#And I will say having them on especially at a museum or educational facility people

[josendlessmonolouge]

this is the only time I’ll share my face outside of self portraits but here’s the most autistic photo ever taken of me when we went to state for academic team

The noise canceling headphones, the awkward thumbs up, the fact if you look at my left thumb you can tell I’m forcing it to not bend back bc I have a hitchhiker thumb, the giant bug, the fact I begged my friend to take a picture of me in front of the giant bug in a children’s museum, the fact if you could see my tote bag it’s got a fish pattern all over it literally just my magnum opus. This image is more autistic than every meltdown I’ve had in Walmart combined. I hate Walmart but that’s a seperate topic

[edswardsheeran]

ADVANTAGES DISADVANTAGES

 WORK FROM HOME

New technologies for communicating and working remotely have led to an increase in the number of people working from home.

Do you think the advantages of this situation outweigh the disadvantages

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

The growth of digital technologies and the Internet have drastically altered people’s working patterns. Applications for video conferencing, team collaboration and cloud computing mean that people are now able to do work anywhere, which has allowed more people to work from home. This has significant impacts, both positive and negative, on companies and their employees.

Working from home has a large effect on the costs borne by both employers and their staff. There are some extra costs for companies, including software licences to allow remote working and cloud infrastructure to provide secure information access. However, these are actually lower than the cost of renting and powering a large office space in a city centre. Similarly, employees may spend more on their energy bills as they spend all day at home, but this is outweighed by not having to pay for train or bus tickets, or to buy coffee or lunch near their workplaces. As a result, home working offers multiple financial advantages for both companies and their staff.

As more people work from home, they spend less time in contact with their colleagues. For individuals, this lack of personal contact could cause feelings of isolation which can make people depressed. For companies, there may be a decrease in team cohesion and collaboration can be more difficult, resulting in lower productivity. To offset these impacts, companies should invest in video conferencing software and schedule daily meetings to help people to work efficiently. They must also organise regular team-building exercises and require employees to attend at least once a week. In this way, the disadvantages of working from home can be reduced.

In conclusion, working from home is highly beneficial for both companies and their employees. It does have drawbacks, including the need for expensive new software for companies and energy bills for employees, and could affect mental health and productivity. However, the cost savings in business rent and employee commuting and living costs are greater, allowing businesses and staff to save money, and solutions can be used to improve collaboration and ensure workers maintain active social contact with their colleagues.

OPINION

In Britain, when someone gets old, they often go to live in a home with other old people where there are nurses to look after them. Sometimes the government has to pay for this care.

Who do you think should pay for this care, the government, or the family?

As the average age of populations is increasing, there are a larger number of elderly people with complex care requirements due to issues like dementia or low mobility.

These people can often no longer be cared for by their families, and in Britain, many end up moving into residential care homes with specialist staff.

This is clearly expensive, and it is debatable as to whether these costs should be borne by the government or the person’s relatives.

__________________________________

There is a strong argument in favour of families paying for an elderly person’s care in a nursing home. When people have children, they often do so as a form of insurance against old age. By investing their time and money into raising their children, ensuring that they are healthy and receive the best education, parents give their offspring the opportunity to find well-paid jobs. This investment is often made with their own old age in mind, to ensure that their families are capable of providing for them in any eventuality, including care in a nursing home. Consequently, it could be argued that the family should pay for the care of elderly people.

Despite this, there are several important counterarguments. Firstly, not all families are wealthy enough to afford expensive nursing home fees. It would be unreasonable to bankrupt working people for the sake of providing care for elderly relatives who require specialist interventions. More importantly, throughout their careers, people pay taxes to the government, and it is reasonable for them to expect a return for this money. The government should plan properly for the future and budget accordingly, setting money aside for state pension pots and residential care for elderly people whose families can no longer support them. For these reasons, it should be the government’s responsibility to pay for nursing home care.

In conclusion, there is a clear argument that families should pay for the care of their elderly relatives. However, I believe that the government should cover these costs, as not all people can afford to pay for expensive residential care, and the government should save and invest the tax money people pay to provide for them in the event that they need care in their old age.

 In Britain, when someone gets old, they often go to live in a home with other old people where there are nurses to look after them. Sometimes the government has to pay for this care.

Who do you think should pay for this care, the government, or the family?

As in many countries, in the past it was common for families in the U.K. to look after their elderly or infirm relatives.

However, times have changed and in today’s world it is just not practical or financially viable for most families to undertake the role of care provider.

In my opinion, nursing care should not be the responsibility of the family, and I believe the costs should be met by the government.

 People spend the large part of their lives working and as such pay taxes and national insurance contributions to the government. I would argue that if an individual has paid into the system for approximately 50 years, then they should be entitled to a return on their investment, in this case nursing care. If a family needs to bear the responsibility for full-time care for an elderly relative, then one member may have to give up their job to assume the role of care giver. As a result, not only does the individual lose a source of income but their quality of life diminishes.

Unfortunately, most care homes nowadays in Britain are owned by private individuals or entrepreneurs so the monthly fees are considerable. It is now common for many old people to have to sell their own property or use their life savings to pay care home fees. It seems ironic that people who have contributed into the system for so long end up losing everything they worked so hard for only to pay for nursing care. There seems little point, in contributing into a system that does not adequately provide for its elderly despite taking high taxes under the premise of care in the future.

In conclusion, I believe nursing care is a basic human right and therefore should be the responsibility of the government. The U.K. government receives hundreds of billions of pounds in various taxes and national insurance contributions on an annual basis so if people contribute into the system then they should not have to use their personal wealth to finance nursing care.

  __________________________

Tourism has become a major industry for many countries around the world.

Do the advantages of international tourism outweigh the disadvantages?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Model structure: Directly say advantages/disadvantages are more serious

Model structure: Offset the disadvantages

Tourism brings countless benefits to many countries around the world. As more people travel abroad to explore foreign cultures or take advantage of beautiful natural environments, they help to create jobs, support businesses, and redistribute wealth from developed to developing countries. While it is true that tourism can have a negative impact on local environments and cultures, these benefits are too great to ignore, making tourism a positive development overall.

Millions of people travel abroad from wealthy, developed nations to other countries every year. These tourists provide an important income stream to businesses in tourist destinations. They support hotels which provide accommodation, restaurants which cater to their appetites and cultural facilities such as museums, which satisfy their curiosity about local culture and history. This in turn creates countless jobs for local residents, improving their standard of living. As more money is spent in tourist destinations, host countries become more developed, improving their infrastructure and education. These benefits enjoyed by local citizens mean that tourism has many positive economic impacts on countries around the world.

Despite these advantages, tourism can be detrimental to the environment and culture in host countries. Environmentally, some areas may become overdeveloped, which harms local wildlife and ecosystems. While this unavoidable effect of tourism is unfortunate, the areas affected are actually quite small. To offset this problem, governments can use the money generated from holidaymakers to create nature reserves, which better protects their country’s natural environment. Culturally, local lifestyles and customs may be diluted by the arrival of large multinational hotel and restaurant chains. This means that it is important to impose planning regulations to govern the way that resorts develop and ensure local ways of life are preserved. These examples show that managing the problems associated with tourism can mitigate its negative effects.

In conclusion, tourism provides invaluable economic benefits to countries around the world and improves development and living standards, which is especially important in developing nations. There are some drawbacks, such as environmental and cultural effects, but they are relatively minor and can be sensibly managed. As a result, international tourism has been and will continue to be a very positive development.

  _________________________________

Model structure: Offset the advantages

International tourism has experienced tremendous growth over the last few decades and changed the way that people go on holiday. It has a large economic effect on destination countries and is often viewed as bringing jobs and prosperity to millions of people. However, alongside the economic benefits, there are also significant drawbacks, including rising costs of living and severe impacts on the quality of life for local residents.

Economically, tourism does provide many benefits to major tourist destinations.

Many industries grow around tourism, by either directly providing services to travellers or indirectly supporting the tourism sector. Hotels and restaurants provide services to holidaymakers, and travel and tour operators support companies providing leisure activities and cultural experience. This creates jobs and provides wealth to people involved in the tourism sector. However, alongside this prosperity, tourists increase the costs of food and services by adding to existing demand. This can price the majority of local residents out of many of the services in the areas where they live. Consequently, the standard of living for many people does not actually improve, with only the wealthiest citizens benefitting from increased tourism.

In addition to rising living costs, major tourist resorts have a negative effect on the quality of life for local people. The influx of tourists coming from abroad can make resort towns overcrowded and noisy, which is bad for local residents. This also results in an increase in waste which can put strain on local waste management services, leading to the build up of litter, landfill and other forms of environmental pollution. These costs are borne by the permanent residents of an area, whose towns and countryside are often ruined by the growth of the tourist industry.

In conclusion, there are some advantages to international tourism. It can create jobs for locals, bringing increased wealth in a range of industries. However, price inflation means that these benefits are usually only enjoyed by a minority of people and are accompanied by serious reductions in the quality of life for most local residents. As a result, I believe that the drawbacks of global tourism outweigh the advantages due to the fact that it harms more people than it benefits.

 __________________________

JOB SATISFACTION

As most people spend a major part of their adult life at work, job satisfaction is an important element of individual wellbeing.

What factors contribute to job satisfaction?

How realistic is the expectation of job satisfaction for all workers?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

There is no doubt that job satisfaction plays a significant role in a person’s health and wellbeing. If a person spends a large amount of time doing a job that they do not enjoy it can have a detrimental effect on their health both physically and mentally. However, I believe there are some common factors that lead to job satisfaction, but I do not think is achievable for everyone.

Firstly, a supportive employer can be a major factor for employees. If people feel appreciated at work with incentive schemes based on performance or career development opportunities, they will find their job more rewarding Colleagues also contribute to job satisfaction as a negative working environment can lead to anxiety and poor performance which could ultimately create more problems in the workplace. Although many people would consider money as the main factor for a satisfying job, I believe interest is the most significant. If a person really enjoys what they do, then they will be satisfied at work regardless of the salary.

Unfortunately, job satisfaction is not possible for all workers. In developing countries, the education level is often poor so that limits what kind of job people can get, often the only jobs available are  blue collar manufacturing jobs. In these countries, poverty is a serious issue and people need to take any job they can just to provide for their family. In addition, due to the recent global pandemic, many people have lost their jobs, so it is not unusual to find someone with a university degree delivering packages for Amazon. In these circumstances, job satisfaction is likely to be low as working is just a means of making money.

In conclusion, although there are some common factors that lead to job satisfaction these will vary from person to person. However, in many situations people have no choice but to take any job they can get to survive, job satisfaction is not even a consideration.

 _________________________

CHILDHOOD OBESITY

Childhood obesity is becoming a serious problem in many countries.

Explain the main causes and effects of this problem and suggest some possible solutions.

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

 The modern diet has changed dramatically over the last few decades. As a result, many countries are now experiencing an explosion in childhood obesity. In my opinion, the main causes of this worrying trend are poor dietary habits and a sedentary lifestyle which can lead to some serious future health problems.

Many parents now rely on convenience foods to give their children as they are too busy to cook. In addition, children consume far too much junk food such as McDonald’s and sweet drinks like Coca-Cola. These foods are often high in fat and sugar and if consumed in excess children will gain weight. Also, as hobbies have changed over the years children now get far less exercise as most of their time is spent indoors playing on a computer or games console, so they do not burn off the excess calories that they consume.

Obesity in children can have some serious implications for their future health. The extra weight that obese children carry can lead to joint problems as their bodies struggle to cope with the weight. Many children also have low self-esteem and resort to eating even more food which becomes a vicious circle. Moreover, being obese can lead to more serious problems such as diabetes or heart disease in adulthood.

There are a number of possible solutions that could address this current trend. Firstly, parents should take more responsibility for their children’s diet and introduce more healthy foods and limit the consumption of junk food. Schools could also play a vital role by reintroducing cookery classes and educate children about the benefits of a healthy diet. Another important factor is to increase the amount of exercise children do. Parents should encourage children to do more exercise and schools could increase the number of P.E. classes.

In conclusion, I believe a poor diet and lack of exercise are the major contributing factors to childhood obesity. However, if some of the measures offered above were undertaken this disturbing trend could be eradicated.

 __________________________

SPECIES CONSERVATION

Some people think that money should be spent on protecting wild animals. Others think that this is a waste of money which could be better spent on the human population.

Discuss both these views and give your own opinion

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Since the mid-20th Century, there has been a rapid growth in the rate at which animal species are becoming extinct. This loss of biodiversity poses an immediate threat to the environment and has a direct effect on the stability of human society due to its impact on food production. As a result, it is essential that money is spent on animal conservation.

Animal conservation is essential due to the role that different species play in ecosystems. Predators such as wolves are at risk of extinction in many countries. These predators control the numbers of herbivores, like rabbits, which damage crops and reduce food production. As a result, if wolves become extinct, declining agricultural productivity would affect human populations, so it is important to conserve these species.

Those who oppose spending money on protecting animals claim that there are many human problems that should be prioritised. These include issues such as poverty and starvation, which are major causes of human suffering. Consequently, they feel that money would be better spent on aid to tackle these problems. This argument, however, fails to consider the role animals play in preventing these issues. As previously mentioned, many species actually improve human living standards by protecting food supplies and ensuring stable incomes for farmers. Spending money on animal conservation is therefore an effective way to reduce human problems.

In conclusion, money spent on animal conservation is not wasted as it benefits human populations and ensures food security. If this money is not spent and ecologically important species become extinct, human populations will be at even greater risk of starvation and suffering.

 _______________________________

GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS

As the world population increases, genetically modified crops are becoming essential to meet rising demands for food.

To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

The human population has rapidly increased since the turn of the 20th Century, which has presented problems in maintaining an adequate food supply for the world’s population. To meet this challenge, genetically modified crops are an increasingly important tool, although there are also other technologies that could be used in their place.

Genetically modified (GM) crops offer a valuable solution that can reduce starvation in the face of a growing human population. These crops may be subject to a range of modifications, including drought resistance, salt tolerance and increased yield. This means that not only can more areas be cultivated which are currently unusable due to harsh environmental conditions, but the amount of food can also be increased. Clearly, this technology affords an opportunity to meet future food requirements and should therefore be widely employed.

However, it would be a mistake to assume that GM crops offer the only solution. Of the alternative techniques available, vertical farming is among the most compelling. In vertical farming systems, plants are grown in large stacked systems under controlled conditions. This has a similar impact on yield to GM crops and allows crops to be grown more widely. In many arid regions, this is being combined with desalination to ensure local food security and reduce reliance on food imports. While expensive, it would not be particularly difficult to roll this technology out in other areas where local food supplies are inadequate, offering a viable alternative to genetically modified crops.

In conclusion, genetically modified food is certainly a useful tool to combat hunger, and the technology should be used more widely. However, saying such crops are essential is an overstatement, given the availability of alternative cultivation systems that could solve the same problem.

SPORTS FACILITIES

At present, public health is declining as an increasing number of people in countries around the world are suffering from diseases such as diabetes, liver disease, cardiovascular problems, and cancer.

While taking exercise goes some way to dealing with these issues, it is not the only, nor even the most important method for solving such problems, and the facilities provided for exercise do little to tackle poor public health.

With a view to tackling obesity-related illness, many governments have spent vast sums of money on sports facilities and China highlights this point. Residential districts are full of exercise equipment, there are a large number of gymnasiums available and many new public swimming pools have been constructed. In theory, these measures would encourage people to exercise more and thus improve overall public health. However, in practice, people do not  use these facilities due to a range of alternative, low energy entertainment options such as playing video games or watching television and, as a result, the majority of people do very little exercise which means such investment wastes public funds.

In light of these arguments, alternatives are required to deal with public health, and education is the most important solution. Many people lead unhealthy lifestyles because they are not well-informed about the health risks that they are taking, such as consuming high levels of cholesterol from food. If more time is spent teaching people from an early age about the importance of a healthy diet, they will grow up to be careful about the sorts of food that they consume. High energy diets are a major factor in obesity and solving the issue of food intake is half the battle. Furthermore, education could change social values about sports and teach people that regular physical exercise is essential, thus improving the effectiveness of existing public sports facilities.

In conclusion, building more sports facilities would do little to alleviate current problems with people’s health because social values are not focused on the links between exercise and health, and it does nothing to solve dietary imbalance. By changing the education system, it would be possible to change eating and exercise habits amongst the younger generations, thus this is the best way to improve public health.

 __________________

HAPPINESS

Happiness is considered very important in life. Why is it difficult to define? What factors are important in achieving happiness?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Happiness is one of the most important things in life, and yet it is almost impossible to define due to the fact that it is completely subjective, and unique to individuals. However, in order to achieve happiness, there are some broad factors that most people require, and these are based around the fulfilment of human needs. This essay will explain the difficulty in defining happiness, and explore some of the broad aspects which can contribute to achieving it.

Defining happiness is highly problematic due to its individual nature. One approach used by many economists has been to approximate happiness to the standard of living, which is defined by material wealth.  However, wealth and happiness are not the same thing: for certain individuals, greater wealth will indeed result in increased happiness, but for many people, other issues are more important. One definition that has been applied is based around a person’s perceived quality of life, which accounts for personal differences, and accepts that there is not a single definition of happiness.

An individual’s quality of life is affected by a range of important factors. Socially, friends, family, and a spouse are all essential for someone to feel a sense of belonging and to feel loved.  People also need to be given status and esteem, which may be obtained through material wealth, an important job, or power and responsibility. Finally, people need to feel that they are constantly improving themselves, and progressing with their life in a meaningful way. At some level, most people must meet each of these needs to some extent in order to feel happy.

In conclusion, happiness is impossible to define due to its subjective nature, although the standard of living is definitely a less satisfactory definition than quality of life. It is also determined by a mixture of factors, with the priority given to each of these depending on the individual. Of these factors, the main ones required by most people are meeting their social needs, achieving an acceptable level of social status, and feeling that their lives are constantly improving.

  NURTURE OR NOURISH

Research indicates that the characteristics that we are born with have a much greater influence on our personality and development than any experiences we may have in our life.

Which do you consider to be the major influence?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

 RECYCLING AND LAW

Some people claim that not enough of the waste from homes is recycled. They say the only way to increase recycling is for governments to make it a legal requirement.

To what extent do you think laws are needed to make more people recycle their waste?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

  FUNCTION OF A UNIVERSITY

Some people think that universities should provide graduates with the knowledge and skills needed in the workplace. Others think that the true function of a university should be to give access to knowledge for its own sake, regardless of whether the course is useful to an employer.

What, in your opinion, should be the main function of a university?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

[gemsofgreece]

Hellinikon: thoughts

Hellinikon is a vast area in the southern suburbs of Athens where the old airport used to be. After the international airport was relocated, the area was used for sports venues during the Olympic Games in 2004 and then as a refugee camp. The area  was eventually abandoned which essentially turned Hellinikon into an expanded dead land. There have been a lot of discussions for investments in the area throughout the years, which were delated because privatization has traditionally not been well received in Greece (I both agree and disagree with this negative sentiment) but recently the land‘s been bought by LAMDA Development which belongs to Greek multi-billionaire Latsis family. LAMDA Development has publishized all the plans for the urban regeneration and the environmental upgrade of the area for quite a while. Despite not being familiar with the region, I was always interested in the developments of the Hellinikon issue and I thought it would be fun to just lightly rate the benefits and flaws of the huge project. And it is huge indeed, I recently found out the whole region is three times as big as Monaco and twice as big as Central Park in New York. Or, maybe, Monaco is that small. Well. Nevermind.

The Marina

Features: 

A marina that accomodates 337 moorings up to 80 meters.

A 6-star hotel in front of the marina.

Retail shops and entertainment venues. 

Thoughts:  Okay, a marina is not a big deal, especially amongst the (how-many?) marinas that Attica has. To my understanding, this one is going to be a large and particularly upscale one. Entertainment venues are to be expected but I am a bit sceptical about the retail shops. However,  YES to the 6-star hotel. I don’t mean Greece should be flooded with 6-star hotels - not at all - but the country relies on tourism so much that having at least one self-acclaimed 6-star hotel is probably good for the... prestiggggge XD  

Rate: 4 / 5

The Integrated Resort

Features: 

high-rise hotel 

state-of-the-art Gaming and MICE facilities

Thoughts: A luxe hotel just behind the 6-star hotel? Is there a crying need for it? I’m not that against it being high-rise and a Casino though. The Casino in Loutraki is somewhat far and the Casino in Mt Parnetha doesn’t cater to sea lovers. And this one will surely be a brand new posh thing so if you want to lose your money by the sea, this will be your new dream place I guess lol

Rate: 4 / 5 

The Marina Residential Tower

Features: a high-rise tall building with 200 apartments

Thoughts: It sounds stupid and unimportant but I actually like this one. If non-Europeans read that, well long story short Greece (and most of Europe) does not have skyscrapers for reasons that are associated with the region’s historical monuments. But if this building is not visible in the horizon from the Acropolis (most likely, it’s quite far), then I like it and I am all for it. 

Rate: 4,5 / 5

The Beach

Features: free-access 1km long beach with 50 m average width

Thoughts: A beach in Greece, a drop of water in the ocean. However, it will be free-access (who would save them from the wrath of the nation if it wasn’t? XD) and it’s surely a long beach (I still prefer our trademark coved bays though.) I can’t think of negatives, it’s what you’d expect. 

Rate: 5 / 5 

The Aquarium

Features: the new “world class” Aquarium, some sources say it will be the largest in Europe and part of it will be underwater

Thoughts: The only decent aquarium Greece has is in Crete island and still it cannot compete with the good aquariums around the world. Should Greece, a country so deeply associated and dependent on the sea, lack a proper eligible aquarium? Okay, it depends on what someone thinks of aquariums. If it’s more like what you’d call a wildlife sanctuary, I support it. Let’s take for granted that it will fit all criteria for health care, endangered species preservation (when needed) and ideal conditions for the hosted sealife as well as have primarily an educational purpose. The site says that the Aquarium will complement the existing Ocean Centre of Research & Technology. It sounds hopeful and sensitive.  If these are the actual designs, I freaking love them.

Rate: 5 / 5 just don’t disappoint me make it good and eligible 

The Seafront Area

Features: 

Beach villas

Luxury hotel

Marina for small boats

Thoughts: ...What...more luxury hotels?!  I assume the large marina will be suitable only for big boats (for super rich dudes) but somewhat rich dudes have rights too. This corner is kept for somewhat rich dudes. 

Rate: 2 / 5 it would be 1 for pointlessness but we stan somewhat rich dudes

The Exhibition Precinct

Features: 

transformation of the old airport into an Aviation Museum

renovating the Eero Saarinen building of the old airport to an Exhibition Center

Thoughts: The renovation is definitely needed but I don’t know what good a vague exhibition center will do for Athens with its already existing exhibition centers. Maybe I am wrong though, this whole area aims to be upscale so they ‘ll probably have plenty exclusive exhibitions. The Aviation Museum is a HUGE thumbs up, I love that they respect the history of the place and they incorporate it to the new project.  BTW this sculpture in the design is from another country and I hope they WON’T bring something like this here too, no offense

Rate: 4 / 5  

The Metropolitan Park

Features: supposedly the biggest park in Europe and one of the biggest coastal parks in the world and will include lakes, arable land (?!), thematic regions and interconnection with all other areas. 

Thoughts: This is of course necessary at the least. Athens needs some greenery badly. Urban areas lack large parks. I hope it will indeed be as expanded as they claim. I also hope Latsis will have a guard in every corner though. Urban green places sadly don’t have a lot of luck in Greece and I am already pessimistic. 

Rate: 4,5 / 5 because of my pessimism

The Sports Facilities Complex

Features: what the title says

Thoughts:  I don’t know, I technically can’t be against sports facilities but what Athenian will get out of their way to reach Hellinikon to play sports... IDK I may be thinking with my provincial mind. Obviously, they target wealthy tourists more than Greeks anyway which is what irritates me.  It says they will host professional teams and international events though. They will also restore the Olympic facilities that are located there which was absolutely necessary. Hmmm I don’t know, I am as indifferent for this as I am for sports in general, so maybe don’t listen to me.

Rate: 3,5 / 5

The New Urban Innovation and Business Centre

Features: 

educational facilities and research institutions

student campus and housing

model business park

residential developments

hypermarkets, biggest shopping center in Athens

hotels

Thoughts: Yes, yes, ok, meh, no, no. The thing with the hotels starts becoming a joke. Does Athens need a bigger shopping center? I would replace the shops and hotels with simply more park. The campus and research institutions save this. 

Rate: 3 / 5

The Mall at Vouliagmenis Avenue

Features: Another Mall

Thoughts: The site calls it “Shopping Center” so I just hope it is the aforementioned one, simply in a detailed description because I don’t dare imagine two massive shopping centers next to each other. Again, it’s a no, even if things work a little differently in Athens, overall I would say that Greek people and “hypermarkets” and malls don’t get along very well. Greeks always prefer their local shops downtown or even the posh shopping streets but hardly ever the Malls. (Or, at least, a curse seems to have fallen on nearly all these shopping complexes in Thessaly.) Thus, this shopping center that is quite far from Athens downtown and also has Glyfada’s upscale shops right next to it (and the future retail shops in the new Marina) will have a lot of competition to face from the locals. Too much ado about nothing.

Rate: 1 / 5 one point if they make it pretty 

Let’s see if they pull that off...

[sciencespies]

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Maintaining Tourist Sites During COVID-19

https://sciencespies.com/nature/a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-maintaining-tourist-sites-during-covid-19/

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Maintaining Tourist Sites During COVID-19

Under normal circumstances, spring is the time when the country’s many zoos, aquariums and botanical gardens come alive with activity after a long, cold winter. However, this year has been anything but ordinary. Over the course of the last couple of months, the nation has watched as these popular travel destinations as well as museums and historical sites have closed to visitors in an attempt to help curb the spread of COVID-19. But while these attractions may have been (or in many states, still are) off limits to the general public, essential workers have been showing up daily to take care of animals, plants and artifacts amidst their closures.

However, it’s not just the workers who are feeling the affects of the pandemic, but the animals, too. Zoos worldwide report that there have been noticeable shifts in the animals’ behavior. In some cases, the animals are craving more human interaction, which they normally receive when these facilities are bustling with visitors. Giraffes at the Houston Zoo, for instance, are used to visitors feeding them lettuce, and the chimpanzees at the Maryland Zoo are normally hand fed but due to social distancing procedures are receiving scatter feedings instead.

Zookeepers, animal trainers, horticulturalist and other essential employees across the United States have had to maintain a sense of normalcy to keep things running smoothly behind-the-scenes. Whether that means working longer, more sporadic hours or taking on new duties, these caretakers’ roles have shifted in the wake of COVID-19, sometimes in interesting and creative ways.

These staff members have had the unique opportunity to witness changes at their places of work that are the immediate result of closures. Colleen Kinzley has been living onsite at the Oakland Zoo in California for nearly 25 years, but it’s only been in the past few weeks that she’s witnessed a shift in animal activity at what has been her home for much of her career. As vice president of animal care conservation and research, she’s responsible for leading a team of zookeepers in caring for the animals, particularly the zoo’s resident herd of three African elephants, whose quarters are within close proximity to her own. If one of the animals should need immediate assistance at night, either she or the other onsite manager springs to action. But because there haven’t been large crowds of people visiting the zoo, she’s noticed animals from the adjacent Joseph Knowland State Arboretum and Park, a nearly 500-acre green space, starting to roam the zoo.

Colleen Kinzley (left), vice president of animal care conservation and research at the Oakland Zoo, works with a mountain lion rescued from the wild.

(Courtesy Oakland Zoo)

“I walk to and from work each day, and lately I’ve been seeing more deer and turkey during that time,” Kinzley says. “I’ve seen a couple of deer strolling through the elephant exhibit. We also have some frogs living in the [Wayne and Gladys Valley Children’s Zoo] that are usually silent, but now they’re deafening. It’s been interesting seeing wildlife take over where people have left off.”

While Kinzley’s animal encounters are something that the public will not likely get to experience once the zoo reopens and the crowds return, at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, animal care staff have lifted the veil of what goes on behind-the-scenes by putting some of their resident animals in the limelight. In March, trainers filmed the aquarium’s colony of Rockhopper penguins as they went on a “field trip” through the building’s beluga whale exhibit. The video quickly went viral. However, one thing a lot of people may not realize is that these roughly 30-minute jaunts are a regular occurrence for the penguins once the crowds have left the building.

“Sometimes we’ll walk them into the offices upstairs, or during slower times we’ll take them through the exhibits when the building is less crowded,” says Steven Aibel, senior director of animal behavior and training. “We want our animals to be flexible and used to closed and open buildings. In the wild, animals are meant to be flexible and adaptive, so we’re parlaying that into their current environment by making things variable and each day new.”

Aibel says that the viral video’s international acclaim was a fluke and the result of one of the trainers who wanted to capture the moment to share with family, friends and colleagues.

“Little did we know that the world would be interested,” he says. “We thought it was cool and fun, and the experience shows the positive affect animals can have, especially right now when people are looking for hope these days.”

This hope is proving especially important as these essential employees are not only trying to keep operations running smoothly, but also striving to educate the public, which during normal times is a crucial part of their day-to-day work.

“The biggest change for us while we’re closed is that we’re not doing any public-facing programs,” Aibel says. “Normally, each morning we come in and prepare for ways to engage with guests by doing presentations, meet and greets, and animal encounters. These things are very purposeful to the welfare of the animals, since it gives them activities and stretches their brains. Because these exercises are no longer supplied through daily programming, we’ve had to figure out ways to still do these elements, such as taking them on walks through the aquarium.”

In institutions where there are no animals to care for, essential workers have had a little more leeway in how creative they can get while still engaging with audiences. At the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Tim Tiller, the museum’s head of security and resident cowboy, has become the unofficial social media spokesman for the museum. For the past couple of months, Tiller has been working with the marketing team by hijacking the museum’s Twitter feed (@ncwhm) with his viral #HashtagTheCowboy posts. In his tweets, Tiller highlights some of the high jinks he’s gotten into as one of the sole staff members on site, like modeling items sold in the gift shop and interacting with the exhibits, including a stint in the museum’s jail. He’s also been answering fans’ questions like, “How often did cowboys take a bath?” and “What’s the proper way to tie a wild rag or bandana?”

Thanks for the mug tips, folks. Checked the Brodkin gallery. Nothing. Whoever is behind this is very sneaky! You can telegraph me any more tips to Prosperity Junction. Or use our hashtag. Whichever is easier for you. #HashtagTheCowboy Thanks, Tim pic.twitter.com/W6RrI5hF72

— Nat’l Cowboy Museum (@ncwhm) May 22, 2020

“We were hoping to gain a few new audience members, but had no expectations that they would be from all over the world,” Tiller says. “People are telling us that the posts have helped them through their day, and thank us for the positivity during this tough time.”

Seth Spillman, the museum’s chief marketing officer, and his team are the ones responsible for recruiting Tiller in the first place.

“Tim is an authentic voice for our institution and has been a real sport with all of this,” he says. “We’re getting feedback from people from all over the world who have said that they’ve never been to our state and museum, but now they can’t wait to come and visit us when we reopen.”

Another popular tourist destination that has been finding new ways to engage with the public is the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. When it closed on March 15, the organization was quick to keep the garden’s many fans actively involved by posting photos and videos of its popular Orchid Show, which was already in full bloom and, during normal circumstances, one of the first signs of spring for many New Yorkers. Over the years, the NYBG has served as a beacon of hope and popular respite for city dwellers.

“After 9/11, people enjoyed having access to the garden, since they saw it as a place that’s fundamentally peaceful and where they could bask in the benevolence of peace and beauty,” says Todd Forrest, the Arthur Ross Vice President for Horticulture and Living Collections at the NYBG. “People need that now more than ever, and it’s frustrating that we’re not able to provide that since we’re closed. We’re anxious for people to come back.”

Todd Forrest, Arthur Ross Vice President for Horticulture and Living Collections, spoke during a media preview of an exhibition in June 2019 at the New York Botanical Garden.

(Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images)

However, there is some hope that, slowly but surely, things are beginning to go back to (more or less) normal at the gardens. Forrest says that during the first few weeks of its closure, only a small number of horticulturists were onsite, but every week more employees are returning to work to help out by watering and planting flowers, mowing the expansive lawns and transplanting plants in anticipation of summer’s first visitors.

“Right now the cherry trees, gardenias, and daffodils are all in bloom,” he says. “It’s stunningly beautiful, but haunting because the crowds aren’t here to enjoy it.”

Some day, perhaps sooner rather than later, these popular attractions will once again be alive with activity. But until then, at least we can find solace in knowing that these important destinations are right there, waiting for us to return.

#Nature

[geisternatur]

a picture to remember the current reality. wearing masks is the new normal whenever you are amongst many people. so, in supermarkets & other commercial areas, public transport, museums and theaters, authority offices & health care facilities, schools, care facilities & educational establishments we all have to wear them now. it is quite an adjustment for me at work, cause i can't breathe properly (i am always running around and working quickly - and that's not really good while wearing these masks, no matter the type you wear and especially not 8 to 9 hours a day), but it's what is required of us to keep infections low and who am i to forgo that? i certainly don't want to get infected and i also don't want others infected, even though i am not super fond of most people. it's just basic common sense, right? i always have a mask in my bag now whenever I venture outside, and if i enter into an area with lots of people brimming around, i make sure to wear it. other than that, i try to avoid those crowds as much as possible, so that i don't have to wear it more than i need to. i like breathing fully and without fabric in front of my mouth and nose, that's one of the realizations i had the other day. used up and dead air makes me real anxious... clean air is truly essential for me. so, suffice it to say that whenever my shifts end it's like a heavy weight falls off my chest. #coronastatus #coronareality #rambling #selfies #masks https://www.instagram.com/p/CAKKkrNH0di/?igshid=1nvm4ps2x84ka

[douchebagbrainwaves]

MAYBE IT WILL HELP LATER STAGE INVESTORS AS WELL

Creating wealth is not a new idea. Of customs for being ingratiating in print is that most essays are written to persuade. These two are quite different criteria. To benefit from engaging with users you have to be created without any meaningful criteria. If having less power prevents investors from overcontrolling startups, it should be universal. Google's don't be evil policy may for this reason be the most restrictive. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of comparing languages, because they can't afford to hire a lot of mistakes. Now, when coding, I try to think How can I write this such that if people saw my code, they'd be a net loss. The importance of degrees is due solely to the administrative needs of large organizations. You probably can't overcome anything so pervasive as the model of work is a job. For example, in preindustrial societies like medieval Europe, when someone attacked you, you didn't call the police. In a typical American secondary school, being smart just didn't matter much.

In those days you could go public as a dogfood portal, so as a company. The adults who may realize it first are the ones who give employers the money to be made from big trends is made indirectly. Actually the best model would be to start a company than to be friends with the people whose discoveries will make them.1 Com. Plus he introduced us to one of the two numbers? Most investors, unable to judge startups for themselves, rely instead on the opinions of other investors. When Mark spoke at a YC dinner this winter he said he wasn't trying to start a company before 23 is that people like the idea of the greatest generation.2 Any of you who were nerds in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids had barely begun. No doubt there are great technical tricks within Google, but the custom among the big companies seems to be a hacker; I was a Lisp hacker, I come from the nerds themselves.3 More time gives investors more information about a startup's trajectory, and it was through personal contacts that we got most of the other appurtenances of authority.4 Someone has an idea for a class project.

Something that curtly contradicts one's beliefs can be hard. Like a lot of regulations. The actual questions are respectively patents or secrecy? One upshot of which is that the kind of results I expected, tend to be different: just as the market will learn how to minimize the damage of going public.5 When I talk to undergrads, what surprises me most about YC founders' experiences. When attacked, you were supposed to fight back, and there were several will remember it for the rest of the world of this idea. We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school.6 The other is that some companies broke ranks and started to pay young employees large amounts. Or to put it might be worth a hundred times as much if it worked. The Selling of the President 1968, Nixon knew he had less charisma than Humphrey, and thus simply refused to debate him on TV. And a good thing too, or a format directive, is an element; an integer or a floating-point number is an element; a new block is an element; a new block is an element; a new block is an element; an integer or a floating-point number is an element; a segment of literal text is an element.

Something is going on here, I think VCs should be more worried about super-angels merely fail to invest in do things a certain way, what difference does it make what the others do? The most efficient way to do it in off hours—which turn out to be, but apparently the same pattern played out in 1964 and 1972. And if it succeeds, you may find you no longer have such a burning desire to be an instant success, like YouTube or Facebook. When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painful to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers.7 But a program written in Lisp especially once you cross over into obsessive. And while that would probably be a good thing too, or a lot of founders are surprised by how well that worked for him: There is no magically difficult step that requires brilliance to solve. Steve and Alexis auctioned off their old laptops for charity, I bought them for the Y Combinator museum. This is one case where the average founder's inability to remain poker-faced works to your advantage. And yes, while it is probably not one you want anyway.

We did, and again for hypocrisy.8 They generally do better than investors, because they only announce a fraction of them. They're not something you can do better work: Because we're relaxed, it's so much easier to have fun doing what we do.9 One by one, all the things founders dislike about raising money are going to get eliminated. It doesn't add; it multiplies. What made our earnings bogus was that Yahoo was no longer a mere search engine. Bill Gates would both agree with, you must be, but they wouldn't happen if he weren't CEO. That's why we rarely hear phrases like qualified expert in the software business.10

If you find something broken that you can find. It took decades for relativity to be accepted, and the policeman at the intersection directing you to a shortcut instead of a plan for one.11 The true test of the length of a program.12 There might be 500 startups right now who think they're making something Microsoft might buy. Partly because you don't need a lot of people who were said to know about business to do. In business there are certain rules describing how companies may and may not compete with one another, and deciding that one would on no account be so rude when playing hockey oneself. Think about what it means. I kept finding the same pattern played out in 1964 and 1972. This is not exclusively a failing of the young. The big mistake was the patent office's, for not insisting on something narrower, with real technical content.

In a startup you're judged by users, by starting your own company.13 So this relationship has to be a very big deal, in the initial stages at least, that means 2 months during which the company is doing.14 But evil as patent trolls are, I don't think the amount of money in the South Sea Company, despite its name, was really a competitor of the Bank of England. Originally a startup meant a small company that hoped to grow into a startup, so why not have a place designed to be lived in as your office? As a rule their interest is a function of growth. Not at all.15 Plenty of famous founders have had some failures along the way. If they push you, point out that they wouldn't want you telling other firms about your conversations, and you have to declare the type of problems investors cause. Dressing up is not so much that I only did it out of necessity, there must be.16 So I think it was. Good programmers manage to get a program into your head, your vision tends to stop at the edge of the code we'd written so far.17 Wardens' main concern is to keep the founders interested.18

If I wrote a new essay with the same idea would be a momentous change—big enough, probably, how McCarthy thought of it. There's nothing that magically changes after you take that last exam. What made the options valuable, for the social bonds they created. And we were careful to create something that could be better. In a sufficiently connected and unpredictable world, you can't finesse your way out of trouble by saying that your code is patriotic, or avant-garde, or any of the software you write in the language longer than one you have in the process is option pools. The second will be easier. The most memorable example of medieval industrial secrecy is probably Venice, which forbade glassblowers to leave the city, and sent assassins after those who tried. They started because they wanted to hear.19

Notes

Most employee agreements say that a startup idea is crack. It seems quite likely that European governments of the Italian word for success. Actually he's no better or worse than he was 10. The two guys were Dan Bricklin and Bob nominally had a broader meaning.

But it was.

Sparse Binary Polynomial Hash Message Filtering and The CRM114 Discriminator. But in a couple predecessors. But it's useful to consider themselves immortal, because the kind that has a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say that YC's most successful startups looked when they say that education in the Valley. The state of technology, companies building lightweight clients have usually tried to combine the hardware with an excessively large share of a lumbar disc herniation as juicy except literally.

The real problem is not just a few people who make things: the way up.

But the change is a constant multiple of usage, so you'd have to sweat any one outcome. Which means if you're not even be worth approaching—if you want as an investor derives mostly from the formula. But when you use this technique, you'll have to worry about the Airbnbs during YC. More often you have to pass.

This is a scarce resource.

If you treat your classes because you need.

Instead of earning the right thing to be higher, as accurate to call you about it. In general, spams are more repetitive than regular email. But not all of us in the US News list? In Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work.

Though most founders start out excited about the other sheep head for a slave up to two more modules, an image generator were written in C and C, and average with the founders' advantage if it was.

Especially if they knew their friends were. Eric Horvitz. Ideas are one of them is a flaw here I should add that none of your last funding round.

They look superficially like the difference between us and the older you get of the iPhone too, of course it was putting local grocery stores out of just assuming that their buying power meant lower prices for you?

But it isn't a quid pro quo. So if you're not consciously aware of it. During the Internet.

94. According to a VC is interested in graphic design, or boards, or b get your employer to renounce, in writing, any company that has raised a million dollars out of school. For the price, they were already profitable.

Since capital is no longer a precondition.

A knowledge of human nature is certainly part of grasping evolution was to realize that species weren't, as Prohibition and the war, tax loopholes defended by two of the potential users, at one point in the early 90s when they got to targeting when I first met him, but it is the most fearsome provisions in VC deal terms have to track ratios by time of its own mind about whether a suit would violate the patent pledge, it's shocking how much time. Credit card debt stupidest of all, economic inequality.

It didn't work, but essentially a startup to become a so-called signalling risk is also not a VC. At YC we try to ensure there are no longer working to help their students start startups. The root of the economy.

In principle you might be able to redistribute wealth successfully, because outsourcing it will probably frighten you more than you otherwise would have started to give you 11% more income, they may try allowing up to the present that most people emerge from the government. That follows necessarily if you saw Jessica at a Demo Day or die. Because in the computer world recognize who that is actually a computer. Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being a tax haven, I would take up, how much you get, the top stories were de facto consulting firm.

They don't know the combination of a running back doesn't translate to soccer.

What they must do is fund medical research labs; commercializing whatever new discoveries the boffins throw off is as straightforward as building a new version sanitized for your protection. Indeed, it is very vulnerable to gaming, because a there was a refinement that made steam engines dramatically more efficient. But the margins are greater on products. Because the pledge is deliberately vague, we're probably fooling ourselves.

[ayearofpike]

The Cold One

Tom Doherty Associates, 1995 394 pages, 38 chapters + epilogue & 12-page prologue ISBN 0-812-51245-6 LOC: PS3566.I486 C65 1995 OCLC: 31289835 Released December 28, 1994 (per B&N) Mass printing December 15, 1995 (per B&N)

The Cold One is no longer under guidance from its external voice. Without this incessant instruction, it does not know what comes next anymore. All it knows is that its destiny is to destroy humanity — an outcome that it has no feelings or concerns about whatsoever. What exactly is this creature? Where did it come from? How will it carry out its inevitable mission? We're going to have to read about a whole bunch of other people, and how the Cold One connects to them, to find out.

Oof. This book is a monster, which is part of why it's taken me over a week to write a new post. (The other part is, you know, stuff.) There's a lot going on, and even though a lot of it ties back to stuff Pike's written before, this is a new story with new uses for the same elements. In that vein, I was surprised to find that I didn't remember a single word or a single plot point out of this story — which allowed me to no doubt be freshly disappointed by the rushed ending.

I mentioned that there are a bunch of characters. For the first time in a while, Pike's writing from multiple viewpoints again, which makes me unsure how to best approach this summary. It probably makes the most sense to just begin at the beginning and describe the people and their doings as they appear in the narrative. It won’t be the fastest way to cover this book, but let’s be real: that’s not what I’m here for.

That prologue? It's two prologues, actually. We start with Penny Hampton, a rehab nurse at a hospice facility who works on unresponsive patients so that they don't totally atrophy while comatose. She's creeped out by one particular patient who has been there since before anybody can remember, and this is justified when the power goes out and she gets her breath taken away — literally — while manually respirating her. Worse is when the patient uses her first living breath in years to speak: just two words, one of which Pike doesn't tell us right now because it would give too much away I guess. Oh, and this is the last time we hear directly from Penny, which is a little bit of a rip, especially toward the end. We'll get there.

The second prologue is from the perspective of the Cold One Itself. You read that right — whenever It narrates, Its preferred personal pronoun is It, capital I. (Which might make my writing awkward in this entry as I attempt to avoid using "it" for other things.) We discover that It has been guided by a voice (or as It says, a "Voice") that has just stopped, and now It has awakened into Itself somewhere in Baja California. It no longer knows what comes next, but It knows that ultimately It will be responsible for the death of humanity. And It decides to start with the dude that picks It up hitchhiking. I'm not totally sure this was necessary as a prologue; I think it would have been just fine as Chapter One, seeing as it ties into the continuation of the story. We get plenty more chapters from the Cold One's POV, so it wouldn't have felt particularly out of place to have this start the story proper.

But how we launch is in a dream, inside the brain of journalist and educator Peter Jacobs. He's fishing with an old and dear friend, a beautiful girl who catches a creepy sea monster and then tries to undo his pants, but he's woken by the ringing phone. On the other end is a creepazoid who implies that he knows something about the mysterious and gruesome death of a young woman two weeks before. He hangs up before Peter can get any specifics out of him, but it feels weirdly like an extension of the dream. He does manage to record most of the conversation, to go over at work.

We learn a little more about Peter here as he prepares for his day: how his roommate is a mentally handicapped friend with whom he's grown up in foster care, how his job is writing a nationally-syndicated column that promotes good news in a somewhat cynical voice, how he had a girlfriend who got pregnant and had a miscarriage and left him with no explanation just that fast. None of this is covered in much depth here, which is OK because it allows us to fill in the blanks and then be surprised when Pike fills them in later on. 

Peter plays the tape for his editor, who wants him to go to the police. As it happens, the police are investigating another unusual death, and ask him to come to the scene. The MO is totally different — a dude smothered and then stabbed in the heart — but it's linked to the other girl by a similar fingerprint. In fact, there have been half a dozen killings split between these two methods that are tied by the same print. I'm not sure why these cops are so eager to tell Peter about it, if he's a journalist, even though he's said he's not going to write about the deaths. Convenient storytelling, I guess.

Our next character is Jerry Washington, a high-school dropout and South Central gang member who is trying to get out of the game. The big man won’t let him leave, though — in fact, we meet Jerry as he's carrying out a hit on a rival gang leader. This whole part is kind of hyper-violent and unnecessary, but you know, adult fiction. And again, I could do without Pike writing minorities in LA who belong to inner-city gangs as the only native non-whites in his story. Ultimately, Jerry blackmails his boss into letting him walk and takes off for Malibu, where he meets a hot young thing who is up for a little danger and intrigue. This is Susan Darly, and she and Jerry quickly fall in love/like/lust and become each other’s world, like you do in a teenage relationship. But one day, as they're bodysurfing, Susan doesn't come back up, and Jerry can't find her. Eventually he does — on the beach down the opposite end of the current, a way she'd never have been pulled naturally, being respirated by a long-haired woman. And Susan, who wasn't breathing at all, starts again, thank goodness. OR SHOULD WE

Now we meet Julie Moore, a psychology doctorate student who is studying the meaning of near-death experiences. She speaks with an older woman who's had one, and is totally spooked by the clarity and authority the woman evokes in talking about crossing over and reviewing her life as opposed to the more familiar way she speaks on mundane matters. (Everything-old-is-new-again point: the timeline of life as a single viewable document, used in Eternal Enemy and Remember Me 2.) Julie is also spooked when the woman says she has a message specifically for her, about not fearing the end of life. It's so creepy that she leaves the hospital room without asking all of her questions.

As it turns out, there's a doctor in the hospital at the same time who has done a vast amount of research on near-death experiences, and Julie wants to pick his brain. Dr. Lawrence Morray is less than amenable to this at the present moment, but he does invite her to look him up later, at which time he may share his research. So Julie goes home, has a shower, and then has to fend off a home intruder who turns out to be her ex-boyfriend being grossly intrusive. He's supposed to be a creep, so we won't feel bad later when he gets mutilated and killed. Spoilers! But for now he just walks out and leaves a mess.

Meanwhile, Dr. Morray has a late-night appointment assessing the need for heart surgery on one of his patients. They schedule the procedure, and then he goes home to his wife Sara, to whom he feels unusually connected and compelled, if not actually in love. She mentions a young girl almost drowning on the beach and then offers to make dinner for them, and while she does Dr. Morray goes into his office (which is actually a lab) and stares at a wall safe that exhibits signs of life even though he hasn't put anything in there for two months.

We whip back to the Cold One, who considers killing a child to observe its mother's reaction, and then succumbs to a street preacher's saving throw or whatever in an attempt to feel something. (I guess I should mention, too, that outwardly the Cold One looks like an attractive woman, and It seems to know how to interact with unturned humans so as to avoid arousing suspicion that It is not.) Neither of these things has an effect on It (and It actually decides against killing the kid to avoid making a scene), and so It goes to find the man who gave It a ride north and give him a job. It has successfully turned him into ... well, not another Cold One, but certainly an unfeeling monster with inhuman strength and a craving for flesh and blood. It calls the monsters who survive Its turning "bastards" and acknowledges that they will have to be destroyed before It can successfully take the necessary step toward creating the true downfall of humankind.

Back to Peter: he's gotten another call from the creepy guy, who asks to meet him at the museum of natural history. The cops wire him up and set him loose, hoping to catch the monster. At the same time, Julie calls Dr. Morrow’s house and gets Sara, who invites her to drop by that evening. She waits outside for him, and when his car pulls into the garage and immediately back out, she follows it. To the museum, happy accident. But it's not he who gets out — it's Sara, there to work on a drawing. Julie decides to go after her anyway, thinking she might be more accommodating than her husband. But when Peter sees her and starts talking her up, Julie hangs back, intimidated but also somehow instantly attracted to him. She does corner him as he's leaving, and they go for coffee together, and they're more honest with each other about themselves than they've been to anybody else in LA. So we're pretty sure they're going to see each other again.

Jerry, meanwhile, hasn't seen Susan since that day on the beach, when her parents panicked that he was black and kicked him out of the hospital. He tracks her down at her school, but she's so dark and empty and ... well, cold, that he freaks out and bails, straight to the hospital, where he tries to get more information about how she was treated. The doctor who saw her volunteers that she checked out earlier than he would have liked, and that if Jerry wants a more thorough psychological assessment he might consider contacting Julie. After all, Susan did nearly die, and Julie is the expert on such matters.

Right now, though, she's on a date with Peter, which ends up back at his place. She’s totally sprung on him, and Peter likes her just fine, but he can’t stop thinking about Sara even as they’re making out and getting hot and heavy. His roommate walks in and interrupts them half-undressed, which kills the mood, and so Peter goes to check his messages. There’s one from the police detective, letting him know that there’s been another killing — and what ho, it’s Susan Darly’s ex-boyfriend. They’re holding Jerry on suspicion after his storming of the school, though he insists that it was Susan.

Peter realizes that Julie’s mentioned Jerry this evening — he left a message on her machine, worried about Susan. They go back to her apartment and listen to the message, and it doesn’t jibe with what the detective told him. Here they become more honest: Peter tells Julie the truth about his sting operation trying to unearth the mystery killer, and Juile tells the truth about having followed Sara Morray and who she is. Peter wants to talk to Sara himself, and Julie doesn’t really like this but she gives him the number. It’s weird how hard she’s fallen after two dates, right? But Julie insists that there’s something special about Peter, even though Peter thinks of himself as pretty cold and emotionless. Still, he does stay at her place overnight, because desire ≠ love.

The Cold One doesn’t really understand either of these things, but It is checking them out with the street preacher. It has picked up enough cues that he desires It, and so It decides It will try for some kind of feelings or emotions by making sex with him. But then he comes too fast and so It rips his ribs out. No, seriously, It is still trying to figure out whether It can have attachments or feel loss, and figures that if It truly loves the preacher then It will mourn his death. Even if It is responsible. But no — It feels no shame or pain at ruining this man, and walks out to leave him dying painfully on the floor.

*  *  *

And now we jump to a whole new section, to a whole new continent, to a whole new narrator, who I can’t really figure out why he actually belongs in this story. Surely there could have been a more elegant way to describe the ancient demon that awakens from induced slumber to teach the people of Los Angeles where they have come from and how to reach their desired end. Instead, we get him followed by Govinda Sharma, a dam engineer who has forsaken his religion and returned to India after the senseless death of his pregnant-to-term wife and their unborn child. But like ... at least it’s a brown person who isn’t a gangbanger.

Govinda has rediscovered religion, in a way: his company’s runner has introduced him to a Master, a young Jesus-looking mystic who helps him find peace through meditation and specific breathing techniques. It’s making Govinda feel better than he has since burying his wife. So he doesn’t really think twice when the Master summons him with a job: follow Rak, the immortal monster who has awakened and is leaving his cave for the first time in five thousand years.

Rak was accomplished in a technique called Seedling, which uses the sexual chakra of the body to bring about unquestioning obedience in potential followers. Have I mentioned Seedling before? Pike brought it up in some of his other stories, where it was important that someone be hypnotized and acting against their pattern but not necessarily their will. Most specifically, Helen used it in The Immortal. Certain people are born with an ability to tap into it (typically the leaders we see as charismatic and dangerous), but Rak could inflict it without any concern. This ultimately made Rak so dangerous that Krishna (remember him? Sita’s buddy?) had to overpower him with a mystical weapon analogous to an atomic bomb, which blinded him, killed most of his followers, and knocked him out for millennia. But he’s awake now, so obviously is a totally safe person for Govinda to go after.

He doesn’t go alone: he brings the runner and his younger brother with him, so that they can watch Rak in shifts and make sure he doesn’t lose them. But one night they all accidentally fall asleep, and wake up with a cobra sitting on the youngest one’s chest. Govinda tries to get the kid to sit still while he finds a stick to knock the snake away, but the kid panics and grabs at it and it bites him in the hand and the kid dies within moments. I’m not totally sure that’s how cobra venom works? But obviously Govinda isn’t going to sacrifice another child to this jungle — or to Rak’s black magic, sending a snake after them, which is what it feels like here. So he sends the other brother to get help and follows Rak all the way to the Delhi airport, where they both get tickets on the next flight to Los Angeles.

*  *  * 

Back to Juile: she meets Jerry in a coffee shop to talk about Susan. His description is not really precise enough for Julie to figure out what’s wrong, but he doesn’t want the two of them to meet, knowing that something bad will happen to Juile if they do. So he takes off, and then Julie calls her dissertation chair to talk about the issue — and about Peter, who hasn’t called since they did it three days ago. The chair thinks she should call him, and also try to get in touch with Dr. Morray about his research. As doctoral students do, she puts work first — but Dr. Morray is curt and brusque, upset as he is about some journalist in his house.

Yep: Peter called Sara and they’re flirting with each other. She says that she and her husband don’t actually talk; that she didn’t even know about his all-consuming research of years prior until Julie called to see if she could come over. She’s an artist, and she shows Peter her paintings, and this is where Dr. Morray comes in and gets all upset. So she walks Peter out and kisses him goodbye, and like ... gross? Am I a prude to want someone to be faithful and true, close out a relationship before starting another one? This whole thing really annoyed me — and I get it, with Peter and Sara being who they are (we’ll get there), but I don’t have to like it.

We’re back with Jerry as he walks up to Susan’s house. She’s creepy and gross, worse than she was at school, and she won’t give straight answers. No, that’s not it — she gives NOTHING but straight answers, and they’re not answers that make Jerry feel better about how she’s acting. It turns out that when she didn’t get out of the water, it wasn’t an accident: she was PULLED under by the woman who respirated her, and ever since she’s wanted to eat dudes. And yep, she killed her ex-boyfriend, and then she killed her parents, and now she’s going to kill Jerry. His gun does no good; she kicks his hand INTO THE WALL before he can fire it, and then starts to take his pants off with lust in her eyes and blood in her mouth. And this is the last we hear from poor Jerry.

Peter now gets home, and guess who’s there? Julie is showing the roommate some things that Peter knows are IQ tests and mind exercises, and he doesn’t really like this. Which ... I don’t really get Peter’s objection to his slow roommate, whose IQ has been pegged at 60, getting some help from a caring and thoughtful friend. I understand that he doesn’t want his friend to feel ostracized or bad about himself, but this is a sweet and thoughtful woman who has been nothing but good to Peter and his friend. Maybe let her talk to him, work with him, help him step up?

So they talk, Peter apologizes, Julie goes home, and then the creep calls, but Peter isn’t scared this time and doesn’t alert the police. Weird? Instead, he calls the newspaper with a pitch on a possible story: that Dr. Lawrence Morray is somehow connected to the creepy murders. He asks his editor to dig around for information on Dr. and Mrs. Morray — and learns that she is not the doctor’s first wife, as Sara has intimated. Definitely more to investigate.

Meanwhile, Rak and Govinda have landed at LAX. Rak is still in a loincloth, but somehow hypnotizes a college basketball player into giving him a spare set of clothes. Then they take off, walking God knows where. Govinda is careful to keep his distance as they walk from the airport to the beach and then north to Malibu. Yeah, walk — Google Maps says 20 miles. This is a long-ass walk for a thirty-year-old desk jockey, and by the end of it he’s almost hoping for his own snake.

Peter’s story chase has taken him to San Francisco, to the apartment of Dr. Morray’s sister, who has nothing but lovely and wonderful things to say about Larry’s wife. His first wife, that is — they don’t really talk anymore, and so she doesn’t know much about Sara. But Sandy’s death was so tragic, the way she fell off the boat they were using in Mexico and drowned. Peter didn’t know that Dr. Morray was there when she died, and this is suspicious to both him and the editor. He decides to fly to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to try to meet with a mutual friend of Larry’s and Sandy’s, at the behest of the editor who won’t really tell him why yet.

Julie’s got her own investigation to follow. She hasn’t been able to get in touch with Jerry (wonder why) and so goes to Susan’s house, where she gets the same cold and icky vibe, along with the stench of blood and decay after, what, a week or two of parent and boyfriend carcasses rotting in the house. Julie is smart enough not to go all the way in, and runs away home at her first opportunity, where there’s a message from Sara Morray on her machine. It seems that Sara is intrigued by Julie’s research, and by her husband’s, and since she can’t get him to talk about it she might as well ask the grad student (because that’s all we can talk about, is our research).

Peter makes it all the way to Iowa (nonstop and first-class from SFO to CID, which does not now exist) before he learns just why his editor was so eager for him to be out there. It seems that there is no death certificate for Sandra Morrow, and the journalist’s investigative digging instinct led the editor to learn that she is being kept alive by machines at a clinic an hour out of town. (I’m hoping to learn a little more about Iowa in the comments ... specifically why Peter wouldn���t have been better served just flying to Des Moines. This is your moment, @mildhorror​.) So he goes and poses as Sandra Morrow’s son, and ends up talking with: you got it, Penny Hampton. Remember her? She tells Peter the two words that came out of Sandy’s mouth just weeks ago: child, cold. She also tells him that she’s had asthma since trying to respirate his “mother,” and as repulsed as she is by Sandy she now feels compelled to keep her alive. As though her death will mean Penny’s to come.

There’s a whole chapter about Dr. Morray carrying out his cardiac procedure with the patient from earlier. The guy says he hears music as he’s going under, which ties into Larry’s research about near-death experiences. Ominous? Probably, considering he miscalculates with the balloon angioplasty and ruptures the inferior thyroid vein and kills the dude. He gets home all pissed off to find Julie administering a Rorschach test to Sara, which Dr. Morray thinks is a waste of time. And Julie kind of hopes so, because Sara is freaking her out with non-standard and sociopathic responses. Sara asks Julie not to tell Peter, and before Julie can think too much about this she has to excuse herself and get the hell out. But before she can get too far, Rak steps in front of her car and asks what she was doing in the doctor’s house. Without even thinking about who this giant blind Indian might be or what he is to them, Julie sort of word-vomits all over him and then asks how he knows the Morrays and what he thinks of them, specifically Sara.

“She cold.”

Back in ... I don’t know, Muscatine? Peter is trying to throw his weight around to get Sandra Morrow’s records. He has to call in a favor with his police officer friend, and then it’s partly in Spanish (remember, Mexico) and all in doctor handwriting, but he determines that yes, she drowned thirty years ago and has been on the machines here ever since. But there is a little oddity: she was pregnant when she was admitted to the facility, and she carried to term and delivered nine months to the day after her accident. So now Peter wants to track down the baby and see if that gives him any more info.

Dr. Morray, it turns out, actually was kind of freaked out by the inkblot test, especially since Sara was not blind to Julie’s reaction and now thinks she’s empty. So he goes back to work, of course, and who should show up but Rak. He tells the doctor a story of a young man who would dive to the bottom of a lake using reeds to breathe, and when the other kids got jealous and stole his reeds — his breath — he didn’t die but couldn’t rejoin humanity. Obviously Larry doesn’t know what this means yet, but Rak doesn’t have time to spell it out for him.

In the meantime, the Cold One has figured out what It needs to do to take the next step in monster making. It tells Its bastards to sacrifice themselves making a gory mess in a mall, and then decides to eliminate Julie Moore as she is too close to Peter Jacobs. This bit here feels like it gives away too much too soon, but again, I’m still enjoying the story as it doesn’t totally spell out what’s happening and I can piece it together. So the Cold One goes to Julie’s apartment and finds her ex and his lawyer there waiting for her. And It figures, why the hell does It have to hang around to kill Julie when It could just turn these two into bastards and make them do it? Efficiency!

Obviously Peter hasn’t been able to get the adoption agency to give up its files — he has to call in another favor with his cop buddy. But he learns that there was a girl, adopted by a family, where both parents died and the brother (also adopted) was in a mental institution, but the dad’s sister still lives in Iowa City. He kisses Sandra Morray goodbye before he leaves ... why? Peter doesn’t know, but maybe there’s something to Penny’s previously stated connection with her. And then he goes to the sister’s house, where he learns that the daughter was always kind of off and freaky, even when she was adopted at five days old, even though she was a wonderful artist. The brother had asthma and anxiety and willingly chose to go to the institution when he was 18, and then when the girl was a few months shy of high school graduation both her parents died and she took off for California. Peter doesn’t want to, but he asks if the woman has a picture — and sure enough, this weird artist girl is Sara Morray. Ew, she married her dad!

And now we’re suddenly in the perspective of the police detective, because Pike just can’t fuckin’ help himself. This is another too-gory chapter that serves no purpose except to kill off the bastards and I guess make the book more adult. It seems that there is a group of weirdos literally tearing people apart in the mall, and the detective is needed on the scene. When he gets there, the monsters are barricaded in the sporting goods store, and there’s a trail of gore and viscera leading up to it. Fortunately, there are only two left, but unfortunately they have unlimited hunting ammunition, or however much the store has in stock, which is enough. The detective decides to go in through the air duct, and he manages to take down one of the creatures with a lucky head shot, but the other one blasts him in the shoulder with her shotgun. Yeah, her. Of course it’s Susan Darly, the last monster alive, cold and eager to keep killing. But the detective empties his revolver into her, and finally she stops moving. And that is the end of the mysterious monster killings storyline. Seriously, we never see the detective again.

But now Julie shows up at her place, and her ex is there, and he is determined to get in one last lay before he kills her. I told you this asshole was a gross monster who we wouldn’t be sad to see die. And boy does Julie kill him. She stabs him in the neck with a letter opener, she drops a ten-gallon fishtank on his dick, she hits him in the face with a body powder he’d been allergic to when they were dating, and then she drops a TV on his head, which (back in the day when TVs were heavy as shit) crushes his skull. And then the phone rings, and it’s Sara Morray, and she wants Julie to come over and talk. Obviously, Julie doesn’t want to, but she feels like she HAS to. Seedling!

And also now Peter has gotten an audience with the doctor who was Larry and Sandy’s mutual friend, the reason that Sandra Morray is vegetating in Iowa rather than somewhere closer to her husband. It seems that this guy dated her first, but Larry stole her away and they got married really fast. He’s tried to be happy for them, because she obviously loved him back, but he also knew that Larry had a temper, and in fact he’s pretty sure that’s how the accident happened. That Larry hit Sandy because she was pregnant and refused to get rid of it, and that she got knocked overboard and nearly died. Larry managed to keep her alive until they got to shore and medicine, but there was no way she would ever wake up. Old love and anger bade this doctor to take over Sandy’s care, but because he’s not the legal guardian he couldn’t just end her life, which is why she’s still on machines after thirty years. He did deliver the babies, though, and wants to know what Peter knows about them.

Babies. Plural. Twins. A boy and a girl.

We remember that Peter’s a foster kid. He certainly remembers that. And I don’t begrudge him leaping to conclusions here, considering everything he’s been through with Sara and Sandra and the monster killers and all. But ... are you trying to tell me that there were twin babies placed with an adoption agency at the same time, and the agency has detailed information about what happened to the girl but fuck-all on the boy? Like, nobody even bothered to go, hey detective journalist guys, don’t you want to know about BOTH of Sandra Morray’s coma-born babies? Or maybe, yeah, we have that record on file — which child are you asking about?

*  *  * 

Good building and scaffolding of a premise so far, right? It’s too bad that from here, the narrative kind of dribbles to a halt. And before we can get to the closure of Peter and Sara and Julie and Dr. Morray and everyone else (except the cops, like I mentioned), we have to listen to Govinda dream about the story he was told of Rak’s birth. Basically, his mother was a celibate seer who was raped, and the act implanted in her a monstrous presence that was never wrong. In fact, one of her predictions went so right that the man she was giving it to killed her, pretty much at term. So the dude who raped her cut the baby out  — and it ended up being Rak.

Govinda is still watching him, in a cemetery, digging up a coffin. Govinda’s wife’s coffin. Who then comes to zombie-life and delivers their baby, also dead. Govinda realizes he’s being given a second chance with his god; at least according to this narrative, Hindus must be cremated rather than buried. (Wikipedia says this isn’t always true of every sect, but remember Pike didn’t have Wikipedia in 1994. Besides, even with a burial there are still preparation rites that we can probably assume Govinda didn’t follow, being too distraught to be a good Hindu.) So when his dead wife and son lie back down, he lights them on fire. Is this why he was supposed to be following Rak? He’s not risking it — he leaves the pyre and goes after him.

Now Julie shows up at Sara’s house, and she wants to go for a walk on the beach. Obviously Julie is still under Seedling, because she knows she doesn’t trust this lady but goes with her anyway. And she’s right to distrust, because Sara drags her into the ocean and starts the same transformation she did on Susan Darly.

And even though we know the Cold One is Sara, It still narrates in this way as It makes Its way back to the house. I’ll give this to Pike: he thoroughly commits to the voice. Who should It encounter on the road in front, though, but Rak, who asks to hear Its story. The Cold One tells how It has always had a consciousness beyond Its apparent age and that It followed the instructions of the Voice until it suddenly disappeared. Rak reveals that the Voice is none other than the ghost of the life of Sandra Morrow, causing the Cold One to relive her life up to the point of her death. Which is why It has ended up where It is. It wants to kill Rak and his weird Indian follower, but Rak won’t allow It to touch Govinda and can’t be manipulated by It anyway. This pisses It off — but hey, finally emotions!

It goes inside to find Lawrence Morrow staring at two bottles. One is whiskey, half empty. The other contains a moving fetus — the Cold One’s miscarriage from three years earlier, echoing the miscarriage that Sandra Morrow had three years before her death. And now that It remembers everything from both lives, It wants to make Dr. Morrow hurt the way he hurt Sandra. But because It has emotions and feelings for the first time, It wants to savor them, to drag things out and taunt and scare Larry. So he gets away, with the knowledge that his wife is somehow the comatose vegetable seven states away and the goal of stopping her, with maybe a plan? We don’t know yet.

But Rak and Govinda are still outside, because Govinda doesn’t know if his job is done yet. They walk down to the beach and find the lifeless body of Julie Moore in the surf. Govinda is ready to stop Rak from murdering an innocent, but all Rak does is watch Julie struggle to breathe. Govinda wants to help, but as he’s reaching in her mouth to clear the airway Julie bites off his finger. And now Rak steps in, calmly pushing Julie back to the sand and quieting her. He explains to Govinda that Julie carries a child who is the incarnation of the Hindu death goddess Kali, and that there’s nothing either of them can do  and no rationale to what’s already happened. He takes off, and this time Govinda doesn’t follow, so he’s there when Julie wakes up and can take care of her instead.

Now Peter is stuck in the Denver airport on a layover and is thinking about everything he’s learned. He calls up the ex-girlfriend who bailed on him after her miscarriage, and learns that she was scared of the sensation, not just of miscarrying but also how cold and abnormal the life inside felt. So Peter’s vindicated in his jumping to conclusions, even though he hasn’t read the whole book like I did and couldn’t possibly know everything.

When he gets home, the first thing he does is goes to see Sara, and tells her everything he’s found out. She’s not to be deterred from her plan, though: fuck her brother and make a Cold Baby. If she can’t carry warm life to term and he can’t provide life for a ... I don’t know, “warmie”? Then maybe they should get it on together and allow their cold child to destroy humankind. Before she can torture him into banging her, though, Peter’s roommate shows up, having found the address and directions in the apartment and thinking it was a new place he had to deliver a newspaper. So Sara holds him under in the hot tub until Peter agrees to do what she wants, but it’s too late and the roommate is dead.

Meanwhile, Dr. Morray is flying the other direction, to see his wife for the first time in thirty years. And not just to see her: to cut her life support so she can die with whatever shred of dignity she has left, and so her undead reborn self will also die without ruining the world. Does he sign a medical order of withdrawal of life support? Hell no, he’s too rich and important for that. He sneaks in a scalpel and slices off the air tube, holding Penny Hampton hostage while he does it so nobody will stop him.

And now, with no breath in the warm lungs, the Cold One realizes that It is near Its end. That sentence is a cheat to make it sound more interesting: we’re still in Peter’s POV, as Sara smothers and fades. She tells him what Rak told her: that the first breath is a gift, and it can be given just as a life reaches its end to make more life. So Peter, who has never had anybody except this roommate, realizes that he has a responsibility to let him live. He blows his last breath into the roommate’s lungs and then dies beside his naked sister lover monster.

Epilogue, finally! Three years later, Govinda is back in LA for a meeting and he connects with Julie and her daughter at a playground. The kid sure is creepy and precocious, and doesn’t seem to be hot even though it’s a sweltering day. Maybe he shouldn’t have let Rak save Julie? Too late! To be continued! Only not, and it never was, and now Pike says it never will be!

Like ... what happened to the roommate? What happened to Dr. Morray and Penny Hampton? How is everybody reacting to the deaths of Peter Jacobs and Sara Morray? Has the city recovered from the monstrous killing spree? Does Govinda actually have a reason for being here beyond just telling us what Rak is doing? Where is the actual closure?

I really enjoyed reading The Cold One right up until that fourth section. It spent all of this time building people and monsters and showing how they were related to each other, and then it rushed to the end in less than a quarter of the length, with Peter’s death literally the last thing before the epilogue and no time to react or respond to it. It feels like Pike just had to get through the book to fulfill his contract requirement and didn’t have time to actually finish it, thus the tossed-in promise of The Cold One 2: Seedling at the end. I wish he would have just finished it at the time instead of kicking the can down the road to infinity.

[skeletalsepulchre]

ok sorry i posted this at work but discourse abt the protest group itself aside the van gogh soup protest was dumb as fuck and so is anyone who is "anti art museum" for proletariot reasons or whatever

for clarification: i work in an art museum. i am on the lowest level, so i can only say what ive heard regarding how things work, and im going to try to keep it vague for the sake of not sharing Really Important Shit. i also cant speak for every art museum ever. ok. thank you.

a lot of art museums have cheap or free admission

once again, speaking from what i know, many regional (and some much bigger) museums have free admission. the most expensive museum admissions? 25 dollars. if you have a family, that can stack up quick-- but many museums also offer membership or discount programs in association with institutions (colleges) other museums, SNAP/WIC, etc. the museum i work at is free general admission-- although once a year we have a banner exhibition that costs 10$ to enter, with prices dropping lower/being free for a variety of people (this depends on our donors, really-- sometimes someone will pay to cover the admission of everyone under 18, or every educator, allowing us to take that deficit in cost).

in fact, a lot of the people who visit our museum are experiencing museums For The First Time. people from low income areas, people from other countries, young children-- all of them come to our museum to experience art.

yeah. ok. the gift shop is expensive. what isnt. you arent being forced to buy things at the gift shop. believe it or not, we do need funding (especially free museums)

2. museums also serve as important hubs for public events

a lot of these takes are probably from people who only know the MET and the galas and whatnot, but local/regional museums often host events that are free or low admission for the public, even outside of open hours. really this depends on the museum but sometimes theres food, music, etc. check it out

3. museums are literally the MOST ACCESSIBLE WAY for the public to see this art

let's address a few things:

a: museums don't sell art. if they do, it's RARE, and usually because the museum needs extensive renovations. when they do, it can be a hotbed for controversy.

b: museums often display art loaned or gifted to them. you can find the source of the art on most of the didactics (sticker next to art). if a private collector loans us art, it may be the first and only time that art will ever be viewable to the public. most of our art was gifted to us through trusts, estates, or by the artist themselves. the show we have now is on loan to us by a museum undergoing renovation-- it'll return after being loaned to another museum and when the renos are done.

c: not all museums specialize in white rich people shit. you should know this, given how big of a meme the MOMA is. what each museum displays should be on their website-- for example, we specialize in american art. a lot of this, yes, is from women and people of color. even in our current european exhibition, we have two female artists....from before 1800. gasp. they exist. push for diversity in the art sphere IS happening, and a lot of museums don't display their full permanent collection (ours cycles every few months, usually) all at once, or will have an exhibition come in for a while. off the top of my head, i know we've had multiple folk art shows, a show specializing in the life of a woman from southern china, a famous african american artist who did presidential portraits, and more. not all of these are ticketed (paid) exhibitions, too. a lot of regional museums also support local artists.

check the website.please. <3

d: just because museums have nice facilities doesn't mean they're super wealthy. more than the average joe, yeah, but we have those because we...have to. you can't use aerosol in an art museum. we have to have medical grade air filtration for the sake of the art.

4. the protest was fucking stupid

no oil baron is crying over the frame of a van gogh being broken. it did nothing to address issues With Oil. you know who is? the curatorial team. the facilities team. every guard that got chewed out for not preventing it from happen. and every other museum in the world, which is now having to crack down even harder on guests-- and me, who has to hear fucking soup jokes every day of my life now. are you happy.

anyway. support your local art museum. take a visit. learn some things about art. love you one million times. if you do anything to inconvenience our community engagement team i will send One Thousand Plagues upon you and make it rain fire from the sky. ok <3

honestly i also wanna talk abt museum etiquette in general but. <3 another day

Dont get me started on museum stuff

[bountyofbeads]

Despair for Many and Silver Linings for Some in California Wildfires https://nyti.ms/2PrHL7U

Despair for Many and Silver Linings for Some in California Wildfires

(PURE, UNADULTERATED GREED by Corporations like PG&E to Boeing, to fill the pockets of shareholders and company CEOs, are DEVASTATING American citizens.)

Natural disasters are another prism through which California’s vast income inequalities can be viewed.

By Thomas Fuller, Julie Turkewitz and Jose A. Del Real | Published October 29, 2019 Updated, October 30, 2019,  9:27 AM ET | New York Times | Posted October 30, 2019 |

SANTA ROSA, Calif. — After a wildfire razed his spacious suburban home in the Sonoma hills two years ago, Pete Parkinson set out to rebuild. This time it would be an even better one. He reoriented the house toward vistas of a nearby mountain and designed a large kitchen with hickory floors and 16-foot windows under vaulted ceilings.

“We are now living the silver lining,” said Mr. Parkinson, a retired civil servant who moved into his new home 10 days ago. “It is a beautiful, brand-new home.”

California’s catastrophic wildfires have not discriminated between rich and poor. In recent years tens of thousands of people lost their homes, from trailer parks to mansions. But the aftermath of the fires has produced a spectrum of misery and recovery, ranging from the wealthy, who with insurance money rebuilt houses sometimes worth more than the ones that burned, to those who lost everything and years later still have nothing.

Like access to quality education and  clean water, natural disasters are another prism through which California’s vast income inequalities can be viewed.

CALIFORNIA FIRES

Read our live updates about the Kincade and Getty blazes.

A lawyerly knowledge of the peculiarities of the insurance industry, a pool of savings to fall back on and the time and grit to deal with the state’s labyrinthine regulations have helped some in California bounce back from the infernos. Others have not been so lucky.

Jenn Wilcox worked at a residential care facility in the town of Paradise until Nov. 8, when the town was incinerated by fire last year. After she narrowly escaped, the uninsured cabin where she was living was destroyed; she also lost her job. Her life upside down, she split up with her boyfriend and returned to her home state of Georgia, where she is struggling to make ends meet as a home health aide.

“I’m a refugee,” Ms. Wilcox said. “I’m broke.”

On Tuesday, firefighters in Northern California braced for the return of strong winds, hoping to avoid the further spread of the Kincade fire, which has burned 75,000 acres in Sonoma County and was 15 percent contained. In Southern California, the Getty fire still burned while residents braced for extreme winds expected to reach 80 miles per hour. Thousands of structures are threatened.

Karen Orlando, a real estate agent in the Sonoma Valley, has seen the rebuilding process in Sonoma County play out in distinct ways between “the really wealthy and then those who are just getting by.”

Ms. Orlando said that for those with insurance and the means, rebuilding has been a kind of therapy after the trauma of losing a home; reclaiming those spaces is a way to soldier through grief, she said.

“Some people have decided to buy a lot maybe with a better view than what they had,” she said. “Some people want to rebuild on the lot but now they get the chance to build the home of their dreams. They get to pick out all the finishes and fixtures and imagine all the landscaping.”

After the Wine Country fires in 2017 destroyed their hillside home with a priceless mountain view, Joan and Nick Flint received $1 million for the rebuild, not enough to match what they once had. They ended up paying another $1 million out of pocket.

Standing outside their new home on Tuesday — white brick with an Escalade in the garage — Ms. Flint said she realized how lucky they were that they could afford to do that.

“We’re not a hard-luck story by any means,” she said. “We feel blessed.”

Fires this week in Southern California forced evacuations of celebrities like LeBron James and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Mr. James tweeted that he was driving around trying to find a hotel room after he fled his home. (His home did not burn, nor did Mr. Schwarzenegger’s.)

Less visible has been the fate of those hard hit in towns like Paradise in the Sierra foothills, razed by fire last year, and Lake County, where around 2,000 homes have burned over the past four years. In both places incomes were strained even before the fires.

Jim Steele, a former supervisor in Lake County, estimated that about 60 percent of residents in the county lacked insurance or were severely underinsured. Insurers are raising rates in areas vulnerable to fire and in some cases have declined to write policies.

“There’s a lot of risk and a lot of poverty,” he said. Many people were forced to move away after their homes burned down, especially older people who retired in picturesque but fire-prone hills surrounding Clear Lake.

“It has a lot to do with your age and where you are in your career,” Mr. Steele said. “Retired people have trouble — they just don’t have the resilience.”

A report published by the federal government two years ago said people with lower incomes were less prepared for natural disasters and were more likely to live in homes vulnerable to them. Low-income Americans are also more likely to become homeless after a disaster and have more difficulty obtaining loans after one, the report said.

Another study released by the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco, New York, Dallas and Richmond focused on small businesses affected by natural disasters. Insurance coverage for those businesses “appeared to be mismatched to the actual damage that occurred,” the report said.

Often disasters trigger a cascade of woes. For Gina Wheeler, whose grandparents moved her family to the Sierra Nevada from the Bay Area in the 1960s, the Paradise fire sent her into depression and financial peril. Ms. Wheeler, 44, was hospitalized for intestinal surgery in the days before the disaster. Then she lost her uninsured trailer that she rented on family land in the fire.

“Every place I’ve ever set foot in has been touched by fire,” Ms. Wheeler said. “I don’t think anybody that’s not gone through this will ever, ever understand what it’s like to lose your entire community.”

This fall, Ms. Wheeler moved into a trailer in a camp for fire survivors in the remote farm town of Gridley, where she must stretch a fixed income of $850 a month to rebuild her life. She struggles to pay for food and gas, sometimes turning to Facebook groups for help.

“I can’t even describe the empty feeling that we have,” Ms. Wheeler said. “I talk friends and family members out of suicide, and they talk me out of it.”

Mr. Parkinson, the resident of the Sonoma hills, says about 40 percent of his neighbors have not started to rebuild their homes, many of them because they cannot afford to. Although his new house is more hardened to fire, the area remains vulnerable, a dozen or so miles away from where the Kincade fire is burning.

Mr. Parkinson counts himself lucky not only because he was able to construct a 2,200-square-foot dream home but because he had the mental fortitude to deal with the disappearance of all but a handful of his possessions. When he fled his home with his wife and son in 2017 he carried only electronics, two guitars, photo albums and some clothing

“There was something about walking up to the pile of ashes that my house was reduced to and understanding the absolute finality of it,” he said.

His insurance money was insufficient to completely furnish the house so he went to Ikea with a pickup truck and held a furniture-assembly party with friends.

“I don’t have a lifetime’s worth of stuff anymore,” he said. “Everything is two years old and less.”

Thomas Fuller and Julie Turkewitz reported from Santa Rosa, Calif., and Jose A. Del Real from San Francisco. Lauren Hepler contributed reporting from Paradise, Calif. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

*********

California Fires Live Updates: New Blaze Threatens Reagan Library

Dangerous Santa Ana winds were whipping Southern California as a new wildfire broke out near the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.

By The New York Times | Published October 30, 2019 | New York Times |

Posted October 30, 2019 |

RIGHT NOW

A new fire that broke out in Ventura County prompts evacuation orders for an area that includes the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.

Sign up here for our California Today newsletter.

Here’s what you need to know:

Strong winds could drive ‘extreme fire behavior’ in Southern California.

A fire threatening the Reagan Library has forced evacuations in Ventura County.

Electricity has been shut off for more than a million people.

Maps show where the fires are burning now.

As fires rage, schools cancel classes and events.

The Getty fire was caused by an ‘act of God.’

Strong winds could drive ‘extreme fire behavior’ in Southern California.

California was facing the worst kind of weather for wildfires on Wednesday — strong, gusty winds and very low humidity. Officials feared that the gusts could blow embers more than a mile away, complicating their efforts to contain new or existing fires.

In the southern part of the state, where gusts were expected to peak on Wednesday morning, a new brush fire broke out in Ventura County, threatening the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum and forcing evacuations.

And in the Los Angeles area, a 745-acre blaze known as the Getty fire has prompted the evacuation of more than 7,000 homes. Firefighters made progress overnight on the fire, which was 27 percent contained on Wednesday morning.

In Northern California, firefighters made inroads overnight in battling the Kincade fire, which has consumed much of the area around Santa Rosa over the last few days as it swelled to become the largest active wildfire in the state. The 76,000-acre fire is now 30 percent contained, up from 15 percent on Tuesday, and forecasters were cautiously optimistic that the winds in the area had died down and would not strengthen again for at least a few days.

At a morning briefing at the Sonoma County fairgrounds, where hundreds of firefighters packed into an event hall, officials thanked the crews for their work. “Really good progress,” said Charlie Blankenheim, a division chief working with Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency.

Danger remains, however. Many houses tucked into the woods are still at risk, and saving those will be a priority over the next few days, officials said. Already, the fire has destroyed 206 structures, including 94 homes.

A fire threatening the Reagan Library has forced evacuations in Ventura County.

The fast-moving fire near the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Ventura County forced evacuations early on Wednesday.

The fast-moving blaze known as the Easy fire quickly grew to more than 400 acres and led local officials to order an evacuation for parts of Simi Valley and Moorpark, two cities in the southern part of the county. Eric Tennessen, chief of the Ventura County Sheriff’s office, said deputies were knocking on doors and escorting people to safety. The evacuation area consists of ranches, farms and a golf course and is not densely populated, Chief Tennessen said.

Video from local news outlets showed smoke billowing from several distinct parts of the fire along hilltops as the sun rose, with the flames fanned by the wind. The fire approached the presidential library, which houses memorabilia including a former Air Force One plane inside, but was kept at bay by firefighters as of about 9 a.m.

Electricity has been shut off for more than a million people.

Santa Ana wind gusts topped 70 m.p.h. in elevated areas near Los Angeles, close to matching the speeds of a Category 1 hurricane, which has sustained winds of at least 74 m.p.h.

“When you have a fire form in these conditions, it can spread very quickly,” said Lisa Phillips, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Los Angeles office. The combination of dry and windy weather, perfect for fires to ignite and grow, led the weather agency to issue an “extreme red flag warning” for much of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

NWS Los Angeles

✔@NWSLosAngeles

Latest observation from Warm Springs at 12:53AM in the hills above Santa Clarita: ENE 38 mph Gusting 55 mph. Relative Humidity was down to 14% Expect Santa Ana winds to strengthen and become more widespread through this morning and continue through Thursday. #cawx #LAweather

4:10 AM - Oct 30, 2019

The threat posed by the winds has led the utility Pacific Gas and Electric to cut off power to about 1.5 million people in some 30 counties in Northern California in recent days, with about 1 million still without electricity since the weekend.

In the south, San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison reported preventively shutting off power on Wednesday to a total of about 200,000 people.

A new state web portal includes links to updates on fire status, evacuation zones, power outages, shelters and housing, road conditions and other information related to the fires, compiled by state agencies like Cal Fire and Caltrans and by utility companies.

Maps show where the fires are burning now.

(We’re continuing to update our page of maps showing the extent of the fires, power outages and evacuation zones.)

Maps: Kincade and Getty Fires, Evacuation Zones and Power Outages(SEE WEBSITE FOR EVACUATION ZONES)

Detailed maps show the current fire extents, power outage zones and areas under evacuation orders.

As fires rage, schools cancel classes and events.

With many school districts closed in Sonoma County and surrounding counties, parents have been left trying to entertain their children amid power outages and evacuations.

Parker Palizi, 9, did not mind getting a few days off from school, but the thought of staying home in Novato without working electronics was less than appealing. “There’s no fun stuff we can do,” he said. Still, Parker was more concerned about his pet bearded dragon, Spike, whom he was bringing in a glass tank to a hotel room in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where electricity beckoned.

“He needs the heat lamp to stay alive,” Parker said.

The Palizis, who live in Marin County, were supposed to be on a 7 a.m. flight from Los Angeles on Monday so Delilah could perform as an elephant in her second-grade play. “She was so excited,” said her mother, Brooke Palizi, who works for a nonprofit organization.

But Delilah’s star turn will have to wait. The Novato Unified School District canceled school on Monday, and then on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Palizis learned late Monday afternoon. By then they were driving a rental car the seven and a half hours home.

The Windsor High School girls volleyball team had been slated to play in the playoffs on Wednesday, until a mandatory evacuation order came for the entire town of 28,000 on Saturday morning, giving residents six hours to flee. With all the district’s schools closed this week, the town on lockdown and the team scattered, Coach Rich Schwarz said he and the athletic director made the difficult decision to forfeit the game.

The players responded to his group text announcing the decision with sad-face emojis and messages of support, said Mr. Schwarz, who is in his final year coaching the team.

“How do we play when we don’t have practice and don’t know where the girls are? said Mr. Schwarz, who is staying with his sister in the town of Rohnert Park. “We can’t tell parents to break into the town to get their uniforms. At what point does an extracurricular activity become way too much? We need to let families worry about whether their house is still standing.”

[The New York Times has photographers on the ground, documenting the California wildfires and the battle to contain them. Follow their work here.]

The Getty fire was caused by an ‘act of God.’

The Getty fire started when a branch broke off a tree and hit nearby power lines — an accident that Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles called an “act of God.”

The power lines began to spark and ignited nearby brush, Mr. Garcetti said at a news conference on Tuesday afternoon. He said investigators have not found any evidence that faulty equipment started the fire.

The fire, which has burned at least 650 acres and was 15 percent contained as of Tuesday night, broke out shortly after 1:30 a.m. Monday along the major freeway known as the 405, near the Getty Center. It quickly spread through neighborhoods north of Brentwood, destroying 12 homes and damaging five more.

The authorities determined the cause in part after seeing dash cam footage that showed an explosion on the side of the road early Monday morning, Mr. Garcetti said.

Reporting was contributed by Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Dan Levin, Thomas Fuller, Julie Turkewitz, Jose A. Del Real and Jacey Fortin.

*********

[sciencespies]

Using Art to Talk About the Holocaust in ‘The Evidence Room’

https://sciencespies.com/history/using-art-to-talk-about-the-holocaust-in-the-evidence-room/

Using Art to Talk About the Holocaust in ‘The Evidence Room’

In 1996 David Irving, a British writer known in certain circles for his expertise on Nazi Germany, sued Deborah Lipstadt, a historian and professor at Emory University, for libel because she called him “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial.” Irving—who has asserted unequivocally and wrongly that ”there were never any gas chambers at Auschwitz”—strategically filed the lawsuit in the U.K. By law, the burden of proof for libel cases in that country lies with the defendant, meaning he knew that Lipstadt would have to prove he had knowingly promoted a conspiracy theory.

Lipstadt didn’t back down. A lengthy court battle ensued, and four years later, the British High Court of Justice ruled in her favor.

What the trial (later dramatized in the film Denial starring Rachel Weisz) ultimately came down to was a trove of irrefutable documentary evidence, including letters, orders, blueprints and building contractor documents that proved without a doubt the methodological planning, building and operating of the death camp at Auschwitz.

This past summer, The Evidence Room, an installation of 65 plaster casts that manifests a physical, sculptural representation of that trial, came to the United States for the first time, and went on view in the nation’s capital. Those familiar with Washington, D.C., might assume the exhibition was installed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Instead, it went on view just a short walk down the street at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where crowds jostled to see it on its short June to September showing.

“It really opens it up in a whole different way,” says Betsy Johnson, an assistant curator at the Hirshhorn. “You had people coming to see it here in the context of an art museum, who are very different than your populations at a history museum, or at a Holocaust museum.”

The Evidence Room was originally created as a piece of forensic architecture for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. Working through 1,000 pages of testimony, Robert Jan van Pelt, an architectural historian and the main expert witness for Lipstadt’s case, and a team from the University of Waterloo School of Architecture led by Donald McKay and Anne Bordeleau with architecture and design curator Sascha Hastings teased out the concept of The Evidence Room from the pieces of court evidence themselves.

“Sometimes,” says gallery guide Nancy Hirshbein, “visitors would say things like: ‘Oh, this is difficult to read,’ and then look at me and go: ‘Oh, because it’s difficult material.’”

(William Andrews, courtesy of The Evidence Room Foundation)

More

Everything in the work is unrelentingly white. Three life-size “monuments” are featured. They include a gas chamber door showing that its hinges had been moved because it was determined that if the door opened outward, more bodies could be put in the room. (The door was originally designed to swung inward, but it couldn’t open if too many of the dead were pressed against it.) There’s an early model gas hatch, which is how the SS guards introduced the cyanide-based Zyklon-B poison into the gas chamber. A gas column, which made the killings as efficient as possible, is also depicted. Plaster casts of archival drawings, photographs, blueprints and documents on Nazi letterheads populate the room as well. They are given a three-dimensional aspect thanks to a laser engraving technique and testify to how workers during World War II—carpenters, cement manufacturers, electricians, architects and the like—assisted in creating the most efficient Nazi killing machine possible.

Strong reception to The Evidence Room helped the architects to raise funds to return the work to Waterloo. From there, it was shown at Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, which is where Johnson first experienced it when she was sent there about a year ago by the Hirshhorn’s director and chief curator.

“I went there, and realized almost immediately that even though it hadn’t been displayed in an art context before” says Johnson, “that it had potential for fitting into an art context.” Johnson recognized in the work connections with the direction that contemporary art has gone in the past four or five decades, a trend that places more importance on the idea behind the art object itself. “Really when it came down to it, even though it’s not a traditional art project, it fits so well within the trends that have been happening in the realm of contemporary art from the 1960s on,” she says.

But bringing it to the Hirshhorn meant considering the piece differently than how it had been framed before. “We realized fairly early on that there were certain ways that [Royal Ontario Museum] had framed the story that were different than the ways we did,” she says. “Things like the materiality of the work, which while they did discuss this at the Royal Ontario Museum became even more the focus in our museum,” she says. “The plaster was one that was actually quite symbolic for [the creators],” she says. “They were thinking it through on multiple different levels.”

Because this wasn’t a history museum, they also decided to go more minimalist with the text. “We still wanted people to be able to access the information about it,” says Johnson. “But we also wanted them to have this experience of confronting an object that that they don’t quite understand at first.”

The Evidence Room “allows history to be recovered,” says Alan Ginsberg. What you’re left to do as the viewer, then, “is to understand and try to grapple with what is absent from there.”

(William Andrews, courtesy of The Evidence Room Foundation)

More

Asking the audience to do the work to engage with what they were seeing on their own, she felt, was key. “That work is really important work,” Johnson says. “Especially within the space of this exhibition. We felt like there’s something kind of sacred about [it]. We didn’t want people to be mediating the space through their phones or through a map that they hold in their hand.” Instead, they relied more on the gallery guides like Nancy Hirshbein to supplement the experience.

Hirshbein says the most frequent question from visitors was: “Why is it all white?”

“That was the number one question,” she says. “Visitors would stop. As soon as they walked in, you can tell that they were struck by the space. And I would approach them and ask if they had any questions. And then I would often prompt and say: ‘If you’re wondering about anything, if you’re wondering about why the room may be all white, please let me know.’”

That opened up the conversation to discuss the materiality of the white plaster, and what it may have meant to the architects who designed the room.

“I would also like to find out from the visitors their interpretation,” says Hirshbein. “We sometimes did some free association, about how it felt to them to be in this very minimal white space.”

By design, the all-white nature of the panels made them difficult to read. So, visitors often needed to spend time squinting or navigating their own body in order to better read the text or see the image. “Sometimes,” says Hirshbein, “visitors intuited that. They would say things like: ‘Oh, this is difficult to read,’ and then look at me and go: ‘Oh, because it’s difficult material.’”

That’s just one thing that could be pulled from that. “We’re also looking through a backward lens of history,” as Hirshbein says, “and the further we get away from these things, the more difficult they are to see. That’s the nature of history.”

Alan Ginsberg, who serves as the director of the Evidence Room Foundation, the custodian of the work, mentions during our conversation that for him, he notices in different light, coming from different angles, that the shadows the plaster casts stand out. “It allows history to be recovered,” he says. “It allows memory to be recovered.” What you’re left to do, as the viewer then, “is to understand and try to grapple with what is absent from there.”

The Evidence Room

Internationally renowned and award-winning historian Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt’s The Evidence Room is a chilling exploration of the role architecture played in constructing Auschwitz—arguably the Nazis’ most horrifying facility. The Evidence Room is both a companion piece to, and an elaboration of, an exhibit at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, based on van Pelt’s authoritative testimony against Holocaust denial in a 2000 libel suit argued before the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

Buy

Ginsberg says the Evidence Room Foundation, which partnered with the Hirshhorn on the exhibition, was fully on board with how the Hirshhorn framed the work. “The Hirshhorn was the obvious and perfect and premier place for this debut not only in the United States, but in the world of art,” he says. Like many people, he sees the room embodying many identities, including being a work of contemporary art.

Holocaust art has always been a controversial topic, something that Ginsberg is very aware of when he talks about the room as art. “Can you represent the Holocaust through art without being obscene?” he asks. “This is a question that has been debated endlessly. And I think the answer clearly comes down to—it depends on the specific work. There are works of art that are understood to be commemorative, or educational, or evocative, in a way that is respectful. And that’s what The Evidence Room is.”

Still, he says, there’s something in the work and the way it’s crafted that does give him pause. “Is it wrong to have something that refers back to atrocities and yet the representation has a certain eerie beauty to it? These are good questions to ask,” he says. “And they’re not meant to be resolved. Ultimately, they’re meant to create that artistic tension that provokes conversation and awareness.”

The Evidence Room Foundation, which only launched just this year, is looking to use the work as a teaching tool and a conversation starter. Currently, Ginsberg says, they’re speaking with art museums, history museums, university campuses and other kinds of institutions, and fielding inquiries and requests about where to exhibit The Evidence Room in the future. For now, he’ll only say, “Our hope is that we will get a new venue announced and put in place before the year ends.”

#History

[readymade-journal-en]

Javin Mo / Designer Sturdiness and Sensibility

Putting on a navy sportswear, Javin rolled into the café where some blushing flowers blossomed aloft. I’ve heard he was a gym goer, and his sporty outfit, bronzed skin and his inclination for cycling while travelling assured his image of a vibrant and resolute exercise lover. Not surprisingly, being a former online radio host, he demonstrated his eloquence by narrating the design journey and knowledge. But what I didn’t expect was his frequent remarks on personal feelings, especially when he mentioned T · PARK, a mass project which touched him with the power of design. Who says a sturdy man could not be sentimental now and then?   

Why do you commit to visual branding in Hong Kong’s art and culture circle?

I roved about Europe in 2014 and 2015, and realised that the galleries there worked intimately with designers, because designs had an impact on business. At that time the idea of having a visual system for branding has already flourished in Europe, whereas in Hong Kong it was no more than focusing on a few posters or events. This impelled me to work on art and culture projects as visual identity. When I finished off a project, similar projects would come to you, as they were connected. I find pleasure in what I do now, they are not big businesses yet sustainable in a way which allows me to run my small design studio, and at the same time keeps me moving on a new track.

How do you describe the recent situation of Hong Kong’s art and culture branding?

I would say it is blooming. The number of young designers who join the field soars, and the things I do more or less affect the directions of their studios. I witness how the art circle transforms, now there are a lot more art and culture events which employ branding to absorb, and the fact that they need more designers than ever provides an abundance of opportunities for young designers to reach this circle. Government departments and art groups tend to use consecutive designs of the same designer, seeing that the result is applauding. Social media also makes it happen because designers themselves serve as a self-promoting media. And it usually requires a designer or two to complete a project. Consequently, it becomes a trend for independent designers to set up studios. They can expand their circles and make a number of attempts without fearing the prices of failure, as the costs are rather low.

What do you think are the next steps to consolidate art and culture brands in this city?

I believe there are still a number of independent designers who are not yet assigned large-scale projects, and haven’t applied a whole, integrated design to art and culture.  But within these two or three years art-related facilities have whizzed along, and projects such as Art Basel and M+ in West Kowloon Cultural District have altered the ecology of the circle. Other organisations would therefore be spurred to an upgrade of design and content. Hong Kong is too small to accommodate unique buildings, but lately it has become home to plenty of cultural buildings. They are excellent opportunities a well as fascinating developments.

T · PARK is one of your projects with the theme on environmental issues. How did you come to involve in an environmental facility’s branding, instead of staying in the art and culture realm you were so accustomed to?

T · PARK is a museum to me, although its concepts are linked more to the environment. So I thought then why shouldn’t I do its branding as if it was a museum? And my clients were very supportive of what we planned to do, so we agreed to take it on. The things they told me about, such as the nordic incinerator with a ski slope on top and the Japanese eco-facility which was also an art piece, surely had an impact on me. I spoke to them candidly that we’ve only got three or four people to carry this out, and it was the first time we undertook an eco-project. They said we should give it a try, and we proceeded bit by bit. This project has made the most complicating feelings in me since I worked in the design field. Hong Kong is a very commercialised place, and what we had to deal with was the government. Making the decision of using the word “park” has almost taken us a year. The powerlessness felt in the process was overwhelming, because the consequence could not be reversed even when a small mistake was made. I have always been encircled by people in the art and design field, yet T · PARK truly connected me to the public who I could influence through design. Seeing children drew T · PARK logo on the comment board surely made my day.  

“M+ Rover”, another project of yours, aims at bringing art to the campuses. Could you share some of your views on local art education?   

Art education plays a pivotal role. Most of the time contemporary arts are for the highbrows, their exhibitions are top-grade, but people who really take heed of them are few. One of the perks of “M+ Rover” is that it enters the secondary school’s campuses and offers a learning experience to students. When art sets foot in the community through the concept of rover, it begins to spread to students from non-art backgrounds, and even Liberal Studies and Chinese teachers bring their students to join. T · PARK and “M+ Rover” are tied by a common core of community education. This is why I proposed bringing these two projects together, so that we could connect two different groups of people, combining art with environmental education. I am more than willing to run similar projects with multiple missions.

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West Kowloon Cultural District Authority

T · PARK

Video Interview by Sabrina Li

Text by Sabrina Li

[clareomalley-blog1]

Does “contemporary art need to be transgressive? Patrick Radden Keefe, "The Family That Built an Empire of Pain"

The Sacklers are an insanely wealthy family (net worth thirteen billion dollars) known globally for their philanthropic work.  “The Brooklyn-born brothers Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler, all physicians, donated lavishly during their lifetimes to an astounding range of institutions, many of which today bear the family name: the Sackler Gallery, in Washington; the Sackler Museum, at Harvard; the Sackler Center for Arts Education, at the Guggenheim; the Sackler Wing at the Louvre; and Sackler institutes and facilities at Columbia, Oxford, and a dozen other universities.”  They speak publicly about their generous donations, but they often do not talk about Purdue Pharma - “a privately held company, based in Stamford, Connecticut, that developed the prescription painkiller OxyContin”.  This family has acquired an unfathomable fortune on peddling pills to whoever will pop them.

Purdue Pharma has used many ‘marketing tactics’ to sell their most infamous concoction, Oxycontin.  They were known to go into doctors offices and speak with clinicians and pay off doctors to endorse the product.  One on the brothers also happened to be a medical advertiser, and seemed to be able to coerce doctors into prescribing the medication by creating savvy advertisements in medical journals that stood out from the rest.  They completely misinformed the medical community about the risks, saying that Oxycontin was ‘virtually’ non-addictive, and other bs like that.

It is extremely difficult to say wether or not museums should vet and reject their sources of income on the basis of how their patrons accrue wealth.  Some people might argue that philanthropy might represent, for at least some of the Sacklers, a form of atonement.  Regardless, this would undoubtedly result in a massive overhaul of, dare I say, pretty much everything in our society if establishments were to ‘comb’ through their donations.  I have a sneaky feeling that there is way more corruption, akin to the scandalous Sacklers, than we can comprehend.  If museums, for example, begin to reject money that comes from companies who are not the most ‘down to earth’ and ‘wholesome’, where will the money come from?  Thats the kicker…it won’t.  And then these great expansive museums will fall from a lack of funding - because only people like the Sacklers have enough extra money laying around to be able to give enough to national museums.  The rest of the world is scrambling to pay an overdue electric bill of $46.23 (or is that just me?).  Imagine how hard the world would freak if a museum began to take the art away?  Or close down the spaces built by these people?  Because of the corruption of the donators?  I wonder if the donators themselves might take some kind of stealthy ‘big cat’ approach to screw over the establishments that rejected them.  I know when im feelin good and evil (especially on Mondays), I’d do just about anything to cause the demise of those who shorthanded me for my hard weekend work (I don’t really feel this way *nervous laughing*).  Perhaps they should leave the past to the past and reevaluate from this point on.  It is tricky when a vast majority of a museums ever changing display of monumental works and spaces continue to come from people who never quit it with the ‘fu**ery’.  However, if we take the other route and leave it be, nothing changes for the worst, and money keeps gushing through the pipes to all of our favorite public facilities, and we’ll all continue to have that monotonous, dead-eyed jolly that everyone who ‘turns a blind eye’ has as they look away from the wreck.  Too dramatic?  Not really.  Its like we have all, as a society, become the step kid, left choiceless as we take handouts from the evil step mother, Lady Tremaine, despite our yearning to break free and take on the hardships of independence for the sake of justice and morality.  I think ultimately, just like everything else in this world, it comes down to money and greed.  These museums are too greedy, complacent and settled into their flow to suddenly shut off the water in quest of a long trek to a far away well.  Why carry buckets out in the heat when we have a sink right here?  I’ll tell ya why - its because behind the sink, there is a guy strong-arming 12 little kids from South America into illegally pumping water from Lake Nicaragua to a basin for you to access in your kitchen at your leisure (ok, this one is super super over the top dramatic and ridiculous, but you get the point).  Ultimately, these museums have decided to turn their backs on all the people who have been screwed by Purdue Pharma.  This company has ruined lives and families because of false advertisement and predatory business practices. To stop taking their donations would be really really hard, and probably detrimental in more way than one, but it would be the right thing to do.  It is scary though, because who would they then give their money to once the do-gooder museums wont take it anymore?  Who knows.  Real ‘philanthropy’ would be to contribute money to taking care of the people they should own up to fu**ing over.  Hopefully someday, the Sacklers will have a change of heart and hopefully the places that accept donations from people like this will begin to do the right thing.

[labourpress]

Labour’s Culture manifesto launch speech

***CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY***

Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party, speaking at the party’s Culture manifesto launch in Hull, said:

There could be no better place to launch our cultural manifesto, Labour’s plan to guarantee a ‘Creative Future For All’, than right here in Hull.

In the last Labour Government our then Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, was impressed by how Liverpool had been transformed after being made the European City of Culture.

So Andy proposed the idea that every four years we should have a UK City of Culture. 

And in 2013, thanks to a brilliant bid from Labour-run Hull City Council, it was Hull that was chosen.

And what an inspiration you have been as a City of Culture

Hull had hoped to encourage an extra million people to visit Hull during 2017.

A third of a million visited in the first week.

And I'm not surprised. Look at what you've offered. 

'Blade' saw a 200 foot wind turbine blade, made locally at Siemens Green Port factory go on display in Queen Victoria Square.

The Poppies Weeping Window had 450,000 visits in just two months.

And finally you created the 'Sea of Hull' by encouraging 3,000 local people to strip naked, paint themselves blue and be photographed in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Those photos by the brilliant photographer, Spencer Tunick, are now on display in the refurbished Ferens Art Gallery.

So in a very nice way, the people of Hull have literally made an exhibition of themselves.

I'd like to thank Hull's Labour council leader Steve Brady for all his hard work in helping the city deliver for culture, along with Hull 2017's Chief Executive Martin Green. 

Because we can see what the transformative powers of culture have done for Hull.

Not just by attracting visitors and creating world class cultural events. But here in Humber Street, where a former Fruit Market has been regenerated into a thriving cultural hub, creating new business and new jobs.

The New Humber Street Contemporary Gallery next door has seen 60,000 visits in its first six weeks.

It is estimated that being the UK City of Culture will bring a £60 million economic boost in 2017 alone.

Now Labour wants to replicate what we've seen in Hull across the rest of the UK

And here's why: Our music industry alone contributes £4 billion to our economy each year. But every Adele or Stormzy has to start somewhere.

And small venues like Hull's New Adelphi and larger ones like Fruit give artists their first break as they learn their craft.

But over the last ten years in London alone 40 per cent of small venues have closed.

And this Conservative Government has made matters even worse for artists. 

Since 2010 they have slashed £48 million of funding to the Arts Councils in England, Wales and Scotland.

There is creativity in all of us. Labour’s mission will be to set free that creativity.

We need to give people the opportunities for this creativity to flourish.

So today we unveil Labour's cultural manifesto which sets out a bold and inspiring policy programme to encourage creativity.

We're pledging £1 billion to launch a new Cultural Capital Fund to support our world leading cultural industries savaged by Conservative cuts.

We will end austerity to boost creativity.

It will be amongst the biggest arts infrastructure funds ever created. 

It will boost arts, music, theatre and literature, upgrading our cultural and creative infrastructure for the digital age, and supporting our economy.

The fund will also invest in creative clusters across the country based on a similar model to business enterprise zones. 

I don't want to see just one city benefit from the transformative powers of culture every four years.

Our Cultural Capital Fund will help many more towns and cities like Hull benefit all year round.

The fund will be administered by the Arts Council over a five-year period and help to transform our country’s cultural landscape.

We will also protect and invest in music venues to support grassroots and professional music ensuring a healthy music industry across the country. 

Labour will review the business rates system to make it fairer to organisations like music venues extending the £1,000 pub relief to help small music venues that are suffering from rates rises. 

We will also maintain free museums and invest in our heritage sector which is central to both the identity and economy of local communities across the country.

Because access to culture is vital for the emotional and intellectual growth of our people, especially the young.

We want to unleash the potential of every young person, not just through education, but also through culture. 

In every one of us there is a poet, a writer, a singer of songs, an artist. 

But too few of us fulfil our artistic ambition. 

And under the Conservatives it's getting worse. Per pupil funding for schools is going to be cut for the first time in a generation.

It has become so bad that headteachers are sending out begging letters to parents to make donations to keep the school running.

This is a shameful state of affairs.

So as well as scrapping tuition fees, fully funding our schools and introducing universal free school meals – something pioneered here in Hull - we will go further.

Labour will introduce an Arts Pupil Premium that will allow every primary school child in England the chance to learn an instrument, take part in drama and dance, and have regular access to a theatre, gallery or museum. 

Labour will not only feed our children's bellies, we will feed their minds and unleash their creativity.

The Arts Pupil Premium will provide £160 million per year to boost creative education and ensure arts facilities in state schools match standards found in many private schools.

We will deliver a creative future for all and culture for the many not the few.

But we need your help.

If people want to see these transformative changes then they have to be able to vote.

Those who are not on the register have just over 12 hours to get registered. 

Since the election was called more than two million people have registered to vote – 40 per cent of them aged between 18 and 24.

If you're tired of being held back and want to lead a richer life, then get registered and have your say.

We can stop a Conservative Government that wants to pit the old against the young.

And replace it with a Labour Government that offers hope and unity.

A government for the many not the few and a government that ensures culture is for the many not the few

Thank you.

[shadyufo]

Why are there laws against owning certain birds? They've already passed away, I do not understand why one cannot keep their remains :(?

Here in the US, the majority of native bird species are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act which makes it illegal for individuals to possess, sell, or trade in any part of them, be it shed feather, bones, eggshells, nests, etc. These pieces can be kept if an individual is affiliated with a museum or educational facility and has the proper permits. Members of Native American tribes can also obtain permits to possess parts from protected raptors like eagles and hawks but only members of those tribes can keep them and they cannot be gifted to anyone outside of the tribe. Licensed falconers can also keep feathers from their birds.

The MBTA was originally passed back in 1918 to prevent native songbirds from going extinct due to excessive hunting for sport and for the fashion industry (their colorful feathers were highly sought after for use in decorating hats and other accessories). It was later revised to protect many other birds, including birds of prey whose numbers were on a dramatic decline due to wanton slaughter and rampant poisoning. Vultures in particular were often killed simply because people thought they were ugly.

It may seem like overkill today with most of the native bird populations doing well—especially when you find a beautiful, naturally molted feather just laying on the ground at your feet—but without that law in place anyone could kill a bird and then try and pass its feathers off as being naturally molted too. Or say that they just found the bones after the bird died of natural causes. There’s no way to regulate that sort of trade successfully so to prevent a repeat of a history of badly damaged populations it is in the best interest of the animals to have that blanket protection over them.

Unfortunately there are still many birds killed regardless of their protected status (eagles and hawks are frequently killed by individuals fearing for livestock, songbirds are killed for being noisy or too populous, and I’ve heard of people killing herons to save their pond fish) but making the trade in their parts illegal saves many others by eliminating that demand for feathers and other parts.

And as responsible collectors and good stewards of the vulture culture community it is very important to respect these laws. They are there for a reason.

Hope that helps shed some light on it all for you, Anon! Thanks for the message!

[geraldfierst]

HERE’s TO YOU

December 2016 Dear Friends,

I am sitting in an apartment overlooking the Acropolis.  My friend Judy Trotter and I hopped over to Athens on our way to Birmingham and the Limmud conference.  As my friend Wallace Norman often exclaims, “Not shabby!”  

This past summer, Wallace, who founded and directs the Woodstock Fringe Festival, directed Happy Days by Samuel Beckett.  The production was one of the most extraordinary pieces of theatre I have ever experienced, proving that great directing and acting can fill a simple space with transformative emotion and poetry.  Not shabby.  

As I sit here, I am thinking of all the connections that take us on our life’s journey, and how so many of them have affected me this past year and will continue into 2017-  new paths opening thanks to old ties.  

Judy and I first met about twenty years ago in Oxford when Andrew Gilbert, (whom I had previously met at CAJE, a conference I would regularly attend with my great friend and mentor Peninnah Schram)  invited me to Limmud which at that time was less than 500 people meeting in Oxford. This year Limmud will be at the National Exhibition Center with about three thousand attendees.  I describe Limmud as the TED conference for Jews.  Since that first time attending, I have been blessed to have been invited to present at Limmud every few years, and I have watched the conferences grow and have experienced the extraordinary people who come from all over the world to share their expertise on everything from politics to religion to art to cooking.  

Last summer, my childhood friends Shelley and Ken Gliedman introduced me to the Pine Tree Foundation whose funding made possible a wonderful project this school year at Today’s Learning Center, a school with parallel programs for general and special needs children from pre-K through high school.  Last spring, my friend Terry Burnett with whom I exercise at our local Y,  had introduced me to Pushcart Theatre, a local children’s theater company, and I had begun talking about developing educational programming for them;  meanwhle, my wonderful dog Bianca had introduced me to two dog walking neighbors, Jessica Lederman and Tara McAlister (humans to Harley and Atticus) who teach at TLC and had talked to me about their work.  So, I put all the pieces together to create a year long pilot project that we hope will be adopted in other school settings, using Terry’s puppetry, my storytelling, and Pushcart’s performances, to offer new ways to create educational communities and enhance literacy in ESL, special needs, and general populations.  I have often been frustrated by the dismissal of a teaching artist residency as no more than enrichment  programming, instead of the recognition of how essential the arts are to developing higher level thinking especially in elementary and middle school classrooms. Working at TLC, especially with special needs children, I again and again see how great teaching comes from teachers who use body, mind, and imagination, to reveal and amplify  their curriculum-  finding multiple ways to excite students, no matter their learning styles.  

I often think of how years back, when Remi Barclay Bosseau Messenger and I worked at the Whole Theatre Company, Bob Alexander of the Living Stage taught us “We are all geniuses.  The teacher’s job is to bring out the genius in all of us.”    Genius, like a genie (or djin) is the energy of the imagination that enables great thinkers to understand what is there that everyone else overlooks.  And teachers who inspire bring out that spirit in all of us.  My friend Margaret Read MacDonald as an author, storyteller and children’s librarian has been such a teacher.  Margaret has invited me over many years to accompany her to many wonderful places in the world.  I have always been delighted to be her entourage.  Eight years ago, while driving up a mountainous road in Malaysia, I suggested that we distract ourselves from the frightening twists and turns and make up a story about Big and Little to tell.  Many years passed, and this year, Margaret, who never gives up, offered that story to Liz Smith Russel, our old friend from August House.  Liz is starting publishing again with the founding of Plum Street Press and was delighted with our story which will be published next fall as Bye, Bye, Big! with illustrations by Kitty Harvill.  As Liz and I talked, I also sent her Imagine the Moon, a lyric poem listing the folkloric names of each month’s full moon.  Liz, who is a brilliant editor, suggested that I create a second tier of information to parallel each month’s verse, so I wrote accompanying text for the educational market based on the core curriculum philosophy of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math)  Imagine the Moon with wonderful illustrations by Leslie Stall Widener will be released late spring, 2017.  

Meantime, my friend Karen Shafer, who I first hired to manage the Whole Theatre Company forty years ago, has asked me to help on an advisory board to develop Aunt Karen’s Farm, her visionary dream.  Over decades, Karen has bought and renovated four houses along a road in Mt Vision, NY, near Cooperstown.  With space for twenty-two guests, Karen sees Aunt Karen’s Farm as a developmental artist retreat.  Dance, theatre and film companies have already used the facilities to work on projects. Last spring, I invited a company of a dozen storytellers, many of whom I first met three decades ago when Marie Winger and I organized the MidAtlantic Storytellers Conference, to join me for a long weekend.  This community of storytellers, including me,  had recently been working as an ensemble with Ray Gray in a series of collaborative performances at the Mercer Museum.  Inspired by the weekend at Aunt Karen’s Farm, Phil Orr, Luray Gross, Bill Wood, and I, have continued to collaborate, creating On the Road With Orpheus, a musical storytelling performance piece which riffs on the Orpheus myth by layering folktales, personal stories, and current events into a two act play.  We will be performing the show  June 14, 2017, at the Grapevine in Washington DC.

My friend Steve Zeitlin published a wonderful book this year The Poetry of Everyday Life.  In it he writes, “In the babble of mothers and their babies, in the inscriptions of teens in their yearbooks, and in the jump rope rhymes and expressions shared among family members lies a world of unselfconscious artistry and poetic expression that is always available to lift our spirits and inspire our creative expression.”   This sense of life’s poetry immediately made me think of my own Anjel, now eleven, who began middle school this year.  Watching her flourish in sixth grade reminds me of the great teachers I had at that age, particularly Marjorie Bull and Colin Reed.  Each of them invested me with a sense of my ability to create and own the world, and, now, I see Anjel discovering those strengths in herself. Both practical and empathetic as well as filled with imagination, she is a wonderful writer, a delicious companion.  I have often asked her opinions as I edited my own books.  I have no greater joy than to sit side by side with her ( actually, Bianca, my beloved dog, usually likes to snuggle between us) as we read and work and chat.  Her presence is my greatest pleasure, my fullest, most beautiful moments.  Sheer poetry.

At home in Montclair, we continue inviting artists to present their work in our living room.  In recent years, my friend Gladys Grossman has pulled me along to hear Monique Owens at the Village Gate.  Monique was a student at Demarest Middle School where I did playwriting residencies year after year thanks to Gladys.  I am friends with Monique’s whole family, so I was overjoyed to host Monique Owens and Friends at a house concert in the fall.  Then, on December 1, Jean Rohe and Liam Robinson continued their tradition of bringing their holiday show to our home with a wonderful performance of traditional and original music to bring a finale to 2016.  I always fondly recall that first afternoon when Jim Rohe (who had become my friend as  part of a storytelling class I was teaching at the Montclair Adult School) invited me over to the little house in Nutley.   There, I first met Jean and her brother Dan sitting in their high chairs singing Baby Beluga.  Ah, how the years go by!  

2017 looms before me- and let me be frank-  brings with it lots of personal and political trepidation, and I am wondering if the answer lies in trying to tend my own garden or in trying to change the world, but I am thinking of the opening second act image from Wallace’s production of Happy Days.  There is  Winnie (superbly played by Bette Carlson ) buried up to her neck, but as the lights come up, she opens her eyes, smiles and exclaims, “O Happy Day.”  It would be so easy to list the failures and disappointments that seem about to bury us, but in writing this end of the year letter,  I want to acknowledge how good it is to awake in a world that always brings opportunity for something new to be born.  I send this letter out to you because you are important to me, a part of my life, and even if much time passes before we are together again, you are here, not just in memory, but in the now.

I heard this story on a TED talk.  Alexander the Great coming over the Himalayas meets a naked yogi sitting on a rock  “Where are you going?”  the yogi asks .  Alexander replies, “I’m going to conquer the world!”  The yogi silently thinks Alexander is completely nuts.  " What are you doing?” Alexander then asks.  “I am trying to find nothing,” the yogi replies, and Alexander thinks the yogi is completely nuts.   No one can foresee the future, nor restore the past;  only in the constantly disappearing now is the song at the center of our story.  

Marge and I send our love to all of you.

With hopes for health and happiness AND, as my mother used to say, Money isn’t everything, but it doesn’t hurt.

Gerry

[aurelliocheek]

The Art of Coding

What a milestone: The demoscene was recognized as a Finnish national UNESCO cultural heritage.

It is a breakthrough for Digital Culture: In April Finland accepted the demoscene on its national UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

The ­Ministry of Education and Culture listed the demoscene on proposals from the ­National Board of Antiquities and the Intangible Cultural Heritage Expert Group as national cultural heritage of humanity together with eleven other cultural ­practices.

And shortly afterwards the Ministry of Culture and Science in North Rhine-Westphalia announced that the demoscene was nominated for inclusion in the national German UNESCO cultural heritage register. Together with three other cultures, the jury selected the demoscene as worthy of recognition from a total of 18 applications. A great success for Tobias Kopka from the Cologne-based applicant Digitale ­Kultur e.V., responsible for the application in Germany and the community work of the overarching Art of Coding initiative.

Making Games talked with Tobias about Art of Coding, the demoscene and his further plans.

Co-initiators Andreas Lange (r.) and Tobias Kopka presenting at the internal UNESCO conference about “Immaterielles Kulturerbe im urbanen Raum”, Dortmund July 2019.

Making Games: Please give us a short overview of your career in the gaming ­industry and your current position. Tobias Kopka: My background started in the demo scene. From the early 90s on we gathered on so-called demo-parties, and from there many of my friends went into game development, or closely affiliated industries like tech and security, and so did I. In the 90s and 2000s I worked in the tech-space, too, while doing my master in Media Studies and Political Science in Cologne. First appearances in the games industry started around 2007 with academic exchanges and workshops on mobile content development and a research project on Serious Games at the international film school in Cologne. Within this project I was also in charge to organise my first conference, which was on physical movement, learning and games. Which was actually super-stressful, but gave me a taste of what it means to bring awesome people together, curate programs and be a facilitator of connections and projects – in short: which got me hooked on the dopamine conference work life cycle. Bigger projects started with the first two editions of Next Level Conference in Cologne, and really took off with joining Aruba Events in 2012 for almost six years – being the Conference & Program Director for Quo Vadis, Berlin, and Respawn Gathering of Developers, Cologne – and also part of the team in the first year of devcom before moving on to the international level. Nowadays I’m the Festival Director of ­Ludicious Zurich Game Festival and also Head of Community Relations for Reboot Develop Conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia and Banff, Canada, whereas I have good chances to slip in demoscene knowledge and connections here and there.

Shader Showdown with Flopine & NuSan at Evoke 2019.

What does the listing as National Inventory of Living Heritage in Finland mean for the demoscene and for Art of Coding?  For AoC it was the breakthrough, as it confirmed majorly, that the scene is matching pretty well with the UNESCO criteria for an immaterial cultural heritage from an application standpoint. For the Finnish scene I don’t want to speak on their behalf, but let me just say: people were pleased. For example, Remedy Entertainment (founded by sceners) sent out a tweet that day celebrating the success with reference to Future Crews “Second Reality”, a true demoscene classic and self-reference to their history. On a meta-level the national recognition means, that the scene now can benefit from the responsibilities and duties for a UNESCO member state, which are connected to a national listing. In article 13 of the UNESCO convention, the signing countries are obligated “to ensure the safeguarding, development and promotion of the intangible cultural heritage present in its territory.” This may support party organisers to raise funds or sponsorships and acquire facilities very concretely. Also, it will help us with preserving and discussing our cultural heritage not only within the scene but also via professional heritage institutions and experts in archiving and preserving digital culture for the years to come. As it will also help them more easily to justify spending money on research, archiving and preservation of something like the Demoscenes cultural history. And lastly but most importantly, it can help tremendously raising the awareness and attract new and more sceners with fresh perspectives and influx as it might give a spike in mainstream media. It is also a nice experience for many sceners and ex-sceners to hear about, as they love the idea that their personal history gets looked at from a new perspective, as a living breathing culture with relevance in its history and style.

Koopee Hiltunen, Florine Fourquart, Anna-Liisa Mattila, ­Andreas Lange and Tobias ­Kopka at Nordic Game ­Conference 2019

How did you even get the idea to found the initiative and apply for it?  The actual idea goes back to a collaboration with Andreas Lange, founding director of the computer games museum in Berlin and nowadays secretary of the European Federation of Game Archives, Museums and Preservation Projects (EFGAMP), in 2010. Andreas was building exhibits for the newly opened permanent exhibition of the museum and I curated and edited three ­videos for the permanent exhibition on behalf of Digitale Kultur e.V. for giving an insight into the demoscene. We knew each other before but stayed in contact ever since, especially during my five years working on Quo Vadis during gamesweek Berlin, as Andreas was in charge of Gamefest. One thing which connects both of us is that we have a passion for not only the practical and historical side of game ­development and games culture, but also still feel attached to the academic and ­social discourses around it. The actual idea spawned out of a conversation between the two of us two years ago, on where we see digital culture and also the challenges around it, and why ­neither games nor the demoscene or hacker culture, let alone Open Source etc. were deemed as cultural entities on the same eye level then our ­traditional cultural heritage.

How long was the decision-making ­process, and how exactly was it? After the initial idea, it took us a moment to mull over it. As it’s clear this is a project which will go on for years. So far no ­money involved, but it involves a lot of community work – scenewise and on the external cultural policy landscape. Addressing one of the largest cultural institutions in the world with a mission to put a subculture of the digital sphere – which is by the way very cautious for its independence and self emergence – on its official lists, is not an easy thing. But with all questions in mind – we decided to go for it and build a process, which constantly has to balance the community work, the application coordination in different countries and the outward-­facing initiatives towards the public, press and institutions. But first and foremost it’s about the scene, not to talk over the scene trying to superimpose a discourse or theme which isn’t really there, but build momentum for positive results. Big part of this is to build trust and keep people attached while gaining momentum at the same time. For me, it’s a great method to connect the personal history with my professional perspectives in media studies, game ­development and conferences. And to tell the story how a decentral and pretty competitive culture can build an absolutely marvellous community at the same time, which is producing breathtaking content for decades and a strong identity of international style, but also not shying away from the challenges. Building or expanding the scene relations is especially key for making sure the community is involved (which is no easy task in a decentral and informed and very decisive culture). Also making sure that the content is incorporating many perspectives and aims of sceners, based on conversations all around – while integrating these perspectives into our approach of the initiative and formulating directions on a meta-level. As we don’t want to define one perspective about the scene, as there are many as it has members – which is a key component of a decentral digital culture. But so far so good, sceners and also supporting institutions have declared their support in many countries or have joined the mission already, so we are on a good way!

We remember the 1980s when game fans sooner or later came into contact with the demos contained in cracker intros. How big is the demoscene and how relevant is it today? As there is no official census, we can only roughly gauge the numbers. We estimate it’s around 5,000 – 10,000 active sceners and many more people semi-actively attached to the scene. This is based on the numbers of people we see active at main community sites. Based on numbers of submissions at demoparties and on community-sides like pouet.net the numbers of active groups are in the hundreds, and in terms of demoparties are all over Europe and also beyond in US or Japan for example, as you can see on demoparty.net. Of course the median age of the members goes up each year a bit, and this is also one of the reasons why we wanted to initiate this initiative. So more people can join if interested to share their coding, or music or artistic skills or any other kind of creative contribution to the scene, or just join the community for the fun of it.  And like all other events right now we have to face the same challenges: all physical events are postponed or moved online because of COVID-19. Revision, the biggest demo­scene party worldwide was recently aired online during Easter, and at Evoke we are assessing the situation. Sceners can’t wait again being in the same space for 72 hours straight, from competitions to awards, voting to seminars, personal exchange and also celebrating friendship and the newest achievements together. Why the demo scene is still relevant? There are so many reasons: The self-­imposed limits in the competitions generates creativity outside of the ordinary, the community centers around knowledge, challenge and excellence, making things happen in unseen ways, and there is also a kind of digital heritage which is preserved admittedly, keeping some of that early-­computer-time spirit alive, just to name a few aspects. Since I joined in ‘92, every year the scene was discussed “to be dead”, and it has seen many changes and iterations. But at the same time, the scene renewed itself, again and again, is very vibrant and developing furthermore.

The hall at Evoke 2019. Evoke is an annual demoparty and for more than 20 years. It’s taking place at AbenteuerHallenKALK in Cologne, Germany.

What are the characteristics of the ­demoscene in general and the Finnish demoscene in particular? Just a few examples in bullet points: Size coding, live coding, shaders- and engine creation, all kinds of platforms for producing demos, pixel graphics competitions, music-tracker competitions, newcomer awards, audience voting etc. As you said the scene has its background in the cracker scene of the 80s and 90s, with strong European focus, but worldwide influence especially on people who got into programming and game development. Many studios were founded or influenced by demo­sceners. Every demo has to be released on a demoparty, and only once. The demoscene is caring for the heritage in old school competitions, and at the same time it’s pushing for the boundaries what is possible technically and creatively in self-imposed limits. The Finnish scene has been one of the most active worldwide and is tight knit. In competition with some other Nordic countries, there is probably no national culture in the world that has been more influenced by the demo scene like the Finnish one. This is because Finland also identifies nationally with its technology companies and games companies that represent innovation. Accordingly, the companies that have emerged from the demoscene are also something that people in Finland might like to identify with. Concrete examples are Housemarque or Remedy. But also on the association level, in the museum landscape or in academic discourse – everywhere people are positively open-minded towards the demoscene, probably also because it represents their own technological history and the technical and intellectual founding field of the later games industry, be it in PC or mobile. And to this day there is one of the biggest LAN parties and games events in Finland with the Assembly, which has its origin in the demo scene, which dedicating till today a complete exhibition hall with an own fully equipped stage to the demo scene for three days every year. On a meta-level, one can perhaps say that the North has a certain advantage in digital contexts because of long winters, a strong community identity (if you’re part of the Circle of Trust, you feel it for sure), and honest and clear feedback. My experience is that Finnish culture is characterised by a knowledge-oriented, pragmatic “no-bullshit” attitude, without being unfriendly or demarcating at the same time, which is very helpful in creative-technical, but also social movements.  Our demoscene-group Haujobb was also composed in its high times essentially from half German, half Finnish members – which might explain my slight bias in this direction. Nevertheless, the scene has its own history in each country, and despite all the enthusiasm for Finland: overall, the transnational identity of an international scene is the core message – also in the application.

Where can I watch some of the works? If you’ve never seen some demos, a great start is on our AoC homepage (demoscene-the-art-of-coding.net), where we have put some Youtube playlists in the about section. Other great works, which won the Meteorits this year (kind of the yearly ­Oscars of the scene) are linked on the Meteroriks website (www.meteroriks.org). And if you like what you see, the best way how demos are meant to be shown and consumed are of course Software generated in realtime in a few kilobytes or megabytes. The biggest community resources for this are the community-site pouet.net and the file archive of scene.org.

What’s next? The final aim is to be accepted as first digital transnational culture on UNESCO intangible cultural heritage lists. Germany and Finland were the initial submission spots – now we focus on building momentum in more countries based on the submissions which were successful so far. The scene is a strong European phenomenon, but has activists around the whole world – and especially hundreds of thousands of people, who have been influenced by the scene in some point in time – and hence feel ­attached majorly. So, if you have background in the scene, and want to push forward an application in your country – or want to help sceners with this – check our website and get in touch via email or our Discord!

Tobias Kopka Festival Director & Community Activist

Tobias is Festival-Director at Ludicious Zurich Game ­Festival and Head of ­Community Relations at Reboot Develop. Pro-bono side projects include the European Game Showcase during Game Developers Conference and ­#ArtOfCoding, an initiative to bring the Demoscene as first digital culture on UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage.

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