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Making Magic — sidebar
2014-02-28 Derek Pearcy 3 Comments
There is a site called "Illuminati Game Revealed," which details secret messages and imagery some people feel they've discovered in the Illuminati: New World Order card game. It's hosting extensive archives of the game art, noting, "These cards, most likely, were made by Steve Jackson and staff, who had an extensive knowledge of Freemasonry, the occult, blasphemies to The Lord Jesus Christ, and occultic practices and groups. We hope to expose and correct them (Ephesians 5:11), in light of The Word of God, The Holy Bible."
Also, here's a two-month-old thread from Reddit of people talking about the game and its card art.
People have called the game ahead of its time. The truth is it was only a product of its age.
Making Magic — 15
2014-02-27 Derek Pearcycrash, hackers, win 1 Comment
Soon, September passed by. It was no longer Summer though, situated as we were in the middle of Texas, still the heat would not relent. I was working 10-16 hours a day, six or seven days a week.
I spent a lot of my time with Steve.
"No," he said one day. "I don't want to see any more of this?"
"Any more of what?" I was really confused. We were looking at an abstract design for a computer-centric cards. One of the secret societies was called The Network, so naturally we had a lot of technology touch points in the game as well, and I'd painted it up in shades of green.
"No," he said, turning away from the screen. "I don't want to see any more green."
I don't think I said anything.
"If it's not something like a tree," he said, counting exceptions off one finger at a time, "or grass, or money, or an Army uniform — something that is supposed to be green — don't use green. It's a dull color. Stop it."
"Why?" I asked, and when his shoulders tensed, I almost wished I hadn't.
"When I was in school," he said, "a long time ago, I had to read 'The Red Badge of Courage'."
"Sure — all American school kids have to."
"And the author described rotting wounds on the battlefield as green." He shuddered. "It's stuck with me. So I don't want us to use anything green here. Please."
"That's—" I started.
Steve caught me in a strong stare. "Please," he said.
I sighed. "I'll tell the guys: no green from here on out." I turned back to the computer. "As long as we still have red and blue to work with."
Life went on like that, more or less, for nearly two months, in a blur of dark air-conditioned rooms, take-out meals, and computer-colored artwork reviews with Steve, peppered by the occasional playtest.
Pushing a mouse to color artwork for more than 80 hours a week — week after week — will do something to your brain. When the artwork you're coloring is an extended vision of the power structures of the world and icons of your age and paranoid delusions, it's possible to create in your mind a perspective that never before existed and may never should have.
The eye in the pyramid goes back at least as far as Ancient Egypt. In America, it most famously appears on the back of the U.S. one-dollar bill, though because it's also been used for hundreds of years by the Freemasons, and it's commonly believed that many of the Founding Fathers were brother Masons, some see the Great Seal of the United States on the back of the buck as a wink to the conspiracy that was the true force behind the birth of that new democracy.
The strength of the symbol is its simplicity. It's a triangle with a circle in it — that's all. It makes a perfect seed for paranoia because it takes two of the most simple shapes and produces something that crosses the lowest threshold of what our brains consider to be an actual signal against the noise of randomness around us. It's a trick, exploiting the limits of our lowest levels of cognition to find a way into our minds. It's a hack, bringing along whatever you attach to the symbol and giving it a stronger cognitive presence than the payload might have otherwise.
Every piece of art in Illuminati: New World Order has an eye in the pyramid in it, somewhere. Sometimes it had been spec'ed for the art, often I had to add it. In reviewing the art, Steve and I sometimes found even better places for them. It was fun. I spent essentially countless hours running a virtual brush along inked lines, watching as the forms abstracted out into their fundamental geometries: adding a subtle eye to a triangle that seemed to be begging for one, or adding acute angles in the shading to create a slanted cone behind a circular form.
What little walking around I did outside the office only made it clear to me how far gone I was. The eye in the pyramid was everywhere, when you were looking for it. The only pleasures I allowed myself were music and driving and comic books. The local comic book stores had begun selling collectible card games, given that everyone was buying them, so taking a break to walk around Dragon's Lair or Austin Books was like walking through a story of economy and commerce that I was at that time myself living. The feedback loop was focusing in some ways, but in other ways not.
I stopped showering every day. I shaved rarely. I hadn't had a haircut in months. I used to let the TV news run in my apartment, all the time, but by that point in the production I had to keep it off or my mind's noise amplification would create too much signal. I even found myself struggling to avoid reading tabloid headlines at convenience stores.
There were secrets in the world, and if someone wasn't going to tell me what they were, I was going to figure them out myself. I saw conspiracy everywhere, and it wasn't just me. A lot of us were becoming similarly afflicted, one way or another, which only seemed to make the game deeper. A few of the things that bounced out of our heads in that time strike some people as eerily prescient today, like the card that shows the New York World Trade Center's twin towers, cropped closely, with one tower exploding from its middle.
All I can say is that everything we put in the game seemed very plain to us at the time. I don't know if that's a reasonable explanation given that I had become delusionally paranoid.
A Street Gang, controlled by the Mafia, attacked the Game Developer. The Local Police, controlled by the Servants of Cthulhu, attacked to destroy a Street Gang, causing it to lose its Safe House. The Archeologists, controlled by the Discordians, took over the Safe House, sharing its protection with the Game Developer. The Mafia attacked the Safe House, but George the Janitor, controlled by the Local Police, blocked the attack.
It all made sense, in a fragile sort of way. And while I was dropping card art into the layout, it struck me that the cyberspace I'd long anticipated, that I yearned for, had come true in the form of modern design tools. Those geometric abstractions of pictures and text and boxes that I'd spent days creating and flying over, and which I still struggled to control, described a virtual reality of locations and people and forces which had been designed for the sole purpose of fighting it out with one another.
I decided I'd been in cyberspace for years, and never even realized it.
All the fears that had welled up in my head for so long were wrung out into that production, and all the pieces that my paranoia put together culminated in an last, fevered round of color correction and art tweaking. The artists themselves, the illustrators, were beginning to feel exhausted, though we were close enough to the end that it didn't seem to matter. We had what we needed to be successful. It didn't take the whole two months for Rick to develop into a Photoshop powerhouse, and Jeff was turning in work that I not only didn't have to touch up, but which I knew was better than the job I'd have done on the same thing. He was more than good enough, by then. He'd developed a genuine skill there, and in the darkness of my office it was impressive.
I wasn't alone in those last weeks. Steve was there with me, and he looked close to as worn out as I felt. We spent an hour or two every day reviewing art, tweaking it there — between getting faster with the tools than I thought possible and lowering my standards slightly, I was often able to get Steve to sign off on a card at first glance by making quick changes right there in front of him. He'd rap on my war-surplus metal desktop that a piece of colored art was now good and we'd move on to the next.
One day, I don't remember why, I stumbled out of my office. It was late, probably close to midnight if not past it — Steve regularly stayed in the office until at least two in the morning — and we were the only two people in the building.
"How did it happen?" I asked him.
He pushed himself back from his desk, squinted his eyes, and shook his head.
"How did what happen?" he asked.
"Illuminati," I said. "Ogre was your first baby, though — taking nothing away from how awesome it is — it's kind of taking something that already existed to its logical conclusion. And GURPS is taking the point-balanced role-playing game and doing it right. You have this real knack for taking things that already exist and making them better — much, much better. But Illuminati is its own thing. I've never seen anything else like it. You've done some genius-level stuff, no doubt, but where did Illuminati come from?"
"It just came to me," he said quietly. "I was driving down the road, back from a friend's house, one of those long country roads out here, and—" He looked up with a widening smile, as if the heavens were opening before him. "I could see it laid out before me. I pulled off to the side of the road and I immediately began taking notes. And that was Illuminati."
I don't know if what he said was true, but it felt true.
The next night, not a week before I'd ship the game to the printer, Steve caught my eye walking past my office. I don't know why I'd left my door open.
With no introduction, he said, "I'm color-blind."
I'd like to think I made no response. "Not badly," he quickly followed, "not in a terrible way. I can see color just fine, just a little less so than some people. So things look better when they've been pumped up a little." He frowned. "I probably should have told you that earlier."
"It would have made things easier," I said.
The next morning I showered and shaved and I arrived early, where again Andy was kicking boards in half up in the rotting stable. Wordlessly I joined him, knocking down posts, busting open a knuckle on a too-thick board, working up a sweat.
"Good morning," he said. It was the end of October.
I shook my head. "Not really," I said. "But we're almost done."
"Yeah," I said. "I am." Andy waited for me to say more. "You know the story about the caterpillar and the, I don't know, some other bug?"
"The other bug asks the caterpillar, 'Hey, you've got a lot of legs, how do you even coordinate them all? How you even walk at all?' So the caterpillar thought about it, and after that he was never able to walk again."
"That's fucking depressing."
I checked my mind. Somehow, it was quiet. It was mostly empty, in order, like it hadn't been in a very long time.
"What I'm saying is that I'm not thinking any more about how I'm walking," I said. "So I feel okay. I don't know why, but I'm not going to question it."
He laughed. "Well, keep on walking, man. We're flying to Michigan for a press check in less than two weeks."
"It'll be fine," I told him. "Don't be afraid."
Making Magic — 14.75
2014-02-26 Derek Pearcy Leave a comment
"Yeah," the cop said. "That's your basic death threat. They do that once or twice, with the idea being that if you don't stop whatever it is they don't like, next time they'll fire into the house." He pulled a flashlight out of his belt to better examine the bullet. "Hollow-point bullet," he said, "but it looks homemade."
"Thought that, too. Hey: don't mind me, but you looked a little serious when you came up to the house." It was cinematic-moment serious, a blinding flashlight up high in one hand and the other hovering over his sidearm, ready to draw.
"Oh, we know this address. Seems like every couple of weeks, one of us had to head out here to pick up one of the boys who lived here — big family; can't remember the name. Spanish."
"Picked 'em up for what?"
"Stolen car, usually. One time, the vehicle was actually in the driveway as we drove up." He laughed. "Your car been stolen?"
"Well, when the address went out on the radio, I hurried over, thinking, 'Not again!' You can imagine what I thought when I pulled up and saw a little red convertible with a hole cut out of the roof. Say: how long you been here?"
"About a month. I think it was empty for a month before that."
"That's about right."
"My car got stolen this summer. They recovered it maybe a mile from here, behind a furniture store. Hispanic gang initiation, they said."
"Huh," said the cop. "Wouldn't that be a coincidence?"
"Mmm-hmmm. So, what do I do about the death threats?"
"Oh, they'll stop, once they see that the family who was here ain't here anymore."
My sense of politeness wrestled with my sense of self-preservation.
"Do you have any ideas," I said, "about how best to let these people, whoever they are, know that this family no longer lives here?"
"Huh," he said. "Okay, here's what you do: put a sign on the backdoor: 'To whom it may concern, the Whatever family no longer lives here.' Can I use your phone?"
We went inside and he called a friend of his at the electric company. "Hey, I got a guy here, he's getting death threats meant for the family used to live here. He's gonna put up a sign warning them off. Any way of sharing with me the name of the family?" He rattled off the address. "You're a peach. Thanks." He hung up the phone. "Lopez," he told me, and I finished the sign I'd started while he was making the call. I taped it up at waist height, where it'd be sure to be seen by someone crouching to place a second bullet on the porch.
I really hoped that I was finding the first bullet, and not the second one.
"Thank you, officer. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it."
"Well, I can't tell you how much I appreciate knowing that I don't have to come out to this address anymore." His foot slipped out from underneath him a tiny bit as he made his way across the living room to the front of the house. "Spill something over there?" he asked.
I walked over near the fireplace. Sure enough, the dampness was returning, and the wet-dog smell with it. Very loudly in my head, I said bad words.
He tipped a non-existent hat at me. "Everybody's got a job to do," he said. I thanked him again and he disappeared out into the night, then the next day I went back to work.
Making Magic — 14.5
2014-02-25 Derek Pearcycrash Leave a comment
We sat down in my small office, our faces lit by monitor glow.
"Here are my notes," Steve said. "How do you want to do this?"
"One at a time?" I asked. "I'll bring each one up, then we can talk about it?"
"Sure," he said, and so we did.
I'd been expecting the bulk of the comments to run along the lines of, "This looks terrible next to the others — make it not-terrible," or "Can you make this not-great illustration look less sucky by doing the color differently?" And he had a good number of comments like that. He also had some good notes on easy ways to improve the artwork, which was cool.
But a good number of comments were just differences of opinion as to how something should be colored. It soon became clear that there was too much for me to correct live, with Steve there watching, so instead of piloting Photoshop while he commented I instead took notes on his notes.
"I think that should be red," was the general class of comment, "and not all this muddiness there."
"I don't think it's muddy," I'd say, for example. "It's got some subtlety to it, sure—"
"Red. Make it red — really red."
"Okay. Um, you know you can't just change all these shaded maroon-like pixels to red pixels."
"Can't you simply fill it with red and clean up the shading?"
"It doesn't quite work that way. There are edges along the black lines of the art, soft gray edges—"
"Anti-aliasing," said Steve. He generally knew the technical details of everything his business depended on, and what he didn't know he always tried to learn.
"—yes, and we need to be careful about preserving all the soft grays along the way. It doesn't take long to do the right thing, but I can't just use the paint bucket tool to dump a bunch of red in here and presume I'll have picked the right shade of red, and then apply shading with the couple of other shades of red that will give it depth."
"No browns. It needs to pop. It can't be muddy."
"It'll be fine. There'll be highlights, too."
Steve sighed. "No pink," he said.
I blinked. "Why would I use pink?"
"Light red is pink. Dark red is brown. I can't have any of those here."
I'm not sure how long I left my mouth open before closing it.
"Here's the next one," I said, turning back to the display.
"Did Jeff do this one?"
"Yes," I said. I had to do less clean-up on his art than I was doing on Rick's though Rick was improving more quickly than Jeff.
"I thought so, because it's not one of the worst ones."
"Rick's getting better," I said.
"Here's what I had on this one," he said, and then he told me.
Clearly, I wasn't going to be done with this first batch of images tonight, maybe not even tomorrow. Clearly, Steve would need a second review of all the updates before signing off on them. My sense of the time we'd need to do all the work zoomed away into the distance, well past our firm deadline. A printer had just committed to a window for production, and if we missed it we'd be out of luck. We had to do this more quickly.
Clearly, it was up to me to put in more hours.
After reviewing the art for about two hours — I figured we spent nearly ten minutes on each one — we decided we were hungry.
"Sushi?" Steve asked. "Doug Barnes was stopping by. We were planning to get something to eat."
"Sure," I said. "If Rick's still here, I'll bring him along."
At the restaurant, we paired off in conversation, Steve with Doug and Rick with me. Rick looked a little wary of the whole thing.
"I've never had sushi before," he said.
"Really?" I said, then realizing that Mentor was the one who had actually introduced me to sushi, a few years before. "You'll like it."
"So, you said you and Suzanne went out the other night?"
"Yeah," I said, smoothing out the napkin in my lap. "Yeah, it was good to see her, grab some food. We don't hang out enough."
"But you used to."
"Oh, yeah — like six years ago, we dated for a while." When she was about Felicity's age. "We stayed friends, which I feel really lucky about, and then two years ago we were housemates for a couple of months. That was cool."
"And," he said, "why don't you…."
"I mean," he said, "you're single, and she's—"
"You know," I said, "when we broke up, it was because she was seeing somebody else, and while—"
"No, really — seriously, she's one of the most trustworthy people know, I swear. I'd trust her with anything, absolutely. She's one of my best friends. But I just don't think I can trust myself to go there anymore, if you know what I mean."
"With her," Rick added.
I nodded, even though I wasn't sure I meant specifically with her. I think I meant that I couldn't actually go there at all anymore, with anyone. I didn't want to.
The evening had been great. I'd picked her up, we'd driven down Barton Springs and grabbed a table for two at a decent Italian joint and talked and laughed and caught up. It's funny how you can work with a person every day, even someone you really like, and not talk deeply with them.
She'd worn a dress. I thought that was unusual, but I didn't say anything.
I didn't try to hold her hand. I didn't give her a hug. I was all smiles, and no kisses. She was smart and beautiful and she was sitting in my car — what else did I need?
"Mmm, I don't think it's in the cards. Besides, I have too much work to do at the moment." I thought about it. "I think I need the seasons to change. I need it to be cold again, for a while."
The waiter populated our table with the usual sushi accoutrements. Rick poked at a little wasabi ball.
"What's this?" he asked.
"For the sushi," I said.
"What do you do with it?"
"Oh, you eat it," I said with the straight face that I'd always thought my friends understood meant I was joking. Then Rick popped the ball in his mouth.
"Motherfucking wait—," I said, hands up in warning, but it was too late.
After a couple of minutes and a lot of water, Rick looked as though he felt a little bit better.
"I'm really sorry," I said. "I'm so, so sorry. I was totally being a jerk for no reason, and I'm really sorry."
"No," he said, waving me down. "No, no." But I couldn't imagine on what grounds he could possibly call me off from apologizing.
As Rick's face had turned red, and he'd gobbled a couple of glasses of water, a brief montage played back in my head of friends saying, "No, I didn't know you were kidding," in response to some absurd thing I'd said or done. I thought I was just being clever, when I was only being an asshole.
I'd shown up as a jerk, when what Rick needed was a mentor.
"The tuna is really good," I said, blowing past his obvious caution about every word that fell out of my mouth. "But they sometimes slip a bit wasabi underneath it, between the fish and the rice, so be careful." He nodded. "The rolls are clearly marked spicy or not, so you can really easily judge how strong something's likely to be."
"Okay," he said, scanning the menu.
"I am really sorry," I said. It seemed like the wrong time to bring up the coloring, but I began scripting what I'd tell him in the morning that would accelerate his Photoshop improvement. I'd been assuming he'd improve because I knew he would. I forgot how much faster things go when people help point the way.
On the way back to the car, I got to catch up with Doug. "Things are going pretty well," he said, sighing. "I still have Patch and Felicity on the floor of my living room." He looked up at me and smiled. "So that's interesting."
"I can only imagine," I said, working hard not to imagine. I had other things to think about, anyway.
Later that night, when I got home, the house was dark but silent. The industrial fans had been taken away and the dried-out carpet re-stapled. I walked out onto the concrete slab in the back yard to look up at the sky.
I really somehow thought I was being funny all these years, when I was just being a jerk. I was making sounds out of random license plates in my head, and the universe did not give a shit because I was literally making no sense.
I began to wonder if Cookie had been right. What if I really was crazy? Not just a little crazy, but seriously so.
Turning to go back inside, I saw the hollow-point bullet set neatly on the back porch, deliberately placed to point in toward the house. Living with archeologists and their friends around, at least these people in that time in our place, meant giving careful consideration to anything that in your own home you might ordinarily confuse for a random pile of stuff, because it might instead be a little shrine or an offering of some kind to any number of hopefully reasonable spirits. Two days before, when I'd first found the bullet, I'd left it where I found it. Maybe it was someone's good luck charm. Then the day before, when it was still there — right where someone would step when coming into the back yard — I'd slapped a sticky note on the outside of the sliding glass door, which read "Is this somebody's?" That night, I could tell that someone else had written a graceful curling question mark beside my note, meaning it wasn't one of ours.
Minutes later, when the police arrived, they explained to me that it was a common death threat.
Production of a 400+ card game, when you've never done a card game but are desperate and driven and experienced enough to want to get things right, is a great misery. Andy felt it first, which was why — after I blazed my way up the gravel drive to slide gracefully into my parking space, only seven hours after I'd driven home the night before — I saw him on the low rise of the neighboring property, kicking out boards from what remained of walls of the the derelict stable.
He didn't say anything for a while, just stood and raged at the remaining horizontal boards around him. He didn't want to take out too many in the same place, he explained to me during a later session, since knocking out too many might cause what was left to collapse down around us. There was no ceiling left whatsoever, though the thought of the remaining wall frames falling was a serious one.
"Motherfucking printers?" I asked.
Andy shook his head.
"Ah," I said, "Steve."
Andy kicked another gray board, knocking one half off and leaving the other half to dangle a thousand fresh, pink splinters out over the open air. Steve could get very passionate about what he saw as the right thing to do. My ego was still numb from the bruising it took when he'd pulled my book, so I understood, and Andy knew I understood, and he was happy to kick out a bunch more boards while I stood there and watched, and I was happy to watch him.
Inside, behind my sliding door — I'd moved back upstairs and taken over the often-empty "business person" office, next to Andy's print-buyer office — I spent my days in darkness, playing with color.
It was a meditation, really. As the first batches of art came in, I scanned them and distributed some to Jeff and some to Rick, keeping the ones I felt inspired to color myself. I thought I was doing well spending only about 20% of my time correcting the art that Jeff and Rick turned in, though I didn't know how well.
After a good week and a couple of days worth of coloring, I sent what I had to Steve. While I waited for him to get back to me, I turned my attention to the thing I'd been dreading: the actual card layouts.
Here's how you do it: You take a monstrous, thousand-dollar software package that you've learned inside and out, and you tell it to imagine a large sheet the size of the sheet you'll be printing on. Then you take a bunch of geometrically shaped virtual objects meant to represent the precise placement of images, or text boxes, or rectangles of solid colors. Then you think very carefully about how you want everything to come together, and how large the cards need to be, and whether or not it was a good idea to use a repeating pattern as a background, given that you won't be able to line them up edge-to-edge unless you get the repeating pattern absolutely just exactly right.
Then for more than 400 cards, you type in the card name, you type in the card text, you adjust the height of the image and the colored box based on how much descriptive text there ended up being, then you place however many arrows you are needed around the edge of the card and move on to the next one.
If you take 5 minutes with each one, it'll take you 33 hours to lay out 400 cards. So you try not to take 5 minutes with each one, and you get it done in three days, just in time for the next playtest. There's nearly no art in place, but at least you now have a way to print decent demo cards.
After the playtest, Steve said, "I have collected my notes on the coloring. Is this a good time?"
"Sure," I said. Things did not go well.
2014-02-23 Derek Pearcygirls Leave a comment
The first playtests were rough. I didn't watch them; I was coloring art that I'd repurposed from Pyramid for use in the card game. However, I heard about how they went as I was passing through the larger upstairs room later that evening, looking for coffee, as the games were winding down. Dustin was there.
"It was a little rough," he said, smirking. He had a pleasantly deep voice that could make the worst news seem amiable. "Some cards are way overpowered, especially when you think that you could have a lot of them in a deck. It's the same problem Magic is having."
"Oh, yeah. Their first batch of rare cards were far too powerful. I think they never thought people would spend hundreds of dollars to build a deck stocked with rare cards. But it's happening." He shrugged. "I heard they're going to ban some early cards from official play—"
I took a half-step back. "What do you mean, 'official' play?"
"They're having tournaments, now, with real money involved. They're talking about ultimately wanting to see Magic played on the sports cable networks — like ESPN and whatnot, I guess."
Three years later, ESPN2 would begin broadcasting Magic: The Gathering tournaments, for a while.
"And anyway," Dustin went on, "you don't want people with, like, four Black Lotus cards in tournament play. It'd ruin the game."
Nineteen years later, in November of 2013, a Black Lotus card in pristine condition went for $27,000 at auction. That was more than my annual salary at the point when I was working on our game.
Steve seemed bullish about the playtest.
"I learned a lot," he said, nodding vigorously.
"Are you going to keep the action tokens working the same way?" asked Dustin.
Steve smiled. "I think it could be improved, but yes, more or less."
Dustin nodded, leaning back over towards me. "You coming home soon?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said. "Still got some things to do." And I did. I worked late, pushing myself to pull a better quality of art out of Photoshop, which was then and now the professional's choice for digital graphics work. It had really taken off in the previous couple of years, new filters being discovered and written about in order to produce various digital effects. Still, there weren't any tutorials at the time for colorizing art. I had to figure it out as I went along, and pass what I'd learned along to Jeff and soon to Rick once I'd learned something new.
My roommate — ex-roommate, I reminded myself — was a Photoshop junkie. Like me, he had a monstrous computer for the age, which he used to produce contract work for one client or another. He stayed on top of the tech, which was cool. He didn't actually do much work, which was not.
There were times I very distantly missed my old roommate. I'd taken him and his girlfriend at the time to a comedy club, Austin's Laff Stop — where Lizard and I had gone six years before, as freshmen at the university — to see the angriest, most honest comedian I had ever known, Bill Hicks, perform. Everything — nearly everything — he said was so true and horrible. For the second show of his I saw that week I made sure we grabbed a table right by the stage, where I literally had to crawl back up from underneath it, mopping tears from my face. It was one of the greatest shows I'd ever seen. It turned out, sadly, there was a reason he was being so honest. Six months later, Bill Hicks would be dead from pancreatic cancer.
Good times with my roommate were great. Ultimately, though, I didn't trust him, and it's not entirely his fault. I didn't trust most people — Andy and Mentor and Jeff, sure; Doug and Jim and Patch and Felicity, sure; Rick, of course; Suzanne and even Steve, in my own way. Beyond that, I'm drawing a blank. There were a couple of other people back then who I trusted, but who I'm not writing about now, though really that was probably it.
So moving in with archeologists was a real step for me.
"Whoa," I said, walking into our house, squinting as if I'd been sprayed with crowd-clearing chemicals. Dustin had found a giant, three-bedroom place in south Austin, with a massive central living room sporting 1970s-era shag carpet. Radiating out from the brick fireplace, from one corner of the room, was a dampness in the carpet. We weren't sure where it came from but it would not go away, that smell like a wet, dead dog. After a couple of weeks waiting for it to go away — we kept the doors and windows open; we stayed away from the third of the room that squished when stepped on — the landlord had promised to send some people by to take care of things.
Dustin and his girlfriend — fiancé, rather — were sitting on my couch on the far side of the room, fanning air away from their noses. The carpet had been pulled up and away for the fireplace, and an industrial blower was loudly shooting air underneath.
"IS THIS WORKING?" I asked.
"NO," Dustin said. "WE'RE LETTING IT RUN ITS COURSE, THOUGH."
They couldn't find where the dampness was coming from, though they figured that drying it up would stop the smell.
"WHERE'S MELINDA?" I asked.
"TEN-DAY," Dustin said. He and Melinda and the four or five of their friends who I'd met worked one of the few regular jobs still available for archeologists in mid-1990s Texas, processing survey certificates for strip-mining operations. Because there was a huge history of nomadic Native American life in and around Texas, and their seasonal paths took them back and forth across some of the richest deposits of lignite coal in the whole state, the mining company needed to have done a full survey of whatever land they planned to ruin by peeling up in order to extract the coal. And they needed a certificate to prove that they'd done the work, and the survey company only got paid after delivering the certificate, so there was pressure to turn the work around quickly. If an initial survey uncovered evidence that a plot of land seemed to host one of myriad perennial Native American campsites, a full survey needed to be done to verify that the site contained nothing of historical value — graves, especially. But the survey had to be done quickly, because that's how the surveying company got paid. In order to do the work quickly, young archeologists were trucked out by the tent-load to spend ten days at a time scraping and digging, followed by four days off to decompress and to take a decent shower for a time. They called these "ten-days," and that's where our other roommate had gotten off to.
The whole thing was fascinating and stomach-turning and another real lesson in how the world worked. I retreated into my room, opening the window to keep away the dog smell, and settled into a deep brood.
I'd been angry for awhile, feeling betrayed by unnamable forces. It was not a conspiracy, it just was. Passing by a bait-and-tackle shop, I'd seen a t-shirt they had for sale: above a picture of a fishing lure were the words, "Bite me."
What was I angry about? Hey, man — what do you got?
Earlier that day, I'd brought Rick in for a tour of the office before his first day at work. Coming in through the main entrance, we ran into Suzanne first. I introduced them.
"Um, hey," Rick said, pointing at a small framed photo behind her. "Is that you?"
Suzanne smiled with a tightness that was her replacement for blushing. "Yes," she said. "That's me." It was a photo of her dressed as Robin, from Batman — from The Dark Knight Returns, specifically, where Robin was a girl — sitting on a couch, petting a cat.
"Because that's my cat," Rick said. It turned out that the Halloween party that she and I had gone to — I'd dressed as the Joker — was at a large house where Rick had been one of many roommates. So, years later, a photo of his cat greeted him on his initial tour of his first post-school job.
"That's wild," I said. "You were there, Rick?"
"It was my house; I was there."
"We were together at the time," Suzanne explained, pointing back and forth between us.
"Ah," said Rick. "Say no more."
Later, Suzanne pulled me aside.
"He's got a girlfriend," I said.
"Do you want to get dinner?" she asked.
"Ah," I said. "Sure. Not like I have plans." I pressed my hand against my forehead. "The first playtest is tonight. Should probably be here for it."
"So, tomorrow. When are you done?"
"I don't know. Seven?"
"I'll be gone by then," she said. "Will you pick me up?"
"Sure," I said. "Sure."
"You remember where I live now, right? I'm just around the block." She'd moved to live in one of the apartment complexes close to work.
I remembered.
Later that day, Jeff asked me, "When are you gonna start dating again?"
I scoffed. "That is the furthest thing from my mind," I said.
"I dunno, man. I mean, I'm happy being married, but if I were single I would totally be out there."
"Doesn't feel right," I said. "Feel like this summer's been so oppressive. I wanna wait until things have cooled down, I think, to be able to think about that. I need to cool down, somehow."
"That's for sure," he said.
I glanced at my shirt. "Bite me," it said.
In the early days of a project, even a rush project like Illuminati: New World Order, it's easy to feel like you have plenty of time and to avoid letting the stress drive you, that all you have to do is work patiently and deliberately, day after day, and everything will come together. As I began to show off the early card and box designs, it was clear that we would not have the luxury of a quiet period at the beginning of our efforts.
"Is that really going to work?" asked Steve, squinting at the design.
"I think it can," I said. The group cards, for example, had a red, lightly textured background, the card name in gold along the top with drop-shadows and a few highlights throughout the design. "My only worry is that the drop-shadows may need too much manual tweaking." With today's tools, it would be easy to get the effect right. In 1994, it would take a lot of manual manipulation, with no guarantee that it was perfect before the first proofs arrived.
Still, I did like the effect. It gave the cards some depth. They even looked a little fleshy, in an enjoyable way. If I'd taken the time to experiment for a couple of hours, or even simply just thought about it a bit more, I probably could've made it work, but —
"Then drop it," Steve said. "And this looks flat somehow. Can you make it pop more, like this one?" The new Illuminati would have a ton of special cards, which I'd given blue backgrounds to clearly separate them from the groups. The blue was richer and deeper than the red, that was for sure, as the groups would be laid out on the table most of the time while the special cards would be played and discarded, so it made sense that the group cards should be less garish, allowing their card art to pop out more.
I began to explain this to Steve.
"There's no time to get anything any more right," he said. "Just make some of these changes, and let's keep going. Have you looked over my list of card art ideas yet?"
I had not.
"Do so," he said. "I'm sending them out to the artists tonight."
Just like we had three colorists on our end, we had three artists ready to draw art for the cards. The idea was that their black-and-white line art would show up in the mail — FedEx, really — at least once a week, giving us more than enough to do for that week. They simply needed to be told what to draw and ink.
I looked over Steve's list of card names and art ideas. Some of them were obvious and needed little description — the Bill Clinton card didn't need a lot of text — and some of them were obvious but needed a lot of text — the art spec for the National Security Agency's card described a guy with headphones and an old reel-to-reel recorder, crouched outside a bedroom window on which you could see a silhouette of lovers embracing. I only took a few hours working on the list; the art specs were mostly either great, or good enough, or so specific and idiosyncratic that Steve would not listen to any criticism.
For example, the George Bush card — this was Bush the elder — had to show the man with a piece of broccoli on a plate, because evidently he'd said at one time that he'd never liked the stuff and that as President he wasn't going to eat it any more. As a total media junkie from that era, I was surprised that I'd never heard that quote, and not at all surprised when I couldn't find anyone else who could recall having heard the joke. But Steve thought it was the line that best summed up our 41st President, so that's why the card shows the man with a piece of steamed broccoli on a plate.
For all the weird, personal references that Steve insisted on hanging on to, we found many more cool bits of art to slip in. As it'd be at least a week before the first bundles of art began arriving, Jeff and I spent a couple of days going over our recent publications, books and magazines, and pulling out interesting art that either immediately jumped out at us as an embodiment of one or more concepts in the game, or could simply be colored really well, or hopefully both. With Rick and his girlfriend having just arrived in town, it was time get him up to speed, and fast, and this batch of fifteen or so pieces of existing art would be great practice.
The first playtest made a lot things very clear, though.


text:
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Venn_Logo_and_Symbol_plusTS_small, light bkgd 0.1
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


One of the key factors that differentiates CourseCo from other course administration systems - is our ability to deliver tailored solutions for course and training providers.
We meet enthusiastic course providers on a regular basis - who present ideas that simply can't be handled with off the shelf platforms.
At CourseCo we strive to understand client requirements by running workshops that help us to build out goals and understand the systems that are in place. We will never deliver an off the shelf solution that only partially fulfills a client's needs.
This means that while our users can take advantage of standard CourseCo features they can also set up system rules which allow them to for examples generate a report which details all students in a faculty or segment students by attribute.
One of our key clients, Kilmartin Education Services save up to 10 hours per week with an automated attendance alert system so that manual text alerts don't have to be handled manually after each and every roll call where a student is absent from class. We worked closely with Kilmartin Education Services to move their entire member management process from spreadsheets to our robust online platform which has greatly improved administration in the organisation. Now that the details of course-goers have been centralised in the database, Kilmartin Education Services can leverage this data into meaningful information and reports.
Another one of our clients, Brookfield House was using pen and paper throughout their operations. We embarked on a mission to make it as easy as possible for students to make bookings and for staff members to manage day to day sales efforts and business operations. The solution we delivered encompass a combination of many bespoke automation requirements from Bookings to Member Management. Through our platform Brookfield can now generate accounts and store attendee data automatically when students sign up for new courses.
While we have described a number of sample applications in this article, they only serve to document some of the things we can achieve for course providers and training businesses. The beauty about the way we do business is that your creativity will be matched by ours!


An LED corn lamp with integral driver, perfect for use with open fittings such as low bay and high bay fittings. Supplied with an integral driver, this lamp can be easily installed by simply bypassing the control gear and inserting the lamp. Using LED as a replacement for HID lighting provides an easy to install and cost-effective solution, saving up to 75% on existing lighting and gives a more natural white light compared to the orange glow of sodium. As LED is instant strike and re-strike, there is no warm up time to full light output.


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By Grant Buckler
Lessons from CEOs
Best business practices from successful IT leaders...and Wayne Gretzky
Whatever part of the technology business you're in, there are secrets to making it work. And some stand out because so many successful people point to them as keys to their success.
I've talked with the chief executives of quite a few successful technology companies in Canada and the U.S., and even one or two elsewhere. Especially, in the last couple of years, small to mid-sized firms that survived the dot-com bust and have seen rapid growth since then.
It's interesting what comes up again and again.
Ask these executives what mistakes they've made, and by far the most common response – apart from something along the lines of "too many to count" – is that when they made bad hiring decisions (as everyone who runs a company does sooner or later) they didn't correct them soon enough.
"Those few people that we have terminated our relationship with, it's taken too long every time," says Brian Cohen, who was chief executive of SPI Dynamics, a maker of web security tools, before Hewlett-Packard acquired it in the summer of 2007. "The problem is really in hindsight. When you look at it, you say 'I should have gone with my instinct because I thought two months ago that this wasn't working out, and sure enough it's not.'"
When someone doesn't seem to be working out, it's natural to want to give him or her one more chance, and it's hard to admit you made a bad decision. But a bad employee can do a lot of damage, making customers and co-workers unhappy, in a short time.
Another thing people who built successful companies often say is a variation of Wayne Gretzky's axiom about skating to where the puck is going, not to where it is.
Businesses have to do the same thing – see where the market is headed and aim not to follow it, but to be there when it gets there.
One example is Asigra, a Toronto company maker of remote backup software. Remote backup isn't a new idea today – but David Farajun started Asigra in 1986. At first the idea was a hard sell, but Asigra got an early start in its market. IDC Canada named it one of its 10 Canadian software companies to watch last year.
In the late 1990s, Turning Technologies developed audience-response software that integrates with PowerPoint. A few years ago the Youngstown, Ohio, company saw the audience-response market would move away from proprietary hardware to letting audience members provide feedback through their own laptops and cellphones – so it developed software for that. Now it's moving to a web interface, because CEO Mike Broderick believes that's where the market is headed.
There are other bits of wisdom you'll hear from many successful bosses, but we have room for just one more, and that is, always talk straight with customers.
"As long as you're truthful with customers – you tell them what you can do, what you can't do, when you can do it, when you can't do it, and make sure that you're right on board and you deliver when you say you can and what you say you can," says Bob Heard, founder and CEO of Dallas-based security company Credant Technologies, "then it's my experience that most if not all customers will partner up with you and they'll work very closely with you."
Author: Grant Buckler
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On a train rumbling eastward from Los Angeles in 1940, a young man in uniform invites himself to sit down next to a pretty young woman absorbed in her book. As it turns out, they are both from neighboring towns in Kentucky, and each is traveling home in the wake of life-altering disappointments. So begins the Washington Stage Guild's entrancing new production of Arlene Hutton's Last Train to Nibroc, a sweet and intimate love story that plays out against dramatic societal changes occasioned by a global war.
Although they grew up just miles apart, Raleigh and May inhabit different worlds. He aspires to be a writer. She is drifting toward missionary work. He is a great fan of southeastern Kentucky's decidedly secular Nibroc Festival; she prefers to spend her summertime at church-based camp meetings. F. Scott Fitzgerald (whose body, he notes, is traveling back home for burial on this very train) is his literary hero; she is mesmerized by Lloyd C. Douglas's spiritual 1929 novel Magnificent Obsession, a copy of which she clutches to her chest each time Raleigh makes a verbal advance. Little by little, however, each of them reveals the reasons for heading homewards.
Lexi Langs (May) and Wood Van Meter (Raleigh. Photo by C. Stanley Photography.
May attempts to wall herself off from another involvement but soon she surrenders to Raleigh's quirky humor, and the rocky romance begins. We root for this pair over the three years encompassed by the play, hoping that they will ultimately triumph over the physical and psychological barriers they continue to construct.
Under Bill Largess' sensitive direction, Hutton's clever, charming dialogue is brought to life brilliantly by Wood Van Meter as Raleigh and Lexi Langs as May. They thrust and parry throughout the play, each challenging the other to look inwards and live up to their self-stated ideals.
Van Meter adroitly uses his lanky frame to project a poignant mix of bravado, restlessness, passion, and shame. We watch Langs grow her character from the sanctimonious and naïve young woman we meet on the train into a maturing adult whose growing self-assuredness enables her to transcend the narrowness of her upbringing. Her misunderstanding of Raleigh's illness, however pathetic, gives us a breathtaking look into her loving soul.
Deft and creative teamwork among those responsible for the production's design is critical to framing Last Train to Nibroc within the devastating years of 1940-43. Again, Washington Stage Guild has come up with a ringing success. Jingwei Dai's spare and handsome set meets the play's twin objectives of creating a simple and affecting tale within a society wracked by change. Three scenes are played out on three successive benches. Video screens to either side place us first on a passenger rail car, and then highlight news of the day, from Pearl Harbor to Rommel's defeat in the North African desert.
Wood Van Meter (Raleigh) and Lexi Langs (May). Photo by C. Stanley Photography.
Superb lighting by Marianne Meadows ushers us from one year to the next, and Sigrid Jóhannesdóttir's costumes successfully project the characters' changes over time. Frank DiSalvo's sound design, from faint train whistles and the crickets that dominate rural nights, to the iconic Glenn Miller big band tunes, transports us easily back to 1940s.
Hutton, we learn from Bill Largess's illuminating notes, has based her characters (but not the play's action) on her own parents and their courtship. And although she didn't know it when she premiered the play in 1998, it became the first of The Nibroc Trilogy, which also includes Rock City and Gulf View Drive. What a great treat it would be to follow Raleigh and May in DC productions of these subsequent plays!
Last Train to Nibroc plays through February 19, 2017, at the Washington Stage Guild performing at the Undercroft Theatre of Mount Vernon United Methodist Church – 900 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, in Washington, DC. For tickets, call the box office at (240) 582-0050, or purchase them online.
LAST TRAIN TO NIBROC has extended one week – now running through February 26th – information and tickets available through the theatre's web site – http://www.stageguild.org. Helen Hayes Recommended!


I recently had my wisdom teeth removed and so far, I've been recovering well thanks to the clear instructions provided by Sivakumar Sreenivasan. He's professional and sincere about his work. He has good bedside manners. Before the extraction process, Dr. Sreeni takes whatever time necessary to walk me the process in a compassionate manner. He's straightforward and makes sure I was relaxed during the surgery. Afterward, I had a smooth recovery thanks to Dr. Sreeni and his team.


Researchers from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina have 3D-printed functioning, tiny versions of hearts and lungs.
The age of 3D-printed organs is now upon us!
In the picture above, the dark object represents the liver and the pale gray objects mimic the heart, produced by "reprogramming human skin cells into heart cells, which were then clumped together in a cell culture," explains New Scientist.
After deciding on the proper size and shape of the organs, 3D-printing techniques were utilized to create cellular blobs that measure merely 0.01 of an inch in diameter.
In the end, the ultimate goal is to eventually be able to use a series of these 3D-printed organs to create a not only realistic, but accurate model of the human body for drug testing.
Scientists could then utilize the 3D-printed organs to test new therapies quicker, eliminating the need for animal testing.


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New Genealogy Records for Ireland & Scotland
by Lacey Cooke | Mar 16, 2019 | 01 What's New, Records & databases
This Saint Patrick's Day we're highlighting new and updated genealogical collections for Ireland and Scotland! You'll see new and updated records from Ancestry and Findmypast, with particular emphasis on newspaper additions including birth, marriage, and death notices. Plus Findmypast just released their new Irish newspaper archive of transcripts that were compiled by the celebrated Irish genealogist Rosemary ffolliott.
Featured: Irish Records
Genealogy giant subscription website Ancestry.com has a new collection of Cork, Ireland, Marriage Licence Bonds Index, 1623-1750. "The original rolls from which the printed index was created are held in the National Archives of Ireland (formerly the Public Record Office of Ireland). A Marriage Licence Bond was entered into before a Bishop, prior to the granting of the Marriage Licence, with the purpose of ensuring that the impending Marriage was legally sound. Two solvent individuals (one of which was usually the bridegroom) entered into the bond for a stated sum."
From this collection, you might discover your ancestor's name, their spouse's name, and the year and place they were married.
Additionally, Ancestry has updated their collection for the Northern Ireland newspaper, The Belfast Newsletter (Birth, Marriage and Death Notices), 1738-1925. The Belfast News-Letter began publication in 1737 as the Belfast News-Letter and General Advertiser.
This is a fascinating database because it chronicles almost two centuries of Irish history, including the Great Famine, the country's own political upheavals, and World War I, when the paper printed long lists of death notices after actions such as the famed Ulster Division's attack during the Battle of the Somme. Genealogically significant items researchers may find in the News-Letter's pages include, amongst others:
death or memorial notices
notices from or about ships or passengers that arrived safely
people taking out game certificates
notices from trade groups or guilds
premiums paid
notices of executions
lists of sheriffs
announcements for ships that will be leaving
Irish Newspapers Update
Findmypast just released the Irish Newspaper Transcript Archive, Ffolliott Collection 1756-1850! Search this collection of Irish newspaper transcripts that were compiled by the celebrated Irish genealogist Rosemary Ffolliott. Discover if your Irish ancestors had their birth, marriage or death announcement printed in a newspaper. Each record includes a transcript and original image.
Additionally, Findmypast's newspaper website, The British Newspaper Archive, has a new Irish newspaper and added additional pages to the following collections:
Portadown News (new title!)
Sunday Independent (Dublin)
Sunday World (Dublin)
Dublin Intelligence, including the addition of historic years (1723-1724)
Scottish Records
Find your Scottish ancestors in Findmypast's recent additions and updates to their genealogical records for Scotland.
Dundee & Forfarshire (Angus) Hearth Tax 1691 – Use this collection to find out the number of hearths in your ancestor's home, which can provide you with clues about the family's wealth and status. In 1690, Parliament granted a tax of 14 shillings on hearths including kilns. Heads of households, landowners, and tenants were liable for the tax, only hospitals and the poor living on charity from the parish were exempt from the tax.
People of Banffshire 1334-1851 – Explore more than 28,000 extracts that taken from original Kirk Session minutes. Responsible for parish business, and the morals of the parishioners, the Kirk Session was the lowest level of a church court and minutes typically contained a detailed account of the parish business.
Newspaper Death Reports – Uncover details surrounding your Scottish ancestor's death amongst more than 72,000 death notices printed in Scottish newspapers between1807 and 1990. Discover more about your relative's life, while searching these publications you may be able to find out the date of their death and the names of their parents or spouse.
Renfrewshire, Paisley Poll Tax 1695 – Search these Poll Tax records from 1695. Each record includes a transcript of the original record, the amount of information in each record varies, you may find a combination of your ancestor's occupation and the name of their employer, spouse or parent.
About the Author: Lacey Cooke
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For Trump to win "significantly" more of the white vote would mean getting into the mid-60 per cent range, or two out of three white voters -- two out of three! As absurd as that sounds, Trump's chance of simply not doing as poorly as did Romney amongst African Americans and non-Cuban Hispanics looks even more absurd.
Donald Trump will not, cannot, win the general election for U.S president.
It's time for the media to stop pretending otherwise in order to live off of Trump click bait.
There are three principal reasons why Trump cannot win. But let's start with the second most important, which is the one where most people start -- that Trump was written off in the primaries before, so he shouldn't be written off in the general election.
This is worse than an apples to oranges comparison; it's just plain lazy thinking.
That Trump was able to rally 11 to 12 million voters in a small-scale, homogenous contest was a small surprise. But this says nothing about his ability to rally the 65 or so million needed to win a general election.
Or put it this way: just because your team beats all odds to win the neighbourhood beer hockey league doesn't mean that it stands a chance of surprising the experts a second time to take the Stanley Cup.
So far Trump has managed to win over only a subset of Republican primary voters, who are in turn a subset of registered Republicans (not all registered GOP voters bother with the primaries), which in turn are a subset of likely GOP general electorate voters consisting of GOP-leaning independents and Democrats, which in turn are a subset of the general election.
You just cannot -- or to be more accurate, can no longer -- win the general election with just white voters.
This is why we speak of candidates running two campaigns; one for the party base during the primaries and then a second, often different, campaign for the general election.
Just because you can win one doesn't say much, if anything, about your ability to win the second. And nowhere does this look to be more the case than with Trump.
The second, and more important, reason that Trump cannot win -- to paraphrase former Clinton presidential adviser, James Carville -- "It's the math, stupid."
In the 1980 general election Ronald Regan won a landslide with an eight-point margin of victory over Jimmy Carter by taking 56 per cent of the white vote. Flash forward to 2012 and Mitt Romney beats Regan's mark taking 59 per cent of white vote and loses the general election in a five-point "landslide" to Obama. Romney does three points better than Regan amongst white voters and suffers a 13-point reversal.
So, do the math on a "win with whites" strategy for the current election and you realize how absurd it is to think that Trump stands any chance at all.
Especially as every month roughly 60,000 U.S.-born Latinos turn 18 and become eligible to vote. This group, which may not have registered to vote, suddenly has a clear and compelling reason to do so. We've also seen a sudden surge in nationalization amongst Latinos in advance of this election for reasons that are again fairly self-evident.
For Trump to have any hope of winning the general election, he is going to have to either do better than did Romney with African-American and non-Cuban Hispanics/Latinos, or he's going to have to pull in not just more, but a heck of a lot more white voters. Or some combination of these two.
None of these scenarios look even remotely possible.
For Trump to win "significantly" more of the white vote would mean getting into the mid-60 per cent range, or two out of three white voters -- two out of three! As absurd as that sounds, Trump's chance of simply not doing as poorly as did Romney amongst African Americans and non-Cuban Hispanics looks even more absurd. Again, this is not doing better than did Romney, but just doing as poorly as did Romney.
Putting the bar even that low still places it too high for Trump.
The third nail in the coffin for Trump is the power of incumbency.
In the 2000 presidential election, Democrat Al Gore basically turned his back on Bill Clinton, the scandal-dogged incumbent, and it cost him, probably the presidency. This will not be the case for the democrats in 2016; instead this is happening to the republicans.
The GOP is now fractured and is not headed for reconciliation and closing ranks behind Trump. The two living former Republican presidents, Bush '41 and '43, have both flatly refused to endorse let alone campaign for Trump. These are Republicans who got other Republicans to vote for them for president. Their silence will be as harmful as their support would have been helpful; especially in assuring nervous moderate Republicans.
On the other hand, 51-per-cent-approval-rating Obama will be out in full force, thumping pulpits and singing Hillary's praises. In this he'll be joined by former President Bill Clinton. Nowhere will this duo be more powerful than with African-American voters. Having the country's first two African-American presidents (many African-Americans, including yours truly, only half-jokingly refer to Bill Clinton as the country's first black president).
While many of the younger and more progressive elements of the Democratic and African-American electorates may not be enthused by Hillary, the combination of Obama and Bill will get out the rank and file, church ladies with hats who show up every election and yell at their nieces, nephews and son-in-laws to do the same.
The GOP, on the other hand, missing the moderate portion of its base, will be left to yell for white people to come out and vote. Yes, there are other, deeper issues, but this is the U.S. and those issues won't surface beyond the wall of race. And let's face it, how does Trump make a pitch to that portion of the general electorate, beyond Ben Carson, who knows who David Duke is or to people he's basically accused, or who's first cousins he's accused of all being rapists?
Even Cuban Americans may be reticent given his treatment of Marco Rubio. So, unless Trump suddenly gets an "Asian" strategy it's going to be a, default and de facto, call for white people to come out and vote. Dammed if you do, dammed if you don't, but it's a damnation of his own making.
So, bottom line, the Democrats lose some white working class voters and some of the youth movement. The GOP on the other hand loses its moderates and does even worse among Hispanics. The African American vote holds steady, and the non-Cuban Hispanic vote as a percentage of total votes finally rises, especially if Hillary picks HUD Secretary and rising democratic star Julian Castro for VP.
Now -- this -- should be a real "landslide."
But in victory lies the path to future defeat for the Democrats. The rise in Hispanic voters will cause tensions within the party with African-Americans; tensions that could rip the party apart similar to what is happening to the GOP now.
What all this means for Canada is a subject for another day.


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text:
By car to Costa in Argolida and then cross over to Spetses by boat or water taxi. Journey time: about 2 hours and 30 minutes to Kosta – 10 minutes by boat.
By bus up to Costa. There is regular bus service from the bus station in Athens (L. Kifissos 100, tel: +30 210 5134588).
By Flying Dolphin from Piraeus. Journey time: approximately 2 hours 15 minutes.
Hellas Flying Dolphins
Telephone bookings: +30 210 4199000
Agency Spetses: +30 229 8073141-2
Saronic Dolphins
Agency Spetses: +30 229 8072107
Boats – Water Taxi


Exhibitor List of Who's Who at The South's premier annual Franchise Expo coming to New York. Chose from hundreds of franchise opportunities.
PROSHRED's mobile shredding trucks are some of the best in the mobile shredding industry. Read more about these cost-effective heavy-duty shredding trucks.
Foodservice at the Bat - Concessions at sports venues no longer stop at hot dogs and popcorn, and in fact, arenas and ballparks are becoming food destinations.
Select your employer from the list to the left. If your employer has setup a password for your training, please enter it, otherwise leave the password field blank.
Baldinos;s subs & Sub, American, Marietta, Doraville, Chamblee, East Cobb, Jonesboro, Atlanta's Most Searchable Restaurant Listings, Ratings and, Reviews.
Franchise Gator is your #1 source for franchise opportunities, news, and how-to information. Browse 100's of franchises for sale.
2014-2-27· Appliances and presses are disappearing from countertops in luxury homes, as built-in coffee makers offer a one-stop coffee shop in the kitchen.
Since 1984, Culver's has been delighting guests one meal at a time with our signature ButterBurgers and made-daily Fresh Frozen Custard.
Island Oasis - New Ready to Use Margarita Mix!
Offers all natural, premium beverage mixes. Company profile, product information, cocktail recipes, and contact details.
It's tough not to get overwhelmed with all of the info about franchising out there, so it's terrific to have something like this easily available.
Visit MapMuse to quickly find Bellacino's Pizza and Grinders locations, and contact information.
Find Business For Sale ads in Canberra Region, ACT. Buy and sell almost anything on Gumtree classifieds.
Downloadable pdf versions of lawsuit complaints regarding personal injury, patent and trademark infringement, environmental actions, and libel/slander.
Western Libraries is a collection of seven libraries at The University of Western Ontario located in London, Ontario, Canada.


text:
India's fintech unicorn Yubi forays into middle east and north africa through Spocto
In February 2022, Yubi acquired a 75.1 percent stake in Spocto Solutions which already has a presence in the Middle East.
ED takes action against Chinese fintech companies involved in money laundering
In the latest action against fintech companies controlled by Chinese, who had been providing short term loans and were allegedly involved in money laundering, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday said that it has attached assets worth Rs 6.17 crore lying in various accounts, merchant IDs belonging to the accused companies and persons.
Need To Convert Fintech Initiatives Into Fintech Revolution: PM Modi
Fully digital banks without any physical branch offices are already a reality and may become commonplace in less than a decade, he said.


text:
Q: What does "pseudo" mean in CSS? When I read about CSS and HTML I cross the word pseudo-elements.
I haven't found a good short explanation for what pseudo means. Could someone please explain this to me?

A: psuedo-elements allow you to style specific parts of an element. Some examples of pseudo-elements are:

*

*::after

*::before
These specific ones allow you to add style to just after, or just before an element.
for example:

.test {
    background-color: gray;
}

.test::after {
    content: ' some more text';
    color: red
}
<div class='test'>
    testing...
</div>

Here, we style the .test element normally
BUT, then we add a bit more after it using the pseudo-element selector ::after to let us add more text and change the colour.
You can read more and see more examples at https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/Pseudo-elements

A:
Supposed or purporting to be but not really so; false; not genuine:

— https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/pseudo-
A pseudo-element is something that acts like an element, but is not an element.

A: In a word, "fake".
A more complete definition can be found here: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/pseudo

A: A pseudo element is a CSS-generated non-DOM element that is rendered as if it was a DOM element in the browser.  But it doesn't actually add a node to the DOM.  So if you inspected it in, say Chrome Dev Tools, you won't see it as a regular node.
Interestingly some screen-readers read pseudo-element content and others don't.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Lean luxury is the theme at Cinnamon Red.
The newest upmarket hotel in Colombo, Cinnamon Red has been built on a small land area and reflects what is called 'lean luxury'. With 243 rooms with either a city, park or lake view, Cinnamon Red is dedicated to do-it-yourself comfort. Ice, drinks and snacks are available from slot machines, and even check in can be done automatically.
There is a roof top gym and an infinity pool overlooking the city, a main and a snack restaurant. While the hotel concentrates on efficiency, its décor is a blatant red in keeping with its image as chic and edgy.


Amelia is doing well, we had a QEQM visit on Monday night at 1:15 in the morning, a mix up between Rainbow Ward, as Amelia was due a transfusion on Tuesday morning at 9:00, but they had ordered the blood and wanted us there ASAP, so of the girls went at 2am in the morning. They were home by 11:30 on Tuesday, but just a situation we don't need with everything else going on. To be honest, it's hard to complain, as the service from Rainbow Ward has been outstanding.
On Monday, Tracyann caught Amelia singing and dancing (lightly) to Annie. This was a big moment, as this was the first time Amelia has interacted in this way since the production of Thanet Stage School Show back at the beginning of June/end of May. Que tears of joy!
Who would have thought we would be so elated just to hear/see something that is taken for granted every single day. Believe you me there has been times when I have said to Amelia "Do you have to sing that song again"? Well maybe I'll think twice next time eh?..
There are now signs that the meds side effects are starting to show. Amelia has taken this in her stride, although she has had her moments, we couldnt be prouder of our princess. What is noticable is how quickly her leg muscles have decayed, so Miss Joesphine/Miss Amy you have some work to do when Amelia is back!!
We also received Amelia's school report this week, again she managed to blow us away with an outstanding report.
So we maybe going to Marsden on Thursday, waiting on some results, but we have a little rest from hospitals until the start of block 2, consolidation.
A BIG Thank you to all that supported the rounders tournament on Sunday at Palm Bay, it was a fantastic event, well supported and well organised. Everybody seemed to enjoy themselves and a great sum of money was raised, our thanks also goes to the Palm Bay Mummies (#PBMums) for the boot fair stall on Sunday morning.
The total sum of money raised on Sunday was over £700 - WOW!!
So much love and support!


text:
Richard K. De Atley
@RKDeAtley
rdeatley@scng.com
A journalist since 1975, for City News Service in Los Angeles, The Associated Press in Los Angeles and New York, and The Press-Enteprise, Richard DeAtley has been Entertainment Editor, a features writer, courts and breaking news reporter. He is currently a business reporter for The P-E. He is a Cal State Long Beach graduate, lifelong Southern Californian (except for that time in New York -- which was great!), he has been in Riverside since 1992, and has watched and reported as a great community grew into its own identity.
Tweets by Richard K. De Atley
Kirk Price, 57, was hospitalized Dec. 27 after the fight at the Theo Lacy Facility in Orange, and died on Jan. 18, officials said Sunday.
After warm and wild winds, weather will cool for Southern California
A system that brought high winds and warm temperatures will begin to fade Tuesday.
Fire damages building at closed Bracken Bird Farm in Redlands
No injuries were reported from the fire at the abandoned and unoccupied single-story commercial building at 10797 New Jersey St.
Santa Ana winds push through, prompting warnings throughout Southern California
The system will affect travel along several major freeways and could cause power outages.
Did you feel it? 3.0 earthquake hits near Brea
No damage or injuries were reported from the quake, recorded at 8:28 a.m.
New Pacific storm Monday will again threaten SoCal mountain passes with snow
The storm will bring snow to local mountains and passes, including the Cajon Pass and the Tejon Pass.
15 Freeway through Cajon Pass reopens in both directions after heavy snowfall
Caltrans warns that if conditions become too icy, lanes could close again.
Rain and mountain snow forecast through Christmas for Southern California
The coldest of the two storms will arrive Christmas and could affect travel on the Tejon and Cajon passes.
3rd man charged in 1998 Riverside County slaying of woman who worked in San Juan Capistrano
The case was filed in 2018 after a man who had been convicted in the slaying was found factually innocent.


text:
Dmitri Vladímirovich Gáyev (en ruso: Дмитрий Владимирович Гаев; 21 de octubre de 1951 - 27 de octubre de 2012) fue un funcionario civil ruso que fue jefe del Metro de Moscú.

Biografía
En 1973 se graduó en el Instituto de Moscú de Ingenieros de tren en 1986 - el Instituto de Moscú de Gestión, y en 1989 - la Escuela Superior del Partido.

De 1981 a 1982 fue ingeniero jefe del Ministerio de Ferrocarriles.

En 1982 se hizo instructor Sokolniki del comité de distrito del PCUS desde 1986 - un instructor y consultor para el comité de la ciudad de Moscú del PCUS.

De 1990 a 1995 trabajó como primer jefe adjunto del Metro de Moscú. El 25 de diciembre de 1995 fue nombrado jefe del Metro de Moscú.

Desde 2001 Dmitry Gaiev es el diseñador general del proyecto "Tarjeta Social de Moscovita. Fue aprobado por la posición de acuerdo con la orden del Gobierno de Moscú 585-RP de fecha 29 de diciembre de 2001.

En 2002, DV Gaiev fue elegido presidente de la Asamblea de Metro Unión Internacional de Transporte Público. Se fue en 2011.

Referencias

Enlaces externos
 Биография на сайте Департамента транспорта и связи г. Москвы
 Статья в Большой энциклопедии российских производителей товаров и услуг в Интернет
  Электронная приёмная ГАЕВА Дмитрия Владимировича

Nacidos en Moscú
Miembros del Partido Comunista de la Unión Soviética

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Category Archives: Gareth Thomas
Rugger Bugger
Posted on November 9, 2011 by The Ed
Now then, Guys and Gals: Here's my favourite Daily Mail story of the week. Just goes to show how lucky I have been:
Burly rugby player has a stroke after freak gym accident… wakes up gay and becomes a hairdresser
When 19-stone rugby player Chris Birch suffered a stroke during a freak training accident, his family feared it would be a life-changing injury.
Yet while his recovery certainly brought about a transformation, it seems to have been in a way no one could have expected.
For when he regained consciousness, the 26-year-old – who was engaged to his girlfriend – claimed he had become gay.
Mr Birch's astonishing change saw him break up with his fiancée, ditch his job in a bank to retrain as a hairdresser and lose eight stone in weight.
Before the accident Mr Birch, of Ystrad Mynach, South Wales, had spent his weekends watching sport and drinking with his mates.He has now moved in with his 19-year-old boyfriend.
The now ex-rugby player, a flanker with his local amateur reserve side, had been attempting a back flip in front of friends on a field when he fell down a grass bank, breaking his neck and suffering the stroke.…..
(continues…but I can't be arsed to print anymore)
Poor, poor sod. He goes through all that pain and sorrow, those long uncomfortable nights in hospital, the operations and the bed-baths. Then he wakes up and he's still Welsh.
Breaks your heart.
Posted in Beer, Gareth Thomas, gay, Hair, Health, homosexual, Hospital, Journalism, Robbie Savage, rugby, RWC, sex, Sport, Wales, work | Tagged Barber, Daily Mail, Engagement, Gay, Rugby union, South Wales, Stroke, Ystrad Mynach | 3 Replies
Fair Play and Fablass
For those unlucky enough to be watching NZTV coverage of the rugby let me tell you what happened. The welsh flanker and captain Sam Warburton picked up an opponent in a tackle, turned him over in the air and spear-tackled him, head-first, into the ground. A sending-off offence. So Irish referee Alain Rolland sent him off. The tv coverage missed half of this. TV in 1957land isn't interested in anything that doesn't involve some part of Dan Carter's body, but you'd have thought at least ITV, who took the tv feed here in Blighty might have spotted a) the serious foul and b) the red card. They didn't.
The first the pundits and commentators knew of it all was when they saw pictures of Warburton on the bench. They assumed he had been given a yellow card. This was Warbuton's Rooney moment. A week after Wayne had been hounded out of town for kicking a player in the leg, Sam was given legal aid for trying to break a bloke's neck. "Our little Sammy didn't mean that". "He's not like that." Well, Mr and Mrs Warburton, he did and he is. Sorry.
For the next 80-odd minutes (it's still going on as I speak) the bleating from various welsh former players and their collaborators whinged and whined about the decision: Referee Rolland had administered a "huge injustice". No he didn't. Steve Ryder – the ITV anchorman – even said the welsh were "cheated" by the referee. No they weren't. I happen to know that Mr Ryder is a Charlton Athletic supporter, so he can be forgiven for not having seen a lot of real sport. Fit professional men running around at pace must be very confusing to old Steve. Luckily he had former Rugby stars to help him out.
Francois Pienaar, the Matt Damon impersonator, said the tackle was excusable in the cauldron that is a world cup semi-final. No, Matt. Semi-final or no semi-final, you can't pick a bloke up and spike him into the ground. When the kiwis do it to Brian O'Driscoll during a British Lions tour there's a national outcry. If it were a Frenchman doing it to Lee Sixpence Ha'panney, Gareth Thomas would have been screaming blue murder. Not just screaming.
Next to Francois was Larry Dallaglio, looking lost without big Johnno to stick the boot into. Larry manfully joined in with Steve, Frank and welshman Martyn Williams in vilifying the ref. Oddly none of them lambasted the welsh for not taking advantage of drop-goal situations. Nor was the boot of Stephen Jones (surely now, the winner of Club Foot of the Year Award) blamed for the fact that they lost by one point. I lost count of how many kicks he missed.
The refs have been woeful this tournament and here at The Sharp Single we may have pointed out a few of the culprits. Rolland was never on our hit-list and certainly won't be because of this performance. Though he nearly snuck in there when, with five minutes to go, he awarded a penalty to the Welsh in front of the posts. A shocking decision. Even Gareth in the comm box admitted it. Fortunately, Lee TwoBob missed the kick for the three points. If he'd have kicked that one the Taffs would have won the game due to a rank decision.
Didn't hear Ryder and friends moan about that one.
The French were a poor rugby side all match. The Welsh looked up for it and none could have begrudged them the win. But they didn't. Until the Australians change the rules, the side with more points wins the match. That's how it works. Sorry. The English were shite all competition and are already back home paying their fines (those of them who aren't still in Kiwi gaols). Good riddance to them. The Scotch never even bothered to send a team. So please, Wales, take it in good grace, shut up and fuck off home. Oh, and pick up those chips from your shoulders before you leave. Thanks.
Tomorrow Rugby Union meets Rugby League in the second semi-final. A game one side wants to play without forwards. After all, they beat the SAffers without any so why not the ABs ? If they win this cup it will be the death of Rugby Union. The Death of Rugby Union.
I pause here to allow my Aussie mates to pick up the keyboard and tap away furiously (cue the phrases "whingeing poms"; "spectator sport";"jonny fucking wilkinson" etc etc ad nauseum).
It won't of course come down to the forwards. It'll all be decided by a moment of genius or stupidity by Quade Cooper. By not changing his name from Quade, you'd have thought he'd been stupid enough for several lifetimes. Sadly not. This bloke makes Campo look like a solid and safe pair of hands. He was born a Kiwi but plays for Aussie. How to make friends and influence people. Quade (my spellchecker still doesn't like that) has the chance tomorrow to make a lot of friends, on one side of the Tasman or other.
So I shall remove my beret and don the Silver Fern in the hope that a team still using the scrum and lineout to secure good ball can prevail over the 13-man, tap-thru-the-legs tactics of the Wallabies. I wonder if, as the teams come out, they'll be a bloke pretending to make noise by blowing into a conch shell, jumping up and down and sticking his tongue out ? I do hope so, it's so frightfully exciting. Not at all boring.
I worry that referee Craig Joubert is officiating this one. Clearly the better of the refs on show, he should be doing the final not the semi. One can only surmise what that means. Bryce Laurence or Wayne Barnes anyone ? Now THAT would be a final worth watching.
Posted in Australia, Charlton, Football, France, Gareth Thomas, Ireland, Misc, New Zealand, Robbie Savage, Rooney, rugby, RWC, Scotland, South Africa, Sport, TV, Violence, Wales, World Cup | Tagged Alain Rolland, Dan Carter, Francois Pienaar, Matt Damon, Quade Cooper, Rugby union, Sam Warburton | 11 Replies
Savage Truth
Another in an occasional series…
You be the judge : Separated at birth or secret offspring ?
I have the utmost respect for Gareth Thomas for coming out. Very brave indeed in the world of nasty gnarled welsh rugby. So come on then, Robbie, do your mum a favour and do the decent thing too. It'd explain a lot. That haircut for a start.
Posted in Football, Gareth Thomas, gay, Robbie Savage, rugby, RWC, Sport, TV, Wales | Tagged Rugby union | Leave a reply