#both john saying it and qualifying gale

[alienoresimagines]

Surely if it's one time per fic, people won't notice ? 🥲

[swifty-fox]

From the angst writing prompts list: “ you’ll fuck me but you won’t [go out with/date/marry] me. ” for Buck x Bucky?

prompt list

let's do some Hockey AU! Old Men Yaoi time Buck and Gale are in their late thirties here.

Saturday evening's argument starts out in that silent way of theirs. A slight downward curve of Gale's lips, a scoffing eyeroll from John. A decision not to sit beside each other on the plane ride home.

John shuts down the goal on Gale during practice, a pointed petty over-exertion of routine practice.

Gale uses the last of the creamer and doesn't replace it. He doesn't even like creamer in his coffee.

By Monday night they're in a full-blown Fight.

It makes the rookies uneasy, the tension between their Captain and their Alternate. The way the two men snipe at each other from the showers, from the locker room, from puck drop to final buzzer reminds the other veterans of their debut year on the team. Before they'd figured things out and decided they made a damn good team on the ice and romantically to boot.

The Buckies didn't fight. It was an irrefutable fact of the universe, like how Biddick always ate a nerds rope between second and third periods and the way Little Mac always had dog fur in his duffel bag.

Tuesday they lose their game because Gale is too busy chirping John for leaving the crease yet again and so John tells him to care about his own game and lets in three points diving for the puck halfway to the blue rather than trusting their Dmen.

Wednesday is a double OT Win and John goads the teams into a line brawl because it would be exceptionally bad form for him to punch his Alternate in the face.

Friday Coach Chick Harding sits them down and tells them to figure their shit out or be benched for the foreseeable future.

At home they cook dinner and don't talk about it. John does the dishes and Gale does the laundry and they don't talk about it. They have bitter, biting, angry sex and hold each other in the aftermath but they don't talk about it.

They're both healthy scratches for Saturday's game and Brady loses a tooth trying to fill Gale's skates. Curt corners John in the owners booth after, sticks a blunt scarred finger at his nose and orders him to fix this.

John, who'd always been the slightly more emotionally intelligent of the two, and also the elder, and also the goddamn Captain, sighs like a scolded teenager.

Lying in bed after another bout of wonderful sex where they don't talk about it and don't talk about anything else either John stares up at the ceiling they'd painted together and purses his lips.

"We have to talk about it."

Gale grunts, twists to pop a couple advil in his mouth and passes the bottle to John. They both were living with their aches and pains more prominently these days and their medicine cabinet had long been well stocked with compression bandages and OTC painkillers and packs and packs of IcyHot. "Talk about what?"

"Oh fuck off, eh? You're not stupid and you're not a fuckin' liar Buck."

"What is there to say?"

Throwing his hands up John makes a wordless sound of frustration, rolls to pin Gale with his thighs and glare down at him. Both their bodies were mid-season lean, packed with muscle and bruised from rough play that would only grow rougher as teams fought to qualify for the playoffs. "You're content to fuck me all these years but you won't marry me?"

Gale, lines around his beloved face that were not there even five years ago, grey creeping through his hair unnoticed for the paleness of it, avoids John's gaze.

"Isn't this enough? We got a house and we got a team and it's each other we come home to at night. We live like we're married already Bucky, what's a document got to do with any of it?"

"If it's just a document it should be no big deal right?" John asks sweetly.

Gale frowns up at him and John jabs him in the center of his chest, drawing a grunt from the other man.

"You're being a puss and you know it. I just can't figure out why."

Pale blue eyes close, muscled cheekbones flexing with tension as Gale sighs slowly. John strokes down Gale's chest, over the seams of his stomach muscles and along the ladder of his ribs. Even angry, they'd lived too long together to not be at ease.

"I don't want the end of my career to become a political statement. I don't want to be a martyr or a symbol, I just want to play some good fucking hockey and then retire. And then when it's no longer our Job to be talked about I want to marry you quietly and privately and play beer leagues with you so you can finally have your Goaltender fight."

there's a long period of silence in which Galer's face screws up tighter, eyes squeezing shut as if waiting for his partner's ire. And then John is laughing, loud and incredulously and from the belly.

"That's it?"

Gale opens one eye and finds John looking down at him with his signature toothless grin. His salt and pepper hair falls around their faces as he bends down to kiss Gale soundly, "You spent the last week stressing out all the children because you were too scared to ask for a long engagement?"

"Engagement?"

John rolls back off Gale's body with a groan, stretching his body out, "Yeah. Unless I heard wrong you just said you wanted to marry me, which is as good as asking in my book. So sure Gale, I'll marry you after you retire."

"Hold on, John, fuckin' hell, we're not resolving this that easy are we?"

"I mean it ain't the most romantic of proposals, but there's time for you to do it right."

[anachilles]

-> clegan teacher!au, my beloved.

one niche thing i love in every fandom i'm part of is teacher!AU fic.

ruminating on: gale and john who met in freshman year of college and eventually went to post-grad teacher training together as well, who had the biggest, most notoriously earth-shattering missed opportunity "one drunken night away from ruining the friendship and embarking on a beautiful love story" non-intimate situationship that was the bane of their mutual friends' existences.

extremely close. clearly were in love with each other, but could never quite make the ends meet for any number of reasons:

gale not being ready to fully accept himself and what their relationship was.

john never getting up the nerve to say anything about how he felt.

neither wanting to risk ruining the most meaningful, supportive, and fulfilling friendship either had ever had by opening pandora's box and exploring what more it could have been.

basically both of them being young and dumb and not quite fully sure of themselves yet.

after they both graduated and were fully qualified however, they ended up getting positions at opposite ends of the country to each other - gale teaching (insert: physics/calculus/math in general) and bucky teaching phys ed (because idk bucky has such 'fun but slightly unhinged' PE teacher energy lol) alongside coaching football (mostly just as a junior/assistant coach his first couple of schools) - and eventually lost touch.

so, at the end of the day, they ended up losing it all anyway.

until: bucky gets a call one day out of the blue. from gale. letting him know that the high school he's at - one of the biggest in the district; kind of prestigious but suffering a bit from a spate of retirements from old school teachers who sort of made it what it was, and so things are going down hill a bit.

a position has opened up for a head football coach of a once great but now flagging team, who can also slip in and double up teaching phys ed. it'd be bucky's big break.

aaaaaaand then they're back teaching in the same school together having to deal with all the complicated feelings they both have about what happened between them.

all under the watchful eye of nosy students and faculty who're surprised two people as opposite as mr cleven (known for being a bit of a hard ass and doesn't take bs but also one of those teachers that is really dryly funny and sarcastic with the older year groups and the kids who clearly respect him/the class) and coach egan (extremely personable and outgoing right off the bat, tends to earn respect by speaking to the kids honestly and on their level) were old friends.

so much gossip and drama potential.

[chicagoindiecritics]

New from Jeff York on The Establishing Shot: APPRECIATING THE SUBLIME NASTINESS OF STUART GORDON’S “RE-ANIMATOR”

Original caricature by Jeff York of David Gale and Jeffrey Combs in RE-ANIMATOR (copyright 2020)

With the passing of filmmaker Stuart Gordon this past week, I was inspired to re-visit his darkly comic horror film RE-ANIMATOR. A loose adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s horror short Herbert West – Reanimator, Gordon made it his own by amping up the comedy and the grotesque in equal measures for a modern horror classic. When it came out in 1985, America was settling into a comfortable groove with a second term of the Reagan administration, a nationwide obsession with music videos on MTV, and a steadying economy. Gordon likely wanted to shake audiences out of its complacency, and he did just that with his hellzapoppin horror show.

The film was probably too controversial by half to be anything more than a qualified hit at the time, but nonetheless it still had quite an impact. Not only did it achieve instant cult status, and lead to a number of sequels, but it cemented Gordon’s artistic reputation as a provocateur and set his film career up to continue to shock and awe. (He’d already done a lot of similar things in Chicago with his Organic Theater Company where, among other things, he introduced the world to the equally edgy playwright David Mamet when he produced his first play entitled Sexual Perversity in Chicago.) 35 years later, the chills and laughs Gordon put out for the world to see in RE-ANIMATOR still stand tall, and if anything, the entire enterprise seems even more outrageous than it did when it opened during that comfy and conservative Reagan era.

The idea of reanimating corpses wasn’t exactly the edgiest subject for the horror genre. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which helped start the genre back in 1818, was about that very idea. Nor was excessive violence and gore new to films or even TV shows in the genre. The Hammer horror films dumped buckets of blood all over the screen in the ’60s. THE NIGHT STALKER made-for-TV movie in 1972 pushed the boundaries of violence transmitting into people’s homes with its tale of a vampire on the loose in Las Vegas. And God knows that John Carpenter was raked over the coals by critics for the spectacularly graphic deaths in his remake of THE THING in 1982. RE-ANIMATOR didn’t do anything all that new by being excessively violent. What was novel about it was how viciously it was employed, and how glibly. It was gross, sure, but mostly, it was served with a sense of humor.

In a word, RE-ANIMATOR was nasty.

Nasty in tone, look, and physicality, not to mention its treatment of death, the medical community, patriarchal society, ingenues, and yes, the classic hero’s journey. It was a sniggering and snide middle finger to propriety, daring audiences to watch, laugh, and stay till the end of a film wall-to-wall with outrage. Some did, some didn’t. I had to chase after my date who walked out during it due to being so offended. I returned the next day to see it on my own. It was a very polarizing movie.

The story concerned a brilliant but certifiably cuckoo medical student named Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) who has invented a reagent that can re-animate deceased bodies. He pulls his classmate and roommate Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) into his twisted world when cat Rufus ends up dead by accident and West brings it back to life with his DayGlo green goop. Unfortunately, the lovable personality of the frisky feline doesn’t return as easily as his body. Instead, the sweet kitty’s personality is replaced by a savage and mutated one, a zombie-cat driven by bloodlust. As the two roomies dig deeper into experimentation with reanimation, human bodies start to pile up all over campus, all becoming as vicious as poor Rufus. It’s a film with a pretty sizable body count, one that ends with most of the cast dead, or at least dead for the moment. Dr. West’s formula glows in the dark in the final fade to black.

Combs gave one of the greatest horror film performances ever, a snide sociopath somewhere between Tony Perkins’ boyishness and Christopher Lee’s silken menace.  West was arrogant, tart-tongued, and incapable of even showing a speck of human empathy, By the end, he’s not become a better person one iota. Instead, he’s grown even more obsessed and dangerous. And he’s the lead. (Gordon was all but taunting Joseph Campbell, if not Robert McKee.)

Dan, while a cliched handsome hero in appearance, is little more than a feckless fool throughout. West all but leads him by the nose the entire time. Dan’s girlfriend Megan (Barbara Crampton) is introduced as a sweet, innocent girl and then promptly gets pulled into one humiliation after another. She’s bamboozled by Dan, has to watch her kind father, the dean of the school (Robert Samson), die and then turn into a vicious zombie. West treats her with derision, and the film’s villain Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale) will spend the entire hour and 45-minute running time trying to get into her pants. Today, they’d give her a Katniss Everdeen moment or two to counter such victimhood, but not in ’85.

RE-ANIMATOR is a film that at every beat of its story, exuded in its politically incorr ect attitude Gordon, and his fellow screenwriters Dennis Paoli and William J. Norris threw all the sacred cows out the window or against the wall. (Literally and figuratively, truly.) Rufus’ death is played for grisly laughs. So are all the human deaths. The story also ridicules people in mental institutions, padded cells, and morgues. The character of Megan’s father goes from a sweet, caring man to a drooling, lobotomized caricature in about 10 minutes. And to justify its adult rating, Megan ends up nude for a great deal of the third act. It should be noted too that the film has no problem lingering on Crampton’s comely figure either, including her pubic region. The film takes no prisoners and laughs all the way to the dank.

Most horror comedies tend to play more cute than cruel, like BEETLEJUICE, GHOSTBUSTERS, and ZOMBIELAND. RE-ANIMATOR, however, emphasizes humor that often plays as mean as the bloodletting. Nowhere is this more evident than in how Gordon treats the film’s villainous Dr. Hill. When West catches him trying to steal his reagent, he attacks him with a shovel, and then for good measure, decapitates him too. Still, Hill stays in the picture. The lascivious villain is reanimated and soon both his head in a pan, as well as his foot shorter body, are plotting more nastiness.

The film ends with a phantasm of violence and craziness, chock full of multiple corpses attacking and spraying blood and guts around like the top was left off of a Cuisinart. Yet, even that over-the-top ending cannot compete with the single most memorable set piece in the film. That is when Dr. Hill’s decapitated head tries to, ahem, give head to Megan as she’s strapped to the slab. (Thankfully, my girlfriend left before that scene!)

When the film was originally presented to the review board, it received an X rating because of such scenes, as well as its violence. Gordon trimmed some bits and pieces here and there to scale back such offenses, and thus ensured the video release of the film got an R rating that made it acceptable for Blockbuster and mom & pop stores nationwide. In rentals is where the film really took off and built its reputation that it enjoys today.

Gordon and his producer Brian Yuzna consciously went for the shock and delivered it in spades. They spent a considerable amount of their meager $900,000 budget on the gruesome makeup effects, ensuring that they were as disgusting and graphic as the photos they discovered in a forensics pathologist manual.  John Naulin, the film’s effects supervisor, said it was the bloodiest film he had ever worked on. In past horror films, he never used more than two gallons of blood. For RE-ANIMATOR, he used 24.

And, dare one say, it was bloody effective. By not pulling its punches, RE-ANIMATOR was true to Gordon’s vision of splitting skulls and being side-splitting too. And for such a brazen film, it’s got dozens of quotable quips, particularly those uttered by West. When he discovers the headless Hill trying to get it on with Megan, West admonishes the bad doctor. “I must say, Dr. Hill, I’m very disappointed in you. You steal the secret of life and death, and here you are trysting with a bubble-headed coed.” Snark like that is comedy gold. And it’s in a horror film.

It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but then Gordon wasn’t interested in the status quo.

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[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

What proportion of U.S. fossil fuel consumption is attributable to our food system? How much are farmers earning from their crops? What percentage of American households have enough food to healthfully feed their members? How would various trade policies affect U.S. agriculture?

When policymakers and other interested parties need answers to these questions, they turn to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. However, ERS is at the center of a heated debate as the USDA moves to reorganize the agency and relocate it outside of Washington, D.C. The USDA says the plan will save money and improve the agency’s ability to serve its stakeholders. Critics, including at least 56 former USDA and federal statistical agency officials, say the plan undermines the agency’s ability to carry out its mission and threatens its independent status.

The new plan would move ERS from the research arm of the USDA to one that supports the administration’s policies from within the agriculture secretary’s office. That’s worrisome, said John E. Lee, the administrator of ERS from 1981 to 1993, because the agency’s position under the undersecretary for science and education has helped to protect it as a place for objective science. Moving it to the offices of the chief economist places it in a branch centered on policy, which could threaten its ability to remain policy-neutral. (Lee recently wrote an op-ed in The Hill voicing his opposition to the plan.)

“Every administration I’ve worked for — both Democrat and Republican — at some point gets uncomfortable with one piece or another of ERS analysis,” said Susan Offutt, the ERS administrator under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. As an example, she pointed to research showing that most farmers are fairly well off. “It’s not a politically popular finding,” she said, adding such finding are why it’s essential to keep the agency in a neutral role, lest inconvenient statistics like those disappear.

The current mission of the ERS is to provide evidence to inform policy, not to support any policy over another. ERS evaluates USDA programs but not in a prescriptive manner, said Kitty Smith Evans, who served as the ERS administrator from 2006 to 2011. “We had a saying: Never say ‘should.’” Instead, the agency’s role is to determine the economic consequences of policies and then allow policymakers to use that information to make their own decisions, she said.

The new changes were put into motion by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and announced out of the blue, according to multiple sources interviewed for this story. (The USDA press office and ERS are closed during the government shutdown, so they were unavailable to respond to FiveThirtyEight’s request for comment.) “The current administrator is a friend of mine,” said Smith Evans. “The stakeholders were not consulted before or since.”

Many former officials are shaking their heads. “I personally know the secretary [Perdue] and have an extremely high regard for him,” said Gale Buchanan, a former USDA chief scientist and undersecretary of agriculture for research, education and economics. “But I’m just kind of at a loss to really understand the rationale here.”

The USDA has stated three reasons for relocating ERS: to move “important USDA resources closer to many stakeholders,” to “improve USDA’s ability to attract and retain highly qualified staff,” and to save taxpayers money. Realigning the agency with the Office of the Chief Economist, meanwhile, “will enhance the effectiveness of economic analysis at USDA,” according to a USDA press release.

Former ERS administer Lee said the USDA’s contention that most of ERS’ stakeholders are far from the D.C. area suggests “a lack of knowledge about what the agency really does and who the stakeholders are.” ERS doesn’t work with individual farmers; instead, the agency’s focus is on answering questions about the national impact of policies and legislation.

The American Statistical Association has written a point-by-point rebuttal of USDA’s stated rationale. It notes that moving ERS out of the capital region, which is a hub for statistical researchers, agricultural policy groups and federal agencies, will actually make the agency less connected to its stakeholders and national discussions of agriculture. The relocation would also remove ERS from the broader scientific funding research community, said Steve Pierson, director of science policy at the ASA.

The Trump administration’s 2019 budget proposal, released last February, called for slashing the ERS workforce by more than 40 percent and cutting the budget nearly in half, to $45 million. Congress balked and restored funding in their spending bill1 in May, but the administration’s proposal says a lot about their objectives, Offutt said. Some former ERS officials I spoke with suspected the proposed changes to the agency could be an alternative way to shrink the agency. While the USDA says “no employees will be involuntarily separated,” multiple sources told FiveThirtyEight that since the proposal was announced, the agency has experienced a “brain drain” as workers seek other positions in Washington in anticipation of their jobs being moved to another part of the country. USDA solicited “expressions of interest” for hosting ERS as well as the USDA’s research funding arm, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and says it has received 136 of them.

Meanwhile, a blue ribbon panel of 37 current and former university agricultural administration leaders and former USDA chief scientists wrote to members of Congress saying that relocating the ERS “will set back the agency for 5-10 years and undermine its independence as a federal statistical agency” and urged Congress to intervene to halt the restructuring and relocation plans “at least until there has been a comprehensive independent study and full consultation with the stakeholder community.” The American Statistical Association and the Agriculture and Applied Economics Association also wrote letters opposing the plan.

With Democrats now in control of the House, these groups may yet get their wish. Last month, Reps. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., and Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, introduced the “Agriculture Research Integrity Act,” which would block the proposed changes. Meanwhile, the USDA Office of Inspector General is reviewing the USDA plan at the request of Hoyer and other Democrats.

[dipulb3]

Software mogul John McAfee charged with cryptocurrency fraud

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/software-mogul-john-mcafee-charged-with-cryptocurrency-fraud-2/

Software mogul John McAfee charged with cryptocurrency fraud

NEW YORK (UPI) — Federal prosecutors have charged antivirus software mogul John McAfee and an adviser with conspiracy to commit fraud, among other crimes, in a scheme involving cryptocurrency investments, authorities said Friday.

The founder of the McAfee antivirus software company and associate Jimmy Gale Watson have been charged with conspiracy to commit securities fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy.

Officials said the charges relate to two plots to fraudulently promote cryptocurrencies qualifying under federal law as commodities or securities.

Authorities said agents arrested McAfee in Spain and Watson in Texas. Their arrests were announced Friday after indictments were unsealed in U.S. District Court in New York.

“As alleged, McAfee and Watson exploited a widely used social media platform and enthusiasm among investors in the emerging cryptocurrency market to make millions through lies and deception,” U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement.

“The defendants allegedly used McAfee’s Twitter account to publish messages to hundreds of thousands of his Twitter followers touting various cryptocurrencies through false and misleading statements to conceal their true, self-interested motives.”

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission also filed a complaint in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York charging both men for a scheme it says involved numerous digital assets, including Verge, Dogecoin, and Reddcoin.

McAfee, Watson, and other members of McAfee’s cryptocurrency team are accused of taking in more than $13 million from investors in the fraudulent schemes.

“Manipulative and fraudulent schemes, like that alleged in this case, undermine the integrity and development of digital assets and cheat innocent people out of their hard-earned money,” CFTC Acting Director of Enforcement Vincent McGonagle said in a statement.

“Financial innovation is constantly breaking new ground, and [our] enforcement efforts must keep up. We will always act to hold fraudsters and manipulators accountable for misconduct.”

Reporting by Clyde Hughes

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[godsavetheq]

1-30 c;

*GALE FORCE SIGH COMES IN FROM CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA*

1: Do you try to stay away from walkthroughs?

Yes. I want to win through my own merit. But I need that old ass game guide magazine for Perfect Dark because I want to unlock all the things and beat all the things (Perfect Dark will be a recurring theme from start to finish so buckle up)

2: Company you're always loyal to?

For consoles, Sony for the most part. XBox is the devil. But I do most of my gaming on PC these days. 

For games, the Creative Assembly (which makes the Total War series of grand military strategy games). Although my loyalty is being tested because their cranking out fantasy Warhammer: Total War games like hotcakes now, presumably because their SEGA corporate overlords like the money they’re making off them. Though apparently they have a separate team that’s pretty far into developing the next historical Total War game so I’ll come back around when that comes out, probably.

3: Best game you've ever played?

What a hard question. You know I have 111 games in my Steam library? We’ll say 100 because some of those are like expansions of other games or test servers of WIP games. So 100 games just on PC, plus god knows how many PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, N64, GameCube, and Wii games I’ve played. It comes to a point where I can’t objectively single out one game from all of my favorites, so I’ll take “best” as meaning like highest production quality and best execution of the game, and I’ll hand it to Resident Evil 7. So professional, so fun... so Shoney’s.

4: Worst game you've ever played?

Shower With Your Dad Simulator 2015. Yes that’s a real game, it costs like $1 and someone bought it for me on Steam and it is the simplest, stupidest game that it probably belonged on a free online game site to justify its existence in some way.

5: A popular series/game you just can't get into no matter how much you try?

Well there’s a lot of popular games that I can’t get into, but that’s partially because I’ve internalized that I hate them without having given them much of a chance (looking at you, Dota, League of Legends, Overwatch (Or as we in the trade call it, “$40 Team Fortress 2″))

But now that I think of it, World of Warcraft. I got my free trial and played it some with Perry & Good Old Boys™ from Steam, but I just did not enjoy myself. I also had a prejudice against this one before I played it but at least I tried it and confirmed that I didn’t like it.

6: A game that's changed you the most?

Fallout series I guess. Kind of got me into post-apocalyptic stuff, RPGs and the like. Kind of opened the door for fantasy for me somewhat. I generally don’t like fantasy and I like to make the distinction between sci-fi and fantasy to justify my liking Fallout but truthfully half of the shit in Fallout is too over-the-top to qualify as like realistic fiction. Still haven’t played Skyrim because it’s too fantasy, but I’d at least consider it because it’s not all that different from Fallout if I’m willing to excuse the magic and shit.

7: A game you'll never forget?

Surgeon Simulator. What a titan of ridiculously clunky medical malpractice. 

The Stanley Parable because that game messes with you and is comedy gold

POSTAL 2 because rarely does a game execute low-quality production and lack of taking itself seriously so beautifully 

Hotline Miami because it fucks with you even worse than the Stanley Parable. I mean seriously, what a rollercoaster ride of mental fuckery. Am I a good guy? Am I a bad guy? All I know for sure is I’m killing a copious amount of Russian mobsters while masked figures in my head whisper nonsense at me and everywhere I go I see my dead best friend and........

Rollercoaster Tycoon (the old one for like Windows 98) because muh childhood

Destroy All Humans! 2 because they just don’t make any alien games that compare to it. Also muh childhood.

KHOLAT because it’s like a clinic in how to do horror right. And it came out at a time when it was a sad time to be a horror fan because Resident Evil was all “hurr durr our games need to be like Call of Duty” and there were no new Silent Hill, Outlast, or Slender games coming out. Of course eventually Resident Evil got good again, Outlast 2 came out, Silent Hills was SUPPOSED to come out (RIP)

Kerbal Space Program. I held out on this one for so long because I was turned off by the little green alien people and I figured it wasn’t serious. But holy fuck it’s actually like the best simulation of running a space program and designing rockets and shit oh my god like they train Astronauts with that game no lie.

8: Best soundtrack?

Slender: The Arrival. Honorable mentions go to Hotline Miami and Supreme Ruler: Cold War

9: A game you turn your volume off every time you play it?

None

10: A game you've completely given up on?

Five Nights at Freddy’s, like, all of them. I can’t beat all of the levels in any of them. I beat the five nights in the original FNaF but not the edgy sixth night. Didn’t even get that far in the second or third. Kinda lost track of which is which too...

11: Hardest game you've played?

Fucking Perfect Dark. I’ve been playing that game effectively for my entire conscious life and only just this summer have I begun to win A FEW levels on Perfect Agent difficulty. For context, I beat the entire game on Special Agent difficulty years ago, but at the time, I could not even beat the first level on Perfect Agent. 

12: Shortest time you've beaten a game in?

When I got GTA V for Christmas several years ago I did almost nothing but play it all day every day and beat it in a few days.

13: A game you were the most excited for when it wasn't released yet?

Probably Total War: Rome II. Honorable mentions go to Saurian, Resident Evil 7, Silent Hills (RIP)

14: A game you think would be cool if it had voice acting?

I dunno, I feel like most games that SHOULD have voice acting DO have voice acting. Nothing comes to mind.

15: Which two games do you think would make an awesome crossover?

I got nothing.

16: Character you've hated most? From what game?

I have to do it. Ashley from Resident Evil 4. I don’t care if you are the President’s daughter, you are useless and annoying.

17: What game do you never tell people you play?

I mean, games that I don’t like I guess.

18: A game you wish your friends knew about?

I got nothing, my friends know about most such things.

19: Which game do you think deserves a revival?

Spore, 100%. Nobody before or since has saw to completion a game where you literally design your own organism from a microscopic sea creature, evolving onto land, gaining sentience, building a civilization, uniting your planet and pushing out into space to build a space empire. It deserves to be remade, and done right this time.

20: What was the first video game you ever played?

The first REAL video game was GTA 3, but I may have played something stupid before that.

21: How old were you when you first played a video game?

I dunno, young.

22: If you could immerse yourself in any game for one day, which game would it be? What would you do?

Kerbal Space Program. I’d finally make that manned mission to Duna (Mars), baby. It has eluded me for so long, and to see it with my own eyes... 10/10

23: Biggest disappointment you've had in gaming?

Rome Total War - Alexander expansion. It seemed like such a simple thing. Make an expansion for Rome Total War about Alexander’s Empire. It was the most pitiful thing I’d ever seen. I mean, I know the original Rome Total War is old as dirt, but the base game and the Barbarian Invasions expansion were pretty good.

24: Casual, Hardcore, or in the middle?

In the middle. I tryhard sometimes and just fuck around other times.

25: Be honest; have you ever used cheats (like ActionReplay or Gameshark)?

I mean... do the cheats in GTA 3 count that spawn a bunch of guns and tanks for you? I didn’t use them to beat the game, I just wanted to fuck around because that’s the best way to play GTA 3 :P

26: Handheld or console?

Given those choices, console. Never was too into handhelds after Gameboy Advance. I had a DS Lite and was into Scribblenauts on that for a while, but since then, nah.

27: Has there ever been a moment that has made you cry?

Don’t think so, but it hit me in the feels when John Marston got killed by the crooked wild west cops in Red Dead Redemption.

28: Which character's clothes do you wish you owned the most?

The only thing that comes to mind is Trent Easton from Perfect Dark because he has like a fucking red velvet suit and it’s so ridiculous like he’s the head of the NSA you’d think he’d wear a black suit but no, bright red. I’ll take 20.

29: Which is more important, gameplay or story?

Don’t make me choose. Depends on the game I guess. I like Perfect Dark despite the fact that its storyline is an incoherent mess. Try to follow along.

It involves a plot between Cassandra de Vries, owner of a shady arms manufacturing corporation with private paramilitaries on the march in every corner of their corporate HQ as well as all over the city streets (I, too, voted for Trump so that he could legalize corporate-owned private armies) that also has a massive underground research lab hidden inconspicuously under the city of Chicago; Trent Easton, the fashionable Director of the National Security Agency, whose goons start shooting up Air Force One in a plot to kidnap and clone the President of the United States, and a mysterious tall blonde man known only as Mr. Blonde who wears evil clothes and, unbeknownst to the other two conspirators, is a massive alien dinosaur thing that sounds like a jaguar in disguise who eventually kills both of them once they’re no longer useful. But don’t worry! The plot to give the dinosaur aliens a super-weapon fails when some guy sends his on-staff professional mass-murderer to go kill endless corporate militias and NSA agents to get to the bottom of it with the help of a flying laptop that has developed a moral code and a different race of aliens who look much less impressive. Or something. So that game makes a compelling case against storyline, but in other cases it’s not so XP

30: A game that hasn't been localized in your country that you think should be localized?

Everything that I care about is localized to the US.

[newssplashy]

Opinion: It's like paradise (if you can overlook a few things)

Gary Gerth, 74, the recently elected town supervisor of Shelter Island, described this sylvan knob of land tucked in the crook of the East End of Long Island as “an emerald jewel set in the bracelet of turquoise waters.”

Gary Gerth, 74, the recently elected town supervisor of Shelter Island, described this sylvan knob of land tucked in the crook of the East End of Long Island as “an emerald jewel set in the bracelet of turquoise waters.”

“It’s not for everyone,” he added.

Georgiana Ketcham, 82, discovered Shelter Island more than 50 years ago, after her husband inherited a boat and the couple combed the Long Island coast between Amityville and Montauk, looking for a place for a summer home. Ten years later, they moved there permanently.

“I’m the oldest living real estate broker on Shelter Island,” Ketcham said. So she knows what she is talking about when she tells you it “isn’t for everybody.”

Shelter Island is a qualified paradise because of challenges that are the flip side of its charms. The 4-by-5 mile chunk of Suffolk County, shaped like a disastrous experiment in pancake making, is reached somewhat inconveniently by ferry, but residents say their cares drift away as they cross the waters from the North or South Fork. The island has clams, osprey and golden forsythia foaming like Champagne in the spring, but lacks a hospital, a movie theater and home mail delivery. Police mostly deal with small stuff like returning lost wallets or field calls about felled power lines, but if you are caught speeding, your name will be in the local newspaper.

“My mother can’t wrap her head around the fact that there’s no shopping,” said Annemarie Norris, 41, who in 2015 bought a four-bedroom house with her husband, Benedict, for $775,000 in the Silver Beach neighborhood.

Which is to say, Shelter Island has a pharmacy, a bookstore, two hardware stores and a grocery store but nothing remotely resembling a mall. “We sit around the firepit,” Annemarie Norris said. “Or we sit on the back porch. Or we walk around the corner. Or we sit on the beach.”

With a population of 2,400 that explodes to five times that number in the summer, the island has two kinds of residents.

The Norrises are part-timers. They live in a two-bedroom Brooklyn co-op with their two young sons and spend weekends in their brick-and-shingle house on Brander Parkway. They even enjoy coming out in winter, when the island is low-key and windswept, and only a few restaurants are open. (A favorite, the Tavern at the Shelter Island House hotel, has recently changed hands and is turning Italian; it reopens as Caci this month.)

By contrast, John Kaasik, 62, grew up on Shelter Island and returned after spending much of his 20s in Europe.

“I stayed here against the better wishes of my wallet,” he said, referring to the island’s narrow, service-oriented economy, which encourages multitasking. He and his wife, Anu, own the Azalea House bed-and-breakfast and the Go’fors taxi company and stage the annual high school musical. John Kaasik is also a playwright.

The permanent population, with its many retirees, is its own clan, residents say. Shelter Island’s churches, school, library and fire department are all volunteer strongholds that keep people active throughout the seasons and raise the quality of services.

But the twain do meet at the island’s golf courses, tennis courts, sailing school and beaches. And at Sylvester Manor, a plantation that was run with slave labor into the 19th century and is now an organic farm with cultural events and educational programs; at the farmers’ market on the grounds of the historical society, which is being expanded; and at concerts at the Perlman Music Program, a summer institute for young string players founded by Toby Perlman, the wife of Itzhak Perlman (he leads the faculty).

And there are clashes. As Shelter Island attracts wealthy buyers sidestepping the snoot and traffic of the Hamptons, prices are rising and the character is changing.

“I wouldn’t want it to feel like some sort of gated community in a retirement village in Florida,” John Kaasik said. “I can’t say it’s the case now, but it’s trending toward that.”

In August, six residents filed a lawsuit to reverse a rule forbidding short-term rentals. Although the law was enacted to reduce disruptions caused by raucous visitors, the plaintiffs argue that renting gives vital income to homeowners who need help paying mortgages or taxes.

Gerth, the town supervisor, is on their side. Renting for any length of time, he said, brings in tourists, and tourists are often converted into residents. Besides, he added, “Renting is a tradition here.”

What You’ll Find

Shelter Island has a variety of topographies and housing styles and one great common theme: water. There are four marinas, as many public beaches and an assortment of ponds, bays and creeks.

The Mashomack Preserve, more than 2,000 acres of protected oak and beech forests, meadows, salt marshes and pine swamps, takes up a third of the island. The habitable remainder contains neighborhoods with different aqueous bodies and wealth indexes.

Shelter Island Heights, for instance, the neighborhood near the North Ferry terminal, has frilly Victorians sunning themselves on hillsides overlooking the harbor and yacht club. These houses are kept close to the bosoms of multigenerational families and come on the market only once in a while. The cluster of nearby businesses includes Stars Café on Grand Avenue and Marie Eiffel’s organic market on North Ferry Road.

Another attraction is the Chequit on Grand Avenue. Built in 1872 as a Methodist retreat, the 37-room hotel was recently renovated and is for sale with its restaurant for $9 million.

Dering Harbor, to the east, has the distinction of being an autonomous village with the smallest population in New York state (11, according to the 2010 census). This status gives the village its own mayor, water supply and an architectural review board that has been criticized for being arbitrary, if not spiteful.

Hay Beach, to the north, is a 1960s subdivision with minimum 1-acre lots. Little Ram Island and Ram Island are narrow spits connected by causeways to the east, where almost all of the houses are on the water or have ocean access or views. Silver Beach, to the southwest, is a former postwar summer community on a peninsula where modest homes are routinely replaced with fancier ones. Nostrand Parkway and Westmoreland Farm are both elite enclaves to the west.

The center of the island is where Ketcham lives on 2 acres, near Gary Paul Gates, journalist and author, and Eric Demarchelier, the restaurateur and artist (and the brother of fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier). “If Shelter Island were a target and you threw darts at it, my house would be in the bull’s-eye,” she said.

Asked whether the island has changed in the 40 years he has known it, Demarchelier, who owns an 1860s clapboard house on a former lima bean farm, said, “Not much. The houses have gotten a little bigger, but there are still no traffic lights and no traffic jams.”

What You’ll Pay

Deborah Von Brook-Binder, who sells real estate for Daniel Gale Sotheby’s on Shelter Island, said the market for the first quarter of this year was slower than last year. The new laws affecting property taxes and mortgage interest rate deductions might be discouraging buyers, she added. “Also, the weather hasn’t been that great.”

According to the real estate website Trulia, the median sales price of Shelter Island homes as of March 18 was $837,500, a year-on-year increase of 5.3 percent based on 116 transactions.

Twenty-three properties were offered on the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island’s website as of May 14. They included a two-bedroom ranch house on 2.2 acres, at 57 North Midway Road, listed at $699,000, and a shingled Colonial-style home with six bedrooms and 600 feet of private beach, at 29 Winthrop Road, listed for $6.9 million.

The Vibe

Shelter Island is “chill,” to use Annemarie Norris’ expression. On their first visit, she and her husband had paused during a cycling excursion when a child approached them. “He was maybe 10,” Norris recalled. “Maybe younger. He said, ‘Do you need help getting anywhere?'”

It wasn’t just that the boy was polite; he was totally unsupervised. She thought, “That’s what I want for my children.”

Kindnesses, small and large, are typical of the islanders, John Kaasik said. After his daughter received a diagnosis of Hodgkin lymphoma, he received concerned messages from community members he barely knew.

“I’ve seen it happen over and over again,” he said. “It’s the perfect example of how things should be.”

The Schools

Christine Finn, who became superintendent of the Shelter Island Union Free School District in the fall, said the district has been reversing the greater Long Island trend of declining enrollments and is showing an uptick. “We’re going to keep the trend going by offering more electives and AP classes,” she said.

Ketcham pointed out that the district just passed an $11.7 million budget, and divided among the 222 students in prekindergarten through 12th grade, that comes to more than $52,700 per student. “Come on, you can send a kid to Choate for that!” she said.

Among the elementary school students who took the 2017 state tests, 51 percent met standards in English versus 42 percent statewide; 54 percent met standards in math versus 46 percent statewide.

Among the middle school students, 48 percent met standards in English versus 40 percent statewide; 26 percent met standards in math versus 39 percent statewide.

The average SAT scores for high school juniors and seniors who took the test in the fall of 2016 were 609 for reading and writing and 557 for math, versus 528 and 523 statewide.

The Commute

Shelter Island is about 2 1/2 hours east of New York City. The North Ferry departs for Greenport, New York, on the North Fork every 10 to 20 minutes. The ride takes eight minutes and costs $16 round trip for a car and driver making a same-day return. The South Ferry departs for North Haven, New York, in the Hamptons every 10 to 15 minutes. The crossing takes four minutes and costs $19 round trip.

The History

In June of 1947, a conference about theoretical physics took place at the Ram’s Head Inn on Shelter Island. Twenty-four of the world’s leading scientists — including Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, John von Neumann and Richard Feynman — gathered to discuss the foundations of quantum mechanics. On the way to what is now known as the Shelter Island Conference, the men were given celebrity-style police escorts, tributes to the work many of them had done on the atomic bomb.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

JULIE LASKY © 2018 The New York Times

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/05/opinion-its-like-paradise-if-you-can.html

[swifty-fox]

Writing ask! 5, 14, and 21!

5. a description I'm proud of

from a book WIP of mine. Dom is why i fell so hard for Gale they're very similar lol

Dom hesitates a moment, then scoffs to himself, shrugging his jacket off and tugging his shirt off over his head. Instantly his skin goosepimples and he rests an uneasy hand on his bicep. Marks of a hard life were on his body. Not the excessive violence of movies and books; not the sort of thing that would garner stares, but Dom knew what the scars were from. Which were innocent human fuck-ups and which were inflicted by an angry parent with too much to drink and too little regard for kindness. His hurts didn’t have to leave marks on his skin to linger; a cigarette burn here, the stinging edge of a belt there, it was all headed by dark scriptwork, shocking against the pale skin and freckles of his shoulders.

Hands Off.  No more than the length between the tip of his thumb and the base of his pinky, black ink turned blue and fuzzy with age and lack of care. 

15. that was out of my comfort zone

I don't like casual dialogue very much so

“Why unicorns?”

The question is sudden and random enough that it startles Bucky, he can tell by the way the other man blinks rapidly.

“Huh?”

“Why are unicorns your favorite extinct animal?”

John laughs, his face creasing in a sunny smile, the type of grin he was known for. All encompassing and enough to light up any room. Enough to light up the entire night sky. If they ever figured out how to capture and bottle a John Egan smile they would make millions. 

“What’s not to like about ‘em? They’re horses which are already a noble animal as is, add a giant stabbing horn on top and you’ve got one badass beast. ‘Sides they represent all things good and pure. That’s pretty neat.”

“What on earth do you know about purity John Clarence Egan?”

21. that i liked but had to cut

I don't really work on drafts so I dont tend to cut but uhhh i've got this?? It probably wont make it into Dom's story

“I think I’m fucking my life up.” Dom hugs his knee closer to his chest. 

Arnie glances over his shoulder at him, hand poised in the dirt where he was subtly tracing Dom’s profile in the dirt. Dom pretended not to notice, Arnie pretended he wasn’t aware of Dom noticing. The arrangement suited them both. 

“You’re twenty-six.” Arnie snorts. The scratching in the dirt resumes, a mechanical inhale as he takes a hit of his vape, releasing a cloud of peach-scented vapor into the oncoming sunset. The sacred heart on his right shoulder flexes with his drawing, bared by the sleeveless Fine Ink t-shirt he wore.

Dom makes a disdainful face “You’re twenty-seven.” 

“Yeah,” Arnie loftily waves his twig for emphasis, “And in my whole extra year of experience qualifies me to tell you that you’re in no way fucking your life up this young.” 

A heavy breeze lifts the hair from Dom’s forehead, catches around the neck of his hoodie and tickles the exposed skin on his ankles. He scowls into it “You’re so full of shit.” 

“And you’re a grouch.” Arnie leans back, the knobs of his spine pressing warmly into Dom’s ribs. The tumble of rocks they were sat on reversed their heights, the top of Arnie’s blue curls only reaching to Dom’s shoulder. “Tell me what you think you’re doing so wrong that the next sixty years are a total wash.” 

“Sixty years is generous,” Dom presses his lips against a smile as the other man elbows his thigh. He sighs and shrugs, ashing his cigarette on the rock and tucking the half-used butt into his pocket for later. “I don’t know. I’m spending my life working in a shithole bar, chasing after a brother who doesn’t want me in his life and dodging phone calls from a father who thinks I’m as unstable as the chick from Sharp Objects.”

“I saw that show.” Arnie says idly.

“I read the book.” Dom shrugs again, heavier this time. “I dunno, fuck, I have no aspirations, no goals, no trajectory, I’m just clinging to the idea that I can be this fucking savior to the most stubborn sixteen-year-old to grace this good green earth.” 

“You know,” Arnie says casually, “sometimes I can really tell your mom was from the bible belt.” Dom elbows the back of his head gently. He laughs, tongue between his teeth and loudly enough to echo around the copse of trees they were taking their refuge under. 

“You have friends, a partner, a job, some pretty fun hobbies and you’ve got a goal, even if it is a tough one. Don’t you think that’s enough?” Arnie asks after a beat of silence.

[dipulb3]

Software mogul John McAfee charged with cryptocurrency fraud

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/software-mogul-john-mcafee-charged-with-cryptocurrency-fraud/

Software mogul John McAfee charged with cryptocurrency fraud

NEW YORK (UPI) — Federal prosecutors have charged antivirus software mogul John McAfee and an adviser with conspiracy to commit fraud, among other crimes, in a scheme involving cryptocurrency investments, authorities said Friday.

The founder of the McAfee antivirus software company and associate Jimmy Gale Watson have been charged with conspiracy to commit securities fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy.

Officials said the charges relate to two plots to fraudulently promote cryptocurrencies qualifying under federal law as commodities or securities.

Authorities said agents arrested McAfee in Spain and Watson in Texas. Their arrests were announced Friday after indictments were unsealed in U.S. District Court in New York.

“As alleged, McAfee and Watson exploited a widely used social media platform and enthusiasm among investors in the emerging cryptocurrency market to make millions through lies and deception,” U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement.

“The defendants allegedly used McAfee’s Twitter account to publish messages to hundreds of thousands of his Twitter followers touting various cryptocurrencies through false and misleading statements to conceal their true, self-interested motives.”

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission also filed a complaint in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York charging both men for a scheme it says involved numerous digital assets, including Verge, Dogecoin, and Reddcoin.

McAfee, Watson, and other members of McAfee’s cryptocurrency team are accused of taking in more than $13 million from investors in the fraudulent schemes.

“Manipulative and fraudulent schemes, like that alleged in this case, undermine the integrity and development of digital assets and cheat innocent people out of their hard-earned money,” CFTC Acting Director of Enforcement Vincent McGonagle said in a statement.

“Financial innovation is constantly breaking new ground, and [our] enforcement efforts must keep up. We will always act to hold fraudsters and manipulators accountable for misconduct.”

Reporting by Clyde Hughes

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