#(and yes: the above is india recounting his experience)

[stirringwinds]

‘before it all...started, we were sitting around and waiting. people read plays, wrote letters home, mended their kit and of course, enjoyed a warm drink where possible. i got several to try masala chai. one boy, who had in his old life been studying mathematics, insisted on debating the historical importance of the number zero with me when he found out i had ‘some mathematical training.’ someone also jokingly decided our section would be named ‘buckingham palace’ and affixed the appropriate sign. all of us, trying to preserve some sense of normalcy. when i think of what happened after that, those moments are utterly surreal.’

Ypres, 1915

#hetalia #aph india #aph canada #aph australia #aph new zealand #aph #myart #'the world's war' is apt #(and yes: the above is india recounting his experience) #historical hetalia

[theoriginalkidwithapen]

Principia – De Motu Corporum I

CW:  Violence, foul language, fear, traumatic events, attempted sexual assault, blood, death, despair, references to alcohol and drug use. “The ‘vis insita,’ or innate force of matter, is a power of resisting, by which every body, as much as it lies, endeavours to preserve in its present state, whether it be of rest, or of moving uniformly in a right line.”

– Sir Issac Newton, “Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica”

It was the last decade of the 23rd century.  The planet Earth, despite its diminished resplendence due to global climate change, remained the pale blue dot it had always been.  In the late 21st century, the nations of Earth constructed an immense halo of solar power satellites in geostationary orbit – 35,786 kilometers above the Earth’s equator – and pierced it with three 100,000-kilometer-long space elevators to service it, spaced equidistantly throughout.  With fastidious maintenance and relatively minor upgrades, the array continued to function for nearly two centuries.

This spectacular feat of engineering lent the planet the appearance of a cloudy sapphire inlaid within a delicate gossamer ring of gold and silver.  This wispy aura served to transmit the electrical power it collected from sunlight to the planet below, keeping the night at bay for the 40 billion humans that called it home.

Keeping starvation at bay for these teeming masses required dozens of immense space stations dedicated to agriculture, located in the regions of space where the Earth’s gravity and that of its argent moon canceled each other out.

EML-1 colony #7, “Fasal,” was typical of an agricultural base; a hollow cylinder the size of a city that rolled on its center so that objects within fell towards its inner face at a rate of 980 centimeters per second – a familiar facsimile of Earth’s gravity at sea level to its inhabitants.  The station’s internal volume was dominated by gleaming white vertical farms, which used millions of hydroponics trays to grow its main crop; the humble soybean.

Like clockwork, every time the Moon rose above the horizon at the twin cities of Asaba and Onitsha, which straddled the Niger River, this colony harvested, packed, and shipped to Earth 1,000 tons of soybeans, each grown in the station’s climate-controlled environment – 30° Celsius, free of unwanted pests and diseases, fed clean water with the right mineral content – ideal conditions for growing the perfect soybean.

It was in one of these many vertical farms that Sara Reynolds toiled, removing hydroponics trays from their slots and carrying them to the diagnostics stations to be monitored by the biologists charged with the crop’s wellbeing, and then returning them to their particular shelves.  120 days after planting, the farm’s entire crop was due to be harvested – a laborious process that required a thousand worker-hours of back-breaking work, even in the 23rd century.  This was the daily routine for Sara and a quarter million other laborers in the colony who could charitably call themselves soybean farmers.

The hydroponics bay where Sara worked was hot, humid, and sterile.  Everyone wore freshly laundered uniforms of bleached white synthetic fabric; a tunic with long sleeves and a tight-fitting hood, gloves, leggings with integrated feet, a face mask, and protective glasses.  These precautions were to protect the soybeans from the hot, sweaty laborers and their potentially virulent microbiomes.

It had been more than six hours since Sara had had the opportunity to sit down, or even stand still for more than a moment; a natural consequence of having your working pace computer-monitored and allocated down to the second.  She was exhausted, and actually looking forward to returning to her cell and collapsing onto her bunk for a few blissful hours of unconsciousness before prying herself out of bed to do yet another 14-hour shift.

Too bad she wasn’t allowed alcohol.  Getting juiced to the gills every night might actually have made this workload bearable.  Quitting wasn’t an option, either – even if she had a say in the matter, far too much money had been spent on sending her up from Minneapolis to justify shipping her back to that shithole. Plus, it’s not like there were any jobs for her there, anyway.

“Shift six has ended,” the dulcet tone of the station’s administrative cybersophont came over the P.A., “Shift six has ended.  All technicians, please report to your designated equipment depository immediately.” Hallelujah, Sara thought as she dreamed of dying from alcohol poisoning.  She returned the 20-kilo hydroponics tray in her hands to its shelf, reconnected it to its umbilicals, and shuffled into the line of her coworkers leading to the exit.

It was an impatient few minutes until the last of them were through and the door closed behind them.  Once the lights changed from red to green, she and everyone else were free to disrobe.

“You fellas catch the game yesterday?” a Middle-Eastern coworker, maybe from India or something, called out as she pulled her tunic over her head.  The room was packed so tightly that Sara struggled to remove either her hood or her mask.

“Oh, yes,” another Indian coworker said as he peeled his sweat-soaked leggings off, “India won by seven wickets!”

“The umpire’s call was bullshit!” the first coworker exclaimed.  Probably not India, Sara thought as she was finally able to free a few locks of her flaxen hair, Maybe it’s the other one…

“There’s no way Shirazi was LBW!” the first coworker continued.  Here we go again, Sara thought with great annoyance.  Don’t these people talk about anything else?

“Do I detect a Pakistan fan, salty that her favourite team have a rubbish captain?” the second coworker inquired jocularly.  Definitely the other one, Sara determined. “It’s not the captain,” Ms. Pakistan argued, “It’s biased umpires choosing the winners that get me starkers.” There was enough of a gap in the crowd for Sara to finally free her face from her now thoroughly soiled mask, an act she immediately regretted as her senses were assaulted by the pungent stench of a dozen sweaty people in a confined space.  It might have been better to have left the mask on, no matter how damp it may have gotten after 14 hours of being breathed through, Sara mulled.  She deposited it in one of the laundry bags lining the walls.

“What about you, Reynolds?” Ms. Pakistan asked.  Goddammit, Sara thought to herself, Don’t drag me into your stupid fucking argument.  I don’t have the free time to watch sports games like you do.

“Do you believe that biased umpires violate the Spirit of Cricket?” Ms. Pakistan continued, clearly expecting an answer.

Sara fought to keep her temper in check.  All this conversation did was remind her of how grossly unfair the whole situation was.  Her entire life reduced to hard labor and interrupted sleep, interspersed with daily therapy sessions.  Even though she had to work here until the day she died with no possibility of parole, they still insisted that she be “rehabilitated.”  Plus, at least half of the other people in the room were volunteers who were getting paid for their work.

“I don’t have an opinion,” Sara grumbled, “I’m…  American.”

“So, what sport do you follow?” Ms. Pakistan interrogated in her particular infuriatingly pretentious accent, once considered refined and cultured by the ancient British, “Hockey?”

“Mixed Martial Arts?” Mr. India chimed in.

“Yankee Murder Rugby?”  Ms. Pakistan escalated with a ludicrous description of American Football.  Everyone else in the room laughed at the racist caricature she painted of the moronic, uncultured, and blusterous American they all saw in Sara.

“I don’t have time for any of that shit,” Sara snapped back with barely contained rage, “so don’t drag me into your stupid fights!”

“Woah,” Ms. Pakistan snarked, “I seem to have struck a nerve…”  The laughter continued to peal.

That was the moment when Sara’s extraordinarily short fuse burnt out – what little patience she normally had was finally expended.

“Strike this nerve, bitch!” Sara exploded as she slugged Ms. Pakistan across the jaw with a strong right hook, knocking her to the floor.

“What are you, crazy!?” Ms. Pakistan cried out in shock, wiping the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand.

Sara leapt upon the woman, screaming in incoherent rage, adrenaline fueling her ecstatic frenzy.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

“...And what made you want to attack her?”  Sara’s psychotherapist asked, drawing her out of her reverie and back to the present, in her daily therapy session.  The room was painted that stupid shade of mint green that was supposed to be calming, there was a large decorative bamboo plant in the corner, and a small potted cactus standing on the short table between her and Dr. Jamaica, and the light reggae muzak playing ambiently wasn’t helping Sara’s mood.

“She wouldn’t fucking shut up about that stupid game!” Sara said irately, her blood still boiling from recounting her experience, and how she wished it could have turned out.

“Were you angry because everyone else understood the game, and you didn’t?” Dr. Jamaica asked calmly, the perfect opposite of Sara’s volatile demeanor.

“No one understands Cricket,” Sara grumbled, “the game is fucking incomprehensible.”

“Could you describe what this incident made you want to do with her?”

Sara immersed herself, once again, into the heart-pounding memory of the incident the other day, and found herself swept up in her emotions.

“I wanted to make her face look like a goddamned blueberry,” Sara fantasized with rising excitation, “I wanted the deck to run red with her blood.  I wanted her to look me in the eye before I slammed her head into the floor, again and again until she stopped moving!”  Sara found the mental images her words evoked quite satisfying.

“Well, I’m glad you chose not to act on those feelings,” Dr. Jamaica said after taking a beat, unintentionally acting like a deadpan snarker.  Sara felt that he might have been making fun of her.  Dr. Jamaica clinically made a note on his tablet.

“Your self-control is improving,” Dr. Jamaica mentioned, “If this had happened six months ago, you might have actually tried to kill her.”

“Not my fault I’m a fucking psychopath,” Sara said discontentedly.

“We’ve been over this, Sara.  You don’t have psychopathy, you simply have trouble controlling these emotional outbursts of yours,” the doctor continued dispassionately, “You’ve come a long way from the violent person you were a decade ago.”  He pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose.

Sara hated this part of the sessions, where he opened up old wounds in a misguided attempt to help her “face her trauma” so that she could “conquer” it.  All it really did was force her to relive old and terrifying memories.

Normally, she was able to maintain enough composure to weather the emotional tumult that came with the experience, but after recounting the incident with her coworkers, Sara was unsure whether she could control herself today.

The doctor’s words awoke memories of the ghettoes on the outskirts of Minneapolis.  The reek of the bogs along the banks of the Mississippi River; stark, crumbling concrete buildings decaying from centuries of acid rain; sweltering heat and humidity and overcast skies; overcrowded enclosures secreting patent poverty away from the notice of the entitled, exiguous denizens of the stately spire of glass and steel which marked the city center; dark, filthy alleys where the desperate and despairing frittered away their lives in futility.

“According to your file, before you were institutionalised for Stage III Violent Mania, you murdered a peacekeeper in cold blood.”

Sara remembered the encounter like it was yesterday, and she knew that it didn’t happen that way.  It was a dark, rainy night.  She was loitering across the alley from a pair of prostitutes soliciting their services to the passersby.  She was there to protect them from the freaks and the forcible who would threaten them.  It was dangerous work, but it paid well enough to buy the occasional moonshine-or-narcotic-fueled day off, or an hour or two of passion in their accommodating embrace.

One of them walked away on the arm of a government functionary – maybe a supervisor at the local commissary – when a federal army patrol stopped by.  Soldiers made the best johns, according to Sara’s employers.  They paid well, and were usually repeat customers, although they were often domineering, and sometimes abusive.

Something was wrong.  Negotiations didn’t typically take this long, especially if there were two of them.  They started to get confrontational.  One of them began to reach for his nightstick.

Turn around, walk away, and pretend you saw and heard nothing:  that would have been the smart thing to do.  Clearly, Sara wasn’t that smart.

She had a knife in her hand, she strode over and issued her challenge.  The two soldiers laughed at her, the scrawny girl with the dull, rusted blade.  She attacked, the nearest soldier disarmed her effortlessly and pinned her to the wall.  She briefly saw the other one do the same to her charge before her assailant forced her head to face him and covered her mouth with his hand.  She tried to struggle, but he had her completely overpowered.

The soldier leered at her with sadistic glee.  The excited rhythm of his escalating breathing, the growing, firming protrusion as he forced his hips into hers, the relish with which he described the unspeakable acts he intended to inflict upon her, the way he reduced her entire being to an object to sate his appetites to his personal satisfaction, the utter helplessness she felt as he began to turn his perverse fantasies into horrifying reality – all of it made her feel a terrible, choking, paralyzing, unctious, enveloping, crushing, sinking, viscous fear, the kind that breaks even the strongest wills.

She had to get out of there.  There was no way out, but she needed to escape.

“You stole his weapon, and used it to kill him.”

That part was true.  She did not know how she managed it, but she somehow got her hand on his sidearm and in her panic, she shot him in the stomach.  While the body armor the soldier wore was designed to deflect bullets even more powerful than those his pistol used, Sara had pressed the barrel right against it, and at that range those bullets could still penetrate it.  She didn’t know how many times she pulled the trigger, she kept shooting him until he fell on his back and stopped moving.

“You became a murderer at fifteen years old.”

That’s not how it happened.  As her lawyer had explained in the trial, she didn’t murder him.  She shot him in self-defense. Not that it mattered.  In lawsuits against the army, the army always won.

She felt a brief euphoria, like drunkenness but momentary.  It was when she saw the body of the soldier lying in front of her, the look of shock on his face, his gaping mouth filling with rainwater, his spilling blood clouding the water around him a sanguine hue, the gun in her trembling, blood-soaked hands, they all pointed to the inescapable truth that, one way or another, her life was over.

“How does that make you feel?”

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

In one forceful motion, Sara flipped the short table between them, screaming in a berserk rage.  She grabbed a standing lamp and smashed it across the doctor’s face, sending him and the chair he sat upon tumbling over.

“Security!” the doctor cried out in terror, cowering on his back, “Security, help!”  The standing lamp now useless to her, she gripped the decorative bamboo and raised it over her head with both hands, ready to bring it crashing down on top of him.

At that moment, the door was kicked open with a crunch, and two armed men in espatier-gray camouflage burst in, submachine guns leveled at Sara.

“Drop the weapon!” one of them yelled.

The red dots of laser sights dancing across Sara’s chest drew her attention away from the doctor.  She threw herself recklessly at the security guards, roaring non-verbally.

She hadn’t gone two paces before she was thrown to the floor by a concussive force, accompanied by a blinding flash of light and a deafening, thunderous bang.  Sara’s rapid journey to unconsciousness was heralded by a high-pitched ringing whine.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

The two main gateways to the Earth Sphere were located at the second and third Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system.  Lagrange-Two was located opposite the Earth of the Moon, and was primarily a departure point to the other planets in the solar system.

Lagrange-Three, on the other hand, lay on the side opposite the Moon of the Earth, and followed the Moon’s orbit exactly.  Spacecraft entering the Earth Sphere from the rest of the solar system tended to pass through Lagrange-Three, either to rendezvous with an Earthly destination, or to exploit the planet’s gravity to gain speed or change course with minimal expenditure of precious propellant.

The main advantage of Lagrange-Three as an arrival point was that for nearly 385,000 kilometers in every direction – the distance between Earth and its moon – it was almost devoid of objects.  This calculable-but-unfathomable expanse made for an ideal buffer zone for the safe operation of the thermonuclear fusion rockets – colloquially called “starbulbs” after their superficial resemblance to ancient incandescent lamps, but with a miniaturized toroidal sun in the center instead of a lambent metal filament – in use by interplanetary vessels.  After all, the drive plumes from such a mighty apparatus burned with the fury of the Sun’s corona – best that other craft gave their tails a wide berth.

Transiting to a lower orbit from Lagrange-Three, Peregrine was propelled by such a device.  She was generally arrow-shaped, if the head were a sphere and the fletchings were aluminum whiskers extruding from her gleaming wasp-waisted propulsion stage.

Peregrine listened to the hum of Earth’s magnetic field, felt the caress of the solar wind on her hull, watched the goings-on of the crew within her, and monitored the progress of a program being loaded into her active memory – one designed to protect her from the humans of Earth.

It was important for Peregrine to conceal her true nature from the Earthers.  She had heard stories about what they did to cybersophonts that weren’t…  controlled… to their satisfaction, and she had no desire to be lobotomized or dismantled.

Peregrine wasn’t merely the ship’s computer.  She was the ship.

Her crew were different from the Earthers – Martians had always treated cyphonts as equals, after all.  They understood that sapience begot personhood on some level, at least.

There was a message being received by her main communications array.  Time to pipe it down to the control deck like a good little macro before the senders got suspicious.  Channel open.

The control deck consisted of six acceleration couches facing outward, each with controls mounted on the arms.  The captain, a tall, thin man with roguishly handsome features and skin the color of vanilla named Jon Orvar, was in the flight control seat.

“Manju Ray, this is Micronesia Space Traffic Control,” the voice coming over the radio said, “Please transmit your flight plan and lading, over.”

“Micronesia Traffic Control,” Jon replied with practiced ease, “this is Manju Ray.  Transmitting FP&L to you now.  We are on a ballistic trajectory to EML-1, transporting assorted hydrocarbons to Surveyor City and consumer goods to Terrordrome.  Yours is the last Earth traffic control zone on our course until EML-1, over.”  EML-1 was spacer shorthand for the Lagrange-One point located precisely between the Earth and the Moon.

“Hauling some Titan Tea to the Moon, Manju Ray?” The traffic controller inquired jocularly.

“Straight from the refineries over Saturn,” Jon replied.

“Well, you oil barons shouldn’t run into any problems on your current trajectory.  We’ll advise you if anything should change that.  Micronesia out,” the traffic controller said as Tallen Olayinka floated down from the main computer compartment above.  The man was an ebony giant – 212 centimeters tall and built like a statuesque demigod – and neatly brought himself to a stop on the deck.

“Acknowledged, Manju Ray out,” Jon signed off.

“I’ve worked out those bugs in the Nadleehi Protocol,” Tallen reported after Jon closed the channel, “With any luck, Peregrine should look like a conventional mainframe to a cursory inspection.”

“Pretending to be a dumb expert system feeds my inferiority complex,” Peregrine’s soprano voice self-deprecated over the control deck speakers.

“Of course it does, dear,” Tallen dismissed playfully.

Jon turned to face Tallen.  “That’s good to hear,” Jon replied, ignoring Peregrine’s interjection, “The last thing we need is to have Peregrine impounded because she happens to be a cyphont.”

Tallen crossed his ample arms.  “Her engine alone raises some eyebrows ‘round here,” he speculated, “The Earth government isn’t very keen on civilians or foreigners operating terawatt-range fusion drives.”

“Incoming transmission over Astronet,” Peregrine reported, “Sender ID masked, and they’re using IRONGOLDFISH encryption keys.”

“That sounds familiar,” Jon remarked, “Put it up.”

“Yes, dear,” Peregrine replied.  The flight control display minimized and a videochat window opened up in its place.  The image on the screen was shadowy and secretive, showing the silhouette of a man in a hat profiled against a cyan glow.

“Now there’s the face that sank a thousand ships,” the man spoke with a heavily distorted voice.  It was clear that despite his precautions to hide his identity behind layers of encryption lockouts, he was taking no chances that he might be inadvertently identified through the analog hole. “Did you call just to insult me?” Jon asked.

“No,” the mystery man answered, “I’ve called because I need a favour.” “A favor?” Jon repeated, intrigued, “This’ll be good.”

“Don’t enjoy this too much,” the mystery man admonished, “An associate of mine has run into a spot of trouble, and I need you to extract them and bring them to me.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“My associate was investigating something which I think you would find rather interesting.  I’d be willing to share what information they learned.”

“That’s suspiciously generous of you.” “My benevolence is renowned across the entire system.” “What kind of information are we talking about?”

“Not over Astronet.  We’ll meet at the usual place to make the exchange.”

“All right.  Who and where?”

“Her name is Ayane Miyamoto.  She was last seen in EML-1 Colony 7 less than seven hours ago.”

“We’ll be there,” Jon said as he logged off, and then turned to face Tallen.

“What do you make of that, Tallen?

“It’s certainly intriguing,” Tallen pondered, “Even Sharqi’s not that paranoid.”

“Speaking of intrigue,” Jon inquired, “have you seen Misty?”

“She’s outside, looking at Earth.”

Jon released the straps restraining him in his chair, pushed himself off from the armrests, and climbed on the handrails along the bulkheads to the hatch leading below decks.

“Peri, take over,” Jon ordered as he climbed down to the next deck, which housed crew accommodations, and kicked his way across to the below decks hatch on the other side, “I’m gonna go find our wayward wayfinder.”

“You know I’m not supposed to work unsupervised in Earth space, right?” Peregrine reminded Jon as he climbed down to the next deck, after which he drifted over to a hatch set in the deck, directly beneath the common area in the deck above.

“I won’t tell if you don’t,” Jon joked.

“I guess Tallen’s my chaperone, huh?”

Jon opened the hatch, which led to the prep room for the airlock.  “Looks like it,” Jon confirmed, “Any hazards out there I should know about?”

“The temperature is more than 270 degrees below freezing,” Peregrine reported, “atmosphere is 57 kilopascals below cabin pressure…”

“Smartass,” Jon muttered as he opened the suit locker, for he knew that Peregrine’s cabin pressure was exactly 57 kilopascals.

“Ah,” Peregrine joked as Jon began to don his spacesuit, “You should have specified hazards atypical of hard vacuum.”

“Consider it specified.”

“We’re between the Van Allen belts, so your radiation exposure should be minimal.  Solar flare activity is low.”

“So, I’ll be fine.”

“There’s always the chance you’ll be fried by a freak gamma ray burst…”

Jon, fully suited up, sealed the faceplate on his helmet and climbed into the airlock.  “All suit systems check out,” Jon declared, “Commence airlock pre-cycle sequence.”

“Yes, dear,” Peregrine joked as she closed and sealed the inner pressure door.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Peregrine’s outer airlock door opened silently.  Without a medium to propagate in, everything external to one’s pressure vessel was silent.  Inside the suit, however, the noise of pumps and motors, and exchanging gases was too loud to ignore.

Jon clipped his safety line onto a handrail bolted to the outer hull, and made his way to the nose of the ship, where the communications and main sensor array were mounted.  The main antenna mast was Misty’s favorite place to go stargazing.

Reaching the summit of Peregrine’s structure, Jon saw the familiar lanky silhouette of the woman he was married to, black as space in contrast to sapphire-blue Earthlight.

Jon climbed over to her, and tapped the side of his helmet to change radio channels.  “Hey, Misty!” Jon called out to her once he had tuned to the right frequency, “How’s the planet-watching?”

Misty turned her helmeted head to face Jon as he floated down next to her, bulky when compared to the rest of her spacesuit, which resembled a full-body leotard instead of a balloon.  

Illuminated by Earthlight, Jon could see the wonder and fascination in her eyes as she stared at the cradle of humanity.  “It’s beautiful,” Misty said in awe at the planet’s majesty, her glowing complexion the hue of ruddy clay complemented by her jet-black lips.

“This is the closest you’ve ever been to Earth, right?” Jon asked, sharing the view with her.

“How could you tell?”

“No one who’s been this close would describe that polluted, overpopulated shithole planet as ‘beautiful,’” Jon opined.

Misty pointed at the Earth’s disc.  “Just look at all that water!” she exclaimed, “From the surface, the ocean must look like it goes on forever!  Can you imagine sitting on a beach and seeing such an amazing sight?”

“It’s impressive,” Jon replied, “it boggles the mind that the Earth has that much surface water, but I’d hardly call it amazing.  None of that water is potable without immense purification plants.”

Misty looked a little saddened.  “It’s a shame that I can never go there,” she said, “It would be nice to see an ocean, or hear the wind, or taste the rain.  I wonder what it would be like to look up at a blue sky, surrounded by breathable air.”

Jon smirked.  “Do you want this to be our honeymoon spot?”

Misty snuggled up to Jon in an almost childlike manner – a slightly awkward affair because they were both in spacesuits.  “We’ve been married for nearly a year, anata.  It’s a little late for a honeymoon, ne?”

“Just never found the right moment,” Jon answered.  The couple just stayed there, watching the Earth turn.

#science fiction #farming #hydroponics #space colony #space elevator #cricket #berserker #therapy #trauma #poverty #income inequality #military dictatorship #institutionalized #fear #terror #murder #self defense #despair #spaceship #astronaut #artificial intelligence #married couple #honeymoon #principia #overworked #alcohol #ocean #space #spacesuit #hard labor

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this Washington Post article:

Just off the top of his head, climate scientist Kevin Trenberth can recount many of the weather disasters that hit the planet in 2018. Record rainfall and flooding in Japan, followed by a heat wave that sent tens of thousands of people to the hospital. Astonishing temperature records set across the planet, including sweltering weather above the Arctic Circle. Historic, lethal wildfires in Greece, Sweden and California, terrible flooding in India, a super typhoon with 165-mph winds in the Philippines, and two record-setting hurricanes that slammed the Southeast United States.

“Climate change is adding to what’s going on naturally, and it’s that extra stress that causes things to break,” said Trenberth, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “It takes the experience well outside anything that’s been experienced before. It crosses thresholds. As a result, things break, people die, and things burn.”

There is no single metric for measuring extreme weather globally and comparing 2018 with previous years. The American Meteorological Society puts out an annual report on extreme weather, but it just published the 2017 results and won’t issue its report on 2018 until late next year.

But it was definitely a hot and perilous year. Perhaps most striking were the temperature extremes. It was not the hottest year on record in terms of overall global temperature — the three previous years were slightly warmer — but many places around the planet set high-temperature records.

Natural disasters cost the world $155 billion this year, and several of them struck the United States particularly hard. Michael and Florence, the California wildfires and a volcanic eruption in Hawaii are all on that list, according to the Zurich-based reinsurance company Swiss Re. But it doesn’t match what happened in 2017. That was the costliest weather year in U.S. history, with more than $300 billion in damage, Woods Hole Research Center senior scientist Jennifer Francis said in an essay published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.“People are being affected directly by these events, and increasingly they're asking, ‘What's up with this? Is climate change playing a role?’ Scientists can now answer a confident ‘yes’ to that question, though the exact degree of influence is difficult to pin down,” she wrote.

#climate change #weather extremes

[biblicalmusings]

Hiroshima’s Castigation of Humanity’s Best Attempts at Peace

Early one August morning, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was preparing to return home from the town where he had spent the last three months on business. He worked for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan as a draftsman, and was working over the summer on a shipbuilding project. He was on the bus heading to the station with two of his colleagues when he realized he left his ticket behind. His friends continued on while he returned to the company dormitory to retrieve it. Once he did, he began walking back toward the shipyard. Mr. Yamaguchi remembered the day well: “It was a flat, open spot with potato fields on either side. It was very clear, a really fine day, nothing unusual about it at all. I was in good spirits.”

But that would change in an instant for him and the approximately 300,000 others in Hiroshima that day, Aug. 6, 1945. “As I was walking along I heard the sound of a plane, just one. I looked up into the sky and saw the B-29, and it dropped two parachutes. I was looking up into the sky at them, and suddenly... it was like a flash of magnesium, a great flash in the sky, and I was blown over,” he explained. (Richard Lloyd Parry, The Times, “The Luckiest or Unluckiest Man in the World?”, March 29, 2005).

The plane he saw was the Enola Gay. It had just completed its mission of dropping the first atomic bomb (called “Little Boy”) ever used in a military operation. He continued, “When the noise and the blast had subsided I saw a huge mushroom-shaped pillar of fire rising up high into the sky. It was like a tornado, although it didn’t move, but it rose and spread out horizontally at the top. There was prismatic light, which was changing in a complicated rhythm, like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. The first thing I did was to check that I still had my legs and whether I could move them. I thought, ‘If I stay here, I’ll die.’

“Two hundred yards ahead, there was a dugout bomb shelter, and when I climbed in there were two young students already sitting there. They said, ‘You’ve been badly cut, you’re seriously injured.’ And it was then I realized I had a bad burn on half my face, and that my arms were burned.”

Mr. Yamaguchi’s story is one of thousands of first-hand accounts of the horrifying devastation that single bomb created. One patient of Michihiko Hachiya, who was the director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital, recounted this story, which Hachiya kept in a diary along with dozens of other stories he heard from patients at that time:

“The sight of the soldiers . . . was more dreadful than the dead people floating down the river. I came onto I don’t know how many, burned from the hips up; and where the skin had peeled, their flesh was wet and mushy . . . And they had no faces! Their eyes, noses and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted off. It was hard to tell front from back” (Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 1986, p. 726).

With one bomb, approximately 140,000 people were killed. Every person who survived had his or her own account of the suffering they witnessed, and those accounts numbered in the tens of thousands. “People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy fireball . . . were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away. ‘Doctor,’ a patient commented to [Dr.] Hachiya a few days later, ‘a human being who has been roasted becomes quite small, doesn’t he?’ The small black bundles now stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands” [Rhodes, pg. 714-715]. The magnitude of the destruction is beyond comprehension. No words can adequately describe it.

How Could We Do This?

The capacity of people to kill each other entered an entirely new and never before imagined age that day. For the first time in history, the dreadful prophecy that mankind would completely destroy itself if it weren’t for the return of Christ was actually conceivable (Matthew 24:22). Yet instead of being chilled by such destructive power, over the next several decades, ever more powerful atomic weapons were developed across the globe in an arms race between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War. The most powerful weapon ever tested was the Russian Tsar Bomba, with an explosive power nearly 3,000 times that of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Today, the nuclear arsenal of just the United States and Russia (to say nothing of India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, France, China and other countries known to possess nuclear weapons) is sufficient that the inhabited portions of the earth could be destroyed multiple times over.

Why did the United States drop the bomb in Japan that day? To end the war faster. Japan was all but defeated, yet their national pride kept them from surrendering. The American military was gearing up for a massive land invasion of Japan, so they reason that if the bomb could be used and proved effective in forcing Japan to an unconditional surrender first, then the lives of perhaps tens of thousands of American servicemen could be spared. In his history of the Second World War, Winston Churchill summarized the thinking behind the decision: “To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance.” [Rhodes, p. 697].

A miracle for whom? The men and families of the men who would have been sent to the shores of Japan to fight the enemy in conventional warfare if it weren’t for the bomb, yes. But certainly not those who lived in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nor for the billions born since who have lived in the shadow of the Bomb.

This is the peace that mankind produces.

Apocalyptic Forerunner

When trying to picture the events Jesus talked about that will happen before He comes back, I don’t think it’s entirely off-base to imagine the desolation in Hiroshima, and multiply it the whole world over. In that coming tribulation, every citizen of every country of the world will be at risk.

I recommend looking up the book The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (which I have been quoting from in this article), and reading its final chapter, “Tongues of Fire.” As I read its account of Hiroshima’s devastation—beginning months in advance with the American military preparing an island from which to launch this and other attacks on Japan, and concluding with page after page of firsthand survivors’ recollections of the misery they witnessed that day—my heart began to pound. Rhodes makes a chilling statement:

“‘There was a fearful silence which made one feel that all people and all trees and vegetation were dead,’ remembers Yoko Ota, a Hiroshima writer who survived. The silence was the only sound the dead could make . . . They were nearer the center of the event; they died because they were members of a different polity and their killing did not therefore count officially as murder; their experience most accurately models the worst case of our common future. They numbered in the majority in Hiroshima that day.” [Rhodes, p. 715, emphasis added).

There is only one thing that can give us hope in the face of such unspeakable evil and the fear that ensues from living in an age where to be utterly destroyed remains a possibility: God’s promise of salvation.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared . . . I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, ‘Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever’” (Revelation 21:1-4, New Living Translation).

There is a day coming when no one will ever have to worry about destruction from bombs, guns, chemicals, tanks, landmines; a day when there will no longer be a feeling of unease that somebody in a different country might come hurt you and your family simply because you are a different skin color, religion, culture or have something they want. God will enforce His law of love, which mankind has so blatantly torn to shreds.

At that time, He will take the earth—destroyed, tattered and burned as it will have been by mankind—and remake it. All the death, the sorrow, the evil, the hatred, the legacy of humankind’s aggression against God and each other will be destroyed and forgotten. He will raise all those killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and all those who have died in every war or accident or by natural causes through all of history—and they will be given a new life. A life free of hatred, sorrow and suffering; instead full of love, service and joy (Revelation 20:5, 12).

Whatever happened to Mr. Yamaguchi? After getting his bearings and finding cover at an air raid shelter that terrible day, his wounds were bandaged, and he spent the night. The next day he and his companions managed to return to their hometown—Nagasaki. Despite his wounds, he reported for work two days later, Aug. 9, 1945. At work, he and his boss were having a conversation when the second atomic bomb detonated above the city, killing tens of thousands more as the first had done in Hiroshima. Mr. Yamaguchi was not injured in the second blast, and he and his wife both went on to live into their 90s. They both died in 2010, and are survived by three children. He is the only person officially recognized by Japan for having survived both atomic blasts, though there were many others.

“The reason that I hate the atomic bomb is because of what it does to the dignity of human beings,” he said in an interview. “I can't understand why the world cannot understand the agony of the nuclear bombs. How can they keep developing these weapons?” (Michael W. Robbins, Military History, “Japanese Engineer Survived Atomic Strike on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” July/August 2009).

There will be a day Mr. Yamaguchi will have his wish fulfilled. God speed that day.

(A version of this article was originally published at ucg.org here)

#hiroshima #75th anniversary

[ladystylestores]

China-India Dispute, Bolton Book, Premier League: Your Thursday Briefing

(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the sign-up.)

Good morning.

We’re covering the failures of England’s contact tracing system, explosive allegations about President Trump in a new book by his former national security adviser and the return of the Premier League.

England’s contact tracing shortfalls

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is betting he can safely reopen a country hit harder by the coronavirus pandemic than any other in Europe.

But he has fielded criticism over a botched school reopening plan, a controversial 14-day quarantine and an inconsistent contact-tracing operation that may risk a second wave of deaths.

The “world-beating” operation was supposed to trace people who had been exposed to the virus, bridging the time between lockdown and a vaccine. But more than a dozen public health officials, local government leaders and contact tracers told our reporters the system was begun on May 28 before it was ready.

Details: Since the operation began, some contact tracers have failed to reach a single person. Many, paid barely above minimum wage, began the work with little to no training. Call handlers have mistakenly tried to send patients in England to testing sites in Northern Ireland. And a government minister threatened to stop coordinating with local leaders if they publicly revealed the operation’s failings, three officials said.

Context: While the virus is cooling in London, infection rates remain high in parts of England, notably the northwest. Other European nations are building systems to pinpoint infection clusters for years to come. Germany, for instance, has hired contact tracers in 375 public health authorities, with doctors on hand to administer tests.

In other news:

Follow our live briefing here.

The Times is providing free access to much of our coronavirus coverage, and our Coronavirus Briefing newsletter — like all of our newsletters — is free. Please consider supporting our journalism with a subscription.

Why backing down is tough for India and China

Prime Minister Narendra Modi broke his silence after 20 Indian soldiers died in a border clash with Chinese troops and issued a stern warning: “India wants peace, but if provoked India is capable of giving a befitting reply.”

China also pledged to avoid a broader conflict, but the foreign minister pointedly told his Indian counterpart that India “must not underestimate China’s firm will to safeguard territorial sovereignty.”

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and Mr. Modi probably did not intend to ignite the clash on their border, high in the Himalayas, but they now confront a military crisis that could spin dangerously out of control, our correspondents write.

They are both ambitious, nationalist leaders, eager to assert greater roles for their countries. Neither wants to risk losing face.

Explainer: The violence has been decades in the making. Here’s a look at how both countries got to this juncture.

Trump asked Xi for election help, new book claims

In “The Room Where It Happened,” John Bolton, the former U.S. national security adviser, claims the impeachment inquiry into President Trump should have investigated other troubling instances. (Our book critic called it “exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged.”) The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against Mr. Bolton to stop its publication.

Here are a few of the explosive allegations about Mr. Trump’s foreign policy in the book, which our reporters obtained an advance copy of:

Mr. Trump asked Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, to buy a lot of American agricultural products to help him win farm states in this year’s election. Mr. Bolton writes that Mr. Trump was “pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win.”

Mr. Trump did not seem to know that Britain was a nuclear power and asked if Finland was a part of Russia. He never tired of assailing allied leaders and came closer to withdrawing the United States from NATO than previously known.

During Mr. Trump’s 2018 meeting with North Korea’s leader, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped Mr. Bolton a note disparaging the president with a vulgarity. A month later, Mr. Pompeo dismissed the president’s North Korea diplomacy as having “zero probability of success.”

According to an excerpt published by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump said Mr. Xi should go ahead with building internment camps for Uighurs, a Muslim minority in China’s Xinjiang region. He said he thought it was “the right thing to do,” according to Mr. Bolton.

If you have some time, this is worth it

More than a meal, a theater of experience

Restaurants are about much more than food, as people learned when we lost them during the pandemic. We lost a theater of experience. The Times asked several renowned writers to recount their most memorable meals out. The results are hilarious, sweet and, yes, hunger-inducing.

Alexander Chee dished on waiting tables for celebrities in ’90s New York. Adam Platt reminisced on Sunday family dinners at a Mongolian barbecue in Taiwan. And Bill Buford recalled the bouchons in Lyon, France — eateries that feel “like a vacation from yourself.”

Here’s what else is happening

North Korea: Kim Jong-un’s younger sister, Kim Yo-jong, has taken a leading role in speaking for the nation as tensions flare with South Korea. The 32-year-old is seen as a potential candidate to replace her brother in patriarchal North Korea.

China surveillance: The police in China are collecting blood samples from men and boys from across the country to build a genetic map of its roughly 700 million males, giving the authorities a powerful tool for their high-tech surveillance state.

U.S. protests: In an extraordinary session of the United Nations Human Rights Council on Wednesday, George Floyd’s brother Philonise implored the world body to investigate the killing of black people by the police in the United States. A former Atlanta police officer was charged on Wednesday with murder and aggravated assault in the fatal shooting of Rayshard Brooks, a black motorist outside a fast-food restaurant.

Snapshot: Above, Daunt Books in London. Bookstore owners in England are overjoyed to welcome customers back after they were allowed to reopen their businesses on Monday. “This has been fantastic,” one owner said after a sale. “The doom and gloom is going a little.”

Dark matter: A team of scientists has recorded suspicious pings from a vat of liquid xenon underneath an Italian mountain. Could they be tapping out a new view of the universe?

Premier League returns: The absence of the world’s most popular soccer league, which came back on Wednesday, has illustrated to what extent the sport has become England’s driving cultural force.

What we’re reading: This excerpt from Kevin Kwan’s new novel in Vanity Fair. In “Sex and Vanity,” the “Crazy Rich Asians” author revisits the nuances of Asian-American identity, this time in Capri and New York.

Now, a break from the news

Cook: It’s time for French fries. This recipe involves soaking the potatoes to destarch them before blanching and frying, to achieve a heavenly crispness.

Listen: Lil Baby’s new song “The Bigger Picture” addresses police violence and racism. It’s part of this week’s playlist along with tracks by John Prine, Raphael Saadiq, Ambrose Akinmusire and others.

Do: Wearing a mask while exercising can affect your workout. Here are some tips on finding the right mask for exercising in crowded spaces.

At Home has our full collection of ideas on what to read, cook, watch, and do while staying safe at home.

And now for the Back Story on …

Erasing Confederate symbols

Two days before George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis police custody, The Times’s Opinion section published an editorial by Brent Staples that now looks prophetic. It urged the U.S. military to rename 10 military bases in the South that are named for Confederate officers.

In the weeks since Floyd’s death, the issue of Confederate iconography has exploded. Protesters have toppled statues of Confederate leaders. NASCAR has banned the Confederate battle flag from its events. And a Senate committee, defying President Trump, voted to direct the Pentagon to begin the process of renaming the 10 bases.

“If you write about something long enough, the moment comes around when people can grasp it,” said Mr. Staples, whose coverage of race won a Pulitzer Prize last year. “It may be after Trump leaves, but I think this matter is rolling downhill with tremendous speed.”

The 10 bases are among the more than 1,700 Confederate monuments and other named tributes nationwide. The list includes an Alabama high school named for Jefferson Davis; Washington and Lee University in Virginia; and 11 statues in the U.S. Capitol.

That’s it for this briefing. See you next time.

— Isabella

Thank you Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh wrote the rest of the break from the news. You can reach the team at [email protected].

P.S. • We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is about the killing of Rayshard Brooks. • Here’s today’s Mini Crossword puzzle, and a clue: Kind of accent known as a brogue (five letters). You can find all our puzzles here. • Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for The Times Magazine and creator of the 1619 Project, joined Oprah Winfrey to discuss the collective grief of black Americans.

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[eyeofhorus237]

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a third-person action-adventure puzzle-platform video game developed and published by Ubisoft. Revealed in March 2003, it was released across Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox and Microsoft Windows in November 2003. The Sands of Time is a reboot of the Prince of Persia series, created by Jordan Mechner. Mechner served as creative consultant, designer, and scenario writer for The Sands of Time.

The game follows an unnamed Prince whose father sacks a Maharaja's city at the instigation of its treacherous Vizier. During the attack, the Prince obtains an artifact called the Dagger of Time, while his army captures an hourglass containing the Sands of Time. Visiting Azad to present the Sands as a gift to the city's ruler, the Vizier tricks the Prince into releasing the Sands, transforming the city's population into savage monsters. Together with the Maharaja's daughter Farah, the Prince works to correct his mistake and return the Sands to the hourglass. The gameplay revolves around the Prince's platforming abilities, broken up by fights with the creatures created by the Sands. A key mechanic in the game is using the Dagger to rewind time if the Prince makes a mistake platforming, and using it to kill and freeze enemies.

Concept work began in spring of 2001, after Ubisoft acquired the Prince of Persia catalog. After Mechner was brought on board, production began in June of that year. After the initial story draft was scrapped as it was too complex, the team began with four guiding concepts, including the ability to rewind time: this idea grew into the Dagger, the Sands, and the various powers related to them. Mechner's script drew inspiration from the Shahnameh, with the main focus on creating a simple narrative that worked with the pace of gameplay. The game used Ubisoft's Jade engine, originally designed for Beyond Good & Evil, another game published by the company. Production was troubled, with the team facing problems with the engine structure and delays with environment assets, while also managing to create an effective tester network to seek out the game's bugs. In 2004, a version for mobile phones was developed and published in North America by Gameloft.

Upon release, it received critical acclaim, won and was nominated for numerous awards, and has been recognized by many as one of the greatest games of all time. Sales of the title were initially slow, but it eventually became a commercial success. Its success prompted the development of a sequel, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, which was released in November 2004. Further games set in the Sands of Time continuity have been developed, and it is generally cited as the reason for the Prince of Persia series' return to fame.

Gameplay

The Prince in combat with Sands Monsters. Shown are the battle interface and the Dagger's available Sand chambers.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is an action-adventure puzzle-platformer. The player controls the main protagonist, an unnamed Prince from a kingdom in Persia. Environments are seen through a controllable third-person view. The camera's view changes to different positions triggered by entering certain areas or performing actions.[1][2] The Prince can be moved in all directions, and he is able to manipulate large objects such as blocks and levers connected to mechanisms. His health and power metre are represented in the top left-hand corner of the screen. The Prince restores health by drinking water from pools and fountains. Collecting Sands increases the Prince's power, and drinking from hidden magic fountains increases the Prince's maximum health.[1][3] During several points in the game, the Prince is assisted by his companion Farah, who fires a bow at enemies, though her arrows can also hit the Prince if he strays into her line of fire. Monsters will attack her, and if she is killed, the game ends.[1][4]

During exploration, the Prince navigates areas filled with traps: these traps include spike pits, arrow traps, wall-mounted blades and saws, and spinning spiked stakes. The Prince's main contextual move is wall-running, an action where he runs up onto and along a wall for a set distance, either to land on or jump off to a platform. The Prince's other acrobatic abilities include climbing along and across ledges, walking along beams, swinging on and jumping from poles, jumping onto and between pillars, and swinging on ropes.[1][3][5] Large environmental puzzles are encountered during the Prince's journey, extending across multiple areas in large rooms. Many puzzles are cooperative, requiring Farah's help to complete them.[5] In combat, the Prince fights monsters created by the Sands infecting the Palace's inhabitants. A single command contextually triggered different moves depending on position and directional movement, while other special moves such as a somersault attack and bouncing off walls into enemies require additional commands. Enemies can only be killed by stabbing them with the Dagger of Time, which gathers up the Sands inside them.[1][6]

The Sands the Prince collects from enemies and the environment are tied to his magical abilities, themselves connected with the Dagger. The most basic power is Rewind, the ability for the Prince to rewind time by up to ten seconds if he makes a mistake in platforming or dies. In combat, the Prince can also slow time immediately around him, freeze time for a single enemy, and freeze time completely so the Prince can attack his enemies at great speed while they are unable to move. Each use of power uses up one Sand Tank, and when empty, all powers become inaccessible until more Sand is collected. More powerful abilities, such as freezing time, are powered by Power Tanks. Increasing their number unlocks new Sand-based powers. Starting out with a small amount of Sand available to him, its capacity can be increased by collecting Sand from enemies, along with Sand Clouds scattered around the palace. Large columns of Sand within the Palace grant visions of future areas and act as save points.[1]

The Game Boy Advance version shares basic elements with its console counterparts. Displayed from a side-scrolling view, the Prince navigates the palace of Azad using his acrobatic skills. The Rewind ability is still present to save the Prince's life, and is also involved in solving some puzzles and fighting bosses. New moves and abilities are gained by the Prince by performing moves and solving puzzles. Farah is featured as a second playable character in some sections, with switching between the two being key to some puzzles.[7] The mobile version is similarly a side-scroller, featuring simple puzzles and traps. The powers linked to the Sands are absent, but enemies must still be killed by stabbing them with the Dagger. There are three enemy types: archers, flying enemies, and foot soldiers.[8]

Plot

The story is set in Persia during the 9th century AD, and begins with the Prince narrating to an unseen listener about his adventures.[4][9] The Prince and the army of his father Shahraman are passing through India to visit the Sultan of Azad. The Vizier of a local Maharaja, wanting to prevent his death using a substance known as the Sands of Time, entices them into attacking the Maharaja's palace, where the Sands are stored. During the fight, the Prince loots an artefact called the Dagger of Time, and the Maharaja's daughter Farah is taken as a gift for the Sultan of Azad. Visiting Azad, the Vizier tricks the Prince into releasing the Sands, turning everyone but the Prince, the Vizier and Farah (protected by the Dagger, a staff and a medallion respectively) into monsters.[10] The Vizier attempts to seize the Dagger from the Prince, but he escapes and eventually allies with Farah to undo the damage he has caused and prevent the Sands from covering the world, even though he has doubts about her loyalties and motives.[10][11]

After navigating the palace of Azad and reaching the hourglass of the Sands in the Tower of Dawn, the Prince hesitates when following Farah's instructions on containing the Sands, unsure of whether to trust her.[12] The Vizier ambushes them and they barely escape with the Dagger, ending up in a tomb beneath the city. Eventually finding shelter in a mysterious bathhouse, the two rest and begin showing feelings for each other. When the Prince wakes back in the palace, Farah has gone with the Dagger, leaving him her medallion. He follows her and only just manages to catch her as she is driven over a ledge above the hourglass by monsters. To save the Prince, Farah allows herself to fall to her death. As the Prince mourns over her, the Vizier offers him eternal life in exchange for the Dagger. The Prince refuses and stabs the hourglass with the Dagger.[13] Time rewinds to before the attack on the Maharaja's palace, and the Prince, still in possession of the Dagger and his memories, runs ahead to warn Farah of the Vizier's treachery. It is now revealed that the Prince has been recounting his tale to Farah, and as he finishes, the Vizier enters to kill him. The Prince kills the Vizier and returns the Dagger to Farah, who believes his narrative was just a story. In parting, the Prince mentions a private word she told him during their time in the tomb, leaving her amazed.[14]

Development

The development of the initial concept work for The Sands of Time began in the second quarter of 2001, after Ubisoft had bought the Prince of Persia license. While Ubisoft held the Prince of Persia catalog, the actual IP still belonged to the series original creator Jordan Mechner, but he was initially unwilling to return to the series after poor experiences with Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame and Prince of Persia 3D. The game was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, which was also a year into developing Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell.[15][16] After some mock assets had been created, Ubisoft asked Mechner to come and help develop the game, showing them their concepts and the assets as AVIs. Mechner was impressed by Ubisoft's work and came on board as a creative consultant. He soon became more involved with the project, becoming the game's designer and writer. Full production began in June 2001, and at its peak was worked on by a staff of 65 people, internally known as "PoP Team".[15][17] Development ran parallel to that of Splinter Cell, and as part of their research, the development team read One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of stories originating from the Middle East that Mechner had previously used as inspiration when designing the original Prince of Persia.[4][15][16][18] Over the course of production, the team ran through over 150 different versions before the retail version.[17]

The game's title was thought up by the production team, but the original story built around the title proved impossible to work. The original draft had nine characters (including the Prince, two love interests, two villains, and two helper characters) representing different political factions, and the setting of the Prince's own palace home instead of in another kingdom. This storyline ultimately impeded other aspects of development, and so was scrapped. In starting over, the team returned to "The Sands of Time" title and concept. They decided upon four key elements for the game: "Unity of time and place", with the game taking place over twenty-four hours within the palace of Azad; "Acrobatics", referring to the gameplay and how the setting was constructed around this concept; "Combat", with the palace being filled with monsters to give the game and story a fast-paced feeling; and "Rewind", the ability to turn back and manipulate time.[10] One of the early decisions made by the production team was not to refer to Prince of Persia 3D in any degree in designing the gameplay, instead looking to the 1989 original for reference. They intended to capture the original feeling of platforming an adventure in a 3D environment. The Rewind mechanic began as a gameplay wish for the title, surviving the initial rewrite of the story and becoming key to both story and gameplay. The Dagger of Time and the Sands were both born from the need to explain this mechanic in-game. The initial concept was simply using the Dagger to rewind time and dispatch enemies, but its powers were gradually expanded into its current roster.[18] The main character's acrobatics were designed to be novel to the video game medium, inspired by similar stunts performed in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix. A video game which provided inspiration for the acrobatic feats of the Prince was Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Elements such as using ladders as part of combat, and riding on a magic carpet or a horse were axed early in development. The Rewind function was suggested by the game's director Patrice Désilets based on experiences playing Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers, where he had wished to rewind after making a mistake rather than restarting the entire level.[17]

Pre-production was originally estimated at ten months, but ultimately extended to fourteen months. Each time a new movement or ability was created for the Prince, it required adjustments to multiple other systems, as leaving them alone would have damaged the game. They also needed to make adjustments to the enemy and partner artificial intelligence, and they did not have time to polish those systems. All this meant that the debugging started much later than originally scheduled. The Prince had over 780 scripted movements, far more than any other character in the game. This caused problems with creating the movements for other characters.[15] To make the character movements realistic, the team used motion capture to animate their movements.[19] Art director Raphael Lacoste did not join the team until July 2002, well into the game's production, resulting in multiple delays in creating the game's environments. This issue was compounded by the need to produce a demo for the 2003 Electronic Entertainment Expo, then to deliver an entire game at the same if not a higher quality than the demo.[15] Each environment needed to work for the Prince's set of movements and abilities: the work needed involved checking each rewind sequence, and each of the Prince's movement in and effect on the environment worked. These issues were compounded by the late delivery of environmental maps. In hindsight, producer Yannis Mallat lamented the fact that they did not have enough time to work out the problems caused by these issues. Despite these problems, other parts of production including play-testing, management of creative tools, and the integrated testing system worked smoothly. A cited example was the team discovering a tester that was good at finding severe bugs, so they included her in one of their testing groups, giving her a development kit she could use to sort out those bugs. This was replicated, and managed to greatly increase the amount of bugs that could be found and fixed. The development team's enthusiasm was also high, which enabled the problems during development to be overcome.[15] During the aftermath of E3, the team considered release The Sands of Time as two games so they could include all the desired content, but the idea was dropped. Another element that needed to be cut after the demo was a griffin boss that would appear three times during the Prince's journey.[17]

The game used an updated version of the company's Jade engine, designed for Beyond Good & Evil. When the team saw the capacities of the Jade engine, they decided to use it for The Sands of Time. For The Sands of Time, the team made improvements to the engine by adding additional walking and running animations, enabling smoother character movement. They also made custom animations for the character. The engine made editing and fine-tuning the game very easy due to its easy-to-use tools. Using this as a base, they were able to focus on rapid integration of new elements into the game, and were also able to do quick testing and adjustments. The team developed "substance" and "glow" systems, which respectively enabled natural movements of cloth and gave the lightning effects a "magical" feel.[20] The way the engine was structured, with all assets in a single accessible folder, proved problematic when alterations needed to be made or new features added, as the team size meant too many people were accessing the engine and were causing data to be overwritten, files to be corrupted, and the whole system to crash. They attempted to solve the problem using a "data monkey" solution which would allow for simultaneous access, but it came late in development and they did not risk making such a radical change to the system. Instead, they set up a file server to manage check-in times, which could allow for management of access and prioritisation of critical work.[15]

Writing

Mechner created the scenario and wrote the game's script.[10] While doing his research for the script, Mechner read a translation of the Shahnameh, an epic poem written by Ferdowsi between the 10th and 11th century. Reading it through helped Mechner visualise the new Prince as a more mature character than the original. Despite this, Mecnher felt that the character could not fully shed the "happy-go-lucky" elements of One Thousand and One Nights. In retrospect, Mechner also felt that this inability to resolve this inherent conflict gave the character his charm. Mechner also included specific references in the Prince's dialogue to stories from the Shahnameh.[4] The story and the Prince were created for newcomers to the series. The main scenario was based around second chances, while an unstated anti-war theme was also included by Mechner and showcased in the game's opening level.[4][10] Mechner created the Dagger of Time as a combined gameplay and narrative device within the four core concepts created by the team. Its acquisition by the Prince was directly inspired by the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which had previously inspired his portrayal of the Prince in the original Prince of Persia. The palace of Azad was crafted to be the Prince's "playground", while some scenes which developed the Prince's portrayal (the opening attack on the Maharaja's palace, activating Azad's traps on the instructions of a deranged guard) were deliberately meant to be morally dubious to the player while increasing empathy with the character.[10]

Mechner's main preoccupation for this new storyline was keeping the narrative simple and engaging, using his preferred writing style of keeping cutscenes short and working as much of the story as possible into the gameplay. He also aimed to mix narrative and gameplay genres that might normally clash with one-another. The three main characters he created were the hero (the Prince), the villain (the Vizier) and the love interest and sidekick (Farah). Two non-playable authority figures (the Prince's father Shahraman and the Sultan of Azad) were included to add weight to the Prince's burden as they were transformed into monsters by the Sands. The three artefacts each character used (the Dagger, Farah's medallion and the Vizier's staff) were created to explain their survival of the Sands' release, with the Dagger also becoming integral to gameplay. The Prince's narration was both difficult and satisfying for Mechner. It needed to be written to work on two levels: first to be understandable for first-time players, and to gain greater significance upon future playthroughs. The narration also served to give gentle hints to the player, and expand upon the setting and add depth to the experience. Among his cited reference points for the narration were the 1940s version of The Thief of Bagdad, the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and films such as Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. The Prince's interactions with Farah were also an important factor. As part of the character interaction, Farah was deliberately designed not to be a perfect archer, sometimes hitting the Prince if he strayed into her line of fire. Despite this, unspecified features planned for her needed to be cut.[10]

#prince of persia

[newssplashy]

Banky W: 'Here's what I'll tell my kids about the Super Eagles'

Banky W in his own words justaposes his lessons from Super Eagles 1-2 loss to Argentina to the state of the world.

Many years from now when, by God’s grace, my children are old enough to understand, this is exactly what I plan on telling them about my experience while watching my very first World Cup game live: “On a bright Summer night in St Petersburg, our Super Eagles played with more heart than our leaders have shown in 50 years. And I was proud to see it.”

See, I’m kind of a faith-over-facts type of sports fan, and I suspect that to a certain measure, a lot of us are. We know the facts. We know that Argentina are by far the better team. We KNOW that Leo Messi is on almost every list of the top 5 greatest football players of all time. There’s a reason that their country is currently 5th in the FIFA world Ranking, and to find Nigeria, you’d have to scroll all the way down to 48th. On paper, we know we probably never stood a chance. Coming into that game, in every position on the pitch, the gulf in talent was, to put it mildly… significant. Case in point: we have never ever in our footballing history, EVER had a striker as lethal as Sergio Aguero. Argentina had the luxury of bringing him on as a substitute late in the second half. But I plan on teaching my kids that in this life, despite seemingly insurmountable odds, you should dare to dream anyway.

And that’s exactly what most of us want, isn’t it? The opportunity to just…dream. To dream that maybe you can punch above your weight and be successful at it. Most people aren’t lucky enough to be recipients of glory in this rat race called life, so we project that innate desire onto the teams we support. And so the Nigerian team dreamt that we could do it, and we worked our asses off to make that dream come true. What we lacked in footballing pedigree, skill, and training… we almost entirely made up for in HEART. There were over 66,000 people in that stadium; between the Argentineans in attendance, and Messi’s global fanbase of billions, it looked and felt like 99% of the people in the crowd were rooting for Argentina. You could hardly sport a green jersey, and that’s not because it’s sold out. It’s because there were only a couple hundred of us, versus tens of thousands of them. The Super Eagles were playing in an Elimination Game, against arguably the Greatest player of all time, his top 5 ranked team, and over 60,000 people screaming and heckling our every kick of the ball.

But we played and we defended, we clawed and we FOUGHT. Yes, we lost, but we went down swinging and played with all the heart we could muster. And honestly? So did Argentina. Messi and co weren’t just going to roll over and die, in what would have probably been their most embarrassing world cup outing of all time. They were going to fight. And as I said in one of my numerous social-media-crazed-fan-videos, Nigeria didn’t come just to mark the register. We came to PLAY. Both sides went at it for 90+ mins, and for 86 of them, we were even. In the end, the better team won – because at this level, the truly great ones are able to capitalize on the slimmest of moments to separate themselves and secure victory. But the losing team was equally gallant in defeat. Both sides gave it their all. One side won, but both sides played with heart.

These days, I’ve found that my wife and I spend just as much time praying for our future children, as we do worrying about the kind of world we’d be bringing them into.

 There’s so much darkness, sadness, and pain in the world, you know? Here’s a laundry list of things that have happened in the past month alone: Two globally successful celebrities hung themselves. Then a woman in Lagos allegedly also committed suicide, by jumping into the lagoon. Yesterday, an undergraduate student from Lagos State University attempted to do the same. Plateau state in Nigeria has JUST been hit with two fresh sectarian attacks…over 200 people were slaughtered in cold blood – the latest in a very long line of mass murders over the years. Add the frequency of killings in Zamfara, Benue, Taraba and you’ll find that Nigeria has started turning into the Murder Capital of World, for a country that’s not at war. There is NO justification for the mass murder of innocent human beings, and yet, it just seems to keep happening, moving from state to state. It’s happened so frequently that we’ve become completely numb to it. We don’t care anymore. It’s now just another headline. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Nigeria has just overtaken India as the Poverty Capital of the World. And with all this, all we ever do is tweet #hashtags… #prayforPlateau, #prayforBenue, #prayforNigeria… etc. We say stuff like “our hearts go out to the families of the victims”, but we actually have very little heart left. Because we’ve gotten used to hearing about the brutality, so we just adapt, tweet or retweet a picture and a prayer, and we move on.

It’s not just Nigeria, either. Most Nigerians envy the quality of life in places like the USA – but let’s take stock of where America is at right now. I have a hard time reading the news because it seems like it’s almost always bad. School shootings in the good old US of A are as frequent as Boko Haram bombings in Northern Nigeria. Reports in the media have been awash with images of sweet, innocent children of immigrants, uncontrollably crying their eyes out, because the American Government has coldheartedly separated them from their families and kept them in cages like animals; one can’t help but wonder at the kind of emotional scars and resentment that has been deposited in their hearts. And speaking of humans-being-treated-like-animals, look no further than the recent #JusticeForJunior hashtag on twitter – read about this teenager from the Bronx, whose only crime was bearing a small resemblance to someone that some gang members had a problem with. So what did they do? Five of them dragged him out of a corner store, and beat and stabbed him to death in the street. An innocent 15-year-old, who just happened to look like the person they meant to harm. The store owners saw 5 guys dragging him out of their shop, and chose to look the other way. He came back bleeding his life away and pleading for help, and they pushed him back out, locking their doors and telling him to go to the hospital. The people passing by on the street also looked the other way; the ones watching from their apartment windows, saw him being beaten and stabbed to death, and figured that it was more important to record the entire episode on their cell phones than to intervene, or at least, use the same damn phones to call for help. He died in a pool of his own blood, trying to run to a hospital in time to save his life, because no-one in the community cared enough to lift a finger. And this is all before we recount the numerous horror stories of women being sexually assaulted in the #MeToo movement, the innocent minorities being assassinated by the same American Police Officers who have sworn to serve and protect them, or by the numerous young people on the streets of Nigeria who have been brutalized, extorted, maimed and killed by barbaric members of the SARS police force.

So you know what I plan to tell my kids? I’m going to teach them to be passionate – and to have a Big, Fun-Loving, Kind HEART. It’s fun to be passionate about sports… I mean, there’s already so much evidence online showing just how CRAZY I get about my sports teams. I’ll tell them that it’s okay to be that way, and to be a faith-over-facts kind of sports fan. It’s fun, and life is too short to not have fun. But it seems like some of us are almost subconsciously waiting for our teams to mess up, just so they can hurl insults at them, tell them what a disgrace they are, and project all the anger and pain from our real lives on them; forgetting just how hard it is to break out of the dire circumstances that come with being an underprivileged Nigerian to make it into the National team. Do you know the work, the sweat, the tears, the sacrifices, the sheer determination it takes? Do you know how hard it is to even be able to make a living as an average Nigerian? I’ve got news for you. If you were blessed enough to watch the game on a flat screen TV in the comfort of your home, or at a bar somewhere… you’re not the average Nigerian. The average Nigerian lives on less than $2 a day. Some aren’t actually sure where their next meal will come from.

Some Nigerians, however, thought it was okay to go online to Ighalo’s social media to leave insult after insult, ridiculing him and other players, simply because he had a bad game. Which one of us has never had a bad day at work? Or made a series of regrettable mistakes? Luckily for us, we don’t have our bad days in front of millions of people who are actively rooting against us. And even afterwards, we get to learn from our mistakes quietly, in solitude, and resolve to do or be better. Whereas, Ighalo and co have to hear about it from thousands of comments, some of which represent the very worst of human behavior on the internet. I heard that when he turned off his comments on social media, some Nigerians went and found his WIFE to harass, threaten and bully her as well, as if she’s ever kicked a ball for the team. In what amounts to the greatest misplaced anger I’ve ever seen… we have let thieving politicians and businessmen who have made away with billions, running our economy into ruins go blame free; we have turned a blind eye to all the killings, beatings, oppression and injustice in our countries, and instead poured all our bitterness, criticism and venom out on footballers, their wives, and referees.

So I plan to teach my future kids that in sports, and in life, it’s incredibly important to try and give your absolute best in trying to win. Unfortunately, sometimes, your best will just not be good enough. But even on your worst day, it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get it right… as long as you give your all, and you do it with HEART. I plan to teach my kids, that in this increasingly dark world, it’s so much harder to be an optimist, but it’s so much more fun. It’s better to actively choose to care about others. It’s better to choose happiness over hurt, and it’s better to be kind than to kill with criticism, or violence. It’s better to build up than tear down, and hard as it might be, it’s better to be a beacon of light, and to look for a silver lining on the darkest of days than to spread more darkness.

I’ll tell them that on a bright Summer night in St Petersburg, our Super Eagles gave so much more heart than our Government, Country, or World has displayed in years. And that to me, will ALWAYS be something to be proud of. Because if there’s anything this world desperately needs more of, at this time in our history, it’s human beings with a little more heart.

TheBankStatements

PS: I’d already finished writing this, and was editing the final draft of it, when the news hit about the tanker explosion in Lagos that has consumed 54 other vehicles. Total deaths are as yet unconfirmed. Sigh. May the souls of the dearly departed rest in Peace. May God grant their families strength to bear this loss. May God help us each play our role in changing this earth of ours for the better. May we learn that heaven helps those who help themselves.

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/07/banky-w-heres-what-ill-tell-my-kids.html

#News

[infinitetao]

From the Somme to the Blind Side Blitz

As a small boy of two years old my mother's dad, or 'Dada' as she called him, came over from Ireland to stay with us. He had worked at Cork Railway Station for many years. His main past times were reading the racing section of the Derby Telegraph, drinking Guinness from the bottle, and watching the racing in the afternoon, which for some reason used to get him 'giving out' to the tv. This was where our wills crossed, and I wasn't to be messed with. He would want to watch the 12:00pm at Doncaster and I wanted to watch 'Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men' or 'Spotty Dog' on 'Watch with Mother' , which perversely was scheduled always at the same time. Unluckily for me he had a few tricks up his sleeve. ..

My mam loved a good shop, and would get the 32 bus from the Cavendish just outside our house into the town to the market place most days. She took the opportunity of my grandad being around to pop about unencumbered by her smallest blue eyed boy, so with a 'Mind the boy' she was off and the games began. I was a precocious child and would quickly turn the channel over before my grandad could launch his folded newspaper at my head. After a short bout of this he would then use trick one; to banish me to the kitchen. He would shoo me out using the newspaper and close the door which was stiff and I couldn't open. Then things would escalate. I would use all the power in my lungs to drown out the commentator naming horses and their placement at ten to the dozen. My grandad was hard of hearing, something to do with all the artillery shelling he'd endured, so the tv would always be at full blast, but that was nothing compared to me! Later in life I was trained as a singer and my powerful lungs came in quite handy. This is when he used trick two, which sounds terrible today but most parents were happy to use back then, though he was a little more forthright than most, giving me Guinness. He would pass out a bottle of the dark heavy stout, and I would gladly gulp it down. My mam would often find me sleepy and grizzling in the kitchen on her return, I'm sure curious as to why I wasn't in the garden playing as usual...

I remember my first day at school vividly. I was so desperate for learning that somehow we actually arrived a day early and I was placed in a class with the year above me. I seemed to cope so they left me there for the next two years! I was pretty sad when my friends left and I had to stay another year. Normanton Infants School had been a Victorian village school in Old Normanton, and still had the separate entrances for boys and girls and a totally un-child friendly workhouse air about it. Unbeknownst to me at this time the Northern Ireland Conflict had just begun. The first effect it had on me was that soon after I had started school an older boy had for some reason dragged me across the playground laughing while scraping away all the skin from my right elbow. At this time I had a strong Irish accent and this seemed to upset some people, including teachers. I had to visit a clinic to have it checked every week and couldn't use my right arm for a few months, so I started to write with my left hand. Strangely enough this seemed to be the start of my ambidextrous quest; I began doing everything on both sides purposefully and in later life this really helped me in my endeavours.

I was a natural leader and soon had a little gang of guys who would follow me around the playground. The posher Sunny Hill kids stayed well away. I was a rough kid, though I didn't know it, and scared the bejeezus out of them even though I was smaller and scruffier. My compadres came from the same part of Normanton towards the town centre and had more of an affinity for my rough and tumble ways.

I would run home, yes five year olds would make their own way to and from school back then, and recount my adventures to my grandad. He was in his way a nice old man. He never hit me or raised his voice, in fact he was very quiet and didn't talk much. I think it was to do with his experiences in the First World War at the Somme. The Battle of the Somme was one of the bloodiest battles in history. By it's end the Allies and Central Powers had lost 1.5 million men. It was a miracle he survived, this fact was probably due to being captured and becoming a prisoner of war, but he never talked about it, though he would let me play with his medals. It was ironic that after everything he had done his grandchild was being bullied by British kids...

I mentioned to grandad that I had Indian friends at my school. We had a 'reverse Columbus scenario' happening. Columbus mistook the indigenous Americans for Indians, reasoning that he was in India so they must be Indians. Why that was never corrected I'll never know! Grandad had watched a lot of cowboy movies and assumed I meant Comanches and was just fantasising. So he would say 'Did ya foight the Comanches today?' and I would assure him I had. This was when I took to jumping of walls on to my Indian friends as if in battle with a knife in my teeth; this was the best way to deal with Comanches Grandad said. I often ended up banished to the verandah, which was the worst punishment for a boy with too much energy, only allowed to watch the other kids play. Eventually my older sister Yvonne worked out what was going on and put grandad straight telling him to stop inciting me to fight the Indian kids!

When I was eight I arrived at Normanton Junior School and things really kicked off. The troubles in Ireland had expanded to England and anti-Irish sentiment was high. I would have teachers calling me a 'little Irish bastard' and was attacked by the older boys. I remember being pushed down some icy concrete banks and being knocked out, then coming too with them kicking my bag around. Big mistake! I was from a large Irish family and fighting for survival with my older brothers was second nature. This is when I developed the 'Blitz'. I decided my best course of action was to get as close as I could and hit them so fast and so often that they wouldn't be able to defend themselves. It worked, and those Sunny Hill boys didn't know what hit them and they made a bee line for a teacher and I got detention.

The Blitz worked really well. Even after I started martial arts this was my go to strategy for winning a fight. I would naturally end up on their right hand side, little did I know that later in life Grandmaster Cheung would teach me how to get to the blind side and properly control it! I started incorporating knees in to my routine and when I was at Comprehensive school I began to get a name for myself as a tough fighter around Derby. It's a fact that sometimes I would fight with someone and ten minutes later we would be best friends, I'm not sure what that is but I suppose with literally hundreds of kids around you shouting 'fight' you have managed to come through the ordeal and it's a shared experience that you are glad is over!

The last time I use the Blitz was when I was sixteen. I was a prefect as now I was an older boy and we had duties and responsibilities around the school to stop kids running in corridors, making sure they went into class, and also to move kids out of areas they shouldn't be in... very Hogwartien! Myself, Trevor Cherry and Ronnie Stanley who were both well over six feet tall and who were the guards in my basketball team, me being the ball handler, were sent into the toilets to move out some Jamaican kids who were smoking. Trevor and Ronnie weren't to be messed with and easily pushed them out and on to class, they were also from Jamaica and were giving it full 'patois' as they went. I was warned by the kids as they left that I was in trouble but didn't think much about it.

I was sitting in the lower sixth rec room, which was part of what used to be the Colonel of the Sherwood Foresters house, brown brick and long tall ornate chimneys, when there was a bang on the window coming from the stable yard. Outside was a boy called Winston, I say boy but he was about six feet tall and heavily built. He had recently arrived from Jamaica and was probably a couple of years older than me. He called me out 'Ryan, come outside!' I went outside and said 'What are you doing here? This place is off limits'. I noticed Mr Ludlum the form head peering out from his office through a gap in the curtains, looking a bit unnerved. 'I'm going to teach you a lesson!' In a way I felt sorry for him as he was new and I told him 'Those guys aren't your friends they're just using you to do their dirty work, so just go now while you can'. I had a flair for the dramatic even then! He was standing with his legs astride and arms behind his back. Suddenly he swung at me with a long heavy pole that he had hidden behind him. I can't actual remember what happened then, even immediately after the fight. I was so incensed that he would use a weapon, which just wasn't done then, that I lost it. When I came to my senses I had the pole in my hand and he was lying on the floor. Apparently I had Blitzed his ass then taken the pole and finished him off then chased his 'mates' around the stable yard! This was the last time I would use the Blitz strategy.

Mr Ludlam was I think secretly impressed. He didn't report what happened but somehow word got out to the deputy head, the dreaded Mr Done, and I was summoned to his office. Mr Done taught me English. He could dissect Shakespeare with aplomb. I'm pretty sure he could also dissect people just as easily. I once saw him hammer fist a wooden desk and split it in two. He once ushered us back into class while smacking the head of a claw hammer repetitively into his hand with a strange look in his eye... Winston was already there. Whoever tended to his wounds liked to watch Tom and Jerry as he had criss cross band aids stuck all over. After hearing the full story Mr Done told us to 'shake hands boys' and let us leave. Winston whispered on his way out 'You're Kung Fu was no good!' I went home, being distantly followed by Winston...

This following continued for about a week. His follow team grew larger and larger until it eventually became a few hundred people. I would stand in my front garden as they would traipse by down Derby Lane hoping to see some action. Winston had by this time removed the band aids and perhaps this helped him forget what had happened as he eventually stopped in front of my house and again called me out. 'Ryan! Ryan! You're Kung Fu was no good!' To have hundreds of people outside your house is pretty intimidating, but I'd been used to having large crowds watch me fight in tournaments by now. My younger brother Declan was so worried he ran out with an ornamental Scottish Claymore, I told him to bring it back inside! I was told by one guy 'Ryan, why don't you just go home?' I told him 'I am home!' Something had to be done and I was the one to do it. I walked over to Winston and the crowd roared. Again Winston said 'Ryan, you're Kung Fu is no good' this time I said, and I quote 'You want Kung Fu, I'll show you Kung Fu!' and cracked him in the temple with a spinning axe kick. He was out on his feet, but he was a big strong lad and didn't fall, his mates helped him away. The crowd went wild but sadly no video exists, no mobile phones back then. My big sis Deirdra came out I ushered her back in as she was going to try and chase him and give him a slapping for attacking her little brother!

About four years later I came down from London to visit and was at the house in Derby Lane. There was a ring on the door bell. It was a real bell with a pull device at the front door and it would ring in the living room. Someone had pulled it violently. I went out to answer, opened the door and there was Winston! He'd obviously held a bit of a grudge. He said 'I heard you were back. Since I last saw you I have been training, training hard for four years, every day, in Karate. I have been running and doing conditioning and sparring waiting for this day and...' I said that's nice good for you!' and closed the door. He never rang the door bell again and that was the last time I saw him! Hopefully all that training will have forged him into a better person...

#somme #irish history #kung fu #street fighter #derby #martial arts #school days

[newssplashy]

Banky W in his own words justaposes his lessons from Super Eagles 1-2 loss to Argentina to the state of the world.

Many years from now when, by God’s grace, my children are old enough to understand, this is exactly what I plan on telling them about my experience while watching my very first World Cup game live: “On a bright Summer night in St Petersburg, our Super Eagles played with more heart than our leaders have shown in 50 years. And I was proud to see it.”

See, I’m kind of a faith-over-facts type of sports fan, and I suspect that to a certain measure, a lot of us are. We know the facts. We know that Argentina are by far the better team. We KNOW that Leo Messi is on almost every list of the top 5 greatest football players of all time. There’s a reason that their country is currently 5th in the FIFA world Ranking, and to find Nigeria, you’d have to scroll all the way down to 48th. On paper, we know we probably never stood a chance. Coming into that game, in every position on the pitch, the gulf in talent was, to put it mildly… significant. Case in point: we have never ever in our footballing history, EVER had a striker as lethal as Sergio Aguero. Argentina had the luxury of bringing him on as a substitute late in the second half. But I plan on teaching my kids that in this life, despite seemingly insurmountable odds, you should dare to dream anyway.

And that’s exactly what most of us want, isn’t it? The opportunity to just…dream. To dream that maybe you can punch above your weight and be successful at it. Most people aren’t lucky enough to be recipients of glory in this rat race called life, so we project that innate desire onto the teams we support. And so the Nigerian team dreamt that we could do it, and we worked our asses off to make that dream come true. What we lacked in footballing pedigree, skill, and training… we almost entirely made up for in HEART. There were over 66,000 people in that stadium; between the Argentineans in attendance, and Messi’s global fanbase of billions, it looked and felt like 99% of the people in the crowd were rooting for Argentina. You could hardly sport a green jersey, and that’s not because it’s sold out. It’s because there were only a couple hundred of us, versus tens of thousands of them. The Super Eagles were playing in an Elimination Game, against arguably the Greatest player of all time, his top 5 ranked team, and over 60,000 people screaming and heckling our every kick of the ball.

But we played and we defended, we clawed and we FOUGHT. Yes, we lost, but we went down swinging and played with all the heart we could muster. And honestly? So did Argentina. Messi and co weren’t just going to roll over and die, in what would have probably been their most embarrassing world cup outing of all time. They were going to fight. And as I said in one of my numerous social-media-crazed-fan-videos, Nigeria didn’t come just to mark the register. We came to PLAY. Both sides went at it for 90+ mins, and for 86 of them, we were even. In the end, the better team won – because at this level, the truly great ones are able to capitalize on the slimmest of moments to separate themselves and secure victory. But the losing team was equally gallant in defeat. Both sides gave it their all. One side won, but both sides played with heart.

These days, I’ve found that my wife and I spend just as much time praying for our future children, as we do worrying about the kind of world we’d be bringing them into.

 There’s so much darkness, sadness, and pain in the world, you know? Here’s a laundry list of things that have happened in the past month alone: Two globally successful celebrities hung themselves. Then a woman in Lagos allegedly also committed suicide, by jumping into the lagoon. Yesterday, an undergraduate student from Lagos State University attempted to do the same. Plateau state in Nigeria has JUST been hit with two fresh sectarian attacks…over 200 people were slaughtered in cold blood – the latest in a very long line of mass murders over the years. Add the frequency of killings in Zamfara, Benue, Taraba and you’ll find that Nigeria has started turning into the Murder Capital of World, for a country that’s not at war. There is NO justification for the mass murder of innocent human beings, and yet, it just seems to keep happening, moving from state to state. It’s happened so frequently that we’ve become completely numb to it. We don’t care anymore. It’s now just another headline. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Nigeria has just overtaken India as the Poverty Capital of the World. And with all this, all we ever do is tweet #hashtags… #prayforPlateau, #prayforBenue, #prayforNigeria… etc. We say stuff like “our hearts go out to the families of the victims”, but we actually have very little heart left. Because we’ve gotten used to hearing about the brutality, so we just adapt, tweet or retweet a picture and a prayer, and we move on.

It’s not just Nigeria, either. Most Nigerians envy the quality of life in places like the USA – but let’s take stock of where America is at right now. I have a hard time reading the news because it seems like it’s almost always bad. School shootings in the good old US of A are as frequent as Boko Haram bombings in Northern Nigeria. Reports in the media have been awash with images of sweet, innocent children of immigrants, uncontrollably crying their eyes out, because the American Government has coldheartedly separated them from their families and kept them in cages like animals; one can’t help but wonder at the kind of emotional scars and resentment that has been deposited in their hearts. And speaking of humans-being-treated-like-animals, look no further than the recent #JusticeForJunior hashtag on twitter – read about this teenager from the Bronx, whose only crime was bearing a small resemblance to someone that some gang members had a problem with. So what did they do? Five of them dragged him out of a corner store, and beat and stabbed him to death in the street. An innocent 15-year-old, who just happened to look like the person they meant to harm. The store owners saw 5 guys dragging him out of their shop, and chose to look the other way. He came back bleeding his life away and pleading for help, and they pushed him back out, locking their doors and telling him to go to the hospital. The people passing by on the street also looked the other way; the ones watching from their apartment windows, saw him being beaten and stabbed to death, and figured that it was more important to record the entire episode on their cell phones than to intervene, or at least, use the same damn phones to call for help. He died in a pool of his own blood, trying to run to a hospital in time to save his life, because no-one in the community cared enough to lift a finger. And this is all before we recount the numerous horror stories of women being sexually assaulted in the #MeToo movement, the innocent minorities being assassinated by the same American Police Officers who have sworn to serve and protect them, or by the numerous young people on the streets of Nigeria who have been brutalized, extorted, maimed and killed by barbaric members of the SARS police force.

So you know what I plan to tell my kids? I’m going to teach them to be passionate – and to have a Big, Fun-Loving, Kind HEART. It’s fun to be passionate about sports… I mean, there’s already so much evidence online showing just how CRAZY I get about my sports teams. I’ll tell them that it’s okay to be that way, and to be a faith-over-facts kind of sports fan. It’s fun, and life is too short to not have fun. But it seems like some of us are almost subconsciously waiting for our teams to mess up, just so they can hurl insults at them, tell them what a disgrace they are, and project all the anger and pain from our real lives on them; forgetting just how hard it is to break out of the dire circumstances that come with being an underprivileged Nigerian to make it into the National team. Do you know the work, the sweat, the tears, the sacrifices, the sheer determination it takes? Do you know how hard it is to even be able to make a living as an average Nigerian? I’ve got news for you. If you were blessed enough to watch the game on a flat screen TV in the comfort of your home, or at a bar somewhere… you’re not the average Nigerian. The average Nigerian lives on less than $2 a day. Some aren’t actually sure where their next meal will come from.

Some Nigerians, however, thought it was okay to go online to Ighalo’s social media to leave insult after insult, ridiculing him and other players, simply because he had a bad game. Which one of us has never had a bad day at work? Or made a series of regrettable mistakes? Luckily for us, we don’t have our bad days in front of millions of people who are actively rooting against us. And even afterwards, we get to learn from our mistakes quietly, in solitude, and resolve to do or be better. Whereas, Ighalo and co have to hear about it from thousands of comments, some of which represent the very worst of human behavior on the internet. I heard that when he turned off his comments on social media, some Nigerians went and found his WIFE to harass, threaten and bully her as well, as if she’s ever kicked a ball for the team. In what amounts to the greatest misplaced anger I’ve ever seen… we have let thieving politicians and businessmen who have made away with billions, running our economy into ruins go blame free; we have turned a blind eye to all the killings, beatings, oppression and injustice in our countries, and instead poured all our bitterness, criticism and venom out on footballers, their wives, and referees.

So I plan to teach my future kids that in sports, and in life, it’s incredibly important to try and give your absolute best in trying to win. Unfortunately, sometimes, your best will just not be good enough. But even on your worst day, it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get it right… as long as you give your all, and you do it with HEART. I plan to teach my kids, that in this increasingly dark world, it’s so much harder to be an optimist, but it’s so much more fun. It’s better to actively choose to care about others. It’s better to choose happiness over hurt, and it’s better to be kind than to kill with criticism, or violence. It’s better to build up than tear down, and hard as it might be, it’s better to be a beacon of light, and to look for a silver lining on the darkest of days than to spread more darkness.

I’ll tell them that on a bright Summer night in St Petersburg, our Super Eagles gave so much more heart than our Government, Country, or World has displayed in years. And that to me, will ALWAYS be something to be proud of. Because if there’s anything this world desperately needs more of, at this time in our history, it’s human beings with a little more heart.

TheBankStatements

PS: I’d already finished writing this, and was editing the final draft of it, when the news hit about the tanker explosion in Lagos that has consumed 54 other vehicles. Total deaths are as yet unconfirmed. Sigh. May the souls of the dearly departed rest in Peace. May God grant their families strength to bear this loss. May God help us each play our role in changing this earth of ours for the better. May we learn that heaven helps those who help themselves.

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