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macgyvermedical · 6 years ago

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“Let’s Get to it, Nature Boy” a “Lidar+Rogues+Duty” Medical Review

A lot of times I sit down to write these reviews and think something like “wow, there’s a lot to unpack here.” Fortunately for this review, the only thing I thought was that somewhere an NSA agent is definitely going to have to read this because of all the alarming keywords. Hope they like clavicles.

Let’s get to it. Spoilers ahead.

The main story centers around Mac and Desi going on a mission to recover the body of LCDR Robert Reese, an old friend of Mac’s who was presumed dead when his plane crashed in an unauthorized part of Azerbaijan. While there they find that Reese is still alive, though injured, and that a group of American CIA operatives has found a cache of white phosphorus-based chemical weapons which they intend to sell on the black market. Mac and Desi manage to subdue the operatives using homemade tranq darts, prevent the white phosphorus from ending up in the wrong hands, and get Reese back home safely.

The main medical situations in the episode include Mac’s diagnosis and field treatment for Reese’s fractured clavicle, the potential use of white phosphorus as a chemical weapon, and the morphine darts.

A little spoiler for you, the morphine darts are what I’m mad about this week.

The Clavicle:

But let’s start with that clavicle break. The clavicle is the thin bone that makes up the front part of the shoulder, attaching at the shoulder joint and sternum. A broken clavicle is a pretty common sports injury and occurs when the patient falls either directly on the outside of the shoulder, or falls on their hand or forearm and the force travels upward. Due to how close the bone is to the surface, if the bone segments are displaced, deformity from the break is often visible or palpable (feel-able).

^^The bump is where one of the ends of the bone segments pushed over the other. Euagh.

It’s entirely possible that Reese fell onto his shoulder or forearm when he detached his seat from the parachute, so this (or anything consistent with a fall) is a pretty expected injury. While most remote first aid guides would tell you to sling the arm or wrist (slinging the wrist only takes pressure off the shoulder and reduces pain), the splint Mac makes for it- a version of a “figure eight” splint- is also a real way of splinting a clavicle fracture. The figure eight splint would work much the same way it does in the episode, pulling the outer (distal) part of the clavicle up and back and putting/keeping it in a reasonable place to heal. It would also have the advantage over a simple sling of leaving the affected arm free and somewhat usable (though still not weight-bearing)- something that would be important in a remote and hostile environment.

The thing I’ll nitpick about this scene is the fact that Mac seems to know immediately without looking that Reese has a clavicle fracture, where the break is, and the best way to treat it. Reese was holding his arm awkwardly, looked like he was in pain, reported that he was banged up, and Mac knew that he’d recently fallen out of a tree. Together those would still only point to a shoulder injury, without specifics. Mac would still have to look at it (like, skin level look at it) and probably touch it to know it was a clavicle fracture (and not, say, a dislocation or other fracture) before splinting it.

I understand a lack of assessment was a decision likely made for time’s sake, but assessment is a really, really important part of the process- and it would have made a significant difference in treatment. A figure-eight splint is only helpful when the break is in the middle or closer (proximal) third of the bone, because the strap has to go somewhere that’s not directly over the break. A day after the injury, where they would have been in the episode, there might have been significant swelling and bruising which might make it difficult to know where the break is, and if that figure eight splint would be appropriate.

I probably would have gone with the sling either way, but I see why they did the figure eight (both from a cool TV thing(TM) standpoint and for mobility). Its the lack of assessment that’s the problem, not the intervention for once.

White Phosphorus:

I’m sure you all know the feel when your primary (academic) fascinations in life are toxicology and chemical weapons, so you’re constantly paranoid that you’re one google search or tumblr post away from a SWAT team showing up at your apartment.

About 3 years ago I did a lot of internet research on white phosphorus in order to write a Criminal Minds tag that followed up an episode where a character was tortured with white phosphorus salve (please excuse the minor errors in hospital realism, I had not yet graduated nursing school when I wrote it), and I was really excited that this episode might give me reason to talk about what I learned.

I guess it didn’t exactly, but I’m going to talk about it anyway.

White Phosphorus (known from here on out at WP) is a waxy, yellowish substance useful as a chemical weapon because of its versatility and plethora of uses other than terrorism. It doesn’t occur naturally, but is created and used extensively in industry as a necessary component in the production of fertilizer, cleaning chemicals, munitions, (illegal) fireworks, older rat and cockroach poisons, and certain food additives. Most common exposures are due to industrial spills, not terrorism.

WP can contaminate food, water, and soil as particles, or air as smoke. Eating or drinking contaminated food or water can cause severe gastrointestinal distress and fatal damage to the kidneys, liver, and heart in doses of about 50-100mg. Breathing the smoke can cause airway irritation and coughing, but is rarely if ever fatal at typical concentrations. Exposure to intact skin is also usually not thought to cause lasting damage, though as you’ll see in the next paragraph, that doesn’t happen often.

Another way WP can enter the body, and probably more relevant in the context of its use as a chemical weapon, is through burn wounds. WP tends to burn or explode on contact with any air above 86F (30C), and can cause extensive partial and full-thickness burns. The burns may have a characteristic yellow wound bed, and can pose a hazard to both the patient and rescuers due to the fact that unspent WP particles in the wounds can spontaneously re-ignite. Wounds must be kept damp until the patient is decontaminated to avoid re-ignition of the particles, and the careful use of copper sulfate or silver nitrate as an antidote can make the decontamination process a lot safer and easier.

Note that I don’t recommend googling this unless you have an exceptionally high tolerance for human suffering.

Instead, enjoy these curated pictures:

Picture “A” is of the yellow wound beds, and “B” is all the unspent WP glowing under a UV light.

The WP passes readily through the burn-damaged tissue, and if the patient survives the burns themselves, can still cause fatal damage to the kidneys, liver, and heart.

Before we move on, I would like to point out one last particularly horrifying aspect of WP poisoning: It does not kill quickly. Initial symptoms of severe gastrointestinal distress may last up to 8 hours, after which a latent period similar to the kind seen in radiation poisoning lasts for about 3 days. Organ failure then develops, which if severe, usually results in death unless dialysis and a liver transplant can happen fast enough.

Tying this back in, you can see why the team didn’t want this getting into the wrong hands.

Morphine Darts

So now we’re finally here at the fun part. And by fun I mean... well, poorly portrayed?

Because honestly? Morphine could take these guys out, or at least make it difficult for them to fight, which would accomplish the goal of leveling the field a little. The problems in this scene lie, as they usually do in TV, in:

The route of administration-

Repeat after me, kids: If you are chucking a needle at someone, you’re hoping against hope to hit a muscle. Did I say “neck needle” anywhere in that sentence? Good. You should know how I feel about them by now.

I know they were going for the needle to have hit the exterior jugular, delivering the dose of morphine IV and therefore making it reasonable that the person could be quickly subdued afterwards without alerting his friends to the guy running around chucking needles at people. To give you an indication of how difficult it would be to do this, however, placing a 18g IV catheter into the exterior jugular (placing an “EJ”) is something RNs are not allowed to do in hospitals because there’s too much room for error. No one, not even MacGyver, could reliably throw something 20 ft and hit the EJ perfectly.

Plus, there’s a lot of really important things in your neck that you don’t want to just forcefully stick needles in randomly. While insulin needles are very small, it would still be safer and more effective and reliable to stick them in large muscles like the thigh or butt, which can also take considerably higher volumes of medication without injury.

The dose-

The validity of the needle chucking contraption notwithstanding, the needles they use in the scene are U100 insulin needles (not exclusive to insulin, that’s just what they’re called), meaning if you filled the entire syringe, the total volume would be only 1ml. Morphine comes in IV concentrations up to 15mg/ml. The most filled syringe I saw in this whole scene was to about the 0.15ml mark, so even assuming they used the frankly ridiculously high concentration of 15mg/ml, that would only be about 2.25mg/dose.

I say “only” because the starting dose of morphine for acute pain clocks in at around 4mg for otherwise healthy people. How much of an impact morphine has has a lot to do with size and tolerance, too. Some of the antagonists in this scene were big enough they probably wouldn’t have been knocked off balance by (or possibly even felt) 2.25mg, let alone felt “10 shots of vodka” as the scene suggests. At the peak of effectiveness, it might have given Desi a slight advantage in a fight, but wouldn’t have taken anyone down.

The time to onset/peak-

The last thing about these I’ll say before I step off (never!) is about the onset time. The “onset” is the length of time it takes, on average, for a drug to begin working, and the “peak” is when it is most effective. This is different between drugs and routes. Morphine’s IV onset is rapid (and at the speed this would have been pushed, probably would have made the person briefly dizzy and nauseated), but it still takes about 20mins to “peak”, so assuming Mac *did* impossibly manage to sink an EJ from 20 feet away and there was a high enough dose to do something, anyone in this scene would still have had plenty of time to alert others or fight before they were incapacitated. The best thing throwing a needle at someone in this scene would do is provide some distraction while Desi takes them out manually.

More realistically, morphine injected into the muscle takes at least 10 minutes for onset and up to an hour to peak and doesn’t have as rough of side effects, meaning overall that no matter the dose, morphine is a really poor choice for a tranq dart (but admittedly, if its what you’ve got, its what you’ve got. Also who decided just leaving it lying out in a supply closet was a good idea? The fact that it hadn’t been stolen yet is a miracle in itself.).

R E F E R E N C E S

So there you have it. If you liked this and want to take a look at other MacGyver reviews I’ve done, you can find them here: Awl - X-Ray + Penny - Duct Tape + Jack - CD + Hoagie Foil - Guts + Fuel + Hope - Wilderness + Training + Survival - Father + Bride + Betrayal

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#MacGyver #review #whump reference #writing reference #white phosphorus #needles #tranq darts #onset/peak/duration

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starcitizenprivateer · 6 years ago

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Monthly Studio Report: May 2018

Welcome to Cloud Imperium Games’ Monthly Studio Report for May, bringing you insight into what all of our studios have been working on. This month, the team made updates to Alpha 3.1, and pushed forward on new systems, ships, and features for Alpha 3.2 and beyond. Work also progressed on various aspects of Squadron 42. With that said, let’s dig into the details.

Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES

VEHICLE FEATURES

The Vehicle Features Team’s primary focus this month was working on scanning for the mining feature and making improvements to turrets, both of which will appear in the Alpha 3.2 release. Regarding scanning, the team worked closely with VFX, UI, and other teams to develop the pinging, scanning, and blob work needed for the launch of this feature.

The team also completed the implementation of cameras on remote turrets that can be controlled by players, allowing them to focus their turret target on a ship to see its relevant status.

VEHICLE PIPELINE

The team, consisting of Vehicle Art, Systems Design, and Tech Art, developed vehicles for both Alpha 3.2 and subsequent releases. On the art side, the Anvil Hurricane completed its flight prep pass and has been handed off to the other vehicle disciplines for the 3.2 release. The Art Team has also wrapped up their pass on the Consolidated Outland Mustang Alpha and has begun working on its variants.

Work was also done on the greybox set-up for the Consolidated Outland Mustang Alpha, the RSI Constellation Phoenix, and the Anvil F8 Lightning.

Meanwhile, the Tech Art Team worked on their final flight prep passes, which included damage and landing gear compression on the Anvil Hurricane and the rest of the 3.2 ships: the Aegis Avenger, Aegis Eclipse, Origin 600i, and Vanduul Blade. Additionally, the team took a Tech Art pass in support of the MISC Prospector for the mining feature.

GAMEPLAY FEATURES

The Gameplay Features Team is working with the Spectrum and Backend teams to sync to the new Spectrum architecture, which will allow players to view and manage their contacts in the mobiGlas Comms app. The team is placing the chat feature directly into the mobiGlas, so players can communicate using both the visor chat and the mobiGlas Comms app. In addition to this, Group creation, destruction, rules, and interaction are now being implemented and improved as the team works alongside Turbulent. The ability to invite contacts to groups by selecting them in interaction mode is being added, as is identifying contacts by name in your visor.

NARRATIVE

A wide variety of tasks kept the Narrative Team busy in May. The month kicked off with a release of a Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy segment focused on the Oso System. They also recorded episodes for several upcoming systems. They wrote and released three new lore pieces, including part one of the Subscriber exclusive short story Hostile Negotiations. May’s issue of Jump Point focused on the Crusader Hercules Starlifter, game optimization, a Galactapedia entry on whiskey, and more. Two older Jump Point features also received wide release on the site, including the tragic tale of the Lost Squad and part one of the serialized story The Knowledge of Good and Evil.

The Squadron 42 Team spent part of the month working with Production to organize work on the remaining narrative tasks and started tackling a handful of set dressing documents. These kickoff documents focus on specific areas of the game and list ideas for props that could be used to sell particular story moments.

The team also wrote procedural text for new PU mission types. They drilled down into the specifics of some upcoming locations, which included creating posters to be plastered around Lorville and other locations. They worked with other departments to organize and streamline game documentation essential to inter-office communication, and collaborated with the Community Team on Ciera Brun’s Journal of a Volunteer, which was featured on the Hercules Starlifter sales page.

CHARACTERS

The Character Art Team showcased their work on the Legacy Armor sets for both the Outlaws and Marines in an episode of Around the Verse (both of which will appear in Alpha 3.2).

A considerable amount of effort was put into multiple Squadron 42 characters along with new weapon concepts. The upcoming Mission Givers for PU outfits have made tremendous progress, as have the clothing collections for both Olisar and Hurston. The updated flight suit continues to be developed, and R&D on the pipeline for delivering character heads (including realistic hair for all characters) also received attention. And, as always, bugs were fixed for the Alpha 3.2 release.

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Austin

AUSTIN

DESIGN

The team put together features and fixes for Alpha 3.2 and pushed ahead on content for future releases. They refined the recipe system to prepare it for future implementation – early iterations will be simple, but will form the basis of a more complex system that allows players to get into the nuts and bolts of what makes items in the ‘verse tick.

Quantum Linking progressed nicely. Soon it will be synced with the Group System to allow for various interactions between local players and those in a party. Once done, groups can easily Quantum Jump to a shared destination together.

Spline jumps were added, which allow players to travel from one side of a celestial body to another. The team can adjust the parameters to ensure a smooth experience while still allowing for future iterations and tweaks by the Design Team.

With the animations of Battaglia and Klim added, focus has shifted to a pair of new mission givers. The team is also building out the Bartender character, with the goal of instilling a level of life and dynamic activity fitting of a real, hard-working mixologist.

BACKEND SERVICES

Feature creation and bug smashing kept Server Engineering busy in May. With the Persistence Cache being broken up and streamlined, several new features and services were created. Data Cache, Badge Service, GEID Broker, and Character Management Service were previously part of a larger Persistence Cache. They were broken out to allow for higher efficiency and scalability of the Backend Services, ensuring they work within the improved and more efficient Diffusion Service Architecture. The Generic Cache service can now be used by any other service to store data and contain persistence. The Persistence Item Cache grants game items for online players, and will organize and manage the associations of items between each other and provide optimized queries.

The team and Turbulent continue to modify the Gateway Service to support the bridge to Spectrum. This work ensures that Spectrum and Services won’t have trouble when Spectrum becomes integrated into the game. Work was also completed on creating a link from CMake generated services into WAF. Now, developers don’t need CMake to use services and can automate the process of building services using WAF for other developers to quickly integrate with their workflow.

ANIMATION

The PU Animation Team finished their previous set of Mission Givers and NPCs and handed them over to Design for implementation. A new set of Mission Givers is now being worked on, and research was done on the Bartender’s animations to bring as much life to this NPC as possible. They also collaborated with other teams to get the Vanduul fully functional and ready for motion capture.

The Ship Animation Team continued adding a modular system for entering and exiting seats and turrets. By breaking up the existing animations into sequences, the character can use any of the enter/exit templates to interact with any cockpit type. For example, there can now be an animation that uses the Aegis Gladius enter animation, but then has the player grab a dual-stick control scheme. Previously, the team was limited to only using the Gladius enter animation for cockpits that used one specific configuration. They can now use thousands of different combinations, granting more flexibility when creating new ships.

The Ship Animation Team focused on completing the new ships for the 3.2 release. They created new animations for the Origin 600i and the refactored Aegis Avenger, as well as the Aegis Eclipse, Anvil Hurricane, and the Vanduul Blade. Plus, they’ve been fixing various bugs for the 3.2 release. They’re very excited about the improvements made to the ship pipeline and are looking forward to the opportunities that it provides.

ART

Work continues with high polygon and flight-prep modeling of the Constellation Phoenix. In the last few weeks, the team focused on the exterior of the ship, getting it fully fleshed out and finishing the damage setup and LODs. They have also been getting the Constellation Emerald setup and modeled. Constellation variants share most of their parts with each other, but to accommodate the Emerald’s paint job, UV revisions of the original Constellation were required. Once the exterior is done, they will return to the interior to finish various parts such as the floor, guest quarters, and master bedrooms (and the all-important hot tub!).

The high poly and detail modeling phase is complete on the F8 Lightning, and the team have moved on to getting it flight-prep ready. The internal damage has been completed and work on LODs are next. Then they will concentrate on the last polish and efficiency pass before creating marketing material for the ship reveal.

OPERATIONS

On the Publishing side, QA wrapped up the last of the 3.1 incremental patches by testing fixes and changes to IFCS. In addition, they tested the new Launcher updates and monitored both PTU and Live to report any new issues to the devs.

After the devs wrapped up work on 3.1, QA focused on updating test documentation and processes in preparation for 3.2, continued verifying bug fixes, tested new tool updates, and trained new hires. As the month progressed, more 3.2 features came online for QA testing. These features included Quantum Travel improvements, new ship testing, Item Kiosk shopping, PMA/VMA improvements, and ship & weapon Power Allocation.

Leadership worked to better incorporate processes into the new development cycle. This includes dedicating testers to specific feature teams and having them create documentation and test cases. They have also been looking at new software to make testing more efficient as the game grows exponentially.

DevOps continued their work on the feature stream process and staging build system. Feature streams are a subset of the main development branches that allow the devs to maintain a tighter focus on specific features without their work interfering with others. DevOps was happy with the rollout, but it hasn’t been easy. The build system has grown so complex that minor updates and adjustments are risky, which is why they’re working closely with the Corp Tech team in Austin on a ‘staging’ build. This new environment will allow engineers to test changes in a safe location rather than apply them directly into the production environment.

The DevOps Publishing Team monitored the live service for stability and performance indicators, providing a constant flow of data to the dev teams. They also prepped the Evocoti and PTU servers for the next publishing cycle (which is right around the corner). The team provisioned more server capacity for all regions in anticipation of a very popular feature publish.

The Player Relations Team helped wrap up 3.1.4 this month, and have already started early preparations for 3.2 testing with the Evocati. The 3.1 publishes were the first of the quarterly testing cycle. It was a tremendous learning experience that will be used during further cycles.

The team was also proud to roll out over 80 articles to the new Knowledge Base – there have already been 25,000 visits in its first month. Players should check it out, as the team continues to add new ‘How To’ articles, patch notes, and live service notifications.

As always, Player Relations would like to remind and encourage everyone to use the Issue Council to help triage and rate bugs and functionality. The team uses this data to prioritize future updates. Plus, participation makes you eligible for earlier PTU waves.

Wilmslow & Derby

WILMSLOW & DERBY

ENGINEERING

The Actor Teams have been carrying on with the ‘pickup-and-carry’ work, now concentrating on reducing the animations required for the different combinations of item sizes, grip types, and player states. They did a rough calculation of all these combinations and it came out at roughly 1700 animations. However, with the sensible authoring of assets, combining animations in blend spaces, and layering up, the team should be able to get this down to under 100.

They’ve also been developing new animation time-warping technology using player knockdowns as their test case. The problem with something like a knockdown is that the time the character spends in the air varies based on the force and environment. Normally, you would play a looping animation, but this can look unnatural. This new method calculates the airtime and stretches a single animation to fill it. Used sparingly, it produces much better results, and the technique can also be used on other features like jumping.

The Social AI Team has got a test setup of a ‘usable’ now fully working with the new channels in Subsumption. A ‘use channel’ describes what you can do in a particular ‘usable’ – examples could be eat, drink, mend, and so on. This is a great milestone as the Subsumption setup simplifies how the designers create ‘usables’, whilst at the same time giving them much more flexibility.

The Vehicle Team has implemented the ability to under and overpower ship components, and hooked it into the vehicle’s MFD UI. For example, when you underpower your weapons, they fire slower or the projectiles have less energy. Similarly, your shields will be more effective if they have more power.

The Tools Team has been working on a new check-in request tool. As they get closer to a release, they lock down what does and what doesn’t go into the build to improve stability and reduce the risk of new bugs appearing. To help, they’ve been developing a new tool that can track all change requests and give a nice interface for the leads to be able to approve or reject changes. With the number of requests going into a build every day, the overhead of managing them was becoming very large. The hope is this new process will reduce the workload on the teams and production, as well as giving better visibility on what is and isn’t approved.

SHIP TEAM

The ships due for 3.2 have really come along with all the final polish and lighting work that’s gone into them this month. The Vanduul Blade has undergone a rework; mainly around the wings so that it can better accommodate weapons after it was decided the underslung position looked too ‘human’ and needed to be more aligned with the Vanduul aesthetic. It’s also had some extensive work done to the landing gear – previously the ship just rested on the wing tips, but with this change, the wing tips now deploy landing gear to accommodate compression under the weight of the ship. The team has continued to optimize the ship and make sure everything is done so they can switch focus to promo shots and trailers.

AUDIO

On the Audio Code side, the preload manager system was optimized to work asynchronously, so that the audio thread isn’t blocked when streaming audio assets. ‘Asynchronous caching’ was also addressed, which keeps audio events in memory after the game has finished with them. Thanks to this work, assets don’t need to be reloaded from the disk each time they’re needed, which will improve overall performance.

As well as bug fixing, debug info was added to the aforementioned preload manager. The music system was improved with a feature to add a further randomized recombination of tracks. The Audio Propagation and Room systems were extended to enable cheaper pressure lookups and allow for room and object-based reverb. Weapons 2.0 audio tech was worked on further, as were the IFCS 2.0 audio set-up and multithreading optimization. Finally, on the code side, the ATL build process was ported over to WAAPI to enable more incremental audio building, improving iteration times for everyone in the team.

In Dialogue, new content was delivered for Alpha 3.2 via an improved dialogue pipeline. Characters now have their vocal output processed in real-time through communication devices, via porting the audio and any local secondary sound and transmitting it much as one would find in the real world.

In Sound Design, the Scalpel sniper rifle underwent further work and is ready for final review. The FPS weapon system is ripe for refactoring and some work was done to improve quality and simplify the system. They also delivered sound design for the Gemini F55 LMG, the Klaus & Werner Demeco LMG, and the Associated Science & Development Distortion Repeater.

The shopping and mining kiosks were polished to increase responsiveness and synchronization. The mining mechanisms have been worked on extensively and are now ready for further implementation and iteration, with work on the fracture and tractor beams for the mining arm receiving a lot of attention. Hangars had some extra improvement work, and ambiance for the Lorville trash biome was prototyped.

On the ships front, the Origin 600i, Aegis Eclipse, Esperia Blade, and the Anvil Hurricane all had sound added for their thrusters, moving parts, and interiors. The conversion to IFCS 2.0 created a big project to bring everything in line with the modifications to that upstream system. Development of the ship-wide audio concept also continued, separating maneuvering and ‘cockpit feedback’ sounds from the thruster burn sounds, and adding more directionality towards rotation sounds. Room tones that react to ship handling and damage states were also added to the Constellation as a proof of concept. The new physics objects system had assets created to put it through its paces, which will give more behavioral fidelity across the game.

In Music, the Vanduul and Xi’an themes were pushed forward for Squadron 42. For the Persistent Universe, new music was created for derelict ship exploration (small, medium and large).

The UI Team primarily focused on feature work for the Item Kiosks, Mining, and QT Linking. The Item Kiosks wireframes were signed off and later implemented into Flash and hooked up on the code side. The team is now finalizing additional branding skins for the terminals alongside bug fixes on the code now that the QA Team have started testing it. The HUD design for mining was finalized and implemented too. The team is also working on a Kiosk terminal that allows players to sell the refined ore gained from mining. Finally, the QT Linking Flash work has been completed in the UK, with the code hookup for this being tackled by engineers in the LA studio.

In addition, work progressed on improving the UI Tech, with the relevant TDDs being written and a proof of concept being created for the building blocks system. Finally, the team supported the Art Team by providing a generic utilitarian branding sheet to be used within the upcoming Rest Stops among other areas.

ANIMATION

Animation tackled the implementation pass for the trained combat set of FPS AI combatants. This included enter and exits from cover as well as combat actions like peeks, reloads, blindfire, and reloads. A previs pass on the untrained combat set was also completed this month. The team took raw motion capture to compare it to the trained set, so combatants would feel distinct and stay true to their character.

The team also worked on improving the looting system and added assets to improve the general look and feel of picking up objects, boxes, and items in Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe. Work also continued on the weapon recoil improvements. As shown in the recent ATV, the team worked with design and code to develop the look and feel of all FPS weapons.

The team also made some important strides on the Vanduul animation, creating a behavior set to provide a visual guide on how they will move and operate in Squadron 42. Player locomotion sets have been updated to work with an entity-driven system to ensure that client and server animations are exactly the same. The team also made tweaks to some of the poses to allow for better blending between animations and minimize foot sliding.

VFX

This month has seen a similar pattern to last, with the team supporting the ongoing Mining and Scanning sprints. The effects for both are coming along at a rapid pace, improving almost daily – as evidenced by the various WIP footage seen in recent weeks.

Ship VFX received plenty of attention in May, including the luxurious Origin 600i. Work continued on weapons VFX, with visual improvements to legacy ballistic guns, as well as general fix-ups required since the conversion to weapons 2.0 was completed by the Game Code and Systems Design Teams.

Collaboration with the Graphics Team also continued, with spline emitter tech coming along nicely. This continues to open up new ideas, and is likely to prove useful in unexpected areas, such as in Quantum Travel.

GRAPHICS

The Graphics Team worked on multiple features this month, the main focus being mining, which required the expansion of the ship damage-map system to work on new types of assets. It also required completely new visuals to show the cracking and heating of rocks. This work also allowed the team to diagnose and fix some long-standing bugs that should lead to improved texture details.

The multi-resolution gas cloud work is complete, making it possible to combine several gas clouds together at different resolutions and scales. Memory, however, is still the limiting factor, so the team compressed the density fields to just 8 bits per voxel (down from 32 bits). However, the shadowing data is still too large and can’t be compressed as easily. Therefore, research has started on various forms of deep shadow maps that work in 2.5D to try and avoid the memory and performance issues associated with full 3D lighting data.

The foundations of the new multilayer shader system are finished and focus has shifted to adding visual features to the shaders. The first being a new clear coat shading model to achieve convincing paint and anodized metals – both important for high-tech materials. The next is a texture mode called height-variance blending which allows for realistic blending of natural materials (e.g. rock/sand/grass). It supports per-pixel-control of the blend and crucially works at any distance with no aliasing, which is obviously critical with the scale of the game.

Some other tasks included optimizations to the rendering in the editor, a holographic effect for use within Squadron 42, and improved temporal anti-aliasing stability.

ENVIRONMENT ART

The Environment Art Team started the final pass of the Common Element Utilitarian Hangars. The most critical aspect of this was the setup of the master material to give the artists a fully functional set of textures to pull from when taking the assets to final quality. Each piece used in the hangars will now go through its final art pass where, amongst other things, it will have its finished UVs, textures, custom normals, LODs, and physics proxies. There are lots of assets to get up to final quality, but when complete, the hangars will be considered finished from an Environment Art perspective.

Alongside this, work has been done to get future locations ready for production when the bulk of the Environment Team moves onto them later in the year.

Frankfurt

FRANKFURT

The QA Team continued daily maintenance of their numerous checklists as well as Subsumption, Editor, and Page Heap regression. Additionally, they took some time to be trained by the Engine Team to better understand how to interpret a callstack, which will ultimately lead to quicker and more reliable bug assignments.

A new quick smoke checklist for the client was setup to provide the Design Team with an overview for specific systems in the Persistent Universe, such as AI turrets and their functionality. With the new checklist in place, when asked for the current state of a system worked on exclusively in the DE office, QA will be able to provide information much faster.

QA has also been working closely with the Cinematics Team to provide specifically requested support and set up test levels for easier reproduction and a quicker turnaround. Testing on a potential Test Case Management Software candidate was also started to determine if this new software would allow QA to more efficiently manage and track our test cases and reports.

SYSTEM DESIGN

The team added mechanics for NPCs to use grenades to flush their opponents out of cover if they remain stationary for too long. Also, more work was done on improving the way the NPCs react to incoming grenades – they now use a navmesh to determine where they can safely escape to. Combat ships now know how to fight as proper gunships and not just fighters. For example, if a ship with numerous turrets engages you, it may fly around while its turrets track you down, as opposed to flying directly at you.

Regarding Vanduul combat, a lot of work was done to previz the way they fight. The emphasis was to make them as different from Humans as possible, so players have a completely different experience when fighting the Vanduul. The team is happy with the current results and are approaching full production for the Vanduul enemies. General population NPCs are also being experimented with as the team tests small, almost cinematic vignettes that the player can experience as they walk around major landing zones. Mining is also progressing as it approaches the bug fixing and polishing phase.

ENVIRONMENT ART

The Environment Art Team continued their push on Hurston, and the second group of ecosystems had their first pass completed. One of the newest ecosystems is the Wasteland Biome, which was first shown during CitizenCon 2017 and will cover a large part of the surface of Hurston. The team took the time to properly update the Wasteland biome to take advantage of the newest planet tech completed this year. The second biome that received proper attention this month was the Strip Mining ecosystem, which too can be found around Hurston. Lorville is also moving forward, with the artists spending their time focusing on the various areas the player will be able to visit, refining the shapes and architecture, adding materials, lights, and assets to further bring these areas to life.

TECH ART

The Tech Art Team continued to improve the deformation algorithms and asset pipeline of the v2 character customization system. Since the underlying tech for facial/head customization is working as intended now, the focus has shifted towards polishing the corresponding assets (head morph targets, head attachments such as hair and beards, etc.). R&D work on the technical foundations for body customization of both male and female characters has begun. Besides developing suitable deformation methods, the team also needs to determine what range of body shapes they can support without introducing clipping artifacts, and which body types they want to support from an artistic perspective. Time was also spent fixing existing bugs and improving the usability of the internal character editor, Character Tool.

For FPS weapons, they supported the Gemini Light Machine Gun, which is now ready for its final review and sign off.

They also completed Tech Animation work, such as implementing multiple animations into Mannequin for the Cinematics Team, improving the Playblast Tool to speed up reviewing, and improving the binder process to map animations from MotionBuilder onto our Maya rig.

They also completed Tech Animation work, such as implementing multiple animations into Mannequin for the Cinematics Team, improved the Playblast Tool to speed up the process of creating playblasts for reviewing purposes, and worked on improving the binder process to map animations from MotionBuilder onto our Maya rig.

The AI Team worked on adjusting the AI components with the new API to allow a safer construction in different threads – it’s a fundamental step towards fully achieving Object Container Streaming. The Actor code has always been very dependent on Lua (it’s not easy to make a thread safe with good performance), so all the AI components are now being moved to either be fully C++ or Dataforge components. They also worked on a few core functionalities for Subsumption. Subsumption Missions can now define Event Callbacks: missions can receive and send Subsumption events and logic can be written to be executed in association with specific events as described by designers. This functionality is part of the overall effort to support designers in creating more modular missions, and enforce correct communication between modules that can preserve thread safety and avoid a ‘spaghetti code-like’ logic. They also extended the functionality of supporting multiple Mission Objectives for each Mission module. They continued work on improving the way ‘usables’ are defined and executed: designers can now create behavior logic associated with the different use channels of each usable type. For example, assuming there is a usable bed that might expose the following use channels: ‘Sleep’, ‘Rest’, ‘WatchTV’, ‘SitOnBed’. When an NPC uses a ‘use channel’, it will effectively use some logic written by the designers in a similar way to Subsumption functions: this allows a more modular definition of the actions allowed when interacting with a usable maintaining the context of the behavior that is currently running.

Human combat is progressing with improvements in the grenade handling during combat, so fighters can now react to incoming grenades and try to duck to reduce the damage received by explosions. Vanduul AI progress is also continuing along in the prototype phase. For Ship AI, take-offs and landings have gone through a small refactor to allow AI behaviors to utilize designer placed splines to be more robust and deliver a more cinematic effect. Work was also completed on improving the validation of the navmesh during spawning: this allows designers to easily request spawning of characters in reachable areas where there are multiple navmeshes present.

LIGHTING

The Lighting and Enviroment teams have been working closely to add new whitebox-level lighting to the Lorville landing zone. The goal is to start blocking in a basic mood and ensure the entire location is lit consistently without areas that are unnaturally bright/dark while maintaining visibility along the critical player path. Alongside this, they’ve been continuing work with the Rest Stop’s modular lighting. They also recently received some updated holo-advertising assets from the Props Team in the UK and started to explore how these can drastically influence the lighting and mood wherever they are placed.

As the Hangars common element starts to move into the final art stage, they’ve been experimenting with some variations of lighting for each module, which have similar benefits and drawbacks to the Rest Stops modular system. Each module must be somewhat independently lit so that it looks consistent in every configuration. They also built a new test environment for the Character Team where they can balance skin and armor assets in a completely neutral lighting scene for greater consistency across our wide range of characters.

WEAPONS

The Weapons Team completed a full polish of the Gemini F55 Light Machine Gun, Klaus & Werner Demeco LMG, and Kastak Arms’ Scalpel sniper rifle in preparation for the 3.2 release.

LEVEL DESIGN

The PU Level Design team spent a large amount of time working on flagship landing zones, pushing the ways in which they use procedural technology for layouts. They’re currently looking into customizing the various entry points into Lorville, as well as adding content for the immediate areas around the city. Time was spent revisiting Area18 to revamp and fully integrate it into the universe, taking advantage of the new procedural tools in place.

CINEMATICS

The Cinematics Team worked with the Level Designers on newly created whitebox levels to implement scenes that had not yet been featured in the game. They were brought to an initial implementation stage called PreVis to give visibility on runtime length, coverage of space, as well as the environmental interaction each scene requires. The process is important so that scenes taking place on a traversal path from A to B feel properly paced when level designers lay down paths. It also gives everyone working on a level an early preview of the narrative in that specific level. Since Squadron 42 is a narrative-heavy game, getting that in as early as possible helps ensure everything will work as intended.

The Cinematic Animators have been doing R&D on a sophisticated bit of performance capture manipulation called ‘feather blending’. This technique allows drastic changes to performance capture if needed, so animators can decide from which bone to ‘feather in’ the original performance capture on top of. In addition, they can add an additional animation of him holding his pilot helmet in his left hand at his hip and dial in a certain LookAt-range, so he can look at the player. In total, that means combining 3-4 different separate clips of animation at any given time and blending them seamlessly for a convincing result. The team also went back to a level that has a large cinematic and started overhauling the planet setup and vistas to the latest workflow standards. That level also includes Squadron 42’s way of customizing your character, so work was completed on some assets that will be at the core of that process.

ENGINE

The Engine Team generally work on several areas at the same time and this month was no exception. One long term task that was completed was the refactoring of the Entity Component Scheduler. The system is responsible for managing the ‘update frequency’ of the game logic. As more and more features were added over time, its design degenerated, resulting in a hard to use system. With the refactoring complete, each aspect of the scheduler is now orthogonal to each other, making the code easier to maintain and extend. They also decoupled the ‘IN_RANGE’ and ‘IS_VISIBLE’ events from their component updates, which allows components to receive and react to those events without having their update logic depend on them. More features are planned to be added to the scheduler over time.

The team also spent time improving the threading system. For the background job manager, they added a Fiber-based system. As the system was used more and more for Object Container Streaming, they took the time to clean up all out-threading primitives. Now all those are Fiber-aware, allowing them to schedule another job when a background job is blocked and thus a more efficient resource usage. In the same code area, they adjusted the scheduler to not block on submission to improve runtime performance by preventing the main thread stalling when submitting numerous jobs simultaneously. They also gave some focus to Object Container Streaming, making the 3DEngine loading code thread safe, allowing us to load large parts of our game world in the background. They made several improvements to the shader build pipeline and infrastructure code, started work on the vertex animation processing refactor and optimization (moving it to the GPU), and continued work on the telemetry system, amongst numerous other things.

ENGINE TOOLS

The Engine Tools Team continued working on improving the general game editor stability and usability. New tools were added for designers to improve their workflows, including a new console implementation to easier parse the engine/game logging for warnings and errors, also adding better support for the massive amount of console variables and commands they currently have. Console variables and commands can now be filtered and saved out as favorites and shared between designers.

On top of that, a tool called the Window Outliner was added to make it easier for designers to setup, save, and share their favorite toolsets. Another tool, called the Universe Outliner, was added to better scale with the amount of content inside the universe, which replaces the entity outliner from Lumberyard, including additional information for Subsumption. The level layer handling was also replaced by the Layer Outliner, again for scalability and workflow improvement reasons.

BUILD ENGINEERING

Flexibility was added for the engineers to produce QATR test builds, either by building their code changes against major builds already distributed to the company, or against their own time. This was an engineer request as it gives them more freedom when building changes and handing off for QA verification. A bug in incremental linking was fixed which allowed us to reduce our output PDB file size by almost 50%, taking it down from 2.5GB for debugging StarCitizen.exe to 1.25Gb. They put finishing touches on unifying the DevOps codebases that are used by TryBuild and the main build system, Transformer, so that there can be one umbrella that covers the continuous integration monitoring. This codebase unification also leverages the tech in the Transformer main build system, which has a more straightforward layout in designing both tasks and jobs.

VFX

The VFX Team worked closely with the Graphics Programmers, Gameplay Programmers, Designers, and Environment Artists on the resource mining feature to create an entire suite of new effects. There’s a primary mining beam which heats up and fractures the rock. There are also effects that play on the surface of the rock to show it being cracked apart. After the rock is destroyed, an explosion effect is parameterized based on how well you did; if you add too much power, you get a much larger explosion than a successful operation. After you break the rock, a secondary extraction mode uses a tractor beam to collect the minerals into your cargo hold.

Platform: Turbulent

PLATFORM: TURBULENT

The team at Turbulent made some massive leaps in development for group services with several Spectrum releases to PTU, and provided platform support for the Community Team.

SPECTRUM

On May 24th a new release of Spectrum hit the PTU. This very early patch includes a ‘Friends’ implementation, allowing you to send requests and manage your contacts. Using this early rudimentary version, the team discovered functionality bugs and system limitations, and has been refactoring code to optimize the experience.

Currently, the Spectrum Team is in sprint 4 of 4, which is all about the notifications system. The notifications system will provide the necessary alerts for receiving and sending friends requests. This is the last missing piece to get the friends system feature complete. Calling all Spectrocati, expect a full release on PTU within the month.

RSI PLATFORM

On May 25th, a new European Union Law came into effect, protecting the use of personal data. Turbulent made substantial changes on the backend side to create new tools, ensuring that CIG was compliant with the new rules that came into effect.

The Backend Team also produced new tools for the roadmap. A new Import Console has been created on the backend so that production leads can now easily import all their Jira tasks without any requirements from the Platform Team. This has made the review and publishing of the Roadmap faster and much more efficient.

Turbulent supported the Starlifter launch, designing the page, and publishing the posts from Ciera Brun and Operation Sword of Hope. They really enjoyed working on this project as it included an exciting twist, and reading all of the community stories made it all more rewarding.

Turbulent’s Front-End and Design Teams have been working on building a page to host the FanKit. The Fankit is still being built, and will include a series of wallpapers, logos, possible 3D models, and audio. It will be an excellent tool for our community to build their personal fan projects, not to mention give out some exclusive items.

KNOWLEDGE BASE

The team launched the Knowledge Base on May 10th, and the Player Relations Team has currently built over 82 articles with FAQs, known issues in patch releases, and many other self-help articles. Based on page views since release, the team already knows that the Knowledge Base has had a positive impact on the community, which will continue as the number of articles increases. Last week when RSI Platform unexpectedly experienced server downtime, the Knowledge Base jumped into action to get a post out and inform the community.

They also released a new series of Contact Us forms that will help optimize and prioritize requests. Ultimately, this will help Player Relations react faster to urgent matters.

GROUP SERVICES

Turbulent has been asked to participate in the build of game code for the Groups services, and the Backend Team has been working furiously to build it. The team has been concentrating on an API service to setup group invitations system and the concept of leadership within a group.

The two releases of the Groups service were completed last month, which included all the necessary calls for the invitations. The system is being implemented and tested by US gameplay teams. The next iterations of the service release will include a call for group leadership.

Community

COMMUNITY

Taking into account player feedback and constructive input during Evocati and PTU phases, the Community Team supported a successful publish of Alpha 3.1.4 to the Persistent Universe, with improvements to Gravlev, flight controls, and more.

The public unveiling of the Crusader Industries Hercules was celebrated with a story contest where more than 500 contenders competed to win an M2 military variant. Make sure to check out all the Hercules stories, available to read on Spectrum, which feature the ship in everything from cargo runs to epic space battles.

The team ran several screenshot contests, in concert with an Intel Streamer Promotion, giving away three Intel® Optane™900P SSDs. If you haven’t seen them already, head over to Spectrum now and check out the beautiful entries depicting the themes of space combat, scenic vistas, and lifestyle.

Also in May, another contest was held, aimed at helping new pilots jump into the verse by giving an overview of the Star Marine and Arena Commander game modes. In this contest, content creators had the chance to win game packages and leave their mark on the Star Citizen website as the winning entries will be added to the How To Play section.

Subscribers received limited edition finishes for their Devastator shotguns this month, continuing a series of weapon finishes exclusive to subscribers and commemorating the Imperial Cartography Center.

The Community Team is excited to announce a direct and organized process for creators to invite official CIG representatives to their podcasts, videos, streams, and talk shows, as the Invite a Developer form is now live and integrated into the ticket system. Check out the FAQ to find out more.

And don’t forget: on October 10th, the entire CIG team will celebrate current and future developments of Star Citizen and Squadron 42 at the Long Center in Austin, Texas. The first wave of CitizenCon tickets is gone, but stay tuned in the coming months for further details and more chances to get tickets.

Conclusion

WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…

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#star citizen #squadron 42

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britpinksblog · 5 years ago

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A Day in the Life

A few years ago, my friend sent me an article about a guy who broke down his first week of work at Target. She said it reminded her of me because I have a similar style of writing. I decided to break down one of my days and email it back to her. I came across it the other day and thought I'd share it with you.

Please Note: This was written several years ago when I was working at a different company than where I work now.

A Day in the Life of Brittany:

- Got up, exercised, showered… you know… boring adult stuff.

- Enjoyed a Hershey Kiss with my breakfast because why not live a little? Not so boring after all.

- Got to work 32 minutes early. Enjoyed an extra 32 minutes sitting in my car before I start the work day.

- Finished my two-hour project in 25 minutes. Is “being too efficient” a weakness I can play as a strength in future job interviews?

- Overheard a coworker having an argument on the phone. He said “calm down” to whoever he was talking to. I can only imagine that this caused the other person to calm down immediately (not).

- Witnessed an argument between two other coworkers (one of which happens to be my supervisor). One person yelled “I’m not being argumentative!” I looked up the definition of “argumentative” just to see if it had changed. Nope. It still means “tending to argue: having or showing a tendency to disagree or argue with other people in an angry way.” The court finds my coworker guilty of being argumentative.

- Another coworker whispers to me “work isn’t normally like this.” I’ve been here 5.5 months. I feel like it is increasingly like this. It’s not even 10:15 a.m.

- My coworker walks away then brings back “breakfast” to eat at her desk. I use the term breakfast very loosely. It smells like what can only be described as a twisted combination of meats, eggs, and day old vegetables. Basically, a terrible assault on the nostrils. Sadly, it smells better than the lunch room smells most days.

- Someone described there being 3/4ths of a mannequin in an email. I’m wondering what the other 1/4th is. I’m guessing the head?

- Learned a coworker signed up for a Wine of the Month Club. She decided she’ll pick the wine up from the winery instead of having it delivered. The winery is 140 miles away from her house.

- Went to a meeting where I had to sit next to someone who described himself as “death bed ill.” I made a mental note to OD on Vitamin C the minute I get home. I sneezed and coughed immediately after leaving the meeting. I’m sure that’s just the placebo effect of sitting next to a sickie.

- I find a table by myself at lunch (as usual), hunker down, and make sure my body language is closed off so no one will try to sit with me. I need these 30 minutes of peace if I am to survive the rest of the afternoon.

- At one point during lunch, I laugh out loud (quietly) at something I see on my Twitter timeline. I screen-shot it to show friends later. I have come to the point where I don't care if coworkers think I'm crazy for laughing at my phone by myself. Saying you don't care if people think you are crazy means you aren't crazy and have a good grasp on reality, right? Right?

- I go to a meeting and a coworker has a notebook with the phrase “Shit is Magical” embossed on it. I’ve seen her use it before and I finally muster up the courage to tell her I love it. We briefly bond over notebooks and washi tape. I remember I was scared of her the first day her desk was moved to my side of the building, but I really like her now. She is soft spoken, but extremely smart as proven in the meeting.

- I get back to my desk and realize it’s only ‪2:03. I still have over an hour until my ‪3:30 pee break. Let me start this off by saying I can go pee any time I want, but I break my day up so that I have a pee break ‪at 10:30 and ‪at 3:30. These breaks give me something to look forward to. I have yet to poop at work and I’m hoping that’s a streak I can keep up for as long as I work here.

- A new District Manager comes over to my team’s desks to say goodbye after new hire training. I’m the only one from my team present and I make some nice small talk. I feel like this is a hugging moment, but I’m not great with hugs, so I sport a goofy smile and wish the DM luck. Smooth.

- The afternoon presses on and I do a google search of “shit is magical notebook” to see if I can find the same notebook as my coworker. No success, but an article entitled “What is the world’s greatest non-sexual physical feeling?” pops up under the search. If I wasn’t using a work computer, I’d click the link. I’m going to guess that “a satisfying, well-executed high five” is the world’s greatest non-sexual physical feeling. I make a mental note to look up the link when I get home.

- Headphone time presents itself when one of my supervisors leaves for the day. We are technically allowed to wear headphones at work (everyone does it), but my main supervisor never uses headphones and talks out loud all of the time. I usually need to listen to what she says, so I rarely use headphones. I listened to some songs while working on contest recaps. It is glorious.

- The new LP Director got a fraudulent money/credit card UV detector and a few of us bring money and cards over to test it out. After headphone time, it was the best part of the day.

- I receive an invitation to a holiday party hosted by my company for some time in December. I’ve never gone to an office party before, but this one will be hosted at the California Science Center, so I’m excited. We are allowed to bring a date. Based on the way things are going with the guy I'm seeing, I don't think I'll bring him.

- ‪4:00 finds me ready for my afternoon snack. It’s usually some type of power bar because I always have at least 3 in my purse, except today apparently. While my protein bars are missing, I do have some Star Wars themed Jelly Beans so those will have to suffice. I’d prefer protein to tide me over ‪until dinner, but I’ll settle for galactic candy.

- I worked on store communication emails and spreadsheets.

- Surprisingly, this has actually been one of the better days at work in a while.

- The office starts to smell like bananas ‪at 5:00. This is new. At least it smells better than my coworker’s breakfast.

- I was sure someone stole my white-out tape today. As I was cleaning up my desk at the end of the day, I learned it was under my keyboard the whole time. Typical.

- The drive home is grim because it is so dark outside.

- The Jelly Beans did not hold me over, so I make Minute Rice once I get home. I preheat my oven to make a corn dog as well. I haven’t had one in a while and it just seemed like the right thing to make.

- I get dressed to go workout and as I take off my dress, I realize I’m not wearing a bra. Sudden panic sweeps over me because I can’t believe I went to work without a bra. I look over and see my bra chilling on my living room floor and remember that was the first thing I flung off after I walked through the door after work. Sigh of relief.

- I work out and get my 10,000 steps in for the day. Back to boring adult stuff.

- There is a new New Girl episode on tonight and I am so happy because I send a weekly recap of quotes to one of my old store managers. It’s been our ritual for over 2 and a half years.

- I text the guy I'm dating to see if he's free on Sunday, but he's busy doing stuff for a work project. This is what I get for dating a highly motivated person trying to forward his career.

- I look up the “What is the world’s greatest non-sexual physical feeling” article from earlier. Turns out it’s not really an article, just a Reddit thread with a lot of bizarre suggestions. The tamest answers include: 1) Sleeping naked on crisp, clean cotton sheets with open windows on a dry, cool night after a hot shower. 2) An after shower Q-Tip in the ear. 3) Getting that last damn popcorn kernel out of your teeth. 4) Pulling up saggy socks. 5) A pile of warm towels straight from the dryer (this is my favorite one but I still maintain that a satisfying, well-executed high five is the best option).

- I get ready for bed and check my 3 different alarms about 15 times before I’m confident that they’ll wake me up on time tomorrow morning to start the whole process over again.

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glittership · 6 years ago

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Episode #69 — "Ratcatcher" by Amy Griswold

Direct download

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 69 is part of the Summer 2018 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: http://www.glittership.com/buy/

Ratcatcher

by Amy Griswold

1918, over Portsmouth

The souls in the trap writhed and keened their displeasure as Xavier picked up the shattergun. “Don’t fuss,” he scolded them as he turned on the weapon and adjusted his goggles, shifting the earpieces so that the souls’ racket penetrated less piercingly through the bones behind his ears. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

The two airships were docked already, a woman airman unfastening safety ropes from the gangplank propped between them to allow Xavier to cross. The trap rocked with a vibration that owed nothing to the swaying airships, and Xavier lifted it and tucked it firmly under his arm. He felt the soul imprisoned in his own chest stir, a straining reaction that made him stop for a moment to catch his breath.

Full story after the cut:

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 69 for April 4th, 2019. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to share this story with you. Our story today is “Ratcatcher” by Amy Griswold.

Before we get to the story, GlitterShip has recently had some exciting news. Our second anthology, GlitterShip Year Two was listed as a Tiptree Award Honor Book for 2018. We’re very happy that the Tiptree jury enjoyed the book, and owe a great debt to all the authors who have allowed us to publish their work. You can find out more about the Tiptree Award and check out the winner Gabriela Damian Miravete’s story, “They Will Dream in the Garden” at tiptree.org.

You can also pick up copies of the GlitterShip Year One and Year Two anthologies on gumroad at gumroad.com/keffy for $5 each. Just use the coupon code “tiptree,” that’s t-i-p-t-r-e-e.

Amy Griswold is the author of the interactive novels The Eagle’s Heir and Stronghold (with Jo Graham), published by Choice of Games, as well as the gay fantasy/mystery novels Death by Silver and A Death at the Dionysus Club (with Melissa Scott). Her short fiction has been published in markets including F&SF and Fantastic Stories of the Imagination.

Robin G has been an entertainment manager, entertainer/vocalist, theatrical producer and writer of several pantomimes including a UV version of Pinocchio that toured 20 theaters in the UK. He was first alerted to the supernatural in a strange dream sequence while in the Royal Air Force that placed him at a future event. The knowledge that a part of our brain exists in another reality has shown him many unusual incidents of the sixth sense. He writes both fiction and non-fiction which includes Jim Long — space agent, a series of stand-alone stories in 7 books, including one as a radio episodic creation, and the non-fiction book Magical theory of life—discusses our life, history, and its aftermath in non-religious spiritual terms.

Ratcatcher

by Amy Griswold

1918, over Portsmouth

“If you’re ready, sir,” the airman said, and Xavier forced himself into motion. He nodded crisply and strode out onto the gangplank with the ease of long years spent aboard ships, his gloved hand just brushing the rail. He scrambled down from the other end and got out of the way of airmen rushing to disengage the gangplank and close the hatch before the two ships could batter at each other too dangerously in the rising wind.

The Coriolanus’s captain strode toward him, and Xavier winced as he recognized a familiar face. He set the trap down, both to get it farther away from the casing that housed the soul in his chest, and to give himself a moment to banish all envy from his expression.

He straightened with a smile. “Hedrick. I see you landed on your feet after that muddle over Calais.”

“I’ve got a knee that tells me the weather now,” Hedrick said, scrubbing at his not-entirely-regulation stubble of ginger beard. “They told me you’d been grounded.”

“I’m still attached to the extraction service,” Xavier said. “As a civilian now.”

Hedrick’s eyes flickered to the odd lines of Xavier’s coat front, and then back up to his face without a change of expression. He’d always been good at keeping a straight face at cards. “We could use the help. We had a knock-down drag-out with the Huns a few weeks back—just shy of six weeks, I make it. Heavy casualties on both sides, and some of them damned reluctant to move on.”

“Only six weeks? You hardly need me. Chances are they’ll still depart on their own.”

“You haven’t seen the latest orders that came down, then. We’re supposed to call in the ratcatchers at the first sight of ghosts. Not acceptable on a well-run ship, don’t you know.”

“You’re also meant to shave,” Xavier said. “It’s not like you to comply with every absurd directive that comes down the pike.” He couldn’t help reveling in the freedom to talk that way, one of the few rewards of his enforced change in career.

“These are Colonel Morrow’s orders.”

“Mmm.” That put a different face on it, or might. Morrow supervised the ratcatchers, civilian and military, and his technical brilliance had saved Xavier’s life when he lost his soul. That said, it was entirely in character for Morrow to go on a tear about efficiency without regard for how much work it made for anyone else.

“Besides, there’s more to it,” Hedrick said as the Coriolanus drifted free of the Exeter. “We’ve been having damned bad luck of late. Pins slipping out of a gangplank just as one of the lads stepped on it—he just missed ending up a smear on the landscape. More engine malfunctions than you can name, and some of them dangerous. If the Coriolanus weren’t in such good repair to start with, she’d have burned twice over in the last month.”

“You suspect sabotage.”

“Some of the Jerries had their boots on our deck when they bit it. We tossed the bodies over the side, but still I’m not entirely easy in my mind.”

“Next time, don’t,” Xavier said. “The soul’s more likely to stay in the corpse if it’s well treated. Ill handling breaks the ties faster.” He directed his gaze out the porthole window of the gondola rather than at Hedrick’s face. “You weren’t using shatterguns?”

“We haven’t got them mounted. No budget for them in our grade, I hear. And just as well if you ask me. They give me the cold chills.” Hedrick glanced at the shattergun under Xavier’s arm.

“A necessity in my profession,” he said.

“Better you than me.”

It was a backhanded enough kind of sympathy that Xavier didn’t cringe away from it. “Any particular area of the ship most affected?”

“The crew quarters, I think—I’ve had men stirring up their whole deck with screaming nightmares, and not the usual nervous cases.”

“At least it’s a place to start.”

He followed Hedrick through the narrow corridors of the airship’s gondola to the cramped berthing area that housed the enlisted men. Only the night watch was there and sleeping, young men squeezed into claustrophobically low bunks, some with their knees tucked up to keep their feet from dangling off the end. A panel of canvas made a half-hearted divider screening the row of women’s bunks from the men’s view.

Xavier set down his gear and stretched out on the nearest unoccupied bunk. “Leave me alone, now, and let me work.”

“Funny kind of work,” Hedrick said, raising an eyebrow at his recumbent form.

“‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’” Xavier said, and tried not to sound bitter. “Now get out.” He closed his eyes at the sound of Hedrick’s retreating footsteps and schooled his breathing into the steady rhythm that would send him swiftly into a doze. The soul in his chest shifted once, making him break his rhythmic breathing with a gasping cough, but he spread an entreating hand across its cage and it quieted.

He knew he was dreaming when he saw Thomas walk into the room and sit down on the foot of the bed. For a moment the more rational part of his mind protested that it was impossible to sit down on the foot of an airship bunk, but his dreaming mind obligingly replaced the scene with a four-poster bed lit by streaming sunshine.

Thomas’s hair was limned with gold, his eyes bright and laughing. “Haven’t you got work to do?” He was dressed in the uniform he died in, but as Xavier took his hand, it faded like smoke to reveal freckled skin.

“I do,” Xavier said. “I’m most remiss.” He raised his chin unrepentantly, and Thomas grappled for him like a wrestler. He was aware of reality as soon as they touched, the sensation of Thomas’s soul writhing through Xavier’s body painfully erotic but nothing remotely like physical sex.

He heard himself gasp, unsure whether he’d actually made a sound the sleeping airmen could hear, and realized how genuinely unwise this was. He pushed Thomas away, and the other man’s soul retreated, dissolving into curling smoke, and then retreated too far, tugging away in unstoppable reflex. It felt like someone was pulling a rib out of his chest.

“Thomas—”

The smoke resolved itself for a moment into the golden-haired man, his face contorted. “I’m trying to stop,” he said. His shape exploded into smoke again, and twisted almost free of Xavier’s chest, leaving Xavier unable to draw a breath for long enough that his vision darkened. Then Thomas was back, sprawled against Xavier’s side as if in the exhausted aftermath of love.

“Christ, that hurt,” Thomas said. “Like trying to hold onto a hot iron.”

“You know it will only get worse.”

“And so what’s the point in talking about it?” The image of Thomas appeared to stand, now pressed and correct in his airman’s uniform, looking around the dim barracks-room. His soul lay quiet in Xavier’s chest, a weight that eased its lingering ache. “We still have a job to do.”

“So we do.”

“There have been ghosts here,” Thomas said. “Two, I think. I’d look in the engine room if I were you.” He turned, frowning. “And don’t lay aside your gun. At least one of them is in a dangerous mood.”

In the engine room, the thumping of the steam engines pulsed through Xavier’s bones, and the heat coming off every surface beat against his skin. Through his goggles he could see wisps of what looked like steam but were really the lingering traces of the dead, men and women who had died in the recent battle. Not ghosts but something more like bloodstains.

He turned a circle, looking for a more solid form, and settled the goggles’ earpieces more firmly against the bones behind his ears. A hundred sounds were familiar, the cacophony of airship travel he’d long ago learned to drown out. Under them was the faintest of animal noises, a tuneless moaning. He took a step toward it, and then another.

A rattling on the other side of the engine room distracted him, and he turned. A connecting rod was flailing free, its pin out and the mechanism it served shuddering with the interrupted rhythm. He crossed the deck swiftly, keeping his head lifted as if watching the loose rod, but his eyes fixed on the deck.

He caught the movement and stopped short as a hatch swung open in front of him, steam rising from the gaping space he had been intended to step into.

“A creditable try,” he said. “Pity I’ve seen these tricks before.”

He raised his shattergun, keeping his expression calm despite his awareness of his danger. A ghost could only move small objects, but here there might be a hundred small objects that could release steam or poison fumes or heavy weights if moved.

“Why don’t you go in the trap like a good lad?” he said, putting the trap down on a section of deck that he made sure was solid. “This is the end of the road, you know.”

Silence greeted him. He turned a slow circle, raising the shattergun.

“You’re dead,” he said. “Stone cold dead. Your corpse is sinking to the bottom of the Channel or spattered across some unfortunate farmer’s hayfield. All that remains for you is to let go your precarious grip on this plane of existence and go to whatever awaits you.” There was no answer. “Or I can shoot you with this shattergun and destroy your soul. Would you like that better?”

He heard the moaning again, rising to a ragged wail like a child’s crying. He took cautious steps toward it, aware of every rattle in the machinery around him.

A wisp of smoke was curled up in a niche between the steel curves of two large engines, wailing forlornly. He raised the shattergun, and the smoke solidified into a dark-haired shape in an English airman’s uniform. It was a woman, and when she raised her head, he could see from the jagged ruin of one side of her skull that she’d met her end in an abrupt collision with some blunt object.

“Don’t shoot me!”

He lowered the shattergun cautiously. “I would far rather not.”

“I don’t want to be dead,” she said. “I’m still here, I’m still here—”

“You died weeks ago,” Xavier said. Six weeks ago, assuming she was a casualty of the most recent skirmish. “Your body is miles away and decomposing. You are dead, and the sooner you grasp that, the sooner you can move on.”

“I won’t go in that thing.”

“You will,” Xavier said briskly, knowing gentleness would be no mercy now. “The trap will confine you painlessly while I remove you from the site of your death.” He hefted the shattergun, but left the safety on. “Or I destroy your soul. That, I promise you, will hurt.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, lifting a stubborn chin. It took stubbornness to be a woman in the service.

“There’s been sabotage.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“No, I don’t think it was,” he said. He was watching her face, and he saw her eyes move past him, fixing on something behind his shoulder. She cried out, but he was already moving, and threw himself to the deck as a blast of superheated steam singed the back of his neck. Steam swam in front of his eyes, and something darker within it: a second ghost, and one that was up to no good.

He pushed himself up to one elbow and reached out with his gloved hand, thrusting its mesh of wiring into the yielding substance of the new ghost and then clenching his fist. The ghost was a chill weight as he began drawing his hand back toward the trap. He had expected it to be too clever to be caught so easily.

There was no resistance. He understood why a moment too late as the ghost rushed toward him, and then into him, reaching for Xavier’s heart. Clever after all, he had time to think, before the sensation of being hollowed out from the inside sent him plunging into shellshock-vivid memory, a predictable and yet unavoidable descent—

—Xavier ducked under the web of grappling lines that bound the two ships together and fired between them, flattening himself against the remains of the breached gondola wall to reload. Through his goggles, he could see souls curling up out of the bodies that littered the deck, drifting free or swirling in snakelike muddled circles as if seeking a way back in. The wind screamed.

He reached down with his gloved hand to yank the nearest circling soul firmly free from its body, and held it flailing in his fist. He found his trap with the other hand, or what remained of it, shattered fragments. He shoved the soul at them anyway, but it wouldn’t go in.

“Never mind the sodding dead!” someone shouted, firing from beside him, but the only certainty he had in a world full of flying debris and blood was that the souls needed to come out of the corpses, extracted like rotten teeth. He raised his head, and saw the shattergun pointed at him from across the narrow gap between the ships.

He flung himself to one side, and the blast caught him on the side of the chest rather than between the eyes. I’m still here, he thought, I’m still here, and then saw the curling smoke trailing away from his chest like a ragged cloud torn apart by the wind. His breath caught in his chest, and then stopped, like something he’d forgotten how to do a long time ago.

He didn’t breathe, but he still moved, crushing the soul in his fist against his chest, reaching out mechanically for the remains of the trap, pressing it to his chest, then pressing harder. Harder, until the glass cut through skin and flesh, trapping the soul coiled half in, half out of his chest. Harder, until he bled, and breathed—

—He gasped for breath, and he was in the hospital ward, with Morrow sitting in a straight-backed chair at the foot of the bed, a look of interest on his stubbled face. “You know, it never occurred to me to try what you did. Not that it would have worked for long.”

Xavier looked down, and saw an alien construction of glass and metal wrapped around his chest, smoke swirling in its depths and an electric buzz humming against his skin. He breathed, trying not to gasp like a drowning swimmer. Each breath came more predictably than the last, but not more easily.

“I built you a more stable housing for your passenger,” Morrow said. “Tell me, what is it like? Having someone else’s soul animating your body?” He leaned forward eagerly, chin rested on his fist.

“Who is he?”

“Corporal Thomas Carlisle. Now unfortunately deceased. His service record is brief and unenlightening. You haven’t answered my question.”

“I’m alive,” Xavier said, but he had seen his soul shattered. Had felt himself dying. He reached up with one shaky hand and spread his fingers across the warm metal. Someone else was there as well, holding on to the inside of his chest as if wrapping desperate fingers around his ribs, determined not to let go—

His head snapped back and he tasted blood as Thomas’s shadowy form erupted from his chest, thrusting the invading ghost out with him and holding it at arm’s length.

“Possessive, are you?” Xavier managed, reaching blindly for the trap and finding it thankfully intact. He maneuvered it closer to where the ghost was writhing in Thomas’s grip, trying to ignore the warning ache in his chest.

“You know it.”

The German ghost was solid enough now for Xavier to see his uniform and the grim set of his jaw as he fought Thomas’s grasp. Xavier’s thumb slipped clumsily off the trap’s trigger the first time he tried it, and then slipped again. The increasing pain was becoming a problem. Finally he hit it solidly, and watched in satisfaction as the ghost became a rushing fog that swirled into the trap and disappeared.

His vision blurred, and he realized he hadn’t breathed in some time. He spread one hand in warning, and felt the soul rush back into his chest, its grip tightening, but still not as firm as it had been even a few hours before. Xavier spread his hand across the soul cage, a habitual gesture that still brought irrational comfort. Not much time. But enough to finish the business at hand.

“Your turn, now,” he said to the English airman’s ghost, as lightly as he could manage. “Don’t dawdle, we haven’t got all day.”

She slipped down from her perch and approached the trap, hanging back a healthy distance from its electric hum. “What happens after this?”

“There’s an air base in Manchester where we’ll empty the traps. It’s far enough from where you died that you’ll have no trouble moving on.” And considerable trouble doing anything else, with no death energies to give her a grip on the world of the living.

“I mean…what happens after that? Where do we go?”

“I’m not going to find out,” he said.

She met his eyes, something like sympathy kindling in her expression, bearable from someone already dead. “I am sorry,” she said, and then bolted away from the trap.

He already had his gloved hand out to catch her. “So am I,” he said, and crammed her ghost into the mouth of the trap, thumbing the switch to suck the swirl of angry fog inside.

Footsteps clattered on the metal decking, and an engineer stuck his head in, probably in answer to alarms from whatever essential piece of machinery the German ghost had employed in his attempt to kill Xavier. “What’s all this?”

“Tell the captain I’ve taken care of his pest problem,” Xavier said. “And that he can drop me in Manchester. I’m going to sleep until then.”

The moment he closed his eyes he could feel Thomas lying beside him, as if they were ordinary lovers indulging in a late morning lie-in.

“You could be wrong,” Thomas said.

“I think my clock keeps good time.” Even in the dream, he could feel the ache in his chest, his hands and feet cold.

“I hear Gottlieb thinks that the shattergun doesn’t really destroy the soul, just keeps it from being able to manifest as a ghost.”

“Gottlieb is a German.”

“Does that make him wrong?”

“Morrow thinks his work is fundamentally unsound.”

“For Christ’s sake.”

“Morrow has occasionally been wrong,” Xavier said, but he couldn’t believe the world was fundamentally merciful enough for any part of him to survive when the link between Thomas’s soul and his body rotted away. They would put him in the ground, and that would be the end.

“How long?” Thomas asked finally, his voice more even.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“You’re the ratcatcher. I was just an ordinary aviator. Blow those men down for king and country, yes, sir.” Thomas saluted jauntily, rolling away from Xavier in bed to do it. The ache in his chest worsened, and he ignored it.

“A day or two, I should think. Time enough to report to Morrow and offload these poor sods.”

“Maybe Morrow can do something.”

“We’ve discussed the problem. He hasn’t been optimistic.” Morrow’s soul cage had lasted for months longer than Xavier’s own bloody improvisation would have, but it was still failing, the link between Thomas’s soul and its electric cage fraying faster every hour.

“A day or two,” Thomas said.

“Yes.” Xavier was certain it wouldn’t be two. He slept until Hedrick shook his bunk to wake him.

“Manchester,” Hedrick said. “Come on, sleeping beauty.”

“It’s a harder job than you’d think,” Xavier said, following Hedrick up to the observation deck to debark. “Or would you like me to put them back and you can have a go at rounding them up? You were right, by the way. One of them was a Jerry, and up to considerable mischief.”

“I suppose that’s patriotic, by his lights,” Hedrick said. “But I’ll tell you this, if I die up here, I’ll go quiet as a little lamb. No more fighting for me. I’ve had my share and that’s a fact.” He clapped Xavier on the shoulder. “Next time I’m in Manchester I’ll stand you a drink.”

“Have one for me,” Xavier said, and stepped onto the waiting gangplank.

The air base towered above Manchester, an iron tree twenty stories high with jutting piers and thrumming generators that made the floor gratings shudder under Xavier’s feet. Morrow met Xavier on the pier.

“Good news,” he said, falling in beside Xavier as he walked. “I think I have a solution to your problem.”

“You said it was insoluble.” Hope rose unbidden in his throat, a hard knot that he swallowed down ruthlessly.

“I’ve worked out a technical solution. A side application, actually, of another process. Not that way,” he said, as Xavier turned toward the end of the pier, eager now to release the souls in his care and free himself to find out what Morrow had concocted. “Bring the trap down with you.”

Xavier frowned, but followed Morrow to the lift cage. It clattered downward, descending through a hell of industrial machinery past levels that bustled with airmen and engineers down to the quieter cargo bays. The lift stopped on the ground floor, generally deserted except when shipments of raw materials were brought in by truck. Bare electric lights swayed overhead, casting harsh shadows.

“You have no idea how much we all owe you,” Morrow said as Xavier followed him out of the lift. “What we’ve learned about how to maintain a ghost’s link to physical objects—it’s invaluable.”

“You mean physical objects like my body,” Xavier said. His chest was aching again, Thomas’s soul stirring uneasily in its housing. He wished Morrow would get on with it and either offer up whatever fix might help him or stop holding out hope.

“Incidentally. Not most importantly.” Morrow had been leading him through the shadowy bay toward the heavy bulks of vehicles, and stopped now with his hand caressing the hard lines of a tank. Its turret swiveled toward Xavier, and he froze in momentary alarm. “There’s no danger, its guns aren’t loaded.”

“I didn’t think these things were radio-controlled.”

“They’re not.” Morrow drew a bulky pistol from his coat pocket that Xavier realized after a moment’s examination was a shattergun, though a smaller model than any he’d seen before. “Can’t you see it?”

Thomas’s soul was writhing in alarm, and Xavier squinted at the tank, adjusting his goggles. When he turned them up to maximum sensitivity he could see the curl of smoke at the tank’s heart, swirling in tight unhappy circles and then battering itself against the walls of an invisible cage before returning to its circling.

“It’s haunted,” Xavier said.

“Inhabited,” Morrow said. “By a ghost with the power to control it without risking any living men.” His eyes were alight. “The next step in modern warfare.”

“Its occupant doesn’t seem very pleased.”

“They never like being in a trap. Surely you’ve learned that as a ratcatcher. There’s a certain discomfort involved in being bound into something other than a living body.”

By discomfort Morrow generally meant excruciating pain. “How long can you keep it there?”

“Indefinitely. Which provides a solution to your own problem, by the way.” He extracted a glowing puzzle-box of glass and metal from his pocket, something like the central cage within the maze of glass and wiring on Xavier’s chest. “But this is the real promise of it. There won’t be any more need for our men to leave the service just because they’re dead. No more excuses for desertion.”

“I wouldn’t call it desertion.”

“Retreating from the field,” Morrow said. “Going to their rest. Well, no one’s resting until this war is over.” The glitter in his eyes suggested that it had been long since he slept himself.

“As long as it’s voluntary.”

“Of course it’s voluntary.” Morrow brandished the shattergun and bared his teeth. “So far they’ve all preferred it to the alternative.”

“I see,” Xavier said. He was very aware of the weight of the trap under his arm, the souls within it only dimly aware, but moving restlessly in response to Thomas’s agitation. “One of these is a German,” he said. “Not good material for your purposes.”

“There’s an easy cure for that,” Morrow said, thumbing the safety off the shattergun.

“Of course.” He wondered how long it would take for the German high command to hear about this, and how fast the order would go out to destroy any English soul found haunting German battlefields. It couldn’t take much longer for Gottlieb or someone equally clever on the other side to replicate Morrow’s process and fill the battlefields with machines powered by the unquiet dead.

His vision swam, and he gritted his teeth in mingled panic and frustration—not yet—before he realized that Thomas was pulling him down into a waking dream, appearing at his side overlaid on the shimmering forms of tanks.

“The man in that tank was a gunnery sergeant,” Thomas said. “A good soldier. He’s in incredible pain, and Morrow threatens him with the shattergun whenever he makes a credible effort to tear himself free.”

Xavier spread his hands in acknowledgement, but did not reply. Morrow was in no state to hear objections to his plan, and if he objected too strongly, Morrow had the life-saving soul cage to withhold from him. The hope Morrow had kindled beat in his throat, a desperate desire to live at any cost. All he had to do was accept.

“We’re dead men anyway,” Thomas said.

“So we are,” Xavier said, and opened the trap.

The ghosts erupted out of the trap and streamed as one toward Morrow. Thomas followed them, striding forward, and Xavier staggered back, his chest burning.

“Xavier,” Morrow said, disapproving but not afraid yet.

“So clumsy of me,” Xavier said. He managed to take a breath, and then couldn’t remember how to take another one.

Morrow pointed the shattergun at Thomas’s chest, and Xavier strained to move, but his limbs felt filled with lead. Morrow pulled the trigger, but the gun didn’t fire. The safety was engaged again, and clearly stuck fast as Morrow struggled to disengage it.

Xavier could make out some individual forms within the roiling mass of souls, the faces of dead men and women, all painfully young. The soul of the woman airman hung back, reaching into the tank with both hands, tugging the ghost inside free of its metal bulk.

Other ghostly hands were on the shattergun, twisting it in Morrow’s hand, pressing its muzzle toward his temple. Morrow tugged at the gun, and then fought for it, still looking more annoyed than afraid.

For a moment Xavier met Thomas’s eyes. He knew he should shake his head, forbid murder, but he took refuge in the weariness that made shaking his head a Herculean task.

The ghosts were moaning, now, a rising wail of single-minded purpose. Even without goggles, Morrow looked as if he could hear them now, or perhaps he only felt their chill as they swarmed him, writhing against his skin.

“You’re all dead men,” Morrow said.

There was acceptance in their voices. Their grip on this world was loosening, the pull of whatever lay beyond growing stronger by the second. Now, he mouthed in choking silence, and he saw Thomas nod, his eyes smiling. It seemed all right then to let his eyes close. He heard, rather than saw, the safety catch on the shattergun give, and as if from a long way away he heard it fire.

Time passed, and went on passing. He could feel hands inside his chest, holding desperately tight to his ribs, familiar and yet strange. The metal grating of the floor was cold against his cheek. He lifted his head.

Hurry, someone urged. Xavier tried to stand, and failed. He crawled instead, inching his way toward Morrow’s still form. Morrow’s chest was moving shallowly, but his stare was sightless.

He felt across the grating until he found the soul cage that had fallen from Morrow’s hand. It felt warm even through his glove. He tore open Morrow’s collar and pressed it to Morrow’s skin. Wires sprouted from it, burrowing into bare flesh. He felt a surge of envy, and the presence within him writhed in denial and anger, holding on tighter.

Morrow opened his eyes. “Maybe not such dead men,” he said, the voice Morrow’s but the tone teasing and familiar.

“Morrow?”

“I expect I had better be.”

“If you’re in there …” Xavier spread his hand across the soul cage on his chest.

“Airman Anna Lambert,” the woman airman said, as close as if she were sitting on his lap, not a position he’d ever been in with a woman. He could feel her amusement at that thought. “You’d better get used to it, since I don’t want to die and neither do you.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Such pretty manners, yet. I think we’ll do all right.” She retreated back into the soul cage, settling in like a cat turning round before curling into its basket.

Morrow sat up cautiously, fingering the soul cage where it pulsed against his skin. “We need to find another one of these to house your passenger in the long term,” he said, and then frowned. “Unless he made only one?”

“Morrow never made only one of anything.” Xavier looked around at the empty trap and the motionless tank. Souls still roiled within the others, aching to be ripped free. But first things first. “What are we going to say happened here?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Morrow said, looking at him with Thomas’s most level gaze. “I admit I’m not feeling…entirely myself. A touch of shell shock, maybe. Requiring a holiday from my work while I figure out what in blazes Morrow was doing here and how to give the impression I understand it.”

“His mind is gone?”

“Gone wherever shattered souls go. Gottlieb might still be right.”

“I’m not going to weep for Morrow either way,” Xavier said.

“I’m Morrow. You’d better keep that straight.”

“A touch of shell shock myself,” Xavier said. “I don’t know what I was saying.”

“Think nothing of it, old chap,” Morrow said, and turned to regard the tanks. “Gruesome things, aren’t they? I think we’ll be writing this off as a failed experiment.”

“You mean that you’ll be writing it off,” Xavier said. “If you can transplant Lambert here into more permanent housing without accident—I expect Morrow left good notes—”

“I devoutly hope so.”

“Then I’ve got work to do in the field. This war won’t stop making ghosts.” He felt a twinge of loss at the thought of making those bloody rounds without Thomas curled under his breastbone, and told himself angrily not to be a fool.

“Kiss him, for Christ’s sake,” Lambert said. “I would.”

Xavier coughed, and Morrow looked at him in alarm. “My passenger has an unfortunate sense of humor,” he said by way of explanation.

“That ought to suit you,” Morrow said. He looked as if he felt a certain degree of loss himself.

It would have been madness to make any such gesture in the air base, but Xavier reached out and caught his hand, and Morrow held it, his rough fingers unfamiliar in Xavier’s own.

“I’m still here,” Xavier said, and went on breathing.

END

“Ratcatcher” was originally published in Mothership Zeta and is copyright Amy Griswold, 2016.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

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Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a GlitterShip original, “The Girl With All the Ghosts” by Alex Yuschik.

Episode #69 — “Ratcatcher” by Amy Griswold was originally published on GlitterShip

#GlitterShip #lgbtq fiction #queer fiction #short stories #science fiction and fantasy #podcast

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wellpersonsblog · 6 years ago

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The 7 Supplements I Take, 2019 Edition

Yep, seven. Kind of a lot for a “whole foods” guy, right?

Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

If you’re even a casual NMA reader, you know it’s been a loooong time since I wrote two blog posts in a week. We’re talking years, I think.

Well, I’m here to boldly declare that I’m back. My goal for the year, No Meat Athlete’s 10th anniversary year, is to write a blog post per week, on average. Not because I should, but because I really want to — the time away has renewed my enthusiasm. And after going for so long without writing regularly, I’ve got a lot I’m excited to share.

But writing more is just one of my goals. This year, I gave myself permission to set a bunch of them — not just one or two, like I usually tell people is best — and to make them BIG.

Upgrading the OS

It didn’t take long, though, for me to realize that in order to do more, my “operating system” needs to be better — which means upgrading my daily habits, and to pay particular attention to nutrition, since that affects just about everything else.

For several years now I’ve been careful to cover the bases: vitamin B12, vitamin D, and DHA/EPA, just to safeguard myself against common deficiencies of a vegan diet (and many other diets, too, by the way). But now I’m paying more attention to things like sleep, recovery from workouts, nagging injuries, and even long-term prevention — and because of that, I find myself both more diligent and more experimental with supplements.

Don’t worry, this isn’t the post where Matt turns into a biohacker. In general, my philosophy is still “whole foods first,” and probably always will be. (Not the store — in that case, it’s actually “Whole Foods second,” after we’ve gotten everything we can at a cheaper place!)

In fact, you’ll see that several of what I call “supplements” actually are whole foods; it’s just that I take them like a robot would take fuel. If robots ran on fuel.

So here goes. I’ve listed the daily dose I take next to each.

1. Complement (provides B12, D3, and DHA/EPA) — This one is actually a three-for. I’ve written about Complement at length, since it’s the supplement I created, so I won’t spend long on this one. In a nutshell, here’s why the nutrients it provides are so important:

Vitamin B12 (1000mcg) is just about a no-brainer for vegans. I know there are still a few purists out there who say we can get enough B12 from dirty produce, but I just don’t see the point. Even many non-vegans are deficient in B12, and when I didn’t take it in my first few years of being vegan, I experienced symptoms of deficiency. So I take it, and make sure my kids do too.

Vitamin D3 (2000IU) is the best form of vitamin D, which our bodies make in response to sunlight. Unfortunately, the combination of our modern, indoorsy lifestyles (plus knowledge about the dangers of UV exposure) and a plant-based diet leaves many of us “D-ficient.” Dr. Greger and others recommend supplementing with 2,000 IU of vitamin D daily, so that’s what I take.

Finally, DHA (300mg) and EPA (70mg) are two long-chain omega-3 fatty acids that are important for brain health. We can get ALA, which is another omega-3, from vegan foods like flaxseeds and walnuts, so many vegans assume they’ve got omega-3’s covered. But it turns out that although some people can efficiently convert ALA into DHA and EPA, many cannot. I haven’t done the testing to know whether I or my wife and kids can, so that’s why I take it in supplement form, derived from algae.

You can learn more about Complement here, but see the note at the bottom of this blog post first.

2. Creatine (5g) — This is strictly for building muscle and increasing strength, so I only take creatine when I’m trying to bulk up or doing a strength sport. Creatine is an amino acid that our bodies do make, so it’s not essential. And although we’re completely fine without it, I find it absolutely helps me to build muscle, and the extra motivation that comes from that is reason enough to take it, given that it’s well-studied and appears to be completely safe. (There’s some evidence to suggest creatine helps vegetarians perform better on tests of memory, too.)

3. Magnesium (350mg) — As I mentioned in a recent podcast episode (“Matt’s Quest for Deeper Sleep”), lately I’ve been obsessed with increasing the amount of deep sleep I get each night, as measured by an OURA ring that tells me how much time I spend in each sleep phase.

I get plenty of total sleep, and plenty of REM sleep, but very little deep sleep (which, oddly, is not as “deep” as REM). Deep sleep is very important for tissue repair and recovery. I haven’t figured out whether my body just happens to need less deep sleep than others, or whether it’s something about my diet, lifestyle, and sleep habits that prevents me from getting more of it.

I’ve been experimenting with a lot of small changes, ranging from obvious ones — like eliminating light from my bedroom at night and limiting screen time after about 7pm — to making changes to my diet (especially around caffeine and alcohol) and supplementing.

Magnesium is a mineral that’s associated with improved sleep and helpful in the absorption of iodine (see below), so it’s a natural one to test.

I’ve only been taking magnesium for 10 days or so, but I suspect that it’s responsible for adding roughly 10 minutes of deep sleep each night. Which doesn’t seem like much, but when I typically only get 30 minutes or so, I’ll take whatever I can get!

Once I figure this shiz out, I’ll write a whole blog post about my sleep project.

‘Supplements’ that are Actually Food

4. Brazil nut (1 small one provides ~100mcg selenium) — We don’t need much selenium, but we absolutely need it. Selenium deficiency is linked to certain cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. And, thanks to soil depletion, most plant-based diets are low in selenium. Luckily, a single, small Brazil nut each day provides more than enough. So I eat one a day, in my smoothie, and selenium is taken care of.

(Incidentally, one of the reasons I love the daily smoothie is that it’s easy to toss in things like a Brazil nut, flaxseeds, a slice of turmeric… things I want to eat each day but don’t show up in my diet on their own.)

5. Iodized salt (60mcg iodine per quarter-teaspoon salt) — Let’s be clear here, there’s no reason to supplement with salt; in fact we should limit our intake. It’s the iodine that I want; the fortified salt just happens to be a convenient way to get it.

Iodine used to be in our soil, but with modern agriculture, it’s less plentiful in our food than it once was. Which wouldn’t be a big deal, except that iodine deficiency affects two billion people (!) and is the leading preventable cause of intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Which is why they put it in our salt. Except we vegans like to be natural, so many of us choose unrefined sea salt… which usually doesn’t have iodine added to it.

Non-vegans actually get some iodine from the cleaning products used on dairy processing equipment that make their way into the milk, so it’s less a concern for them. Vegans should make sure we have an iodine source, whether supplemental or with fortified salt.

6. Tart cherry juice (1oz concentrate or 8oz juice) — Tart cherry juice has been shown to reduce inflammation and muscle soreness after workouts, which is why I’ve been a fan for a long time.

Most days out of the week now, I do Muay Thai, a form of kickboxing, and get pretty beat up in the process. So I have a renewed interest in the benefits tart cherries provide.

I don’t like to drink any juice on a daily basis; in general whole fruit is much better. But immediately after workouts is one time when juice may be one of the best things we can consume, for its speed in reaching the bloodstream. So that’s when I try to take my tart cherry juice, about an ounce a day.

7. Turmeric (1 tsp ground or a quarter-inch slice fresh) — Faddish, perhaps, but I think turmeric is legit. There’s a lot of research about how it can help with everything from muscle repair to recovering from hospital surgery, not to mention reducing the risks of cancer and heart disease.

Dr. Greger recommends either a quarter-teaspoon of ground turmeric or a quarter-inch slice of the fresh root daily. Fresh and ground actually do different things, so I try to mix them up, and almost always eat it in combination with black pepper to increase bioavailability.

If I don’t use ground turmeric in cooking or don’t add a slice of fresh to my smoothie, then at night I’ll take it in pill form (turmeric, not just curcumin). But I much prefer getting it in whole-food form.

Blurring the Food/Supplement Line

I actually could go further with the “foods I view as supplements” list, but there’s not a clear dividing line between these and the rest of my food.

For example, green tea. I don’t really drink it like tea: in order to extract the most nutrients, I steep it at close to boiling temperature and for much longer than the tea-types recommend, producing a drink far more tannic and bitter than green tea traditionally is. Or I’ll put the tea leaves directly into my smoothie, not for flavor but for nutrition. Similar with flaxseeds — I don’t eat them as snacks like I do other nuts and seeds; instead I just add them to my smoothie because I know how healthy they are.

But I had to draw the line somewhere. So I did.

What’s Missing?

Believe it or not, there are two other supplements I believe I should be taking, but am not, simply because it’s not convenient to take more pills and I’ve been lazy about it. These are zinc and vitamin K2, both of which are likely deficiencies in plant-based diets.

Zinc: Beans provide plenty of zinc; the problem is that the phytates in beans interfere with absorption. Zinc may be especially important for heart health, and given family history, this is important to me.

K2: Vegans can get plenty of K1 from leafy greens, but K2 isn’t found in almost any plant-based foods, especially not in the West. (It is in natto, a Japanese, fermented soy product, but unfortunately not in tempeh, sauerkraut, or other fermented foods in reliable and appreciable amounts.) K2 is important for both bone and heart health, so not something I want to be missing.

To the Rescue…

Good news here, though. This week, an upgraded version of Complement, called Complement Plus, ships for the first time. (Mine is supposed to arrive today!)

It’s in capsule form instead of a spray, and for me will drastically simplify my supplementation routine, not just by filling the zinc and K2 void, but also by providing iodine, selenium, magnesium (all of which I’m currently making the effort to get into my diet), and of course the “Big 3” that are already in Complement.

When I first announced Complement Plus last year as a pre-order, we sold through everything we had allocated for it. But now we’ve got a few hundred bottles from this first shipment that we can sell, so next week I’ll send the details about how to get a special NMA-reader discount on Complement Plus.

If you’re thinking about getting Complement or Complement Plus, I’d join the email list and wait until then.

It feels great to be writing again. Look for a new post from me next week, and every week after that!

The post The 7 Supplements I Take, 2019 Edition appeared first on No Meat Athlete.

First found here: The 7 Supplements I Take, 2019 Edition

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ethelbertpaul444-blog · 6 years ago

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Summer TV: The 30 Most Exciting New Shows

This summer, the chicest brand-new sunblock on world markets is a Netflix subscription. Of course, there are necessary accoutrements to the UV ray-shielding regimen: an Amazon subscription, Hulu account, YouTube premium access, a full cable bundle, a DVR, and enough hours in the day to maintain them all.

With the idea of a traditional fall-to-spring Tv season so 2013, there are more TV streak than ever striving for your attention during the summer months.

In addition to returning favourites like GLOW , Queen Sugar , Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt , em> Younger , The Affair , and more, there are dozens of brand-new series wooing you back inside to the air mode bliss of your lounge. We’ve cross-examine them all: a Ryan Murphy dance musical with an historical LGBTQ cast, a Stephen King multiverse, Amy Adams’ TV debut,’ 90 s Nickelodeon nostalgia, John Krasinski’s take over Jack Ryan, and more.

Here, we’ve culled the 30 proves most worth your attention.

Reverie ( NBC ) strong>

May 30 at 10 p.m. ET

Summer TV begins with a fright narration for technology skeptics. Sarah Shahi plays a onetime hostage researcher banked to extricate people whose subconscious are trapped inside a intelligent virtual reality program. Bonus: Between this sequence and the word’s constant be utilized in Westworld , we may actually come out of Summer 2018 knowing what “reverie” means.

C.B. Strike ( Cinemax ) strong>

June 1 at 10 p.m. ET

It was only a matter of time, but it’s finally here: television broadcasting adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s favourite books! Well , not those diaries. The supernatural whimsy of Hogwarts is swapped for the mental excites of Rowling’s series of detective tales, penned under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. This TV adaptation once aired in the U.K ., performing Tom Burke as a battle veteran second-lifeing it as a private investigator break lawsuits that have baffled police.

Pose ( FX ) strong>

June 3 at 9 p. m. ET

There’s a Whitney Houston music cue at the end in the first escapade of Pose that will have you out of your set, forgiving the nearly hour-and-a-half it took to get there.( Hour-long dramas apparently now merely view that first part as a suggestion .) All of that, of course, is hallmark Ryan Murphy, who is uttering record with this succession about life in’ 80 s New York City set against the backdrop of ballroom culture, the transgender parish, and, yes, Trumpian excess. Boasting the largest LGBTQ cast ever made, including breakout recitals by transgender leading performers, you’ll start voguing as you wait for the next episode.

Succession ( HBO ) strong>

June 3 at 10 p.m. ET

We’re not saying Succession , in which a world media mogul’s children jockey for superpower and oversight matters of a massive corporation, is modeled after the Murdochs. But we’re not saying it’s not, either. The truth is it’s not hard to activity any number of strong families onto this show–the Trumps, anyone ?– which imbues an Empire -like Shakespearean vibe into the world of the power-suit wearing. 0001 percent.

Dietland ( AMC ) strong>

June 4 at 9 p. m. ET

Plum Kettle( played by Joy Nash) is saving up for weight-loss surgery while phantom writing letters from the editor on behalf of a popular women’s magazine’s HBIC, Kitty Montgomery( Julianna Margulies, doing colours of Miranda Priestly ). Everyone is slightly distracted, however, by the flock of men who retain disappearing and getting killed, all of whom happen to be accused sexual harassers. Timely enough for you?

Condor ( AT& T/ DirecTV ) strong>

June 6

There are many rationales to be intrigued by Condor . em> It’s adapted from the 1975 Sydney Pollack film Three Days of the Condor and the book it was based on, some of the most fascinating, mind-banging political thriller generator cloth here i am.( A CIA employee tops to lunch and returns to see his entire agency has been killed .) But, folks, this co-stars Mira Sorvino, a beacon of the #MeToo movement and a awesome actress whose occupation was derailed by the Monster Weinstein, a comeback we should all be heartening for.

Impulse ( YouTube Red ) strong>

June 6

Proof that top aptitude is spread all over the million or so different material pulpits, this line for YouTube’s premium service comes from Doug Liman, whose action-thriller pedigree includes launching the Bourne dealership and targeting movies like Mr.& Mrs. Smith and The Edge of Tomorrow . Tackling teleportation and sex crime, Impulse might sound like 2018 TV-development Mad Libs, but it’s based on the same volume streak that caused his 2008 film Jumper . em> Liman has announced Jumper the film he’s least pleased with, suggesting that he’s on a operation here for a solid re-do.

American Woman ( Paramount ) strong>

June 7 at 10 p.m. ET

It was only a matter of time before one of Bravo’s Real Housewives heading toward cachet TV. Beverly Hills Housewife Kyle Richards is co-executive producer of this period dramedy loosely based on her childhood, growing up with a single mama, giving full play to Alicia Silverstone, in California at the increases of second-wave feminism in the’ 70 s. The manner! The theme song by Kelly Clarkson! Cher Horowitz fills Real Housewives ! What would her tagline be?” You can reverberate the buzzer in my bottom .” Too much?

Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger ( Freeform ) strong>

June 7 at 8 p. m. ET

The only thoughts specific in life are fatality and taxes and, at any point in time, there is a new Marvel series debuting. This one is the first for Freeform, the teen-skewing system known for shows like Pretty Little Liars and Grown-ish . That’s an plotting vibe to lend the omnipresent superhero genre. This one centers on two teenages who discover that they have superpowers and that they’re in love. Hormones, every young hero’s kryptonite.

The Staircase ( Netflix ) strong>

June 8

The” Netflix True-Crime Docuseries That Will Simultaneously Disturb the Entire Nation for a Season” is its own bungalow industry by now, coming its summertime installment with The Staircase . This one is a super-mash-up, of sorts. Examining the case of crime novelist Mike Patterson, who was convicted of killing his wife, The Staircase firstly aired in 2004, and then was updated with a miniseries in 2013. This explanation compounds everything there is and adds three additional bouts with brand-new shows, a total of 13 installments for you to binge.

Strange Angel ( CBS All Access ) strong>

June 14

With The Good Fight em> and Star Trek: Discovery as its founding records, CBS All Access previously boasts a nice stellar track record when it comes to original digital material. Its next offering is Strange Angel , a sci-fi series on the basis of the story by George Pendle and boasting perhaps the greatest tagline of any tv series ever:” Sex. Magick. Rocket Science .”

Breaking Big ( PBS ) strong>

June 15 at 8: 30 p.m. ET

” How did they get notorious ?” has been done before. The 2018 question is,” How did they get influential ?” PBS’ interrogation line will plot the unconventional directions some of the most conspicuous artistic chairmen took to get where they are today, including occurrences on Trevor Noah, Eddie Huang, Gretchen Carlson, San Juan, Puerto Rico Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, and SoulCycle co-founder Ruth Zukerman.

Deep State ( Epix ) strong>

June 17 at 9 p. m. ET

TV development execs have never met a government conspiracy thriller they didn’t like. This one from Epix superstars the ever-menacing Mark Strong as a former spy banked by an ex-MI6 operator to affiliate his new covert uniting espionage arrangement, The Division. Observes on sleuths on spies.

The Proposal em >( ABC ) strong>

June 18 at 10 p.m. ET

In what sounds like a demented mash-up of Blind Date and The Bachelor — and therefore perhaps the crowning accomplishment in summer reality TV guilty pleasure–each chapter of The Proposal will see contestants playing for the attention of the members of a suitor or “suitress” whose identity is camouflaged. Merely when the committee is two helpless nostalgics remaining will the suitor be uncovered and the finalists have the chance to propose marriage. And you thought Tinder was stressful.

Yellowstone ( Paramount ) strong>

June 20 at 9 p. m. ET

After winning an Emmy for his rendition in the miniseries Hatfields& McCoys , Kevin Costner is back on a pony and in a cowboy hat for Yellowstone , his first regular TV line role. While movie stars heading to Tv is still being newsworthy, it’s the movie ability behind the camera that has us intrigued. Tyler Sheridan, who wrote Hell or High Water , Wind River , and Sicario writes and targets this streak, about the unexpectedly high-stake strivings facing a modern-day rancher.

Take Two ( ABC ) strong>

June 21 at 10 p.m. ET

The new crime drama from the team behind Castle em> bangs unusually Castle- y, made all the more amusing by the fact that effortlessly charming The O.C . em> alum Rachel Bilson is standing in for aggressively charisma Nathan Fillion in the lead: the onetime superstar of a TV patrolman show shadowing a detective to experiment a capacity that she hopes will be her big comeback.

Double Dare ( Nickelodeon ) strong>

June 25 at 8 p. m. ET

Millennial nostalgia is a strong, witchy circumstance, this time imparting back from the dead the madcap Nickelodeon teenagers’ game show Double Dare, which married trivia, goo, and a human hamster motor for a stunt been demonstrated that, god help us all, recently celebrated its 30 th remembrance. While YouTube star Liza Koshy will host, O.G. emcee Marc Summers will be back to support pigment note, thus forestalling off a riot mob of thirtysomethings.

A Very English Scandal em >( Amazon ) strong>

June 29

A Very English Scandal would be irresistibly stimulating even if it wasn’t based on a real-life tabloid brouhaha, albeit one that American audiences are likely unfamiliar with. In Britain in the 1970 s, MP Jeremy Thorpe has a secret affair with a younger gay mortal worded Norman Scott, which he is frantic to keep secret as his political career makes off. When Scott is found dead, Thorpe stands ordeal for his murder. As for the Very English Molding: Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw play the doomed lovers.

Sharp Objects ( HBO ) strong>

July 8 at 9 p. m. ET

* WHEE-OO WHEE-OO*( That’s a 911 -emergency alarm bell, if you couldn’t tell .) Amy Adams is starring in a HBO prestige drama thriller! I reiterate, Amy Adams is starring in a HBO prestige thriller! Make your mind lozenges, because it merely gets better from there. The line is accommodated from the hit record by Gillian Flynn, who wrote Gone Girl ( know where it is ?). Buffy , Mad Men , and UnREAL vet Marti Noxon, too hectic the summer months with Dietland , is creator and showrunner. Patricia Clarkson and Elizabeth Perkins round out the casting. Get thee to a ventilator.

Heathers ( Paramount ) strong>

July 10 at 10 p.m. ET

Rebooting and renovating studies that are considered generational canon can run the gamut from invigorated to blasphemous, and the jury is still out on where this Heathers streak falls on that spectrum. The high school dark humor snaps the script by making one of the Heathers genderqueer, portrayed by male actor Brendan Scannell. But the series’ pilot, which is now being make them accessible the beginning of this year, was blared for a lack of subtlety and sensibility that territory on, as The Daily Beast’s Samantha Allen wrote, a” LGBT-bashing ordeal .”

The Outpost ( The CW ) strong>

July 10 at 8 p. m. ET

The logline for The Outpost is so CW-evocative and high-concept that it is able to tell us it describes The 100 or The Tomorrow People or The Secret Circle em> or The Messengers of The[ Fill in the Blank ] em> rebooted, and we’d believe you. That said, those depicts are all enjoyable! This one is about the lone survivor of an entire hasten who discovers superhuman superpowers while learning how to stay alive. Sure!

Burden of Truth ( The CW ) strong>

July 11 at 8 p. m. ET

Some Smallville actresses become high-ranking recruiters for a infamous fornication faith. Others graduate to topline The CW’s version of Erin Brockovich . In Burden of Truth , Kreuk plays a big-city lawyer who returns to her hometown to make the case of groupings of girls who are all suffering from a inscrutable illness. By the end of the season, we hope she gets justice, and that we stop instinctively typing Burden of Proof instead of Truth . em>

Castle Rock ( Hulu ) strong>

July 25

Castle Rock is the mysterious Maine town where many of Stephen King’s storeys are set. Castle Rock is a new anthology sequence from J.J. Abrams that realizes a Stephen King multiverse of sorts, where people and storylines from across the author’s works, including Cujo , The Dark Half , and The Dead Zone , will meet in an original narrative stellar Sissy Spacek, Andre Holland, and It ‘ s Bill Skarsgard. This is exciting, geeks!

Stirring It ( NBC ) strong>

July 31 at 10 p.m. ET

Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman are co-hosting a crafting streak, be still my twee middle. It’s as if The Great British Baking Show took a pit stop in Pawnee, with the Parks and Recreation performs hiring gobs of find, cement, and wry laughter for a competition sequence that has entrants fad handmade goods. Poehler’s self-described crafting naivete and Offerman’s legendary woodworking talents will inform their succour, guidance, and narration.

Disenchantment ( Netflix ) strong>

Aug. 17

In Dreamland , an alcoholic princess reputation Bean and her spunky elf companion identified Elfo navigate giants, sprites, harpies, gremlins, trolls, and Bean’s personal demon, Luci, on a series of misadventures. The animated line comes from Simpsons lore Matt Groening, and, be talking about demented sovereign pedigree, boasts Broad City ‘ s Abbi Jacobson preceding the singer cast. Yaaas queen. Err, princess.

The Innocents ( Netflix ) strong>

Aug. 24

” Romeo and Juliet, but they’re shapeshifters .” Who knows if that was the actual pitch for The Innocents , in which star-crossed teenage lovers Harry and June run away from their families only to discover that June has the power to shapeshift.( You think you know person .) It’s a superhuman have entered into Netflix’s exploding young adult opening, on the ends of another watercooler season of breakout punched 13 Reason Why.

Jack Ryan ( Amazon ) strong>

Aug. 31

Are you among those irate that, for all his brilliant directing and acting in A Quiet Place , John Krasinski dedicated the cinematic sin of saving his damn shirt on the whole time? He Who Was Jim Halpert, famously buff since leaving Dunder Mifflin, ascends to activity hero status to take the wand as Jack Ryan in Amazon’s spin on the Tom Clancy series. Krasinski’s biceps have large-scale sleeves to fill, following Chris Pine, Alec Baldwin, and Ben Affleck in the persona.

Lodge 49 ( AMC ) strong>

August 2018

The network that brought you the offspring ennui of Don Draper, the tortured moral tension of Walter White, and all those zombies acquaints its new complicated leading man: a surfer buster? Lodge 49 is a new tonal attitude for the network, performing Wyatt Russell as well-meaning but rudderless former surfer–a” charming loser ,” as the network’s director of programming describes–who moves into a frat lodge in Long Beach after the deaths among his father, is expecting to get his life on track, but finding it unusually derailed by his new support system.

All About the Washingtons ( Netflix ) strong>

Summer 2018

Run-DMC’s Rev. Run( aka Joey Simmons) sets up his own explanation of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air with this lightly autobiographical sitcom in which Simmons and his wife, Justine, frisk fictionalized versions of themselves conjuring their own families of four babies.

Insatiable ( Netflix ) strong>

Summer 2018

The logline for Insatiable predicts,” A disgraced, dissatisfied civil lawyer-turned-beauty pageant tutor( Dallas Roberts) takes on a vengeful, bullied adolescent Patty( Debby Ryan) as his client, and has no idea what he’s about to unleash upon countries around the world .” We have no plan either, as Netflix hasn’t released much more information than that. But it’s procreated Lauren Gussis, an alum from Dexter , so consider us intrigued by how that sensibility translates to the teen charm pageant nature.

Read more: https :// www.thedailybeast.com/ summer-tv-the-3 0-most-exciting-new-shows

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sad-ch1ld · 6 years ago

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via RSI Comm-Link

Monthly Studio Report: May 2018

Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES

VEHICLE FEATURES

The team also completed the implementation of cameras on remote turrets that can be controlled by players, allowing them to focus their turret target on a ship to see its relevant status.

VEHICLE PIPELINE

Work was also done on the greybox set-up for the Consolidated Outland Mustang Alpha, the RSI Constellation Phoenix, and the Anvil F8 Lightning.

GAMEPLAY FEATURES

NARRATIVE

CHARACTERS

The Character Art Team showcased their work on the Legacy Armor sets for both the Outlaws and Marines in an episode of Around the Verse (both of which will appear in Alpha 3.2).

Austin

AUSTIN

DESIGN

BACKEND SERVICES

ANIMATION

ART

OPERATIONS

Wilmslow & Derby

WILMSLOW & DERBY

ENGINEERING

SHIP TEAM

AUDIO

In Music, the Vanduul and Xi’an themes were pushed forward for Squadron 42. For the Persistent Universe, new music was created for derelict ship exploration (small, medium and large).

ANIMATION

VFX

GRAPHICS

Some other tasks included optimizations to the rendering in the editor, a holographic effect for use within Squadron 42, and improved temporal anti-aliasing stability.

ENVIRONMENT ART

Alongside this, work has been done to get future locations ready for production when the bulk of the Environment Team moves onto them later in the year.

Frankfurt

FRANKFURT

SYSTEM DESIGN

ENVIRONMENT ART

TECH ART

For FPS weapons, they supported the Gemini Light Machine Gun, which is now ready for its final review and sign off.

LIGHTING

WEAPONS

The Weapons Team completed a full polish of the Gemini F55 Light Machine Gun, Klaus & Werner Demeco LMG, and Kastak Arms’ Scalpel sniper rifle in preparation for the 3.2 release.

LEVEL DESIGN

CINEMATICS

ENGINE

ENGINE TOOLS

BUILD ENGINEERING

VFX

Platform: Turbulent

PLATFORM: TURBULENT

The team at Turbulent made some massive leaps in development for group services with several Spectrum releases to PTU, and provided platform support for the Community Team.

SPECTRUM

RSI PLATFORM

KNOWLEDGE BASE

They also released a new series of Contact Us forms that will help optimize and prioritize requests. Ultimately, this will help Player Relations react faster to urgent matters.

GROUP SERVICES

Community

COMMUNITY

Conclusion

WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…

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#RSI Comm-Link #star citizen #roberts space industries

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djgblogger-blog · 7 years ago

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Mother's milk holds the key to unlocking an evolutionary mystery from the last ice age

http://bit.ly/2r21MEn

Sunrise at noon in the Arctic. Little exposure to sun was a piece of the genetic puzzle. Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, CC BY

As biologists explore the variation across the genomes of living people, they’ve found evidence of evolution at work. Particular variants of genes increase or decrease in populations through time. Sometimes this happens by chance. Other times these changes in frequency result from the gene’s helping or hindering individuals’ survival, a phenomenon known as selection. If a gene conferred a survival advantage, people with the mutation would have more offspring and the mutation would become more common in subsequent generations.

Most of those past episodes of selection make sense, as they worked on genes involved with things like resisting disease, blood oxygen levels at high altitudes, and having paler skin at northern latitudes.

However, researchers have also identified an episode of strong selection that doesn’t have such an obvious logic. It’s a mutation on a gene involved with the development of a suite of traits that don’t seem very similar at first glance: hair, teeth, sweat glands and breasts. This one was a mystery — what could have been the adaptive value of this mutation that led to it being common in northeastern Asia but nowhere else?

My research usually focuses on teeth, specifically genetic influences on their development. I came to this particular evolution puzzle when my colleagues and I gathered in Boston at the AAAS meeting last year to discuss the latest evidence of how people first migrated into the Western Hemisphere. We put together the clues about this episode of selection on human genetic variation – and found an example of adaptation to life at high latitude during the last ice age.

Natural selection … of what?

We were trying to understand selection for a mutation in the gene called EDAR – it encodes the ectodysplasin A receptor that plays a role in how tightly cells adhere to each other during the development of hair, teeth, sweat glands and breasts. All of these anatomical structures form via a very similar developmental process that happens while you’re still in your mother’s womb. Slight changes to the developmental mechanism results in the final differences between hair and teeth and sweat and mammary glands. But there is a fundamental similarity that, among other things, includes the activity of EDAR.

This shared development is especially obvious when things go wrong. For example, 1 in 10,000 newborns have a disorder called ectodermal dysplasia, which causes disruption to the development of their hair, teeth, skin, sweat glands and breasts.

The V370A mutation that we focused on, the one that experienced strong selection, doesn’t disrupt development of these structures; rather, it augments them. People with V370A have thicker and straighter hair shafts, and their incisors have extra buttressing on the tongue side – a feature biologists call “shoveling.”

Human upper incisors with significant ‘shoveling’ on the tongue side. Christy G. Turner, II, courtesy G. Richard Scott, CC BY-ND

So why did this mutation provide such an advantage to people who carried it? Mice that have been experimentally induced to have the V370A mutation have thicker fur shafts and increased density of sweat glands. A previous study of modern human genomic variation interpreted the selection to have occurred in northern China during the last ice age and focused on the sweat glands. The researchers suggested that the selection was for improved sweating that could help with regulating body temperature. But to my colleagues and me, that just didn’t feel like a convincing adaptive scenario given that this took place during the (cold) ice age.

Instead of the sweat glands, our attention was drawn to another trait. Mice with the V370A mutation also have an increase in the branching of their mammary ducts – the tiny tubes that intertwine with breast tissue and extract nutrients to make milk. Maybe it was this change in the breast tissue that was so valuable to people with this mutation?

Christy G. Turner II, shown working in 1975, and his students assessed variation in incisor shoveling in over 30,000 people around the world. The current study relied on a subset of these data collected by co-author G. Richard Scott. G. Richard Scott and Joshua P. Carlson, CC BY-ND

Rather than trying to sample DNA from thousands of ancient people’s remains to see if they carried the mutation, we took advantage of the effect V370A has on human incisors. Relying on data collected over many years by my colleague G. Richard Scott from the University of Nevada, Reno, our group looked at the dental variation of over 5,000 skeletons from archaeological sites in Europe, Asia and the Americas to get a sense of how this mutation varied through time.

We found that all of the indigenous people living in the Western Hemisphere prior to European colonization had shovel-shaped incisors, which means they all likely had the V370A mutation. In contrast, only about 40 percent of the people in Asia had shovel-shaped incisors, and essentially no one in Europe did.

This pattern suggests that a population ancestral to Native Americans experienced the strong selection for V370A, an interpretation that differed from what my colleagues found when they only looked at genomic variation in living people. Using these ancient teeth, we were able to figure out when and where the selection happened. The next question we needed to address was why this selection occurred. What was going on to make this mutation so helpful and thus so much more prevalent?

An ice age advantage

Beringia outlined over today’s Siberia and Alaska. U.S. National Park Service, CC BY

Previous genetic work found that Native Americans descend from a common ancestral population that lived in Beringia, the region that links Siberia and Alaska. During the dramatic climate change associated with the last ice age 28,000 to 18,000 years ago, plants and animals that had previously lived in Siberia took refuge in a circumscribed area called the Beringian Refugium. For about 5,000 years, they were genetically isolated from other populations because of a vast dry tundra to the west and a lot of ice to the east. The people who found haven there too are referred to as the Beringian Standstill population.

Modern-day mesic shrub tundra near the northwestern Alaskan town of Kotzebue is similar to what the environment would have been like in Beringia during the ice age. Scott Elias, CC BY-ND

It’s not easy to live that far north. Sure, it’s cold. But more importantly, at high latitudes the sun is lower in the sky so sunlight must travel through more atmosphere to reach Earth’s surface. This journey through the atmosphere mostly filters out the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Most life forms need sun exposure to be healthy, in large part because UV exposure induces the body to make vitamin D.

Lighter skin tones let in more UV and have been selected for multiple times in human history. But once you get to the Arctic, skin depigmentation alone won’t suffice. In order to live with so little UV, people have culturally innovated, eating diets rich in vitamin D, such as oily fish. But nursing infants don’t eat these foods. Babies get their nutrients through their mother’s milk.

This is where our EDAR gene comes back into the picture. The V370A mutation in mice increases the branching density of the mammary ducts, and very likely does the same exact thing in human breasts. Scientists know that vitamin D deficient conditions induce more ductal branching during the breast development that happens with pregnancy. All of the evidence suggests that the increased ductal branching associated with V370A helped transfer nutrients from mother to infant through breast milk in a population that was extremely vitamin D deficient.

So the selection wasn’t for thicker hair or shovel-shaped incisors – instead, it was much more likely to have been on mammary ducts. The thicker hair and tooth variation just went along for the ride because they are created by the same basic developmental pathway. Selection on genetic variation in EDAR is probably related to health consequences for nursing infants rather than its effects on hair, teeth or sweat glands.

Excavation of a site occupied in Beringia 32,000 years ago. V. V. Pitul'ko & E. Yu. Pavlova, CC BY-ND

Still traceable genetic inheritance

Once the Earth started warming up at the end of the last ice age, those ice sheets started to melt, sea level rose and global climate became more humid. The people living in Beringia needed to move again. Some went east, populating the Western Hemisphere rapidly and extensively. Some went west, merging back into populations that were living in northern and eastern Asia. Scientists see traces of this migration today. The occurrence of incisor shoveling decreases as you move away from the Arctic, there is evidence of a long-lost language, and some of those Beringian Standstill mitochondrial DNA mutations can be found in Asian populations.

Today, everyone with shovel-shaped incisors carries a little remnant of this ephemeral population with them and a reminder of the importance of the maternal-infant bond to human survival.

But they also have the other effects of the V370A mutation. The increase in mammary ductal branching seems likely to influence the transfer of nutrients from breast tissue into milk. It may also play a role in susceptibility to breast cancer, given that breast density differs between Asian and non-Asian women as does the occurrence of breast cancer, a relationship that matches the distribution of V370A around the world today.

These ideas present exciting hypotheses to test in future studies. For now, our research shows that the bones of our ancestors can provide evidence of human adaptation, evidence that shifts our understanding of how genes work.

Leslea Hlusko does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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spotlightsaga · 7 years ago

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Kevin Cage of @spotlightsaga reviews... The Strain (S04E02) The Blood Tax Airdate: July 23, 2017 @fxnetworks Ratings: 0.913 Million :: 0.30 18-49 Demo Share Score: 2.25/10 @thestrain-fx TVTime/FB/Twitter/Tumblr/Path/Pinterest: @SpotlightSaga **********SPOILERS BELOW********** Messy. Messy. Messy. The whole entire first half of the episode for Dutch (Ruta Gedmintas) and Setrakian (David Bradley) is a flashback, which is extremely confusing considering that the other narrative playing out involving Gus (Miguel Gomez) and his random cousin, Raul (Michael Reventar), who we've never met, not even once, is happening in the current timeline. Luckily, for Gus, Raul works at a high clearance blood farming lab at 'The Partnership' and I'm literally losing interest as I'm writing this sentence. It's crazy to think we were all so excited about the possibilities of 'The Strain' when it first premiered. It really felt boundless, a new twist on an old genre. Even more insane is that I truly believe that people actually want to like the show. About 1.5 Million Viewers tuned in to the S4 premiere, which is huge for a show that's been on cable since 2014, as very few series see actual gains in overall viewer numbers... Albeit, the gain was only 6%, but it's a rare & notable gain nonetheless. After the first episode of S4 premiered, many of us were left wondering what had become of the fate of these characters covered in this 2nd episode, the same ones that are completely absent from any scene in the premiere, besides Setrakian in a strange dream sequence. Suddenly, I wish I had never wondered or even asked. 'Time Jump' tropes can already throw a lot at you, but filling in the blanks can make it even worse. It's almost better for the writers to set the stage and insinuate bits and pieces of the lost path here & there, otherwise it becomes extremely convoluted... Let the audience think for themselves, don't dog walk them through everything, because then we're left scratching our heads, feeling confused and even a bit dumbfounded, when really it should be cut & dry. When things are supposed to be simple, but you position them in a chaotic & restricted way, it feels like you're reading a children's book that you keep having to turn back to the previous page again & again, asking yourself, 'Wait a minute... Now what just happened?!' Frankly, it's insulting. FX Networks is better than this and even this show, during its lowest of low points, have been better than this clusterfuck of an episode. The good news is that every episode of 'The Strain' moves fast as lightning... Before you can even lift up your hand to scratch your head, its over and the credits are rolling. Unfortunately for us we still have a bit more ground to cover. Dutch has been separated from Setrakian and is being farmed for breeding due to her rare and Strigoi friendly B-Positive Blood Type. One of her captive roommates is happy that she's at least safe in her bizarre, bloodletting, breeding ground, Dutch brushes off that ridiculous notion. Imagine Carol from 'The Walking Dead' being locked up with someone for some random reason and then having one of her fellow prisoners telling her, 'Well at least we're safe and breeding out new Walkers vs fighting for our lives and living in fear out there in the wild.' Dutch doesn't give 'Roommate #4' quite the look of pure disdain that Carol would return that sentiment with, but nonetheless 'Roommate #4' gets the picture and rolls out. She's weak, Dutch isn't, we get it. Thank you writers, crystal clear. If you guessed that everything was going to go wrong with Gus' plan to use his cousin for his and his ruthless crew's personal gain and then put him in danger by keeping him around his homicidal group of friends, cookies for you. The flow of the episode is such a mess at this point that I found myself flipping through IMDB to see who Directed this nonsense. Ah, J. Miles Dale. Ok, now it makes sense. Usually on a bad day 'The Strain' is still a solid '5' out of '10', but this episode is more like the bottom of a muddy, moss covered rock behind a venomous snake pit deep in the banks of the Appalachian Mountains. If you aren't familiar with Dale's Directorial Debacles, let me catch you up; Robocop: The Series (1994), F/X: The Series (97/98 - yet another needless tv adaptation), Earth: The Final Conflict (2000 - so a late series episode), Andromeda (2002-03, no we weren't aware the show even ran that long), The Skulls III (2004 - The first film was quite enough), Doc (2001-2004 w/Billy Ray Cyrus, yeah we have no idea either), Sue Thomas F.B.Eye (2002-2004 - WTF?!), Shadowhunters (2016 - Did I just hear you snort?), and every previous episode of 'The Strain' that you hated... No seriously, we looked back as we keep all of our ratings on file and the highest rating we'd given to any episodes with his name on the Director's Chair was a 4/10. Dale is not a Director, he's a producer with money and power. He's severely untalented and he's worked on some of the worst tv shows in the history of television, but he's thrown money at some decent ones... See the difference? I had to watch the episode twice, because I was so disinterested the first time, I was unable to piece together a coherent review. It was more cohesive than this episode, but it needed work. I'm a perfectionist... And I really don't like going negative, but if I have to, it's going to be in an entertaining key. Hopefully this article is far more interesting than the episode itself. Luckily we won't see Dale return to 'The Strain' until the 10th episode... But if the gravity of that reality hasn't sunk in yet, I'll give you a moment to think about it... No, go ahead, take your time. You already got it, didn't you? See, I knew it, you and me, we're on the same level. We love the #horror genre... We've loved parts of 'The Strain' and have enjoyed its lighting fast pace... We all love to hate Zach (Max Charles) and are most likely all completionists. We are going to ride S4 all the way out, we were hoping for a huge turnaround for the big series finale, but more than likely Dale has thrown a lot of money down to help sustain this project, so he's going to be directing the FINAL EPISODE. Why, God, Why? God gave us Cancer. God gave us AIDS. And God gave us J. Miles Dale. Suddenly I'm rooting for The Strigoi... And whoever they hired to write this drivel... Liz Phang, girl, what the fuck? If anyone asks, you blame it on Dale, you at least have a few good episodes of USA Network's 'Colony' under your belt. Quick 'flash review' on where we are here, mmhkay? Zach sets off a giant nuclear bomb, directly causing some sort of hazy like fog that's thick enough to allow The Strigoi to run free in the daylight, blocking the sun's harmful UV Rays... Winston Churchill did some sort of version of this in real life, wonder why people don't hate him like they hate Zach?! Everyone is fine though, forget what we know about Hiroshima and all those mutations, that stuff is happily skipped over because that might create a few more hours in the workroom for the writers (can't have that). Dutch takes lead in the B-Positive Breeding Ground, possibly showing her cards before she should play them to the 'Head of B+ Blood Type Breeding Operations', Sanjay Desai (Cas Anvar). He's still alive, who knows why, most likely to participate in ridiculous subplots like this one. Don't worry, I'm still not giving up, it's most likely due to the diligent person inside of me that can't get this far into a show and simply just stop. The most disheartening take on this whole episode, which congratulations 'The Strain', you've ensured we leave a little section for 'Worst Of' for our end of 2017 Awards (consider it a small Spotlight Saga/TV Time Community Version of the Razzies), is that the Dutch character is completely wasted. Once upon a time she was a bad ass, making sketchy decisions and given redemption arcs. Then it was made clear they had no idea what the hell to do with her next... Dutch's Fall From Grace: Unnecessary love triangle? CHECK! ✔️ Female who needs strong but damaged male character to save her? CHECK! ✔️ Almost escaping but puts another, weaker human being, Sherry -or as we referred to her earlier, Roommate #4-, (Jess Salgueiro) before her and it backfires? CHECK! ✔️ Getting her only way out doomed to a terrible fate for allowing the other useless, weak character to take her place instead? CHECK! ✔️ Its 2017. I don't know how it runs in your city, but in Miami we don't help you if we don't know you. So add 6-foot tongues in a blood sucking ancient race of #vampires that come from tiny worms that look like extremely fast moving maggots, a bustling, b-positive, baby-making, muncher snack maker, nursery prison... And then have the most intelligent & capable woman in the entire building stick the one psychologically frail woman of the group , who's already directly told her that she feels safer on the inside, into her only chance to escape... Only she doesn't even want to escape... So really this is just a way for the writers to take yet another shortcut to fuck everything up? Oh hell no! Keep with the East Coast, NYC to Miami attitude, Dutch. Walk over a bitch, before a bitch walks over you. This is a horror series, not a 'everything works out in the end' type of series. It's almost over, people. Picture me saying this next sentence with every word annunciated as if I'm asking a really difficult question very slowly in a genuine state of confusion, possibly in a massive K-Hole, or 'Stoned' for all you chemical amateurs... "I'm sure things will get better and be totally worth it by the 10th and final episode????" Inspiring confidence yet? Damn, I was sure that would work! At least we have Eph, who seems to be finding a purpose in the midst of his gloomy, dystopian, post wife and child, existential crisis. The resistance group, led by possible unnecessary romantic interest Alex Green (Angel Parker), that he stayed behind with and helped in return for supplies, conveniently has to get out of their hiding spots due to a Strigoi draining a member's blood and therefore absorbing all of his memories. Suddenly Eph can help, suddenly he wants to. It's cheesy, but Corey Stoll is very aware of that and even deliver's Eph's sudden 'back into action' style-line like a Schwarzenegger one liner from an old 80s action film with all the heart of 'one of the good ones' like Mark L Lester's 1985 'Commando'. In all fairness, barring directors like Dale from touching this show, 'The Strain' still has a chance to deliver us a semi-satisfactory ending. It's time to ham that shit up tho... Break out the Gouda Cheese, the blood red corn syrup, those creepy ass, aforementioned 6-foot muncher tongues and give Eph a whole lot more ridiculous one-liners, bomb detonators, large amounts of explosives, guns & firepower and we could still be walking out of this thing with a smile on our face yet.

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