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ourcherokeeinniowa · 6 months ago

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When is the Best Time to Book a Hotel in Cherokee, IA?

Cherokee, Iowa, is a picturesque town known for its rich cultural heritage, scenic landscapes, and welcoming community. Whether you’re visiting to explore local history, enjoy outdoor adventures, or simply relax, finding the perfect place to stay is crucial to your travel experience. This article delves into the best time to book a hotel in Cherokee, IA, considering various factors that influence hotel availability and pricing. We'll also highlight some top accommodations, including the highly recommended Cherokee Inn Cherokee Iowa and other hotels and motels in Cherokee IA.

Factors Influencing the Best Time to Book a Hotel in Cherokee, IA

1. Seasonal Variations

The demand for hotels and motels in Cherokee IA fluctuates with the seasons. Understanding these seasonal patterns can help you determine the best time to book your stay.

Spring (March to May): Spring in Cherokee is a beautiful time with mild weather and blooming flowers. It’s a great season for outdoor activities like hiking and visiting parks. Booking a hotel in advance during this period is advisable as it attracts a moderate number of visitors.

Summer (June to August): Summer is the peak tourist season in Cherokee, IA. Families, groups, and solo travelers flock to the area to enjoy the warm weather, festivals, and outdoor activities. Booking your hotel or motel at least three to six months in advance is recommended to secure your preferred accommodation and take advantage of early bird discounts.

Fall (September to November): Fall is another popular season for visiting Cherokee due to the pleasant weather and stunning fall foliage. This season also sees several local events and festivals, increasing the demand for accommodations. Booking your stay two to four months in advance can help you find better rates and availability.

Winter (December to February): Winter in Cherokee is quieter, with fewer tourists. This off-peak season is ideal for those seeking a peaceful retreat. Booking one to two months in advance is generally sufficient during this period, and you might find lower rates and special offers.

2. Local Events and Festivals

Cherokee, Iowa, hosts several local events and festivals throughout the year, significantly impacting hotel demand. Some notable events include:

Cherokee Jazz and Blues Festival: Held in January, this popular festival attracts music enthusiasts from all over, increasing hotel bookings. If you plan to attend, book your hotel or motel well in advance, preferably six months ahead.

Cherokee County Fair: This annual summer event draws crowds for its agricultural exhibits, rides, and entertainment. Booking your accommodation at least three to six months in advance is recommended.

Cherokee PRCA Rodeo: Another major event that attracts visitors. Early booking is essential to secure your stay during this time.

3. Length of Stay

The duration of your stay can influence how far in advance you should book your hotel. For longer stays, it’s crucial to ensure continuous availability at your chosen hotel or motel. Booking three to six months ahead for extended stays is advisable, especially during peak seasons.

4. Type of Accommodation

Cherokee, IA, offers a variety of accommodations, from budget-friendly motels to mid-range hotels and charming inns. Popular options like the Cherokee Inn Cherokee Iowa tend to fill up quickly. If you have a specific hotel or motel in mind, it’s best to book as early as possible to guarantee your stay.

Why Early Booking is Beneficial

1. Better Rates and Deals

One of the primary advantages of booking your hotel in advance is the potential to secure better rates and deals. Many hotels and motels in Cherokee IA, including the Cherokee Inn Cherokee Iowa, offer early bird discounts and promotional rates for early reservations. This not only helps you save money but also provides more options within your budget.

2. Greater Availability

Early booking ensures that you have a wider selection of rooms and accommodations to choose from. This is particularly important during peak seasons and popular events when hotels can fill up quickly. By booking early, you can select the room type and amenities that best suit your needs.

3. Peace of Mind

Having your accommodation booked well in advance gives you peace of mind, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your trip, such as planning activities and sightseeing. Knowing that you have a confirmed reservation at a reputable hotel or motel eliminates the stress of last-minute searching.

Highlighting Top Accommodations in Cherokee, IA

1. Cherokee Inn Cherokee Iowa

The Cherokee Inn Cherokee Iowa is one of the top recommendations for accommodation in Cherokee. This hotel offers a comfortable and welcoming atmosphere, making it a favorite among travelers. Key features include:

Convenient Location: The Cherokee Inn is conveniently located, providing easy access to local attractions, dining, and shopping options.

Comfortable Rooms: Guests can enjoy comfortable and well-appointed rooms equipped with modern amenities.

Exceptional Service: The staff at the Cherokee Inn are known for their exceptional service and hospitality, ensuring a pleasant stay.

Value for Money: The Cherokee Inn offers great value for money with competitive rates and quality services.

2. Best Western La Grande Hacienda

Another excellent choice is the Best Western La Grande Hacienda, offering a range of amenities including:

Outdoor Pool: Perfect for relaxing after a day of exploring.

Free Breakfast: A complimentary breakfast to start your day right.

Business Center: Ideal for business travelers needing work facilities.

3. Budget Inn Motel

For budget-conscious travelers, the Budget Inn Motel provides affordable and comfortable accommodations. Features include:

Affordable Rates: Competitive pricing for budget travelers.

Convenient Amenities: Basic amenities ensuring a comfortable stay.

Central Location: Easy access to local attractions and dining options.

Tips for Booking Your Hotel in Cherokee, IA

1. Use Reputable Booking Platforms

When booking your hotel in Cherokee, IA, use reputable booking platforms to ensure a secure and hassle-free reservation process. Websites like Booking.com, Expedia, and the official hotel websites offer reliable booking services with customer reviews and detailed information about the properties.

2. Take Advantage of Early Bird Offers

Many hotels and motels in Cherokee IA, including the Cherokee Inn Cherokee Iowa, offer early bird discounts and special promotions for advance bookings. Keep an eye out for these deals to save money on your accommodation.

3. Consider Flexible Booking Options

Flexible booking options, such as free cancellation or date changes, provide peace of mind in case your travel plans change. Check the hotel's cancellation policy before making your reservation to avoid any potential penalties.

4. Read Reviews and Ratings

Before finalizing your booking, take the time to read reviews and ratings from previous guests. This will give you a better understanding of the hotel's quality, service, and overall guest experience.

5. Join Loyalty Programs

If you frequently travel, consider joining hotel loyalty programs. These programs often offer members exclusive discounts, perks, and rewards that can enhance your stay.

Conclusion

Booking your hotel in Cherokee, IA, at the right time can significantly enhance your travel experience. Factors such as seasonal variations, local events, length of stay, and type of accommodation play crucial roles in determining the best time to book. For a comfortable and memorable stay, consider top accommodations like the Cherokee Inn Cherokee Iowa, which offers excellent service, great value for money, and a convenient location.

By planning ahead and taking advantage of early booking benefits, you can secure the best rates, ensure availability, and enjoy peace of mind during your trip. Whether you're visiting for the local history, outdoor adventures, or simply to relax, early booking will help you make the most of your stay in Cherokee, Iowa. Start planning today and book your hotel early to experience all that this charming town has to offer!

#Cherokee Inn Cherokee Iowa #Hotels in Cherokee Iowa #Cheap hotels in cherokee iowa #Hotels in cherokee iowa budget #Cherokee inn menu

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heretic-altias · 3 years ago

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Still thinking about chocobos, I’ve always seen them as a fusion between horses and chickens as someone with experience with both animals, so have some fun headcanons. Below a cut bc my list is long. Feel free to add on, I’d imagine some stuff from larger birds like emus and ostriches would make nice additions but my family doesn’t own ostriches, we own chickens so that’s what I know about.

- Despite the ingame sleeping model for them laying down, they probably sleep standing up like horses most of the time and just lay down sometimes. Roosting would be a bit impractical for birds this big lol. That being said, they are built much better for laying down and getting back up than horses so they could potentially lay down more often than horses do. They'd certainly sit on a nest if they're brooding eggs, so honestly any amount of laying down you headcanon probably would make sense anyway. They probably mostly lay down to sunbathe, chickens do that irl.

- Chocobos dust bathe bathe like chickens do. It’s very cute.

- There are competitions other than racing for them, maybe similar to horse shows irl. Imagine a chocobo cross country jumping course or chocobo dressage, or for western riding reining or barrel racing (I suggest YouTubing/Googling any of these you don’t know to see what they are)

- Chocobo breeds can vary. Some are bred for riding or driving purposes more like irl horses while others are bred for egg laying or meat (I could never eat one, but in world people probably do unless it’s a cultural Nope) more like chickens are. Some are also bred for interesting color combinations. You should absolutely google different chicken breeds and imagine chocobos with those feathers, I especially like the ones with poofy head feathers. Since chocobos ingame have even more colors than I’ve seen in chickens though, I’ll dip into my knowledge of parrots too and suggest those as color ideas as well. My family has a blue and gold macaw, African gray, and my little black capped conure, all of which would look fantastic as chocobo colors in my opinion. Anything is possible really, not just the solid colors we get ingame or specific irl birds.

- Much like a lot of irl kids go through a ‘horse phase’, lots of eorzean kids go through a ‘chocobo phase’ where they’re absolutely obsessed. Those who discover it’s not just a phase like myself are the ones who will work with chocobos for life, be it as a hobby or career path.

- Chocobos aren’t as bad as chickens with their pecking order, but even horses might clash a little when first introduced. Turn out groups are planned pretty carefully. Between hens mostly though, see further down for why roosters are Problematic.

- There are trail ride places that offer chocobo rides for people with 0 experience. Much like irl, this causes people to insist it’s easy to ride them bc they ‘did it once on vacation’ or 'took a chocobo porter once'

- You cannot geld a bird. To my knowledge anyway, and honestly I don’t really want to know how if I’m wrong lol. This means male chocobos are like roosters. Rooster chocobos probably have the longer fancier looking tail feathers, and probably longer fancier feathers on their head too since the ingame model has a little crest there. They also have spurs. Roos are way meaner than hens usually, so most casual riding birds are probably hens. Some show circuits might not even allow roos to enter. It also means you can only keep one roo with a group of hens usually unless it’s a really big group. Roosters irl can be ok together if there are no hens, and the grand companies probably do this since roos would have the spurs to better attack with in battle. Probably a specific breed of chocobo, bred for well tempered roos to ride into battle. They’d still have to check who they’re turning out with who carefully to make sure they get along, but it is doable. So casual riding birds, mostly hens, war birds, mostly roos. People with very large pastures might keep a roo with their hens for protection though.

- Some breeds of hen might get broody fairly often. It means they’ll sit on eggs or in a nest if there are no eggs bc they really wanna hatch some. They’re probably brats and near impossible to ride unless you manage to drag them out of their nest so they’re on their feet. Some people dunk their chicken’s butt in cold water to try and break the broodiness irl, but with a chocobo you’d probably need to just take a hose and spray it bc they’re too big to dunk. I’d imagine the broody breeds aren’t really the riding breeds though, they’re probably used for hatching eggs laid by the desired breed. They probably breed for less broodiness in riding bird breeds.

- Roosters absolutely crow. I doubt it would sound exactly like an irl rooster, some loud drawn out variation of the kweh or the little whistle sound they make maybe? I’ll leave the exact sound of it up to your imagination. Good luck sleeping on the chocobo farm.

- Just like chickens I don't think theres really a way to tell a roo from a hen on hatch until they grow their feathers in and start to crow. Unless you get a specific breed that you can tell at birth, but most chickens it's a wait and see thing. We've got two chicks rn that my family is praying to the irl genetic rng gods to be girls since we can't keep them if they're roos. I'm sure similar situations have arisen hatching chocobos before, where someone can only keep the chick if it turns out to be a hen. Potential for a Tragic Backstory if your character raised and bonded with a chick that turned out to be a roo and had to give it up.

- They probably grow at a rate closer to horses than chickens. This could really be head cannoned either way, so feel free to say they grow as fast as chickens or ostriches or something if you wanna but as riding animals this just feels too fast in my opinion. That means you probably won't be saddling your chocobo till it's at least 3 or so. Egg incubation however is probably closer to birds since horses don't lay eggs. Chickens take 21 days to incubate and hatch, google says ostriches and emus take closer to the 40-50 day range and personally that longer time feels better to me since they're much larger than chickens. Looks like there was an ostrich fact in here after all huh.

- Lifespan is probably closer to horses, chickens don't actually live very long. Horses can live 25-30 years. I knew one that lived to be well over 30 though, so there are exceptions.

- If a baby chick is raised without a mother hen irl, they need to be raised in a pair or larger group or they'll get lonely as flock animals. With our chickens, the sibling they were raised with is usually their best buddy and they'll stick together when out free ranging fairly often. Chocobos are probably like this too. Horses are also herd animals and prefer to be kept in groups usually, so really it just makes sense for chocobos to be flock oriented.

- Paddocks and/or stalls probably need a big nest box type setup for the birds to lay their eggs in. But I doubt all chocobo breeds lay year round. Second ostrich fact, google says they only lay during breeding season. Chocos not bred for laying might work more like this, but I could see it varying based on breed. Most chickens actually stop producing eggs entirely when they're older, unless they're death layers. That's a specific type of chicken that'll lay for their entire life.

This is all I can think of for now, will add more if I think of anything else. I'm open to questions about horses or chickens if people want information for their own headcanons. I'm no expert, but my family keeps chickens and I own a horse so I at least have experience working around both that others out there might not have. Don't ask me about ostriches though. Find an ostrich farmer for that.

#i really do need an OC thats a chocobo rider #id be so good at writing that #idk what the word 'equestrian' but for chocobos would be #ekwehstrian?#no that was horrible im so sorry #ffxiv #final fantasy xiv #chocobo #shadowbringers #endwalker

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hey-hamlet · 5 years ago

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BNHA AU Ideas: Grand Design

Also on AO3!

TL;DR:

If you asked the Heroics Commission why they created Izuku, you'd get an answer pretty close to the truth. The rising power of quirks was making them nervous, and All Might won't live forever.

What they aren't mentioning is the fact that they don't like All Might either.

He's kind and good and dedicated to people over the country. The man will break countless laws to save a single life and has defied the heroics commission on many occasions - something they can't punish him for in any way without being slammed by the media.

So, they come up with a plan.

if you asked the heroics commission why they created Izuku, you'd get an answer pretty close to the truth

the rising power of quirks was making them nervous, and all might won't live forever. 'there might be another quirk as powerful as all mights just around the corner for the heroes' you might say. 'we're just taking away the 'might'' they'd reply

but what they aren't mentioning is the fact that they don't like All Might either.

he's kind and good and dedicated to people over country. the man will break countless laws to save a single life and has defied the heroics commission on many occasions - something they can't punish him for in any way without being slammed by the media

so, they come up with a plan

"if we can't control all might, we make the next all might ourselves"

sure, the doctor who does the work for them is a little shady, but it can't be helped. quirk genetic experiments were recently made illegal in a case spearheaded by nezu himself. nezu doesn't exactly agree with a total ban and is encouraging regulation in place of a blanket stop, but its been years and the laws are going nowhere fast

maybe the man has some shady connections to some shady people all too eager to replace all might? oh well, it can be managed

a pregnant woman called Inko Midoriya shows up at a hospital, dead on arrival, with the baby inside her still clinging to life?

well.

thats just convenient, isn't it?

they extract the child, pronounce the mother dead and whisk the child away into 'foster care', or the arms of the good doctor

when he's revealed to be quirkless? at first the commission is dubious but the doctor assures them this is perfect. he doesn't have to base the quirk off anything, it can be built from the ground up, as exactly the quirk the commission wants

izuku is born 3 months premature to a dead mother and one month later has a strong enough combination of quirks to take down all might when he grows up.

there is a bit of a catch, though. due to the whole 3 months early and dead mother thing, his constitution isn't the greatest, leaving him pretty sickly. the doctor assures him he'll be much better when he grows up (he’s lying). still - it’s a long while until their creation will be an adult. they could let him grow up normally in a nice house, only to pounce on him when he's grown a little stronger

but a chance of letting their perfect child slip away? nope. they resolve to train him as soon as he can crawl.

A few variations of this AU bc I had loads of quirk ideas before I settled on one - Knock Off For All: Izuku has a quirk as similar to OFA as was possible to create without being able to stockpile, complete with the achy breaky bones (no extra quirks) - Power Set: Izuku has a set of the most useful quirks the doctor could think of, ala USJ nomu (Shock nullification, Regeneration, Super Strength, etc) - Midorigiri: Izuku has a powerful combination quirk like a certain cloud mist dude. Probably either a shock absorption + redirection quirk / all 4 elemental types / guardian angel: wings, flight, hard light construct, healing - All for Naught: Izuku has a knock off of All for One that lets him perma copy 5 quirks at a time

So, Guardian Angel is the quirk I’m going with, mostly for the Hawks parallels. They end up basically being raised with each other, hawks jokingly calling Izuku his little brother. He almost cries when Izuku asks what that is.

Izuku’s quirk allows him to fly with a set of wings (he has hollow bones to facilitate this), can create hard light constructs; the more complicated the shape the harder it is and was originally classified as a forcefield quirk before Izuku got creative with it, and gives him the ability to heal.

All abilities excluding flight are based on the amount of ambient light. The brighter it is, the stronger his constructs and the better he can heal. His blood glows. Make of that what you will.

The problem being that while his quirk/s are strong, Izuku himself is very weak. He has chronic anaemia, difficulty putting on weight, a heart murmur, weak lungs, etc. the HA don’t care at all and make him train until he can’t walk.

From birth till 7 Izuku has no contact with people outside the facility, whereupon he is promptly dumped into a public school for 5 days a week. The education he gets there isn’t important, he’ll learn what he needs at the facility. What they do deem as important is A, creating a paper trail for the kid and B, socializing him somewhat.

People flock to him for his quirk, cementing what they always told him. “All of your worth is in your quirk. You have an obligation to save others.”

Plus, they’ve told him he wasn’t born like everyone else, he was created. Different, artificial, inhuman, those where all words used to describe him at the facility. He finds it difficult to make friends.

He forms a strange almost friendship with Bakugo as the only other kid with a super powerful quirk in the school, even if it’s more of a support quirk than anything else. Izuku silently heals Bakugo when he gets into fights, Bakugo snarls at anyone who makes Izuku too uncomfortable. It’s odd, but it works.

Izuku’s personality is similar to canon in the fact he's the same person but it’s a little jumbled.

He’s even less trusting of adults than canon which is saying something, but he doesn’t have canons blatant disregard for authority. If he breaks a rule he makes sure he doesn’t get caught because the punishments he’s had before left scars.

His anger runs a little closer to the surface but he feels like a bad person for feeling any emotion that isn’t positive so he crushes it down under forced optimism. Izuku shows his anger rarely and when he does, it’s quiet and vicious.

If an authority figure tells him to do something, he does it. It takes a while for Aizawa to break the kid’s conditioned need to respond automatically to any request from a ‘Handler’. Aizawa is very afraid of where it came from, but Nezu can’t find anything about this kid other than the record of his birth and his school enrolments.

Izuku thinks he’s less valuable than others which is pretty canon, at least at the start, but here it’s because he’s ‘not as good/natural/ something’ as a ‘normal’ human. Most of the UA teacher see it, but they have no idea why he thinks he’s lesser so their mixed attempts at questioning/comfort fall pretty flat. Izuku is convinced they would abandon him if they knew.

So, Izuku has a complicated relationship with the concept of All Might.

To start off with, even with everything that happened, Izuku adores heroes right down to his very core. Hawks counts the HA lucky that they didn’t accidentally turn Izuku into a villain. Izuku’s favourite hero is All Might, but -

For a start, he was told he was made to be better than All Might. The part of the HA that created him isn’t fond of the no. 1 as someone they can’t at all control, Izuku has basically been taught that All Might is lying to the world with the way he presents himself and that he’s secretly a terrible person and would hate him for both being artificial and for being made to be better than him

Ergo, Izuku is shit scared of him.

Izuku wants to go to UA because Katsuki is going to UA and Katsuki is the only person other than Hawks he’s ever had a somewhat close relationship with. The HA thinks: eh, fuck it, it’ll be a nice fuck you to All Might anyway.

Then All Might is announced as a teacher after Izuku has been accepted and all hell breaks loose.

A brief set of things that happen:

Dadmight and Dadzawa to the extreme, all of 1A basically adopts Izuku instantly (after they get over the fear of his crazy quirk lmao). All Might and Eraserhead are Izuku’s favourite heroes, other than Hawks, so he's both terrified and in awe of them at all times. He finds himself both loving the familial affection he was denied as a child and being terrified they’d think he was a monster when they learnt he was made to overtake All Might, and isn’t a ‘real person’.

Izuku gets OFA, eventually. It ends up improving his physical health which is neat, along with its extra quirks and strengthening of his own.

Todoroki hates Izuku a little from the beginning, although he’d never admit it. Izuku’s quirk is incredibly powerful and he didn’t have to undergo Todoroki’s childhood torment (Which is Incorrect, but he doesn’t exactly know that, does he) When Todoroki finds out (sports festival, Izuku has a pretty emotional response to his little angst time and lets a few things slip) he becomes fiercely protective of him.

Izuku and Bakugo develop an actual friendship and it’s an adventure

Izuku gets kidnapped along with Bakugo at the training camp, during which the doctor, AFO or Shigiraki reveal he was created to beat All Might, just like the Nomu. Izuku wants to run away out of fear/shame, but Bakugo drags him along with the rescue attempt. Izuku, too scared to go back to the HA or UA, wants nothing more than to vanish off the face of the earth. When Aizawa and All Might visit him and Bakugo at the hospital, Izuku breaks down crying and cowers in fear, convinced his teachers are either going to hurt or kill him. Everyone involved is horrified. They try to calm him down but just seeing them is scaring the shit out of Izuku so they end up getting chased out by Bakugo who clumsily comforts him.

#grand design au #bnha au #bnha #midoriya izuku #bakugou katsuki #All Might #yagi toshinori #izuku #midoriya #aizawa shouta #eraserhead #todoroki shouto

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gaintiktokfansblog · 3 years ago

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The Lowdown About TikTok Advertising

At present, there are ads on TikTok to allow you to develop your reach and new publicity. Again in January 2019, TikTok started experimenting with adverts on its stage.

buy for tiktok

This induced the launching of the managed service stage in April 2019. In the time of composing this info, TikTok advertisements aren't out there in most states.

Much like different social media platforms, then there's a biddable advert surrounding accessible. You can't self serve TikTok commercials proper now, and all the items wished to expertise a representative of the provider.

All accessible adverts on TikTok are of these short-sort movie formats. This makes glorious sense since TikTok is a stage full of transient-type movies to verify some ads will most likely be readable for purchasers. There are 3 Distinct variations Which You Can follow with TikTok commercials which are:

The specializing in attributes are a small regular right now. It is potential to choose your audience in accordance with age, sex, and place. The geo-targeting allows you to purpose at the nation stage within the USA. In the future, you possibly can expect to find out further specializing in selections, including consideration and behavior.

Perhaps you've got expert the narrative advertisements on Instagram? All these are full-display style and normally fairly helpful. If that appeals to you, you then positively actually are going to need the native ads on TikTok. Chances are you'll add an exterior hyperlink to a web site with these adverts.

With this advertisement, you have to select the interval of your movie from 5 minutes to fifteen minutes. It is advisable to supply a vertical format movie since it'll exhibit from the"For You" page of your supposed viewers. You'll be able to add a call to movement, like downloading a program or visiting your website.

Hashtag battles are widespread on TikTok. Subsequently it's logical to create commercials on this specific format. What you may do here could be to promote your TikTok shoppers in your meant viewers to take part in a problem that is based mostly round your brand or varied your merchandise.

TikTok users want to have interaction in its place of merely taking a passive posture. Subsequently, if you provde the greatest hashtag impediment industrial, you'll anticipate some superb engagement quantities. These commercials function for seven days, and likewise a TikTok guide can encourage you the entire time.

The Model Takeover advertisement appears each time a person opens its TikTok program. It is entrance and center in their show. It's doable to make use of one in every of these advert to ship a person to a personal merchandise of articles or induce them into your website.

Brand Takeover commercials are allowed on a category basis. Only one advertiser could use this sort of advertising to get a category each day. We forecast that these will flip into the priciest TikTok commercials due to the restricted accessibility.

In case you opt for a branded lens commercial, you will have the ability to make use of facial filters, 3D objects, and far more. Even the suitable branded lens program might offer a great deal of involvement on the stage, in order that they're value contemplating.

I then decided to get serious, and seek for "occupation suggestion", since that was a modern hashtag trending on TikTok (and that is probably a bit extra related for this blog than a video exhibiting anyone operating house for pizza rolls.) What I believed would be a set of extra essential videos, have been truly additional movies that made me snort out loud! I wasn't anticipating profession suggestion to be every educational and entertaining! May TikTok really be an outstanding place for recruiters to dabble into, I believed?

On this weblog, we'll check out what TikTok might suggest for recruiters: Is it really the perfect platform to be recruiting on? What are the advantages of utilizing it? What sort of videos do you publish on it? What are somethings you would possibly wish to take into account earlier than using it? We're going to look into all of those questions and even discover the rumored new job service that TikTok is at current piloting.

Before downloading the app, I knew what TikTok was, however you under no circumstances really know the way it really works till you employ it first-hand. In case you might be very quite a bit not accustomed to TikTok, it's a social media software that permits you to create brief kind movies. To your movies chances are you'll add effects, filters, improve velocity, add a background, splice movies collectively, and more! If you are viewing movies, you presumably can view by topic, trending hashtags, look for hashtags or issues, and even observe prospects. You will discover every kind of movies on the making use of from dancing videos, to pranks, to how one can movies, to movies for just pure comedy. There's not one kind of TikTok video in the marketplace!

In 2020, TikTok turned the most downloaded app worldwide, overtaking Facebook, Instagram, and Zoom.(1) The App Annie State of Cell report exhibits TikTok is in the meanwhile on observe to hit 1.2 billion energetic customers in 2021. Demographic intelligent, 78% of TikTok customers are beneath 39 with 30% falling between the ages of 20-29 based totally on a current report revealed by Statista.(2) Whereas the age group is youthful, get more tiktok audience what is important to notice is that Millennials and Gen Z's have gotten the most important demographic in the workforce as Little one Boomers retire. Millennials have already turn out to be the biggest group of execs within the U.S. Labor Pressure, making up 1/three of staff.

If one factor is for sure from these stats, TikTok usage is quickly on the rise, especially for younger generations. Corporations wish to have the ability to get in entrance of the right candidates for alternatives, which is why extra staffing and recruiting corporations have flocked to TikTok, where the largest demographic in the workforce is spending their time.

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bagquart04 · 4 years ago

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Once you have actually been placed on the treatment couch, a safety gel pad will certainly be positioned onto the location to be treated. arms fat freezing Hemel Hempstead acts as a barrier in between your skin as well as the device to secure your skin.

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How Much Gap Is Needed In Between Coolsculpting Treatments?

Some patients experience redness, small discoloration, swelling, tingling, pins and needles or pain in the cured area however this is short-term, brief lived as well as will entirely fix. I came recently for the very first time, after needing to re-jig my consultation 3 or 4 times because of ailment. Shrina was so useful and obliging, so other companies would certainly follow her lead. I felt comfortable as soon as I walked in as well as her actually fantastic aide Aga did my gel nails and also they are excellent. This strategy leads to substantial and long lasting reduction of localized fat, but for even more efficient outcomes, it should be combined with a nutritional elements as well.

They will certainly consult you based on your individual demands and sign, and go through how many cycles you would preferably need for your wanted outcome. This treatment is ideal for those who lug tiny pockets of stubborn fat, that would be seeking a reliable option to lipo. It is not an alternative to healthy and balanced diet plan and exercise, nor is it suitable for those that are obese or that have dense pockets of fat. open site is a non-surgical choice, in contrast to lipo or minimally-invasive fat dissolving therapies. Bingo wings are areas of flesh under the tricep on the arm that totter, that are visible when the arms are raised as well as trembled. They can cause self-consciousness as well as lack of confidence as individuals bother with their look. When weight is shed promptly, the skin is not provided time to shrink to its previous size, leaving extended flesh that sags.

Do You Provide Sophisticated Body Contouring Therapies Such As Double Chin Fat Reduction?

Love handles are deposits of excess fat at the midsection, often called stubborn fatty deposits, as a result of physiology; there are much more fat cells in this region than in others. We make use of the CoolSculpting Mini as well as Tiny applicators to better attend to smaller sized areas of persistent fat. The Petite applicator was designed particularly for the more secure, much more comfy treatment of the arm as the third most unpleasant location of subcutaneous fat. The Mini targets submental fat below the chin, with outcomes visible with as few as two treatments, for a more contoured neck, with the Coolsculpting benefit of minimal downtime. Among the advantages of this therapy versus procedures like lipo is that there is no downtime. You can resume your typical daily activities immediately and also most individuals return to work or carry on with their day usually after therapy.

CoolSculpting therapies are only available at doctor-led clinics, however, in truth, the treatments are carried out by aestheticians. CoolSculpting therapies can be fairly lengthy as the device just has one applicator, indicating double the therapy time when dealing with multiple locations such as the love deals with or inner upper legs. To day, there have been greater than 140,000 treatments done worldwide given that its launch in 2009. The clinical researches sustaining the therapy date as much back as May 2006, which verify the efficiency and also safety of the procedure. During the procedure itself, you might experience a minor pulling experience in the deeper structures. It is necessary to divulge all case history prior to therapy. During the consultation procedure, the Aesthetician will outline your viability for therapy, along with experience our different fat decrease choices.

Cryolipolysis is the medical term for CoolSculpting treatments which are likewise known as Fat Freezing. Words Cryolipolysis originates from the Greek word of Cryo suggesting cold as well as Lipolysis implying the break down of fat cells.

Any request to terminate a membership before the endo of the 12-month term must be supplied in creating with 4 week's notification. Whether you pick CoolSculpting or 3D Lipo treatments, it is essential to do your research to make sure you pick a reliable facility as well as provider. While Coolsculpting Fat Freezing treatments are an efficient way to deal with unwanted or persistent fat pockets, it does have it's constraints. 3D Lipo devices have double cryo functions implying 2 locations can be dealt with at the very same time.

Both therapies offer various dimension applicators to target various body areas. The procedure of freezing fat cells coincides with both 3D Lipo and also CoolSculpting. The tissue is iced up in the same way to accomplish Apoptosis in the targeted location which damages fat cells.

Patients Flock to Fat-Freezing Procedure Cryolipolysis, Sans FDA Approval - ABC News

Patients Flock to Fat-Freezing Procedure Cryolipolysis, Sans FDA Approval.

Posted: Tue, 25 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Must you desire to terminate your membership prior to the end of your 12-month agreement, all treatments, cup therapies and skin care got will come to be chargeable at the full cost. Any type of discount rates or cost-free therapies will come to be void as well as needs to be spent for completely before the cancellation can be authorized.

Throughout the treatment clients continue to be comfy and can resume back to function instantly after. The modern technology has actually been authorized by the Food & Drugs Management as well as there is no downtime adhering to the treatment. The direct exposure to cooling is established to make sure that it causescell deathofsubcutaneous fattissue without noticeable damages to the overlyingskin. The procedure is billed as an effectivenonsurgical different toliposuction. Discount rates used on treatments and skincare can not be made use of in conjunction with any various other offers or promos.

Fat cells are eliminated of the body as pee and also it is as a result crucial to dink great deals of water after your treatment.

Professional studies have actually revealed decreases in pockets of fat complying with a fat freezing therapy, while verifying to be a secure as well as effective therapy.

The impacts of Cryolipolysis treatment were uncovered by scientists as well as discovered that cooling down temperatures would certainly cause fat cells to die.

Cryolipolysis also described as fat freezing, fat freeze or 3D LIPO has ended up being a preferred treatment across the world.

They determined that when children consumed ice lollies they were creating dimples in their cheeks from weight loss.

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troger · 4 years ago

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TLDR: How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

At a laboratory in Manhattan, researchers have discovered how SARS-CoV-2 uses our defenses against us.

By James Somers

November 2, 2020

Some four billion years ago, in the shallow waters where life began, our earliest ancestors led lives of constant emergency. In a barren world, each single-celled amoeba was an inconceivably rich concentration of resources, and to live was to be beset by parasites. One of these, the giant Mimivirus, masqueraded as food; within four hours of being eaten, it could turn an amoeba into a virus factory. And yet, as the nineteenth-century mathematician Augustus de Morgan said, “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.” The Mimivirus had its own parasites, which sometimes followed it as it entered an amoeba. Once inside, they crippled the Mimivirus factory. This trick was so useful that, eventually, amoebas integrated the parasites’ genes into their own genomes, creating one of the earliest weapons in the immune system.

We tend to associate “survival of the fittest” with lions hunting antelope. But disease—the predation of parasites upon hosts—is actually the most potent force in evolution. “Every single phase of life has been selected to try to avoid parasitism,” Stephen Hedrick, an immunologist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. “It’s driven evolution as hard as it could be driven. Because it’s life or death all the time. And it’s a co-evolution.” Whenever a host develops an immune defense, it perversely rewards the survival of the very parasites that can defeat it. Hosts, meanwhile, tend to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. “Bacterial or viral populations are truly vast in size,” Robert Jack and Louis Du Pasquier write, in “Evolutionary Concepts in Immunology,” and the wide variation among them gives natural selection many candidate organisms upon which to work. Viruses and bacteria also reproduce half a million times faster than we do. Given this “generation gap,” Jack and Du Pasquier write, “one might well ask how on earth we could possibly have survived.”

A clue comes from the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. It spends much of its life marauding alone, eating things. But, when food is scarce, it releases molecules that serve as a flocking signal to others of its kind; the amoebas merge, forming a superorganism of as many as a hundred thousand members. For this multicellular “slime mold” to be effective, almost all the amoebas must give up their ability to eat, lest they prey on one another. The few that retain it don’t eat for themselves; rather, they swallow up debris and dispose of it to protect the organism. The other amoebas, freed from the burdens of offense and defense, form a “fruiting body” that releases spores for reproduction. Although none of the individuals would survive on their own, the collective thrives.

A human being is likewise a society of cells, with a coördinated defense. Our circulatory system doubles as a communications network; our blood vessels have an “endothelial” lining—a surface that is charged with the intelligent routing of immune cells. When ordinary cells are infected by a pathogen, they send signals to their neighbors, who pass them on until they reach the endothelial cells. In response, the blood vessels swell, creating off-ramps through which white blood cells, which are part of the immune system’s circulating defense force, can flow toward the site of infection. This is merely the beginning of our immune response.

Our bodies, like the United States government, make a startlingly large investment in defense. Our bone marrow produces billions of immune cells each day, and then discards most of them. Almost every one of our cells is perpetually scanning itself for evidence of invasion. The system is complex—ask a microbiologist about immunology and she’ll whistle, wishing you luck. Those who describe it often resort to metaphor. Contemplating the enormous amounts of information that it collects and synthesizes throughout the body, Jack and Du Pasquier suggest that “the immune system can be regarded, above all else, as a computational device.”

This device is so finely tuned that we seldom notice it at work. Our guts burble with foreign microbes outnumbering human cells roughly ten to one, but the good are seamlessly sorted from the bad; every day, some of our cells grow into cancers, but the immune system dispatches them before they become dangerous. On a recent camping trip, I was bitten three times by some kind of insect while putting my arm into a jacket sleeve. Who knows what entered my bloodstream. Almost immediately, three welts formed; a few minutes later, the welts came down. In moments like that, it is easy to assume that we hold the advantage over the parasites.

On Friday, March 6th, a purified sample of the novel coronavirus arrived at the laboratory of a virologist named Benjamin tenOever, at the Icahn School of Medicine, in East Harlem. Many virology labs focus on a single pathogen, but tenOever’s studies dozens of viruses and how they change the cells they infect. During the winter, tenOever and his team were focussed on the flu. But, as the coronavirus pandemic began to escalate in the U.S., they initiated a side project, infecting lung cells in a dish with sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, and studying the results. TenOever posted their preliminary analysis to Twitter on March 14th. Within a week, a program manager at the Defense Department e-mailed to ask about the research. Two weeks later, Defense gave tenOever a $6.3-million grant to find out what the new virus was doing to our immune systems.

Born to Dutch parents, tenOever grew up in rural Ontario. Now forty-three, he approaches his work with an amused, easy confidence. On March 26th, he gathered his team and they discussed their plan. They would take half a dozen viruses—including sars, mers, and the new coronavirus—and induce infections in hosts, starting with cells in a petri dish and graduating to ferrets. They’d study the results to understand what made the new coronavirus unique. Their goal was to have results in three weeks.

The infections took place inside the lab’s Biosafety Level-3 facility, a series of nested rooms in which each is kept at a lower pressure than the one surrounding it, so that air flows inward and up an exhaust chute containing sensitive filters. In the “warm zone,” where there is always the danger of being exposed to a live virus, you must wear a gown, two sets of gloves, two sets of shoe covers, a respirator mask, a face shield, and a bouffant cap. You work with your arms under a hood, protected by an extra set of disposable sleeves. When you’re finished with your experiment, you disinfect this gear and throw it into an autoclave—a kind of kiln—where it cooks for twenty minutes. To return to the “cold zone,” you remove your shoe covers before stepping over a red line. In New York, at the end of March, these precautions had a whiff of the absurd: in a city where around three thousand new coronavirus cases were being diagnosed each day, you were more likely to be exposed to a highly pathogenic virus in your neighborhood.

A Ph.D. student named Daisy Hoagland, who had herself just recovered from a mild case of covid-19, prepared the samples for analysis. Using a shaker machine and test tubes loaded with sand and ceramic pellets, she turned a suspension of ferret lung cells—some from infected animals, and others from members of the control group—into a homogeneous juice, then separated the solution in a centrifuge that generated fifteen thousand g’s. It is painstaking work. (“I listen to a lot of podcasts,” Hoagland said.) Using a pipette, she carefully transferred the topmost layer, a pink liquid, into another tube, which she centrifuged again, until she had a purified sample of RNA. This she handed off to her colleagues Rasmus Møller and Maryline Panis for sequencing. The process takes sixteen hours to complete, and Møller, who during the height of the pandemic lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, often biked home at dawn over the Pulaski Bridge.

Whereas the sequencing of DNA defined molecular biology in the early two-thousands, the sequencing of RNA defines it today. If you imagine a cell as a kind of computer, then your DNA contains all the software that it could possibly run. It is a somewhat astonishing fact of life that the exact same DNA is shared by every cell in your body, from the skin to the brain; those cells differ in appearance and function because, in each of them, a molecular gizmo “transcribes” some DNA segments rather than others into molecules of single-stranded RNA. These bits of RNA are in turn used as the blueprints for proteins, the molecular machines that do most of a cell’s work. If DNA is your phone’s home screen, then transcription is like tapping an icon. By sampling the RNA present in a group of cells, researchers can see which programs those cells are running at that moment; by sampling it after the cells have been infected with a virus, they can see how that virus substitutes its own software.

TenOever’s team quickly discovered that sars-CoV-2 was uncannily good at disrupting cellular programming. A typical virus replaces less than one per cent of the software in the cells it infects. With sars-CoV-2, tenOever said, about sixty per cent of the RNA in an infected cell is of viral origin—“which is the highest I’ve ever seen. Polio comes close.” Among other things, the virus rewires the alarm system that cells use to warn others about infection. Normally, as part of what is known as the “innate” immune response—so called because it is genetically hardwired, and not tailored to a specific pathogen—a cell sends out two kinds of signals. One signal, carried by molecules called interferons, travels to neighboring cells, telling them to build defenses that slow viral spread. Another signal, transmitted through molecules called cytokines, gets a message to the circulatory system’s epithelial lining. The white blood cells summoned by this second signal don’t just eat invaders and infected cells; they also gather up their dismembered protein parts. Elsewhere in the immune system, these fragments are used to create virus-specific antibodies, as part of a sophisticated “adaptive” response that can take six or seven days to develop.

Usually, the viruses that humans care about are successful because they shut down both of these signalling programs. The coronavirus is different. “It seems to block only one of those two arms,” tenOever told me. It inhibits the interferon response but does nothing about the cytokines; it evades the local defenses but allows the cells it infects to call for reinforcements. White blood cells are powerful weapons: they arrive on an inflammatory tide, destroying cells on every side, clogging up passages with the wreckage. They are meant to be used selectively, on invaders that have been contained in a small area. With the coronavirus, they are deployed too widely—a carpet bombing, rather than a surgical strike. As they do their work, inflammation distends the lungs, and debris fills them like a fog.

In late May, tenOever’s team shared its findings in the biweekly journal Cell. In their article, they argued that it’s this imbalanced immune response that gives severe covid-19—which can sometimes cause blood clots, strange swelling in children, and ultra-inflammatory “cytokine storms”—the character of an autoimmune disorder. As the virus spreads unchecked through the body, it drags a destructive immune reaction behind it. Individuals with covid-19 face the same challenge as nations during the pandemic: if they can’t contain small sites of infection early—so that a targeted response can root them out—they end up mounting interventions so large that the shock inflicts its own damage.

The gears of the immune response that come apart in covid-19 were discovered slowly, in a blundering way, as though science itself were recapitulating evolution. In a sense, there are several immune systems. In health, they coördinate with and balance each other. But a machine with so many moving parts is, inevitably, vulnerable.

Immunology as we know it began in earnest in 1882, at the Italian seaside. Ilya Metchnikoff, a Russian zoologist who would later help popularize yogurt in Western Europe, had developed an obsession with digestion, and with the process by which one cell eats another. In his memoir, Metchnikoff described the insight that would define his career. His family had gone to the circus, but he’d stayed home, “observing the life in the mobile cells of a transparent starfish larva” through his microscope. Suddenly, a thought occurred to him:

It struck me that similar cells might serve in the defense of the organism against intruders. Feeling that there was in this something of surpassing interest, I felt so excited that I began striding up and down the room and even went to the seashore in order to collect my thoughts. I said to myself that, if my supposition was true, a splinter introduced into the body of a starfish larva . . . should soon be surrounded by mobile cells.

Metchnikoff immediately performed the experiment, using a thorn from a rosebush in his garden. Sure enough, he saw cells surrounding the foreign body.

At the time, leading biologists, including Louis Pasteur, didn’t think of hosts as actively defending themselves against pathogens. If it was often impossible to get diseases twice, then that was because we became inured to them, like alcoholics to liquor, or because some unknown quantity of illness within us was “used up” as each disease ran its course. Immunology had advanced only haltingly since 1730, when the clergyman Thomas Fuller speculated that each person was born with “Ovula, of various distinct Kinds, productive of all the contagious, venomous Fevers we can possibly have.” According to this theory, an infection was actually an impregnation; each “egg” could be fertilized only once.

Using dyes to distinguish cells under a microscope, Metchnikoff helped show that the body actively defended itself. In fact, specialized cells responded to intruders in a process he described as “phagocytosis,” or cell-eating. One kind of cell-eater, called a “neutrophil”—because it can be stained only by pH-neutral dyes—swarmed to the site of the infection first. Larger cells called “macrophages” followed, absorbing both the invaders and the neutrophils into their “amoeboid protoplasm.” Neutrophils and macrophages, Metchnikoff found, lived in tissues throughout the body—a standing army.

Metchnikoff’s findings were promising: he had uncovered what would become known as “cellular” immunity. At the same time, other researchers seemed to be making progress in an entirely different direction. Emil von Behring and Shibasaburō Kitasato, two biologists working in Berlin, injected guinea pigs, goats, and horses with diphtheria and tetanus toxins. They found that, from the victims’ blood, they could derive “antitoxins” capable of conferring protective immunity on other animals. (Von Behring won the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work, in 1901.) It wasn’t clear what these antitoxins, later called “antibodies,” were made of. Still, von Behring and Kitasato had discovered what came to be known as “humoral” immunity, and it had nothing to do with cells eating other cells.

There came to be two camps: the cellularists, aligned with Metchnikoff, and the humoralists, aligned with von Behring. The feud over the origins of immunity was political and cultural as well as scientific. Metchnikoff was working at the Pasteur Institute, in Paris, and his followers, who believed that cell-eating was the basis of immunity, were mostly French. Von Behring’s supporters, who focussed on antibodies, were German. The humoralists won the mainstream in 1897, when a biochemist named Paul Ehrlich published a theory explaining how antibodies might work. In his paper, Ehrlich drew a toxin as an amoeboid blob with small nubs jutting out of it, each differently shaped; the antibodies were like little tadpoles whose mouths sometimes fit exactly onto the nubs. It was these variations in shape, Ehrlich argued, that allowed the antibody system to adapt to new pathogens and cripple them. For the first time, the elusive concept of immunity to specific diseases, so important and yet so poorly understood, felt tangible. “Helped in no small measure by the pictures which Ehrlich published,” Arthur M. Silverstein writes, in “A History of Immunology,” antibodies became “the principal object of interest to almost all immunologists.” Although Ehrlich and Metchnikoff shared a Nobel Prize for their contributions to our understanding of immunity, Ehrlich’s account eclipsed interest in Metchnikoff’s cell-eaters for nearly fifty years.

As biologists grew expert in the distillation of “curative serums,” the great quest in immunology became figuring out how antibodies were made, and how there could be so many kinds. It seemed that a person’s antibody repertoire was limitless: biologists found that the immune system could quickly create antibodies to fit synthetic chemicals never before seen in nature.

For the first half of the twentieth century, the going theory was that the invading element—the “antigen”—served as a template around which a corresponding antibody was molded. Only in 1955 did scientists discover the much stranger truth. It turned out that the cells that produce antibodies—called B cells, because they were first discovered in the bursa of Fabricius, an organ that does for birds what bone marrow does for humans—can produce only one kind each. Its structure is random, and nearly every B cell is discarded unused. If, however, an antibody created by a B cell happens to match some part of an antigen, that B cell will not just survive but clone itself. The clone incorporates many mutations, which offer the possibility of an even better match. After a few generations, an antibody with the best fit is “constructed” through a process of mini-evolution that occurs continuously in our lymph nodes and spleen. (Our ancestors the bony fish adapted the machinery of the B-cell system from an even more ancient parasite.)

The vividness of this picture—a weapons factory deep in our bodies, working on the principles of Darwinian selection—further etched the formula “immunity equals antibodies” into the biological imagination. And yet problems remained that only the cellularists could solve. During the Second World War, severe burns treated with donor skin grafts became more common. But the donor skin was often rejected by the body. When scientists examined the site of a rejected graft, they didn’t find antibodies. Instead, they saw swarms of a previously unknown kind of immune cell. Later, the attacking cells were shown to come from the thymus, a small, spongy organ, then thought to be vestigial, that straddled the esophagus. They were named T cells as a result, and became an object of fascination. T cells were incredibly destructive but somehow selective. They knew the difference between self and other.

The balance between protection and self-destruction had always been a theme in immunology. Since Ehrlich’s time, allergies had been seen as a misdirected immune response; in the nineteen-forties, scientists learned that certain precious parts of the body—the eyes, the reproductive organs, the brain—are actually walled off from much of the immune system. (Ehrlich himself discovered the “blood-brain barrier,” a mesh too fine for phagocytes and even tiny antibodies to penetrate.) Now the question of how the body distinguished between foreign and domestic tissue focussed itself on skin grafts and T cells.

Earlier, in mice, researchers had identified genes that affected the success of organ transplants: they called this collection of genes the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC, from the Greek histos, for “tissue.” In the sixties, a human version of the MHC was found. The genes turned out to be a blueprint for a remarkable system designed to distinguish self from non-self. Fragments of proteins built inside our cells are loaded onto tiny molecular rafts, which ferry them to the cell surface for inspection by T cells. Meanwhile, in the thymus, T cells are trained as inspectors: they are presented with rafts containing protein fragments, some of which are natural to the body. Any T cell that ignores its raft, or that goes on the attack in response to self-generated fragments, is destroyed. Competent inspectors are set loose to search for foreign material. They look for cells that display unfamiliar protein parts in their rafts and kill them.

This is how skin grafts are detected and rejected; how incipient cancers are disposed of; how cells that have been co-opted by viruses are rooted out. Together, B cells and T cells allow the human immune system to update itself as fast as our cells can replicate. But their power comes with risks. The immune system’s adaptive weapons aren’t always precise. Allergies affect somewhere between ten and forty per cent of the global population; as many as four per cent of people suffer from debilitating autoimmune diseases. And parasites could find ways to hack the system. “The invention of acquired immunity was like escalating a war with an omnipotent opponent,” Hedrick, who is a T-cell expert, writes. Our new weapons could be turned against us.

By the late eighties, it no longer made sense to contrast cellularists and humoralists. They had both been right; it was just that they saw different parts of the immune system depending on where and when they looked. Phagocytes were often present at the moment of infection. Antibodies in the blood, which could take days to emerge, pursued invaders outside the body’s cells, while T cells used MHC to peer inside those cells, destroying the ones that had been infected by viruses or corrupted by cancer.

Still, mysteries remained. At a 1989 symposium, the immunologist Charles Janeway described what he called the field’s “dirty little secret”: a vaccine containing an antigen designed to elicit antibodies wouldn’t work unless an extra irritant, or “adjuvant”—usually a harmless chemical or bacterium—had been added. Why wasn’t the antigen enough to jump-start the creation of antibodies? “To be quite honest, the answer is not known,” Janeway said. His suspicion, though, was that the process couldn’t begin unless the innate immune system—with its interferons, cytokines, and epithelial cells—had sounded its alarms first. Without marching orders, the standing army remained on call.

An innate system has to anticipate its enemies—a seemingly impossible task, given their stupendous variety. It wasn’t until around 1997 that Janeway began to understand how such anticipation might be accomplished. About a decade earlier, a pair of biologists named Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus had found a gene that affected development in fruit flies. Nüsslein-Volhard had called it Toll, using the German word for “great.” (“Das ist ja toll! ” she exclaimed, upon making the discovery.) Another scientist, Jules A. Hoffmann, learned that the same gene was involved in the fruit-fly immune response; Janeway, with the help of Ruslan Medzhitov, showed that a version of it was also present in humans, and employed in some of the white blood cells that are the innate immune system’s first responders. Through experiments with human cells, they showed that the gene coded for what came to be called a “Toll-like receptor,” which could recognize a particular molecular motif—a building block of bacterial membranes. It was as if evolution had noticed that, while many cells built their houses out of oak or brick, dangerous bacteria always seemed to use pinewood. Why not make a pine detector?

Immunologists soon discovered a second Toll-like receptor, then a third; they started giving them names like TLR4 and TLR5. Whole new families of “pattern-recognition receptors” were found. Each receptor, ingenious in its design, recognized some characteristic microbial or viral signature—a kink in a virus’s RNA, a crenellation in a microbial cell wall.

At long last, a picture of the whole system was coming into focus. It was all interconnected. Innate immunity kicks off the immune response, as cells at the site of infection use their receptors to recognize and combat invaders, and release interferons and cytokines to raise the alarm. Various types of white blood cells respond, having been routed to the infection via the bloodstream. They identify and eat foreign cells, returning the digested bits, via the lymph nodes, to the thymus and the bone marrow, as intel. In the days that follow, antibodies and killer T cells—the weapons of adaptive immunity—are built to spec. Everything plays a double or triple role. Antibodies, for instance, don’t just attach to invaders to block their entry into cells; they also tag them so that they’ll be easier for white blood cells to find and eat. The innate and adaptive arms ramp up each other’s destructive abilities.

Here, again, Hedrick sounds a cautious note. “Such a scheme should worry any systems analyst,” he writes. “A potentially lethal mechanism controlled by positive feedback is a recipe for runaway destruction.”

In late March, a thirty-two-year-old man of Dutch ancestry was admitted to a hospital in the Netherlands. He had difficulty breathing, and a CT scan showed an opaque haze spreading in his lungs. He was given a diagnosis of covid-19, and spent sixteen days in intensive care; four days after he was moved out of the I.C.U., one of his lungs collapsed. He recovered enough to be sent home nine days later. His twenty-nine-year-old brother, who lived in a different house, got sick at roughly the same time, and died. Their parents had moderate symptoms.

When scientists learned that a second pair of young brothers—twenty-one and twenty-three years old, of African ancestry—had also had severe cases of covid-19, they sought to study all four men. By sequencing the genomes of the men and their parents, the researchers hoped to find an anomaly that might explain why some young people, particularly men, had such bad outcomes.

The Dutch team found something that echoed tenOever’s theory about the way in which sars-CoV-2 rewires the cellular alarm system. The four men all had an ineffective variant of TLR7, a Toll-like receptor that recognizes viral RNA. When it works, TLR7 helps produce interferons, which tell nearby cells to increase their antiviral efforts. When it doesn’t, the alarm is silent, and the infection spreads. This genetic abnormality had made the virus’s work dramatically easier. The raiders had come to an unlocked house.

This spring, a clinical trial in the U.K. gave interferon-beta, a synthetic version of the molecule, to a random selection of a hundred and one patients hospitalized with covid-19. The trial found that those who received interferon early in their infection were seventy-nine per cent less likely to become seriously ill. Researchers agree that timing is crucial. In the early days of a coronavirus infection, an interferon boost might help your innate immune system contain the virus. Later, though, it might be harmful; at that point, your adaptive immune system could already be out of control, and you might need an immunosuppressant, such as the steroid dexamethasone. (Last month, President Trump received dexamethasone as part of his treatment for covid-19; he was also given a drug that contained lab-engineered antibodies capable of fighting the virus alongside, or ahead of, his body’s own adaptive response.)

The genes for TLR7 are on the sex-linked X chromosome. That could be a partial explanation for why men suffer from severe covid-19 more often than women. But a TLR7 deficiency is likely to be rare—far rarer than the incidence of severe covid-19 among young people. There are almost certainly other genetic or environmental factors that weaken the interferon response. In mid-September, research published in Science showed that some covid-19 patients with bad outcomes had “autoantibodies” that were attacking their own interferon; another article published in the same issue outlined a genetic flaw related to TLR3, which is also involved in the interferon response. (As many as fourteen per cent of severe covid-19 cases may be attributable to one of these two conditions.) The more researchers study our immune response to the virus, the more complexity they find. According to some theories, how things go for you could depend on how many viral particles you’ve inhaled, and on whether they reach your lungs when you breathe them in. If you’ve had a cold recently, it’s possible that the T cells you developed to fight it could partially fit the coronavirus. Vitamin D levels might matter, because Vitamin D can help control inflammation. Harmful autoantibodies could be responsible for the persistent symptoms suffered by covid-19 “long-haulers.” All of this is still being explored.

The immune system uses feedback to stay balanced, like a gymnast on a beam. If a light breeze blows, the gymnast might sway a bit; sensing this, she’ll shift her weight to return to center. But, given a strong enough push, she’s prone to overshoot with her reaction and, from the other side, overshoot again until she falls. Many factors contribute to the slip—a tight hip flexor, a strained calf, moisture in the air—each magnifying the force of the shove.

Older gymnasts tend to be less agile. The same goes for the immune system, which is why covid-19 disproportionately affects the elderly. The already high case fatality rate for sixty-five- to seventy-four-year-olds more than triples in people seventy-five and older. This age distribution is unique to the coronavirus. Kids are more susceptible to the seasonal flu; children and young adults who had the swine flu in 2009 were hospitalized the most, while the pandemic flu of 1918 hit adults in their twenties and thirties the hardest. (Perhaps their immune systems overreacted, or older people had acquired immunity to similar strains.) “The difference of risk and profile, young versus old—I don’t think anyone has seen an infectious agent behave quite like this before,” Richard Hodes, the director of the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, said, of the coronavirus.

The lopsidedness of the virus means that vaccines might not be as effective in older patients, even with double the dose, or after repeated inoculations. The beauty of a vaccine is that it relieves us of the task of completely understanding the virus; its package of antigens simply presses the On button of the great machine. Helping older people may require a more fine-tuned approach, tailored to the particular way this virus destabilizes the immune system. What we have learned so far suggests that it isn’t just that being older makes you weak, and that covid-19 preys on this weakness; the disease’s mechanism of action is actually amplified in the aging body.

For this reason, about a month after beginning their coronavirus investigations, the researchers in tenOever’s lab switched from ferrets to hamsters. Ferret immune systems are highly responsive, and the animals were getting better too quickly. “They look a lot more like kids,” tenOever said. By contrast, some hamsters, when infected with the virus, “actually develop respiratory distress. We see a lot more infiltration in their lungs.” In older hamsters, as in older people, innate immunity is less likely to contain the virus and adaptive immunity is slower to turn on and off. The hamster ends up wildly dysregulated. “The difference between these two outcomes really comes down to, as you get older—” TenOever paused. “Getting older sucks. Everything breaks down, even at the simplest of levels.”

As we age, our immune systems stiffen up. “If I had to respond to an insult—bacteria, a virus, a trauma, a lesion—the response is slower and is less strong,” Luigi Ferrucci, who studies the aging process and the immune system at the National Institute on Aging, told me. But, at the same time, the system becomes chronically activated. Cytokines circulate at a constant, high level in the blood, as though the body were at all times responding to some attack. This is true no matter one’s health. “Even in individuals that are extremely healthy, extremely well nourished, have no disease, and they’re taking no drugs, there are some inflammatory markers whose concentration increases with aging,” Ferrucci said. Think of the welt that rises with a bite, then imagine the same process��swelling, redness, stiffness, the accumulation of pus—slowly pervading the body. Your level of inflammation contributes to your “biological” age—which is not always in perfect lockstep with your chronological age—and increases your risk of developing cardiovascular disease, cancer, and dementia; it contributes to what geriatricians call “frailty.”

A phenomenon known as cellular senescence is partly responsible for the body’s increasing inflammation through time. As cells age and divide, small errors accrete in their DNA. These errors could lead to cancer, among other maladies. And so cells police themselves. When they detect decay in their DNA, they stop replicating and begin emitting cytokines, as though asking the immune system to inspect and destroy them. The accumulation of senescent cells may contribute to severe covid-19: according to the current theory, Ferrucci said, they could “expand tremendously the cytokine storm,” in which a runaway feedback loop leads to a sudden spike in inflammation throughout the body.

Adaptive immunity suffers with age, too, but for different reasons. The thymus itself atrophies. (On a restaurant menu, thymuses are called sweetbreads. “Sweetbreads come from young calves,” Hedrick told me. “If you were to try to harvest the thymus from an old bull, you’d get . . . nothing.”) When you’re young, with a short history of exposure to pathogens, your thymus produces new T cells at an extravagant rate. But as you age production slows, and the cells differentiate. Some live indefinitely as “memory T cells,” carrying with them a record of their defeated foes.

Certain viruses use up more T-cell memory than others. Around twenty per cent of an older adult’s T-cell repertoire is devoted to fighting a single virus: human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), a strain of herpes that usually has no symptoms. It would be ironic if, in some small way, HCMV makes it harder to survive covid-19. Unlike sars-CoV-2, which spreads without hiding and so causes extensive damage, HCMV is a master of disguise. When infecting a cell, the virus turns off that cell’s MHC system. No cellular raft delivers evidence of the infection to the surface. Still, this isn’t enough to avoid detection. Our immune system has invented a weapon, the “natural killer” cell, that looks specifically for cells without functioning MHC systems. And so HCMV evolved to create a decoy MHC raft, designed to fool the natural killers.

As a parasite, HCMV is almost perfectly adapted to its host; able to spread without attracting attention, it does nothing but consume resources. The thymus is one place where such cleverness leaves its trace. The practice of science is another. Many of the workhorse tools employed by molecular biologists—including the enzymes used by tenOever’s team to sequence RNA, and the crispr gene-editing system, perhaps the most important scientific discovery of our time—were once either weapons or defenses in the microbial arms race. It’s there, at the crucible of life and death, that biological innovation happens fastest, leaving us with technology for mounting a new kind of defense.

The last time I spoke to tenOever, in late July, his team had begun a search for treatments. In the BSL-3 lab, Møller was infecting hamsters; the plan was to give the animals candidate drugs, sequencing their RNA through the entire process of infection and treatment. By examining patterns in the data, the team could find out which drugs were better at undoing the coronavirus’s reprogramming. TenOever made use of a handy way of visualizing what was happening in the cells. He could turn the genetic analysis into an inkblot-like map, showing which parts of its genome each cell was activating. “You can build a landscape, if you will,” tenOever said. If the coronavirus shifted the landscape to the northeast, they would look for drugs that pulled it southwest. They were testing four good candidates a week like this.

It was an impressionistic way to look at an immune system. But the system was not designed to be legible; it was, of course, not designed at all. For years, Robert Jack, one of the authors of “Evolutionary Concepts in Immunology,” taught a class on immunology to students just beginning their Ph.D.s. Bright and enthusiastic, the students struggled to untangle the immune system’s feedback loops. Jack told me, “We tend to look at these systems and say, ‘Wow, who would have thought of that? That’s incredible. That’s so fantastic. It does this incredibly complicated job, and it does it really well!’ ” He took a breath, then continued. “Whereas, in reality, the immune system has simply, in the face of pathogen attack, staggered from one emergency to the next. It just uses whatever is lying around. It is hoping against all possibilities to try to survive a little bit longer. Whatever crazy solution it comes up with—so long as it works, it will be accepted.” The result is a system of great flexibility and power, which, pushed the right way, can be made to collapse upon itself. ♦

#covid19 #newyorker #tldr #health

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ckret2 · 5 years ago

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And I got so into writing out that Worst Case Scenario last night I forgot to mention my second misgiving with the whole damn prompt, which AS IT HAPPENS covers some headcanons I've been meaning to bring up AND is relevant to a prompt coming up in my list that I am gonna write, so I'm gonna devote a post to this:

The very scenario "x character gets upset over y character CHEATING!!!" is based on the presumption that, like... the characters give a shit.

In the case of Rodorah, it assumes that two giant animals, one of which is an alien, both:

1) are familiar with the concept of monogamy as humans understand it

2) believe in and adhere to the concept of monogamy as humans understand it

3) consider dating or banging anyone outside their relationship a breach of trust in regards to said monogamy

4) would have the exact same emotional reaction as a human to said breach of trust

Which is a lot of assumption to put on a dinosaur and a dragon. And also anyone who dates Ghidorah is automatically in a polyamorous relationship so monogamy is kinda out the window right from the get go, you know?

So I'm gonna dig into why all those assumptions are unnecessary to assume. Half based on canon and half covering fic headcanons.

Gonna go out on a limb and assume that we don't know anything worth discussing about the mating habits of pteranodons; but Monsterverse Rodan's also got a lot of bird in him, so let's go with that. Lots of birds are socially monogamous, but not sexually monogamous. What that means is that once two birds are committed to each other—went down to bird city hall and signed their bird marriage license, exchanged tiny bird rings, whatever birds do—they've committed to sharing a nest and splitting egg-guarding and child-rearing duties in that nest. They HAVEN'T committed to only screwing each other. Depending on the species, 10% to 33% of the eggs in the nest could have a different genetic father than the male bird in that couple. (And some even have a different genetic mother, which boggles my mind. Like did she fly all the way over to someone else's nest just to lay the egg like "I don't wanna deal with this one thanks" and they're like "that's fine have a nice day"? I'm sure that's not how it works but the thought amuses me.)

Operating by that definition, Rodan's image of "totally committed and faithful" would be "there's only one person whom I split daily chores with, and I can have kids with anyone."

(Some bird species are both sexually and socially monogamous... but then, some bird species also are only committed to one partner for one breeding season, then break up and commit to a new partner next year. There's variation, is the point—and more than that, "you can't logically assume that a species like this is going to be sexually/socially monogamous for life the way humans idealize" is the bigger point.)

The fact that Rodan's species, like all titan species, seems to be in a perpetual state of "less than two dozen deaths away from total extinction" would actually select against sexual monogamy, because a species that goes "I'm not having kids with anyone except my one true love. Who died a century ago," is gonna go extinct a lot faster than a species that goes "boy won't my one true love be excited when she hears about the prime real estate me and Ms. Krakatoa found to lay our eggs in."

And I've established in prior headcanons that because parents might die long before their kids are born and because volcanoes act as natural fortresses/incubators for eggs, Rodan's species doesn't share nests, doesn't need to protect or incubate eggs, and doesn't rear their young—so what would social monogamy even entail for them? It doesn't need to entail much of anything, if they even subscribe to it at all.

Ghidorah's species is alien so there's no need to try to compare them to their "nearest related species on Earth" because they aren't related to any species on Earth. But, if we're gonna use Earth species as a framework off of which to base their headcanons anyway: dorats/Ghidorahs, when taken all together, are like 50% snake, 30% cat, and 20% bat.

Snakes are the least monogamous bunch of animals you could ask for. During mating season, males and females both have multiple partners, females can lay eggs from multiple fathers in one clutch, and most species don't even bother incubating their eggs. (In the few that do, the mother does that without a partner.)

Domestic cats are into gang bangs. When a female cat is in heat, she will yowl to attract as many male cats in the area as possible. When a male cat wants some, he'll yowl in hopes a female cat in heat will zip over. They'll mate with multiple cats in a row, loitering around watching while they wait for their turn. They'll mate with whoever shows up. They'll mate with their own relatives. Cats don't care. Cats are gross. Get your cats fixed.

Most bats will have multiple partners. Some bats are polygamous—one or two dudes with a collection of multiple female partners. In both of these cases, males don't help rear the young. A few bats are monogamous and share parenting duties—but these are the minority.

So Ghidorah's most closely related species are three counts of "I don't care who you screw, I don't care who I screw, once a year there's like a month where anyone could screw anyone else at any time and nobody is safe. I'll screw you and then I'll screw a space chicken cyborg and then I'll screw myself, watch, I'm flexible."

One hopes they're a bit more selective than that, but those are the nearest Earth analogues we're starting with as our basis for their species.

Based just on that, between Ghidorah and Rodan, if one of them is gonna be fussed about the other having additional partners—sexual, romantic, or otherwise—odds are it ain't gonna be Ghidorah. Ghidorah's gonna be the clueless alien trying to figure out what weird Earth etiquette rule he broke while Rodan's upset—assuming Rodan cares either.

So beyond Earth animals: what's been established about dorats so far is that they live in big groups with multiple aeries. The basic dorat social unit is a flock (30-200 adults), not a nest (1-2 adults). Since they communally share nests, eggs from multiple parents will end up in the same pile, and so it's likely no one gives a damn about who's had kids with who. (And—although I haven't gotten into dorat reproduction yet—eggs are laid immediately after mating, so it's impossible to have dubious paternity in a dorat mating—which IRL, aside from "doubling the amount of parents looking after these kids," is one of the driving factors of monogamy in the wild.)

The Xilien military HAS witnessed aggression based on sexual jealousy between adolescent dorats, enough so that they think it's a threat to their experiments. The Xilien military is locking up dorats in cages and experimentally fusing them together. The Xilien military is not observing dorats in their natural habitat. The actual dorat breeder is absolutely horrified to hear of dorats behaving like that, because it's a sign of extreme stress and trauma. Viciously competing for mates and chasing off other potential sexual partners, therefore, is abnormal for dorats.

Using Ghidorah as they are now as an example of what dorats are like is dicey, since they've lived such a strange life and so much of their psychology is shaped by trauma—buuut, it's evident from them that dorats can feel romantic love, but we don't know what function it would've had among normal dorats. Maybe it's supposed to be a temporary thing that fades after a mating season, maybe it's supposed to encourage a few members of one flock to latch on to members of another flock and move as a means to discourage stagnation in the genetic pool of a single flock, maybe its primary purpose has nothing to do with driving reproduction but rather is supposed to strengthen social bonds between members of this naturally empathic species...

So the presence of romantic feelings doesn't inherently correlate with monogamy, or a desire for monogamy, or sexual/romantic exclusivity, or sexual/romantic jealousy...

So add all that together and what do you get. Of the two of them, Rodan is more likely to have a natural and/or cultural inclination toward any sort of monogamy than Ghidorah is, and even at that it's most likely to be romantic monogamy than sexual monogamy. Ghidorah's the one more likely to assume against exclusivity from the outside. However: to the original premise, if Ghidorah DID find out Rodan had taken another sexual partner (and let's be frank, it would be sexual because nobody in this fandom is writing a damn thing about infidelity plots that don't eventually fall back on "o noez Rodan screwed someone he shouldn't have," even when romance IS involved it boils down to sex, and yeah it's always Rodan—)

That parenthetical went on a bit of a tangent. Anyway if Ghidorah found out Rodan had taken another sexual partner, there'd be three possible reactions:

1) The LEAST likely: as in the potential scenario yesterday written on the "okay, let's assume that cheating is a thing for them" assumption: an apocalypse with a potential side of murder/suicide. In order for something like that to happen, Ghidorah's experiences on Earth would have to have pushed them into full Despite All My Rage I Am Still Just A Dorat In A Cage mode. Their baseline mental state is at about 45% on the "stressed caged dorat" meter. Right now they're hovering around 30% and gradually dropping. Being an enslaved war machine kept them at a steady 75%. They'd need to be at like 90% before they started flipping their shit over romantic jealousy. To get them to that level of stress, they'd need to be getting constantly harassed by Godzilla and human military units, psychically bombarded by Mothra, and on top of that probably getting gaslit to hell and back by Rodan re: their relationship status so they couldn't be confident of where they stood with him—and that leads into the other factor that's necessary for this scenario to happen. Rodan would need to 1) insist to Ghidorah that he's the only one Rodan's got any sort of sexual/romantic involvement with, and 2) convince him that the stability and continued existence of their relationship is predicated upon Rodan being interested in only Ghidorah. They'd need to be specifically convinced of these things first in order to feel lied to/betrayed if Rodan had a relationship of any kind with someone else, because they wouldn't naturally assume either of them.

Since we've got no evidence Rodan is a raging abusive asshole who would go out of his way to convince an ignorant alien that their happiness is dependent upon Rodan being exclusive and then go off and not be exclusive, this scenario isn't happening.

2) Actually likely scenario, bad outcome: Rodan comes home and Ghidorah asks where he's been all day and he goes, oh yeah, he found another member of his species today, they're gonna try to make eggs, it's great—because to Rodan that's no big deal, that's normal, he's got absolutely no reason not to tell his mate that he's banging another bird. Ghidorah gets nervous solely because they DON'T know what's normal here. They don't know whether monogamy or polyamory is the norm for Earth in general or Rodan in particular. Are they still a thing or is this Rodan's way of saying the relationship's run its course and he's moved on? Was he always planning to move on once someone of his own species became available? Was he expecting Ghidorah to expect that? Because they did expect that, they've always feared they were just a temporary substitute for a more desirable partner, they just didn't know if they were supposed to expect that. At which point they go "oh" and Rodan goes "'oh' what?" and they go "so is that it then?" and he goes "is what it?" and they actually communicate for thirty seconds and everything's fine. So hey the bad outcome isn't even bad. It probably just takes them a month to have that conversation while Ghidorah invents mental worst case scenarios.

3) Actually likely scenario, good outcome: Rodan comes home and Ghidorah asks where he's been all day and he goes, oh yeah, he found another member of his species today, they're gonna try to make eggs— And Ghidorah goes EXCUSE US if they're in a relationship with him and he's in a relationship with her then that means they and he and she are all part of the same flock and they are DEEPLY offended that he hasn't brought her by to meet them yet, come on, go get her, they need to know what she looks like so they don't accidentally get in a fight with her if they see her in Rodan's territory. Also they need to know where her volcano is so they can get their scent all over it.

#(using a wtf prompt as an excuse to write a longass headcanon post I already wanted to write)#(Like A Boss)#headcanons #meta #about my writing #rodorah #godzilla

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blubberquark · 5 years ago

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Seven Types of Game Devs And The Games They Make

The Computer Science Student

The computer science student had to write a game for class in the fourth semester. The game must demonstrate OOP design and programming concepts, and solid grasp of C++.

This game is written not to be fun to play, but to demonstrate your skill to the professors - or to their poor assistants who have to read the code and grade the accompanying term paper. The core loop of the game is usually quite simple, but there are many loosely connected mechanics in there that barely don’t really fit. For example, whatever the core gameplay is, there could be birds in the sky doing some kind of AI swarm behaviour, there could be physics-enabled rocks on the floor, there could be a complicated level and unit editor with a custom XML-based format, and all kinds of weird shaders and particle effects.

And with all this tech infrastructure and OOP, there are just two types of enemies. That’s just barely enough to show you understand how inheritance works in C++.

The core gameplay is usually bad. Un-ergonomic controls, unresponsive game feel, flashy yet impractical 3D GUI widgets make it hard to play - but not actually difficult to beat, just unpleasant. The colours are washed-out, and everything moves a bit too slow. There is no overarching design, the moment-to-moment gameplay is not engaging, and the goal feels like an afterthought.

But that’s ok. It is to be expected. The professors are CS professors. They (or rather their assistants) don’t grade the game based on whether the units are balanced, whether the graphics are legible, or whether the game is any fun at all. They grade on understanding and correctly applying what you learned in class, documentation, integration of third-party libraries or given base code, and correct implementation of an algorithm based on a textbook.

The CS student usually writes a tower defense game, a platformer, or a SHMUP. After writing two or three games like this, he usually graduates without ever having gotten better at game design.

The After-Hours Developer

The after hours programmer has a day job doing backend business logic stuff for a B2B company you never heard of.

This kind of game is a labour of love.Screenshots might not look impressive at first glance. There is a lot going on, and the graphics look a bit wonky. But this game is not written to demonstrate mastery of programming techniques and ability to integrate third-party content, tools and libraries. This game was made, and continues to be developed, because it is fun to program and to design.

There is a clear core loop, and it is fun and engaging. The graphics are simple and functional, but some of them are still placeholder art. This game will never be finished, thus there will always be place-holders as long as the code gets ahead of the art. There is no XML or cloud-based savegame in there just because that is the kind of thing would look impressive in a list of features.

More than features, this games focuses on content and little flourishes. This game has dozens of skills, enemies, weapons, crafting recipes, biomes, and quests. NPCs and enemies interact with each other. There is a day-night cycle and a progression system.

While the CS student game is about showing off as many tech/code features as possible, this kind of programmer game is about showing off content and game design elements and having fun adding all this stuff to the game.

This game will be finished when the dev gets bored with adding new stuff. Only then, he’ll plan to add a beginning and an ending to the game within the next six months, and go over the art to make it look coherent. The six months turn into two years.

The after-hours developer often makes RPGs, metroidvanias, or rogue-like games. These genres have a set of core mechanics (e.g. combat, loot, experience, jumping) and opportunity for a bunch of mechanics built around the core (e.g. pets, crafting, conversation trees, quest-giving NPCs, achievements, shops/trading, inventory management, collecting trinkets, skill trees, or combo attacks).

The First-Time Game Jammer

The first-time game jammer wants to make his first game for an upcoming game jam. He knows many languages, but he does a lot of machine learning with torch7 for his day job, so he has decided to use LÖVE2D or pico-8 to make a simple game.

This guy has no training in digital art, game design, or game feel. But the he has a working knowledge of high-school maths, physics, and logic. So he can write his own physics engine, but doesn’t know about animation or cartoon physics. He doesn’t waste time writing a physics engine though. He just puts graphics on the screen. These graphics are abstract and drawn in mspaint. The numbers behind everything are in plain sight. Actions are either triggered by clicking on extradiegetic buttons or by bumping into things.

The resulting game is often not very kinetic or action-oriented. In this case, it often has a modal/stateful UI, or a turn-based economy. If it is action-oriented, it could be a simple platformer based around one core mechanic and not many variations on it. Maybe it’s a novel twist on Pong or Tetris.

The first-time game jammer successfully finished his first game jam by already knowing how to program in Lua, copying a proven game genre and not bothering to learn any new tools during the limited jamming time. Instead, he wrote the code to create every level by hand, in separate .lua files, using GNU EMACS.

The Solo Graphic Designer

The graphic designer has a skill set and approach opposite to those of the two programmers described above. He is about as good at writing code as the programmer is at drawing images in mspaint. The graphic designer knows all about the principles of animation, but has no idea how to code a simple loop to simulate how a tennis ball falls down and bounces off walls or the ground. He used to work in a team with coders, but this time he wants to make his own game based on his own creative vision.

The graphic designer knows all about animation tools, 3D modelling, composition. He has a graphic tablet and he can draw. He knows all about light and shade and gestalt psychology, but he can’t write a shader to save his life.

Naturally, the graphic designer plays to his strengths and uses a game engine with an IDE and a visual level editor, like Unity3D, Construct, or GameMaker.

The graphic designer makes a successful game by doing the opposite of what the coder does, because he does it well. The screenshots look good, and his game gets shared on Twitter. He struggles writing the code to aim a projectile at the cursor in a twin-stick shooter, but we live in a world of Asset Stores and StackOverflow.

The resulting game is a genre-mixing thingy full of set pieces, cut scenes, and visual-novel-style conversations. The actual gameplay is walking around and finding keys for locks, but it’s cleverly recontextualised with a #deep theme and boy does it look pretty.

The Engine Coder

The engine coder is like the CS student on steroids. He has nothing to prove. He knows his C++. He lives in a shack in Alaska, and pushes code to GitHub over a satellite connection. He also knows his Lua, C#, Python, and Haskell. The engine coder writes a physics engine, particle system, dialogue engine, planning-based mob AI, savegame system, a network layer and GUI widget library.

He has written five simple demos for the engine: A first-person walking simulator, a third-person platformer, a very pretty glowing orb swarm shader thingy, a non-interactive simulation of a flock of sheep grazing and a pack of wolves occasionally coming in to cull the herd with advanced predator AI, and a game where you fly a spaceship through space.

Somebody comments in the forums that it’s hard to even write Pong or Tetris in the engine. The Engine Coder is more concerned with optimising batched rendering and automatically switching LoD in the BSP tree so you can land on planets in space without loading screens.

The Overeager Schoolboy

The schoolboy has an idea for a game. He saves his money to buy Game Maker (or RPG Maker) and tells his all friends about his amazing idea. Then he makes a post about it on tumblr. Then he makes a sideblog about the game and posts there too, tagged #game development.

Unfortunately, the schoolboy is 15, and while he is talented, he doesn’t really know how to program or draw. He’s good at math, and he can draw with a pencil. Unfortunately, he wants to learn digital art, level design, and programming all in one go. He already knows all the characters for his game, and he writes posts about each of them individually, with pencilled concept art and flavourful lore.

Even more unfortunately, our schoolboy is hazy on how big the game is actually going to be, and what core mechanic the game should be based around.

After designing sprite sheets and portraits for ten characters you could add to your party, plus the Big Bad End Boss, he realises that he has no idea how to get there, or how to make the first level. He starts over with another set of tools and engine, but he doesn’t limit his scope.

In an overdramatic post two months later, he apologises to the people who were excited to play the game when it’s done. A week later he deletes the tumblr. He never releases a playable demo. He never gets constructive feedback from game developers.

The Game Designer’s Game Designer

The game designer’s game designer is not exactly a household name, but he has done this for a while. While you have never heard of him, the people who made the games you like have. All your favourite games journalists also have. Through this connection, many concepts have trickled down into the games you play and the way your friends talk to you about games they like.

The game designer’s game designer has been going at this for a while. When he started, there was no way to learn game design, so he probably studied maths, psychology, computer science, industrial design, or music theory.

The games fall outside of genres, and not just in the sense of mixing two genres together. They are sometimes outside of established genres, or they are clearly inside the tradition of RTS, rogue-likes or clicker games, but they feel like something completely new.

The games of the game designer’s game designer are sometimes released for free, out of the blue, and sometimes commissioned for museums and multimedia art festivals. Some of them are about philosophy, but they don’t merely mention philosophical concepts, or use them to prop up a game mechanic (cloning and transporters, anyone?). They explore concepts like “the shortness of life” or “capitalism” or “being one with the world” or “unfriendly AI” through game mechanics.

But they also explore gameplay tropes like “inventory management“ or “unidentified magic items“ or “unit pathfinding“.

Sometimes bursts of multiple games are released within weeks, after years of radio silence. Should you ever meet the game designer’s game designer, you tell him that you got a lot out of the textbook he wrote, but you feel guilty that you never played one of his games. So you lie and tell him you did.

#game design #video games #game development #jokes #listicle

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not-a-space-alien · 5 years ago

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Into the Unknown, Part 14: No Refunds or Exchanges

Series masterpost

On AO3

Well, it’s all well and good to be hopeful. Hope is the first step to solving your problems. But unfortunately, the second step is usually some variation of actually doing something to solve your problem, avenues for which Crowley had precisely zero available.

Crowley spent a good amount of time slithering forward in search of a way out of the Pit. Then he had a good session of sniffing about and investigating, then a spate of time spent roving and wandering.

He had heat pits as a snake, of course, but they weren’t helpful. The entire place was hot, glowing in his UV vision like a blazing supernova. He had to turn it off after a while to avoid the sensory overload.

His tongue flicking out and tasting the air provided an overwhelming array of scents, all jumbled up on one another, an unread story with a thousand layers on top of one another like a hellish lasagna. He occasionally caught scent of someone nearby, sensing a shift in the air, the vibration of footsteps against his scaly belly, snaking towards it in a predatory way, but unable to reach anyone before they ran off. He called out for them to wait, always, but they never did. They moved at the edges of his periphery like the ghosts of timid rodents.

Crowley coiled up, considering changing back into his human form. The forked tongue was useful for now, and there was something comforting about being in his original shape.

The soft tmp tmp tmp of footsteps sounded in the pitch-black.

“Hello?” said Crowley, periscoping up. “Don’t run away! Please!”

There was suddenly a bright light, the light of the innermost layer of Hell. Crowley would have slammed his eyes shut had he had eyelids.

He felt a hand on him, clamping on his neck, and dragging him out.

The light of Hell’s throne room felt like the piercing brightness of Heaven after the darkness of the Pit; it took several moments for Crowley’s vision to adjust so he could see:

Satan was holding him, his coils looped around the length of her arm and squeezing as a panicked reflex. Behind her was the archdemon Vycra; her face bore a gnarly set of fresh talon marks, and she looked chastised and cowed.

Crowley stood statue-still like a panicked deer as Satan lifted him up to meet his eyes. “What’s so special about you?” she demanded.

He flicked his tongue out.

“You must know something,” said Satan. “Some information they need. Or some ability you’ve kept hidden from me. Whatever it is, they can’t want you for anything good.”

Crowley’s muscular coils slid along her arm, pulsing with enough force to crush lesser beings to death. He let out a hiss like a tea kettle.

“Maybe if you tell me, things will go a lot easier for you.”

“What are you talking about?” Crowley croaked.

“Someone wants you very, very badly,” she said. “And I can’t imagine why. But I intend to find out.”

********************************************

The group dawdled and bickered about what their next step should be while they waited to be contacted again by Hell. Which finally happened about an hour later, a message to tell them to meet Satan in the same spot as before, at sunrise the next morning.

The delay was unnerving. Their precious time in this universe before having to return was burning up. Three days and two nights it had been, and at sunup when Satan wanted to meet they would begin eating into their third day. They were due back at 7PM, which meant that, if anything in this trade-off went wrong, they would only have about 12 hours to scrape up some alternate plan.

They sent down to Hell a very polite request to meet earlier, which was summarily and unambiguously rejected.

So they flocked together in the eaves of the church like bats huddled up, trying to get some anxious rest while they prepared themselves.

Uriel kept the Book of Life cradled in her wings. Aziraphale caught her in the middle of the night reading it; it was open to Lucifer’s page, and she caressed it gently, as though comforting a lost loved one.

The morning of the third and final day in this universe came soon enough.

They had decided Aziraphale should appear again, but the previous encounter with Vycra made them hesitant to risk Aziraphale’s physical safety in the same way, so at least one of the higher-ranking members of the group would go with him.

If they all stood there waiting for Satan to show up, they figured Satan would probably suspect (rightly) that it was a trap, get suspicious, and call it off. Seeing Uriel and Victoria would be a tip off that something very strange was happening and would probably shift the focus of the meeting towards the fact that their un-fallen doppelgangers somehow existed, and who knew how they would react to that?

Again, they were caught up in the unpredictability….They would have been able to have some kind of idea what to expect in their home universe, but this Satan was new, a different animal entirely. And they had to figure out how to outsmart her, to double-cross and walk away with both Crowley and the Book of Life, unless they wanted to let this universe burn down behind them when they left.

But how to finagle it so they had the upper hand? What if Satan brought four archdemons with her and matched their firepower? What if this meeting turned into a battle? What if she concocted up a way to thwart their attempts to keep both Crowley and the Book of Life, or worse, keep them both herself? What if she got wind it was a trap and slaughtered Crowley before they could get him?

That led Aziraphale to visions of his beloved being slain as a consequence of their attempts to play dirty, and it sent spikes of anxiety through him. He was tempted to actually give over the Book of Life and let this universe fall to ruin as long as it meant he would get Crowley back safely.

But the others wouldn’t let him, because they at least had some sense of propriety remaining, and he was shocked to discover that was probably the only thing holding him back from such a selfish action.

They eventually decided it had to be Maltha to stand by Aziraphale and assure his safety. It couldn’t be Victoria or Uriel, and Mykas would probably be troublesome as well. They decided the best course of action would be to mask Maltha’s aura with the angel dust spell. This would obscure her identity and make it difficult to tell if she was an angel or a demon. This would likely be better than being up-front about a demon and an angel working together, because that kind of thing was still scandalous and unheard of in this place, and the revelation would, again, draw an unpredictable response from Satan.

All they had to do was get Crowley close enough that they could grab him. Aziraphale would have the Book of Life, and Maltha would be next to him. They would say whatever outlandish thing they had to in order to get Crowley within snatching distance. Aziraphale would drop the Book, grab Crowley, and Maltha would fend off any resistance until Mykas, Victoria, Uriel, and Ramial arrived for backup.

They would, they assumed, be able to overpower Satan and whoever she brought as backup. That was a big assumption. And they only had to grab Crowley and the Book and then run away; they didn’t have to win the battle, just hold their own. It might, just might work.

Creating the angel dust for Maltha unfortunately required quite a good deal of feathers, which were taken from Aziraphale, Ramial, Victoria, and Uriel. Maltha healed the poor plucked sods because they had taken so many feathers it was doubtful they would be able to fly, but it was still a quite unpleasant experience.

They didn’t have all the ingredients they would need to make the drinkable version of the spell, so they hastily put together the dust version and sprinkled it on her. They ended up needing to go back and make more, and even then it just barely covered her entirely. The sun was rising by the time they finished and got into position.

The dead grass crunched under their feet as they took up position, the exact same place Aziraphale had stood last time. The others were far enough away to not be felt, to preserve the element of surprise, and it unnerved Aziraphale that their backup was so far away.

But he had seen how fast Mykas was capable of moving. And he had Maltha by his side now, and frankly, Aziraphale had been pretty thoroughly convinced by now of Maltha’s ability to get away with pretty much whatever she wanted, even moreso than him. Aziraphale and Maltha both had flare guns, which they would set off to let the others know to rush over.

So there Aziraphale stood, the hefty Book of Life in his arms, with Maltha and her masked aura hovering behind his shoulder. He didn’t dare pray; he didn’t know what might happen.

A towering inferno of flames and billowing white smoke erupted in the distance, and winged figures could be seen in the flames.

“Here we go,” said Maltha.

Leading the way was Vycra, bearing fresh wounds on her face, likely the result of talking back earlier. Behind her, snuffling across the dry bracken was this universe’s version of the archdemon Mykas, a bearish figure crisscrossed with scars and looking incapable of more than the most bestial instincts. A chain around his neck led to the hand of—

Satan. She had a skeletal frame and awful, terrible wings full of eyes. And in the other hand she held a sack, which writhed faintly.

Aziraphale eyed the sack hungrily, desperate. He knew what was in it. Despite the circumstances, he managed a small laugh. “They just brought him in a pillow case.”

Satan stopped within shouting distance, Mykas on her right, Vycra to her left. Satan, and two archdemons. They might be able to win, if the others could get here quickly enough. A sneer crossed Satan’s face. “And who exactly might this be, principality?”

“An escort to ensure you play fair,” said Aziraphale darkly. “Considering what you tried to pull last time.”

Satan’s faced crunched into hatred. “What kind of angel is this? What’s wrong with her aura?”

“Don’t worry about her,” said Aziraphale. “Do you have him?”

Satan reached into the bag and pulled out a black and red snake, hand firmly behind his jaw and out of biting distance. She dropped the sack and held him up, his thick body coiling around her arm.

The panic in his eyes and frantic movements of his serpentine body broke Aziraphale’s heart. Crowley writhed and made eye contact with Aziraphale. Still, he trembled.

Aziraphale thought that he needed a way to signal to Crowley that this was his Aziraphale, not the other one who had tried to kill him. So he very subtly spread his fingers, lifting his ring-finger up slightly to draw Crowley’s attention to the golden band there.

Crowley’s eyes wheeled about in his head, and he snapped at Satan, trying to bite her hand. It was unfortunately a futile gesture, but the renewed attempts at escape made Aziraphale think Crowley had gotten the message.

“This creature is what you want, isn’t it?” said Satan.

“Yes,” said Aziraphale. “Let him go.”

“Not yet,” said Satan. Crowley’s sides heaved, expelling a fearsome hiss. “First, I demand an explanation. Something very strange is going on. Who is this ‘archangel’ next to you, and for what purpose do you demand this demon, that you would trade Heaven’s most holy artifact for him?”

Maltha’s hand grabbed the collar of Aziraphale’s shirt, and it was only then that he realised he had started forward to pummel Satan’s face in. “Patience,” Maltha hissed.

“That is none of your concern,” Aziraphale yelled. “You agreed to the trade, now let’s trade.”

All she had to do was put Crowley down, Aziraphale thought. Just put him down, and he could slither far enough away for them to reach him before Satan could retrieve him. As it was, she had a death grip on him, and there was no way to snatch him without risking retaliation.

Just put him down.

“Put him down,” Aziraphale said. “And we’ll get on with it.”

Satan narrowed her eyes at him.

Vycra drew her sword, laying it across Crowley’s neck. “Let me rephrase this,” said Satan. “This demon must be of some considerable value to you, and I stand to lose nothing. So if you wish to re—”

She was interrupted by an ear-splitting blast from a horn, and all heads looked up to see the sky parting, Heavenly warriors pouring out, led by Kris.

Maltha hissed. From Satan’s side, Mykas barked and snarled viciously.

“Villain!” Kris’s voice boomed. “I knew you were up to no good. You intend to hand the Book of Life over to the Adversary.”

“I knew this was a trap,” Satan shrieked. “Vycra, take him back down. They won’t trick us out of our leverage so easily.”

This was the point at which Aziraphale dropped the Book of Life, which landed with an Earth-shaking thud to the gasps of all present, and sprinted with all his force to bridge the gap between them. He had killed Satan once, and he was prepared to do it again, and now that he had Crowley in his sight he wouldn’t let him out of it again for anything.

The sky disgorged an impressive amount of angels. Maltha set off the signal for their reinforcements to come and snatched the Book of Life of the ground. Satan dropped Mykas’s chain, releasing him. Aziraphale pumped his wings and rocketed at Satan, who was handing Crowley to Vycra.

Aziraphale drew his sword.

Vycra also drew hers.

Aziraphale’s lunge at Satan was easily deflected with a sneer and a wave of her arm, sending him careening into Vycra and landing heavily at her feet.

Vycra lifted her sword to ram Aziraphale through.

This diverted her attention away from the serpent in her hand, briefly, just long enough for him to twist and spit venom in her face.

It splattered on her cheek and hit her left eye. She recoiled, screaming, but she dropped her sword instead of Crowley. Whatever damnable reflex was responsible for it, she dropped her sword instead of him, holding onto him like her life depended on it.

Aziraphale stood to try and wrestle Crowley off of her, but she kicked him square in the chest and flung him back. Crowley erupted into a stream of hisses, flicking venom everywhere, but she had pointed him away from her face by this point.

“I told you to take him and go,” Satan growled.

Vycra’s gaze—one good eye, one swamped with black, crawling venom—went from Satan to Aziraphale, then she turned and spread her wings.

“No!” Aziraphale shouted.

Vycra kicked off into the air, Crowley still coiled around her arm, zigzagging around the descending heavenly forces and veering out of their path. Aziraphale leapt up to follow, unsuccessfully trying to grab onto her ankles before she got out of reach.

Vycra was a much stronger flier than he was, and it was obvious from the moment she took off he wouldn’t be able to catch up to her, but that didn’t stop him from trying. She rocketed up into a cloud bank out of sight, and Aziraphale followed, breaking through the mist. The sounds of the freshly started battle below faded with distance.

Aziraphale exited the cloud into an empty sky, panting and wheeling around to try and find them. There. He spotted the archdemon diving towards the ground, where a portal to the underworld had opened up to admit her.

“No you don’t!” said Aziraphale. He tucked in his wings and dived. He could faintly see the serpentine figure in Vycra’s grasp writhing and struggling as they plummeted.

The portal swallowed Vycra up.

Please, Aziraphale thought, stay open just two seconds longer.

It had begun to close by the time Aziraphale reached it, but he was able to tuck and roll to fit through it.

He hit something hard and felt his nose break, his vision filled with white blurs as he tumbled over. He finally lay motionless on the ground for a moment, his head ringing, then sat up as quickly as he could, vision spinning.

He had made it through the portal, all right, into the infernal dimension, but he hadn’t made it past the gate. In front of him loomed a massive white stone door patterned with an eye set into a cave wall, firmly closed. The blood smear on it told Aziraphale he had collided face-first into it.

He wiped the blood with his sleeve, springing to his feet. Vycra must have gone inside already, somehow. Aziraphale marched around, but the little antechamber was empty, and there was nowhere they could be hiding.

Aziraphale’s heart sank as his brain began to process the fact that he had failed. He jogged around, looking vainly for some sign that he was wrong, but the only logical conclusion was that Vycra had gone in and someone had managed to close the gate with impeccable timing to lock him out.

He marched up to the door, huffing, and knocked on it. The eye on the door shifted to look at him.

“Let me in!” he demanded.

The eye blinked.

“I demand you let me in.”

“No,” said a voice, and the eye closed.

Aziraphale beat at the gate and yelled till he was hoarse. Then, he sunk dejectedly down into a siting position with his back against the gate.

Now this was a predicament, wasn’t it? What was there left to do? They were basically back to square one. Aziraphale’s instinct was to march in and resort to force….but he couldn’t very well do that alone. Could he?

Tears sprung to his eyes.

No, he couldn’t even get past the gates. He had failed. He was a failure.

Wait a minute. Crowley was still in danger, and Aziraphale was sitting around crying? When had that ever accomplished anything? There would be time to feel miserable later. For now, he had to put his anger aside and act smartly…something he hadn’t traditionally been very good at.

The first step would be to regroup…Except he had left the rest of his party in the middle of a huge battle with Heaven. His mouth felt dry thinking about it. Maybe there wouldn’t be anyone else to help him when he got back.

Surely they all had good enough survival instincts to get out of there alive?

Yes. He had to trust them. Now he just had to regroup with them.

Except…

This Hell did not have a static exit like the Hell in their home universe had. The antechamber he found himself in was just a smooth unbroken cave. The only exit was the stone door behind him, which remained firmly shut.

“Oh bugger,” he said.

The only way to leave must be through the same kind of magic used to access it in the first place. Aziraphale patted his pockets, trying to gauge whether or not he had the spell ingredients necessary to concoct such a ritual.

He thought again about the Heavenly armies pouring down onto Satan’s head. No way Hell would win that fight. Satan would probably be retreating soon, so he’d better hurry before she showed up.

Unless…? Maybe he could hide and then when the gates opened, sneak in? That seemed incredibly dangerous, and very foolish. Maltha, or Mykas, or even Uriel would probably be able to figure out a way to get through the gates; the opportunity to get in wasn’t so rare he needed to risk going in alone.

He got out a piece of chalk and started drawing a circle he supposed might get him back up to Earth. He laid out the ingredients in his pockets and frowned as he noticed he was short on the prerequisite amount of sulfur needed. Best to try it anyway.

Aziraphale mixed everything together and laid it out, lighting the candles and saying the incantation. The candles fizzled out, but nothing happened.

“Hmm,” said Aziraphale.

A portal zoomed open in the wall.

“Ah, there we go,” said Aziraphale, paying no mind to the fact that it decidedly hadn’t come from his spell.

Maltha’s head peeked in. She had a volley of fresh claw marks scored down her face and leading into her neck. “Aziraphale,” she hissed. “Get out here. Satan is coming.”

“Is everyone else here too?” said Aziraphale. “They must’ve gotten not too far, I was thinking we could—”

“She called for reinforcements,” Maltha said tightly. “You will die. Get the fuck out here.”

Aziraphale, chastised, stepped out without further argument.

Maltha grabbed his belt to haul him out faster. He found himself on the roof of the church they had convened at earlier. The portal to Hell closed behind him.

In the distance, where the sky had been rent to produce Heaven’s armies, the two forces could be seen retreating to their respective strongholds. Satan’s escort had swelled to include an arm of cavalry mounted on Hellhorses, and Azirpahale could sense the presence of at least three archdemons that definitely hadn’t been there before. The fiery hooves of the horses and the miscellaneous flames on the infantry glowed faintly in the darkness of the black gate swallowing them up.

Maltha was right, Aziraphale would have been trampled. He tugged at his collar, sweating. He looked to Maltha, who had plopped herself down tiredly on the roof shingles. Besides the injury on her face, it looked like most of the feathers on her right wing had been torn off, as well as a few injuries to her arms and torso that had been partially healed.

He looked around. Mykas was lying out, whining faintly under a crisscross of lacerations from holy weapons on his snout and all over his body. Victoria had lost her left arm, which had been lopped off just above the elbow and cauterised with infernal fire, by the looks of it. Poor Ramial was sitting on a pipe with a leg injury that looked like it would make her unable to stand.

Only Uriel, sitting on the edge of the roof with the Book of Life on her lap, was uninjured.

“What happened?” Aziraphale asked.

“They weren’t quite sure what to make of us,” said Victoria with a pained smile. “So we got attacked by both sides.”

Aziraphale sat down heavily, his head in his hands.

“I don’t suppose you managed to catch up to Vycra?” said Uriel.

“No, of course I didn’t,” Aziraphale snapped. “Don’t be stupid.”

Uriel turned red.

“I see you managed to get away with your precious Book, though,” Aziraphale fumed. “For all the good it does us.”

“Aziraphale, I gave the Book of Life to Uriel and told her to run to keep Heaven from getting it again,” said Maltha. “It’s our best leverage over Satan right now. She still clearly wants it.”

She was right, but that didn’t mean Aziraphale had to be polite. He glowered without apologising.

“All right,” said Victoria, still breathing heavily. “So that was a failure. But we all made it out alive, and we’ve still got the Book, and there’s still time. We’ve got…” She struggled to count on her fingers with only one hand. “…eight hours left.”

“Eight hours…” Aziraphale grappled with a hard dilemma: if the time came and went, would he go back home and try to think of an alternate plan? …Or would he stay here in this universe, even if it meant being trapped, to try and get Crowley back?

Maltha exhaustedly leaned onto a gargoyle for support, running her hands up and down her injuries. “All right. There’s no way around it. I was really hoping there was, but there isn’t. The time for clever plans and bargaining is over. We have to stop pissing around.”

“Full-frontal assault,” said Mykas.

Victoria nodded. “Then let’s go.”

#good omens #my good omens fanfic #my writing

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katharinalsz-blog · 5 years ago

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Doing cardio With A Ketogenic Diet

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drgreg · 2 years ago

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Dr Gregory Hough South Africa

Other statistically vital effects were found for the younger male inhabitants and for the measure of African immigration. In all cases, the path of the relationship between the socio-structural elements and contact dr gregory hough south africa crime is according to expectations. Brown63 found that socio-economic variables had been more significant determinants of crime in South Africa than deterrence variables .

Identification and characterization of microRNAs expressed in the African malaria vector Anopheles funestus life phases utilizing high throughput sequencing. Identification of phenotype-relevant differentially expressed genes in breast cancer demonstrates enhanced quantile discretization protocol’s utility in multi-platform microarray data integration. An integrated and comparative method towards identification, characterization and functional annotation of candidate genes for drought tolerance in sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench). The Transcription Factor 7-Like 2–Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor Gamma Coactivator-1 Alpha Axis Connects Mitochondrial Biogenesis and Metabolic Shift with Stem Cell Commitment to Hepatic Differentiation. Structural and practical results of nucleotide variation on the human TB drug metabolizing enzyme arylamine N-acetyltransferase 1. Developing reproducible bioinformatics analysis workflows for heterogeneous computing environments to assist African genomics.

Steve Gardner retired from the Kingswood workers at the finish of 2020 having served as Business Manager at Kingswood for 15 years from January 2006 until December 2020. His contribution to the school was immense and beneath his astute guidance many modifications dr gregory hough south africa and new buildings popped up on the Kingswood campus. However, Steve’s ardour for Kingswood was shared along with his ardour for golf, especially at his residence membership, The Royal Port Alfred Golf Club.

Well done to Birdlife South Africa for making this journey so particular. Being in a position to experience that remote and infrequently visited region, observe unbelievable wildlife, and contribute to its future protection and conservation, made this the most amazing trip. Never ever will anybody who have been on the Flock to Marion cruise forget this distinctive, once-in-a-lifetime expertise that filled everybody with awe and wonder, especially the magnificent birds across the Prince Edward Islands.

We are simply over two weeks into E-learning and our #wellnesswednesday clip is aimed toward our pupils this week, but the analogy that's used on this video clip, might properly be helpful to our larger Kingswood group as well. This week’s #WellnessWednesday message comes from our faculty psychologist Ms Teresa Yell. This week she seems at the idea of hope, and the method to find hope in these difficult times. Lack of sleep has a huge impact on your day and the way people experience you.

Nelson Mandela's name for the expansion of the Goldstone Commission of Enquiry. Mandela's position in the peace talks between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party. The first ANC nationwide convention held in Durban, after unbanning. Nelson Mandela's position within the lifting of sanctions in opposition to South Africa. The far proper wing in South Africa, and Mandela's visit to Orania. The results of South Africa's first democratic election and the inauguration of Mandela as President.

This yr has been a really different year not only for our school, but indeed our nation and the world at large. The recurring message all through her speech was taking a look at how we've all tailored to this very tough year and that we are actually and really the “Hero’s of our own story”. There is something quite particular about music – the fact that gamers of all ages and talents can mix to carry out. For today’s #MusicMonday we want to share some photographs from our Strings Concert which took place on Thursday 5 November.

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mensbodybuildingtips · 6 years ago

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Top 5 Fat Burning Supplements for 2015

Top 5 Weight loss Supplements for 2015

It's concerning that time again. The sunlight is out, the skies are blue as well as the coastlines are all set to be loaded. Summer season is upon us and also 1000's of supplement customers will certainly be flocking to their favorite vendors in search for the very best weight loss supplements.

To aid our readers in their mission, we have compiled a listing disrobed to just include the Top 5 Fat Burning Supplements For 2015. In 2012's listing was particularly challenging to make with the intro loads of brand-new high top quality items in 2015. A number of aspects brought about our last decision consisting of: high quality, effectiveness, rate, portions, as well as ingredient study. As you all know, research is extremely important to Directlyfitness.com. We desire our viewers to get their following fat burner supplement based upon proof - not empty assurances. Without additionally a due, let's have a look at our top 5 products!

5. Roxylean Fat Burner By BPI

Roxylean by BPI is a powerful way to slim down and also boost general power levels. We we're quite satisfied by Roxylean's active ingredient lineup. Roxylean by BPI does consist of a 510 mg proprietary blend so the exact values of each ingredient are unidentified. Caffeine is the very first detailed ingredient of the 510 mg mix significance is consists of the most of this particular blend. Caffeine is followed by the complying with ingredients: lemon, adhatoda, yohimbe, goldenseal, white willow, chinese skullcap, and rauwolfia.

Lemon has long been utilized for advertising weight management and also detoxing of your liver although the precise evidence for this is clouded at ideal. Lemon benefits have been determined via some research write-ups (1). Adhatoda is a fascinating option as some research reveals that is valuable for opening up the breathing tract and also advertising a decrease in blood stress. This is typically used to treat those with bronchial asthma or breathing deficiencies yet maybe BPI was choosing enhancement in cardio or weight training efficiency through boosted breathing exchange (2).

Yohimbe has been made use of in fat burners as well as standalone products for a long time with research revealing yohimbe is helpful in enhancing workout and sexual impotence (3-8). Yohimbe does, nevertheless, advertise boosted blood stress in small doses or reduced high blood pressure in bigger doses which can be bothersome for those with existing blood pressure disease.

Golden seal provides a selection of health and wellness advantages including high blood pressure reduction. White willow is frequently utilized for arthritic patients as an analgesic to stop joint pain (9). Chinese head cap offers a host of health benefits including blood pressure decrease. Rauwolfia is also known to reduced blood pressure.

So it appears that Roxylean BPI took caution to combat any type of blood stress boosts from yohimbe with a wide variety of blood stress decreasing representatives. Furthermore, Roxylean seems to provide even more of a holistic method to supplementation in mix with well looked into metabolic simulators such as caffeine.

Roxylean by BPI additionally provides 60 servings in all at 1 pill per offering. Roxylean additionally carries an affordable, but greater rate when compared to other fat burning rivals. This item additionally contains a high dose of caffeine so those conscious energizers may go with an alternate fat burner. You might also experience a light prickling sensation in the face from the niacin component consisted of in Roxylean called, 'niacin flush'. This is a usual sensation, however safe as well as reduces with continued usage as your body adapts to niacin.

The verdict: Total Roxylean supplies greater doses of popular metabolic stimulants while likewise including a holistic method to supplements for weight management. Roxylean does feature a modest cost but does include 60 portions each container. A bargain for any individual seeking a solid fat burner with higher portions and also not too conscious stimulants.

4. Cellucor Super HD By Cellucor

Cellucor is a brand name that has actually been around for fairly some time and also the quality of their products has always been high. This branding top quality evidently rollovered to their fat heater, Super HD.

It has 2 proprietary blends, the initial called, 'Super HD Nootropic and also CNS Support Blend' included useful components consisting of: caffeine anhydrous, N-Acetyl-L-Tyrosine, and toothed clubmoss. Toothed clubmoss has been utilized to treat Alzheimer individuals and also various other memory condition problems. It has additionally revealed benefit in minimizing inflammation.

The 2nd blend is called, 'Super HD Thermosculpting Blend' including 253 mg of a collection of herbs and root essences that advertise raised metabolic process, minimized water retention and increased power, although not all components included have a strong study background. Another bonus is that Super HD likewise contains a valuable B vitamin blend which urges energy and weight loss.

The rate as well as variety of portions per container of Super HD is quite attractive, especially to those that are on a tight budget. It has 120 servings per bottle (1 capsule each offering). The directions state to take this item two times a day, so the real offering dimension is more like 60 portions each bottle. However, this is an effective item with sufficient servings to last 2 months. It ought to also be noted that the 120 pill size is the bigger version of Super HD which is around $70 each container. The smaller sized alternative includes 60 capsules as well as is more detailed to $50 in cost.

The verdict: Super HD is backed by a well recognized company, Cellucor, that has actually been in the supplement market for a long time - which speaks quantities. This product has somewhat limited research on some components yet does consist of greater dosages of the proven, a lot more investigated active ingredients. Super HD boasts a modest cost tag yet does have enough portions to last longer compared to the average weight loss supplement. It is more affordable to acquire the bigger variation and consequently Extremely HD is a great product for anyone trying to find a high quality much longer long lasting product at reasonably high cost in the weight loss market.

3. Hydroxycut Hardcore Elite By Muscletech

Muscletech Hydroxycut has been a staple in the fat burning market for fairly a long time now. Muscletech took place to create Hydroxycut Hardcore Elite to update and also surpass the old formula. Just what we such as concerning this item is that all the active ingredients are transparent. No proprietary blends or 'secret solutions'. What you see is exactly what you get with Hydroxycut Hardcore Elite.

The components detailed in order are as follows: high levels of caffeine anhydrous, coleus essence, eco-friendly coffee extract, l-theanine, cocoa extract and also yohimbe extract. Coleus extract or coleus forskohlii is an active ingredient we have actually not yet discussed. It is generally included in many fat heaters and there is some study recommending it may minimize appetite and also weight problems (10) while other study is not so compelling (11).

L-theanine is typically coupled with high levels of caffeine as studies have actually shown this combination to be efficient at enhancing cognition, performance and emphasis (12-13). Eco-friendly coffee essence does consist of some high levels of caffeine as regular coffee does. Eco-friendly coffee extract is more efficient due to the fact that it consists of chlorogenic acid which has actually shown to promote weight management effects (14). When regular coffee is baked, the majority of the chlorogenic acid is eliminated ( 15). This makes eco-friendly coffee essence an excellent option or excellent couple with high levels of caffeine for boosted fat burning capabilities.

The powers of yohimbe have been previously gone over in this listing yet it has been revealed to be a blood vessel dilator, permitting improved blood flow to the muscles. The disadvantage? It might trigger boosts in blood pressure that some individuals with existing blood stress condition could wish to remain clear of.

The verdict: In recap, Muscletech's Hydroxycut Hardcore Elite gives a transparent overview of it's ingredients and also dosing. Many of the active ingredients have strong years of study to back up cases while some still do not have evidence. Hydroxycut Hardcore Elite has 50 servings (ONE HUNDRED capsules) and cost roughly $25-30 - an extremely practical rate for the advantage. If you desire a solid basic item backed by a reputable company at a practical price, Hydroxycut Hardcore Elite might be for you.

2. Torrid FX By Imperius Labs

Torrid FX by Imperius Labs is the primary marketing supplement in it's brand schedule - as well as completely factor. Torrid FX flaunts a mix of powerful fat burning components developed to shed weight in the least quantity of time feasible. Torrid FX offers a distinct 4-way fat melting formula that Imperius Labs uses to highlight it's fat burner.

Torrid FX's 4 means system intends to give: 1) Boosted thermogenesis, 2) improved cognition 3) elimination of subcutaneous water, as well as 4) sustaining a healthy and balanced functioning thyroid for the ultimate shredded figure. In addition to it's 3 main blends, Torrid FX consists of B vitamins B3 and B12, chromium as well as biotin.

Chromium picolinate has been shown to be reliable at minimizing lipid levels (16-17) while biotin has been shown to be an essential regulative element in fatty acid synthesis, metabolism of amino acids and gluconeogenesis. Biotin has even been revealed to improve the synthesis of specific proteins. Biotin also plays a major function in immune system, skin, hair as well as nail health as a bonus (18-20). Vitamin B3, otherwise called Niacin, advertises an increase in HDL (excellent cholesterol). Vitamin B12 or Cobalamin help produce red cell as well as create the oxygen carrying protein, hemoglobin.

Torrid FX's very first mix is 400 mg of power and also focus brokers and also so properly named, 'Power as well as Focus Accelerator'. This blend has: high levels of caffeine, bacopa monnieri, l-theanine, as well as l-tyrosine. Bacopa monnieri has been revealed to enhance memory and also focus (21). L-tyrosine is crucial in a lot of means to the body it is regarded an 'all objective amino acid'. Some fast advantages for active individuals consist of: lowered stress, minimized tiredness, boosted alertness and memory, and avoidance in rest deprivation (22-25).

Torrid FX's next blend is called, 'Fat Incinerating Complicated' which has: hoodia gordonii, l-carnitine base, chili pepper, ALA, CLA and also 7-keto-DHEA. Hoodia gordonii helps promote weight loss via appetite decreasing homes, l-carnitine advertises reduction in fatigue as well as improved power levels (26), cayenne pepper helps in fat burning and also hunger control (27), ALA and also CLA are effective anti-oxidants and also decrease LDL (bad cholesterol), and also 7-keto which has developed a current buzz in the fat burning community - supplying powerful fat burning as well as effective weight loss abilities shown effective in several studies (28-29).

The final mix in Sizzling FX is called, 'Diuretic Shred Matrix' consisted of juniper berry as well as dandelion powder. These ingredients are diuretics as well as primarily reduce the level of subcutaneous water degrees and also therefore advertise a more 'ripped' look, among other health benefits.

The verdict: Sizzling FX supplies an well balanced item that promotes every little thing you should be seeking in a weight loss supplement. Torrid FX's active ingredients offer evidence via study to allow for enhanced energy/focus, metabolism, and diuretic buildings for an even more lean physique look. Sizzling FX includes 30 servings per bottle (60 pills) at a reasonable rate for this effective fat heater! Imperius Labs' well rounded item earns it the second place on our top 5 fat burning supplements listing, sliding from the primary area to our following item ...

1. Lipo-6 Black Ultra Concentrate By Nutrex

Back to fundamentals! This is one reason we really enjoy this item and is our leading fat heater for 2015. Lipo-6 Black Ultra Concentrate by Nutrex has actually been updated from the initial Lipo-6 formula and also consists of the complying with active ingredients: caffeine anhydrous, theobromine anhydrous, advantra z Citrus aurantium, yohimbe HCI, and also rauwolscine. As you could see, Lipo-6 Black Ultra Concentrate contains many ingredients discussed by the various other leading fat burners making this listing. Lipo-Black 6 does include a 294.5 mg exclusive blend so knowing the precise application of the ingredients is not possible however we obtain a smart idea based on the order of ingredients.

Theobromine has actually been utilized in a selection of fat heater items and also forever factor - it exerts results much like those located in high levels of caffeine! That 'anhydrous' merely implies there is less water material included and thought to be much more powerful as well as easily absorbed by the body as a result (as compared to the non-anhydrous type).

Advantra z citurs aurantium is a fancy method of saying, 'extract of citrus fruit'. This component has actually been very investigated and also advertised as a weight management as well as energy booster (30-31). Yohimbe as well as rauwolscine are additionally included and an effective weight loss combo. Yohimbe has an extremely high affinity for the α2-adrenoreceptor. These receptors (largely in fat cells) regulate the price of release of saved fat. As villains, Yohimbe and Rauwolscine lock on to α2 fat cell receptors. Fat storage space is deactivated as well as rapid release of kept fat is initiated.

The verdict: Not just is Lipo-6 Black Ultra Concentrate by Nutrex a powerful formula, it comes at an extremely practical price for a 60 portions per container. Lipo-6 Black has everything and is the leading fat burner for 2015! Begin your body makeover right with a product that not just assures results, but supplies them.

In Conclusion

There you have it. The leading 5 weight loss supplements for 2015! We understand that fat burning can be difficult and also difficult, especially with hundreds of products to pick from - but we wish this evaluation made your option easier!

Do you agree with this checklist? Aid our readers with options that did not make our list. Allow us learn about your encounters with those items below in the comments section.

#bodybuilding #bodybuilding workout #health #health and wellness #how to build muscle #weight #wellness #workout

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sakaar-wheretherestendsup · 6 years ago

Text

Completely unrelated:

The whole Scarlett Johansson thing happening right now.... (I’m not talking about Ghost In the Shell- that should’ve gone to an Asian woman, not a white one), but for her being cast as a Trans man: I understand the need for representation and the fact that trans people need to be shown properly in the way that they are in society in true form, but what about all those times where a straight actor played a gay man/woman, what about all those times where a straight man played the role of a trans woman, what about all those times a gay individual played a straight person???? I mean, it’s called acting for a reason, is it not? I’m not trying to be callous or ignorant here, don’t get me wrong, nor am I trying to hurt anyone’s feelings. I understand the argument that if trans actors got the chance to play non-trans roles, this wouldn’t be that big of a problem, but the thing is, in most of the comments and reactions I’ve been reading on this situation, very few people are using that as their argument. Most of it is just the fact that straight or non-trans people shouldn’t be playing trans people. I just don’t understand why? It’s a role? Acting is about becoming someone you are not. It’s about leaving your comfort zone, it’s about adopting a different persona, a different personality, a different individuality.

Let’s talk about the race card. I’m sure some (a lot) of people would say, “according to that logic, a white actor playing a person of another race or color shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is and Hollywood is starting to acknowledge that”. Here’s the thing though, there’s a lot of history surrounding the introduction of race into the industry. At the beginning it would be a major thing if there even was a character of color included in a script! And then, IF there was, they would have a white actor play him/her. What that implied and outright said, was that “we don’t find person’s of color attractive enough to put in films, or make films about them. Gradually, when the issue of race started sweeping the whole country, they started including more people of color in films. Then, the issue became more about proper representation, and having more important roles with more people of color (and different from just black and white at that) rather than just having them in the first place. The issue was, and still is, about having people in films that mirror the way society is. If you have a white man playing a black, Asian, or Indian one, then the message that’s being sent out is “we think white people are more attractive than the actual type of person we are trying to portray.” It’s also saying, that “we don’t actually believe society should be the way it is and have all these different people live and work cohesively”.

I understand that you can say that gender identity and sexual orientation should be treated the same way, but what these two topics and issues really need are awareness and acceptance. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have proper representation, but you also have to be practical about some things. The main issue surrounding gender identity is most people’s’ lack of acceptance or “believability” of/in it. What these big Hollywood films do by making biopics and storylines surrounding gender identity issues and casting star studded names in and as those people is bring awareness to real people that went through real, painful facets of life to become who they really were/are. I get that in an ideal world, everyone would like to say that by casting trans people in such roles would be the thing that would really be making a statement and really be enforcing awareness, but frankly that’s not going to happen. I’m not trying to be insensitive, but while it is undoubtedly true that a lot of lgbtq+ people would flock to theatres and fill some seats and watch those movies, the overwhelming majority of people won’t, and those percentage of people that won’t are the ones that need educating, not the people who already know and accept and appreciate trans people! The people who don’t aren’t going to go watch a movie with some person they couldn’t care less about playing another person they don’t particularly care much about knowing. Those movies in those cases would tank. “What about Love, Simon, and Wonder Woman, and Black Panther, and other such movies that represented minorities in a correct manner and did so well!! Look at that! That’s what proper representation does. The right way will prevail!” Yeah. No. Black Panther? Look at how fucking long that took. A whole black cast with black superheroes and black super villains and black music and various “black” cultures. Very. Fucking long. and it did well for various reasons: 1. They started introducing some of the characters earlier to get audiences used to them, 2. They used some big house names in the cast to kickstart a few things (Lupita (big before BP-Oscar winner), Michael B. Jordan, Forest Whittaker, Angela Basset), 3. it was a MARVEL STUDIOS, Disney film. It had ALOT of backing and fandom support, and 4. Finally, yes of course one of the biggest reasons for its success and impact and influence was the fact that it was an all black cast and a black superhero done all in the right way, but all those people that filled those seats?? They had been waiting for this for ages! Ages. It was way past time for something like this! And again we’re back to the race card. WONDER WOMAN. Let’s talk WW, it did great! It even didn’t have a huge name actress! But it did have a huge name character. Wonder Woman herself drew a huge part of her audience. And the fact that it was a female directed film. Again, another group of people, who had never been given an opportunity like this. LOVE, SIMON. Love, Simon did really well for a movie solely surrounding a gay kid. In fact, it’s the biggest “blockbuster” for such a “genre”. 8, even 4 years ago? It would’ve tanked. With a pretty much “no-name” cast besides Jennifer Garner (who is not the center of the storyline), it would’ve gotten nothing, but it did. Why? Because for the past couple of decades, Hollywood has been “experimenting” various times with gay concepts and storylines and characters. It’s not a “new” thing. It’s not something people haven’t heard of. It’s not something only a handful of people accept or recognize and appreciate. It’s still a battle and gay acceptance has a long way to go with the public, but it’s not “strange” (mostly) for someone to see a gay character on screen because it’s no longer considered “strange” (mostly) to interact with, and associate with, and live lives with, and develop relationships with gay individuals in the real world.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the trans community. Of course none of that is their/our fault. It’s the world, and the media, and Hollywood, and people who refuse to accept. But the thing is that while, I’m sure the trans community has been suffering and waiting for ages as well, the truth of the matter is, that a majority of the public is not recognizing that. They’ve barely begun to accept the l, g, and b parts of “lgbtq+”, so on the cycle of awareness, recognition, acceptance, and complete normalcy of these things, the trans community, unfortunately, is still put on awareness. Even now, this last month, with all the pride parades across the country, the amount of non-lgbtq+ persons toting signs of awareness and accceptance for those first 3 and last letter were bigger than those for trans. We’re still stuck on awareness. When Trump pulled his shit about the military and trans people, people stood up and fought back but it was all surface level. It was all “we stand with trans people”, “trans people are people too”, “we recognize and accept trans” and things like that. It hasn’t gone beyond that yet. We’re still at the point where we need all the help we can get in awareness. And the fact of the matter is that that means getting Hollywood to make films about trans people. Successful trans people, not successful trans people, good trans people, bad trans people, trans people of all colors, races, shapes, and sizes. Just like they did and are doing with gay, and lesbian, and bisexual people. And we need this films to gain awareness. BIG AWARENESS. Not just theatres with seats filled only by lgbtq+ and some supporters, but more people than that. People that will go to watch their favorite actor or actress. Or a certain director or production house. That means getting and letting big stars be cast as iconic trans people, so that the public will start recognizing and accepting them/us.

Also, back to the acting thing. Where do we draw the line? Of what people are allowed to play and what they aren’t? Race makes sense, on a fundamental level it just makes sense, there’s not much acting experience you can learn or earn by playing another race in an official capacity. You can learn by playing character types. And I’m sorry, but sexual orientation definitely falls under character type. So does gender identity, in a sense. Just like religion. If you extend the line to gender identity, then will you extend it to sexual orientation? And then after that, to religion? What’s the point of acting then? I get that some of you will say there’s a lot you can don by just staying in your lane, but for people and actors who have done so much of that, what about them? Some of the most iconic and award winning roles and movies have centered around sexual orientation and some gender identity issues. It gives the actors a challenging and emotionally charged role. How is that disparaging or improper representation? Will you eventually start getting offended over the fact that a Jewish individual might play a Hindu, or vice versa? Or whatever variation with religion that could come up? Shouldn’t there be , with that logic, “proper” representation there then too?

Also, again, I apologize, but what if the actual trans actors that are auditioning for the role just aren’t what the studio wants? That’s just show business. You have to get over that. Basically what you’re saying is that if it fits your bill and works properly somehow in your mind, it’s fine, but if it doesn’t it’s not? That’s not for you to decide.

The ScarJo thing: frankly, her non-marvel movies recently haven’t done that well and a lot of that is simply on the stories of the films she’s been in and some of it is also because of the controversy surrounding her (but not too much - the money depends on the entertainment factor, sorry). Personally, I love her as Natasha/Black Widow, I think her acting chemistry with her co-stars is fantastic. She plays really well off of other actors, and she’s a good actress. should she have thought GitS through? Yes. But she didn’t. Actors make idiotic choices all the time. The trans role she’s taking on, if she does a good job, I’ll like her performance, if she doesn’t, I won’t. It’s as simple as that. A lot of that also lies on the directors and story-writers shoulders as well so there’s that. There’s a lot of crap with her and Woody Allen that I don’t condone, but I’m also trying to come to terms with the fact that there are quite a few actors who I love who had said nice things about him in the past (Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett, Javier Bardem, etc.). So there. That’s my bit. Thanks for listening. I apologize if I offended people, I’m trying to simultaneously understand and explain what I’m thinking/feeling. I’ve never written such a long post about anything in my life. I promise I don’t hate trans people. Or any people really. Actually, I hate neo -nazis, and those that are explicitly trump followers (not simply republicans but trump followers, there’s a difference- you know who you are). Anyways. I don’t. I’m a liberal, minority colored woman myself, (not that that means anything), but yeah I get it. But it’s confusing.

#scarlett johansson #scarjo #woody allen #trans community #trans people #trans men #rex #hollywod #rupert sanders #natasha romanoff #black widow #marvel #black people #people of color #minority rights #lgbtq #lgbtq+#lgbtq community #lgbtqa

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