#florian’s the only roman of the group but it still works

[arrows-unofficial-ocs]

𝕺𝕮 𝕳𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖔𝖜𝖊𝖊𝖓 𝕮𝖍𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖊𝖓𝖌𝖊 •  𝔇𝔞𝔶 6: ℜ𝔬𝔩𝔢 𝔖𝔴𝔞𝔭 𝔄𝔘

⤷ Give your oc a role in their story that is different than the one they already have. Whether this is making a hero a villain or vice versa, your victim a survivor or vice versa, or anything else you can think of.

In which the prophecy of seven refers to Eloise Kittredge, Landon McCallister, Val Flores, Harmony Reyes, Florian Mostyn, Arlo Stanhope and Ivy Gao.

[dark-and-twisty-01]

Charles Cullen - Angels of Death

The usual cliche about serial killers is how normal they always seemed before their ghastly secrets were uncovered. Not so Charles Cullen. Few people could have appeared more out of step with their surroundings. Cullen worked for 16 years at hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, during which he admitted to killing as many as 40 patients, but that could just be the tip of the iceberg. Police suspect he could have given drug overdoses to as many as 400 elderly patients, which would make him the worst serial killer ever in North America, but due to lack of evidence this figure way never be confirmed.

Danger Signs

Charles Cullen was a shy and unhappy child. The youngest of eight children, he was born in West Orange, New Jersey on 22nd February 1960. His father, a bus driver, died when he was only seven months old and two of his siblings passed away while he was still young.

The danger signs were from an early age. When he was 9, Cullen tried to take his own life by swallowing the contents of a chemistry set. Later he told the police he had tried to commit suicide on at least 20 separate occasions (though it would only have taken one attempt had he shown the same shabby expertise he used to dispatch his mainly aged victims).

in 5th grade, he revealed the depth of his adolescent angst with an unpublished book called ‘Infinity Years Will Never Know and Punishment’ about growing up in a world devoid of meaning, and he began compulsively reading and re-reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment which details the mental torment of a student who commits murder.

At the age of 17, he suffered a crushing blow when his mother was killed in a car crash. Cullen’s behaviour became increasingly off-kilter. Bullied at school, he went to a party where he laced his tormentors’ drinks with rat poison. It was a practice run for what was to follow.

Dropping out of high school, Cullen joined the US Navy in April 1978, enlisting as a ballistic missiles technician. He came through the stringent psychological test for submariners with flying colours and was assigned to a Poseidon missiles unit board the nuclear submarine U.S.S Woodrow Wilson. Here he was christened with the nickname ‘Fish-belly white’ due to deathly pallor of his complexion. His bunkmate, Marlin Emswiler, acknowledged Cullen had no friends. ‘Charlie hung out with Charlie. Kept saying he wanted to become a nurse because he liked helping people.’

One day, Cullen was discovered by crew members at the missile control panel of the nuclear submarine, wearing a green surgical gown, surgical mask and latex gloves pilfered from the ship’s medical cabinet. He was transferred to the U.S.S Canopus, and discharged from the Navy in March 1984 after yet another suicide attempt.

One-Word Answers

He was now free to follow his morbid medical bent. He gained a degree from the Mountainside School of Nursing, Montclair, NJ which he left in 1987. He married his wife, Adrienne , in that year and began his first nursing job at the St Barnabus Medical Center, Livingston, NJ.

A colleague recalled his inability to deal with normal social situations. ‘You’d ask him, “Are you married” or something like that, and get one-word answers.’ In 1988 he killed for the first time. His victim was 72-year-old judge John Yengo, who was injected with a drug called Lidocaine. The death recorded in newspapers of the time being ‘a case of Seven-Johnson syndrome’, a rare allergic reaction. In 1992, Cullen was fired, probably for randomly contaminating bags of intravenous fluid with insulin, No one seems quite to be sure.

Due to the shortage of nurses and the fact that, for legal reasons, honest work appraisals were seldom passed on between medical companies, Cullen never had trouble finding work. Over the next 11 years, he had nine separate jobs. Like many ‘angels of mercy’, he discovered a taste for working ‘graveyard shifts’ on cardiac and intensive-care wards where he was left without supervision and where people died all the time. The atmosphere of trust in hospitals allowed him plenty of leeway.

in 1993 his wife Adrienne, from who he was now estranged, filed for a restraining order against him: she claimed he had spiked drinks with lighter fluid, left his daughters at a babysitter’s for a week and shown cruelty towards their two Yorkshire terriers, zipping one up in a bowling bag. His debts mounted steadily as he took to drink and his life fell apart.

Bizarre Behaviour

Psychologists say Cullen killed to relieve stress and this does seem to borne out by the facts. Accused of domestic violence, he murdered three elderly women by giving them overdoses of the heart medication digoxin. Faced with a lie detector test to show he had not neglected his children or abused alcohol in their presence, he killed 85-year-old Mary Natoli.

After a social worker recommended all visits to his children be supervised, he killed Helen Dean, 91, who was recovering from surgery for colon cancer. Her son Larry recalled a thin male nurse entering the room and telling him to leave. When Larry returned, his mother said, ‘he struck me,’ and showed him an injection mark on her thigh. Next day she grew ill and died.

Cullen’s behaviour grew more bizarre. Neighbours talked about him chasing cats down the street dead of night, muttering to himself and making faces. He harassed and stalked a fellow nurse when she turned down his offer of engagement after just one date. In every hospital where he worked Cullen aroused suspicions He was fired from one for stealing vials of medicine. At St Luke’s Hospital, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a group of nurses reported their suspicions that Cullen had been using drugs to kill patients. The case was dropped.

At Somerset Medical Center, NJ, computer records showed Cullen was accessing the records of patients he was not assigned to as well as requesting medications that patients had not been prescribed. When Jin Kyung Han, a 40-year-old cancer patient, went into cardiac arrest, doctors were surprised to find high levels of digoxin in her system despite the fact they had taken her off the drug.

Cullen was fired from Somerset on 31st October 2003 for falsifying his job application,, but remained under surveillance. On 12th December he was arrested and charged with the murder of Father Florian Gall, a 68-year-old Roman Catholic priest who died from a digoxin overdose, as well as the attempted murder of Han. The floodgates opened and Cullen confessed to a catalogue of murderers, but not all of them. He blocked most of the fatalities from memory... or so he said.

On 2nd March 2006 Cullen was sentenced to 11 consecutive life sentences for the number of 22 and the attempted murder of three persons in New Jersey; this will make him eligible for parole after 397 years in jail.

[fictionadventurer]

Father Brown Reread: The Flying Stars

“The most beautiful crime I ever committed,” Flambeau would say in his highly moral old age, “was also, by a singular coincidence, my last.

This flips the regular detective story in multiple ways. The focus is on the criminal, rather than the detective. We’re trying to find out why he repented, rather than how he got brought to justice.

In one sentence, we see Flambeau showing some shocking character development. Not only does he stop committing crimes--he becomes “highly moral.”

Once again, if we know what Flambeau was like in his old age, when are the Father Brown stories supposed to take place? Given that Chesterton later mentions some “old Victorian chandeliers���, and that he often discusses “modern” political and philosophical fads, I think he’s engaging in a bit of literary time travel, where the stories take place in the “present day” but give us glimpses of the characters’ futures. (Sayers sometimes does something similar in the Peter Wimsey stories).

This is a strong contender for my favorite Father Brown story. I’ve read it at least six times. (It’s been a Boxing Day tradition for a few years. I’m listening to Christmas music right now to get me in the spirit.) As such, I may have a lot to say. I’ll try to restrain myself.

It was committed at Christmas. As an artist I had always attempted to provide crimes suitable to the special season or landscapes in which I found myself, choosing this or that terrace or garden for a catastrophe, as if for a statuary group.

Flambeau, here’s a hint: most criminals don’t care about the aesthetics of their crimes. You’re not a thief. You’re an artist. Your trouble is that you create your works of art using other people and their possessions.

Did Flambeau ever really need the money? Or was he just carried away by the romantic idea of being a trickster and creating those types of tales in real life? Brown’s speech at the end suggests he used the latter to justify the former. (“I’m not a criminal. I’m an artist.”)

I really think my imitation of Dickens’ style was dextrous and literary. It seems almost a pity I repented the same evening.

So Old Flambeau has repented of his crimes in a moral sense, but he still appreciates them on artistic terms. He’s reformed, but he hasn’t lost that flair for the overdramatic, or that arrogant self-confidence.

I’m suddenly struck by the desire to see Flambeau meet Lord Peter Wimsey. They’d be two obnoxiously self-confident artistic snobs who’d end up getting drunk on the good wine and doing ridiculous acrobatics to break into someone’s house.

Flambeau would then proceed to tell the story from the inside; and even from the inside it was odd. Seen from the outside it was perfectly incomprehensible, and it is from the outside that the stranger must study it.

Why does the stranger have to study it from the outside? We heard the first part of the story from Flambeau. I want the rest of Flambeau’s version!

Not that I dislike this version, of course. It’s too much fun to wish for any change, and we do need to keep some aspect of the mystery intact.

Here she gave an exclamation of wonder, real or ritual, and looking up at the high garden wall above her, beheld it fantastically bestridden by a somewhat fantastic figure. “Oh, don’t jump, Mr. Crook,” she called out in some alarm; “it’s much too high.”

I believe my first suspicion was that this person was Flambeau--he would do just that sort of acrobatic nonsense. The suspicion’s quickly squashed, but it’s a nice little misdirect.

It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that Chesterton was trying to mislead us by naming one of the suspects “Crook”.

This is also a parallel to Father Brown’s conversation with Flambeau at the end of the story.

“I think I was meant to be a burglar,” he said placidly, “and I have no doubt I should have been if I hadn’t happened to be born in that nice house next door. I can’t see any harm in it, anyhow.”

Even if Mr. Crook’s not literally Flambeau, he’s certainly a symbolic parallel. This is the sort of philosophy that Flambeau uses to justify his crimes. Perhaps Flambeau was a bit like this before he became a thief--which makes it more meaningful that he reforms at the end of this story.

With him also was the more insignificant figure of the priest from the neighbouring Roman Church; for the colonel’s late wife had been a Catholic, and the children, as is common in such cases, had been trained to follow her. Everything seemed undistinguished about the priest, even down to his name, which was Brown; yet the colonel had always found something companionable about him, and frequently asked him to such family gatherings.

I can only imagine Flambeau’s dismay at discovering this priest showing up yet again. (I doubt that he knew about this family habit beforehand). After making such elaborate preparations for the heist, he couldn’t just abandon it on the fear that Brown would recognize him.

Did this make it more fun--a chance to finally pull one over on the priest? Or did it make it more awkward--the guy did convince him to repent last time, after all.

“I’ll put ‘em back now, my dear,” said Fischer, returning the case to the tails of his coat. “I had to be careful of ‘em coming down. They’re the three great African diamonds called ‘The Flying Stars,’ because they’ve been stolen so often. All the big criminals are on the track; but even the rough men about in the streets and hotels could hardly have kept their hands off them.

What made you think these would be a good present for your goddaughter? Just what every girl wants--three diamonds that’ll draw every big-name criminal to her house.

Also, why put them back in the tailcoat? I imagine the house has a safe, if he thought they could keep the present. Unless they plan to put them in a bank later?

... What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?” “A saint,” said Father Brown. “I think,” said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, “that Ruby means a Socialist.”[...] “A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it.” “But who won’t allow you,” put in the priest in a low voice, “to own your own soot.”

I’ve always loved this bit. Father Brown shows that religion doesn’t necessarily line up with any political fashions.

The major philosophical tension in this story is the question of property--who has it, who deserves or doesn’t deserve it, how we should distribute it. Crook supports redistributing property and attacking policemen in theoretical terms. Flambeau takes the initiative to do so in practical terms.

"Why couldn’t we have a proper old English pantomime--clown, columbine, and so on.

As in “The Blue Cross”, Flambeau’s artistry is his downfall. He could have stolen the jewels by sleight-of-hand at any moment and been gone long before the policeman arrived. Instead, he decides that a much better plan is to throw together a pantomime.

But no matter how insane the plan is, I have to respect how well he pulls it off. He gets the whole household in on the plan in a matter of minutes, and no one thinks to question him about this “actor friend”. 

I adore this whole section. The wild energy of their slap-dash little play is infectious, and very Christmassy.

The harlequin, already clad in silver paper out of cigar boxes, was, with difficulty, prevented from smashing the old Victorian lustre chandeliers, that he might cover himself with resplendent crystals. In fact he would have done so, had not Ruby unearthed some old pantomime paste jewels she had worn at a fancy dress party as the Queen of Diamonds.

I know Flambeau would have adored smashing that chandelier (and I love the image of him trying to do it) but he really lucked out that Ruby had some paste jewels. If he’d smashed those chandeliers, I doubt her father would have been in a mood to let the pantomime go on.

He was supposed to be the clown, but he was really almost everything else, the author (so far as there was an author), the prompter, the scene-painter, and, above all, the orchestra. At abrupt intervals in the outrageous performance he would hurl himself in full costume at the piano and bang out some popular music equally absurd and appropriate.

I’m surprised at how much Crook gets into this. He’s almost as enthusiastic as “Blount” is.

The fantastic @isfjmel-phleg has located recordings or sheet music of all the songs mentioned in this story. Definitely a post worth checking out.

The climax of this, as of all else, was the moment when the two front doors at the back of the scene flew open, showing the lovely moonlit garden, but showing more prominently the famous professional guest; the great Florian, dressed up as a policeman.

How did Flambeau explain the lack of policeman during the rehearsal? Everyone was okay with the explanation of “He’ll show up in the middle of the show”? For that matter, how did they open the doors just when he showed up? There’s no mention of him knocking.

“Wife!” replied the staring soldier, “she died this year two months. Her brother James arrived just a week too late to see her.”

Flambeau knew that Fischer had the diamonds two months in advance? And ingratiated himself to the family that long ago? Talk about elaborate planning. Was there really no other moment he could he could have retrieved the diamonds? I suppose the day of gift-giving would be when they were most vulnerable.

“Chloroform,” he said as he rose; “I only guessed it just now.”

Apparently Flambeau carries chloroform on him at all times. Nothing like being prepared, I suppose.

Father Brown’s detective style is the opposite of Sherlock Holmes’. It’s truly deductive reasoning--starting with the “big picture” and finding details to support it. So far, we haven’t really seen Father Brown collect clues. He’s just living life, quietly observing, until he gets a sudden flash of inspiration. Only then can he pick out the little details to support his theory and show how the crime was done.

There were hollows and bowers at the extreme end of that leafy garden, in which the laurels and other immortal shrubs showed against sapphire sky and silver moon, even in that midwinter, warm colours as of the south. The green gaiety of the waving laurels, the rich purple indigo of the night, the moon like a monstrous crystal, make an almost irresponsible romantic picture; and among the top branches of the garden trees a strange figure is climbing, who looks not so much romantic as impossible.

Here Chesterton shifts from past tense to present tense for a page. There’s no explanation. Sayers does these kinds of shifts sometimes, too. Were writing rules different back then, or is this a failure of editing?

The present tense does give it a bit of a “stage show” feel, paralleling the dramatics of a moment before.

“Well, Flambeau,” says the voice, “you really look like a Flying Star; but that always means a Falling Star at last.”

Does Father Brown practice these one-liners?

Flambeau’s disguise must have been pretty good if Father Brown didn’t recognize him until now. But once Brown understood the crime, it must have been easy to figure out the criminal’s identity. Who else would do something so overelaborately artistic?

You were going to steal the jewels quietly [...] You already had the clever notion of hiding the jewels in a blaze of false stage jewellry. Now you saw that if the dress were a harlequin’s the appearance of a policeman would be quite in keeping.

The stage jewellry can’t already have been a part of Flambeau’s plan, not if he planned to steal them quietly.

However, just before he got his letter, he was ready to applaud Ruby’s idea of a little show. Perhaps Brown meant that this gave him the idea to use a Christmas show to hide the jewels, and he got the idea for a pantomime a moment later when he heard about the policeman?

“I want you to give them back, Flambeau, and I want you to give up this life. There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don’t fancy they will last in that trade.”

Father Brown already got Flambeau to repent and return his stolen goods once before. This time he has to be more specific. It’s not good enough to just give back the goods. He has to give up this life entirely.

Flambeau may be the criminal, but there’s an innocence about him. Father Brown, for all his cloistered lifestyle, has a much grittier and more realistic view of the world. Yet another example of how these stories invert the typical detective story tropes.

“...I know the woods look very free behind you, Flambeau; I know that in a flash you could melt into them like a monkey. But some day you will be an old grey monkey, Flambeau. You will sit up in your free forest cold at heart and close to death, and the tree-tops will be very bare.” [...] “Your downward steps have begun. You used to boast of doing nothing mean, but you are doing something mean tonight. You are leaving suspicion on an honest boy with a good deal against him already; you are separating him from the woman he loves and who loves him. But you will do meaner things than that before you die.”

This page is one of the best monologues in fiction. This entire speech gives me chills, but the ending is especially powerful.

The restoration of the gems (accidentally picked up by Father Brown, of all people) ended the evening in uproarious triumph; and Sir Leopold, in his height of good humor, even told the priest that though he himself had broader views, he could respect those whose creed required them to be cloistered and ignorant of the world.

Chesterton loves highlighting this bit of irony. It’s also a nice bookend to “The Blue Cross” where this irony was the turning-point of the whole story.

After the chilling dramatics of the garden, it’s nice to end on this lively, cheery, Christmassy atmosphere.

I wonder how Flambeau first got back in touch with Father Brown. The next time we see him, he and Brown are already good friends. It must have been an awkward, dramatic, and epic moment when a fully repentant Flambeau reapproaches the man who convinced him to reform.

[sportworldnews-blog]

Europa League: SK Sturms Heiko Vogel off Larnaka: "In principle I am the culprit"

Check out https://sportworld.news/europa-league/europa-league-sk-sturms-heiko-vogel-off-larnaka-in-principle-i-am-the-culprit/

Europa League: SK Sturms Heiko Vogel off Larnaka: "In principle I am the culprit"

Ajax Amsterdam was at least one size too big for the SK storm. After his defeat in the Champions League, the runners-up will now face AEK Larnaka at 7 p.m. on Thursday in the first leg of the third round qualifiers for the Europa League. Coach Heiko Vogel relies on his offensive against the Cypriot cup winner.

In a storm, the EL group phase is targeted after the burst dream of the top class. This is quite aggressive, as Coach Vogel demonstrated at a press conference on Wednesday. “The good thing is that you (journalists, note) always point out the negative,” Vogel said, referring to the nine goals scored so far in the league and at European level. His tenor: “That’s all past.” And: “As long as we win, I don’t care.”

After the most recent 3-2 win in Innsbruck, where the Graz team still had to tremble after a 3-0 lead, the German himself was very excited. Vogel wants to have come to a positive conclusion about the game. “We are in a luxury situation. We come to opportunities, which means that some things are already working. All I have to do now is appeal to the stringency of the players.”

Storm’s tactical approach to Larnaka was difficult to elicit. “We have the best storm in the league, that’s the match plan,” Vogel said, probably in allusion to the six goals scored – the best league result. He was not the only one who missed the last consequence before the goal. His players would often still be too busy thinking about the correct positioning on the field. “This clouds the clarity at the gate. “In principle, I’m to blame for the lack of efficiency.”

With two 3:2 victories, the runner-up started successfully into the championship. It has been seven years since Roman Kienast gave the “Blackys” their last European Cup home victory so far. In August 2011, they beat Georgian FC Zestafoni 1-0 in the CL qualifying round, nine games, nine defeats, 6-19, and then Larnaka. Vogel expects a duel at eye level.

Sturm will play their sixth competitive game of the still young season. “There haven’t been many opportunities to work in the tactical field lately. But especially when one game follows another, it’s what I like best as a coach,” Vogel said. “I’m having a great anticipation.”

Larnaka reached the EL play-off in the last two years. Last year, southern Europeans failed Viktoria Pilsen (1:3 overall), and 2016/17 was the final destination after a 4-0 defeat by Slovan Liberec. This year they set the upcoming duel against the Irish representative Dundalk FC after a 0:0 in the return leg at home.

Ivan Trickovski, Macedonia’s 2011 Footballer of the Year, scored two goals at 4-0. Florian Taulemesse wasn’t there yet. The goal getter scored 25 times last year in 31 games. The Frenchman was last beaten, but against Sturm he is at least in the squad.

The unofficial official language of the AEK, which was formed from a merger in 1994, is Spanish. Spanish ex-team player Andoni Iraola, who has been working as a coach since this summer, is joined by the 15 legionnaires, including ten Spaniards.

“Larnaka is a very dangerous opponent, they can play football really well,” said Vogel, who expects a typically Spanish team. “In their offensive section there are technically very skilled players who, if they get space, can develop a lot.” Storm should disturb your opponent early. “Of course, zero is of the utmost importance.”

With an average age of 27.5 years (storm: 24.0), Larnaka are an old team. Eleven players in the Green-Yellow squad are 30 years or older. “They certainly have a lot of experience and know exactly what needs to be done,” said Vogel. But the 42-year-old also found weaknesses: “If the possession of the ball changes, I think I’ve noticed a certain slowness.”

While the home game against Ajax had been sold out for weeks, the Merkur-Arena against the less melodious Larnaka might be much less well filled. By Wednesday afternoon, only about 6,000 tickets had been sold. “I think the club deserved a five-figure response. These are special nights, it is a privilege to play internationally,” said Vogel.

[jonathanbelloblog]

Forget Clay Models: The Modern Tools of Car Design

Last year I attended the Unity AutoTech Summit, the single most interesting automotive event I’ve experienced in the past decade or two. No, it wasn’t an auto show; those manifestations of the long-ago past are not exceptionally relevant anymore, regardless of how many cars show up for the first time in those public settings rather than in online reveals, as is now common. Our awareness of Unity’s event came in the form of an unremarkable email invitation, one of many that turn up regularly, from a company I’d never heard of, for an event with “a focus on VR design and streaming the CAD design process.”

I wouldn’t have paid much attention save for the location: Berlin, the happening European city for design and the arts today. The venue was Berlin Station, a huge, dilapidated, and no-longer-active train station used only for exhibitions and large-scale meetings.

Robert Cumberford was blown away by what he saw at the Unity summit in Berlin.

I was more than a little surprised by the attendees when I arrived. Car designers tend to be crisply turned out and quite stylish, even if in all-black outfits meant to convey their profession and status therein. The crowd at Berlin Station was mostly a rather scruffily clad group of somewhat Bohemian-looking post-student young people like those you find near big universities all over the world. But this bright-eyed, intense, and obviously highly intelligent bunch were not car designers at all; they were computer gamers, doubtlessly more concerned with “Grand Theft Auto” than “grand style auto.”

Unity CEO John Riccitiello expressed the company’s role in his opening remarks at Berlin Station. “Gaming tools are foundational,” he said. An example of how vital they are came in another speaker’s comment that at least 70 percent of the time spent in computer imaging is used for data input. Manipulating that data is no minor matter, either. Unity allows as many as 60 million polygons to define a surface and can move all of them simultaneously.

Anything that reduces the time in realizing a project is highly valuable. The first steps are typically transforming the designer’s thoughts into something that can be shared with others.

So what is Unity? It was set up 15 years ago in Denmark by three computer scientists who wanted to create a computer game. So they did. But what it was called, and why hardly anyone wanted to play it, is discreetly ignored by the company today. The game wasn’t successful, but some of the underlying software was brilliant, even revolutionary, and the protagonists wisely decided to capitalize on it. As René Schulte of Seattle’s Valorem, one of the many companies using Unity, put it in one of the multiple breakout sessions during the Berlin meeting, they had developed a way to deal with images “faster than real time.”

Unity CEO John Riccitiello says gaming tech underpins the engine powering his software.

Much of what went on during the Auto Summit was incomprehensible to anyone not totally immersed in computer and gaming technology. I frankly have no idea what the term “jacketing” means, nor yet the significance of light baking, tesselate, material morphing, texture generation, polygon target decimation, proxy mesh, scriptable render pipeline, and multiple other arcane terminologies bandied about during the two fascinating days. But what it all meant in practice was of crystalline transparency from the result of seeing what has been accomplished.

To understand why what Unity has is truly important to aesthetic automotive design, it’s necessary to consider exactly what car body design is, how it has been done in the past, and what matters most in transforming a mental image inside a designer’s brain into a highly complex piece of hardware that can be driven.

There are tens of thousands of steps that must be taken in logical sequence to get from vague notions of new shapes to functional reality, all of them time-consuming. And as we all know, time is money, so anything that reduces the time involved in realizing a project is highly valuable. The first steps are typically transforming the designer’s thoughts into something that can be shared with others.

Usually that means making sketches, often quite rough and approximate, then refining those into presentable illustrations. In the early days of coachbuilding, that typically meant accurately dimensioned orthographic drawings, principally in profile. Sketching cars in perspective has presumably always existed but only came into prominence in the 1930s in American styling studios. But for presenting a design, whether orthographically or in perspective, fairly lavish color renderings were required, and a good one can take literally days to accomplish.

I have had a close look at the development of rendering techniques by an accident of circumstances. I moved back to my native Los Angeles in 1950 and finished my secondary education at Benjamin Franklin High School there. That year, both the junior and senior national winners of the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild were fellow students; junior winner Ron Hill was in my 10th grade English class, and senior winner Bob Cadaret was in my gym class. Both used their $4,000 college scholarships (equivalent to about $42,000 today) to attend The Art Center School, perfect their skills, and then join General Motors Styling. Cadaret was one of the finest rendering artists, and Hill, who also drew beautifully, was instrumental at GM in turning the computer-aided special-effects software used in filmmaking into a CAD (computer-aided design) car-design tool, initially with Alias-Wavefront in Canada. The mergers, fusions, and combinations in the rapidly evolving computer business led to that early CAD company becoming part of Autodesk, originally aimed at architecture, then at car design. Late last year it became allied with Unity.

I participated in a demonstration in Berlin that was revelatory in a totally unexpected way. Basically, a few of us automotive, not games-oriented, visitors were invited to a session presented by a group from Volkswagen led by Florian Uhde and Roman Wiche. VW has been working on virtual reality since 2015, and it has a Virtual Engineering Lab, much needed to deal with 12 vehicle brands whose products are created in 37 technical centers around the globe. There was nothing to see; we were just standing in a circle and watching the seemingly demented dance of a man wearing a thick electronic mask over his eyes and holding a pair of complicated plastic devices, one in each hand, each equipped with various buttons and triggers.

One by one, we were invited to put on a similar VR mask. Suddenly we could see a bright yellow VW Golf where our bare eyes had seen just empty space. And we could see that the gyrating dancer was constructing a nonexistent luminous line in front of us, a perimeter he quickly filled with a membrane he could manipulate in a number of ways. Using his hand controls, he moved the perimeter line and pulled and pushed the imaginary membrane to create a curved surface. He could then attach that theoretical surface to another pre-existing car shape, in effect making a visible full-scale surface model in a couple of minutes or hours, depending on the complexity. A team of highly skilled modelers might accomplish the same basic task by executing a full-size clay car in a week or two with the handwork methods used in the ’50s, or later within a few days by using a computer-driven 3-D milling machine to shape the clay, as BMW did in the ’90s.

Volkswagen has been an early adopter of Unity’s VR technology that allows designers to communicate with each other and make changes to prototypes on the fly.

The revelation? This new method is a perfect analog for the techniques used by one of the great body designers in the history of the automobile, Jaguar founder William Lyons. He liked to work with one particular sheetmetal worker, telling the unnamed and unknown artisan what he wanted to see in a piece of sheet steel, which was then shaped using an English wheel, a hammer, snips, and a torch to create a complex formed curved section that could be attached to a pre-existing car structure. This is exactly what I saw in Berlin, but in VR it was almost instantaneous, and in England 80 years ago it must have taken weeks. So I was left realizing there may well be nothing new under the sun, but time—and cost—have been compressed unimaginably.

And there, above all, is where Unity comes in. Uncountable hours of working time are simply removed from the design process. The steps that must be taken are still done as in the past, but using appropriate pre-existing software programs that incorporate Unity’s founders’ “tricks,” any designer can make renderings as good as—or better than—those Cadaret produced long ago, and they can do it with astonishing speed. It will require skill, of course, and for the designs to be any good, it will, as always, require innate talent, taste, and imagination. Science—and science fiction—writer Arthur C. Clarke suggested in his Profiles of the Future that to anyone who didn’t understand it, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Virtual reality may seem magical, but because we know what computers are capable of achieving, we know it is not.

Real-Life Renderings: No, that’s not an actual Lexus LC500, but rather a photorealistic representation of one generated through Unity.

But we do recognize that VR is a new way of working that will, I believe, quite quickly supplant almost all the materials and methods used up to now, not just in styling and engineering but in manufacturing, testing, and marketing. Clay models, or those superb plaster models the Italians could whip out back in the ’60s? No need for them anymore. It will even be possible to get into a new car, check out all the controls, start it, and drive it really seriously, feeling all the acceleration, braking, and cornering forces—all without that car ever having existed for real. In other words, experiencing everything in a simulation that gets more realistic all the time, largely thanks to the work of all those “non-serious” computer games and their very serious creators. No, it’s not magic. But it’s close.

The post Forget Clay Models: The Modern Tools of Car Design appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

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[jesusvasser]

Forget Clay Models: The Modern Tools of Car Design

Last year I attended the Unity AutoTech Summit, the single most interesting automotive event I’ve experienced in the past decade or two. No, it wasn’t an auto show; those manifestations of the long-ago past are not exceptionally relevant anymore, regardless of how many cars show up for the first time in those public settings rather than in online reveals, as is now common. Our awareness of Unity’s event came in the form of an unremarkable email invitation, one of many that turn up regularly, from a company I’d never heard of, for an event with “a focus on VR design and streaming the CAD design process.”

I wouldn’t have paid much attention save for the location: Berlin, the happening European city for design and the arts today. The venue was Berlin Station, a huge, dilapidated, and no-longer-active train station used only for exhibitions and large-scale meetings.

Robert Cumberford was blown away by what he saw at the Unity summit in Berlin.

I was more than a little surprised by the attendees when I arrived. Car designers tend to be crisply turned out and quite stylish, even if in all-black outfits meant to convey their profession and status therein. The crowd at Berlin Station was mostly a rather scruffily clad group of somewhat Bohemian-looking post-student young people like those you find near big universities all over the world. But this bright-eyed, intense, and obviously highly intelligent bunch were not car designers at all; they were computer gamers, doubtlessly more concerned with “Grand Theft Auto” than “grand style auto.”

Unity CEO John Riccitiello expressed the company’s role in his opening remarks at Berlin Station. “Gaming tools are foundational,” he said. An example of how vital they are came in another speaker’s comment that at least 70 percent of the time spent in computer imaging is used for data input. Manipulating that data is no minor matter, either. Unity allows as many as 60 million polygons to define a surface and can move all of them simultaneously.

Anything that reduces the time in realizing a project is highly valuable. The first steps are typically transforming the designer’s thoughts into something that can be shared with others.

So what is Unity? It was set up 15 years ago in Denmark by three computer scientists who wanted to create a computer game. So they did. But what it was called, and why hardly anyone wanted to play it, is discreetly ignored by the company today. The game wasn’t successful, but some of the underlying software was brilliant, even revolutionary, and the protagonists wisely decided to capitalize on it. As René Schulte of Seattle’s Valorem, one of the many companies using Unity, put it in one of the multiple breakout sessions during the Berlin meeting, they had developed a way to deal with images “faster than real time.”

Unity CEO John Riccitiello says gaming tech underpins the engine powering his software.

Much of what went on during the Auto Summit was incomprehensible to anyone not totally immersed in computer and gaming technology. I frankly have no idea what the term “jacketing” means, nor yet the significance of light baking, tesselate, material morphing, texture generation, polygon target decimation, proxy mesh, scriptable render pipeline, and multiple other arcane terminologies bandied about during the two fascinating days. But what it all meant in practice was of crystalline transparency from the result of seeing what has been accomplished.

To understand why what Unity has is truly important to aesthetic automotive design, it’s necessary to consider exactly what car body design is, how it has been done in the past, and what matters most in transforming a mental image inside a designer’s brain into a highly complex piece of hardware that can be driven.

There are tens of thousands of steps that must be taken in logical sequence to get from vague notions of new shapes to functional reality, all of them time-consuming. And as we all know, time is money, so anything that reduces the time involved in realizing a project is highly valuable. The first steps are typically transforming the designer’s thoughts into something that can be shared with others.

Usually that means making sketches, often quite rough and approximate, then refining those into presentable illustrations. In the early days of coachbuilding, that typically meant accurately dimensioned orthographic drawings, principally in profile. Sketching cars in perspective has presumably always existed but only came into prominence in the 1930s in American styling studios. But for presenting a design, whether orthographically or in perspective, fairly lavish color renderings were required, and a good one can take literally days to accomplish.

I have had a close look at the development of rendering techniques by an accident of circumstances. I moved back to my native Los Angeles in 1950 and finished my secondary education at Benjamin Franklin High School there. That year, both the junior and senior national winners of the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild were fellow students; junior winner Ron Hill was in my 10th grade English class, and senior winner Bob Cadaret was in my gym class. Both used their $4,000 college scholarships (equivalent to about $42,000 today) to attend The Art Center School, perfect their skills, and then join General Motors Styling. Cadaret was one of the finest rendering artists, and Hill, who also drew beautifully, was instrumental at GM in turning the computer-aided special-effects software used in filmmaking into a CAD (computer-aided design) car-design tool, initially with Alias-Wavefront in Canada. The mergers, fusions, and combinations in the rapidly evolving computer business led to that early CAD company becoming part of Autodesk, originally aimed at architecture, then at car design. Late last year it became allied with Unity.

I participated in a demonstration in Berlin that was revelatory in a totally unexpected way. Basically, a few of us automotive, not games-oriented, visitors were invited to a session presented by a group from Volkswagen led by Florian Uhde and Roman Wiche. VW has been working on virtual reality since 2015, and it has a Virtual Engineering Lab, much needed to deal with 12 vehicle brands whose products are created in 37 technical centers around the globe. There was nothing to see; we were just standing in a circle and watching the seemingly demented dance of a man wearing a thick electronic mask over his eyes and holding a pair of complicated plastic devices, one in each hand, each equipped with various buttons and triggers.

One by one, we were invited to put on a similar VR mask. Suddenly we could see a bright yellow VW Golf where our bare eyes had seen just empty space. And we could see that the gyrating dancer was constructing a nonexistent luminous line in front of us, a perimeter he quickly filled with a membrane he could manipulate in a number of ways. Using his hand controls, he moved the perimeter line and pulled and pushed the imaginary membrane to create a curved surface. He could then attach that theoretical surface to another pre-existing car shape, in effect making a visible full-scale surface model in a couple of minutes or hours, depending on the complexity. A team of highly skilled modelers might accomplish the same basic task by executing a full-size clay car in a week or two with the handwork methods used in the ’50s, or later within a few days by using a computer-driven 3-D milling machine to shape the clay, as BMW did in the ’90s.

Volkswagen has been an early adopter of Unity’s VR technology that allows designers to communicate with each other and make changes to prototypes on the fly.

The revelation? This new method is a perfect analog for the techniques used by one of the great body designers in the history of the automobile, Jaguar founder William Lyons. He liked to work with one particular sheetmetal worker, telling the unnamed and unknown artisan what he wanted to see in a piece of sheet steel, which was then shaped using an English wheel, a hammer, snips, and a torch to create a complex formed curved section that could be attached to a pre-existing car structure. This is exactly what I saw in Berlin, but in VR it was almost instantaneous, and in England 80 years ago it must have taken weeks. So I was left realizing there may well be nothing new under the sun, but time—and cost—have been compressed unimaginably.

And there, above all, is where Unity comes in. Uncountable hours of working time are simply removed from the design process. The steps that must be taken are still done as in the past, but using appropriate pre-existing software programs that incorporate Unity’s founders’ “tricks,” any designer can make renderings as good as—or better than—those Cadaret produced long ago, and they can do it with astonishing speed. It will require skill, of course, and for the designs to be any good, it will, as always, require innate talent, taste, and imagination. Science—and science fiction—writer Arthur C. Clarke suggested in his Profiles of the Future that to anyone who didn’t understand it, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Virtual reality may seem magical, but because we know what computers are capable of achieving, we know it is not.

Real-Life Renderings: No, that’s not an actual Lexus LC500, but rather a photorealistic representation of one generated through Unity.

But we do recognize that VR is a new way of working that will, I believe, quite quickly supplant almost all the materials and methods used up to now, not just in styling and engineering but in manufacturing, testing, and marketing. Clay models, or those superb plaster models the Italians could whip out back in the ’60s? No need for them anymore. It will even be possible to get into a new car, check out all the controls, start it, and drive it really seriously, feeling all the acceleration, braking, and cornering forces—all without that car ever having existed for real. In other words, experiencing everything in a simulation that gets more realistic all the time, largely thanks to the work of all those “non-serious” computer games and their very serious creators. No, it’s not magic. But it’s close.

The post Forget Clay Models: The Modern Tools of Car Design appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

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[eddiejpoplar]

Forget Clay Models: The Modern Tools of Car Design

Last year I attended the Unity AutoTech Summit, the single most interesting automotive event I’ve experienced in the past decade or two. No, it wasn’t an auto show; those manifestations of the long-ago past are not exceptionally relevant anymore, regardless of how many cars show up for the first time in those public settings rather than in online reveals, as is now common. Our awareness of Unity’s event came in the form of an unremarkable email invitation, one of many that turn up regularly, from a company I’d never heard of, for an event with “a focus on VR design and streaming the CAD design process.”

I wouldn’t have paid much attention save for the location: Berlin, the happening European city for design and the arts today. The venue was Berlin Station, a huge, dilapidated, and no-longer-active train station used only for exhibitions and large-scale meetings.

Robert Cumberford was blown away by what he saw at the Unity summit in Berlin.

I was more than a little surprised by the attendees when I arrived. Car designers tend to be crisply turned out and quite stylish, even if in all-black outfits meant to convey their profession and status therein. The crowd at Berlin Station was mostly a rather scruffily clad group of somewhat Bohemian-looking post-student young people like those you find near big universities all over the world. But this bright-eyed, intense, and obviously highly intelligent bunch were not car designers at all; they were computer gamers, doubtlessly more concerned with “Grand Theft Auto” than “grand style auto.”

Unity CEO John Riccitiello expressed the company’s role in his opening remarks at Berlin Station. “Gaming tools are foundational,” he said. An example of how vital they are came in another speaker’s comment that at least 70 percent of the time spent in computer imaging is used for data input. Manipulating that data is no minor matter, either. Unity allows as many as 60 million polygons to define a surface and can move all of them simultaneously.

Anything that reduces the time in realizing a project is highly valuable. The first steps are typically transforming the designer’s thoughts into something that can be shared with others.

So what is Unity? It was set up 15 years ago in Denmark by three computer scientists who wanted to create a computer game. So they did. But what it was called, and why hardly anyone wanted to play it, is discreetly ignored by the company today. The game wasn’t successful, but some of the underlying software was brilliant, even revolutionary, and the protagonists wisely decided to capitalize on it. As René Schulte of Seattle’s Valorem, one of the many companies using Unity, put it in one of the multiple breakout sessions during the Berlin meeting, they had developed a way to deal with images “faster than real time.”

Unity CEO John Riccitiello says gaming tech underpins the engine powering his software.

Much of what went on during the Auto Summit was incomprehensible to anyone not totally immersed in computer and gaming technology. I frankly have no idea what the term “jacketing” means, nor yet the significance of light baking, tesselate, material morphing, texture generation, polygon target decimation, proxy mesh, scriptable render pipeline, and multiple other arcane terminologies bandied about during the two fascinating days. But what it all meant in practice was of crystalline transparency from the result of seeing what has been accomplished.

To understand why what Unity has is truly important to aesthetic automotive design, it’s necessary to consider exactly what car body design is, how it has been done in the past, and what matters most in transforming a mental image inside a designer’s brain into a highly complex piece of hardware that can be driven.

There are tens of thousands of steps that must be taken in logical sequence to get from vague notions of new shapes to functional reality, all of them time-consuming. And as we all know, time is money, so anything that reduces the time involved in realizing a project is highly valuable. The first steps are typically transforming the designer’s thoughts into something that can be shared with others.

Usually that means making sketches, often quite rough and approximate, then refining those into presentable illustrations. In the early days of coachbuilding, that typically meant accurately dimensioned orthographic drawings, principally in profile. Sketching cars in perspective has presumably always existed but only came into prominence in the 1930s in American styling studios. But for presenting a design, whether orthographically or in perspective, fairly lavish color renderings were required, and a good one can take literally days to accomplish.

I have had a close look at the development of rendering techniques by an accident of circumstances. I moved back to my native Los Angeles in 1950 and finished my secondary education at Benjamin Franklin High School there. That year, both the junior and senior national winners of the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild were fellow students; junior winner Ron Hill was in my 10th grade English class, and senior winner Bob Cadaret was in my gym class. Both used their $4,000 college scholarships (equivalent to about $42,000 today) to attend The Art Center School, perfect their skills, and then join General Motors Styling. Cadaret was one of the finest rendering artists, and Hill, who also drew beautifully, was instrumental at GM in turning the computer-aided special-effects software used in filmmaking into a CAD (computer-aided design) car-design tool, initially with Alias-Wavefront in Canada. The mergers, fusions, and combinations in the rapidly evolving computer business led to that early CAD company becoming part of Autodesk, originally aimed at architecture, then at car design. Late last year it became allied with Unity.

I participated in a demonstration in Berlin that was revelatory in a totally unexpected way. Basically, a few of us automotive, not games-oriented, visitors were invited to a session presented by a group from Volkswagen led by Florian Uhde and Roman Wiche. VW has been working on virtual reality since 2015, and it has a Virtual Engineering Lab, much needed to deal with 12 vehicle brands whose products are created in 37 technical centers around the globe. There was nothing to see; we were just standing in a circle and watching the seemingly demented dance of a man wearing a thick electronic mask over his eyes and holding a pair of complicated plastic devices, one in each hand, each equipped with various buttons and triggers.

One by one, we were invited to put on a similar VR mask. Suddenly we could see a bright yellow VW Golf where our bare eyes had seen just empty space. And we could see that the gyrating dancer was constructing a nonexistent luminous line in front of us, a perimeter he quickly filled with a membrane he could manipulate in a number of ways. Using his hand controls, he moved the perimeter line and pulled and pushed the imaginary membrane to create a curved surface. He could then attach that theoretical surface to another pre-existing car shape, in effect making a visible full-scale surface model in a couple of minutes or hours, depending on the complexity. A team of highly skilled modelers might accomplish the same basic task by executing a full-size clay car in a week or two with the handwork methods used in the ’50s, or later within a few days by using a computer-driven 3-D milling machine to shape the clay, as BMW did in the ’90s.

Volkswagen has been an early adopter of Unity’s VR technology that allows designers to communicate with each other and make changes to prototypes on the fly.

The revelation? This new method is a perfect analog for the techniques used by one of the great body designers in the history of the automobile, Jaguar founder William Lyons. He liked to work with one particular sheetmetal worker, telling the unnamed and unknown artisan what he wanted to see in a piece of sheet steel, which was then shaped using an English wheel, a hammer, snips, and a torch to create a complex formed curved section that could be attached to a pre-existing car structure. This is exactly what I saw in Berlin, but in VR it was almost instantaneous, and in England 80 years ago it must have taken weeks. So I was left realizing there may well be nothing new under the sun, but time—and cost—have been compressed unimaginably.

And there, above all, is where Unity comes in. Uncountable hours of working time are simply removed from the design process. The steps that must be taken are still done as in the past, but using appropriate pre-existing software programs that incorporate Unity’s founders’ “tricks,” any designer can make renderings as good as—or better than—those Cadaret produced long ago, and they can do it with astonishing speed. It will require skill, of course, and for the designs to be any good, it will, as always, require innate talent, taste, and imagination. Science—and science fiction—writer Arthur C. Clarke suggested in his Profiles of the Future that to anyone who didn’t understand it, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Virtual reality may seem magical, but because we know what computers are capable of achieving, we know it is not.

Real-Life Renderings: No, that’s not an actual Lexus LC500, but rather a photorealistic representation of one generated through Unity.

But we do recognize that VR is a new way of working that will, I believe, quite quickly supplant almost all the materials and methods used up to now, not just in styling and engineering but in manufacturing, testing, and marketing. Clay models, or those superb plaster models the Italians could whip out back in the ’60s? No need for them anymore. It will even be possible to get into a new car, check out all the controls, start it, and drive it really seriously, feeling all the acceleration, braking, and cornering forces—all without that car ever having existed for real. In other words, experiencing everything in a simulation that gets more realistic all the time, largely thanks to the work of all those “non-serious” computer games and their very serious creators. No, it’s not magic. But it’s close.

The post Forget Clay Models: The Modern Tools of Car Design appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

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[crossedswordsrp]

The Tragedian

❛ 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know. ❜

Full Name Clovis Barbet Alias — Age 28 (b. 1613) Alliance Hôtel de Bourgogne Position Civilian Negative Traits Withdrawn, Critical, Finicky Positive Traits Urbane, Modest, Conscientious

The son of Ming dynasty mandarin Shen Fu-Tsung, later Barbet, who had settled largely in Paris after visiting the country with a party of Jesuits, Clovis grew up in moderate luxury in the city of his birth with his mother Violette, a Frenchwoman. An only child, although the young man had loving and doting parents, his father was by necessarily distant, spending a great deal of time at court or undergoing long sea voyages in order to attend to business back in Nanjing. As such, his childhood was relatively quiet and relatively lonely, punctuated by visits to court, and education by private tutor, as would be seen fitting for a boy whose father was a well-known gentleman and scholar. As such, Clovis grew up with both a keen eye for the facile nature of court, as well as a true appreciation for the beauty of the written word.

It was at court in 1628 that he first saw the performances of the first authorized theatre troupe, Les Comédiens du Roi (The King’s Players), invited there by the then-Queen Regent Marie-Claire as education for the young Alexandre Valois. Struck by the nature of the secular drama that he had seen performed, he was inspired to learn more about the theatre – the beauty of the piece that he had seen, simple but awe-inspiring, leaving him unable to sleep. Clovis, who had always appreciated the written word – had only known it in the form of written poetry and word, he had never seen it played. He had never seen the emotions that it could inspire, the co-mingling and engagement that it wrought, and in that moment words – words were not so much empty, black and white letters or characters on paper, but vehicles to a higher and more authentic kind of consciousness. Always a measured man before, well versed in the understanding of courtly manners and graces, Clovis felt true passion for the first time in his young life. He desperately wanted to learn more.

Despite the often-prejudice leveled against those who were on the production side of French theatre, Clovis was undeterred. After speaking with one of the troupe’s actors after the performance as to the writer of the tragedy he had seen performed, the 15-year-old boy made his way to the rue Mauconseil and the newly permanent home of Les Comédiens du Roi - the Hôtel de Bourgogne. The young man was determined to catch the eye of the attached playwright of Les Comédiens du Roi, Emmanuel Brassard, one of the most prolific playwrights France had ever known. For two years, the young man visited the theatre, attempting to ingratiate himself to the brilliant, but infamously erratic playwright. During the day, Clovis learned the politics of the theatre, and all the roles that went into making a show possible. At night and often long into the night, he read voraciously and slaved with ink and quill to shape his own pieces. Unfortunately, Brassard, no matter how much Clovis seemed to try, did not seem to have the time or the interest to take on a young protégé – when the playwright was even present in the theatre at all. After such a long time had passed - even serving in the stage crew, willing to do whatever was necessary to be present at the right time and the right place, Clovis was beginning to truly despair of ever getting his chance to be a true part of the theatre in his own right. It was then and only then that providence granted him a chance in the form of appropriate – tragedy.

As prolific as Brassard was, his well known debaucheries and heavy drinking were quickly beginning to catch up to him, and Clovis was becoming more and more disillusioned with the fact that the man who had penned the miracles he had seen was visibly and obviously throwing his gifts away. It was close to the date of an important performance for a member of visiting nobility that Brassard had been nowhere to be found, and the play that was meant to be performed not even half-finished. The director of Les Comédiens du Roi, Florian Marchand, asked in desperation of the general company if anyone had any ability as a playwright. When there was resounding silence, Clovis raised his hand. At first, his volunteerism was greeted with laughter, as he was then the equivalence of a theatrical intern, forever overlooked -  a nobody. However, when his piece was actually read by the company, any mocking laughter had long since died away. The room - with the players having finished their initial reading - was as silent as a crypt.

On June 26th 1630, Clovis’ first publicly-performed piece, a simple and heartrending tragedy entitled Sigoléne, debuted to a party of visiting aristocracy. There was likewise little sound in the house when the last line of the work rang out upon stage, although the young playwright was lauded afterwards with thunderous applause. The mass success of that work catapulted him directly into a position to supplant Emmanuel Brassard in the same year, where he still serves today eleven years later as Les Comédiens du Roi’s chief playwright. Lauded for his meticulous creation of his works as well as for his modest and down-to-earth nature, Clovis Barbet is much loved among the aristocracy as a playwright and also enjoys celebrity at court when he has opportunity to visit - although he has long given up any courtly ambitions. Prizing especially classical literature for his works’ inspiration, he hopes, however, to pen soon a piece that harkens back to his own half-Chinese heritage, as he is well aware that his father’s culture is still little understood or appreciated in Paris.

Connections

Luc Brazier — He has a rivalry with the relative newcomer (in 1635) playwright of the Théâtre du Marais as they are now the two main playwrights of the two dominant theatres in Paris. They both have their own specializations, with the highly social Luc preferring to pen lively tragicomedies and farces, while the more self-effacing Clovis prefers to pen lovingly crafted tragedies. Clovis grudgingly acknowledges the skill of the other writer but what he does bridle at is the hotheaded comportment of the other playwright, worrying that his antics will lend the theatre a worse reputation than it already holds and pollute what he considers to be the purity of their art form. On his part to Luc in person, Clovis is polite, but he is not particularly warm, and he uses Luc’s successes (as they are seemly without effort) to drive himself to work harder. He is not aware of the connection between Luc and Madeleine.

Claudette Valois — He has struck up a bit of a friendship with the cousin of the King. Both seem to share a love of the theatre, and he had noticed that Claudette seemed to particularly be moved by his works when Clovis has the occasion to play at court. He’s heard rumors that a young woman matching her description has been hanging around the Théâtre du Marais - and hopes that it is not true. Her patronage to the Hôtel de Bourgogne instead would be very much appreciated.

This character is portrayed by OSRIC CHAU and is OPEN

OOC Notes: Please read the information on Visiting the Theatre for more information that may be useful for your character.

To get an idea of the play style Clovis prefers to write - the expression classicism as it applies to literature implies notions of order, clarity, moral purpose and good taste. Many of these notions are directly inspired by classical Greek and Roman masterpieces.

In French neoclassical theatre, which Clovis specializes in, a play should follow the Three Unities:

Unity of place: the setting should not change. In practice, this led to the frequent "Castle, interior". Battles take place off stage.

Unity of time: ideally the entire play should take place in 24 hours.

Unity of action: there should be one central story and all secondary plots should be linked to it.

Although based on classical examples, the unities of place and time were seen as essential for the spectator's complete absorption into the dramatic action; wildly dispersed scenes in India or Africa, or over many years would—critics maintained—break the theatrical illusion. Sometimes grouped with the unity of action is the notion that no character should appear unexpectedly late in the drama.

Linked with the theatrical unities are the following concepts:

"Les bienséances": literature should respect moral codes and good taste; nothing should be presented that flouts these codes, even if they are historical events.