#this art is sponsored by the shadow government

[grandhotelabyss]

I don’t know, Anna, but I imagine it will have something to do with this:

The deep right is vitalist: it believes that the purpose of life is vitality, and the purpose of good government is the promotion of general and immeasurable human vitality.

Unlike pleasure, which can be “measured” statistically (with the model that consumer dollars spent is a rough proxy for pleasure, or so-called “utility”), human vitality is immeasurable in principle. Some aspects of vitality can be measured—physique is an important part of vitality, and there are many excellent metrics of physique—but the problem of vitality as a whole will never submit to any kind of political statistics.

Thomas Carlyle called this the “condition of England question”—the problem that the health of a nation, the salus populi whose preservation and improvement is the purpose of government, cannot be measured. The craze for “government by steam,” for some scientific or mechanical process of decision-making above mere human frailty, was just beginning. Carlyle saw right through it...

Etc., etc. I didn’t have the patience to read this when it first dropped so I listened to Michael Millerman declaim it on YouTube instead. Millerman seems not to have looked at it before reading it aloud. Student of Aristotle that he is, Straussian devotee of the ancients against the moderns, he almost flinched when he got to the vitalism part. I’m no political scientist, but if there such a thing as a “deep right,” surely it has pledged its troth to another V entirely: virtue. If not that, maybe order. Vitality is the modern summum bonum, by contrast, scarcely imaginable before the steam power Carlyle decries. Deep right? Try explaining “the purpose of life is vitality” to Dante. Try explaining it even to Dr. Johnson, who was himself halfway to the insight.

Drubbing English utilitarianism with German Romanticism, Carlyle was the unofficial British sponsor of the American Renaissance, the mid-19th-century efflorescence that founded our liberal literary culture in the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville, all of them eager readers of Carlyle, especially Emerson and Melville. Vitalism was their principle, too, and Carlyle taught them to fuse the surging individual imagination with burgeoning technological, economic, and political modernity, an ambition they inspired down the line to their diverse successors, from William James to Ralph Ellison and on through the postwar explosion of American cultural creativity in whose shadow or ruin we still stand. 

Back in the mother country, the two most important Carlyle-inspired condition-of-England novels, the ones we still read, are Dickens’s Hard Times and Forster’s Howards End, both of them issuing the same complaint for different generations and class milieux: that the men who run the big businesses are too mechanistic and moralistic and desperately need an infusion of vitality and even spirituality from the cultural sphere—just the accusations against “woke capital” we hear from the Dimes Square set, is it not? 

Not that there isn’t a road that runs from vitalist liberalism to fascism. Borges contrasted Carlyle with his disciple Emerson. The Scottish crypto-Calvinist sage was a forerunner of Nazism, he said, while the American Orpheus was a spiritual democrat:

Heroes, for Carlyle, are intractable demigods who–with some slight military frankness and foul language–rule a subaltern humanity; Emerson, on the contrary, venerates them as splendid examples of the possibilities that exist in every man.

But then fascism is probably not exactly of the “deep right” itself. Marxists say fascism is liberalism in its panic mode, and there may be something to that. But no matter how long John Ganz rewrites Bourdieu’s Rules of Art day by day on his SubStack, we Americans are probably all too far down Vitality Road for French Marxism to seem like a plausible destination now. Lucky for us, Vitality Road runs both ways, from liberalism to fascism and, most importantly, back again. 

Yarvin thinks we need to form a new social contract for our mutual protection: “If the citizens are in power, they even have the power to give up their power irreversibly, turning themselves from citizens to subjects.” In other words, he is a deep liberal, which is why, in the end, sophisticated literary journalists and hip art-school catgirls don’t mind talking to him or even marrying him. 

On my part, I pledge to read more Carlyle—though I read Sartor Resartus back in 2014 and wrote an essay about it, around the same time I first alluded to the way Yarvin’s views would probably end up being incorporated by liberalism.

However, it is as a student and even continuer of a literary tradition I regard as more important than political philosophy that I renew my longstanding invitation to the liberals, extended most elaborately in the two books I wrote around 2013, my doctoral dissertation Modernism’s Critique du Coeur and my novel Portraits and Ashes. As the savior from the future says in the movies: Come with me if you want to live.

[cayenne-twilight]

Professor Layton Iceberg Explanation

As I said in the tags of the original, the iceberg I made was a meme consisting of both real theories and satire/parodies/fandom memes. If anyone is interested, I can work on an unironic version that only has real theories.

Buckle in because this post is LONG and heavily saturated with lore and information.

Actual theories

Parallel universe 1960s where the world wars didn’t happen. There’s an unused file in Curious Village that shows the year as 1960 and the time machine from UF is set to 1973, ten years into the future. The series canonically takes place in an undefined time period (hence the technological inaccuracies and fantasy elements), but it’s based off the 60s. There’s more evidence but we don’t have time to go over every little thing. I linked my “no wars” theory below but TL;DR the outdated airplanes and underdeveloped medicine in the Layton series imply that the world wars may never have happened. https://cayenne-twilight.tumblr.com/post/632205992162099200/outofcontextdiscord-timegearremix-zonosils-war

The real meaning behind the statue in Future London. In UF, the purpose of the statue is to spark Layton and Luke’s conversation about their friendship. Luke is stressing out about moving overseas and sees himself and the professor in the story behind the statue, but in the bigger picture, Clive must have been the one to commission it. Some theorize that the little boy is Clive and the man is either his father or the professor. One idea I’ve seen is that Clive wishes he could be Luke for real, while another is that he wishes he died ten years ago, and another is that he’s literally terminally ill explaining why he doesn’t care about consequence. Personally, I think “the boy succumbed to his illness” refers to his mental illness seeing as he wanted the professor to save him from his madness as he saved him all those years ago.

True location of Monte D’Or. there are no deserts on the British isles to my knowledge, so it makes the most sense for Monte D’Or to be in Southwest USA where English is the default language, they have a desert, and there exists a city famous for flashy hotels, casinos, and entertainment. What makes it odd is that nobody ever mentions overseas travel, and all the major characters are from England.

Loosha’s origins are not explicitly explained if I remember correctly, but the implication was that her prehistoric (supposedly) species was sealed away along with the garden, allowing them to survive all the way to the time of LS until Loosha was the only one left. The garden provided a good habitat and protection from predators, and it’s logical that they’d slowly die out anyways, but there’s no explanation of any specific factors that led to Loosha being the last.

Beasley is not a bee I wrote a post about this one as well, but TL;DR Beasly lacks several defining bee traits whilst having several human ones. He is not human, yet, by definition, not a bee. It’s possible that he is the result of Dimitri’s testing, but whatever his untold story is, he remains an enigma of nature. https://cayenne-twilight.tumblr.com/post/632381715250282496/theory-beasly-isnt-a-bee

Subject 2’s identity is currently unknown. There is a subject one (parrot) and subject 3 (rabbit) so there has to be a second. For a long time, people suspected Beasly to be him seeing as he’s a bit of an amalgamation and definitely not a regular bee (see above). After the release of LMJ, though, people began to suspect Sherl, the intelligent hound who could speak to certain people but not others. That being said, it’s possible for one to be subject 4. Sherl’s memory of a bright flash matches up with subject 3’s memory of being electrocuted. They never explain why the animals were being experimented on, but it was probably Dimitri making sure the conditions of his machine were safe for humans before reliving the incident from ten years ago.

Lady Violet died from the plague from DB. There’s no evidence for this or anything, it’s just an idea. People say she died from the flu but I don’t remember them saying that in the game, at least the US version. Extending off my “no war” theory: it’s theorized that the Spanish Flu was spread by the travlelling soldiers, so if that’s true, it’s possible for the epidemic to have been averted for some decades. Maybe the Spanish Flu reached England later than in real life. The hole in this is that DB’s plague must’ve been close in time to 1918 while Violet’s death was much later, so it would’ve had to stick around.

Bill Hawks is working with Targent and Arthur Cantabella. There was a force in the shadows buying the time machine technology from Bill. Someone with a ton of money who helped him cover up a freak accident and get away with it completely, a feat that involved shady means like violence by hired thugs. Some theorize that it was Targent, seeking power over time in exchange for a little mafia magic. The Labarynthia project was sponsored by the UK government, so as the PM, Bill must’ve known about it. He probably supported dubiously ethical, high stakes (witch pun) psychological experiments like Cantabella’s and helped him stay in the shadows.

All the NPCs in St. Mystere and Folsense are dead. I make fun of this type of theory later, but they’re admittedly captivating. I’m pretty sure the canon in CV is that the villagers are Bruno and Augustus’s OCs that they made robots of and built a town around, but it’s more interesting to think that the village was there before, and the townspeople died of a plague and were replaced like Lady Violet. In Folsense, there really was a plague and they never explain the NPCs there. They’re either real people who appear way younger than they are due to hallucinations (even the ones who already look old ?), or they don’t exist at all, which is pretty spooky. This part of the story is a gaping plot hole. In a similar vein to CV, the edgy yet plausible theory is that they used to live in Folsense but died of the plague and now live on as hallucinations.

Hershel seeing everything as a puzzle is a coping mechanism for all his trauma. This was a joke but I thought about it for more than five seconds and it makes way too much sense.

Plot holes and unexplained questions that we like to overthink because it’s fun

The downfall of the Azran was vaguely explained in canon by people being so greedy that it lead to the civilization collapsing. It’s not a stretch to imagine that happening, but it would’ve been more interesting with a little more detail.

Layton and Luke are programmed to routinely forget how to walk. I didn’t know whether to list this in the joke section or not, but it’s odd that the characters actively participate in the walking tutorial (as opposed to showing a little memo to the player) as if they didn’t know how to before, especially when they go through this several times a year.

The truth behind Pavel. He’s simply a joke character who teleports, is a polyglot (sort of, at least he wants us to think he is) and is mega confused all the time. He’s a fun character to make crack theories about because of his cryptic nature that even he doesn’t seem to understand.

Miracle Mask deleted scenes. The first trailer for MM featured animations that were not in the final game. One was the Randall falling scene, except in a slightly different style than the one we know. Others were completely foreign, like Layton and Luke pacing across a theatre stage as if Layton’s about to expose someone with a dramatic point. Cut content and “could’ve beens” are always curious to think about.

Evan Barde: secret mastermind. Arianna and Tony’s dad is a mysterious character who died under mysterious circumstances. I think the canon is that his death was a genuine accident, but concept art of him making a creepy evil face suggests that maybe he originally had a larger role in the first drafts of LS than the finished game.

The secret to how Paul and Des pull off their disguises is unclear and will remain unclear. There is no plausible explanation for their shape shifting. Unless Paul is just a little dude wearing a human suit like that one Wizard of Oz species and Des is the best quick-changer ever and hides his naturally feminine legs under his cloak.

Alfendi’s mom. When LBMR came out people scrambled to piece together who Hershel had a kid with, but there’s no way alfendi is his biological son. This happened with Kat as well and her biological parents turned out to be brand new characters, so I’m sure Al will get an adoption backstory if his arc continues, be his parents old major characters or nameless, faceless NPCs.

Granny Riddleton and Stachenscarfen are omnipotent deities. Idk which section this fits best under, but these two characters have some serious power. At first introduction, they’re implied to be robots, but they appear everywhere in later games. They follow the Professor wherever he goes and assist him on his adventures, GR collecting puzzles and housing them by some odd magic, and Stachen teaches you how to walk. They both introduce and supervise the gameplay. By extension, I guess this idea could apply to Albus as well in the prequels. GR and Stachen even had the power to appear in LMJ, something no major character could do. I consider them akin to the velvet room attendants from the Persona games.

Clive’s kill count is a vague subject in the game for the sake of keeping it PG. I don’t know if anyone’s ever mathematically estimated the damage he caused, and I sure don’t want to try, but the game appears to push the idea that he didn’t kill anyone at all, saying they stopped him in the nick of time and things like that, even though we watch him raze the city. If they ever want to bring him back post-time skip, I can see them twisting it so that the mobile fortress cutscene wasn’t a linear sequence of events, but instead a compilation of scenes over the course of hours so that London neighborhoods around him could be evacuated and have it make sense. Knowing Level-5, it’s more likely that they wouldn’t think this deep and do something more lazy, though.

Memes and references

Post-time skip Flora is real references the famous L is real theory from Super Mario 64. Like Luigi in SM64, Flora was also a highly anticipated character who didn’t appear in a new game, in this case LMJ or LMDA. In the end, Luigi did become real in the DS port so hopefully Flora is real will be realized as well.

Hershel can’t read is a veteran fandom meme referring to how in the first few games, especially Curious Village, Layton asks Luke to read every document out loud for him. Perhaps this was an exercise to improve Luke’s reading skills and independent thinking, or perhaps he was just too lazy or preoccupied to do it himself, but this grew into the joke that our genius Professor was actually illiterate this whole time.

Layton’s smash invitation is hidden in PLvsAA. It’s no secret that the fandom would kill a man to get the Professor into the smash brothers franchise. In PLvsAA one of the puzzle artworks features a goat eating a familiar white envelope with a red stamp, sparking the joke that either Layton or Wright got the invitation their respective fans desired, but it got lost along the way.

The science board is the mysteriously vague organization Don Paolo got kicked out of for the crime of being evil. It’s the epitome of liberal arts majors and art school graduates trying to bs their way around not knowing any science and failing miserably. “He was very good at all the sciences, but then the CEO of science told him to stop because he was using the power of science for evil science”. They do this again when “Dr. Stahngun” describes his time machine what with the soolha coils and whatnot.

Hoogland is death cult initiation is a parody of “Mario 64 is Freemason initiation” which is ridiculous, just like the creepy human sacrifice subplot of AL.

You can see the reflection of someone watching you in Aurora’s eye references the famous, creepy Talking Angela theory. In retrospect it would’ve been funnier if I said Angela instead of Aurora.

Every copy of Professor Layton is personalized references the famous “every copy of Super Mario 64 is personalized”

Clive’s fat ass in HD is a meme that originated from the announcement of UFHD, saying that half of the excited fans wanted to cry again while the other half were simply attracted to Clive. If we want to enter real bottom-section-of-the-iceberg-chart territory then let’s say Clive’s character has some sort of psychological siren properties that draw people to him like a magnet and/or Harry Styles.

Things I pulled out of my ass for shits and giggles

Infinite hint coin hack: I’m sure a tech savvy cheater could hack the game for infinite hint coins, but there’s no easy or interesting way. I don’t know why someone would do that though, considering a lot of the hints suck and there are puzzle guides on the internet.

Cringy, unused Randall villain monologue. This joke is derived from the actual scrapped MM content as well as deleted content being a popular element of iceberg charts, but it’s sadly not real. Would’ve been hilarious, though.

Last Specter Puzzle 031: Light Height tracks and records children’s intelligence level. It doesn’t, but it’s always fun to make fun of arguably THE most ridiculously difficult puzzle in the franchise. (Seriously, do they expect 7+ year olds to know trigonometry???)

Hershel struggles with tea addiction. Hershel from the games drinks tea in moderation, but the manga begs to differ. He has a tea set in the Laytonmobile, and an attempt at teatime while driving causes him to crash.

Folsense is a metaphor for Alzheimer’s. This is inspired by those edgy kids’ show theories where everyone’s in hell or something, but nobody has ever said this.

London Life is reality and the plot of the games is all in Luke’s head. That’s one way to fill every plot hole. How funny would it be if Luke made up crazy characters and stories based off his fellow townspeople Sharkboy and Lavagirl style. “This dude who lives in a castle and asks people to give him all their money for nothing in return is a vampire from 50 years ago involved in a tragic love story”.

Secret ending encoded into Tago’s Head Gymnastics. It’d be crazy if there was, and Dimitri would hound Tago for the secret to time travel. If you didn’t know, the Layton games started as an adaption of Akira Tago’s puzzle series, except they decided to add a story to make it more interesting and marketable.

Daily puzzles datamine your DS. I’m bad with technology but is it even possible to datamine a DS??? Idk, but I think my DS lite from 2008 is safe.

[rockislandadultreads]

New Books: Asian Author Features

Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung

How do you grieve, if your family doesn't talk about feelings? This is the question the unnamed protagonist of Ghost Forest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong "astronaut" fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China. As she revisits memories of her father through the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs. Buoyant, heartbreaking, and unexpectedly funny, Ghost Forest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese-Canadian astronaut family.

A Song Everlasting by Ha Jin

At the end of a U.S. tour with his state-supported choir, popular singer Yao Tian takes a private gig in New York to pick up some extra cash for his daughter's tuition fund, but the consequences of his choice spiral out of control. On his return to China, Tian is informed that the sponsors of the event were supporters of Taiwan's secession, and that he must deliver a formal self-criticism. When he is asked to forfeit his passport to his employer, Tian impulsively decides instead to return to New York to protest the government's threat to his artistic integrity. With the help of his old friend Yabin, Tian's career begins to flourish in the United States. But he is soon placed on a Chinese gov­ernment blacklist and thwarted by the state at every turn, and it becomes increasingly clear that he may never return to China unless he denounces the freedoms that have made his new life possible. Tian nevertheless insists on his identity as a performer, refusing to give up his art. Moving, important, and strikingly relevant to our times, A Song Everlasting is a story of hope in the face of hardship from one of our most celebrated authors.

Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen

When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle in to life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father. But with time, Huong realizes she will never see her husband again. While she copes with this loss, her sons, Tuan and Binh grow up in their absent father's shadow, haunted by a man and a country trapped in their memory and imagination. As they push forward, the three adapt to life in America in different ways: Huong takes up with a Vietnamese car salesman who is also new in town; Tuan tries to connect with his heritage by joining a local Vietnamese gang; and Binh, now going by Ben, embraces his adopted homeland and his burgeoning sexuality. Their search for identity--as individuals and as a family--threatens to tear them apart. But then disaster strikes the city they now call home, and they must find a new way to come together and honor the ties that bind them.

The Dating Plan by Sara Desai

Daisy Patel is a software engineer who understands lists and logic better than bosses and boyfriends. With her life all planned out, and no interest in love, the one thing she can't give her family is the marriage they expect. Left with few options, she asks her childhood crush to be her decoy fiance. Liam Murphy is a venture capitalist with something to prove. When he learns that his inheritance is contingent on being married, he realizes his best friend's little sister has the perfect solution to his problem. A marriage of convenience will get Daisy's matchmaking relatives off her back and fulfill the terms of his late grandfather's will. If only he hadn't broken her tender teenage heart nine years ago... Sparks fly when Daisy and Liam go on a series of dates to legitimize their fake relationship. Too late, they realize that very little is convenient about their arrangement. History and chemistry aren't about to follow the rules of this engagement.

[favonius-captain]

what’s the story behind fancy story map 👀👀

bro … bro. i love you. thank you for asking so i can ramble about my original. i fucking Love talking about it

idek where to begin but like. important stuff bolder for easier reading of my mind scrabbled madness

the main story takes place on the continent of itharia which was the first continent of the entire world (called aeyan). there were originally 5 nations for the 5 gods (called Immortals) that ruled — xutia (fire/lightning) of art, axivus (earth/metal) of stability, koerin (ice/water) of justice, edea (wind/wood) of knowledge, and vena (phantom/shadow) of journey.( there’s also … a lot of stuff i can get in to with these 5 nations and how all of them went wrong. but you can’t ask for that separately if you want to know lol because i’m kinda going off the rails )

essentially, after a big war (called the Celestial War), the gods started teaching certain humans magic so they could learn to protect themselves, these people being called Vexes. and these “blessed” were able to manipulate certain elements depending on the immortal that blessed them. and then this special trait was passed down to their children and ye

and then few mortals, killed all said immortals and used their blood to make a serum which would create fake vexes called Aurtheins. these serums were caked kryptics. when the Vexes found out what was done , they created the 6th nation of Itharia called Assyk and they pushed all the mortals out. it was a desert land, and the mortals had no way of having resources which causes … problems

now to the actual plot, basically the princess of assyk, calista, has to go undercover with a corvital agent & vex named arya. corvital is actually in corvex (another continent) and it’s sort of this ultra secret company sponsored by the eldexian government and they have a lot of vexes — it’s essentially there to go in the gray areas of the law. corvex treats vexes very differently ( they have a whole other long history timeline that i can get into if you’re interested ). in corvital, the agents aren’t meant to be “good” per say but they have a sense of duty.

anyways, arya and calista have a long history, part of which in they fought in a war together and were almost lovers kind of thing. but then stuff happened, both being duty bound to their respective organizations/companies, they left

and now they both have to work together to steal a kryptic from a place called kadenza keep. since assyk is in the desert, they’re facing a serious drought problem and the idea is to steal the kryptic of ice/water which may give them the power to make water since dead godly power and stuff. which forces calista and arya into close proximity and to overcome all their past stuff and. yeah.

it’s a badly written fantasy/heist/romance novel and this is an awful explanation. i am sorry

(the unfinished map in question)

[sibidikkokarca]

Siberian surgeon’s drawings show devastating rise in domestic violence in Russia due to Covid-19 pandemic

Ruslan Mellin turned to art as a refuge from the brutal reality of lockdown and the effects of the virus

Ruslan Mellin is a facial surgeon based in Siberia who has been treating victims of brutal domestic violence for years—and, more recently, of Covid-19. Art is his salvation and a window onto the humanity of his patients. His drawings have attracted attention in Russia and are now becoming noticed internationally thanks to Meduza, a Russian news site that has profiled him and his work.

“The work was hard and if not for my art, I’m not sure how it would have ended,” he tells The Art Newspaper about the death and despair of 2020, which he has also described in a documentary. “Many colleagues died. Art helped me hide from this horror. Every day at least two or three patients died.”

Lockdown exacerbated the domestic violence he had depicted on the faces of countless female patients and in the rage of their abusers, whom he has also drawn.

“The number of patients with broken jaws, especially women, started to grow,” he said during a late evening telephone conversion after his hospital shift. “Most of them said they had provoked their husbands. These were women with high-level job, bank managers and doctors, with serious injuries.”

A major issue in combating domestic violence in Russia is that the victim is often blamed and takes the blame. “I hope things will change for the better,” Mellin says. “I think this happens because they are degraded and beaten and they think this is how it should be and they are afraid to leave, they think this is normal.”

Kemerovo, the Siberian mining city where he is now based, has in recent weeks become a flash point for Russia’s domestic violence crisis. A man is on trial for beating his girlfriend to death over the course of many hours, while police dismissed neighbours’ calls for help. Legislation from 2017 that decriminalised first-time battery offences has led to a nationwide spike in cases and an activist campaign to repeal the law. Russian government statistics are notoriously imprecise, but studies in recent years count from 5,000 to 14,000 women who die annually from abuse.

The memory of one of Mellin’s early patients, in another city, haunts him to this day. She was an orphan who was taken in by an alcoholic who then brutally attacked her.

“He was drunk and beat her with an axe,” deforming her hands and arms and smashing her face, Mellin says. “The blunt force destroyed her face, her frontal sinus, bone fragments flew off where he hit her against the floor, some covered her eye which went blind.” A significant part of her nose was crushed as well.

Although Mellin, who is 27, studied drawing for years as a child, growing up in a poor family in which his parents had an abusive relationship (“I know about domestic violence because I lived through it”, he says) led him to choose medicine as his profession.

“I loved art, but I understood that if I go into painting I might end up being as poor as my parents and wouldn't achieve anything in life,” he says.

To protect the privacy of his patients, Mellin draws their wounds, but uses the facial features of fellow doctors.

Now, Kemerovo’s medical university will be hosting an exhibition of his works. A central state art gallery in the city had rejected his works, he says, because a government official learned that he was not a credentialed artist. However, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a Russian government newspaper, has been sponsoring a touring exhibition of his drawings of Covid-19 patients to libraries in the region. He also posts his works on his Instagram account.

Further afield, Mellin’s works also feature on the website of Licht Feld Gallery in Basel, Switzerland, as an entrant in its Corona Case competition of Covid-themed art.

Fredy Hadorn, the artist who founded the Swiss gallery, describes Mellin’s work as a “combination of the scalpel and the pencil and the stories of the people affected” in a way that is “interesting and shocking also in relation to the home office situation imposed by the virus.” The art highlights that “in many countries, domestic violence is on the rise and leads to outbreaks of violence.”

Mellin has a particular affinity for the works of Van Eyck and Rembrandt, whom he especially admires as a “master of shadow and light.” He has been teaching himself to paint by reading about their technique via his extensive personal library of art books. Mellin recalls art teachers when he was a child who “were breaking me psychologically” by imposing Impressionism as the only acceptable style, and is grateful to another teacher who set him on his current trajectory.

“We had art history, which I loved, with a good teacher, who had a good Moscow education,” he says. “She was the director of our school. She told us in detail about anatomy, about muscles and how they are drawn, and instilled a love for biology. Then in ninth grade, when we were studying human anatomy, I loved looking at muscles in biology textbooks. I think art determined my future profession.”

[thecomicsnexus]

Watchmaker

WATCHMEN #4 DECEMBER 1986 BY ALAN MOORE, DAVE GIBBONS AND JOHN HIGGINS

SYNOPSIS (FROM DC DATABASE)

On Mars, Dr. Manhattan drops the photograph of himself and Janey Slater on the Martian soil and revisits various turning points in his life.

In August 7th of 1945, a sixteen-year-old Jon Osterman is in the middle of assembling a watch when his father, a watch-maker, shows him the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Confronted with the undeniable facts of the theory of relativity, the elder Osterman declares his profession outdated and throws his son's watch-making parts out the windows, urging Jon to instead pursue a career studying nuclear physics. Jon does so in which he attended Princeton University in 1948, and graduating with a Ph.D in atomic physics in 1958.

By 1959, Jon is employed at Gila Flats in Arizona, where experiments are being performed concerning the 'intrinsic fields' of physical objects. He meets Professor Milton Glass, his colleague Wally Weaver, and his love interest Janey Slater. During a trip to New Jersey, Jon and Janey visit an amusement park. There, Janey's watchbrand breaks and is accidentally stepped on by a fat man. Jon decide to fix the watch and finally consummate his relationship with Janey.

One month later, on August, shortly after his thirtieth birthday, Jon plans to give Janey the repaired watch, only to discover he has left it in his lab coat which is inside the intrinsic field experiment test chamber. When retrieving his coat inside the chamber, he is accidentally lock in. Once Professor Glass and the others found Jon, they are shocked and horrified. Glass tells John that the chamber's door has locked automatically and the generators have already began warming up to begin an experiment: removing the intrinsic field from cell block fifteen. Jon is locked in and the door cannot be open or override the countdown. Jon could only accept death and examines the watch he has put back together while his colleagues - except Janey, who cannot bear to see the last moment and flees the room - watch in horror as the countdown reaches zero. Jon is disintegrated in a flash of light.

A month later, a series of strange events occur at Gila Flats involving the apparitions of a disembodied human circulatory nervous system, a circulatory, and a muscled skeleton which last for seconds. The residents believed the facility to be haunted until on November 22nd, Jon returns as a tall, hairless, naked, blue-skinned man with incredible abilities. Jon return to his life with Janey, but remains somewhat emotionless and distant among his peers.

A year later, on February 1960, the American government recruited Jon as their military asset and touted him before the public as "Dr. Manhattan," the first super-hero. He is also provided with a costume which he grudgingly accepts, though he refuses to accept the icon design which is provided for him (this being a stylized orbital model of the atom). Instead, Jon chooses as his emblem a representation of a hydrogen atom, whose simplicity he declares to be something that kindles his respect; accordingly, he painlessly burns the mark into his forehead. Despite being considered America's greatest weapon, Jon wasn't able to prevent certain disasters such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, even though he is aware it is going to happen as he meets the President.

By 1966, during the first and only meeting of the Crimebusters, Jon fell in love with the then sixteen-year-old Silk Spectre, Laurie Juspeczyk, and bitterly ending his marriage with Janey. By 1970, Jon's true name is revealed to the public as his father had passed away in 1969 and there is no reason to conceal it.

In 1971, Jon was requested by President Richard Nixon in intervening in the Vietnam War alongside the Comedian. Within two months, the United States had won the war and forever tipping the balance of the Cold War in the West's favor. In 1975, Nixon proposed a new constitutional amendment that would allow the President to have an extended term in office. Amidst all this, Adrian Veidt publicly reveal his identity as Ozymandias and announcing his retirement from costumed heroics. Veidt invited Jon and Laurie to visit his Antarctic retreat Karnak. During a conversation between Veidt and Jon, the world have radically changed since the last fifteen years from quantum physics to transportation all thanks to Jon.

During the Police Strike of 1977, Jon and Laurie handled the riots in Washington, D.C. in which the former dispelled the rioters by teleporting them back to their homes. This caused two people to suffered heart attacks. Following the riots, the U.S. government passed an emergency bill (the Keene Act) proposed by Senator Keene which made vigilantism illegal and exempting registered adventurers such as Jon and the Comedian. Laurie and Dan Dreiberg retired their identities of Silk Spectre and Nite Owl, while Rorschach remains active in which he respond his feelings towards compulsory retirement by leaving a note on the dead body of a multiple rapist outside police headquarters. In 1985, Jon recalls walking in New York with Laurie and buying a Time magazine commemorating Hiroshima Week, and finally the events that lead him to leave for Mars.

Jon construct a giant, glass structure that rises from the soil while wondering if events had gone differently if he didn't become Dr. Manhattan. He then stands on the balcony of his structure to watch a meteorite shower.

DR. MANHATTAN: SUPER-POWERS AND SUPERPOWERS

In his book Doctor Manhattan, Super Powers and the Superpowers, Professor Milton Glass, the director of Gila Flats and sponsor of Dr. Manhattan, discuss his misgivings of Dr. Manhattan. Prof. Glass dispel the myth that he was the one who came up with the popular phrase "The superman exists and he's American" that described Manhattan in his public appearance by the American media. He instead said the chilling quote "God exist and he's American."

Glass states that the god-like Manhattan proved valuable as a pawn for the United States, in which his powers would allow him in defending the country from Soviet retaliation with ease and arguably forcing the Soviets to never risk a full-scale global conflict. Despite Manhattan's presence which have curbed Soviet adventurism, this does not spell global peace but only to exacerbate the Cold War.

To understand the mindset of the Soviet Union, Glass looks to the Russians' contributions in the Second World War and conclude that the Soviets would do anything to protect their nation from threats such as Manhattan no matter what the cost. This is supported by the sharp increase of Soviet and American nuclear stockpiles since the advent of Manhattan and making the possibility of Mutually Assured Destruction. Unfortunately, the Nixon administration does not share Prof. Glass' concerns and have become intoxicated with having a superhuman being to continually promote American interests unopposed.

Aside from affecting the international sense, Manhattan had also changed the domestic sense in which he contributed advanced technology such as electric cars and clean, economical airships. Thus, human culture have contort itself to accommodate Manhattan. Glass conclude that "We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan."

REVIEW

Some things work in Watchmen, that shouldn’t. One of those cases is this issue. It looks like a big departure from the murder mystery of the first issue, but all the story elements introduced here are essential to understand “the plan”.

This is also one of the chapters of Watchmen you will remember.

The script for this comic is filled with little gems, and paired with the art it takes into a different level. It is hard to tell how much Moore or Gibbons is in the art. Moore’s scripts are too detailed, but every now and then, Gibbons would improvise over the less detailed panels. Details may be Moore’s script, but the vision and everything we remember, comes from Gibbons.

This issue also explains why history on this Earth is so different than ours. This would be later explored in Tom Strong (by Alan Moore and Chris Sprouse), where the existence of a super-hero changes history (in that case it’s a more classic super-hero).

To be continued...

[slowlyteenagestarlight]

ThanQ U Agnes Janssen everything is right here, all of these videos !!! THE EL$ITE C$RIM$INAL NAMES ARE ALL HERE !!

FOLKS!! Note this one on YouTube - Fall Cabal

HOW DOES ONE BECOME AWARE... THEY CAN AWAKEN WHEN THEY DO NOT EVEN REALIZE THEY ARE ASLEEP. Paul L Davis 1987. Please Share: We wright history now!

The Fall of the Cabal by documentary by award winning researcher Janet Ossebaard.

PART 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtjTRYrF8X4 13 MINUTES

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMMMM... Beginning the search for the Truth, Left & Right in politics, Wikileaks, the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, and the birth of the Q-phenomenon... English spoken Part 1 of 10

Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCtkYZeQ7Oo 15 minutes

Part 2: DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

About the Q-phenomenon, the battle for world dominance, shadow governments, the 1%, the power of the banks, the Rothchilds, the Rockefellers, and George Soros…English spoken Part 2 of 10 Documentary by award winning researcher Janet Ossebaard.Music by Myuu, Foxwinter and Alexander Nakarada

Part 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_p5MOK7CYM 16 minutes

Part 3: THE ALIEN INVASION

About the migrant caravan, George Soros, NAMBLA, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the destabilization of the world, the importance of “United we stand, divided we fall”. About the role of President Trump, his achievements, Fake News, human trafficking, the wall, and child trafficking for the elite…English spoken Part 3 of 10Documentary by award winning researcher Janet Ossebaard.Music by Gothic Storm, Myuu, Savfk

Part 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN-imi34Mn8 16 MINUTES

Part 4: CHILDLOVERS EVERYWHERE

About child trafficking, paedophile logos used by child protection agencies, adoption agencies, in Disney cartoons & movies, in Hollywood, in business and in politics. About Haiti as child trafficking island, the role of the Clintons and Trudeau…English spoken Part 4 of 10

Part 5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XsYzMMlFzY 19 MINUTES

Part 5: CHILDREN, ART& PIZZA

About the sexualization of children and the normalization of paedophilia in our society. About Comet Ping Pong, James Alefantis, David Brock, the Podesta brothers & Pizzagate, pedo artwork, the Podesta e-mails published by Wikileaks, pizza related code words, the role of the Clintons, the Obamas, and the Rothschilds. About Cognitive Dissonance…Part 5 of 10

Part 6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLlDSAnWojA 16 MINUTES

Part 6: MAJOR MEDIA MANIPULATION

About the torture swimming pool of Gloria Vanderbilt, her son CNN-reporter Anderson Cooper. About fake news, media manipulation & propaganda, the CIA, Project Mockingbird, whistle blower Udo Ulfkotte, the Illusion of Choice in media land, major sponsors of Hillary Clinton & the Democratic Party. About the dangers of censorship, Media Matters for America, Correct the Record, Facebook, Google & YouTube, Snopes. About Avaaz and the use of Controlled Opposition…Part 6 of 10

Part 7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOzeK7aINSA 23 MINUTES

Part 7: WITCHES & WARLOCKS

About Marina Abramovic, Spirit Cooking, the Brazilian healer John of God, 8 cases of alleged suicides by hanging from a doorknob (Dolores Zorreguieta, L’Wren Scott, Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington, Tim Bergling (Avicii), Annabelle Neilson, Aaron Swartz, Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain), the wrath of Hillary Clinton. About worshipping the devil, normalizing cannibalism, the Church of Satan, statues of Moloch. About the Dutch royal family, the Nazi connecton, Operation Paperclip, Bariloche, the Bilderberg Group Part 7 of 10

Part 8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnCCayci1Co

Part 8: BEYOND KINGS & QUEENS

About the hunting parties of the European royal families & the elite, Pizzagate, Adrenochrome, survivor accounts, the English royal family, their connection with Jeffrey Epstein, the naked boy trying to escape from Buckinham Palace, the ITCCS, Kevin Annett, 50,000 murdered Canadian children, the evidence, the sacrific of children throughout the ages, the tradition of the red shoes. About Anthony Weiner’s laptop, his Life Insurance file, blackmail, and the murder of those who speak up…Part 8 of 10

Part 9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJrwQs9OJP0 19 MINUTES .

Part 9: THE DAWN OF A NEW WORLD

About the Q-phenomenon, the Q-Anons, the Yellow Vests, the uprise & revolution of the people, the help of Q, the identity of Q and the Truth Movement. About the hints and clues by president Trump, NXIVM, the Bronfman sisters, the Dalai Lama, Frank Giustra. About red-pilling the people, draining the swamp, Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server(s), the mysterious soccer ball at Helsinki & president Putin, Barron Trump. About the stepping down of 80,000 CEOs, the assassination attempts on president Trump, about the real Russian Collusion, the Uranium One scandal, the Rosatom Deal, bribary, corruption, money laundering, pay-to-play. About Clinton’s & Obama’s high treason, the infiltration by the Muslim Brotherhood, the execution of John McCabe, the encoded flag on his coffin & Osama Bin Laden…Part 9 of 10English spoken

Part 10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbci6F6xZbk

Part 10: THE RETURN OF THE KING

About president Trump’s spelling errors (Covfefe, Hamberders, Smocking Gun), his hints and clues, his direct communications with the people. About a future spokesman for the US, about John F. Kennedy senior & junior, their deaths. About the clues junior left behind, the Tiffany Blue Boxes, George Magazine, Survival Guide to the Future, Vincent Fusca, Nicola Tesla, John Trump, Julian Assange. About the possibility of time travel, worm holes, parallel timelines, the mysterious books by Ingersoll Lockwood, the Ingersoll Trump pocket watch, Alice in Wonderland, Follow the White Rabbit, Future Proves Past, Q in Star Trek, the Q-continuum, Trust the Plan, WWG1WGA… Part 10 of 10 English spokenJ

[ceetates]

&&. word has it ( cordelia tate ) was just spotted around the city. ( she) is/are a ( 26 ) year old affiliated with ( no affiliation). it’s been said that (she ) resembles (olivia cooke ). ( she ) has been said to be ( charismatic & logical ) but also quite ( fragile & stubborn ). ( she ) is currently serving as ( a bartender/fake psychic ).

hi, i’m Jenni and this is my bean Cordelia. I’m in the MST time zone but mostly around to plot either via Tumblr or my Discord is __#9118! Name the plot and there’s a 99.7% chance I’m down for whatever. Now onto Cordelia’s backstory.

Short version: 

Grew up the youngest and only girl in a conservative political family on the west coast.Spoiled rotten to the core.Her middle brother ran away from home prompting Cordelia’s acting out. Lashing out in ways that she would disclose her family’s secrets. 

The golden son gets in a car crash with Cordelia in the car on purpose to try to shut her up once and for all. The crash aftermath is orchestrated by her father and brother. She was the one driving, DUI, and she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. The force of the crash had placed her underneath the car and crushed her ribs along with puncturing and crushing her oxygen supply.

Ended up in rehab for two years until she was released into her mother’s custody.

Robbed her family and got a plane ticket out of there to find a doctor to do the lung surgery she needs.

Ended up getting robbed of her inheritance when she got to NY. After panhandling for a year and doing other questionable things she landed the job of being a bartender.  All the while pretending to be a psychic and getting money on the side. 

Full Bio:

A beautiful surprise. That’s what her parents described her as with a forced proper laugh. Jackson Tate was over with having children when Liam was born. Then followed Richie, and when he thought he was in the clear. Elizabeth Tate announced a decade later that she was expecting their last child.  Cordelia’s existence complicated their image from the minute she was conceived. The whispers of infidelity whisked around their political image. To the point when she was a couple of days old a DNA test was conducted to end the whispers once and for all.

Elizabeth had more of a say in what happened to Cordelia. There weren’t any boarding schools she would be sent to. Instead she stayed suffocated in their house with a private tutor. Constant bickering and looks of disdain raised her along with the strangers coming in and out of the house. The favorite parts of her childhood was spent annoying her brothers or following around the family dog.  To be fair, she had more of the spotlight than Richie did. No one could resist the small girl in pigtails portrayal or how she would waddle around the scene.

Towards the end of her elementary school years is when things had a shift. Cordelia couldn’t relate to either of her brothers, but she seemed to be closer to Richie than Liam.

Around the same time that Richie had left the family to pursue his ambitions. To escape from their family’s obsession in politics. All her younger more cherished memories had Richie in them, and before high school is when she started to act out with the absence of her older brother.This caused a stir that her brother wouldn’t see.

She sat up all night debating with her parents, until they finally permitted her to attend a public high school. Only if she swore to uphold the Tate image. It also gave her an inch of identity that she would test the rest of her years being at home. The constant acting out at dinners. The way she would spitefully ask about Richie when they were near sponsors of Liam’s campaign.

Jackson Tate’s punishments became more aggressive. Because Cordelia has her own voice, she wasn’t a shadow like her brother. She had a following of their young audiences that could easily tamper the polls if left unchecked. The two remaining Tate siblings had their own discussion of the future, and Cordelia’s role was finalized. Liam promised her under the table that he would take her to visit Rich. This caused the façade to go to fruition. She walked the perfect image until after her high school graduation.

The facade started to crack on her twentieth birthday when they had made no progress on their deal. She still hadn’t seen the middle child of the family, and yet had been the Stepford child they had wanted. Liam Tate is well on his way into local government, and it’s at one of his sponsor dinners that she makes her threat.

She will flip the campaign if she doesn’t get her way. Liam pleads with her albeit a bit drunk that he will take her that night. Cordelia leaves the scene and wouldn’t see the amount of alcohol that Liam consumers until he comes to get her and her suitcase. Nor would she see that her father and eldest brother had collaborated her death before she even got into the car.

The alarm bells were all deafening had she been paying attention to anything but her inner hope that her eldest brother wasn’t a gormless git. While in the car he accelerates and occasionally glances into their rear view mirror. It’s only after she caught that small detail she knew she was going to die. Liam collided with a barrier on the side of the street that sent the car flying through the air. Cordelia had been buckled in, but the details were blurry. Once she came to the car was being lifted off of her with a thousand shards of jagged glass stabing her in multiple ways.The markless cop car and her father were there to greet her with nothing but blame for almost killing her brother.

The news wouldn’t broadcast her own injuries, and within twenty-four hours she was the enemy of the crash. Liam was painted the victim, but she was too weak to interject. Even when they went to the lengths of sending ehr to rehab to continue her silence. Her mother had lost her mind within the first year she was there, but she used that and manipulated the woman with her permanent injuries that she needed a way out.  

During her stint in rehab she had met many people, but there was one that stuck out from the rest. Someone that didn’t believe the big picture painted in front of them. Cordelia taught them the facade, and they taught Cordelia all about the key to divination. Palm reading, tea reading, predicting someone’s future via the signs in their apperance. She was thankful, but she was awful at it. 

Elizabeth Tate came through with surprising canter to check her only daughter out of rehab. Even more surprising was the burner phone that she was handed with her inheritance. The goodbye almost asphyxiated her weak lungs, but she trudged on. Using the keys she learned in rehab to live her own life. Until she crossed the wrong people in New York. They stole whatever inheritance she had and left her broken on the streets with just her oxygen tank.

It was either pity or desperation, but someone took her under their wing and showed her the art of bartending. Cordelia feels triggered being around the alcohol and imaging the car crash. Though she’s successfully hidden in New York and doesn’t think her eldest brother or father would come looking for her. Then again.. she did steal from them.

[elliewritesfantasy]

The World of Wayfinder

I’ve talked a lot about how expansive my worldbuilding is, so I thought I’d make a large masterpost about the world my novels take place in!

The trilogy of Wayfinder takes place in the world of Edhest:

(I used this website to generate the map)

Edhest plays host to a myriad of countries. Each is home to different races and cultures, from hardy humans, to the swift wood elves. 

The world is said to be created by the gods long ago. Each god created one part of the world, from its earth, to the raging seas. But once the world was created, they grew bored. What was the use of having empty lands?

Together, they all decided that they would create intelligent beings. Each god would get a part of the world with which to place their race. Though every culture in Edhest worships the same pantheon, they all have a specific sponsor; the one who was said to have breathed life into them.

Westerfall

Naharo, the goddess of water and change, created a race of hardy humans pale in complexion and quick to anger to live in the country of Westerfall. Most of the land is covered with snow 9 out of the 12 months, but the Frostmarch rarely thaws. 

King Hadrian reigns over the land from the capital city of Alizarin. Since his coronation eighteen years ago in the year 2311 of the second age, he has run a campaign of terror. Soldiers are posted at every road, and the smallest mistake or break of the law means death. Westerfall is the only country in the world to have closed borders; to pass into the country, a person needs a permit.

Fairkeep

Fairkeep was the very last country to be populated. Kiriel, the goddess of the moon, decided to wait. She did what no other god did: she formed a new race out of the many who already existed. A group of brave heroes lead by a Redwatch woman named Asta came together in the year 1124 of the first age to defeat a great evil. As recompense for their sacrifice, Kiriel bestowed the her blessing upon them. They were given the ability to turn into wolves on command, and the land of Fairkeep to make their home. The plains of Fairkeep survive through cold winters and hot summers.

The land is governed by Lord Alberon, who is a direct descendant of Asta. He rules fairly and justly, and is slow to anger. He serves as the leader of the Azored, the rebellion against King Hadrian.

Faristad

Faristad is the fourth and final country of humans. They have lightly tanned skin and a deep sense of justice. They loathe the king of Westerfall, and have openly defied him. As a result, the king has begun to attack their borders. They are led by a democratically elected leader. 

Redwatch

Redwatch is a land of horrid deserts and blistering heat. Eweyr, the god of home and traders, is sponsor to the Watchmen. They are people who have a dark complexion and high heat tolerance. Redwatch serves as the trade center of the world, so the people are very open to other cultures.

This country is governed by a guild of merchants who are elected to their seats.

Lorlyn

Lorlyn is covered in hot, humid jungles and raging rivers. Bynir, the god of peace and community, created the wood elves to reside in these jungles. Wood elves are dedicated to all living things. They hunt and gather only just enough to eat. They are very skilled bowman, and are swift in their movements. They love to leap from tree to tree, and chase each other through the highest branches. They possess a rare magic that allows them to blend into their surroundings and melt into shadow. Their skin is the color of the bark of an oak tree.

Wood elf voices are soothing and sweet to the ear. They sing to the trees and animals, and it is said that even massive trees will bend to hear them sing.

Wood elves live long lives. They love community and peace above all else, so a council of both the old and the young governs Lorlyn. They believe all voices carry wisdom, no matter their age or social standing. Though, a thousand years ago, they were once governed by a monarchy aided by dragons. 

Aldhaven and Hammerforge

Aldhaven is home to the second race of elves. High elves value knowledge above all else, having been created by Tauna, the goddess of knowledge. Aldhaven possesses more magic than any other country. It once played host to the mage council, before it disbanded in 2311 SA. 

High elves are tall with deeply tanned skin. They study the arcane arts religiously. Their land is not nearly as hot as Redwatch and Lorlyn. Instead, it boasts deciduous forests, and mild winters and summers. Their main export is wine.

North of Aldhaven are the mountain ranges of Hammerforge. Deep beneath the mountains live the dwarves, created by Haniyah, the goddess of the earth. The are known not only for their craftsmanship, but for their scientific advancements. They once used magic to create water purification systems for small villages all around the world.

Dwarves are of short stature to be able to fit in small crevices and little caves. They have very pale skin from rarely seeing sunlight, and hefty beards that protects their skin from rough cave walls and the harsh heat of the forges.

WIP Page :: character bios :: WIP Intro

Tag list: @leicawri 

If you would like to be tagged in Wayfinder posts, just shoot me an ask or a message, say so in the tags, or reply to this post! 

I used Inkarnate to create the individual maps.

[rioblog24]

Cyber Security Threats For The Tokyo Olympics

Experts have warned approximately the opportunity of cyber-assaults via way of means of the ones searching for to purpose havoc all through the enormously disputed Tokyo Summer Olympics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, international tensions have elevated after a yr of developing cyber-assaults on many agencies. There are a few concerns as properly. As said via way of means of Neil Jenkins, the leader analytics officer of the Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA), “The Olympics are a large possibility for a country, on this case, Japan, to position its quality foot forward, to reveal off, to reveal the profits and strides that it has made, to growth tourism, to position itself on a higher area on the sector stage.” He additionally warned the media that “Any geographical region that isn't aligned with Japan may also see an possibility right here to attempt to embarrass Japan via a cyberattack.” The risks of Olympic cybersecurity aren't new. North Korean, Russian, Chinese, or even South Korean hackers are some of the Olympic cybersecurity activists with a records of attacking. Based on their assaults on beyond Olympics, we may also have a take a observe the not unusual place threats that CTA expects with inside the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and what can safety merchandise inclusive of Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) do to Olympics cyber safety.

• Targeted Attacks 

Targeted assaults may also bring about extreme economic or reputational damage or losses to excessive-profile Olympic assets, people, or agencies, both monetarily or politically (for instance, broadcasting structures, Olympic commissioners, Japanese cybersecurity agencies). An instance of that is all through the maximum current Olympic chance incident. There is proof that APT28/Fancy Bear, a malicious hacker, centered anti-doping agencies as soon as again. In the center of September 2019, the chance actor started concentrated on at the least sixteen affiliated agencies, simply days earlier than WADA introduced that Russia may face in addition Olympic sanctions. Microsoft claims that (who refers back to the actor organization as Strontium). Although, the assaults had been ordinarily unsuccessful. CTA believes that anti-doping organizations and specialists, and offerings helping the Games’ operations and logistics, inclusive of WiFi networks and ticketing structures, are maximum vulnerable. In addition, vacationers and spectators, Japanese government and accomplice countries, Olympic companions and sponsors, and deliver chain and infrastructure providers also are feasible targets. In addition to geographical region risks, the 2020 Summer Olympics might be a outstanding goal for cyber thieves attributable to the excessive wide variety of capacity sufferers the use of net structures and visitors’ loss of cybersecurity understanding.

• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) 

Advanced chance actors release state-of-the-art DDoS assaults. These assaults in opposition to Tokyo 2020 infrastructure or related networks may want to disrupt the supply of offerings or distract from different ongoing assaults. During the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games, a large-scale DDoS chance executed via way of means of Lizard Strasser, a famous IoT botnet, happened. According to Arbor Networks’ Security Engineering & Response Team (ASERT) research, a department of CTA member NETSCOUT Arbor has been actively worried in permitting DDoS detection and mitigation at substantial events. Many of those assaults took place earlier than the Games started, however the adversaries elevated their efforts extensively after the Games started. Because of those assaults, CTA took a huge step to enforce Network Firewalls which can counter such superior DDoS assaults.

• Ransomware Attacks 

Devices, offerings, and underlying infrastructure helping the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, together with player and tourist gadgets, transportation offerings, and point-of-sale structures, is probably centered via way of means of ransomware assaults. Cyber thieves may additionally hire ransomware to break operations for economic gain. High-profile ransomware assaults on authorities organizations have currently been not unusualplace withinside the United States. Attackers use this danger to head in opposition to the authorities and Olympic organisations in Japan. An assault like this can make Olympic-associated IT structures unusable at essential times. To save you ransomware assaults, it's miles crucial to be usually vigilant, with Sangfor Technologies, you could make sure your community protection from being accessed via way of means of attackers.

• Malware Attacks

Before the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics establishing rite on February 9, 2018, terrorists centered networks in an try to sow disruption and confusion. The attackers deployed a adverse virus called Olympic Destroyer, which knocked down the professional Olympics website, affected WiFi connectivity withinside the stadium, and brought on announces of the occasion to get disrupted. In addition, many visitors had been not able to gain and print tickets for the rite because of the assault. According to Cisco Talos’ research of numerous malware versions used withinside the assault, the attackers had been simplest inquisitive about interrupting the games, now no longer stealing data. According to Talos, the malware makes the sufferer system unusable via way of means of deleting shadow copies, occasion logs and trying to use local running machine features like PsExec and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to transport via the environment. Cyber actors may want to use this assault to damage the popularity of individuals, sponsor agencies, or the host nation. It will also be applied for political goals or to purpose havoc all through the Olympic Games.

• Data Leaks and Misinformation for Cyber Propaganda 

These forms of assaults can damage the reputations of people, sponsoring agencies, or the host nation. It may also doubtlessly be applied for political goals or to destabilize the Olympic Games. Data leaks are a effective device for chance actors to inflict humiliation. Victims may also go through extreme consequences. In current years, misinformation, or deceptive data intended to mislead, has emerged as a critical concern. Data leaks are often found in aggregate with disinformation and propaganda efforts.

• Japan Readying 

Their Security Measures Japan has numerous demanding situations in protecting the 2020 Olympics from numerous state-of-the-art and complicated cyber threats, lots of which end result from a widespread loss of guidance and incapacity to install area the essential cybersecurity safeguards. Researchers seemed into the cybersecurity chance panorama for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, in addition to training discovered from preceding Olympic Games, which actors offer a cybersecurity chance, and what coverage alternatives may assist planners control those risks. The team’s coverage pointers consist of making plans beforehand of time, participating and sharing knowledge, and allocating sources primarily based totally on risk. With the Summer Olympics swiftly approaching, cybersecurity arrangements are properly underway, and plenty of events have motion plans in area. Countering those state-of-the-art and adverse assaults from many nations calls for the usage of superior next-era firewalls. CTA has been operating with IT safety organizations to construct an appropriate next-era firewall for the enormously expected 2020 Olympics considering NGFWs are technologically state-of-the-art firewalls which can deflect such threats as the ones cited above.

[un-enfant-immature]

Digitizing Burning Man

For decades, Burning Man has represented an escape from the current reality. An event for free-er spirits to rethink new age ideals inside a stateless entity where art, music and partying reign supreme on the desert plains.

Over the years, the Bay Area-founded event has dealt with an internal clash as the gathering has grown larger and attracted a heavy presence from Silicon Valley’s wealthy tech class, with tales of turnkey experiences, air-conditioned camps, helicopters and lobster dinners. Now, under the shadow of a historic pandemic, the organization behind the massive, iconic event is desperately working to stick to its roots while avoiding financial ruin as it pivots the 2020 festival to a digital format with the pro bono help of some of its tech industry attendees.

With just a few weeks before the event is set to kick off, the organization is bringing together a group of technologists with backgrounds in virtual reality, blockchain, hypnotism and immersive theatre to create a web of hacked-together social products that they hope will capture the atmosphere of Burning Man.

Going virtual is an unprecedented move for an event that’s mere existence already seems to defy precedent.

Burning Man is held in late August every year inside Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. For nine days, the attendees, who refer to themselves as Burners, fill up the desolate landscape with massive art installations, stages and camps. Attendance has been climbing over the past several decades, to the point that the federal government got involved, creating a more than 170-page report arguing why the event’s attendance should be capped. More than 78,000 people attended in 2019.

It’s an escape from society in a shared social experience that doesn’t seem to be replicable elsewhere.

Black Rock City irl. // Viaggio Routard (opens in a new window) / Flickr (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new window) license.

The Multiverse

Steven Blumenfeld became the CTO of Burning Man days before the org’s leaders publicly announced that, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the physical event was being abruptly canceled and the team was going all-in on a virtual gathering. Though the serial CTO expected the position to largely involve crusty tasks maintaining the event’s media infrastructure, he soon was pressed to rethink the front-end of a sprawling event that’s decades old and steeped in lore.

“My first inclination is, ‘Great! Let’s go build a big 3D VR world blah blah blah… So then I spent the first two weeks looking at what I had for staff, what I had for time frame, and what we could actually do,” Blumenfeld says. “There was just no way. And you know, I actually still wanted to do it. I wanted a challenge… but the reality was it just wasn’t going to happen.”

Burning Man is a massive undertaking, with a particularly deep emotional hold inside San Francisco, where it was first held in 1986, and by extension Silicon Valley. It isn’t all that surprising that when the Burning Man Project announced the event was making the move to a digital format, there was a rapid influx of community input to help decipher what an on-the-grid virtual Burning Man might look like.

“We had 14,000 people tell us they wanted to contribute in some way to a virtual Black Rock City,” said Kim Cook, the org’s director of art and civic engagement. “Some of them said what they wanted to contribute was love; so that’s cool. We also had around a thousand of them say they wanted to do developer-type work.”

Some of the groups that reached out to the Burning Man Project were companies that were willing to build a Burning Man experience but wanted official branding present. Despite a precarious financial position, Burning Man’s organizers declined help from these sponsors, citing the org’s adherence to “de-commodification” — a desire to prevent corporate infiltration of the event, eschewing advertising, branded stages and corporate partnerships.

Turning away from the professional studios, Blumenfeld and others settled on a network of small indie teams filled with Burners that were willing to develop the official digital experiences for the event on their own time.

Image Credits: BLM Nevada (opens in a new window) / Flickr (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new window) license.

A new moment for social networking

Eight projects eventually emerged as official “recognized universes,” each taking drastically different approaches to what a virtual Burning Man should look like. While some focus their efforts on virtual reality, others add social layers to video chat or build 3D environments on top of existing platforms like Second Life or Microsoft’s AltspaceVR .

During the pandemic, revamped developer conferences and trade shows have been able to port keynote addresses or panels to a Zoom format fairly seamlessly, but there are plenty of elements of the Burning Man experience that the teams involved realize might be impossible to replicate with online platforms. The developers creating the event’s virtual worlds are determined to rethink the conventions of online social networking to ensure that Burners make new friends this year.

“The sense of awe and scale is tricky,” says Ed Cooke, who is building one of the official apps. “One way of explaining Burning Man is that it’s a state of mind that you access as a side effect of all the things that happen on the way there.”

Cooke, a London startup founder who also boasts the title of Grand Memory Master, earned for — among other things — memorizing the order of 10 decks of cards in less than an hour, has been building SparkleVerse with his friend Chris Adams, whose daytime gig is as a senior software manager at Airbnb.

Their web app, which pairs a 2D map interface with video chat windows, is primarily focused on advancing how shared context can facilitate and better frame social relationships.

Amid quarantine, the pair tells TechCrunch they have been creating deeply complicated video chat parties for their friends. One example is a moon-themed party where they created a clickable map of the lunar surface that guided the 200 attendees through 16 separate virtual spaces with their own themes. Before the party kicked off, the hosts walked people through the “experience of traveling to the moon” by guiding them through the effects of zero gravity and instructing them to play along with experiencing it. Another hot tub-themed party invited guests to jump into their bath tub before firing up Zoom.

Cooke and Adams are leaning on some of these mechanics to create a Burning Man theme, hoping that taking cues from immersive theatre will enable people to commit more deeply to the experience. The acts of driving, losing your phone connection and growing tired and hungry on the way to the physical event add to a “spaciousness in your consciousness” that allows people to act more freely, Cooke says. He wants participants to replicate these experiences by taking steps outside their normal life in the run-up to the event, whether that’s sitting through an obscenely long video chat session to simulate a drive to the desert or setting up a tent in their living room, or cutting off their water line and avoiding showers during the nine days.

“All of this is embedding you further and further into this distant context, miles away from your normal life, where effectively in the course of this, you’re just becoming a radically less boring person,” Cooke explains in a nine-minute video outlining the platform.

Many of the apps are building on the idea of how spatial interfaces can feed greater social context and make it easier to approach people and make new friends.

Another official app, Build-a-Burn, takes the idea of a stylized 2D interface for video chat even further with a sketched-out grayscale map of Black Rock City that users can navigate little stick figures across. As a user moves through different camps and their avatars get physically close to each other, new video chat screens fade in and users can gain the experience of venturing into a new social bubble.

A screenshot of Build-a-Burn

While Build-a-Burn and SparkleVerse are leaning more heavily on video chat, other experiences hope that creating massive 3D landscapes that match the scale of the real-world event will help people get into the spirit of the event.

Other than Burn2, which is wholly contained within the Second Life platform, most of the 3D-centric apps integrate some level of virtual reality support. Projects that support VR headsets include The Infinite Playa, The Bridge Experience, MysticVerse, BRCvr (which taps into Microsoft’s AltspaceVR platform) and Multiverse.

Each of the VR experiences will also allow users to join on mobile or desktop, an effort to ensure that the apps are more widely accessible.

Over on Extra Crunch, read about how a new generation of chat apps are leaning on game-like interfaces

Multiverse creator Faryar Ghazanfari, who runs an AR startup and previously worked on Tesla’s legal team, says that the motivations for building his app were a bit on the selfish side, telling TechCrunch that he became “extremely sad” after the physical event’s cancellation and felt the need to help build a place where he could reunite with his own camp.

Screenshot from a demo of Multiverse.

Ghazanfari tells TechCrunch he feels a responsibility in creating the environment that other Burners will experience; he says his chief concern is capturing the event’s complexity. Compared to the other apps, Multiverse focuses primarily on providing a photorealistic 3D playground where avatars can zoom around.

“As Burners, we don’t think of Burning Man as just a music festival or art festival; it is much more than that. Burning Man is a social experiment of creating a community out of a shared struggle,” Ghazanfari says.

Each of the Burning Man-approved apps seem to engage with evoking that shared struggle differently, which appears to be the most looming challenge of moving this event to a virtual format. While the apps hope to bring elements of the physical event into their virtual spaces, the creators also seem to realize that aiming to compete with attendees’ past memories is unwise. It’s a challenge that has been faced by dozens of startups in the virtual reality space over the past several years.

“I think the main challenge is taking something that exists in reality and then porting it into a different platform,” said Adam Arrigo, CEO of Wave, a venture-backed startup that initially launched a VR app for music concerts but has since shifted focus to mobile and desktop experiences. “When you’re in these digital spaces, the agency that you have as a user and the experiences you can create are so different than something that could exist, even at a concert.”

Image Credits: Burning Man 2012 Hawaii Savvy (opens in a new window) / Flickr (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new window) license.

Financial uncertainty

Perhaps the biggest unknown, as the organization readies for Burning Man’s August 30 start date, is that nobody really has any idea how many people are going to show up. While Blumenfeld pointed me to suggestions the entire digital event could attract up to 30,000 people over its nine-day run, Ghazanfari hopes that hundreds of thousands or millions of users will come into the fold of his experience.

Another point of contention internally is how exactly the groups plan to monetize these digital experiences.

In 2020, the standard ticket price for Burning Man was $475. The organization postponed the “main sale” of tickets prior to this year’s physical event’s cancellation, but they had already sold tens of thousands of tickets. Ticket holders will have the option of being refunded, but the organization has encouraged those who “have the means” to consider making a full or partial donation of the ticket price instead.

In 2018, Burning Man cost $44 million for the organization to produce, according to tax documents. The Burning Man Project reported about $43 million in ticket sales from that event, with other donations and revenue streams bringing the nonprofit’s total revenue for that fiscal year to about $46 million. In a blog post, the event’s organizers noted that though the group had event insurance, they were not covered for a cancellation caused by a pandemic. Burning Man Project says it has $10 million in cash reserves, but that it anticipates draining through that funding by the end of the year to stay afloat. The organization is listed as having received a loan from the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program for between $2-5 million.

While some like Ghazanfari are pushing to make their experiences free to access with the option of giving a donation later, others expressed desire for a single digital ticket that would give attendees access to all eight digital experiences. Cooke says users will need to pay a $50 entrance fee to access the SparkleVerse.

The disparate nature of the experience being built this year — with some being shipped as native apps, others in HTML5 and others inside existing tech platforms — meant that a unified ticketing platform just wouldn’t work, Blumenfeld told TechCrunch. Not all of the developers were thrilled with this outcome, which they fear could fracture attendance at events on certain platforms. The biggest concern seemed to be ensuring that all of this effort pays off in some way for the organization so that they can continue to host the Burning Man event post-pandemic.

“One of the biggest reasons we’re all doing this is to help Burning Man survive, because the Burning Man organization unfortunately was really badly hit because of COVID,” Ghazanfari says. “The organization is in kind of a precarious situation financially.”

The organization has attracted criticism in recent years for the event’s inclusiveness. Some of the developers acknowledge that planning for a nine-day trip to the middle of the desert can be daunting and prohibitively expensive for people that want to join the community, and they hope that this year’s shift to a digital format will open up the event to more people and that these apps can be a less intimidating way for skeptics to get a taste of the community.

Image Credits: BLM Nevada (opens in a new window) / Flickr (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new window) license.

Thinking of the future

None of the developers behind the digital experiences are being paid for their efforts building these apps. However, the Burning Man Project has given at least some of them perpetual licenses to continue operating these digital platforms with the Burning Man name and an option to monetize, though a percentage of proceeds will be kicked back to the organization.

While getting this event across the finish line by the end of the month is daunting enough, the Burning Man Project is also trying to consider how its rapid learnings will apply to next year, though they hope that the physical event returns for 2021.

Blumenfeld says he plans to spend the next year working on the background infrastructure so that items like gating and ticketing functions for a virtual Burning Man can all be centralized.

While having eight distinct experiences this year could complicate the goal of getting one big group together, developers concerned about troubleshooting their new apps or having a sudden influx of virtual Burners overwhelm their infrastructures view multiple entry points to the festival as a necessary logistical move. Organizers hope the diversity of options will keep things interesting for attendees.

“I think we’ve got a good mix, and part of it is, we want to learn,” Blumenfeld says. “What we’re trying very hard to avoid is being in Zoom meeting hell.”

Whether users are connecting via video chat or as avatars inside a large virtual world, the developers building Burning Man’s virtual experiences believe they are operating on the cutting edge of virtual interaction and that they are rethinking elements of modern social networking to create a virtual Burning Man where people will be able to form new social bonds.

“I’ve fallen in love with this idea that at some point in the future, some Ph.D. student in 300 years time is going to write a thesis on the first online Burning Man, because it does feel like an extraordinary moment of avant garde imagineering for what the future of human online interaction looks like,” Cooke tells TechCrunch.

Immersive chat startups have a very different vision for the future of voice

[pmsocialmedia]

Digitizing Burning Man

For decades, Burning Man has represented an escape from the current reality. An event for free-er spirits to rethink new age ideals inside a stateless entity where art, music and partying reign supreme on the desert plains.

Over the years, the Bay Area-founded event has dealt with an internal clash as the gathering has grown larger and attracted a heavy presence from Silicon Valley’s wealthy tech class, with tales of turnkey experiences, air-conditioned camps, helicopters and lobster dinners. Now, under the shadow of a historic pandemic, the organization behind the massive, iconic event is desperately working to stick to its roots while avoiding financial ruin as it pivots the 2020 festival to a digital format with the pro bono help of some of its tech industry attendees.

With just a few weeks before the event is set to kick off, the organization is bringing together a group of technologists with backgrounds in virtual reality, blockchain, hypnotism and immersive theatre to create a web of hacked-together social products that they hope will capture the atmosphere of Burning Man.

Going virtual is an unprecedented move for an event that’s mere existence already seems to defy precedent.

Burning Man is held in late August every year inside Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. For nine days, the attendees, who refer to themselves as Burners, fill up the desolate landscape with massive art installations, stages and camps. Attendance has been climbing over the past several decades, to the point that the federal government got involved, creating a more than 170-page report arguing why the event’s attendance should be capped. More than 78,000 people attended in 2019.

It’s an escape from society in a shared social experience that doesn’t seem to be replicable elsewhere.

Black Rock City irl. // Viaggio Routard (opens in a new window) / Flickr (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new window) license.

The Multiverse

Steven Blumenfeld became the CTO of Burning Man days before the org’s leaders publicly announced that, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the physical event was being abruptly canceled and the team was going all-in on a virtual gathering. Though the serial CTO expected the position to largely involve crusty tasks maintaining the event’s media infrastructure, he soon was pressed to rethink the front-end of a sprawling event that’s decades old and steeped in lore.

“My first inclination is, ‘Great! Let’s go build a big 3D VR world blah blah blah… So then I spent the first two weeks looking at what I had for staff, what I had for time frame, and what we could actually do,” Blumenfeld says. “There was just no way. And you know, I actually still wanted to do it. I wanted a challenge… but the reality was it just wasn’t going to happen.”

Burning Man is a massive undertaking, with a particularly deep emotional hold inside San Francisco, where it was first held in 1986, and by extension Silicon Valley. It isn’t all that surprising that when the Burning Man Project announced the event was making the move to a digital format, there was a rapid influx of community input to help decipher what an on-the-grid virtual Burning Man might look like.

“We had 14,000 people tell us they wanted to contribute in some way to a virtual Black Rock City,” said Kim Cook, the org’s director of art and civic engagement. “Some of them said what they wanted to contribute was love; so that’s cool. We also had around a thousand of them say they wanted to do developer-type work.”

Some of the groups that reached out to the Burning Man Project were companies that were willing to build a Burning Man experience but wanted official branding present. Despite a precarious financial position, Burning Man’s organizers declined help from these sponsors, citing the org’s adherence to “de-commodification” — a desire to prevent corporate infiltration of the event, eschewing advertising, branded stages and corporate partnerships.

Turning away from the professional studios, Blumenfeld and others settled on a network of small indie teams filled with Burners that were willing to develop the official digital experiences for the event on their own time.

Image Credits: BLM Nevada (opens in a new window) / Flickr (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new window) license.

A new moment for social networking

Eight projects eventually emerged as official “recognized universes,” each taking drastically different approaches to what a virtual Burning Man should look like. While some focus their efforts on virtual reality, others add social layers to video chat or build 3D environments on top of existing platforms like Second Life or Microsoft’s AltspaceVR .

During the pandemic, revamped developer conferences and trade shows have been able to port keynote addresses or panels to a Zoom format fairly seamlessly, but there are plenty of elements of the Burning Man experience that the teams involved realize might be impossible to replicate with online platforms. The developers creating the event’s virtual worlds are determined to rethink the conventions of online social networking to ensure that Burners make new friends this year.

“The sense of awe and scale is tricky,” says Ed Cooke, who is building one of the official apps. “One way of explaining Burning Man is that it’s a state of mind that you access as a side effect of all the things that happen on the way there.”

Cooke, a London startup founder who also boasts the title of Grand Memory Master, earned for — among other things — memorizing the order of 10 decks of cards in less than an hour, has been building SparkleVerse with his friend Chris Adams, whose daytime gig is as a senior software manager at Airbnb.

Their web app, which pairs a 2D map interface with video chat windows, is primarily focused on advancing how shared context can facilitate and better frame social relationships.

Amid quarantine, the pair tells TechCrunch they have been creating deeply complicated video chat parties for their friends. One example is a moon-themed party where they created a clickable map of the lunar surface that guided the 200 attendees through 16 separate virtual spaces with their own themes. Before the party kicked off, the hosts walked people through the “experience of traveling to the moon” by guiding them through the effects of zero gravity and instructing them to play along with experiencing it. Another hot tub-themed party invited guests to jump into their bath tub before firing up Zoom.

Cooke and Adams are leaning on some of these mechanics to create a Burning Man theme, hoping that taking cues from immersive theatre will enable people to commit more deeply to the experience. The acts of driving, losing your phone connection and growing tired and hungry on the way to the physical event add to a “spaciousness in your consciousness” that allows people to act more freely, Cooke says. He wants participants to replicate these experiences by taking steps outside their normal life in the run-up to the event, whether that’s sitting through an obscenely long video chat session to simulate a drive to the desert or setting up a tent in their living room, or cutting off their water line and avoiding showers during the nine days.

“All of this is embedding you further and further into this distant context, miles away from your normal life, where effectively in the course of this, you’re just becoming a radically less boring person,” Cooke explains in a nine-minute video outlining the platform.

Many of the apps are building on the idea of how spatial interfaces can feed greater social context and make it easier to approach people and make new friends.

Another official app, Build-a-Burn, takes the idea of a stylized 2D interface for video chat even further with a sketched-out grayscale map of Black Rock City that users can navigate little stick figures across. As a user moves through different camps and their avatars get physically close to each other, new video chat screens fade in and users can gain the experience of venturing into a new social bubble.

A screenshot of Build-a-Burn

While Build-a-Burn and SparkleVerse are leaning more heavily on video chat, other experiences hope that creating massive 3D landscapes that match the scale of the real-world event will help people get into the spirit of the event.

Other than Burn2, which is wholly contained within the Second Life platform, most of the 3D-centric apps integrate some level of virtual reality support. Projects that support VR headsets include The Infinite Playa, The Bridge Experience, MysticVerse, BRCvr (which taps into Microsoft’s AltspaceVR platform) and Multiverse.

Each of the VR experiences will also allow users to join on mobile or desktop, an effort to ensure that the apps are more widely accessible.

Over on Extra Crunch, read about how a new generation of chat apps are leaning on game-like interfaces

Multiverse creator Faryar Ghazanfari, who runs an AR startup and previously worked on Tesla’s legal team, says that the motivations for building his app were a bit on the selfish side, telling TechCrunch that he became “extremely sad” after the physical event’s cancellation and felt the need to help build a place where he could reunite with his own camp.

Screenshot from a demo of Multiverse.

Ghazanfari tells TechCrunch he feels a responsibility in creating the environment that other Burners will experience; he says his chief concern is capturing the event’s complexity. Compared to the other apps, Multiverse focuses primarily on providing a photorealistic 3D playground where avatars can zoom around.

“As Burners, we don’t think of Burning Man as just a music festival or art festival; it is much more than that. Burning Man is a social experiment of creating a community out of a shared struggle,” Ghazanfari says.

Each of the Burning Man-approved apps seem to engage with evoking that shared struggle differently, which appears to be the most looming challenge of moving this event to a virtual format. While the apps hope to bring elements of the physical event into their virtual spaces, the creators also seem to realize that aiming to compete with attendees’ past memories is unwise. It’s a challenge that has been faced by dozens of startups in the virtual reality space over the past several years.

“I think the main challenge is taking something that exists in reality and then porting it into a different platform,” said Adam Arrigo, CEO of Wave, a venture-backed startup that initially launched a VR app for music concerts but has since shifted focus to mobile and desktop experiences. “When you’re in these digital spaces, the agency that you have as a user and the experiences you can create are so different than something that could exist, even at a concert.”

Image Credits: Burning Man 2012 Hawaii Savvy (opens in a new window) / Flickr (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new window) license.

Financial uncertainty

Perhaps the biggest unknown, as the organization readies for Burning Man’s August 30 start date, is that nobody really has any idea how many people are going to show up. While Blumenfeld pointed me to suggestions the entire digital event could attract up to 30,000 people over its nine-day run, Ghazanfari hopes that hundreds of thousands or millions of users will come into the fold of his experience.

Another point of contention internally is how exactly the groups plan to monetize these digital experiences.

In 2020, the standard ticket price for Burning Man was $475. The organization postponed the “main sale” of tickets prior to this year’s physical event’s cancellation, but they had already sold tens of thousands of tickets. Ticket holders will have the option of being refunded, but the organization has encouraged those who “have the means” to consider making a full or partial donation of the ticket price instead.

In 2018, Burning Man cost $44 million for the organization to produce, according to tax documents. The Burning Man Project reported about $43 million in ticket sales from that event, with other donations and revenue streams bringing the nonprofit’s total revenue for that fiscal year to about $46 million. In a blog post, the event’s organizers noted that though the group had event insurance, they were not covered for a cancellation caused by a pandemic. Burning Man Project says it has $10 million in cash reserves, but that it anticipates draining through that funding by the end of the year to stay afloat. The organization is listed as having received a loan from the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program for between $2-5 million.

While some like Ghazanfari are pushing to make their experiences free to access with the option of giving a donation later, others expressed desire for a single digital ticket that would give attendees access to all eight digital experiences. Cooke says users will need to pay a $50 entrance fee to access the SparkleVerse.

The disparate nature of the experience being built this year — with some being shipped as native apps, others in HTML5 and others inside existing tech platforms — meant that a unified ticketing platform just wouldn’t work, Blumenfeld told TechCrunch. Not all of the developers were thrilled with this outcome, which they fear could fracture attendance at events on certain platforms. The biggest concern seemed to be ensuring that all of this effort pays off in some way for the organization so that they can continue to host the Burning Man event post-pandemic.

“One of the biggest reasons we’re all doing this is to help Burning Man survive, because the Burning Man organization unfortunately was really badly hit because of COVID,” Ghazanfari says. “The organization is in kind of a precarious situation financially.”

The organization has attracted criticism in recent years for the event’s inclusiveness. Some of the developers acknowledge that planning for a nine-day trip to the middle of the desert can be daunting and prohibitively expensive for people that want to join the community, and they hope that this year’s shift to a digital format will open up the event to more people and that these apps can be a less intimidating way for skeptics to get a taste of the community.

Image Credits: BLM Nevada (opens in a new window) / Flickr (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new window) license.

Thinking of the future

None of the developers behind the digital experiences are being paid for their efforts building these apps. However, the Burning Man Project has given at least some of them perpetual licenses to continue operating these digital platforms with the Burning Man name and an option to monetize, though a percentage of proceeds will be kicked back to the organization.

While getting this event across the finish line by the end of the month is daunting enough, the Burning Man Project is also trying to consider how its rapid learnings will apply to next year, though they hope that the physical event returns for 2021.

Blumenfeld says he plans to spend the next year working on the background infrastructure so that items like gating and ticketing functions for a virtual Burning Man can all be centralized.

While having eight distinct experiences this year could complicate the goal of getting one big group together, developers concerned about troubleshooting their new apps or having a sudden influx of virtual Burners overwhelm their infrastructures view multiple entry points to the festival as a necessary logistical move. Organizers hope the diversity of options will keep things interesting for attendees.

“I think we’ve got a good mix, and part of it is, we want to learn,” Blumenfeld says. “What we’re trying very hard to avoid is being in Zoom meeting hell.”

Whether users are connecting via video chat or as avatars inside a large virtual world, the developers building Burning Man’s virtual experiences believe they are operating on the cutting edge of virtual interaction and that they are rethinking elements of modern social networking to create a virtual Burning Man where people will be able to form new social bonds.

“I’ve fallen in love with this idea that at some point in the future, some Ph.D. student in 300 years time is going to write a thesis on the first online Burning Man, because it does feel like an extraordinary moment of avant garde imagineering for what the future of human online interaction looks like,” Cooke tells TechCrunch.

Immersive chat startups have a very different vision for the future of voice

via Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/31Q0EGc

[howtohero]

#026 Legacy Heroes

As we’ve mentioned in the past, picking the right codename is hugely important. It’s what distinguishes you from other heroes who wear similar costumes or have similar powers. It’s intrinsic to your brand. Yadda yadda yadda yadda (that’s code for: go read the backlog I am in no mood to repeat myself). But codenames aren’t necessarily attached to just one individual. Sometimes heroes fail to do the proper research before selecting a name. Sometimes heroes purposely steal other heroes’ names just to mess with them. And other times names are passed down in order to create a lasting legacy.

Legacy names serve to create a sort of mythology or lore surrounding a name. Usually bearers of a legacy name will try to conduct themselves in a manner similar to those who have borne the name before. They will generally wear either the exact same costume or, if the original is old, tattered, and/or smelly, an identical one, and have the same powers as their predecessors. Sometimes, and this is especially common in modern incarnations of famous heroes from days’ past, the costumes will be altered to incorporate contemporary costume technology. Stuff like added armor for protection, modern voice-disguising doohickeys, wrist mounted harpoons… there’s that one guy who attached a tiny smoke machine to a World War II era superhero costume, for the sole purpose of making grand entrances (shout out to Flying Stars N’ Stripes VII!) 

Legacy heroes usually fall into four categories: mantles that are passed on through families, all grown-up sidekicks, state-sponsored titles, and names that are carried on by non-family members or complete strangers.

Family Legacies:  

Think of this sort of like a family business. Except instead of the shoe store on the corner of sixth and main, joining the family business means putting on a spandex costume and punching bank robbers. And also you don’t get paid. That’s another way it’s different than a family business. Plus, the hours suck. And the job comes with a whole set of super powered evil people who want to murder you (send help my analogy is just completely crumbling!) Being this kind of legacy hero has its perks. Presumably, you come from a long line of family heroes who have connections to other heroes and advice they’re ready, willing, and able to share with you. Plus in these cases, powers are often genetic and passed down through the family tree so you’ll have plenty of people to help you deal with, and master your powers. But it can also be daunting. Often children in these situations feel pressured to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors even if wearing a cowl and dueling human-scale, bipedal, dragons is not necessarily their first career choice. If you’re a family legacy superhero it’s important to not try to pressure or force your child into following in your footsteps. Let them come to the decision on their own, teach them about superheroing life (or or or, show them this guide.) show them the good they can do, and then, leave them be to live their life the way they choose. If they decide they’d rather be a pasta chef or a carpenter or a street artist who leaves like vaguely pseudo-intellectual half-phrases on the sides of post offices. (Stuff like “can life be packaged?” or “what is the meaning of envelope?” like none of that means anything and actually it’s for sure a crime to vandalize the post office like that. Unless the post office commissioned him to do that but that only raises more questions.) It’s totally fine if a legacy hero skips a generation. There are other heroes. The world won’t die. Probably. Almost definitely.

Sidekicks, All Grown Up:

As much as I’m against superheroes taking on teenage sidekicks my word on the matter is, for whatever reason, not (yet) taken as gospel by the superhero community. And so it happens that some heroes do have sidekicks that can’t even legally enlist in the military or buy scratch off lotto tickets. Sometimes, if the child somehow survives superhero life long enough, their mentor/the person who so recklessly endangered them will pass their name and costume down to them. These survivors are often the most well prepared legacy heroes due to the fact that they’ve been trained in the art of fighting crime and not dying all their lives (and they’ve been deprived of normal childhoods). This type of legacy will have a near lifetime’s worth of training from their adult counterpart and are therefore best suited to wear the suit and assume their identity. 

State-Sponsored Legacies: 

State-sponsored heroes in general are a whole nother (fun fact: in certain part of America “another” is parsed “a nother” which is where the otherwise nonsensical phrase “a whole nother” comes from, see, this blog is highly educational. I don’t understand why the teacher’s union won’t admit me.) topic that we’ll cover soon but usually a state-sponsored legacy hero will come about when the country, or its government or military wants to create an everlasting symbol for the country to rally around. Just as the title of Corporal Venezuela is undying so too is the heart and spirit of Venezuela everlasting. Something like that. Oftentimes (but really not all the times there are plenty that defy this rule) these heroes serve only as figureheads and don’t often see active combat duty or fight any real crimes. After all, it’d be pretty bad for morale and PR if the symbolic heart and soul of your country was killed by terrorists or fell in battle against an angry octopus man. State-sponsored legacies also have the advantage of predecessors’ experience but really only sometimes. Many state-sponsored legacies are life appointments and a replacement is only selected once the old one passes away.

Rando Legacies:

These kinds of legacies come about when a person is particularly inspired by a certain hero. Maybe they’ll see them on the news or maybe they’ll read about them in a history book (or this guide) or maybe they’ll learn about them from that documentary about the best break dancing superheroes from the late nineties that the history channel put out a few years back. Maybe they’ll have actually been saved by that hero as a child. Either way this person has decided to take on the mantle of their beloved hero. Since these types of cases generally only come about after the original hero has retired or died oftentimes this kind of legacy will take on the identity without the blessing or guidance or sometimes even knowledge of the original hero. These legacies often take the greatest liberties with their adopted identities. They may have different powers than their predecessors or make major alterations to the costume design. In some cases they may even deviate wildly from the accepted philosophies and principles of the original hero whose name they’re taking. If you’re thinking about being this kind of hero it’s important to take into consideration the feelings of the original hero’s friends and loved ones. It could be that they won’t be too happy to find out that their dear whoever’s name and image is being coopted by someone else. So it’s important to truly pay respect to the original hero and understand that if you going to carry on their legacy that you should do it in a way that will truly honor their memory.

Being a legacy can be a huge burden on a young hero but it can also be a source of pride and security. Knowing that other heroes have walked where you now walk and stood where you now stand can be instrumental in a young hero finding their place in the world. And remember identities aren’t forever. If a hero ever decides they want to make their own way and their own name in the world without having to live under the shadow of those who have worn their costume and borne their name before them that’s ok. Being a legacy is a big responsibility but also a big honor. It’s not for everybody but if you can do it, more power to you (that might be a pun.)

[wiremagazine]

MIAMI FILM FESTIVAL SPOTLIGHTS

Photos provided by Miami Film Festival

BOTERO Colombia, Canada, France, China, Italy, U.S., Monaco, 2018 Director: Don Millar 

Festival Summary: His style is instantly recognizable, his art greatly sought after, and his vision admired all over the world: Colombian legend Fernando Botero is, without a doubt, one of the greatest living artists today. An intensely avid learner and private person, he has never made much mention of his start in provincial Medellín and how he educated himself traveling through Europe – a past that allowed him to pave his way to eventually become El Maestro. In Botero, director Don Millar offers a poetic chronicle of the painter's life and art. Shot in 10 different cities all over the world, the film digs deep into Botero's roots to follow his ascent to the pinnacle of the art world, where he has secured himself a permanent position. 

BUY ME A GUN Colombia, Mexico, 2018 Director: Julio Hernández Cordón Cast: Matilde Hernández Guinea, Rogelio Sosa, Sostenes Rojas, Wallace Pereyda, Ángel Leonel Corral, Ángel Rafael Yanez, Mariano Sosa, Jhoan Martínez 

Festival Summary: A retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that plays both with gender and the notion of adventure tales, Buy Me a Gun is set in the near-future of Mexico where women are disappearing and children are being abducted with frightening impunity. A young girl named Huck wears a mask to hide her gender as she helps her dad, a tormented addict, take care of an abandoned baseball camp in service to a gang of narcos who use it for recreational purposes. With the help of her friends, a group of lost boys who have the power of camouflaging themselves in the windy desert, Huck has to fight to overcome her reality and to defeat the local capo. All given a hallucinatory texture by director Julio Hernández Cordón's famously stunning visual inventiveness, Buy Me a Gun creates a dark world where fear rules and violence is routine.

GIGANTES Spain, 2018 Director: Enrique Urbizu Cast: José Coronado, Isak Férriz, Daniel Grao, Carlos Librado 

Festival Summary: Miami Film Festival is proud to present the first two episodes of one of the biggest hits of 2018's TV fall lineup in Spain. With a total of six episodes, Gigantes is a restless, bold, fast-paced tale of brotherhood and rivalry, where alliances are broken as quickly as they are made, and blood loss and violence reign supreme. In this world, the three brothers will have to learn to stand united against their rivals and the police, or they will risk losing the empire their ruthless father built, the only thing they have ever called home.

GOLDEN YOUTH Belgium, France, 2019 Director: Eva Ionesco Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Galatéa Bellugi, Melvil Poupaud, Lukas Lonesco, Alain-Fabien Delon, Nassim Gguizani 

Festival Summary: Rose (Bellugi), 16, was abandoned by her parents when she was a child, but thankfully she has her fiancé Michel (Lonesco) by her side, who loves her as much as she loves him. Through their rose-tinted glasses, they see the Paris they move to as the most magical, exciting city on Earth: it's the height of the Palace years, and they find themselves living alongside eccentrics, artists, and intellectuals. Rose and Michel can't help but being swept up into the exuberance of their new friends' lifestyles, full of extravagant parties and eternal nights. It's at one of said parties that they meet Lucille and Hubert, a couple of bourgeois bohemians who take a liking to the young couple. Soon, an unusual relationship will develop between the four of them, blurring the lines between friendship, love, and sex more than they could have ever imagined. 

HELMET HEADS Chile, Costa Rica, 2018 Director: Neto Villalobos Cast: Arturo Pardo, Daniela Mora, Harvey Monestel, Charly Mora, Gabriel Rojas, William Quiros, Janko Navarro 

Festival Summary: Motorcycle messenger Mancha lives the good life, enjoying the camaraderie of his workmates as they carouse around the streets of San José, Costa Rica, and hookups with his girlfriend, Clara. That is, until a sudden and massive layoff at the motorcycle company ends the party, and Clara announces she is moving to Isla Caballo, where motorbikes are not permitted. Faced with the reality of losing his job and his love, Mancha will have to reach deep within to lead his motley group of misfits, dodging usual and unusual obstacles, to find a way to triumph without even holding any cards. 

KNIFE+HEART France, Mexico, Switzerland, 2018 Director: Yann Gonzalez Cast: Vanessa Paradis, Kate Moran, Nicolas Maury, Jonathan Genet, Romane Bohringer, Elina Löwensohn, Jacques Nolot

Festival Summary: It's the summer of 1979 and in the streets of Paris, France, a serial killer is on the loose. But Anne – played by radiant French pop superstar Vanessa Paradis – isn't aware of this yet. Instead, she is sulking over her breakup with Loïs, her lover and the editor of the third-rate gay porn Anne produces. In an attempt to win her back, she decides to shoot her most ambitious film yet, with the full support of her flamboyant best friend Archibald. But Anne gets more than she bargained for when one of her actors is brutally murdered and she gets caught up in a bizarre investigation. Making her way through dimly lit streets, busy sets, and sweaty clubs to do the job of the ineffectual investigators, Anne is accompanied by a killer retro score composed by French electronic band M83, only one of the many aesthetic details director Yann Gonzalez carefully chose for his vibrant ode to '70s horror cult classics.

NOTTI MAGICHE Italy, 2018 Director: Paolo Virzì Cast: Mauro Lamantia, Giovanni Toscano, Irene Vetere, Giancarlo Giannini, Ornella Muti 

Festival Summary: Three young aspiring screenwriters – working-class Luciano, scholarly Antonino and bourgeois Eugenia – are summoned to Rome as finalists in a national competition sponsored by the Italian film industry's old guard. The boozy evening carries on and on, with the actual award seeming like an afterthought to the assembled aging eccentrics hanging on to the dying lights of the Golden Age of the Italian film industry. But when one of the venerable old movie producers turns up murdered at the end of the evening, the police turn to the young upstart screenwriters as their prime suspects. As they are questioned over the course of the night, each writer elaborates on their own fantastical version of what happened on that fateful night. 

SHADOW China, 2018 Director: Don Millar Cast: Deng Chao, Sun Li, Zheng Kai, Wang Qianyuan, Wang Jingchun, Hu Jun, Guan Xiaotong, Leo Wu 

Festival Summary: In Pei, a kingdom ruled by a young and unpredictable king (Zheng Kai), everyone has their own scheme. Most of all the military commander (Deng Chao), who is a brave and accomplished warrior on the battlefield, but has to face peril inside the palace walls too. He has a secret weapon, however: his "shadow," a look-alike who can deceive both Pei's enemies and the King himself. As he prepares to triumph over a rival kingdom for control of the city of Jing, the commander hatches an intricate plan unlike any seen before, leading up to a combat of indescribable consequences. 

THE ACCUSED Argentina, Mexico, 2018 Director: Gonzalo Tobal Cast: Lali Espósito, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Daniel Fanego, Gael García Bernal\ 

Festival Summary: Dolores Dreier (Lali Espósito) is a typical fun-loving high school student – but when her best friend is brutally murdered and Dolores is accused of the crime, her carefree and privileged existence comes to a hard stop. As Dolores awaits trial, the sensationalistic, tabloid-type media coverage (with global star Gael García Bernal playing a TV talk show host with a particular interest in the case) seems to result in a predetermined judgment by the court of public opinion. 

THE BEST SUMMER OF MY LIFE Spain, 2018 Director: Dani de la Orden Cast: Leo Harlem, Toni Acosta, Maggie Civantos, Jordi Sánchez 

Festival Summary: Curro is a kitchen robot salesman who dreams of making it big in the financial world. After a marital crisis, and despite being burdened by debt, he makes a promise he cannot possibly keep: if his 9-year-old son, Nico, gets straight A's in school, then Curro says he will take Nico on an unforgettable summer holiday. When Nico fulfills his part of the deal, father and son set out on a journey that will change their lives. The Best Summer of My Life is an enchanting comedy about our flights of fancy in showering our loved ones with untold joys. Curro's greatest gift to Nico is to dream with abandon and yet not forget who he is, bringing a message of resilience and love. 

THE EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY OF CELESTE GARCÍA Cuba, Germany, 2018 Director: Arturo Infante Cast: Maria Isabel Díaz, Omar Franco, Néstor Jiménez, Yerlin Pérez 

Festival Summary: Celeste is a widow living a tranquil, unadventurous existence in Havana, fulfilling her daily shifts as a tour guide at the local planetarium. One day when several "Cubans" mysteriously vanish into thin air, the government announces that aliens have been living in Cuban society disguised as humans, and that these foreign guests are now returning the favor by inviting humans to visit their far-away world. It all makes perfect sense to Celeste – she had always thought that her "Russian" neighbor Pauline was eccentric, but now learns she was truly from another planet! Celeste discovers that Pauline has left her a personal invitation to join her and joins the government preparation program to journey to the far unknown.

THE HARVESTERS France, Greece, Switzerland, South Africa, Poland, 2019 Director: Etienne Kallos Cast: Brent Vermeulen, Alex van Dyk, Juliana Venter, Morne Visser 

Festival Summary: With a powerful new voice, a first-time Greek-African filmmaker explores sexuality, religion and masculinity in the deep South African countryside. Two teenage boys start a dangerous fight for power, heritage and parental love that will change both of their lives forever. Religion and field work are the guiding principles of their conservative farming community, where strength and masculinity are valued above all else. In this repressive environment, Janno keeps his feelings to himself. One day his mother brings home Pieter, a hardened street orphan she wants to save, and asks Janno to treat this stranger as his new brother. But Pieter does not want to be saved…

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING U.S., 2018 Director: Tom Donahue Cast: Geena Davis, Meryl Streep, Rashida Jones, Reese Witherspoon, Sandra Oh, Jessica Chastain, Tiffany Haddish 

Festival Summary: This Changes Everything seeks to explore the causes and consequences of ingrained discrimination that women in Hollywood have continued to face. Tracing back a decade of Hollywood history to get to the root of the persisting gender disparity in the industry, this powerful documentary features interviews with engaged members working for meaningful change, among them Geena Davis, Meryl Streep, Sandra Oh, Rosario Dawson, Taraji P. Henson, Cate Blanchett and young, up-and-coming talent such as Chloë Grace Moretz and Yara Shahidi. 

THIS IS NOT BERLIN Mexico, 2019 Director: Hari Sama Cast: Xabiani Ponce de León, José Antonio Toledano, Ximena Romo, Mauro Sánchez Navarro, Klaudia García, Marina de Tavira, Hari Sama, Juan Carlos Remoina, Lumi Cavazos, Américo Hollander, Fernando Álvarez Rebeil 

Festival Summary: 17-year-old Carlos doesn't seem to fit in anywhere: not with his friends, who won't stop talking about the upcoming 1986 World Cup, and not at home, where no-one understands his biggest passion, his record collection. He spends his days listening to his favorite music and daydreaming about Rita, his best friend's older sister, fully settled into the monotony of his day to day life. But then, Rita invites him and Gera along to a place Carlos had only dreamed of before: the mythical nightclub Azteca, where neither rules nor limits seem to exist. As Carlos is roped further and further into the punk nightlife scene, he is confronted with drugs, sexual fluidity, and consequences he never saw coming.  

TREMORS France, Guatemala, 2019 Director: Jayro Bustamante Cast: Juan Pablo Olyslager, Diana Bathen Evans, María Telón 

Festival Summary: In Guatemala City, the very ground the city is built on is fragile and unreliable for its people. It shakes and destroys at will, often with catastrophic results. Under these circumstances, Guatemalans hold strongly onto their faith, the only stable thing they have ever known. Pablo is no different, a good Catholic man who has visited church all his life and is faithful to his wife Isa and their two beautiful children. But when he meets Francisco, immediately falls for him, a sin in the eyes of his church and his family. As Pablo battles his own internalized homophobia, he has to deal with his surroundings' disgust at this discovery, too: he loses his job, the right to see his children, the support of his community. Encouraged by Isa and their Pastor, he starts attending conversion therapy, and soon enough, everything seems to be going back to normal – that is, until the ground starts trembling again.

This was originally published in Wire Magazine Issue 4.2019

[101percentindia]

While The Military Fights Dissidents, Art Is Creating Social Change And Bringing People Together In Kashmir

I have had some of my best cultural experiences in conflict zones.

Kashmir, paradise on earth, proclaimed even by the people who have never set foot on the wondrous land ensconced between the Great Himalayas.  As I spend days traversing the valley on foot, the call for prayer fills the air. Little red apple cheeks sing in unison, the colourful house boats and shikaras with intricate woodwork bob to its tune. Sadly, this undisturbed tranquility doesn't last long. The changing hues of the mystical blue skies reflect Kashmir’s volatile disposition. Those who marvel at the never ending vistas of snowcapped mountains and glistening Jhelum, are also embrolied in the Kashmir conflict; messy and savage. Empty yet evocative boulevards lined on both sides by tall stiff poplars, men and women in woolen pherans scuttle down shadowed alleys as the curfew looms large over Srinagar.

Curfew is often enforced to push angry people back into their homes. Public spaces might be wiped off of its people and their protests, but in the hearts and minds of these young Kashmiris, they continue to resist and question the authority robbing them of their rights. As the military try to erase the physical presence of dissidents, a cultural space is being created amongst the Kashmiris.

War and peace – the two constants

Art and revolution have always followed each other, where periods of social upheaval are often also periods of profound artistic experimentation. Additionally, art is often used as a mechanism to incite people into action. For example, it was a small piece of graffiti demanding the fall of the Syrian regime which instigated a vicious crackdown by the government upon its young perpetrators that led to the Syrian revolution. Activism through art is using revolutionary power to erase fear, to claim public spaces and set off protests and uprisings. Kashmiri artists and cultural activists are now using creative means to protest and express their anger and frustrations. These young art activists try to mobilise broad popular support in their struggle for freedom and change.

Graffiti at Kashmir University

During my time in Palestine, I met a broad spectrum of artists; painters, illustrators, performing artists and poets—their art thrived on conflict. I was fascinated and baffled in equal measure to see these young artists overcome the affects of oppression in conflict zones and pursue their art. Some paint about political and social change, but for many their art is also a way to escape the gory reality of conflict. The artworks convey their innermost hopes, desires and the events of the past which have moved them. And they firmly believe their art plays a significant role in helping people re-establish peace in these conflict areas. It is inspiring and extremely motivating to see how even in the most complicated situations people continue to produce art and culture. What stayed with me was their belief that it was just as important as basic necessities like food, water, medicine in helping alleviate conflict. And as I ventured into the valley of apples, apricots, cherry blossoms and pellet guns to interact with the young minds of Kashmir, I met artists of similar valour and compassion that I had seen in Palestine.

Why? Digital work by Mujtaba Rizvi (Srinagar)

Meeting these peace revolutionaries in universities and makeshift studios exposed me to the humane side of the conflict. Songs and arts that emerged out of the ongoing resistance gave me an insight into the struggle and helped me look at the issues through a more compassionate lens. I spent weeks with them and it dawned on me how all the stories we read on the crisis are dominated only by a political perspective and agenda. We seldom see the individuals involved.

Children of conflict, digital artwork by Masood Hussai (Srinagar)

I was lucky to have stumbled upon one such artist, Sayed Mujtaba Rizvi, in a cute little cafe who took me through his artistic journey. He is also a cultural entrepreneur who happened to run this artsy café, redolent of Kashmiri culture and history in its decor — a cultural space for the young minds of Kashmir. Rizvi didn’t have any formal education or training until he bagged a scholarship to study fine arts at Goldsmiths, London University. This became a turning point in his life and a new artistic consciousness was set in motion. After being exposed to a whole lot of literature, his artworks acquired a certain structure and presented him with an opportunity to explore various styles of expression through art. As a child he didn't have the privilege of having a mentor, but now his work is considerably influenced by Michael Craig Martin and Raqib Shaw. His work reflects the tumultuous past, unsure future of the youth and the crisis. A journey emblematic of many artists in war-torn regions. For them art is duty that must be performed with utmost honesty, where the pain and suffering of fellow men become the cynosure of the artist, provoking the audience to think about the resistance more in context of personal sufferings.  

As Rizvi puts it, “We have to get past the so called ‘news worthy’ stuff and create a fresh engagement for the audience to become involved with Kashmiris and their crisis.”  

With this line of thought, he embarked on his first artistic venture in 2010, by organising and holding Kashmir’s first ever contemporary arts show—Kashmir Arts Quest. A network of Kashmiri artists from all over the world came together to display their works representing an eclectic mix of diverse styles that embraced the full spectrum - popular and contemporary, traditional and modern. Individuals came together not only as participants and victims, but also linked as sponsors, creators, and consumers of art. Kashmir Arts Quest is now an annual event, which primarily looks at promoting young Kashmiri artists and involve the locals for more deeper and critical engagement.

Upside Down, digital artwork by Danish Beg, (Anantnag)

There were hurdles. Following bureaucratic intervention after Burhan Wani’s killing, Rizvi and fellow artists were unable to hold the exhibition at its designated venue. Instead they exhibited the work through an online gallery - To Art Is To Resist. Thus pushing the boundaries of political freedom, and giving vent to the frustrations of the people, especially the youth. Through this platform he hopes to be able to raise  forbidden questions, challenge preconceptions and garner support for the resistance in the international arena. Other initiatives were also launched and taken to cities all over the world - Basel, Schaffhausen, Kuala Lumpur, Guangzhou, Shiraz, Cape Town, and London. In each city, local artists have painted their interpretation of Kashmir and what it means to them. The canvas intends to travel a lot more before the final artwork becomes a permanent public installation in Srinagar, Kashmir.

All the paintings, poems, writings, graffiti, posters are saturated with the painful journey of these artists. Not only to harvest the memories of their struggle, but also encapsulate for many Kashmiris all that has been sacrificed and all that has been lost. Often wondering when it will all be worth it.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are independent views solely of the author(s) expressed in their private capacity and do not in any way represent or reflect the views of 101India.com.

By Pratishtha Chhetri Photographs by Pratishtha Chhetri Cover photo credit: Digital artwork (Untitled) by Danish Beg (Anantnag)

[xavierfiles-blog]

Entry 065 - Polaris

Art by Jim Steranko

Name: Lorna Dane

Code Names: Polaris, Magneta, Malice, Magnetrix

First Appearance: X-Men #49

Powers: Mastery of Magnetism

Teams Affiliation: X-Men, X-Factor, Starjammers

About

How important is your parentage? Are you defined by who raised you or your genetic code? For Lorna Dane it wasn’t that simple. She wavered between the person she thought she was, and the person she was fated to be. She wanted desperately to be normal, but normal was never going to be an option for Magneto’s daughter. It comes down to a classic question, nature or nurture. And the answer, it’s not so clear.

Lorna didn’t remember much before the plane crash. There was some yelling, someone was angry. Then screams, someone was afraid. The young Miss Dane blacked out and awoke to viridian hair and dead parents. From there she grew up fairly normal, and without Cerebro she would have remained that way. The X-Men came to recruit her for their school, but so did Mesmero, a servant of the master of magnetism himself. Mesmero hypnotized her and brought her to meet the man who claimed to be her true father, Magneto. Their shared control over magnetism seemed to cement their relationship but after a complicated plan, one that involved Cyclops dressing up in Viking bondage gear, the X-Men were able to save the girl. She joined the Xavier School and trained to become an X-Man.

Art by Jim Steranko and John Tartaglione

At the school, she met Havok and the two quickly fell in love. They dreamt of leaving their adventuring lifestyle behind them and were given that opportunity when the Professor recruited a team of all-new, all-different X-Men. The lovebirds decided to pursue their dreams and worked on their education in geophysics in the American Southwest. That concept of a “normal life” would always be out of Lorna’s grasp as she and Alex were mind controlled by Erik the Red (who was an alien dressed in the same Viking, bondage gear that Cyclops wore) and attacked the X-Men.

Art by Dave Cockrum, Sam Grainger, and Don Warfield

They would spend the next few years alternating between trying to live a normal life, finishing their PhDs, and getting drug into superhero shenanigans. Lorna’s life would get derailed when the Marauder/evil choker necklace known as Malice took over the body of Polaris. Malice controlled Lorna as the Marauder’s continuously attacked the X-Men after the mutant massacre, but the death of Mr. Sinister weakened Malice’s hold over the girl. This was just in time for Zaladane, the Savage Land priestess, to convince her that they were secret sisters because the “Dane” at the end of their names. I want to take a moment to point out that a basic understanding of how last names work would have solved all of this, but I digress. Long story short, Lorna got rid of Malice, figured out how sisters work, and got mysterious flying brick powers that no one ever explained. This was not good times for Lorna Dane.

Art by Marc Silvestri, Dan Green, and Joe Rosen

Polaris went to Muir Island to try and understand her new powers, and wouldn’t you know it, she got possessed again. This time by the Shadow King, because of course she did. After the X-Men saved the day, Lorna was approached to join the new government sponsored X-Factor, once again alongside Havok. They had changed in the years apart, and their relationship didn’t start as smooth as it had been. The final straw broke when Havok turned heel and became a mutant terrorist (he was actually undercover but whatever). After that, the team got darker, too dark for her taste, and she left X-Factor.

Art by Joe Quesada, Al Milgrom, and Marie Javins

Lorna was determined to discover the truth about her parentage which led her to Genosha, the mutant nation under Magneto’s control. The locals loved Magneto and treated Polaris as a princess. It would have been a good life but the former X-Man couldn’t watch as her father reverted to the maniacal villain she always feared he was. Worse for her, she discovered that all the metal on her parent’s plane was magnetized before the crash. She left several times but she was drawn back to the island.

Soon, Cassandra Nova attacked Genosha and killed over sixteen million mutants who lived there. Polaris was able to survive the onslaught, but was traumatized by the genocide around her. She was a blank slate when the X-Men found her, wandering naked though the devastated island. With her, were the magnetic patterns, recordings, of the last moments of Genosha. It drove her nearly mad, she had to boost the signal. Of all the voices she kept, all the ambient magnetic fields, Magneto’s was the loudest. She broadcast his final moments throughout the island, accepted his death, and was calm for the moment.

Art by Phil Jimenez, Andy Lanning, Chris Chuckry

She returned to Westchester, and to Havok. Lorna was erratic, the stress of Genosha had crippled her mind. She was desperate for some sort of normal, some sense of stability, and asked Alex to marry her out of the blue. It was a short engagement, rushed even, but Polaris didn’t take the groom’s absence well. Her mania came to the surface and she attacked the guests while wearing a Magneto helmet fashioned out of the spoons and forks from a reception that would never be. The X-Men let her stick around after that and it wasn’t long until she lost her magnetic powers in the Decimation. She tried to hide it from the others, but when her deception came to light, she was strongly encouraged to take a break from super heroing.

Art by Philip Tan

Lorna was soon approached by Apocalypse with an opportunity, serve him as Pestilence and regain control over metal. For the daughter of Magneto it was no choice. She attacked her former friends as Apocalypse tried to fill the power vacuum after M-Day. The X-Men were able to save their friend from Apocalypse’s control and Lorna wanted to atone. She made it her mission to destroy the Clan Akkaba and set off to Egypt.

Art by Salvador Larocca

Professor Xavier recruited her to join his X-Men on their mission to stop Vulcan. Havok was on the squad too. When they were unable to stop Vulcan from becoming the King of the Shi’ar Empire, Lorna and Havok led the Starjammers in rebellion.  After many battles, Polaris and Havok were captured by the Shi’ar and left to rot in prison on some backwater world. They escaped, as one does, and assisted the Guardians of the Galaxy in defeating Vulcan in the War of Kings.

Art by Paco Diaz, Vicente Cifuentes, and Brian Reber

With the mission over, Havok and Polaris returned to Earth. After some coaxing from Wolverine, they took over X-Factor Investigations from a presumed dead Jamie Maddrox (he came back). Earth brought back memories, and Polaris began dwelling on her parents again. With the help of Longshot, Ms. Dane was able to see what really happened that fateful day. Her parents were fighting in the cockpit, her father found out about her mother’s affair. She didn’t want them to fight, or yell, or get a divorce. She was so scared. The plane shook, the bolts came loose, and Lorna’s powers manifested there and then, ripping the plane in two. This revelation left Lorna in a daze, she began drinking heavily and soon ended in the care of Harrison Snow with an offer.

Snow was putting together an all-new X-Factor. A corporate superhero team for his multinational, Serval Industries, and he wanted Lorna to lead it. She was a strong, determined leader for the squad but the project soon fell apart. At the end of the world, the final incursion, Polaris made peace with her father, Magneto, and used her power to supercharge him as he tried to prevent the end of all things. She hasn’t been seen since.

Art by Kris Anka

Must Read

I’m gonna be straight with you, the best Polaris story has yet to be written. In lieu of something good, why not try something interesting like her first arc in X-Men #49 – #52. It is a truly bizarre arc that emphasizes everything cool about Silver Age comics. The plot doesn’t make much sense, the motivations are vague at best, but the art is killer and the story is absurd enough to enjoy. Check it out on Marvel Unlimited.

Art by Marie Severin and Joe Sinnot

Ranking

I know there are a ton of people out there who really like Polaris. I am not one of them. She spent too many years alternating between mind control and parentage drama that would make Maury a little leery. I can’t think of a single thing to describe her that doesn’t involve her powers, her family, or her hair color. She is just so inconsistent in all of her appearances that I can’t form an attachment to her. I legit like Skullfire more than her, same with Darwin. Mastermind has the Dark Phoenix working for him so she drops below him, but Sage has nothing going for her. That’s why Polaris is squeezing in at number 54 in the Xavier Files.

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Make sure you check out Legion Quest a new podcast where me and Newsarama reviewer Matt Sibley talk about the FX show Legion. You can follow the show at any of these sources (iTunes | Google Play | Sticher | RSS).

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Entry 065 – Polaris was originally published on Xavier Files