#Like we need to establish that this series follows historical details in some areas and then takes batshit crazy liberties in others

[setaflow]

People in the comments of the Assassin's Creed: Shadows trailer becoming armchair historians trying to explain why Yasuke shouldn't be a protagonist actually are hilarious. Like besties this is a franchise where people can control eagles with their minds and a good 5% of the population are descended from evil psychic aliens. I THINK we can expand on a story of Japan's only-recorded African koshō without it jumping the shark.

[vapehk1]

2025 E-Cigarette Market Insights from Vape Vision: Navigating a Year of Transformation

The e-cigarette industry stands at a crossroads as we approach 2025, with heightened competition and a rapidly evolving landscape. The insights gained from the first half of 2024 point to a year of significant changes, offering a glimpse into the future of this dynamic market. In this article, we’ll explore the key trends that are poised to shape the e-cigarette industry in 2025, providing a detailed analysis of what to expect. Expanding Product Lines Across the E-Cigarette Industry As the market for e-cigarettes matures, leading brands are no longer content with sticking to their established product categories. In an effort to capture a larger market share, companies like Geek Vape and Lost Vape are branching out into new areas. Historically focused on specific segments such as pod systems and box mods, these brands are now diversifying their offerings. Geek Vape, known for its strong presence in the pod system market, is actively expanding into new product categories to broaden its appeal. Lost Vape made waves in 2023 by launching the Orion Bar, a series of disposable e-cigarettes that quickly gained traction. This move toward diversification is a strategic response to the challenges posed by the global economic environment, enabling brands to explore new opportunities and reduce risks. Similarly, Elf Bar, a dominant player in the disposable e-cigarette market, has entered the refillable pod system segment with products like ELFX PRO and ELFX. While competition in these new markets is intense, the potential for growth is significant for brands that can successfully navigate this transition. Market Consolidation and the Integration of Supply Chains One of the most notable trends in 2025 is the continued push toward market consolidation and supply chain integration within the e-cigarette industry. Major brands are increasingly looking to control the entire production process, from manufacturing devices to producing e-liquids. This vertical integration aims to create a more cohesive and attractive product ecosystem for consumers. For instance, Vaporesso’s entry into the e-liquid market with its “Deliciu Juice” brand in early 2024 marked a significant shift. Elf Bar followed suit, launching its e-liquid brand “ELF LIQ” in the UK. Elux, another leading brand, has also leveraged its extensive distribution network to enter the e-liquid market. By offering both hardware and consumables, these companies are creating more integrated experiences for their customers. While this trend promises improved compatibility and convenience for consumers, it also poses challenges for independent e-liquid manufacturers, who may find it increasingly difficult to compete with these vertically integrated giants. As a result, the e-cigarette market is likely to see further consolidation, with a few dominant players gaining even more influence. The Evolution of Smart E-Cigarettes The development of smart e-cigarettes gained significant momentum in 2024, a trend that is expected to accelerate in 2025. These devices are becoming more advanced, featuring larger displays, enhanced functionality, and innovative features like cameras, Bluetooth connectivity, GPS, communication capabilities, and even puff animations. This push toward “smart” devices is driven by the desire to offer a more interactive and personalized vaping experience. Manufacturers are using these features to differentiate their products in a crowded market and attract tech-savvy consumers. However, the success of smart e-cigarettes will depend on their ability to balance innovation with usability. While some consumers may appreciate the added functionality, others may find it unnecessary or cumbersome, especially in disposable devices where simplicity is often a key selling point. As the industry continues to explore the potential of smart technology, manufacturers will need to focus on practical, user-centered features that enhance the overall vaping experience without overwhelming the consumer. Embracing Environmental Responsibility and Sustainability Sustainability is increasingly becoming a central focus in the e-cigarette industry, a trend that will continue to grow throughout 2025. As global awareness of environmental issues rises, consumers are demanding more eco-friendly products, leading to a shift in industry practices. In 2024, a new disposable e-cigarette brand gained attention for its commitment to environmental sustainability, with 98% of its components made from eco-friendly materials. This aligns with a broader consumer shift toward products that reflect their environmental values. As we move into 2025, sustainability will play an even more critical role, especially in regions like Europe, where strict environmental regulations are driving innovation. Brands that successfully integrate sustainable practices and materials into their product development will gain a competitive edge in the market. However, this also presents a challenge for those who lag in adopting these practices. Key Trends to Watch in 2025 As we look ahead, several key trends are expected to define the e-cigarette market in 2025: - Sustainability: The push for environmentally friendly products will gain further momentum, with a strong focus on sustainable materials and practices. Brands prioritizing sustainability are likely to see increased consumer demand, particularly in markets with stringent environmental regulations. - Vertical Integration: The trend toward market consolidation and supply chain integration will intensify, with major brands seeking to control both device manufacturing and e-liquid production. This will create a more seamless and integrated experience for consumers, though it may also heighten competition among brands. - Smart Features: The rise of smart e-cigarettes will continue, with devices becoming increasingly sophisticated. Success in this area will depend on balancing innovation with practicality, offering features that genuinely enhance the user experience. - Localization: As global markets become more competitive, brands will need to focus on local marketing strategies and channel penetration. Understanding and catering to local consumer preferences will be crucial for success. - Practical Functionality: In addition to smart features, there will be a greater emphasis on practical functionality. E-cigarettes that offer user-centered, practical features will be well-positioned to succeed, while those that prioritize gimmicks over practicality may struggle. Conclusion As we approach 2025, the e-cigarette industry is on the cusp of significant transformation. Brands must adapt to the evolving landscape to stay competitive, whether through product diversification, supply chain integration, smart technology adoption, or a commitment to sustainability. At Vape Vision, we are closely monitoring these trends to provide insights that help industry stakeholders navigate the challenges and opportunities ahead. Those who can effectively leverage these trends will be well-positioned to thrive in the dynamic e-cigarette market. News Source: https://vapevision.org/2025-e-cigarette-market-insights-emerging-trends-and-predictions/ Read the full article

[doshmanziari]

Architectural Criticism in 2021/2022 || Part 1.5

Before writing a fuller continuation of my previous essay on architectural criticism, I’m inserting a mini-essay that focuses on a particular piece of criticism. Let me be clear: I don’t see Kate Wagner, the person behind @mcmansionhell, as an enemy; I’m just using one of her articles as an example because I had, in my essay, already linked two articles of hers (more accurately, one article and an image from another), and I’d rather elaborate on what I mean when I write “...a vapid buildup to a politically convenient takeaway” than bring in an entirely different item. Wagner, in my view, represents a sort of destabilizing criticism that takes pleasure in tackling “dry” subject matter with breathless, Meme-heavy sarcasm. I find the tone off-putting, but I appreciate it as one attempt to invigorate and broaden the audiences of architectural appraisal. My issue is that by now the joke has overestimated its capacity for judgmental clarity. Really anything can be made fun of if you’re determined enough, and the more of an unquestioning audience you have the easier it is to believe everything you say is true or coherent.

The image was from this 2018 Vox article: “Betsy DeVos’ summer home deserves a special place in McMansion Hell” (a title likely devised by the editor; given the other residences Wagner has lambasted, I would be surprised if she truly believes this is among the worst). My observations won’t make sense unless anyone who is reading this reads her article as well, so please do that if you’d like to follow along. It should take only a couple of minutes.

What I’d first draw readers’ attention to is that Wagner spends the first four paragraphs on the United States’ beyond-vast inequality of wealth. Two of these paragraphs are the article’s largest, and the article is twelve-paragraphs-long, meaning that 1/3 of it is devoted to establishing a socio-economic context -- at least, that is the pretense. Once Wagner writes “...getting paid to make fun of DeVos’s tacky seaside decor is one of few ways to both feed myself and make myself feel better”, it is clear that her personal intent is a kind of vengeful mocking, and that her intent for readers is to prime them to associatively, knee-jerkingly despise anything which could come next with flat-affect “lmao”s. It’s hardly irrelevant to mention economic realities when examining luxury items (and what else is a mansion?), but Wagner’s subsequent analysis is not really architectural or even artistic: it is rather about looking at several photographs of a building, knowing who lives there and hating that person (and also imagining that they were responsible for all design decisions), and then mocking this-and-that in whatever ways one can devise. These grievances are understandable, but understandable grievances do not automatically lead to perceptive criticism.

Please look (perhaps again) at the first image. Note that only four, maybe, of the fourteen details Wagner chooses to focus on -- “no wry comment needed”, “these look like playdoh stamps”, “when you love consistency”, and “oh my god is this a shutter” -- approach anything vaguely resembling coherent criticism; and the other four images fare even worse (with the exception of the highlighting of an apparently absurd interior balcony). The rest are inane attempts at saying anything at all. Writing “hell portal” by an upper porch area may be funny for a moment, but what does it actually express? Well, nothing, except the author’s own irritation which will find whatever it can to announce its contemptuous sarcasm. Wagner’s captions will land only to the degree that the reader is humorously sympathetic.

The aforementioned remarks, excepting the one about the embedded chubby Tuscan columns’ Play-Doh-likeness, suggest that the worst thing a building can do is be formally heterogeneous. The implicative corollary here is that good architecture is eminently justifiable in all of its parts -- consistent, unified, rational. This is as fine a personal belief as anything else, but when it is wielded as dogma against architecture which has no interest in being a Petit Trianon it can only reveal its intellectual self-limitations. Wagner writes that “there is a difference between architectural complexity and a mess”, yet what that difference may be is hand-waved away. We just have to believe that thirteen different windows styles is too much. What’s the threshold? Does it depend on the size of the building? The types of styles used? Who knows.

Now of course bad architecture exists, and sometimes the failure indeed points to deficient editorial acumen; for architecture, like any other art, is as much about what’s included as what’s excluded. But in saying so little about the shingle style itself, Wagner seems to have given no thought to readers concluding that all shingle style houses are freakish -- more specifically, concluding that this freakishness is a damning transgression, and that no self-respecting, punching-up class-warrior would ever be caught dead sincerely enjoying their geometric, “exquisite corpse” escapades. In fact, the freakish tendencies of shingle style houses are just what make them such great fun to see, visit, or reside in. Wagner’s article, as far as I can tell, omits this possibility. When she writes, “Betsy likely went with this style because it is very popular in New England and in coastal enclaves of the rich and famous in general”, one is being pushed to presume that the only probable reason the shingle style exists or could be preferred over another style is to signal élite solidarity.

The photograph right above is of Kragsyde, a Massachusetts shingle style mansion, designed by the US-Northeast-oriented firm of Peabody & Stearns, completed in the 1880s. It was demolished almost a century ago, but the few exterior images of it which remain are, I think, fascinating -- maybe most of all for its enormous archway, possibly a porte-cochère, which has a thin, overextending keystone bizarrely driven into the top like a nail puncturing a petrified rainbow. I bring the building up because Wagner gives us no reason to consider why Kragsyde may have been a genuine architectonic accomplishment and not merely an oversized farce of contiguous pretensions. To the layperson hot off of the Vox piece, there may be no artistic difference between it and DeVos’ place, except that perhaps Kragsyde has a more consistent fenestrative application (would that make it better? if so, why?).

I appreciate that only so much can be said when you’re limited to less than a thousand words, especially when the issue is “complicated” (as the byline for Vox’s First-person series advertises). But the problem I keep coming back to is how DeVos’ mansion is treated as a stand-in for DeVos herself. This makes any architectural critique, no matter how pressed it is for size, flimsily presentist: its durability starts and ends with how alive the architecture’s resident(s) and political presence are. On some emotional level, this is pretty sensible: if we despise monarchical institution, we can find a sort of loophole to enjoying Versailles palace on the basis of it no longer being the residence of royalty. Our awe over its decadence and scope is intersectionally “admissible” on the basis of its having become a UNESCO World Heritage site. Similarly, one can imagine DeVos’ mansion being appreciated in a hundred years (should it still exist then) because the passage of time will have rendered DeVos’ person a historical fact, and perhaps more separable, and then tolerable, in that regard -- even if the building remains private.

But if architecture is, as a craft, critically whittled down to nothing more or less than inorganic expressions of social disparities, with every aesthetic decision a reflection of politically explicable taste, then we must assume that a great deal of the world’s most remarkable architecture is equally ridiculous and despicable, since so much of it was born out of great privilege and required specialized resources. I doubt Wagner actually believes this, because it would betray the entire premise of her McMansion Hell project, which is to demonstrate how so many modern day mansions are deeply unpleasant mounds of visual illiteracy, and cannot hold even a stump of a candle to the luminously learned and eclectic talents of prior great architects such as Mackintosh, Norman Shaw, Lutyens, or Ledoux. So what’s the takeaway here? As far as I can tell, it’s simply that if you hate Betsy DeVos, and if you care about class, you should hate her house too. And I do not think that that is architectural criticism.

[razieltwelve]

By the time of Final Effect, is there a law stating "If a Dia-Farron says 'I can neither confirm nor deny', it means that they are guilty" ?

It's basically Dia-Farron speak for 'you can't prove it was me and we both know it'.

The standard response to this is to unleash Farron-level of tyranny.

Amusingly enough, Vanille I (so far the only half Dia-Farron empress) was more than capable of blaming things on her hamster... so that she could then pardon him for his crimes using her powers as empress. It was the perfect plan, and they came up with it together after realising they could rules-lawyer their way out of any problem using that strategy. The hamster accepting blame is key because the emperor/empress cannot technically pardon themselves (that clause dates back to Arendelle when a less benevolent monarch decided to render themselves immune to the law by pardoning themselves for every crime they committed). However, they can pardon other people.

Basically:

She didn't do it, so she can't be held responsible.

The hamster did it, so he should be held responsible.

She is the empress, so she can pardon the hamster.

Rinse and repeat as needed.

This would later lead to her successor passing a law limiting how frequently someone could receive a pardon, as well as setting a limit on the maximum number of pardons that someone could receive.

It's been dubbed the 'hamster loop' since it involves looping the same steps over and over again to do whatever you want. It became common parlance for exploiting the rules/laws of a system to get the desired outcome.

Imperial Law is actually a fascinating subject since it draws influences from many places. For instance, Arendelle had its own legal tradition, but so did the Four Great Kingdoms, as well as each of the clans. The resulting legal framework is both highly flexible but also incredibly complex in certain areas.

The foundation of Imperial Standard Law by Emperor Claw II was a pivotal moment in the Empire's history since it represented a gigantic leap forward in integrating the various legal frameworks into one framework that could be widely and easily understood by the average Imperial citizen. It was said that Claw II did this because he was a legal scholar who had served as a prosecutor, defender, and a judge at various points of his life. As a result, he was well aware of the need for reform.

The Empire's legal code has largely followed the framework he set ever since, which is a testament to how good a job he did of it. To the dismay of legal scholars, he is often less revered than his more martially inclined kin. However, portraits of him are typically found in places of honour in courts and other buildings where the law is a subject of interest. Likewise, statues of him are found in every law school in the Empire, and he is widely considered the most important and influential jurist in galactic history.

Some of the most widely cited and read texts legal texts in the galaxy include his correspondence with Winter Schnee (I've simplified her name here due to how long it would be), who was one of the finest legal minds in the Alliance's history. The pair did not always agree, but their correspondence is required reading for anyone with an interest in law due to the detail and cogency of the arguments put forward regarding a range of different topics and positions. Indeed, the pair were such close friends that he was the one who gave the eulogy at Winter's funeral. It is generally believed that the reason the Alliance and Empire have fairly similar legal systems is due to the exchange of thoughts and ideas between these two.

Claw II also clarified and detailed what has come to be called Adamantine Law. Adamantine Law is essentially the set of laws and concepts that are considered foundational to the Empire's legal system and thus basically impossible to change.

The most commonly cited section of Adamantine Law is the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which clearly enumerates both the rights and responsibilities of Imperial citizens. Another document of immense importance is the document which outlines the way trials ought to be conducted and the standards of evidence required for conviction, etc. It is called Achieving a Just Verdict.

One of the reasons Claw II's reign is often overlooked by non-legally-inclined historians is how peaceful it was. His reign was relatively free of large-scale Grimm incursions or internal strife, which allowed him to turn his considerable intellect to legal matters. Moreover, the system he devised became a victim of its own success. Nobody really thinks about the legal system much anymore because it works really well. It's kind of like trains. Nobody notices if the trains run on time, but you better believe people will notice if they're running late.

As an old man, Claw II was asked about this. At that point he had long-since retired allowing his successor to take over, but he spent his retirement further contemplating legal issues and writing extensively on judicial matters. His response has since become legendary amongst members of the legal profession.

"If I can leave behind a legal system so fair and just that nobody feels the need to complain about it, then I'm more than happy to become a historical footnote. Like a good emperor, a good set of laws, ought to protect and serve the people rather than the other way around."

As an aside, Claw II has experienced rising popularity during Averia VII's reign. This largely stems from a series of articles that Averia VII has written regarding her predecessors and how she views their achievements and legacies.

She rates Claw II extremely highly as a ruler. Indeed, she rates him as arguably the third most influential due to the importance of the legal framework he established. Her spirited defence of his importance did wonders for his popularity.

[150289city]

ILLUSION - SURREALISM

Analyse creative manipulation images.

1. Zdzislaw Beksinski

The canvas, known as "Creeping Death", evokes a lot of emotions and remains relevant all the time. The leitmotif is death, which creeps silently like a spider. This is how he appeared in the eyes of the painter - death comes unexpectedly and destroys everything on its way.

Beksiński's paintings were about loneliness and the inevitability of death. The painter also often presented a vision of Armageddon. This is also the case of "Creeping Death". The end of the world appears in dark, brown and bloody colors. And death takes its toll and disappears unnoticed from the battlefield. The city burning in the background means that death has won again. Nobody survived. Death can take many shapes, it can resemble a human, an animal or a spider. In the painting by Zdzisław Beksiński, he is a terrifying creature that leaves the ruined area on its cramped limbs. Instead of the face, you can see a bandage through which a blood stain pierces. Instead of a torso, there is a hairy abdomen, similar to that of deadly spiders, and they will always flee from impending danger. Just like death, which also has time to hide from fire.

Beksiński's painting is one of the most terrifying contemporary works of Polish painting. Suffering, anger and resignation permeate them. The artist knows that he is unable to change his fate. He only has pain and the awareness that death will come for him. "Creeping Death" can be a universal picture, presenting the world after war, apocalypse or catastrophe. They can also be the darkest thoughts of every human being that circulate through the mind looking for an outlet. Because everyone is struggling with their own demons, which may appear completely different. It is certain that they cause fear, but they are essential in the fight against the suffering that is part of human life.

2. SALVADOR DALI

There are four clocks in the picture. One hangs from a dry tree, the other, with a blue shield and golden edging, flows down from a brown plinth. There is a fly on it, which can symbolize the "flying" and passing time. The orange watch lying next to it seems to be less soft and melting than the others. Ants crawled over him. The orange clock looks like it's about to be eaten by insects. Ants are here a symbol of rotting, decay. The fourth clock is in the center of the painting. It flows down from a deformed, beige-colored form. Only after looking closely you can see something like a nose, eyelid, long eyelashes. The distorted form resembles skin pulled from the face. According to some, it is a self-portrait of Salvador himself.

"Soft clocks" is nothing but a delicate, extravagant and lonely, paranoid-critical camembert of time and space.’’ Salvador Dali

Persistence of memory is perhaps one of the artist's most recognizable works. It was established in 1931. The idea was born when Dali, eating a melting French Camembert cheese, saw clock faces in it.

Dali created works that were supposed to amaze or shock. He did not represent anything directly, but through a vision. Therefore, he is included in the group of surrealists. Obraz Persistence of memory is a dream about time deformed by memories and dreams. Gala - Dali's muse and wife - said about this painting that the viewer's memory would only be the "softness" of the watches, because anyone who saw this work at least once would never forget it. The rocks of Cape Creus are an element of the landscape that appears in many of Dali's works. They have become an example of "hard" forms. The artist, who has a well-prepared drawing and knows the perspective, creates in a surprising way. An example is theoretically correctly painted clocks, but why is one of them hung over a branch, and the other running off the counter? It was this astonishment that the artist wanted to combine various objects in any way. The elements of the painting are arranged on the canvas in such a way that we have the impression of a large space and emptiness. Thanks to vivid imagination, all details have been divided into soft and hard. Clocks are among the soft ones.

3.  RENÉ MAGRITTE

With my popular sympathy for the Belgian painter René Magritte, I have allowed myself to be introduced to you by opening the whole series "Art for Tuesday" with his "Lovers". Together with the blog returning to the expanses of the Internet, let Magritte be the patron of the reactivation of this cycle, this time with her "Son of Man".

The very title "Son of Man" (French: "Le fils de l'homme") is a bit puzzling when confronted with this picture presents itself.

After all, we see an elegant man in a suit and a bowler hat against the background of the wall separating him from the sea, above him there are clouds that announce a storm or storm. And what is very important - it is a self-portrait.

Oh yes, I would ... Before the face of forgotten people (levitating?) A green apple that makes his face invisible, revealing part of the eye and eyebrow in fact. We have to remind ourselves that the Belgian was definitely a surrealist who grew out of the impressionist school. However, he used his symbolic linguistic voice, which was shaped by such tragic experiences as the mother's suicide - hence the motive of the shroud. The motif of a veiled face, or the lack of it, is constantly present in Magritte's painting. Maybe it allows you to stay safe? For both the "covered" and those looking at him? Or maybe these masks and covers allow for proper perception of things (I refer to the author's painting "Rape")?

As for the "Son of Man", a stretched (as always), original interpretation appeared in my head.

The apple ripens with its apple tree represented by the man. He is well dressed, which can mean high social status. Or maybe an apple covering a man's face makes him anonymous? is it just a tree from which society grows? And when he dies, will someone eat the forbidden fruit that he has grown, and will continue this process? Another "Son of Man" ..?

4. Max Ernst

"Day and Night" is a work that Max Ernst painted in the years 1941-1942. It presents a gloomy rocky landscape in dark colors. The image of the night is dominant here - the dark blue sky and the outlines of boulders. On the dark background, however, there are traces of the day, resembling daytime photographs of the same space. In these pictures these places appear completely different - they are sunny and full of bright colors. They do not resemble a barren night landscape.

Ernst's work follows surrealist poetics. Its meaning becomes understandable above all in the historical context in which it was created. It is about the tragedy of World War II, which left its mark on the artist's own biography. He miraculously managed to escape from the hands of the Gestapo and emigrate from France to the United States.

The night landscape is a barren land devoid of color and optimism. One gets the impression that we are dealing with a world completely destroyed by some cataclysm. His memories are only optimistic photographs from the past, which show the old face of the landscape. These optimistic incrustations in combination with the dominant gray and sterility not only do not cheer up the whole, but make it even more repulsive. We are dealing here with a world that will never return to its former glory.

The colorful pictures bring to mind illustrations from children's books. Thus, the artist refers to the myth of childhood as a lost paradise. Children's dreams are triggered here, in which reality seems to be a magical and wonderful being. At the same time, the juxtaposition of colored fragments with a gloomy background is also associated with the biblical Eden, where innocence and beauty are destroyed by sin and evil.

You can also understand "Night and Day" as a kind of puzzle. The picture resembles a puzzle that needs to be matched in an appropriate way so that they form a whole together. In this sense, one should see in Ernst's work traces of hope for rebuilding what was destroyed during the war. It is, in a way, a proposal to organize the world once again so that it becomes a place where a person feels safe again.

5. Pablo Picasso

"Guernica" is a famous painting by Pablo Picasso, painted in 1937 in reaction to the Spanish Civil War. The work is an act of protest against violence and at the same time a great manifestation of pacifism.

The title of the painting comes from the name of a Spanish city bombed by the German Luftwaffe air force in response to resistance to General Franco's group.

"Guernica" shows deformed human and animal figures, forming a chaotic swirl. You can see the bodies in pieces, especially the heads and limbs. The severed hands tighten tightly on the objects they hold: a candle or a sword. The mouths of the characters are usually open in a silent scream, and terror is visible in their eyes. People seem to squirm in deathly groans. Human figures blend with animals.

The whole thing looks like a huge, dynamic swirl. The depressing impression is deepened by the colors of the painting, in shades of black and gray. The central part of the painting is lit by a light bulb in the upper edge of the work. It seems that the situation depicted in the picture takes place in a narrow room, intensifying the impression of being surrounded and threatened.

The painting was painted in cubist aesthetics, which in the case of such a dramatic topic emphasizes the cruelty and tragedy of war. The fragmentation of the solid is here not only an act of artistic deformation, but also emphasizes the essence of any armed conflict, which is the total destruction of the world.

The war appears on Picasso's canvas as unbridled chaos and suffering. People dehumanize, they are reduced to the level of terrified animals, driven by the survival instinct. Human remains are clearly deformed, they resemble meat. Human and animal bodies are fragmented as if after a bomb had exploded.

The symbol of destruction is the Spanish bull emerging from the gloom, which covers the unfolding events with an unshakable gaze. Broken hands clutch at useless objects, among which stand out a candle and a broken sword. The former may symbolize the desire to illuminate the escape route, but it is also a sign of mourning for those who died. A broken sword and a torn horse indicate the uselessness of conventional weapons in a modern war that brings mass death and destruction.

Picasso's painting exudes an atmosphere of fear and terror, the image of a mother lamenting over a child's corpse is particularly poignant. The claustrophobic narrowness of the room in which the characters find themselves emphasizes the non-exit character of their situation.

[kaibacxrps]

Name / Alias: Vani Are you over 18?   Yes  / No Is your muse(s) over 18?    Yes /  No  / Verse Dependent / Depends on the muse you’re asking Kaiba & Set = yes | Atem = no When was your blog established? Kaibacxrps: May 2020 (the og sideblog) moved him to here on Jun 2020 // Quebracabeca: Sept 2020

– W R I T I N G  –

Are you selective about who you write with?

No (anyone)  /  Semi (most people) / Yes (some people) / Highly (few people) / Private (mutuals only).

Are you selective about who you follow?

No (anyone) / Semi (most people) /  Yes (some people) /  Highly (few people).

If your muse is canon, how much do you adhere to canon?

Not at all  / A little  / Some / Mostly /  Strictly / Not Applicable. (I try to expand on the areas that were left vague, or the serie didn’t get into.)

What post lengths do you write?

One-Liners  / Single-Para / Multi-Para /  Novella / All of the aforementioned. (one-liners are only for cracks/dash shenanigans)

Do you use icons and/or GIFS?

No  /  Gifs / Icons /  Yes / Sometimes.

Do you write on other platforms?

No / Yes (discord)

What level of plots do you write?

Unplotted /  Open-Ended Plots  /  Semi-Plotted /  Fully Plotted Epics / All of the aforementioned (I have a preference for plotted stuff. Knowing the course of events and my partner’s muse makes things a lot easier for me.)

How quickly do you usually respond to threads?

Very Slow (more than a month) / Slow (3-4 weeks) / Average (1-2 weeks)  / Fast (less than one week) /  Very Fast (less than three days)  (It depends on the kind of thread & the size of it TBH)

What types of themes do you like?

Adventure  / Romance / Fluff / ANGST / Violence (I won’t write gore in great detail) /  Tragedy / Domestic / Family

WHAT GENRES DO YOU LIKE? ( Feel free to add! )

High Fantasy / Supernatural / Science Fiction / Historical / Horror /  Comedy / Romantic / Drama / Action / Smut / Adventure /  Espionage / All of the aforementioned

Are there any themes you’re uncomfortable writing on your blog? (Not triggers)

No  / Yes /  Sometimes

Very descriptive gore can leave me feeling ill. I’m not against delving into taboo territory, but I feel like somethings are best left outside of tumblr and should be kept in discord- privately. I only do them with people I trust on, because I don’t want to romanticize anything.

Do you have any triggers? How do you request it tagged?

I have no triggers! But I ask for my mutuals to tag anything related to politics/IRL stuff, I’m not here for those things. Sorry, not sorry.

I also have some ships filtered/blacklisted, because I have 0 interest in seeing them on my dash. (They are: Puppy/violetshipping & corruptshipping).

– S H I P P I N G –

What types of relationships are you open to?

Romantic /  Platonic  /  Familial / All of the aforementioned

I’m open to anything really, however be aware that most of them just really aren’t made for certain things. I’m even more picky/selective when it comes to my Atem.

What types of pre-established relationships are you open to?

Romantic  /  Platonic /  Familial / All of the aforementioned

Again, I’m game to anything with my muses. But we need to come up with something that works for our muses, and doesn’t feel forced.

Do you have OTPs?

No /  Chemistry Only / Yes

Kaiba: Rival / Money / Master / Pride Set: Headdress / Truth / Mizu / Historychannel (Rosenkreuz/Set) Atem: Scandal / Pride

Do you have NOTPS?

No / Yes

Kaiba: Tabloid / Mirror / Puppy or Violet Set: Corrupt Atem: Caste / Dark / Fragile (just don’t put Atem with any of the Bakuras, thanks.)

What is your muse’s sexual orientation?

Heterosexual /  Heteroflexible  / Bisexual / Pansexual /  Homoflexible  / Homosexual / Demisexual /  Sapiosexual /  Asexual / Still trying to figure it out / Depends on the muse you’re asking

Kaiba is homosexual

Atem and Set are bisexuals

What is your muse’s romantic orientation?

Heteroromantic /  Heteroflexible  / Biromantic /  Homoflexible  /  Homoromantic   / Panromantic / Demiromantic /  Sapioromantic  / Aromantic / Still trying to figure it out / Depends on the muse you’re asking

Kaiba is unable to fall in love with/develop any bonds with anyone due to his upbringing, because of that he can’t be considered aromantic.

Atem and Set are biromantics.

Are you comfortable writing smut?

No  / Selectively / Yes

Kaiba and Set are completely open to it, I’ve got an entire smut blog just for that! Atem however, I’m keeping smut only for the people I ship him with after extensive plotting/discussion has been made.

How early in a relationship do you ship romantically?

Autoship / During plotting  /  After a couple IC interactions / Several IC interactions / Slow burn / Plot dependent /  Never 

Are you open to toxic ships?

No / Selectively  / Yes  / I am not sure

And it won’t be sugar-coated or romanticized.

Are you open to problematic ships?

No /  Selectively / Yes / I am not sure

Depends on the ship. While for the most part I’m not opposed to delving into darker subjects, there are certain things where even I have to draw a line. This is especially important, considering how young the YGO cast really is. Yes, this especially includes Atem. Who by all means, is still technically in a way- a 16 years old.

Are you open to polyshipping?

No /  Selectively  / Yes / I am not sure

I personally have no problem with them, but most of my muses just aren’t open to something like this. Set is the only one I have, who might be into it.

Are you an exclusive shipper?

Never / Sometimes / Yes / I would be open to discuss it

Atem is the only exception to this, and even then that’s only from my end. For Kaiba and Set, I cap the limit of doubles from the same character by 3. No more than that, otherwise it just becomes overwhelming.

Does crack shipping ever happen?

Nope / Yes / depends / altho they normally become normal ships

[mediaevalmusereads]

The Black Hawk. By Joanna Bourne. New York: Berkley Sensation, 2011.

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

Genre: historical romance

Part of a Series? Yes, Spymasters #4

Summary: Someone is stalking French agent Justine DeCabrillac through London's gray streets. Under cover of the rain, the assassin strikes--and Justine staggers to the door of the one man who can save her.  The man she once loved.  The man she hated.  Adrian Hawkhurst. Adrian wanted the treacherous beauty known as "Owl" back in his bed, but not wounded and clinging to life. Now, as he helps her heal, the two must learn to trust each other to confront the hidden menace that's trying to kill them--and survive long enough to explore the passion simmering between them once again.

***Full review under the cut.***

Content Warnings: blood, violence, graphic sexual content, graphic sexual content involving teenagers, references to child prostitution and sexual assault

Overview: This book appeared on Bustle’s list of feminist romances, which has been hit or miss for me. On the one hand, the list gave me favorites like The Suffragette Scandal and The Raven Prince, but also duds like Not Quite A Husband. I decided to give this one a go, and despite the high rating it has on Goodreads, The Black Hawk just wasn’t for me. While I applaud Bourne for creating a spy story that goes against the grain of usual marriage plots, I ultimately didn’t think I, as a reader, was given enough motivation to care about the politics or the characters. Maybe it’s my fault for coming in at book 4 in the series, but still. I wanted so much more than what I got from this novel.

Writing: Personally, I found Bourne’s prose to be a little stilted. There were a lot of paragraphs where the sentences would be the same length, making some passages feel robotic, and Justine, in particular, spoke in ways that felt either archaic or overly formal. I also think Bourne had a problem of over-writing in some areas; characters would narrate what they were doing or going to do rather than Bourne showing us (”I am going to put the kettle on for you, and then you will shave” rather than something like “She put the kettle over the fire as he sharpened his razor”) and some scenes would get dragged down by unnecessary detail. As a result, I felt like the pace throughout the entire novel felt the same, and even when we get moments of sentence variance, it didn’t feel like form matched function.

I also think the structure of this book was a little strange. The narrative flashes backwards and forwards in time, and while I like it when books do this, I think authors need to be deliberate and show how the two (or more) timelines parallel or compliment one another. The Black Hawk seemed to not know why it was jumping through time; I thought at first that the first plot thread (Justine’s assassination attempt) was going to be a frame narrative, and somehow, the assassination would be linked to her past. Granted, we do get some of that, but I think overall, the time jumps weren’t deliberately placed. We got an intro where Justine seeks out Hawker and he treats her wounds, then we jump back in time and follow them as 13 year old spies for some 60 pages, then back to the present for 6 pages, then a different point in the past for 30, etc. I think I would have preferred a structure where the events happening in the present were made more significant by the plotline of the past. When Justine is laying in bed and recovering, for example, maybe Hawker could be worried about her dying and start thinking back to when and how they first met. When Justine starts to sicken from the poison, maybe there’s a scene from the past where they discover the Caches have been learning to make poison or something. In short, I wanted the past and present to comment on one another a bit more, and for the present to be more of a frame, rather than a plotline in itself.

Plot: The summary of this book makes it seem like the main plot will be about Justine and Hawker overcoming their tumultuous past and learning to love one another again. What we really get is a story with 3 main threads: 1.) the present day assassination plot, 2.) the discovery and rescue of the Caches in 1794, and 3.) thwarting a plot to kill Napoleon in 1802.

Personally, I found the present day plot to be a little underwhelming, which is why I wanted it to be the frame rather than the main draw. There wasn’t nearly enough angst to make the present day story feel suspenseful, and I ultimately didn’t feel like I was watching a mystery unfold because the motivations of the perpetrators were somewhat bland. I think if Bourne had put more work into the emotional turmoil and developing the relationship by navigating old wounds and lingering angst, the present day stuff would have felt more suspenseful.

The 1794 plot is mostly significant for establishing the concept of the Caches - children who are trained to essentially be sleeper agents for France. This plot is less significant to Justine and Hawker’s story than it for a side character, Pax, which meant that I didn’t feel like rescuing the children and thwarting the operation was personal for our main characters. Even though Justine claims to want to rescue them because they’re children, I never got the sense that she had unusually strong convictions - she (and Adrian) seemed to act only because it was the right thing to do. I think I would have liked to see more personal stakes in this plot, like if Justine herself was an escaped Cache. While Pax and Hawker’s friendship makes the stakes somewhat personal for Hawker, I feel like it doesn’t come to fruition until much later, so I would have liked to see more immediate concerns for Hawker as well (maybe he has a soft spot for children or something).

The 1802 plot was also similarly empty. Justine seemed to want to thwart the assassination attempt because she’s pro-Napoleon and pro-France, and Hawker wants to subvert the assassination because he doesn’t fancy England and France going to war again. While I can understand these nationalistic and political motivations, I never got the sense that Justine was spying because she loved France or felt like she owed her spy organization anything. Bourne seems to take for granted that the reader will care about saving Napoleon or preventing war, and personally, I didn’t really feel strongly about any of these potential consequences because the characters don’t seem to have complex feelings about them. I think this plot would have been more compelling if Justine had some event in her past that makes protecting France and France’s interests personal for her, or if she felt like she owed the Police Secrete for saving her from prostitution. The same would be true for Hawker; maybe a friend or family member died in the Napoleonic Wars and he has to balance the need for revenge with the desire to prevent more human suffering. The vague “I’m doing this for my country” felt rather empty and impersonal, and I think that prevented me from really getting into the story.

Characters: Justine, our heroine, is likeable in that she’s a competent spy. I liked that she never made any stupid decisions for the sake of the plot, and even when she was put in a position where she was helpless, it felt like a believable fault or limit to her abilities. I also really liked her devotion to her younger sister and her sense of pragmatism, even when her emotions told her to do something else.

Hawker, our hero, is also fun in that he’s a competent spy and master thief. I liked that he was ruthless without being cruel, and he wasn’t overly broody or belligerent.

I don’t really have anything to say about the two of them other than that because it my opinion, they didn’t really evolve that much. They were still likeable, they had some nice banter, and I think they were competent enough spies, but there wasn’t much in terms of a character arc. Justine seemed to have some trauma from her past as a child prostitute, but other than the first sex scene and the protectiveness she feels for her little sister, it didn’t really play a big role in her life.

Side characters were interesting in that they embodied archetypes that are useful to the plot. Pax, Hawker’s friend and fellow spy, is a great addition and a good source for a potential conflict of loyalties. Severine, Justine’s sister, gives the story a personal element while also providing a sweet familial relationship to counterbalance the darker elements. Antagonists like Leblanc and allies like Doyle were also complex and well-used, and I think Bourne did a good job showing how these espionage networks were made of different people with messy personal and political motivations.

However, I ultimately didn’t think the “main” present-day antagonists were all that interesting. Because we don’t spend a lot of time in the present (compared to the past), we don’t really get to explore their complex motivations for wanting to kill Justine and frame Hawker. I think if these characters had been integral to Justine and Hawker’s story in both 1794 and 1802, their crimes would have been more impactful, but as it stands, these antagonists felt like random background characters who have a shallow grudge.

Romance: Despite being about two rival spies, The Black Hawk did not contain nearly enough angst for my taste. Hawker and Justine are supposed to be on opposite sides of a political conflict, but they didn’t seem to clash much or be put in situations where they had to choose between their love and their loyalties. They were more reluctant allies than anything, with both of them working towards the same goal more often than not - their relationship only seemed to be taboo because Justine was French and Hawker was English.

I also didn’t quite buy that they had many hang-ups in the present-day, as they seemed to reunite after being apart for years and just get over their emotions without any real, honest reconciliation. The main barrier presented - that Justine had once tried to kill Hawker - was ultimately revealed to be an accident, so there really wasn’t anything to grapple with, emotionally.

Overall, the book feel less like a story about Justine and Hawker’s romantic relationship and more like a political/spy thriller. While I wouldn’t normally knock a book for trying to subvert or play with genre tropes and structure, I personally felt like Bourne was more interested in espionage than in character relationships. For me, that made the romance feel like an afterthought, and while I’m ok with books that are light on romance, I feel like character relationships should still be important, regardless of genre. In this book, there wasn’t really an arc to the relationship, and though I liked how well-matched Hawker and Justine were in terms of ability, I didn’t see how being together improved or enriched the emotional lives. It was difficult to see why they loved each other (rather than just having professional admiration or respect for one another), and in my opinion, not enough was done to show that their loyalties were in conflict.

I also was not a huge fan of the first major graphic sex scene, since it was between the two protagonists when they were 16 years old. I know there’s an argument to be made about how teenagers experience sexual desire and there’s a way to handle teen sexuality with care, but ultimately, the sex scene in this book just made me uncomfortable.

TL;DR: While I appreciated that The Black Hawk doesn’t follow typical romance structure and focuses on spies, this book ultimately suffers from a plot with no personal stakes and a barely-there romance.

[paulisweeabootrash]

Series Review: Read or Die (R.O.D. the OVA)

Welcome to another episode of Paul is Weeaboo Trash! Today’s topic is a show I’ve previously seen one episode of, so long ago that I’m almost going in fresh: the OVA (what we in the US would call a “direct to video release”) of Read or Die (2001–2002)! I was lucky enough to grow up in a household where education and fun were not portrayed as opposites, and we had the means to find plenty of fun educational things to do.  My parents searched for all kinds of potentially interesting activities, and living in southern New Hampshire, the Boston area was not prohibitively far to go for them.  And so I was signed up for Splash, a program one weekend per fall in which MIT students teach middle- and high-school-age kids seminars on a wide variety of topics.

What counted as topics worthy of education was quite broad, however.  I ended up in a "class" that consisted of watching one episode each of several anime that the student running the class was a fan of.  This was back in the days where anime fandom spread person-to-person by recommendations and there was more emphasis on developing a background knowledge of "classics" among the more informed and/or snootier fans.  (I still feel this way a bit because certain tropes and references are so common or influential that being familiar with the original sources can make newer shows suddenly make a lot more sense, but I disapprove of the gatekeeper tendency to look down on people who don't yet know the things "everyone knows".)

I don't remember how many shows we sampled there, but the two that made an impact were Hellsing, which in retrospect was at best questionable for the age of the audience, and was very much not my thing because I have a low tolerance for gore, and the topic of this post, Read or Die, which was very much the kind of thing I wanted to see: a nerd being a badass in a fantastical way.  Especially since I was also really into James Bond at the time, so I was probably primed to eat up other media involving a British spy fighting a mysterious secret organization.  Since I'm incredibly averse to media piracy and had no clue where to buy anime, though, I never followed up to finish watching it, and eventually it faded from my mind.  Until I stumbled across the first volume of the manga for super-cheap at Saboten Con last year, and it flicked some nostalgia switch that reminded me how much I'd enjoyed it at the time, although I barely remember any actual details, so I am practically going in fresh here.

Read or Die follows Yomiko Readman, a teacher, obsessive book collector and reader, and superpowered secret agent who can manipulate paper in nearly any way.  Any paper available, from money to ribbons to a briefcase full of blank looseleaf she apparently just brings with her.  She uses this power in the course of her service as a secret agent, codename The Paper, working for the British Library?!  Along with Miss Deep, who can selectively phase shift, and Drake Anderson, a gruff and dismissive military type (and apparently potter in his cover job), she is assigned to a plan to save the world in a way that vaguely involves collecting books.  Saved from whom?  The I-jin, clones of historical geniuses with superpowers related to their areas of expertise, such as... knowing stuff about insects, or... uh... spreading Buddhism to Japan... who are going to flashy and violent lengths to steal books the British Library is trying to acquire legitimately.  Trust me, it eventually gets explained, and the Big Reveal, although pretty goddamn weird, fits in with the rest of what has been established.  Suspend your disbelief enough to accept the I-jin at all, and it’s fine, although still a bit ludicrous.

And I submit that all that is still less weird and ridiculous than your typical superhero or spy movie, and this show does after all have elements of both genres in one.  Or, well, more and more superhero and military action as it goes on.  Although the theme music uses 60s guitar sounds, chromatic chord changes, and blaring brass hits that are virtually guaranteed to evoke the James Bond theme, and our main cast do work for a secret intelligence agency, they are in quite open military-style conflict with the I-jin -- with the approval of the UN -- and very little that’s actually covert occurs, with the notable exception of something I can’t spoil that happens at the end of ep. 2.  And because of the superpower angle, some of the instances of weirdness are not flaws at all but pretty creative implementations of the characters’ powers (using a paper airplane as a lethal weapon?!).

This last point didn’t really fit in organically, but I'd also like to mention a couple of things about the art that I love but don't see often.  The very first shot of the series uses multiple flat backgrounds at different distances moving in relation to each other to convey the camera moving across the scene, which I have seen in other animated works (at the moment, I can only think of examples from very old Disney movies off the top of my head), but not in recent ones.  I don't know whether it's simply out-of-fashion or this is a result of the shift to CGI so animators figure "why would we do this when we can actually render a city with realistic perspective?"  This show also has a particular kind of fluid motion in characters that I’ve seen in many reasonably-high-production-value shows from the 90s and 00s, but rarely in newer shows (Space Dandy being a notable exception).  Maybe I'm watching the wrong recent shows, maybe it's just a stylistic choice that's out of fashion, maybe it's harder to pull off convincingly when you're not animating by hand.

I’m glad I finally got to watch this.  It’s even better than I remember.  Now to get to work on the rest of the manga and the other series.  Oh yeah, haha.  The abbreviation "R.O.D." stands for both "Read or Die" and "Read or Dream", which are different parts of the same larger series.  The Read or Die manga (4 volumes), this OVA series, the Read or Dream manga (also 4 volumes), and a 26-episode TV series all take place in the same narrative universe, rather than the usual model of the anime being an adaptation/retelling of the manga.  There is also a light novel series I know nothing about, but it sounds from the Wikipedia article like that is the single ongoing series that is the source for the two manga and two anime.  (There is also apparently a barely-related future side story manga.)

-----

W/A/S: 1/3/3

Weeb: I don’t think there’s much, if anything, in here that would require explanation to a typical Western audience and which isn’t also explained in the dialogue.

Ass: There is a single implied nipple in the opening sequence.  Gasp!  And Miss Deep's costume design is pretty fanservicey, but only barely more explicitly so than you're likely to get in American media deemed suitable for older children.

Shit: Until the Big Reveal, it's just unclear why anyone involved other than Yomiko should be this interested in acquiring the specific books that serve as the show’s MacGuffin, nor is it clear that the I-jin’s plans extend further than searching for them in a very destructive way, leaving me baffled that the Library immediately makes the connection that the books are key to saving the world.  There are a few minor errors in the subtitles and a visual glitch (Blu Ray remaster, please?), and a couple of places where faces just... don’t... look right.  Oh, and if you’re watching the dubbed version, add another half point of Shit for Crispin Freeman’s British accent.

And for the first time I feel the need to add a CONTENT WARNING.  Usually, I think the review is sufficient to give you the idea whether there is anything likely to be disturbing in a show, but this is different, because the first two episodes have the sort of over-the-top stylized combat you might expect from other action anime or Western superhero media, where even a death comes off as un-shocking.  But in ep. 3 of this, there is a shocking pivot.  There are several short instances of graphic and sudden violence of kinds that are quite a bit more disturbing and distressing (even when they involve the use of powers) than anything that occurred previously.

-----

Stray Observations:

- Yes, those of you who know a little Japanese caught that joke: "Yomiko" could be loosely translated as "read girl".  Her name is "Read Girl Read Man".  Because she likes to read.  Get it?  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!

- In the manga, Yomiko is also established to be a literal bibliophile.  As in "books, regardless of content, turn her on".  I'm kind of glad this is not a plot point in the anime.

- The “secret” operation in the last episode, which is conducted with UN approval and involves an actual military attack with an actual goddamn naval fleet (and collaborating with North Korea to keep the US too distracted to notice it, even though this is a British operation against an organization that literally burned down the White House in the first scene of the first episode) might actually beat the first few episodes of Full Metal Panic! for “worst undercover operation ever”.

[euroman1945-blog]

The Daily Thistle

The Daily Thistle – Archeological News From Scotland

Friday 20th July 2018

"Madainn Mhath” …Fellow Scot, I hope the day brings joy to you…. Friday, our chance to see what has been discovered this week in Scotland, or more to the point, what archeologists have released for us, mere mortals to read about…  I know I have spoken about it before, but let me explain again as several people have writain to me asking” Why does it take so long from discovery to publication?” the answers always the same, dating of the object, proving it really is a “Roman” “Viking” Pict” item, in some cases it takes years to prove the age, provenance etc., of an object… but enough of me, go read and enjoy… and the next time you are walking, take care of what you kick, it may be a Roman Pot…..

IRON-AGE WOODEN BOWL FOUND IN SCOTLAND…. SOUTH RONALDSAY, SCOTLAND—A 2,000-year-old wooden bowl has been found in a chamber accessed with a series of stone-cut steps beneath Cairns Broch, a round tower at an Iron-Age village site on South Ronaldsay, one of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, according to a report in The Independent. Researchers led by Martin Carruthers of the University of the Highlands and Islands think the bowl may have been placed there before the broch was sealed and abandoned. “In appearance, the bowl is similar in shape to certain of the pottery vessels of the period,” Carruthers said. The bowl’s round base suggests it may have been passed from person to person, similar to the way a traditional alcoholic drink is passed in a wooden vessel at weddings in Orkney today. The excavation of the chamber also uncovered what could be woven plant fibers, and two other wooden objects that look like pegs or stakes.

EXCAVATIONS AT NEWCRAIGHALL SHOW A LANDSCAPE OF CHANGE…. EDINBURGH-- Archaeological investigations coupled with historical research of Newcraighall on the south-east edge of Edinburgh reveal a complex story of land use changes from prehistory to the present day. Between 2011 and 2016, GUARD Archaeology teams led by Alan Hunter Blair undertook a series of surveys and excavations across land that had previously been part of the policies of Brunstane House and and Newhailes House. While the earliest activity encountered comprised groups of pits dating to the late Mesolithic/early Neolithic, late Neolithic and Bronze Age, the majority of features dated from the medieval and post-medieval periods through to modern times. These included various sized coal pits or shafts, and the foundations of four colliery buildings, arranged around a now infilled mineshaft on the southern site. Elements of a designed landscape associated with Brunstane House included a ha-ha that traversed the northern site. The presence of several large culverts may also have connections with both landscape alterations and the coal-mining industry. Fragments of curved and linear ditches appear to be remnants of earlier field systems dating from the medieval and post-medieval periods and associated with extensive remnants of broad rig cultivation found across the two areas.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS TO SEARCH FOR LOST JACOBITE ARMY CAMP NEAR STIRLING…. The first survey of a potential site for the Jacobite army camp shortly before the battles of Falkirk and Culloden is planned for this August. In January 1746, while pursuing the last siege of Stirling Castle, Bonnie Prince Charlie stayed at Bannockburn House, owned by local Jacobite supporters, and it is thought that some of his troops camped in the grounds. The House itself became forfeit following the defeat of the Jacobite army at Culloden later in 1746. The niece of the owner, Hugh Paterson, was the mother, Clementina, of the Prince’s only recognised child, Charlotte. For the first time an organised archaeological survey is planned, by the Community Trust that bought the 17th-century house and its grounds in late 2017.  Willie McEwan, vice-chair of Bannockburn House Trust, said: ‘We hope to establish the location of the camp and to find examples of both daily camp life such as cooking utensils and of the equipment men and horses would have used in battle.' Archaeologists from GUARD Archaeology Ltd will guide metal detectorists and diggers in carrying out the archaeological investigations. Volunteers are invited to come along and help with the archaeological survey of this site, which is adjacent to Bannockburn House. Details and how to apply for a place or to support the work can be found here and here and here. ‘This is a unique and exciting opportunity to try and resolve the mystery of where the Jacobite army camped in January 1746 before marching to the battles of Falkirk and Culloden,’ said John Atkinson of GUARD Archaeology Ltd. The last great Jacobite Rising, the ’45 is one of the key events in British history. It finally settled years of conflict and features both the last siege of Stirling Castle and the last battle on British soil (Culloden). It resulted in the banning of tartan and the suppression of Gaelic culture across Highland Scotland.

COMMUNITY ARCHAEOLOGY DIG UNCOVERS WHAT MAY BE THE REMAINS OF A PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN PREHISTORIC SETTLEMENT…. CAITHNESS-- Volunteers at a 'hands-on' archaeology dig organised by the Caithness Broch Project have uncovered remains which may turn out to be part of a previously unknown prehistoric settlement. More than 40 people attended the event organised by Caithness Broch Project and experienced ‘hands on archaeology’ in a series of trial trenches at Thusater Burn near Thurso in the north of Scotland. In fact, so many people turned up that an additional trench had to be opened. This trench was soon commandeered by the children of the volunteers who under supervision from the ORCA team started to develop their excavation skills at a pace! All three excavated trenches soon revealed archaeological features consistent with that anticipated by a previous geophysical survey conducted by the ORCA team several weeks ago. Rubble and stony deposits containing cultural material were encountered, although perhaps the most exciting structural find was a perfectly preserved hearth constructed of orthostats, a base slab and packing stones. Under the blazing sun, the team’s hard work was also rewarded by finding a hammer stone and possible striking stone used for starting fires and a wonderfully preserved pigs tooth. The latter find is usually associated with high status sites. The investigation raised the possibility of the mound containing prehistoric structural remains although more research is needed to confirm their extent and the actual period of occupation. The hearth, together with the finds point to domestic use – perhaps a ‘wag’ or, even more excitingly for the Caithness Broch Project, the remains of a broch.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS TO SEARCH FOR 'LOST' MONASTERY AT COLDINGHAM THIS SUMMER…. COLDINGHAM PRIORY, BERWICHSHIRE, A team of archaeologists are to begin searching for the ancient monastery established by King Oswald’s sister near Coldingham. Somewhere near the village of Coldingham in Berwickshire lie the remains of an ancient monastery founded by Princess Æbbe nearly 1,400 years ago. Its location has eluded archaeologists for decades, but now a team armed with new evidence is asking for help from the public to reignite the search. Oswald is perhaps best known as the King of Northumbria who returned from exile to reclaim the family throne and founded a small monastery on Lindisfarne in AD 635. Famous for being where the place where the Lindisfarne Gospels were created, and the first place in the British Isles to be targeted by the Vikings, the monastery is now one of England’s best known historic sites Meanwhile, the monastery at Coldingham founded by his sister Æbbe remains much less well known. Now separated by a border, they were once part of the same kingdom, and both were influential in the spread of early medieval Christianity. DigVentures archaeologist Brendon Wilkins explained the background to the dig, which will start later this month: 'Despite Coldingham’s significance, compared to Lindisfarne, much less is known about it. This project aims to change that and reveal Æbbe’s side of the story in Scotland.  'Although previous attempts to locate the remains of the original monastery based on historical sources have come up largely empty handed, we’re working with a new set of geophysics results that have revealed a number of possible Anglo-Saxon structures at a slightly different location. Now, we just need to excavate and see if it’s really there.' Historical sources indicate that Æbbe’s monastery burnt down soon after she died, was abandoned for a short while, rebuilt and continued to thrive until AD 870 when it was destroyed once and for all by a devastating Viking attack – just like Oswald’s Lindisfarne. The team ran a small trial excavation in November, and collaborated with the community to help decide where to dig during the upcoming excavation.

On that note I will say that I hope you have enjoyed the news from Scotland today,

Our look at Scotland today is a "Flying Scotsman" post from the 1930's a piece of archeological art.....

A Sincere Thank You for your company and Thank You for your likes and comments I love them and always try to reply, so please keep them coming, it's always good fun, As is my custom, I will go and get myself another mug of "Colombian" Coffee and wish you a safe Friday 20th July 2018 from my home on the southern coast of Spain, where the blue waters of the Alboran Sea washes the coast of Africa and Europe and the smell of the night blooming Jasmine and Honeysuckle fills the air…and a crazy old guy and his dog Bella go out for a walk at 4:00 am…on the streets of Estepona…

All good stuff....But remember it’s a dangerous world we live in

Be safe out there…

Robert McAngus #Scotland #Archeology #History #Edinburgh #Coffee #Bella

[thedatasciencehyderabad]

Data Science

As tools become simpler to make use of and the people who use them become more obtainable, the worth of Data Science will go down. Current infrastructures for developing big-data functions are able to course of –via big-data analytics- huge quantities of knowledge, utilizing clusters of machines that collaborate to perform parallel computations. However, present infrastructures were not designed to work with the requirements of time-critical applications; they're more targeted on general-purpose purposes than time-critical ones. Addressing this problem from the angle of the real-time methods group, this paper considers time-critical big-data.

The information in normal and defective conditions are simulated through the use of the DT model. Both the simulated knowledge and extracted historical knowledge are utilized to enhance fault prediction. A convolutional neural community for fault prediction might be trained with the generated data which matches the characteristic of the autoclave in defective conditions. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is verified via result analysis. To stand out as a prolific Data Scientist being well versed in machine studying is important. Knowing the methods like logistic regression, decision timber, and so on. can aid the method.

In summary, data science may be due to this fact described as an applied branch of statistics. A large number of fields and subjects, starting from everyday life to conventional analysis fields (i.e., geography and transportation, biology and chemistry, medicine and rehabilitation) involve big information problems. The popularizing of assorted forms of community has diversified varieties, issues, and solutions for large data more than ever before. In this paper, we review current analysis in data sorts, storage fashions, privacy, data security, evaluation methods, and applications associated with network massive information. Finally, we summarize the challenges and development of huge knowledge to foretell present and future tendencies.

Data scientists are responsible for breaking down huge amounts of knowledge into usable information and creating software programs and algorithms that help corporations and organizations decide optimum operations. As knowledge continues to have a serious impression on the world, Data Science does as well due to the close relationship between the two. During the 1990s, in style terms for the method of discovering patterns in datasets included "knowledge discovery" and "data mining". We examine “citizen” data scientists and debate between Jeffersonians, who search to empower on an everyday basis worker with Data Science tools, and Platonists who argue that democratizing data science results in anarchy and overfitting. In the present world, the technology and utility of knowledge is a crucial economic activity. Data Science facilitates it with its power to extract info from massive volumes of information.

It has robust scalability and excessive processing efficiency and has utility and reference value. Data Science is the essence of deriving valuable insights from information. It is emerging to satisfy the challenges of processing very large datasets, i.e. Big Data, with the explosion of new knowledge constantly generated from various channels, similar to good gadgets, net, mobile and social media. Data science is expounded to data mining, machine studying and large data. Digital enterprise is considered one of the necessary and priceless industries' names today and it is the mixture of enterprise and IT elements and its uses.

Rather than performing the info science themselves, they need to prepare and guide the users in changing into self-sufficient. Organizations can establish a formal training program for customers who wish to become citizen Data Scientist. At the tip, customers receive a certification that enables them entry to the tools. As they gain more experience and data they will in turn mentor different business customers. This paper presents a movie recommendation system in accordance with scores that the users present. In view of the film evaluation system, the impacts of entry management and multimedia safety are analyzed, and a secure hybrid cloud storage structure is offered.

It deals with the definition of a time-critical big-data system from the point of view of requirements, analyzing the particular characteristics of some in style big-data applications. This evaluation is complemented by the challenges stemming from the infrastructures that help the functions, proposing an architecture and providing initial performance patterns that join software costs with infrastructure performance. Cloud computing is actually a mechanism used for virtualization IT resources software programs and hardware availability. Cloud computing helps in using less computer hardware together with IT Infrastructure delivery.Use of minimal software with utilization of applications can also be essential features of Cloud Computing and Applications.

This leads us to understand how guidelines of linear algebra operate over arrays of knowledge. We aim to propose some solutions for digital pictures safety, primarily utilizing a probabilistic-randomness method; chaotic maps & chance. Data scientists use Python and R for information preparation and statistical analysis. [newline]Compared to R, Python is used for common objectives, more readable, easier, and offers more flexibility than learning. Moreover, Python is used in a number of verticals apart from Data Science and presents you various purposes. Data Science facilitates firms to leverage social media content to obtain real-time media content material utilization patterns. This permits the companies to create target audience-specific content, measure content performance, and recommend on-demand content material.

By this I imply that there are some critical points that end result from handing these tools to the uninitiated. Such individuals need to combine area data and adequate data science course in hyderabad , presumably with certification”. Innovative data intensive functions similar to health, power, cybersecurity, transport, food, soil and water, sources, advanced manufacturing, environmental Change, and so forth.

In 1974, Peter Naur mentioned the term ‘Data Science’ a number of times in his evaluation, Concise Survey of Computer Methods. In 1977, the International Association for Statistical Computing was shaped to link trendy computer technology, conventional statistical methodology, and domain experience to transform knowledge into data. In the same 12 months, Tukey composed a paper, Exploratory Data Analysis, that briefed the importance of using information. If you’re also planning to explore your Data Science career with EXL, these EXL Data Science interview questions will assist you to prepare higher.

The proposed Hierarchical Multiresolution Time Series Representation model makes use of a buffer-based approach that mixes one-pass stream processing with hierarchical aggregation to attain excessive processing speed without extreme hardware necessities. In addition, this paper presents a brand new representation primarily based on the proposed model, Hierarchical Multiresolution Linear-function-based Piecewise Statistical Approximation. The proposed representation considers fluctuations and continuity of modeled processes to be able to preserve fundamental characteristics of time series at lowered dimensionality. The case study outcomes for the generated data set verify that the proposed mannequin leads to greater and more stable processing speed at decreasing RAM consumption evaluating a related model, particularly when coping with greater number of time resolutions. The case research results for real UK good meter knowledge verify that the proposed representation results in a reduced amount of information loss and an improvement in subsequent time series clustering compared to associated time sequence illustration.

When mixed with languages like Java, C and C++, python turns into extremely adaptive and suitable to make use of. An estimate of eighty eight % have a masters degree whereas forty eight percent have a doctorate. It has become necessary to have an excellent schooling to develop the required deep understanding of a big selection of matters. Most Data Scientists are well versed within the utilization of Hadoop and large knowledge queries. DSS was created to supply a prime worldwide forum for researchers, industry practitioners and domain experts to exchange the most recent advances in Data Science and Data Systems in addition to their synergy.

There is, however, a debate between two teams; Jeffersonians and Platonists. The Jeffersonians argue on behalf of the yeoman farmer, or in this case the yeoman scientist. Being deeply committed to the republicanism of science they are opposed to an aristocracy of knowledge, to an elitism of hackers, material consultants, and statisticians. This leads to higher choice making since they're getting into the details of the model and the info, creating a deeper understanding of what is driving their decisions. Forbes reported that “unicorn Data Scientists”, these special people who are subject matter specialists with hacking and statistical expertise, can earn $240,000 yearly.

2019 is the fifth event following the success in 2015 (DSDIS-2015), 2016 (DSS-2016), 2017 (DSS-2017) and 2018 (DSS-2018). There is still no consensus on the definition of Data Science and it is considered by some to be a buzzword. The existence of Comet NEOWISE was found by analyzing astronomical survey knowledge acquired by a space telescope, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. In order to reply to the outlined questions, descriptive statistics allows you to rework each statement in your data into insights that make sense. Common information buildings , writing capabilities, logic, control flow, looking out and sorting algorithms, object-oriented programming, and dealing with exterior libraries. Most data roles are programming-based apart from a number of things like business intelligence, market evaluation, product analyst, and so forth.

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All the pieces have been really falling into place for Python data professionals. We are roughly a decade faraway from the beginnings of the modern machine learning platform, inspired largely by the growing ecosystem of open-source Python-based technologies for data scientists. It’s a good time for us to reflect back upon the progress that has been made, spotlight the most important problems enterprises have with existing ML platforms, and talk about what the subsequent generation of platforms shall be like. As we’ll focus on, we believe the following disruption within the ML platform market will be the growth of data-first AI platforms.

This comprises information that has undefined content and doesn’t fit databases like movies, blog posts, etc. There are exceptional resources to dive deep into math, but most of us aren't made for it, and one doesn’t have to be a gold medalist to learn Data Science. Every Data Science course that I enlisted there required college students to have an honest understanding of programming, math, or statistics. For instance,the most famous course on ML by Andrew Ng additionally depends heavily on the understanding of vector algebra and calculus. Calculus — derivatives and limits, by-product rules, chain rule , partial derivatives , the convexity of features, local/global minima, the math behind a regression model, applied math for coaching a mannequin from scratch.

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If there was ever a series today more appropriately titled to convey its value,  it’s Timeless because that’s what this show has been from its very first episode, which is a rare treat in and of itself. I expected to like Timeless sure, but sixteen episodes later I didn’t expect to call it the best thing on network television. I didn’t expect to rally everyone I know to watch it because it’s that great and worthy of such praise. But here I am, I’ve done my part to tell everyone I know in person, and I’m now here to convince you, internet. Also, I can vouch not every TV show I watch, no matter how great is for everyone, but sometimes, just sometimes, if you could find at least three reasons to cling onto something then who knows what it could do for you. So without further ado, here are 10 reasons why Timeless is the show we should all be watching.

1. History

History may not be everyone’s favorite subject to dive into, but it’s of such monumental importance that the knowledge of it, even in its most simple form is absolutely necessary. And Timeless gives us history in a way that’s easy to remember, in a way that’s fun, and if I were still studying, I’d be so much more eager to continue learning about the time period we travel to. While history is altered to meet the premise of the series, where legitimate facts are considered, it remains untouched, and to determine which is true or false is always a fun little aspect within the series — at least for me it is. Who doesn’t love research? (No, I’m not being sarcastic.)

2. Friendships

Is there anything more important than friendships? No, no there isn’t. And for those who aren’t new here, you already know how much they mean to me, for those who don’t, it’s a lot. We are who we are because of the people we love, the people we’ll ceaselessly fight to protect, and the people we’ll follow to the ends of the earth — The Time Team is the best team. I will praise any friendship that’s built on honesty and adoration, but I will also praise any friendship that’s constantly growing, and where the Time Team is concerned, this is just the beginning of the solidifying the inimitable bond between them. Within 16 episodes they’ve already showcased the great lengths they’re willing to go for one another, and they’ve taken the time to get to know each other to the core, validating the fact that in a dark world, this team is forever. This team is a family.

3. Unapologetically Honest

This is it, folks — my absolute favorite thing about this show. History was ugly. History was dark. Our world is dark. Our world is ugly. Our world is racist. History was ridiculously racist. History wasn’t kind or accepting of women. Our world isn’t always kind and accepting of equality for women. And Timeless tells it how it is. It reminds us of the just how dark the world was and how easily it’s erased people of color from our history in the media. Fun fact, The Lone Ranger was black! A fact we came to learn in an episode of Timeless that refused to erase the truth. The monumental changes in our world will come from the moments in media where we acknowledge the truth, and a series like Timeless is easily a step in the right direction. In the first episode alone, there’s a remarkable monologue from Malcolm Barrett’s character Rufus that will absolutely floor you. I can promise this.

4. Character Driven

I am the first to admit that I have dropped shows that weren’t driven by the characters because the stories flopped as a result. They aren’t easy to watch — it feels as though the episode is never-ending and not in a good way. But where Timeless is concerned, its stories are told through the characters. The characters are the very heart of the series allowing their circumstances to pave the road towards an intriguing plot that’s flowing gracefully without a ridiculous attempt to “shock” the audience. Because when Timeless wants to give us something to come back to, a cliffhanger or a plot twist, they’ve done so in a way that’s felt incredibly organic as opposed to a plot device that needlessly wants to pull its characters through the ringer solely for the purpose of appearing “unique” or “dark and gritty”. Eric Kripke and Shawn Ryan care more intently for the intricate stories their characters are telling as opposed to utilizing plot devices that don’t often work for the benefit of the series in the long run.

5. The Performances

I’ve always been a fan of Abigail Spencer’s work, but apart from her, I had no idea what else would be in store on Timeless. And each performer, Spencer included, has easily made me feel so deeply, it’s been captivating to watch. Malcolm Barrett has made me cry more times than I can recall. Matt Lanter can speak so well with his expressions it’s left me in awe. Goran Višnjić has made Garcia Flynn the most enamoring, multifaceted TV villain I’ve seen in years. Timeless is filled with performance so riveting that when reviewing, I’ve had to make sure I single someone out during each episode because they’re constantly deserving of the praise. And while the core cast is a gifted group of individuals, the guest stars often portraying historical figures have effortlessly managed to layer their characters in a matter so fantastic, you won’t want to see them go.

6. Action

There’s something for all and if you’re the kind person who longs for some fascinating action sequences in a series, Timeless has got you covered on that ground, too. I mean, we have a soldier as our leader so, we were bound to get action, and the series handles it so well. Timeless makes action fun, much like a lot of superhero movies it doesn’t get too gritty or reach a point where it’s uncomfortable to watch for the faint at heart. And personally, I’ll always take that over the darker action sequences.

7. Light | Balance

Timeless is hysterical. There’s not been a single episode that hasn’t made me laugh at least once or twice in the midst of all the chaos the characters are living through. And while humor brings light, so does heart — the exploration of real human emotions, insecurities, relationships, and realizations easily plays a role in reminding viewers of the little things we must look towards in life. There’s light in the character interactions. There’s light in the moments of pure bliss that comes from meeting historical figures the time team has always admired. There’s light in making significant changes. There’s light in the stories our characters tell in their quest towards righting wrongs and making the world they live in a better place. There’s light in the Star Wars references. There’s light in honesty. And Timeless creatures have made sure to balance this aspect of the series within the already intense storyline perfectly.

8. Love Story

For all my hopeless romantics out there that need great “ships” to ship, Timeless has us covered in that area, too. The gorgeously established relationship between Rufus and Jiya is just about the sweetest thing you’ll ever see. The blossoming romance between Lucy and Wyatt is everything I didn’t know I needed. It involves undercover lovers, friends — best trope ever, am I right or am I right? Then there’s Garcia Flynn’s quest to avenge his wife and daughter that’ll break your heart more times than it’ll make you angry.

9. Lucy Preston

Each and every character on this show is incredible, so effortlessly lovable, but I personally need to single out Lucy for how well she’s written. Lucy isn’t fearless. She isn’t a superhero. She isn’t perfect. But she’s so remarkably realistic and it leaves me consistently inspired because of how easily she’s relatable to a number of women. She’s afraid of things. She’s a giant nerd. She’s unapologetically excited about what she cares for. And she’s so emphatic it breaks me. TV series are doing a great job of putting women front and center of their stories, and I for one am always so captivated by how multifaceted they each can be. In writing real, relatable women, we’re bringing light into a world that refuses to acknowledge worth and value. And Lucy Preston is a woman with so many enthralling stories to tell.

10. Fashion

Oh my goodness, the costumes! This is probably the funnest part of time travel because the wardrobe is so fascinating to explore. And it’s a crucial part of the series because as a historian, Lucy is always adamant on them getting everything right, but also, sometimes Wyatt pitches in, too adding on the series’ light wonderfully. (I also want the entire wardrobe so there’s that.)

Have I convinced you yet? Timeless has something for everyone. There are very few series out there with as much as heart as this show, and for those who love This is Us, Timeless has just as many emotions to offer. It succeeds in intricate, detailed story telling without ever losing sight of the characters that drive the show. It battles with human emotions in a way that’s so organic, so raw, you don’t want to miss it. It deals with significant issues that our world faces daily in a way that’s bound to profoundly inspire because it glosses over nothing. The truth is laid bare and the series is as compelling as one can be. The exploration of fate vs. free will leave you thinking for hours on end. Timeless does it all, beautifully and meticulously — it’s a show with profoundly moving, potently great stories to tell. For more on Timeless, check out our reviews here. We’ve also got to separate articles on Rufus Carlin and Wyatt Logan for our #100DaysofFanFavorites project. Lucy Preston’s will be coming soon to a computer screen near you. P.S. all 16 episodes are now on Hulu* and season two will premiere Sunday March 11 on NBC — get to watching, my darlings.

(*NBC also has the episodes in OnDemand, and streaming on their website, and outside the US, I believe S1 is available on Netflix!

Found families, friendship, romance, adventure with a heart, a wonderfully layered heroine (and other great ladies!), dynamic heroes (I recommend reading their articles about Rufus and Wyatt too, as they express many of the ways they defy tropes and many of the reasons why they’re both such good and multifaceted men) and complex villains, history with an emphasis on women and POC, beautiful costumes and production design and cinematography, a delightful cast, it’s all here!)

[aion-rsa]

Why Grand Theft Auto 3 Deserves a Remake

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Rockstar recently confirmed that the next-generation version of Grand Theft Auto 5 will be released on November 11 for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, but the GTA news that’s catching everyone’s attention at the moment is this section of a recent GTA Online update blog post:

“In honor of the upcoming 20th anniversary of the genre-defining Grand Theft Auto III, we’ll have even more fun surprises to share — including some specifically for GTA Online players.” While recent years have taught us to not get our hopes up in regards to impending GTA announcements (and GTA Online players may end up getting the bulk of any new content), players can’t help but hold out hope for some kind of new GTA release, even if it’s only the rumored remaster of GTA 3 that’s been floating around for the last few years.

However, I think that GTA 3 deserves more than a remaster and a couple of themed GTA Online items. To be more specific, I think that GTA 3 deserves a remake on the level of Resident Evil 2 and 3‘s recent remakes, or even a remake as ambitious as Final Fantasy 7. You may be saying “Oh, of course it does,” but the reason that GTA 3 deserves a full remake is less about how great it would be to play any kind of even vaguely new GTA game and is more about how GTA 3‘s worst qualities deserve to be fixed just as its best qualities deserve to be celebrated.

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GTA 3 is the Most Important and Influential Game of the Last 20 Years

I was lucky enough to get GTA 3 as a Christmas present in 2001, and I’ll never forget describing the game to a friend. I was trying to explain how you could steal nearly any car and then drive around the city in it, but he just couldn’t understand. He kept assuring me that I must be mistaken and that you could only steal some of the cars and that taking one somehow loaded a “driving level.”

At a time before “sandbox” and “open-world” became shorthand for that kind of experience, GTA 3 was just this game that people had always dreamed of but still seemed to be years away from actually being possible. While there were open-world games before GTA 3, nearly all of them made compromises designed to help hide the fact that they couldn’t quite offer the nearly seamless free-roaming experience that they sometimes presented themselves as.

After years of false starts and false promises largely caused by technological limitations, GTA 3 was suddenly just there and waiting to be experienced. It wasn’t just that the game offered a large area to walk around in; it was the fact that the game successfully convinced us that you really could do anything in that world. Of course, it managed to convince us anything was possible because it actually made so much possible.

More importantly, GTA 3 was an action-adventure game whereas so many notable early “open-world” games were RPGs that depended on slower gameplay to compensate for the inherent limitations of their worlds. Even better, GTA 3 was a full-blown crime epic released at a time when you could count the worthwhile crime video games that had ever been released on one hand. It wasn’t just the scope of the chaos; it was the chaotic nature of the entire idea and the way that the game’s open-world design allowed Rockstar to realize that vision in a way that no other format could have.

While you could certainly argue that the modern gaming industry is a little too obsessed with open-world titles and have made them feel more standard by turning them into the standard for Triple-A design, you can trace most of the key elements of Triple-A game design in 2021 to GTA 3. It was a bolt of lightning that made us ask new questions about what was possible, and it made every other developer in the industry spend the next 20 years looking for the answers to those questions.

Honestly, the game deserves a proper remake on the basis of its historical significance alone.

GTA 3 Still Does Some Things Better Than Any Other GTA Game

Most people talk about GTA 3 as a historically significant game above all else for reasons we’ve already discussed and reasons that we’ll soon talk about, but GTA 3 really does do some things better than any GTA game since.

While I’d argue that GTA 3 still has the best talk radio station in any GTA game (Chatterbox’s script lives rent free in my mind) and some of the most memorable side characters in GTA history, the game’s biggest asset is undoubtedly its “pure” sandbox style.

As the 3D evolution of the original GTA titles, GTA 3 retained the more chaotic nature of those original games. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever spent as much time running around and getting into trouble in a GTA game as I did with GTA 3. Granted, that has something to do with the lack of sidequests and other distractions found in later GTA games, but there’s something to be said for how GTA 3 was clearly designed with open-world chaos in mind.

The GTA 3 may have been experimenting with a more cinematic style that would later play a bigger role in the GTA series, but years later, it’s easy to be fond of GTA 3‘s more arcade-like nature if for no other reason that so many of the great open-world games that followed would struggle to replicate the simple pleasures of the game’s often cheat code fuelled chaos.

Speaking of which…

GTA Vice City “Replaced” GTA 3 a Little Too Quickly

Considering that it’s been eight years since GTA 5 was released, it’s incredible to think that GTA Vice City was released just one year after GTA 3 and improved upon the previous game in a lot of notable ways.

While you’ll never hear me bad mouth GTA Vice City for more than a minute, it’s always been a little tragic that Vice City‘s ’80s vibes, world-class soundtrack, and high-profile voice actors made Vice City a viable GTA 3 replacement at a time when we were still processing how revolutionary GTA 3 truly way.

Again, that’s mostly because GTA Vice City was a better overall game than GTA 3, but that’s kind of the point. Rockstar so quickly addressed so many of GTA 3‘s problems with Vice City that it feels like we barely had time to talk about GTA 3‘s characters, settings, most memorable lines, fun quirks, and all the little things that simply didn’t exist in Vice City.

Maybe it’s inevitable that a remaster or remake of GTA 3 will ultimately just make people ask for a remake or remaster of Vice City, but in a way, that’s all the more reason to remake GTA 3. While you could give Vice City a new coat of paint and earn the praise of many GTA fans, GTA 3 needs a little more love to properly stand out in the modern era and feel like the revolutionary game that it very much was.

To put it another way, Vice City was (in a lot of ways) already a kind of remaster or reimagining of GTA 3, which is part of the reason it was so successful. It let Rockstar use the core design principles they established with the previous games and focus on the embellishments and intangible elements that would put Vice City over-the-top. What I really want to see is how Rockstar can enhance the core GTA 3 experience with help from the knowledge of everything they’ve learned and accomplished since it was released.

A GTA 3 Remake is the Best Way to Return to Liberty City

When most people talk about GTA 6‘s map, they tend to focus on its potential size (as well as the game’s location) and their hope that GTA 6 will be significantly bigger than GTA 5. While that’s certainly understandable, it’s a little sad to think that escalation in that area of game design mean that we might never get another GTA game that focuses as heavily on a single major city.

That’s honestly maybe the biggest reason why I’m rooting for a GTA 3 remake. While GTA 4 offered a glimpse at what a more modern version of Liberty City would look like, video game technology has advanced so much since then. I’d absolutely love to see what Rockstar could do if they were tasked with using the best next-gen technology to build a slightly smaller map designed to showcase an incredibly detailed version of Liberty City that may very well become the definitive portrayal of arguably the most important city in the GTA universe.

There is a “Lost” Version of GTA 3 a Remake Could Restore

In case you didn’t know, a fair bit of content was cut from GTA 3 not long before it was released. In fact, some fans have tried to restore that lost content to the PC version of the game over the years.

Granted, it sounds like the cut content wouldn’t have drastically altered the final product, but it’s especially interesting to note that most of the content that was cut from the game was cut due to concerns related to the 9/11 attacks that occurred just weeks before GTA 3‘s intended release date. The rest of the missing content just consists of things that were lost along the way for one reason or another.

While Rockstar has said that GTA 3 would only have been about 1% different from what we eventually got if that content had been implemented, I’d still love to play the “original” version of GTA 3 via a remake that restores whatever originally cut content is appropriate.

The post Why Grand Theft Auto 3 Deserves a Remake appeared first on Den of Geek.

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In many nations, also a significant land-based club can not contend with what online gambling clubs and also wagering sites offer the table., Online gambling establishment wagering can provide bother-free account creation, super-fast banking, and also an option of video games you will not uncover in an online casino site setting. All things thought about, what the number of brick 'n mortar club close to you provides numerous table video games and slots including low risks that give chances for informal bettor.

A far better range of casino site games: That is the area banking on the internet truly makes its mark. You can surf a massive selection of video games and provide numerous titles a shot with the expectation of complimentary casino site games cost-free spins. Several betting clubs even have sportsbooks, poker areas and also bingo signed up with. You can move your funds easily using home windows tab, offering you the pleasure of real-money players in the casino site video games as well as exceptional casino signup offers. All you need to do is try to find the exciting casino join perk and produce an account with your picked web site. In the following action after logging right into your account, browse via the variety of games like baccarat, craps, online poker, blackjack, keno, faro and also more.

Massive Bonus Offers: Following, on-line casino site gaming rooms provide rewarding greeting rewards to brand-new players. These benefits offer numerous dollars, pounds or Euros in complimentary cash, only for playing the selected games. You can also obtain some free rotates on one of the most current opening, which is an extraordinary technique for winning authentic cash without spending a cent.

Extraordinary Protection: Lastly, all on-line club maintain the most strict safety standards. All routed internet wagering websites use industry-standard 128-piece or higher file encryption to guarantee gamers for better safety and security. They will certainly even have independent checkers set up to examine the product before it strikes the market. Inspectors likewise make sure that a club website's payments are precise regularly.

An overview to gamble through cellphones

With the arising trends in modern technology in 2020, visitors can win real money from on the internet casino sites [2] via mobile phone devices. Wagerers from around the world can create their betting account and log in to access the very best table games, ports and sportsbooks.

Touch display video games are readjusted especially for your mobile phone tv. The look of the tables and game-screen is fundamentally the same as their on the internet relatives, yet you could miss out on a part of the highlights that are usually found in desktop computer variations only.

Furthermore, it doesn't make a distinction whether you get on Apple iphone, Android, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone: there will certainly be a neighborhood application or "instant-play" website only for you.

The most effective table video games and slots tons like a flash, as well as you can also make great cash stores with a swipe of the finger. Websites are reconfigured for your littler touch-screen nevertheless with insignificant disturbance. Table games and also ports work in HTML5 or likewise referred to as Flash, while casino poker gamers can take on equivalent rivals from the exact same online platform.

Apple iphone: Players having an iPhone or iPad can download on the internet casino applications from the Application store. Apple gizmos have typically had an enormous issue with Adobe Flash, yet with committed applications or HTML5 table video games as well as slots, you shouldn't have any kind of issues.

Android: Android customers can find and also download and install gambling establishment applications from Google Play store or can access the internet site from the internet browser.

Windows Phone: Microsoft operates home windows phones, and also its users are growing from around the globe. There are fewer windows phone apps offered, yet, the OS supports HTML 5 and also flash to run the games on your phone immediately.

Blackberry: Their brand-new range of touch-screen gizmos self-control many in-play club as well as wagering websites. BlackBerry likewise supports Android so you can sometimes, reach video games in this way.

[slaaneshfic]

“There is no reason for you to live: gendered trauma and ecstasy in ‘No World Dreamers, Sticky Zeitgeist episode 2: Aperitif (conference notes)

This is my text/notes for my presentation at the "beyond the console" conference at London South Bank university / v&a the other week. I've not edited this into a proper essay format because it's already going to be re-edited into part of a thesis chapter in the next month.

“There is no reason for you to live: gendered trauma and ecstasy in ‘No World Dreamers, Sticky Zeitgeist episode 2: Aperitif’

[introduce self and position as artists, researcher and phd candidate in art practice, working primarily with post-structuralist feminism, horror, and play.]

This paper is built on a structure which I hope reflects and supplements the material it is concerned with.

[Note that it is brutally chopped out from a thesis chapter primarily about Cixous, whos work shadows the whole text but who only appears briefly as a sort of cameo towards the end. As such there is a large section about her relation to queerness, her use of the category “woman” as a post-structural rather than essentialist term, and the relation of these of these to my own identity as genderqueer. I just want to state at the start, to reassure against the obvious horror of a masc presenting person on stage lecturing on such a huge figure of feminist art that I approach this with the utmost love and care for her work.]

First I need to establish the position from which I am writing it, which is that the video game I am about is address is a work of art. There are many other ways to approach video games; as products, as recreational activities, as social of historical objects. However approaching it as a work of art not only only feels most comfortable for me as an artist and researcher of art practice, but it both reflects the increased art context in which the maker’s work is presented and also allows for a ways of looking at the work which is particular to art.

In a 2001 journal chapter entitled “The Aesthetics of Affect, Thinking art beyond representation” the artist and lecturer Simon O’Sullivan calls for a way of thinking about and reading art works which centre’s their aesthetic and affective qualities, that which grants them an “apartness” from other objects (O’Sullivan, 2001). O’Sullivan draws initially from the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, and the journal chapter begins with a quote from the later which ends with the following statement :

“But the work is not merely a cultural object, although it is that too. It harbours within it an excess, a rapture, a potential of associations that overflows all the determinations of its “reception” and “production” (Lyotard, 1991).

    This images of “rapture” and “excess” will return throughout my writing here, particularly in regards the feminists and queer philosophers I will be primarily drawing from, and again because such things are in my view central to the game I am going to talk about. However before all of this I wish to make clear my position which echoes O’Sullivan’s call for “Art history as a kind of creative writing” (O’Sullivan, 2001). I will attempt to avoid where possible a hermeneutic analysis of the game where it becomes only a expression of social production to be reduced to an ‘explanation’, instead I want to place this “bundle of affects” (O’Sullivan, 2001) alongside concepts and ideas, with different intents and aims, and see what happens in between. Paraphrasing writer AB Silvera in “Radical Transfeminism Zine”, “Multiplicity of strats guys, you cant carry every team with a Hanzo, sometimes you gotta use D.vas Ult to break a choke point” (Silvera, 2017).

The work of art can now be introduced by its name, which is “No World Dreamers. Sticky Zeitgeist. Episode 2: Aperitif” (Aperitif), the second in a series of collaborative works by coders, artists, musicians, writers Porpentine Charity Heartscape and Rook (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). in the words of one of its makers Aperitif “combines top-down RPG, Shmup, visual novel and medical sim” (Hayes, 2018). In playing the game, the player alternately takes control of and interacts with four principal characters. These characters include “Ever. The Loser”, and “Brava. The Leader” who are broadly humanoid with cat/fox/deeresque features including enlarged ears. There is also “Chalcedony. The Big Sister” and “Agate. The Little Sister” who are both “labor drones” who have been modified and “overclocked” almost beyond capacity in order to have some kind of consciousness. All four of these characters are employed by a large company called “Innocent” to recover salvage from a contaminated and overgrown former city referred to by the characters as “Swamp-Dot-Com”. The area’s contamination is connected to the presence of a mysterious object only referred to by this point in the series narative as “The artefact”. Another character that we see, and occasionally have control over is called “The Therapist” who is presented as a human size, anthropomorphic moth-like person. Finally, we also hear from an interact with “MOM”, the Innocent A.I., and possibly (though not via intelligible words) from the Artefact itself.

The episode prior to Aperitif was titled “No World Dreamers, Sticky Zeitgeist. Episode one: Hyperslime” (Hyperslime) and primarily serves to introduce the setting and characters, principally through the eyes of Ever, detailing her mental health and particularly anxiety (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). Episode one was concerned with our characters getting to work, passing various obstacles to achieve this including panic attacks and mandatory drug tests.

Picking up where Hyperslime ended, Aperitif is concerned with our characters beginning the job they are assigned, and their discussing the material and social relations within that environment, as well as portraying material effects these provoke. I would like to consider this through philosopher Eugene Thacker’s definition of the horror genre as “the space between”, and “passages between”, “I cannot see what I believe”, and “I cannot believe what I see” (Thacker, 2015). For our character’s, this field of uncertainty crops up frequently and extends at times out to include us the player. Early in the narrative, text from an unspecified character or voice sets this tone:

“Jeez how much blood do you have?

The Inside becomes the outside.

    The world grasps hungrily at the swamp gate. Two voracious circuitries at war. the fever of skin grafts.

    Four salvagers set out in search for debris” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).

The context for this statement is not revealed until the end of the game, and the “who” that is speaking all of it remains ambiguous even then. Our player character proxies recount their memories and feelings about Swamp-Dot-Com in fragments as you explore it with them in turn.

It is important at this point to note that it is implied to degrees that some or all of Aperitif’s “four scavengers” are not cisgendered. This was first implied in Hyperslime, but I will stress that this is my interpretation of the game. It is never stated within the game’s text that any characters are trans, cis, non-binary, or what if any concept of gender exists in its setting. However in the sequel Aperitif, the characters gender identity contrasting to that one assigned to them by a social power is implied more strongly. This contrast is also expanded as their non-cis status is not just in relation to gender but in terms of crossing further boundaries to arrive at their identity.

Accessible in the game’s folder from the start, and later triggered by an on screen event is a pdf manual for Agate, the younger robot sister. The pdf presents as an official service manual for the original robot model which Agate belongs to, which has been subsequently annotated and edited by Agate herself and her sister after they are both upgraded to consciousness. Agate is implied to be transgender because her manual originally labels her a “[redacted] labor drone” and she herself has altered this to instead assign her the name “Agate, cool girl” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).

The overlapping of transgender identity discourse and sentience of nonhuman or modified humans is not without precedent. In the article “Making and Getting Made: Towards a Cyborg Transfeminism” in Salvage, writer Solvi Goard argues that the “1995 anime version of Ghost In The Shell [offers] both the dream and the nightmare of trans politics”. Goard makes the case that “Cyborgs [...] are undoubtedly transgender [because] they choose and change their bodies based on what relationship they desire from that body” (Goard, 2017). In Ghost In The Shell, the cyborg cop protagonist Major Motoko Kusanagi begins to express doubts about her own existence through the course of the narrative which centres on hyper augmented bodies and brains and the limits of existence and identity (Oshii, 1995). Goard identifies this doubt, “the visceral confusion that comes about from knowing how you feel and experience your body, but having that experience jar so powerfully with what meaning other people and society give to it” as “one many trans people will recognise” (Goard, 2017).

The doubts and confusions over self expressed by the characters in Aperitif are different to those of Major Kusanagi. Chalcedony expresses fear and regret that like her, she sister Agate was “overclocked” and modified to have sentience and that “she would pay for it with every moment of her life” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). For Chalcedony, much of her anxiety is around her and her sister being unable to be safe, to rest, to have energy, to have “a room to hide in” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). While Agate seems exhausted by the demands of her body run beyond its intended capacity, and at the newness of the world after their escape which is both exciting and terrifying in turns. (The pdf robot manual states that the overclocking can lead to violent failure of the unit’s heart, and that these are advised to be bought in bulk. This whole section in the manual has been all but obliterated by Chalcedony with a note to tell her younger sister not to read it [this should be a footnote, but i dont have the ability to insert footnotes on the tablet I’m using]).

Both the robots experiences undoubtably jar with “what meaning other people and society give” them (Goard, 2017) as they are literally on the run from that authority, but this is joined by the jarring of the body itself not functioning as they need it too. The culmination of this will be the medical sim section of the game where we play as Chalcedony attempting to repair her sister’s overworked organs, potentially watching Agate repeatedly die in the process. What seems to most concern Chalcedony at least is this perpetual state of exhausted, unstable, borderline survival. She asks herself “what if it was forever. What if nothing changed, and we kept as we were. Unable to perfectly live or die” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). This same anxiety about not escaping is echoed shortly after by Ever when she states that she “and Brava always said we’d be the ones to make it out. We wouldn’t be the losers stuck in this nowhere shithole” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Constructing improvised temporary solutions to keep going through trauma and awareness of their imminent potential failure is common to most of the characters in Aperitif, if not the entire universe they inhabit.

Characters within the game might lament the possibility of their being caught in limbo, but our encounter with the work of art called Aperitif is one of approaching something always in flux and always pointing to incomplete or decaying possibilities. Video games broadly of the sort Aperitif belongs to often present the player with avenues which may be explored or ignored. In this instance, there might be dialogue options we do not choose, or we might miss sections of the map, and not trigger every piece of narrative description text. This is one potential way in which we experience this game as never fully resolving, as an altering space. Knowing that you could have told Agate “We are sisters and our fate is bound together” but instead you told her “I’m doing for you what no one did for me” when asked why you as Chalcedony keep looking after her means the game does not quite resolve into a fixed form (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). You might speculate on what would have happened in game if you took the other path, and your emotional response to the game might have been different also. This however could be said of most games of this broad type, and that all but the completist who must replay every possibile forked path experiences such a game as fluid in this way. However there is another instance of alterability in the experience of encountering Aperitif which melds with the former This instance is less common, and I would argue makes Aperitif a richer and more complex experience for its lack of solidifying resolution.

When playing Aperitif we are never given full, authoritative, and non conflicting information on anything we encounter. We experience much of the game as a mediation of a visual landscape which we interact with, and our proxy character’s interior monologues on this landscape, its history, its impacts. Each character has a different response to this space and the first half of the game consists of exploring the same map, with the same triggers for these monologues with each character offering a different association. A clearing with a pool triggers the text for Ever “this is where I hide”, for Brava the description is “I think this is where Ever goes to whack off”, and for Chalcedony it is simply “small water” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Across these multiple descriptions is presented a world that resists one single interpretation, but beyond this, the specific writing that the game employs is frequently one which is open, personal, multiple and incomplete. We experience the game therefor as a series of fragments, and these fragments feel less like they were crafted to convey one meaning than as they were pulled together and placed somewhere for them to form new associations with whatever text came before them and whatever the audience had already in mind. In a published interview, the writer Kathy Acker who practice involved cut ups and often plagiarized re-edits was asked about control in their work and gave the following response.

    “When you write are you controlling a text? When you’re really writing you’re not, you’re fucking with it” (Acker & Lotringer, 1991).

Text in Aperitif feels extremely fucked with, and invites the player to fuck with it further. The ruined signposts which litter Swamp-dot-com contain easy to cite examples of such fucked with text. Approaching these signs with a controlled character triggers an onscreen text. Some sign-triggered-text describes its context in the manner of “The sign says, Feeling depressed? This is the only thing it says” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Other sign-triggered-text such as “watch out for stuff” lack the initial contextual statement leaving available the possibility that this is something else other than what the sign reads (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). What could be read simply as inconsistency of form becomes yet another way in which the experience of this work of art invites us to embrace uncertainty. The narrative content of these signs re-enforces this. As a player there is real joy to be found in uncertain fragmented warnings and questions, which leave us plugging in whatever context we have to hand to try and make sense of. The fucked with text triggered by bringing a character near to one of these signs (or not, if you happen to miss them) sits very much within that definition of the horror genre from Thacker, as well as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s broad definition of “Queer” as existing in “lapses and excesses of meaning” (Sedgwick, 2004). They elicit both the disbelief that what we read is correct and the absence of that which would fully qualify and resolve them.  

It would incorrect to suggest that there isn’t an overall linear narrative to Aperitif, but that narrative is not responsible for the only, or dominant experience of encountering it. That encounter, is one of being hit with a splattering of different affects, each eliciting thoughts and associations and creative possibilities for us as collaborator rather than mere musculature for that narrative skelton. O’Sullivan describes the affective encounter with art as “self overcoming”, to be immersed in our encounter to the point where our self, that certainly of the “I” becomes lost. The splattering of affects in Aperitif as we jump from witnessing character struggle to articulate their trauma and love, to the game on various levels presenting us with an incomplete or decaying experience of an incomplete or decaying world strongly provokes such self overcoming. This isn’t the unrelenting insistence that we forget our human body and commit to the protagonist of a narrative, supporting their every decision and telegraphed emotions backed up with orchestral swells, rather instead the game seduces us into active collaboration with never claims to be certain, and to be fine with this.

Philosopher and writer Helene Cixous in her text “The Laugh of The Medusa” called for women to write “Ecriture Feminine”  (Cixous, 1976). Such “women’s writing” presents an alternative of art, language, and being, distinct from the phalogocentric order which supports its power through reason. I believe that Aperitif embodies much of what Cixous called for, through its “intoxicating, unappeasable search for love” (Cixous, 1976).

Of relevance to a game series that began with a character “getting high and whacking off”, the Ectriture Feminine in “The Laugh of The Medusa” is frequently described in terms of masturbation. [Note about queerness and concept of “Woman” in Cixous] Principally this association is about the creation nof desire, of something that is erogenous at different territories and speeds. This is not the monomyth of phallocentricity, the seminal work where writing is built like a tower, but a multiplicity of queer desires that are not just the one dull drive to completion. Cixous elaborates on this with the following;

“Heterogeneous, yes, for her joyous benefit she is erogenous; she is the erotogeneity of the heterogeneous; airborn swimmer, in flight, she does not cling to herself; she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, delirious and capable of others of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn't, of him of you” (Cixous, 1976).

This is writing that self overcomes. The uncertainty of horror is now joyous delirium, yet the circumstances have not changed only our ethical position to them. Our encounter with Aperitif mirrors the loss of self, overwhelming affects, and improvised collaboration with an unstable world which its characters experience. However for us at least, this is not crashing trauma, but what O’Sullivan identifies in art as an exploration of the “possibilities  of being, of becoming in the world” (O’Sullivan, 2001).

[caredogstips]

In accolade of the humble fruit fly

Drosophila, the hard-working fruit fly widely used in genetics investigate, is a lot more like us than we might care to think. Time we got to know the little pest

In a series of areas in the Fly Facility of the Department of Genetics at Cambridge University, around 5m return wings are kept in test tube at any given point in time. Theyre stored at different temperatures to adjudicate running durations of life cycle at 25 C, its about 10 dates; at jug temperatures as long as five weeks.

Out in the wild, “they dont have” pest quite so likable to human needs as the humble pomace fly. It may have spent the summer feasting on the contents of your return container, but not until your assembled plums and peaches were starting to canker. But while gastronomic predisposition are typical to be applauded in a run, the drosophila, to present it its official title, has more going for it than good table manners.

For the past century, it has also acted the crucial serve of a science and medical search tool. Today, its often the first stop in research into a wide range of human illnesses, including Alzheimers disease, Huntingtons disease, spastic paraplegia, cancer and obesity. By compared to mice and dogs, let alone apes and humans, its massively inexpensive and easy-going working in cooperation with and there is little chance of sucking dissent from even the most radical anti-vivisectionist.

In many respects its position as a crucial search tool is a historical accident. Between 1910 and 1915, the pioneering American geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan worked on Drosophila melanogaster in his renowned Fly Room at Columbia University and been demonstrated that genes provide the basis for chromosomal inheritance, for which he won a Nobel prize winner. It was a critical breakthrough, but there was no particular reason that it had to be made via the fruit fly. Yet ever since then, the tiny drosophila has been at the vanguard of genetic research. In the 1920 s, another American geneticist, Hermann J Muller, has showed that radioactivity leads to genetic mutation in fruit wings. The reason were careful about exposure to x-rays is no tiny portion due to Mullers work.

But some of the mutations that Muller grew, such as pilots with legs coming out of their premiers, subsequently played into the postwar period of atomic paranoia, acquainted George Langelaans short story The Fly, which was constructed into a film first in the 50 s and then remade by David Cronenberg in the 1980 s.

Jeff Goldblum mid-mutation in David Cronenbergs 1986 cinema The Fly. Image: Sportsphoto Ltd/ Allstar

In the tale and the films, research scientists mutates into a wing, an idea thats shaking precise since we are experience ourselves as being so altogether differences between moves, with their strange the organizations and massive, honeycombed leaders and plainly creepy practices. This deep-seated nervousnes about runs has led to some famed misunderstands of biology. The most appalling speciman was in 2008, when Sarah Palin, extending for vice-president in the US presidential elections, told an audience that their money was going to is planned that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Concepts like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

Despite Palins clueless doubts, one of the reasons that operates have become important to much genetic and medical investigate in its relationship with humans is that they tolerate a impressive genetic similarity to us. The sci-fi fear of a flys otherness may well be based, somewhere direction down, on its unsettling closeness to us.

It was Michael Ashburner, the godfather of fruit fly research at Cambridge, who first established that of the genes that in their mutant anatomy campaign diseases in humen cystic fibrosis being one example around 75% have very similar equivalents in return hovers. When Ashburner started out in the 1970 s, runs were maintained in milk bottles in a temporary laboratory on the outskirts of Cambridge. As an expression of the results of his foundational act, which includes his classic book Won For All: How the Drosophila Genome Was Sequenced , Cambridge has become arguably the worlds passing centre of fruit fly research.

Its Fly Facility is run by one of Ashburners former PhD students, Simon Collier, who showed me around the labs and fly storage of the facility. Hes been working with fruit operates for 25 years and in that time hes come to know and realize many of their obscured to most human observers characteristics.

If you take a tube of runs and left open here you notice that they have practices, he alleges. The males courtroom the females. They follow the females and put one wing out and it vibrates. Theres a person in Leicester whos experimented this and what theyre doing is producing a kind of love song.

Apparently, the females are not looking for a long-term affair and, certainly, theyre likely in their short life span to have multiple spouses. The question with this for geneticists is that they store semen so paternity is a disputed issue. To counter the embarrassment of this brazen immorality, geneticists tend to work with innocent females.

How can they tell? I ask.

The look in their seeing, Collier says drily.

A colourised SEM micrograph, amplified 70 epoches. of the head of a fruit fly, evidencing compound seeing. Photograph: Tom Hartman/ Getty Images

He shows me a magnification of a onu of fruit operates that have been knocked out by carbon dioxide. Theyre still blinking but essentially stationary. He points out the differences between males( a bit smaller) and females and shows that young wings virgins if you like are pale and unpigmented.

He explains that for study determinations special chromosomes have been developed that enable geneticists to draw exactly what genes have been inherited. With mouse, for example, its necessary to check gene by gene whats been inherited, which moves genetic study much more time-consuming and costly.

Because the fruit flys life cycle is so short and they procreate so fast( sexually maturity is reached within eight epoches of incubating ), drosophila are ideal subjects for its further consideration of inherited traits, including genetic aberrations, over many generations.

Still, to the amateur, even one slightly more versed in the exigencies of scientific research than Sarah Palin, theres something intensely counterintuitive about doing genetic research on wings. For one thing, theyre so small. Doesnt that make it a whole lot trickier?

Collier shakes his head. Its fairly simple if you want to look at the fruit flys genome. You exactly place them in a tube and squish them up and do some simple DNA extraction. Whats more complex is becoming the other route implanting genetic substance into them.

He takes me to a special lab where this procedure is carried out. They take the tent-fly larvae and strip the eggs off their eggshells by putting them in bleach. Then with a long and highly fine needle, the relevant genetic material is introduced into the posterior of the eggs where the germline cells are located.

Drosophila melanogaster gaze quality variants, picturing grey and cherry-red. The grey seeing gene is sex-linked. Picture: Alamy

Given that an egg is about 0.5 mm in length( about the dimensions of the a particle of sand ), and the DNA administered into it is about the capacity of a millionth of a drop of ocean, you can see how delicate an operation it is. It takes about six months to master the instant motor skills necessary to do the job.

Usually half the embryos will survive that procedure, enunciates Collier. And we are in a position reproduction from them and examine them.

But study what exactly? And to what end?

Collier innovates me to two colleagues who are active in fruit fly research, a reader in genetics announced Cahir OKane and Damian Crowther, a director of neuroscience the investigations and change at the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, who still holds links to the Fly Facility.

We go out to lunch and talk fruit operates. I expect Crowther first of all why “hed left” academic study to go into industry.

The story I tell, he alleges, is pals, and perhaps even adversaries, would ever insert me as, This is Damian, hes the tent-fly guy. In my occasion, Ive been a registrar in neurology and a research scientist in many areas I didnt conclude fly person certainly summarized me up.

OKane resembled the detail and both men agree that fly investigate has not made them either health professionals or social acknowledgment they speculate their work warrants.

What seems to matter most, to its implementation of professional appreciation at the least, is what is known as rendition, that is, passing the findings of fly research into productive contributions to medical applications for humen. There is little doubt that hovers study does contribute, in a wider appreciation of biological understanding of how all organisms piece, but also in specific examples of human illnes. However, its not easy to become direct links.

Its problematic, for obvious grounds, to lead from run tests to human experiments; there often needs to be a whole scope of happening stagecoaches in which other scientists take over and, unavoidably, take the spotlight and accreditation.

I cant tell you that theres a drug that Ive tested on return flies[ with an artificially created version of Alzheimers disease] thats benefited the fruit fly thats then gone on to benefit the human, articulates Crowther.

But, he excuses, Alzheimers commits the overproduction of proteins that species plaque in the brain that destroys neurons. So you can oblige frameworks of runs that raise these proteins, get their own plaque and succumb, he shows, and you are able to measure various ways of preventing the plaque formations.

Fruit wings dont naturally develop Alzheimers, although they have all the genetics of the Alzheimers pathway in their brain.

You have to give them human equivalent genes and push it really hard to get them to have Alzheimers in three weeks, shows Crowther.

Life hertz stages of the pomace fly, Drosophila sp, presenting larva, pupa, adult male( dark abdomen) and adult female. Image: Ed Reschke/ Getty Images

Instead of thinking of pilot research as a direct route to medical breakthroughs, its better to see it, Crowther quarrels, as a style of doing quick and dirty research. He believes that because its so cheap, it should be used in a multiplicity of ways that might spot the direction to most productive routes of research. And whenever there is drugs that have already been measured on humans and have passed safety requirements but have failed in their efficacy with the targeted disorder, they could be retargeted by first testing them on flies.

The contemplating around really bad maladies like engine neurone malady, Huntingtons disease, is if you can get anything to work in a cell culture replicated in an animal, thats the beginning as long as its safe of promptly get it to patients, remarks Crowther.

OKane is especially suspicious of overblown claims for translation. For him, the allure of the fruit fly is that it is a organism that rewards analyse in a larger context.

Im interested in it because I think its a great arrangement for finding out how living things in general can work. I conceive by understanding the principles of how tent-flies labour you are able to make better prophecies for humans. The better you understand how “were working” the most rational you can be about trying to pattern rehabilitations; I imagine even without directing your work towards therapy, you are able to speculate more intelligently about cares five or 10 years down the line.

It has been said , not least by Collier, that more know anything about the biology of the drosophila than any other animal on Earth. For speciman, we know that fruit moves have a kind of built-in compass in their mentalities that allows a sense of direction. As all animals need to know how they move, its not unreasonable to assume that its a way of universal computation.

Another study to demonstrate that male fruit moves that are rejected by a female teammate are more inclined to drown their anguishes in food spiked with alcohol than male fruit tent-flies that have succeeded in copulated. Again, a mentality chemical that governs the wings stomach and is predictive of their thirst for alcohol has an equivalent that has been linked to alcohol uptake in humans.

In another consider, this time at Oxford, it was found that fruit operates are capable of what are liable to be worded intelligent deliberation. Rather than doing solely impulsive decisions, they take time to react when will come forward with a difficult choice.

In other terms, once again their behavior could be described as human-like. It seems that the common ingredient in both human and operate action is a gene announced FOXP, which is closely linked to cognitive developed as humen. Pilots with defective FOXP take longer to arrive at policy decisions, just as flaws in the human type of FOXP have been correlated with low-toned intelligence.

It is this long and valuable history of consider of the drosophila that should guarantee its continued involvement in genetic investigate. But much of what has been very successful about working with operates is now being be repeated in human stem cell research, which has the added advantage of being species-relevant. This was the other is why Crowther moved into the private sector: the competition from stem cells meant that he found it increasingly difficult to get fruit fly-based experiment funded.

The fly is yesterdays person, he mentions, yesterdays engineering. For me, stem cells are the next fruit fly.

OKane searches fairly glum at the prospect and argues that there have been queries over the future of pomace fly study ever since he started his laboratory 25 years ago. But he maintains that the work hes done in inherited spastic paraplegia would have taken 10 times longer to perform with mouse. OKane has grown to appreciate the rich biological and social development of fruit flies in the time hes been working with them.

The more you look at their behavior, he says, the more sophisticated you realise they are. Even in aggressivenes, how a male pomace fly behaves in a fight is dependent on his previous experience of fighting with other male and female what the other males previous know-how of fighting is. Its amazing to be considered all the machinery thats involved to be able to do that. Undoubtedly were more sophisticated, because were studying them, theyre not analyse us.

For the time being, until some over-ambitious genetics professor does manage to mutate into a run, thats the practice the relationship should be pursued. And both humans and return wings, it is about to change, can drink to that.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

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