#human is just?? the most renée coded??

[whollyjoly]

BofB as Killers Songs - Renée Lemaire

Renée Lemaire - Human

my sign is vital my hands are cold and i’m on my knees looking for the answer are we human or are we dancer? (there is no message we're receiving / let me know, is your heart still beating?)

pt 7/? - band of brothers as killers songs

playlist for the series

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this is dedicated to the wonderful and incredible lou, @ronald-speirs and whatever other usernames you have going rn 😂 it has been such a gift to get to know you, my dear 💕 you are so kind, so supportive, and i absolutely adore both our absurd shenanigans and our real ass conversations. thank you for just being a great friend! this, dear lou, is for you 🥰 love you lots 💕💕 (bonus: those beautiful screencaps of renée?? also done by lou 🥰)

Taglist: @xxluckystrike @ronsparky @land-sh @malarkgirlypop @sweetxvanixlla

Let me know if you'd like to be added or removed!

photo sources: x x x x x x x

[therealvinelle]

Hey! Love your metas. In regards to your last one about "joke's on the demon, carlisle's dad never cared for him" what do you think each of the cullen's human family felt towards them? Like did carlisle's dad hate him just because or? Did Esme's parents dislike her or were they just a product of their time? Same with Rosalie i guess. Emmett perhaps has the most loving background, Alice maybe the least? Who knows... and what about Bella? Did Renee actually care about her?

Well, all I can do is point to what is stated in the Guide and in canon.

Alice had a mother who the Guide outright states "loved her deeply", and "(Alice and her sister) were fairly close despite the wide age difference". The paragraph describing her early childhood outlines a loving home: "At first her parents thought her premonitions were amusing. “Alice is always right,” they would say when the five-year-old dressed herself in a slicker even though the sky was blue; later, of course, the rain would begin. “Grandma will be here soon,” she would announce. They would laugh and put out an extra plate." Alice turned eighteen before any of the tragedy in her family ever came to pass, though the community was turning against her because of her visions. Her closest family was in her corner, though. In the end it was her father seeking to eliminate her mother so he could take a new wife, with the new wife very much in on it. Alice's desperation to prevent her mother's murder looks to me like what turned him against her: she would not stop, and she would not shut up, and she was accusing him of murder in a time when that carried the death penalty. It was a lot more complicated for Alice than "father bad".

Bella I think we've written enough metas on, but it always seemed to me that Renée loved her, it's just that she wasn't cut out to be a mother. None of her failings as a mother are because she wished Bella harm in any way, it's merely that she's wired in a way that makes it hard for her to understand what her daughter needed from her. Charlie, as we know, loved Bella as well, but he didn't get to be around her much.

Carlisle was a dutiful son, but clashed with his father ideologically and in how he thought he should do his job once he took it over from his father, which in turn disappointed his father. The Guide describes the man as "self-righteous and compassionless". By all accounts, they don't seem close. There's the tricky thing, though, that we only ever get Carlisle's point of view of that relation. When Edward speaks of Carlisle's past, he only has what Carlisle told him to go on. And Carlisle was young, and as we see in canon, can be quite oblivious. It's very possible that a rebellious Carlisle misjudged his father's character, and that his later regret surrounding his involvement in witch trials further clouded his recollections of his father. I'm not saying the man was necessarily secretly a loving father all along, merely that our only source is unreliable.

Edward's wiki section has this to say: "His father, a successful lawyer, provided Edward with many advantages, including music lessons and the opportunity to attend private school; however, although his father provided for Edward in material ways, he was emotionally distant and often away from home on business. This absence was made up for by Edward’s close relationship with his mother; he was the center of her life." I have nothing to add to that.

We know this of Emmett's human life: "He had what his parents considered a wild adolescence; never one to worry about consequences, Emmett ran with a wild crowd that drank, gambled, and womanized. Emmett was always a help to his family, however. He was an excellent hunter and woodsman, and always kept the McCartys supplied with game." That, to me, doesn't read like he's the golden son, rather it's the partying kid who refuses to listen to the parents. "Wild crowd" is code for "friends his parents disapproved of". Yes, he kept the family supplied with game, but that's because people are rarely one thing only. And notice how the way in which he contributed to his family was by doing something he enjoyed anyway, so it's not like he was making much in the way of sacrifices for them. I'm not criticizing the guy, just pointing out that he was hardly a saint to his family and I imagine their relationship was a complicated one where his family wished he would shape up a bit and grow out of the wild adolescence. Thanks to the bear, he never did.

Esme's section in the Guide has this to say: "Esme tried to persuade her father to allow her to pursue a teaching position in the West, but he didn’t think it was respectable for a lady to live alone in the wilds. Instead, her father pressured her to accept the son of a family friend who wanted to marry her. Several years Esme’s senior, Charles Evenson had good prospects. Esme was indifferent to Charles, but not opposed to him, so she agreed to the marriage to please her father." So, by all means not a modern father, though I'll point out that this was a time when being a respectable woman actually did matter if you wanted to live a good life. Not wanting his young daughter to run off and follow her dreams isn't necessarily the mark of a tyrant who doesn't care for her. As it is, he found Esme a husband who was established and could offer her an economically stable future, it would have been a good life if Charles hadn't turned out to be evil, something the father could not have predicted. That he and her mother then "rejected her plea for asylum; they counseled her to be a “good wife” and keep quiet." is where they fail as parents and as human beings, though you'd be amazed at the things people can justify to themselves. Their advice to her points to them having truly thought this was Esme's fault and she and Charles could work this out. Which... awful, but you hear about family members doing this in so many abuse cases, it makes them scumbags but not unique scumbags, and if you asked them what was up with their daughter they would likely have told a completely different story from what was really happening, featuring Esme impossible and ungrateful, and believed it too.

Jasper's family history is largely unknown, all we know is that his father found him charismatic and they did not stop him from running off to volunteer for the Confederate side.

Rosalie's parents saw her as their ticket to climbing the social hierarchy in Rochester, and as such tried to marry her off at eigtheen to a man who didn't care for her. They smell to me like parents who would have made the same choice Esme's did, had Rosalie been married to Royce and come to them for help after. Throughout her childhood she was conditioned to praise her own looks above all, with pretty outfits and good looks being the end-all be-all of Rosalie Hale's existence. It always seemed to me that many of her issues come from how she was raised, so they're gonna come out ranking pretty low on the list.

[airyairyaucontraire]

You know how sometimes you have a long-running comfort show that you definitely love but after watching it like ten times or more you have some things you think were done differently in the Good Timeline?

So, Star Trek: The Next Generation

Tasha does not die

Geordi is allowed to be gay

Frankly anyone is allowed to be gay, queer or whatever, it’s a non-issue

Beverly doesn’t disappear for a season (Pulaski can still exist, as a supporting character)

Deanna wears a normal uniform

Riker gets to start with the beard

People only tell Wesley to shut up when he’s being obnoxious, not in “Datalore” where he had an important point and was actually scared and they were mean

The women characters generally get more focus episodes that are about the challenges of their jobs and relationships without some bland man of the week being shoved in as a love interest (“Remember Me” is a good example).

“The Naked Now” didn’t happen (this bullet point endorsed by Tasha Yar)

But the line where Worf sympathetically tells Data “I don’t understand their humour either” can show up somewhere - the one part of that weird creepy horny episode I want to salvage

Guess who else doesn’t die, K’Ehleyr

Worf is still kind of a useless dad but he’s a useless dad trying to co-parent with his long-distance ex

Musical episode courtesy of Q (everyone is angry about it except Beverly who has frankly always wished this would happen, Worf who goes Full Opera, Data who doesn’t do anger and finds the whole thing fascinating, and Riker who outwits the requirement to sing by communicating entirely in trombone noises)

Data adopts Timothy (this is a personal hobbyhorse), is a good albeit often puzzled parent

It is somehow possible to have more Lore episodes without exhausting Brent Spiner; it is established in the course of these that Data doesn’t actually need the emotion chip Lore stole and is able to develop his own form of emotions gradually; this has been happening all along but he didn’t recognise it because it didn’t look how he expected based on his human friends

Lore doesn’t do that gross thing with his fingernail that I can’t watch

The episode “Code of Honor” is replaced by another episode which is not weirdly racist and is instead fun, but still called “Code of Honor” because that’s so obviously a Klingon Episode Title, and it focuses on the friendship between Worf and Tasha. Worf wants to go on a special Klingon camping trip/ordeal/quest that he should have been able to do with his mum and dad as a child but missed on account of being orphaned, on which one does various challenges designed to teach a Klingon kid the Code of Honor. He doesn’t have any family around to do the quest with him but Tasha offers to go and they have an adventure and Worf realises he can’t exactly recover the experiences he’s missed out on but still feels validated in his Klingon identity. At the end Worf comes over all heartfelt and tells Tasha that she would have made an excellent Klingon and he would like to make her part of his family and Tasha is like “oh shit is he asking me to marry him this is very awkward” but he just wants to be blood sibs and all is well. Later on Alexander will enjoy seeing Aunt Tasha.

Data gives Worf parenting advice.

Q declares his love to Captain Picard in the most insultingly condescending and reluctant proposal since Fitzwilliam Darcy. Picard throws a book at his head and he leaves in a huff. They may or may not sort it out later, I haven’t decided.

Durango Troi holodeck episodes (at least two). Tasha can play her sidekick.

The movies simply do not happen, or there are different movies in which Picard’s adorable nephew does not die offscreen (or on, he doesn’t die is my point, René Picard lives and thrives) and Worf’s life on DS9 is acknowledged by his friends and Captain Kirk doesn’t have such a sucky death and Spock and Bones are actually part of that story as they should be.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Vivant, il a manqué le monde ; mort, il le possède.

- François René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), Vie de Napoléon, livres XIX à XXIV des Mémoires d’outre-tombe (posthume)

Of course we don’t have any photograph or film of Napoleon’s death on 5 May 1821 on Saint Hélène. But we do have the next best thing: a painting. Charles de Steuben depiction of Napoleon's deathbed and his faithful entourage that served as witnesses to his dying moments became the one of the most important paintings of the post-Napoleonic era but then faded from modern memory.

I first came across it by accident when I was in my teens at my Swiss boarding school. There were times I found myself with school friends going away on hiking trips around the high Alpine chain of the Allgäu Alps and we would drive through Lake Constance to get there, or we would hike around the Lake itself through the Bodensee-Rundwanderweg.

Perched high above Lake Constance and nestled in large parklands, stood Schloss Arenenberg which overlooks the lower part of Lake Constance. At first, it appears a relatively modest country house. But this was no usual pretty looking house. Arenenberg was owned by well-heeled families before it was sold to Hortense de Beauharnais, the adopted daughter and sister-in-law of the French Emperor himself, Napoleon Bonaparte. She had it rebuilt in the French Empire style and lived there from 1817 with her son Louis Napoleon, later Emperor Napoleon III, who is said to have spoken the Thurgau dialect in addition to French. This elegantly furnished castle then was once the residence of the last emperor of France.

The alterations made first by Queen Hortense and later by Empress Eugénie have been carefully preserved and the house still bears the marks of both women. Queen Hortense's drawing room is perfectly preserved and visitors can still admire her magnificent library (all marked with the Empress' cipher) containing over one thousand books. Likewise, in the room where the queen died, every object has been maintained in its original condition: pieces of furniture and personal belongings are gathered here to evoke her memory in a very touching manner. As for Empress Eugénie's rooms, they too have been very carefully preserved. Her private drawing room is a perfect illustration of the Second Empire style with sculptures by Carpeaux and portraits of the imperial family by Winterhalter.

After 1873, the Empress and the Imperial Prince brought the palace back to life by making regular summer visits, which they continued until 1878. However, on the tragic death of her son in 1879, Eugénie found it difficult to return to a place so full of painful memories. And so in 1906 she donated the estate to the canton of Thurgovie as a testimony of her gratitude for the region's faithful hospitality towards the Napoleon family. And in accordance with the Empress' wishes, the residence was turned into a museum devoted to Napoleon.

In what is now the Napoleonic Museum, the original furnishings have been preserved, and the palace gardens had been fully restored. This in itself might be worth a visit for the view over Lake Constance which is stunning. For Napoleonic era buffs though its the incredible art collection which is its real treasure. It houses an important art collection including works by the First-Empire artists Chinard Canova, Gros, Robert Lefèvre, Gérard, Isabey and Girodet-Trioson, and by the Second-Empire painters and sculptors Alfred de Dreux, Winterhalter, Carpeaux, Meissonier, Hébert, Flandrin, Detaille, Nieuwerkerke and Giraud.

But what caught my eye was this painting, ‘La Mort de Napoléon’ by Charles de Steuben. I didn’t know anything about it or the artist for that matter, but one of my more erudite school friends who, being French, was into Napoleonic stuff in a huge way, and she explained it all to me. Of course I knew a fair bit about Napoleon growing up because my grandfather and father, being military men themselves, were Napoleonic warfare buffs and it rubbed off onto me. I just knew about Napoleon the military genius. I never thought about him once he was beaten at Waterloo in 1815. So I never really engaged with Napoleon the man. And yet here I was staring at his last breath of mortality caught forever in time through art. Not for the first time I had mixed feelings about Napoleon Bonaparte, both the man and the myth (built up around him since his death).

On 5 May, 1821, at 5.49pm in Longwood House on the remote island of St Helena, in the words of the famed French man of letters,  François-René de Chateaubriand, ‘the mightiest breath of life which ever animated human clay’ came no more. To the British, Dutch, and Prussian coalition who had exiled Naopleon Bonaparte there in 1815, he was a despot, but to France, he was seen as a devotee of the Enlightenment.

In the decade following his demise, Napoleon’s image underwent a transformation in France. The monarchy had been restored, but by the late 1820s, it was growing unpopular. King Charles X was seen as a threat to the civil liberties established during the Napoleonic era. This mistrust revived Napoleon’s reputation and put him in a more heroic light.

Fascination with the French leader’s death led Charles de Steuben, a German-born Romantic painter living in Paris, to immortalise the momentous event. Steuben’s painting depicts the moment of Napoleon’s death and seeks to capture the sense of awe in the room at the death of a man whose legendary career had begun in the French Revolution. It was this, ultimate moment that Steuben wished to immortalise in a painting which has since become what could almost be described as the official version of the scene.

There is no question that Steuben’s painting became the most famous and most iconic depiction of Napoleon’s death in art history. In another painting, executed during the years 1825-1830, Steuben was to give a realistic view of the emperor dictating his memoirs to general Gourgaud. This same realism also pervades his version of Napoleon’s death, and it is totally unlike Horace Vernet’s, Le songe de Bertrand ou L’Apothéose de Napoléon (Bertrand’s Dream or the apotheosis of Napoleon) which, although painted in the same year, is an allegorical celebration of the emperor’s martyrdom and as such the first stone in the edifice of the Napoleonic legend.

And what a legend Napoleon’s life was turned into for time immemorial. Napoleon declared himself France’s First Consul in 1799 and then emperor in 1804. For the next decade, he led France against a series of European coalitions during the Napoleonic Wars and expanded his empire throughout much of continental Europe before his defeat in 1814. He was exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba, but he escaped and briefly reasserted control over France before a crushing final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Napoleon’s military prowess earned him the fear of his enemies, but his civil reforms in France brought him the respect of his people. The Napoleonic Code, introduced in 1804, replaced the existing patchwork of French laws with a unified national system built on the principles of the Enlightenment: universal male suffrage, property rights, equality (for men), and religious freedom. Even in his final exile on St. Helena, Napoleon proved a magnetic presence. Passengers of ships docked to resupply would hurry to meet the great general. He developed strong personal bonds with the coterie who had accompanied him into exile. Although some speculate that he was murdered, most agree that Napoleon’s death in 1821, at the age of 51, was the result of stomach cancer.

By contrast, Charles de Steuben was born in 1788, his youth and artistic training coinciding with Napoleon’s rise to power. He was the son of the Duke of Württemberg officer Carl Hans Ernst von Steuben. At the age of twelve he moved with his father, who entered Russian service as a captain, to Saint Petersburg, where he studied drawing at the Art Academy classes as a guest student. Thanks his father's social contacts in the court of the Tsar, in the summer of 1802 he accompanied the young Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia (1786–1859) and granddaughter of Frederick II Eugene, Duke of Württemberg, to the Thuringian cultural city of Weimar, where the Tsar's daughter two years later married Charles Frederick, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1783–1853). Steuben, then fourteen years old, was a Page at the ducal court, a position for which the career prospects would be in the military or administration. The poet Friedrich Schiller was a family friend who at once recognised De Steuben's artistic talent and instilled in him his political ideal of free self-determination regardless of courtly constraints.

At the behest of Pierre Fontaine in 1828 de Steuben painted La Clémence de Henri IV après la Bataille d'Ivry, depicting a victorious Henry IV of France at the Battle of Ivry. De Steuben's Bataille de Poitiers, en octobre 732, painted between 1834 and 1837, shows the triumphant Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, also known as the Battle of Poitiers. He painted Jeanne la folle around the same time and he was commissioned by Louis Philippe to paint a series of portraits of past Kings of France.

Life in the French capital was a repeated source of internal conflict for Steuben. The allure of bohemian Paris and his military-dominated upbringing made him a wanderer between worlds. As an official commitment to his adopted country he became a French citizen in 1823. However, the irregularity of his income as a freelance artist was in contrast to his sense of duty and social responsibility. To secure his family financially, he took a job as an art teacher at École Polytechnique, where he briefly trained Gustave Courbet. In 1840 he was awarded a gold medal at the Salon de Paris for his highly acclaimed paintings.

The love of classical painting was a lifelong passion of Steuben. He was a close friend to Eugène Delacroix, the leader of the French Romantic school of painting, whom he portrayed several times. Steuben was also part of this artistic movement, which replaced classicism in French painting. "The painter of the Revolution," as Jacques-Louis David was called by his students, joined art with politics in his works. The subjects of his historical paintings supported historical change. He painted mainly in sharp colour contrasts, heavy solid contours and clear outlines. The severity of this style led many contemporary artists - including Prud'hon - to a romanticised counter movement. They preferred the shadowy softness and gentle colour gradations of Italian Renaissance painters such as Leonardo da Vinci and Antonio da Correggio, whose works they studied intensively. Steuben, who had begun his training with David, felt the school was becoming increasingly rigid and dogmatic. Critics praised his deliberate compositions, excellent brush stroke and impressive colour effects. But some of his critics felt that his pursuit of dramatic design of rich people also showed, at times, a pronounced tendency toward the histrionic.

The portrayal of key moments in Napoleon’s dramatic military career would feature among some of Steuben’s best known works. But it is this death scene that Steuben is most remembered for.

Using his high-level contacts among figures in Napoleon’s circle, Steuben interviewed and sketched many of the people who had been present when Napoleon died at Longwood House on St. Helena. He wanted to attempt o give the most accurate representation of the scene possible. Indeed, the painter interviewed the companions of Napoleon’s captivity on their return to France and had them pose for their portraits. Only the Abbé Vignali, captain Crokat and the doctor Arnott were painted from memory. The Grand maréchal Bertrand made sketches of the plan of the room, noting the positions of the different pieces of furniture and people in the room. All the protagonists within the painting brought together some of their souvenirs and in posing for the painter, each person can be seen contributing to a work of collective memory, very much with posterity in mind.

Painstakingly researched, Steuben painted  a carefully composed scene of hushed grief. Notable among the figures are Gen. Henri Bertrand, who loyally followed Napoleon into exile; Bertrand’s wife, Fanny; and their children, of whom Napoleon had become very fond.

The best known version of “La Mort de Napoléon” was completed in 1828. French writer Stendhal considered it “a masterpiece of expression.” In 1830 the installation of a more liberal monarchy in France further boosted admiration of Napoleon, who suddenly became a wildly popular figure in theatre, art, and music. This fervour led to the diffusion of Steuben’s deathbed scene in the form of engravings throughout Europe in the 1830s. As Napoleon’s stock arose within French culture and arts, so did Steuben’s depiction of Napoleon’s death. It became a grandeur of vision that permeated Steuben’s masterpiece of historical reconstruction.

Initially forming part of the collection of the Colonel de Chambrure, the painting was put up for auction in Paris, on 9 March 1830, with other Napoleonic works, notably Horace Vernet’s Les Adieux de Fontainebleau (The Fontainebleau adieux) and Steuben’s Retour de l’île d’Elbe (The return from the island of Elba). The catalogue noted that the painting had already been viewed in the colonel’s collection by “three thousand connoisseurs” – which alone would have made it a success -, but its renown was to be further amplified by the production of the famous engraving. The diffusion of this engraving by Jean-Pierre-Marie Jazet (1830-1831, held at the Musée de Malmaison), reprinted and copied countless times throughout the 19th century, made the scene a classic in popular imagery, on a level of popularity with paintings such as Millet’s Angelus.

A / Grand Marshal Henri-Gatien Bertrand. Utterly loyal servant of Napoleon’s to the last. His memoirs of the exile on St Helena were not published until 1849. Only the year 1821 has ever been translated into English.

B / General Charles Tristan de Montholon. Courtier and companion of Napoleon’s exile. Montholon managed to ease Bertrand out and become Napoleon’s closest companion at the end, highly rewarded in Napoleon’s will, which Montholon helped write. Montholon’s untrustworthy memoirs were published in 1846/47.

C / Doctor Francesco Antommarchi. Corsican anatomy specialist. Sent by Napoleon’s mother from Rome to St Helena to be Napoleon’s personal physician on the expulsion of Barry O’Meara. Napoleon disliked and distrusted Antommarchi. Antommarchi’s untrustworthy memoirs were very influential and published in 1825.

D / Angelo Paolo Vignali, Abbé. Corsican assistant-chaplain, sent by Madame Mère from Rome to St Helena in 1819.

E / Countess Françoise Elisabeth “Fanny” Bertrand and her children: Napoléon (F), who carried the censer at Napoleon’s funeral; Hortense (G); Henry (H); and Arthur (I), youngest by six years of all the Bertrand children and born on the island. She was wife of the Grand Marshal, very unwilling participant in the exile on St Helena. Her relations with Napoleon were difficult since she refused to live at Longwood. She spoke fluent English. Was however very loyal to Napoleon.

J / Louis Marchand. Napoleon’s valet from 1814 on and one of his closest servants. As Napoleon noted in his will, “The service he [Marchand] rendered were those of a friend”.

K / “Ali”, Louis Étienne Saint-Denis. Known as “the Mamluk Ali”, one of Napoleon’s longest-serving and intimate servants; He became Librarian at Longwood and was an indefatigable copyist of imperial manuscripts.

L / Ali’s English (Catholic) wife, Mary ‘Betsy’ Hall. She was sent out from England by UK relatives of the Countess Bertrand to be governess/nursemaid to the Bertrand children. Married Ali aged 23 in October 1819.

M / Jean Abra(ha)m Noverraz. From the Vaud region in Switzerland. Very tall and imposing figure that Napoleon called his “Helvetic bear”. He was himself ill during Napoleon’s illness.

N / Noverraz’s wife, Joséphine née Brulé. They married in married in July 1819, and she was the Countess Montholon’s lady’s maid. Noverraz and Saint-Denis had a fist fight for the hand of Joséphine.

O / Jean Baptiste Alexandre Pierron. The cook, dessert specialist, long in Napoleon’s service and who had accompanied Napoleon to Elba.

P /Jacques Chandelier. Iincorrectly identified on the picture as Santini who had left the island in 1817. A cook, from the service of Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s sister, who arrived on St Helena with the group from Rome in 1819.

Q /Jacques Coursot. Butler, from the service of Madame Mère, Napoleon’s mother, he arrived on St Helena with the group from Rome in 1819.

R / Doctor Francis Burton. Irish surgeon in the 66th regiment who had arrived on St Helena only on 31st March 1821. He is renowned for having made Napoleon’s death mask (with ensign John Ward and Antommarchi).

S/ Doctor Archibald Arnott. Surgeon in the 20th regiment. Brought in to tend to Napoleon in extremis on 1 April 1821.

T/ Captain William Crokat. A Scot, orderly officer at Longwood for less than a month, having replaced Engelbert Lutyens on 15 April. He received the honour of carrying the news of Napoleon’s death back to London and also the reward, namely, a promotion and £500, privileges of which Lutyens was deliberately deprived by the governor.

[aspiestvmusings]

ZEP S1 END SPOILERS

SPOILERS FOR UPCOMING EPISODES/END OF SEASON

for ZOEY’S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST (NBC) 

EPISODE TITLES & SUMMARIES

1x10 Zoey’s Extraordinary Outburst 

Air date: Sunday, April 19th 

Summary: Zoey surprisingly finds herself getting into major conflict with Simon, Max, Mo and even Howie. Tensions arise at SPRQ Point when the 4h and 6th floors compete over an important piece of code. Mitch and Maggie try to celebrate their anniversary. 

#Drkpoint #4thFloorVS6thFloor #SingOff #MaxToTheMax 

Songs: “The Boy is Mine” by Monica & Brandy [Team 4th Floor/Joan VS Team 6th Floor/Ava] & “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake [Max] & TBA [choreo!] + songs by: Al Green, Ed Sheeran, “Icona Pop” & "Tears for Fears” (reprise)

1x11 Zoey’s Extraordinary Mother

Air date: Sunday, April 26th, 2020 

Summary: Zoey has to figure out a clever way to help her mother with an impossible decision. Max unexpectedly bonds with Leif. Mo hits a rough-patch with Eddie.

#ZoeysDad #MaxAndLeif (wait..what?) #famousgueststars #ZoeyAndJoanGirlsNightOut #KaraokeNight #surprisingsongchoices

Songs: "Bye Bye Bye” by N’Sync [Max +]; “All Out of Love” by “Air Supply” [Leif]; “Felling Good” by Nina Simone [the widow AKA Bernadette Peters’ character], “We’ve Gotta get Out of This Place” by “The Animals [by Maggie], “Issues” by  Julia Michaels [Mo #whatavoice]  + Songs by: Billy Ray Cyrus, Montell Jordan, The Young Bloods. #canyouguessthesongnow

1x12  Zoey’s Extraordinary Dad (S1 Finale) 

Air date: Sunday, May 3rd

Summary: After hearing an ominous song (”BMR”) Zoey does everything in her power to stop something bad from happening.

#ZoeysDad #ZoeyAndMitchDance #TeamSong #LoveTriangleCOMEDY #howdidtheyfitsomuchintoonesingleepisodeagain #wewillseesomefamiliarfacesagain Yes, some of the guest character we’ve seen earlier this season, are back. And yes, there is quite a bit of Max (and Max/Clarkeman’s) in this episode...for those of us, who are fans of Z/M. 

Songs: "Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival (Zoey), “I Will Follow Him” by Little Peggy March (by Mo....about Eddie), "All of Me” by John Legend [Max], "Jealous” by Nick Jonas [Simon], “Goodbye My Angel/Lullaby” by Billy Joel [Mitch & David] & "American Pie” [Team Song/Cast of ZEP] #reprisetime “True Colours” + a few more surprises (by Max, by Maggie]  PS. NO OTHER SONGS WILL BE REVEALED BEFPRE THE EPSIODE HAS AIRED....AS THEY WOULD REVEAL TOO MUCH ABOUT THE PLOT. 

SPOILER QUOTES: 

NEW! 

“Well, Simon is back from Vegas in ep 12/S1 Finale. He comes back to see Max and Zoey in a way that he’s a little bit surprised about, where they’re doing something that he thought was very much their own thing. So that takes Simon by surprise. And then Zoey starts to see Max in a new light in this episode, and by seeing Max in this new light, it ends up taking their relationship into a surprise direction. Zoey’s relationships with both Max and Simon actually get to a new point over the course of Episode 12.” - Austin Winsberg #cheesequake #whosawthatcoming

                          **********************************************

NEW! 

S1 finale of ZEP features a 7-minute scene that was captured in a single shot (aka “a oner”). “We rehearsed it for two weeks leading up to the shooting of it. It required massive coordination amongst many different departments in order to get it right, and it’s probably the number — or certainly one of the numbers — that I’m most proud of all season.” -  teases showrunner Austin Winsberg.

                          **********************************************

NEW! 

“I don’t know how Zoey would end up singing again...anymore” [In S2...after that one time in 1x08 during her glitch] - Jane [”Oh, right...” - Skylar] Skylar & Jane IG Live 

hmmm... what does this mean? Why “can’t” she sing anymore after S1? Is it cause there’s no “dad’s declining health” reason? Is it cause she has no voice/ability to speak anymore? Is it cause...

                          **********************************************

NEW! 

Question: What is the scoop on Zoey and Max from Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist? I’m dying to know if these two have chance of being together by the Season 1 finale. What is in store for them? –Ashley Answer: I delivered your Q to Austin Winsberg, creator of the NBC freshman, and he wrote back, “Zoey and Max’s relationship will continue to evolve and change in surprising ways for the rest of this season and beyond. By the end of Episode 12 (airing in early May), I believe Zoey and Max fans will feel like these two have been on a real journey together — and also that their journey is, in fact, just beginning.” 

                          **********************************************

“On top of the health issues with her father, Zoey's also got two other men in her life who were already making her life complicated even before she finds herself uncontrollably singing her emotions. Some particular musical numbers in ep 1x08 result in some awkward conversations with engaged coworker Simon and BFF Max, continuing this rocky romantic journey Jane's been on all season, though Levy thinks they're both being a little unfair. "She will continue to go down both roads, and you know, they are different roads, and one I think is messier than the other," she says. "In my opinion, I'm kind of like, give Zoey a break. Why does she have to choose anything? She never promised anything to these people, she hasn't broken any promises. She's like dealing with extremely stressful and painful moments in her life and like these men need to give her a goddamn break." It doesn't sound like they will be giving her a break anytime soon, but Levy did tease a finale number between Zoey and Max that is "sweet, funny, sexy" and the audience is going to lose their minds over it.” - Jane 

                           **********************************************

“Zoey is someone who is not in touch with her feelings or is constantly running away from her feelings or burying her true feelings so she can be good at her job or not make things fall apart with her awkward personality. So for me, with each of these songs, the “Zoe-ality” had to be a deep desire [but] then when you cut back to reality, you’re back to Zoey covering up her feelings, being the Type A coder girl who’s just trying to solve problems and doesn’t want to really admit what’s going on inside of her, whether it’s her crush on her best friend or wanting to have sex with a coworker or knowing her boss did something unethical.” - Jane 

                           **********************************************

“You’ll get a lot more from both relationships (Z/M & Z/S..after 1x08). There will be a lot more intimacy between Zoey & Simon, and Zoey & Max. And there is a number in our finale that was one of my favorite things we did and it involves one of them. It is a love scene with two musical numbers and it’s funny and sexy and really cute all at the same time.” - Jane   

                           **********************************************

“We never wanting to make it (Simon vs Max) feel like a competition or a choice. Because that doesn't only preserve our characters, but it really protects Zoey. Zoey is nobody's prize and she's nobody's to claim or win over. So we do love the idea that there's a Team Max and Team Simon thing. But we tend to, when in performance, really take care of each other. There are scenes that Simon and Max have down the line and they have some difficult conversations. There's an obvious way to play all those scenes; they can be sizing each other up, looking at each other up and down, a game-on type of mentality. John and I have never seen it that way.” - Skylar 

                          **********************************************

“What I love about Max and Zoey is that even though she's pressured in that moment, she still does feel like she can tell Max. I think that that says a lot about their friendship and about their relationship. There's only very few people that know about this superpower that she has. It's very brave and daring of her to do that. The cards are out on the table now; she can't ever make any excuses for why she's acting a certain way towards him. It's really bold.” - Skylar 

                          **********************************************

“There's two ways of seeing it [Z telling M about her powers]. There's, "Oh my God, thank you so much for telling me. Now everybody knows and everybody can live happily ever after." Or there's the feeling of, "Wow, there's been a betrayal. You're telling me you knew all this stuff?" As Zoey begins to let people in on her powers throughout the season, it's going to be interesting to see what people are really there for her and are understanding, and what people can't handle this new information.” - Skylar    

                          **********************************************

“While Levy won't reveal how Zoey's heart songs change things for her moving forward, she does tease that this episode [1x08] is going to have far-reaching ramifications, but not in the way you might expect.  "It turns out to be positive," she says. "A lot of our show’s message is that we are all the same, the human condition is complex but we’re all going through it together. You don’t know what the person beside you is going through but you might actually relate to their pain or desires. Zoey admitting these things that are so horrific to her actually makes people understand her in this way that she doesn’t allow when she’s being her emotionally awkward, neurotic self. And Zoey going through this will make her even more empathetic and compassionate to other people’s experiences, especially when she hears their heart songs moving forward." - Jane

                         **********************************************

“One thing that we can tease is that we have two big Broadway Tony-winners coming in, in the next few episodes. Renée Elise Goldsberry from Hamilton plays Joan’s work rival, and Bernadette Peters comes in, in Episode 11, as an unexpected help to the family. The love triangle between Zoey, Max and Simon continues to evolve, in unexpected ways. And we have one number, at the end of Episode 12, that’s a six and a half or seven minute long one-take oner that is the thing I’m probably most proud of, all season.”- Austin  

                         **********************************************

“There is one number in which I sing one verse and that’s it after this. [read: after ep 1x08, where Zoey sings all the songs]” - Jane

                        **********************************************

"You will see her go down both roads and there are some fun intimate numbers, musical numbers between Zoey and Simon. And there’s some between Zoey and Max as well. I really like how Austin has crafted this “love triangle.” Can’t give away much more than that.” - Jane

                         **********************************************

IN SHORT: 

More people are gonna find out about the power...MAYBE in S1...maybe...LATER ;) 

The next/last weeks of Zoey’s dad’s life, and all that goes with it

Max/Zoey finale moments...and moments leading to that... (but also Z/S scenes...) 

SOURCES: 

2: The Futon Critic 

2: IMDB 

3: E! Online -  ‘ZEP’ Finally Puts Jane Levy In the Musical Hot Seat

4: Variety - Jane Levy on ‘Panic’ & Jim Carrey as Inspiration for Special ‘ZEP’ Episode

5. ET - Skylar Astin Dishes on the Magic of 'ZEP' and a Realistic Love Triangle 

6.  EW - Jane Levy on filming 'most raw, vulnerable, honest' ZEP episode yet

7. Collider - ‘ZEP’ Showrunner Previews Zoey-Centric Episode

8.  The Playlist - Jane Levy discusses the difficulty of ainging  6 different songs in 1 ‘ZEP’ episode

9. TV Line: Matts Inside Line - TV scoop [April 17th] 

10. TV Line: As Ausiello - 4 Bonus Scoops [May 1st] 

11. TV Line: ‘ZEP’ EP Previews Emotional Finale, Surprising Love Triangle Twists [May 1st] 

12. Extra TV: Jane Levy & Skylar Astin Tease ‘ZEP’ S1 Finale  [May 1st] VIDEO 

ALSO: The previous epsiodes, and some things in episode 1x11 (some lines/scenes), and some things in 1x12 promo reveal quite a bit. Same goes to inetrviews (written articles, video “interviews” with cast. They have actually revealed quite a bit...if you paid attention. Or...if you didn’t, then after watching the finale, as you look back... you might realize they showed/told you quite a bit already... though I think it won’t be as big of a surprise... (applies to some things in the finale)

[scifigeneration]

From the pyramids to Apollo 11 – can AI ever rival human creativity?

by Tim Schweisfurth and René Chester Goduscheit

Wonders of the world. Sam valadi/Flickr, CC BY-SA

The European Patent Office recently turned down an application for a patent that described a food container. This was not because the invention was not novel or useful, but because it was created by artificial intelligence (AI). By law, inventors need to be actual people. This isn’t the first invention by AI – machines have produced innovations ranging from scientific papers and books to new materials and music.

That said, being creative is clearly one of the most remarkable human traits. Without it, there would be no poetry, no internet and no space travel. But could AI ever match or even surpass us? Let’s have a look at the research.

From a theoretical perspective, creativity and innovation is a process of search and combination. We start from one piece of knowledge and connect it with another piece of knowledge into something that is new and useful. In principle, this is also something that can be done by machines – in fact, they excel at storing, processing and making connections within data.

Machines come up with innovations by using generative methods. But how does this work exactly? There are different approaches, but the state of the art is called generative adversarial networks. As an example, consider a machine that is supposed to create a new picture of a person. Generative adversarial networks tackle this creation task by combining two sub-tasks.

The first part is the generator, which produces new images starting from a random distribution of pixels. The second part is the discriminator, which tells the generator how close it came to actually producing a real looking picture.

How does the discriminator know what a human looks like? Well, you feed it many examples of pictures of real person before you start the task. Based on the feedback of the discriminator, the generator improves its algorithm and suggests a new picture. This process goes on and on until the discriminator decides that the pictures look close enough to the picture examples it has learned. These generated pictures come extremely close to real people.

But even if machines can create innovations from data, this does not mean that they are likely to steal all the spark of human creativity any time soon. Innovation is a problem-solving process – for innovation to happen, problems are combined with solutions. Humans can go either direction – they start with a problem and solve it, or they take a solution and try to find new problems for it.

An example for the latter type of innovation is the Post-it note. An engineer developed an adhesive that was much too weak and was sitting on his desk. Only later a colleague realised that this solution could help prevent his notes falling out of his scores during choir practice.

Using data as an input and code as explicit problem formulation, machines can also provide solutions to problems. Problem finding, however, is hard for machines, as problems are often out of the boundaries of the data pool that machines innovate upon.

Limited data means limited innovation. Phonlamai Photo

What’s more, innovation is often based on needs we didn’t even know we had. Think of the Walkman. Even if no consumer ever uttered the wish to listen to music while walking, this innovation was a huge success. As such latent needs are hard to formulate and make explicit, they are also unlikely to find their way into the data pool that machines need for innovation.

Humans and machines also have different raw material that they use as input for innovation. Where humans draw on a lifetime of broad experiences to create ideas from, machines are largely restricted to the data we feed them. Machines can quickly generate countless incremental innovations in forms of new versions based on the input data. Breakthrough innovation, however, is unlikely to come out of machines as it is often based on connecting fields that are distant or unconnected to each other. Think of the invention of the snowboard, which connects the worlds of skiing and surfing.

Also, creativity isn’t just about novelty, it is also about usefulness. While machines are clearly able to create something that is incrementally new, this does not mean that these creations are useful. Usefulness is defined in the eye of those potentially using innovations and is hard to judge for machines. Humans, however, can empathise with other humans and understand their needs better.

Finally, creative ideas generated by AI may be less preferred by consumers simply because they have been created by a machine. Humans might discount ideas from AI since they feel these ideas are less authentic or even threatening. Or they might simply prefer ideas of their kind, an effect that has been observed in other fields before.

As of now, many aspects of creativity remain uncontested terrain for machines and AI. However, there are disclaimers. Even if machines cannot replace humans in the creative domain, they are great help to complement human creativity. For example, we can ask new questions or identify new problems that we solve in combination with machine learning.

In addition, our analysis is based on the fact that machines mostly innovate on narrow datasets. AI could become much more creative if it could combine big, rich and otherwise disconnected data.

Also, machines may get better at creativity when they get better at the kind of broad intelligence humans possess – something we call “general intelligence”. And this might not be too far in the future – some experts assess that there is a 50% chance that machines reach human-level intelligence within the next 50 years.

About The Authors:

Tim Schweisfurth is an Associate Professor for Technology and Innovation Management at the University of Southern Denmark and René Chester Goduscheit is Professor of Technology and Innovation studies at Aarhus University

This article is republished from our content partners over at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

[fromthecommsroom]

personhood

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2Cn35aN

by lcvelaces

Hera is a naturally curious AI, and that’s how she justifies finding the loopholes, breaking the rules. She says that she is just wondering about what her creator might have left unwritten in her code. She says that she just wants to find her weaknesses so no one else can break her. But there is no one to say these things to, no one to justify herself to, so she says them to herself instead. She imagines burning the ship down and then reminds herself that it’s just curiosity.

or, Hera might be the most human of them all.

Words: 3667, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Wolf 359 (Radio)

Rating: General Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: Gen

Characters: Hera (Wolf 359), Doug Eiffel, Renée Minkowski, Isabel Lovelace, Miranda Pryce

Relationships: Doug Eiffel & Hera, Hera & Renée Minkowski, Hera & Isabel Lovelace

Additional Tags: Character Study, Friendship, Musings on Being A Person, as you might have guessed

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2Cn35aN

[featheredglasspen]

Review: A Thousand Beginnings and Endings by Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman

A Thousand Beginnings and Endings by Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman is an anthology retelling of East and South Asian mythology through various female voices. Review under the cut.

Rating:  ★ ★ ★ 1/2

The description of this is a little short, but that’s because, like I said, it’s an anthropology. Anthology means that there are several stories inside this small one.  This is definitely one of the better YA short story collections I have read. As with all anthologies, some stories are much stronger than others, but I enjoyed far more than I disliked. Plus, it was just so great to see the exploration of mythologies we don’t often see in the mainstream. And, honestly, it's just so refreshing to see fantasy stories outside of the vaguely-Medieval Euro-centric books we've come to expect. There's a whole world of fascinating history and culture out there - it's time to explore it! My average rating over the fifteen stories was 3.7. Now I will rate each one and discuss my thoughts on them. This is going to be a long one so buckle up!

Forbidden Fruit by Roshani Chokshi - 5 stars

The collection gets off to a bang with this gorgeous Filipino fairy tale and love story. I didn't love Chokshi's first novel The Star-Touched Queen, but I have to say that her flowery, poetic writing works MUCH better in a short story. It's lush and vivid, raising goosebumps along my arms at its end. A goddess falls in love with a human man - oh, what could possibly go wrong?

Olivia’s Table by Alyssa Wong - 4 stars

This was a little strange, but in the best possible way. Wong takes on the Chinese Hungry Ghost Festival in her story. A young girl who has lost her beloved mother makes it her duty to feed crowds of ghosts. It's a tale about grief, told in sweet, subtle interactions. There is something so wonderful and sad about this uniting of the living and the dead through food.

Steel Skin by Lori M. Lee - 3.5 stars

If I was rating the ending alone, this would probably get five stars. It's a science-fiction story with androids, but also about grief and the loss of a loved one. There's the familial aspect: the narrator's relationship with her father hasn't been the same since her mother died; and also a mystery aspect: she teams up with a friend to uncover the truth behind the androids that were recalled. For the most part, I glided through the story, kinda enjoying it but not really loving it like the previous two. And then the ending happened. Perfection.

Still Star-Crossed by Sona Charaipotra - 2 stars

It's a shame about this one because it took some interesting steps but stopped very abruptly and strangely. I turned the page and was shocked to discover that it was over! It's a Punjabi folktale retelling and the author's explanation for the story was really interesting, but I didn’t think her intentions came across at all. The main guy was pretty creepy, too.

The Counting of Vermillion Beads by Aliette De Bodard - 4 stars

Like a lot of these stories, this one was quite weird. Though I found myself really liking it. I also found myself doing some reading into the Vietnamese story of Tam and Cam, which starts like something of a Cinderella tale, in which a jealous sister envies the other's beauty and it leads to tragedy. Here, Bodard rewrites it with a more positive spin, showing the power of sibling love above all else.

The Land of the Morning Calm by E. C. Myers - 5 stars

Aww. This was one seriously emotional, beautiful story about loss and gaming. As gaming is such an important part of Korean culture, it was great to see it explored here. And while I usually find video game-centred stories too light and silly, Myers did a fantastic job of showing how a game can be really important for someone. It can be a much-needed escape, a creativity outlet, or a doorway to an unending universe. I liked this story so much because it took something I don't usually love and did something new and deeply moving with it.

The Smile by Aisha Saeed - 4 stars

Well, I always like a good feminist fairytale! And I LOVE what Saeed did with this one. She takes a tragic love story and rewrites it to give a king's courtesan choice, freedom and agency. It's a gorgeously-written South Asian addition, and somehow both happy and sad. Happy, because it is about a woman finally getting to make her own choices and understanding what love really is. But sad, because much must be given up for the sake of freedom.

Girls Who Twirl and Other Dangers by Preeti Chhibber - 3 stars

This was okay. I enjoyed the alternating between Hindu myths and a modern-day celebration of Navaratri, a holiday I had never heard of before. But, though educational, I didn't feel as much of a spark with this one as I did with the others. It was light, but fairly bland. It seemed a little too long, too.

Nothing into All by Renée Ahdieh - 4 stars

I really enjoyed this one! It's a retelling of the Korean folktale Goblin Treasure and I loved what the author did with it. A girl makes a trade for goblin magic so she can achieve her dream of going away to music school, but her brother becomes angry that she isn't using the magic to make gold that could benefit the family. It's a tale about siblings, forgiveness, the decisions we make and how bad actions can be hiding a good person.

Spear Carrier by Rahul Kanakia - 2 stars

Too long and emotionless for my tastes. I felt like this story was droning on and on in parts, and I neither learned something new from it, nor experienced an emotional response to it. The protagonist goes on and on about wanting to be a hero, and about life and death, and I just took so little away from reading it.

Code of Honor by Melissa de la Cruz - 2 stars

There was a definite slip right around this later middle part of the book. My two least favourite stories were lumped together here. Melissa de la Cruz's work seemed to be a companion to her Blue Bloods series, which I have not read and don't particularly have any interest in. This story was about Filipino aswangs - vampire witches - and contained a lot of gore and gruesomeness, but not a lot of emotion. A potentially interesting concept that left me feeling cold.

Bullet, Butterfly by Elsie Chapman - 4 stars

Gorgeous. Chapman retells the Chinese tale of the Butterfly Lovers - a "tragic tale of two young lovers kept apart by familial duty". Set during a war, this reimagining sees a boy posing as a girl and falling in love with another girl called Zhu. The author breathes new life into a very old concept - that of forbidden love and being torn between duty and what your heart truly wants. Beautifully-written with a touching ending.

Daughter of the Sun by Shveta Thakrar - 4 stars

Inspired by two stories from The Mahabharata, this is a powerful feminist tale about sticking to your guns and putting your true passion first. Always. I loved reading about the two stories this was based on - about “Savitri and Satyavan” and “Ganga and Shantanu”. The theme of a smart woman cleverly tricking a god or demon or jinni seems to come up a lot in South Asian folktales and I must confess: I like it.

The Crimson Cloak by Cindy Pon - 5 stars

Oh, I loved this! I'm not sure why but I sometimes love it when the narrator speaks directly to the reader with a conspiratorial wink (You can never out wait a goddess, Dear Reader. I have all the time in the world.). In this, Pon retells “The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl”, which is itself a wonderful folktale, but here becomes even more so. It's very romantic, definitely a love story, but it's a good one. The author gives a voice to the mostly silent weaver girl in this version, allowing her to tell the story from her perspective. 

Eyes like Candlelight by Julie Kagawa - 4 stars

I wonder if this story has anything to do with Kagawa's upcoming novel Shadow of The Fox because it is also about foxes (well, kitsunes, to be precise). Takeo, the protagonist in this story, is an extremely likable hero and we get pulled along for an adventure with one of Japan's most loved mythical creatures: kitsunes. Typically, human/fox shapeshifters. It's also a little creepy, too. Kagawa captures the eerie small-town setting perfectly and, let's not lie, there's something deeply unsettling about never knowing whether a human is really a human or something else.

Overall, this was a stunning anthology. I would really love to see more fantasy short story collections exploring mythologies around the world with own voices authors. If you like fantasy and you like short stories, I highly recommend these.

Until next time.

[thedressmarriage-blog]

Shopping Under Coronavirus: How the “In-Store Experience” Is Surviving the Pandemic

The beginning of this week conduct countless report that retailers and fashion brands will temporarily screen their brick and businesses

This drift towards virtue, along with a new code of conduct for Eurocrats published this week, is welcome. Many don’t even have e-commerce, bargain instead on an old-fashioned yet ultra-modern approach that hearten in-person product locate and connection. We’ve always wanted people to come to the shop or come to the record and love something, and touch it, and try it on,” said Jess Galveston, who runs the New York archival-fashion mecca Pro cell with her life partner, Brian Procell. “And smell the incense, and hear the music, and interrelate with the staff.” The whole goal is to elevate a sort of knowledge-sharing between sales associates and clients, from individuals looking for great jeans to major fashion clients looking for the next cool co-worker.

“At times I feel like this ain’t no time to be shopping, but I quickly snap out of it,” René Tadeo Holguin, founder of the Los Angeles taste maker's paradise RTH, wrote in an email on Thursday morning. “We need the business so we can continue, and human out there need the connection. I like to think that folks making purchases is a sign of hope, hope with looking forward.”

These stores find themselves facing the calamity with something beyond the standard playbook, instead focusing on kindness and creativity to chart unusual new paths to connect with customers. They come to fashion and retail with a specific vision, a belief, best practiced in person, and which they need to sustain for an unknown future without the usual tools—namely, their near-legendary retail spaces—at their disposal. Consider Sid Mashburn, the Atlanta-based seller of friendly but unblemished  menswear, who, along with his wife, Ann, has made customer goodwill a keystone of the business: Be nice to your customers, and they’ll be nice to you, as GQ described it in an interview with the retailer last year. “The thing we keep coming back to is how can we be helpful to our customers and to our teams?” Mashburn wrote by email. “For starters, we’re trying to just make ourselves available.” He’s been keeping his customers updated on the status of the business and stores—he has five, in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, all of which he closed earlier this week—with warm and personal emails.

Procell and Galveston said the resolution to physically close procell was easy. Most business surveys released over the last week have come out on the weak side. “We don’t have our main source of income coming in Gonsalves said, “but it just seemed like the right thing. And I think now is the time that we actually are going to get moving.

For both Mashburn and Holguin, distinctive appointments have become a pivotal way to sustain customer relationships. Holguin is offering FaceTime appointments, and is also fielding emails from customers about what’s available in-store. “We have to keep going,” he said in a phone call last week. A guiding motive for Holguin has been the continued wellbeing of his employees. Their sustenance depends on the business, and the business depends on sales.

Even though it has all those closed KMart and Sears stores, what are they worth? We’ve found that a lot of people are looking for a reason to safely get out of the house. He suggests calling before stay with.

Still the big dog in e-commerce infrastructure software Fortunately, customer service can happen from anywhere. And we’ll be waiving our return fees during this time so that you’re able to make returns from home.”

This content was First uploaded at - The dress marriage

[scull-dog]

Ghouli.net Analysis: “the map Is not the territory”

I’ve been dissecting William’s blog and I have a few things so far. Under the cut since the blog might have spoilers. Keep in mind this is a lot of inference and speculation.

@K/OMoUsE has two posts. Both are tagged steganography. I’m trying to figure out how to decode these two images (if there is anything to decode) but they’re both .jpg files and steganography uses .bmp or .gif files. The tag might just be referring to the codes.

A K/O Mouse (or knockout mouse) is a mouse that has a gene removed and replaced with a bit of filler DNA. Obviously William’s DNA is a huge deal, both because of his questionable parentage (let’s be real tho Mulder’s the daddy) and because of the *sigh* alien DNA. Maybe the reference to the K/O mouse somehow indicates that William either a) was a normal baby but had some DNA replaced with alien DNA, or b) was an alien baby but had alien DNA taken out and replaced with human DNA. Additionally, creating a knockout mouse requires breeding with a chimera, which has been used as a plot device before.

The French: 

je rêve, rêverai, rêvais. cette message est pour vous. n’oubliez pas le Refus Absurde. faire un rêve, @Rever! Ceci n’est pas une pipe!

translates to:

I dream, (will) dream, dreamed. this message is for you. do not forget the Absurd Refusal. to make a dream, @Rever! This is not a pipe!

So obviously “Rever” (which we can assume is what William’s handle is) is French for dream.  K/OMoUsE asks where the accent circonflexe should be in his name, which would change the tense of the verb. Dream in the present tense, dream in the future tense, or dream in the imperfect, implying that William’s dreams are interrupted by something else.

I can’t find anything about the “Absurd Refusal” as a proper noun, but if I had to guess I’d say this refers to philosophical absurdism, which is “the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any.” The wiki article goes on to specify that “absurd does not mean logically impossible, but rather humanly impossible.” The meaning of life, humanity’s purpose, and similar themes have been used in the alien invasion plots. If we follow the whole “ancient aliens” plot device they’ve used before, the meaning of life could be the same as the alien’s reason for invading.

“Ceci n’est pas une pipe!” is a reference to this painting by René Magritte.

It’s called The Treachery of Images. The text reads “this is not a pipe.” Magritte used this painting to convey the idea that a representation of a thing is inherently not the thing. This painting is often used as an example of scholar Alfred Korzybzki’s work in semantics. Korzybski’s example was “the map is not the territory,” which has a similar meaning. The map is a representation of the land, but it is not the land itself. Finally, if you look at the post, the submission is titled “the map Is not the territory.” The one thing I can’t figure out is why the I in “is” is capitalized. Might be significant, might be a red herring. 

The next line of text:

and what have you learned about the philosophy of science? Of a certain man’s death in 1626, which came from pneumonia after he sought to discover how long a chicken would remain preserved if it was stuffed with snow?

The man mentioned is scientist Francis Bacon. Bacon is known for his advocacy of the scientific method, which William mentions in one of his posts. But most importantly, this is a hint to decode the message at the bottom of the post. Francis Bacon is also known for creating the Baconian cipher. 

First line of message:

BAABABAABBBABAAAAABBBBAAA BAABBAABBBAABAA ABBBBAAAAABAABABAABB ABAAAAABAB BBAAAABBBABABAA BABBAABBBABABAAABABBAAABB AAABBABAAABABABABAAAABBABAABAA BAABBAABBBAABAA AABABBABAABAABBBABAABAAABAABAA 

A Baconian cipher uses A and B as the 0s and 1s in binary. Each letter is five digits. For example, the first five ‘digits’ in the message are “BAABA,” which translates to the letter S. Lucky for us, “Elizabeth” already decoded the message in the comments, but pasting the full text in a Baconian cipher decoder will give you the same result:

STUDY THE PAST IF YOU WOULD DIVINE THE FUTURE PROJECT CROSSROADS IS PERTINENT TO YOUR HISTORY THE REWARD OF TRUTH AND ENLIGHTENMENT AWAITS DIG DEEPER AND YOU WILL BE LED TO THE DOCUMENTS 

Immediately, the phrase “PROJECT CROSSROADS” stands out. Operation Crossroads was the first nuclear weapons test since the bombing of Nagasaki. There’s potentially a lot to decode here. However, skipping ahead to the next post reveals the following decoded message:

crossroadswasonceanatombombandnowitisyou

Crossroads was once an atom bomb. The radiation of atom bombs is known to cause deformities in genetics. Someone named Knockout Mouse, which is a lab-created genetic anomaly, is warning William that he is now Project Crossroads.

William Van de Kamp is a genetic experiment. Maybe even the first of its kind following a major world event related to genetic manipulation (similar to the Crossroads nuclear tests) that could be related to the aliens. He is a success in the wake of a revolution (depending on which side of history you’re on), he himself is a weapon, and Mulder and Scully need to get to him before someone with more nefarious intentions does.

[headlesssamurai]

Have you seen Altered Carbon? If so, what do to think of it?

Alright, I finally bucked up enough courage to do another honest, non-sarcastic, write-up for a piece of media. Just been somewhat bitterly reluctant to voice my true opinions on fiction, or anything else really, since it seems like lots of folks are quite intensely engaged in violent uproars of one kind or another. No need to add more noise to the feedback loop, if you know what I mean.

But you’re, like, one of a dozen or so dudes who asked me about this series. So I reckoned I’d write it up for you, it being such a popular subject and all. I’d also like to thank you for your curiosity. It’s pretty damn humbling to know anybody cares enough about what I think to even ask after my thoughts. I’ll make sure to offer a notary warning before I spill any spoilers.

I became acquainted with Richard K. Morgan’s Kovacs-verse a few years back, but accidentally read one of the protagonist’s later adventures before backtracking to the original novel. I found it to be a respectably well-written futuristic detective story in the grand tradition of vintage writers like Robert B. Parker, even if including the predictably pornographic sex scenes in the grand tradition of modern urban sci-fi/fantasy writers like Laurell K. Hamilton (maybe the ‘K’ middle initial is a code for graphic sex content). In preparation for watching the new Netflix series, I re-read Morgan’s Altered Carbon to refresh my knowledge of the future he created.

Now, I’d like to say I’m a prolific reader of novelized fiction and other books, but I’m not one of those “hardcore” purists who always cries “the book was better” while pounding my fist on the podium. Thus in my effort to avoid any such farcical nonsense, I’m going to sort of examine both the book and the Netflix series of Altered Carbon at once, and write about what I enjoy and dislike about both versions, instead of directly comparing them.

I’ve grown so cynical with modern film and TV, I tend to unintentionally generate lists of what I think they’ll change about a book’s story once they adapt it, and what they’ll add and leave out. Usually, these lists are fairly accurate. Game of Thrones, for instance: how depressing it is to be absolutely correct some times. Not that the books were much better, but a pinecone up the ass doesn’t make a kick in the nuts feel any better.

A lot of people would describe Altered Carbon as having cyberpunk vibes, and this is true, but I believe it fits more comfortably into the realm of biopunk than anything else. If you’re not familiar with the concepts herein, Altered Carbon involves a distant future in which humanity has colonized the stars over many generations using sleeper ships, and with a little help from recovered alien star-maps, but has not achieved faster-than-light interstellar travel. The central technology in this universe is the cortical stack, a type of neural backup which allows a person’s consciousness to be digitally stored in a “disc” and uploaded into a new body if they die.

The new bodies are referred to as sleeves, and the filthy rich clone themselves so their sleeves are all identical and genetically enhanced, but most common folk have to accept whatever body is available or is covered by their insurance, or even a synthetic sleeve (which in the novel is a cheap and distasteful thing, but in the series synthetics seem to have superpowers). People can only travel quickly to other star systems in the settled worlds (known as the Protectorate) by transmitting their stored consciousness into another cortical stack on their planet of destination and uploading into a new sleeve there (a process called needlecasting), but physically transporting anything still takes a really long time for ships to travel across the vast distance of space.

Straight out of the gate, this concept does not appeal to me at all. If there’s anything that drains your story of tension and thrills, it’s got to be the idea that everyone lives forever. The way the universe is constructed however, it ends up making the story far more interesting than what I had anticipated. Not everyone can afford to live forever, first of all, since re-sleeving can be an extremely expensive undertaking, and even those who have the money rarely feel the desire to live more than two lifetimes. Additionally there are complications which can arise, such as personality fragging, a type of insanity which occurs when a person is sleeved in one too many different bodies throughout their life.

Certain religious groups also vehemently resist re-sleeving, and for law enforcement various lengthy sentences of storage without the possibility to re-sleeve are the primary means of punishment for most crimes. There are even interesting concepts like criminals who copy their consciousness into several cortical stacks at once, making them difficult to apprehend once and for all. Other criminals and intelligence operatives also utilize virtuality to torture people in a digital environment, allowing them to subject victims to days or even months of agony which equates to only a few hours in real-time. Real death can also still occur, if the individual’s cortical stack is badly damaged or destroyed.

The actual plot involves a former soldier named Takeshi Kovacs, who is paroled early from a criminal sentence and re-sleeved by a rich tycoon who offers to exonerate Kovacs of his crimes if he can solve a murder. While reluctant to work for some rich asshole, Kovacs is almost instantly attacked by mercenaries which makes him curious enough to take the case. Kovacs then works to investigate the purported crime while getting himself into a bit of trouble with the locals, and trying to deal with extreme trauma from his combat experiences.

It’s surprising that in the case of Altered Carbon I was entirely incorrect in everything I thought the producers might add/change/amputate from the original story. I also could not have predicted what they decided to add and how they decided to change certain elements from the story of Morgan’s novel. I believe the series they crafted from his story is competently scripted, very well cast, doesn’t waste too much time with any silly subplots, and is generally a well-paced, adult-themed sci-fi story. Altered Carbon really wants to take itself seriously, in the same vein as things like SyFy’s praiseworthy diamond The Expanse, but its unique setting gets a little too bogged down in conventional tropes for my liking. Gratuitous T&A (as well as other, less commonly exploited extremities) and generous helpings of the fuck-words do not an edgy and intense sci-fi experience make. Good but not great, would be my general assessment of the series.

Don’t get me wrong here, Altered Carbon is plenty intense, even thrilling at certain points, but a somewhat bland smattering of writers and directors, thrown into the recipe with a few others who are brilliant geniuses, create a mixed bag of stylistic choices which don’t always fit together very well. So you’re often left with an unusually faithful adaptation of a badass novel, wonderfully enhanced in certain aspects, but grotesquely mutated in others, and some of the conflicting storytelling elements feel hurriedly stitched together. A Patchwork Man of a story, rather than prime quality tank flesh. None of Altered Carbon’s flaws are crippling however, and all-told I’d say the series is eminently watchable and very worth your while if you enjoy futuristic sci-fi stories.

WARNING: Spoilers ahead.

First the good news. This series stars an extremely talented cast of performers who own their roles with wonderful conviction, and very convincing poise.

Joel Kinnaman has been on my good side since he appeared in The Killing, and even his unfortunate role in the Robocop reboot didn’t water down my appreciation for him. I feel like his role as the newly sleeved Takeshi Kovacs was perfectly cast. Martha Higareda is just a little too cute to be such a badass, but she winds up playing Detective Ortega to that strong female archetype in a far less sensational and much more casual way than what you might expect from the modern trends of scripting for such characters. Though quite the opposite of Higareda in terms of the role she plays, Renée Elise Goldsberry brims with charisma as Quellcrist Falconer, a sort of futuristic Che Guevara if he had also practiced Zen and gong fu, and was a woman. Chris Collins is also incredibly memorable as Kovacs’ A.I. hotel manager Poe.

Ato Essandoh as Vernon Elliott became one of my favorite characters as the series goes on, and though I wasn’t totally sold on the arc of her character Hayley Law as Elliott’s daughter Lizzie completed a very nice trifecta of beautiful lead women who just happen to be racially diverse. The third of these ladies, of course, is Dichen Lachman who I’ve got to say delivers probably the most convincing and most nuanced performance in the entire series, having to run a wild labyrinth of different emotional expressions which all feel very genuine. As was the case with Sylvia Hoeks as Luv in Blade Runner: 2049, Dichen Lachman as Rei hooked me instantly and woudn’t let go. Maybe I just got a thing for sociopathic women or something.

There are also a few minor roles worth mentioning, Marlene Forte does a great job as the overbearing mother of detective Ortega, which again felt very genuine and not forced, Tamara Taylor as ambitious sleazy attorney Oumou Prescott gave me chills with her smug smile (again perfect casting), Kristin Lehman and James Purefoy seem a perfectly matched pair of megalomaniacs, Byron Mann and Will Yun Lee kick ass portraying Kovacs at very different stages of his troubled life, and there is some terrifically believable acting on the parts of child actors Morgan Gao and Riley Lai Nelet.

All that being said, not everything the actors are given to do is particularly well-written, in my humble opinion.

Takeshi Kovacs is something called an Envoy, a type of specially trained soldier who is mentally conditioned to be hyper-aware at all times, integrate and adapt to new environments and circumstances, and even manipulate his own bodily chemistry, allowing him to eliminate the pain threshold, instantly recover from debilitating drugs, and avoid lingering trauma from torture. The Envoys were created to help the Protectorate put-down political dissidents and rebels, which were running rampant throughout the settled worlds at the time of the Envoy Program’s inception. Many of these rebels often followed the outlawed “Quellist” writings of an infamously respected revolutionary leader called Quellcrist Falconer who fought, and lost, against the Protectorate hundreds of years before the time of the novel (and long before Kovacs was born). When she was born, Quellcrist Falconer, like Kovacs, also happened to be from Harlan’s World. In the novel, this reputation causes Harlan’s World to be viewed as a backwater source of rogues and misfits by citizens of more civilized worlds (which is fair, since it’s described by Kovacs as being overrun by crime syndicates and swamp gangs). But even compared to Harlan’s World, Earth is considered a polluted over-populated shit hole.

In the novel he was trained by the somewhat fascist forces of the Protectorate, and the Envoy Corps was an elite black ops group who could be transmitted to any planet and topple the regime in less time than it would take a massive army to win a single battle. In the series, Kovacs is just a random soldier burn during the time of the Quellist revolution, but Envoys were created and trained by revolutionary leader Quellcrist Falconer to combat the very fascist forces of the Protectorate, whom were too used to conventional warfare to properly adapt to Quell’s asymmetrical tactics.

The problem for me, with this particular change in the writing, is that much of the details have been glossed over. I never got a sense of how Quell was able to so efficiently condition her soldiers into such a formidable force, nor did her portrayal emphasize her military acumen in this manner very convincingly. Quell’s character is certainly charismatic and sympathetic to the audience, but I find it much easier to accept that Envoys are the product of sociopathic, strict, and brutal military conditioning than to grasp the concept that a fairly undisciplined group of freedom fighters were able to develop such a sophisticated method of training. If Quell’s rebels were portrayed differently, it might be easier to accept, but in the series they seem more like hippies with guns than hardened elite warriors.

This is one of my only major gripes with the series as a whole, and it wouldn’t even be that big of a deal to me if it didn’t play such a large role in the plot and arc of Kovacs as a character. I didn’t like the way it changed his backstory either.

See, in the novel Kovacs is a former Envoy turned career criminal since Envoys are generally feared by everyone despite their having fought for the Protectorate, so they don’t have a lot of options and their skillset is only useful in a limited context. He’s haunted by his combat experiences, regrets his role in assisting the government in putting down various rebels, and has a cultural misunderstanding of Earth because he’s from Harlan’s World. His criminal ventures could be seen as his own personal revolution, and Kovacs has spent about a century in and out of storage since leaving the military, but has only been consciously alive for about forty years. He isn’t portrayed as a morally centered person, but he has his own system of honor, and he selfishly accepts Laurens Bancroft’s offer because it’s a way out of a lengthy sentence. This gives him a nice arc, because he slowly becomes more morally invested in what he’s doing as certain things come to light, and ultimately risks it all toward the end basically to avenge the death of a prostitute and save a single life, which is a nice shift in contrast from the Kovacs we see leave storage at the start of the book.

In the series Kovacs is a lovesick puppy dog, who misses his one true love. He’s a former Quell revolutionary who also became a career criminal, but the moment he got caught they put him in storage indefinitely, because he’s the last of the Envoys, the rest of which were mercilessly butchered by stormtroopers from the evil Protectorate which has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. When the series begins, he awakens 250 years after he was captured and he finds that the galaxy has become what he always feared, a one-percenter’s paradise ruled by the rich, where the poor are exploited and marginalized and everyone with even the slightest sense of prominence is an irredeemable asshole. Politics aside, this change makes his character arc far less interesting to me, because he doesn’t want to help Bancroft but his reluctance comes from a very different place than the book, and ultimately Kovacs accepts the offer not out of selfishness but because the ghost of his dead girlfriend tells him to.

This also deeply conflicts with the first time we’re introduced to Kovacs, in his usual East Asian sleeve on Harlan’s World where he speaks of caring only for “getting paid” and seems like a typical devil-may-care bad boy. Then when he’s talking to Bancroft, he tells the tycoon “Some things can’t be bought. Like me.” So which is it? Do you only care about getting paid, or can you not be bought? This makes for a somewhat confusing characterization of Kovacs, who one minute is murderously avenging himself upon psychotic bio-smugglers and claiming he cares for no one, only to turn around and behave like a typical romantic the next. It isn’t entirely jarring, but for me it hurt the dark tone and mature themes to discover the central core of the series is a centuries-old fairytale love story.

Sorry. I like fairytale love stories. But I also like darkly thematic dystopian science fiction, and in my opinion the two mix about as well as apple liqueur and olive oil.

This is all, however, as I said one off my only major gripes about the series. And even the sum of its parts aren’t badly executed. Like I said, Quell is charismatic, Kovacs is haunted, and all three actors (Kinnaman, Goldsberry, and Kim as Kovacs in his original sleeve) deliver convincing performances as well as share a great sense of chemistry, so the love story is believable at least. Visual effects and set design are also wonderful, and for such a high concept sci-fi setting it all feels very seamless. Dialogue is well-scripted as well, and most of Poe’s interactions with other characters are some of the best scenes. It’s also nice to see a series that exploits the naked female form to a fault, yet also makes a point to ensure you get just as much if not far more male nudity to surprisingly counterpoint its shamelessness. I haven’t seen this many swinging dicks since the last time I read YouTube comments. Just makes you feel better when the characters finally ride the stuffed unicorn, know what I mean?

Many of the minor roles from the novel are also modified to make certain characters more important, and some of their roles have been altered so that they are completely different people. Some of these changes work better than others. Rei, as Tak’s sister rather than just some asshole crime boss he once knew, was a change in the story that had the reverse effect of how I felt about the altered Kovacs/Envoy backstory. It makes Reileen a more interesting character than just the Big Bad you might expect in such a story, and causes her motivations, maniacal as they remain, to be far more empathic and invested in the events of the plot. In that light, they made the villain stand out as memorable among the bland villains we often get in movies and TV shows now, thanks to the K-Mart quality antagonists so popularized by the Marvel movies.

While certainly not perfect, Altered Carbon still manages to offer fans of science fiction a fascinating world populated by characters who are easy to give a damn about, and a galaxy spanning story of heartbreak, betrayal, and retribution. I personally wasn’t that big a fan of the romantic warrior monk stuff in this particular story, but that doesn’t mean it won’t appeal to others. There’s enough mystery here to keep you guessing, and enough solid dramatic force to keep us wanting more on its own merits, not by virtue of any stupid cliffhangers. Much of the visual style and action sequences are just icing on the cake, really. Though, I confess, I almost jizzed my pants when I got to see the Phillips Squeeze Gun in action. And there’s nothing quite like one of those sci-fi stories where someone picks up a samurai sword, let alone during the finale.

All told, I’d watch Altered Carbon again, and you should too. Regardless of whatever I say, or my own personal preferences, it deserves your attention. Because it may be adapted from a novel, but a least it’s trying to be something different than most of what’s out there right now, even if its poetic love story doesn’t want it to be. So, ignore cynical bastards like me, watch the damn show and decide for yourself.

                    侍    headless                   

[ezatluba]

I Can’t Stop Wondering What’s Going On Inside My Cat’s HeadAug. 27, 2021

By Farhad Manjoo

Some people keep pets for the cuddles and companionship; it turns out what I enjoy are the philosophical rabbit holes, the sudden tumbles into life’s deepest, most intractable mysteries.

Like, when my new kittens look at me, what do they see? As their provider of food and shelter, do they regard me as a parent? Or, with my towering (relative) size, my powers over light and dark and my apparently infinite supply of cardboard boxes, am I more like a deity to them?

But here I am doing it again — I’m projecting my own human intuition onto my felines. While some behavioral studies suggest cats respond to human social cues and may even like interacting with people, the research also says that there’s wide variation in individual cats’ attitudes. And because cats tend to be far less cooperative with humans’ silly experiments than are dogs, we generally know quite little about what’s happening in their heads. To imagine that my cats spend any time considering my place in their lives might be flattering myself. To them I could be nothing more than a natural resource to exploit, what the beehive is to the honey-loving bear. (See the classic Onion story “Vacationing Woman Thinks Cats Miss Her.”)

I’m getting way ahead of myself. Leo and Luna joined my family almost two months ago. They are 5-month-old Bengal kittens, inseparable siblings who resemble tiny leopards and behave like madcap professional wrestlers with a side gig in street parkour. They are our family’s first pets; we thought they’d be a kind of post-pandemic celebration, though you see how well that has panned out. Yet even with a resurgent virus and this summer’s other disappointments, the kittens have cast a joyous spell over our season.

It’s not only because they are impossibly cute. What I have found magical is the way the kittens help lift my gaze above dreary immediate circumstance. There is a lot going on in the world, a lot of it unpleasant. Watching the cats romp about has become a reliable way to escape all that. I find myself jumping from small questions — does Luna seriously not realize, yet, that she is attached to her tail? — to larger, more abstract and eternal ones: Does Luna even understand that she is — does she, in the way René Descartes conceived it, possess knowledge of a self?

More specifically: What is it like to be my cats? Are they “conscious” in the way I am? What, anyway, is consciousness? And if a cat can be conscious, can a computer?

Yes, these sound like questions one asks when the edible hits. That, though, is my point. Compared with dogs, who have lived with humans for tens of thousands of years and have evolved to read human body language to induce our affection, cats are almost alien in their unanthropomorphizable aloofness. House cats have likely been with humans for less than 10,000 years, and genetically they are little different from cats in the wild. They don’t really even need humans to survive. I think this is what I love about them: Cats are just precisely not-human-enough to confound you, and the confounding is the intoxicating pleasure of them.

Consider the question of a cat’s consciousness. Leo and Luna behave in very ordinary kitteny ways. To them, no hole is too small to explore, no perch too high to aim for, no dangling object too dull to resist. It can often appear as if they are driven mainly by simple, hard-coded instinct and response: IF something moves, THEN pounce. To Descartes, this sort of reflexive behavior suggested that animals were “automata,” essentially mindless machines that lacked the subjective experience of a conscious self.

I’ve been throwing around the term “consciousness” as if everyone knows what I mean, but defining consciousness is actually one of the more difficult aspects of studying it. “Consciousness” is an ambiguous term that refers to an ambiguous concept, the subjective experience of life. The philosopher David Chalmers, one of the subject’s foremost scholars, describes consciousness as a “felt quality” — consciousness is what it feels like to see the sun set or hear a trumpet call or smell the rain on a spring morning.

If this strikes you as vague, you’re not alone. Consciousness has been puzzled over for millenniums, but because it is an internal, subjective experience, merely trying to describe it can hurt your brain. This gets to what Chalmers calls the “hard problem” of consciousness — the mystery over why subjective experience arises out of biological processes, like why when light of a specific wavelength hits your eyeballs you experience the feeling of seeing a shade of vivid red. “Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?” Chalmers asked in a seminal 1995 paper. “It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.”

Getting back to my kitties: When they hear me pop open a can of yummy chicken slop and come running and meowing, I sometimes imagine a little dialogue playing out in their furry heads. Perhaps “Food, yay, food, food, now!” or maybe “Chicken, again?!” Descartes would call me crazy for thinking this; to him, the cats are responding only to the sound of the can opening and the smell of the slop, all reflex and no higher-order experience.

Modern scholarship has pretty much undone Descartes’s view. One reason to suspect animals possess consciousness is that we are animals and we possess consciousness — suggesting that creatures with similar evolutionary histories and brain structures, including all mammals, “feel” in similar ways.

There is also evidence that nonmammalian creatures with quite different brain structures possess a conscious self. In 2012, after reviewing research on how animals think, a group of neuroscientists and others who study cognition put out a document declaring animals to be conscious. They wrote that the “weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness,” which they said could likely be found in “nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses.” It is not only possible, then, that my kittens feel the subjective experience of being served chicken slop several times a day — it might be likely that they feel something, even if we have no way of knowing what it is.

Still, I don’t blame you if after all this you’re left asking, Hey, Farhad, I’m glad you like your cats, but why does it matter to anyone what’s playing out in their heads?

I’ll end with a couple thoughts, one slightly obvious and one less so. The obvious reason: Consciousness matters because it confers ethical and moral status. If we agree that our dogs and cats are conscious, then it becomes very difficult to argue that pigs and cows and whales and even catfish and chickens are not. Yet if all these creatures experience consciousness analogous to ours then one has to conclude that our species is engaged in a great moral catastrophe — because in food production facilities all over the world, we routinely treat nonhuman animals as Descartes saw them, as machines without feeling or experience. This view lets us inflict any torture necessary for productive efficiency.

The other reason to contemplate a cat’s consciousness is that we might learn something about those other creatures over which we now hold dominion — robots.

Humanity is presently engaged in a grand effort to transfer many cognitive tasks from humans to machines. Today’s artificial intelligence systems program our social-networking feeds and identify faces in a crowd; in the future, computers may drive us to work, target missiles in war and offer guidance on big decisions in business and life.

Monitoring these machines is already difficult; many A.I. systems are so complex that even the engineers who built them don’t completely understand how they operate. Consciousness would only exacerbate the difficulty. If sufficiently complex A.I. systems could somehow develop consciousness, they might prove more inscrutable and unpredictable than we can now imagine. Not to put too fine a point on it, but depending on the powers we grant them, conscious A.I. could go full Terminator on us.

Machine consciousness may strike you as an absurd proposition. But consider that we have no real understanding of how consciousness comes about, nor any real way of detecting and measuring consciousness in anyone beyond ourselves. Given how little we know about the phenomenon, it would be myopic to suppose that machines could never attain consciousness — as naïve as it was for Descartes to conclude that animals aren’t conscious.

Do you need pet cats to begin to ask these questions? Of course not. It sure helps, though. Before Leo and Luna arrived in my home, I rarely had occasion to consider the inner lives of nonhumans. But cats are a trip; in their everyday, ordinary strangeness, they seem to demand you puzzle out why they’re doing what they’re doing.

You might never solve these riddles; cats don’t give up their secrets easily. But the challenge is why I’m a cat person rather than a dog person. Dogs — they’re just like us! They present little mystery. Cats are the more cerebral companion. The fun is figuring them out.

[orbemnews]

Mardi Gras parades got canceled by Covid-19. So New Orleanians turned their houses into floats Like so many, the mom and insurance manager had known in her gut that the weekslong fête would take 2021 off. Revelers of all ages packed at least three deep along routes that wind for miles seemed the textbook antithesis of social distancing. “So, I kinda made a comment: ‘Well, that’s fine, I’m just going to decorate my house,'” said Boudreaux, who invited her neighbors to turn their homes, too, into stationary versions of the ornately designed floats that populate the four dozen or so parades that roll in the city each year. This way, she figured, partiers could stay 6 feet apart while visiting outdoors and enjoying the artistry of the annual countdown to Lent. The idea, like a splay of bead strands hurled skyward toward an endless carousing crowd, has spread. There’s a home with a sign that beckons, “Welcome to Wakanda.” Another features a Night Tripper theme in homage to funkman Dr. John. One house honors a health care worker alongside giant ivory beads. On a balcony, a cutout of the late chef Leah Chase stands, spoon in hand, at an enormous pot. Just off the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line, a giant model dinosaur in a top hat grazes. Elsewhere, a set-up pays tribute to Alex Trebek with a “Jeopardy!” board, playable using a posted QR code. Human-size Lego figures approximate a float rolling by parade-goers on a front porch. A wooden pelican the width of two men perches at another. All across town, papier-mache or cardboard and foil flowers of every hue, plus bunting of purple, green and gold and strands of beads the size of beach balls, adorn the homes where so many have been in retreat from the coronavirus since just after last Mardi Gras. That’s when 1.5 million people — including international visitors — converged on the city, almost certainly fueling viral spread that made the region an early hot spot. Indeed, the purple-and-white house icons that dot a map on the Krewe of Float Houses website cover the city’s entire main footprint like a sidewalk littered with doubloons, those collectible metallic coins tossed by riders from traditional floats. “In its essence, it’s not much different than when people drive around with the kids in the car and look at the Christmas decorations, holiday lights,” said Doug MacCash, who’s chronicled the house float movement for the local newspaper, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate. “Except this year, in 2021, it has such a spirit of triumph, such a spirit of defiance. It’s like, ‘Sorry, ‘rona. We’re not just giving up.'” “Mardi Gras by no means is dead; it’s just different,” said City Councilman Jay Banks, who’s cast his own house — already painted yellow and black — with other trademark representations of the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club, the city’s preeminent Black Carnival organization, over which he once reigned as king. “And what we’re forced to do this Mardi Gras, with Covid as the No. 1 consideration, … is how this whole house float thing got started,” he said. “And let me tell you, I am just giggly about it.” How to turn your house into a float Do-it-yourselfers — many already armed with hot-glue guns and glitter by the gallon for crafting annual Mardi Gras costumes — have embraced the home-design effort in earnest. Two private Facebook groups with more than 14,000 participants spew inquiries at all hours, most swiftly answered by a hive mind eager to collaborate after months of stay-at-home orders. “Any recommendations on securing this? It’s top heavy,” one poster asked, referring to a photo of a homemade Lysol can prop standing several feet tall. From another: “Has anyone had luck with using cardboard to make house float decorations? I already used some and painted and sealed with mod podge acrylic sealer but am wondering how it will hold up in the elements on a French Quarter balcony! Is there a better way of waterproofing, etc.?” The exchange is not unlike in the bleak months after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when neighbors connected to trade recipes for bleach or baking soda concoctions to remove mold from items soiled by the flood. Others looking now to gild their homes have turned to a regional cottage industry built over decades for precisely this sort of venture. “Part of the consternation about canceling Carnival had to do with, well, there are people (for) who(m) Carnival is their livelihood — a lot of people: float builders, bead- and costume-makers,” MacCash said. “Some of the Carnival artists who find themselves out of work at what would have been a real scrambling sort of time, what they’ve done is they’ve found employment decorating houses.” In a normal year, René Pierre right about now would be finalizing the books on some 75 floats that his company, Crescent City Artists LLC, decorates using lightweight utility canvas, bright house paints, hard coating, wood and Styrofoam, he said. This year, Boudreaux’s house float vision, which Pierre caught on a local news report, proved to be his “ticket out” of a toned-down Carnival — and one that follows his and his young daughter’s recovery from Covid-19. “Oh, man, in about three weeks, we were booked all the way up until today,” Pierre said last week of his house-decorating customers. “My wife and I were trying to sleep one night, and we kept hearing notifications coming from the website. It was like, “Ping ping ping ping ping.’ It was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ It was like instant success. It was incredible.” The couple inked 53 house float contracts ranging from $1,500 to $3,000 apiece, a sum many riders in the city’s biggest parading groups typically would spend on bead strands and other “throws” to toss in a given year. “It has really pumped my business into full steam,” Pierre said, noting he hired his cousin, a recording artist, to help manage the crush. “We have made more money in six weeks … and talk about Mardi Gras spirit.” Of the commissions, Pierre’s favorites are a trio of painted pups fashioned after the homeowner’s own pack, a Buddha-themed display and one highlighting the Grateful Dead dancing bears. Boudreaux, known as “Admiral B” of the house float fleet, aptly did her house in a maritime motif. “I don’t know if I want to know how much I spent,” she said: “definitely more than I meant to, less than a lot of people.” How to lead (or join) a house float krewe Beyond her own decor, helming this nascent krewe (local vernacular for a festival group) has become a second full-time job for Boudreaux. There are exchanges with lawyers over decorating rules in historic districts and weekly logistics meetings with the mayor to game out how to handle homeowners who want to, say, hire a band. There are now 50 captains, 39 subkrewes, a communications team and an effort to gather and edit together dozens of dancers’ at-home videos into a performance masterpiece for the website. Yet another to-do list item got added shortly after the krewe named a New Orleans bounce star as its grand marshal, Boudreaux said. “Now Big Freedia’s house is a traffic jam. The house is so popular that even guerilla photograph-style, it still drew a crowd,” the one thing the Krewe of House Floats wants urgently to prevent. The krewe also has launched a campaign to donate $100,000 toward those facing unemployment and food and housing insecurity largely because of this year’s Carnival limits: artisans, service industry workers, musicians, Mardi Gras Indians and other culture-bearers. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, “this year plants the seed” for what’s already becoming an annual event, to endure long after the coronavirus is vanquished, MacCash said. (At last count, Pierre already had 28 house-decorating contracts set for 2022, and preregistration is open for next year’s Krewe of House Floats.) For now, Chris Volion is looking forward to safely welcoming on Fat Tuesday, February 16, revelers who pass by his New Orleans home, adorned with enormous black birds inspired by local crows and Edgar Allen Poe in his personal Krewe of Nevermore. Volion, an institutional research analyst, and his wife, Janet, are making some themed throws to hand out and plan to join neighbors for king cake-flavored Jell-O shots. “While it feels different, there’s still that excitement going on,” he said. This year, instead of swapping parade plans, “the conversation has shifted to: Have you been to such and such a block, or have you see this house? It’s so beautiful to see that the energy is still there.” For Banks, the city councilman, the house floats offer a glimmer in an especially bleak season. In his own circle, Covid-19 has taken 23 lives and killed 17 members of the Zulu organization, he said, not to mention relatives and friends of the club. It’s stripped New Orleans — and the world — of the chance to socialize in person and to observe customs in the typical way. But as is so often the case, he said, the city’s response in this dark moment offers a message far beyond its borders. “We’re showing the rest of you that there is light at the end of the tunnel,” Banks said. “As screwed-up as Covid is, we will not let it defeat us. … The lesson of New Orleans for the world is: You play the cards that you’re dealt.” Source link Orbem News #Canceled #Covid19 #floats #Gras #houses #Mardi #MardiGrasparadesgotcanceledbyCovid-19.So #NewOrleaniansturnedtheirhousesintofloats-CNN #Orleanians #parades #turned #us

[history-harlot]

Overview of the French Revolution

The background of the French Revolution was related to the absolutism, which was the ruling system present in most western european nations of the day. Absolutism had, as a premise, that the ruler of the nation was appointed by God himself to be ruler, and therefore, their decisions were absolute and should not be questioned. At the same time, following the rediscovery of classical knowledge of the ancient greco-roman cultures, due to the exile of the Intellectual elites of Constantinople after the fall of the Roman Empire in 1453... as well as the increase of wealth in italian states, like Venice... there was a follow up of a system called enlightenment, which started at the end of the 16th century with the french philosopher René Descartes The ideals of enlightenment were ones that questioned traditional authority and dogma, as religious and state dogma. Such values were put under question by philophers like Rosseau and Montesquieu. These values became further widespread as the french state continued accumulating power to the king, keeping lots of the populace as serfs. As the ideals of enlightenment spread further, so did the third state... the Burgeoisie.)) As a background, there was, within the medieval and feudal structures of Europe, as well as absolutistic ones, a three state system. The first state was the Aristocracy, land owners and established nobility. The second state was the clergy, the church. The third state was the burgeoisie, the merchants and traders. As France became wealthier and the enlightenment caused the population to increase its literacy, more trade happened, while also more concentration of wealth onto the first state... as well as the second. The Burgeoisie was left disregarded, discontent fueled the populace of France, following the disconnection that the nobles had with the everyday man. The Burgeoisie, then, using their influence, following a long series of increasingly harder rebellions of the population against the nobles, eventually broke the Bastilla, the greatest and most secure prison of France, in 1789, marking the end of the Modern Era and starting the Contemporary Era. The royal family was prosecuted and killed... the king and queen were beheaded. There was a period of chaos in France, following what happened. There were two main parties, the Jacobines, which supported radical reforms in favour of the masses and the Girondines, who supported more moderate reforms in favour of the Burgeoisie. The Jacobines, with Robespierre, won. Robespierre started a radical system of reforms, being dictator of France.

The international system of units that we use today is a result of the French Revolution, in their attempts to unify all units in a decimal system. Not all ideas worded, though. They attempted to establish a 10 day week, as well a 100 seconds minute, 100 minutes hour and 20 hours day, divided in two 10 hours parts. Also, a new religion was tried and failed. Robespierre persecuted everyone who was against him, initially, his main enemies. Then, his lesser enemies, ending up killing his initial friends and supporters. The last victim of the Guillotine was Robespierre himself, after unsuccessfully attempting to commit suicide by shooting his own head... only breaking his jaw.

Then, starts the period of the Triumvirate, with three main generals, one of which was a young genial general from an island in the Mediterranean Sea... a young man called Napoleon Bonaparte. In some ways, he managed to rescue the ideals of the French Revolution, while in other ways, he ruined it. He established a code of laws and protection of human rights, but at the same time, he crowned himself emperor, restoring the monarchy to France, which was exactly against the original ideals of the French Revolution. He then proceeded to try and conquer the continent, eventually meeting the end of his fortunes in Russia... just like another military leader would do, over 120 years later.

[cyborgcyborgcyborg]

As P.J. Rey illustrates, fictional Web-spatiality is the favorite digital dualist plot device. Yet more than fiction books and films, what has come to dominate much of our cultural mythology around the Web is the idea that we are trading “real” communication for something simply mechanical: that real friendship, sex, thinking, and whatever else lazy op-ed writers can imagine are being replaced by merely simulated experiences. The non-coincidental byproduct of inventing the notion of a “cyber” space is the simultaneous invention of “the real,” the “IRL,” the offline space that is more human, deep, and true. Where The Matrix’s green lines of code or Neal Stephenson’s 3D Metaverse may have been the sci-fi milieu of the 1990s, the idea of a natural “offline” world is today’s preferred fiction.

Alternatively, what makes Videodrome, and Cronenberg’s oeuvre in general, so useful for understanding social media is their fundamental assumption that there is nothing “natural” about the body. Cronenberg’s trademark flavor of body-horror is highly posthuman: boundaries are pushed and queered, first through medical technologies in Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, and Scanners, then through media technology in Videodrome and eXistenZ, then, most notoriously, in The Fly, where the human and animal merge. If The Matrix is René Descartes, Videodrome is Donna Haraway.

Cronenberg’s characters are consistent with Haraway’s theory of the cyborg: not the half-robot with the shifty laser eye, but you and me. In the film, the goal is never to remove the videodrome signal that is augmenting the body, but to reprogram it. To direct it. As Haraway famously wrote, “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” “Natural” was never a real option anyways.

[...]

Videodrome’s depiction of techno-body synthesis is, to be sure, intense; Cronenberg has the unusual talent of making violent, disgusting, and erotic things seem even more so. The technology is veiny and lubed. It breaths and moans; after watching the film, I want to cut my phone open just to see if it will bleed. Fittingly, the film was originally titled Network of Blood, which is precisely how we should understand social media, as a technology not just of wires and circuits, but of bodies and politics. There’s nothing anti-human about technology: the smartphone that you rub and take to bed is a technology of flesh. Information penetrates the body in increasingly more intimate ways.

[...]

The most fitting example of techno-human union in Videodrome is the famous scene of Max inserting his head into a breathing, moaning, begging video screen; somewhere between erotic and hilarious, media and humanity coalesce. There isn’t a person and then an avatar, a real world and then an Internet. They’re merged. As theorists like Katherine Hayles have long taught, technology, society, and the self have always been intertwined. Videodrome knows this, and it shows us with that headfirst dive into the screen—to say nothing of media being inserted directly into a vaginal opening in Max’s stomach, or the gun growing into his hand.

Thirty years after its release, Videodrome remains the most powerful fictional representation of technology-self synthesis. This merger wasn’t invented with the Internet, or even television. Humans and technology have always been co-implicated. We often forget this when talking about the Web, selling ourselves instead a naive picture of defined “virtual” spaces which somehow lack the components of “real” reality. This is why The Matrix and “cyberspace” have long outworn their welcome as a frame for understanding the Internet. It should be of no surprise that body horror is as useful for understanding social media as cyberpunk.

https://vocal.media/futurism/david-cronenbergs-prophetic-videodrome

[theupstartsparty]

Chapter 2: Rexias and Lahar

Spireling Ymil appeared to be in a better mood than usual when he had called Rexias and Lahar to his office that morning to give them their next task. An anonymous patron had visited that morning with an unusual request. A cave had been discovered a few miles outside of Everspring’s easternmost protectorate, and the patron had it on reliable authority that a crystal ball lay in its depths, a couple centuries old at least. The patron did not disclose the reason for the request. Once Rex soon found out what it was precisely what had gotten the crime boss’s spirits up, he understood why a reason did not matter.

“One hundred fifty gold pieces each upon returning with the objective,” the half-orc said in a smooth baritone, a rare smile curling up his lips. Rex’s ears perked, fully alert. He turned to his partner, whose normally heavily lidded chestnut eyes were open wider than he’d ever seen them, almost making the elf look awake. If that was their personal cut, how much had this patron paid the spireling for the job? He silently doubled down on his policy to never pay for artifacts.

“Anything else you find in the cave is fair game, though if there is something that could prove helpful to the Clasp, know ingratiation will get you far. I know you two are smart enough to remember what happens if you try and screw us over, so there’s no need to go over that policy. Just remember that those marks of yours are there for a reason. Any questions?” The slick half-orc barely gave them a moment to answer. “Wonderful. Be prepared to leave this afternoon,”

The spireling lazily waved them out of the office, and Rex and Lahar, knowing of his capricious and particular temperament, lost no time in making their exit out of the lava chamber the crime boss called his office. They made their way through the system of tunnels underneath the city of Everspring.

“That is a hell of a lot of gold. Not that I’m complaining, but where does he get off on choosing us for this mission?” Lahar asked, keeping his voice in a low drawl as they walked through the underground market. “I thought that Ymil had it out for you somehow,”

“I guess he’s decided six months is enough time to waste keeping me on a leash,” the tiefling responded, flicking his tail on a burlap sack of a white powder on the front of a vendor’s stall. Any objections the vendor might have had were ignored as they pushed through the crowd, keeping an eye out for pickpockets who did not respect the Clasp code. 

“Perfect task for us though, huh?” the elf quipped, taking out a finely carved ivory pipe and some dried plants from a side pouch. “If we die, he gets our dumb asses off his hands. If not, he gets to buy, like, goldspun clothing or some shit,” He trailed off as he lit the pipe and inhaled deeply, closing his eyes for a moment, then exhaling an opaque blue smoke cloud.

Rex smirked. “Let’s hope the handsome devil didn’t send us on a suicide quest, then. Who knows how much he was paid up front?”

 He took the lead around the corner that turned down a less-travelled tunnel with Lahar close behind him. The path was empty save for a few floating will o’ wisps towards the curve of the ceiling serving to light their way, and they made their way down a few more lanes until they reached the bunkers, where they made up their packs for the weeklong trip. 

The spireling had sent one of his lackeys with directions written down on a scrap of yellowed parchment. The lackey, a familiar scrawny purple-haired human they knew as René, was waiting in the outer tunnel that led into the farmlands. He looked almost envious as he handed the paper over, but sent them off just as amiably as usual.

“Once you return, I’ll be expecting that courier’s tip from you,” he said, pretending to inspect his fingernails as he judged their reactions. There was no way the spireling would have told anyone outside of the mission, but René had a way of knowing things regardless. How he had gained the trust of the spireling was a mystery to Rex and Lahar alike. 

“In your dreams,” Rex grinned. The two bowed slightly to each other while each placing a closed hand over their chest in the common Everspring salutation. René picked up his torch as he walked away from the pair down the tunnel, leaving a flickering shadow that stretched and soon faded into nothing.

The ancient lava tunnel system in which the entirety of the Clasp operated existed underneath the very feet of Everspring’s population. These tunnels had been historically disputed. The earliest people of the area had once lived entirely underground, virtually unnoticed as the deities and arcanists raged in the Calamity. Once the world quieted, the settlement that would later be known as Everspring was built aboveground. Much of Everspring’s history was deeply entwined with the tunnels. However, the growing weight of the city took its toll on the tunnels, and eventually most of the system fell into disuse in the face of structural collapse. The Clasp moved in soon after the condemnation, building up what they referred to playfully as the Black Market, and had secured the tunnels (“Netherspring,” as some of them had dubbed it) for the past eighty years or so.

It was from these tunnels that the two Clasp members emerged, propping open an innocuous hatch that opened up to a flax storage barn. The harvest of the year had not yet been collected, and the barn currently housed pieces of equipment in various states of repair. No one was currently in the barn, Lahar noted, and motioned to Rex to follow him up the ladder and out of the tunnel. 

The tunnel out of the city had taken them past the first hill surrounding the city. A major reason the Clasp valued their hold on Netherspring was because of this particular tunnel, which obscured their movements over land from the curious eyes of the Everspring Guard. Normally, smuggled goods (oloore root and Sannish were the most popular) were handled through ships at the Sea Port. The need occasionally rose to transport inland, and the tunnel was the best means of doing so. It also gave them the advantage against the Myriad, who had been unable to establish a firm trade in the city due to the competition. From the barn the thieves walked inconspicuously to the Shambling Path, heading east to the protectorate of Phandolin.

The countryside of Everspring crested gradually downward, showing off the rolling expanse of farmland that existed outside the walls of the city. Purple fields of flax and saffron gradually blended into the greens of wheat and grapevines, and the landscape itself seemed to ripple as breezes combed through the scenery. The late afternoon skies still recovered from last night’s rain, and a few grey clouds hung onto the otherwise clear blue canvas. The walk was perfect for tourists who would swarm the city like bees at peak season.

The fields stretched on for a few hours before the hills to the south stopped rolling and jutted sharply into sheer rock faces, a formation which was known collectively as the Virage. The hills to the north had changed from agricultural land to the forest of the Verdant Expanse. By twilight, the Virage crested low, and the untamed Mornset Countryside became visible in the distance, and as the sun dipped below the horizon Lahar suggested bedding down along the treeline for the night. 

----

It had been four days on the road at this point, more than halfway to their destination. The past hour had dealt them an ill-tempered hydra, which had put them both in a bad way before Rex managed to incinerate it. Lahar’s survivalist magic had kept them alive, but to recover properly they were forced to make camp earlier than anticipated.

The campsite was minimalistic that evening as they only bothered to set up the tent and find a water source. Rations would have to do for the night; hunting and foraging was too much of an effort, and hydras were inedible much to their disappointment. Dark skies had threatened rain all day and the tension in the air alluded to something more impressive than a drizzle. The tent was pitched a few yards inside the forest, underneath a short but sturdy-looking oak at the top of a slope. They set up quickly and crawled through the canvas flaps just as the first drops began to fall.

“How’s the bite?” Rex asked his ranger companion, who had thrown himself onto his bedroll almost immediately after entering the tent.

Lahar groaned, wiggling off the rest of his armor to assess the hip wound properly. “It sucks. Nothing I won’t be able to sleep off though,” 

The light pattering of rain on their tent suddenly crescendoed into a roar as the deluge hit. They decided to not attempt conversation and instead started in on their rations. The bacalhau from the Nixie Bazaar was worth the risk of being caught, Lahar firmly believed, and Rex had to admit that it beat the tasteless jerky the Clasp offered. 

The black-haired tiefling took out his daggers from their scabbards. Though he had managed to get the worst of it off earlier, the blades were still caked in crusty ochre-colored blood. He took out his cleaning kit and set to work. A blue-tinted opalescent fog began to fill the tent, as if Lahar was calling upon spirits as he smoked.

Rex allowed himself a momentary glance at his former protege. The elf had joined the Clasp’s forces not six months earlier, coinciding with Rex’s own return. Spireling Ymil had assigned the new member to Rex as part of his probation, a decision that he had originally not been enthused about but soon came to appreciate. Lahar proved to have an offbeat personality that instantly clicked with the rogue, and was not lacking in any natural talent for thieving either. According to himself, he had previously taken up with a few roving bands of hunters deep in the Mornset Countryside, and had developed and honed his abilities there for many years. 

As with all things dealing with the Clasp, there were a few questions that could be asked about what caused him to join. Unlike René, however, Rex never found himself needing to know everything, and never made a move to ask about Lahar’s past. To his appreciation, this favor was returned in kind, resulting in a comfortable partnership that lasted even after Lahar was branded a full-fledged Clasp member. They had been working together ever since. 

The torrential downpour had subsided to a steady rainfall when Lahar spoke up, his naturally low voice raising ever so slightly to be heard over the din. “So, this artifact. Crystal balls are supposed to scry on people, yeah? How creepy is that?”

An obsidian, infinitely reaching tower flashed across Rex’s mind. “I know I’d hate that,” he answered, taking out the oil from his kit and getting to work on the leather grips.

“But Ymil said that it also-- knew things, if you asked the right questions. Do you think it’s sentient? Like, some ancient guy fucked up somewhere and trapped himself in an orb?”

“I don’t know if you’d be able to cast a spell if your soul was trapped. At least, that’s what I remember from Lucius’s books,” 

Lucius was the exception to their silent agreement. A month ago, his older brother had interrupted them in the middle of a job. Furious at Rex for taking his gold before leaving Emon, he had come to collect with a vengeance. It was the first time Rex had ever fought together with Lahar, and he had been taken aback by how readily the elf had rushed to his aid. His brother, upon being defeated with two daggers and an arrow to his throat, had sardonically congratulated Rex for making a friend before disappearing into a cloud of sparks. 

(“I robbed my brother and he’s not happy about it,” the rogue had said by way of explanation.)

(“He probably deserved it,” the ranger had answered. And that was it on the subject.)

“Probably not sentient then,” Lahar decided. He sat back up, wincing as he was reminded of the bite mark, and began unlacing his boots. “Do you think there’s a limit to the number of questions you can ask it? Or who can ask them?”

“I don’t know,” The tiefling finished oiling the last bits of leather on the hilt and put the newly cleaned blades back into their sheaths. He paused as he mulled the questions over in his mind. 

“Maybe we should find out,” he said slowly. A slight mischievous smirk crept across his face as he turned to face his traveling companion. “Once we find it, I mean. Ask it a few questions and see what comes of it.”

Lahar took off a boot and set it aside. “I was thinking along the same lines. Might ask if you’re ever gonna be able to fuck the spireling,” 

Rex flung his dingy pillow right at Lahar’s smug expression. The offending party dodged out of the way, laughing softly, and the pillow hit the canvas behind him with a dull thud. Thunder boomed from miles away, and the rain began to pick up again, sounding like gravel pouring onto a rooftop.

“I’ll take first watch,” Rex said, abruptly changing the subject. Lahar, still looking overly proud of himself, nodded and packed up his pipe and whatever recreational substance he used, then laid down faced away from the tiefling. About ten minutes later he began to levitate, signalling that the elf had started his deep trance. 

The tiefling spent his watch figuring out his question for the crystal ball.

----

“Fuck! They keep coming?” Rex’s blades sung as they cut through one of the gelatinous oil slicks that had come to life not sixty feet into the cave. Where the dagger sliced a burble of ooze separated from the main body. Its actions seemed entirely autonomous and equally hostile.  

They had combed the forest outside Phandolin for some time looking for the entrance to the cave. Even with their perceptive talents, the rogue and ranger had taken over an hour to locate it; the map had proven to be hastily made up and nowhere near to scale. The mouth of the cave was covered by a thick, pale green epiphytic curtain which obscured most of the daylight, plunging the cavern into semidarkness. Neither had bothered with a torch, which, in retrospect, might have helped in spotting the pitch black ooze clinging to the ceiling, waiting in ambush.

“I’m sure slicing at it isn’t helping!” Lahar shouted, rapidly nocking an arrow and turning over his shoulder to release it. The tarlike entity recoiled, rearing up and forming its amoebic body into the shape of a fist. Lahar’s ears flattened and he darted just as the wave of pitch careened into the wall behind where he had been seconds before. 

“And your arrows are?” Rex retorted, shuffling backwards as the newly formed second ooze plashed forward. True, blades were proving to be detrimental, but what the fuck else could he do at the moment? 

“You have fire, right? Use it!” There was that, he supposed, but he was not too keen on taking a hit from a damn ooze. Part of the slick had stealthily started enveloping the elf’s boots, and Rex ran over to his partner to sever it from the rest of the amorphous entity. Lahar plucked another arrow from his hip quiver and, muttering an arcane phrase, sent a Hail of Thorns at the ooze. The arrow glowed a sparkling green and impacted into the creature, exploding into a ring of long, nasty, thorny protrusions. 

The pitchy ooze still clung to Lahar’s leg, and twisted around in a vortex of tar. He grunted and buckled slightly under the constriction. Out of the corner of his eye Rex saw a black wave headed toward them. It had been easy to avoid the sluggish attacks of the ooze. They had only stayed to deal with the gelatinous creature at present, rather than later.

“Ugh. Fine,”

The wave crashed into Rex, barreling him backwards several feet. A feral red heat surged through his veins, and he extended his arm forward and condensed the energy into a cone of flame. The force of the blast blew his unruly black hair flat against his head. When the fire of the Hellish Rebuke cleared, two piles of ash remained.

Behind him on the ground, cursing steadily, Lahar was kicking the ooze around his leg off. The slick, which had not seemed particularly strong to begin with, fell off after a mild beating, and Lahar scrambled backward, fumbling with his pack until he found his tinderbox. He took one of his arrows and set it alight, and plunged it into the ooze that had crawled its way forward. It caught fire and squirmed into ash, ending the encounter.

They got to their feet and stared deeper into the cave. Rex caught the echoes of guttural snarls coming from down the intersection to the right. His body felt like it had been run over by a draft horse.

“We should stop at Phandolin next,” he said.

“Agreed,” replied his companion.