#LET ME LIVE THE ONE MECHANIC EVERY EARLY 2000 GAME HAD

[squeaky-potat]

Everyone should be able to skatesword and compete early 2000 style 😤

(Version without text or sword under the cut)

[takaraphoenix]

Ship game!! What about Nico and Will?? It’s pretty popular, but I don’t think I’ve seen you write much of it…

That's an interesting one in that I have vocalized my reasons for disliking it way back when it first became popular but instead of just linking that, it has been years so I think it's time for an updated version.

Firstly: This post is gonna be properly tagged and not crosstagged so if any shipper comes across it and feels the need to bitch about it, just don't; your lack of curating your own tumblr experience is not my problem! ;D

Now, there are three key factors that play into my dislike of this ship: How it was written, what it represents, how the fandom around it acts.

1. It’s rushed and uncomfortable

In BoO, it was incredibly rushed. They had literally five sentences of interactions before they walked into the literal sunset together. Five. It was just entirely born from Riordan's Noah's Ark Complex, where he just can't let people be single. The series was ending and he needed Nico to have an endgame so he rushed into some random romance with zero build-up.

The way their interactions went down was also severely uncomfortable for me. Will was acting so offended by Nico not wanting to go to camp and be friends in an entitled way that he had no right to be, he downright guilt-tripped Nico about how he had wanted to be friends. Nico has been just so severely traumatized at such a young age and his coping mechanism, as unhealthy as it was, was to run away and hide. Will acted like Nico not wanting to form attachments to people who could potentially leave him again was somehow just an Edgy Emo Decision and not a direct reaction to his trauma. His entire approach to Nico was basically all these hippie posts of "Don't have depression!! Just go out into the sun and stop being depressed!", which is already a bad take with non-medical people but he's supposed to be a doctor (and let's not get into the shadiness of him technically being Nico's doctor).

There is also an inherent "I can fix him" angle to this ship and to me, only few ship dynamics are more uncomfortable than that. If you want to fundamentally change a person's behavior and personality, you... don't actually want to be with this person.

Now, here's where my points overlap, because the following parts of their writing that bothers me also stand for what this ship fundamentally represents.

2. Solangelo is a queer ship written by and for straights

I'm a queer woman and as a queer woman, I want queer wish-fulfillment, not what straights want out of queerness. I'm kind of tired of that, I've been sitting through it for enough decades now. That's, of course, not to say that no straight writer can give proper queer representation, but far too often do straight writers - even the most well-meaning ones - project straight desires of queerness into their queer representation.

Let me explain that closer through this ship.

Nico's been in love with Percy for years and I'm going to do my best to not hijack this post with some Percico agenda; that's not what this his about, this isn't some "my ship is better than your ship" ship-war nonsense. It's simply a canonical fact that Nico has had romantic feelings for another character for years.

A character who, in this medium, is heterosexual. And if you're queer, you've been there. In love with your straight best friend. It's a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason.

We have also all been well-meaningly rejected by said straight friend.

And here's the straight desires for you: The queer person who was in love with a straight person just immediately stops having those feelings and will then as quickly as possible fall in love with the next queer person they meet to be happy and no longer uncomfortably in love with a straight person, because that thought makes the straights uncomfortable.

Queer wish-fulfillment would be for Percy to return those feelings, for the queer character to get his first love, to not be rejected. That thing queer teens always dreamed about for themselves.

Aside from the wish-fulfillment angle, the pacing is another problem. Let me repeat, Nico was in love for years. But a five sentence conversation with Will once causes a crush on Will and we see him physically turn away from Percy and toward Will just immediately to rebound and actually fall out of love with Percy and in love with Will. Anyone who's ever been unlucky in love will attest to just how unrealistic and ridiculous the pacing here is.

It's also straight queerness in another respect; Nico has been the first ever queer character we meet in that world. He loves a straight guy - and to get over that, we introduce the second queer character. Because heaven forbid there are multiple queers to pick from. No, in straight-written queer romances, there is always that one main queer and then they introduce a second one and the two just immediately hit it off and develop a romance like all a queer person needs to form attraction to someone is the confirmation that the other person shares your sexuality.

Also the notable gay guy on gay guy ship here, whereas the more queer-wish-fulfillment option would have also included more nuance to the queer experience, because Percy doesn't have to be heterosexual just because he has only been with girls so far. It's a very old-fashioned - think 90s and early 2000s - kind of straight-written queerness that there are only exactly two homosexuals and that those two homosexuals then pair up.

And, listen, I'm not immune to these outdated straight-written queers entirely, I have many such ships that I grew up with that I am still fond of because they were groundbreaking at that time and they weren't outdated yet back when they happened in said 90s and early 2000s. I am however a grown woman now and just like I have grown, so has queer rep so I am not as easily baited into falling onto my knees in gratitude for canon rep. You have to go with the times. And this ship, by all that is given to us, is just entirely outdated straight-written rep.

Which, I mention earlier that even straight-written rep can be good. If the author tries. Riordan doesn't really try though; he does the bare minimum when he writes any of his rep - and there have been many, many more qualified voices being very vocal about his depiction of people of color and, as a woman, I've been vocal about his depiction of women. I don't want to derail this post with all of that, but I do think that it bears mentioning that Riordan doing rep but only doing a bare minimum and not putting in the necessary work to deepen the representation he wants to give is a repeating pattern that has been pointed out many times by now.

(I’d also like to point out that no, it is not just the ship and not just the listed instances that make it straight-written rep for straights. It’s Nico’s entire queer arc, starting with his forced coming out. A severely traumatizing event that is completely brushed over because the straight author doesn’t understand the impact this has on queer people. Not to mention the framework; Nico’s coming out isn’t Nico’s story, it happens in Jason’s POV, it is given to us through the POV of the straight bystander who gets to be Best Ally by assuring Nico that being gay is okay. This kind of coming out is not a queer wish-fulfillment, it’s a straight wish-fulfillment of getting to be the straight savior, the ally to show the gay the light of acceptance. And, additional to the ridiculous pacing of how fast Nico gets over his love for Percy, Nico also gets over years of internalized homophobia just because of, I don’t know, Jason’s few encouraging words and the fact that Will paid attention to him? For a gay kid who was in the closet all his life, the nonchalant way in which he publicly confessed his crush to Percy at the end made absolutely no sense and was written as basically a joke, finished off with Nico literally high-fiving Percy’s girlfriend despite those two never having seen eye to eye before but this is straight wish-fulfillment so all straights are Super Allies, because that’s the way straights want to see themselves, even though Annabeth has shown before just how jealous she can be and she most definitely wouldn’t go around high-fiving people who confess to her boyfriend. Nothing about Nico’s queer arc in HoO felt natural or queer or satisfying.)

Sure, Solangelo on a surface level is big because it's a canon queer couple in a YA book-series and kudos for that and yay for the kids who get to grow up seeing queers in YA books, but I actually do think that kids growing up with books written in the 2010s shouldn't grow up with 1990s levels of representation, because the 2010s overall are actually at a far more nuanced and better level of representation when it comes to queerness. And I do reserve the right to quit on too straight-written and too outdated queer rep in a landscape where I can get more satisfying representation elsewhere; we don’t live in times anymore where you necessarily have to love every bit of rep because it’s the only one you get.

Now that we've gone through my first two gripes, let's wrap this up with the final point, because it also directly ties into this.

3. The new wave of antis hiding behind this ship

A huge part of the fandom is so busy kissing Riordan's ass solely for giving them queer rep at all they think that both the author and the ship are beyond flawless and that kind of attitude is not good. Just because an author includes rep doesn't make either perfect. Absolutely no one is beyond critique - especially not when said critique comes from the very people the author is representing. And even beyond any "valid" critique on the ship, quite frankly, someone should also be allowed to just not like it, without any reasons given at all.

But there is a certain... protective obsessiveness about this ship that doesn't allow a not liking. Very similar to how PJO bore this mindset around Perc/abeth already. It's okay to have OTPs, even OTPs that you have a blindspot for and just don't want to see any flaws in. It is however not okay to then go around attacking people who don't like the thing and mind their own business.

Solangelo's bred a new generation of antis in this fandom. And, particularly with the fact that this post too receives an "anti" tag, I feel like there needs to be a clarification (because tumblr likes to forget what actually makes an anti). Not liking something doesn't make you an anti, venting in properly tagged posts doesn't either; it's the people who harass others, who seek out the content they dislike to then complain that it even exists and who actively try to make others stop creating for it - those are antis.

And with Solangelo's popularity, there was a high rise in Percico antis, who sought it out, were unnecessarily nasty about it, harrassed creators and tried to enforce some kind of "Solangelo supremacy" that won't allow other ships for the characters.

I've been in fandom long enough to be perfectly aware that not all Solangelo shippers count into this category and that there are completely normal and nice Solangelo shippers, but this is a Venn diagram where the overlap between Solangelo shippers and antis is too large to not widely associate the nasty people with the ship itself. (I've been there myself, shipping the very ship behind which a fandom's antis all hid. The second-hand embarrassment of having these people give the ship a bad name is horrendous and I do feel bad for all the normal Solangelo shippers.)

The more often I encountered these people, who made Percico bad (sometimes in wildly ridiculous manners that bent and deliberately misinterpreted canon) and who in the same breath praised Solangelo high, the more tired I grew of that ship. It's a simple game of association, really. You see that linked to the gross and nasty behavior and you start associating the ship itself with that gross and nasty behavior - and with all the things I said before that already weighed into my dislike of the ship, this just was the final tipping point, really.

And that's it. That sums up why I dislike Solangelo. It was hastily rushed, uncomfortable in its execution, it is outdated rep that very much feels as straight-written as it factually is and it does not feel aimed at me as a queer person but rather at the straight audience and it has gathered a cult following of quite uncomfortable people who on their own would be reason enough to avoid it so you can avoid them.

Send me a ship and I will explain why I do or don't ship it

[tardisbadwolfrose]

For the character thing, please do Rose Tyler

Ooo thats fun. I was not expecting a doctor who character. Ok. Lets go.

Why I like them: part of it is just because she was my first companion. I fell in love with Doctor Who through her. But also, theres something to be said for a perfectly normal, ordinary person with flaws and who probably doesnt think much of themselves, who is young and naive and loving, who ends up doing extraordinary things without some preternatural destiny guiding them. The only other companion who really hit on that was Bill. Donna had a bit, but there were elements of s4 that implied that it was all some sort of prophecy coming together. The DoctorDonna and all that. Rose really was so ordinary. Even Bad Wolf was born of something so ordinary, so human, this intense love and desire to protect. Rose was, in so many ways, such a perfect first companion, because from the beginning shes such an every girl. And she has so much compassion for so many. Everytime she interacts with people, especially people who work for other people, she treats them like people and like equals. Theres the mechanic in "the end of the world," gwenyth, etc. I just... Ugh. I love her. Bills still my fave, but rose is a VERY close second.

Why I don't like them: her selfishness. I dont know if its really that I dont like her because of it, because I like that she has a real, human flaw, and its a real reason that people might dislike them. It means shes well written, and feels real and human. But it still bugs me. Especially in s1, but even in parts of s2. She treats Mickey and her mother with this dissmissiveness, which is very immature. Like she thinks they only exist when shes around. She gets called on it though, and pretty early on. She never fixes it fully, especially where Jackie is concerned, but she makes an effort. But you can especially see it in school reunion, with her jealousy of sarah jane. She has a problem with the people she loves fully having lives outside of her, especially when those lives seem like a threat to the one shes creating.

Favorite Episode: the Parting of ways, fear her, turn left, or stolen earth/journeys end. Aka, im a simple girl with simple pleasures, and those pleasures are rose being a badass/saving the day. Special mention for the idiot lantern bc i must have watched it 20 times and they give me LIFE the doctor and rose in that episode.

Favorite season: 2. Shes starting to get more confident and sure of herself, but shes still human and flawed.

Favorite Line: whatever the hell she says during the christmas invasion, when shes trying to get the sycorax to leave. Its utter bull, makes zero sense, and its beautiful.

OTP: Doctor/Rose. Any doctor. Im a little desperate to see rose/thirteen. Also Rose/doctor/river. If ianto didnt exist, id say rose/jack/doctor, but alas, he does.

Favorite outfit: oh god. Either the one in the unquiet dead, the idiot lantern, the long game, or the doctor dances. There are so many more though. Her costuming was brilliant.

BroTP: rose and jack.

Headcanon: you mean besides time lord/immortal Rose? Ok here it goes.

So when Rose dropped out of high school for Jimmy Stone, she ran away. Went off on tour with Stone and his band. While on tour, she got.very close to the other band members, including the lead singer/lyricist, a very cute 20 yr old Welshman going through his rebellious phase named Ianto Jones, who helped her figure out she needed to go home and, in the process realized he needed to stop rebelling and start acting like a mature adult, leading to him eventually signing on with Torchwood. Meanwhile, Rose is stranded all the way in Paris because she won't stay on that tour bus with Jimmy, and she's terrified to call her mum, who had told her she'd never forgive her if she ran off and wasted her life on Jimmy. Penniless and desperate, walking alone in the rain, Rose thinks she's never going to make it back to London when she almost gets run over by a car after forgetting to watch where she's going and wandering into the street. The driver swerves and just barely miss her, and after pulling over, a man hops out of the car and starts admonishing her, when Rose bursts into tears. Feeling badly, the man insists on taking her home. She tells him home is in London, too far away for her to accept, but the man refuses to listen, telling her he was heading to London anyway, and here, why don't you borrow my cell phone and call your mum, I'm sure she wants you home. He's right of course, and Jackie cries from relief at hearing from her and is thrilled she's coming home. The man's name was Rory, she learned on the drive, and he was married to a wonderful woman who he loved named Amy, and they lived in Leeds but he was travelling around from work and he was heading from Paris to London because of it. It took six hours to gt back to London, and once they got there, her mum treated Rory to breakfast and he went on his way and rose never saw him again.

Yes, it was that Rory. He was with Amy and the Doctor and he got stranded in Paris in the early 2000's and he wasn't heading into London at all but he felt very bad about almost hitting the poor girl with his car and he recognized her from an old picture he found while he was wandering the Tardis and he brought it to the doctor to ask him about it and the Doctor got very sad and very quiet and walked very quickly away from the conversation and Rory figured that meant that he used to travel with her and there was a sad story in there somewhere and he was curious about the girl and how she'd inspire that kind of emotion from a man he'd rarely seen care about anything real.

Should I make this a fanfiction? I kind of want to make this an actual fic... Anyway.

Unpopular opinion: ...She is a very much not straight woman. I don't know if that's unpopular, but it isn't popular. Or at least, it isn't talked about.

A wish: That she comes back in S13 and we see a reunion. I am but a simple girl with simple pleasures and I have been WAITING WITH BATED BREATH FOR A ROSE COMEBACK FOR YEARS AND I AM O V E R D U E.

An OMG-Please-Don't-Ever-Happen: For a character that is no longer in the show there isn't much I can say. I'd be very disappointed if they brought Rose back and ruined it but that requires them to bring her back first.

5 words that best describe them: Kind, good, jealous, badass, loving

My nickname for them: I don't really have one

Give me more characters! I love this!

[vroenis]

Lost Legacy Exemplifies Naughty Dog’s Cultural Crisis

There’s a discussion about Ocean’s 8 that positions its existence around whether or not it's necessary as a counterpoint to the Ocean’s reboot - the Ocean’s Cinematic Universe - if you will (what a world we live in) - that it was only made as a gender flip of the reboot that spawned two sequels, three films in total cast almost entirely with men.

My perspective is that as much as I generally enjoyed the Ocean’s reboots for what they were, Ocean’s Eleven should have been a cast entirely with women in the first place.

The heroes we both need and deserve.

Massive spoilers for the original 1960 Lewis Milestone version and the Steven Soderbergh one in 2001 of Ocean’s Eleven - Soderbergh’s flip is of-course that they get to keep the money at the end so that they have to potentially give it back in the sequel he knew he’d be able to make, whereas I doubt Milestone knew he’d ever get a sequel back in the early 60′s so the rub for film-making back then is to burn the money at the end. Nevertheless even for the early 2000′s, the boldest of moves would have been to cast it with women, not to be progressive but also to be progressive, tho that’s still an absurd thought that to cast women is progressive - but to be smart. Ocean’s 8 is a fantastic film, deftly written, paced, acted, shot and edited. Would the world have responded to it in like-kind? I know how *I* would have responded to it, I think you can answer for yourself how societal cultures may have responded at any point from 2001 thru to now. In any case, I have Ocean’s 8 on blu-ray. I love it.

A reader asked me whether I’d played Uncharted: The Lost Legacy after kindly reading through my bludgeoning of Uncharted 4, and seeing as they were patient enough to endure that blood-letting, I felt I owed them and probably Naughty Dog the time of day to give Uncharted-And-A-Half a chance, and I’m really glad I did. Fair warning, there’s a lot I didn’t like about Lost Legacy, and there’s going to be some more pain - a lot of pain. I don’t think any of my tumblr audience is quite on the rest of my socials, but anyone who’s connected to me anywhere else on the Wire was subject to my frustrations as I played thru the game on Saturday, including the blurred image of my Google Keep notes I took while playing the game in preparation for this journal. I keep notes now.

Nevertheless, I can say that on the assumption that the Uncharted series is wrapped, or at least in the narrative arc with these characters as we know them, that Lost Legacy is easily without question my favourite Uncharted game by far.

On that assumption that Uncharted is more or less done, now’s as good a time as any to take a top-down look at the franchise as a whole. I know I already did a fair bit of that in the last piece, but some broader thoughts on what the series does and says have solidified while playing Lost Legacy, and I’ll discuss them as a lead-in to my thoughts on the game.

Again - this is going to be riddled with spoilers for Uncharted: The Lost Legacy and most likely the entire Uncharted series, so if you’ve not played them and are interested in doing so, or don’t want to see them heavily critiqued, please stop here.

The first game was released in 2007 and was apparently in development for roughly three years. What was happening up to and around 2004 to 2007? September 11 had happened in 2001, the world was at war in the Middle East in Afghanistan and second invasion of Iraq had begun in 2003, Hurricane Katrina happened in 2005 - the same year the IRA ended armed conflict in Northern Ireland, 2005 saw the outbreak of H5N1 Avian Flu - topical right now. There are so many more, I can’t list them all here - lots of momentous events that in some way or another highlight community awareness in some way - that’s probably a bit of an obtuse statement but hopefully it’ll string together in a sec. What struck me and a bunch of my friends odd about the first, then the second and then somehow every Uncharted game since, is that Naughty Dog seem to choose an ethnicity for their antagonists and scratch the surface of “what if this element of their cultural violence is bad”, but then leave it so shallow that it remains a caricature and comes off as casually and carelessly racist. The first game frames the theme around Nazis, but the actual enemies are anything but. Yes, they’re intended to be mercenaries, but they’re hardly nondescript, they’re absolutely of very specific ethnicity.

From the second game onward, Naughty Dog seem to want to make use of real world settings and do some nuanced research on actual sociopolitical conflict and I always feel uneasy about how its presented. Lost Legacy begins much the same way and I worried about the tone going in. An active war-zone in India as gravitas to your setting that is then almost completely abandoned until the very end? This is my problem with how the writers treat setting in Uncharted. They use very real conflicts that have real-world consequences for people in which actual lives are lost to inject gravity into their narrative and then quickly discard it for the sake of shenanigans once the wise-cracking starts when the tone shifts gear and the characters themselves take centre-stage in the foreground.

Here’s the thing.

The character’s are enough. I *love* these characters. Their story is fantastic. Nadine’s and Chloe’s story was the best and most cohesive of the entire series. Also it only took me roughly six hours to play thru and I only feel like half of that was wasted! That’s still probably being too generous but I’m grasping for positives, here. Still - I don’t know why the senior production team has never had confidence in the core of their product which is the charm of their characters and the play dynamic - Uncharted is primarily about *seeing* and *doing* - for the most part, unfortunately, separately.

The dialogue between Chloe and Nadine is extremely interesting, it is absolutely the best thing in the game, yet it keeps getting interrupted by stupid gameplay beats due to poor timing of rolling up on level locations. Uncharted 4 was supposed to have locations hidden around levels where you could engage in dialogue between characters but I barely found them - why hide such interesting content in your game?? It’s completely absurd. Then the only few I did find were between Elena and Nathan altho I really don’t think those were meant to be hidden, and they were so poorly written and I hated them so much, I didn’t care to discover any more. Again - no disrespect at all to Nolan North and Troy Baker whom I absolutely adore and respect, but I didn’t find anything engaging or interesting *at all* about the brother narrative. I didn’t care one bit what that nonsense was about. What about Sully? Where’s Sully’s story?? I’m just so - so glad we got a story for Chloe, and that at least Nadine got some great screen time too as a part of it and that it all presented so well.

Before I continue to praise what went well, there are a few things I can’t let pass. While the driving has thankfully improved and controls quite well now, the exclusion of a minimap or GPS HUD element is interesting. I’m fairly certain it’s intentional as to not detract from the game’s clean, cinematic look, to not break immersion, but this just generates a horrific breakdown in actual player experience for me. Without any navigational assists, I constantly got lost and stopped every 20 meters to check the map, frequently driving into dead-ends, off cliffs and past where I wanted or needed to go. The game isn’t a 30 hour open-world experience with distinct and varied landmarks the player will familiarise themselves with and learn to navigate by, for the most part the level is fairly homogeneous in object geometry.

Some of the puzzles take far too long to mechanically execute, in particular the smashy-slashy statue block jumpy stupid whatever it’s called one and the sliding shadow motif. It doesn’t matter that neither actually takes too long once you know the solution, it’s that they feel long and then are actually over-long and also not interesting to mechanically execute. This is due mostly to clunky character animation and animation smoothing, and part of Naughty Dog’s overall obsession with being cinematic which is something I’ll return to towards the end of this piece, something which has been a strength but will ultimately be to their detriment. While cinematic visuals might be a benefit for traversal, it’s something that absolutely does not suit puzzle-solving. In the example of the statue-block puzzle, the hard reset each time the player is hit means laboriously jogging all the way back to the beginning and starting again - it’s just poor puzzle design having to begin again from a full reset. There’s no satisfaction in having to remember the whole thing and while I didn’t look up the solution online, I’m willing to bet many people will have just dialled up a clip on YouTube and copied it without figuring it out themselves. This is a failure of connecting what’s satisfying about moving in your game and what’s satisfying about solving puzzles, something Crystal Dynamics understood far better in the Tomb Raider reboots, in particular the second outing (Rise of) with their much more environment-centric puzzling.

The sliding shadow puzzle just simply takes way too long to jog around the space, then clip onto the hot-zone for each lever, wait for the animation to lift it, wait for the animation for the pieces to slide, rinse, repeat. Once you know what you have to do, it’s overly frustrating actually having to do it.

It brings me to a weird quirk of design where the puzzle designers perhaps don’t understand something that the environmental designers do. Maybe they didn’t get the same little notes in the Slack channel, or Trello board or Teams pin or whatever. Uncharted level-design has almost no back-tracking, less in each successive game, and it’s almost entirely absent from Lost Legacy - you’d have to look closely to realise you’re navigating the same area you came in thru and almost always moving over it in a different way that’s been modified - now it’s flooded, now there’s a bridge, now you’re swinging or leaping or climbing where you weren’t etc. I feel like this is the Hidetaka Miyazaki Souls/Borne effect of level design in which environments are designed to be both realistic and practical.

Great! Good for the level designers. Did the puzzle designers not get that note? Maybe they did. I need to stop thinking that every poor optimisation is a symptom of ignorance - that’s bad form on my part. What’s more likely is it’s a symptom of either bad leadership, poor tool implementation, lack of time or too narrow or strict an observation of representative vision - by which I mean - they can’t change the way the characters move or animate just for puzzles, because it has to be consistent with the cinematic representation of the game as a whole - and that sucks lemons. It means the overall play experience suffers for the sake of the overall cinematic experience except executing a puzzle isn’t cinematic unless it’s expansive...

Like the positive example I’ll give of the light reflector room. Shoplifted from Uncharted 2′s giant knife that has Nathan climb all over a giant knife, Lost Legacy’s light reflector room has slightly less climbing but is a much larger space, more impressive and a much better example of good puzzling in Uncharted. It’s not difficult to solve but again (I think again?) I’ll argue that you don’t come to Uncharted for difficult puzzles - you don’t come to Tomb Raider for difficult puzzles, either. 

The puzzles in these games should be mostly environmental because they feel good solving them, and solving them should be more about the doing - the playing - and the playing should be moving - running, jumping, climbing etc.

Both the giant knife and the reflector room are a joy to execute because they’re fantastically realised - large cavernous environments that aren’t annoying to navigate, that give you time to appreciate both the scale of the spaces and the details the designers and artists have put into them. Lost Legacy’s is more impressive because you do a lot more puzzling and spend much more time in its vastly larger space, culminating in combat that usually I would be ho-hum about, but I guess exhibits more animation and destruction tech which while scripted, is still impressive nonetheless given how extremely difficult it is to have interactivity still occurring.

I have a few things I want to mention before I begin to wrap up, given it’s going to be a very long wrap - I’d say I’m taking cues from Joseph Anderson but I’ve always been this verbose.

The medallion puzzles were excellent, in part perhaps because they felt like the closest thing to the Tomb Raider reboots’ challenge tombs. Some of them were silly and lazily implemented, the worst offender being you just had to shoot mans and get the medallion from the lock-box that the mans had put it in (pfft), but the best ones were integrated into the environment such that you may well have walked past or thru areas that were puzzles before you knew what they were. This brings up one of the most interesting things I’ve been turning over for quite some time now. Ben Croshaw aka Yahtzee aka Zero Punctuation may have first mentioned “chest high walls” in his first Gears of War video, but it may well have been an Uncharted game. I don’t remember but he will have thrown in mentions of all the generic cover-shooters as a catch-all for how the environments immediately telegraph that Combat™ will happen. It’s a particularly astute remark and speaks volumes of video game design - developers always seem to have very specific design language to separate traversal, combat and puzzling. While I clearly don’t care for combat most days, and yes - I do acknowledge there are some practical concerns for combat that can’t be avoided, I always envisaged design that blurred the lines between puzzle and environment so that you never quite knew what was and wasn’t a puzzle. Everything should be the puzzle. In some senses, Cyan’s old Myst games were a bit like this but in a very rudimentary and crude way - sure, they’re quite old now, but even those had very clear not puzzle areas. It’s a complex and subtle subject, but something of a study of games like Fireproof Games’ The Room would be in order. Understandably smaller scale, but the thinking behind it is definitely adjacent.

Final notes - the young Indian girl in the prologue has amazing animations that you’ll miss entirely unless you swing the camera yourself. A whole team of people or a single animator has spent hours on those animations - that a director or team leader hasn’t forced the player to see and appreciate them is a disservice.

Every section where you have to do something under pressure like run from mans shooting at you or dash through a lengthy section of crumbling cave network etc. is a horrible play experience of not knowing where to go. They’re trying to inject excitement by applying pressure but there’s no clear guidance and no dependence on player skill, so you end in bizarre fail-states due to going in completely the wrong direction that glitches cameras or scene time-outs resulting in check-points and the whole thing just doesn’t scan as a cinematic experience. I hate hate hate them - you’re subject to the same musical swell that’s supposed to be like a movie only to fail again and it comes off as b-grade and pathetic. Every game has had this problem and it is just straight bad design.

Three? Four? Games in a row, Naughty Dog have recycled; 

being pursued on foot by an armoured vehicle crashing through level geometry while you have to run and occasionally shoot/fight mans, 

driving down a shanty-town on a hill pursued by an armoured vehicle - perhaps the same one as previous scene

a big chase scene of lots of vehicles jumping from vehicle to vehicle shooting and/or punching mans that may or may not include...

a train combat sequence where you start at the back of the train and work your way to the front of it shooting mans as you go

This lacks creativity at this point. I think duplicating these once each - so you do them twice total across the franchise is fine, but they hit the same beats in the same way - exactly - every time they appear. It just strikes me as Naughty Dog just not knowing what else to do. At one point, I think it was in Uncharted 4, when driving down the shanty-town on the hill, I literally had a brain-fart not knowing which game I was playing because I swear we did it in 2 and 3. Did we do it in 3?? Look, I don’t know. But it’s getting old. At least we didn’t do it in Lost Legacy, but we did the train and I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of doing the same things in the same way. It could have been a train but it should have been in a way that just wasn’t just another Uncharted train. It hasn’t worn thin, it’s worn out.

Overall, the games look great... but playing them feels like they’re stuck in PS2 and early PS3 era philosophies, like Naughty Dog haven’t evolved and don’t realise that people’s brains function much quicker and can process more, or that the media we consume, the games we play function at a higher level and we can digest more, we’re capable of processing higher functions. I’ve been playing Ubisoft’s The Division 2 and enjoying it more the more I play, much to my surprise. I understand the intent behind the gameplay is extremely different to the single-player experience of Uncharted, however there are some parallels in what it achieves animation wise;

The Division is also a cover shooter but of-course as a multiplayer, open-world live-service game, its intent is to telegraph to the player that the entire environment is a permanent play-space in which to always be playing. It utilises an information-rich GUI that is an always-on system with button icons telling the player what button to press over what surfaces to snap to, vault over, climb up, run to (and snap to cover), open and loot, interact with etc. I don’t know if these can be turned off but I like them on. It’s a pretty amazing feat that almost every environmental object has been mapped as a snap-to-cover and/or climbable object. For this reason, the character movement in Division is pretty quick and snappy, however it still manages to have a decent degree of natural human kinetics in the character rigging which is amazing. This means if you move-off from standing still, there’s a slight delay as your “weight” shifts, same if you change direction. When I say “snap” to cover, it’s not actually instantaneous, your character makes a movement and takes time to do so, yet it’s still not sluggish. Somehow the developers have worked at fine-tuning a balance between not-instant, but not too slow.

This is something that even in Lost Legacy, I feel Naughty Dog simply can’t do. The animations are decent during play - they’re outstanding during cutscenes (we’re getting there), but character models have a really awkward relationship with the environment. They clip awkwardly with ladders and buttons and wheels - with puzzles and levers - getting the grappling hook to prompt is again better than Uncharted 4 but still not ideal. I had far fewer glitch-outs than 4 too, which was a significant improvement, but I still had to animate back and forth a few times to get into hot-zones appropriately and with character kinetics not quite right, it wasn’t exactly easy.

And again to be fair, this stuff is suuuuuper difficult. I don’t mean to talk about this stuff like it’s cooking instant ramen. It’s so freaking tough. Rigging and mapping interactive character models has to be one of the most stupendously difficult things a developer has to do - making it work with all that scripting, getting it to play nice with all those assets and lines and lines of coding for the full experience. I have so much respect for game developers and what an astronomical task it is. So when I say I prefer one development team’s product over another’s, I don’t mean to say that the other team is absolute garbage - there are so many things that might contribute to that final product and we have no idea what’s been going on at Naughty Dog. If the team leaders and producers say they’re happy or even if they don’t, and the decision is made to ship, there’s nothing more they can say or do.

If there was one thing I absolutely loved about this game, it was the two main characters and the story that was told about them. I can excuse the main text as the catalyst that brought them together - even to the point that it’s a story about Chloe ultimately deciding what’s important to her. My issue with this comes full circle with the setting being in a real world conflict. There’s a bit of white savour complex in there in that Asav might be the narrative’s antagonist, but he at least is local. It’s not clear exactly what Chloe’s ethnicity is and I’m not here to judge what her stakes are in it because clearly her character has a sense of home and place in India, but she certainly also has a complex sense of being an outsider. So the point is not to judge, but the game also is unclear on its positioning other than she’s the heroic vehicle of deliverance. See what I mean about theme? This is what I mean by you could have just as easily written almost an identical story about Nadine and Chloe, with very similar interactions, tension, redemption and resolve - even with an antagonist, conflict and a happy ending, but either treated real sociopolitical issues with better care or not set your game in them at all. I’m all for setting games in the real world, but if you’re going to do it, do it right. I’m not the person to ask.

I need to be careful not to direct that criticism at the base-level developers nor at Claudia Black who is the manifestation of Chloe’s voice because she does an amazing job of bringing her to life. The casting of Laura Bailey voicing a black South African Nadine was much more awkward given Nadine’s ethnicity wasn’t decided when she was cast - again that’s on Naughty Dog’s leadership, but I won’t knock Laura Bailey for it. It’s easy to say she should have resigned, perhaps she should have, that’s an economical question only Laura can answer and I’m sure it’s not an easy one. Suffice to say, VO work isn’t lucrative.

What a side-track.

I don’t think I ever cared about Nathan. I think I always cared about Elena, and not because WAIFU and also not because WHITE KNIGHT or whatever other bullshit reasons stupid alphagamerz will spit from their frontheads. Elena’s just more interesting, probably because Nathan is written like a design document and Elena’s written like a human being. Naughty Dog want to create a game about adventuring with lush expansive environments, shooty mcshooting and light puzzling. They want it to be cinematic and unrivalled in its quality and they have the smarts to build the tech around it, with Sony’s help. Backed by Sony money, they take VO seriously and do a great job at creating that cinematic experience, coupled with some above-par for video games narrative writing. The problem this introduces for me is Nathan’s raison d'être has to justify everything - action, tension, stupidity...

Nathan Drake really is the design document.

I feel like he’s just the unfortunate side-effect of being central to the game, and it’s typical of my character to just not dig the focus of things and get into subtexts a whole lot more. Often I get into things in the periphery, things adjacent - I don’t love or hate Shakespeare or for that matter Baz Luhrmann but Romeo + Juliet ‘96 is an amazing film and not at all because of the eponymous Romeo and Juliet and again, not for Leonardo di Caprio (spit!) or for Claire Danes (she can stay) but the absolutely divine cast of supporting characters (John Leguizamo will live in my heart forever oh baby).

That Nathan makes stupid decisions is already something that turns me off. That he makes poor decisions because... he’s an orphan? Because... he was bullied? Because... his brother left him? This is why he’s not transparent with his wife? Actually, he’s quite realistic. Except the people like him I’ve known in my life aren’t heroes - they’re pathetic or unreliable or abusive or dangerous. Elena is an adult. She’s not perfect either and that’s also great because neither am I. As a side character she has the conceit of being more nuanced, but as the contra to Nathan, she’s also mature versus his childishness. OOOOAAAAH EVERYONE LOVES A LOVEABLE MANBABY OOAAAH COMEON LIVE A LITTLE EVERYONE’S GOT A LITTLE CHILD STILL IN THEM SOMEWHERE yea fine, I get it, like I’ve said before, yes - he embodies the recklessness and playfulness in us, but that’s a confusing position for a game that frequently tries to ground itself in real world conflict to be taking. You’re reducing him to that but injecting complex and nuanced characters like Elena and now eventually both Chloe and Nadine? I’m telling you now - any male that doesn’t know when it’s appropriate to grow-up, when the time to set aside the playfulness and be TRUTHFUL AND TRANSPARENT WITH HIS PARTNER is a dangerous person and FUCK THAT NOISE. Nathan, as much as I do absolutely - make no mistake - adore Nolan North’s voicing - ends up being another Homer Simpson - as long as you laugh at his stupidity, you’ll excuse it, and you’ll excuse the hurt that’s done by it, and that shit doesn’t fly with me. His redemption was not earned. I say again - Elena should throw him into the sea.

Nadine ends up being a fantastic character, even if she’s given less narrative time, she’s a great example of her behaviour telling more story in contrast to Chloe getting to reveal her past and it’s nice to see them play off one another. I feel Nadine and Chloe as characters hit great story beats in ways Nathan didn’t get to with pretty much any of the other characters in four games - not Sully, not Elena, not his brother, not even Chloe - all told, we never actually get any back-story on Nathan and Chloe and I think we’re better off for it because I don’t care.

Having a quick squiz around tumblr reveals the obvious and rampant shipping of Nadine and Chloe and I couldn’t be happier. I think Naughty Dog knew what they were doing. There were so many moments. Those moments were for us. I think they were subtle enough that the fragile manbabies would have missed them but there’s no fooling us. Some of the babyboiz would have been seething thru their mouthbreething hairmouths and I’m sure probably took to the internet but that’s OK, they can remain unfucked incels for the rest of their lives or worse, serviced by whatever unwashed creatures want to dare fondle them in the dark. The elephant ride and that whole conversation was almost enough for me to forgive the absolute disaster that was Uncharted 4. It was given enough time to breathe, it was absolutely beautiful, and just when you thought they were going to terminate it and apologise for making things too awks, it concludes just perfectly and you get a phone picture that doesn’t have Nadine in frame, yet her presence in that picture is definite, pervasive and emotional. Again, some people may have completely missed it and maybe it chalks up to life experience, but as completely contrived as an artefact of complete fiction as that whole sequence might be, it was one of the most wonderfully tender moments ever created in a video game and I wonder if it makes the whole affair worth it.

In the Uncharted 4 piece, I threw in a few barbs about the most meaningful interactions, and in Lost Legacy, what I really loved was Chloe taking photos of things she thinks are beautiful and interesting on her phone, and feeding the elephant - these were the most meaningful interactions in the game. I love that the photos on the phone didn’t serve any gameplay utility at all, they were there because her character wanted to document her travels, because she thought what she was seeing was cool, and any time in the game, you could pull out your phone and look at what you’d seen. It was such a good and important decision to have the very first picture to be the Indian girl in the market, as that rather than the local conflict, does more to ground you and Chloe as a character in the setting. The game never forces you to look at it as a reminder, but you know it’s there.

I did steal these from the internet, sorry - so if they’re yours, let me know and I’ll be happy to take them down - this one in particular, seeing as it’s a photomode capture. I should have taken my own but I don’t do photomode caps on my first play-thru and there’s no-way I’m replaying this ever again.

It took five games for Naughty Dog to finally get some decent character writing, but a part of me still feels they couldn’t have existed without all the dross of the other games. There’s this immense amount of back-story and labour both the developers and the players had to slog thru to get to this point, and I feel as tho we get here and there’s just too little to show for it. I still really enjoyed the story that was told, the sense of character I felt, but a lot of that was contingent on the Uncharted universe in situ. Lost Legacy feels like a combining of all of Naughty Dog’s narrative motifs - the earnest redemption, the moment of tenderness and connection centred around peaceful animals - it’s a greatest hits of Naughty Dog in the best way possible because each narrative beat hits perfectly. I’m glad I played it with two characters who endeared themselves so much to me, that I truly cared about.

I’ve spend a lot of time praising the strengths of writing for at least Lost Legacy, but for each thing I’ve enjoyed about at least these two characters, there have been so many things I’ve been critical of. I feel like in order to get to the tiniest bit of enjoyment, I had to suffer thru so much. Honestly I don’t know if it really was worth it. It’s hard to know given that who I am now and where my tastes are and have developed as a consequence of my experiences, and I definitely would not replay any of those games again - so where does that leave me? I can’t go back and play The Last Of Us and I absolutely won’t play the second game, I just can’t do Naughty Dog games now, I don’t have it in me.

Naughty Dog have spent the better part of two decades developing tech for visual fidelity specifically for the Playstation hardware platforms (PS3 and 4). They’ve also been doing it by overworking their staff, many of which have left out of frustration or necessity. The problem they face is that as industry tools in general improve, there will no gap between games developed by Naughty Dog and any other contemporary studio from a visual perspective. Make no mistake - the Uncharted games are absolutely chock-full of objects, geometry and animation - somehow miraculously so on the Playstation platform in comparison to other games with the exception of other first-party and exclusive games receiving similar support from Sony such as Guerilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn and Sucker Punch’s forthcoming Ghost of Tsushima. There are probably other similar examples for the previous generation on PS3.

Yes, there’s a certain style of game Naughty Dog create as far as narrative goes but because it’s becoming more cinematic, that style is judged more and more by cinematic standards and at best it’s barely semi-professional aside from the outstanding voice work. There are few striking visual motifs that set Naughty Dog games apart from a design perspective, and the gameplay and mechanical constructions that once distinguished them at least a little from others are ever diminishing at increasing rates - more-so as their work practices make the level of quality they set out to achieve ever more unsustainable.

Lost Legacy encapsulates a lot of what I feel about video games as a whole at the moment - as an industry and as a culture. It’s a snapshot of a culture that’s achieving wonderful, beautiful things that are in ways huge - immense, yet somehow can feel so small in comparison to some of the challenges it faces. It’s an industry and culture experiencing a period of great upheaval, where after years upon years of malpractice, terrible things somehow still endure. It’s a space where sometimes it feels like a battle to find the tiniest shred of beauty buried in the dirt and ash, and there doesn’t seem to be an end to the frustration that working thru it brings about while grass-roots labourers continue to be burned.

Like many things in life, both at my age and at the level I guess a person gets to at the exposure rate of a thing, I’ve cut back a great deal on my engagement time with video games, so I’m a lot less patient with the functions and mechanisms of a game. There’s a labour element of video games that I feel developers might think is somehow necessary and there’s a component of that which is true, just not quite in the way they think it is, and it takes a unique frame of thinking to break out of traditional design to understand it. Again I’m not saying there’s anything special about how I understand games - there’s nothing at all original in my thoughts - I’ve shoplifted them wholesale from a hundred other people back from when I used to read Gamasutra and even now when I read designers and the people I follow and talk to on Twitter etc. There’s also absolutely nothing wrong with traditions and the people that enjoy them - just because they’re not my thing any more doesn’t mean they’re bad. It just means I’ve moved to something else and I shouldn’t engage with them.

That, I think, is what I’m waiting for. Kentucky Route Zero, Howling Dogs, Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, a whole bunch of others - these are the games I feel are pushing past the boundaries of tradition. Then the moments Uncharted takes itself out of its traditions - Nadine and Chloe’s elephant ride, Chloe’s phone pictures, Elena and Nathan’s house tours especially as Cassie - that’s when I think now you’re running! Run with it! Look, I’m still playing The Division - I’m still moving and shooting and enjoying it.

But we can do so much more. Many developers are doing more. We as an audience need to play more All of us together need to do and play more.

(The epilogue is me figuring I talk a lot of shit about AAA games and nary a word about KRZ, Howling Dogs, Dear Esther and the rest and I get it, but oooooo howdy is it really difficult for me to talk pragmatically about games I actually love)

[bahinscute]

American McGee’s Alice

I’d be underselling it if I said the visage of a morose, brunette Alice Liddel stained in blood and wielding a knife wasn’t something of a creature comfort for me. It brings me back to a time of unabashed edge and calling yourself -*twisted*- on MySpace. I never played either of American McGee’s Alice games when I was younger, but Madness Returns always intrigued me. A 3D platformer that seemed to conform to my every niche. It wasn’t until last year when I actually picked it up; and with it, the first game.

 I don’t want to dwell too much in the history of the game, much less it’s titular auteur. I’ve watched a few reviews of the series in preparation and, much to my interest, many of them go into lengthy detail into the admittedly tragic life of American McGee. His mother was criminally neglectful in his early life, and in his later life he would come to bare the kidnapping and certain death of his sister, along with the cruel taunting that ensued by what we only can assume was his sister’s captor. It’s no wonder then, that the very first game he helmed featured such dark themes. Themes of survivor’s guilt and the utter destruction and reconstruction of a mind proceeding tragedy.

 Here’s the short of it. The game takes place after Lewis Carroll’s novels and functions as a sequel more or less. Sound familiar? That’s the premise of Tim Burton’s live-action adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, but this time with a much less confusing execution. There’s no arranged marriages or trading companies for Alice to inherit. Instead, she’s been institutionalised in the wake of a house-fire of which she was the only survivor. This entire premise is exposited during the intro cinematic, so if you weren’t paying attention then too bad. These events are barely revisited again. This might sound like a critique on my part, but I appreciate this threadbare style of storytelling. The rest of what you need to know is laid out for you subtly, it paints a story for you through the subtext of the environment. Yes, you’re in a weird school, then a garden where even the ants tower over you, then a smothering claustrophobic cave filled with water. These seem innocuous enough (with maybe the exception of the Skool) but keep in mind, these events take place inside the players mind!!

 Apparently, the manual which shipped with the game included a journal of Alice’s Ward as he tried his best to treat her mental state. I didn’t read this, partly because I don’t actually own the manual, but mostly because I think this is bullshit. Everything you need to know about Alice’s emotional journey is within the game itself, and a “real world” account only exists to muddle the game’s themes.

You could draw parallels to the player’s conquering of the game, the stages and the enemies, as Alice conquering her own trauma and retaking control of her own mind. Your arsenal grows as Alice discovers more tools with which to resolve the blame she assigns herself. Obviously this is all conjecture, what sort of game would it be without enemies and weapons and etc., but that’s art for you. It’s not entirely unfounded, of course. The Jabberwock fight is markedly a poignant fight for Alice, and the themes are much more opaque. The Jabberwock openly mocks Alice for letting her family die in a fire, and its death certainly represents a forgiveness she allows herself. It’s no mistake that this fight takes place in the Land of Fire and Brimstone. This is a running theme in American McGee’s Alice series, of bosses representing some part of Alice’s struggle. The Mad Hatter owns an asylum and dedicates his life to hurting his infirms. The Red Queen represents a fear of the real world and a complacency in fantasy. She urges Alice to stay where she is, doomed to face the consequences of losing herself to her own escapism. The Queen’s face peels back to reveal to Alice who she’s really speaking to, herself. And that’s an interesting thing to keep in mind in a story like this, essentially every dialogue Alice has is in fact a monologue.

 If there’s one thing I’ve always admired in these late 90s-2000 PC games, it’s the amazing moods they always manage to create. They suck me in like one of those sucky things in a pool would suck at your leg. Most dev teams couldn’t or wouldn’t hire some writer to hi-jack their video game, so to compensate artists could inject the project with an incredible atmosphere you’d be hard pressed to find in any modern game. This game manages both and passes with flying colours.

The dialogue and tone, beyond the edge and grit, is unrelentingly Wonderland, short just of the copious Oxford educated maths jokes. Alice speaks with a sophisticated wit and approaches her own strange world with a seemingly innocent curiosity. Despite her broken psyche in the waking world, she’s comfortable in her fantasy, no matter how depraved it’s gotten. I’m sure I’m not the only one who can relate with this idea.

The majority of the locales are viciously memorable. The source material demands imagination and the game, with the exception of a few stages, certainly delivers. The first real location is the Skool, looking like a miniature from the set of Nightmare Before Christmas. The floorboards giving way to a hypnotizing infinite, where titanic stacks of books threaten to topple over and phantoms infiltrate the walls. The battlefield beneath the grass where insect troopers threaten Alice with bayoneted rifles, and the only refuge from the battle is down below the earth, in the treacherous ice caves. The Hatter’s Domain with it’s daunting amount of mirrors and ticking clocks, where enemies can be waiting around each corner, behind each wall. The Pale Realm, with it’s perplexing geometry and chequered stylings, where Alice must traverse as a Rook, Knight or Bishop. It’s just all so endearing.

The gameplay might be the one aspect of the game I’m still not entirely sold on. Unlike their first-person counterparts, third-person games developed on the id-Tech engine have aged like bread. See also: Heretic 2. The game requires a lock-on mechanic for you to ever hope to hit your attacks and it features a jumping reticle of all thing. Stand close enough to a platform and you’ll see a spinning imprint of Alice’s boots projected onto it. They seem like very rudamentary solutions to issues that console devs strived in solving. This game was released four years after Crash Bandicoot and Mario 64, and two years after Banjo Kazooie and Sonic Adventure. Even for its time, the gameplay was awkward.

 Alice in Wonderland is one of those rare stories whose mythos inspires creators more directly than even what you might consider the most influential of art. Storytellers make allusions to Carroll’s work as much as they might Greek legend, which is a monumental claim to fame. The Jabberwock is referenced in the same tone as Hercules’ Hydra, the White Rabbit which leads Alice down it’s spiraling gateway has been used to symbolise psychedelics, More recently, Arkane’s Prey has borrowed an Alice title for it’s iconic in-universe Looking-Glass technology. McGee has made his very own impact in this legacy, instilling a grit and twistedness to the world which can still be seen today. I doubt that Tim Burton would have wound up directing a Wonderland movie without American McGee’s input.

I do hope McGee gets another shot at game direction. He’s a talented level designer, his life has been harsh and his Alice series holds a special, extremely biased place in my heart. That said, maybe he could give the series a break, maybe work on that Oz idea he had. Madness Returns left a bittersweet taste in my mouth, and his track record of video game direction slants slightly more to bad than good. I mean, google Bad Day LA.

[benisasoftboi]

A Very Serious Pokemon Theory

A while ago I wrote a 2,406 word essay about Pokémon Live! that I thought no one would read. And then, apparently, a few people actually did read it. I found this incredibly flattering - and have also taken it as a challenge to write something even more niche and completely unnecessary.

I will therefore be attempting to convince you of my theory that Pokemon Live! (the Pokemon live-action stage musical) and the Pokemon Christmas Bash music album actually take place in the same universe - one that is more similar to our own than any other in the franchise. My explanation will include reference to the American military, Jesus, politics, infinite multiverses, and the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon. I feel that I should warn for very frequent reference to homophobia, as well as a brief reference to something that could be seen as anti-Semitic. Also, someone will get a Tony Award at the end.

If any of that intrigues, please read on.

The Works In Question

I’m going to briefly explain what Pokemon Live! and Pokemon Christmas Bash are - the initiated can feel free to skip down to the next section if they want.

Pokemon Live! was a live action Pokemon musical that toured in the US from September 2000 to January 2001. It is best known among Pokemon fans for including a subplot that revealed that Ash’s mother and Giovanni dated, possibly implying that Giovanni is Ash’s father - leading to an incredible showdown between Ash and Giovanni where Giovanni, no joke, taunts Ash (a child) by implying that he slept with Ash’s mother, and then follows that up by telling him that nice guys finish last.

Outside of Pokemon fandom, it is mostly known because the character of James was played by a young Andrew Rannells. Rannells would go on to be a very successful Broadway and television actor. One of the things he’s best known for is originating the role of Elder Price in the musical The Book of Mormon. He has, as of writing, been personally nominated for two Tonys, but won neither. This will be relevant later.

Pokemon Live! can be watched for free on YouTube, albeit in very poor quality. It follows Ash trying to win a ‘Diamond Badge’, which is actually a ruse by Giovanni to train his (~mechanical marrrrrvel~) Mecha Mewtwo. It’s a really fun, bizarre ride, because there’s something weirdly earnest about it - like the creators were genuinely, sincerely trying to make a good musical. They did not succeed. It’s a dumpster fire. But a glorious one. 

Pokemon Christmas Bash is an album released at Christmas 2001. It features 10 Pokemon themed Christmas songs, some of which are covers of existing songs, and others which are entirely original. The singers are all members of the 4Kids anime cast. Most of the songs are hilarious, and it’s obvious that everyone was having fun with the whole thing (contrasting Pokemon Live!, which was apparently absolute hell to work on). 

Fun fact, at least one of the songs was written by Eric Stuart, James’s original English voice actor (unless you want to get anal about it, in which case I’m talking about James’s second voice actor, following Ted Lewis, who did all of seven episodes versus Stuart’s hundreds). All in all, there’s not a lot else to say about it (for now). It can all be listened to online, but a physical copy will set you back a hundred dollars or so.

Both Pokemon Live! and Pokemon Christmas Bash are American-made entries into the franchise, and are therefore considered non-canon by most fans. I find this attitude very boring, especially since the Generation 6 games established Pokemon to exist in an infinite multiverse rather than just one fictional universe with one canon. There’s no reason these two can’t exist in their own bizarro canon universe, far away from the rest of the franchise - and I am now going to begin presenting my theory.

The Weirdest Line In Pokemon Live!

Pokemon Live! is filled with strange moments. Mewtwo Ex Machina. Team Rocket on scooters. Brock stopping the entire plot to sing and dance about his polyamorous inclinations towards much older women. 

But the strangest (to me) is when James references Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. By name. Seriously, here’s the quote:

Well yeah, but where does [Mecha Mewtwo] stand on campaign finance reform, social security, and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell?

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, for the unfamiliar, was America’s policy regarding gay and bisexual individuals serving in the military, instituted in 1994, and repealed in 2011. The policy basically meant that if you wanted to serve, you had to stay in the closet - but also no one could harass or try to out you. In other words - ‘it’s okay that you’re having gay thoughts, so long as you never act upon them��. (Was that an inappropriate time to make a reference? Can’t be more inappropriate than referencing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in a Pokemon musical, surely...) 

I talked about the meta-level homophobic implications of this line last time, but here, we’re looking at this from an in-universe perspective. It raises important questions.

This must mean Pokemon Live! takes place in Pokemon America, as opposed to the Pokemon Very-Loosely-Japan that we see in the anime and games. So if there is a Pokemon American military, what other American staples are there Pokemon versions of?

So why is there homophobia in this version of the Pokemon universe? No other Pokemon universe has homophobia (sidenote, is it not a little bit darkly funny that the most homophobic piece of Pokemon media is the musical?). In fact, most other Pokemon universes are kind of progressive, if anything - very equal opportunity regardless of race, gender, nation regionality.

Pokemon Christmas Bash has us covered.

Nobody Don’t Like Christmas

Everything we need to know comes from the fourth song on this album - ‘Nobody Don’t Like Christmas’. 

This song is sung entirely by Meowth, and well. Look. Maddie Blaustein was a very talented voice actress. Perhaps she was also a good singer when not doing the Meowth voice, I don’t know. 

But Meowth should not sing. Singing and Meowth do not go together. No one should have heard that voice and thought ‘let’s give that character a song’. It happened in the anime as well, and it’s the worst part of an otherwise great episode. 

If you can look past the grating vocals, though, this song is incredible. The whole thing is a three minute diss track for every non-Christmas holiday, going everywhere from shaming the dateless on Valentine’s Day, to pointing out that Thanksgiving isn’t all that fun for the turkeys, to just straight up declaring St. Patrick’s Day to be dull.

But there are three important lines here to consider.

The first is my personal favourite line in the whole song. 

The Fourth of July / Can be a real drag / If you can’t get no one to salute your flag

Firstly, I love that Meowth is offering the warning that patriotism can only go so far and that eventually citizens’ blind loyalty to country will evaporate if given sufficient reason, leaving celebration of said country hollow and meaningless. A bold choice for Christmas 2001. Not to mention a necessary message for today. 

More importantly though, this suggests that these songs might be being sung by specifically American versions of the main cast. The Fourth of July is a holiday only an American would reference in a song like this, as no other country celebrates it - it definitely wouldn’t come up if they were, say, British, for example (in that case, would probably mention Guy Fawkes Night instead). Even more unlikely if they’re Japanese.

However - it’s worth remembering that Meowth is actually canonically American (he is from Hollywood), meaning it isn’t unreasonable for him to make this reference. This is where line number two comes into play.

Memorial Day is a day to forget!

That’s right, everyone.

Meowth hates the troops.

It’s true. Why else would he dismiss this holiday?

But why does Meowth hate the troops?

We return to Pokemon Live! for answers.

Pokemon and the American Military

Interestingly enough, these are not the only franchise entries that mention the American military. Gym Leader Lt. Surge was explicitly described to be an American soldier in the early games (also fun but not really relevant fact, his anime counterpart shares his English voice actress with Meowth - if him having a voice actress seems odd, the explanation is that Blaustein was a trans woman, and so mostly played male roles as they suited her voice better). 

Real world locations have been gradually phased out as the franchise has continued, and later games implied that he is now from Unova, the region based on America. 

Meowth never seemed to have a problem with Surge in the anime, suggesting that in that version, he does not hate the troops. So what’s different in Christmas Bash?

There’s only one explanation.

Remember, Pokemon Live! establishes the existence of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Also remember - James and Meowth are good friends. And James is gay.

What? That’s always been ambiguous, you say? 

Go watch Pokemon Live! and tell me that version of James isn’t gay. Watch one scene with him in it. Go watch it and then tell me that man is straight. Go and do it. You can’t. Pokemon Live! James is gay as Christmas.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is a policy that discriminates against gay people. James may not be a soldier, but it still does reflect social attitudes towards discrimination, and so is something he would likely oppose on general principle. And as James’s friend, Meowth would likely do the same.

Meowth hates the troops because he is an ally.

And so we have our definitive connection. This also confirms that we are in America in both entries.

Probably Blasphemy

So what’s the third important line then?

Who wants to go through all that Yom Kippuren?  

A reference to Yom Kippur. This is a Jewish holiday that I do not feel equipped to explain, due to my definitely not being Jewish, but I understand it to be extremely important in the Jewish faith. 

Essentially saying that it’s too tedious in a song about how great Christmas is doesn’t seem like a great look, 4Kids, just saying. I doubt it was done maliciously but like... still.

However, this confirmation of the existence of Judaism confirms something much bigger - the existence of religion. Another American staple! 

Up until now, this has been ambiguous. Sure, we’ve been referencing Christmas all this time, but there have been no references to Christ, so we could assume that Christmas is a secular holiday with a weird name. It’s already somewhat secular in the real world - my family couldn’t get less religious and we celebrate it. But if there is Judaism, it is totally reasonable to assume there is Christianity. And that opens a whole floodgate.

So firstly, this finally gives us an explanation for where Pokemon Don’t Ask Don’t Tell probably came from! After all, which religion is most associated with homophobia in real-world America? (No hate towards non-homophobic Christians, just for the record, but like... this is a problem, to put it mildly). So this further solidifies the connection, putting them in the same universe.

Plus, the song ends with Meowth stating that he actually hates Christmas! So Meowth is again being an ally - he’s just, like, the kind that takes it really, really far and maybe needs to chill just a little?

Secondly, this makes a certain line from another song on Pokemon Christmas Bash even funnier, where Brock replaces the beginning of the hymn Joy To The World with:

Nurse Joy is a girl / She sure is fun / But I like Jenny too!

Because this means that covering that song with those lyrics isn’t just kind of inappropriate out-of-universe, it’s also inappropriate in-universe!

But what’s really messing with me is the hundreds of new questions Pokemon Christianity raises. How do they reconcile Arceus with God? Is God in this universe a metal goat, or do they coexist? Was there Pokemon Jesus? I’m not sure I’m okay with Pokemon Jesus. If there is Pokemon Jesus, did Pokemon help with the crucifixion (the Timburr line seem like they’d have been helpful)? Or was Jesus like, a baby Arceus, and therefore probably quite difficult to crucify? Is there Pokemon Heaven? Is there Pokemon Hell? How do the Pokemon Christians feel about Mr. Mime, who is clearly an insult to God? What is a Pokemon church service like? Are there different sects of Pokemon Christianity? Were there Pokemon religious wars? Are there Pokemon Catholics? Pokemon Protestants? Pokemormons???

I don’t like this.

And here’s another question.

Remember how I mentioned how Andrew Rannells played James? And how he also originated Elder Price in Book of Mormon?

Well. Here’s the thing. 

Pokemormons are a very real possibility. If there is Christianity, and also America, then it wouldn’t be unlikely for them to exist in this universe.

However, we have determined that this is one universe, and therefore, James and Andrew Rannells cannot coexist. Only James exists in this universe.

So who first played Elder Price in The Book of Pokemormon?

Okay, So, Full Disclosure, This Is Basically Just My Fanfiction Now, But the Sunk Cost Fallacy Says You’ll Probably Stick Around Since You’ve Already Read Over 2,000 Words Of This Nonsense By This Point, and I’m Going to Take Advantage of That

I think it was James. 

I think James went on to start a Broadway career. I think he was in an unlicensed Karate Kid musical, and was Tall in Jersey Boys, and then wound up as Elder Price. I think he did a great job. I think he got nominated for a Tony when award season came round, along with lots of other people involved with The Book of Pokemormon. 

But he didn’t win it. Norbert Leo Butz won it for Catch Me If You Can (I had to look that up, was planning on changing it to a Pokemon-joke title - but what do you know, it already has one. Serendipity!). 

James no longer has a Broadway career. But he does have a Tony.

He stole it.

Because here’s the thing - Team Rocket are actually pretty good at crime when Ash and Co. aren’t around. Remember that one time they stole an entire stadium?

They could have literally stolen the whole show, but instead they just stole one thing - that Tony Award. And so James now has an award for Best Actor in a Musical, as well as the unofficial award for Most Extra Thing Ever Done At The Tonys. 

James disappears, but his legacy remains. In this universe, all Elder Prices have lavender hair - fans reject any Price who tries to avoid this. 

Meanwhile, Jessie, James and Meowth sail off into the sunset in their balloon. James is happy. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell will be repealed soon. He will have a chat with Meowth about overzealous allyship, though he appreciates it all the same. He smiles at his friend Jessie and takes her hand. Christmas is a long way off, but he can’t help but be excited all of a sudden. He’ll spend it with his family - Jessie, Meowth, and now, his stolen Tony Award.

In the meantime, they’ll do what they love best.

Be gay and do crime.

What Have We Learnt?

This is the most homophobic Pokemon universe we know of

It’s also a universe where everything is set in America

Meowth is surprisingly politically aware

Meowth hates the troops

There was a Pokemon Jesus

4Kids maybe should have hired some sensitivity readers

James from Pokemon possesses more Tony Awards than Andrew Rannells 

I have way too much free time

Anyway, this was 2,698 words long and a terrible use of literally everyone’s time. It is rambly and extremely self-indulgent and goes off on countless tangents and you could probably poke like ten holes in it without trying. Please don’t take any of this seriously. It’s now 4 AM. Thank you and goodnight. 

[outhereontheprairie]

Ruso, North Dakota

Tiny Ruso, ND is allllmost a ghost town! But thankfully other people have found this place interesting enough that I have some info about it to draw from! From several sources! Yay! Let’s get going and jump into this tiny town on the verge of becoming a certifiable ghost town. 

So, according to Wikipedia Ruso was founded in 1906 and incorporated in 1909. It was either named for the first two letters in the words “SOth RUssia” which was where many of the settlers came from, or after a Russian word meaning “South of us.” At the 2010 census only 4 people lived in town - and that was 9 years ago. That makes Ruso the least populated incorporated place in North Dakota. 

Let’s check out this cool stone barn that caught my eye right away! 

Turns out, according to this source, that it’s the old jail and later blacksmith shop! 

This article shed a lot of light on Ruso. To summarize - two people lived here in winter and four in summer (as of early 2018). They had a mayor. He was mayor for 30+ years. He used to be a rural mail carrier and moved to Ruso in 1956 - before my own dad was even born. He spent the winter in a bigger small town but as soon as summer came he always went back to Ruso. He loved it. And in the article he said “If I ever leave I’m sure that will be the end.” And he was almost right.

That article also said that there were grocery stores and meat market in Ruso way back in the day. Like, the 20s. And, just after incorporating, the town had over 100 people and a doctor and a newspaper! Lots of towns didn’t have those things back then. Also a repair shop, a grain elevator (or 5, according to another source), a park, a place to leave horses, and later a place where someone built 14 foot fishing boats! And according to another source this town was on a railroad line so there was a depot and everything too, and a cream station, and a gas station and mechanic shop. This town had everything! 

And the park? Now it’s a slough, apparently - although on maps it’s still the official city park. But back in the 30s, according to a woman interviewed in the article, they used to play down there because it was so dry. When the rains came back and the slough filled back in it would freeze in winter and they’d use it as a skating rink! 

The little bit of taxes people pay go to two street lights, sewage, and garbage pickup. They can’t afford snow removal. Ouch! No wonder two people live there in winter. 

Sadly, a follow up article soon appeared announcing the death of the mayor who kept the town going for so long. He was still mayor at the time - all 3 residents voted for him. 100% turnout. Now that the mayor is gone, there aren’t enough people to fill the city council (3 people are needed - the town now only has 2 full time residents). That means the city probably won’t be a city for long.

This looks to be an old house. I have no info about this one. 

Happily, another follow up article came out last summer with good news for Ruso! It said that the town was supposed to get a 100% population increase! From 2 to 4. And they’re appointing a new mayor! Yay! So there is hope for Ruso after all. 

Anyway, you can see there’s a big field in the middle of town here. According to this website there used to be a baseball diamond there where they would have games. 

And I’m thinking that this used to be the school. 

It seems someone may be turning it into a house? I hope it gets more love in the future, it’s looking kind of shabby. Such a cool building though! 

A comment by “Vivian” on this website describes the school and more: “I was born in 1925 and grew up in Ruso. My parents and many of my family are buried in the Ruso cemetery. The school was large enough to accommodate 2 years of high school when I was growing up. There was a big bell that was rung to signal the start of a school day. We kids would take turns ringing it. It was great fun as the bell was so big, you would pull down on the rope and be pulled up into the air by the return swing of the bell. You could hear the bell all over the county. We lived a few miles away, so usually my brothers and I walked to school. Sometimes we would take one of the horses though. And in the winter sometimes Dad would bring us in the cutter sleigh. In the winter Mom would make ice cream and we would bury it in the snow bank to eat at recess. Growing up there was an experience. We cooked & heated the house with a wood stove. We had kerosene lamps & candles for lighting and there was no indoor plumbing. Mom did the wash once a week, boiling water on the stove and washing everything using a washboard and soap. The clothes were hung out on a line to dry – in the winter she’d bring the frozen garments in to finish off drying by the stove. Bath time was once a week too & followed the same process – boil the water on the stove & use it to scrub yourself while sitting in a big washtub in the kitchen.”

Down the overgrown street and around a corner is the old Lutheran church!

And someone has moved in, at least around the church. They’ve brought animals and lots of junk but hey, it’s lived in! 

Thanks to street view you can see what this place looked like in 2008. You can see the outhouses and junk and a big scrapped bus that says “Huntley Project Red Devils” - that made me go back to my MT days because Huntley Project is in MT! 

Back to present day, a donkey! 

And another donkey! And look in the background it looks like someone is growing flowers. 

Again, according to this article, the Lutheran church closed in 1997 for good. It never did have running water - only an outhouse. Sadly, the basement of the church was used to house chickens and then a dog got in there and killed 80. The “city” passed a law that said no vicious dogs allowed in town. 

Before the church closed they went out in a classic way - a lutefisk dinner. One of the ladies interviewed in the article said: “That was about the last activity...We had a snowstorm before the supper. What a mess. There was no water at the church. All I got done was hauling water in and carrying water out. We made it but that’s the last supper we had.”

Going back to the 2008 street view shots - here it is before anyone moved in. 

And there’s that bus again. On this website there was a comment from David Seaman that had some information about it: “according to my ex-father in law from velva the bus has been there since the late 80s early 90s it had broken down between ruso and velva and was left and never repaired or retrieved and was towed by some local farmer to its current resting place. i have no way of verifying this but he’s been in velva all his life since 43 so i would imagine its probly right along the lines of what happened.”

And this comment from the same website by someone named Lisa had alot of insight about Ruso: “My mom was the last postmaster at Ruso’s post office, which was located in what was the old bank building (also a residence). The post office closed sometime in the 2000s. The sign that the author speaks of that mentions 1981 was in commemoration of Ruso’s 75th Anniversary Celebration. It is a shame that the church grounds are in the shape that they are in now – it’s not necessarily the fault of the few residents (most of whom have no connection to the church), but rather the person who purchased the property and is using it as a junkyard. My great-grandfather was a carpenter and helped build the church and the furnishings inside. I remember going to bridal and baby showers and anniversary celebrations in the church basement as a young girl. I also remember softball games being played in the baseball diamond. The stone building across from the baseball diamond was the old jail. Both of my grandfathers and many other relatives attended school in Ruso. My grandmother worked in the bar that Deputy Sheriff Bob speaks of and I remember hearing about the fire. Ruso used to have 5 grain elevators in its heyday. I often wish I could timetravel and visit Ruso during its height! The Ruso Record newspaper is available for viewing on microfilm at the State Archives in Bismarck and has a lot of interesting information from the busy days of the town.”

Heading back around to the “main part” of town. 

I believe that, according to this article, Ruso’s two full time residents live here. I think this is the bank/post office that they are remodeling. 

Beside the bank there used to be a gas station. It burned down many years ago - 1980, according to a comment from this website. “Mike Pflipsen owned the gas station and mechanic shop next to the Post office. The sign that is referred to was in front of his gas station and the post was part of his filling station area. He also owned the property where the ball diamond is on. Mike ran the gas station for many years and was a bachelor his whole life. In 1980 his gas station burned down while he was sleeping inside. Somehow he was able to get out and he lived with my father, Hubert Pflipsen of Max, until he went into the Nursing home in Garrison. I have since purchased the lots from him and visit Ruso every year when I come back to ND.”

Street view 2008:

An interesting comment by Bob Roggenbuck from this website about the bar in Ruso which either was in this building or one nearby. “I was a deputy sheriff in McLean County in 1977 -1978 working out of Garrison when I and another deputy stopped in Russo at the bar on a bar check, we went on to Butte and were called back to Russo, because the bar was on fire. It burned to the ground that night as we watched and could not believe that less than a hour earlier we were in there visiting we the people in the bar. It was rebuilt, but the place was never the same. It is so sad to see the town in the shape it is now.”

Further down the road is this place. Someone mowed a path to it. So I walked down.

Well this place has seen better days!

I spy a water heater...and a lot of junk.

Further down the bath continued into the trees and it was kind of magical. All overgrown and green.

Looking across from this house, an old building and an old garage. 

Here’s the storefront. No idea what it used to be.

And the garage.

Think there’s anything in there?

Looking back toward the occupied home in town.

I’m guessing this used to be someone’s house, long abandoned now.

I was delighted with all the information I was able to find on Ruso! What a delightful little town in such a beautiful area of ND! 

On my way out I stopped for this photo. The sunset and angle of the receding storm clouds made this thistle glow.

So pretty!

And to see me out of Ruso - this pretty hawk. It was still partially raining when I got this photo so it’s not great. But he sat still for me for a moment!

Ruso, you are so neat little town! I hope you can maintain your population or even grow so you never become unincorporated!

[secretlyatargaryen]

July 2019 Reviews

Games

Walden, a game - A delightful experience for those who love games and literature and the idea of them together. The best parts of the game are the quotes from Thoreau's book that appear on the screen when you examine something closely, like a fox or a maple tree, complete with great voice acting. The ecological detail put into the game is impressive. The worst part is that the game mechanics for completing tasks are clunky and there is very little time each day before the game forces you to go to sleep and begin the next day, and your hunger, fuel, and shelter meter always seems to be low, causing you to spend the majority of your daylight hours picking berries and collecting firewood. I get that this is supposed to mirror the experience of "living simply," but 1) it is boringly repetitive and if anything calls to mind the irony of “being one with nature” in a computer game and 2) there are a lot of other interesting things to do in the game which you do not have enough time to do, such as helping escaped slaves on their way to the underground railroad. I learned playing this game that Henry David Thoreau was basically every guy I met in college who hated the government and whose solution to its atrocities was to fuck off into the woods and smoke pot instead of actually doing anything about it. This analogy is completed by the fact that you are able to go into town and get food and clean laundry from your parents' house if you get too low on those things.

Black Mirror (2017) - No, not the Netflix series. This is a re-imagining of the Black Mirror series of adventure games developed in the early 2000s. The original game is considered a classic of point and click adventures but suffers from an unoriginal plot (obligatory part where I once again complain about horror games and their obsession with "Surprise! You're crazy! Dead women!") and the unfortunateness of early 3D polygon graphics. The second and third game took the series in a completely new and original direction and were quite good, so while I had never heard of the remake before I came across it during the steam summer sale, I was cautiously hopeful. Even if it was trash, it's just the kind of gothic-mystery-exploring-a-haunted-castle trash that I like to throw my money at. The gameplay is pretty fun (minus some quick time events where you can get killed by ghosts mostly by failing to operate the somewhat clunky controls - the game was originally ported for PS4) and the story is original but also expands upon the series mythos. An enjoyable trashy gothic yarn, although the story also felt incomplete, even to someone who has played the original games, and was both wrapped up too quickly and left weirdly unresolved.

Books

Greenglass House, Kate Milford - I started this book a while ago and it’s been on my radar for a while, and I restarted it again when I heard it was going to be on this year’s BOB list. A fun young adult adventure story which utilizes one of my favorite mystery tropes, the closed circle. The story is that preteen Milo lives in the eponymous house, which his family runs as an inn. The house used to be a meeting place for smugglers back in the day, which means there’s buried treasure somewhere in the house, and when the story starts a slew of guests arrive at the house and are stranded by a snowstorm, when things start getting mysterious. Someone in the house is a thief! I really like this book and the way that the story’s original folklore is woven into the plot. There are also several dungeons and dragons elements that play a role in the plot - to solve the mystery, Milo and his friend Meddy pretend to be characters in a role-playing game, and I love the way the story makes connections between games, stories, and language, since that happens to align with my interests.

Serafina and the Black Cloak, Robert Beatty - Another BOB book, this one also has been on my radar for a while because the series is very popular among my students, and when I went to Beatty’s website recently I saw that Disney had already put their name on it, lol. What I didn’t know was that the series takes place in my state. The setting is the Biltmore Estate in the late 1800s, and the story is a historical fantasy that utilizes some of the local folklore in some really interesting ways, although it’s more fantasy than historical. An enjoyable read with an interesting female protagonist.

Movies

Ready Player One - I enjoyed this movie a lot more than I thought I would. I had heard going into it that it was not a great adaptation from friends who loved the book, which I haven’t read. That might be why I did enjoyed it so much. I don’t think it’s anything that memorable, but it is enjoyable. I can see why the book became so popular, although I’ve read books with similar storylines. I guess a book like this is more relevant nowadays with the popularity of VR in the modern gaming market, but the story relied on some tired cliches nonetheless. I also was a bit annoyed when the story acknowledged the issue with the main character falling for Artemis’ idealistically beautiful avatar without really knowing her...and then had her turn out to be stunningly gorgeous in real life. Okay, she had a wine-stain disfigurement on her face, but she was still traditionally beautiful, and the main character gets to be with her in the end while meanwhile, his actual best friend, who turns out to be an unfeminine black girl in real life and who obviously has a crush on him, is left behind.

Picnic At Hanging Rock - I come across this movie on gothic film recommendation lists every so often and have wanted to watch it for years, and I happened to find it on youtube, which surprised me. The original movie is from 1975 and is a cult classic for a reason. Stunning visuals and a story that leaves you confused in the just the right way. After watching it, I was itching to learn more and came across last year’s amazon prime series with Natalie Dormer and watched all six episodes, and although the series was enjoyable and a good extension for anyone who enjoys the original movie, it does not have the charm or brilliance of the original. The series expands on the story, but part of the beauty of the original movie is the way the story is told in what isn’t said, and in carefully choreographed scenes where nobody on screen says a word. I can see why the movie is called “gothic” as it has some of the trappings of the genre. It takes place in 1900 at a remote and mysterious boarding school in Australia. Three girls vanish during a school field trip, seemingly without a trace. What happened to them may have been supernatural. Or they may have been murdered, kidnapped, or run off on their own. Also, I’m pretty sure everyone is gay.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle - I’m a huge fan of the Shirley Jackson novel which this movie is an adaptation of, and unlike Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, this movie is actually a fairly straight adaptation of the novel. The movie captures the gothic feel of the book as well as the anxiety about gender and class from which it gets its themes, and there are solid performances all around, but the movie does seem a bit devoid of a life of its own. Despite, and possibly because of, the voice-over narration, Merricat never really comes alive as a character the way she does in the book. This is, I think, a problem with a lot of book to movie adaptations that rely on voice-overs to tell the story. I can see the appeal of this, especially with a book like this which is both heavily steeped in POV and characterized by an unreliable narrator, but I found myself really wishing the movie would just let itself tell the story rather than the narrator.

Shows

American Gods - I watched all of season two on the starz website except for the finale, which I was told that I needed to upgrade by account to watch, so if you are watching on the website or the app be aware of that. I enjoyed season two, although it lacked some of the urgency of the first season. I do enjoy some of the adaptational choices made that update the novel a bit, such as having Technology be outsourced by New Media. Also, season two saw the arrival of my daughter, Sam Black Crow. I’m also looking forward to the Lakeside subplot next season (I assume) as it’s my favorite part of the novel.

Stranger Things - I watched the first four episodes of season one when it came out, and then for some reason never finished it. I know, I know. It didn’t take me very long to watch all three seasons, which I sort of interpreted as one as a result, although I do think there’s a drop in quality somewhere in the second/third season, but overall it’s a fun show that definitely kept me interested and invested in the characters. Also, every scene relating to the upside down motivated me to clean my bathroom.

[zippdementia]

The Main Resident Evil Games, Ranked

I’ve been playing Resident Evil games since Resident Evil 2 first terrified me as a 14 year old. I have fond memories of having to have my friend play through the sewer sections in that game, the ones involving giant spiders... and I also have fond memories of eventually overcoming those fears to achieve the coveted A Rank on the game and unlocking Hunk and Tofu (God, I had way more time back then). Since those early days, I’ve played through every main game in the series and have mostly kept up with the lore of the side games. It remains one of my favorite go-to franchises for its atmosphere and fun mix of horror and action, not to mention its over-the-top story, which always feels a little bit like Capcom browsed Reddit for its favorite fan fiction than turned it into an official game.

That said, this list looks at only the nine main games in the series (that’s Resident Evil 0 through 7, plus Code Veronica) as those are the only ones I’ve played, outside of obsessing for a month or two on Umbrella Chronicles... oh, and a brief, extremely un-fun run through Outbreak.

Because I started the series so long ago, I have a love in my heart for the old school fixed camera games and those that give us a healthy dose of survival horror over action, but I’ve tried to be as objective as possible in creating this list, keeping in mind that of course such things can never stray too far from the subjective. Also, as an added bonus, I’ve included a “scariness” ranking for each game separate from the main ranking. This, of course, is COMPLETELY subjective.

And with that, let’s do *assumes dark growly voice* RESIDENT EVIL: RANKING.

#9: Resident Evil 6

Resident Evil 6 is a mess of ideas and intentions. From the beginning, its development was hampered by too many cooks in the kitchen as various directors and producers continually changed their mind as to what the game should be. Eventually they settled on making it everything by breaking up the game into three extremely different short games, one that relies heavily on horror aspects, one on action aspects, and one on shooting aspects (including heavy use of a widely panned cover system). Unfortunately, these three approaches are intrinsically opposed to each other in terms of genre, gameplay, and aesthetic. Instead of pleasing all fans, this approach guaranteed that no matter who you are, you are going to like exactly one third of Resident Evil 6 and hate two thirds of it. It also highlighted for fans that Capcom no longer knew what its series wanted to be. The asinine story which arguably jumped the shark as far back as Code Veronica now captured that shark, put a saddle on it, and rode it around an arena while Chris Redfield did steroids. In short: the story was so nonsensical, it seemed to leave nowhere else for the series to go (a problem they just sort’ve ignored in Resident Evil 7). Resident Evil 6 has some fun elements to it, and it fixed many of the problems people had with bad companion AI and clunky run and gun mechanics, but it wasn’t enough to make the experience a good one.

Scary rank #9: In addition to being a poor game, Resident Evil 6 almost completely moves away from the game’s horror routes. Leon’s campaign has some nice tip of the hats to the old series, but the game never becomes scary. The fact that you run around with a partner for the entire thing and that those partners quip ridiculous lines like “it’s really powerful, especially against living things” means you’ll be cringing in embarrassment more than fear from this title.

#8: Resident Evil 0

Released in 2002, Resident Evil 0 feels like the final evolution of the old school style and systems of Resident Evil’s fixed camera games. The controls are smoother, the use of weapons easier, you can drop items directly on the floor and the game will keep them there for later retrieval, and there is the buddy system which represents a very early attempt at cooperative AI. Unfortunately, despite all of these improvements to the mechanics, the experience itself feels too well worn by this point to be very exciting. You can tell that the developers themselves were growing tired of the formula as they start to move away from zombies to other monsters... like, er, frogs. Yes, unfortunately the replacements aren’t very interesting: frogs, baboons, a giant bat, and an operatic villain feel like weak additions to the series and make it seem like the developers were out of ideas. The story fills in some of the backstory of the mansion incident but ultimately doesn’t push us forward towards anything new (which is what fans really wanted and wouldn’t get until RE4). Aside from an incredible opening sequence on a train and the criminally underused character of Billy, Resident Evil 0 is a very polished but very bland experience.

Scary Rank #6: The scariest thing about Resident Evil 0 is managing two characters. Trying to gather enough supplies for one person in Raccoon City is a trick in itself. Having to keep both members of your team well equipped, well healed, and ready to deal with the plethora of enemies they will face can be harrowing. It’s the rare occasion where having two does not feel better than having one. And then there’s the leechmen. I don’t know if it’s because they are sturdy or seem to pop up whenever you least expect it, or maybe it’s that music that plays when they attack, but the leechmen will freak me out and leave me with the jitters every time they show up. None of the other enemies are very frightening, though, and anytime I get too scared I just think back to that cinema scene of Markus singing opera to his leeches... and burst out laughing.

#7: Resident Evil Code Veronica

After the events of Resident Evil: Nemesis, no one was sure where Capcom could take the story next. Raccoon City had been destroyed, Umbrella Corps had fallen, and all of our heroes had been given somewhat happy endings. Enter Code Veronica, which blew open the possibilities again by reintroducing Albert Wesker. By now, Wesker is so well associated with Resident Evil as to be a cliche, but it was a huge surprise in 2000 when he was revived, green lizard eyes and all, to take on Chris Redfield once again. Suddenly people were talking about Resident Evil again and where it might go in the future. This success, however, is less impressive now that that future has arrived and there are better games to play in the series. Code Veronica always favored innovation over polish and it has not aged well as a result. Most notably, the game seems to demand more speed and fighting ability of its player than previous entries, pitting Claire and Chris against such fast moving villains as the Matrix-inspired Wesker and his pack of lightning quick hunter beasts. Combats tend to be fought in tighter quarters, sometimes to extremely frustrating effect, such as the infamous “Steve” battle (also, I hate Steve), or the Tyrant fight in the back of an airplane. Players who have not properly kept up their inventory with powerful weapons and healing items can find themselves stuck in these places, struggling with the clunky controls to try and dodge extremely damaging attacks. The atmosphere and story make Code Veronica worth the experience... but only barely.

Scary Rank #4: A lot of Code Veronica’s scares are due to the feeling that you can’t handle what the game is throwing at you. This is, as described above, a mixture of awful controls and enemies that are far too fast and resilient for most players to be able to take on with that control scheme. Still, it does make the experience harrowing. More legitimate scares come from the creepy gothic atmosphere and the bizarre nature of the Ashford twins. Alex is... ridiculous. But his sister Alexia brings to bear all the things we all hate about creepy little girls and then throws in some incest and patricide to boot. Alexia is a genuinely disturbing addition to the Resident Evil roster.

#6: Resident Evil 7

Resident Evil 7 had the Herculean task of redeeming Resident Evil as a series after the missteps of Resident Evil 6. And, for the most part, it succeeded at this. Choosing to return to the series’ horror routes, RE7 draws upon the influences of other games in the genre, most notably Alien Isolation and Outlast, to craft an experience that feels modernized and on par, atmospherically, with some of the best Resident Evil titles. There are moments that are absolutely terrifying and the game doesn’t stop feeling tense until very near the end. Gamers like myself who grew up with RE1 and RE2 love this return to form and find that the first-person perspective retains the feel of the old fixed camera without being as restrictive, creating a horror experience where you are constantly wondering what’s behind you (but at least have the ability to turn around and check). Even fans who are newer to the series seemed to collectively breath a sigh of relief when they played the game. Reading forums and Reddit threads reveals that most gamers find the game to be fresh and smart, and are happy that it lacked the emphasis on lore and the over the top mustache-twirling villains that dominated previous titles. Objectively, though, there are flaws that I think will not be looked on favorably the more it ages. The blocking system, for instance, feels shoehorned in as a quick fix to disguise the fact that you can’t dodge or easily slow an approaching enemy down. Then, too, the game tries to be an action game near the end and utterly fails at it, only highlighting its unsatisfying shooting mechanics. The Molded are scary but overall a let down as enemies, with little variety between their forms, and the boss fights are the worst in the entire series, being clumsy and frustrating and a weird tonal break from the rest of the game. So for as much as it gets right, Resident Evil 7 is hopefully a stepping stone to something better.

Scary Rank #3: For the most part, RE7 does stop being scary after the first couple of hours, but holy shit those first couple of hours. There is more terror crammed into the initial exploration of the Baker house than in the entirety of most of the other games in the series. I was actually glad when the scares let up a bit to give me a breather, but it never quite reaches the same “heart attack” level again. That doesn’t mean there aren’t moments of terror sprinkled throughout: the wrecked ship has wonderful atmosphere, and despite having terrible boss fights, the battle against Margueritte is a stand out experience, making you constantly spin around to see if that creepy woman is crawling around behind you. More often than not, just as you turn, she’ll drop on you from above. Seriously, I don’t know how people play this on VR.

#5: Resident Evil 5

As the game that introduced functional multiplayer into the series, Resident Evil 5 remains popular to this day. As I type this, there are probably at least a dozen people live-streaming the game on twitch for the billionth time, and people are still tuning in to watch. Resident Evil 5′s lasting power comes from an absolutely incredible campaign that takes players through a wealth of diverse environments. Its combat situations are well crafted and each one feels a little different from the last, demanding different things of its players in each new area. Whether it’s fighting your way out of a crowd or solving puzzles while keeping back hordes of enemies, Resident Evil 5 keeps throwing new things at the player to ensure they don’t get bored. Its boss fights are similarly diverse and well paced (with a couple exceptions... that stupid jeep fight key among them). Graphically, it still looks good and mechanically some people think (myself included) that it actually plays a little smoother than its successor, Resident Evil 6 (some people say it looks better, too). The game’s main failings come from the fact that it is about 100% less fun to play as a single player experience and from the fact that the game let go of pretty much any horror elements, opting instead for pure action. The result is a game that is one of the most fun to play in the entire series even while it is also the furthest removed from the roots of the series and probably feels the least like a Resident Evil game.

Scary Rank #8: Resident Evil 5 traded in dark nights for African sunshine and switched out zombies for... tribal warriors? No matter what RE5 does, it just seems to be less scary then when it was done before. The Lickers make a triumphant return... but aren’t as scary as they were in Resident Evil 2. The El Gigante fight in the jeep is frustrating and feels like a weird arcade game. Only the fight against Jill and Wesker manages to be tense and even there tension is somewhat broken by Wesker’s drawling accent and ridiculous dialog. Resident Evil 5 is an action game first and foremost, which does little to sell it in the scariness department.

#4: Resident Evil 1 (REmake)

Resident Evil 1 (even before being remade in all its graphical and mechanical glory on the Nintendo Gamecube in 2002) had all of the right elements to create a lasting franchise. It featured incredible sound design and cinematic camera angles, designed not only to keep you guessing what was around the corner but to emulate camera shots used in actual horror movies. For the time it was released, it was mind blowing, unlike anything else on the market in terms of both ambition and quality. More than anything, it was its precise timing that was so impressive. For a horror experience to be good, the timing has to be perfect. That’s easier to do in a film, where the director has control over what the audience experiences and when they experience it. But in an interactive game it’s very difficult. There has to be just enough breathing room to get the player comfortable. Musical cues have to be spot on. That jump scare has to happen at exactly the right moment to have its full impact. And for all of this to work the director has to be able to anticipate what the player will do and where they will go and when they will do it. Resident Evil understood these barriers and crushed them with a key understanding of how gamers play. REmake only improved on this with added enemies (like the infamous Crimson Heads and Lisa Trevor) and new jump scares. The result? Very few of the Resident Evil games since REmake have felt quite so well made. Some took bigger risks, and some are more memorable, but the one that started it all established a formula so good that everything else the series does has been informed by it. Wesker, the Tyrant, creepy mansions... they are all here and as good as ever they will get.

Scary Rank #1: Resident Evil 1 never stops being tense. You never seem to have enough ammo, never enough healing items. You always wonder if this time through the hallway will be the time something jumps out at you. The remake makes this worse with the inclusion of Crimson Heads, which make zombies rise from the dead faster and more resilient (and with a heck of a scary growl), but even the original kept the mansion scary by throwing in those damnable Hunters just when you thought you’d cleared the place out. Speaking of the Remake, can anyone say Lisa Trevor? Dear lord, she alone gives this the number one spot on the list. It may never make your heart pound as hard as Resident Evil 7 does in its most intense moments, but Resident Evil 1 keeps the pressure on for longer and it truly is a sigh of relief when you get picked up by Brad’s helicopter at the end of the game. The first is still the best when it comes to putting your heart in your throat.

#3: Resident Evil Nemesis

Resident Evil Nemesis is a roller-coaster from start to finish, packed with so much action that it is hard to remember that it is possibly the shortest game in the main series. Nemesis doesn’t waste space, transforming Raccoon City into a constantly changing arena. Running around the ruins of Raccoon City as the zombie invasion hits full swing, you witness the city fall further and further into destruction as the streets gradually fill up with harder and harder enemies. No area feels safe in Nemesis, as even spots you’ve cleared previously can repopulate with new enemies. I say “can” because Nemesis keeps players on their toes with a randomly generating enemy system that changes where and when certain enemies appear, meaning you can’t get too comfortable in Raccoon City, even on subsequent playthroughs. And any time you do finally get some breathing room, the quiet is interrupted by a deep voice growling out “STARS...” Originally intended to be only a side story, Nemesis earns its rightful place among the main series mostly due to its titular villain, who is the most impressive of all of Resident Evil’s monsters. Years before Papa Baker would chase you through the halls of his bayou home, the nearly unstoppable Nemesis was already terrifying players by breaking all the old rules of where an enemy would go, chasing players around huge portions of the game’s map, breaking through doors and walls to continue the chase and even equipping a rocket launcher to target players at a distance. There are other innovations that shouldn’t go unnoticed here, either, such as a last-second dodge feature that encourages players to be more aggressive and get up close with enemies. There’s also the “choose your own adventure” timed choices that pop up in intense moments, like when the Nemesis is bearing down on you and you have to choose to jump out of a window or try and blow him up. Sometimes one option is better than another, and sometimes the option changes the story, leading to high replayability. And if you ever get tired of the main game, there is the unlocked Mercenaries mode. That’s right, it wasn’t Resident Evil 4 that started that. Like so many things, Nemesis did it first. All of these quirks and innovations, alongside the incredible non-stop pace, make Nemesis still a blast to play today and one heck of a send off to Raccoon City.

Scary Rank #2: Because the action moves so fast in Nemesis, you will never get a chance to calm down. Not to mention Nemesis himself is a walking jump scare. If Resident Evil 7 proves that being chased makes for some of the scariest moments in a video game, then Nemesis makes you feel chased for the entire game. The only thing that keeps it from being as scary as Resident Evil 1 is that it is over sooner.

#2: Resident Evil 4

Resident Evil 4 represented a revolution in the series, ushering it from its old-school fixed camera routes into a more modern over the shoulder style of play. I struggled with this change throughout my entire first playthrough, upset with the fact that it abandoned the old formulas. Gone were zombies, gone were most of the scares, gone were most aspects of survival horror. But then I also found myself dreaming of it, saying “heheh, what are you buying?” until my girlfriend asked me to stop, and starting over and playing it over from the beginning as soon as I had beaten it. Despite the change in direction, it was a game I didn’t want to end, and I’ve gone on to purchase it on nearly every system its been released on. I’m not alone in this: Resident Evil 4 is one of the most successful games in the franchise and indeed one of the most influential video games of all time. It didn’t only redefine what Resident Evil was for an entire new generation of gamers, it also redefined how people thought of third person shooters, opening the doors for everything from Gears of War to Uncharted. If you load it up today, you’ll find it takes an hour or so to get used to the older controls, but the game was so well designed that once you do you’ll see how everything in the game caters to those controls, creating an enticing run, stop, aim, shoot cycle that is addictive and never stretches beyond its limitations. Of the over the shoulder Resident Evil games, Resident Evil 4 feels the most complete, not requiring a co-op experience to make it good nor relying on years of lore to understand and care about its story and characters. Resident Evil 5 may have been fun, but it never got quite this good again.

Scary Rank #7: Resident Evil 4 is often tense, because of the nature of its gameplay, which forces you to stand still while shakily aiming at oncoming enemies. It never really gets scary, though. Enemies are too slow and your bullets too numerous, your spin kicks too awesome, to make you truly feel vulnerable. It does get props for a certain boss that chases you relentlessly through a certain caged area... oh, and for the Regeneradors. The Regeneradors, with their constant snuffling sound and their twitchy gait, are among the scariest enemies ever in Resident Evil. But a few minutes of pure terror isn’t enough to ignore the heavy focus on action and the fact that Leon carries enough firepower to wage his own war.

#1: Resident Evil 2

Resident Evil 1 may have started the franchise but it was Resident Evil 2 which jumpstarted the fan base. Resident Evil 2 had a lot to prove, mainly that this series could survive (pun intended) more than a single outing, that it could expand its scope, grow its cast of characters, and build on its setting. And boy did it deliver. If Resident Evil 1 broke ground when it came out, then Resident Evil 2 dug deeper. One mansion became a city. The two selectable characters did more than have different items and slightly change the order of events. Now, you had to play both characters one after the other to experience the full story. As if that wasn’t enough, the game changed depending on which character you played first, and in order to see everything the game had to offer, you had to play four times. Granted, two of those times would feel awfully similar, but the A&B scenarios changed just enough about the story and scenarios to make it well worth every second. The scares of the first game remained mostly intact but now a healthy dose of video game action was thrown in and boss fights became more numerous and dynamic, creating what remain the series’ best and most diverse boss fights. Simply put, Resident Evil 2 is a masterpiece of realized ambition that hasn't been matched by any other game in the series. It’s one failing now is that it is old, both graphically and in terms of controls. There’s a reason that fans have been clamoring for a remake of this for so long! But I’m glad Capcom waited so long to do it. Resident Evil 2 needs more than a new coat of paint. It is a carefully constructed experience and care is going to be required to give it a second life on par with the original experience. Here's hoping 2019 delivers on that.

Scary Rank #5:  One of the best things about Resident Evil 2 is that you aren’t playing special forces this time around. Claire Redfield is a simple citizen and Leon Kennedy a rookie cop. They feel, from the opening cutscenes, completely out of their element which added a wonderful connection between them and the player. Unlike the first game, you don’t start off in a safe situation that grows worse the longer you explore. No, you start off in a goddamned car wreck, surrounded by zombies and not nearly enough bullets to fight them. From the beginning, Resident Evil 2 highlights that you need to run to survive. Then it introduces Lickers, which add a whole new element to jump scares and you think that the game may be too frightening to keep playing. But also around this time it introduces you to grenade launchers and shotguns and lots of ammo for both of them. This makes the Resident Evil 2 scares manageable because the reaction to anything that moves in that game is to scream and then douse it with either buckshot or acid rounds.

[mindthump]

The untold story of how the XPS 13 defied odds to become the world’s best laptop https://ift.tt/2vCoc4N

Dell.

What does that name make you think of? You’re answer is likely beige boxes, affordable laptops or – if you’re a child of the ‘90s – the infamous ‘Dude, you’re getting a Dell!’ guy. Despite his best efforts, Dell spent most of its life as the very definition of dull. The company’s computers were affordable, practical, reliable, but never exciting.

Not anymore. Dell’s XPS 13, our favorite laptop three years running, has redefined what people expect from a premium Windows-powered notebook – and its 2015 release was just the beginning. The company has since unleashed salvo after salvo of cutting-edge products across both its Dell and Alienware brands.

Change like that doesn’t happen overnight – but, as we found out, it can be spurred by just a few talented people with ambitious ideas.

The Birth of the Adamo

XPS (Xtreme Performance System) is not a new brand for Dell. It’s been around for over fifteen years, a carry-over from a simpler time in computers and technology. We all remember those days, right? Gateway controlled the market on high-end consumer PCs, Windows 95 reigned supreme, and Apple was known only as a desktop computer company.

In many ways, Dell’s feet are still firmly planted in that world. It’s a massive corporation that still makes a large chunk of its revenue selling computers to corporations in bulk. Yet something was in the water in the late 2000s. While the MacBook Air was developed in Cupertino, Dell was attempting to pioneer its own radical new direction for the future of computing.

Dell Adamo 13

It was called Adamo — a quiet, short-lived experiment within the walls of Dell that would pave the way to a very different future for the conservative computer manufacturer. It was built by a small team, created as if out of thin air, and disbanded within two years – but the groundwork it laid within the walls of Dell would change it forever.

“It was what we called a dark program,” says XPS Lead Marketer Donnie Oliphant. “It was a ‘need-to-know’ basis. It was literally like three guys in a room upstairs that had a lock on it. If we’d had more exposure to the rest of the business, it never would have made it out the door. We let the rest of the company in on it about six months before we shipped it.”

While the MacBook Air was in development in Cupertino, Dell was attempting to pioneer its own radical new direction for the future of computing.

Oliphant was moved over from the Latitude business at Dell, and he’s the longest-standing Dell employee in key roles on the current XPS team. He was joined by another key figure: Nicolas Denhez. You may not have heard the name before, but the French designer is responsible for some of the most celebrated modern technology concepts such as the Xbox One S and X, HoloLens, and the Microsoft Courier project. Before he moved over to Microsoft, he worked on multiple laptops in the Adamo line laptops, all of them futuristic, risk-taking, and doomed.

“The mechanical carcass cost on that was $570,” says Oliphant, pointing to the solid chunk of aluminum in an Adamo laptop’s chassis. “They were ridiculously expensive, and that wasn’t because of the material choices. It was because of our ineptitude with regards to design.”

The Adamo line produced two products its short life, the Adamo 13, and the Adamo XPS. They’re among the strangest PCs ever released commercially. Launching within six months of each other, they featured an all-aluminum body, and hefty pricetags to match. The Adamo 13 was $2,000 for the lower-priced model, and $2,700 for the higher-end model. But from a design aesthetic perspective, the Adamo 13 was far ahead of its time, even compared to something like the MacBook Air.

Dell Adamo XPS

“It was basically myself and [Denhez] that sat upstairs and built ID models on what we wanted it to look like. And then we took it to engineering and said, ‘put a computer in this.’ Typically, it’s the other way around. Typically, we do a design — architecture, features — and then we wrap a skin around it. This was done the opposite. If you think about it from today’s design philosophies, they were done ass-backwards.”

The Adamo XPS had a very different design story, though it was even more experimental in its conception. Dell completely out-sourced the design and development of the product, hoping to save a few bucks along the way.

“We used an outside design house — so, non-Dell employees. The idea was that we could offshore the development,” he says. “The thought process was that was going to be cheaper, but it just turned into a major headache — and we still had to finish it for them. There was a little bit of animosity toward that second system. But it was cool, because it was sub-10mm.”

Dell’s Adamo XPS is tiny even by today’s standards at just 0.4 inches thick.

In fact, the Adamo XPS was declared the thinnest laptop in the world when it was launched at CES of 2009. At just 0.4 inches thick, it’s tiny even by today’s standards. Oliphant would be the first to admit that ultra-thin designs come with its own flaws and compromises, but the desire to create bold, sleek products would live on in future XPS products.

“When I inherited XPS in 2010, and we took the products that were going to be the next-generation Adamo and we put those on the XPS roadmap,” said Oliphant. “The first XPS 13, codenamed Spider, launched in early 2012. That really should have been an Adamo product if we had kept [Adamo] alive.”

Going from Adamo to Dino

In 2006, Dell purchased Alienware, a popular gaming PC manufacturer based in Miami, Florida. The acquisition made great business sense, giving Dell access to a new market for high-end gaming rigs. Yet Alienware was a very different company than Dell. It was scrappy, down-to-earth, and completely consumer-focused. That ethos was about to get injected into the company in a big way.

Frank Azor Bryan Steffy/Stringer/Getty Images

The face of Alienware today is Frank Azor, who might be the most casual and earnest tech executive you’ll ever meet. He’s the kind of guy that’ll tease his employees for wearing a suit to a meeting and can just as easily talk about the internal components of a laptop or the latest gaming trends. While Azor and his team brought a casual attitude to Dell, for him, a corporate culture of risk-taking is what made the XPS 13 possible.

“You have to have a culture that is willing to innovate,” says Azor. “You can’t have ID with these crazy fucking ideas that are far out there, and then have a product planning team that say ‘I like some of them, but those are too expensive, or ‘my engineering team will never let us do that.’”

Azor started working at Alienware when he was just sixteen years ago, as one of just four other employees. Now, he’s the manager of both Alienware and XPS lines at Dell — and he’s determined to transform Dell’s stuffy culture from within.

“We’re an aircraft carrier,” he says. “To make a turn, it takes a long time. You need to start gaining momentum, and then you’ll start making the turn. I would say we’re in the momentum phase right now. This stuff is leading the company’s image — it’s leading the kind of culture we want to be. It’s all stemmed from the type of stuff we’ve done on XPS.”

Within just a few years of its launch, the influence of the XPS 13’s design has reached just about every screen we look at today.

Compared to the Adamo products, the XPS 13 might not look that strange, but it took significant risks. Starting the trend of thinning out bezels, the XPS 13 dared to move the webcam below the screen. The result when using the webcam was (and still is) odd, shooting right up your nose, and giving you a double chin. The team received its fair share of criticism for it, but the XPS team has stuck to its guns rather than caving in on the decision.

“When everybody’s like ‘we’re bought in, we’re going to be a culture of innovation, we’re gonna take risks, we’re gonna augment the engineering process to help solve for those defects and risks,’” he says. “But we’re going to go into this together with risk — a higher risk than we would if we built a “me-too” product — then you can make amazing things happen. If that hadn’t happened, we probably wouldn’t be where we are right now.”

During our tour of the Dell headquarters, we received an in-depth look at all the advanced engineering that powers the next generation of XPS laptops. (Photos: Luke Larsen/Digital Trends)

The legacy of XPS

Design trends come and go, but they always start with a trendsetter. The 2015 version of the XPS 13 was such a device. Manufacturers of televisions, monitors, smartphones, and laptops have all been on a mission to remove bezels — and that was set in motion by the XPS 13. On the smartphone front, you need only to look to the iPhone X or Galaxy S8 in your pocket. In laptops, look at the MateBook X Pro, which takes the bezel-less approach to the next level.

Dell’s XPS devices even make the MacBook Pro look a little outdated. According to Oliphant, that was always the goal, and the XPS 13 proved it was possible for PC manufacturers.

“Apple was very successful during that decade,” he said, speaking of the late 2000s. “Before 2015, most ultra-notebooks were just deemed MacBook Air-knockoffs or wannabes. What we saw shift with the introduction of Dino, our XPS 13 in 2015, was we started winning some of those head-to-head comparisons. We were actually delivering products with things that Apple didn’t have.”

Like any success, the XPS laptops didn’t spring out of nowhere. It was forged in a fire of bad experiments, lost profits, and finger-crossing moments. Yet Dell stuck with it, because the people behind the XPS 13 believed in the quality of what they’d built. Instead of retreating, they improved, tweaked, and revised. The result was a laptop that impressed critics and changed the company that built it.

“We’ve had to create a subculture for XPS. And from a consumer perspective, we’re trying to change the perception of customers or potential customers of Dell,” Azor said. “That’s what XPS is here for.”

[phoorn]

SWORD

I'm a writer, a cliche. When I was young writing was easy. Now it's hard. How?

Well, you get scared, don't you? And too ambitious. Your mouth's bigger than your stomach, your arms are puny.

And you're not at school any more. That's the tricky part. There's no Sword of Damocles hanging over your head. You need one, or you sit around wasting your one and only life. It's insane, but that's how it is.

So let me organise one. I, **** ***** do pledge to have written this new story I've come up with before seven days have passed. It's 10 Dec right now, so let's say I get it done by the end of 17 Dec, next Thursday.

I'll say a bit more about my situation. I've been published -- a small publisher, the book sank. I mean, I think people bought it. But I never saw any of the money. I'm not sure to this day if I got scammed.

That was quite some time ago. I was contracted to write a follow-up, but terrible things happened, I went mad, I had no idea what I was doing, I slinked away into the shadows. As I say, I'm not sure to this day if I got scammed. I'm also not sure if scammed my publisher. I've kept my head down since.

It's been quite some time since then. What have I done? Well, not much, right? I did nothing for many years. In the past couple of years I've done some writing, finished one story, nearly finished a bunch of others. I mean, I've always got to the end of the first draft. I've retired from the race every time somewhere about the middle of the second.

Some of these stories are ... not bad. The truth is, though, they're not amazing. They're not what someone of my ego would expect from someone who was published for the first time as early as I was.

I HAVE BEEN HUMBLED. God knows I needed it. You're not as good as you think you are. Someone on Youtube a while ago said something like the tricky thing is we think we're great because we know we have great taste. We read books and go, "I'd do that part better." "I hate how she does this. God, is she stupid?"

It's like watching streamers on Twitch. They are in fact better than their audience, but their audience goes, "Why did he get supply-blocked there?" It's cause he was doing a bunch of things you don't have the eye to notice, and he's 2000 MMR higher than you, shut up.

But I am getting better. I can see improvement in all these stories. Each one is mostly better than the last. Sometimes the ideas are worse, but they're still better-executed.

I just need to do more. I'm not young. It's a bit scary, to have considered yourself a writer all your life but not to have really practiced.

So that's that; there's my pledge. I'm gonna post a diary entry every day, too. Short. I won't go on and on. I like talking, you know. I like writing. But I have no writer friends to talk to. I don't think you need them. Talking does help, though. Some of my best story ideas come from my talking to myself, explaining to imaginary journalists how I made my millions.

I'm putting the source on Gitlab. If you know about Git, you'll know you'll be able to go look at all of the different revisions. You might find it fun. I've thought about streaming on Twitch, too, so you can watch every word, every hesitaiton. But thinking about it today made me nervous, so, no, I won't bother.

This secret blog is about enough for me. It's public, but not really, cause it's unknown. Pretty perfect.

Here follows the first day of notes. They actually written in my diary. I won't post notes like this again. It'll all be in the repo.

I should also say I don't plan to be very comprehensible here. I don't plan to be a blogger, though right now in the throws of enthusiasm it seems to me doing this (pledge, blog) for every story is a very intelligent thing to do. But it's a means to an end. The end, by the way, is riches, fame, an editor. I'd give my right arm for an editor.

FIRST DAY

2020-12-10T06:26:36+00:00

I'm not going back to mogen. No. One day I will. Let's do something new. Yes. 5,000 words for real. I've had plenty of ideas. As usual I'm influenced by things I've been reading.

Something I've always loved is spies. Really I mean "darkfriends". In the Wheel of Time, there's darkfriends -- they follow Shai'tan. Anyone could be one. It was the thing that made WoT really good. A Song of Ice and Fire has the same thing -- people aren't "darkfriends", but they can betray you. There's always danger.

Though in a short story I don't think I can do that. I could write a story about a guy who's found a spy. Or a guy who's a spy himself. Though that would involve coming up with a palace/court. But I wouldn't have to go into detail. Do I have one already? Not really.

There's also the shogun's wife idea. A story about a shogun's wife trying to keep him occupied, save him / the country in some way.

Since it's a short story it could be about her trying to get his mistress back. She's leaving because he's unstable. But the wife needs her back because she keeps him stable.

A story about a spy who needs to get some papers for his country. That'd need a few more thousand words to be worth it.

A dangerous world. That's another idea I've been having. I've written it down. Worlds with danger -- monsters, weather -- in them are the best. Middle Earth is dangerous. Randland (WoT's world) is dangerous (because of darkfriends). The Shadow of the Echo of All That is Lost's (James Islington's trilogy, not its real name) world is dangerous -- it's full of ancient, dangerous powers.

Another idea I've been having is about a magic that's only "items". Only objects of power, no power that a person can themselves wield. But I've always liked that, fuck knows why.

A story about a magic artefact. That sums up 90% of fantasy.

A fun story about a fun girl.

Which of these do I want to write? I'll look briefly through my story ideas first.

OK, something important: I've made a note to write a story about a character that wants something, needs something else and cant have either. This is how Brandon Sanderson writes. I will make sure to do that.

Another pertinent note: it says to think of the "perfect" world, thinking of all the books, games and films I've read/played/watched.

Middle Earth: loneliness, emptiness. Xenoblade Chronicles: a world on a God's body. Final Fantasy VII: Midgar, black pipes. Final Fantasy VI: cold waste, mechs. The Shadow of the Whatever: an ancient place filled with dormant, dangerous things. WoT: the atmosphere of the first and second novels. The world isn't amazing, come to think about it.

CJ Cherryh's Alliance Universe: it's sci-fi, but there's a lovely tenuous feel. Everyone's vulnerable going through space, everyone's weak.

OK, let's think about that. There's a new season of Attack of Titan. That's got an incredible premise. I could do something similar.

Rather than huge monsters, let's have small beautiful people. Who are kind and intelligent. That's scary because you're the bad guy.

You're an ancient monster. You're perverted, you love fear and pain. Or maybe you're a human. And perverted -- actually perverted but also basically normal. But the "monsters" are these beautiful creatures. They're elven. And they have no respect for you. They'll lock you up or kill you if they find you.

You WANT: To be accepted You want to be one of them You've found a magic spell that can make you into one of them To escape To kill them all, start the human rebellion To escape with A magic artifact Something that could kill them all A weapon that could be used to wage war A portal or ship that could take you to the moon Your mother sister girlfriend father The monsters are: Humans that changed themselves Using a spell They gave themselves magic powers They look just like you, so you can't tell who's who at a glance You can tell pretty quickly, though

It seems ... OK. What the opposite of perfect monsters? Imperfect humans. Maybe it's our guy who is perfect. No, I wouldn't know how to write that.

Let's just try out a lot of these wants and needs.

He WANTS: To be accepted. He NEEDS: To live happily, discrimination-free?

So, he wants to be one of them, but needs to just be accepted. That's fine.

How does he go about getting what he wants? How do you become someone else? He could use the same magic spell they did. He could use a different one. They somehow do it the real way, he the fake way. A bit like Gattaca.

Let's make the community small. It's not a world, just a village. An interesting village, and this will have something to do with what changed the rest of them.

Well, first, how about people start disappearing and appearing outside? It's a bit Attack on Titan. And not that original. Really cool, though.

But that wouldn't come into it. That would have already happened. And maybe wouldn't be explained. So, they became the superior humans by this mysterious mechanism. He's trying to fake it.

They all left and seemed to become really happy/intelligent/healthy. But they won't come back into the city.

They keep disappearing. Are they being taken? I think yes. Finally our guy is the only one left in the town. And he leaves, tries to become one of them.

They look different. They're covered in hair. So he shaves all the dogs and cats in the city, covers himself in their hair and leaves.

He finds a small camp of them. They don't accept him.

Or they do, though they know he's not one of them. I mean, they don't care. Or maybe they do. Maybe whenever he gets close they leave. Or maybe they just accept him. Do what you want, they say. They don't run away. But they don't really talk to him.

If they run away, that'd be cool. Nasty. Lonely for him. If not, you'd be able to see what they say. Maybe it's only when he covers himself in fur they let him stay. But they know he's not one of them.

He'd need to figure out what happened to them. In the end he doesn't do it in time and they all leave.

Or maybe he does figure it out and they leave. He just doesn't get something.

So what is it?

A drug A book A religion A small sphere They keep going to the sphere, standing around, then leaving When he finds it, he stands around He doesn't feel anything, but he changes to look like them The next time he sees them, they're walking -- not as a group He follows, tries to talk to them and they don't say anything. A minstrel

That's a nice mystery. It's got a nice feel to it. Btw I just took a small detour -- 2020-12-10T08:17:37+00:00 -- to make rsn's random number not be based on the time.

Randomness in programs. You start by "seeding" a random number generator. The classic way to do this is "srand (time (NULL))". srand takes an integer. time (NULL) returns the current second (since the start of Unix time).

The problem with with this approach is if you run the program more than once in a second you get the same result. Because the seed is the same.

Now I'm reading from /dev/random:

int fd = open ("/dev/random", 0); int seed; if (fd != -1) { ssize_t ret = read (fd, &seed, sizeof seed); if (ret != sizeof seed) { /* warn ("Couldn't read from /dev/random: using time (NULL) instead"); */ seed = time (NULL); } } else seed = time (NULL); srandom (seed); if (fd != -1 && close (fd)) err (1, "Couldn't close /dev/random");

You will see it defaults to time (NULL) if for some reason /dev/random can't be opened.

/dev/random is a psuedo device. Linux "collects" entropy over time and sticks it in a kind of pool. I have no idea how that works. But you can read random numbers from /dev/random.

Back to the story. It's a nice mystery, one of those what's-going-on stories. Do I explain what's going on? Stephen King says that stories that don't show the monster are cheating. But when you do show the monster you lose something.

Let's just come up with a half-explanation. Like a book, drug or sphere. But say nothing else.

Maybe instead of them leaving they go back to the village and don't let him back in. "Get the fuck out! And stay out!" Or they just acts as if nothing's happened.

Maybe it's him that's put them out there. Magic.

How could he be responsible? It'd be hard for it to be him, if they're supposed to be content.

Maybe they're experiencing something more. They're actually logged into the magical multiverse net.

Maybe he spoils it in some way. And they don't get to ascend.

The important thing is what's the thing that's brought them out there.

It's got to be something weird or incredible. Let's favour weird. Let's get some random sentences:

Its a garbed jollified Its a refractable corrugate Its a remindful hiccupping Its a backboneless chum Its a upland erase Its a cacuminal compart Its a accented bishoping Its a emendatory deceive Its a isoperimetrical reground Its a agrostological appear Its a urticant hinnied Its a reunionistic presses Its a homodont barber Its a unscrupulous cellars Its a psychic harp Its a Laodicean prevaricate Its a clipped hurries Its a quartic worst Its a stimulant eulogised Its a tangiest processes Its a numerable dosing Its a cornered totalizes Its a raggle-taggle focussed Its a sacrificial dissuade Its a synoicous enable Its a kingly recapped Its a unconscionable woofs Its a silver depone Its a self-confessed heathenized Its a led flocks Its a microseismical cons Its a hypodermal rehangs Its a fogless trephined Its a urbanized mutating Its a bewitching trauchling Its a boozy untruss Its a unanxious blow-dries Its a elenctic platinise Its a usurpative alleviates Its a unsatisfiable overbids Its a Jugoslav embedded Its a redder booby-trap Its a torn rinsing Its a intelligible fans Its a decorative restrict Its a annalistic bandying Its a oral shikars Its a sejant outlast Its a sapindaceous mussitate Its a evoked antiquates Its a secular impaled

Of those I like:

Its a psychic harp Its a accented bishoping Its a silver depone Its a backboneless chum Its a refractable corrugate Its a secular impaled

A psychic harp. That's straightforward. It'd be just sitting out there, playing itself sometimes. Or is someone playing it? Our guy thinks about going up there, touching the empty space. That's scary.

The accented bishoping -- an accented bishop. Just a bishop, sitting out there on the hills. Not that great.

Its a silver depone. I'm not sure what a depone is. But it doesn't matter. I've settled on the psychic harp.

It's psychic. That means it can hear your thoughts. It can communicate, though, but only in music. Is it communicating, our guy thinks?

It could play folk songs. Our guy would know the words. But he'd know various words and wouldn't get far.

Maybe the crux of the story is the meaning of the tune it's playing. Is it "My Johnny Went off to War" or "The Silver Plate", which is about a woman who kills herself because her Johnny cheats on her?

Or maybe the songs are about the town, or God. Let's just say he listens and changes. He thinks about marching to war. And then everyone leaves.

Probably best to not bother with the words stuff. Won't be able to make it work. It's just a mesmerising tune, and it changes him.

And then people leave. This is fine. Will people think it's just weird / feel unsatisfied? I can't know.

I'm feeling a little self-conscious now because I'm thinking I'll go post this on my blog, announce that I'm going to finish this story in a week, put the repo on Gitlab, stream this on Twitch. I like the idea of it. Probably best not to bother with Twitch.

Alright, let's plan that. Where to post? I can stick it on my Tumblr. Toks has made a website, apparently. I could do the same. I won't, though.

Today Make repo, stick it on Gitlab. Write post for Tumblr, include these notes. Write All characters, names, etc -- temp names -- wants, needs Synopsis Clean kitchen Call Mother Put money on phone Read

[ebenvt]

Introduction to Bacon & the Art of Living

The quest to understand how great bacon is made takes me around the world and through epic adventures. I tell the story by changing the setting from the 2000s to late 1800 when much of the technology behind bacon curing was unraveled. I weave into the mix beautiful stories of Cape Town and use mostly my family as the other characters besides me and Oscar and Uncle Jeppe from Denmark, a good friend and someone to whom I owe much gratitude! A man who knows bacon! Most other characters have a real basis in history and I describe actual events and personal experiences set in a different historical context.

The cast I use to mould the story into is letters I wrote home during my travels.

The Danish Cooperatives and Saltpeter

Copenhagen, March 1891

My dear Minette,

It is Sunday afternoon.  I slept most of the morning.  I am excited and refreshed.  I know you are here in spirit. Life has turned out much more insanely exciting than I could ever have hoped for. The entire thing is a grand adventure of discovery.  I could never dream that trying to unlock the secrets of bacon would be as insanely exciting as it all turned out to be.  Hopefully, you will receive the letter I wrote yesterday before you get this one.  I will hold on to it and post it next Friday.

I have been wondering about meat curing for as long as I can remember.  Even as a child I tried to imagine how people discovered that dry meat lasts longer.  Initially, I believe that people ate meat raw or fermented.  Animal carcasses that are left outside will start to ferment.  Fermentation breaks the tough muscles down and the first priority of humans must have been to find ways to get tough game meat soft.  Leaving the carcass then outside or in water to protect it from preditors would have been a natural way of softening the meat.  Later, boiling the meat and roasting it over fire became other ways to soften meat or pulverizing it with a stick or a rock.

I imagine that as people soon discovered that dry meat lasts long and the wonderful benefits of salt.  Food was initially only seen as something to consume in order to fuel our bodies.  As humans developed, we started changing food into an art form.  The king or leader and people with means could now demand the best meat.  We learned that meat, like any other food, can be prepared in many different ways to improve the taste and food changed into art.  These different techniques of “softening” meat were becoming art in themselves and Sharma, medicine men and women and housewives became the custodians of this new technology.

When we make bacon, we use a technique called curing.  Cured meat is identified by three things.  The salt and saltpeter change the colour of the meat.  When an animal is killed, the meat blooms a beautiful red colour.  If you do not rub it with saltpeter, it changes to a dull brown colour.  If you, however, rub it with a mixture of salt and saltpeter, it changes the colour to a pinkish-reddish colour.  Related to the science of making good bacon, colour is the first key.

The second thing that saltpeter does is to impart a unique cured flavour to the meat.  The third characteristic of cured meat is taste.  The last one is longevity.  Cured meat lasts long outside a refrigerator and in Europe is the staple food in many countries as far as meat is concerned.

I know saltpeter is important because it imparts all three characteristics to bacon.  Let me rather say it like this.  Using Saltpeter is not the only guarantee for good bacon, but leaving it out of the salt-rub, you will never get the right colour, taste or longevity.  You have the option of drying the meat without saltpeter in which case it will also last longer, but the meat will be dry and it will not have the characteristic taste of cured meat.

In South Africa, the old Dutch farmers fused their knowledge of drying meat in the chimnies in Holland and the North European practice of using vinegar in their hams with the indigenous practice of hanging meat out in the sun and wind to dry.  I have found this to be an ancient practice among all the peoples of southern Africa that I met in my travels.

The Dutch farmers add coriander and black pepper with salt to the vinegar to create what they call biltong.  The coriander and black pepper were initially added to mask any off-flavours in case the meat did not dry quick enough and some spoiling of meat has set in. This is a good example where drying works well to preserve meat with or without saltpeter.  Saltpeter can only be left out of the recipe if vinegar is used and lots of salt.

I have always known that the secret of bacon is in saltpeter, but saltpeter is not everything that goes into the making of the best bacon on earth.  So, my quest to understand bacon starts with saltpeter.  What is it and why does it have the power to give longevity to meat, change the colour back to the colour of freshly slaughtered meat why does it give this unique taste?  These are the questions I knew I had to answer first.

Besides understanding saltpeter, our goal in Cape Town is to set up a factory and not merely making bacon for home use.  Scale changes everything.  This is a lesson I learned from very early on.  On my grandfathers’ farm, I have seen how easy it is to make the best bacon on earth if we make it for our family only.  When my dad’s bacon became famous and Dawid de Villiers Graaff placed an order with us, we made five-time more we normally do.  It was a disaster!  Everything went wrong.  We had more workers to help, but they were not trained.  We could not keep the meat cool and in the end, we had to feed most of the meat to our dogs.  Scale is difficult and the importance of the right structure of a bacon factory is something that we can not under-estimate.  Right from the word go, I came face to face with lessons pertaining to structure and ingredients and the first ingredient to look at was saltpeter!

The Spirit of the Danes

The morning was crisp and interesting.  Andreas’ dad is an impressive man.  He is very intelligent with an amazing knowledge of many things.  He gave me a lot of perspective on what Jeppe told me on Friday.  For example, how did it come about that a man of Jeppes age was exposed to learning new butchering and curing techniques?  Why was there in Denmark such a focus on continued education that people showed up for lessons by the Irish, in sufficient numbers to make a proper transfer of skills possible.  How did the most current thing about the structure of a bacon plant fit so nicely into the Danish culture?  How were the Danish people inspired to take up a new way of doing things?

It often takes a prophet to change long-held perceptions; a visionary to change entrenched positions!  An inspirational man who draws his own strength from the Divine to lift peoples gaze from their own depressed positions and onto better things.  To instill hope.  These are however not all that is needed because these are often also the qualities of an imposter and someone who destroys.  What is needed are all these qualities with a simple and effective plan to improve things.  A person who can lead people to a better and more profitable future.

Andreas’ dad told me about just such a man.  In many ways, he is the father of the agricultural miracle of Denmark.  It may sound like a boring report on men and women who lived very long ago, but the truth is that it is an inspirational story about men and women with their backs against the wall.  Who triumphed against the odds.  The man at the center of the story is N. F. S. Grundtvig.

Denmark was an impoverished nation.  They lost Schleswig-Holstein to Germany.  The soil of their lands was depleted and yielding fewer crops with every harvest.  In all of Europe, the Danish soil seemed to be the poorest.   The conditions in 1864 were dire and farmers had little hope competing with Russia and America with their crops.  They were not making money.  Apart from little diversified agriculture, there was very little money in the country.  Farmers identified dairy farming as a lucrative diversification of their economy, but they lacked the money to make their plans a reality.  The depleted soil on the farms offered little collateral for lenders to advance money against.

I wish so much that I would get every South African to hear their message.  We are a nation of faith and still, we complain as if we have no hope.  What we need in South Africa is a prophet, a visionary and a very good plan!  The plan will in all likelihood have to be built on very practical education!  It is exactly for this reason that I am here!  I need to be very clear on the plan!  To my great amazement, the bedrock of the structure of the Danish bacon factory is in the first place not on the mechanics of doing it one way as opposed to another way.  The basis of their entire system rests on an almost religious belief in the power of cooperation and education!

Grundtvig was a churchman who lived between 1783 and 1872 and was described by some as the Apostle to Denmark.  He taught that Danish people must love their own country above all, more than any other real estate on earth.  He believed that Danes must love God and trust each other; their own skill and ability to solve problems; that success will come through cooperation.  The principal way to achieve this was through education and what he called the “cultivation of the people.”  This was distilled through his concept of high school which is completely different from high school in the rest of the world.

N. F. S. Grundtvig’s high schools were initially attended by people from the age of 18 to 60 or even older and everyone in between.  Every farmer’s adult son and daughter, every farmer himself or his wife, considered it a loss not to attend High School for at least one term.  The poor and the rich paid the same small fees and lectures covered an array of interesting subjects.  Religion and nationalism were part of the course, but it never dominated the other subjects.  Men and women looked forward to high school in the same way as Americans looked forward to a trip to Europe.  What he achieved is that even more than the information that was imparted, a general method of teamwork was created which would become the basis for cooperative farming and production.  Later, men and women aged between 16 and 35 mostly attended these high schools.  Young men attended in the winter and young ladies, in the summer.  Experimental agricultural farms were set up around the schools.  The teaching was not done from textbooks, but from practice.

Cooperation

His teachings against individualism slowly but surely sowed the seeds which germinated into mutual trust and a belief that by doing things together, more can be achieved.  Directly as a result of this, in 1881/ 1882 the first cooperative dairy farm was established in Jutland.  The Danes realised that to be successful, they must find ways for their fields to yield better crops and they must develop better ways to use their crops, once harvested.  Better than selling it at depressed margins on the open market in competition with the Russians and the Americans would be to utilise it to produce commodities.  On par with a relentless focus on scientific farming practices was unprecedented cooperation.  The middle man had to eliminate.  The farmer and the salesman joined forces and discovered that by cooperating they always had “something to go on,” a phrase which became an example of the new approach.

The cooperatives were set up where every member had equal rights.  Each member of the dairy cooperative had one vote and his milk was collected every morning and the cooperative agents returned the skimmed milk.  The cows, therefore, produced butter and feed for the pigs.  Money is loaned from the bank. Each member made himself responsible for repaying the loan in accordance with the number of cows he had.  Every seven days, the members received 25% of the value of the milk they delivered to the cooperative.  Apart from selling the milk to the cooperative, the member was entitled to his shares of the profit on the sale of the produce.  The cooperative kept 25% from which running expenses were paid and the loan was repaid.

There is another reason, Andreas’ dad tells me, why the Danish system works so well.  Not only did they manage themselves, but they also elected farmers to positions of power in government.  It was not only, like the Americans, for the people, by the people, but the Danes took it one step further.  The need and most pressing priority was their agriculture and so the cooperatives elected representatives for the farmers, by the farmers to the government.  These men and women abhor profiteering so that the priority is the benefit of the many.  This hatred for large trusts and monopolies goes back to the old feudal system which was prevalent in Europe.  Peasants did not own land, but in Denmark, this changed and the peasants were allowed to own their own farms.  This gave them every stimulus and motivation to improve the small farms.  It is said that 90% of all farmland in Denmark is owned by small scale farmers.  The first revolution in Danish agriculture was ownership.

The new farm owners started protesting against rulership and land aristocracy.  They sought more political power and proper representation.  They worked out a constructive plan to break up the remaining large feudal farms and to distribute it among sons and daughters of the workers.  Farm ownership, a systematic and thorough education system and the cooperative model for farming and production all work together.  The one feeding the other and strengthening the overall agricultural experiment.  In large part, the middle man was eliminated and the few matters run by the state are done for the benefit of the farmers and not for the government to make a profit.  A good example is the railways.  Still, the Danish farmer is not a socialist.  They simply believe in cooperation who thinks in terms of self-help and are not reliant on the state for help.

As Andreas’ dad spoke, I again wished I could get him to South Africa to come and tell them how it was done in Denmark.  I know that cooperation runs much deeper than simply pooling resources.  The role of education and private ownership was the basis of the Danish miracle and I see no reason why the exact same model cant work in South Africa.  The one reason I see is how deeply distrust runs between the different peoples who call South Africa their home.

Skimmed Milk to Pork to Bacon

In Denmark, it was probably the need to find a use for the skimmed milk that gave the farmers the idea of raising pigs in the same way that the need to feed cows indoor for nine months of the year forced them into intensive farming in fodder.   Pig farming therefore directly grew out of dairy farming.  It was going well with the establishment of cooperative pig farming and the live pigs were sold to Germany.

Before 1888, Danish farmers relied on selling all their live pigs in Germany.  The Germans, in turn, produced the finest Hamburg bacon and Hams from it and it was mainly sold to England.   A disaster struck the Danish pork industry when swine fever broke out in the country in the autumn of 1887.  This halted all export of live pigs.  Exports to Germany fell from 230 000 in 1886 to only 16 000 in 1888.  One of the most insane industrial transformations followed.  In a staggering display, the Danes identified the problem,  worked out the solution and dedicated every available nation resource to solving it. The creation of large bacon curing cooperatives was born out of the need to switch from exporting live pigs to processed pork in the form of bacon and to sell it directly to the country where the Germans were selling the processed Danish pork namely England.  The project was a stunning success.  In 1887 the Danish bacon industry accounted for 230 000 live pigs and in 1895, converted from bacon production, 1 250 000 pigs.

After breeding and pig farming, the next step in great bacon production is slaughtering.  On 14 July 1887, 500 farmers from the Horsens region created the first shared abattoir.  On 22 December 1887, the first co-operative abattoir in the world, Horsens Andelssvineslagteri (Horsens’s Share Abattoir), received their first live pigs for slaughter.  In 1887 and over the next few years eight such cooperative abattoirs were set up and there is still no end in sight where it will end.  Each is in excellent running condition.  As in the case with the dairy farmers, each member of the cooperative has only one vote.  The profit of the middleman and the volumes exported for butter and bacon are determined by the cooperative.  The market price is fixed in Copenhagen on a daily basis by an impartial committee.

Every farmer in Denmark or manager of a bacon curing plant cant be a scientific person, and yet, it is important that farmers and factory managers alike know something of the science underpinning their trade.  It is here where the high school lessons play an important role because it provides a solid foundation and the government is doing the rest.  They have a system of inspectors who look after farms and factories where they do the exact calculations, for example, to show how much butter must be produced from the milk of each cow.  The reason for the inspections was that the Danish Government were required to guarantee the quality of the bacon and the butter it delivered to England, but it had the double benefit of on the one hand guarantees the quality and satisfy the English requirements and on the other hand, improved the quality by assisting the farmers and producers.

The logic of cooperation was extended into England, the largest market for Danish bacon.  Some years ago the English bacon market was being serviced for the Danes by middlemen.  The farmers organised a selling agency in England to represent them known as the Danish Bacon Company of London.  The concept was applied to many areas of the Danish economy.  Banking and buying in Denmark are likewise done cooperatively.  Every village has a cooperative store.

The farmer in Denmark also uses the state in another interesting way.  Commissions are sent abroad to study foreign methods.  It was most probably on one of these trips that the Danes came across the striking workers in Ireland whom they brought back to Denmark to teach them mild curing.  Mild curing technology that came from Ireland years earlier became the cornerstone of Danish bacon.  It was this industrialised model that allowed the Danes to become the undisputed leaders in the world bacon trade.  The Danes did exactly what we intend doing namely learning not only how the cooperative factory is set up, but also the inner workings of such a factory.  They learned this from the Irish and I intend learning it from them!  That will satisfy one of the cornerstone reasons why I am in Denmark.

Neat, Prepared, Ready

Many years ago, on one of my visits to Johannesburg, I met another chemicals traders with the name of Willie Oosthuizen.  Willie told me that wherever I am in the world, before I leave home, every morning I must ask myself, “am I ready, prepared and neat?  These are according to him, the three essentials without which nobody will be in a position to use opportunities that come our way every day.

Thinking about the Danish Bacon trade, I realise that the government ensured that when the right time came, the industry was ready, prepared and in a general position of neatness.  It is a strange thing that as we walked through this small Danish town and I saw the small but neat Danish houses, that I could see this Danish approach to life in everything.  I do not see class differences between people.  I see people from all walks of life getting together in small coffee shops at the end of the day, celebrating life and sharing stories.

I can see how my quest to unravel good bacon curing is teaching me as much about life than it is teaching me about meat.  Andreas told me something this afternoon before I retired to my room which is very curious.  He told me that I am too quick to claim that this is the end of my quest.  That simply knowing the steps of bacon curing without understanding it is not to know the steps at all.  Brief exposure to the Danish attitude towards work and cooperation and the internal mechanics of a bacon curing operation is only the beginning of my education.

We were sitting in a small coffee shop one afternoon when Andreas and I were talking about all these matters.  Nothing about the pork trade is easy!  It is one of the most wonderfully complex trades on earth!  He asked me how long I think I will have to stay before I know enough to set up our Woodys bacon plant in Cape Town.  I knew enough by now not to simply venture a guess.  “As long as it takes”, I said.  He smiled.  “There is so much to learn!”  “Stay for at least a year!”.  He then produced a pouch with salt in.  He placed it in the middle of our table.  I dipped a finger in the salt and tasted it.    I recognised it as saltpeter.  “This, he said, is the next subject.  I discussed it with Jeppe and he agrees that after the structure of the factory, understanding Saltpeter is your next priority!”

That was where our business talk ended.  The rest of the afternoon we talked about life.  What it was like growing up in Cape Town and the many different cultures that co-exist in this great city.  I shared many of my experiences with him from my transport business.  I told him the story of Joshua Penny and how, after his ordeal on table Mountain, a Danish captain gave him a job on his ship sailing for Europe.  I invited Andreas to visit us when we set the Cape Town factory up.  The evening was pleasant and I became very fond of my Danish instructor.  A great friendship was struck that would last the rest of my life.

Please give the kids all my love and to our dear parents.  Please give them both my letters to read before you sent it on to Oscar, James, and Will.  I will write Dawie Hyman, David de Villiers Graaff, and Uncle Jakobus separately.

I miss you dearly!

Eben

——————

Photos from Chris Speedy and my visit to Denmark in 2011 when Andreas Østergaard introduced us to the science of bacon production.  Chris was a master, but as for me, I knew nothing! 🙂

      (c) eben van tonder

“Bacon & the art of living” in bookform

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Bacon Curing, a Historical Review

Detroit Free Press (Detroit, Michigan) 7 October 1906, p 60.  From The Little Kingdom at the Mouth of the baltic Great Nations May Learn How to Build Up a Trade in Dairy and Meat Products.

Ellsworth County Leader (Elsworth, Kansas) 18 December 1919, p 2.

The Mother Brine

Tank Curing came from Ireland

The Yazoo Herald (Yazoo City, Mississippi), 7 November 1914, p 2, from the article, Agriculture in Denmark.

Chapter 08.02 – The Danish Cooperative and Saltpeter Introduction to Bacon & the Art of Living The quest to understand how great bacon is made takes me around the world and through epic adventures.

[toonpunk-game]

Happy Independence Day...

“...It’s Christmas again.”

Once a year, Americans all over the country come together to celebrate the principles that made their nation successful: things like slavery, warfare, and the omnipresent yoke of capitalism.  What began as a colony of religious fundamentalists trying to escape a bunch of other fundamentalists has now blossomed to become a global leader in culture, science, economics, and--most importantly of all--bombs.  In just the last century alone, Americans have perfected the hydrogen bomb, the mother of all bombs, and--my personal favorite--the Miss Atomic Bomb.

410 years ago, when Jamestown was first established by English pilgrims, the future was uncertain.  Disease was rampant, transportation was hard, and racism had yet to be perfected. Now, we live in a modern utopia: surveillance and communication technology move closer towards their theoretical “perfect” state every day; and by that same token, we are moving closer and closer to the corporate-fascist cyberpunk hellscape our founding fathers imagined.  We here at Toonpunk are all about cyberpunk hellscapes, of all shapes and sizes--which is why instead of plugging our own, we’re just gonna use our (exceedingly) limited influence to try and make some of you aware of a few cyberpunk adventures that you might not be familiar with.

Dex is a side-scrolling metroidvania RPG with stealth, hacking, and beat-em-up elements.  While the game itself is incredibly well-constructed and makes use of numerous well-refined genre elements, the story is what really drew me in.  The plot is about a single college-aged woman who wakes up in her crappy downtown apartment one morning to realize that A: She can now control computers with her mind, and B: A lot of people want her really really dead and she doesn’t know why.  What I loved the most is how fluid the plot was, and how heavily the player could impact it if they wanted.  I’m not gonna out-and-out say that it’s just a pixel art side-scrolling Deus Ex game, but...I mean, come on.  It’s right there in the name. 

As some far-off chummer once said, cyberpunk is a sliding scale: on one end is the grim, gritty, run-down dystopian hellhole; and on the other is the wacky, campy, scan-lines-and-everyone-dressing-like-rocksteady-from-the-ninja-turtles--still a hellhole, but with a worse dress code.  These two extremes are respectively called “Black trenchcoat” and “Pink Mohawk”.  The former includes Blade Runner, Deus Ex, and Ghost in the Shell; while the latter includes Far Cry: Blood Dragon, Shadowrun, and--of course--Toonpunk. Satellite Reign is a game that straddles the line of the two--marrying oppressive corporate-capitalistic excess, and neon-glow fetish attire anarchists.  I’d have more to say on it mechanically, but the fact is, uh...it’s just “Syndicate”.  The old strategy games that were good--not the shooter, which sucked.

Also I’m just going to warn you people ahead of time, the entire game is a buildup to one terrible pun and no that is not a joke.

Our last entry on this list is a dark and disturbing look at the gradual psychic degeneration of a young adolescent male--who, while trapped in the poverty-stricken slums of Detroit in the year 2055, hallucinates a nostalgic but subtly off-kilter version of the Early 2000s Washington.  I don’t want to spoil too much, but let’s just say it’s like the Truman Show, Serial Experiments Lain, and Pleasantville made one immensely disturbing baby.  

Anyway--that’s all the time we have for today.  Happy Independence day to each and every one of you, and may you see many more!  

[asfeedin]

‘There has to be a format where the bowlers are able to challenge batters’

It’s not the time to be fussing over birthdays and celebrations, and Sachin Tendulkar doesn’t have his 47th on his mind. The days he has kept track of instead are the number he has spent indoors in his home in Mumbai, without meeting a single outsider. Count them from March 15 onwards. And let’s not forget that, regardless of whether social-distancing norms are in place or not, it’s not like he can step outside for a change of scene and shop for groceries. What Tendulkar misses is the happy whirl of meeting old friends, playing golf or badminton, and otherwise being busy.

This is, though, a chance to think about the future, to reflect on what could be, and think about what the new normal might be when cricket does return. Though players have generally tried to adapt to this “forced off-season” by trying to stay fit at home, it may take a while for them to return to their previous levels of on-field sharpness, no matter how much fitness work they have done during the lockdowns. But Tendulkar says, “I personally don’t feel the game is going to change as such.” What he cannot get his head around is the idea of closed-door contests.

“That would be odd. Because you get so much energy from the spectators also. If India is to win a crucial game, you want people to be around you to celebrate – to amplify that. But no one inside the stadium? It’s not going to make anyone feel special. It is going to be a weird feeling, and I don’t know how players will react.”

ALSO READ: Kartikeya Date: The three phases of Tendulkar’s ODI batting (2018)

International games, at least, Tendulkar says, need their living, breathing audiences.

“Can you imagine Roger Federer and [Rafael] Nadal playing on the centre court of Wimbledon with nobody there? It’s going to be such a strange thing to watch. Not just cricket, any sport needs to have that energy.”

In contrast to the still vast global appetite for him, Tendulkar himself post-retirement is not an obsessive watcher of live cricket. It has been seven years since his emotional Wankhede farewell, and in that time cricket appears to have been enormously transformed, with the advent and explosion of T20 leagues and fundamental changes in elements of the sport itself.

Since these are days of nostalgia and whimsical imaginings, what kind of batsman would a millennial or Gen Z Tendulkar have been? Not much different, he thinks: “I would have continued to be myself in today’s cricket, I don’t think I would have changed anything.” What, no 360-degree shot-making or Dilscoops or switch hits?

He has seen his younger self on a few YouTube videos and imagines he would not have needed to use those tools. “I don’t see there would have been any need to do something out-of-the-box different. Because if I had continued doing [what I did] the same way, the boundary line is only 70 yards [away],” he laughs. “So if you are going to back yourself to clear [it], then you work on consistency more than anything else, depending on the surfaces. There are surfaces that compel you to play differently, I would have been flexible in my mind, my thought process. I think that flexibility has to be there.”

Playing without spectators? Not an experience Sachin Tendulkar is familiar with, nor one he wants to see in cricket’s future Getty Images

What both longevity in the game and the new rules of modern cricket demand is the willingness to keep innovating. “Like how bowlers have developed the slower-ball bouncer, the knuckleball and the wide yorker – they have developed various things. So have the batters. In time to come, maybe eight-ten years down the line, we will be looking at a totally different game – the batswing could be different, the stance could be different. Or the loading up. A lot of elements which we are not thinking of today because it’s not demanded by the game today. But in time to come, it may change.”

He remembers watching Andy Flower reverse-sweeping his way to the top of the Test aggregates on the 1999-2000 India tour and saying that Flower was about “eight-ten years ahead of the rest of the lot”. Twenty years on, Tendulkar is right and Flower has come to be seen as having been an innovator back then. When he is asked about the most visible changes in the game since his retirement, Tendulkar points to two issues. One is the absence of a mechanism to correct umpiring bloopers using the DRS. “Those types of things, when the bowlers didn’t get the wicket even though the batsman was out, or the batsmen were given out when they were not, it costs us games. Those type of things win or lose matches and series. Today that doesn’t happen – a bad decision can be completely negated and you still have a chance.”

The other he has touched upon before – the ODI rule changes in the early 2010s, where a total of four fielders were allowed outside the ring in the non-powerplay overs, and the use of two new balls in ODIs.

“If you have to look at one-day cricket then [with] the two new balls, if the pitches are not helpful, it makes bowlers’ life really difficult. Two new balls have virtually diminished reverse swing, I have not seen lot of reverse swing. [There is] occasional reverse swing here and there.” The use of a single ball, he says, “guaranteed little bit of reverse swing with the discoloured ball and the softer ball”. With two new balls, the ball stays hard, “travels faster, and so I think bowlers have been challenged more”.

ALSO READ: Have the new rules made ODIs an unequal contest? (2013)

The five fielders in the ring has been an additional challenge. Tendulkar illustrates, offering a standard field for an offspinner: “You would normally have a long-off, long-on, deep midwicket and deep square-leg, and you have to have a deep point inside the ring. Because of T20, batters are prepared to back themselves, because they’ve worked on those shots, reverse sweeps and all sorts of things.” Earlier, if you pierced the infield ring, he goes on to say, “you got a single for that, with the extra fielder back on the boundary line and you lost strike. If the strike was not rotated, then you [as a non-striker] lost possibly three balls an over. And when you were batting well, the bowler would want to bowl at the non-striker and not you.”

It must be remembered that Tendulkar was the first batsman to make an ODI 200, ten years ago, before the new rules came into play, when he was two months short of 37. In the decade since, only five other batsmen have gone past 200, Rohit Sharma twice.

Talking about the new rules, which he sees as palpably unfair to bowlers, gets Tendulkar’s cricket self buzzing again. The on-strike, in-form batsman today is supplied with a bounty. The ball past the infield ring is a four. “If I was batting well,” Tendulkar says, “I would hit a boundary and I would face the ball again. You are getting three runs extra, plus you are retaining strike and I would love to do that.”

It is this reminder of his appetite for run-scoring that brings the twin hundreds in Sharjah in 1998 to mind. Those innings were played around this time 22 years ago, and are part of the collective memory of a generation of Indian cricket fans: the Desert Storm innings (143) that took India into the tournament final and the match-winning 134 in the final two days later on Tendulkar’s 25th birthday. His partner in the 143 was VVS Laxman, who scored 23 in a 104-run partnership and remembers talking to Tendulkar in between overs. “But I know he wasn’t listening to me,” Laxman said.

On batting under the current field restrictions: “If I was batting well, I would hit a boundary and face the ball again. You are getting three runs extra plus you are retaining strike and I would love to do that” AFP/Getty Images

Tendulkar has himself recalled being “obsessed” that night about keeping strike. “When you are batting well, you want to face every ball. I wanted to win that game, I didn’t want to just achieve our run rate, I wanted to beat Australia and get into the final, so I was playing for the victory.”

What was it like being in the zone that night? “Sometimes, I don’t know… you look at the bowler and whatever you’re thinking, the bowler exactly bowls that,” he says. “It was a little bit of that. I knew more or less what they were bowling and I was ready to play that shot. Sometimes that happens, I wouldn’t say every ball, but whenever one is planning to play a big shot, you say okay, if the ball lands in this area I am going to hit. And exactly that is where the next ball has landed and I have gone for that shot. You have those days where whatever you are thinking, that is what exactly happens.”

Over the course of a conversation, especially one of this kind, during a time when cricket itself stands suspended, it is easy to lapse into the past and search for new paths around familiar stories. But the game will go on, cricket will resume, and new stars will be born. Is there anyone in the new crop of gung-ho swashbucklers around the world in whom Tendulkar sees a glimpse of his younger self?

ALSO READ: Tendulkar: ‘I wanted to beat Australia twice (2018)

It is, of course, a headline-seeking question but Tendulkar, always a batsman of turbo-charged intensity and skill, has remained a man of controlled verbal expression. “Since we are talking about promising youngers, there are a number and the names would be Prithvi [Shaw], Shubman [Gill] and [Sanju] Samson. They all are different players. Just like how when we were playing, Rahul [Dravid] was different to me, I was different to Sourav [Ganguly], and Laxman was different from all of us. Similarly these guys are different but have a promising future. They have their own styles.”

Because we are where we are, with cricket stalled, the board chiefs all meeting to talk about the future, and Tendulkar turning 47, maybe this is the best time to talk about what the game could include looking ahead. Something larger than tinkering with powerplays, surely. Tendulkar would personally like the debate about Test cricket to be focused not on quantity (four days not five) but on improving the quality of the contest and keeping spectators engaged.

Get home boards to move away from the extremes of dead or unplayable wickets and commit one way or the other – seam or spin. Right in the playing conditions, if need be. It may sound radical and impossible to achieve, but Sachin Tendulkar, cricketer, cricket fan, has a parting observation: “We have two formats in which the bowlers are constantly challenged, have restrictions in their field settings, so there has to be a format where the bowlers are able to challenge batters.”

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Tags: batters, bowlers, Challenge, Cricket, Format, India, Sachin Tendulkar

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[biofunmy]

As Minor Leaguers Try to Keep Their Careers Alive, Some of Their Neighbors Are Not

OLD FORGE, Pa. — The most notorious residence in the Yankees’ minor-league system comes with a furnished bedroom, a cozy porch, ample street parking and a handy private side entrance.

One downside: the bodies housed underneath the apartment.

“I’ve seen people getting wheeled in and out a few times, which was a little — different,” said Yankees relief pitcher Chad Green, who lived in the apartment here in early 2017. “The place was nice. As soon as you got over the fact you’re staying in a funeral home, it was fine.”

Many ballplayers describe getting called up to the majors as a dream come true, but for some Yankees, their last stop before reaching the Bronx is a setting more fit for nightmares: an apartment above a funeral parlor on a sleepy corner of this city of about 8,000 people.

Less-than-desirable living situations aren’t uncommon for the many minor leaguers living on painfully tight budgets, but few are as eerie as the apartment where several Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders have ended up while playing in one of the smallest markets to host a Class AAA team.

When Clint Frazier was traded to the Yankees’ organization in July 2016, he moved in above the funeral home with two teammates at the time, Ben Gamel and Cito Culver. Frazier was mired in a slump, and since his new roommates were thriving at the plate, he figured living among the bottles of embalming fluid and caskets might prove to be a talisman.

“It didn’t save my season,” Frazier said.

He lasted about one month before moving into a hotel. The breaking point came one Saturday morning when he awoke to the sounds of a funeral service taking place downstairs.

“That’s when I was like, ‘I’ve got to get out of this place,’” Frazier said. “It’s nice on the inside, but it’s a very eerie feeling. I could hear the stuff going on in the basement. That’s not cool, man. I would never in a million years go back.”

Frazier, somewhat surprisingly, is an outlier in his feelings toward rooming with the dead. Many players are comfortable surrounded by the macabre, and even recommend the experience; the apartment has a reputation in the RailRiders clubhouse as one of the lusher accommodations available in the area.

As Gamel points out, when it comes to minor-league living, it can get much worse than staying above a funeral home. “It’s not the dead you’ve got to worry about,” said Gamel, now an outfielder with the Milwaukee Brewers.

The home in Old Forge, Pa., about five miles from the RailRiders’ ballpark in Moosic, belongs to Bob Gillette, whose family has operated Ferri & Gillette Funeral Services for 78 years.

About eight years ago, after his grandmother died, Gillette renovated the space on the top floor of the building where she had lived to make two apartments. Pat Rovello, Gillette’s neighbor who had been renting out properties to ballplayers since the early 2000s — including above a pizzeria he owns — suggested offering the apartments to RailRiders.

Currently, pitcher David Hale resides in the smaller of the two spaces. Gillette listed Scott Sizemore, John Ryan Murphy and Shane Greene as former tenants. The larger apartment goes for $1,200 a month, with the smaller space renting for $800. All utilities are included, and sometimes two or three players live in one apartment to save money.

“We’re big Yankees fans,” Gillette said. “The guys, they’ve been so great. They see my kids in the yard, and they taught my son to throw the proper way.”

Gillette did not recall ever hosting an unruly tenant. There are moments, though, that have made lodgers feel uneasy.

One night when Gamel and Tyler Austin were living at the funeral parlor, smoke from the basement furnaces triggered the building’s fire alarms. But with no smoke visible in the players’ rooms, the players immediately suspected mystic forces at play. Austin asked if he could spend the night with Gamel.

“Tyler used to sleep on the ground in my room,” Gamel said. “Nights where he’s feeling a little sketchy. I was used to it.”

Austin, now with the San Francisco Giants, called the apartment a “relatively nice place,” but said he had to be extra careful on certain days.

“The thing that was kind of weird was some mornings we’d wake up and there was a service going on downstairs,” he said. “I’d have to be really be quiet because I don’t want them hearing me walk around up top as they’re going through their service.”

Gamel added that the funeral home was quite serene compared with other minor league dwellings. Minor-league salaries vary widely depending on signing bonuses and service time, but players in Class AAA can make as little as $2,150 a month before dues and taxes, and only during the season, making it hard to find optimal living spaces.

RailRiders second baseman Gosuke Katoh lived with six other players in a two-bedroom apartment in Bensalem, Pa., when he played for the Class AA Trenton Thunder last year. He recalled two murders in the neighborhood while he lived there.

“We definitely don’t live in the best neighborhoods,” Katoh said. “The places we do live, the team apartments, I mean it’s nice that they let us stay there. It’s whatever we can get.”

To make sure his players don’t have similar experiences while with his club, Josh Olerud, the RailRiders’ team president and general manager, tacks on broker duties to his daily responsibilities. In recent years, he has built a catalog of available properties and personally inspects sites before a player moves in.

“I check out every single home,” Olerud said. “You don’t want to send someone somewhere that’s not going to be livable.”

The team pays for a three-night hotel stay for players upon their arrival, and some newcomers choose extended hotel stays if they can negotiate a reasonable rate. When players choose to search on their own, unexpected challenges can arise.

During spring training, pitchers David Sosebee and Cale Coshow could not find anything to their liking on websites like Craigslist or Zillow, but their teammate Danny Coulombe met a woman on his flight to Scranton who mentioned she lived in a duplex with a vacant apartment.

When Sosebee and Coshnow arrived the morning before their first home game to move in, they figured they must have gotten lost.

“We pulled up and I was like, ‘This has got to be the wrong place,’” Sosebee said. “It’s kind of like an auto body, slash junkyard, slash I think the guy sells cars out of there, too. There’s a bunch of cars in the back, mechanics everywhere. That’s our house.” All in all, though, he sounded satisfied with his new home.

Among those who stick to Olerud’s tips, players recognized a sense of civic pride from their landlords. Some proprietors forgo broker’s fees or security deposits and offer month-to-month or six-month leases, which helps minor leaguers facing unpredictable seasons. Gleyber Torres, who went on to finish third in the 2018 American League Rookie of the Year Award vote, spent the beginning of last season in an apartment that included access to a personal man cave, complete with a gym and golf simulators.

“Peace of mind,” said Olerud, sounding almost like a funeral director himself, “is a big thing.”

James Wagner contributed reporting from San Francisco.

Sahred From Source link Sports

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[love-transparentstudentarca-blog]

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i know starbucks does but i was wondering if there were any others...

""I got pulled over, and failed to surrender insurance?""

I was driving my friends home from a party one night, (being a DD), unfortunately I was caught going 123 in a 90 zone, and then I got pulled over. The police officer told me that not only I was speeding, but I was driving past midnight with a G2 class license. But the only thing I was charged with, was a 65$ fine for not surrending insurance, because I was driving my Dad's truck and could not find the insurance papers ANYWHERE. Since the police officer said there were no demerits to be added, does this mean my insurance rates will go up? I plan on pleading guilty and paying the ticket.""

Good car insurance deals?

can someone please tell me where i can get the best car insurance deals?? Thanks

Affordable medical insurance?

I'm looking for an affordable medical insurance that will primarily be used for prescriptions. I don't need a huge hospital deductible. Any ideas?

Car Insurance.?

Does anyone know if there is a temporary car insurance you can get, so you only have to pay for it when you are driving the car. My car insurance is $150/month for plpd(partial), it is the cheapest there is, and my car is only worth around $2000. I only drive my car once a month for a 70 mile round trip. I just think its a lot to be paying $150 for a 70 mile trip. More than $2 a mile just for the insurance seems like quite a bit to me. There is no taxis or public buses where I live, and I dont want anyone else to take me. I am only interested if someone can give me information about the insurance. And a motorcycle wont work. Thanks.""

Is an audi a3 cheap to insure for a new driver?

I came across a forbes article that said that the audi a3 was the chepaest car to insure and this seemed a bit strange to me. Is it true? If not any advice on a good car for a new driver for under 10 grand? I really have a strong preference for vw.

How will my first speeding ticket in Florida effect my insurance?

Ok I'm 19 and just got my first speeding ticket on the way to work today doing 9 miles over. So my question is how many points are added to your license for doing this much over and is there any way to avoid getting these points? If not, how will this affect my insurance? Is it going to skyrocket, even though this is my first speeding ticket ever?""

How to deal with car accident with no insurance?

FYI: this falls under New Mexico laws I drove a small 2 door honda civic and was on my way to school. There was alot of traffic being it was around lunch time and i was approaching an intersection when this dodge durango came out of nowhere and tried to cross in front of me. (I had the green light) I tried to brake and swerve but my driver side front end hit her passenger front end. I didnt have insurance at the time of the accident and she came and said it was completely her fault and that she went because the other drivers were waving her to go ahead and go. She was 19 with no DL so ended up getting 2 tickets. I, on the other hand,didnt get any tickets and took an ambulance to the E.R. being i was having bad chest pain so my husband emptied the car because it was pretty much totalled. So, since ive never been in an accident before, what steps can i take to make sure she pays for this? I have a disabled husband, a 6 year old child, and now without a car with injuries i cant afford to have right now.""

Health insurance in Colorado?

I just moved to Colorado from California and am looking for a job. My problem is I have to get my vision tested, and I'm going to an optometrist, but I'm pretty sure he'll refer me to a specialist and testing will be required. I really want to go because I've been putting it off forever and it's starting to affect me a lot. I applied for Medicaid and was denied, obviously, since you have to have children or be over a certain age. Is there an insurance plan that's comprehensive and affordable, something that's going to cover doctor visits? I'm not looking for hit-by-a-bus insurance because that won't cover doctor visits or prescriptions. Or is there another public option? Thanks for your help!""

Is my Car Insurance Valid?

If i use my Aunty name (dose not live with me and lives one mile away from my home) as the Main Driver and my name as the second driver on our car insurance policy (as it saves me some money and even i will be the main driver) will my insurance is valid? Please help me. If it is not, please tell me how can i save money by using her name as she is an experienced driver. Many thanks.""

UK Car insurance in-between switching cars?

To keep things simple I am calling the current car I have Car A and the new car as Car B. I have insurance that runs out on CAR A in 2 months time which I want to keep on the basis that I don't want to lose my no claims bonus for this current year by cancelling the insurance. I was planning to switch cars in 2 months anyway but have found CAR B at a very competitive price with all the extras I need. (Car B comes taxed and MOTd). I currently cant change my policy from car A to car B as the provider says the update will increase my premium to over 2000 just for the remaining 2 months! I am a young driver so I am not able to get temporary car insurance either. My question is what are my options other than simply buying car B now and letting it sit on the driveway for 2 months waiting for my current policy to expire? E.g.is it possible to take out insurance on car B without NCB now and add ncb 2 months after the policy has started? Any other loop holes you clever poeple can think of?

Can i get insurance to cover me driving my girl friends car?

My girlfriends mom is nervous with me driving her daughter's car. The mother is the one who holds the registration and insurance. Is there a way that I could have it insured for me so that she will feel comfortable if I borrow it? She worries about getting sued if I get in a wreck. is there a way to have that fall on my shoulders?

What Cheap car insurance do you use?

What car insurance do you use?

Where to find discount on car Insurance?

Hello, I am too tight to pay to car insurance companies, looking for chear auto insurance but ofcourse good company who can take care of my car, some discount on insurance policy will be welcome.""

How much does a chest X-Ray cost with no health insurance?

i've been experiencing pain in my chest, and i think i need a chest X-Ray. the only problem is, my insurance papers haven't gone through yet, and they won't for about a ...show more""

How much would insurance be on a hummer?

A hummer h2 2003 and up. I live in tennessee, and am 16. Parents use state farm. I have never had a car so i have a clean drive record. Its a used hummer, just give me some guessing please""

Can car insurance limit your driving distance by gade?

My father wouldn't let me road trip to another state because my car insurance would only let me drive from here to school. Can car insurance limit the places you drive?

I am 19 years of age i how much will they charge me for my insurance?

i have never been involved in a car accident or gotten pulled over by the police i live in california i have had my drivers license since i was 16. i own a 1997 nissan sentra gxe i pay 480 for it every 6 month and a 2011 nissan murano and i pay 554 every 6 months for it i have Farmers Insurance my dad is main driver my sister in the policy also. How much will they charge me if i buy a 2005 mustang will my car insurance sky rocket because i am consider an inexperience driver and mustang is a sports car Please help

Car modifications and insurance?

I was wondering which modification to a car can increase the price of car insurance, could something as small as alloys affect it? And if you have already had the car for a while then make modifications do you have to tell the insurance company?""

Will I affect car insurance rates ring on the cars title?

Me and my fiance re buying a car together I asked him to put it in both our names but he said nothing against me he just don't want his insurance to go up but I was told I don't have to affect the insurance even if the title says (him and me) the insurance would still just Be in his name.?

If you receive SSI Disabilty can you stay on your spouse's health insurance?

If you are awarded disability do you have to get on Medicare/Medicaid or can you stay on your spouse's insurance through their employer? I am afraid of not being able to see my regular doctor if I have to get on Medicaid because so few doctors accept it. Anybody familiar with this?? Thanks in advance!

Where can i get cheap car insurance for 20 year old?

hi, im 20 live in liverpool, just bought a ford fiesta flight 1.3 Y reg (2001) 1299cc were can i get insurance for no more than 3000 any tips on what to do aswell had my licence for 8 months""

MY FRIEND CAR INSURANCE?

I WANT TO KNOW WHY STATE FARM CANCEL PEOPLE INSURANCE MY FRIEND HAS HAD 2 WRECK AND THEY PAY INSURANCE TWICE A YEAR THEY SAY AFTER YOU HAD MORE THEN ONE WRECK NO MATTER HOW LONG YOU BEEN WITH THEM THEY CANCEL AND ALSO ALLSTATE HAS A FORGIVENESS THEY NEVER CANCEL YOU

What cars usually have the lowest insurance rates?

I do not have the greatest driving record and am in the market for a car. I also do not have a huge budget (looking to stay under $10,000). I want something newer than 2000 and do not want very high insurance rates. Any ideas?""

Car insurance uk only pt 2 ?

i just posted a question which i have varied answers.. another question of mine is that ok they took the whole years insurance.. now my mums left with 154.77 with not enough money to pay for another car.. she is fully comp, they did not give her a courtesy car which they are suppose to have done for 3days the car had been gone and one top of it the policy claims to give replacement cars until another car has been bought! any opinions?""

Where does it say this about car insurance in California?

I've heard on the news that it's now illegal for a car insurance company to change your rates based on where you live, at least in California if not nation wide. Does anyone know where any official documentation/websites that specific state this fact that someone could site if it becomes an issue with a particular company?""

Regarding Auto Insurance?

Applied online to AAA for an auto insurance quote.. Currenty with Geico and AAA ssent email offering to beat the rate.. So I completed the app online nad a gal calls me back.. My GF answers the phone and she gives it to me.. So the rep from AAA asks who is living with me and if she drives.. I told her a friend and she doesnt drive, no DL for over 10 years.. So AAA tells me I have to list her on the policy even if she isnt licensed and never drives a car.. So I said No thanks and said goodbye. whats the policy on roommates having to be insured for auto insurance? Not listed on my current GEICO policy.""

How much will my insurance go up? D=?

There was a misunderstanding and my car skidded against a 2009 Cadillac i unno what and left a mark. It wasnt even my fault but i kinda afraid of the man so... D=

""What are the requirements for getting a license and driving in Tennessee, age,insurance,cost,et cetra.?""

What are the requirements for getting a license and driving in Tennessee, age,insurance,cost,et cetra.?""

Cheapest car insurance for a 17 year old?

Hi i am 17 years old and have just past my test 2 days ago and i am currently trying to insure a 2003 ford fiest 1.3 lx petrol 3 door. I know it has quite a big engine (1.3) for a first car, but only has 8 valves and just creeps into insurance group 3 due to electrical equipment inside, which is nothing really. I have been looking around and i am getting ridiculous qoutes of around 5000, however i have found ikude insurance which is only 1800 but iyou have to have a box, which i would really rather not have but might have to. I would like to spend nor more than 2,500, help please????""

What is the best car insurance company for a graduate student?

What is the best car insurance company for a graduate student?

What is the cheapest car insurance in california?

My parents won't even consider getting me insurance because they think it's too expensive. I'm a girl, 16, gonna be 17 in October, and have above 3.0 GPA My car is a 1996 (i think?) toyota camry.""

Car insurance confusion?

I have full comp. insurance for my car and I can drive any other vehicle as 3rd party (As per policy). I also own another car which is not insured to anyone...Can I drive my this car (un insured) under my existing policy as 3rd party ?

Is insurance for a two door car higher than a four door car's?

is insurance for a two door car higher than a four door car's?

Insurance??????Insurance?

just wondering. my mom has a trailblazer and my dad has a lumina. they already have full coverage. my question is do they have to add my the insurance or since i have my drivers lisence i can start driving. my mom said that im already insured because it already has full coverage is that true or does she have to add me or what???

Do I need business use car insurance? For Domino's Pizza Delivery?

I have been offered a job working as a delivery driver for domino's. Currently my car insurance only covers domestic and personal use and not business. The domino's contract says drivers are responsible for ensuring they have the correct insurance but also says they have third party cover. Does this mean they cover the business side or do I still need to get business use insurance as well? If this is the case my insurance is likely to be bumped up by at least 800 a year! Not really worth accepting this job when its only for the summer then is it.

What would you recommend as a first car for a young driver?

must be cheap insurance, affordable and any good insurance companies for young drivers?""

Double up on individual health insurance?

Can you have more than one Health Insurance Plan for your self? I have to buy my own insurance, but even the best individual insurance is crappy and I wanted to now if people ever buy two insurance plans? The insurance i have now only lets me see the doctor twice a year. If I got another insurance plan would it pick up where the other left off?""

""Someone hit & run my car when it was parked, will my insurance go up?""

I have coverage with AAA, a friend from State Farm said I wasn't at fault so I should call AAA, but will my insurance rate rise if I report it?""

California Lawyer Malpractice Insurance Requirements?

Does a lawyer in California have to get Malpractice Insurance in order to take clients? For example if a newly admitted lawyer wanted to do a simple will for a family friend, would they have to obtain insurance first or can they take the case, at their own peril, and collect a fee for it?""

Is there a website that has Arizona Auto Insurance Questions that I can study for my test?

Is there a website that has Arizona Auto Insurance Questions that I can study for my test? I have my test next week and need to get some questions to get prepared!

What is an average cost of IUI without insurance?

What is an average cost of IUI without insurance and what is the success rate?

Do red light camera infractions hurt your insurance?

on the ticket it reads: this infraction will not be a part of your driving record and will be processed as a parking infraction. I live in Seattle, WA.""

Auto and House Insurance...what to ask!?

I'm a first time auto and house insurance buyer....yipee (NOT!) As I shop around for prices, I find each of the policies vary so much. What are some key questions I should be asking? What are the things I should be inquring about which will greatly affect the future with this insurance? In other words, to those of you who have had experience with insurance policies, what do you find most important in having on your policy? How do I make sure I'm well covered?? Thanks!!!""

How much is the insurance for a trampoline?

I am looking into getting a trampoline but I would like to get liability insurance. I have AAA and I was wondering how much my homeowners insurance would go up if I get a trampoline with a net around it

I want to file a complaint about two health insurances.?

I went on the Internet to try to get health insurance, this company called alliance for affordable service called me and told me that my percriptions would only cost in the neigbor hood of $10- to &50 dollars. I spoke to my Dr. and he told me that there was none of my medicines that he could change to the lower prices. I contacked the company and told them what the Dr. told me. I asked for my money back, they told me to send a letter, which I did. They sent me one back aqnd told me that they would not give me my money back. I dropped the insurance. I contacked another insurance on the internet. They called me. I sepicifity asked if they covered preexisting conditions and he asked did I mean, I told he that the Dr. wanted to do surgery on me left foot. He told me that it would cover any preexisting preplanned surgeries. The Dr. office called them and they told her that they would not cover any suegery inpatient or out. This company was Sure Care.""

Can you get maternity insurance only? Without regular health insurance included?

I am not pregnant yet.

Steps to getting your life insurance license in CA?

I have no previous experience with Life Insurance and am considering getting my life insurance license. What are the steps involved, how long does it take, how much does it cost, and how difficult is the test? Anyone help?""

MY FRIEND CAR INSURANCE?

I WANT TO KNOW WHY STATE FARM CANCEL PEOPLE INSURANCE MY FRIEND HAS HAD 2 WRECK AND THEY PAY INSURANCE TWICE A YEAR THEY SAY AFTER YOU HAD MORE THEN ONE WRECK NO MATTER HOW LONG YOU BEEN WITH THEM THEY CANCEL AND ALSO ALLSTATE HAS A FORGIVENESS THEY NEVER CANCEL YOU

Can I be under my parents' insurance under a different state?

I am a college student with a permanent address in Illinois, but I am in California for college. I am planning on getting a car in California. Can I get insurance under my parents' policy? What is the cheapest way of doing so? Should I register the car under their name or my name?""

Which car in Canada has the lowest insurance rate?

I'm not talking about new cars btw, I'm talking about the old cars from 95-2002 the shitbox cars, I'm a student and I plan on getting my first car with my first insurance so I need to know what's a good starter/shitbox car with the lowest insurance costs. Thanks""

2 Door Cars vs 4 Door Cars cost of Insurance?

I am interested in going from my 4 Door Acura TSX to a 350z or G35 Coupe, 2 door cars. I was wondering what the difference in prices would be for me, I am 19, no accidents, no tickets, clean record. As of now my parents have me on their insurance which I am sure makes it much cheaper, so what would the average cost of switching be if I was on my parents insurance or I was to take up my own. Please let me know, Thanks! :)""

How much will my insurance go up after dui in ny?

OK so i recently was caught for a DUI in NY state , i am under my sister's insurance (geico) and the car is in my name....i want to know how much will the insurance go up even though my sister never had a claim and i am under her...""

Why is my car insurance so high at 18? How can I get it down?

I've just passed my test and learnt in a 1.4 diesel and I have a peugeot 206 1.4 hdi, I had insurance quote for 1800 a month ago and now they are saying its 3700 I don't understand what's changed in a month what's the best way to get it down, I'm going on my Nans policy as a named driver and registering the car in her name and its still 3700! Any ideas? Thanks in advance""

""Cheaper car insurance, please help!?

I am paying about 250$ on my car insurance and i cant afford it anymore. Mine is a 2000 model car and i need a cheaper insurance. Please help. I am in the Northern Nevada.

How do I rent a car? without any insurance (i have no car)?

So I want to rent a Dodge Magnum, for about 9 days in May through Thrifty.I will be driving from Missouri to Orlando for a vacation. I assume that I will pay the fee for the loss damage waiver (about $11 p/d) Or maybe my credit card might just cover that. But why do they keep refering to my insurance?... I don't even own a car! Else why do they think I am renting? Anyway what advice would you nice people give a dumb person like me as to what I need to do or what other insurance I need to purchase, thanks.""

Does Bupa insurance cover child birth in USA?

Does Bupa insurance cover child birth in USA? and what is the steps for that?

Premium cost of insurance

If an insurance company has a payout of 17 millions, admin expense at 5 million, and profit of 2 million, with 26,000 insured. How much premium would they charge to each client.""

How is mandating health insurance like mandating auto insurance (according to Obama)?

Auto Insurance: If I don't want auto insurance, I don't have to drive. Auto insurance is a CHOICE. Health Insurance: Will be the only thing somebody HAS to pay simply for being alive in America. Some people do NOT agree with ANY main stream health practices like myself. I would NOT go to a doctor even if I was on my death bed. Comment: Does it concern ANY of you that this mandatory health insurance will be the FIRST thing the government REQUIRES you to buy. Even Taxes are a choice. Some people chose to work for goods and barter (Amish). Isn't this America, where I can choose to seek alternative health rather than be forced to pay for something for merely being alive? Also, what about Church of Christ Scientists - Why force people who are religiously opposed to our health care system to buy health insurance. Many Christ Scientists will die before they seek main stream health. This plan makes me sick.""

Is there a time limit for a auto insurance claim to be completed?

I was in a fender bender with another car in a parking lot a month ago. I filed a claim with the other guy's insurance agency the same day as the accident and have yet to be told if the claim was approved or denied. I spoke to my adjuster last week (as well as the week before) and they were still waiting on photos of the other vehicle. Is a month normal? The auto insurance company is Wawanesa. So my questions is...is there some kind of legal time limit for an insurance agency to approve/deny a claim in the state of California? Or might I end up waiting months to hear anything? Thanks.

Question regarding life insurance for children?

I have 6 children between the ages of 19 and 3..so i am interested in buying a life insurance that will cover college expenses, but i don't know which one to go for..does anyone know if gerber life insurance would be a good option?""

I was wondering who has the cheapest auto insurance rates in the bay area california? please help.....?

I was wondering who has the cheapest auto insurance rates in the bay area california? please help.....?

Will my Insurance go up if my son (22yo) gets a license but does not drive?

My son is going to graduate from college (in May) and wants to get his license taken care of now since he will have some free time. However, he does not actually need to drive (and will not be doing any driving until he gets ready to move out), and neither of us want to pay for the insurance rates right now. Will just him having a license cause the insurance to go up even if he does not drive and does not need to be insured? Thanks for your time!""

Where can i get good health insurance?

ok im 18 and a college student i found out a few months ago im no longer covered by my former heath plan since i turned 18... i need a heath insurance that wont cost alot? any ideas?

Car Insurance Price..........?

I have a question on Car Insurance price.. In the state of Virginia If I get my license at 16, and not drive till I'm 18, meaning I let my license sit, is my insurance going to be cheaper when I turn 18? So basically, is my insurance going to be cheaper if I get my license at 16, than 18?""

New Drivers: How much do you pay in Car Insurance a month?

I know this is a more personal question so I will just ask for a RANGE; like for example, $400-$500.""

Cheapest Car Insurance?

Hello everyone, so I had a talk with my father today and he told me as soon as he's done paying off my car, he's putting it under my name and I will have to pay the insurance. When I first received my driving license I did receive two citations for speeding. I don't know if that will play a roll ? Since I was 15 at the time. Anyway we currently have progressive which to me seems like they are too expensive for a college student I was wondering what insurance many of you have had luck with and still at an okay budget. I'm 18 years old, so I'm sure it will be expensive. My car is a 2008 Pontiac g6 4 door sedan I've had two citations. And that's about it ...can someone give me kind of a price range estimate for different car insurance companies in Florida ? If that makes a difference? And about how much I should expect to pay a month or for a six month policy? I know right now my dad paid almost 1200 for a six month policy on my car, but thats on his insurance and for being a diamond member. Thankyou all in advance.""

Car Insurance For 16yr old boy?

What is The cheapest car insurance for a 16-18yr old boy that lives in Milwaukie, Oregon?""

What is some cheap health insurance?

What is some cheap health insurance?

How do you get health insurance for under $500 a month?

My health insurance premium costs $500 a month. What options do I have for a cheaper plan? Would I have to avoid going to the doctor for many years to get affordable health insurance ? What is the secret?

Do car insurance companies know if I currently have insurance?

So my insurance lapse a couple months ago without me knowing it (stupid auto pay) and now currently looking at other insurance companies, but my question is would they know if my insurance through another company lapse at all? If not, then I'll just say I'm still with them and get the cheaper rate like I was getting.""

Does full coverage motorcycle insurance cover other riders on my bike if they have an accident?

Does full coverage motorcycle insurance cover other riders on my bike if they have an accident?

How much does insurance on a Chinese moped cost?

I'm female, 22, 3 years car no claim bonus.. I was thinking about the Piaggio Zip 50 for 1000 but I'm now v. tempted and seriously considering buying a Guoben LB50QT-21 for 500. I've heard people have had problems with these bikes but I am buying it from an actual bike shop not just ebay. Does anyone know how much insurance I would pay on the cheap bike? Is it likely to be a lot more than a branded bike? Thank you!""

Will insurance cover a new transmission or total my car?

My dad's 2001 Toyota 4Runner recently broke down and the mechanic said it was b/c water got into the transmission and that we would need a new one. We talked to Geico and they said they would cover the transmission cost plus the cost of some converter thing (both got damaged b/c of weather). But now Geico is saying that if the price goes over $1000 they're just going to total the car. The mechanic said it'll be around $5000 and the adjuster hasn't seen the car yet (he'll try today or on Monday), so do you guys think that Geico will definitely total the car? When we first talked to them they said they would cover everything and I'm guessing they know the cost of a new transmission, so I don't understand why they won't cover it anymore.""

MY FRIEND CAR INSURANCE?

I WANT TO KNOW WHY STATE FARM CANCEL PEOPLE INSURANCE MY FRIEND HAS HAD 2 WRECK AND THEY PAY INSURANCE TWICE A YEAR THEY SAY AFTER YOU HAD MORE THEN ONE WRECK NO MATTER HOW LONG YOU BEEN WITH THEM THEY CANCEL AND ALSO ALLSTATE HAS A FORGIVENESS THEY NEVER CANCEL YOU

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-get-cheap-car-insurance-jimmy-blair"