#i really wanted to work on some maps / do some more writing for our 15th session on monday and since i havent been feeling up for it

[famewolf]

also been struggling again with allowing myself to rest ... had a lot of plans today that went awry. getting that Anxiety of not feeling like i accomplished much of anything on my days off despite that not being true

[fahrni]

Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Its been a super duper exciting couple weeks which culminated in an App Store feature for Stream! As an Apple developer you dream of stuff like this but don’t expect it to happen. At least I didn’t. It’s quite an honor and I’ll be on Cloud 9 for a while.❤️

CNN

“Suzanne Somers passed away peacefully at home in the early morning hours of October 15th. She survived an aggressive form of breast cancer for over 23 years,” Hay wrote in a statement shared on behalf of the actress’ family.

R.I.P. 🪦

Marc Adreessen

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

Someone stayed up way too late reading the works of Ayn Rand and in a ketamine driven manic state started writing.

Clearly Andreessen has been smoking his own supply and is so privileged and ultra wealthy he has no clue what real life is like any longer.

I chose to share the paragraph above because he’s basically describing himself and his fellow libertarian tech bros looking to build a perfect society on the backs of a servant class. Us.

One day this piece will be part of some psychological study on the harms of the early 21st century wrought by a class of technology oligarchs.

We’re all just trying to survive out here, save the planet, and help others along the way. You want the exact opposite. All you care about are wealth and power at the expense of all else.

Go enjoy the outdoors with a loved one and chill. Oh, and lay off the microdosing.

Dylan Scott • Vox

In the coming weeks, the majority of Americans will engage in a bizarre, mildly terrifying, distinctly American seasonal ritual. I refer, of course, to open enrollment — the time when you sign up for your health insurance plan.

As far as I know we’re still the only major country in the world with a second rate sense of healthcare.

Healthcare for all is just what the doctor ordered. A healthy America is a better American, just as an educated America is a better America. So, while we’re getting healthcare for all taken care of let’s make all state universities free of charge.

Paul Stamatiou

It was March 2020, I was in New England when covid quarantine had just begin and I found myself much more homebound. In these situations I’m not one to just do nothing. I always have some sort of project or hobby to keep me busy, be it taking and editing photos, writing detailed blog posts, or coding something.

Holy cow is this app beautiful! It’s a real bummer it’s never seen the light of day but I understand his reasons.

It’s a shame nobody bought this from him, hired him, and let him see it to fruition, it’s an incredible piece of work. 👍🏼

Jason Snell • Six Colors

If I had a dime for every “Apple’s going to release a low-end product to compete with other low-end devices” rumor, I’d have a hefty bank account by now. And you can find plenty of stories debunking this report as “sketchy.” At the risk of giving this report more credulity than it deserves, let me try to understand what this report might actually mean.

I’m not a longtime Apple device user, I started in 2006, but I can say this doesn’t sound like something Apple would do. 🍎

Daniel Lemire

The C++ library has long been organized around stream classes, at least when it comes to reading and parsing strings. But streams can be surprisingly slow.

Call me crazy but I still love C++ as a development language. I never really dove into streams, I used std::string, std::vector, and std::map a ton but not with streams.

The language has morphed so much since 2014 I hardly recognize it. That’s not a bad thing, they’re just trying to make it easier to use and safer for developers.

Anywho, interesting read if you’re into C++ or languages and performance in general.

Chloe Veltman • NPR

Netflix recently shuttered the longstanding mail-order DVD service that led to the closure of video stores around the world and ushered in the era of streaming. But now the company appears to be embracing brick and mortar.

Heh, let’s come full circle and open a physical location! 🤣

Now, if they include Blu-ray and DVD rentals that would be amazing! Perhaps they can take over all the shuttered Blockbusters that haven’t been turned into something else?

Meera Navlakha • Mashable

But some spots are closing their doors on influencers, raising questions. Take Dae, a design shop and cafe in Brooklyn. As reported by Curbed, the space was inundated by influencers carrying tripods, to the point where the owners decided to ban them entirely.

I can understand businesses doing this if the gaggle of influencers are forcing regulars and paying customers to avoid their favorite haunt. It doesn’t seem unreasonable at all.

Asher Fair • Beyond the Flag

Carson Hocevar has been formally announced as Spire Motorsports’ third driver for the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season, replacing Ty Dillon.

I’m happy for Carson Hocevar and bummed for Ty Dillon.

Hocevar has driven a few Cup races this season and has proven himself a fast, talented, racer. He has a lot to learn about rubbing elbows with the big boys but he’ll learn.

As for Dillion I wonder where he’ll land? As far as I know there aren’t any Cup Series seats open. Maybe Xfinity or Truck Series? Regardless, I wish him well.

[Fritz Bogott • AutoDesk Instructables]

After several years of baking in North House Folk School’s wood-fired brick oven, I decided to build an oven of my own. I went a little crazy with extra features (slab foundation, arches, ash dump, chimney, doors, wood storage) and decorations (limestone around the foundation), but you can make a very usable version in a weekend with salvaged materials and a couple of friends.

Folks always make this look so easy! I’d never complete a project like this! But boy does it sound amazing.

I’m thinking a Roccbox is more my speed! 🤣

Ron Amadeo • Ars Technica

After ChatGPT disruption, Stack Overflow lays off 28 percent of staff

Yikes! The industry is at the beginning of yet another transformation and this one is happening very rapidly. I’d be lying if I didn’t say this terrifies me at some level because I’m essentially “aging out” at this point in my career. I always thought I’d have to learn JavaScript to continue on as a developer. Instead I may have to become a “Prompt Engineer” to bend the LLM’s to my will.

I still refuse to call it AI. 😃

Cory Doctorow

Amazon’s bestselling “bitter lemon” energy drink was bottled delivery driver piss

This is an amazing story! How in the world can someone game the system so hard they’re able to sell urine bottled as an energy drink? It also exposes Amazon, yet again, as a sweat shop. This time with drivers.

[samchaffe-blog]

Digital Citizenship

https://www.diigo.com/user/samchaffe

https://twinery.org/2/#!/stories/a9c94369-879c-4928-91a9-9d7b0fc0528b

Assessment 2 Digital Citizenship                                                                           Sam Chaffe

Artefacts

 Diigo Reflection                                                                                          

Diigo is a social bookmarking web page, it provides signed-up users to bookmark and tag Web pages. Furthermore, it allows users to highlight any part of a webpage and bind sticky notes to specified highlights or a whole page. Annotations can be stored privately, combined with a group within Diigo, or be forwarded to someone else via a special link. It’s a remarkable digital toolkit’ that improves your ability to be productive, creative and critical of information presented online by others. My Diigo consisted of articles and my views on garment factories and workers. How they are treated and what people are trying to do about this. I highlighted and annotated my bookmarks, taking advantage of the tools on Diigo. Making it easier for my readers. Making it quick and snappy but giving everyone the information they need to educate themselves on these matters. Diigo launched publicly on July 24, 2006, although it had been open since 2005 in beta version. The skills I used in my Diigo artefact, firstly was the annotating and finding useful information. Information that interested and intrigued me. I gained good reading/scan reading which made me incredibly affective in collecting key facts in articles. The most successful features from my Diigo artefact are “Why don’t you care who made your clothes?” because it gives you outstanding information, with the harsh reality facts, giving readers the full idea and the devastating reality of the garment factories. If I was to undertake the task again I would annotate my highlights fully and extend into Diigo, fully understanding new tools and learn more about the web-page. What people have said about my Diigo is that I have a solid admiration and a worthwhile topic/starting point. I have really good articles and my understanding and knowledge of Diigo are impressive. The criticism they gave me is that I could annotate more and take more advantage of the web-tool. Pictures with annotations would improve my Diigo massively.  

 Twine Reflection                                                                                            

To create my short story, I used an interactive story-making website tool called Twine. By using Twine, you can get a huge mind map plan of your own personalised story. In your little boxes, you can disperse your ideas from one box into many. By doing this it helps you cover different endings and possibilities. For example:

 Twine was primarily constructed by Chris Klimas in 2009 and is now facilitated by a whole group of people at several different repositories. In context, the technique method used in twine is creating interactive fiction, where users read content and then interact by clicking links in the text. Twine uses a very simple visual flowchart and composing substantially leads to making hyperlinks amongst such modes, or passages. My leading story idea was the concept of connecting what we are gaining knowledge on in class. The technological and digital side of our world and how it affects individuals. I connected this to me personally by adding in some of my views, basing it on my age group yet telling it through a story. It involves a teenage girl called Romee and how she deals with social media, popularity and keeping her admiration to do what she loves. To not be undermined by social media and haters. My main creative decisions were to keep my story flowing and to keep it interesting. It's not seen as a story to be action based or a pop-out story. I wrote about this subject as I feel very strongly about the topic and base it to my interests in fashion and social media. I overcame barriers to create my piece such as analysing which way my story could go. Could I make it go different ways, I decided to make it go streamline for a reason. I saw this as a barrier as I felt like with my story I didn’t want to make it confusing, messy or un-dynamic.

The successes of my story personally are its method of demonstrating what social media/internet does to young adults. Furthermore, I see my story as a slight heartfelt attachment to the main character. Each chapter is a change and an introduction to something new. Evaluation of my story, I could improve branching out and taking more advantage of the tool Twine. Playing with my story and branching out to other ideas and other aspects that you haven't seen in my recent draft. It would give the readers more and satisfy a more broad number. What I also thought about doing in the future is use arrows and the diverse way of branching out the story. Give the side of different characters feelings. For example, Romee’s expressions/feelings. tremendous feedback and majorly agreed with how I could improve “Un-social Media”. Others admired my idea and the way I introduced daily problems, especially in the UK. And also how I looked at a certain age group but however my story can be towards all age-groups.

 Wikipedia Reflection

I constructed a Wikipedia article. My article is about the Garment Factories in foreign countries. Relating to my Diigo artefact. I talked about the information regarding what happens in these factories. The gender majority and the traumatic occurrence that happened at the Raza plaza Dhaka, in Bangladesh. Furthermore, as I did in my Diigo I also talked about what forming or existing companies and organisations are trying to do. Wikipedia launched on the 15th of January 2001. I used and gained many skills whilst producing my article. Firstly, I gained massively researching and finding solid information skills. This was whilst I was looking for information and the organisations that are out there to solve and contribute helpfully to this situation that I am writing about. I gained exceptional reading/scan reading which made me incredibly affective in collecting key facts in articles. My most successful feature and one that I am most proud of is my Rana Plaza section because of the information and realisation I give to the reader. I also believe that my company section talking about Fashion revolution and my fashion and textile segment is another I can call a successful feature. If I was to undertake this Wikipedia task again I would process onto connecting with a member of the garment factories and get there inside opinion and self-knowledge and understanding of what it is like to be within working at a garment factory especially as a woman. What positives people have said about my article is that it gives good profoundness and quality of information. It gives good detail on my chosen areas and expresses how in need of a change these women need in there working environments. The criticism they gave me is that they feel like I could expand a lot more and break into what the women think to get solid information and how we can change this by clothing purchasing. What shops you can buy from to avoid this and how you can help.

[enchantingkittengaditor]

The MCU’s Daughters Prequel: Loser In Me

A/N: This is a Prequel, to my new story The MCU’s Daughter, inspired byBrie Larson’s album Finally Out of PE. Loser In Me was merely the inspiration for this piece and if lyrics are seen it’s probably just me listening to the song about 100 times writing this and editing it.

Summary: Long before she was the MCU’s Daughter. Before they were the Internet’s Daughters. They were just teenage girls trying to fit into a new system, a new country and a new school. Before all the fame and success two teens first became friends and teammates.

Warnings: Mentions of Depression, Anxiety, Epilepsy, Violence, Extreme Angst, THE FIRST HALF OF THIS TAKES PLACE IN A THERAPY GROUP. Extreme Fluff in part 2 though to make up for it, after an anxiety attack.

Master List

February 14th, 2016

Tegan

It was that time of the week again, no not the weekend. Therapy day. I’m meant to be looking forward to today. But I don’t. I mean, I sit in a room with 9 other depressed and anxious teens and an overly enthusiastic adult trying way too hard for 2 hours. Where’s the fun in that?

The way I knew it was therapy day was simple my alarm went off, my cat jumped on my face and my sister yelled breakfasts ready from the kitchen downstairs. I’ve gotta get up and out of bed, but why so I could talk about things people think I make up to a bunch of kids around my age. I know I shouldn’t have but I turned my alarm off and tried to go back to sleep grabbing my cat to use as a teddy bear in the process.

“TEGAN!!!” Alex yells again, this time from the other side of my door. I groaned getting up knowing my attempt failed and if I didn’t get up now my sister would enter my room. The one place I had left.

Dragging my brush through my tangled hair to make it look semi-presentable and grabbed a clean shirt from my draw and my leggings from my desk putting them on, not caring that they didn’t look good together. Because I don’t care. I would much rather be in bed or be somebody else because I’m getting really tired of myself. 

I put on some mismatching socks and my teddy bear slipper and running downstairs to join my mother and sister for our traditional heart-shaped pancakes and fruit Sunday breakfast. One of the few things that hadn’t changed in the past 15 months. One thing I could hold onto. One thing that kept the memory alive. I know people behave like I do when a loved one dies but that’s not my story. My story’s worse because I was the one who died. Well not literally but figuratively for sure.

We chatted about meaningless trivial things. Until I noticed the time and said I should go pack my bag for therapy. The bag I had to pack for therapy contained my sketchbook, my writing pad, and my book. The writing pad and sketch pad were to show I was making progress and not just drawing and writing the same old memories. The book was a form of entertainment as my mum always dropped me early and picked me up late at the Library where these sessions were held due to my sister’s tennis lessons.

After the process of packing my bag, I shoved it onto my shoulder, turning to say goodbye to my cat. That was when  I saw the photo frame. The photo frame that contained three of the most important photos in my life. One was of me and my best friend at my 4th birthday party laughing while eating cake on my Dora the Explorer map which for some reason was of Russia, Mongolia and China. One of the others was of me and my two best friends at one of their 7th birthdays with my arm in a sling. The last one was of me, my classmates and our teacher from the last place I lived. I could feel myself begin to cry as the memories began to flood my already drowning mind.

“Tegan, Vamos!” My mother yelled at me from the door so I grabbed my shoes and threw the photo frame down onto my desk careful not to break it.

On the short twenty-minute journey to the library, we laughed trying to sing along to the music on the radio. Or at least I tried. It wasn’t the same. Nothing ever will be. And they don’t seem to care. I know they do but I haven’t seen it.

Once at the library I said goodbye to mum and Alex, walking through the door I was met by the warm embrace of the library air and take a deep breath of the book scented filled air letting it fill up my lungs. This was one of the few places I could feel at home in. But everything good in this world has to be ruined by people, doesn’t it?

“Come in Tegan we were just about to start,” Madison, the human in charge, told me as she walked past me holding a takeaway cup, most likely filled with Irish coffee to help her get through these sessions that I could tell were just as unbearable to her as they were for me.

When It was my turn to share what I did this week I shared the news of becoming ‘friends’ with the new girl at school and everything I’ve done to improve my mental health, although none of it worked. They then asked me questions about the new girl, which lead me to say, “She’s been through similar things to me, well closer than anyone I’ve met outside the people I would call if anything went wrong.”

To which, much to my dismay, Julie told me the cheesiest thing I have ever heard in this cheese-fest of therapy, “Maybe you went through it,” referring to the moves I had endured 13 and 22 months ago, “so you could help someone else survive it.”

“Maybe, or maybe the world is a cruel heartless bitch, who can’t handle that some people were made for more and decides to shoot them down. Like Malala or Martin Luther King Jr or Ringo. The world destroys the souls that only want to do it good and sadly I fall into that pile. I may have had what all of you call the dream life, but it’s a living hell. A combination of amazing until about 5 minutes later when I get shot in the heart over and over and over again until I decide to give up or till the world gives up on me and I don’t know which one is worse. I have never seen myself age past 20. I don’t know why. Even in the before, the before everything went fucking wrong. And it went wrong spectacularly. It always does. My life from the outside might look good but my mind. My mind is slowly trying to kill me. Even on all my meds. My mind is poisoning itself because it always had, from a young age and it will until I’m six feet under and probably after that. If you believe in the afterlife,” I yelled in frustration at Julie and all of her positivity nonsense. She was the eldest person here and the only one of us who doesn’t have to come but she still does, because she thinks of us as her family. In fact, her positivity was so infuriating to me that I got up and walked out of the room towards the bathroom ready to cry my heart out. That’s what I needed. And that’s what I did.

February 15th, 2016

Simone

It was my second Monday at school in New Zealand. And it wasn’t going that well. So far I had walked in on Indy and her boyfriend Lachie kissing, my friend Tegan had been bullied by Scarlet, I had been lectured about Harry Potter by Alexandra, someone in year 6 had been punched, and I had been told off by the principal for not wearing a hat outside. Not a good start to the day especially considering we had just gone out for ‘fitness’ which happens at 11:30 in the morning.

That was when it first happened. The first time I saw Tegan for who she was under all of her layers.

In the middle of our class game of basketball, I noticed her starting to lag behind where she had been. Then she started becoming short of breath, her face started to drain of colour as she stood still in the middle of the court. I looked around the court only to notice that no one else was seeing her break down in the middle of the school.

So, I went over to her.

“Are you OK?” I asked her squatting down so I could look up at her and look her in the eye.

That’s when I noticed how hard she was struggling to breathe. I ran. I ran as fast as my legs could carry me over to Miss G who was reffing the game.

“Tegan can’t breath and I don’t know what else is going on, but I know she can’t easily breath,” I spat out in about 3 seconds flat pointing my index finger over to her almost colourless body standing in the middle of the court. Except she was gone.

“She seems fine Simone, she just went to the bathroom,” Miss G told me in a condescending tone.

“Well then, can I please go to the bathroom?” When she nodded her head in response and faced back to the game I walked back over to where the toilets were.

I raised my fist to the grey stall door and knocked.

“I’m fine. Really, but thanks for checking!” Tegan yelled from the other side sniffling.

“Just come out, please. You really looked like you needed a hug out there and I would love to give you one because I think of you as my friend. So please just come out here and talk. It’s only me.”

“And me. Tegan, I want you to come out here so we can talk. We can all just lean against the door while you tell us what happened so no one else can enter if you want,” Alexandra said as she walked into the bathroom.

“Only if you give this up.”

“What up?” I dared to ask.

“Trying to make me better,” She opened the door to reveal herself, “I’ve been trying for years to fix myself.  I’ve been trying since I was 7 to fix whatever the hell is wrong with me. There is a giant loser who lives within me and currently in control and I am fine with that because it’s better than the giant demon that’s in there. I… I am just a shell of a broken child who will never be able to grow up. I’m so scared for her and her future because everyone is telling me to let her go but I can’t because she’s the me I only let a few people see. She is what is at the centre of all my thousands of walls and there’s a good reason for those walls. I’m broken. Defective. People only want people you fit perfectly with themselves. I don’t. I don’t fit with anyone unless their pieces are broken too and then we can become a beautiful mosaic. But, then again, nobody in this godforsaken country seems to realize you don’t have to put your pieces back in the same places to become whole again. And putting yourself back together exactly the same is hard, especially when you don’t know how the broken pieces fit together because you’ve been broken for too long. I… I was just having a panic attack that’s all. It happens all the time and nobody has ever reacted how you did and it scared me if I’m honest. Nobody ever really cares normally,” by this point we all had our backs to the girls’ toilets on the floor. Me and Alexandra had our arms around Tegan’s shoulder comforting her as she cried/talked to us about whatever was on her mind, “For the longest time all I’ve wanted is to have someone else’s puzzle piece and be compatible with others. All I want to do is order in and stay at how with my TV and guitar, and waste the day, crashing at home, without people. But I can’t because my sister or mum is always with me. I just want to run away from my so-called life. No matter how hard I try I keep losing my head and it keeps happening again and again and I can’t stop it.”

“Have you tried therapy?” Alexandra asks with the best intentions but I could tell by the way Tegan flinched that it was a touchy subject.

“Yeah, I go once a week to a group session for 10-18-year-olds who have dealt with loss. It’s on Sunday at South Library, but I hate it. It does nothing except make me want to punch a bunch of teenage girls in the face,” she responds in a post tear voice, I’ve come to know all too well.

“Well, I’m sure it’s good for you and it’ll get better. All of it,” I said with a smile, “After all, who’s going to show me how to get through moving away from everything they’ve ever known to here? Not Indy or Scarlett or Saskia. They all seem lovely but they don’t know what it’s like and you do. And that makes you special.”

“Ok. But should we head back out there?”

“I’ll go and tell Miss G that both of you are just going to stay in the classroom and I’ll come back and we can find some cat videos to watch together. Ok?” Alexandra said to Tegan’s question.

“That sounds good Bob.”

“Bob?”

“Her nickname,” She smiles to me as we get up and walk into the classroom and sit at the jelly bean table waiting for ‘Bob’ to get back.

Tags: @hollandarling, @wazzupmrstark, @hollandroos, @keepingupwiththeparkers

[manitthemenace-blog]

Manit's creative technologies journey 25/02/2019

Hello my name is Manit. I enrolled into AUT colab because I have set free from all my responsibilities and now I can do whatever I want. Now I have more time. I’ve always had a skill for being creative, naturally it’s who I am to explore creativeness. I am a multi-passionate entrepreneur, I consider myself not limited. Studying creative technologies will give me skills to achieve my greatest dreams.

26/02/2019

Today was the 2nd day of colab. Definitely an interesting one, we all had loads of fun socializing. We were in groups for multiple activities. One activities was interviewing and communication skills. For this, we were the only group that had 4 people. We kinda broke the rules of the observer on this one. The observer was not supposed to contribute in anyway in the conversation. We all ended up just talking about our-selves, sharing our skills, goals and personalities. The goal of the activity was to get information about each following the activity's guidelines. And so then weren’t successful in the activity but we did get to know each other a little bit.

We’ve already been given two papers on a our 2nd day. This ain’t no joke huh?

Activities:

- Make a 3min vlog about our-selves and why we chose AUT colab.

- In a group, create playing cards targeted at a chosen audience.

My group was very collaborative. We made a google doc and shared it to everyone in our group. This way we can work on it whenever and wherever. We can share all ideas live and everyone had edit privileges. I believe working this way is ideal because it gives us freedom and diversity. I was satisfied with the progress I had made today with my team. I ended the day going the minor’s electives at WG403. I can feel the pressure is real. I’m not the type of person to complete tasks on a deadline. But I’m not gonna quit yet.

27/02/2019

Today was our first class with Stefan for “Programming for creativity”. We were introduced to “programming”, a software used to implement actions and change visual features of certain tasks using the software language. I played with it enough to understand how to navigate the interface. I am still to learn the language more in-depth.

28/02/2019

Mind-mapping our ideas for “cards for play” and repeating the process over to see what differences we have in our mind-maps.

29/02/2019

Played monopoly with the gang because it was a free day.

04/03/2019

I need to re-visit this day for re-cap.

I was absent until 12/03/2019

12/03/2019

Today we had class with Ricardo. He talked about design fundamentals and process.

2nd lecture with Ben, We had a guest speaker come in (Stephan Reay), to represent DWH, https://www.initiate-collaborate.com/ and http://www.goodhealthdesign.com/projects/cardsfordementia/

They are a design group that partnered with Auckland Health. The purpose of their design group is to create new or better services for patients with dementia and such illnesses.

13/03/2019

Programming for creativity with Stefan. This is y 2nd class with Stefan, I missed last week’s session. Today we were shown slides on coding practices for the Processing program. Our first assignment is due on the 15th.

Our vlog is due today. Ben said it has been extended until next week.

For our  “play for cards” project we play tested our 7th time. We got some really good feedback from the testers. Our testers said our game is too similar to charades. They suggested we implement an element to make it different or new. They also had trouble understanding our rules of the game. We had to re-write some of it.

14/03/2019

I was late to class today.

15/03/2019

Today we went exploring and got students outside of our class to play test our “Xpress Yoself”. We played tested two groups. It was our 8th and 9th test. The first group all knew eachother, They had a hard understanding the rules. The second group didn’t know eachother and they understood the rules a bit better.

[mr-mormons-adventures]

Week 45 Update!

Hey everyone! Sorry for today's late update and last week's short email. We had a bit of a change in how we usually do our p-day activities, so I wasn't able to send the usual day-by-day playbook that I like to send. However, I am at a library now, so I will be able to let you all know what's going on in more full detail!      The first thing I need to mention is that we got transfer calls last night. I'll be sticking around in the Champaign Illinois area, but my companion, Elder Rogers, will not. So I'll be saying goodbye to him tomorrow, and welcoming a new companion later that day. I'm sad to see him go. We had a lot of good experiences together and we were able to work hard. We learned a lot from each other.       On to the day-to-day! Tuesday: Tuesday we had exchanges with our zone leaders. I went with Elder Sharp for the day. He's been out the same time as my companion. We started off mowing a member's lawn for them while they're out of town. We may or may not have accidentally broken one of their garden pots while doing so, but we did replace it. After that and lunch, we picked a spot on our map to go work in and spent a good couple hours working in that area and around other focus people on our map. We were able to talk to a few people for a while, and while not all of them were interested, all of them seemed nice. We finished the day by going to Institute! Since Elder Sharp is over the YSA branch (a congregation of LDS people who are between 18-30 years old and single, stands for Young Single Adult) out here, he needs to be there in case people they are teaching show up. We got to stay, since one of their people showed up. The lesson was wonderful, and I picked up an amazing quote in the lesson that I had to write down: "God's will is made manifest in tragedy".  Wednesday: Wednesday started off with District Council! We had a joint training given by Elder Bowman and Elder Tucker on how to keep the Spirit with us as we teach. Then we had another training by a new elder on Christlike attributes. After district council, we went to try to find people, but we kept having to run errands and see people so we didn't get as much time as we would've liked. After dinner, we taught a family that only speaks Arabic with the help of a translator. We were able to read 3 Nephi chapter 11 with them, and they loved it! Thursday: Another exchange today! This time I went with Elder Tucker, and we worked in the Mahomet area. We started off by walking around a few parks with no luck. After that, we had a member call us to ask for some help in setting up her treadmill. Turns out, the tread on a treadmill is heavy. Like, really heavy. It took 5 of us (four missionaries and a nonmember) to carry it through a house, down some stairs, and then into their exercise room. We had lunch with Elder Rogers and Elder Bowman at BWW, then after lunch we had time to go work a few neighborhoods. We planned on going to play volleyball tonight with the group that usually does it, but they canceled. Friday: Friday it rained a ton. There was a lot of rain. It was good though, because we had to do our weekly planning on that day. We stayed inside at the Institute building to plan and make some goals, then by the time we were done, the rain had let up quite a bit to where we could go out and find again. We walked around and tried to find people on a list our ward council had set up for us. We also had a ward party that night! We had planned to make it a picnic outdoors, but with all the rain they had to move it indoors. We came early and helped set up chairs and tables for it. Saturday: Saturday was a pretty good day! We started off with a lesson with Brandon, who is doing super well! He got interviewed to receive the priesthood and passed, and he got his limited-use recommend to go to the temple! He plans on going with the ward youth temple trip on the 15th of this month. We also got a referral for a deaf lady in our area who wants a copy of the Book of Mormon, and also someone to come by and bless her home. We called her a few times (the phone connected to an interpreter who video chatted with her) and set up an appointment, but it got canceled. She wanted to come to church too, but since we don't have a solid interpreter in our ward, she didn't come. Oh well. There's an interpreter in another ward, and so we're going to let the elders in that ward begin to teach her. After that, we walked around a neighborhood and met Matt, who has some family that is of this church. We talked with him for a bit, and set up a return appointment for the next Saturday! Sunday: Sunday was great. Had a good ward council session, then when we came back to the apartment we had some good studies together and personally. 4 people were able to come to church with us too! We had an investigator we picked up last week, Alandria, and also two people we've taught for a while named Magaly and Eric. Also one of the people we teach accidentally went to another ward, but they had a good time there, so no harm there. After church, we had dinner with the Allen family in our ward, then stopped by Mike, an investigator that we started teaching a while ago. We taught him for a bit, then we invited him to be baptized and he said yes! We were able to commit him to be baptized on the 13th of October. We can't wait for it. Monday: Monday was a bittersweet day. On the one hand, we saw a lot of success. We went and delivered a bible to a lady named Tanyia, and she accepted a copy of the Book of Mormon and said we could continue to teach her! We also walked around our apartment for less than 2 minutes before we ran into Michael, who has been interested in this Church for a long time, and wanted to learn more. After getting his address and contact info, he told us that his dad was also interested and wanted us to teach him as well! It was an incredible experience. But, to make the day a little bit more sad, we got the call that Elder Rogers is leaving. I'm sad to see him go, as I said earlier, but I'm excited for him and the new adventures he'll have elsewhere in this mission. That was my week! I hope you all have a great week this week, and I'll talk to you all later! Love, Elder Brown

[detroittoaccra]

Last week I traveled to Lisbon for the 2nd International Conference on African Urban Planning, held at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning at the University of Lisbon.  I felt like I missed out when I didn’t attend the first conference two years ago.  So, despite its inconvenient timing, I seized on the opportunity to attend and learn more about the politics of urban planning and the New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals of the UN-Habitat project.  More on that to come as I continue to think about the very interesting conversations from that conference.  In the evenings, after the conference closed and in the day and a half I had before my flight, however, I took the opportunity to explore as much of Lisbon as I could.  I went with fellow conference attendees to eat in central Lisbon at night, which often involved wandering around until we stumbled on something that looked good.  In the process, we passed beautiful architecture.  But after the conference ended, I seized my 36 free hours and set off to see the sights.

I’m teaching the second half of the African history survey this semester, which technically begins in 1800, but which I normally begin with a review of the age of exploration – a sort of “how did we get here” lesson to connect African History and the history of colonialism with what are probably more familiar narratives about European exploration to find new routes to the gold and spices of the East.  Since I missed that day in class, I told students that I would see the sights themselves in Lisbon and report back.  In many ways, this is where it started in the late 15th century – where Vasco da Gama set sail on his trip around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean, where Columbus visited on his way to the Americas, where Prince Henry the Navigator funded the development of new sailing technologies and seemingly far-fetched expeditions.  The narratives we get of those histories are romantic.  Only more recently have people raised questions about the appropriateness of celebrating Columbus Day.  Most people could repeat to you that Columbus’s voyage was extraordinary because he traveled West in defiance of conventional wisdom of the time that said that the world was flat.  They could not really tell you much about what happened once he arrived or what and who he found when he got there.  They could tell you that he was looking for gold and spices.  They probably couldn’t tell you anything about the threat posed by the encroaching Islamic Empire and the wealth it obtained through control over the Silk Road and Trans-Saharan trading routes.  I was curious about whether anything was different in Portugal.

On the very first day that I arrived, I was already primed by my Airbnb host, who said that the old quarter of Belem was a sort of shrine to the explorers, built from the profits of colonialism without of a lot of thought about its negative consequences.  Some of that is less obvious.  The monks at Jeronimos Monastery, for example, provided assistance to seafarers passing through Lisbon.  Vasco da Gama and his sailors famously spent the night and prayed in the monastery the night before setting off on their famous voyage around the southern tip of Africa and on to India.  The building was completed with money obtained through a tax of trade from Africa and Asia – trade that Portugal increasingly controlled as “explorers” established new sea-based routes, allowing them access to foreign markets that had previously only be accessible through long-distance, land-based trade that was under the control of the Islamic Empire.  In the process, they effectively reshaped global trade and enriched themselves.

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Nearby the Tower of Belem protected the enclave from potential attack.

While these sites have been preserved as part of a national historical narrative, they sit near a huge monument that makes clear how that narrative is remembered and its significance in the national imaginary.  The giant Monument to the Discoveries sits in between Jeronomos Monastery and Belem Tower, jutting out into the sea, towering over the people below, standing on top of a stone map set into the ground, marked by distinguished Portuguese discovery and conquest.  Built in 1960, this monument reflects a final effort by the dictator Salazar to boost the confidence of the struggling country, which steadfastly refused to give up its empire until the mid-1970s (and then only through significant struggle on the part of African resistance fighters in armed conflict) despite widespread international condemnation.  Read within this clearly political and imperialist context, one reads the symbolism of the monument in different ways.  In turning the “discoverers” into larger-than-life heroes, Salazar makes a moral claim to Portugal’s right to imperialism – an experience and a culture that unites all parts of Portuguese society.  On the monument itself, the explorers are aided by aristocrats and religious leaders, who literally push the explorers up the incline around the monument’s base, symbolizing the critical financial, moral, and political backing that made these voyages possible.

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On the ground around the monument, a giant map marks the sites of Portuguese conquest, symbolically fueled by the winds, risking the dangers of the open ocean, and empowered by the gods of the natural world.

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It’s hard not to feel a little taken aback at the explicit self-congratulatory celebration if one questions at all the narrative of “discovery” and imperialism.  Today, in the aftermath of Portugal’s near-economic collapse, these kinds of statements about historical greatness feel desperate.  In another time, we might easily fall into a sort of self-congratulatory critique.  But very similar questions are being raised about history and memory in this country right now, particularly around monuments.  As these public conversations and some of the excellent public writing by professional historians make clear, monuments often reflect attempts to enshrine particular interpretations of historical narrative and shape historical memory to suit political purposes and to support political claims to power.  Particularly when one is as large as the Monument to the Discoveries, you’re kind of stuck with it.  But how do we recontextualize it after that historical moment, as our understanding of power and the past changes?  How do we address present inequalities and discrimination when monuments to the very people and processes who created the systems and structures of inequality sit in our cities and public squares?

I’m curious to learn more about how this process is unfolding in Portugal, particularly as people pour into the country from former colonies like Angola and Mozambique and the kleptocratic leadership of those countries use their wealth to buy stakes in important Portuguese telecommunications and financial firms.  No one seemed to be talking about it and the permanent exhibits in spaces within the Jeronimos Monastery or the National Tile Museum don’t do much to complicate the narrative, but I likely missed a lot as a tourist who speaks no Portuguese and some of the visiting artists are at least thinking through the relationship between Portugal and its sites of discovery, like the interesting tile work of Japanese artist Haru Ishii found in the National Tile Museum.  And there’s certainly lots of engagement with the history of Moorish occupation in the city.

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The connection to a Portuguese history of colonialism in Africa, however, is a little harder to find – in the winding streets of Mouraria, for example, where many Angolan and Mozambican residents live or in the tours of “African Lisbon” which take visitors through major sites of the city’s contemporary African community.

I walked away from the Monument of Discoveries, and Lisbon more broadly, struck by the incredibly beauty of the city and its connection to its history – I can’t wait to go back.  But I was also reminded once again of how pervasive and insidious the narrative about “discovery” and “civilization” really are and how much we live unthinkingly in the shadow of imperialism and neocolonialism and relive its worst attributes in language, assumption, politics, and perception.  That’s yet another reason why it’s important to learn to grapple with the complexities and contradictions of history rather than sit comfortably with the romanticized memories and monuments of our supposed “heroes”.  People are complicated; so is the past.  And isn’t there a saying about not putting someone on a pedestal unless you want to get them knocked off?

Tourism, Colonialism, Monuments, and Memory Last week I traveled to Lisbon for the 2nd International Conference on African Urban Planning, held at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning at the University of Lisbon. 

[faucetdouble51-blog]

72 Hours in Seattle

Hi, it’s Abby. My mom asked me to write an introduction for this post about our last-minute trip to Seattle a few weeks ago. I was invited to play in a soccer tournament there and this one was different than most because there was only one game a day, which means there was plenty of down time to explore a city. (That is how I convinced my mom to go.)  We flew out the morning after my last final and stayed with her college roommate, Jenn for three nights and three days. Mom already told you that the culinary highlight of our trip was eating a Dutch Baby with backyard raspberries in Jenn’s kitchen nook, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t pound some pavement in search of great food around town. Here, Mom and I take turns giving you a run-down of our packed 72 hours.

DAY 1: THURSDAY

1:00 [Jenny] I am forever in search of counter-service spots when I travel, especially for lunch, when you don’t want to spend an hour-plus lounging around while the sun shines on a brand new city that is calling for you. That’s why we dropped our bags at my friend Jenn’s house (in Ballard) at 12:45, then headed straight to The Fat Hen, a sweet, bright fast-casual spot that served avocado toasts, ricotta toasts, freshly squeezed juices, and good coffee. It killed us to forgo Frankie & Jo’s, the vegan ice cream shop sensation right across the street (they have multiple locations around the city) but we were saving room for dinner. FYI: Delancey — remember Delancey? — was right there, too. [Photo credit: Seattle Magazine]

2:30  [Abby] We walked from Fat Hen down 15th Street to Ballard Avenue, the main drag in Ballard, a neighborhood that reminded me of Brooklyn. There was a ton of stuff to do and a lot of fun shopping including a cool second-hand furniture store called Ballard Consignment, an aesthetically pleasing succulent store (I can’t remember the name, can someone help me?), and a trendy clothing place called Prism where my mom tried on a thousand dresses but ended up just buying my sister an iron-on patch for her jean jacket that said “Stay Wild Child.”

4:00 [Abby] We met up with my mom’s friend Jenn, who got out of work early for us, and headed to Golden Gardens Park for a walk. It was so beautiful! I got a virgin pina colada at Miri’s, a new cafe right on the beach. Also, even though everyone says Seattle weather is not so great, look at our sky! It was like that for most of the time we were there. (Here’s a tip to future travelers: Go there in late June, early July.)

5:30 [Jenny] I think the only reason why I agreed to take Abby to Seattle was so I could try to snag a table at The Walrus and the Carpenter, the original Renee Erickson French-style raw bar in Ballard that opened almost ten years ago and that I tried to get into during my last visit, only to be turned away by the long wait every time. This time I wasn’t messing around. At the very un-glamourous hour of 5:30, I dragged Abby, Jenn, and Jenn’s 15-year-old daughter Stella to dine on fried oysters and small plates in their bright happy space. FYI: Erickson has opened a bunch of other places in Capitol Hill, including a steakhouse Bateau, another oyster bar with the greatest electric mint color scheme (Bar Melusine), and stuffed doughnut mecca General Porpoise, which, for Abby, might’ve been more of a reason to go to Seattle than her soccer tournament. (More on that below.)

7:30 After dinner, we walked back up Ballard Avenue to get ice cream at Salt & Straw, the Portland-based makers who have won over legions of fans with their artisanal concoctions…think Fresh Sheep’s Cheese and Strawberries or Oregon Wasabi and Raspberry Sorbet. But the line was too long, and even though it was still early, we were on East Coast time, so we headed home to bed. (For those of you interested, here’s an interview with Salt & Straw founder Tyler Malek on the always awesome Bon Appetit’s Foodcast.)

DAY 2: FRIDAY

10:00 [Abby] I had a soccer game in Redmond (we won 4-0!) where the most exciting food moment of the morning was a pretzel that came with that fakey nacho cheese that is so delicious. We didn’t get to start exploring again until lunchtime and decided we wanted to spend the afternoon checking out Capitol Hill. First stop…

12:30…Rocket Taco for lunch, where we ate some of the best carnitas tacos I can remember.

1:45 It was Pride Month! We loved the rainbow crosswalks which made for especially good instagram posts. (That’s me with our friend Maylie. And this was at the intersection of East Pine and 10th Ave.)

2:30 [Abby] And of course, we had to hit Elliott Bay Books. My mom bought me a paperback copy of The Handmaid’s Tale — I’ve been watching the TV show and it’s very disturbing, but she said I’d like the book. (She wants me to tell you that for school I also had to read Hiroshima and Take the Cannoli)

3:01 [Abby] Then the funniest thing happened. I had been looking forward to going to the iconic General Porpoise Doughnuts from the moment we booked our flights — we practically planned our entire Capitol Hill outing around it — but when we got there at 3:01, we tried to open the door and it was locked. It closed at 3:00! For about ten seconds we were all super disappointed but then, out of nowhere, an employee walks outside and asked “Does anyone want a dozen free doughnuts?” I guess they like everything to be fresh, so at the end of the day, they give away what hasn’t sold instead of selling them the next day. That might’ve been the highlight of the trip. And those doughnuts were some of the best I’ve ever had– the vanilla stuffed ones especially!!

4:00 [Jenny] We hadn’t planned on it, but we decided to hit Pike Place Market (because: of course!) on our way home to Ballard from Capitol Hill. We bought fruit and a lovely flower arrangement for our lovely hosts, but for the most part we just walked up and down the long hallways and gaped at the offerings. Maybe the most amazing part was that I got a parking spot on Pike Place right in the middle of everything (across from the flagship Starbucks.) I kept looking at the spot and looking at the sign saying This is too good to be true (once a New Yorker always a New Yorker, I guess) but it was actually true. Over a month later, I’m still on a high from it.

6:30 [Jenny] I know this is hard to believe, but we still had more to eat. I’ve written about this before, but the way Abby and I go about planning where we want to eat in a new city is completely different. I go to tried-and-true sources like Bon Appetit City Guides or Eater’s Heat Maps. She goes right to instagram, searches by locations, then studies the grid until a particularly inspiring pastry or bowl of ramen shows up. That is how she landed on Fremont Bowl where we went with Jenn’s family. Abby’s review: “Crazy good Japanese bowls, with fish, chicken teriyaki, and so much more. I’m not really a tofu fan, but according to my mom she had the best tofu she’d ever had in her life at this place. Fremont’s a fun area to walk around, too.” She’s totally right, the fried house-made tofu that our friend Maylie ordered was off-the-hook delicious. I was psyched because right next door was Book Larder, a store that specializes in cookbooks and community culinary events, but sadly they were closed for a private event. I guess that’s as good an excuse as any to return to Seattle in the very near future.

DAY 3: SATURDAY 9:00 [Abby] Mom, Jenn, and Jenn’s husband, Ben went for an early run around Green Lake Park (about a 3-mile loop she says) then we all gorged on Jenn’s now legendary Dutch Babies and plotted the day. Ben pointed us in the direction of the giant Asian Market Uwajimaya which was awesome (Oh, before that, Mom stopped for another cup of coffee at Anchored Ship in Ballard) but we ended up eating around the corner at at Dough Zone due to some intense soup dumpling cravings, aka the best food in the world.  It’s a good thing my next soccer game wasn’t until 4:00 that afternoon. We pretty much rolled out of there. Those dumplings were amazing.

6:00 [Abby] After my soccer game (lost 2-1) we drove to Mulkiteo and caught a ferry to Whidbey Island, about 25 miles north of Seattle across the Puget Sound, where Jenn and Ben have the sweetest cabin. The ferry was only about 25 minutes, but involved spectacular views of islands and huge mountains in the distance.

7:30 We only had about 12 hours to hang on Whidbey, but we got a good taste of it, snacking on their porch (above), chilling out by the campfire for an epic sunset; Ben grilled some local salmon and hot dogs for dinner. The house only had two bedrooms so my mom and I got to sleep in a tent listening to the crackling campfire. 

. Side Note [Jenny] Those of you who follow me on instagram might remember this photo. Jenn and Ben were torturing themselves trying to decide what color to paint the cabin — they were going for a dark Scandinavian cottage look — so I conducted an insta poll asking which combo you all liked. Most of you were in favor of the navy/white palette, the third one down. Last week, she sent me this pic:

How beautiful is that?!?!?! They went with Sherwin Williams Inkwell for the house and Benjamin Moore Oxford White for the trim.

DAY 4 SUNDAY

8:30 [Abby] We had an early afternoon plane to catch, so didn’t have a ton of time to explore, but we did manage to squeeze in a walk on the beach and a quick trip to Langley, where we ate eggs and cinnamon rolls at Useless Bay Coffee, then took a walk to a dramatic sandbar called Seawall Park. The town was so charming! From there was a convenient shuttle from Whidbey to the Seattle Airport, and we were on our way home.

Boy you fed us well, Seattle. We miss you so much!

Related: 36 Hours in Austin; 36 Hours in Portland, Maine; 48 Hours in Montreal.

Source: http://www.dinneralovestory.com/72-hours-in-seattle/

[lordbelatiel]

Shattered Minds (Laura Lam)

4.5 stars

“Ex-neuroscientist Carina struggles with a drug problem, her conscience, and urges to kill.

She satisfies her cravings in dreams, fuelled by the addictive drug ‘Zeal’. Now she’s heading for self-destruction – until she has a vision of a dead girl.

Sudice Inc. damaged Carina when she worked on their sinister brain-mapping project, causing her violent compulsions. And this girl was a similar experiment. When Carina realizes the vision was planted by her old colleague Mark, desperate for help to expose the company, she knows he’s probably dead.

Her only hope is to unmask her nemesis – or she’s next.

To unlock the secrets Mark hid in her mind, she’ll need a group of specialist hackers. Dax is one of them, a doctor who can help Carina fight her addictions. If she holds on to her humanity, they might even have a future together. But first she must destroy her adversary – before it changes us and our society, forever.”

Set in the same dark future as ‘False Hearts’, the newest offering from Laura Lam ( @lauraroselam ) is a very different book. Whereas ‘False Hearts’ was a book of neon warmth and arching redwoods, ‘Shattered Minds’ is a story filled with clinical chrome and the buzz of electronic instruments. It is a harder, colder book, less forgiving, with characters that take a little bit longer to love. But love them you definitely do.

Centring around a hacking group that is attempting to bring down a large, corrupt corporation that seems to own most of the West Coast (now Pacifica), ‘Shattered Minds’ has a really classic cyberpunk feel that put me in mind of William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’. Members of society now have complex neural implants to allow functions such as the straight downloading of information from external systems. Such neural implants can also allow hacking via VR, a more natural interface than hard code, though also bringing the added risk of cybersecurity systems being able to ‘fry’ user implants remotely, and, with them, the user’s own mind.

Carina, our protagonist, an ex neuroprogrammer, takes some time to warm to. She’s blunt and difficult, though once you realise how much of that ‘difficulty’ is due to self loathing and trauma she’s much easier to understand. She’s a character who has been betrayed by everyone she ever thought to trust, from her father to Roz, the scientist who was supposed to take her pain away. ‘Taking the pain’ away in Carina’s case turned out to be much more literal, with Roz re-engineering Carina’s brain in a way that made it so she rarely felt strong emotion. It was only when that programming began to unravel and sudden strong compulsions to commit violence and murder began to develop that Carina realised what had happened to her. Terrified of hurting people, she retreats into the world of zeal, a drug that allows users to manipulate their own dreamscapes. Her body falling apart at the seams, Carina feels that at least she is less of a threat to those around her…it’s heartbreaking on so many levels. The story raises the question on multiple occasions of just how much of Carina’s personality is her own and how much is what the brain engineering made her. Even if they were to reverse that engineering, how much of what Carina is was caused by nature and how much is what was done to her?

Dax, an important secondary POV character and love interest, was my favourite. I try not to play favourites, but I just couldn’t help it. He is, in Laura’s own words, the ‘cinnamon roll’, and I entirely agree with that assessment. The medic to our hacking collective, Dax originally was a surgeon specialising in body modification, common in the state of Pacifica. Always excellent at including LGBTQA+ characters and respectful rep in her stories, Laura’s decision to write Dax as a trans man is such a positive thing. Dax’s identity is not a plot point, it’s not a twist, it simply is. More books need to include LGBTQA+ characters in a way that makes identity incidental and not somehow part of the plot. LGBTQA+ people exist and their story doesn’t have to end there, let them have stories beyond that! Let them be heroes and villains and hackers and doctors, let them be whatever your stories need them to be, like any other character.

Also, you know, let them be cinnamon roll Native Doctors, because I love Dax so much.

Before I go on an excessively long ramble about how much I love one character, I’ll direct you towards our villain, the ruthlessly driven Roz. It’s been a while since I’ve disliked a villain quite as much as Roz. Cold, hard, indifferent to the feelings of others, she is probably my entire opposite, but I don’t think it’s even that which got under my skin so much. The most horrifying thing about Roz is how she doesn’t view consent as something sacred. She doesn’t care what you want, you’re simply her experiment and she has no qualms whatsoever in knocking you out and making fundamental changes to your brain. Genuinely, she gives me the shudders.

The half a star came off because I wasn’t able to gel with the story quite as much as I would have liked. It has a complicated structure, moving backwards and forwards in time in a way that makes a lot of sense for the plot and for Carina’s character, but sometimes left me a little confused. I’ve also mentioned before that Carina is maybe a little more difficult to love than your classic protagonist, but I think, once again, that that’s a personal thing and I know from reading other reviews that other people have absolutely adored her.

One of my favourite parts of the world that Laura builds for her Pacifica novels is the culture and the cities. There are all these subtle hints at other stories happening behind the scenes, like the fan who tried to clone his idols and led to a fashion for covering all fingerprints and shaving off all hair, so that no DNA was accidentally left behind. There’s also some overlap with ‘False Hearts’, in mentions of the cult that the protagonists were raised in, characters reappearing and further discussion of the some of the repercussions of events in the other book. Whilst you don’t have to have read ‘False Hearts’ to enjoy this, I’d honest recommend picking up both books, because ‘False Hearts’ is one of my favourite books of all time, and the world that Laura has created is a joy to read.

So, if you’re looking for a cerebral thriller (no pun intended), with diverse characters, genuine threat and much much neurohacking, this is definitely the book for you.

‘Shattered Minds’ is out on the 15th of June, and Laura has a pre order promotion going at the moment with 10K of extra Pacifica fiction available in return for proof of pre-order!

Many thanks to Tor Books for a copy in return for an honest review!

Originally posted at Moon Magister Reviews.

[wanderlustwonderlots]

Day 10 - The Last Day

I’m writing this back in Canada, so forgive the delay!  I’m a lil tired!  But I’ll finish up with the last post </3

Final Fieldwork

On the last day, we didn’t have any participants set up for Team Nasal Harmony.  Ideally we would have gone back to Austria to get more from the speakers there, but they weren’t keen on having us back.  So, we drove out to the Prlekija   region, about two hours east of Ljubljana, right in the corner of Slovenia hugged by Croatia.  Specifically, we went to the town of Središče! Which I can sometimes pronounce properly!  We brought another linguist with us, Karmen.  She’s done research on presence of nasal [ j ] in Slovenian dialects, and we used her map and cited her in our presentation back at the beginning of the trip, so it was nice to meet her.  She was really kind and spoke to us in English lots so Deepam and I wouldn’t get lost in her conversations with Peter!  

I slept most of the ride there (and back) as I’d gotten up early again, as always, but when I was awake the drive was gorgeous of course.   We were in a fairly flat part of Slovenia by the end of the drive, but “flat” still means lots of hills and mountains in the distance. When we first started out, still in the hills, I saw the coolest thing!  The trees were steaming!  It was so early in the morning and it was a little chilly and gloomy but the trees were still warm, so air was rising off of them.  I had only seen something like this once before, back in Ontario, and much less substantial.  We could see the trees way in the distance doing this.  The air was rolling out of them slowly and calmly but we could still see it moving!  What a beautiful thing to witness.

It’s always funny to hear how the navigation narration tries to pronounce Slovenian words, but the funniest was on this trip.  We passed a town called Ptuj, but in the instructions the voice didn’t even attempt this one.. and just spelled out P-T-U-J.  The poor software can’t keep up with all the unfamiliar sounds and consonant clusters!  At first attempt I can’t either so I don’t blame it.

Once we got to Središče, we parked near the church and started walking around in search of someone to talk to.  We really didn’t have a plan for the day!  We saw a woman working in her backyard, so Peter and Karmen went to talk to her while Deepam and I stood around looking awkward. She wasn’t able to participate, nor anyone she lived with, but she pointed us in the direction of the local municipal building to find help.  It was great of her to talk to them for so long and to try to help as best she could!  So off we went to the next step.  Just outside the building there was the TINIEST kitten I have ever seen!! I’m still thinking about it!!! I wanted to spend more time with it and pick it up and cuddle it but I didn’t have time :( I felt a little bad for it, its eyes were a lil runny and it was so small it was still unbalanced while walking!! Super cute though, and truly a good omen for the day.

So upon going into the municipal building, we found a woman who I think we were going to ask to recommend people or contact people for us, I’m not too sure.  But she actually participated in the experiment for us!  I’m not sure what her name was.. but she was very nice. So we set up the laptop and the nasalance mask at her desk as other employees brought us coffee and water.  She seemed interested and keen on it and did a great job with the stimuli!  The way it worked, similarly to in Austria, was Peter or Karmen would ask the participant how to say something or what a word for ___ would be, and the speaker would give their answer until we got the right term for it.  Then Deepam and I record and save it, and Peter would ask them to say a similar word but with a segment changed out. At least based on what they were saying, this is what I’m fairly certain was happening.  For example, “svila” but with a /j/ would be “svija”.  This was a way to create minimal pairs from real words that already existed - an easier way to elicit sounds than nonce words, which can be tricky.  She did really well with them though!  After we finished the stimuli, she called up a couple people in town for us who might be able to participate as well.  One man was out of town but another woman was able to do it so we went to her house.

One of the other employees was kind enough to walk us to the house rather than just showing us the way!  It was a small town and very close so only took a couple minutes but I still found it very nice of her.  The woman we recorded second was 94 years old! Born in 1923!  Wow!  We ran the same tasks as we did before, recording about 40 words.  She did so well with the mask and a great job overall.  Some things took multiple explanations from Peter, Karmen, and her son, but if I were 94 I would need the same.  Her and her son were so hospitable, inviting strangers into their home to do experimentation, and offering us drinks and cookies afterward.  It was what we’d been experiencing on each day of fieldwork but those were all after setting them up previously and this was straight out of the blue.  Everyone I interacted with on this trip was equally as kind and inviting.  We were there as researchers but also as guests, each time.  It was valuable to learn how to be both, and even more so in an unfamiliar language and culture.  

We could have potentially found another participant, but Peter had more stuff to do in the evening for Wenxuan’s project, so we called it a day with just the two.  We stopped at a cafe before heading out for a snack - ice cream and coffees.  I opted for one scoop of pistachio and another of mixed nuts, and an espresso as usual.  I never used to like espresso but I’m glad I do now, because it’s all I was drinking when we got coffee out!  So strong and satisfying, and this was an especially nice complement to the sweet ice cream.  The cafe was beautiful too, a couple smaller rooms in the place, all with tons and tons of plants.  It was a great atmosphere, very homey and relaxing.  The woman that served us was lovely, Deepam and I chatted with her about why were there in Središče and Slovenia in general.  She was really impressed that students from Toronto came all the way to the small town to do research!  We could have talked longer but we had to head home again.  It was a satisfying stop before we left though and made me even happier to have stopped in the town and talked to the people there.

After we got home, we ended up just relaxing for a bit.  Peter had to leave soon after to record another person with Wenxuan, but we stayed back to clean, pack, and help cook dinner with Andrea and Rachel.  I managed to pack almost all of my stuff between getting home and cooking dinner which was great!  We listened to music and sang along as we cooked, it was so fun and happy!  Lots of classics, some throwbacks, and a couple good sing-alongs. It was a nice home cooked meal to use up everything left i the fridge!  We waited until Wenxuan and Peter were back to eat so it ended up being kinda late, but also we wanted it to be a family dinner with everyone!  We had a salad with all the produce left, hard-boiled eggs, and homemade croutons, roasted carrots and whole garlic gloves, and baguette baked with either cheese or meat on top. The garlic was sooo soft and delicious, we just spread it on the bread like butter.  I have to make it that way more often!! The salad was also super fresh and tasty. We also finished the bottle of wine we had started earlier in the week - a very satisfying cheers after 10 days of working hard.  

It was a wholesome dinner with a wholesome bunch of people <3 

Final Thoughts

I’m so happy I could be part of such an incredible trip, it’s an experience I won’t forget.  I became so close with everyone and I feel like I’ve grown as a person.  I’m on my way to becoming a true linguist!  It was such a valuable trip and I’m a little sad it’s over.  As nice as it is to be back in a familiar city with my cat, back to the usual days, Slovenia will be on my mind for a while. If ever given the opportunity I would absolutely come back here for research!  I would very much like to come back by myself when I have the chance, to explore the city of Ljubljana, seeing museums and galleries and just walking around like I did on my last Europe trip.  I do still love being by myself, being able to take things in at my own pace and on my own terms.   It was really interesting traveling with a group though, and a lot of fun with everyone.  I felt like I was able to be a classic tourist more comfortably, taking photos of everything and gawking, and it was nice having people to take photos of me too, something I really missed while traveling solo!  

Having done real research on endangered dialects and working with real participants, I’m so excited for what my future holds for me.  I’m incredibly happy to be in this field and explore the options ahead of me!  I hope that I can do fieldwork again soon and see how it differs in different environments and on different projects.  I’ve gained so much more than just data from this trip!  But before looking onto what I can do next, I’ll have to buckle down and analyze everything for this project.  We’ll be presenting at a workshop here in Toronto on August 15th, so lots to do before that!  Peter plans on going back to Prlekija again (as he’s staying in Slovenia until mid-August) so he’ll have more data to send to us later as well.  The rest of my summer certainly won’t be boring!!

All in all, this trip has been absolutely amazing.  I met to many kind people, I made great bonds with the team, and I’m even more passionate than before about linguistics.  Who knows what the future holds for me, and if it will involve this blog again...  Thank you to all who kept up with my adventures and I hope you enjoyed reading about them!  Until next time~

[entergamingxp]

Who gets to write video game history? • Eurogamer.net

In Spring 2016, I took part in a rather unusual archaeological dig. There was no dirt, no trowelling – in fact the excavation didn’t even take place outside. It was just me, in my childhood bedroom, digging through old copies of Official Nintendo Magazine and realising that I could map my childhood obsession with video games from the stacks hidden in my bookshelf. Opening up an issue from February 2006 I found a feature lauding the mysterious new ‘Nintendo Revolution’ console and a caption jibing “Good looks and great to play with. Revolution sounds like our ideal girl.” It’s a window into a different time. 14 years later and some things have changed- we didn’t get a Revolution, we got a Wii. I’ve grown up. Games journalism (for the most part) has too.

Back in 2016 someone else was also rifling through some old stuff in their house, but their discovery would draw more attention. Dan Tiebold found the last known existing Nintendo PlayStation prototype in his dad Terry’s attic. The console represents a turning point for the games industry; Nintendo and Sony were to collaborate on an add-on to the SNES. Nintendo infamously snubbed Sony in 1991 when it announced it had instead made a deal with Phillips. Sony would go on to release its own console, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Fast forward to 2020 and the Nintendo PlayStation was once again in the limelight as Terry Diebold put his up for auction. On March 6th, Greg McLemore paid $380,000 in total to get his hands on a piece of hardware that had been touted as priceless. As an archaeologist, I’m familiar with the buzz that can surround individual artefacts, and the cognitive dissonance on display in auction houses putting the hammer down on ‘priceless’ objects to the highest bidder. While I’ve been intrigued by the billing of the Nintendo PlayStation as a fable turned to fortune, I wondered what video game historians and preservationists made of the furore surrounding it.

Frank Cifaldi, founder of the Videogame History Foundation, succinctly describes the piece as a “view into an alternate timeline.” Frank has been working in games preservation for almost twenty years and founded the VHF after identifying the gaps in the field that needed to be filled. “Things like working with games developers to preserve their original source code, and a library of complete video game magazines,” Cifaldi explained to me over Skype, reminding me that my trove of magazines is tiny compared to the thousands he’s carefully collected. When I ask him about the historical value of the Nintendo PlayStation, he understands that people want to see it preserved but tells me “I don’t think historians can extract more stories out of this physical object than they already have.” The console has been photographed and analysed to the point that it’s been bled dry of new data. Given Cifaldi describes his work on video game preservation as “stopping the bleeding rather than re-inventing the wheel,” it’s not surprising he doesn’t consider the Nintendo PlayStation as a top priority for preservation.

The Nintendo PlayStation

Like Cifaldi, video game historian Carly A. Kocurek believes that “ephemera like magazines, flyers, promotional merchandise are profoundly important… A lot of my work is going through tens of thousands of pages of magazines. It’s extremely glamorous, I assure you.” Kocurek is an associate professor of digital humanities and media studies at Illinois Tech, and author of the book Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade. A key argument of the book is that the gendering of video games as a masculine pursuit was never inevitable, but was shaped by young boys’ greater access to public gaming in arcades, the association of video games with competitive male-dominated sports, and the idea that technological skill was a male attribute. I wondered if the hype surrounding the auction of the Nintendo PlayStation, itself a public game for the prize of influencing video game history, reflected the techno-masculine competitiveness discussed in Kocurek’s book. “On the one hand, I’m glad people are excited about video game history,” she continues, “on the other hand, I think about what half a million dollars would mean to any of the institutions really doing the hard work of preserving games.”

The Videogame History Foundation is one such institution. Cifaldi pointed out that the money spent on the Nintendo PlayStation amounts to a third of the VHF’s annual revenue. Fundraising is his main priority going forward. “We’ve digitised 10,000 optical disks and old press kits. By our own estimate we need two years to catalogue what we just have now.” New projects are constantly popping up. Cifaldi recently worked with the family of a programmer who had sadly passed away and left boxes of degrading floppy disks that needed urgent attention. This kind of work can involve collaboration with other games heritage institutions, like the Strong Museum of Play.

While the Nintendo PlayStation may have dominated recent video game history discourse, there is a diverse range of work going on that isn’t just concerned with the legacy of big brands. “I’m really excited by the work a lot of researchers are doing,” Kocurek elaborated. “Whitney Pow’s research on work by transgender game developers is just beautiful. Adrienne Shaw’s LGBTQ Game Archive has turned up so many fascinating things-someone should give that project half a million.” Furthermore, TreAndrea Russworm and Samantha Blackmon have recently published a piece in a special issue that edited about video game history as black feminist mixtape. Hearing her and Cifaldi cite different collaborators and researchers makes it clear that video game history can’t and shouldn’t only be the purview of a narrow group of people who can afford to buy themselves into it.

While it’s easy to put prestige pieces like the Nintendo PlayStation on a pedestal, modest personal video game histories are important. When I asked Frank Cifaldi how he felt about becoming a part of video game history himself he admitted to not having saved articles from his time as a journalist at 1UP. “I finally started a box in our archives that’s our company archives. When we’ve hand-made some swag for a little retro show I try to keep at least one or two examples.” When we make the effort to preserve something, it shows that we value it and can envision it being valued in the future.

Video game hardware and software preservation poses a host of problems in terms of proprietary software, obsolescence, media forms subject to disk rot and legal issues with emulation software. The analogue record of games culture has a key part to play in video games history because it’s actually more durable. As Kocurek elaborated, “Our hope is that we get robust study and documentation before the games decay beyond playability. But, paper is much more robust. We’ll have magazines and flyers for a long, long time, and they’re so important.”

This brings me back to those dusty magazines I mentioned earlier. They’re important as a source on gaming in the mid-00s. They’re also a memento on how I felt about games as a 13-year-old. Austin Walker, co-founder of Waypoint and Friends at the Table, wrote a piece for ROMChip called “The History of Games Could Be a History of What Play Felt Like.” He argues that blogs, let’s plays and guides are key for capturing what play actually means to people, which is a crucial aspect of their history. After all, a game can have very different connotations in different contexts, as Carly explained to me: “Children playing in grade school chess tournaments in 1997, for example, are having a very different experience and doing something quite different from the experience Margaret of Anjou [Queen of England in the 15th century] had playing chess.”

I was intrigued that I had a very similar experience to Kocurek growing up with video games. In the introduction to Coin-Operated Americans, she laments how once she reached adolescence she no longer felt as comfortable gaming. As a teen when I considered myself a young woman (I’ve since come out as non-binary), I turned my back on games and the publications that made jokes about “our ideal girl.” My game magazine collection stops in 2006 because I stopped playing. If the Nintendo PlayStation points to an alternate history in which Nintendo and Sony weren’t competitors, then my collection of Official Nintendo Magazine represents an alternate personal history of gaming.

Video game history is about stories. As Frank Cifaldi says of the Videogame History Foundation, “I run a charity whose sole purpose is to make sure that people who want to tell the story of video games have access to the tools and materials that they would need to do that.” Researching video games has been my way of writing myself back into their history. You don’t need to be a white middle class cis man to have your turn. If you play games, if you make them, if you like watching them or discussing them, you’re a part of their history. Who gets to write video game history? We do.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/03/who-gets-to-write-video-game-history-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=who-gets-to-write-video-game-history-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[detectivefiles2019]

Twitter Questions and Answers #WritingCommunity

Twitter Interview with the Writing Community

Greetings. Happy Saturday to everyone in the #WritingCommunity. This past week I asked a series of questions on Twitter and got varying answers to the questions. Here some of your answers will appear on here. Hope you have had a great start to the weekend so far. All responses from Twitter.

Question 1 for my post this weekend. What inspired you to become a writer?

From Tiffany Elliot When a student teacher in my 5th grade read my essay out loud to the class, then praised it as the best afterwards. It was a weekend assignment, so I was really nervous.

From BubbleyBrain  I enjoy writing. Did some fan fiction, was fun. People made fan art for me based on it. Thought to do it professionally and was a horrible mistake and I wasted years of my life even trying.

Question 2. What is yoru favorite genre or subjects to write about? Answers below too.

From Amanda Johnston-Creepy Word Witch  The Sci-Fi element creeping into my Fantasy books was brain-twisting, but it was a lot of fun to have to sit down and map out what exactly was happening to who, and when it was happening, and when it WASN'T happening...lol

From DB Carter- I like to write Drama and Romance

From Hardstyle Meets Headphones  Epic sword fights based on 15th century German martial arts  Evidently trauma (childhood trauma, traumatic experience, the aftermaths)  Sex - including discussions on foodplay and cruise lounge etiquette

Question 3 for my post this weekend. Which writer had the most or greatest influence on you?

From Jenn Sackleh  Although I’ve loved many authors and many books, I suppose Stephen King, because my mother use to read all of his books out loud to our family during my youth

From Diana Schooling  Lucy Maud Montgomery. Few writers can make the characters seem very real. Better than classics like Wuthering Heights, etc. She continues to be my writing hero, a goal tantalizingly just out of reach. Steven Moffat (Dr Who; Coupling) does that, too.

Question 4 for my post this weekend. What is your philosphy in life? Answers below

From Amanda Crozier Author   Take each day as it comes and don't worry about what is to come - it may never come and you will have worried for nothing.

From Jessey the Re-animator of Things   Always learn. Keep doing what you love. And above everything else, do the things to prove your self-doubt and other people wrong

From Dave Evans   If you can’t find a door make one, always try to leave a door open on friendships, treat people as they treat you, try not to judge empahsis on try and be thankful for what I have

Question 5 for my upcoming post on my blog. What do you think the biggest issue is facing humanity today (can be political or non politicial)? Answers below

From BubbleyBrain  Too much power and wealth in the hands of an elite few people and corporations.

From Holly Tinsley  Lack of trust/reliability in information sources both online and via spoken word. There's probably lots but hope that helps!

Question 6. For my post #WritingCommunity#WritingCommunity. If there was one thing that was going on in the world today that I could change what would it be?

From Kacey Kells  Climate change... because it threatens every form of life. Hence,  other issues come necessarily AFTER this one.

From Rebecca MacCeile  The current political circus in the US. It’s bad abroad too, but right now the US is just an embarrassment.

From The Adventures of Cardigan  Racism. We all bleed the same blood.

Question 7 for my blog post this weekend. Which of the fine arts (music, literature, art, etc) was your favorite to study in school?

From Maria Elena Martinez  Literature. I have a degree in English Literature.

From Lisa Reynolds English. I would have to have studied music but it wasn't an option.

From Sherril  Fine Art major, Graphic Design minor, sparking a creatively driven career, encompassing multiple mediums~~>>Self employed by "can do" attitude, each custom request contributing skills towards what is needed for the next! Follow your passion & success is inevitable.

Question 8 for my blog post this weekend. What genre or genres do you write and why did you chose that or those? What influenced you?

From Stephen J. Wolf  Always fantasy for me, writing or reading. I need the essence of magic, the ability to create from the mind alone and have it manifest in the world around me.

From Dana Lee Burton   I mostly #write#write in #fantasy#fantasy or #scifi#scifi #adventure#adventure. I love the thought of playing around with #magic#magic, so it's fun to create plot lines revolving around a world that has it. But I've written in a variety of different genres, a good story should be told regardless

Question 9 for my blog post this weekend. If you knew you only had a week left before biting the dust what would your 'bucket' list entail?

From author carrie weston   Now I’ve had a close experience so I’ve really thought about this one. I would go away with my family and do anything and everything fun and exciting with them so they remembered happy times with me

From Andrew Pullins  Spending time with my wife and friends, trying to outline my second wip so someone could pick up and run with it, travel a bit, and have fun. And pray. A lot. It would terrify me and that would be the one of thr only things that might bring me comfort.

From J.R. Rioux  Making sure I said my good-byes, assigning heirlooms to family, and figuring out where to get myself cremated.

Question 10 for my blog this weekend. If you like pizza what is your favorite toppings?

From reneemarskiauthor  Onions and mushrooms

From J.D Caren Mushrooms and onions

From Wanda Thibodeaux  Definitely classic pepperoni

From Juliette Kings   Pepperoni and artichokes and black olives and mushrooms. And lots of cheese!!!!! But seriously, pretty much everything except big chunks of green bell pepper.

Question 11 for my blog this weekend. If you write for both kids and adults which do you find harder to write?

From JCFuller M.S.Ed  I do write both and I do find challenges in both. With adults you can have little more freedom. With kids you do have to be careful what you write.

From CinderellaMonologues  Adults

From Wanda Thibodeaux  Kids. It's hard for me to talk in their language anymore, so to speak. I have to work hard to do it.

Question 12 What in your view is the hardest part of going through the process of getting a book published?

From Elizabeth A. Wilson   Publisher rejections that come back so fast there's no way anyone even looked at the manuscript & their cold letters lacking any acknowledgement of, let alone respect for, the time & hard work that went into writing a great story they ignored. They're why I publish Indie now.

From AngieMWrites  Creating a submission packet. Published A wants these three thing. Pub B wants those three things in a different format and two others. Pub C wants completely different things.

From Bryan R. Quinn  In mainstream publishing, it would be securing a literary agent.  In India publishing, it would be finding a reputable publisher.

These are all great answers from very great writers and authors in the #WritingCommunity. Do go and check out their works. Hope you have great Saturday

[coffeelevel8-blog]

72 Hours in Seattle

Hi, it’s Abby. My mom asked me to write an introduction for this post about our last-minute trip to Seattle a few weeks ago. I was invited to play in a soccer tournament there and this one was different than most because there was only one game a day, which means there was plenty of down time to explore a city. (That is how I convinced my mom to go.)  We flew out the morning after my last final and stayed with her college roommate, Jenn for three nights and three days. Mom already told you that the culinary highlight of our trip was eating a Dutch Baby with backyard raspberries in Jenn’s kitchen nook, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t pound some pavement in search of great food around town. Here, Mom and I take turns giving you a run-down of our packed 72 hours.

DAY 1: THURSDAY

1:00 [Jenny] I am forever in search of counter-service spots when I travel, especially for lunch, when you don’t want to spend an hour-plus lounging around while the sun shines on a brand new city that is calling for you. That’s why we dropped our bags at my friend Jenn’s house (in Ballard) at 12:45, then headed straight to The Fat Hen, a sweet, bright fast-casual spot that served avocado toasts, ricotta toasts, freshly squeezed juices, and good coffee. It killed us to forgo Frankie & Jo’s, the vegan ice cream shop sensation right across the street (they have multiple locations around the city) but we were saving room for dinner. FYI: Delancey — remember Delancey? — was right there, too. [Photo credit: Seattle Magazine]

2:30  [Abby] We walked from Fat Hen down 15th Street to Ballard Avenue, the main drag in Ballard, a neighborhood that reminded me of Brooklyn. There was a ton of stuff to do and a lot of fun shopping including a cool second-hand furniture store called Ballard Consignment, an aesthetically pleasing succulent store (I can’t remember the name, can someone help me?), and a trendy clothing place called Prism where my mom tried on a thousand dresses but ended up just buying my sister an iron-on patch for her jean jacket that said “Stay Wild Child.”

4:00 [Abby] We met up with my mom’s friend Jenn, who got out of work early for us, and headed to Golden Gardens Park for a walk. It was so beautiful! I got a virgin pina colada at Miri’s, a new cafe right on the beach. Also, even though everyone says Seattle weather is not so great, look at our sky! It was like that for most of the time we were there. (Here’s a tip to future travelers: Go there in late June, early July.)

5:30 [Jenny] I think the only reason why I agreed to take Abby to Seattle was so I could try to snag a table at The Walrus and the Carpenter, the original Renee Erickson French-style raw bar in Ballard that opened almost ten years ago and that I tried to get into during my last visit, only to be turned away by the long wait every time. This time I wasn’t messing around. At the very un-glamourous hour of 5:30, I dragged Abby, Jenn, and Jenn’s 15-year-old daughter Stella to dine on fried oysters and small plates in their bright happy space. FYI: Erickson has opened a bunch of other places in Capitol Hill, including a steakhouse Bateau, another oyster bar with the greatest electric mint color scheme (Bar Melusine), and stuffed doughnut mecca General Porpoise, which, for Abby, might’ve been more of a reason to go to Seattle than her soccer tournament. (More on that below.)

7:30 After dinner, we walked back up Ballard Avenue to get ice cream at Salt & Straw, the Portland-based makers who have won over legions of fans with their artisanal concoctions…think Fresh Sheep’s Cheese and Strawberries or Oregon Wasabi and Raspberry Sorbet. But the line was too long, and even though it was still early, we were on East Coast time, so we headed home to bed. (For those of you interested, here’s an interview with Salt & Straw founder Tyler Malek on the always awesome Bon Appetit’s Foodcast.)

DAY 2: FRIDAY

10:00 [Abby] I had a soccer game in Redmond (we won 4-0!) where the most exciting food moment of the morning was a pretzel that came with that fakey nacho cheese that is so delicious. We didn’t get to start exploring again until lunchtime and decided we wanted to spend the afternoon checking out Capitol Hill. First stop…

12:30…Rocket Taco for lunch, where we ate some of the best carnitas tacos I can remember.

1:45 It was Pride Month! We loved the rainbow crosswalks which made for especially good instagram posts. (That’s me with our friend Maylie. And this was at the intersection of East Pine and 10th Ave.)

2:30 [Abby] And of course, we had to hit Elliott Bay Books. My mom bought me a paperback copy of The Handmaid’s Tale — I’ve been watching the TV show and it’s very disturbing, but she said I’d like the book. (She wants me to tell you that for school I also had to read Hiroshima and Take the Cannoli)

3:01 [Abby] Then the funniest thing happened. I had been looking forward to going to the iconic General Porpoise Doughnuts from the moment we booked our flights — we practically planned our entire Capitol Hill outing around it — but when we got there at 3:01, we tried to open the door and it was locked. It closed at 3:00! For about ten seconds we were all super disappointed but then, out of nowhere, an employee walks outside and asked “Does anyone want a dozen free doughnuts?” I guess they like everything to be fresh, so at the end of the day, they give away what hasn’t sold instead of selling them the next day. That might’ve been the highlight of the trip. And those doughnuts were some of the best I’ve ever had– the vanilla stuffed ones especially!!

4:00 [Jenny] We hadn’t planned on it, but we decided to hit Pike Place Market (because: of course!) on our way home to Ballard from Capitol Hill. We bought fruit and a lovely flower arrangement for our lovely hosts, but for the most part we just walked up and down the long hallways and gaped at the offerings. Maybe the most amazing part was that I got a parking spot on Pike Place right in the middle of everything (across from the flagship Starbucks.) I kept looking at the spot and looking at the sign saying This is too good to be true (once a New Yorker always a New Yorker, I guess) but it was actually true. Over a month later, I’m still on a high from it.

6:30 [Jenny] I know this is hard to believe, but we still had more to eat. I’ve written about this before, but the way Abby and I go about planning where we want to eat in a new city is completely different. I go to tried-and-true sources like Bon Appetit City Guides or Eater’s Heat Maps. She goes right to instagram, searches by locations, then studies the grid until a particularly inspiring pastry or bowl of ramen shows up. That is how she landed on Fremont Bowl where we went with Jenn’s family. Abby’s review: “Crazy good Japanese bowls, with fish, chicken teriyaki, and so much more. I’m not really a tofu fan, but according to my mom she had the best tofu she’d ever had in her life at this place. Fremont’s a fun area to walk around, too.” She’s totally right, the fried house-made tofu that our friend Maylie ordered was off-the-hook delicious. I was psyched because right next door was Book Larder, a store that specializes in cookbooks and community culinary events, but sadly they were closed for a private event. I guess that’s as good an excuse as any to return to Seattle in the very near future.

DAY 3: SATURDAY 9:00 [Abby] Mom, Jenn, and Jenn’s husband, Ben went for an early run around Green Lake Park (about a 3-mile loop she says) then we all gorged on Jenn’s now legendary Dutch Babies and plotted the day. Ben pointed us in the direction of the giant Asian Market Uwajimaya which was awesome (Oh, before that, Mom stopped for another cup of coffee at Anchored Ship in Ballard) but we ended up eating around the corner at at Dough Zone due to some intense soup dumpling cravings, aka the best food in the world.  It’s a good thing my next soccer game wasn’t until 4:00 that afternoon. We pretty much rolled out of there. Those dumplings were amazing.

6:00 [Abby] After my soccer game (lost 2-1) we drove to Mulkiteo and caught a ferry to Whidbey Island, about 25 miles north of Seattle across the Puget Sound, where Jenn and Ben have the sweetest cabin. The ferry was only about 25 minutes, but involved spectacular views of islands and huge mountains in the distance.

7:30 We only had about 12 hours to hang on Whidbey, but we got a good taste of it, snacking on their porch (above), chilling out by the campfire for an epic sunset; Ben grilled some local salmon and hot dogs for dinner. The house only had two bedrooms so my mom and I got to sleep in a tent listening to the crackling campfire. 

. Side Note [Jenny] Those of you who follow me on instagram might remember this photo. Jenn and Ben were torturing themselves trying to decide what color to paint the cabin — they were going for a dark Scandinavian cottage look — so I conducted an insta poll asking which combo you all liked. Most of you were in favor of the navy/white palette, the third one down. Last week, she sent me this pic:

How beautiful is that?!?!?! They went with Sherwin Williams Inkwell for the house and Benjamin Moore Oxford White for the trim.

DAY 4 SUNDAY

8:30 [Abby] We had an early afternoon plane to catch, so didn’t have a ton of time to explore, but we did manage to squeeze in a walk on the beach and a quick trip to Langley, where we ate eggs and cinnamon rolls at Useless Bay Coffee, then took a walk to a dramatic sandbar called Seawall Park. The town was so charming! From there was a convenient shuttle from Whidbey to the Seattle Airport, and we were on our way home.

Boy you fed us well, Seattle. We miss you so much!

Related: 36 Hours in Austin; 36 Hours in Portland, Maine; 48 Hours in Montreal.

Source: http://www.dinneralovestory.com/72-hours-in-seattle/

[tripstations]

Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains in Madrid

If you are a fan of Pink Floyd and happen to be in Madrid before mid-September, I’d highly recommend taking a trip out of the city centre to visit the Pink Floyd Their Mortal Remains Exhibition located in Feria de Madrid.

I first heard about the exhibition during a visit from my parents to Madrid. My dad has always been a fan of theirs. When I was younger, I generally reacted to their music as most children do to their father’s beats, with general disgust.

But as I have aged, my musical taste has expanded (my waistline is in a similar situation) and now I love a lot of their music. Some of it is still a little too weird, but on the whole, I would happily say I enjoy Pink Floyd.

On the other hand, my dad has been an avid fan of the band for over 50 years! So how would we both react to The Pink Floyd Exhibition? Is it just for the fans or can the casual observer also get a kick out of the experience?

What is the Pink Floyd Exhibition?

The exhibition is a musical journey in the form of documentary footage and personal effects from the band’s history including many rare and previously unseen items. It tells a story from the formation of the group and their weird stuff to the more melodic era and their madcap musical theatre concerts of the ’80s, right up to their reformation for the Live 8 concert in 2005.

Having seen success and received great feedback while in residence in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, it was decided to take the Pink Floyd Exhibition on tour. After leaving London, it has been to Dortmund and Rome and has now landed in Madrid. Where it heads to next is currently unknown, so you only have until 15th September 2019 to give it a visit.

The official website describes it as “an audio-visual journey through 50 years of one of the world’s most iconic rock groups, and a rare and exclusive glimpse into the world of Pink Floyd. It features many previously-unseen objects collected over the band’s eclectic history.”

It even goes a step further to include a quote from a British newspaper “almost as good as seeing the band live”.

Now, that’s some pretty lofty expectations being set right there, so how did it go?

Buying Pink Floyd Exhibition Tickets

It was a spur of the moment decision to pay a visit as my dad had seen it advertised while wandering along Gran Via the previous day. He suggested we checked it out, so I hopped online to check out the tickets.

The tickets were listed on their website at €19.90, but after the usual additional fees they throw in, the total cost ended up at €42.20.

When buying the tickets, I had to specify our arrival time that is broken down into half-hour slots. A nice touch is that the times are colour coded based on popularity, so you can try to aim for a quiet time. If you miss your slot, the website does say they will let you into the next available time, which based on how busy our visit was, shouldn’t be an issue.

Getting to the Feria de Madrid

The Feria de Madrid is a huuuuge exhibition centre, and The Pink Floyd Exhibition takes up just a tiny corner of it. While we drove there, it is also easy to reach by Metro on the pink line, number 8.

I have found this handy map that points out exactly where the exhibition is in the Feria. It would have been pretty helpful for me had noticed it before we visited, I wasted 10 minutes driving around looking for Pink Floyd Exhibition signs that didn’t exist.

If you are driving to the Feria de Madrid, there is plenty of parking (€2.25 per hour) close to the exhibition. I was able to find street side parking quite easily for free. But, it is worth noting I was visiting on a Sunday, if you are visiting mid-week, then these free spaces will probably be a lot harder to come by due to the number of offices in the area.

The Pink Floyd Exhibition

As mentioned, I am certainly not an avid fan of the band. I have a passing interest, the kind of guy that may listen to a best of album now and again. My dad, however, he has been a long time fan of the Pink Floyd, owning pretty much all of their records and also getting to see them live at their peak.

A shipping crate archway painted yellow and black like an oversized lego wasp marked the entrance. With the Madrid sun blinding us outside, we could bearly see what we were walking into.

As my eyes adjusted from the sun to the darkness of the exhibition room, I could see three staff waiting, staring at us. My eyes took just long enough to adjust to make it feel somewhat awkward.

Once my vision was restored, we handed over our tickets and the lady explained to us (in English) that we need to turn the WiFi off on our phones, which was strange, but we did as requested.

As we worked our way around the optimistically set up queue ropes, many surrealistic giant inflatables loomed over us. I later found out they were part of Pink Floyd’s The Wall tour.

As we passed into the next section, there was a small desk to pick the audio gizmo, and a different staff member to explain to us that there were no numbers, wander freely and the gizmo will connect to the correct audio as you look at a screen. Suddenly it made sense why I wasn’t allowed my WiFi on.

The exhibition began with some classic posters and press clipping before introducing us to the Pink Floyd Family tree. This graphic showed the band through their various lineups and other bands or projects that spun from group members. As my dad pointed out, it was interesting how few of them we had ever heard of.

Once we turned the corner, we were into the central part of the exhibition, which was broken down into various time frames. It has a window displays containing lots of paraphernalia relating to the band at that period.

Close to each exhibit were TV screens running various documentaries with band members and associates talking about what they were doing at the time and other stories. While I found it interesting, I did find it difficult to digest as I jumped from one screen to the other. I also found the audio sometimes struggled to connect or tuned into the wrong thing, which led to confusion, but on the whole, they were well-presented displays.

As we slowly made our way through the ’60s and ’70s, we entered a room where there was a floor to ceiling display of the band equipment with a documentary talking about how the ideas and experiments they were performing with music. Also, to the side of the room and my one of my favourite things, a mixer set to the band’s song Money where you can play around with the different instrument levels, fading and get a little experimental myself.

When I finally dragged myself away from destroying one of the band’s iconic hits, I turned the corner to see a replica of the giant wall used on one of their tours and more of the stunning inflatables. This section talks about the bands desire to do more than just concerts and how they came up with the concept of musical theatre. The Wall was the concert my dad attended, so for him; it was a trip down memory lane. For me, it was interesting to learn about how the band nearly brought Heathrow to a standstill with a giant inflatable pig! A little different to these days where it is drones you have to worry about.

Finally, there are a few more displays from their more modern work before building up to the highlight of the exhibition, the immersive experience which is “almost as good as seeing the band live”.

So was it? No, I mean I haven’t seen them live so I cannot compare, but having been introduced to the concept of musical theatre about 15 minutes earlier, this was a massive let down.

My expectation was some clips from the iconic The Wall concert, maybe a medley of there tops songs, but all it is is Comfortably Numb from Live 8 and a video of one of their early hits, Arnold Layne, about a man who pinches underwear off clotheslines.

While the volume was nice and rib vibratingly loud, and the guitar solo is pretty epic, I was expecting better for the grand finale.

Finally, as always at these kinds of things, we had to exit through the gift shop. Both my dad and I were feeling good and felt like we would buy something. He wanted a t-shirt for sure while I can always spend money. However, the prices were something else. While I understand, there is always a premium when buying souvenirs at an event, charging €30-40 for a t-shirt and €40 for the event souvenir book, needless to say, we both left empty-handed.

So did it live up to the expectations?

Well, I’m writing this one week after going, and I’m still unsure. The exhibits and information there are fantastic and look stunning, and any Pink Floyd fan or even those with a passing interest in the band will enjoy the exhibition. However, in my opinion, the way it was presented with the auto-connecting audio didn’t work as well as I think they hoped. While it is old technology now, I still feel that the old audio guide style of tapping in a number would have been a better way.

The audio presentation also means that you end up with your headphones on all the way around, taking away the feeling that it is a group activity. Again, numbered audio guides negate this as rather than a continual stream of information, you can do it in your own time.

The videos just felt like a chopped up documentary, and by the time we were halfway through, I’d given up on them thinking if I care enough, I’ll watch a full documentary about the group on another day.

However, that said, the displays were fantastic, I loved seeing all the concert inflatables, and I learnt a lot about the band. The whole of the past week I have found myself listening to Pink Floyd, the stuff I know I like and trying some of their other stuff too.

I came away with a new appreciation of the group that defied definitions while my dad certainly enjoyed his trip down memory lane. But would I say it was value for money? Not really, I think for what it is, €10 – €15 would have been a fair price, but if you have a love for the band or a dad that loves them, then you will undoubtedly enjoy it, but don’t think about the price.

Final Words

As he features quite strongly in this post, I thought I’d leave the final thoughts to the old man I call dad:

When sitting in a mates house after school in 1967 listening to Pink Floyd’s debut album Piper at the Gates of Dawn, you wouldn’t have thought that 52 years later these masters of psychedelic music would still feature in my life. But Floyd like many other bands from the period are still played regularly in my household. So when visiting my son in Madrid recently and seeing the “Experience “ advertised I had to drag my little boy along!

It’s a fascinating insight into the band covering each of the band’s albums chronologically from Piper at the Gates of Dawn to the final tribute to Richard Wight, The Endless River. You get the story of the album told by the band, producers even the album cover artists.

There’s plenty of guitars, drums, keyboards and amps to drool over as well as the larger than life recreation of LP covers. I also found the story behind the staging of The Wall fascinating as I saw the show at London’s Earls Court.

There probably isn’t anything new to learn for a Floyd devotee but having it all under one roof does mean you can indulge yourself and I hadn’t heard the story of the flying pig. The one that crash-landed in Kent after breaking away from its tether over Battersea Power Station during the photo shoot for the Animals cover.

However, one question still remains unanswered, and we’ll never know, would albums like Dark Side of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall have been made if Dave Gilmour hadn’t replaced Syd Barrett?

I also feel I must throw in that I was also disappointed with the finale if you are going to create a large screen experience let’s have more than two tracks!

The post Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains in Madrid appeared first on Tripstations.

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Darklands

Darklands may well have been the most original single CRPG of the 1990s, but its box art was planted firmly in the tacky CRPG tradition. I’m not sure that anyone in Medieval Germany really looked much like these two…

Throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s, the genres of the adventure game and the CRPG tended to blend together, in magazine columns as well as in the minds of ordinary gamers. I thus considered it an early point of order for this history project to attempt to identify the precise differences between the genres. Rather than addressing typical surface attributes — a CRPG, many a gamer has said over the years, is an adventure game where you also have to kill monsters — I tried to peek under the hood and identify what really makes the two genres tick. At bottom, I decided, the difference was one of design philosophy. The adventure game focuses on set-piece, handcrafted puzzles and other unique interactions, simulating the world that houses them only to the degree that is absolutely necessary. (This latter is especially true of the point-and-click graphic adventures that came to dominate the field after the 1980s; indeed, throughout gaming history, the trend in adventure games has been to become less rather than more ambitious in terms of simulation.) The CRPG, meanwhile, goes in much more for simulation, to a large degree replacing set-piece behaviors with systems of rules which give scope for truly emergent experiences that were never hard-coded into the design.

Another clear difference between the two genres, however, is in the scope of their fictions’ ambitions. Since the earliest days of Crowther and Woods and Scott Adams, adventure games have roamed widely across the spectrum of storytelling; Infocom alone during the 1980s hit on most of the viable modern literary genres, from the obvious (fantasy, science fiction) to the slightly less obvious (mysteries, thrillers) to the downright surprising (romance novels, social satires). CRPGs, on the other hand, have been plowing more or less the same small plot of fictional territory for decades. How many times now have groups of stalwart men and ladies set forth to conquer the evil wizard? While we do get the occasional foray into science fiction — usually awkwardly hammered into a frame of gameplay conventions more naturally suited to heroic fantasy — it’s for the most part been J.R.R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons, over and over and over again.

This seeming lack of adventurousness (excuse the pun!) among CRPG designers raises some interesting questions. Can the simulation-oriented approach only be made to work within a strictly circumscribed subset of possible virtual worlds? Or is the lack of variety in CRPGs down to a simple lack of trying? An affirmative case for the latter question might be made by Origin Systems’s two rather wonderful Worlds of Ultima games of the early 1990s, which retained the game engine from the more traditional fantasy CRPG Ultima VI but moved it into settings inspired by the classic adventure tales of Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells. Sadly, though, Origin’s customers seemed not to know what to make of Ultima games not taking place in a Renaissance Faire world, and both were dismal commercial failures — thus providing CRPG makers with a strong external motivation to stick with high fantasy, whatever the abstract limits of the applicability of the CRPG formula to fiction might be.

Our subject for today — Darklands, the only CRPG ever released by MicroProse Software — might be described as the rebuttal to the case made by the Worlds of Ultima games, in that its failings point to some of the intrinsic limits of the simulation-oriented approach. Then again, maybe not; today, perhaps even more so than when it was new, this is a game with a hardcore fan base who love it with a passion, even as other players, like the one who happens to be writing this article, see it as rather collapsing under the weight of its ambition and complexity. Whatever your final verdict on it, it’s undeniable that Darklands is overflowing with original ideas for a genre which, even by the game’s release year of 1992, had long since settled into a set of established expectations. By upending so many of them, it became one of the most intriguing CRPGs ever made.

Darklands was the brainchild of Arnold Hendrick, a veteran board-game, wargame, tabletop-RPG, and console-videogame designer who joined MicroProse in 1985, when it was still known strictly as a maker of military simulations. As the first MicroProse employee hired only for a design role — he had no programming or other technical experience whatsoever — he began to place his stamp on the company’s products immediately. It was Hendrick who first had the germ of an idea that Sid Meier, MicroProse’s star programmer/designer, turned into Pirates!, the first MicroProse game to depart notably from the company’s established formula. In addition to Pirates!, for which he continued to serve as a scenario designer and historical consultant even after turning the lead-designer reins over to Meier, Hendrick worked on other games whose feet were more firmly planted in MicroProse’s wheelhouse: titles like Gunship, Project Stealth Fighter, Red Storm Rising, M1 Tank Platoon, and Silent Service II.

“Wild” Bill Stealey, the flamboyant head of MicroProse, had no interest whatsoever in any game that wasn’t a military flight simulator. Still, he liked making money even more than he liked flying virtual aircraft, and by 1990 he wasn’t sure how much more he could grow his company if it continued to make almost nothing but military simulations and the occasional strategic wargame. Meanwhile he had Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, the latter being Sid Meier’s latest departure from military games, to look at as examples of how successful non-traditional MicroProse games could be. Not knowing enough about other game genres to know what else might be a good bet for his company, he threw the question up to his creative and technical staff: “Okay, programmers, give me what you want to do, and tell me how much money you want to spend. We’ll find a way to sell it.”

And so Hendrick came forward with a proposal to make a CRPG called Darklands, to be set in the Germany of the 15th century, a time and place of dark forests and musty monasteries, Walpurgis Night and witch covens. It could become, Hendrick said, the first of a whole new series of historical CRPGs that, even as they provided MicroProse with an entrée into one of the most popular genres out there, would also leverage their reputation for making games with roots in the real world.

The typical CRPG, then as now, took place in a version of Medieval times that had only ever existed in the imagination of a modern person raised on Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons. It ignored how appallingly miserable and dull life was for the vast majority of people who lived through the historical reality of the Middle Ages, with its plagues, wars, filth, hard labor, and nearly universal illiteracy. Although he was a dedicated student of history, with a university degree in the field, Hendrick too was smart enough to realize that there wasn’t much of a game to be had by hewing overly close to this mundane historical reality. But what if, instead of portraying a Medieval world as his own contemporaries liked to imagine it to have been, he conjured up the world of the Middle Ages as the people who had lived in it had imagined it to be? God and his many saints would take an active role in everyday affairs, monsters and devils would roam the forests, alchemy would really work, and those suspicious-looking folks who lived in the next village really would be enacting unspeakable rituals in the name of Satan every night. “This is an era before logic or science,” Hendrick wrote, “a time when anything is possible. In short, if Medieval Germans believed something to be true, in Darklands it might actually be true.”

He wanted to incorporate an interwoven tapestry of Medieval imagination and reality into Darklands: a magic system based on Medieval theories about alchemy; a pantheon of real saints to pray to, each able to grant her own special favors; a complete, lovingly detailed map of 15th-century Germany and lands adjacent, over which you could wander at will; hundreds of little textual vignettes oozing with the flavor of the Middle Ages. To make it all go, he devised a set of systems the likes of which had never been seen in a CRPG, beginning with a real-time combat engine that let you pause it at any time to issue orders; its degree of simulation would be so deep that it would include penetration values for various weapons against various materials (thus ensuring that a vagabond with rusty knife could never, ever kill a full-fledged knight in shining armor). The character-creation system would be so detailed as to practically become a little game in itself, asking you not so much to roll up each character as live out the life story that brought her to this point: bloodline, occupations, education (such as it was for most in the Middles Ages), etc.

Character creation in Darklands is really, really complicated. And throughout the game, the spidery font superimposed on brown-sauce backgrounds will make your eyes bleed.

All told, it was one heck of a proposition for a company that had never made a CRPG before. Had Stealey been interested enough in CRPGs to realize just how unique the idea was, he might have realized as well how doubtful its commercial prospects were in a market that seemed to have little appetite for any CRPG that didn’t hew more or less slavishly to the Dungeons & Dragons archetype. But Stealey didn’t realize, and so Darklands got the green light in mid-1990. What followed was a tortuous odyssey; it became the most protracted and expensive development project MicroProse had ever funded.

We’ve seen in some of my other recent articles how companies like Sierra and Origin, taking stocking of escalating complexity in gameplay and audiovisuals and their inevitable companion of escalating budgets, began to systematize the process of game development around this time. And we’ve at least glimpsed as well how such systematization could be a double-edged sword, leading to creatively unsatisfied team members and final products with something of a cookie-cutter feel.

MicroProse, suffice to say, didn’t go that route. Stealey took a hands-off approach to all projects apart from his beloved flight simulators, allowing his people to freelance their way through them. For all the drawbacks of rigid hierarchies and strict methodologies, the Darklands project could have used an injection of exactly those things. It was plagued by poor communication and outright confusion from beginning to end, as Arnold Hendrick and his colleagues improvised like mad in the process of making a game that was like nothing any of them had ever tried to make before.

Hendrick today forthrightly acknowledges that his own performance as project leader was “terrible.” Too often, the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing. An example cited by Hendrik involves Jim Synoski, the team’s first and most important programmer. For some months at the beginning of the project, he believed he was making essentially a real-time fighting game; while that was in fact some of what Darklands was about, it was far from the sum total of the experience. Once made aware at last that his combat code would need to interact with many other modules, he managed to hack the whole mess together, but it certainly wasn’t pretty. It seems there wasn’t so much as a design document for the team to work from — just a bunch of ideas in Hendrick’s head, imperfectly conveyed to everyone else.

The first advertisement for Darklands appeared in the March 1991 issue of Computer Gaming World. The actual product wouldn’t materialize until eighteen months later.

It’s small wonder, then, that Darklands went so awesomely over time and over budget; the fact that MicroProse never cancelled it likely owes as much to the sunk-cost fallacy as anything else. Hendrick claims that the game cost as much as $3 million to make in the end — a flabbergasting number that, if correct, would easily give it the crown of most expensive computer game ever made at the time of its release. Indeed, even a $2 million price tag, the figure typically cited by Stealey, would also qualify it for that honor. (By way of perspective, consider that Origin Systems’s epic CRPG Ultima VII shipped the same year as Darklands with an estimated price tag of $1 million.)

All of this was happening at the worst possible time for MicroProse. Another of Stealey’s efforts to expand the company’s market share had been an ill-advised standup-arcade version of F-15 Strike Eagle, MicroProse’s first big hit. The result, full of expensive state-of-the-art graphics hardware, was far too complex for the quarter-eater market; it flopped dismally, costing MicroProse a bundle. Even as that investment was going up in smoke, Stealey, acting again purely on the basis of his creative staff’s fondest wishes, agreed to challenge the likes of Sierra by making a line of point-and-click graphic adventures. Those products too would go dramatically over time and over budget.

Stealey tried to finance these latest products by floating an initial public offering in October of 1991. By June of 1992, on the heels of an announcement that not just Darklands but three other major releases as well would not be released that quarter — more fruit of Stealey’s laissez-faire philosophy of game development — the stock tumbled to almost 25 percent below its initial price. A stench of doom was beginning to surround the company, despite such recent successes as Civilization.

Games, like most creative productions, generally mirror the circumstances of their creation. This fact doesn’t bode well for Darklands, a project which started in chaos and ended, two years later, in a panicked save-the-company scramble.

Pirates!

Darklands

If you squint hard enough at Darklands, you can see its roots in Pirates!, the first classic Arnold Hendrick helped to create at MicroProse. As in that game, Darklands juxtaposes menu-driven in-town activities, written in an embodied narrative style, with more free-form wanderings over the territories that lie between the towns. But, in place of the straightforward menu of six choices in Pirates!, your time in the towns of Darklands becomes a veritable maze of twisty little passages; you start the game in an inn, but from there can visit a side street or a main street, which in turn can lead you to the wharves or the market, dark alleys or a park, all with yet more things to see and do. Because all of these options are constantly looping back upon one another — it’s seldom clear if the side street from this menu is the same side street you just visited from that other menu — just trying to buy some gear for your party can be a baffling undertaking for the beginner.

Thus, in spite of the superficial interface similarities, we see two radically opposing approaches to game design in Pirates! and Darklands. The older game emphasizes simplicity and accessibility, being only as complex as it needs to be to support the fictional experience it wants to deliver. But Darklands, for its part, piles on layer after layer of baroque detail with gleeful abandon. One might say that here the complexity is the challenge; learning to play the entirety of Darklands at all requires at least as much time and effort as getting really, truly good at a game like Pirates!.

The design dialog we see taking place here has been with us for a long time. Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, the co-creators of the first incarnation of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, parted ways not long afterward thanks largely to a philosophical disagreement about how their creation should evolve. Arneson saw the game as a fairly minimalist framework to enable a shared storytelling session, while Gygax saw it as something more akin to the complex wargames on which he’d cut his teeth. Gygax, who would go on to write hundreds of pages of fiddly rules for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, his magnum opus, was happily cataloging and quantifying every variant of pole arm used in Medieval times when an exasperated Arneson finally lost his cool: “It’s a pointy thing on the end of a stick!” Your appreciation for Darklands must hinge on whether you are a Gary Gygax or a Dave Arneson in spirit. I know to which camp I belong; while there is a subset of gamers who truly enjoy Darkland‘s type of complexity — and more power to them for it — I must confess that I’m not among them.

In an interview conducted many years after the release of Darklands, Arnold Hendrick himself put his finger on what I consider to be its core problem: “Back then, game systems were often overly complicated, and attention to gameplay was often woefully lacking. These days, there’s a much better balance between gameplay and the human psychology of game players and the game systems underlying that gameplay.” Simply put, there are an awful lot of ideas in Darklands which foster complexity, but don’t foster what ought to be the ultimate arbitrator in game design: Fun. Modern designers often talk about an elusive sense of “flow” — a sense by the player that all of a game’s parts merge into a harmonious whole which makes playing for hours on end all too tempting. For this player at least, Darklands is the polar opposite of this ideal. Not only is it about as off-putting a game as I’ve ever seen at initial startup, but it continues always, even after a certain understanding has become to dawn, to be a game of disparate parts: a character-generation game, a combat game, a Choose Your Own Adventure-style narrative, a game of alchemical crafting. There are enough original ideas here for ten games, but it never becomes clear why they absolutely, positively all need to be in this one. Darklands, in other words, is kind of a muddle.

Your motivation for adventuring in Medieval Germany in the first place is one of Darklands‘s original ideas in CRPG design. Drawing once again comparisons to Pirates!, Darklands dispenses with any sort of overarching plot as a motivating force. Instead, like your intrepid corsair of the earlier game, your party of four has decided simply “to bring everlasting honor and glory to your names.” If you play for long enough, something of a larger plot will eventually begin to emerge, involving a Satan-worshiping cult and a citadel dedicated to the demon Baphomet, but even after rooting out the cult and destroying the citadel the game doesn’t end.

In place of an overarching plot, Darklands relies on incidents and anecdotes, from a wandering knight challenging you to a dual to a sinkhole that swallows up half your party. While these are the products of a human writer (presumably Arnold Hendrick for the most part), their placements in the world are randomized. To improve your party’s reputation and earn money, you undertake a variety of quests of the “take item A to person B” or “go kill monster C” variety. All of this too is procedurally generated. Indeed, you begin a new game of Darklands by choosing the menu option “Create a New World.” Although the geography of Medieval Germany won’t change from game to game, most of what you’ll find in and around the towns is unique to your particular created world. It all adds up to a game that could literally, as MicroProse’s marketers didn’t hesitate to declare, go on forever.

But, as all too commonly happens with these things, it’s a little less compelling in practice than it sounds in theory. I’ve gone on record a number of times now with my practical objections to generative narratives. Darklands too often falls prey to the problems that are so typical of the approach. The quests you pick up, lacking as they do any larger relationship to a plot or to the world, are the very definition of FedEx quests, bereft of any interest beyond the reputation and money they earn for you. And, while it can sometimes surprise you with an unexpectedly appropriate and evocative textual vignette, the game more commonly hews to the predictable here as well. Worse, it has a dismaying tendency to show you the same multiple-choice vignettes again and again, pulling you right out of the fiction.

And yet the vignettes are actually the most narratively interesting parts of the game; it will be some time before you begin to see them at all. As in so many other vintage CRPGs, the bulk of your time at the beginning of Darklands is spent doing boring things in the name of earning the right to eventually do less boring things. In this case, you’ll likely have to spend several hours roaming the vacant back streets of whatever town you happen to begin in, seeking out and killing anonymous bands of robbers, just to build up your party enough to leave the starting town.

The open-ended structure works for Pirates! because that game dispenses with this puritanical philosophy of design. It manages to be great fun from the first instant by keeping the pace fast and the details minimal, even as it puts a definite time limit on your career, thus tempting you to play again and again in order to improve on your best final score. Darklands, by contrast, doesn’t necessarily end even when your party is too old to adventure anymore (aging becomes a factor after about age thirty); you can just make new characters and continue where the old ones left off, in the same world with the same equipment, quests, and reputation. Darklands, then, ends only when you get tired of it. Just when that exact point arrives will doubtless differ markedly from player to player, but it’s guaranteed to be anticlimactic.

The ostensible point of Darklands‘s enormously complex systems of character creation, alchemy, religion, and combat is to evoke its chosen time and place as richly as possible. One might even say the same about its lack of an overarching epic plot; such a thing doesn’t exist in the books of history and legend to which the game is so determined to be so faithful. Yet I can’t help but feel that this approach — that of trying to convey the sense of a time and place through sheer detail — is fundamentally misguided. Michael Bate, a designer of several games for Accolade during the 1980s, coined the term “aesthetic simulations” for historical games that try to capture the spirit of their subject matter rather than every piddling detail. Pirates! is, yet again, a fine example of this approach, as is the graceful, period-infused but not period-heavy-handed writing of the 1992 adventure game The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.

The writing in Darklands falls somewhat below that standard. It isn’t terrible, but it is a bit graceless, trying to make up for in concrete detail what it isn’t quite able to conjure in atmosphere. So, we get money that is laboriously explicated in terms of individual pfenniges, groschen, and florins, times of day described in terms that a Medieval monk would understand (Matins, Latins, Prime, etc.), and lots of off-putting-to-native-English-speakers German names, but little real sense of being in Medieval Germany.

Graphically as well, the game is… challenged. Having devoted most of their development efforts to 3D vehicular simulators during the 1980s, MicroProse’s art department plainly struggled to adapt to the demands of other genres. Even an unimpeachable classic like Sid Meier’s Civilization achieves its classic status despite rather than because of its art; visually, it’s a little garish compared to what other studios were putting out by this time. But Darklands is much more of a visual disaster, a conflicting mishmash of styles that sometimes manage to look okay in isolation, such as in the watercolor-style backgrounds to many of the textual vignettes. Just as often, though, it verges on the hideous; the opening movie is so absurdly amateurish that, according to industry legend, some people actually returned the game after seeing it, thinking they must have gotten a defective disk or had an incompatible video card.

One of Darklands‘s more evocative vignettes, with one of its better illustrations as a backdrop. Unfortunately, you’re likely to see this same vignette and illustration several times, with a decided sense of diminishing returns.

But undoubtedly the game’s biggest single problem, at the time of its release and to some extent still today, was all of the bugs. Even by the standards of an industry at large which was clearly struggling to come to terms with the process of making far more elaborate games than had been seen in the previous decade, Darklands stood out upon its belated release in August of 1992 for its woefully under-baked state. Whether this was despite or because of its extended development cycle remains a question for debate. What isn’t debatable, however, is that it was literally impossible to complete Darklands in its initial released state, and that, even more damningly, a financially pressured MicroProse knew this and released it anyway. To their credit, the Darklands team kept trying to fix the game after its release, with patch after patch to its rickety code base. The patches eventually numbered at least nine in all, a huge quantity for long-suffering gamers to acquire at a time when they could only be distributed on physical floppy disks or via pricey commercial online services like CompuServe. After about a year, the team managed to get the game into a state where it only occasionally did flaky things, although even today it remains far from completely bug-free.

By the time the game reached this reasonably stable state, however, the damage had been done. It sold fairly well in its first month or two, but then came a slew of negative reviews and an avalanche of returns that actually exceeded new sales for some time; Darklands thus managed the neat trick of continuing to be a drain on MicroProse’s precarious day-to-day finances even after it had finally been released. Hendrick had once imagined a whole line of similar historical CRPGs; needless to say, that didn’t happen.

Combined with the only slightly less disastrous failure of the new point-and-click graphic-adventure line, Darklands was directly responsible for the end of MicroProse as an independent entity. In December of 1993, with the company’s stock now at well under half of its IPO price and the creditors clamoring, a venture-capital firm arranged a deal whereby MicroProse was acquired by Spectrum Holobyte, known virtually exclusively for a truly odd pairing of products: the home-computer version of the casual game Tetris and the ultra-hardcore flight simulator Falcon. The topsy-turvy world of corporate finance being what it was, this happened despite the fact that MicroProse’s total annual sales were still several times that of Spectrum Holobyte.

Stealey, finding life unpleasant in a merged company where he was no longer top dog, quit six months later. His evaluation of the reasons for MicroProse’s collapse was incisive enough in its fashion:

You have to be known for something. We were known for two things [military simulators and grand-strategy games], but we tried to do more. I think that was a big mistake. I should have been smarter than that. I should have stuck with what we were good at.

I’ve been pretty hard on Darklands in this article, a stance for which I don’t quite feel a need to apologize; I consider it a part of my duty as your humble scribe to call ’em like I see ’em. Yet there is far more to Darklands‘s legacy than a disappointing game which bankrupted a company. Given how rare its spirit of innovation has been in CRPG design, plenty of players in the years since its commercial vanishing performance have been willing to cut it a lot of slack, to work hard to enjoy it on its own terms. For reasons I’ve described at some length now, I can’t manage to join this group, but neither can I begrudge them their passion.

But then, Darklands has been polarizing its players from the very beginning. Shortly after the game’s release, Scorpia, Computer Gaming World magazine’s famously opinionated adventure-game columnist, wrote a notably harsh review of it, concluding that it “might have been one of the great ones” but instead “turns out to be a game more to be avoided than anything else.” Johnny L. Wilson, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, was so bothered by her verdict that he took the unusual step of publishing a sidebar response of his own. It became something of a template for future Darklands apologies by acknowledging the game’s obvious flaws yet insisting that its sheer uniqueness nevertheless made it worthwhile. (“The game is as repetitive as Scorpia and some of the game’s online critics have noted. One comes across some of the same encounters over and over. Yet only occasionally did I find this disconcerting.”) He noted as well that he personally hadn’t seen many of the bugs and random crashes which Scorpia had described in her review. Perhaps, he mused, his computer was just an “immaculate contraption” — or perhaps Scorpia’s was the opposite. In response to the sidebar, Wilson was castigated by his magazine’s readership, who apparently agreed with Scorpia much more than with him and considered him to have undermined his own acknowledged reviewer.

The reader response wasn’t the only interesting postscript to this episode. Wilson:

Later, after 72 hours of playing around with minor quests and avoiding the main plot line of Darklands, I decided it was time to finish the game. I had seven complete system crashes in less than an hour and a half once I decided to jump in and finish the game. I didn’t really have an immaculate contraption, I just hadn’t encountered the worst crashes because I hadn’t filled my upper memory with the system-critical details of the endgame. Scorpia hadn’t overreacted to the crashes. I just hadn’t seen how bad it was because I was fooling around with the game instead of trying to win. Since most players would be trying to win, Scorpia’s review was more valid than my sidebar. Ah, well, that probably isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever done when I thought I was being fair.

This anecdote reveals what may be a deciding factor — in addition to a tolerance for complexity for its own sake — as to whether one can enjoy Darklands or not. Wilson had been willing to simply inhabit its world, while the more goal-oriented Scorpia approached it as she would any other CRPG — i.e., as a game that she wanted to win. As a rather plot-focused, goal-oriented player myself, I naturally sympathize more with her point of view.

In the end, then, the question of where the point of failure lies in Darklands is one for the individual player to answer. Is Darklands as a whole a very specific sort of failure, a good idea that just wasn’t executed as well as it might have been? Or does the failure lie with the CRPG format itself, which this game stretched beyond the breaking point? Or does the real failure lie with the game’s first players, who weren’t willing to look past the bugs and other occasional infelicities to appreciate what could have been a whole new type of CRPG? I know where I stand, but my word is hardly the final one.

Given the game’s connection to the real world and its real cultures, so unusual to the CRPG genre, perhaps the most interesting question of all raised by Darklands is that of the appropriate limits of gamefication. A decade before Darklands‘s release, the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop RPG was embroiled in a controversy engendered by God-fearing parents who feared it to be an instrument of Satanic indoctrination. In actuality, the creators of the game had been wise enough to steer well clear of any living Western belief system. (The Deities & Demigods source book did include living native-American, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese religions, which raises some troublesome questions of its own about cultural appropriation and respect, but wasn’t quite the same thing as what the angry Christian contingent was complaining about.)

It’s ironic to note that much of the content which Evangelical Christians believed to be present in Dungeons & Dragons actually is present in Darklands, including the Christian God and Satan and worshipers of both. Had Darklands become successful enough to attract the attention of the same groups who objected so strongly to Dungeons & Dragons, there would have been hell to pay. Arnold Hendrick had lived through the earlier controversy from an uncomfortably close vantage point, having been a working member of the tabletop-game industry at the time it all went down. In his designer’s notes in Darklands‘s manual, he thus went to great pains to praise the modern “vigorous, healthy, and far more spiritual [Catholic] Church whose quiet role around the globe is more altruistic and beneficial than many imagine.” Likewise, he attempted to separate modern conceptions of Satanism and witchcraft from those of Medieval times. Still, the attempt to build a wall between the Christianity of the 15th century and that of today cannot be entirely successful; at the end of the day, we are dealing with the same religion, albeit in two very different historical contexts.

Opinions vary as to whether the universe in which we live is entirely mechanistic, reduceable to the interactions of concrete, understandable, computable physical laws. But it is clear that a computer simulation of a world must be exactly such a thing. In short, a simulation leaves no room for the ineffable. And yet Darklands chooses to grapple, to an extent unrivaled by almost any other game I’m aware of, with those parts of human culture that depend upon a belief in the ineffable. By bringing Christianity into its world, it goes to a place virtually no other game has dared approach. Its vending-machine saints reduce a religion — a real, living human faith — to a game mechanic. Is this okay? Or are there areas of the human experience which ought not to be turned into banal computer code? The answer must be in the eye — and perhaps the faith — of the beholder.

Darklands‘s real-time-with-pause combat system. The interface here is something of a disaster, and the visuals too leave much to be desired, but the core idea is sound.

After my lights, Darklands is more of a collection of bold ideas than a coherent game, more of an experiment in the limits of CRPG design than a classic example of same. Still, in a genre which is so often in thrall to the tried and true, its willingness to experiment can only be applauded.

For sometimes experiments yield rich rewards, as the most obvious historical legacy of this poor-selling, obscure, bug-ridden game testifies. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, the joint CEOs of Bioware at the time that studio made the Baldur’s Gate series of CRPGs, have acknowledged lifting the real-time-with-pause combat systems in those huge-selling and much-loved games directly out of Darklands. Since the Baldur’s Gate series’s heyday around the turn of the millennium, dozens if not hundreds of other CRPGs have borrowed the same system second-hand from Bioware. Such is the way that innovation diffuses itself through the culture of game design. So, the next time you fire up a Steam-hosted extravaganza like Pillars of Eternity, know that part of the game you’re playing owes its existence to Darklands. Lumpy and imperfect though it is in so many ways, we could use more of its spirit of bold innovation today — in CRPG design and, indeed, across the entire landscape of interactive entertainment.

(Sources: the book Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay; Computer Gaming World of March 1991, February 1992, May 1992, September 1992, December 1992, January 1993, and June 1994; Commodore Magazine of September 1987; Questbusters of November 1992; Compute! of October 1993; PC Zone of September 2001; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of January 17 1992; New York Times of June 13 1993. Online sources include Matt Barton’s interview with Arnold Hendrick, Just Adventure‘s interview with Johnny L. Wilson, and Arnold Hendrick’s discussion of Darklands in the Steam forum.

Darklands is available for purchase on GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/darklands/

[kristinsimmons]

In Search of Intra-Aero-Bili-ty

By MATTHEW HOLT

Another one of my favorites, although this one is much more recent than those published so far–dating back to only March 2015. It was the written version of a talk I gave in September 2014 following the birth of my son Aero on August 26, 2014. So if we are discussing birthdays (and re-posting classics as, yes, it’s still THCB’s 15th birthday week!) we might as well have one that is literally about the confluence of a birthday and the state of health IT, health business, care for the underserved and much more!

Today is the kick-off of the vendor-fest that is HIMSS. Late last week on THCB, ONC director Karen De Salvo and Policy lead Jodi Daniel slammed the EMR vendors for putting up barriers to interoperability. Last year I had my own experience with that topic and I thought it would be timely to write it up.

I want to put this essay in the context of my day job as co-chairman of Health 2.0, where I look at and showcase new technologies in health. We have a three part definition for what we call Health 2.0. First, they must be adaptable technologies in health care, where one technology plugs into another easily using accessible APIs without a lot of rework and data moves between them. Second, we think a lot about the user experience, and over eight years we’ve been seeing tools with better and better user experiences–especially on the phone, iPad, and other screens. Finally, we think about using data to drive decisions and using data from all those devices to change and help us make decisions.

This is the Cal Pacific Medical Center up in San Francisco. The purple arrow on the left points to the door of the emergency entrance.

Cal Pacific is at the end of that big red arrow on the next photo. On that map there’s also a blue line which is my effort to add some social commentary. To the top left of that blue line in San Francisco is where the rich people live, and on the bottom right is where the poor people live. Cal Pacific is right in the middle of the rich side of town, and it’s where San Francisco’s yuppies go to have their babies. Last year, on August 26, 2014 at about 1 am to be precise, I drove into this entrance rather fast. My wife was next to me and within an hour, we were upstairs and out came Aero. He’s named Aero because his big sister was reading a book about Frankie the Frog who wanted to fly and he was very aerodynamic. So when said, “What should we call your little brother?” She said, “I want to call him Aerodynamic.” We said, “OK, if he comes out fast we’ll call him the aerodynamic flying baby.” So he’s called Aero for short.

Thus began the Quest for Intra-Aero-Bili-ty –a title I hope will grow on you. The Bili part will become obvious in a paragraph or two.

Something had changed since we had been at Cal Pacific three years earlier for the birth of Coco, our first child.

If you look carefully at the top of Amanda’s head, there’s now a computer system. Like most big provider systems, Sutter–Cal Pacific’s parent company–has installed Epic and it’s in every room or on a COW (cart on wheels). Essentially we have spent the last few years putting EMRs in all hospitals. This is the result of the $24+ billion the US taxpayer (well, the Chinese taxpayer to be more accurate) has spent since the 2010 rollout of the HITECH act.While we were there all the nurses, all the doctors, everyone, were busy putting information in the computer system. Now they weren’t universally happy. Many of them were complaining about having to use Epic, about having to fill out a lot of dropdown menus, and several times the Imprivata auto-login tool didn’t work, so they had to re-login. In fact, one nurse told me,“The problem with this hospital is we always put in the cheapest system.” I said, “I don’t think you quite understand how Epic’s pricing works.”

Anyway, after two days, the pediatrician signed us out and we went home. While the clinicians may have been moaning, I was happy because Coco, the big sister in this picture, is already in the Epic System, and I want my kids lifetime medical records available.

Coco’s pediatrician is at the Bayview Children’s Health Center, also part of Sutter, which was set up by a great, increasingly famous pediatrician called Nadine Burke, who gave a wonderful TEDMED talk last year. Nadine and her espousing of the issues raised in the ACEs study is on the jacket I often wear at conferences painted by Regina Holliday. The Children’s Health Center is in the poorer part of town and we’re one of the few families to go there who have good insurance. But because it’s part of Sutter like Cal Pacific it’s on the Epic system, and after some agitation on my part I got to see Coco’s records using the MyHealthOnline portal.

I actually get to see a good part of Coco’s records. You can see really detailed information. For example, let’s say, you were a mother who left your baby in the care of her dad on the bed when the baby had just learned to crawl. Using this system you can actually see the the radiology report from the X-Rays she had after she fell off the bed and hit her head on the floor. It doesn’t happen to have a corresponding note about what you said to the dad who’d gone back to sleep and let the baby crawl off the bed. So if you’re keen on making sure your kid’s lifetime medical information is available to them–as you should be–this is a good way to start.

So a couple of days later, we want to have that first post-pediatric visit and I call the BayView Childrens Health Center and get their answering service. I say ”Can we have an appointment?” They say, “Sorry. It’s the week before Labor Day, we’re off,” and I go, “Why are they off?” I realized, of course like the rest of San Francisco they’re all at Burning Man.

The answering service finds me another pediatrician, also in the Sutter System. We got an appointment. It’s now Friday and we visit the new office and my wife Amanda of course fills out the clipboard. We go in to meet the pediatrician and 4 day old Aero gets checked out and there’s a bit of a problem involving this machine, the spectrometer. What it does is test the baby’s bilirubin level, which is a proxy for jaundice. Most babies get jaundice, which is related to the liver taking time to start functioning. They usually get over it when they start drinking and pooping, but in rare cases, jaundice can be very, very serious. If the bilirubin level gets too high, the liver function closes down and really bad things like kernicterus or mental retardation can happen. So you want to be very careful with babies and their bilirubin level.

The spectrometer test on his forehead says 15.9. That’s not a good number. The pediatrician digs out her iPhone and tries to download an app called BiliTool. She can’t download it but I’ve got my Android phone. I get connection to the BilliTool website app and plug in the 15.9, plug in the age of the infant, and it recommends that a follow-up is required within 48 hours. Note that neither the EMR, the spectrometer nor the app talked to each other. The data created digitally in the spectrometer was hand typed into the EMR, and then hand typed again into the analysis tool. On the way out, we get given a printout of our Epic record which we’re supposed to take to the new appointment.

So we need that appointment and of course, because it’s a Friday in 48 hours it’s Sunday, and this pediatrician is closed and my regular one is at Burning Man. So what did we do? Well, the good news is that there’s a Pediatric Weekend and Evening Referral Center in San Francisco so we call to make an appointment there. On Sunday morning, we go over. There’s Amanda filling in the clipboard at the new appointment on the Sunday morning. I’m thinking it’s ok because they have the Epic System there too and they must be connected because it’s in the same building (the red arrow in the picture above) which we just checked out of four days before. But instead, after we fill out the clipboard we go into an exam room and the computer screen is somewhat suspiciously backed up against the wall.

Now the referral clinic pediatrician comes in carrying a pen and a blank piece of paper. She starts saying, “Okay. Now tell me about the kid. Why are you here. When was he born? What was his bilirubin level?” Of course we’ve left that paper printout that we were given at home. I say “Well, I’m a bit concerned because the bilirubin level was 15.9, and Amanda stops me and says, no it was 14.9.” That’s actually a big difference. We apparently can’t look it up and the whole time that computer stays against the wall, and the pediatrician is writing it down on paper.

All right. She says, “What you need to do because you don’t know the real number is to is get a blood draw. Don’t worry. Go down the street to the other facility of Cal Pacific which is just a few blocks away”. So we go down the street into this facility and I’m holding the referral slip she just gave me. I see that the lab is on the second floor. As we walk past the front desk, they said, “Do you want to register?” I said, “No, we have a referral to the lab.” We walked up to the lab. The lab of course says, “You haven’t registered.” So I then have to go back downstairs and register again. Some guy takes my name and then hands me another clipboard.

I write up the information. He gives me some stickers with barcodes on them and I get back upstairs. The baby gets his blood drawn. The tech put the stickers on the bottles and then later that night, the great news is that the pediatrician calls and says, “I got the test back. It’s back down in the 14 range. and not going up. It’s pretty good, but you need to go and see your doctor as soon as you can in next couple of days to check out the bilirubin level again.”

So we’ve had demographic data not transferring between sites, clinical data not transferring from diagnostic machines into the record, and lab tests not triggering analysis automatically. All in one provider system with the same EMR.

But overall it’s going to be fine because now we’re going to be back into the Sutter system with our regular doctor, the same one that Coco has. We’re heading over there on Weds morning (I sort of bullied them into an appointment, as they were trying to put me off for another week). On the way there, I stopped for coffee at this place called Specialty’s which has these amazing, amazing cookies. When you go there, you can run your credit card through the iPad and it will show you what you bought last time and also it will suggest what you might buy now. You order your food, it emails you a receipt and you tell it which pager you picked up and it’ll actually tell you when your food is ready and to come up to the counter–which is the first time a Specialty’s employee needs to talk to you, to hand you the bag. All that for a $3 cookie and a $4 cup of coffee. By the way the cookies are worth the $3, even if they are creating more work for cardiologists in the future.

But we’re not that close to this customer service nirvana in health care. We next get to the Bayview Childrens’ Health Center, which is part of Sutter Health (and where Nadine Burke’s new Center for Youth Wellness is). We go upstairs and as it’s Aero’s first visit, Amanda fills in yet another clipboard. Then we go down the hall to the exam room and I took a good look at the computer. If you get right up close at that top left red arrow, it doesn’t say Epic, it says NextGen. On the bottom right arrow, it says South of Market Healthcare. Now I’m a little bit suspicious about this. Where are those records from the rest of Sutter? Well none of the data from Epic from that recent activity is in this NextGen System because the clinic was not off at Burning Man, they were taking a week off to move. It’s no longer part of the Sutter system, it’s now affiliated with a Federally Qualified Health Care Center called the South Market Health Care.

Aero has been discharged from inpatient, had two outpatient visits, and the spectrometer tests and a lab test. This information is on a random printout and in his parents’ head. So I get out Aero’s Epic printout and I literally held it up to the screen and took a photo. That’s the state of the art in Intr-Aero-Bili-Ty.

But of course, Aero still needs his bilirubin taken. He gets his test taken using the spectrometer and the good news is that it’s heading down below 12 and he’s getting better.

But then it has to be put in the machine. And now we see the actual real user experience.

The nurse having taken the test tired in vain to get the pointing part of the cursor placed in the correct part of the screen. She has to fill that data in manually because the spectrometer doesn’t talk to the record. Eventually she was able to click it in there but only just and it took her a long while.

So in terms of usability and the user interface, we’re not quite there yet. But this is state of play, almost state of the art in 2014, eight years after we started doing Health 2.0.

Now, our doctor comes in. Dr. Zea Malawa, who is a wonderful pediatrician, dedicated to her patients in one of the poorest parts of the Bay Area. She of course has learned Epic and she’s complaining about having to move to NextGen–in fact she was the only clinician I met who said she liked Epic!

Like her nurse she was having trouble with the mouse. I said, ���Sometimes you can put it on your skin, it works better there.” Don’t forget as a nation, we spent about $500,000 putting her through residency and we spent $24 billion putting in electronic medical records. And the result is that a brilliant young pediatrician is holding the mouse on her hand to try and make her data entry work.

But of course, this change didn’t happen in a vacuum. Then I said to Dr Malawa, “Why did you move?” “Well, we’re in the Sutter System but we’re a very badly off clinic. Most of our patients have Medi-Cal and we don’t receive a lot of money. It’s a better deal for the organization because if we’re in the Federally Qualified Health Center, we get Federal funding as oppose to Sutter having to subsidize us”. I said, “But I thought Sutter was a big rich system which was interested in subsidizing care for the poor.” She said, “Well you know, I think they’ve already got their deal.”

Then I remembered this hole in the ground that I took a photo of which happened to be next to one of Amanda’s ultrasound appointments. This hole is going to be become the new Cathedral Hill Cal Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. There was a big political battle about getting this new building approved and Sutter made a lot of promises about things it was doing for the disadvantaged areas of San Francisco in return for permission to build the new hospital. There were questions about to whether those commitments were going to be kept. Now they’ve got the deal through and perhaps because of that the BayView’s Children’s Health Center had to move. At Health 2.0 we ask, “how are we covering the underserved and are we doing it with the same systems?” Honestly, in terms of computer systems right now, we’re not.

Aero and Coco now have records in two separate but equal computer systems, and as far as I can tell not only do they not talk to each other, but there is no way I as the patient can see into the NextGen system.

So, what’s my conclusion? We talk a lot about data coming from the data utility layer and the health interface layer with all its devices creating more data. I can really taste it. Every year at Health 2.0 and of course in my day-to-day life at work, I see so much health technology that should make these problems obsolete

But when I see it from the point of view of patient, we’re just not there yet. It was only in 2015 that Sutter added the ability to download (rather than just view) Coco’s record. And we’re not even to the point where there is a Blue Button in Coco’s record as a symbol that it can be easily downloaded. Kaiser, the VA and many other systems have rolled it out and there you can not only view the record but download it and put it into other applications.

But many are not there yet and I don’t know when Aero’s record at the BayView Child Health Center is going to be downloadable. So right now I can’t download or even see the the record in which all his well baby visits and immunizations are actually being recorded. I know it’s a thankless task but all of us need to be pushing for that data availability.

Because in that one patient’s case Intra-Aero-Bili-ty is pretty damn important.

In Search of Intra-Aero-Bili-ty published first on https://wittooth.tumblr.com/