#running theory is Yellow is just another piece of The King and John is still with The King

[kikkomansoymilk]

partnerships, duality, union ʎuoɯɹɐɥsıp ,ssǝupǝpıs-ǝuo ,ǝɔuɐןɐq ɟo ssoן

reversed version under the cut

[entwinedmoon]

John Torrington: Reflections

(Previous posts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)

Today, January 1, 2020, is the 174th anniversary of John Torrington’s death. Him dying on New Year’s Day must have dampened whatever celebrations the crew were most likely enjoying, a dark day in a quite literally dark month, as the sun would not return for some time. He would have been buried in that endless night, during a snowstorm (a layer of snow was still preserved on top of his coffin), the first death in what had so far been a successful expedition. A death so soon may have worried the crew, but since it was due to an illness he’d brought with him, it may have just been considered a fluke. They may not have been concerned, still thinking they would make it through and discover the last piece of the Northwest Passage. If they had succeeded, Torrington would have been a minor footnote in the history of a triumphant journey, his grave a small curiosity for anyone who may pass by. But no one made it home from the Franklin Expedition, and Torrington is now seen as an early warning sign of the tragedy awaiting the rest of the men.

Why is it that, after all these years, anyone still talks about Torrington? What is the fascination with him and the other men buried on Beechey? I know what draws me to his story, and while I can’t speak for everyone, I think there are at least some people who share the same reasons.

So what intrigues me about John Torrington? Why did I write this series, spanning eleven blog posts and over 25,000 words (that’s half a book!), about a 174-years-dead Victorian sailor, spending my spare time researching and dedicating long hours to studying his life and death?

In trying to pin down just what fascinates me about Torrington, I went through some of my old writing, and I found this little snippet from an essay I never finished. It was written almost ten years ago, on January 13, 2010:

It was all John Torrington’s fault. I couldn’t sleep because of that frozen grimace, mouth and eyes both slightly open—eyes, intact, seriously, staring back at me. He just stares, cold, frozen, dead. I’m not likely to go on a polar expedition any time soon and possibly die from lead-tainted food or whatever killed him, but it’s not that idea that frightens me. He stares at me in the night, in the corners, in the reflections in the moonlit mirror on my closet door, in the folds of the dirty laundry on the floor, he’s there, staring at me. Going to the bathroom at night is the worst, walking through the dark hallway, knowing he’s following me, just behind me, out of sight, but still manages to jump ahead to stare at me in the split second before the bathroom light comes on, inches from my face in the thick darkness, but then he runs and hides again in the shadows of the hall, lurking, waiting to follow me back to my room.

Sometimes it’s Otzi or Jaunita or Ida Girl or Cherchen Man. Never King Tut or Ramses II for some reason though. But John has always stood above the rest, just the memory of a picture haunting me.

As you can see, I had a slightly different attitude toward Torrington back then. To explain this, let me start from the beginning.

When I was about seven or eight, my older brother brought home a copy of Buried in Ice from school, where he was learning about the Franklin Expedition. He of course shared the pictures in the book with me and my older sister because he thought they were creepy and that’s what you do when you’re a kid, you share creepy stuff to try to scare your siblings. I’m in my early thirties now, so the memory has faded over the years, but there’s still a lot that stands out even now. I remember eating a particular type of corn chip that to this day I associate the flavor of with lead poisoning. My brother told me about how the brains of the three mummies had turned into a yellow liquid—something we thought was gross but also cool for some reason. I remember that there was no way to just flip the book over to cover up the picture of Torrington on the front cover because—oh goodie—there was a picture of him on the back too. My brother and I commented on the golden color of Torrington’s discolored skin (I don’t know why we thought “golden” instead of yellow—it sounds more poetic to call it “golden” but that was certainly not our intention). I also remember that later, after my brother had returned the book to school but we were still haunted by the images, we couldn’t recall the names of Hartnell and Braine, so we called them Big Head and Snarl Face instead. But we remembered the name Torrington, probably because he was featured more prominently in the book. And due to that prominence, Torrington was the one I would think of when lying in bed at night, watching shadows in the closet morph into monsters.

To try to combat my fear, I used a trick I’d learned where I turn the scary thing into something ridiculous (this was before Harry Potter was published, but it’s the same theory as how to fight a Boggart). I put the three mummies into a long-running story that I’d made up in my head—and I made them undead idiots. Like zombie versions of Beavis and Butthead. Yeah, I did that. I made them weird funny sidekicks in my story, but it didn’t really stop me being afraid when I saw pictures of them again.

Remarkably, despite being terrified of Torrington, I became obsessed with mummies as a kid, an obsession that continues to this day. I would marvel over pictures of Tollund Man, Ötzi, and the Qilakitsoq mummies of Greenland.

But not John Torrington.

Whenever I would flip through a book about mummies, if I encountered a picture of Torrington, I would slam my hand over the page to cover it. I would be creeped out by other mummies, but it was never to the same level as it was with Torrington. And yet, I would still be compelled to peek, even after covering the page. I would regret it immediately, but there was something that made me want to look, even though looking at him was the last thing I wanted to do.

Over the years, Torrington would find his way into a few more stories of mine, in some form or another. In college, I wrote a short story for a fiction writing class where the picture of Torrington on the cover of Frozen in Time started talking to a young woman, representing her repressed thoughts and fears (he cracked a lot of jokes in that one). At that point in time, however, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to read Frozen in Time. I had bought a copy a while ago—the 2004 revised edition—and when it arrived from Amazon I flipped through it, telling myself that I was an adult and I loved mummies and I could bravely face the pictures of these boogeymen from my childhood.

That last part turned out to be incorrect. Several weeks of being too afraid to turn off the light at night ensued. I wouldn’t read the book for another eight or nine years.

But eventually I did read it, multiple times in fact, and I’m no longer terrified of pictures of Torrington, or Hartnell and Braine. That all started a little less than two years ago.

It began with another story idea I had that incorporated Torrington, one I have yet to write. I thought I should do some research into him first if I was going to include him. Around the same time, The Terror was airing on AMC. The exact timeline is a little hazy for me, because the story idea actually first came to me at the end of 2017, but The Terror first aired in March 2018. I can’t remember if I had the idea to add Torrington to my story before I started watching The Terror or not, but I think it was before.

Once I started researching Torrington and the Franklin Expedition, I quickly became obsessed. I had poked around Franklin research before, but my fear of Torrington would always hold me back. I would peer through my fingers at pictures and facts, but I could never do more than that. But now I was hooked.

My childhood nightmares were there at first, just out of the corner of my eye, but my research started to shift those in strange ways. I had always seen Torrington as this ancient, towering monster, but then I discovered that he was only twenty when he died and stood at only five-foot-four. I’m older than him. I’m taller than him. His desiccated body weighed less than ninety pounds, which I definitely weigh more than. Basically, if he came charging out of the closet, I could take him.

But what really drew me in was realizing that we knew so little about him. I could look at a picture of his face, frozen in time, but I couldn’t reach back into the past to ask him about himself. I’ve known about him almost my whole life, with him skulking in a corner of my brain, stepping out of the shadows every now and then, but I didn’t really know who he was as a person. The Franklin Expedition can drive people mad with the mystery of what happened to the men after they entered the Arctic, but suddenly I became obsessed with knowing what had happened before the expedition. Who was John Torrington? Who was this guy that has occupied my dreams and nightmares, who has taken up a permanent residence in my mind ever since I first laid eyes on him? Who was this young man who has somehow been a part of my life for so long, but whom I know so little about?

I know I’m not the only one who has been asking these questions, or who has been living with the Franklin ice mummies in their heads. I’ve met some amazing people online who are just as obsessed, if not more so. Thanks to this series, I’ve had people contact me about their own interest in Torrington and the Beechey Boys and how they understand my love for them.

Many times before, I’ve attempted to put in words just what draws me to mummies. In 2011 I even started a long-since-abandoned blog about mummies called Digging the Dead, where I tried to explain my interest. But I’m going to try my best now to pin down what has compelled me to study Torrington, and why he keeps popping up in my life.

I think part of the appeal of Torrington—and Hartnell and Braine—is the shockingly alive appearance of their preserved bodies, with some morbid curiosity over their undead vibe thrown in. The preservation of a body, preventing the natural process of decay, is fascinating. It’s a type of immortality, although one the mummy doesn’t get to enjoy. Torrington looks like he could get up and walk around—possibly in a zombie-like way, but still. He looks more like a real person than some mummies, like bog bodies that became too twisted by the weight of the peat or desert mummies that have a freeze-dried appearance. But a large part of the fascination with Torrington, and mummies in general, is that it’s like touching a piece of the past. When we see their pictures, we’re looking at something that is from a time long gone, but they seem so very present, so tangible in the here and now. They are time travelers, in a way, and this is our way of reaching out to them across the years.

And with the mystery of the Franklin Expedition, Torrington, Hartnell, and Braine add an extra layer of intrigue as well as reminding us that there were more than just officers on board. We have pictures of Franklin, Crozier, Fitzjames, and many of the lieutenants and mates, but the ordinary sailors and marines didn’t have the luxury of having their pictures taken. What they looked like has been lost to time, but the preserved remains of Torrington and the Beechey Boys literally puts a human face on the ordinary men of the expedition, the ones who never wrote memoirs or had journals that were preserved for posterity. Men who have been largely forgotten by history, who don’t get the same reverence we give the captains, who don’t get memorials or landmarks in their names. When thinking of the men of the Franklin Expedition setting sail for their destiny, it’s easy to see Torrington on deck—alive, his striped shirt billowing in the wind as they sail toward Lancaster Sound—and to imagine that these were working ships, fully manned with ordinary people who led regular lives and had dreams of what they would do when they returned home to double pay and the fame of having helped discover the Northwest Passage.

But on January 1, 1846, those dreams winked out for one of those men. On this day, I think not about how well Torrington’s body has defied time and decomposition, but about who sat with him as he passed. Was he alone? Did he have friends on the crew? And what of his family back home? Did they toast him and his journey, not knowing that he was gone?

Who said a prayer for John Torrington 174 years ago?

If it’s not too late, I think I’ll say one for him today.

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Torrington Series Masterlist

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by John Robison Do the slot machines on the ends of aisles pay better than the machines in the middle? How about the machines near the table games? They’retight, right? And are the machines near the coin redemption booths loose? Join us on our journey for finding loose slot machines. The loose slot machine is the slot player’s Holy Grail. Much as King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table searched Britain for the Holy Grail of myth, slot players search casinos for loosemachines. Slot players have formulated many theories about where casinos place their loose machines to aid them in their quest. Before we can figure out where the loose machines are, we have to figure out what they are. There is no U.S.D.A. system for grading the looseness of machines and no national orinternational standard that determines whether a machine is tight or loose.

The games themselves didn't really give much satisfaction for winning, as a round of each game was pretty small and unfulfilling, and the amount of coins won was also pretty meagre. Pokemon yellow rocket game corner slot machine. The game corners of Pokemon were my first encounter with gambling, and they taught me that gambling is a huge waste of money.

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So, what is a loose slot machine?

Say we have two 94% payback machines. Are they loose? I bet some people say yes and some say no. Slots cash hits slots machine snd cadino games party. Why isn’t there agreement? Let me add a little more information to thescenario to see if it gives you an idea of why one person calls a 94% payback machine loose and another calls it tight. What if I told you that one machine was a nickel machine and theother a dollar machine? For most people who play nickel machines, a 94% machine is among the best-paying machines in their area. For most people who play dollar machines, on theother hand, a 94% machine is among the worst-paying machines in their area. The person who called 94% loose probably plays lower-denomination machines, while the person who called 94%tight probably plays higher-denomination machines. Let me add one more piece of information. The dollar machine is a video poker machine. Dollar video poker players would rather have root canals onall their teeth with no anesthesia while their fingernails and toenails are ripped off than play a 94% payback machine. They have many adjectives for a 94% payback machine, but loose isnot one of them. You see, loose isn’t an absolute. Looseness depends on your frame of reference. Looseness is actually a comparison. We shouldn’t say “loose.” We should really say“looser”. We should really be asking where the looser machines are. But let’s bow to common usage and continue using the term loose machine.

So, what is a loose machine?

Which Slot Machines Pay the Best 2020? Published by Paige December 2, 2020 Categorie(s): Casino News. Everyone is searching for a lifechanging win in 2020, so we’ve listed which slot machines pay the best and how to identify them. After all, you want to get to winning quickly, so why waste time finding them? Graton Resort & Casino has over 3,000 of the newest slot and video poker games as well as all the classic titles. You’ll always find your favorite game here! With a new dedicated Non-Smoking gaming area, our 9,000 square-foot venue offers a variety of nearly 300 new games. I noticed that on many of the machines, they had a 'counter' that was clearly visible to guests. (They were on the side of the machines) The counters showed 'dollars in', 'dollars out', and 'number of hand pays'. So from what I can tell the payback percentage is 89% on most machines. This is pretty comparable to the slots on the Vegas strip.

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Quite simply, a loose machine is a machine that has a higher long-term payback percentage than another machine. The loose machines in acasino are those machines that have the highest paybacks. These are the machines that will take the smallest bites out of your bankroll in the long run. No wonder slot players areconstantly searching for them. Over the years, players have developed a number of theories about finding loose slot machines. Casinos place loose machines near the entrances, for example, so passersby can see playerswinning and are enticed to enter the casino and try their luck. The loose machines are also at the ends of the aisles to draw players into the aisle, where the tight machinesare. And, of course, a loose machine is always surrounded by tight machines. You never have two loose machines side by side. That’s done for players who like to play more than onemachine at a time. If they should happen to stumble upon one of the loose machines, they’ll be pumping their winnings from it into the tight machines around it. More theories. The machines near the table games are tight because table games players don’t want to hear a lot of bells and buzzers going off and happy slot players whooping it up aftera big win. Another reason the machines near the table games are tight is because table games players will occasionally drop a few coins into a slot machine and they don’t expect to winanything, so why give them a high payback. Similarly, the machines near the buffet and show lines are tight. People waiting in line are just killing time and getting rid of their spare change. They’re not going to play for along time or develop a relationship with those machines, so the machines can be like piggy banks – for the casino! Money goes in and rarely comes back out. The machines near the coin redemption booths, on the other hand, are loose. Players waiting in line for coin redemption are slot players and the casino wants them to see other playerswinning. Seeing all those players winning will make them anxious to get back on the slot floor to try their luck again. Finally, finding loose machines in highly visible locations is most likely. Again, casinos want players to see players winning and be enticed into trying to get a piece of the casino’sbankroll themselves. These are the theories I can think of off the top of my head. Maybe you know of some others. Most of the theories have a basis in psychology. When we see others winning, we’llwant to play too because 1) we’re greedy, 2) we’re envious, or 3) we see that at least some machines really do pay off and if we keep trying we might find one too. Based on my own discussions with slot directors, interviews with slot directors, and seminars I’ve attended, I don’t think these theories are relevant in today’s slot world. To see why,we have to look at how slot machines and slot floors have changed. Picture a slot floor of 10-20 years ago. Even if you don’t go back that far, I’m sure you’ve seen pictures on TV or in books. The slot machines on a casino floor in that era arearranged in long rows, much like products out for sale in a supermarket aisle. There’s no imagination used in placing the machines on the floor. The machines are placed using cold,mechanical precision. On page 193 in Slot Machines: A Pictorial History of the First 100 Years by Marshall Fey, there’s a great picture of Bally’s casino floor in Atlantic City that illustrates my point. Thepicture shows hundreds of slot machines all lined up in perfect rows like little soldiers. The caption reads, “Like a Nebraska cornfield, rows upon rows of Bally slots extend as far asthe eye can see.”

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Try an online casino for FREE. We have over 15 No Deposit Bonus Codes. No credit card needed, just sign up and startplaying! Compare that image with the slot floor layout at a casino that was designed in the last five or so years. Studies have shown that players feel very uncomfortable playing in longaisles. They feel trapped when they’re playing in the middle of a long aisle, particularly if the casino is crowded. As a result, modern casinos have shorter aisles and when a long aislecan’t be avoided, it will be wider than others so players won’t feel like they can’t get out. One of the finding loose machines theories has casinos placing loose machines at the ends of aisles to draw people into the aisles. Having shorter aisles means having more machinesat the ends of those aisles. Can all of these machines be loose? In addition to being uncomfortable in long aisles, players are also uncomfortable being put out on display for the other players. Perhaps they feel like they might become a target iftheir good luck is too visible. One slot director I heard speak said that he tried to create “comfortable niches” for his players. Instead of being in a fish bowl, visible to most of the slot floor, players in hisniches can be easily seen by only the other players in that niche. Another theory about loose machine placement is that casinos place them in highly visible areas. Modern casinos still have highly visible areas, but the areas are visible to a smallernumber of players. A loose machine in this area will influence fewer players than before. The last change in the slot floor that I want to mention is perhaps the biggest change of all. Casinos used to have hundreds of slot machines. Now they have thousands. Oneslot director in Las Vegas said in an interview a few years ago that with so many machines on his floor, he didn’t have time to micro-manage them. He and his management decided the holdpercentage they wanted for each denomination and he ordered payback programs close to that percentage for his machines. Furthermore, he said this was the common practice in LasVegas. As much as the slot floor has changed, the changes on the floor are dwarfed by the changes in the slot machines themselves. One thing that struck me about that picture of Bally’s is howall the machines look alike. They really do look like soldiers being inspecting, all standing at attention and in identical uniforms, or like rows of indistinguishable corn plants. In fact, it looks like there are only three different games in the 10 machines in the first row in the picture. Granted, the majority of the machines in Bally’s casino were Ballymachines. Still I’m surprised by the lack of variety in the machines in the front row in the picture. I heard that one theory why Americans have gotten heavier is that we have access to a wider variety of foods today than we had before. When meals consisted of the same thing time aftertime, it was easy to pass up second helpings of gruel and eat just enough to no longer be hungry. But now we have Chinese one night, Mexican the next, followed by Thai, burgers, pizza,and pasta -- it’s easy to overeat on our culinary trip around the world. Just as variety in food creates desire, so does variety in slot machines. “Hey, I used to watch The Munsters all the time. I’ll try that machine.” “I never miss TheApprentice. I’ll give that machine a go.” “I played Monopoly all the time as a kid.” “I have a cat and a dog and a chainsaw and a toaster.” Not only is there more variety in themes on machines, there’s also more variety in paytables. Back in the 1920s, a revolutionary change in slot machine design was paying an extra coin fora certain combination. Adding a hopper to the machine in the electro-mechanical era made it possible for the machine to pay larger jackpots itself instead of requiring a handpay from ajackpot girl. Adding a computer to the slot machine made it possible for today’s machines to pay modest jackpots of a few thousand coins all the way up to life-changing jackpots ofmillions of dollars. The computer also makes it possible to add more gimmicks to machines. Gimmicks like “spin-til-you win,” symbols that nudge up or down to the payline, haywire repeat-pays, and double spinall add more variety and interest to the games. Today’s machines are immeasurably more interesting and fun to play than those of even just a decade ago. Each new generation of machines has crisper graphics and better sound than theprior generation. Slot designers are working overtime to devise compelling bonus rounds that will keep players playing for just one more crack at the round. How many people playingWheel of Fortune are trying to win the jackpot? Not many. Most people keep playing to get one more spin of the wheel. Slot directors today don’t need to pepper their slot floors with loose machines to stimulate play. Today’s machines themselves generate more desire to play than seeing a player doingwell. Now I'll finish our discussion of where slot directors place loose machines with some additional thoughts, with a few anecdotes I've heard at slot seminars, and with what I think will be thefinal nail in the coffin of loose machine placement philosophies. One of the placement theories says that tight machines should be placed near the table games because the table games players don’t like a lot of noise while they’re playing. Have the peopleputting forth this theory ever been near a craps table? A craps table with a shooter on a hot roll has to be one of the loudest places -- if not the loudest place -- in the casino. Crapsplayers can be a boisterous lot even when the table isn’t hot. Okay, I can see players needing peace and quiet at blackjack tables (It’s difficult to count cards even in a quiet casino.), butnot at craps, roulette, Let It Ride, and other tables. In any case, the casino can adjust the volume level on a machine. The slot director can put a very quiet, loose machine near the tablesand not disturb a single table games player. Another problem with following a loose machine placement philosophy is that it limits the flexibility slot directors have in moving their machines around on the slot floor. If the directors aregoing to give up a little bit in payback on some machines, they certainly will want to get their money’s worth and ensure that these machines are in locations where they’ll be played, be seenbeing played, and entice other players to play. Slot floors have only a limited number of high visibility areas. Slot directors won’t want to waste any of their high-paying machines in the morenumerous less visible areas, where the machines won’t be encouraging other players. Now I’d like to share some anecdotes I’ve heard at panel discussions during the big gaming show (first the World Gaming Congress, then the Global Gaming Expo) that’s held in Las Vegas eachyear. First, one slot director described an experiment he conducted in his casino. He had a carousel of 5 Times Pay machines that all had the same long-term payback. He ordered new chips to lower thepayback percentages on a couple of the machines to see if anyone would notice. The machines with the lower long-term paybacks received just as much play as the higher-paying machines. Noplayer, furthermore, ever complained that some of the machines in the carousel were tighter than others. In another seminar, a slot director shared the philosophy he used to place some machines that he had inherited from another property. These machines, he said, had lower long-term paybacks thanthe payback he usually ordered for machines on his slot floor. He said, 'I read the same books that the players read. I put these lower payback machines in the spots that the books said shouldhave the high payback machines.' My last anecdote is about a decision made by the slot director at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas many years ago. He was ordering 10 Times Pay machines for his slot floor and he was concerned aboutthe low hit frequencies available for those machines. (Machines with multiplying symbols tend to have low hit frequencies, and usually the higher the multiplier, the lower the hit frequency.)The slot director was afraid that his players would think the machines were very tight because they hit so infrequently. He said that he ordered higher paybacks than he usually does for thosemachines in an attempt to offset the low hit frequency. The machines would still have a low hit frequency, but at least the average value of a hit would be a little higher than if he hadordered a payback percentage nearer the percentage he usually ordered. He hoped that would be enough to keep his players from thinking these were tighter than the other machines on his slotfloor. Although I think these anecdotes are the exceptions that prove the rule that some casinos at least order the same long-term paybacks for machines of a particular denomination, there is evidencethat some casinos may not. In the first edition of Casino Operations Management, for example, Kilby and Fox list a number of “general philosophies that influence specific slot placement”including: “low hold (loose) machines should be placed in busy walkways to create an atmosphere of activity” and “loose machines are normally placed at the beginning and end of trafficpatterns.” They then say that “high hit frequency machines located around the casino pit area will create an atmosphere of slot activity.” I’m not sure whether they’re saying high hit frequencyshould or shouldn’t be placed near the pit. In any case, note that one philosophy said that loose machines create an atmosphere of activity and another said that high hit frequency machinesalso create an atmosphere of activity. This is the perfect segue into what I think puts the final nail in the coffin about loose machine placement theories. There is no correlation between long-term payback and hit frequency. A low hit frequency machine can have a high long-term payback. High hit frequency machines, in addition, can have lowlong-term paybacks. Larry Mak, author of Secrets of Modern Slot Playing, recently queried the Nevada Gaming Control Board to find out the payback reported on penny machines. The Board said itwas 90.167%. Most of the penny video slots have very high hit frequencies, yet the overall average long-term payback is very low. The usual reasoning behind putting loose machines in highly visible areas is so slot players can see other players winning. Maybe we should be more precise here and say that players will seeother players hitting and assume that they are winning because they are playing loose machines. But because there’s no correlation between hit frequency and long-term payback, these players canactually be playing machines with low long-term paybacks. I don’t put much stock in loose machine placement theories, but I do believe slot directors may follow a hit frequency placement philosophy. Slot directors may try to place high hit frequencymachines in visible areas to encourage play. This philosophy says and implies nothing about the long-term payback of the machines.

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Young Justice Season 3 Episode 22 Review: Antisocial

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The quality rebounds as the focus narrows as Young Justice: Outsiders starts barrelling towards its season finale.

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This Young Justice: Outsiders review contains spoilers.

Young Justice Season 3 Episode 22

Grading on a relative scale, last week's episode of Young Justice was a debacle. It was too busy and too rushed. This week's episode, "Antisocial," fixes almost every problem with "Unknown Factors" by dramatically narrowing its scale. It sacrifices some action in doing so, but this episode really starts thundering towards the finale and pushing plot lines to their inevitable conclusions.

The action starts out focused at the Outsider's Hollywood headquarters. Everyone is recovering from their ordeal in Granny's X-Pit, but the only one nearing death is Dick. Batman grabs Oracle, Robin, Aquaman and Miss Martian for a private conference, and Black Lightning pieces everything together. He figures out that the resignations were staged, and that the team has been sent out on missions in conjunction with the League. He is...really pissed, and it gives us some terrific voice acting.

Khary Payton is best known for his work as Teen Titans/GO!'s Cyborg. He's a versatile, talented voice actor who's doing tons of work in Young Justice that is virtually unidentifiable from his Cyborg, and Cy in those shows is not especially prone to anger. So when he lets rip here, we get a little bit Cyborg, a lot of pent up rage, and he just uncorks in a really entertaining way that helps sell Jeff's fury at being used by Batman. And that rage and sense of betrayal contributes a lot to the most powerful moment of this story line, when Oracle takes Bruce down a peg.

Barbara Gordon is probably the only person on the show who is qualified to and can get away with pushing back on Batman. Yes, Jason Todd is alive and amnesiac and around, but Barbara in a wheelchair is the most visible, powerful and immediately available symbol of a failure of Bruce's mission, and everything this season has been part of or in service to that mission. The whole argument is great character work, especially for characters who have had less than 5 total minutes of screen time for the rest of the season, but it also wonderfully implies a richer world that's not part of the show. "Batman, Inc." was a throwaway line from Black Lightning early in the season because we assumed he'd be part of the actual Outsiders, but they've been operating this whole time while Dick was running his team, Beast Boy was operating his Outsiders, Miss Martian was overseeing The Team, Aqualad was in charge of the League, Wonder Woman had the space contingent under her command, Lex Luthor was starting up Infinity, Inc, and even more. This is a robust superhero universe and every time we get peeks at the greater world, it's exciting.

While all of this is going on, Terra is taking notes to report back to Deathstroke, and Dr. Jace's story is finally paying off. There was some to like here and some to really dislike. Tara Markov's relationship with Slade is approximately infinity percent better than in the comics. Judas Contract's Terra/Deathstroke is supremely gross, the sole stain on an otherwise legendary story. Young Justice removes all the weird lasciviousness and makes them both better characters: Tara is a traumatized, neglected kid being shown a perversion of respect and care by someone who is a bad guy and in all likelihood using her, but at least is being decent enough to give her some paternal affection in the process. They're setting up a parallel between Slade and Batman here - Slade appears to care about Tara, but is really just using her to manipulate events in his favor, while Batman is manipulating everyone around him, but genuinely cares about their well being. It's nice, and pretty slick.

Slade also gives Tara a way to break the Starro-tech inhibitor chips that Jace uses on her and Brion to get them out of the tower and heading towards her "mentor," the Ultra Humanite. She grabs Halo on her way, and they meet up with the Ultra Humanite and Granny, who uses Overlord to take control of Halo, then drops everyone into the X-Pit to finish figuring out the Anti-Life Equation.

This episode has one of the most easy to understand explanations of Anti-Life I've ever heard. It's not a complex mathematical formula like it is in the comics or when I use it on Twitter: it's Life-Free Will=Anti-Life. Halo is a human Mother Box with the safeties ground off, so when she's exposed to the X-Pit's torture and activates her healing aura, that triggers anti-life and makes the person exposed to it a slave to Granny. In this case, Granny tests her observations by shoving Jace out into the torture of the X-Pit and having her explain her entire diabolical plan.

Here is the only part of the episode I didn't care for. Jace goes from brilliant, shady scientist to "WHY WON'T YOU LOVE ME" stereotype in the blink of an eye. She did all her meta-experimenting to make children for herself, and now Brion and Tara are her children and Violet, who isn't a meta at all but is a living, breathing Mother Box, is a disgusting freak who isn't good enough to date her son. And she was only sleeping with Black Lightning to stay near her children. This is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over the top. She might as well be boiling Count Vertigo's pet rabbit here. It's not great. Eventually, Terra breaks away and frees Geo Force, so Granny and Violet boom tube one way, the Ultra Humanite and Jace boom another, and the kids head back to the tower to break the bad news to Jeff.

Jace's character developments are trash, but everyone else gets a pretty good episode. And the big surprise reveal at the end is that there are two Grannies - one on the space station with the Furies moving metas around the universe, and one running Goode World Studios on Earth - which has some fascinating implications. This was a solid start to the season's endgame.

OUTSIDER TRADING TIPS

- The three people from Luthor's Infinity, Inc. team talking to Stargirl I MEAN Courtney Whitmore are also from Luthor's Infinity, Inc. in the comics. The one talking is Trajectory (confirmed by the end credits), a super speedster. The bald guy is probably Everyman, and the woman in yellow is probably Fury. All three were introduced in 52, the weekly jam comic by Geoff Johns, Mark Waid, Greg Rucka, Grant Morrison, and Keith Giffen that grew out of Infinite Crisis. Trajectory was killed when Luthor turned her powers off mid-run; Everyman shapeshifts into another person by consuming a part of their body, turns into a cannibal who likes the taste of long pig, and was killed by Cupid in Green Arrow & Black Canary; and Fury is Ranma 52: a guy who shapeshifts into a super strong woman with claws.

- Despite being the best Robin, the modern world continues to do Tim Drake dirty. He's a key part of the story here, and he gets no dialogue and his contributions to the discourse amount to a shrug and a head tilt.

- About that ending: comic book logic says that the two Grannies could be anything - hard light projections, clones, time displaced copies, psionic ghosts from the astral plane, secret twins. Literally anything. However, there are two specific things from New Gods lore that could be the explanation.

1. Lump. The Lump was a giant blob created by Granny in the comics to trap Mister Miracle - she would link their minds together and he would be stuck in there forever. Later, Simyan and Mokkari would try and lock Batman in there in Final Crisis, but Batman convinced him to get up and help with an escape. Lump was also a popular theory for what was going on in Tom King and Mitch Gerads' Mister Miracle: that Scott was trapped in an anti-life loop by Darkseid, and Lump was his and Barda's child. That ended up being not the case in an emphatically brilliant way and if you haven't read Mister Miracle yet, you're missing out on one of the finest DC comics of all time and should buy it immediately.

2. According to Multiversity's map of the multiverse, the New Gods exist outside the Orrery of Worlds as platonic forms, casting different shadows down into each distinct universe. So it's possible Gretchen Goode is the Granny of Earth-16, while the Granny on the space station is the Ur-Granny hunting for Anti-Life from outside the 52 known universes. Probably not, but still a fun theory.

Keep up with all our Young Justice: Outsiders news and reviews right here.

Read and download the Den of Geek SDCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

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4/5

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DC Entertainment

Young Justice

Animation

Review Jim Dandy

Aug 13, 2019

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Have you ever dreamed of getting insanely rich overnight? Well, of course you have. Everybody wishes he or she could wake up and never have to work another day, having everything one could ever want or need. That’s why the lottery and gambling are so popular and ‘get-rich schemes’ on the internet are endless. People fall for these scams in the hope that they might be the one to get lucky to find the gold to prove that the odds weren’t against them. What about searching for a hidden treasure? Wouldn’t this fulfill every childhood dream you had? You might be surprised to find out that there are still hidden treasures out there all over the world. Things that have never been found. There is gold hidden by pirates, old artifacts stolen, golden owls hidden away for fun, yellow Indian diamonds missing, crazy expensive necklaces with thousands of diamonds, and so much more, all waiting to be discovered.

#1 Forest Fenn’s Hidden Artifacts Forest Fenn was a rich collector who was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 1988. So, with only a year to live, he went to the Rocky Mountains and hid many treasures and old artifacts estimated to value about one to three million dollars. It’s like an old adventure film. He left instructions in the form of a riddle to help people find his treasures. “Begin it where warm waters halt And take it in the canyon down, Not far, but too far to walk. Put in below the home of Brown.” Seriously! How generalized and unspecific did he want his riddle to be? No wonder no one has ever been able to find it.

#2 The Golden Owl Have you ever tried to drive someone crazy? Well, this is the way to do it. A man went by the name Max Valentine and in 1993, he claimed he had hidden a treasure, a golden owl in the French Country Side. He said if anyone managed to find it, he would reward them that person a million dollars. People went crazy trying to find this. Some even burned a church down in pursuit of this golden owl. In an interview, Max Valentine stated that the owl was still in place as he had gone back to check on its location. He said people had gotten close with obvious signs of searching nearby. Unfortunately, Max Valentine is now dead and no one knows whether the owl is even still hidden. Imagine if this man just made up the whole story to draw attention to himself and give the impression to everyone in the world that he had enough money to play games with it. We can only guess.

#3 Thomas Beale’s $63 Million Thomas Beale was a miner who discovered about $63 million worth of gold with a few other men in 1816. They wanted to make sure their children and all their descendants got this money so they left it hidden. Thomas Beale wrote three codes describing where the treasure was, what the treasure was, and the names of the men and their family, so that they would know who the treasure belonged to. He gave this code in a box to a man named Robert Morris who was supposed to open the box after ten years. Thomas Beale was supposed to send a key for the codes if he wasn’t able to return, but he never did. Robert and a friend tried their best to translate the code, but the best they could do was understand what the treasure was. No one has found the treasure to this day.

#4 Pearls In The Salton Sea In 1612, a ship was sailed by Juan De Iturbe across the Pacific Ocean. Rumor has it that the ship sank in what is now known as the Salton Sea, in the Mojave Desert. They say there were loads of expensive black pearls on the ship. The pearls are believed to be worth millions of dollars. The men say they were tossed off the boat into Cahuilla and had to leave the ship and hike on foot all the way to safety. No one has ever claimed to find all these pearls, so people believe that they are still out there somewhere. This legend has grown in fame, so much so that they even made a movie about the treasure being found in 1870.

#5 Diamonds In London This treasure has a greater chance of being discovered since it was only lost in 2009. Graff Diamonds is an expensive jewelry store in London that was robbed in 2009. The two men who robbed the place had extensive disguises. They had gone to a makeup artist for four hours before the robbery, changing their faces and hair. They said to each other that even their own mother wouldn’t have been able to recognize them. They went into the Graff store pretending to buy jewelry and then held an employee at gunpoint forcing the store to give them 43 pieces of jewelry worth up to about $65 million. These jewels were never discovered even though both of the men were eventually caught by police. So there is $65 million worth of jewels and diamonds out there somewhere. Although, if you did find these stolen jewels, you would still have to return them, as each one is marked and chipped with the Graff code.

#6 Flor Do Mar Put on your scuba-diving gear and get ready for the underwater experience of your life. A nobleman, Afonso de Albuquerque, had a large Carrack filled with gifts for the King of Portugal. The boat had traveled around the Indian Ocean, but unfortunately sank in November, 1511. This was one of the biggest Carracks in existence for its time, weighing 400 tons. So when you hear that it was full of treasure, you know there had to be a lot. This treasure was taken from the Sultan of Malacca’s palace. The ship sunk during a storm leaving many men dead. It sunk in the Kingdom of Aru, Sumatra off Timia Point. Alfonso lost all of the treasure. The boat and its treasure are still to be discovered. Portugal, Indonesia, and Malaysia are all fighting over who actually owns the boat if it is found, so you might have a hard time keeping this treasure even if you discover it.

#7 Mosby’s $350,000 Colonel John Singleton Mosby (is that not the longest name you’ve ever heard?), also known as the Gray Ghost because of how quickly he disappeared, was a commander in the Civil War in Virginia, fighting in the Battle of Bull Run and the Peninsular Campaign. He had outstanding skills in disappearing and blending into things to avoid being caught. As a child, he was weak and frail and was often bullied. He always tried to fight back and would lose. He shot a kid that was attacking him, without killing him, and ended up in jail for a year. Perhaps this is what taught him to disappear and hide rather than attack face on. He took $350,000, but then almost got caught so he and his men buried the treasure. He sent men back later to collect the money, but they were all caught and killed. So John Mosby never ended up going back to collect his treasure.

#8 The Irish Crown Jewels People are still trying to work out how the Irish Crown Jewels went missing back in 1907. The cleaner who worked in the Dublin Castle discovered the safe wide open with the jewels gone, while the inner door had been secured with the library key still in the lock. The Jewels were said to be worth around £1,340,000 in 2015 and contain the “jeweled star and badge regalia of the Sovereign and Grand Master of the Order of St. Patrick.” The safe was moved in 1907, but the dimensions were wrong and so it couldn’t fit in the strong room, so they had to store it in the office of the King of Arms, Arthur Vicars. The keys were all held by the Vicars and staff. They were very relaxed about this. The Vicar got drunk once and awoke with all the precious jewels on him. This might not have been an outside job. Perhaps it was carried out by those who protected the jewels. People say these jewels have probably been broken to pieces and sold off or hidden away somewhere.

#9 The Florentine Diamond This mystery feels like the sort of thing you find in many novels. The Florentine Diamond is a beautiful yellow diamond with origins from India that was valued at $750,000 during World War One. The stone dates back to at least 1476. During the 1700’s, the jewels were placed in the Hapsburg Crown Jewels after Francis Stephan of Lorraine married Empress Maria Theresa, bringing the jewel to Vienna with him. During WWI, the Austrian Empire fell. Thus, Charles I took many jewels, including the Florentine diamond, into exile to Switzerland. This diamond was stolen by an unknown subject around 1918 and was taken to South America. With no clue of its whereabouts, some claim it may have been cut up and sold in America after it was stolen in 1918. If it wasn’t cut and resold, it would be an extremely impressive jewel to discover and would be worth a great amount today.

#10 Oak Island Mystery The Oak Island Mystery is a baffling one. While many critics believe there is no treasure on this island, there have been countless books written about this mystery and even a documentary that was aired in 2014 about finding the hidden treasure of the island. The Oak Island is located in Canada in Nova Scotia’s south shore. There are so many different theories as to what’s hidden in these islands, mostly ancient artifacts and numerous locations the supposed treasures could be. Mostly, treasure hunters like to look at a few specific locations—the “Money Pit, a formation of boulders called Nolan’s Cross, the beach at Smith’s Cove, and a triangle-shaped swamp.” They say that the Money Pit has already been excavated and nothing has ever been found, but people continue to go to these islands to search.

#11 Patiala Necklace This is a pretty amazing necklace. It contains 2,930 diamonds. Not only that, but it actually holds the world’s seventh largest diamond known as the “De Beers,” some rubies, and seven more diamonds with 18 to 73 carats. The necklace was made for Bhupinder Singh of Patiala in 1928 by the House of Cartier, and then later given to Maharaja, also of the state of Patiala. Somehow, in 1948, the necklace disappeared, but the famous De Beers diamond reappeared in 1982 by itself at Geneva auction being sold for $3.16 million. The rest of the necklace later surfaced in London, but was of course missing all of its large diamonds and rubies. Cartier decided to buy the necklace and remake it. It took them four years, and they only made a replica, probably realizing the danger of making such an outrageous necklace. They filled the missing jewels with cubic zirconia and made a fake De Beers diamond for the centerpiece.

#12 Alamo Treasure In Texas USA, the lost Alamo Treasure is hidden. The Mexican army fought 100 men from Texas and destroyed every single one of them in the battle of the Alamo in 1836. Reportedly, the Alamo had hidden treasure of gold in its grounds worth millions. The treasure was brought to help free the Texas people from Mexico. They hid the treasure in case another war arose and they needed supplies. The theory is that the treasure was hidden in the bottom of the well, though others believe there isn’t any treasure and that if there were, they wouldn’t have hidden it in a well during a war, as that would have dirtied their only access to clean drinking water in the instance of a siege. The Alamo was a fortress and also used as a Roman Catholic mission. The building was actually designed for educating the newly converted Christian American natives. The front street has already been excavated in search of the lost treasure. The building is now a museum.

#13 Poland’s Royal Casket Poland’s Royal Casket was made for royalty in 1800 and was said to contain seventy-three prized relics “including gold watches, chains, silver rosaries, ivory boxes and silver cutlery.” It went missing during the World War II after it was sent to Sieniawa in Southwest Poland. They tried to hide the treasure in Poland, but ended up losing it. Some people say that its whereabouts were given away in 1939 by a local named German Miller who told the invading Nazis where to find the hidden Royal Casket. To this day, none of the missing relics have been found. It’s possible that they are all scattered throughout Germany hidden in various places.

#14 Ivory Coast Jewels $6 Million The Ivory Coast Jewels were stolen only in 2011. The museum in the capital of Ivory Coast was robbed during the Abidjan battle. They believe this robbery had help from the inside as none of the windows or glass boxes were smashed and the doors weren’t even open. The museum hasn’t been able to recover a single thing. The museum has managed to mark most of the stolen things in the Interpol database, so that if anything surfaces, they will know that it’s stolen. They didn’t just steal things of monetary value, these artifacts contain Ivory Coast’s precious history, with some of them being from as early as the 17th century. “Among the stolen artifacts were 35 gold pendants dating from the 18th Century, 12 traditional necklaces from the 17th Century, six miniature gold boxes from the 18th Century, a 19th Century royal sabre, and an Akan king headdress, which could come from the Baoule or Anyi kingdoms.”

#15 Jean Lafitte Jean Lafitte was a pirate from France. He and his brother worked together during the 19th century to steal treasure off boats in the Gulf of Mexico. They were hardcore pirates. They had a warehouse set up where they would bring the treasure to sell it. Many people believe that Jean and his brother, Pierre Laffite, had so much treasure that they weren’t able to sell it all. Instead, they began to bury the treasure to keep it safe. Whether this part is true or just a legend is hard to really know. Rumor has it that the treasure was buried in Lake Borgne and still remains there. This is located near the coast of New Orleans. Jean died in 1823, right before pirates basically became extinct in the Gulf of Mexico. There are also many rumors and legends about his death. No one is really sure how it happened.

Source: TheRichest