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othernaut · 2 years ago

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Potato thoughts.

So there I was, making an admittedly lazy and low-effort dinner, when I was (as I so often regretfully am) reminded that I am an absurd human animal and this thing that I am doing, that I consider functional and everyday, is in fact batshit insane.

Not the cooking itself (admittedly also batshit, but for more pedestrian, i-am-bad-at-life-skills reasons), but the sheer variety involved in what I consider a lazy and low-effort meal. First, the base matter: Potatoes, onions, and chicken wieners. Two root vegetables, one animal. Okay. Then, the lubrication: a mix of sunflower and sesame oils. All right, seeds added; a common omnivore dietary supplement. Then, the flavorings: Garlic (still a root), chili paste (wait, that pepper that wants to harm you?), 1/4th of a beef stock cube (a boiled, powderized entire other animal), salt and pepper (seeds and minerals!) and ketchup (the fruit of another plant that wants to harm you, a grain alcohol fermentation byproduct, and whatever taxonomic hell white sugar is).

Even for an omnivorous species, like, what the hell is this?

Most other animals on Earth specialize into a dietary niche and ride that single diet off into the sunset. Where variety appears, it’s opportunistic and frequently involves insects, which human omnivores paradoxially avoid. It’s rare as hell to find an omnivore with a 50/50 plant/animal diet (i can only recall the maned wolf right now), and even in other opportunistic omnivores, there’s one thing that forms the base of their diet, and everything else is just sort of consumed when you find it. No other creature goes so out of its way to invade and exploit other niches. No other creature looks at the bright red mouth-pain bush and thinks, “How do I extract nutrition from this?”

And because I’m in a lazy potato mindset, I feel like extrapolating this to the rest of the universe. What if this weird mega-omnivorousness isn’t just bizarre for Earth, but bizarre for everywhere? What if most of the other life in the galaxy works like the life on Earth - one staple foodstuff, opportunistic scrounging if it’s available, but primarily a single thing?

What happens if we meet?

Imagine a future where everything goes right. Humans travel to the stars, meet our neighbors, and we get along. Imagine three human drifters kicking around a space station, looking for work, and imagine they get picked up as crewmen on a passing freighter staffed by accommodating aliens who’ve never seen a human before. Imagine being the alien quartermaster, trying to update the manifest with whatever the Human Food turns out to be. Imagine them asking these humans what they want to eat.

One guy’s been surviving off of ramen noodles for the last few weeks while waiting for work to pick up, and, like, he’s alive, he’s been taking a multivitamin, but he’s been seriously considering engaging in space piracy if the result was a good paella. One person keeps wanting to eat better, but they’re half a year away from home and have absolutely no self-control yet: the Spacey’s down at Dock 9 just demoed a pulled pork poutine that they’ve been eating like three nights a week, and the only thing they can actually cook for themselves is lasagna. One girl is lactose and gluten intolerant and has been kept going via fried mushroom-and-onion omelets and unagi rice, but she’s got an ersatz homebrew setup in her room, one’s just at the start of its fermentation cycle, and she’s got all the materials for fish sauce and doesn’t want to just abandon it.

Meanwhile, the alien quartermaster eats food. Like, there’s a grub, named “food”, that every member of their species eats, sometimes with a green broth for supplementary calcium and copper. They’ve never had opinions about food, never wondered if they liked eating food, they just ate it. There’s 38 crates of food grubs flash-frozen just before pupation in the hold. They don’t know what kind of grub a “ramen” is or why this human is angry at it. They don’t know why you would intentionally create and consume flavored medical cleaner. They have passed by Spacey’s once, and it scared them.

After looking up what a “pursuit predator” is, the quartermaster sources 30 live salmon and releases them into their ship’s water system. The humans neither pursue nor predate upon them. The humans display qualities of omnivores, exclusive carnivores, detritivores, granivores, fructivores and more, sometimes all at once, sometimes fluctuating day by day. In frustration, the quartermaster orders 50 pounds of “pulled pork poutine” from Spacey’s; one of the humans eats it exclusively, which causes them to vomit, after which they continue eating the poutine. Two of them try the food-grubs; one human declares them inedible, and the other says it’d be fine with some soy sauce.

The stars are wild and wide. There is such variety in the universe, and the humans apparently want to eat all of it.

#pulled pork poutine is so good though #my own dinner was passable at best #ah hell soy sauce actually would have improved it

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news-update-covid-19-usa · 3 years ago

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NEWS UPDATE USA !!! A Missouri couple says they dragged their feet on getting the Covid-19 vaccine. Then they got sick

Louie Michael and his wife, Pattie Bunch, were both hospitalized last month with Covid-19 in Springfield, Missouri.

An ambulance first had rushed her, with respiratory failure, to an emergency room one day; he was admitted the next night. "You may not make it through the night," she recalls a physician telling her. Michael remembers the doctor asking him about possible intubation: "Do you want us to fight for you? Do you want us to do anything we can to save your life?" Bunch, now recovery at home, says she felt helpless. "You have no control." Coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths are rising again in Missouri, with the federal government deploying a Covid-19 surge team to provide public health support. The state's health department estimates that more than 70% of the virus in the state is the more infectious -- possibly more dangerous -- Delta variant. That variant, first identified in India, accounted for 51.7% of all new Covid-19 infections in the country over the two weeks that ended Saturday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated. State health officials push vaccination efforts Robert Knodell, acting director of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, on Friday acknowledged significant outbreaks of the Delta variant in north-central Missouri and a similar surge in southwest Missouri. Vaccination, Knodell told reporters, "is now, and remains the number one most effective mitigation step that every Missourian age 12 and over can take to protect themselves, to protect their families, and their neighbors." Dr. George Turabelidze, a state epidemiologist, said Missouri had "vulnerable hot spots" where not enough people were vaccinated and warned the state is "heading towards widespread infection with Delta."

Over the past week, Missouri's Covid-19 caseload was second highest in the country, with 15.5 new cases per 100,000 people daily, or 108 cases per 100,000 people over seven days, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Arkansas had the highest rate at 15.7 new cases per 100,000 people each day, the data showed. At Springfield's Mercy Hospital, the rapid spike in hospitalizations left administrators scrambling to borrow ventilators from other hospitals. At the city's CoxHealth hospital system, 90% of coronavirus patients had the Delta variant. "We are seeing a tremendous increase in the number of Covid patients in our emergency department over the past several weeks," said Dr. Howard Jarvis, medical director of the emergency department at CoxHealth. He added, "We are going to get worse over the next couple weeks. Certainly people are out doing a lot more things. I think there's a lot of people that have less concern about the virus. Now we don't have a very high percentage in this area of people who are vaccinated." Breeding grounds for more deadly Covid-19 variants Missouri is not alone. More than 9 million people live in 173 US counties with Covid-19 case rates at or more than 100 cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days and with vaccination rates lower than 40%, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, said at a White House briefing on Thursday. More than 90% of those counties also have a vaccination coverage of less than 40%, according to Walensky.

"Many of these counties are also the same locations where the Delta variant represents the large majority of circulating virus," Walensky said. "Low vaccination rates in these counties, coupled with high case rates -- and lax mitigation policies that do not protect those who are unvaccinated from disease -- will certainly, and sadly, lead to more unnecessary suffering, hospitalizations and potentially deaths." In fact, a new data analysis has identified clusters of unvaccinated people, most of them in the southern United States, who are vulnerable to surges in Covid-19 cases and could become breeding grounds for even more deadly variants. The analysis by Georgetown University researchers identified 30 clusters of counties with low vaccination rates and significant population sizes. The five most significant clusters cover large swaths of the southeastern US and a smaller portion in the Midwest. The clusters are largely in parts of eight states -- from Georgia to Texas and southern Missouri. About one-third of Americans have not received a Covid-19 shot. About 39% of Greene County residents fully vaccinated Katie Towns, acting director of the Springfield-Greene County Health Department, said the county -- population about 300,000 -- had 240 Covid-19 cases just on Wednesday and 17 deaths in the last two weeks. About 39% of its residents are fully vaccinated, according to health department website. "We're not a huge community," she said of the 240 cases. "That's a really large number and we haven't seen these numbers since we had a surge back in December and January." About 56% of adults in Missouri have received at least one Covid-19 vaccine dose and 39.4% of residents are fully vaccinated, according to CDC data. In Taney County, where the southwestern Ozark city of Branson is a huge tourist draw, about 25% of its roughly 56,000 residents are vaccinated. "It runs the gamut," Lisa Marshall, director of the Taney County Health Department, said of the hesitancy to the vaccine. "Maybe they just want to wait and see or ... it's not quite ready yet. Maybe they're just not someone that vaccinates. We've also heard a little bit of concern over how quickly the vaccine was developed." Overall, data shows that Covid-19 is expected to swell in less vaccinated communities, especially as the Delta variant continue to spread in those areas. In Missouri, a federal surge team deployed there is to include an epidemiologist, research assistants, a health communication specialist, contact tracers and others who will help with vaccination and outreach, according to the health department. The teams include members of CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency "We have a CDC representative helping us with ... investigating the (Delta) variant and its presence here in our community," Towns said. "But we just have ... one representative right now. We'll gladly accept the additional resources."

At the 500-bed CoxHealth hospital system, Jarvis said nearly all of the new Covid-19 admissions have been unvaccinated younger patients. "This is going to keep happening," he said of the latest surge in cases. "It may peak here and then it's going to spread to other places. If we don't get enough vaccinated there's going to be another variant that's probably worse. It's just that's the way viruses work." Couple, sick with Covid-19, holds hands in the ICU In Rogersville, Louie Michael said he and wife Pattie Bunch, a nurse, had been "dragging our feet" since the spring about getting a Covid-19 vaccine. In mid-June, Bunch got sick. "It felt like a bomb dropped on me," said Bunch, who is still recovering less than a month later. "I just wasn't feeling good at all. And I thought, 'Oh, no.'" An ambulance rushed her to the hospital with respiratory failure on June 17. The next night, Michael, an entertainer, had to be rushed to the same emergency room in Springfield. A nurse eventually put them in the same ICU room, where Michael took a snapshot of them holding hands. "We didn't know how it was going to turn out," said Michael, who along with Bunch urges people to get vaccinated. "We didn't know if we'd get to go back home." "Or see our kids again, or our family or grandson," she said. "It could have just ended that night," said Michael, who has been with Bunch for 30 years. "It made me mad. I didn't want it to end that way. It's not supposed to end that way ... and unfortunately, it's ending for a lot of people that way."

https://dzone.com/articles/hd-velozes-amp-furiosos-9-assistir-fast-amp-furiou https://dzone.com/articles/hd1080p-assistir-velozes-amp-furiosos-9-dublado-on https://dzone.com/articles/vem-hd-assistir-invocacao-do-mal-3-a-ordem-do-demo https://dzone.com/articles/asisstir-invocacao-do-mal-3-a-ordem-do-demonio-onl https://dzone.com/articles/assistir-hd-invocacao-do-mal-3-a-ordem-do-demonio https://dzone.com/articles/vem-hd-assistir-mortal-kombat-2021-filme-completo https://dzone.com/articles/vem-hd-assistir-mortal-kombat-filme-completo-dubla https://dzone.com/articles/vem-hd-assistir-um-lugar-silencioso-parte-ii-2021 https://dzone.com/articles/ver-filme-um-lugar-silencioso-parte-ii-2021-online https://dzone.com/articles/vem-hd-assistir-cruella-2021-filme-completo-online https://dzone.com/articles/ver-filme-cruella-2021-online-assistir-filme-cruel https://dzone.com/articles/assistir-demon-slayer-o-trem-infinito-filme-comple https://dzone.com/articles/vem-hd-assistir-demon-slayer-o-trem-infinito-2021 https://dzone.com/articles/onde-assistir-a-guerra-do-amanha-2021-filme-comple https://dzone.com/articles/vem-hd-assistir-viuva-negra-2021-filme-completo-gr https://muckrack.com/fanny-cyntiaa/bio https://minimore.com/b/lVZXr/1

#covid19 #pandemic #us

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daggerzine · 4 years ago

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Early DC hardcore gent Rob Moss tells us what it was like then....and now.

When I became friends with a Rob Moss on Facebook a year or so back I knew the name sounded familiar. Then, I’d heard he was a musician (as well as an author) and releasing a new record under the name Rob Moss and Skin-Tight Skin. Hmm….very interesting band name. I then began digging a little deeper and found out it was the same Rob Moss who had been in the Washington, DC-area pre-Marginal Man band called Artificial Peace and had later played in Government Issue for a time.

Apparently Rob hadn’t played music since those old hardcore days, but was now back in the saddle and living in Portland, Oregon (where he’s lived for several years). With Rob Moss and Skin-Tight Skin he put together an interesting concept, a different guest guitarist for each song. Some of the names you will definitely recognize from the punk rock days and beyond. It’s certainly a unique sounding record (and I reviewed it here on the site a few weeks back).

I wanted to ask Rob about the old days and have him bring us up to the present and everything in between. He was more than happy to oblige.

You’re on Flex Your Head and were in two iconic Washington, D.C. hardcore bands, were you born and raised there?

We moved from Boston to Wheaton, Maryland in 1966 – I was three – and to Bethesda a year later. The Bethesda I grew up in had a downtown of mostly old two- and three-story buildings, and there were cows in the field across from Walter Johnson High when I went there. I’ve not lived in the D.C. area since the fall of 1983.

Do you remember your earliest exposure to music?

My first memories are my dad playing records, like Edvard Grieg’s Hall of the Mountain King and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. I think he chose them because that kind of music’s so visual. In the mid 1970s I discovered WPGC, a Top-40 station. I had a Radio Shack cassette deck that I’d put up against the radio to record stuff like The Night Chicago Died (Paper Lace) and Blockbuster (Sweet).

How and when did the punk rock bug hit you?

The how and who was Marc Alberstadt (original drummer in Government Issue). We’ve been friends since kindergarten and went to Hebrew school together. We used to hang out at his house and listen to his older brother’s records. Like Can’t Stand the Rezillos, the first Generation X album and the Sex Pistols. The when was 1978 or ’79.

Back then, Kenny, Marc’s brother, would sneak us in to see bands at the Psyche Delly and at the University of Maryland. There were no underage shows then. We saw the Slickee Boys, the Bad Brains, Tina Peel, Sorrows – bands like that.

But as far as really getting bit by the bug, it was when I saw how much fun the Slickee Boys had on stage. I had to start my own band, even though at that point I didn’t play a guitar or anything. This was before the Teen Idles, Dischord, or any of that.

When did you first pick up an instrument?

Marc was already playing drums, and Brian Gay played guitar. They convinced me to get a bass. Brian and I started getting together at his mom’s place in 1979 to write songs. They were pretty crude, we were taking our cues from the :30 Over D.C. compilation album.

How did you meet the Artificial Peace guys?

Let’s go back further. I was away for two weeks in the summer of 1980. And during that time, Government Issue had formed with Brian on bass and Marc on drums.

Brian and I already had a bunch of songs, and he still wanted to play guitar. So we formed another band – he played in both. We knew Mike Manos from school and learned that his brother had a drum set. Mike didn’t really know how to play. Marc gave him some tips, the rest was on-the-job training.

But we still needed a singer. This new wave-looking girl, named Sandra something-or-other, appeared in our school. She’d just moved from New York. None of the other girls at school looked like her. We asked her to sing. We called ourselves The Indians – it was supposed to be ironic.

Our first show was at American University with the GIs, S.O.A. and Youth Brigade. But it got cancelled at the last minute. So everyone met up at Roy Rogers. Fifty, maybe seventy-five, punks walked into the place within a few minutes of each other. The manager came out from behind the counter, he thought we were up to no good. But all we wanted was something to eat and to come up with a plan-B.

We ended up playing that night in the basement of a house in D.C. It was the first time we actually got to hear Sandra sing, because she’d kept pulling a no-show to our practices. John Stabb said she sounded like a dying parakeet.

After that we replaced her with Steve Polcari, who we’d known since junior high school, and changed our name to Assault and Battery. We played some shows like the infamous Pow Wow House gig, which I had set up, and recorded a demo a few months later.

But at the end of the summer of 1981, Brian went to art school in Chicago and I started at the University of Maryland. That meant the GIs needed a new bass player and we needed a new guitarist. Minor Threat had just broken up for the first time, and Brian Baker joined the GIs on bass, he later moved to guitar. Red-C had also just disbanded, so we welcomed Pete Murray to join us.

Artificial Peace was the name of one of our songs. I don’t know if we’d played it with Brian, I may have written it after he left. But we felt like we needed a new band name. We became Artificial Peace.

What were some of Artificial Peace’s most memorable shows?

Opening for the Bad Brains at the Peppermint Lounge in New York City. H.R. called the number he had for me, which was the pay phone down the hall from my dorm room in College Park. We drove up the day of the show, unloaded our gear and discovered H.R. gave me the wrong date. It was the next day. The show itself was terrible! The soundman screwed us. There was nothing in the monitors, we couldn’t hear a thing.

We played another show in NYC at the A7. The first band went on at midnight, we went on around five in the morning. Cheetah Chrome played that night, all I remember was that he was pretty messed up.

We also opened for Black Flag in Baltimore on their Damaged tour. We played well, but the power went out twice during Black Flag’s set. Henry recreated the Damaged album cover and punched out one of the mirror tiles that edged the stage. Lots of blood. How punk rock (laughing)!

As far as D.C., we played some shows at the Wilson Center, which were probably our best. We also played a talent show at the high school that Mike, Steve and I went to. We’d graduated the year before – I don’t recall how we got on the bill. A lot of punks showed up, it was pretty funny.

Only known color photo to exist of Artificial Peace. Wilson Center, 1982. Photo by Davis White.

How did the band end?

Pete called me on the phone, telling me that he and the guys didn’t want to play anymore. It was a surprise. He gave no reason. A few weeks later I heard about Marginal Man. I guess they couldn’t be straight with me.

Was G.I. next? How did that happen? Stabb was my first D.C. hero that I ever met (1985 in Trenton).

Before I joined the GIs, I got together a few times with Kenny Alberstadt, who’s a fantastic guitarist, as well as a female guitarist, whose name escapes me. She looked like Joan Jett and played great! But it didn’t go anywhere.

Then Mitch Parker left Government Issue in the spring of 1983, and I got a call asking if I wanted to join. I played on the GIs summer tour. Our first show was at CBGBs. We had John’s dad’s Buick and a U-Haul trailer full of gear. Just us, no roadies. Tom and I did nearly all the driving. John never got a license. We’d let Marc drive only if Tom and I needed a break. We’d crash at people’s houses after the shows. Some nights it was at nice place and we got to do laundry. Other times, it was more like a squat. Tours were grueling then.

Marc Alberstadt, Tom Lyle, Rob Moss, Tuffy. Outside Shamus O'Brien's, South El Monte (Los Angeles), 1983. Photo by Jordan Schwartz.

John Stabb and Rob Moss, Sun Valley Sportsman's Hall (Los Angeles), 1983. Photo by Ted Ziegler.

How did your tenure in G.I. end? Did you stop making music?

Around the end of the tour I heard that my transfer to Boston University got accepted. I told the guys. Tom, understandably, was not happy. Once I moved, I stopped playing. And by that time, I felt the scene wasn’t fun anymore.

How did Rob Moss and Skin-Tight Skin come about? Had the idea been brewing for a while?

I’d always wanted to do something more in music. About three years ago I picked up a guitar, started writing songs and posted a few on Facebook. Dwight Reid asked if I wanted to record them at his home studio. He’d play bass and we’d find a drummer. That’s how it happened.

Why did you get a different lead guitarist for each song?

I can get by playing rhythm guitar and singing, but not leads. And I wasn’t ready to commit to forming a touring band. Under those circumstances it would’ve been too big an ask to interest a great lead guitarist to get involved.

But what if, instead, I asked a different guy to play on each song? So I called up old friends and friends of friends, and nearly everyone agreed to help.

What made it such an incredible experience for me is how many musicians I’ve long admired said yes. In your question earlier, about when the punk rock bug hit me, I told you about seeing the Slickee Boys when I was 16 and hearing the first Generation X album. To have guys from those bands – Marshall Keith and Bob ‘Derwood’ Andrews – play on my new album is tremendous. I feel the same about Nels Cline, Don Fleming, Franz Stahl, Stuart Casson, Billy Loosigian, Dave Lizmi, Saul Koll, Chris Rudolf, Marion Monterosso, Spit Stix and everyone else who took part.

How’s the response to the record? Are you happy with it?

Many people comment on the song quality. That even after hearing the album once, they find themselves humming the songs. The earworm thing. To me that’s the best compliment.

What’s also made me happy is hearing from the guys who played on it. That they really like the album as a whole, not just their work on it.

Did you consider recording a hardcore album?

Listening to proto-punk and pub rock made me happy as a kid. And when I speak with friends who were there, many say the same thing. That’s why I make that type of music now, not hardcore.

With all that’s going on, isn’t hardcore still important?

As protest music? I suppose but it seems like preaching to the converted. Bob Dylan’s entire career is protest music, but he grew as an artist to express himself and reach more people. When he went electric in 1966, the folkies booed, they called him a traitor. They expected him to play the same Woody Guthrie songbook forever.

It's the same with hardcore. It had its place. I’m glad to have been part of it. But I no longer want to play it. Still, plenty of my new songs contain the kind of messages I wrote when I was in Artificial Peace. There’s also humor, like Ugly Chair and A Maltese Falcon. Or humor and tragedy, like Got My Ass Stuck in a Tree. Some are about getting older (Tony Alva’s Pictures) or being a kid (Life at 33 1/3 RPM).

How do you discover new music?

Recommendations from friends, mostly. But when I lived in Manhattan in the mid-‘80s to early ‘90s, I had a neighbor in the music business. He’d set down stacks of albums, mostly promo copies, by the trash. I saved what I liked and traded the rest.

That’s how I discovered a band I missed growing up. Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band. They were incredible, should’ve been huge! The intro to Rock & Roll ’78 still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Years later I met the guitarist from that band, Billy Loosigian, through Facebook. And now he’s played on one of my songs. Experiences like that really made the album special to me. I hope it does for everyone else.

What’s next? More music in the future?

Anything’s possible.

https://skin-tight-rock.bandcamp.com/

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dyketectivecomics · 6 years ago

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Retrieval, Ch. 9

Read on AO3 or below:

@squiddybeifong its been a long time pardner. (also a note, that uhhh, this one hasn't been edited for italics n such yet, so def preferable to read on ao3, but like.... i cant stop y'all from choosing one over the other lmao. just know that this is Longer Than Usual for ME)

...

Despite his growing concern, Constantine knew better than to disturb Zatanna and Raven from their meditative state, even though it had already been well over three hours of standstill with no signs of return. They each remained perfectly still and stoic, no matter what obstacles they may have been facing inside of Raven's mind at any given moment.

Of course, there was always the possibility that they could find their collective consciousness trapped endlessly inside of the confines of ill-gotten memories or repressed nightmares. But he was certain, if nothing else, they would find a way to send him a sign of that struggle, and of a need for help, should it come to that.

So for now, he sipped a bitterly steeped tea, and flipped between vinyls of The Clash and Fleetwood. And for the second in painfully short amount of time, he found himself hoping against every instinct that told him otherwise, that his girls were safe.

...

The stench hit, long before anything else in this new memory. The unholy combination of burning flesh mingling with excrement. Zatanna could feel bile rising in her throat, but closed her eyes, and carefully swallowed instead.

She'd already spent so much of this time screaming uncontrollably. Now, a more rational side of her mind began taking over, that logical shut down of the terror that was incredibly unhelpful in a moment of crisis.

After all, this wasn't actually Hell, she found herself reasoning. This was just a memory of it. Nothing would hurt her here.

But everything was going to hurt the little girl that she had followed down this particularly unpleasant rabbit hole.

When she remembered that, pushing past the blinding light and the mind-numbing terror within her, she could feel Raven's presence fully then. And the magician opened her eyes to see the girl's tiny body, curled in on itself in fear. It was instinct, then, running over to the girl and trying to pick her up. A desperate attempt to shield her from the torment that undoubtedly surrounded them.

Only to watch in horror as her own arms passed right through the girl, like those of a ghost.

She tried in vain, to turn the girl around by her shoulders, to grab her face to look into her eyes, anything to get her to focus away from what she was a witness to now.

"Raven, it's not real. It's a memory," she tried to remind the empath, to no avail. The girl's wide, amethyst eyes stared unblinkingly through the magician, and at the carnage beyond.

It was something that Zatanna was strangely familiar with. It was, after all, a kind of rite of passage for a mystic to visit Hell once or twice in a lifetime, if not to be doomed to spending an eternity there. Only if one upset the karmic balance of the universe too much, of course. Zatanna knew that she'd come close to that edge a few times in her life. But never close enough to warrant a lingering stay, never enough to earn eternal damnation.

Not yet, at least. And she certainly hoped to keep things that way.

Of course, she never was brought unwillingly to witness the worst that the Underworld had to offer. That was another reason for this hesitation to turn around, and to fully comprehend the horrors she had tried to save this girl from all of those years ago.

Steeling her nerves, she muttered one more reassurance, "It's not real, just a memory," and turned to see what Raven had seen.

And most of all, to understand.

In the midst of a cliche of fire and brimstone, and as far as her eyes could see, this part of Hell was a little different from the others which she had been witness to in the past. While much of Hell had changed with the modern age, of introducing psychological torture and inducing metaphysical pain upon its new residents to accommodate to changing philosophies and fears, this area bore witness to the most classic cases of torture.

Zatanna tried not to let her eyes linger in any one area too long, viewing with as much detachment as possible. Bodies were being bent into unnatural shapes, before being torn apart with hideous glee lighting up the torturers' faces. Blood and sinew and bile dotted the landscape, rivers of sewage and masses of limbs. The screams, the laughter, the stench all assaulted her senses with renewed vigor, all mingled together in a violent cacophony of displeasure.

And suddenly, she longed once more for the mind games that were played upon the potentially repentant, as she recalled John calling them.

Here, in this particular Hell, there was no hope for redemption, no prayer of peace. There was only slaughter. And here, Zatanna wished once more she could take it all away again.

There were many different kinds of Hell, of course. But being subjected to witness one so violent, seemed nearly as cruel a fate as to endure it for oneself.

Turning away, she focused attention once more on her daughter.

The magician reminded herself, though Raven did not look it at the moment, and while she possibly didn't feel it, she was much older. She was wiser, stronger than the five year old that had tumbled down to this land of depravity. And now more than ever, she needed reminding of that.

"Nevar, esaelp, llet em uoy era ereh," she softly commanded, whispered more like a wish than a request.

Her eyes flashed with momentary awareness, that emotionally turbulent amethyst clearing back into rich navy. But it was blinked away just as quickly, as her eyes fluttered and she shook her head.

"M- mommy?" she looked around hesitantly as she called out, eyes frantic and welling with tears now. "Where- Is there someone...?"

Recognizing that the girl's presence came back even stronger in that moment, Zatanna sighed in relief. She may have been reliving this hell all over again, but she wasn't lost in the memory. Not yet. Not completely.

"Raven, I hope- no, I know you can hear me. I promise I'm not going to leave you. Ouy t'now eb enola ni siht."

A promise, which in this case, acts almost as a self-imposed curse. But then again, all promises, even without added magic, were cursed in one way or another.

Outside of their periphery, as Raven continued to call out for help that wasn't coming, red hot tendrils of fire morphed seamlessly into something resembling hands. They slinked along the ground until they reached the duo, and purposely started to wrap around the girl, unnoticed as she sat transfixed once more by the torment around her.

Zatanna tried calling out to the girl, to warn her of the impending danger around her now. But her cries fell on deaf ears, as those hands tightened around the demoness' small body and dragged her through a small gap that opened up in the ground behind her.

And though she knew it was useless, Zatanna found herself reaching again for Raven's small, outstretched hand, ghosting through it again as she tumbled down after her daughter, and into the darkness.

Only for that same pitch to turn alarmingly bright, when she opened her eyes against a completely different scene before her.

An officespace that could have belonged to any number of buildings in any number of cities, were it not for the completely blank white walls that seemed to stretch infinitely around them in all directions. Painfully white tiles dotted the ceiling and floor, which provided little context to the dimensions of the space. A single doorway, leading to a busy hallway provided no help whatsoever, and she could feel as it only served to raise Raven's level of anxiety as people flitted angrily through.

"Never mind, this is the Bad Place," Zatanna muttered to herself. She certainly wasn't suddenly longing again for the more straightforward torture that had played before them only moments ago, but she could sense the awful anxiety on all sides that must have absolutely assaulted the girl's senses.

Here inside this room, if it could truly be called that, a woman sat at a completely mundane desk with a few rows of filing cabinets behind her. She leaned far back in her chair, feet propped atop the desk with an air of disinterest as she loosely played with curling brown locks and flipped through files.

What Zee finally realized could only be human souls continued fluttering in and out of the adjacent hallway, more than a few tearing out their hair or mumbling under breath about missing forms or incorrectly filed documents. The woman paid them no mind as they only appeared to grow more frantic with each passing moment. One sat at a desk in the room across that hall, sobbing hysterically as she tried to white-out a page over and over, only for increasingly glittery ink to reappear at the top just as she finished with the bottom half. Another appeared to be unsuccessfully trying to deliver coffee, only for it to spill anew upon himself or others with each new cup.

They all disappeared as the woman at the desk flicked her wrist for the door to shut. More than she appeared to be. Likely a demon, then.

With that subtle click of the door, the room became unnaturally quiet, only Raven's quick breaths filling the space. The papers at the demon's desk rustled a bit as she switched between them, addressing, but not looking at, the girl.

"Hmm, let's see what we have here. A Daughter of Darkness. Pride of Lucifer. Spawn of Tr-"

"Who are you?" Raven asked, evidently working up enough courage to address the demon head-on.

"The name's Rybizen. You can call me Ry, cousin."

"Cousin?"

Zee could feel an odd calm that filled the room. The faintest hints of hope tickled at the periphery, and she found herself latching onto that feeling like a life preserver. Unfamiliar familiarity, the small kind of reprieve that must have saved Raven's sanity during this first trip down.

"Sure. Cousins," Ry said decidedly as she kicked her feet off of the desk and shuffled the papers back together, placing them back into the file as she continued, "We're all related here through some kind of convoluted fork-up in our family tree."

She flung open a drawer to the cabinet behind her then, letting it drift endlessly open for a second or two before stopping it. Raven's head swiveled comically to follow it's journey into an impossible eternity behind her, before watching it retract back into the cabinet at twice the speed it had been thrown open with.

"This whole forking place is a Looney Toon, I swear," Zee muttered again, rolling her eyes and crossing her arms over her chest before turning attention back to the scene before her.

"There's no precedent for it, but it seems your father- or perhaps one of your brothers even, it's too close to tell- Someone wanted an audience with you." She rested her elbows at the desk, steepling her hands in thought as she looked over the girl for the first time. Raven stiffened in her chair at the sight of her glowing eyes, like dull coals that sat smoldering as they took in every part of the child before her.

Unlike how Zatanna remembered she would come to look by the end of her journey, at this moment the girl looked fairly well kempt. Her clothes were only partially singed from their descent before, and her bob was only slightly frizzed, nothing at all like the mess she recalled Constantine claimed she had looked upon his accidental summons.

But then again, the occultist was known to exaggerate when it suited his needs.

"And given your status, halfling," Ry said, interrupting the magician's nostalgia, "I don't think you're in much of a position to deny them."

"I... I do not-"

Just as the girl tried to protest, the phone rang on Rybizen's desk, cutting her off. The demon listened carefully to the voice on the other line, eyes shifting back between the girl and her papers, humming agreements or dissents before finally hanging up the line.

"Speak of the devils," the demon smiled wryly before adding under her breath, "-Always did wanna say that, with some irony- That was your brother. And you, my dear, will be seeing him right now."

Before Raven could even open her mouth to protest again, Ry flicked her wrist another time, sending the girl's chair tumbling backward, and the girl herself was flung back into yet another opening, a pitch black hole opening inside of those blinding white tiles that dotted the floor. And Zatanna found herself once again, tumbling after the child as she screamed for help once more.

...

It was when they started to approach the six hour mark, that Constantine started to seriously consider calling in back up. But the question remained, who could possibly be qualified for this sort of ordeal? Zatanna was already the best mortal equipped to handle such a task. Raven had been slowly inching towards surpassing them for quite some time now.

No, there'd be no trying to plead uselessly with Fate. No calling in the Dark for aid that could simply not be adequately provided. And no matter how much John wished he could have followed them in, he knew it wouldn't do to harbor any regrets now.

Not when, as he check both of their pulses, he began to worry as it registered almost too faintly.

But perhaps, in times like this, he could count on at least one old fling to help him out of his growing worry.

Though he knew Zatanna never thought much of the Nightmare Nurse, he was sure Raven wouldn't mind a little help from Auntie Asa.

He set right to work, making the necessary call for backup.

...

Raven remembered it all now. Those days of mundanity that lead up to this awful and unexpected field trip into Hell. The voices of her father and brothers, like tiny, nagging whispers that encouraged her to gather the right ingredients, and coached her through the right incantations. That nagging sense in other parts of her head that told her curiosity would better be satisfied by simply asking Arella or Azar these questions that plagued at her psyche.

All of that instantaneous regret when she realized that all she really seemed to do was fall from one trap into another with each passing moment in this horrible place.

Yes, she remembered thinking in those moments, about being all of five years old and falling so much. Of how little she had been aware of her sense of self and that first fleeting acceptance and understanding, that her actions truly did have consequences. And in between that, wondering exactly who and what these voices were to bring her here to such a horrid place.

She wondered why, despite all of the suffering she could feel around her, why it tickled such a delighted part of her soul to witness it. As if it understood the justice that was being carried through, that most of that suffering around her was earned, and right, despite how horrible it all was.

And she remembered how much that scared her, more than anything she actually saw as it unfolded before her.

And now, at this particular crossroads, she remembered meeting with that first brother. His name spoken too quickly for her to catch onto, especially given the whiplash that occurred as her descent was brought to an abrupt halt, and she was distracted by the alarming change in appearance.

While the demon, her 'Cousin Ry', before had chosen a more human-like form to blend more easily with her human subjects, evidently this brother had done away with even the slightest pretense of offering these souls the uncanny and disquieting comfort. A grotesque cliche of gnarled horns adorned his head, all crimson red skin and glowing yellow eyes that kept Raven's full attention as he prattled on about their siblings 'joining them soon'.

"A shame that Father stayed behind to lay waste to that insipid dimension. It's expanses would hardly cover half of an average hospitable planet! It'd be a waste to send even a meager army of ghouls to torment those inhabitants, much less a demon like him!" he snickered to himself as he prattled on, circling around the girl like a tiger eyeing its prey. "But who am I, to question the ways of Trigon the Terrible!? I suppose, it may be understandable, given the more... personal reasons for such an attack-"

"You... you mean Azarath," Raven gasped in realization. "You mean Azarath is-"

"Being utterly laid to waste? Yes. You would do well to keep up, Sister-"

"Oh, don't torment her so, Brother dearest," a new voice called from just beyond the ring, "The whole reason he was able to steal her away was because she's so painfully young and dull. You would do well to remember that."

"Oh, Belial the Bully! Here to put all the Sons of Trigon in their place!" another chimed in.

A sea of disturbingly familiar voices soon flooded the space, each one raised higher, louder over the rest at they tried to get in the last word. Some of the devils started shoving one another, trying to take what each perceived to be the best thrones in the circle, and growing more violent in their scramble with each push and accompanying threat.

In her minds eye, in a memory within this memory, more and more clearly those last fleeting moments on Azarath before she had been pulled away began to take shape.

She remembered a form rising from the runes she had drawn, a flash as acolytes closest to her were vaporized. That awful gleeful grin that greeted her in welcome.

As those monsters continued their arguing and as their anger fed more and more deeply into her own fragile state, she could feel her emotions becoming undone again.

She could feel that demon lurking just beneath the surface. After being so tightly kept under wraps, so few years of learning to keep it at bay, yet so much training being undone in one awful, horrible moment of weakness.

"Stop. I- I want to remember something else," she whispered, shutting her eyes tightly. A momentary awareness, that this wasn't her reality, wasn't her present. "I want my- my mom. I need-"

She paused. Because it certainly wasn't Arella who sprung to her mind then.

Sapphire eyes that shone brighter than the San Francisco bay. Straight black hair, that always absolutely glittered in the magic of stage lights. A warm smile that could melt the iciest of Gotham winters. And a voice, a strong mezzo-soprano that could cut through the worst of nightmares, that was already a verse through an all too familiar tune.

"Blackbird singing in the dead of night," it continued faintly, voice low and cracking. Raven finally felt its owner's presence reached hesitantly forward to touch the girl's shoulder again. And though the hesitancy she could feel from it now, told her that it should have ghosted right through her, she was pleasantly surprised to feel the warmth of a loving hand against her skin. And the voice continued the verse, her voice much stronger at the reassurance.

"Take these sunken eyes and learn to see."

She leaned forward to embrace the girl, this memory of her, fully into a hug now. The possibility that disturbing the memory would cause untold damage be damned, she knew this was what her daughter needed of her right now.

"All your life..."

As Raven felt her mother's love and concern, she heard her own small voice join the magician's. The song, a lullaby that had carried them both together through so many a tumultuous night. Their voices lilted together in time, in familiar harmony, alto and soprano. Magic and emotion. Mother and daughter.

"You were only waiting for this moment to be free."

As Raven's arms wrapped around the sorceress' body, and held her tight with impossible strength. She knew she had her mother back. And she was grateful all at once for her presence.

"I tried to tell you, Blackbird," Zatanna laughed with tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, "I tried to tell you, that you're not alone here."

"I know. But..." Raven brushed away the tears that were starting to form in her own eyes, quick and careless. "But there's still so much I'm missing here. Azarath's last moments, and my brothers and-"

"And we can get to that in time," Zee reassured her, gripping the young woman tight in her arms and pressing a kiss to her crown, "But please, Raven. Even you have limits. Let's revisit something pleasant. And then-" she turned the empath by her shoulders to look at her sternly, "Then we dive into these memories together, capisce?"

The young mage only laughed, squeezing and opening her eyes again to clear the memory before them. And once again, the world around them shifted.

"I believe you are already familiar with this gallery of moments?" Raven chimed, her tone lightly accusatory as their feet touched back down onto the floor of a Wayne Manor hallway. "Go ahead and take your pick, Mom."

...

"They've been under for ten bloody hours, Asa. I really don't know what else I can tell you," Constantine sighed, rubbing a frustrated hand over his face.

"Their auras are strong, their pulses are fine-" she started, an air of boredom and annoyance slipped through her voice that John was more than privy to.

"It's too long to be so lost like that!"

"And I'm telling you, they're fine. Gods knows, you've spent longer in much worse magical comas. Be grateful that this was a voluntarily induced one, instead of some awful accident-"

"That's the thing. I'm worried they may have run into an accident in there and-"

"Do you want my formal diagnosis, John? Or do you just want an excuse to insert yourself where you don't belong?" the Nightmare Nurse said, crossing her arms over her chest with some finality, and stance changing from bored, to something just subtly more aggressive.

This made the exorcist finally pause, and really consider where his concern was coming from.

"I just... I want to know my daughter is okay. I want Zee to be safe, and," he sighed, "Asa, please. Just give me something I can do, instead of sitting here with twiddling my thumbs and praying for a miracle."

"Didn't know you were the praying type," she said snidely. His pleading look was all that was needed before she opened her mouth to make any more comments. She cleared her throat before changing gears and taking a seat on his couch. "Why don't you fix me something to drink? And I can tell you all about the drama that you've been missing out between all of the creatures of the night that you three have been neglecting."

"Y'know," he chuckled lowly, putting his hands in the air in relent, "That might just be exactly the distraction I need." He moved leisurely to the kitchen, trying to let an internal debate of whether caffeine or alcohol would be best appreciated drown out the worry that continued to nag at the edges of his thoughts.

Zatanna and Raven's bodies were safe. Their minds, as far as they could tell, were in tact. What was supposed to be a simple procedure was taking longer than expected, but all appeared well.

Well enough, for the moment.

#zatanna zatara #rachel roth #john constantine #dc bombshells #au: magic foster family #retrieval #randywritesfic #long post #<-hopefully cuts n such work for anyone on any of the sites but WE ALL KNOW HOWTUMBLR IS #dear sweet baby jesus i hope this tags alright tho

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marcuserrico · 7 years ago

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'The Lion King': Filmmakers, Cast Reveal Little-Known Facts, From Original Title to Elton's Rejected Tunes

The Lion King (Image: Disney)

Simba got plenty of shine over the weekend. For the opening act, Jon Favreau took the wraps off his hugely anticipated photo-real update of The Lion King, showcasing a “Circle of Life” scene populated with eye-popping CG beasts and one adorable cub during Disney’s live-action presentation on Saturday. The classic cartoon was in the spotlight again on Sunday as filmmakers, animators, and cast members reunited to reminisce about the making of the film — and disclose some fascinating facts about a project they once nicknamed Bambi in the Jungle. Here are the highlights.

Mark Henn (Simba animator), Jim Cummings (voice of Ed), Rob Minkoff (co-director), Ernie Sebella (voice of Pumbaa), Don Hahn (executive producer), Whoopi Goldberg (voice of Shenzi), and Tony Bancroft (Pumbaa animator) at D23 Expo’s Lion King anniversary panel. (Photo: Disney)

Disney originally considered The Lion King a B-movie. As the filmmakers explained, Disney did not have high hopes for the films, and they had to work hard to scrounge together a creative team.

“We couldn’t get people to work on this movie,” said executive producer Don Hahn.

Rob Minkoff, who co-directed with Roger Allers, continued: “The reason was because when we were making Lion King, it was the first time in the history of the Walt Disney Studio that two [animated] movies were going to be made at the same time: Lion King and Pocahontas… The head of the studio [presumably then-boss Jeffrey Katzenberg] got up and basically said, ‘Pocahontas is a home run. It’s West Side Story meets Romeo and Juliet meets Dances With Wolves. And Lion King, on the other hand, is kind of an experiment.”

“Our pitch was Moses meets Joseph and Hamlet in Africa, with music by Elton John,” Hahn quipped. “I think people would be surprised at how much you guys had to perform and sell the work to get Lion King up on its feet. It had really humble beginnings.”

The Lion King directors Rob Minkoff and Roger Allers pitching the “Hakuna Matata” scene in song. (Photo: Disney)

“The studio head said, ‘We’re not sure about Lion King, if the movie makes $50 million, I’ll get down on my hands and knees.’ And he did,” recounted Minkoff.

Added Hahn: “The first week it made like $100 million and we forced him to get down on his hands and knees and it was fantastic.”

The Lion King wound up tallying $968 million worldwide to become the highest grossest hand-drawn animated film of all time (“We did draw with a pencil, the old-fashioned way,” Hahn noted).

Mark Henn sketching young Simba (Photo: Disney)

The Lion King wasn’t the original title. Minkoff, who was inspired by a National Geographic documentary called Lions and Hyenas: The Eternal Enemies, recalled that the original title was King of the Jungle. “We called it Bambi in Africa for obvious reasons,” Hahn added.

The first version of Elton John’s “Circle of Life” was rejected. Minkoff explained that Elton John was too busy touring to join the filmmakers in the studio. “We would usually get songs on tape, a demo that he would perform on electric piano in his hotel room, wherever he was.” They received John’s first pass at “Circle of Life” in the mail.

“Totally different than the one we wound up with. It went, “And we’ll all join in in the circle of life,'” Minkoff said, singing the lyric as a bouncy ditty. “And we thought, ‘It’s terrible.'”

So the filmmakers used lyricist Tim Rice as their go-between to coax a “rocking anthem” from John, which he delivered. Said Minkoff: “And we were like, ‘Now that is a good song.'”

“Can You Feel the Love Tonight” was only crooned by Pumbaa and Timon in the first cut. Hahn says that the first time Elton John saw the film was an early test screening in Atlanta. At that point, Minkoff says they had decided to make Pumbaa the warthog and Timon the meerkat, the film’s comic relief, sing the song because the filmmakers felt it was “too obvious” as a love ballad.

“What have you done? You’ve destroyed my song. This is the reason I did the movie, I always wanted to write a great Disney love ballad, and you’ve just destroyed it.

Minkoff says the filmmakers “went home with our tail between our legs” and they ultimately changed it the duet between Simba and Nala (watch below). But they also kept remnants of Pumbaa and Timon’s version at the beginning and end of the sequence as a framing device.

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Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella auditioned for the hyenas. The two actors, co-starring on Broadway’s Guys and Dolls at the time, came in to test for the hyena roles. “We were in this little booth that they concocted and we were ad-libbing as well, and when we got done, there was silence in the room. And I said to Nathan, ‘Well, at least we have a job at night.'” Two months later they got the call for Timon and Pumbaa.

Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella recording as Timon and Pumbaa (Photo: Disney)

Pumbaa’s flatulence was improvised. As Sabella tells it, Lane was wiped out after several days of consecutive performances. “I wanted to pick up his spirits.” Every time Lane delivered a line, Sabella would make a fart noise by blowing on his hand. It cut up Lane and wound up becoming Pumbaa’s defining characteristic.”Later when we were doing interviews, I would tell reporters, ‘Pumbaa is the first Disney character to have gas.’ … And then Nathan would take the mic and say, ‘It’s actually Snow White, but we don’t talk about that.'”

Another ad-libbed line came when Simba wanted Timon and Pumbaa to distract the lines and, per Hahn, “Nathan came out with ‘What do you want me to do, dress in drag and do the hula?'” Hahn and Minkoff had “to do a lot of selling” to keep that line in the final movie, including whipping up with an impromptu song to pitch the sequence to the executives.

Tony Bancroft’s character designs for Pumbaa (Photo: Disney)

Whoopi Goldberg owed her casting to Elton John… and Tommy Chong. Minkoff and Allers conceived the hyenas as a tandem to be voiced by Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong. But the two former partners were estranged at the time and refused. Along came Whoopi.

“I begged,” said Goldberg of her role in the film as female hyena Shenzi. “I heard that they were making this and I said, ‘Can I be in it?'”

Whoopi Goldberg takes the stage at D23 Expo’s The Lion King panel (Photo: Disney)

Mikoff picked up the story. “We were having lunch and the head of animation walks in and says, ‘Guys, Whoopi Goldberg wants to be in your movie.’ We’re like, ‘How does that happen?’ ‘She had lunch with Elton John, who told her about it, and now you’ve got to figure out something, you’ve got to put her in the movie.’

“We couldn’t get Chong and Cheech to work together. But we thought, ‘Could it be Cheech and Whoopi?'”

Whoopi Goldberg recording her Lion King dialogue (Photo: Disney)

Just as Sabella and Lane recorded together and played off one another, Goldberg and Marin did the same. “We couldn’t do it separately,” said Goldberg. “We needed each other… They let us play. Chemistry is everything.”

The third hyena was called Ed for a reason. As Minkoff recalled, “We had these two hyeans, Shenzi and Banzai, and we have this third one, the laugher, what’s he going to be called? Some of you might not know this reference, but there was a show called The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson, and the guy sitting to his right was Ed McMahon.” Added Hahn: “So we needed someone to laugh at the jokes all the time.”

Jim Cummings in the booth for The Lion King (Photo: Disney)

Jim Cummings voiced the unhinged hyena who communicates solely in cackles. He also had an actual speaking role as the Naked Mole Rat of the African Underground.

Disney also took advantage of the reunion to announce a spiffed-up “signature edition” of The Lion King will arrive Aug. 15 on Digital HD and two weeks later on Blu-ray.

Watch: Whoopi Goldberg Wants Disney to Bring Back Song of the South:

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Read more from Yahoo Movies:

When Universes Collide: Superheroes, Princesses, Star Wars, and Oprah Do D23 Expo

Not Even the Stars of The Incredibles Thought There Would Be a Sequel

Wreck-It Ralph Sequel Reunites All Your Favorite Princesses

#elton john #_uuid:7cba8e78-7b58-364f-ad46-124ad18b47c1 #d23 #_revsp:wp.yahoo.movies.us #d23 expo #_lmsid:a0Vd000000AE7lXEAT #d23 2017 #features #lists #disney #_author:Marcus Errico #movie:the-lion-king #whoopi goldberg

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technicalsolutions88 · 5 years ago

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Tempo wants to be the Peloton of barbells. It’s a 42-inch tall screen with 3D machine vision that tracks and teaches you as you workout. The giant upright HD display makes it feel like your personal trainer is right there with you while you compete with others in live and on-demand classes.

Tempo’s Microsoft Kinect-esque motion sensors scan you 30 times per second and notify you if your form is wrong. It’s all housed in a sleekly designed free-standing cabinet that neatly stores the included barbells, dumbbells, attachable weights, workout mat, recovery foam roller, and heartrate monitor.

Tempo opens for pre-orders today for $1995, requiring a $250 deposit and $39 monthly content subscription before shipping this summer.

“Every single product in the market took a piece of equipment out of a gym and slapped a screen on it” says Tempo CEO and co-founder Moawia Eldeeb. “You need to be able to see a user to actually be able to give them guidance so they can work out safely. We wanted to build a fitness experience from the ground up with training and form feedback at the core of it.”

I demo’d Tempo this week and found the in-home convenience, motivational on-screen personal trainers, and the real-time posture corrections gave me the confidence to lift weights without the fear of injury. It might not feel quite as fun and addictive as Peloton, but it offers a facsimile of personal training that’s more affordable than in-person classes that cost $100 or more.

The idea of democratizing access to trainers is what convinced Eldeeb and the Tempo team to stretch its initial $1.8 million in seed funding for four years. While collecting data from its SmartSpot in-gym weight lifting assessment device, Tempo survived long enough to build this prototype.

“Most investors had given up on us. We built this product and had just $700,000 left” Eldeeb recalls. But once people could try Tempo, “we pitched 10 investors and got 9 term sheets. It got very competitive.” The startup recently walked away with a $17.5 million Series A round from Founders Fund, DCM, and Khosla Ventures. Now Tempo will pour that cash into marketing, retail distribution, R&D, and content production.

A founder’s journey out of homelessness

Tempo’s mission is to change people’s lives for the better like personal training did for Eldeeb. “Training is what took me out of a homeless shelter and got me to where I am I today” he reflects.

Tempo co-founder, CEO, and CPO Moawia Eldeeb

Eldeeb’s family immigrated to the US from Egypt when he was nine. But after an explosion leveled their building, they wound up in a homeless shelter. Eldeeb eventually dropped out of middle school to work in a pizza parlor and help pay the bills. But personal trainers at a local YMCA took him under their wing. He eventually paid his way through a computer science degree at Columbia University by working as a personal trainer to his eventual co-founder and CTO Josh Augustin. “Having trainers say you’re getting stronger taught me I could do something for myself.”

While at school, Eldeeb was developing an idea for a physical therapy wearable while Augustin was building 3D sensors for guiding robot perception. They soon realized that a combination of these ideas “offered us the possibility to deliver on the promise of guiding your form and tracking your progress accurately.”

In 2015, they started a company called Pivot to build SmartSpot — a similar looking upright screen that was designed for gyms. It could track users, but only output raw data about their form, like how bent a user’s knees were during a squat. It then worked with trainers to annotate the data to determine what movement patterns were safe and which were dangerous.

Gym owners bought in because it let them track which trainers were actually helping customers improve. “It held trainers accountable. If you weren’t delivering results, it’d be obvious” Eldeeb tells me. The company built up a dataset of over from over 1 million 3D tagged workouts, from hundreds of gyms, overseen by thousands of trainers. That formed the basis of the artificial intelligence that would let Pivot pivot into Tempo.

Pumping Iron With Tempo

At first, Tempo’s giant screen and black or white armoire can feel a bit daunting. The thing is about six feet tall, though it only takes up as much room as a large chair. It makes efficient use of space, with the barbell and dumbbells racked on the back, an internal shelf for the foam roller and mat, and a soft-closing cabinet on the front with the rubber-coated weight set. Keeping everything together means you won’t have to go digging in your closet to start a work out.

Tempo walks users through an initial computer-vision fitness assessment to understand your strength and flexibility so it can set base levels for its exercises. If you have an injury it needs to nurse, Tempo connects you to a human personal trainer that helps customize your workout plan. Otherwise, it uses your goals and data to set out a progressive regimen that gets a little tougher each day. It even blocks you from jumping into later classes so you don’t strain yourself.

Your workout plan begins with tutorial sessions that teach you to do the exercises with safe and proper form. When I was hunching forward during my squats, Tempo’s computer vision would ding me with instant feedback to keep my knees back and chest up. Then once I’d corrected the issue, it congratulated me with little green checkmarks. “Any product that doesn’t offer that is no better than a DVD or YouTube videos” Eldeeb remarks.

From there I could choose between a variety of class styles and lengths, ranging from high intensity interval training circuits to isolated sessions focused on particular muscle groups. In each, you watch a near life-size personal trainer doing the routines right in front of you while they demonstrate form and drop inspirational quotes.

Tempo is producing seven live classes per day from its San Francisco studio which you can also watch on-demand. You can compete against friends or strangers, and Tempo compares you rep for rep so it’s more about perfect form than reckless speed or weight. The live trainers can actually see all your data and your mistakes on a dashboard as they lead classes, and can call you out for screwing up (though you can deactivate this shame mode). Eldeeb says “knowing the trainer can possibly see your numbers will motivate you to actually do this right.”

The class selection interface is suspiciously similar to Peloton’s, though that at least will make it familiar for some. Over time, you build up an immense collection of data on your performance in each work out, excercise, and muscle. Unlike hitting the gym by yourself, you’ll never struggle to remember how much weight to use or whether you’re improving. Classes are soundtracked with dancey remixes sourced from a partnership with Feed.fm to avoid the royalty issues with original songs that slapped Peloton.

Tempo gives feedback when you’re doing exercises wrong, and when you correct yourself

For a 14-person startup, Tempo is trying to do a ton and that can leave some rough edges. The bluetooth armband heartrate monitor can have connectivity issues and the computer vision doesn’t always register every rep, especially if your posture is off. Classes also fail to include enough stretching to prevent strains, instead devoting the start of classes to warmups that ease you in but might not protect your muscles well enough. My quads were destroyed after my demo.

Tempo still achieves its primary objective: it makes weight lifting accessible. No need to drag yourself to the gym or be beholden to a trainer’s schedule, where I’d always end up arriving late and wasting 25% of my session. The form feedback fixes my core complaint about remote personal training app Future I’ve been using for nine months, which can’t see you. That’s led to minor injuries from bad sit-up posture and other incorrect movements. Tempo can’t catch everything, but it can nip some of the most common mistakes in the bud.

Eldeeb was blunt when asked why Tempo is better than well-funded competitors like $3000 Tonal’s wall-mounted resistance cable-based training system or the $1500 Mirror’s massive screen.

“The biggest problem with Tonal is two-fold. Cables and motors do not last. I want this product to be in your house for 10-plus years. [Tempo] is in gyms running 24/7 in for 3 years and it’s still working. The second biggest thing is just feedback.” While Tonal does include a camera and microphone it might employ in the future, it’s not scanning you to detect when you’re lifting weights crooked like Tempo.

As for Mirror, “What is the difference between ClassPass Live and Mirror? It doesn’t come with any equipment, and there’s no training. It’s just a two-way mirror and a Samsung LED panel behind it with an arduino board” Eldeeb rails. He claims it can’t actually monitor your workouts and that his team’s tests found Mirror would say they’d burned 500 calories when they were literally just sitting on their couch in front of it.

Eldeeb demos Tempo

If the software proves to have high retention so people actually recommend Tempo to friends, the biggest hurdle will be its price. You can buy a couple dumbbells for $50 or get a barbell weight bench for a few hundred. Even if Tempo’s $55 per month financing option plus $39 subscription makes it cheaper than a single personal training session or on-par with a gym membership, it could still seem like a serious commitment.

That feeling is magnified by how all of its equipment and classes and data can feel a bit overwhelming. The startup might have to spend a fortune on retail establishments that can guide users through their first Tempo experience. There’s also no mobile version yet, so you can’t bring the work outs on the road with you.

Eldeeb seems guinely motivated to keep improving the product so it’s better than commuting to work out. “Getting to the gym or class is often half the battle. By bringing the gym to you and structuring the classes to be as efficient as possible, Tempo not only makes improving your health more convenient, but it gives you back your most precious resource: time.”

For those comfortable lifting the cheap weights they have at home or hitting up a budget gym, Tempo might seem needlessly overwrought and expensive. But for anyone who needs more instruction or wants to get a Barry’s Bootcamp-worthy workout at home, Tempo might be just their speed.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2T3F3qS Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

#Technical Solutions #SEO #Online Earning #Youtube Marketing #Android Developer

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sheminecrafts · 5 years ago

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Tempo reveals $17M-funded $2000 weight lift training screen

Tempo opens for pre-orders today for $1995, requiring a $250 deposit and $39 monthly content subscription before shipping this summer.

A founder’s journey out of homelessness

Tempo co-founder, CEO, and CPO Moawia Eldeeb

Pumping Iron With Tempo

Tempo gives feedback when you’re doing exercises wrong, and when you correct yourself

Eldeeb was blunt when asked why Tempo is better than well-funded competitors like $3000 Tonal’s wall-mounted resistance cable-based training system or the $1500 Mirror’s massive screen.

Eldeeb demos Tempo

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2T3F3qS via IFTTT

#IFTTT #iraidajzsmmwtv

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magzoso-tech · 5 years ago

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Tempo reveals $17M-funded $2000 weight lift training screen

New Post has been published on http://rebrand.ly/c98un4u

Tempo reveals $17M-funded $2000 weight lift training screen

Tempo opens for pre-orders today for $1995, requiring a $250 deposit and $39 monthly content subscription before shipping this summer.

From homeless to in-home gym

Tempo co-founder, CEO, and CPO Moawia Eldeeb

At one point, Eldeeb was living in a shelter without even a middle school education. But personal trainers at a local YMCA took him under their wing. He eventually paid his way through Columbia University by working as a personal trainer to his eventual co-founder and CTO Josh Augustin. “Having trainers say you’re getting stronger taught me I could do something for myself.”

Pumping Iron With Tempo

Tempo gives feedback when you’re doing exercises wrong, and when you correct yourself

Eldeeb was blunt when asked why Tempo is better than well-funded competitors like $3000 Tonal’s wall-mounted resistance cable-based training system or the $1500 Mirror’s massive screen.

Eldeeb demos Tempo

#Miscellaneous

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ethelbertpaul444-blog · 6 years ago

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What does running do to your brain?

Neuroscientists have contemplated treadmill runners, ultramarathon athletes and a number of lab animals to investigate the consequences of moving on grey matter It may seem self-evident- as you push on through a long run, deviating wildly between hotshots of hardship and glee- that loping can have a huge result on your state of mind. It is an instinctive sentiment that a growing number of neuroscientists have begun to are serious about, and in recent years they have started to show us what actually plays out on the hills and valleys of your grey matter as you run. Their observes corroborate what many athletes know from their own experience: we can use passing as a tool to improve the way we fantasize and experience. And we are currently reading accurately why movement can recall focus, vanquish stress and improve mood. Plus we know why- if you’re lucky – you might get a brief view of nirvana. It would be crazy be suggested that running is a universal solution to all of our mental invites. Certainly, from your brain’s position, you are not able to want to push it extremely hard-handed. German neuroscientists examined the brains of some of the entrants before, during, and after the TransEurope Foot Race, in which competitors slog through 3,000 miles, over 64 consecutive days. In the middle-of-the-road of this absurdly extreme ultramarathon, the runners’ grey matter had shrunk in magnitude by 6 %: the’ normal’ shrinking associated with old age is just 0.2% per year. Luckily, the narrative doesn’t terminate too badly: eight a few months later the athletes’ abilities were back to normal. But if considering gargantuan lengths can be counter-productive, it is clear now that more moderate flows can result in very real benefits. First, in a macrocosm where smartphones bombard us with foreplay and blur the border between work and life, a seizure of recent examines presents why going for a pas going to be able to regain a sense of control. A 2018 venture from West Michigan University, for example, showed that feeing abruptly for half an hour improves” cortical flicker frequency” doorstep. This is associated with the ability to better process information. Two others, from the Lithuanian Sports University and Nottingham Trent University, has been demonstrated that interval guiding improves various aspects of” director affair “. This is a suite of mental high-level departments that include the ability to marshall attention, tune out distractions, switch between enterprises and solve problems. Among the young people learnt, measurable advantages were clear immediately after 10 minutes of interval sprints. They too compiled after seven weeks of training. A brain imaging consider led by David Raichlen at the University of Arizona ties in neatly with these results. They saw clear differences in brain activity in serious runners, compared to well-matched non-runners. For self-evident concludes, you cannot range while you are inside a brain scanner, so the neuroscientists studied the mentality at rest. First, they learnt increased co-ordinated activity in regions, principally at the front of the mentality, known to be involved in director offices and cultivating recall. This represents sense. Second, they recognized relative softening down of the actions of the” default mode system”, a series of linked brain regions that spring into action whenever we are idle or disconcerted. Your default procedure network is the source of your inner monologue, the instigator of mind-wandering and the voice that ruminates on your past. Its results are not always accepted or helpful, and have been associated with clinical depression. Raichlen’s was a preliminary study, but if demonstrated in the future, it will give fresh heavines to the idea that guiding can be a figure of moving mindfulness musing. Brain scans been demonstrated that meditation and moving can have a somewhat similar upshot on the brain; simultaneously committing manager gatherings and becoming down the chattering of the default state structure. Again, this seems instinctively right: in the midst of a drain, you are likely to be immersed in the present moment, tuned into your bodily government, and conscious of your breather. These are all key aims of mindfulness-based rules. Lacing up your trainers and going for a race could, therefore, ensure that they are able to collect some of the mental benefits of mindfulness. Fellowships, extremely, are cottoning on to the therapeutic effects of running: I recently worked with running-shoe fellowship Saucony to create a podcast about the effects of feeing on the mind. All of this might start to explain why some people find that flowing, like mindfulness, can be a helpful highway to overcome stress and dip. Recent experiment from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden sees, at a chemical tier, how work can defuse at least one important biological stress pathway. When you are under stress, metabolic processes in your liver alter the amino acid tryptophan into a molecule with the mumble-inducing reputation of knyurenine. Some of that knyurenine procures its room into your psyche, where its accumulation has been strongly associated with stress-induced dimple, nervousnes diseases and schizophrenia. When you exercise, the levels of an enzyme called kynurenine aminotransferase be developed further in your muscles. This enzyme breaks down knyurenine into the related molecule kynurenic acid, which, importantly, cannot open the brain. In this nature, exerting your skeletal muscles by racing clears from your bloodstream a substance that can cause mental health problems. It is important to be recognised that, for technological and ethical rationales, some of the details of this mechanism have been proven simply in laboratory animals. Saucony has even worded its recent shoe collection “White Noise” after the mind-clearing effects of a drain Photo: Saucony figcaption > root > At first glance, it is not obvious why manipulating your leg muscles should have a direct effect on your mental state. This work offer rare insight into the often-mysterious links between psyche and figure- and is a powerful remembrance that your intelligence is merely another bodily part. What you choose to do with your body will, inevitably, have mental consequences. Running can do more for your climate than smooth out stress. Some luck beings drool about its own experience of the” runner’s high”, which, they claim, is a powerful sensation of euphorium and invincibility. Feeing “ve never” relatively done that for me, but we do now know more about the potent chemical payoffs that running initiations in the mentality. The favourite project of the” endorphin charge” was tolerate in the 1980 s and 90 s, when a series of studies has been demonstrated that the levels of beta-endorphin raise in your bloodstream during the course of a roll. Beta-endorphin targets the same receptors as opiates, and has some similar biological influences. The endorphin scoot hypothesis always had a shortcoming, nonetheless, since beta-endorphin does not cross quickly the blood-brain barricade. And if it didn’t make it into your intelligence, how could it give you a high? In 2008, German neuroscientists gave that right. They employed functional brain imaging to demo that, in trained smugglers, beta-endorphin levels do indeed spike in the psyche after a two-hour movement. Increased positions endorphin the actions of the ability likewise correlated with the smugglers’ self-reported sentiments of euphoria. It is not just home-brew opiates that can dull the aching and invoke your spirits while you are on the run. Endocannabinoids are a diverse genealogy of bodily chemicals which, like cannabis, bind the brain’s cannabinoid receptors. The levels of endocannabinoids moving in the blood rises after 30 times of moderately intense treadmill leading . Rigorous ventures, conducted on laboratory mice, show that running-induced endocannabinoids are responsible for reductions in anxiety and perception of aching. It is a good bet that the same mechanism works in our brains. For many of us, feeing may never hand a drug-like high-pitched. But we now assure why a operate that feels like murder at the start can leave you feel slaked and at ease by the dwelling straight. Some of these studies are initial and need fleshing out. And it is definitely the example that your gender, genetic chart, fitness, expectancies and many other factors besides will influence the behavior your mentality responds to running. Even so, I read all these neuroscientific studies as good information floors. While the physical benefits of feeing and aerobic practise are well established, we are starting to see why ranging can have profound assistances for mental health, more. Hopefully, knowing this will redouble your determination to get out there and guide more frequently. Ben tweets at @mountainogre Read more: https :// www.theguardian.com/ lifeandstyle/ the-running-blog/ 2018/ jun/ 21/ what-does-running-do-to-your-brain http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/07/05/what-does-running-do-to-your-brain/

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thepermanentrainpress · 7 years ago

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TRACK BY TRACK FEATURE: HOLY HUM - “ALL OF MY BODIES”

It’s been a long time coming for Holy Hum’s debut record, but with All Of My Bodies out this past October, listeners are finally getting an opportunity to explore the complex mind of multidisciplinary artist Andrew Yong Hoon Lee.

Behind his slurred tone enveloped in lush synths, gentle (and more cacophonous) guitar, a lingering sense of grief and anxiety. Each track holds its own as part of a whole, poetic and spacious in sound, while maintaining a burdening warmth.

Lee was kind enough to write us an in-depth track-by-track on the record, which you can delve into below.

Words below by Andrew Yong Hoon Lee:

1. “All Of My Bodies”

This song was probably one of the first things I recorded after I borrowed some money from my mom for a new computer to record my album. A lot of the synths in the beginning of the song don’t really follow any type of chord progression and even when they do they are often inconsistent. That’s why it sounds like multiple waves of synth sounds coming and going. That’s where I got the idea for the first line of the song “Tonight I am the tallest of tidal waves.”

The song needed a rhythmic structure so that I could give it a chord progression but there wasn’t an inherent meter in the song so I did the next logical thing - which was to create an illogical rhythm structure using a drum machine. Which is how and why I came up with that drum pattern that feels disjointed but has it’s own logic. It sounds cool on it’s own but when you try and sing over it it made no sense so I added the 808 high-hat sample that helps me keep time in the song.

The majority of this song was recorded in my apartment and my studio in Vancouver, Canada. We then dumped the entire multitrack to 2" tape at The Unknown in Anacortes, WA and then recorded the vocals. The song was then dumped back into Logic. The bass was recorded in Vancouver at our studio and the percussion was recorded in a long cement hallway in the basement of our rehearsal space. I recorded Jacqueline's vocals in my apartment. And then it was mixed by myself and Colin Stewart.

This song starts off the record but is ultimately the final chapter of my time with my father. So we’re kind of starting at the end.

The song starts out with me having to explain to my father that he was dying and that this really was going to be the end of his life. My father had a difficult time acknowledging this. He was already making plans for what he was going to do after he got out of the hospital, or he was praying for another five years. I do not envy anyone having to tell anyone that “this is all there is/this is all there ever will be” because no one has ever experienced death and lived to talk about. And you have no idea what to expect, how to act, and how to talk about it so my father didn’t really acknowledge it.

I had no idea how to honor him with my art. So what I did was to just tell the story like it happened. Him taking my hand and putting it in his and telling me that it was going to be alright and me knowing that it wasn’t going to be alright. Me holding him close for the first time in my life and realizing that I actually was never that close to him. But I still held him close. Things are illuminated in a very different ways when death is in the room.

The phrase “All Of My Bodies” has so many different associations for me; the urge to give up my body so that my father could have it. It also is a way of delineating time for me. I think of my physical form as ultimately being changed and different after my father died. I grew up in a religious home and so the idea of sacrificing the body in order to achieve some type of transcendence also finds its way into the interpretation of the song.

All Of My Bodies by Holy Hum

2. “Yoo Duk Lee”

I played a bunch of chords on a synth in my apartment. I had no speakers so I plugged it into my stereo system and I recorded it onto my Zoom H4n hand held recorder. The sounds have been processed heavily in Ableton and then recorded onto Logic so I can't really recall how this sound was made.

All Of My Bodies by Holy Hum

3. “Flower In The Snow”

This song was mostly recorded in my apartment except for the bass which was done in Ryan's apartment in DTES, Vancouver. We dumped the Logic session onto 2" tape and then back into Logic. We recorded vocals and guitar at The Unknown but we ended up using the stuff I recorded in my apartment despite the buzz. Ash came over one night in the winter and we recorded his guitar part in my living room. This is a very old song that has been hanging around for awhile and I feel that this is the definitive version. My friend Angela Seo of Xiu Xiu plays the piano and Kathryn Calder of The New Pornographers assumes the voice of the female character in the narrative of the song. In a lot of ways “Flower In The Snow” is a duet.

All Of My Bodies by Holy Hum

4. “Heavy Lark”

Almost everything on this song was recorded in my apartment during the winter. We then dumped the track onto 2" tape at The Unknown in January where we also recorded the guitar parts for this song. Vocals were attempted at The Unknown but we ended up using the scratch vocals that I did in my apartment. I had to sing the song really quietly in my apartment and because of that I couldn’t really hear myself and was singing very out of tune. So I put some auto-tune on my vocals because it was just a demo but then ended up liking it and kept it in the mix. The song was then dumped back into Logic and mixed by Colin Stewart and myself. The song features a very random flamenco guitar solo and a lot of Mellotron.

I actually don’t really know what this song is about. With the faint taste of death still in my mouth I spent a lot of time thinking about existential questions like life after death and heaven and hell. After seeing death I had a bit of a moral panic because maybe you don’t really know if you’re a good person or not. I think this is what this song is about.

All Of My Bodies by Holy Hum

5. “Sex At 31″

I got the idea for the title of this song from one of my favourite poets Barry McKinnon. I've never met Barry but my friend and poet Jeff Derksen went up to Prince George, BC one time and brought me back a signed copy of "In The Millennium" which I cherish. I've read all of McKinnon's books of poetry and have even come across some of his chapbooks at the special collections library at Simon Fraser University. This song was entirely recorded in my apartment. The vocals were recorded using an old AKG d160 microphone.

I think this track is about death that is disguised as a love song. Or maybe it’s the other way around? The song is definitely set in Vancouver. It rains here a lot and a lot of the people who live in the city endure six months of grey clouds and endless rain in hopes of a dry and sunny summer and fall.

All Of My Bodies by Holy Hum

6. “Joseph Pt. II”

I first got Logic on my computer in January of 2013. This is the first thing that I recorded. In a lot of ways this is the first Holy Hum song. The drums were recorded in our rehearsal space in Vancouver. The audio of the waves crashing was recorded in January of 2014 during a hike near Deception Pass (Deception Pass is a strait separating Whidbey Island from Fidalgo Island, in the northwest part of the U.S. state of Washington.) I was drawn to the place because of the name.

This song is titled after my father. I kind of envision this song as being a classical symphony motif about passing through to the next life. I was thinking about that scene in Stanely Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey” when Dr. David Bowman is flying through time and space and experiencing total elation and terror all at the same time. György Ligeti’s score in the film I think really does an amazing job at evoking the sublime and the terrifying concept of vast nothingness.

All Of My Bodies by Holy Hum

7. “White Buzz”

This is the only song on the album that was recorded entirely at The Unknown on Anacortes, WA. We did the song live off the floor for the most part save a few overdubs and the vocals. The recording session was booked over three days where we only worked on this one song. It is the longest song on the record and the guitar solo was the first part of the song that was conceived of. The rest of the song structure was built to facilitate the guitar solo which I think is the main character of the song. I am a huge Mount Eerie fan and had always admired his female vocal parts in his Wind's Poem, Clear Moon, and Ocean Roar albums. The female vocals on those Mt. Eerie albums were credited to Allyson Foster who lived on Anacortes so I asked her if she would come in and sing on a song and she said yes. The song was initially almost a minute longer but I cut out an entire stanza. At the end of the song I am attempting to sing like my father who was an opera singer and was completely improvised.

What is the story behind the song?

The lyrics are set in a hospital room where I’m sitting next to my father (except for the last line which is kind of in a different time and place where I am thinking back to the hospital room). The first two stanzas deal with loss: letting go and giving it away. The last two stanzas are about sacrifice. At least that’s what I think. The end of the song is me trying to sing like my father who was an opera singer. This is one of those songs where I’d like to think that the mood and the sound of the song speaks more than what I’m actually singing.

The song is called White Buzz because it is set in the hospital room where my father lay sick and dying. The exceptionally white light and the buzz coming from the fluorescent light above his hospital bed was like a constant fog or mist that permeated the room. So when ever I think back at that time my mind generates that buzz and my eyes adjust to the light.

As I mentioned, the singing at the end of the song was improvised and was my attempt at singing like my father who was an opera singer. The guitar solo in the song was also improvised.

All Of My Bodies by Holy Hum

8. “Sun Breaking”

Guitar and synth were recorded in my apartment in the winter of 2013. The audio of the storm was recorded in spring of 2013 right outside of my bedroom window.

I was attempting to create a small vignette of what I was thinking and feeling at the time. And again this is another example of me trying to convey a sense of mood and feeling without saying anything. The setting takes place in a small town in Korea called Cheongju where my father was from and I had just taken my father's ashes to their final resting place on the family burial lot where all of my ancestors on my father’s side are buried. I’m standing on top of a hill and able to see all of the apartment building roof tops and the sun is breaking through some storm clouds right before it begins to rain. Another film reference - I tried to recreate the iconic synth sounds from the Vangelis soundtrack for Blade Runner. I believe the synth is a Yamaha CS80.

All Of My Bodies by Holy Hum

9. “Ready To Have It”

The vocals and classical guitar were recorded at The Unknown. The Cello and Clarinet were done in my apartment on separate occasions. The percussion was done in the hallway of our rehearsal space.

In this song I am dealing with existential questions of being who I want to be, where I want to be, and who I want to be with. I think for me, the line “When the ink well runs dry/The sun will not rise again” is a theme that has come up in a lot of songs that I have written over my lifetime. For me - not being able to be creative would be a type of death. It’s almost like a fear of creative writers block and what that means for me and my identity as an artist. If I wasn’t able to create would I even have an identity - who would I be?

All Of My Bodies by Holy Hum

10. “Space and Time”

This song was recorded for the most part in my apartment.

I think this song is about our innate human desire to conquer things like space and time. Humans are clever by creating things like satellites to beam information across great distances and also containing the concept of time in a small thing like a wristwatch but ultimately these devices are only abstracted perceptions of themselves. We can’t actually control time and we can’t travel any great distance without also experiencing the passing of time.

All Of My Bodies by Holy Hum

11. “Mellotron Doom”

This song was recorded entirely in my apartment.

This song has a very specific date in mind but it jumps around from past to present within the universe of the song. It starts with having my father already being dead and then walking up to his grave to do a traditional Korean burial ceremony where we prepare a feast for the departed and also drink on their behalf. For each deceased relative in our family mausoleum we pour a drink and then we bow then pour it out onto the grave. It’s a lot of alcohol to go through and waste but I was thinking at the time that no amount of drink could fill the void I was feeling.

“We walked up to the grave Began to drink Not enough to make it right But enough It was enough”

The line “Lungs lit up like a constellation of stars” is a direct reference to my father's x-ray of his chest. The cancer had spread from his thyroid gland in his neck to his lungs and the x-ray was all lit up with white spots in his lungs. It literally looked like a constellation of stars.

“Lungs lit up like the constellation of stars You won't breath anyway”

The date that this song is alluding to is December 26th, 2011. The date my father died. It was a stark contrast to have people celebrating the birth of a savior then my father passes away the next day.

“A father finally sleeps A saviour is born We say We say We sing Halleluah”

All Of My Bodies by Holy Hum

_______________________________________________________

We thank Andrew Lee for his candid words on each individual track of his new album; his ability to capture emotion through personal loss is a strength in itself, but to create the sonic soundscape that is All Of My Bodies is true art. We highly recommend giving the record a thorough listen for its vulnerability, and power through raw narration.

WEBSITE | FACEBOOK | TWITTER

Posted by: Chloe Hoy

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mdonline · 7 years ago

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Katie Lee, dead at 98

Singer, songwriter loved the canyons

Katie Lee, a free-spirited folk singer who found her mission as a performer and writer protesting the loss of Glen Canyon’s spectacular beauty to a dam on the Colorado River, died on Nov. 1 at her home in Jerome, Ariz. She was 98.

Her death was confirmed by Kathleen Williamson, the executor of her will.

“Rivers are the lifeblood of our planet and they need to flow,” Ms. Lee said in “Kickass Katie Lee” (2016), a short biographical film by Beth and George Gage. “They don’t need to be dammed every 15 feet.”

Eloquent and blissfully profane, Ms. Lee joined conservationists like David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club, and the writer Edward Abbey to try to stop construction of the 710-foot-high Glen Canyon Dam in Northern Arizona, which opened in 1963. She became part of the chorus of environmentalists that ever since has demanded that the canyon be restored.

The only impediment to her blowing up the dam, she would say, was that she did not know how.

Her enchantment with Glen Canyon began in 1953 during a visit with friends and continued when she became a river runner. She adored its rapids, and the breezes that she said sounded like voices speaking to her. She swam nude in its potholes and waterfalls. She explored its 125 contoured side canyons, each of them named (some by her), and each one a different aesthetic experience.

“When they drowned that place, they drowned my whole guts,” she said in an interview in 2010 at Telluride MountainFilm, a documentary festival. “And I will never forgive the bastards. May they rot in hell.”

Her anger at the federal government, in particular the Bureau of Reclamation, which built the Glen Canyon Dam, fueled her music and made her a magnet for filmmakers. In her ballads, she sang about rivers and boatmen. In her protest songs, she rebuked dam builders.

In “Colorado River Songs,” an album she released in 1964, she pilloried the Bureau of Reclamation.

Three jeers for the Wreck-the-Nation Bureau

Freeloaders with souls so pure-o

Wiped out the good Lord’s work in six short years.

Eric Balken, executive director of the nonprofit Glen Canyon Institute, said that Ms. Lee was an important part of the environmental movement to the end of her life.

“She converted her passion for the canyon into fiery opposition to the Glen Canyon Dam,” Mr. Balken said in a telephone interview. “She conveyed the canyon’s beauty and essence to so many people nationwide.”

She was often referred to as “the Desert Goddess of Glen Canyon.”

Once the dam was built, she did not return to Glen Canyon. The loss was too great.

“What’s left of my rivers, what’s left of me,” she said when she was 96. “We’re probably going to go together.”

Kathryn Louise Lee was born on Oct. 23, 1919, in Aledo, Ill. Her family moved to Tucson when she was three months old, and she grew up loving the desert. Her father, Zanna, was an architect and homebuilder; her mother, the former Ruth Detwiler, was a decorator. Her mother pushed her to play the piano. Her father taught her to hunt rabbit and quail with a Remington shotgun.

Earning the lead in a high school play called “The Patsy” made her feel as if the stage were her living room. “Wow! This is where I belong!” she recalled thinking in 2008 in an oral history interview for the Cline Library at Northern Arizona University. “I knew every line of the play, I knew exactly what to do, and I was fine.”

That early acting experience led her to study drama at the University of Arizona. She went on to have a modest career as an actress that included roles on radio shows like “The Great Gildersleeve” and “The Railroad Hour,” a music series starring the singer Gordon MacRae.

She found greater acclaim as a folk singer, developing friendships with stars like Burl Ives, Josh White and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Mr. Ives praised her once by saying, “The best cowboy singer I know is a girl — Katie Lee.” Her repertoire was traditional for folk singers in the 1950s: songs about outlaws and murder, love and hate, cowboys, labor, poverty, injustice and politics.

But the planning for the dam on Glen Canyon gave her a particularly strong motivatation to sing.

“My river was about to be unjustly dammed … politically dammed,” she wrote in “All My Rivers Are Gone” (1998), one of several books she wrote about Glen Canyon. “Songs about my river! Songs of protest! Folk songs. Holy Mother!”

She added: “I had a cause! A cause that didn’t center on me-me-me: one that asked nothing of me, really, yet was far from mute. I’d never had a cause before, but now there was a place, almost a person, that needed my help.”

She did not sing only folk or protest songs. She recorded humorous songs about psychoanalysis on the 1957 album “Songs of Couch and Consultation.” With lyrics by the jazz saxophonist Bud Freeman and music by Leon Prober, the album became a hit in England and the songs became a popular element of her act. She had initially rejected Mr. Freeman’s suggestion that she record the songs but reconsidered after listening to his demo tapes on her way back from a trip to the Colorado River.

“The tunes were catchy,” she told The Arizona Republic in 1960, “so I thought, ‘Why not?’ ”

In “Stay as Sick as You Are,” she sang:

I love your streak of cruelty

Your psychopathic lies

The homicidal tendencies

Shining in your eyes.

She continued to sing about cowboys, rivers and canyons. She recorded the album “Love’s Little Sisters” in 1975 at a studio on the ranch owned by the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart in Novato, Calif. At the time, Mr. Hart was living and working with Jerilyn Lee Brandelius, Ms. Lee’s stepdaughter.

Last month, at a party for her 98th birthday, Ms. Lee performed her composition “Song of the Boatman.” Holding a birthday card, she sang:

Today I know your magic call

Will lead me back to the canyon wall.

And the music in your rapids roar

Make this boatman’s song from his soul outpour.

In addition to Ms. Brandelius, Ms. Lee is survived by her son, Ronald Eld; another stepdaughter, Susie Brandelius; and two stepsons, Ken and John Brandelius.

Her longtime partner, Joey van Leeuwen, whom she met on a trip to Australia in 1979, committed suicide one day after her death, Ms. Williamson said. Mr. van Leeuwen, who filled their house with his wood carvings of birds, worried about what would happen to him if Ms. Lee died first. In “Kickass Katie Lee,” he said, “I would have a terrible life on my own.”

Ms. Lee was married at least twice. She was divorced from Eugene Busch Jr., a businessman, and became a widow after the death of Edwin C. Brandelius Jr., a racecar driver and track announcer.

Ms. Lee recalled in “All My Rivers Are Gone” that while on a trip to Glen Canyon in 1957, a year after the first dynamite blast that initiated construction of the dam, she took a break from lunch, stared at the river and talked to the water.

“I feel betrayed,” she said. “Homo sapiens! Greedy pathetic fools with a genetic mania to destroy all the sanctuaries that feed their souls. Well, hell, I don’t give a damn if we’re blotted out. I don’t want to be a part of the human race when I see the pimps in government and the whores who do their bidding. I’d rather be a coyote.”

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oldguardaudio · 7 years ago

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The Patriot Post -> Antifa, coming to a Theater Near You

Hey Libertards spend you time doing what you talk about, Feed some homeless or something. at HoaxAndCahnge.com

Liberals are so kind and tolerant of others at HoaxAndChange.com

trophy for losing at HoaxAndChange.com

ALEXANDER’S COLUMN

The Antifa Movement — Coming to a Theater Near You

What is “Antifa,” and who is backing and benefiting from its actions?

By Mark Alexander · September 6, 2017

“Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capacity, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence.” —Joseph Story (1833)

Most Americans — those with jobs, families and community obligations and responsibilities — had likely not heard of “Antifa” before throngs of its masked thugs initiated the riots in Charlottesville last month — though the “group” played dominant roles in riots at Berkeley University in February and Evergreen State College in June.

What, then, is Antifa?

Correctly stated, it is a domestic derivative of “Antifaschistische Aktion,” the paramilitary wing of the1930s communist movement in Germany.

Reemerging in the U.S. in the 1990s under Bill Clinton, it has metastasized over the last eight years under Barack Obama’s regime into an autonomous collective of radical “useful idiots.”

The movement was invigorated by Obama’s Marxist agenda and that of his socialist bourgeoisiecadres. It coalesced around Obama’s revolution-tested politics of disparity, as instilled in him by his Marxist mentors. Antifa is the current manifestation of his repugnant Red October uprising, “Occupy Wall Street,” in the fall of 2011.

Recall that Obama proclaimed to his Occupy cadres, “You are the reason I ran for office.”

This growing radical anarchist/socialist movement, also referred to as the “alt-left,” declares that it is anti-fascist — but this is Orwellian. In truth, the movement bears a strong resemblance to Hitler’s brownshirt fascists, whom they claim to oppose. As American Enterprise Institute fellow Marc Thiessen aptly notes in a Washington Post op-ed: “Yes, Antifa is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis. … Both practice violence and preach hate. They are morally indistinguishable. There is no difference between those who beat innocent people in the name of the ideology that gave us Hitler and Himmler and those who beat innocent people in the name of the ideology that gave us Stalin and Dzerzhinsky.”

Over the last eight years, the Occupy Wall Streeters and their kissin’ cousins, the so-called “Black Lives Matter” cabal, have had a hand in every urban-area riot across America. Like them, the Antifa thugs typically organize protests using social media accounts, websites and email blasts.

In 2016, the Antifa movement was further energized by the socialist platform of Bernie Sanders, until his presidential campaign was bushwhacked by the Democrat National Committee and Hillary Clinton.

Antifa is composed of mostly white adolescent agitators, violent malcontents between 18 and 30 years of age, from about 200 autonomous anarchist and anti-capitalist factions. Thus, it’s not an overtly formal organization — yet.

Who benefits from Antifa propaganda and violence?

The lack of organization doesn’t mean that no one is benefiting from Antifa’s propaganda and violence. Indeed, the Antifa movement has created a fundraising windfall for leftists, particularly the Democrat Party race-baiters and the hate-hustling profiteers at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

These two money-grubbing organizations have generated an endless stream of revenue beginning with their faux indignation at Donald Trump’s condemnation of both hate factions involved in the Charlottesville riots. The Democrat leadership and their Leftmedia propaganda machine devoted all their bandwidth to castigating Trump for daring to call out the thugs from both alt-right and alt-left.

Despite the Demo-goguery, historian Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, observed: “In the olden days, demonstrators decked out in black, with masks and clubs, would have been deemed sinister by liberals. Now, are they the necessary shock troops whose staged violence brings political dividends? Antifa’s dilemma is that its so-called good people wearing black masks can find almost no bad people in white masks to club, so they smash reporters, the disabled, and onlookers alike for sport — revealing that, at the base, they perversely enjoy violence for violence’s sake. As the cowardly Klan taught us in the 1920s and 1960s: Put on a mask with a hundred like others, and even the most craven wimp believes he’s now a psychopathic thug.”

National Review’s Jim Geraghty notes, “Antifa chants, ‘No Trump, no wall, no USA at all.’ The label ‘anti-American’ is not a pejorative, it’s just descriptive.”

And NR’s Rich Lowry calls out the hypocrisy: “Too many people were willing to perfume Antifa in the wake of Charlottesville. But Berkeley demonstrates once again the true nature of this left-wing movement, which is thuggish in its tactics and totalitarian in its sensibility. Anyone who at this point makes excuses for Antifa — or worse, justifies it — is participating in its moral rot. … There was certainly moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin. Likewise, bully-boy fascists spoiling for a fight and black-clad leftists looking to beat them up exist on the same moral plane. They both thrill to violence and benefit from the attention that comes from it. They both reject civility and the Rule of Law that make a democratic society possible. They both are profoundly illiberal. … Liberal commentators spread memes comparing Antifa to American GIs who stormed the beaches at Normandy. The comparison would be apt if the 1st Infantry Division got together to spend an afternoon beating up fellow Americans rather than giving its last measure of devotion to breaching Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.”

Lowry was referring to, among others, this absurd social media post from The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who equated our nation’s valorous D-Day forces with Antifa: “Watching ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ a movie about a group of very aggressive alt-left [antifa] protesters invading a beach without a permit.”

Shame on him. Far better men than Goldberg shed their blood on those Normandy beaches so that he could have the freedom to make such profoundly dullard remarks.

One of the nation’s most noted liberal protagonists, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, warned that Democrat leaders are making a grave mistake by embracing those who want to “tear down America” and by not condemning both sides of the riotous mobs in Charlottesville.

He implores his fellow Democrats: “Do not glorify the violent people who are now tearing down the statues. Many of these people, not all of them, many of these people are trying to tear down America. Antifa is a radical, anti-America, anti-free market, communist, socialist, hard-left sensorial organization. They use violence. … I’m a liberal, and I think it’s the obligation of liberals to speak out against the hard-left radicals, just like it’s the obligation of conservatives to speak out against the extremism of the hard right.”

After being uniformly condemned by conservatives and most moderates, even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi finally condemned Antifa, declaring, “Our democracy has no room for inciting violence or endangering the public, no matter the ideology of those who commit such acts. The violent actions of people calling themselves Antifa in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.”

Even that most entrenched of the Trump-hating Left media outlets, The Washington Post, is now playing catch-up. The paper recently ran a headline proclaiming, “Black-clad Antifa members attack peaceful right-wing demonstrators in Berkeley.”

How dangerous is this latest iteration of communo-fascist malcontents?

Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, the FBI issued alerts to DHS about the increasing risk of Antifa violence, noting that “anarchist extremists” were responsible for most of the political violence across the nation.

The Antifa tactics clearly fall within the federal guidelines defining domestic terrorism, most notably that the intent is “to intimidate or coerce a civilian population,” and “to influence a state or federal government policy by intimidation or coercion.” Despite this, it will be difficult to officially label Antifa a terrorist organization because, at present, it is not a formal organization but an amalgam of communist, fascist and anarchist political ideologies.

However, as previously noted, Antifa is not an overtly formal organization — yet.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

*PUBLIUS*

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The Patriot Post PO Box 507

The Patriot Post -> Antifa, coming to a Theater Near You The Patriot Post -> Antifa, coming to a Theater Near You ALEXANDER'S COLUMN The Antifa Movement — Coming to a Theater Near You…

#Antifa and Alt-Left

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mavwrekmarketing · 7 years ago

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Starry CEO Chet Kanojia

Image: starry

You don’t threaten entire industries without making some enemiesor spending some time in court. That’s a lesson Chet Kanojia has lived and learned.

A few years ago, Kanojia took on some of the biggest media companies in the U.S. with his streaming TV startup Aereo. Well before the recent explosion of internet-based TV bundles, Aereo became a tech phenom by streaming broadcast channels over the internet for a small monthly fee.

It had the feel of the next big thing. The company had customers, funding, and no immediate competitors. It was all going to planup until the Supreme Court stopped him. It’s the kind of defeat that can cripple an entrepreneur.

Not Kanojia. Over tequila shots with colleagues on Aereo’s final day, he was already hatching his next move.

“There’s no obligation, but if you walk in we can’t promise it’s going to work,” he told some of his remaining staffers, many of whom took him up on the offer.

Almost three years after that ruling, I’m riding an elevator with Kanojia up to a loft in Charlestown, Massachusetts. He’s going to show me a piece of that technology Kanojia teased over tequila shots.

The elevator arrives, and we walk into a penthouse apartment, where a white triangle with a screen sits on a window sill.

“This is part of Starry,” he said.

Starry is Kanojia’s new venture, a way to provide cheap, wireless internet access to people’s homes. Most people only have one choice for high-speed internet, a choke point that causes any number of issues and is central to the ongoing net neutrality debate.

This device is an internet router, but it’s just the tip of a much larger, technology-sophisticated system that includes various pieces of equipment set up across a city to create super-fast, wireless access. For now, Starry Internet is only running as a beta test in the greater Boston area. The company is on track to launch in several additional cities by the end of this year.

Image: starry

If Starry works, it could mean big things for the internet, not just from a business perspective.

It’s a big if, the kind Kanojia deals in.

“What we’re doing and what other people will do it’s not only critical, it’s necessary,” Kanojia said.

‘All roads lead to India’

Kanojia, 47, is a disruptor at a time when “disruptor” is thrown around by Silicon Valley poseurs with a new food delivery app.

He immigrated from India in 1991 and has expertise in mechanical engineering, computer systems engineering, and the telecommunications industry. He gained notoriety for Aereo, which was well on its way to irrevocably changing the TV business. Prior to that, he had run Navic Networks, which developed data-collection technology for cable companies. He sold that startup to Microsoft in 2008 reportedly for $250 million.

“Engineering, its like magical… Its so abstract that you either get totally intimidated, or you think, ‘How does it work?'”

Like many of tech’s most impactful entrepreneurs, his story started outside the United States. He was born in Bhopal, India. Bhopal is known for being the site of one of the worst industrial accidents in human history. Thousands of people died in 1984 after a nearby pesticide plant leaked toxic gas.

He gravitated to engineering from a young age. He also saw what it meant to have gatekeepers.

When he was growing up in India, young people took one national exam that determined the level of university they could attend. That single exam set children like Kanojia on one path with little ability to veer from it.

“All roads lead to India. Growing up in India theres a hierarchy because there’s so much competition, there’s not a lot of opportunity,” he said. “If you were an engineer or a doctor, you had a path forward. Everybody else, you had to figure it out.”

That experience of fighting for a spot and then being unable to veer from it informed Kanojia’s views on technology and business. You can be successful, sure, but within the system. Entrepreneurship was, for the part, absent, meaning the status quo was never challenged.

Kanojia now relishes that opportunity. Both Aereo and now Starry have been squarely aimed at bringing change to markets in which big companies held outsized power.

Starry Point placed on a rooftop in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Image: starry

“Unchecked corporate interests can do a lot of damage, and there are new age corporate interests that tend to be more ‘Do no evil,'” Kanojia said.

“To me, technology it allows you to transform things, and thats the coolest part about it all. It changes everything,” he added.

Aereo’s rise and fall

Starting in 2012, Aereo looked like a winner. Kanojia raised almost $100 million for the company, which grew quickly. He had the backing of media mogul Barry Diller.

FirstMark Capital was one of Aereo’s investors. Amish Jani, managing director of the firm, had met Kanojia in early 2001 back when he was running Navic. The company had raised some early-stage capital, not that anyone could tell. Jani recalled the first meeting inside Navic’s second offices, a tight-packed room, stacked with boxes and desks side by side.

“What you got the sense immediately was someone who is very intelligent about technology and products and how they can be leveraged to disrupt an industry,” Jani said.

“You saw someone who was very hard-working, and you saw someone who was very gritty about it. This was right around the bubble. Other companies had fancy stuff left and right. [Navic employees] were passionately focused on a mission,” he continued.

Aereo, the project he started after leaving Microsoft in 2010, worked by operating clusters of tiny antennas that streamed broadcast TV to users. It was a hack, but one that seemed to have found a legal loophole around the rules against rebroadcasting over-the-air TV.

Various courts agreed. The broadcasters sued Aereo and lost just about every time until the Supreme Court heard the case. The judges ruled 6-3 that Aereo had exploited a loophole to get around copyright law.

But Aereo wasn’t a failureto Kanojia and to investors. Jani put Aereo on the list of historical investments for his biography. Rather than an acquisition or a public listing below Aereo, it reads: U.S. Supreme Court.

“We built a lot of great momentum and Chet single-handedly accelerated the movement of TV anywhere,” Jani said. “Now every person expects to see a live-stream of their favorite game on their device, no matter where they are. [Aereo] was not a failure. It was masterful execution.”

“Was” being the operative word there. Aereo’s execution was too masterful. A Supreme Court ruling and a few tequila shots later, Starry became the new gig.

Enter Starry

Kanojia already had a backup planand this one involved a loophole as well, though with far fewer legal issues.

It is very expensive to build new internet infrastructure, particularly the “last mile,” which refers to the connections used by normal consumers. Most Americans have no more than one option here. Kanojia recognized this as a problem for Aereo, as it is for every other tech company that operates on the internet. For all the wide range of choices consumers have for services on the internet, it’s all coming down one pipe. And that meant a gatekeeperthe kind that Kanojia doesn’t particularly like.

So he, along with his business partner Joe Lipowski, who serves as Starry’s chief technology officer, started thinking about how to fix that.

“If Aereo succeeded, Aereo was going to need it. If Aereo failed, we were going to need new gigs,” Kanojia said.

Starry’s main product is its router. It looks like Google Home and Eve from Pixar’s Wall-E had a baby. Which is to say, it looks like something I wouldn’t mind having on my window sill. But why would I need a router this fancy?

Well, the simple answer was it provides fast, reliable, in-home WiFi.

In the apartment, Kanojia fired up “Stranger Things” on Netflix. It’s a controlled demo, but it is fast. His experience with Aereo taught him the risks that a company like Netflix faces (or at least faced when it wasn’t quite as powerful as it is now) in trying to stream video.

If only a few companies control the pipes, you’re going to have problems. This is the essence of the net neutrality debate.

“If you dont have net neutrality, how does Netflix continue to make the investment it needs to make?” Kanojia said. “When it doesnt consider the cost to the consumer, the power will be in two to three companies.”

The 10-year plan (as of this moment)

Unlike Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Kanojia isn’t following a 10-year plan.

“The one certainty in a 10-year plan is in three months, it’ll change,” Kanojia said with a smile when asked about long-term strategy.

“If there is a 10-year plan, it’s find and hire the best,” Lipowski said.

Kanojia said he doesn’t have a hard time recruiting for his new venture.

A Starry employee working at the company’s offices in Downtown Crossing.

Image: kerry flynn/mashable

That’s one reason why Starry’s operations are based in Boston, where nearby Harvard and MIT students are apparently eager to solve challenging problems in the engineering industries, not just build the next Facebook.

“I think a lot of us now are utterly spoiled because each project is more complex and more difficult and more impactful,” Kanojia said.

Kanojia has a lot of work to do. As CEO, his time is split between calls with investors (Starry raised $30 million in a Series B last year, totaling $63 million in funding), hiring, operations, design, sales, and new tech. Like many entrepreneurs, he’s rarely off.

The majority of Starry’s 100 employees do not come from traditional backgrounds in the telecommunications industry. They have some people who worked in defense and other software engineers who have spent most of their past writing mobile apps.

“It’s so fun to sit in this mix because they dont speak each others language. It forces them to build a solid API across people,” Kanojia said, using the tech jargon of API, application program interface, as a metaphor for creating human relationships.

Chet Kanojia on a phone call with investors while standing next to Starry Beam, the network node, in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Image: KERRY FLYNN/MASHABLE

Starry is still in early phrases, but it does have a product in the marketplace. An undisclosed number of Starry Stations have been installed across the country. Starry Internet is live as a beta service in Boston. The station itself is pretty, and that’s part of the selling point.

The biggest question for Starry remains the core technology. It relies on something called “millimeter wave band active phased array” to provide internet access over the air. It’s a technology that others have tried before but failed to make into something ready for consumers.

Kanojia and Starry say they have succeeded where others failed. The company is promising 200 megabit per second speed for $50 per month.

Next up for Starry is perfecting the technology and then, obviously, expanding to markets.

“We’ll make mistakes,” Virginia Lam, Starry’s communications chief, said.

What else would you expect from a true disruptor?

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