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bcanetwork · 3 years

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BCA NFTalk Vol.5丨Decisive Moments in History of NFT

This podcast is produced by the BC A Blockchain Art Center, supported by China's CryptoPunks community, Panda community, Vulcan DAO and Block Rhythm.

Background: The author of "When the Stars of Mankind Shine" said in the preface that a moment of historical significance is about to usher in a rich and rich history of the human world. A few hours, often even only in a certain minute, but their decisiveness affects beyond time. In the process of WEB2.0 migration, we should also discover some great moments. Look, they will also become their shining stars in the galaxy of human history.

ModeratorLou Ziwei Arthur BCA Co-founder丨Vulcan DAO GP (hereinafter referred to as L)

Guest: Senior Practitioner of Alex NFT (hereinafter referred to as A)

Ah Feng TheForce.trade BD (hereinafter referred to as F)

Wang Yang NFT Senior Collector (hereinafter referred to as W)

Jason US Stocks/Blockchain Robot (hereinafter referred to as J)

Why is a JPEG worth a thousand dollars? Why does CryptoPunks become the spiritual symbol of the encryption circle?

F: Token to Metaverse is a progressive process. From no entity to entity, something must be used. The best way to achieve this is pictures. CryptoPunks just appeared. In the initial stage of NFT, the main function of people buying NFT is for social identity, and the pursuit of social status is the driving force for the advancement of human civilization. The price of CryptoPunks already symbolizes a certain status. Buying a very expensive CryptoPunks also shows the determination to be optimistic about the NFT industry.

CryptoPunks is the first NFT community to survive, and the first successful benchmark has very strong vitality. The first group of community members have received very rich returns. This group of people is rich and interesting, but the appearance of CryptoPunks does not seem important. The community has become the largest wealth deposited by CryptoPunks, giving CryptoPunks a historically low level of time condensed.

A: CryptoPunks has become the spiritual symbol of the encryption circle, which is essentially the difference between FT and NFT. A friend once said a classic saying, "FT is consensus, and NFT is empathy." FT cannot mark emotions, but NFT can entrust emotions, and its manifestation is unique. Only emotional things can be connected to spiritual symbols, and only on this basis can CryptoPunks gradually generate value. CryptoPunks inspired the establishment of ERC721 and the NFT craze. CryptoPunks is like the first person to climb Mount Everest and will be remembered forever. It is supplied in limited quantities. As more and more people know about NFT, its price is getting higher and higher, which also expresses the spirit of Crypto and the spirit of punk. Based on the historical status, the spirit of expression, and NFT, it has become the spiritual symbol of the encryption circle.

The historical position of CryptoPunks cannot be replaced, neither Monkey nor Loot can be shaken. Perhaps the price will exceed, but the CryptoPunks logo will continue to be consolidated as more ecology enters, and the historical position will be condensed there.

W: Because I am a basketball fan, I resonate with NBA Top Shot. There is very little information about NFT on the Internet. After entering the CryptoPunks community, I found that the knowledge base here is perfect. Any new NFT project, about their characteristics and innovations, will be discussed in the CryptoPunks group first.

The community has accumulated a large portion of people who have been playing CryptoPunks since 2017. They have been doing NFT in this circle for many years. In April, many senior CryptoPunks veterans were discussing Art Blocks and were very optimistic about the technological breakthrough of this project.

Moderator L: Being at the tip of the information pyramid is very, very important. Whether the first-hand information received is high-quality information or marginal information is directly related to subsequent actions.

J: The most successful community and project on the Ethereum chain is CryptoPunks. The social value of holding it far exceeds the beauty or so-called actual value of a picture. The ultimate goal for many people to earn money in the currency circle is to hold a Punk, and I also earn enough money to buy my own Punk by investing in different projects. Because everyone wants a Punk, it becomes the spiritual symbol of the encryption circle.

Collect NFT strategy and experience? What are the bright projects? What do you think of Loot?

J: In recent months, I mainly invested in Art Blocks and Crypto Cities. I am more optimistic about the innovative project of Loot, which has changed the logic of the NFT project from top to bottom, and the value of NFT is given by the community.

W: The Internet has become the main place of modern life. The emergence of NFT gave the online virtual product pricing mechanism. After a picture is uploaded to the Internet and made into an NFT, no matter how many people copy the picture to their computer, they will eventually distinguish between original and copy due to the existence of NFT. Original value. NFT opened up a new field and started the process of value discovery.

The avatar NFT is used as a social platform avatar, which represents a social identity and cultural community circle in online social networking. The biggest difference between Art Blocks and other digital art NFTs is that it is natively on the chain and does not involve storage such as PNG and JPEG. Its biggest innovation is to put the code that can draw the picture on the chain and read the code through the browser. , To generate. The advantage is that as long as the ether chain exists and can read the code, the possibility of NFT disappearing is almost zero.

Damien Hirst, as one of the highest-priced artists in the world (a painting exceeding 100 million US dollars), is the first to test the new field of NFT. The release price of his works is only set at 2,000 US dollars. It is an absolute welfare for NFT collectors. It has risen to 50,000-60,000 US dollars. I believe that in the future, there will be more big-name artists of classic art testing the NFT, and these have the potential to become opportunities for high returns.

One of the main reasons for the popularity of Loot is also technological innovation. It can be used as a platform to make many games. In the future, competitors will buy Loot to make their own games, or create Loot to make their own games. These are all to be determined. It depends on whether it can form a large enough community so that everyone must use it (traffic).

A: My collection of NFT is more from the perspective of industrial blockchain. In our opinion, the most valuable thing about NFT is the underlying accounting technology of this non-homogeneous asset. The categories for bookkeeping are artworks and digital collections, and there will be many categories for bookkeeping in the future. Because human beings have two kinds of assets, one is called FT and the other is NFT. FT is currency, and NFT includes artworks, real estate, contract bills, and so on. NFT truly realized the private ownership of digital assets for the first time.

Private knowledge in the traditional physical world is protected by law, but legal supervision is a very high-cost accounting method. Blockchain creates a very low-cost and efficient accounting method and circulation method. From the perspective of the industry, NFT gave the blockchain a huge opportunity to break the circle for the first time because it was connected with traditional assets.

After the emergence of NFT, it gave birth to assets connected to the currency circle and the crypto circle such as NBA Top Shot, and realized the rapid transfer and flow of assets through the blockchain. Essential changes are the basis for the entry of major players in these eras such as Alibaba, Tencent, and NetEase. I bought Punk because I wanted to do the business of NFT, and explored in this direction. The survey found that Punk is the project with this status the most.

Blockchain and NFT have truly changed the soil, and only flowers and plants that we can't imagine will grow on them. Loot is similar. It creates the chemical reaction in NFT, which will inspire many projects and become a seed of innovation.

F: All innovations are played out. My strategy is to be familiar rather than raw, and start trading from familiar areas. From the perspective of game manufacturers, although Loot is very malleable, it takes a very long time for the final product and game to be made. A complete game development cycle will not be less than one year. Loot has not passed the test of time, it is a very dangerous behavior to rush now.

Understanding of encryption art? Is the emergence of generative art and programmable art overturning and challenging traditional art?

W: Compared with traditional art, encrypted art has a very wide audience (dissemination). When you make an NFT work, the world can see it; as an art lover or collector, you can see the art of artists from all over the world with a mobile phone. Works; for professional collectors, it is easy to transfer works (liquidity), because facing the global open market for collectors; transaction information, prices, and circulation information are completely transparent, and traditional art industry information is very opaque; NFT is storing and transporting On the one hand, it is safe, low-cost, and fast to circulate, and there is no need to consider storage space issues.

J: The limited edition NFT is a bit like grabbing a sneaker. You can change hands to earn 20% to 30% in two days after you buy it. More contacts have found that the art category has a unique collection significance. Different artists have very interesting understandings of the world and blockchain, and they have gradually changed from short-term traders to long-term collectors.

Xcopy, which is relatively popular recently, started doing NFT two years ago. I bought it in a bear market and the return was good. Unlike the Beeple hype, Xcopy is a very down-to-earth artist with a high degree of recognition in the circle.

A:I think the history of NFT, or the current innovation projects are all marked. These projects may have a relatively good return on investment, but the wealth-making effect of the industry will not last forever.

F: This market has a strong head effect. As young people, what I see is that these things are no longer for young people. We must look at a larger market in the longer term, so we choose Go to Gamefi. Only playable things that allow more users to participate can expand the entire NFT market. NFT art is only a very small part of the entire market.

Social NFT and game NFT can be stacked, and the most potential in the future may be the characters or equipment on the Gamefi track with the nature of social games.

Host L: Traditional art has the problem of high music and lack of music. The interactive experience of encrypted art will be much better, allowing users and audiences to participate in the creation of artworks.

NFT projects with Asian cultural themes are rare in the market. What is the reason for the current lack of influence? Breakthrough ideas?

J: RPC can be regarded as a domestically produced NFT project with a larger transaction volume. Kongfu Hero and River export traditional culture. It is a good publicity for traditional Chinese culture, but the culture of China for 5000 years needs more artists to join in. In the next three and five years, Chinese culture/Asian culture will be gradually introduced to the blockchain. Whether it is building Chinatown in Metaverse or different social circles, more and more Chinese people will enter, whether it is buying or issuing, there will definitely be more and more NFT projects in Asia.

A: Kongfu Hero originated in the Punk community. The element that can most arouse global empathy is Kongfu, who has designed characters such as gods and demons. Lack of influence, because many times lack of innovation, some bold things. This kind of craze will actually drive more teams to invest more resources to plan longer-term roadmap development IP. The Chinese or Asian teams can make very good projects, and gradually we will see some better projects, because it is really just starting now.

Moderator L: There are some things that time cannot pass, but you can learn from it. In the blockchain world, persistence is the most important thing, leaving some traces.

F: Many Asian projects do not have the ability to operate overseas communities, and lack people who have the ability to operate communities. We have an advantage in doing Japanese culture, but we still don’t know how to talk to the community and listen to the voice of the community. This is our weak point.

W: The success of a project is critical to the recognition of well-known collectors in the community. Because as long as the big collectors approve it, ordinary investors will come in one after another. One of the main problems with Asian elements is that wealthy Asians have always invested conservatively. The acceptance of potential customers is relatively lower than that of high-income groups in Europe and the United States.

#nftart #nft crypto

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classyfoxdestiny · 3 years

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Accenture, the silent partner cleaning up Facebook for $500 million a year

In 2019, Julie Sweet, the newly appointed chief executive officer of global consulting firm Accenture, held a meeting with top managers. She had a question: Should Accenture get out of some of the work it was doing for a leading client, Facebook?

For years, tensions had mounted within Accenture over a certain task that it performed for the social network. In eight-hour shifts, thousands of its full-time employees and contractors were sorting through Facebook’s most noxious posts, including images, videos and messages about suicides, beheadings and sexual acts, trying to prevent them from spreading online.

Some of those Accenture workers, who reviewed hundreds of Facebook posts in a shift, said they had started experiencing depression, anxiety and paranoia. In the United States, one worker had joined a class-action lawsuit to protest the working conditions. News coverage linked Accenture to the grisly work. So Sweet had ordered a review to discuss the growing ethical, legal and reputational risks.

At the meeting in Accenture’s Washington office, she and Ellyn Shook, head of human resources, voiced concerns about the psychological toll of the work for Facebook and the damage to the firm’s reputation, attendees said. Some executives who oversaw the account argued that the problems were manageable. They said the social network was too lucrative a client to lose.

The meeting ended with no resolution.

Facebook and Accenture have rarely talked about their arrangement or even acknowledged that they work with each other. But their secretive relationship lies at the heart of an effort by the world’s largest social media company to distance itself from the most toxic part of its business.

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For years, Facebook has been under scrutiny for the violent and hateful content that flows through its site. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly pledged to clean up the platform. He has promoted the use of artificial intelligence to weed out toxic posts and touted efforts to hire thousands of workers to remove the messages that AI doesn’t.

But behind the scenes, Facebook has quietly paid others to take on much of the responsibility. Since 2012, the company has hired at least 10 consulting and staffing firms globally to sift through its posts, along with a wider web of subcontractors, according to interviews and public records.

No company has been more crucial to that endeavor than Accenture. The Fortune 500 firm, better known for providing high-end tech, accounting and consulting services to multinational companies and governments, has become Facebook’s single biggest partner in moderating content, according to an examination by The New York Times.

Accenture has taken on the work — and given it a veneer of respectability — because Facebook has signed contracts with it for content moderation and other services worth at least $500 million a year, according to The Times’ examination. Accenture employs more than a third of the 15,000 people whom Facebook has said it has hired to inspect its posts. And while the agreements provide only a small fraction of Accenture’s annual revenue, they give it an important lifeline into Silicon Valley. Within Accenture, Facebook is known as a “diamond client.”

Their contracts, which have not previously been reported, have redefined the traditional boundaries of an outsourcing relationship. Accenture has absorbed the worst facets of moderating content and made Facebook’s content issues its own. As a cost of doing business, it has dealt with workers’ mental health issues from reviewing the posts. It has grappled with labor activism when those workers pushed for more pay and benefits. And it has silently borne public scrutiny when they have spoken out against the work.

Those issues have been compounded by Facebook’s demanding hiring targets and performance goals and so many shifts in its content policies that Accenture struggled to keep up, 15 current and former employees said. And when faced with legal action from moderators about the work, Accenture stayed quiet as Facebook argued that it was not liable because the workers belonged to Accenture and others.

“You couldn’t have Facebook as we know it today without Accenture,” said Cori Crider, a co-founder of Foxglove, a law firm that represents content moderators. “Enablers like Accenture, for eye-watering fees, have let Facebook hold the core human problem of its business at arm’s length.”

The Times interviewed more than 40 current and former Accenture and Facebook employees, labor lawyers and others about the companies’ relationship, which also includes accounting and advertising work. Most spoke anonymously because of nondisclosure agreements and fear of reprisal. The Times also reviewed Facebook and Accenture documents, legal records and regulatory filings.

Facebook and Accenture declined to make executives available for comment. Drew Pusateri, a Facebook spokesperson, said the company was aware that content moderation “jobs can be difficult, which is why we work closely with our partners to constantly evaluate how to best support these teams.”

Stacey Jones, an Accenture spokesperson, said the work was a public service that was “essential to protecting our society by keeping the internet safe.”

Neither company mentioned the other by name.

Pornographic Posts Much of Facebook’s work with Accenture traces back to a nudity problem.

In 2007, millions of users joined the social network every month — and many posted naked photos. A settlement that Facebook reached that year with Andrew Cuomo, who was New York’s attorney general, required the company to take down pornographic posts flagged by users within 24 hours.

Facebook employees who policed content were soon overwhelmed by the volume of work, members of the team said. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, and other executives pushed the team to find automated solutions for combing through the content, three of them said.

Facebook also began looking at outsourcing, they said. Outsourcing was cheaper than hiring people and provided tax and regulatory benefits, along with the flexibility to grow or shrink quickly in regions where the company did not have offices or language expertise. Sandberg helped champion the outsourcing idea, they said, and midlevel managers worked out the details.

By 2011, Facebook was working with oDesk, a service that recruited freelancers to review content. But in 2012, after news site Gawker reported that oDesk workers in Morocco and elsewhere were paid as little as $1 per hour for the work, Facebook began seeking another partner.

Facebook landed on Accenture. Formerly known as Andersen Consulting, the firm had rebranded as Accenture in 2001 after a break with accounting firm Arthur Andersen. And it wanted to gain traction in Silicon Valley.

In 2010, Accenture scored an accounting contract with Facebook. By 2012, that had expanded to include a deal for moderating content, particularly outside the United States.

That year, Facebook sent employees to Manila, Philippines, and Warsaw, Poland, to train Accenture workers to sort through posts, two former Facebook employees involved with the trip said. Accenture’s workers were taught to use a Facebook software system and the platform’s guidelines for leaving content up, taking it down or escalating it for review.

‘Honey Badger’ What started as a few dozen Accenture moderators grew rapidly.

By 2015, Accenture’s office in the San Francisco Bay Area had set up a team, code-named Honey Badger, just for Facebook’s needs, former employees said. Accenture went from providing about 300 workers in 2015 to about 3,000 in 2016. They are a mix of full-time employees and contractors, depending on the location and task.

The firm soon parlayed its work with Facebook into moderation contracts with YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and others, executives said. (The digital content moderation industry is projected to reach $8.8 billion next year, according to Everest Group, roughly double the 2020 total.) Facebook also gave Accenture contracts in areas like checking for fake or duplicate user accounts and monitoring celebrity and brand accounts to ensure they were not flooded with abuse.

After federal authorities discovered in 2016 that Russian operatives had used Facebook to spread divisive posts to U.S. voters for the presidential election, the company ramped up the number of moderators. It said it would hire more than 3,000 people — on top of the 4,500 it already had — to police the platform.

“If we’re going to build a safe community, we need to respond quickly,” Zuckerberg said in a 2017 post.

The next year, Facebook hired Arun Chandra, a former Hewlett Packard Enterprise executive, as vice president of scaled operations to help oversee the relationship with Accenture and others. His division is overseen by Sandberg.

Facebook also spread the content work to other firms, such as Cognizant and TaskUs. Facebook now provides a third of TaskUs’ business, or $150 million a year, according to regulatory filings.

The work was challenging. While more than 90% of objectionable material that comes across Facebook and Instagram is removed by AI, outsourced workers must decide whether to leave up the posts that the AI doesn’t catch.

They receive a performance score that is based on correctly reviewing posts against Facebook’s policies. If they make mistakes more than 5% of the time, they can be fired, Accenture employees said.

But Facebook’s rules about what was acceptable changed constantly, causing confusion. When people used a gas station emoji as slang for selling marijuana, workers deleted the posts for violating the company’s content policy on drugs. Facebook then told moderators not to remove the posts, before later reversing course.

Facebook also tweaked its moderation technology, adding new keyboard shortcuts to speed up the review process. But the updates were sometimes released with little warning, increasing errors.

As of May, Accenture billed Facebook for roughly 1,900 full-time moderators in Manila; 1,300 in Mumbai, India; 850 in Lisbon; 780 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; 300 in Warsaw; 300 in Mountain View, California; 225 in Dublin; and 135 in Austin, Texas, according to staffing records reviewed by The Times.

At the end of each month, Accenture sent invoices to Facebook detailing the hours worked by its moderators and the volume of content reviewed. Each U.S. moderator generated $50 or more per hour for Accenture, two people with knowledge of the billing said. In contrast, moderators in some U.S. cities received starting pay of $18 an hour.

Psychological Costs Within Accenture, workers began questioning the effects of viewing so many hateful posts.

Accenture hired mental health counselors to handle the fallout. Izabela Dziugieł, a counselor who worked in Accenture’s Warsaw office, said she told managers in 2018 that they were hiring people ill-prepared to sort through the content. Her office handled posts from the Middle East, including gruesome images and videos of the Syrian war.

“They would just hire anybody,” said Dziugiel, who previously treated soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. She left the firm in 2019.

In Dublin, one Accenture moderator who sifted through Facebook content left a suicide note on his desk in 2018, said a mental health counselor who was involved in the episode. The worker was found safe.

Joshua Sklar, a moderator in Austin who quit in April, said he had reviewed 500 to 700 posts a shift, including images of dead bodies after car crashes and videos of animals being tortured.

“One video that I watched was a guy who was filming himself raping a little girl,” said Sklar, who described his experience in an internal post that later became public. “It was just awful.”

If workers went around Accenture’s chain of command and directly communicated with Facebook about content issues, they risked being reprimanded, he added. That made Facebook slower to learn about and react to problems, he said.

Facebook said anyone filtering content could escalate concerns.

Another former moderator in Austin, Spencer Darr, said in a legal hearing in June that the job had required him to make unimaginable decisions, such as whether to delete a video of a dog being skinned alive or simply mark it as disturbing. “Content moderators’ job is an impossible one,” he said.

In 2018, Accenture introduced WeCare — policies that mental health counselors said limited their ability to treat workers. Their titles were changed to “wellness coaches” and they were instructed not to give psychological assessments or diagnoses, but to provide “short-term support” like taking walks or listening to calming music. The goal, according to a 2018 Accenture guidebook, was to teach moderators “how to respond to difficult situations and content.”

Accenture’s Jones said the company was “committed to helping our people who do this important work succeed both professionally and personally.” Workers can see outside psychologists.

By 2019, scrutiny of the industry was growing. That year, Cognizant said it was exiting content moderation after tech site The Verge described the low pay and mental health effects of workers at an Arizona office. Cognizant said the decision would cost it at least $240 million in revenue and lead to 6,000 job cuts.

Internal Debate More than one Accenture chief executive debated doing business with Facebook.

In 2017, Pierre Nanterme, Accenture’s chief at the time, questioned the ethics of the work and whether it fit the firm’s long-term strategy of providing services with high profit margins and technical expertise, three executives involved in the discussions said.

No actions were taken. Nanterme died of cancer in January 2019.

Five months later, Sweet, a longtime Accenture lawyer and executive, was named chief executive. She soon ordered the review of the moderation business, three former colleagues said.

Executives prepared reports and debated how the work compared with jobs like an ambulance driver. Consultants were sent to observe moderators and their managers.

The office in Austin, which had opened in 2017, was selected for an audit as part of Sweet’s review. The city was also home to a Facebook office and had large populations of Spanish and Arabic speakers to read non-English posts. At its peak, Accenture’s Austin office had about 300 moderators parsing through Facebook posts.

But some workers there became unhappy about the pay and viewing so much toxic content. Organizing through text messages and internal message boards, they called for better wages and benefits. Some shared their stories with the media.

Last year, a worker in Austin was one of two from Accenture who joined a class-action suit against Facebook filed by U.S. moderators. Facebook argued that it was not liable because the workers were employed by firms like Accenture, according to court records. After the judge in the case ruled against Facebook, the company reached a $52 million settlement with the workers in May 2020.

For Sweet, the debate over the Facebook contracts stretched out over several meetings, former executives said. She subsequently made several changes.

In December 2019, Accenture created a two-page legal disclosure to inform moderators about the risks of the job. The work had “the potential to negatively impact your emotional or mental health,” the document said.

Last October, Accenture went further. It listed content moderation for the first time as a risk factor in its annual report, saying it could leave the firm vulnerable to media scrutiny and legal trouble. Accenture also restricted new moderation clients, two people with knowledge of the policy shift said. Any new contracts required approval from senior management.

But Sweet also left some things untouched, they said.

Among them: the contracts with Facebook. Ultimately, the people said, the client was too valuable to walk away from.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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tak4hir0 · 5 years

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Witten’s ends his speech by pointing out that despite the constant barrage of nonsense claims to investigate, "the power of a Vice President of a big company is so great that the reason there was a laboratory at Wright Field [today known Areas A and C of Wright Patterson Air Force Base] was to find out what we were doing and to help us do it and I got a contract from Wright Field to do it - to do gravity. Which I did, very happily." It’s unknown what, if anything, ever came of Witten’s research or the program's other related research. While we haven’t found a record of him at Wright Patterson to confirm his account, Witten did in fact publish several theoretical articles concerning general relativity throughout that period including “Invariants of General Relativity and the Classification of Spaces”, “Geometry of Gravitation and Electromagnetism”, and “Conformal Invariance in Physics”, all of which list Witten as an employee of the Research Institute for Advanced Studies established by Martin. The anti-gravity work Witten claims to have conducted at RIAS on behalf of Martin is corroborated by a series of three articles written by aviation journalist Ansel Talbert and published in the New York Herald Tribune on November 20, 21, and 22, 1956. Talbert served as the aviation correspondent for the Herald Tribune from 1953 until the paper shut down in 1966, after which he wrote for various aviation magazines and trade publications. New York Herald Tribune The front page of the November 20, 1955 issue of the New York Herald Tribune. The articles outline several research institutes that were focused on unlocking the secrets of gravity in the 1950s, including several major universities and private laboratories. A key part of much of the research conducted at these facilities involved relatively down-to-earth topics like electromagnetism, rotating masses at high speeds, and various methods of attempting to reduce an aircraft’s mass. Ansel Talbert was offered a firsthand glimpse into the research conducted at many of the laboratories set up in the 1950s to research gravity and attempts to combat it. His series of articles exploring the subject mention the anti-gravity interests and research of some of the biggest names in aviation: William P. Lear, Lawrence D. Bell, Dr. Igor I. Sikorsky, Martin's Vice President Trimble, and even frozen foods magnate Clarence Birdseye. "Mr. Birdseye gave the world its first packaged quick-frozen foods and laid the foundation for today's frozen food industry," Talbert wrote, "more recently he has become interested in gravitational studies." New York Herald Tribune Lawrence Bell of Bell Aircraft with Lt. Col Frank J. Everest, Maj. Charles Yeager, and Maj. Arthur Murray. According to Talbert's articles, Bell believed that is was possible "to cancel out gravity instead of fighting it." Talbert’s series offers a fascinating glimpse into the many anti-gravity research efforts which were underway in the mid-1950s, but like all accounts of anti-gravity or breakthrough propulsion research, none of the subjects Talbert interviewed offered any suggestion that conclusive working anti-gravity technologies ever came from these endeavors. Still, Talbert points out that some of the brightest minds in aerospace engineering and physics were devoted to studying gravity at the time, studies which led to important breakthroughs in general relativity: The current efforts to understand gravity and universal gravitation both at the sub-atomic level and at the level of the universe have the positive backing today of many of America's outstanding physicists. These include Dr. Edward Teller of the University of California, who received prime credit for developing the hydrogen bomb; Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; Dr. Freeman J. Dyson, theoretical physicist at the Institute, and Dr. John A. Wheeler, professor of physics at Princeton University who made important contributions to America's first nuclear fission project. It must be stressed that scientists in this group approach the problem only from the standpoint of pure research. They refuse to predict exactly in what directions the search will lead or whether it will be successful beyond broadening human knowledge generally. One of the biggest takeaways from Talbert’s series is the optimism shared by many of those involved with the project, as well as the stigma surrounding such an endeavor, even back then: Grover Loening, who was the first graduate in aeronautics in an American university and the first engineer hired by the Wright Brothers, holds similar views. Over a period of forty years, Mr. Loening has had a distinguished career as an aircraft designer and builder and recently was decorated by the United States Air Force for his work as a special scientific consultant. "I firmly believe that before long man will acquire the ability to build an electromagnetic contra-gravity mechanism that works," he says. "Much the same line of reasoning that enabled scientists to split up atomic structures also will enable them to learn the nature of gravitational attraction and ways to counter it." Right now there is considerable difference of opinion among those working to discover the secret of gravity and universal gravitation as to exactly how long the project will take. George S. Trimble, a brilliant young scientist who is head of the new advanced design division of Martin Aircraft in Baltimore and a member of the sub-committee on high-speed aerodynamics of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, believes that it could be done relatively quickly if sufficient resources and momentum were put behind the program. "I think we could do the job in about the time that it actually required to build the first atom bomb if enough trained scientific brainpower simultaneously began thinking about and working towards a solution," he said. "Actually, the biggest deterrent to scientific progress is a refusal of some people, including scientists, to believe that things which seem amazing can really happen... I know that if Washington decides that it is vital to our national survival to go where we want and do what we want without having to worry about gravity, we'd find the answer rapidly." Transcribed full text versions of Talbert’s articles "Conquest of Gravity Aim of Top Scientists in U.S.," "Space-Ship Marvel Seen If Gravity is Outwitted," and "New Air Dream - Planes Flying Outside Gravity" can be found online here, while digital versions of the articles as they appeared in the New York Herald Tribune can be found through the Herald Tribune archives available through the ProQuest database or the New York Public Library system. New York Herald Tribune An op-ed sent to the New York Herald Tribune in response to Talbert’s series. The Aerospace Research Laboratories At Wright Patterson Air Force BaseGeorge Trimble, Clarence Birdseye, and Lawrence Bell weren’t the only ones interested in researching anti-gravity. Talbert's series reported that nearly every major aerospace company at the time was involved in some way with researching "the gravity problem": Convair, Lear, Sikorsky, Sperry-Rand Corp., General Dynamics, and Avro Canada. Just as Dr. Louis Witten mentioned off-hand in the closing seconds of his speech at the 27th Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics, the United States Air Force also established its own gravity research project at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. The project was initially known as the General Physics Laboratory of the Aeronautical Research Laboratories (ARL), but its name was changed to Aerospace Research Laboratories at some point. To head the project, the Air Force hired physicist Joshua N. Goldberg who had recently received his PhD from Syracuse University. According to Goldberg’s Curriculum Vitae, he served as a research physicist at Wright Patterson’s Aerospace Research Laboratories from 1956 to 1962, as well as teaching graduate-level classical mechanics at the Ohio State University Extension at Wright Patterson. Goldberg’s publications from that period show he published a number of theoretical articles in academic journals while working at Wright Patterson, including titles such as “Conservation Laws in General Relativity”, “Measurement of Distance in General Relativity”, and “Einstein Spaces with Four-parameter Holonomy Group.” Many of Goldberg’s peers at Wright Patterson likewise produced peer-reviewed research in general relativity while at Wright Patterson. Numbers vary, but some accounts say dozens of studies were produced by Goldberg’s group. Some of the reports published from that era include equation-dense publications like “Some Extensions of Liapunov’s Second Method” by J.P. LaSalle and “Gravitational Field of a Spinning Mass as an Example of Algebraically Special Metrics” by Roy Kerr. Physical Review Letters Viewpoints differ on the nature of the research conducted at Wright-Patterson under this program. Some have posited that it had to do with actually trying to develop anti-gravity propulsion, while others say its goals were far more mundane. Nevertheless, the research supported by the Air Force led to what some science historians have called the “Golden Age of Relativity,” a title disputed by others, such as German physicist Hubert Goenner, who argues that “to a great extent what was named the ‘Golden age of relativity’ in the United States, may have been nothing but a feature of a general trend in physics after the ‘Sputnik’-shock.” It’s often claimed that the institute at Wright Patterson and other associated Air Force-funded laboratories were set up merely to investigate reports of Russian anti-gravity research to see if America's adversaries had achieved what the United States had not been able to. The anti-gravity research conducted at Wright Patterson concluded in the early 1970s with the passage of the Mansfield Amendments. The first of these, passed in 1970, limited “military funding of research that lacked a direct or apparent relationship to a specific military function.” According to an Office of Technology Assessment report delivered to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1991, these Mansfield Amendments for some years somewhat slowed the rate of U.S. military research into the types of lofty, abstract topics studied at Wright Patterson throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Following those Amendments, the Department of Defense’s research strategy shifted more towards the proposal-grant model seen at university and private laboratories today. That is not to say that the U.S. military’s research into gravitation ended with the Mansfield Amendments or was limited solely to Goldberg’s group at Wright Patterson. There is a wealth of research in the public realm that shows the Air Force’s research into these concepts continued long after the scientists at that base moved on to long careers in academia. In 1972, an ad hoc group with Franklin Mead, then Senior Aerospace Engineer with the Air Force Aerospace Research Laboratories, serving as editor had published a technical report titled “Advanced Propulsion Concepts - Project Outgrowth” for the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base. The document discusses various advanced propulsion concepts ranging from traditional rocket propulsion to “anti-gravity propulsion,” to which an entire chapter is dedicated. Two main approaches are outlined in Project Outgrowth: those using gravitational absorption, and those based on unified field theory which unites electromagnetism and gravitation. While the document notes that these approaches would “require some major breakthroughs in materials,” it points out that “no new or radical change in fundamental physics” would be required to make these breakthroughs a reality. In other words, Mead and the rest of the study group believed that these types of breakthrough propulsion concepts may be possible once materials sciences caught up with concepts developed in theoretical physics. USAF Throughout the expansive Project Outgrowth document, Mead and the other scientists also explored field propulsion, defined as those concepts which use “electric and/or magnetic fields to accelerate an ionized working fluid, or react directly with the environment by electric or magnetic effects.” While a range of theoretical field propulsion approaches were analyzed, they concluded that “it would be impossible within the time constraints of this study to evaluate the field propulsion area completely,” noting however that “more radical concepts may be found in the open literature by those interested in pursuing them.” Still, the document contains quite a few curiosities. One chapter, titled “Electrostatic Effects,” describes the use of electric generators to charge giant metallic spheres buried in the ground six miles apart in symmetrical arrangements. Another sphere would be placed on top of the ground in the center of this arrangement of spheres, which would then be shot up to 620 miles into space when the other spheres are charged with an intense electrical current, according to the document. It is also claimed that vehicles flying in space with charged skins could be used to cause the spheres to change directions instantly without any loss of velocity or use of propellant. USAF As fascinating as this experiment sounds, there is nothing in the document to suggest the Air Force actually sent metal spheres flying into the sky, and the document points out that “analysis of this concept completely ignores the effect of the immense electric fields of the surrounding environment,” noting that ambient ions accumulating around the spheres would nullify the repulsion effect. "Handling and producing charged objects of the magnitude assumed for the analysis may be well beyond the reach of technology for decades to come“ and "all of the ideas discussed lack theoretical and technical merit,” the study group concluded. USAF The same document outlines theoretical approaches at using superconductors to achieve electromagnetic spacecraft propulsion, noting that the applications of high energy electromagnetic fields range far beyond propulsion: The greatest advantage of this concept is that the system is initially charged on earth with a tremendous amount of massless energy which is stored in a low-loss propulsion system. [...] Similar to other low-thrust vehicles, this system is capable of accelerating to very high velocities when operating over great distances for substantial periods of time. [...] This system could be used to decelerate vehicles approaching the Earth at high speed. Militarily, this concept could, with its high magnetic field, destroy, deflect, or severely damage incoming high-speed projectiles. USAF The Project Outgrowth document concludes by arguing that while many of these concepts are still out of the grasp of the USAF, advances in materials and engineering could make what in 1972 seemed like fantasy a reality in the decades to come: Obviously, advancements in certain areas of technology could make a number of concepts suddenly very attractive. Improvements in high energy lasers by several orders of magnitude of energy output or new concepts involving long-distance energy transfer would make both laser propulsion and infinite Isp ramjet very attractive. The development of higher current density superconductors, metallic hydrogen, or even room temperature superconductors would make many of the magnetic concepts more attractive. [...] Radical departures from time-honored, well-proved approaches are either discarded or lack visualization. Possibly, not until man truly becomes a creature of space will the restrictions imposed on his imagination be removed and radically new propulsion concepts devised. We are just beginning to understand the true nature of space and to attempt to utilize this environment for our propulsion needs. The same concepts explored in the Project Outgrowth document were later examined by subsequent Air Force-funded studies. In 1988, the New York-based Veritay Technology, Inc. submitted the document “21st Century Propulsion Concept” to the Air Force Astronautics Laboratory (AFAL) at Edwards Air Force Base. The document looks at the Biefield-Brown effect, a controversial theory that claims that electrical fields can produce propulsive forces sometimes referred to as ionic wind. The AFAL was able to generate minuscule measures of propulsion with the concept, but concluded that “ion propulsion effects are negligible.” A similar report from 1989 titled “Electric Propulsion Study” also complied for the Astronautics Laboratory at Edwards outlines a variety of theories and experiments that explore the interactions between gravitational, electrical, and electromagnetic fields. Concepts like ionic wind, the Mach effect, and various applications of high energy electromagnetic fields are discussed. One brief chapter explores the concept of inertial mass variation using a rotating cylinder filled with mercury. The Air Force concluded that the experiment showed little promise and that “no AFAL action is suggested at this time” but that “should an experiment by external agencies be done with positive results, then this area should be reconsidered.” Ultimately, the document concludes that while much of the research it cites is still in its infancy, inertial mass reduction techniques may offer the most promising results with further study: It is recommended that policies and plans take into consideration long time studies in the area of gravity and inertia. These areas deserve more emphasis. This is likely to be more important than any single experimental program. Since chemical propulsion is reaching its theoretical limits and nuclear propulsion has political difficulties, it is more likely that gravitational and electromagnetic studies will lead to future breakthroughs than any nuclear force studies (with the possible exception of more recent low temperature fusion work). The Air Force continues to look into ways of defying gravity without the use of propellants and some technical reports maintain that this will soon be possible. According to the 2006 study “Advanced Technology and Breakthrough Physics for 2025 and 2050 Military Aerospace Vehicles” which was published by the American Institute of Physics, some scientists claim that next-generation propulsion may be achieved sometime within the next three decades. The study was compiled at the request of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and examines the technological breakthroughs that researchers believed could be developed and implemented by 2025 and 2050. American Institute of Physics The conceptual "2050 vehicle" featuring hypothetical inertial mass reduction technology which is theorized to extract energy from the quantum vacuum. While most of the report centers around compact fusion reactors and the developments of new high temperature composite materials, the section on the “2050 Vehicle” predicts that the jet propulsion and power systems of this hypothetical aircraft will come in the form of propellant-less field propulsion based on the principle of inducing mass fluctuations using high-frequency electromagnetic fields: One example of propellant-less field propulsion [...] proposes the use of high voltage and high frequency electromagnetic (em) field pulsations to induce mass fluctuations within the electronic and ionic structure of dielectric materials - to cause a favorable “gravinertial” field coupling with nearby and distant matter that results in unidirectional force. Of course, as we now know, the USAF isn’t the sole branch of the military openly looking into next-generation hypothetical vehicles based on concepts of electromagnetic fields and inertial mass variation. Based on the recent announcement declaring a partnership with TTSA, we know even the U.S. Army is also exploring similar concepts for next-generation ground vehicles that exploit the same principles the USAF has explored for decades: mass manipulation, electromagnetic metamaterial waveguides, and quantum physics. Civilian Research Into Gravitation, Electromagnetism, And PropulsionThe military isn’t the only sector that has for decades conducted research that has explored the boundaries of aerospace propulsion and general relativity. In 1996, NASA funded an endeavor known as the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics (BPP) Program which invited some of the brightest minds in physics and aerospace engineering to propose radical new ideas to propel spaceflight into a new paradigm. In a paper outlining the BPP program presented at the Second Symposium on Realistic Near-Term Advanced Scientific Space Missions in 1998, its director, Marc Miller, offered an overview of NASA’s aims for the project, noting that “it is known from observed phenomena and from the established physics of General Relativity that gravity, electromagnetism, and spacetime are inter-related phenomena” and that “these ideas have led to questioning if gravitational or inertial forces can be created or modified using electromagnetism.” Many of the ideas Miller and the NASA BPP program describes were developed or are better understood thanks to the research funded by Wright Patterson, including Hermann Bondi’s concept of negative mass (Bondi’s group at Kings College, London received funding from the U.S. Air Force) and Joshua Goldberg’s theory of gravitational radiation. In an attempt to achieve breakthrough propulsion based on these concepts, NASA’s project identified three major barriers that stood in the way of their main goal of achieving interstellar travel: (1) MASS: Discover new propulsion methods that eliminate or dramatically reduce the need for propellant. This implies discovering fundamentally new ways to create motion, presumably by manipulating inertia, gravity, or by any other interactions between matter, fields, and spacetime. (2) SPEED: Discover how to attain the ultimate achievable transit speeds to dramatically reduce travel times. This implies discovering a means to move a vehicle at or near the actual maximum speed limit for motion through space or through the motion of spacetime itself (if possible, this means circumventing the light speed limit). (3)ENERGY: Discover fundamentally new modes of on board energy generation to power these propulsion devices. This third goal is included since the first two breakthroughs could require breakthroughs in energy generation, and since the physics underlying the propulsion goals is closely linked to energy physics. In 1997, NASA’s Lewis Research Center, now known as the John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field, held a conference on these breakthrough propulsion concepts, the proceedings of which are worth a read and contain titles such as “Inertial Mass as a Reaction of the Vacuum to Accelerated Motion”, “Force Field Propulsion”, and “The Zero-Point Field and the NASA Challenge to Create the Space Drive”. From what little we know or think we know about Salvatore Cezar Pais, the elusive inventor of the Navy’s intriguing if not puzzling anti-gravity ‘UFO’ patents that we’ve explored in our previous reporting, he was working on his PhD dissertation at Case Western Reserve University while serving as a NASA Graduate Student Research Fellow at NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field at the time of the conference. There’s no concrete evidence that Pais attended the workshop, but according to the document’s foreword, 12 students were in attendance. The table of contents for the conference proceedings lists a total of 449 pages, the last of which is a list of workshop participants. However, the versions available online stop at page 389. We are currently pursuing a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the missing pages. Confirming Pais' presence at the conference would be significant because many of the exact same revolutionary concepts that NASA was exploring in terms of unlocking new forms of propulsion and space travel are the same types of concepts found throughout the patents for his "hybrid aerospace-underwater craft" and "high energy electromagnetic field generator." Many of the participants at NASA's workshop are also cited throughout Pais' patents and publications. Placing Pais at the conference would add to the body of evidence which suggests the technologies in the Navy's patents may have been in the works for the past 20 years, at least as far as the inventor is concerned. In reality though, as we've laid out here, many of the concepts in Pais' patents are similar to those which were researched at Wright-Patterson and other facilities in the 1950s and are still being explored today. Aside from NASA, academic and independent laboratories have been researching the same principles and approaches the Air Force and other military laboratories have been looking into for decades. One of the most commonly researched areas is in hypothetically reducing an aircraft’s mass using electromagnetism, preferably to zero, and several Lockheed Martin researchers have been involved with quite a few theoretical studies into altering inertial mass (see Haisch, Rueda, and Puthoff, 1998; Rueda and Haisch, 1998; Haisch and Rueda, 1999; and Woodward, Mahood, and March 2001). A large body of peer-reviewed research into mass reduction involves using advanced superconducting materials such as yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO (see Podkletnov and Nieminen, 1992; Li et al, 1997; and Podkletnov and Modanese, 2001). Some of these studies, many of them more than 20 years old, reported observing mass reductions of up to two percent. Of course, just because scientists report a peer-reviewed result doesn’t mean their data can’t be challenged or have been impacted by spurious factors. Other attempts to overcome and harness gravity focus on the use of electromagnetic fields. In the 2007 publication “The Connection between Inertial Forces and the Vector Potential”, researchers found a connection between electric and magnetic fields, writing that there is a “possibility to manipulate inertial mass" and potentially "some mechanisms for possible applications to electromagnetic propulsion and the development of advanced space propulsion physics.” In 2010, an Air Force-funded study at the University of Florida leveraged these principles to design and test a "Wingless Electromagnetic Air Vehicle (WEAV)" which is claimed to employ "no moving parts and assures near-instantaneous response time." The study writes that this vehicle is designed to support the Air Force Research Laboratory's strategy to “deliver precision effects: ubiquitous, swarming sensors and shooters” by 2015-2030. The study was able to produce a disc that "was able to hover a few millimeters above the surface for a sustained duration (about three minutes)" and noted that "prototypes of varying radius were also successfully 'flown', demonstrating that WEAV is scalable." Air Force Office of Scientific Research Many other approaches have focused on the unique properties of novel materials. The 2007 publication “Direct Experimental Evidence of Electromagnetic Inertia Manipulation Thrusting" reports “new experimental results suggesting that ‘propellantless’ propulsion without conventional external assistance has been achieved by means of electromagnetic inertia manipulation” using piezoelectric materials, compounds that change shape when subjected to an electrical charge. In fact, several researchers have reported significant results in mass manipulation using a specific piezoelectric compound, lead zirconate titanate (PZT), which is found throughout several of the Navy’s recent patents. One physicist in particular, Dr. James Woodward of California State Fullerton, has found repeated success in altering the mass of small test samples of PZT. While the levels of mass reduction Woodward has observed are tiny, so are the samples and energy levels he has used. Still, in one study published with aerospace engineer Paul T. March, then at Lockheed Martin, the authors note that “very large mass fluctuation effects should be producible with only relatively modest power levels,” but are beyond the scope and scale of their study. Even so, Woodward’s results have been so promising that at least two Air Force studies, the 1989 technical report “Electric Propulsion Study” and the 2017 paper “Movement and Maneuver in Deep Space: A Framework to Leverage Advanced Propulsion”, call attention to his research in particular and note that his approach seems most promising. However, the 2017 Air Force paper notes that “obvious institutional and funding barriers stand in the way” and that “materials science and engineering work would be required to produce new piezoelectric materials and compensate for natural resonance, mechanical fatigue, and thermal effects.” Perhaps for that reason and for likely many more, various branches of the Armed Forces have for years been actively researching metamaterials that can propagate high energy electromagnetic fields. Navy budget documents show that between 2011 and 2016, the Navy’s In-House Laboratory Independent Research program conducted research into the “dispersion and control of electromagnetic (EM) waves in the microwave (RF) region, using fabricated metamaterial structures”. Department of Defense Starting in 2017, the Navy combined several program elements under one title, changing the way individual projects are reported in their budget and thus making it more difficult to know whether this metamaterial research continues today. Scratching The Surface While Not Knowing What Lies Beneath ItThe research cited here is only a brief look at a handful of the numerous studies the Air Force, other branches of the military, and various academic laboratories have conducted into "anti-gravity" and various propellantless propulsion methods, and only those that are available to the public. Anyone familiar with military research and development knows that there is a vast trove of projects, associated data, and technologies the public has yet to be shown and may never be shown. There have been hints of those secret technologies for years offered by insiders of some of America's most high-level aerospace research and development outfits. For instance, Ben Rich, the second director of Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, told Popular Science in 1994 the following: “We have some new things. We are not stagnating. What we are doing is updating ourselves, without advertising. There are some new programs, and there are certain things, some of them 20 or 30 years old, that are still breakthroughs and appropriate to keep quiet about [because] other people don’t have them yet.” With this in mind, it is possible that there are certain technologies in existence that once were, but may no longer be the things of science fiction. Regardless, when it comes to harnessing exotic methods of overcoming gravity, the U.S. military’s interest in doing so has continued since the 1950s, and civilian laboratories have been hot on their heels. We're still pursuing answers to the enigma surrounding the recent Navy patents, but to say they have come out of the blue and have no scientific basis whatsoever seems to be not entirely accurate based on the decades of research we've presented here. The same principles and many of the same names cited in Salvatore Pais' patents filed for the US Navy between 2015 and 2018 appear throughout numerous NASA studies, the peer-reviewed publications of the scientific community, and the long history of U.S. government-funded research into general relativity and breakthrough propulsion science. We have to stress once again that this doesn't mean that actually realizing these concepts and putting them to use is possible at this time, or even ever in the future, for that matter. But it does show that there has been an incredibly long and detailed history of interest by the U.S. military and the scientific community in this exotic field that has resulted in significant amounts of research that spans nearly seven decades. All this occurred in spite of the fact that scientists realized as far back as the 1950s that the topic was largely taboo and often scoffed at by the larger scientific community. Once again, what exists behind the curtain of the classified realm is the big wildcard here. With so much research present in the unclassified environment, one can only guess as to just how far the military and their industry partners have actually gone in an effort to obtain the 'Holy Grail' of aerospace engineering. For some, that speculative answer may be not very far at all. For others, it may be quite the contrary. The fact is we just don't know. But at least we do know that the topic, in general, isn't quite as alien as it may seem. Contact the editor: [email protected] Don't forget to sign upYour Email Address

#The Drive

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graphicpolicy · 7 years

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The Tick Season 1 Part 2 Gets a Teaser Trailer

The Tick Season 1 Part 2 Gets a Teaser Trailer #TheTick #Amazon

In a workaday world where superheroes fly among us, mild-mannered accountant Arthur Everest (GRIFFIN NEWMAN) suspects The City is controlled by a fabled villain known as The Terror (JACKIE EARLE HALEY), despite evidence of The Terror’s death 15 years ago. Arthur has a traumatic connection with The Terror, whose movements he has…

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#amazon #amazon studios #griffin newman #jackie earle haley #Peter Serafinowicz #the tick #valorie curry #video

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liveforfilms · 7 years

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The Tick launches on Amazon Prime today

Spoon! I loved the pilot episode (read my review) and now more episodes of The Tick have been released on Amazon Prime Video in the UK. I have watched a couple more and it just gets better and better. In a world where heroes and villains have existed for decades, accountant Arthur Everest (Griffin Newman – […] http://dlvr.it/PhWMfK

#action #All #comedy

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andjustarthur-blog · 8 years

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rules: your muse answers the interview questions

tagged by @bennogaldaan

tagging anyone who wants to?

1. WHAT IS YOUR NAME? “Arthur. Just... Arthur.”

2. WHAT IS YOUR REAL NAME? he hesitated before responding with “Arthur Everest.”

3. DO YOU KNOW WHY YOU WERE CALLED THAT? “I couldn’t think of any cool superhero name so I just went with... my first name. If you have any better ideas let me know

4. ARE YOU SINGLE OR TAKEN? he exhaled quickly, almost a laugh. “Something like that.” Well aware it didn’t answer the question.

5. HAVE ANY ABILITIES OR POWERS? “Yeah, I can fly, with the suit!”

6. STOP BEING A MARY SUE/GARY STU. “I’m not sure what you mean by that, but it isn’t a question anyway.”

7. WHAT’S YOUR EYE COLOR? “Brown.”

8. HOW ABOUT YOUR HAIR COLOR? "Also brown.”

9. HAVE YOU ANY FAMILY MEMBERS? Two sisters, and a mom. And the Tick, if he counts. 10. OH? WHAT ABOUT PETS? “I’m busy.”

11. THAT’S COOL I GUESS, NOW TELL ME ABOUT SOMETHING YOU DON’T LIKE. “dogs.”

12. DO YOU HAVE ANY HOBBIES/ACTIVITIES YOU LIKE DOING? “I crochet?”

13. EVER HURT ANYONE BEFORE? “Not intentionally”

14. EVER… KILLED ANYONE BEFORE? ”OH, no.”

15. WHAT KIND OF ANIMAL ARE YOU? “I like moths.”

16. NAME YOUR WORST HABITS. "Trusting.”

17. DO YOU LOOK UP TO ANYONE AT ALL? “Yeah, plenty of my friends.”

18. GAY, STRAIGHT, OR BISEXUAL? “Uh, the third one”

19. DO YOU GO TO SCHOOL? "I have a master’s degree in accounting.”

20. DO YOU EVER WANT TO MARRY AND HAVE KIDS ONE DAY?? “I don’t know, I worry about... well all of it but especially the fragileness.”

21. DO YOU HAVE ANY FANBOYS/FANGIRLS? he laughed. “Not yet I suppose. Any day now.”

22. WHAT ARE YOU MOST AFRAID OF? “The Terror.”

23. WHAT DO YOU USUALLY WEAR? "My suit.”

24. DO YOU LOVE SOMEONE? "I love my family, my friends, and the Tick who’s a bit of both.”

25. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU WET YOURSELF? “Probably right now, I’ve never been interviewed before.” he joked

26. WHAT CLASS ARE YOU? (HIGH CLASS, MIDDLE CLASS, LOW CLASS) “Middle class but that’s a weird question.”

27. HOW MANY FRIENDS DO YOU HAVE? "A few, I cherish all of them”

28. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON PIE? “Positive.”

29. FAVORITE DRINK? "Ginger-ale”

30. WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE PLACE? "Home”

31. ARE YOU INTERESTED IN SOMEONE? he blushed lightly. “Gosh, I don’t know.”

32. WHAT’S YOUR BRA CUP SIZE AND/OR HOW BIG IS YOUR WILLY? "What kind of interview is this again?”

33. WOULD YOU RATHER SWIM IN THE LAKE OR THE OCEAN? "Neither, I’m not a big fan of the water.”

34. WHAT’S YOUR TYPE? "Type of what?”

35. ANY FETISHES? "Not really?”

36. SEME OR UKE? TOP OR BOTTOM? DOMINANT OR SUBMISSIVE? "No”

37. CAMPING OR INDOORS? “Indoors.”

38. ARE YOU WANTING THE QUIZ TO END?? "It was a strange one.”

#It got long so i put some of it under a readmore #{muse info}

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allbestnet · 8 years

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Goodreads Best Books of the Decade: 1990's

959 people voted for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1) by J.K. Rowling

673 people voted for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3) by J.K. Rowling

639 people voted for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2) by J.K. Rowling

377 people voted for A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1) by George R.R. Martin

374 people voted for Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

354 people voted for The Giver (The Giver, #1) by Lois Lowry

295 people voted for The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1) by Philip Pullman

276 people voted for The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

244 people voted for The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

234 people voted for Holes (Holes, #1) by Louis Sachar

180 people voted for Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

175 people voted for Bridget Jones's Diary (Bridget Jones, #1) by Helen Fielding

171 people voted for Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

167 people voted for Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt, #1) by Frank McCourt

149 people voted for The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

141 people voted for Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park, #1) by Michael Crichton

136 people voted for Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett

137 people voted for A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, #2) by George R.R. Martin

134 people voted for The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #1) by Lemony Snicket

127 people voted for Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (The Wicked Years, #1) by Gregory Maguire

126 people voted for Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

121 people voted for Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

123 people voted for The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2) by Philip Pullman

119 people voted for Outlander (Outlander #1) by Diana Gabaldon

111 people voted for The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

113 people voted for Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story by John Berendt

109 people voted for Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson

105 people voted for The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

108 people voted for Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

105 people voted for The Green Mile by Stephen King

101 people voted for Blindness by José Saramago

100 people voted for Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

100 people voted for The Secret History by Donna Tartt

101 people voted for Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

97 people voted for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

99 people voted for White Oleander by Janet Fitch

100 people voted for Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

100 people voted for The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

98 people voted for The Notebook (The Notebook, #1) by Nicholas Sparks

94 people voted for High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

94 people voted for Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

91 people voted for Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

91 people voted for The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

90 people voted for The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

90 people voted for The Firm by John Grisham

84 people voted for Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

83 people voted for Stardust by Neil Gaiman

84 people voted for Oh, The Places You'll Go! by Dr. Seuss

79 people voted for She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb

78 people voted for The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, #1) by Alexander McCall Smith

76 people voted for Possession by A.S. Byatt

75 people voted for A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

76 people voted for A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson

72 people voted for The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman

73 people voted for Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

71 people voted for All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1) by Cormac McCarthy

71 people voted for I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb

70 people voted for The Hours by Michael Cunningham

69 people voted for The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

63 people voted for The Secret History by Donna Tartt

66 people voted for Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

63 people voted for Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

62 people voted for Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg

60 people voted for Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

58 people voted for Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières

57 people voted for Sabriel (Abhorsen, #1) by Garth Nix

56 people voted for American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

55 people voted for A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks

51 people voted for A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

53 people voted for Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

50 people voted for The Eye of the World (Wheel of Time, #1) by Robert Jordan

50 people voted for Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

50 people voted for American Pastoral (The American Trilogy, #1) by Philip Roth

48 people voted for The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan

48 people voted for Naked by David Sedaris

47 people voted for About a Boy by Nick Hornby

44 people voted for Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

42 people voted for Chocolat (Chocolat, #1) by Joanne Harris

43 people voted for Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts

44 people voted for The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

42 people voted for The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, #3) by Philip Pullman

36 people voted for Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

37 people voted for L.A. Confidential (L.A. Quartet, #3) by James Ellroy

36 people voted for Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx

34 people voted for Insomnia by Stephen King

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comiccrusaders · 7 years

Text

The Tick returns with more action-packed episodes! Evil is on the march, and The City is right in its way. Something terrible is going to happen, and Destiny needs her champions now more than ever. The Tick and Arthur round up the gang in a crash collision course between justice and villainy.

https://www.comiccrusaders.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/TICK_S1B_TRLR_TEAM_PRE_AV_h264_hd.mp4

About The Tick In a world where superheroes have been real for decades, an accountant with mental health issues and zero powers comes to realize his city is owned by a global super villain long-thought dead. As he struggles to uncover this conspiracy, he falls in league with a strange blue superhero. Together, they launch into an adventure brimming with crazed archvillains, blood-soaked vigilantes, mad science, and superhuman freakery.

Created by:

Ben Edlund

Cast:

Peter Serafinowicz (The Tick), Griffin Newman (Arthur Everest), Valorie Curry (Dot Everest), Brendan Hines (Superian), Yara Martinez (Ms. Lint), Scott Speiser (Overkill), and Jackie Earle Haley (The Terror)

Look out for additional characters, including:

Midnight

(Voiced by Townsend Coleman)

Dr. Karamazov

(John Pirkis)

VLM

(Ryan Woodie)

Tinfoil Kevin

(Devin Ratray)

and

Dangerboat

(Voiced by Alan Tudyk)

The Tick is available globally exclusively on Amazon Prime Video

#TheTick

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheTick/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/theticktv

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theticktv/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/primevideo

New Trailer for THE TICK SEASON 1: PART 2 The Tick returns with more action-packed episodes! Evil is on the march, and The City is right in its way.

#amazon #comics #tick #TV

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jokeronthesofa · 5 years

Text

Prime Review - The Tick: Seasons 1 and 2 (Spoiler-Free for Season 2)

Prime Review - The Tick: Seasons 1 and 2 (Spoiler-Free for Season 2) Probably the most lovable superhero spoof of all time gets his second live-action adaptation and it is filled with the sweet aroma of justice. #TheTick #AmazonPrime

Probably the most beloved superhero spoof of all time got his second (Patrick Warburton’s was short lived) live-action adaptation and it is filled with the sweet stench of mighty blue justice.

SUMMARY

Arthur Everest (Griffin Newman) is a mild-mannered accountant… except that he’s not particularly mild-mannered, more neurotic and borderline PTSD. When he was young, his father was killed by the…

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#Alan Tudyk #Amazon Prime #Amazon Prime Review #Ben Edlund #Brendan Hines #Griffin Newman #Jackie Earle Haley #Peter Serafinowicz #Prime Review #Scott Speiser #The Tick #Valorie Curry #Yara Martinez

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fashiontrendin-blog · 6 years

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Why The 1950s Is The Most Stylish Decade Right Now

http://fashion-trendin.com/why-the-1950s-is-the-most-stylish-decade-right-now/

Why The 1950s Is The Most Stylish Decade Right Now

There’s a key moment in The Wild One, the 1954 youth-ploitation movie in which an outlaw biker gang runs rampant through Hicksville USA, when a starstruck girl inquires of their ringleader, an impeccably leather-jacketed, cuff-jeaned, scuff-booted, 1950s fashion icon Marlon Brando, “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”

Brando’s response, with a world-weary sigh: “What’ve you got?”

The short answer, at least in sartorial terms, was: quite a lot. The early years of the decade were a style desert, a buttoned-up hangover of rigid post-war conformity in which even the maddest of men were trapped in grey-suit lockdown; but a great loosening-up had begun to occur by the time Brando roared into town.

Rock ‘n’ roll music, Beat poetry, and the abstract expressionists were leading the countercultural charge, and fashion took its cue from their let-it-all-hang-out ethos; cuts became looser, collars lost their starch, and elements of sportswear, workwear, and military uniform began to find their way into the everyday wardrobe.

What Is 1950s Style?

This was a time when some of today’s style staples – the turtleneck, the denim jacket, the knitted polo – were starting to come into their own, worn with an air of studied nonchalance, if not a sneer at the be-hatted corporate drones. But perhaps nothing symbolised the new, rebel-yell era more potently than the elevation of the humble white T-shirt.

Formerly a military-issue undergarment, it was suddenly draped across the decade’s most iconic chests; Brando got sweaty in one in 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire, while James Dean brooded in one in Rebel Without A Cause (1955). Even Arthur Miller was pictured in one at his writing desk. “It became a kind of visual shorthand for rebellion,” says G. Bruce Boyer, fashion historian and author of True Style: The History and Principles of Classic Menswear, who was himself a teenager in the 1950s. “It represented the appropriation of blue-collar clothing for those who refused to buy into corporate society.”

Meanwhile, rockers like Elvis Presley left more formal dress codes, well, all shook up, replacing trilbies with slick quiffs, ties with button-down shirts, and fusty flannels with featherweight fleck-linen jackets. Jack Kerouac and the Beats made a fetish of utilitarian workwear, both in their lives – in their plaid shirts and beat-up blouson jackets – and in their literature: “His dirty work clothes clung to him so gracefully, as though you couldn’t buy a better fit from a custom tailor but only earn it from the Natural Tailor of Natural Joy,” writes Kerouac of Dean Moriarty (inspired by real-life Beat hipster Neal Cassady) in 1957’s On The Road.

Leading the pack of unruly artists, Jackson Pollock sported splattered denim overalls when creating his epoch-making drip paintings: “A lot of artists in the 1930s and 1940s dressed like accountants,” says Boyer. “Jackson and his peers wanted to look like the antithesis of that.” In their decisive break with sartorial tradition, the 1950s rebels found their ultimate – and most enduring – cause. “They broke the mould,” says Boyer. “And we’re continuing to live with their legacy.”

What Does 1950s Fashion Mean Today?

“I wanted to try and push some freedom into the men’s collections,” Miuccia Prada has said, “and one of the best ways I found of doing that was to reference a time – the 1950s – when men first found the freedom to express themselves with their clothes.”

While many brands have rebooted the classic 1950s fashion – high-waisted trousers, Perfecto leather jackets, Cuban-collar shirts, penny loafers – Prada have done more than most to keep the faith while adding a modern twist; witness their recent collaboration with Mr Porter that consisted of striped bowling shirts, checked Harrington jackets, graphic knitted polos, suede blousons, and loafers in Prada’s own Spazzolato leather. “The 1950s was a time of celebration and optimism,” said Mr Porter buyer Daniel Todd, “and the collection reflects that.”

Prada x Mr Porter

Fifties styles are also increasingly relevant at a time when traditional dress codes have broken down, and a well-placed knitted polo, textured sport coat, or pair of pleated trousers will add an air of breezy insouciance and smart-casual confidence to a work-or-play outfit.

“We’re at a similar point to the 1950s themselves, in some ways,” says the tailor and designer Timothy Everest. “Separates have largely replaced suits in most offices, so people need to find different ways to stand out. A lot of the shapes and patterns that are key to that – from the wider-leg trouser to the fine-checked blouson jacket – came to prominence in that decade.”

Reiss

And other modern designers aside from Mrs Prada – Lucas Ossendrijver at Lanvin, Pier Piccioli at Valentino – have put their own spin on some of those looks, from printed satin bomber jackets to palm tree-print shirts. “The ‘50s styles laid down the marker for modern menswear,” Ossendrijver tells FashionBeans. “They can be reinvented again and again.”

But there’s another reason why 1950s fashion is imperishable; more than half a century after Marlon Brando roared his way into cinematic history, they still carry a whiff of the subversive and the ineffably cool. From Cliff Richard’s urging us to move-it-and-a-groove-it in a drape jacket in 1958 (yes, he was a hepcat once) to a bequiffed Alex Turner donning a Saint Laurent varsity jacket in the 2010s, this particular revolt into style shows no sign of burning out.

As a contemporary issue of Life magazine declared, of the newly-minted species of teenager: “They live in a jolly world of gangs, games, movies, and music. They speak a curious lingo, adore chocolate milkshakes, wear moccasins everywhere, and drive like bats out of hell.” Be honest – sixty years on, who wouldn’t want to channel at least a little bit of that?

1950s Lookbook

Key 1950s Fashion For Men

Cuban Collar Shirt

Nothing says ‘Havana blast’ more than this breezy summer staple, which can trace its history back to the 18th century in South America, where it was a kind of working-class uniform, though it really made a striped, checkered, and Polynesian-print splash in the ‘50s, where it was seen on the back of everyone from Elvis to Montgomery Clift.

With its notch lapel-like collar (also known as a camp or revere collar), short sleeves, and straight, boxy hem, you could think of it as a classier take on the Hawaiian shirt. The modern variant has a more fitted cut and tapered sleeves; wear under a blazer for an off-duty Don Draper effect or roll the sleeves for the full Gene Vincent look. Reiss has a pretty good selection, both plain and printed, or try Timothy Everest’s bold-checked or white-weaved versions.

Pleated Trousers

Those who would see the ‘50s as a bastion of flat-front uniformity in the trouser department didn’t reckon with the hepcats or the rockabillies, who were saying “pleats please” decades before Issey Miyake got in on the act. “The early rockers borrowed heavily from the zoot suits that the jazz musicians of the 1940s wore,” says G. Bruce Boyer. “It was a colourful, exaggerated take on tailoring.”

Pleated trousers create elegant lines and a full silhouette (though any maxi-pleated ‘80s-style take should be avoided, unless you’re heading to a Kid Creole & The Coconuts-themed costume party), work equally well in a formal or casual context, and have the added summertime benefit of allowing air to circulate around the pins. E.Tautz has many versions on offer – the beige cotton chinos are particularly mid-century chic – while Kent & Curwen’s come in utilitarian tan.

Penny Loafers

The classic slip-on shoe (the ‘moccasins’ referred to in Life’s breathless anatomisation of the teenager) has a chequered history – Norwegian fishermen and small-denomination coins factor in at various points – but, for our purposes, it’s enough to know that they became the classic finishing touch for the Ivy League preppy look that blossomed in the ‘50s, and that they’ve been gracing the feet of every well-dressed man since, from Paul Newman – who remains the only man to pair them with white socks and still look cool – to Tinie Tempah.

If you want to go full prep, team an original pair of Bass Weejuns with khakis, navy blazer, Oxford button-down and knit tie (no socks, natch) and avoid the ‘enhancements’ that various designers have felt moved to add in the ensuing decades – zebra print, baroque tassels, Cuban heels, backless iterations with fun-fur trim and so on.

Knitted Polo

The original polo shirt, pioneered by Rene Lacoste, was designed in the ‘20s as a breezy alternative to the heavily starched, long-sleeved whites that tennis players had hitherto laboured in; the knit polo, developed in the ‘50s in fine-knit cottons and cashmeres, was a breezy alternative to the shirt, with patterned versions conferring pizzazz and Riviera-readiness on their wearers.

For confirmation, check out Dickie Greenleaf, as played by Jude Law in The Talented Mr Ripley, all stripe-panel polos, cuffed shorts, and suede loafers, an object lesson in dressing with corniche-owning, bebop flair. Modern-day Dickies can sip their dirty proseccos in retro-futurist versions by the likes of Scott Fraser Collection (sky blue L-stripe) or Uniqlo (plain emerald green).

Blouson Jacket

Where to start with the blouson? Starting out as the Harrington jacket, the sporty, waist-length, zippered, tartan-lined, elastic-cuffed mainstay was initially produced as a lightweight rainproof golfing jacket in the UK in the 1930s (the lining came courtesy of Lord Lovat, a British commando and keen putter who gave permission for his clan check to be used), but really took off after its export to the US in the 1950s, dovetailing with the trend for flight and bomber jackets worn by pilots during World War II and the Korean War.

It was taken up by the decade’s Holy Trinity of style – Elvis, Dean, Steve McQueen – and has since been adopted by subcultures from mods to soul boys and Britpop legends (take a lightweight bow, Damon Albarn and Liam Gallagher). You could do a lot worse than investing in an original Baracuta G9, but Prada’s satin number is a little more Drive, though at an investment-piece price.

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