and the whole area was wiped out, leaving behind the same food, but now perfectly cooked.

One of the judges did give them an offer, but the two went hostile, saying that the offer was as useless as Gordon Ramsey, and they left. That same judge fired an army of ducks to attack them, one of them ramming into my face before I would wake up.

4.) America’s Got Marshadow

This was during the chase for Marshadow, in where everyone was begging for codes of the new Mythical Pokemon. In this dream, it didn’t go as I originally planned.

I was heading to Gamestop, and I was basically buying a new 3DS game that was said to be critically acclaimed. The person who managed the place told me he has one last Marshadow code just for me, and told me to never give it to anyone. In excitement, I went home as if I were in a movie, heading to my room (that was purple and filled with Chandelures), and got myself the beloved Pokemon.

However, once I achieved it, Marshadow immediately broke out of the game, and invited me to a brand new episode of “America’s Got Talent,” with a promise of money for my family. In delight, I accepted it, and thus was teleported to the front stage.

There were four judges that were there: Micheal Bay, Hau Memes, my fucking sister, and Darky. All of them told me that I claimed to master and perform every last Z-Move in the book, and wanted to see if it was true. So I did so, and I was surprisingly good at it. The audience was in awe from how I performed one move after another, complete with explosions and fireworks. Hell, at one moment, the cameraman showed Markiplier’s reaction, who was basically frightened from what he has witnessed.

Once that was done, the four judges had their jaws dropping, and Marshadow didn’t like how I got this much attention. Out of nowhere, it turned into Arceus and tried to kill me, but not before the said duck rammed into my face.

3.) Hau-stagram

This dream is exactly what it says on the label. In the dream, Generation 9 had arrived, and the new region was based on the Middle East as a way to share their anti-nuclear weapon propaganda. The game was considered the “Watership Down” of Pokemon games, because it was the game that hit home to the victims of war.

However, there was one particular moment where the rival goes back in time to help a baby Normal/Ghost type legendary find its true self, aka Hau, and I was helping him out as well. One of Hau’s selves wasn’t island kahuna, but instead a social media critic that’s popular on YouTube. Upon realizing who I was, he asked if I could help him out with a couple reviews, and didn’t take no for an answer.

The first contestant was a newbie, and had an Instagram on hand with a couple selfies and stolen pictures to go with. They were immediately eliminated from the contest, Hau saying, “Instagram is for bigots. Why don’t you try something trendy, like Tumblr?”

The next contestant was an artist, and a professional, but only had an Instagram. Showing a bit of sympathy, Hau gave the said person a 6/10, only because their art managed to make up for it.

The final contestant… Oh golly, the final contestant, in which was my sister out of all things. Hau was shocked to see her, and found out that you can play the story-mode in multi-player without fail. My sister didn’t back down, showing off both her Twitter and her Tumblr, in which made him faint and gave it a “Necrozma out of ten.”

King Dice was somehow there was well, being the inspector of Hau’s said reviews. He congratulated him on his success and me for helping him out. While I was forced into a Pokemon battle (a note to add was that he had a Ribombee and a Chandelure in his team), things still went as usual. King Dice gave him the new title as “Mister King Critic.”

And then I awoke from bed.

2.) Ultra Dice

This fever dream was the origin of the Emperor Lunacy AU, although I did replace the said Necrozma fusion with Chandelure.

In this dream, the creators behind Cuphead had a new DLC, and was bought by Nintendo in order to keep the traditional 1930s animation. When the Direct had announced a new DLC for one of the sequels, many of us were excited and weren’t afraid to spend money on it.

One of the DLCs was, well, a bit weirder than it was. They brought back King Dice to mark the yearly anniversary of the game, but also marked the anniversary of Ultra Sun and Moon, in which a few people found confusing but was okay with.

Now, you think because it was a DLC made just for King Dice, it would be as normal as it is? Well, you’re bloody wrong.

King Dice had a second stage, and it involved him breaking out of his own dice head to reveal a prism-like void. His attacks mostly involved cards that turn into “burning lights” and sucking the player into his head to leave it with one HP left.

Once you battle him, there’s no going back, and exiting the game won’t do much, either. Winning to him means you’re free to go, but lose to him, and he mercy-kills you by destroying your computer, the only game over text shown in Morse code below before the blue screen:

.- .-.. .-.. / .. … / .- -. / . -. .. –. – .- –..– / .- -. -.. / - …. ..- … / -.– — ..- .-. / – .. -. -.. / – . .- -. … / -. — - …. .. -. –. .-.-.-

1.) The Empty Ones

I won’t say this is a dream, but rather something I had in mind all through the night.

In the “daydream,” my younger self and my pack of goth friends were wandering through the night, laughing and talking while one of my friend’s dad drunk drives us to a party that was a after-Halloween party. Bluntly ignorant, we entered the house without any warning, and somehow crashed it.

As the party progressed, I slowly became self-aware of what was happening outside, and decided to see what it was. There was a group of goths just like us, but in a form of a cult instead. They didn’t mind me “joining,” since they said it was “the ritual to end everything.” Turns out, this was a ritual to bring back the ghosts of “wound and flesh” in order to protect us from a rising threat, and when the ritual functioned, I saw the pain in their eyes.

The ghosts started to possess one person after another, a massacre that struck just immediately, but I didn’t see any bloodshed, the party members became ghosts as well, going after the racists in the neighborhood, leaving a trail of candy for children to eat. I wasn’t effected because one of the cult members said my “Pokemon type,” could be the case (I did a quiz before, and I got Electric/Dark, so there’s something).

I eventually saw a pond that was two yards deep, and figured that the only way to put an end to this is if I joined them, and so I took my life. The ghosts saw that I was “chosen,” and followed me into the waters below as I delve into a permanent sleep.

If you thought the dream was scary, it all turned out to be one giant movie, and while it did get positive reviews, it didn’t do well in the box office. I never did die from drowning, because I was jumping on one giant pillow.

[beacon-of-chaos]

Defenders of Aura - A Battle Century G Campaign Diary

Sorry for the delay, laser eye surgery makes staring at large blocks of text difficult. Session 7 Sadly Juyon's player was not able to make this session. Juyon was assumed to be working in the background during the game. We begin this session where we left off: Floating in the middle of space having been saved from death by an alien vessel. The Naul (a race of horned humanoids) tell us that they were tracking the ship that attacked us and when they saw we were in trouble they came to help. Our ship is being held together by a tractor beam and not much else, so after the initial panic has worn off, the ship's crew and the Naul begin working together to fix things. Fiona and Ax lend a hand fixing the holes in the hull (Fiona's mech in particular being designed for this kind of work), Spectre and Eric head to the medical bay, and Sinclair helps getting the ship's computer up and running. The android is given two options for the ship's computer; either try and repair it as best as he can, or try and bypass it using his own brain to run the ship until full repairs can be done. Sinclair's response? Sinclair: *gasp* I've always wanted to be a ship's computer! However, after the GM reports the difficulty level of the two options, Sinclair decides to go for the longer, but less risky, method of repairing the computer. Perhaps next time. After completing their respective tasks the group meets up and finds one of the nauls in one of the corridors, looking confused as she places her hand on one of the walls. She says she doesn't understand why she cannot detect the "Life Energy" of our ship. It seems Naul ships are organic in nature, grown rather than built. She turns to Sinclair in fascination at the concept of a lifeform that was built rather than born. She asks many questions and expresses an interest in learning more about our human ways. We ask her questions too, especially about what appears to be the magic that the Naul are using. Right on cue, a wormhole appears next to us and a naul comes out to invite us onto the naul ship to speak with their captain. When we enter the wormhole we exit in what appears to be a large forest. We look up and find ourselves staring up at what appears to be open space. GM: Everyone roll 1d10 plus willpower to avoid freaking out. Fiona: *rolls a 10* It's a window. I've seen them before. Sinclair: *rolls a 1* Oh my god sensors don't detect any glass what is happening ahhhh! It's actually a projection of the outside. So the ship is space Hogwarts being run by space elves. Neato! The captain is an older-looking naul with a cane. He greets us and tells us that he is from Camelot, the planet with the human-alien alliance. The ship that attacked us was a member of the Ebon Order, a group of humans and nauls originally tasked with hunting the aliens that the cultists we fought in session 1 are supposedly working for. The Ebon Order went rogue not long after they entered dark space and since then have been attacking other ships indiscriminately for no apparant reason. The captain wants to enlist our help in capturing this rogue order. We ask about the Chinese ship we were supposed to be meeting. The captain tells us that they passed a human ship on the other side of Miranda that seemed abandoned. We decide we'll check it out after dealing with the Order. Our team and the captains of each ship get together to discuss plans to take the Ebon Order ship down. After checking the information from our recent battle, Eric notices something unusual about the enemy shields; when they lauched their mechs to counter ours, the shield frequency changed to allow low-speed objects to pass through briefly. This seems like our best shot of stopping them, so we plan to lure them in by pretending the Naul ship is broken down, then the Cruel Odysseus will come up behind them and catapult us towards the enemy ship as soon as the enemy mechs launch. Then we'll disable the enemy shields and engines in order to allow the Naul to board. It's a crazy, risky plan, but that's what we're here for! For additional power, Fiona builds an anti-spaceship sword for her mech out of scrap metal from the Odysseus and also finds a nuclear missile onboard. Why does this junky old ship have one of those? I don't know. So the bait is set and we wait. We don't wait for long, as the Ebon Order ship arrives quickly and immediately begins firing on the Naul ship. The Odysseus moves from its hiding place in the gas giant's cloud and we are launched in time to catch the shield at its weakest. We pass through, aiming to land at the rear of the ship between the engines, where we can do the most damage before we are noticed. The GM makes us roll for the landing. Sinclair once again makes a perfect landing (3 for 3!) while the others get scattered across the ship's aft. We go to town on whatever we can find that looks important; Sinclair hacks the engines to disable them while the others bring their weapons to bare against shield generators, weapons, and suspicious-looking chunks of metal. Soon enough we are set upon by enemy mechs. Fiona gets two artillery units appear close to her, Ax and Sinclair get two mid-range mechs, and Spectre ends up dueling the commander mech from the last fight, who's only communication is "DIE SCUM!". Fiona dodges between weapons arrays and the artillery hesitate, not wanting to blast apart their own ship. Sinclair shields Ax from attack while the rock star uses his bazooka and heavy-duty anti-mech cannon with impunity, blasting one mech clear into space and disabling the other. Fiona and Spectre perform a double team maneuveur against the commander, with Spectre pushing her towards Fiona who then leaps off a wall and down with her ridiculously large anti-spaceship sword, which smashes into the commander and the ship, causing all three mechs to crash through a section of the hull and into some kind of small hanger. Sinclair considers following Fiona and Spectre, but the hanger is already cramped and Ax's low speed makes him a sitting duck against the artillery mechs, who are now free to attack since most of the ship's systems around us have been destroyed. Sinclair repairs Ax's mech up to almost full health, but sadly a full salvo from each of the enemy mechs is enough to smash his mech to pieces. It survives at 1 hit point, due to GM fiat, just long enough for a retaliatory blast from Ax to put them at critical HP. Luckily, now that the shields are down, we get some support fire from the Odysseus, putting the remaining mechs out of commission. Ax's mech gives up the ghost (RIP Riggnarok) and Ax is badly injured. Sinclair ejects from his own mech to perform some emergency first aid on the rock star, using duct tape and superglue to hold his wounds together. Ax sadly retrieves a broken guitar neck from his cockpit as a reminder. Meanwhile, the three mechs in the hanger are striking each other at point blank range, each taking heavy damage. The commander runs a sword straight through Spectre and Eric's mech, forcing both of them to eject (RIP Eagle). Fiona strikes back with her jackhammer punch attack, but the commander is able to get one last attack in before her mech is destroyed and Fiona's mech is downed at the same time (RIP Arc Gear). Sinclair: Honestly, I take my eyes off you for one minute... By the time Fiona comes to, Spectre is gone. Eric informs her that the woman that the two of them fought has dragged him off. Sinclair and Ax meet up with Fiona and Eric and go to find the kidnapped doctor. Spectre comes round to find the mech commander standing over him. She's clearly injured with a bleeding side wound, but she's pointing a gun at him. She begins barking questions at him, strange questions like "Are you with them!?" and "Do you hear the voices?". Spectre informs her that he doesn't know what she's talking about, he's only here because he's looking for his father, Victor. The woman hesitates for a moment. "Yes, yes. You look like him. I'm taking you to see the captain." Spectre is then dragged off by his collar. He tries to fight back, but he's a scrawny scientist and she's a trained soldier so he doesn't get anything other than a bash on the head for his trouble. Meanwhile, the rest of Delta Team is on their way to the bridge to find Spectre and take over the ship. We get waylaid by soldiers so we need to take cover and try to fight back. Naturally the only team member with any non-mecha combat skills, Juyon, is not here. We take a few potshots from behind cover (Sinclair using a non-lethal stun gun, Ax using a flamethrower) but we're cornered. Thankfully we get help from some Naul soldiers who have been able to warp on board now that the shields are partially down. On the bridge, Spectre is brought before the captain, an older gentleman with a severe expression. Spectre asks about his father and the captain tells him that Victor worked with their order for some time, but eventually he left for parts unknown. There's more talk about them and the voices with no real explanation. The captain offers Spectre a place on his ship instead of Victor, asking him to finish his father's work. Before Spectre can answer, Delta Team and the Naul arrive. There are many naul guards around so we duck behind some consoles. The captain grabs Spectre to use as a human shield, effectively recinding his offer of employment. Fiona shoots the lights out, plunging the bridge into darkness. This probably would have been a good idea if we had thermal vision and the enemy didn't instead of, y'know, the other way around. Well, Sinclair has infrared vision so he drops a smokebomb to double blind everyone. So the entire bridge is a mess of soldiers staggering around trying to determine if who they just punched is friend or foe. Fun times. Fiona decides to try a bluff. She yells out to the enemy forces: Fiona: If you don't stand down we will fire a nuke at this ship and there will be no survivors! Cultist: No survivors is what we live for! [beat] Sinclair: Wait... what? Well, it was worth a shot. The injured mech commander tries to attack Fiona (who has decided that they are now rivals) but with her wound slowing her down, Fiona is able to simply pin and handcuff her. Sinclair administers some first aid to the prisoner. The captain seems to be trying to make a break for it, with Spectre in tow, when a wormhole opens andout steps the captain of the naul ship. The two captains seems to have some history as they exchange some quick banter. And then both of them draw beam swords and starting having an actual light sabre duel on the bridge! While we're getting all the Star Wars quotes out of our systems, the captain's elite guard, the Reaper, appears, lunging for the injured Ax. Ax does the only thing he can in this situation: he stabs the reaper with the neck of his broken guitar. Reaper: You... killed me... with a guitar. Ax: And there's nothing more Metal than that! After this, the naul captain wins his duel and the remaining guards surrender. We won! We did lose 60% of our mechs though, so it's a fair cost. The naul captain thanks us for our help and invites us back to Camelot to receive rewards. We accept but decide to check out the abandonded human ship they mentioned first. Upon arriving, however, we find that this is not the Chinese ship we were supposed to be meeting, and is from the old mining colony we passed last session. It's been abandonded for a long time, and already looted, so it's of no use to anyone. We're confused as to what happened to the Chinese ship, but we decide we'll deal with it later. We head to Camelot where we meet with the human president, who thanks us for a job well done. As thanks, we'll be getting access to some of their advanced technology to take back to Aura (and use to rebuild our mechs). He also agrees to help Spectre in finding any information on his father. We head back to Aura to report the missing ship. When we meet with Nina she tells us... that the Chinese ship has already arrived. What's more, they say they already met us and that we told them we were going to investigate a distress signal. And that research station we checked in with? Doesn't exist. What the-? Sinclair requests that the team be placed under quarantine until this matter can be sorted out and the team agrees. And there ends session 7! There's a large amount that I missed out because this was a busy session and this log is long enough, but it was easily my favourite of the campaign. I'm sure the action and plot twists don't come across as exciting and interesting with my writing style but I hope you enjoyed reading. Sessions 8&9 will hopefully be posted next week. Bonus quotes: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/shows...postcount=1239

[nebris]

US is a Classic Empire and Is Becoming a Repressive Police State at Home

July 4, 2019 by Dave LIndorff

As I set out to fly home from the UK on Monday following a short film project in Cambridge, I found my boarding pass, which I had been blocked from obtaining online the night before, carrying a bold-faced SSSS stamp in the lower right corner. Asking about it I was told by the British employee at the United check-in counter, “That is because you are on a US Department of Homeland Security list, sir.”

Later, after my son and I got the boarding gate, my name was called and I was ushered through a door in the wall behind the gate desk where two British security agents pawed through my bag and ran a cloth over computer, phone and all the zippers on my suitcase and computer bag looking for traces of explosives. After that I was politely told that I and my son (whose luggage was left uninspected) could board the plane. When I asked why I, a journalist with no criminal record, was being treated like a suspected terrorist, they laughed and said I would have to inquire of the DHS.

It’s not the first time this has happened to me. The same thing happened when my wife and I flew to Vienna in March where she was playing a concert on Vienna State Radio. That time at a checkpoint between Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and Terminal 2, my boarding pass was rejected, and when I got it reprinted a red stamp saying “ICE Security” was added. As on Monday, I was subjected to a special search in a separate location near the gate by an apologetic British security officer.

Today is July 4, and many American citizens will be bringing blankets and lawn chairs to local fireworks displays to celebrate American independence. Of course, those fireworks really hark back to the “rockets’ red glare” referred to in Francis Scott Key’s racist national anthem, which was largely a condemnation of the freed black slaves that the British employed in their effort to conquer Baltimore harbor during the War of 1812.

What, really, have we got to celebrate?

The US today is a global empire. Our country’s military, ballooning to some 2.1 million in uniform at a time that there is really no significant war underway. US military spending, greater in constant dollars than at any time since WWII, represents 34% of all global military spending, and the US military budget, depending on how one counts it, is larger than the next largest eight-to-ten countries’ military budgets combined. To show how ridiculously huge the US military is, consider that at $220 billion for fiscal year 2020, the US budget for Veterans Affairs alone (that’s the agency that provides assistance of all kinds, including medical, to those who served in the military, not counting career soldiers who receive a pension that is counted separately) this one military budget line item is larger than the entire military budget of China, and is more than three times as large as the entire military budget of Russia, considered by many to be our primary “adversary”!

And remember — US empire and militarism is and has always been supported by both political parties.

Here at home, our police are increasingly militarized to the point that most people now view the police as a potential threat, cowering politely in any interaction with cops, and fearing to assert their rights when they disagree with a stop for fear they will be cuffed, brutalized and arrested for speaking up. Our militarized, power-tripping law-enforcement officers insist on “respect,” are quick to make up reasons to take us down and take us in (like “resisting arrest” or “causing a disturbance”) if we don’t show it, and are quick to fire a taser or a gun if they “feel threatened,” knowing that prosecutors and the courts will almost always give them the benefit of the doubt even if video evidence shows them to have been in the wrong.

I’m 70, and the decline in freedom in this country has been a long but quite visible process back at least to when I was a young adult resisting the draft and the Vietnam War. Being on a “watch list” is nothing new for me. I learned from the FBI file I obtained back in the late ‘70s when the Freedom of Information Act was still actually working as originally intended, that I was on a list back during the war years and in fact was scheduled to be arrested by the US Attorney in Hartford, CT for draft resistance until the order, all unknown to me, was rescinded at the last minute. The FBI visited a colleague of my father’s at the UConn Engineering School in 1971 looking into an effort I and my wife made at the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa, Canada to obtain permission to visit China.

Is the US a police state? Yes, certainly it is for some people. It is certainly a police state for immigrants, legal and undocumented alike, for black people wherever they reside, for hispanics and Native Americans, and for those like myself who oppose the political policies and foreign policy of this country. And I guess that answers the question. One doesn’t define a police state as a place that represses everyone, since by definition those who keep their heads down, support the political status quo and those in power, are doing what the state wants them to do. There is no need to show the iron fist or the jackboot to them. A police state is a place that applies force and the tools of repression to those who challenge it. So even before we consider the concentration camps for immigrants along the border, the outrageous separation and imprisonment of babies, toddlers and children by Border Patrol thugs, and our latest president’s desire for military parades to honor himself on this day, the real answer is: Yes! the US must be considered, today, to be a police state.

So what’s to celebrate?

I read that a recent Gallup Organization poll shows a significant drop in the percentage of US Americans who are “extremely proud” of their country. True, 45% still say they are “proud” of America, but normally that is how many say they are “extremely proud” to be Americans. That’s a significant fall-off. Even among normally super-patriotic Republicans the percentage of those saying they are “extremely proud” this July 4 of this country was down to 76%, a 10% drop from 2003, and close to the 68% low point reached at one point during the Obama administration.

The main cause of the loss of patriotic ardor appears to be dismay or disgust with the US political system. According to the poll, only 32% of Americans say they are “proud” (forget “extremely proud”!) of America’s vaunted political system. In a close second for popular disgust, only 37% said they are “proud” of the US health care system.

So I guess I’m in pretty good company. I won’t be oohing and aaahing at the local fireworks display this year. It’s basically a glorification of US war-making anyhow, and there’s nothing at all to be proud of in that regard, particularly with the US in the midst of a $1.5-trillion upgrade of its nuclear arsenal, threatening war with Iran, pulling out of a Reagan-era treaty banning intermediate-range nuclear missiles, and embarking in a new arms race both in space and in virtually unstoppable hypersonic cruise missiles.

In my view, my country has become the world’s leading “rogue” nation, dismissive of all international laws and codes of conduct, actively attacking many countries on its own authority, without the support of UN Security Council resolutions, exonerating war crimes committed by its soldiers, and committed to the first use of nuclear weapons, both as a first strike against major power rivals like Russia and China, and against non-nuclear nations like Iran, and equally dismissive of all efforts, large and small, to respond to the crisis of catastrophic global heating. At home, the US legal system has become a supine supporter of virtually unlimited executive power, of unchecked police power, and of repressive actions against the supposedly constitutionally protected free press.

It’s tempting to hope that the decline noted by Gallup in the percent of Americans expressing “extreme pride” and even of “pride” in the US, but support for the US among the country’s citizens still remains shamefully high in the face of all these negatives.

Anyhow, count me among those who won’t be celebrating today’s July 4 national holiday.

https://thiscantbehappening.net/us-is-a-classic-empire-and-is-becoming-a-repressive-police-state-at-home/

[cutshoe15-blog]

The Last Ship Boss Breaks Down Series Finale, [Spoiler]'s Fate, the Marines' Involvement and That Missing Cameo

The following contains .50 cal spoilers from the series finale of TNT’s The Last Ship.

After five intense, dangerous and world-saving adventures, The Last Ship is no more. And in more ways than one. The TNT action-drama wrapped its five-season mission on Sunday night, and when all was said and done, the Nathan James was down for the count — though she had jusssst enough fight left in her to save the day.

On land, the Navy and Marine forces stormed a Colombian beach, where heavy battle ensued. With an assist from the James, the heroes squelched the enemy and forged ahead to Tavo’s compound, ultimately getting the drop on (and putting down) the revolutionary.

At sea, however, the war was uglier. In the course of outwitting one of Tavo’s corvettes, the James was sneaked up on by the near-mythical battleship that Chandler (played by Eric Dane) had been sensing all season long. Perforated by missiles and rendered defenseless, the Nathan James crew heard Kara say the two words they had in myriad skirmishes before eluded: “Abandon ship!”

Abandon they did, though Chandler secretly stayed behind, determined to go down with the ship and all that. But first he saw to it that the James got in one final, fatal blow, by turning the weapons hot and steering the ship right into the belly of the battleship beast. It seemed a purposeful suicide for Chandler, but in a surreal sequence that followed, we saw him — alive and well, clad in his dress blues and touring a healthy James.

There, he was teased by the hint of dearly departed Dr. Rachel Scott, while reuniting with other heroes lost along the way — Tex included. It was a conversation with the latter, coupled with the voice of Chandler’s daughter Ashley, that nudged Tom to halt his underwater free-fall and swim up to the surface, much to the delight of Slattery, Kara and Jeter in a nearby RHIB.

In this in-depth post mortem Q&A, TVLine spoke with Last Ship showrunner Steve Kane about finally dry-docking the TNT drama, Chandler’s fate, that brutal Wolf fight and the assorted cameos — including the one that wasn’t.

TVLINE | You wrapped filming well over a year ago. How does it feel to finally have the series finale on air? Well, I’ve been saying goodbye to the show slowly for a year now, you know. When we wrapped, that was pretty emotional. We actually wrapped on the beach after we finished shooting the D-Day sequence, which was a great way to go out. It was really special with lots of hugs and tears and toasts and speeches. And then I had several months of post[-production], where I was still kind of busy with the show and I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of it being over.

Then we had the final mix of the finale in February, and that became sort of a final ending. For the last 10 months, I’ve been sort of adjusting to life post-Last Ship, and then to watch it come on the air and talk about it has been fun.

TVLINE | That D-Day sequence, by the way… wow. This finale looked expensive. It was, but it wasn’t crazy. We had to make a lot of compromises to be able to make it work, but we ended up under budget or on budget again this season.

TVLINE | When I see the half-dozen amphibious things that clamber onto the beach, I’m like, that’s not easy. Oh, the AAV — the amphibious assault vehicle. And then we have hovercrafts later. Well, that didn’t cost us anything. What happened was the Marines wanted to play with us in Season 5 — they had been watching the show from a slight distance and eventually were like, “OK, we want in.” So I said to them, “We’d love to have you guys.” Sometimes you get all these offers for really cool things and it’s great, but a lot of times it doesn’t work out — it’s either too expensive for you to go shoot it, or the timing doesn’t work out or you don’t have a story for it. Like, the Navy would offer us really cool stuff and we didn’t really have a story that was designed around that. You had to be picky and choose your battles.

I knew early on I wanted to do D-Day, so I said to the Marines, “If you’re ever doing any kind of amphibious landing exercises down at Camp Pendleton — nothing you’re not going to already do, because we don’t want to use taxpayer dollars — but if you’re going to do it, can you let us film it?” So I drove down the coast with a small crew, brought like nine cameras and a drone, and we filmed this amphibious assault exercise with the amphibious tanks coming out of the water and all this stuff. That was in April, and we went back in September and shot again with our crew. And then all the Marines who were off-duty came out and worked as extras for us…. We got a lot of production value, is my point, for the same budget we always have. It still was the most expensive episode of the season, probably, but we also find ways of doing smaller “bottle episodes” where you don’t even need a set and you do very internal storytelling. Those episodes actually end up being sometimes our most successful because we’re really getting creative.

TVLINE | Talking about bottle episodes, that reminds me: There was one a couple of weeks back where you had a team in Cuba working through different scenarios to take back the command center in Florida. That gave me déjà vu to a Season 1 SEAL Team episode — but in retrospect, you filmed yours before they did. And maybe that’s just a very common tactical thing. It’s funny. I haven’t seen the SEAL Team episode where they did that, but it is actually very common for SEALs to do a full rehearsal. Like when they got Bin Laden, they do a full rehearsal over and over again. The only difference with ours is that different people were rehearsing than would be executing it. And what was challenging about that was we had to figure out how to redo our entire command center set. It was actually the very same set; we just boarded it up and then shot the scene the way it looked in Cuba.

TVLINE | Let’s talk about the finale. Was there any debate about Chandler’s eventual fate? Because you had me thinking he heroically went kablooey, which I would have been “OK” with. Well, it’s good that you didn’t know. We took the show from, I think, a much more popcorn, all-American story of good guys and bad guys in the first season to much more complicated areas as the seasons went on, and we have always dealt with moral ambiguity and other real issues.

And in this last season, we were sort of undermining a lot of what we’d built in the first season because we wanted to show that all this gunplay and shoot ‘em up and war actually killed people that matter, as opposed to extras or just bad guys. They killed people we love, and that screws up brains and emotions. So you see Danny go into his struggles with Kara and just being a dad, and Chandler being haunted by the specter of his own demise. He’s been haunted since really the third season, when he was like, “I don’t want to be the man who saved the world any more. I don’t want to be this guy who’s face is on the wall of the buildings.” So yeah, if he did actually die, you would see that as a logical conclusion to his story.

But the one thing that we kept from the very first season — and from the very first meeting I had with Michael Wright, who at that time the head of the network, and I totally agree with it — is that this is a show about hope. The book on which it was loosely based was a nuclear holocaust story which didn’t have much hope. I wanted to change it into a pandemic because that was more frightening to me at the time, but also with a sickness there’s always hope for a cure. So the idea of killing off the hero at the end felt a bit like a betrayal of that. What I wanted to really say in the end is that yes, despite being haunted, despite this fact that the world can be an ugly and awful place with violence, if you theoretically or metaphorically go to the light, or go towards where there’s love and hope, you’ll be better off.

I think that was kind of the metaphor or the theme for the whole five years, “looking for the light.” So even though Chandler really feels like he’s committing suicide as he’s crashing his ship into the other ship, he does have a choice when he’s underwater. He can follow his Nathan James into the murky depths and join Tex and Rachel and Michener and Meylan and Burk… everyone who’s passed away that he feels responsible for and guilty about, or he can listen to the voice of his daughter and go towards the light. So it was never really in doubt for me. I like that it was in doubt for you, but no, we were always about ending with a sense of hope. (Coming up this week on TVLine: the inside story on how the series almost ended.)

TVLINE | For the record, in your mind Wolf (played by Bren Foster) wound up surviving? Yeah. You see him getting into the gurney at the end, so in my mind he does survive.

TVLINE | Because, man, that was a brutal fight, including him getting stabbed six ways to Sunday. He was operating on pure adrenaline there. I called Bren Foster and said, “I want to give Wolf the mother of all Wolf battles, but I don’t want it to be in this big, open space, and I don’t want any guns involved, at least in your hands.” I told him we’re going to do it in a hallway, so he went to the location a week in advance with his team of martial arts experts and choreographed this thing, and I can say he really brought everything to it. He gets shot twice, he gets stabbed, he gets punched in the groin a couple times…. And the way, Bren described what he was doing to people! He goes, “Here I’m going to break the guy’s trachea. Here, I’m going to punch his rib cage into his heart….”

TVLINE | He knows his stuff. It was pretty visceral, but that alone is a really fun kind of relationship story, between me and Bren. I passed him for Season 2 based on his audition, but I didn’t know he was a martial artist. Someone told me on the set: “Have you seen Bren’s martial arts videos?” I said no, and I looked on YouTube and I was like, “Oh, my God.” He’s a several times world champion in many different versions of martial arts, so I said to Bren, “Yeah, maybe we’ll take the gun out of your hand a couple times.” [Laughs] I was just happy I’d named him Wolf because it worked out perfectly that he became Wolf.

TVLINE | Tell me about approaching John Pyper-Ferguson, because seeing Tex at the end was a great little callback. Pyper is just a great mascot of the show. We originally only had a two-year deal with him, because he was exploring other opportunities, and I begged him, please, let’s find ways to be able to work together. On a handshake agreement, we agreed he’d come back with three episodes in Season 3, but we knew we didn’t have a contract with him and that he wasn’t going to be available to us on a full-time basis beyond that, so I killed him off. And his death was so important because it was the last straw that kind of pushed Chandler to the edge. I knew that when Chandler was going to be teetering between life and death, Tex was the one guy he was always able to talk to him straight. Even if Slattery and Jeter were always guys he could count on, there was something about his relationship with Tex, because Tex wasn’t in the Navy and there was something more plain-spoken about him.

It was great for the cast and crew to see him again — it was like homecoming week. What was lovely was bringing back all the old faces for the final scenes, when they’re all in the room saluting Chandler. Actors and friends who’d been gone for several seasons came back, and we had a great kind of reunion there on the set which was nice.

TVLINE | Well, I have to ask: Do you even put in the phone call to Rhona Mitra, to her people? To actually show Rachel? No. We do not. In fact, I shouldn’t say that – I was going to, but then she made it very clear on some of her social media postings that she was not happy with the way things ended with us, so I didn’t want to stir the pot. But I think the way it is now actually is more spectral, more interesting.

TVLINE | True. True. And then lastly, if I were to say that I think that Season 5 was among the best, perhaps the best of the run, would you argue the point? No, I would appreciate that. Every year I go, “This is our best season yet,” and I think that’s because I’m always looking forward, I’m always trying to evolve the show and grow the show. I feel like we’ve done so many cool things over the years. We’ve been as much of a genre show as any kind of Walking Dead-type show in terms of our virus, but we did a very realistic version of it. We dealt with the occult and the religion that cropped up in this post-apocalyptic world. We dealt with post-traumatic stress and the drugs and the Mediterranean adventure…. This was really just our way of saying that in the end, these people were warriors and this is what a warrior’s life is like.

I think also that this was our most accomplished season because we got really good at making the show. We did Season 4 and 5 back-to-back, and the demands on that were so great. On the one hand, we had to create two seasons’ worth of stories and mythology without a break. Normally you get 10, 12 weeks of buildup between seasons just to get a running start. We finished the writing of Season 4 really early, by November of whatever year that was, 2016, and we were still filming that season in April of the following year. That gave us a big head start to really get our act together and write Season 5.

We also got really good, as you can imagine, with our production meetings, where I’d say, “OK, Page 2, how many tanks do we have? OK, we have 40 tanks, great. And we have two helicopters, and we’re going to blow up how many people…?”

TVLINE | You no longer have Jimmy in the props department saying, “Tanks?! Where am I going to get a tank?” By the time we got to Season 5, it was no skin off anyone’s back. “You want 12 tanks? You got it.” The crew was so professional and there was no challenge too big for them. I remember we had a guest visiting during one of the production meetings and he was, like, having a panic attack just listening. “How do you do this every week on the budget?!” Because every episode is really custom made. There’s no episode that’s like the others, so each one created from scratch.

I could go on at length about our amazing locations and art departments. That we were able to shoot from the North Pole to Asia to South America to the Mediterranean without leaving Southern California? That’s because we found great locations and we had great art direction, a great production design team, great visual effects people…. I’m so very proud of those guys, and I’m very proud of Season 5. I think that we took the show to its logical end, and it feels like the show was always destined to be five seasons as a result. People say, “Could you have done six seasons?” You know, of course, but…

TVLINE | I love the show, but I’m very satisfied with where and how it ended, yeah. That’s the way I feel. Again, the biggest thing for me is that we had just gotten so great at doing the show and we were such a tight-knit family. That’s the biggest loss for me, that everyone’s kind of scattered to the wind to do different shows. I’m proud of all of them, but what we had was really special and I’ll cherish it.

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Source: https://tvline.com/2018/11/11/last-ship-recap-series-finale-season-5-episode-10-nathan-james-sinks/

[waywardluminarychaos]

South Dakota is a surprisingly fun state with lots of interesting- and free- attractions. First up on our list was the Corn Palace in Mitchell- this civic auditorium creates huge murals made of corn products each year (this year’s theme is weather). They also serve some delicious popcorn s’mores balls, which I highly recommend.

Next on our list was the Akta Lakota Museum– a free (donations welcome) museum that tells the story of the death of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee, as well as general information about the Sioux (the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota tribes) way of life. The museum has some beautiful art work as well some props from the Dances With Wolves movie. At the same exit, but across the highway, a 50 foot tall statue entitled “Dignity of Earth and Sky” has been installed as of 2016, and is really beautiful. She’s visible from the highway but I’d definitely recommend stopping for a look.

The following day, we started off with a tour of the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. It is crazy and scary to think of how close we came to nuclear war- not once but on several occasions.

We picked up our National Parks Access Pass ($80, good for one year) at the entrance to Badlands National Park, and spent a few hours driving through there. We got lucky at one of our first pull-offs and encountered a bighorn sheep crossing the road right in front of us. I always thought the Badlands would be fairly monochrome but in fact they were colorful and variable in really lovely ways.

We took the off-highway road through the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands on our way down to Mt Rushmore. We were worried at first because it began to rain, a lot, and the temperatures dropped and it was pretty miserable. But the weather app promised it would clear up, so we parked at Mt Rushmore, dodged the rain, and went and toured the museum and watched the video, and when we came out, the rain had stopped and the fog lifted and we got a nice view of the mountain with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt carved on it.

The next morning, we visited the Crazy Horse Memorial– my parents had gifted us with a special tour to the top of the arm, where you can really see the work being done on this colossal carving project- the largest in the world, in fact (the four profiles in Mt Rushmore easily fit on the side of Crazy Horse’s head, and when finished, it will be taller than the Washington Monument). Learning about the history of both Crazy Horse and the sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, was really awe-inspiring. Imagine being so committed to a project that you knew would be finished in your lifetime!

From there, we drove through the Black Hills and did a quick drive by of both Deadwood and Sturgis. Even a month before the Sturgis motorcycle rally, there were plenty of bikers all over the Black Hills roads. It’s a fun drive. We also stopped in at Belle Fourche, which claims to be the geographic center of the United States.

We made it to Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, in the afternoon, and went for a walk around the monolithic magma butte- what a cool landform. So unique. We also got to sit for a while and laugh at the prairie dogs, which are really hilarious to watch.

That night we camped in the Bighorn National Forest- we drove in to the park, turned on one of the side roads, and wound up following the road until we were 7800 feet above sea level and we had arrived at a horseman’s camp. But they had empty spots so we pitched our tent there and enjoyed the lovely, if chilly views. The national forest campgrounds provide a picnic table, fire ring, toilets, and water, and are a bargain at only $10.

With that, we left Wyoming and headed north to Montana. We stopped and spent half a day at the Bighorn National Battlefield Monument, a monument to all the men who died there. The battle is often called “Custer’s Last Stand”, but really, it was the last stand of the Indians who surely knew it was their last chance to avoid being contained on a reservation. The ranger giving the talk was so knowledgeable and obviously really enjoyed his work- this was his 30th summer at that national park.

“Warriors, we have everything to fight for and if we are defeated we shall have nothing left to live for; therefore, let us fight like brave men”. — Sitting Bull

That night we drove into the Lewis and Clark National Forest and camped- we weren’t so high up this time but it was still cold- down in the 40’s- and it rained a bit that night. But our tent stayed dry and we were able to catch the most amazing sunset (still light out at almost ten pm).

We decided, with this being Fourth of July week, that we will wait to see Yellowstone National Park on our way back after Burning Man in September. Anxious to get on up to Alaska, we passed through the border at Sweet Grass Montana and into Canada this afternoon. Stay tuned for the next blog post in a week or so, which will be about Alberta and Yukon Territory. Got suggestions for these Canadian territories? Let me know.

Road Trip Week Two: South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana South Dakota is a surprisingly fun state with lots of interesting- and free- attractions. First up on our list was the…