#and meowing at kids on the playground is not eternal

[catcatb0y]

Bro trans or not, kids are going to ID as animals. We always have. We always will.

I used to hiss at kids on the playground, and guess what? I grew out of it. Being more 'cat' than 'boy' has always come naturally to me. It doesn't harm anyone.

Whether it's for fun or for serious.

Find a group of kids not casting spells to make them vampires or werewolves or cats or whatever- it might be pawsible now, but most everyone I know either had or knew someone at their school that had an otherkin/furry/animal phase.

It's a part of growing up.

u can become fully immune to a lot of scaremongering transphobic headlines simply by being chill about otherkin stuff. 'what's next? children identifying as CATS and DOGS??' why not! i hope they have a lovely time doing it.

[orbemnews]

Not Your Pre-Pandemic Las Vegas A decade ago, after a rained-out Thanksgiving desert camping trip with our five kids, my wife, Kristin, and I headed to the nearest available lodging, the now-shuttered Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas. Watching our brood eat their Thanksgiving meal as cigarette smoke and slot-machine clamor wafted over their cheeseburgers, Kristin and I locked eyes with an unspoken message: We ar­­e the world’s worst parents. We have avoided Las Vegas with the kids since then, but an aborted drive to slushy Aspen this April with three of our heirs caused us to pause in Vegas. At the time, the city was just awakening from its Covid slumber, with mandatory masks and limited capacity in most indoor spaces, traffic so light that cars were drag-racing down the normally packed Strip, and a lingering, troubling question over the whole place: Will this reopening really be safe? But extraordinary things have been happening during this slumber, and while we were only going to spend one night there, we had so much fun that we ended up staying four. At first we spent most of our time in the relative safety of the outdoors, but then we started to relax along with the rest of the city, drowning our hands beneath the ubiquitous liquid sanitizer dispensers, masking up and heading indoors. I knew things had shifted in Sin City when, while maneuvering the minivan through some seemingly dicey neighborhood between Downtown and the Strip, I noted on the back alley wall of a hair salon a striking mural depicting the cult outsider artist Henry Darger’s seven Vivian Girl warriors in their trademark yellow dresses. What were the Vivian Girls doing here? Farther along, Vegas’s ghost-town adult stores, shuttered warehouses and other buildings were also sporting increasingly elaborate murals: a blood-squirting horned lizard spanning half a city block; a dog with an impressively slobbering tongue piloting an open cockpit plane; a colorful phoenix and dragon rising like fireworks from an empty parking lot — all producing collective surprised “Wows!” from inside our minivan. Las Vegas, it seems, is emerging from the Covid crisis as a place of spectacle and creativity, especially outside the air-conditioned gambling ghettos of the Strip. Over the next four days we did a lot of walking, crawling, flying and even railroading, all of it away from the casinos. We explored the Arts District, an area that has gone into hyper drive — so much so that we waited 30 minutes to get into my once “secret” Colombian breakfast joint, Makers & Finders — and wandered along Spring Mountain Road, the hub of the city’s Chinatown, rapidly expanding westward. In the midcentury mecca of East Fremont Street, a $350 million investment by the tech titan Tony Hsieh, who died last year, has produced a boulevard of fantastical art installations, restored buildings and a sculptural playground surrounded by stacked shipping containers converted to boutiques and cafes, all guarded by a giant, fire-spewing, steel praying mantis. “Vegas is going through a cultural renaissance,” a former member of the city’s Arts Commission, Brian “Paco” Alvarez, told me in a recent telephone interview. “A lot of the local culture that comes out of a city with two million unusually creative people didn’t stop during the pandemic.” A mysterious, windowless building The most striking newcomer is Area15, which opened in February in a mysterious, airport-hanger-size, windowless building two miles west of the Strip. Imagine an urban Burning Man mall (indeed, many of the sculptures and installations came from the annual arts festival held in northern Nevada), with some dozen tenants providing everything from virtual reality trips to nonvirtual ax throwing, accompanied by Day-Glo color schemes, electronic music, giant interactive art installations and guests flying overhead on seats attached to ceiling rails. Face masks are currently only mandatory in Area15 for self-identified unvaccinated people, though some of the attractions within still require face masks for everyone. Everywhere, we encountered the constant presence of cleaning attendants spraying and wiping surfaces. On the second floor of Area15’s art riot I met an old acquaintance from New York, Chris Wink, one of the co-founders of the joyously weird Blue Man Group, who was bringing his creative magic to Area15 in the form of a “Psychedelic Art House Meets Carnival Funhouse” called Wink World (adult tickets start at $18). Wink World is centered around six rooms with infinity mirror boxes reflecting Slinkys, plasma balls, fan spinners, Hoberman Spheres and ribbons dancing to an ethereal soundtrack of electronic music, rhythmic chanting and heavy breathing. “I worked on these installations for six years in my living room in New York,” Mr. Wink told me. “I was trying to evoke psychedelic experiences without medicine.” My unmedicated children were transfixed, as if these familiar toys frolicking into eternity were totems to their own personal nirvanas. I’ve never seen them stand so still in front of an art exhibit. Lava-filled caves and artificial lawns Omega Mart (adult admissions start at $45, face mask and temperature check mandatory), the biggest attraction in the complex, lines one side of the complex’s atrium and seemed — at first — to provide a banal respite from Area15’s sensory overload. Along the sale aisles I found Nut Free Salted Peanuts, Gut Monkey Ginger Ale and cans of Camels Implied Chicken Sop. My kids, good campers, immediately ducked into a small demonstration tent erected in the back of the store. They never came out again. A hidden entry brought them through the wall and into a world of artificial lawns, lava-filled caves, drab offices, a desert canyon, locker rooms, a secret bar and other divergent spaces often linked by hidden entrances. “Pull every knob and open every closet you see, Dad,” my daughter, Vivian, breathlessly advised as she whizzed by me for the fourth time in this 52,000-square-foot maze. Created by the renowned Santa Fe artist collective Meow Wolf (the name derived from pulling two random words from a hat during their first meeting), Omega Mart is an amalgamation of some 325 artists’ creations tied together by disparate overlapping story lines which one can follow — or not. For a short time, I tracked the story of the takeover of Omega Mart’s corporate headquarters by a hilariously manipulative New Agey daughter, and then got sidelined into the tale of a teen herbalist leading a rebellion to something else. I have no idea what I experienced other than that Brian Eno composed the music to one of the installations. None of my kids could explain what they experienced either, other than something mind-expanding. If it wasn’t for dinner, we might still be in there. Feasting in Chinatown Dinner! The choices are dizzying and there are now 10 Michelin-starred restaurants in the city. We weren’t going to any of them. Leaving Area15, even the distant lights of the Strip seemed relatively calming. But we were driving the opposite direction, to Chinatown. A decade ago, Chinatown was mainly a small enclave of restaurants and shops behind an ornate red gate overlooking a strip mall called Chinatown Plaza, catering to Vegas’s growing wave of Asian immigrants. Chinatown has now expanded to the far reaches of Spring Mountain Road, a desert Hong Kong of neon signs in Mandarin, Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean, advertising restaurants, coffee houses, foot-massage salons and lots of stuff I couldn’t read. Our goal was an unlikely corner of a strip mall, where hides, in the Jones family’s collective opinion, the best Japanese restaurant in North America, Raku. Step behind an understated white backlit sign and you enter an aged wood interior of an intimate restaurant that you might find off a Kyoto alley. We slid into the family-style tables behind the main dining room and commenced to feast. There’s a $100 tasting menu if you are feeling adult, but my tribe ordered cream-like tofu with dried fish, foie gras skewers and a dozen other items. Chinatown became our go-to-spot for snacks and boba tea between adventures. A favorite spot became Pho 90, a low-key Vietnamese cafe with outstanding noodle dishes and exquisitely layered banh mi sandwiches for picnics in the wild. Beyond the city Las Vegas’s expanding grid abruptly surrenders to the desert, which might be the most overlooked part of Vegas family vacations. Red Rock Canyon, 17 miles west of the Strip, is like walking into a Road Runner cartoon with a Technicolor ballet of clashing tectonic formations. We grabbed our admittedly reluctant brood on a 2.4-mile, round-trip hike on the Keystone Thrust Trail through a series of gullies until we emerged above epic white limestone cliffs jutting through the ocher-colored mountains. Here we had our Vietnamese picnic overlooking the monolithic casinos in the distance. Our last night’s excursion into nature didn’t take any persuasion: Half an hour’s drive south to Boulder City, a company called Rail Explorers has set up rail bike tours on the abandoned tracks leading to the Hoover Dam construction site. We booked a sunset tour (from $85 to $150 for a tandem quad bike). After some quick instruction, we, along with three dozen other visitors, climbed into an 800-pound, four-person Korean-made bike rig and, giving the group ahead of us a three-minute head start for some space, started peddling. Our route was along four miles of desert track gently sloping into a narrowing canyon pass. As we effortlessly peddled at 10 miles per hour, we noticed that the spikes holding down the railroad ties were often crooked or missing. “I bet these were all driven in by hand,” my teenage son, Cody, a history buff, noted. In the enveloping dusk, we glimpsed shadows moving along the sagebrush: bighorn sheep, goats and other critters emerging for their nocturnal wanderings. But the most surreal sight was at the end of the ride, where a giant backlit sign for a truck stop casino appeared over a desert butte — Vegas was beckoning us back, but now we welcomed the summons. Here we were, peddling into the sunset, feeling more athletic, cool and (gasp!) enlightened than when we first rolled into Vegas four days ago. Oh what good parents we were! “The moniker of ‘Sin City’ is totally wrong,” Mr. Alvarez told me, “if you know where to look.” Source link Orbem News #Las #prepandemic #Vegas

[arplis]

Arplis - News: Virtual reality pops up at Denver museums, festivals and even VR escape rooms

Samantha Doerge was shutting down the Denver Film Festival’s virtual reality floor last fall when a woman shuffled in with her elderly mother, asking if Doerge would run the hour-long, three-part “Spheres” program one last time. ” ‘We’re sorry to be here so late,’ ” Doerge, a programming coordinator for the festival, remembers the woman telling her. ” ‘But my mother has wanted to be an astronaut all of her life and couldn’t because of an astigmatism. This is as close as she’ll ever get.’ Of course, I was more than happy to stay open for her.” “Spheres,” which has captivated audiences and critics at the Telluride, Sundance and Venice film festivals, invites viewers to don the now-standard virtual reality goggles and take a celebrity-narrated trip through the cosmos. Created by Eliza McNitt and executive produced by Darren Aronofsky (“Black Swan”), “Spheres” employs digital animation to render the big bang and other astronomical events in spectacular detail, bringing participants as close to space travel as they’ll likely ever get. The effect of narrative experiences like “Spheres” is uniquely powerful, said Doerge, who has helped program the Denver Film Festival’s virtual reality offerings the last couple of years. She also assisted with the debut of “Spheres” as Telluride’s first-ever VR offering in 2018. “When this woman, who had to have been 85 or 90 years old, came out of it, she was just crying,” Doerge said. “The word she used was ‘magical.’ “ Long in the wings, VR has increasingly inched into the spotlight at festivals, museums, theaters and bars as its complex technology — bulky headsets, servers and software — has grown rapidly cheaper and more compact. When it returns Oct. 30-Nov. 11, the Denver Film Festival will offer eight separate virtual reality experiences at its Festival Annex at the McNichols Building, with another four provided by its VR sponsor, Boulder-based Reality Garage, a lounge and makerspace that produces its own VR content. In recent years, the entrance of Facebook, Microsoft, Sony and other global players into the industry has rapidly accelerated VR’s consumer-friendliness while spurring artists and programmers to dream up new interactive concepts. Investors are also licking their pixelated chops at forecasts that predict the global market will increase from about $8 billion in 2018 to $44.7 billion in 2024, according to a recent report. And as Doerge knows, virtual reality isn’t just for gaming and entertainment. Her husband, a technology specialist for Children’s Hospital Colorado, uses VR to transport sick kids from the confines of their beds to Altspace, a social platform that offers simulated meet-ups and activities. “It’s there so kids can do things like have dinner with their families,” Doerge said. “These are mundane things we take for granted, but sick kids can check into Altspace and no longer feel this alienation from their childhoods.” Of course, that requires the other participants to don VR headsets, too. But as people get used to seeing VR at places such as Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum (which offers simulated plane rides), the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (in its new “Extreme Sports” installation), and the casino-like environs of Dave & Buster’s, the idea of bringing it into the living rooms gets less intimidating. In other words: Much like table tennis or life-sized Jenga, it’s another trendy entertainment — albeit a pricey, fast-evolving one. Related Articles “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” director Rian Johnson will be at opening night of Denver Film Fest “Knives Out,” “Marriage Story” will bookend Denver Film Fest’s 2019 red carpets Denver Film Festival reveals 2019 dates, tribute to late artistic director Brit Withey “There’s no headset at home, but that’s been a request for Christmas,” said Mandi Hoffman, a Denver mother overseeing nine middle-schoolers last week at VR Social, a virtual reality arcade in Broomfield. “We don’t have a lot of space, so I’m a little worried about how it would work. But we love VR. We visited a VR art exhibit in Montreal, which was incredible, and we like to do the VR games at the Punch Bowl Social on South Broadway.” Hoffman’s son, Henry, was there celebrating his 11th birthday with school buddies — all of them playing a sci-fi combat game and loosely tethered to the ceiling by cords on their headsets. The scene prompted Hoffman’s daughter Millie to acknowledge a common criticism of VR: Why should kids hook themselves up to machines for entertainment, even in poor weather, when indoor playgrounds, trampoline parks and “American Ninja Warrior”-style obstacle courses are so widely available these days? “Clearly from the outside, when you don’t have the headset on, it looks completely different,” Millie, 14, said as she stood in the bare-bones, LED-lit arcade space. Next door, a quintet of near-motionless people sat in a darkened room playing a virtual escape-room game. “But once you get inside it’s a heightened reality — fantasy games, fighting off robots, things you don’t get to experience when you go to (a business like) Jump Street or Lava Island.” Basic VR emulators such as Google’s Daydream Viewer, which mimics the look of VR by turning your phone into a display screen, retail for about $100. Gaming-friendly VR headsets, like the new Oculus Quest, range from $400 to $1,500 for crisp, stereoscopic imagery that offers the illusion of three-dimensional interactivity. Provided by Wings Over the RockiesVisitors to the Blue Sky Gallery in Centennial experience a virtual plane ride as part of Wings Over the Rockies’ VR programming. (Provided by Wings Over the Rockies) That’s a pricey buy-in compared to a board game or night at the movies, but nothing can match the experience, proponents say. Blotting out natural stimuli with eyepieces and headphones is one thing, but adding to the sensory immersion with physical elements, motion-tracking, controllers and other features can take something like a video-game escape room to new heights of interactivity — and meaning. “As a technology, it’s extremely exciting for us,” said Lauren Cason, creative director of Interactive at Santa Fe-based art company Meow Wolf. “If you’ve ever been to a VR exhibit or seen a demo, you’re going to be sitting in a blank room with a thing on your face, and it might not have much to do with the space you’re in.” Meow Wolf, however, has been busy researching and developing new XR (or “extended reality”) concepts that will allow guests to blur the lines between their physical and digital worlds at the company’s interactive art-playgrounds. That includes its forthcoming Denver location, a 90,000-square-foot, $60 million, four-story complex under construction at Interstate 25, Colfax Avenue and Auraria Parkway viaducts. “There’s technology out there — like HoloLens, Magic Leap, Spark AR, Apple’s AR (augmented reality) kit, ARCore and others — that allows you to superimpose three-dimensional digital objects onto real-world objects, and then have an interplay between those real and fabricated worlds,” said Cason, a veteran of MIT and Apple. “We believe that’s the future of these immersive, experiential spaces.” Or the present. Last week, the Washington, D.C., location of Madame Tussauds wax museum announced its new “Alive in AR” augmented-reality experience that uses smartglass technology to animate its celebrity and historical statues. That includes everyone from Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. to Tyra Banks, who come to life with the aid of 360-degree video, holograms and custom soundscapes. “While some attractions have experimented with AR on handheld smartphones, Madame Tussauds D.C. is embracing the more immersive and hands-free smartglass technology,” said ARtGlass founder and CEO Greg Werkheiser in a press statement. So how long will it be before we see that in Denver? Possibly sooner than you think, Meow Wolf officials said, although they declined to reveal specific details about Denver-based XR offerings, or say how much the company is investing in those technologies. “We’ve had several interesting tests and successes that are pointing toward something larger,” said Emily Montoya, a co-founder of Meow Wolf. “A couple of years ago, we took a VR experience called The Atrium to South by Southwest, which allowed people to experience our (Santa Fe-based) House of Eternal Return. And last year we took Navigator (a ‘mixed-reality sculpture’) to L.A.’s L.E.A.P. Con, which was sort of a giant-robot headset experience.” Navigator, which invited participants to climb behind the controls of a car-sized, spider-like robot, combined VR, AR and physical features to create the experience of operating a giant robot in real time. This sort of “spatial computing” is a clear emphasis for the company moving forward, Montoya said. “One of our biggest interests is incorporating theatrical storylines into the technology,” she said. “We already have the capacity to create such fantastic physical spaces and controls, so why not start there?” The same criticisms that detractors have for VR — its largely sedentary nature, its contrived imagery and sound — could just as easily be leveled at all manner of film and gaming, defenders say. And VR’s unlimited adaptability in the virtual space means, for example, that deaf people can use sign language to communicate with one another, or that wheelchair-bound people can fulfill dreams of walking, running and even flying. Recent advances have broadened VR’s applications to the point of mainstream appeal, from VR headsets going wireless to virtual learning, workplace training and even theater –  such as last month’s “Virtue of Reality” production from the University of Colorado’s Experience Design MFA students. There’s limitless room for experimentation, backers promise. Just not, you know, in the literal sense. “At my core, I am a cinephile and I love movies,” said Denver Film Fest’s Doerge. “But one thing that’s so exciting about VR is that your brain doesn’t make a distinction between what’s happening to you and what’s happening in the headset, so the emotional response you can get from a VR experience is very powerful. I have watched grown men burst into tears because it was so captivating.” She hopes to further evangelize for the format at the Denver Film Festival’s VR-focused panels at Civic Center’s McNichols Building on Nov. 9. One is a general creator panel, while the other explores its uses in pediatric health care. Both are fundamentally rooted in storytelling, she said. “One of the most successful and basic VR experiences out there is called Job Simulator,” Doerge said. “It’s also the first one I ever tried about four years ago. In it, I was basically a 7-Eleven cashier, but what shocked me was how consuming it was, because I almost had to reintegrate into my own reality after taking off the goggles. It’s been an uphill battle with VR into the film world, but whether it’s storytelling or escape, it has this unique ability to transport you, even when you’re fully aware that you’re wearing the headset.” Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get entertainment news sent straight to your inbox. #TellurideFilmFestival #Museum #ThingsToDo #News #MeowWolf

Arplis - News source https://arplis.com/blogs/news/virtual-reality-pops-up-at-denver-museums-festivals-and-even-vr-escape-rooms