#Box of Style Review Spring 2017

[popculturebuffet]

Ducktales: The Treasure of the Lost Lamp Movie Reviewcap! (Patreon Stretch Goal)

Hello all you happy people! And we have a special review today for two reasons. The first is that this is my second patreon stretch goal review, having hit the 15 dollar goal back in march thanks to my wonderful friend Emma, the same patreon whose responsible for the Green Eggs and Ham Reviews,  who helped me hit the 15 dollar goal.  As a result you fine people are getting three movie reviews each based on a Disney Afternoon Movie with Treasure of the Lost Lamp today, a goofy movie at the end of the motnh for  a weeklong tribute to my favorite dogmandadguy.  Extremley was going to be part of it but the length of this review convinced me otherwise, but I will be doing it this summer so keep an ear out. If you want to help me hit my next stretch goals do yourselve a favor and zip on over to my patreon YOU CAN FIND MY PATREON HERE. My next stretch goal at “OH Look 20 Dollars” would give everyone patreon and not, a monthly review of Darkwing Duck as decided by my patrons, reviews of BOTH season 2 mini series from Ducktales 87, introducing Fenton to the world and blighting it with Bubba before the 2017 series fixed him, and as a brucey bonus added last month a review of Danny Phantom the Ultimate Enemy. And if that wasn’t enough if you help me get to the goal after that at 25 unlocks another trilogy of disney film reviews, this time for the proud family and recess movie and the best kim possible movie, and dcom period, so the drama as well as Bryan Lee O’ Malley’s two stand alone graphic novels, lost at sea and seconds for you Scottaholics in the audience.

The other reason now the shilling’s done. is that the plan WAS to review this back to back with Treasure of The Found Lamp, to the point the orginal review had a whole thing about that, why it was delayed etc... but now that review’s been scrapped all together as something sudden and wonderful happened. After just kinda giving up someone came through with a translation of Della’s first apperance so presumibly i’ll be doing that as part of the build up to mother’s day, and since I still want ot do maternal instincts too, and already had to let the Floyd Gottfredson birthday special slide away as well... it had to go as I want to leave the only open space on the schedule for the lovely person who found the story for me. But this review is still done, i’m very proud of it so join me under the cut won’t you?

Behind The Scenes: Before I get into it i’d just like to note this article from SyFy Wire. It , along with articles I found via wikipedia citations, was an invaluable resource. 

The film was an experiment: It was an experiment to see if one of their tv properties could bring in theatrical money, to see if a movie made on a cheaper budget and still rake in decent money, to see if a film could be made being outsourced to several diffrent places, and to see what one of those places, their recently aquiried french stuido, could handle this kind of work. 

The film, if succesful would be the first of Disney’s MovieToons line, a series of films based on their shows. As you can tell by the fact only this movie and Goof Troop happened and the Movie Toons label wasn’t applied to that one it very much failed. While the film was warmly recevied by people who liked the show general audiences didn’t turn out for it. As a result the MovieToons label was scrapped, future projects with it were canceled.. but the stellar work put in by the french stuidio lead to it perserviering for several more decades and lead to them working on the Goofy Movie, which we’ll get to later this month but needless to say was a MUCH bigger hit with a much bigger budget. 

As for why the film failed... I have two theories. THe first is that parents were stupid back then and didn’t want to pay to see something on the big screen they could see on tv’s. This is a stupid mentality to me as generally a movie of a tv show puts in a ton of extra effort and usually goes bigger and dosen’t go home. It’s a likely theory given most liscened films of the era didn’t do quite well, with all three hasbro films tanking. And look I get Transformers the Movie is cheesy and killed a lot of people’s childhood toys, but damn if it ain’t aweosme.. and also something I need to cover at some point. Thankfully this died out by later in the 90′s with Rugrats getting a hugely succesful if flawed film, a better sequel and a third one that was also a crossover with the wild thornberries. 

And even now in 2020 we’re getting the Loud House and Rise of the TMNT movies sometimes this summer, we were SUPPOSED to have gotten the bobs burgers movie this summer but arne’t because Disney is being a dick about it.

And we got a phineas and ferb movie last year. With this trend hopefully thsi means we’ll get a Ducktales 2017 movie at some point since season 4 left a huge sequel hook laying right there to grab for a feature film.  One final note: The film was conceptually thought up as a 5 part serial like “Treasure of the Golden Suns”, “Catch as Cash Can”, “SuperDucktales” and “Time is Money, something that DOES show as the movie weirdly has act breaks. In a feature film. Yup. 

The Guest Cast:

I won’t go into the full cast since I’ve sung Alan Young and Russi Taylor’s praises PLENTY on this blog before, and I plan to go into Beakly and Launchpad’s actors when they show up in the pilot movie. But i’d be remiss if i didn’t talk about our three guest actors for our three new parts. 

First up is Merlock voiced by legend and if I had a hall of fame, hall of famer Christopher Lloyd.. I need to get me one of those. Lloyd is of course known for playing Doc Brown in back to the future but has done countless other films, voicework, and other good stuff. Among his MASSIVE filmography includes The Back to the Future Trilogy (Already mentioned it but it bears repeating), Star Trek III, Who Framed Roger Rabbit as the pants destroyingly terrifying Judge Doom, The Addams Family duology as fester, a role rip torn would ironcially play for the animated series made to captalize on said movie, Hey Arnold! The Movie, The Oogieloves in The Big Ballon Adventure (Look everybody needs money sometimes okay?), and Art of the Deal: The Movie, which was not, thankfully an ego filating nightmare made by trump himself but a film made by funny or die parodying his terrible book and having Llloyd return as Doc Brown. TV Wise he’s known for Taxi, Back to the Future the Animated Series, Cyberchase and he most recently popped up on Big City Greens. How I missed that ep I.. do know as I haven’t watched season 2. Gonna fix that later this month. Lloyd is utterly awesome, a great guy and thankfully still alive at the time of this writing, so I was happy to have him here. 

Less familiar to me but still known is Rip Taylor, a comedian known for his flamboyant unique way of speech and his marvelous mustache. He showed up in things occasionally and always seemed like the nicest guy and his passing in late 2019 truly is sad. He does a terrific job here but more on that in a moment. 

Finally we have Richard Libertini, a comedian I never really saw in anything besides this who according to IMDB was most famous for his ablility to do a foreign accent. I REALLY hope all of them aren’t as horribly racist as this one. We’ll.. get to that in a sec as it’s time for the plot!

A Treasure Uncovered:

We open our film gorgeously. The animation is great in the film, having some rough edges I chalk up to the film’s hectic production, the studio being new at working at disney properties, and the film not being meant for HD. That being said a few rough spots here and there aside.. the film looks ungodly gorgeous. Like most theatrical films based on a cartoon it takes an already great style and makes it look great. It feels like a more fluid evolution of the cartoons look and it’s a shame we didn’t get more movies in this style for both this show and others, ESPECIALLY Darkwing Duck. Can you imagine a Darkwing Duck movie with this lush animation? Hopefully we’ll get one eventually. 

So our heroes are going to somewhere in the Middle East. That’s.. that’s all wikipedia gives me and all the film gives me. As usual Scrooge is after treasure in this case the Treasure of Collie Baba, the greatest thief there ever was based obviously off Ali Baba from 1001 nights and that one Beastie Boys song. 

It’s here we find the WORST thing about the film, the thing that makes this a hard one to watch depsite otherwise being pretty good, and that makes my skin crawl knowing i’m a white man and a BUNCH of white guys, Ducktales series creator who did the voice casting for this character, the writers who wrote him, the direector disney them fucking selves who thought this was okay. 

The film has some horrible steroytping. It starts with a bunch of backgorund guys surronding Scrooge, with crooked teeth and steotypical voices. This on it’s own is odious. 

It somehow gets worse. Then we meet one of our antagonists. We meet Dijon. 

This Fucking Guy 

Djon is horribly offensive reminding me of other such luminaries in being ungodly offensive yet somehow getting put to film as Jar Jar Binks (With all respeect to his poor actor Ahmed Best, this is not his fault), Rob Schinder as a Sterotypically asian preist, Skids and Mudflap, Rob Schinder as a sterotypically mexican bandit, The Whitewashed cast of The Last Airbender, and Rob Schinder as a stereotypically asian preist. What i’m saying is Djon is an AWFUL, horribly offensive character.. and that Rob Schinder should be shot up into space, not to watch cheesy movies, he’s not funny enough for that, but instead to be sent to a satlitie that’s liveable, but also filled to the brim with spring loaded boxing gloves. Just tons of boxing gloves that feel like getting punched by a heavewight boxer all hidden... they could hit his legs, his face, his nuts, his face and his nuts, the point is he’s in constnat pain unless he moves carefully. 

And lest you think i’m exaggerating for starters this is his design. 

It just screams “vaugely but sterotpyically middle eastern” along with cowardly. The fact he’s also a literal rat is just the icing on the cake made of broken glass, shrapnel and broken DVD’s of Transformers; Revenge of the Fallen. They say if you eat a reveng eof the fallen dvd John Tutoro appears at the foot of your bed and watches you while you sleep.. and by they I mean me. It was a bad bet. I got rid of him with some insese and a bribe of five dollars. 

Oh but that’s just design.. when he talks it’s MUCH worse. His voice is like if they took Apu from the simpsons and said “This but MORE offensive”, and his perosnality is WORSE. He’s a thief.. and not in the endearing loveable rogue way but he’s a pick pocket and a running “Gag’ is that he’ll often grab eveyrthing within reahc. As the deisgn shows he’s a coward running at every opportunity. Oh and to top it all off he’s the willing servant of the white coded, given all ducks in this series are white coded and voiced bby white actors, big bad. And the actor is naturally VERY white to make this cocktail of offensivness so complete that if Disney ever got rid of this film I GUARANTEE the republcian party would be running in with accusations of cancel culture gone amok and never shutting up about this like they did the muppets. Which for the record THEY DIDN’T CANCEL THEM, YOUR POINT IS ILLEGITMATE, THEY JUST WANTED TO BE SENSTIVE YOU GHOULS. 

I do have a reason for bringing up Disney’s content warnings... most damming of all given just how DEEPLY uncomfortbale this character is.. there isn’t one for this movie. I double checked: There isn’t even wanring notes on the website. It’s just.. on there. And given just how ghastly a sterotype Djon is.. that’s not right. Seriously they DID put them on certain episodes of the show, theyk now this sort of thing is wrong and they done wrong.. but for NO reason they haven’t done so for a film released 31 years ago. Around the same time as the series and just offensive as that show at it’s worst if not more so. This is flatly inexcusable.. par for the course for Disney’s incompetence but still horribly furstrating, disgusting and shameful.. which has been the theme of the last three days really. I expect better because when it comes to putting that warning label on this stuff, they usually are better. First the scheduling mixup and now this. You already do a handful of things wrong Disney why add this to the list?!

It’s just draining not only to run into another Disney Fuckup after a weekend of dealing with one of their worst in recent memory, but just to watch Djon. To see this horrible caractrure saunter onto the screen and go on with his harmful schtick, to see that THIS is what Ducktales 87 reduced non white people to more often than not.  It’s remarkable just how throughly and awesomely Frank and Matt completely and totally reversed this. Instead of horrible sterotypes in the reboot, we got TONS of loveable people of color, an endearing latino hero, a smart african american buisness woman who takes no shit but is still a consumate professional, and an egyptian HERO with an intresting story and a strong moral code instead of this horrible reminder that racisim in media was such an afterthought not ONE person brought this up during the scyfy wire stuff or in any inteview i’ve seen. No one cared. Djon was POPULAR enough that he got three episode sin the series. THREE FUCKING EPISODES. This film could be GOOD.. but it’s just so bogged down EVERY FUCKING TIME this artists interpreitation of what Tucker Carlson sees when he looks at a middle eastern person I had to pause to compose myself and had to take a break writing this review to avoid tyiping this in all caps and using the phrase YOU RACIST MOTHERFUCKERS every other sentence. And again i’m white, I get this is second hand offensiveness.. I do... but it dosen’t mean I can’t be offended other white people were so callous about other cultures behaviors this happened.

And what makes me feel worse.. is that I just sorta... never thought about white people voicing non white characters. Things like this I noticed sure, I realize now part of the reason I didn’t like this movie the first time I saw it was this alex jones version of a looney tune, but I do feel shame for not noticing or caring long before this. Sure I loved it when a character of color got played by a person of color.. but I didn’t realize just how deep that problem was and how LONG it went on for before the outcry post george floyd and the call to action lead to most shows still going course correcting. It’s why stuff like this extra botehrs me: because THIS was just as okay at the time. No one blinked twice about this and odds are the creators involved still haven’t. And that.. that’s just terrible and it hurts to think about and  I still have most of the movie to go.  

The Pyramid of Peril:

So we do get a gorgeous unvewling scene of a box Scrooge found out about from Collie Baba’s horde that should lead them to the treasure. This scene reminds me of Indina Jones.. and I bring this up because the poster was specifically made to mimick an indinia jones poster, to the point of getting drew struzan to do it. THe creator of Ducktales objected..l but I do not get WHY. While I”m not sure if he had yet, Speilberg flat out admits the Carl Barks comics were an inspiration for Indina Jones, with the iconic bolder chase coming from a similar scene in one of Barks Stories. Gotta cover that too. So yeah I don’t get not wanting an indina jones style poster when both were inspiried by the same work and it’s just simple logic and it looks so neat. Thank you. 

Scrooge finds seemingly just clothes.. and a map. Jeff Dunham’s Most Racist Puppet reports to his master, Merlock. Merlock is a.. meh villian. Christopher Lloyd does try.. but Lock is your standard evil overlord wants to take over the world type. He dosen’t have much depth, or personality and only his style saves him from dragging the film down along with Dana Carvey’s most racist disguise in master of disguise. He does have a deent shape shifting gimick and being played by Christopher Lloyd means he’s acted TREMENDOUSLY. Alan Young was apparently in awe watching him work and that’s wonderful to hear. The guy did his best. Weirdly Merlock would show up in tons of other works, mostly video games.. but even weirder he NEVER showed up in ducktales 2017. Both Djon and Gene would, Djon thankfully renamed we’ll get to all of that tommorow thank god. I need it after this. But Frank has outright said they didn’t use Merlock because there simply wasn’t anything they could do with him they couldn’t dow ith magica. My likely guess is the might of found a way to revamp him EVENTUALLY, it’s not like radical revamps weren’t there thing come on, they just had way more stories with Magica and didnd’t get around to it before the show was canceled. Just make him some sort of evil god or something. it’s what I might do. There’s a lot of angles with him. Though I would’ve still gotten christopher lloyd back. I mean most of the recasting is good but he’s still alive and deserved a better shot at things. 

So Merlock sends Djonn to go with scrooge as his guide to find the treasure, as there’s something of imense power within it. And I gotta ask WHY does Merlock need a minon. No really. This isn’t a situation like reboot magica where he’s trapped in another realm. He can shapeshift into any animal. We only see him use falcon, rat, cockroach and bear but theoritically he can become anything and bear alone is still a LOT. Why does he need this sterotype even other sterytopes ar eashamed of? The film dosen’t NEED Djonn. Just let Christopher Lloyd monologue and leave this post 911 propogranda cartoon at home. 

So our heroes nad rejected jar jar prototype head into the desert, and seemingly find nothing before finding a small pyramid all while Merlock follows desecretley as a mighty hawk. 

Scrooge makes the boys and Djon dig... because they clearly forgot the “work hard” part of his ethos. 

Our heroes unveil the pyramid... and while Merlock SAYS he searched the desert and I get it’s hard to see thourgh all of that.. the dude is immortal, had decades to search and had Mickey Rooney there on standby to force him to go comb the desert. I have an artist rendering of that hang on

So our heroes enter the pyramid and it goes.. really how you’d expect: there’s a bunch of traps our brave explorers have to pass, the boys minintpret a juinor woodchuck saying about loosing your marbles to mean using the ones they actually have which geninely comes in handy as they trip the traps and Rob SChinder as a carrot stumbles into one. Also launchpad is wearing a hawaiin shirt and shades. This has no baring on the plot, but it does bring the movie up a notch in my book and I question why the reboot never used this outfit. Then again they also never properly used Donald’s Quack Pack Outfit (Which bad show or not, is objectively awesome), or his Quack Shot Indiana Jones Riff Outfit, so  it’s not like there isn’t a presdecnt for not giving a character a cool costume change from a previous medium. I really should do a top 12 missed opportunities list for the 2017 cartoon.. the ideas for stuff are really piling up. 

OUr heroes eventually find the treasure which has insidiously clever security the more I think about it: at first I thought it had none, just a pit with some... scorpions? I mean their supposed to be but they look like they crawled out of the same stygian hole in the sky Doofus crawled out of. And if your asking me “wait which Doofus” the answer is both. Both these abominations crawled out of a stygian hole in the sky.

But the treasure is on a platform surrounded by scoprions with the only way out being the trap filled way they came in. Unless someone comes in with a full team and a bunch of lootin sacks, they aren’t getting out with EVERYTHING. They can steal SOME of the treasure but there’s no way to get any signifigant portion... and the team thing itself is an issue, something Collie defintely predicted being a thief himself: while some thieves can work well as a team, hence why we have four oceans movies 3/4 damn good, and for the record 12 is the bad one, 8 is how you do a soft reboot and a female led reboot right, a good chunk of professional crooks will turn on each other or try and swinldle... and tha’ts dangerous in a trap filled temple but hey some criminals ain’t so smart.  If they all were Rudy Gulliani wouldn’t have two razzies for preparing to pull his pants down, and have waved his phone around on tv like a dare for future adminstrations to arrest the shit out of him would he? 

But Scrooge has his family so they get loading. But not before Webby finds the lamp. Not knowing about it Scrooge has no intrest in it, but Webby does. We also get a really simple but hilarious gag where SCrooge dickers over the idea for a second.. before Webby picks up a Jeweled tiara to possibly take instead. The best gags to me are often the ones that just let the character’s perosnalities take the lead and bounce off each other. It’s why when I reviewed the four lilo and stitch crossovers recently I harped on character interaction as their biggest weakness: it’s what MAKES a good work for me. It’s why my faviorite comics and shows often follow a loveable group of disfunctional misfits. I like a group of big personalities who despite in theory should NOT be able to work making it work anyway. And it’s honeslty what’s made Scrooge last so long: Scrooge on his OWN is awesome.. but iwth the boys, donald, and in the case of this series and the reivival Webby and Launchpad, with people to bounce off of who he contrasts heavily with, from Launchapd’s buffonery to Webby’s inehrent sweetness in both versions, to the boys genuine honesty and sense of adventure.... it makes him truly stand out. He’s a great character on his own, don’t get me wrong.. but it’s the people around him that give him chances to show WHY. A good character on it’s own is fine and dandy.. a good character with other good characters around them is where it gets truly special. 

Merlock naturally bursts in and in a VERY Black Heron move needlesly outs what micheal bay sees when he closes his eyes as a bad guy... no really he grabs the guy with his talons as he captures the treasure and reveals he’s a bad guy. I don’t even get why keep Djonn alive. He’s done all Merlock possibly could’ve needed and Merlock is ruthless... this makes no sense and only happens because they need Djonn for later in the plot.

Our heroes barely escape, rafting out on the platform itself in a thrilling sequence.. but it’s the one right after that catches my attention. Scrooge utterly defeated, having searched for this treasure for forty years and unresponsive to everyone else. The anmation, coupled with the incomprable Alan young’s acting makes this the highlight of the film for me. Beneath the armor of wealth and skill.. is only a poor old man who just lost something he’s been chasing after most of his life. Scrooge tries his hardest not to be vunerable and both shows and the original comics all use that so when he truly is devistated like this, and i’ts belivible since this treasure is a personal goal of his and as someone who has had things that they seek out specifically, loosing them always hurts. It hurts to ALMOST reach a goal only to have it crumble out under you

But while this alone is good.. what’s next makes it great. Webby sweetly offers up the lamp. Scrooge turns it down, and her genuine gesture reinvgorates him and reminds us of who he is “I’ll find it if it takes another 40 years”> Scrooge may be bitter, mean and selfish a lot of the time.. but deep down, he’s a good man and one who will not give up, and a momentary setback can only stop him so long as long as he has his family to remind him of who he truly is.. and what’s truly important. It’s genuinely sweet and to me is also a reminder of why 87 Webby is a good character: Shes’ not perfect, her main personality trait is often Girl Sterotype”.. but she’s a genuinely sweet small child with a huge heart. It’s telling that while 17′ Webby is almost completely diffren,t and far better, that heart remains her biggest strength. Sure her reboot self could kill a man nad no one would ever find the body, but it’s her heart and empathy that makes that possible and makes her Webby.  That inherent loving nature is what makes Webby webby wether she’s a toddler having a tea party or a tween getting ready to intergoate a guy with a meat tenderizer while saying ‘Cute girl stuff”. 

Gene Genie Let’s Himself Go:

It’s a few days later and this is the point where it REALLY becomes obvious this was written as a bunch of episodes. Though to the film’s credit while it does ake this feel like a compliation movie as a result... it dosen’t hamper the film’s quality, condiment from Rush Limbaghs’ hot dog stand does that just fine, but once you notice it it’s impossible to unotice it. Weirdly though it seems chunked up into four episodes rather than the usual five, likely cutting down an episode, though I can’t see where they cut out material frankly if they did and i’ts just as likely they woudl’ve had to make one to fill in the space.

So Scrooge is in a mood, being grumpy with his secretary Mrs. Featherly, quackfaster in all but name, and having to be sent home. So while Duckworth goes to fetch him Webby polishes her treasure at long last readying for a tea party, something the boys roundly reject because their sexist little twits and swo were the writers or executies who assumed all little boys act the same. It’s easily my biggest pet peeve with the series as a whole: anytime this crops up with the boys it turns them into the worst dicks imaginable. It’s telling this, being mean about her wantin ga tea party with her surrogate brothersi s TAME. Normally they’ll say she can’t do things because she’s a girl or mock her hobies outright instead of just be mildly dickish. And while she dosen’t look much younger Webby is VERY CLEARLY, in this series anyway, supposed to be say 5 or 6 to the boys 8-10. 7 at most. SHe’s a small child and while it is realistic for older kids to bully younger ones, it’s not fun to watch. It’s why I get annoyed at all the big sibling bully characters.. some work, but most aren’t fun to watch because there’s nothing funny or intresting about it. It’s the same deal here. 

Thankfully that quickly goes away as the lamp moves when Webby rubs it and does so again to prove it did move. Huey finishes it and we’re introduced to Gene, the best part of the film.  Gene is a Genie and he takes a second to dart around before messing with the appliances in the kitchen, as he was last around during the time 1001 Nights Came About. Cleverly though, and so we thankfully don’t have 80 dozen fishout of water jokes that have already been done before. As you can probably guess i’m not a huge fan of time travel fish out of water stuff. Now from another dimensoin or planet, i’m on board with with Star Vs, Steven Universe and Sym-Bionic Titan being great examples of this, as is the comic resident alien. (Despite having the wonderous Alan Tuduk the show sounds way more mean spirited and misses the entire point of the comic as given by the author in the credits, i.e. that the alien is supposed to NOT be a threat and just be gently waiting for a ride) The inverse is also good with Amphbia and owl house, taking a human and plopping them into our world. But time travel stuff just usually runs the same beats of “look at the shiny thing” and what not. The only time i’ve sene something SIMILAR work is with thor where their society is SIMILAR to vikings time but still it’s own thing.. it also gave us a classic gag in..

So yeah i’m glad they dropped this and instead had a clever way around it: Gene reads the encylopedia at the mansion. Granted it’s Scrooge so I don’t know how current it is and given this came out in 1990 thus HOW racist it is. It’s not a questoin of IF it was, but how much.

But having caught up the kids confront him with the fact he has to grant wishes. This lamp runs on what I now realize are Aladdin rules: Whoever currently holds the Lamp is the Genie’s master, they only get three wishes, and that dosen’t reset if it changes hands. The only big diffrence from the usual is Gene dosen’t have to TELL them about the wishes like Genie did, and Gene very begrudginly agrees to it. He also seem’s phsyically pained when doing so. 

So since all 12 know about him, each of the kids gets a wish though it seems unfair with HDL. Their one person, they shoudln’t get 9 wishes just because their brain is spread out over three bodies. 

This film continues the weird simliarties to Aladdin by attaching rules though they instead come up as a result of our heroes talking rather than the Genie just flat out tleling them: both share the “you can’t wish for more wishes” thing, a common rule in these stories and usually only broken nowadays as a clever twist as the rule is SO common place, not having it is a twist. But it is there for a reason: to limit the sheer power of a reality warping wish. The wishes can also only go so far. In a nice line, when Huey, Dewey or Louie suggests wishing for peace one earth, Gene says “No pipe dreams’ He can’t bend people or reality on THAT scale. He can bend reality as we find out, but it’s smaller scales like turning someone’s possesions over ot someone else, warping the bin into a castle, or bringing inanitamte objects to limited life. Still HUGE feats worth of a genie, so Gene’s power isn’t so nerfed it’s unusuable, but it does explain why his evil pervious ownder Merlock, more ont hat in a bit too, didn’t just wish to have eternal dominon over the earth or something. Gene can do just about anything but he can’t change the world on a fundemental level. 

And I do LIKE having rules in wished based stories like this, I chalk it up to growing up with Fairly Odd Parents... though they eventually went too far in the oppsoitie direction, pulling rules out of their ass to suit the episode, instead of simply having some very standard, very understandable rules that still pose challenges but don’t outright cheat so the episode can happen. 

So Webby does her first wish.. and wishes for a Baby Elephant, something Gene is against as he prefers they keep the wishes small: otherwise he gets found out, and the fight over him begins. So one of the boys wishes him away. Or Webby does. Point is it’s gone though not before Beakly sees it and Scrooge smells something is up. Our heroes try to hide gene, but gene thankfully simply dresses up like a modern kid and thus is able to pass as a friend of there staying for the night. 

So with the rules established and what not the kids find a clever solution: they simply go a ways away from the mansion into the woods, far enough from town to avoid any suspcion, and same iwth the mansion and just wish for all kinds of stuff: a giant bunch of ice cream toys, standard kid wish fufillment but it’s nice... in part because the kids treat Gene like one of them. Wihle they STARTED asking him about the wishes, this starts the bonding process. Soon he will be part of the hive mind.. SOON. 

Until then though after using another wish to make scrooge not mad at them for coming home late and missing dinner, that night we find out Gene’s backstory.... and it’s an utter tearjerker. As it turns out Merlock wants him back because he’s Gene’s former master and as you’d guess.. it was NOT a happy existnace, used contstnatly to do horrible things with no power to stop himself. Pompeii and Atlantis were both directly Merlock’s fault and it was only Collie Baba stealing the lamp that put an end to his hell. He also answers the two obvious questions botht he audeiince and the boys have: How the hell is Merlock still alive and shoudln’t he be out of wishes then? The first is simple. Unlike pretty much every DBZ Villian whose WANTED to do so, Merlock wished for immortality first chance he got, taking the Zamasu route instead and thus leaving him free. 

As for the wishes thing it turns out his amulet, in adition to shapeshifting, also gives him extra wishes becuase fuck it. 

But the boys sweetly offer to protect him. 

The next day, Apu’s Cousin let’s Merlock know the maps in the mansion and Merlock has him help sneak in with Merlock taking rat form. This backfires as Mrs. Beakley notices the form and chases after him with a broom

Meanwhile Webby has her tea party with Gene after he and the boys played cops and robbers earlier, and he’s bored.. though nicely not because it’s a girly thing, but because the stuffed animals aren’t alive and she naively has him fix that. This leads to 

Which sadly is jsut scrooge vs a duck toy but admit it, you want that movie for Disney Plus yesterday. Call Charles Band Disney. CALL CHARLES BAND! 

Whelp Scrooge Still Sucks:

Scrooge takes for a turn for the obnoxious in the next part, but i’ts fine by me as it’s part of the plot. Naturally this reinactment of Cult of Chucky has lead to Scrooge finding out about the Genie. To his credit, Scrooge is tactical about his wishes. As said by the Duck himself “I could wish for a diamond, no the world’s biggest dimaond, no ten world’s biggest diamond, no a diamond mind, no the MINING INDUSTRY!”

The sheer power this gives him is TERRIFYING, both because of his status.. and because unlike the kids who all wished for simple kid stuff and used up their wishes quickly, he both gets how much he can do with this and could conquer the world economy if he truly wanted to. 

The obnoxious part comes in as he treats Gene as not a person, figuring he’s just there and forces him into the lamp despite the kids protests after Gene grants his first wish: Collie Baba’s treasure. It also dosen’t feel like the wishing nor him using the lamp to get the tresure back goes against his hard work ethos: for the former while he is getting all this magically, he’s still having ot use his wits to get the most out of it, and he did earn the lamp itself square. For the latter, he already earned the treasure square too and had it stolen. He’s onlyg etting back what’s by all rights HIS. Granted he plans on giving most of it up for a tax break but still it’s his by right. 

However the reason his assholery works is twofold: first it’s Scrooge. While he’s not a TERRIBLE person, in the comcis and this cartoon he isn’t a GOOD person either. He DOES have a good heart and will usually do the right thing, but his first instnct is always to get more money and to be a cantakerous old bastard to eveyrone and everything. While he’s subtly grew out of “I hate eveyrone and everyone hates me” as his guiding principal, it’s still his defualt reaction to most situations. But he first relents by letting Gene attend the party, part of why the Collie Baba thing stung so bad was that he’s told the historical society he’d get the treasure for years only to come back empty handed, if shrunken. But he still manages to have a good time while Asok and Merlock infiltrate.. well I’mRunningOutofINsultingNIcknamesCanYouTell steals the silverware. Yes... that.. that really happens. 

Look we’re almost done, i’m almost free of this racist mummies curse. Let’s continue. Gene sees melock and freaks and drags SCrooge with him and while at First Scrooge is cranky...

No but now I want a Donkey Kong Country crossover too dammmit. And to talk about those games. Another thing for the list. But Scrooge is righ tot be a bit surly...

Okay now your just pushing it. As Gene whisked him away without telling him anything other than vauge worries... but then he gets a full idea of why Gene’s so terrified when Merlock shapeshifts into a bear and starts breaking the door down. Eh, could be worse. 

Gene shrinks them to escape and Merlock leaves thinking they fled but leaves Skids Minus Mudflap to go look for them. Scrooge sneaks out but bumps into a cart running from the photo you see when you look up stereotype on google. I mean I assume.. let’s try it. 

Huh you know I HOPED but I never expected... 

So Google Proving My Point plans to give his lamp to the master because of his weird Torgo-Esque obession with helping a man who clearly wants to murder him but takes his sweet time doing so because plot, and Gene figuring this COULDN’T POSSIBLY go as bad as Melock getting him urges the dummy to keep him and make his own wishes.

This goes about as well as you’d expect....

Wiped Out With A Wish:

Scrooge returns home to find Watto has wished to take his poessions, fortune, everything and Scrooge gets thrown in jail for breaking into his own house. We get two great moments back to back. The first is Scrooge lamenting loosing his fortune in jail, and realizing the sheer power and risk of the lamp, especially since he worked hard to earn it, every bit of it.. and Sam Wilson’s 70′s Backstory came in and took it all in an instant. 

The second is Scrooge’s family coming for him, including Launchpad , Beakly and Webby obviously and bailing him out. Though Beakly is UNGOLDLY annoying in this scene, sobbing hysterically and adding nothing and it’s not nearly as funny as the  film thinks. Turns out Goliath getting buried wrapped in chains threw them out. 

Scrooge takes a bit to rebound from all this.. but eventually realizes something: he knows the security of the bin inside and out. He had it put in after all. So it’d be easy enough to break in. So they gotta break in to break out the lamp, undo this nightmare, and END THIS MOVIE. Seriously this review has taken two days  as is I do NOT want to miss my invincible review. 

So they break into the bin, and it’s a tightly paced Scene, scrooge going in one way while the kids go the other and we even get a nice callback as the marbels come in handy to get past one of the traps. It’s just a good scene. it’s only real flaw is that Launchapd just sorta disappears as does Duckworth despite the fact their in a plane, and the bin later gets turned into a floating castle. Kinda a plot hole to not have Launchpad crash in to save htem just saying. 

Scrooge eventually does get to Djonn, whose been ignoring the imminent threat of Merlock while Gene sweats it out... and this backfires horribly as Merlock hitched a ride as a roach (Though there was a hilarious scene of him getting fried constnatly by lasers when Louie went through a laser hallway, as while Louie had the directions, it dind’t take into account passengers on your head. 

So Merlock remanifests in full gets the Lamp and unleashes his wrath on Tin Tin in the Congo and turns him into a wild pig. 

Not you sweetie. He then forces Gene to turn the castle into a fortress and float it back to his home in parts unknown. It’s a DAMN cool scene with impressive and horrifiing animation as the bin melts and crumbles into thte castle and the kids barely make it up the stares as they shift and disolve. Really top notch stuff.

Scrooge stands up to Merlock... and this naturally goes poorlyw ith Gene begging Merlock not to respond.. and Merlock having him blow scrooge off the top of the forgtess storm eagle style, though scrooge understands. And this is the true reason why scrooge being a dick didn’t bother me so much. Because it helps create a great contrast between him and Merlock. Both thought of Gene as a tool rather than a person.. but Scrooge grew to realize he was wrong and what he was dealing with wasn’t some magical goodies creator.. but a child forced to constantly grant wishes, in sheer agony to do so no less, likely so sick of it because again and again and again people used him as a slave to get what they wanted and to hell with what Gene wanted. He realized he was terrible for making this poor boy into his slave simply because that’s his job. In contrast Merlock could give no shits and is a malevolent monster who glefully uses Gene despite the pain the wishes put him through and his protests. It’s why Gene is the best part.. he’s  athroughly likeable, throughly inncoent character with tons of personality and a truly tragic and horrifying backstory and Rip Taylor acts the hell out of every scene with the guy. 

Thankfully the marbles come in handy one last time and Huey, Dewey or Louie snipes the lamp away and a struggle for it insues between Scrooge and Merloc mid air. it’s fucking awesome.. and it get sbetter in how scroogewins. He simply gets rid of Merlock’s amulet, taking it then throwing it. Grante dhe COULD’EVE used it for unimited wishes.. but it was too risky to do that and as we’ll see in the ending , Scrooge realized the Lamp was too powerful to keep around for much longer and too much of a tempting target for his rogues.. not that we see them this movie as the crew wanted it to bea ccesaible and thus kept hte cast to the main cast from season 1 and just made new vilians and a new supporting character, but still. 

He does use his second wish though to undue the damage Merlock had done and the bin and clan mcduck are returned to duckburg in good condition.

Time for our ending, which is genuinely and wholly touching. With the lamp too dangerous to use Scrooge considers just sending it to the earth’s core, which horrifies the kids as it’d mean Gene would be trapped there forever... if the molten lava iddn’t just outright destory the lamp and probably kill him. But Scrooge.. isn’t the bastard he likes to potray himself as. Instead he makes Gene into a real boy. He gives the poor kid HIS wish, which designrates the lamp and undoes all the spells... so Merlock is PROBABLY dead but he does return for some games so maybe not? 

And so we end on two things: Gene happily playing cops and robbers with the boys finally free.. and Birth of A Nation grabbing all the loot he can in his patns and running off. Ha ha ha thank god i’m done with this prick. And no I will not be looking at his ducktales episodes unless I have to. 

Final Thoughts:

This movie is OKAY. It has a solid plot, gene is a wonderful chacter, the animatoin is pretty prettay pretty good, and the voice acting as usual is excellent, with Rip Taylor being the standout. 

But as my paragraphs of rage shoud’ve made Clear Djonn is just BAD. Easily the worst character i’ve encountered in my year of reviewing and some of the worst writing i’ve ran into. And that writing includes a goblin man voyerstically forcing two teenagers to make out, making jokes about santa renaming himself Clem the sceneafter he tearfully confessed to letting the elves and ms. claus die, accidental transphobia via the u-men, and Bryan Lee O malley thinking we needed more than one volume of Julie Powers being around.  This was disgusting, even by 1990 standards and especially by 2021 standards and it drags the film down considerably. Without it the film is okay.. with it the film is just VERY hard to watch any time he pops up.  He made getting through the movie a nightmare and while I pause a lot becaue it’s a bad habbit I did so more simply because as I said earlier in the review I could not stand him. 

It makes it a hard film to recommend. If you can stomach the racisim, then it might be worth it, but be aware of what your putting up with going in. But if you can’t.. there’s no shame in that, it’s carbombya levels of bad. Which yes was a real fictoinal country. It was so bad Casey Casem quit transformers over it. True story. So yeah, it’s an okay film, on par with the series at it’s best for the most part.. but Djonn just spoils it for me. 

If you liked this review, like it, share it around that sort of thing and if you want MORE disney movie reviews, in addiiton to the goofy movie one later this month, if you help me hit my 25 dollar stretch goal on patroen.com/popculturebuffet, i’ll do reviews of the Recess, Proud Family and Kim Possible MOvies (Well so the drama anyway), so help me out would you and i’ll see you at the next rainbow.

[impossiblerebelstarfish]

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(REVIEW) Old Food, by Ed Atkins

Jon Petre takes a hearty bite out of Ed Atkins’ Old Food (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019), musing on the transfiguration of consumption and disgust into a carnivalesque prose poetry of mastication, food prep and Dadaist stylistics.

> There’s nothing worse than food cooked badly, is there? On our street we used to have sleepovers at a friend’s house. His parents couldn’t cook for shit. To this day I recoil to think of breakfast at his, which was always lukewarm beans, underdone toast and grey sausages, their skins thick and resistant to slicing, the meat inside limpid and oozing water. You’re more likely to remember an awful meal, I think, than a decent or just an average one. You remember consumption when it’s disgusting.

> Bad food sticks in the memory as well as the throat. It takes you back: a glimpse of grey sausages and I’m a twelve-year-old snob again. The opening scene of Ed Atkins’ Old Food  (2019) strikes a similar chord:

Spring finds medium son just on the floor. Looks maybe six? evil, holds the red plastic-handled table knife in a small right fist, fishes a slice from the open bag of bad read with a left.

> What follows is a slightly sickening description of buttering bread with ‘crumb-stuck margarine’, margarine on the foil lid, margarine glistening on the kid’s skin and an old sock where it’s smudged in the food-prep process. It’s such a specific, carefully observed scene, with all the detail of a memory. The speaker destabilises the workaday and familiar (buttering bread, being awake before your mum at the weekend) and makes it an uncanny, vaguely gross and alien process.  And that’s just for starters: welcome to Old Food.

> Old Food began life in 2017 as an art installation at the Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin. I didn’t see it. From what I gather from videos, images and reviews online, animation formed a central part of the exhibition. In Atkins’ films, hyper-realistic people gorged themselves on food, eating and dying in some nightmarish uncanny universe. Old Food became infamous for a CGI shit sandwich that was full of tiny babies. In one film, a creepy child jerkily crosses the room and plays the piano as a storm rages outside. This book, elegantly published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in their signature blue French-flapped style, distils that visual exhibition into a verbal form: a fatty lump of consumption and disgust rendered into prose poetry.

> The speaker, or speakers, takes us through a series of meals and mealtimes. I felt like I was reading someone’s hardscrabble childhood, picturing Lord of the Flies children foraging for herbs and thieving cast-offs in a violent dystopia. But it feels wrong to ascribe Old Food such a linear narrative. No, Old Food is a carnival. A parade of savage mealtimes, a festival of overindulgence and late-capitalist excess. It is a meditation on the strange ways that consumerism has chewed up our animal instincts of desire and consumption.

> Old Food is narrated in second-person, and I was transfixed by the ‘we’ of the speaker: ‘We used to cut most everything with fridge-cold clammy chicken’, ‘we’d cut parachute silk / with skate wings’, ‘We became happy brutes’. For whom are they speaking? Are they carnal and transgressive as a collective, or is the speaker hiding in a crowd from individual responsibility? Vaguely troubling, rarely elucidated.

> Like artistic composition, food prep is both destructive and creative – taking a dozen bitty parts from a dozen separately whole things and making a composite other whole-thing whose wholeness depends entirely on how well it’s made, how well done-it is, how refined your taste is. Like art, food sounds mad. In its twisty language and wordplay, Old Food resembles some of the best Surrealist poetry (I won’t name names, taste being subjective) as well as the Futurists’ Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine (1930). The Futurists fetishized elaborate eating rituals as a way to cement ideas of nationalism and the supremacy of masculine desire. (they tried to ban pasta because it’d stop Italians from being uber-mensch.) Old Food comes out closer to Dada – sure food can be art, but it’s still full of shit!

> Words are chopped up and blitzed into paste, disassembled and reconstituted to suit the speaker’s palate. Peanut butter on bread is measured in ‘knifefuls’, zucchini is ‘scabbed’ in Tempura, and the ‘hot long release’ of pissing in a field sounds like ‘the frying pan sizzle’. This is poetry for a nation in turmoil, where even the language around who we are a nation and what is normal has started to go off. Old Food brings us down to its level.

> A roasted goose has ‘opened [its] legs’ for cooking; filling the bird’s cavity with stuffing is to ‘engorge to torture’. Eating has forever been synonymous with sex, but Old Food doesn’t take any prisoners – cooking juices are like body fluids, feasting is fucking, and so on. Sex, violence and eating – are all the same desire, Atkins suggests, carnal impulses that poetry is always better for embracing.

> Yet there is a tinge of desolation to all this gluttony and lust, no matter how fun. Old Food’s epigraph is from Georges Bataille: being formless, we may as well imagine it as ‘something like a spider or spit’. There is no grand narrative behind eating three meals a day until you die. Imagine every meal you’ve ever eaten, the good and the bad, the Wotsits and the Wellingtons, the slurped oysters and the Daddies’ sauce and, no matter how delicious or well-prepared they were, it’d all be the same in a vast, Sisyphean heap. There’s horror between those buns.

> ‘What’s at stake with this sandwich?’ the speaker asks, and the answer is desire itself: which desires we’re willing to admit to, which inhibitions we’re willing to shed. Whether it’s food or sex, someone is trying to sell us a fantasy of consumption; to think of either as sacred is absurd, Atkins seems to say, and in Old Food we’re better off revelling in the shit than swallowing it.

There used to be justice rather than I don’t know chocolate eggs. There used to be rallying cries’d rather than just a rich man suppressing belches at you. There used to be an unopened box and an open front door.

> By revelling in the shit, with its imagery of disgust and vocabulary of consumption, Old Food makes a stink about the sourness of our sex and food after late capitalism’s had its way with it. It’s credit to Atkin’s talent as an artist that he can move between visual art and prose poetry without seeming to lose his bite. If Old Food is like Surrealist poetry, then it is because you can enjoy the poetry as much for its puns as its absurdist critique of late capitalism. And for all the Bataille and nihilism, Old Food is a reminder that consumption is fun. Forget health cleanses and behaving yourself in public. What’s wrong with wanting crisp sandwiches and dirty sex?

~

Text: Jon Petre Published: 7/7/20

[esonetwork]

Tiger Kings, Snyder Cuts, and direct-to-streaming blockbusters: Entertainment in the time of COVID-19

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/tiger-kings-snyder-cuts-and-direct-to-streaming-blockbusters-entertainment-in-the-time-of-covid-19/

Tiger Kings, Snyder Cuts, and direct-to-streaming blockbusters: Entertainment in the time of COVID-19

As an entertainment blogger, finding topics to write about this year has been somewhat of a challenge. Normally I have my blog schedule all neatly planned out, based on what movies are coming to the theater.

Of course, pretty much all the big spring and summer blockbusters have been moved to a later time, although of course due to the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19, those release dates may have to be moved again if quarantine procedures must be reinstated.

I’d initially thought this time might be a great opportunity to do a blog series project similar to my Western blog-a-thon earlier this year, but pandemic anxiety and the loneliness of the quarantine have made staying motivated challenging. I find myself turning to entertainment comfort food (a.k.a. watching Star Wars again for the billionth time and then staring longingly out the window and remembering what it was like to go to a movie theater).

Return of the (Tiger) King

Anyway, I finally got around to watching one of the more unusual hits during this pandemic: Netflix’s “Tiger King,” a documentary about private zoo owner Joe Exotic. The show is billed as a tale of “murder, mayhem, and madness” and honestly that doesn’t even begin to capture just how wild this show is. At numerous points, I found myself staring at the screen and thinking, “There is NO WAY this can be real.”

Even if you gather all the world’s best creative writers and told them to come up with the most outlandish story possible, I don’t think they could top the true story of “Tiger King.” If this show had come out before 2020, I don’t think I would have made it past the first episode. But 2020 has been so crazy that somehow it fits right in. The fact we’re all stuck in our homes and the world is awful right now provided the perfect environment for this show to become a viral hit.

I don’t even really know how to describe this show, other than that it must be seen to be believed. It features a feud (which you’ve probably heard about, thanks to Internet memes) that takes place between Joe Exotic and tiger sanctuary owner Carole Baskin (who may or may not have murdered her husband). The disappearance of Baskin’s husband is just one of the many over-the-top subplots this show has. In fact, it’s not even necessarily the craziest.

Ultimately, I wasn’t sure how to feel about the show after I finished watching it. I wanted to see it because it was a viral hit and everyone was talking about it, but in the end it actually made me feel a little sad. Because once you look past the eyebrow-raising drama, the real victims are the tigers who are bred solely for the purpose of entertaining people and who are not always treated with proper care and respect.

While Joe Exotic is getting a lot of attention right now, I hope that everyone who watched this show came away with an increased awareness of why people shouldn’t be keeping exotic animals like tigers as pets and why the breeding of these animals should be left to licensed, accredited zoos that can take care of these animals and that have their interests at heart.

To cut or not to cut

Though this entertainment news was not a surreal as “Tiger King,” I was still more than a little shocked by the announcement that the mythical “Snyder cut” of the Justice League movie did, in fact, exist, and it will be coming to HBO Max in 2021.

If you’re a geek, you’ve probably heard about all the drama surrounding the so-called Snyder cut of “Justice League,” but just in case, here’s a quick recap.

“Justice League” was released in 2017 to disappointing critical reviews and box office returns. Joss Whedon finished up the project after Zack Snyder had to depart the production due to a personal tragedy. The final film felt like a mishmash of Snyder and Whedon’s very different personal styles, and for a while now, certain fans have been quite vocal about wanting to see a specific Zack Snyder cut of the movie.

I always saw #ReleasetheSnyderCut as a quirky social media trend that would eventually fade away, but apparently Hollywood was actually listening and now the Snyder cut is a real thing. They’re even devoting a reported $30 million+ to the project.

Is this new cut a cash grab that won’t be that different from the version we saw in theaters? Maybe. But I have to confess that I’m already hooked; I will pay my hard-earned money to watch this alternate version, simply because I’m dying of curiosity. I did not really enjoy “Justice League,” but I’m actually a “Batman v. Superman” apologist, so I’m interested in seeing what Snyder comes up with here.

“Batman v. Superman” is a deeply flawed movie, but there are moments of greatness that it doesn’t receive enough credit for. Maybe “Justice League: The Snyder Cut” will still be a raging dumpster fire, but I’m intrigued enough to check it out.

As a side note, I am a little troubled by the concept of fans demanding a redo of a movie they didn’t like. Blockbusters, by their very nature, aim to be crowd-pleasers, but there’s also a danger of film makers being so concerned by audience reception that they’re afraid to try anything bold or ground-breaking. I don’t believe that “fans making demands of creators” is a very healthy process for creating art.

On the other hand, one could argue that “Justice League” suffered due to studio interference, and if the Snyder cut is a success, maybe Warner Bros. will give more directors freedom to follow their own vision for a project.

Skipping the theater?

Finally, an interesting trend we’re seeing in terms of entertainment in our new COVID world is that more films are bypassing a traditional theatrical release and going straight to streaming.

In some cases, it may be a good thing, such as Disney’s poorly reviewed “Artemis Fowl” that probably would have flopped at the box office.

Even as someone who deeply loves the movie theater experience, I’m okay with having a mix of films, with some going straight to streaming and others that start in the theater. I still think a movie theater is the best place to see a movie, but not every film necessarily needs to be seen on a giant screen.

I hope that as theaters are able to safely reopen, the industry will find a balance between in-person and on-demand.

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One thing that sets Box of Style apart from the rest is the care that they take with packaging. It truly feels like a treat to unwrap, and it’s exciting to unwrap each piece. In this specific package, this month’s special extra was actually wrapped outside the box because it was bigger than usual. (More on that later.)

  I love it when a box compliments me.

Again, this is what I mean when I say each item is carefully wrapped- I never worry about anything being broken in shipping, and it’s fun to open each little package! You get a bit of that anticipation, ya know? So… let’s see what I got!

Each Box of Style is curated by The Zoe Report where Rachel Zoe is Editor-in-Chief. Subscribing to this box is probably the closest thing most of us will ever get to being styled by Rachel Zoe. I love RZ- I have a few of her books and her style is just effortless cool girl.

Each box contains an insert with information about all of the products in addition to fun facts, how-to’s and styling tips. In the Spring 2017 box, Rachel Zoe wanted to focus on highlighting female-founded brands, which I think is amazing. (Who run the world? Girls!)

So, without further ado, check out everything from the box! So many things! And right away, before investigating at all, I see so many high-end brand name products I recognize, which is always exciting. But let’s take a closer look at all of the products, shall we?

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Adornmonde Ivo Earrings ($62): Eeek!!! I love these earrings so much!!! Ear jackets have been my jam for a few years now, ever since Baublebar came into my life. So I was so fired up when I learned these would be in our boxes because we were able to choose whether we wanted gold or silver. I think that it’s so neat that a subscription box like this can personalize boxes a bit. These are just right up my alley- the bar part goes in the front, and you can even just wear those alone if you are so inclined- and the hoop part goes on the back  of the earring.

The day I took this picture, I got a spray tan so I am extra golden and glowy than I normally am. But see how cool those earrings are?! Heart eye emoji.

Butter London Patent Shine 10X Lacquer ($18): Sometimes I forget about Butter London nail polishes since I am so deep in the Julep World but Butter London polishes are GREAT. I’m normally not into colors like this, but that’s actually why I’m glad I got this – I don’t have it already! This almost looks like it will be nude on me and there’s definitely a time and a place for that. Sometimes dark polishes are hard to maintain and when you know you’re not going to have time during the week to touch up your nails, you can go in with a color like this which is much more forgiving than a dark oxblood red.

Symbology Scarf ($50): This is one of the items in the box that I am just slightly confused about. I think it’s because I’m not fashion-y, so I’m not into wearing the shorter scarves these days. But you can ask my friends, when I was in college, I was VERY into scarves like these! I would either get them from my mom’s vintage collection or find some at thrift stores. I can’t tell you how many times I dressed like a hipster mime when I was younger – so many black and white stripe shirts with red neck scarves. I just haven’t thought to wear one in well over 10 years! However, this might make me want to bring it back! Lauren Scarves 2.0.

Another idea is to tie a scarf on your handbag! The next color of purse I want is navy and I think this scarf would look so cool tied on a navy purse!

BKR Glass and Silicone Water Bottle ($35): I was SO excited to get this water bottle! I have seen these for years but never purchased one because I didn’t want to spend that kind of money on just a water bottle. But now… I have one! (And it took approximately 8 seconds for it to get cat hair on it. This is why I can’t have nice things.) I am looking forward to drinking more water out of my super pretty bottle! And I already want a bigger one!

Tatcha Polished Gentle Rice Enzyme Powder ($65): I am so excited to get this! A few years ago, I tried to buy the POPSUGAR Must Have Fall Special Edition box and…. it never came. And it had this stuff in it and Jill LOVED IT. (It must be nice to get the box you ordered, huh? Not that I am bitter. ANYWAY. I have this now! Of course, the day I get it, I get a spray tan, so I don’t want to use it and scrub off the tan I just got. BUT SOON. I will be using the heck out of this. I hear such good things AND it has amazing reviews on Sephora, so while I am excited to be tan, I’m excited to use this when I’m no longer tan.

And Tatcha really knocks it out of the park on a packaging level. It was just such a treat to open, which makes me feel like the product is super luxurious.

Tribe Alive Custom Carryall ($238): This was the big ticket item this month and I am sad to say it’s just not my fave. This is one of those times where Rachel Zoe’s aesthetic and mine just differ a little bit, as I prefer much more structured, classic type bags and this just isn’t my jam. But when I first looked at it, I was like, whoa, that looks like the bag I got in my February POPSUGAR Must Have Box, and sure enough, it was the same brand! I actually really like the clutch we got. Again, it’s not my style to carry it like a purse, but I really enjoy it for carrying my makeup brushes in my gym bag.

The brand is really cool- Tribe Alive was founded by a gal named Carly Burson to utilize her passion for fassion as a platform to help alleviate poverty among women around the world. The partnership with Box of Style, created this special exclusive bag for subscribers, employed over 150 Indian artisans in three cities!

At first, I found the price point to be a little high, but then I realized the straps are real leather, which I didn’t originally see. It also has an inner zippered pocket like a lot of purses, plus 2 of those little inside side pockets for your cell phone or whatever. It’s definitely a decent purse! It’s just not my jam specifically. But I think the story of this brand is so cool and definitely a great addition to the box. I actually have an idea of the person I am going to give this to, and I know she will love it and give it a great home!

Stella Artois Chalice, Brazil -Special Bonus! ($13): Each month, TZR editors will include a little bonus item that doesn’t go towards the full value of the box. This bonus was actually really cool and one that Matt really enjoyed! We have a pint glass collection- well, MATT has a pint glass collection. (I only helped by adding a Luby’s pint glass.) So now I am doing my part by contributing a Stella Artois pint glass! What’s really cool about the inclusion of the glass in this box is that the purchase of one chalice, provides five years of clean water for a person in the developing world through the partnership of Stella Artois and Water.org. You can learn more about the campaign at www.BuyALadyADrink.com.

[line]

Final Grade: A

Once again, The Zoe Report’s Box of Style is knocking it out of the park! I am dying over the Adornmonde earrings, Tatcha exfoliator and of course, that BKR water bottle! And I think it’s incredible that you can get almost $500 worth of products in a $100 box. While $100 might seem a little steep, I think the value and the quality of the products that are included in each box makes the cost more than worth it!

Check out TZR Box of Style on social media! Click here for their Facebook page , here for their Pinterest and here for their Insta. And obviously, click here if you want to subscribe! Don’t forget to use our promo code BOXYLSP10 for a $10 discount!

Press sample sent in exchange for an honest review Post contains affiliate links

The Zoe Report Box of Style: Spring 2017 (and PROMO CODE!) I was SO EXCITED when The Zoe Report Box of Style reached out to me and asked if I would review a box for them and, duh!

[musemash]

MORTAL ENGINES AUDIENCE MISSING IN ACTION by David D. Fowler & Aeon 999

“It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.” This is the wonderfully intriguing opening line of MORTAL ENGINES, the first book in PHILIP REEVE's fanciful dystopian series about the world of Municipal Darwinism, inhabited by huge greedy, predatory cities.

PETER JACKSON's grand-scale production of the film version was highly anticipated in some circles, and its combination of his best trademarks – including thrilling action, amazing visuals, astonishing world-building, heartfelt acting, phenomenal special effects, and compelling storytelling – delighted both of us. Directed by Jackson protege CHRISTIAN RIVERS, and scripted by Sir Peter along with PHILIPPA BOYENS and FRAN WALSH, the film should have been a huge hit.

But instead of getting the enthusiastic reception it so richly deserved, it was roasted by most pop culture media outlets – reflecting today's cynical and shallow obsession with formulaic franchises, competition, and box office performance. Its considerable merits met the same indifference as those of several notably outstanding fantasy films of the past few decades – which also suffered both financially, and at the hands of unperceptive critics.

Thus, Mortal Engines joins the ranks of other high profile films that never got the widespread acclaim they clearly warranted – such as David Lynch's DUNE (1984), Andrew Stanton's JOHN CARTER (2012), the Wachowskis' JUPITER ASCENDING (2015), Duncan Jones' WARCRAFT (2016), Brad Bird's TOMORROWLAND (2015), and Luc Besson's VALERIAN & THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (2017).

Since Jackson's film is now available on streaming video, MFF takes this opportunity to pay tribute to the production, and to provide some perspective on why such an ambitious and entertaining film failed to find a large audience at the theaters. At the links below, you can view the full movie; you'll also find highlight clips from the film, plenty of behind-the-scenes materials, and a number of positive reviews. Hopefully, this will inspire those of you who missed this supremely imaginative film to give it another chance.

Trailers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRsFc2gguEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-tFqmlHQkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=s-Q-wgosfKg London Conquers All https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOZeYnu7Zhs Sixty-Minute War https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd_03fC1nb0 Old Tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5PLIa1r3XI Hester’s Warning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fU_qNRZaeE Hunted In The Outlands https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0Lkz7bZnkk Escaping The Auction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CBbQNaaT3g Dropping In On London https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IpE1Mv_R0Q Medusa Unleashed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kz5rpXCk7c Full Movie https://123movies.net/watch/bxqpozmv-mortal-engines.html High Level Of Craft https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2019/03/07/mortal-engines-4k-blu-ray-review-natsworthy-city-limits/#45af7cc73d50CHAK Building The Mortal World https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kxhrFL_vK4 https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2019/01/mortal-engines-they-built-this-city-on-rock-and-roll/ Mortal Dark Secrets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjXXH-xHVg4 Predator Cities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPZImNtoJdw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNu2Jkyh0xg Hester Shaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQRfIUo9st8 Tom Natsworthy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyGGTchcM1I Thaddeus Valentine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-Flski7bc0 Anna Fang https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ2ddg5mKf0 Shrike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbtT-ZXXhQ4 London 360 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt8qk6VoxZU Behind The Scenes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSDwADobAg Mortal Concept Art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db-i3d7P-t0 Modeling A World https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuNNmP8-0Hw A Living Canvas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u0qyu1ix_w Mortal Craftsmen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOTQ_7A-lpU A Mortal Painter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Izn20L0F6w Mortal Sound Artists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2iENUWvFTM The Mortal Composer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZxdLq81FMA Mortal Cinematographer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIkBfbWQyg The Breakdown Squad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyiU-jxPucc The SFX Squad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgZVt6z1aTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXLwZ6jNn7o Tested & Savaged https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1mEMmY2ZB8 Interviews https://www.fandom.com/articles/peter-jackson-mortal-engines-lotr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxW8Uv1h2k8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-plySmwkFd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1XXeq-Ifw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdCcIr5Rs9o Speed Dating Cast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APuzIG88Hdk Book Vs. Movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne4wu_nKFd0 https://screenrant.com/mortal-engines-movie-book-changes/ https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/movies/mortal-engines-differences-between-the-book-and-the-film/ar-BBR4j0F Author’s Reaction http://www.philip-reeve.com/the-mortal-engines-movie-arrives/ The Absent Audience https://film-book.com/audiences-fans-mortal-engines-decided-skip-film-theater/ What Went Wrong? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFuH4Llc-SI Reviews https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/5/18126288/mortal-engines-review https://discussingfilm.net/2018/12/05/mortal-engines-review-an-epic-for-the-ages/ https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/film/film-reviews/109042759/mortal-engines-wondrous-kiwishot-fantasy-offers-pace-and-style https://www.hindustantimes.com/movie-reviews/mortal-engines-is-a-thrilling-visionary-spectacle-says-rashid-irani/story-B6TxQPXSyZ0R2IW6QTI88H.html https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mortal-engines-review https://www.flicks.co.nz/reviews/mortal-engines-is-a-beautiful-burly-bustling-blockbuster/ https://www.thewrap.com/mortal-engines-film-review-peter-jackson/ https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/a-fine-imagining-of-philip-reeve-s-dystopian-universe-20181205-p50ka4.html https://www.herocollector.com/en-gb/Article/mortal-engines-review https://www.filmink.com.au/reviews/mortal-engines/ https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/movies/dystopian-tale-gets-by-on-oddball-charm-502813242.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/hollywood/mortal-engines-movie-review-peter-jackson-delivers-a-visually-stunning-spectacle/story-ztkCtXwpgfUnkM0rIDQ7yJ.html http://www.reelviews.net/reelviews/mortal-engines https://northshoremovies.wordpress.com/2018/12/13/review-mortal-engines/ https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/12/13/18136402/mortal-engines-review-peter-jackson-hugo-weaving

Updated November 1, 2020

[kamandzak]

Gaining Control

Warning: v. long self-care post that hopefully doesn’t suck.

Don’t you hate it when your life is falling apart and you see those self-care posts? If you’re like me, I only like those posts when I’m feeling good about my self care in the moment. If I’m depressed or anxious or overwhelmed, they just make me feel like a failure? 

When I say “I spent 5 years struggling with my sense of self”, it may not seem like a big deal, but I’m going to be 30 in 2020. As of right now, 5 years is more than 1/6 of my existence on this earth. That’s a long time to go on hating yourself.

So what did I do? I’m going to tell you. If you’re in a bad place right now and don’t want to read, I’ve been in your shoes. Hopefully my writing style will make you not hate what I have to say. If it does, save it. It may help one day.

1) I went to therapy, but not until I was ready

Arguably all of my issues from 2012 - 2017 branched from one thing: I was raped in college and did not remember. My anxiety, depression, and tendency to panic all really kicked off after the trauma, but without remembering anything, I couldn’t pinpoint what was different from before. It messed with my relationships, my communication, my marriage, my self-confidence. It literally fucked up everything.

From 2014 to 2017, which covers when I met my now-husband until I started feeling better, he encouraged therapy constantly. It did wonders for him. Our sex life was non-existent because I couldn’t let anyone close to me and as our marriage started falling apart less than 3 years after we tied the knot, he REALLY started pushing it. I tried it a few times between those years, and nothing really ever came out of it.

But in the Spring of 2017, when I was triggered into remembering everything from the attack 5 years before, I knew it was time. I had this sudden, calm realization wash over me that I simply couldn’t do this by myself. I found a therapist, I found a listening ear, and I found a diagnosis. Most importantly, I found out that what I had (PTSD) was something other people also had; I found out I was not alone. 

2) I started believing I could do stuff, and I started wanting to do the best job I could

This, also, took a long time. The rape had taught me that I was not smart or well-rounded or strong. After all, if I was any of those things, I would have insisted that I go home right away. I would have not followed my friend upstairs to his room. I wouldn’t have done a lot of things.

Finding a good support system is CRUCIAL. After talking things through with my therapist and talking and journaling to myself, I finally felt like I was able to tell other people, and the more I talked about it, the better I felt. I wrote about it, I basically had to make my husband listen to me (that is a story for another time, but long story short, between the stresses of teaching, marriage, and no sex, he became an alcoholic), and I confided in my best friend what had happened. Just the act of being able to talk about it allowed me to understand that it wasn’t my fault. It helped me undo years of damaging thoughts and helped me unlearn some really terrible habits I had gotten myself into while thinking I wasn’t worth anything.

As I talked with them, worked it through via books and workbooks, and began working my ASS off at my job because it was the one place I could go where I didn’t have to let my past affect my present, I began realizing that I was capable of things. I was capable of being a good friend and coworker and boss. I was capable of making sound judgments.

I started taking pride in every aspect of my job, whether or not I wanted to really do them. Listening to 90 voice mails that were left over the course of 2 months on a phone where the voice mail indicator light was broken? That’s real shitty. But I was going to do it, and I was going to do it well. I felt like I could conquer anything and everything. That led to taking pride in every aspect of my life; walking the dog, grocery shopping, making appointments, watching Judge Judy.

I still don’t trust myself all the time, which I think is normal. But I’ve learned to:

- Not panic over things I cannot control at that moment (ie, work problems when I’m not at work) - Allow myself to make mistakes - Maintain my “box”

(my box is in my car. when i leave for work, i place all my home issues in the box and when i arrive at work, i collect my work issues. then when i get back in the car on the way home, i place all my work issues in the box and when i get home, i collect my home issues. this way i can really enjoy my 40 minute commute to work and think about other, peaceful things. this is IMMENSELY helpful for me.)

3) I started Living my Truth (x)

I’ve been in the Phandom for nearly 10 years now, but nothing ever spoke to me the way that Dan Howell’s video about living your truth did. I’ve been writing for 17 years, and publication has always been a major goal for me. Suddenly, in a video from a nerd who I had watched while maturing and growing up - not to mention in the darkest phases of my life - he was encouraging his fanbase to do what they loved, and to live the life they wanted to despite what anyone else thought.

So I did just that. I maintained (and am still maintaining) the highest standards for myself at work, I’m living the kind of life I want to live at home, and I’m unabashedly writing my butt off. I’m submitting to expeditions and I’m telling everyone about my writing goals and I’m not ashamed to promote this silly habit that I love so much.

4) I actually started romanticizing simple things

This is a very recent thing (like, beginning of 2019, 10-days-old new) but my life has definitely changed. I took inspiration from a post about how you should live your life like a Studio Ghibli movie. Romanticize all the little things you do and make them truly enjoyable. I do just that.

- I no longer go to Starbucks. Instead I make a pot of tea and heat it up each morning and start my commute with fresh hot liquids and some sort of music/podcast - I started bullet journaling. It’s not pretty, but it’s functional, and the hobby and habit tracker requires me to take time (maybe not every day because hey, life’s crazy sometimes!) to review the past days and how I’ve felt - I tidy every day. I used to not do this, but between enjoying putting things in their place (the type-A part of me) and the fact that it makes my husband so happy, I’m starting to make it a habit, and a habit that I really like doing

I hope this gives you a little hope, you there, person who is struggling and who feels betrayed by their own mind. Remember you’re not alone, there’s no timeline to figure out your life, and the crappy feelings you have now, so when you dig yourself out, you can be proud of where you came from.

[universitychallenged]

University Challenge 2017/18, THE FINAL: review

St John’s, Cambridge: 145

Merton, Oxford: 100

Behold! Something to be truly proud of on this St George’s Day! The arrival of something unutterably exciting! No, it’s not the birth of the new royal baby but the final of University Challenge 2017/18! Oh wait, what? It’s an Oxbridge final? Hmm, I take it back. Gimme dat babyking.

Sketch by @ChesterScribble

Team Vibe:

St John’s: Mid-century modern, circa 1969, Palm Springs

Merton: Arts and Crafts, circa 1910s, The Red House, Bexleyheath

Grandad Count: Wiberg would quell any high jinks from the other seven with one curt word. I’m more scared of him than of Jeremy! (Both teams actually have an average age of 23.)

Gender Diversity Count: Two, ie two more than last year.

Style News: Merton were all very inoffensive in pastel - UGH! Over at St John’s, Captain Devine-Stoneman and Hazell The Vet clearly decided the final meant turning it up a notch, and by turning it up a notch I mean throwing on the only shirt, jacket and tie in their respective wardrobes. Someone get the Queer Eye quintet on those boys! Thankfully, St John’s McKeown was sporting a pillar-box red shirt, which transpired, at the trophy-giving, to be a perfectly exquisite dress.

Cult Hero Of The Episode: Ahhh, Merton. I confess I totally expected these bruvs to win. Peplow as usual was quick off the mark, before Captain Woodland did her thing, answering a slew of bonuses and brushing off Wiberg’s feeble attempts to help her at probability. I adored her delicately blinking ‘oh...’ if the team’s guess was incorrect. But alas! They crashed in incorrectly several times, Woodland included, and St John’s began to pick up their game.

McKeown stretched her arms, sat up a little straighter, and started casually tossing out starter question answers like they were orders of drinks at a bar: ‘Danse Macabre’; 'corpuscles’; ‘ontological’; ‘snail’; as well as rattling off a line of a Marvell ode. Sure, the bromance of Devine-Stoneman and Hazell teamed up for some bonuses on organic compounds and spectroscopies, but without McKeown, they would have been nothing. All hail our leader!

Handsome Person of the Episode: I preferred Hazell with the beard and jumper. Rosie McKeown, you are glorious in all ways and I bow before you.

Horror Round: ‘Three bonuses on the ineffable, Merton.’

Dream Bonus Question Round: I am beyond proud that I got 3 out of 4 in the critical theorists word-cloud round (Derrida, Judith Butler and Foucault).

Regular Classical Fail By Composition PhD-owning Composer, Kerry Andrew: University Challenge have been pleasingly notable on featuring female musicians this year, have you noticed? So rejoice! The subject of this bonus round is on music conducted by Marin Alsop in the BBC Proms. Commiserate! They are all from operas. I spent the whole time going ‘Rule Britannia is from AN OPERA???’ Also, I didn’t get the Handel.

Speaking of female musicians…

Trophy Presentation Bonus Feature: Oh. My. God. I’d had my money on Mary Beard presenting it this year, but UniChall went one better, with Master of the Queen’s Music and all-round composer legend, Judith Weir. I can tell you from personal experience that Judith is the most gorgeously humble and splendid person, and it was sooo cool to see her on there. 

Judith Weir fun anecdote #1: I played a set at my birthday party recently under the DJ name Judith Weird.

Judith Weir fun anecdote #2: she has done tutorials at the composition summer school where I teach. My staff and I prepped our students for her impending arrival by singing the words ‘JUDITH WEIR IS HERE’ over and over to the tune of the national anthem in choral harmony and with a piano part, not realising that she was standing at the door. 

Jezza Watch: There he was, swapping awkward pleasantries with Dame Judith, as if both of them were at a party but really wanted to be at home with a Horlicks and the last few episodes of Breaking Bad. ‘It’s amazing what people know, isn’t it?’ he said, affably, which is quite an about-turn from barking meanly at everyone for not knowing about macroscopic particles, like he normally does.

Kerry and Andy’s Score: 15! Not bad, given the excitement. I got 9, because I know about Turkish wars, American poets and early English kings, y’all.

Brain Food: Andy’s birthday! We went out for a stonkingly good Sri Lankan curry in Tooting (ask for the green banana bhajis at Apollo Banana Leaf).

I’ll leave you with an après-series photo of these bad boys (by which I mostly mean GIRL), with the bonus of Hazell’s beard being back. Note Levin’s unyielding polo-neck/jacket combo.

Tweets of the Day:

Please feel free to share, retweet, etc, and tell me if you’ve enjoyed reading. I’m mostly a musician but a writer now too, and every little helps. Look! I wrote a novel which has recently been published!

[royallypsychotic]

Christian Dior Purse Photographs And Premium High Res Footage

Apparently, in 1995, France’s then First Lady Bernadette Chirac, gifted Lady Diana with the latest creation from the House of Dior. The Lady Dior was first introduced in 1994 beneath the inventive course of Christian Dior’s successor, Gianfranco Ferré. Initially, the bag was nicknamed Chouchou – French for “the favourite” – and was only renamed a yr after its first launch. wikipedia Harry Archer is an editorial assistant at Editorialist engaged on trend, beauty, and every thing in between. A recent graduate from The London College of Fashion, he has interned at Esquire, the Gay Times, and Attitude magazine. When he is not invested in pop culture, you'll discover him engrossed in a book, working from natural choice, or doing a red wine rendition of Can't Fight the Moonlight from the critically acclaimed movie Coyote Ugly. The bag was first launched in 1994 by then-creative director Gianfranco Ferré, and the style was famously beloved by Princess Diana, who was gifted the accessory by France’s First Lady, Bernadette Chirac, in 1995. Ferraro has posted tons of photographs prior to now few weeks with Dior luggage, backstage, and in full make-up and clothes from the brand, and nearly every time has captioned the picture with #ad, and even credited the photographer. In any case, the folks chosen to promote the Saddle Bag 2.zero all have one thing in common. The reimagined version of the classic Lady Dior purse was the second collaboration between Chicago and Dior Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri. Another one of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s creations for Dior, the Dioevolution Bag proved that trend is all concerning the revolution. First launched in Dior’s Spring/Summer 2017 collection and discontinued by 2020, the Dior Dioevolution Bag was created to make a daring trend statement. The Caro flap bag additionally features the brand’s “CD” emblem with a twist clasp while Dior’s tackle “30 Montaigne” is embossed on the again. A detachable chain-link strap enhances the handbag that is out there in two sizes and multiple shades such as mint green, rose, and black. Although the basic hobo silhouette bag was initially created in the Nineteen Fifties, the bag's declare to fame skyrocketed when Kennedy touted the bag around. Clean lines and a classic shape are delivered to the fore and the reversible flap lends it a bold character that appeals to Dior’s trendy feminine viewers. Available in three sizes and various colourways, there's a Diorever bag to go well with to each mood and magnificence. He has now been replaced by Belgian designer Raf Simons, former inventive director with the Jil Sander trend house, who's honoured to be responsible for probably the most elegant and famous French brand on the planet. On the contrary, with greater than 230 outlets worldwide, it is doubtless considered one of the main manufacturers in the luxurious market. Dior Couture posted half-yearly turnover of 632 million euros on 31 October 2012, up 26% compared with the identical period in 2011. Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri, as an example, has been mining the legacy of not solely Monsieur Christian Dior himself, but additionally his successors, among them John Galliano, whose saddlebag debuted in 2000 to instant success. Of course, Kardashian West is not one to let her possessions collect mud. Given her love of wearable art—remember that George Condo–painted Haut à Courroies she wore back in 2013? — it was only a matter of time earlier than she paired her saddlebag with a coordinated outfit. Today, the Birkin bag is stored at a high stage of exclusivity by the model. Due to their low production quantity, the Birkin is considered an funding piece, increasing in value round 14.2 percent every year from 1980 to 2015. The bag is remodeled a number of days using the corporate's signature saddle sew in different hardware finishes and skins from numerous tanneries. One reviewer describes this Marc Jacobs bag as “attractive, elegant and sophisticated” for its vibrant colors and enjoyable strap that will get you plenty of compliments for certain. This would be an excellent option for somebody who has never had a designer bag before or doesn’t need to drop too many cash. CNN Underscored is your guide to the everyday services and products that allow you to live a better, simpler and more fulfilling life. Referencing brand muses, the brand new assortment is all about Versace necessities for the women and men of today. Get the most effective offers on dior bucket bags and save as a lot as 70% off at Poshmark now! Buy second-hand classic Dior Clutch bags for Women on Vestiaire Collective. There are at all times more decadent versions available out there; the Christian Dior 2017 John Giorno Lady Dior Medium Handbag went upto US$4500 (Rs 3.5 lakhs). As a half of Art Basel Miami, Dior collaborates with a quantity of artists from everywhere in the globe and unveils a line of artistic Lady Dior bags with the starting price of US$5000 , going up to US$14,000 . Ultra chic and with beautifulcraftsmanship, the bag has survived an evolving market for almost 25 years and grown beneath six inventive directors. Forged with craftsmanship, expertise, and technical innovation, this special edition assortment includes a recent take on a handful of a few of the most sought after RIMOWA designs. Do you realize if the miss dior promenade clutch pouch is discontinued? I can't find it on the Dior website and I would like to buy it whereas in paris at one of many boutiques. One of Dior’s most popular purses so far, the Dior Miss Dior has been discontinued in 2016. First released in 2011, the Miss Dior Bag featured the signature Dior Cannage quilting on the outside, together with a press lock closure and a series hyperlink shoulder strap. In reality, over the years, Dior has released and discontinued many luggage. And that’s a disgrace, because some of those kinds had been really lovely. Today, I want to make a journey into the Dior archives and remember a variety of the recently discontinued Dior handbags. For followers of the chic Lady Dior bag and the traditional St Honoré tote – two quintessential Dior high deal with types – should contemplate this new boxy companion with discreet gold hardware a more bookish addition to the household. When Tom Ford was appointed director of Gucci in 1994, Ford positioned the label on the forefront of style, fully reviving the model with a sense of modern glamour. From 1999 to 2000, Gucci relaunched the Jackie bag in a collection of new colors and leathers, together with pythons and metallics to the tune of Ford's new look for the model. Current inventive director Alessandro Michele selected to revive the Jackie in his own whimsical methods for Gucci's Cruse 2019 collection in a collaboration with famed Los Angeles lodge, the Chateau Marmont. Dior Blue Indirect Jacquard Shirt Replica "Due to the poor high quality of workmanship, incorrect packaging, and former experience with comparable products, officers decided the footwear were not genuine gadgets," said the CBP. I appreciate it lots been wanting to buy them for myself too. What I learned from purchasing this counter replica baggage is to rigorously evaluation the written reviews of shoppers, it helps lots. The parallels in between automobiles and watchmaking factor a depth and wide selection that Chopard has lengthy been continually discovering for several yrs designer watches . It moved there in June 2014, when Pure Nightclub underwent an expansion and annexed its area. As of December 2015 it incorporates 16 tables with free Wi-Fi and USB charging ports. The authentic resort tower had 680 rooms, and each featured a room with one wall which was absolutely mirrored from floor to ceiling. The hotel featured an 800-seat theatre restaurant and three public dining areas, two health clubs, an epicurean room, a convention corridor of as a lot as 2000 folks and 20 separate halls and committee rooms, accommodating up to 5000 people in total. Today, I wish to suggest some necessary accessories for men who like wearing completely different suits and shirts, greatest replica Christian Dior cufflinks, lets take a view together. This could be the take pleasure in manufacturing plant distinctive notion. Presented in a 41mm chrome steel case and bracelet, the surface of the Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra Pyeonchang 2018 Limited Edition AAA Replica Watches replica watch alternates brushed and polished finishes. On the caseback, a sapphire crystal glass with the official Olympic emblem reveals the motion. The Omega Replica Watches Seamaster Aqua Terra Pyeonchang 2018 Limited Edition replica watch is waterproof to 150 metres, in line with the collection’s origins as a dive watch. High winds blew over the water causing not only surfable products from the bigger manufacturers. A weaker mainstream trade unable to capture the hearts and minds of consumers is unlikely to breed too many people who then go on to need the expertise of a high-end unbiased model. Although how a lot are breitling watches replica tiger woods tag heuer watch replica the Millenary models are attention-grabbing, they are considerably lost in light of the popularity of the Royal Oak. When designing a mechanical replica watches with box work for a skeleton watch, care is taken to make certain that the bridge type can all the time be transferred to the board as well. European and American luxurious Dior bag market slowdown, new markets in Europe and China began to become luxury Dior bag. replica Dior bag satisfying folks's vainness, due to this fact, although the old luggage some big cash, the brand new bag is eclipsing price, it's troublesome to make individuals want to drop a little. Dior bag price is remind individuals of the vanity of the first cause. Dior bag purses are always geared to the European and American stars. Woman Dior Bag Authentic Vs Fake Information 2021 So on the time, the Oblique canvas of the Oblique canvas was additionally a modern and retro bag. The hardware should be well-affixed and sound and it has two small engravings within the inner aspect. Another essential thing is the printing on the bottom of the leather of charms. In the original Lady Dior bag is written Christian Dior, whereas in the faux one usually is written “Christian Dior” Paris made in Italy. Later, after being improved, the style of the saddle bag grew to become smaller and smaller, the leather grew to become increasingly stiff, and it was lovely and sensible to be placed on the horseback. The Lady Dior bag is a iconic purse of the Dior household. Everyone from fashionistas to royals have been noticed with their timeless basic pieces. This bag is just offered in Dior boutiques which is harder to buy or to get one. I am a big fan of lv and ysl, i have many genuine bag. When i open the package deal, very nice replica only a precisely the same compared to the actual thing. It did not come with a field or receipt but definitely may cross for the real factor. depurses dior LVbag great dimension to suit plenty of issues inside, customer support may be very professional and affected person, resolve any of my questions. Quality is above common, that a extremely good imitation, only critique can be this one had a scent nevertheless the other one i ordered didn't. I’ve use this seller multiple instances & they’re at all times nice. Lady Dior handbag bag printed with the model iconic cannage sample, and Diorrismo handbag is not any modification of the sleek leather-based. When turning to the pre-loved market, its essential to learn not simply concerning the seller you’re buying from, however concerning the brand as properly. LOVEthatBAG is my trusted source for pre-loved and vintage designer bags having purchased from them on multiple events, in addition to having the privilege of collaborating with them. An Endless Selection of Perfect Replica Designer Handbags. Unlike different companies, we provide a wide selection of designer purse faux brand replicas. Regardless, in case you are in search of a Givenchy replica purse, a Louis Vuitton or Christian Dior designer copy, we now have it in inventory. Gucci Replica Handbags are simple to gather, replace, and perfect for feeding the shopaholic's bag cravings. Furniture › Designer Replicas › Replica Designer Chairs. The design of CHRISTIAN DIOR PRE-OWNED Lady Dior Cannage 32 Mini Tote Bag is straightforward and stylish, simple square bag kind, with none extra decoration, just hanging the four-letter metallic pendant on the deal with. This is the superior custom spirit that Dior brings to us, exposing traditional luxurious in simplicity. Princess Diana’s favorite black leather day bag is both practical and aesthetic, and can additionally be Lady Dior’s original type. The diamond-shaped grid above is a novel image of Replica Dior Bags products.

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Current Ham Radio News

                                     Current ham radio news                                  

                 EA1BP will be active as ED8W from Canary Islands, in ARRL DX SSB Contest, 6 - 7 March 2021.

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March 02, 2021 at 10:09AM

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Current ham radio news                                  

                 Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Mark Hirst, who shares the following guest post: Using the Yaesu FT-891 for SWLing by Mark Hirst Introduction While I have a small collection of portable shortwave radios for outdoor listening, I’ve been looking to fill a gap in my amateur radio lineup for a while. Outdoor operation has […]

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March 02, 2021 at 10:09AM

           via RSS Feed            https://swling.com/blog/2021/03/guest-post-marks-review-of-the-yaesu-ft-891-as-shortwave-broadcast-receiver/          

                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Current ham radio news                                  

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March 02, 2021 at 10:09AM

           via RSS Feed            http://www.arrl.org/news/view/moldova-peace-corps-to-sponsor-march-3-amateur-radio-on-the-international-space-station-contact          

                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Current ham radio news                                  

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March 02, 2021 at 10:09AM

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Current ham radio news                                  

Following info is provided by Mats, RM2D / SM6LRR on his upcoming activity from Alif Alif Atoll, Maldives. My next planned operation will be March 28th – April 10th 2021. Holiday-style DX operation on mainly 40-15 meters CW, but with some SSB as well. Main bands of operation this time are thought to be 40-15 […]

The post

8Q7MS – Maldives

first appeared on

DX-World

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March 02, 2021 at 12:09PM

           via RSS Feed            https://www.dx-world.net/8q7ms-maldives/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=8q7ms-maldives          

                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Current ham radio news                                  

The winning article for the February 2021 QST Cover Plaque award is “Create Your Own 1:1 Coax Choke Balun,” by John Portune, W6NBC.

The QST Cover Plaque Award — given to the author or authors of the most popular article in each issue — is determined by a vote of ARRL members on the QST Cover Plaque Poll web page. Cast a ballot for your favorite article today!

Antenna

3D Print – 3 element 2m (145 MHz) Ultra Portable yagi

May 26, 2015

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3D Print – 3 element 2m (145 MHz) Ultra Portable yagi by OK1CDJ Description Tape measurement yagi. Weight only 170 g. The longest part is 530 mm... Read more

Building the 6 Meter Moxon Antenna

February 10, 2015

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Building the 6 Meter Moxon Antenna As the late spring and summer months heat up, six meters comes alive. Known as the Magic Band, the six meter band c... Read more

Ham Radio EMP Kit, The Tactical Trash Can

August 31, 2020

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“Many believe the worst threat to our electronics is being damaged by an Electromagnetic Pulse. Today I show you how to prevent that damage and... Read more

Jim W6LG Shows How He Connects 2 HF Antennas at the Same Time

December 19, 2017

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JIm, W6LG shows how he recently used 2 off the shelf coax switches to connect 2 antennas to his transceiver at the same time. This simple solution rep... Read more

4-Band OCF Antenna 40, 20, 10, and 6 meters

March 05, 2015

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 4-Band antennas cover 40, 20, 10, and 6 meters, with no tuner required! 12 meters may also work on the 4-Band 300 watt model. The 4-Band antenn... Read more

Review

First Look at the new Yaesu FTDX-101D – DXEngineering

April 18, 2019

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Yaesu FTDX-101D Announced features for incredible Yaesu FTdx-101D include: * Elite-Level 160 to 6 Meters 100 Watt Transceiver * Superb and astonishing... Read more

MFJ 4230 DMP 30A Power Supply with Powerpole connectors

December 16, 2019

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The ⁦Lab599⁩ TX-500 memory keyer in action!

August 19, 2020

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https://twitter.com/SWLingDotCom/status/1296134848403267585 Read more

Top 6 Tips For Digital HF , WSJT-X, FT8, JS8CALL

May 21, 2020

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Unboxing and Testing the BaofengTech UV-5X3 Triband HT

October 11, 2016

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BaofengTech has released a model called the UV-5X3, which is a Triband HT, including the 220MHz band. Let’s take a look at this radio, see how t... Read more

Equipment

K44 CW Keyer & Reader w/Keyboard I/F by K1EL

March 09, 2019

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The K44 is the Swiss Army knife of CW keyers. A CW keyboard interface, CW reader, iambic paddle keyer, backlit LCD display, and optically isolated key... Read more

HF-One MKII – 30Khz to 30MHz – QRP

April 23, 2016

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New ! Yaesu FT-410

August 27, 2015

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YAESU FT-410 features General   Rx Frequency Range: 30 kHz – 30 MHz (operating) 160 – 10 m (specified performance, Amateur bands only) Tx Frequency Ra... Read more

Compact Power Supply for Elecraft Radios

April 30, 2015

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 Description The SS-30DV is designed to supply 25 Amps continuous (up to 5 minutes) and 30 Amps surge at 14.1 VDC. It is the perfect companion s... Read more

Works with Flex Radio

December 15, 2018

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Applications that work seamlessly with your Flex Radio. Any comments can be sent to the Flex Community  FlexRadio Mestro Flexradio Power Amp. 1.5KW   Read more

News

Moldova Peace Corps to Sponsor March 3 Amateur Radio on the International Space Station Contact

March 02, 2021

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An Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) contact between youngsters and youth in Moldova and an International Space Station (ISS) c... Read more

John Portune, W6NBC, Wins the February 2021 QST Cover Plaque Award

March 02, 2021

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The winning article for the February 2021 QST Cover Plaque award is “Create Your Own 1:1 Coax Choke Balun,” by John Portune, W6NBC. The... Read more

ARRL Interview Explains Background of Ham Radio in Space Film Short

February 25, 2021

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Josh Tanner, the Australian filmmaker who produced the thriller Decommissioned  by Perception Pictures, has explained how he came up with the idea to... Read more

Amateur Radio Helping to Fill Earthquake Report “Donut Holes”

February 25, 2021

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An article describing how radio amateurs can help fill the information “donut hole” by providing post-earthquake “did you feel it” (DYFI) reports via ... Read more

Mystery Box! ARRL Expo At Home Surprise Pack

February 25, 2021

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The ARRL offered surprise boxes as part of their ‘Expo at Home’ for the 2021 Orlando Hamcation. I ordered a mystery apparel pack and a mys... Read more

The post John Portune, W6NBC, Wins the February 2021 QST Cover Plaque Award appeared first on QRZ NOW - Ham Radio News.

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March 02, 2021 at 03:09PM

           via RSS Feed            https://qrznow.com/john-portune-w6nbc-wins-the-february-2021-qst-cover-plaque-award/          

                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Current ham radio news                                  

An Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) contact between youngsters and youth in Moldova and an International Space Station (ISS) crew member is set for March 3. The Moldova Peace Corps (MPC) is the hosting organization, and 90 students (aged 10 – 18) from a consortium of educational institutions, rural schools, and libraries from nine Moldovan villages will participate.

MPC promotes economic and civic development with a particular focus on developing local resources in rural and suburban communities. Another focus of MPC is to provide youth in Moldovan villages with access to STEM opportunities and build capacity among local teachers/librarians to implement STEM activities in their curricula.

During the multipoint telebridge contact, students will take turns asking questions of astronaut Mike Hopkins, KF5LJG. ARISS team member David Payne, NA7V, in Oregon will serve as the relay amateur radio station.

In support of this contact, the MPC partnered with the staff at the Centre of Excellence for Space Sciences and Technologies within the Technical University of Moldova (UTM), the US Peace Corps Volunteer Coordinator, and the participating schools and libraries. The contact will be livestreamed via the MPC and UTM Facebook pages.

SOURCE:ARRL

Antenna

Universal DIY Carbon VHF Yagi Antenna

February 15, 2017

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 by:Jenny List “If you’ve ever cast your eye towards the rooftops, you’ll be familiar with the Yagi antenna. A dipole radiator with a refl... Read more

“KBG” Short Dipole Antenna

May 19, 2015

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     Short Dipole Antenna No, it is not a KGB antenna, even though it’s overall length makes it a stealthy antenna: 1m8 for the... Read more

KT36XA – M2 Antenna – TriBand 10/15/20m

August 25, 2015

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The M2 KT36XA is the result of many hours spent on perfecting the original KLM KT-34XA through computer optimization confirmed by range and actual on-... Read more

Build your own Roll Up Slim Jim Antenna for the 2 Meter Ham Radio Band.

December 08, 2020

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Build your own Roll Up Slim Jim Antenna for the 2 Meter Ham Radio Band. Read more

Installation of New 3 El for 80 meters in LZ5R

September 07, 2018

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MILARA CONTEST CLUB LZ1KFM / LZ5R Read more

Review

Impedance, Basic Description For Ham Radio With Jim Heath W6LG YouTube Elmer

June 11, 2020

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Read more

Review of QRP Labs QCX QRP Radio

November 30, 2017

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“Unboxing, building and using the QRP Labs QCX single-band, 5-watt QRP radio. This advanced technology radio borrows ideas from software-defined... Read more

Yaesu FT 817 – CAT, CW decoder, waterfall, frequency readout, audio filter and audio recording.

April 29, 2019

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What this lad has done with this screen for the 817 is astounding. CAT, CW decoder, waterfall, frequency readout, audio filter and audio recording. Wh... Read more

ELAD FDM-DUO SDR QRP Quick Tour and Review

August 30, 2017

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FDM-DUO is a SDR tranceiver that offers the possibility to operate STand-alone like traditional radio or attached to a Personal Computer discovering t... Read more

What is a Ham Radio Hotspot | Digital Voice Ham Radio

September 03, 2020

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Ham Radio Hotspot Read more

Equipment

Radioddity Raddy RW3 Go-Kit-Type Radio AM/FM/WX, Phone Charger and More

February 22, 2021

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Radioddity Raddy RW3 Go-Kit-Type Radio AM/FM/WX, Phone Charger and More [Small Size But All-Purpose] Unlike other FM/AM/NOAA radios, the RW3 is a Blue... Read more

FlexRadio Systems Maestro

September 18, 2017

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The FlexRadio Maestro is an intuitive, plug-and-play control console that directs the operation of any FLEX-6000 Signature Series transceiver without... Read more

DR4020 Dual band Digital QRP radio

September 17, 2019

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A simple QRP digital transceiver.          — Fully assembled and tested– Perfect for outdoor digital radio contacts,such as FT8,FT4,JT65 etc. Band: 20... Read more

The new Silphase R1 SDR receiver

July 27, 2020

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Frequency coverage RX 0.1–30MHz Frequency resolution 1Hz Dial step 1Hz to 1KHz Dual VFO Direct sampling 16bit high speed 122 M/s ADC Mode CW, SSB, AM,... Read more

Icom PoC Full Duplex Radio System, Nationwide Coverage Over 4G / LTE Mobile Phone Network

July 30, 2018

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Icom’s new PoC (Push-to-Talk Over Cellular) radio system allows you to communicate with your two-way radio system over a 4G / LTE closed network. Now... Read more

News

Moldova Peace Corps to Sponsor March 3 Amateur Radio on the International Space Station Contact

March 02, 2021

No comments

An Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) contact between youngsters and youth in Moldova and an International Space Station (ISS) c... Read more

John Portune, W6NBC, Wins the February 2021 QST Cover Plaque Award

March 02, 2021

No comments

The winning article for the February 2021 QST Cover Plaque award is “Create Your Own 1:1 Coax Choke Balun,” by John Portune, W6NBC. The... Read more

ARRL Interview Explains Background of Ham Radio in Space Film Short

February 25, 2021

No comments

Josh Tanner, the Australian filmmaker who produced the thriller Decommissioned  by Perception Pictures, has explained how he came up with the idea to... Read more

Amateur Radio Helping to Fill Earthquake Report “Donut Holes”

February 25, 2021

No comments

An article describing how radio amateurs can help fill the information “donut hole” by providing post-earthquake “did you feel it” (DYFI) reports via ... Read more

Mystery Box! ARRL Expo At Home Surprise Pack

February 25, 2021

No comments

The ARRL offered surprise boxes as part of their ‘Expo at Home’ for the 2021 Orlando Hamcation. I ordered a mystery apparel pack and a mys... Read more

The post Moldova Peace Corps to Sponsor March 3 Amateur Radio on the International Space Station Contact appeared first on QRZ NOW - Ham Radio News.

via Current ham radio news

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March 02, 2021 at 03:09PM

           via RSS Feed            https://qrznow.com/moldova-peace-corps-to-sponsor-march-3-amateur-radio-on-the-international-space-station-contact/          

                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Current ham radio news                                  

Baofeng UV-9R TP 18-watt HT Ham Radio Unboxing and power testing – let’s see if this 18-watt HT does what it is advertised to do!

Antenna

What’s In The Box? DX Commander All Band Vertical

April 04, 2019

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HexBeam SP7IDX Technology assembly

April 15, 2020

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OB9-2WARC 9 Element Duoband Yagi

December 16, 2014

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 OB9-2WARC (new optimized version)   9 Element Duoband Yagi 17-12m       Bands   17 / 12 Gain (dbd)*   7,6 / 8,4 Gain (dbi)**   15,1 / 16,1 F/B... Read more

HF RX SWL Antenna For Small Spaces And Apartments RTL SDR

March 14, 2020

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This antenna has internal loaded wire traps to act as a great alternative to a long wire. Ideal for those who want to listen to shortwave but have lim... Read more

The Random Wire Double Zepp Antenna

April 01, 2016

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Dipoles fed with an open wire line are called “Double-Zepp” or “Doublet”. The dipole (2 x Xm) may have any length, the open wi... Read more

Review

Power Line Noise On Your Ham Radio? How To Find AND Get it Fixed

October 16, 2020

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Power Line Noise On Your Ham Radio? How To Find AND Get it Fixed Read more

NEW Icom IC-705 Unboxing from the Guv’nor

July 31, 2020

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Read more

Tools for Every Ham [ ARRL PODCAST ]

September 14, 2018

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The Doctor discusses basic tools that every amateur should have in his or her station.    Read more

Icom IC-7851 Transceiver – ARRL Review – QST

October 11, 2016

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Contesters and DXers are always looking for that competitive edge to magically pull out the weak signal that is either the rare country or multiplier... Read more

DV4home New Software – DMR / D-Star crossmode, C4FM, Brandmeister, IPCS2 added

January 30, 2017

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“I’m currently testing a new software for the DV4home. The modifications included, the DMR+ complete masters list, the Brandmeister reflec... Read more

Equipment

QCX-mini is coming soon!

November 11, 2020

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QCX-mini is a response to quite a few comments on the new QCX+ kit, from people who want to take it out portable for SOTA operations and other po... Read more

PALSTAR LA1K – 1000 watt RF Sensing Amplifier

November 06, 2017

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FCC approval pending. Not yet available for sale. The new LA-1K 1000 watt RF Sensing Amplifier. While the LA-1K will work with a wide variety of tuner... Read more

The ACOM 3x2000A

May 20, 2015

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 The ACOM 3x2000A The ACOM 3x2000A is a HF power splitter / combiner which is a passive device designed to sum the outputs of three HF linear am... Read more

openSPOT3 introduction [ VIDEO ]

March 19, 2020

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Home » openSPOT3 ••••••••• The openSPOT3 is a battery powered, portable, standalone digital radio internet gateway (hotspot) designed mainly for amate... Read more

DC9DZ: Project Tsunami 40K – Power Amplifier (PA) using 4CX15000AA

February 19, 2015

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Data of DRESSLER Tsunami-40K RF Linear Amplifier Frequency bands all HF amateur bands 1.8 MHz to 29.7 MHz Power supply 3 power supply transformers 200... Read more

News

Moldova Peace Corps to Sponsor March 3 Amateur Radio on the International Space Station Contact

March 02, 2021

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An Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) contact between youngsters and youth in Moldova and an International Space Station (ISS) c... Read more

John Portune, W6NBC, Wins the February 2021 QST Cover Plaque Award

March 02, 2021

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The winning article for the February 2021 QST Cover Plaque award is “Create Your Own 1:1 Coax Choke Balun,” by John Portune, W6NBC. The... Read more

ARRL Interview Explains Background of Ham Radio in Space Film Short

February 25, 2021

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Josh Tanner, the Australian filmmaker who produced the thriller Decommissioned  by Perception Pictures, has explained how he came up with the idea to... Read more

Amateur Radio Helping to Fill Earthquake Report “Donut Holes”

February 25, 2021

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An article describing how radio amateurs can help fill the information “donut hole” by providing post-earthquake “did you feel it” (DYFI) reports via ... Read more

Mystery Box! ARRL Expo At Home Surprise Pack

February 25, 2021

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The ARRL offered surprise boxes as part of their ‘Expo at Home’ for the 2021 Orlando Hamcation. I ordered a mystery apparel pack and a mys... Read more

The post Baofeng UV-9R TP 18-watt Power Testing | UV9R Plus HT appeared first on QRZ NOW - Ham Radio News.

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March 02, 2021 at 03:09PM

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                 Mats, RM2D will be active as 8Q7MS from Ukulhas Island, Alifu Alifu Atoll, Maldive Islands, IOTA AS - 013, 28 March - 10 April 2021.

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March 02, 2021 at 03:09PM

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Current ham radio news                                  

NEWS UPDATE – Tom is now on the island as of February 28. His equipment is still to arrive. QRV thereafter. LoTW is ready. COPYING & USE OF TEXT ON DX-WORLD   JANUARY 17, 2021 – Starting mid-February 2021 (lasting 90 days), Tom is returning to Wake Island. Activity again expected on 40 / 20m […]

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[UPDATE] KH9/NL7RR – Wake Island

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March 02, 2021 at 11:09PM

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Current ham radio news                                  

This info recently appeared on QRZ.com My name is Joanna. I’m very new to the ham radio family. Please be patient when you hear me. I recently finished at Jagielonica Law University in Krakow, Poland. I am a living rebel, so I joined forces with Rebel Dx Group. My plan is to be active from […]

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3D2ZK – Fiji

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March 02, 2021 at 11:09PM

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Current ham radio news                                  

                 From the Isle of Music, March 7-13: This week we enjoy several new and recent releases on the EGREM label. The broadcasts take place: 1. For Eastern Europe but audible well beyond the target area in most of the Eastern Hemisphere (including parts of East Asia and Oceania) with 100Kw, Sunday 1500-1600 UTC on SpaceLine, […]

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March 02, 2021 at 11:09PM

           via RSS Feed            https://swling.com/blog/2021/03/ftiom-ubmp-march-7-13/          

                                                             Manage                                                  

[berniesrevolution]

What is the most reprehensible innovation human beings have yet produced? The atom bomb seems the leading contender, but I’d posit that the vertical airplane seat is a close second. Airbus came up with this idea in 2003, and since then multiple budget airlines have flirted with it. To call it a “seat” is to stretch that word’s meaning to its limit: it is, essentially, a padded board at an 85 degree angle, to which a passenger is strapped for the duration of a flight. It was devised as a way to store even more humans in a coach cabin, and makes the inside of a sardine tin look comparatively roomy and luxurious.

Budget airline VivaColombia is the latest to look into “standing-room flights,” with the company’s CEO telling the Miami Herald this summer that “There are people out there right now researching whether you can fly standing up. We’re very interested in anything that makes travel less expensive.” They haven’t done it yet, in part because it would be illegal. But it’s disturbing enough that such a concept could even cross people’s minds in the first place.

And there are even those who believe that reacting negatively to the “standing seat” proposal is irrational. As one commentator sarcastically put it: “Consumers are outraged at the possibility of getting a completely optional extra choice in the comfort vs. price tradeoff.” If before the introduction of standing seats, you could only choose to take a seated flight at a cost of $150, and now you can choose to take a $150 seated flight or a $100 standing flight, how can you possibly object? You literally have more options now. Nobody is making you stand up, they are merely offering you an opportunity to save some money. It’s the same response given to people who grumble about Spirit Airlines’ carry-on fee or atrocious customer service: well, you’re the one who decided to fly Spirit instead of a normal airline. You’re being given the widest possible range of “tradeoffs” (high comfort, high price versus low comfort, low price) so that every different individual consumer preference can be satisfied as much as possible, and yet you complain.

This is how a lot of libertarian or free-market arguments go, actually: the market offers you a range of goods and you decide what you want based on what you value. If my croquet partner and I go shopping for new mallets, I might buy the simple, utilitarian Uber Games Family-Style Mallet for $59.95, which Amazon reviewers call “nice but faulty” and give a middling 3 stars. On the other hand, my partner, Torvald, is more serious about croquet: he might spring for the $375 Airrow Professional Mallet with white maple inlay, wood box-beam AirGrip Shaft, and brass end-weighting. Torvald and I simply have different hierarchies of preferences: I prefer not to waste my money on frivolous nonsense, while Torvald enjoys croquet. I might take the money I save from opting for the cheaper mallet and use it to buy something I find more worthwhile, like this Victorian-era French tulip-shaped lampshade with “Cottage Rose”-colored fringed tassels and 6 inch dangling beads. Capitalism affords us an endless range of choices and we can each customize our lifestyle to optimize our happiness. When people make choices, they simply demonstrate which goods they value more than other goods.

The incredible glaringly obvious problem with this conclusion, of course, is that not everybody has the same amount of money. If two well-off people are deciding how much of their wealth to spend on croquet equipment versus lampshades, it may hold true. But in reality, a grossly unequal distribution of wealth, with some people very rich and others very poor, will make it impossible to say that people’s market choices reflect “how much they value” something. Some economists, when making the case that price gouging is Actually A Good Thing, say that allowing the price of goods to be determined by the market will cause them to end up in the hands of people who value them the most. But that’s obviously false: if I’m wealthy, I could buy up all the bottled water after a storm, even if it’s incredibly expensive and I have no real need for it. Whereas for a person without money, it doesn’t matter how much they “value” a thing, or desperately need it: they’re not going to get it if the free market is the one deciding how goods are allocated.  It’s honestly kind of astonishing that there are people who can still talk about “choice” in the free market without mentioning that you can only buy things you can afford.

Just look at the ridiculous new “Everyday Objects” collection from Tiffany and Co. Because the Trump era has collapsed the line between reality and parody, Tiffany is now selling absurdly expensive luxury versions of the most mundane imaginable household items: a $425 sterling silver protractor, a $1000 tin can, a $350 gold vermeil crazy straw, a $9000 ball of silver yarn, etc. However much I may wish I could drink my whisky from a Tiffany fish-shaped flask, I don’t have the $2000 necessary to buy one. My colleague Dr. Moneybuckets, on the other hand, might have only the mildest possible interest in acquiring the Everyday Objects range. But because he has, as the name implies, buckets of money, he could easily decide that he would find it moderately amusing to buy a set of sterling silver Tiffany-branded Lego pieces and throw them in a storm drain before my eyes, knowing how much I wanted them. (See, e.g. the Cambridge University conservatives who laughed about burning money in front of the homeless.)

This is crucial to understanding why “extra choices” can make people upset, even though none of their previously-existing options have been taken away. Say I am a landlord in a poor neighborhood. And I decide I am feeling generous, so I say to my tenants: next month, you can either pay the usual $500 a month, or you can pay $200 and allow me to pee on your furniture. When you get upset at my offer, I become indignant: “How can you complain? I’m not making you do anything. I’m just offering you another tradeoff that you didn’t have before.” It is, just as the VivaColombia CEO said, less expensive, and less expensive is better for the consumer!

(Continue Reading)

[aceadmiral]

Spring 2018 Asexual Scholarship Call for Applications

(See the 2018 Solicitation Schedule in AAW) | Twitter | ASPeN

Who is eligible?

Any ace or grace in any form of school or training in Spring 2018 (Fall 2018 for our friends in the Southern Hemisphere)

What is the scholarship?

$500 (USD) to use towards tuition, program costs, and/or books

How do I apply?

Fill out this application form by October 2, 2017. The essay prompt is: What’s something the community does not have now that you’d like to see built in the future? Is there a need you see that is not currently being met? What about something you've seen done in other communities? Is there any way to build on existing institutions to broaden its reach or effectiveness? (Any suggestions to build on the scholarship itself will certainly be considered!)

I want to apply!

Good, click this Read More to find out the details.

What criteria are you going to be using to determine the awardee?

Mostly, I'm going to be looking at the content of the essay.

How long do you want this essay to be?

As long as you think it needs to be to answer the question and no longer. The selection panel consists of just me, so brevity is your friend. Previous finalist essays have been between 200 and 600 words, and have been written in a semi-formal, friendly style. Examples can be found here.

...So, what do you like to read?

I like to read about people's passion for the things they love, I like to read things that make me ask questions, and I also love to laugh. I am just some loser on the internet with a tumblog, so please do not stand on ceremony with me.

I need more help on the essay.

Feel free to go through the Ace Scholarship tag on my blog. I’ve written a lot about what I’m looking for as a reviewer and a sample essay in the past.

Do I get bonus points if I know you?

Actually, it might count against you... You can use whatever pseudonym you like for the application phase, and I would prefer it if I could be as clueless to your identity as possible.

When will you announce the winner?

By November 1. If you have a program with deadlines that conflict with that, please note it in the "Anything Else" box on the second page of the application.

What if I win?

If you win, then I will contact you by email to get your real name and information and discuss the best way to get the money to you and/or your school. At that time I'm also going to ask to see something verifying your enrollment - acceptance letter, letter from the school, registration confirmation, picture of your classmates carrying you around on their shoulders to congratulate you on winning. If you're not comfortable with this requirement, please do not apply.

How does the payment work?

We send the money directly to the institution both so you don’t have to deal with it and for lots of boring tax reasons. For that reason, the money can only be used to pay an existing bill, which is why we have several solicitations throughout the year

When will you be making the payment?

Depending on how quickly we can coordinate it, within a week of your acceptance of the award. Please note that this scholarship is for people who have tuition bills to pay for Spring 2018 ONLY.

Can I apply if I'm not American?

Yes.

Do I have to apply in English?

You may also apply in Japanese or, if you're feeling particularly lucky, Swedish.

Can I apply if I'm only doing training?

Yes. You do not have to be degree-seeking to qualify.

Can I apply if--?

Are you a student on the asexual spectrum? If yes, then yes.

What if I’m not out and/or can’t be safely contacted through email?

You do not have to be out to apply, but if you do not have an email account that is safe from prying eyes, please note that in the “Anything Else” section of the application, and all correspondence from us will be from my personal account instead.

What if I just don’t want to tell you my real name?

The application is very flexible about how you want to be referred to, and that’s the name we will use for talking to you and about you. It is a requirement, however, that you be willing to provide your legal name for enrollment verification and disbursing purposes if you win--your organization won’t know what to do with a check from us for “AmazingAce66”!

I have a question you didn't answer!

Then please either send me an ask (NOT ANON) or an email at asexualscholarship [at] gmail [dot] com with "Question" in the subject line.

[galaxa-13]

Person here who's barely been on tumblr for a year, asking what the fuck home stuck is and what it did and why it invokes a strange alien fear in me even though I don't know what it is

‘Hoooooooo boy am I glad you asked me. Not because I think I’ll give the best answer, but because I just love talking about Homestuck and how it applies to the internet (and fandom) at large.

O.K., so, first off the simplest explanation of Homestuck is:Homestuck is a webcomic found at mspainadventures.com made by one Andrew Hussie.

Simplest explanation of what it did:Garner a huge fanbase and changed how a lot of people viewed/interacted with fandom.

Simplest explanation of why you’re filled with fear:The fandom has been asleep for a long while, you may have heard whispers of the infamous “homestucks”, suddenly they are everywhere again and those who were around during it’s heyday are worried of things to come (including those that were a part of it).

Now I’m just going to ramble at length. First I’m going to go on about the fandom and then I’ll move on to describing the comic itself. LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT HOMESTUCK.

So as I mentioned earlier the fandom, known as homestucks, is quite infamous. Due to it’s sheer size there were a lot of issues. Some of it being that since there were just so many of us it was hard to go anywhere without running into one. This wasn’t just on the internet either, conventions became so packed with Homestuck cosplayers that convention rules literally changed because of them. Some convention locations no longer allow body paint because too many Homestuck cosplayers didn’t properly (or straight out didn’t) seal their paint and left smudges all over the venue (and people). Photo shoots also became more structured. Before conventions didn’t really get involved with them, people attending set them up and ran them themselves, but there were just too many people dressed as Homestuck characters. They blocked pathways, crowded areas, convention staff needed to start regulating photo shoots even if they were still ran by attendees themselves.

With the size there was also the problem of negative behavior being in more abundance. It’s not that people who like Homestuck are more likely to make bad decisions or be nasty people, there were just more people in general so more of a sample size of events to take note of. Like the afore mentioned body paint. There was also buckets and bike horns. The buckets were a problem because some thought it would be funny to just yell the word or repeat it over and over, which was quite annoying. There was also an incident of people spitting into a bucket and then giving said bucket to Hussie. The horns were noisy, as you can imagine.

There was a lot of porn drawn of Homestuck characters (often known as “homesmut”). Some people are turned off by this since most of the characters in the comic are underage. The argument about porn being drawn of these character is a discussion I’d rather not be having since it is something argued about at quite a length and has often led to really nasty things like doxxing and smear campaigns. The age of the characters wasn’t the only thing people were weirded out by. Tentacles also became a very popular thing within the homesmut community. Gore porn was also pretty common (compared to other fandoms, in my experience), though it wasn’t nearly as big as the “tentabulge”.

Homestucks were ravenously creating fandom content back at its peak. AUs of all kinds were created, just think of a word and add “stuck” on the end and there’s probably a fic for that. Petstuck, Regancystuck, Humanstuck (lots of characters in the comic aren’t human), Zeldastuck, StarTrekStuck, you name it. Homestuck was the AU community. Then there was the cosplay. First, many of the characters had simple designs so it was ridiculously easy to cosplay them, then there was the hoards of characters from which to choose, then there were all the AU variants, and then there were the upd8 cosplays.

Whenever a new page or set of pages was added to the site it was known as an upd8 (or for a really injoke, a papaya) and if a new character or outfit was revealed in such an update then it was a mad race to see who could be the one to cosplay it first. Sometimes you’d find pictures of people in completed cosplays (including styled wigs) within the hour. This even happened at conventions.

Homestucks were everywhere, and they were loud. Many people began to resent them simply for being a thing. Even people who liked the webcomic itself could be cited as fearing/hating the Homestuck fanbase. It became accepted that no one likes homestucks. Then something happened. Homestuck embraced how they were hated. Now I’m not saying they were trying to stick it to the man or anything, homestucks were able to look at all the things they were hated for and go, “yeah, that’s all pretty trash, but I’m still having fun”. It became a thing where you’d see a post bashing Homestuck or the community and you wouldn’t be able to tell if it was a homestuck who wrote it themself or not. “Homestuck trash” is a popular phrase. We’re trash and we’re proud of it. No one hates Homestuck more than homestucks. No one hates homestucks more than homestucks. Yet we’re still one big family.

A couple of years ago 4chan ran a campaign. They were going to inavde tumblr and make all the tumblrites cry and run to their SJW princess mommies. They flooded tags of popular fandoms with horrific images and bashing of their fandoms. People were scared to leave their dashes. Then, 4chan tried to go after the homestucks.

They bashed the comic. They found the most disgusting porn and death art of the characters. Homestucks took one look at that and shrugged. “Yeah, seems about right.” 4chan lost its mind. Why couldn’t they bother this fandom? Nothing they did seemed to work. Other fandoms began to rally behind Homestuck. Maybe they had bashed it themselves before, or they had simply stayed away from it, but now homestucks were the heroes, the wall against this cruelty. Homestucks laughed at 4chan’s pitiful attempts. Eventually 4chan had to throw in the towel, their troll campaign had failed, they just couldn’t outmatch the homestucks.

Along with the horror stories about the fandom in general there was now this. Homestuck couldn’t be taken down by 4chan. The most vile trolls on the internet had no power over them. That in itself was a terrifying thing.

Yet homestucks began to be regarded highly. Partly it was from this event where they were able to stand up to the bullies, partly because the fandom had matured over the years. Many people had grown up. They weren’t the immature children they once were. They set up charity funds, such as the Can Town Project, an organization that donates canned foods to the hungry.

Of course we can’t talk about Homestuck without talking about its creator, Andrew Hussie. Hussie is a strange man, to say the least. He’s been doing webcomics and other online endeavors for years before even starting Homestuck. Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff (SBAHJ), a comic written and drawn to be as terrible as possible while making fun of the “two guys on a couch play video games” style of comic; Problem Sleuth, a noir detective comic full of whacky shenanigans and done like text-based adventure games of old; Whistles: The Starlight Calliope, an unfinished comic about a clown in a dark circus (I really couldn’t begin to properly describe this story without talking about it by itself, but this is about Homestuck and already will be way too long); fancy Santa reviews, sadly I have been unable to find a copy of such reviews; Wizardology graffiti, he simply defaced a copy of a Wizardology book to hilarious effect as a gift to his friend; Olive Garden money, humorous blog posts about how he set out to spend $150 at Olive Garden; I could go on with his zany creations and adventures, but I won’t.

Hussie is a troll. He does things just to mess with people. He has a dark sense of humor and he isn’t above crass humor either. All that and he can weave fantastic tales you could never dream of. He is fairly private and is known to do odd things, which has led the fandom to calling him a real life cryptid. The Hussie experience isn’t really something that can be properly explained, so I’ll just leave you with this gif of the man himself.

Hiveswap is to be a video game tie-in to Homestuck. It was put up on Kickstarter known only as the Homestuck Adventure Game. 700k was asked for. It raised nearly 2.5 million. Hiveswap is currently why the fandom’s seen a resurgence. It’s being released episodically and the first episode was released September 14, 2017 and the second episode is to release Spring, 2018. In the meantime the studio has been releasing previews and extra bits of lore, which has been making the fandom go wild.

*DEEP BREATH*

Homestuck, at its simplest, is about a group of teens playing a video game. It follows the format of the other previous webcomics hosted on mspaintadventures (all written and drawn by Hussie, of course) of looking like it was drawn on MS Paint and acting like a text-based adventure game. Readers would submit actions and Hussie would draw the results, continuing the story. Over time this method proved unwieldy and Hussie did away with the command box, but the comic still acted like it was in such a format. Even without direct reader input Hussie still managed to incorporate a lot of input from the fans. Injokes mostly, but sometimes things fans had done would come back as major plot points.

In the beginning the art style was simple, using sprites and limited colors. One of the more well known things about Homestuck is its characters’ lack of arms in this style. As the comic progresses different art styles are used as well as different artists. Many people have bashed the comic for its simple visuals, but even aside from some of the more complicated visuals used later even the “simple” ones can be breath taking. Here’s some examples of the art.

Yes, these are all images from the same comic. As you can see gifs are used quite a lot in this comic. There are also sound pages, animations, and interactive games. Homestuck uses the fact that it’s on the internet to the fullest degree. It has inspired many other webcomics to experiment in similar manners.

Homestuck goes beyond that, however. Homestuck would not exist without the internet. In a way, Homestuck is about the internet. All the characters communicate over the internet to each other for a majority of the story. Internet subgroups and cultures are referenced, satirized, and incorporated. Real life websites are used and you can find characters’ personal accounts yourself in the real world such a one character’s DeviantArt account.

O.K., back to the story itself. I said it was about some teens playing a game, but obviously it’s more complicated than that. First off the game destroys Earth and sends our first four protagonists (yes, you heard that right, the first four, Homestuck has a lot of characters and a lot of them are protagonists) into a realm known as The Medium which is where the game itself (known as SBURB) will be played.

Part of the draw of Homestuck is SBURB itself. We know a lot of the mechanics involved in the game and if it weren’t for the destruction of our planet loads of people would pay good money to be able to play it. Unfortunately, for some, the story doesn’t really focus on the game, despite spending quite a lot of time in the confines of it. If you’ve ever heard of god tiers, classpects (Class and Aspects), Propsit, or Derse these are all SBURB things that the fandom loves to pour over. This stuff is like Hogwarts houses, you get sorted into them.

Throughout the story you get introduced to a new band of characters that troll our original four. Turns out these guys are all aliens who had previously played the game (their version known as SGRUB). Their race are literally called Trolls and they are another commonly known thing about Homestuck. These are the grey-skinned, black-haired, horned people. Their race has a rainbow of different blood colors they can be born with, which is another thing for readers to sort themselves into (are you a greenblood or an orangeblood?). They also have quite a fascinating romance system known as the quadrants (guess how many different types of love they have) and a society based on violence and no adults on homeworld. If SBURB doesn’t scratch your lore itch then Alternia and the trolls will probably do it for you.

The comic also has time travel and alternate universes. No, not AUs like what fandoms make, actual alternate universes where there are multiples of a single character that led different lives. Homestuck coined the phrase “double mobious reach around” to explain some of its convoluted nature. There are literal graphs and spreadsheets people have made to help keep themselves on track with what is going on in the story.

I could go on to explain the actual plot of Homestuck in more detail buuuuut this is already a grotesquely long answer to your message aaaand I don’t really want to spoil it too much if there’s even a chance you feel like giving it a read for yourself (other than what I’ve already told you and what you will see on the internet in general). Instead I’ll mention one event that happened in comic that affected the real life internet.

There is one flash animation in the comic known as Cascade. The comic had been building up to it for a while and I would say it’s one of the first climaxes of the story (yes, there’s more than one in my opinion). Hussie took a break to work on creating it. I forgot to mention earlier that Hussie updated the comic on a daily basis for years, often multiple times in a day. The insane update schedule was part of the reason the fanbase grew so immense. With this break the fanbase became tense and ravenous.

Cascade dropped and people flooded the site. The flash refused to load because so many people were trying to access it at once. Hussie put the flash on Newgrounds as well, because he knew his website wouldn’t be able to handle the traffic. We crashed Newgrounds. Homestucks. Crashed. Newgrounds. The website designed to host flashes and had loads of people on it daily was crashed by one fandom just to see one flash. It didn’t stop there, though. Livestream crashed as people who were able to get access to the flash streamed it so others who couldn’t get mspa or newgrounds to load could watch it. Megaupload crashed as people ripped the file and tried to share it so others could watch it on their computers without a website. It’s known as the day Homestuck broke the internet. It was absolute chaos. There’s a great image that summarizes this chaos with a collage of #notes that were used at the time and ending with a tweet that Hussie had issued at the time which was “well that didn’t work”. I would link it, but I can’t for the life of me find it right now.

There’s so much more I could talk about, all the different characters, the various hiatuses, shipping, all the wonderful people I’ve been able to meet thanks to Homestuck, my love for this comic and the community surrounding it. If you’ve actually made it all the way through my word vomit then I commend you. Feel free to ask me about anything Homestuck related. As you can see, I do so love to talk about it. Thank you sincerely for asking me about it and giving me a chance to write this huge wall of text.

OH GOD I DIDN’T EVEN TALK ABOUT LYRICSTUCKS AND FANDOMSTUCK.

I’M POSTING THIS NOW BEFORE I THINK OF ANY OTHER THINGS I DIDN’T MENTION BECAUSE BY GOD I’M SURE THERE’S LOADS.

[aion-rsa]

Ranking Every Krampus Movie by Krampus Lore Accuracy

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Christmas horror movies have long been one of the best parts of the festive season, and over the past decade interest in the festive beastie known as the Krampus has been on the rise. 

But who is the devilish creature? And which of the eleven feature films (of vastly varying quality) that have taken their name from the Krampus mythology are most similar to the actual ancient folklore that inspired them? 

2020 has been a year of horrors so it seems only fitting to do a deep dive investigation into this most important of Christmas horror queries so you can celebrate this year’s Krampusnacht in style and accuracy! 

The Origins of the Krampus

So the creepy European tale of the Krampus goes a little something like this: Krampus accompanies St. Nick (that’s right, Santa Claus) on his gift giving rounds, but instead of offering rewards for good kids he punishes bad ones. It adds an enticing little bit of nastiness to the classic Christmas traditions which makes it all the more understandable that it’s become such a large part of the cultural consciousness over the years. 

So what is the actual history of the Krampus and where did it first spring from? Encyclopedia Britannica gets into deeper detail, explaining that Krampus “was thought to have been part of pagan rituals for the winter solstice. According to legend, he is the son of Hel, the Norse god of the underworld. With the spread of Christianity, Krampus became associated with Christmas–despite efforts by the Catholic church to ban him. The creature and St. Nicholas are said to arrive on the evening of December 5 (Krampusnacht; “Krampus Night”). While St. Nicholas rewards nice children by leaving presents, Krampus beats those who are naughty with branches and sticks. In some cases, he is said to eat them or take them to hell.” 

Lovely. 

We wrote more about Krampus traditions here.

Mother Krampus 2: Slay Ride A.K.A. Lady Krampus (2018) 

Though it’s titled as if it’s a sequel to our next entry–which is also not about Krampus–there is little to no connection between these movies. This film has no Krampus accuracy as it is not in any way, shape, or form about Krampus. 

What it is about is a group of women who are about to finish their community service but have one last task: to visit an elderly woman and check in on her before Christmas. Turns out that she’s not the weak old lady they were expecting and instead is a slasher who loves terrorizing families and young women. Like I said, there’s no Krampus here and it’s also not a supernatural film. It is exceedingly strange, though, and features an OAP slasher suspect, which is rare. So even without the mythical creature this micro-budget murder movie might bring you some enjoyable Christmas horror chuckles during the festive season. 

Mother Krampus (2017) 

The reason that this movie is close to the very bottom of our rankings is simple. Mother Krampus isn’t actually based on the lore of Krampus at all and is instead inspired by another creepy Germainic folkloric figure known as Frau Perchta. Seeing as the Krampus is more well known, the filmmakers decided to misleadingly name this movie Mother Krampus. 

But the two creatures do share some similarities, hence why the simple but comedic OAP slasher Mother Krampus 2 takes the “prize” as our least accurate title. Frau Perchta is also not too fond of children and in the ancient myths surrounding her it’s said that “she flies through the night sky attended by an army of lost souls, including the demonic-looking Perchten, her army of servants who are visually nearly indistinguishable from Krampus. The only way to know for sure is context; Krampus rides abroad at St. Nicholas Eve while the Perchten tend more toward Epiphany, and the last three Thursdays before Christmas, also known as Berchtl nights or Knocking nights.”

This non-Krampus movie is at least a sort-of accurate version of the Frau Perchta legend and sees a town terrorized by a curse that was put on them by a woman (maybe) wrongly accused of stealing missing children. Now 25 years later, it seems like the Christmas witch, Frau Perchta, is upon them and is planning on stealing 12 children over the 12 days of Christmas. Scary stuff. 

Krampus 2: The Devil Returns (2016)

This incredibly low-budget sequel to Krampus: The Christmas Devil (more on this in a minute) centers on–like so many bad straight-to-streaming horror sequels–some useless cops. They’re searching for missing children who it seems have been stolen by Krampus, so this at least gets one point for a classic Krampus trope. 

There is a naughty list in this film too, although it’s actually held onto by the grimy mall Santa who plays a truly horrible role in this movie that is utterly unpleasant to watch. Generally this movie has little to no Krampus accuracy with most of the plot following the useless cops as they struggle to battle a gang of low level violent criminals including the grimy Santa Claus. 

Read more

Culture

The Anti-Christmas Spirit of Krampus

By Tony Sokol

TV

Doctor Who: The Weird Anomaly of the 1965 ‘Christmas Special’

By Andrew Blair

That gross Santa actually poses one of the biggest issues to the Krampus accuracy as the movie is more concerned with making a bleak festive crime flick ala Silent Night Deadly Night–but nowhere near as good–rather than making a movie about a scary folkloric figure. That’s why this one ends up near the bottom of our accuracy list, not just because it’s really not about Krampus at all but also because it’s gross, exploitative, and is more concerned with lazy “shock twists” than the story of Krampus. 

Krampus Origins (2018)

Seeing as this movie begins in WWII with Nazis trying to summon Krampus and American soldiers stealing the Krampus summoning machine, this is surely the least accurate… but shockingly, no. 

The film follows the young inhabitants of an orphanage who end up with the Krampus box. From this viewer’s perspective it’s definitely a movie that probably began life as a non-Krampus film and had the folkloric figure hamfistedly added at a later date because Krampus barely makes an appearance. Also, does this title imply that these are the origins of the Krampus? Because that doesn’t make any sense, seeing as the box summons him from his ancient world, so he clearly already had origins there that are not explored here at all!

Read more

Movies

The 21 Best Christmas Horror Movies

By Rosie Fletcher and 5 others

Movies

The Christmas Chronicles 2: Who or What is the Belsnickel?

By Natalie Zutter

Despite the fact this is mostly a not very entertaining film about ye olde depressed kids in an even more depressing orphanage, like most of our other entries the 2018 film does stick to two key Krampus lore points: the Krampus (briefly) featured here does love to hunt kids and has big scary horns. His arrival is also heralded by an enigmatic child called Nicholas, which seems like it’s a reference to Krampus’ connection to St. Nicholas, but maybe we’re being too generous. 

Krampus Unleashed (2016)

Apparently the idea of the Krampus just appearing each Krampusnacht and terrorizing local kiddies is a bit too much for filmmakers to stomach as this is the second movie in our list that includes a very specific plot line about Krampus being trapped in the past and then freed by Americans. Here, though, he’s freed by a group of prospectors who at the open are looking for the mythical treasure of Eric Klaus. They come to a very gnarly end at the claws of the old Krampus who is looking very much like a goat-man here which is a step up from the usual red horned devil representations we’ve gotten in some of the other Krampus movies. 

Alas, this is otherwise pretty light on Krampus-accurate lore as we spend most of the runtime with a family having some Hallmark-esque Christmas gathering in a desert ranch. For most of the movie the Krampus seems to be controlled / represented by a magical orange shiny rock which doesn’t appear in any lore we’ve seen but is a smart way to keep the budget low.

Krampus: The Christmas Devil (2013)

A voiceover gives us a slightly confusing rundown of Krampus history as we venture into this micro-budget movie. Apparently in this world Krampus is St. Nicholas’ brother which is definitely not the case in any Krampus lore we read about. But we do get to see Krampus putting a naughty kid into a sack and then trying to drown them which is both brutal but also pretty accurate for Krampus lore. The creature also has some solid claws and has a naughty list which he uses to find the bad girls and boys that he has to kill. Krampus: The Christmas Devil is also the only movie in our list that specifies that Krampus has just one night to do his terrible deeds. 

Read more

TV

DuckTales Season 3 Episode 18 Review: How Santa Stole Christmas!

By Shamus Kelley

Movies

How Darlene Love Brings the Holiday Spirit and Soul to The Christmas Chronicles 2

By Tony Sokol

In this film’s defense, it does have more Krampus action in its opening than some of the films on this list do in their entire runtime, and it makes use of some good weird out-of-license Krampus art during the opening and credits. 

But after the first few minutes we get sucked into a boring crime story about (you guessed it!) useless cops trying to find kids that the Krampus has apparently stolen. When Krampus does pop up in brief moments throughout the film, he’s killing anyone who gets in his way, losing the spirit of the Krampus Christmas. Plus, the original folklore doesn’t have any mention of cops let alone an entire Krampus duology of low-budget movies centered on them. 

Krampus: The Reckoning (2015)

This one begins with a solid retelling of the Krampus legend which makes it one of the most Krampus-heavy offerings in our list. According to this flick, Krampus is as old as time itself and as the grandma warns her child “as Santa rewards good children, Krampus punishes the bad.” Which is all very true! Congrats creepy, horror grandma! 

Interestingly, this film adds in a weird Krampus voodoo doll which is created by a young girl so she can wield the power of the monster against those who do her wrong. In a non-lore but still entertaining twist, the Krampus here is essentially a Jason Voorhees-style killer who just murders everyone including beginning with an abusive couple who’ve been having some pre-marital sex. On the naughty list you go!

Read more

Movies

New Netflix Christmas Movies in 2020 Ranked from Best to Worst

By Delia Harrington

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13 Best Blumhouse Horror Movies Ranked

By David Crow and 3 others

The big change from the legend is that Krampus is controlled and summoned by a little girl who uses the monster to exact revenge on adults who harm children. So ironically this one would have been better under the title Krampus: The Avenger. Revenge movies are fun, but even though there’s some good “what is Krampus” wiki moments, that big twist means this one slides down the Krampus accuracy rating pretty quickly. 

A Christmas Horror Story (2015)

This freaky and festive anthology is a whole lot of fun and includes an interesting visual representation of Krampus. To really get into this entry would be to ruin its secrets, but on the surface it’s about Santa Claus as he battles his elves and Mrs. Claus who have been turned into nightmarish zombies. During the finale, Santa battles the Krampus who is definitely one of the best and most interesting versions that we’ve seen on screen: a true representation of the half-goat half-man creature that we’re all desperate to see. 

This is a really cool Christmas anthology that utilizes the Krampus in an interesting way that adds to the story, even if when all’s said and done we can’t say that this is a wholly accurate Krampus movie. 

Krampus: The Avenger A.K.A. Krampus vs. Vikings (2019)

This historical horror entry is at moments surprisingly “accurate” (well, at least as far as Krampus movies go). 

Set in England during 820, the film centers around a Viking troupe trying to take over the castle of the British king. But their plans are waylaid by a demonic horned beast who lives in the forest and comes each “Yule Day” to kill families. This isn’t technically correct as Krampusnacht is usually on December 5th, the night before St. Nicholas Day on December 6th, plus Krampus is usually most interested in stealing/harming children rather than whole families. But early on in the movie we see Krampus talking about the naughty list, which gains the movie another accuracy point, and visually the practical effects heavy Krampus looks relatively like the creature we all know and fear, although it’s arguably more like a standard devil than a half-goat half-man beast. 

Read more

Movies

20 Christmas Movies for Badasses

By Michael Reed

Movies

Best Modern Horror Movies

By Don Kaye

Just like the majority of this list, Krampus the Avenger is a super low budget movie that is mostly concerned with the easy to shoot action of the Vikings and the royal family and less so with the Krampus. In fact, I would go so far to say this likely could have been a random Game of Thrones style knock-off that added a few Krampus reshoot moments… but that’s just a guess. Either way, the miniscule but present Krampus storyline is more accurate to the lore than usual until it gets lost in a strange wishing / vengeance / murder twist which makes little to no sense. 

Krampus (2015)

A modern Christmas horror classic, Krampus is truly a joy to watch. With an all-star cast featuring Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koechner, and Allison Tolman, this dark comedy is all about that titular creature even if it strays a little from the classical lore. 

When a family gathers for Christmas, their stress, tension, and bitterness around the season begins to seep into their celebrations which comes to a head when the young son tears up his letter to Santa and throws it outside. It’s a mistake that will change all their lives forever as it summons the Krampus, a huge blizzard, and a nightmarish evening they’ll never forget.

This Krampus looks just how you’d expect the beast too, with huge horns and ghoulish goat hooves. But a big change in his motivations means that this Krampus is sent out to punish those who have lost the Christmas spirit, which is very different from dragging bad kids to hell or whipping them with sticks. Saying that, the entire family is objectively very badly behaved and really deserves the punishment the Krampus gives them. The final twist also strays from Krampus lore but is really creepy and overall this is a magnificent example of a Krampus tale. 

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)

Ironically, the film that feels closest to the origins of the Krampus doesn’t use the word Krampus once. It’s also one of the best films on our list, so if you haven’t seen this cult horror hit now is the perfect time. Rare Exports does feature a horned beast but here he’s known only as Santa Claus and is only ever seen frozen in a block of ice, which to be honest makes him even scarier. Directed by Jalmari Helander, this creepy classic begins when the local people of a small Finnish province which is thought to be home to the original Santa Claus, Joulupukki (which translates as Yule Goat), discover something incredibly strange. Their entire town was built on an ancient burial ground used to trap a strange ancient horned creature…

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The legends of Joulupukki and Krampus are incredibly similar, though the most interesting difference–which the film plays on–is that rather than being St. Nick’s helper, Joulupukki is the original Santa Claus. While we don’t get too deep into Krampus lore here, there is an evil horned beast, kids in peril, multiple evil Santa-type figures, and some good chilly Christmas horror. If you want something that lives up to the creepiness of the Krampus, and adds lore and depth to the story you already know, then Rare Exports is the ultimate Krampus movie pick. 

The post Ranking Every Krampus Movie by Krampus Lore Accuracy appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[picturebookmakers]

Ingrid Godon

In this post, Ingrid talks about her working process, and she shares stunning illustrations from some of her books, including the ‘Ik Wou’ trilogy with words by Toon Tellegen, and ‘Dantesken’ which features over 600 pages of autonomous drawings. She also shares wonderful fabric sculptures, ceramics and textile art.

Visit Ingrid Godon’s website

Ingrid: When I was a child, I was always watching. From a distance. Who did what, and how they did it. I drew. Not what I saw, although I did store the images in my mind. One day, they would come out. Drawn. School didn’t work out, but I kept drawing. I met Rik Van den Brande, an illustrator and teacher, at the academy. He took me under his wing and I kept drawing. I soon got assignments as an illustrator. I was working! Drawing became my work.

Educational publishers gave me assignments. This led to the creation of ‘Nellie & Cezar’ in 1995, which, via an educational detour, turned into a short book which remains popular with toddlers and teachers to this day. It became a success in many versions, animated movies were made from it, and Nellie & Cezar became great puppets. And I kept drawing, especially for children.

I made ‘Waiting for Sailor’ in 2000, and took the initiative for a story of my own for the first time. My dear colleague André Sollie wrote my story and I drew. That was the start of an international story. The book won many awards, and was published in English, French, German and Korean.

Foreign publishers were now asking me to make books for them as well. Often the German, French, Swedish or English books were never even published in Dutch. I received more awards, and in 2020 I was longlisted for the ALMA for the fourth time.

Photography has played an important role in my life for a long time now. A series of photographs could grab me, and I could go to work with it. For instance, I became enthralled by the work of Belgian photographer Norbert Ghisoland. He made portraits of ordinary people in his studio in the Borinage, an industrial region, each of them dressed to the nines, but there is a great deal of misery behind the well-groomed facade. This became the foundation for my work which was mainly aimed at adults: IK WOU (I Wish). Toon Tellegen wrote the text for the first series of portraits for this book; 33 portraits of serious people. Dressed to the nines. I drew them.

IK WOU became a trilogy, with IK DENK (I Think) and IK MOET (I Must) as parts two and three.

The trilogy has been successful, not just in Belgium and The Netherlands, but also in the French and German-language regions. It also led to beautiful exhibitions, with a large exhibit in Frankfurt being the tentative highlight. In Cologne, I displayed the works from IK WOU in combination with the children’s portraits of August Sander in 2016. I WISH, the American edition of IK WOU, was published in the spring of 2020. At the end of 2020, its portraits were supposed to be in an exhibition at C.G. Boerner in New York City, but this was cancelled due to Covid-19.

2018 was an important year for me. For the first time, I made a book without a story. Unless the viewer finds a story in there, of course. DANTESKEN: over 600 pages of drawings, an explosion of what goes on in my head. For me as an artist – because that is how I finally started seeing myself as well – this was an important step. More than ever before, I realised the importance of entrusting the paper (or canvas or wood or printing press or clay or fabric) with lines and shapes. I can do no different. I keep drawing.

Recently, I started making little sculptures out of fabric: three-dimensional drawings, like puppets stepping out of my drawings.

I’ve also been working more and more with ceramics and textile art.

My work is becoming increasingly autonomous, and diverges more and more from merely illustrating. Drawings live lives of their own, become works in their own right, sometimes with a story, sometimes starting from a story, sometimes from nothing.

I have no style; I have the Ingrid Godon style. I’m continuously looking for the right way to tell my story, rustling around in my box of materials, alternating between pencil and paint, covering it with a paint roller, cutting into wood and printing it, scribbling on photographs. I keep searching.

I mainly draw people who – like me – look in all directions and are curious about what goes on in front of them. They sometimes look away, but they are always very present. I have at times – on request – drawn landscapes. But even then, I could not resist placing a person in the landscape here and there. Looking, like I do. I search continuously, take different paths, and keep looking. Full of wonder.

In the meantime, I keep working on commissions, I take the initiative to make books, I keep searching for the right pen line or brush stroke, the images keep flowing from my head, and I keep drawing. I draw and I draw.

Illustrations © Ingrid Godon. Post translated by Gengo and edited by dPICTUS.

Buy the English edition

Ik Wou / I Wish

Ingrid Godon & Toon Tellegen

Lannoo, Belgium, 2011

‘Pairs portraits with poetry to articulate wrenching individualism, yearning, humour, desires, and pathos. This probing psychological journey makes for an exciting exploration in empathy.’ —Kirkus Reviews

‘Each face is round as the moon, with small shining eyes that sit curiously far apart... One boy wears a bellhop’s uniform; another, a red jersey and cap... By voicing the fears, angers, and secret desires of the figures, Tellegen spurs readers to embrace those of others, and their own.’ —Publishers Weekly

Dutch: Lannoo

English: Elsewhere Editions

German: Mixtvision

French: La joie de lire

Buy this book

Här är vi / Here we are

Åsa Lind & Ingrid Godon

Lilla Piratförlaget, Sweden, 2017

What happens when we become us? And how do we look at them? Belonging and not belonging is the theme of this poetic picturebook. Åsa Lind is one of Sweden’s most loved authors, and Ingrid Godon is an award-winning Belgian illustrator. Together they have created an unforgettable story about us and them.

Buy this book

Dantesken

Ingrid Godon

MER / Borgerhoff & Lambrechts, Belgium, 2018

Who are the creatures that populate Ingrid Godon’s drawings? They are people, sure. But what is there of a person who only exists as an image? In this book we travel through the works of a gifted artist, illustrator and image maker.

Who will we meet? Who, or what, will we recognise? A book with 800 images which speak for themselves.

[utk-hlp]

Blockchain Virtual Entire world Evaluation

After more than 24 months of development, the as soon as highly anticipated chain game king Decentraland has finally launched. What is this "blockchain+VR+Second Life" concept product? This article uses "My Time in Decentraland" to take you around One turn, furthermore, the four-day "treasure hunt" action is not to be missed. DR close friends have already started to open up the treasure box frantically. At the end of this article, let the team explore together!

What is Decentraland (MANA) Whatever the blockchain group and the currency group, Decentraland is considered an old project. As soon as August 2017, Decentraland completed the initial public offering (ICO, Initial Gold coin Offering) of its token MANA, setting a proud report of raising 24 million US dollars worth of ether (ETH) within 35 seconds. After a round of bulls and bears, MANA's performance is rather good. The fundraising price will be $0.024. The current price will be $0.055. Weighed against most of the 90%+ tokens, it really is already quite conscientious. 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After all, his story will be beautiful. ¨Minute Living〃 empowered by ¨Blockchain〃 and ¨VR (Virtual Fact)〃 is within Dapp. When Review was first established, Vincent mentioned he just paid attention to the concept I wish to open my budget and move stud. Coupled with the movie "Levels 1 Player" that came out in those days, the concept of VR has been hyped right up, so from 2017 to 2018, Decentraland can be said to be the most concerned and popular project in the application form layer. In simple terms, Decentraland is really a decentralized digital reality platform based on the Ethereum blockchain; in the Decentraland platform, users will be able to create their own exclusive content and applications, not only can encounter them personally but additionally Tokenize them. Prolonged reading: [?Basic knowledge] DApp ecology-N things you need to know about DApp Extended reading: Seven entire world events of "blockchain and cryptocurrency" that you need to know in 2020 The core asset of the game: Property The core asset in LandDecentraland may be the limited, passable 3D virtual space LAND, which is an NFT asset preserved by the Ethereum Smart Contract. The holder of LAND, that's, the landlord, can fully control the content environment and applications he created, which range from a static 3D scene to an application or game with more interactive functions. LAND can further form themed communities, also called communities, to create a number of curiosity tribes and shared spaces with rich makes use of. Prolonged reading: Bargaining KingTaiwan's first asset tokenized shopping platform, "Millions of cars" converted into NFT, can be traded within the exchange More reading: Cryptocurrency assets vs. Traditional resources: That has more "dark swans"? Decentraland Property" data-medium-file="%E5%9C%9F%E5%9C%B0-Property-300x300.png" data-large-file="%E5%9C%9F%E5%9C%B0- Property-1024x1024.png" launching="sluggish" course="size-full wp-image-48372 sluggish" src="data:picture/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=''%20viewBox='0%200% 201600%201600'%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="%E5%9C%9F%E5%9C%B0-Land.png" alt="Decentraland Property" width="1600" elevation=" 1600"/>Decentraland Property Decentraland In the initial auction by the end of 2017, a complete of 34,356 pieces of LAND were sold, well worth 161 million MANA, which was about 30 million All of us dollars at that time! At the end of 2018, the remaining 9331 plots were sold for the second time, and a complete of 109 million MANA was destroyed, which was 6.6 million US dollars at that time. 2 yrs of development, officially launched on February 20! After more than 2 yrs of development, Decentraland is finally officially open to everyone on February 20, 2020 (the day before). Gamers can directly get on the game to generate an Avatar and have fun with in the game planet of Decentraland. Decentraland is officially launched on the general public series" data-medium-file="%E5%85%AC%E9%96%8B%E4%B8%8A%E7%B7%9A%E6%AD%The3%E5%BC%8F% E5%95%9F%E5%8B%95-300x133.png" data-large-file="%E5%85%AC%E9%96%8B%E4%B8%8A%E7%B7%9A%E6% AD%A3%E5%BC%8F%E5%95%9F%E5%8B%95-1024x453.png" launching="sluggish" course="size-full wp-image-48373 sluggish" src="data:picture /svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=``%20viewBox='0%200%201600%20708'%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="%E5%85%AC%E9%96%8B %E4%B8%8A%E7%B7%9A%E6%AD%A3%E5%BC%8F%E5%95%9F%E5%8B%95.png" alt="Decentraland is officially launched to the general public" width= "1600" elevation="708"/>Decentraland is publicly launched and officially launched. Prolonged reading: Trivial issuesNFT collection <2> What is NFT? - The main element to the integration of blockchain and digital reality, everything can be currency? To celebrate the official launch, the four-day "Treasure Hunt" was officially held. The prizes are worth a complete of 100,000 US bucks, which includes NFT (Non-Fungible Token, non-fungible token), token, and in-game Virtual products:

* 1.25 million MANA tokens * 596,000 ANJ tokens * 14.49 million MATIC tokens * 25 Property plots * 5011 CryptoKitties (CryptoKitties) * 30 Axies * 1 HTC EXodus1 encrypted phone (physical!) * Thousands of outfits in Decentraland As long as you bind your budget, find the treasure chest, you can receive the prize! While earning money, along the way, I furthermore experienced a series of colorful activities in the virtual planet of Decentraland, such as for example culture, sports, amusement, and nightlife, with both religious and material civilization. Let's take you to see the daily routine of this day in Decentraland (hereinafter referred to as DCL) and the knowledge of scalloping made of woll. My day of preparation in DCL is simple. Open up the Ethereum web browser budget, recharge the accounts with Ethereum to cover the gas charge, and prepare the garbage bag (because I am dizzy in 3D). Enter and start pinching the face, DCL's pinching continues to be a little magical. After squeezing the face, it is possible to name it. To find the name, you need at hand in 100MANA, but I am here to squeeze the made of woll, and I decisively select Guest to get into. Squeeze your face and name" data-medium-file="%E6%8D%8F%E8%87%89%E3%80%81%E5%8F%96%E5%90%8D%E5%AD%97- 300x253.png" data-large-file="%E6%8D%8F%E8%87%89%E3%80%81%E5%8F%96%E5%90%8D%E5%AD%97-1024x865. png" launching="sluggish" course="size-full wp-image-48375 sluggish" src="data:picture/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=''%20viewBox='0%200%201600%201351' %3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="%E6%8D%8F%E8%87%89%E3%80%81%E5%8F%96%E5%90%8D%E5%AD%97 .png" alt="Pinch your face, name it" width="1600" elevation="1351"/>Pinch your face, name it, and adhere to the instruction to stroll and jump, get into the portal and start the game. I was born in Genesis Plaza (Genesis Plaza). The first thing I saw has been the strong Chinese style, "Little bridges and flowing water, historic temples and giant Buddhas, along with a green leek industry (no, it's bamboo), rice paddies, traffic, chickens and canines. I heard that there is a genus from the fertile fields as well as the genus of mulberry." I walked here for ten minutes, enjoying the pleasant scenery.

As soon as I walked out of "Peach Blossom Spring", the design of painting changed all of a sudden and I found a picture called "Merlin's Preserve" (Merlin's Preserve). The strong magical atmosphere attracted me. After exploring completely, there is a red dragon hidden in the mountains, entrenched here. At the foot of the dragon, there's a golden treasure chest! Decentraland suddenly changed his style and found a location called "Merlin Fortress"" data-medium-file="%E7%95%AB%E9%The2%The8%E7%AA%81%E8%AE%8A%EF% BC%8C%E4%BE%86%E5%88%B0%E4%B8%80%E8%99%95%E5%90%8D%E7%82%BThe%E2%80%9C%E6%The2% 85%E6%9E%97%E8%A6%81%E5%A1%9E%E2%80%9D-300x139.png" data-large-file="%E7%95%AB%E9%A2%A8% E7%AA%81%E8%AE%8A%EF%BC%8C%E4%Become%86%E5%88%B0%E4%B8%80%E8%99%95%E5%90%8D%E7% 82%BA%E2%80%9C%E6%A2%85%E6%9E%97%E8%A6%81%E5%A1%9E%E2%80%9D-1024x476.png" launching="sluggish" course ="size-full wp-image-48378 sluggish" src="data:picture/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=''%20viewBox='0%200%201600%20743'%3E%3C/svg%3E "data-src="%E7%95%AB%E9%A2%A8%E7%AA%81%E8%AE%8A%EF%BC%8C%E4%Become%86%E5%88%B0%E4 %B8%80%E8%99%95%E5%90%8D%E7%82%BA%E2%80%9C%E6%A2%85%E6%9E%97%E8%A6%81%E5%A1 %9E%E2%80%9D.png" alt="Decentraland has a sudden change in style, and found a place called "Merlin Fortress"" width="1600" elevation="743"/>Decentraland has a sudden change in style and found a location It's called "Merlin Fortress" and I produced a step of faith, and easily came under the wings from the red dragon. I thought it would trigger a boss fight. I really think too much. This video game doesn't have even a blood tank and an apparatus bar. What boss to fight. Open the cherish chest swaggeringly, harvest a head wear along with a spotted CryptoKitties (CryptoKitties). Get NFT hats and CryptoKitties" data-medium-file="%E7%8D%B2%E5%Become%97NFT%E5%B8%BD%E5%AD%90%E5%92%8C%E8 %AC%8E%E6%88%80%E8%B2%93%EF%BC%88CryptoKitties%EF%BC%89-300x139.png" data-large-file="%E7%8D%B2%E5%Become %97NFT%E5%B8%BD%E5%AD%90%E5%92%8C%E8%AC%8E%E6%88%80%E8%B2%93%EF%BC%88CryptoKitties%EF%BC%89 -1024x474.png" launching="sluggish" course="size-full wp-image-48379 sluggish" src="data:picture/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=''%20viewBox='0%200%201600 %20741'%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="%E7%8D%B2%E5%Become%97NFT%E5%B8%BD%E5%AD%90%E5%92%8C%E8% AC%8E%E6%88%80%E8%B2%93%EF%BC%88CryptoKitties%EF%BC%89.png" alt="Get NFT hats and CryptoKitties (CryptoKitties)" width="1600" elevation ="741"/>Get NFT hats and CryptoKitties. It turns out that this may be the so-called Treasure Hunt. Essentially, you are walking around in this world and searching for treasure chests. Since the planet is too large, it really is impossible to visit anywhere by relying on legs, so are there natural shortcuts. Press Enter to enter the chat box, Entering /help will screen some popular commands. The way to have a shortcut may be the portal /goto coordinate command. As a soccer fan, Moonshot Stadium (60, 10) is naturally never to be missed. Below we enter: /goto 60,10

I entered the soccer field because the offensive "gamer + referee" of both edges. I brought the ball to the goalkeeper single-handedly. He has been overwhelmed by my complete power, and I performed and scored easily.

The supporters cheered for me magically. I greeted them with a grin, converted around and noticed the treasure chest in the middle of the stadium, and got away the 10MANA and a small NFT prize inside. The supporters cheered for me magically. I greeted them with a grin, converted around and noticed the treasure chest in the middle of the stadium, and got away the 10MANA and a small NFT prize inside. "data-medium-file="%E7%90%83%E8%BF%B7%E5%80%91%E9%AD%94%E6%80%A7%E5%9C%B0%E7%82%BA %E6%88%91%E6%AD%A1%E5%91%BC%EF%BC%8C%E6%88%91%E5%90%91%E4%BB%96%E5%80%91%E5 %Become%AE%E7%AC%91%E8%87%B4%E6%84%8F%EF%BC%8C%E7%80%9F%E7%81%91%E8%BD%89%E8%BA %Abdominal exercises%EF%BC%8C%E7%9C%8B%E5%88%B0%E4%BA%86%E7%90%83%E5%A0%B4%E4%B8%AD%E5%A4%AE %E5%87%BA%E7%8F%Become%E7%9A%84%E5%AF%B6%E7%AE%B1%EF%BC%8C%E6%8B%BF%E8%B5%B0%E4 %BA%86%E8%A3%A1%E9%9D%A2%E7%9A%8410MANA%E5%92%8C%E4%B8%80%E5%80%8BNFT%E5%B0%8F%E7%8D %8E%E5%93%81%E3%80%82-300x173.gif" data-large-file="%E7%90%83%E8%BF%B7%E5%80%91%E9%AD%94 %E6%80%A7%E5%9C%B0%E7%82%BA%E6%88%91%E6%AD%A1%E5%91%BC%EF%BC%8C%E6%88%91%E5 %90%91%E4%BB%96%E5%80%91%E5%BE%AE%E7%AC%91%E8%87%B4%E6%84%8F%EF%BC%8C%E7%80 %9F%E7%81%91%E8%BD%89%E8%BA%AB%EF%BC%8C%E7%9C%8B%E5%88%B0%E4%BA%86%E7%90%83 %E5%A0%B4%E4%B8%AD%E5%A4%AE%E5%87%BA%E7%8F%BE%E7%9A%84%E5%AF%B6%E7%AE%B1%EF %BC%8C%E6%8B%BF%E8%B5%B0%E4%BA%86%E8%A3%A1%E9%9D%A2%E7%9A%8410MANA%E5%92%8C%E4%B8 %80%E5%80%8BNFT%E5%B0%8F%E7%8D%8E%E5%93%81%E3%80%82.gif" launching ="sluggish" class="size-full wp-image-48382 sluggish" src="data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=''%20viewBox='0%200%20480%20276'%3E% 3C/svg%3E" data-src="%E7%90%83%E8%BF%B7%E5%80%91%E9%AD%94%E6%80%A7%E5%9C%B0%E7% 82%BA%E6%88%91%E6%AD%A1%E5%91%BC%EF%BC%8C%E6%88%91%E5%90%91%E4%BB%96%E5%80% 91%E5%BE%AE%E7%AC%91%E8%87%B4%E6%84%8F%EF%BC%8C%E7%80%9F%E7%81%91%E8%BD%89% E8%BA%AB%EF%BC%8C%E7%9C%8B%E5%88%B0%E4%BA%86%E7%90%83%E5%A0%B4%E4%B8%AD%E5% A4%AE%E5%87%BA%E7%8F%BE%E7%9A%84%E5%AF%B6%E7%AE%B1%EF%BC%8C%E6%8B%BF%E8%B5% B0%E4%BA%86%E8%A3%A1%E9%9D%A2%E7%9A%8410MANA%E5%92%8C%E4%B8%80%E5%80%8BNFT%E5%B0%8F% E7%8D%8E%E5%93%81%E3%80%82.gif" alt="The fans cheered for me magically, I greeted them with a grin, turned around and saw the treasure chest in the middle of the stadium, and took it away I acquired 10MANA and a small NFT prize inside. "width="480" elevation="276"/> The supporters cheered for me magically. I greeted them with a grin, converted around and noticed the treasure chest in the middle of the stadium, and got away the 10MANA and a small NFT prize inside. The supporters cheered for me magically. I greeted them with a grin, converted around and noticed the treasure chest in the middle of the stadium, and got away the 10MANA and a small NFT prize inside." data-medium-file="%E7%90% 83%E8%BF%B7%E5%80%91%E9%AD%94%E6%80%A7%E5%9C%B0%E7%82%BThe%E6%88%91%E6%AD%The1% E5%91%BC%EF%BC%8C%E6%88%91%E5%90%91%E4%BB%96%E5%80%91%E5%BE%AE%E7%AC%91%E8% 87%B4%E6%84%8F%EF%BC%8C%E7%80%9F%E7%81%91%E8%BD%89%E8%BThe%Abdominal exercises%EF%BC%8C%E7%9C% 8B%E5%88%B0%E4%BThe%86%E7%90%83%E5%A0%B4%E4%B8%AD%E5%The4%AE%E5%87%BThe%E7%8F%Become% E7%9A%84%E5%AF%B6%E7%AE%B1%EF%BC%8C%E6%8B%BF%E8%B5%B0%E4%BA%86%E8%A3%A1%E9% 9D%The2%E7%9A%8410MANA%E5%92%8C%E4%B8%80%E5%80%8BNFT%E5%B0%8F%E7%8D%8E%E5%93%81%E3%80% 82-2-300x184.png" data-large-file="%E7%90%83%E8%BF%B7%E5%80%91%E9%AD%94%E6%80%A7%E5%9C% B0%E7%82%BA%E6%88%91%E6%AD%A1%E5%91%BC%EF%BC%8C%E6%88%91%E5%90%91%E4%BB%96% E5%80%91%E5%BE%AE%E7%AC%91%E8%87%B4%E6%84%8F%EF%BC%8C%E7%80%9F%E7%81%91%E8% BD%89%E8%BA%AB%EF%BC%8C%E7%9C%8B%E5%88%B0%E4%BA%86%E7%90%83%E5%A0%B4%E4%B8% AD%E5%A4%AE%E5%87%BA%E7%8F%Become%E7%9A%84%E5%AF%B6%E7%AE% B1%EF%BC%8C%E6%8B%BF%E8%B5%B0%E4%BA%86%E8%A3%A1%E9%9D%A2%E7%9A%8410MANA%E5%92%8C% E4%B8%80%E5%80%8BNFT%E5%B0%8F%E7%8D%8E%E5%93%81%E3%80%82-2-1024x627.png" launching="sluggish" course=" size-full wp-image-48385 sluggish" src="data:picture/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=''%20viewBox='0%200%201600%20980'%3E%3C/svg%3E" data -src="%E7%90%83%E8%BF%B7%E5%80%91%E9%AD%94%E6%80%A7%E5%9C%B0%E7%82%BA%E6%88 %91%E6%AD%A1%E5%91%BC%EF%BC%8C%E6%88%91%E5%90%91%E4%BB%96%E5%80%91%E5%BE%AE %E7%AC%91%E8%87%B4%E6%84%8F%EF%BC%8C%E7%80%9F%E7%81%91%E8%BD%89%E8%BA%AB%EF %BC%8C%E7%9C%8B%E5%88%B0%E4%BA%86%E7%90%83%E5%A0%B4%E4%B8%AD%E5%A4%AE%E5%87 %BA%E7%8F%Become%E7%9A%84%E5%AF%B6%E7%AE%B1%EF%BC%8C%E6%8B%BF%E8%B5%B0%E4%BA%86 %E8%A3%A1%E9%9D%A2%E7%9A%8410MANA%E5%92%8C%E4%B8%80%E5%80%8BNFT%E5%B0%8F%E7%8D%8E%E5 %93%81%E3%80%82-2.png" alt="The fans cheered for me magically, I greeted them with a grin, converted around, and saw the treasure chest in the center of the stadium, and took away the 10MANA and A little NFT prize. "width="1600" elevation="980"/> The supporters cheered for me magically. I greeted them with a grin, converted around and noticed the treasure chest in the middle of the stadium, and got away the 10MANA and a small NFT prize inside. Good guiding ideology of both style and style, I won the competition and decided to cultivate my sentiment, so I found the well-known museum area (14,76). There are many paintings, characters, landscapes, and stills on display in the large and small exhibition halls. It is dazzling to find out. The works are from musicians from all around the globe. When you enjoy a number of the works, the author's Ins will pop-up. Account number and introduction. Museum area (14,76)" data-medium-file="%E5%8D%9A%E7%89%A9%E9%A4%A8%E5%8D%801476-300x190.png" data-large-file= "%E5%8D%9A%E7%89%A9%E9%A4%A8%E5%8D%801476-1024x650.png" launching="sluggish" course="size-full wp-image-48386 sluggish" src= "data:picture/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=''%20viewBox='0%200%201280%20812'%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="%E5%8D%9A%E7 %89%A9%E9%A4%A8%E5%8D%801476.png" alt="Museum area (14,76)" width="1280" elevation="812"/>Museum area (14,76) Decisively followed the long-legged treasure super model tiffany livingston Ins.

Along with works of art, I furthermore saw some beautifully crafted models.

Decentraland artwork "data-medium-file="%E8%97%9D%E8%The1%93%E5%93%81-300x240.gif" data-large-file="%E8%97%9D%E8% A1%93%E5%93%81.gif" launching="sluggish" class="size-full wp-image-48389 sluggish" src="data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=''%20viewBox ='0%200%20320%20256'%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="%E8%97%9D%E8%A1%93%E5%93%81.gif" alt="Decentraland Art Item" width="320" height="256"/>Decentraland artwork seems to support creation in DCL really well. After visiting the museum, knowledge exploded in my mind, and We needed to find a place to relax. The labyrinth (113, -5) from the herb siege made me feel ample oxygen over the screen. This is the feeling. I threatened to apparent the level in five minutes, but has been lost with this green ocean for half an hour. I had to think of a way. After all, the garbage luggage I prepared in advance were full of vomit; I climbed to a mountain next to the maze and neglected the entire maze, and discovered a treasure chest hidden in the center of the maze! My IQ soared to 150 immediately and recorded the whole picture from the maze.

With my amazing memory, I walked to the center of the labyrinth and took away the prizes that were hidden in my fame. After exhausting my energy in the maze, I decided to find a lighter entertainment project and found the hot air balloon at (-55,142). I had been sitting within the hot air balloon, considering the sky silently, thinking of failing woefully to confess to the goddess on Valentine's Day the other day, tears loading down my face. Decentraland Valentine's Day Balloon" data-medium-file="%E6%83%85%E4%BThe%BA%E7%AF%80%E6%B0%A3%E7%90%83-300x146.png" data-large -file="%E6%83%85%E4%BA%BA%E7%AF%80%E6%B0%A3%E7%90%83-1024x500.png" launching="sluggish" course="size-full wp-image-48392 sluggish" src="data:picture/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=``%20viewBox='0%200%201600%20781'%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src= "%E6%83%85%E4%BA%BA%E7%AF%80%E6%B0%A3%E7%90%83.png" alt="Decentraland Valentine's Day Balloon" width="1600" elevation=" 781"/>Decentraland Valentine's Day Balloon I wiped away my tears and stepped lower firmly in the hot air balloon. I found that there is a casino next to it. As a professional coin owner (dog betting), I must not skip it. I wiped away my tears and stepped lower firmly in the hot air balloon, only to discover that there's a casino next to it. As a professional coin owner (dog gaming), I must not skip it. "data-medium-file="%E8%B3%AD%E5%A0%B4-1-1-1-1-300x168.png" data-large-file="%E8%B3%AD%E5%A0 %B4-1-1-1-1-1024x573.png" launching="sluggish" course="size-full wp-image-48393 sluggish" src="data:picture/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=' '%20viewBox='0%200%201600%20896'%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="%E8%B3%AD%E5%A0%B4-1-1-1-1.png" alt="I wiped away my tears and strolled down firmly in the hot air balloon, only to discover that there's a casino next to it. As a professional coin owner (dog gaming), I must not skip it. "width="1600" elevation="896"/>I wiped away my tears, and strolled down in the hot air balloon firmly, only to discover that there's a casino next to it. As a professional coin owner (dog gaming), I must not skip it. I put the goddess' birthday in Baccarat Stud and dropped all my money. The world is indeed cruel. I thought We jumped a hundred from the second floor, but I found a treasure chest within the balcony.

Mountain darkly, vista. I decided to have some real fun.

I saw a huge black high-heeled shoe (69, -135) rising from the ground. The upper has been dotted with striped stripes of homosexual purple. The back heel was a tall and sturdy cylinder. The center of gravity of the entire building rested on this column. on. Perhaps it had been worried about the stability from the column. A elegant woman leaned back slightly, supported the very best from the back heel with her fingers, and leaned her body within the column. Who can stand it! When I found the stairway, a huge red "Stop" blocked my way. All the facts below read "adult content material, 18+", which reminded me which i came to the proper place. Decentraland restricted area 18+exclusive area" data-medium-file="%E7%The6%81%E5%8D%80-18%E7%89%B9%E6%AE%8A%E5%9C%B0%E5%8D %80-1-300x167.png" data-large-file="%E7%A6%81%E5%8D%80-18%E7%89%B9%E6%AE%8A%E5%9C%B0%E5 %8D%80-1-1024x568.png" launching="sluggish" course="size-full wp-image-48396 sluggish" src="data:picture/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=''%20viewBox= '0%200%201600%20888'%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="%E7%A6%81%E5%8D%80-18%E7%89%B9%E6%AE%8A% E5%9C%B0%E5%8D%80-1.png" alt="Decentraland restricted area 18+special area" width="1600" elevation="888"/>Decentraland restricted area 18+special area stroll along the stairs to the floor You can force the entranceway and enter. Surprisingly, there are only two girls performing ball aerobics in the club, not really a single guest. The orange-haired girl on the proper was originally residing at the bar. Each time she pours a glass of wine for herself, she'll dance and jump on the pub and twist her waistline. The most amazing thing is the fact that whenever she stacks up, the clothing on her body will become clear, so when she squatted down, it will turn black again. Decentraland Pole Dancing" data-medium-file="" data-large-file="" launching="lazy" course="size-full wp-image-48397 lazy" src="data:picture/svg+xml,% 3Csvg%20xmlns=``%20viewBox='0%200%201600%20881'%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="" alt="Decentraland pole dancing" width="1600" elevation="881" />Decentraland Pole Dancing The black ponytail lady on the still left hand side continues to be standing in the center of the dancing floor, revealing her pole dance. When the dancing is happening, she will reduce Luo Chang and start ball sports. Do you consider she's not dressed up to any extent further? Don't get worried, her clothing will grow back in ten seconds. I needed to jump onto the dancing floor and dancing with her. I had been sweating and couldn't jump in. Sure enough, I can appear far away and not have fun with with it. Since it has been so dull, I appreciated it a large number of instances, and left with guilt at the goddess.

After a tiring day, I wish to find a place to sleep. I heard how the depths of Taoyuan at (59, -66) are a good resort. The peach blossoms within the human face reflect the red, especially the large green on the floor that makes me feel particularly comfortable. I just wished to sit under a tree to rest, but all of a sudden a treasure box popped right out of the side. I reluctantly got the prizes inside and cursed, "The poor money that disturbs my rest!" and ended the journey nowadays. To sum up, after a long time of traveling, we found out Decentraland skins and adornments worth nearly one thousand, as well as several MANA tokens. Even though whole experience is quite joyful, there have been many game page crashes and freezes. Decentraland has not been downloaded yet, and the car is still flying in the sky (1)" data-medium-file="%E9%82%84%E6%B2%92%E4%B8%8B%E8%BC%89%E5%AE %8C%E6%88%90%EF%BC%8C%E8%BB%8A%E9%82%84%E5%9C%The8%E5%The4%The9%E4%B8%8A%E9%The3%9B -1-300x187.png" data-large-file="%E9%82%84%E6%B2%92%E4%B8%8B%E8%BC%89%E5%AE%8C%E6%88%90 %EF%BC%8C%E8%BB%8A%E9%82%84%E5%9C%A8%E5%A4%A9%E4%B8%8A%E9%A3%9B-1-1024x639.png" launching ="sluggish" course="size-full wp-image-48399 sluggish" src="data:picture/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=''%20viewBox='0%200%201600%20998'%3E% 3C/svg%3E" data-src="%E9%82%84%E6%B2%92%E4%B8%8B%E8%BC%89%E5%AE%8C%E6%88%90%EF% BC%8C%E8%BB%8A%E9%82%84%E5%9C%A8%E5%A4%A9%E4%B8%8A%E9%A3%9B-1.png" alt="Decentraland not the download is complete, the car is still flying in the sky (1)" width="1600" elevation="998"/>Decentraland has not been downloaded yet, the car is still flying in the sky (1) This little theater in the sky I never know how to get there "data-medium-file="%E9%80%99%E5%80%8B%E5%A4%A9%E7%A9%BA%E4%B8%AD%E7%9A%84%E5%B0%8F %E5%8A%87%E5%A0%B4%E6%88%91%E4%B8%80%E7%9B%B4%E4%B8%8D%E7%9F%A5%E9%81%93%E6 %80%8E%E9%BA%BC%E5%8E%BB-300x139.png" data-large-file="%E9%80%99%E5%80%8B%E5%A4%A9%E7%A9 %BA%E4%B8%AD%E7%9A%84%E5%B0%8F%E5 %8A%87%E5%A0%B4%E6%88%91%E4%B8%80%E7%9B%B4%E4%B8%8D%E7%9F%A5%E9%81%93%E6%80 %8E%E9%BA%BC%E5%8E%BB-1024x475.png" launching="sluggish" course="size-full wp-image-48400 sluggish" src="data:picture/svg+xml,%3Csvg %20xmlns=``%20viewBox='0%200%201600%20742'%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="%E9%80%99%E5%80%8B%E5%A4%A9% E7%A9%BA%E4%B8%AD%E7%9A%84%E5%B0%8F%E5%8A%87%E5%A0%B4%E6%88%91%E4%B8%80%E7% 9B%B4%E4%B8%8D%E7%9F%A5%E9%81%93%E6%80%8E%E9%BA%BC%E5%8E%BB.png" alt="The tiny in the sky I never know how to get to the theater" width="1600" elevation="742"/>This little theater in the sky I never know how to see my floating pose" data-medium-file="%E7%9C %8B%E6%88%91%E9%80%99%E5%80%8B%E6%87%B8%E7%A9%BA%E6%BC%82%E6%B5%AE%E5%A7%BF %E5%8B%A2-300x193.gif" data-large-file="%E7%9C%8B%E6%88%91%E9%80%99%E5%80%8B%E6%87%B8%E7 %A9%BA%E6%BC%82%E6%B5%AE%E5%A7%BF%E5%8B%A2-1024x658.gif" launching="sluggish" class="size-full wp-image-48401 sluggish "src="data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=''%20viewBox='0%200%201154%20742'%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="%E7%9C% 8B%E6%88%91%E9%80%99%E5%80%8B%E6%87%B8%E7%A9%BA%E6%BC%82%E6%B5%AE%E5%A7%BF% E5%8B%A2.gif" alt="Look at my suspended floating position, appear at my suspended floating position" width="1154" elevation="742"/>Look at my suspended floating position. From the product perspective, the above articles is merely for Bojun's grin, why don't we below From the product perspective, briefly discuss the true experience of the game: Overall, Decentraland continues to be in a very early state. There are lots of "coming in contact with" insects in both the screen and the knowledge. The interactivity of the game is slightly rough. A lot more than 99% from the moments, buildings, and objects cannot directly connect to the player. The physics engine is quite rudimentary, & most from the gameplay is performed through extremely simple program logic. At present, the number of people on the internet at exactly the same time shouldn't exceed 200, as well as the launching speed of many moments has encountered problems, as well as the performance problems when several people are on a single screen are worrying (at most we have encountered 3 people using one screen). In terms of social functions, there is currently nothing but public channel chat. The merchandise or communities made by the designers on the property are all remarkable and rich in imagination, however they are all at the amount of sketches or demos. Is it possible to form a system effect to pull the designers in to the god-level ecosystem for Decentraland? That is back again A chicken-and-egg problem, did users or products come first? According to the product form delivered in 24 months, it really is conservatively estimated that when you want to polish this video game into a more mainstream video game, it will take a minimum of 3 years. As for the inclusion of VR? Right now, let's pay attention to the storyplot and wear it the agenda in 3 years (if it can live for 3 years). The above evaluation might be a bit harsh to get a blockchain video game, but don't forget, this can be a project that has raised 24 million US dollars and claims to build a game product and ecology, not really a public string (Public Chain) project . Prolonged reading: Wilson's column | strong application of blockchain, the rise of decentralized finance DeFi (part 1) Extended reading: The most full introduction to DeFi: Why is decentralized finance the second breakthrough in the history of encryption? Further reading: Trivial thingsNFT series <2> What is NFT? - The main element to the integration of blockchain and digital reality is everything can be currency? Prolonged reading: Weibo banned! TRON Justin Sunlight and Binance "One Sister" are blocked: the brand new accounts (Aunt He Yi) will only post selfies More reading: DisneyTRON trademark is banned by "Disney" from applying in the U.S. Justin Sunlight TRON 6 Twitter responses Prolonged reading: Introduction to Decentralized FinanceUnderstand the lending mechanism in five minutes, what's "DeFi Bank" Chemical substance? 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