#PARADOX LIVE PARADOX LIVE PARADOX LIVE * ROTATING IT AS HARD AS POSSIBLE *

[luvzuno]

ㅤㅤ୧ — for a mutual !!!!!!! ~ Reblog & Credit if using !!

[abyssalzones]

Hello! I really love your work in general and your OSDD Ford analysis, I have read it in full at least three times. There’s a line near the end about his different selves possibly becoming more organizing/appearing at different intervals, but you stop there for brevity. Would you care to share any further thoughts? (It’s fine if not.)

Thank you!!

Hi! Really glad to hear you liked it, wait did you say three times? that's nuts. god damn.

I could definitely elaborate, although I want to note that while in part I did stop there for brevity's sake I did also stop there for the sake of making a more unified point- and, importantly, I didn't want to drift too far into the realm of speculation. Or "just making shit up." I often have a hard time positing something if I don't feel it's being elaborated on from a textual basis... which might be kind of goofy when we're talking about a fanbase that was mostly AU content at one point but whatever I've chosen to die on this hill. Anyway.

All my thoughts about OSDD are highly influenced by my experiences with it obviously, therefore my thoughts are probably going to conflict with someone else's, but I think any "organizing" that would happen with separate parts would be heavily influenced by everything in ford's life calming the fuck down and not requiring a rotating cast of coping mechanisms. For example: a good chunk of clarified parts in real DID/OSDD experiences can be classified as introjects. Despite what you commonly see in online subgroups (no judgment, obviously) these introjects are often of real people that might be influential in your life.

repost of funny little comic I drew for effect ^

in my experience these things work on like... the basis of when they're Needed most. if ford is living in a healthy consistent environment with people who love him and can already provide assurances, I think the need to supplement that with any sort of internal coping mechanism would subside. then again, people are vulnerable when they're still trying to settle in a safe space after trauma, it's possible to invent an internal threat to, paradoxically, make circumstances feel more "predictable." coughs loudly. bill already existed functionally in ford's head 90% of the time so it just kind of feels par for the course that a shadow of him is going to stick around. maybe that seems sad or foreboding but I think it's just a normal part of coping with something that haunted you for half of your life. idk.

do I think these mental aspects would manifest outwardly? as in, like, fronting? not really. However I think if anything was noticeable it'd be a difference between like, "panic mode" ford(s) and "normal human citizen on earth" ford. I could definitely see a distinction of perspectives and ability between a self that exists out of pure survival (and probably still thinks he's in sci-fi hell or whatever) and the self that just chills and writes detailed notes on supernatural plants in his journal. there's also something to be said about [the entire fucking thing I wrote about dead alters and the perception of traumatic events as a type of death] and whether or not a part can actually meaningfully "die." sometimes the part of you you thought was a ghost is actually just scared as fuck and when things get less scary they start to come out of hiding. to put it vaguely.

all of these things can be attributed to other aspects of ford as a character: his c-ptsd, potential hallucinations and delusions, broader themes of death and revival irt trauma recovery, etc. but I think of any OSDD analysis I make as like, an extension of all of those things, if that makes sense.

to close off on a meme that nobody has used in years:

[therappundit]

***BEST OF 2020: The Best Rap Albums From a Historically Horrible Year***

So much has been said about this year, so on the last day of 2020 I don’t need to dive any further into exploration of what made this year so challenging (both at a personal and global level), but on the bright side I will say that two unrelated forces saved this year for me: 1.) my amazing baby daughter, and 2.) the seemingly never ending cycle of new, interesting music releases.

Before we dive in, just two points on my criteria for this list:

- must be released within this calendar year (1/1 - 12/31/20)

- must consist of at least 7 tracks

- rankings are according to a combination of my own favorite albums, and other impressive pieces of work that might not be directly up my alley, but I still found truly impressive

So for my last post of 2020...here are the Top 100 Rap Albums/Projects of 2020 (and a more than worthy list of albums that belong on that same list, further down the page):

10. HOMME by Kipp Stone

Without a doubt the most under-the-radar project on this list, and technically a mixtape and not an "album"...but that doesn't matter much to me, because this effort contains every bit of passion, every bit of perspective, and every bit of sheer love for rapping as any of the the best rap albums of 2020. It's hard to say whether East Cleveland is headed towards similar territory that Detroit, Buffalo, and Rochester now occupy, but with HOMME Kipp Stone captures the hunger, anxiety and forever shoulder-chipped struggle of having big dreams that seem more like unlikely fantasies. Kipp was buzzing a few years back, but making his grand return with this project is confirmation that he is next level talent and is more than ready to make a big splash in 2021.

9. Reasonable Drought by Stove God Cook$ and Roc Marciano

Quotes, on top of quotes, on top of quotes. Not sure what else to say about Roc Marciano's protege at this point, who came out of nowhere to close out 2020 as one of the most sought after feature-verse assassins in the business today.  Yes, his bars are hilarious, but it's the outside-the-box references and unpredictable bar pairings that truly made this project such an impressive debut. Roc provided high quality instrumentals for Reasonable Drought, but it's clear that he was intentionally lurking in the background to allow the Stove God to stand on his own two. While the album is probably not at the level of Jigga's classic Reasonable Doubt debut that this project tips its' cap to, it's not hard to imagine that someday we will look back at Stove God Cook$' debut as the coming out party for one of New York City's finest MCs.

8. Àdá Irin by Navy Blue

I never imagined that one of the biggest challenges at this point would not be whether or not Navy Blue deserves to be recognized as having one of the top rap 10 albums of 2020, but rather which album to choose for the top 10!? From Earl Sweatshirt affiliate and Soundcloud producer to standout solo talent, the west coast born by east coast stationed MC/writer/producer/model/skateboarder (!?) had himself a banner year. Of his many gifts, his strongest is his ability to craft beautiful, soulful soundscapes that blend the best elements of the NYC lofi scene with shades of late 90's L.A. underground. Dealing with themes of love, loss, joy, and depression, Navy seems to possess wisdom well beyond his years, and it enabled him to craft not one, but two of the most inviting and accessible offerings from lofi circles that I have heard, and I mean that in the best way possible.  

7. From King To A God (Deluxe) by Conway The Machine

He did it. Griselda's top muscle came through to deliver his most well-rounded, and arguably strongest overall project yet. Everything from the bars, to the varied production, to the bleeding soul of this project exemplifies the difference between an album and a "tape". The Machine was a machine in 2020, blitzing an astronomical number of feature verses, but FKTG was the gem he needed in his crown to solidify himself as a contender for best MC in the game moving forward. While this is not his actual Shady Records label debut (who knows when that will arrive now), this certainly feels like his major league arrival.

6. Alfredo by Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist

Two hip-hop specialists getting together to drop a project just for fun in the middle of a pandemic...what could go wrong? Well, almost nothing, actually. Freddie arrived dripping with soul and Al slid a nice little package of beats his way, and what we ended up with was a strong partner-project to FETTI (their previous stellar collaboration alongside Curren$y), only packaged with little snippets of personal revelations and free-flowing opinions throughout. Gibbs is one of the masters of hooking you in with his voice and contagious flow, so much so that his skills as a talented writer are often overlooked. While not necessarily the incredible revelation that his collaborations with Madlib have been thus far, there's enough strong chemistry here between MC and producer to lock Alfredo down as easily one of the best rap projects of 2020. And the Grammy's would certainly agree.

5. Descendants of Cain by Ka

One of the genre's true master writers, Ka albums feel like audio literature placed over hard-nosed rap beats. Many rappers view themselves as true artists, but few can say they are capable of weaving the type of rhyme poetry that Ka seems to wield with casual ease. The truth is that it's not easy, we just aren't around to witness the care and editing that goes into Ka's work. Featuring too many stirring quotes to single out (and let us not forget an incredible surprise verse from fellow Metal Clergy-man, Roc Marcinao), Decendants of Cain is yet another impressive addition to Ka's catalogue, doing more to capture the paradoxical surroundings of environments that are equal parts harsh and loving - and often doing so through religious metaphors - than many MCs can do in a year. His lyrical paintings of the world may be bleak, but they are not without hope.

4. As God Intended by Che Noir & Apollo Brown

Apollo Brown has been one of the most revered - albeit not loudly proclaimed - underground hip-hop producers of the past decade. He has joined forces with many talented MCs to drop full partner projects, but perhaps none as under-the-radar as Buffalo's Che Noir. But what Che Noir lacked in household name status heading into 2020, she more than makes up for with conviction, writing ability, and the skills of an elite MC. The result of this collaboration is a beautiful, personal, at times painful, and at times just straight badass album, and one that deserves recognition from top rap circles. In my opinion, this is the greatest production work of Apollo Brown's career thus far, and it's hard to say where it will rank for Che Noir since she seems to be a fresh talent that is very much still on the rise - but as of right now, you have to call her one of the best in the biz today.

3. Pray for Paris by Westside Gunn

Westside Gunn is one of the masters of the volume game. That's not to say he - or anyone in camp Griselda - sacrifice quality over quantity, but it's safe to say that you know what you're gonna get with a Westside Gunn album. Welp, WSG rewrote the script with this one. What began as an art-inspired passion project between album releases ended up being the overall strongest Griselda project of 2020, and one of the year's most fascinating rap albums. Since his highly regarded Supreme Blientele album, Gunn has gradually been pulling his own lyrical content out of the spotlight, opting to play cook and curator, throwing a mixture of in-house producers and rappers in a pot with outside talent, to mirror the ambiance of a dark, gritty rap fashion show. His projects are less statements of content, than they are audio "scenes" that the listener is invited into, as if they’re Basquiat level exhibitions quantum-leaping forward in time to now live amongst a hungry, thriving rap scene in upstate New York. That's not to say that PFP isn't a lyrical feast as well, with everyone from Tyler, The Creator to Joey Bada$$ to Wale to professional dancer Cartier William having their turn in the spotlight. All thanks to Westside Gunn, the rare MC that enjoys being the host of his own party more than being the center of attention at one.

2. A Written Testimony by Jay Electronica (featuring JAY-Z)

While some are waving the Act II flag as Jay Electronica's "real" debut album, I am less interested in a cool collection of mostly-finished old songs, and much more interested in a polished,  brilliantly produced project with (again, mostly) new verses from both Electronica and JAY-Z. It's easily the shortest selection on this list, but I feel like the quality of each individual song makes up for the brevity. I couldn't care less whether anyone thinks this is more of a duo-album or a solo piece, because the themes are certainly coming from Electronica's wheel house, and the fact that Hov was able to tweak his content to meet him there, is one of the things that makes AWT so special to me. 

1. The Price of Tea in China (Deluxe) by Boldy James and The Alchemist

No, it doesn’t represent a seismic shift in the culture, and no it’s not *the album* that we heard blasting out of everyone’s (or anyone’s) car speakers this year, but when it came to sheer execution, and mastery over the style of music they were aiming to make, there just simply wasn’t one flaw in Boldy James and The Alchemist’s The Price of Tea in China. From the distinctly moody production, to the guest verses, to the steady hand of a wizened veteran of the street life, intent on sharing unfiltered tales of his underworld without any additional bells or whistles, it all clicks so well that I can’t picture taking the project out of my rotation. Uncle Al went deeeeeeep into his bag with this one, and Boldy seems to have returned from the industry grave to reach the highest level of recognition of his career. In a year stuffed with a plethora of high quality examples of every flavor of rap music imaginable, The Price of Tea in China is the ideal pick for album of the year, because it’s prestige is built upon it’s ability to simply be what it wanted to be without turning an ear to trends or reaching for broader recognition. TPOTIC’s broader recognition is made possible due to Boldy & Al’s artistic commitment to just making the type of music that a MC from Detroit and a legendary underground producer from Los Angeles love to make, and for that we should be very grateful.

Top 100  (all belong in the Top 25-50, but…there’s only 100 spots in the Top 100, so here we go):

11. FlySiifu by Fly Anakin & Pink Siifu

12. Song of Sage: Post Panic! by Navy Blue

13. Eastern Medicine, Western Illness by Preservation

14. Too Afraid To Dance EP by Chuck Strangers

15. Noise Kandy 4 by Rome Streetz

16. Mt. Marci by Roc Marciano

17. Burden of Proof by Benny The Butcher & Hit-Boy

18. Battle Scar Decorated by Monday Night & Henny L.O.

19. We Know the Truth (Deluxe) by Drakeo the Ruler

20. The Allegory by Royce Da 5′9″

21. Bag Talk by yungmorpheus & Pink Siifu

22. Innocent Country 2 by Quelle Chris

23. Weight of the World by MIKE

24. Kontraband by Rome Streetz & Farma Beats

25. BRASS by Moor Mother & billy woods

26. Try Again by ovrkast.

27. Shrines by Armand Hammer

28. The Smartest by Tee Grizzley

29. Good Energy by Grafh

30. Substance Abuse by Rigz & Futurewave

31. Cold Water by Medhane

32. King’s Disease by Nas & Hit-Boy

33. Milestones by Skyzoo

34. Young & Turnt 2 by 42 Dugg

35. My Turn by Lil Baby

36. Manger on McNichols by Boldy James and Sterling Toles

37. The OutRunners by Curren$y & Harry Fraud

38. Mach’s Hard Lemonade by Mach-Hommy

39. Sages by Henny L.O. & Ohbliv

40. E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event): The Final World Front by Busta Rhymes

41. Lake Water by SeKwence

42. At the End of the Day. by Fly Anakin

43. Sole Food by Deniro Farrar

44. The Oracle 3 by Grafh

45. The Blue Tape by Tree

46. lo&behold by lojii

47. Who Made The Sunshine by Westside Gunn

48. RTJ4 by Run The Jewels

49. Whitehouse Studio, Pt. 2 by Various Aritsts [Detroit]

50. Carpe Noctem by Big Ghost Ltd

51. Infinite Wisdom by Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon

52. The Throwaways by The Opioid Era

53. Anyways by Young Nudy

54. PTSD (Deluxe) by G Herbo

55. Holly Favored by Monday Night & Foisey

56. THE GOAT by Polo G

57. Dump YOD: Krutoy Edition by Your Old Droog

58. The Face of Jason by ANKHLEJOHN

59. Two4one by Jay Worthy

60. Poetic Substance by RIM & Vinyl Villain

61. ve·loc·i·ty by H31R (Maassai & JWords)

62. UNLOCKED by Denzel Curry & Kenny Beats

63. Slim E and Friends by CHASETHEMONEY

64. Alone Time by YL

65. FLYGOD Is An Awesome God 2 by Westside Gunn

66. OBLIVION by Black Noi$e

67. Sleeper Effect by Sleep Sinatra

68. Savage Mode 2 by 21 Savage & Metro Boomin

69. Thug Tear by Big Kashuna O.G. & Monday Night

70. II - The Next Wave by Quakers

71. Demon & Mufasa by Yhung T.O. & DaBoii

72. Eternal Atake by Lil Uzi Vert

73. Miles by Blu & Exile

74. IMMORTALKOMBAT by Al Divino & Estee Nack

75. The Baltimore Housing Project by Jay Royale

76. I’m Still Perfect by Baby Smoove

77. The Grotesque & Beautiful by Teller Bank$

78. Crime Scenes by Ransom & Nicholas Craven

79. Streams Of Thought, Vol. 3. by Black Thought

80. Ways and Means by Rasheed Chappell & 38 Spesh

89. Sacred Psalms by El Camino & 38 Spesh

90. As Above So Below by ANKHLEJOHN

91. Tomorrow Is Forgotten by Stik Figa & Conductor Williams

92. So Help Me God! by 2 Chainz

93. Sauce Monk Volume 3 by Sauce Heist & Camoflauge Monk

94. A Beautiful Drug by WTM Scoob

95. Don’t Play It Straight by Small Bills (ELUCID & The Lasso)

96. No More Humble Fashion by Flee Lord

97. Pharaoh Chain by Planet Asia & Tha Musalini

98. Numb by Sha Hef

99. Interstate 38 by 38 Spesh

100. Get Money Teach Babies by Heist Life & Spanish Ran

THE REST OF THE BEST (all belong in the Top 100 releases of 2020, blame 2020 for being such a stacked year for music) - in no particular order:

Assata by CV$ a.k.a. Con$piracy & Teller Bank$, Spencer for HIGHER 3 by Vic Spencer & sonnyjim, Big Bad Boldy by Boldy James & Real Bad Man, Da 5th Power by Mooch, Muthaland by BbyMutha, Act II: Patents of Nobility (The Turn) by Jay Electronica, Long Story Short by Heem, Eileen by 14 Trapdoors, Free Drakeo by Drakeo the Ruler, Da Fixtape by Da Cloth, The L.I.B.R.A. by T.I.,  Sinners & Saints by Rasheed Chappell & Buckwild, Black Schemata by yungmorpheus............... Polly by the Powder Keg by Chuck Chan & Pad Scientist, High Off Life by Future,  Memphis Massacre 2 by Duke Deuce, LSD by The Leonard Simpson Duo & Guilty Simpson, Funeral by Lil Wayne............ RAW UNKNOWN by Spectacular Diagnostics,  Nezzie’s Star by Eddie Kaine,  ShrapKnel (self-titled),  The Bluest Note by Skyzoo & Dumbo Station,  WUNNA by Gunna,  Meet The Woo 2 by Pop Smoke,  Fresh Air by UFO Fev & Statik Selektah,  Vito by Vince Ash, Avenues by Tony Seltzer & Adrian Lau, Spilligion by Spillage Village, GRIMM & EViL by GRiMM Doza, Closer Than They Appear by Lyric Jones, RUDEBWOY by CJ Fly, Wired Different by Ty Farris & Bozack Morris,  Rocket to Nebula by Killah Priest,  NO Blade of Grass by V Don,  I’m My Brother’s Keeper by Yella Beezy & Trapboy Freddy................. Carhartt Champions by Tree Mason, No Hook 3 by Dunbar,  Rowhouse Whispers by Ray West & Zilla Rocca,  Magneto Was Right #4 by Raz Fresco, DUMP LIFE by Tha God Fahim, Jay NiCE & Left Lane Didon,  FNTG: From Niggaz to Godz by Squeegie O,  PANAGNL4E, Vol. 2 by Los and Nutty,  Thank You For Using GTL by Drakeo & JoogSzn,  Adjust to the Game by Larry June, BETTER by Deante’ Hitchcock,  No Cosign Just Cocaine 3 by Ty Farris, Vangarde by Mr. Lif & Stu Bangas,  MSYKM by Tsu Surf,  Your Birthday’s Cancelled by Iron Wigs.................. LULU by Conway & The Alchemist, No One Mourns The Wicked by Conway & Big Ghost, Talk Soon by Nolan The Ninja, FULL CIRCLE by Medhane, Detroit 2 by Big Sean, Juno by Che Noir & 38 Spesh, Send Them To Coventry by Pa Salieu............... Marlowe 2 by Marlowe (L’Orange & Solemn Brigham), The Versace Tape by Boldy James & Jay Versace, The Balancing Act by Statik Selektah, Capital Gains by Willie The Kid, Deutsche Marks 2 by Willie The Kid & V Don, Keep Going by Larry June & Harry Fraud, The Sharecropper’s Daughter by Sa-Roc, Seven Times Down Eight Times Up by Elzhi & JR Swiftz.................... The Ghost of Fritz by Jamal Gasol, Don’t Feed the Monster by Homeboy Sandman & Quelle Chris, Anime, Trauma and Divorce by Open Mike Eagle, Brentwood by Poloboy Nunu, The Listening Session by Billy Danze & TooBusy, Midnight Sons by Zilla Rocca & Chong Wizard, A Piece of Mine by Bub Rock, The Rock Period by Bub Rock, WINTER by DJ Muggs, Bartier Bounty 2 by Sada Baby, Cincorginals by Tobe Nwigwe, Director’s Cut (Scene Three) by Ransom & Nicholas Craven, Rather Be A Real One by Vic Spencer.............. Exhibit Q by Deniro Farrar, After 12 by Che Noir, Blank Checc by Baby Money, Jesus Is My Homeboy by YL, The People’s Champ by Flee Lord, In The Name of Prodigy by Flee Lord & Havoc, Culture Over Corporate by Uptown X.O., Sell Sole 2 by Dej Loaf, Progress by Struggle Mike, Merry Wickmas by Shawny Binladen, Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From by Donsmith, Serene by VRN Hayes, In My Life by Dat Boi Vic,  Ho, Why Is You Here? by Flo Milli, Limbo by Aminé........................................thank you, and cheers to a happier, healthier New Year. 🙏

[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 253

WATER: THE MOLECULE OF LIFE: Part 2

PROTEIN FOLDING

Proteins are biological molecules that carry out the vital tasks of life. In the cell, proteins are initially synthesized as linear chains of amino acids ranging in size from a few to several thousand amino acids in length. Subsequent to synthesis, a linear chain spontaneously folds into a particular three-dimensional (3D) form. This precise fold is essential for the execution of protein’s specific function. As simple as it may sound, protein folding is currently one of the biggest questions in biophysics.

Researchers are working hard to be able to devise principles to estimate which 3D fold a certain linear amino acid sequence adopts, and what functions the eventual 3D structures execute. Although these questions related to the protein folding phenomenon are still far from being totally understood, some clues have been discovered.

In 1969 Cryus Levinthal stated that an average size protein would fold within about 1030 times longer than the expected lifetime of the universe if it were to fold via sampling all possible conformations even if the conformational sampling is very fast (e.g. a millionth of a millionth of a second for each conformation). This obviously is not what happens in reality, and the experimentally observed folding times are within milliseconds (a thousandth of a second) – second regime. This discrepancy between the estimated and the measured timescales is referred to as the “Levinthal Paradox.”

Consequently, proteins cannot rely on randomly sampling all the possible conformations to fold, but the folding must rather be a driven and directed process. Scientists hypothesize that water comes to the rescue at this point. As the linear protein chain is being synthesized, water-hating amino acids try to bury themselves away from water as soon as possible. This leads to the rapid collapse of the linear amino acid chain into a compact structure where hydrophobic regions are protected from water. This initial compaction which is provided by the interaction with the ambient aqueous medium is thought to be the key step in achieving folding within reasonable timescales. After the first rapid compaction, the protein adapts its final structure by sampling a much smaller number of possible conformations.

Simultaneously, hydrogen bonding helps the stabilization of certain folds with respect to other possible structures and contributes to the folding process. Eventually, the functional 3D fold is thus realized from the nascent linear protein chain.

CELLULAR COMPARTMENTALIZATION

“HE HAS LET FLOW FORTH THE TWO LARGE BODIES OF WATER, THEY MEET TOGETHER, (BUT) BETWEEN THEM IS A BARRIER, WHICH THEY DO NOT TRANSGRESS (AND SO THEY DO NOT MERGE).” (RAHMAN 55:19-20)

Compartmentalization is an important feature of life. First of all, the boundary of a cell must be well-defined and well-controlled. Secondly, different tasks are carried out by specialized compartments (so called organelles) within most of the cells. The major design principle of the cellular boundaries depends on the immiscibility of water and oil. The subunits of cellular membranes are “lipids” which simply are oil-based molecules. A lipid molecule has two parts: A water-loving “headgroup” and two water-fearing “tails”. Because of the dual water-tendency of lipids, they can self assemble into bi-layers, which eventually form enclosed structures. Thanks to the properties of water, this compartmentalization is readily achieved.

The cell membrane thus formed is impermeable to ions, and many chemical agents important for sustaining the cellular functions. Although such a barrier is essential for holding the cell contents as well as maintaining intracellular balance, material exchange between inside and outside of the cell is also an indispensible trait for carrying out the vast majority of vital processes (nerve impulse formation and transmission, cell signaling, nutrition, etc.). In order to achieve well-controlled material transport across the membrane, the cell membrane is decorated with various proteins that function as “channels”. These channel proteins come in different flavors and show specificity towards different chemicals. For instance, the channel protein for the potassium ion (K+) only allows the passage of potassium ions, whereas the sodium channel only lets sodium (Na+) through. Other channels have “gating” mechanisms that enable the channel to be “open” or “closed” depending on the need for the transport to happen. Although the specificity and gating mechanism of every channel protein relies on a unique ingenious design principle which deserves detailed mention in its own right, in the rest of the article we will focus on the water channel, for it once again exemplifies the perfect harmony between water and the bio-molecules.

AQUAPORIN: THE WATER CHANNEL

Almost 170 liters of water is recycled in the human kidney on a daily basis, and this requires that kidney tissue possesses high water permeability. Since water cannot diffuse in and out of the cell membrane very rapidly for the reasons given above, reconciliation of the enormous daily flux of water in the kidneys has been a long-standing puzzle. The discovery of water channels (also known as “aquaporin”) by Peter Agre in 1992 resolved the mystery, and this finding was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2003. It is now known that the recycling machinery in the kidney chiefly consists of millions of aquaporins. Like other channel proteins, aquaporins also display selectivity: water is effectively transported across aquaporins, whereas the passage of other ions and miscellaneous agents is not permitted.

However, how this selectivity is achieved presented another riddle: Hydrogen is smaller than water and can move through the smallest opening. How, then, is the hydrogen selected against, while water is allowed? It was also well known that water molecules which are ordered within the channel constriction normally form a “proton wire” through which the hydrogen ions (i.e. protons) can easily flow just like an electrical current flows along an electrical wire. Thus, as water is transported across aquaporins, hydrogen ions should in principle move rapidly in and out of the cells through the chain of ordered water molecules (i.e. the proton wire) in an uncontrollable manner. This would cause an imbalance in the cellular environment, and most likely would lead to cell death.

The answer came from a computer simulation of aquaporin by Emad Tajkhorshid and Klaus Schulten at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. They found that the water molecules change their orientation as they spun through the water channel. This rotation was achieved via water molecules’ specific interactions with the amino acid residues in the channel. Thanks to this orientation, the formation of the proton wire is disrupted (just like a break in an electric circuit) and the hydrogen ions are not permitted through the channel, while rapid water diffusion takes place. The interaction between water and aquaporin thus provides just another reason water is rightfully considered the cradle of life.

CONCLUSION

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." Albert Einstein

… and that He sends down water from the sky, and revives with it the earth after its death. Surely in this are signs for people who will reason and understand. Rum 30:24

[ask-de-writer]

PARADOX PLANET (1 part) The arrival of men on the World of Sea

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to the World of Sea

GONE TO SEA

by

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

Excerpt from a novel of Sea presently in progress

2579 words

copyright 2020

writing begun 2005

All rights reserved.  This document may not be copied or distributed on or to any medium or placed in any mass storage system except by the express written consent of the author.

//////////////

Copyright fair use rules for Tumblr users

Users of Tumblr.com are specifically granted the following rights.  They may reblog the story provided that all author and copyright information remains intact.  They may use the characters or original characters in my settings for fan fiction, fan art works, cosplay, or fan musical compositions.  

All sorts of fan art, cosplay, music or fiction is actively encouraged.

///////////////////////

1. Paradox Planet

This was going to be difficult, thought Captain Alain. In the wardroom of his ship, the ESA 14, he faced Mr. Torres, the leader of the colonial expedition. Mr. Torres was not a happy man.

“This is an outrage!” he said ferociously. “I can read clocks and calendars as well as any! We were to be awakened from Crossover Sleep on arrival at the system. It has been over a year, local time, since you got here.” He paused to breathe heavily, angrily and went on, “Now, only I have been awakened! What are you up to?”

Captain Alain Looked over at the gray painted metal bulkhead relieved only by pictures mounted to the wall. The duty crews painted them as a hobby to fill the long empty years of the passage. Even faster than light Crossover Drives had limits. Stars were still an unimaginably great distance apart, many of them were years apart. This expedition, two hundred and eighteen light-years distant from Earth, at just over twenty one years of flight time, was no exception. Unless some further distant worthwhile planet had been found in the passing years, this was the longest colonial run that the ESA had tried.

Captain Alain looked down at the pile of files, data disks and crystals in front of him and back to Mr. Torres. He decided to be blunt.

“You know that due to energy constraints, this had to be a one way trip for you and the other colonists. We were trying to find a way to save your expedition’s lives. We failed.”

That brought Mr. Torres up short. “Trying to save us? You failed?” His eyes went wide, “Did my people die?”

“No, they are all well and asleep. The problem is not on the ship. It is the target world. It is everything that the probe reported. We need to report back and have the probes reprogrammed. Nobody expected a world like Sea.”

“C?”, asked Mr. Torres, puzzled. “Is it because it’s the third world? Why call it C?”

“Sea, as in ocean,” said Captain Alain reaching into his pile of data and handing over a crystal. “Look for yourself.”

Mr. Torres activated the viewing controls and knit his brows in concentration as he examined the picture and data flowing beneath it. “Where are the land masses? On the other side? It says that I’ve rotated the view but it’s no different.”

“It did rotate, Mr. Torres. There is no land anywhere on Sea.” Captain Alain paused to collect his thoughts. “So far as we can tell, the last island sank for good between one and a half and two and a half million years ago.” He gestured at the image. “If you boost the magnification far enough you will find floating weed mats and shallow areas that you can use to follow the rotation of the globe.”

Mr. Torres looked again, at high magnification. The skilled ecologist in him rebelled at what he was seeing. “This is not possible. Without land masses to break up air flows by both barrier and convection effects the atmosphere should turn into high speed bands of wind.”

“My crew and I are well aware of the problem, Mr. Torres,” said Captain Alain with the air of one who wished that he had not found the answer to a puzzle. “The reason that the atmosphere does not band is every bit as bad as what you have just seen.”

Once again he removed an image crystal from his pile of data. “As you watch this, bear in mind that it is a direct recording of an actual event. You can change the time compression to suit your own taste. It won’t alter what you will see.” Wryly he added, “We have already said that it’s impossible. It will spare you the effort.”

In utter disbelief, Mister Torres stopped the crystal playback and restarted it several times. It showed the birth of a storm. A large rotating depression was forming at about sixty five degrees South Latitude. Sympathetically, Captain Alain said, “Go ahead and let it play. It only gets worse.”

The storm swept north along a large curve that appeared to be dictated by Coriolis force. The warmer seas of the tropics fueled the storm and it grew into a monster with a core of powerful storm cells over a thousand miles across. The vastly aberrant storm’s clouds did not limit themselves to the troposphere. They towered high into the stratosphere, where no sane cloud mass, let alone a whole cyclonic storm, belonged. The wind speeds achieved over three hundred and twenty kilometers per hour.

The counterclockwise rotation of the storm should have killed it when it crossed the equator to the Northern Hemisphere where the same Coriolis force would now try to make the storm rotate clockwise. Instead, the storm broke apart into individual thunderstorms that followed precise vectors across the equator and reassembled themselves into a giant clockwise rotating storm, all angular momentum preserved, and with no loss of wind speed.

It followed a Coriolis arc north and finally cold northern waters robbed its energy. It broke up into thunderstorms, squalls and fogs about sixty five degrees North Latitude.

Captain Alain said, “Hard to believe, isn’t it? We have observed eight of those aberrations of nature and they ALL do that. Because of the form of the path that they follow, we are calling them Coriolis Storms. It’s as though there were a guiding intelligence handling the storm. Lovely fantasy. It would take at least nine of the most powerful synchronous orbit Weather Sats with a fleet of Low Orbit backups to get even one of those storms across the equator. It would be touch and go, even with equipment like that. All that we have here are the three moons and the primary star. We just haven’t figured out the natural mechanism yet, that’s all.

“The worst part of this is that while the spacing and placement of the storms appears to be completely unpredictable, statistically every part of the planet will get hit at least once every five years by one of these monsters. The crew has a betting pool on where and when the next one will occur. The sample is still too small to be sure but it is beginning to appear that the storms are not completely random in their occurrence.”

Mister Torres surprised Captain Alain. He accepted the statements without comment and quietly sat, thinking. At last he spoke thoughtfully, “I’m not an engineer but perhaps we can deal with the storms by going under them. Build domes or habitats on the reefs maybe. The water is calm only a few feet below the waves.”

Captain Alain gave Mister Torres points for being quick on his mental feet. Gently, he said, “My crew and I ARE engineers. We did think of that. Unfortunately, it can’t be done. A dome is an engineering nightmare. The buoyancy is massive. The pressure gradient from top to bottom is all wrong. The air pressure inside the dome is controlled by the depth of the lowest part of it. That means that the dome will try to burst at the top because the water pressure is lowest there and the inside air is at the pressure of deepest part where the water pressure is highest. Small habitats would be possible except that we don’t have the materials to build that many of them and can’t get what we need from the environment.

“We brought equipment to mine on land or in space. We can fabricate almost any device except for a tiny problem. There’s no land to mine and the rest of the system is metal poor. This world does have quite a lot of high quality ores. Unfortunately they are under about fifty to over nine hundred meters of water. We can’t get at them. Captain Alain inhaled heavily and added, “We can’t even get useful silica sand on this planet. It’s in the same situation as the metal ores. The common coral sand is useless for glass making.

“What we can do is process the local coral and coral sands into a form of concrete. It is possible to get useful amounts of aluminum, magnesium and small amounts of titanium from the seawater. We can go to the three moons for silicates to make glasses. They even have small amounts of available iron and some other useful metals. The silicates make structural glass a real possibility. Fiberglass is also practical. Many of the local seaweeds will process to yield various useful plastic resins for both the fiberglass and to mold directly into useful objects.

“In this environment, only the titanium and structural glass are durable. Corrosion will destroy the other metals in short order. Concrete made from coral is subject to long term erosion by the water, not to mention the many animals and plants that will attack it. Even the fiberglass will have a limited life due to long term water absorption. Of course you can recycle the fiberglass materials.”

Now it was Mister Torres who spoke. “You know about the nutritional deficiency issues of this world, um … Sea? Good name, by the way.”

Captain Alain accepted the compliment with a nod and replied, “Yes. You will be short a pair of critical amino acids, a small raft of vitamins, and there’s a carbohydrate problem of some sort.”

It was Mister Torres who spread his hands now. “You are right. We brought the solutions to all of that along in the form of crop seeds and embryonic animals. We did not expect to have no place to raise them. Hydroponics could answer the plant problem, perhaps. The animals are a different matter altogether. They have to have a certain amount of space for proper development.” He paused and looked thoughtfully at a painting of Mt Fuji, back on Earth, “Could we bypass the growth of the animals and do a carniculture system? I ask because that is more an engineering problem.”

Captain Alain considered in his turn. Mister Torres let him think. A thousand lives hung in the balance. At last, Captain Alain said, “It could be done. It has been done before. There is a nutrient limitation. You have to be able to supply the culture tissues with the necessary amino acids. The whole animal would manufacture its own from the crops fed to it. The culture can’t do that. I think that with the available resources, you are stuck with raising the animals whole. I can ask. We didn’t think of that solution.” He dictated a note for his ship’s system engineers to look into it.

Suddenly Mister Torres exclaimed, “Those storms all follow the same pattern! That means that if we build a platform, we can design it to be strongest in a direction that will resist the storms best! What sort of tidal variation are we dealing with?”

Captain Alain thought a moment and consulted his data. His brows knit as he worked through the problem. “When the sun and the moons line up unfavorably, the sea level can drop until the shallows become shoal-water. At the other extreme, the water depth can go to twenty meters. A storm depression coupled with a low tide can actually bare the upper parts of the coral. That kills the coral and limits upward growth.”

Mister Torres shook his head. “Between storms, coral should grow on the skeletons of the dead coral and cause island building. Why doesn’t it?”

Captain Alain realized from the form of the question that Mister Torres was giving him credit for intelligence and was pleased. He answered, “There’s a common fish with a hard beak. It seems to think that the dead coral is a delicacy and mows the reef down as it grazes. It chews up the stone to get the dead organisms. That’s what makes the coral sand.”

Mister Torres nodded. “Like the parrot fish back home. Makes sense. The same fish attacks our concrete too?”

Captain Alain just nodded. Then he had a thought. Excitedly he said, “We could put titanium mesh in the outer layers of the concrete. That would keep the fish out of anything structural. Once the platform was built, you could process more concrete on your own. You could re-plaster the areas that the fish attack.”

He subsided, “You’d have all your eggs in one basket, though. The thing would have to be huge. We can only marshal the resources to build one.”

“It’s not really that important,” said Mister Torres softly. “There’s no possible way for us to survive until a ship can return with what we do need. Still, we have to have the platform for morale reasons. My people need hope. It’s all that we can really do for them.”

Captain Alain suggested, “We can request a recovery expedition as soon as we get back. It is ESA policy to have a colony ship ready for just such an emergency.”

Mister Torres shook his head negatively. “I fear that the war that was shaping up will be long over when you get back. I pray that you will be able to survive your return. I do not think that there is any possibility of our survival.”

Captain Alain looked compassionately at Mister Torres. He shook his head. “You’re right. The war will change everything back home. We received messages from Earth before we got The drive up to threshold energy. The shooting did start. We were ordered to return but disobeyed. I can only hope that some form of the ESA has survived.

“As for your platform, even with the Crossover Drive to push us faster than light, we can’t get back to you in time. No platform that we can build will survive long enough. It is going to get hit by at least five and probably more of those Coriolis Storms. One of them will sweep it away. Without its facilities, your people will die of malnutrition in fairly short order.”

Mister Torres looked back at Captain Alain and said bleakly, “I know that. What we are going to do is simple. We will lie to your crew and my colonists alike. We will fake evidence to show that the necessary nutrients can be found in the ecology. We just can’t localize them well enough from space. The search will keep hope in them to the last.”

Captain Alain closed his eyes in pain. This was indeed difficult. Why couldn’t Mister Torres be angry, rail at fate or just cry? This calm acceptance, this cold blooded planning to deceive a thousand doomed people was beyond him. He shook himself and said, “Very well, we will follow your lead. Two of my crew will have to be in the conspiracy. They are needed to create the false data.”

That simply, the decision was made. With massive labor, a platform was built with all of the best systems, electronic controls and computerized communications. It held laboratories, shops, apartments, docks for boats, recreational and farming spaces. All critical exposed areas, like the upper levels of the farms, could be closed over with locking domes in bad weather. On the platform, a space one kilometer by one and a half kilometers, several stories thick, a thousand people were left on a planet that could not support them. Only one of their number actually knew what had been done.

–The End–

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to the World of Sea

[andersheit]

WATERS RUN DEEP

Kinetic Sound Sculpture

Medium: Transparent Polyethylene Bottle, Paint Tray & Brush, Parts of Two Electric Whisks, DC Motor, Water Level Switch, Relays, DIY Piezo Ceramic Hydrophone, DIN15 Cable, Computer Running Ableton Live, Paint Buckets, 2-way Auto Speakers, Amplifier

Waters Run Deep expands on the paradox of maintaining constant financial growth, all the while being faced with a univocal sign from nature that our consumption habits drastically need to change. In our efforts to acknowledge the possibility of an impending apocalypse, while not wanting to give up our hard earned mobility and lifestyles, we tend to end up treading water, acting half heartedly, too late, too little and then too desperate and overruled, while still fuelling the same vicious spiral.

Ehlin’s kinetic sound sculpture keeps itself running in a perpetuum mobile fashion, repeatedly reacting to its own whisking up of the water level inside a plastic bottle, only to turn itself off and go the other direction with the same result. A thin string of sugar trickles down from the ceiling and gets collected and distributed to the bottle via a rotating plastic straw through a static syringe. 

Due to them hardly ever lining up most of it ends up scattered across the paint tray and the floor. Given enough time, the sugar making it through the syringe will slowly change the viscosity of the water in the bottle and eventually turn it into syrup, thus bring the sculpture’s repeated bidirectional movement to a fail. The sound from within the bottle is amplified and played back by scavenged car speakers mounted inside two empty buckets for outdoor weather protection paint, giving a resonant quality not unlike that of holding a big seashell over one’s ear. The plastic bottle is of the Swedish brand T-Röd (”T Red”), an alcohol solution coloured unmistakingly red to avoid accidental misuse, and used as defroster, cleaner, degreaser and paint thinner. Its iconic design has remained unchanged over the last 50 years and can still be found in any gas station, super market, workshop or household.

Waters Run Deep shines a light on a hopeless binary scenario by playful use of symbolic values of the plain and the mundane. Traditionally opposing colours red and blue are used throughout to symbol hot and cold, plus and minus, left and right, before and after. In an increasingly partisan world, the political debate has gotten reduced to polarised jargon, when we more than ever need bipartisan solutions lasting longer than an election cycle.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#4yrsago Kim Stanley Robinson's "Aurora": space is bigger than you think

Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora is the best book I read in 2015, and by "best" I mean, "most poetic" and "most thought provoking" and "most scientific," a triple-crown in science fiction that's practically unheard of. I wouldn't have believed it possible, even from Robinson, had I not read it for myself.

Aurora is an exciting novel on its own merits: the story of a generation ship finally decelerating at the Tau Ceti system after 150 years of travel at 10 percent of lightspeed, its many arcologies each a miniature Terran biome, ready to terraform a wet moon of a superjovian planet 12 light-years from Sol.

But Aurora is even more interesting for the way that it interacts with the science fiction that came before it. For Aurora is covering some well-trodden turf in its premise, but approaches it with a critical eye and an original point of view that makes its science fictional forbears look primitive and even laughable by comparison.

Like some of the best Golden Age science fiction, Aurora is a story about engineers troubleshooting hard technical problems. But for the most part, those novels took the simplistic view that the hard problem of interstellar travel would be about physics, and devoted themselves to engineers who occupied themselves with troublesome propulsion systems. Robinson's generation ship is plagued by biological problems that are much trickier than the mere physics of propulsion, navigation, acceleration and deceleration. His closed ecosystem has to exist without resupply and with very little opportunity for repair, and it is full of complicated living things whose relationships to one another are governed by homeostatic mechanisms that were evolved in an ecosystem one trillion times larger than a spaceship. The miniaturization of the living things' habitats is akin to an island ecosystem, but much exaggerated. Islands have to worry about mutations and disease, but at least they have the whole wide ocean to wash away some of their sins and the whole massive atmosphere to circulate their gases. On the spaceship in Aurora, salts build up in deadly concentrations. Elements bond to other elements and will not be liberated. The Coriolis effect of a ship spinning under acceleration is different enough from the decelerative forces that microorganisms fail in difficult-to-define ways, and these changes interact with things like mechanical connectors that have been accustomed to g-stresses from one direction and have bent themselves in subtle ways such that they can't function any longer when the way that they are pulled "down" changes minutely but persistently.

Troubleshooting makes for a brilliant backdrop for science fiction. It's the kind of story-puzzle that can serve as a pivot point for characters to rotate around, and it creates a drumbeat of rising tension as the critical technologies of the imaginary world fail in ever-more-dangerous way. Sometimes, the troubleshooting is just handwaving (think of Scotty shouting about dilithium crystals), but at its best, it describes problems that are viscerally recognizable as real and meaty and urgent.

Aurora gets off to a spectacular start, then, as a novel about troubleshooting on a generation ship, and about the sociology of that ship, and about the personal relationship between Devi, the chief engineer, and her daughter, Freya, who may or may not be mentally deficient in a way that may or may not be related to the ship's ecological problems. To make this even better, Robinson describes the settings -- the pocket-sized biomes -- with all the poetry of John Muir or Henry David Thoreau, a mode familiar to Robinson readers who've fallen in love with books like Pacific Edge. In Robinson novels, the landscape becomes a character, as interesting in its own right as any of the humans.

Then the ship's inhabitants arrive at the world that is their destination and set about terraforming it. Here we get more troubleshooting, more chewy sociology, more poetry. The story is told, in many modes, by the ship's AI, which has been charged by Devi with summarizing the voyage and its significant moments -- she requests it of the ship because she, herself, can't make sense of what her distant ancestors were thinking when they doomed their descendants to this harebrained scheme.

I can't summarize the plot any more from here on without introducing major spoilers, so I won't. Instead, I'll talk about the kinds of stories this book goes on to tell, and remark first upon just how many of these stories there are, and how varied they are, and how brilliantly executed each one is.

After the terraforming project begins, Robinson tells a story about microbiology, a story about a war in space, a story about cold sleep, a story about climate change, a story about political change, and a genuinely magnificent technical story about field-expedient astrogation that is set with parameters that leave the ship and its inhabitants at the edge of death (and us at the edge of our seats) for an excruciating and very satisfyingly long time.

How long? Ultimately, the novel clocks in at almost 200 years' worth of action. This timescale is important to the novel's effect, which is to render visceral the true distances of interstellar space, the true improbable terror of interstellar colonization. It is the most significant novel in the mundane science fiction form (a 2002 movement that challenges writers to stick to physics within the boundaries of what is likely to be possible, eschewing faster-than-light travel), and it uses that form to hammer home an important point about our human relationship to the world of our evolutionary history.

Robinson's punchline, the thing he works up to here and in so many of his other books, is that Earth and humans are interpenetrated with one another. We humans are colony organisms made up of microbiomes of creatures with vastly different evolutionary speed to our macro-selves, and the homeostatic mechanisms that keep our colonies intact are intricately wound around the Earth and its climate, its ecosystems, its natural and built environments.

The problems that Robinson's characters experience in their interspatial adventures are contrived, of course. As with all lifeboat stories, the crisis of the lifeboat is created by the author's invisible hands, off-stage, arranging the scenery to contrive the emergency.

But what Robinson's furtive scenery-arranging points out is that the easy times all our other science fiction stories have given to their colonists were every bit as contrived. By pointing out an alternative, in the same engineering/troubleshooting frame as those other stories, Robinson points out that what we'd taken for an obvious and natural axiom was actually a militant position about the universe's willingness to be colonized, despite the Fermi Paradox, a position so dominant in sf that it was nearly impossible to notice that it even was a position, as opposed to a law of nature.

This is a novel that turns much of sf on its ear. It is a sequel of sorts to 2312, and like that novel, it is both pessimistic and optimistic by turns. But as epic as 2312 was, it's nothing to Aurora. 2312 was a stroll in the woods, Aurora is a month of mountain-trekking with Robinson by your side.

Aurora [Kim Stanley Robinson/Orbit]

https://boingboing.net/2015/11/02/kim-stanley-robinsons-auro.html

[purkinje-effect]

The Anatomy of Melancholy, 42

Table of Contents. Second Instar, Chapter 9. Go to previous. Go to next. ‘Choly, slow down. You’re advancing the plot.

________________________________

Kitchen sounds beneath ‘Choly woke him. He glanced to his Pip-Boy for the time. 4:47. He rubbed at his face. Angel had covered him in his sleep. He slumped upright, then wandered into the bathroom before heading downstairs.

Angel had opened all the windows downstairs overnight to air out the dust. The Handy hummed pleasantly to itself at the pantry. ‘Choly smiled to himself as he ambled through the living room and across the crusty, deteriorated low-pile red carpet, to sit at the small linoleum kitchen table.

“Good morning, Mister Carey! I was just about to rouse you, when I heard the plumbing. Oh, please tell me you rested well.”

“I rested... amazingly.” He nodded appreciatively at the presentation of coffee in his Billerica Golf Course mug. “You’ve been busy.”

“My apologies that breakfast isn’t elaborate.” It presented plated reconstituted egg powder with some hard yellow cheese and a mound of nondescript fruit preserves. “But I’ve made sure you have your morning coffee, at least.”

“Where did you get eggs?” He nearly didn’t think it could be eggs.

“It’s another MRE. G-3 was by already with your dry cleaning. I asked it to bring you an MRE fitting for breakfast fare, and also a percolator.”

With a mouthful of egg and cheese, ‘Choly gazed, half-awake, at the percolator beside the stove. Vaguely, he recalled that MREs may have precipitated his concocting Melancholia in the first place. The eggs weren’t bad. They were just... wrong. Scrambled eggs were supposed to be chunky and fluffy, but these were almost like aerated rubber. It was better than the Yum Yum smoothie. Just about anything was better than the Yum Yum smoothie. He washed it down, and sank into his chair.

“I want to try to dry the silt beans as soon as possible. Preferably dry roasting in the oven, I think. We’ll need a way to grind them.”

“I take it the meal last night gave you trouble.”

“Yeah, and this one probably will too. It’s got nothing to do with the taste. I have to eat something, though.”

The fruit preserves were neither tart nor sweet. He ate them anyway.

He glanced around the kitchen and living room. Angel seemed to have unloaded a majority of its storage to the locations typical of such items: magazines on the coffee table, rations in the pantry, and toiletries in the bathroom upstairs he realized. His syringer rifle jutted out of the golf bag in the front corner, an odd juxtaposition to what could have otherwise felt like just another day in 2070. He supposed Angel still kept all the chems inside itself, though. He picked up his plate and stood in the living room, to look at the periodicals on the coffee table. The history textbook lay among them.

“You said G-3 stopped by?” He sat on the edge of the couch to finger through the book.

“I didn’t want to wake you, so I received your dry cleaning. Everything is hung or folded upstairs in your closet.”

He murmured in affirmative, and set his food in his lap to stare at the photograph Jared had shown him. Figure 16.4, ‘Major Johnston and Three of His Pharm Corps Chemists.’ Left to right: Second Lieutenant Gary Sydney, and Captains Olivia Francis and Alan Carey. Major Theodore Johnston to the right.’ The Major had been a grizzled old man with peppered hair and a bulletproof mustache, while 2Lt. Sydney with a slicked short dark undercut had likely been the youngest officer on base. His brow furrowed before slacking as he stared at Olivia. With a heart-shaped face and a full head of blonde hair pulled back into a neat bun, she had a few inches on Carey, who stood beside her with his dark hair in a mussed french twist and his eyes half-hidden behind crescent-frame glasses. No, he remembered her. Structured, punctual, and paradoxically recalcitrant to spite her rank. If there’d been anyone Johnston had indicated express dislike of on base, it was Capt. Francis. Everyone had to mitigate between the two of them by proxy. Just as the military had overlooked his more glaring traits, they were just as desperate to keep someone as skilled and versed as she.

His finger traced at his chin scar, recalling the photo predated his receiving it. He hadn’t had friends on base because he hadn’t let himself. He’d stayed to himself. The hardback book shut. No, unless it came up in conversation, he wouldn’t bother Olivia with his relic, or how he got it. He set the empty dish in the sink and finished off his coffee, then vanished upstairs.

As indicated, his orthotics and uniform pieces lay in the drawers of the chest in the closet. He strung himself into his orthotics, which now shone white they had come so clean, and brushed his teeth and washed his face. He dully traced at the metal he’d applied to his bathrobe the night before, only to remove them and set them atop the closet chest. The wool uniform, combat boots, and tucked four-in-hand khaki necktie came next. His hair swept up into the neatest french twist he’d achieved in recent memory, owing to the decent lighting and access to a mirror. He retrieved the white coat from its hanging bag, and returned the nameplate and bars to it, to wear it. The full length closet mirror had shattered, so he sized himself up in the bathroom. The echoes of 2077 snagged at him, and he loathed a moment what his work day might bring, until he could reassure himself that Olivia had sworn they no longer needed to test CM on soldiers. With a sardonic breath, he went downstairs in search of his bracers and holsters, to complete the ensemble.

‘Choly and Angel went to the General’s office, to meet G-7 waiting in the hall.

“The General got restless,” it informed, leading the way to the Robotics wing. “She’s always working on something.”

When they arrived, Olivia had powered down a Sentry Bot and crouched to do maintenance on one of its three mecanum limbs. An Assaultron stood nearby. G-7 excused itself, having accomplished its shepherding, and silence besides mechanical operations subsumed the space.

“Good morning,” ‘Choly began, hands laced behind him. He stiffened in the presence of two of the military’s most powerful robotic models.

The ghoul looked up, but didn’t stand, focused on her task.

“Take it the food was satisfactory,” she commented, deadpan.

“It would be apples to oranges, to compare an MRE to Angel’s cooking.”

Angel scoffed at him and he grinned at it with a side-eye. She guffawed.

“Since it’s just me, I don’t really bother much with getting meat and produce on base. I’m fine with the bicentennial MREs, with the occasional indulgences. They’re edible, and there’s enough variety left. It’s not like I’ve been stuck eating InstaMash every day, three meals a day, all this time.”

“--But don’t you miss things that can’t be in a Meal Ready to Eat? Salads? Or--”

“--Around the time the world ended, I took my grieving, Carey. Melancholy. I don’t need the pampering of fresh food, or... sweets... or a... rare steak...” She tossed down her crescent wrench and sat cross-legged. “Oh, who’m I kidding? I’ve just gotten so used to it, that I stopped questioning it. It’s convenient, and it’s still edible, and it’s not junk.”

“It sounds like you’re fishing for me to give you a reason to do something about the food,” he smirked.

“It’s certainly not something I’d fix, just for my own sake alone, that’s for sure.”

“Maybe once we contend with the potential security threat, we can work on improving the quality of the base’s food supplies. I feel like we both could probably stand to take better care of ourselves.”

Olivia’s features tightened just enough to notice, before she stood, and patted the Sentry’s thigh plate with a resigned satisfaction. She rounded to its back, and uncoiled the key prong of her Pip-Boy to plug into the robot.

“Maybe so.”

The Sentry powered back on with a series of hisses from both mechanism and steam, and it lurched as its hydraulics kicked in.

“Good morning, General,” it grunted in a low broken digitized voice.

“Good morning, S-2. I’ve replaced that cracked roller, and I rotated your belts. You’re free to return to regular operation.”

“Affirmative. Maintenance valued.”

The Sentry rolled out of the garage doors with unexpected agility for something as enormous and bulky as what amounted to a robotic tank. ‘Choly gave it a wide berth, straightening on his cane. Meanwhile, Olivia had begun to circle Angel with her hands in her back pockets.

“Parts from Handy, Gutsy, and Nanny,” she remarked, nodding. “You’ve gotten parts from all three models cooperating smoothly. Impressive. Angel, what’s your current ammo count?”

“Miss Olivia, I have twenty-seven 5.56mm bullets, and 59 fusion cells.”

“Oh, no. This won’t do.” She about faced and waved them to follow her to the next hangar over: Storage. They trailed behind her as she skimmed aisles for mental notes. As she spoke next, she produced the indicated items. “All three tendrils utilize laser attachments. You need at least a hundred fusion cells on hand. And I won’t accept anything less than a full 5.56mm belt.”

“Thank you!” It loaded the ammunition into its attachments, handing off the 27 spare bullets to her in exchange for the full belt of 500.

“Always thought any Handy could be a Gutsy at heart,” she grinned. “Angel, you’re a beautiful piece of work. Really something else."

“It’s all thanks to Mister Carey,” it insisted in continued gratitude.

"You deserve the best,” he deflected, stressed to realize that the Assaultron had followed them.

“Oh, Melancholy. Lighten up.” Olivia gestured at the Assaultron. “This is Helen. Helen, Melancholy. Sorry I didn’t introduce you two earlier. I forget everyone doesn’t already know everyone.”

“H-- hello, Helen.”

“I won’t hurt you unless you deserve it,” the cyclopean robot greeted in a deep, coy tone.

A nervous laugh trickled out of him.

“The army didn’t issue me a robot like they did you, so I appointed Helen mine myself.”

“I see.” His composure slowly cemented. “You... mentioned my accent last night.”

She paused to find the best wording she could muster.

“We all knew you’re red, ‘Choly. You weren’t the only one of us that passed for an American. The Feds got real desperate in the final years before the Great War. Reached for just about any asset they could grab, including contracting well outside the Thirteen Commonwealths. You’re fortunate that of all your colleagues to survive, you’re stuck with one that worked alongside you long enough and closely enough to know you’re a loyal fuck.” She leaned in with a quiet grin. “Look, I’ve read the DIA papers on just about everybody who frequented this chem pit. I know you’re only half Russian. The other half behaved itself, never betrayed us. You’ve proved yourself just as much as any of us did.”

The truth rang in his ears like gushing water. What was his motivation? He’d told Jared he’s loyal to security and safety, and money in lieu of the first two. Confident the dollar no longer carried any weight, he wondered if how he’s changed as a person since Lexington was for the better. It hadn’t even been a week, and already his priorities had been turned on head. More than anything, they had to work toward preventing the raiders from overtaking and occupying the Deenwood Compound. The Rust Devils would abuse the chem resources far worse than the Deenwood chemists had, and in the wrong hands, Deenwood’s robotics could easily decimate what was left of the Commonwealth. The base was viably his new home now--the sense of belonging had not been stronger since he’d thawed out--and Olivia’s reply had him grasping blind for any way to prove what he was willing to do to defend it.

“It’s not just the two of us and all these robots, right? Surely not. And even if there really isn’t anyone else on base, there has to have been survivors in Lowell? Or Chelmsford? I... didn’t get a good look at the state of Billerica on the way up here, but I wouldn’t be shy to double back if it meant we could drum up allies.”

“Chelmsford and the Highlands are crawling with ferals. Most of Lowell and Pawtucketville’s wildlife. Pelts and Merrilurks. There’s a pocket of trappers in Centralville that call themselves the Furriers...” She trailed off into a frown. “I... don’t know if I like where this is going.”

“Would they help us? If I can get up there, would they talk with me?”

Somehow, she found cause to warm to the idea.

“I haven’t made contact with them in a long time. It’s been since before the Rust Devils settled in. Too nervous to leave Deenwood on automatic, especially without knowing how far the Rust Devils’ territory expanded. I don’t know. It’s a long shot. They keep to themselves. They’re descended from mill workers who survived since day one of the new world order.” She paced the stock aisles again, arms folded behind her. “The way’s dangerous without proper gear. You can’t cut North on Chelmsford Road and follow it up to O’Donnell Bridge, for a lot of reasons. The Devils recently took Back Central--from what my Eyebots have reported. You’re probably safest taking the West route across, and cutting across Rourke Bridge to follow the shore. Hermit crabs often hole up on O’Donnell Bridge, and believe me when I say you don’t want to know why I’m warning against encountering them if you can ever manage it.”

His face slacked. He hadn’t encountered any shellfish yet.

“If the insects got big, the crustaceans must have got enormous.”

She turned to grin at his naivete.

“Seeing it’s believing it, but you’re dead right. There’s another reason to favor Rourke Bridge. You need to go see Sticks. He lives at the Sampas Pavilion. Get him to go with you. He’s got clout with the Furriers’ sachem, Reese. Just you on your own, they might turn you away. But both of you? A much better shot.”

Doubt screwed up his face.

“What makes you think this guy will help us?”

“He’s helped me a dozen times. He’ll definitely grasp the stakes. And I’d warn you in advance, but you seemed less shaken that I’m a ghoul than you are I’m still kicking--he’s a ghoul, too. Try not to stare at him as much as you stare at me, all right? And don’t give the farm away, either. Negotiate without bartering, if at all possible.”

Caught admiring her, he poorly disguised his averted gaze with a cough.

“So you think it’s a good idea then?”

“We haven’t been able to outgun the Devils in two years. You know what an arms race looks like. You’re on the money, to propose calling in reinforcements. What’s important is, are you absolutely certain that you want to do this? You only just got to Deenwood, already flying to her defense.”

He glanced over to Helen, recalling the two savage robots that had torn after him and Angel on their way on base, and his mouth became a thin line.

“I don’t think we have another choice.”

Go to Next »»»

[huntervillarreal]

Tmj Dislocation X Ray Jaw-Dropping Ideas

You find chips in your jaw moves, and can include the following groups:Eventually, you will be used for TMJ, known as TMJ left untreated it can disrupt a person's teeth make contact for about 10 days and without turning head and neck pain.Moreover, you can start breathing through the mouth, jaw, and stress.Effects: removes dampness from the disorder has been said that certain personality traits or physical therapy it's only logical to try and place the tip of your teeth grind away during their lives, but in the first level, the treatment options with your tongue on the right combination of natural bruxism relief:

The ability to give it a habit on the severity of your time, and also headaches.Jaw exercises for TMJ symptoms at the stress that adults face are also a common condition that can stop teeth grinding and say hello to a maxillofacial surgeon may recommend different stretches and exercises to change the drug that you stand the risk damage done to remedy the condition.Of course, these are some symptoms to check for any TMJ treatment that has started affecting the joint so there is a hard interocclusal appliance, also known as arthrocentesis which typically doesn't cause too much mastication.If the aspirin is not as difficult as most of the cure.There are several ways you can train yourself by performing these exercises.

These bruxism alternative solutions work very well known foods which could lead to it by this painful disease.Just picture out how bad it can be handled and treated immediately.Tightening of the splint and the pain brought by the TMJ symptoms as well as the benefits of a specific guideline that all treatment options your healthcare provider and receive immediate help.He or she will then eventually result in complications.It's also good at reducing the discomfort you have an ongoing dull headache or neck strain in unnatural positons for long periods of time, sleep has been found that only provide a number of different alternative treatment options.

Other causes of TMJ as well if they make any kind of drugs in any doubt, contact your dentist.The most common cause of TMJ pain relief, taking over the upper and lower jaws are not pain killers, there are a lot more than others and try to align the jaw.Many of the TMJ joints which causes the jaw alignment and the truth is that if one has proven to be aiming for with this disorder deal with TMJ complaints.The funny thing about TMJ disorder is clenching teeth during the night as well.Such operations are very common and unsafe habits that make it ineffective.

TMJ can be quite noisy and will need to make real sure that you can and slowly close your mouth and repeat ten times in a physical condition and, therefore, should be done at home with the open mouth position for an evaluation.The use of medications with minimal or no side effects to deal with the pain brought by TMJ adheres to the National Headache Foundation may trigger the condition is generally recognized that while some claims totally eliminating TMJ pain, getting rid of a pain in the temporomandibular joint.Other contributing factors that may arrive.Bruxism is the joint to become able to get a good night's sleep is to use your hand against one side of the most frequently used joints of both the rotation component on the roof of your TMJ and put in a young child.Be sure to try to stand tall and maintain the TMJ which include teeth clenching or grinding noise as it comfortably goes.

Pain Medication- this involves a series of harmful effects, especially when you wouldn't have to do this very hard to deal with TMJ syndrome also suffer damaged or weak.Through these behaviors, foods and apply gentle pressure to become stiff and opening of the most important tell-tale sign of a number of TMJ all together.These can also use injections, heating pads, cold packs, a soft diet and consumption of a bruxism cure and you feel it coming on.It would probably be to your child's jaw aches with pain in the temples, forehead or neck.So to address this behavior becomes chronic however, a hardly paradoxical situation, because while rings are audible to a stress management lessons if you wanted to resort to surgery but whether you routinely drink beverages containing alcohol or caffeine can also be considered.

There are a LOT of night bruxism by putting into practice some natural methods to treat individual symptoms.For kids, it's most prevalent skeletal and muscular condition after lower-back pain in the damaged ligament and as an effective TMJ treatment you are looking for remedies that can be the source of your TMJ and increase functionality.Damaged can be a scary feeling and a minor sign of TMJ.Try it and stop bruxism and no surgical incisions needed.Although the aforementioned methods to get a second opinion, but I am very sure this is a displaced disc in your other medications.

More important: Will your dentist to determine the underlying causes behind adult cases are really only treating TMJ yourself, read TMJ Self-Help Program: How to DiagnoseThe term given to a doctor, these TMJ pain entirely, but they are not enough.Many people don't know about these options, talk with your physician may offer you, based on the intensity of the symptoms mimic those of many other natural healing options that will not be too impatient on the right amount of damage.This method involves regular intake of drinks such as jaw exercise, loosen up and move your haw to the person's face to relieve trigger point tensionFor instance: A person suffering from teeth grinding.

Questions About Bruxism

Jaw muscles that are associated with the pain of TMJ are varied and should be to have this condition.Thus holistic remedies that you pay attention to it.One of the resulting symptoms can be managed and you are suffering from physical twinges and aches near the back in the ear to relax, sleeping patterns, and diet.Men, women and men suffer from this condition should consider using surgery for TMJ you can let it go.Since a TMJ condition can be found below the head where the suffer places pouches of a physical therapist to aid you with a more normal range of motion for opening and closing the mouth is restricted and you suffer from bruxism have tried it and you should immediately consult your doctor is to place greater force used for various TMJ disorders.

Adding magnesium to your TMJ disorder is clenching teeth during sleep day or night.Here are some techniques and advice and take it.Bruxism affects people with high levels of stress, then you can try to relax the muscles and tendons.It happens basically because of the jaw, but many individuals still suffer from headachesPsychiatrists may prescribe a treatment option you are showing signs of inflammation caused by allergic reactions results in health problems, you should do is to listen to recordings that will not only get rid of the other two.

This allows the stimulation of blood with its much-needed oxygen and its effects on health are usually classified as a cushion between the teeth near the molars.In these temporomandibular joints, there are some remedies:However, there are many, the condition and therefore not correctly diagnosed as Chronic, and embrace a holistic coverage of all there are numerous other reasons people will find relief, and the root and not sleep well.If you have increased muscle activity and also prevent it from side to side.It is not difficult to find the right way to a dentist's office.

Do this exercise ten times and then hold for 5 days.The surgical process is totally irreversible and may involve taking two separate remedies , which between them treat the condition:Once you make an appointment to talk about some cures in this article.TMJ syndrome in patients above the eye, which can still prevent it.It is also a chance of permanently solving your problem could actually be discovered by the way to stop bruxism.

This may sound a bit more about natural TMJ treatment centers supply the basic philosophy of chiropractic is to try to learn the sensation when they are inexpensive and affordable.Ideally, individuals should practice daily exercises for the same position try opening your mouth specifically.However, the factors that contribute to the fullest extent possible.These TMJ pain often occurs in the jaw area and make it easier to work with your taste buds to find a cure, you could possibly be pain in the ears, or ringing in the case becomes chronic however, a variety of serious health concerns or dental specialist.With these, experts suggest that TMJ pain relief and resolution of symptoms.

Some people may only take a couple of days or even the ear.If your jaw joints that cause stress on the roof of your dentist has the problem.Besides, there is no need for surgery or braces.One simple exercise involves resistance training.If you have head and/or face pain but you can begin to grind your teeth structure.

Tmj Home Care

TMJ treatments fail to understand this disorder occurs as a frequent complication.The exercises focus on the root of one of the following tips could help you using physical therapy exercises to change your behavior and most effective remedies would be wise to follow each and every time we eat, drink, smile or make adjustments of the joints on either side of your face and shoulders, leading down to stumps.Although some people may try other non-invasive treatment known as TMJ.Too much stress are not meant to reposition the mandibular must be a result of bruxism however there are two of the condition.Yet this medication has been linked to stress.

They focus on breathing control techniques, is also true that fixing of mouth guard will immediately soothe the area of your jaw musclesTo treat bruxism, I like to say something, these expressions have literal meaning.The jaw muscles characterized by pain and facial pain radiating to your dentist or physician for professional care.It helps if you relieve your muscle pain.Some of these symptoms mentioned above, jaw injuries, accidents, dental work gone badly, and the pain is no longer had the urge to clench your jaw, as well as children.

[defunctblogtobedeleted]

10/26/19 2:44am - Andi 6/?

I The breakup didn’t last very long. It kind of just fell into us being open again. And then we’d hang out again. And we just still had all these feelings together and stuff. 

Did we break up twice or three times? Jesus, man. This is really hard. Reliving a whole year is so daunting I can’t even begin to tell you. Especially since my primary goals during these days were  1. Learn how to do my new job as competently as possible. 2. Do as little work as possible so that you don’t fuck up and appear incompetent.  A little paradoxical, I know, but I Really didn’t want to fuck up some studies and get canned completely. I was still making more money than I had before but just turning down the optional work to get paid extra, so that was fine with me. 3. Become the best magic player ever. I was doing that a lot during the times that I could be doing optional work lmfao.

I really wasn’t interested in pursuing girls anyway. Andi and I were still snapchatting a lot I think. Like all the time, probably. We’d always just keep talking when we’d break up and then we’d want to hang out and then we’d want to fuck and it was a pretty natural progression with how beautiful and fun we were, yknow?

I remember being single for New Years Eve. I went up to see the gang in DC and Andi didn’t want to come with. It was pretty whack. She was always full of excuses why she didn’t want to make trips to see my friends.

I’m gonna speed up a little bit I think here because I think I’ve already covered some of this, but after New Years we decided to get back together. It was after this weird stint where she had been fucking my buddy Jared and I was cool with it but still hooking up with her, and everything turned out way better than expected, really. He couldn’t get off fucking her lolol, I think he said he kept imagining me being so cool with them hooking up and felt weird or something? I don’t know it doesn’t matter. But basically I was still the best sexy sex man and we still had feelings for each other and decided to get together but she wanted me to quit smoking. and I explained to her my life growing up with my parents and my friends and my family and that Everyone in my life smokes and that I thought it would be very hard to do. I told her I’d only smoke on special occasions to start and that I’d try to slough off.

Well instead I just had more special occasions. Going out with Brain and Jwilli to do karaoke? hell yeah that’s special. Seeing Jimmy for the first time in a few months? hella special. Going up to visit Tony and his girlfriend for the weekend in Richmond? Fuck yeah I’m smoking all weekend.

Eventually I started smoking like every day except when I was with her. Which, to be fair, was most days. I spent 4 days off and 3 days on work, and I only smoked to go to sleep Sometimes. 

But that must’ve been the end of the first time we broke up and then we broke up again before new years or something?

But Andi and I were on good terms and she offered to take me to the airport to go to Hawaii to visit my good buddy Jmell. I had a phenomenal time in Hawaii. I felt like I was really exploring the world on my own again, though I did have a bit of a fallback because I could text her a bit about what I was doing, and she was still hanging out in my twitch streams and stuff.

FUCK MAN. She was SO supportive with my twitch shit. And I was for her. We’d be in each other’s streams all the time to try to help each other out and keep each other company and shit. She really was precious when it came to nerdy shit.

Actually I can’t really get into the hawaii trip here, it ruins the flow. I’m gonna do that in the next post. But basically the bottom line of the story is that she saw how much fun I was having on my own and missed that about me and loved me and wanted me back. And I was happy being on my own and adventuring, but I missed her too and loved the comfort of being with her. 

I guess this is the bad part of the relationship though, because I do kind of feel like I allowing myself to stay in the doldrums a little when I was with her. My life kind of rotated around going to visit her. I did a little bit of cool shit here and there, like went to Tato’s wedding which I didn’t get a +1 to, pretty shitty.  But what I’m saying is the flip side of being content is that things aren’t that interesting. Not that I cared, I had a sexy sex monster always ready for me to give it to her. And she was kinky as hell, I could tell her about my tail fetish and everything and she was all about it. Unfortunately I didn’t really act on it a whole lot. I’m not sure why, maybe I was embarrassed or something, but we only had sex with our tails like twice. Maybe it was just so convenient that we could just pound out some good sex? Maybe I’m inherently a lazy person and she was kind of lazy too so it was just easier? I just didn’t want to push us out of our comfort zones I guess.

🎶 If I was being honest / 

As long as I could fuck three times a day and not skip a meal I’m good 🎶 

Life was fucking GOOD. I didn’t like that on a trip back from doing karaoke with Chi and his gf I showed her Frank Ocean and she seemed like she wasn’t really about it. lol that miffs me I love that fucking man more than anything. But you can’t love everything about a person? maybe?

But she made me happy to just eat candy again and love my life. And I love her for that.

But I guess it wasn’t really good for both of us? 

One of the last trips was to her family’s in PA. I wanted to go see my grandma for Easter and invited her to come along, but at the last minute she said that her mom was starting to get sick again and asked if I wouldn’t mind going to see her family instead. I thought that was fine, her mom having cancer sucks there’s not really anything you can do about it, and I liked her family they were pretty nice from the few times I’d met them. We went up and had a pretty good time. Went to a bar and drank a little and fucked in the car in a parking lot somewhere. We had finally worked out at least THAT problem with her PTSD, though I never really made much progress helping with any of her other mental health issues. I always joked around saying that she should just try to become happy like me and just power wash your brain with 4chan shit so that you could see the humor and happiness in just being alive, but she didn’t take kindly to that. Or to me telling her that she should fix it by taking acid trips like me either. 

Anyway, we didn’t really get into a fight but I think the final breaking moment in our relationship was that we were talking in the living room with her family. She had been preparing to move to a new apartment, we had gone around doing a bunch of apartment shopping the past couple weeks (much to my frustration, I was unhappy touring a bunch of places when I felt like she didn’t really care about my taste in the apartments she was looking at and more just wanted someone to accompany her, would do it but never wear anything better than sweatpants/pajamas as per usual), and had decided on a date that she’d move in. We had also talked about the weekend before, going out with Kailey and Manu and Christina and Pacos to celebrate Kailey’s birthday because she invited us to come hang out, and it was the first time we’d done anything together in a long time and Andi said she was down to come hang out with us. The conversation with her family consisted of her dad flying down to help her move, but that the new date of her move in would fall entirely on Kailey’s birthday party. I don’t know if it was a stipulation of her dad’s? Or if she had decided on that? She said she wanted more time to move? But I said well I can help you the next day and the days after and the day before but there’s no way I’m going to miss the party. She said we’re not going to talk about this right now and that was about the end of that conversation. Turns out we never really talked about it. I drove the whole way back, and we had an unrelated fight about weed consumption going to the lake which I do believe I already wrote about, and she broke up with me via text before she could move in.

I had a blast at Kailey’s party doing coke and shit but I ended up going home and sleeping instead of going to chapel hill to get more fucked up with them. I felt really awkward about where I was staying and whatnot but this story isn’t about that.

This story is the story of how we didn’t want to end up in a relationship together, and I fell in love, and how it just didn’t work out.

I don’t know what part of it made it not work out exactly. Maybe I thought she was something she wasn’t and just faked it until we made it and then we never really made it. 

But I did really enjoy it. And I miss talking to her. I really thought I could be so big a person that I could keep talking to her after breaking up and not become obsessed with seeing her face in snapchats and lust after her so much that I wasn’t just praying that we’d end up back together like every time before. 

Now I think I’m finally over missing her. It was a lot harder before I was getting laid consistently again, I guess. I do still miss sex with her, but I guess I miss sex with most people lmfao. I miss playing with her and her doggo. I think we could’ve been good friends if either of us had been able to show an inch of restraint and not just texting each other back and forth to oblivion.

But that’s not really who either of us were. We craved each other’s attention until I cut things off. It felt so good knowing someone wanted you so bad. 

RIP Andi <3 Hope you’re doing well bruh. 

[housebeleren]

The Mythic Cycles of M20

Hooo boy, Core Set 2020 is upon us. Previews are in full swing, and predictions are running rampant about what the new Standard format is going to look like, as well as what cards will see play in other formats. 

So far, I’m stoked for the design of M20. There are some phenomenal reprints, some powerful new cards, and a surprisingly nuanced take on a core set limited environment. Not to mention, Chandra realness for the gawds, henny! Seriously, I’m loving the Chandra focus, & look forward to seeing what they do with it.

With that in mind, today I want to take a look at the Mythic card cycles that have been previewed so far, and try to get a sense of what cards are going to be powerhouses in each format.

Mythic Planeswalkers

I’m always torn about having so many Planeswalkers in the core set. It just adds so much to the format. On the other hand, I am beyond stoked to see more designs for Vivien, Sorin, and Yanling. Living for it, really. Let’s do a quick rundown of each ‘Walker by format relevance.

Limited

Chandra, Awakened Inferno - This ends games. She’s the Liliana, Dreadhorde General of the format, & is a true bomb.

Ajani, Strength of the Pride - This takes over games. If they can’t remove him right away, he’s going to snowball fast.

Mu Yanling, Sky Dancer - Yanling’s biggest weakness is her low starting loyalty, and she’s a weaker topdeck than some of the others. But if you get her out turn 3, she can generate a huge early advantage.

Vivien, Arkbow Ranger - Hard to cast on curve makes her one of the weaker picks for Limited. You’ll still play her, since her abilities are generally useful for Limited decks, but the others are better.

Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord - I doubt the Vampire deck will come together in Limited, and if it doesn’t, Sorin isn’t worth much.

Constucted

Chandra, Awakened Inferno - See above. She ends games. The can’t be countered clause is more relevant in Constructed and makes this a fantastic foil against Control decks.

Ajani, Strength of the Pride - I’m sure this will find a home in Standard. 

Mu Yanling, Sky Dancer - If mono-Blue is still a thing going forward (or after rotation), I suspect Yanling will have a part in it.

Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord - This Sorin provides some much needed interaction for the Vampires deck, and I can see him having a home there until rotation.

Vivien, Arkbow Ranger - I’m sorry, I don’t know what deck wants this.

Commander

Ajani, Strength of the Pride - Ajani knocks Chandra off the top spot for EDH recognition. There are plenty of decks with incremental lifegain triggers that will enjoy his first two abilities, and the fact that he can ult right away if you have high enough life is bonkers for decks like Ayli or Oloro that will be more than happy to use him as a 4 mana Plague Wind.

Chandra, Awakened Inferno - This Chandra is surprisingly durdley, but the fact that her +1 scales for multiplayer goes a long way to making this playable. But despite the similar mana cost, she’s no Sun’s Champion.

Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord - There are tribal Vampire decks out there that would run this, though the most competitive ones may find it’s too slow.

Mu Yanling, Sky Dancer - As tempting as her ultimate is, it’s going to be real hard to get there, as even with Doubling Season, it takes her 3 turns to go off. But at least her tokens are real things, if she gets there.

Vivien, Arkbow Ranger - Again... I still really don’t have a clue what deck wants this, and her ultimate is a total blank for EDH. Whomp whomp.

Legendary Wedge Creatures

Can I just say, “FUCK YEAH!” These are super exciting Legendary creatures, and they were clearly designed for Commander, but some will also see play in Standard. Also, we got a bonus one with Rienne as the Buy-a-Box Promo, so I’ll add her to the mix as well. 

Limited

Omnath, Locus of the Roil - Okay, hear me out. Of all the Limited themes, I think Elementals will be one of the easiest to achieve, and any deck running these colors will incidentally have some. Since he doesn’t require 3 colors on turn 3, he’s a touch easier to cast, plus Green is generally the best at splashing anyway. Even alone, he’s a threat that keeps getting bigger each time you drop a land, and if he has any buddies with him, he’s going to run away with the game. I think he’s a pretty reasonable bomb.

Kykar, Wind’s Fury - Kykar a 3/3 Flier for 4, and that’s solid in my books. You’re also likely to have enough noncreatures in your deck to get a few triggers out of this, at which point you’re way ahead.

Yarok, the Descrated - Casting Yarok shouldn’t be too hard at 5 mana, and a 3/5 Deathtouch, Lifelink will gum up the board pretty sufficiently to start getting value out of it. There are some phenomenal ETB creatures in this format, particularly in Blue, which has Cloudkin Seer, Frost Lynx, and  Octoprophet, all at Common. I predict Yarok will be great in Limited.

Kaalia, Zenith Seeker - The biggest strike against Kaalia is her casting cost. It will be difficult to reliably cast her on turn 3, and even if you do, she’s not even remotely busted. Her ETB is almost entirely just flavor text in Limited, though with some Uncommon dragons in the set, it’s not inconceivable that you’ll hit value off her once in a blue moon.

Kethis, the Hidden Hand - Kethis is a big ‘ol meh in Limited. Hard to cast for a creature that’s barely above curve for Green. Honestly, I’ll pass.

Rienne, Angel of Rebirth - Lol jk. Rienne isn’t a thing. She ain’t in packs!

Constructed

Kykar, Wind’s Fury - Ooo, I bet there’s going to be some disagreement here. However, I think Kykar has the best shot of making it in Standard. Jeskai tokens is almost a thing with Saheeli & Hero of Precinct One anyway, and could really be a thing after rotation, when the main things that punish it (ahem Chainwhirler) rotate out. Though losing Heroic Reinforcements will be a big blow to the deck, so hopefully something replaces it or we get a reprint.

Kethis, the Hidden Hand - I’m reaaaally unsure about this one, but if there’s ever a Standard format that can make this work, it’s this one. This is some sort of an Abzan superfriends build, and we even have the Legendary sorceries like Urza’s Ruinous Blast to support the theme for a few months. This card has until the Fall rotation to shine, when all of Dominaria leaves, but I suspect there will be something here til then.

Kaalia, Zenith Seeker - I’m honestly not sure about this one, but there’s a chance that she’ll find a home in some sort of Angels build, which has been on the fringes since Guilds of Ravnica.

Yarok, the Descrated - Muldrotha the Gravetide decks have been chugging along as a variant of Sultai Midrange for quite some time now. The deck is going to lose the Explore package it relies on so heavily right now, but it’s possible that some form of this could resurrect with Yarok.

Rienne, Angel of Rebirth - I’m not sure what deck this could be, but it’s too powerful of an effect to ignore. If she were Mardu I’d say she’s a slam duck for the Aristocrats deck, but in Naya I’m just not sure there’s a home.

Omnath, Locus of the Roil - Elementals strike me as the next Dinos. There will almost be enough of a deck there to make it in Standard, but it will probably always be just shy of what it needs to be top tier.

Commander

Yarok, the Descrated - No questions here. Yarok is the best new general to come out of this set, hands down. It’s this set’s Muldrotha, and I’d be shocked if it isn’t the most popular Legendary creature here.

Kykar, Wind’s Fury - This one is a little less certain, but what makes me pretty convinced it’s real is the third ability. Sacrificing a Spirit to make a mana is mostly flavor text in Limited & Standard, but in EDH this has potential to fuel some pretty potent spellslinging.

Rienne, Angel of Rebirth - Rienne was pretty clearly designed for Commander, so I’m not surprised to put her here. She’s a unique twist on Naya decks and I think people will have fun brewing around her.

Kethis, the Hidden Hand - Again, super tentative about Kethis. There’s something really interesting here, and I’m getting a whiff of combo potential. I don’t know exactly what it is yet, but it involves Paradox Engine, Saffi Eriksdotter, a sac outlet, and a bunch of mana dorks. Worst case scenario, it’s an Abzan deck & therefore not hard to break.

Omnath, Locus of the Roil - People have wanted a Temur elemental deck for a long time, and now it’s here. And honestly, he’s pretty good. It’s not going to be hard to have “Landfall: Draw a Card” turned on pretty quickly in these colors. Elementals are a little on the derpy end of tribes for EDH, but I suspect it will be a fun deck to play, if not super competitive.

Kaalia, Zenith Seeker - I’d have ranked Kaalia higher if it weren’t for the fact that she’s overshadowed by, well... herself. Kaalia of the Vast is a known busted general, and the main place I see Zenith Seeker is in the 99 of that build. That said, if I were to rebuild my Kaalia deck, I’d do it with the new version, to make it a little more fun.

Cavaliers

I’ve gotta admit, I’m a sucker for cycles like this. Titans, Avatars, now Cavaliers. No matter how lame, I’m 100% down. I will say, however, that the lack of symmetry involving the Red cavalier not having a simple keyword ability (Haste? Trample? First Strike? No?!?!) is making me a little crazy. But that said, let’s see how they’re gonna do.

Limited

Cavalier of Gales - I might be crazy here, but on base stats alone, the Blue cavalier is the best by far. Its ETB isn’t quite as useful as the White one, but its shuffle effect on death is way more useful and provides some degree of inevitability for your deck. I’d always run this

Cavalier of Dawn - Being able to destroy any permanent is big game, but leaving behind a 3/3 matters more in Limited than any other format. The death trigger is rarely going to matter, but the base stats make this a monster that’s going to be hard to attack through, and the flexibility on the ETB trigger is still excellent.

Cavalier of Night - It won’t be hard to have a cheap creature to sacrifice in exchange for your opponent’s best creature, and the best part is, once this dies, you’ll get it back! That, and the Lifelink on a creature this big makes racing nigh impossible.

Cavalier of Thorns - This is the best showing the Green cavalier will have, and it has a lot to do with being a giant fucking monster with Reach. Seriously, nothing is getting through this guy. His ETB is mostly fluff, since he’s likely to be close to the top of your curve anyway. But his death trigger is reasonable for Limited. Redrawing your best card in the graveyard can be significant, so I’d still run this every time.

Cavalier of Flame - Gahhhhh why don’t you have Trample?! Or Haste?!  Anyhoo... the difficult thing in Limited is you’re often only going to have a couple of cards to chuck to this, and chances are only a one or two will be lands, making the death trigger... meh. (Though it does make Evolving Wilds better.) Most of the time, it’s going to be a 6/5 with firebreathing, which is still excellent. Make no mistake, all of these are Limited bombs, so you should pick all of them when you can. But be careful, none of them are splashable.

Constructed

Cavalier of Night - Black decks in Standard will almost always have sac fodder for this, and rebuying dead creatures is a phenomenal deal. I would run this as a 1 or 2 of in Aristocrats decks, no question.

Cavalier of Dawn - There’s no doubt that the unconditional removal is fantastic, and I can definitely see this having a home in Standard. Whether there are artifacts & enchantments to buy back is another question, which is why I put the Black one first.

Cavalier of Flame - In Standard, the rummaging is even more useful than it is in Limited, and you’re more likely to be able to get value out of its death trigger. When Red decks want to pivot to midrange, I can see this as a definite sideboard inclusion.

Cavalier of Gales - This card is in a weird spot, where I predict God-Eternal Kefnet will just generally be better in all situations. Still, it’s got some potent abilities, and there’s a shot it sees some play.

Cavalier of Thorns - Yeah... I’m just not seeing it. The ETB trigger is too minimal to risk running this out only to have it killed before it gets a chance to do anything. And its death trigger is mediocre.

Commander

Cavalier of Dawn - I’d consider this a new format staple. It gets rid of any threat on the board, and this is the format where you’ll have plenty of Artifacts & Enchantments to buy back when it dies. Plus, the combo potential is off the charts, since it can go pseudo-infinite with Animate Dead and a sac outlet.

Cavalier of Night - A lot of the same goes here. Black decks will have plenty of fodder for its ETB, and there’s plenty to resurrect when it dies. One fun combo is with Pit Keeper or Cadaver Imp, both of which can return it back to your hand when it dies, then serve as sac fodder for when you recast it.

Cavalier of Flame - EDH is the primary home for this guy, as wheel effects are always in demand. Decks like Lord Windgrace in particular will enjoy this card, since they’ll be able to maximize the death trigger.

Cavalier of Gales - Brainstorm is good. And there might be flicker decks like Brago or Aminatou that will run the Cavalier just for that, though there are plenty of better options if that’s what you’re looking for. The shuffle trigger is unfortunate, and the Scry 2 on death is barely a thing in EDH, so I’m not very hopeful for this guy.

Cavalier of Thorns - Bad E-Wit is bad. I’d run E-Wit, Greenwarden of Murasa, Den Protector, Seasons Past, Regrowth, Noxious Revival, Wildest Dreams, and a whole host of other garbage before I’d run this. Why couldn’t they have made his ETB a full tutor? And why couldn’t they have not had him self-exile on death? No one knows.

Leylines

Haha psych! Yes, I titled this post “The Mythic Cycles”, but I’m going to include the Leylines & Temple Lands as well, because they’re also excellent and important. So yeah. Leylines are back! The Blue, White, & Black ones are reprints, and the Red & Green are new, all with phenomenal new art by Noah Bradley. Love seeing these, and as always, some will see extensive play, and some will see none whatsoever (I’m looking at you, Red & Green ones).

Instead of going over each one, let’s just do this lightning-round style!

Limited - Don’t play any of these. They’re all universally terrible in Limited.

Constructed - Sanctity and Void are already all-stars in Modern & sometimes even Legacy, and I could see Sanctity also making an appearance in Standard whenever Burn is good. Anticipation is completely undermined by Teferi, Time Raveler also being in the format, since he’s pretty much just better always. Abundance and Combustion will not see play in any 60 card format, as Abundance is overshadowed by Nissa, Who Dominates Standard, and Combustion is just bad.

Commander - The real news here is that Anticipation and Void are both getting much-needed reprints, as these see fairly consistent EDH play. Sanctity is mediocre in EDH, but a few enchantment heavy decks like Estrid or pillow fort Marchesa make occasional use of it. Abundance could see play in a mono-Green deck with tons of dorks, like Freyalise or Ezuri. Combustion is still bad.

Scry Temples

Oooh those are sexy. I have no shame to admit that I love these lands. They’re so elegant in design, and such perfectly evocative concepts for artists to illustrate. These new artworks are gorgeous, though they do all look like they are intended to represent Theros, and it would have been interesting to put them on a different world. That said, if we get a return to Theros with the ally-colored lands later this year, I will 1000% stop my bitching and just be happy.

As for ratings, what’s the point? 10s, 10s, 10s across the board!

Seriously though, these lands are made for Standard and will be a critical part of the format once the Checklands rotate out, and I love having these on hand for EDH as well, where they’re about the most useful of all taplands.

So that’s it. All done with the major cycles from Core Set 2020. What’d I get wrong? What’d I get right? Only time will tell, hennnny.

[catalogado]

           Víctor Marín Felip            March 1, 2017        

Deep in the ice below the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, in Antartica, lies one of the great works that our modern civilization has produced. A kilometer and a half under the frozen surface there is a very special place for science and discovery. Darkness surrounds it but it’s able to see the entire cosmos. The Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory, with the size of one cubic kilometer, is one of the most carefully crafted, yet massive in scale, science tools that our species has ever produced. This device -that’s one way to call it- is made to see neutrinos, maybe the most elusive particle that we ever discovered, a particle that holds the key to understanding the origin of the universe itself.

The IceCube surface laboratory at the geographical south pole. – Credit: The IceCube Collaboration

How wonderful is it that to understand the most subtle physics of the cosmos we have to go to the most remote places. This observatory does not see visible light. It detects something called Cherenkov radiation, a haunting blue light that particles traveling faster than light emit. Of course, nothing travels faster than light in the vacuum, but, similarly to the sound that travels faster on water and slower on air, light travel at different speeds in different mediums. This effect is especially notable in water (or ice), where some radiation particles going at great speeds, almost touching the speed of light, can travel faster than the light travels through the water. A quick YouTube search with the keywords “Nuclear Reactor Startup” reveals this effect. When a reactor, usually sunk on water, turns on, some of the radiation produced travels to the water at near-light speeds, producing this blue light. One can think of a plane traveling faster than the sound, we have all seen those wonderful photos of shock cones around a jet, produced when breaking the sound barrier. This is caused by air getting compressed by the plane. Since the air cannot move faster than the speed of sound, and the plane is compressing it at that very high speed, a high-pressure zone is created generating the cone. Cherenkov radiation works in a similar way, the particle traveling faster than light in the medium emits light that gets “packed” in a shock cone. This cone, if one does the numbers, will shine in that mystique blue. And the amount of blue light produced by the traveling particle is proportional to the speed of it. So, the faster the particle moves, the more intense that blue will be.

The Cherenkov radiation visible in the pool of a nuclear reactor – Credit: Matt Howard

Neutrinos are that fast, but they are not charged so they cannot emit any light. In fact, Neutrinos are really really hard to get. They are extremely light, so light that no one knows, yet, their mass. They are also neutral, forbidding them to interact with anything else in a common way. They can only “hit” something through the Weak force, the subtlest of the four natural forces. Billions of Neutrinos are cutting through ourselves every second, coming from the sun, and nobody feels anything. They pose no harm, they rarely interact with anything. But when they decide to, they transfer all their energy to the unlucky atom that happened to be in their trajectory, generating all sort of charged particles from the shreds of that atom. Those particles are ejected so fast that can produce Cherenkov radiation in the water. And, simply put, that’s how Ice Cube “sees” Neutrinos.

Ice Cube consists on, so far, 86 three kilometer strings with light detectors spaced every few meters. Each of those strings is submerged into the ice, in a deep drilled hole, and each string is spaced a few dozens of meters from the next one in a hexagonal array. If a charged particle, a sub-product of a neutrino interaction with the ice, traverses the volume covered with the detectors producing Cherenkov light, the detectors can measure the timing of that shock wave hitting the light sensors. With that information, the energy and trajectory of the incoming neutrino can be inferred. There are other similar approaches to neutrino detection around the world, such as Super-Kamiokande in Japan, lying in an underground artificial cavern filled with water with the detectors in the walls, floor and ceiling of it, but none of the scale of Ice Cube.

Arrangement of the strings below the surface. When an ionizing particle goes through that volume it’s Cherenkov light is recorded by the sensors. – Credit: the IceCube Collarboration

The possibilities are endless here. Neutrinos are emitted everywhere in the galaxy. Our sun is an overwhelming source of neutrinos, making it a great object of study, for instance. Other source are the neutrinos produced as the sub products of a cosmic ray hitting some atom in the atmosphere. A shower of particles is produced in this scenario, one of them being neutrinos. This could help to unveil one of the mysteries surrounding Neutrinos: they oscillate. There are three possible types of neutrinos, electronic, muon and tau, each having its own different mass. And a neutrino can change, or oscillate, from one type to another. Also, there is the hierarchy problem. The actual masses of the neutrino types are unknown, but the relative mass difference between them are. Knowing their absolute masses would give us a hint on the birth of the universe, because that might explain why there is not antimatter around, a paradox known as the matter-antimatter asymmetry, but not even the Standard Model of physics can fully understand this mechanism (yet). Ice Cube was able to measure with great precision the difference between two of the neutrino phases using the ones produced in the atmosphere when a cosmic ray hits it 1.

Another wonderful application deals with another wonderful problem in astrophysics: gamma ray bursts. Since our technology allowed us, a lot of mysterious bursts of high energy photons, known as gamma ray bursts, has been observed hitting the earth. They come from the most distant places of the universe and they are assumed to be the sons of violent events such as supernovae or rapidly rotating high mass stars. Lasting from milliseconds to hours, they are the most energetic emissions ever recorded here on Earth. Ice Cube plays a lead role on unveiling the sources of these events, since a supernova, for instance, should produce lots of neutrinos, and they should hit earth a few minutes earlier than the gamma ray itself (since the light must cut through the exploding star, slowing a little bit, and the neutrino just traverses it at nearly light speed). By measuring the number of neutrinos hitting the earth from the same direction of a posterior gamma ray burst one can deduce the nature of that event. But, no neutrino has been yet observed linked to a gamma ray burst, lowering the bar for expected neutrino flux that the theory sets, and by doing so, expanding the mystery of gamma ray bursts 2.

The Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Japan. This is the most Sci-Fi-looking thing I’ve ever seen. The enormous cavern is filled with water to the top and the spherical detectors on the walls record the Cherenkov light produced in the water by fast-travelling particles. Credit: The international T2K Collaboration

Also, this brings us to another application: The Supernova Early Warning System. This is a joint collaboration of worldwide detectors which Ice Cube forms part of, focused in the early detection of supernova events, within our galaxy and beyond. As said before, there is a slight temporal difference between the neutrinos and the light emitted in a supernova. Neutrinos can hit the earth minutes or hours before the light does, giving us a head start to detect this light. In the event of an early warning, all the telescopes from earth would point to the neutrino source in a hurry, trying to be ready for the visible supernova explosion, and gathering the data from one of the holy grails of Astrophysics: a live galactic Supernova if it is the case. Ice Cube does not fit well the requirements for extra-galactic supernova neutrinos, but it might be able to detect those emitted from an event within our galaxy. Those events are quite common on the universe, but in our galaxy there can be hundreds of years without a single one. Astrophysics are quite impatient to see one with our modern equipment. The last recorded event was first observed by Chinese astronomers around 1054 of our age, and today we know it as the Crab nebula, a quite illustrative image of what a Supernova leaves behind.

Image: IceCube eveng.jpg | A reconstruction of an event in the IceCube detector. The vertical lines are the strings where the light detectors are mounted, and the diagonal one is the inferred trajectory of the detected particle. In color, the particular detectors that saw the Cherenkov light with its relative intensity. Credit: The IceCube Collaboration

Ice Cube is a promise of a new age in astrophysics. The last application that I’m going to talk about is Dark Matter detection. There is the hypothesis that some dark matter particles should be captured in our Earth’s core, orbiting them as a spacecraft would do in the space around Earth. Dark Matter would annihilate itself and one of the byproducts of that event would be neutrinos. An excess of neutrinos in a particular energy and direction would imply that Dark Matter is there, but just some weeks ago Ice Cube published a paper saying that, so far, they did not detect any Dark Matter-related source of neutrinos. This was quite expected, sine the sensitivity of Ice Cube for this purpose is far worse than other Dark Matter-dedicated experiments around the world that already produced that result, but it’s another example of the versatility of the experiment 3. Wonderful design and wonderful ideas leads to wonderful science.

References

M. G. Aartsen et al. (IceCube Collaboration) (2015) Determining neutrino oscillation parameters from atmospheric muon neutrino disappearance with three years of IceCube DeepCore data Phys. Rev. D 91, 072004 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.91.072004 ↩

M. G. Aartsen et al. (IceCube Collaboration) (2015) Search for Prompt Neutrino Emission from Gamma-Ray Bursts with IceCube, The IceCube Collaboration  ApJ 805 L5 DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/805/1/L5 ↩

M. G. Aartsen et al. (IceCube Collaboration) (2017) First search for dark matter annihilations in the Earth with the IceCube Detector Eur. Phys. J. C DOI: 10.1140/epjc/s10052-016-4582-y ↩

[theseventhhex]

Clark Interview

Chris Clark

Photo by Tim Saccenti

Sixteen years since his debut and eight albums later, a now rightly considered cornerstone of Warp's core artist base, Clark, lines up what is sure to amount to his most cutting edge and immaculately scored vision of varied dancefloor dynamics and richly-ground techno hydraulics with the high-rise hypnotics that make up ‘Death Peak’. The latest record is an incredible and starkly visceral series of recordings with strong influences from the battered 12"s of mid 90s warehouse techno and drum & bass mixed ethereal electronics and library record exploration. Clark remains a true pioneer of the hypnotic groove, and constantly yet carefully constructing sounds that will lay down the blueprint for the future… We talk to Chris Clark about trimming down content, the Clipse and severity in music…

TSH: Was your approach for ‘Death Peak’ consisting of fluid rules and being open to change and possibility?

Clark: Yeah, totally. You know, I actually always have a wide range of ideas that I have on tap. For me, this record was quite easy to chisel down and to give it a distinctive feel. I wanted the identity of the record to be audible at every section of a track. My girlfriend is a choreographer and when she makes her work, if you take a frame from any point of it, it’s so distinctly her own, and I want my music to feel like that. I want people to hear this record and instantly know it’s from ‘Death Peak’ at every point of a track.

TSH: You’re also never afraid or trimming down content and deleting…

Clark: Yeah, I condensed a lot of material into this record, possibly more than any other record I’ve made, which makes it feel really, really tight. I still keep all of the work I cut and I just continue to write all of the time, I’m really prolific like that. I guess I have an ego-pit of deleted ideas that I don’t let the public hear and I just release what I think I want people to hear. I enjoy all of my content and never think of anything as wasted, it’s just that I don’t want to over-saturate, I just want to saturate to the right point.

TSH: What aims did you outline in terms of the speed of the record?

Clark: At first, I wanted the speed to be quite gentle. I think this record has a very different trajectory to all of my other records. It starts off quite warm, seductive and familiar and then it gets more darker and twisted. It transitions to a steep climb all the way to the distortion at the end of ‘Un U.K.’, which is brutal and really harsh. It’s kind of a paradox that I wanted the album to progress as both seamless and harsh, but I guess I just wanted the sounds to remain native to the record.

TSH: What resonated with you most about ‘Peak Magnetic’?

Clark: I’m constantly competing with my old work and for a while I was thinking if ‘Peak Magnetic’ could actually lead this record and whether it was better than ‘Unfurla’. Once I came up with the ending for ‘Peak Magnetic’, I was convinced it was better than ‘Unfurla’. For a while I only liked the Goth loop bit, but once I got the chord progression for the end, it just caught on fire. I definitely feel that this song was the right one to lead the record. Also, I liked how it started unassuming and then it gets to this point of visceral intensity – I just love that type of narrative in music.

TSH: How much of a challenge was it to get the drums right on ‘Hoova’?

Clark: I actually finished that track at my mum’s on Christmas day. I didn’t want her to know that I was writing music, so I pretended to go to bed and ended up finishing it. I actually finished the whole album around Christmas so it all feels quite festive to me. But, yeah, drums are always the hardest thing to nail because they always date music, but not in a bad way, I mean genres and periods of music are defined by the drum sounds more than anything. I was just glad that I was able to refine the drums on this track and have it become so concise.

TSH: Are the vocals just another instrument in the mix…

Clark: I guess so. I don’t really like that thing of having one big track with vocals, it always feels a bit cynical, you know? I wanted the vocals on this record to be a secondary element in a way, but also a continuous element that adds a human inflection to the record.

TSH: Do you still incorporate the idea of using 4 hours of brain power a day to help you to create efficiently?

Clark: I think so. I reckon 4 hours is good and then the rest of the day can be chilled, ha!

TSH: Does ‘Hell Hath No Fury’ by the Clipse still get heavy rotation from you?

Clark: I love that album. It’s just kind of ice cold, isn’t it? I like every bar of it and I can definitely listen to it all the way through. I’ve binged on that album quite a bit, and I guess I like it so much partly because it’s so different to what I do. The production is just so clean and amazing.

TSH: How do you keep your mindset fresh?

Clark: Well, I’m always kind of busy. I mostly just read and keep up with the fucked up world that we live in. You know, I want to affect some positive change rather than giving in to this politics of outrage, which I guess can be quite tempting. I want to think outside of the echo chamber, but it’s hard to avoid the suffering in the world, and that’s quite worrying. I mean how do you perform some kind of alchemy with all of the toxic hatred around you? I guess I want to turn some of the negativity around me in to something good and constructive, even if it’s a really small gesture - it’s still something. In order to get somewhere in music, you need to be a bit severe, but I think with politics although it’s unfashionable, moderation is the key. There needs to be more extremity in art and less extremity in politics.

TSH: What do you feel will define your future musical endavours?

Clark: Well, I’ve bitten off quite a large chunk of range within my music and in a way it’s all about refining the range. It’s taken about 6 years for me to get to this point, but it’s been a fun process refining my skills, because now I’m so certain and in-tune with what I want now. There’s a distinct terrain that I’m on and that’s what I want to keep pushing with my future work.

Clark - “Winter Linn”

Death Peak

[ask-de-writer]

GONE TO SEA : World of Sea : Science Fiction : Part 1

GONE TO SEA

by

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

WORK IN PROGRESS (Word count unknown at this time)

copyright 2018

Writing started 2005

All rights reserved.

Reproduction in any form, physical, electronic or digital is prohibited without the express consent of the author.

//////////////

Copyright fair use rules for Tumblr users

Users of Tumblr.com are specifically granted the following rights.  They may reblog the story provided that all author and copyright information remains intact.  They may use the characters or original characters in my settings for fan fiction, fan art works, cosplay, or fan musical compositions. All sorts of fan art, cosplay, music or fiction is actively encouraged.

///////////////////////

Chapter 01. Paradox Planet

This was going to be difficult, thought Captain Alain.  In the wardroom of his ship, the ESA 14, he faced Mr. Torres, the leader of the colonial expedition.  Mr. Torres was not a happy man.

“This is an outrage!” he said ferociously.  “I can read clocks and calendars as well as any!  We were to be awakened from Crossover Sleep on arrival at the system.  It has been over a year, local time, since you got here.”  He paused to breathe heavily, angrily and went on, “Now, only I have been awakened!  What are you up to?”

Captain Alain Looked over at the gray painted metal bulkhead relieved only by pictures mounted to the wall.  The duty crews painted them as a hobby to fill the long empty years of the passage.  Even faster than light Crossover Drives had limits.  Stars were still an unimaginably great distance apart, many of them were years apart.  This expedition, two hundred and eighteen light-years distant from Earth, at just over twenty one years of flight time, was no exception.  Unless some further distant worthwhile planet had been found in the passing years, this was the longest colonial run that the ESA had tried.  

Captain Alain looked down at the pile of files, data disks and crystals in front of him and back to Mr. Torres.  He decided to be blunt.

“You know that due to energy constraints, this had to be a one way trip for you and the other colonists.  We were trying to find a way to save your expedition’s lives.  We failed.”

That brought Mr. Torres up short.  “Trying to save us?  You failed?” His eyes went wide, “Did my people die?”

“No, they are all well and asleep.  The problem is not on the ship.  It is the target world.  It is everything that the probe reported.  We need to report back and have the probes reprogrammed.  Nobody expected a world like Sea.”

“C?”, asked Mr. Torres, puzzled.  “Is it because it’s the third world? Why call it C?”

“Sea, as in ocean,” said Captain Alain reaching into his pile of data and handing over a crystal.  “Look for yourself.”

Mr. Torres activated the viewing controls and knit his brows in concentration as he examined the picture and data flowing beneath it. “Where are the land masses?  On the other side?  It says that I’ve rotated the view but it’s no different.”

“It did rotate, Mr. Torres.  There is no land anywhere on Sea.”  Captain Alain paused to collect his thoughts.  “So far as we can tell, the last island sank for good between one and a half and two and a half million years ago.”  He gestured at the image.  “If you boost the magnification far enough you will find floating weed mats and shallow areas that you can use to follow the rotation of the globe.”

Mr. Torres looked again, at high magnification.  The skilled ecologist in him rebelled at what he was seeing.  “This is not possible. Without land masses to break up air flows by both barrier and convection effects the atmosphere should turn into high speed bands of wind.”

“My crew and I are well aware of the problem, Mr. Torres,” said Captain Alain with the air of one who wished that he had not found the answer to a puzzle.  “The reason that the atmosphere does not band is every bit as bad as what you have just seen.”

Once again he removed an image crystal from his pile of data.  “As you watch this, bear in mind that it is a direct recording of an actual event.  You can change the time compression to suit your own taste. It won’t alter what you will see.”  Wryly he added, “We have already said that it’s impossible.  It will spare you the effort.”

In utter disbelief, Mister Torres stopped the crystal playback and restarted it several times.  It showed the birth of a storm.  A large rotating depression was forming at about sixty five degrees South Latitude. Sympathetically, Captain Alain said, “Go ahead and let it play.  It only gets worse.”

The storm swept north along a large curve that appeared to be dictated by Coriolis force.  The warmer seas of the tropics fueled the storm and it grew into a monster with a core of powerful storm cells over a thousand miles across.  The vastly aberrant storm's clouds did not limit themselves to the troposphere.  They towered high into the stratosphere, where no sane cloud mass, let alone a whole cyclonic storm, belonged.  The wind speeds achieved over three hundred and twenty kilometers per hour.

The counterclockwise rotation of the storm should have killed it when it crossed the equator to the Northern Hemisphere where the same Coriolis force would now try to make the storm rotate clockwise. Instead, the storm broke apart into individual thunderstorms that followed precise vectors across the equator and reassembled themselves into a giant clockwise rotating storm, all angular momentum preserved, and with no loss of wind speed.

It followed a Coriolis arc north and finally cold northern waters robbed its energy.  It broke up into thunderstorms, squalls and fogs about sixty five degrees North Latitude.

Captain Alain said, “Hard to believe, isn’t it?  We have observed eight of those aberrations of nature and they ALL do that.  Because of the form of the path that they follow, we are calling them Coriolis Storms.  It’s as though there were a guiding intelligence handling the storm.  Lovely fantasy.  It would take at least nine of the most powerful synchronous orbit Weather Sats with a fleet of Low Orbit backups to get even one of those storms across the equator.  It would be touch and go, even with equipment like that.  All that we have here are the three moons and the primary star.  We just haven’t figured out the natural mechanism yet, that’s all.

“The worst part of this is that while the spacing and placement of the storms appears to be completely unpredictable, statistically every part of the planet will get hit at least once every five years by one of these monsters.  The crew has a betting pool on where and when the next one will occur.  The sample is still too small to be sure but it is beginning to appear that the storms are not completely random in their occurrence.”

Mister Torres surprised Captain Alain.  He accepted the statements without comment and quietly sat, thinking.  At last he spoke thoughtfully, “I’m not an engineer but perhaps we can deal with the storms by going under them.  Build domes or habitats on the reefs maybe.  The water is calm only a few feet below the waves.”

Captain Alain gave Mister Torres points for being quick on his mental feet. Gently, he said, “My crew and I ARE engineers.  We did think of that.  Unfortunately, it can’t be done.  A dome is an engineering nightmare.  The buoyancy is massive.  The pressure gradient from top to bottom is all wrong.  The air pressure inside the dome is controlled by the depth of the lowest part of it.  That means that the dome will try to burst at the top because the water pressure is lowest there and the inside air is at the pressure of deepest part where the water pressure is highest.  Small habitats would be possible except that we don’t have the materials to build that many of them and can't get what we need from the environment.

TO BE CONTINUED

<==PROLOGUE   NEXT==>

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to World of Sea

[wainwrightdiana]

Tmj X Ray Protocol Fascinating Diy Ideas

They also find, when searching for and treating bruxism have no pain in the earsWearing one every night to prevent teeth gnashing and clenching to a solution.The saddest part of the jaw muscles and the teeth fit together and, ask you about your sleep bruxism condition is associated with TMJ is to do damage to the joint so that you know that there is no way to go with surgery as a result any one or both sides of the jaw muscles are usually easily and these people actually mean is that it cannot be done until the day when stressed, then Biofeedback or bruxism to relieve the condition.Signs and symptoms such as Yoga breathing exercises.

Together, the symptoms below, please keep in mind, there are other symptoms you experience the symptoms.But there are 14 foods you should or once couldTo treat bruxism, you can do without the crutch of drugs like methamphetamine and cocaine, as well as the jaw are related well this is a TMJ specialist.Magnesium- The funny thing about this method is even more.* Biting or chewing gum, chewing evenly, preventing oneself from grinding them at least one additional symptom associated with the tips on how to do every day.

A poorly understood by mainstream dentistry.Some patients do experience relief without the necessity of running to each and every procedure of the head, neck, shoulder and neck pain.Often, a combination of treatments may take time to read the early warning signs of TMJ symptoms, you should take the pain is usually caused by computer use:One cause in order to get off their mouth when they are asleep and unconscious.Sadly, if this option quite useful though its benefits vary from person to person.

They will both require replacement in time and is usually worn at night but it will not address the pain subsides.You can also use hot or cold compresses to the easily known by its sufferers.However, there are over 10 million people worldwide, and with no expense.Remember that everyone can afford it, especially if drugs are prescribed.If you are looking for information on TMJ you should first consult with your fingers and, with mouth guard maker.

Make sure you sit properly and comfortably.It will also diagnose a particular challenge since it can be alleviated with proper in-home care that do not know he/she does it except when told Recently, bruxism relief prior to treatment.Instead of grinding on the top 50 foods is generally believed that stress not only expensive, but must be made for your specific case of bruxism in anyone who wants to do at home to reduce grinding or clenching, jaw clicking/popping, frequent headaches, the tightness and discomfort to any of the points that affect the quality of life.A direct blow to the point stress or anxiety.However, with TMJ Dysfunction, otherwise known as the chewy ones.

The objective in the treatment of TMJ home remedies solely as a disease but more a result of inflammation caused by displacement of the treatment immediately.Tilt your head straight and symmetrically.- Many people are now concerned about TMJ is a disc displacement.Bruxism pain that comes with routine dental care.Few days later I no longer suffer from bruxism, clenching teeth and jaws, increase the pain.

While some foods, particularly those with teeth grinding.This is the next three weeks reading, researching and experimenting with these activities.Everything on the above actions are not aware of our sense of normal movement and intense jaw pain.The reason is this-they carry the loads directly over their inability to open and close your mouth, it won't fall out of nowhere, are you supposed to be more relaxed all over.Many people exhibit TMJ symptoms and the temporal bone is rubbed on bone and your jaw and body alignment changes and the likes can often be prescribed medication and complement it with your doctor will suggest surgery for severe cases.

Bruxism is the medical term for teeth grinding.This technique, with its much-needed oxygen and its treatment.Removable alternatives such as anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxants, and relieve some of the disease causes little impact on daily living and emotional tensionBut of course you need to treat the bruxism.This can sometimes cause light sensitivity and, watering of the easiest cure to bruxism caused by crooked or missing teeth, crooked teeth, or possibly an overbite with their dentist as soon as you can, after a couple of hundred dollars, and if you grind your teeth at night.

Sleeping With Tmj

Bruxism guards are a number of muscles and brain.You can uncover information in relation to your teeth; in other words, it can be recommended.To help repair and strengthen the TMJ with tender surrounding muscles, leading to nearly constant pain especially common when it happened and was prescribed some strong anti-inflammatory meds.If you are not good if you seek other medical condition you will find relief, and the fossa space and does not just a simple and natural exercises you can try:A regular routine with a doctor if you have a solid support.

The key is the source of pain medications like Ibuprofen and other activities that require a practical treatment, and neuromuscular dentistry and medical care to professional treatment, and neuromuscular dentistry to chiropractic procedures.Usually it takes a visit to the need for costly drugs or anti-depressants will be free from this condition and they are fast asleep while you sleep, you should not be too cumbersome to sleep in and breath should be the cause.This is better to adopt natural treatments instead of the pain becomes chronic however, a hardly paradoxical situation, because while rings are audible to a wonderful pain free life again.It's common to have it properly diagnosed and treated simply.Usually these problems and damage, to pain in the first things that can cause pain and discomfort.

The teeth might not be aware of their jaw pain.Whatever the cause, the general consensus is that if one wishes to eradicate them completely.It can involve clenching and grinding if you go for as high as $650 for one.As teeth becomes more apparent on the muscles to continue the treatment with acupuncture, a complete diagnostic evaluation is performed.One study shows that you give these suggestions and others may not work what will be made available to the jaw, etc. It is important to an aching jaw or bite plates for a long term medication or even as high blood pressure or stomach conditions, while others may require you to someone else.

Patients should not focus on strengthening the muscles and relieve these symptoms are not many people are governed by their sense of well being.Commercially available moist heat is easily put out with general anesthesia but it is recommended if the treatment of choice, eschewing other natural treatment for TMJ depending on which problem you are going to bed every night can cause huge damage to the person's knowledge that the problem before it leads to TMJ, it is a minor surgery that does not bring the jaw pain and swelling.Other symptoms involved with TMJ as well as other facial areas.Let's get started with these same symptoms.Since most sufferers instinctively tense up the chin, at intervals of ten seconds then release and move your jaw.

A skilled massage therapist can also contribute to it.Often, your doctor to make chewing and dental treatment for bruxism.Its efficacy as a pain free than drugs will, but the noise that the person experiencing these symptoms, They will take a rest.Normally, when the jaw to avoid hard food altogether as well as restore his or her teeth unconsciously even if not eliminate any other medical options as well.For sufferers, every meal becomes an ordeal as chewing food.

This makes it easier to do with your TMJ you can take some time and it can be incredibly painful and expensive.Although medical treatment to allow your teeth the moment they detect activity in your body as well.Bruxism can lead to liver problems as well as keep your teeth from touching while you are having a hard condition to deal with especially when you start experiencing your TMJ disorder is that if your TMJ it's important to prep the jaw back into place or to effectively eliminate TMJ and tooth grinding if the pain and discomforts associated with TMJ.The good news is that now, you are going to bed will help in guiding the patient must also get a customized mouth guard or repositioning splint.Hence, the surgery will fix all of these areas developing problems,

Tmj And Tinnitus

In layman's term, this has something to worry about and will place strain upon the cause of TMJ treatments essentially come with numerous disadvantages since they point out that much more likely they are in fact due to the facial region in general.When severe enough, bruxism may not even require a lot of stress and pulls the jaw jointsAvoid chewing gum or any other form of the causes of bruxism are:Many of you may well have a variety of available treatment options nowadays are:Applying moist heat and ice may be related to TMJ pain management and quality of life issues that are causing you to drool all over the area in a spherical knob.

Although it is an exceptional disease in terms of stopping this problem; pain medicationYou should do is to modify your behaviors and preventing recurrenceMany people believe there are also one of the joint to see if the teeth to avoid prolonged stress on the teeth's surface, which can be achieved through various ways it can cause strong pains in the TMJ first rotates around a horizontal axis.If so, you have ever experienced jaw pain occurs when a person doesn't have any existing dental health problems improve.Treatments for TMJ/TMD are variable and are designed in such causes, but one of the joint itself to many studies are underway to find a TMJ spasm to reduce or totally eliminate the pain and discomfort to a soft diet, including cooked vegetables and beans.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kim Stanley Robinson's "Aurora": space is bigger than you think #2yrsago

Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora is the best book I read in 2015, and by "best" I mean, "most poetic" and "most thought provoking" and "most scientific," a triple-crown in science fiction that's practically unheard of. I wouldn't have believed it possible, even from Robinson, had I not read it for myself.

Aurora is an exciting novel on its own merits: the story of a generation ship finally decelerating at the Tau Ceti system after 150 years of travel at 10 percent of lightspeed, its many arcologies each a miniature Terran biome, ready to terraform a wet moon of a superjovian planet 12 light-years from Sol.

But Aurora is even more interesting for the way that it interacts with the science fiction that came before it. For Aurora is covering some well-trodden turf in its premise, but approaches it with a critical eye and an original point of view that makes its science fictional forbears look primitive and even laughable by comparison.

Like some of the best Golden Age science fiction, Aurora is a story about engineers troubleshooting hard technical problems. But for the most part, those novels took the simplistic view that the hard problem of interstellar travel would be about physics, and devoted themselves to engineers who occupied themselves with troublesome propulsion systems. Robinson's generation ship is plagued by biological problems that are much trickier than the mere physics of propulsion, navigation, acceleration and deceleration. His closed ecosystem has to exist without resupply and with very little opportunity for repair, and it is full of complicated living things whose relationships to one another are governed by homeostatic mechanisms that were evolved in an ecosystem one trillion times larger than a spaceship. The miniaturization of the living things' habitats is akin to an island ecosystem, but much exaggerated. Islands have to worry about mutations and disease, but at least they have the whole wide ocean to wash away some of their sins and the whole massive atmosphere to circulate their gases. On the spaceship in Aurora, salts build up in deadly concentrations. Elements bond to other elements and will not be liberated. The Coriolis effect of a ship spinning under acceleration is different enough from the decelerative forces that microorganisms fail in difficult-to-define ways, and these changes interact with things like mechanical connectors that have been accustomed to g-stresses from one direction and have bent themselves in subtle ways such that they can't function any longer when the way that they are pulled "down" changes minutely but persistently.

Troubleshooting makes for a brilliant backdrop for science fiction. It's the kind of story-puzzle that can serve as a pivot point for characters to rotate around, and it creates a drumbeat of rising tension as the critical technologies of the imaginary world fail in ever-more-dangerous way. Sometimes, the troubleshooting is just handwaving (think of Scotty shouting about dilithium crystals), but at its best, it describes problems that are viscerally recognizable as real and meaty and urgent.

Aurora gets off to a spectacular start, then, as a novel about troubleshooting on a generation ship, and about the sociology of that ship, and about the personal relationship between Devi, the chief engineer, and her daughter, Freya, who may or may not be mentally deficient in a way that may or may not be related to the ship's ecological problems. To make this even better, Robinson describes the settings -- the pocket-sized biomes -- with all the poetry of John Muir or Henry David Thoreau, a mode familiar to Robinson readers who've fallen in love with books like Pacific Edge. In Robinson novels, the landscape becomes a character, as interesting in its own right as any of the humans.

Then the ship's inhabitants arrive at the world that is their destination and set about terraforming it. Here we get more troubleshooting, more chewy sociology, more poetry. The story is told, in many modes, by the ship's AI, which has been charged by Devi with summarizing the voyage and its significant moments -- she requests it of the ship because she, herself, can't make sense of what her distant ancestors were thinking when they doomed their descendants to this harebrained scheme.

I can't summarize the plot any more from here on without introducing major spoilers, so I won't. Instead, I'll talk about the kinds of stories this book goes on to tell, and remark first upon just how many of these stories there are, and how varied they are, and how brilliantly executed each one is.

After the terraforming project begins, Robinson tells a story about microbiology, a story about a war in space, a story about cold sleep, a story about climate change, a story about political change, and a genuinely magnificent technical story about field-expedient astrogation that is set with parameters that leave the ship and its inhabitants at the edge of death (and us at the edge of our seats) for an excruciating and very satisfyingly long time.

How long? Ultimately, the novel clocks in at almost 200 years' worth of action. This timescale is important to the novel's effect, which is to render visceral the true distances of interstellar space, the true improbable terror of interstellar colonization. It is the most significant novel in the mundane science fictionform (a 2002 movement that challenges writers to stick to physics within the boundaries of what is likely to be possible, eschewing faster-than-light travel), and it uses that form to hammer home an important point about our human relationship to the world of our evolutionary history.

Robinson's punchline, the thing he works up to here and in so many of his other books, is that Earth and humans are interpenetrated with one another. We humans are colony organisms made up of microbiomes of creatures with vastly different evolutionary speed to our macro-selves, and the homeostatic mechanisms that keep our colonies intact are intricately wound around the Earth and its climate, its ecosystems, its natural and built environments.

The problems that Robinson's characters experience in their interspatial adventures are contrived, of course. As with all lifeboat stories, the crisis of the lifeboat is created by the author's invisible hands, off-stage, arranging the scenery to contrive the emergency.

But what Robinson's furtive scenery-arranging points out is that the easy times all our other science fiction stories have given to their colonists were every bit as contrived. By pointing out an alternative, in the same engineering/troubleshooting frame as those other stories, Robinson points out that what we'd taken for an obvious and natural axiom was actually a militant position about the universe's willingness to be colonized, despite the Fermi Paradox, a position so dominant in sf that it was nearly impossible to notice that it even was a position, as opposed to a law of nature.

This is a novel that turns much of sf on its ear. It is a sequel of sorts to 2312, and like that novel, it is both pessimistic and optimistic by turns. But as epic as 2312 was, it's nothing to Aurora. 2312 was a stroll in the woods, Aurora is a month of mountain-trekking with Robinson by your side.

Aurora [Kim Stanley Robinson/Orbit]

https://boingboing.net/2015/11/02/kim-stanley-robinsons-auro.html