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stefanyrodriguezblog-blog · 6 years ago

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The Interior Voices of America in If Beale Street Could Talk

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

Barry Jenkins follows the success of MOONLIGHT with a dynamic, intimate story based on the novel IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK by James Baldwin.

It is incredibly regrettable to say that the progress we have made is still not enough to claim we are better off with our current justice system. Last year, the case of Cyntoia Brown rose to the public eye when she was granted clemency after serving 15 years in prison for killing a man who bought her for sex when she was only 16 years old. Brown saw little justice in her case; at the same time, unharmed people from poor minority communities have repeatedly been more likely to be stopped or gun-down by police officers. Philando Castile was shot down inside his car after being stopped by a police officer and informed him that he had a permit for his gun. Botham Jean was shot down by his downstairs police neighbor while in his own home because she thought she saw him breaking into her apartment. Stephon Clarke was shot in his grandma's backyard because the cops believed he was reaching out for a gun which turned out to be a cellphone. These crimes appear to be a never-ending disease. Their names along with the names of every victim who have suffered from systemic racism enforced by the people who are supposed to protect them should resonate in the voices of every citizen of this country. Instead, what we get are the typical "what happened before" questions, short mainstream media attention, and little discourse provided by our legislators.

In part, IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK is a masterfully crafted film which allows audiences to reflect on the consequences of our country's racist epidemic through characters' emotions.

We begin the film with an aerial tracking shot of Alonzo "Fonny" Hunt (Stephan James) and Clementine "Tish" Rivers (KiKi Layne) walking down the stairs next to a river. The camera, located at a physically higher position than them, is brought down to a medium shot of the couple holding each other, followed by a medium shot of the characters starting at the camera. Almost never again in the film do we get an aerial shot like the opening one, but we do get ceaseless amounts of medium shots of the characters at eye level; suggesting we might have walked into the film with a similar preconception of the characters but to understand their story, we have to see them at their same level.

Revealing the news about Tish and Fonny's baby also reveals a candid understanding of the characters, particularly the two grandmothers. Tish's mother Sharon (movingly portrayed by Regina King) is caring and firm about the way she questions Tish in the kitchen. When it comes time to reveal the news, a medium shot of a nervous looking Tish staring up at us cuts to her family in their living room. Now Sharon is informed, and they are both telling the rest of the family together. This leap is indicative of the love Sharon has for her daughter. By establishing the two characters' relationship, looking through Sharon's eyes, and suddenly cutting before Tish even says anything, we understand that Sharon doesn't need to hear a reason to feel empathetic for her daughter. The abrupt absence of a moment depicts an image of motherly affection.

Fonny's parents Mr. and Mrs. Hunt (Michael Beach and Aunjanue Ellis) give polar opposite reactions to Tish's announcement. While Mr. Hunt celebrates, Mrs. Hunt disapproves of the conception and condemns the two for having sexual relations in the first place; Fonny's sisters also reinforce a derogatory language towards Tish. The self-imposed judgment that they adopt has little to do with religious belief as Mrs. Hunt expresses and more with societal oppression against African Americans. One only needs to observe both their attitude and costuming to understand. Their dresses are reminiscent of the traditional 1960s wife fashion and their hair is combed down as to imitate that same style. This look is in sharp contrast to Tish and her sister's high-waisted pants and afro hair, which was typical of the 1970s black woman. The willingness of Mrs. Hunt and her daughters to turn back on their culture and attack those who suffer in the same struggle suggests that they have fallen victim to a system which wishes to suppress and divide black Americans. While it successfully manages to segregate these two families, Ellis' performance as she leaves the house illustrates the character's inner confliction. Mrs. Hunt goes from forcibly mouthing the words "that child" as if to proceed it with something offensive but instead, whimpers the same words out of the house. This moment is symbolical of her struggle to wish for tenderness in a society that perpetuates violence and hatred.

Immediately following the harsh interaction between the two families, we jump back to the time when Tish and Fonny went on their first date. The film's narrative is nonlinear, so it goes back and forward from before and after Fonny was sent to prison. The film leaps from periods of grief/anguish to ones of affinity/joy and vice versa. Very often we go through periods of emotional instability in our daily lives; similarly, the juxtaposition of these sequences suggests the relentless unpredictability of life itself. What's more, a lot of the sequences before Fonny is sent back to prison have a lush dream-like quality to them. We can assume this is because we are experiencing the story from Tish's consciousness and she looks back at these memories with a gentle introspection. But previous collaborator of Jenkins also reinforces this sentiment with a sweeping score that parallels the film's tone. The encompassing sounds of the harp, trumpet, and violin compose a melodious harmony deserving of its own examination.

In Fonny's apartment, their first sexual interaction is touching but shot with realistic attributes. When Fonny and Tish are kissing in his bed, the camera captures them passionately touching each other in a medium shot. The shot stays with them as they undress and the music gets progressively lower. The sequence seems to become increasingly more uncomfortable to witness when the music goes away, and there is no dialogue. Simultaneously, it places the focus on the character's body movements; this is revealing of their emotions. Tish is looking down and up at Fonny until her back in facing the camera. Fonny cannot stop staring at her with a concerned look on his face as he covers her with his sheets. When the shot cuts, it is to see Fonny play music and back again to a close-up of Tish with little space in her frame compared to him. The space in which the characters find themselves is symbolic of their own confidence. Fonny in a full shot visualizes his poised attitude while Tish's close-up visualizes her timidness. This sequence depicts the character's inner feelings at a meaningful part of any relationship.

The latter sequence is one in which its purpose is to explore the humanity of the characters, but one of the film's major themes is the subject of systematic oppression. How does a black body navigate through a sea of racist discrimination? The two scenes which best highlights this subject (and are arguably the best entirely) see Fonny and Dany (Brian Tyree Henry) having a conversation and Fonny inside prison. Both revolve around this concept and ponder on what it mentally does to its victims. In a powerful performance by Henry, we witness a man explain the reason why he got sent to prison and what it did to him. The camera pans from side to side in the conversation, creating an energetic fluidity between the two men. Every time it turns from Fonny to Dany, the tone gets severely more cynical and eerie. Henry's performance assures us that this man has been broken down; a close-up sees him utterly disturbed and unsettled, a full shot briefly captures him tearing up, he is without any consolation that "the white man" would show him justice. This scene depicts a man reflecting on a hurtful past and foreshadowing another's near future.

The next sequence does not include dialogue, and it almost relies on visuals alone to express the mentality of a man in prison. A traveling full shot of Fonny is circling him as he works on a sculpture which then cuts to a close-up of his face laying in his cell bed; this suggests that now we are looking back at one of his memories. Fonny is free to move around this space unrestrictively and the flowy movement of the camera captures this going in circles. The spatial freedom established by this shot illustrates Fonny's retrospective outlook of this memory. Next, a static shot captures his face motionless and with minimal space in the frame; another close-up shows him motionless again and with a single tear running down his face. The subtext implies that we are seeing a man when he felt his freest juxtaposed to when he felt most entrapped.

Another thing that is important to point out is the presence of smoke in the mise-en-scene of both sequences. This smoke is cloudy, all-encompassing, like a blanket hovering over the characters. One reading could see the smoke to be symbolic of the system itself, as it is restrictive and you can't seize it. Another reading could see it as a catalyst for these men to reveal their emotions, Dany expressing pain and Fonny expressing bliss. This decision is completely subjective, but the presence of smoke in these two sequences is more than mere coincidence. Nevertheless, these moments effectively dwell on systematic oppression as one of the film's main themes by portraying the emotional consequences it had on two different men.

In an interview with Slash Film, director Barry Jenkins noted on the challenges of adapting James Baldwin's novel: "so much of the power of his writing is how he goes into the interior lives of the characters. So you understand how the story is making these characters feel and what those feelings are saying about life in America, about American society. So the challenge was, how do you make a film, which is not interior text, which is all surface in a certain way – you’re outside them, you’re not inside of their heads – but how do you still translate this interior voice? "

At its best moments, IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK is a cinematic landscape of faces which communicate the interior voices of its characters. These voices represent a familiar story to its audience, one which stimulates those who have experienced prejudice based on race and influences those who have not. With the election of a bigoted president who continues to perpetuate racist propaganda, American society evidently still has many issues to address and resolve; beginning with the acknowledgment of how slavery and discrimination have evolved through our system of justice. As observers of this film, we will make a decision one way or another on how to react to the way the system treated these characters. But regardless of this, after watching IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK, we can pave the way towards being more empathetic as well as seeing another person's struggle as our own.

#ifbealestreetcouldtalk #barry jenkins #movies #film #cinema #review #analysis #america #us #discrimination #newyork #oscars #2018 #books #literature #james baldwin

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king-kage · 8 years ago

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WHAT THEY LOOK FOR IN A LOVER: Sanji, Ace, Law, Luffy, Zoro

A/N: Warning. Looooooong post ahead. I hope this makes up for my silence. I’ve got Naruto headcanons coming up within the next couple days. Reading week is drawing near! (Thank God).

Sanji

-Passion. Sanji has the most fantastical dream of all of the straw hat pirates, given that the All Blue is entirely a myth when compared even to the Hieroglyph that Robin is seeking out. Despite the question surrounding his dream, he actively and furiously defends his vision in any form that it takes. He has the same attitude towards cooking. If you disrespect his craft he doesn’t only become defensive, but will physically, mentally, and emotionally combat this disrespect. He is a passionate individual, and sometimes he can barely contain his passion and love for the things he holds dear. He needs a lover who holds the same fiery passion in at least one aspect of their life.

-Empathy. Given his past, Sanji has grown up knowing the importance of empathy, and sharing all of your goods with the people around you in need. In order to properly understand arguably the most important lesson he learned as a child, a potential lover would need the ability to see the world and its pains and have the strength of character to be able to share these pains. They would need the strength of character to aspire to create a positive change for the people around them, and not just a greater change for themselves.

-Mindfulness. Sanji has a sense of empathy, but it is often reserved mainly for the people that he or his captain actively invest in. A lover with a sense of mindfulness and consideration when measuring their actions towards unknown people, children, and animals would be notably invaluable towards Sanji’s perspective. Another aspect of mindfulness would include maintaining their personal health by keeping fit, eating well, and properly managing their mental and emotional health to the best of their ability. Sanji would not only benefit from this trait in a lover, but would find it incredibly attractive.

-Optimism. It’s no secret that Sanji has a well concealed sense of hope for the world, shown through his overwhelming passion for his goals. However it has been shown several times through his life that he can be pessimistic at best when analyzing the severity of a situation. Although it seems likely that he addresses the worst case scenario in order to ensure a better outcome, a lover with a strong sense of optimism would be able to take stress of his shoulders that he doesn’t need to carry.

Ace

-Understanding. Ace needs someone who would be able to learn who he is, and understand his circumstances. Someone who loathed the Pirate King would probably look at Ace and see a child that should never have been born. Someone who was inspired by the Pirate King may treat him differently, and he doesn’t need any special treatment because of a Father that he spent his childhood dissociating from. In order to even consider someone as a potential lover, Ace needs to see an active objectivity which they use to understand the world around them. He believes this is the only way that they will properly understand his unique view regarding his birth. As an extension, perhaps this understanding will lead to forgiveness of who he is, and what he symbolizes. That is his hope.

-Assertiveness. Ace is a commander, and obviously has the ability to lead his comrades properly. However when he is on his own, and when he feels safe with his family, Ace can be blindly happy and carefree. A little assertiveness from a significant other to organize his home life a little more would be welcomed to Ace’s world. In addition, Ace can be as dense as Luffy when it comes to understanding direct affection and not just general communication. In order to get his attention in the first place, a lover would have to have an assertiveness to their character.

-Thoughtfulness. Ace may be able to grasp that someone loves him, but he is attacked by feelings of doubt regarding his self worth. He’s been riddled by these thoughts so often in his life that he is almost a master of concealing when he is feeling beaten down and depressed. A significant other who will engage in small acts of thoughtfulness would be a forgiveness in and of itself for Ace. Having these small reminders that someone cares for him enough to organize even the most miniscule, seemingly meaningless tasks in his life will- over time- instill in Ace that his lover doesn’t just love him on occasion, but that they love him every day in many different ways.

-Nurturing. Although strength is something that Ace admires, a softer significant other to influence his life would be beneficial. He is a master of making himself appear strong, and making sure that his friends and family know that they can share his strength if need be. A nurturing significant other would add to Ace’s life in the most impactful way. A lover should be able to have his trust enough to see him weak, and to allow him to find a safe haven in a secret space with them. He does everything he can to keep his loved ones safe, and he deserves someone who will grant him that same feeling of security.

Law

-Intuition. Law is an observant person, and often trusts his senses when gauging a situation he wishes to understand. It comes as part of being a doctor. He has always analyzed the physical faults in order to diagnose the problem and find a solution. He could use a force in his life that relies on intuition and emotion, and will remind him on occasion that sometimes not everything needs to be seen with empirical evidence. Sometimes there are things in life that just need to be silently felt.

-Goodness. Given his abilities, Law has always been in a position where he has to consider that all of the people around him have ulterior motives. In most cases- being a pirate- this fear was confirmed and then adequately dealt with. Before Law will ever consider someone as a potential lover, he would need to understand that they have a goodness to them, and that they have his greater good taken into consideration when they are considering their own. He will trust in their actions and judgements only when they have consistently proven to him that they are ruled by good intentions for himself, and for his crew. If Law is given any reason to distrust or otherwise question their motives, it is unlikely that they will have a chance at getting close to him.

-Cautiousness. Someone who has an understanding of their abilities and what they can or cannot handle is a must for Law. He cannot be constantly worrying for you due to your own brashness. He worries for the people he cares about enough, without having someone who is actively putting themselves in danger’s path.

-Patience. It is not going to be a quick and easy process to get Law’s attention. Even once you’re sure that you’ve managed to grab it, there isn’t a high likelihood that he will be overly affectionate in any way, shape, or form. Affirmations of his love will be few and far between, and only a lover with patience will be able to have the persistence to win over his affections, and then handle the time between the displays of this affection.

Luffy

-Perception. Although Luffy has shown on more than one occasion that he understands more than he lets on, having a significant other that will grant him a different perspective on situations they encounter, or even just draws his attention to matters needing his attention faster, will be a great addition to Luffy’s life.

-Selflessness. Luffy worries endlessly for his crew in times of crisis. He would gladly fight to the death to bring his loved ones to safety. He has a blind sense of selflessness when the people he cares about are put in harm’s way. He would need a significant other who understands this aspect of himself at the very least, and at their greatest potential they would share the same feelings for at least one loved one in their own life.

-Gratefulness. A large theme in Luffy’s life has been to unapologetically be and express himself. He appreciates all things in his life that bring him happiness, and all things that define him. A significant other for Luffy could not be blind to the things in their life that they should be appreciating. They would need to understand the importance of all of the small gifts that life had bestowed upon them, whether that be food, clothing, freedom, or even just one single friend. Someone bitter who wasn’t thankful for what they had or- worse than that- constantly craved more like what they had wasn’t enough would confuse and frustrate Luffy.

-Ambition. Luffy is drawn to and captivated by people that have a clear, often hard-won goal that they will do anything to accomplish. A lover would have to have this same trait, and aspire to be, do, or create something that will make them greater than the person they were when they began their journey. Otherwise, a romantic candidate can be seen as boring, or unimpressive.

Zoro

-Spirituality. Zoro’s whole philosophy and fighting technique have elements of spirituality entwined within them. Wado Ichimonji possesses the spirit and dream of Kuina. When he battles, he often calls upon a spirit which allows him to possess three heads, and six arms. When he is on board the ship, he is on his own methodically caring for his swords to ensure their strength, or relaxing in a deeply meditative state and focusing his senses on the area surrounding himself and the ship. Naturally, a significant other would need to understand this hidden inner power and identify it as a part of Zoro. Someone who doesn’t believe in the spiritual, or fails to contain a connection with their inner selves-whether through personal reflection of their own spirituality- would be dispatched immediately from any consideration as something more than an acquaintance. (Possibly a friend, if they prove themselves to him in some other way.)

-Endurance. A significant other doesn’t need to be physically strong in order to impress Zoro. As long as they could hold their own, and keep getting up after they’ve been knocked down, they will be able to earn his respect. This doesn’t just apply to a physical sense, either. This includes having the mentality to withstand failure, analyze, and redirect their efforts to a different approach. Emotionally, as well, a significant other should be able to handle their emotions in ways that are healthy for them, and then continue to move on to what must be done.

-Discipline. A significant other shouldn’t be lazy, unpractised, or otherwise unengaged in the course that their life is taking. A lover for Zoro would need to have a clear cause, and be working towards that. Whatever shape that takes depends upon the person entirely. They could be honing their physical body, and have a clear plan for how they plan to accomplish that goal that they intend to stick to. They could be trying to understand their own purpose in life, and be actively engaged in learning about cultures, beliefs, and powers in order to identify this purpose. They could even be trying to improve small goals such as having a sense of gratitude, or soothing a harsh temper, or improving a destructive diet.

-Tact. Zoro is able to understand what is required in the moment, but it is more of an innate wisdom of how structures and dynamics should work than a sensitivity to the needs of the people around him. For example, he is able to tell Luffy what he represents for the crew and how he should be responding to severe situations in order to be a proper captain, but is unlikely to take notice of an emotionally distraught comrade and approach them with the intent to comfort or advise. A significant other who is more emotionally intelligent would be advantageous to Zoro, and would grant him an understanding of how to deal with people in a situation that doesn’t require them to be strong. Someone with tact might also be a useful companion just to explain what Zoro himself cannot, in any situation where his advice is misconstrued and taken with offence.

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jacewilliams1 · 4 years ago

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Five airplanes every pilot should fly

You don’t get to pick your parents and most pilots don’t get to pick the airplane they learn to fly in. If the local flight school has a beat up old Cherokee, that’s what you’ll fly, whether you love Pipers or not. But once you earn your license, it’s a real thrill to check out in (or at least log some time in) a variety of airplanes. I actually think this is more interesting than adding a new rating—new models offer new adventures and new lessons to learn, and there are no annoying FAA tests to pass.

What should you fly? Almost anything with wings. I might skip the rare Soviet warbird that hasn’t flown in 25 years, but unless you have reason to doubt the design or construction, strap in and go flying. You won’t catch Barry Schiff; still, it’s fun to try.

While all airplanes have stories to tell, some are more important and more interesting than others. Here are five I believe should be in every pilot’s logbook or on their to-do list. These aren’t necessarily the best or most exciting airplanes ever to take to the skies, but they define specific ages in general aviation and make up the rich history of our industry. Call it the general aviation canon.

1. Piper Cub. The familiar yellow taildragger almost single-handedly created general aviation in America, teaching an entire generation of pilots to fly. Consider the numbers: in 1939 there were fewer than 35,000 pilots; by 1950 there were over 500,000. One key reason so many Americans earned their license was obviously the military, but that meant the Cub was often their first airplane. In fact, nearly 20,000 were built in less than a decade. For comparison, only 10,000 piston airplanes total were delivered between 2010 and 2019.

A yellow Piper Cub in the grass is the essence of recreational aviation.

But the Cub is also a survivor, a symbol of a general aviation boom that didn’t really happen. At the end of World War II, some enthusiasts assumed that the thousands of returning military pilots would want to settle down to family life with an airplane in the garage. It didn’t turn out that way (commuting by Cub wasn’t quite as practical as boosters predicted), and many interesting airplanes disappeared as the post-war boom turned into a bust.

Not the Cub. Almost 100 years after it was introduced and many decades since it was last produced, the Cub remains an iconic airplane. It’s fun to fly, affordable to own, and challenging enough to be rewarding when mastered. Some are basic airplanes with no electrical system, some are fully restored showplanes, and some are modern reincarnations of the famous design—all of them are recreational aviation in its purest form. Spending a late afternoon with a Cub on a grass runway is just about the most fun you can have in aviation. It’s like going back in time, but without having to stroll around a dusty museum.

2. Beech Bonanza. After the bust of the early 1950s, general aviation began its next big boom in the 60s. Cessna thought the post-war future looked like the 195, a gorgeous but fairly dated airplane with a tailwheel and a radial engine. Beechcraft, on the other hand, designed a strikingly modern airplane with low wings, retractable gear, and an engine we would recognize today. The public voted with its checkbook, and by the mid-60s the Bonanza was a best-seller. In particular, the V-tail S35 and V35/A/B models were memorable designs, the pinnacle of general aviation flying in that decade. When you showed up in one of those sleek airplanes, you not-so-subtly told the world you had arrived.

Beyond making good airplanes, Beechcraft helped to create the era of personal transportation by light airplane. Here was a machine that could go beyond the local area, with both the performance and reliability to be a personal airliner. Ads from the 60s show businessmen and families alike traveling in the comfort and speed of a Bonanza, a dream that pilots still chase today.

Much like the Cub, the Bonanza lives on. In this case, you can buy a brand new one, but you’ll find even 55-year old models doing everything from chasing $100 hamburgers to logging hard IFR flights. It’s still a joy to fly, with responsive controls and solid performance. I was raised on Cessnas, so the first time I hand flew a Bonanza I felt like I had stepped out of a pickup truck and into a sports car. I instantly understood why people loved it. The Bo has had many imitators over the years, but not until the Cirrus (see below) did the graceful Beech finally face a real threat—an incredible run of over 50 years.

3. Cessna 172. Here’s my nominee for best all-around general aviation airplane. It’s not fast, it doesn’t haul that much, and most pilots wouldn’t call it a beautiful airplane, but it’s capable of handling a wide variety of missions without complaint. As a trainer it is unmatched, taking the place of the Cub as the most popular flight school airplane. As a cross-country IFR airplane it is surprisingly capable, as Richard Collins proved many years ago during his criss-crossing of the US in one. It has also served as a photo platform, a law enforcement tool, and a perfect first airplane for new owners.

The Cessna 172 is the most popular trainer for a reason.

One reason for its success is its forgiving nature and bulletproof design. It has enough power to take three people on a 300-mile trip but not so much that pilots quickly get in trouble, a complaint early in the V-tail Bonanza’s life. The systems are basic but reliable: just watch the abuse the landing gear takes during a typical pancake breakfast fly-in if you want proof. The 172 (don’t call it a Skyhawk) is the everyman airplane.

It also represents the glory days of general aviation, a 10-year span in the late 60s and 70s when it seemed like flying would become a mainstream activity. Cessnas were on popular TV shows and sales were as red hot as the Miami condo market in the mid-2000s. In 1978, over 17,000 piston airplanes were delivered, a stunning number never to be equaled (or even approached), and the Cessna 172 led the charge.

4. Cirrus SR22. After the GA winter of the late 1980s, many pilots wondered if the industry would ever recover. Cessna restarted its single engine line in 1996, but arguably the real rebirth of personal aviation came from two brothers in Minnesota. When the Klapmeiers’ sleek SR20 hit the market in 1999, it had some radically new assumptions (fast airplanes can have fixed gear, safe airplanes have a parachute, big color screens are better than round dials) and some sexy marketing to go with it.

Many scoffed, but it worked. Cirrus has delivered more than 5,000 airplanes since 2006, dwarfing Cessna’s 182/206 line of traveling airplanes and even outselling the vaunted Bonanza by a wide margin. In one of the most impressive turnarounds in aviation history, the SR22’s accident record has gone from a liability to a strength, and the once-scrappy startup has established a powerful brand with devoted fans. It is the airplane non-pilots dream about.

Whether it’s the parachute or the occasionally abrasive fans, Cirrus has made some enemies over the years, but in my experience, the biggest skeptics have the least experience with the airplane. My advice? Don’t hate it until you fly it. The SR22 is everything a modern airplane should be: it’s a joy to fly, the performance is impressive, and the interior comfort is magnificent. On a cross country trip in one last year, I found myself cruising along at 170 knots in air conditioned comfort, with deice protection and great avionics to point the way. Not bad for a fixed gear piston airplane. I think it’s fun to fly, but at the very least, passengers love it—and that should count for a lot.

The RV-12 is one of the few successful Light Sport Airplanes.

5. Van’s RV series. What will follow the Cirrus? Maybe nothing in the transportation segment of the market. But to me, the next generation of recreational aviation has been around for a long time and is only now starting to claim the spotlight. As certified airplanes have become more and more expensive (that 172 is now a $400,000 airplane), the “Van’s Air Force” of homebuilts has become a more attractive option for everyday pilots. The build time has been reduced with the use of ingenious quick-build kits, and the avionics options are actually better than most certified airplanes.

Which RV to fly may be the hardest question. The RV-12 is what an LSA should be, light on weight but heavy on fun. The RV-10 is basically a half-price Cirrus, with excellent performance and seats for four. The RV-8 is your own personal airshow airplane, with thrilling performance but reasonable operating costs. All of them exhibit great flying qualities and affordable operating costs (I remember being shocked the first time I flew an RV-12 and saw a fuel burn of less than 4 gallons per hour).

While I’m not a homebuilder, I’m excited by the energy and the innovation in that world. The latest models are safer than previous generations and practical enough to be used both in flight schools and for cross-country travel. If there’s going to be a rebirth of piston aviation, I would put my money on RVs and not Skyhawks or Bonanzas.

Bonus: I promised I would stop at five airplanes, and I will. But if you’re looking for extra credit, let me add a category: light jets. Along with experimental airplanes, the real growth in general aviation over the last 10 years has been in turbine airplanes. These are wildly expensive and certainly overkill for VFR pilots in search of the next great airport diner, but the progress here has been stunning. I got to ride in the right seat of a Citation Mustang a few years ago and couldn’t believe how easy it was to fly. Compared to a Cessna 421 or a King Air, the top of the heap in the late 70s, the Mustang was a walk in the park—even single pilot. Life is just different in the turbine world, from the systems (FADEC, automatic pressurization) to the maintenance (much better than typical piston shops) to the training (regular simulator sessions). Light GA manufacturers and pilots could learn a few things from the jet jockeys, so if you’re ever offered a ride in a CJ or a Phenom, don’t hesitate.

What airplanes are on your personal to-fly list?

The post Five airplanes every pilot should fly appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/07/five-airplanes-every-pilot-should-fly/

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hermanwatts · 5 years ago

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Sensor Sweep: Legion of Time, Creepy Asimov, Fletcher Pratt, Lost Worlds

Gaming (Modiphius): Today we’re delighted to announce the release of Conan the Adventurer in PDF a major new sourcebook for the acclaimed Robert E. Howard’s Conan Adventures in an Age Undreamed of RPG. Conan the Adventurer is the definitive guide to the lands south of the Styx River, including serpent-haunted Stygia, Kush, Darfar, Keshan, Punt, Zembabwei, and that vast region known to the folk of the Dreaming West as “the Black Kingdoms”. Rife with mystery and ancient, long forgotten cultures and ruins, this region is brimming with potential for adventure and intrigue.

Science Fiction (John C. Wright): LEGION OF TIME was first serialized from May to July of 1938 in Astounding Magazine. It concerns one Dennis Lanning, who, as fate would have it, is the lynch pin on whose actions the existence of two mutually-exclusive future worlds hinge. The visions reveal that some future act of his will grant one of the two futures certainty, and abolish the other into impossibility. The impact of this tale on the science fiction readership of the day is easy to underestimate, and that for several reasons. Foremost, because it is hard to remember or imagine how new the central conceit of the story had been.

Asimov (lithub): By 1969, Asimov himself reported, he was being described by longtime friend Frederick Pohl as someone who “turned into a dirty old man at the age of fifteen.” Asimov, by his own account, was “perfectly willing to embrace the title; I even use it on myself without qualms.” He wasn’t kidding. Two years later, he published The Sensuous Dirty Old Man.

Review (Eldritch Paths): I never know what to expect from author Brian Niemeier. His works always seem to subvert my expectations while exceeding them. Strange Matter, his collection of short stories is no different. All the stories are just weird and different, and they range from fantasy to sci-fi to weird fusions of genres. In short, it’s awesome. Here are my thoughts on each story.

Culture War (Walker’s Retreat): Independent author Misha Burton had a good Twitter thread (starting here) that identifies why contemporary fiction sucks harder than a Hoover on overdrive. Reproduced below; emphasis mine. There is a significant difference between fantastic fiction of the form “what if I fought a dragon” and “what if I were a dragon”. For this discussion I don’t mean “dragon” literally–it could be magic spells or handwavium mutant superpowers.

Comic Books (13th Dimension): Marvel has been producing high-end omnibi collecting this classic run but in June, the publisher is scheduled to start making the stories available in the more affordable Epic Collection paperback format. Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith’s Red Sonja debut might be the main selling point — but check out the other artists represented in this volume: Gil Kane and John Buscema. Beauteous.

Fiction (DMR Books): The last ninety-plus years have seen Haggard’s star slowly fade. There was a massive shift, in many ways, immediately after World War Two. A large percentage of the authors writing for the pulps and Men’s Adventure Magazines after WWII were influenced by HRH either directly or indirectly. However, there was a zeitgeist in the air which said that all those titans from the time before the Bomb were somehow wrong, and that a “better way” could be found…or just hadn’t been tried. Thus, the gradual memory-holing of H. Rider Haggard.

Gaming (Monsters and Manuals): In adventurer-dense settings, you get an adventurer-friendly infrastructure developing. Institutions arise to facilitate what adventurers do, from your bustling inn brimming with hirelings and rumour, to your adventurer’s guild, your market in ancient treasures and exotic weapons, your sages willing to shell out fortunes for rare collectibles, and so on. (Arguably, the true potential of adventurer-dense settings has never come close to being fully explored; would a system of adventurer insurance come into being? How about hireling labour exchanges?

Tolkien (Tor.com): We’ve come now to the end of Fëanor’s story: to the infamous Oath and the havoc it wreaks on Valinor, Middle-earth, and especially the Noldor. In the title of this series of articles, I’ve called Fëanor the “Doomsman of the Noldor” for this reason. Mandos is known as the Doomsman of the Valar because he is the one who pronounces fates, sees the future, and is especially good at seeing through difficult situations to their cores. I’ve named Fëanor similarly because it is his Oath, his set of ritualized words, that bind the Noldor in a doom they can’t escape.

Fiction (Goodman Games): The Appendix N is a list of prolific authors of science fiction and fantasy. But Fletcher Pratt is not one of them, at least not in comparison to most of the authors on the list. He primarily wrote historical nonfiction about the Civil War, Napoleon, naval history, rockets, and World War II. So why is Fletcher Pratt listed in the Appendix N and why does he have the coveted “et al” listed after The Blue Star?

Sherlock Holmes (Pulp.Net): I’ve posted several times about Solar Pons, a popular character inspired by Sherlock Holmes that was created by August Derleth, continued by Basil Copper and more recently by David Marcum. (I think calling him a pastiche doesn’t do him justice.) We’ve gotten reprints of the original works and collections of new stories, and recently we got the return of the scholarly journal on Solar Pons: The Pontine Dossier.

Video Games (Rawle Nyanzi): No one plays video games anymore. It can sure feel that way when no one purchases the indie game you worked so hard on. All those sleepless nights, all that time, effort, and money — all of it is ignored. You feel like you did nothing of value. But I’m not here to talk about video games, I’m here to talk about books. It’s easy to think that no one buys your book because “no one reads anymore,” but I believe that perspective is very mistaken.

Manga/T.V. (RMWC Reviews): In June of 1972, Nagai’s Devilman manga began, and in July an anime based on it began airing. A horror-action series that would become one of his flagship franchises, the anime was significantly toned down for television. The same year, on October second, Mazinger Z debuted in Weekly Shōnen Jump and a subsequent anime series from Toei Animation would begin airing on December third.

Publishing (DVS Press): Tradpub is a facade, but perception matters. You have to think about who you are facing, in what arena you are facing them, and what victory means. Yes, traditional publishing is in trouble right now due to store closures and paper supply problems, but that doesn’t mean they are dead. Most normal people don’t spend a second thought on the entire industry, and they certainly aren’t looking at any numbers to see what the problems within the industry are.

Biography (Interstellar Intersection): Mark Finn penned what has become the definitive biography on Robert E. Howard in the 21st century, titled “Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard.” Published by MonkeyBrain Books in 2006, a second edition with revisions was later furnished by the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press in 2012. Finn, a scholar from Texas, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in the Special Award — Professional category in 2007 for his biography and scholarship of Howard, highlighting how desperately the genre fiction community needed new scholarship of Howard, as his creations outshined him.

Fiction (Paul McNamee): Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond is ex-SAS with a problem–he’s easily bored. Civilian life holds nothing interesting for him. He places ads for excitement. Once he’s sifted through the dross, he finds himself pulled into an international plot set on destroying Great Britain as a world power. Only Bulldog and his team of former comrades-in-arms can save the day, weaving between the law and the villains. I.A. Watson brings us a modern Drummond. This novel is as high-octane as any action movie out there today. The novel is wall-to-wall action, does not let up, and leaves you breathless.

Art (DMR Books): The three stories in “Castaways” were all good to varying degrees, but the Frazetta art, every single plate of it, is what really sticks in my mind decades after I laid eyes on it. What I didn’t know until much later was that Frank had just finished up his first ever paperback gig doing ERB covers for Don Wollheim at Ace books. The Canaveral Press edition of Tarzan and the Castaways was Frazetta’s first chance at illustrating a book in the more prestigious hardcover format. Like the major league ballplayer he very nearly became, Frank swung for the fences.

Fiction (Legends of Men): The lost world genre centers around exploration. The land that comprises the setting has been lost or is legendary to the European characters in the stories. They often have something valuable like diamonds or gold. Those valuables compel the characters to search for the land, which is always hard to find and traverse many dangers in the process. The protagonists are usually forced into the role of explorer, even though it might not be their primary skill. For example, in King Solomon’s Mines, the protagonist is an expert elephant hunter who undertakes an exploratory quest.

Gaming (Old Skulling): Due to their importance and influence on the sword and sorcery adventures, Factions can effectively be treated as characters and, as such, can influence the events of the campaign in a myriad of ways. But how do we resolve the outcome of their actions in a fair and neutral way? This system proposes assigning them scores in 4 main Attributes similar to those of the PCs: Warfare, Subterfuge, Machinations, and Influence.

Sensor Sweep: Legion of Time, Creepy Asimov, Fletcher Pratt, Lost Worlds published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years ago

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Chief Gates Comes to Oakhurst: A Cop Drama

One day in late 1992, a trim older man with a rigid military bearing visited Sierra Online’s headquarters in Oakhurst, California. From his appearance, and from the way that Sierra’s head Ken Williams fawned over him, one might have assumed him to be just another wealthy member of the investment class, a group that Williams had been forced to spend a considerable amount of time wooing ever since he had taken his company public four years earlier. But that turned out not to be the case. As Williams began to introduce his guest to some of his employees, he described him as Sierra’s newest game designer, destined to make the fourth game in the Police Quest series. It seemed an unlikely role based on the new arrival’s appearance and age alone.

Yet ageism wasn’t sufficient to explain the effect he had on much of Sierra’s staff. Josh Mandel, a sometime stand-up comic who was now working for Sierra as a writer and designer, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with him: “I wasn’t glad he was there. I just wanted him to go away as soon as possible.” Gano Haine, who was hard at work designing the environmental-themed EcoQuest: Lost Secret of the Rainforest, reluctantly accepted the task of showing the newcomer some of Sierra’s development tools and processes. He listened politely enough, although it wasn’t clear how much he really understood. Then, much to her relief, the boss swept him away again.

The man who had prompted such discomfort and consternation was arguably the most politically polarizing figure in the United States at the time: Daryl F. Gates, the recently resigned head of the Los Angeles Police Department. Eighteen months before, four of his white police officers had brutally beaten a black man — an unarmed small-time lawbreaker named Rodney King — badly enough to break bones and teeth. A private citizen had captured the incident on videotape. One year later, after a true jury of their peers in affluent, white-bread Simi Valley had acquitted the officers despite the damning evidence of the tape, the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 had begun. Americans had watched in disbelief as the worst civil unrest since the infamously restive late 1960s played out on their television screens. The scene looked like a war zone in some less enlightened foreign country; this sort of thing just doesn’t happen here, its viewers had muttered to themselves. But it had happened. The final bill totaled 63 people killed, 2383 people injured, and more than $1 billion in property damage.

The same innocuous visage that was now to become Sierra’s newest game designer had loomed over all of the scenes of violence and destruction. Depending on whether you stood on his side of the cultural divide or the opposite one, the riots were either the living proof that “those people” would only respond to the “hard-nosed” tactics employed by Gates’s LAPD, or the inevitable outcome of decades of those same misguided tactics. The mainstream media hewed more to the latter narrative. When they weren’t showing the riots or the Rodney King tape, they played Gates’s other greatest hits constantly. There was the time he had said, in response to the out-sized numbers of black suspects who died while being apprehended in Los Angeles, that black people were more susceptible to dying in choke holds because their arteries didn’t open as fast as those of “normal people”; the time he had said that anyone who smoked a joint was a traitor against the country and ought to be “taken out and shot”; the time when he had dismissed the idea of employing homosexuals on the force by asking, “Who would want to work with one?”; the time when his officers had broken an innocent man’s nose, and he had responded to the man’s complaint by saying that he was “lucky that was all he had broken”; the time he had called the LAPD’s peers in Philadelphia “an inspiration to the nation” after they had literally launched an airborne bombing raid on a troublesome inner-city housing complex, killing six adults and five children and destroying 61 homes. As the mainstream media was reacting with shock and disgust to all of this and much more, right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh trotted out the exact same quotes, but greeted them with approbation rather than condemnation.

All of which begs the question of what the hell Gates was doing at Sierra Online, of all places. While they were like most for-profit corporations in avoiding overly overt political statements, Sierra hardly seemed a bastion of reactionary sentiment or what the right wing liked to call “family values.” Just after founding Sierra in 1980, Ken and Roberta Williams had pulled up stakes in Los Angeles and moved to rural Oakhurst more out of some vague hippie dream of getting back to the land than for any sound business reason. As was known by anyone who’d read Steven Levy’s all-too-revealing book Hackers, or seen a topless Roberta on the cover of a game called Softporn, Sierra back in those days had been a nexus of everything the law-and-order contingent despised: casual sex and hard drinking, a fair amount of toking and even the occasional bit of snorting. (Poor Richard Garriott of Ultima fame, who arrived in this den of inequity from a conservative neighborhood of Houston inhabited almost exclusively by straight-arrow astronauts like his dad, ran screaming from it all after just a few months; decades later, he still sounds slightly traumatized when he talks about his sojourn in California.)

It was true that a near-death experience in the mid-1980s and an IPO in 1988 had done much to change life at Sierra since those wild and woolly early days. Ken Williams now wore suits and kept his hair neatly trimmed. He no longer slammed down shots of tequila with his employees to celebrate the close of business on a Friday, nor made it his personal mission to get his nerdier charges laid; nor did he and Roberta still host bathing-suit-optional hot-tub parties at their house. But when it came to the important questions, Williams’s social politics still seemed diametrically opposed to the likes to Daryl Gates. For example, at a time when even the mainstream media still tended to dismiss concerns about the environment as obsessions of the Loony Left, he’d enthusiastically approved Gano Haines’s idea for a series of educational adventure games to teach children about just those issues. When a 15-year-old who already had the world all figured out wrote in to ask how Sierra could “give in to the doom-and-gloomers and whacko commie liberal environmentalists” who believed that “we can destroy a huge, God-created world like this,” Ken’s brother John Williams — Sierra’s marketing head — offered an unapologetic and cogent response: “As long as we get letters like this, we’ll keep making games like EcoQuest.”

So, what gave? Really, what was Daryl Gates doing here? And how had this figure that some of Ken Williams’s employees could barely stand to look at become connected with Police Quest, a slightly goofy and very erratic series of games, but basically a harmless one prior to this point? To understand how all of these trajectories came to meet that day in Oakhurst, we need to trace each back to its point of origin.

Daryl F. Gates

Perhaps the kindest thing we can say about Daryl Gates is that he was, like the young black men he and his officers killed, beat, and imprisoned by the thousands, a product of his environment. He was, the sufficiently committed apologist might say, merely a product of the institutional culture in which he was immersed throughout his adult life. Seen in this light, his greatest sin was his inability to rise above his circumstances, a failing which hardly sets him apart from the masses. One can only wish he had been able to extend to the aforementioned black men the same benefit of the doubt which other charitable souls might be willing to give to him.

Long before he himself became the head of the LAPD, Gates was the hand-picked protege of William Parker, the man who has gone down in history as the architect of the legacy Gates would eventually inherit. At the time Parker took control of it in 1950, the LAPD was widely regarded as the most corrupt single police force in the country, its officers for sale to absolutely anyone who could pay their price; they went so far as to shake down ordinary motorists for bribes at simple traffic stops. To his credit, Parker put a stop to all that. But to his great demerit, he replaced rank corruption on the individual level with an us-against-them form of esprit de corps — the “them” here being the people of color who were pouring into Los Angeles in ever greater numbers. Much of Parker’s approach was seemingly born of his experience of combat during World War II. He became the first but by no means the last LAPD chief to make comparisons between his police force and an army at war, without ever considering whether the metaphor was really appropriate.

Parker was such a cold fish that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who served as an LAPD officer during his tenure as chief, would later claim to have modeled the personality of the emotionless alien Spock on him. And yet, living as he did in the epicenter of the entertainment industry — albeit mostly patrolling the parts of Los Angeles that were never shown by Hollywood — Parker was surprisingly adept at manipulating the media to his advantage. Indeed, he became one of those hidden players who sometimes shape media narratives without anyone ever quite realizing that they’re doing so. He served as a consultant for the television show Dragnet, and through it created a pernicious cliché of the “ideal” cop that can still be seen, more than half a century later, on American television screens every evening: the cop as tough crusader who has to knock a few heads sometimes and bend or break the rules to get around the pansy lawyers, but who does it all for a noble cause, guided by an infallible moral compass that demands that he protect the “good people” of his city from the irredeemably bad ones by whatever means are necessary. Certainly Daryl Gates would later benefit greatly from this image; it’s not hard to believe that even Ken Williams, who fancied himself something of a savvy tough guy in his own right, was a little in awe of it when he tapped Gates to make a computer game.

But this wasn’t the only one of Chief Parker’s innovations that would come to the service of the man he liked to describe as the son he’d never had. Taking advantage of a city government desperate to see a cleaned-up LAPD, Parker drove home policies that made the city’s police force a veritable fiefdom unto itself, its chief effectively impossible to fire. The city council could only do so “for cause” — i.e., some explicit failure on the chief’s part. This sounded fair enough — until one realized that the chief got to write his own evaluation every year. Naturally, Parker and his successors got an “excellent” score every time, and thus the LAPD remained for decades virtually impervious to the wishes of the politicians and public it allegedly served.

The Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts burns, 1965.

As Parker’s tenure wore on, tension spiraled in the black areas of Los Angeles, the inevitable response to an utterly unaccountable LAPD’s ever more brutal approach to policing. It finally erupted in August of 1965 in the form of the Watts Riots, the great prelude to the riots of 1992: 34 deaths, $40 million in property damage in contemporary dollars. For Daryl Gates, who watched it all take place by Parker’s side, the Watts Riots became a formative crucible. “We had no idea how to deal with this,” he would later write. “We were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives, and Molotov cocktails. It was random chaos. We did not know how to handle guerrilla warfare.” Rather than asking himself how it had come to this in the first place and how such chaos might be prevented in the future, he asked how the LAPD could be prepared to go toe to toe with future rioters in what amounted to open warfare on city streets.

Chief Parker died the following year, but Gates’s star remained on the ascendant even without his patron. He came up with the idea of a hardcore elite force for dealing with full-on-combat situations, a sort of SEAL team of police. Of course, the new force would need an acronym that sounded every bit as cool as its Navy inspiration. He proposed SWAT, for “Special Weapons Attack Teams.” When his boss balked at such overtly militaristic language, he said that it could stand for “Special Weapons and Tactics” instead. “That’s fine,” said his boss.

Gates and his SWAT team had their national coming-out party on December 6, 1969, when they launched an unprovoked attack upon a hideout of the Black Panthers, a well-armed militia composed of black nationalists which had been formed as a response to earlier police brutality. Logistically and practically, the raid was a bit of a fiasco. The attackers got discombobulated by an inaccurate map of the building and very nearly got themselves hemmed into a cul de sac and massacred. (“Oh, God, we were lucky,” said one of them later.) What was supposed to have been a blitzkrieg-style raid devolved into a long stalemate. The standoff was broken only when Gates managed to requisition a grenade launcher from the Marines at nearby Camp Pendleton and started lobbing explosives into the building; this finally prompted the Panthers to surrender. By some miracle, no one on either side got killed, but the Panthers were acquitted in court of most charges on the basis of self-defense.

Yet the practical ineffectuality of the operation mattered not at all to the political narrative that came to be attached to it. The conservative white Americans whom President Nixon loved to call “the silent majority” — recoiling from the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the hippie era, genuinely scared by the street violence of the last several years — applauded Gates’s determination to “get tough” with “those people.” For the first time, the names of Daryl Gates and his brainchild of SWAT entered the public discourse beyond Los Angeles.

In May of 1974, the same names made the news in a big way again when a SWAT team was called in to subdue the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical militia with a virtually incomprehensible political philosophy, who had recently kidnapped and apparently converted to their cause the wealthy heiress Patty Hearst. After much lobbying on Gate’s part, his SWAT team got the green light to mount a full frontal assault on the group’s hideout. Gates and his officers continued to relish military comparisons. “Here in the heart of Los Angeles was a war zone,” he later wrote. “It was like something out of a World War II movie, where you’re taking the city from the enemy, house by house.” More than 9000 rounds of ammunition were fired by the two sides. But by now, the SWAT officers did appear to be getting better at their craft. Eight members of the militia were killed — albeit two of them unarmed women attempting to surrender — and the police officers received nary a scratch. Hearst herself proved not to be inside the hideout, but was arrested shortly after the battle.

The Patti Hearst saga marked the last gasp of a militant left wing in the United States; the hippies of the 1960s were settling down to become the Me Generation of the 1970s. Yet even as the streets were growing less turbulent, increasingly militaristic rhetoric was being applied to what had heretofore been thought of as civil society. In 1971, Nixon had declared a “war on drugs,” thus changing the tone of the discourse around policing and criminal justice markedly. Gates and SWAT were the perfect mascots for the new era. The year after the Symbionese shootout, ABC debuted a hit television series called simply S.W.A.T. Its theme song topped the charts; there were S.W.A.T. lunch boxes, action figures, board games, and jigsaw puzzles. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be like Daryl Gates and the LAPD — not least their fellow police officers in other cities: by July of 1975, there were 500 other SWAT teams in the United States. Gates embraced his new role of “America’s cop” with enthusiasm.

In light of his celebrity status in a city which worships celebrity, it was now inevitable that Gates would become the head of the LAPD just as soon as the post opened up. He took over in 1978; this gave him an even more powerful nationwide bully pulpit. In 1983, he applied some of his clout to the founding of a program called DARE in partnership with public schools around the country. The name stood for “Drug Abuse Resistance Education”; Gates really did have a knack for snappy acronyms. His heart was perhaps in the right place, but later studies, conducted only after the spending of hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, would prove the program’s strident rhetoric and almost militaristic indoctrination techniques to be ineffective.

Meanwhile, in his day job as chief of police, Gates fostered an ever more toxic culture that viewed the streets as battlegrounds, that viewed an ass beating as the just reward of any black man who failed to treat a police officer with fawning subservience. In 1984, the Summer Olympics came to Los Angeles, and Gates used the occasion to convince the city council to let him buy armored personnel carriers — veritable tanks for the city streets — in the interest of “crowd control.” When the Olympics were over, he held onto them for the purpose of executing “no-knock” search warrants on suspected drug dens. During the first of these, conducted with great fanfare before an invited press in February of 1985, Gates himself rode along as an APC literally drove through the front door of a house after giving the occupants no warning whatsoever. Inside they found two shocked women and three children, with no substance more illicit than the bowls of ice cream they’d been eating. To top it all off, the driver lost control of the vehicle on a patch of ice whilst everyone was sheepishly leaving the scene, taking out a parked car.

Clearly Gates’s competence still tended not to entirely live up to his rhetoric, a discrepancy the Los Angeles Riots would eventually highlight all too plainly. But in the meantime, Gates was unapologetic about the spirit behind the raid: “It frightened even the hardcore pushers to imagine that at any moment a device was going to put a big hole in their place of business, and in would march SWAT, scattering flash-bangs and scaring the hell out of everyone.” This scene would indeed be played out many times over the remaining years of Gates’s chiefdom. But then along came Rodney King of all people to take the inadvertent role of his bête noire.

King was a rather-slow-witted janitor and sometime petty criminal with a bumbling reputation on the street. He’d recently done a year in prison after attempting to rob a convenience store with a tire iron; over the course of the crime, the owner of the store had somehow wound up disarming him, beating him over the head with his own weapon, and chasing him off the premises. He was still on parole for that conviction on the evening of March 3, 1991, when he was spotted by two LAPD officers speeding down the freeway. King had been drinking, and so, seeing their patrol car’s flashing lights in his rear-view mirror, he decided to make a run for it. He led what turned into a whole caravan of police cars on a merry chase until he found himself hopelessly hemmed in on a side street. The unarmed man then climbed out of his car and lay face down on the ground, as instructed. But then he stood up and tried to make a break for it on foot, despite being completely surrounded. Four of the 31 officers on the scene now proceeded to knock him down and beat him badly enough with their batons and boots to fracture his face and break one of his ankles. Their colleagues simply stood and watched at a distance.

Had not a plumber named George Holliday owned an apartment looking down on that section of street, the incident would doubtless have gone down in the LAPD’s logs as just another example of a black man “resisting arrest” and getting regrettably injured in the process. But Holliday was there, standing on his balcony — and he had a camcorder to record it all. When he sent his videotape to a local television station, its images of the officers taking big two-handed swings against King’s helpless body with their batons ignited a national firestorm. The local prosecutor had little choice but to bring the four officers up on charges.

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The tactics of Daryl Gates now came under widespread negative scrutiny for the first time. Although he claimed to support the prosecution of the officers involved, he was nevertheless blamed for fostering the culture that had led to this incident, as well as the many others like it that had gone un-filmed. At long last, reporters started asking the black residents of Los Angeles directly about their experiences with the LAPD. A typical LAPD arrest, said one of them, “basically consisted of three or four cops handcuffing a person, and just literally beating him, often until unconscious… punching, beating, kicking.” A hastily assembled city commission produced pages and pages of descriptions of a police force run amok. “It is apparent,” the final report read, “that too many LAPD patrol officers view citizens with resentment and hostility.” In response, Gates promised to retire “soon.” Yet, as month after month went by and he showed no sign of fulfilling his promise, many began to suspect that he still had hopes of weathering the storm.

At any rate, he was still there on April 29, 1992. That was the day his four cops were acquitted in Simi Valley, a place LAPD officers referred to as “cop heaven”; huge numbers of them lived there. Within two hours after the verdict was announced, the Los Angeles Riots began in apocalyptic fashion, as a mob of black men pulled a white truck driver out of his cab and all but tore him limb from limb in the process of murdering him, all under the watchful eye of a helicopter that was hovering overhead and filming the carnage.

Tellingly, Gates happened to be speaking to an adoring audience of white patrons in the wealthy suburb of Brentwood at the very instant the riots began. As the violence continued, this foremost advocate of militaristic policing seemed bizarrely paralyzed. South Los Angeles burned, and the LAPD did virtually nothing about it. The most charitable explanation had it that Gates, spooked by the press coverage of the previous year, was terrified of how white police officers subduing black rioters would play on television. A less charitable one, hewed to by many black and liberal commentators, had it that Gates had decided that these parts of the city just weren’t worth saving — had decided to just let the rioters have their fun and burn it all down. But the problem, of course, was that in the meantime many innocent people of all colors were being killed and wounded and seeing their property go up in smoke. Finally, the mayor called in the National Guard to quell the rioting while Gates continued to sit on his hands.

Asked afterward how the LAPD — the very birthplace of SWAT — had allowed things to get so out of hand, Gates blamed it on a subordinate: “We had a lieutenant down there who just didn’t seem to know what to do, and he let us down.” Not only was this absurd, but it was hard to label as anything other than moral cowardice. It was especially rich coming from a man who had always preached an esprit de corps based on loyalty and honor. The situation was now truly untenable for him. Incompetence, cowardice, racism, brutality… whichever charge or charges you chose to apply, the man had to go. Gates resigned, for real this time, on June 28, 1992.

Yet he didn’t go away quietly. Gates appears to have modeled his post-public-service media strategy to a large extent on that of Oliver North, a locus of controversy for his role in President Ronald Reagan’s Iron-Contra scandal who had parlayed his dubious celebrity into the role of hero to the American right. Gates too gave a series of angry, unrepentant interviews, touted a recently published autobiography, and even went North one better when he won his own radio show which played in close proximity to that of Rush Limbaugh. And then, when Ken Williams came knocking, he welcomed that attention as well.

But why would Williams choose to cast his lot with such a controversial figure, one whose background and bearing were so different from his own? To begin to understand that, we need to look back to the origins of the adventure-game oddity known as Police Quest.

Ken Williams, it would seem, had always had a fascination with the boys in blue. One day in 1985, when he learned from his hairdresser that her husband was a California Highway Patrol officer on administrative leave for post-traumatic stress, his interest was piqued. He invited the cop in question, one Jim Walls, over to his house to play some racquetball and drink some beer. Before the evening was over, he had starting asking his guest whether he’d be interested in designing a game for Sierra. Walls had barely ever used a computer, and had certainly never played an adventure game on one, so he had only the vaguest idea what his new drinking buddy was talking about. But the only alternative, as he would later put it, was to “sit around and think” about the recent shootout that had nearly gotten him killed, so he agreed to give it a go.

The game which finally emerged from that conversation more than two years later shows the best and the worst of Sierra. On the one hand, it pushed a medium that was usually content to wallow in the same few fictional genres in a genuinely new direction. In a pair of articles he wrote for Computer Gaming World magazine, John Williams positioned Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel at the forefront of a new wave of “adult” software able to appeal to a whole new audience, noting how it evoked Joseph Wambaugh rather than J.R.R. Tolkien, Hill Street Blues rather than Star Wars. Conceptually, it was indeed a welcome antidote to a bad case of tunnel vision afflicting the entire computer-games industry.

In practical terms, however, it was somewhat less inspiring. The continual sin of Ken Williams and Sierra throughout the company’s existence was their failure to provide welcome fresh voices like that of Jim Walls with the support network that might have allowed them to make good games out of their well of experiences. Left to fend for himself, Walls, being the law-and-order kind of guy he was, devised the most pedantic adventure game of all time, one which played like an interactive adaptation of a police-academy procedure manual — so much so, in fact, that a number of police academies around the country would soon claim to be employing it as a training tool. The approach is simplicity itself: in every situation, if you do exactly what the rules of police procedure that are exhaustively described in the game’s documentation tell you to do, you get to live and go on to the next scene. If you don’t, you die. It may have worked as an adjunct to a police-academy course, but it’s less compelling as a piece of pure entertainment.

Although it’s an atypical Sierra adventure game in many respects, this first Police Quest nonetheless opens with what I’ve always considered to be the most indelibly Sierra moment of all. The manual has carefully explained — you did read it, right? — that you must walk all the way around your patrol car to check the tires and lights and so forth every time you’re about to drive somewhere. And sure enough, if you fail to do so before you get into your car for the first time, a tire blows out and you die as soon as you drive away. But if you do examine your vehicle, you find no evidence of a damaged tire, and you never have to deal with any blow-out once you start driving. The mask has fallen away to reveal what we always suspected: that the game actively wants to kill you, and is scheming constantly for a way to do so. There’s not even any pretension left of fidelity to a simulated world — just pure, naked malice. Robb Sherwin once memorably said that “Zork hates its player.” Well, Zork‘s got nothing on Police Quest.

Nevertheless, Police Quest struck a modest chord with Sierra’s fan base. While it didn’t become as big a hit as Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, John Williams’s other touted 1987 embodiment of a new wave of “adult” games, it sold well enough to mark the starting point of another of the long series that were the foundation of Sierra’s marketing strategy. Jim Walls designed two sequels over the next four years, improving at least somewhat at his craft in the process. (In between them, he also came up with Code-Name: Iceman, a rather confused attempt at a Tom Clancy-style techno-thriller that was a bridge too far even for most of Sierra’s loyal fans.)

But shortly after completing Police Quest 3: The Kindred, Walls left Sierra along with a number of other employees to join Tsunami Media, a new company formed right there in Oakhurst by Edmond Heinbockel, himself a former chief financial officer for Sierra. With Walls gone, but his Police Quest franchise still selling well enough to make another entry financially viable, the door was wide open — as Ken Williams saw it, anyway — for one Daryl F. Gates.

Daryl Gates (right) with Tammy Dargan, the real designer of the game that bears his name.

Williams began his courtship of the most controversial man in the United States by the old-fashioned expedient of writing him a letter. Gates, who claimed never even to have used a computer, much less played a game on one, was initially confused about what exactly Williams wanted from him. Presuming Williams was just one of his admirers, he sent a letter back asking for some free games for some youngsters who lived across the street from him. Williams obliged in calculated fashion, with the three extant Police Quest games. From that initial overture, he progressed to buttering Gates up over the telephone.

As the relationship moved toward the payoff stage, some of his employees tried desperately to dissuade him from getting Sierra into bed with such a figure. “I thought it’s one thing to seek controversy, but another thing to really divide people,” remembers Josh Mandel. Mandel showed his boss a New York Times article about Gates’s checkered history, only to be told that “our players don’t read the New York Times.” He suggested that Sierra court Joseph Wambaugh instead, another former LAPD officer whose novels presented a relatively more nuanced picture of crime and punishment in the City of Angels than did Gates’s incendiary rhetoric; Wambaugh was even a name whom John Williams had explicitly mentioned in the context of the first Police Quest game five years before. But that line of attack was also hopeless; Ken Williams wanted a true mass-media celebrity, not a mere author who hid behind his books. So, Gates made his uncomfortable visit to Oakhurst and the contract was signed. Police Quest would henceforward be known as Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest. Naturally, the setting of the series would now become Los Angeles; the fictional town of Lytton, the more bucolic setting of the previous three games in the series, was to be abandoned along with almost everything else previously established by Jim Walls.

Inside the company, a stubborn core of dissenters took to calling the game Rodney King’s Quest. Corey Cole, co-designer of the Quest for Glory series, remembers himself and many others being “horrified” at the prospect of even working in the vicinity of Gates: “As far as we were concerned, his name was mud and tainted everything it touched.” As a designer, Corey felt most of all for Jim Walls. He believed Ken Williams was “robbing Walls of his creation”: “It would be like putting Donald Trump’s name on a new Quest for Glory in today’s terms.”

Nevertheless, as the boss’s pet project, Gates’s game went inexorably forward. It was to be given the full multimedia treatment, including voice acting and the extensive use of digitized scenes and actors on the screen in the place of hand-drawn graphics. Indeed, this would become the first Sierra game that could be called a full-blown full-motion-video adventure, placing it at the vanguard of the industry’s hottest new trend.

Of course, there had never been any real expectation that Gates would roll up his sleeves and design a computer game in the way that Jim Walls had; celebrity did have its privileges, after all. Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: Open Season thus wound up in the hands of Tammy Dargan, a Sierra producer who, based on an earlier job she’d had with the tabloid television show America’s Most Wanted, now got the chance to try her hand at design. Corey Cole ironically remembers her as one of the most stereotypically liberal of all Sierra’s employees: “She strenuously objected to the use of [the word] ‘native’ in Quest for Glory III, and globally changed it to ‘indigenous.’ We thought that ‘the indigenous flora’ was a rather awkward construction, so we changed some of those back. But she was also a professional and did the jobs assigned to her.”

In this case, doing so would entail writing the script for a game about the mean streets of Los Angeles essentially alone, then sending it to Gates via post for “suggestions.” The latter did become at least somewhat more engaged when the time came for “filming,” using his connections to get Sierra inside the LAPD’s headquarters and even into a popular “cop bar.” Gates himself also made it into the game proper: restored to his rightful status of chief of police, he looks on approvingly and proffers occasional bits of advice as you work through the case. The CD-ROM version tacked on some DARE propaganda and a video interview with Gates, giving him yet one more opportunity to respond to his critics.

Contrary to the expectations raised both by the previous games in the series and the reputation of Gates, the player doesn’t take the role of a uniformed cop at all, but rather that of a plain-clothes detective. Otherwise, though, the game is both predictable in theme and predictably dire. Really, what more could one expect from a first-time designer working in a culture that placed no particular priority on good design, making a game that no one there particularly wanted to be making?

So, the dialog rides its banality to new depths for a series already known for clunky writing, the voice acting is awful — apparently the budget didn’t stretch far enough to allow the sorts of good voice actors that had made such a difference in King’s Quest VI — and the puzzle design is nonsensical. The plot, which revolves around a series of brutal cop killings for maximum sensationalism, wobbles along on rails through its ever more gruesome crime scenes and red-herring suspects until the real killer suddenly appears out of the blue in response to pretty much nothing which you’ve done up to that point. And the worldview the whole thing reflects… oh, my. The previous Police Quest games had hardly been notable for their sociological subtlety — “These kinds of people are actually running around out there, even if we don’t want to think about it,” Jim Walls had said of its antagonists — but this fourth game takes its demonization of all that isn’t white, straight, and suburban to what would be a comical extreme if it wasn’t so hateful. A brutal street gang, the in-game police files helpfully tell us, is made up of “unwed mothers on public assistance,” and the cop killer turns out to be a transvestite; his “deviancy” constitutes the sum total of his motivation for killing, at least as far as we ever learn.

One of the grisly scenes with which Open Season is peppered, reflecting a black-and-white — in more ways than one! — worldview where the irredeemably bad, deviant people are always out to get the good, normal people. Lucky we have the likes of Daryl Gates to sort the one from the other, eh?

Visiting a rap record label, one of a number of places where Sierra’s pasty-white writers get to try out their urban lingo. It goes about as well as you might expect.

Sierra throws in a strip bar for the sake of gritty realism. Why is it that television (and now computer-game) cops always have to visit these places — strictly in order to pursue leads, of course.

But the actual game of Open Season is almost as irrelevant to any discussion of the project’s historical importance today as it was to Ken Williams at the time. This was a marketing exercise, pure and simple. Thus Daryl Gates spent much more time promoting the game than he ever had making it. Williams put on the full-court press in terms of promotion, publishing not one, not two, but three feature interviews with him in Sierra’s news magazine and booking further interviews with whoever would talk to him. The exchanges with scribes from the computing press, who had no training or motivation for asking tough questions, went about as predictably as the game’s plot. Gates dismissed the outrage over the Rodney King tape as “Monday morning quarterbacking,” and consciously or unconsciously evoked Richard Nixon’s silent majority in noting that the “good, ordinary, responsible, quiet citizens” — the same ones who saw the need to get tough on crime and prosecute a war on drugs — would undoubtedly enjoy the game. Meanwhile Sierra’s competitors weren’t quite sure what to make of it all. “Talk about hot properties,” wrote the editors of Origin Systems’s internal newsletter, seemingly uncertain whether to express anger or admiration for Sierra’s sheer chutzpah. “No confirmation yet as to whether the game will ship with its own special solid-steel joystick” — a dark reference to the batons with which Gates’s officers had beat Rodney King.

In the end, though, the game generated decidedly less controversy than Ken Williams had hoped for. The computer-gaming press just wasn’t politically engaged enough to do much more than shrug their shoulders at its implications. And by the time it was released it was November of 1993, and Gates was already becoming old news for the mainstream press as well. The president of the Los Angeles Urban League did provide an obligingly outraged quote, saying that Gates “embodies all that is bad in law enforcement—the problems of the macho, racist, brutal police experience that we’re working hard to put behind us. That anyone would hire him for a project like this proves that some companies will do anything for the almighty dollar.” But that was about as good as it got.

There’s certainly no reason to believe that Gates’s game sold any better than the run-of-the-mill Sierra adventure, or than any of the Police Quest games that had preceded it. If anything, the presence of Gates’s name on the box seems to have put off more fans than it attracted. Rather than a new beginning, Open Season proved the end of the line for Police Quest as an adventure series — albeit not for Sierra’s involvement with Gates himself. The product line was retooled in 1995 into Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: SWAT, a “tactical simulator” of police work that played suspiciously like any number of outright war simulators. In this form, it found a more receptive audience and continued for years. Tammy Dargan remained at the reinvented series’s head for much of its run. History hasn’t recorded whether her bleeding-heart liberal sympathies went into abeyance after her time with Gates or whether the series remained just a slightly distasteful job she had to do.

Gates, on the other hand, got dropped after the first SWAT game. His radio show had been cancelled after he had proved himself to be a stodgy bore on the air, without even the modicum of wit that marked the likes of a Rush Limbaugh. Having thus failed in his new career as a media provocateur, and deprived forevermore of his old position of authority, his time as a political lightning rod had just about run out. What then was the use of Sierra continuing to pay him?

Ken and Roberta Williams looking wholesome in 1993, their days in the hot tub behind them.

But then, Daryl Gates was never the most interesting person behind the games that bore his name. The hard-bitten old reactionary was always a predictable, easily known quantity, and therefore one with no real power to fascinate. Much more interesting was and is Ken Williams, this huge, mercurial personality who never designed a game himself but who lurked as an almost palpable presence in the background of every game Sierra ever released as an independent company. In short, Sierra was his baby, destined from the first to become his legacy more so than that of any member of his creative staff.

Said legacy is, like the man himself, a maze of contradictions resistant to easy judgments. Everything you can say about Ken Williams and Sierra, whether positive or negative, seems to come equipped with a “but” that points in the opposite direction. So, we can laud him for having the vision to say something like this, which accurately diagnosed the problem of an industry offering a nearly exclusive diet of games by and for young white men obsessed with Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings:

If you match the top-selling books, records, or films to the top-selling computer-entertainment titles, you’ll immediately notice differences. Where are the romance, horror, and non-fiction titles? Where’s military fiction? Where’s all the insider political stories? Music in computer games is infinitely better than what we had a few years back, but it doesn’t match what people are buying today. Where’s the country-western music? The rap? The reggae? The new age?

And yet Williams approached his self-assigned mission of broadening the market for computer games with a disconcerting mixture of crassness and sheer naivete. The former seemed somehow endemic to the man, no matter how hard he worked to conceal it behind high-flown rhetoric, while the latter signified a man who appeared never to have seriously thought about the nature of mass media before he started trying to make it for himself. “For a publisher to not publish a product which many customers want to buy is censorship,” he said at one point. No, it’s not, actually; it’s called curation, and is the right and perhaps the duty of every content publisher — not that there were lines of customers begging Sierra for a Daryl Gates-helmed Police Quest game anyway. With that game, Williams became, whatever else he was, a shameless wannabe exploiter of a bleeding wound at the heart of his nation — and he wasn’t even very good at it, as shown by the tepid reaction to his “controversial” game. His decision to make it reflects not just a moral failure but an intellectual misunderstanding of his audience so extreme as to border on the bizarre. Has anyone ever bought an adventure game strictly because it’s controversial?

So, if there’s a pattern to the history of Ken Williams and Sierra — and the two really are all but inseparable — it’s one of talking a good game, of being broadly right with the vision thing, but falling down in the details and execution. Another example from the horse’s mouth, describing the broad idea that supposedly led to Open Season:

The reason that I’m working with Chief Gates is that one of my goals has been to create a series of adventure games which accomplish reality through having been written by real experts. I have been calling this series of games the “Reality Role-Playing” series. I want to find the top cop, lawyer, airline pilot, fireman, race-car driver, politician, military hero, schoolteacher, white-water rafter, mountain climber, etc., and have them work with us on a simulation of their world. Chief Gates gives us the cop game. We are working with Emerson Fittipaldi to simulate racing, and expect to announce soon that Vincent Bugliosi, the lawyer who locked up Charles Manson, will be working with us to do a courtroom simulation. My goal is that products in the Reality Role-Playing series will be viewed as serious simulations of real-world events, not as games. If we do our jobs right, this will be the closest most of us will ever get to seeing the world through these people’s eyes.

The idea sounds magnificent, so much so that one can’t help but feel a twinge of regret that it never went any further than Open Season. Games excel at immersion, and their ability to let us walk a mile in someone else’s shoes — to become someone whose world we would otherwise never know — is still sadly underutilized.

I often — perhaps too often — use Sierra’s arch-rivals in adventure games LucasArts as my own baton with which to beat them, pointing out how much more thoughtful and polished the latter’s designs were. This remains true enough. Yet it’s also true that LucasArts had nothing like the ambition for adventure games which Ken Williams expresses here. LucasArts found what worked for them very early on — that thing being cartoon comedies — and rode that same horse relentlessly right up until the market for adventures in general went away. Tellingly, when they were asked to adapt Indiana Jones to an interactive medium, they responded not so much by adjusting their standard approach all that radically as by turning Indy himself into a cartoon character. Something tells me that Ken Williams would have taken a very different tack.

But then we get to the implementation of Williams’s ideas by Sierra in the form of Open Season, and the questions begin all over again. Was Daryl Gates truly, as one of the marketers’ puff pieces claimed, “the most knowledgeable authority on law enforcement alive?” Or was there some other motivation involved? I trust the answer is self-evident. (John Williams even admitted as much in another of the puff pieces: “[Ken] decided the whole controversy over Gates would ultimately help the game sell better.”) And then, why does the “reality role-playing” series have to focus only on those with prestige and power? If Williams truly does just want to share the lives of others with us and give us a shared basis for empathy and discussion, why not make a game about what it’s like to be a Rodney King?

Was it because Ken Williams was himself a racist and a bigot? That’s a major charge to level, and one that’s neither helpful nor warranted here — no, not even though he championed a distinctly racist and bigoted game, released under the banner of a thoroughly unpleasant man who had long made dog whistles to racism and bigotry his calling card. Despite all that, the story of Open Season‘s creation is more one of thoughtlessness than malice aforethought. It literally never occurred to Ken Williams that anyone living in South Los Angeles would ever think of buying a Sierra game; that territory was more foreign to him than that of Europe (where Sierra was in fact making an aggressive play at the time). Thus he felt free to exploit a community’s trauma with this distasteful product and this disingenuous narrative that it was created to engender “discussion.” For nothing actually to be found within Open Season is remotely conducive to civil discussion.

Williams stated just as he was beginning his courtship of Daryl Gates that, in a fast-moving industry, he had to choose whether to “lead, follow, or get out of the way. I don’t believe in following, and I’m not about to get out of the way. Therefore, if I am to lead then I have to know where I’m going.” And here we come to the big-picture thing again, the thing at which Williams tended to excel. His decision to work with Gates does indeed stand as a harbinger of where much of gaming was going. This time, though, it’s a sad harbinger rather than a happy one.

I believe that the last several centuries — and certainly the last several decades — have seen us all slowly learning to be kinder and more respectful to one another. It hasn’t been a linear progression by any means, and we still have one hell of a long way to go, but it’s hard to deny that it’s occurred. (Whatever the disappointments of the last several years, the fact remains that the United States elected a black man as president in 2008, and has finally accepted the right of gay people to marry even more recently. Both of these things were unthinkable in 1993.) In some cases, gaming has reflected this progress. But too often, large segments of gaming culture have chosen to side instead with the reactionaries and the bigots, as Sierra implicitly did here.

So, Ken Williams and Sierra somehow managed to encompass both the best and the worst of what seems destined to go down in history as the defining art form of the 21st century, and they did so long before that century began. Yes, that’s quite an achievement in its own right — but, as Open Season so painfully reminds us, not an unmixed one.

(Sources: the books Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick and Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces by Radley Balko; Computer Gaming World of August/September 1987, October 1987, and December 1993; Sierra’s news magazines of Summer 1991, Winter 1992, June 1993, Summer 1993, Holiday 1993, and Spring 1994; Electronic Games of October 1993; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of February 26 1993. Online sources include an excellent and invaluable Vice article on Open Season and the information about the Rodney King beating and subsequent trial found on Famous American Trials. And my thanks go out yet again to Corey Cole, who took the time to answer some questions about this period of Sierra’s history from his perspective as a developer there.

The four Police Quest adventure games are available for digital purchase at GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/chief-gates-comes-to-oakhurst-a-cop-drama-2/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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itsworn · 6 years ago

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ModNationals 2018 event Forecasted Full Speed For The MMC

There was a time when a Modular-based drag event didn’t have staying power. Whether it was a lack of aftermarket support, not enough competitors, or just the wrong time of year, we remember the Modular-based events from years gone by. Thankfully, as evidenced by the turnout at ModNationals 2018, things have changed. New ideas, new venues, new dates, and more importantly, the support of the performance aftermarket has changed the Modular Mustang landscape for the better.

Perhaps the biggest change is that Mustang performance enthusiasts have embraced the Coyote engine, which has caused a trickle down/competitive effect on the Modular engine community. If you don’t have a Coyote-powered Mustang, it seems you want to beat a Coyote-powered Mustang. The Coyote engine has created more competition between Mustangs, which is good for making sure someone is in the other lane at the dragstrip.

At ModNationals 2018, there were plenty of competitors in the other lane at South Georgia Motorsports Park. What’s more, mix a sticky racing surface with cool, fall temps, and personal records didn’t have a prayer. Several racers recorded personal bests at ModNationals 2018 in just about every class. The good thing about ModNationals is that there’s a variety of classes for just about every Modular- or Coyote-powered Mustang or Ford. There was a Modular Outlaw, King of the 4V (Cobra vs. Coyote), a 6R80/10R80 class, and even an Underdog class for Two- and Three-Valve cars.

For the full-skinny on the 2018 ModNationals, peep the captions. Hopefully this will keep you going until the 2019 version, which is scheduled to take place November 13 -17 at South Georgia Motorsports Park.

Bart Tobener has never met a race he didn’t like. The Race Parts Solution front man competed in Mod Outlaw at ModNationals, but a little too much grip caused his car to wheelie against eventual winner Eric Leeper. “I didn’t have anything for him…car has only been 4.50s in that trim, but I was trying,” Tobener said. He had to short-shift, causing a loss of boost, allowing Leeper to get the win. Tobener uses an MPR-built 305-inch Coyote with a Holley Sniper intake, an 88mm single turbo, a Holley Dominator EFI and 160 lb/hr injectors and JGS wastegates. Behind the Coyote is a Proformance Racing Transmissions Powerglide with a ProTorque GenX converter. The car’s 25.3 chassis was built by Scott Black at Chassis Pro, and features a Cobra Jet rear suspension.

One of our favorite race cars from ModNationals was Keith Ciborowski’s Dark Shadow gray 2003 Cobra. Competing in King of the 4V class, which is designed to pit 2003-2004 Cobras against Coyote-powered Mustangs, Ciborowski ran in the 7.50s at the ModNationals, and that was good enough to get him to the semi-final round, but not past Jake Conant. Ciborowski’s Cobra boasts a sleeved Coyote engine from Rich Groh Racing Engines/JPC complete with Oliver rods, Diamond pistons, a stock crank, ported heads, and JPC turbo cams. His power adder of choice is a Precision ProMod 85mm single turbo, while tuning is done via a Holley Dominator ECU. Sticking with the JPC theme, Ciborowski tunes the car with help from Eric Holliday and Kevin MacDonald. A TSI/JPC Powerglide is in the tunnel with a ProTorque GenX Converter.

Donnie Gilder had a great weekend in the Unicorn. His S550 features a Fast Forward Race Engines powerplant, a Hellion Power Systems twin turbo system, a Brett LaSala built 6R80, a Steeda Autosports suspension, and a Sai Li tune. At ModNationals, Gilder busted out a 1.24 60-foot time, on the way to an 8.63 at 165 mph. The car is just at home on the street, as well, and weighs in at 3,880 pounds. Racing in Heavy Street, Gilder bowed out at the hands of eventual class winner, Thomas Benavidez, in round 3.

Marty Balintfy brought his 2004 Mystichrome Cobra to ModNationals to compete in Driver Mod and True Street. His Cobra had been stuck in the 10.0s, but he was finally able to break into the 9s with a 9.98 at 142 mph. In True Street, Marty ran a 10.05, a 10.001, and a 10.33 for a 10.129 average. In Driver Mod, Balintfy did very well before running up against Yandro Ulloa’s Minion in the semi-final round. Balintfy’s Cobra features its stock engine with Comp cams, a supercharger pushing 22 pounds of boost, Metco pulleys, a Fore fuel system, Kooks 1 ¾-inch long-tube headers and 3-inch X-pipe, and a Bassani 3-inch after-cat. The stock T56 is beefed up with a 26-spline input shaft and a McLeod RXT clutch, while the chassis benefits from a Racecraft K-member. The IRS has GForce Performance half-shafts, Viking shocks, and 3.73 gears.

Eric Leeper arguably has one of the nicest Mustang drag cars in existence. What started out life as a 1966 Coupe was turned into a more aerodynamic fastback by AC Carcraft in Coral Springs, Florida. The body was transformed around the chassis, while a MPR-built Ford GT 5.4 is nestled under the hood and filled with Diamond pistons, GRP billet aluminum rods, a billet crank, and Bullet Racing cams atop Navigator heads. Boost comes from a Garrett GTX Gen2 88mm turbo plumbed with Race Part Solutions tubing and fittings, along with a Chiseled Performance intercooler and ice tank. Leeper does the tuning with a Fueltech FT600 and the combo gets its fire from an FTSpark CDI ignition. A ProTorque Revolution converter is coupled to a Proformance Racing Transmissions-built Turbo 400, while Santhuff struts reside up front with Precision Racing suspension-tuned Penske’s in the rear. Those shocks and struts do the job of taming the Weld V-series wheels custom-coated by Mr. Speed on Mickey Thompson ET Street Radial Pros, and The Brake Man’s best brings the fun to a stop. Speaking of which, no one was able to stop Leeper and his fastback in Mod Outlaw, and he was able to take the win over JPC’s Justin Burcham in the final.

For Justin Jordan, it’s been a race to the 6s, no matter the venue, event, or track. At the ModNationals, every pass it seemed everyone was waiting for a 6.9-something to light up the scoreboard. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, but one thing that did happen was that Jordan got the win in the King of 4Vclass. Jordan uses an MPR-built engine with a Hellion twin turbocharger system featuring Precision 6466 units, a TSI Powerglide with a ProTorque converter, a BMR rear suspension, a Pro Fab Performance anti-roll bar, and a Racecraft front suspension with Santuff struts. Watch for a full feature on Jordan’s car in a future issue.

Tom Benavidez won Heavy Street in a car built by Small Blower winner Oscar Morin, who says the car was built in five weeks. The car wasn’t even ready when they left for ModNationals before arriving at Triangle Speed Shop to finish it up. The team used the qualifying runs to dial in the 2013 California Special, which boasts an MPR-built engine, a ProFormance Racing Transmissions Turbo 400, a BMR suspension, Viking shocks and struts, a TigVision 10-point cage, and a custom twin turbocharger system consisting of Precision 67/66 units. Oscar says the high 7-second car has more in it, and can’t wait until ModNationals 2019.

Like Justin Jordan, Yandro Ulloa was also trying to eclipse an elapsed time hurdle by getting his car into the 7s at ModNationals. With every pass, everyone was looking for the scoreboard to light up a 7-second pass. Fortunately, our dreams, and Ulloa’s, came true when he ran a 7.99 at 178 mph, and then backed it up with a 7.92 at 180 mph. The Minion features a Levin Motorsports-built and tuned Four-Valve with a pair of Precision 6870 turbochargers, an AEM Management system, and a Tremec T56 Magnum tricked out by RPM Transmissions. The car is looking good thanks to Truline Collision in Tampa, Florida. Ulloa won the Driver Mod class after beating Ben Stoner in the Fathouse Fabrications 2011 Mustang GT.

Taylor Baker wasn’t necessarily happy about being in the Driver Mod 2nd chance race, but sometimes you have to keep moving. Baker was busy tracking down a bad sensor, and an exhaust leak that became worse as the event went along. The sensor failure is what knocked him out of the main race. However, he had enough to take the win in the Driver Mod 2nd chance race. Baker’s ride is a 2004 Cobra, featuring a stock bottom-end, MHS-ported heads, PAC valve springs, KMS custom cams, Accufab and Shelby Mike Racing timing components, twin Precision 6466 turbochargers, a face-plated T56, a 9-inch rear, a ProEFI Engine Management System, Mickey Thompson ET Street Radial Pro 275s, and E85 in the tank. Baker says the car is still a full-weight car, as it has a full interior, A/C, power steering, and power brakes. “It was saying 3,610-3,660 the past few times I crossed the scales,” Baker says. He adds that he is just now starting the figure out the tune at its current power level. He keeps it safe since it sees a lot of street action. “It went 8.30’s at WCF and then 8.20’s at ModNats on pretty much the same tune-up aside some fueling changes,” Baker says.

If we were just going off the elimination sheets from ModNats, we would be talking about Jim Brown, but thankfully, the winner was actually Jim Braun in his 2012 Mustang GT. Braun relies on Fast Forward Racing Engines for machine work, but the engine, along with the car’s turbo system and 10-point roll cage, is self-built. The 6R80 in Braun’s car has a lot of Brett LaSala’s billet parts in it, along with a Circle D converter, and the rear has Strange Engineering 35-spline axles in it. Braun’s GT is usually in the 8.0-range at around 178 mph, and he plans on doing a lot of racing in 2019. For 2018, Braun closed out the year with a ModNationals win in the 6R80/10R80 class.

Oscar Morin was a busy man leading up to ModNationals 2018. His shop Shrek Motorsports specializes in Coyote builds, and this 2016 Mustang GT (far lane) is owned by Ariel Salinas. Morin drove the car, nicknamed “The Toro,” and it has an MPR sleeved Coyote, a Gen 3 supercharger ported by Jason Teixeira, a Triangle Speed Shop tune, a BMR suspension, Viking shocks and struts, and a Double AA Performance K-member. Morin made it look easy by running consistent 8.60s at over 157 mph to get the win. “Shout out to Daniel and Craig Pachar from Triangle Speed Shop for their support,” Morin says.

We’re not going to get into the timing issue that plagued the Outlaw All Motor class, which provided a home for Coyote Stock regulars. It seemed if a competitor went deep, the timing system would automatically disqualify that racer. In the end, the win light came on in Darin Hendricks’ lane.

In the Battle of the Underdogs, which is a Two-Valve vs. Three-Valve class, Andrew Lavender was the last man standing with his 2003 Mustang GT. Under the hood is a garage-built Two-Valve with PI heads, custom Todd Warren cams, and a single BorgWarner 76mm turbocharger. Lavender uses a Holley EFI system, a Turbo 400 transmission, and Mickey Thompson ET Drag Radial Pro 275s. This combination is good for 8.50s and a Battle of the Underdogs win at the 2018 ModNationals.

Joe Hutchins is no stranger to Open Comp racing. He put his expertise to work at the ModNationals, taking his 10-second 1985 Mustang to the winner’s circle, beating other regulars like Charlie McCulloch and Steven Daniels along the way.

A champion many times over, Randy Conway proved he hasn’t forgotten how to win. On a 10.22 index, he ran a 10.29 each round, except for his semi-final round bye run. Conway beat Joe Cascio in the final to get the ModNationals win.

The post ModNationals 2018 event Forecasted Full Speed For The MMC appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

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how2to18 · 6 years ago

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WHEN RICHARD, her film scholar husband, is killed in a hit-and-run, Clare would be perfectly justified in ditching their plan to attend a horror film festival in Cuba. But there she is, a mere five weeks later, fingering the useless second set of tickets on the flight to Havana. She imagines a run-in with someone from her town in upstate New York: they’ll snap photos, make small talk, and inevitably ask, “What are you doing in Havana?” For Clare, that answer is complicated: “She might have said, I am not who you think I am. She might have said, I am experiencing a dislocation of reality.”

Who are we within a marriage? Is there room for secret selves without hurting those we love? Can we be separate yet create a united front? From the start, we know Laura van den Berg’s The Third Hotel will not be a typical summer read with such questions at its heart. Despite its Cuban setting and tempting August publication, The Third Hotel is eerie and uncanny, layered and sharp. It will not be that book slipped into the beach bag to read in fits and starts while waiting for friends to arrive. It will be consumed in lieu of being present. The waves can wait.

It’s 2015, and Cuba is experiencing its first tourism boom in decades. Luxury hotels are being erected with a post-modern aesthetic that contrasts with the old modes of Soviet brutalism and colorful art nouveau, and Cuban filmmaker Yuniel Mata’s Revolución Zombi is repurposing bunkers from the Cuban Missile Crisis as backdrops for his politically charged horror film. Clare wanders through the festival in a haze. Without Richard, her life is unmoored.

And then she sees him taking in the sunrise in a white linen suit she’s never seen before.

Shifting between Clare’s past and present, the novel examines marriage and solitude through the framing of her husband’s absence and eerie reappearance. Van den Berg (The Isle of Youth, Find Me) presents Clare and Richard’s relationship in sparkling fragments that reveal their unspoken fear of being seen completely, of being known from all sides and angles.

Just after their wedding, Clare discovers the extent of her husband’s weighty student loans and extensive credit card debt, details kept under wraps during their flirtation. A year later, to celebrate their first anniversary, the couple sets off for Nevada — a compromise that includes Las Vegas for Clare and Death Valley for Richard. When their car breaks down in the middle of the desert, the pair spends a harrowing night atop their sweltering car listening to the coyotes howl.

In the morning, a woman on her way to church rescues them with the caveat that they accompany her. As the service comes to a close, the pastor asks the congregants to close their eyes and invites sinners to receive God’s forgiveness. Clare keeps her eyes open and watches as people make their way to the front of the church. Suddenly, Richard “shot up from the pew and then he was on his knees, crawling fast toward the altar.” Her perception of their relationship shifts: “Clare did not tell him how left behind she had felt in the pew, a door slammed shut in her face and now she would have to figure out how to crack it back open — or not.”

Arguably, this betrayal forms the foundation of Clare’s veneration of secrecy as armor against the vulnerability of intimacy. As a result, Richard’s secret life remains mostly a secret. He takes up walking in the evenings, his gait changes. Yet Clare never badgers him about his newfound flânerie, where he went or what he thought about: “[S]he respected his privacy, his desire for whatever solitary strangeness he was seeking, though later it would occur to her that maybe she had misjudged the situation and solitude wasn’t what he wanted at all.”

Meanwhile, Clare relishes her frequent work trips selling premium carbon elevator cables to hotels and businesses across the Midwest for the solitude and independence they afford her. She enjoys life on the road, the magic she experiences in the mundane. Driving along the highway in her rental car, she watches the wheat ripple like waves, the sun glinting off silos. She catalogs the dentures she finds in a seat pocket on a flight to Toledo, the hotel room phone that mysteriously rings on the hour in Wichita. Opening a nightstand drawer in Omaha, she’s amazed to find a pinkie fingernail, perfect and intact, lying inside. In the light from her bedside lamp, it has “a pearly translucence” like “a precious thing on display,” and she fights the urge to swallow it. This, for Clare, is breathtaking and strange.

In the year leading up to Richard’s death, Clare’s work trips become a point of contention, as she begins to feel more at home on the road than she does in New York: “She wanted to be married and she wanted to leave; the two did not seem mutually exclusive. She had this second, secret self that she didn’t know how to share with anyone, and when alone, that self came out into the open.”

She reveals this truth obliquely to the increasingly insecure Richard, telling him, “[I]n a hotel room her favorite thing in all the world was to switch off every light and everything that made a sound — TV, phone, air conditioner, faucets — and sit naked on the polyester comforter and count the breaths as they left her body.”

What she describes is delicious solitude, a temporary retreat into solipsism. Richard reacts with anger, shouting, “Naked!” as if this detail were the first step in unraveling an infidelity.

The reader may very well wonder what ties Richard and Clare together. Their passions divide them, with Clare hankering to fly away and Richard spending his time analyzing film in the belief that it offers its own precious solitude: “[O]nce the theater went dark and the film began, the viewer was alone — even if they had arrived in the company of others.”

They have no children. There is care, yet their marriage seems defined by a shifting respect for the other’s right to exercise their independent identity through secrecy — they put great value on “privacy, that most essential armor.” It’s telling that, in Havana, Richard lives in a sparse room with only one chair sidled up to his table: a “single chair suggested solitude […] in this life, he was alone.”

Strikingly, van den Berg allows the novel’s central mystery to stand unchallenged. The Third Hotel is not bound up in a neat little bow: the reader is never told whether Richard is real or a fever dream of Clare’s grief-stricken imagination. Rather, scenes and circumstances become increasingly bizarre until the reader is unsure whether even Clare can claim credibility as a reliable witness.

Moreover, van den Berg’s use of details furthers the novel’s uncanny atmosphere — particular and unexpected, they evoke the bizarre certainty of the dream world. Only in a dream would someone lick a mural at a cocktail party and describe the chalky flavor of a painted tree; find an opalescent fingernail resting beside the King James Bible in the nightstand of a Nebraska hotel room; or watch her dead husband run away upon calling his name, jump onto a motorbike, and slalom through raucous Havana traffic as if he’d been doing it all his life, as if he’d never had a life with her. Additionally, The Third Hotel’s consciously fractured style, which allows the reader access to Clare’s past alongside her present, echoes the jump-cut transitions of a film.

Van den Berg also subtly captures the nuances of the female experience. To be a woman alone is to be a target of harassment and misogyny so casual and pervasive that they’re almost difficult to decipher. Clare is approached more than once by an unaccompanied man, “baring his teeth” in greeting, who talks at her more than with her. Their presence is often unwelcome, a repetitive, low-level annoyance that seems to be a feature rather than a bug of being a woman in Cuba, in Florida, in any public space.

Without being told, a teenage Clare comes to understand that “if you risked your body, that most precious commodity, it was only a matter of time before you were punished.”

Confronted with pressure to fall into one of two boxes — childish innocence or overt sexuality — Clare tests the boundaries. She talks to strange boys in chat rooms who sometimes turn out to be men. In the far reaches of a Kmart parking lot, she kisses many of them. She dry humps. One night she goes skinny-dipping with another at Crescent Beach, “and in the water he brushed her wet hair from her face, so very tenderly, and said, I wish I could rape you right now.”

Then he laughs — it was only a joke. As a college junior, she immediately dumps her boyfriend when, the anger twisting his face into “something both unrecognizable and terribly familiar,” he punches her in the mouth, and she discovers that risk doesn’t have to be overt to be present: “[The danger] had been walking her to class, studying next to her in the coffee shop, sleeping in her bed.”

Even Clare and Richard’s meet-cute is no exception. One summer, she begins to notice a man following her through the university campus where she works as a librarian. Her first instinct is to question her interpretation — he can’t possibly be following her. Yet when he trails her to a coffee shop, she spins, “ready to scream and toss hot coffee in his face if that’s what it took to get away.”

Richard, embarrassed and alarmed, calms her with an apology and an admission that though his intent was to ask her on a date he’d “gone and done it in the wrongest way possible.” Clare cracks up in the face of it, “almost on her knees with laughter.” Does the fact that the reader knows they fall in love and marry offset the discomfort? When they tell the story of how they met, “[Richard] always failed to mention his eventual confession to Clare: that he had felt terribly humiliated by her laughter, […] even though she had every right to laugh or scream.”

And Clare can’t help but wonder if humiliation is somehow easier for women to bear, since “the world kept insisting they were built for it.”

Though subtly drawn, what it means to be a woman becomes just as central to The Third Hotel as the mystery of Richard’s reappearance. Powerful and atmospheric, van den Berg’s novel portrays a haunting descent into grief and the mysteries we can’t quite solve while advancing a thought-provoking exploration of marriage, misogyny, and the loneliness that lurks within unwavering privacy.

Lauren Sarazen graduated from Chapman University with a BFA in Creative Writing and currently studies literature at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. She lives in Paris.

The post A Veneration of Secrecy: Marriage, Misogyny, and Loneliness in “The Third Hotel” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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sleepadvisor · 7 years ago

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Top 7 Best Cooling Bed Pad (Topper) Reviews for 2017

Suffering from sweaty, sleepless nights that result in groggy mornings? When kicking off the covers and turning the fan on to its highest setting fails to improve your sleeping conditions, a cooling mattress topper for your bed is a viable, energy-efficient and comfortable option.

Aside from conserving energy, toppers often add plushness to beds and further enhance one’s sleeping experience. Although some buyers may initially shy away from toppers with larger price tags, the promise of lower electric bills and higher quality nights of sleep arguably warrant the initial investment.

If you’re in a hurry check out the ExceptionalSheets Bamboo Extra Plush: It’s made out of a breathable material which is the perfect product for anyone who is looking for a topper that works wonders in an overheated home.

Purchasing a top-of-the-line topper is not a process that many are familiar with, though. Bed-related items necessitate trips to the store infrequently, so knowledge of mattress pads and the like is often minimal for the average consumer. But buying the right pad can present a plethora of challenges – even more so if its use serves two people instead of one.

Accommodating one’s height can complicate the buying process, as well as finding a topper that’s not too large to put in the washing machine or stow away if need be. Of course, comfort is ultimately king; if a mattress pad isn’t comfortable for its user(s), nothing else matters.

Rather than cherry-picking various bits of research, numbers, and reviews from a frenzied online search, simply continue reading to gather the best information on cooling mattress pads. Our aggregated research will help you make a good buying decision that leads to an even better night’s sleep.

PRODUCTTYPEHEIGHTWARRANTYRATING ExceptionalSheets Bamboo Extra Plush Bamboo Plush1.5" Hassle-Free 1 Year 9/10 SleepBetter Iso-Cool Memory Foam Memory Foam3"3 Years8.4/10 Night Guard Microplush2"1 Year8.9/10 ExceptionalSheets Gel Memory Foam Gel Memory Foam2.5" Hassle-Free 1 Year 8/10 ExceptionalSheets Extra Plush Plush1.5" Hassle-Free 1 Year 8.6/10 Nature’s Sleep Gel Memory Foam Gel Memory Foam3"3 Years8.2/10 ViscoSoft Gel Memory Foam Gel Memory Foam2"3 Years 8.5/10

Considerations When Selecting a Cooling Pad For Your Bed

Up Your ‘Cool’ Factor

There’s only one factor that distinguishes a cooling pad for your bed from a regular mattress topper, but the sole reason is more than enough. Muggy climates, hot flashes and more can quickly escalate from minor irritants to full-blown problems, turning away the Sandman night after night and leaving you restless.

Many sleep-deprived buyers end up frustrated, though, because not every topper advertised as ‘cooling’ delivers on that promise. Some are initially cooling, but fleeting; according to other reviews, they have no effect at all. It’s important to note that certain individuals naturally become warmer more easily than others, but take into account the consensus of multiple reviews as well.

Comfort is King

When shopping for a new pair of shoes, the slightest discomfort – such as a hint of snugness around your toes – can be a deal-breaker. No matter how much you may like them, aesthetic almost always yields to practicality when it comes to products that are intended for comfort. The same goes for pads for your bed; you may not be wearing them on your feet, but they separate you from the ground and serve to optimize comfort.

Unfortunately, what’s satisfying for one person is another’s annoyance or pain. Comfort, especially in reference to something like a mattress pad, is subjective; hence, the success of mattresses that are able to adjust firmness on both sides of the bed. A cooling mattress topper, then, needs to be supportive without feeling too rigid; plush, but not too soft – it’s a common concern that plagues buyers of all shapes, sizes and sleeping arrangements.

Finding the Right Fit

Even if a potential buyer discovers a mattress pad that appeases their standards for comfort, the pad will do little good if it doesn’t fit over the bed! Although toppers are supposed to be able to stretch and grip around beds over varying sizes with ease, not all of them live up to that expectation. Others may perform well initially, but lose elasticity over time, which results in unwanted shifting of the pad.

And if a bed is not a traditional size – for example, if you’re very tall and need a bed with six extra inches of length – that makes the topper buying process more complex.

Check the Price Tag

Contrary to the eponymously named game show, the price is not always right. A cool mattress pad isn’t something that you need (or probably want) to purchase more than a couple of times in your life, so it may pay off to splurge and go for a pad with a higher price tag that matches its higher reviews.

Despite the universal need for sleep, though, there is not a universal budget that applies to every mattress pad buyer. When push comes to shove, if your allocated spend for a topper is under $100 and your partner’s favorite pad is $200, you’ll have to determine which option(s) best fall within your parameters. Just remember that at the end of the day – literally and figuratively – you’ll be using your topper more frequently and for longer periods of time than almost any other item in your home.

Storage and Care

In a perfect world, you would only have to re-locate your cooling mattress pad once. A quick removal of the packaging and a heave onto your bed would be the only labor required from you, giving you long-term comfort with little effort. But in a real world, you’ll likely want to wash your cooling pad every now and then, and you may move homes one or more times throughout your life.

Heavy cooling pads, then, pose a problem for owners; without assistance, even dragging a pad from one room to another can dissolve into a major struggle. When shopping for a topper, make sure to consider how easy it is to move it – whether you’re transferring it to another room, or to another country. On top of that, take general storage and care into account: can it be packaged and stored efficiently? Will it fit in your washing machine? Does it require special detergents or professional care?

Perks of Owning a Mattress Pad to Cool Your Bed

MAXIMIZE YOUR COMFORT

There’s no need to resign yourself to nights of tossing, turning and excessive sweating. A cooling pad requires little effort – there’s no installation, and companies will often ship the pad straight to your doorstep – but the payoff can be monumental. Dream-filled, uninterrupted nights set the stage for productive and fulfilling days; why deprive yourself of that accessible luxury?

REDUCE YOUR ELECTRICITY COSTS

Quality cooling toppers can chip away a couple hundred dollars, but purchasing one is a single transaction that makes a lasting difference. Compare that to your electric bill, which may rack up even more costs year over year. Ultimately, a cooling topper is a better decision for your wallet.

INVESTMENT FOR LONG-TERM HEALTH

It’s a popular trivia fact and a startling reality: roughly one-third of our lives are spent sleeping. Given how much shut-eye we need to function and thrive, it only makes sense that we invest in the products and innovations that help make that third of the pie more enjoyable.

Ready to Buy One? Read our Mattress Topper Reviews

ExceptionalSheets Bamboo Extra Plush Cooling Bed Pad

Bamboo is favored for its ability to ‘breathe,’ giving this pad an edge over others in that regard.

The hospitality industry on a whole has already taken note, as evidenced by the mattress pad’s debut in Marriott, Omni, Courtyard and other 4- and 5-star hotels across the nation.

While the top of the pad is silky, giving users a sense of luxury, the pad itself is rooted in practicality. Plenty of RevoLoft Cluster Fiber Filling, which is engineered to create fiber ‘balls’ that trap air and retain the pad’s shape, enable the cooling mattress topper to hold its shape and facilitate air flow.

Even for users with heat-holding mattresses like Tempur-Pedic, the ExceptionalSheets pad effectively cools and comforts; reviewers noted that it dramatically cooled their beds at night time.

Material

Lifespan

Price

Warranty

OVERALL RATING: 9 out of 10

Check Price on Amazon

While the ExceptionalSheets pad lacks the familiarity and customized experience that memory foam mattress toppers provide, the absence of that may be a useful feature. Other positive reviews of the pad stated the pads could promote unwanted heat over extended periods of time, making a pad like ExceptionalSheets’ a welcome addition to an overheated home.

Iso-Cool Memory Foam (with Outlast Cover)

Boasting three inches of visco-elastic memory foam and a cover made out of 100% cotton, the USA-crafted Iso-Cool is a fitting choice that will up your ‘cool’ factor.

Most notably, the product utilizes Outlast Adaptive Technology to moderate an individual’s body temperature as it fluctuates over the night.

As a result, the topper draws heat away from you and absorbs it, allowing you to comfortably snooze in any condition; on top of that, the cover is hypoallergenic and machine-washable.

Many reviewers of the topper raved over its ability to quell pain sensations and increase overall comfort; others attributed the three inches of foam to making their nights much more enjoyable.

Although others mentioned that the topper is heavy, the extra heft is likely due to the thick foam – a tradeoff that many buyers don’t mind making.

Material

Lifespan

Price

Warranty

OVERALL RATING: 8.4 out of 10

Check Price on Amazon

Night Guard Mattress Pad – Cooling Bed Cover

For a fraction of the cost of similar bed covers, Night Guard’s Cooling Bed Cover adds a layer of coziness and soothing chill.

Compared to other pads, though, Night Guard’s pad doesn’t noticeably change the familiar grooves and feel of one’s bed.

Crafted out of micro-plush fleece, the hypoallergenic pad is also sewn to promote a balanced distribution of fleece and poly filling, which ensures a more pleasant sleeping experience overall.

Despite the smaller price tag, customers rave about the topper’s quality and its transformative nature; some reviewers even said that they could sleep without any bedding on top of it.

Less glowing reviews mentioned that the pad felt thinner compared to others, but the cover’s thinner composition helps ensure that the support and comfort of the mattress underneath isn’t overshadowed.

Ultimately, the machine washable and ultra-breathable pad is a solid choice for buyers with more restrained budgets.

Material

Lifespan

Price

Warranty

OVERALL RATING: 8.9 out of 10

Check Price on Amazon

ExceptionalSheets Gel Memory Foam Topper 2.5-inch Cooling Gel Infused

The team behind the ExceptionalSheetsprides itself on the pad’s ability to conform to one’s body without jeopardizing air flow.

The topper incorporates open cell technology and the integration of gel beads into the topper’s three-pound memory foam, which relieve pressure points and support spine alignment while letting the mattress below breathe.

The one-two punch paves the way for a restful and pain-free sleep.

Multiple customers rate the product highly not only for its level of comfort but also for how easily it fits onto various mattresses. One reviewer noted that the pad expanded to its out-of-the-box size almost instantly!

If you notice a smell upon opening the topper, as other buyers mentioned, it may be a result of the gel beading technology throughout the product.

But for a great topper that uses innovative technology, others would argue that the smell is not an issue in the long run.

Material

Lifespan

Price

Warranty

OVERALL RATING: 8 out of 10

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ExceptionalSheets with Fitted Skirt – Extra Plush

Another winner from ExceptionalSheets, this mattress pad comes with a fitted skirt to add both practical and aesthetic appeal to your bedroom.

In addition to its cooling quality, the Extra Plush Topper can save you money by restoring mattresses past their prime and adding a cushy layer to otherwise firm, uncomfortable mattresses.

Hypoallergenic cluster down fiber ‘traps’ air to retain the pad’s shape and promote air flow more than other toppers currently available, all while providing the feel of genuine duck and goose down.

According to consumers who have used the product, the topper’s materials also make it highly effective against soiling; the machine-washable fabric is also easy to clean, deterring any potential stains and smells from seeping in.

Even more, reviews praise the topper’s advertised ability to breathe new life into older mattresses, saving money and time.

Although other buyers say that the pad tends to shift, it’s an easy adjustment that doesn’t detract from the topper’s holistic quality.

Material

Lifespan

Price

Warranty

OVERALL RATING: 8.6 out of 10

Check Price on Amazon

Nature’s Sleep Thick AirCool IQ King Size 3-Inch-Thick

This topper from Nature’s Sleep steals the top spot in terms of price, but the extra dollars earn their keep.

The pad, which uses all-new, patented AirCool IQ Gel technology, simulates the support and comfort of a thicker topper without the actual weight and dense materials.

As a welcomed result, users can enjoy the pad’s cooling effects and customized pressure point reduction molded to one’s body.

Besides, the product is CertiPur-US certified, guaranteeing that the foam is of the highest quality.

Reviews of the cooling topper call out its added capacity to stifle creaking and other sounds – another common irritant that can disrupt one’s sleep.

And amongst the multitude of shining comments about its plushness and general comfort, other reviews note that the pad is able to expand without problems and lacks any nose-wrinkling odors.

Material

Lifespan

Price

Warranty

OVERALL RATING: 8.2 out of 10

Check Price on Amazon

Despite its heftier size that makes moving it more of a challenge, chances are that you won’t plan on moving it anytime soon; its microfiber cover is easy to remove and clean, protecting the pad’s quality year over year.

ViscoSoft 3-lb. Density 2-Inch Gel Infused

The Gel Infused from ViscoSoft highlights four qualities: body temperature regulation, body contouring, pressure point relief and the elimination of motion transfer.

It costs less than nearly all of the toppers mentioned on this list but succeeds in fulfilling its four promises.

A temperature-controlled surface helps disseminate body heat equally throughout the pad, while the high-density memory foam hugs your body without sagging.

Buyers across the board have raved about the topper, claiming that it’s improved their sleep quality and lived up to its cooling standards.

New parents and chronic pain sufferers are among the reviewers who gave the product a thumbs up, supporting its place on our list of top toppers.

ViscoSoft proudly calls out that their pad weighs 42 pounds – more than twice the weight of other competing brands – but follows that statement with the assurance of delivery to one’s door for convenience.

Material

Lifespan

Price

Warranty

OVERALL RATING: 8.5 out of 10

Check Price on Amazon

The sizable topper may deter some potential buyers, but ViscoSoft asserts that greater weight, in this case, correlates with premium quality.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Which mattress pad is right for me?

There are plenty of factors to consider when selecting a mattress topper that best suits your needs.

Working with a more restrictive budget? The Night Guard and ViscoSoft toppers are both lower-cost options but hit many of the key points that buyers are seeking out.

Worried about lingering pain? Pads like the Iso-Cool or ExceptionalSheets Gel toppers may help alleviate those discomforts most effectively.

Sleeping with a partner? Hone in on a mattress pad that decreases or wholly eliminates noise and motion, such as Nature’s Sleep pad.

As you deliberate, questions like these will help you narrow down your options.

2. How can I keep my mattress cool during warm summer nights?

The toppers are designed to increase air circulation and allow mattresses to breathe, so little else is required on the user’s part. If you want to enhance the cooling effects of the pads, consider investing in bedding made with more breathable fabrics, like bamboo.

3. Will it last?

Rest assured that your mattress topper will serve you well year over year. Just like regular mattresses, toppers are not meant to be thrown out and replaced frequently. With proper care, you should be able to use it for years; pads with removable covers are also more predisposed to stay clean and ‘fresh’ for a longer duration of time.

Want something that will last rougly 10 years? Check out our top cooling mattress picks.

4. What are the best bed sheets to keep me cool?

There is a variety of bed sheet options to upgrade your sleeping conditions on particularly warm nights (great tips to cool down). Proponents of synthetic bedding, which is engineered to fight against climbing temperatures, claim that the state-of-the-art fabrics can achieve what natural products lack. But some of these fabrics are treated with special chemicals that can wash out over time, reducing their potency.

In contrast, natural fabrics like linen, cotton, and bamboo are hailed as tried-and-true materials that help prevent sweat from absorbing. However, make sure to purchase bedding with low to medium threat count (between 200-400); higher thread counts trap in heat more.

5. How do I keep cool while sleeping on a hot memory foam mattress?

A cooling topper for your bed can offset the stifling heat that can emanate from a memory foam mattress. Luckily, thanks to innovations like gel memory foam, you don’t have to sacrifice your memory foam for a cool night’s sleep!

Update: We just released our memory foam mattress pad/topper buyer’s guide.

Conclusion

Keeping your bed cool and your nights restful doesn’t have to be an ordeal. A high-quality, cooling mattress pad can compensate for less-than-optimal sleeping conditions and improve breathability and comfort – without breaking the bank.

Given its plethora of high reviews and its mid-range price, we recommend the ExceptionalSheets Bamboo Extra Plush Lightweight Cooling Mattress Pad with Fitted Skirt – its lightweight features keep beds cool at night while sparing buyers the stress and strain of moving a heavy pad. The topper also adds some extra plushness to mattresses without compromising the qualities of the bed beneath it.

Although it’s important to be mindful of factors like budget and size, it’s even more valuable to remember that your purchase is a long-term investment for your well-being. A good night’s sleep doesn’t have to be a dream – with the right cooling topper, you can make it a reality.

See Editor's Choice

Back To The Comparison Table

Sources and References:

Effect of High Rebound Mattress Toppers on Sleep and Sleep-Related Symptoms – Clinicaltrials.gov

Evaluating the effect of mattress topper thickness and firmness combination on pressure and temperature distribution – iea.cc

Mattresses and Pads Flammability – cpsc.gov