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orangedodge · 3 years

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@dannybagpipesarecalling replied to your text post:

I didn't realize those were Destiny's diaries either. If you would be so kind, can you explain how Emma knows? Unfortunately I haven't read enough comics to know this backstory.

I am glad you asked about this, because it gives me an excuse to post about it while hopefully not sounding like a conspiracy blog. I've been slightly obsessed with this idea since Emma first turned up in House of X, so I'm rather excited that “maybe Destiny's Diaries still exist” isn't just my weird crack canon any longer.

Emma was, in short, the last person who can be established to have control over the whereabouts of the diaries. And as one of the top five telepaths in the world, who has expressly defended that secret from the likes of Exodus and Mr. Sinister, she is capable of preventing Professor X from just taking the information from her. So barring new retcons, if Moira has the diaries now, they had to have been obtained directly from Emma.

That's not enough to say that she turned them over to Moira specifically. She could have given them to Charles or Er—okay, no, she wouldn't give them to Charles. There could be a circumstance where she'd trust them to Erik though. But in that contingency, I think there's enough context to support Emma knowing why they'd want them and for who. To be clear though, I would be less confident about making that assertion if Emma hadn't just opened the “Dr. Moira MacTaggert Memorial Public Hospital” expressly to freak out Charles and Erik, and if HoxPox hadn't already linked them by showing Moira to be worried about what Emma was up to.

(This got kind of long so I thought it'd be helpful to say the important part up front before spiraling down the continuity rabbit hole)

The origins and resulting chain of custody for Destiny's Diaries are as follows: One January, decades ago, Destiny began recording visions of the future in a series of diaries. Filling one book per month, she continued writing for thirteen months. This process was described as auto-writing, and Destiny herself did not have a complete memory of what she had written, nor did she understand the meaning of much of what she wrote.

Nonetheless, the July diary contained a recording of the events leading up to the defeat of Apocalypse, and another diary contained information on the life of Hope Summers, so they've been very relevant to the events of the modern era. It's not explicit yet that Krakoa's founding is also in the diaries, but because we know Destiny had at least one separate vision of Krakoa, and because Moira is interested in reading them, it seems fairly likely that whatever Moira, Charles, and Erik have been doing behind the scenes is also in there.

In the decades since Destiny authored them, most of these diaries were lost, except for five that Mystique kept hold of, and a sixth that Irene hid away herself. After Mystique killed 'Moira,' she sent her five diaries to Professor X, hoping that the temptation of using them would consume his life and lead him toward a ruinous fate. Destiny meanwhile had entrusted the sixth diary to Shadowcat (who Destiny met in 1936, while she was time traveling and having an affair with Moira's grandfather don't worry about it), who eventually became so freaked out by something she read in it that she vanished on a mission, let her friends believe her dead for weeks, and had herself deleted from Cerebro, while leaving the diary to Rogue for safekeeping while she was away.

(That last chain of events isn't incredibly important, I just think it becomes kind of lol in light of current canon)

Rogue went on to take that diary and the research that had been done on it to Storm. Storm and Rogue then formed a splinter team of X-Men, to journey the world searching for the lost diaries, believing Professor X could not be trusted. Along the way a seventh book turned up with a treasure hunter named Vargas (don't worry about him), and an eighth was found by Gateway and given to Rogue in a dream. Eventually Storm tried to get Phoenix to collect Professor X's diaries for her, but they discovered that they had already been stolen (Shadowcat did it).

The rest of the diary hunt isn't really important, just that Kitty eventually ended up retrieving the full set, before she rejoined the X-Men, which only happened after Xavier had left Scott and Emma to run the school. This timeline is important for establishing that Xavier has never possessed the full set of diaries himself, and was not involved in collecting the lost books at any point, nor was he present at the time the diaries were brought to the school and fell under Emma's protection. This rules out the possibility that the set of diaries we've previously seen were somehow forged by Xavier.

Xavier would not return to the school until after losing his mutant powers, whereupon he departed for space on an adventure to another galaxy. He was unavailable, therefore, to have undertaken any telepathic shenanigans, so what happens next actually happened, and is not a psychic illusion. While Xavier was gone, Mr. Sinister recruited Exodus and Mystique, and began a campaign of hunting down precognitive psychics, time travelers, and any other sources of information on the future. Scott, Emma, and Kitty meanwhile predicted that they were going to be next, and came up with a bananas plan to keep the books safe.

X-Men volume 2 no. 203 by Mike Carey (Writer), Humberto Ramos (Penciler), Carlos Cuevas (Inker), Studio F’s Edgar Delgado (Colorist), Virtual Calligraphy’s Cory Petit (Letterer), Will Panzo (Assistant Editor), Nick Lowe (Editor), Joe Quesada (Editor in Chief), Dan Buckley (Publisher)

First they hid the diaries somewhere in parts unknown. Emma then altered the minds of “all of us” (everyone who lived at the mansion at that time) to perceive a bunch of decoy books as the real thing. She then erased Kitty's memory, and her own, so that no telepath would be able to extract the information by force, before they gave each other a series of post-hypnotic triggers so they could restore one another's memories if they ever needed the books again. When eventually Exodus attacked the school looking for the books, they restored their memories, and decided to send another team to the hidden location where they'd buried a mystery box. Emma gave this location to Sam and Bobby, who dug up the box, which was never opened, and which was destroyed by Gambit during a firefight with Sinister's forces before anyone could confirm its contents.

This was intended by author Mike Carey to be the end of Destiny's Diaries, a dropped plot from a previous creative run, that was vaguely useful at building up to the Messiah Complex crossover, but was a lot more trouble than it was worth to an author who was writing about the X-Men trying to avert a bad future. But there's a lot of room in the story he wrote for the diaries to have survived after all.

I think it's actually really suspicious that the box was accessible to Bobby and Sam at all. Why not drop it under a mountain? Why not bury it under the ocean? Why not keep it phased in a tree? And it's a big red box with a big red 'X' on it. I know the X-Men love their branding and all, but that's going pretty far.

No one actually opens the box before Gambit blows it up either. It could have contained more decoys, or nothing at all.

And when talking among themselves, Emma and Kitty never actually say that they're sending the X-Men to retrieve the diaries. They say that they know where the diaries are, and then send the X-Men to a place where they've buried something. The intent of the author is clear, but there's room in the dialogue for a later writer to decide that this just was another plan to keep the books hidden.

So for the entire period of time between assembling the complete collection of thirteen diaries, and their seeming destruction, they are never unaccounted for. Only Emma and Kitty knew the full extent of what they did to hide them, and where they were hidden. If fakes were destroyed instead of the real thing, no one would have known.

We could just be in retcon territory, but I don't think so, because it's fine on its own without any direct changes to canon. And really, faking the destruction of the books to cover up their real location makes a lot more sense than believing Emma Frost actually sent Sam to retrieve the incredibly suspicious looking red box that contained the most important object in the world, while half the super villains on the planet were chasing him.

Believing the diaries weren't really destroyed just requires the reader to accept that Emma would lie to the other X-Men, and keep lying to them for years, and that she'd be willing to put Sam and Bobby's lives at risk to protect that lie. Which she was already doing in that story anyway. She was already lying to everyone when she changed everyone's memories. And she—and Scott and Kitty—was already fine with risking everyone's lives when setting up a decoy trap in a school. So that's why I think this works better as a continuation of the existing, known, story of the diaries, and not a direct retcon to what happened.

In conclusion I think Emma knows about Moira because Moira got the diaries from somewhere, and Emma is the person she could have gotten them from. Nothing proves a direct hand-off in, like, a formal standard of proof or anything, but Emma having access to the diaries for so long, and having been wrapped up in this whole weird plot thread—which involves Moira and most of the Quiet Council—is enough to imply the connection in a story sense.

(ETA - For completion’s sake, there is also a weird story I didn’t go into called Chaos War that was published in 2011 where Moira is resurrected and finds a book in the ruins of the Xavier School that may or may not be one of the diaries, and touching it causes her soul to merge with Destiny’s, who then possesses her and guides her through a quest to destroy an evil god. This was an odd story to place in continuity at the time, and has only gotten stranger, given 1. that couldn’t be the real Moira, 2. Destiny is not merged with her soul. If this is in continuity (it’s been suggested that Moira’s golem was the character in this event), and all of the characters are who they say they are, and if the book in question was actually one of the thirteen diaries (and not some other book that Irene also wrote), then it requires Emma to have deliberately left one of the thirteen books behind for “Moira” to find, which if anything only adds to the likelihood that she knows what’s up)

#x-men #comics #marvel #wednesday spoilers #long post

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dragonprincefan · 6 years

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Hey Dragon Fans! Let’s do a round up of all the information we’ve gotten so far about The Dragon Prince! This is quite a lot of info, so I’ll be throwing the bulk of it under a cut. (There will be spoilers for episode 1 of the show below the cut.)

The Dragon Prince, developed by Wonderstorm Inc., animated by Bardel Entertainment, and distributed by Netflix will be releasing all the episodes of the first season on September 14, 2018.

The official summary is, “Two human princes forge an unlikely bond with the elven assassin sent to kill them, embarking on an epic quest to bring peace to their warring lands.”

You can watch the promotional trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7Bf7JLnlOU

Promotional taglines used by the official accounts have been “Destiny is a book you write yourself!” and “dragon big”.

Netflix currently has the show rated as TV-Y7 for Fantasy Violence. The animation is cell-shaded CG, much like what you see in Fire Emblem, Guilty Gear, or Avatar: The Lost Episodes.

The show will have an accompanying video game developed by Wonderstorm* with the story tellers for both show and game working closely together to ensure the stories being told are well integrated and complementary.

Our lead characters for the Netflix series are Callum, the elder human prince, Ezran, the human crown prince, and Rayla, a Moonshadow Elven Assassin.

The universe The Dragon Prince takes place in is divided into two primary areas, Xadia, the magical lands in the East, and the five great human kingdoms in the West. Centuries ago, Thunder the King of Dragons guarded the border between Xadia and the Human Kingdoms.

In the TDP universe, there were originally six types of magic: moon, sun, stars, earth, ocean, and sky. Humans developed a seventh type of magic, Dark Magic. With Dark Magic you find a creature that has that magic as part of their essence, you consume it quickly, and it unleashes a great amount of magic quickly. Dark Magic became a shortcut to great, fast power, but led to corruption and was wielded at the expense of the varied, intelligent, and powerful magical creatures of Xadia. The dragons and the elves allied to try to put a stop to the humans’ use of Dark Magic, but the Dragon King Thunder was killed by humans using dark magic and Thunder’s only egg and heir, The Dragon Prince, was destroyed. Now the world stands on the edge of all out war...

The first episode is titled “Book 1: Moon, Episode 1: Echoes of Thunder” and was premiered at the SDCC 2018 panel. You can read IGN’s review of the episode here.

SPOILERS FOR EPISODE ONE BEGIN HERE

Ezran is scared of thunderstorms and likes to steal treats from the baker with his pet glow toad, Bait. Glow toads are described as “the Grumpy Cat of magical illusionary amphibians.”

Even though Callum is older he is not the crown prince because he is the stepson of the king. This means Callum and Ezran are half brothers. The condition and whereabouts of Callum and Ezran’s mother is reported to be a spoiler. The King is a black man, and it appears that Ezran may be biracial.

One of the royal guards Sorin/Soren/Zoren (spelling unknown) is tasked with training Callum in sword fighting. Callum is disinterested and prefers to draw, unless Soren’s sister, Claudia, is around. Callum appears to have a crush on Claudia, and Soren helps by going easy on him in sparring sessions in front of her. Claudia appears to be very studious and nearly runs into a tree while reading because she is too focused on her book. Claudia and Soren’s father is a highly placed lord and leader of the royal army/guard.

It looks like Callum will be learning to use magic over the course of the show. What type of magic he uses is currently unknown. Based on the trailer I think that may be Claudia also shown using magic. Regardless of her identity, I suspect what the dark haired female magic user in the trailer is using is the Dark Magic we’ve seen discussed.

The elves that Rayla is a member of are called Moonshadow Elves (white haired elves with dark horns) and they literally draw power from the moon. They are at thier strongest during the full moon. The bracelet Rayla wears was acquired during a ceremony swearing loyalty to the Dragon King’s cause/memory(?). Moonshadow Elves demonstrate at minimum some form of cloaking magic, but can still be detected by certain types of animals. Rayla has a Scottish accent.

Rayla is going to be something of a mysterious figure and strongly conflicted about her role in current events, “testing her sense of right and wrong.” She tries to tell herself that “an assassin does not decide right or wrong, only life and death.”*

When the Moonshadow Elves stage an attack on the castle, the King decides to send Callum and Ezran away for thier own safety. Meanwhile, Soren and Claudia are ordered by thier father to stop the assassins. Callum wants to help but is told he cannot because he is only 14 (and 3/4!) years old and he must be 15 to fight.

There was a black-haired guard in the first episode (the one attacked by Rayla) that had not been formally named, but when asked by the panel audience they named him Marcos.

END OF SPOILERS FOR EPISODE ONE

During the Q&A session (I’ve discussed this with several people who were in the room now trying to get clarity) it sounds like the question of if there would be LGBT+ representation in the show was very narrowly sidestepped. They told the panel audience that any sort of answer would be a spoiler. It seems likely that there will be LGBT+ representation, but it has not been explicitly promised, and I urge folk to temper expectations with the knowledge that while it’s wrong to use the TV-Y7 rating as a reason to not show canonically LGBT+ characters, it may end up being outside the Wonderstorm team’s hands to try to get it on screen. I’m cautiously optimistic. We’ll have to wait and see.

The staff did say they are strongly dedicated to creating an inclusive and diverse fantasy universe, with an especial focus on visible ethnic diversity. We can already see the beginning of that with the King and Ezran.

Being on Netflix permits the staff to do a darker take on the story than they might have been permitted on network television, and they’re excited to get to tell a complex and nuanced story that explores moral grays and the idea that there are both good and bad actors in every group and culture. That said, they want this series to be fun, light-hearted, and quirky too.

The SDCC panel gave away two goodies to anyone lucky enough to get into the panel, a large physical poster version of the concept art we first saw with the initial announcement and an enamel pin of Ezran’s pet glow toad, Bait. The backing for the enamel pin announced that Hot Topic will be carrying exclusive merchandise for The Dragon Prince beginning in September 2018.

(A big thank you to elventhespian, owldee, and kohisu for thier live blogs of the SDCC 2018 panel.)

Official TDP social media accounts:

Tumblr - @dragonprinceofficial

Twitter - @thedragonprince

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/dragonprinceofficial/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/dragonprinceofficial

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPn8cnHhLHMQrGCmS0K5aBQ

TDP CAST AND CREW

The show is being helmed by Aaron Ehasz (Avatar: The Last Airbender, Futurama) and Justin Richmond (Uncharted 2, 3, & 4). Other staff members include:

Executive Producer -- Giancarlo Volpe (Avatar: The Last Airbender, Green Lantern: The Animated Series, Star vs the Forces of Evil)

Composer -- Frederik Wiedmann (Green Lantern: The Animated Series, The Damned, Dying of the Light, various DC animated films)

Executive at Netflix -- Jenna Boyd (Avatar: The Last Airbender)

Animation Directors -- Meruan Salim, Carlyle Wilson

Animation Coordinator -- Tony Power (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles)

Lead Animator -- Brian Ahlf (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) , Eric Childs (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Brian Kavanagh (DinoTrux), Kevin Kyle (The Adventures of Puss in Boots), Jody Prouse (DinoTrux, The Adventures of Puss in Boots)

Other Wonderstorm Staff -- Robert Cogburn, Devon Giehl, Danika Harrod, Iain Hendry, Dan Liebgold, Lauren Topal, Neil Mukhopadhyay, Justin Santistevan, Lulu Younes

Various Animators, Storyboard & Graphic Artists, Directors, etc -- Sabrina Ali, Laura Ambrosiano, Nicki Bianchini, CT Chrysler, Frankie Franco III, Zakiah Grant, Chelsea Gratzlaff, Tim Kaminski, Erica Kim, Nasus Lee, Jessica Mahon, Katie Olson, Daniel Pira, Candice Prince‏, Devin Rosychuk, Alicia Schaeffer, Siggy Sigmond, Eman Thabet

Voice Actor [Callum] -- Jack DeSena (Sokka on Avatar: The Last Airbender)

Voice Actor [Ezran] -- Sasha Rojen (The Flash, iZombie)

Voice Actor [Rayla] -- Paula M. Burrows [@paulamburrows]

Voice Actor [Claudia] -- Racquel Belmonte [@raqattack5 | x] (Sira on Lego Elves)

Voice Actor [Soren] -- Jesse Inocalla [@jinocalla] (The Little Prince, Dead Rising 4)

Voice Actor [King Harrow] -- Luc Roderique [@lucroderique]

Voice Actor [Runaan] -- Jonathan Holmes

Voice Actor -- Rena Anakwe [@DJLadyLane | x] (Sapphire Shores on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic)

Voice Actor -- Erik Todd Dellums [@ErikToddDellums | x | x] (Koh on Avatar: The Last Airbender)

Voice Actor -- Adrian Petriw [@adrianpetriw | x] (Adam in The Hollow)

Voice Actor -- Jason Simpson [@aboySimpson] (Cyclops on The Hollow)

I’m looking forward to having a fun fan experience with everyone in the months to come!

Fan accounts to watch on twitter: DragonPrinceFan, The Dragon Prince Podcast, and Mundo Avatar (news in Portuguese)

Dedicated fan accounts to watch on tumblr: @dragonprincefan and @tdp-news

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airdropsandcryptonews · 3 years

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Bitcoin special! New 2020 high, election fallout, DeFi suffers: Hodler’s Digest, Nov. 2–8

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Bitcoin special! New 2020 high, election fallout, DeFi suffers: Hodler’s Digest, Nov. 2–8

Coming every Sunday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.

Top Stories This Week

Bulls keep running as Bitcoin notches a new 2020 high at $15,950

It’s been another extraordinary week in the crypto markets. Over the course of Thursday, BTC surged by more than 10%. As well as breaching $15,000 for the first time since January 2018, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency romped to highs of $15,950.

To understand how significant this is, data from Messari shows that BTC has only been above this price point for 0.4% of its existence. A rare event indeed.

“People will never again say Bitcoin is dead,” Grayscale CEO Barry Silbert approvingly noted.

Cointelegraph analyst Michaël van de Poppe said Bitcoin was nearing the final hurdle before a new all-time high can be reached, with one last resistance zone between $15,800 and $16,800 standing in its way.

However, he cautioned: “The probability of a breakthrough in one go is not high, given that the price of Bitcoin has already surged by more than 50% in recent weeks.”

Not all analysts agree. Some believe BTC’s dazzling rally may not stop at $16,000, with the number of Bitcoin held on exchanges continuing to drop.

Parabolic predictions

Three ways Bitcoin’s price and stocks may react to a Biden presidency

Bitcoin has cultivated a reputation of being a “safe haven asset,” meaning that investors tend to flock to it during times of uncertainty.

We saw uncertainty by the bucketload this week. BTC appreciated steadily when the U.S. election result wasn’t clear on Wednesday and as ballots continued to be counted. Donald Trump also claimed, without evidence, that many votes were fraudulent.

But look what happened on Saturday when major news outlets officially projected that Joe Biden would be the next president of the United States. Bitcoin fell by 5.67% in the hours that followed. And then it bounced back again in less than 24 hours.

So does this mean the crypto markets fear a Biden presidency? Love the idea? Don’t know what to think? Or are we just seeing heat leave the market now that the results are clearer? And what’s next for BTC?

Well, Biden’s election brightens the prospect of a stimulus package by the end of the year — and this could positively affect Bitcoin, boosting investor appetite for high-risk assets. Analysts also anticipate the U.S. stock market to recover now that the results have been confirmed.

There’s still something we don’t know: the president-elect’s views on Bitcoin. “For now, it really isn’t a big enough issue to warrant his attention,” Compound Finance’s Jake Chervinsky said.

Bitcoin at $15,000 is now bigger than PayPal, Coca-Cola, Netflix and Disney

Early September seems like a lifetime ago now, doesn’t it? Back then, Bitcoin was hovering at about $10,000, with a market cap of approximately $190 billion.

Fast forward to now, and BTC appears to have found support at $15,000. This has also helped Bitcoin’s market cap rise by 50% to $280 billion — and it means the world’s biggest cryptocurrency is now more valuable than most major companies.

Data suggests that, if BTC’s valuation is compared with publicly listed firms in the U.S., it would be the 18th largest. This dwarfs the likes of Verizon, PayPal, Disney, Netflix and Bank of America.

Bitcoin could now end up setting its sights on overtaking Home Depot, which is in 17th place with a market cap of $306 billion. If BTC rises further and grabs 16th place, it would also demote Mastercard — sending a powerful signal about where the future of money lies.

That said, BTC has a long way to go before it can catch up with Apple’s $2 trillion market cap, which makes it the most valuable company in the world. For Bitcoin to eclipse this, we’d need to see a price per coin of $120,000.

Binance’s DeFi index crashes 60% as Bitcoin overshadows altcoins

Bitcoin’s time in the spotlight has been bad news for altcoins… and it appears to have taken the shine off DeFi, too.

Binance’s DeFi Composite Index is now trading under $400 — a 60% decline from all-time highs. To make matters worse, most DeFi tokens have erased 70%–90% of their gains since early September.

The exchange also said that it’s been an “underwhelming month” for large-cap cryptos such as ETH, XRP, BCH and LTC, all of which only eked out “modest gains” in October.

That said, it isn’t all doom and gloom for DeFi. Although the value of governance tokens has taken a beating (perhaps unsurprising given how some of them, such as YFI, were designed to be worthless), the total value locked in protocols hasn’t crashed. It currently stands at $12.16 billion — not far off the record highs seen in late October.

“Extreme Greed” and FOMO taking hold as BTC nudges $16,000

Bitcoin’s surge could tempt traders to take some profit, and all of this could result in a pullback.

But the bigger danger is this: With Bitcoin prices touching their highest levels in 33 months, we’re beginning to see greed seep into the crypto market once again.

The latest Fear and Greed Index rating is flashing a score of 82, placing it firmly into the “Extreme Greed” category. Earlier this week, the score hit 90. The last time it was this high was last June, when it reached 92 as BTC powered to 2019 highs of $14,000.

As billionaire and former hedge fund manager Mike Novogratz noted: “The hardest thing to do in a bull market is to sit. My pal Paul Jones calls it the ‘pain of the gain.’ This is a $BTC bull market. Your job is to sit on your hands and lock away your phone.”

Winners and Losers

Winners and losers week of 11/8

At the end of the week, Bitcoin is at $15,336.80, Ether at $452.55 and XRP at $0.25. The total market cap is at $443,512,630,806.

Among the biggest 100 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin gainers of the week are Aave (76.51%), HedgeTrade (56.00%) and Synthetix (49.09). The top three altcoin losers of the week are ABBC Coin (-16.15%), CyberVein (-13.61%) and Crypto.com Coin (-13.13%).

For more info on crypto prices, make sure to read Cointelegraph’s market analysis.

Most Memorable Quotations

“All eyes may be on Bitcoin and the surge past the $15,000 level. However, the recent development update related to Ethereum may result in some capital rotating back into Ethereum and its broader ecosystem.”

Denis Vinokourov, Bequant head of research

“Regulation is certainly going to be an area of focus in the crypto space going into this next year. It’s only a matter of time before an increasing number of jurisdictions adhere to regulations.”

Sasha Ivanov, Waves CEO

Dan Tapeiro on the Sweet Spot

“All in all, the sentiment is heavily bullish at this point, with the price at multi-year highs and only one major resistance level remaining at $16,000 before a new all-time high comes into play.”

Michaël van de Poppe, Cointelegraph analyst

“Thanks for flying with us today ladies and gentlemen. Off to the left you’ll see we’ve just passed $15K #Bitcoin and coming up on the right you’ll see $16K bitcoin. Please make sure to fasten your seatbelts as we begin our ascent to the moon.”

Cameron Winklevoss, Gemini co-founder

“Rising prices during an uptrend while open interest is also on the rise could mean that new money is coming into the market.”

Messari

Prediction of the Week

Bitcoin sees record 100 days above $10,000 as one analyst eyes “parabolic” 2021

If all of this excitement wasn’t enough, Bitcoin has also officially broken a new record after trading above $10,000 for 100 consecutive days.

Now, a well-known analyst believes BTC could go “parabolic” in 2021 if it follows its behavior after previous halvings.

Bloomberg Intelligence’s senior commodity strategist, Mike McGlone, says it’s a simple matter of supply and demand. The number of new Bitcoin being mined fell yet again in May, yet appetite for the crypto among institutional investors is soaring.

“New highs are a next potential iteration and may be only a matter of time unless something we don’t foresee trips up the trend of greater adoption and demand vs. limited supply,” he predicted.

FUD of the Week

“I destroyed my life” — Uniswap trader spends $9,500 in fees on $120 transaction

Away from Bitcoin, let’s have a look at some FUD stories. And we begin with a clumsy trader who says they have “destroyed” their life after inadvertently paying $9,500 in fees for a $120 transaction on Uniswap. Whoops.

On Reddit, “ProudBitcoiner” revealed that they accidentally stumped up 23.5172 ETH in fees after getting the Gas Limit and Gas Price input boxes confused in the MetaMask wallet.

Uniswap is a non-custodial exchange for ERC-20 tokens, meaning that trades are executed directly from a user’s wallet, allowing them to manually set the gas prices they are willing to pay for a transaction.

Other Reddit users are now calling for MetaMask to introduce safeguards that would force users to confirm a transaction when the inputted gas price significantly exceeds the estimated price calculated by the wallet.

No surprises from Binance

QuadrigaCX trustee only has $30 million to pay claims worth $171 million

Ernst & Young has received $171 million worth of claims from customers who lost their funds when the doomed crypto exchange QuadrigaCX collapsed. There’s just one problem: The trustee only has $29.8 million in funds to distribute.

More than 17,000 users filed claims — with $90.2 million in Canadian dollars, 24,427 BTC, 65,457 ETH and 87,031 LTC among the assets that are missing.

Gerald Cotten, the founder of QuadrigaCX, died in India of complications linked to Crohn’s disease. He was the only person who had keys to the exchange’s wallets — and in recent months, speculation has grown that he may not be dead at all.

Ernst & Young also noted that Cotten traded using customer funds, which has likely contributed to the discrepancy between assets and liabilities.

$1 billion from Silk Road wallet moves for the first time since 2015

An anonymous crypto user has just moved 69,370 BTC from an address associated with the Silk Road darknet market.

According to CipherTrace, the transfer was made in two transactions. The crypto user first sent 1 BTC, likely as a test transaction, before moving the bulk of the coins.

The blockchain intelligence firm speculated the anonymous user made the transactions “to stay up to date with the Bitcoin network” by switching between address formats.

It’s possible that hackers may have been responsible for moving the funds.

Best Cointelegraph Features

Bitcoin price nears $16,000, but it’s Ethereum that may shine in November

After Bitcoin’s strong breakout above $15,000, analysts are looking toward Ether as the market sentiment around Ethereum strengthens.

Coinbase, Gemini and others join forces to combat human trafficking

Leading exchanges are tracing suspicious crypto transactions to combat human trafficking.

The cryptocurrency sector is overflowing with dead projects

Blockchain technology is just a tool that solves a problem, it cannot be the goal of the entire project.

Bitcoin special! New 2020 high, election fallout, DeFi suffers: Hodler’s Digest, Nov. 2–8

Altcoin News Bitcoin special! New 2020 high, election fallout, DeFi suffers: Hodler’s Digest, Nov. 2–8

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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I'VE BEEN PONDERING MOVES

And conditions in our niche are really quite different. In a specialized society, most of the surprises. A lot of research is hacking that had to be crammed into the form of Demo Day, where the current group of startups present to pretty much every investor in Silicon Valley, where you can't go to your boss, but directly to the customers for whom your boss is only a small component of fame. The ideal medium seemed the short story, which I've since learned had quite a brief life, roughly coincident with the peak of magazine publishing. To take an extreme example, consider math. The closer you can get close. To benefit from engaging with users you have. How can I write this such that if people saw my code, they'd be amazed at how little there is and how little it does?

We had the opportunity to raise a lot more interested. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by designing a new kind of animal that has moved into it. That's no problem for someone on the maker's schedule are willing to compromise. By putting you in this situation, to realize what was happening and to milk it.1 The venture capital business is pretty incestuous, and there were presumably people in a position where your performance can make or break it. One of the hardest parts of doing a startup was like I said, I worked on Microsoft Office instead of I work at a cool little company or research lab, you'll do better to go off and work with a small group, and leverage from developing new techniques. But high school students? And if you want to go to the meeting.2 They're just promising to do what we do. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not start the type with the most potential? Can you afford the loss in productivity that comes from making the company bigger?3

I was downstairs in the Harvard Square T Station. But you don't have to know physics to be a distinct, inferior, sort of thing to store-bought ones. I'm talking to companies we fund? One way to answer that is to ask yourself at what point you'd bet against it.4 In existing open-source projects. For the next fifty years, I want to work a a lot b on hard problems. So it's not surprising that so many want to take the VCs' money? Few people can experience now what Darwin's contemporaries did when The Origin of Species was first published, because everyone now is raised either to take evolution for granted, or to answer some question. Clothes are important, as all nerds can sense, though they may not realize it consciously.5 The leading edge of technology moves fast. You don't have to remember everything you've said in the past century.

At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, like microprocessors, power plants, or passenger aircraft. When we first started. But we're not these people's bosses. Money to grow faster is always at the command of the most promising path. Why do founders want to take.6 Plus you have to charm them. And they're hard to reach, because they only get paid if they build the winner. They're so earnest and hard-working.7 Late stage investors supply huge amounts of money and everyone left. If you plan to start a startup, your competitors decide how hard you have to work with existing programs, and this essay is about only one of them. I'm sorry to treat Larry and Sergey as one person.

There is, as I said before, is a dangerously misleading example. But recently I realized we can also attack the problem downstream. Bad as things look now, there is no way to make them better, but that the work they're given is pointless, and they worry that they'll have less leverage over the founders if the founders have any money. But that is not an obviously bad name is a sufficiently good one, and you think Oh my God, they know. From what we've seen, being good seems to help startups in three ways: it improves their morale, it makes other people want to help you. So let the path grow out the project. But it worked so well that we plan to do all our investing this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was. It was pretty advanced for the time. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed but on balance, created for all of human history.8

Notes

It would be to ask for more than one level of links. At one point in the US News list? Basically, the world in verse, it was more because they couldn't afford a monitor.

Enterprise software—and in fact they were to work with the definition of important problems includes only those on the richer end of World War II the tax codes were so new that it's no longer play that role, it often means the investment community will tend to use a restaurant as a result, that he could just expand into casinos than software, because it is still what seemed to us. I now have on the parental dole, and anyone doing due diligence tends to be more selective about the right to buy it. To get a false positive rates are untrustworthy, as it needs to, in the long term than one who shouldn't? 66, while Columella iii.

Einstein, Princeton University Press, 2006.

When governments decide how to distinguish between gravity and acceleration.

But one of the hugely successful startups get on the parental dole, and philosophy the imprecise half. Because we want to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this thought experiment works for nationality and religion as a separate feature. 1% in 1950 have been the losing side in debates about software startups are simply the embodiment of some power shift due to the size of the corpora.

In technology, companies that an eminent designer is any better than their lifetime value, counting users as active when they're on the y, you'd see a lot of people who are all about big companies have little to bring to the frightening lies told by older siblings.

In the early adopters. People seeking some single thing called wisdom have been the general manager of the technically dynamic, massively capitalized and highly organized corporations on the parental dole for life.

The first assumption is widespread in text classification. Quite often at YC. Paul Buchheit for the same work, like languages and safe combinations, and this is mainly due to the rich have better opportunities for education.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Sam Altman, Sarah Harlin, and Dan Giffin for putting up with me.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #time #users #adopters

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redsoapbox · 4 years

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MY ALBUMS OF 2019

Redsoapbox is five years old this weekend, during which time I have blogged over 150 reviews/interviews/opinion pieces. Many of these, together with my work for Wales Arts Review, New Sound Wales, Buzz magazine and From the Margins, make up the bulk of my debut collection Pop Hack. A revised and updated version, for the first time in print form, will be available by Christmas ( Watch out for updates on the blog). One of the annual features that I’ve most enjoyed compiling is my choice of Album of the Year and it’s that time of year once again folks. Before revealing this year’s shortlist (as has become the custom, the winner will be announced as the clock strikes twelve on New Year’s Eve!) here are the previous recipients of the award.

2015 - Trouble In Mind: Jodie Marie

2016 - You Can’t Go Back if There’s Nothing To Go Back To - Richmond Fontaine

2017 - Zero Moon - David Corley

2018 - Asking For Trouble - Dan Bettridge

So, it’s delicately poised at Wales 2 the Rest of the World 2. Here’s my 2019 shortlist -

Fontaines DC: Dogrel

‘Dublin in the rain is mine / a pregnant city with a catholic mind’. And so begins Dogrel, the irresistible debut from young tyros Fontaines DC. Frontman Grian Chatten, his rebel yell influenced by the cities rich literary tradition and the dramatic song staging of Shane MacGowan, throw’s a flurry of big punches early on in a successful attempt at shock and awe. “Big”, “Sha Sha Sha” and “Too Real” are all thundering tunes that rattle your cage. The first time you play this record, it’s possible to believe that you’re listening to an all-time great album unfold in real-time. Ultimately, though, Dogrel burns itself out before the close, but there’s no doubting it remains a powerful debut and a certain contender for album of the year.

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The Delines: The Imperial

Hot on the heels of their critically acclaimed debut Colfax (2014), Willy Valutin and his country-soul combo issued a limited-edition bonus album Scenic Sessions (2015), the unexpected result of a summer recording session initially booked with the sole intention of cutting the group’s next single. The band had already set aside a dozen or so songs for their second album proper, which was scheduled for release in 2016, when fate took a hand. The band was halfway through recording their new album when singer Amy Boone was knocked down outside a convenience store in Austin and seriously injured. It suddenly looked as if Scenic Sessions, once intended as little more than a superior stop-gap, would become the final chapter in the Delines story.

One thing was sure, there was never any possibility of Vlautin drafting in a new singer. The Richmond Fontaine frontman had only formed The Delines in the first place as a vehicle for working with Boone, delighting in the qualities she brought to her interpretations of his downhearted ballads. With his alt-country outfit Richmond Fontaine officially disbanded, Vlautin concentrated on re-working his latest novel, counting down the days until his friend was ready to return to the studio. Thankfully, after nine surgeries, Boone was able to re-join the band and work re-started on The Imperial. It was, of course, well worth the wait - The Imperial is an impeccable collection of heart-breaking character studies, Boone’s well-worn, country-soul whisper vividly bringing to life the despondent tales of Vlautin’s three-time losers. “Cheer up, Charley”, “Holly the Hustle” and “Eddie & Polly” are stand-out vignettes, but there is no filler here. The Imperial is a solid gold comeback.

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Armstrong - Under Blue Skies

I reviewed this sublime re-issue on TBM/Country Mile (with no less than 8 extra tracks!) for New Sound Wales. You can read it here - www.newsoundwales.com/cd-reviews/armstrong-under-blue-skies/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ochnWdLJN3Q

Night Flight: Night Flight*

Night Flight’s debut album, notwithstanding a terrific review in PopMatters, seems to have gone somewhat under the radar, which is a deep disappointment given that it’s an outstanding piece of work. The band wisely used their two excellent pop/rock EPs Wanderlust (2017) and Carousel (2018) as a departure point for an elegant and emotional debut that is best heard with the lights turned down low and a whiskey chaser near to hand. Although sometimes compared to Elbow, Night Flight are more akin to a seventies soft-rock band. Their beautiful new single “Mexico” makes you believe that AOR can be king again in the 2020s.

* the loophole I’m using to include the album is that although it was available to stream in December 2018 it wasn’t released on CD until this January.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuOk2Wgr_KM

Swimming Tapes: Morningside

I’m sorely tempted to just write see Night Flight above and save on the man-hours! In fact, London’s Swimming Tapes’ beautifully manicured dream-pop, particularly on tracks like “Passing Ships” and current single “Mirador”, positions the band somewhere between The Beach Boys and Real Estate in the great scheme of things. There are, however, comparisons to be made with Night Flight – the classic songwriting, rooted in pop’s pre-punk past, for one, the fine-grained musicianship, another. I saw them play a wonderful set at Swn in October (as I did Night Flight the year before) before a smallish crowd. The times will change, though, and the race is on to see which of these bands plays a stadium tour first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFSTJdkZMtw

Purple Mountains: Purple Mountains

Back in 2009, David Berman singer/songwriter with cult Americana outfit Silver Jews pulled the plug on his critically acclaimed band after twenty long years and six assured albums. Nothing very strange in that, you may think: Bands run their course, musical differences set in and people fall out. Except in Berman’s case, there was an altogether more unusual motivation for his walking away from the music business. Posting on the group’s message board, Berman “confessed” to the fact that he was the son of the union-busting lobbyist Rick Berman, a man dubbed by CBS’ 60 Minutes programme as “Dr. Evil”, due to a career spent representing the likes of big tobacco. The singer described his father as a ‘despicable man, a human molester and a scoundrel’, declaring that he’d previously thought that the band could provide ‘a refuge away from his world’. He jokingly promised to turn his hand to ‘screenwriting or muckraking’.

Except it was anything but a laughing matter though, as the opening track “That’s Just The Way That I Feel”, from Purple Mountains memoiristic debut makes painfully clear – ‘Course I’ve been humbled by the void / Much of my faith has been destroyed / I’ve been forced to watch my foes enjoy / Ceaseless feasts of schadenfreude’. Berman had long been battling depression and the album’s lead single “All My Happiness Is Gone” painted an even bleaker picture of Berman’s state of mind – ‘Lately, I make strangers wherever I go / Some of them were people I was once happy to know… I confess I’m barely hanging on’.

Tragically, David Berman was unable to hang on to life. He was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment this summer, three days before Purple Mountains were due to embark on a scheduled tour of North America. The medical examiner’s verdict: suicide.

Does it matter in the end that Berman’s last work and testimony represents a career-high, or that his music as a whole will survive until the time comes when our species is swept back into the sea? It’s worth calling attention, however, to Berman’s thoughts on his last communication with us - ‘Mine is not a cry for help, but an offer to provide a kind of it’.

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Silent Forum - Everything Solved At Once

The long-awaited debut album from blog favourites Silent Forum is an absolute stormer. A full review can be read at https://www.walesartsreview.org/

You can also read my brand new interview with the band at

www.newsoundwales.com/interviews/silent-forum/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U92eAaNr04

Peter Bruntnell: King of Madrid

Peter Bruntnell has been around a long time with, depending on how you figure it, somewhere between 10 and 14 albums to his name. I can’t claim, though, to have ever heard a Bruntnell record (although there is a possibility of having chanced upon a track on an Uncut freebie down the years) until this year’s sublime “King of Madrid”. And even that was a fluke! As a Juror for the Welsh Music Prize (WMP), I get to listen to any albums released through the qualifying period by Welsh artists, and Bruntnell’s album appeared, along with eighty or so others, on the 2019 longlist. It didn’t take me more than a track or two to realise that I was listening to an album that might be the AOTY, never mind Welsh AOTY. The opening track, the soaring, six and a half-minute sweetener, “Broken Wing”, is a master class in songwriting and the album as a whole reveals a true craftsman working at his absolute peak.

You might be wondering, given the glowing recommendation above, why there was no sign of King of Madrid on the recently announced WMP shortlist. It turned out that Uncut magazine’s claim that Bruntnell was born in Wales, made when nominating his Nos Da Comrade (2016) as their Americana AOTM, was, sadly, incorrect. Bruntnell, as you might have guessed from that album’s title, had spent much of his life in Wales, but having been born in New Zealand and residing now in Devon, he was not eligible for the honour this time around. The silver lining for me, of course, was that an artist that I’d missed out on for many years was finally on my radar. Make sure he’s on yours!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUi1oxhlr6U&list=RD_AXJlX0zPZs&index=2

The Murder Capital: When I Have Fears

The Guardian may describe Dublin’s finest as purveyors of art-punk (and there is certainly no denying the force of nature that is “More is Less” or Feeling Fades”) but for me, The Murder Capital’s atmospheric debut is a cast-iron case of Indie-Noir. When I Have Fears is hugely impacted by the suicide of a close friend (an official band statement confirms that every lyric on the album relates in one way or another to that terrible event) and singer/songwriter James McGovern should be saluted for somehow navigating his way through unbearable pain to deliver a singularly devastating record. What also impresses about When I Have Fears, is that it’s in no hurry to get from A to B – some tracks weigh in at nearly seven, slow-paced minutes. This doesn’t always work, but I applaud the grand ambition at play here. The album finishes big, too, with both “How The Streets Adore Me Now” and, particularly, “Love, Love, Love”, which wouldn’t be out of place on Joy Division’s Closer, being colossal tracks which signpost the band’s extraordinary potential.

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Oblong: Hollalluog

Llanelli’s bilingual post-punk trio Oblong may well be the most underrated band in the U.K. Their debut album Brilliant…Gwd (2016) was fast and furious from start to finish, with one melodic masterpiece following another. Incredibly, they repeated the trick on Hollalluog (which translates as almighty) with storming tunes like “Giro Day” and “Light Sleeper”, both contenders for track of the year. And yet they still failed to secure themselves a slot on the shortlist for the 2019 Welsh Music Prize. If you do nothing else after reading this AOTY list, give this band a fair hearing, you won’t be disappointed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsLW0ZAgVVQ&t=114s

Amy Speace - Me And The Ghost Of Charlemagne

When you’re described by Folk Radio as ‘one of the great contemporary Americana singer-songwriters’ and when the much-admired Mary Gaulthier claims that your work has reached ‘a level of absolute mastery’ then you can’t just put out an album once a year for the sake of it - you have a certain reputation, a standard of excellence to maintain. Just as well then that Speace’s latest album more than lives up to the hype. Produced by Neilson Hubbard, featuring regular collaborators Kris Donegan and Will Kimbrough on guitars and Eamon McLoughlin on violin, Me And The Ghost Of Charlemagne is a beautifully crafted, tenderly sung record that, thanks to Speaces’ lyrical dexterity, always hits home. Stylistically, Speace has much in common with the legendary Mary Chapin Carpenter, especially in terms of song texture/structure and vocal tone, as can be heard on the wistful title track below. It’s an album rich with new material, but the cover of Ben Glover’s “Kindness”, rightly held back to the close, will not soon be forgotten.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTECsSBawGM

Liz Brasher - Painted Image

North Carolina’s Liz Brasher is a marketing department's dream - a star in the making from the moment you see her. More important than how many units you can shift (someone fetch the smelling salts for the a&r reps) is, of course, the quality of the music itself. Brasher’s 2018 Outcast EP left no-one in doubt as to her potential, but the guitar-toting chanteuse has really delivered the goods on her debut album. Gospel, soul, country, pop and blues are all combined to memorable effect on Painted Image. A stellar career awaits.

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toldnews-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/sports/im-alive-i-survived-says-the-queen-of-bare-knuckle-boxing/

'I'm alive, I survived,' says the 'Queen of bare-knuckle boxing'

Bec Rawlings, the self-styled “Queen of bare-knuckle boxing,” is remembering the terror of living with an abusive husband. Though the 29-year-old Australian doesn’t cry anymore when talking about her miserable marriage, some wounds will never heal.

Nearly six years on, she can sleep now without fear of being murdered and no longer flinches when touched. “It gets easier day by day,” she says candidly. “I’m alive, I survived.”

The former UFC fighter, a mother of two boys, a bare-knuckle world champion, is opening up because she wants to help those who may be suffering like she once did.

She wants to tell victims of abuse that they are not to blame, that they are not weak. “I’m the definition of a powerful woman,” she says. “That it can happen to me means it can happen to anyone.”

Rawlings did not press charges against her now ex-husband Dan Hyatt, the father of her youngest child. Since their relationship ended, former MMA fighter Hyatt has been found guilty of physically and emotionally abusing girlfriends in subsequent relationships and Rawlings regrets not taking her case through the courts.

“I could’ve saved them if I went ahead and pressed charges,” says the Tasmanian, ruefully.

“The only way I feel I can make up for that is to share my story and hope someone reads it and realizes that if it can happen to someone like me, who is so strong and looks fearless, it can happen to anyone. It doesn’t mean you’re weak, you’re not pathetic, because that’s how I felt.”

In the dead of night, with her two boys, Enson and Zake, and little else in tow, Rawlings mustered the courage to leave her husband and her home in 2013. Had it not been for her sons, she says, she would probably have stayed in a relationship which as emotionally abusive as it was physical.

“I left to save them,” she says. “Once he threatened to hurt them that was my switch to get out. If I never had them, I would never have made it out.”

Visit CNN.com/Sport for more news, features and videos

Rawlings met Hyatt in 2010 and within three months she says he began to belittle her, to play with her mind, the torment turning physical when Rawlings became pregnant with Enson. It was relentless. It was daily. It was hell. But crushed by his fists and by fear, she stayed.

“Looking back, I see the flags early on in our relationship,” the boxer admits with the help of hindsight.

“He was a pro fighter himself so even when I tried to fight back I couldn’t win. It was impossible for me to defend myself. He’d burn and tear my clothes. There were times that I had no clothes because he would destroy them.

“He always said he would hunt us down and hunt my family down if I ever left and that was always in the back of my head — that he would find us and would kill us.”

Hyatt was released from prison eight months ago and in an email to CNN the Australian described his relationship with Rawlings as “toxic” and “volatile” but refuted the allegations of violence made by her and described her claims that he threatened to kill the boys as “disgusting.”

“Bec is as much a victim of our relationship as I was myself,” he wrote. “That may not be a popular opinion, but its [sic] the truth and it’s been my story since day one. I was a poor partner and an even poorer father, but I am certainly not the picture Bec likes to paint of me when media comes calling.”

For Rawlings if any good has come from the bad it is that it was her ex-husband who introduced her to MMA, setting her on a path to UFC, bare-knuckle boxing and world domination. “I’m happy, strong and healthy,” she says. “I’ve got a good life and he hasn’t so that’s the ultimate revenge, success.

“It’s definitely a bitter-sweet story because I found fighting and MMA when I started seeing him, so he brought something cool into my world and, obviously, my young son Enson.

“It’s definitely made me the strong person I am today. I know going into training, going into fights, no-one can hurt me as much as he could. He’s definitely given me a strength I never knew I had. That’s one of the positives I can take. If he couldn’t break me, no-one can.

“It also taught me to love myself, to never let myself be in that position again. I put up with it and went through with it because I thought I deserved that and because I didn’t love myself and I believed what he was saying.”

The Australian has come a long way since her professional debut as an MMA fighter in October 2011. Knocked out in the first round by a head kick, it was a fight which, Rawlings jokes, “scared my mother for life.” Her mum has not attended a fight since. These days she will record a televised bout, watching her daughter only when secure in the knowledge that she is unharmed.

Standing at 1.68m (5ft 6in) and competing at a fighting weight of 57kg (125lbs), the athletic Rawlings, who once described herself as a “wild child” and has the moniker “Rowdy Bec” stitched onto her fighting shorts, isn’t big in stature, but she does nevertheless stand out.

Sometimes her hair is purple, other times white and dreadlocked. There are also the tattoos. Lots of them. She has, she thinks, about 60, all inked by the tattooist who was her first sponsor.

One tattoo is a big red heart at the front of her throat, another the word “Riot,” her ex-husband’s nickname as an MMA fighter, still visible under a red “VOID” stamp. Her left leg is adorned with a tattoo of a hand pistol tucked into a garter.

Like most who earn a living with their fists, Rawlings has swagger (“I definitely think I’m going to be dominating this sport for a long time”) but the bluster isn’t relentless.

She isn’t afraid to talk about her traumatic past and laughs when speaking about one particular weakness. A design on her right leg has yet to be completed because, she says giggling, she is a “cry baby” when it comes to getting inked.

But Rawlings can tolerate pain better than most, though the Australian stresses that the majority of her training sessions are spent mastering the art of avoiding crunching blows to the head by a clenched bare knuckle.

How does it feel to be bashed in the face by a fist flying at such a force that the eyes begin to weep and swell? Rawlings laughs.

“To be punched bare-knuckle, it doesn’t feel any different to the MMA gloves,” she explains.

“When you get punched by a big boxing glove it’s more like a thud that rings your head. With MMA gloves and bare-knuckle, it’s like a real sharp sting. If you’ve ever been hit on the nose with a basketball, it’s kind of that feeling. That stingy, eye-watering feeling.

“To hit someone bare-knuckle you feel it on your hands more. You can’t be throwing punches 100% and you definitely have to be careful with where you’re throwing the punches.

“You don’t want to be hitting people at the back of the head, or the side of the head, because you’re going to do damage to your hands, so you’re going to have to be precise and aim for the softer parts of the body and the face, look after your hands that way.

“You definitely throw a lot less punches and focus on speed, precision and power.”

Rawlings says her hands swell easily, but with the added composure that comes with experience the bumps, cuts and redness were not as significant after her second bout compared to her debut.

To strengthen her hands, she practices an ancient Kung Fu method called iron palm training, which includes punching sandbags and rubbing a special oil onto the hands to help them heal.

“Basically, you’re calcifying your knuckles, so they get hardened and less prone to injury,” she says.

Rawlings is currently training for her world title defence on February 2 in Cancun, Mexico, against Cecilia Ulloa Flores. Though only her third bare-knuckle fight, she is confident.

“I get called the bare-knuckle queen and I feel like the queen of this sport,” she says.

“I don’t think anyone’s got what I have. My skill is getting better and better every fight and I’m going to go out there in February and show that I’ve evolved as a fighter again.”

Typically, Rawlings trains for three to four hours a day, starting with a 2-3km early morning run before returning home to feed her boys and take them school.

With the children in the classroom, she embarks on a two-hour boxing session in the gym, comprising of either sparring, bag work or pattern drills, returning home for lunch and to collect the boys from school. Mid-afternoon and there is more to be done, either improving her cardio, endurance or explosiveness.

Sometimes she will have to drag her sons, now aged eight and 10, to the gym. They have known of no other life, but occasionally they will grumble. With the boys developing their own interests, the family dynamic is slowly changing Rawlings admits, but she is adapting.

“You’ve got to be able to give your kids attention and love and you also need to find the time to train. That’s my job. It’s how I put food on the table,” she says.

“It’s stressful and hard, but it’s also my motivation. They keep me hungry, they keep me motivated to do better. It’s definitely a blessing in disguise.”

After being released by UFC following four successive defeats, Rawlings was offered a contract by the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship (BKFC), the first promotion to be sanctioned to hold regulated bare-knuckle events in the US since 1889.

She is earning a decent living competing in a sport she describes as the “ultimate test on your body, heart and soul,” and wants to create a legacy. She has, she says, found her calling.

“I love the adrenaline of it. I love the rawness of the sport,” she says wholeheartedly.

“It’s not just the physicality, it’s not just the athleticism, it’s your mentality and your heart to fight and keep going.

“I’m forever tested no matter how my fight goes. I learn something new about myself and I think that’s what keeps me coming back for more and it’s the same with training.

“I think I lost the love of it [fighting] under UFC. I let the bright lights, the stress of making weight, get to me. I started questioning myself and forgot what I was doing it for. I forgot that I loved fighting, that it made me a better person, and I forgot that.

“My coach and anyone who has seen me fight say I’m a natural. I was made for this sport and I feel like that in training and when I fight.

“I feel like I’m meant to be in this sport and this was my calling.”

#Bec Rawlings: Australia&039;s bare-knuckle world champion - CNN #latest sports news #news sport #Sport #sportnews #sports articles #sports breaking news #sports latest news #sports news headlines #sports news in english #sports scores #today's sports news #today's sports news headlines

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kristablogs · 4 years

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Local opposition to Alaska’s Pebble Mine grows as the project reaches the next milestone

Male sockeye salmon are among the prized resources in the proposed site of the Pebble Mine. (Bjorn Dihle/)

Editor’s note: Bjorn Dihle is a lifelong resident of Alaska, and an advocate for Alaska’s wild habitat and natural resources. You can find him on Instagram and Facebook.

This story originally featured on Outdoor Life.

Today, a host of conservation and news organizations received via the U.S. Postal Service the final Environmental Impact Statement from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska. This paves the way for the federal permit the controversial mine needs in order to proceed, which will likely be issued within 30 days now that the final Environmental Impact Statement has been released. With the current political atmosphere, the Pebble Partnership is now in position to bulldoze through the final state and local permits required to start development in the wild country of the Alaska Peninsula, where a fully realized mining district would likely spell the death of Bristol Bay and its incredible sockeye salmon runs, the largest on the planet.

Many Alaskans, myself included, have strong ties to the area and its incredible natural resources. In a recent poll, 62 percent of Alaskans said they’re opposed to Pebble. Former governor Jay Hammond and former senator Ted Stevens (both Republicans and likely the most influential Alaskan politicians in recent history) strongly opposed the mine. Many believe you can either have salmon or you can have the Pebble Mine, but you can’t have both.

And many Alaskan outdoorsmen and women have good memories from hunting and fishing the area. My dad had taken me and my two brothers on a caribou hunt there when we were teenagers. I remembered a blond grizzly rising from the brush and glowering as a herd of caribou flooded across the hilly tundra north of Lake Iliamna. My younger brother and I knelt, watching two big bear cubs appear. We’d just about gotten within rifle range of a group of massive white-maned bulls but, now, with the bears nearby, we weren’t eager to push our luck. We backtracked to our dad without firing a shot. A few hours later, we lay on the tundra as hundreds of caribou filed by us only 40 yards away. Twenty years have passed since that once-in-a-lifetime hunt, but the memories of thousands of caribou moving across the tundra and red salmon filling the waterways of that big wild country remain crisp to this day.

I hadn’t heard of Pebble Mine back then, nor did I realize that we were hunting atop the proposed mine’s deposit of gold, copper, and molybdenum. A few years after that hunt, geologists announced the deposit to be the world’s largest untapped resource of gold and copper, and estimated its worth at $500 billion. The idea of a mine in that location was met with staunch opposition in Alaska. And for good reason—the region has the world’s largest run of sockeye salmon, which is vital for the area’s mostly Native population and the $1.5 billion commercial fishery that supports 14,500 jobs and an array of other industries, including guiding sport anglers, hunters, and bear watchers.

Alannah Hurley, a Yup’ik resident of Bristol Bay and the executive director of United Tribes of Bristol Bay, testified before Congress that “Pebble’s proposal to build a mine at the heart of our watershed has been a dark cloud over Bristol Bay for the last 15 years.”

Triston Chaney, a Yup’ik and Athabaskan fisherman, doesn’t mince words when it comes to Pebble. The deposit lies partly beneath the Nushagak River watershed, which has sustained his people for generations.

“We don’t like Pebble. We don’t want it,” Chaney says. “They couldn’t have picked a worse spot to dig a big hole. This could damage our whole livelihood. Life here revolves around fish and if that went away…”

A moose hunter returning to camp on a lake on the Alaska Peninsula. (Bjorn Dihle/)

For Melanie Brown, a Yup’ik and Inupiat commercial fisherwoman, salmon connects her to her culture.

“Bristol Bay would become a desolate place without salmon,” Brown says. “Salmon don’t just nourish the people; they nourish the land. It’s sad to think that could be disrupted. The disappearance of salmon has happened all over the world. My hope is our collective consciousness can keep projects like Pebble from destroying places like Bristol Bay.”

During the Obama administration, Pebble was blocked from moving forward. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a three-year peer-reviewed scientific study that concluded a mine “would result in complete loss of fish habitat due to elimination, de-watering, and fragmentation of streams, wetlands, and other aquatic resources” in a significant portion of the region and that “these loses would be irreversible.”

The EPA invoked the Clean Water Act, potential investors fled, and Pebble appeared to be dead. During the beginning of Trump’s administration, the EPA agreed the environmental risks were too great and announced they would block the mine from going forward.

That all changed in May 2017, when Scott Pruitt, the recently appointed director of the EPA, met with Tom Collier, a veteran D.C. lobbyist and the CEO of the Pebble Partnership. A few hours after Pruitt and Collier’s meeting, the EPA announced it was rescinding its plans to protect Bristol Bay. In late 2017, the Pebble Partnership filed for a mining permit from the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Collier, who stands to get a $12.5 million bonus if he gets Pebble permitted within four years, came forward with the idea of applying for a smaller mine that would operate for 20 years and only recover a small percentage of the deposit. There would be less environmental degradation, Collier pointed out, than the original 78-year mine plan. The “small” mine would still be massive. Its industrial footprint would cover hundreds of miles of the Alaska Peninsula with hundreds of miles of roads, toxic-sludge-filled lakes, power plants, deep water ports, and a natural gas line.

Some critics also argue that Collier’s 20-year mine isn’t economically feasible. Richard Borden, who has three decades working in the mining industry and once was a permitting expert for Rio Tinto, the world’s second largest mining corporation, predicted Collier’s model for Pebble would lose billions of dollars. The Pebble Partnership needs investors to build all the infrastructure and those folks wouldn’t want to commit to a 20-year mine. Still, Collier pushed on, claiming the mine would make a profit and not negatively impact the salmon and people of the region. After the Corps of Engineers released its draft Environmental Impact Statement in late February 2019, the Department of the Interior concluded the report relied on “subjective, and unsupported claims” from the Pebble Partnership and was “so inadequate that it precludes meaningful analysis.” Some locals say that the Corps of Engineers was in collusion with the Pebble Partnership, or, at the very least, under the sway of the current political atmosphere while forgoing any legitimate scientific process.

Alannah Hurley put it simply: “The Corps has made it clear that our people, science, and fact do not matter in this process.”

Since applying for a permit in 2017, the Pebble Partnership had led the public to believe it was planning a transportation route to the mine called the “southern route.” On May 22, 2020, on the eve of the Corps of Engineers releasing its final review and decision on whether to issue Pebble the primary federal permit it needs, the Corps of Engineers announced it was changing its preferred transportation route for the mine to the “northern route.” The northern route is the only transportation route able to accommodate the 78-year mine plan, which is economically feasible and would likely attract investors. The “northern route” would cross land owned by the Bristol Bay Native Corporation (BBNC), Pedro Bay Corp, and Igiugig Village Council; all three entities have made clear that their land will not be available to accommodate the mine.

An Alaska Peninsula brown bear chomps down on a sockeye salmon. (Drew Hamilton/)

Dan Cheyette, BBNC Vice President of Lands, said in a press release, “There are numerous problems with the northern transportation route. It has not been vetted and scrutinized by both the public and cooperating agencies on the same level as other transportation routes. It crosses lands that are not and will not be available for the purpose of building Pebble Mine. And most importantly, it is a clear sign that PLP has no plans to stop at its current 20-year mine plan.”

On June 18, Collier announced the Pebble Partnership will pay at least $3 million in dividends to residents of Bristol Bay who register. As the mine becomes more profitable, Collier claims, dividends will increase. Alannah Hurley called Collier’s dividends a “false promise” and “predatory and shameless.”

Tia Shoemaker, a brown bear and moose hunting guide who grew up on a remote homestead on the Alaska Peninsula, is calling B.S.

“Pebble is telling potential investors this will be a multi-generational mine, while telling the public this will be a 20-year mine plan,” she says.

Shoemaker’s hunch that the Pebble Partnership’s proposal is smoke and mirrors is shared by many who oppose the mine. Drew Hamilton, a bear viewing guide on the Alaska Peninsula—bear viewing brings in an estimated annual $34 million annually—agrees. Hamilton works tirelessly raising awareness of how Pebble threatens the greatest population of brown bears left in North America.

“By applying for a permit for a 20-year mine that won’t pay the bills, they are either lying or stupid, and I don’t think they are stupid. It is just red flag after red flag and our politicians’ commitment to the sham ‘process’ has gone beyond reasonable, to the point that they are just wasting our time and resources,” Hamilton says.

The battle for Bristol Bay isn’t over yet. With enough public support, the EPA could still veto the mine under the authority of the Clean Water Act, as it has before. But barring that, or big changes in national and state politics, Pebble Mine will eventually become a reality. I had this in the back of my mind when my brothers and I took my dad to the Alaska Peninsula for a moose hunt last September, in honor of his 70th birthday. King Salmon was buzzing with anglers, hunters, and bear viewers who’d come from all over the world to experience the region’s incredible fish and wildlife opportunities.

We glassed the country for days, looking out on miles of tundra and giant glacier-covered volcanoes, waiting for a bull to appear. I thought about how, during our caribou hunt 20 years prior, I believed Alaska would stay wild forever. I believed the streams would always be full of salmon and that there would always be places to make that hunt of a lifetime. I know now that isn’t the case. I was wondering if Bristol Bay’s natural wonders would still exist in the decades to come when two massive bulls appeared out of the tundra and snapped me back to the present. We grunted and racked brush, mimicking a rival bull. The moose steadily came our way, aggressively shaking their antlers—a true picture of the wild.

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scootoaster · 4 years

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Local opposition to Alaska’s Pebble Mine grows as the project reaches the next milestone

Male sockeye salmon are among the prized resources in the proposed site of the Pebble Mine. (Bjorn Dihle/)

Editor’s note: Bjorn Dihle is a lifelong resident of Alaska, and an advocate for Alaska’s wild habitat and natural resources. You can find him on Instagram and Facebook.

This story originally featured on Outdoor Life.

A moose hunter returning to camp on a lake on the Alaska Peninsula. (Bjorn Dihle/)

For Melanie Brown, a Yup’ik and Inupiat commercial fisherwoman, salmon connects her to her culture.

Alannah Hurley put it simply: “The Corps has made it clear that our people, science, and fact do not matter in this process.”

An Alaska Peninsula brown bear chomps down on a sockeye salmon. (Drew Hamilton/)

Tia Shoemaker, a brown bear and moose hunting guide who grew up on a remote homestead on the Alaska Peninsula, is calling B.S.

“Pebble is telling potential investors this will be a multi-generational mine, while telling the public this will be a 20-year mine plan,” she says.

0 notes

jonathanalumbaugh · 6 years

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What I learned

January 13th, 2018, 7th issue. A roundup of what I learned this week, sources linked. Published weekly. All blurbs written by yours truly unless otherwise noted. Grouped in quasi-random order.

Design

Land art is awesome. — 10 Female Land Artists You Should Know

There's free money out there for projects! — The Complete Guide to 2018 Artist Grants and - Artwork Archive

Better design can help guide the user to what they want to do, while leaving them in control. Bad design lets them flounder. — Hawaii missile alert: Blame terrible interface design for the Hawaii debacle — Quartz

Looking at a familiar environment through a photo can give us a new perspective. — January Cure 2018 Assignment 7 - Photograph Your Home - Apartment Therapy

Design-centered companies like IBM seem like the ideal, if there must be monoliths like them. — IBM’s Quest To Design The “New Helvetica”

Things that are interactive get more attention than things that are static. Things that are interactive in strange and unexpected ways, probably even more so. — Ikea’s New Ad Is A Pregnancy Test You Pee On. Really.

The impact of simple choices ("this font or that one?") is important. — The importance of typography in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

International fire code/OSHA guidelines for evacuation floor plans are a thing that exists. — Is there a Standard for Emergency Evacuation Maps? - NFPA Xchange

Basic principles of animation apply to more than just animated films. — Making CSS Animations Feel More Natural - CSS-Tricks

CNC made houses cause quite a stir in the comments section. — The PlyPad: CNC Machine Yourself A Tiny House - Hackaday

Design nostalgia looks to an era that never existed, a charicature of an era that wasn't as glorious as it's made out to be. — That font you hate is coming back in style - The Outline

Git

Yes, a section dedicated solely to all the things I learned about git.

Git is a powerful way of managing projects that have releases, ongoing development, and multiple team members. — A git Primer

Use "git checkout" to use files from a different branch in the current branch. — Git: checkout files or directories from another branch – clubmate.fi

This was supposed to help me deploy my website. — Git: copy all files in a directory from another branch - Stack Overflow

Git can also be used to automate deployment of web apps or websites, especially powerful when combined with post receive hooks. — Setting up Push-to-Deploy with git - Kris Jordan

Order of operations: git commit > git pull > merge whatever needs to be merged > push to server. — When do I need to do "git pull", before or after "git add, git commit"? - Stack Overflow

Finance

In systems of continually growing complexity, administration becomes more and more difficult. — An Alleged Theft of a Billion-Dollar Fund Grips ETF World - WSJ

A lot about retirement accounts. — Congratulations, Your Income Is Too High: Non-Deductible IRA Conversions - Part 2 - Seeking Alpha

Ethereum is a crypto-currency that is built to be used for smart contracts, which function as multi-signature accounts, manage agreements between users, store information about an app, and more. — How Do Ethereum Smart Contracts Work? - CoinDesk

Scandal

In a shitstorm of bad apologies for terrible assaults, a victim accepts her harasser's apology. — Dan Harmon’s apology to Megan Ganz was a moment of self-reckoning - Vox

Excerpt: “We are talking here about destroying all the ambiguity and the charm of relationships between men and women,” explained the writer Anne-Elisabeth Moutet... “We are French, we believe in gray areas. America is a different country. They do things in black and white and make very good computers. We don’t think human relationships should be treated like that.”

What I learned: I'm not really sure.

— Opinion: Catherine Deneuve and the French Feminist Difference

In the almost every one of the differing opinions about Ansari's wrongdoings, even the ones who decry his accuser, there is at least some shred of truth. — The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari

Social media

Facebook has shifted its focus from personal connection to advertising. Can it be saved? Probably only by killing it. — Facebook Can’t Be Fixed. — Facebook (FB) is using an old drug dealer tactic to keep its users hooked to News Feed

In a society anxious to be texted back, we value the ability to put off replying. — How It Became Normal to Ignore Texts and Emails

youtube

Algorithmic systems like Youtube feed off of its users preferences. If we don't like it, it's our fault. — Making a Better YouTube

There is a new dialectic, or at least one that has been brought to the fore by the over-availability of news: virtue signalling vs. engagement. Every inflammatory headline begs to be shared with righteous opinion attached, and every time one is it fans the flames of the 24 hour news cycle. Maybe before long, it'll be called the 1400 minute news cycle. — Seriously, You—Ok, We—Need To Stop Watching The News This Year

Massive systems like Youtube are now almost completely run by algorithms that are exploitative. It's not that there is aberrant behavior in the algorithm; it is built to be exploitative, and it's now being taken to its natural end. And yes, as users, we are complicit. — Something is wrong on the internet – James Bridle

We need to consider the root beliefs collectively held by society that have given rise to the services that now run our lives. — Lost Context: How Did We End Up Here?

Life

A catch-all category for stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else, or fits in too many other categories!

There are points in time that we're more likely to work to push beyond our current capabilities; perhaps by preparing for them, we could push even farther. — The Bizarre Motivating Power of Aging Into a New Decade

Spiciness is carried to our brains through nerves in the dermis on our tongues, not through taste buds. — Did You Know That "Spicy" is Not a Taste?

Alcohol hits the bloodstream very quickly (~90 seconds) but takes hours to be fully released into the bloodstream, so BAC can climb even after the last drink. — Here's Why You Vomit After Drinking Alcohol And How To Feel Better After Getting Sick

Discomfort and fear keep us from enjoying ourselves. When we experience them, slow down, check them at the door and forge ahead. — I Was the Youngest Person at the Dump - Kathleen Ann Thompson

The authors argue that inequality is almost the same as it has been for decades, the top 1% is simply receiving their large slice of the pie in salary, rather than in increasing shareholder value pre-Reagan tax changes. — A new study says much of the rise in inequality is an illusion. Should you believe it?

Making room for opportunity to occur is the first step to seizing opportunity. — Opportunity Knocks When You Least Expect It. - Kathleen Ann Thompson

What I learned: The internet is a utopia; it does not physically exist, it's a virtual space that enables the amplification of the moral outrage that is a tool of self-absolution. And now we are no longer able to shape the internet, what we made now shapes us. Excerpt one: "The utopian ideal of the internet—unregulated access to information, pure connectivity—now feels antiquated. Also antiquated: trying to determine if the internet is simply good or bad. Possible and necessary: thinking more deeply about how it’s rewiring our brains and warping our experience of time, about the vistas of reality it’s revealing and creating, and what to do with our positions therein, so that we do not go mad from it all nor flee altogether." Excerpt two: "Communicating every thought about every moral conflict has become so effortless, even obligatory, that it feels like nothing could possibly be informing our reactions beyond the conflicts themselves." Excerpt three: "The myriad reckonings we’re desperate for might be cultivated in the kind of safe space Kaufman describes. Not a literal dream state, but somewhere where you don’t feel watched or compelled to perform. Somewhere private, or where you’re listening to one person at a time rather than a ton of little representations of people all at once. Somewhere where the discomfort of moral responsibility can’t be mowed over with the stimulus of an outrageous story. Where, if you’re disturbed to come upon a transgressive thought of your own, the next move is to pick it apart, rather than to go online and project an image of yourself as perfectly evolved." — Rookie » Editor's Letter

Automating repetitive tasks using whatever tools at hand is a powerful way to reach past a productivity plateau. — Schedule Tasks on Linux Using Crontab

Giving our viewers "everything" is doing our audiences a disservice. Shows like Twin Peaks make us work to understand. — ‘Twin Peaks’ Episode 8 Explained: Recap & Top Theories

B teams at Google (teams that were not composed of top performers) made more significant contributions to the company than its A teams, once again proving that soft skills are incredibly important. — The surprising thing Google learned about its employees — and what it means for today’s students

Figure out your most productive hours and be prepared to work on your most important projects in that time. — Work During Your Hours of Peak Productivity

Google may not be explicitly evil, but it is starting to force web developers to do things the Google way. — Web developers publish open letter taking Google to task for locking up with web with AMP / Boing Boing

Psychology

I have no idea what's going on here. — Carl Jung Was Alt-Right

Contradicting perhaps decades of psychology, personality (as measured by OCEAN, or the "Big Five") shows downward trends in all traits except agreeableness. — Study of 50,000 people shows personality changes throughout life

A free "Big Five" or "OCEAN" test! — Understand Yourself - Personality Test

Beginnings, endings, and other psychological landmarks are powerful times to take advantage of in our lives. — You’re Most Likely to Do Something Extreme Right Before You Turn 30

#Weekly Digest

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kellyrachael84-blog · 6 years

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Do Suicidal People Get Cancer, Just Like Everybody Else?

The Premise Of This Question Is False. Suicidal People Do Get Cancer, Just Like Everybody Else.

Today is my brother's birthday, and my mom's friend is close to dying of cancer. I need to tell my mom that I have strong suicidal thoughts since I am having to wait for my meds to be refilled. How can I do that without overwhelming her?

If it's diagnosed on time, the treatment of melanoma involves a fairly non invasive surgical procedure. Sometimes, a combination of external radiation and internal radiation is used. It is very fast progressing with devastating destructive power. Irwin's first tournament victory came at the 1971 Sea Pines Heritage Classic. They know when your chemotherapy or radiation treatments begin and end, how you're feeling about all of it, what the side effects of your treatments are, and what you need to help you get through it. These safe instruments are constantly prepared and arranged to safeguard the body from contamination. Prostate cancer screening and more effective treatments have improved the 5 year survival rates, increasing from 66% in 1975 to 99% in 2005. Carl Simonton, a ongologist and his psychologist wife, Stefanie Mathews, treated terminal cancer patients for physical, emotional, and social ailments holistically in his cancer counseling and research center in Fort Worth Texas. As per statistics, more than a million women in India alone develop breast cancer in a year. I still have no real idea what's happening, I'm just happy someone's going to help me. Individuals with this ailment may experience increased urge or frequency of urination, the urgency to urinate, pain with urination, or urinary incontinence. More than a thousand runners and walkers were expected to run the 3.1 mile long stretch along the Hollywood Boardwalk. The first was Sister Donna which gave her personal story of her grandmother and father that died from breast cancer and how technology has advanced from their generation to now.

youtube

If you live alone, try to stock up on meals when you feel well. The cancer is still in her body and the chance for recurrence is high. This appointment would be scheduled in about two weeks. It will provide your doctor with a clearer image and make it easier to read the images.

Should men stop eating eggs to reduce the risk of prostate cancer?

Zoren, MD., F.A.C.S. whom gave detailed information about the advances in the regular procedures to battle cancer like chemotherapy, how that the guest had a lot to be thankful for because of those advances and the future of where cancer research is headed, also giving statics on breast cancer. Some of your treatments can be quite taxing, making the added stress of negotiating through traffic inadvisable. As soon as they find conditions conducive again, they start multiplying. My kids love the dog and I need to do something.Me: Then I guess they need to do a splenectomy (an operation requiring general anesthesia to remove the spleen and stop what would otherwise be a fatal hemorrhage into the abdomen).About 2 weeks late my friend calls me back.Doctor Friend: Well my dog surveyed the surgery and they had to give her 4 transfusions. Feel free to learn about colon cancer treatment options here. My father died of chemically induced cancer (benzene among others), so I'm as anti-toxic chemical as they come but, IMO, CA should by renamed CYA when it comes to these matters. Memories that shall last a lifetime.Be thankful to God for the health he has blessed you with. Some cancers can be successfully treated with simple surgery; others may require a combination of surgery, radiotherapy and/or a regimen of expensive chemotherapy. After a brief hospitalization, Dan returned to working, only to find himself admitted a few days later to Banner Desert's oncology Department ICU . They also told me I could not use sunscreen for the first year due to the harm it would cause the skin. As long as the patient has not undergone chemotherapy,the recipient should remain unaffected. Except for big drug companies who are making billions of dollars in profit by marketing these therapies. What does it mean when you're a (F) Sag sun, Cancer moon, and Taurus rising? I'm sure some people will come back with stats, but individuals are NOT statistics. They would be unlikely to have the same protections if transplanted into another person. It was more important to me that I survive and live a long and healthy life than it was to preserve my ability to have children. Caffeine may increase the problem so it is probably best to completely eliminate it. Signet Jewelers Limited ("Signet") (NYSE: SIG) (LSE: SIG), the world's largest specialty retail jeweler, intends to announce its results for the 13 weeks ended April 30, 2011 ("first quarter Fiscal 2012") at 7.30 a.m. If one atom of a chemical known to cause cancer in man or beast, it ranks a label, even if CA is the only place where anyone knows it. So we continued this routine, Norco tablets every four hours followed by injections every hour, all night until I was released the next morning at 9:30 a.m. No matter what anyone tells you about losing their hair or being incontinent of stool or urine, it is embarrassing. We use tumor markers to detect the presence of certain types of cancer in the body, and to monitor the progress of cancer treatment.Specifically, we can use this test (in conjunction with other tests) to monitor the success of a current therapy, evaluate the need for surgical intervention, or assess the development of recurrence. But these were reported by cranial cancer patients whose tumors were found on the jaw and sinus in addition to the frontal bone.Not Brain CancerIf you're concerned that the lump is brain cancer, rest easy. It's highly unlikely that there would be a cure for "cancer."Can there ever be a "one size fits all" cure for all cancer types? You asked: Is there a way that I can diagnose cancer at home?Well, even if you were a Pathologist, at best you might very well be able to suspect a cancer at home. The books said to imagine destroying the "bad" invasive cells by blowing them up. Moreover, no one generally bothers with intratumoral infusion of a drug unless it requires a very high concentration to work.

#Cancer #treatment

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topmixtrends · 7 years

Link

ON OCTOBER 28, 1949, Kurt Vonnegut wrote to his father as follows:

Dear Pop:

I sold my first story to Collier’s. Received my check ($750 minus a 10% agent’s commission) yesterday noon. It now appears that two more of my works have a good chance of being sold in the near future.

I think I’m on my way. I’ve deposited my first check in a savings account and, as and if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year’s pay at GE. Four more stories will do it nicely, with cash to spare (something we never had before). I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God.

I’m happier than I’ve been in a good many years.

Love.

This letter — which first appeared publicly in Vonnegut’s “autobiographical collage” Fates Worse than Death (1991), and is quoted in the editorial material of the newly published volume Complete Stories — may strike the contemporary reader as one of the most improbable narratives Vonnegut ever devised. The idea that by selling five short stories a year an author could earn as much as a publicist at General Electric (Vonnegut’s day job at the time) seems to come not just from another era, but from another planet. Incidentally, the word is (i.e., it says so on Wikipedia) that Collier’s bought his second story for $950. To get a sense of these amounts in today’s money we should multiply by 10.

That first short story was “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” and it’s a great one, straight off the bat, full of what we’ve come to know and love about Vonnegut’s writing. Arthur Barnhouse is a scientist who has the ability to destroy matter with his mind. The US military expects him to use his powers against weapons belonging to his country’s enemies, but he’s a multilateralist and he destroys all weapons, regardless of which side they belong to. Complications inevitably ensue. The prose is plainspoken, droll, and immediately engaging. The story has an element of wild fantasy, although the characters are all too human, and it contains a powerful antiwar message. To say it’s “typical” Vonnegut sounds reductive, but the story remains surprising and subversive, and of course extremely current, nearly 70 years after it was written.

Although “Barnhouse” was Vonnegut’s first published work of fiction, Complete Stories contains one written before that, from 1947. Titled “Brighten Up,” it’s about wheeling and dealing by US soldiers in a German prison-of-war camp during World War II. It’s another good one, though Vonnegut couldn’t get it published at the time, perhaps because it shows the US military as less than saintly. It first appeared in print in 2008 in a posthumous collection titled Armageddon in Retrospect.

Seen from our present viewpoint, those two early stories might be thought of as a blueprint for Vonnegut’s subsequent obsessions, but the writing life is never so simple. As is often the case, Vonnegut’s ambition to write preceded knowing exactly what he wanted to write about, and so the early stories head off in many directions as he tries a little of this, a little of that. There are quite a number of stories dealing with war, of which more later, and a considerable number involve a fantasy or science-fictional element. In “Confido,” a man invents a device that allows your own thoughts to talk to you. In “The Drone King,” a man invents a communications system operated by bees. We find a bit of O. Henry here, a touch of Damon Runyon there, even some hints of early John Cheever. Vonnegut isn’t writing to a formula, but he is trying to break into a market, writing stories suitable for the “slicks”: the likes of the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Redbook. “Slick” referred to the glossy paper the magazines were printed on, but it often describes the nature of the fiction too, even Vonnegut’s. The least successful of his stories seem too glib, as in “Tango,” where a rich, pampered young man discovers “the savage in himself,” rejects his privileged background, and runs off with the upstairs maid.

Vonnegut got a lot of stories published in magazines, but a lot were rejected, too. He just about made a living from his short stories, along with his early, only modestly successful novels, and when things got really tight he went to teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Gradually however, he moved from the world of the jobbing writer to that of the serious man of letters. In 1967 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1969 published Slaughterhouse-Five, the book that changed everything for him. It was a best seller, a critical success, and a countercultural phenomenon, with the money from the movie adaptation the icing on the cake.

After Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut no longer needed need to write short stories, so he didn’t; in any case, the market for them was drying up. The last short he had published in a magazine was “Welcome to the Monkey House,” in Playboy in 1968. By my reckoning, his last story to be published outside one of his own collections, appeared in 1972 in Harlan Ellison’s anthology Again, Dangerous Visions. It was titled “The Big Space Fuck.” He’d come a long way from Collier’s.

Keeping track of Vonnegut’s short stories is not an easy business. Depending on how you count, he published two or three volumes of short stories in his lifetime, with a good deal of overlap: all but one of the stories from Canary in a Cat House (1961), for instance, later appeared in Welcome to the Monkey House (1968). The one left out was “Hal Irwin’s Magic Lamp,” a pretty ropey thing about money not buying happiness, with some casually naïve asides about race relations. Vonnegut must have had his reservations about it, because he rewrote it for Bagombo Snuff Box (1999), a gathering up of stories that had appeared in magazines but not in book form. By this time, he hadn’t published a new story in over 25 years. In that volume, you’ll also find an essay titled “Coda to My Career as a Writer For Periodicals” in which he tells us that two other stories — “The Powder-Blue Dragon” and “The Boy Who Hated Girls” — were similarly rewritten. He described these stories as “literary fossils,” although “[a]s fossils, they are fakes on the order of Piltdown Man, half human being, half the orangutan I used to be.”

The editors of Complete Stories have found five more unpublished fossils among Vonnegut’s papers at the Lilly Library in Indiana, bringing the total of extant stories to 98. Some of these are, unsurprisingly, slight, but one of them, “Atrocity Story” — about the gap between military justice and natural justice, and about how decent men are sometimes happy to let the enemy do some dirty work on their behalf — is terrific.

Organizing this mass of work is obviously a tricky business for an editor. Arranging them historically by date of composition strikes me as the best way, but apparently there is scant archival evidence of when the individual stories were written. Therefore, the editors, Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield, say, in their introduction, that “the method in assembling these materials has been to group the stories rationally, according to their subject matter and approach.” Well, one man’s rational arrangement may be another’s cause for bafflement. The book is divided into eight sections, each with a headnote from one of the editors. Readers won’t be surprised to find sections labeled “War” and “Futuristic,” but they might be surprised by what does and doesn’t appear there: you might think that “Barnhouse” story could easily have fit into either of those sections, but in fact it appears in the one titled “Science.” There are sections titled “Women” and “Romance,” but all the romance stories certainly involve women, and many of the women’s stories involve romance. There’s a section called “Work Ethic Versus Fame and Fortune,” a perplexing title, not least because it contains the gloriously odd “Ed Luby’s Key Club,” a story which fuses elements of Raymond Chandler and Kafka — bad cops, corrupt officials, an impenetrable legal system, a hunt for a fugitive — and has some final twists that are as bizarre as they are unconvincing, but in which the matter of ��work ethic versus fame and fortune” is not, to my mind, foregrounded.

There’s also a section titled simply “Behavior.” Klinkowitz writes, “Human behavior has always been a prime topic for fiction writers.” Well, yes. Pretty much all of Vonnegut’s stories might be included under that title, as for that matter could pretty much any story ever written by anybody. Still, one can’t blame a dead author for the foibles of his editors, and it’s good to have all of Vonnegut’s stories accessible and in one place at last.

Sudden immersion in the early work of Kurt Vonnegut, the kind of immersion that comes with reading your way through 900 pages of his short stories, reveals a world very different from our own — very much whiter for one thing — but by no means alien or unrecognizable. One way or another, the United States and its ideals, aspirations, and failures are always on his mind. His political concerns are, for the most part, as relevant as ever: environmental conservation, overpopulation, state control, and, of course, war.

Other early Vonnegut stories are far more domestic, and the world they depict does seem, some six decades on, a little bit square. The characters tend to be middle class, often with jobs in sales. They want to live in decent homes, and care about money and respectability above all. Relationships tend to be what Vonnegut very definitely would not have called heteronormative. Of course there are problems; people stray, betray each other, undergo adjustments and realignments, and naturally some relationships fail completely. But there’s always the sense that human companionship, and above all love, is the goal worth fighting for. In the story “Paris, France,” for instance, we meet three couples, one old, one young, one middle-aged, traveling on the train from London to Paris. The two older pairs appear to have terrible marriages, while the young couple are in the first flush of love. Later we see them all again — well, five out of six of them — on their way back to London. The older couples have found ways to reconcile, the young lovers have split up. You feel this could have been taken from one of those 1960s portmanteau movies, probably starring Cary Grant.

For obvious historical reasons, the women in Vonnegut’s stories would not call themselves feminists, though judging by their actions that’s what they are. They’re also invariably wiser and stronger than their male counterparts. In “Miss Snow, You’re Fired,” for instance, two men fall desperately in love with the same woman; neither has a clue who she really is, and she’s the one who’s smart enough to point that out. The one story where the sexual politics goes completely haywire is alas, one of Vonnegut’s best known: “Welcome to the Monkey House,” set in a future where the government controls reproduction, and the outlaw Billy the Poet “rapes” women into “liberation.” Even in 1968 this wouldn’t do. The fact that he wrote the story for Playboy somehow makes it even less forgivable.

Though not everything works, there are wonderful lines, sentences, and whole paragraphs throughout the collection; it is full of constructions that are funny, clever, and unexpected. In “Eden by the River” you’ll find: “The boy was seventeen, tall, still growing — as graceless as a homemade stepladder.” In “The Honor of a Newsboy,” the police chief is trying to solve a murder case: “He guessed Earl Hedlund had done it […] Estelle had told Earl to go to hell one night at the Blue Dolphin, told him off the way he’d never been told off before. Nobody had ever told Earl off that way because everybody knew Earl would kill anybody who did.” And from “The Big Space Fuck”: “In 1987 it became possible in the United States of America for a young person to sue his parents for the way he had been raised. This was not only an effort to achieve justice but to discourage reproduction, since there wasn’t anything much to eat any more.”

What even the best of the short stories don’t, and I suppose can’t, do is create the broad sweep and the sense of interconnectedness that’s present in Vonnegut’s novels. In Breakfast of Champions, for instance, my favorite work of his, we see how entangled are the fates of various classes and types of people. There is no us and them. The “fabulously well-to-do” businessman, the guy who runs the car dealership, the kid who sweeps up at the dealership, the cocktail waitress, and the pulp sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout are all destined to cross paths and have their lives changed, and there’s nothing they can do about it. The short story form doesn’t allow for that kind of breadth and complication, and that was what Vonnegut needed.

I think it’s fair to say that we wouldn’t be so fascinated by Vonnegut’s short stories, might not be reading them at all, if they hadn’t led to the greater achievement of the novels, and in particular Slaughterhouse-Five. There are 19 stories in the section labeled “War,” and the effects of war are felt in others too. A moral discomfort and ambiguity informs most of them. People in wartime, Vonnegut tells us, are selfish, corrupt, unheroic: that’s what war has done to them, but to understand all is not necessarily to forgive all. The distinction between the good guys and the bad guys is never simple or clear cut, but that’s not an occasion for cynicism, rather for even finer shades of moral distinction. In the story “The Commandant’s Desk,” a carpenter in Czechoslovakia is forced to build a desk for the occupying Russian commandant, but before he can finish it, the Americans arrive and a boorish army major requisitions the desk. It contains a bomb, and the carpenter is every bit as willing to blow up the US major as he was to blow up his Russian predecessor. The major leaves and is replaced by a new, generous, decent captain who saves the day. Generosity and decency seem to be the two qualities Vonnegut values most, even as he recognizes their fragility and rarity.

Reading these early war stories, it’s possible to sense that Vonnegut is trying to find a new way to write on the grand scale about war, but, like Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon after him, he needs to approach the subject obliquely, to find a MacGuffin. Even so, there’s very little here to suggest he would succeed in this by combining fictionalized autobiographical material with an improbable time-travel narrative as he did in Slaughterhouse-Five. Who could possibly have dared even to think such a thing was possible? The obvious answer is: A writer of genius. But if this collection of stories proves anything, it’s that genius never arrives fully formed. So it goes.

Geoff Nicholson is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books. His latest novel, The Miranda, is out now.

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