sysig · 3 years ago
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rjalker · 4 years ago
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[ID: White text on a grey background that reads, “Pawpaw tree cuttings, February 10th, 2021.” End ID.]
We finally got some cuttings from the one confirmed pawpaw tree, so that we (mainly me) can lean how to identify it, and so we can try to cline it. Here are close us of the twigs, with their key features pointed out.
I originally had one picture...but it’s too big so the text looks tiny, so I’m just breaking it up into zoomed in versions. 
Please note that these cuttings are from a very old tree. I don’t know how old it is, but the trunk is twice the size of any tree I’ve seen in my research. I don’t know if the age of the tree is going to affect what it looks like.
If you have any pictures of younger trees, please feel free to add on! I’m still learning how to identify them and I would love more examples! 
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[ID: A cropped photo, showing the tips of two twigs against a light grey background. The twigs have grey bark, and multi-colored arrows are pointing to different features. White arrows direct attention to the very tips of the stems, which are labeled, “Terminal bud of naked leaves”. Where the arrow points, a small, narrow bud sticks up straight out of the twig, tapering towards the top, like a paintbrush.
A red arrow with accompanying text that reads, “large flower bud” points to one of the large, round buds along the sides of the twig. Below the bud is a paler, blurry leaf scar.
A yellow-green arrow with accompanying text that reads, “smaller leaf bud” points to another bud lower on the branch where they are no flowers, much smaller than the flower bud.
End ID.]
You can’t see it in this picture, but where there are flower buds, there are also leaf buds. The flowers are larger because the tree flowers before it gets its leaves for the season, since it’s first priority is to produce viable offspring (seeds), which requires the flowers to be pollinated.
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[ID: A cropped photo of the same twigs, now further down, with the top of a white hand holding them now visible. The twigs are about the same thickness as a pencil. White text reads, “Knobby, uneven branch,” with “This is from a very old tree, I don’t know if younger trees would be the same” in parenthesis below it. The twigs are knobby, with leaf nodes currently devoid of buds making the branch almost appear to zig-zag. On a small off-shoot to the right, another white arrow and outline point to another terminal bud, which sticks straight off to the side. End ID.]
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[ID: A cropped photo even further down the twig, with the edge of the hand visible at the top of the picture. Part of the stem had been copy and pasted off to the side, where it has been marked with yellow circles around each leaf node, making their position more visible. A green line traces the middle of the stem, and more yellow lines connect each of the circles marking the nodes in a zig-zag pattern up the branch. Yellow words read, “alternating leaves / leaf scars”. End ID.]
I forgot to draw another example, but there are two main types of leaves, alternate, like shown here, where the leaves alternate on each side of the stem in a zig-zag, and opposite, where two leaves are across from eachother on opposite sides of the stem, in pairs.
If I’d drawn an example of that, instead of zig-zagging, the lines would go straight across up the stem. 
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[ID: A new, also cropped photo, showing a much sharper image of a twig, with a white hand behind it, and blurred red in the background.  The terminal bud is now in much sharper focus, now revealing that it is red-ish brown, and slightly fuzzy. It is marked “terminal bud” in black letters, and outlined in white.
The flower buds are also much clearer, and are also fuzzy, covered in red velvet-like coverings. Several of them are outlined in red, and marked in red text, “flower bud”.
The leaf scars now have blue arrows pointing to them, and are a tan colored scar against the light grey of the bark, curving around each flower and leaf bud in a rounded crescent shape, with a row of small black dots in the middle. They are marked with blue text, “Leaf scar”. End ID.]
Here are some pictures from late summer 2020 when it still had leaves. Pictures taken from below because they were about a foot above my head.
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[ID: A photograph showing a branch and some leaves from directly below it. The branch is almost a twig, long and narrow, about the same size as the ones in the earlier pictures, with their knobby shape clearly visible. There are five very large leaves in focus, clustered around the very edge of the branch like a giant hand. The leaves have smooth edges, and are lime green on the bottom. They ablong, with a slightly pointed end. They are skinnier towards the stem, then get wider in the middle, before coming to a point at the end furthest from the branch. In the far background, blurry branches and leaves can be seen, with bright white sky between them. End ID.]
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[ID: a photo showing the same tree, now from the side, with the large drooping leaves visible, with the closest one much darker green on the top, with paler edges and an almost yellow central vein. A small pawpaw fruit is visible in the center of the shot, with the edge of one barely peeking over the edge of the branch on the opposite side. The pawpaw in the middle is mostly pale green, with a smooth, round surface, and a small point at the opposite end of the branch. There is some darker green mottling on the fruit on the side facing the leaf,, and a black spot on the side. End ID.]
If you have more pictures, please add them on!
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dailyaudiobible · 4 years ago
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02/03/2021 DAB Transcript
Exodus 17:8-19:15, Matthew 22:34-23:12, Psalms 27:7-14, Proverbs 6:27-35
Today is the 3rd day of February welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I'm Brian it is an honor and privilege and joy to be here with you today as we put one of our feet out in front of us and shift our balance and lean forward into it and take the next step forward, which is what we do every day. 365 step journey. Seems like a little one, but it takes us through the whole Bible, takes us through the whole year. And, yeah, like I was saying in the last couple of days, now that we’re moving into this second month of the year, we…we already can look back. It's not like the Bible didn't start speaking to us right out of the gates. It’s been speaking all along. And, so, let's dive in and that take the next step. We’re reading from the Voice Translation this week. Exodus chapter 17 verse 8 through 19 verse 15.
Commentary:
Okay. Let's talk about chosen people for a second, right? Because probably…unless this is like…you’re just…very very new to anything about the Bible and just hearing these stories or some of this terminology for the first time…and I know there’s a ton of you…and…and no problem…it’s all gonna start clicking into place as we keep following the story. But those of us who have been around this faith for a while, like understanding that the Israelites are God's chosen people. That’s just kind of part of the story. And we can think that He chose them because He wanted them more than anybody else and somehow, they are better or more exalted or are more favorable somehow than anybody else. And, so, they're like almost a different level of human being and everybody else is below that. And that terminology, that kind of concept, it then bleeds over into the Christian faith. And those of us who have accepted Christ, then we know that we have been chosen and have been adopted in the family of God. And, so, we feel that same kind of “I'm special-ness.” And that's fine, that's good, but it's not all there is to it. I mean, if the Scriptures tell us God is not a respecter of persons, if the Scriptures tell us like nobody's better than anybody else, and that's very explicit in the writings of the apostle Paul, then how do we get to this favored chosen people and what does this mean? God very clearly speaks to that today as the children of Israel are at the mountain of God. So, there out in the wilderness at what has traditionally been believed to be Mount Sinai. And God and Moses have been talking and God is…has instructed Moses to invite the people to purify themselves, because He's…God is going to meet with them directly, personally, like not through a prophet or anything. Like we're seeing God's intention was to communicate directly with His people. As the story unfolds, we’ll see that that's not how things exactly work out for various reasons and we’ll discuss them as we go, but at this point that is the invitation, that the people purify themselves and not come upon…on the mountain, the mountain of God until they are given permission. And God speaks. And I read this out of the Scriptures, and this is the voice of God. “You are eyewitnesses of all that I did to the Egyptians. You saw how I snatched you from the bonds of slavery and carried you on Eagles wings and brought you to myself. Now, if you will hear my voice, obey what I say, and keep my covenant, then you out of all the nations of the world will be my treasured people. After all, the earth belongs to me. You will be my kingdom of priests, a nation holy and set apart.” There it is. There is a reason these people are being set apart. It is so that they can be His kingdom of priests to the world so that all nations can be blessed through them, which is what God told Abraham. They’re not being chosen because they are better. They are being chosen for a purpose, a purpose that affects the world until this day. So, my brothers and sisters as believers in Jesus Christ we share in that. We aren't better. We are chosen for a purpose. We are set apart to be a kingdom of priests, to be a city on a hill, to be the light of the world.
So, if we zoom out of the wilderness and zoom forward in the story by millennia and come into the time of Jesus and just look at how things are than we hear God in flesh, Jesus speak of these priests and what He says…well…I'm gonna quote Him. “The Pharisees and the scribes occupy the seat of Moses. So, you should do the things they tell you to do but don't do the things they do. They heap burdens upon their neighbors backs and they prove unwilling to do anything to help shoulder the load. They're interested above all in presentation,” right? In how things look. “They wrap their heads and arms in the accoutrements of prayer, they cloak themselves with flowing tasseled prayer garments, they covet the seats of honor at fine banquets in the synagogue, and they love it when people recognize them in public and call them teacher and beam at them.” That is a very different thing than knowing that you have been set aside, set apart to God to be a kingdom of priests to the world. So, indeed we are chosen, indeed we are special. It has nothing to do with us. And when we start subtly thinking that it does, we have planted seeds that are going to grow up and they’re going to be called arrogance and pride. And that I guess…maybe the easiest most clear way to say it is, that won’t work. Look around you. Look at the stories in the Bible and see it doesn't work and just look at the world we live in, it doesn't work.
Prayer:
Father, indeed, we feel chosen. Indeed, we know Your love for us, but indeed we know that we didn't do anything. There's nothing we could do that would ever force Your hand. You would never…there's nothing we can do that would make You go, “like, okay You have achieved righteousness on Your own. I have no choice but to see You that way.” We are what we are because of You. We are nothing without You. Our next breath is a gift. We are utterly dependent upon You even when we don't acknowledge it, even when we’re not paying attention. So, we’re taking this moment to be grateful and to humble ourselves. That was Your words today Jesus, “for whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” Come Holy Spirit and help this to be the way we live, the default, the normal, we ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Announcements:
dailyaudiobible.com is the website, it is home base and it's where you stay in touch and stay connected and find out what's going on around here.
It’s where the Prayer Wall is, where we pray for one another on a continual basis. It's where different links to get connected on social media are, wherever we’re participating. You can find that all in the Community section.
You can also check out the Daily Audio Bible Shop. There are resources there that have been pulled together and crafted and created over…over the years to take this journey deeper. So, yeah, the Daily Audio Bible Journal is there. And we encourage journaling often because remembering is something that is…is an inherent narrative inside the Bible that…that we would remember what God has done, that we would tell future generations what God has done. And, you know, in the Old Testament or whatever they would build an altar, they would pile up rocks, they would make a memorial. Ad we think about around the world, like there's memorials and statues and all kinds of stuff all over the world to say, “this is what happened here” or “this is the significance of this place or this person.” It's important that we…that we remember…that we remember these things in our own lives and then we can look back at God's faithfulness and that we can share with the future generations what God has done. And maybe a more modern representation of that over piling up a pile rocks would be to write it down, write it down in your own hand. Let it be a memorial in your own hand of God's faithfulness in your life. And, so, there’s the Daily Audio Bible Journal but then there's also the Black Wing pencils and all of the writing utensils that are there in the Shop. I discovered those…well…let’s see…it would've been several years ago. It was when my mom…it would’ve been 2016. She got real sick and she passed away in early 2017. And just…it was just constant care…constant care and kind of on a plane on the weekends and traveling and speaking and back, constant care. And it was just exhausting the level of just how quickly dementia was becoming a part of the story and just the confusion and the anxiety and on her side and my side…all of our sides that were involved. And, yeah, Jill and I were out in little community near us where there's some art galleries and that's where I found the Black Wing pencils. I was just out there bot too long ago remembering all of that. And I don’t know, there was something about. Why am l gonna spend so much money on pencils? Who writes with pencils anymore? But then just sharpening those pencils and knowing like, this is the best pencil you can get. Like this is actually a craft pencil and just I mean wit the Cedar wood and with the craftsmanship of the whole thing. And I just fell in love. I just…I was like I…it connected me back to other earlier points in my life. I hadn't written with pencils in since…I don't know maybe school, but there was something about it and that stuck. It stuck all these years. And I’m looking at a Black Wing…like I’m picking it up. I’m holding my Black Wing pencil that I write with every day right now. And, so, that's little pieces of the story that get incorporated along the way that make up the story of this community and what we are aiming for, which is certainly to move through the Bible together in community, but that it's not like this passive thing where we just go, “there. Check. I read the Bible.” We’re actually the Bible transformed us, where we really entered into the stories and allowed it to do what it does, which is become a mirror into our own hearts, and then really bring up the stuff that needs healing and really bring up the stuff and needs to not be thee in our lives anymore and then to be able to write these things down as they are happening and to refer back. “Oh, yes I remember walking through that season and now look at where I’m at.” So, we encourage all that stuff. And that’s why everything that's in the Daily Audio Bible Shop is there intentionally. So, check that out.
If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com as well. And as I've said so many times the fact…the fact is we wouldn't be here if we weren't in this together. That’s just the fact. But…but we are here. And, so, we are in this together. And, so, if life is coming to you through the community here as we make this journey through the Bible than thank you for your partnership. There is a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. If you're using the app you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.
And, as always, if you have a prayer request or encouragement, you can hit the Hotline button in the app, which is the little red button up at the top or you can dial 877-942-4253.
And that's it for today. I’m on Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.
Community Prayer and Praise:
Hey, DABbers this is Slave of Jesus in North Carolina. Alright Holy Spirit let's roll. Lord we are watching over Henry from florida's family. We are playing for his uncle that is suffering from Covid. Amen to prayers from Ethan coming back to the Lord as he and his family deal with his big car reck. Amen to Big Hearted…I put feds…but Ben he’s called for a new revival around the world. I like that. Amen to Guardian from New England. Amen to your players for Dylan from Florida. He’s battling…struggles there. Amen to all the Muslims who have turned to Christ as your savior. Pretty interesting that I studied the Koran long before…as an atheist…long before I studied the Koran as a Bible. So, it's weird that the Koran brought me to Christ. But as…as people who do read the…the Koran, he talks about Jesus a lot, talks about Christianity a lot. Actually, says that they would be most common and have fellowship with Christians. They call them people of the book. Because of 911 we've been so tainted with the concept of infidel and things like that that we think that that's how they all think. But I make the argument that it is much easier to talk to a Christian about Jesus Christ than it is an atheist who just didn't even believe He…He was alive. So, I'm grateful for the Koran beard I'm grateful for the grant for me that got me thinking, oh man, Mohamad's talking about all these biblical figures like the people of Lot and I don't know who that is so I guess I gotta go read…and I used to call it the stupid Bible which I thought was the worst book of the world ever as I talked to my Christian friends about how violent and horrible it was but eventually I did get to the New Testament and hear the words of Jesus and He definitely got ahold of my heart. But at first, I was appealed to His rebel nature appeared. So, love you all. I know most of you that it's hard to leave your faith and to come to Christ…but you have a good day.
Good morning DAB family this is Rosanna from East Tennessee in the United States. Today is January 28th and I just heard from Flourishing in the Desert. You obeyed the push from God to leave your abusive relationship. I am so proud of you for this bravery and obedience. This is a terrifying process. I also obeyed that call to finally leave my 12-year abusive marriage two years ago. I know our situation varies in detail, but I do understand. Let me pray for you. Loving heavenly Father, I praise you for who you are. You are holy, holy, holy. I pray that you will give strength, joy, and courage to Flourishing in the Desert. May your healing oil flow down from her head and heal the wounds in her heart. May she cling to you as the one and only bridegroom and her one and only source of peace and happiness. May she trust in you in this uncertain time. Amen. Thank you for your transparency and I am so thrilled that you are part of the DAB family. Be encouraged.
Morning DABbers my name is Henry and I'm calling from Cape Town in South Africa. I have been listening to Daily Audio Bible since 2010 and this is my first time to make a call. On 26th December last year 2020 I got exposed to Covid virus and since then it has been a struggle in my life but thankfully, I passed the 10 day or 14-day period but still I feel like they are…the virus is still active in me because there are continuous chest pains, sore throat, and…and…and a dry mouth. So, I am asking if you Daily DABbers could pray for me, that the healing process that God has started in my body He will bring it to completion and that there would be no other complications related to it. Please DABbers stand with me in prayer for my healing process in Jesus’ name I ask you. Amen.
Hey DAB family this is KZ from Hope MI. I'm a long-time listener and a first time caller and I have a long long overdue prayer request for you all. Last year in May our community suffered a…actually two dam failures due to flooding and the community was terribly impacted by this. We got a lot of help in the beginning. Because it was a dam failure insurance companies tended not to pay to help people replace homes that were washed out or, you know, people basically lost all of their belongings. In many cases some were just, you know, a lot of clean up, things like that. But nine months later we're still trying to figure out if our lakes will come back. And it just dawned on me that. like I said I live in Hope, Hope. Our Lake is contained by the Edenville, Edenville dam. These are really good communities of people and nobody deserved any of this; however, I just pray that you all would pray with me to find God in all of this. It's…it's been an ugly thing, but I know God is in this somewhere, somehow. And I just pray for that light to be shown to our community and the heartbreak to end. Thank you.
Hey Daily Audio Bible family it's Kanaio here from London and I hope all of you are well and blessed. What an absolute joy it was to hear Onyu call in as a first time DABber when she shared that she's gotten into this podcast as a result of me sharing a little post on Twitter about my experience over the past three years. And incredible it has been. Grounded it has been. And I just want to say thank you for Brian to continuing on with his ministry. Thank you to your wife Jill and thank you to China and all of you who are involved. It's just incredible that every time he reads and listens to God's word, we are exposed to His word in a new way appeared. You know, we have a fresh understanding of scriptures that we may have listened to you 100 times over. And we also get the perks of a wonderful community. So, God bless you all. This year I said I'm going to get sowing into the Daily Audio Bible. I've enjoyed it at the last three years, and it was only right that indeed I sow into what has been feeding me. And I encourage you all. If you have spare…spare money please, please support the ministry. Please, please, please because you can see how it's blessing so many far and wide. And, yeah, we just want to continue to ensure that God's word reaches the four corners of the earth in Jesus’ name. I do want to pray for a few people. Praying for the lady who was separated from her husband of 46 years. I'm praying for the Lord to strengthen you and fortify you with His peace during this time, a peace that surpasses all human understanding, that even you will say what is going on? Why do I feel so…so fine in this difficult situation? It’s because the Lord is with you. God bless you.
May we pick up every cross, may we handle our crosses may we stand up today whatever happened…whatever happened yesterday, whatever just happened moments ago, and may we take grab, handle, maneuver our cross and may we walk knowing that we are not alone, knowing that we have our brothers and sisters alongside of us. May we see that we are walking in a place where the harvest is harvest time. May we walk in the field line by line shoulder by shoulder body by body, feet marching in the direction of the promised land, God in front of us God with us, Emmanuel, God with us. May we pick up our cross, carry it to the promised land, taking up our cross carrying it to the promised land knowing that we are not alone, knowing that it is not just us but knowing that what happened today wasn't just a mess but taking up our crass and still following Jesus. God bless you brothers and sisters.
Hello, DABbers this is ginger from Indiana. Brian spoke of identity today on January 29th. If asked about my church affiliation, I've only said the church I've gone to for 20 years. I don't respond about the Daily Audio Bible which I have listened to for over 10 years, but in this time of Covid when my church building has been closed DAB has taken first place in my religious life. DAB has taught me more than any pastors sermons daily. The word of God given daily. The insight by Brian and Jill. Yes, this year I became a double DABber. My identity has shifted. And I thank you Hardin’s for your faithfulness so that so many can shine the light of God the word of God the presence of God to the workers of God. And may those…that word be spread throughout God's harvest field. That is my identity now. Thank you, Brian. Have a blessed day everybody. Goodbye.
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eorzeasntm · 6 years ago
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Hi everyone!  Last week our models battled to the death with the primals.  Our intrepid Warriors of Light risked life and limb for some of the best battle shots we’ve seen in the history of the competition.  
The ever present threat against Eorzea, primals are our primary foe.  How are you keeping Eorzea (or Doma or Yanxia) safe from these menaces?
However, even though everyone did a great job this week (and gave the judges and the community absolute fits - the rankings were all over the place), only one model emerged from the pile of corpses with the best overall score by a mere third of a point: 
Rymmrael Bhaldraelwyn
Congratulations!  Not even Ramuh’s beard can stand up to your fierce display of paladin strength.  Time for a shave and a haircut, primal!
The next round of ENTM Tumblr Cycle 10 will hopefully be posted sometime before midnight EST on Friday, October 12th - assuming Michael stays far, far away. 
Please check below for feedback from our judges.
A note from Kat:  Models, please know that if you have any questions or want clarification from a judge on a critique, you are welcome to DM them from the Discord channel.  Often when the round is this excellent the decisions come down to tiny nit picks, so a suggestion for how a shot could have been improved is not always the same thing as a low vote in the ranks.  You could be a judge’s favorite that week and they’ll still have something to say that could have made it even more amazing.
Judge Kusuh
Hey all! Just as a note: these critiques are being written on the road due to a major life move! These may be a bit shorter, but as always, feel free to reach out me with any clarifications!
Ni’ko: Colored marker is an *amazing* color choice for this picture! Everything about this picture adds to it in an amazing way: the dark sun in the back center drawing the shot together, the line connecting you and Ifrit, the ice shards adding sharp edges to the frame of the shot; everything adds something! Here’s my caution though: this picture walks that very thin line between enough and *too much*. While everything in a shot can have a purpose, there is such a thing as overloading a frame, even if you believe it’s all necessary! I want you to keep an eye on that in the coming weeks, making sure to really keep an editorial eye on what you do. 
Cowbot: The deadly slice of Odin gives me some maaajor flashbacks to the DPS checks of that fight when it came out, so I’m glad you were able to catch it in a much more showy and epic light! I believe the cinema frame here was a good choice, it’s like the climax of a movie! Now, here’s something I’ve noticed in a few of your shots, including this one: you are a lalafell, and therefore you are shorter then most of your fellow models. This is going to produce unique challenges, mostly in terms of visibility. In this shot, while the look and effect is great, I’m having a hard time seeing you! For the future, I want you to try zooming in a lot more! See what you can get from a different perspective. 
Ysildor: I very much appreciate the choice of color and use of the tools available to you in gpose, you’ve clearly put a lot of thought into what you need to do to make the shots as aesthetically pleasing as possible. Here’s what I’m noticing this week: the shot feels a little crowded to me. This mostly comes from the fact that while you are clearly engaged in combat with Odin, the fact that you two overlap on different planes makes me wonder exactly where you are looking and aiming your attacks. Whereas I commonly ask others to zoom in, I’d like to see what you can do with a wider shot in the weeks to come! Let’s see how you do with much more room to work with.
Judge Vederah
Azalea:   Stylistically there's some pretty neat things happening here. I love how you put some thought into the glamour you wore for this particular shoot- helps your character fit in with the shot and helps with the narrative. I also like how both you and the primal are super imposed over one another. His might may be looming over you, but the ferocity in the characters expression shows where the true power lies. However, the picture is so over saturated with blue and green hues that you lose a large portion of the primal's shape and a lot of the details on the floor for that mechanic. Perhaps a different filter, or less direct lighting would've helped. Lily:    I love how crisp and clear this image is- like almost to the point where it looks like a screenshot from a cut scene. How your character is positioned in relation to the primal makes it feel like they're actively engaged in battle. I also really like the contrast between your character's blue hued armor against the warmer toned backdrop and Ifrit.  It's a really well composed shot- and the only thing I could point out as maybe something to change would be to scoot the shot a touch more to the left so it's more centered.
Rymm: I love the pink and deep blue tones of this shot- and how you matched your glamour to it. It's always important that your character fits into the settings. I also really like the angle of the shot and how it directs the eye over to Ramuh who is just being completely surrounded by that amazing lightning graphic. I think the only con to this image is that it's a little dark around the edges.  So much so that it almost makes the image as a whole too muted. If the lighting was a touch brighter, those amazing colors would've popped even more- making this image mindblowingly good.
Judge M’Telihgo
Wren: I want to start by saying how much I absolutely adored your picture from last week.  You were front and center and in the irrefutable focus of your picture.  That picture was you and everyone knew it.  Why?  Partly you are in the center part of your picture, we always start there when looking at an image.  You are the only thing that is blue.  We can see your beautiful face, you should show it to us much more often, you are very pretty!  I’m sorry Wren, I cannot say the same things for this week.  It helps that you are the only thing in white, it really does so +1 for you.  I’m kinda sad that I cannot see your face this week.  I also have pink hair and thanks to a request by my bf, I am using the same hairstyle right now.  I would love to see how your face looks with it too.  A slightly different camera angle to focus on you a little more and show your face could be just what you need!  Shiva commands much more of the area of this picture than you do.  Neither one of you are facing the camera and that would help your image too.  I can tell you are trying, and you do get credit from me.  This next round is for a close up, please, let me see how awesome you look in that!!
Ona: Your picture also suffers from your face being obscured.  Taken from the opposite side, much more of your face would be visible since the hairstyle is asymmetrical.  I like the effect, it does look like you are fighting Garuda, you lined it up well.  Unfortunately, it leaves you in a weird pose that I feel detracts from your image.  I do think a different outfit may have helped you some too.  You skin tone doesn’t pop against the blue background, it makes you blend a little bit and since your armor is light and has a low coverage it takes some focus away from you.  I like the lighting on Garuda, it makes her look like she has some depth to her and that is also something that you lack because of the pose the action left you in.  Again, it’s a nice pose and it works well for the action part, just not so much for the you part.  Keep at it, I know you will get there.
Judge Rongi
Adam: This week you really used contrasting colors to your advantage. I love the colors in this shot! This pencil filter was a genius choice because not only does it make the background look fantastic, it also made you look like youre straight out of a comic book. You look amazing in this shot, but one of the hard things about taking screenshots with mobs is getting them to also look good. Garuda has a lot of appendages, and as such, if she isnt in the right position, she can become a confusing mess. If Garuda had looked like she does in Ona's shot in your shot, I think this picture would have been much stronger. 
James: Normally I do not like these portrait style shots, but both you and Haila really pulled out some great shots with it. While you both pulled it off very well here, I think where you faltered in comparison is by not doing a back shot. In the shot you submitted it looks like you are summoning the Pheonix yourself, a lot like Azalea did as well, but I think it would have been stronger if you had been facing the Phoenix. Many models this week are facing away from the primals, but the way they are positioned makes them still seem engaged with them in battle. The Pheonix's wings are also cut off at the tips, which I dont think a horizontal shot would have fixed because then we couldn't have seen you either. I didnt rank you low, but I wanted to explain why I didn't rank you super high. 
Nadede: Wow! This shot is amazing. I love the color contrast, the pose of both of you, the way you fit like a puzzle piece into the silhouette of Leviathan, everything. I feel like you went for something less flashy, and it totally paid off. I wish we could see more of a weapon, where your hand is being cut off at a strange place, but not focusing on that, only looking between you and Leviathan, i think this shot is great. Wonderful job.
Judge Kai
Chee: Good job with the setup of this image. I love that you’re dominant, and I can see you clearly! Also, you were very smart to wear lighter clothes, seeing that the ground and sky are much darker. It makes you pop without needing to force it. The lighting is also lovely, and I love how dramatic it looks on your face. Concept wise, I see what you were going for but it seems more like you’re getting ready to flee than actually face this menace. Also, the outfit you chose to wear, while great color-wise, is a bit off where it pops out with the knee. Unfortunately, SE didn’t map these outfits to fall naturally when turning and having such a pose, so it ends up just popping straight out and leaves my eye wondering what exactly your body is doing. Overall, love the lighting and I see what you were going for but I don’t think it quite got there. As for the outfit, kudos on picking a color that makes you stand out, but from the waist down it’s just not working for me.
Haila: First off I will say this… that is a beautiful shot, and I love that you made it a long shot and not a wide. It really gives you the height to show how massive this creature really is! That said, concept-wise I’m not sure if it comes off as facing a foe. It seems more like you’re summoning it, and you’re the for about to lay waste to a bunch of innocent people (which hey, I’m not against this because it’s awesome looking). Nice job on the lighting, and on picking an outfit that makes you pop. As for the back to the camera, I’ve always said I'm not fond of it unless it really adds something to the image, and I’m not sure if this really adds to it. Overall it’s an awesome picture, you pop and have nice lighting. Seeing Levi fly out of the water like that is amazing… but I’m just not sure it really follows the concept, as well as some of the others, did.
Lantis: This looks like a battle shot, and I love how you have yourself leaping into the air to meet your foe head-on. Concept wise, I’ll say you hit it pretty much dead on. I’ll also say that it was smart for you to use the glowing weapons and that arc of light under you to attract the eye. If you didn’t have those bright color to pull the eye to you, I don’t think this would have worked as well as it does. The image does come off very dark, and your clothes almost blend into the background without the help of the light around you. If you’d somehow made this image a bit lighter, or have worn something that popped a bit more I think it would have helped your character become more dominant in the image. Overall I think this is a great setup, and the concept is spot on, but the darkness of the image leaves you dependent on bright pops of color to attract the eye instead of your character. 
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thegeekerynj · 4 years ago
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An Occasional Attempt to Read, Discuss and Review the Wonders of Comics
By: John Rafferty, cranky old man, and Fan of All Things Comics
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The ALL Death Metal Issue 
Dark Nights: Death Metal # 5 - 6 (DC Comics)
# 5: Writer: Scott “the Scourge’ Snyder   Pencils: Greg ‘Cold-Blooded’ Capullo  Inks: Jonathan ‘Gallows God’ Glapion
#6: Writer: Scott ‘Slasher’ Snyder   Pencils: Greg ‘ Crusher’ Capullo   Inks: Jonathan ‘Death Punch’ Glapion
1)  ‘Speaking of Batman, What’d you do to the Castle Guy?
Simple. I transferred his soul from that Gotham to the one in your hand.
Thanks to a modified BRAINIAC algorithm, he will remain trapped inside for centuries, even thousands of yea - - -
Or, you could step on him!
2) He’s sent his evil Earths! I can sense them coming! Get Prepared!
Bizarro SO NOT prepared!
Wait!,What?
I have a very sharp rock.
From here on out, we fight together, every LIVING Being on this - - -
AHEM.
Sorry. Every being - - Living, DEAD, Undead - - We Fight together!
Better’
3)  ‘I’ve heard a lot of Prayers on the battlefield. Sometimes they’re whispered. Sometimes they’re screamed at the sky. They usually come before the worst of it. I’ve heard Prayers for Victory, for Providence, Prayers for Forgiveness. Whatever’s in a soldier’s heart, whatever longing, you hear it then.
God, I wish I still had my hair.’
4) ‘You wanna say it kid?
All right everyone… #$%* CHARGE!
Language kiddo, Language.’
———————————————————————————————————
Greetings, Gentle Readers, and welcome one and all to the back half of this, the ride to Crazy Town called Death Metal!
Now, before we go too far into this, and believe me, there’s lots to touch on, let’s recap:
At some point following Hell Arisen, The Batman Who Laughs, and his infected Multiversal minions, recreated much of the Earth - Prime Universe in his image
Perpetua is off destroying other Universes, collecting Crisis Energy, so she can remake the Universes in HER vision
Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Harley Quinn, and Scott Free are being kept as ‘Wardens’,  payment for protecting their loved ones
Batman is controlling the Black Lantern (we know what that means)
Superman has been infected with Anti-life
There are many heroes running around the reconfigured fighting their battles to maintain their freedom, and perhaps, turn the war
There are villains doing so, too
Jarro is totally badass!
Jonah Hex is so much moreso!
When doing multiple issues, and having so many great snarky quotes, you can’t pick just one… and 4 still isn’t enough!
So, between the Metal, Year of the Villain, Hell Arisen, the Primary Death Metal story, the side issues, which in some cases were better than the primary story, and the 5 issue crossover into JLA (a true crossover, not a Crisis 1-Panel type of crossover), we have come almost two years to get to where we are…
Issue 5 and 6, two issues which carry most of the motion toward the endgame of Issue 7, really deliver. We get payoff from some of the earlier storylines. We get explanations, and confirmations for things that were hinted at early in the storyline. 
There’s paragons of virtue working alongside villains. There’s Black Lanterns working with Red and Green Lanterns, Supermen, good, evil and cyborg, coordinated for one goal.
And an Amazonian Princess leading the largest group of Czarnian Bastiches ever seen.
All against the Hordes of the Laughing Bat.
I’m going a little off script here for a minute, so please, don’t treat this as a reason to zoom ahead to the next stop…
I must admit, I am sorry to hear the readership has dropped off for this storyline. While I understand there are choices that need to be made, to say there are too many crossovers is ludicrous, especially if you stuck through the original Metal Saga, then the Year of the Villain , with every title having three or four crossover books, then right into Hell Arisen, with the Infected one-shots, and the crossovers for all those books, and the native title crossovers.
The way Snyder and Capullo, and ultimately DC handled this Event was the right call… Keep everything isolated to the Event Books. Let the series continue to play out, so the Readers were not forced to make the unfortunate ‘Do I really need to pick up THIS title, even though I never read the book’ decision.
I mean, outside of the 5 issue JLA run, which wound up being a block of issues which were 100% a JLA story, links to the Death Metal storyline, there were none of the ‘Crossover Banners’ we have grown so used to since Crisis, Infinite Crisis, Invasion, Secret Wars, Spider-Geddon, Millennium, Civil War, and I could go on ad nauseam… No, for once, they took the High Road, and basically made the reader aware ‘This Book Is Part Of This Story’ Period. 
By giving the Readers the choice, do I want the Extras, or do I just want the Main Storyline, there was a show of Actual Understanding for the consumer. There was no need to stick 2 panels in a book to connect it to the Event, let’s play it out separately.
I’ve been reading comics for a very long time. THIS WAS A FIRST.
My feeling is, many Readers saw the first two issues, then the One Shots, and immediately thought they needed everything to know what was going on in the story. Now, that isn’t to say the first two issues weren’t a little slow, but, like I’ve been saying all along, that was the hill, and Issue Three, well, that was the First Drop, and we kept picking up speed from there.
I think many got out a little too early.
I can only compare it to a fine wine, which, upon opening, might not have everything you want in that first sip. However, once there is a little bit of breathing, slightly more time has progressed from the first sip to the second, there is so much more nuance, and flavor and outright appeal, that the progression through to the last swallow makes each prior an event unto itself.
So it is with great literature, and excellent graphic novels.
But I have digressed long enough.
These issues carry us from the action of the JLA ‘Doom Metal’ segue, where the reformed amalgam of the League, League Dark, and Titans fight their way to the Omega Knight, and both save the Martian Manhunter from his Bat influenced doppelgänger, and defeat the Omega Knight, recover the Death Metal, the legendary ‘Tenth Metal’ (Nth Metal actually being the Ninth Metal), which can bestow the ability to harness, unmake or create worlds and universes. This is the building material of the gods, used to create the Mother Boxes utilized by the Fourth World.
We also find out what ‘thinking small’ is all about, as Wonder Woman finally figures out what Lex was alluding to with the story of his childhood, and as a direct result, we get a different rendition of the WW84 Armor.
As setups go, these issues laid out the roadmap to the end of the story, making the participants fight for every inch of ground they travelled, every single enemy they extinguish.
Scott Snyder has paved the way to a MASSIVE FINAL Issue, a No Holds Barred, No DQ, No Time Limit , RFK Stadium Pelt Santa with Ice Balls Brawl between Wonder Woman and her Forces of the Multiverse and The Darkest Night and His Corrupted Dark Universe Minions, Winners Take All!
As with the last 4 issues, Greg Capullo and Jonathan Glapion have left nothing to chance, portraying each panel with the care and dedication of master surgeons, giving the Reader visceral eye candy, which rips, rends and tears at the fabric of emotion, similar to the Warhead mixed in with pieces of lemon candy. In some cases, it is enough to bring tears, always for the right reason.
May the Gods, Snyder, Capullo and Glapion have mercy on our souls, as they bring the goods one more time! On to Issue 7!
Out of 5🌶        🌶🌶🌶🌶.5
(And, I am sorry for my time on the soapbox.)
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Death Metal: The Secret Origin
Writers: Scott Snyder & Geoff Johns    Artists: Jerry Ordway  (1 - 7, 35 - 38), Francis Manapul (8-12, 32 - 34), Ryan Benjamin & Richard Friend (14 -21), Paul Pelletier & Norm Rapmund (22 - 31)
‘Look! The Evil Worlds! They’re vanishing!
Whoever did it, they just gave us a fighting chance!
Whoever did it is dead.
But who? Who did it?
We’ll never know.
RRF.
RAARF.
AAAOOOO!
———————————————————————————————————
The Secret Origin…
Or, the one where we figure out Superboy Prime…
Yes, Gentle Readers, this is the story Thirty-Five Years in the making.The Story of Clark Kent of Earth Prime, a young man who, on a night unlike any other found he had the same super powers as his comic book hero and namesake, Superman.
In the Infinite Crisis storyline, Superboy Prime was written having gone insane, having been in this ‘perfect utopian pocket dimension’, too long with the memories that everyone he had loved, his parents, his sweetheart Laurie, were all dead, he while was alive in an idyllic world.
Who wouldn’t lash out… and KILL Superman and Lois Lane of Earth-2?
Scott Snyder and Geoff Johns bring a completion to this story, bringing it full circle, to examine the character, and his psyche, what he has been living with, dealing with, and ultimately showing him to be a sympathetic character, and the hero he has always dreamed of being.
Now, as we learned in the Trinity Crisis one shot, The Bat who Laughs travelled the timelines, pulling specific players from the points of their defeats, and gave them an opportunity to correct their defeats… and did so with Darkseid, the Anti-Monitor and of course Prime. 
The Bat’s plan? To derail the Trinity, and ultimately end the War before the major fighting got started.
What wasn’t counted on was the ability of Diana to convince Clark Kent that the Bat would find a way to make the reward insufferable, and that she would help him to become the hero he had always seen himself as, the one he wanted to be by fighting against the Dark Universe’s influences, and help bring about the rebirth of the Multiverse that was.
Which brings us to the Secret Origin.
This is where we learn what the Bat offers Superboy Prime, what he thinks will sway this young man to give in to the madness which took him once, the madness he has regretted, and ultimately suffered because of, ever since.
Where we learn the measure of those he has been teamed with, and whether they Hero or Villain, are deserving of the titles they carry, based on how he is viewed.
Ultimately, we learn a lesson some of us have already known, that in the measure of intelligence, the instincts of a dog are far more impressive than the most intelligent man’s thoughts. By miles.
At this point, I would like to say when this character was included as part of Death Metal, I saw some form of this story coming. The character received truly shabby treatment after Crisis, and in Infinite Crisis, rather than being treated as broken, was painted as a villain. 
Hell, Hank Hall got better treatment after Armageddon 2001!
Anyway, Scott Snyder and Geoff Johns have written what must be seen as the HAVE TO READ Story of this series, outside of the series itself. This is not only a great story, it is a clinic on how to build a character, These writers have taken this broken child, a Kal-El who has lost everything he loved, over and again, and shown how a man can be saved.
Through belief, faith, and the love of a dog.
So, you see, Mr. Williamson, this is how you write a Redemption Arc.
The art for this story is transformative (heh heh heh). For each section of the story, whether it is the Man, the Superboy as seen by Others, The Boy and A Dog, or the Fight Scenes, there is a specific artist for each portion of the arc, with specific strengths. As such, they will be addressed individually…
Jerry Ordway opens and closes the book. I could stop here, and anyone who is a longtime DC Reader would know why this needed no elaboration. He has been a DC staple since the 1980s, known for artwork that is detailed artistically accurate and beautiful. For anyone who does not know his work, he is technically accurate and imaginatively beautiful. For comparisons, think Neal Adams, Marshall Rogers, the Dodsons, or Capelli and Glapion… but, he’s doing it by himself, no inker to interpret his work. (Example - the comics spinner rack, with the 1984 accurate covers, and bending of same from being riffled through).
Then, of course, there is the final splash page of the book, an homage to Action Comics #1. This page would have brought a tear to this cranky old man’s eye, were I not already all cried out…
Ryan Benjamin and Richard Friend bring us through the character driven portions of the story, the interactions between Prime and the other members of the ‘Super Squad’, and the battle with the Bat’s team… The Superiors of the Ancient House of El - The Saint, the Shepherd, the Savior, and the Last Sun. 
These pages are beautifully rendered, detailed and distinct from all the other artists, but not distractingly so. This method of storytelling, with the truly distinct art styles gives an illusion of the ‘fractured’ nature of the character, how he is broken on some level, and as a result, is  somewhat disjointed. 
Add to this the ‘Temporal and Dimensional Dissonance’ displayed when Prime interacts with the characters, the explosive nature of the differences he sees when he physically assaults one of the Supermen, and the entirety of the storytelling process is on display from the mind of the character.  Without access to the script, there is no way to know how much of this is directly on the Art Team, however, as the interpretation is important, I’m happy to give the tie to the runner here.
It works on so many levels.
The battle between the Bat and Prime falls to the team of Paul Pelletier and Norm Rapmund. This work is sharp, explicit and explosive, showing the inter-connectivity between Prime and the Multiverse, a carryover from the Crisis events which become a major strength for Prime. Every touch, every punch evokes sights, visions of things that could be, could have been, may still be…
And now, the reason the old crank was all cried out…
Francis Manapul.
I held off talking about these pages due the something special I found in them.
For the most part, there were two characters on these pages. Yes, the first page and a half featured the entire Superman Squad, including the Villains, but my focus was drawn to, and laser focused on the Boy and the Dog.
You could say Manapul merely rendered the interpretation of the words Snyder and Johns wrote to describe each panel, but in the end, He. Drew. Each. Panel. Manapul owned each and every panel, whether it featured the Boy, the Dog, or Both. 
You could say Francis Manapul made each panel his bitch.
Now, any person who has owned a dog knows that the dog is actually the one who selects who their master will be, who they will love, and who they will stand beside, from the time they are both pups, until their end of times.
Manapul proves he understands this. He expresses this through graphite and ink, bringing more emption to the face of a dog than I’ve seen on many people. The feeling expressed in Krypto’s face tells as much of the story here as does Prime’s expressions. The expressiveness is captivating, and deserving of very tear shed.
In years to come, comics fans will (as Comics Fans do) bring up this story on a level with Old Yeller, The Biscuit Eater, Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Alan Moore’s ‘Man of Tomorrow’ and the incomparable Harlan Ellison’s ‘A Boy and His Dog’, as examples of how to write animals with feeling.
They won’t be wrong, except, in my humble opinion, this story is head and shoulders above the others.
This is the story which changes the entire Death Metal Saga, and more importantly, that finally redeems one of the most maligned characters in the Post - Crisis DC Universe.
Out of 5🌶        🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶
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Dark Nights: Last Stories of the DC Universe
Writers: Joshua Williamson, James Tynion IV, Scott Snyder, Jeff Lemire, Mariko Tamaki, Gail Simone, Christopher Sebela, Cecil Castellucci, Mark Waid
Artists: Travis Moore, Rafael Albuquerque, Daniel Sampere, Meghan Hetrick, Christopher Mooneyham, Minka Andulfo, Francis Manapul
‘An Oath.
Excuse me?
I would’ve liked to have had an oath. Just something cool to say when suiting up. Was always a little jealous of the Lanterns, to be honest.
“Beware my noise! Black Canary’s Yell!”
Dork! Remind me not to let you write it!’
———————————————————————————————————
When all is said and done, it is necessary to go with a Green Arrow quote. There is no greater level of snark, and from a writing perspective, I just can’t use Robin Williams’ standard.
Gentle Readers, when it is time to go into the Final Battle, this is the group of characters, no heroes, one should want to see standing by, ready to take up arms for the people.
Now, with this particular book falling between issues 5 and 6 of the Death Metal series, these are the stories of the group of characters currently coming together around Donna Troy, Wonder Girl.
Teen Titans, Titans, JLA, and other groups as they have fallen together, all these characters have at one point or another crossed paths with Donna Troy, which makes her a perfect rally point for the writers. The fact she has been around, either as part of the Original Teen Titans, or with Wonder Woman since the Sixties, makes her one of the iconic characters in this storyline.
Williamson, Tynion and Snyder have no problem waltzing her around from group to group, checking on heroes, villains, combined groups. Tao make sure all is well, and to make sure a friendly face is seen before everything goes to Hell in ahand basket burning hand basket.
Which is when Wally West shows up.
This compilation of short stories gives some insight into the characters, their mindsets, and how they see all this playing out.
The Green Lantern story, is one of regrets repented, with Hal Jordan and Thaal Sinestro fighting on the same side, once again, in more ways than one. Jeff Lemire can write a simple story that tugs at the heartstrings, and brings real feelings. The artwork by Rafael Albuquerque is simple, and everything necessary for this story.
The Wonder Woman story, ‘The Question’, is the self examination of why we fight, what drives a person. The question, posed as a riddle by the Riddler, is simple, What do you call a person who’s greatest strength is their weakness, Someone who can never win, and never lose, A person who must fight for justice, but brings an end to justice?
The answer, both simple and complex. And the basis for the story.
Green Arrow and Black Canary take center stage in Dust From a Distant Storm. A story of oaths, and OATHS, and a question unspoken, but answered. Leave it to Gail Simone  and Meghan Hetrick to kick my ass in 8 pages. Feelings, laughs, Joker Megalodons, and the daughter of the Arrow and Canary from one of the 46 destroyed Earths. This was my second favorite story in the book, excluding the wrapper.
Cecil Castellucci is a name I have not heard before reading this story of the Bat-Family, We Fight For Love. That I hadn’t heard of him before meant I had no expectations, other than the potential to be disappointed. I was very happily surprised, and this story was a real gem. 
Now, part of the reason for this was the artwork of Mirka Andolfo, whose soft lines, and sharp detail (go ahead, figure that one out) made this a story more about the family that exists around Bruce Wayne, the young men and women who look to him as a father, and he to them, as his children. The beauty of the storytelling, the simplicity of some of the framing, the whole idea of the dead man bringing the family together to celebrate life, well, it struck a chord in me which has been hit all too often in this series.
And did I mention Damien, Magpie, Croc and Despero in a High Stakes Poker game… and Jason Todd trading some time to listen to Mara the swordsmith for a new sword? How about Dick trying to reconcile with Barbara before going into battle, in case there isn’t a later?
Oh, and a wedding.
My favorite story, well, that would be from one of my favorite writers, Mark Waid.
His story, Man of Tomorrow, is one we have been waiting for, or promised, or expected in some variation for, ahhhh, probably 30 years, since GENERATIONS. It’s a simple tale, one of desire to spend the last little while before all Hellscape breaks out with your loved ones, but also needing to answer the call of duty. How can a man accomplish both?
As it turns out, if the Man of Tomorrow has a piece of Time Hopper tech from the Thirtieth Century, he can answer the call to duty as many times as necessary in one minute… and he does. And why wouldn’t he, after all, he is Superman.
This, Gentle Readers, was the finest story of the collection, again excluding the wrapper story. Mark Waid pulled out all the stops, never took his foot off the gas, cut the brake lines, and powered through this story, not with action, but emotion. 
Now, Mr. Waid would have been nowhere without the pencils and inks of Francis Manual. I will NOT repeat myself here, as I had much to say about his work above. I can only say, Thank You Great Creators that there were no animals in this story. *snf*
Eight pages of people in need. Famine arrested, schools built, food delivered, the poor made whole, the damaged, saved.
Good-byes made to family and friends.
And, when the minute is up, the rest of the night is for his wife and son. 
I hate these people for making me feel.
And now, ‘Together’, where we see EVERY Titan from every iteration of the team… picking up right after Wally shows up.
This is the first time Donna has seen Wally since the Heroes in Crisis storyline, when his insanity brought about the Speed Force explosion that killed Roy Harper, their friend, and teammate.
Time, and history make strange bedfellows in this world, hugs and forgiveness become commonplace.
So does resurrected Black Lantern Titans.
Leaving this story, the Titans of Old, and New are whole, they’ve had their pep talk, and been told they are better than the JLA, because they have been facing the same things the JLA faced, but as children… which makes the Titans the team to be.
And, off we go, Gentle Readers, to the last steep hill on this pan dimensional roller coaster ride in an effort to reset the Multiverse. Wh will live, who will die, how much will be reset… only time, and Scott Snyder know for sure.
But, I can tell you this. I am looking forward to the last two issues of this series!
Out of 5🌶        🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶
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topicprinter · 5 years ago
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I left my job last week. It’s a retail startup founded at the end of 2017. After working there for a year and a half, and viewing so many things happened, I decided to write this article to talk about my experience of working at a startup as a junior data scientist.Myself is the teamI joined the company when it launched for two months. The office was located in “Silicon Alley” in New York, where tons of startups are born and died. It was a single person office with about 6 people (but only 4 tables). After I worked in that office for 2 weeks (most of the time working at the coffee shop across the street), we moved to a larger space which can accommodate 20 people.I didn’t have a specific job description. I was hired to satisfy all their data needs. When a company first launched, how much data could they have? The reality is when no one knows you, you would be lucky if getting 3 orders a day. So in the earlier time, my main responsibility was to build out dashboards and generate reports, although my CEO wanted me to build out complex recommendation system when we barely had any data.I dealt a lot with data (query, ETL, cleaning and viz). But I am not a data scientist.The last straw was really the fact that I have been doing things on my own, it’s hard and lonely. Some people might argue that you can connect with other people outside work and go to meetups to learn from them. But nothing is better than learning at work. After a long time I found myself bringing up questions but no answers, my desire to work on a more structured team peaked. (I did post questions online and it helped sometimes. But tbh it’s not efficient and learning this way is not very systematic).Some companies have 30% of their talents working on data team. Some companies, like my previous one, only hired me and is not planning to hire even a part-time data analyst till the end of this year.I have to say one benefit of working at a startup like this is I got the chance to understand business from every single perspective. I interacted with different teams all day. I tried to get what they needed from their point of view, and tried to give them solutions as quickly as possible. Also, as a data person at a small company, I was able to manage data from end to end. I brought my SQL and Python skills to the next level. I learned two different BI tools, one data warehousing tool and worked with one ETL tool in a little more than a year. But it’s time to have some guidance.Startups are NOT THE SAME. Be wise.When thinking about startups, people may think about layback working environment, casual dress code, flexible working hours as long as you get your work done so on and so forth. Candidly, these things are quite common for lots of companies these days. These things are highly correlated with leadership style and company’s culture. It has nothing to do if this company is a startup or not.Startups are different. A startup like my previous company has a very rigorous vacation policy. I have to log all my vacations and wait for approval. Although I have all the logs of vacation requests, my previous CEO still told my manager he believed I took more vacations than other people.They also lack basic trust. My previous CEO even emailed me “are you working” when I worked remotely. He also texted some of my colleagues saying he wanted to have a serious conversation with everyone because they were taking a long lunch break (I don’t think any of them took longer than 30min). TBH he is part of the reason I made up my mind to leave.A lot of people believe in startups fantasy, thinking about joining a startup at an early stage and make lots of money if the startup becomes something one day. But honestly, it’s so rare that a startup can become next Zoom, Slack or WeWork. Even if it does, your 0.03% - 0.1% of equity can probably worth about the same as a big bonus at a big firm. Equity is a nice thing to have. But it really doesn’t mean anything.Budget is always an issueJoining a company is like starting a relationship. Things are always sweet at the very beginning. When my previous company just raised seed round, they were generous. They paid interns (yes they don’t anymore). They bought customized mugs, notebooks and pencils with company’s logo on it. They aggressively hired people (although most of them left before their first year anniversary)...But after they burned money for six to eight months, things changed dramatically. As a data scientist for a company whose core asset is customer, I wanted a tool to track customers’ events and customers’ navigation patterns. I brought it up three times and got rejected three times due to budget reason. By then I knew data exploration was not their priority. (I respect and understand, so I decided to leave).A few more words...For those who are on the fence if they should do data related work for a startup. Think from these perspectives…Which stage this startup is actually at, do your data skills match what they actually need? Be aware very very new startup could barely have data to allow you to explore and build fancy stuff.Are you still in the early stage of your career when you do need lots of mentorship and coaching? Who do you report to? Does this person have the ability to teach you things?Co-founders are the people who make the final decisions. Their decisions can totally change the fate of a company and can have a huge impact on your career. You may want to connect with people who have left the company and ask their working experience there. Choose a leadership style is very important especially for a startup, since all the people sit in one small room so you can absolutely feel their leadership style during daily talk and interaction (example: encourage/blame, respect/belittle, trust/micro-monitoring… )​I hope this could be helpful for those who are debating if they should join a startup. I would like to hear more opinions and diverse startup experience.
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chriswoodink · 6 years ago
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DUNGEON CRAWLING ON A CYBERPUNK SKYLINE
You crawl through rubble filled hallways, climbing through a hole in the roof to find a dilapidated former apartment room. Or a hospital wing. Or a convenience store. Inside is a dirty, scraps-wearing man cradling a long dead skeleton. One of your friends tries talking to him of course but it goes badly. 
The man picks up a shard of glass resting on a shattered digital photo frame. He attacks. You see whirring pistons beneath your broken skin but you don’t feel anything. The man’s legs disappear underneath a fallen pillar to the left of the room. 
Another friend asks whether or not to move through the destroyed rooms to the left, following the man, or climb right up through the shaky vent above them. The first option is a lot safer but it’s going to take a while and time is money. Your wrist beeps and the device strapped to your arm reads ‘59 MINS POWER REMAINING’. The latter route is risky but looks a shorter trip. 
A whirring sound hums louder and you can hear metal on metal echo throughout the room. It’s coming from the hole in the floor you just climbed up...
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If you were to kneel at the great tree of Role Playing Game taxonomy, trace it’s many branches down and dig the dirt away, you’d unearth a root close to the surface: Dungeon Crawling.
With the resurgence of the old school mindset, the dungeon crawl has once again taken its place as both the bread and the butter.
But why do people keep going back to them? Well, they’re easy to run, right?. Simple in concept and in practice. The procedure for running the adventure is right there in your hands and it’s mostly fool proof.
Now I’ve learnt to love fantasy. But my first love was sci-fi. I adore cyberpunk and I’ve been hankering for a good cyberpunk game. I’ve also gotten right into the OSR as of late. So how do we reconcile cyberpunk and the OSR?
Dungeon crawling in an abandoned Judge Dredd-esque freaking mega-block skyscraper.
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A structure so large it could have once held the equivalent to an entire city’s population.
Think combing the ruins of an older world ala Fallout or wading through a dangerous, falling apart high-rise that’s leaning on another in the Last of Us. The real life urban exploration explosion comes to mind as well.
This will be the first of a series of posts about hacking up this sort of game for my play group. 
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Now it doesn’t take long into thinking about the logistics of running an underdark-like campaign in a vertical plane that things start falling apart. Nearly all underdark maps I’ve seen are hex crawls. Veins of the Earth is a considerably impressive manual depicting procedures for replicating labyrinthian cave systems in both planes. But its macro layout is still mostly horizontally distributed.
So the chief obstacle is how to manage a map that makes the y axis a central pillar of its design while still maintaining clear, minimal note taking that’s easy to use at the table.
This is what I came up with.
Grab an index card. This is going to be one Block in the larger city building structure. Each Block has a number of Rooms that are still intact enough that something is or has recently been there.
Roll a D6 to determine how many Rooms are in the Block.
Any position is fine. The map is mostly conceptual rather than literal. A simple method is to place them on the card in the arrangement of dots on the dice.
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Not all rooms are the same so let’s differentiate them a bit and add a little variety. Remember to do everything at the same step, working clockwise before moving on. So determine the size of all the rooms before heading to the next instruction. Do this for all of the following steps. I found it’s quick and easy to have a pencil in one hand and the dice in the other.
Roll a D6 to determine how big the rooms are.
1-2: Small or one room.
3-4: Medium or 2-3 small rooms
5-6: Large or 4-6 small rooms or 2 medium rooms
Marked with a S, M or L respectively.
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Remember we want verticality to permeate all of the map design so there’ll be 3 levels within each card.
Roll a D6 to determine which rooms are in which levels of the block
1-2: Level 1 or the lowest level
3-4: Level 2 or the mid-tier level
5-6: Level 3 or the highest level
Note this by writing the Level number next to the size
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Now we’ve got our rooms, let’s determine some of the connective tissue. Routes link the rooms together and are the ‘gutters’ to our ‘panels’.
Let’s take a little time to clearly define Rooms and Route, and what this means at the table. During play Rooms are ‘Zoomed in’. We play through this portion of the fiction in a moment to moment basis, seeing all the nitty gritty details. 
Routes on the other hand are ‘Zoomed out’. We gloss over the journey a lot of the time in stories and role playing games because it’s usually not the particularly exciting part of the games. Here we’re working at an hour to hour basis compared to moment to moment. That is unless there’s something interesting for the players to interact with. Then we Zoom In. This could be a risky climb for instance. Rooms have specific interactive encounters. Interesting things happen in them, compared to Routes where there usually isn’t anything interactive.  Routes could be hallways or a number of actual rooms. But since they’re rooms with nothing inside them worth the players’ time then we don’t zoom in. 
This sort of concept is important to understand if you notice you get a lot of blank stares and awkward dead air after you tell them things about the fiction. You’re probably not giving them enough of a cue of something for them to interact with and respond to. The game is like a conversation in this way. I used to do this all the time when I first started GMing. The players would tell me they move through the tunnel. And then I’d respond with a detail of some sort about how the tunnel looks and smells like and how it extends onwards and then cue the awkward silence. They’d ask me if they come across anything and I’d skip to where they came across something important and interactive like an encounter. 
Skip to the good stuff.
Draw some lines between a few rooms. These are our Routes. Then let’s determine how they connect. No rolling here, just look at the levels of the two rooms you’re trying to connect.
The Route is:
Horizontal if the two rooms are on the same level
Slope (~45*) if they’re a level apart. This has a +1 Dice Modifier for when the players roll to see how long the passage takes to traverse.
Vertical (~90*) if they’re two or more levels apart. This has a +2 Dice Modifier.
Next is how, in general, the Route is structured.
1-2: Walkway. Large enough in diameter to make your way through without any squeeze.
3-4: Crawl. Hands and knees territory. This has a +1 Dice Modifier
5-6: Squeeze. Walls up against you. You almost have to stay calm in order to even fit. This has a +2 Dice Modifier.
Write W, C or S along the line representing the route.
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This is your basic Block.
Let’s talk about Time in a little more detail. Each Route is a point of decision making. Do the players travel down it or find another path? Time eats away at resources. Time is important in time-sensitive situations. And it's an important factor in creating tension in your OSR games. When the players traverse a Route have them roll a D6, adding any modifiers for the route. Each result equals that many 10 minute increments. On a 6, the die explodes and another D6 is rolled, adding any remaining modifiers. Tracking time through the use of PbtA/Blades style Clocks with six 10 minute sections I can fill in.
If your players want to find another route not on your card to a room on or not on your card then they can roll to determine how long it takes for them to find it. The building is a maze of cracks and crevices, and since we don’t want the players to be wasting their time they’ll always find the passageway. Usually they’ll probably want to skip a dangerous vertical climb by breaking it up into a longer Slope or maybe they’re just looking for a random room off the beaten path. If they are roll one up quickly and mark the new Route as a dotted line.
There are a few rules that are important in order to maintain verisimilitude. The time it takes to climb up a Route is twice as long than it is climbing down. The time it takes to travel through a Route is halved if it has already been traversed
Once you’ve got your Block repeat this process a couple of times and then arrange them like this.
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This is your building (or part of it). This setup is conceptually the same as stacking cards of the same letter on top of each other with the higher number on top.
The highlighted areas of the cards are all areas that are on top each other, either directly below or above.
To the right is the concept from a different angle. The North area of Block A1 is right under the North Area of Block A2. If the players were in a Level 3 Room in the North area of A1 they could travel through a Slope Passage to a Level 1 Room in the North area of A2.
Simply draw any routes between the cards/blocks, connecting them. I’ve found when I use this method at the table I can hold the cards around them like a hand in poker, but when I’m playing a game of Discord I have no problem laying out the relevant cards in the way drawn above. How many you want to place down entirely depends on how many you want to generate at a time. Think the limited view distance in old video games popping objects up or having them vanish. 
You could probably use this for running a crawl through castle ruins in your classic fantasy campaign too. Or a dungeon that goes straight down.
In further posts we’ll talk about what players will find in these rooms, how to structure an encounter within this framework and the idea of Power as both the amount of light remaining and fuel for chainsaws and laser weapons. Also monsters.
All images copyright 2018 Chris Wood Ink.
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junsojung-text · 6 years ago
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“Kiss me Quick” by Sojung Jun Limitation-Rise-Indulgence of Senses
Sohyun Ahn (Independent Curator)
As I go up the stairs traversing the café rather overly decorated with flowers, I encounter the glass door of the gallery. On the right of the door, it reads “ß” indicating left and “Gallery”, under which are shown the symbols prohibiting filming, recording, telephoning, eating and contact. Basically, in this space, only visual is allowed, meaning I have to put all my auditory, gustatory, and tactile senses to sleep and never use any means or tools to remember any images.  I think to myself that the arrow sign is not really necessary and that there are so many “NO” signs. A place that erases all the senses other than visual, interferes with our memory and excessively controls our experience… I am not just talking about this space, but most exhibition spaces are like that.
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The title of the exhibition is “Kiss me Quick”. The silhouette of the title’s type is very uneven, as if it had been zoomed in from an analog printing material. Maybe the letters were not cut out well, which explains the infiltration of other letters. Anyways, “Kiss me Quick” is a name of a cocktail mixing red fruit juice, apple juice, and sparkling water, etc. with vodka as base. Come to think of it, the sixth floor of the SongEun building is occupied by a vodka company. I imagined for a second the sparkling red bitter and sweet taste in my mouth, but I soon put aside my gustatory sense since it was banned in this space. [kısmıkwık]. It is a repetition of an aspirated sound “k” and short vowel “I”. I found it even awkward to say it out loud in an exhibition hall, but the sound of the title is surely piquant and sparkling. Given the fact that the title was named after a cocktail, it is like a self-contenting sound, just like scat in jazz. There are many cocktail names out there that are overly simple and infantile associated with colors and tastes of the liquor. Red lip or sweet kiss is a very banal description, but if the taste can be felt while pronouncing the word, then the titles seems to be appropriate. Now, I decide to put behind the thought of taste and focus on “looking” around the exhibition.
A dimlight is shed upon musical score no. 5. It’s a score for stringed instruments that was hand-drawn and cut into pieces and reassembled. So much traces of a hand for a music score. Also, phrases like “tap strings with the bow”, “with the high pressure of the bow” reminded me of sounds that clang like a percussion instrument or movements of the bow bouncing back and forth from the strings, even though I am a laymanin stringed instruments. The arrow in the score seems to indicate the flow of the music. However, this arrow, unlike the unnecessary one next to the “Gallery” type at the entrance, is very disruptive in its own. The performer can surely know the order of the next music with this arrow, but he or she doesn’t have to perform in the same order. The arrow transforms this musical score into a completely different one, from all the other scores premising a safe, parallel connection. No wonder I felt like I had to move to another place after playing a piece of this score, if I were to accurately play this musical score.  
Somewhere further below the musical note no. 5, on a lightless dark wall hung two pencil drawings. They were definitely drawn with eyes closed. That is because after a cluster of lines that are grouped into one mass, then appear the lines that make their way through to find another space, and again a group of lines follow, and then they overlap with one another. These lines are not preciselymoving towards a vanishing point, but are hesitant, wandering and falling as if strayingaround the desert with no visual references solely relying on their sense of touch. Then, they are disconnected and then connected again, just like before when a piece of sound/noise was played in the musical score and then moved onto the next piece with the help of an arrow.  With the visual dogmatism now gone, the tactile senses become a series of irregular fragments. So, I close my eyes. Now,fragmentsof sounds coming out from the speaker abound. These sounds come to an irregular halt, just like a blind man who is catching his breath after passing a district of a hustling city just before crossing the road, or a person trembling with fear that he might be going around in circles even after having gone numerous sand dunes in a dessert.
The sound rides and goes over the hill. It is a white hill, whose corners are edgy, made out of wood. I follow the sound that went past the hill to take a turn along the silhouettes of the hill. There feature two simple movements overlapping at the top and bottom. One is a person going around in circles, and the other is a hand moving along the corners of the hill. The movements inside the monitor are repeated over and over. This time, they do not hesitate. The movements are repeated in a stable and resigned manner, just like the footsteps of a blind man who has alreadyentered a desert.    
The light rides and goes over the hill. As I take a turn around the silhouette of the hill, now appears a structure of a forest whose top is blocked and the bottom is open. A person who is lost the middle of a dark forest desperately struggles to look for any sound and light coming from outside to escape. On the other hand, an able woodcutter knows how to read the light and the sound inside a forest.  He is adept in reading the ruggedness of the space through sounds and light just like braille: knowing where the sound and light go,  bump and come back and where they end up being absorbed and buried.
“Exhibition to the 3rd floor. Push”, it reads at the exit. Suddenly I come to myself again. What did I do till now in this dark room? I activated my appetite and felt around the space following the light and the sounds. My gustatory, auditory, and tactile senses once banned at the entrance have now all revived, and the only allowed visual sensation has now become inactivated with few minimal functions left.
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As I enter the hall on the 3rd floor, at my feet, I can see the forest that I had just seen. The light and the sounds go through the hole to flow into the upper floor. The text barely visible under the flown-in light includes secrets behind these unfamiliar spaces. The text beginning with “closes the eyes” illustrates the artist’s all forms of struggle to find the coordinates in a visually-limited state (<Metaphysical Dissection>(2017)). The invisible body is struggling hard to capture even the vague colors, play the saved images and capture the changes in speed in light of the experience. In the end, the artist seems to have realized that in orderto understand the space in a visually limited state relying on tactile sensations, she has to repeatedly read the gap between the space and her own body. That is, despite visual constraints, it is clear that gravity is in action, thus the body is used as a verticalaxis. To someone who cannot see, the angle between his body and the world becomes an important coordinate, and the space is constructed to allow an easy understanding of such coordinate. The slightly inclined boards grow larger and repetitive, and while moving forward by placing hands on each and every board one by one, one can easily reach a narrow hallway that leads us to another room. Images are projected on these incremental boards, but the movements of dancers in the images are all fragmented, and in between theseboards appear again the bits and pieces of drawing and musical scores. On the wall of a hallway leading to another room, feature repeated matte-white and glossy-white oblique lines that are inclined at a similar angle as the boards. These two types of white color are more distinct under a dim light than a strong light, and even if I completely close my eyes, I can feel around the space thanks to the different surface textures and move to the next space. At this point, a visitor, although he cannot see straight, has now learned his way to find the right path. .
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The video displayed on a slightly oblique screen is <Interval. Recess. Pause.>(2017). The title is the juxtaposition of words from 『Dictée』by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The voices of people are intermittent, vacillating and then suddenly dropped. Not only Theresa Hak Kyung Cha but also the characters in the video for some reason have become distant from the place of memory, and the colors, taste and touch felt in this distant place are reproduced in a language. However, why are they clinging to these indescribable difficult sensations rather than objective easy information when describing their experience back in the days? In fact our experience already has the answer.  The more quickly sensation is paralyzed, the more difficult to be described in language and relies on physical conditions, the longer they stay in your memory. These sensations are different from memories that had been intentionally stored by intelligence and called upon by language. That is whywhen we smell something, although the smell is very distinct and sharp, we really don’t have a clue as to why the smell is so distinct, so we try very hard to remember what the smell it is. A sensation always appears unexpectedly, drops suddenly and then disappears abruptly.  The performer in the video expresses this type of irresistible senses. A sensation that we cannot prevent from approaching us resembles a rainbow with its indistinct silhouette yet a strong, distinct existence.
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Finally <La Nave de Los Locos>(2016). A video installed in a skateboarding park-like space begins with a laser-close look at the painting with the same title of Hieronymus Bosch. The voice gives a hint about “you.” “This is what you tell me. The best option is not to be born. But if you are already born, not to be expelled is the best.”  This video is a letter sent to Cristina Peri Rossi, an exiled writer of the novel 『La Nave de Los Locos』. Whereas the two previous works dealt with our primary senses such as sound, light, taste, and touch, this video seems to have called upon so much information with language. The voice telling us the barbaric history where all the insane men were put together in each city and sent off on a boat to be sequestrated, suddenly reads out all these meaningless names of electronic displays, banners, and signboards, and the video points out for us each and every name of the streets the skateboarder goes through via Google Map. Moreover, it tells us the names, age, and stories of the exiled, deported and LGBT. Finally the artist tries to explain Bosch’s painting to a blind dancer in Barcelona, whose words are again translated intoCastilian, Catalan, and English. It may be quite natural for a visitor, who had groped around different dark spaces with limited senses to reach this work, finds it difficult to digest this saturated state of language.
However, if a visitor has faithfully followed the process of training (limited) senses that Sojung Jun had placed in different spaces, then he or she would be able to discover the sensuousorder that reconstructs all these abundant information. The artist zooms in on Bosch’s painting (in digital image) to the point that pixels are visible, and then allows the visitor to skim through the screen with a cursor pointing to a specific spot. This close-up was surely meant to take a closer at all the historic scenes, but it does not stop at a point when the image is most clearly visible, but goes on to the point of revealing pixels, implying that there is a hidden intention behind such attempt. This is similar to a movement of groping around the image with one’s fingertip and moving forward (the kind of pleasure felt when the pixels and the cross-shaped cursor overlap and disappear!). This tactile interpretation is soon translated into a movement of a skateboarder in Barcelona groping around the street floor. And the indistinctvoice reading out the signboards are translated into images with smudged colors. It is not about picking out only meaningful words, but the act of reading and feeling around all types and signs coming into our realm of vision is comparable to that of a blind man who has to feel around the spaces in between to move to a nearby place.  Having to do many translations to deliver a message to someone is also likened to the process of feeling around different ways towards communication. After all, all movements in this video are tactile recitation.  
Meanwhile, the exiled are subject to sympathy as they dream to “return to the times that cannot be returned to”. However, artist Sojung Jun shows sympathy (with the risk of causing ethical controversy) but also shows a long yearning for maximum level of tactile sensation that they could have felt. Those exiled, deprived of the right to stand on a solid and flat ground, need to develop a sense of touch and equilibrium tantamount to that of a surfer who can stand on the waves in the sea in order not to drown. Sojung Jun seems to improperly envy these exceptional senses of lesbian writer Christina Peri Rossi, who had exiled from Uruguay to Spain, the land of Catalans having claim their independence. The images of a blind dancer’s moves shot in infrared camera intuitively tell us that the dancer cannot see, and at the same time was a very careful way of expression chosen by the artist to opt for darkness, as she could not express someone’s disability under a bright light.  However, in Sojung Jun’s screen, we feel the gaze of sensation-driven people who indulge in the movements of dancers, who activate their senses of balance to the maximum and feel around the void in the dark. This is similar to the sensation of skateboarders taking the risk of groping around the ground even if no one really forces them to do so. The movements groping around the uneven and rugged space entail a risk of sudden fall and deprivation, making the audience to have butterflies in their stomach, but their spatial indulgence becomes the visual indulgence of Sojung Jun.
Eventually, Sojung Jun has translated all of these experimental, linguistic, historic, political and social records in an order based on senses. By the end of the exhibition, it is revealed that the title “Kiss me Quick” was a cocktail menu in the 『Le Paysan de Paris』written by Louis Aragon, and the letter types which seemed to have been wrongly cut from an analog printing materials were in fact from the menu. The title was translated into a taste by a chef, and the taste was translated again into a critic’s language. The text describing the experience of walking around blindfolded was translated into music of a composer, space of a scenographerand video of a cinematographer. And we witness the amazing rise of our senses in a feast of all these sounds, lights, colors, tastes, movements and languages. The moment we give up on the dogmatism of a single sensation or limit such sensation, all the other senses once oppressed come alive, and these awakened senses do not stop at just passively embracing external stimuli. These once banned senses invite in the stories of someone’s loss, constraints, disruption, and fall. We listen to the stories that start from the pressure spot of our skin, cochlea inside our ear, and the tip of our tongue. The reason why Sojung Jun cannot stop her indulgence in senses and why we cannot help but continue to follow on her indulgence is becausetheir stories continue to go on.
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jostylr · 7 years ago
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What a year: 2017
This year has been a long year. Much of it centered on the national news. The anger and threats. The crumbling of icons to harassment. The feeling of powerlessness as the majority is ignored in the country. The non-stop desire to see what other embarrassment or trauma was in the news. None of that was good, but good did come out of it.
It was a year of endings for me and, in that ending, hope of new beginnings.
Apple
The only apple device I currently use that I used at the start of 2017 is my iPad Pro. In the spring of 2017, my 2009 iMac died (hard drive failure). It was a slow death which held the promise of maybe keeping it as a display monitor. I tried to use just my Macbook air and either use a dedicated external monitor or the 2009 iMac screen. Both ultimately ended in failure (the dedicated ones never looked good with the MBA while the iMac had catastrophic heat failure).
I ordered a new iMac in May, but they released a brand new version at WWDC. It was just within my return window so I returned the old new one and got a new new one. Been happy with it ever since.
My MBA died in November. It was working fine one moment and then it was dead the next. The repair would have cost more than a new refurbished one at MicroCenter (Apple no longer makes my beloved 11" MBA) and so I got that. Looked briefly at the Macbook but the keyboard felt like pounding on concrete.
iPhoneX came out and I just had to get it despite getting a lot of flack for paying so much for a new phone. I love it. I love the FaceID login flow, the smoothness of it all, the screen, and the camera is just fantastic. Low light, no problem. Crystal clear video. Cool zooming. I am not that much into taking pictures anymore, but this makes me wish I were. I might explore Halide a bit with it to learn more about digital photography. My daughter inherited my iPhone6; she was another motivation as her iPhone4S (my old one) died suddenly.
I bought the iPhoneX and the iPhoneSE for my wife using a tradeoff of a new carrier: Xfinity Mobile. We were paying $90 a month for AT&T. After our first month, we paid $25 for Xfinity Mobile, $12 for 1GB usage level (we used 200Mb) and $13 in taxes. The taxes are non-negotiable, but the $12 could disappear if we used less than 100Mb -- seems unlikely).
So in one year, I got a new iMac, MBA, and iPhone. If FaceID comes to the iPad and they redesign the Apple Pencil to have an eraser part, then I would consider replacing the iPad Pro too.
I also bought AirPods and absolutely love them. They can be a little slow to switch between devices, but otherwise, I am very pleased with them. Being wireless is incredible, and pausing when I take them out is a fantastic feature. I don't use the taps very much. The quality is fine for me and the range is great. Also, when they run low on power, I can charge one at a time. I don't often run out of power, but in the times I do, it comes in handy. I also enjoy sharing them with my wife when we are watching something together that is not intended for our daughter.
Apps
While speaking of Apple, there are a few apps that I find amazing to use:
Mac
Yoink. Drag and drop files onto the side, then find where to put them, drag them out. I find this works very well for me as I like to segment out my process in exactly this way: First find it, then figure out where to put it.
Grand Perspective. This is blowing my mind away. It can scan any folder (or the whole drive) and show in nested blocks the storage area. As one mouses over the blocks, it shows how much space and what file it is. This is a great way to get an understanding for where the space goes. Pretty too.
Magnet. Still early days for me, but this is a windows manager for snapping to a few specified areas using the keyboard. It seems to do exactly what I want though having a few more options would be very useful for me.
The indispensable apps I use all the time are, of course, MacVim, SourceTree (git), Terminal (ssh, literate-programming), 1Password, and the browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari). Some storage programs and some math apps are listed below.
I also acquired AffinityDesigner. It looks awesome and I hope to use it, but I have not yet had an opportunity to really delve into it.
iOS
To be honest, I have tried a number of apps, but there are not that many that really captures my attention. I continue to use SafariBooksOnline, Reeder, Firefox Focus, all for consuming.
Love you to bits. This is a graphical game that reminds me strongly of text-based games. My daughter and I both enjoyed playing through it. It is the spiritual successor to the much beloved (and gone) Tiny Thief.
GrafnCalc83. A wonderful touch implementation of the TI-83. I have the actual calculator, but the iOS version is a joy to work with while being very faithful to what the TI-83 would produce.
Many of the apps I come across seem to demo nicely (IKEA furniture placement app, for example), but I simply do not use that many despite having a lot of them.
I do use Notability for writing out notes on my iPad. It was particularly useful in conjunction with Screenflow in doing videos of working out mathematics problems.
I have also used AstroPad for converting my iPad into a graphics tablet for my desktop.
Storage
With all the failures of my devices this year, backup has certainly been on my mind. I had pretty good luck with them all except for my daughter's iPhone4S though I am not sure that there was anything much lost on it. Right now, I am using iMazing to do backups to an external drive connected to my iMac. They do it wirelessly to all the devices and this seems to be working fine.
For the desktop and laptops, I use Carbon Copy Cloner 5 and back the laptops up once a month. I also have Arq which backs up the high use folders (desktop, downloads, documents, my repositories) to OneDrive. Additionally, I have a main external storage folder that keeps a bunch of stuff, such as the photo library and I back that up to another external drive.
I just finished sorting all the many "messy desktop" folders all around and consolidating all the materials. Saw some interesting memories along the way, including my Tiddlywiki experiments. I have my OneDrive sync folder with a variety of documents that I find useful. I hope to keep it in sync with the folders on the main Storage device, probably using rsync.
Storage is still a bit of a pain, but I am hoping to work at it.
Currently, I have Amazon Cloud Storage and OneDrive. They are both very nice. I opted to not go with iCloud because I could not understand how to control what was syncing where. It sounded like they try to stuff my hard drives full and manage it. I am a big fan of having control even if it does cause me headaches of organization.
Jobs
My jobs have certainly changed a bit this year. I quit one part-time online teaching gig because I did not like the direction it was heading. I also wanted to have more time for other efforts. But another of my part-time online teaching gigs has been going crazy with enrollment so instead of 2 semesters, it looks like I will be teaching 3 semesters in the year.
I also left the neighborhood association. I am quite pleased to no longer be going to meetings.
My Arts&Ideas job also expanded to include a summer camp for our students. It went well and we expect to continue it. It is a very different feel, much more relaxed, but it also takes up a lot of time. I did feel that having limited free time helped keep me focused on working on what I was concerned with.
Healthcare
We have used CareFirst since going on our own about five years ago. We initially had $300-500 in premiums per month, but last year it spiked to $900 and now this year it would be $1500. This is insane given our income levels. So we switched to KaiserPermanente for about $500 a month after subsidies. I worry about the stability of the health system, but I guess we'll take it one year at a time.
This year, none of us needed medical help, that I can recall. In previous years, I had sicknesses and a surgery, but this year was a healthy year.
I did get a FitBit which has helped me stay motivated to move around. My weight is not moving in the direction I want it to, but it does seem at least stable. My goal is to lose about 30 pounds from where I am now.
Shoes and Sandals
This is the year when my feet stopped wanting to wear shoes. Shoes I have worn for a long time became uncomfortable. Perhaps my feet have gotten wider, perhaps I just have transferred my claustorphobia to my feet.
In any event, I started wearing sandals. All the time. Even with socks. To deal with weather, I have overshoes. One pair ($10) is for rain and light cold or snow. Another pair is expensive ($100) but are built for heavy winter use.
I have used both of them, I find them amazing. They look a little dodgy, but I love to wear my sandals and this is a neat separation of the external needs. The foot size of these overshoes are very large, but my feet are securely placed inside thanks to the sandals.
Inside, I have the comfort of open-toed sandaling.
RPG
Pushed by the students at Arts&Idea, I have been working on a new role-playing system based off of D&D. I call it self-directed role-playing. It takes the classes and breaks them up into individual skills. The system is complicated for the assignment of experience points and requires a computer. I also revamped the magic system to open it up to characters in a more general way. The combat is largely opposed rolls of attack versus defense. The initiative system is also computerized to allow for a dynamic ordering based on trying to make everyone feel like they are participating more (the less well one does or the more minor the action, the sooner one gets to play again; also defending slows one down a little as defending is rolling dice).
One neat feature (I hope) is that instead of a d20 for everything, the skills start at d4 and work up to d20, gaining modifiers at each level. Since attack and defense are opposed, this should balance out, regardless of how it goes, but I am hoping to reduce some of the random swings of fortune while still giving the thrill of rolling. The damage is a multiplier based on weapon and other factors, multiplied by how well one does in succeeding in the attack.
The biggest question is whether we can run this at a fast speed.
I hope this deals with the problems I have with D&D. The material is very nice and thorough, but the system has always felt not quite right. I have done some playtesting with a brave group of guinea pigs. In a week, I hope to begin two groups working through the prepared D&D adventures of Out of the Abyss and Curse of Strahd.
Fifth Staff
We spent the year at school looking to hire a fifth staff. It was quite a journey. We learned a lot, had a lot of fun with the Hiring Committee, and we finally did find someone that we are all very excited to join us.
But it is tough to envision a fifth person. We have been a tight group of four, knowing each other quite well. We can anticipate how each reacts and we have the bonds to both care about the others while also being free to oppose one another.
I have confidence in the person we hired, but it will take time to adjust.
We also hired a professional cleaner for bi-weekly cleanings. This has also been an adjustment.
Development
I have found this year to be difficult to work on my projects. I have added some to literate programming. I entered this winter break with the intention of redoing it, using Promises or perhaps Observables. But on looking at the options, I realized I love my Event-When paradigm. So I have spent the vacation trying to improve that, which is still a work in progress, but I am pretty happy with some of the innovations. It strikes me as the mental model that works well for me: events happen, stuff reacts to it. This is a bit silly in terms of scientific or mathematical computations (maybe), but for user interaction stuff, it is perfect. Even in the realm of math and science, events can be a way to break problems into separate computations.
My goals are to finish the Event-When rewrite, incorporate that into Literate-Programming and update all of that. With luck, I could get that done by May.
Once that is done, or perhaps concurrently, I intend to finally get my own blog system going and MathPebbles. So much to do and I still need to do A&I internal web stuff.
I am captivated by the ideas of mathematics and physics. I have been taking breaks from programming this vacation and retreating to reading mathematics. There is so much to explore and understand. This is what I hope to bring to MathPebbles. I think one idea for the site is to thread some pebbles together as a kind of companion to some good math books. I used to think of writing a math book, but there are plenty of those in existence. What is needed is a platform for exploring mathematics in a way that is most helpful to those learning. I absolutely love GeoGebra, WolframAlpha, Desmos, but they all strike me as giving answers while skipping much of the journey. I want to remove the burden of the manual computations, but facilitate stepping through the process rather than shortcutting it.
Family
Family has been good. My daughter is growing up fast. While only six, she seems much older. She has just lost her two front teeth. She is into Legos this year, working diligently in following the instructions of the sets. While I always enjoyed the free form method, I have to admit it is pretty cool to see the constructions she makes.
My parents are definitely getting older. We have had some conversations in trying to prepare for the inevitable, but I get the sense that when disaster finally strikes, I will be completely unprepared. I can't help but continue to think that our society is most failing the young and the old. Our lack of neighborly community, shall we say, hurts them the most.
I do worry that I spend too much time working on my projects when I should spend more time with my daughter and my parents.
My wife is going through her own journey. The new year may see some significant changes to our lives as she takes on a new direction.
Future
I am hoping this year will be pretty stable in terms of my jobs, devices, and time usage. My hope is to get MathPebbles going full blast along with finishing up Literate Programming and Event When. There are some internal projects at A&I to do as well as the RPG to run.
Each year, I hope to get further into my many projects. There are books and other projects I want to do, but I think the biggest desire is MathPebbles. So let's hope this is the year for that!
Sunday will be a day to declutter, clean, and refocus each week on the upcoming week. Discipline is the call to action.
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