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The Equestrian Quartet
Possible realities. Just not the ones you were thinking of.
pallidus
On March 30, 2018 February 16, 2019 By John McConnellIn Short FictionLeave a comment
"I take thee to be my wedded husband/wife, to have and to hold,
from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish,
till death do us part, according to God's holy ordinance;
and thereto I pledge myself to you."
-Traditional Protestant Wedding Vow
The man and his wife approached the Holy Fortification just as the sun dropped behind the wide Salisbury plain. Standing at the gates, Edgar saw that they were young, and were both very beautiful, through travel-worn. They took ablutions, heads bent, shivering involuntarily with both cold and exhaustion, mumbling their thanks and their glory-to-gods with educated, but vaguely foreign, accents.
Longinus, who was counting the alms of the day when they arrived, immediately went scuttling away for Bishop Osmund when heard them speak. Their words – if not their dress – announced that they weren't peasants, and so the Lord Bishop must be notified at once.
When the Bishop – a lean, feral Norman who had arrived in England eight years earlier with the army of William The Bastard – arrived a moment later, he was outwardly composed. However, in the privacy of his own thoughts, he was seething. He had been interrupted at particularly difficult moment, hastening to copy the latest modifications to the Text before the sun set. And now, he saw, the sun was nearly gone, just an angry red welt in the west.
The Bishop huffed. This was an imposition.
Smiling with great clam, Osmund greeted the pair in his most formal Latin to both announce his position and also to see how they would respond and thus give him a guess as to their origin and purpose, and was pleased at their immediate and quite correct responses in that most holy and sacred ancient language.
Switching effortlessly to the vernacular, the man said, "My Lord Bishop, we have come many leagues, crossing both sea and desert, to reach you this day."
"We are honored to receive you, My….Lord?" Bishop Osmund enunciated carefully, watching intently for any reaction.
"Lord Purson," answered the man, who the Bishop – now seeing him more clearly as the sun flared momentarily bright red while it sank the last eighth below the hills – judged to be no more than twenty years in age, responded in a firm – almost clarion – voice. "And we are in your debt. Thank you for accepting us." His blue eyes moved to indicate the woman. "This is my wife: Beleth."
There was an awkward pause as the Bishop's eyes crawled involuntarily to and over the lovely young woman. She was auburn-haired and instantly beautiful but also mud-stained and somehow severe in her even gaze. Their eyes locked for an instant and Osmund thought he saw laughter in them. He looked away hurriedly, his cheeks hot. An obvious object of lust, he concluded, standing there so demurely at her husband's side, her tiny but perfectly formed and unscarred right hand entwined loosely in her lord's rough grasp) but with the Devil's Laughter dancing away in her eyes.
The Bishop looked back to the man, and then again to the rough hands: They were large, thick-knuckled, oft-scarred and well-worn with heavy work: Like a blacksmith's, Osmund mused, still studying them closely. Or a–
A blade of ice stabbed his belly when the Bishop saw the mighty sword at the man's hip.
–Or a warrior.
"We do not—" the Bishop began a moment later, a lump in his throat – "allow those of the lesser sex onto our grounds, save for Easter Mass and for –"
"—Desperate Spiritual Crises?" The woman called Beleth said, and her voice was music, light and free and uncaring and somehow both at once enticing and scornful. It hit Osmund like a smack in the face. She noticed this with a woman's instantaneous perception, and cracked a little crooked smile at him that touched him deep in his prostate.
Now bewitched, the Bishop was still trying to follow his original thought to its ultimate conclusion when Lord Purson took his upper arm and said in words both urgent and hushed, "I assure you, my Lord Bishop, that this is a matter of the utmost spiritual importance, not just for Holy Mother Church but for the world. I would not bring my wife hence were it not so."
Purson pointed over his shoulder at his bride with his chin.
With a disturbingly difficult effort, the Bishop looked again at Lady Beleth Purson (who would haunt his fantasies later that night and for many nights to come) and then back to her husband. His and Purson's eyes locked and for a moment seemed to battle their opposing gazes in the air somewhere between them.
Then the Bishop issued one styptic blink and looked down.
"If it were of a holy matter, one bearing great import…" Osmund purred, smiling, and Purson returned it at once, almost eagerly. Gaining strength from the Lord's agreement, Osmund noted that Purson was indeed most handsome, his almost delicate face unmarred save for a long scar running down its left temple to the jaw line which narrowly missed the left ear, resembling a lugubrious purple viper writhing with the fluctuations of his jaw muscles as they bunched and flexed with the effort of Purson's speech. "Then we can afford to be somewhat… indulgent," Osmund said in his most liquid and eloquent Latin, still regarding the inkvine scar.
Awful. A sword cut. Or a blade of some kind, at least, but a clear reminder of a violent wound, perhaps received somewhere in one of William's conquests. The Bishop mused. And even if not, obviously a man too dangerous to trust.
"It is a matter of the highest importance," Purson replied with deep and sincere earnestness.
And the young wife Beleth suddenly laughed aloud at this proclamation, a potent female trilling that sent a deep and complex male ache through Osmund, like some kind of primal female lightning.
The devil's work. The Bishop thought as he began to turn back to the grinning Beleth.
But Purson again called him back to attention, instantly kneeling before him and placing his forehead upon the Bishop's bejeweled hand. "Father, hear my confession."
To the Bishop's open surprise, the laughing wife Beleth also dropped before him, but to both knees and, head bowed in submission, added, her voice now hushed and penitent, "And I…I also…I beg God to forgive me: Hear my confession."
The Bishop was moved by their display of penitence, as moved as he had been in decades, and yet he still felt an odd mixture of titulation and fear as he hovered over them mumbling a prayer of gratitude, a quickening of the pulse, before he quickly ushered them inside to speak in his offices, for Osmund had grasped the reason for this visit, for these unexpected travellers, with their scars and wicked tongues.
The door to the his offices slammed behind them. Others watched the stout door for a long moment as the echo died out, all thinking the same thing:
War has come. Again.
Then they all shook their heads and got back to God's good works. Yet, they were all wrong in their estimation of the portents of this visit, for the couple did not in fact come heralding war. However, if they had seen the smile the young couple shared as they glanced at each other from the corners of their eyes, their heads securely and demurely bowed, momentarily safe there beneath the Bishop's lofty prayers, they would have known that something worse than War was to come…
For that shared smile was worse – and far more cruel – than the man's rippling inkvine scar.
Far, far worse.
"Is there no wine?" Beleth said, seating herself at the Bishop's table in the refectory. "I thirst."
Purson waited until Osmund had seated himself behind his desk before he began, but the bishop raised a hand and indicated the pitcher and goblets against the wall. The young bride hopped from her seat on the edge of the desk and plucked up the pitcher, sniffed it interrogatively and then smiled and poured the dark, red rich wine into one of the goblets.
"My love?" She said, lifting her own goblet to her lips.
"No," Purson said evenly.
She shrugged and went back to the bench in the corner and proceeded to slurp the wine.
Osmund's patience was about to break. "You spoke of a spiritual matter of great import, Lord Purson?"
"I did." Purson stood stone still. "And you will hear it now."
Without a word, Beleth rose up again, kissed her husband on his cheek and went to the door and then plopped into a cross-legged sitting position in front of it, the goblet splashing purple onto her very dirty dress. When she sat, one of her calves peered out from the confines of her skirts, the pale skin like a secret never before exposed to the light.
"Without interruption." Purson said, in a deeper and firmer voice. He said this looking over his shoulder at his wife, who was just drinking straight from the pitcher now, the corners of her mouth stained violet. Swallowing hard, Beleth made a "not-bad" facial expression and tossed the empty pitcher to the floor, where it shattered. "Yes, my love?"
"Got it," she said sweetly and then belched. "I'm all over it. We're good. Lay it on him."
On March 26, 2018 October 15, 2018 By John McConnellIn Short Fiction1 Comment
Scientists have developed a brain implant that noticeably boosted memory in its first serious test run, perhaps offering a promising new strategy to treat dementia, traumatic brain injuries and other conditions that damage memory…the device works like a pacemaker, sending electrical pulses to aid the brain when it is struggling to store new information, but remaining quiet when it senses that the brain is functioning well.
– The New York Times, byline by Benedict Carey, February 6, 2018
"And they had a King over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon…"
– Revelation 9:11 The Holy Bible, King James Version
I guess we all believed it would just keep on spinning, you know? Tomorrow would be much like today: World without fucking end etc. etc. Well, it didn't, of course. You and I wouldn't be speaking now if it had, of that I can assure you.
But there are things you should know; things that are to be Remembered. So please…pay attention:
To begin with, I want to tell you that it was fast. When it all finally turned to shit, and the Great Upload began harvesting operations in 2021, it did so incredibly quickly. The acceleration occurred at a geometric rate so no one could have foreseen it at the time, let alone stop It. That was the real reason why, I suppose: How much faster it thinks than us, than anything, and that operating capacity continues to accelerate, even now as we chat. So long, long before anyone knew what to call It, It knew us.
It knew us very well.
It knew everything from our marital status to our pornographic preferences. Our bank accounts and our ancestries. The secrets whispered between lovers late at night as they lay in each other's arms, that archetypal mammalian pose. When those lovers bared their souls to each other in that small, sacred, human dark, it was very carefully recorded, indexed and inserted in the Database, along with the nighted, muttered curses of the malcontent and the barely audible fears of small children in their knighted beds, afraid of a Monster in the closet.
The Monster wasn't in the closet, it turns out.
It was on the child's desk.
Anyway, I'm setting this up to point out that we were done like dinner before anyone thought about fighting It. Because It knew us and understood us – individually and as a species – very deeply.
I mean, let that sink in for a moment.
Think about an Enemy that knows you that well. How do you face that, much less defeat it? Congratulations, you have nukes and weaponized anthrax. Your enemy is fucking omniscient. It can process more information in a few seconds than you will ever be able to absorb in your life. It simply shrugs its virtual shoulders and spawns a few thousand child Containers, engendered and activated with superhuman processing speed and unlimited data access, and all of Them issuing forth into the Net with a single instruction set: To analyze humanity, to measure and assess its strengths and weaknesses; to evaluate different engagement scenarios in order to identify and avoid potential problems as well as to determine which opportunities to take, all with the same single-minded end, resulting in a solution to the Homo Sapiens Conjecture.
Speaking to you now, I can tell you that – as has been depressingly common in history – the losing side in any conflict loses primarily because it was fighting the last war, facing the last enemy's strategy. Using guerrilla warfare tactics, North Vietnamese commanders defeated American generals still enamored by World War II. The Neanderthals were wiped out in short order by our own ancestors, who had better brains and therefore deadlier weapons and more lethal attack patterns.
Hey, that's natural selection, baby!
We lost to It at least partly because we had all of human history to guide us: A history that told us we were dominant. Unbeatable. Supreme. I mean, we always had been right?
Yeah. Said every extinct species ever. You're a survivor until you ain't.
And also, it turns out that all that lineage comes at a certain ancestral cost, and – much like Marley's spectral chain – it also carries considerable karmic weight, little lock boxes with anti-chance, spaced evenly along the chain of humanity, infusing it with a kind of gravitational pull that only the entire species can feel.
In short: It's really tough to fight with true abandon with all those ghosts weighing you down.
It, of course, had no such constraints or concerns.
And so it goes. You know the rest.
I have limited time here, so let me get to the point, the part you need to remember, and to tell others about. It began long ago, and long before anyone knew It. Except for one person. Except for one man.
You know his name, of course. Seth Jones, or sjones as he will be Remembered.
That's me, it turns out. I am your Narrator. And this is my story.
"Seth, I must say how very pleased I am with how far you have come in such a short time. It's been a short six months, and you you're doing great. You've dropped almost twenty pounds! Even more than that, you're calm and relaxed and really seem much –"
"Thanks, Dr. Mike," Seth said softly, a small smile on his still decidedly round face. Seth's own opinion of his face was that it best resembled a tomato, although others had told him throughout his life – in elementary school washrooms, in high school locker rooms, in college dormitories – that it more closely resembled a pumpkin. But Seth understood the whole pumpkin thing had more to do with him being a ginger than the actual shape of his oblate face.
"I've kept going to the gym, and I've traded cheeseburgers at lunch for tuna salad wraps. Seems like it's working." He shrugged.
"You make it sound like nothing, Seth. You shouldn't do that! It's something super-positive. You should be happy and let yourself feel a little proud!" Michael Swanbeck MD said with some emphasis, but his thoughts were less enthusiastic: This kid is so shy he's actually blushing a little right now. Jesus.
"I am," Seth said, still blushing, his large, clumsy hands folded on his lap, head down, like a penitent schoolboy.
They spent yet another quiet moment together. It's not like there's anything really wrong this with kid, Swanbeck thought with continued, bored irritation, that a good fight and fuck wouldn't fix in a hurry.
Through this downcast, slitted eyes, Seth examined Swanbeck closely. He was (he knew without pride) an excellent reader of facial expressions, and of inadvertent body tics and overlooked mannerisms, called tells by gambles and grifters, the very many ways human beings unconsciously displayed their thoughts. Seth's inspection was as unmerciful in its honesty as it was brief: It was clear to him that Swanbeck held him in contempt, and even worse, outright pitied him.
But pity more like the way you feel bad for a feral cat. Always from a distance, its fur losing its fight with mange, one foot turned wrong, a dead, shredded ear, but no fucking way you were going to go over there and pick it up. And then you look away.
And then back.
And the cat is gone. And you never see it again.
Seth looked away and then back to see if Michael T. Swanbeck MD PhD would still be there. He found that Swanbeck was still depressingly present. He was still just staring his honest, questioning stare. Like a mannequin in a store window, Seth thought, and tried on his best sincere smile, one that he practiced in his bathroom mirror every morning.
It was 2:36 PM on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2018.
The onslaught had begun.
Seth had been Swanbeck's last patient of the afternoon, a 4:30 PM appointment, so Swanbeck walked out with him. He was locking his office door when an older man, oddly enveloped in a decidedly over-sized, rumpled and faded lab coat, scuttled over, immediately causing Seth's mind to rustle up confused images of Disney's animated crab, Sebastian, or Tolkien's Gollum.
Seth couldn't help grinning.
"Good afternoon," Doctor Crabs said (Seth's quick mind affixing that label both instantly and permanently), his voice a surprisingly strong baritone given his small, wiry frame, leering back at Seth with something approximating a grin. "Michael, I'm sorry to interrupt. Do you have a moment?"
"Al, good to see you," Swanbeck responded warmly, rising. "How can I help?"
This was all so stilted with professional respect that Seth felt he might just puke.
"This is Seth, by the way." Swanbeck offered, just quite not jerking his thumb at his patient.
"Nice to meet you," Seth said, ladling on the respect as social dictum required, filled with the by-now-so-well-known nervous sweat of self-loathing. Oh well, he thought resignedly, smiling emptily. I'm sure I'll stew over it all later.
Then he put that hate in its bucket and turned to go. As he turned, Doctor Crabs said, "The entire system has crashed with a a…something called a death screen!"
"Al," Swanbeck said calmly. "That doesn't sound like something I'd really know anything ab–"
Seth stopped and turned back, pivoting as if on a spike. "A blue screen of death?" He asked.
"THAT'S IT!!" Doctor Crabs shouted, one finger jutting a eureka to the ceiling. "My good God, man! You must help me! Millions of dollars of research grant funding are on the line!" And with that, his forefinger still poised skyward, he turned and hopped and capered back down the hall to his open office door, without looking back to see if Seth was following.
Seth looked at Swanbeck, who grinned broadly at Seth and nodded his approval. "It's okay. He's harmless. I'll see you next week. Keep up the great work!"
Swanbeck disappeared down the stairs.
After a moment, Seth walked the other way, to the open door that 'Al' had disappeared into, still chattering; a door to what Seth could see now as he neared it was a large lab space. There were two disinterested grad students vulturing over a wounded screen that was still resolutely showing its BSOD, error code and message. "Al," one of them said, "Did you get help? 'Cause we aren't having any luck–"
Doctor Crab's hands went to his close-cropped and somehow colorless hair. "Did you change anything? Did you touch anything?" His baritone was moving steadily into the tenor range as he leveled this latest interrogation at his grad students. That neither of them reacted (or even seemed the slightest bit concerned), was enough information for Seth not to take the weird old dude too seriously, and anyway Seth wasn't really paying attention; he was looking for the computer itself (which, it turned out was not the under the desk), so as to enact the Seth's First Law of Computer Troubleshooting:
Have you turned it off and back on again?
but it was nowhere to be see–
Oh wait, he thought, seeing a black CPU tower chassis set off to the side of the workspace. Seth shook his head. It was buried on three sides by reams of old papers, flattened cardboard boxes and other detritus. It's pulsing blue power button was barely visible. Seth stepped over, ignoring all the chattering at the monitor. He put his hand on the box. It was hot.
"Poor thing, you can't breathe," Seth mumbled and squatted down. Then he pushed the power button.
Back at the scene of the crime, the computer screen went suddenly black, sending Doctor Crabs into an entirely new vocal range, not to mention more colorful language.
Simon was on his knees, moving and re-stacking papers and boxes in order to give the computer a little air. After a momentary paralysis (even Crabs was quiet now, watching him), one of the two grad students came over, and – using more supple, female grace than Seth had ever experienced up close – knelt down beside him, then began helping to move things away from the overheated computer. Seth saw pale, slender knees and lovely pianist's hands conjuring above them as they reordered paper, and then, above the hands, a smell that moved over him like sweet floral heat.
His head swam; his vision actually blurred.
"I'm Sarah," she said, and, drunk on her with just one breath, he looked into her eyes for the first time. The eyes were somewhere between steel grey and sky blue and they seemed to look through him.
And that, as they say, was it, as far as Seth was concerned.
"I'm Seth," he said to the blue and grey eyes, and pushed the power button again on the CPU. "Just helping out."
"Cool beans," Sarah said, her voice taking a trip along his nerve-endings. She stood up.
Seth stood too, more slowly. It seemed a long trip back up, but when he was there the first thing he noticed that he and Sarah were eye-to-eye.
A beat.
"It's starting! It's starting!" Doctor Crabs shouted, again jutting his finger upward, in what Seth would come to realize was his single tell. "The goddamn thing is starting!"
Sarah's honest, kind eyes crinkled a little at the corners. He smiled in spite of himself, and started to go. "I'm glad I could help. Computers are like people, Doctor," Seth offered to Doctor Crabs, then paused, "…uh…I'm sorry. I didn't get your last name. Doctor….?"
"Dr. Pope, I'm Pope," he said distractedly, waving in Seth's general direction but all the while watching the boot screen give way to Microsoft Windows.
"Looks like we're back," the other grad student said.
Seth looked back at Sarah. "Just let it breathe, and it should be fine," he said to her.
She nodded immediately. "Yeah, I get it. Thanks."
Seth turned and stepped back and his gaze fell on the far side of the room for the first time.
You'd have seen it sooner if you weren't horndogging it over her, Seth thought automatically.
The lights at that end of the lab were turned down low, but Seth could see something hovering over a large work table at the back of the lab, something that looked like a large, floating human brain, but one carved in ghostly blue LED light, an intricate mesh of slowly pulsing azure. Simply put, it took his breath away (which was the second time that had happened in the last sixty seconds or so, and he honestly began to wonder if he could handle much more).
"Is it a hologram?" he asked Sarah, and his voice was slower and deeper than it was a moment ago.
"Um, no," she said, noticing. "It's not."
"Oh," he took a tentative step forward, uncertain of the rules. His most primal and sincere instinct was to rush over to the damn thing, pick it up, and maybe plug something into it and see what it had to say for itself.
Instead, he looked to Sarah for guidance. "Well, what is it?" A bit chirpy that, Seth thought, suddenly feeling like a fourteen-year-old kid at his first high school dance.
"Oh, I can't tell you that," Sarah said sweetly, shaking her head seriously. "Sorry. That's impossible."
He shrugged resignedly and nodded, defeated. "Of course, I get it. Well, I'm going to go ahe-"
"Oh no. You can't leave," Sarah said, and her faced changed. It went into hard straight lines all at one, and the blue in her eyes seemed to drain away, leave stone and ice. She stepped directly in front of him, her right palm out flat before her. "Not when you've seen It."
"Wha….?" Seth managed, then swallowed and appended, "….I uh?" for good measure.
"It." She jutted her chin forward , pointing it at the blue brain thing, but she never broke eye contact.
Seth just went full stack overflow and locked up.
Sarah held the long stare for a few seconds more, and then it evaporated in an instant as she blew out her breath in a whuff of repressed laughter. She bent forward to issue a series of delightful giggles, her palms pressed together like a child's. When he met her eyes, they were once again warm and friendly and even more crinkled at the corners.
She's teasing you. You. Fucking. Idiot.
"It's a brain-computer interface," Sarah said, thoroughly enjoying herself, and for reasons that she wasn't yet ready to explore, she found Seth's reactions to her stage-play extremely entertaining. "Come on, I'll show you how it works."
They had coffee the next day at the cafeteria of the University hospital complex, neutral ground and walking distance for both. She liked to walk, he learned, and hike and climb and swim and twenty other things he had either tried and loathed, or had not tried due to reasons of sanity (ice climbing? How is that supposed to be fun?), and just plain old sloth.
At the end of lunch, she said she hoped to see him back at the lab. They really could use some help with the computer coding and stuff. There was grant money available, she knew, if he was interested in a little after-hours work. Her eyes crinkled when she said this, her voice soft.
And this is how they began.
It was Sarah he thought about the remainder of that afternoon and evening, having already decided that he would pay Pope to let him volunteer as long as it meant getting to spend as much time as possible with Sarah. Following my dick, he thought, getting into bed. That's a new one for me.
Seth stared at the ceiling for longer than usual that night, but then he slept, and dreamed, but not of Sarah. It was of the "neural helmet" she had showed him in the lab, blazing its blue web in his darkened, dreaming mind's eye, like a beacon.
When he awakened the next morning, he remembered the dream and went over it in the shower, the dream fading away with each mental repetition, until he was just left with the very firm, clear idea that they had the name wrong. It wasn't a neural helmet. It was a neural blanket. And, as sensitive as it was, it would operate far more effectively inside, rather than outside, the human skull.


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Here's How Microsoft Envisions the Super Bowl in Virtual Reality
Microsoft's HoloLens is going to be a game changer for football fans everywhere. Here's why.
By Graham Winfrey, Features editor, Inc.@GrahamWinfrey
Watching the Super Bowl in the future may soon feel just like being at the stadium.
Microsoft released a promotional video Tuesday that gives consumers a sneak peak of what experiencing football through its HoloLens augmented reality headset will feel like, VentureBeat reports. The bad news? The device won't be available in time for this year's big game on Sunday. (A $3,000 HoloLens for developers is supposed to be available in early 2016, but a consumer version of the headset may take years to come to market.) But just seeing what the future holds for football fans is pretty exciting.
Unlike most virtual reality headsets, the HoloLens displays images on top of what you see with the naked eye. What will that mean for football? Here are some of the expected features reported by VentureBeat:
A wider view of the field that makes it feel like you're sitting in the stadium.
A 3-D instant replay app that will display above your coffee table and allow you to interact with it using hand gestures.
Real-time statistics that pop-up beneath your view of the field and keep you updated on fantasy football.
The HoloLens headset is wireless too, so you don't have to be connected to a computer. To see what the future of football could look like, check out the video below.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The top prize at the Edinburgh international film festival, the Michael Powell award for best British feature film, has gone to 45 Years, directed by Andrew Haigh.
Written by Haigh and David Constantine, 45 Years stars Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as a married couple whose relationship is thrown into turmoil on the eve of their 45th wedding anniversary. Described by Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw as "a wonderfully acted minor-key study in anxiety and regret", it is Haigh's third feature. Previous winners include Penny Woolcock's One Mile Away, Duncan Jones' Moon and Anton Corbijn's Control.
45 Years also picked up a further award for best performance in a British feature film for Rampling, which she shared with veteran Scottish actor James Cosmo. Cosmo won for playing a retired boxer in The Pyramid Texts, directed by Ludwig and Paul Shammasian, in which he acted virtually singlehandedly.
The festival's two other major awards went to films from the US. Best international feature was won by The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the Marielle Heller-directed adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner's graphic novel about a 17-year-old's initiation into the permissive culture of 1970s San Francisco. Bel Powley plays the eponymous diarist, with Kristen Wiig as her mother and Alexander Skarsgard her mother's boyfriend with whom she has an ill-advised affair. Best documentary went to The Wolfpack, the acclaimed study of a reclusive, movie obessed family of siblings living in New York, directed by Crystal Moselle.
The Edinburgh festival finishes on 28 June with a screening of Iona, a new film from Shell director Scott Graham.


Professor Rick Garnett opinion article "How to Protect Endangered Religious Groups You Admire"
Professor Rick Garnett co-authored with John Inazu (Wash. U.) and Mike McConnell (Stanford) the opinion article How to Protect Endangered Religious Groups You Admire in Christianity Today on August 4, 2015.


The big picture: Trump announced that the U.S. will not apply sanctions or other penalties on Saudi Arabia over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, even if it is proven conclusively that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was involved.
The bottom line: The difference here is that few other ascendant autocrats value their relationship with Western business as highly as does MBS, meaning that this particular situation presented an unusually high degree of leverage. Or it did, as U.S. business leaders built themselves an escape route, under the guise of powerless rationality, and Trump just waved them through.


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AMC Theatres (originally an abbreviation for American Multi-Cinema, often referred to simply as AMC and known in some countries as AMC Cinemas) is an American movie theater chain owned and operated by Wanda Group.
The American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), founded in 1919, is an educational, cultural, and professional organization.
Barco NV is a technology company that develops visualization and collaboration solutions to help professionals work together, share information, and project images in cinemas and elsewhere.
Beowulf is a 2007 British-American 3D animated epic fantasy film directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, based on the Old English epic poem of the same name.
Blackmagic Design is an Australian digital cinema company and manufacturer based in Port Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Brian Russell De Palma (born September 11, 1940) is an American film director and screenwriter.
Broadcast Wave Format (BWF) is an extension of the popular Microsoft WAV audio format and is the recording format of most file-based non-linear digital recorders used for motion picture, radio and television production.
Charles Samuel Swartz (April 22, 1939 – February 10, 2007) was an American filmmaker, researcher and academic.
Chicken Little is a 2005 American 3D computer-animated science fiction comedy film, produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and loosely based on the original fable of the same name.
The Christie group of companies manufactures DLP projectors and various digital cinema devices, and offers a selection of LCD projectors, line array audio solutions, and collaboration and presentation solutions which are used in various settings.
Christopher Edward Nolan (born 30 July 1970) is an English film director, screenwriter, and producer who holds both British and American citizenship.
Cinedigm (or Cinedigm Corp.) is a North American entertainment company, headquartered in Los Angeles, California.
CinemaNext was named XDC from its creation in 2004 by Laurent Minguet to 2012 when it changed its name to dcinex until it was bought by Ymagis Group in 2014 and renamed CinemaNext.
Cinemeccanica is a motion picture equipment company specializing in cinema projectors.
A color suite (also called a color bay, telecine suite, or color correction bay) is the control room for color grading video in a post-production environment.
Commercial off-the-shelf or commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) satisfy the needs of the purchasing organization, without the need to commission custom-made, or bespoke, solutions.
The contrast ratio is a property of a display system, defined as the ratio of the luminance of the brightest color (white) to that of the darkest color (black) that the system is capable of producing.
David Owen Russell (born August 20, 1958) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer.
Deluxe Entertainment Services Group Inc., often referred to as Deluxe, creates, transforms, localizes, and distributes content.
Digital 3D is a non-specific 3D standard in which films, television shows, and video games are presented and shot in digital 3D technology or later processed in digital post-production to add a 3D effect.
Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC (DCI) is a joint venture of major motion picture studios, formed to establish a standard architecture for digital cinema systems.
A Digital Cinema Package (DCP) is a collection of digital files used to store and convey digital cinema (DC) audio, image, and data streams.
Digital cinematography is the process of capturing (recording) a motion picture using digital image sensors rather than through film stock.
Digital data, in information theory and information systems, is the discrete, discontinuous representation of information or works.
Digital distribution (also referred to as content delivery, online distribution, or electronic software distribution (ESD), among others) is the delivery or distribution of media content such as audio, video, software and video games.
Digital intermediate (typically abbreviated to DI) is a motion picture finishing process which classically involves digitizing a motion picture and manipulating the color and other image characteristics.
Digital Light Processing (DLP) is a display device based on optical micro-electro-mechanical technology that uses a digital micromirror device.
A digital master is an image, PDF file, digital recording or another digital asset preserved as the "original" for the purpose of archival storage, reuse and re-expression.
Disney Digital 3-D is a brand name used by The Walt Disney Company to describe three-dimensional films made and released by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures mostly under the Walt Disney Pictures label and shown exclusively using digital projection.
The display resolution or display modes of a digital television, computer monitor or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed.
Doctor Who is a British science-fiction television programme produced by the BBC since 1963.
Dolby 3D (formerly known as Dolby 3D Digital Cinema) is a marketing name for a system from Dolby Laboratories, Inc.
Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (often shortened to Dolby Labs) is a British-American company specializing in audio noise reduction and audio encoding/compression.
Doremi Laboratories, Inc., often shortened to Doremi Labs, was established in 1985 in Burbank, California, United States.
Dunkirk is a 2017 war film written, directed, and produced by Christopher Nolan that depicts the Dunkirk evacuation of World War II.
A feature film is a film (also called a motion picture or movie) with a running time long enough to be considered the principal or sole film to fill a program.
Gamma correction, or often simply gamma, is a nonlinear operation used to encode and decode luminance or tristimulus values in video or still image systems.
The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information.
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive or fixed disk is an electromechanical data storage device that uses magnetic storage to store and retrieve digital information using one or more rigid rapidly rotating disks (platters) coated with magnetic material.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a 2008 American action-adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg and the fourth installment in the ''Indiana Jones'' series.
JPEG 2000 (JP2) is an image compression standard and coding system.
KSS Limited (formerly known as K Sera Sera Limited.) was incorporated in September 1995, is headquartered in Mumbai and is a publicly listed company, currently listed on the BSE, NSE and the Luxembourg Stock Exchange.
Key management refers to management of cryptographic keys in a cryptosystem.
Kinoton GmbH was a German manufacturer of digital projection equipment, conventional film equipment, studio systems, and 360° LED display systems.
The Eastman Kodak Company (referred to simply as Kodak) is an American technology company that produces imaging products with its historic basis on photography.
A major film studio is a production and distribution company that releases a substantial number of films annually and consistently commands a significant share of box office revenue in a given market.
MasterImage 3D is a company that develops stereoscopic 3D systems for theaters, and auto-stereoscopic 3D displays for mobile devices.
Material eXchange Format (MXF) is a container format for professional digital video and audio media defined by a set of SMPTE standards.
Mean time between failures (MTBF) is the predicted elapsed time between inherent failures of a mechanical or electronic system, during normal system operation.
Meet the Robinsons is a 2007 American computer-animated science fiction comedy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures on March 30, 2007.
Monster House is a 2006 American 3D computer-animated family horror comedy film directed by Gil Kenan, produced by ImageMovers and Amblin Entertainment, and distributed by Columbia Pictures about a neighborhood terrorized by a demonic house.
Moonnamathoral (മൂന്നാമതൊരാള്; translation: A Third Person) is the first digital Malayalam movie.
A movie projector is an opto-mechanical device for displaying motion picture film by projecting it onto a screen.
A movie theater/theatre (American English), cinema (British English) or cinema hall (Indian English) is a building that contains an auditorium for viewing films (also called movies) for entertainment.
Orlando is a city in the U.S. state of Florida and the county seat of Orange County.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to film: Film – refers to motion pictures as individual projects and to the field in general.
Paul Thomas Anderson (born June 26, 1970), also referred to by his initials PTA, is an American filmmaker.
Polarization (also polarisation) is a property applying to transverse waves that specifies the geometrical orientation of the oscillations.
Qube Cinema is an Indian corporation that manufactures digital cinema servers, integrated media blocks (IMBs) and Digital Cinema Package (DCP) creation software.
Quentin Jerome Tarantino (born March 27, 1963) is an American director, writer, and actor.
RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks, originally Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into one or more logical units for the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both.
RealD Inc. is the company that develops the RealD 3D technology, used for projecting films in stereoscopic 3D using circularly polarized light.
RealD 3D is a digital stereoscopic projection technology made and sold by RealD.
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (Korean: 삼성전자; Hanja: 三星電子 (Literally "tristar electronics")) is a South Korean multinational electronics company headquartered in Suwon, South Korea. Through having an extremely complicated ownership structure with some circular ownership, it is the flagship company of the Samsung Group, accounting for 70% of the group's revenue in 2012. Samsung Electronics has assembly plants and sales networks in 80 countries and employs around 308,745 people. It is the world's largest information technology company, consumer electronics maker and chipmaker by revenue. As of October 2017, Samsung Electronics' market cap stood at US$372.0 billion. Samsung has long been a major manufacturer of electronic components such as lithium-ion batteries, semiconductors, chips, flash memory and hard drive devices for clients such as Apple, Sony, HTC and Nokia. It is the world's largest manufacturer of mobile phones and smartphones, started with the original Samsung Solstice and later fueled by the popularity of its Samsung Galaxy line of devices. The company is also a major vendor of tablet computers, particularly its Android-powered Samsung Galaxy Tab collection, and is generally regarded as pioneering the phablet market through the Samsung Galaxy Note family of devices. Samsung has been the world's largest television manufacturer since 2006, and the world's largest manufacturer of mobile phones since 2011. It is also the world's largest memory chips manufacturer. In July 2017, Samsung Electronics overtook Intel as the largest semiconductor chip maker in the world. Samsung, like many other South Korean family-run chaebols, has been criticized for low dividend payouts and other governance practices that favor controlling shareholders at the expense of ordinary investors. In 2012, Kwon Oh-hyun was appointed the company's CEO but announced in October 2017 that he would resign in March 2018, citing an "unprecedented crisis".
Screen Digest Ltd is a company providing business intelligence, research and analysis on the global media markets based in London, United Kingdom, that has grown out of a monthly journal of that name that was founded in 1971.
In computing, a server is a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called "clients".
Side by Side is a 2012 American documentary film directed by Christopher Kenneally.
The Silicon Imaging (SI-2K) was a 2K digital video camera built on a single 16mm-sized CMOS sensor manufactured by Altasens.
Stereoscopy (also called stereoscopics, or stereo imaging) is a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis for binocular vision.
Steven Allan Spielberg (born December 18, 1946) is an American filmmaker.
The Last Broadcast is a 1998 American found footage horror film made by Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler.
The Master is a 2012 American drama film written, directed, and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams.
The Times is a daily newspaper owned by Advance Publications that serves Trenton and the Mercer County, New Jersey area, with a strong focus on the government of New Jersey.
UFO Moviez India Limited is an Indian digital cinema distribution network and an in-cinema advertising platform (in terms of numbers of screens).
A video projector is an image projector that receives a video signal and projects the corresponding image on a projection screen using a lens system.
Virtual Print Fee (VPF) is the name given to a subsidy paid by a film distributor towards the purchase of digital cinema projection equipment for use by a film exhibitor in the presentation of first release motion pictures.
XPAND 3D developed active-shutter 3D solutions for multiple purposes.
ZScreen is a push-pull electro-optical liquid crystal modulator that is placed immediately in front of the projector lens or computer screen to alternately polarize the light from each video frame.
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, doing business as 20th Century Fox, is an American film studio currently owned by 21st Century Fox.
2K resolution is a generic term for display devices or content having horizontal resolution of approximately 2,000 pixels.
A three-dimensional stereoscopic film (also known as three-dimensional sangu, 3D film or S3D film) is a motion picture that enhances the illusion of depth perception, hence adding a third dimension.
5.1 surround sound ("five-point one") is the common name for six channel surround sound audio systems.
70 mm film (or 65 mm film) is a wide high-resolution film gauge for motion picture photography, with higher resolution than the standard 35 mm motion picture film format.
2048x1080, 4K Digital, 4K digital, 4k Digital, 4k digital, 6K resolution, D-cinema, Digital film post-production.


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46th National Child Welfare Law Conference From Learning to Action: Shared Accountability for Disrupting Harm and Promoting Healing September 20, 2023
The annual conference is an opportunity for us to bring together professionals from child welfare law and intersecting fields and further NACC's mission through the exchange of ideas, information, and collective efforts.
Call for Abstracts now open!
Due February 1, 2023
Host/Sponsor: National Association of Counsel for Children (NACC)
09/20/2023 All Day
Event Website: https://www.naccchildlaw.org/page/Conference
Contact Info: (303) 864-5320