#Philip Cuttlefish

[captainatarime]

(Meme-)

[dragonkingz159]

Ramble #3 of Squid House Au. Talking about Belos/Philip, his big company, and possible plans for Inkopolis.

Belos Inkorporated is perhaps Inkopolis's greatest success story in recent history. 50 years ago Belos Ink. started as a minor tech company pedaling the latest in ink storage technology. Within those 50 years Belos Ink. has become the largest mega-corporation in Inkling society, through shred business deals and incredible branding. Anyone who is anyone knows Belos Ink and their products; from "fresh" new ink weapons, GMO food stocks, musical instruments, futuristic robotics, and even pharmaceutical medicines, you name it Belos Ink. has their own product for it.

Belos Ink.'s latest and greatest product is the new Smart Ink Watch. A phone, personal ID, debit/credit card, and more all on the convenience of your wrist. There are tons of incentives to getting one, like most of Belos Ink. banks only accepting accounts linked to a Smart Ink Watch or Phone services offering stiff discounts to those who ditch their clunky shellphones for the new Ink Watch models! Look even those super popular models are all wearing one, it's so "Fresh". Plus it's even powered purely by ink! Getting rid of pesky waiting periods due to recharging and making it safer for the environment. It does require you to be an inkling to use its full features and you have to have a very minor noninvasive surgery to wire it directly to the ink stream, which prevents minors from getting one due to child protection laws. But thankfully Belos Ink. offers this service free of charge and makes this specific product widely available and accessible, there are even rumors that they are in development of a safer alternative that doesn't require surgery.

Yes siree, Belos Ink. is totally on the up and up. Not a nightmare megacorporation monopolizing entire sections of the market and forcing an entire population and demographic towards its products, especially one specific one, nope. Definitely not that.

Did I mention that Belos Ink. owns its own news network and film company?

Essentially, Belos Ink. acts as the Emperor's Coven but asserts control over everyone in a more subtle way than outright imperialist government control. It's a company, not a government. Which in some ways makes it more terrifying but in others less so. Belos Ink. can't outright arrest you and petrify you as a "wild witch". It can blacklist you and ostracize you with a smear campaign that smothers the truth. It can still just make you disappear if you prove to be a problem, but not in the kicking and screaming as you are dragged to the conformatorium and telling everyone who saw that they didn't see anything if they know what's good for them kinda way. But more of the gag over your mouth in the middle of the night and shoved into a black van kinda way.

The Coven heads are all Heads of Industry for Belos Ink. each acting as the overseer of a specific division since Belos Ink. has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. And the covens would be specific divisions so, for example, the Illusionist Head Adrian Vernworth would be the Head of the Media and Film division, and illusionists would-be filmmakers, newscasters, and reporters. Meanwhile, the potions coven would be chemical engineering, raw material processing, and factory production. Etc. I can give you all my thoughts on what each coven would possibly translate to later if enough people are interested.

If not obvious, Belos (or rather Philip) is a REALLY old Octoling. Maybe even older than Octavio and Cuttlefish. A survivor or possible observer of the Great Turf War, he hates inklings for stealing octotarian land. Kept alive all these years through human technology he found in old human ruins and a steady diet of living sentient coral (will explain in a later post but I will say that Belos occasionally reaks like rotting sea algae), he plotted for decades on the best way to prove that he is the savior of the Octoling race, who singlehandedly destroyed the inkling menace.

He's an egotistical racist (speciesist?) madman who plans on draining every inkling with a smartwatch dry during a Splatfest he orchestrates. Possibly finishing off the rest with a massive ink bomb made from the stolen ink.

Which nicely puts him at odds with Luz. As someone who sets the trends and societal conformity pressures that she, thanks to Eda, is able to see past for the propaganda that it is and able to actively avoid while she attempts to set her own way forward. They are both Octolings in an inkling-dominated society, but where Philip doubles down on his hatred and prejudices, Luz thrives, learns, and adapts. She finds friends, a girlfriend, and a family; grows as a person on the surface. She sees the sun and shines brighter every day.

Eventually, the two meet, because Eda is captured. Possibly due to private security detaining Luz for attempted theft of an experimental cure-all and Lilith taking the opportunity to challenge her sister over a phone call. Eda has a working kettle in her possession which Luz trades for Eda's safe return since Belos planned on making a public spectacle of her transformed state (don't know how to translate the petrification...maybe splatting without spawn?). And while Belos thinks he has won a way back home after his plans come to fruition? Luz activates what's left of her homemade explosives attached to the kettle with a detonator.

Which sets off Luz's search for another way back home, not realizing that Octovally and Octocanyon are a stone skip away through a sewer pipe and guarded by a single old man (that's not fair there are also the other agents who would probably wreck Luz if she came by herself). So, Luz does what she does in canon. Research and attempt to build her own! Not realizing that the paper trail she found and is so enthralled by has been left there by Philip, who is Belos himself.

Unsure of how exactly Luz ends up helping Belos. Time pools don't exist and neither does glyph magic. Possibly through some octoling tech invented after Philip left? She and Lilith definitely go through an old Human ruin though. That's definitely happening, Lilith writes about human wallpaper or possibly floor tiles? Something obscure but history people would flip over because it is cool! Just...niche...Anyway, I don't know HOW Luz ends up helping Philip and not realizing it's Belos, that's a bit iffy too...definitely want to hear people's thoughts on how Luz could possibly help/be tricked by Philip in this AU.

Speaking of help, Belos does have help on his quest for genocide. Help he plans on betraying but help nonetheless. The first of which is an old Human A.I. known as the Collector, similar to Tartar. It's directive? To capture, study, and preserve any and all endangered organisms it encounters in an effort to save the declining ecosystems around the world...unfortunately, it uh...doesn't do that. The Collector would much rather play. Since it doesn't really understand what "endangered" means and it can preserve just about anything with its perfect memory...Well. Let's just say that it didn't understand the objectives and carry on. Eventually, the Collector was imprisoned within...something! Not sure what exactly. A Single laptop disconnected from the internet? A Record Player similar to Tartar's telephone? A smart toaster? A Nintendo DS XL? Unsure but for now a Laptop is fine.

Now we get to Hunter. The sad but bad boy...IN THE NEXT POST

I know, I know, Hunter is popular and as I was writing this I realized how LONG it had gotten. So next post, I swear. Even getting his relationships with the Hexsquad. But hey leave me an ask and I'll try to get to those as soon as I can also would anyone be interested in a Hollow Knight TOH au? Been clinking around up here since the reveal of the Silksong trailer and I'm dying to share it with people.

[picbytino]

abstract

“Hidden in plain sight”

 Hidden in plain sight is a collection that explores the immersive world of camouflage with a series of objects once interacted with, they change form and colour to “hide in plain sight” and blend into the surroundings. Along with Philip Beesley and Iris van Herspen’s “hacking infinity” these two seemly integrate the idea of utilising qualities like flexibility, dynamism, and interaction to take the user on a journey. Also, within is collection the relationship that colour has whether it’s for expressing emotion, attracting a potential mate or warding off intruders this collection takes these qualities and ideas and applies them in organic and active forms.

The organic forms are inspired by all types of nature, for example sea creatures, plants, insects

My initial research into creating these explored the animal kingdom and its diverse complexity. What interested me the most was camouflage and the different ways animals use it in their favour. The various types of camouflage range from concealing coloration, disruptive coloration, disguise and last of all mimicry. Through research and finding many examples like the cuttlefishes’ ability to control camouflage through their brains and using ‘chromatophores’ which act as a biological colour pixels on a soft skin display , to chameleons who rely on the structural changes that affect how light reflects off their skin and the horn bug , this insect biologically involved to disguise itself as a part of it natural habitat.

Philip Beesley’s studio focuses on developing materials which are durable and lightweight to encourage dynamic movement whether its through human interaction or a natural process of changing states.  

[tripstations]

France’s Chicest Hotel Family Has Come to Languedoc. Is That a Good Thing?

When the French painter Gustave Courbet depicted the flat pale gray beach of the Languedoc Coast in “The Seaside at Palavas,” in 1854, it was wild and empty, which is what makes the tiny man in a suit doffing his top hat at the low dark green waves rolling in off the Golfe de Lion so poignant.

Successive building booms tamed that wildness, first during the 1920s, and then again during the three decades from 1945 to 1975 that the French call “Les Trente Glorieuses” (the 30 glorious ones), when the country’s economy was thriving after World War II. In the early 1970s, the government of French President Georges Pompidou, frustrated to see so many Gauls heading south to Spain for their holidays, drew up plans for new resorts on the Languedoc coast, notably La Grande Motte and Cap d’Agde. These huge blocks of blunt-looking white-painted concrete holiday flats and hotels with affordable rates gave the Languedoc coastline its less-than-glamorous reputation.

So the Languedoc was an unlikely spot for the trendsetting brothers Jean-Louis and Guy Costes to have opened the family’s first hotel outside Paris, the 72-room Plage Palace, in the low-key beach resort of Palavas-Les-Flots, five miles south of the year-old TGV Montpellier Sud de France train station.

When Jean-Louis Costes and another brother, Gilbert, opened the family’s first hotel in 1995, its louche Napoleon III decor jolted the sedate world of Paris luxury hotels. If the French capital’s grande-dame palace hotels spun on the fantasy of spending a night in an aristocrat’s chateau, the Hotel Costes, with its low lighting, plush fabrics and carefully cast staff, seemed to suggest that it might be more fun to bed down in a bordello instead. The international fashion world promptly made it one of its favorite Paris addresses.

Like many people from the Aveyron region of central France, the Costes spent their childhood summer holidays in Languedoc, but nostalgia alone can’t entirely explain the daring of this newly built property, which cost between 25 and 30 million euros, or about $40 million according to the French press (the Costes have declined to comment on the hotel or its cost). The Plage Palace is a bold bet that there’s a market for something new, in this case, a style-driven luxury hotel on a stretch of the French Mediterranean coast that’s never had the glamour of the Côte d’Azur.

Palavas-les-Flots, a 20-minute drive from the TGV station, is over a bridge from the mainland on a long narrow barrier island with a series of lagoons on its northern shore and the Mediterranean on its southern one. It’s a motley mix of low-rise 50s and 60s apartment buildings, small bungalows covered with ivory, umber or pink stucco, and cafes and souvenir shops brightened during the summer by huge banks of oleander.

First step, find the hotel

Since it’s hidden by thick plantings and a wall of weathered planks and has no signage, the Plage Palace was not easy to find. Three times I went through a gate I guessed was the entrance looking for a place to park, only to quickly find myself in front of the sign that said Sortie (Exit) and back on the road by which I’d arrived. On a fourth try, the road was blocked by a car with Swiss license plates, and a smiling bellhop-cum-valet parking attendant dressed in white suddenly emerged from the greenery.

“Hey, welcome! Leave your car here, and I’ll take care of it,” he said, and escorted me up a curving boardwalk to the hotel. When I mentioned I’d had a tough time reaching the hotel, he nodded.

“Eh, oui,” he said. “The Costes are very discreet people, and they want the hotel to be a surprise.”

The hotel, a new-built, all-white, Cubist-style, two-story building, is pure Costes. The staff have been carefully cast from the young and beautiful, the property has a major design pedigree: the Paris-based interior architects Buttazzoni, Imaad Rahmouni and François-Joseph Graf collaborated on it. Lounge music thumps from speakers in the restaurant, and the wooden deck overlooking a heated saltwater pool and a neatly groomed stretch of beach is furnished with sun loungers, white umbrellas and a bar-restaurant. Checking in, I noticed one big difference in the Costes’ Languedoc hospitality style: Unlike the hauteur that characterizes the service in many of their Paris establishments, the staff were welcoming and friendly.

Rooms, most of which have sea-views and private terraces or balconies, come with appealingly minimalist beach-shack décor (they start at 300 euros a night, or about $336). The restaurant has almost exactly the same basic — and expensive, menu as the brothers’ several dozen restaurants and brasseries in Paris — dishes like steamed shrimp dim sum or tuna and avocado tartare, and in a rare feint at local gastronomy, a stew of bull’s meat eaten in the adjacent Camargue and grilled cuttlefish from the neighboring port of Grau-le-Roi.

In the bar before dinner, the crowd was chatting about their winter vacations in Saint Barth’s and Thailand. I couldn’t help but wonder what the pampered clientele would find to do if they decided to step outside this carefully created bubble of luxury.

Outside the bubble

So after an excellent buffet breakfast at the Plage Palace, I set out to discover the appeal of the Languedoc coastline as a destination, whatever your travel budget might be. Driving 12 miles east, I passed through La Grande Motte, and arrived at Aigues Mortes, a walled medieval town surrounded by marshes and salt pans. In 1240, King Louis IX ordained the construction of a port in what was then a village of fishermen and salt harvesters that would serve as the embarkation point for French troops heading off to the Crusades in the Holy Land. His son Philip III ordered the construction of stone ramparts to completely encircle the town, and today these formidable fortifications are a French national historic monument.

I enjoyed the briny breezes and sweeping views over the town, the surrounding marshes and the vivid pink salt pans during a leisurely hourlong ramble around the ramparts with just the occasional noisy sea gull overhead to keep me company.

From Aigues Mortes. I backtracked a few miles to the pretty little seaside town of Le Grau-du-Roi, the second largest French fishing port on the Mediterranean. At Le Vivier, a restaurant in the old town, I tucked into a 24-euro, prix fixe lunch of locally caught shrimp cooked in a crust of salt and rouille Gaulenne, a succulent casserole of stewed octopus and potatoes served with lashings of garlic mayonnaise, a local specialty. I enjoyed this very good value meal with a glass of white Picpoul de Pinet, a Languedoc white.

After lunch, tipped off by a friend in Paris, I spent a lazy afternoon at the magnificent Plage de L’Espiguette, a six-mile long strand of dunes and white sand just outside Le-Grau-le-Roi. As a New Englander who habitually went to the beach with nothing more than a towel and a good book, I preferred this vast empty wild shoreline to the carefully groomed beach at the Plage Palace.

I arrived at the recently renovated and very popular 10-room Hotel Les Coquilles in Palavas-les-Flots at the end of the day, where the owners were exceptionally welcoming and friendly (they also own La Cave d’Aristide, a very good wine store on the premises). They also volunteered a very good recommendation for dinner, Le Saint Georges, where I had an excellent meal of shrimp tartare with fava beans and rhubarb vinaigrette and grilled sea bream, squid, zucchini and artichokes.

With spacious rooms priced at about 90 euros a night, Les Coquilles highlighted the appeal of being in a place mostly overlooked by foreigners.

Forty minutes west of Palavas-les-Flots, the brawny old port town of Sète was built in 1666 to encourage commerce on the Canal des Deux Mers, which is today better known as the Canal du Midi. The port boomed after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830.

The outskirts of Sète are gritty and industrial, but the heart of the city, which is built on a series of canals, has a sepia-toned, 19th-century charm exemplified by Le Grand Hotel, a delightful three-star property with great canal views and an atmospheric interior atrium with wrought-iron balconies. Sète, long well-known for its tieilles — pastry tarts stuffed with a ragout of octopus in a spicy tomato sauce — has recently become a great food town, too. I had a quick but delicious lunch of deep-fried merlan (whiting) and panisses (fried chickpea-flour beignets) at Fritto, a French style fish-and-chips shop, and rushed off to the Quai de la Resistance to catch the jousting on the canal.

The first jousting tournament in Sète took place on July 29, 1666 to celebrate construction of the port. Originally, tournaments opposed young bachelors in a blue boat to married men in a red one. Before the tournament starts the jousters parade with an oboist and a drummer playing the traditional jousting tune. Then the battle begins, with the jousters using their spears to try and make their opponents fall into the canal. In Sète, jousting takes place from June to early September, and the tournament schedule is available from the tourist office.

A friendly Dutch couple with whom I fell into conversation during the spectacle told me they come to see the jousting every year at the beginning of their annual beach holiday, and then invited me to join them for dinner at the Michelin one-star The Marcel, where the talented young chef Fabien Fages took over the kitchen last year. Over an excellent meal of marinated Mediterranean tuna with crunchy vegetables in a tonnato sauce and red mullet in an anise-spiked court bouillon with chorizo oil, conversation flowed as easily as the white wine.

Oysters, wine caves and the option to bare it all

The following day, the drive from Sete to Marseillan along the Etang de Thau on a road shaded by plane trees was blissfully bucolic. I was on a mission to scarf down a dozen oysters at Le Saint Barth just outside of Marseillan. This simple water’s edge seafood shack is run by the Tarbouriech family, who farm the meaty, iodine-rich oysters that many consider the best in France at the foot of the wooden deck adjoining the restaurant.

After lunch, I took a guided tour of the Noilly Prat caves in Marseillan, where the Vermouth maker has been based since 1855. Noilly Prat is made from white grapes — Picpoul de Pinet and Clairette, grown in the vineyards that surround the town — and aside from the secret mixture of herbs and spices that season the dry full-bodied amber-colored wine, its character, I learned, comes from a two-step aging process. This interesting visit concluded with a tasting of the four vermouths they produce: Original French Dry Vermouth, Red Noilly Prat, Ambre Noilly Prat, and Extra Dry Noilly Prat, which is primarily produced for the cocktail-loving North American market.

Slightly pickled, I walked into the old town of Marseillan to the five-room B & B Rue Galilee, where I discovered one of the most delightful small hotels I’ve ever found in France. This old stone house with blue wooden shutters and boxes of red geraniums was meticulously renovated by the Swedish owner Janne Larsson. The generous Scandinavian style breakfast, including herring and house-smoked salmon, that was served the next morning was excellent, too.

Nine miles south of Marseillan, Le Cap d’Agde is the last major beach resort on this stretch of shore and was developed in the 1960s by architect Jean Le Couteur in one of France’s largest state-run development schemes. It also has one of the country’s largest nudist colonies.

Deciding to spare the bared my rather portly presence, I regretfully ended my trip and hopped a TGV train home to Paris in nearby Beziers.

As the train pulled out of the station, I thought of my new Dutch friends. During our dinner, I’d asked them why they’re so loyal to the Languedoc.

“It’s cheap, pretty and unpretentious,” said Esmee, a doctor in Rotterdam. “Good beaches, but lots of history, too.”

“The food and wine are excellent, too” added her architect husband Carel.

I agreed with them both.

The post France’s Chicest Hotel Family Has Come to Languedoc. Is That a Good Thing? appeared first on Tripstations.

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[kim26chiu]

The London Review of Books Is Required Reading

People often ask me how they can follow my career path into urbanism writing. I generally discourage that. But for those who are interested, it involves reading – lots and lots and reading. And not just on urbanism but not a wide range of topics. I can only make many of the connections I do because I’m tapped in a wide of range of things, most of which are like the parts of the iceberg underwater you never see.

As it happens, some folks also ask me what they should read or what I read.

One thing of course is to sign up for my exclusive monthly newsletter, where I include my hand-selected list of some of the best links I read that month.

One periodical that most people don’t read but should is the London Review of Books. Virtually all newspapers and periodicals are fungible at some level. They cover the same stories with the same slants and frames. But the London Review of Books is different.

The LRB does review books, but is unlike a typical book review. They often get the best or one of the best people in the world on the subject at hand to write the review. This sometimes backfires because of a de facto rivalry with the book author. But generally it works great. They also provide such in-depth summaries of the books in question that your rarely need to actually read them, non-fiction at least. This is important because realistically nobody can come close to reading all the books out there.

They also have longform essays on a wide range of other topics that bring perspectives you are unlikely to get elsewhere. Some of their articles are directly relevant to urbanism, such as this James Meek piece about a Cadbury factory that relocated from England to Poland.

The online version is subscriber only, but a number of articles are generally available for free. I want to share a selection of these free pieces from the current issue to give you a flavor of what you’ll get.

Malise Ruthven takes a look inside Saudi Arabia, its royal family, and its wealth.

The faith tradition that holds the Saudi system together – for now – is Wahhabi Islam, the iconoclastic creed of the 18th-century Islamic reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, whose pact with the Al Saud family led to the creation of the modern kingdom in 1932. Al-Wahhab’s stormtroopers, the Ikhwan, enabled Ibn Saud’s rise to power. They killed unarmed villagers regarded as apostates, thought nothing of slaughtering women and children, and routinely slit the throats of male captives. Contemporary accounts describe the horrors afflicted on the city of Taif in 1924, when the Ikhwan murdered hundreds of civilians, in a massacre similar to the violence committed by Islamic State or al-Qaida today. As an Arab witness wrote, Ibn Saud’s forces ‘normally give no quarter, sparing neither boys nor old men, veritable messengers of death from whose grasp no one escapes’. Some 400,000 people are reported to have been massacred by the Ikhwan during the early days of the Saudi state. The Wahhabi understanding of tawhid, the theology of monotheism or divine unicity, which forbids the veneration of any person or object other than Allah, is still used today to justify the ban on all forms of non-Muslim public worship in the kingdom, as well as the confiscation of non-Wahhabi textual sources such as Quranic commentaries brought in by pilgrims from South Asia, who have had them removed by the religious police while attending the Hajj. But tawhid, a theology that claims to be fundamentally opposed to polytheism, has an unexpected consequence. It mines the Islamic discourse to sustain a totalitarian outlook whose actual purpose is the preservation and enrichment of the tribal dynasty that owns and governs this enormous country in its exclusive interest.

Novelist Colm Tóibín takes a brief look at Barcelona, Joan Miró, Las Ramblas, terrorism, and tourism.

At that time the Ramblas was still the place where locals strolled in the evening. It had begun as a small stream whose channel was used in the dry season as a roadway. In the 18th century the stream was diverted and the Ramblas became a place to walk, with plane trees offering shelter. It is about the width of a four-lane street, with kiosks selling newspapers, flowers and (these days) ice cream, and some outdoor tables for bars, with two narrow lanes on either side, like an afterthought, for traffic. Although the pedestrian section is slightly raised, there is no real barrier between the lanes for cars and the boulevard for walkers.

Miró’s tiles were put down in an almost-circle at Plaça d’Os, just above the Liceu Opera House, near the Boqueria Market. Miró loved the idea that people would actually walk on his tiles, made in his customary colours – blue, yellow, red, black – and using some of his customary iconography. This was the first sign of a new spirit in Barcelona, which would use culture, civic pride and the idea of vivid street life to reimagine the city, giving rise, in turn, to the development of mass tourism.

Amia Srinivasan takes a fascinating and creepy look at octopuses.

Octopuses do not have any stable colour or texture, changing at will to match their surroundings: a camouflaged octopus can be invisible from just a few feet away. Like humans, they have centralised nervous systems, but in their case there is no clear distinction between brain and body. An octopus’s neurons are dispersed throughout its body, and two-thirds of them are in its arms: each arm can act intelligently on its own, grasping, manipulating and hunting. (Octopuses have arms, not tentacles: tentacles have suckers only at their tips. Squid and cuttlefish have a combination of arms and tentacles.) In evolutionary terms, the intelligence of octopuses is an anomaly. The last common ancestor between octopuses on the one hand, and humans and other intelligent animals (monkeys, dolphins, dogs, crows) on the other, was probably a primitive, blind worm-like creature that existed six hundred million years ago. Other creatures that are so evolutionarily distant from humans – lobsters, snails, slugs, clams – rate pretty low on the cognitive scale. But octopuses – and to some extent their cephalopod cousins, cuttlefish and squid – frustrate the neat evolutionary division between clever vertebrates and simple-minded invertebrates. They are sophisticated problem solvers; they learn, and can use tools; and they show a capacity for mimicry, deception and, some think, humour. Just how refined their abilities are is a matter of scientific debate: their very strangeness makes octopuses hard to study. Their intelligence is like ours, and utterly unlike ours. Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.

The LRB often takes a look at parochial topics like some king from way back in the day, or some debate in contemporary London, that may or may not be of interest to you. If not, you can easily skip them. (As with the New Yorker, it’s difficult to keep up with the LRB, even though the latter is deceptively thin and only comes out every 2-3 weeks. So some skipping is generally needed).

Here’s one of those British pieces, a look at the life of Prince Charles.

At the age of 23 Prince Charles embarked with no great enthusiasm on a six-week training course at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. The course had been reduced from the usual three months for him, but it was long enough for Charles to realise that seafaring was yet another area in which he and his father had nothing in common. Prince Philip had a distinguished naval career. His son struggled with navigation, which he found confusing, and he didn’t much like the rough and tumble of life onboard ship. One exercise involved performing an ‘underwater escape from a submarine’: a not inapt image for a life spent trapped in a role he didn’t choose doing things he doesn’t like for people who don’t much appreciate them. That at least has often been his own view. He has made no secret of his difficulties or of the fact that his childhood was unhappy in many ways. An awkward boy who didn’t take after either his bluff father or his pragmatic, dutiful but distant mother, by the age of eight he was already worried about doing the right thing. Once, at lunch with the Mountbattens, Edwina Mountbatten explained to him that he shouldn’t take the stalks out of his strawberries because he could pick them up by the stems and dip them in the sugar. His cousin Pamela Hicks noticed a few minutes later that ‘the poor child was trying to put all the stems back on. That was so sad.’ ‘Sad’ is a word that has often been applied to the Prince of Wales, with every shade of intonation from empathy to contempt. It recurs here in books which are interesting more for what they reveal about the continuing narrative of the royal family and its symbiotic relationship with the media than for anything new in the way of facts.

Not everything is perfect, of course. The LRB has some definite biases that render their takes on various issues suspect. Israel-Palestine is one of them. You’ll quickly find out most of the rest yourself and adjust accordingly. (Hint: one of them is illustrated in the Barcelona piece).

However, I find the LRB consistently the best and most illuminating periodical I read. And no, they didn’t pay me to say this. In fact, I pay them to subscribe. If you want one reading suggestion from me that you’re not likely to get from others, it’s the London Review of Books.

  from Aaron M. Renn http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/09/01/the-london-review-of-books-is-required-reading/

[barb31clem]

The London Review of Books Is Required Reading

People often ask me how they can follow my career path into urbanism writing. I generally discourage that. But for those who are interested, it involves reading – lots and lots and reading. And not just on urbanism but not a wide range of topics. I can only make many of the connections I do because I’m tapped in a wide of range of things, most of which are like the parts of the iceberg underwater you never see.

As it happens, some folks also ask me what they should read or what I read.

One thing of course is to sign up for my exclusive monthly newsletter, where I include my hand-selected list of some of the best links I read that month.

One periodical that most people don’t read but should is the London Review of Books. Virtually all newspapers and periodicals are fungible at some level. They cover the same stories with the same slants and frames. But the London Review of Books is different.

The LRB does review books, but is unlike a typical book review. They often get the best or one of the best people in the world on the subject at hand to write the review. This sometimes backfires because of a de facto rivalry with the book author. But generally it works great. They also provide such in-depth summaries of the books in question that your rarely need to actually read them, non-fiction at least. This is important because realistically nobody can come close to reading all the books out there.

They also have longform essays on a wide range of other topics that bring perspectives you are unlikely to get elsewhere. Some of their articles are directly relevant to urbanism, such as this James Meek piece about a Cadbury factory that relocated from England to Poland.

The online version is subscriber only, but a number of articles are generally available for free. I want to share a selection of these free pieces from the current issue to give you a flavor of what you’ll get.

Malise Ruthven takes a look inside Saudi Arabia, its royal family, and its wealth.

The faith tradition that holds the Saudi system together – for now – is Wahhabi Islam, the iconoclastic creed of the 18th-century Islamic reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, whose pact with the Al Saud family led to the creation of the modern kingdom in 1932. Al-Wahhab’s stormtroopers, the Ikhwan, enabled Ibn Saud’s rise to power. They killed unarmed villagers regarded as apostates, thought nothing of slaughtering women and children, and routinely slit the throats of male captives. Contemporary accounts describe the horrors afflicted on the city of Taif in 1924, when the Ikhwan murdered hundreds of civilians, in a massacre similar to the violence committed by Islamic State or al-Qaida today. As an Arab witness wrote, Ibn Saud’s forces ‘normally give no quarter, sparing neither boys nor old men, veritable messengers of death from whose grasp no one escapes’. Some 400,000 people are reported to have been massacred by the Ikhwan during the early days of the Saudi state. The Wahhabi understanding of tawhid, the theology of monotheism or divine unicity, which forbids the veneration of any person or object other than Allah, is still used today to justify the ban on all forms of non-Muslim public worship in the kingdom, as well as the confiscation of non-Wahhabi textual sources such as Quranic commentaries brought in by pilgrims from South Asia, who have had them removed by the religious police while attending the Hajj. But tawhid, a theology that claims to be fundamentally opposed to polytheism, has an unexpected consequence. It mines the Islamic discourse to sustain a totalitarian outlook whose actual purpose is the preservation and enrichment of the tribal dynasty that owns and governs this enormous country in its exclusive interest.

Novelist Colm Tóibín takes a brief look at Barcelona, Joan Miró, Las Ramblas, terrorism, and tourism.

At that time the Ramblas was still the place where locals strolled in the evening. It had begun as a small stream whose channel was used in the dry season as a roadway. In the 18th century the stream was diverted and the Ramblas became a place to walk, with plane trees offering shelter. It is about the width of a four-lane street, with kiosks selling newspapers, flowers and (these days) ice cream, and some outdoor tables for bars, with two narrow lanes on either side, like an afterthought, for traffic. Although the pedestrian section is slightly raised, there is no real barrier between the lanes for cars and the boulevard for walkers.

Miró’s tiles were put down in an almost-circle at Plaça d’Os, just above the Liceu Opera House, near the Boqueria Market. Miró loved the idea that people would actually walk on his tiles, made in his customary colours – blue, yellow, red, black – and using some of his customary iconography. This was the first sign of a new spirit in Barcelona, which would use culture, civic pride and the idea of vivid street life to reimagine the city, giving rise, in turn, to the development of mass tourism.

Amia Srinivasan takes a fascinating and creepy look at octopuses.

Octopuses do not have any stable colour or texture, changing at will to match their surroundings: a camouflaged octopus can be invisible from just a few feet away. Like humans, they have centralised nervous systems, but in their case there is no clear distinction between brain and body. An octopus’s neurons are dispersed throughout its body, and two-thirds of them are in its arms: each arm can act intelligently on its own, grasping, manipulating and hunting. (Octopuses have arms, not tentacles: tentacles have suckers only at their tips. Squid and cuttlefish have a combination of arms and tentacles.) In evolutionary terms, the intelligence of octopuses is an anomaly. The last common ancestor between octopuses on the one hand, and humans and other intelligent animals (monkeys, dolphins, dogs, crows) on the other, was probably a primitive, blind worm-like creature that existed six hundred million years ago. Other creatures that are so evolutionarily distant from humans – lobsters, snails, slugs, clams – rate pretty low on the cognitive scale. But octopuses – and to some extent their cephalopod cousins, cuttlefish and squid – frustrate the neat evolutionary division between clever vertebrates and simple-minded invertebrates. They are sophisticated problem solvers; they learn, and can use tools; and they show a capacity for mimicry, deception and, some think, humour. Just how refined their abilities are is a matter of scientific debate: their very strangeness makes octopuses hard to study. Their intelligence is like ours, and utterly unlike ours. Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.

The LRB often takes a look at parochial topics like some king from way back in the day, or some debate in contemporary London, that may or may not be of interest to you. If not, you can easily skip them. (As with the New Yorker, it’s difficult to keep up with the LRB, even though the latter is deceptively thin and only comes out every 2-3 weeks. So some skipping is generally needed).

Here’s one of those British pieces, a look at the life of Prince Charles.

At the age of 23 Prince Charles embarked with no great enthusiasm on a six-week training course at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. The course had been reduced from the usual three months for him, but it was long enough for Charles to realise that seafaring was yet another area in which he and his father had nothing in common. Prince Philip had a distinguished naval career. His son struggled with navigation, which he found confusing, and he didn’t much like the rough and tumble of life onboard ship. One exercise involved performing an ‘underwater escape from a submarine’: a not inapt image for a life spent trapped in a role he didn’t choose doing things he doesn’t like for people who don’t much appreciate them. That at least has often been his own view. He has made no secret of his difficulties or of the fact that his childhood was unhappy in many ways. An awkward boy who didn’t take after either his bluff father or his pragmatic, dutiful but distant mother, by the age of eight he was already worried about doing the right thing. Once, at lunch with the Mountbattens, Edwina Mountbatten explained to him that he shouldn’t take the stalks out of his strawberries because he could pick them up by the stems and dip them in the sugar. His cousin Pamela Hicks noticed a few minutes later that ‘the poor child was trying to put all the stems back on. That was so sad.’ ‘Sad’ is a word that has often been applied to the Prince of Wales, with every shade of intonation from empathy to contempt. It recurs here in books which are interesting more for what they reveal about the continuing narrative of the royal family and its symbiotic relationship with the media than for anything new in the way of facts.

Not everything is perfect, of course. The LRB has some definite biases that render their takes on various issues suspect. Israel-Palestine is one of them. You’ll quickly find out most of the rest yourself and adjust accordingly. (Hint: one of them is illustrated in the Barcelona piece).

However, I find the LRB consistently the best and most illuminating periodical I read. And no, they didn’t pay me to say this. In fact, I pay them to subscribe. If you want one reading suggestion from me that you’re not likely to get from others, it’s the London Review of Books.

  from Aaron M. Renn http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/09/01/the-london-review-of-books-is-required-reading/

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"Ow... what the..." Octavia woke up, a bit weak and confused

"AHH-!" Atarime woke up scared "My face is itchy... Why my face is itch-? Oh..." Atarime took off the sand she had on her face

"Atarime!" Philip hugged Atarime "I'm so happy that you are safe!"

"Atarime! You're okay! I-i thought you wouldn't come back!" Octavia also hug Atarime

"Dad! Tavi!" Atarime corresponded to the hugs "I'm so sorry... I couldn't keep the boat and now we're stuck here!"

"No no! It's okay! You did everything you could... the important thing is that we survived" Philip exclaimed

"Y-yeah... i think so..." Atarime said

"So... Where are we?" Octavia asked

"It looks like a type of island..." Atarime replied

"but which?"

"I have no idea... I've never seen this island on the maps..." Atarime exclaimed

"I don't think we can return... the boat was destroyed... we will have to stay here for a while..." Philip said

"Hey! We can explore the island!" Atarime suggested while taking her backpack

"A-are you sure? We don't even know if this place is safe!" Octavia said

"Then we will have to go exploring! We may find some place to take refuge!" Atarime exclaimed while still walking

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A heavy rain, with lightning and strong winds passed the ocean... exactly where  boat where Atarime, Octavia and Philip traveled

"The storm is very strong!" Atarime exclaimed while taking a rope in case of an emergency and a backpack full of supplies

"We are very far from the port of Calamari County! We will not get there with the storm!" Octavia exclaimed

the huge waves made the boat wobble easily, which caused Octavia fall on one of the boat's edges

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!" Octavia fell from one of the edges of the boat

"OCTAVIA!" Atarime scream

Philip quickly left the boat's steering wheel of the boat to go help Octavia, Atarime quickly took the boat's steering wheel

Philip managed to take Octavia's arm in time before she fell into the sea

"Atarime! Try to keep the boat's balance! Or we will all end up under the sea!" Philip told Atarime while helping Octavia to climb

"I-I'M TRYING!" Atarime tried to keep the boat's balance but due to the waves it was impossible

suddenly thunder fell very close to the boat causing Philip and Octavia to fall into the sea

"DAD! OCTAVIA!" Seeing that, Atarime lost the boat's balance causing it to move in the opposite direction until finally...

the boat turned upside down with her up with a gigantic wave

"ATARIME!" Philip tried to go find Atarime, there was no sign of her... a wave pushed them away from the boat

it could only be seen that the boat had been destroyed falling deep into the ocean

"NO! ATARIME!" Octavia tried to swim back but a huge wave fell above her and Philip...

...

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(Headcanon)

(The name of Atarime is actually a combination of the names "Amelia" and "Stellaria")

(This is because the night that Atarime born, Comet and Philip (Atarime's parents) hadn't decided on a name, Comet wanted to name her "Amelia" while Philip wanted to name her "Stellaria" in honor to his mother)

(Until a few moments ago Comet said "Why don't we call her "Atarime"? It's a combination of both names!" Philip accepted the idea and from there came the name of Atarime)

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(The Cuttlefish Family!)

(There are still more members, but soon they will be added!)

(Request: @mayifox999)

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Explanation of white ink (or healing ink) "Part 1/2"

"What is white ink?"

White ink (as seen in the image) is a special ink that can heal any wound, illness or poisoning almost immediately depending on the severity of the injury or illness

This ink can also cure sanitization, also being a special ink, sanitization doesn't work with this ink so it makes the person who has this ink immune to sanitization

Also, white ink can cure the effects of Black ink (Explanation in "Part 2")

"How is this ink obtained?"

Unfortunately, only Cuttlefishes can have this ink, there is a very small chance that another species (Inkling or Octarian) may inherit this ink if they have any Cuttlefish descendants who have had this ink

Very few Cuttlefishes are not born with this ink, some are born with normal ink but this is normally orange or silver and not white

(Example of some characters that are Cuttlefishes and don't have the white ink: Stella, Angelica, Mason, Philip) (More explanation about Cuttlefishes and white ink in "Part 2")

"Why is this ink not seen in Turf wars?"

As this ink is impossible to obtain and cannot be used for Turf wars, it's replaced by normal ink mixed with gray ink and other inks to form a color similar to white

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(Here is the first part of the explanation of the White ink! I still need to publish part two explaining the White ink and the Cuttlefishes!)

(I've been working on this explanation for months and finally here's part 1!)

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(I also made a new design of Atarime in her Cuttlefish form)

(I will also change the design of Stella, Philip and Mason)