text:
Police: Armed, masked man was heading to church to 'fulfill a prophecy'
Emilie Eaton Dec. 30, 2018 Updated: Dec. 31, 2018 9:59 a.m.
Police: Armed, masked man was heading to church to...
1of5Tony Dwayne Albert II is pictured in a October 2016 mugshot in Harris County. Albert, who is from Houston, was arrested Sunday, Dec. 30, 2018 by Seguin police as he made his way to an unidentified church to fulfill "a prophecy," officials said.Photo: Texas Department of Public Safety
2of5Tony Dwayne Albert II is pictured in a December 2010 mugshot in Harris County. Albert, who is from Houston, was arrested Sunday, Dec. 30, 2018 by Seguin police as he made his way to an unidentified church to fulfill "a prophecy," officials said.Photo: Texas Department of Public Safety
3of5Tony Dwayne Albert II is pictured in an October 2010 mugshot in Harris County. Albert, who is from Houston, was arrested Sunday, Dec. 30, 2018 by Seguin police as he made his way to an unidentified church to fulfill "a prophecy," officials said.Photo: Texas Department of Public Safety
4of5Tony Dwayne Albert II is pictured in a August 2008 mugshot in Harris County. Albert, who is from Houston, was arrested Sunday, Dec. 30, 2018 by Seguin police as he made his way to an unidentified church to fulfill "a prophecy," officials said.Photo: Texas Department of Public Safety
5of5Tony Dwayne Albert II is pictured in a June 2007 mugshot in Harris County. Albert, who is from Houston, was arrested Sunday, Dec. 30, 2018 by Seguin police as he made his way to an unidentified church to fulfill "a prophecy," officials said.Photo: Texas Department of Public Safety
In an incident with eerie overtones of last year's Sutherland Springs church massacre, a masked man carrying a semi-automatic handgun and extra ammunition was arrested in Seguin on Sunday morning as he made his way to an unidentified church "to fulfill a prophecy," authorities said.
Tony Dwayne Albert II, 33, of Houston was wearing tactical-style clothing and a white surgical mask when he was arrested near West Kingsbury and West Court in Seguin around 7 a.m., police said. His handgun was loaded, and he was carrying a magazine of ammunition, they said.
An unnamed person had noticed Albert's odd attire and called police. An off-duty officer was first to respond.
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Albert, a former Marine, "was allegedly en route to an unidentified church to fulfill what he called a prophecy," said Officer Tanya Brown, a Seguin Police Department spokeswoman.
Brown said Albert was cooperative but did not identify the church.
"We don't want to speculate, so we can't say what his plans were, if any," Brown said. "But if this individual was not stopped and apprehended, the results could have ended differently."
She said police were "extremely grateful" to the person who alerted authorities.
Albert was being held in the Guadalupe County Detention Center on $100,000 bail, records show. He was charged with possession of a firearm by a felon and possession of marijuana under 2 ounces.
Brown said the Texas Rangers, the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were assisting with an investigation. She said it was possible that additional charges would be filed.
Albert has a lengthy criminal history, records show. He's been arrested six times in Harris County on various charges dating to 2009. He was convicted in four of those cases: for driving while intoxicated, possession of marijuana under 2 ounces, attempting to disarm a police officer and, most recently, assault of a family member causing bodily injury.
His link to the Seguin area is unknown, Brown said.
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In a court filing in January, Albert wrote that he was associated with Messianic Judaism, a modern religious movement that combines Christianity with elements of Judaism, and with the First Church of Cannabis, a religious organization that contends that marijuana is a healing plant.
Albert was jailed the month before for allegedly violating terms of his probation. In the court filing, he sought to justify his marijuana use by tying it to "a stated religious conviction regarding the usage of cannabis."
He wrote: "This affiliation is generally a very private and secretive one as the desire of we affiliates is to separate ourselves from recreational cannabis users who continue to pervert the usage of our sacrament."
Bill Levin, founder of the First Church of Cannabis, said he does not know Albert and does not believe him to be a dues-paying member of the Indiana-based house of worship.
As for the prophecy Albert allegedly intended to fulfill Sunday, Levin said: "Didn't come from us. We are not a Bible-based religion. We broadcast every Wednesday night. We have viewers all around the world.
"I can't account for anyone's actions on who is watching," he added.
In 2009, in what appears to be his first run-in with law enforcement, Albert was arrested in Harris County after a police officer pulled him over and conducted a Breathalyzer test. Albert's blood alcohol content was .08 percent, the threshold for drunken driving in Texas, records show. He pleaded guilty to DWI and was sentenced to 30 days in the Harris County Jail, followed by one year of community supervision.
In 2014, a Houston police officer arrested Albert after he was found with less than 2 ounces of marijuana, a misdemeanor. Albert pleaded no contest and was sentenced to three days in jail.
In July 2016, he was arrested in Kingfisher County, Okla., after he attempted to elude a police officer, also a misdemeanor. He pleaded guilty and received a 39-day jail sentence.
Albert was arrested again later that year after he attempted to grab a firearm from a Houston police officer.
The case was handled in Harris County Veterans' Court, a specialty court designed to increase access to mental health and addiction treatment for veterans. Albert pleaded guilty to attempting to disarm a police officer and was sentenced to two years' probation as part of a plea bargain.
Most recently, in March 2017, Albert was arrested after he struck a woman with whom he was living. He pleaded guilty to assault and was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
In January, as part of his probation for the 2016 case of attempting to disarm a police officer, Albert entered a residential substance abuse treatment center in Humble for individuals with mental health issues and substance abuse history, court records show. He successfully completed the Dual Diagnosis Residential Program and was released, records show.
Athill Muhammad, a Houston lawyer who represented Albert in two of his criminal cases, described him as "a fine, upstanding man" who had been honorably discharged from the military.
"If anything of this is true, I'm very, very surprised," Muhammad said.
After Albert's arrest Sunday, hundreds of Facebook users thanked the anonymous person who called police and the off-duty officer who was the first on the scene.
"Thanks be to God for those who watch and report," one user wrote.
The Sutherland Springs tragedy unfolded 21 miles southwest of Seguin. On Sunday morning, Nov. 5, 2017, Devin Patrick Kelley, a former airman with a history of domestic violence and mental illness, opened fire on worshippers at First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, killing 26 people and injuring 20.
Kelley, 26, wore a black mask and tactical gear and wielded a Ruger AR-556 semi-automatic rifle. He fled the scene in his SUV and killed himself as pursuers closed in.
Staff writer Nicole Hensley contributed to this report.
Emilie Eaton is a criminal justice reporter in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | eeaton@express-news.net | Twitter: @emilieeaton
Emilie Eaton
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emilieeaton
Emilie Eaton is a criminal justice enterprise reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, delving into homicides, police-community relations, officer-involved shootings, capital punishment and officer misconduct. Previously, Emilie worked for two years at The Cincinnati Enquirer covering child poverty, business and breaking news.
Her work has been honored in the Hearst National Journalism Awards and the Society of Professional Journalist's Region 11 Awards, among others. In 2015, she was one of 30 students, out of 1,150 nationally, selected to participate in the Hearst 55th Annual National Journalism Awards Championship. Her work has been published by USA Today, NBCNews.com and The Center for Public Integrity, among others.
A native Californian, Emilie attended the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State University, where she graduated magna cum laude and was the school's commencement speaker.
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"Twelve Small Boats" by Deborah Tilby, Oil, 26in. x 36in.
"Evening Light on Lighthouse Overfalls" by Michele Byrne, Oil, 16in. x 20in.
"Late Afternoon" by Carol Jenkins, Oil, 20in. x 24in.
"Fortress Cove" by Rick Delanty, Acrylic, 30in. x 40in.
"Russet and Honey" by Erin Dertner, Oil, 24in. x 48in.
"It's How We Ride - Havana" by Nancie King Mertz, Soft Pastel, 24in. x 20in.
"City Hall, Philadelphia" by Thomas Bucci, Watercolor, 11in. x 15in.
"Still Life Study" by Minh Nghiem, Acrylic, 18in. x 24in.
"Siesta" by Becky Porter, Oil, 12in. x 16in.
"Avalon Harbor Early Morning" by Randy Sprout, Pen and Ink with Acrylics, 9in. x 12in.
"Katie's Door" by Miguel Malagon, Oil, 9in. x 12in.
"London SW1" by Carole Rafferty, Oil, 30in. x 40in.
"Tying Up-San Blas" by Ned Mueller, Gouache, 11in. x 14in.
"Geraniums with Peace Lily" by Kaye Franklin, Oil, 11in. x 14in.
"Vermont Icefall" by S. Pamela Reese, Oil, 20in. x 16in.
"Moonrise" by Sue Smith, Oil, 8in. x 10in.
"Valentina" by Jeanette Le Grue, Oil, 11in. x 14in.
"Low Tide at Siesta Key" by Tony Damico, oil, 14in. x 11in.
"As The Crow Flies" by Timothy Horn, Oil, 18in. x 24in.
"Adirondacks Sketch 1" by Richard Sneary, Watercolor, 5in. x 6in.


text:
package de.schilling.workinghours.checkin;

import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonCreator;

import java.time.LocalDateTime;
import javax.persistence.Entity;
import javax.persistence.GeneratedValue;
import javax.persistence.Id;
import javax.validation.constraints.NotNull;

/**
 * David Schilling - davejs92@gmail.com
 **/
@Entity
public class CheckIn {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    private Long id;

    @NotNull
    private LocalDateTime startTime;

    @NotNull
    private String username;

    public CheckIn(LocalDateTime startTime, String username) {
        this.startTime = startTime;
        this.username = username;
    }

    public CheckIn() {
    }

    public Long getId() {
        return id;
    }

    public LocalDateTime getStartTime() {
        return startTime;
    }

    public String getUsername() {
        return username;
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Recently I was amused to discover a Kashmiri literary magazine published from Azad Kashmir in Pakistan. The name of the magazine Neerposh is so meaningful, beautiful as well, that it reminds me of one of the earliest magazines of Kashmiri Kongposh which was published from Srinagar in 1950s. One should appreciate the significant contrast these two names reflect. I had a brief exchange of emails with Neerposh's editor Mr. Altaf Andrabi and in that conversation I learnt that there were and are a few souls who wrote in Kashmiri though mostly for Radio Azad Kashmir. This also reminds of the situation in the other part of Kashmir during 1950s and part of 1960s when Radio Srinagar was the main source of inspiration for Kashmiri writers.
Mr. Altaf Andrabi promised to send the three issue of the magazine published so far. I couldn't believe my eyes when I opened the mail; it was an incredibly beautiful magazine! One must appreciate him for his efforts and resources he has put in this magazine. I wish him success and hope that he'll be able to continue the publication, even if it's sporadic.
In the first issue Mr. Altaf Andrabi writes, "Though this fact continues to pinch me that writing in the Kashmiri language outside of Kashmir is not only a formidable task, but also a futile practice, primarily so because of the lack of Kashmiri readers -- those who could read with interest cannot understand it; those who would understand are too busy to read; and finally those who can both understand and spare time, have no inclination towards it. But these pinches are nothing vis-a-vis the pain that I share with many ardent and compassionate Kashmiris. A pain sweet and difficult as well, always searching your heart! How can it let one alone? In order to give it a little vent, it's necessary to reach the compatriots of Kashmir in mountains, in green meadows, in scorching deserts. This journey, though long and difficult, I stronly believe, will be joined and supported by many lovers."
One can totally understand the toughness of circumstances in which Mr. Altaf Andrabi has brought out these three issues. The magazine deserves whole-hearted support by lovers of the Kashmiri language in all lands, particularly by those in Pakistani and Indian Kashmir.
This 32-page magazine is 8.5 x 11 in size. All the three issues carry pieces by writers from both sides. Most of the pieces are overtly or covertly patriotic. I hope Mr. Altaf Andrabi broadens the gammut of contents in subsequent issues by including writings other than patriotic in nature.


text:
Playful Experiences
An Ultimate Insider's Guide to The End
TrailOff
Water Logged!
Schuylkill Saved
Immersive Theater
The Ballad of Joe Hill
The Giant Squid
Cross Pollination
Liz and Nick
Ken and Cindy
Raph and Manu
Nora and Brad
Eun Jung and Cappy
Lyric and Mike
Katherine and Omar
Jaime and Magda & Chelsea
MJ and Chris
Mark and Shelley
Sarah and Katonya
The Dance Apocalypse and Nadia
Lorna and Sean
donia salem and Maria Dumlao
JJ and Ann
Awesome Ladies
Ladyfesto
Introducing the TRAILOFF Writers!
Swim Pony friends and family!
Adrienne here, writing today to bring you two exciting pieces of news about our latest creative undertaking. Back in January we shared updates on a project that was then called Story Trails, a mobile app we've been creating in partnership with the Pennsylvania Environmental Council and app developer Toasterlab, to bring original and underrepresented stories to the trails of the Philadelphia region.
Photo: John Hawthorne
First off, our project has a new name! While Story Trails was certainly descriptive, it lacked a certain… panache. It was a label that started as a working title, always with the assumption that at some point down the road we'd change it to something better. Until now! Over the past few weeks, the core creative team of the project undertook a #namestorm together and are super excited to announce our newly minted project moniker: TrailOff.
The new name says a lot about what I hope this project will be. It has allusions to writing, to thinking and meandering, to the promise of leaving the main road for the potential in trails less traveled. It's about discovering something you never knew was hiding just beyond the obvious path. It makes me think of a favorite quote from Rebecca Solnit's fantastic book Wanderlust:
I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
The second, even more exciting announcement is that we have selected 10 amazing writers, after nearly a year of outreach and connection to artists all across the region. This process was incredibly competitive and we could have chosen almost any one of the creators that submitted applications for the project. Our ten final authors are a blend of rigorous artistry, thoughtful connection to the project's values, and communities that will connect to their works:
afaq is a philly based daughter, with grandmother tendencies. assembled in yemen (from sudanese parts) afaq considers herself a global citizen of her own country. this international award winning poet, museum exhibiting photographer, activist, and educator seeks to love the world until it loves her back. she has collaborated with Netflix, Pen America, Beautycon Media, Poetry Out Loud, the Barnes Foundation, and several universities including NYU, Columbia, and UPenn. Continuously targeted and previously arrested for her activism, afaq uses her art, experiences, and the violence she has witnessed to combat injustice while spreading messages of empathy and change. She's writing for Camden's Gateway Park.
ari is a spoken word poet and educator based in north philly who began their career writing erotic fan fiction and large scale games of dungeons and dragons. Their work focuses on the Intersectionality of queer identity, trauma, and the latin experience as an outsider. ari is a member of Babel & deadname collectives and has been featured in Bedfellows and Paperback; and was featured on the philly poetry show, Drop The Mic. ari is currently looking to adopt a large cat whom they can name King Bastard. They are writing for the Chester Valley Trail.
Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's Bazaar, Tin House, Vogue, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife. She's writing for the northern portion of the Schuylkill River Trail.
Denise Valentine is a Master Storyteller, historical performer, consultant and founder of the Philadelphia Middle Passage Ceremony & Port Marker Project. Denise is a storyteller of forgotten and neglected histories of the African Diaspora with special emphasis on the early history of Pennsylvania. Her workshop, Historytelling, integrates archival research, folk heritage and oral history to demonstrate the role of the expressive cultural arts in creating sustainable communities. Currently, Denise works as a program facilitator for the Museum of the American Revolution and serves as advisor to the curatorial team of the new Early American Art Galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art opening in 2020. She's writing for the Tacony Creek Trail.
donia salem harhoor is an Egyptian-American co-conspirator with her 12-year-old cub. ED of The Outlet Dance Project, she is an alumnus of the Community of Writers, Urban Bush Women's Summer Leadership Institute, Open Mouth Poetry Retreat, and several Winter Tangerine Review & Speakeasy Project workshops. A principal dancer and choreographer with Sakshi Productions, she is part of the Brown Girl in the Ring Collective. She was a 2016 artist-in-residence with Swim Pony. Her poetry has appeared in Anomaly, Ballet Review, and Sukoon magazines. donia believes fervently in game nights. She has her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College. She's writing for the Perkiomen Trail.
Eppchez! (Ep-chez Yes) is a Quaker, gender expansive, Cuban & Jewish theater maker, musician, and designer. In 2012 Eppchez started up Alma's Engine; a process focused production company/creative ministry developing eir new work across a variety of genera and medium; spreading whimsical and earnest dis-ease. Ey also collaborates with several other Philly theater companies as a performer deviser, choreographer and writer. Eppchez is also the founder of Darb Garb, making soft wearable sculptures for gender adventuring bodies in need of other lumps. Ey are writing for the southern section of the Delaware River Trail.
Erin T. McMillon is an urban horror and suspense author, blogger, and artist, from Trenton, N.J. Her work has been viewed and purchased by readers and curators from around the world. She is the author of several books (What's Hiding in the Dark?: 10 Tales of Urban Lore, They Eat: An Episodic Zombie Thriller, and The Abducted), with a forthcoming release, Simone, to be released in the fourth quarter of 2019. Erin can be found on Facebook and Instagram @TheLadyWrites82 and on Amazon @erinmcmillon. She's writing for the D & L Trail.
Jacob Camacho is a CHamoru writer, educator, and activist born and raised in Guåhan, Islan Marianas. He received his Creative Writing MFA from Rutgers University, Camden. He is an alumni of The University of Guam and UCLA's Extension Writers Program. He's a Lead Teacher at All Things Are Possible, Foundation in Willingboro New Jersey and Lead Educator for the Move Mountains Project 501 (c)(3) in San Luis, Colorado. He's a former English Teacher at Philadelphia's alternative high school, CADI, and NJ's YMCA of Burlington & Camden Counties' Academic Coach. His short story, Proclamation, appears in University of Guam's Storyboard 18. Half-Moon is featured in Philadelphia's MadHouse Magazine Volume 4. His poem, Kao siña hao fumino' Chamoru?, is in University of Hawai'i Press' Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia. He's writing for the north Delaware River Trail.
Jacob Winterstein is an artist, event producer and educator from Philadelphia. Through performance art, poetry and events, Jacob's work explores how we have been separated from and how we can joyfully connect with each other and our environments. Jacob is the co-founder of The Philly Pigeon collective which organizes, poetry slams, multi-media productions, workshops and artists retreats. Jacob is currently attempting a pilgrimage down every block in Philadelphia, asking people "when life is difficult, how do you feel better?" and towing their answers on a mobile altar. He's writing for the Heinz Wildlife Refuge.
Li Sumpter, is a mythologist and multidisciplinary Philly-based artist. She uses world-building, D.I.Y media, afrofuturism and gameplay strategies to cultivate eco-awareness and community action around the "art of survival". Li's artistic practice and collaborative design initiatives address existential threats to mind, body and spirit through speculative tools and sustainability projects that illuminate symbols and patterns of change. She was the 2017 Artist-in-Residence for Haverford College's Urban Ecology Arts Exchange and the 2018-2019 Leeway x NextFab Art and Technology Artist-in-Residence. Li strongly believes in hope and the power of myth as a catalyst of personal and collective transformation. She's writing for the Schuylkill River Trail at Bartram's Mile.
At the end of March we held a workshop to bring these ten amazing humans into the TrailOff fold and, wow, they did not disappoint. Swim Pony fans, you are in for what I know will be our most intimate and heart-filled project yet. This group is awe-inspiring in their sensitivity, capacity, and thoughtfulness. They are a group of deep and challenging makers that are more than I ever could have imagined when we began to dream of this project years ago.
More to come in the coming months as their work begins to take form!
Be well. Be kind. Be curious.
Posted in Community, Context for Creation, In Progress, Process, TrailOff and tagged art, arts, design, games, Geolocative, GPS, inspiration, PEC, trails, writing on June 25, 2019 by Adrienne. Leave a comment
A Peek Into TrailOff
Intrepid fans of Swim Pony, founder Adrienne Mackey here with some exciting updates!
You might have heard that we here at Swim Pony HQ have been busy with research for our newest project TrailOff, created in collaboration with the Pennsylvania Environmental Council (PEC) to bring original audio stories to nature trails throughout the Philadelphia region.
Since getting the funding go ahead earlier this year (Thanks NET, William Penn and Barra Foundations!) we've been delving deep into that funky space between digital and analog, between the mind's imaginary space and the natural world. Some of the goals behind TrailOff are practical: for example, how we might offer experiences akin to immersive and site based theater to a wider network of audiences. However, on the macro-level we're also looking at creative and philosophical questions that reimagine how we experience what form stories can take and who gets to tell them.
Heinz Wildlife Refuge, Photo: John Hawthorne
Before we get into all that, let's start with a few quick words we've been using to explain what the heck this thing will be:
TrailOff is a brand new mobile app, designed to re-imagine how people interact with recreational trails and, by extension, expand the diversity of users that seek them out. The core of this work lies in the creation of 10 unique narrative walks: intimate journeys that use GPS to link audio storytelling to physical attributes along a mapped route. Each selected path will feature text from a local writer along with underscored music and sound design, all tailored to sync to the movement of a listener as they travel along a trail.
TrailOff grows out of two lines of inquiry that have been simmering in Swim Pony's pot over the past several years. If you're even peripherally aware of what the company has been up, you know that we've been keen to explore how the design of games and other interactive media might teach theater makers something about how to structure immersive works. The lessons learned in works like WAR OF THE WORLDS have spurred us to dig deeper about what it means to place an audience in the center of an experience. Similarly, projects like WALK AROUND PHILADELPHIA have spurred a curiosity about what it means to curiously explore the tangible world in relationship to one's own personal narratives and experiences, with the moving body as the medium through which these two collide. In THE END we got a first chance at blending these impulses, and with TrailOff, we're also aiming for the process and product to create space for a wider variety of Philadelphia's voices. In short, this new work is a creative process that will examine the narratives of place – who dominates the meaning we make about the natural world and how we might re-imagining those stories from new perspectives – while simultaneously giving its eventual audiences a visceral experience of literally walking a mile in someone else's shoes.
Schuylkill Banks, Photo: John Hawthorne
While we can't yet share the actual stories that will be part of the project but we can share some creative insight we've gained in exploring what aspects of a story best suit this particular format.
In July, Swim Pony and Toasterlab, our tech partners in the TrailOff app creation, undertook a narrative workshop, visiting potential trail sites across the area to explore writing specific to trails. In the same way a novel, screenplay, or standup comedy set all include language but utilize hugely different techniques to best serve their medium, we wanted to learn what kind of story is uniquely heard best while walking and listening through headphones.
Swim Pony & Toasterlab near Bartram's Garden, Photo: John Hawthorne
We took away a LOT from that workshop but a few things stood out. The first lesson seems obvious in retrospect: when writing to place you have to spend LOTS of time there doing the same thing you expect the audience to do. When writing for a form that will eventually require you to move as you listen, it's best to write in motion and on your feet as well. We spent tons of time walking trails and noticing the stories that made sense there and what we found is that there's a balance between density of language and the ability to stay connected to what you see. Useful silence is key.
We also found that simple details that connect the listener to the world they are surrounded by are hugely powerful. One of the most effect pieces of language was also the most humble: standing in Heinz Wildlife refuge hearing someone talk about wind washing over reeds.
Our last big summer takeaway was that while this form is tricky on plot-heavy stories – relatively little happens or changes on a trail – it is uniquely well suited to putting you in another's state of mind. We found language that traversed that space of internal thought or invited us as users into contemplative spaces of our own super exciting.
Jenna Horton on the Delaware River Trail, Photo: John Hawthorne
In November, we brought sound designer Mikaal Sulaiman into the mix to delve deeper into the aesthetics of sound as well as an overarching narrative structure for the app . We brainstormed and begin to define how sound will influence the user experience. We also strategized questions about how audio triggering might work. We shared research on other projects that felt inspirational to this one and finally started trying out ideas again in real space.
Brainstorming notes, Photo: John Hawthorne
A few key takeaways from this workshop centered on the interface experience the user will have. We began wondering narratively who it is that the user is interacting with when they first download TrailOff. Some questions that guided that process:
Is there a guide that has put together the overall experience?
What is the aesthetic that one encounters as they interact with the app?
What is the journey from the first story to the last? What is gained? What is the narrative connection, if any, between each trail?
We began developing a character we're currently calling The Ranger, a mysterious curator and guide who will over see the experience that each user will have. In tandem with this development we started thinking about the difference between a piece of immersive theater and a pre-recorded audio tour. What is it that makes "liveness" so palpable and special? Why does the story "being there" with the audience matter?
Adrienne walking Gateway Park, Photo: John Hawthorne
Finally, we began very functionally playing with ways that sound might overlay story content and actually began testing sound scores underneath previously generated text from our summer workshops. And if you've made it this far, I'm guessing you might even like to experience it yourself.
Below are three pieces of audio we experimented with. Stream or download one of files above and play it while you take a walk. Each of these files are an little tests in pairing different kinds of language, music and soundscape. To assess what "works" and doesn't think about the following:
Is the experience you connect most to located in your ears, in the world, or somewhere in between?
Are there places where your thoughts are in conversation with what you hear?
How much (or little) does the language feel connected to the place you are in?
What about this experience feels uniquely suited to this format?
Is this even a "story" at all?
A Horror Inspired Creature Story https://swimponypa.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/story-1-via-august-2018-v2.mp3
A Banal Convo About Appliances and the Future https://swimponypa.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/binaurial-via-july-2018-workshop.mp3
A Nostalgic Tale of Cicada Pee https://swimponypa.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/cicada-2-via-august-2018-v1.mp3
If you give it a try, we'd love, love, love to add your creative thoughts to our own. Just throw a few thoughts quickly into the box below!
Posted in Community, Context for Creation, In Progress, Process, Story Trails and tagged art, creating, design, games, inspiration, music, PEC, process, trails, transmedia, work on January 3, 2019 by Adrienne. Leave a comment
An essay on the emergence, at long last, of spring
I've been musing this morning on divining rods.
I've never actually used one, but the idea of this object – a stick that subtly helps point one to something desired – is one I love. I invoke the divining rod all the time in my teaching as a metaphor for thinking about creative impulse like water that hides under the surface, a flowing material that needs a bit of focused attention in order to be found. I like that using a divining rod is a tactile endeavor, an action-based object held in the hands rather than examined in the mind. I like its connotation to something spiritual, a channel to something just a little bit mystical and beyond the natural realm. And too, I like that the tool is one that requires the body to listen to a pulsing current already existing in the world. A divining rod insinuates that creative spirit requires one to get outside and muck around a bit in order to be found.
The past months have felt a lot like interminable winter. There is, of course, that literal season which I'm sure we can all agree outstayed its welcome far beyond what was appropriate and polite. But too, it's felt a bit like the space between last year and this one has been a creative freezing that is frustratingly resistant to a thaw. In the din of the daily artistic grind there are so many forces that pull towards themselves – funders with ever so slightly magnetic needs to fulfill their board's directives, students with aims that require an ever so mild adjustment to the inner compass, collaborators that exert subtle forces on the instincts of the work. In the midst of this one can lose that inner flow of water, that first thirst that drew the body to drink. None of this is to say that I feel I've been creatively unproductive. In some ways one could look at the last year in Swim Pony's work as a time of far greater produce than any in the past decade. But, to take this metaphor to its fullest, it's also felt in some way like ground that has been over-planted. The nutrients that allowed the soil to yield such fruits feel depleted, as if there is simply not much left from which to grow.
What is that thing that I sense myself seeking?
Heart?
Impulse?
Maybe it's easiest to just call it water. At this moment the current feels slack and the tide feels low and while I know I'm a savvy sailor who can ride the ups and downs, I fear without finding a source of liquid force, the boat is going to get stuck. As the weather warms, and the ice begins to melt, it seems imperative to get outside with that stick and figure out where all the water has gone.
A few weeks ago the husband and I undertook an adventure to the Wheaton Arts Center in Millville, NJ. I found an exhibit listed on a "Things To Do" website: something to do with biology and the intersection of science and art in the form of glass. It seemed promising enough that we set out on a 45 minutes drive to a small museum devoted to the roots of American glass manufacture in the local area.
Much of the museum was chintzy in a charming kind of way. Not terribly interesting, I'll be honest, but relaxed enough that our general lack of said interest didn't interrupt an enjoyable walk through a faux-Victorian-styled home filled with fragility. We wandered through the exhibits on the origins of American Revolution-era glass blowing, the catalogue of a building up and then eroding away of an industry throughout the area. We saw shelves of Tiffany and mass-produced Depression glass. We learned that creation of a "Millville Rose" paperweight was a sign of a high level skill for those craftspeople that managed to master it.
And then, at the very end of the circle through the museum, we came upon an exhibit cataloguing the work of an artist named Paul Stankard. His form: nature-inspired themes encased to form paperweights. Collected in this area were hundreds of small round objects taking nearly identical form in perfect rows. His early stuff felt about the same to me as much of what we'd already encountered – pretty but a bit too delicate and girly for my tastes. These first works were thing I would never buy for my home because a) where would I put them, b) fancy glass makes me nervous, and c) the only thing they do is gather dust on some shelf where they never get looked at.
What I'm saying is that Stankard's early works provoked little of the spirit of water in me. They were decently photorealistic depictions of flowers that seemed nice enough to spend, say, a few seconds on noting that it probably was really hard to make a cactus flower out of glass. They were objects that offered an "Oh… Huh." level of artistic response. Then we turned a corner into another room, one filled with Stankard's later phases of work. From the very first approach, they literally took the breath right out of my body.
The images I took will not do them justice, these intricate tiny creations of flowers and roots and bees. They were small dioramas of surrealism, of ritual, of things sprung from supernatural purpose. They were absolutely transcendent tiny worlds encased in crystal, suspended in motion so perfect it's hard to believe they are not alive.
Some minutes after first encountering at these objects, I stood in front of a video playing an interview with the artist in which he articulated a turning point in his creative practice from mimicry and re-creation into something more metaphoric and representational. I walked back inside to look again at the tiny bodies hidden in the roots of flowers made of glass and heard Stankard's echoing voice explaining something about metaphors of life and death and giving oneself leeway to let go of what a flower literally is and instead dive into what it might have the capacity to reveal.
These art works are deeply comforting to me, not only in their intense and vivid beauty but in the way they underscore the long arc of creative trajectory for the maker. They hold in their perfect suspension the promise of something unseen to break through. In the midst of what has felt like the unending cold and gray sterility of long winter, it was a reminder of future warmth and growth much needed, that perhaps every mundane step can be a tiny pull towards an inner stream of something downright divine.
Right now, the best I can think to do is to take time each day to try and feel the pull of water, even when all that seems to be present is its absence.
To take small steps, in whatever direction a bit of wood demands.
To read, if only as a practice of feeding the soil.
To write, regardless of whether or not the work finds its feet.
To whittle away at the dam, without worrying too much about what's released.
So here's a letter of well wishes to you all, written in the hopes you are finding the emerging spring.
Posted in Context for Creation, Fears, Feelings, How do I do this?, In Progress, Motivation, Process, Response to Other Art Forms and tagged art, artist, creativity, glass, impulse, inspiration, intuition, life, making, Paul Stankard, spring, work on May 1, 2018 by Adrienne. Leave a comment
An Invitation to The End
There's a story I tell about myself as a child that goes like this: around 5th or 6th grade I learned about infinity and it gave me an existential crisis. Trying to wrap my middle school mind around a never-ending mathematical concept opened up a door to the idea that there were things vastly bigger than my own consciousness. Once that door was opened, once those interlocking curves of a sideways figure eight began unspooling, I couldn't go back to a conceptual space where the world could be wholly known. Infinity showed me the universe was unending, while I on the other humble and human hand, was not.
In the fall of 2008 while in France I took a trip to the Catacombs of Paris. I don't know what exactly I thought I would be doing there. I don't know why it never occurred to me that a massive shrine containing the skeletons of over 6 million bodies might not be the emotional equivalent of visiting the Monet museum, but I honestly went in thinking little more than that I was in for a light afternoon of cultural purveyance.
The worst part was the bones just sitting in massive piles. Somehow arranged in intricate designs the skeletons were abstracted in a way that was tolerable, but the piles, the vast and completely unremarkable piles of bones, and the sense that those inanimate objects used to be people and that it is likely no one alive remembers or cares about them… It left me with the intense and pressing desire to do something, to make my life mean something, to create a legacy that helped me feel alive in the face of those sad and lonely mounds of former humanity. That night I wrote for hours, trying to unpack the intensity of the feeling the experience had provoked.
While I couldn't directly bring myself to think again about that trip to the Catacombs and the panic it produced for some number of months, I will say that within a year of going I made three original plays, quit my day job, and got engaged.
On page 14 of psychotherapist Irving D. Yalom's book Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death, he and a patient undertake a thought experiment grounded in Greek thinker Epicurus' writings, imagining the oblivion after death as the same as oblivion before birth. In the book, he talks about this as a tool to find solace. We do not fear the time before we were born, he says, and so too, might we come to lose our fear of the time after we die.
The first time I read the book, I made the following note in the margins:
This thought is in NO WAY comforting to me
The thesis of Staring at the Sun is that death anxiety manifests from a fear of a life unlived. Yalom's point, as I understand it, is that by acknowledging our current actions in the context of their inevitable end, we can gain perspective about what is important to us. Such "existential shock therapy" gives us a sense of whether the things we currently are preoccupied with will really matter to us in the long run and leaves us grappling with our need "to construct an authentic life of engagement, connectivity, meaning, and self-fulfillment."
Multiple times as I read this book I started to get the infinity feeling. But I also realized that the more I read, the more the reading got easier. The past year I've begun to talk about death and dying a lot, and the more I do so, the less weird and horrible the topic feels. These days, while I can't say I never get that spinning unending queasiness, it definitely doesn't have the same hold over me that it once did. And I've made a lot of changes that have moved me away from what I feel like I'm "supposed" to be doing and towards what feels authentically who I am.
It's a strange thing to ask a person to think about dying. Not dying in the abstract or dying in the context of a gritty television drama or immersive video game but dying in the way that each one of us personally, inevitably, and unquestioningly will have to experience.
But then again… isn't it equally strange to walk around as if such a thing doesn't exist?
The End isn't a game, exactly. It isn't theater, exactly, either.
It's a month-long contemplation. It's a structure designed to create a little existential shock. It's room to step back and reflect on what it is you want your life to be.
And I'm inviting you to it, into what I hope will be an experience of bravery and questioning and meditation and fear and, yes, I hope, even fun.
Some basics:
The End will last from May 1 – 27, 2017 with a culminating event the evening of May 28, 2017
It will take, on average, 10 – 15 minutes a day
Each day you will choose a card from a deck that offers a different task aimed at examining your values, choices, and wishes for life.
It can be played on your own at home, on your lunch break, and even on your way to work
It will interact with you in all the ways you live – through text message, email and social media posting, phone and in-person experience – and the "playing" of the game can be tailored to suit the mode of communication that best suits you.
If you've made it this far and you're interested in being one of the first 50 players who take part in The End…
[Edit: Applications are now closed. Thanks to everyone who applied – stay tuned!]
Or write to SwimPonyPA@gmail.com to ask for more info.
Be well, dear ones.
– Adrienne
Posted in Context for Creation, Fears, Feelings, How do I do this?, In Progress, The ENd and tagged art, creativity, games, inspiration, life, theater on January 4, 2017 by Adrienne. 1 Comment
An Open Letter to my Awesome Ladies and my Awesome Lady Allies
Before I get started lemme just say if you're not in the mood to read a lot and just want the details on the upcoming Awesome Lady Squad event, jump down to the bolded stuff down below…
At the end of April of last year, as civic unrest was sweeping Baltimore in the wake of Freddie Gray's death, I was feeling awfully heavy about the world. That sense of weight was born out of the inequity I saw in society, in the brutality of an "othered" community being discriminated against, and a sense of helplessness about what to do about it. It seemed clear to me that I could no longer sit back in my own privilege, that I needed to ask myself some hard questions and begin to find better ways to hold myself accountable for how my personal actions echoed out into larger cultural forces in the world around me.
At the same time, I was teaching a class called Voice for the Stage. The course was structured to end with students performing a monologue of their choosing in the college's main stage theater, a place that required them to show off their newly acquired vocal prowess. During the final session of that class I watched a female student perform a monologue from the movie Lord of the Rings in which she took on and totally owned the character of Gandalf the Gray. As I watched her I felt a moment of something cracking. It was a thread that pulled on my desire to show empathy for those who were suffering unfairly. It also pulled on the frustration I felt as a teacher for the way that our society's impoverished narrative landscape had pushed so many of my female students towards male roles as they sought to embody power and status as characters.
In the wake of that class, I wrote a post for the Swim Pony blog called A Million Female Gandalfs. That post was my attempt to make sense of a deep heaviness I felt at the time. A bit from that writing:
I have seen female Gandalfs and female Jack Nicholsons from A Few Good Men. I have seen African-American students play Abraham Lincoln and Tom Cruise and Liam Neeson (saving his daughter from kidnappers) and Liam Neeson again (this time fighting wolves in the woods). Today I see two girls with long black hair, girls whose heritages are both Mexican, play Carrie Bradshaw and Gretchen Weiner from Mean Girls. I am sad that between the very occasional For Colored Girls… monologue there is so much Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap and Macaulay Culkin from Home Alone.
Another quote from farther on in the piece:
I think about the stories we as a culture force on people without their consent. I think about how we also allow those stories to be forced onto people while apathetically doing nothing. It makes me think about the way that stories about thugs and gangs and riots are used to distract us from the larger more terrible and oppressive stories about the world we live in. It makes me think about the way that we shove these stories into the brains of children who do not yet have the ability to judge these stories for the garbage they are. I think about all the work we are now responsible to do as adults to pull them out of ourselves.
Awesome Ladies and Awesome Ladies' friends, I don't know about you, but the last few weeks have evoked a lot of the same heaviness of feeling. I've been feeling a lot of the same sense of frustration about the landscape of dialogue and narrative we've been living in. And similarly, I don't have a clear sense yet about what exactly it is we do about it.
But, once again, I do know that I can't sit passively by.
And so.
I'm reconvening the Squad.
Because if there's anything possible to be done, I know that Awesome Ladies are the ones to do it. And thanks to a generous space donation from Headlong, Swim Pony's Awesome Lady Squad will host:
A Two-Part Awesome Brainstorming Town Hall
Monday Dec 5 from 8 – 10pm &
Saturday Dec 10 from 2 – 4pm
at Headlong Studios (1170 S Broad)
The focus of this time will be to share our feelings and responses to recent events, imagine some concrete actions that we as an intersectional Lady community might imagine being useful to the world, and come up with a plan to put our Awesome might into action.
Come to one or both armed with your ideas and your readiness. We'll do our best to facilitate a convo that helps create a plan of attack from there.
RSVP to SwimponyPA@gmail.com if you can (though please still come if you haven't and pass along to anyone in the creative community you think would want to take part) so we get a sense of size to watch for.
Keep on Awesome-ing and hope to see you soon.
Posted in Awesome Lady Squad, Community, Context for Creation, Equity for the Arts, Fears, Feelings, How do I do this?, In Progress, Reactions, Women in Theatre and tagged actresses, art, arts, Awesome Lady Squad, change, choice, doing, equality, fear, feelings, gender, getting it done, imbalance, making, Potential, women, work on November 30, 2016 by Adrienne. 1 Comment
Why I'm Walking Away
I'm giving you all fair warning.
In the next few weeks or months if you come up to me and start talking about how horridly busy your creative life is, how you're overwhelmed and not totally committed to the work you're doing…
If you open the conversation with how much you hate that you have no time for all the other parts of living but you seem to keep ending up in this situation and you're scattered and can't really feel yourself fully doing anything…
If you start talking to me about this quandary like it's normal and something we all have to share as a natural given of our artistic existences and though you don't really like it, it's just this thing we all will agree to keep doing…
If you do that to me I'm going to walk away from you.
Maybe not right away. I'm probably going to nod with you for another minute and then make an excuse to go to the bathroom. Or grab another drink. Or to say hi to someone else that walked in the room. But make no mistake that I'm leaving because of what you're saying, and I'm doing so because I'm trying to be done with it.
I would like to publicly declare a divorce from exhausted distraction as the expected baseline.
Look, I like working hard. If you've spent ten seconds with me ever this is obvious. But there is a difference between useful rigor and running in random circles. Lately, I feel myself stepping back and watching people I love – smart people who are thoughtful and intelligent makers – talk about projects in this way that makes clear they don't really like them. I hear seemingly everyone around me detail work that drains their reserves of time and creativity and doesn't pay enough.
This is the definition of absurd, no?
And yet it is the default operating mode of most of the artists I am surrounded by.
Here's a question. Taking a long-term view, what's going to be more fulfilling and useful to your creative practice: taking on that role you don't much like with the company you feel ambivalent about for that tiny bit of money or spending that extra time at home reading? Or volunteering at a hospice center? Or taking a long walk and seeing what comes to mind?
These are actual questions I'm asking myself these days. Because I've really started to wonder what it means about all of us that we physically can't stop ourselves from working. It makes me wonder if we're laboring smart or just laboring hard so that we don't have to get into stickier questions about meaning and value that are WAY more difficult to answer. It makes me wonder if at the end of all that frantic effort we'll have given ourselves any room to actually be living the substantive lives from which we'll want to draw meaningful creative source material from.
Not to be the kind of person who talks about this thing that happened a few weeks ago in a therapy session but, yeah, here's a thing that happened to me a few weeks ago in my therapy session:
I finished talking about a ton of exciting new work projects on the horizon. I catalogued a bunch of stuff that I was wrapping up that I felt proud of. I talked about the effort of finishing the wedding planning and how great my classes were going. I spent 45 minutes talking and talking and talking about all the things I was doing and doing and doing.
And then, right near the end, I ran out of things to say and my therapist and I sat in silence for a minute. In that minute this feeling began to rise out of the center of me, like a steel weight but in reverse, a balloon of heavy emotion that needed to bubble out. And because it was quiet and because I was in a place where I didn't need to do anything else and because I took a second and actually let it happen, it popped and I started to cry.
It was a combination of things: watching police shootings over the past few months and feeling guilty and helpless at our collective lack of compassion for those who experience racial prejudice in this country, the bile of Donald Trump and the way it has unleashed a whole new level of misogyny into the open American air, the hangover of sentiment in the days after a massive personal event and realizing I've made this huge step forward in my life, and a whole jumble of other influences that I'd accrued and had remained unexamined. In that moment of silence all the actual life that I'd been squeezing into the edges of my working existence came bursting up and out of me. And for once I gave myself room to sit for another few minutes in my tears and notice the need to process these reactions to the world.
We need to create room for these moments. We need to create room for such noticing.
Not because of some self-care "keep yourself sane" kind of way. (Though shouldn't this be enough of a reason…?) We need to do it because without that space we are all action and no reflection. We are only functional systems without mission and ethics to evaluate the meaning of the products we produce. I wonder if doing less and doing it with more (to paraphrase an Artist U maxim) will mean that in the long run we'll all be more genuinely productive in creating things that we value. Maybe rather than feeling constantly exhausted by having to generate new stuff, I'd be far better off creating work about the things that are already somewhere in me and needing to be expressed, if only I could give myself space to notice that they need to get out.
I get all my ideas for blog posts in the shower because it's one of the few places there's silence and room to wander.
These days I'm dreaming about what a life of mostly shower-sized room might look like.
And that's why if I feel like we're normalizing the opposite in out conversations together, I'm going to find a way to walk away, walk off into the silence, so I can see what bubbles out.
Posted in Context for Creation, Fears, Feelings, In Progress, Motivation, Reactions, The ENd and tagged art, busy, inspiration, life, silence, wandering, work on October 17, 2016 by Adrienne. 3 Comments
True fact.
On the dressing room mirror of the Macy's bridal boutique at the Cherry Hill mall there is a decal that says the following:
Be the kind of SPECIAL you want to be.
If you are Adrienne Mackey such a decal will make you cry.
Now I'd like to talk about Orlando.
(deep breath and another warning shot to those who might need it)
I have followed the story of the Orlando shooting with the predictable mix of sadness and anger. I do not carry an LGBTQ+ status and in the aftermath of the events, I've felt a thorny mix of privilege and frustration: a feeling that has coalesced into uncertainty about what exactly to do, lo these several weeks later, for the beautiful colleagues and friends and students that I know and love who have been reminded with this event that no, they are not safe and that yes, they are under attack, and that indeed, we still live in a culture that denies them the equity they deserve.
And in my sadness and privilege and anger, I've wanted to come up with a plan of action because this is how I understand myself useful in the world: not in my sympathy or feelings (which should be a given), but in my doings towards different outcomes for the future. I want to come up with something that moves our culture even a tiny step away from such a thing that seems so thoroughly and obviously horrible.
Weirdly, I have also spent the last weeks planning a wedding.
It's my wedding, if you're wondering, one that has been in the works for about 8 years now. Or rather it's mostly not been in the works for 8 years now. Up until a couple months ago when I told people I was engaged and they said the usual, "Oh my god! Congrats! You must be SO SO SO HAPPY!!! When's the date?" I would usually look at the ground and tell them that it's not that big a deal and we've essentially been all but legally married for a while now and please, please, please just don't make a big fuss about it.
There are a lot of things about a wedding that freak me out, many that I am only just beginning to realize the depth of my discomfort with. I don't like engaging in an activity that makes me feel so poor. I don't like events that constantly put me in a place to feel super girly and hyper stereotypically feminized. I don't like feeling that my relationship to a man (however genuinely wonderful he happens to be) is the most salient feature about me as a person.
For a long time after getting engaged, my husband to-be and I continued not setting a date and thus the wedding just kept not happening. At some point, when the length of betrothal got long enough (somewhere on the scale of three years) people started to tilt their heads and raise one eyebrow and then sort of shrug their shoulders about it with a meaningful kind of look and say, "Huh…" or "Oh… That's interesting… What are you waiting for?"
Eventually, when the engagement got really really long (somewhere on the scale of six years) people would say the same thing and then I'd see this silent other thing pass through their faces which I always took to mean, "Well clearly you can't really be in love and want to marry this guy if it's taken you so damn long to get around to doing it, I mean Jesus, he's already given you a ring, girl."
On the Sunday when the news of the shooting broke, I had tasked myself to follow up with a myriad of emails to caterers I'd been putting off all week. It seemed about the single stupidest thing to be focusing on the midst of such a terrible tragedy but my mom and I had planned months before that she would come into town and tag along with me on a variety of wedding related events the following few days.
So this is what I did in the midst of the news about 49 innocent dead people: set up meetings to talk to people about dress fittings and pressed bamboo disposable plates and rose gold earrings that matched the shoes I'd ordered.
"You family is safe. You partner is safe," I kept thinking as I did all this. "Do not take these blessings lightly."
At this point, I'd like to say for the record that I love my partner. I care about him deeply. He is unequivocally one of the most important people in my life. But on the same token, taking part in the stereotypical "head over heels" goo-goo ga-ga romance narrative one sees in dumb rom com movies has always made me feel uncomfortable.
The most extreme and cliché stories about romantic love – one in which a person happily, eagerly, gives up their individuality and throws themself into being part of an eternally linked soulmate-style couple – uniformly upset me. Women who take their husband's names freak me out. Wearing a veil and dressing in the symbolism of white, walking down an aisle and being "given away" from one man to another, standing in front of people all dolled up like the star of some wedding play I've dreamed about my entire life, all these things feel like they cut hard against aspects of my self-definition that I've worked quite hard to cultivate in my life.
There are plenty of people that take these traditions and re-appropriate them in ways that make them happy, and for those folks, power to 'em. For me, such rituals are things that feel disempowering and trigger-y. They make me feel like an archetype, like a generic thing I don't identify with. They make me feel like an imperfect version of "bride" rather than the actual person I am.
And at this point, let me say that I'm going to try not to "wedding" all over Orlando. One is a huge and massive tragedy and the other is a small and totally self-oriented event. One is so so so big and the other so so so small.
At the same time, I bring up my personal struggle over my wedding because I see it as an example of the sensation that arises when one's personal sense of self is in conflict with a larger cultural story. Surprisingly intense feelings of helplessness have sprung from moments in which I feel myself wholly out of sync with the way that I sense this wedding story is supposed to be told.
It feels like there is this way, a way that we all can sort of intuitively feel, that such a thing is supposed to be done. And yeah, sure, one can unseat and come up with an alternate solution to every single one of the defaults. It is indeed possible to ask to please not be shown a white dress, or quietly undercut people's assumptions that you believe that this is the most magical day of your life, or say that no you really won't need to set up the dining area like a 12 year-old's idea of a royal palace. You can politely negate the assumption that someone will give you away like a set of family dishes or awkwardly explain that you have to check with your partner about the rental agreement not because he's in charge of paying for shit but because he actually and seriously cares about the aesthetics of table linens, maybe more than you do if we're honest, and he's the one whose done most of the research on decorative place settings.
One can do all these things but eventually it just gets tiring explaining that all the things people assume about you are wrong. It's tiring even when they aren't mean about it. It's tiring because you have to keep doing it over and over and over. It starts to feel like you're being a pain in the ass when you just wish someone would shut up about telling you that you're going to look so pretty. It's even more tiring to try and explain that it's not even that you hate looking pretty, you just wish pretty was maybe 2% instead of 99% of the data coming at you.
You can do these things but – for me anyway – it mostly feels like you're some kind of cranky and difficult person that hates the things that everybody else blissfully and easily loves doing. Like you're some kind of problem that needs to be solved.
Here's a thing I kept thinking about in my cranky difficultness and privileged sadness of wedding planning in the wake of Orlando: I don't think people go from zero to massacre. I don't think people are born murderous.
I think they accrue tiny morsels of discomfort within themselves, discomforts about things in themselves they do not like and discomforts about the people around them they do not know well enough. I think these discomforts can slowly aggregate into a kind of soil into which hate can be seeded. And I think that once in a while such seeds find a particular climate and soil that grows into the kind of rage that makes an Orlando.
Tangent: once when I was in high school, a close family member told me that the idea of two men dating each other made him uncomfortable.
As I remember it, admittedly now nearly two decades later, we were out to dinner when the topic came up. I was performing in a musical at the time and mentioned offhandedly that the lead role of the play had been double cast – two young men splitting a role and performing it on alternate nights.
"You know what's funny," I said. "I think they're also together. Both pretending onstage to like the girl playing the lead while offstage they're dating each other. At least, that's the rumor."
"Can I admit something?" my family member said. "The idea of two men holding hands, kissing, anything romantic… It weirds me out. I mean, I know that's wrong. I would never do anything because of it… but if I'm honest, that's how I feel."
I remember a very particular state of dissonance that my relative kept articulating: that logically they understood it was not good to feel grossed out by a man holding hands with another man they care about, but that this "ick" factor was an instinct, one born out of the environment in which they were raised.
I think there are stories that as a culture are collectively comfortable with and I think there are those that we are not. I think some stories cause this discomfort simply because we haven't encountered them enough. Like the first taste of coffee or red wine, they are foreign and untested to the aesthetic palate and as such give our senses a shock. But such discomfort doesn't appear because they are bad stories. It is simply that our brains and guts have not yet figured out what to do with them in their newness. As we grow, hopefully, we learn to widen our circle of comfort and not only tolerate but appreciate the ways in which such things make our lives richer than we have previously known the world to be.
But what if we don't? What if we spit out otherness and confine ourselves to only a small number of definitions about what stories are good stories to hear? What if we continue to needlessly limit our ability to acclimate to such diversity of narrative? What happens when we confront people who do not, cannot, and should not need to fit their tales into the limited palate we have created?
And as I wrote in regards to another mass shooting, I have been wondering in the wake of Orlando if this kind of rage might not stem in part from a kind of poverty in our narrative landscape. I wonder what would happen if we lived in a world in which we had swaths of stories about lives that looked like the ones in all those tragic articles I have been reading: ones about people living as theme park ride operators and travel agents and restaurant managers and community college students while simultaneously being gay.
What do we do with people who elicit discomfort in us because our experience is not yet adequate to the depth and fullness of this complicated world?
What we should do is figure out how to hold our discomfort in our mouths and taste it for richness. What we should do is sit with that discomfort and wrap ourselves in it so that we might get to know it. What we should do is mine our own patterns of defense so we might notice when that discomfort is everything to do with we the havers of dissonance and unquestionably not to do with those that provoke it within us.
But this is hard to do when we live in a culture that gives some of us the leeway not to bother.
It is hard when some of us are never required to imagine ourselves holding the dissonance of difference, when some of us never have to bother to strengthen the muscles of such holding.
What if we had, say, a whole three mainstream sitcoms or rom coms or heady dramas in which the central romance between main characters we narratively invest in wasn't a straight couple? And not because they are doomed or tragic but because we like watching such a couple fall in love? What if we had a lead character that was trans and their trans-ness wasn't the point of the story?
Is it possible that if we decided something like those things were important that the inherent discomfort of such things might be something we all had to practice getting comfortable with earlier and more often?
This is what I was thinking about as I tried to be the kind of SPECIAL that I wanted to be.
And so it was that Orlando plus one final stink eye from the saleswoman communicating nonverbally that I was being the bizarre kind of woman who seems not to want to be beautiful and happy and celebrate my love in a white dress made me start to cry in the Cherry Hill Macy's bridal salon dressing room.
Just before it happened I said I didn't want to wear white. The woman replied, "Ah ok… So a color more like… Champagne? Or Eggshell?"
And as I walked into that dressing room with a dark blue dress she begrudgingly handed me I was so fucking mad at that stupid woman and her shitty pen with a giant fake flower taped to it for being able to make me feel small and dumb and unlike the person I generally believe myself to be. I was so fucking mad she had elicited this feeling over something as insignificant as a color choice. I was so fucking mad at myself for feeling sorry for myself three days after a crazy person shot 49 people for no reason other than just being who they are.
I looked at that word "SPECIAL" hovering on the mirror and I just started bawling. I stood there weeping over feeling so tired at having to re-write the script of my wedding story in all these tiny but slowly accumulating ways. It was a moment of actually letting myself feel the freaking work of subverting all the defaults of this one dumb ceremony that I voluntarily bought into. It was, to paraphrase Ann Patchett, the realization that I was reading one slender volume of such hardship while others I cared about had catalogued an entire library. It was me feeling so goddamn angry at the stupid vinyl decal that lyingly promised to hold people in their specialness in their moments of major personal catharsis and growth.
I see the story written on that Macy's mirror in this way: the world would appreciate it if you, the dissonance provokers, could just be a little less weird, that it would be great if you could just make things a little less hard for those of us that aren't used to your desire for otherness, that if you could just default into a story that's not quite so umm… odd it would be easier, and if you could just do things in this way that's a little less stereotypically gender-non-conforming this story would just be so much better and satisfying, so yeah, if you can just be a slightly different kind of person than the one you are and act a little more normal so that you're recognizable as something I am used to seeing, if you could do all that it would be so so so SO great!
I mean, you don't have to be exactly the same – be the kind of SPECIAL you want to be! – but a little decorum would be appreciated.
(deep breath)
Here's what I figured out about what I think we can start to actively do.
I think we find the moments in which we feel a dissonance within ourselves and note that we could give over to the ease of weakness, that there are times when we can sense in the back of our minds and hearts that what the "other" is asking of us is to imagine our usual stories in a way slightly out of our "normal" conceptions and that it would be easier for us to do what feels comfortable.
And then we actively work to make the opposite choice.
I think we intentionally work to put ourselves into such places where we must hold discomforts. Not the discomforts that we have already acclimated to. Not the red wines and coffees we have already learned to love. No, we put ourselves in places where these dissonances make us itch, where they make us feel weird and maybe stupid, like we can't instinctually sense what's "normal."
We put that discomfort in our mouths and chew on it until we've acclimated to the taste.
This cannot happen if we fill our theaters' seasons with love stories only between women and men.
This cannot happen if we never allow those who look unlike us to design, act and direct for our companies.
This cannot happen if we only cast minorities as sidekicks to the central journeys of straight white cis male characters.
I think we need to look at our choices and say, "Hey, it feels a little weird to let this person do this thing that I am not used to someone like them doing. It feels like maybe I'm taking something from this white/straight/dude/cis/whatever person who I know is super talented and with whom I am used to working. It feels like it's a little out of my comfort and knowledge zone. But I'm going to trust that the dissonance I feel is the thing that eventually gives me a wider understanding. That discomfort is an opportunity to take my own internalized and problematic instincts and make them mine to hold."
I think this is what we do so we starve those fertile climates of hate of the seeds that grow rage.
I think this is what we do to truly let people be the kind of SPECIAL they want to be.
I think this is what we do to help stop an Orlando.
So for now, it's what I plan to do.
Posted in Community, Fears, Feelings, In Progress, Reactions and tagged art, arts, change, creation, doing, equality, fear, feelings, gender, imbalance, LGBTQ, messy, Orlando, Potential, work on June 28, 2016 by Adrienne. 3 Comments

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
G20, Europe prepare for Greek election shock
Time restrictions on NHS eligibility set to be lengthened
BRITISH expats may soon have greater access to NHS care, despite recent media reports claiming that pensioners who live abroad were set to be denied free treatment by the health service.
Currently, expats based in Cyprus are not eligible to free NHS care if they spend more than three months a year away from the UK, but that is now set to be extended.
The good news comes after the British government promised a crack-down after hospitals were told to charge patients who were found not to be resident in Britain or from countries with reciprocal arrangements.
A confidential internal report on health tourism leaked last year estimated that the bill for treating foreign patients, many so-called 'health tourists' amounted to at least £62 million a year.
Now, the British Government is proposing that the period of absence for current UK resident's eligibility for free NHS hospital treatment in England is extended from three to up to six months.
The proposed changes come after an increasing trend of Britons spending longer periods overseas and are designed to protect the rights of British citizens who travel abroad whilst still residing substantively in the United Kingdom.
However, only treatment for emergencies - such as heart attacks, accidents or sudden illness - will still be free at anytime.
The proposals were confirmed by a NHS spokesman in an interview with the Sunday Mail.
"UK state pension holders living overseas are exempt from charges if they need treatment during their visit to the UK. This does not include pre-planned treatment.
"A UK state pensioner living overseas who then resumes their permanent residence in the UK is exempt from charges for all hospital treatment, including pre-planned treatment, from day one. They should be prepared to show evidence to a hospital that they have returned permanently," he said.
Strict limits of access to the NHS were introduced in 2004 by John Reid. The then Health Secretary described his reforms as designed to make the NHS "a British service for people who live in Britain".
A similar tone was given by the NHS spokesman last week, who told the Sunday Mail, the NHS is primarily a concern for British residents.
"The NHS is first and foremost for the benefit of people who live in the United Kingdom. People who are not ordinarily resident here are not automatically entitled to access free NHS hospital treatment. This has nothing to do with nationality or payment of taxes. The regulations on charging for overseas visitors have been in place since 1989, so the basic principles are not new, but have been in operation for some 20 years."
As it stands, entitlement to free NHS hospital treatment is based on "ordinary residence" in the UK and anyone who leaves the UK for three months is no longer automatically entitled to free NHS treatment.
By Nathan Morley, Cyprus Mail, September 13, 2009
|||Better access to UK NHS for expats


text:
Q: Get specific row from dataset in rdlc expression My data set like as.
 AccName    Debit   Credit
 A          500000  0
 B          400000  0
 C          30000   0
 D          10000   0
 E          0       950000

Now i want to show AccName i.e E in a Text box(which Credit greater than 0).DataSet contain only one row which contain Credit greater than 0.
Thanks in Advance.

A: Use a where condition  for filter the rows based on AccName column content
 select AccName,    Debit,   Credit
 from my_table
 where AccName  = 'E';

or based on Credit column content
 select AccName,    Debit,   Credit
 from my_table
 where Credit> 0;

If you need only AccName  then  select only this column
 select AccName
 from my_table
 where Credit> 0;

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Home News Judges Scientific hikes interim dividend 15% as profit beats expectations
Judges Scientific hikes interim dividend 15% as profit beats expectations
Judges Scientific PLC (AIM:JDG) increased its interim dividend 15% as the company continues to recover from the impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
The scientific instruments group reported revenue of GBP43.0mln from the first six months of 2021, up 15% on the year before. Adjusted pre-tax profit rose 32% to GBP8.5mln.
Chairman Alex Hambro said: "Pleasingly, the group's performance has started to recover from the initial impact of the pandemic. Whilst there are further obstacles to overcome, the group's resilience and adaptability and the contribution of the recent acquisitions have enabled the first half performance to reach the record established in 2019."
Order progress was strongest in geographies which were affected most in 2020, the company said, with North America up 41%, continental Europe up 34%, the UK up 26%, China/Hong Kong up 2% and the rest of the world up 8%.
As cash generated from operations surged 57% to GBP8mln, the half-time dividend was hiked to 19p from 16.5p a year ago.
House broker Liberum said adjusted profit was 12% ahead of its expectations and the business is "recovering strongly …but with plenty more to go for".
Previous articlePeel Hunt raises GBP112mln ahead of AIM debut
Next articleFTSE 100 sheds 26 points to end in the red


Construction Laborer at Ruston Paving Co, Inc.
The paving and grading laborer performs tasks involving physically demanding labor at construction projects. The individual may operate a variety of hand and power tools. May clean and prepare sites, clean up rubble and debris and remove waste materials. The individual may assist other workers.
Perform a variety of tasks involving strenuous manual labor at construction projects in the preparation and construction of site work and paving projects.
Hand shovel bituminous concrete (asphalt), aggregate and dirt into construction area.
Clean, sweep, hand excavate and fill holes, trenches and ditches using various hand tools including but not limited to shovels, brooms, picks and jackhammers.
Shovel, rake or lute bituminous concrete (asphalt), aggregate and dirt for fill to grade.
Assist in patching and compacting bituminous concrete (asphalt), aggregate and dirt.
Material handling inclusive of lifting, relocating, mixing/blending and application of construction materials and supplies for project use and storage.
Any combination of education and experience that demonstrates the knowledge and ability to perform the work as described.
Site excavation and/or paving experience is preferred.
While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit; use hands to finger, handle, or feel objects, tools, or controls; reach with hands and arms; talk and hear. The employee is regularly required to stand; walk; climb or balance; and stoop, kneel, crouch, or crawl.


Our crews are working hard on this extra large job…. 130,000 sq ft! Selfleveling the whole area before installing VCT and/or carpet tile. Great job once again guys!
This South End Lobby is looking handsome after our Sandstone stairs and Marble lobby floor tile have been installed.
Check out this team hard at work installing this custom Dekton Panel Outdoor Sign. This piece is the final touch to a very large indoor/outdoor job that we took on and completed using high end Cosentino products. Looking good guys!
We recently completed some gorgeous updates to this stunning new bathroom. Wall tile, chair rail, shower tile and floor tile... but the real prized piece is the tile rug design that was installed. It really brings the room together and helps to create an upscale vibe. What do you think!?
We recently tackled this 5500 sq ft leveling job and are more than happy with the outcome. Self leveling and moisture mitigation.... complete! Smooth as ever! Here are some before, during and after images from the job site.
What a day... We spent today at The Belknap White Group surrounded by informative folks from Crossville Inc, Laticrete and Montolit Tiling Tools. Learning lots about thin gauged porcelain tile panels and getting our Crossville Laminam Certification. We love learning about new products and techniques!


C/O Rosebud Magazine, N3310 Asje Rd., Cambridge WI 53523.
Contest for original works of fantasy, science fiction, mystery, or horror, 4000 words or less. Deadline: September 15, 2013. GRAND PRIZE: $1,000, 4 runners-up each receive $100. All winners published in Rosebud. Entry fee: $10/story. Guidelines on website at http://www.rsbd.net.
The following comments are for "2013 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Award for Imaginative Fiction"


Do you know that Malaysia imported A$5.3million (RM71.3 million) or 871 tonnes of Australian fruits in 2015. Over the last five years, between 2011 and 2015, the value and quantity of imported Australian fruits each grew by approximately 30 percent per annum. This is a clear demonstration of the high demand for top quality Australian produce in a very competitive market.
Australia's quality soil, continual supply of clean water, strict food safety regulations and innovative farm practices. These factors, amongst others, are its horticulture industry's marks of distinction.
During the launch event, we also picked-up some healthy tips from Daphne Iking, the celebrity fitness-beauty-health mum. Plus Chef Chef Brandon Chin, from Breakfast Thieves, Fitzroy Melbourne also demo and whipped up two dishes using the Summer Stone Fruits, such as Lamb Rissoles with Charred Peach and Coconut Chia Pudding with Apricots and Cherries. Both are mouth-watering and great to serve up at dinner parties and make you look like a star.
Of course, we had the chance to try out fresh fruits and dishes cooked with these Australian Cherries, nectarines, apricots and peaches. You can get these two recipes from NOW! In Season Malaysia Facebook page.
I love all these premium quality Australian Summer Fruits, they are so fresh, juicy, sweet, safe and healthy. Especially the cherries because it's one of the superfruit, load with anti-oxidant and nutrients. Alright! stay tune for my easy and healthy recipes coming up soon incorporating these Australian Cherries and Summer Stone Fruits.
NOW! In Season is a global campaign by the Victorian State Government, Australian Government and Horticulture Innovation Australia. Throughout the year, they will educate consumers on the seasonality of the commodities, health and nutritional benefits of Australian produce as well as how to select and store the seasonal commodities.
The premium Australian Cherries and Summer Stone Fruits are now available at Village Grocer, Jaya Grocer, Aeon, and Isetan Kuala Lumpur.
Wow! What a huge amount of Australian fruits imported in Malaysia! I love cherries so much!!
I haven't got a chance to try summer fruits there in Australia yet. This post is making my mouth watering for nectarine! And I'll check the recipes out, they really look good!
These are some of my favourite fruits and I am glad to know they are in season already! I just hope that the Ringgit improves a little bit because these prices are not so friendly right now.
My favourite cherries and apricot is back in season. Quality fruits from Australia.


text:
Q: L2 norm of composition of two functions Consider a function $f(x)$ in $L^2(\mathbb{R})$. Let $g_a(x)$ be defined as
\begin{equation}
    g_a(x) = \sinh ((\text{arsinh}\;x) - a)
\end{equation}
for some real number $a$.
Now let us consider composition $f \circ g_a$. I would like to know whether $f \circ g_a= f(\sinh ((\text{arsinh}\;x) - a))$ is still in $L^2(\mathbb{R})$.
Clearly, if $a=0$, then $\Vert f \circ g_0 \Vert_{L^2} = \Vert f \Vert_{L^2}$. What happens when $a \neq 0$?
Any help is deeply acknowledged.


Andhra Bank Nandyal IFSC Code Kurnool: Swiftly get the Andhra Bank Kurnool Nandyal IFSC Code here. In this page, you can obtain Andhra Bank Kurnool Nandyal IFSC Code as well as MICR code along with all essential information of Andhra Bank Kurnool Nandyal. Grasp Andhra Bank Kurnool Nandyal branch Address, Phone number, Branch code, Timings easily in this page. Make use of Andhra Bank Kurnool Nandyal IFSC Code for your easy and quick money transfer through NEFT and RTGS.


At the heart of the layout, an installation by Dutch artist, Levi Van Veluw offers visitors a chance to share an emotion. Inside the low-tech square display windows evoking the shape of the famous Hermès silk scarves, he develops nine interactive animations. Visitors activate little mechanisms which, via a set of pistons and gears, bring to life a spectacular monolith in the centre of the atrium. A building machine offering everyone a timeless experience, an emotion-filled journey on the theme of "time, a Hermès object".
This is because at Hermès, time is also an object. Over and above technical performances which seek to measure, order and control time, Hermès dares to explore another time. "We want to awaken a playful relationship with time through an object that is true to its function", explains Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Hermès Artistic Director. "We create timepieces stemming from the mastery of numerous skills and reflecting a serene perspective on time."


Plans4boats.com: visit the most interesting Plans 4 Boats pages, well-liked by users from your country and all over the world, or check the rest of plans4boats.com data below. Plans4boats.com is a web project, safe and generally suitable for all ages. Their most used social media is StumbleUpon with about 83% of all user votes and reposts. Plans4boats.com uses Apache HTTP Server.


District Bar Association advocates the General Assembly on Saturday froze commotion . Proceedings had to be adjourned due to uproar . President of the Association of Shivmohan could not decide on withdrawal of resignation .On the instructions of the State Bar Council advocates convened at the House Bar Library Hall . Sacchidanand the general secretary Shiv Mohan Singh Sabha Speaker then put the question of withdrawal of resignation advocates began protesting . Advocate on the issue of withdrawal of resignation were divided into two camps .
Many advocate against resign withdraw support and many were standing . Chaotic House – was panic situation . The Secretary-General tried to silence them . However, he could not succeed . In such case was adjourned . Could not proceeding to sign the book advocates . State Bar Council informed the Secretary General of the matter . After receiving instructions from there further action will be taken . Please tell the executive meeting on Friday was convened . Withdraw his resignation at a meeting held after the case was stalled . Due to adjourn the meeting it was decided to call a general meeting on Saturday . Jaymngl Prasad , vice president of the Bar Association at the meeting , several members of the executive and advocate than Treta Kumar Dubey were present .


An art born 35 years ago, that of the master cheese maker D'Aprile, inspired by the most genuine craftsmanship. From the early hours of the morning, the milk, just milked, passes from our stable to the boilers already on the fire, to offer every day a multiplicity of aromas and flavors, witnesses of ancient knowledge. The natural environment of our land, sunny and full of perfumes, gives the genuineness that characterizes our products.


Do you remember when McDonald's had teams of enthusiastic 30-year-old men scrubbing down every inch of the store? Me neither. But true-to-life or not, this spot launched the trend of featuring elaborate production numbers in commercials. Casual TV viewers might spot a young John Amos (James Evans on Good Times) among the Mickey D crew members. Heavy-duty watchers may recognize Johnny Haymer (Sgt. Zale on M*A*S*H) as well.
DID YOU KNOW? While Barry Manilow wrote many hit jingles, he did not pen the "You Deserve a Break Today" song (although he did occasionally sing it in concert). The tune was written by Kenny Karen.
If you grew up during the golden age of MGM musicals, you're probably wrinkled by now. But you probably also remember Ann Miller as one of the studio's biggest tap-dancing stars. If you spent most of your time in front of the small screen in the 1970s, though, you probably remember her as the pitchwoman for the line of Great American Soups by Heinz.
DID YOU KNOW? This commercial was written and directed by parody song legend Stan Freberg.
There are catchy commercial jingles, and there are those that are just plain infectious. This one always got my toe tapping, and I bet you won't be able to resist "haw haw-ing" along with this classic Levi's commercial (even if you do it the second time you watch it).
Until the mid-1960s, Nesbitt's Orange was the only orange soda pop sold at Disneyland. The animation in this commercial leans more toward R. Crumb than Uncle Walt, though.
DID YOU KNOW? Marilyn Monroe appeared in print ads for Nesbitt's Orange in 1946.
The song in this spot was so popular that Faygo released it on a 45 (that's a small, seven-inch vinyl record, kids) that sold for the princely sum of 25 cents. "Remember When You Were a Kid" appeared briefly on several Detroit-area radio stations' Top 30 playlists.
DID YOU KNOW? This commercial was filmed aboard the Boblo boat, which for 81 years ferried passengers from downtown Detroit to the Boblo Island amusement park near Amherstburg, Ontario, Canada.


text:
calendar icon Sep 1, 2016 8:41:47 AM
solarmillennialssmart homeArc House
The Arc House Goes to Vegas: Millennials Rejoice!
On display at this year's Solar Power International in Vegas, the Arc House is a Millennial's dream, not the lumbering McMansion of yesteryear.
I'm not a millennial, but I find myself intrigued by many of the things that seem to drive the interest and attention of that generation—smart technologies, clean energy, the circular economy, and tiny living.
Fortunately (for me and the Millennials), all of those sectors are spreading like wildfire, and innovation is rampant. Smart technologies are transforming the way that we interact with our homes, vehicles, and cities. Car sharing is blossoming, with mega-million dollar investments by the major automotive players in companies like Uber and Lyft. Tiny living is commanding the hearts and minds of people of all ages, from Millennials who want the freedom to live "stuff free", all the way to Boomers who want to shed the yoke of McMansions.
And on to solar—ah, solar. Let's linger here for a moment, since the category is so vital to the future physical and economic health of said Millennials. With pricing at an all-time low (the cost of solar fell by 5% for residential systems and 12% for utility-scale projects in 2015, with an equally steep decline in 2016), there are more residential, commercial, and utility solar installations today than ever before. As reported by Scientific American, "The cost decline observed in 2015 indicates that the coming years will likely see utility-scale solar become cost competitive with conventional forms of electricity generation."
And while some states like Nevada and Maine are still absurdly bantering over the benefits of solar, the sector has experienced some significant wins lately, including a pivotal voter approval of a constitutional amendment in Florida that provides property tax breaks for people with solar panels on their homes and removes a "tangible personal property tax" on installed solar equipment. No doubt, even with annoying squirms here and there, solar is here to stay.
Green Builder Media has partnered with specialty modular builder Shelter Dynamics to marry smart home technology, advanced solar systems, and tiny living together in the form of the Arc House, a hand-crafted, beautiful, net-zero, tiny home (which happens to be its own microgrid with super-efficient solar panels from Jinko Solar and an integrated inverter/battery storage system from SMA.)
We're dressing the Arc House up and taking it out—next stop is Solar Power International (SPI) in Vegas on September 12-15.
The Arc House will be a main attraction in SPI's can't miss Smart Energy Microgrid Pavilion (located in the Silver Lot outside of the Las Vegas Convention Center,) which will showcase advanced smart + solar technologies.
We're excited to show off the Arc House's intelligent ability to produce, store, and monitor its energy usage, automatically making adjustments to optimize resource use and comfort, and it providing behavioral feedback to occupants.
We invite you to visit the Arc House at SPI in booth SL43. Join us for cocktails, appetizers, fresh air, and lively conversation after the show on Wednesday, September 14, from 5:00-6:00 at a private event generously hosted by Jinko Solar—it's invite only, so be sure to RSVP today!
To learn more about the Arc House, please visit the project's microsite. Heading to SPI and want a tour of the Arc House from one of our project team members? Write to me at sara.gutterman@greenbuildermedia.com.
Want to read more? Follow me on Twitter and Facebook. For more information about green building and sustainable living, visit Green Builder Media at www.greenbuildermedia.com, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter for regular updates and breaking news.
calendar icon Sep 1, 2016 8:41:47 AM · Reading time 2 min read
Today's Home Buyers Talk Furniture
This millennial focus group video reveals how members of the younger generation make furniture...


Doing your best in every race is the only thing that anyone can ever ask of themselves. At Headsweats, we want to help competitors achieve personal bests at every 10K, marathon, and cycling race in which they participate. If you need running hats, cycling caps, or any kind of performance headwear, browse through the categories below and you'll find the perfect hat or cap for your next race. We have performance hats for both men and women, so no matter who you are or how you compete, you'll find the perfect headwear.


text:
kubectl create -f kube/frontend-controller.yaml
kubectl create -f kube/read-controller.yaml
kubectl create -f kube/write-controller.yaml


text:
/* $Id: symbian_sound_aps.h 3553 2011-05-05 06:14:19Z nanang $ */
/*
 * Copyright (C) 2008-2011 Teluu Inc. (http://www.teluu.com)
 * Copyright (C) 2003-2008 Benny Prijono <benny@prijono.org>
 *
 * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 * the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
 * (at your option) any later version.
 *
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 *
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 * along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
 * Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA
 */
#ifndef __PJMEDIA_SYMBIAN_SOUND_APS_H__
#define __PJMEDIA_SYMBIAN_SOUND_APS_H__

/**
 * @file symbian_sound_aps.h
 * @brief Sound device wrapper using Audio Proxy Server on
 * Symbian S60 3rd edition.
 */
#include <pjmedia/types.h>

PJ_BEGIN_DECL

/**
 * Set audio routing for APS sound device.
 *
 * @param stream	The sound device stream, the stream should be started
 *			before calling this function.
 * @param route		Audio routing to be set.
 *
 * @return		PJ_SUCCESS on success.
 */
PJ_DECL(pj_status_t) pjmedia_snd_aps_set_route( pjmedia_snd_stream *stream,
						pjmedia_snd_route route);

PJ_END_DECL

#endif	/* __PJMEDIA_SYMBIAN_SOUND_APS_H__ */


Rugby Ladders with Ball Handling Agility & Running Skills • The aim of the drill is to develop SAQ and handling the same time.
Rugby 2 in 2 out Kareoka Agility & Running Skills The aim of the drill is to develop speed and agility.
SAQ (Speed, Agility, Quickness) drill for warm ups, handling the ball and warming up muscles.
Rugby player trys agility ladder for the first time!
Keep this session up your sleeve - Get things going with a half hour conditioning introduction and then progress onto Attacking Patterns!
how would you describe key factor analysis in one sentence?
what drills are there to use a ladder amp; balls?
1.Forward, fast feet catch the ball with speed.


Curved design allows a greater ability to absorb punches in an anatomically correct hand position for the trainer.
Designed specifically to ensure they allow the partner's hands to sit in a comfortable position, the curve ensures the pad is able to better absorb punches and in effect allows the trainer or coach to 'catch' the punch each time. Their role is to help develop timing and accuracy so whether you are a beginner or a seasoned boxer, you'll spend some time using hook and jab pads. They are also perfect for working on attack and defence techniques.


Located at 227 North Eola Drive, this three-star hotel offers the best of hospitality services and amenities to visitors and travelers in the city. The hotel is located in the lively downtown area of Orlando providing access to several bars, cafes, and restaurants where guests can have a lovely time.
The hotel is fitted with modern facilities while the rooms are furnished with modern décor and decorations. The Eo Inn Downtown offers comfort and guarantees satisfaction.
The hotel is ideally located where it offers guests a closeness to major tourist attractions and places of interest. The Eo Inn Downtown is the place to be when in Orlando.
The hotel offers lush room options such as Deluxe Queen Room and Deluxe King Room while some rooms come with a private such as the Queen Room with Balcony.
The hotel is within a short drive away from the famous Walt Disney World Resort while the Interstate 4 is just a stone throw away. The famous Lake Eola Park is about a minute walk away from the hotel while the SeaWorld is about 25 km away from the hotel.
The hotel has a rooftop terrace, the perfect place to relax and enjoy the stunning view of the surrounding.
Featured as Frommer's Exceptional Choice in Orlando.
Featured in New York Times' 36 Hours in Orlando.