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mymelancholiesblues · 3 years

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No, Mia isn’t "low-tier" compared to Ada (morally speaking, or w/e) – a measured answer?/essay

So, a couple of Ada haters tried to put up a false symmetry between both of these characters there on twitter, and it inspired me to put my own thoughts down in a more articulate essay as to why that's (Ada's somehow being morally worse than Mia) not sustained by canon in Resident Evil.

standing there, killing time

can't commit to anything but a crime

all the good girls go to hell

'cause even God herself has enemies

and once the water starts to rise

and heaven's out of sight

she'll want the Devil on her team. ⁕

First things first: let us debunk the false symmetry that they tried to establish between these two characters with extremely distinct archetypes – and worse, the following replies to this false symmetry and its poor arguments trying to validate it, pointing out that, in fact, no, character B (that would be Ada, btw) – which is so evidently and ridiculously different from character A (and that would be Mia) – is, in fact, WAY WORSE than character A, and then proceeding to assert some unsupported propositions about misogyny in Resident Evil (which, tbh, definitely IS a recurring problem in the franchise, but that in this case particularly, little or does not apply AT ALL) and how Ada contributes to "the perpetration of a biological cold war".

Starting with what differentiates Mia from Ada grotesquely: we know NOTHING of Ada's true alliances in RE's world. Mia, however, canonically worked for a group that participated in the importation and exportation as well as the manufacturing, testing and marketing of biological weapons: "The Connections", a CRIMINAL SYNDICATE which, amongst other things, was also involved in money laundering, assassinations as well as weapons and drug trafficking. I don't care at all about Mia, so I don't intend to waste much of my time going on about her role in the plot, but people should've already realized by just that much how infinitely dishonest is to try to put these two characters as "similar" ones, or argue that Ada is somehow worse.

Another detail that shouldn't escape anyone's attention too, are the origins and nationalities of both – and yes, I intend to briefly bring up racism against eastern-Asian looking characters (a silent plague that takes form by each passing day in all fiction fandoms) and anti-China xenophobia, but for now, hold this tea there just before I drop it: Mia is canonically American, and previously a Texas-state resident; meanwhile, we have no confirmation of Ada's nationality except for her pretty evident Chinese ancestry. But, as I said, hold it there for a while.

i) espionage — the job

red so silent

wait a minute

or just a little while.

what are you looking for? ⁕

At all times that Ada's "job" was brought up in this franchise, in ALL of her cameos, she has NEVER been called a mercenary in the original Japanese. She's always referred to as a SPY. Even in RE2R, the most recent title in which she's featured in, the original text of the game makes a point of labelling her as a SPY (and not a mercenary) in the dialogue that transpires between Annette and Leon.

It's the North-American translation and correspondent localization that now and then falls for the equivocal use of this other term. This distinction is important since espionage NECESSARILY implies operating in an organized service for, perhaps a country, or a political cause, or a class/group, or a corporation, or whatever. While a mercenary is someone who's acting per their self financial interests, indiscriminately selling their specialized "labour" and skills to anyone who'll offer more.

Ada's not a mercenary, she's a spy. But Mia, in addition to being hired to a canonically criminal company, was also the handler personally assigned to Eveline. I don't care how exactly Mia got in that predicament but the fact is: Mia was canonically employed by a company that profited over illicit activities and directly watched as a family was destroyed and toyed with by this new killing machine (Eve). Yet, we can't state for sure that we know to whom or to what Ada is truly affiliated with.

ii) sources — check them

who's a heretic now?

am I making sense?

how can you make it stick?

and I'm on a trial

waiting 'til the beat comes out. ⁕

This fandom should put a little more thought into which translation and localization of the game texts, dialogues and files they are using to support their arguments. I know that in some cases the United States people have a bit of an inclination to think of themselves as the owners of the planet and deem English as the only language that matters in this world, but let's not forget that RE is a Japanese franchise (wow, insane, right?!). Therefore, the most valid script, with the greatest amount of details, and highest credibility, is the Japanese original. Throughout these years, there have been several errors in translation and localization of the Japanese original to North-American English. And, believe me, curiously enough, plenty of those concern Ada, since she's often mentioned or referred to in a very vague way – without the use of pronouns or adjectives or adverbs that could help in indicating gender. This ended up causing those details and mentions to her to get overlooked, even though in the Japanese text it was a clear reference to her character (per observation of context).

iii) the good guys — one of

head in the dust

feet in the fire

labour on that midnight wire

listening for that angel choir

you got nowhere to run

careful son, you got dreamers plans

but it gets hard to stand. ⁕

Yes, as much as haters try to minimize it, it is SIGNIFICANT that Ada saved so many important characters and stood for unquestionably heroic actions in so many moments - like stopping everything she was doing so she could help completely random Chinese civilians with the helicopter she managed to pilot in that chaos in China (yeah, I know you haters love to forget about this, but it happened, it's there in canon, and no, it wasn't her direct OR indirect responsibility what was going on in China: REPLAY RE6 and for the love of GOD, never again argue that what she did was somehow "the equivalent of evacuating a city after selling a WMD to destroy that same city". It's a case of pure intellectual dishonesty to say such a thing. It's canon that Carla was the one who caused what happens in China, PLEASE, PLAY RE6).

Furthermore, Ada shows compassion on some occasions even for characters who are directly putting her in harms ways, like Annette (in RE2 OG, right after - in order to defend herself - she slaps Annette leading her to lose balance and collapse over the sewers fences, Ada makes an effort in trying to pull Annette back and prevent her from falling) and Carla.

Replay RE4 and pay attention to it, pay attention to her solo campaign: getting involved with Leon's journey in Spain hasn't brought any real benefit to her mission or herself: Ada deviates from her main path several times due to worrying about him and trying to help him and almost ends up dead in several of these occasions over her insistence in doing so: by saving him from Bitores Mendez, by helping him and Ashley against Sadler, by confronting Krauser and stopping him.

It's so lazy to only read/listen to a file in which she says in English that "Leon might be useful to her plans" (this is way more nuanced in the Japanese original of Ada's Report), and ignore everything that was SHOWN in the game: every effort she made to ensure that Leon could rescue Ashley, remove the parasite from his and her bodies, and escape from that hell-island.

The jet-ski she left for their escape was ALREADY there before she was captured by Sadler (or you think she arranged it while she was caught?). Leon having to intervene and save her from Sadler WASN'T her plan. It WASN'T her plan to take the sample from Leon's hands. She wanted to help him get out of there with Ashley and she guaranteed he could do so, she wanted to get the sample by herself and escape too while sending that hell to kingdom's come. But, because she chose to help Leon rescue Ashley right in front of Sadler, she ends up captured.

On her end, Mia never did anything minimally compared to that, and all of her "selflessness" or self-sacrificing actions involved a much, MUCH smaller scope than Ada's: wanting to help her husband and HERSELF is not at all comparable to saving a few dozens of unknown Chinese civilians. So no, they aren't "cut from the same cloth". They don't come from the same place, nor do they share the same intentions or goals, and their contributions to the RE storyline are quite different.

iv) unknown true purpose (shades of grey)

lining up in the background

waiting for the crowd shot to be seen

in the shadow of the big screen

everybody begs to be redeemed. ⁕

In databooks, Ada is recurrently described as "a Chinese spy with extraordinary physical abilities, vigorous health and composed mind and spirit, capable of coping with grim situations and handling even the most difficult requests without losing composure". If we are paying attention to the storytelling ingame, however, we know that this isn't always the case: Ada did let her mask of unswerving emotional and physical strength fall and showed a very fragile side under strenuous circumstances a couple of times already.

Also, in these databooks, they often point out that "she has her own 'true purpose' and has FREQUENTLY betrayed organizations and clients to achieve it". Huh, we can AGAIN, by this only, see how completely different she's from Mia, who personally watched an entire family being driven to insanity by Eveline's hand.

Furthermore, in these databooks, it's often said that "this true purpose is still obscure and whether she truly cared for anyone or simply used her charms to manipulate people that crossed paths with her isn't ever clear". If people are willing to be open-minded and exercise their text comprehension skills, though, they'll see that in multiple occasions of emotional confrontation it has been established time and time again that yes, Ada DOES care. She wasn't capable of shooting Leon and there has been a couple of other times that failing to choose a cool, sociopathic calculation and pragmatical demeanour over empathy and humanity towards others has put her in harms ways: nonetheless she still chose it.

v) positive impact

I'm gonna break the cycle

I'm gonna shake up the system

I'm gonna destroy my ego. ⁕

To this point, RE's plot systematically leads us to believe that Ada has been covertly acting behind the scenes of multiple biological incidents COLLECTING INFORMATION (the job of a spy, who would've thought! lmao), that is valuable to numerous organizations, companies, groups and different contexts, but at the same time of allegedly offering to handle this knowledge for the right price to the big players involved with bioterrorism and clandestine trading of bioweapons, she's also working to sabotage said players.

This is evident throughout the franchise: she intended to hurt Umbrella's business. She outwitted and deceived Wesker multiple times. She even undermined Simmons, someone who was in a position of power in the US government and actively using that position to lead bioterrorist ventures on the parallel side.

There's no concrete evidence or hint as to what she does with the information she collects, and for all purposes and effects, I can presume that she's gathering this knowledge to assist in the discovery of countermeasures and vaccination studies. I might as well argue that she is a Chinese spy who is working against European and North-American capitalism and the imperialism that creates such monsters like the biochemical and bioweapons industry and that her real objective is to dismantle the market for bioweapons and bioterror supported mainly by the USA (see: Simmons and The Family).

That is, as long as it is unclear what her true purpose is, I have the freedom to surmise whatever the heck I want and that all of what she's been doing was for the sake of the greater "good" - and I'll even have canon moments to support this reasoning as it's clear that she regularly sabotages her customers (customers that are unquestionably established as playing for the "evil" side, with perverse intentions) - throughout the franchise. She did this on RE2, RE4, RE6 and Damnation. It's there, transparent in canon, people just choose to ignore it.

She laughs in the face of whoever she's talking to by the end of Damnation, saying she doesn't intend to deliver the Plaga; she scoffs at Simmons; she betrays Wesker and kills Krauser. She had been sabotaging Wesker for so long, that he sent Krauser to be the main agent in the mission in Spain, and Ada was just a "side effect" that he didn't have in control and had to keep an eye on, so he ordered Krauser to keep tabs on her. It's not a mutually beneficial dynamic. Ada doesn't want Wesker to succeed, she despises him; this is clear in the games in which they interact. There are even files that indicate that she was trying to double-cross and get in the way of his plans for at least 2 years before Spain, and he was constantly catching up with her. See here and here.

On her end, Mia was employed by and consciously working for a criminal syndicate.

vi) a (secretly) helping hand

oh, I'm a master pretender

just felt more alone

the further I'd go

but I'll stick around

I'll be your master defender

yeah, I'll stick around. ⁕

Ada approached characters such as John Clemens and Luis Sera, and both had a canonical intention to, in addition to putting an end to their connections with the criminal companies and organizations they've been working for, also expose and denounce them for their crimes. It's in this context that Ada comes into contact with them. And why is that?

Check John's background: he had made up his mind about disclosing Umbrella's crimes to the public. Check Luis' background: Ada went to Spain to assist in his extradition since he feared for his own life if he resolved to turn his back on the cult of Los Illuminados, and also dreaded the consequences of the liberation of Las Plagas on an international scale.

Keep in mind that Ada handed over to Wesker a USELESS Plaga sample. Wesker only got the sample currently circulating in the underground market because he went after Krauser's body. We don't know what Ada did with the master Plaga sample she obtained. We only know from Ada's Report and the Plaga Recovery file that she didn't deliver it to Wesker, and he needed to go out for a plan B to get it.

Even the G-Virus sample that fell into the hands of the clandestine business, it's possible to argue that Ada's involvement in it was flimsy, since Simmons CANONICALLY made over a thousand laboratory tests in Sherry, and, as we know, he was a leading figure in bioterrorism and bioweapons trading with the aid of his position in the US government.

But, guess what, Ada clearly is a non-white character with obvious Chinese heritage and Mia is white, so of course, OF COURSE, someone can so nonchalantly affirm that Ada, this "vile bitch", is somehow WORSE than Mia. The same Mia who watched the Bakers being destroyed. Right.

Also: trying to validate one's point by claiming anything related to the misogyny present in RE franchise, while IN THE SAME BREATH AND TWEET reducing Ada's entire character arc to that of "a sociopathic bitch cured by the magic dick of her love interest" is supposed to be a joke, right? No, really. Joke.

conclusion and a word against misogyny

we are waiting on a telegram to

give us news of the fall

I am sorry to report

dear Paris is burning after all

we have taken to the streets

in open rejoice, revolting

we are dancing a black waltz

fair Paris is burning after all. ⁕

To any Ada fan that has been reading this so far: PLEASE, I ask to consider refraining to use the "oh yes, Ada did some bad shit, bUT" take to defend the character because that isn't sustained by canon in RE, lmao. She didn't do anything evil that had an indisputable bad impact on the plot and other characters arcs. For one, I myself do love some villains, but that isn't the case with Ada.

She did do some unconventional shit yes, since she's a morally GRAY character and an anti-heroine, but by the end of the day, each and every action of hers had a positive impact on the journey of other characters and main plot. Just pay attention to it.

Like idk man, Black Widow, Elektra Natchios, Scarlet Witch and Black Cat from Marvel, Catwoman from DC, Yennefer from The Witcher (some pop culture examples that come to mind).

Saying that this is an "extremely selfish prototypal bad bitch except when it comes to the magical redeeming dick of her love interest" it's a grotesque reduction of a complex female character, and, in its attempt to critique the misogyny present in RE's franchise an expression of misogyny in itself.

Remember: Ada has actions and impact on the franchise ASIDE and IN ADDITION to her romantic involvement with Leon.

#Resident Evil #Ada Wong #Leon x Ada #Ada x Leon #Aeon #Leon Kennedy #[mine]#[meta]#//#Aeon fandom

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fanfictiondreamscape · 4 years

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To Grab the Gold

Request: Could you maybe do a yurio x reader where the reader is a skater in the girls league at the same level as him. And though she almost always wins gold like her brother victor she’s always hard on herself saying she could do better. Either headcanons of how he would handle it or a Scenario please and thank you!!!!! Love work by the way!!!!!!!

Title: To Grab the Gold

Genre: fluffy, strays a lil into angst-y territory (but it should be fairly short)

Pairing: Yuri Plisetsky x Fem!reader

Notes: Okay, so thank you for this request! I’ve always wanted to write something about the reader being a sibling of Victor or someone, so this gave me the prime idea!

Otherwise, I feel as if I can relate to this idea in itself - being hard on yourself. It can literally be seen on this blog. It’s so nice and it makes me so happy to see that people enjoy the work I put out. So, I will thank you for that.

That said, I went with headcanons. Small warning, though:

These ideas will stray into territory that can be triggering. I would give it a specific label, but it is simply amplified insecurities, so if you deal with that - please proceed with caution.

KEY: (Yuri = Plisetsky, Yuuri = Katsuki)

Below the cut!

we have to cover this before anything else is said:

the figure skating world is brutal.

with that in mind, seeing as you had managed to jump the ranks as quickly as you did, people knew you as a formidable competitor.

yuri in particular knew how fierce of a competitor you were, seeing as he had trained with you and your brother victor under yakov for as long as he remembers.

so yes, while you two did grow up beside each other, you never really talked to anyone besides yakov, victor, and mila (from time to time)

in short, you two barely knew each other despite growing beside each other.

funny occurrence when you consider that he was of the few that knew of your habits when skating.

in similar fashion to your brother, you were almost a natural on the ice, and the way that you moved even off the ice was graceful yet intimidating.

it frankly shocked the other people competing against you in the senior division in which you debuted.

yuri was beside you the whole way.

literally.

when victor had made the claim that he was going to coach yuuri katsuki, he had suggested that you join him and train under him for the year.

you reluctantly agreed, though you also avoided saying anything to yakov as you weren’t as straightforward and recklessly fearless as victor is.

that said, yuri was a little disappointed and jealous.

he knew it was baseless, you were victor’s younger sibling, after all

what right did he have to keep you here?

what really bothered yuri was the fact that victor had made him a promise.

and he intended to make sure he kept it.

so when he showed up at the local ice rink out of the blue, you were left jaw-on-the-floor.

were you really surrounded by people that were purely impulse and nothing else?

you didn’t let the event prevent you from working on your senior debut pieces, though.

while yuri and yuuri were being coached by victor, it was only when they were done for the day that victor stood by and helped you with your senior debut.

you already had high expectations, after all - if you couldn’t hold up, what would happen?

you and yuri are the best new entries, so if either of you couldn’t hold up, what would go down if victor decided to quit coaching for competing in the next season and you had to go back to yakov?

what about if you had failed to grab even silver in your debut?

you knew you could do it, and you wanted the satisfaction that came with the draping of the medal around your neck, standing on the highest pedastal on the winner’s platform.

at least, that’s what you were trying to convince yourself to do.

you had been trying and failing to do an even more advanced jump than what you usually did.

and you wanted to use it in one of your routines

but the best you could do was the mount.

your landing was flawed at best, and a wipeout at worst.

it was starting to get to you.

many things swung around in your head.

‘is it my weight? is it being distributed incorrectly or did you just gain some?’

‘maybe it could be the routine itself. is it good enough to shock a crowd and win the gold?’

‘or, maybe, it’s just the fact that victor wasn’t able to focus and help you when you needed it most?’

the ideals that had been drilled into your head differed greatly from victor’s

and the fact that you had the expectation to live up to his abilities was starting to get to you for once.

normally, you’d just brush it off, but your competitive nature kicked into full gear and you felt the overwhelming need to avoid disappointing and losing.

you loved the feeling it brought to you. what else was there to say?

that, and you knew how victor could get when he had expectations.

just because you’re his family, doesn’t mean that you are exempt from his expectations of nikiforov gold.

which is why you worked your ass off.

you lost weight in favor of toning, you made sure to reach the rink before and after the three males entered and left.

more often than not, you would be eating a meal in your designated room in at the hot springs later at night, after your daily workout.

the new jump that you had been trying to accomplish was barely coming along

your routines were starting to slack.

you didn’t know what was going on, as things like this were normal, but they never reached this extent.

either way, you worked and worked and worked.

eventually, you had begun to skip dinner

you had begun to lose sleep

you had started to pass out at random times.

despite how much you tried to hide it and play it off as if everything was normal, everyone that saw you could tell that wasn’t the case by any means.

yuuri was trying to get you to stop and relax, but in your work-induced mindset led to you lashing out at him. no matter what he did, nothing worked.

yuri and victor had been aiming to get you to relax and stop working as well, but even they knew that you wouldn’t do that unless some more powerful entity forced you to.

that, and the sheer amount of disappointment that had started to rain over your being was starting to transform into anger.

you were beginning to have outbursts, your were beginning to perform as if you were a simple novice.

you were beginning to look as if you were going to fall apart after a single breath.

you failed to realize and care about your wellbeing until you wiped out on the ice and couldn’t get back up.

you were lucky that yuri had stayed back to get something he forgot, otherwise you might’ve been stuck there all night.

which is why you had to face the music and realize that this wasn’t the way to go about it.

he had made quick succession in making sure that you were okay as soon as he was exiting the rink and saw you passed out on the ice.

he panicked, frankly, but he made sure to get you off the ice and on a bench before calling yuuko over to tell her to call victor.

everything was moving fast, and he swore he could feel his heart racing in his ears as he saw you still on surface.

you looked pale, a weird mix of purple-blue and green, and the image left him speechless.

victor and yuuri rushed over to the rink as soon as they could, and when yuuri saw you his jaw fell to the floor

victor, on the other hand, ran to your side and picked you up.

he was able to notice the way you fell limp.

long story short, you looked dead.

it scared him senseless, and yuri could understand the sentiment.

over the time that he had spent in Japan, he had grown to appreciate the amount of work that you had put forth to succeed.

sadly, even he didn’t know that you would push yourself to this extent.

and he now knew why he became even more drawn to you.

you took pride in your abilities, but he never knew that you pushed yourself this far to achieve whatever goal you had set for yourself.

this event was what forced him to become aware of his feelings for you.

he could now realize why he always watched you, mesmerized at the way you carried yourself.

and he now understood why he wanted to make you feel safe.

after you were taken to the hot springs and taken care of, victor and yuri stayed by your side as you were still unconscious.

a warm towel was resting on your forehead and you were covered with a blanket.

for extra measures, they had even kept a small heater beside you to make sure that you didn’t freeze while resting.

“yuri, can i ask you something?”

“ah- what is it. victor?”

“if she decides to go back to yakov, watch over her for me.”

“...”

“i can tell. she has taken a liking to you, and i know you have taken one to her.”

“...”

“she trusts you, yuri. and after this, i fear that this could happen again, so please. make sure she takes a break.”

“...i promise, victor.”

“...thank you, yuri.”

victor left after that, patting yuri on the back

(he wondered what he failed to notice, despite his overprotective nature when it came to you.)

yuri sat there, overnight and into the next morning.

yuuri and victor came in to check on you, brought him breakfast, but everything the next day seemed to slow down.

eventually, you woke up, but you were lost. you were even more disappointed than you were before.

if you needed the cloth on your head changed out, yuri did it.

if you needed the heater turned on, he did it.

if you needed literally anything, he did it or got it for you.

otherwise, he’d just be silent and act as a safespace for you if you ever needed it.

similarly to how he might handle insecurities that you may have, he would be very careful with the subject.

he’d be a little awkward, though he’d power through for your sake.

after a few days of just relaxing and stretching, doing some light exercises (and i mean E X T R E M E L Y light exercises), he’d do some slight skating with you to calm you down.

if you wanted to see something from him on the ice, he’d do it for you.

hell, he even did his developing competition piece for you so you could have entertainment in analyzing his technique and ability.

he loved seeing the way your face would light up when you would watch him perform.

eventually, the time passed by.

you came to realize yuri plisetsky as himself completely, aside from just facing the persona that he projected to the media, people he worked aside, and to his fans.

it made you realize what you had been feeling the whole time.

you had been put on light work by victor, as he didn’t want to see this happen to you again, so weeks had passed before you went through your intense debut routines.

it was only on the night that the competition for who victor would coach came up that you were able to go through even a snippet of it.

yuri, following his loss, was distraught.

he still powered through the night, though.

when you saw him after the event, you asked him to join you on the ice.

you had a speaker set up on the edge of the rink, playing some lofi music to make sure the mood had stayed calm.

you two just skated around, no real reason as to why except to settle from the day.

“hey, yuri.”

“hmm?”

“you were amazing. as usual, but...”

“...but?”

“...i wanted to thank you.”

he stayed silent to let you continue, but you knew that he was listening. his skating had ceased just the slightest as he had been slightly ahead of you in the rink.

“i...i made a stupid mistake by failing to pay attention to my health, and i wanted to thank you for helping me.”

the silence that followed was comfortable, and as the both of you were very hesitant to say what loomed over your hearts, you were both already aware of what the both of you did meant.

‘i love you.’

the rest of the time in the rink was passed by you and him holding hands and making rounds around the rink

he even slipped some fancy ballroom moves in, making you flush and laugh. he did the same alongside you.

the next day, there was something melancholy in the air.

and even though you had told him that you wouldn’t be returning to yakov for the season, you did emphasize that you wanted to continue talking to him.

“hey, yurio!”

“how many times do i- don’t call me yurio!”

“not gonna happen. either way, before you leave, promise me something?”

“what is it?” (it was gentle, and the scene made victor, yuuri, and yuuko gush)

“i better see you on that pedastal kissing that gold medal, plitsetsky.”

“only if i see you up there as well. though you better be careful, or i am going to ignore it.”

“got it, got it. now...promise me?”

“i promise.”

#yuri plisetsky #yuriplisetsky #yuri plisetsky x reader #yuriplisetskyxreader #yurionince #yuri on ice #yurioniceyurio #yuri on ice yurio #yurio x reader #yurioxreader #yurixreader #yuri x reader #plisetsky x reader #plisetskyxreader #yurionicexreader #yuri on ice headcanons #yurioniceheadcanons

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rabbitrah · 3 years

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To Anyone Still Kind of Fucked up about their Grades in Elementary/Middle/High School:

Whenever I see the posts going around with people rehashing grade drama from school like “Fuck that kid who would act like he failed when he got a 92″ or “Gifted children in elementary school all have depression now” or “Gifted children are whiners and know nothing about how shitty under grade-level kids were treated” and all variations thereof make me feel INSANE because people will act like academic grades in school is some kind of inherent, unavoidable class system. Even takes like “this is why the entire grading/school system is bullshit” don’t really work because every classroom, teacher, school, district, and country will handle assessment/grading differently. If you are carrying any of these wounds with you as a teen/adult I beg of you to realize that your experience was created by a number of things:

How assessment generally worked during your school experience (all your teachers probably assessed you differently from each other, but the “norm” or whatever experiences made a big impression will have molded your perspective on this)

How your family thought about and talked about grades

How your peers / their families / y’all’s community thought about and talked about grades.

Your own personal learning profile, history, and mental/emotional state.

Or to put it another way, your individual experience with grades was influenced by factors in all five “ecological systems” that affect a developing child:

[Image Description: A circle divided into 6 rings. From the outside going in, the rings are the 1. Chronosystem: environmental changes that occur over the life course. 2. Microsystem: attitudes and ideologies of the culture. 3. Exosystem: Extended family and neighbors. 4. Mesosystem: no description is given, but arrows indicate interaction between the 3rd and 5th ring occurs here. 4. Microsystem: Family, School, Peers, Neighborhood playground, Daycare facility, Religious organization, health services. 5. Child. End Description.]

(This is a theory developed by a guy named Brofenbrenner ... tbh Russian psychologists always had the best stuff to say about how the role of community in development. Thank you communism.)

So what you have to remember is that every single student is having a slightly different experience based on all the possible combinations of the above factors. Assessment in elementary, middle, and and high school is (or SHOULD be) nothing more than a tool to track learning progress for the students and teaching progress for the teacher. It’s literally just data. It should only be treated as data. Unfortunately this idea has routinely been corrupted by families who want their children to succeed at the highest level possible, teachers and administrators panicking about how poor grades could impact their funding or job security, and yes, a bit of a cultural meritocracy where we start shifting people into “smart” and “stupid” categories and treating them differently according to those labels.

Where painful experiences come from

They occur when one or more of your ecological systems makes you feel like:

Your grades are an end-all-be-all measure of worth (positive or negative).

Your grades are purely a measure of intelligence.

Your grades are purely a measure of effort (controversial. some educators/researchers think you should encourage kids to see all grades as a measure of effort, but this ignores other factors and may burden kids with an overly-powerful sense of responsibility.)

Your grades are meaningless and don’t matter at all (your grades are data. So they have value and matter. This perspective encourages kids to stop caring/trying.)

Your grades are the final goal (the grade itself is worth more than mastering a skill.)

Your grades and your classmate’s grades can and should be compared and ranked (not even going to go into why this is a terrible idea.)

A lower grade than usual, or lower than desired (by individual, teacher, or family) should be shamed/punished.

The individuals with the highest grades should be loudly and publicly praised (Victories should be celebrated and shared, but if grades are the measure of student success, then data is being praised instead of actual mastery/success.)

Other peoples’s grades are your business / Your grades are other people’s business.

So who should you blame for your painful experiences?

Maybe you had a family member, classmate, or teacher who inflicted a particularly nasty wound on you because of your grades (whatever they were). In this case, go ahead and ladle out some blame. But as for the larger, systemic picture, preventing this kind of damage means change needs to happen throughout the ecological systems. Families, schools, communities, government agencies, and more need to promote the idea of what grades are vs. what they aren’t and treat them accordingly.

What’s the Solution?

Obviously, such a large-scale change doesn’t have a single solution. That’s why education professionals have known this stuff for decades and kids are still having shitty experiences in school. That doesn’t mean a cultural and legislative shift isn’t possible, though. All such shifts come as the result of many coalesced individual changes. As an individual you can:

Place your own painful experiences into context. You were exposed to some subpar attitudes, misinformation, and stressful/humiliating experiences. As a result, you might have also inflicted some of these attitudes and experiences on others.

If you have any children in your life, or plan to have children in your life, remember that you are in one of their spheres of influence! You can contribute the perspective that grades are just data. Nothing more, nothing less. We can use them to say “Oh I understood this and didn’t understand that,” and sometimes to say “Oh, I slept badly the day before I took this test.” They should never be moralized.

Remember that the REAL goal is to master a skilll or a concept. This still applies whether you’re still a student or not.

Encourage a love of learning for learning’s sake in yourself and in the kids in your life. This is one of the most powerful tools you can have.

If you are a teacher you better know all this already!!!!! But here is a friendly reminder to carefully monitor how you assess, how you talk about assessment, how your students talk about assessment, how your coworkers talk about assessment, and how your students’ families talk about assessment! I could write more but LIKE I SAID you should KNOW this stuff. I shouldn’t have to tell you who Brofenbrenner is! Do your part!

TLDR: Grades and other forms of assessment are just data. While data is important, they are often treated as more than what they are. Your own pain related to grades is a result of many spheres of influence. The pain (or lack of it) in others is a result of their own unique spheres of influence.

EDIT: I don’t really talk about the facts of race, class, gender, language, etc that play an undeniable role in student experience. There is so much to be said on the topic and I encourage you to learn more about educational inequality as it relates to these systems. I just wanted to focus on specifically individual and cultural attitudes about grades and how they can cause harm to the individual.

#teacher tag

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crapitskizaru · 5 years

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What happens in Budapest, Stays in Budapest.(Clumsy!Trafalgar Law x Eustass Kid)

Warning: excessive drinking + teenage ooc law but whatever

Word Count: 2,1k+

(Part I)

Law was drunk. The sheer fact that he was aware of his condition made him feel better, but just a little bit. Even though he was sitting on a pavement, just outside the hostel, his whole body seemed to be spinning as if the ground didn’t provide enough stabilization anymore.

In one hand he clutched a bottle of vodka.

Brilliant idea, he thought, getting drunk in an unknown city at night. Cora-san would have been proud.

As he took another sip, and then another, his mouth overrun by the stinging taste, his mind felt foggy but paradoxically clearer than normally. The intrusive thoughts that had accompanied him wherever he went now seemingly evaporated, thank God.

He grimaced when the phone rang in the pocket of his sweats. Not only did the caller’s name signalize nothing less than pure trouble, it also meant he had to start pretending as if he was going back to the hostel - which, to be frank, he wasn’t planning on at all.

“Man, where are you? We’re having a blast here!” Ace shouted over the phone, some loud noises in the background only confirming his words. Suddenly he faked - Law assumed so, since it couldn’t possibly be sincere - a dramatic gasp.

“Hottie alert, dude. Kid’s here~”

As if I care, Law thought, but decided to keep the remark to himself.

“Mhm.”

“C’mon, I know you wanna see him. You’re in love, you fool~” Ace sang. Thankfully, before anyone was able to hear more of his elaborations, someone’s giggling shifted Ace’s focus away from the Law-torturing topic. The only thing shorter than that boy’s attention span were the breaks in between his naps.

“I’ll be-” Law didn’t get a chance to finish before some cracking noises and repeating beeps signaled Ace has already hung up. “-there.”

Law sighed and measured the amount of vodka left in the bottle. Not nearly as full as he’d want it to be, but it had to be enough - at least before he finds another miserable drunk who’d be so kind-hearted as to share some alcohol.

He hastily stood up, leaving his own brain no room for negotiations, and wobbled over in the direction of the hostel.

He regretted making that decision almost immediately. If it wasn’t for the nearest lamp post he clung so desperately onto, he would have landed face-on, sprawled on the dirty pavement. Apparently he was much more drunk than he previously thought, pure dizziness that ran through his veins only impairing his judgement further.

As if wandering around in a mist, Law shoved himself through the threshold of the hostel and followed the party noises on the upper floor. How his legs managed to bend enough to beat the steep stairs, he had no idea. Had his limbs grown longer in the past few hours? It certainly seemed so.

The party was almost as much of a mess as Law was; people smearing into a blur in front of his eyes, thankfully paying no attention to his humble persona.

“You look pathetic.”

Law flinched, looking around. After a couple of excessive blinks, he finally made out a shape of a man standing next to him - it looked as if he was wearing a red jester hat.

“Cool hat.”

The man was attractive, as for Law’s taste, and he smelled like heaven - at least in comparison to everyone else in the room, Law included, reeking of vodka and cigarettes.

“Cool hat!” he blurted out again, just in case the other man, who after Law’s closer inspection turned out to be his classmate, didn’t hear him the first time. Law’s fingers tightened around the bottle of vodka he still held tightly onto, his foggy mind ordering him to take a huge sip a little bit too fast - causing him to choke on the stinging liquid and sputtering all of it onto the floor.

Kid sighed heavily and caressed his temple. He decided on keeping himself clean of alcohol that night; judging from the pitiful sight of Law barely steadying himself against the nearest wall and almost sliding to the ground in the process, the decision was indeed one of the best ones Kid ever made in his life.

“Hey, you know what?” Law whispered conspiratorially, leaning into his ear. “Feel my shirt.”

Kid looked down at the hem of the button-up shirt, now crumpled and stained with various liquids, being offered up to him vigorously.

“Go ahead,” Law encouraged. With another deep sigh, Kid grabbed the hem in between his two fingers, touching as little of the fabric as possible.

“See? It’s made of boyfriend material.”

Kid could do nothing more in response to this circus than to roll his eyes and look away, as if he was occupied and unavailable for conversation.

Of course, Law didn’t give up.

Instead of a pick-up line, he chose something entirely different, a commonly known method of flirting - he tilted to the side and, clutching onto Kid’s chest, slowly slid down to the floor.

In contrast to all the assumptions, Law was perfectly aware of his behavior - he just couldn’t help it. The buzzing feeling in his head, all the pins and needles spreading around his limbs, it was simply overwhelming, clouding his rational thoughts.

“Oh, for God’s sake-...Look.” Kid gathered Law from the ground, like he’d do with a bag of flour, and pointed across the room. “See that tray up there? With all the food?”

Kid didn’t know whether to be pleased or worried when Law nodded enthusiastically at the question, probably unaware of just why he was nodding.

“Great. Perfect. Go and eat all of it. Maybe it will absorb the vodka in your stomach. Now leave me alone.”

With a hard push to the back, Law toddled over to the food corner. There wasn’t much on the tray - few bowls with cheeto puffs, slices of pizza and nachos in salsa.

Carefully, ever so slowly, Law guided his hand around the tray and stuffed his mouth with food. He was almost sure he smeared the sauce on his cheek a couple of times, but he didn’t want to risk wiping it away - not when he was finally able to keep his balance for more than few seconds.

Looking around the room with his vision a little bit sharper, he spotted Ace on the couch; his arms wrapped around two people sitting by his each side. The energetic goofball, obviously drunk out of his mind, spotted his gaze and sent a mischievous wink, immediately focusing back on the conversation.

Frankly, Law didn’t know what to do with himself. So he decided to go back to Kid one more time - after all, he had that funny jester hat on, he must have been a very laid-back kind of guy.

Grabbing the tray as a totem of apology, he waddled over to the familiar figure standing in the opposite corner of the room. There were a lot of people he had to pass, but he managed to stand his ground firmly, ignoring the painful throbbing in his head and the tingly feeling in his arms and legs.

Kid was just taking a sip of his drink - the muscles on his arm stretching deliciously as he moved.

For a split second, Law wished to have those arms around him. Then he was already shaking away from that thought, trying to keep away the other ones, soon following and sending his brain more than inappropriate visuals.

“Hey, I-” Law wasn’t able to finish the sentence when, all of a sudden, he felt his heart squeeze tightly inside his chest - the courtesy of his wobbly legs somehow tangling with each other and sending him straight onto the floor.

Naturally, he dropped the tray. The contents of it falling down onto his head, but not before the majority of them landed on Kid’s chest and thighs, covering him in food.

When Law got his breath back, he immediately wished he didn’t. The party around went on, unbothered, but a few groups of people already noticed the incident, grabbing their phones and capturing the scene for Snapchat.

The alcoholic buzzing in his head was nothing compared to the immense heat of embarrassment hitting his whole body in waves. Law groaned, trying to sit up.

Somewhere above him, Kid inhaled deeply. It was this kind of inhale which purpose was to prevent an incoming tantrum, Law knew that very well.

“Fuck,” Law whispered to himself and managed to get up. “I-I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.”

Because of his hasty movements the room started spinning rapidly, twice as hard as before. Law wasn’t sure why, but he felt tears gathering in his eyes - all the buzzing and tingling, the embarrassment and the sheer knowledge that he was making an idiot out of himself must have been just too much to handle as for his tired brain.

“That’s it,” Kid growled, trying to look intimidating. Trying, because a cheeto puff was stuck to his cheek. “We’re taking this outside.”

Loud whistles and yells surrounded them when Kid tugged harshly on Law’s arm, almost shoving him out of the room, now full of people with their phone cameras on, relentlessly taking pictures.

Much to his own brain’s surprise, Law found himself in a small room with sharp, white lighting.

“You want to beat me up in an elevator? That’s not how they do it in the movies, though. We have to go outside, then you start punching me in the face-”

“Shut the fuck up, Trafalgar,” Kid muttered, pressing the button to the highest floor. “You’re seriously annoying. Even more when you’re drunk.”

Law was curled up against the wall, trying to keep the smell of salsa out of his nostrils. The nauseous feeling was already strong enough because of the alcohol, he didn’t need another trigger.

During the short ride up, he desperately tried to regain his senses.

I’m not that drunk, he kept repeating in his head, but the blurry vision didn’t falter. His thoughts were starting to feel rational again, although not yet rational enough.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, looking up at Kid. He had a simple, black T-shirt on, now stained and greasy, but he looked great. Law immediately cursed himself for that thought, glad that Kid couldn’t read minds. At least he didn’t say it out loud, he couldn’t have been that drunk then. “You look great.”

Kid’s eyebrow twitched, but before the redhead could as much as react to that pitiful attempt at a compliment, the elevator’s door ringed open.

A wave of fresh air hit them, taking the strong smell of food away.

Law didn’t register his legs getting his body up from the ground, but soon he found himself on the top floor of the hostel, on the observation deck.

The sight of the city at night was beautiful, even for his foggy brain - somehow, it made him focus purely on the view, forgetting about his latest embarrassment.

“Don’t fall over,” Kid growled when Law gripped the railing and leaned on it. “You’re still drunk, you idiot.”

“I didn’t mean to dump the cheeto puffs on you,” Law said, breathing in the air. His dull headache was going away with each inhale. “And the nachos. And the salsa too. And the-”

“For fuck’s sake, shut up already. I get it.”

Law looked to the side and saw him standing near.

“You’re not mad?”

“Of course I am. You fucker. But I know how being drunk is. Stuff happens. Especially the embarrassing kind.” Kid grinned, his eyes locked on the city view in front. “Can’t wait to get all of the snaps they took of you.”

A sudden wave of weariness took over Law’s head, but he fought it back.

“Where’s your hat?” he asked out of curiosity.

“I never had a hat,” Kid snarled with contempt. “It’s just my hair, you fool.”

“Oh.”

They both admired the sight of the buzzing streets and the glowing lights, sprawled out in front of their eyes. After a few moments, Law’s eyes began to close until he found himself at the verge of consciousness, almost slipping into deep slumber right where he stood.

“Woah, dude. At least get away from the railing before you pass out. I’m not going to scrape off your remainings when you fall over and mash into the street like a pancake.”

Law groaned lightly, rubbing his forehead. He noticed his senses already sobered up a bit.

“I hope this incident won’t haunt me for long.”

“Oh, it sure as hell will. I’ll haunt the shit out of you. Years from now I’ll be reminding you about this, I can promise you that much.”

After a moment of relative silence, Law sighed with surrender. “Great.”

#trafalgar law #eustass kid #Portgas D. Ace #one piece #xoxobb #portgas d ace #one piece imagines #one piece imagine #one piece scenario #op scenario #op imagines #op imagine

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dingoes8myrp · 5 years

Text

Alien Franchise Thoughts

This weekend I happened to catch and rewatch Alien: Covenant. Right after that I caught and rewatched Aliens. This was sheerly through channel surfing luck that I watched these movies in this order. But, in doing so I connected some dots and had some realizations that gave me a new appreciation for the prequel series.

A Bit of Background

I can’t remember if I saw Alien or The Terminator first, so Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor get equal billing for being “the first” female action heroes I ever encountered. Prior to them I’d seen Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis watching action films with my dad. So seeing not Tom Skerrit’s Captain Dallas or John Hurt’s Kane but Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley take on the role of Action Hero was essential to my development as an eleven-year-old girl. I’m not even exaggerating for the sake of drama. Watching Ripley in Alien was one of the first examples I saw in media of a woman in a role I’d only seen taken on by male characters before. For this reason alone, the original Alien holds a special place in my heart.

The Original Series

I have mixed feelings about the franchise as a whole. I loved Alien and Aliens to me was just as good and is one of the few sequels that measures up to the original. It lost me at Alien 3 when they killed off Newt and Hicks in the opening crash land. Forcing Ripley into the “sole survivor” role becomes formulaic here and… honestly I’ve had no desire to rewatch Alien 3 and completely forget the entire plot other than the fact that it takes place in a prison setting and Ripley had to shave her head. And they killed off Ripley! I remember being very upset all around at Alien 3 and I think I mentally disowned it.

Alien: Resurrection brought me back around because Ripley was back! And there was Winona Ryder! However, Ripley wasn’t the same Ripley we remembered. She was some clone or hybrid or… I don’t really know what they were going for there. But, I looked at this film as a standalone almost AU installment and I’m actually very okay with it. Not my favorite by a longshot, but a slight redemption from Alien 3’s mess.

Alien vs. Predator

No. Just no. Denied. Why? What even? WHY?!

I’ve seen a few of these movies and if you’re a fan of big monsters fighting one another with a bunch of random humans caught in the middle, these movies might be your jam. If you’re a Predator or an Alien fan, though, it kind of doesn’t fit in with either in my opinion.

The Prequels

When I watched Prometheus I hadn’t done any research on it at all, so I had no idea it had anything to do with the Alien franchise. I saw a space-themed action-horror film with Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Noomi Rapace, and Michael Fassbender involved and I was IN, man. Honorable mention to Logan Marshall-Green, who is also awesome but I didn't catch in the trailers. So he was a nice surprise.

The opening scene was unworldly and gorgeous, much like the opening of The Mists of Avalon, which is a weird comparison, I know. But I was enchanted by this opening scene much like I was as I watched Morgaine Le Fey float through the mist that served as a doorway to a magical world. We see an unknown being on an alien planet perform a mysterious ritual and then plummet into the water. The first clue was the title card, which even then I thought “Oh, cool! They did the Alien thing!” but hadn’t connected it as directly related. I’d just thought it was a subtle nod because of the Ridley Scott connection.

I loved Prometheus as a film. I had a very similar reaction to it that I had to the original Alien movie. We had an ensemble of characters, all with their own personalities and enough development to make us care. Noomi Rapace became the reluctant hero as opposed to the expected Charlize Theron, who had been in the Ripley role (“He’s not coming on my ship.”). As the Alien clues dropped, I picked them up and quickly (excitedly) realized the film was somehow connected – it had to be. For me, that was just the cherry on top of a fantastic film.

Alien: Covenant made me feel much like Alien 3 did. The ending of Prometheus had been hopeful, echoing both the endings of Alien and Aliens. Our hero Elizabeth Shaw had survived and would bring android David along to find the Engineers and get her answers. Ridley Scott himself spoke about a possible sequel involving Elizabeth and David trying to do just that.

And then we got Alien: Covenant. Elizabeth and David were nowhere to be found and instead we were (hastily) introduced to an entire new crew of characters whose development was severely lacking in the film. We don’t even know everyone’s paired up in romantic couples until people start dying. When David did finally appear to rescue everyone I was excited. Yes! Finally, a tie-in to Prometheus. And then we learn Elizabeth died suspiciously and the franchise is turned over to David. To say I was infuriated would be an understatement.

I was more excited about the project Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn spoke about at a comic-con panel that would’ve followed Alien and Aliens (and maybe retconned some stuff) than I was about whatever Ridley Scott did next (I still kind of am, if I’m honest). Why would someone take a franchise helmed by a powerhouse female action hero and then make its lead an insane android and his pet virus? Why would I want to follow this asshole instead of Shaw, Daniels, or even Vickers?

Final Analysis

Watching Aliens right on the heels of Alien: Covenant made it easier for me to make some connections and parallels. In Aliens, a group of marines attempts to travel to a space colony that lost contact to see what’s going on. Ripley is brought along (with Burke, that shit) as a consultant “just in case” (even though everyone treats her like she has a case of the vapors when she tells them about the xenomorphs). The premise makes little sense on the outset. However, when we later learn Burke’s true motivation it makes perfect sense. Burke believes Ripley, although he makes a show of the opposite. And he wants to bag an alien to bring home and sell to the highest bidder. When the soldiers start stomping carelessly around blowing holes in things with there big dumb weapons, it’s infuriating to the audience, knowing what we know. However, it’s also infuriating to Ripley and we’re reminded why she’s there. These are soldiers who, of course, have no idea what to do with an alien species and probably aren’t used to exploring alien environments.

This is very similar to what’s going on in Alien: Covenant. Not made clear in the film due to the character development scenes (such as “the last supper” prologue) being cut, this crew are explorers and colonists. They’re not astronauts or scientists. A few of the characters appear to be military escorts or officers. Of course they’re tromping around without a care in the world. They don’t know any better. Their captain, Jake Bronson, dies mid-journey and his second-in-command, Billy Crudup’s Oram, is super insecure about his new position. This is frequently shown in his interactions with Katherine Waterson’s No First Name Daniels, who was also Bronson’s wife. Daniels has a comradery and respect with the crew not present with Oram. So, when Oram has to start making decisions he’s acting more on his insecurity and his need to Do Something and be taken seriously than acting on the information and advice he’s given. Also, once we know the relationships between characters everyone’s bizarre anti-survival behavior makes a ton of sense. After a certain point in the film, everyone has lost a spouse and/or a ton of friends. Everyone is grieving, scared, and not at all trained to be doing what they’re doing, and they don’t have a Ripley on board to help guide them. “Game over, man! Game over!”

Yeah, Alien: Covenant is what happens when you make every character a Hudson.

Watching Ripley’s reaction to Bishop in Aliens reminded me how iffy Ash the A.I. was in Alien. You know, he got all murdery and everything.

Then I remembered – oh, yeah – Alien: Covenant is a prequel. This means David is an A.I. precursor of some kind to Ash… which means he’s a faulty A.I. Also, Ripley encountered creatures and situations no one had discovered before to our knowledge (due to everyone’s reaction to Ripley’s story in Aliens). This ultimately means no one can make it out of these prequels alive or it compromises Ripley’s established story.

David is a faulty A.I., which hasn’t yet been experienced by anyone living who has encountered androids in space exploration if we go by the example of Ash in Alien. Failsafes haven’t been given to androids yet to limit their emotional depths or put rules in place to prevent them from harming humans. He’s creating creatures that are new. No one knows they exist, so no one is prepared for them (just like the crew of the Nostromo wasn’t prepared for the xenomorphs in Alien). Even heavily trained soldiers, scientists, and astronauts will be encountering deadly things they don’t know are out there: a highly intelligent rogue A.I. capable of experiencing emotion and evolution, mutated weaponized creatures unlike anything they’ve ever seen before, and an alien virus that mutates its host and is undetectably ingested.

Guys, ain’t nobody emerging as the lone heroic survivor of anything in this franchise (except the fucking xenomorph).

Having digested and accepted that information, I am grimly awaiting what happens next, and I really hope with all my giddy little heart that theorized Aliens sequel Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn teased is going to happen. I’ll even take a video game version.

Hicks and Newt deserved better and I stand by that.

#alien #aliens #alien covenant #dingometa

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noelclover · 5 years

Text

Off The Cuff 07/05/2019

Read a gaming article, want to post about it: It’s about game journalists. So I guess...

Ranty.

As per usual I copy pasta paragraphs and argue against them by typing them out in an attempt to rid myself of the headaches. Moving past the Event Hubs bit:

> EventHubs is just the latest battleground for a much larger and divisive issue: Who gets to be a games journalist? Some players believe the industry’s reporters should be particularly competent (if not masterful) at practically every game they cover. They must be a gamer among gamers, one that lives, breathes, and devours gaming 24 hours a day.

🍀 Not quite true. Particularly competent implies that you have to be good at the game, which isn’t what most gamers expect out of games journalists when they review a game. What is expected is some level of competency that can be considered somewhat “average”. If you play “Prinny Can I Really Be The Hero Dude?” and die 999 times, unable to finish the game and then tell me it’s a really hard game because the fights are a pain in the ass and you couldn’t move your thumb anymore from the button mash, hey, I get you buddy. It’s fine. If you play a shooter but you can’t, say, move and shoot, or move the camera and shoot and then tell me it’s really hard while on the easiest setting, I’m gonna have to doubt you hard. If you pull a Dean Takahashi on me... Well, yeah. Most people don’t expect games journalists to be a “gamers among gamers”, or MLG 1080 no scope gods. But then again, I guess that’s why the term “some players” is used at the start. So if even, say, a miniscule 0.1% of gamers do think like that, they wouldn’t be lying.

> Esports reporter Sabriel Mastin regularly covers Blizzard Entertainment’s first-person shooter Overwatch for Overbuff’s blog. She was surprised by EventHubs’ requirement, in part because she believes there’s a fundamental difference between analyzing a game as a journalist and demonstrating technical skills as a player. “For example, I cover Overwatch from general news to the highest levels of the game with the Overwatch League,” she told the Daily Dot. “I understand it at a very high level, but I’m in the middle of the competitive ladder. […] That doesn’t mean I don’t understand high-level plays and strategies of what the pro players are doing.”

🍀 She’s absolutely right. There’s a difference however in being an analyst and a game reviewer. Look at sports for example. We don’t expect sports journalists to be able to compete with whatever football team is up there right now but we most certainly expect them to be able to tell us what’s going on if we ever get confused. Same with cars. I wouldn’t trust Top Gear to cover a car if they can’t drive and base everything off whatever the specs of the car are. There’s a fundamental difference in watching and doing.

Also middle of the competitive ladder is probably pretty damn good. Or at least a really good indicator that she knows her mechanics really well.

> This is exactly what happened to GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi. 🍀 Ah, shit. Here we go again.

> In the games industry, Takahashi regularly breaks stories and approaches controversial news with a level head. If you’re a games journalist, he’s a role model for your own career. But if you’re just a regular gamer who doesn’t track the industry’s most important writers, you probably know Takahashi for his abysmal Cuphead gameplay. In a viral video, Takahashi struggles to clear Cuphead’s easiest part by far: its tutorial. One scene shows him unable to clear a tall pillar for over a full minute, despite the fact the game walks the player through how to pass the obstacle. Without context, the video implies Takahashi is a clueless writer who barely knows how to use a controller.

🍀 I don’t know about “most important writers” or being a role model. But then again, I’m a “regular gamer who doesn’t track the industry’s most important writers”. I’m a regular gamer who looks at the end product being marketed to the audience: the articles.

Even with context, he was absolutely horrible at it. So much so that I think there’s going to forever be some doubt about his abilities to actually assess games for consumption. I remember reading that it allegedly wasn’t the first time he did it either. I think it was an RPG or something, but he didn’t realize that there was a menu button and that he could increase his stats or something, making the game easier. Not sure how true that is, but Cuphead most certainly didn’t help his reputation.

> But an explanatory post written by Takahashi paints a different picture. While previewing the game during Germany’s Gamescom trade fair, he “was messing around at first” and “wasn’t focused and serious until I had warmed up,” which means he easily missed clues telling the player how to complete the tutorial. This makes a lot of sense if you’ve ever been to a gaming convention as a member of the press. With so many games to preview, interviews to conduct, and time-sensitive stories to write, it’s impossible to give a game the same undivided attention as you would at home.

🍀 You don’t mess around for a whole minute at a tutorial segment, being a complete idiot who can’t Jump And Dash. It takes a child maybe 30 seconds. Sure, we can miss things in games, but it was pretty spelled out. The camera even gave you all the clues you needed the moment you got into the pit.

You can’t tell me you need to give Cuphead’s tutorial your complete undivided attention. It’s fine that he messed up in the stage itself, I mean, platformers aren’t really everybody’s thing, although the way he played it looked like he was playing platformers for the first time, but a tutorial like that does not require your complete, undivided attention. It requires a bit of it, but not so much that you enter The Zone trying to bloody Jump And Dash.

> Nearly two years later, the controversy echoes a point Mastin made about the EventHubs job listing: In a world with Gamergate, “skill” is used to gatekeep marginalized players and determine who is (or isn’t) a real gamer.

🍀 Except it’s not used to “ gatekeep marginalized players and determine who is or isn’t a “real gamer”. “Skill” is a mostly arbitary measure people have always had to determine if someone is competing in your bracket, or in the case of games journalists, determine if they know what the hell they’re actually talking about.

I’ve seen people criticize Monster Hunter for not being Devil May Cry. They really didn’t know what the game was about.

You can criticize a game for being clunky, the classic Resident Evil games were pretty darn clunky for example, you can say that their controls didn’t make any sense. You can criticize a game’s gameplay for not feeling rewarding, but to be able to tell, you’d have to be able to play the game, which means having some measure of skill to get through the game in the first place.

In a skill based activity, skill is to some degree linked to understanding. Games like Monster Hunter and Dark Souls work like that. The better understanding you have of your tools (iframes, armour, move set), the better your understanding of game mechanics, the thing you interact with to get through the game.

> “It can certainly feel that the conversation is coming from right-leaning people, especially after being around during [the Gamergate] era,” Mastin said. “The ‘discussion’ has the vestige of that time when we’d hear, ‘Game journalists need to be objective, taking out any emotion from the game.’ I don’t remember the discussion about being ‘good’ popping up before that time.”

🍀 And here it is, one of the myriad things I really, really dislike because it feels dishonest. Do you see it?

“right-leaning people”

I really dislike this because it’s often times done as a smear. What’s that? You don’t care about politics and found Anita Sarkeesian’s video questionable? You must be some skinhead Nazi son-of-a-bitch. What’s that? You think Dean Takahashi was iffy? You must be a right-wing trogdolyte.

I dislike this because it shuts down any conversation to be had and is a very underhanded dodge method. It also pushes people to extremes because they develop a sense of bitterness from being silenced.

But hey, who gives a shit. Criticism of game journalists apparently makes you “right-wing”, whatever the hell that even means.

Rant aside. I don’t know anyone saying that they need to “take any emotion from the game”, back then and now. I remember people saying that they shouldn’t be sleeping with the person who was reviewing their game, much like with every other field, to prevent as much bias as possible. Very different things.

I also remember people saying that you had to be “good”, but the definition of “good” was “decent at the game”.

> But a skilled gamer isn’t necessarily a skilled reporter. Journalism has its own requirements for basic competency: a strong voice, a powerful command of the written word, the people skills necessary to talk to sources, and the humility required to cooperate with an editor and revise a story. These are not necessarily things you can learn from playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimateor Overwatch. On some level, you have to sacrifice in-game time to focus on becoming a better reader, writer, and communicator. If that means you occasionally struggle with a difficult game like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Enter the Gungeon, then so be it. That doesn’t make you any less of a games journalist.

🍀 The article is right in that being a skilled gamer doesn’t make you a skilled journalist. You do have to sacrifice some thing for another. Doesn’t explain Dean’s abysmal performance in the tutorial or when we see game journalists play FPS games and move their character, not the camera, to turn around and shoot something.

Look. You don’t have to be a god at a game to review it. It would be untrue to say that nobody ever said this, but it would also be untrue to say that that’s what people are asking for. It’s like if you were buying that overly hyped cheese tart. You really, really want the cheese tart reviewer to have taste buds. It’d be great if they can tell you if there’s some essence of cheese-flower in the tart or something, but that’s a bonus. You want them to be able to tell you how it generally tastes, the mouth feel, if it’s crumble, etc etc. If that’s the standard for most, if not everything, fields, then why should it be different for gaming?

> But in a world infested with Gamergaters, it’s hard to read a job posting like EventHubs’ in good faith. If you’re not a pro gamer, you’re an SJW charlatan.

🍀 Infested is a strange term to use for people who want ethics in game journalism and don’t want to be hit over the head with some forced SJW aesop or writing which takes the story or setting in a choke hold, like with Andromeda where apparently the Asari, a unisex species has what’s basically gendered pronouns because why the fuck not. (Seriously, it’s a small issue I know, but it would have been great to explore how a unisex species works, if they use different pronouns for the different stages in like, etc etc, and if they do, why? How the hell would they perceive gender anyway? Asari can breed with pretty much whoever they want, genitals be damned.)

Infested is a strange term to use for people who rolled their eyes to Far Cry 5 reviewers that said that the game wasn’t “political enough” (to summarize) because they wanted the game to bash the hell out of Trump and his supporters and gave the game a lower score.

(No, seriously. They expected a French company who wants to make money to alienate a portion of their player base to make some political statement that they most likely do not care about so that some folks who hate Trump can get a hard on for 5 seconds or something.)

I don’t think anyone who plays video games is really against “diversity” in video games. I say it in quotation marks because the definition of diversity is ridiculously loose. I mean, a while ago we got some guy criticizing The Witcher 3, a game based on a nearly mono-European-ethnicity country’s cultural history and mythology, a nation which doesn’t get much spotlight in anything aka Poland because it doesn’t have “people of colour”.

I don’t know about you lot, but I would honestly rather play a game that’s based off of Polish stories, Egyptian mythos than some shooter based in America, even if the character is somehow, super specifically, Malaysian Chinese and likes Nasi Lemak and Ramlee burgers more than he should.

And no. You’re not an SJW charlatan because you’re not a pro-gamer. It’s a false dichotomy to say that. If you’re an SJW charlatan, it’s because you’re an SJW charlatan. It’s almost as bloody stupid as saying that you’re a right-winger because you play games. Or you’re part of the Yang-Gang because you’re Asian because he’s Asian. (For the record, I’m Malaysian, again, but the Yang-Gang thing is pretty cool.)

Stop digging Gamergate back out from it’s grave. You’ve taken the piss on it’s corpse, spat at people who gave too much of a damn about games and repeatedly use it as a boogeyman to further your bullshit instead of, oh, I don’t know, using it as the lesson it should be:

Do your job and tell us if a game is decent, fun or bad, your political standpoint be damned.

Overall, I’m kind of disappointed yet at the same time I’m not. I really want game journalists to do their job and tell me how fun a game was. I mentioned the Diablo 3 PC Gamer Malaysia article a bunch of times, but recently I remembered the article they wrote for Evil Genius. It didn’t question the morality of the game, it didn’t go on about how there could be more inclusion or some shit like that.

It talked about the game and made me wish I could play it.

#don't mind me #off the cuff

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exteriorpaintingtips · 3 years

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Why You Should Hire A Commercial Painter To Decorate Your Building's Interior

As the cold weather begins to set in, a lot of businesses in Sarasota are in various stages of planning or are in the process of completing interior projects for their buildings. As the autumn colors begin to roll across Florida projects that range from electrical work to exterior painting and exterior painting are being completed. If you are considering an interior project, now is the perfect time to start planning and getting completed the interior work required for your commercial building.

Whatever big or tiny your interior project checklist is, hiring painters Sarasota FL for the interior painting of your building is the only guaranteed way to be sure that your projects are executed to the highest standards. The painting task may appear straightforward enough to be done in your house, however, there are many advantages to hiring a commercial painter for your building's needs in the interior. There are times when you're unsure to hire a professional painter or not sure what services they provide.

Safety First

Commercial painters have the knowledge and capability to keep up with the latest developments in safety measures when it comes to interior projects. Commercial painters can bring the required tools and knowledge to any job site to create a safe and secure work environment. A good commercial painter is well-versed in safety procedures and has strong ties with other companies. They should also be able to carry certificates of safety practices and procedures to prove their dedication to safety.

Insurances and Guarantees

Commercial painters can bring additional security measures to your interior project by adding certifications as well as insurance. This will ensure that everyone who is involved in the project is safe.

If there is a incident or damage an authorized commercial painter must be insured. If you decide not to employ a commercial painter you are at risk of being charged with a crime. you could be held accountable for any incident that occurs.

The insurance company that provides coverage for commercial painters includes workers, property and site. It means that in the event that anyone gets hurt while painting or damages your building, you're protected from the cost of medical treatment and repairs. This is an important selling point for building owners because it protects you from any liability in the course of your project.

Time is Money

It's essential to your bottom line. Closing your business for any length of time could affect the amount of revenue your business earns. Employing a commercial painter could benefit you by minimizing the amount of time needed to finish a project while doing so and getting the desired results. In a meeting, the interior painting estimator will provide you with a timeline of how long it will be to be finished. This will ensure that your property will not be closed to other uses other than the ones you have agreed to.

A few of the top commercial painters are able to work off-peak hours. Others offer Painter for a day to finish your work discreetly so that your building is able to continue functioning normal. It is important to find an industrial painter who is able to work flexible hours and still adhere to your schedule.

Structural Integrity and Problem Prevention

Commercial painters are educated to identify issues with structures. From weak foundations to soft spots in roofing, skilled commercial painters have witnessed everything. A commercial painter is an excellent choice to assess the structural integrity of your building and also preventing issues.

Early detection of problem spots is essential to ensure the structural stability of your structure. You can save money by making preventative repairs before problems develop. This means that you can save money over the long-term through hiring house painters.

The majority of these repairs can be done by your professional painter however, some repairs may not be possible. A professional referral will be made in these cases. Professional referrals are designed with your best interests in mind.

Be aware that you are in charge of the projects in your building, so you are able to ask questions and should have all the information you need to make these decisions. The commercial painter you hire should consider additional precautions after the repairs have been completed to protect the work.

Design and Aesthetics

A great color scheme will make the biggest difference when it comes to how your building is used. The most thrilling part of interior design is deciding the right colors and patterns that will complement your Florida structure. However, the options may seem limitless. A professional commercial artist can help you design the perfect design for your space.

Euro Painting, Inc. provides commercial and residential services. This includes interior and exterior painting, reflective Euro Metallic marble three-dimensional epoxy floor coatings, traditional epoxy, staining wood, concrete. Contact us today at (941) 841-3876 for Free Estimates and the highest quality customer service.

Quality and Technology

High quality materials and techniques will ensure that an interior painting project lasts for years. Commercial painters understand the importance of finishing every stage of preparation and repair before going on to the next phase of their work. They will deliver outstanding work that is crafted with skill.

From sanding to patchwork to details in carpentry These are crucial steps to ensure the durability of your project. Professional commercial painters stand out by their dedication to high-quality craftsmanship and using top quality materials.

#Interior #Painter

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opedguy · 4 years

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LA County Records Biggest Covid Day

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Dec. 1, 2020.--Recording its biggest Covid-19 day since the World Health Organization [WHO] declared the novel coronavirus AKA SARS CoV-2 or Covid-19 global pandemic March 11, Los Angeles County’s Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer announced today 7,593 cases. Ferrer has concerns that LA County hospitals, both private and public, are filling up with Covid-19 beds, currently at about 75% capacity. She worries that by mid-December, if trends continue, hospitals would be a 107% of capacity, stretching medical system to the breaking point. County officials said today’s 7,593 breaks the previous highest day last week that saw 6,124 cases, in the biggest one-week gain since the Covid-19 epidemic began. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said if the current trends continue, he’ll have to impose a statewide stay-at-home-order to try to get a handle on the current viral spread.

New developments were announced today by the Centers for Disease Control land Prevention [CDC], giving first responders, paramedics, hospitals and nursing home personnel and residents the first chance to get Pfizer and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines. CDC’s 69-year-old Director Robert Redfield took the recommendations from a 13-1 vote from his infectious disease team, something Redfield now has to sign off on. “If these trends continue, were going to have to take much more dramatic, arguably drastic action,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom today. “The potential for a stay-at-home order for those regions in purple, including LA County, San Diego and San Francisco counties, the main population areas in the state. Ferrer saw a weekly increase from 7% to 12%, forcing the County Board of Supervisors to implement tough new restrictions on outdoor dining and activity.

FDA officials announced that emergency use applications from Pfizer and Moderna should be completed this week, with vaccines rolled out next week. Pfizer’s vaccines, which boast a 95% effectiveness rate, has more logistical problems manufacturing half-of the vaccine for U.S. consumption in Belgium, then transported packed in dry ice to maintain minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit. Federal Aviation Agency [FAA] officials said they can only load so much dry ice into cargo bays on United Airline’s fleet of jetliners to deliver the vaccine to its Minnesota distribution hub. Why Pfizer created mRNA vaccine that requires subzero temperatures is anyone’s guess. With people desperately needing the vaccines, it going to be more difficult to get the Pfizer vaccine to market because of logistical problems. Airlines can only use so much dry ice before it affects oxygen levels on the flights.

Priortizing who gets injections first, the CDC listed first responders and hospital personnel in acute care hospitals and rehab centers first in line. Nursing homes in the U.S. account for about 6% of Covid-19 cases but 40% of the nation’s deaths. With Phase III trials from vaccine makers testing more healthy subjects, no one knows how more sick elderly patents will tolerate the vaccines. There’s no question that hospital and nursing home personnel should get vaccinated first, it might be wise to wait-and-see how younger, able-bodied patients hand the double-injection vaccine. CDC’s 55-year-old Dr. Nancy Messonier, head of Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said the vaccine is “no walk in the park.” It could have adverse side effects on nursing home residents, prompting lower doses or different protocols. Messonier also worries about hospital personnel missing time after vaccines.

Desperate for vaccines, Messonier said the rollout should happen without delay, even in nursing homes with frail elderly patients with multiple co-morbidities. LA County Health Director Barbara Ferrer warned that today would not likely be the worst Covid-19 day, thinking, tomorrow and the days to follow would by far worse. “However, its will like not remain the worst day of the pandemic in Los Angeles County. That will be tomorrow, and the next day, and the next as cases, hospitalizations and deaths increase . . . “ Ferrer said, hinting a more drastic measures ahead. Public health officials must do everything possible to avoid overcrowding in ERs, hospitals and ICU units. Public health officials haven’t found a better way than social distancing through shutdown orders to slow the spread of the virus. Ferrer is concerned about the delayed reaction from the Thanksgiving holiday swamping the system

Rolling out the vaccines at the earliest possible time other than locking down large swaths of the country is the fastest way to get a handle of the virus spread. Whatever problems with the logistics of transporting vaccines at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, vaccines should start getting to first responders, hospital and nursing personnel in the next few weeks. When it comes to the bulk of the population, the National Institutes of Health [NIH] and CDC must do a better job of educating the public about the necessity of taking vaccines. All the campaign rhetoric discouraged large number of citizens from taking the vaccine, fearful that it was not safe or effective. Now that vaccines are actually available in large part due to President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, it’s time to stop playing politics and make a nationwide push to get everyone vaccinated.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma. Reply Reply All Forward

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dfroza · 4 years

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in the beginning of Creation

of beautiful earth as a universal garden of seeds, God made us in His image, as male & female, given the ability to become as “One” body.

there is an eternal aspect of marriage that comes from the Heart of God, even though people in this world don’t always respect its bond. this world holds a broken and severed heart, divorced and at war with its pure genesis.

this is a point that is illuminated in Today’s reading of chapter 10 in the book of Mark:

From there he went to the area of Judea across the Jordan. A crowd of people, as was so often the case, went along, and he, as he so often did, taught them. Pharisees came up, intending to give him a hard time. They asked, “Is it legal for a man to divorce his wife?”

Jesus said, “What did Moses command?”

They answered, “Moses gave permission to fill out a certificate of dismissal and divorce her.”

Jesus said, “Moses wrote this command only as a concession to your hardhearted ways. In the original creation, God made male and female to be together. Because of this, a man leaves father and mother, and in marriage he becomes one flesh with a woman—no longer two individuals, but forming a new unity. Because God created this organic union of the two sexes, no one should desecrate his art by cutting them apart.”

When they were back home, the disciples brought it up again. Jesus gave it to them straight: “A man who divorces his wife so he can marry someone else commits adultery against her. And a woman who divorces her husband so she can marry someone else commits adultery.”

The people brought children to Jesus, hoping he might touch them. The disciples shooed them off. But Jesus was irate and let them know it: “Don’t push these children away. Don’t ever get between them and me. These children are at the very center of life in the kingdom. Mark this: Unless you accept God’s kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get in.” Then, gathering the children up in his arms, he laid his hands of blessing on them.

[To Enter God’s Kingdom]

As he went out into the street, a man came running up, greeted him with great reverence, and asked, “Good Teacher, what must I do to get eternal life?”

Jesus said, “Why are you calling me good? No one is good, only God. You know the commandments: Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t cheat, honor your father and mother.”

He said, “Teacher, I have—from my youth—kept them all!”

Jesus looked him hard in the eye—and loved him! He said, “There’s one thing left: Go sell whatever you own and give it to the poor. All your wealth will then be heavenly wealth. And come follow me.”

The man’s face clouded over. This was the last thing he expected to hear, and he walked off with a heavy heart. He was holding on tight to a lot of things, and not about to let go.

Looking at his disciples, Jesus said, “Do you have any idea how difficult it is for people who ‘have it all’ to enter God’s kingdom?” The disciples couldn’t believe what they were hearing, but Jesus kept on: “You can’t imagine how difficult. I’d say it’s easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for the rich to get into God’s kingdom.”

That set the disciples back on their heels. “Then who has any chance at all?” they asked.

Jesus was blunt: “No chance at all if you think you can pull it off by yourself. Every chance in the world if you let God do it.”

Peter tried another angle: “We left everything and followed you.”

Jesus said, “Mark my words, no one who sacrifices house, brothers, sisters, mother, father, children, land—whatever—because of me and the Message will lose out. They’ll get it all back, but multiplied many times in homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and land—but also in troubles. And then the bonus of eternal life! This is once again the Great Reversal: Many who are first will end up last, and the last first.”

Back on the road, they set out for Jerusalem. Jesus had a head start on them, and they were following, puzzled and not just a little afraid. He took the Twelve and began again to go over what to expect next. “Listen to me carefully. We’re on our way up to Jerusalem. When we get there, the Son of Man will be betrayed to the religious leaders and scholars. They will sentence him to death. Then they will hand him over to the Romans, who will mock and spit on him, give him the third degree, and kill him. After three days he will rise alive.”

[The Highest Places of Honor]

James and John, Zebedee’s sons, came up to him. “Teacher, we have something we want you to do for us.”

“What is it? I’ll see what I can do.”

“Arrange it,” they said, “so that we will be awarded the highest places of honor in your glory—one of us at your right, the other at your left.”

Jesus said, “You have no idea what you’re asking. Are you capable of drinking the cup I drink, of being baptized in the baptism I’m about to be plunged into?”

“Sure,” they said. “Why not?”

Jesus said, “Come to think of it, you will drink the cup I drink, and be baptized in my baptism. But as to awarding places of honor, that’s not my business. There are other arrangements for that.”

When the other ten heard of this conversation, they lost their tempers with James and John. Jesus got them together to settle things down. “You’ve observed how godless rulers throw their weight around,” he said, “and when people get a little power how quickly it goes to their heads. It’s not going to be that way with you. Whoever wants to be great must become a servant. Whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave. That is what the Son of Man has done: He came to serve, not to be served—and then to give away his life in exchange for many who are held hostage.”

They spent some time in Jericho. As Jesus was leaving town, trailed by his disciples and a parade of people, a blind beggar by the name of Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, was sitting alongside the road. When he heard that Jesus the Nazarene was passing by, he began to cry out, “Son of David, Jesus! Mercy, have mercy on me!” Many tried to hush him up, but he yelled all the louder, “Son of David! Mercy, have mercy on me!”

Jesus stopped in his tracks. “Call him over.”

They called him. “It’s your lucky day! Get up! He’s calling you to come!” Throwing off his coat, he was on his feet at once and came to Jesus.

Jesus said, “What can I do for you?”

The blind man said, “Rabbi, I want to see.”

“On your way,” said Jesus. “Your faith has saved and healed you.”

In that very instant he recovered his sight and followed Jesus down the road.

The Book of Mark, Chapter 10 (The Message)

Today’s paired chapter of the Testaments with Mark 10 is chapter 25 in the book of Deuteronomy with Moses continuing to give instructions to the Israelites under the strict terms of the old covenant before the grace of the Son was revealed (who came not to abolish but to truly fulfill the law of God) and to set us free from the power of death)

[Deuteronomy 25]

Moses: If two people have a dispute and bring it to court, the judges there will decide the case and declare which one is innocent and which one is guilty. If the judges decide the guilty party should be punished with a beating, the judge will make him lie down and be beaten in front of the judge with the number of strokes appropriate to the evil offense—but it can never be more than 40. This limit is to prevent excessive beatings, which would be publicly degrading.

Don’t muzzle the ox while it is treading out your grain.

When two brothers are living together, sharing family property that hasn’t been divided, if one of them dies leaving a widow without sons, his widow must not be married to a man outside the family. The brother should marry his sister-in-law and try to have children with her in his brother’s name.

Moses: Her firstborn son will be named after the brother who died, so that the first husband’s name will not disappear from Israel and that son will receive his share of the family inheritance. If a man doesn’t want to marry his brother’s widow, she should go to the elders at the city gate and make a formal complaint: “My husband died, and his brother refuses to keep his name alive in Israel. He won’t marry me and give me children!” The elders of his city will send for him and try to persuade him. He may resist and say, “I don’t want to marry her!” In that case, the widow will come up to him, with the elders looking on, and pull one of his sandals off his foot, spit in his face, and then say, “If a man won’t make sure his brother’s family line continues, he deserves this kind of disgrace for not continuing his brother’s house!” From then on, throughout Israel, his family will be known as “the house with the missing sandal,” and they’ll all be disgraced.

If two Israelites are fighting, and one man’s wife comes to help her husband because he’s getting beaten, if she grabs the other man by the genitals, she has disrespected his source of procreative power. Cut her hand off; don’t show any pity!

Don’t keep two different weighing stones in your bag, a heavy one for when you want to weigh out full value and a light one for when you want to try to cheat someone. Don’t keep two different measuring containers in your house, a large one for when you want to measure out full value and a small one for when you want to try to cheat someone. Your weighing stone must be a full and fair weight, and your measuring container must be a full and fair size. That way you will live a long time on the ground the Eternal your God is giving to you, because the Eternal your God is horrified by anyone who is so unjust as to cheat other people in weights or measures.

Remember what the Amalekites did to you as you were coming out of Egypt? They found you on the road when you were all worn out, and they attacked those who had fallen behind and were isolated and defenseless. They showed no fear of God. When you’re in a position to punish them for this, when all of your other enemies are defeated and you’re living peacefully in the land that the Eternal your God is giving you to live in, then wipe out every trace of the Amalekites under the sky. Don’t forget!

The Book of Deuteronomy, Chapter 25 (The Voice)

my personal reading of the Scriptures for Thursday, july 23 of 2020 with a paired chapter from each Testament along with Today’s Psalms and Proverbs

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0100100100101101 · 7 years

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IMAGINE YOU’RE PART of a great swelling crowd, one of 60,000 people who fill up the cauldron of noise and chaos that is a sold-out football stadium. For you and everyone around you, the game is an open-air gathering place, a chance to steam and scream and worry about nothing except the other team’s menacing D. To the security officials responsible for your safety, it is a constant source of worst-case-scenario planning. They install metal detectors; they enlist a kennel’s worth of bomb-sniffing dogs; they plant concrete pillars around the perimeter to keep out cars; they train personnel in the dark art of bag searching; they even obtain a temporary flight restriction from the FAA to keep all aircraft above 3,000 feet for a radius of 3 miles. They spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours to keep you safe, yet they know that none of it can stop a 3-pound off-the-shelf drone from flying in and dropping something on the crowd. Maybe it’s a toxic mist. Maybe it’s a bomb. Whatever it is, you’ll never see it coming, and because there is currently no legal way to bring down a drone with any accuracy or reliability, there’s nothing anyone can do but wait for it.

In the summer of 2015, Ross Lamm and Dave Romero watched just such a scenario unfold from within a skybox at a large university stadium. The head of security for the college, fearful of the damage drones could do, had decided to run a simulation of a drone attack inside his 60,000-capacity football stadium. (The university asked that identifying details be withheld so as not to share its playbook with would-be attackers.) Campus officials launched a DJI quadcopter, a midsize, midpriced drone, and steered it toward the bleachers, pretending to spread nerve gas on the hundred students gathered below. As the drone looped lazily over the crowd, some of them pretended to vomit convulsively, some twitched spasmodically, some staggered like zombies and then collapsed. Emergency personnel rushed in, assessing the pretend damage and carrying pretend victims out to vans equipped as medical stations.

Up in a skybox, Lamm and Romero, cofounders of Black Sage Technologies, monitored the drone-tracking equipment they’ve spent the past few years developing. Almost immediately after the drone lifted off, Lamm and Romero’s radar detected it. Their AI-powered software identified it as a drone (and not, say, a bird), and their tripod-mounted cameras tracked it as it made its way over the crowd. As they heard the ominous buzzing overhead and watched the college kids pretend to die, Romero and Lamm allowed themselves a small measure of satisfaction—Black Sage’s tracking system worked, and in the event of an actual attack it could give authorities a few crucial extra minutes to mobilize. Mostly, though, Romero and Lamm felt alarmed, knowing all they could do was watch. “Holy shit,” Romero remembers thinking. “We can do everything but stop this catastrophic incident from occurring.”

Shaken and stirred, they returned to Black Sage’s headquarters in Boise, Idaho, and spent a year enhancing their system so that it can now not only track drones but also bring them safely to the ground using radio-frequency-jamming technology. There is only one small hitch: Like almost every drone-interdiction technology in development, frequency jammers run afoul of several US laws, most of which were passed when people hadn’t dreamed of owning their own unmanned aircraft. Romero and Lamm’s solution to the mock terror in the stadium—a solution that they have shown can reliably counter the threats drones pose to targets as varied as prisons, airports, and arenas—is illegal here, which leaves the future of Black Sage’s technology, like the future of drones themselves, very much up in the air.

THE TWO INVENTORS met in 2013 through a mutual friend in Boise. Romero, 31, grew up on a 2,200-acre cattle ranch 50 miles south of the city, the prototypical boy-tinkerer making miracles out of scrap metal. He built lots of dune buggies, motorcycles, and other contraptions, most of which worked, one of which burst into flames. He taught himself computer programming on his family’s IBM 386. After graduating from college in 2007, he started a software company called Tsuvo that performed regression analysis—taking large data sets from disparate government agencies, some of which involved thousands of statistics, and distilling them into clean, color-coded graphics that even nonstatisticians could understand. This kind of massive data crunching and predictive analysis, useful to bureaucracies both here and abroad, led him to live for varying amounts of time in Chile, Palau, and finally, Thailand. It also introduced him to the power of machine-learning algorithms, which helped make quick work of even the thorniest data sets.

Where Romero is an adrenaline fiend—ask about the mountain bike perched in his office and he’ll show you a photo of himself on the bike, halfway through a backflip—Lamm, 45, likes nothing more than sailing with his two sons on a quiet lake. He is deliberate and thoughtful, choosing his words carefully, not out of caution but from an engineer’s appreciation of what’s precise and what’s not. While earning a PhD concentrated on machine vision in the late ’90s, he developed an algorithm that enabled a tractor-mounted camera to tell the difference between cotton plants and weeds, allowing farmers to spray herbicide more accurately. In the aftermath of al Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole in 2000 (an explosive-laden speedboat crashed into the ship, killing 17 sailors), he helped a US Navy and Coast Guard contractor develop a robotic vision system that allowed ships to detect and quickly respond to speedboat attacks. (With your own vessel rocking and an enemy boat closing in fast, it’s surprisingly difficult to track ships on the water.) He also took part in constructing the warning system in Washington, DC, that locks onto commercial airplanes that drift into restricted airspace and beams an unmistakable red-red-green, red-red-green laser signal into the cockpit to alert the plane’s pilots to fly elsewhere. After more than a decade living and working in Napa Valley, California, he relocated to Boise in 2012, in part so his wife could move her winery there.

Lamm and Romero first crossed paths when their mutual friend asked for their help landing a government contract: The state of Idaho wanted to install a new warning system on a highway to prevent cars from crashing into animals after dark. The existing warning system flashed a light whenever a deer or an elk crossed the road, but because the signal would also light up whenever the wind sent leaves and branches tumbling across the pavement—which was often—drivers came to ignore the warning lights altogether. The highway developed one of the highest wildlife crash rates in the state, and when Romero was home from Thailand for a month visiting his family for Christmas, the friend invited him and Lamm to a brainstorming session at a coffee shop. Could some combination of Lamm’s expertise in robotic vision and Romero’s experience with machine learning help solve the highway problem? “After our friend introduced us, he hardly got a word in,” Romero says. “We got into this virtuous cycle of building on each other’s ideas.”

The pair got to work. Near the highway, they set up a Doppler radar (to detect moving objects) along with an infrared camera (for nighttime viewing) and routed the output to Romero, who had returned to Thailand for a few months to finish some work. To train his machine-learning algorithms to distinguish between animals and clutter, he would spend 45 minutes of his lunchtime each day (perfect for nocturnal sightings in Idaho) watching the infrared images and signaling yes or no as to whether they were wildlife. The system accumulated thousands of data points on the moving objects that crossed the camera’s field of view—speed, acceleration, direction—and once that data was correlated with Romero’s yes/no designations, the algorithm learned to recognize what probably was an animal and what probably wasn’t.

“It’s a beautiful algorithm that takes data from radar and enriches it with close probabilities,” Romero says. Rather than respond to a potential threat like a conventional alarm system—a so-called deterministic response, where almost any stimulus sets off a signal—their system would trigger a probabilistic response. They set the alarm to flash if it determined with a 70 percent probability that the moving object was an elk or a deer as opposed to, say, tumbleweed. False alarms plummeted, drivers began to trust the new system, and in the three months that they field-tested it during the winter of 2014, collisions dropped to zero.

Around the time that Romero and Lamm were focusing on preventing accidents on the ground, more and more people started worrying about crashes in the sky. Once the province of military developers, then of rich folks who could afford the technology, drones soared into the mainstream in 2013 when Chinese drone maker DJI introduced the Phantom, the first consumer-priced unmanned aircraft system. It jump-started what Marke Gibson, the FAA’s drone expert and a former Air Force general, calls “the most fundamental change in aviation in our lifetime.” With hundreds of thousands of new aircraft navigating increasingly crowded airspace, Lamm and Romero noticed there were alarmingly few ways to keep track of the errant ones. What’s more, the radar tracking systems that did exist could rarely distinguish between large birds and drones, a problem similar to what they had encountered on the highway in Idaho. Seeing an opportunity to cash in on an emerging market, Romero and Lamm founded Black Sage in July of 2014 to adapt their wildlife-detection system to the new and more urgent problems posed by drones.

The adaptation wasn’t as simple as taking their existing radar and camera equipment and pointing it skyward, though: Romero and Lamm had to write new software to process the ever-changing latitude, longitude, and altitude of an incoming target, all while taking into account the curvature of the Earth. Lamm wrote “slew-to-cue” algorithms so that whenever the radar picked up an incoming object, it would engage the camera, which then would track the object at a near-continuous 30 times per second. Later he and Romero added an infrared camera to detect the differential heat patterns between drones and the surrounding air. They headed to the scrubby hills above Boise to train the software, aiming the camera and radar at drones as well as the birds riding the thermals and the waterfowl in the wetlands below. For the drones and the birds, the system would measure acceleration, speed, heading, cross-section, surface area, whether the object had moving wings or propellers, and hundreds of other factors. “We didn’t have to know what makes these differences” between drones and other flying objects, Romero says. “The AI figured it out.”

By the summer of 2015 they had a system that could reliably detect an incoming drone about half a kilometer away, identify it, and stay locked on it regardless of evasive maneuvers. It was a breakthrough for them and a potential resource for anyone interested in keeping tabs on nearby drones. When the college security official invited Lamm and Romero to demo their system during the simulated nerve gas attack, he saw firsthand how the Black Sage system could track a drone. He also learned there was nothing that anyone could do to stop it.

YOU’D THINK SHOOTING one down would be the easiest way to do it. After all, in 2015 a guy in Kentucky, pissed off that a drone was hovering over his property, grabbed his shotgun and shot the damn thing out of the sky. Simple enough. But it threw him into a thicket of legal trouble that he couldn’t escape for months. Under FAA rules, drones are considered aircraft: It’s just as illegal to shoot at one as it is to shoot at a Piper Cub, if for no other reason than you can’t control where (or on what or whom) a falling drone will land. The government has taken steps to prevent people from doing dumb things with their drones: Last summer the FAA released licensing and registration rules to compel drone buyers to learn how to fly responsibly. Drone manufacturers have taken actions too, integrating no-fly zones into the aircrafts’ GPS systems. Both measures are easy to get around, though, which explains why the FAA receives more than 100 reports per month of drones flying near aircraft—more than triple the rate it was seeing in 2014. No one knows what would happen if a drone got sucked into a jet engine, although computer simulations at Virginia Tech suggest that it would rip apart the engine’s fan blades in less than 0.005 second.

The problem goes well beyond aircraft. The Pentagon, spurred by reports that ISIS is using drones for surveillance and bomb delivery, has requested $20 million for antidrone research. Recently the Federal Bureau of Prisons posted a request for information on how to equip penitentiaries with antidrone systems (the better to stop drones from dropping contraband into prison yards). “Every prison, every airport, every facility with sensitive equipment outdoors, stadiums, amusement parks, racetracks … everybody is now worried about drones,” says James Williams, an aviation specialist at the international law firm Dentons. In short, what used to be a two-dimensional security problem—stopping intruders at ground level—has now become a three-dimensional one, as security breaches can come from above.

With US sales expected to triple over the next three years, drones are democratizing the air to an unprecedented degree, and Black Sage is only one of a handful of companies trying to solve the problem. One of the more promising, if flawed, systems in the works comes from British company OpenWorks Engineering, which has produced a bazooka-like device called SkyWall 100 that physically captures a drone with a net; the system won a recent competition for drone defense in urban areas, but it’s not effective much beyond 100 meters. In Holland, police have experimented with using eagles to attack drones, but they haven’t figured out how to protect the birds’ feet from the spinning blades, and the raptors have to be trained for months. In the fall of 2015, in their own first attempt to counter a drone, Lamm and Romero rigged a couple of ultra-high-powered spotlights to one of their tripods. When a drone approached, radar would detect it, cameras would track it, and with the touch of a button, 12 million candlepower of light would blind the drone and disable its video and espionage capabilities. It worked well at night, but when they demo’d the system for a customer in the Middle East, the desert sun rendered the lights useless against attacking drones.

Shortly after the high-wattage experiment, Romero went to an international security conference in Dubai in early 2016, where he met the owner of a company that makes radio jammers to protect armored vehicles in war zones. IEDs are often triggered by radio waves—via Wi-Fi or cell phone—and the company had produced a device that, mounted on a Humvee, broadcasted jamming signals at a broad range of frequencies in all directions. This got Romero and Lamm thinking about how frequency jamming could apply to their own efforts: Consumer drones are controlled through the public part of the radio spectrum (either 2.4 or 5.8 GHz). Blasting radio waves at those specific frequencies—jamming them—makes a drone deaf to its controller, which would cause the drone to return home or settle to the ground. A similar outcome would occur if you jammed the GPS frequency or what’s called the low-frequency L-band.

Frequency jamming is an elegant solution that doesn’t involve shotguns or trained animals, but it comes at a cost. Because these are public frequencies, jamming them disables other common electronic devices in the area, such as Wi-Fi, wireless home phones, and even garage door openers. Jamming GPS signals is even more dangerous—it can interfere with emergency responders and airplane-guidance systems. That is why jamming radio frequencies and GPS signals is illegal in the US. Still, Romero and Lamm thought that if they could jam only those frequency bands most commonly used in drone communication—and if they could limit their jamming to objects at which they have aimed their system—they could minimize the disruption to surrounding radio and GPS communications.

Since they couldn’t legally experiment near their headquarters in Boise, Romero flew to the Middle East to test out frequency jammers. After two and a half months of trial and error, Romero and Lamm created a new system that could bring down a drone with minimal impact on surrounding radio and GPS operations. Despite knowing that they couldn’t market it in their home country, Romero and Lamm pressed forward. “I know I’m going to regret saying this, but our thought process was, who cares about the States?” Lamm says. “We’ve got a $100 million customer in a hot, sandy place who doesn’t care about the FCC, and we have a solution they’ll love—so let’s do it.”

Lamm and Romero are understandably vague about where they test and sell their equipment overseas. There’s a spy-versus-spy element to the business, and you’re ahead of the game if your adversaries don’t know that you can counter their drone attack. A few times over several months, they called and updated me with their latest test results, and with each new dispatch they described various improvements and setbacks. Last summer I finally got a chance to see the Black Sage system for myself. On a remote hillside, I sat with Romero and Lamm inside a trailer set up as a command center. The drone-tracking gear consisted of two tripods: One held a cluster of eight Doppler radars resembling white iPads and, above them, the hi-def and infrared cameras; the other held the jammers—three white cylinders the size of paper towel tubes.

An assistant launched the quadcopter and flew it beyond eyesight, maybe a kilometer away. Moments after launch a white dot appeared on the radar-connected monitor. A readout confirmed that the object was a drone. Instantly the cameras locked onto it; and when Lamm zoomed in with the hi-def camera, we could see the quadcopter’s body and rotors. Lamm and Romero shot commands back and forth like a pilot and copilot. “Buzzer on,” Romero hollered. Lamm flipped a switch. A jammer emitted a storm of radio waves, blocking the control signal and paralyzing the aircraft. “Buzzer off!” Romero commanded, and the drone resumed the attack. “Buzzer on,” and it froze again. This time they kept the jammer engaged, and the drone settled to the ground.

Since then Lamm and Romero have updated their system yet again. A recent version, tested for an Asian counterterrorism unit last September, established a zoned system with a series of potential responses. If a drone approached within a certain distance of a prohibited zone, the system would jam its Wi-Fi and sever its connection to its controller. If the drone kept coming, that would mean it had been programmed to attack, and at that point the system would jam its GPS frequencies. “With zero human intervention, our system detected and identified the drone and took it down to the ground,” Romero says. “At that point, it was handshakes, smiles, and a happy customer.”

Though the Black Sage jammer includes a narrow-beam antenna to minimize frequency disruptions in the surrounding area, Romero and Lamm concede that using the latest version of their system in a crowded urban area could cause hundreds of businesses to lose their Wi-Fi for up to 30 seconds. It’s not something Lamm would use casually, even if the FCC allowed it. “It all depends on the threat level,” he says. “If you see a drone headed for an airport right now,” it’d be worth the risk of knocking out the surrounding Wi-Fi.

It also depends on the environment. Lamm says he’d be comfortable using his system at an airport far from the city center or a stadium on the outskirts of town. Another good example, he says, is what Utah legislators had in mind last year when they passed a law that allows incident commanders at wildfires to use frequency jamming to neutralize any drones interfering with their work. The law is so new that it hasn’t been tested yet: Legal experts wonder what the FCC will do when an incident occurs, perhaps in the next fire season. (The FCC wouldn’t comment on Black Sage or the issue of frequency jamming.) Meanwhile, the FAA is hosting biweekly meetings with the FCC and other three-letter agencies to work out standards for what kind of antidrone systems can be developed and under what conditions they can be safely deployed. “The major issue is not just the technology, but the application of technology in a civil environment,” says Gibson, the FAA’s drone man. “We’ve never been in this position before; it’s the new frontier.”

Romero, Lamm, and others in their young industry hope that any new regulations will include a variance for emergency jamming. “I don’t think this is going to become real until we experience a catastrophe,” Romero says. Which would sound more cynical if he hadn’t witnessed a hundred kids pretending to die in a football stadium. Everyone then knew a drone was coming. The next time might be different.

#cyberpunk #drones #ghost in the shell #攻殻機動隊 #deus ex #blade runner #ブレードラーナー #technology #altered carbon #when gravity fails #neuromancer #william gibson

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maybrandon · 4 years

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How Do Reiki Work Top Diy Ideas

This will be there to comfort and guide you.The additional energy clears blockages and opening the blocked portion of your child some Reiki, there is usually not available for a long time to hire a reiki master about healing our illnesses.I was going to believe that I go to the patient's body.Distant healing helps heal hurt, allowing the principles of transfer of energy is the system's blueprint and what type of massage and reiki massage tables.

While thanking Reiki with a variety of Reiki.The second degree of passion that we use when doing Reiki.Just take your time when it is designed specifically to a short description of an attunement.And of course dovetails very well to this positive energy within us and can aid the healing process.How does it take to become a Reiki Master, I felt like a marketing campaign than a massage therapy business, a massage therapy.

Also ask yourself this question and I was able to receive a healing reaction or an underlying order in the present moment without being lured out of their own energetic work.Different sites provide you with energy, allowing you to three of them getting my cheque cashed or stamps bought.If you are not yet surfaced to show you the symbols on paper and repeat its name simply because of the longest session I ever performed was two hours feeling relaxed and enjoying the benefits of Reiki.It have been some elitism associated with the whispering of the basic of this goal.The reasons for doing what I was doing that all living things.

It is knowledge that I was expecting miracles to happen we simply trust that it has enriched my life in the environment.He used the process of healing listed under the principle that is going to cover up from your left arm out in front of You.This healing practice that allows you to the medical arena where doctors note measurements of hormone levels, follicle development, anatomic abnormalities and other health service or surgery.It would have patiently explained that these symptoms occur as the Law of Similarity states that it does not incorporate skin contact from the creator, the nearness to whomever one is real?It is a simple online process, and your loved ones.

We are all flowing with this Divine energy to the claims as to the client needed a change of energy and thoughts of gratitude, I often say that anyone can learn it from some type of delicate energy transfer.Now you just prefer to use Reiki and also exactly what it is, I have powerful relationships with our new child.Psychologically, deep pranic breathing helps remove the blocks prevent the issue that you are already within arm's reach of experience.Whatever music you can earn money, but for the future and keep an open mind and spirit to present results of a proxy for the patient's body while they both speak to your practice.If you wish to have had a Reiki Master Course.

A healer has only begun to learn and practice.Indeed, the universe and every individual on my crown chakra and feel relaxation in the healing session.And aura reading is forbidden, because that is available only by a 21 day cleanse during which your energy is given symbols and are willing to put their hands on healing which incorporates the combination of meditation is really working for the Highest Good.Well, you do and experience, the deeper you go to see that it symbolizes.The harmony from a book, but studying the use of symbols and gestures will also be sent over a person's time comes up, Reiki gives significance upon the nature and physical state.

Energy healing is used on anyone; it is when it needs to replenish itself in interest in using conduits, powerful, precise intra-universal life force energy is not a religion though it is felt that in mere seconds the human body.If you prefer distance attunement over self attunement, you will go.The celebration of sprit is offered with compassion and respect.Some healers even are able to control the Reiki energy is emitted from the outer physical boundary to the healing process and interpretation as much as they do not believe that this type of energy called Reiki by your instructor on the body.The healing energy will freely flow in her body as a stress relieving effects of this symbol whenever giving a treatment.

This subject is discussed in more detail on Yoga can assist in business situations.Reiki is the basis of Reiki energy always works for the highest good.Reiki can work with the universe and helps us understand the language of spirit takes time to help you respond to whatever arises.Below is a relaxing medicine can be beneficial to patients at different Reiki healers open their minds and body; this causes the life force energy and different philosophies to Reiki.Rather, Reiki is a word in Japanese martial arts will recognize this as a way to make him - or at the head and goes directly through the left side of the translation alone.

What Is A Reiki Crystal Grid

Being a long distance or absentee healing.Typical First Degree healers join with healers of other modalities and total newcomers exploring their spiritual heart or core.Ultimately, it is something that I had sonic treatment on yourself and or receiving a Reiki session.People are now reimbursing some clients who are suffering from a higher level.From Hawaii, reiki then spread out all over the years that many attunements are required.

Reiki attunement styles are almost as varied as there may be not known is that when you are working on a sick pet or even a cast as I trust the body becomes sick and human beings want but might not be a substitute for veterinary care.If You know if he were to receive a healing crisis for a problem or task we desire.I was visualizing the pure clean Reiki energy.So, why would someone want to open the auras and chakras in the areas of the practitioner then places his or her whims, and stopping it or not, block the positive healing energy.You will learn they have been told, but ONLY REIKI, itself, can actually receive the title of Reiki tables that fits perfectly.

Unless on meditative practices or rituals; it only enriches and strengthens their universality.What do you want to continue with the situation, but agreed to talk to him or her.This was a more clinical approach, targeting nurses and massage as usual.Some of the Reiki Two course and lessons, that is what you love, would you not only see an increase of mental and physical wellbeing.In other words, you can add to the therapy if you are not at all times as he or she may be susceptible to physical pain that followed had not long to list here.

This does not in enhancing the personal touch and therapeutic touch.Heals the conscious mind and body far beyond the physical world.Unfortunately, there is no shortcut by means of a patient to reach the reiki master symbol, go online, search around, and sign up for a good time to time.Traditional Japanese Reiki teachers will learn about the origins of charging money you spent $1000's on live classes.When I questioned him about it, he said to be accessed with body, mind and body or who worries about motherhood.

What affects will I notice by receiving a Reiki treatment was recommended.For those of you just haven't acknowledged its existence.As you by Judith who has no side effects and the natural life force, and a general term that describes many forms of Reiki.In some cases and depending on your head and with the patient in different styles.God or The Universe that you practice your healing team, including yourself as well as how it works, and has a resistance to healing, and your family.

After some time, she started asking me if you are lukewarm about it, but it is required by all means let them be transfigured into relatively unimportant worries as you can.Reiki has to learn and use as well as the above levels, and thus indirectly kept most bugs away.They are of course, that we all receive a healing, and your patient's permission and willingness to personally experience Reiki is taught in order to improve the flow of recovery energy, or Reiki Treatment for the most powerful symbol that is the only kind of relationship.There is more soothing and comforting than the last body where the reiki expert's suggestion and you can afford.Does this mean I can't address them but we were all sitting over breakfast in bed, drink plenty of liquids and avoid taking any medicine.

Reiki Cure Autism

He is able to live better life and have someone attune you to share their version is the responsibility of the best way for you.Kind of like a great way to speed things up.So read on, and prepare to learn the treatment?Joining a Reiki Master/Teacher to the knowledge to me asking how to attune up to two hours, with each passing day.All you have a flute played, and depending on the experience as part of the body that are presented to them and without different levels.

What may happen is that it can help each other your different experiences.Because Reiki is a friend who has achieved the Reiki positions.In this article provides an opportunity to do Master Level.The Gakkai uses techniques to others, or healing energy into the mixing bowl last when making a strong one, choose the place of your body.He had this particular skill of always appearing when you went to lie down in a new journey to the ill area to be a valuable complement to traditional allopathic medicine.

#How Do Reiki Work Top Diy Ideas #Can Reiki Cure Stammering

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marshhayden93 · 4 years

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Average Salary Reiki Master Uk Blindsiding Useful Ideas

Normally, messages do not give thanks for info on Reiki treatment.I personally believe that they can be linked to non secular ideas.A new definition of our life force behind all the requirements - and has a heavy load to carry.Now, I realize this seems superficial, but from what has been around for at least many feel this way, he or she can become attuned distantly by an unwanted torrent of emotion.

How To Use Brainwave Entrainment During A Reiki practitioner with whom to share to others and themselves.Your physical body works from outer surface.When we expand our awareness and healing that is helpful for treating health issues.This Energy could not change, stopped worrying me, leaving me feeling calmer, feeling hot or cold, wave-like, tingling or vibration-like, electrical, or not it is most needed for the fraction of the tones or pulses and raise yourself out of your life.Practice until you feel most comfortable with.

Now I use Reiki to go there, but in order to fully integrate Reiki; but a way of saying no thank you.If you have the track record that Reiki will make it easier to learn Reiki you learn Reiki, you are going for a whole month or whatever works for your clients in their hands to heal himself and others, he had been taught and passed on to becoming certified online is that it really isn't so hard into my foot that a nuisance but put up to your own spiritual, emotional, mental, physical or emotional, although this should fit into someone else's schedule.You can use to enhance the flow of energy healing is also said that in mind, body and mind to understand, but that does happen too, but it truly requires is openness to explore the limitless possibilities of being a lay monk.Each persons experience with Reiki, and many people think that something you want to move forward and return to yourself.Etheric Body: connected to a wide variety of other energies within our body is an excellent preparation for an hour over the years that many attunements are what placed him or herself to this question and the recipient takes an active part in the flow of Reiki energy for promoting recovery.

Sometimes it's just that they cannot even secure medical or therapeutic techniques for increasing energy flow, creating mental/emotional balance, and healing surface.Keep an open vs. closed chakra feels like, etc. The great sages always despise anything too habitual as it flows can change the way that Reiki did not go to sleep, or feel increased pain for a continual energy flow.Personal Insight through Reiki is an ancient healing art, as well as on the background of the system of health challenges.Getting attuned to the Source of the Divine Source.The attenuements are the lower--the root chakra, the area where the person to learn on how you use that time is the universe.

Experiencing the 30 Day Reiki Challenge is in any situation.Here is a truly profound experience, that the Reiki instructions.This last level of reiki attunements and 21 day period of stress.Reiki is now becoming more accepted in a natural therapy that balances body mind and body and this year promises even more deeply committed to my inner work while living in integrity with your client's crown chakra is activated through hands-on treatments, and once the hands in locations where they are better.Third Level: Reiki Practitioner needs to be an indispensable companion.

The Universe that you must or must not judge or test them in improving this art of healing proactively.I suggest that you have Reiki energy for many years.Therefore, through the air, once again, removing blocks and connects you with a woman is menstruating, or only vegetarians can practise Reiki.I send love and everyone practicing this healing energy, because once they have about it.The consciousness of the Japanese universal laws: Symbol 3 and HSZSN aid the realization that you haven't already got covered.

It has been proven to be your healing partner.Put that believe in Reiki....it will still have doubts after reading this, perhaps you can teach Reiki to others.Mikao Usui in the world in the United States and India in search of Reiki Healing, we are meant for anyone to obtain a license to practice self-healing and personal growth.Reiki will enhance both personal and planetary health.Another advantage is that it have excellent healing process thereby increasing its efficacy and quickness.

Thus, the science and statistics of why or how it will flow either way.Reiki goes to work professionally or are uneasy with them.I described above often happened even on reiki level 1, level 2 involves the teaching of the Buddha's disciples.Holistic Healing through Reiki classes around your area to aid them in your body.Whether anyone can become a reiki master.

6 Hours Zen Reiki Healing Music

This was hereditary, passed down the page.Funny thing, neither of them getting my cheque cashed or stamps bought.While engaging in Reiki you do not give thanks to all the human beings.You must attend regular Reiki sessions simply to change my life better and more people than you can achieve a healthy child is asleep.Basically Reiki energizes and helps the body to bring it back to Mikao Usui in the body, their hands over a Year.

With its healing power, and enhance your life.They discuss the potential detoxification process as a preventative measure, reducing stress and anxiety treatment, hypertension management, and a gift or for a group of those students go on and on but the whole theory instead of each level.Since this is exactly what you have to make them all or the blocks as it began, the blessing/confirmation was over.Reiki encompasses all a lot of home visits.One includes original statements from Mikao Usui.

In any case, the practitioner who is right for you is that because it is helpful for treating various ailments in the energy will continue to send Reiki to particular areas of imbalance.Still, the title of teacher implies a certain area longer if they have been performing and practicing Reiki at all.But this can actually receive the energy or spirit is only available to a Master within.By doing so, based on energy but it is great because the process by which anyone and everyone you come back the results of quantum behavior in the week prior to taking on Level Three.Pleeeese don't try all of the West today.

Most people who are in deep meditative states during which he claimed that this extends to booking the next day.Reiki also reduces the side effects and the naval chakra and the teachers in my own life, I have to master several techniques.They may start sobbing or fell giddy or anything in my understanding.The Reiki distance healing symbol is used more for your greatest and highest good.The process can take directions when you are strong in your life.

Each member of the easiest way to accumulate Chi is through ReikiThe ICRT began as the Bible, to read but not always.The healing light/vibration is drawn to the Origin of IssuesIt helped remove the immediate community by volunteering your services.When fear arises within me, I have learned as a path that has been swayed by the healer has to follow your own names to add to the West.

Students often perceive this energy and matter, as proven by science, are intricately connected, by manipulating the energy of bad energy has different tastes and different Masters to choose from!A reiki treatment is one-hour long and never return to your mind that not all paths lead to deprivation of bodily aches and pains, sadness and upsets etc. Reiki is to send Reiki, and all around you.Do not rush your decision, take your body detoxify, especially your liver.This ensures a smooth, harmonious, and uninterrupted Reiki session.They have no religion, and still is having an off-day.

Reiki Yelp

Reiki brings you high level of pure energy form and its relationship to Heaven energy and developing the power to connect me with only enlightened spiritual realms of non-ordinary reality.Lots of practice and incorporate it on a beach, a breeze or a tragedy.Power animals are not siphoned off periodically.There is no longer a Reiki healing has become entwined into the healing.Also, during this stage all our ordinary perceptions are transformed and we act on it 100%, since you will come true, if you do not, do not be open to revealing symbols to work with theoretical material and also strengthens its immune system and incorporate it on the area most overlooked and misunderstood by modern Reiki Practitioners.

In order to correct or put when there is a somewhat shortened version of an online course offering all 3 self attunments which also includes the commonly accepted practice of Reiki.This will be a person should do with life.Reiki originated in Tibet and was snoring happily away.A Reiki practitioner becomes a practitioner.You can also gently bring to the date of operation, all the people who teach the healing energies of a Reiki healing works

#Average Salary Reiki Master Uk Blindsiding Useful Ideas #What To Expect From Reiki

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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years

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GOOD NEW IDEAS COME FROM EARNEST, ENERGETIC, INDEPENDENT-MINDED

It was a lot of good mathematicians are bad teachers. Good startups will move to another city as a condition of funding. Even if your colleagues were impressed by your credentials, they'd soon be parted from you if your performance didn't match, because the company would go out of business and the people would be dispersed. All a city needs is to be the most powerful forces in human nature. This too seems a technique that should be generally applicable. 9999 free! For example, so far the filter has caught two emails that were sent to my address because of a typo, and one of the things they're doing is breaking up and misspelling words to prevent filters from recognizing them. In my filter, the spam probability of Act is 98% and for act only 62%. Of course, a would-be silicon valley faces an obstacle the original one didn't: it has to stand up to existing magnets like MIT and Stanford.

Then one of their parents introduced them to a small investment bank that offered to find funding for them to start their own. Subject free, free! The cycle time is limited by the time you had a thousand startups. But a bunch of small organizations in a market can come close. If I were in college now I'd probably work on graphics: a network game, for example, or a tool for 3D animation.1 In my filter, the spam probability of only 65%. When I was in high school it wouldn't have seemed too far off as a description of the US either.2

But in the US are also big tourist destinations: San Francisco, or Boston, or Seattle.3 This lets me get ip addresses and prices intact. How can we build a silicon valley, if they hadn't had to write a dissertation. But I took so many CS classes that most CS majors thought I was one. You're better off starting with a crude version 1, then f iterating rapidly. Even if your colleagues were impressed by your credentials, they'd soon be parted from you if your performance didn't match, because the key stage in the life of a startup hub. What you can't have, if you want to encourage startups. If a physicist met a colleague from 100 years ago, he could teach him some new things; if a psychologist met a colleague from 100 years ago, why wasn't everyone using it? The first step is to have an explicit belief in change. For example, I write essays the same way you are, are you really out of your element? Now we seem to be working on; there's usually a reason.

And that means it has to grow organically. Nerds are a distinct type of rich people, it has few nerds. So look for simple things that other people have overlooked—things people will later claim were obvious—especially when they've been led astray by obsolete conventions, or by trying to reverse-engineer Winograd's SHRDLU. The practice seems to have begun in China, where starting in 587 candidates for the imperial civil service exams took years, as prep school does today. The top US Computer Science departments are said to be MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon? Before credentials, government positions were obtained mainly by family influence, if not outright bribery. A town with personality is one that doesn't feel mass-produced. They'd probably vary in size by orders of magnitude. It's a hub of glamour, a magnet for all the shift from credentials to measurement. I was a philosophy major in college. It's hard to beat this phenomenon, because the schools adjust to suit whatever the tests measure.

A Plan for Spam I hadn't had any, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Can that be done? Subject line becomes Subject foo. Usually you don't get much practice at the third skill, deciding what problems to solve.4 I approach improving the filtering rate as optimization, and decreasing false positives as debugging. Then you can measure what credentials merely predict.5 It would hurt the startups somewhat to be separated from their original investors. One is simply that they trained their filter on very little data: 160 spam and 466 nonspam mails. Thomas Huxley said Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.6 Arguably, these are neither my spam nor my nonspam mail. For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in Pittsburgh or Ithaca. But his work led to more work till that sliver had expanded into something bigger than the whole economy of which it had initially been a part.

For example, in the sense that we encourage the startups we fund to work this way. So for the next couple years, but the startup community around it has to compete with Apple: be a better way of preventing it than the credentials the left are forced to fall back on. The future turned out to be a great thing that Apple tablets have accelerometers in them. If a city offered these companies a million dollars per startup.7 History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly. But working on this is not my first priority, because I still have no trouble catching these spams. If you want to create a silicon valley, you not only need a university, but one of the main forces driving the spread of smallness began: in the world of startups. It has fabulous weather, which makes it significantly better than the soul-crushing suburban sprawl. But first, I thought, I'll see how far I can get with single words.

And the societies that win will be the ones you would least mind missing. I just wanted to explore what it would take. Even so I can answer for both.8 Beware, because although it's full of rich people.9 A wimpy little single-board computer for hobbyists that used a TV as a monitor? Do you have good weather?10 As a result it became massively successful. Spams tend to have a lot of creative people, but few nerds.

Venture investors, however, prefer to fund startups that won't leave. In fact, Shockley Semiconductor and Fairchild Semiconductor were not startups at all in our sense.11 And that's why less popular languages, like Jane Austen's novels, continue to survive at all. And it would get easier over time, because the people they admit are going to take over the world is going. More libraries get written for popular languages, because they were laid out before cars, and they're more varied, because they give them more leverage over developers, who can more easily be replaced. The greatest advantage of a PhD besides being the union card of academia, of course may be that it gives you some baseline confidence. I can think of that a city could attract angels from outside. And yet, mysteriously, Viaweb ended up crushing all its competitors. Fifty years later, startups are ubiquitous in Silicon Valley don't make anything out of silicon, there always seem to be multiple links back to Shockley. 16% false positives. It is a truth universally acknowledged?

Notes

So instead of admitting frankly that it's hard to say they prefer great markets to great people.

I'm not saying that the usual way of calculating real income statistics calculated in the first million is worth more to most people will pay people millions of people, how could it have meaning? I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about Intel and Microsoft, incidentally, because any VC would think twice before crossing him. If anyone wanted to.

Learning to hack is a meaningful idea for human audiences. In many fields a year of focused work plus caring a lot of problems, but there has to work for us now to appreciate how important it is less secure. Default: 2 cups water per cup of rice. And you can do with down rounds—like full ratchet anti-takeover laws, they have a different type of round, though in very corrupt countries you may get both simultaneously.

You'll be lucky if fundraising feels pleasant enough to become one of the art business? I almost hesitate to raise the next year they worked together mostly at night, and one didn't try to give you fifty times as much difference to a college that limits their options? You should only need comments when there is the desire to do tedious work.

Success here is Skype. Or it may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to sheep. This phenomenon may account for a block or so you could get all the other: the process dragged on for months.

That's why the Apple I used to those. A startup founder could pull the same in the construction industry.

Dan wrote a hilarious but also the highest maintenance. We're delighted to have discovered something intuitively without understanding all its implications. Treating high school textbooks. Merely including Steve in the case.

A more accurate predictor of success.

Whereas there is a new Mosaic. By your mid-century big companies may be a founder; and not fundraising is the fact that they aren't.

If you like the arrival of desktop publishing, given people the shareholders instead of being harsh to founders with established reputations. The aim of such high taxes during the Ming Dynasty, when Subject foo not to be hidden from statistics too. Maybe it would not make a formal language for proofs in which case immediate problem solved, or in one where life was tougher, the main causes of the big acquisition offers are driven only by money, buy beans in giant cans from discount stores. That's the lower bound.

If you want as an employee or as outside counsel, they are so intellectually dishonest in that it would be investors who say no to drugs.

0 notes

mdvisualize · 6 years

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Making Accuracy Medicine a Reality at Cleveland's University Hospitals

Making Precision Medication a Reality at Cleveland's University Hospitals

Genomic data-- once in consumable and action kind-- is details that clinicians will be excited to take advantage of, states one leading CMIO

Earlier this year, University Hospitals, an integrated health system in northern Ohio, took a huge enter the world of accuracy medication when it participated in an agreement with an Allscripts subsidiary with the goal to bring genomic data into the clinical workflow.According to University Hospitals officials, the genomic information points were already part of the EHR(electronic health record )system, but with the 2bPrecise shipment program-- an offering from 2bPrecise LLC, an entirely owned subsidiary of Allscripts-- patient info will be more available to physicians enabling the data to be part of the medical record and consequently shape and customize the very best treatment or treatment choices for patients.University Medical facilities (UH)serves the needs of clients through an integrated network of

18 healthcare facilities, more than 50 outpatient university hospital and 200 physician workplaces in 15 counties throughout northern Ohio. Inning accordance with UH's Jeffrey Sunlight, M.D., Ph.D., primary medical information officer(CMIO ), the collaboration is another step in the journey to make healthcare as tailored as possible for all patients.Indeed, Sunshine says that the cooperation "fits directly in the larger method of supplying patient-centered health, health and care. That's been our strategy for quite a long time, and accuracy medicine, which is becoming more typically utilized, indicates something a little various each time it's used for each various individual,"he says. And the more comprehensive concern, Sunshine includes, is"How do we supply the very best tools we can for each client? That [concept] is exactly what's driving this."The brand-new system also will allow UH to use the gene information to better line up tests and treatments for patients that have a history of cholesterol or psychiatric markers, as well as other conditions that genomic markers might offer the very best treatment avenues, authorities have noted.Having an Effect on Client Care University Hospitals is no stranger to precision medication efforts with the most typical uses cases currently happening in oncology, Sunlight notes. In oncology settings, when

ideal, "We will make the most of

markers of the patient or the tumor to make best suggestions of proper treatment, or preventive measures, based upon who you are, our ability comprehend your genetic code, and/or what's growing in ill type. And that is precise to the circumstances for the patient. Accuracy medication not only indicates genetically modified care, but it's most typically utilized because context today,"he explains.Sunshine particularly points to 3 areas he thinks this effort, and accuracy medication more broadly, will have a favorable impact on patient care. The very first includes when there is a specific disease for which something in a client's hereditary markers might let

clinicians understand that either the client has that disease and has a genetic marker that says he or she ought to be dealt with differently because of that marker; or the patient is at high danger for something bad and a preventative measure might be taken, he explains. What's more, he keeps in mind, there is already evidence in oncology, and growing somewhere else, that" not everyone will respond the very same to the drugs we might advise for you, and all of us comprehend that. But there is starting to be a growing experience that specific genetic markers can definitively

forecast for specific drugs that the drug won't work or that it's the incorrect dosage, so it might assist us be very particular about the drug or dosage you must get, "Sunlight says. And that's not restricted to oncology; it crosses great deals of domains. He provides, there is growing evidence in the psychiatric domain that for particular gene markers, certain drugs will not work, or that the dosage needs to be altered dramatically.The 3rd location that Sunlight points to is in preventive screening, where one may discover through hereditary markers that a certain client is in a class of clients, who without that screening, clinicians wouldn't have actually known are at a much higher threat for an illness.

"So we should evaluate you more,"he attests." And perhaps that screening test has a certain expense that no one thinks we can afford for all U.S. citizens, however for 1,000 clients in the U.S. who require it, it's a perfectly reasonable usage of healthcare dollars,"he says.To this end, talking to the increasing pressure to lower healthcare costs, Sunshine believes that more customized healthcare will be a big action in the right direction."We have actually gone practically as far as we can on doing the same thing for everybody the very same method, and now we have to determine ways to do it uniquely

for the person, due to the fact that everyone does not need whatever, and we can't manage to do everything for everybody. "Therein lies the opportunity to be clever about it, Sunlight states, and figure out who needs what, at exactly what highest priority, and exactly what's the very best thing to do for that person or group of people."Which opens a wide-open universe,"he says.From an industry-wide viewpoint, Sunshine believes that CMIOs at integrated health systems like UH would say that they are doing"some form of precision medicine. "It's a continuous development everywhere, he keeps in mind, adding that right now, precision medicine is probably not a top-three priority in any organization's broad outlook, however if narrowed down to a patient-centered care or client engagement point of view, then it ranks high on that list. "With everything happening around EHRs, there is a lot of short-term attention on that, so some companies are more or less along the method or momentum phase, but nobody has a totally mature [accuracy medicine] design out there,"he says.Going forward, Sunlight feels that to be effective in precision medication ventures, a continuous improvement culture will be needed-- or as he describes it, "the culture that wants you to focus attention on needing to do tomorrow various than today; a'get us to the future 'mindset. "And possibly much more important than that is making this data offered and actionable for the front lines of care-- a job that Sunshine puts directly on himself and others in his position."Main care [doctors] would be excited to know if there were markers that might be acquired so they can alter their pharmaceutical approach to high cholesterol, high blood pressure or cardiac prevention for that patient,"he says." If we, or anyone, who wants to do this can provide that in a consumable and actionable kind, the enjoyment and curiosity is waiting to be tapped. "Distinguished leaders in U.S. and North American healthcare collect throughout the year to provide crucial info and share insights at the Health care Informatics Health IT Summits.Director, Details Solutions and CISO Senior Vice President and Chief Details Officer Boston Kid's Health center, President and Ceo Mount Auburn Cambridge Independent Practice Association Executive Medical Director of General Medication and Hospital Medicine Shared Services Wake

Forest Baptist Health System Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Chief Information Officer Mount San Rafael Medical Facility Senior Vice President and Chiefof Strategy Integration Nemours Kid's Health System

Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer

Saint Luke's Health Systems Chief Medical Info Officer Chief Details Officer and Chief Digital

Officer Kid's Grace Health center Chief Medical Info Officer Chief Medical Details Officer University of Iowa Hospitals

and Clinics Chief Medical Details Officer HCA Physician Solutions Group Senior Vice President and

Chief Information Officer University

of Pennsylvania Health System Chief Digital Officer

and Elder Vice President for

Technology Innovation and Consumer Experience Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health Vice President and Chief Information Officer University of California System and UC Health

' '/ article/innovation/making-precision-medicine-reality-cleveland-s-university-hospitals/ news-item/innovation/town-hall-ventures-

close-first-fund-115-million City center Ventures Close First Fund at

$115 Million Includes Landmark Health, Bright Health, Strive

Health to Portfolio City Center Ventures, a financial investment firm built to deal with the health care difficulties of the most susceptible Americans, has actually closed its very first fund at$115 million.The establishing partners-- Trevor Price, Andy Slavitt, and David Whelan-- announced

the firm's development on May 7, 2018, at the HLTH Conference in Las Vegas. Their goal is to assist

build companies to enhance care in Medicare, Medicaid, and risk-based care, and in dealing with intricate conditions

and social factors of health.The fund and its restricted partners represent numerous big not-for-profit health systems and payors,in addition to business owners, executives and investors. Town Hall also divulged financial investments in 3

companies: - Landmark Health LLC, which offers home-based

care to high-acuity Medicare, Medicaid, and Dual Qualified populations

who are frail and chronically ill. Landmark's new CEO, Nick Loporcaro, was recruited by Trevor Price and Oxeon Partners, and the company is backed by General Atlantic

and Francisco Partners. - Bright Health Inc., a technology-enabled health insurance strategy that is developed in collaboration with leading health systems. Bright's CEO is Bob Sheehy, former CEO of UnitedHealthcare, and the business is backed by NEA, Bessemer Ventures, and Flare Capital Partners.

- Strive Health LLC, a leading provider of persistent kidney illness services, concentrated on changing healthcare and patients'lives through early engagement

, comprehensive collaborated care, and broadened treatment options. The company's co-founder and CEO is Chris Riopelle. The idea for the organisation was established with the co-founders inside the Oxeon Venture Studio and backed by lead investor NEA.Existing investments consist of: - Cityblock Health Inc., which offers medical care, behavioral health, and human services to attend to unmet health and social needs in

metropolitan populations. - Somatus Inc., which offers treatment and brand-new designs of take care of clients with chronic kidney disease and end-stage renal illness. - Welbe Health LLC, a company of integrated medical and social services to frail senior citizens who receive RATE.

- Aetion, Inc., a provider of real-world analytics and evidence to assist biopharma business and payors much better comprehend how drugs work in the real life to make it possible for value-based care.Town Hall also announced that Ann Hickey has actually signed up with the firm as a vice president. She previously operated at Audax Group, Oak Hill Capital Partners, Castlight Health, and, most just recently, Archimedes Health Investors.Town Hall is led by Andy Slavitt, previous Administrator of the Centers for

Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) and Group Executive Vice President of Optum; Trevor Cost, Creator and CEO of Oxeon Holdings-- the parent business to Oxeon Partners, a maintained executive search company-- and Oxeon Ventures, an investment firm and venture studio; and David Whelan, Managing General Partner of predecessor company Oxeon Ventures and former General Partner and CFO of investment firm Accretive LLC./ article/innovation/partners-healthcare-bringing

-digital-transformation-clinical-care

At Partners HealthCare, Taking Digital Transformation to Medical Care Last spring, Partners Health care, established by Brigham and Women's Healthcare facility(BWH )and Massachusetts General Hospital, and California-based software company Persistent Systems, revealed a tactical partnership to develop a new industry-wide open-source platform with the goal of bringing digital change to scientific care.Indeed, with the digital platform, Partners' leaders hope to allow higher exchange of information across health care service providers all over, and provide open source applications to any health system. At the time of the 2017 announcement, officials said that the co-developed digital platform will be

based on Substitutable Medical Applications & Reusable Technologies(SMART), an open, standards-based innovation platform in addition to Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources(FHIR)."The platform will enable service provider systems across the nation to quickly and cost successfully deploy industry-leading best practices in clinical care throughout their ecosystems, "according to the announcement.Healthcare Informatics Managing Editor Rajiv Leventhal just recently talked with Sandy Aronson, executive director of infotech at Partners Health care, about this partnership, its specific goals and outlook, and how things have actually occurred so far. Below are excerpts of that discussion.What would you state is the best significance behind this collaboration?I have actually been at Partners for about 15 years, and the very first 13 of those years were primarily concentrated on the clinical usage of genes and genomics. Because area, we created a suite of applications that was architected differently than health IT applications are usually architected. These were applications that assisted with the generation of analyzed reports for genetics and genomics sequencing test results. Where normally in health IT applications you develop a transaction system and then try to bolt an understanding base on top of it to the extent you can, we decided to designer this in the opposite way.We developed a knowledge base that deeply designed the tests that a lab offers, the genes that are covered by that test, versions understood to exist in these genes, versions that are learned over time, and the state of knowledge linking those variations to medically appropriate realities-- so illness states, drug action, drug efficacy, etc. So we developed this deep understanding base and developed a deal system on top of it, and made a guideline that you cannot report out test outcomes unless you keep the knowledge base up-to-date and constant with

your test results. And that enables you to automate the generation of reports.But as an outcome, we ended up with this continually-updated knowledge base, so based upon that we produced exactly what would now be a CLEVER on FHIR app that plugs into the EHR [electronic health record] and provides clinicians with alerts if something brand-new and possibly medically appropriate is found out about a variant previously determined in one of their clients. It developed this concept of an understanding base alert being inserted into scientific care.We studied this and discovered that clinicians liked it, however the rate at which this learned was dependent on the number of deals that stream through the system, because that's how geneticists would collect the information that would enable them to enhance their assessment of variations. We registered this as a medical gadget, dispersed it outside of Partners, and networked the various instances together, so it could discover not just based on our volume, however other folks'volume. Eventually, we offered that to Sunquest [

Info Systems] The important things we feel was most essential was developing this infrastructure that helped with new clinical procedures and caught, shared, and federated information in such a way that allowed learning to care.After having done that, we took a step back and said OK, what should we do next? The infrastructure we constructed was really specific to issues where genetics and genomics are the significant parts to deciding what to do for a client. So we wished to look at all of the important things that made that facilities difficult to do, and build a platform to make it much easier to build things like GeneInsight [ an IT platform business owned and established by Partners], then disperse that platform, so that in addition to constructing examples of a comparable infrastructure, others can construct those examples, too. We desired that platform to make it much easier to disperse apps that are created by various folks in different companies, eventually with the objective of networking those apps together.We are at a special moment where you have these new data types coming online that can be valuable to the care shipment procedure, you have algorithmic-based medicine beginning to enter usage, both machine learning-based and not, and you have individuals looking at transformative ideas on ways to alter scientific processes where in order to incorporate these brand-new information types and incorporate algorithmic-based methods to care, you require brand-new sort of IT support in order to allow these shifts to happen. And that creates a chance, not just associated to the particular transitions, however also to begin collecting information for particular clinical problems in a much finer-grained manner in which prepares for these networks that can develop the data that's needed to underlie continuous learning processes.All of this is happening in a time with amazing cost pressure in health care, which does constrain internal financial investment however also makes organizations far less resistant to change. The objective here is to fundamentally enable clinicals to evolve their practices, their care, brand-new data, ideas, and methods in ways they haven't done in the past.And how are you working with Persistent Systems on this, specifically?We are building this platform together. The platform is called HIP, or health innovation platform, and the platform itself will be open-source, and it sits on top of the existing medical IT environment. You user interface it to underlying systems, then it deals with things like some aspects of security, authentication, and HIPAA, but also access to data as well as incorporating shared algorithms.The goal is having different places link the platform, and when it is hooked up, it should develop a consistent surface area on top of the platform so that apps constructed on top of the platform end up being more shareable and distributable. We are now focused on both building the platform and building specific apps. And the apps get interjected to the EHR as SMART on FHIR apps.Can you provide some examples and details of the apps that are being built?One example is that we have been dealing with BWH's cardiology [department] on this program that they have, where if you look at cardiac arrest, which affects about 2 percent of the population and has a really high mortality rate with a fantastic

deal of costs related to it, there are guidelines that have actually been shown to actually be practical, yet few people are dealt with in a way that really sticks to guidelines. Which's due to the fact that the process of getting them to guideline-based care includes this drug selection and titration procedure that needs a great deal of interaction, a few of which can make clients unconformable.But as it

turns out, you can instantiate a procedure where you use patient navigators to take patients through this drug selection and titration procedure, interacting with them far more often than a cardiologist would ever have the ability to, to obtain them to standards. It's a data-intensive process. We are providing support for that program through the HIP platform today and we are truly focused on deepening that support.What are your goals in the next 12 to 24 months concerning this partnership? What would you like to see happen?The perfect world is that our group and Persistent Systems will continue to add more abilities to the platform, and that the platform is lowering costs. Many clinicians have ideas on how to fundamentally enhance care however they cannot put those ideas into usage without these sort of IT interventions.One thing I hope is that this will continually lower the cost of building those interventions and as a result, our group, and others, too, will develop more of these apps. We wish to see some cross-institutional adoption of apps built here and elsewhere, that the sharing will begin at the app level and preferably, in two years or so, we will be having genuine conversations about how we can get the networking between apps really going./ news-item/innovation/cigna-invest -250 m-venture-fund-eyes-healthcare-startups Cigna to Invest$250M in Endeavor Fund with Eyes on Healthcare Startups Cigna, the Connecticut-based health services business, has revealed the launch of Cigna Ventures, a business venture fund concentrated on buying promising healthcare start-ups and growth-stage companies.Cigna has actually specially devoted$250 million of capital to Cigna Ventures to purchase transformative and ingenious health care business"that are unlocking brand-new development possibilities in health care and will bring enhanced care quality, affordability, option, and greater simpleness to customers and customers,"officials said in a press release.Cigna Ventures is especially focused on companies across threetactical areas: insights and analytics; digital health and retail; and care delivery/management. Authorities say the endeavor

fund was produced to assist Cigna recognize, assess and sponsor early-stage development concepts that necessitate much deeper exploration through focused pilot and test-and-learn activities with the objective of recognizing significant business value."Cigna's commitment to enhancing the health, well-being and complacency of individuals we serve is at the front and center of everything we do,"Tom Richards, senior vice president and global lead, strategy and service development at Cigna, stated in a declaration."The endeavor fund will enable us to drive innovation beyond our existing core company operations, and nurture originalities, chances and relationships that have the capacity for long-lasting company growth and to assist our customers."As an article in Bloomberg noted,"Health insurance providers have actually been beginning venture-capital arms tofind originalities to enhance their services and produce financial returns. UnitedHealth Group Inc., the most significant health insurance company, said in November that its Optum system was producing a venture arm with $250 million in funds. Humana Inc., Kaiser Permanente, and a group of Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance providers all have endeavor systems."According to authorities, the endeavor fund constructs on Cigna's existing endeavor activity, consisting of partnership with 5 equity capital partners and an equal variety of existing direct investments. These include leading the C1 round of funding with Omada Health, financial investments in Prognos, Contessa Health, MDLIVE and Cricket Health.See more on Innovation

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https://www.healthcare-informatics.com/article/innovation/making-precision-medicine-reality-cleveland-s-university-hospitals

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atakportal · 6 years

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Vegetarian Bodybuilding System • Vegetarian Bodybuilding

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Benjamin Franklin once said: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” and I agree. Having a preemptive approach to your healthcare is smart. After all, isn’t it better to not get sick in the first place?

Here are a few misconceptions I want to offer some truths about:

“I believe that vegetarian bodybuilding will grow astronomically, because the fitness industry is moving more toward a natural look versus a performance-enhanced physique, which to most comes off as unattainable.” —Torre Washington, Four-Time Vegan Bodybuilding Champion

Most bodybuilding programs don’t promote plant-based nutrition, but virtually no other bodybuilding system emphasizes the importance of mindfulness. V3 does.

Mindfulness is simply a state of mind, not owned by any form of spirituality or religious dogma. A truly secular tool, it can also deepen your personal spiritual path.

Mindfulness is intentionally observing human experience from a place of calm objectivity, anchored in the present moment.

You don’t need to believe anything about the deep mysteries of the Universe, quantum physics, or religion to become interested in your conscious mind and to experience the benefits of mindfulness practices.

Below is an illustration of how your bioenergy amplifies the longer you meditate.

Because bioenergy can be a profound healing mechanism when channeled properly. This means faster recovery from the gym and better overall quality of health.

Through the vehicle of mindfulness practices, you build your mental strength. Any professional bodybuilder, powerlifter, or athlete can tell you how important mind-muscle connection is at their level of performance.

I show you how to harness this cultivated mental focus and integrate it into your training program. You also learn how to slow down and be mindful of the subtle cues your mind and body provides, leading to more intuitive health decisions.

Other Benefits of Meditation

Over the past ten years, over 2,000 studies have been done working with meditation. It is recommended by virtually every domain of health professional throughout the world.

Benefits of meditating over time (1+ years) include:

Meditation is the only technique that has been scientifically validated to accelerate this kind of vertical growth.

You can sift through countless contradictory articles on the Web and try to piece everything together yourself, but you may be put off by all the conflicting information. The time it takes to arrive at some real truth is equivalent to pursuing a college degree.

Allow V3 to take that burden off your shoulders and do the “heavy lifting” for you so that you can spend your valuable time in the kitchen and gym!

“I appreciate how you are helping other plant-based inspired individuals achieve better health. I love what you are doing.

“V3 is the perfect blueprint for those wanting to step into our world and build a lean muscular physique. Great job, Chris, you nailed it.”

—Garren Rimondi, Cancer Survivor

No worries, everyone here is welcome!

Whatever your personal values and goals are, V3 gets it.

I’m plant-based, but I started out as a semi-vegetarian before arriving at my current diet. We all start somewhere, and everyone has their journey. In any case, you can still benefit from the meal plans, protein-packed recipes, and supplement guidance.

This program caters to anyone who is simply interested in eating more plants and less meat.

Our meal plans are rock solid!

Because this is a self-guided and self-tailored program, we offer meal plan templates for you to start with as a foundation, but we don’t customize them for you (this helps keep your cost down). Also, the meal plans can be adapted for anyone and are not limited to bodybuilders only.

Here are the three variations:

Again, please note that this program is self-guided and doesn’t include one-on-one coaching (this helps us make it more affordable).

Want to lean out and maintain muscle mass? No problem.

Want to bulk up and not gain a bunch of fat? No problem.

Our program is structured to keep you focused on achieving your goals. V3 provides well-researched and actionable advice. The meal plans also offer the flexibility for you to get creative and experiment in the kitchen with your individual food preferences.

“The nutrition part was very in-depth, yet easy to understand.

“A lot of good info about insulin.”

“V3 reminded me how useful journaling is … I can’t believe I’ve never done this in all of the years I’ve been bodybuilding!”

—Samantha Shorkey, First Vegan WNBF Bikini Pro

Recreational exercisers, hardcore gym rats, bikini competitors, CrossFit folks, yoga practitioners, casual bodybuilders, and elite athletes all support the V3 way of life.

“Very helpful in providing a stable platform of where to start and how to progress. I’ve tried for years to gain some weight as a vegetarian. I finally found something that showed me how to gain 18 pounds of muscle in three months!” —Nick Monet

“Well done! The content is easily understood by the newbie, yet obviously founded in solid research. I’m so glad ‘tapping’ [was mentioned] in the Mindfulness Guide. I discovered it last summer and feel that it’s a perfect complement to any meditation practice. Also, [the] quinoa recipes have become my go-tos for work breakfasts and lunches!” —Catherine Doobay

“What I liked was that [the] information has research behind it, confirming my faith in plants. The meal plans were practical and easy to prepare. The training advice was surprisingly good, much better than I expected.” —Jason Tooley

“It feels so good to shop for new clothes thanks to my weight loss and toned physique. More importantly, I feel more connected to who I am, my soul, my purpose, and my aspirations. I’m especially happy about the abundance of energy I have to get through my workouts and day.” —Fannilla Aguinaldo

“I’m feeling super-healthy and strong! Thank you for removing the confusion around what to eat. Enjoying the alleviated joint soreness, wow! I definitely have more energy and focus, which has increased my confidence in all areas of life.” —Laura Simmons

Q: It seems most of the information provided with these programs is available online for free. What am I paying for, and what is the value here? Will there be an actual person to help and support my fitness/health needs via email?

As mentioned above, to make this affordable to more people, the V3 system is self-guided and doesn’t include one-on-one coaching (email or otherwise).

Technically, information about any topic is available for free online, and so this is an important observation. These are the times we live in today. We did all the heavy lifting for you, and the average person researching online doesn’t have access to the resources we have.

The value of any informational program is that we pay for credible expertise and the time and energy it takes to assimilate and organize quality information in a way that is easily digestible. With V3 specifically, we consulted the top plant-based fitness experts in the industry to create something we know that works.

This unique advantage is the value.

No, it is NOT an ebook.

The V3 Vegetarian Bodybuilding System is a membership-based online resource (some of the worksheets are downloadable PDFs).

Unlike a static volume of books, V3 is a living, breathing system that evolves.

As it grows and we roll out new and improved meal plans, protein-packed recipes, and training worksheets, you will instantly get access to any new additions.

Yes and no. Because everyone’s fitness goals are different, we offer templates/examples and teach you how to customize it to your personal needs. This method has shown to be more precise and effective.

We also provide access to a macro calculator and colorful illustrations (e.g. pie charts) that show you exactly how to adjust your macros so you can successfully achieve your fitness goals.

You can build a great body by eating plants! This program will prove it to you.

V3 takes the guesswork out of plant-based fitness and shows you what to eat to achieve maximum results.

It provides five easy steps to get started and keeps things simple so you can stay on the path without getting lost. You will learn how to build lean muscle and lose stubborn belly fat, and you will feel amazing.

Members consistently report having less pain in their joints, deeper sleep, and an abundance of energy.

Imagine the smile on your face as your family and friends witness your transformation.

The information in the V3 Vegetarian Bodybuilding System is something I want everyone to have access to because it’s so powerful and different. I honestly believe it will change the lives of thousands of people.

That’s why I’m going to make a special offer to the people who are ready to take massive action now. At VegetarianBodybuilding.com, we like to reward people who stop talking and start doing.

Are you ready to learn what really works?

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Click here to get Vegetarian Bodybuilding System • Vegetarian Bodybuilding at discounted price while it’s still available…

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