#spins are literally jawdropping

[thisthisthisandthis]

the maturity baby mao has???? at 14??????????

[lampmanliveblogs]

THIS. THIS ENTIRE SEQUENCE. STUNNING. JAWDROPPING. GORGEOUS.

You guys know how much I love pretty lights, and this is like… the prettiest light.

Hold on, I gotta go back and rewatch this entire sequence, it’s just that beautiful. The animation!

When Luz and King do their second roar, Luz bounces back from the force, that’s so cute. And then when she flies up, she lets go of Stringbean and catches the butt of the staff and the she and Eda spin around to draw the big spell circle. And then they twirl around inside the circle and cast the spell together. Good stuff, good stuff.

Inside the Archive House, the witch kids and Camila are doing their best to make sure no one gets hurt even as the Tiara Halls begin crumbling around them. And hey, glyphs still work, that’s good.

Aw man, what will Amity say when she sees Luz’ transformation? My guess is she’ll say nothing, because she will be too stunned to speak.

(Future Lampman here: I think I noticed the first time through but didn’t bring it up, but Amity is using a plant glyph and Willow is using a fire glyph. Plants are of course Willow’s thing, and aside from abomination magic, Amity is known to use a fireball spell. They’re using each other’s elements.)

Gorgeous.

…

HOLD ON A MINUTE! How come King and Dad Titan in the In-Between only have three fingers, but the Titan’s skeleton clearly has five?????!?!?!!!!?!?? How???? Okay, uh,,, c’mon Lampman, you’re good at coming up with weird ideas for this kinda stuff…

I guess… maybe… maybe the strange big claws we see on King and Dad Titan’s hands are actually like… some sort of covering over their four fingers? Not sure what purpose that would have, evolutionary, but then again, these are magical beings. Plus, King doesn’t have wings right now, while he’s small enough to use then, but Dad Titan had wings (we can even see remnants of them in the water on The Titan’s right side) while he was WAY too big to possibly use them.

Anyway, time for something completely different.

We can see quite a lot of bones from other Titans lying around. On the left side of the image we can spot a skull (and I think there might be another corpse in the upper right corner, but it’s a bit difficult to tell with the clouds). Not only is there a skull, but there is a pretty large landmass. Which is odd, because didn’t that book King was reading at the beginning of Young Blood, Old Souls say that there were only a few, smaller remains of other titans to be found in the boiling sea?

I dunno, maybe I’m misremembering.

Also, tough luck for anyone who lived on the left arm, your house is now sideways. We can literally see entire villages or towns in some shots, so, uh… the people of the Boiling Isles are gonna have to learn how to build high-rises with cheap apartments real fast, or find some other way to deal with the large chunk of the population that is now homeless.

One downside with this super smooth, super gorgeous animation is that it makes it slightly more difficult to get screenshots in motion that looks good. Whatever, they’re gonna cut Philip Phungi off from his source of power. Callback to season one episode four, The Intruder, where, when asked by Eda where magic comes from, Luz replied ”The heart.”

(Future Lampman here: We have a trio of heroes who crashes into the large body of a monster in order to get inside and take out the core which is the source of its power… am I taking about this scene right here, or am I talking about Chrono Trigger, if you chose to crash the Epoch into Lavos’ shell in order to skip the first eleven phases?)

(Future Future Lampman here: I can’t believe I forgot to mention it, but the music in the background here is the melody from the opening theme. And you know things are hype in an anime when the main theme starts playing.)

Raine is alive! YES! Ha, Belos, you absolute failure! You buffoon! Raine was literally in the midst of things, and you couldn’t even kill them. The only person you’ve managed to kill so far was a powerless human, and she came back strong.

And that is Raine’s Rhapsody/Eda’s Requiem Raine is whistling.

[fongjingying21]

XiaoMi Roborock S50 S55 $keyword$ Jawdropping Rebate

Are a roller brush and a twist brush for border cleaning, two wheels, and an wheel in the front. For mopping, the vacuum includes a water tank and cloth that you simply attach to the bottom when you're ready to clean flooring. The app interface of the Roborock is designed and intuitive to use. 

The map that the vacuum builds during its initial cleaning fills most of the screen. The dimensions of this cleaning area, underneath is displayed, in addition to the cleaning duration, and the remaining battery charge as a percentage. At the very bottom, buttons to trigger the cleaning manners. It's a little boy, also. Where some robot vacuums will change leadership as soon as their bumper encounters resistance, the Roborock attempted to push through obstacles as it could. Sometimes, that helped as when it struck a pair of my child's shoes and only pushed them together until they transferred out of the way. It could also be potentially disastrous, like when it insisted on becoming under a guitar stand until it met immunity to change direction just before tipping over a costly axe. It might not have the name-brand cachet of iRobot's Roomba or even Samsung's Powerbot, but the Roborock S5 can hold its own. The Roborock S5 includes laser navigation, flood mapping, and both vacuuming and mopping functions, so you can tackle all of your floor cleaning out of the comfort of your sofa. Although this auto mode is great for general maintenance cleanup, the app offers you a few more choices. 1 great one, particularly in the event that you have kids, is a place feature which lets you click a spot and send the vacuum into it. You are able to activate Spot Clean manner, also from the program, for a cleaning. Another is Zoned Clean Up, which lets you scale one or more areas on the map with a resizable box and dispatch the vacuum to do everything. That is also where you can access your cleaning background, see how long the vacuum parts have until they need to be cleaned or replaced, and even access manual vacuum controls at the form of a virtual remote control or joystick. Mopping Throughout a cleanup, the voice prompt of the S5 will float in with status reports, permitting you to know when it is starting or quitting cleaning or returning into its dock. There is even a"Find my robot vacuum" button in the program that if pressed drives the Roborock to call out"Hi, I'm here." Setup and usage The Roborock had no problem navigating the transitions between the various floor types, nor did it get hung up on any furniture. Its elevation prevented it from becoming under my couch and kitchen cabinets, but it abandoned the wide-open spaces free of debris. Including wall borders, which are tough for some circular vacuums. The spin brush swept any dirt to the path of the brush so that it could sweep it. And the whole cleaning took 21 minutes in line with this app. The program  The Roborock S5 impresses right out of the box with its bright white finish, a welcome change in the shades of black common to the majority of robot vacuums. On the top is a button that triggers automatic cleaning, another for spot cleaning, and a third for recharging, which basically works like the"house" button on additional robot vacuums, sending the Roborock back to its own charging dock. Unfortunately, the mopping performance did not impress as much as the vacuuming. It didn't do a sheen of water on the floor, and unevenly at that. It lifted just the loosest dirt off the outside, and it is certainly no substitute for a hand cleaning. More problematic was that the Roborock doesn't avoid carpeting when it's in clean manner --as Ecovacs Deebot OZMO 930 does--nor does it recognize when it has moved back on the carpet and stop mopping. When I didn't supervise a kitchen-floor cleaning, Because of this, I ended up with several feet of moist rug. The Settings menu offers an abundance of further features you are guaranteed to utilize. I'd recommend activating Carpet Mode as it permits the Roborock to recognize carpets and boost suction. Also helpful is a"don't disturb mode" that allows you to decide on a time once the vacuum shouldn't clean. Another design detail is that the inclusion of a mat that is moisture-proof. You snap this on the charging doc so that water from your mopping won't drip on your flooring while the Roborock is recharging. You just plug the dock and set the vacuum on its charging pins. Download the Mi Home companion program, As soon as it's charging, insert the Roborock, and follow the prompts to link it to your Wi-Fi network.

You need to attach the module to wash floors. This is made up of a horizontal water tank and a fabric. It's rather simple: First you dampen the cloth then attach it to the bottom of the tank. Then you fill the tank and slide it into its own slot on the bottom of the vacuum. In the end, select the mopping mode in the program and start the cleaning. For the initial cleaning, I turned the Roborock loose onto a 50-plus-square-foot area that including carpet, hardwood, and linoleum littered with everything to paper bits from pet hair. The vacuum cleaned a small area of floor completely before moving onto a second, building a map because it moved. A turret on the top of the vacuum homes the Roborock's laser distance sensor and brings its total height to approximately 3.8 inches. A 0.6-liter dustbin is located below a lid only behind it. A cleaning tool for the untangling hair from the brush is latched to a slot next to it--a thoughtful detail since these tools are easily misplaced.

[adrilzulqarnain]

XiaoMi Roborock S50 S55 Lavender Singapore Jawdropping Rebate

The Roborock had no problem navigating the transitions between the different flooring types, nor did it get hung up on any furniture. Its height prevented it from getting under my couch and kitchen cabinets, but it abandoned the spaces free of debris. That includes wall edges, which are tough for some vacuums. The spin brush swept any dirt to the route of the brush so that it could sweep it. And the cleaning took 21 minutes in line with this program. That is also where you can get your cleaning history, see how long the vacuum components have until they have to be cleaned or replaced, and even access manual vacuum controllers at the form of a virtual remote controller or joystick. To mop swept floors, you have to attach the module.

This is made up of a water tank and a fabric. It is rather uncomplicated: the cloth dampen then attach it to the base of the tank. You then fill the tank and slide it into its slot on the base of the vacuum. Finally, pick the style that is mopping in the program and begin the cleaning. A turret at the top of the vacuum homes the Roborock's laser distance sensor and brings its full height to about 3.8 inches. A 0.6-liter dustbin is located below a lid just behind it. A cleanup tool for the untangling hair from the home brush is latched directly a thoughtful detail, since these tools can easily be misplaced. Another design detail that is welcome is the inclusion of a mat. You snap this on the charging doc that water out of your mopping won't drip on your own floor whereas the Roborock is recharging. You then plug the dock in and place the vacuum on its charging pins.

While it's charging, download the Mi Home Companion program, insert the Roborock, and follow the prompts to link it to your own Wi-Fi network. While this auto mode is great for general maintenance cleanup, the app gives you a few choices. 1 one, especially if you have kids, is a place feature that lets you click a place on an area map and ship the vacuum to it. You are able to activate Spot Clean manner, also from the program, for a concentrated cleaning. The other is Zoned Clean Up, which enables you to scale a couple of areas on the map using a resizable box and then dispatch the vacuum there to do everything. It's a determined little bot, also. Where some robot vacuums will change direction as soon as their end encounters resistance, the Roborock tried to push through obstacles as it could. Sometimes, that helped as when it struck a pair of my kid's shoes and only pushed them along until they moved out of the way. It might also be potentially devastating, like when it insisted on getting beneath a guitar stand until it met immunity to change direction just before leaning over a costly axe.

The Roborock S5 impresses right out of the box with its bright white finish, a shift in the samey colors of ordinary to the majority of robot vacuums. On the very top is a button which triggers automatic cleaning, another for spot cleaning, and a third for recharging, which essentially works as the"home" button on other robot vacuums, sending the Roborock back to its own charging dock. It may not have the name-brand cachet of iRobot's Roomba or even Samsung's Powerbot, but the Roborock S5 can hold its own with both those robot vacuums. The Roborock S5 includes laser navigation, flood mapping, and both vacuuming and cleansing functions, so you can handle your flooring cleaning out of the comfort of your couch. The Roborock's app interface is cleanly designed and intuitive to use. The map the vacuum builds during its first cleaning fills the majority of the screen. The size of this cleaning area, underneath is displayed, along with the cleaning interval, and also the remaining battery charge as a percentage. At the base, are buttons to trigger the cleaning modes. For the cleaning, I flipped the Roborock loose onto a 50-plus-square-foot area that including carpet, hardwood, and linoleum littered with everything to newspaper scraps from pet . The vacuum cleaned a small area of floor thoroughly before moving onto another, creating a map as it moved. 

The app Throughout a cleanup, the S5's voice prompt will float in with status reports, permitting you to know when it is starting or quitting returning or cleaning to its dock. There is even a"Locate my robot vacuum" button in the app that if pressed drives the Roborock to call out"Hi, I am here." Mopping On the bottom are a roller brush and a single twist brush for edge cleaning, two main wheels, and an omnidirectional wheel at the front. For cleaning, the vacuum comes with a separate water tank and fabric that you simply attach to the floor when you're ready to wash flooring.Installation and usage The Settings menu provides an abundance of features, you are guaranteed to utilize. I'd recommend activating Carpet Mode as it permits the Roborock to recognize carpeting and boost suction. Also helpful is a"don't disturb mode" that lets you decide on a time once the vacuum shouldn't clean. Unfortunately, the cleaning performance didn't impress as much as the shaving. It did not do a sheen of water on my floor, and unevenly at that. It lifted the loosest dirt and it's certainly no substitute for a thorough hand cleaning. More problematic was that the Roborock doesn't avoid carpeting when it is in mop manner --as Ecovacs Deebot OZMO 930 does--nor does it understand when it's moved back on carpet and quit mopping. As a result, I ended up with several feet of rug that was moist when I didn't oversee a cleaning.

[whitelippedviper]

Blame! Vol. 2: Revisiting

The most immediately striking thing about Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame! While reading it is the dungeon crawl dread of it.  The book follows Kyrii(also called Killy in earlier editions) as he crawls up an endless sprawl of technological ruin.  Nihei more than any other comic artist plays with scale. Closed claustrophobic spaces opening into giant caverns.  Small guns, large mile long blasts.  Dramatic pull aways where Kyrii becomes just an ant moving up the spin of a dead cyborg god.  Even though a lot of the mythos of Blame! Forms the foundation for all of Nihei’s work afterwards.  Blame! Is the basic formulas of Nihei’s storytelling at their most primordial and most direct. Kyrii searches for thousands of years for the net terminal gene which will connect humanity from the base reality that is corrupted by insane machines and cyborgs eliminating humans on sight.  Much of Blame! Works along these basic cycles: Nihei climbing silently around, through, and up mechanical ruins.  Encounters corrupted mutated human populations.  He searches for the net terminal gene.  The safeguards show up.  Kill all of the humans.  Kyrii kills some of them.  Then he keeps up his journey.  The unrelenting repetition of Blame! Is key in building the dread of the book.  As a reader you figure out pretty early that this is a dungeon you can’t escape from.  So it makes the few moments where the book opens up into grand vistas, or dramatic fights between Kyrii and the safeguards all of the more dramatic.  It makes the existence of Kyrii, Cibo, and the fallen humans all the more tragic.  The architecture and the design of the world is along the lines of Giger’s Biomechanics, so some of the appeal as well is just the spectacle of what Nihei draws on one page or the next.  His capacity for continually upping the ante in design and scale is really incredible in Blame!   What’s interesting to me on this reread though, is the way that the microstructures of the world in Blame! Are suffused with the flaws of the greater cosmos.  To understand Blame! You have to understand that there are kind of three tiers to it.  There is the base reality which is the zone where humanity lived and built these machines, programmed all of these various rules, and where the second tier, the netsphere was created.  The netsphere is where all of the programming for the machines in the base reality reside.  The third tier is the space between the netsphere and the base reality that the safeguards move between.  The safeguards are these terrifying cyberpunk hellraiser looking demons that exist to enforce the rules of the netsphere within the base reality. 

Something you find out in the prequel series Noise is that the netsphere, the reason only those with the net terminal gene can interact with the netsphere was that it was a way for humans to segregate those who had power to connect versus those that did not.  This human class warfare presented an exploit for the safeguards to pervert.  So once the netsphere rules were altered to send the safeguards after the humans, it just became a matter of exterminating all of those with the net terminal gene, so that the humans could never access the netsphere for long enough to save themselves from the safeguards and builders.  The insane builders are why there is this endless technological sprawl.  They can’t be stopped from building, so they just mindlessly continue to maintain this huge superstructure which imprisons humans.  And humans thousands of years removed from this catastrophe exist under the suppression of the safeguards, removed from the netsphere admins who are functionally God of the base reality.  So you can see the genetic structure of humans breaking down because of inbreeding and flawed cloning technology that they’ve lost the knowledge of how to repair or rebuild.  As humans break down they either move toward the safeguards in evolution or seem to devolve into sewage. This aspect of being both withdrawn from god in the netsphere, god’s absence, human’s fall--while every aspect of their reality is simultaneously controlled and is an avatar of that withdrawn god.   The architecture is literally the design of this netsphere programming.  It’s randomness.  It’s chaos.  Is design.  The safeguards themselves as fallen demons, seem corrupted by their continual interaction with these humans.  They become more human.  Jealous.  They take on personalities. Filling the void of vacated humans.  It is apocalyptic hell on earth.  Techno-apocalypse. 

So in volume 2 of the Master Editions that Vertical have been putting out, there’s this great moment toward the end of the book, where Kyrii and Cibo are trying to defend the last of this group of humans against an unholy assault of safeguards both in number and scale.  We get these micro battles between the humans, kyrii, cibo and smaller safeguards, and this huge kaiju like battle evoking the old ones between a giant safe guard monster and a builder that Cibo has hijacked.  So on one level you have this tribe of humans fighting off these basic safeguards.  On another level Kyrii is fighting this super demon angel safeguard Sanakan--occupying this space of demigods.  And then beyond that is the space in between the netsphere and the base reality that Cibo has hacked into which is like a lesser ring of heaven, where an admin has descended to guide her.  And she’s fighting the safeguards in this almost immaterial space.  That also manifests itself in the base reality battle.  So these three tiers are all moving around at the same time as Nihei zooms in and out at extreme distances while everything around is bathed in fire and metal and leather.  At one point Sanakan actually takes on the aspect of a dragon almost in her fight against Kyrii invoking the earlier heroic cycles of knights and dragons, as well as Ragnarok.  Nihei is interweaving multiple cosmos while showing simultaneously the unimaginable scale of the battle happening across three realities AND how small it still is within the greater whole of Blame!.  This is only the second volume of the omnibus editions!!!  There’s a few battles later in the series that are even larger in scale than this one.  And even this battle everything feels lost, nothing is saved, and there is only more ruin and despair.  Kyrii is knocked back.  And then just starts the climb back up.  There are no comics that are like Blame!.  Even Nihei’s later work which is also excellent.  Particularly Abara and Biomega.  I mean it makes sense that there’s no reason for Nihei to just keep making Blame! And the themes and basic structures of Blame! Are present in all of his work--but this cyclical saga of technopunk despair is a one off.  And there’s nowhere else in comics to go for this fix.  This is comics at its most spectacle.  It’s fun to read Blame! In this kind of Instagram world we live in now.  Because since it is so many moments of “oh shit, look at that” there’s a way that reading it now is like touring it with friends.  These are snapshots from my Giger vacation.  Reading Blame! Is like going to Rome.  We should all aspire to make something so jawdropping and singular.

[thekingsnecktie-blog]

Der Roof Ist On Fire

From the very beginning of the Trump presidency there have been widespread fears that he would eventually reach a point of such pressure, and of such panic at the threat of being exposed as the criminal he is, that he would precipitate some kind of fake international crisis to distract the public and justify seizing imperial-like powers. A Reichstag fire is the usual metaphor, although the Gulf of Tonkin or sinking of the Maine would also suffice.

In many ways, the “national emergency” over the border wall is that long awaited, all-but-inevitable Reichstag fire.

Yes, there are other motives in play. Obviously, Trump is desperate to fulfill his signature campaign promise—or what Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) more correctly calls “a campaign applause line”—and satisfy his xenophobic base. As part of that, he is trying to save face and somehow spin his humiliation at the hands of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats as a “win,” a contortion that strains the credulity of even his reliably slavish followers (See Ann Coulter.)

But at the same time, the wall is undeniably a means of distracting the public from the slowly closing jaws of the Mueller probe and Trump’s myriad other existential problems on the legal and counterintelligence fronts. It’s no coincidence that his rambling, free association Rose Garden announcement came hot on the heels of several bad moments for the White House.

One was this week’s court hearing for Paul Manafort, where the usually sphinx-like Mueller team revealed the centrality of Manafort’s coordination with Konstantin Kilimnik to their case. (“This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating,” prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told the judge.)

Another was Andrew McCabe’s jawdropping revelation that the FBI and DOJ actively looked into recruiting Cabinet members, and even Mike Pence, in an effort to invoke the 25th Amendment and carry Trump out of office rolled up in duct tape.

And lastly, there was Friday’s revelation, in a court filing, that the special counsel has proof that Roger Stone had direct contact with Wikileaks and Russian hackers. (News that the White House likely knew was coming. Trump is frequently at his craziest right before big, damning stories like that drop.)

So the camouflaging aspect of the “national emergency” should not be underestimated. Indeed, the mere fact that I am writing about it—even if just to point out its insidiousness—is proof that it is at least partially working to steer the national conversation away from more substantive matters, especially those involving his legal jeopardy.

I understand that the Reichstag comparison is not perfect, in that the burning of the German parliament was a manufactured pretext for the Nazis to consolidate power, not primarily a Wag the Dog style distraction from other issues per se. But in another way, the comparison is very apt, in that this fake emergency represents Trump literally usurping powers that rightly belong to Congress. If he is allowed to succeed in doing that, where will he stop?

But here’s the thing about the Reichstag comparison. By definition, it presupposes that the invented crisis will fool people. That’s the whole enchilada—the whole reason that a despicable regime would manufacture a distraction of that sort.

The wall is not quite doing that. Outside of Trump’s base, which would believe him if he pissed down their collective throats and told them it was lemonade, the majority of Americans see right through this idiotic non-emergency.

So it turns out Trump can’t even misdirect effectively.

When Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfowitz and the rest of Team Slam Dunk told the American people the epic lie that Saddam Hussein definitely definitely absolutely positively 100% had weapons of mass destruction, they at least did a reasonably convincing job of it……until our troops got on the ground in Iraq and no WMD were anywhere to be found.

Next to Trump, though, they look like geniuses.

But does Trump really need to bother with misdirection? His followers don’t need anything to distract them, as they readily swallow his lies whole. The sentient majority of the American public knows he’s full of shit and isn’t fooled by any of this. I suppose there is a small slice of the electorate that remains susceptible to his bullshit, but they are statistically insignificant.

For as we’ve seen, neither the facts nor the will of the majority seem to matter anymore in these United States. And if the Supreme Court permits this blatantly unjustified usurpation of authority, they will be handing Trump—of all people—a serious escalation of imperial powers, regardless of whether the American people know it’s a scam or not.

Chancellor Schicklgruber never had it so good.