#the center image is a redraw of some official art

[madbard]

“How am I supposed to get over you?”

[thepeacockshallstrut]

Ingo & Emmet (with Chandelure & Eelektross) from Pokémon Center's 「Pokémon Trainers」 merchandise line

Some transparents of these pics from the ~2020 merch line, since I liked the art so much! I found a decent picture of the sticker page from a no-longer-up listing on Yahoo Auctions Japan and decided to try my hand at making a transparent out of more complicated images.

Due to the quality of the source pic (one day, I'd like to get a high-quality scan of the clear file or something...) I had to color-adjust and then rescale the images using waifu2x. I actually erased the edges before upscaling, so then I had to go through and redraw a bunch of the lineart... a lot of the border lines on the first pic are redrawn, so if you notice some differences between it and the official art, that's why! I did my best to keep it both faithful and to make it look good. The chibi lineart is almost entirely unaltered.

They look best on darker backgrounds, though I tried on some lighter, high-saturation ones and they looked fine too. White and light gray bring out some of the imperfections in the line job--sorry!--but I still think they're acceptable enough to post.

Free to use, no credit needed. I hope you're able to get some use out of them! Or just spend some time admiring them... train men...

[pinkblood-kin]

mod kiibo! i really love your anthology icons, how do you make them? they look so nice but i have no idea how to make them look like that... sorry if you can't answer >.<

I guess it’s finally time for me to make a tutorial! Pay in mind that’s how I personally make them, & there is no one correct way to make any type of graphic. 

Proper tutorial under the cut:

1. Choose your editor of choice + what you would like to edit

First of all, you need to find a program to edit in. Fun fact – although Photoshop is a really good editor (from personal experience, I used many versions throughout the years oldest being 7 & newest CC), not all of us have that type of money or are comfortable with pirating, so we will focus on freebie editors in this tutorial. Free of charge editors may not have as many options as PS, but for something as simple as icons you won’t need much – I’m using currently FireAlpaca (which is usually seen as the free version of PaintToolSai) which is an art program with layer functions similar to PS. Another similar editor I highly recommend is GIMP, but you will have to look up some base tutorials to use it properly (but it takes only a few days to master it which is always a good thing, plus they got some decent tutorials on their official site).

Next, you need the files to edit (duh!). Luckily, I already have downloaded the two available anthologies for V3 so I’m set to go! if you don’t have any scans, many scanlation groups offer volumes &/or chapters in zip/rar files. Here is a good place to get DR related anthologies: ☆.

2. Find a template that works for you

You can either make your own base for the icons of whatever size you wish, or you can find a PSD file online (note: PSD files aren’t fully functioning on most freebie editors, due to PSD being a PS centered files & has many more functions that won’t work in some programs). Here is the PSD file I’m using: ☆. Now, this is a good base, but I feel the frame is too wide & the icon itself is too small (95x95). The original author gives permission on changing sizes, so it’s not a problem for us.

In the upper menu, choose Edit > Image Size. I small window will pop up (as shown bellow) & you can change the icon to any size you desire (although anything above 150x150 isn’t recommended).

Now for the border – after you closed the size window, press on your keyboard cmd+T (or ctrl/shift+T on Windows I don’t actually remember please look it up properly;;) & a resize option will show. If you tag the corners, the resizing will be even, & you can make the border as wide or thin as you want (another option is to make your own border by choosing select > all & then select > Draw Selection Border or find a PNG file online that you like).

3. Customize + cropping

Now after playing around with the file a bit (changing sizes, colours & adding maybe some things of your own like small pixel art at the corner) you can now make your own icons! Just open up the manga page & copy it, then go back to the file of your icon & paste it on top of the layer called BASE & use again the cmd+T command to resize it & place it however you like. & there you go!

Extra notes: colouring & redrawing

To fill in a new layers with colour, I use a massive normal pen brush (I actually use the max size because I also use it to colour on top of big graphics).

The pen(Fade In/Out) should usually be the size of 1 px because usually you need to draw super thin lines, & you can make it look like you used pressure on a tablet while actually work with a mouse (also highly recommend for art if you don’t have a tablet 10/10).

The pencil brush is your eraser & filler for black/grey parts. DO NOT USE THE ERASER TOOL DEAR GOD. It will leave holes in your layer & you’ll have to paint white underneath every other layer & you don’t want that, trust me!

[arplis]

Arplis - News: The year was 1995, and I was watching television

Frasier, to be specific, whose placement in the NBC “Must See TV Tuesday” lineup my family took literally. This was event viewing in the Michelman household, and my tweenage brain soaked it up like a sponge: the fashion, the erudition, the many glasses of sherry. One moment stands out above all else, wherein the audience is given a brief glimpse inside the Crane family refrigerator, which is revealed to be stocked to the brim with glowing blue glass bottles of mineral water imported from the United Kingdom. In the context of the show, this was just another item—like the Macclesfield ties, Joan & David loafers and Frasier’s apartment itself—meant to symbolize wealth and class. I discussed the topic with my mother; she told me that the water on Frasier was very expensive, and that in this family we drank water from the spigot on the fridge door. “Imagine paying money for water,” I remember thinking. Today, I wish we’d bought stock in La Croix. Bottled water of a clear, identifiable origin has long been popular in Europe, where the history of drinking site-specific mineralized water dates back thousands of years. But here in America, mineral water has baggage. I believe I speak for many readers when I describe first encountering mineral water as a totem of yuppie excess vis-à-vis late 20th-century movies and television, obsessed over by the likes of Patrick Bateman (he drinks Ramlösa and Apollinaris) and the aforementioned Frasier Crane (those iconic blue teardrop bottles of Tŷ Nant, from Wales). This identity wholly disconnects mineral water in the U.S. from its curative, egalitarian image abroad. It’s a status symbol, something rich people drink as a class flex: the little bottle of San Pellegrino, same as what they sell at the grocery store across the street, marked up to $12 at a restaurant catering to assholes. Frasier may be relegated to the great rerun loop of history, but today’s outlook for mineral water in America is evolving quickly, and there are merchants for the cause. One of them is a guy out of Fort Lauderdale named Brett Spitalny. With his company, Aqua Maestro, Spitalny has, since 2002, overseen a portfolio of imported bottled water. And that’s all he sells, offering about 30 different fine waters from around the world (including Borsec from Romania, Fiuggi from Italy, and yes, Frasier’s beloved Tŷ Nant), selling to a collection of retail and wholesale clients around the country and providing water education along the way to high-end hotels and restaurants. “What’s coming from the source is what you find in the bottle,” he says. “It’s not adulterated, and it hasn’t been purified or filtered or messed with.” The sentiment might be familiar to anyone who’s set foot in a natural wine bar. Aqua Maestro’s portfolio includes some recognizable brands, including Fiji and Voss, as well as deeply obscure bottles like Iskilde, a highly oxygenated still water from Denmark that “comes out of the ground looking like milk.” “Imagine paying money for water,” I remember thinking. Today, I wish we’d bought stock in La Croix. Ashley Epperson of Salacious Drinks, a Washington D.C.–based distributor and direct seller of mineral waters, looks at the seltzer boom as a pump primer for the U.S. market. “As far as Americans are concerned, we are way behind the times,” she tells me. “If you go to Japan, Europe, Australia, even Canada, they have huge water markets. But we are so used to the idea of free water, or buying purified tap water in a bottle. Most people don’t know what fine water tastes like.” In this way, a brand like Salacious Drinks caters to people who have had their interest piqued by seltzer, and are ready to learn more about the world of fine water. “We love someone saying, ‘Oh, I like La Croix’ because that means when we sit down and do a fine water tasting, they are going to say ‘Ohhhh…’” If mineral water is a beverage primed for growth in the American market, its punky cousin seltzer is surely to thank. The year 2019 was the year seltzer peaked: The stuff is everywhere, filling entire aisles at your local Target and spanning the spectrum of popular culture, from New York Times think pieces to Coachella activations to junk science finger wagging. La Croix in particular has been embraced by the extremely online millennial work force (especially in media), showing up in desk office candids and work fridge tableaus. There’s even a secret Facebook group for devotees of seltzer, profiled by everyone from The Spoon to The Guardian. (I’m a longtime member.) My own avid consumption of La Croix, which is just filtered tap water that’s been force-carbonated and flavored, had become reflexive, habitual, desultory—a drink to drink when I didn’t feel like using my brain, the water equivalent of ordering a Starbucks coffee. By contrast, Borjomi, a Georgian water I credit for thrusting me down this rabbit hole, tastes as if it were beamed in from another consciousness entirely. It is creamy, lush, with just a touch of finessed funk, like a beautiful raw milk cheese, or a piece of foie gras, or a glass of farmhouse saison (minus the hops and malt). I found myself (quelle horreur) skipping past the wine section and forgoing the beer at World Foods—the excellent specialty food and beverage market near where I live in Portland, Oregon—in favor of more Borjomi, and eventually, other delicious waters from around the world: Antipodes of New Zealand, Jermuk of Armenia, Llanllyr Source of Wales, and Essentuki of southern Russia, not far from the border with Georgia. The seltzer boom (and likely impending bust) has opened a door for us to reconsider what mineral water is, and who it should be for. If brands like Polar and La Croix (and yes, even White Claw) have helped unmoor fizzy water from its wealth-and-privilege trappings in America, then I say bully; after all, La Croix is owned by the same company that makes Faygo, the beloved soda of the ’90s horror-rap crew Insane Clown Posse. How bourgeois could it really be? In the pantheon of affordable luxuries, mineral water has few peers—a .75 liter bottle of Borjomi, the utterly delicious, naturally sparkling mineral water of the nation of Georgia, costs somewhere between $1.99 and $3.99, depending on where you’re purchasing. Turns out this was just scratching the surface. The well for water appreciation runs deep, and all aqueducts lead to the work of the world’s leading authorities on mineral water: Martin Riese and Michael Mascha, who together run Los Angeles’ Fine Water Academy, bestowers of the official Water Sommelier Certification. Germany native Riese first gained fame in this country for his work with the Patina Restaurant Group, whose properties across the United States include multiple operations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and in New York’s Lincoln Center, Rockefeller Center and Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Riese’s water menu for Patina is the stuff of legend, helping land him everywhere from The New York Times to Conan. “People started to come to [LACMA] just for the water menu and try the different waters and taste the differences between them,” Riese tells me. “I was a little surprised and almost scared.” Mascha, meanwhile, runs FineWaters.com, an international clearinghouse for water information and advocacy, and a compendium of bottled water brands large and small. A former professor at USC, Mascha came to water as an alternative to alcohol following a serious health diagnosis. “My cardiologist told me I could live, or drink alcohol, but not both,” he says. “Naturally, I made the decision to stop drinking, but by removing one bottle from the table I began to focus on another.” If mineral water is a beverage primed for growth in the American market, its punky cousin seltzer is surely to thank. Key to the duo’s methodology is understanding the differences among individual water sites. Not unlike wine, tea or coffee, water is a product of its place of harvest—in this case, different sites around the world through which rainwater is naturally filtered. Each mountain range and hillside has its own geological calling card, with a noticeable impact on a given water’s flavor and mouthfeel. Different waters vary in chemical composition, which is why the water bottled as Lurisia (from the Italian Alps) tastes vastly different from the water bottled as Borsec (from the Carpathian Mountains of Romania). Riese and Mascha discuss this in terms of total dissolved solids, or TDS, a phrase well-known by espresso geeks—low-TDS waters have an almost drying effect, while high-TDS waters taste rich and smooth, even sometimes a touch swampy (in a good way). On his website FineWaters, Mascha categorizes a range of mineral waters from “super low” (0-50 mg/L) to “very high” (1500+ mg/L). By this categorization, the 2,210 milligramsTDS on my beloved Borjomi is incredibly high—more than four times higher than Perrier, for example. It makes sense that this would be the water that hooked me. In specialty coffee, a topic I’ve written about extensively, it’s common for new acolytes to have a “light switch moment” with coffees that explore wild expanses of the flavor spectrum: Think wild-fermented and genetically diverse “natural-processed” coffees from Ethiopia, or highly prized and rightly expensive Gesha variety coffees from Panama. Same thing in wine, where young drinkers have gravitated in droves to the electric Technicolor “natural” wines of boundary-pushing makers like Anders Frederik Steen, Furlani and Cornelissen. These experiences fall on the extreme end of the product spectrum, and that’s why they hook new drinkers: The journey to “aha!” upends the preconceived notion of what coffee or wine should be, redrawing its culinary and cultural application. Same with Borjomi, an extremely mineralized water that led me to explore a world of flavor experiences—some more subtle, some even more extreme (say hey, Essentuki #4). “We’re seeing a wave of adoption where people realize that water is not just water,” says Mascha. “They get hooked for whatever reason, and then they realize that water has terroir, it comes from a place, it has flavor, and it can be integrated into epicurean ways like wine.” Ladies and gentlemen, it me. I was first suckered in by flavored filtered tap (La Croix), then had my mind blown by the outer edges of the mineral spectrum (Borjomi). It’s roughly the trajectory a wine drinker undertakes, from nipped high school Boone’s Farm to Jura savagnin sous voile, with a land of exploration and subtlety to discover in between. (Burgundy, if you’re paying.) Riese and Mascha advocate seeking out different styles and weights of water for different meal pairings and experiences: Cantonese suckling pork with Cana Royal water from Slovenia, or smoked fish roe with a low-TDS Swedish glacier water, which Mascha describes as tasting “like you’re in the middle of nature, and it’s raining and you open your mouth.” And in our conversations, each encouraged me to explore offerings across the minerality scale, like the soft, low-TDS waters of Svalbardi, Lofoten and Lurisia, or the complex, naturally sparkling waters of Vichy Catalan, Pedras and Ecuador’s Guitig. Unlike so much of today’s zen koan cacophony of wellness trend buzz, mineral water is certifiably good for you, something czars and soldiers and doctors in Europe have known for centuries (to say nothing of the older regulars at the 127-year-old Russian & Turkish Baths in New York’s East Village, swigging huge plastic bottles of Narzan). Mineral water is culinary, yes, but it’s also elemental in a profoundly satisfying way—an organism consuming the most delicious and interesting version of something it needs to live. “Like with wine, like with coffee, it’s not about finding what’s best,” says Mascha. These days he’s expanding the role of water to its place beyond the glass, working with cocktail bars to develop custom ice and chocolatiers seeking the perfect water to blend into chocolate bars. This feels like a natural expansion of the implied conclusion, which is that by re-evaluating the identity and flavor and history of the water we drink, we can then extend this new consideration into water’s role in the wild beer we drink, the cocktail ice we stir and shake with, the sip of water we take to realign our palates between the bites and bottles of everything else we love. “These waters come from a real place, from a real source with a cultural identity attached,” says Mascha. “They mean something.” The post Seltzer Is Over. Mineral Water Is Forever. appeared first on PUNCH. #LaCroix #MineralWater

Arplis - News source https://arplis.com/blogs/news/the-year-was-1995-and-i-was-watching-television

[thatsnotcanonpodcasts]

Bionic Eye, Miquela & Manchester United

Congratulations SpaceX for their sucessful manned Crew Dragon mission to the ISS.

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. It's not as great as Steve Austin's bionic eye from the Six Million Dollar Man, but it's pretty cool. Scientists have made a bionic eyeball inspired by the actual working of the human eye. This cool tech isn't ready to go in a human head yet, but when it is we can only hope it's cheaper than Steve's eye.

Robots are here, and they're coming for your jobs. Now even actors don't have job security. Miquela is a CGI replacement for advertising models is now leaving Instagram and breaking into acting. Which raises a concerning question. How long until they replace the podcasters?

Football manager is one of the most popular management simulators. Recently they've come under fire from Manchester United for copyright issues. Despite letting it slide for almost 30 years, Man U have decided it's time to sue.

This week in gaming DJ jumps at shadows in Alan Wake and Professor goes full Groundhog Day in Into the Breach.

Bionic eyes giving sight

- https://bgr.com/2020/05/24/bionic-eye-human-prosthetics/

- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2285-x

The Rise of Virtual actresses: Miquela

- https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/25/are-virtual-actors-about-to-put-hollywoods-humans-out-of-work-miquela

Man United suing Football Manager

- https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/may/22/manchester-united-sues-football-manager-makers-over-use-of-name

Games Played

Professor

– Into The Breach – https://store.steampowered.com/app/590380/Into_the_Breach/

Rating: 4/5

DJ

– Alan Wake – https://store.steampowered.com/app/108710/Alan_Wake/

Rating: 4/5

Other topics discussed

Sailor Moon Redraw : Jar Jar Binks edition

- https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1854154-sailor-moon-redraw

Cochlear Implant (A cochlear implant (CI) is a surgically implanted neuroprosthetic device to provide a person with moderate to profound sensorineural hearing loss a modified sense of sound. CI bypasses the normal acoustic hearing process to replace it with electric signals which directly stimulate the auditory nerve.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant

Why some people turned down a 'medical miracle' and decided to stay deaf

- https://www.insider.com/why-deaf-people-turn-down-cochlear-implants-2016-12

Lil Miquela Instagram profile

- https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/

James Dean will be digitally resurrected for a new film. Is it movie magic or dark arts?

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/11/07/james-dean-will-be-digitally-resurrected-new-film-is-it-movie-magic-or-dark-arts/

Peter Cushing CGI resurrection in Star Wars Rogue One

- https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2016/dec/16/rogue-one-star-wars-cgi-resurrection-peter-cushing

The Drip: having a large amount of swag typically used in the context of clothing

- https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=the%20drip

Adobe Voco (Adobe Voco will be an audio editing and generating prototype software by Adobe that enables novel editing and generation of audio.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Voco

Detroit: Become Human (Detroit: Become Human is a 2018 adventure game developed by Quantic Dream and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit:_Become_Human

South Park – They Took Our Jobs

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-kgb1QtSnU

Football Manager ((also known as Worldwide Soccer Manager in North America from 2004 to 2008) is a series of football management simulation video games developed by Sports Interactive and published by Sega.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_Manager

P90 (The P90 or ES C90, as it was previously known, is a submachine gun featured in the Counter-Strike series. They are based off FN P90.)

- https://counterstrike.fandom.com/wiki/P90

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FN_P90

Generic Trademark (A generic trademark, also known as a genericised trademark or proprietary eponym, is a trademark or brand name that, because of its popularity or significance, has become the generic name for, or synonymous with, a general class of product or service, usually against the intentions of the trademark's holder.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

An introduction to YouTube Copyright in United Kingdom

- https://www.bl.uk/business-and-ip-centre/articles/an-introduction-to-youtube-copyright

Pro Evo Soccer (More experienced gamers often use "patches", editing the actual game code and modifying the graphical content to include accurate kits for unlicensed teams, new stadiums, and footballs from Nike, Inc., Puma,Umbro and Mitre, as well as more Adidas balls. Most patches also contain licensed referee kits from FIFA and the official logos of the various European leagues.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_Evolution_Soccer#Gameplay

Quantum Break (From Remedy Entertainment, the masters of cinematic action games, comes Quantum Break, a time-amplified suspenseful blockbuster. The Quantum Break experience is part game, part live action show—where decisions in one dramatically affect the other.)

- https://store.steampowered.com/app/474960/Quantum_Break/

Control (After a secretive agency in New York is invaded by an otherworldly threat, you become the new Director struggling to regain Control in this supernatural 3rd person action-adventure from Remedy Entertainment and 505 Games)

- https://store.steampowered.com/app/870780/Control/

Elvis the Alien (Elvis (real name: Aelphaeis Mangarae) is an alien from the Maian race. He is a 'Protector' (bodyguard) for the Maian ambassador who travels to Earth at Daniel Carrington's request.)

- https://perfectdark.fandom.com/wiki/Elvis

‘Labyrinth’ Sequel: New Director revealed

- https://deadline.com/2020/05/labyrinth-sequel-scott-derrickson-director-maggie-levin-write-script-doctor-strange-1202943188/

‘Labyrinth’ Sequel idea : Jennifer Connelly’s Sarah grows up to be the Goblin King.

- https://twitter.com/kaytaylorrea/status/1265493556988387328

Love, Stranger (TNC Podcast)

- https://thatsnotcanon.com/lovestrangerpodcast

Shout Outs

22 May 2020 – Pac-Man turns 40 - https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/pac-man-turns-40-seven-secrets/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web

The yellow dude with the insatiable appetite for power pellets is turning 40, having racked up everything from sales records to a breakfast cereal. And there is no gaming icon who is more recognizable — or who has done more to bring gaming to the front of the collective cultural mind. Pac-Man’s raison d’être is chomping dots. And Iwatani says food was central to the design of the character. As he thought about how to design a game that would attract female players, he thought about how much his wife loved to eat dessert. That verb — eat — began the thought process that led to the game. The original name for Pac-Man in Japan was Puck-Man. Midway Games, which distributed the title in the U.S., changed it to Pac-Man so vandals wouldn’t cut out part of the P to create something that didn’t fit in a family-friendly arcade. The name Puck came from the Japanese expression “puck puck” which loosely translates to “munch munch.” When Pac-Man made his debut on May 22, 1980, video games were largely considered a boy’s club. Creator Toru Iwatani, in a panel presentation at GDC 2011, said he wanted to create a game to change that. “The reason I created Pac-Man was because we wanted to attract female gamers,” he says. “People had to go to the arcade center to play games. That was a playground for boys. It was dirty and smelly. So, we wanted to include female players, so it would become cleaner and brighter.”

22 May 2020 – Perfect Dark turns 20 - https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/perfect-dark-20-years-old-fans-want-new-game/

Rare Ltd's Nintendo 64 classic Perfect Dark turned 20 years old. Released on May 22nd, 2000, the game was Rare's follow-up to GoldenEye 007. Rare originally intended to make another Bond game, but was outbid by Electronic Arts. Instead, Rare decided to develop their own franchise, introducing the world to protagonist Joanna Dark. The resulting game was a massive success, and a prequel was released on Xbox 360. Although critics widely praised its graphics,artificial intelligence, and number of multiplayer options, they frequently criticised its occasional frame rate drops. The game received the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Moving Images Award for 2000 and theGolden Satellite Award for Best Interactive Product in 2001. The game is occasionally cited as one of the greatest video games of all time. A remaster, also titled Perfect Dark, featuring enhanced graphics and online multiplayer, was released in 2010.

22 May 2020 – Berlin WW2 bombing survivor Saturn the alligator dies in Moscow Zoo - https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-europe-52784240

After hatching in Mississippi, Saturn was soon brought to Germany, residing at the Berlin Zoological Garden. It was here that his association with Adolf Hitler originated, as Hitler reportedly enjoyed visiting the zoo and especially liked the alligator. It was from this period that the popular rumor emerged that Saturn was Adolf Hitler's "pet". This may have originated with the author Boris Akunin, a Russian writer who hypothesized in an article that this may have been the case. In actuality, he was not Hitler's personal pet, as he was on public display at the zoo. However, some sources report his display at the zoo as being part of a personal menagerie of Hitler's, while Dmitry Vasilyev, a veterinarian at the Moscow Zoo, contends that while Saturn was not Hitler's pet, the two certainly came into contact, as Hitler was known to have visited the Berlin Zoo on occasion. During World War II, much of the Berlin Zoo was destroyed. Of the zoo's 16,000 animals, only 96 survived. When the aquarium building was destroyed by a bomb on 23 November 1943, 20 to 30 alligators and crocodiles were killed. Press reports documented that the streets near the aquarium were littered with alligator andcrocodile corpses, but that some, including Saturn, had survived and were wandering through the city in search of food. Saturn was discovered by British soldiers three years later. The British then gave the alligator to the Soviets in 1946. He lived at the Moscow Zoo until 22 May 2020, when he died of old age.

23 May 2020 – Lost series finale turns 10 - https://observer.com/2020/05/lost-series-finale-the-end-jean-higgins-jeff-pinkner-damon-lindelof/

The 10-year anniversary of its series finale, “The End,” was a grippingly divisive chapter in modern pop culture history. Although the final strokes of its conclusion were not set it stone when that pilot first aired, consideration to the endgame had always been brewing. To unpack how the series navigated the minefield of fan expectations while battling the network for direction, Lost‘s conclusion was rockier than most fans at home realized. From the very beginning of the show’s development, the Lost title was meant to have a double meaning. Yes, the characters themselves were physically lost in the world on this mysterious island. But, more crucially, they were each spiritually lost in their own lives. The show always tried to remain true to the characters and, by the end, to some spiritual outlook about life and our purpose. It also edged open new doors into its story even as the show approached its very end. Lost often felt artistically bold, but that didn’t come without drawbacks. “The End” polarized audiences deeply. Several critics named it among the worst series finales of all time, while others called it an underrated masterpiece. Regardless of the ongoing debate that still ensnares “The End,” Lost as a whole remains one of the most acclaimed television shows in history.

Remembrances

25 May 1939 – Sir Frank Watson Dyson - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Watson_Dyson

English astronomer and Astronomer Royal who is remembered today largely for introducing time signals ("pips") from Greenwich, England, and for the role he played in proving Einstein's theory of general relativity. In 1928, he introduced in the Observatory a new free-pendulum clock, the most accurate clock available at that time and organised the regular wireless transmission from the GPO wireless station at Rugby of Greenwich Mean Time. He also, in 1924, introduced the distribution of the "six pips" via the BBC. Dyson was noted for his study of solar eclipses and was an authority on the spectrum of the corona and on the chromosphere. He is credited with organising expeditions to observe the 1919 solar eclipse at Brazil and Principe, which he somewhat optimistically began preparing for prior to the Armistice of 11 November 1918. Dyson presented his observations of the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919 to a joint meeting of the Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society on 6 November 1919. The observations confirmed Albert Einstein's theory of the effect of gravity on light which until that time had been received with some scepticism by the scientific community. Dyson died on board a ship at the age of 71 while travelling from Australia to England in 1939 and was buried at sea.

25 May 1981 – Ruby Payne-Scott - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Payne-Scott

Ruby Violet Payne-Scott, Australian pioneer in radiophysics and radio astronomy, and was the first female radio astronomer. On 18 August 1941, Payne-Scott joined the Radiophysics Laboratory of the Australian government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). During World War II, she was engaged in top secret work investigating radar technology, becoming Australia's expert on the detection of aircraft using Plan Position Indicator (PPI) displays. After the war, in 1948, she published a comprehensive report on factors affecting visibility on PPI displays. She also made important contributions to prototype radar systems operating in the 25cm microwave band, achieving significant improvements. Payne-Scott's expertise as both a physicist and an electrical engineer distinguished her among her colleagues, most of whom lacked a formal physics education. From 1946 to 1951, Payne-Scott focused on these 'burst' radio emissions from the sun, and is credited with discovering Type I and III bursts, and with gathering data that helped characterise Types II and IV. As part of this work, together with Alec Little, she designed and built a new 'swept-lobe' interferometer that could draw a map of solar radio emission strength and polarization once every second, and would automatically record to a movie camera whenever emissions reached a certain intensity. In 2018, the New York Times wrote a belated obituary for her, detailing how her work helped lay the foundation for a new field of science called radio astronomy. In 2008, CSIRO acknowledged Payne-Scott's contribution to science, and established the Payne-Scott Award, intended "for researchers returning from family-related career breaks". She died from complications of dementia at the age of 68 in Mortdale,New South Wales.

25 May 1981 – Fredric Warburg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Warburg

Fredric John Warburg, British publisher best known for his association with the author George Orwell. During a career spanning a large part of the 20th century and ending in 1971 Warburg published Orwell's Animal Farm as well as Nineteen Eighty-Four, and works by other leading figures such asThomas Mann and Franz Kafka. Other notable publications included The Third Eye by Lobsang Rampa, Pierre Boulle's The Bridge over the River Kwai, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf and William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Warburg started his publishing career in 1922, as an apprentice at Routledge & Sons, where he came under the tutelage of William Swan Stallybrass, a man he regarded as "the greatest scholar-publisher of his day". After Stallybrass died in 1931 Warburg became increasingly dissatisfied with Routledge and in 1935 he was dismissed. Later that year he and Roger Senhouse purchased the publishing firm of Martin Secker, which had gone into receivership, and renamed it Secker & Warburg. The firm became renowned for its independent left-wing position, being both anti-fascist and anti-Communist, which put it at loggerheads with many intellectuals of the time. He died from Congestive heart failure at the age of 82 in London.

Famous Birthdays

25 May 1865 – Pieter Zeeman - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Zeeman

Pieter Zeeman, Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Hendrik Lorentz for his discovery of the Zeeman effect. In 1896, shortly before moving from Leiden to Amsterdam, he measured the splitting of spectral lines by a strong magnetic field, a discovery now known as the Zeeman effect, for which he won the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics. This research involved an investigation of the effect of magnetic fields on a light source. He discovered that a spectral line is split into several components in the presence of a magnetic field. The importance of Zeeman's discovery soon became apparent. It confirmed Hendrik Lorentz’s prediction about the polarization of light emitted in the presence of a magnetic field. Thanks to Zeeman's work it became clear that the oscillating particles that according to Lorentz were the source of light emission were negatively charged, and were a thousandfold lighter than the hydrogen atom. This conclusion was reached well before Thomson's discovery of the electron. The Zeeman effect thus became an important tool for elucidating the structure of the atom. He was born in Zonnemaire.

25 May 1889 – Igor Sikorsky - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Sikorsky

Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky, Russian–American aviation pioneer in both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. His first success came with the S-2, the second aircraft of his design and construction. His fifth airplane, the S-5, won him national recognition as well as F.A.I. license number 64. HisS-6-A received the highest award at the 1912 Moscow Aviation Exhibition, and in the fall of that year the aircraft won for its young designer, builder and pilot first prize in the military competition at Saint Petersburg. After immigrating to the United States in 1919, Sikorsky founded the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation in 1923, and developed the first of Pan American Airways' ocean-crossing flying boats in the 1930s. In 1939, Sikorsky designed and flew the Vought-Sikorsky VS-300, the first viable American helicopter, which pioneered the rotor configuration used by most helicopters today. Sikorsky modified the design into the Sikorsky R-4, which became the world's first mass-produced helicopter in 1942. He was born in Kiev.

25 May 1944 – Frank Oz - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Oz

Frank Richard Oznowicz, American actor, puppeteer, director and producer. He began his career as a puppeteer, performing the Muppet characters of Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal, and Sam Eagle in The Muppet Show; and Cookie Monster, Bert, and Grover in Sesame Street. He is also known for the role of Yoda in the Star Wars series, providing the voice for the character in several films and television series. His work as a director includes Little Shop of Horrors , Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Score and Death at a Funeral . Oz has performed as a Muppet performer in over 75 productions including Labyrinth, video releases, and television specials, as well as countless other public appearances, episodes of Sesame Street, and other Jim Henson series. His puppetry work spans from 1963 to the present, although he semi-retired from performing his Muppets characters in 2001. Oz is also known as the performer of Jedi Master Yoda from George Lucas' Star Wars series. Jim Henson had originally been contacted by Lucas about possibly performing Yoda. Henson was preoccupied and instead suggested Oz to be assigned as chief puppeteer of the character, as well as a creative consultant. Oz performed the puppet and provided the voice for Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back , Return of the Jedi , Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace , and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Oz had a great deal of creative input on the character and was himself responsible for creating the character's trademark syntax. He was born in Hereford,Herefordshire.

Events of Interest

25 May 1895 – Oscar Wilde arrested for indecency - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/oscar-wilde-is-sent-to-prison-for-indecency

Writer Oscar Wilde is sent to prison after being convicted of sodomy. The famed writer of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest brought attention to his private life in a feud with Sir John Sholto Douglas, whose son was intimately involved with Wilde. Homosexuality was a criminal offense and serious societal taboo at this time in Britain. Wilde had gone back and forth between hiding his sexual orientation and attempting to gain some measure of public acceptance. At Wilde’s first criminal trial, he was cross-examined extensively on the “love that dare not speak its name.” Wilde managed to secure a mistrial when a lone juror refused to vote to convict. The second trial began on May 21. Although many of the potential witnesses refused to betray Wilde by testifying, he was convicted. The judge remarked at his sentencing, “It is the worst case I have ever tried. I shall pass the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgment it is totally inadequate for such a case as this. The sentence of the Court is that you be imprisoned and kept to hard labor for two years.

26 May 1897 – Dracula goes to sale in London - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/dracula-goes-on-sale-in-london

The first copies of the classic vampire novel Dracula, by Irish writer Bram Stoker, appear in London bookshops on May 26, 1897. It earned him literary fame and became known as a masterpiece of Victorian-era Gothic literature. Written in the form of diaries and journals of its main characters, Dracula is the story of a vampire who makes his way from Transylvania—a region of Eastern Europe now in Romania—to Yorkshire, England, and preys on innocents there to get the blood he needs to live. Stoker had originally named the vampire “Count Wampyr.” He found the name Dracula in a book on Wallachia and Moldavia written by retired diplomat William Wilkinson, which he borrowed from a Yorkshire public library during his family’s vacations there. Vampires–who left their burial places at night to drink the blood of humans–were popular figures in folk tales from ancient times, but Stoker’s novel catapulted them into the mainstream of 20th-century literature. Late 20th-century examples of the vampire craze include the bestselling novels of American writer Anne Rice and the cult hit TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The 21st century saw the wildly popularTwilight film and book series. 

25 May 2010 – Fireball was released in Italy

-https://www.scifihistory.net/may-25.html

- https://www.betafilm.com/en/product/d/fireball.html

- https://horrornews.net/559/film-review-fireball-2009/

On this day in 2010 (in Italy), Fireball burned up the charts of the home video marketplace.  The feature starred Ian Somerhalder and Lexa Doig, and here's the plot summary : Tyler “The Fuse” Draven is a former pro linebacker who has finally hit rock bottom. Draven has been caught using steroids and is no longer allowed to play pro football; if that’s not enough he has a news reporter constantly harassing him waving a camera in his face. After attacking the news reporter Tyler is sent to prison and one would think that would be the end to this mans story however a fire erupts in the prison and melds with the steroids in Draven’s blood stream causing him to suddenly be able to control heat and fire, now somebody is gonna pay!

Intro

Artist – Goblins from Mars

Song Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)

Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJ

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[arplis]

Arplis - News: The year was 1995, and I was watching television

Frasier, to be specific, whose placement in the NBC “Must See TV Tuesday” lineup my family took literally. This was event viewing in the Michelman household, and my tweenage brain soaked it up like a sponge: the fashion, the erudition, the many glasses of sherry. One moment stands out above all else, wherein the audience is given a brief glimpse inside the Crane family refrigerator, which is revealed to be stocked to the brim with glowing blue glass bottles of mineral water imported from the United Kingdom. In the context of the show, this was just another item—like the Macclesfield ties, Joan & David loafers and Frasier’s apartment itself—meant to symbolize wealth and class. I discussed the topic with my mother; she told me that the water on Frasier was very expensive, and that in this family we drank water from the spigot on the fridge door. “Imagine paying money for water,” I remember thinking. Today, I wish we’d bought stock in La Croix. Bottled water of a clear, identifiable origin has long been popular in Europe, where the history of drinking site-specific mineralized water dates back thousands of years. But here in America, mineral water has baggage. I believe I speak for many readers when I describe first encountering mineral water as a totem of yuppie excess vis-à-vis late 20th-century movies and television, obsessed over by the likes of Patrick Bateman (he drinks Ramlösa and Apollinaris) and the aforementioned Frasier Crane (those iconic blue teardrop bottles of Tŷ Nant, from Wales). This identity wholly disconnects mineral water in the U.S. from its curative, egalitarian image abroad. It’s a status symbol, something rich people drink as a class flex: the little bottle of San Pellegrino, same as what they sell at the grocery store across the street, marked up to $12 at a restaurant catering to assholes. Frasier may be relegated to the great rerun loop of history, but today’s outlook for mineral water in America is evolving quickly, and there are merchants for the cause. One of them is a guy out of Fort Lauderdale named Brett Spitalny. With his company, Aqua Maestro, Spitalny has, since 2002, overseen a portfolio of imported bottled water. And that’s all he sells, offering about 30 different fine waters from around the world (including Borsec from Romania, Fiuggi from Italy, and yes, Frasier’s beloved Tŷ Nant), selling to a collection of retail and wholesale clients around the country and providing water education along the way to high-end hotels and restaurants. “What’s coming from the source is what you find in the bottle,” he says. “It’s not adulterated, and it hasn’t been purified or filtered or messed with.” The sentiment might be familiar to anyone who’s set foot in a natural wine bar. Aqua Maestro’s portfolio includes some recognizable brands, including Fiji and Voss, as well as deeply obscure bottles like Iskilde, a highly oxygenated still water from Denmark that “comes out of the ground looking like milk.” “Imagine paying money for water,” I remember thinking. Today, I wish we’d bought stock in La Croix. Ashley Epperson of Salacious Drinks, a Washington D.C.–based distributor and direct seller of mineral waters, looks at the seltzer boom as a pump primer for the U.S. market. “As far as Americans are concerned, we are way behind the times,” she tells me. “If you go to Japan, Europe, Australia, even Canada, they have huge water markets. But we are so used to the idea of free water, or buying purified tap water in a bottle. Most people don’t know what fine water tastes like.” In this way, a brand like Salacious Drinks caters to people who have had their interest piqued by seltzer, and are ready to learn more about the world of fine water. “We love someone saying, ‘Oh, I like La Croix’ because that means when we sit down and do a fine water tasting, they are going to say ‘Ohhhh…’” If mineral water is a beverage primed for growth in the American market, its punky cousin seltzer is surely to thank. The year 2019 was the year seltzer peaked: The stuff is everywhere, filling entire aisles at your local Target and spanning the spectrum of popular culture, from New York Times think pieces to Coachella activations to junk science finger wagging. La Croix in particular has been embraced by the extremely online millennial work force (especially in media), showing up in desk office candids and work fridge tableaus. There’s even a secret Facebook group for devotees of seltzer, profiled by everyone from The Spoon to The Guardian. (I’m a longtime member.) My own avid consumption of La Croix, which is just filtered tap water that’s been force-carbonated and flavored, had become reflexive, habitual, desultory—a drink to drink when I didn’t feel like using my brain, the water equivalent of ordering a Starbucks coffee. By contrast, Borjomi, a Georgian water I credit for thrusting me down this rabbit hole, tastes as if it were beamed in from another consciousness entirely. It is creamy, lush, with just a touch of finessed funk, like a beautiful raw milk cheese, or a piece of foie gras, or a glass of farmhouse saison (minus the hops and malt). I found myself (quelle horreur) skipping past the wine section and forgoing the beer at World Foods—the excellent specialty food and beverage market near where I live in Portland, Oregon—in favor of more Borjomi, and eventually, other delicious waters from around the world: Antipodes of New Zealand, Jermuk of Armenia, Llanllyr Source of Wales, and Essentuki of southern Russia, not far from the border with Georgia. The seltzer boom (and likely impending bust) has opened a door for us to reconsider what mineral water is, and who it should be for. If brands like Polar and La Croix (and yes, even White Claw) have helped unmoor fizzy water from its wealth-and-privilege trappings in America, then I say bully; after all, La Croix is owned by the same company that makes Faygo, the beloved soda of the ’90s horror-rap crew Insane Clown Posse. How bourgeois could it really be? In the pantheon of affordable luxuries, mineral water has few peers—a .75 liter bottle of Borjomi, the utterly delicious, naturally sparkling mineral water of the nation of Georgia, costs somewhere between $1.99 and $3.99, depending on where you’re purchasing. Turns out this was just scratching the surface. The well for water appreciation runs deep, and all aqueducts lead to the work of the world’s leading authorities on mineral water: Martin Riese and Michael Mascha, who together run Los Angeles’ Fine Water Academy, bestowers of the official Water Sommelier Certification. Germany native Riese first gained fame in this country for his work with the Patina Restaurant Group, whose properties across the United States include multiple operations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and in New York’s Lincoln Center, Rockefeller Center and Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Riese’s water menu for Patina is the stuff of legend, helping land him everywhere from The New York Times to Conan. “People started to come to [LACMA] just for the water menu and try the different waters and taste the differences between them,” Riese tells me. “I was a little surprised and almost scared.” Mascha, meanwhile, runs FineWaters.com, an international clearinghouse for water information and advocacy, and a compendium of bottled water brands large and small. A former professor at USC, Mascha came to water as an alternative to alcohol following a serious health diagnosis. “My cardiologist told me I could live, or drink alcohol, but not both,” he says. “Naturally, I made the decision to stop drinking, but by removing one bottle from the table I began to focus on another.” If mineral water is a beverage primed for growth in the American market, its punky cousin seltzer is surely to thank. Key to the duo’s methodology is understanding the differences among individual water sites. Not unlike wine, tea or coffee, water is a product of its place of harvest—in this case, different sites around the world through which rainwater is naturally filtered. Each mountain range and hillside has its own geological calling card, with a noticeable impact on a given water’s flavor and mouthfeel. Different waters vary in chemical composition, which is why the water bottled as Lurisia (from the Italian Alps) tastes vastly different from the water bottled as Borsec (from the Carpathian Mountains of Romania). Riese and Mascha discuss this in terms of total dissolved solids, or TDS, a phrase well-known by espresso geeks—low-TDS waters have an almost drying effect, while high-TDS waters taste rich and smooth, even sometimes a touch swampy (in a good way). On his website FineWaters, Mascha categorizes a range of mineral waters from “super low” (0-50 mg/L) to “very high” (1500+ mg/L). By this categorization, the 2,210 milligramsTDS on my beloved Borjomi is incredibly high—more than four times higher than Perrier, for example. It makes sense that this would be the water that hooked me. In specialty coffee, a topic I’ve written about extensively, it’s common for new acolytes to have a “light switch moment” with coffees that explore wild expanses of the flavor spectrum: Think wild-fermented and genetically diverse “natural-processed” coffees from Ethiopia, or highly prized and rightly expensive Gesha variety coffees from Panama. Same thing in wine, where young drinkers have gravitated in droves to the electric Technicolor “natural” wines of boundary-pushing makers like Anders Frederik Steen, Furlani and Cornelissen. These experiences fall on the extreme end of the product spectrum, and that’s why they hook new drinkers: The journey to “aha!” upends the preconceived notion of what coffee or wine should be, redrawing its culinary and cultural application. Same with Borjomi, an extremely mineralized water that led me to explore a world of flavor experiences—some more subtle, some even more extreme (say hey, Essentuki #4). “We’re seeing a wave of adoption where people realize that water is not just water,” says Mascha. “They get hooked for whatever reason, and then they realize that water has terroir, it comes from a place, it has flavor, and it can be integrated into epicurean ways like wine.” Ladies and gentlemen, it me. I was first suckered in by flavored filtered tap (La Croix), then had my mind blown by the outer edges of the mineral spectrum (Borjomi). It’s roughly the trajectory a wine drinker undertakes, from nipped high school Boone’s Farm to Jura savagnin sous voile, with a land of exploration and subtlety to discover in between. (Burgundy, if you’re paying.) Riese and Mascha advocate seeking out different styles and weights of water for different meal pairings and experiences: Cantonese suckling pork with Cana Royal water from Slovenia, or smoked fish roe with a low-TDS Swedish glacier water, which Mascha describes as tasting “like you’re in the middle of nature, and it’s raining and you open your mouth.” And in our conversations, each encouraged me to explore offerings across the minerality scale, like the soft, low-TDS waters of Svalbardi, Lofoten and Lurisia, or the complex, naturally sparkling waters of Vichy Catalan, Pedras and Ecuador’s Guitig. Unlike so much of today’s zen koan cacophony of wellness trend buzz, mineral water is certifiably good for you, something czars and soldiers and doctors in Europe have known for centuries (to say nothing of the older regulars at the 127-year-old Russian & Turkish Baths in New York’s East Village, swigging huge plastic bottles of Narzan). Mineral water is culinary, yes, but it’s also elemental in a profoundly satisfying way—an organism consuming the most delicious and interesting version of something it needs to live. “Like with wine, like with coffee, it’s not about finding what’s best,” says Mascha. These days he’s expanding the role of water to its place beyond the glass, working with cocktail bars to develop custom ice and chocolatiers seeking the perfect water to blend into chocolate bars. This feels like a natural expansion of the implied conclusion, which is that by re-evaluating the identity and flavor and history of the water we drink, we can then extend this new consideration into water’s role in the wild beer we drink, the cocktail ice we stir and shake with, the sip of water we take to realign our palates between the bites and bottles of everything else we love. “These waters come from a real place, from a real source with a cultural identity attached,” says Mascha. “They mean something.” The post Seltzer Is Over. Mineral Water Is Forever. appeared first on PUNCH. #LaCroix #MineralWater

Arplis - News source http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Arplis-News/~3/G7qKKgMC55Q/the-year-was-1995-and-i-was-watching-television