#that's how ubiquitous time war was for a minute. that i fully had it on the same level in my mind as richard siken poetry

[essektheylyss]

I'm not gonna lie, the Trigun-Time War developments are so funny to me because I'm just like, "what do you mean everyone and their mom who existed on the internet in 2020 (aka the entire world) hasn't read This Is How You Lose The Time War."

[thebuffbengali]

ᴛᴇɴ sᴛʀᴀɴɢᴇ ᴇxᴏᴘʟᴀɴᴇᴛs

The oddity of multitudinous exoplanets have left astronomers baffled ever since they were discovered. In the unquenchable thirst for discovering extraterrestrial life, many of these recently discovered exoplanets, unique in their own esses, are being studied and savvied. Some have been found to be residing in their parent stars' "habitable" (the reason for it being betwixt inverted commas is lucid and very obvious) zones, some in close proximity to their stars, some orbiting their stars, some hot, some cold, some so bizarre, having characteristics and properties so flummoxing that the probabilities and very chances of their existences are questioned and doubted.

The Hubble telescope is always looking for exoplanets to be newly discovered in the vastness of space. The exemplification of it can be nebulously analogous to the odyssey of a deep-sea diver in a diving bell set out to find diminutive, ephemeral and rare mineral crystals in the Earth's oceans. Now, of course, we know that space is immeasurably colossal to be equated or analogized with the oceans but this is just to make someone picture it in his mind how vast our Universe is and how Herculean and labyrinthine it is to discover exoplanets!

Here are ten of some of the weirdest exoplanets ever discovered.

1). The exoplanet named TrES-2b, located approximately 750 l.yrs from our solar system, is officially the darkest planet ever discovered. This abstruse and menacing planet reflects less than 1% of all the light that hits it, making it significantly darker than the majority of known exoplanets. The ominously dark surface can be partially explained by the aerospheric light-absorbent gases that make up the bulk of the planet. Although astronomers aren't fully enlightened about why it is so abberantly dark, there is another eerily confounding fact about this gnomic planet laid bare and unfolded among the myriads of mysteries our universe bears. This sinister-looking sphere of gas also glows a molten red colour as if it's an incandescent ball of coal alight, peregrinating through the fabric of space. This is because the surface temperature of this planet is an inexorably pitiless 1,100°C!

2). This planet is anything but dark, the exact antithesis of the latter - a luminescently sparkling realm just like an astronomically enormous ball of diamond because it is made of diamond! This planet, named 55 Cancri E, is about twice the size of Earth and a third of it is made of solid diamond. It is very carbon-heavy and it is so dense that all the carbon is in the form of diamond. But don't get too overwhelmed and exhilarated because the shimmering exoplanet is a spectacular 40 light years away from us! With our still-developing advancements in science and infinitesimally insubstantial, microcosmic efflorescence in space exploration delimiting us, traversing such a mind-crushing distance is ludicrously beyond us and this makes Cancri stark inaccessible contemporarily. But, even it we were able to reach this diamond elysium and reach home with an influx of even a minute fraction of the diamond crystals there, the ubiquitousness and overabundance of diamonds will be so immanent globally that this would lead to the value of diamonds plummeting exponentially due to the lack of rarity and proliferation in its supply to surfeit! An avalanche of diamonds procurable like nitrogen would not be that much of an euphoria then! So this sublime realm is best admired from afar.

3). Now this exoplanet seems to defy what you have come across in your chemistry textbooks, looks bewilderingly inscrutable when observed and confusticatingly paradoxical, a pulchritudinous world commingling and coalescing two polarities in synchronous accord. This planet, named Gliese 436b, is a ginormous ball of ice on fire - a planet no one would be convinced about when heard of for the first time and would probably laugh it off as some fictional, chimerical realm from Star Wars or Thor or a jejune joke until they are nonplussed and taken aback by reality! The icy surface of the planet is constantly burning at an eldritch 439°C!! So how can this ever be possible that solid ice is perfectly existing unmelted with fire at such a temperature way above its melting point? Astronomers have an explanation for this thankfully. Well, the planet's gravitational attraction is so extremely leviathan that it pulls the melted ice water towards its core, compressing it into a solid form and precluding it from ever evaporating no matter how much it burns!

4). Next time you complain about the weather here on earth, just stop for a moment and be thankful to God that you don't live on the planet HD 189773b, where it unremittingly rains glass sideways! The atmosphere of this exoplanet is profusely full of silicon-infused or silicon-based compounds and substances, which give it its elegantly majestic, worth-panegyrising blue colour. Because of the planet's high surface temperature, these silicon-based particles condense to form solid glass which descends askew as precipitation relentlessly, manoeuvred and dynamicized by tremendously volant winds with staggering speeds of around 4000mph! Seriously! Take a moment and imagine being stranded on this planet, anticipating the worst - an excruciating death as the unforgiving and baleful, aculeate and sword-like glass precipitation perforates every flesh of your zephyr-like body, ripping and tearing it apart into shreds and smithereens! It maybe way too blood-curdling or spine-chilling to imagine but the way I described it is quite close to how it's gonna end! Horror and agony shall be finality.

5). If you think HD 189773b was hellish and unsparing, you haven't met this exoplanet named WASP-12b. This poor and unfortunate planet is being gradually ingurgitated and devoured by its parent star. It's caught up in an orbit so close to the star's punishing vortex that it has been heated up to extremely high temperatures and its mass is being engulfed up by the fireball at a very swift rate, feeding the star up into a gargantuan, blazing fusion reactor venturing in space. WASP-12b is roughly the size of Jupiter. However, it appears to be larger because the crushing temperatures of its parent star have caused it to balloon up and expand on the verge of an apocalyptic implosion! This defenceless planet, awaiting its inevitable doom on sealed fate and the epilogue of its tragic biography, loses an incredible 6 billion metric tonnes of mass every second! In fact, it's being torn apart so rapidly that it is no longer a spherical shape but an egg-like oblong shape resembling the elliptical orbits of the planets of our solar system when viewed from above.

6). This one is a very fascinating exoplanet named Gliese 581c. This planet is very special because it's being voted by the scientific community as one of the top three exoplanets likely to support alien life! And what, in the universe, titillates astronomers more than this? Although Gliese is surmised to harbour extraterrestrial life, there are many features and facts about this planet that makes it very different from our blue home. This planet orbits a red dwarf star 🔴 while the Earth orbits a main sequence star ☀️. On Gliese, if you gazed up at the horizon waiting for the star-rise, you'd get a magnificently breathtaking and literally "out-of-the-world" stupefying sight of a lustrous and flaming red glow in the sky as the red dwarf star comes into your field of view gradually and enthrals you in its alluring emergence. The sky would continue to look a deep crimson red colour throughout the day until star-set. The planet is also tidally locked i.e. it doesn't rotate on its axis, just like the moon's relationship with our Earth. One side of the planet is always facing away from its star and the other always facing towards it. The side that always faces the red dwarf is so blisteringly hot that if you were to stand there, it would melt you alive into soup and vaporize you completely! However, the opposite side of the planet, facing away from the star, is so astonishingly cold that you'd instantly freeze to death! Limiting yourself to assume that some alien life forms will be similar to those here on Earth, you must be wondering how could this violently harsh planet support life. Well, there's a narrow strip of land halfway between the hot side and the cooler side that has just the optimum temperature to support alien life. That central area has been assumed to be the exoplanet's habitable zone. Care has to be taken to make sure the living organisms do not make their way to either of the two extremes to circumvent the torment of getting roasted or frozen to cessation! In 2008, a message was sent by scientists on Earth directly at Gliese 581c and it is expected to reach the planet in 2029.

7). This planet is located in the Scorpio's constellation and known as WASP-17b. One feature that makes this planet so striking and stellar is its sheer size. It is 1.9 times the size of Jupiter, the king of the planets in our solar system. This planet is so prodigious that it is not supposed yo exist theoretically. It kind of seems to break the "laws" of how large a planet can be. For its size, it also has an extremely low density. Because of this, it fits into a very unique class of planets called "puffy planets"! These planets are very large and their densities ate very low in juxtaposition. But it's not the only thing about WASP-17b that makes it so idiosyncratic. It also has a retrograde orbit i.e. it rotates at an opposite direction to its host star.

8 ). You may remember that Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine in Star Wars had two suns. But, as is often the case, reality can be much more awe-inspiring and stupendous than science fiction or imaginative movies. A 149 light years away from us is a planet which has not one, not two, but three stars. This three-star planet, which goes by its catalogue name of HD 188753Ab, ensconces itself in a triple-star system HD 188753. If you had the capability of visiting this planet and be jubilant in surviving and coping with its conditions, you'd experience triple shadows and a sky that gives the spellbinding and captivating view of three different stars of different colours. That'd be one hell of an enrapturing varicoloured show on the horizon gladdening your photoreceptors! You'd also experience constant eclipses as its three parent stars crossed each other's paths. And of course, you'd see very unusual but one of the most intriguing sunrises and sunsets in the universe.

9). Now imagine yourself in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and the horizon seems to be the indistinguishable merging of the blue sky and the ocean. Everywhere you look, there's only water. No sign of land and you're just in between the ineludible big blue seemingly infinite in its hold. That's what it'll exactly be like if you visited GJ 1214b, about 47 light years away from our solar system. It is an exoplanet made entirely of water, the primary liquid astronomers look for in a planet before assuming it to harbour life! They have nicknamed this planet "the waterworld". The entire surface of this distant realm is one vast, continuous ocean and it remains exactly the same for miles underneath the surface until you reach the planet's core which is encrusted with a thick layer of solid ice. But this ice isn't any ordinary ice that you'd expect to find in your refrigerator! This is because this ice isn't frozen due to cold temperatures. The water surrounding the core is under such an immense amount of pressure from the water above on the surface that the water incarcerating the core is totally compressed to solid ice! This outlandish, rare and unique form of ice is known to scientists as "ICE VII".

10). Last but not the least, 470 l.ys away from us is a planet discovered by the Kepler Space Observatory. It is known as Kepler 438b. This is another peculiar planet that has not got its eccentricity from any distinct features but because it is the most Earth-like planet we've ever found! Having the highest ESI (Earth Similarity Index), this planet has an outstanding ESI value of 0.88, making is ultra rare and very special for that case! Discovered in January 2015, this planet has all the right prerequisites for having the possibility of harbouring alien life, according to the scientists. Most importantly, it is a rocky world just like Earth and its propinquity to its host star places it in the Goldilocks Zone (habitable zone). Water is essential to life. Where there is this precious liquid, there is probably life. But in order to have complex life (assuming that we consider other alien life forms to be somewhat similar to those on Earth), there is a necessity of liquid water which, most of the time, can only be present in the Goldilocks zone. So, this planet is highly likely to have liquid water and therefore life, which makes it one of the weirdest and most fascinating exoplanets we've ever discovered!

These were only ten of the strangest exoplanets we've discovered till date. God knows what's waiting for us in the future when we come across a few, among the zillions, which will be far stranger and mind-boggling for us to expect! This is space. It will never fail to leave you nonplussed and humbled, make you ponder on how many other undiscovered secrets are hiding in its grandeur, waiting for us to meet!

⚂PHOTO - Artist's depiction of two neighbouring exoplanets.

∅Written by: Shamsud Doha. /thebuffbengali [Plosker]

[postgamecontent]

Wolfenstein 3D

Original Release Date: May 5, 1992

Original Platform: MS-DOS PC

Developer/Publisher: id Software/Apogee Software

It's a rare thing, particularly in modern times, to witness a new genre of games being born. It's even rarer to know that you're witnessing something that big in the moment. One of the few times this has happened in my life is with the first-person shooter genre. I was at a friend's house and his father, a PC gamer, had recently downloaded the first episode of Wolfenstein 3D. Said father wasn't especially big on letting teenagers mess around with his computer, but he allowed me to play a few minutes of the game. I was so spell-bound by what I saw in that short period of time that I was soon begging my own father for the even more precious favor of using his computer. Unfortunately, that didn't happen terribly often.

Still, I had experienced enough of Wolfenstein 3D to know that it was something big. Something important. It seemed so incredibly immersive. So fast. Most of my experiences with computer games up that point had been simple single-screen or side-scrolling action games, adventure games, and of course, RPGs. Wolfenstein 3D was nothing like any of those. I naturally have to mention Ultima Underworld here, as it was technically a little earlier with its convincing first-person world. But by happenstance, Wolfenstein was the one I encountered first. As such, it's the one that burned itself into my memory. Perhaps part of the mythic quality it achieved in my mind is owed to the fact that I couldn't play it to my satisfaction until quite a long time after. This was going to be huge, I thought, and for once I was actually right.

As was the case for many other players, this was the game that got me started on a minor obsession with first-person shooters. Although I'm more known for my RPG appreciation than anything else these days, it's important to remember that I got my gaming debut as an arcade rat. Fast-paced score attack games like Galaga, Defender, Asteroids, and Robotron were my bread and butter, with RPGs only entering the picture after I got my Commodore 64 computer. In Wolfenstein 3D I could see some of the DNA of those games, but from a totally new angle. Pun slightly intended. As the genre became more multiplayer-focused and less arcade-like all-around, I dropped right out of the genre almost completely. I think the last first-person shooter I really enjoyed at all was Halo 3, and even that felt more like it was out of respect for the good times I had with the previous two games in the series.

The rise of first-person shooters more or less coincided with me getting my first IBM clone PC of my very own, which probably also contributed to my brief but intense affair with the genre. The golden era of BBSes, the increasing utility of modems, and the rapid advances in graphics technology proved to be a fertile ground for the genre. I hate saying that you had to be there to fully appreciate it, but I will say that having boots on the ground in that era was pretty special. It was the Wild West that preceded computers becoming ubiquitous devices in the home, and it was hard to guess just how things were going to shake out.

Wolfenstein 3D was able to take advantage of some of that. Certainly, the game's shareware model of distribution benefited greatly from the increasing popularity of BBSes, though I think it's safe to say that the reverse was also true. The next step from developer id Software would be the bigger one, bringing in ideas like modding and multiplayer modes that they either hadn't thought of adding to Wolfenstein or couldn't. But you can't get to DOOM without going through Wolfenstein 3D, and that makes it an incredibly important part of gaming history. More than that, it's also a pretty unique game by the genre's standards. Simple, to be sure, but also more complex in the way that only a trailblazer tends to be. Is it still fun today, after so much has followed in its wake? Yes, to an extent.

The game's history has been well-documented by better writers than me, so I'm just going to jump right to the game itself. You play as B.J. Blazkowicz, an American spy who has been captured by the Nazis and locked up in the jail of Castle Wolfenstein. The initial game consists of three episodes made up of around ten stages each. It was soon expanded upon with another set of three episodes known as the Nocturnal Missions. Finally, a sequel of sorts called Spear of Destiny was created by the game's retail publisher. The ultimate goal of the original set of episodes is to do no less than take down Hitler himself. Mind you, it's Hitler in a mechanized exoskeleton with quadruple chain guns for arms, but it's hard to mistake that mustache.

One of the most striking things about going back to Wolfenstein 3D is just how much its arcade roots show. While the first-person perspective was extremely immersive, just about everything else about the game screams "video game" at the top of its lungs. It makes heavy use of bright colors. B.J.'s foot speed is blazing quick. You have a score and are awarded points for kills and picking up treasures. The very act of picking up treasures causes a twangy, chirpy sound effect to play. The game even has 1-Up items, which naturally take the form of B.J.'s disembodied head in a circle. Yes, you have a limited number of lives. There are zombies, mechanical Hitlers, and even hidden stages inspired by Pac-Man, patrolled by giant colorful ghosts.

While the idea of a first-person shooter set in World War 2 having any similarities to Pac-Man seems preposterous at a glance, it's more on the nose than you would think. The level designs in Wolfenstein 3D have to make do with simpler tools compared to the games that would follow, but even what they had available was enough to make things quite challenging. The way the game was designed, levels could only take place across one vertical plane. The DOOM engine would fudge this in a believable way and Quake would completely bust it open, but at this point even the idea of a small incline simply wasn't part of the package.

Levels couldn't fold back or twist upon themselves, so the level designers relied on good old-fashioned labyrinths instead. Throw in a couple of different-colored locks and you've got all you need to keep the player running back and forth for a satisfying length of time. Indeed, if you're playing a version of the game that allows you to see the overhead map, many of the stages in Wolfenstein 3D look like they wouldn't be out of place as maps for a Pac-Man hack of some kind. B.J. is slightly more prepared to fight back against his pursuers than Pac-Man, mind you. He can pick up a few extra weapons to supplement the pistol and knife he starts with, and although his arsenal looks positively thin compared to most games in the genre, it suffices. All of the weapons use the same ammunition, and you're frankly best to use whichever one fires the fastest at all times unless you're pinched for ammo. Which you might be, depending on the difficulty level you play on.

The enemies can be very dangerous, especially since you don't get as much obvious feedback when you're being hit as you might be used to. The real challenge comes in navigating the mazes, however. They quickly become huge, and if you're trying to find every secret, collect all the treasures, kill all the enemies, and do it in as fast a time as possible, you'll have your work cut out for you. On the higher difficulty settings, where ammo is scarce and enemies are super-tough, Wolfenstein becomes a very different game. One where carefully peeking around corners and not necessarily killing everything you see is the best way to proceed at times. Where using that silly little knife you start with becomes an essential part of your strategy. While id Software wouldn't start leaning heavily into horror until after this game, there's still plenty to be afraid of in Wolfenstein 3D.

Personally, I enjoy the original three episodes of Wolfenstein 3D the best. The Nocturnal Missions are alright, while the Spear of Destiny campaign just doesn't do much for me at all. It's an interesting game to go back to and play now given just how far the genre has gotten away from its roots, and as long as you can forgive its thin set of features, it's an enjoyable bit of arcade action. It's not too hard to find a version of the game to buy, and I think Bethesda may have even put a free browser version up at some point. I played three versions in anticipation of this write-up: the PC version available through GOG.com, the PlayStation 3 port, and the now-antiquated iOS version.

I found the latter to be the most fun to play, though that will depend greatly on how well you get on with touch controls. It makes sense that it's something of an ultimate version, though. It was the last version of the game that original programmer John Carmack worked on, and I believe he did the port by himself. It includes all of the original episodes, the Nocturnal Missions, and all of Spear of Destiny. There's a handy level select, and you can access a map at any time. It's sort of cheating, but only sort of. It can actually be harder to skip to a later map than to play through from an earlier one, since you won't have access to any of the better weapons. You can only save between levels too, so that adds yet another layer of difficulty to the game, albeit one that speaks true to its arcade-inspired feel.

Wolfenstein 3D was a very surprising game. Even more surprising, however, was just how quickly its own developer would render it obsolete in so many ways. As big and important as Wolfenstein 3D was, its successor would seem so far ahead of it that you would think five years separated the two rather than just a year and a half. We'll be taking a look at DOOM in the next article in this series. I'll mostly be focusing on the first game, but I might dabble in the second one as well since that's one of my favorite games of all-time.

[the-asia-trip]

Days 8-9: Seoul, First Impressions

If I had to describe Korea (and for the purposes of this blog, I do), I'd start by listing adjectives. Clean. Ordered. Green. Not Japan.

There are traces of Japan in Korea, but that much should be obvious to anyone with a cursory understanding of East Asian history. The trains are good. People cue on escalators. There are vending machines, but not quite as ubiquitously. People are reserved, and generally, behave as though they're part of some greater order in a way that I've never seen in North America or Europe.

And yet, Korea is a wholly different country, in ways I can't quite articulate. Where Japan is a series of straight lines, Korea is a squiggle. Where Japan is rigid, Korea is loose. Where Japan is indirect, Korea is direct. It sounds inarticulate when I write it here, but just take my word for it. In many ways, it reminds me of the contrast between England and Ireland, or Germany and Austria. Those aren't entirely fair comparisons either, though. But I digress.

There are few feelings in the world like your first morning in a new country. No matter what the weather is, how you're feeling, where you are, or when you're visiting. It feels like opportunity. It's a moment in space and time that never fails to make you feel profoundly alive.

I started off the day with a brief sojourn at my hotel's breakfast buffet, access to which is included with my room. After two cups of coffee and a big plate of remarkably average eggs and bacon (two foods I've never seen gotten right in my combined time in East Asia) I got some Korean Won out of an ATM, headed to the nearest subway station, and started to get my bearings.

Like Japan, Korea's subway system runs on cash. Also like Japan, it has a pretty sophisticated Tap system, which is pretty intuitive if you already know what to expect. You get a subway card, you put it into a machine at the ticket gate to reload it, you put in the amount of cash you want to put into the card, and you're good to go.

Today's first stop, Gyeonbokgung Palace. Built in 1395, it served as the home of the kings of the Joseon Dynasty, which ruled Korea from the late 1300s until the turn of the 19th century. My photos will hopefully do it some justice, but it has the feel of the kind of place that houses a ruling family for half a millennium. Nestled within a series of walls and imposing gates, the inner halls of the palace are filled with incredibly intricate woodwork and paintings. Combine this with the mountains that Seoul is framed by, and the skyscrapers of modern South Korea easily visible over the walls of the palace, and you've got yourself a fully-fledged vibe. 

Another note, the palace offers free admission to anyone dressed in hanbok, traditional Korean garb. Needless to say, I saw dozens of people in their finest hanbok, many of them seemingly doing wedding photo-shoots.

After about an hour walking around and taking it all in, I started heading downtown. Throughout my time at the palace, I couldn't help overhearing strange orchestral music in the distance. While I have few reference points for this kind of thing, it had the sound and feel of the sort of music that plays over military parades. A few minutes later, I understood what I was hearing.

About two blocks from the palace, in Gwanghwamun Square, I found hundreds (maybe thousands) of people who had turned out for a rally against current South Korean President Moon Jae-in. The rally, organized by a "conservative civic action group," might be best described as a Make Korea Great Again rally (which was an actual sign that I saw at one point). 

On a large stage at the center of the rally, two speakers ranted about how "communism and Jesus Christ are fundamentally incompatible" (direct quote), and how President Moon's failure to work with Trump is indicative of him being a secret communist whose true loyalties lie with China.  At one point, I was handed an incomprehensible brochure in Korean, which Google translate revealed to be about how "liberals are brainwashing children into believing biological gender is a joke," and creating "50 new genders." It's always funny seeing the worst of American conservative thought recycled overseas like so many un-sold concert T-shirts. Mostly funny. A little sad.

On the whole, as you might expect, the crowd skewed very old. I did my best to look as confused as possible as I walked through, lest my presence be seen as an endorsement of whatever else was going on there. It's weird to see your country's flag being waved by scores of people in another country you've been in for less than 24 hours. Of course, I know all too well of the U.S.'s influence on the Korean peninsula over the last 70 years.

A thought experiment: imagine that the Cold War never ended. Now imagine that instead of Canada, across the U.S.’s northern border is the U.S.S.R. Now imagine that instead of Russians, Eastern Europeans, and Central Asians, the U.S.S.R. is made up of people who look just like you—some of them your not-too-distant relatives. This is the Korean experience. About an hour's drive away from where I write this is one of the world's most totalitarian regimes. That will fill some of you with anxiety, but it really shouldn't. As much as the media tries to drum up stories, things are pretty chill here. But there's still a whole generation of Koreans on both sides who lived through it all. I saw quite a few of them at that rally, I suspect.

Following what, in retrospect, was easily one of the top 10 most surreal experiences of my life so far, I wandered into the Myeong-Dong area, a famous street market. In terms of sheer foot traffic and volume of incredibly shitty knockoff clothing, it's a world-class location.

Around this time, I started getting hungry, so I hopped on the nearest city bus and made my way over to Gwangjang Market, a destination I'd been recommended with the highest praise from a close Korean friend. It did not disappoint in the slightest. With an atmosphere best described as "Blade Runner adjacent," it's the kind of location you might imagine two spies to meet, and the third fully-fledged vibe of the day following the palace and the rally. 

Following a little debate over what I was looking for, I found a seat at a noodle stand that featured a sign proudly proclaiming it had been featured on the Netflix show "Street Foods." My first non-hotel-breakfast food in Korea: a little plate of kimchi offered as an appetizer. Apparently, I actually like kimchi quite a bit. There's one pleasant surprise of the trip. Although not hugely so—I've talked here before about the intangible satisfaction of trying something at the source, so this may have been no different. For all I know, American kimchi is absolutely terrible… but I'll definitely investigate that when I get home.

After two little plates of kimchi, my meal arrived—a steaming bowl of kal-guksu, thick hand-cut noodles floating in a savory broth with seaweed and potatoes. 10/10. After a "kam-sah-ham-nee-dah" to the cooks, I wandered over to another stall and followed up lunch with a hotteok, a fried pancake filled with honey and peanuts.

With food in my stomach, I hopped on another bus across town to Gangnam, the ritzy neighborhood most of the world knows Korea for, for some afternoon people-watching. Immortalized by Psy in the wildly-popular early 10s single "Gangnam Style," like Ginza in Tokyo or Newbury Street in Boston, it's your standard Big Ritzy Neighborhood. I got a good look around, and got some more steps in to work off the kal-guksu, before heading back to my hotel for the night and falling asleep at around 9, successfully getting my first 9 hour night of sleep so far. 

That was yesterday.

Today, I got up around 9 and again took full advantage of the hotel breakfast. Along with a cup of coffee and some eggs and bacon, I had a little plate of kimchi and rice. As you might expect, this kimchi wasn't quite up to the standard of the Netflix-featured street food stand. But this wasn't terribly surprising. Still pretty good.

After breakfast, I headed over to Itaewon to the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art. Funded by Samsung's Cultural Foundation, it's one of the finest art collections in Seoul, and came at a high recommendation from my Korean friend. The museum is divided up into three galleries: the first features a collection of historical Korean art and artifacts, and the second and third feature a combination of modern works by Korean artists and their international peers, like Mark Rothko, Willem De Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Donald Judd, Sy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat and more. From the perspective of this art nerd, they've got a world-class setup. It was especially exciting to see a piece by Nam Jun Paik, one of my favorite artists of all time, a Korean native, and a certified digital-age art genius.

Next up was lunch at a nearby hole in the wall. Korea does pork cutlets, too. And they're good. They also have those restaurants where you plug your order into a vending machine and don't have to worry about interacting with a non-English-speaking local. Score.

After that, I walked around for a while before returning back to my hotel room. There's a rooftop lounge on the highest floor of my hotel, and I'm sitting in a bean bag chair here now writing this.  

Korea is not what I expected, and that's a good thing. I really didn't have too many expectations going into it. 

About ten years ago, for a few weeks, I entertained the idea of going to visit Korea with my friend. I remember the feeling I had then, quite distinctly. Looking up information about Korea, seeing how different it was, and trying to imagine what it would be like to visit. In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't go then. It's better now. 

Already, this is definitely a place I can see myself returning to. It doesn't have my heart the way that Japan does, but it's cool and futuristic and East Asian and, as I've said a few times now, a whole-ass vibe. It's like Japan, but not. So far, I really really like it. 

[chicagoindiecritics]

New Written Review from Mike Crowley on You’ll Probably Agree: ‘Ratched’ Is For The Birds

I don’t know where to begin. Do I point out how this is an insult to the source material? Do I state that this is a shameless ripoff of “Psycho?” Ryan Murphy can’t get out of his awkward high school goth phase as a creator, where he thinks that exploring the taboo is shocking. It’s not; it’s comedically obnoxious. Somewhere in heaven, Ken Kesey has stopped his bickering at Miloš Forman over his treatment of “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.” While the two men latch onto one another during one of their weekly physical encounters, the looming shadow of “Ratched” emerges from the clouds like a burning Hindenberg with mountains of glitter pouring out of the vessel. Taking his hands off Miloš, Ken turns towards his decades-long rival; at last, he utters the words, “I think I like your movie now.”

Encountering the first few minutes of “Ratched,” I asked myself in disbelief if I was watching a parody. Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan didn’t respect the source material. If they did, then they sure fooled me. If trying to take a character in a property utterly devoid of its ubiquitous source, why go this direction? Even detaching myself from my love of “Cuckoo’s Nest,” the show is still utterly unwatchable. Jumping from one cheap gory scene to the next “Ratched” is a calamity of chaos with no clear direction other than shock. There’s a message in “Ratched” that gets suffocated in its absurdity regarding how sam sex relationships and physical deformities were improperly viewed during 1947. Such meaningful material is examined with the subtlety you’d find during a session of electroshock therapy. Nothing significant is explored in these areas, just merely abused to benefit a tacky house of horrors script.

The one potential I could see in making a show about the most hated nurse in cinematic history was an account that might humanize her. Although outwardly monstrous upon first impressions when viewing Ms. Ratched in “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” Louise Fletcher’s performance was mesmerizing. What hypnotized us wasn’t her dreadfulness; it was her ambiguity. The audience could be split if Mildred Ratched was truly cold-hearted or righteous in her intentions. That sort of mysticism made our hatred for that character so alluring. In the book, Mildred is just plain evil, but that works for the page. We don’t know if she was a decent person before discovering her at the mental hospital from Ken Kesey’s book or Milos Forman’s movie. So how does this prequel treat her?

In this show, Ms. Ratched is insufferably cruel from the very start, making her no more layered than a Dick Tracey villain. When we discover why she is the way she is, it’s more of an afterthought from Ryan Murphy’s box full of cheap horrors than a meticulously plotted character study. That’s odd, considering this is supposed to be the origin of one of the most iconic villains of all time. What’s the point of an origin story if the character is essentially the same person from beginning to end? Sarah Paulson does an admirable job taking on such an iconic role with her sense of menace and vulnerability. More than halfway through the show, when we discover the meaning behind the nurse’s nihilism, it was too late for me to care. None of which is Ms. Pulson’s fault. 

She does precisely what the script demands of her. Considering that she’s one of the Executive Producers on the show, you’d think she’d recommend some more nuance with her character. When given refinement, Mildred’s backstory is overbearingly cliched with traumatic flashbacks that hardly qualify as writing a fully rounded character—watching Mildred having multiple weepy scenes when before she was as calm as calm can be felt out of character. The writers don’t know if they want us to hate Ms. Ratched or feel sorry for her as it bounces from one vast emotion to the next. 

Joining Ms. Paulson’s over the top persona is a cast of characters that could have been picked from an R rated Tim Burton circus. You have your nymphomaniac junior nurse, your older vengeful nurse, your emotionally insecure doctor, and your corrupt governor. Each scene is compiled with characters frothing at the mouth in moments of excessive rage as if their single direction given by the showrunner was “SCREAM LOUDER!” 

Amongst the shoutfest, I sympathized with Dr. Richard Hanover (Jon Jon Briones) JJB brings a comedic sense of fun and some humanity to one of the few players that’s not a genuine scumbag. To compliment Jon Jon Brione’s performance is Charlie Carver’s Huck, a physically deformed World War II vet turned nurse whose actually believable in this world. My goodness, there’s someone I emotionally latched onto? Thank God. But of course, right as I’m getting invested in his character, the story moves in an entirely different direction.

Although Ken Kesey despised Miloš Forman’s adaptation of his novel, both pieces of material were grounded in reality. They dually were a timeless commentary on the lack of proper mental healthcare in American society. “Ratched” is an exploitation of mental health so the showrunner can make his version of Alfred Hitchcock meets “Friday The 13th.” It’s neither meaningful, nor scary. As a fan of “Cuckoo’s Nest,” I don’t see why in a million years you’d make a show like this based on that material. Does the character of Nurse Ratched really sell in 2020? 

Perhaps if you’re a fan of “American Horror Story,” you’ll love “Ratched.” With the freedom Ryan Murphy has with Netflix, he’s unrestrained by censorship, which is entirely a curse. If you’re looking for a fun crazy gorefest terror show, maybe this will be up your alley. It just didn’t quite work for me, which is a shame because there are so many incredible movies and TV shows that Netflix offers. I’m just saddened that a show that isn’t on Netflix’s good list had to damage one of the movies I hold dearest to my heart. 

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[ecotone99]

[NF] Storms over Fallujah

SAND: It seems to roll and writhe like a living thing. The storm is powered by forces too huge to understand. It fills the entire northern horizon. If a giant, a truly giant Giant, had come and built a living sandcastle wall, it would look like this storm.

The air around him is nearly dead. It hangs like a thick curtain. Sounds seem deadened and the air tastes like ozone. It is the calm before the storm. Suddenly, he realizes how close this damn thing is. It moves with deceptive speed and will be on them in a moment. He dashes inside, just in time.

Now, the sound is deafening. The wind is a living thing and the teeth of the sand grind down everything they touch. There is no escape. Even inside the Marine house which is apparently air tight enough to seal in the air conditioning the dust invades. It pours in a steady stream through every micro crack in the structure. Within minutes every room in the house, with only a few exceptions, is choked with an impenetrable haze of dust. All lights dim behind a veil of earth hanging in the air.

The wind strains at every edge it can find and roars around and through everything. All the dust of the world pours into your eyes, your nose, your mouth, your whole life. The storm doesn’t seem angry, it just seems inevitable. It seems permanent. No photograph, no recording, no description can encompass the total sensory experience of this storm.

For hours it drags on. A new violent, stinging, normal that is too massive to complain about. Life begins to feel like it will always be like this, and has always been like this.

Sudden silence.

It is gone. It feels as though the entire world will be gone when he opens the door. Everything scoured away by the silica teeth of the storm.

But for better or worse, Iraq is still there, waiting for him.

SNOW: When he was a boy, the Captain hunted in the mountains. One night his uncle said it was too cold to snow. He thought at the time that it was a ridiculous thing to say. As he grew older and paid attention he saw the truth. There is a sweet spot on the thermometer that is perfect for snow.

This morning is frigid. He always rises early but tonight his sleep has been fitful and nearly worthless. He has slipped from his sleeping bag and now, in his warming layers, he stands on the roof. He peers out through the camouflage net that has been stretched across the roof to make an enemy sniper’s job more difficult.

The clouds hang heavy and thick blocking the stars. There is very little light in the city. It relies exclusively on diesel generators spread out around the neighborhoods. With Saddam gone, there is no power coming from the central distribution point. He used to placate the restive Sunni residents of Al Anbar province with extra electricity or fuel. Now the interim government in Baghdad sees no reason to part with the precious power from the nearby Tharthar Dam. It’s the Americans job to fix this.

As he gazes over the city he can see the urban glow of Camp Fallujah like a huge temporary city that dwarfs its ancient neighbor. The Americans definitely generate enough power for themselves. What a different experience those people who live on the sprawling FOB(Forward Operating Base) have of this war.

The sun, an enemy to be feared in the summer, begins to bring its welcome light and warmth to this winter’s day. Albeit behind a cover of clouds. Camp Fallujah’s glow fades as the light and warmth spread.

Suddenly, silently the snow begins. I slides from the sky in a solid heavy blanket as if the entire cloud cover decided to come to earth as a solid. The flakes are fat and moist and stick to the first thing they touch and the world is white and clean. Nearly four years of war are erased in minutes. The harsh cracks in concrete are gone in an instant. Craters fill and are obscured. Piles of rubble and debris become indistinct. Fallujah is a bride ready for her wedding. She is young and pure once again.

The snow begins to taper off until only a few flakes drift in the sky like the slowest ducklings following their mothers. Silent and cold the world holds its breath. The light continues to grow and the beauty of the morning is breathtaking.

The Captain watches the city sleep. He wonders at the dreams it has. Does this city remember peace? Was the life before this latest invasion good? Is life in any city as good as it wishes it could be?

Fallujah is ancient, as ancient as Babylon. It is the “City of Mosques” and in ancient times held Jewish schools of high repute. It has seen great battles and historic events. It is torn and broken but it has always been. Its name is not even Arabic. It derives from an ancient word for division because it took the river Euphrates and divided it into canals. It has been the site of division and strife many times. Now it sleeps under a virgin blanket of snow.

He isn’t sure how long he stands there. Thoughts and feelings overwhelm his usually keen sense of time. A sunbeam lances between the clouds, breaking the spell. The clouds are breaking up. The day is fully here. He stands a moment longer; just enough to see the broken pavement begin to reappear in the streets.

That’s it. The Fallujah he has come to know is returning. He hears a far off explosion. A burst of automatic fire follows a few seconds later. He shakes off the cobwebs of the morning and goes down to the radio room to see what this day will bring.

RAIN: The howl of turbo-charged diesel engines fills his ears. His vision is split in two by wearing the monocular night vision goggles over his left eye. The HMMWV races through the night as they follow the SEAL team vehicle as it careens through the narrow city streets. The vehicle in front of them is perfectly clear, although picked out only in shades of green. The Iraqi vehicles behind them are doing remarkably well keeping up at this breakneck pace. They have no night vision capability and are simple following a chemical light stick zip tied to the back of the Captain’s vehicle.

The Iraqis have placed complete trust in the Captain. The Captain does not trust the SEALs.

The SEAL team showed up at the Castle just as the sun was setting. They had called over the radio to the MiTT. The Captain barely had time to get the gate opened for them before they barrelled through and drew up in an open area to the south of the buildings. A person of unmarked rank exited one of the four vehicles and introduced himself as Mark. The rest of the SEALs seemed to instantly fall asleep in and on their HMMWVs. They looked like a collection highly tactical dwarves with their massive beards and collection of gear strapped to them.

“Major, we’d like to brief you on something; if we can go somewhere private.” Mark addressed himself to the new Major who had come out to greet the team.

The new Major was much enamored with his guests and began to swagger a bit and pulled at his chin as if he keenly felt the absence of his own beard. “Sure, Mark. Welcome to the Castle. Come on in.”

What came next could generously be called a brief. It was certainly brief. The SEALs had information that am HVT (high value target) was holed up in the Jolan. They were going to capture him just after midnight. The wanted Iraqi soldiers with them. Well not with them, behind them, way behind them. Could the Major provide these soldiers and also some Marines to sort of keep them out of the way. No need to brief the Iraqis on specifics. The word would leak out.

Naturally the Major agreed and naturally the Captain volunteered.

The Captain had asked for the destination and had been given a ten digit number that allowed him to find a specific house on the map. He had asked for the name of the HVT and had been shown a photograph with a man’s name under it. The Captain kept at the questioning until he had drawn out the essential pieces of the mission.

So here they were racing through the streets of Fallujah in the middle of the night. The Captain navigates on his own just out of habit. As the six vehicle patrol (4 SEAL 1 Marine and 1 Iraqi) whizzes past the building that the Captain had marked on his map he reaches for his handset. He pauses. He puts the handset back down.

The convoy stops. The captain watches in his NVG’ as infrared laser beams sweep in every direction like an invisible laser light show. He steps from the vehicle. “Crash, tell the IA (Iraqi Army) to sit tight.” he walks toward the first SEAL vehicle to find Mark. He sees two small crowds of men. One on each side of two door gate. The gate is in one of the ubiquitous high concrete walls that surrounded every house in the city. There is a loud bang and one side of the gate opens inward and both crowds of men swarms inside. The Captain walks through after them.

What happens inside is a great deal of yelling. Tactical lights from rifles begin to come on inside the rooms. The residents of the house, most of whom were sleeping on the roof, are herded into two different rooms. Men in one and women in the other. There is a great deal of crying and yelling going on. The SEAL’s terp (interpreter) is trying to make sense of things.

The Captain grabs the oldest looking man and pats him down. He cuts the zip ties on the man’s hands and leads him into the room with the women. With a male member of their family there to preserve their honor and dignity the women quiet. With one of their own supervising the women the men calm down. The Captain finds Mark and another SEAL looking at a map . “Man, I think you got the wrong house.” the Captain says.

“Yeah, fuck.” Mark shakes his head.

“Hey, the IA vehicle is right next to it. Do you want me to have them secure it before the whole neighborhood wakes up and your dude gets away?” the Captain offers.

“Yeah, fuck.” Mark nods his head.

The Captain calls Crash on the radio and describes the target house and tells him to get the IA to enter and keep everyone there.

With Mark right behind him the Captain makes his way quickly to the house indicated in the brief. When they arrive, there is a large group of people sitting in the living room of the house. Men on one side and women on the other with the Iraqi soldiers standing rather casually in the middle.

Crash steps up to the Captain, “They want to know who you are looking for.”

The Captain tells him the name. A few minutes of conversation ensue and one of the older women gets up and begins to beat one of the young men with her shoe. She yells at him and hits him until one of the other women pulls her back. The Iraqi soldiers stand looking sheepish, as if they had been the ones scolded. Crash barks rapid fire Arabic and the IA grab the young man and begin leading him outside. Mark stops them, holds up the paper with the picture on it, comparing the faces. He zip ties the young man’s hands together.

As the Captain steps into the street the sky opens up. The rain pelts down intensely, growing from a sprinkle to a shower in a heartbeat. Almost immediately the roads are fast streams of water and anyone outside is soaked. Mark stands just outside the gate of the right house watching his SEALs pile back into their vehicles. All of them wet.

“Good thing we are all amphibious.” the Captain says, attempting to bring some levity to the situation.

Mark looks at him. Water streams off his helmet and down his face. He looks a little stunned and the Captain wonders what his report of this night’s raid will sound like. He can only imagine that certain details will be omitted or even modified in the official intel report.

“Yeah, fuck.” Mark says sagely. “We’re heading back to Camp Fallujah from here.” Mark turns and walks quickly to his vehicle and moments later the four vehicles are gone, as quickly as they appeared.

“Crash, tell the IA they did a great job and they helped catch a dangerous arhabi (terrorist). Oh and what was happening with that lady?” the Captain is very curious.

Crash smiles and blinks in the pouring rain. “That was her son and she was pissed at him for hanging out with the takfiri (muslim who declares other muslims apostates, fallen from Islam) and bringing shame to their house.” Crash lets out a laugh. “Did you see her, sir? She hit him with her shoe. With her shoe, sir!” he laughs again and walks away. In many countries hitting someone with your shoe or shoeing them is the worst insult and Crash think it is the funniest.

The Captain chuckles and climbs into his vehicle. Doc is his driver tonight he looks at the Captain. “Head home now, sir?”

“Yeah, fuck.” The Captain says. The rain falls steadily and washes dirt and filth off the city and into the Euphrates. The sparse grasses will be standing tall and green tomorrow. Engorged with the bounty that falls from the heaven. The air will be crisp and clear all morning and most of the day. The water tanks on the rooftops will have another inch or two of water in them them and people will smile a little more.

On Camp Fallujah there will be one more prisoner. The well travelled dirt roads will be muddy ruts. People will slog across parking lots and along trails strewn with precious gravel in the vain attempt to control the mud. Everyone will complain about the huge amounts of mud that will be tracked into civilian contract chow halls, MWR (morale welfare and recreation) internet cafes and air conditioned mobile living quarters called cans.

Very different deployments for those people, the Captain muses. “Yeah, fuck.” His words go unheard over the roar of Stacy’s Mom carrying them home.

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[olivereliott]

Review: Harley-Davidson’s electric LiveWire

Right now, it’s hard to judge Harley-Davidson’s tactics without framing them against the stiff challenges the company is facing. If it’s not tariff wars, it’s the reality of an aging demographic. And then there’s same struggle every other manufacturer has in the USA: reaching new riders.

But in the midst of this, the Motor Company has just delivered on one of its biggest and boldest promises: launching an electric motorcycle. And the LiveWire means that Harley-Davidson is the first major OEM to release a battery-powered sports bike.

The LiveWire is unlike anything else on the market. On one hand, it’s an electric vehicle from a company that built its heritage on petrol-powered V-twins. On the other, it’s a focused and fast naked from a company that normally builds cruisers.

It seems like an eccentric move, but it’s calculated. Harley say they want to ‘build riders’ rather than ‘build motorcycles’—and the company execs see electric motorcycles as an avenue to reach new customers. And let’s not forget the rumors of some countries planning to ban petrol-powered vehicles. Any company not looking into electric power is going to be caught napping.

Harley is not betting the whole farm on the LiveWire though. It’s a halo product: the top end of a entire range of electric vehicles to be released over the next few years. (We’ve already caught a glimpse of some of the smaller concepts they’re toying with.)

So is the first Harley-Davidson electric motorcycle a hit or a miss? I traveled to the famously weird city of Portland, Oregon to find out.

Available in orange, yellow or black, the LiveWire is a striking machine in the flesh, and visually unlike anything else from the Bar and Shield. Other than a few subtle hints of the XR750 in the tank and tail lines, there’s really not much in the styling that ties it to the Street Glides that sell by the truckload in Middle America.

From the wraparound aluminum frame, to the mono-shock swing arm and aggressive stance, it’s the sort of sporty standard that many people have been waiting a really long time for Harley-Davidson to build.

Even though there’s no chunky V-twin here, the LiveWire’s designers still wanted to make the motor a focal point of the design. They’ve named it ‘Revolution,’ and finished it in silver to distinguish it from the rest of the components.

It makes 105 horsepower, and 116 Nm of torque, everywhere in the rev range. H-D claims it does the sprint to 60 mph in three seconds, 60-80 mph in 1.9 seconds, and has a top speed of 110 mph. The primary drive uses a spiral bevel gear, with a belt sending power to the back wheel.

Juice comes from a 15.5 kWh Lithium-ion battery with a five year unlimited mileage warranty. Range is quoted at 146 miles (235 km) in the city, or 95 miles (152 km) of combined stop-and-go and highway riding.

Hiding under the LiveWire’s faux gas cap are two charge ports: one for a regular wall charger, and one for DC fast charging. The regular wall charger cable is tucked away under the seat, and gives you a full charge in 12.5 hours, while DC fast charging should have the bike fully charged in an hour (those figures haven’t been verified yet).

This setup carries a hefty weight penalty though. The LiveWire sits at 549 pounds (249 kg), and one of Harley’s engineers told me that roughly seventy percent of that is the battery and motor. For the rest, H-D has used surprisingly light parts—like a modular cast aluminum frame that wraps around the battery, using it as a stressed member.

The frame’s actually constructed of multiple pieces, with a separate steering head, and left and right sections. That modular design is everywhere on the LiveWire; the subframe’s easily removable too, and all the electrical components are very neatly tucked under the ‘tank.’ So customization should be a cinch—as should adapting the LiveWire platform for different applications.

Fit and finish are impressive too. There’s not a single messy weld in sight, or a single part that looks out of place. The bodywork is all plastic, but it doesn’t look or feel dinky. All the lights are LED, and there’s hardly any visible cabling or plumbing.

There are a few bits to nitpick though. While the seat is nicely shaped, the upholstery between the rider and passenger pads (and the grab strap), is misaligned and wobbly. And even though the upholstered section just behind the ‘tank’ serves an ergonomic purpose, it reminds me too much of the leather tank covers you see on cruisers.

Up in the cockpit, all the wiring runs inside the handlebars—so the spindly wires running into the turn signals stick out like sore thumbs. The LiveWire uses the exact same switchgear design as the rest of Harley’s range, which is OK, since it works well and feels solid. But it also uses the same mirrors and grips as every other Harley, including the ubiquitous Sportster—and I’m not sure I’m cool with that.

Minor gripes aside, the LiveWire is an attractive motorcycle, electric or not. And it’s running some serious hardware too. There’s fully adjustable Showa suspension at both ends, and Brembo brakes with twin 300 mm discs up front. The tires are 17” Michelin Scorchers—120 mm wide up front, and 180 mm out back.

H-D has also packed a substantial amount of functionality into the LiveWire’s TFT display. Speed and battery charge take center stage, but ‘widgets’ on either side let you flick through everything from distance and running temperatures, to how much battery power’s being used under acceleration and deceleration.

It’s a touch screen unit, which is useful for diving into the menus and changing settings without having to fiddle with buttons. It’s a small unit though, and even though it’s really clear in varying light conditions, the widget areas feel cramped.

The LiveWire also integrates with your smartphone via a proprietary app. The app gives you the bike’s vitals, shows you where the nearest charging station is, and even sends you a push notification when someone tries to tamper with it. You can also call up navigation via your phone, with turn-by-turn instructions popping up on the display. And you can flick through music, by adding a Bluetooth helmet system into the mix.

Unfortunately the bikes we rode at the launch were pre-production units, which meant a lot of that functionality was missing. (It also meant that I had an occasional gremlin when starting my bike.)

The LiveWire’s start sequence is bizarrely uneventful. You flick the kill switch and make sure the side stand is up, then hold down the start button until a pair of yellow LED strips on either side of the dash turn green. The drive system is now active and ready to go, without as much as a burp.

H-D have built a haptic feedback feature into the motor, which basically just generates a intermittent throb to let you know the bike is ‘on.’ It’s a great idea, but the effect is far too vague, and actually sort of off-putting. With a little refinement, it could actually be a really neat feature, but I just couldn’t gel with it.

Pulling away is pretty trippy too. With no clutch or gears to engage, rolling on the throttle is all it takes to get moving. It took me a little while to acclimatize to the throttle’s pickup, but ultimately it’s a very smooth system, and if you whack it wide open, the surge of power really is quite thrilling.

H-D has clearly spent time getting the LiveWire’s engine mapping right. There’s a regenerative braking system too (which effectively regenerates energy as you close the throttle), and it feels a lot like normal engine braking.

There’s also a full complement of rider aids, including cornering ABS, rear-lift mitigation to keep the rear wheel planted during heavy braking, traction control, and an anti-slip system to prevent rear wheel lock under regenerative braking.

There are seven rider modes on board—four presets, and three that are customizable—and each determines the level available power, plus regenerative braking, throttle response and traction control. And there’s a separate switch to disable traction control altogether.

The preset modes are pretty self-explanatory: Sport, Road, Rain and Range. ‘Road’ mode is probably the best, offering smooth performance for day-to-day riding. ‘Sport’ mode opens the LiveWire up for more enthusiastic riding—but that also means the throttle is a little snatchier, and the ‘engine braking’ a little harder.

Our riding route took us from within Portland’s city limits, into the rolling forest-lined hills of the Pacific Northwest. Harley has pegged the LiveWire as a city bike, but it’s one hella good canyon-carver too.

For starters, the ergonomics are damn near perfect. From the upswept bars, to the rear-set pegs and comfy seat, it’s the setup that bikes like the H-D Street Road and Roadster should have come out with. You’re upright enough for good visibility in the city, tucked enough for quicker rides, and there’s ample leverage to push in and out of corners.

The PNW offered up some sweet corner sequences, and hustling the LiveWire through them was buckets of fun. That’s partly because it handles so well, and because those Showas do a good job of holding a line, while also soaking up unexpectedly bumpy sections of road.

But it’s also because there’s no clutch or transmission to fuss with, and no need to keep it at the right RPM. With excellent modulation from those Brembos, I found myself braking deep into corners, pitching the LiveWire over, and then seamlessly rolling on the throttle to launch it out the other side. Within minutes, utilizing the smooth characteristics of the electric drivetrain had become second nature.

You’re shifting a lot of weight around though, so I’d call the LiveWire surefooted rather than nimble. And with the slightly more aggressive throttle response (and regenerative braking) in Sport mode, pushing it hard did tire me out after a while.

There wasn’t much open road to test any top speed claims, but I did manage a ton at least once (anything north of 100 was a strain). And the eerie whir from the motor while pinning it between forests instantly ticked my Star Wars Land Speeder boxes.

We got stuck in traffic the second we headed back into town, but again, the lack of a clutch or gearbox made crawling from light to light less painful. And unlike the combustion Harleys that were riding with us, there was no niggling heat build up from an exhaust or motor. I did notice the LiveWire’s weight again in really slow maneuvers, but at rolling pace it was less of an issue.

I left South Africa hoping deeply that the LiveWire wouldn’t suck—and it truly exceeded my expectations. It’s not only a solid electric motorcycle, but also a sport naked with whip-cracking acceleration and respectable handling.

The only thing holding the LiveWire back could be its price. At $ 29,799 it’s not cheap, and the Zero SR/F in full spec trim offers more performance and range, for around $9,000 less.

But then again, none of the specialist electric motorcycle brands have the dealer network that Harley-Davidson does. The LiveWire’s set to hit 250 North American and European showrooms in September, each with a DC fast charging station and two years of free charges.

I’m not sure how I feel about the range either, but ultimately my opinion of the price and range matters a lot less than individual use case scenarios. Those numbers may be bitter pills to swallow for some riders, but for others, the chance to own a premium electric motorcycle from a major manufacturer just might outweigh the drawbacks. And whether range and charging are issues or not, depends entirely on your lifestyle.

There’s a perception that LiveWire sales will make or break Harley-Davidson’s future, but I don’t think that’s true at all. Halo products exist to juice up a brand, push their engineering departments to their limits and shatter perceptions.

The LiveWire has done just that, and has me excited for whatever Milwaukee has in the pipeline next.

Harley-Davidson | Facebook | Instagram | Images by H-D and Alessio Barbanti

Wes’ gear ICON 1000 Airform helmet | ICON 1000 Nightbreed jacket | ICON 1000 Nightbreed gloves | Saint Unbreakable stretch denims | Merlin x Urban Rider Onyx riding trainers

[daleisgreat]

Skyscraper

Welcome to my first movie blog of 2019! I want to kick this year off with a film sharing a passing resemblance to the last film I covered here, Die Hard. Today I am covering what critics say is ‘Die Hard in a building,’ but what I proclaim is one of my favorite pictures of 2018, yes I am talking about Skyscraper trailer). Will Sawyer (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) is on a routine FBI hostage rescue mission where everything goes wrong and he emerges from the catastrophe without a leg. Flash forward several years and Will is living a second life as an amputee and proud husband to his wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) and father of two kids Georgia (McKenna Roberts) & Henry (Noah Cottrell). He is now a safety inspector in Hong Kong where his former FBI-colleague Ben (Pablo Schreiber) hooks him up as the inspector for the soon-to-open world’s tallest building, ‘The Pearl.’ Not all is rosy as it appears when terrorists compromise the structure and take over its security systems and waste no time in setting The Pearl ablaze. The authorities think Sawyer is the perpetrator, but when Will realizes his family is trapped in the burning Pearl, he becomes a man-on-a-mission who will do anything and overcome all odds in countless ‘you gotta be kidding me’ moments to rescue his family.

I understand the obvious comparisons to Die Hard, but I do not think Skyscraper is a direct copycat of it that I have heard from numerous people. Die Hard put a huge focus on the terrorists led by Hans Gruber and his motley crew of goons were as pivotal to the film as John McClane was. In Skyscraper they do not make the villains standout in any meaningful way as they quickly takeover the Pearl and come off as little more than stereotypical bad guys minus the charming monologues that made Hans Gruber pop and all the little idiosyncrasies that made each and every one of Gruber’s thugs standout as more than bland pawns. There is a little narrative quickly thrown in late why head villain Botha (Roland Moller) is after the owner of the Pearl, Zhao (Chin Han) and a couple of quick cuts to Botha’s head operative Xia (Hannah Quinlivan) making waste out of the Pearl’s security guards, but by and large the terrorists come out of Skyscraper as underdeveloped window dressing until the final scenes where they clash with Will and Zhao. How Skyscraper overcomes this weakness of a lack of attention to the antagonists is making The Pearl a larger-than-life character itself. Where Die Hard had McClane squaring off in multiple firefights and duels outmanned, outgunned and seeing McClane suffer and take a beating throughout, Skyscraper starts Will off without a freaking leg and entering a burning super-structure that is ubiquitously falling apart. Watching Sawyer overcome each hurdle the Pearl throws at him as he makes his way up the mammoth building had me immersed throughout. Part of the fun that had me reeled in was each ‘yeah right’ moment where Will made a heroic leap, climb or dive in order to traverse to the next part of the Pearl.

The filmmakers go out of their way to show the cutting edge tech in The Pearl with the primary example being its showpiece room, ‘The Sphere’ which is comprised of over 100 HD glass panels for some spiffy special effects. Naturally The Sphere comes into play later when the climactic final showdown transpires there and the gunfight plays out like it is happening in the middle of a carnival fun house with those wacky mirrors. It is a thrilling final duel, and that is because Sawyer only sparingly encounters thugs throughout the movie. I want to also give props to Skyscraper for not having Neve Campbell not portray the stereotypical damsel-in-distress and instead has her character have several scenes where she proves fully capable of navigating her family through the weakening Pearl, helping clear Will’s name to the authorities and holding her own against Xia. I do not want this to seem like I am making a case for if Skyscraper is better than Die Hard but instead how Skyscraper does more than enough to distinguish itself as another unapologetic Die Hard-clone. The preceding paragraphs I just presented to you on how Skyscraper is different than Die Hard I had originally jotted down in my notes as I watched the film, and then I nearly chucked them across the room when the director, Rawson Thurber stated in the bonus feature interviews that Die Hard was indeed a huge influence. Thurber also went to state in the interviews how other films like Cliffhanger and Inferno were big inspirations in the ways he wanted to make something more than ‘Die Hard in a building.’

The BluRay has 40 minutes of extra features in addition to a feature-length commentary with Rawson Thurber. About half of the 40 minutes of extras are the deleted and extended scenes which are the highlights of the bonuses. There are some interesting scenes here, and even a silly gag the director had Rock give Bruce Willis a shoutout, seriously! There are six shorter extra features highlighting most of the cast and their characters in semi-interesting pieces, but of those six I would say check out Inspiration on how Rock wanted to give a respectful portrayal of amputees and Pineapple Pitch which showed how Rock agreed to sign on to Skyscraper. The commentary track is one of the better solo tracks I have listened to with many interesting on the set anecdotes and memories with the standout stories being how Raiders of the Lost Ark changed Thurber’s life and lead to him wanting Skyscraper to be the film he wanted to make since he was eight and how he was Face-timing with his wife through labor while simultaneously directing….holy hell. My launch week BluRay I picked up from Target came with a bonus disc with another 20 minutes of extras mostly showing how the team came up with the showpiece set designs and stunt scenes.

No matter how close Skyscraper is or is not to Die Hard, I will not deny that I still had a great time with the film from beginning to end and came out of it psyched. When doing my final rankings for 2018 films of the year (which should be going up not too long after this entry) I was surprised at how high Skyscraper ranked. I will attribute that to seeing it at the right time in the right setting as a summer blockbuster at the theater with a tub of popcorn! Best way to enjoy Skyscraper now is to have a beer or two going in and enjoy the rider Thurber, Rock and company strap you in for! Other Random Backlog Movie Blogs 3 12 Angry Men (1957) 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown 21 Jump Street Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie Atari: Game Over The Avengers: Age of Ultron Batman: The Killing Joke Batman: Mask of the Phantasm Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice Bounty Hunters Cabin in the Woods Captain America: Civil War Captain America: The First Avenger Captain America: The Winter Soldier Christmas Eve Clash of the Titans (1981) Clint Eastwood 11-pack Special The Condemned 2 Countdown Creed Deck the Halls Die Hard Dredd The Eliminators The Equalizer Dirty Work Faster Fast and Furious I-VIII Field of Dreams Fight Club The Fighter For Love of the Game Good Will Hunting Gravity Guardians of the Galaxy Hercules: Reborn Hitman Indiana Jones 1-4 Ink The Interrogation Interstellar Jobs Joy Ride 1-3 Man of Steel Man on the Moon Marine 3-6 Metallica: Some Kind of Monster Mortal Kombat National Treasure National Treasure: Book of Secrets The Replacements Reservoir Dogs Rocky I-VII Running Films Part 1 Running Films Part 2 San Andreas ScoobyDoo Wrestlemania Mystery The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Shoot em Up Small Town Santa Steve Jobs Source Code Star Trek I-XIII Take Me Home Tonight TMNT The Tooth Fairy 1 & 2 UHF Veronica Mars Vision Quest The War Wild Wonder Woman The Wrestler (2008) X-Men: Days of Future Past

[notsdlifter]

Addled Roots: Prologue

The Apocalypse Obsession

The apocalypse was a national obsession, you could say. People always talked about the end of the world. Every summer, Hollywood churned out blockbusters about robots pushing mankind to the brink of extinction. For a decade-long stretch, the most popular show on TV had zombie herds wandering across the country like the buffalo used to tromp across the Great Plains. People had fears galore: global warming, rising seas, super flus, super volcanoes, giant meteoroids, toxins in our food, air, and water. Y2K was supposed to signify the collapse. Then it was the end of the Mayan calendar. The sun itself was a massive flare away from frying all the electronics on the planet and sending us back to the Neolithic Age. It was just a matter of time before some flop-haired billionaire pushed us to the brink of nuclear annihilation. The apocalypse was right around the corner and we were all chewing our fingernails off waiting for it to arrive. Oh, those were the good old days. 

If I could go back to 2018, I would be the Apocalypse’s Paul Revere. “People,” I’d warn, “The apocalypse isn’t coming… The apocalypse isn’t coming. IT’S ALREADY HERE!” 

Here is a quick history lesson. The “first beast” of the apocalypse was invented in Japan in 1893 when a chemist used western science to understand ancient Asian medicines. The Nazis gave a synthesized version of it to soldiers during World War II and the drug-crazed Wehrmacht blanketed half of Europe in a furious Blitzkrieg.  The tentacles of the beast spread across America in the 1950s. It started as a simple pick-me-up, a good time booster that beatnik poets used for fuel. Then it was outlawed in the 1970s by the American government relegating it to biker gangs and hardened drug users. By the late 1980s, Americans were making it in their bathtubs and houses were exploding from Ogunquit Maine to the salt flats of California. It shattered rural American communities like Little Boy’s blast flattened Hiroshima. Crystal Methamphetamine, is far and away the most abused drug in the history of the world. 

The Drug Epidemic

In late 2018, while America was deep in the throes of a quarter century old meth epidemic, another drug started to wreak its havoc. A “second beast”—if you will briefly indulge my hyperbole—had legitimate roots, and many got it by prescription and in pill form. It had a handful of names: oxy, roxy, fentanyl, black tar, china, chiva, smack, heroin… call it what you will. All of them were from the same family of opioids. Unlike its bastardized brother meth, opioids reached into all levels of society. It hit housewives just as hard as street users. Unsuspecting patients were prescribed the drug by their trusted family doctor for an injury only to begin the spiral of addiction. People bought it in the mail, off the shadow internet, and had it FedExed to their houses. Pill mills were seemingly in every strip mall in America. Opioids were everywhere, more ubiquitous than the Golden Arches of McDonalds. 

A syndemic is the study of two epidemics and how they interact. Imagine, if you will, two massive epidemics each wielding a crippling outcome of addiction in millions of people. On the one hand, you have the meth scourge, arguably one of the worst in world history.  On the other, you have the opioid crisis that was rumored to be so debilitating both economically and socially that it alone have removed America’s status as a superpower. Now what if both of those epidemics fed off each other and exponentially magnified the negative consequences? What if they were spinning at breakneck speeds in opposite directions in a social particle accelerator and smashed together? New elements are born that have unforeseen consequences. That is a syndemic effect. And that is exactly what happened to the Great U.S. of A. 

The opioid epidemic was sucked into areas that were already ravaged by meth like light hits a black hole. And in the pressure and darkness of those afflictions, something truly malevolent sprung from the track-marked carcasses of dying addicts.  There was an interaction, an unexpected agitator that spun people into a specific mindset. It wasn’t pure rage, not exactly, because there was a calculating aspect even though they moved with reckless abandonment. These addicts awoke from a figuratively dead sleep with the intent to murder. They had—to borrow a word from the legal community—a “depraved heart” and singular purpose. 

“Oh, you poor fuckers,” I’d say, “you should have seen it coming.” 

A Rash of Drug Overdoses

The addicts called it a “goofball.” It was a mixture of meth and heroin heated in a spoon. The high was a combination of the warm bath sedation of heroin and the frantic euphoria of IV meth. A high-low lethal amalgamation that some addicts described as a tearing in half of the soul. Overdoses skyrocketed. There was a public outcry and a flurry of class action lawsuits aimed at the manufacturers, distributors, and the physicians who wrote the scripts. A hundred thousand died in a three-month period. And, in this little bitty town in the middle of nowhere, there were a handful of ODs that didn’t stay dead.  

It all began in a spot between Denver and Saint Louis. I’m not sure if it happened when some hapless local queued up a “goofball” in a dirty spoon and put a match to it. But I do know that it started with a new synthesis of meth. It wasn’t more powerful than the Mexican meth cooked in super labs or more potent than Walter White’s mythical “baby blue.” But this meth, when it was mixed with an opioid and heated, grabbed peoples’ brains and never let them go. It dipped its tentacles deep into the gray matter and molded the perfect soldiers of the apocalypse.

The signs were everywhere. While people were helplessly plugged into their phones and sprouting roots into their couches binge watching Netflix, America was deteriorating like a bad case of meth mouth. The epidemic hit the rural Midwest first. Addicts showed signs of “the shakes.” Oh, dear God the shakes. These addicts were like normal meth fiends: the rotten teeth, the open sores, hallucinations, advanced aging, the insatiable desire to find the next fix… the whole kit and caboodle. But they appeared only at night in rural areas and in massive packs. They looked like your general run-of-the-mill meth heads but they were different. Really different. 

So, yeah, about the “goofballs”—turns out that was an apt nickname. Do you remember Looney Tunes when Bugs drank poison? His eyes bulged out, arms contorted in lighting fast poses. That was the cartoon version isolated to a single subject. The real-life shakes were this twitchy, spastic shuffle that was eerily coordinated across groups of people. They moved as a unit like nocturnal predators. Once the shakes came, they always packed up and hunting for the living, all while burning swaths of homes to the ground. And these things, these fucking drug beasts, could cut and move like NFL slot receivers. They were dead addicts, with only one key difference. They didn’t eat brains or human flesh. Though they were not alive, they were not undead either. They seemed to exist somewhere between the planes of alive and dead in some biological limbo. These “dead addicts” had only one purpose: to head out at night in large, fast moving packs to murder, burn, and infect. The screams and the flames spread across the country like a viral advertisement.

A year into the syndemic, as the shakes exploded across rural America, there were probably only twenty thousand dead addicts. That sounds like a lot, but they were spread out. The government might have handled things. The larger cities immediately put up fence lines, thick walls, and check points. Martial law and the army’s use of nighttime firing lines and shoot-on-sight strategies were effective for a time. Most places could have ridden out the fires and roving killing herds. But there were issues that no one fully understood. 

These dead addicts didn’t drag their feet and listlessly moan while shuffling toward a meal. They moved in predatory packs and tightly controlled formations.  After they hit an area, they rarely returned. And there are other things, too. They sent out small groups to test the strength of a wall or estimate the total firepower of a defensive position. When they strike, they did it with such an awesome display of force. Twenty thousand rapidly-moving, living corpses, all pressed into and over cement barriers while under a barrage of machine gun fire. The dead addicts scratched and bit and bleed in their frantic, flailing way. It was all so militaristic, like they had a general. And they retreated into dark areas to wait out the day hiding in older sewer lines, in abandoned houses, or just buried themselves in the dirt. Only the most fortified places are still standing, but even they will eventually fall.  

The Troubled Children

Right after the outbreak of the shakes, before shit went south, a new wrinkle appeared. Something started happening with the kids. They were always children of a certain age, slightly older than toddlers and not quite teenagers. You know kids in that horribly awkward stage of life? The big elbows, comically skinny legs, and bad hair. Almost always they were grade-schoolers somewhere between second and sixth grade. These kids became susceptible, open to control. There were many stories of grade-schoolers stopping in mid-stride, always with their head tilted slightly and a thousand-yard stare, before engaging in a brief fit of terrorism. Out of nowhere, in the middle of the night, they threw open gates. They went on violent rampages. They broke into weapon stashes and fuel depos with catastrophic results. A minute later, the kids would be sitting, sobbing, completely oblivious to the world. Utterly unaware of their acts. 

City leaders came up with various plans to deal with the children, all of them equally flawed: (1) isolate, (2) segregate, or (3) eliminate. That would have been a fine plan if talking about a rat infestation or coyotes killing calves. But these were kids. You do not fuck with people’s kids. The slightest insinuation that the government was planning to “deal” with the “kid problem” turned soccer moms into suicide bombers. I honestly believe that Martha Stewart would peel the skin off your face with a butter knife if you threatened her children. All hell broke loose, and it never stopped breaking. No place was safe. There was chaos inside the cities. It always seemed like any place was on the verge of collapse. In the countryside, there was a desperate horror. If the killing herds found you—and there were millions of dead addicts tediously searching everything—they would kill you. 

Token-Oak

All this aforementioned shit started in the little town of Token-Oak. My hometown. And I’d like to tell you that no one saw this behemoth coming, that it was some chemistry accident stumbled upon by a bathtub chef who unwittingly created the batch that brought the greatest military in world history to its knees. But there was one person who saw this whole damn thing decades before it started. 

Before the emergency declarations and mobilization of the national guard, she knew. Before the major cities were surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers with check points every thirty miles on major highways, she knew. Before all rural America became uninhabitable and uncrossable, my grandma knew what was coming. She knew it all the way back in the late 1980s, the first time we saw a meth addict in Token-Oak. She saw the fall and, in her own way, prepared me for what was coming. And everyone thought she was crazy. 

God, I should have seen it, too. It was always right in my face grabbing me by the ears throughout my life. As a kid in Token-Oak, the meth crisis had just taken hold with bathtub cooks springing up everywhere. When I moved away as an adolescent, I saw it increase a little more each time I returned to the town. Little pockets of the apocalypse—lab explosions, rampant murder, and disappearances—were all over Token-Oak. And as an adult that got trapped in that pit of hell, I was at ground zero when the syndemic started. I was in the eye of the hurricane, a silent circle as the ferocious winds of the storm tore the country apart. 

I don’t think we will ever make it back, not to normal anyway. Once the world has been saturated with enough blood, it has forever changed. After the whole scale slaughter of the American Indians, a nation of roads and laws and good Christian morality sprang up in their place. But underneath it all—waiting in the shiny new world—there was this bitterness, the cold reality that human beings are capable of the gravest infliction of suffering and pain. And that is why we were all so obsessed with the Apocalypse. Because deep down, we all knew it was coming. Because it had been here many times before. 

But what I know now is that we wanted it to come, too. And the thing that keeps me awake at night is the thought that we needed the apocalypse in many ways. A fresh start. A clean slate. Call it whatever you want, but millions felt that way before the collapse. 

My story is not the most exciting tale of the downfall—hell, you will find any account of the survivors from the shake attack on Chicago more riveting. It’s not the sexiest, it doesn’t have the best intel on the government response, though there is a great deal written in these pages about how to survive a night in America when they come for you. And they always come for you. But my story is the most complete of all the stories. I was a child in Token-Oak during the syndemic’s humble beginnings in the late 1980s. And, in a blind stroke of luck, I was a graduate assistant at the University of Chicago when the government first tested human brains for the shakes. I was the first person, due to my professional training and location, to recognize that there was a problem with certain American kids. And, somehow, I ended up back home on the day the syndemic officially began. I was at ground zero every step of the way. There is not another person alive or dead that can say the same thing. 

I never thought my life would end up like this. Not in a million years did I think a child from Token-Oak would be on the forefront of the apocalypse. There is a good chance that everyone will be dead soon. The spread has done nothing but intensify since the outbreak. Each passing month, another small pocket of resistance, another American city, succumbs to the killing herds. 

If I told you that I don’t know why I am writing this book, I’d be lying. It will probably never be read by another human being. There won’t be awards, no reading circles, it will not be published. And I can tell you that writing these pages at night nearly drowning in sounds of screaming and the gnashing of teeth has not been easy. But I write this nightly for selfish reasons. It keeps me alive, pushes me to fight on, to scrounge food and keep my weapons clean. Because in these pages, buried somewhere in my memory of the downfall, is a secret. Something hidden that I somehow overlooked. And maybe, if I dig deep enough, pull out my memories, I will find something that will beat these ravenous bastards straight back into hell. 

I am going to take you back to the beginning. All the way back to where it started and walk you through everything step by bloody step. I’ll start with the smartest woman—the most simultaneously ruthless and loving woman that ever lived. And even though we never talked about it, she knew. My Grandma knew it was coming and did her best to warn me.  “Oh, you poor fuckers” I’d say riding from city to city, “the APCOLYPSE IS HERE.” 

Robert Warrington, Ph.D.  Token-Oak, Winter of 2026 2556 days after the Syndemic

[spikeyandspeedles-blog]

September: Update

Hi all! Speedles here :) Sorry it’s been a while. Daniel and Katherine have agreed to do some guest posting over here on the blog, so you’ll probably hear from them in a bit, but for now, it’s just me. 🐢

I wanted to give an update of our last month, ‘cause we’ve already been here that long! Crazy, I know. A few quick spoilers: we found a house! but we’re currently living with D+K’s VERY KIND friend Chris :) He’s pretty cool.

So, what have we been up to?

Well, we spend most of our time around the Ciudad de las Artes y Ciencias, or the City of Arts and Sciences. It’s one of the newest large-scale constructions in the city of Valencia, and is a huge tourist attraction. The four main buildings house a science museum, aquarium, opera house... and then there’s Berklee. Daniel thought that the opera house building was actually Berklee, so he was pretty disappointed to discover that the school is actually in a wall (literally, it’s a wall) off to one side. But now that we’re all used to it, it’s a nice wall to hang out in :) Looking at my pictures, I’m just now realizing that we don’t have any of Berklee itself, so Spikey and I will be sure to take a selfie there ASAP! Until then, here’s some of the opera house and science museum (as well as a random building that doesn’t seem to have any particular non-aesthetic function). Well, actually you can kinda see Berklee. It’s the wall on the right side of the first two pictures.

The opera house. What animal does it remind you of?

One of the best things about Valencia is the Jardin del Turia, which is a huge park-garden complex that runs the entire length of the city. Many years ago, the river Turia flowed there, but after a particularly deadly and damaging flood in 1957, it was re-routed and the Jardin planted in its place. We’ll have to do a special-edition post about the garden later, but until then, here’s a view of the opera house from the other side of the garden:

For our first two-and-a-half weeks in Valencia, we stayed at an AirBnB with a wonderful Cuban woman named Elda and her dog Happy (see below!).

Elda lives in a quiet, very un-hip neighborhood called Mont-Olivet, a ten-minute walk from Berklee. It was a great place to start, partly because we really dig the un-hip vibe (hehe), but also because there’s hardly any car traffic, no nightlife, the shops are simple and reasonably priced, and there’s lots of little cafes where grandmothers and grandfathers drink their morning cup of cafe con leche together. Elda was the consummate hostess, even making us TERRIFIC Cuban gumbo and calling real estate agencies for us while we were desperately apartment-hunting.

Unfortunately, Elda’s place is pretty popular, so it was booked until January after our few weeks were up. But God worked through our friend Chris, a fellow SFTV (Scoring for Film, TV, and Video Games) student and Christian, who invited us to stay at his place until we found an apartment. Berklee is in the Jardin on the eastern side of Valencia. Elda’s flat is below the Jardin, and we moved up above the garden to Chris’s flat, about a 15-minute walk from Berklee.

Albors, our new neighborhood, is a little busier and bigger than Mont-Olivet, but it’s a lot easier to get around. Valencia has a bike-sharing program for €30 a year, which is a pretty good deal. Sometimes it’s hard to find a bike when you want one, or a station when you need to drop a bike off, but it’s been super helpful in getting to school quickly. There’s a bike station right around the corner from Chris’s flat and one right next to school, so it cuts the transit time down to three minutes (when Daniel and Chris are late for school :P).

Some pics: Here we are, with all of D+K’s stuff, in Chris’s hallway (sorry for the blurriness--it’s hard to take selfies that far away).

Here we are watching K make dinner in Chris’s kitchen:

We’ve enjoyed getting to know all of Daniel’s (really super) classmates, and we’ve also gotten to know the staff and students with a group called En Vivo, a Christian campus ministry at the University of Valencia/Polytechnic. When D+K were first thinking of coming to Spain for the year, Katherine applied to be on staff with En Vivo, but she and the team ended up deciding that it would be best if she worked on a volunteer basis for the year.

During our second week in Valencia, D+K met with Jesse and Sophie, the En Vivo team leaders. Not only did they have lots of work for us to do (yay!), but they also offered to help us with our housing search (more on that later). The work was sanding, priming, and painting the interior of a property that En Vivo will use as their “campus house” for student events, weekly meetings, and as a place to chill. K+D have spent the last three Fridays there, getting lots of paint on themselves and some on the walls ;)

Hallway before primer:

Hallway after primer:

It’s amazing even what primer can do to brighten a place up!

Jessie and Sophie (and their family) are the kind of people that, when you’re around them, make you feel totally at ease and cared for, as well as give you the sense that there are still good things in this world, after all. No kidding, but actually.

Our (second? third?) weekend here, we were invited to a cookout in the mountains with En Vivo staff and students, to kick off the school year. It was WONDERFUL to be out of the city: the air was clean and cool, and the mountains were beautifully wild. It’s a place that seems to be incredibly dry and incredibly fertile at the same time: you see dusty slopes filled with prickly shrubs and cacti next to orange and olive groves, or stands of pine trees with short, vivid-green needles.

The cookout was at the summer home of a student’s grandmother--a sort of vacation-home with just the bare essentials, almost like a personal campground. There are many such houses in the mountains around Valencia, and can range from a concrete floor and some walls to pitch a tent under to a fully-equipped house to spend the whole summer in. This place was somewhere in between, with a yard to play Viking Chess (look it up--really fun) and an outdoor fireplace built into one corner, where we built a pine-log and -needle fire to roast racks of pork ribs on. The yard was also the favored habitat of hundreds of snails (the kind you eat, I think), and Katherine and the staff kids had a swell time making little habitats for them and finding them juicy grass to eat.

Playing Viking Chess:

The cooking fire!

Yummmm, barbecue ^-^ This was probably the first really filling meal we had in Spain :P

Just hangin’ out:

[Well, if you’re still reading, you’re a trooper ;) I’ll try to cut it short, and will ALSO try to write more often so you don’t have to stretch your attention span so far hehe.]

While in the mountains, we explored a little trail that led from the house to... TRENCHES! MORTAR NESTS! BOMB SHELTERS! But actually, these mountains were used as a military encampment and fortress to protect Valencia during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). As far as we know, the trench and bomb shelter-cave system was never used in battle, but it was crazy-cool to get a glimpse into that part of Spanish history.

Part of the trench system:

A cave dug (into almost solid rock) as a bomb shelter. These were spaced every 200m or so along the trench, and went back only a yard or so from where you can see. Some seem to have been blocked up at the end, so we wondered if they were connected at some point?

I’d better wrap it up, if only because Daniel will have no dinner otherwise (turtles are actually quite good cooks, if you didn’t know).

Among other things, we have been very blessed by our church, both the community and the Word preached. God has spoken very clearly through the sermon each week, and we’ve gotten to know some other young internationals that we eat lunch and talk with afterwards. Here’s the main room of the church:

And here we are hanging out afterward! Also eating black rice (colored with squid ink).

Other fun things we’ve done:

-- Sleep in late

-- Sleep in late

-- Go play volleyball at the beach with friends

-- Pick pomegranates from a pomegranate tree in the Jardin, and make pomegranate molasses

-- Sleep in late

Also, we found a sand castle at the beach:

Lastly, we have a picture with the ubiquitous breakfast, lunch, and dinner food: TOSTADAS!! (aka toast; we eat it with mashed tomato and oil, sometimes sardines).

Allllllright! That’s it, folks :) Hope you enjoyed hearing of our adventures, and look out for a guest post from the *one and only Daniel Hwang* about God’s provision for a HOUSE for us!

Also, maybe more pictures next time ;)

With all the love of a turtle,

Speedles 🐢

P.S. Spikey gives his love too, but he isn’t sure how much love hedgehogs have, so he says just double whatever turtles have (also, I can’t find a hedgehog emoji). 🐢 🐢

[michalewillard]

Brands That Invite You to Sleep Over—And Even Move In

West Elm makes chic and not-quite-cheap home furnishings. Karl Lagerfeld makes to-die-for luxury fashion. What they have in common—both aim to be great hoteliers, and hope the pull of their respective brands is strong enough to attract loyalists and others to sleep and even live in spaces they have designed.

A growing number of brands are extending lifestyle branding to daily living with this proposition by opening their own hotels, residences—even retirement communities. This hospitable roster is unified by a desire to put the “life” in “lifestyle” brands. They’re creating experiences that transcend selling goods and services to enabling the ability to live, by the day or longer, in an immersive branded aesthetic and philosopy.

“People view brands as promises of an experience,” Larry Light, CEO of Arcature consultants, told the New York Times. Added Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute, “You’re seeing companies begin to leverage themselves in ways that are really out of the box. They’re saying, ‘If I have a brand name that is pristine and prestigious and known by the wealthy, let’s see how I can leverage it across other product lines.'”

Hospitality may be the ultimate brand experience. “While staying at the hotel, the consumer—and guest in this case—is completely immersed in the brand in question,” author Constance Dunn told the South China Morning Post. “This sensory lifestyle experience has the power to cleave a consumer to a brand more potently than a glitzy handbag or bespoke blazer ever could. Remember that branding is not about the object itself, but our feelings attached to it.”

Bulgari, the celebrated jeweler and luxury goods retailer, was a pioneer in the hotel business back in 2001, and operates branded hotels in Milan, London and Bali (above) in partnership with Marriott. Properties are also slated for Shanghai, Dubai, Moscow and Beijing.

Other luxe fashion brands turned hoteliers include Armani (with properties in Dubai and Milan), Versace (with hotels in Dubai and Australia’s Gold Coast) and designer Karl Lagerfeld, who’s opening his first hotel in Macau with plans for more properties worldwide. Versace is also planning a Macau hotel as a foothold in China.

As a press release notes, “KARL LAGERFELD Hospitality will translate Karl Lagerfeld’s vision and unique aesthetic into bespoke projects including hotels, residential properties, restaurants and private clubs. Each property will reflect Karl’s renowned, cutting-edge approach to style and signature touch that surpasses the boundaries of fashion alone.”

Nobu—the celebrity-loved eatery backed by actor Robert DeNiro and chef Nobu Matsuhisa—is expanding its brand in Toronto with a project that includes 660 condominium suites, a hotel and the first Nobu restaurant in Canada, housed in a double-towered complex just a sushi roll’s throw from the iconic CN Tower.

Home essentials brand Parachute Home invites guests to stay at its boho chic hotel above its textiles and linens store in Venice Beach, Calif., bringing its products and style to life, as seen in the bedroom above.

America’s upmarket Equinox gym chain is opening its first hotel in 2019. Located in New York City’s Hudson Yards development near the High Line, the hotel will include a 60,000-square-foot Equinox gym, the brand’s largest ever. Equinox also announced a Los Angeles location in 2019, part of its eventual goal of 79 hotels worldwide.

“The demand for fitness and high-performance living has never been greater, and we don’t see it slowing down,” Equinox CMO Carlos Becil told Condé Nast Traveler. “We polled our members and we received a 95% response rate that our members would be interested in staying at an Equinox hotel.”

Adding to the “sportspitality” trend, Equinox’s SoulCycle brand is planning its own hotel.

Expanding on its travel savvy, Virgin Hotels launched in the US in 2015, with only one property to date but a slew in the works. The first Virgin Hotel opened in Chicago, and a second property will open in San Francisco this year. Also in development: New Orleans; New York; Silicon Valley, CA; Nashville, TN; Palm Springs, CA; and Dallas, TX.

Another iconic British brand is coming to America as Aston Martin plans to open Aston Martin Residences in Miami in 2021. While not a hotel, aficionados can pay to live like James Bond in a fully-branded experience with a luxury condominium, beach club and marina with Aston Martin yachts, of course.

Upmarket furniture retailer Restoration Hardware is working on a 14-room boutique hotel with its biggest RH Gallery retail space to date (replacing its current Fifth Avenue location) and restaurant in New York City’s Meatpacking district. The proposed redevelopment at 55 Gansevoort has had to scale back its architectural plan, but appears to be back on track.

Another furniture retailer, West Elm, is getting into the hotel business by opening branded properties in Savannah, Detroit and Minneapolis in 2018 with Oakland, CA, also in planning. “Where many retail brands have put the nail in their coffins is by opening too many stores,” West Elm President Jim Brett told the Wall Street Journal. In a big bet, West Elm is focusing on experience by showcasing its products in hotels rather than brick-and-mortar stores, with a mobile app creating a seamless cohesiveness.

“Everything is about that guest experience,” David Bowd, a principle at West Elm Hotels, told Conde Nast Traveler. “Our tagline has been whole-hearted hospitality.”

The brand “will offer the experience of a high-end boutique hotel and the pricing of a mid-market player,” Peter Fowler, vice president of hospitality and workspace for West Elm, told Bloomberg.

West Elm will specialize in the reuse of historic building and design elements by local artisans. Fowler told the publication that the rooms won’t feel like showrooms and that the hotels won’t sell a single West Elm product on-site; instead, hotel-related capsule collections will be available online.

At the more ubiquitous end of the home furnishings spectrum, the world’s biggest furniture retailer has its own hotel. The IKEA Hotel (the IKEA Hotell & Restaurang Värdshuset) is located in the center of Älmhult, Sweden, just across from the IKEA museum. Intended for visitors to the brand’s nearby global HQ, it’s open for the public and yes, it’s furnished with IKEA furniture—and no, you don’t unlock your room with an Allen Key.

Magnolia‘s Chip and Joanna Gaines’ have skyrocketed to fame, boosted by their hit HGTV series Fixer Upper. One of their TV remodeling projects was turned into The Magnolia House bed and breakfast, which sold out its six-month booking window in five minutes. Building on their Magnolia Homes real estate business that got them on TV in the first place, they have opened a complex based around “The Silos” in Waco, TX that includes a store, bakery, magazine and product lines. (Fans also search Airbnb and VRBO to stay in their TV show’s renovated houses.)

Disney has mastered the “come stay here” to “come live here” transition, from its theme park hotels and resorts (with a Star Wars-themed hotel now under consideration for Walt Disney World in Orlando) to its Golden Oak gated community that opened in 2011 as vacation homes and primary residences. In the early 1990’s, Disney established Celebration, Florida, as a real-life branded town and master planned community before giving up control.

Of course, plans don’t always work out. Urban Outfitters Inc. planned to open a 

[judithnegrin]

Brands That Invite You to Sleep Over—And Even Move In

West Elm makes chic and not-quite-cheap home furnishings. Karl Lagerfeld makes to-die-for luxury fashion. What they have in common—both aim to be great hoteliers, and hope the pull of their respective brands is strong enough to attract loyalists and others to sleep and even live in spaces they have designed.

A growing number of brands are extending lifestyle branding to daily living with this proposition by opening their own hotels, residences—even retirement communities. This hospitable roster is unified by a desire to put the “life” in “lifestyle” brands. They’re creating experiences that transcend selling goods and services to enabling the ability to live, by the day or longer, in an immersive branded aesthetic and philosopy.

“People view brands as promises of an experience,” Larry Light, CEO of Arcature consultants, told the New York Times. Added Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute, “You’re seeing companies begin to leverage themselves in ways that are really out of the box. They’re saying, ‘If I have a brand name that is pristine and prestigious and known by the wealthy, let’s see how I can leverage it across other product lines.'”

Hospitality may be the ultimate brand experience. “While staying at the hotel, the consumer—and guest in this case—is completely immersed in the brand in question,” author Constance Dunn told the South China Morning Post. “This sensory lifestyle experience has the power to cleave a consumer to a brand more potently than a glitzy handbag or bespoke blazer ever could. Remember that branding is not about the object itself, but our feelings attached to it.”

Bulgari, the celebrated jeweler and luxury goods retailer, was a pioneer in the hotel business back in 2001, and operates branded hotels in Milan, London and Bali (above) in partnership with Marriott. Properties are also slated for Shanghai, Dubai, Moscow and Beijing.

Other luxe fashion brands turned hoteliers include Armani (with properties in Dubai and Milan), Versace (with hotels in Dubai and Australia’s Gold Coast) and designer Karl Lagerfeld, who’s opening his first hotel in Macau with plans for more properties worldwide. Versace is also planning a Macau hotel as a foothold in China.

As a press release notes, “KARL LAGERFELD Hospitality will translate Karl Lagerfeld’s vision and unique aesthetic into bespoke projects including hotels, residential properties, restaurants and private clubs. Each property will reflect Karl’s renowned, cutting-edge approach to style and signature touch that surpasses the boundaries of fashion alone.”

Nobu—the celebrity-loved eatery backed by actor Robert DeNiro and chef Nobu Matsuhisa—is expanding its brand in Toronto with a project that includes 660 condominium suites, a hotel and the first Nobu restaurant in Canada, housed in a double-towered complex just a sushi roll’s throw from the iconic CN Tower.

Home essentials brand Parachute Home invites guests to stay at its boho chic hotel above its textiles and linens store in Venice Beach, Calif., bringing its products and style to life, as seen in the bedroom above.

America’s upmarket Equinox gym chain is opening its first hotel in 2019. Located in New York City’s Hudson Yards development near the High Line, the hotel will include a 60,000-square-foot Equinox gym, the brand’s largest ever. Equinox also announced a Los Angeles location in 2019, part of its eventual goal of 79 hotels worldwide.

“The demand for fitness and high-performance living has never been greater, and we don’t see it slowing down,” Equinox CMO Carlos Becil told Condé Nast Traveler. “We polled our members and we received a 95% response rate that our members would be interested in staying at an Equinox hotel.”

Adding to the “sportspitality” trend, Equinox’s SoulCycle brand is planning its own hotel.

Expanding on its travel savvy, Virgin Hotels launched in the US in 2015, with only one property to date but a slew in the works. The first Virgin Hotel opened in Chicago, and a second property will open in San Francisco this year. Also in development: New Orleans; New York; Silicon Valley, CA; Nashville, TN; Palm Springs, CA; and Dallas, TX.

Another iconic British brand is coming to America as Aston Martin plans to open Aston Martin Residences in Miami in 2021. While not a hotel, aficionados can pay to live like James Bond in a fully-branded experience with a luxury condominium, beach club and marina with Aston Martin yachts, of course.

Upmarket furniture retailer Restoration Hardware is working on a 14-room boutique hotel with its biggest RH Gallery retail space to date (replacing its current Fifth Avenue location) and restaurant in New York City’s Meatpacking district. The proposed redevelopment at 55 Gansevoort has had to scale back its architectural plan, but appears to be back on track.

Another furniture retailer, West Elm, is getting into the hotel business by opening branded properties in Savannah, Detroit and Minneapolis in 2018 with Oakland, CA, also in planning. “Where many retail brands have put the nail in their coffins is by opening too many stores,” West Elm President Jim Brett told the Wall Street Journal. In a big bet, West Elm is focusing on experience by showcasing its products in hotels rather than brick-and-mortar stores, with a mobile app creating a seamless cohesiveness.

“Everything is about that guest experience,” David Bowd, a principle at West Elm Hotels, told Conde Nast Traveler. “Our tagline has been whole-hearted hospitality.”

The brand “will offer the experience of a high-end boutique hotel and the pricing of a mid-market player,” Peter Fowler, vice president of hospitality and workspace for West Elm, told Bloomberg.

West Elm will specialize in the reuse of historic building and design elements by local artisans. Fowler told the publication that the rooms won’t feel like showrooms and that the hotels won’t sell a single West Elm product on-site; instead, hotel-related capsule collections will be available online.

At the more ubiquitous end of the home furnishings spectrum, the world’s biggest furniture retailer has its own hotel. The IKEA Hotel (the IKEA Hotell & Restaurang Värdshuset) is located in the center of Älmhult, Sweden, just across from the IKEA museum. Intended for visitors to the brand’s nearby global HQ, it’s open for the public and yes, it’s furnished with IKEA furniture—and no, you don’t unlock your room with an Allen Key.

Magnolia‘s Chip and Joanna Gaines’ have skyrocketed to fame, boosted by their hit HGTV series Fixer Upper. One of their TV remodeling projects was turned into The Magnolia House bed and breakfast, which sold out its six-month booking window in five minutes. Building on their Magnolia Homes real estate business that got them on TV in the first place, they have opened a complex based around “The Silos” in Waco, TX that includes a store, bakery, magazine and product lines. (Fans also search Airbnb and VRBO to stay in their TV show’s renovated houses.)

Disney has mastered the “come stay here” to “come live here” transition, from its theme park hotels and resorts (with a Star Wars-themed hotel now under consideration for Walt Disney World in Orlando) to its Golden Oak gated community that opened in 2011 as vacation homes and primary residences. In the early 1990’s, Disney established Celebration, Florida, as a real-life branded town and master planned community before giving up control.

Of course, plans don’t always work out. Urban Outfitters Inc. planned to open a 

[josephgsanchez]

Brands That Invite You to Sleep Over—And Even Move In

West Elm makes chic and not-quite-cheap home furnishings. Karl Lagerfeld makes to-die-for luxury fashion. What they have in common—both aim to be great hoteliers, and hope the pull of their respective brands is strong enough to attract loyalists and others to sleep and even live in spaces they have designed.

A growing number of brands are extending lifestyle branding to daily living with this proposition by opening their own hotels, residences—even retirement communities. This hospitable roster is unified by a desire to put the “life” in “lifestyle” brands. They’re creating experiences that transcend selling goods and services to enabling the ability to live, by the day or longer, in an immersive branded aesthetic and philosopy.

“People view brands as promises of an experience,” Larry Light, CEO of Arcature consultants, told the New York Times. Added Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute, “You’re seeing companies begin to leverage themselves in ways that are really out of the box. They’re saying, ‘If I have a brand name that is pristine and prestigious and known by the wealthy, let’s see how I can leverage it across other product lines.'”

Hospitality may be the ultimate brand experience. “While staying at the hotel, the consumer—and guest in this case—is completely immersed in the brand in question,” author Constance Dunn told the South China Morning Post. “This sensory lifestyle experience has the power to cleave a consumer to a brand more potently than a glitzy handbag or bespoke blazer ever could. Remember that branding is not about the object itself, but our feelings attached to it.”

Bulgari, the celebrated jeweler and luxury goods retailer, was a pioneer in the hotel business back in 2001, and operates branded hotels in Milan, London and Bali (above) in partnership with Marriott. Properties are also slated for Shanghai, Dubai, Moscow and Beijing.

Other luxe fashion brands turned hoteliers include Armani (with properties in Dubai and Milan), Versace (with hotels in Dubai and Australia’s Gold Coast) and designer Karl Lagerfeld, who’s opening his first hotel in Macau with plans for more properties worldwide. Versace is also planning a Macau hotel as a foothold in China.

As a press release notes, “KARL LAGERFELD Hospitality will translate Karl Lagerfeld’s vision and unique aesthetic into bespoke projects including hotels, residential properties, restaurants and private clubs. Each property will reflect Karl’s renowned, cutting-edge approach to style and signature touch that surpasses the boundaries of fashion alone.”

Nobu—the celebrity-loved eatery backed by actor Robert DeNiro and chef Nobu Matsuhisa—is expanding its brand in Toronto with a project that includes 660 condominium suites, a hotel and the first Nobu restaurant in Canada, housed in a double-towered complex just a sushi roll’s throw from the iconic CN Tower.

Home essentials brand Parachute Home invites guests to stay at its boho chic hotel above its textiles and linens store in Venice Beach, Calif., bringing its products and style to life, as seen in the bedroom above.

America’s upmarket Equinox gym chain is opening its first hotel in 2019. Located in New York City’s Hudson Yards development near the High Line, the hotel will include a 60,000-square-foot Equinox gym, the brand’s largest ever. Equinox also announced a Los Angeles location in 2019, part of its eventual goal of 79 hotels worldwide.

“The demand for fitness and high-performance living has never been greater, and we don’t see it slowing down,” Equinox CMO Carlos Becil told Condé Nast Traveler. “We polled our members and we received a 95% response rate that our members would be interested in staying at an Equinox hotel.”

Adding to the “sportspitality” trend, Equinox’s SoulCycle brand is planning its own hotel.

Expanding on its travel savvy, Virgin Hotels launched in the US in 2015, with only one property to date but a slew in the works. The first Virgin Hotel opened in Chicago, and a second property will open in San Francisco this year. Also in development: New Orleans; New York; Silicon Valley, CA; Nashville, TN; Palm Springs, CA; and Dallas, TX.

Another iconic British brand is coming to America as Aston Martin plans to open Aston Martin Residences in Miami in 2021. While not a hotel, aficionados can pay to live like James Bond in a fully-branded experience with a luxury condominium, beach club and marina with Aston Martin yachts, of course.

Upmarket furniture retailer Restoration Hardware is working on a 14-room boutique hotel with its biggest RH Gallery retail space to date (replacing its current Fifth Avenue location) and restaurant in New York City’s Meatpacking district. The proposed redevelopment at 55 Gansevoort has had to scale back its architectural plan, but appears to be back on track.

Another furniture retailer, West Elm, is getting into the hotel business by opening branded properties in Savannah, Detroit and Minneapolis in 2018 with Oakland, CA, also in planning. “Where many retail brands have put the nail in their coffins is by opening too many stores,” West Elm President Jim Brett told the Wall Street Journal. In a big bet, West Elm is focusing on experience by showcasing its products in hotels rather than brick-and-mortar stores, with a mobile app creating a seamless cohesiveness.

“Everything is about that guest experience,” David Bowd, a principle at West Elm Hotels, told Conde Nast Traveler. “Our tagline has been whole-hearted hospitality.”

The brand “will offer the experience of a high-end boutique hotel and the pricing of a mid-market player,” Peter Fowler, vice president of hospitality and workspace for West Elm, told Bloomberg.

West Elm will specialize in the reuse of historic building and design elements by local artisans. Fowler told the publication that the rooms won’t feel like showrooms and that the hotels won’t sell a single West Elm product on-site; instead, hotel-related capsule collections will be available online.

At the more ubiquitous end of the home furnishings spectrum, the world’s biggest furniture retailer has its own hotel. The IKEA Hotel (the IKEA Hotell & Restaurang Värdshuset) is located in the center of Älmhult, Sweden, just across from the IKEA museum. Intended for visitors to the brand’s nearby global HQ, it’s open for the public and yes, it’s furnished with IKEA furniture—and no, you don’t unlock your room with an Allen Key.

Magnolia‘s Chip and Joanna Gaines’ have skyrocketed to fame, boosted by their hit HGTV series Fixer Upper. One of their TV remodeling projects was turned into The Magnolia House bed and breakfast, which sold out its six-month booking window in five minutes. Building on their Magnolia Homes real estate business that got them on TV in the first place, they have opened a complex based around “The Silos” in Waco, TX that includes a store, bakery, magazine and product lines. (Fans also search Airbnb and VRBO to stay in their TV show’s renovated houses.)

Disney has mastered the “come stay here” to “come live here” transition, from its theme park hotels and resorts (with a Star Wars-themed hotel now under consideration for Walt Disney World in Orlando) to its Golden Oak gated community that opened in 2011 as vacation homes and primary residences. In the early 1990’s, Disney established Celebration, Florida, as a real-life branded town and master planned community before giving up control.

Of course, plans don’t always work out. Urban Outfitters Inc. planned to open a 

[lorraineromaine]

Brands That Invite You to Sleep Over—And Even Move In

West Elm makes chic and not-quite-cheap home furnishings. Karl Lagerfeld makes to-die-for luxury fashion. What they have in common—both aim to be great hoteliers, and hope the pull of their respective brands is strong enough to attract loyalists and others to sleep and even live in spaces they have designed.

A growing number of brands are extending lifestyle branding to daily living with this proposition by opening their own hotels, residences—even retirement communities. This hospitable roster is unified by a desire to put the “life” in “lifestyle” brands. They’re creating experiences that transcend selling goods and services to enabling the ability to live, by the day or longer, in an immersive branded aesthetic and philosopy.

“People view brands as promises of an experience,” Larry Light, CEO of Arcature consultants, told the New York Times. Added Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute, “You’re seeing companies begin to leverage themselves in ways that are really out of the box. They’re saying, ‘If I have a brand name that is pristine and prestigious and known by the wealthy, let’s see how I can leverage it across other product lines.'”

Hospitality may be the ultimate brand experience. “While staying at the hotel, the consumer—and guest in this case—is completely immersed in the brand in question,” author Constance Dunn told the South China Morning Post. “This sensory lifestyle experience has the power to cleave a consumer to a brand more potently than a glitzy handbag or bespoke blazer ever could. Remember that branding is not about the object itself, but our feelings attached to it.”

Bulgari, the celebrated jeweler and luxury goods retailer, was a pioneer in the hotel business back in 2001, and operates branded hotels in Milan, London and Bali (above) in partnership with Marriott. Properties are also slated for Shanghai, Dubai, Moscow and Beijing.

Other luxe fashion brands turned hoteliers include Armani (with properties in Dubai and Milan), Versace (with hotels in Dubai and Australia’s Gold Coast) and designer Karl Lagerfeld, who’s opening his first hotel in Macau with plans for more properties worldwide. Versace is also planning a Macau hotel as a foothold in China.

As a press release notes, “KARL LAGERFELD Hospitality will translate Karl Lagerfeld’s vision and unique aesthetic into bespoke projects including hotels, residential properties, restaurants and private clubs. Each property will reflect Karl’s renowned, cutting-edge approach to style and signature touch that surpasses the boundaries of fashion alone.”

Nobu—the celebrity-loved eatery backed by actor Robert DeNiro and chef Nobu Matsuhisa—is expanding its brand in Toronto with a project that includes 660 condominium suites, a hotel and the first Nobu restaurant in Canada, housed in a double-towered complex just a sushi roll’s throw from the iconic CN Tower.

Home essentials brand Parachute Home invites guests to stay at its boho chic hotel above its textiles and linens store in Venice Beach, Calif., bringing its products and style to life, as seen in the bedroom above.

America’s upmarket Equinox gym chain is opening its first hotel in 2019. Located in New York City’s Hudson Yards development near the High Line, the hotel will include a 60,000-square-foot Equinox gym, the brand’s largest ever. Equinox also announced a Los Angeles location in 2019, part of its eventual goal of 79 hotels worldwide.

“The demand for fitness and high-performance living has never been greater, and we don’t see it slowing down,” Equinox CMO Carlos Becil told Condé Nast Traveler. “We polled our members and we received a 95% response rate that our members would be interested in staying at an Equinox hotel.”

Adding to the “sportspitality” trend, Equinox’s SoulCycle brand is planning its own hotel.

Expanding on its travel savvy, Virgin Hotels launched in the US in 2015, with only one property to date but a slew in the works. The first Virgin Hotel opened in Chicago, and a second property will open in San Francisco this year. Also in development: New Orleans; New York; Silicon Valley, CA; Nashville, TN; Palm Springs, CA; and Dallas, TX.

Another iconic British brand is coming to America as Aston Martin plans to open Aston Martin Residences in Miami in 2021. While not a hotel, aficionados can pay to live like James Bond in a fully-branded experience with a luxury condominium, beach club and marina with Aston Martin yachts, of course.

Upmarket furniture retailer Restoration Hardware is working on a 14-room boutique hotel with its biggest RH Gallery retail space to date (replacing its current Fifth Avenue location) and restaurant in New York City’s Meatpacking district. The proposed redevelopment at 55 Gansevoort has had to scale back its architectural plan, but appears to be back on track.

Another furniture retailer, West Elm, is getting into the hotel business by opening branded properties in Savannah, Detroit and Minneapolis in 2018 with Oakland, CA, also in planning. “Where many retail brands have put the nail in their coffins is by opening too many stores,” West Elm President Jim Brett told the Wall Street Journal. In a big bet, West Elm is focusing on experience by showcasing its products in hotels rather than brick-and-mortar stores, with a mobile app creating a seamless cohesiveness.

“Everything is about that guest experience,” David Bowd, a principle at West Elm Hotels, told Conde Nast Traveler. “Our tagline has been whole-hearted hospitality.”

The brand “will offer the experience of a high-end boutique hotel and the pricing of a mid-market player,” Peter Fowler, vice president of hospitality and workspace for West Elm, told Bloomberg.

West Elm will specialize in the reuse of historic building and design elements by local artisans. Fowler told the publication that the rooms won’t feel like showrooms and that the hotels won’t sell a single West Elm product on-site; instead, hotel-related capsule collections will be available online.

At the more ubiquitous end of the home furnishings spectrum, the world’s biggest furniture retailer has its own hotel. The IKEA Hotel (the IKEA Hotell & Restaurang Värdshuset) is located in the center of Älmhult, Sweden, just across from the IKEA museum. Intended for visitors to the brand’s nearby global HQ, it’s open for the public and yes, it’s furnished with IKEA furniture—and no, you don’t unlock your room with an Allen Key.

Magnolia‘s Chip and Joanna Gaines’ have skyrocketed to fame, boosted by their hit HGTV series Fixer Upper. One of their TV remodeling projects was turned into The Magnolia House bed and breakfast, which sold out its six-month booking window in five minutes. Building on their Magnolia Homes real estate business that got them on TV in the first place, they have opened a complex based around “The Silos” in Waco, TX that includes a store, bakery, magazine and product lines. (Fans also search Airbnb and VRBO to stay in their TV show’s renovated houses.)

Disney has mastered the “come stay here” to “come live here” transition, from its theme park hotels and resorts (with a Star Wars-themed hotel now under consideration for Walt Disney World in Orlando) to its Golden Oak gated community that opened in 2011 as vacation homes and primary residences. In the early 1990’s, Disney established Celebration, Florida, as a real-life branded town and master planned community before giving up control.

Of course, plans don’t always work out. Urban Outfitters Inc. planned to open a 

[jubajunamobileapps]

Brands That Invite You to Sleep Over—And Even Move In

West Elm makes chic and not-quite-cheap home furnishings. Karl Lagerfeld makes to-die-for luxury fashion. What they have in common—both aim to be great hoteliers, and hope the pull of their respective brands is strong enough to attract loyalists and others to sleep and even live in spaces they have designed.

A growing number of brands are extending lifestyle branding to daily living with this proposition by opening their own hotels, residences—even retirement communities. This hospitable roster is unified by a desire to put the “life” in “lifestyle” brands. They’re creating experiences that transcend selling goods and services to enabling the ability to live, by the day or longer, in an immersive branded aesthetic and philosopy.

“People view brands as promises of an experience,” Larry Light, CEO of Arcature consultants, told the New York Times. Added Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute, “You’re seeing companies begin to leverage themselves in ways that are really out of the box. They’re saying, ‘If I have a brand name that is pristine and prestigious and known by the wealthy, let’s see how I can leverage it across other product lines.'”

Hospitality may be the ultimate brand experience. “While staying at the hotel, the consumer—and guest in this case—is completely immersed in the brand in question,” author Constance Dunn told the South China Morning Post. “This sensory lifestyle experience has the power to cleave a consumer to a brand more potently than a glitzy handbag or bespoke blazer ever could. Remember that branding is not about the object itself, but our feelings attached to it.”

Bulgari, the celebrated jeweler and luxury goods retailer, was a pioneer in the hotel business back in 2001, and operates branded hotels in Milan, London and Bali (above) in partnership with Marriott. Properties are also slated for Shanghai, Dubai, Moscow and Beijing.

Other luxe fashion brands turned hoteliers include Armani (with properties in Dubai and Milan), Versace (with hotels in Dubai and Australia’s Gold Coast) and designer Karl Lagerfeld, who’s opening his first hotel in Macau with plans for more properties worldwide. Versace is also planning a Macau hotel as a foothold in China.

As a press release notes, “KARL LAGERFELD Hospitality will translate Karl Lagerfeld’s vision and unique aesthetic into bespoke projects including hotels, residential properties, restaurants and private clubs. Each property will reflect Karl’s renowned, cutting-edge approach to style and signature touch that surpasses the boundaries of fashion alone.”

Nobu—the celebrity-loved eatery backed by actor Robert DeNiro and chef Nobu Matsuhisa—is expanding its brand in Toronto with a project that includes 660 condominium suites, a hotel and the first Nobu restaurant in Canada, housed in a double-towered complex just a sushi roll’s throw from the iconic CN Tower.

Home essentials brand Parachute Home invites guests to stay at its boho chic hotel above its textiles and linens store in Venice Beach, Calif., bringing its products and style to life, as seen in the bedroom above.

America’s upmarket Equinox gym chain is opening its first hotel in 2019. Located in New York City’s Hudson Yards development near the High Line, the hotel will include a 60,000-square-foot Equinox gym, the brand’s largest ever. Equinox also announced a Los Angeles location in 2019, part of its eventual goal of 79 hotels worldwide.

“The demand for fitness and high-performance living has never been greater, and we don’t see it slowing down,” Equinox CMO Carlos Becil told Condé Nast Traveler. “We polled our members and we received a 95% response rate that our members would be interested in staying at an Equinox hotel.”

Adding to the “sportspitality” trend, Equinox’s SoulCycle brand is planning its own hotel.

Expanding on its travel savvy, Virgin Hotels launched in the US in 2015, with only one property to date but a slew in the works. The first Virgin Hotel opened in Chicago, and a second property will open in San Francisco this year. Also in development: New Orleans; New York; Silicon Valley, CA; Nashville, TN; Palm Springs, CA; and Dallas, TX.

Another iconic British brand is coming to America as Aston Martin plans to open Aston Martin Residences in Miami in 2021. While not a hotel, aficionados can pay to live like James Bond in a fully-branded experience with a luxury condominium, beach club and marina with Aston Martin yachts, of course.

Upmarket furniture retailer Restoration Hardware is working on a 14-room boutique hotel with its biggest RH Gallery retail space to date (replacing its current Fifth Avenue location) and restaurant in New York City’s Meatpacking district. The proposed redevelopment at 55 Gansevoort has had to scale back its architectural plan, but appears to be back on track.

Another furniture retailer, West Elm, is getting into the hotel business by opening branded properties in Savannah, Detroit and Minneapolis in 2018 with Oakland, CA, also in planning. “Where many retail brands have put the nail in their coffins is by opening too many stores,” West Elm President Jim Brett told the Wall Street Journal. In a big bet, West Elm is focusing on experience by showcasing its products in hotels rather than brick-and-mortar stores, with a mobile app creating a seamless cohesiveness.

“Everything is about that guest experience,” David Bowd, a principle at West Elm Hotels, told Conde Nast Traveler. “Our tagline has been whole-hearted hospitality.”

The brand “will offer the experience of a high-end boutique hotel and the pricing of a mid-market player,” Peter Fowler, vice president of hospitality and workspace for West Elm, told Bloomberg.

West Elm will specialize in the reuse of historic building and design elements by local artisans. Fowler told the publication that the rooms won’t feel like showrooms and that the hotels won’t sell a single West Elm product on-site; instead, hotel-related capsule collections will be available online.

At the more ubiquitous end of the home furnishings spectrum, the world’s biggest furniture retailer has its own hotel. The IKEA Hotel (the IKEA Hotell & Restaurang Värdshuset) is located in the center of Älmhult, Sweden, just across from the IKEA museum. Intended for visitors to the brand’s nearby global HQ, it’s open for the public and yes, it’s furnished with IKEA furniture—and no, you don’t unlock your room with an Allen Key.

Magnolia‘s Chip and Joanna Gaines’ have skyrocketed to fame, boosted by their hit HGTV series Fixer Upper. One of their TV remodeling projects was turned into The Magnolia House bed and breakfast, which sold out its six-month booking window in five minutes. Building on their Magnolia Homes real estate business that got them on TV in the first place, they have opened a complex based around “The Silos” in Waco, TX that includes a store, bakery, magazine and product lines. (Fans also search Airbnb and VRBO to stay in their TV show’s renovated houses.)

Disney has mastered the “come stay here” to “come live here” transition, from its theme park hotels and resorts (with a Star Wars-themed hotel now under consideration for Walt Disney World in Orlando) to its Golden Oak gated community that opened in 2011 as vacation homes and primary residences. In the early 1990’s, Disney established Celebration, Florida, as a real-life branded town and master planned community before giving up control.

Of course, plans don’t always work out. Urban Outfitters Inc. planned to open a 

[benjsears-blog]

Upstanding Citizens

Upstanding Citizens

'FRACK OFF!' it read.  Bold and brash in urgent yellow on a black background.  A scruffy, dreadlocked man thrust the sign towards Constable Hughes, spitting the words in to the young officer's face on a wave of stale tobacco and black coffee.  The crowd was quite small at the moment, maybe fifty people at most.  But it swelled with every minute that passed, increasing in energy and conviction as it did.  Hughes took a few steps back.

"This has nothing on the Iraq war protests" scoffed Sgt. Reed.  "The dogs saw plenty of action that day son".  He thumbed the handcuffs and pepper spray on his utility belt, sneering defiantly as he surveyed the row of protesters now pressing against the temporary barriers that lined the entrance to the site compound.  Reed turned and walked off to rejoin his colleagues amassing near the vans and patrol cars.  They joked as they donned their stab vests and helmets. 

This was Tom Hughes' first protest. His first potential for 'public disorder' since he'd joined the ranks, after graduating three months previously.  He wasn't one of those who'd always wanted to be an officer though.  For some he'd gone through training with, it was a lifelong ambition. They'd studied criminology at uni, become Community Support officers (or 'Chimps' as some of his colleagues referred to them) and knew the operational handbook back to front.  Tom however, like most of his friends, wasn't so sure.  His education at a moderately priced public school had given him the confidence and rounding one would expect, but he lacked focus and passion. The expectation of A levels and university was met, and with indifference and student debt, he'd graduated with a 2.2 in English Literature three years ago.  After a gap year (which largely involved getting off his face in South East Asia), he'd returned to Cardiff with a deep tan, a feeling of anticlimax and several thousand pounds more debt.  It hadn't taken long for his parents to start chipping away and before he knew it, he was paying them rent whilst despising the fact he was still living with them and was working in the local pub. Something had to be done.  

He'd procrastinated with the online application over the course of a month or so, struggling to describe a situation where he'd 'challenged someone’s behaviour that was discriminatory or inappropriate'.  By the time he'd finished filling out the Equal Opportunities form and hit the 'submit' button, he'd convinced himself that a call to interview from South Wales Police probably wasn't on the cards.  Six months and several interviews later though, Tom found himself sat with ten other young men and women in a drafty porta cabin in Swansea, listening to a portly middle-aged man with impossibly shiny shoes and a drinker's nose boom proudly about how ‘they were not to take lightly their responsibility as the next cohort selected to become Her Majesty's Officers of the Law'.  He'd enjoyed the practical elements of his training and had looked forward to his first patrol.  But he felt unable to fully embrace his new role and was slightly embarrassed about being in a position that required him to take himself so seriously.

Constable Hughes estimated two hundred people now plugged the entrance road to the site.  A nervous energy was palpable and the atmosphere inside the compound felt less jovial than it had initially been.  Several camera crews had arrived, one with a cherry picker which now hovered above the site's hoarding, alternating it's focus between the eighteen officers inside and the baying, chanting throng outside.  So far, no one had tried to get beyond the barriers, but the tide of the crowd rocked them to and fro as it flowed in and out against them.

Constable James Stirling stood alongside Hughes roughly twenty feet from the barriers, both with hands thrust in the gap between their stab vests and their jackets.  Despite both being of muscular build and above average in height, their age (they were both in their mid twenties) and inexperience meant the pair lacked authority, and they tried to make up for it with posture and gesture as they stood facing sternly straight ahead.  The illusion of authority had obsessed Hughes throughout his training and the more he thought about it and tried to convey it, the less convincing he seemed.  You either had it or you didn’t he’d concluded.

"The drilling rig should be here soon". Stirling looked at his watch and back to the crowd as he spoke, quickly returning his hand to the warmth of his breast.  "Yeah, shouldn't be long now” Replied Hughes. “Are there any more backup coming?" He was trying to sound nonchalant in order to not betray his genuine concern about the growing numbers.

"I think there's an escort vehicle but other than that, it's just us lot I'm afraid. Don't worry though mate.  Once the rig's arrived and they've got something to shout at, they'll soon get bored and go home to burn some incense. Or have a joint. Or sign an online petition to ban the use of… deodorant or something'.  Hughes chuckled nervously. "Yeah, you're probably right" he muttered.

The cameraman in the cherry picker suddenly swung to face out in to the approach road and the low grumble of a diesel engine could be heard briefly before the chants turned to shouts and screams and drowned it out.  People turned and surged away from the barriers towards the cumbersome vehicle as it gradually pulled in to sight, splurging black fumes from its exhaust defiantly in to the air.  "Stirling. Hughes. Time to move" barked Sgt. Reed over his shoulder as he and five other officers ran towards the barriers. They unclipped them, dragged them to either side of the road and forcefully parted the crowd to get to the escort vehicle that crawled towards them from the other side of the mass.  Hughes and Stirling rushed to join their colleagues as the pack closed in behind them, swallowing the six men and women to its churning core.  Hughes raised his arms up and outwards to clear a path through. As he did so, he brushed the breast of a woman through her green duffle coat. “Pervert pig!” she screeched in to his ear as she clawed at his arm “Back!” yelled Stirling as he muscled in close behind.  The woman swung at him with an open hand, cuffing him on the forearm.  He bore his shoulder in to her sternum. “Get Back!” he yelled again. The noise of the crowd was deafening and disorientating.  Hughes fixed his eye on the rig’s exhaust to guide him and continued to force his way through.  A man dressed as the grim reaper leaped in front of him, driving a plastic scythe down at his feet.  “Move, now!” the officer yelled. The man stayed fixed to the spot.  Hughes’ heart was racing.  He was suddenly and acutely aware of just how much hatred was being directed towards him. So much raw emotion and frustration.

He was pretty sure he agreed with these people about risks of fracking. About the unknowns, the long-term environmental effects and the need to focus on renewable energy and sustainable living for the future of the planet.  He wasn’t a bad person.  He wasn’t here because he wanted to be.  It was his job.  A job he’d trained long and hard for and for all the right reasons. Most of these losers probably didn’t even have jobs.  He was just here to keep people safe.  To keep order.  It was the oil and gas companies and the politicians with vested interests and five-year blinkers that were the ones to blame for this.  The injustice was infuriating.  

The Grim reaper still wouldn’t budge and an intense anger welled inside Hughes.  “MOVE, NOW!”.  He reached for his nightstick, flicking it downwards to extend it fully and then raised it offensively above his shoulder. “NOW!”. The man stood defiant and twisted his face towards Hughes’, sticking out his tongue as he did. Without hesitation, Hughes brought the steel down cold and hard on the crown of his head. The hideous mask spun from the man’s face and he slumped instantly downwards to the tarmac and lay still and crumpled at the officer’s feet.  The woman in the green duffle coat shrieked and dropped to her knees at the man’s limp body.  “What the hell have you done Hughes!?”. Stirling grabbed his shoulder, spinning him round to face him as he did.  Hughes stood stunned for a moment.  “We need to get out of here”.  They scrambled desperately back towards the compound as those surrounding them rushed to the assistance of the man on the ground.  The site manager uncoupled a bolt and swung the chain-link gates open to let the two panting officers in, quickly closing and bolting it behind them.

Sgt. Reed and the others had now reached the escort vehicle and were doing their best to guide it through as they tried to shield their faces from the eggs which smashed against its windscreen and splattered over their helmets and uniforms.  A number of people had managed to clamber on to the sides of the rig, hanging on with one arm and punching the air with the other as they chanted like football hooligans.  Two female officers frantically clutched at their flailing legs in an attempt to drag them off.

The rig and escort had finally made it to the gates of the compound. Three more officers had reached the convey and had successfully managed to remove the climbers.  “Now!” boomed Reed.  Hughes, Stirling and the site manager flung the gates open and beckoned the vehicles in.  The remaining officers now flanked the rig down both sides, preventing anyone from squeezing between it and the fence to get in to the compound as the rig rolled slowly inside.  The gates folded in behind it, rattling shut once the last officers had slipped in. Hughes slammed the bolt across just as the mob flooded in behind in close pursuit.  He and Stirling stood for a moment, cold and expressionless, staring blankly into each others clean-shaven faces.  The ubiquitous cherry picker craned its neck in towards the compound, hanging ominously above with its camera trained unwaveringly on the two young men. Suddenly though, it swung away again and out towards the approach road.  Tom Hughes looked up, squinting in the autumn sunlight and heard faintly in the distance the pulsing wail of an ambulance siren.