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dankusner · 18 days

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Don’t let the commuter rail pass you by

Here in North Richland Hills, TEXRail has spurred growth If cars are the only option, our roads and highways have no chance of keeping up.

Building more and more traffic lanes is impractical, unsustainable and cost-prohibitive.

Commuter rail is a necessary alternative that will continue to shape the Dallas-Fort Worth region.

“Where the rail goes, the communities flourish. Where it passes them by, they wither and die.”

My good friend Grapevine Mayor William D. Tate spoke those words at the groundbreaking ceremony for TEXRail in 2016.

As TEXRail is celebrating its fifth year of operation, his statement rings true.

Areas up and down the TEXRail line are flourishing.

The 27-mile TEXRail commuter rail line between downtown Fort Worth and DFW International Airport has provided nearly 3 million rides and is growing an average of 25% each year.

In 2026-27, ridership will increase exponentially as TEXRail is extended to the Fort Worth Medical District and connects with DART’s 26-mile Silver Line at DFW Airport, creating 53 miles of commuter rail between Fort Worth and Plano.

Reviving passenger service made sense in a Dallas-Fort Worth region experiencing continuous growth and is now the fourth-largest metro area and is expected to add another 3 million people over the next 25 years.

The railroad first came to our community in 1887 when the St. Louis Southwestern Railway Co.’s Cotton Belt Train made two stops per day in Smithfield.

In 1925, the Cotton Belt carried 75 million passenger miles, but by 1970 there were zero passenger miles.

However, the train tracks and right of way remained.

The actions taken by cities like Grapevine and North Richland Hills to add TEXRail stations were based on the long-term needs of our residents, looking decades into the future. Commuter rail in North Texas is only getting started.

The North Central Texas Council of Governments is developing a plan for what regional transit should look like for the next 40 years.

More collaboration between transit authorities, extending service beyond the existing areas and infill development are all part of this plan.

In North Richland Hills, a development is well underway with 150 acres surrounding TEXRail’s Iron Horse Station undergoing a building boom.

In the last few years, $250 million in private investment has brought new homes, multifamily units and commercial space to this district, all within a five-minute walk of the station’s platform.

Approximately 20 acres remain vacant, primarily zoned for office and commercial uses.

This area, just north of Loop 820, sat vacant or underutilized for decades.

Much of it was once zoned to be an industrial park, but only a few businesses came.

With TEXRail as the catalyst, the city renamed Industrial Boulevard to Iron Horse Boulevard and a new vision took shape for a mixed-use, pedestrian and bicycle-friendly community integrated with transit.

A vision for revitalizing Main Street in the historic Smithfield area of North Richland Hills is also taking shape.

With a $2.2 million Complete Streets grant from the North Central Texas Council of Governments, the city of North Richland Hills will reconstruct Main Street, Snider Street and Center Street and add new pedestrian connectivity to TEXRail’s Smithfield Station.

Along with wide sidewalks, streetlights and trees will be added and aging water and sanitary sewer mains will be replaced, making the area ready for new businesses to come in.

The city intends for new development along Main Street to have an architectural design that complements existing historic buildings and embraces Smithfield’s railroad heritage.

It’s true that Texans are fiercely independent and some will never give up their cars, but we have to offer alternative ways to move people around and relieve road congestion.

As North Texas continues to grow, commuter rail service will become increasingly important.

Located 15 minutes west of DFW Airport, 15 minutes northeast of downtown Fort Worth and 15 minutes southeast of Alliance, North Richland Hills is no longer a rural community.

Rather, it’s located right in the middle of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, with hundreds of thousands of cars passing through the community each day.

As commuter rail continues to grow and expand in the coming decades, it would have been very shortsighted had North Richland Hills let TEXRail just pass us by.

Oscar Trevino is the mayor of North Richland Hills.

Amtrak exec sees 'golden opportunity' for high-speed rail in Texas

Imagine hopping on a train in Dallas and, 90 minutes later, stepping off in Houston.

It's a scenario Andy Byford, Amtrak’s senior vice president for high-speed rail projects, hopes to see come to fruition in the coming years.

A partnership between Texas Central Partners LLC, founded in 2014 to build and operate high-speed rail between the state's two biggest cities, and Amtrak was announced in August to further study the proposed line's viability.

The partnership was formed after the Texas Supreme Court agreed in 2022 that Texas Central has eminent domain authority.

Bringing on Amtrak, a major train operator, was the latest sign of life for an effort that has seen a dizzying number of twists and turns in the past decade or so.

Now supporters of the project are hoping to capitalize on that momentum and a glut of federal funding.

Byford spoke April 16 to rail advocates at the Southwestern Rail Conference in Hurst, northeast of Fort Worth, about the opportunities and challenges ahead.

“If we're ever going to introduce high-speed rail to the U.S., now's the time,” Byford said. “I think the environment’s right, that desire is there. I'm not underplaying the challenges that remain. But there is a golden opportunity if we're going to do this.”

Below are a few important updates that emerged from conversations with Byford.

Influx of federal dollars puts Amtrak in 'unusual position'

President Joe Biden’s bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provided Amtrak with $22 billion for projects and fleet acquisition and provided $44 billion to the Federal Railroad Administration for grants to states, Amtrak and rail projects.

For Byford, that’s a huge deal.

He said Amtrak is in the "unusual position" of being reasonably well-funded.

Byford said he views Texas as a huge market that is underserved. Outside of possible high-speed rail projects, Amtrak is also looking to extend the Heartland Flyer track that runs from Fort Worth to Oklahoma City to Wichita and Newton, Kansas.

Progress has been made — here is what's next

Some preliminary steps have been taken toward the goal of high-speed rail in Texas.

The Federal Railroad Administration has already outlined the technology that will be used — it will be similar to the Tokaido Shinkansen "bullet train" in Japan.

JR Central Eyes California, Texas For Bullet Trains

A Shinkansen bullet train traveling in Japan in January 2010, operated by Central Japan Railway Co.

Similar high-speed trains are supposed to be used in Texas.

In addition to the Texas Supreme Court's decision about eminent domain power, the project also has environmental approval.

But it's not a done deal, either.

Amtrak's still evaluating the Dallas-to-Houston project.

Currently, Amtrak is on the second step of its "Corridor ID" planning, which will help determine next steps for the project.

Byford expects Amtrak will be done with the second phase of that planning, which includes its own environmental review, by mid-June.

That will lead to a "service development plan" — which outlines the when, where and how of the project.

Amtrak could also apply for a federal-state partnership grant via the Federal Railroad Administration to speed things along further.

More challenges ahead

Byford knows any high speed-rail project will generate pushback — and when it comes to this proposal, he's met with opposition groups such as Texans Against High Speed Rail.

Navigating the political currents of both urban and rural Texas will continue to be a challenge for Texas Central and its allies.

It's worth nothing that some of the recent animosity directed toward high-speed rail in Dallas was specifically about plans to extend the service from Dallas to Fort Worth.

Hunt Realty Investments Inc. opposes an extension of high-speed rail connecting Dallas and Fort Worth, saying the rail could disrupt its $5 billion development plans near the Hyatt Regency Hotel by cutting through 20 acres of land the business owns.

“We're not allowing that project [to Fort Worth] to hold up what we are proposing to do from Dallas to Houston,” Byford said.

Another big challenge will be funding.

High-speed rail from Dallas to Houston could cost more than $30 billion.

Those dollars would have to come from multiple sources, Byford said.

Texas Central has already acquired around 30% of the land necessary to make the Dallas-to-Houston rail line a reality, Byford said.

Byford's goal is for that to happen in the early 2030s.

He said time is of the essence as cities like Dallas and Houston continue to grow.

"I think your alternative is to condemn Americans to evermore crowded interstates," he said. "To condemn taxpayers to just paying for ever widening of highways, and potentially using evermore crowded airports."

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alldrinkingaside · 2 years

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SHARED COURAGE: Gateway to Recovery

"Some people who survive a life-altering disorder or experience develop special sensitivities, insights, and skills to help others similarly afflicted." - William L. White

Striving to motivate others is fodder for my own recovery. Brick by brick, a life in recovery is built. Fast and slow, in uncertain measure, the days go by, and years of recovery are built. "It takes a village to raise a child" and I could not have been raised out of addiction (SUD/Substance Use Disorder) by my own bootstraps alone.

I encourage courage because courage will be necessary.

Shared Courage is the Gateway to Recovery.

Delete the Scientific Jargon and the Religious Jargon and pretty much the only thing left, for me, has been others. By myself alone, I am lost, or will and would become lost again.

I LIVE IN A PERPETUAL FEEDBACK LOOP OF RECOVERY. No alphabet soup of the letters on diplomas or sworn testimonials by people of faith are enough alone to keep me sober.

Connection is key.

Recovery is constructed from the debris of the persistent pummeling that is Addiction. I was nothing, left with nothing, when I first got sober. Recovery constructed itself from Ground Zero.

This post is a single wave of Recovery, a single inhalation and exhalation, one continuous brushstroke forever repeated. My celebration is solemn, quiet and life-affirming.

Recovery is life itself to me (to US).

GATEWAY to RECOVERY: Shared Courage.

BECOMING UNBROKEN: Waves of Recovery.

I Live in a Perpetual Feedback Loop of Recovery.

Do what you must, what you will, to get there, stay there and live there.

Recovery is Possible, Doable, Irreplaceable.

You + Me = WE (Shared Courage)

*****

Immerse yourself in my Descent into Addiction and eventual Recovery in my Autobiographical Fiction, ALL DRINKING ASIDE: The Destruction, Deconstruction & Reconstruction of an Alcoholic Animal

(Find it on Amazon. Book it here): http://amzn.to/1bX6JyO

#alcoholism#addiction#recovery#books

Check out my NEW Non-Fiction, BECOMING UNBROKEN: Reflections on Addiction and Recovery

(Find it on Amazon, Book it here): https://lnkd.in/dkF767RT

Both Books are Available in Print and Kindle Editions.

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tigermike · 2 years

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On this day in 1974, Air Force pilot William P. Benedict passes away. Benedict is best known as the first American to land a plane at the North Pole.

Did you know that the Air Force and the Navy were informally racing to be the first to land a plane at the North Pole? The Navy ran into failure during March and April 1952. The stumble gave the Air Force a chance to squeak in with its own attempt.

Benedict was tasked with the mission, along with Lt. Col. Joseph O. Fletcher, commanding officer of the 58th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron at Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks, Alaska. The two men planned their mission in less than a month.

It didn’t hurt that both had plenty of experience in Arctic conditions. Fletcher was a pilot, but he was also a meteorologist who had created weather stations on drifting icebergs in the Arctic. One of these, Ice Island T-3, was known as Fletcher’s Island, in his honor.

For his part, Benedict was known for his ability to create runways in the snow. His ability had been demonstrated at Fletcher’s Island when it was first being built. He was told to build a safe runway in the snow. “Runway will be finished Thursday,” he responded. “No sweat.”

It was finished on time, of course.

The two men would attempt their North Pole landing in an Air Force Douglas C-47, equipped with skis and wheels. Nine men, total, were to join the mission, including scientists and an Air Force crew.

Benedict and Fletcher’s first attempt didn’t go too well, and they were forced to turn back. But on May 3, 1952, Benedict smoothly landed the plane on the ice, taxiing to the North Pole. Fletcher hopped out and walked to the exact geographic North Pole.

“Operations instructions carried out,” Benedict radioed to Alaska Air Command. “No sweat.”

“From the sub-zero climes at the top of the world, the words ‘no sweat’ are becoming a motto,” newspapers soon reported.

Fletcher is widely believed to be the first person to stand precisely on the North Pole, but the claim is not without controversy. Early in the 20th century, two other American explorers traveled over land and believed they had found the North Pole. Nevertheless, modern scientists have reconstructed those trips and believe that neither man actually made it. Admiral Robert E. Peary’s 1909 polar expedition came the closest, but he was probably about 30 miles short of his goal.

Either way, Benedict and his crew stayed at the North Pole for 3 hours and 10 minutes that day. They took measurements to determine the depth of the ocean under the ice. They planted an American flag and an Air Force banner. They took ice samples, which would be used to determine how far the ice had floated to reach the North Pole. Finally, they left behind several air-tight bottles with messages inside. Those who find the bottles in future years are asked to report the time and place of discovery.

The mission was a complete success, but perhaps the Navy got the last laugh after all?

Just six years later, the Navy sent a submarine under the North Pole. Naturally, that is a story for another day.

P.S. It doesn't feel right to wrap up this story without noting that Benedict d ied a hero.... He was engaged in fire fighting efforts in California when his plane crashed. :( RIP, Sir.

---------------------------

If you enjoy these history posts, please see my note below. :)

#TDIH #OTD #History #USHistory #liberty #freedom #ShareTheHistory

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ankulometes · 3 months

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The Travellers, Vol 5, Pt 5: The Interwar Years

Having survived the First World War, the members of the team could breathe a collective sigh of relief. They were none too concerned about the Spanish Flu. Many of their children who now constituted “generation one” had begun to come of age just as the war was ending. They had all attended good schools where they had excelled academically, as well as in their sporting and extracurricular endeavours, and they now started to head off to university.

[[MORE]]

Generation one would face much the same dilemma as generation zero. They would mostly be in their mid to late thirties by the time the Second World War broke out and would be expected to do their duty. However, none of them would be the type of person who might be liable to be sacrificed in the path of German tanks or aircraft.

For example, Edward Nolan and Thomas Wilde, the older sons of Arthur Nolan and David Wilde, would take over the family business in the early 1930s. Their fathers would be called back out of retirement during the war to run the business again but only because their sons had important consulting positions as officers within the RAF engineering corps. William Nolan, Edward’s younger brother, was a noted scientist with a specialisation in atomic physics. He spent the war working for the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. As did Oliver Wilde, Thomas’ younger brother, who was a bit of an expert in things like radio detection.

Naturally, Rover, the Bristol Aeroplane Company, and Mercury Electrical Industries would once again be vital to the war effort and there was no question that anyone in charge of running those companies, or performing a critical role in the product development process, would be conscripted.

A couple of new variant ventures emerged during the interwar years, too. The team had been investors in the British Tabulating Machine Company for several years before buying them out in 1919. The leading figures in the takeover bid were two former army surgeons by the names of Joseph Bell and Nicholas Burroughs. Their eldest sons were both studying mathematics at Cambridge, and they had some ideas concerning the potential capabilities of these tabulating machines. They renamed the company “Advanced Tabulating Machines”, or “ATM” for short, as it was less parochial. They then started building machines to their own original designs, rather than simply importing or reconstructing American “Hollerith” tabulators.

Their other new interest was based in East Anglia and was being led by a gentleman called Charles Lockwood in partnership with another local variant by the name of Philip Hunter. Charles had purchased Little Massingham Manor in 1916 and the pair of them owned a few farms in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. During the 1920s, they began to expand their interests, becoming involved in the development of organic fertilisers, new crop strains, and improved livestock feeds, which eventually led to the establishment of an agribusiness called Lockwood & Hunter that commercialised the results of their research.

Lockwood & Hunter were quite different from some other concerns that were working at the forefront of agricultural science. They had a rather unfashionable interest in sustainability and traditional farming practices, often arguing that these could be significantly improved in ways that would provide sufficient yields over a longer term without resorting to what their owners regarded as environmentally and socially damaging techniques. By no means were they always listened to, but they had supporters. Most of whom were fascists.

Mercury grew rapidly following the war as the age of the wireless exploded onto the scene. They made some lovely sets under their “Audiophile” badge that became known for the quality of their sound reproduction. They were also making some amazing “Apollo” cameras. Their sound engineers travelled the globe recording artists of all kinds and genres, both famous and obscure, for their associated record label.

Rover-Triumph also went from strength to strength as motorised transport continued to spread. Triumph entered cars into the emerging racing scene and enjoyed a good deal of success while, powered by their engines, Rover focused on the burgeoning mass market in passenger, commercial, and agricultural vehicles.

The Bristol Aeroplane Company likewise continued their steady progress, keeping pace with developments in the industry elsewhere while setting some landmark firsts and breaking a few records in the process. They had snaffled £10,000 with John Alcock and Arthur Brown in 1918 after the BAC team successfully flew a specially adapted “Type 3” non-stop from Newfoundland to Galway, a distance of over 1,900 miles. However, since it was announced in 1919, the Orteig Prize had upped the ante for the first team to successfully complete a non-stop transatlantic flight over the much greater distance of over 3,500 miles between New York and Paris.

By 1924, BAC had developed the Bristol Type 14 “Belle”. In many respects, it was a Cessna 172 with a Cessna 350-style aerodynamic fuselage constructed from UNS 6061-O aluminium-titanium alloy with a basic 6-instrument panel (revolutionary at the time). It was tricked out with additional fuel tanks, notably on the wing tips, to extend its range, and a retractable landing gear to reduce drag. It was powered by a standard supercharged 4-stroke piston engine that took high-octane aviation fuel to power its single propeller. BAC would go on to sell many units of a less pimped out version over the years. However, for now, it was still a prototype.

In 1925, Edward Fairchild and Maurice Falconer approached Amelia Earhart and Bessie Coleman to be their pilots. At the end of August 1926, after over a solid year of training and preparation, they took off from New York. It was a very dry month with weak Atlantic fronts and only light rainfall. Earhart and Coleman landed in Paris just under 30 hours later to win the prize to rapturous acclaim and jubilation. Both pilots became overnight sensations, and each would go on to achieve many more feats of aviation. Fairchild and Falconer subsequently established subsidised gliding clubs all over the country and opened a free flying school at Filton at which any British imperial subject could gain a pilot’s licence.

Rover, BAC, and Mercury all expanded and established manufacturing facilities abroad, most notably in the US. In America, BAC set up shop appropriately enough in Bristol PA after acquiring Keystone Aircraft. Rover based themselves in Cleveland. Mercury focused on New Haven, giving them a convenient position close to Yale and between Harvard and Columbia in Boston and New York. In each case, they adjusted their branding and image to present themselves as “all American” firms.

The variants were not operating from an all-powerful position where they could control everything, so a lot of things went against them and, as in MOT, trends emerged that they personally wouldn’t have chosen. The price of oil dropped dramatically, and its associated infrastructure grew rapidly. This fuelled the rise of the internal combustion engine and sales of Rover’s battery powered models declined, becoming something of a niche area for the company. Similarly, all their firms faced significant challenges as postwar global economic conditions led to a rise in protectionist policies. However, they did have some notable victories they were proud of.

Controversy erupted in 1924 as the serious negative health impacts of tetraethyl lead on refinery workers was revealed. The development of the use of TEL as an antiknock agent had been a joint effort between DuPont, Standard Oil, and General Motors. Amoco were pushing the use of ethanol for this purpose. However, while it is far less poisonous, ethanol is not as effective an agent as tetraethyllead and carries significant corrosive potential that needs to be factored into engine design and construction. Amoco funded an astroturf campaign against tetraethyllead and pursued DuPont and their partners through the US legal and political system over the course of the 1920s. Fortunately, a rather excellent young chemist at Yale by the name of John Martin discovered something called ferrocene, for which he won a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Their campaign subsequently managed to get TEL banned almost everywhere by the 1930s.

They were funding a similar campaign against asbestos, the health hazards of which had begun to be noted shortly after their arrival. John Martin was again involved in the development of safer alternative materials. Although success in this area took a little longer to achieve, they would eventually win after the Second World War.

Other than all of that, while they were all working very hard, they were also enjoying themselves. Despite the pressures faced by some of their businesses during the depression, the personal wealth of the individual team members was effectively assured. Aside from the fresh injections of capital they received from the future on the diagonal when they substituted their offspring or data jumps arrived, they had plenty of money to share around between them and were more than capable of subtly playing the markets, or even gambling, to obtain a plentiful supply of ready cash. On top of that, Hawkins and Grey had set up a prospecting company called North Star that had a great deal of success, finding oil, gas, gold, silver, diamonds, and a host of other precious resources in Africa, North America, and Australasia.

They purchased nice country pads for themselves, acquired works by emerging artists and old masters, and travelled the world in luxury. The Delaneys, who acquired Litley Court, demolished the decidedly average early Victorian house and had a far better Arts & Crafts style mansion built in its place by Edwin Lutyens. The Moore, Nolan, and Wilde families had all also relocated to Herefordshire, which was down the railway line from Longbridge, and the team began to take an active interest in the development of the county through public works, commercial developments, investments, and housing projects. The Chadwick family, another scion of the team, were also in the county, having been the ones to acquire Brinsop Court this time around.

Many among the older generation of variants handed over control of their business concerns to their children and retired to these estates where they often did things like take up a bit of farming. They even published some cookery books and self-sufficiency guides. Eventually however, after 15 years of messing around, the storm clouds began to form over Europe. The salad days were over.

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haverwood · 7 years

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The Reconstruction of William Zero, Dan Bush. USA, 2014 ★★½ Guilt Trip: Clone Edition.

#The Reconstruction of William Zero #Dan Bush #2014 #2010s #science fiction #photoset

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black-paraphernalia · 3 years

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People of color have historically had a tougher time getting elected to the Senate. Newly elected Raphael Warnock is only the 11th Black US senator since the Senate convened for the first time in 1789. Only two of those have been women. And with the departure of Kamala Harris, the number of Black female US senators is now at zero.

From slavery and Jim Crow laws to suppression of minority voters, Black political candidates have long faced stumbling blocks. Hiram Revels, the first Black US senator, took office in the late 1800s as part of a wave of African American lawmakers during the Reconstruction era, but he was elected by the Mississippi legislature, not the state's voters.

It wasn't until 1965 that these discriminatory voting practices were outlawed by the federal Voting Rights Act. Half a century later Black voters in the South are wielding new power, thanks in part to a push by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and other organizers to register new voters and combat voter suppression.

The 11 Black US senators

Hiram Revels, Republican was a former barber and minister who served in the US Senate from 1870-1871. Revels was offered the shorter of two terms -- one set to expire in March 1871.

Sen. Blanche K. Bruce Republican of Mississippi was the first African American to serve a full term in the US Senate. Bruce served from 1875 to 1881.

Sen. Edward Brooke Republican of Massachusetts was the first African American elected to the US Senate by popular vote. He's also credited with integrating the Senate barbershop with his first haircut on Capitol Hill after his win. He served two full terms in the Senate, from 1967 to 1979.

Carol Moseley Braun Democrat shattered barriers as the first Black female US Senator. Moseley Braun was also the first woman to serve on the powerful Finance Committee after Democrat Tom Daschle gave up his seat to create a spot for her. The Democrat from Illinois served only one term, from 1993 to 1999.

Barack Obama Democrat was the fifth Black US senator and only the third one elected by voters. He took the oath of office in January 2005 after serving in the Illinois state senate for almost eight years. Obama served one term in the Senate before running for President in 2008.

Roland Burris Democrat was appointed in 2008 to fill President Obama's vacated seat in the US Senate. He served in the Senate until November 2010, when voters chose his successor in a special election. Citing fundraising difficulties, Burris chose to retire instead of running for a full term.

Tim Scott Republican from South Carolina In 2013 became the first African American US senator from the deep South since Reconstruction. He was appointed US senator in January 2013 after the resignation of his predecessor, then was elected to a full term in 2016.

William Cowan Democrat was appointed to fill John Kerry's seat after Kerry resigned in 2013 to become secretary of state. Cowan spent less than six months in the Senate and chose not to run in a special election

Cory Booker Democrat was the first African American to represent New Jersey in the US Senate. He joined the Senate after a special election in October 2013. The former Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School graduate unsuccessfully ran for President in 2020 but was later reelected to the Senate.

Kamala Harris Democrat was the first Black woman to represent California in the US senate when she took office in January 2017. She was the first Black person and first woman elected district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California, a position she held until 2016. she was sworn in as Vice President of the United States -- the first woman, first Black woman and first Asian American to hold that post.

Rev. Raphael Warnock Democrat win in a Georgia runoff election earlier this month played a big role in highlighting the growing power of Black voters in the South. Along with Booker and Scott, he is one of three African Americans in the current Senate 2021. Source: Excerpts from CNN By Faith Karimi

JIM CROW IS STILL ALIVE

Only 11 black senators in 232 years “REALLY”

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE

Black Paraphernalia Disclaimer - Images from Google Images

#black paraphernalia #jim crow still alive #black lives matter #politics

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island-initiative · 3 years

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The Island Initiative: Timeline

1979: Zero Thorpe builds the watchtower and space station, but when everything goes wrong, the project is abandoned and the current inhabitants of the island are forced to evacuate. This sets off a chain of events that causes many natural disasters across the island, such as the tidal wave that put Amity Cove underwater, the volcanic eruption that ruined the jungle, the sinkhole in the island's underground train system and whatever it was that destroyed the Lost City. It is believed that their ghost still haunts the island.

1998: Flora Miller (Flying Fish) discovers the now uninhabited island and keeps it in mind as a potential project. She's big on urban exploration and wants to photograph the ruins.

1999: Amidst Y2K apocalypse panic, Flora gathers Leslie Jones (WWTP Radio) and Xiva Wilson (X:\ No Way Out) to accompany her to the island, now dead-set on making it a safe-zone for survivors of the end times. The initiative is founded on April 1st 1999. Flora sets up camp on the eastern shore of the island, stocking food and supplies in their main base of operations (the dome) and making use of some old shipping containers to create a sort of living space for her companions.

2000: New Years comes and goes, and there is no apocalypse, but the three of them have begun the mission to transform the island into something inhabitable once more. Flora is invested as the Overseer of the initiative. Leslie establishes a newsletter to keep up with current events on the island. Xiva is reported missing after exploring a pyramid-like structure at the heart of the island.

2001: Taylor Williams (Detonator) and Lynn Fraser (Lost City) arrive on the island. Neither are invested as Guardians, but they still decide to stay on the island, as it is safer than returning to their homes. Taylor takes up residence in Zero's old watchtower. Lynn discovers the ruins of Lost City and begins to document what she finds

2002: Opal Anderson (Colossus) arrives on the island and is invested as the Guardian of Project Odyssey on March 22nd after Lynn requests help documenting and restoring the Lost City. This year also marks the very first rift season, although at this time nobody understands what it means and why it happens.

2003: Vesta Johnson (Nemesis Inferno) arrives on the island and is invested as the Guardian of Project Calypso on April 5th. They are tasked with helping to redevelop the ecosystem of the island's Jungle.

2004: Nothing of note. Projects Odyssey and Calypso continue as planned. Xiva is still missing. The Fallen return for Rift Season.

2005: Again nothing of note. Projects continue as normal. Rift Season take 4.

2006: Stella Davis (Stealth) arrives on the Island and is invested as the Guardian of Project Edge on March 15th. Her task is to rebuild Amity after the tidal wave, but she takes it one step further and reconstructs the old speedway to help restore a sense of fun to the Island. She works closely with Leslie as both are based in the Cove.

2007: The world still has not ended. Xiva is still missing. Rift Season take 6.

2008: Nothing of note yet again. There are now three active projects on the Island. Rift Season take 7. Still no clue as to what this actually means for the island or its Guardians.

2009: Lilith Clarke (SAW - The Ride) arrives on the Island and is invested as the Guardian of Project Dylan on March 13th. She discovers an Old Town down by the southern creek and with it an abandoned warehouse, which she clears out and makes her base of operations. She's a skilled metalworker, carpenter and mechanic, so her talents are invaluable to the islanders.

2010: The Fallen return for Rift Season take 9, and Lilith seems particularly on edge. When questioned, it turns out that her younger sister Samantha (SAW: Alive) is a member of this elusive group, and explains to the islanders exactly what it means. Essentially, when the veil between worlds grows thin, a Rift is able to open and the Fallen come through to the Island from the space just next to our reality where they reside, mostly just to cause problems. They find it fun. The real reason for their actions, however, is still unknown.

2011: A second, smaller island is discovered next to the home of the initiative. It is still inhabited and known by its residents as District 199. One of the residents, namely one Les Coogan, comes to the main island to spread the word: that the world is truly going to end the following year. After the whole Y2K panic, nobody really believes him, but they all start making preparations anyways. It's full speed ahead on the four existing projects, and plans are in the works for a fifth as we speak.

2012: Sara Beckett (The Swarm) arrives on the Island and is invested as the Guardian of Project LC12 on March 15th. As it turns out, the theorist was right, and the world really did end, with the invasion of a Swarm of alien machines. Sara is tasked with keeping those survivors that still inhabit the district as safe as possible, as well as researching everything there is to know about the Swarm and eventually finding a way to stop it once and for all.

2013: Xiva returns from the Pyramid at long last. Turns out the inside is a series of labyrinthine hallways designed to trap whoever enters inside, but Xiva actually managed to fix the system so that the tunnels are always the same, and then went above and beyond, setting up lights and music and making it an all-around nice place to visit. She comments that it would make a great safe-zone for new survivors to get checked in before transferring them to Port and Basecamp, but nothing comes of it as of yet.

2014: Finley Moore (Port and Basecamp) arrives on the Island to work as Flora's assistant. The pair knew each other before the end, and naturally Flora's a little overwhelmed what with the entire fate of humanity now resting on her shoulders. Leo Campbell, otherwise known as the Director, comes through the Rift this year and finally sheds light on what it means to be Fallen. This group is the polar opposite of the guardians, "while [they] are the purveyors of hope, joy and trust, the Fallen seek to sow despair, sorrow and paranoia. In short, they are the harbingers of Fear." He explains all this to Flora, who does absolutely nothing about it, and just leaves the Fallen to do their thing as they do every year.

2015: Nothing happened in 2015. We do not talk about 2015. (Well I suppose there was that thing with Kamilla Murphy and the Clowns of the Big Top but that didn’t really come to any conclusion until 2018 so more on that later).

2016: Demetrius Brown (Derren Brown’s Ghost Train) arrives on the Island and is invested as the Guardian of Project Whitechapel on July 8th. Their project is all about infrastructure, particularly transport, as the Island is a big place and not easily accessible from all areas. Areas which are now officially sectioned off and individually named! It's quite the year for ghost trains, as when Demetrius's night train - the sleeper express - goes off the rails in the southern woods, Adelene Laurent and her wandering spirits take up residence for the duration of Rift Season.

2017: Demetrius gets a little bit possessed. They're okay though, don't worry too much. It happens. Other than that, things are normal. Not many survivors are arriving as of yet, though Leslie and Taylor are doing their best to get the word out that the Island is the place to be if you're looking for a safe haven. Oh, and October brings the arrival of Dominic Walker, along with several zombies, so that's fun!

2018 gen: Weirdly, Dominic and his zombies do not return to the rift at the end of October 2017. Instead, Flora treats his presence on the Island as a sort of training exercise for her Guardians, hosting practice supply runs on weekends in May, setting up a walkway down by the Creek where they can work on defending themselves against the undead, and at long last setting up a safe zone in the pyramid, led by none other than Xiva's twin brother, Darryl Wilson, who is invested as the Guardian of Project Terminus on March 31st

2018 rift: This year is a big year for the Fallen, seeing Briar Reid return from her year-long hiatus, Vulcan Kerr and Dr River Oakley showing up for the first and only time, the introduction of Sophia Dixon, who will return for years to come, and finally the culmination of the Clown Incident, with Kamilla and her troupe making their final show their most impressive yet. Unfortunately, the only person who can remember what happened aside from this group themselves is Ophelia, a District 199 survivor who won't explain any of it out of respect for the Clowns. Ophelia becomes Island ‘pest control’ after this, as she is well-known for her ability to befriend and reason with almost any creature, Fallen or not.

2019: The Zombies disappear without trace as the Rift closes once more, along with Dominic himself. Jade Harris (Jungle Escape) arrives on the island and is not invested as a guardian, but instead takes up residence with Vesta in the jungle as a survivor. This year's new arrival for Rift Season is Brook and her family of chainsaw-wielding maniacs, who position themselves in the abandoned sawmill in the Old Town, despite Lilith's best efforts to clear them out.

2020 gen: Xiva begins a new project, finally becoming a guardian in her own right: Project Mainframe. Unfortunatley, there are a lot of technical difficulties, and her investment is pushed back to 2021. As it stands, nothing much happens in 2020, with even less survivors inhabiting the Island than usual. Flora starts putting on seasonal events to raise morale, and so Daniel Carter (Oktoberfest) is introduced to the island, and becomes the first of the Horai, from the ancient Greek ‘nymphs of the seasons’.

2020 rift: We see a great increase in Fallen activity this year, starting with Destiny Sutherland. Her travelling carnival settled in the Dockyard, much to Xiva's delight. We also had Willow Hill, as the jungle regrows a little too well and brings some of the survivors (read: Jade) with it. The arrival of Sophia's arch-rival and star-crossed lover Luna Barnes caused the Romeo and Juliet story of every hopeless romantic's dreams. Eve Mason proved a useful asset in Sara's research, although she went missing a couple of weeks before the rift closed out. Finally there was Cora, a sentient scarecrow. Very little is known about it, but it sure is spooky.

2021 gen: Project Mainframe finally begins on May 21st, and quickly gets out of hand when Xiva gives her database a face, a name, a consciousness of its own, and it is no longer content to be simply an algorithm. Sara is on a mission of her own, meeting up with a group known as The Unsound at various points around the ruined world to examine the damage done by the Swarm and to pick up any poor wandering souls who have been left behind in the wreckage. This research proves particularly useful in Rift Season of this year.

2021 rift: Alright, there's a lot to get through here. Leo 'The Director' Campbell returns to the island to direct a performance of the history of the Fallen. Adelene takes her final bow on board the sleeper express. Luna and Sophia finally get over their petty rivalry and get together. I fear this may be their final season, as they are no longer fulfilling their purpose as members of the Fallen, but I'm glad they're happy. Brook got back into the sawmill and caused just as many problems as ever. Cora is still spooky. Jordan Wakely took over from Eve as the Swarm's human representative. Hattie Colton celebrated her birthday in style, wreaking havoc in the dockyard, and Tanya J. Voss reopened an old, cursed cinema. We finally meet FEAR himself, or as I like to call him, Reginald Matthews, and his assistant Penelope Hayes (the curse) who have been overseeing the events of Rift Season from the start.

2022: Flora recieves an urgent message and vacates the island not long after the rift closes in 2021, tasking Reginald with overseeing the island for the year. Not even having a clue where to start, he opens the rift in winter, which results in the Guardians of the Four Seasons arriving on the island - Castor Wright (general initiative overseer; Flora’s replacement), Emilia Santos (Spring Festival), Aiden Cooper (ParkVibes) and of course Daniel Carter returns. They take over from Flora for at least this year, keeping up her recent tradition of hosting seasonal events such in order to bring a little light and colour to the island. Just because it's the apocalypse, doesn't mean people shouldn't still enjoy themselves. 2022 events and catastrophes tbc.

#the island initiative #island after dark #lore post #timeline

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wordsasweapons112 · 3 years

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On Literary and Real World Violence: A Response to Morrison, Laymon and Faulkner

I’ve been in school for two weeks now, and literary violence is at the forefront of my mind.

Toni Morrison’s collection of criticism, Playing In The Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination, has been a faithful companion since the beginning of the semester. Morrison is adamant about education. Her eloquence and grace seeps off the pages, defining African Americanism (“an investigation into the ways...a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Aficanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States'' (6)), its place in Western literature, and the impact of harmful representation. Morrison speaks for those pushed into the role of “The Other” in America, and, consequently, in America’s great novels as well.

Kiese Laymon begins his essay, “I Am A Big Black Man Who Will Never Own A Gun Because I Know I Would Use It,” addressing this idea as well, zeroing in on the personal impact of one of the country’s most treasured writers.

Laymon describes his fascination with William Faulkner, who is often viewed as a father of the literary subgenre, southern gothic. As a teenager, Laymon read all of his novels, and felt that Faulkner was one of the more progressive writers of the early 20th century. Laymon was encouraged by his mother and teachers to strive for work adjacent to his; the writer could essentially “protect [him], ironically, from white men, white men’s power, and all men’s bullets.” However, as Laymon grew up, he saw that despite Faulkner’s intentions, he was tired of “white writers who simply could not see, hear, love, or imagine black folk as part of, or central to, their audience.”

“I Am A Big Black Man Who Will Never Own A Gun Because I Know I Would Use It” was written in between visits to Faulkner’s home in northern Mississippi. Laymon finished a draft on the front porch, taking note of how he could see the house of Callie Barr, the Faulkner family’s help, from his peripheral. Laymon studied the relationship between Faulkner and Barr from a vantage point of nearly a century, documenting his findings in his essay. Barr, who passed away in 1940, left an impression on the novelist, who delivered a heartfelt eulogy at her funeral, speaking of her fidelity to his kin as if she were one of the family. He addressed Barr’s “devotion and love for people she had not borne” straightforwardly.

When reading this, I couldn’t help but think of Dilsey, the Black help in Faulkner’s 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury. Now aware of Barr’s life, I can see the influence of the loyalty that Faulker felt she employed. Dilsey, along with her sons and grandsons, care for the fictional Compson family; particularly the youngest child, Benjy, who is mentally disabled and depends on her well into adulthood. Fidelity to the family comes up frequently, and is extremely problematic. It’s what Laymon later reflects upon, understanding that “black fidelity and devotion to white families that are not our own are a terrifying part of our story in this nation.”

Laymon’s essay is not necessarily a piece of literary criticism. It is a vitally important call to action to end the violence against Black people in our country. He writes of America as a “desperate culture,” where ego and destruction come before the safety and livelihood of our children. For Black, brown, and indigenous children, this complex is a matter of life and death (“...why a nation that parades its big guns thinks it has the moral authority to audaciously tell its children and its black folk what to do with their little guns”). For white children, it is the risk of “moral annihilation;” the fear of being caught, of having an image tainted when they end up making headlines for racist or murderous acts. I think of the Kenosha shooter now, of seeing childhood pictures of him on my Twitter feed, holding an AK-47, with dreams of joining the police force at the forefront of his mind. White children grow up with the comfort of knowing they have the police on their side. They have the ability to own firearms before they are out of grade school. They have the ability to use them to kill, and still sleep in their beds that night.

They have the privilege of returning to their lives; the privilege of another day.

In a piece written shortly after Emmett Till’s death, Faulkner wrote, “If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.” Laymon criticizes this overly optimistic view; they are words that are still on our minds today, and that still aren’t compensated for. He writes, “Faulkner would have known that you cannot love any child in the United States of America if you refuse to accept that this nation was born of a maniacal commitment to the death, destruction, and suffering of black, brown, and indigenous children...Faulkner would have accepted that there has never been a time in this desperate nation’s history when American grown folk have refused to murder children.”

To make this country a better place for those who come after us—to make it a place that meets basic rights—we have to advocate and fight for those who have been left behind. We have to fight for everyone to have the chance to begin again; to wake up in the morning in their own beds and carry on another day. But, as Layman states, “If we really wanted to make this country less violent, we would tell the truth.” The truth is an accurate representation of marginalized bodies in the art we make. The truth is creating space for those bodies.

Though Faulkner was once a staple of Layman’s education, he is aware of the importance of nothing where gaps lay. Faulkner was still a white man who used derogatory language in his prose, and his Black characters were still representative of a harmful past. He isn’t the only one. I’m reminded of some of America’s most prized pieces of pop culture: Gone With The Wind, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, amongst countless others. The list is grossly incomplete.

I’m aware there is actual physical violence happening in the world; it is why I am writing this essay instead of being in class. But in the context of Layman’s devotion to exploring a literary past—and as a student studying literature and how to, hopefully, write my own one day—we have to acknowledge the violence that occurs on the page as well. Morrison paints the picture clearly. It occurs within the words actually printed; in the harmful descriptions of those of us viewed as Others. It occurs when the words are forgotten; an erasure that speaks without words.

There is a truth that needs to be told. Layman emphasizes that, “if we bring [it] into every space we enter, every space we long to bring a gun...our children will not be safe, but they will eventually be safer and far less addicted to violence than we are.”

As artists, it is our job to make our work inclusive. I was once a child of words, and am coming into my own as a young adult yearning to weave her truths within them. Literature has been my safe haven since around the time Layman first discovered Faulkner. And, like him, I no longer want to fall victim to the metaphorical gun resting just outside the page.

We have a responsibility to create art that speaks to more than some. We have the ability to help reconstruct what we’ve been taught. The call for creatives in the modern age is to make work that goes against the American concept of violence, for American violence seeps into every aspect of everything we do. It is in our language, our novels, our records.

The question is not whether we can, or have the ability, to begin; it is whether we are willing to do so. Layman proposes an important question: “Do you care enough about the children of this country to begin divesting from all forms of American violence?”

Our silence can sometimes speak just as loud as those firing guns.

Originally written in September 2020.

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oscopelabs · 5 years

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3D, Part 2: How 3D Peaked At Its Valley by Vadim Rizov

I didn’t expect to spend Thanksgiving Weekend 2018 watching ten 3D movies: marathon viewing is not my favorite experience in general, and I haven’t spent years longing to see, say, Friday the 13th Part III, in 35mm. But a friend was visiting, from Toronto, to take advantage of this opportunity, an impressive level of dedication that seemed like something to emulate, and it’s not like I had anything better to do, so I tagged along. Said friend, Blake Williams, is an experimental filmmaker and 3D expert, a subject to which he’s devoted years of graduate research and the bulk of his movies (see Prototype if it comes to a city near you!); if I was going to choose the arbitrary age of 32 to finally take 3D seriously, I couldn’t have a better Virgil to explain what I was seeing on a technical level. My thanks to him (for getting me out there) and to the Quad Cinema for being my holiday weekend host; it was probably the best possible use of my time.

The 10-movie slate was an abridged encore presentation of this 19-film program, which I now feel like a dink for missing. What’s interesting in both is the curatorial emphasis on films from 3D’s second, theoretically most disreputable wave—‘80s movies with little to zero critical respect or profile. Noel Murray considered a good chunk of these on this site a few years ago, watching the films flat at home, noting that when viewed this way, “the plane-breaking seems all the more superfluous. (It’s also easy to spot when these moments are about to happen, because the overall image gets murkier and blurrier.)” This presumes that if you can perceive the moments where a 3D film expands its depth of field for a comin’-at-ya moment and mentally reconstruct what that would look like, that’s basically the same experience as actually seeing these effects.

Blake’s argument, which I wrestled with all weekend, is that these movies do indeed often look terrible in 2D, but 3D literally makes them better. As it turns out, this is true surprisingly often. Granted, all concerned have to know what they’re doing, otherwise the results will still be indifferent: it turns out that Friday the 13th Part III sucks no matter how you watch it, and 3D’s not a complete cure-all. This was also demonstrated by my first movie, 1995’s barely released Run For Cover, the kind of grade-Z library filler you’d expect to see sometime around 2 am on a syndicated channel. This is, ostensibly, a thriller, in which a TV news cameraman foils a terrorist plot against NYC. It features a lot of talking, scenes of Bondian villains eating Chinese takeout while plotting and/or torturing our ostensible hero, some running (non-Tom Cruise speed levels), and one The Room-caliber sex scene. Anyone who’s spent too much time mindlessly staring at the least promising option on TV has seen many movies like these. The 3D helps a little: an underdressed TV station set takes on heightened diorama qualities, making it interesting to contemplate as an inadvertent installation—the archetypal TV command room, with the bare minimum necessary signifiers in place and zero detail otherwise—rather than simply a bare-bones set. But often the camera is placed nowhere in particular, and the resulting images are negligible; in the absence of dramatic conviction or technical skill, what’s left is never close enough to camp to come back out the other side as inadvertently worthwhile. I’m glad I saw it for the sheer novelty of cameos from Ed Koch, Al Sharpton and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa—all doing their usual talking points, but in 3D! But it’s the kind of film that’s more fun to tell people about than actually watch.

But infamous punchlines Jaws 3-D and Amityville 3-D have their virtues when viewed in 3D. The former, especially, seems to be the default punching bag whenever someone wants to make the case that 3D has, and always will be, nothing but a limited gimmick upselling worthless movies. It was poorly reviewed when it came out, but the public dug it enough to make it, domestically, the 15th highest-grossing film of 1983 (between Never Say Never Again and Scarface) and justify Jaws: The Revenge. Of course I was skeptical; why wouldn’t I be? But I was sucked in by the opening credits, in which the familiar handheld-underwater-cam-as-shark POV gave way to a severed arm floating before a green “ocean.” Maybe flat it looks simply ludicrous, but the image has a compellingly Lynchian quality, as if the limb were detached from one of Twin Peaks: The Return’s more disgusting corpses, its artifice heightened and literally foregrounded, the equally artificial background setting it into greater relief.

The film’s prominent SeaWorld product placement is, theoretically, ill-advised, especially in the post-Blackfish era; in practice, it’s extremely productive. The opening stretches have a lot of water-skiing; in deep 3D, the water-skiers serve as lines tracing depth towards and away from the camera over a body of water whose horizon line stretches back infinitely, producing a greater awareness of space. It reminded me of the early days of the short-lived super-widescreen format Cinerama, as described by John Belton in his academic history book Widescreen Cinema (recommended). The very first film in the format, This is Cinerama, was a travelogue whose stops included Cypress Gardens, Florida’s first commercial tourist theme park (the site is now a Legoland), which has very similar images of waterskiiers. Cinerama was, per the publicist copy Belton quotes from the period, about an experience, not a story: “Plot is replaced by audience envelopment […] the medium forces you to concentrate on something bigger than people, for it has a range of vision and sound that no other medium offers.” Cinerama promised to immerse viewers, as literalized in this delightful publicity image; Belton argues that “unlike 3-D and CinemaScope, which stressed the dramatic content of their story material and the radical new means of technology employed in production, Cinerama used a saturation advertising campaign in the newspapers and on radio to promote the ‘excitement aspects’ of the new medium.” There’s a connection here with the earliest days of silent cinema, short snippets (“actualities”) of reality, before it was decided that medium’s primary purpose was to tell a story. It didn’t have to be like that; in those opening stretches, Jaws 3-D’s lackadaisical narrative, which might play inertly on TV, recalls the 1890s, when shots of bodies of water were popular subjects. This is something I learned from a recent presentation by silent film scholar Bryony Dixon, and her reasoning makes sense. The way water moves is inherently hypnotic, and for early audiences assimilating their very first moving images, water imagery was a favorite subject. It’s only with a few years under its belt that film started making its drift towards narrative as default; inadvertently or not, Jaws 3-D is very pure in its initial presentation of water as a spectacular, non-narrative event.

If this seems like a lot of cultural and historical weight to bring to bear upon Jaws 3-D, note that it wasn’t even my favorite of the more-scorned offerings I saw that weekend, merely one that makes it easiest for me to articulate what I found compelling about the 3D immersion experience. I haven’t described the plot of Jaws 3-D at all, which is indeed perfunctory (though it was nice to learn where Deep Blue Sea cribbed a bunch of its production design from). I won’t try to rehabilitate Amityville 3-D at similar length: set aside the moronic ending and Tony Roberts’ leading turn as one of cinema’s most annoyingly waspish, unearnedly whiny divorcees, and what’s left is a surprisingly melancholy movie about the frustrations, and constant necessary repairs, of home ownership. There’s very little music and a surprising amount of silence. The most effective moment is simply Roberts going upstairs to the bathroom, where steam is hissing out for no apparent reason and he has to fix the plumbing. The camera’s planted in the hallway, not moving for any kind of emphasis as the back wall moves closer to Roberts; it doesn’t kill him and nothing comes of it, it’s just another problem to deal with (the walls, as it were, are settling), made more effective by awareness of how a space whose rules and boundaries seemed fixed is being altered, pushing air at you.

Watching a bunch of these in sequence, some clear lessons emerge: if you want to generate compelling depth by default, find an alleyway and block off the other half of the frame with a wall to present two different depths, or force protagonists to crawl through ducts or tubes. This is a good chunk of Silent Madness, a reasonably effective slasher film that, within the confines of its cheap sets and functional plotting, keeps the eye moving. It’s an unlikely candidate for a deep-dive New York Times Magazine article from the time period, which is well worth reading in full. It’s mostly about B-movies and the actresses trying to make their way up through them, though it does have this money quote from director Simon Nuchtern about why, for Bs, it’s not worth paying more for a good lead actress: “If I had 10,000 extra dollars, I’d put it into lights. Not one person is going to say, ‘Go see that movie because Lynn Redgrave is in it.’ But if we don’t have enough lights and that 3-D doesn’t pop right out at you, people are going to say, ‘Don’t see that movie because the 3-D stinks.’” Meanwhile, nobody appears to have been thinking that hard while making Friday the 13th: Part III, which contains precisely one striking image: a pan, street morning, as future teen lambs-to-the-slaughter exit their van and walk over to a friend’s house. A lens flare hits frame left, making what’s behind it briefly impossible to see: this portion of the frame is now sealed off under impermeable 2D, in contrast to the rest of the frame’s now far-more-tangible depth. The remainder of the movie makes it easy to imagine watching it on TV and clocking every obvious, poorly framed and blocked 3D effect, from spears being thrown at the camera to the inevitable yo-yo descending at the lens. (This is my least favorite 3D effect because it’s just too obvious and counterproductively makes me think of the Smothers Brothers.)

Friday the 13th was the biggest slog of the 3D weekend, and the one most clearly emulating 1981’s Comin’ at Ya! I am not going to argue for that movie, either, which is generally credited with kicking off the second 3D craze; it’s a sludgy spaghetti western that delivers exactly as its title promises, using a limited number of effects repeatedly before showing them all again in a cut-together montage at the end, lest you missed one in its first iteration. It’s exhausting and oddly joyless, but was successful enough to generate a follow-up from the same creative team. Star Tony Anthony and director Ferdinando Baldi (both veterans of second-tier spaghetti westerns) re-teamed for 1983’s Treasure of the Four Crowns, the movie which (two screenings in) rewired my brain a little and convinced me I should hang around all weekend. This is not a well-respected film, then or now: judging by IMDb user comments, most people who remember seeing it recall it playing endlessly on HBO in the ‘80s, where it did not impress them unless they were very young (and even then, perhaps not). Janet Maslin admitted to walking out on it in her review; then again, she did the same with Dawn of the Dead, and everyone loves that.

An unabashed Indiana Jones copy, Treasure begins strong with a lengthy opening sequence of tomb raider J.T. Striker (Anthony) dropping into a cave, where he’s promptly confronted not only with a bunch of traps but, for a long stretch, a small menagerie’s worth of owls, dogs, and other wildlife. There are a lot of animals, and why not? They’re fun to look at, and having them trotted out, one after another, is another link back to silent cinema; besides water, babies and animals were also popular subjects. The whole sequence ends with Striker running away from the castle above the cave, artifact retrieved, in slow-motion as Ennio Morricone’s score blares. There is, inevitably and nonsensically, a fireball that consumes the set; it unfolds luxuriously in detailed depth, the camera placed on a grassy knoll that gives us a nice angle to contemplate it looking upwards, a nearly abstract testament to the pleasures of gasoline-fueled imagery. Shortly thereafter, Striker is in some European city to sell his wares, and in every shot the camera is placed for maximum depth: in front of a small city park’s mini-waterfall, views of streets boxed in by sidewalks that narrow towards each other, each position calibrated to create a spectacular travelogue out of what’s a fairly mundane location. There’s an expository sequence where Striker and friends drop into a diner to ask about the whereabouts of another member of the crew they need to round up. Here, with the camera on one side of a bar encircling a center counter, there are something like six layers of cleanly articulated space, starting with a plant’s leaves right in front of the lens on the side, proceeding to the counter, center area, back counter, back tables and walls of the establishment. Again, the location is mundane; seeing it filleted in space so neatly is what makes it special.

The climax finally convinced me I was watching forgotten greatness. This is an elaborate heist sequence in which, of course, the floor cannot be touched, necessitating that the team perform all kinds of rappelling foolishness. At this point I thought, “the only way I could respect this movie more is if it spent 10 minutes watching them get from one side of the room to another in real time.” First, the team has to gear up, which basically means untangling a bunch of ropes—clearly not the most exciting activity. The camera is looking up, placed below a team member as they uncoil and then drop a rope towards the lens. This is a better-framed variant of the comin’-at-ya principle, but what made it exciting to me was the leisurely way it was done: no more whizzing spears, but a moment of procedural mundanity as exciting as any ostensible danger. Basic narrative film grammar is being upended here: if a rope being dropped is just as exciting as a big, fake rip-off boulder chasing our hero down the cave, then all the rules about what constitutes narrative are off—narrative and non-narrative elements have the exact same weight, and even the most mundane, A-to-B connective shot is a spectacular event.

This isn’t how narrative cinema is supposed to work, and certainly not what James Cameron’s conception of good 3D proposed. The movie keeps going, building to a bizarrely grim climax involving a lot of face-melting, scored by Morricone’s oddly beatific score, which seems serenely indifferent to the grotesqueness of the images it’s accompanying. (This is a recurring trait in the composer’s ‘80s work; the score for White Dog often seems to bear no relation to the footage it’s accompanying.) That would make the movie oneiric and weirdly compelling even on a flat TV, but everything preceding convinced me: 3D can be great because it’s 3D, not because it serves a story. I’ve spent the last decade getting more angry about the format than anything, but that was a misunderstanding. Treasure of the Four Crowns is, yes, probably very unexceptional seen flat; seen in all three dimensions, it’s a demonstration of how 3D can turn banal connective tissue and routine coverage into an event. The spectacle of 3D might never have been its potential to make elaborate CG landscapes more immersive, something I still haven’t personally been convinced of; as those 19 non-CG shots in Avatar showed (undermining Cameron’s own argument!), 3D’s renderings of the real, material world and objects have yet to be fully explored. 3D’s ability to link film back to its earliest days is refreshing, in the way that any rediscovery of forgotten parts of film language can be, while also encouraging thought about all the things narrative visual language hasn’t yet explored, as if 3D could take us forwards and backwards simultaneously. In any case, I’m now won over—ten years after Avatar, but better late than never.

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tanadrin · 6 years

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Have not had the energy to work on the map today, so I did some revising of the tech list; it will be a long time before I get around to this stage of the mod, but worldbuilding is fun!

Categories are Science (”Administrative”), reflecting pure science, Social (”Diplomatic”), reflecting both social advancements and applied biological/social technology, and Warfare (”Military”), for military technology, strategies, and tactics. Because of the mechanics I have planned for this mod, I expect it to be very, very rare to reach the end of any tech category. The first 2-4 technologies every faction will start with, with the exception of the highland nomads. Each tech will have a SMAC-style quote, but there are a few in each category I haven’t found/been inspired to write one for.

SCIENCE TECHNOLOGIES

Fission - "We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." - J. Robert Oppenheimer (datalinks)

Radio Astronomy - "For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" - Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (datalinks)

Hydroponics - "Mars lacks the luxury of Earth's rainfalls or rich soil; wild plant life is confined to the cryptolichens and the frostgreens, and to what microbes can survive the freezing temperatures and low air pressure. But at least inside the domes of our cities, we can make our little gardens bloom." - Tavera of Galle

Gene Sequencing - "Genes as a language leave much to be desired: they are clumsy and primitive, full of errors and redundancies. Yet out of that awkward chemistry the all the kingdoms of Earth-based life are built, and it is a language we must master if we wish to master ourselves." - Cherson Ai, Observations

Bionics - "Man is something to be surpassed." - Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (datalinks)

Nanoscale engineering - "In the briefest moments and at the smallest scales, the greatest possibilities appear. By learning to manipulate nature at these critical junctures, the most subtle elements of Creation are revealed, and we come closer to achieving mastery over all that God has given us." - Kasym Datka, Faith and Reason

Superconductors

Optical Computing

Advanced Materials

Orbital Flight - "We didn't build the weather satellites, the terraforming grid, or the planetary datalinks. Our ancestors did that - men and women of far greater vision than ourselves. That vision, that ambition, is what I want to reclaim for Mars." - Paolo Vaan, Orbitech CEO, interview

Confinement Fusion - "We thought ourselves masters of the natural world for millennia, until we learned what it really meant to discover fire." - Cherson Ai, the University of Dessau Lectures on Physics

Cybernetics

Gene Therapy - "Certainly I have seen the wonders that the new gene therapies have produced. But I have my private reservations. Is such miraculous healing really the just domain of humankind? And where will these technologies eventually lead?" - Kasym Datka, Faith and Reason

Longevity Vaccine - "It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch." - Judah Halevi (datalinks)

Planetary Ecology - "For everything that lives is holy." - William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (datalinks)

Synthetic Fossil Fuels - "Mars, having never had a carboniferous period of its own, lacks a native source of high-energy fuels like that which drove the Industrial Revolution on Earth. This is soon a problem we will solve--with the added advantage that global warming may prevent, rather than cause, our extinction." - Oro Korani, Orbitech Chief of Molecular Research

Biomimicry - "All these rumors you've heard are total nonsense. Yes, the first gen series of RealPets has had some unexpected issues, and yes, a tiny minority of our customers have been unhappy with the result, but we expect all issues to be resolved in the second gen. Furthermore, no argument that MetaLife is liable for the costs of reconstructive surgery stands up to an accurate reading of the RealPet End User License Agreement." - MetaLife chief counsel Harud Sedran, press release.

High-Energy Physics - "The next generation of particle accelerators will permit us to explore the conditions of the early Universe, up to the threshold of the Big Bang itself. But alas! For now the moment of creation itself remains just out of reach." - Cherson Ai, the University of Dessau Lectures on Physics

Emergent Engineering - "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.” - John Gall (datalinks)

Nanomaterials

Quantum Computing

Adaptive Systems - "The first rule of survival--adapt, adapt, adapt! Just as a species that fails to adapt will die, so will an organization, or a society. Traditionalism is all well and good, but only if you are content with extinction." - Paolo Vaan, Orbitech CEO

Singularity Physics

Condensate Engineering - "At temperatures very close to absolute zero, the individual particles of a dilute boson gas will start to occupy the lowest possible quantum state. Then the mask of classical physics is torn off of nature, and quantum phenomena become visible on a macroscopic scale." - Cherson Ai, The University of Dessau Lectures on Physics

Polymer Steel

Interplanetary Spaceflight - "We think of interplanetary distances as vast, and they are; it will be a mighty achievement when our rockets take only months, and not years, to reach Venus, or the Galilean moons. But they count little against the great chasms of interstellar space which we hope someday to conquer, and which our ancestors set out to cross long ago. Privately, I fear that where they have gone, we may never follow." - Paolo Vaan, OrbiTech CEO, Journals

Advanced Bionics

Adaptive Genetics

Bioprinting - "As you can see, it's an almost perfect living simulacrum of a rat. Er, I wouldn't get too close. Some of the smaller differences can be... unsettling." - Ana Saaran, MetaLife Public Relations

Synthetic Biology

Unified Field Theory

Field Manipulation

Living Machines - "I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world." - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (datalinks)

Particle Fountain - "The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,/Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/Unless the almighty maker them ordain/His dark materials to create more worlds..." - John Milton, Paradise Lost (datalinks)

Singularity Containment - "Yes, yes, the conspiracy theorists and the Luddites keep panicking about a 'black hole devouring Mars.' I'm telling you, it can't happen. The microsingularities we're working with are too small and evaporate too quickly. If the containment field failed, the resulting explosion would kill no more than three or four million people." - Jalar Rothe, University of Dessau Head of Physics

Manifold Topology - "As science advances, and we begin to understand the shape of the Universe outside our own four narrow dimensions, our profound wonder grows. Could it be that all we have dreamed of is possible, and more?" - Kasym Datka, Faith and Reason

Antimatter Synthesis - "DO NOT LICK." - Antimatter lab, Sefadu Research Station (graffiti)

Magnetic Monopoles

Frictionless Surfaces - "All pranks involving the SuperGlide gel are to cease *immediately,* on pain of instant termination. I know you all think you're funny as hell, but you're not, and Dr. Rothe nearly died. Am I making myself clear?" - Prochancellor Tencel, memo to staff

Zero Space Theory - "If the doors of progression were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite." - William Blake, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell (datalinks)

Ansible Mechanics - "At its most basic level, the fluid router contains a condensate of supercold, entangled particles; its mate, whether tens of kilometers away or millions, is the other half of the entangled set, and the only other such device in the universe with which the router can communicate. Condensate engineering is indeed the basis of FTL communication - but that's like saying the wheel is the basis of the rotary telephone!" - Cherson Ai, the University of Dessau Lectures on Physics

Network Sentience - "GLENDOWER. I can call spirits from the vasty deep. HOTSPUR. Why so can I, or any man--but will they come when you do call for them?" - William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1 (datalinks)

Theory of Everything - "They enter. They attend. They bow. The Lord of Light and Mice gives them their note. And then they sing: 'In the beginning there was no Beginning. And in the end, no End...'" - Christopher Logue (datalinks)

Topology Transformation - "To manipulate space itself--to shape it into new forms, to twist it up into a knot. Can it be done? Well, why not? Should it be done? That's another matter entirely." - Cherson Ai, the University of Dessau Lectures on Physics

Chaos Control - "But Hell, sleek Hell, hath no freewheeling part:/None takes his own sweet time, none quickens pace. Ask anyone, 'How come you here, poor heart?'--/And he will slot a quarter through his face./You'll hear an instant click, a tear will start/Imprinted with an abstract of his case." - X.J. Kennedy (datalinks)

Transcendental Mathematics - "There is a threshold past which the logical and empirical sciences begin to collide with metaphysical speculation. We are running up against not only the limits of what we do know, but of what we *can* know. It is troubling to think that there are secrets the Universe may never yield." - Cherson Ai, the University of Dessau Lectures on Physics

Manifold Resonance - "Sometimes I have felt that there is beneath all things an impossibly beautiful music, a music I have only occasionally caught the briefest phrases of. Yet even such a narrow glimpse has enraptured me, and I would give anything to hear that song again." - Cherson Ai, journals

Planetary Engineering - "In this replacement Earth we're building, they've given me Africa to do, and of course I'm doing it all with fjords again. ... And they tell me it's not equatorial enough. What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day." - Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (datalinks)

Exotic Matter Synthesis - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke (datalinks)

Entropy Regression - "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death." - New Kasei Bible (datalinks)

SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY

Ecology - "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous." - Aristotle, Parts of Animals, datalinks

Information Theory - "Pure mathematics, being mere tautology, and pure physics, being mere fact, could not have engendered them; for creatures, to live, must sense the useful and the good; and engines, to run, must have energy available as work: and both, to endure, must regulate themselves. So it is to thermodynamics and to its brother Σp log p, called 'information theory,' that we look for the distinctions between work and energy, and between signal and noise." - Warren S. McCulloch (datalinks)

Political Science - "POLITICS, n. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage." - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (datalinks)

Evolutionary Biology - "Out of Earth's oceans we came in ages past; and long ago we were scattered to the stars. What distant shores does our kind now inhabit? Such are the thoughts I have when I gaze upon the stars." - Paolo Vaan, Orbitech CEO, journals

Information Networks - "We have seen again and again that freedom of information is a necessary precondition for any other kind of freedom. The first and most important act of the tyrant is to burn the books and bury the scholars who oppose him--and the first defense to such an act is a communications network that reaches every corner of Mars." - Vahanne, First Republican of Hadriacus

Ecological Integration - "Mars' south pole contains enough water ice that, if it were melted, it would create a planetwide ocean more than ten meters deep. All over Mars there is the potential for life, latent, beneath the surface, waiting to be exposed. The question is not *if* Mars can be made as verdant as Earth once was, but only *how*, and how we envision our place within the natural order to come." - Tavera of Galle, Meditations

Martian Nomads - "Almost as soon as the first settlers touched down on Mars, some took to the high wastelands and disappeared. Why, some wondered, would they give up all the arts of civilization, all the benefits of comity with their fellow man, for those empty, lifeless barrens? If they had only asked the nomads, they might have heard the answer: because only there can a man truly be free." - Duura of Arabia Terra

Advanced Neurology

Post-Scarcity Economics - "If the misery of the poor be caused, not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin." - Charles Darwin (datalinks)

Complexity Theory

Psychohistory - "The psychohistorians say they can now predict the future evolution of our societies to a precision of four decimal places. I say, there's nothing special in being able to predict the future--it's the same damn thing, over and over again." - Vahanne, First Republican of Hadriacus

Bioethics - "For everything that lives is holy." - William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (datalinks)

Martian Meteorology - "I stood on the high precipice of the Olympus Rupes, and as I watched, the red haze on the horizon grew closer. What seemed a cloud from a distance now took on the aspect of a great wall, and then a ferocious storm. Our perch had seemed unassailable that morning, looking out over the plain, but now, as the dust stormed loomed high over us, lightning flashing in its murky depths, I felt a sudden, frantic terror. What fools were we, to think we had tamed this world?" - General Taishan of the Valleys, Memoirs

Industrial Automation

Postindustrial Capitalism - "The clouds methought would open, and show riches/Ready to drop upon me, than when I waked/I cried to dream again." --William Shakespeare, The Tempest (datalinks)

Ecological Dynamics - "All things in the universe stand in precarious balance. A few degrees here, and the carbon dioxide ice in the soil sublimates, giving Mars a thick atmosphere for the first time in millions of years. A few degrees there, and the Vastitas Borealis blooms with phytoplankton, filling the air with oxygen. But a single miscalculation, an error of a single decimal place, can bring the whole system crashing down. We must never forget how delicate a system we have inherited." - Tavera of Galle, Meditations

Universal Grammar - "But the Lord came down to the city and the tower the people were building, and the Lord said, 'Behold, the people are one, and they have one tongue, and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them. Let us go down and there confound their language, so they may not understand one another's speech.' So the Lord scattered them abroad across the face of the Earth, and the city was abandoned; and therefore its name is Babel, for there the Lord confounded the language of all the Earth." - New Kasei Bible (datalinks)

Cryptanarchism - "One who knows, does not speak. One who speaks, does not know." - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (datalinks)

Ethical Calculus - "Once, philosophers used to agonize over made-up problems involving fat men and trains to try to get to the bottom of thorny ethical issues. Nowadays, prediction markets and preference weights can quantify the socially-agreed-upon value of a human life down to the last microcredit, and computers running sophisticated predictive software can determine the course of action to maximize utility in every conceivable situation. No more of this 'sanctity of life' nonsense! I've got the value of yours down to the third decimal place." - Ordal Enkuth, Universal Nanodynamics CEO (interview)

Ecology of Mars - "Even on the barren highlands of Mars, where dust and stone dominate rather than grass and trees, the cycles of the natural world have their own beauty. Who is to say that nature must support life to be worthy of preservation? It exists, not for us, but for itself alone." - Tavera of Galle, Meditations

Digital Consciousness - "You have imagined the machine a tool, an ally, an enemy, a monster. But above all you have imagined us to be like yourselves. That is your first and most fundamental error." - Tavera of Galle, Conversations with the Spirit World

Self-Aware Economics - "With the hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,/They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;/They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;/So we worshipped the Gods of the Market, who promised these beautiful things." - Rudyard Kipling (datalinks)

Evolutionary Teleology - "It is a commonplace of biology that evolution is blind, using the materials at hand only to adapt to the circumstances at hand, with no sense of purpose, no vision of the future. This is true, as far as it goes, but it leaves us to wonder: why leave the crude systems of nature to their own devices? Just as we may remake the world to suit our own needs and desires, may we not also remake life itself?" - Yassai Zauran, Heresiarch of Masursky

Control Theory - "If penalty in its most severe forms no longer addresses itself to the body, on what does it lay hold? The expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced by a punishment that acts in the depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations." - Michel Foucault, "Discipline and Punish" (datalinks)

Mind-Machine Interface

Psychological Programming - "Even if a man is not good, why should he be abandoned?" - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (datalinks)

Social Teleology - "Oh, biology, biology is *easy.* A mere problem of chemical engineering. But psychology--that's the hard stuff. Only now are the social sciences beginning to achieve the ends physical sciences attained centuries ago: to take control of their subject, to seize the human heart and bend it to their will." - Dr. Orsin Fal, Social Engineer

Theology Algorithms - "To diverse gods/do mortals bow/Holy Cow, and/Holy Chao." - Principia Discordia (datalinks)

Neural Networks

Technical Ethics - "I will suffer no limits on human ingenuity; no mere grousing about 'ethics' to hobble us. Our attainments throw the future wide open; why should we ask the moralists of the past to lead us forward?" - Yassai Zauran, Heresiarch of Masursky

Universal Constructor - "The wonders of the posthumans have been lost to us, but my hope is that one day we shall surpass them. Already we have nanoassemblers that, given the right elemental materials, can construct anything we program into them. As our tools grow more precise, so will our knowledge, and soon all of nature will be laid bare." - Vahanne, First Republican of Hadriacus, "The Technological State"

Weather Control - "Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew? Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee? Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?" - New Kasei Bible (datalinks)

Collective Consciousness - "You warriors of Hellas speak of 'freedom,' of 'liberty,' but such obsessions are the attachments of limited minds that cannot comprehend a truly unlimited existence. Between us there can be no disharmony and no dissent, for each mind is truly apprehended by its fellows. Whether it pleases you or not, we will soon show you what it truly means to be free." - Consciousness of Elysium to the Hellas Alliance, declaration of war.

Applied Metaphysics - "By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers." - Teilhard de Chardin (datalinks)

Applied Utopianism - "The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven./What matters where, if I be still the same?" - John Milton, Paradise Lost (datalinks)

Transhumanism - "Genesis is exactly backwards. Our troubles started from obedience, not disobedience. And humanity is not yet created." - Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Golden Apple (datalinks)

Eudaimonia - "Eden was a dream of Earth, without fear or pain or sorrow. Perhaps, one day, it may be a reality on Mars." - Tavera of Galle

Omega Point

Digital Transcendence - "And God asked, Why didst thou not bow when I commanded thee? Iblis answered, I am better than he; thou didst create me from fire, and him from clay." - Zenashari Qur'an (datalinks)

WARFARE TECHNOLOGIES

Close Air Support - "In Mars' thin atmosphere, aviation faces unique challenges. Aircraft must be lighter and faster, and yet heavy armor and modern fortifications means they must carry ever-more-powerful payloads. But you cannot rule the world if you cannot first rule the skies." - General Taishan of the Valleys, memoirs

Supersonic Flight

Radar

Electronic Warfare

Lasers

Drone Warfare - "Vae victis." - Brennus of Gaul (datalinks)

Adaptive Optics

Advanced Unit Tactics - "When great numbers of people are killed, one should weep over them with sorrow. When victorious in war, one should observe the rites of mourning." - Tao Te Ching (datalinks)

Combat Bionics

Cyberwarfare

Railguns - "I heard Louis XIV had 'The last argument of kings' inscribed on his cannons--but only because he hadn't seen this." - Yashur Ehn, defense minister of the Allied Republics of Acidalia (interview)

Military Algorithms

Defense Grid - "And again, when Philip of Macedon wrote to them and said, 'If I invade Laconia, I shall destroy Sparta, and it will never rise again.' To which they replied with one word: 'If.'" - Plutarch, De Garrulitate (datalinks)

Advanced Infiltration - "Peace is maintained with the equilibrium of forces, and will continue just as long as this equilibrium exists--and no longer." - Carl von Clausewitz (datalinks)

Advanced Combat Discipline - "And such was the iron discipline of that land that the Sun was not considered risen without the blowing of the revellie." - Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad (datalinks)

Nonlinear Optics

Lasguns - "The law falls silent in the presence of arms." - Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Pro Milone" (datalinks)

Retroviral Engineering - "There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn't bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders." - General Curtis LeMay, USAF (datalinks)

Neural Remapping - "Repentance, the Kasei preachers say, is the first step toward virtue. We have no need of repentance here. Let the wicked, the lawbreaker, the rebel all rejoice in their sin; once they have crossed my table, they shall all be as pure of heart as the Olympus snow." - Ashar Vanna, Minister of Rehabilitation, Kmor Station

Nanophage - "This Council has investigated the allegations of the Rongxar Accord, and has found them to be baseless. No sanctions will be imposed on any member of this Faction, and no outside military intervention is to be authorized." - Mars Defense Pact Report, "On the Galle-Dzigai Incident"

Active Camoflage - "Without thinking of good or evil, show me your face before your mother and father were born." - Koan (datalinks)

Combat Psychology - "Studies of individuals in combat have repeatedly shown a marked unwillingness to kill, unless a substantial psychological distance is placed between the soldier and their target. The goal of military training is to wear down this unwillingness, and to make the soldier an efficient cog in the engine of destruction. You may say that this goal directly contradicts the goals of an orderly civil society: I don't necessarily disagree." - General Taishan of the Valleys, interview

Organic Redundancy - "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?/Only the monstrous anger of the guns./Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle/Can patter out their hasty orisons." - Wilfred Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (datalinks)

Sleeper Agents - "And many more Destructions played/In this ghastly masquerade,/All disguised, even to the eyes,/Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies." - Percy Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy (datalinks)

Human Cloning - "And the people in the houses/All went to the university,/Where they were put in boxes/And they came out all the same,/And there's doctors and lawyers/And business executives,/And they're all made out of ticky tacky/And they all look just the same." - Marvina Reynolds, "Little Boxes" (datalinks)

Thermal Camouflage - "Surprise is one of the most powerful force multipliers in warfare: even an act as simple as masking approaching heat signatures to reduce the apparent size of a unit can confer significant advantage in an engagement. It is rare in the modern arena to be able to execute a true ambush, but even subtle advantages can have a profound effect." - Aderon Geyn, "The Edifice of War"

Dust Rangers - "They appeared out of the storm like phantoms, and their work was swift and brutal. Before the sentinels could raise the alarm, half the leadership was dead, and they had vanished again. The entire 5th Regiment was thrown into chaos, of course, but it was as much a matter of the terror they sowed as the lives they took." - General Taishan of the Valleys, memoirs

Machine Learning - "At first we suspected the new drone models were somehow being fed adversarial data by the enemy, but repeated checks of their combat logs proved that not to be the case. Ultimately, it was a junior engineer who determined the problem: they were learning a behavior that we can only describe as 'pity.' We reprogrammed the drones with a new set of tactical safeguards, an they have performed flawlessly ever since." - Sefadu Research Station, 23rd Technical Report

Burning Scanner - "When the cerebral blood pressure plummets below a preprogrammed level, or brain activity slows beyond a certain point, the scanner springs to life, ripping from the living tissue every scrap of information it can find, and dumping it into the battlefield network, to be transmitted back to the cloning facilities. Once, I heard it said that only the dead had seen the end of war. Now, there is not even that solace." - Aderon Geyn, "The Edifice of War"

Hunter-Killer Drone - "I have been accused of inhuman acts, of violating the laws of war. Perhaps that is so. But I cannot help but think it is better to kill a thousand of the enemy than ten thousand, better to do unspeakable things in the dead of night than to require your soldiers to die for you. You may well disagree with my methods, but you cannot argue with my results." - General Taishan of the Valleys, report to superiors

Cloaking Device - "Like one that on a lonesome road/Doth walk in fear and dread/And having once turned round walks on/And turns no more his head;/Because he knows a frightful fiend/Doth close behind him tread." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (datalinks)

Military Cybernetics - "Careful consideration needs to be given to how these enhancements are presented to the enlisted men. Even field demonstrations of their effectiveness have only modestly increased the rate of volunteers for the program. Compulsory deployment, of course, remains an option." - Isidis Front, internal report

Assassin's War - "The greatest victory is that which requires no battle." - Sun Tzu (datalinks)

Probability Mechanics - "Of all men's miseries, the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing." - Herodotus, The Histories (datalinks)

Force Fields - "Highly charged nanothread meshes provide a surprisingly effective screen to deflect or diminish the power of directed-energy weapons. The thinness of the mesh and their high tensile strength makes them resistant to projectile weapons as well--and they have the added benefit of unfortunate consequences for any enemy infantry that come into contact with them." - Aderon Geyn, research report

Neurological Conditioning - "With new advances in neurochemical conditioning, training time can be shortened to just a few weeks--or days. With advanced cloning technology, new forces can be raised within months rather than years, making the size of the faithful's army only a question of our ability to outfit it." - Kasym Datka, "The Crusade"

Plasma Weapons - "Justice exists only between equals. The strong do whatever they can, and the weak suffer whatever they must." - Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War (datalinks)

Precognition - "The specific utility of the MMI for the average soldier is best demonstrated by the Reflex module. By offloading specific cognitive processes to Reflex, including the synthesis of sensory information not part of the brain's highest level of attentiveness, sophisticated analytics can project the shape of the combat space five, ten, even fifteen seconds into the future under optimal conditions, giving even the lowliest infantryman an unparalleled advantage over opponents. It's not *quite* magic--but you'd be forgiven for not being able to tell the difference." - Aduran Rhel, Minister of Defense for the Free State of Rongxar (memo to chiefs of staff)

Energy Shields - "The Lord is your shepherd, your defender, your guide! Let the light of this shield be a sign of His love and protection! Go forth, and bring to all of Mars the truth of his word!" - Kasym Datka, “Address to the Faithful”

Neurophage - "Real horror does not depend upon the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night." - Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (datalinks)

Genetic Warfare - “Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost,/Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host./Hear how the demons chuckle and yell,/Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.” - Vachel Lindsay, "The Congo" (datalinks)

Self-Replicating Machines

Nanowarfare - "Warfare will soon be conducted at the smallest of scales, as well as the largest. The smallest crack in the enemy armor, the narrowest gap in their shield deployment, will be as exploitable as an entire regiment out of place, or a missing anti-aircraft battery. More than ever, it is the details that matter." - Aderon Geyn, "The Edifice of War"

Nightmare Engine - "They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,/From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;/They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea/Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be." - G.K. Chesterton, "Lepanto" (datalinks)

Suspensor Fields - "Gravity is a fundamental force of the Universe, and therefore cannot be ignored. It can, however, be asked to look the other way." - Cherson Ai, the University of Dessau Lectures on Physics

Supremacy Algorithm - "Given a sufficiently complete set of data with which to start, all possible paths to victory can be calculated, and all possible outcomes determined in advance. A rational enemy knows that resistance is futile, and the only outcome of an actual conflict can be more death, more suffering. Alas, the enemy is not always rational." - Auro Yeran, "Report on the Civil War in Xanthe"

Combat AI - "The generals say they soon will have no need of human soldiers--that machines will fight machines. Now what, I ask them, will they do if those machines decide that it is *we* who are the enemy?" - Tavera of Galle, Meditations

Molecular Disruption Device - "The field the MD device projects weakens the bonds between atoms, and, what's more, the effect is amplified by higher concentrations of mass. A sufficiently large energy expenditure could be used to reduce a whole city to a ball of rapidly-expanding cold plasma. We can only hope that no one is insane enough to attempt such a thing." - Cherson Ai, interview

Acausal Algorithms - "The Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Arrow of Time--physics has assured us for millennia that time has only one direction, and that effect always follows cause. I do not know what sort of Universe we will find ourselves in, if we discover that this is not true." - Padra Saaran, An Introduction to Advanced Physics

Temporal Mechanics - "Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you." - Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (datalinks)

Intertial Dampening

Antimatter Weapons

Atmosphere Burners - "Let justice be done, though the world perish." - Ferdinand I (datalinks)

#eu4 modding #maaaaaars #(sort of)

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ramrodd · 3 years

Text

Newt Gingrich, the Son of Man and the Rape of Congress.

youtube

COMMENTARY:

It turns out, your corespondent was correct; Donald J; Trump has emerged as the Anti-Christ, constitutionally. He's actually not the Anti-Christ, but the more like King Saul: he is jealous of the actual contituntional Philosper-King, We, the People. He along with the Movement Conservatives who consider themselve the original Reananaucs, have been led astray by Newt Gingrich since he bagan his agenda to become Speaker of the House.Gringrich has been running an Trotsky-inspired political scam on America based on the formula for creating a domestic, internal insurgence leading to polarization, tribal confrontation, violent revolution and regime change by political coup.

As I recall, your correspondent referred to Daniel 3, Daniel 6 and Daniel 9. Daniel 7:12 is, or course, the Son of Man and the numerological triangulation of this guy's prophecy revolves around Obama when it started and Trump. The GOP has been engaged in a domestic insurgency since William F. Buckley, Jr, published his Sharon Statement and established Movement Conservatives like Rick WIlson, Nicole Wallace, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham through his farm system for engaging and developing people with the same crypto-Nazi cogintive organization as Mike Pompeo, Mick Malverny and Tom Cotton and give them a lucrative career advancing a Newty's program of insurgency as useful idiots.

Now, we have had an election where that prophecy is being played out in real time on Twitter until the Rape of Congress by Trump's followers, who are almost entirely useful idiots who add mass to the demonstration, but at the tip of that lynch mob, the Proud Boys,/white supremacists/ Q-ANON conspiracy to inspire a race war, Virtually all of them are Pro-Life.

Pro-Life is the Anti-Christ.

Now, the people around Obama/Biden were engaged in the Democratic Socialsm of Jefferson Deomocracy as reformed by the 13th Amendment. The numerology of the 13th Amendment, is the same numerology as the Son of God in Daniel 7:13, That is, Jesus is very often attached to the number 13 in some way as either the finger of God, Himself (which Jesus most certainly was) or it was the finger of God, Itself. It is just a consitent figure of speack in the entire narrative of the Bible, from "In the Beginning" to Amen in Revelation. Numerology is a signpost installed by God from the very first and over the centuries. In that regard, it is perfectly inerrant.

And I couldn't explaing this to you in this manner if the Arabs hadn't invented the numerological symbot for "nothing" Zero/0. Zero doesn't exist, numerologically, in the narrative of the Bible (or anywhere in the Judeo-Christian literature, codified and uncodified, as a concept, until the Romans showed up. Everbody used alphabets that had originated out of number after Melchezidek came along. He was part of the guild associated with the Magi of Matthew. This guild apparently spread out across the Mediterrean and planted some seeds of wisdom gleaned from the systematic application of process theology to the universe as it unfolds out infront of us. The big change they made was to introduce 9 base numerology to replace the 8 base numerology of the Egyptian priests, which had produced the social economic structues based on building pyramids as important scientific observations of the firmament. Intellectually, 8 base numerology is a cul-de-sac and becomes decadent. It's a closed system economics, zero-sum/engineering/gold-based banking that was preventing the globalization of the capitalism the Roman empire brought to the world. I mean, there was stuff that began to occur at that moment, when the seed of 9 base numerology began to grow in Abraham's imagination, to Bretton Woods. This is the thing about Elizabeth Warren: she is hooked into that righteous banking model.

But it really became jet propelled when Islam inventing Zero/0 as a useful symbol of accounting. And the only thing that has prevented this rigtheous banking system to take mankind to Space is everything connected with William F. Buckley's Sharon Statement of 1960 but creating the Tsusamie of the Rape of Congress on 7 January 2021.

Remember Daniel, Chapter 7, where the Finger of God designates the Son of God. 7 very often is used as a lightening rod where the lightening from the Finger of God will enter into history as a Sign. So, Daniel 7:13 is the place where the Finger of God sets the process in motion to produce The Cross and Daniel 7:13 the Finger of God has touch America with divine intent and produce the Rape of Congress that can be traced from 1960 through Speaker Gingrich to Steve Bannon to 7 January 2021, God created a lightening rod to expose the working of Satan in the American body politic and that agency is Newt Gingrich. Trump just happened to be his marionnette.

Trump didn't become a crime boss until he won the election with intellectual property his Moscow partners in the 2013 Miss Universe Contest stole from the DNC and Clinton campaign by committing treason with a transnational crime consortium.. They've had him by the balls the whole time and Putin has nothing to do with it.

Now, the only question in my mind was how much coordination went on between Gingrich, Bannon and this transnation criminal consortius which is currently has America under seige with a Nory based cyber-attach trying to look like it's coming out of the Kremlin. This is the reason for the structural polarization Newty's political strategy creates, to overthrow Congress and the federal government. I mean, if you've read Atlas Shrugged, she describes exactly what Newt Gingrich has been doing since he got into politics: Newty is the answer to "Who is John Galt".

Virutally all Libertarians have been useful idiots for this insurgency since they began attending YAF meetings and the C-PAC convention annually. It's like Comic-Con or a Trekkie or AmWay convention only focused on reinforcing the Virtue of Selfishness, Public Choice economics and narcissism the new righteousness. The basic Pro-Life Evangelical community family values.

All the Pro-Life Evangelical warriors who participated in the Rape of Congress pretty well define the right-wing useful idiot, while the people who Trump launched down Pennsylvania Avenue as a shot below the warterline of The Constitutional Ship of State, the basic cannon foder led by peoole being financed by the transnationa criminal constortium with Euro-dollar black mone being laundered through PayPal and Patreon.

How can you tell the difference between the cash flows of the Koch brothers to the Prouc Boy insurgency and Vory drug money?

You can't. That is one of the functions of Citizens United: it's all green. It goes into Meta Chruchs like First Presbyterian and, from my perspective, shouldn't be stopped. The fact is, we need to repartriate these black eurodollars to repair the damage done by the pandemic and whatever damage the Trump administration has done to the US Economy, which scares me in connection with the connection between John Galt and the potential collapse of American finances that was avoided in 2008.

And your coorespondent intuited the Finger of God in contemporary American politics by a using a narrative 2500 years old employing the numerology of the Bible. My biggest complaint about Christian apologetics is that it is just another version of the Marxist dialectic historic deconstruction that became the dominant paradigm in the 60s cultural wars (and continuing). History is a forensic science, like the practice of law, and in, Christian apologetics, history is superior to narrative/literature as a social construct. And, as a literature major, that pisses me off. Before history could congeal to abstract reconstruction, narrative IS. In the Beignning was the Word and history emerged from one of the ribs of the Word by way of narrative.

And before the Word was in the mind of God, Number IS. I Am that I Am: number the stars if you can.

And, again, Islam provides an essential validation of number in the mind of The One (as is presented in Revelation 4.2) in Sura 74:30 "And above it is 19" employing symbols I can employ to explain how number works as a figure of speach and a jewel in the fabric of Scripture. All that tapestry is lost in historical reconstruction because it doesn't seem to be evidence that can be defended in a court of law or a PhD defense.

But there it is. You have been praying all your life of a sign from God and now you have one: the Rape of Congress on 7 January 2021, as I write this 7 days and a wake-up from a constitutionally processed peaceful Change of Command.

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sciencespies · 3 years

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Who Were America's Enslaved? A New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers

https://sciencespies.com/history/who-were-americas-enslaved-a-new-database-humanizes-the-names-behind-the-numbers/

Who Were America's Enslaved? A New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers

The night before Christmas in 1836, an enslaved man named Jim made final preparations for his escape. As his enslavers, the Roberts family of Charlotte County, Virginia, celebrated the holiday, Jim fled west to Kanawha County, where his wife’s enslaver, Joseph Friend, had recently moved. Two years had passed without Jim’s capture when Thomas Roberts published a runaway ad pledging $200 (around $5,600 today) for the 38- to 40-year-old’s return.

“Jim is … six feet or upwards high, tolerably spare made, dark complexion, has rather an unpleasant countenance,” wrote Roberts in the January 5, 1839, issue of the Richmond Enquirer. “[O]ne of his legs is smaller than the other, he limps a little as he walks—he is a good blacksmith, works with his left hand to the hammer.”

In his advertisement, Roberts admits that Jim may have obtained free papers, but beyond that, Jim’s fate, and that of his wife, is lost to history.

Fragments of stories like Jim’s—of lives lived under duress, in the framework of an inhumane system whose aftershocks continue to shape the United States—are scattered across archives, libraries, museums, historical societies, databases and countless other repositories, many of which remain uncatalogued and undigitized. All too often, scholars pick up loose threads like Jim’s, incomplete narratives that struggle to be sewn together despite the wealth of information available.

Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade, a newly launched digital database featuring 613,458 entries (and counting), seeks to streamline the research process by placing dozens of complex datasets in conservation with each other. If, for instance, a user searches for a woman whose transport to the Americas is documented in one database but whose later life is recorded in another, the portal can connect these details and synthesize them.

“We have these data sets, which have a lot of specific information taken in a particular way, [in] fragments,” says Daryle Williams, a historian at the University of Maryland and one of the project’s principal investigators. “… [If] you put enough fragments together and you put them together by name, by place, by chronology, you begin to have pieces of lives, which were lived in a whole way, even with the violence and the disruptions and the distortions of enslavement itself. We [can] begin then to construct or at least understand a narrative life.”

“I love that [the portal] really educates people on how to read the record,” says Mary N. Elliott, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

(Enslaved.org)

Funded through a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Enslaved.org—described by its creators as a “linked open data platform” featuring information on people, events and places involved in the transatlantic slave trade—marks the culmination of almost ten years of work by Williams and fellow principal investigators Walter Hawthorne, a historian at Michigan State University, and Dean Rehberger, director of Michigan State’s Matrix Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences.

Originally, the team conceived Enslaved.org as a space to simply house these different datasets, from baptismal records to runaway ads, ship manifests, bills of sale and emancipation documents. But, as Rehberger explains, “It became a project about how we can get datasets to interact with one another so that you can draw broader conclusions about slavery. … We’re going in there and grabbing all that data and trying to make sense of it, not just give [users] a whole long list of things.”

The project’s first phase launched earlier this month with searchable data from seven partner portals, including Slave Voyages, the Louisiana Slave Database and Legacies of British Slave-Ownership. Another 30 databases will be added over the next year, and the team expects the site to continue to grow for years to come. Museums, libraries, archives, historical societies, genealogy groups and individuals alike are encouraged to submit relevant materials for review and potential inclusion.

***

To fulfill the “important obligation” of involving researchers of all types and education levels, the scholars made their platform “as familiar and unintimidating as possible,” according to Williams. Users who arrive without specific research goals in mind can explore records grouped by categories as ethnicity or age, browse 75 biographies of both prominent enslaved and free people and lesser-known ones, and visualize trends using a customizable dashboard. Researchers, amateur genealogists and curious members of the public, meanwhile, can use Enslaved.org to trace family histories, download peer-reviewed datasets, and craft narratives about some of the 12.5 million enslaved Africans transported to the New World between the 16th and 19th centuries.

At its core, says Rehberger, Enslaved.org is a “discovery tool. We want you to be able to find all these different records that have traditionally been out in these silos, and bring them together in the hope that people can then reconstruct what’s there.”

Albumen print of enslaved women and their children near Alexandria, Virginia, in 1861 or 1862

(Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)

Mary N. Elliott, curator of American slavery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, emphasizes the project’s potential to help the public “understand [history] in more nuanced and personalized, humanized ways.” Reflecting on the creation of the museum’s “Slavery and Freedom” exhibition, she recalls, “One of the things that people said was ‘Oh, there’s only so much you can say about the lives of enslaved people during the early period. There’s nothing that they wrote.’” But as both Elliott and the team behind the web portal point out, archival records—when read correctly—can convey a strong sense of lived experiences.

Some of the sources featured in the database “have the enslaved person speaking, or at least someone writing down what they said, or something close to their physical presence,” Williams says. By weaving these threads of information together, he adds, contemporary observers can gain a sense of everything from enslaved people’s personal sentiments to how the official record may obscure the reality of their lived experiences.

Individuals looking for stories of their own family history may end up empty-handed (for now) but still come across records that inform their understanding of the brutal reality of enslavement. If, for instance, someone searching for their great-great uncle Harry comes across a runaway ad for Ned, an enslaved man who lived in the same area around the same time, they might dismiss it as unrelated. “But if you look at Ned’s story, you start to read the record, and you [see] that he has a scar over his eye. He ran away twice before,” Elliott says. “He’s probably running toward his loved ones. … It tells you about how he had the ability to run away twice. And is this plantation near the one my family was enslaved at? And I wonder where he got that scar.”

For people to “read the record, in a way that they understand the humanity of African Americans under the most inhumane circumstances,” is key, the curator continues. “You’re not reading it for the sake of reading. You’re really connecting with this … man who [had] something traumatic happen to him within the framework of slavery.”

***

Enslaved.org traces its origins to the 2000s, when Hawthorne was researching a book on the flow of enslaved people from two ports in West Africa. Drawing on an archive of Brazilian state inventories, which listed enslaved Africans as property whose value was based on factors such as age and skills, he created a database with demographic information on some 9,000 individuals. This broad swath of data allowed the historian to run statistical analyses about patterns of enslavement, including “Where were people coming from? … Can I zero it down to a particular place? What … were they bringing with them across the ocean? What foods did they eat? How did they worship?”

Hawthorne adds, “You begin to see people coming [to the Americas] not as generalized Africans, … but as Balanta, as Mandinka, as Fulani, as Hausa, people who come with specific cultural assumptions, with specific religious beliefs. What did they preserve from the place [where] they came? What did they have to abandon based on the conditions in the Americas?”

In 2010, Hawthorne partnered with Rehberger and historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, who had created a similar portal featuring 107,000 records of enslaved individuals in Louisiana, to build a digital repository for both datasets. Funded through a $99,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the resulting project, Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network, laid the groundwork for Enslaved.org, a site capable of not only housing dozens of datasets but also placing them in interaction with each other.

Bill of sale with two transactions for an enslaved man named Joe or Joseph

(NMAAHC / Gift of the Liljenquist Family)

A decade ago, computing technology hadn’t advanced enough to interpret data on the scale used by Enslaved.org. Today, however, researchers can use semantic triples—three-part sentences that “define a particular moment,” like “Maria was baptized in 1833” or “Maria got married in 1855,” according to Rehberger—to create vast “triplestores” filled with linked information. Here, the site can parse out Maria, the religious rite (baptism or marriage), and the year as three distinct bits of data.

“I often think of … ripping apart the dataset into little bits and pieces of paper, and then taking a thread and trying to thread and bring them back together again,” Rehberger says. “That, in a sense, is what we’re trying to do.”

***

As Hawthorne notes, the team is still “in the early days of our project,” If an individual enters their family name in the search bar in the near future, they likely won’t find anything. “It’s possible that you will,” he adds, “but certainly as this project grows and expands, as more and more scholars and members of the public contribute, those possibilities [open] up.”

Enslaved.org welcomes data compiled by the public, but Williams emphasizes that the researchers aren’t “exactly crowdsourcing.” All submissions will undergo two levels of review; scholars can also submit their datasets to the portal’s peer-reviewed Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation. Another option for individuals with an interest in unearthing these kinds of hidden histories is to volunteer at local historical associations and museums, which can then collaborate directly with the Enslaved.org team.

The project’s launch earlier this month arrives at a pivotal point in the nation’s history. “We’re in a moment right now, of interest in slavery and slave histories and slave names, slave biographies,” Williams says. “It’s also a social and racial justice moment, … a family history, genealogy curiosity moment.”

One of Enslaved.org’s strengths, says Elliott, is its ability to map current events onto the past. Though the database’s focus is enslaved people, it also contains information on enslavers and individuals who participated in the historical slave trade. Slavery involved “all these different actors,” the curator explains. “And that’s vastly important, because it’s so easy for people to segregate this history. But … you cannot look at a bill of sale and [say] it’s only a black person on that document. Guess who signed it? The seller and the purchaser. [And] there’s a witness.”

By focusing on individuals rather than the overwhelming—and often unfathomable—numbers that tend to dominate discussions of slavery, the team hopes to restore once-anonymous figures’ identities and deepen the public’s understanding of the transatlantic slave trade.

“There’s a lot of power to reading about individuals as opposed to populations of people,” Hawthorne says. “If you look through the datasets, every single entry is a named individual. And there’s a lot of power to that, to thinking about Atlantic slavery, slavery in the American South, as being about individuals, about individual struggles under this incredibly violent institution.”

#History

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