#st: but there are only five primary colors but by combining them you get... a lot of colors

[gloriousmonsters]

listened to most of The Art of War while hanging clothes at my job earlier and I'm going to just distill down the real advice for y'all without the twenty thousand similes and metaphors and such

Wars are expensive have them really fast

Don't kill your soldiers they need food and stuff

But sometimes put your soldiers into inescapable life or death situations because that's how you really get them to be workin' hard instead of hardly workin', y'know

Have more guys than the enemy and be smarter. The best way to win a war is to have every single favorable condition for winning a war. Hope that helps

DO NOT fight in a salt marsh

If your boss gives you a stupid order, don't follow that order

Be 15 min early to the battlefield

Attack the enemy's weak points. But also they might be faking weaknesses so don't attack if they seem weak. But attack their weak points. But also-

For the love of god don't let anyone read omens

[gypsealife]

What to do in New Orleans

What to do in New Orleans

Do you want to go to New Orleans but aren't sure where to begin? I'll tell you about some of the top things to see in New Orleans in this article (Louisiana). NOLA, or The Big Easy as its residents refer to it, is known around the world as the metropolis of jazz, Creole cuisine, and a distinct dialect.

New Orleans, located in southeastern Louisiana, is described as beautiful, colorful, relaxing, and fun.

It is a city of French and Spanish ancestry with strong African-American characteristics, exhibiting American pluralism via architecture, music, and cuisine.

Since President Thomas Jefferson purchased New Orleans for $15 million from Napoleon Bonaparte, it has been a great American rare.

Immersing yourself in its French Quarter is like stepping back in time to the 18th century, while also taking in the cultural distinctives that have been added during the 19th and 20th centuries to create this the country's most eclectic city.

Due to its origins on the banks of the famous Mississippi River, it has a large ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity, as well as one of the most important musical diversity in the United States. It is a melting pot of cultures, including French, Spanish, African, Latin, and Caribbean, and as a result, the majority of its residents are of African heritage.

1. Go to New Orleans' French Quarter.

Bourbon Street is located in the center of New Orleans' French Quarter.

The French Quarter is unquestionably the crown jewel and thus one of New Orleans' must-see attractions. It covers around 13 blocks from Canal Street to Esplanade Avenue and is known among its residents as "The Vieux Carre" or simply "French Quarter." Bourbon Street, studded with restaurants, cafes, bars, and strip clubs, is one of the city's most popular and busiest streets.

Visit James Square, one of the city's most prominent squares, which is located along the Mississippi River. You can see the gorgeous St. Louis Cathedral from here, or take a rest in the famous Café du Monde, which was built in 1896.

2. Show your support for the New Orleans Saints.

Of course, we can't ignore the most popular sport in the United States, American soccer. This sport is extremely popular in Louisiana, particularly in New Orleans. The New Orleans Saints, 2011 Superbowl champions, and their home stadium, the stunning Mercedes-Benz Superdome, are based in New Orleans. The team is well-liked and respected by the locals because they exemplify the principles of hard work, tenacity, and never giving up in the face of adversity.

These qualities also represent this metropolis, particularly when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005 and wreaked havoc on the city. After winning the Super Bowl, the team's fans elevated them to the status of heroes.

3. Get to know New Orleans by riding the streetcars.

Streetcars in New Orleans

Another thing I recommend doing in New Orleans is taking the streetcars to get a feel for the city. These fantastic electric streetcars date back to the 1600s and provide lovely excursions in buildings that are still in use today.

There are currently four primary lines that provide tours of some of New Orleans' most popular and noteworthy attractions. You'll be able to see the Mississippi River from angles you've never seen before on one of these tours.

4. Louis Armstrong Park and Congo Square

Congo Square is a historically significant square. New Orleans was the only city in the northern United States that allowed slaves to meet in public and play their native music during the French colonial era, when slaves were transported.

On Sundays, their one day off, they met in Congo Square to do so. Today, it is part of Louis Armstrong Park, which was once known as "La Place des Negres" by the settlers, where they sang, played music, and sold homemade cuisine. As a result, it may be stated that in the early twentieth century, Congo Square gave birth to an era's worth of indigenous music: Jazz.

5. Treat your ears to some music at Preservation Hall.

New Orleans' Preservation Hall is a jazz venue.

The Preservation Hall, located on St. Peter Street in the center of the French Quarter, is a historic location where you can enjoy acoustic jazz music in an intimate setting practically every day of the year. Every day, the facility has a cast of more than 50 local musicians who perform in various formats.

If you come in on any given night, you'll be treated to the sight and sound of local and resident musicians improvising great tunes. If you appreciate this type of music, New Orleans holds one of the country's largest jazz events, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which takes place every year.

6. Historic Voodoo Museum in New Orleans

New Orleans was the core of the slave trade and commerce in the United States before the abolition of slavery in the 18th century. During this period, the slaves' cultural and religious traditions, which originated mostly in Africa and Haiti, were assimilated into the metropolis. Voodoo was one of the city's most enduring traditions.

After centuries, the city of New Orleans established the New Orleans Historic Vodoo Museum, which is solely committed to educate people about African culture and religion. Throughout history, ritual books and voodoo dolls or amulets have been found here.

7. Take a walk in City Park in New Orelans to get some fresh air.

City Park, one of the city's main green lungs, situated roughly 3 miles northwest of the French Quarter. With a total area of 5.3 square kilometers, you can breathe fresh air while exploring centuries-old oak forests, walking routes, biking paths, lakes, picnic places, and more. The New Orleans Museum of Art, as well as the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, a garden full of free sculptures and the New Orleans Botanical Garden, are all located inside the park's borders.

The park also features two stadiums, golf courses, rugby and soccer grounds, and hosts a variety of events throughout the year, including weddings and the Vodoo Music + Arts Experience, which is the largest music festival in the world.

8. The New Orleans Museum of Art is number eight on the list.

If you enjoy art, the New Orleans Museum of Art - NOMA - is a must-see in New Orleans. The museum, which is located within the magnificent City Park, has an extensive art collection of 40,000 items covering 5,000 years of history, as well as a sculpture garden in City Park that is open to the public for free.

Hours:

Monday was a holiday.

From 10:00 a.m. until 18:00 p.m., Tuesday through Friday.

Saturday from 10:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m.

Sunday from 11:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m.

Price:

Adults are charged $15.

Students at universities pay $8.

Admission is free for those aged 19 and younger.

9. Oak Alley Plantation is number nine on the list.

Oak Alley Plantation's Avenue of Oaks

Nearly a dozen old plantations with gorgeous houses and exquisite gardens can be found about 50 miles west of Downtown, along the Mississippi River. Whitney Plantation, Laura Plantation, and Felicity Plantation are a few examples. A visit to Oak Alley Plantation is highly recommended.

You'll need at least 2 hours to absorb 200 years of history and tour all of the properties of this old sugar plantation, when roughly a hundred slaves worked between the field and the house as men, women, and children.

Schedule:

Monday through Saturday, 9:00 a.m. to 17:00 p.m.

Price:

Adults are charged $25.

$10 for youth (13-18 years old).

$7 for children aged 6 to 12.

Admission is free for children under the age of five.

10. Take a Mississippi River cruise

I urge that you see New Orleans from a different vantage point. Get to know it by taking a trip down the Mississippi River on the Natchez, Louisiana's most famous steamboat. It would be nearly difficult to truly appreciate New Orleans without traveling down the Mississippi and aboard the Natchez.

You will not only go through the entire city of New Orleans on this expedition, but you will also travel through the states of Kentucky and Missouri, among others. Aboard this lovely old ship, you will have a wonderful time. Don't miss out on wonderful meals and fantastic musical performances!

11. Enjoy a meal at the historic Commander's Palace.

Commander's Place Restaurant in the Garden District of New Orleans

The remarkable ethnic mix of New Orleans is reflected not just in religion and music, but also in the food. The most popular cuisine in the city is "Cajun," which combines classic, rustic French cuisine with regional products and influences.

The legendary Commander's Place restaurant is located in the Garden District, surrounded by lovely and historic colonial farmhouses. I recommend stopping by to get a feel for the area and sample some Creole cuisine.

The National WWII Museum is number 12 on the list.

New Orleans is home to the acclaimed National WWII Museum, which opened in 2000. This museum is a must-see for history buffs who want to learn everything there is to know about WWII.

You can also accomplish it using interactive artefacts and artifacts from the historical period. It is, without a doubt, an attraction not to be missed.

[sunny143sr]

Top 10 places to visit in Italy

Italy is a lovely country, globally loved for providing an eclectic combination of visitor attractions. Vacationers, on one hand, love to enjoy the amazing Roman ruins of Pompeii, Rome, and Herculaneum, and on the other, can’t resist traveling to Venice and Tuscany for his or her romantic appeal.

The USA is likewise regarded for its natural sights and scenic landscapes that ship you to any other world. They are spellbinding, charming, and dumbfounding to mention the least. Virtually words don’t do justice at all. You obtain to see them trust us. However, we gained will let you get lost in the maps!

Right here are the pinnacle 10 cities, which might be additionally the pinnacle hubs of vacationer locations in Italy, which are sinfully excellent. You just can’t face up to their seduction!

Earlier than we go to the information, a quick look at the grandeur of top traveler locations in Italy!

1. Tuscany – You simply can’t leave out the greens here!

Tuscany has continually been the center of enterprise, art, and politics in Europe. The various maximum lovely locations to visit in Italy, the town also received a whole lot of prominence as a primary metropolis of the Renaissance length. Great work of artwork can be seen and loved via the art fans coming to this city. Tuscany is also famous for its notable crafts. Substances used to create awesome craft gadgets are timber, metallic, leather-based, marble, and more.

Key attractions: The Gallery of Uffizi acknowledged for its extremely good museums, treasures, palaces, and churches; excellent perspectives of Siena and the Palio; the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa and Piazza Dei Miracoli for his or her particular architecture; beautiful villages; and the scenic vineyards of Chianti.

Fine time to go to September – October, and April – June

Read More: Alaska Airlines

2. Naples – You’d be Colorbound

Naples, positioned inside the Campania vicinity, is nestled amidst the Phlegraean Fields and the volcanic place of Mount Vesuvius. However, this city isn't only regarded for its beautiful locales but also famous for its wealthy history and way of life. A number of the fine tourist points of interest in Italy, the city has the most range of architecturally renowned church buildings.

Key points of interest: Capodimonte Museum for the famous Flagellation of the Christ via Caravaggio, the celebrity-formed Castel Sant’Elmo navy fort, the well-known Lungomare amphitheater, countrywide Archeological Museum, Naples Cathedral- II Duomo, the Naples Archdiocese seat, Palazzo Reale, Gothic Santa Chiara Church, and Piazza San Domenico Maggiore

High-quality time to visit: September – October, and March – might also

Read More: American Airlines

3. Italian Lake District – The metropolis of lakes and fashionistas

Positioned in Italy’s Northern area, the Italian Lake District is known for its stunning lakes. This location has been one of the well-known Italian traveler places since the Roman instances. Each year, a large variety of tourists visit this stunning destination to admire and revel in its lovely scenic locales, Lake Garda and Lake Como. The destination is likewise recognized for its actual Italian cuisine and is frequented by fashionistas to explore the boutiques.

Key attractions: Lake Garda, Lake Como, Lake, Lake Lugano, Lake Maggiore, Lake Orta, Mediaeval castles, Renaissance Palazzi, fishing villages, and the craggy peaks of Dolomites

A pleasant time to go to September and May

4. Sicily – Wandering in the ruins is amusing too!

Sicily is the most popular tourist destination in Italy for its ancient Greek ruins. The vacation spot has been ruled by Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, and Ostrogoths. The glimpses in their rule can be still visible in the ruins. The stays of the Norman generation's notable architectural achievements additionally attract a wide variety of traffic. The duration architecture is the most important appeal inside the metropolis and is appreciated by site visitors who wish to know more about the bygone technology and its triumphs.

Key points of interest: the Aeolian Islands, Agrigento archaeological website online a.K.The Valley of Temples, the well-known cathedral Cefalu, the hilltop town Erice, Mount Etna, and the Nebrodi Mountains

5. Cinque Terre – Witness a few thoughts-blowing sunsets right here!

Referred to as “The 5 Lands”, Cinque Terre is one of the prettiest needs to see places in Italy. Beautiful vistas at the rugged coastline of Sicily are well worth admiring. The five fishing villages are related through taking walks trails and exploring them is a great concept. Furthermore, this entire region has been declared as a UNESCO international historical past website online.

Key sights: Vernazza fishing village for its cliff, twelfth Century Manarola fishing village for its Groppo and Ruins of Fortifications, Monterosso village for its church buildings and Monastery, Riomaggiore village for its craggy hills,  Corniglia for its 382 stars, and The 12 km Blue course

Fine time to go to March – July

6. Amalfi Coast – A absolutely distinctive vacation spot

Amalfi Coast is one of the most exclusive European destinations, recognized for its ecstatic coasts bordering the Mediterranean Sea. It's miles perfect for exploring nature's marvels in Italy. Positano and Fiordo of Furore are places placed close by and call for quite a time to experience its wonderful sights.

Key sights: astonishing perspectives from Ravello, an implementing and attractive cathedral of Duomo, Spiaggia di Arechi, and the 8th century Salerno citadel

Best time to go to July and August

7. Milan – A spell-binding fashion hub

Italy’s most cosmopolitan city, Milan is famous for soccer and style. The destination is likewise regarded for its herbal points of interest and fashion shows that are prepared two times a yr. The city witnesses the influx of shoppers, designers, and supermodels from all around the world at some stage in the shows. An extremely good thought to the global fashion designers, Milan is absolutely some of the locations to see in Italy.

Key sights: The famous Basilica Sant’Ambrogio devoted to Milan’s client saint, the huge Cemetery of some of the tremendous celebrities of the place, Piazza Mercanti  administrative center of Milan, pieces of artwork on the Pinacoteca di Brera, and the twelfth century Navigli Lombardi canal

Great time to go to: past due September – October, and March – might also

8. Pompeii – A walk down the lanes of records

Placed near the Mount Vesuvius foothills, Pompeii is a historical metropolis, and around 80 BC, the vacation spot became a prime port metropolis. Numerous websites offer glimpses of the Roman rule over the metropolis, that's a UNESCO World history website these days. Its discovery within the year 1748 supplied plenty of statistics about the erstwhile Roman Empire. Humans like to visit this city and explore the properly-preserved ruins to find out more about this city.

Key attractions: Antiquarium museum that gives a lot of information about this fabled metropolis, discussion board Roman metropolis square, Temple of Jupiter constructed on a raised 3-meter base, Teatro Grande, Teatro Piccolo, ancient Stabian Baths, and residence of Menander

best time to visit: April

9. Venice – The floating town

View of the Rio Marin Canal with boats and gondolas from the Ponte de la Bergami in Venice

Venice – the floating metropolis – draws a large number of travelers all-spherical the year. However, its splendor and romantic gondola rides make it the quality of most of the places to go to in Italy for a honeymoon. Many canals are crisscrossing thru the town. The time when the vacation spot witnesses a surge of travelers is throughout Carnevale. Humans sporting colorful costumes and masks are worth watching in their glory. The city is replete with loads of churches, cathedrals, theaters, and art galleries.

Key attractions: Piazza San Marco aka the Drawing Room of Europe using Napoleon, housing St Mark’s Basilica, Doge’s Palace, Torre dell Orologio clock tower, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, and the Grand Canal

Nice time to visit: late February – Early may additionally

10. Rome – The town of affection

Rome, with its stunning attractions and points of interest, is a far cherished destination amongst die-difficult romantics. It has loads of museums, artwork galleries, and theaters that provide perception into its wealthy culture and ancient past. A few of the pleasant locations to visit in Italy with your own family, Rome lets the site visitors understand more about the development of Western Civilization, the boom and progress of Christianity, and the deep-rooted history of the archeological websites.

Key sights: St Peter’s Basilica is known to be  the largest and grandest church within the globe, Roman Empire’s famous Colosseum with an ability to accommodate 55,000 spectators, Piazza Navona fountains constructed inside the seventeenth century, Pantheon built using Emperor Hadrian in the memory of Pagan Gods, and Trevi Fountain

Nice time to go to October – April

[fluorescentpipedream]

For Ali pt 2

Deacon woke up this morning and took in a slow, deep breath, inhaling the warmth of the sunlight that was pooling into the room. They had finally made it to his “cottage” the night before and had gone straight to bed. There had been soft touches, an hour or so of pure intimate bliss, lying in bed beside Aliviya, trailing his fingers over her body and carefully kissing the bruises and pain away. Getting her here had been a feat but now that he had her here, he was already feeling as though he didn’t want to let her go again. Whenever she went back to the States, Deacon had decided, he was going with her. He didn’t care if he had to uproot his entire life at this point.

Slipping out of the plush bed as quietly as he could he pulled the colorful knitted quilt over Ali and kissed the top of her head gently before patting his leg to get the attention of his massive dogs. Augustus and Brutus raised their heads from their individual beds and paused briefly at the foot of the bed to watch Ali as she lay nestled into the bed. Deacon pulled the bedroom door shut a bit behind Brutus’ tail and walked down the stairs, carefully skipping the creaky last one by stepping beyond it onto the main floor. His cottage was an elegant mini-mansion set in the back of the little village of Bibury, England. It was two hours outside of London’s metropolis and hidden away into what could only be described as a picturesque, fantasy village. You would expect to find faeries in his garden, and honestly, it wouldn’t surprise him either.

Crossing the main foyer of his sitting-room he led the boys to the back of the house and released them into his grand backyard and garden. They bolted out the door and instantly found places to relieve themselves before Brutus playfully tackled his older brother and they tumbled around in the freshly cut grass. The backyard was more exquisite than the front, with an in-ground pool situated directly in the middle, the castle aesthetic extended into the courtyard and made the area feel equal parts open and protected at the same time. High fences on both sides were laced with growing ivy and pockets of wildflowers peeking through as well as bright white and pink rose bushes along the grounds. In the back of the yard, beyond a small stone wall, were large trees, originally planted for privacy though since no one lived behind him for several years it rounded out the look of the yard. He always felt safe when he came home. And after the last few days, safety was what was needed more than anything else. Safe and quiet. Deacon watched the boys tumble around in the yard for another minute before he walked away from the arched wooden door to the back, leaving it open for them when they were ready to come in again and walked across the room and down the hall to the front of his house.

The inside was elaborate, with high ceilings and a combination of natural and synthetic light. There were bookshelves everywhere and a small desk near the front door where he usually deposited his keys, wallet, and any mail he’d gotten when he came home. At the moment, the roll-top was down, shielding his personal belongings behind it. Opening the antiqued wooden door with its metal bracers, much like the one you’d see in medieval English castles in some BBC program, he looked down to see a basket and a small metal rack containing six glass bottles of fresh milk. With a soft smile, he picked up both, pushing the door shut with his foot and walked into the kitchen. Inside the basket as a small egg crate containing 12 farm fresh eggs, a small container of strawberries and ½ of a wheel of cheese, wrapped in brown paper. The cheese he placed in the fridge, setting five of the six bottles of milk in there as well. He left out the eggs and the milk, moving to turn on his kettle and filled it with water. This was part of his routine whenever he was home and for all its simplicity, it was one of his favorite parts of being here.  Picking up three of the eggs, he cracked them in a bowl and mixed them around with some cinnamon and sugar, setting the mix aside as he moved to get out a few thick slices of brioche from his bread box. As he started working on breakfast Deacon’s mind was awash with the goings-on that had brought them to this point. 

Aliviya had handled meeting his family with a grace he’d not seen in hardly anyone in a very long time. Especially dealing with his aunt Amelia, his mother’s younger sister. She was never a fan of the Moore men, even her own nephews seemed to irritate the woman and she liked to bring up how they were wasting their time with each and every one of the women or even men that they chose to spend their lives with. His mother had told him once that Amelia was jealous she’d never found the kind of true love her sister had and to some degree, Deacon believed her. She was a terrible woman but even without using Mike as a distraction, Ali had been able to deal with the woman with the tact of a hostage negotiator. Watching it had made Deacon fall even further in love with her. It was her handling of one of his former friends, Langston, that had really won him over, however.

Langston and Deacon had been friends since they were old enough to know one another, meeting when they were only children in primary school and continuing their friendship clear into the early years of university. He was still friends with Deacon’s sister, Charlotte, though the relationship with Deacon had soured long ago. Several years back, at some non-essential party, the boys had attended, Deacon had a few too many drinks and Langston, who was a flamboyant gay man that would put Mike to shame with his behavior, had taken what he’d always wanted from Deacon, despite the first man wanting no part of it. He was too drunk to protest and Langston had taken advantage of the situation. The other man had always been determined and aggravated in a way when Deacon had told him that while he was supportive of his lifestyle, he would never love the other man the way that he wanted. “You’re family Langston, I will always love you like a brother.” Apparently, that had been the wrong set of words to describe the man because Langston had lashed out at Deacon and ultimately stole his ability to protest or fight back. When he’d come around again, Niall had been the one to tell him what had happened and a mortified and disgusted Deacon had told his former friend to stay away from him, if he was going to take what was never going to be offered to him because he couldn’t show Deacon the same type of respect he had been given, then there was no way they could continue to be friends.  

Deacon hadn’t dealt with Langston for a few years and the time apart had not been kind. He knew that the other man had been dealing with a situation in his family, his father had cut him off and when he’d gotten sick, Langston was expected to put everything he’d ever been and ever wanted to the side and stand beside them, giving them all of his time, effort and love in tumultuous seas surrounding them. For all his extravagance though, he was actually doing quite well being a representative of the Pearce family at events. To some degree, Deacon had been impressed but he had told Ali only the bare minimum about what had happened between the two of them, just to be sure to reiterate that they were -not- friends any longer. 

Sometime during the dinner party at the house, Deacon had lost track of Ali and had finally found her sitting with Langston of all people, not just talking but getting him to laugh and actually participate in the conversation. She was leading it slightly but the other man seemed to be genuinely enjoying what they were talking about. He only overheard part of it but it was something about her life and what she liked to do when she was with her friends, how she’d come to be in Deacon’s good graces and how having him love her was the best thing that had ever happened to her. While Niall had later pointed out that Langston was likely looking for anything he could exploit, as he does, it was nice to see his chicken manage to soothe the raging beast Langston could be.

The party had been a grand event, with all manners of people coming and introducing themselves to the Moores and now to  Aliviya, since she was going to be part of the family as everyone seemed to see it, she needed to know how these kinds of things go. As they were standing off to the side watching the likes of Christian Marcone and his wife Emma, Killian McLeod, and his fragile wife Camilla, Deacon had tried to explain how this little game works.

“This is a bit like that biopic we watched on Miranda Priestly, we have to acknowledge each of these people by their names as though we not only know them but know a bit about their lives, and they do the same to us out of respect and hope that we will continue to do business with them in the future.” 

He motioned to Ajay Patel, who had arrived alone as usual and then did the same to a handful of other people. “We may not work directly with them, most of them are partners of my father or people who we keep close so we can see them betray us from a closer vantage point.” He nodded his head towards Embry Powell as he’d said this. Deacon had told Ali about enough of the situation with Langston that he’d wondered if she was actually doing just as the rest of them were…keep your enemies close. Langston had eventually gotten bored of the conversation and had bowed out, leaving Ali alone for only a few moments before Deacon had swept in to save her from the vultures once more. The days that followed the party, before they were heading out to Greece were spent taking her and Mike around London, showing them the sights and some of his favorite places to go, as well as introducing her to the Moore family stables where they kept some of their prized horses as well as rescued farm and exotic animals including Mabel the Alpaca and a rather ornery cassowary named Dirk.

The stables and surrounding lands were overseen by another friend of the family and almost a brother to the Moore children, a man named David Cotterill. He and his father had been in charge of taking care of the Moore Estate for generations and though David was a highly attractive man and Langston had attempted to sew the seeds of doubt within Deacon by telling him that Ali was probably down at the stables flirting with the muscle man he had enough faith in her and his true friends to know nothing was ever going to come of it. 

Deacon frowned as he carefully dipped the buttered brioche into the egg and cinnamon sugar concoction he’d been working on. He had been hopeful that enough time had passed between him and Langston that the other man had grown up. Behind him, he heard the clattering of paws on the hardwood as both of the boys came inside once more and sat down in front of their named bowls. Deacon smiled back at them, telling them he’d get their breakfast in a few moments, they had to wait. A soft whine from Brutus told him the younger was going to be in a protesting kind of mood today, but he ignored the dog and returned to his cooking and his thoughts. As the bread sizzled on the pan, he took the strainers off of both cups, tossing in a splash of fresh milk to both cups before adding in two cubes of sugar to one of them. Breakfast would be done in no time and the tea would be at the perfect temperature as well to drink without having to wait for it to cool too much.

---

The day before the Moores were departing for their private plane to Greece, Lord Moore senior had pulled Aliviya into his office to talk to her. Deacon had asked his grandmother for her family heirloom ring and while she was willing to give it up, Harrison wanted to find out more about the young woman. Deacon had no idea what they had talked about but considering he had heard laughter coming from his father’s office a few times, it must not have been anything too serious. Harrison was a strong man, he put up with very little and was very direct about who and what he wanted for his children and if he liked Ali then it was a good bet that Deacon was going to be permitted to do as he pleased carrying on this relationship. One thing that had caught him a bit off guard was when Roman had come out with one of his father’s special whiskey glasses in a bag, making it, undoubtedly to a lab to be analyzed. Of course, it wouldn’t have been so easy to just accept whatever Ali had told his father about her life before she’d become St. Michael, he would have to test her and find out for himself.

Deacon had wanted to say something about it but there was something in his father’s dismissal about it that had sparked a bit of confusion in him but he’d let it go. If Harrison wanted to tell him, he would but right now there was nothing to really go off of. Deacon didn’t know what that meant and at the time it hadn’t mattered. Now though, he made a mental note to ask his father about it, considering there was something about the whole situation.

Once out in the international waters, guests had started pouring into the massive Burgess Octopus superyacht. This particular model could keep 26 people in 13 luxury, individual rooms, and had two helipads, one of which was reserved for a medical helicopter should one ever need to be called. The yacht had two pools, two very large dining areas one inside the lower deck, and one on the top deck. The rest of the eight decks of this 414ft ship housed anything from jet skies to a private high-speed boat his father often used for fishing, and its own fleet of cars to a glass-bottomed observation deck and its own entertainment center. It was an extravagance most people would balk at but the Moore family had two of them and at any given time they could be either in the waters around Santorini, Greece, or in the Mediterranean waiting until they were needed. The guest list for the event included dignitaries, celebrities, and anyone who may have considered themselves of a higher caliber than others. As he’d given the two the grandest of grand tours, Deacon had to stifle a laugh several times. They weren’t being particularly funny, but it was so different having people who were genuinely surprised by the lavish lifestyle the Moores and their equals lived.

Deacon had taken Ali and Mike out on the jet skies in the first few days of the trip, introducing them to the type of life Ali was going to have just at the tip of her fingertips. He knew she wouldn’t need to have it but sometimes it was nice to disappear into the lap of luxury for a while. Deacon had taken Ali onto the mainland one night for a particularly romantic date set up to look exactly like a picture she had shown him once of her mother’s favorite place.

“I wanted to give you the chance to see the world as I do, so long as you’re in my life, Chicken, I’m never bored, never alone, and never unhappy. I love you, more than there are words to tell you, and more than there are hours in the day to try to show you.”

Deacon had proposed to her there on the beach of Santorini, down on one knee, alone and away from everyone else and everything. He’d been planning this for some time, and while Ali had told him once that she wasn’t ready the look on her face had said it all.

“Oh, Deacon…I told you, as long as it’s an appropriate time, I’m always going to be yours. But…”  

“No chicken, no buts. We’ll make it work. I want you in my life, every hour of every day for the rest of my days.”

The tears that had come to her eyes had made his heart swell and as he’d put the Cartier diamond on her finger, he felt like his entire life now laid out before him and he was the luckiest man in the world. He had been, as they had spent the night together overlooking the port in Santorini, the windows open, a warm breeze blowing in and making the curtains around the bed dance to their own beat. They had lain together, a tangle of arms and sheets together, forgetting there was anyone else alive in the world as the glow of the city took over the dimming light in their room. For that moment, they were the only thing that mattered.

Harrison and Francesca’s anniversary was two days ago though it felt like it was a lifetime ago. No one throws a party quite like the Moore’s and especially not Francesca. Because of her fashion career she has gotten to rub elbows with the best and brightest in film, music and everyone in between so the guest list had included everyone who had been at the estate party a few days prior as well as Hollywood’s elite actors and actresses, dignitaries from as many countries that could attend and in the middle of it all, Deacon, Aliviya and Mike.

Deacon had done his best to prepare his chicken for the insanity that the party was going to be, loud music and a lot of conversations and bodies everywhere, and probably some people that would have her on her toes. “Nana will be here, of course, she’s never missed one of mum’s parties” Deacon had said over breakfast.

“Nana?”

“Well...she’s no one here’s actual grandmother..” Ben began as he sat down beside Ali, his eyes falling on the ring before he overlooked it. If they weren’t going to say anything, neither was he. “But it’s easier than saying Her Majesty every time. When we were little she had insisted”

“Did you say, her majesty?” Mike balked, looking down at the eggs he was served and nodded to the waiter. “As in, the Queen?”

“Of course, who did you think I meant?”

Deacon pinched the bridge of his nose before continuing to go down some of the guests with them. “The good thing is, it’s unlikely you’ll meet everyone, considering how many are actually going to be here tonight, that would be impossible!”

“Watch me. I want to meet Kris Jenner, that woman is a legend” Mike quipped and everyone at the table laughed. As the morning had gone on, however, Ali had started feeling under the weather. 

Deacon had spent much of the day in the secondary private deck with her but after the second time she had thrown up and she was complaining of an itch in the back of her throat he had called the ship’s doctor to take a look at her. Somehow, she had gotten something fishy in her breakfast which was causing her to have an allergic reaction. No one really knew how it happened, it must have been a mistake but the type of oil wasn’t even anything in the kitchens. While Ali was relaxing in their room, Deacon had gone topside and was watching as the chefs and staff were arriving for the party. Most everyone was coming from the mainland through some kind of mode of transportation, there were a lot of pickups and drop-offs happening on the far end of the ship where generally no one was going to be. Every year, the Moores hired a musician and live band to perform at their celebration and this year was no different, except this year the entertainment was one of the youngest performers to earn a Billboard Music Award. Her name was Tiana, her music had a haunting tone to it but her vocal range was amazing, especially for her only being 17. Deacon nodded his head to her and the rest of the band as they disembarked and began getting their equipment off the boat that had brought them. 

As the new chefs were brought onboard for the party and everyone was caught up in the special diets, allergies and otherwise, Deacon had been watching over them all hoping that whatever had happened earlier wouldn’t be risked a second time. The hired chef this year was Nikolai Wolfe, a Michelin Star rated chef that usually worked out of France or Norway but also had a restaurant in Las Vegas and was soon to be opening one in New York. Deacon was looking forward to his dinner, it was going to be heavenly. He hoped.  

Mike was down in the room with Ali keeping her company and trying to take her mind off of what had happened but all he could really come up with to talk about was how her breakfast had been veritably poisoned. 

“I don’t want to be that guy right now but, my money is on Langston.”

“Why woulb you say thabt?”

“He doesn’t like you and Niall was telling me that nice guy act is just his way of getting what he wants. Of course I can’t really go accuse him in front of everyone but...”

“I can’t belieb I have to miss the parby!” Ali’s puffy eyes welled up and Mike pulled her into his arms, rocking her softly.

“You won’t, I’ve seen your recover from worse. Remember the Halloween party we went to?” That got a pained laugh and he snuggled up to her tightly, playing with her hair until she fell asleep. He managed to wiggle out of the bed with her and left enough room for Deacon to replace him. A few hours passed before Deacon was sitting up again looking back at her as he fumbled with his tie. 

Leaning down over the bed, he kissed Ali softly, using one knee to steady himself on the bed. She was looking better but still seemed too uncomfortable to do much else but lay in the bed. He was upset, but not necessarily at her. This  wasn’t her fault, she wanted nothing more than to be up there with him, wearing the dress his mother had given to her and hobnobbing with the rest of the guests. Sighing, Deacon had say back on his knees and looked at her. 

“Are you sure you want me to go up without you chicken?”

“No...but you need to be out there with your family instead of down here with me. I might start feeling better soon and I want you out there to show me around to everyone.”

Deacon kissed her again, nuzzling her softly before he left their cabin and joined everyone on the main deck. Finding his way to his parents through the throngs of people he apologized for not being around but inwardly he really would have rather been downstairs, not dressed up like this and enjoying the quiet.

“How’s Aliviya?”

“A little better, the redness is going down finally, she said she was going to try to come up in a little bit, hopefully before the real festivities begin.” Deacon let out a sigh and Harrison smiled softly, moving over to him and gripped into his shoulder with a firm but comforting grip.

“You’re the same way I am whenever your mother is sick, so let this hopeless romantic give you some advice, hovering only makes the missing her worse. Aliviya is a strong headed woman with a big heart, she doesn’t want her own situation to overshadow our day, and I respect that from her. If she can make it, she will and I honestly believe she will do anything she can to make it” Deacon smiled and hugged his father, allowing himself to relax, especially when he saw how everyone else was enjoying themselves. Mike had been surprised by his...well considering how close they were dancing at the moment Deacon doubted Travis was the ex any longer, and Colin was snuggled up close to Rachel as the music shifted to a slow dance.

Deacon drifted from one foot to the other, changing partners a couple of times between Kim Kardashian to his niece Tess and eventually to a beautiful blond woman he felt like he recognized but he couldn’t quite place. She was striking with a shoulder length bob haircut and bright green eyes. Her dress was Valentino from what he could tell and she moved with a grace one would expect from a dancer. Her name was Roxanne, she was a friend of...someone, Deacon hadn’t really heard, and with so many people on the ship tonight, it really wouldn’t matter.

After dancing for a few songs and mingling with some of the people he would consider acquaintances rather than friends, Deacon had been almost elated when Colin had appeared at his side and told him that Ali was on the top deck and looking for him.

“I worked some magic, Ali’s up above” Colin had stretched the word a bit as he’d noticed the other woman who had her hand on Deacon’s shoulder but disregarded her entirely when Deacon had thanked her for the dances and went to find his love. Ali was standing on the veranda above the party looking stunning in an ombré pink to deep purple spaghetti dress and her hair pinned up in a bun with small butterfly pins wound up in it. For a moment, all he could do was look up at her in awe before ascending the short stairs to the side of her and scooped her into his arms, kissing her deeply.

“Chicken, you look amazing.” His mother had made the dress especially for her to wear tonight and though it had looked nice on the hanger, seeing it on her now, beneath the soft lights of the ship’s decorations and the moon above, if he hadn’t known better he would have thought her an angel in that moment.

“Feel like mingling?”

“I think I can do that...” Deacon wrapped her arm around his and led her down into the fray, introducing her to a few handfuls of guests, the most important being Christian and Emma Marcone and his “nana”, the Queen herself. Giddy as she ever was at these things, the Queen had spent a good few minutes examining Ali, her dress, earrings and her choice of “sensible shoes” before letting them go but extending an invitation for them to cone to tea. As she disappeared into the crowd, her like green hat bobbing through the masses, Deacon barked out a laugh.

“Well...what do you think?”

“I just met the Queen of England. I...me, no one...I just. Wow! I love her!”

“She likes you, which is truly something, if I’m honest...”

Deacon smiled and showed Ali off to a couple more people before they found themselves off to the side of the ship, in one of the quieter areas; they were few and far between but there was enough privacy for the two of them to breathe without a million people around them. With a few minutes alone with her, Deacon leaned into her, kissing her neck under her ear and ran his hands over her hips, pulling her into his arms.

“I love you, and I’m glad you felt like you were able to come out finally.”

“Me too. I might not last much longer though, starting to wear out.”

“It’s just about time for the cake and fireworks, why don’t I go find us something to nibble on until then?” He leaned in and kissed her deeply, feeling his heart swell as he did so. Walking away, he hadn’t even noticed Roxanne off to the side. Once Deacon was gone, she came out and looked over Ali, almost as though she was trying to study her before coming out to talk to her. Or else she was playing her lines, that was half the fun. 

“You look exhausted, are you alright?” 

“Hmm...oh. Hello. Yes, I’m alright. Who are you?” 

Extending her hand, Roxanne smiled brightly, still trying to keep this up for as long as she could though her patience was running thin with this little game. When Ali had taken her hand, she’d seen the ring and for a moment, forgot herself. “.....Roxanne.” She trailed off before catching hold of her thoughts again. “Lord Moore is a very big catch, how in the world did you manage to convince him into marrying you?” 

“....I didn’t catch him. And I don’t see how that’s your business.” 

“Well. I’m just trying to figure out what he would see in someone like you. You really have no place here, haven’t you figured that out by now?” Ali looked taken aback for a moment and tried to excuse herself from the conversation, she was upset, obviously but to have someone call her out on her relationship with Deacon, again...

For their part, Roxie could only smile at her, and it wasn’t the most comforting of smiles. Stepping back from her, Roxie reached up and pulled off the wig, looking down at Ali and dropped the fake accent to her voice too. “I had really hoped you would have just stayed in your little room so no one would have to deal with you but it seems you just can’t take a hint.” 

“Langston. It’s you that can’t take a hint. Deacon isn’t interested in you, and the way you keep trying to insinuate yourself into his life, making him think you’re some beautiful woman...forcing yourself on him....You don’t want what’s best for him, you just want to control him.” 

Langston snarled at her and stepped closer to her, closing the gap between them. Putting his hands on either side of Ali and boxing her in he looked down at her. “I love him. I have always loved him, and who the hell do you think you are? You came from nothing, you’re no more than something shiny he’s playing with...you’re just going to end up taking him for all his money and leaving him miserable.” 

“You really are crazy, aren’t you?” Ali had flinched, Langston knew he was bigger than she was and the ring had only made him see red. He knew, in his heart that Deacon would never love him but it felt like every man he’d deemed worthy enough for his attention would rather fuck each other than dare to touch him. With everything swimming around in his mind, seeing the Cartier ring on Ali’s finger only drove the proof further home than he was prepared to deal with emotionally. He wanted to be happy for Deacon but all he wanted to do was erase this hideous little spot from his side. 

Deacon still wasn’t entirely sure how the next part had played out. He had been walking down the stairs with a few small plates of snacks for him and Ali to share when he had seen Langston strike her across the jaw and in doing so he knocked her off of the ship. She had been trying to scoot away from him and wound up with her back to a small opening in the ship, near one of the emergency exits. Ali had lost her balance but before she’d fallen over, she grabbed hold of Langston and pulled him over the side of the ship with him. Deacon had dropped the plates he was holding and run to the side, hitting a button on the panel closest to him which served as an emergency alert signal. The ship was already stationary, at the very least but that was still an impossible fall to have survived and with it being near twilight he could hardly see anything. 

Roman and a small security team were the first ones to him, after that it was a small handful of people, his mother and father, brother and of course, Mike. Deacon had been poised to jump in after her when he saw Christian Marcone take off his coat, rolex and step out of his shoes before diving over the side, trying to search for Ali in cold water. Deacon was beside himself, and watched as a few others went over as well. Harrison took hold of his son and told him to head below deck to the very lowest level, they’d be able to get Ali back in the boat from there. It felt like slow motion as it had happened but everything had actually gone quite quick. 

When Deacon had reached the lowest level where the loading areas were he saw Marcone and Callahan dragging two bodies back. Panicked, Deacon had taken hold of Aliviya’s arm, helping them get her back onto the ship. Mike was being held back by Travis as Evan performed CPR on her and only stopped when she coughed up water. Harrison had moved to do the same to Langston, who looked a bit ridiculous now in a drenched dress, no heels and makeup smeared across his face. In his anger, Deacon had charged the other man to kill him, potentially but he was stopped by his brother who turned him around to see Ali start to breathe on her own. The whole of the party seemed to be watching this drama unfold but none of it mattered, so long as she was breathing. Harrison had been the one to lay a blanket over Ali as the EMTs that were on staff began to strap her to a board to be air lifted back to the mainland. Deacon had only given Langston one final, over the shoulder look before he followed the men up to the helipad and told Mike to go with her, he would meet her there. 

Six hours in a hospital in Santorini while she was checked out for broken bones, luckily she had none, whiplash, which she did have, and hypothermia. Deacon had been sitting beside her, holding her hand as she was wrapped up in several blankets. In all of her fear and sadness, when Ali had come around she had still apologized for ruining the party. All he could do was snort, it wasn’t her fault but she was unconscious again before he’d been able to say anything. When things had managed to calm down and Ali was sleeping more peacefully, Deacon had a chance to sit with her. He was taking her out of the hospital as soon as she could be moved and would be recovering with him, alone in his own private home. He felt guilty for not seeing that the ‘woman’ he’d been talking to, he’d been trying to keep from getting too handsy had been Langston the entire time. 

For his part, Langston was gone. No one was certain where he had gone but he’d been in the hospital for a few hours himself and when someone had gone to find him, he was just...gone. Deacon’s anger for him was so great he hadn’t even cared. Hell there was part of him that would have wanted the man shot where he stood, but while that was the way of the Marcones, that wasn’t how a Moore dealt with their problems. As soon as she could be moved, Deacon and Ali were gone too. Harrison promised to deal with this situation and their PR people were trying to control the insanity that was taking place on social media around the whole thing. 

--

Deacon carefully took the stairs back up to the master bedroom with a tray in his hands. He had sliced the fresh strawberries and topped the homemade French Toast with them and a light dusting of sugar. As he came into the room, he set the tray down delicately, so as not to spill any of the tea and sat down on the bed, running his hand through Ali’s hair. She was going to survive, of course, her body was bruised and looked as though she had fallen through a solid piece of glass rather than the ocean, it was amazing that she had survived the fall honestly, but she was hard to get rid of. No matter how badly some people wanted her gone, it would seem. He couldn’t make sense of Langston’s hatred of her, she was the woman he loved more than life itself, why wasn’t that good enough? 

Leaning over her, Deacon softly kissed her forehead, and then both of her cheeks, her nose and finally her lips. It was a soft tease at first before he deepened it when he’d taken her mouth finally. “Chicken? Can you wake up for me, love?” Ali’s eyes fluttered awake and Deacon smiled at her as he settled against the pillows behind him. 

“I made breakfast.” 

@musesnotebook​

[blackfreethinkers]

The 2020 Democratic presidential campaign has been surprisingly promising when it comes to addressing poverty. Candidates have offered a host of ideas that would have a significant anti-poverty effect, from universal health care to debt-free college, a living wage, housing for all, universal child care, and more. They have also pledged to push for a debate focused exclusively on the issue—a promise they still need to make good on. But one region that hasn’t received the attention it needs in this or previous elections is the rural Black Belt, specifically the persistently poor counties in 11 Southern states that are home to more than half of the nation’s non-metro poor.

The name “Black Belt” originally referred to the region’s dark, clay soil, before eventually coming to signify its high population of African Americans as well. Today, the region’s roughly 300 rural counties—in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia—each have populations that are between 30 and 80 percent African American. As of 2008, the Black Belt was home to 83 percent of African Americans living outside metropolitan areas. We’re just two weeks away from the South Carolina Democratic primary, on February 29; six more Black Belt states will vote on March 3. It’s time for a presidential candidate to not only engage with the needs of people living in this region but also begin to rectify a history of exploitation and neglect.

There is precedent for it: then-Senator John F. Kennedy’s visit to West Virginia during the 1960 Democratic primary. As Ronald D. Eller describes in his 2008 book Uneven Ground, Kennedy was “genuinely stunned” at the mass poverty he saw, particularly that of unemployed coal miners. He pledged on camera to introduce an aid program for the state if elected—and, after he was, he created a presidential task force to explore a unique federal-state-local partnership for regional development in Appalachia. The task force outlined a program that would support highway construction, health care facilities, land stabilization, timber development, water facilities and sewer treatment, and vocational training. But it would take until 1965 for President Lyndon B. Johnson to succeed in pushing it through Congress, establishing the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC).

Since then, the ARC has received a total of $38 billion in federal funding (adjusted for inflation), benefiting counties across 13 states. While Appalachia still faces challenges such as labor force participation and poor access to health care, the ARC has contributed to largely eliminating the gap between the region’s rates of high school graduation and unemployment and those found nationally. It has helped both to cut Appalachian poverty from 31 to around 17 percent, and to lower the number of high-poverty counties in the region, from 295 to 107.

The idea for a corresponding regional development program in the Black Belt isn’t a new one. Scholars at Southern universities and some politicians—including Democratic US Representative (2003–11) Artur Davis of Alabama and the late Senator (2000–05) Zell Miller of Georgia—have pushed for it since the 1990s. The black rural South’s current unemployment rate of approximately 14 percent and child poverty rate of 51 percent are double those found in rural counties included in the ARC, according to a forthcoming paper from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

“I’ve heard it my whole life: ‘There’s nothing in the Black Belt.’ Are you kidding me?” says Dr. Veronica Womack, a Black Belt native and executive director of the Rural Studies Institute at Georgia College and State University. “This is a region where the people have always made a way out of no way. You can’t find any more hardworking, caring people—people who have continued to raise families, build community, go to church on Sundays, in spite of all of the challenges that have been put in place.” What has been lacking, Womack says, is a commitment to the region so people can “operate at their fullest potential.”

There have been piecemeal legislative efforts to increase the flow of investment to parts of the Black Belt. But none include all 11 states, focus exclusively on Black Belt counties, or—critically—prioritize community participation in designing and leading a commission to address the Black Belt’s unique challenges. “If you understand the tenacity and the resilience of the people who live there, then you understand the importance of them being a part of whatever solutions you have,” Womack says. “The commission has to know the history—the social, political, and economic dynamics of the place and space.”

In 2000, the Delta Regional Authority (DRA) was created as a state-federal partnership that is presided over by eight Southern state governors and a federal cochair. It includes some counties in five Black Belt states and received $25 million for fiscal year 2019. Seventy-five percent of the moneys are supposed to go to distressed counties, and half of those are required to be used on transportation and infrastructure. However, it does not include most of the Black Belt, and none of its board members are African American. It also lacks the community participation and leadership element that Womack says is key.

Arguably the most promising effort was the Southeast Crescent Regional Commission (SCRC), created under the 2008 Farm Bill. Modeled after the ARC, it encompassed counties within seven Black Belt states, and was intended to focus on funding distressed communities for transportation, infrastructure, job training and entrepreneurial development, telecommunications, and sustainable energy solutions. However, while the SCRC was authorized to receive at least $30 million every year through 2019, it was never appropriated more than $250,000 at a time, and “does not appear to be active” as of March 2019, according to the Congressional Research Service. In contrast, the Northern Border Regional Commission—created in the same Farm Bill to address economic hardship in the primarily white populations of northern Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York—has received steady funding, including $10 million to $20 million in each of the past three fiscal years.

The SCRC was championed by the Democratic Representatives Hank Johnson of Georgia and Elaine Luria of Virginia, as well as majority whip James Clyburn, of South Carolina. “Congressman Clyburn has been committed to the SCRC since its inception,” says Hope Derrick, his communications director. “[He] is ready to fight for more funding when the administration appoints a federal cochair, the last hurdle in standing up the commission.”

Womack isn’t surprised by the lack of urgency the SCRC or Black Belt Commission proposals have received from most of the political elite. “When you start talking about policy that will be interpreted as benefiting a region significantly [comprising] black people, then where is the will to actually get that done?” she says. “Even though the Black Belt has all kinds of people in it, there is also a particular combination that our country has had a great difficulty addressing: poor people, and then poor people of color, and then poor black people.”

The need for a commission focused exclusively on the rural Black Belt is most apparent in places like Lowndes County, Alabama, where people are living with raw sewage in their yards.

Lowndes County is located between Selma and Montgomery, and every year tourists pass through, following the route of the historic 1965 civil rights march led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Mostly made up of small rural communities, it has a declining population of under 10,000 people, of whom more than 72 percent are African American. Residents here struggle against the soil that gave the Black Belt its name and made Alabama’s cotton king: Water can’t percolate smoothly through the chalky clay. Traditional septic tanks don’t work there; plumbing backs up when it rains, sending wastewater back into homes through sinks, tubs, and toilets.

The median household income in Lowndes County is $28,000 a year—and the kind of tank that residents would need can cost up to $30,000 for purchase and installation. Some residents resort to “straight piping,” which involves running a PVC pipe away from the home and into the yard, where it discharges untreated waste. As a result of not having affordable waste treatment, families have no choice but to contaminate their own properties. A 2017 study of Lowndes County residents by the Baylor College of Medicine found that 34.5 percent tested positive for hookworm, an intestinal parasite associated with the developing world. After the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty visited homes in Lowndes County and nearby Butler County, he described the waste crisis as “very uncommon in the first world…. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this.”

“You can say all day long that [people] ought to just move, but [they] are born and raised here,” says Lenice Emanuel, executive director of the nonprofit organization Alabama Institute for Social Justice, who has worked with residents on this issue. “They don’t have the money to just uproot their lives and move to Montgomery 25 miles away. Then you have a transportation issue too—getting back and forth to their jobs,” since many work in the community. She also notes that there are businesses—most of which, advocates say, are white-owned—that do have the necessary infrastructure in place to treat their waste, just a half-mile away from homes dealing with raw sewage. Engineers say that simply expanding municipal sewer lines could help solve the problem for some Black Belt homes. For that, the County would need funding.

According to Emanuel, when county residents have invited state officials to come and witness the conditions firsthand, they have been subjected to “intimidation tactics” such as being threatened with arrest warrants, or even fined for lacking septic tanks they could not afford. These reactions from the state have also made it more difficult for residents to feel sufficiently safe to organize and advocate for change. While Alabama says it stopped issuing arrest warrants for sewage in 2002, a black pastor was arrested as recently as 2014 because a septic tank failed and his church wasn’t able to deal with the overflow. Emanuel says that the damage of past warrants is already done: Many people who received them now have a criminal record, and some have lost or can’t find jobs as a result.

Emanuel draws an analogy between the way people are being treated over the waste issue and the KKK’s showing up in their communities—“I liken it to that kind of terror.” She says it leaves people feeling “helpless” and “at the mercy of the institutions and power structures in the community. And it’s similar all over [Alabama’s] Black Belt counties.”

Alabama Democratic representative Terri Sewell sponsored the Rural Septic Tank Access Act—which passed in the 2018 Farm Bill—to help her constituents in Lowndes County and other rural areas access grants of up to $15,000 to install or maintain wastewater systems. This is still significantly lower than the cost of appropriate septic tanks in many homes. An aide to Sewell says she is working to increase the resources devoted to the issue, including the maximum allowable grant.

It can also be difficult for Black Belt communities to navigate the federal protocols to obtain funds—in part, Womack says, because these local governments just don’t have the staff to work on chasing grants. Case in point: Lowndes County is actually eligible for Delta Regional Authority funding, but if you look at the DRA’s most recent grants for infrastructure in Alabama Black Belt communities, the county with sanitation conditions comparable to the Third World is nowhere to be found. In contrast, the DRA did provide $509,000 to extend an industrial park’s water and sewer system to serve Enviva, the world’s largest wood pellet producer.

When Kennedy visited West Virginia in 1960, poverty in the region was stark: 33 percent of Appalachian families lived in poverty, compared to a national poverty rate of 20 percent; unemployment was 40 percent higher than the US average. Many more workers had given up on finding a job and left the workforce. That year, the Conference of Appalachian Governors declared that underdevelopment had meant that people in the region were “denied reasonable economic and cultural opportunities through no fault of their own.” Moreover, inadequate infrastructure for things like “transportation and water resources [had] hindered the local ability to support necessary public services and private enterprise.”

“The ARC is reparations,” says Spencer Overton, the president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. He says that in the coming months, the Joint Center will release a proposal for a Black Belt Regional Commission, hoping to address “an area of our country that once required a large number of people to work there. Those places became automated over time, but large populations are still there and there are fewer jobs. And so we have to come up with policy solutions. That’s the case when we talk about Appalachia; that’s the case when we talk about the Black Belt.”

Kennedy may have advocated for the ARC, in part, because he needed to win over West Virginia voters in the primary. As Michael Bradshaw describes in his 1992 book about the ARC, the senator’s visit to Appalachia came at a key moment in the campaign, when his challenger already had the support of organized labor. Kennedy announced his pledge for a state development program on the day before the vote. He had discussed black Southerners’ struggles during his campaign, but the fact that Appalachia was associated with white poverty made the program politically palatable to white voters and politicians.

Overton points to Appalachia and the Black Belt’s parallel histories of exploitation and resource extraction. In the case of the Black Belt, he says, it has been about “profiting off of cheap labor—whether that is slavery, Jim Crow, or the factories with low taxes, cheap wages, and no unions. Recognizing the unique history and consequent struggles in Appalachia, but not in the Black Belt, is like saying we’re going to treat the opioid crisis as a health epidemic, but we’re going to use the criminal code to deal with the crack epidemic.”

Andy Brack, former press secretary for the late South Carolina Democratic Senator Ernest Hollings and a longtime journalist and editor covering Southern politics, has no doubt as to the root of the structural inequality we see in the Black Belt today. In a 2013 piece, he compared a map showing deep poverty rates with a map of slavery in 1860: “With the blink of an eye, it’s easy to see that these areas easily correlate with where enslaved people lived in 1860. The [Black Belt] is a remnant of plantation life…. One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, it’s time that this area starts receiving the same attention that Appalachia did.”

Researchers with the Southern Economic Advancement Project (SEAP)—an initiative founded by Stacey Abrams that focuses on policy solutions and capacity-building for vulnerable populations in the South—recently embarked on a listening tour in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina. (SEAP is a fiscally sponsored project of the Roosevelt Institute, where I am a journalist-in-residence.) As they spoke with nonprofits and grassroots groups to get a better sense of local challenges, there were some consistent concerns, including a lack of access to transportation, struggles with raw sewage and other environmental issues, and lack of investment from banks. One participant noted the “weight of racism”—as seen in housing separated by race, resegregated schools, and uneven development between predominately white and predominately black areas. Multiple groups cited the challenge of stigma, from outsiders who viewed their communities as hopeless and lacking potential.

Dr. Sarah Beth Gehl, SEAP’s research director, says that in western North Carolina and northern Alabama, which both have ARC funding-eligible counties, the local-state-federal partnership came up repeatedly—for example, for supporting children’s services, local government capacity-building, and transportation for those in addiction recovery. But when SEAP traveled to south Georgia or south Alabama, where counties aren’t covered by the ARC, the conversations were very different. “It was a lot about a lack of resources and a lack of attention,” says Gehl. “The infrastructure needed to take some innovative approaches to tackling deep challenges in these Black Belt communities—that piece was missing.” Moreover, when it came to what some people on the tour called “the basics needed for a dignified life”—like a grocery store, transportation, housing stock, or medical facilities—the resources just weren’t there.

“Economic progress for the Black Belt requires innovation and deep commitment, which means providing consistent investment to address the interconnected issues that hinder growth and block equity,” says Abrams in a statement to The Nation. “Funding the Black Belt Regional Commission would be a declaration of real intent to finally serve this Southern arc, and it is long overdue.”

It is easy to imagine the arguments against a Black Belt Regional Commission that would be loosely based on the ARC. If there is still extensive poverty in Appalachia, why would we repeat the model? But the ARC has had an enormous impact. In the 2018 fiscal year alone, it reported that its investments would create or help retain more than 26,600 jobs, and train and educate more than 34,000 students and workers. The ARC’s $125 million investment was matched by $188.7 million in public and other moneys, and is expected to attract over $1 billion in private investments.

There are ways too that a Black Belt Commission could be done differently. The ARC covers a huge region, including areas that do not suffer from persistent widespread poverty; funds are weighted toward distressed areas, but the appropriated money is inadequate to cover that expanse. A Black Belt Commission could focus exclusively on distressed communities. Also, much of the early ARC money was spent on highway construction through Appalachia—which, as Michael Bradshaw writes, the original ARC director felt was necessary in order to connect poorer economies with wealthier ones. (He also thought it would show legislators “results.”) While infrastructure is vital, a Black Belt Regional Commission could equally emphasize investment in people—their health, education, training, and the creation of jobs that would allow for upward mobility.

Dr. Veronica Womack says she would start with education—from early childhood to higher education—as well as infrastructure development, including for broadband Internet access, investment in start-ups and rural entrepreneurships, and rural health services for people who currently live in “health care deserts.”

“That’s just a start. Because if you’re not healthy, or you don’t have the proper education and training, the likelihood of you being successful in the 21st century is very small,” she says.

Spencer agrees. “Too often, there has been the notion that economic development is attracting a poultry processing plant—very hard, low-wage, unattractive work without a lot of prospects for growth,” he says. “We need to invest in human beings. It gets back to the concept of Black Lives Matter: We really want to recognize the humanity of people, and invest in people so they can achieve their potential.”

In addition to having local elected officials at the table, Womack says a commission should include community-based organizations that have been working in the region for decades, such as the Black Belt Community Foundation, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Southwest Georgia Project, and other similarly focused organizations “connected to agriculture and the land—a big piece of how we can be sustainable.” She would also want to invite historically black colleges and universities, technical and community colleges, and land grant and rural institutions such as Georgia College and State University that “understand rural places and are working in the region already.” Crucially, the commission should also hear from activists who are not attached to any particular organization, Womack says, because “the people in their community look to them and their leadership.”

“These folks can tell you exactly where the hiccups are—where the challenges and barriers lie in their being able to develop their communities,” says Womack. “And so, if we are going to hit the mark, it’s going to require us to do a different type of policy and a different type of policy implementation that doesn’t block off people from even being able to participate in the decision-making.”

Yet none of this will be possible without presidential leadership—the kind Kennedy embraced when he visited poverty-stricken areas in West Virginia.

Bernie Sanders, who has called poverty a death sentence, visited Lowndes County last May and pledged to a resident, “This is just the beginning. We have to get attention to the issue, and then we’ll do something about it.” That resident, Pamela Rush, also spoke at a forum on poverty convened by Elijah Cummings and Elizabeth Warren in 2018. Pete Buttigieg noted at one of the debates that poverty hadn’t come up, and that “it deserves a lot of attention”; both he and Amy Klobuchar have struggled to win over black voters. And while Joe Biden has touted his poll numbers with African Americans, he has struggled to connect with younger generations, many of whom feel he falls short in addressing systemic issues.

If any of these or other candidates spend more time in the Black Belt, will they offer so bold a proposal as a Black Belt Regional Commission? Or will they ignore the generational poverty and continued isolation of the region?

Lenice Emanuel says that elected leaders need to take stock of how they are serving, or failing to serve, the people of the region. “We have got to look inward at our own culpability in maintaining these systems of inequity,” she says. “We have to be real with ourselves about that. That’s where the answer lies.”

[thornstocutyouwith]

|| The Basics ||    Name: Calypso Piper Hisoka    Nickname(s): Caly( Only by family) Age: 12/18-30 (Depending) ➥Birthday: September 17, 2152  ➥Birthplace: New York            ➥Sign: Virgo                 Moon: Taurus                   Mercury: Libra                          Venus:                                 Mars: Nationality: Half Japanese- Half American Hometown: New York Current Residence: Living with his family/Homeless. Occupation: Student/Bounty Hunter Income: $0-$10,000 ( roughly) Talents/Skills: Yo-yo tricks, playing the guitar, playing the piano, lying, sorting things, playing the drums, martial arts, hiding, singing,tracking, lockpicking, stage Magic, acting. Salary: None Birth order: Youngest Child. Gender: Male ➥Preferred Pronouns: He, him, his Sexual Preference: Unknown    Species: Human Intelligence Level: 113 MBTI: ISTP     Introvert(44%) Sensing(1%) Thinking(25%) Perceiving(61%) You have moderate preference of Introversion over Extraversion (44%) You have marginal or no preference of Sensing over Intuition (1%) You have moderate preference of Thinking over Feeling (25%) You have distinct preference of Perceiving over Judging (61%). {Bio} (Coming eventually)        || Personal & Relationships||    Relationship skills: Aware of his own Feelings, Self sufficiency, resilience, acceptance, doesn't like to be touched or handled by people he doesn't know. Parents: Drama and Ashlin  Status: Unknown how he feels about them. Siblings: Lucy and Lucas Status: Strained, mostly because he's blackmailing them for their incest activities. Significant Others: Unknown (9) Ex-Significant Others: Unknown ( 9) Children: None Best Friends: Unknown( 3) Pets: None Rivals: Unknown Enemies: Unknown ( A lot) Education: High School ( Dropped out a few months before graduation) Strengths:  Creativity, Curiosity, Bravery, Zest, social intelligence, playfulness, forceful, spontaneous, adventurous, independent, creative. Weaknesses: Obstructive, Pushy, Loose-tongued, Undisciplined, Sloppy, Aggressive, Chaotic, Vague, Reckless, arrogant, selfish. Introvert or Extrovert?: Introvert How does the character deal with anger?: Usually by taking it out on other things or people, mostly other things. ➥With sadness?: He'll go into hiding.    ➥With conflict?: He tries to avoid it, but when he can't, he make sure to end it.         ➥With change?: He's fine with change, out with the old and all that.                 ➥With loss?:  He can't stand thinking of losing anyone. He will break down if he's particularly close to the person. But he tries not to get too close to people. What does the character want out of life? To just do what he wants to, really. What would the character like to change in his/her life? Probably that he's strayed too far away from his family, that he hardly even knows them in adulthood. What motivates this character? Getting money, having freedom, having fun, taking risks. What frightens this character? The dark, Ghosts, falling, animals. What makes this character happy? Books, music, risks, video games, candy. Is the character judgmental of others? Yes. Is the character generous or stingy? He is stingy. Is the character generally polite or rude? He is rude. Who were they in school? The energetic mute. Occupation they wanted as a child: To be in a band. Living conditions growing up: Middle Living conditions now: Poor Criminal Record: Breaking and entering, theft, stealing cars, assault, reckless endangerment of an underage child, illegal use of explosives, drugs, driving and drinking, fleeing a cop, identity theft, illegal hacking. How does Character see himself/herself? Reckless, brave, cunning,  smart How does Character believe he/she is perceived by others? Worthless and stupid. How self-confident is the character? Pretty self-confident. Does the character seem ruled by emotion or logic or some combination thereof? Emotions, for the most part. What would most embarrass this character? Having to show his softer side in public. Morality (Bold One Per Section): Lawful / Neutral / Chaotic ||| Good / Gray / Evil - You are 47.2% Evil. You are 64.1% Chaotic.    Religious Belief: None Glasses or contact lenses?: Glasses Character Tropes: Catalyst Hero, Trickster, Fool, Shadow, The Child, The Hermit, The Devil, The Priest, Addict, Monkey, Dragon, Clown, Beggar, Destroyer, Detective, Visionary.    Primary Goals In Life: Following his dreams and being free to do what he wants with his life. Character's short-term goals in life: Not dying. Getting cash from bounty's. Sex. Threatening to expose his siblings incest. Character's long-term goals in life: Visiting other countries. Exposing his siblings incest to their parents.    Languages Known: English, Japanese    Secrets: He knows about his brother and sister's incest. He is a sex addict. As well as a sadist, a sexual sadist ( On occasion). He killed one of his girlfriends.  Hates cats. Loves watching children's tv shows, still. Most of the things that happened to him at school. Is a sexual deviant. ( more will be added later. ) Deepest secret: Has a journal of his fears and secrets. Biggest fear: Fear of being bound. (Merinthophobia) Happiest memory: The day he got his first electric guitar. Loneliest moment: When one of his teachers removed him from class and told him he would grow up to be worthless and stupid, then just let him sitting in the hall.    Quirks/Mannerisms/Habits: Is a habitual liar and has made up a family that does not exist. Eats like a child even as an adult. Believes in ghosts. Obsessed with children's Cartoons. Shows up unannounced. Always steals the sweets. Has a leather fetish. Is embarrassed of their family heritage. Takes food off other people's plates without asking. Does not like to share hygiene items like hairbrushes, chap-stick, or razors. Keeps a marker on them at all times so they can draw weird things in public restrooms. Has unresolved childhood issues. Is constantly found only partially dressed. Has a weakness for games of chance. Never leaves home without wearing pants, but never wears pants while at home. Is scared of Neon colors. Always blows bubbles in to their drink when they have a straw, even as an adult. Has attempted voodoo. Dresses as a vampire at every costume party, fancy dress party, Halloween, and formal event. Makes paperclip jewelry. Won't drink without a straw. Has had sex with more people than they have seriously dated. Cannot sleep while in the vicinity of a cat. Gets lost all the time. Colors their hair crazy colors every other week. Likes to file their fingernails to sharp points because it makes them feel more dangerous. Is totally responsible for everything that goes wrong. Knows that they are being watched (by the readers). Has an accent that no one knows how to place. Is a heavy sleeper. Thinks cats can see their soul. Sneezes uncontrollably whenever someone talks about cats, reads something about them, or looks at illustrations of any type featuring them, but has no allergy to interacting with the animal itself. Is left-handed, but tries to pass as being right-handed. Wears either mismatched socks or shoelaces. Has a tendency of laughing at the most inappropriate times. Is double-jointed. Treats all of their friends like they are personal evil minions. Goes to the gym at 3am because 'That's when the ghost is there.' Wears removable tattoos. Steals things from people they think need to be punished for something. Has very bad taste in relationships. Talks in their sleep. Eye-rolling, Potty mouth, Snapping fingers, Stuttering, Toying with objects before them, binge drinking, smokes, eats a lot of sugar, is addicted to video games, Still plays with children's toys, clubbing, picks at mouth with his tongue. Loves anime.    Savvies: Music, Tech, Fact, Media Style (Elegant, shabby etc.): Rebel, Punk, Goth, Steampunk, Cosplay. How does he/she dress?: Mostly black or dark yet colorful colors on normal days. Usually with purposefully placed tears in the pants and such, and risky looking outfits. Loves mesh, baggy, tight fitting and/or leathery clothing. Hobbies: Playing the electric guitar, piano and drums. Singing. Hunting bounties for cash. Boardgames. Gambling. Chess. Cosplaying. Crafts. Keeping a journal. Learning an instrument. Legos. Modeling. Origami. Reading. Videogame's. Renaissance Faire. Writing Music/songs. Speech patterns: Accented, mellow, chilled, stuttering. Disabilities: Dyslexic, Epileptic. Greatest flaw: Being a risk taker. Best quality: Easily figuring out and controlling a situation. Illnesses/Allergies/Allergic/exe: Seizures, Migraines Addictions: Drugs, Alcohol, Sex, Food.        || Physical ||    Hair Colour: Light Brown Eye Colour: Bright blue Skin Colour: Tan Body Modifications: Has several ear piercing, tongue piercings, lip piercings and chest and lower. Build: Slender / Scrawny / Bony / Fit / Athletic / Herculean / Babyfat / Pudgy / Obese / Other    Height: 6′9″    Weight: 146 Health: Very low Distinguishing features: his ears a slightly pointed. Has very, very faint freckles over the bridge of his nose. Scars/Birthmarks: Has several birthmarks on his body, on under his left eye, another two on the right side of his face, five on his back, one inside his ear, and three on his left arm. Along with those, are several scars from his recklessness as a child, one of which cuts down on the nostril of the right side of his nose.  Another on his neck and four on his shoulder.  As well as a ton on his knee's and legs.    Abilities/Powers: Prophecy Construction    Restrictions: He hasn't unlocked his powers fully yet, if at all really. The power triggers sever seizures that incapacitate him and prevent him from learning how to use his powers at the current moment. And this will continue to happen in the foreseeable future, even if he is able to figure out the easiest part of it, that is the prophetic visions he receives while having a seizure. This power also has other unknown effects and restrictions to him.   || Favorites ||    Favorite Food: Candy    Favorite Drink: Koolaid    Favorite Pizza Topping: Taco    Favorite Color:  Steel Blue    Favorite Music Genre: Punk/rock    Favorite Book Genre: Dystopian    Favorite Movie Genre: Fantasy    Favorite Season: Fall    Favorite Butt Type: Firm    Favorite Swear Word: Fuck    Favorite Scent: Cookies Favorite Sayings: " I may not be there, But I am closer than I was yesterday." “That’s what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you’re not so lovable.” “I’ve lived in darkness a long time. Over the years my eyes adjusted, until the dark became my world and I could see.” “Sometimes it feels better not to talk. At all. About anything. To anyone.” “My silence holds a plethora of syllables I am too afraid to say.”“They call you heartless; but you have a heart and I love you for being ashamed to show it.” " And every time I look at you, it hurts." "First of all, you don't know me. Second of all, you don't me." “Life is wonderful. It’s a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn’t really anything else.”    Favorite Quote:   “Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.”        || Fun Stuff ||    “Boss” Theme Music: Love The Way You Hate Me/ Hand Grenade/ Hiding Place /    Bottom or Top:  Top    Loud Burper Or Soft Burper: Loud    Sings In The Shower: Yes / No    Likes Bad Puns: Yes / No Sins: Lust / Greed / Gluttony / Sloth / Pride / Envy / Wrath Virtues: Chastity / Charity / Temperance / Diligence / Humility / Kindness / Patience / Justice Hogwarts House: Gryffindor Element: Darkness Big5: Openness Jugian: INFP ( Alternative Type) MOTIV: Offbeat (Materialist 45% 54% Offbeat 81% 48% Thinking 21% 51% Intimate 21% 56% Vital 50% 54%) Left/Right Brain: Right

[413-request-entity-too-large]

Building A Component Library Using Figma

Building A Component Library Using Figma

Emiliano Cicero

2019-06-17T14:00:16+02:002019-06-17T12:16:45+00:00

I’ve been working on the creation and maintenance of the main library of our design system, Lexicon. We used the Sketch app for the first year and then we moved to Figma where the library management was different in certain aspects, making the change quite challenging for us.

To be honest, as with any library construction, it requires time, effort, and planning, but it is worth the effort because it will help with providing detailed components for your team. It will also help increase the overall design consistency and will make the maintenance easier in the long run. I hope the tips that I’ll provide in this article will make the process smoother for you as well.

This article will outline the steps needed for building a component library with Figma, by using styles and a master component. (A master component will allow you to apply multiple changes all at once.) I’ll also cover in detail the components’ organization and will give you a possible solution if you have a large number of icons in the library.

Note: To make it easier to use, update and maintain, we found that it is best to use a separate Figma file for the library and then publish it as a team ‘library’ instead of publishing the components individually.

Getting Started

This guide was created from a designer’s perspective, and if you have at least some basic knowledge of Figma (or Sketch), it should help you get started with creating, organizing and maintaining a component library for your design team.

If you are new to Figma, check the following tutorials before proceeding with the article:

Best Practices: Components, Styles And Shared Libraries

Intro To Figma: Beginner’s Guide To Figma Basics (Video)

Figma For Beginners

Figma 101

Requirements

Before starting, there are some requirements that we have to cover to define the styles for the library.

Typography Scale

The first step to do is to define the typography scale; it helps to focus on how the text size and line height grow in your system, allowing you to define the visual hierarchy of your texts.

Typography scales are useful to improve the hierarchy of the elements, as managing the sizes and weights of the fonts can really guide the user through the content. (Large preview)

The type of scale depends on what you’re designing. It’s common to use a bigger ratio for website designs and a smaller ratio when designing digital products.

The reason for this is behind the design’s goal — a website is usually designed to communicate and convert so it gives you one or two direct actions. It’s easier in that context to have 36px for a main title, 24px for a secondary title, and 16px for a description text.

Related resource: “8-Point Grid: Typography On The Web” by Elliot Dahl.

On the other hand, digital products or services are designed to provide a solution to a specific problem, usually with multiple actions and possible flows. It means more information, more content and more components, all in the same space.

For this case, I personally find it rare to use more than 24px for texts. It’s more common to use small sizes for components — usually from 12 to 18 pixels depending on the text’s importance.

If you’re designing a digital product, it is useful to talk to the developers first. It’s easier to maintain a typography scale based on EM/REM more than actual pixels. The creation of a rule to convert pixels into EM/REM multiples is always recommended.

Related resource: “Defining A Modular Type Scale For Web UI” by Kelly Dern.

Color Scheme

Second, we need to define the color scheme. I think it’s best if you to divide this task into two parts.

First, you need to define the main colors of the system. I recommend keeping it simple and using a maximum of four or five colors (including validation colors) because the more colors you include here, the more stuff you’ll have to maintain in the future.

Next, generate more color values using the Sass functions such as “Lighten” and “Darken” — this works really well for user interfaces. The main benefit of this technique is to use the same hue for the different variants and obtain a mathematical rule that can be automated in the code. You can’t do it directly with Figma, but any Sass color generator will work just fine — for example, SassMe by Jim Nielsen. I like to increase the functions by 1% to have more color selection.

Once you have your main colors (in our case, blue and grey), you can generate gradients using lighten and darken functions. (Large preview)

Tip: In order to be able to apply future changes without having to rename the variables, avoid using the color as part of the color name. E.g., instead of $blue, use $primary.

Recommended reading: “What Do You Name Color Variables?” by Chris Coyier

Figma Styles

Once we have the typography scale and the color scheme set, we can use them to define the Library styles.

This is the first actual step into the library creation. This feature lets you use a single set of properties in multiple elements.

Styles are the way to control all the basic details in your library. (Large preview)

Concrete Example

Let’s say you define your brand color as a style, it’s a soft-blue and you originally apply it to 500 different elements. If it is later decided that you need to change it to a darker blue with more contrast, thanks to the styles you can update all the 500 styled elements at once, so you won’t have to do it manually, element by element.

We can define styles for the following:

Text

Colors

Effects

Grids

If you have variations of the same style, to make it easier to find them later, you can name the single styles and arrange them inside the panel as groups. To do so, just use this formula:

Group Name/Style Name

I’ve included a suggestion of how to name texts and colors styles below.

Text Styles

Properties that you can define within a text style:

Font size

Font weight

Line-height

Letter spacing

Tip: Figma drastically reduces the number of styles that we need to define in the library, as alignments and colors are independent of the style. You can combine a text style with a color style in the same text element.

You can apply all the typography scale we’ve seen before as text styles. (Large preview)

Text Styles Naming

I recommend using a naming rule such as “Size/Weight” (eg: 16/Regular, 16/SemiBold, 16/Bold).

Figma only allows one level of indentation, if you need to include the font you can always add a prefix before the size: FontFamily Size/Weight or FF Size/Weight *(eg: SourceSansPro 16/Regular or SSP 16/Regular).*

Color Styles

The color style uses its hex value (#FFF) and the opacity as properties.

Tip: Figma allows you to set a color style for the fill and a different one for the border within the same element, making them independent of each other.

You can apply color styles to fills, borders, backgrounds, and texts. (Large preview)

Color Styles Naming

For a better organization I recommend using this rule “Color/Variant”. We named our color styles using “Primary/Default” for the starter color, “Primary/L1”, “Primary/L2” for lighten variants, and “Primary/D1”, “Primary/D2” for darken variants.

Effects

When designing an interface you might also need to create elements that use some effects such as drop shadows (the drag&drop could be an example of a pattern that uses drop shadows effects). To have control over these graphic details, you can include effect styles such as shadows or layer blurs to the library, and also divide them by groups if necessary.

Define shadows and blurs to manage special interaction effects such as drag-n-drop. (Large preview)

Grids

To provide something very useful for your team, include the grid styles. You can define the 8px grid, 12 columns grid, flexible grids so your team won’t need to recreate them.

There’s no need to memorize the grid sizes anymore. (Large preview)

Tip: Taking advantage of this feature, you can provide all the different breakpoints as ‘grid styles’.

Master Component

Figma lets you generate multiple instances of the same component and update them through a single master component. It’s easier than you might think, you can start with some small elements and then use them to evolve your library.

One master component to rule them all! (Large preview)

To explain this workflow better, I will use one of the basic components all the libraries have: the buttons.

Buttons!

Every system has different types of buttons to represent the importance of the actions. You can start having both primary and secondary buttons with only texts and one size, but the reality is that you’ll probably end up having to maintain something like this:

2 color types (Primary | Secondary)

2 sizes of buttons (Regular | Small)

4 content types (Text Only | Icon Only | Text + Icon right | Icon Left + Text)

5 states (Default | Hover | Active | Disabled | Focus)

This would give us up to 88 different components to maintain only with the set of buttons mentioned above!

Thanks to how Figma is built, you can easily manage a lot of button instances all at once. (Large preview)

Let’s Start Step By Step

The first step is to include all the variations together in the same place. For the buttons we’re going to use:

A single shape for the background of the button so that we can then place the color styles for the fill and the border;

The single text that will have both text and color styles;

Three icon components (positioned to the right, center and left) filled in with the color style (you will be able to easily swap the icons).

A shape, a text, and an icon walk into a Figma bar... (Large preview)

The second step is to create the master component (use the shortcut Cmd + Alt + K on Mac, or Ctrl + Alt + K on Windows) with all of the variations as instances. I suggest using a different and neutral style for the elements inside the master component and use the real styles on the sub-components, this trick will help the team use only sub-components.

You can see the visual difference between a master component and a sub-component in the next step:

The more elements, the more instances you can control. (Large preview)

In the third step you need to duplicate the master component to generate an instance, now you can use that instance to create a sub-component, and from now on every change you make to the master component will also change the sub-component you’ve created.

You can now start applying the different styles we’ve seen before to the elements inside the sub-component and, of course, you can hide the elements you don’t need in that sub-component.

Thanks to the color styles you can generate different components using the same shape. In this example, primary and secondary styles are generated from the same master component. (Large preview)

Text Alignment

As I’ve shown you in the styles, the alignments are independent of the style. So if you want to change the text alignment, just select it by hitting Cmd/Ctrl and changing it. Left, center or right: it will all work and you can define different sub-components as I did with the buttons.

Tip: To help you work faster without having to find the exact element layer, if you delete an element inside the instance, it will hide the element instead of actually deleting it.

Component Organization

If you’re coming from Sketch, you could be having trouble with the organization of the components in Figma as there are a few key differences between these two tools. This is a brief guide to help you organize the components well so that the instance menu doesn’t negatively affect your team’s effectiveness.

As you can see here, our library had so many sub-menus that as a result the navigation was going off the screen on MacBooks, that was a big problem for our library. We were able to find a workaround for this issue. (Large preview)

This was the result after improving the library order following the rules for pages and frames, now it’s way more usable and organized for our teams. (Large preview)

We’ve all been there, the solution is easier than you think!

Here’s what I have learned about how to organize the components.

Figma Naming

While in Sketch all the organization depends only on the single component name, in Figma it depends on the Page name, the Frame name, and the single Component name — exactly in that order.

In order to provide a well-organized library, you need to think of it as a visual organization. As long as you respect the order, you can customize the naming to fit your needs.

Here’s how I’ve divided it:

File Name = Library Name (e.g. Lexicon);

Page Name = Component Group (e.g. Cards);

Frame Name = Component Type (e.g. Image Card, User Card, Folder Card, etc);

Component Name = Component State (e.g. Default, Hover, Active, Selected, etc).

This structure is the equivalent to the Sketch naming of ‘Cards/Image Card/Card Hover’. (Large preview)

Adding Indentation Levels

When creating the Lexicon library, I found that I actually needed more than three levels of indentation for some of the components, such as the buttons that we saw before.

For these cases, you can extend the naming using the same method as Sketch for nested symbols (using the slashes in the component name, e.g. “Component/Sub-Component”), under the condition that you do it only after the third level of indentation, respecting the structural order of the first three levels as explained in the previous point.

This is how I organized our buttons:

Page name = Component Group (e.g. Buttons);

Frame name = Component Size (e.g. Regular or Small);

Component name = Style/Type/State (e.g. Primary/Text/Hover).

This structure is the equivalent to the Sketch naming of '*Buttons/Buttons Regular/Primary/Text/Button Hover*'. (Large preview)

Tip: You can include the component name (or a prefix of the name) in the last level, this will help your team to better identify the layers when they import the components from the library.

Icons Organization

Organizing the icons in Figma can be challenging when including a large number of icons.

As opposed to Sketch which uses a scroll functionality, Figma uses the sub-menus to divide the components. The problem is that if you have a large number of icons grouped in sub-menus, at some point they might go off screen (my experience with Figma on a MacBook Pro).

An example of how the components are organized inside a single scrollable sub-menu. (Large preview)

As you can see, using a Macbook Pro the result was the menus going outside the screen. (Large preview)

Here are two possible solutions:

Solution 1 Create a page named “Icons” and then a frame for each letter of the alphabet, then place each icon in the frame based on the icon’s name. For example, if you have an icon named “Plus”, then it will go in the “P” frame.

Solution 2 Create a page named “Icons” and then divide by frames based on the icon categories. For example, if you have icons that represent a boat, a car, and a motorcycle, you can place them inside a frame named “vehicles”.

I, personally, applied solution 1. As you can see in this example, we had a huge number of icons so this was the better fit. (Large preview)

Conclusion

Now that you know what’s exactly behind a team’s library construction in Figma, you can start building one yourself! Figma has a free subscription plan that will help you to get started and experiment with this methodology in a single file (however, if you want to share a team library, you will need to subscribe to the “Professional” option).

Try it, create and organize some advanced components, and then present the library to your team members so you could amaze them — or possibly convince them to add Figma to their toolset.

Finally, let me mention that here in Liferay, we love open-source projects and so we’re sharing a copy of our Lexicon library along with some other resources. You can use the Lexicon library components and the other resources for free, and your feedback is always welcome (including as Figma comments, if you prefer).

Download the ‘Lexicon’ library

Lexicon is the design language of Liferay, used to provide a Design System and a Figma Library for the different product teams. (Large preview)

If you have questions or need help with your first component library in Figma, ask me in the comments below, or drop me a line on Twitter.

Further Resources

“8-Point Grid: Typography On The Web,” Elliot Dahl, freeCodeCamp

Defining A Modular Type Scale For Web UI,” Kelly Dern, Medium

“Relative Color Palettes With Sass,” Ethan Muller, Sparkbox

SassMe (tool created by Jim Nielsen that lets you visualize Sass HSL color functions in real-time)

“What Do You Name Color Variables?,” Chris Coyier, CSS-Tricks

“Best Practices: Components, Styles, And Shared Libraries,” Thomas Lowry, Figma

Figma YouTube Channel

Figma Help Articles

(mb, yk, il)

[biofunmy]

The Queen of Eating Shellfish Online

CINCINNATI — Most of us can probably agree that eating food is more enjoyable than watching someone else eat food. For one, it’s a basic human need. It also tastes good a lot of the time. Not to mention, people can be pretty gross when they eat, especially when they do so in over-the-top, finger-licking fashion.

Still, hundreds of thousands of people tune in each week to watch Bethany Gaskin binge-eat shellfish on YouTube.

Mrs. Gaskin, 44, has capitalized on the popularity of a food-video genre known as mukbang, which involves scarfing down, on camera, more grub than should rightly be consumed in a single sitting.

On her two YouTube channels, Bloveslife and BlovesASMR Eating Her Way, Mrs. Gaskin chats up her audience while eating king crab legs, mussels, lobster tails, hard-boiled eggs and roasted red potatoes. The videos, produced in her Cincinnati home, have made her a millionaire, she said. But getting into the business wasn’t about money; mukbang was more of a calling than a vocation.

“I think of mukbanging as a ministry,” Mrs. Gaskin said. “I didn’t consult with my husband before I quit my job. I knew this was it, and I quit by faith.”

The Spread of Binge Culture

Mukbang seems to have begun as an internet trend more than a decade ago in South Korea. The name is a mash-up of the Korean words for let’s eat (“muk-ja”) and broadcasting (“bang-song”). Korean live-streamers often schedule their mukbang videos to align with dinnertime hours, so their viewers eating alone at home feel like they’re sharing a meal with a friend.

Viewers cite other benefits too. Watching the videos can serve as an appetite-curbing exercise. And for a certain subset, the sounds of a person eating foster an autonomous sensory meridian response, or A.S.M.R.; viewers derive pleasure from the sounds created by extra-loud crunching, slurping and lip smacking.

Craig Richard, 49, a professor of physiology at Shenandoah University and the creator of a website dedicated to the study of A.S.M.R., said that while the phenomenon is not medically diagnosed, people who enjoy A.S.M.R. experience a sensation of “sparkling brain tingles” while viewing “trigger” videos.

On a recent Tuesday, Mrs. Gaskin sat down in her home studio for a recording session with her son Dalvin, who is 25 and something of a protégé, and his friend Nicole. On the walls were plaques commemorating the day she reached the one-million-subscriber mark on YouTube, as well as a framed letter from Susan Wojcicki, the C.E.O. of YouTube.

Mrs. Gaskin began the show with a friendly singsong greeting: “What’s up my Bloveleez?,” a nickname she uses to refer to her viewers. Then she announced the night’s meal, elongating the vowels in “seafood boil” as a soccer commentator would when announcing a goal.

Before diving into her food, she said a brief prayer: “Heavenly Father, in the name of Jesus, I thank you for this food I’m about to receive. In Jesus’s name, I pray. Amen.”

The food was strategically positioned on a serving tray, with the most colorful items on top and accented by bright yellow lemons and corn on the cob. On the table in front of the tray were three glass bowls of Mrs. Gaskin’s homemade Smackalicious sauce. She wants to manufacture the spices used in the sauce so viewers can make their own.

Before taking the first bite of food, Mrs. Gaskin, Dalvin and Nicole briefly paused in front of the camera. They posed with a crab leg, and, while smiling, they sang the word “thumbnail.” After the photo, the real action began. Once Mrs. Gaskin dipped her food into her Smackalicious sauce, she took her first bite and closed her eyes as she chewed.

While nodding, she said, “Yup, umm hmm y’all, this is good.” She used slurping noises to indicate that something was juicy, followed by more head nods and “yup” utterances, as well as some vaguely orgasmic sounds. Dr. Richard said that these “mouth sounds,” in combination with Mrs. Gaskin’s “kind and positive disposition” and the abundance of the food, are textbook A.S.M.R. triggers.

In Mrs. Gaskin’s house, these kinds of table manners aren’t punished but celebrated. She and her Bloveleez slurp and chew noisily and, as she put it, “unapologetically.”

Gross Profits

Perhaps the noisy and bad-mannered eating is off-putting for most, but the genre has a lot of devotees, if Mrs. Gaskin’s success is any indication. Her primary YouTube channel, Bloveslife, has 1.8 million subscribers, and on Instagram she has a following of nearly 900,000, one of whom is Cardi B.

Through advertising on her videos, Mrs. Gaskin said she has made more than $1 million, providing screenshots of a report from YouTube.

Before becoming a YouTube sensation, Mrs. Gaskin, who has an associate’s degree in early childhood development, owned a day care facility. After five years, she sold the business and used the money to pay off loans and leases. She then got a job making circuit boards for the military for a year.

In 2017, she started making Food Network-style cooking videos in her home kitchen and posting them on YouTube. “I’m a foodie,” Mrs. Gaskin said. “I’ve always liked to cook.”

“Then I did a mukbang, and people just went crazy,” she said. “I was like, ‘People want to see me eat, this is weird,’ and since they were easier to record, I just started doing mukbangs and all of a sudden, it just took off from there.”

Mrs. Gaskin’s first mukbang video featured a seafood boil and a largely improvised monologue. Viewers left comments like: “Smacking, finger licking, straight getting down!! Just being yourself…very cool stuff!” and “I’m allergic so I can’t eat it, but you make me wanna take the risk of eating a fried shrimp, just in front of the Emergency Room.”

“Her first 10 seafood boils were doing amazing, and I think it was the fifth one that was recognized by the ‘Stranger Things’ cast,” her son Darius, 18, said. His mother’s “overnight” success is something he is still getting used to, more than two years into her YouTube career.

Her husband, Nate, said that, in the beginning, he didn’t see how mukbang could help support the family.

“When she first started this, I thought it was just going to be a hobby that she wanted to do,” he said. “But when it took off, it really changed the dynamic financially for our family, because in a very short period of time, she was making more money than I was.”

Mrs. Gaskin’s success encouraged her husband to retire early from his 20-year managerial position at General Electric. Since then, Mr. Gaskin has been his wife’s full-time manager.

Her audience has now surpassed that of the YouTubers who inspired her to pursue mukbang. She said that in particular videos by Jasper Daze, who died in 2016 after complications with diabetes, helped her pick shellfish as her cuisine of choice. She dedicated her first mukbang to him.

Feedback

Though the chatter around mukbang videos tends to focus on their benefits, there are also some who see reason for concern. Theresa Kinsella, 42, a dietitian, said in a phone interview that these videos “glorify overeating,” promote disordered eating and ignore the possible risks associated with overconsumption.

“The short-term health risks are physical discomfort, gastrointestinal distress, lethargy and fatigue,” Ms. Kinsella said. As for the long-term effects, she cited weight gain, heart disease and diabetes.

Before the recording, Mrs. Gaskin, a surprisingly petite 4-foot-11, said that mukbang hasn’t affected her health. She eats only when she films, she said, which is on average twice a day.

Some of her fans send gifts. Others describe her as their “medication,” Mrs. Gaskin said, adding that some cancer patients have thanked her for helping them regain their appetites.

Reese Anthony, 34, from St. Louis, Mo., is a fan of Mrs. Gaskin’s fried chicken and shrimp dipping videos, and says that A.S.M.R. videos have helped him with his anxiety and depression.

“When I first started watching these videos, and some of my friends knew I was watching these videos, they thought it was weird,” he said in a phone interview. “But they don’t get it because they aren’t tapping into their senses.”

Mr. Anthony also alluded to the A.S.M.R. quality of Mrs. Gaskin’s screen presence. “The videos can put me to sleep and relax me,” he said. “It makes my hair on my arms stand up or gives me goose bumps because it’s so relaxing.”

Mrs. Gaskin credits her ability to appear authentic as a reason for her success. The other is her faith. “As long as my family and God are behind me, I’m good,” she said. “And I wake up happy every day.”

It wasn’t always easy. At one point during her childhood, Mrs. Gaskin said, she was homeless. “I know the struggle,” she said. “My mom would sacrifice eating to make sure me and my brother ate.”

That’s when Dalvin and Nicole walked through the door. Mrs. Gaskin asked, “Did y’all eat?”

Dalvin said they had not.

“Do y’all want to eat with me?”

And the workday began.

Sahred From Source link Arts

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[dinakaplan]

5 Healthy Spices — The Healthiest Way to Add Flavor to Your Food

Spices can add fabulous flavor. But new research is telling us that these five healthy spices can also fight Alzheimer’s, inflammation, cancer, migraine headaches, stomach problems, and type 2 diabetes.

By Ocean Robbins • Adapted from Ocean Robbins’ soon-to-be-released book 31-Day Food Revolution (February 5th, 2019). Get your copy here now.

Every culture is defined, in part, by the spices used in its cuisine.

In India, there’s cardamom and cumin. In Italy, there’s basil and oregano. In Mexico, there’s chili, garlic, and cilantro. In Thailand, there’s lemongrass, sweet basil, and galangal. And in North America, there’s a bit of everything in the culinary melting pot.

But what is North America most known for adding to the mix? Salt, sugar, and fat.

Not that North Americans don’t use spices. They’re just not what North American cuisine is typically known for. And speaking as a North American, I think that’s a shame.

Fortunately, you don’t have to live in Thailand to enjoy kaffir lime leaves. Or in Mexico to partake of green chilies.

Herbs and spices travel the globe. And they don’t just bring wonderful, mouthwatering bursts of flavor. They also bring stunning levels of nutrition.

Cooking with herbs and spices is an art form. Knowing which ones are especially good for you is science.

Learning about and using the following healthy spices can make a world of difference in your kitchen — and for your health.

5 Healthy Seasonings to Add Incredible Flavor and Health Benefits to Your Food

1) Turmeric

iStock.com/Madeleine_Steinbach

Turmeric is a flavorful addition to sauces, curries, stir-fries, and casseroles.

Popular in India for more than 5,000 years, it’s widely thought to be one of the primary reasons that country has one of the world’s lowest rates of Alzheimer’s disease.

Turmeric is known for its bright orange color. In fact, it’s sometimes used as a coloring agent. The orange comes from a polyphenol called curcumin, which is something of a miracle compound.

Hundreds of studies have demonstrated that curcumin may help prevent or even reverse Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, reduce unhealthy levels of inflammation, protect against heavy metal toxicity, and even lower heart disease risk.

The average daily intake of curcumin in India is thought to be about 125 mg — the amount found in about a half-teaspoon of turmeric powder.

Research has found low rates of certain types of cancer in countries where people eat 100 to 200 mg of curcumin per day over long periods of time.

If a half-teaspoon of turmeric seems like a lot, you might consider a curcumin supplement. My personal favorite (made by a company that also supports Food Revolution Network) contains a potent, absorption-boosting breakthrough. You can see more about it (and get a special discount offer) here.

And one more tip: You’ll get better curcumin absorption if you combine turmeric with some black pepper and/or a bit of (healthy) fat.

2) Garlic

iStock.com/Amarita

Garlic can be chopped, minced, blended, or eaten as a powder.

It’s delicious in pasta sauces, soups, and almost any savory dish. People at the annual garlic festival in Gilroy, California, have even been known to make garlic ice cream, though I can’t say I recommend it!

Garlic is known for helping to ward off the bad guys. But instead of hanging it over your doorway to scare away vampires, you can eat it to fight off certain cancers.

Researchers studied 41,387 Iowa women, tracking their consumption of 127 foods over five years.

The food found to be most highly associated with a statistically significant decrease in colon cancer was garlic. Women with the highest amounts of garlic in their diets had a 50% lower risk of certain colon cancers than women who ate the least.

Another study of 5,000 men and women, conducted in China over five years, found that a garlic extract was linked to a 52% reduction in stomach cancer rates, compared to a placebo.

Garlic has been rumored to help fight colds and flu. But is this folklore backed up by real-world science?

A team of researchers studied 146 participants, giving half of them a garlic tablet and half a placebo tablet, every day for three months.

The people who took the placebo reported cumulatively catching 65 colds. The people who took the garlic reported only 24. And for those garlic-takers who did catch a cold, the symptoms ended 20% sooner. (For other immune-boosting foods, read this article.)

3) Ginger

iStock.com/egal

Ginger is one of my favorite spices. It has a refreshing, clean, invigorating flavor. I love it in soups, stir-fries, casseroles, salad dressings, smoothies, stews, and desserts.

If you like, you can mix ginger powder or ginger tea with sparkling water and stevia for a healthy, homemade ginger ale.

Ginger can be used to treat stomach problems, including motion sickness, morning sickness, colic, upset stomach, irritable bowel syndrome, gas, diarrhea, nausea, and loss of appetite.

It has potent anti-inflammatory properties. And some people find it very useful in relieving pain caused by rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, and menstrual cramps.

As if all that weren’t enough, ginger has also been found to be extraordinarily effective in the treatment of migraines.

If you’ve ever suffered from a migraine, you know that it’s way more than a headache. Migraines make normal activities impossible for an estimated one billion people worldwide. And migraines are responsible for billions of dollars in health care costs.

But could a natural remedy like ginger really work as well as drugs, with fewer side effects?

In 2014, a double-blind, randomized controlled clinical trial was published in Phytotherapy Research. Researchers studied 100 people experiencing moderate to severe pain from migraines.

Half the study participants were given one-eighth of a teaspoon of powdered ginger, and half were given a standard dose of sumatriptan, also known as Imitrex — one of the top-selling, billion-dollar drugs in the treatment of migraines.

The results? Both worked equally fast.

Most participants started out with moderate or severe pain. After taking either the drug or ginger, they were either in mild pain or completely pain-free. The same proportion of migraine sufferers reported satisfaction with the results, whether they took sumatriptan or ginger.

But with ginger, there were substantially fewer negative side effects. With sumatriptan, some people reported dizziness, a sedative effect, vertigo, and heartburn. The only adverse side effect for ginger was that two of the ginger-taking participants reported an upset stomach.

If you want to try the natural migraine remedy, mix 1/8 teaspoon powdered ginger in water at the first sign of a migraine. Drink it, and see if your headache lessens or goes away within half an hour.

Compared to sumatriptan, ginger not only spares you the side effects — but it also comes at about 1/3,000th the price. And it just might do the job.

4) Cinnamon

iStock.com/Sezeryadigar

Cinnamon is one of the most popular spices in the world. It’s made from the inner bark of a genus of a tree called Cinnamomum.

When strips of it dry, they curl into rolls, called cinnamon sticks. The sticks can also be ground to form a powder. This mild-mannered, delectable spice can flavor drinks, baked goods, oatmeal, stir-fries, and dishes both savory and sweet.

For thousands of years, cinnamon has also been prized for its potent medicinal properties. It’s loaded with polyphenols and other antioxidants.

Cinnamon is an anti-inflammatory, antidiabetic, antimicrobial, anticancer, lipid-lowering, and cardiovascular-disease-lowering superstar.

Whoever knew that such a sweet spice could be so potent a healing force!

5) Hot Peppers

iStock.com/19msa05

Hot peppers look a lot like bell peppers, but with one major difference. They contain a compound known as capsaicin, which is colorless and odorless — but definitely not flavorless!

Capsaicin is so intensely spicy that many people can tolerate hot peppers only in small amounts. The capsaicin that brings peppers their heat is also a powerful medicine.

Chili peppers aid digestion by promoting salivation, boosting the stomach’s defense against infections, increasing digestive fluid production, and helping to deliver enzymes to the stomach.

In a 2017 study conducted on mice, researchers found that the capsaicin in hot peppers was able to alter the composition of gut bacteria, promoting more beneficial strains.

This, in turn, led to lower levels of chronic inflammation and obesity.

In another study, 16,179 human participants were tracked for an average of more than 15 years. After factoring out demographic, lifestyle, and clinical characteristics, the people who consumed hot peppers had a 13% lower rate of mortality throughout the study. Put in plain English, people who ate more hot peppers were more likely to live longer.

There are many varieties of hot peppers, and their level of capsaicin ranges from mild to intense. Some people love the spiciness, but others, especially children, may not. Here’s a tip: Instead of mixing hot peppers into a whole dish, you can arrange them on top or serve them separately.

A word to the wise: When you chop hot peppers, be careful to wash your knife, cutting board, and hands with soap afterward, and be sure not to touch your eyes before you’ve washed your hands. I’ve learned from personal experience that capsaicin can burn eyes (and other sensitive parts of the body!).

Plus There Are Many More Healthy Spices

Turmeric, garlic, ginger, cinnamon, and hot peppers barely scratch the surface in the wonderful world of healthy spices. Your spice cabinet is a virtual pharmacy of medicinal compounds.

Nutmeg, cloves, basil, dill, oregano, thyme, sage, parsley, fennel, and many other healthy spices and herbs contain substances that could help fight cancer and heart disease, reduce inflammation, stabilize your blood sugar, fend off dementia, and add culinary delight to your menu.

5 Delicious, Plant-Powered Recipes Made with Healthy Spices

Now that you know about the top five healthy spices, how do you use them?

Here are five recipe ideas that are useful in a variety of ways:

Savory Turmeric Sauce from MindBodyGreen

Sauces make delicious meals fabulously easy! Simply add them to sauteed or roasted veggies, a bed of greens, or grain or lentil bowls, and you have a quick and delicious dish. This sauce (which includes healthy spices like turmeric, ginger, and garlic) is creamy and packed with flavor and nutrition.

Turmeric Vegetable Broth from The Domestic Dietician

This broth is full of gut-healing and immune-boosting ingredients. Packed with veggies and seasonings, this flavorful recipe also includes three healthy spices: garlic, ginger, and turmeric. You can drink this broth as is, add veggies, or use it in other recipes.

Homemade Hot Sauce from PlantPlate

Add a kick of heat to anything you want with your very own hot sauce made in your kitchen. While store-bought varieties often contain loads of salt and other not-so-good-for-you ingredients, this hot sauce — which you can make with multiple kinds of hot peppers — is salt-free and naturally sweetened with dates. And it also includes fresh garlic.

Naturally Sweetened Cinnamon Sauce from Karissa’s Vegan Kitchen

This super simple sauce can be made in five minutes and paired with coffee, drizzled over apple slices, or added to non-dairy yogurt or whatever you want. All you need are dates, cinnamon, and warm water.

Raw Applesauce from Glue & Glitter

Spicy and naturally sweet, this applesauce doesn’t need to be cooked and comes together quickly. Made with fresh ginger and ground cinnamon, you can enjoy it for breakfast, as a snack, or mixed into other recipes.

Spice Up Your Life the Healthy Way

Healthy food can be delightfully flavorful without unhealthy ingredients, like loads of salt and sugar.

Herbs and spices create dishes that engage the senses. And they’re packed with health-boosting, disease-fighting nutrients.

Do you want even more practical tips and insights on how to break free from a toxic food culture?

In his new book, Ocean Robbins – CEO and co-founder of Food Revolution Network – explains simple steps that you can take NOW to live your healthiest life.

Join the movement and pre-order your copy of 31-Day Food Revolution today!

By placing a pre-order, you will also unlock empowering bonus resources to help you on your food revolution journey.

Learn more at 31dayfoodrevolution.com

Tell us in the comments:

What are your favorite healthy spices?

What are your favorite recipes featuring these healthy spices?

How else do you add flavor to food in a healthy way?

Read Next:

10 spices to improve your digestion naturally — and help keep your gut happy

How to stay healthy and fight cancer with parsley

[Read More ...] https://foodrevolution.org/blog/healthy-spices/

[ciathyzareposts]

Quest for Glory III and IV

The VGA remake of Quest for Glory I. By this point, Sierra’s graphics exceeded the quality of most Saturday-morning cartoons, and weren’t far off the standard set by feature films, being held back more by the technical limitations of VGA graphics than those of the artists doing the drawing.

Quest for Glory, Lori Ann and Corey Cole’s much-loved series of adventure/CRPG hybrids, took a year off after its second installment, while each half of the couple designed an educational game for Sierra’s Discovery Series. After finishing her Discovery game Mixed-Up Fairy Tales, a less ambitious effort aimed at younger children than Corey’s The Castle of Dr. Brain, Lori headed a remake of the first Quest for Glory, using VGA graphics and a point-and-click interface in place of EGA and a parser. While opinions vary as to the remake’s overall worthiness — I’m personally fonder of the original version, as is Corey Cole — no one could deny that it looked beautiful in 256 colors. Sierra was, like many other media producers at the time, operating in a short-lived intermediate phase between analog and fully-digital production techniques, which gave the work a look unique to this very specific period. For example, most of the characters in the Quest for Glory I remake were first sculpted in clay by art director Arturo Sinclair, then digitized and imported into the game. One can only hope that contemporary gamers took the time to appreciate the earthy craftsmanship of his work. Sierra and much of their industry would soon fall down the full-motion video rabbit hole, and the 3D Revolution as well was just over the horizon, poised to offer all sorts of exciting new experiential possibilities but also to lose almost as much in the way of aesthetic values. It would, in other words, be a long time before games would look this good again.

Thankfully, the era of hand-drawn — or hand-sculpted — art at Sierra would last long enough to carry through the next two Quest for Glory games as well. Much else, though, would conspire against them, and in my opinion neither the third nor the fourth game is as strong as either of the first two. Today we’ll have a look at these later efforts’ strengths and failings and the circumstances that led to each.

Well before starting work on the very first Quest for Glory, Lori Ann Cole had sketched out a four-game plan for the series as a whole. It would see the player’s evolving hero visiting four different cultural regions of a fantasy world, all drawn from cultures of our own world, in adventures where the stakes would get steadily higher. The first two games had thus covered medieval Germany and the Arab world, and the last two were slated to go to the murky environs of Eastern Europe and the blazing sunshine of mythic Greece. In fact, Quest for Glory II ends with an advertisement of sorts for the “upcoming” Quest for Glory III: Shadows of Darkness, the Eastern European game. Yet almost as soon as the second game was out the door, the Coles started to have misgivings. To go with its milieu drawn from Romanian and Slavic folklore and the Gothic-horror tradition, Shadows of Darkness was to have a more unfriendly, foreboding approach to gameplay as well. The Coles planned to make “aloneness, suspicion, and paranoia,” as Corey puts it, the hallmarks of the game. They didn’t want to abandon that uncompromising vision, but neither were they sure that their players were ready for it.

Shortly before leaving Sierra to join Origin Systems, staff writer Ellen Guon suggested that the third game could easily be set in Africa instead, following up on an anecdote mentioned by one of the characters in passing in Quest for Glory II — thus extending the series’s arc from four to five games and postponing the “dark” entry until a little later. The Coles loved the idea, and Quest for Glory III: The Wages of War was born. Sure, making it did interfere with some of the thematic unities Lori had built into the series; its entries had been planned to correspond with the four classical elements of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water, as well as the four cardinal compass directions and the four seasons. But perhaps that was all a little too matchy-matchy anyway…

Other, less welcome changes were also in the offing: the new game’s gestation was immediately impacted by the removal of Corey Cole from most of the process. Corey had originally been hired by Sierra in a strictly technical role — specifically, for his expertise in programming the Atari ST and the Motorola 68000 CPU at its heart. His first assigned task had been to help port Sierra’s then-new SCI game engine to that platform, and he was still regarded around the office as the resident 68000 expert. Thus when Sierra head Ken Williams cooked up a scheme to bring their games to the Sega Genesis, a videogame console that was also built around the 68000, it was to Corey that he turned. So, while Lori worked on Quest for Glory III alone, Corey struggled with what turned out to be an impossible task. The Genesis’s memory was woefully inadequate, and its graphics were limited to 64 colors from a palette of 512, as opposed to the 256 colors from a palette of 262,144 of the VGA graphics standard for which Sierra’s latest computer games were coded. Wiser heads finally prevailed and the whole endeavor was cancelled, freeing up Corey to reform his design partnership with Lori.

This happened, however, only in the final stages of Quest for Glory III‘s development. Among fans today, this game is generally considered the weakest link in the series, and the absence of Corey Cole is often cited as a primary reason. I’ll return to the impact his absence may have had, but first I’d like to mention what the game undeniably does right: the setting.

Importantly, Quest for the Glory III, this “game set in fantasy Africa,” encompasses the whole of the continent. It’s often forgotten that Egypt, that birthplace of so much of human civilization, is a part of Africa; this essential fact, though, Lori Ann Cole didn’t neglect. Conforming to real-world geography, the northern part of the game’s map, where you begin, is based on ancient Egypt, complete with the pyramids and other monumental architecture we know from our history books. As you travel southward, the desert turns into tundra and then jungle, and the societies you meet there become reflections of tribal Africa. It’s all drawn — both metaphorically, through the writing, and literally, through the graphics — with considerable charm and skill. Sub-Saharan Africa in particular isn’t a region we see depicted very often in games, and still less often with this degree of sympathy. As I noted in my first article on the Quest for Glory series, there’s a travelogue quality that runs through its entirety, showing us our own world’s many great and varied cultures through the lens of these fantasy adventures. The third game, suffice to say, upholds that tradition admirably.

Also welcome is the theme of the game. In contrast to most computer games, this one has you trying to prevent a war rather than win one. The aforementioned Egyptian and tribal African cultures have have been set at odds by a combination of prejudices, misunderstandings, and — this being a fantasy game and all — the odd evil wizard. It’s up to you to play the peacemaker. “You start getting a better and better idea of just how senseless war is,” says Corey, “and how everybody loses by it.” Of course, there’s a certain cognitive dissonance about an allegedly anti-war game in which you spend so much of your time mowing down monsters by decidedly violent means, but props for effort.

In fact, any criticism of Quest for Glory should be tempered by the understanding that what the Coles did with this series was quite literally unprecedented, and, further, that no one else has ever tried to do anything quite like it since. While plenty of vintage CRPGs, dating all the way back to Wizardry, allowed you to move your characters from game to game, the Quest for Glory series is a far more complex take on a role-playing game than those simple monster bashers, with character attributes affecting far more aspects of the experience than combat alone — even extending into a moral dimension via a character’s “honor” attribute and the associated possibility to change to the prestige class of Paladin. It must have been tempting indeed to throw out the past and force players to start over with new characters each time the Coles started working on the next game in the series, but they doggedly stuck to their original vision of four — no, make that five — interlinked games that could all feature the very same custom hero, assuming the player was up to the task of buying and playing all of them.

But, fundamental to the Coles’ conception of their series though it was, this approach did have its drawbacks, which were starting to become clear by the time of Quest for Glory III. Corey Cole himself has admitted that “the play balance — both pacing and combat difficulty — and of course the freshness of the concept were strongest in Quest for Glory I.” Certainly that’s the entry in this hybrid series that works best as a CRPG, providing that addictive thrill of seeing your character slowly getting stronger, able to tackle monsters and challenges he couldn’t have dreamed of in the beginning. The later games are hampered by the well-known sense of diminishing returns that afflicts so many RPGs at higher levels; it’s much more fun in tabletop Dungeons & Dragons as well to advance from level 1 to level 8 than it is from level 8 to level 16. Even when you find that you need to spend time training in order to meet some arbitrary threshold — more on that momentarily — your character in the later Quest for Glory games never really feels like he’s going anywhere. The end result is to sharply reduce the importance of the most unique aspect of the series as it wears on. For this player anyway, that also reduces a big chunk of the series’s overall appeal. I haven’t tried it, but I suspect that these games may actually be more satisfying to play if you don’t import your old character into each new one, but rather start out fresh each time with a weaker hero and enjoy the thrill of building him up.

Sanford and Son make an appearance.

Quest for Glory III also disappoints in other ways.The first two games had been loaded with alternative solutions and approaches of all stripes, full of countless secrets and Easter eggs. Quest for Glory III is far less generous on all of these fronts. There just isn’t as much to do and discover outside the bounds of those things that are absolutely necessary to advance the plot. And one of the three possible character classes you can play, the Thief, has markedly fewer interesting things to do than the others even in the course of doing that much. The whole game feels less accommodating and rewarding — less amendable to your personal choices, one might say — than what came before. It plays, in other words, more like just another Sierra adventure game and less like the uniquely rich and flexible experience the first two games are.

This lack of design ambition can to some degree be laid at the feet of the absence of Corey Cole for most of the design process. Corey was generally the “puzzle guy” in the partnership, dealing with all the questions of smaller-scale interactivity, while Lori was the “story gal,” responsible for the wide-angle plotting.  And indeed, when I asked Corey about his own impressions of the game in relation to its predecessors, he acknowledged that “certainly Quest for Glory III is lighter on puzzles, while having just as much story as Quest for Glory II.”

Yet Corey’s absence isn’t the only reason that the personality of the series began to morph with this third installment. The most obvious change between the second and third game — blindingly obvious to anyone who plays them back to back — is the move from a parser-based to a pure point-and-click interface. I trust that I don’t need to belabor how this could remove some of the scope for player creativity, and especially what it might mean for the many little secrets for which the first two games are so known. I’m no absolute parser purist — my opinion has always been that the best interface for any given game is entirely contextual, based upon the type of experience the designer is trying to create — but I can’t help but feel that Quest for Glory lost something when it dumped the parser.

One issue with Quest for Glory III that may actually be a subtle, inadvertent byproduct of the switch to point-and-click is a certain aimlessness that seems baked into the design. Too much of the story is predicated on unmotivated wandering over a map that’s not at all suited to more methodical exploration.

I hate the Quest for Glory III overland map with a passion. Unique locations aren’t signaled on it, but it’s nevertheless vital that you thoroughly explore it, meaning you’re forced to click on any formation that looks interesting in the hope that it’s more than decorative, a process which disappoints and frustrates more often than not. And while you’re wandering around in this random fashion, you’re constantly being attacked by uninteresting monsters and being forced to engage in tedious combat. Note that what you see above is only the first of several screens full of this sort of thing.

When I played Quest for Glory III, I eventually wound up in that dreaded place known to every adventure player: where you’ve exhausted all your leads and are left with no idea what the game expects from you next. This was, however, a feeling new to me in the course of playing this particular series. When I turned with great reluctance to a walkthrough — I’d solved the first two games entirely on my own — I learned that I was expected to train my skills up to a certain level in order shake the plot back into gear.

But how, you ask, can such problems be traced back to the loss of the parser? Well, Corey has mentioned how Lori — later, he and Lori — attempted to restore some of the sense of spontaneity and surprise that had perhaps been lost alongside the parser through the use of “events”: “Instead of each game scene having one specific thing that happens in it, our scenes change throughout the game. Sometimes the passage of time triggers a new event, and sometimes it’s the result of the ripple effect of player actions. It was supposed to feel organic.” When this approach works well, it works wonderfully well in providing a dynamic environment that seems to unfold spontaneously from the player’s perspective, just the way a good interactive story should. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst case is when you haven’t done whatever arbitrary action is needed to get a vital event to fire, and you’re left to wander around wondering what’s next. Finally, when you peek at a walkthrough, the mechanisms behind it all are revealed in the ugliest, most mimesis-annihilating way imaginable. I understand what Quest for Glory III wants to do, and I wholeheartedly approve. But there needed to be more work done to avoid dead spots — whether in the form of more possible triggers or just of more nudges to tell the player what the game expects from her — or, ideally, both.

Another odd Quest for Glory tradition was to give each game in the series a new combat system. Quest for Glory III tried to add a bit more strategy to the affair with buttons for “swing,” “dodge,” “thrust,” and “parry,” but in my experience at least simply mashing down the swing button works as well as anything else. Thus another Quest for Glory tradition: that of none of these multifarious combat systems ever being completely satisfying.

Still, whatever the game’s failings, few players or reviewers in its own time seemed to notice. Upon its release in September of 1992 — just four months after the Quest for Glory I remake — Quest for Glory III was greeted with solid sales and positive reviews, a reception which stands in contrast to its contemporary reputation as the weakest link in the series. With this affirmation of their efforts and with Corey now free of distractions, the Coles plunged right into the fourth game. Quest for Glory IV would prove the most ambitious and the most difficult entry in the series — and, in my opinion anyway, its greatest waste of potential.

The game officially known simply as Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness — Sierra inexplicably dropped the Roman numeral this time and this time only — is indeed often spoken of as the “dark” entry of the series, but that claim strikes me as, at most, relative. My skepticism begins with the unbelievably cheesy subtitle, which put my wife right off the game before she saw more than the title screen. (“Someone should tell those people that darkness doesn’t make shadows…”) Banal subtitles, perhaps (hopefully?) delivered with an implied wink and nudge, had become something of a series trademark by this point — Trial by Fire? The Wages of War? Cliché much? — but this was taking things to a whole other level.

Dr. Brain fans will presumably be pleased to meet his alter ego Dr. Cranium in Quest for Glory IV. (Frankie, for the record, is a female Frankenstein whose “assets” Dr. Cranium very much approves of.)

To speak more substantively (or at least less snarkily), the “dark” aspects of the game come to the fore intermittently at best. I’ve played games which I’ve found genuinely scary; this is not one of them. It certainly includes plenty of horror tropes, but it’s difficult to take any of it all that seriously. This is a game that features Dr. Brain channeling Dr. Frankenstein. It’s a game where you fight a killer rabbit lifted out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It’s a game where you win the final battle against the evil wizard by telling him the Ultimate Joke and taking advantage when he collapses into laughter. From the Boris Karloff imitator guarding the gates to the villain’s castle to Igor the hunchbacked gravedigger, this is strictly B-movie horror — or, perhaps better said, a parody of B-movie horror. It’s hard to imagine anyone losing sleep over this game.

In fact, I was so nonplussed by its popularly accepted “dark” label that I asked Corey what he thought about it, and was gratified to find that he at least partially agreed with me:

Maybe a better word would be “unforgiving.” A Quest for Glory III theme is friendship and the need to work together with others. In Quest for Glory IV, we turned that around 180 degrees. The player would start out on his own, mistrusted by everyone. Through the course of the game, he will gradually win people’s trust and once again have allies by the end. This is not an easy theme for players new to the series to handle.

Lori Ann Cole elaborated on the same idea in a contemporary interview:

You’ll be very much alone [in Quest for Glory IV]. In Trial by Fire, you had a lot of friends to help you. You always had a place to go back to to rest. You always had a place of safety until the very end of the game. Once you get into Shadows of Darkness, you’re not going to have any sanctuary. You won’t be able to trust anyone because nobody will trust you.

It’s true that a few subplots here strain toward a gravitas unlike anything else the Coles have ever attempted. In particular, the vampire named Katrina can be singled out as a villain who isn’t just Evil for the sake of it. She’s kidnapped a little girl from the village that is your center of operations, and one of your quests is to rescue her. In the course of doing so, you learn that the kidnapping was motivated by Katrina’s desperate, very human desire for family and companionship in her isolated castle. You end up killing her, of course, but her story is often praised — justifiably on the whole, if sometimes a bit too effusively — as a benchmark for intelligent characterization in games.

Structurally, Quest for Glory IV is most reminiscent of the first game in the series. You arrive in the village of Mordavia, part of a region that goes by the same name, which has been plagued of late by vampires, ghosts, mad scientists, and most of the other inhabitants of the Hammer Horror oeuvre. As you solve the villagers’ considerable collection of problems one by one, they go from being spit-in-your-food hostile to lauding you as the greatest hero in the land. In the best tradition of the series, and in contrast to some of the most commonly voiced complaints about Quest for Glory III, much of the game is nonlinear, and some of it is entirely optional.

The combat system in Quest for Glory IV owes a lot to the Street Fighter franchise of standup-arcade, console, and computer games, which were among the most popular of the era. Corey Cole considers it the best combat engine in the history of the series; opinions among fans are more divided. For those not interested in street-fighting their way through a Quest for Glory game, the Coles did make it possible for the first time to turn on an auto-combat mode.

Sadly, though, the game is nowhere near as playable as Quest for Glory I, II, or to some extent even III. This fault arises not from doing too little but rather from attempting to do too much. At the risk of being accused of psychoanalyzing its designers, I will note that the Coles had clearly been psyching themselves up to make this game for a long time — that, even as it was being pushed back to make room for Quest for Glory III, it had long since come to loom over their conception of the series as the Big Statement. Even when they were giving interviews to promote the finished Quest for Glory III, the conversation would keep drifting into their plans for the fourth game. “It will be a very intense game to design,” said Corey in one of those interviews, a comment that could be taken to reflect either excitement or trepidation — or, more likely, both. This was to be the place where the series departed from being easygoing light fantasy to become something more challenging, both thematically and in terms of its puzzles and other mechanics.

So, they just kept cramming more and more stuff into it. The setting doesn’t have the laser focus of the earlier games in the series, all of which portrayed fairly faithfully the myths and legends of a very specific real-world culture. Quest for Glory IV, despite including some monsters drawn from real Eastern European folklore, is more interested in Western pop culture’s idea of Transylvania than any real place — a land of shadows and creatures that go bump in the night and “I vant to bite yer neck.” Then, because the parade of Gothic-horror clichés apparently wasn’t enough, the Coles added H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to the mix (or, as the manual calls him, “P.H. Craftlove”). The two make decidedly uneasy bedfellows. Gothic horror, as expressed best in Bram Stoker’s ultimate Gothic novel Dracula, takes place, explicitly or implicitly, in an essentially moral universe drawing heavily from Christianity, in which Good and Evil, God and the Devil, are real entities at war with one another, thus setting up the narratives of sin and redemption which predominate. Lovecraftian horror, on the other hand, posits an utterly uncaring, amoral universe, in which Good and Evil are meaningless concepts, mere ephemera of the deluded human imagination. To combine the two in one work of fiction is… problematic.

For all that one has to wonder whether any fans of this heretofore genial series were truly saying to themselves, “You know, what these games really need to be is harder,” the Coles’ determination to make this entry more difficult than its predecessors isn’t invalid in itself. In trying to make their harder game, however, they sometimes fall into the all too typical trap of making a game that’s not so much more difficult as less fair. The CRPG aspects are yet further de-emphasized in favor of more puzzles, some of which push the bounds of realistic solubility. And, for the first time in the series’s history, there are irrecoverable dead ends to wander into scattered across the design, along with other situations that seem like dead ends. The latter arise because the design once again relies heavily on “events” that the player triggers without being aware how she does so — and, once again, this isn’t a bad thing at all in theory, but in practice it’s too easy to get stuck in a cul de sac with no idea how to prod the plotting machinery into motion again.

Greatly exacerbating all of these issues — indeed, virtually indistinguishable from them, given that it’s often unclear which design infelicities are intentional and which are not — are all the bugs. Even today, when patch after patch has been applied, the game remains a terrifyingly unstable edifice. If your (emulated?) machine runs just a little bit too slow or too fast, it will crash at random points with a cryptic “Error 47” or “Error 52.” But far worse are the hidden bugs that can ruin your game while letting you play on for hours without realizing anything is wrong. The most well-known of these involves a vital letter that’s supposed to show up at your hotel, but that, for reasons that are still imperfectly understood even after all these years, sometimes fails to do so. If you’re unfortunate enough to have this happen to you, it will only be much, much later, when you can’t figure out what to do next and finally turn to a walkthrough, that you realize you have to all but start over from scratch.

In my experience, an adventure game must establish a bond of trust with its player to be enjoyable. My dominant emotion when playing Quest for Glory IV, however, was just the opposite. I mistrusted the design, and mistrusted the implementation of the design even more, asking myself at every turn whether I’d broken anything, whether this latest problem I was having was a legitimate puzzle or a bug. When you have to meta-game your way through a game, relying on FAQs and walkthrough to tiptoe around all its pitfalls, it’s awfully hard to engage with the story and atmosphere.

Still, I can be thankful that I first played Quest for Glory IV a quarter-century after its original release, after all those patches had already been applied. The game that shipped on December 31, 1993, was in a truly unconscionable, very probably unwinnable condition. This wasn’t, I should emphasize, the fault of the Coles, who would have given anything to have a few more months with their baby. But Sierra was having an ugly year financially, and decided that the game simply had to be released before the year was out for accounting reasons, come what may. If there was any justice in the world, they would have been rewarded with a class-action lawsuit for knowingly selling a product that was not just flawed but outright broken. To give you a taste of what gamers unwise enough to buy Quest for Glory IV in its original incarnation got to go through, I’d like to quote at some length from the review by Scorpia, Computer Gaming World magazine’s regular adventure columnist.

My difficulties began after the game was installed and it simply refused to run, period. A call to the Sierra tech line revealed that Shadows of Darkness, as released, was not compatible with the AMI BIOS (not exactly an obscure one). This was related to the special 32-bit protected mode under which the software operates. Fortunately, a patch was available, and I quickly got it online.

After the patch was applied, the game finally came up. Unfortunately, it came up silent. The 32-bit protected mode grabs all of upper memory for itself, so nothing can be loaded high, and a bare-bones DOS boot disk is necessary. This made it impossible to load in the Gravis Ultrasound Roland emulator, and I found that with the Sound Blaster emulator loaded low, the game again wouldn’t run. So, I had to play with no sound or music, which explains why there is no commentary on either.

I ran from a boot disk without sound, and for a while everything was fine. However, the further into the game, the slower it was in saving and restoring. Actual disk access was quite speedy, but waiting for the software to make up its mind to go to disk took a long time, often a minute or more. Some online folk complained of waiting three minutes or longer to restore a saved game. It was usually faster to quit the game, rerun it, and then restore a position. For saving, of course, you just had to wait it out.

Regardless of the frustrations, I got through the game [playing as] a Paladin and a Mage, and then moved on to the Thief. Three quarters of the way along, the game crashed in the swamp whenever I tried to open the Mad Monk’s tomb. This turned out to be a “random error” that might or might not show up. It hadn’t done so with the other two heroes, but this time it reared its ugly head.

Well, Sierra had a patch that fixed both this problem and the interminable waits for saves and restores (this patch, by the way, came out some time after the first one I had gotten). There was only one drawback: because of the extensive changes made to the files, my saved games were no good and I had to start over again from the beginning.

So, I started my Thief over. By day 11 in the game, all the quests had been finished, the five rituals collected, and it was just a matter of waiting for a certain note to appear in my room one morning (this note initiates the end of the game). On day 26, I was still waiting for it. Nothing could make it appear, even replaying from some earlier positions. Either the trigger for this event was not set, or somehow it was turned off. I had no way of knowing, and, with that in mind, I had no inclination to start from scratch again. This also happened to other players who were running characters other than Thieves, and we all eventually abandoned those games.

A way around the dead-end problem was worked out by Sierra. The key is spending enough nights in your room at the inn to hear several “voice dreams,” and, most importantly, hearing the weeping from the innkeeper’s room one midnight (you are awakened by this; don’t stay up waiting for it). These events must happen before you rescue Tanya.

Once those situations have occurred, it should be safe to rescue the girl. I tried this in my Thief game, and after spending two extra nights in my room, the problem was cleared up and I finished the game with the Thief. So, if you have been waiting around for that note, and it hasn’t shown, follow the above procedure and you should be able to continue on with the game.

Scorpia’s last two paragraphs in particular illustrate what I mean when I say that you can’t really hope to play Quest for Glory IV so much as meta-game your way through it with the aid of walkthroughs. She was extremely lucky to have been among the minority with online access at the time of the game’s release, and thus able to download patches and discuss the game’s multiple points of entrapment with other players. Most would only have been able to plead with Sierra’s support personnel and hope for a disk to arrive in the mail a week or two later.

What ought to have been the exciting climactic battle of Quest for Glory IV was so buggy in the original release that the game was literally impossible to complete. It’s remained one of the worst problem spots over the years since, requiring multiple FAQ consultations to tiptoe through all the potential problems. Have I mentioned how exhausting and disheartening it is to be forced to play this way?

Some months after the bug-ridden floppy-based release, Sierra published Quest for Glory IV on CD-ROM, in a version that tried to clean up the bugs and that added voice acting. It accomplished the former task imperfectly; as already noted, plenty of glitches still remain even in the version available for digital download today, not least among them the mystery of the never-appearing letter. The latter task, however, it accomplished superlatively. In a welcome departure from the atrocious voice acting found in their earliest CD-ROM products, Sierra put together a team of top-flight acting professionals, headed by the dulcet Shakespearian tones of John Rhys-Davies — a veteran character actor of many decades’ standing who’s best known today as Gimli the dwarf in Peter Jackson’s Lords of the Rings films — as the narrator and master of ceremonies. Rhys-Davies, who had apparently signed the contract in anticipation of a quick-and-easy payday, was shocked at the sheer volume of text he was expected to voice, and took to calling the game “the CD-ROM from hell” after spending days on end in the studio. But he persevered. Indeed, he and the other actors quite clearly had more than a little fun with it. The bickering inhabitants of the Mordavia Inn are a particular delight. These voice actors obviously take their roles with no seriousness whatsoever, preferring to wander off-script into broad semi-improvised impersonations of Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, and Rodney Dangerfield. Would you think less of me if I admitted that they’re my favorite part of the game?

https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/qfg4.mp4

Of course, one could argue that Sierra’s decision to devote so many resources to this multimedia window dressing, while still leaving so many fundamental problems to fester in the core game, is a sad illustration of their misplaced priorities in this new age of CD-ROM-based gaming. The full story of just what the hell was going on inside Sierra at this point, leading to this imperfect and premature Quest for Glory IV as well as even worse disasters like their infamously half-finished 1994 release Outpost, is an important one that needs to be told, but one best reserved for a later article of its own.

For now, suffice to say that Quest for Glory IV was made to suffer for its failings, with a number of outright bad reviews in a gaming press that generally tended to publish very little of that sort of thing, and with far worse word of mouth among ordinary gamers. For a long time, its poor reception seemed to have stopped the series in its tracks, one game short of Lori Ann Cole’s long-planned climax. When a transformed Sierra, under new owners with new priorities, finally allowed that fifth and final game to be made years later, it would strike the series’s remaining fans as a minor miracle, even as the technology it employed was miles away from the trusty old SCI engine that had powered the series’s first four entries.

The critical consensuses on Quest for Glory III and IV have neatly changed places in the years since that last entry in the series was published. The third game was widely lauded back in the day, the fourth about as widely panned as the timid gaming press ever dared. But today, it’s the third game that is widely considered to be the series’s weakest link, while the fourth is frequently called the very best of them all. As someone who finds them both to be more or less flawed creations in comparison to what came before, I don’t really have a dog in this fight. Nevertheless, I do find this case of switched places intriguing. I think it says something about the way that so many play games — especially adventure games — today: with FAQ and walkthrough at the ready for the first sign of trouble. There’s of course nothing wrong with choosing to play this way; I’ve gone on record many times saying there is no universally right or wrong way to play any game, only those ways which are more or less fun for you. And certainly the fact that you can now buy the entire Quest for Glory series for less than $10 — much less when it goes on sale! — impacts the way players approach the games. No one worries too much about rushing through a game they’ve bought for pocket change, but might be much more inclined to play a game they’ve spent $50 on “honestly.” All of which is as it may be. I will only say that, as someone who does still hate turning to a walkthrough, the more typical modern way of playing sometimes dismays me because of the way it can — especially when combined with the ever-distorting fog of nostalgia — lead us to excuse or entirely overlook serious issues of design in vintage games.

But lest I be too harsh on these two middle — middling? — entries in this remarkable series of games, I should remember that they were produced in times of enormous technological change, in a business environment that was changing just as rapidly, and that those realities were often in conflict with their designers’ own best intentions. Corey Cole:

Lori has commented that we started at Sierra almost completely clueless, and had to figure out how to design a Sierra-style game “from scratch.” Then, armed with that knowledge, we confidently started work on the next game, only to have Sierra pull the rug out from under us. Each time the technology and management style changed, we had to rework many of the techniques we had developed to make our previous games.

They may be, in the opinion of this humble reviewer anyway, weaker than their predecessors, but neither Quest for Glory III nor IV is without its interest. If you’d like to see the progression of one of the most unique long-term projects in the history of gaming, by all means, have a look and decide for yourself.

(Sources: Questbusters of May 1992, September 1992, December 1992, September 1993, February 1994; Sierra’s InterAction magazine from Fall 1992, Summer 1993, and Holiday 1993; Computer Gaming World of January 1993 and April 1994; the readme file included with Sierra’s 1998 Quest for Glory Collection; documents and other materials included in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. Most of all, my thanks go to Corey Cole for once again allowing me to pepper him with questions, even though he knew beforehand that my opinion of these two games wasn’t as overwhelmingly positive as it had been the last time around.

The entire Quest for Glory series is available for purchase as a package on GOG.com. And by all means check out the Coles’ welcome return to game design in the spirit of Quest for Glory, the recently released Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. I don’t often get to play games that aren’t “on the syllabus,” as a friend of mine puts it, but I made time for this one, and I’m so glad I did. In my eyes, it’s the best thing the Coles have ever done.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/quest-for-glory-iii-and-iv/

[peggyrojas]

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[pravasiga]

Pravāsiga: The First of Many Blog Posts

June 7, 2017

ಪ್ರವಾಸಿಗ (Pravāsiga): (n.) the Kannada word for 'traveler', or at least according to Google Translate.

It's been a week since I've left my room an absolute mess in my last-minute haste to pack for a two-month long trip to Mysore, India. (Shout out to my mother, who understandably, is not pleased about aforementioned mess). In that time since, I have found myself in two countries, three cities, and several wonderful experiences with an incredible team and the absolutely amazing staff at the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement, the NGO that all of us in the Cornell ILR/Global Health Global Service Learning team will be working with. I've been itching to write about my time here ever since I landed, and the most that I can truly capture is that no matter how I write this, I will never be able to entirely describe what it's been like to be here, but it's worth a shot.

Just a warning, I haven't written in a long time. This post is going to be long, meandering, and more importantly, it's about to get sappy and basic and full of love for a beautiful country, full of inspiring people. It's (kind of) worth a read, I promise!

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My first real glance at India happened from the window of a moving van at 5 in the morning, careening through the lines of State Highway 17, connecting Bangalore to Mysore. Still drowsy from almost two days of travel, I caught glimpses of roadside temples, decorated ornately with statues and idols. Through sleepy eyes, I watched as people woke up to start their day. Children playing with their siblings, adults opening small stands to sell food or helmets or shoes. I saw everything in a whirlwind of greens, browns, and blues - a flash of sky, a stretch of field and trees, and patches of ground and homes and road. I drifted in and out of sleep, still caught in disbelief that I was all the way across the world, the furthest I've been from home on my own. In between dreams and short periods of sleep, I processed about three important things:

1) There were few traffic rules here (a thought I later expressed, to which Anant told me that lane lines were more like suggestions rather than boundaries).

2) I had never seen so many free-roaming cows in my entire life

3) My tailbone was falling asleep more than I was and I couldn't do anything about it for at least another three hours.

*

Later, I was to learn and experience that India was a colorful, bustling, and dynamic country, full of movement and noise and liveliness. The next few days were even more of a blur than the very first van ride. Running around Big Bazaar (aptly described as 'Walmart, but with Indian clothing') trying to find kurtas that would fit was by far one of the most stressful shopping trips I had ever endured. I was not prepared for the narrow, straight cuts of the kurtas or that finding good salwar kameez color combinations would be such a herculean task. I am still struggling to find a good way to keep my dupatta on correctly without it flying into my face or becoming lopsided. Forgetting that the exchange rate stands at about 60 rupees to 1USD has left me flabbergasted for a few seconds every time I've gone up to the cashier and seen my total climb into the hundreds and thousands. I'd like to take this time to apologize to my dad for incurring a few foreign credit card transaction fees because I didn't bring enough rupees with me the first time.

Then from Big Bazaar to Chamundi Hills, where our bus took us far above the city and into the lush green forest. The line (though everyone here calls it a queue!) wrapped around the Chamundeshwari Temple, preventing us from going inside, but we were treated to the sight of (and warned about) several monkeys who lived near the temple grounds. I was to learn that they were incredibly clever and were adept at opening zippers and searching pouches in their hunt for food. Here, I also learned that locals will want to take selfies with all of us American tourists who probably look completely out of place.

We witnessed services at St. Philomena's Church, one of the tallest churches in Asia. We ventured into the underground catacombs to visit St. Philomena's relic. We visited Lalitha Mahal Palace Hotel and Mysore Palace. I officially tried mango lassi in India. We had a photoshoot on a balcony. I was caught in the rain when Mysore Palace was completely illuminated, sending a flock of roosting birds rising to the sky. I came back to the hostel tired, ready to sleep before 10pm every night.

I couldn't get enough of India.

*

I have wanted to visit India for years now, and nothing can still quite make me believe that I am actually here. But even more than that, that I am here, pursuing the chance to work in the field that I have grown passionate about and with an organization that has exemplified excellence in so many initiatives to better the health, education, and community development of many of India's poor.

My interest in public health grew from my increasing frustration with the rigidity that most of my STEM course work presented in its curriculum. I had long been in love with the intricate and fascinating nature of biology and human physiology, but when it came to keeping my medical aspirations in perspective, I found that I was not satisfied with how narrow and exclusively STEM-focused my future was looking. Courses on medical anthropology, sociology, inequality, and health care had captured my attention with its holistic approach to understanding the socioeconomic and environment determinants to health. I found that I was beginning to become interested in more than just the biomedical body, but that the same passion that had once driven me to study neurobiology was now enveloping a new desire to understand health and all that impacts it, on a global scale. If you want to hear more about my pre-med existential crisis, feel free to hit me up about it because there's still plenty more episodes to come!

SVYM has been instrumental in working to improve health conditions in communities all across Karnataka state for over thirty years. Their attention to detail, commitment to grassroots initiatives and raising the voices of tribal communities, and understanding of the vast complexities that exist in a rapidly developing country has continued to amaze and stun me. For the next two weeks, we are incredibly fortunate to be taking classes from the Vivekananda Institute of Indian Studies with SVYM on everything from Indian Culture and Civilization, Gender Studies, Global Health and Labor Economics, and Kannada.

My favorite by far, has been the Global Health classes. Each lecture has been incredibly eye-opening and informative about the public health system in India. For a country of 1.3 billion people, there exists a system designed to serve the primary, secondary, and tertiary level health care needs that strives to deliver free, accessible, and quality treatment. I'm not going to go into the entire structure, but at the primary level, there are three main lines of defense: ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists), sub-district centers, and primary health centers (PHC). These institutions and the staff that run them are responsible for overseeing tens of thousands of people who otherwise cannot afford private health care.

We had the privilege of visiting an urban PHC and talking with the medical and nursing staff, as well as the ASHAs. The medical officer (the senior doctor who runs the PHC) sees anywhere from 70-100 patients per day and provides diagnostics, basic lab services, immunizations, and other basic treatment services. However, it was the ASHAs, all women dressed in pink saris that caught my attention. Their work had been described to us in class as being the first resources for any community. They were members of the communities they were chosen to serve and were responsible for an enormous amount of responsibilities. ASHAs are all married mothers, who bear the task of acting as health educators, messengers who remind patients of upcoming check-ups, consultants, and maternal health workers. For so much work, ASHAs are guaranteed no pay. They only receive incentives for successfully completing tasks, like ensuring a mother attends pre- and ante-natal care with the public system, as well as delivering the baby with the public institution. A growing trend of mothers utilizing ASHA services but ultimately delivering their children at private institutions has negatively impacted many of these ASHAs - for if they will not be paid if the mother does not ultimately stay within the public system. All five ASHAs present at the PHC expressed their discontent with the salary and payment system - and revealed to us that they had organized and were fighting to receive better financial security.

These were not the only issues with the public health system. All along the public health institutional structure, there are staff and supply shortages that need to constantly be met. We learned the extent of these shortages - particularly with doctors, specialists, and health staff - in class and it brought up several questions: what has the Indian government done so far to encourage more medical students to take up these posts? Are we seeing more medical students express and pursue interests in public health?

Despite plans to make public service compulsory for medical graduates and a growing need for public health health workers, the current answer is that we will always be looking at these shortages unless something changes. Commonly, the private sector or international opportunities lure talent and brainpower away from these public positions. I felt frustration at this until I realized that all around the world - including the US - this is a phenomenon that occurs over and over. I had entered into the premed track with the intention of pursuing a medical career in neurosurgery that would take me to the top, cutting-edge hospitals. The thought of it is alluring and hard to resist. No matter how strong your conviction is in medicine and helping to save lives, the very real need to be practical can't be ignored. With rising tuition bills, increased concerns over getting into medical schools, and general economic worries, it would be ridiculous to not admit that financial stability was an enticing factor.

But this work is important, irregardless of the money it pays or doesn't pay. Public health is the active fight to protect and ensure the health of our communities. It is concerned with every determinant of health that exists, beyond the biomedical lens. Public health is involved in politics, in social justice, in environmental issues, in the ways that we treat each other on a day to day basis. The gravity of this work is not lost on me - we learn from SVYM and VIIS every day about the complexities of delivering and supporting initiatives that have not reached communities that need it most. Beyond all the sight-seeing and colorful tourism, I don't feel that I am mistaken in saying that the strongest impression that my experience in India will leave me with is the reaffirmation of my passion for service and healthcare. Only a week in, and I've been given an amazing chance to work alongside one of the most amazing NGOs I've ever heard of, and I can't wait to see what comes next.

I will continue to document the next two months and keep you all updated on my embarrassing experiences and all that I will learn. I am just as, if not more, awkward of an international tourist/student as I am a domestic citizen/student. Until the next extravagantly long post in which I will probably say something cliche and sappy again, I'm wishing all of you love and happiness.

Matte siguva (See you again), Winnie

PS: I've never flown Emirates before this trip, but after flying Emirates, it's all I want to fly again. This has little relevance to the rest of my experience but I finally watched Dr. Strange, Tangled, and Up and yes, I did cry during Up even though I've seen Carl and Ellie's story like 87 times because I am an utter wreck of emotions and a hopeless romantic at heart.

PPS: How on earth I got through this entire post without mentioning food is beyond me. The food is delicious and I am adjusting to going vegetarian for the summer. My spice tolerance is slowly building but I am slightly scared because apparently my next work site, the food is spicier than it is here and no matter how much I like the food here, I am currently craving grilled cheese sandwiches and my mother's cooking. Please send food.

PPPS: I am V MAD because Tropicana has been holding out on us because did you know they have lychee juice here??? I did not. Also Tropicana Slice Mango juice is to DIE for and you will catch me drinking this by the gallon if I could.

PPPPS: This is my last post-script, for now.

[troubleincoming-blog]

Info You should Know Regarding Elevating Broilers Chickens

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[groceryproject2017]

The Sweetener Aisle

by Kristina Seals

Introduction

Sweeteners have a long and storied connection to America.  Honey and maple syrup/sugar were the primary sweeteners in early British colonies of North America. (Warner 2011) This changed as the North American colonies gained access to trade with the West Indies and increased their usage of cane sugar and molasses.  Taxes imposed on cane sugar by Britain helped fuel the desire for American independence.  As New Englanders established a highly lucrative triangle of trade in which they sent rum to Africa and brought back slaves to the West Indies in exchange for molasses, they saw how profitable it could be to operate outside of the mercantile system. (Mintz 1985) Once America formed an independent nation, it funded its new federal government primarily through tariffs on cane sugar.  As America expanded, it gained territory capable of growing and producing sugar cane.  The labor-intensive process of harvesting sugar cane and turning it into granular sugar was carried out largely through forced labor and created an economy that was heavily dependent on slavery.  Other sweeteners, such as maple and beet sugar, became popular in abolitionist movements as a means to lessen America’s dependence on slave labor. Changes in technology and chemical discoveries throughout the 19th and 20th century affected the sweetener industry, which in turn impacted Americans: at home, in the workplace, in political affairs, and in their laws.  Americans’ desire for sweetness did not decrease as they entered the 21st century but questions regarding its effect on public health have seemingly increased.  How does the complicated history and politics surrounding sweeteners impact Americans’ purchases and use of different sweetening agents?  How does this manifest itself in the American grocery store?  To answer this question, I examined the store shelves of five grocery stores in the North-West quadrant of Washington D.C., a fitting location given it is the place where many of the political and legal controversies surrounding different sweeteners have played out in America.  

   Field Visits        

     Five stores were visited and either one or two aisles were looked at in each store.  In some stores, syrups or liquid forms of sweeteners were on a separate aisle from powdered versions of sweeteners. The majority of sweeteners, especially powdered versions, were located in an aisle of baking goods.  They were generally adjacent to flours and other items used in baking.  Syrups and honeys were often adjacent to peanut butter and jam.  The stores visited were: a Whole Foods Market, a Trader Joes, a Walmart Superstore, a Safeway, and an independent deli/neighborhood convenience store.  As different store types try to appeal to differing types of shoppers or provide different types of shopping experiences, I wanted to see if the store type had any effect on what sweeteners were sold and how they were displayed.  Then collectively, I wanted to know which sweeteners seem to be the most popular with D.C. consumers based on overall shelf space given to specific products throughout all five stores.  

           The first store visited was the Whole Foods market in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of D.C.  Sweeteners were found in two different aisles as syrups and liquid sweeteners were on their own aisle.  The other sweetener aisle had five shelves of sweetening agents. One and a half of these shelves were devoted to sixteen stevia based products.  There were six white granular cane sugar products and two confectioners. There were also four brown sugar products and two turbinado sugar products.  They also carried sugar cubes and colored decorative sugar.  This was the only store where I found date sugar.  They also carried two erythritol products, one in granular form and the other in confectioners form.  The other aisle contained: honey, maple syrup, molasses, agave syrup, brown rice syrup, coconut nectar, and corn syrup.  They also carried a “vegan honey” that was made from apple juice.  Out of the five stores visited, Whole Foods carried the largest variety of honey and syrups.  Three shelves were devoted to agave products.  The brands of sweeteners carried at Whole Foods all had very detailed labels with stories about how they are made, their benefits, and instructions on how to use them.  

           The next store I visited was a small neighborhood store, the Palisades Deli, which labels itself as a deli and gourmet grocer.  They had ten items which were grouped together on the middle of the top shelf facing back of store.  The majority of items were cane sugar based.  They had traditional granulated white sugar in an opaque bag but also carried organic sugar and demerara sugar. They had brown sugar and powdered/confectioners white sugar in clear plastic bags laid flat on the shelf.  They carried the three major brands of artificial sweeteners: Sweet and Low, Equal, and Splenda.  These came in boxes which contained little pouches with two teaspoons of product.  They also carried honey but in a powdered form designed to be used like granulated sugar. The labels for these products generally contained recipes or a picture of a beverage that could be made with the product.  The organic sugar did contain details about its manufacturing process.

           On aisle two of the Safeway on MacArthur Blvd, one can find cane sugar in a variety of forms including organic.  Also on this aisle are: maple syrup, corn syrup, molasses, and honey.  They carried a few artificial sweeteners which they placed next to their liquid stevia and monk fruit products.  They also had a couple of interesting liquid hybrid products mixing honey or agave with stevia and monk fruit.  Syrups were directly next to powdered sweeteners but honey was further down next to jellies and peanut butters.   Packaging contained a mixture of environmental claims, health claims, how to use instructions, and recipes.

At Trader Joe’s in Georgetown, I found all types of sweeteners on one aisle.  They had them separated into four sections: stevia, honey, syrup, and granulated sugar. All sugar was labeled as either organic or free trade and came in bags that allowed you to peek inside.  Most sweeteners were the store brand including all the sugar and stevia products.  They carried a lot of honey and pure maple syrup products.  They also had shelf labels which carried additional information about the sweetener. Also, I did find agave syrup both on this aisle and then again above some frozen food.

           For my final store, I visited Walmart on H St NW. They had their syrups and honey on a separate aisle than their other sweeteners.  They had a wide variety of sweeteners and had generic store brand counterparts to most name brand sweeteners.  This included store brand versions of: sucralose, stevia, saccharin, and aspartame.  The generic versions used the same colored packaging as the name brand and were placed right next to each other.  They had a lot of hybrid products some of which combined sugar with a sugar alternative which were labeled for baking so one could get some of the qualities of sugar needed when baking such as browning while still being fewer calories or just less sugar overall.

Raw Sugar        

   One product that was universally carried at all grocery stores visited was cane sugar.  It came in various types of packaging and varieties but it appears cane sugar is still a staple in the majority of American pantries. Refined white granular sugar usually came in an opaque paper sack or in a box.  At a couple of stores it also came in opaque plastic canisters.   In addition to refined white sugar, there were a lot of less refined cane sugar products. These products came in bags which allowed you to see the sugar.  They varied in color from blonde to deep brown.  The less refined nature of these sugars was touted as a positive attribute on packaging. From the price and the difference in labeling, these appeared to be more of a luxury item than the sacks of refined white sugar.  It appears DC consumers are willing to pay a premium for these items.  This is an interesting development given that in 1861 Congress had determined the amount of tariff paid on sugar would be determined based on the Dutch Color Standard. (Warner 2011) The Dutch Color Standard was based on jars containing sugar ranging from dark brown to almost white. The lighter the color, the higher the number.  Those that were highest on this scale paid the largest tariff.  The lighter color was assumed to be correlated with purity, because the refining process removed the microscopic sugar beetles present in raw sugar.  However, some sugar makers from the Demerara region of British Guiana, figured out how to make high purity sugar with a middling color and continued doing so because color alone was being used to determine the tariff.  This style of sugar, with its pale amber color, is still found on store shelves today and is called demerara sugar.   The mid-nineteenth century view of raw sugar as dirty, no longer seems to be prevalent today.  This is evident in the use of the brand name “Sugar in the Raw” on a turbinado sugar product.  These sugar products explain how they are more natural with the subtext being that the more natural a product is, the healthier it is.  Not sure what turbinado sugar is?  Just pick up a package of turbinado sugar at Trader Joe’s and it will explain the process of spinning sugar crystals in a turbine and that there is no coloring, blending or chemical refining involved.  In addition to cane sugar products emphasizing being less refined, the label on a coconut sugar product boasted that it was “pure and unrefined” and that it was “unrefined but just as civilized”.

   Environmental and Labor Labeling       

      Another trend observed was that a lot of packaging for sweeteners emphasized the methods employed in their production which lowered their environmental impact and their improved farming methods.  The consumer interest appears to be substantial based on how much space on labels is devoted to text to convey this message and products paying for the right to use certification logos which signify meeting certain standards in these areas.  One certification that appeared quite odd at first was the carbon free logo claimed on some bags of Domino’s brand cane sugar.  How can sugar be carbon free, given that the chemical formula for table sugar is: C12H22O11?  According to Domino, these specially marked packages have been certified as having a carbon neutral footprint by Carbonfund.org. The Domino sugar label claims to accomplish this by converting sugar cane and recycled wood waste into electricity.  Why might Domino’s pay to have this certification on their product? According to Carbonfund.org, Customers are seeking to purchase products from companies which take care of the environment and their certification is a meaningful and transparent way to differentiate their brand as being environmentally-friendly to create loyal customers and increase market share.  The Domino’s brand is owned by the American Sugar Refining company, who also owns the Florida Crystals brand.  The products I found by this brand were: demerara cane sugar, raw cane sugar, and organic raw cane sugar.  Their motto that is printed boldly on the front of their packaging reads, “Earth Friendly. Uniquely Delicious.”  They explain their sustainable farming practices on their packaging and on their company website they state they are “Sweet to Mother Nature!”.  (Florida Crystals)  The development of sugar producers, particularly in Florida, wanting to be seen as stewards of the environment might be their way of changing their image after having made headlines for being fined millions of dollars for violating hazardous waste disposal laws or being seen as forced into responsibility for improving water in the Everglades. (Feder, 1991)  Another popular certification found on a variety of different sweeteners is USDA Organic, which signifies that the product has went through an accreditation process to verify that they follow organic farming methods and have paid to be able to show that on their label.  One product at Whole Foods carrying this label which caught my attention was Biodynamic Cane Sugar, produced by the Wholesome Sweeteners.  In addition to the organic certification, it also certified as biodynamic by Demeter. Demeter Association is a non-profit established in 1985 to promote farming using biodynamic practices.  (Demeter USA) According to the Whole Foods website, this is the first biodynamic sugar on the market and it is exclusively carried by Whole Foods.  Biodynamic farming is a kind of early organic farming method, dating back to the 1920’s, that seeks to be in tune with the rhythms of nature that is based on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner.  (Paull 2013) So far there is only this one product in the sweetener aisle that is Biodynamic; but given the popularity of the organic label it is quite possible this may be the next trend in positive environmental impact labeling.  

           In addition to environmental practices being highlighted, I also found packages which highlighted their labor practices.  This was most evident in Whole Foods where there was an abundance of products carrying a certification of following fair trade practices.  Only at Whole Foods did I find products which described this in more detail to explain how the farmers were paid.  I did not find fair trade certifications on stevia products.  This is interesting in light of the fact that the US recently confiscated a shipment of Stevia from China under the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015, which bans the importation of products into the US made with forced labor.   (Pentice 2016) The product was suspected to have been made via prison labor in China.  This led to Coca-Cola having to prove that their stevia products did not come from the same source.  It is possible that some companies may want to go through the third-party certification process as a way to help them make certain they are dealing with global partners who are not breaking these new labor laws.  Companies who want to see their products on the shelves of Whole Foods might be motivated to seek fair trade certification because Whole Food Shoppers are often believed to be ethical consumers who in part seek to create positive social change through being mindful of how they spend their money. (Johnson 20007)

   Non-nutritive Sweeteners

   In addition to a variety of sugar products being found in the sweetener aisle, it carries non-nutritive or low to zero calorie sweeteners also.  These are sometimes referred to as sugar substitutes or in the case of ones that are chemically made, artificial sweeteners.  The artificial sweetener that I found with the longest history is Saccharin, which is sold under the Sweet and Low brand name.  Saccharin was originally discovered in 1878 by Constatine Fahlberg. It is a derivative of coal tar.  It was cheaper than sugar due to being 500 times as sweet.  When sugar became scarce during World War II it was used in place of sugar.  However, its value has been questioned since it does not contain carbohydrates like sugar but it has long been seen as being valuable for those who suffer from obesity or diabetes.  For a time it had to be labeled that it was intended for “those persons who, on account of disease must abstain from the use of sugar”.  (Warner 2011) I did not find this on today’s packages.  I also only found this product at 3 of the five stores I visited.  It along with Aspartame, another artificial sweetener developed in the 1960’s, did not receive much shelf space.  Sucralose, a more recently developed artificial sweetener, came in a lot more forms than Saccharine and Aspartame thereby gaining more shelf space.  This came under the brand name Splenda.  Due to it being heat stable it promotes itself as being a good choice for cooking or baking with.  It also came in packages where it was mixed with sugar into a 50/50 product. It appears that shoppers are interested in making baked goods that have less calories but are ok with it having some sugar.  However, the non-nutritive sweetener with the most overall shelf space and found at all five stores is: stevia.  

           Stevia comes in a wide variety of formats including liquid stevia and stevia mixed with other sweeteners. At Safeway and Walmart, the majority of stevia products came under the Truvia brand.  At Trader Joe’s it only came in a form touted to be pure stevia powder. These two type of stevia products appear quite differently.  This is due to one being a highly-processed extract version of stevia, as is the case with Truvia, and the other being derived from the plant as a whole.  To be approved as a food additive by the FDA stevia must be in the tested extract form.  It has not been approved by the FDA in the non-extract form but is approved to be sold as supplement the way other herbs are.  This is why the label on the product at Trader Joe’s tell you to take a teaspoon daily and does not contain a regular nutrition label.  It appears Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods shoppers want the more natural version of stevia, whereas shoppers at grocery stores which sale artificial sweeteners seem onboard with the extracted version. The Truvia brand which is a product of the Coca-Cola company was the first to make it to market with the approved extracted form.  Like Splenda, they provide multiple formats and are also willing to mix it with other sweeteners including sugars.  I found it mixed with cane sugar and honey.  

   Conclusion    

      The limited scope of this observational study was able to provide some insight into what sweeteners are popular with consumers in Washington DC and what type of marketing strategies are being employed to get them to pick a particular sweetener. However, without seeing which items people pull off the shelves and how long they look at packages before buying most insight gleaned is speculative.  It would be informative to survey those who purchase sweeteners to discuss what elements went into their decision.  Again, the different types of stores could be used to further assess if certain stores truly attract shoppers who are more likely to base their shopping decisions on ethical considerations.  

           Americans are said to consume an average of 130 pounds of sugar a year a large increase from the average of less than 20 pounds in 1820. (Walton 2012) Given that the majority of food consumed by Americans is processed food, most of this sugar is not coming from the sweetener aisle but rather found in items throughout the store.  It would be interesting to compare which sweeteners are popular with commercial food producers and contrast it with the sweetener aisle. One way to do this is start with one food area at a time.  One area that gets a lot of attention for its use of sugar and even its use of artificial sweeteners is the beverage aisle.  If I were to continue my study that would be my next target.

In 2018, the FDA has ordered that a new food label be used which identifies added sugars in grams and percent of daily value. (Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition)  It would be interesting to do a study before, shortly after implementation, and a year or two after to see if there is any change to shopping behavior and if that then impacts how much sugar is used by commercial food producers or in how the package is designed.  

References

Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. (n.d.). Labeling & Nutrition - Changes to the Nutrition Facts Label. Retrieved April 25, 2017, from https://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/LabelingNutrition/ucm385663.htm

Demeter U.S.A. Retrieved April 18, 2017, from http://www.demeter-usa.org/about-demeter/

Feder, B. J. (1991, December 02). Sugar Growers Seek Cleaner Image. Retrieved April 11, 2017, from http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/03/business/sugar-growers-seek-cleaner-image.html?pagewanted=all

Florida Crystals. (n.d.). Retrieved April 11, 2017, from https://www.floridacrystals.com/

Johnston, J. (2007, December 30). The citizen-consumer hybrid: ideological tensions and the case of Whole Foods Market. Retrieved April 25, 2017, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-007-9058-5 Paull, John (2013) "Koberwitz (Kobierzyce); In the footseps of Rudolf Steiner'", Journal of Bio-Dynamics Tasmania, 109 (Autumn), pp. 7-11.

Peña, C. T. (2010). Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda. University of North Carolina Press.

Prentice, C. (2016, June 01). U.S. impounds PureCircle stevia under new forced labor law. Retrieved April 20, 2017, from http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-stevia-imports-idUSL1N18T26J

Product Certification. (n.d.). Retrieved April 11, 2017, from https://carbonfund.org/product-certification/

Mintz, S. W. (1985). Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history. New York: Penguin.

Walton, A. G. (2012, August 30). How Much Sugar Are Americans Eating? [Infographic]. Retrieved April 23, 2017, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2012/08/30/how-much-sugar-are-americans-eating-infographic/#3fcb60894ee7

Warner, D. J. (2011). Sweet stuff: an American history of sweeteners from sugar to sucralose. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press in cooperation with Rowman & Littlefield .

Whole Foods Market. (n.d.). Only at Whole Foods Market: Wholesome! Biodynamic Cane Sugar. Retrieved April 11, 2017, from http://media.wholefoodsmarket.com/news/only-at-whole-foods-market-wholesome-biodynamic-cane-sugar

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