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jadynrosetta · 4 years

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Okay so I may have caught COVID (not sure I’m going to the doctor tomorrow) so to occupy my time I got a prime account and decided to FINALLY watch Promare.

This movie has been on my Watch List since I first heard of it, which was before 2020 started. I just never got around to it, till I realized I was going to be stuck in my room to avoid people :(

So I watched it... twice. I probably will watch it again cause it’s the only movie I bought and I am not buying anything else. So here’s a little review and my thoughts about the movie. (Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen it)

So the plot I thought was very interesting. For those who don’t know, the story starts with introducing “The Burnish”, a group of people who can create and control flames. These people seemed to come out of nowhere and it started a whole movement for Burnish rights and it caused a lot of problems for society. It ended, but The Burnish were labled as terrorists and do not have the same rights as humans. (Harsh)

Our main character is a part of a group called the Burning Rescue. Which is a group of fire fighters that deal with emergancy flames caused by The Burnish.

The team includes: Lucia, Varys, Remi, Aina, Ignis the leader, and Galo Thymos.

Now as I said, this himbo (Galo) is the main protagonist. He’s a rookie in the Burning Rescue, and has a “Firey Spirit”. He always goes off on some random speech and enjoys his job being a fire fighter and takes pride in saving people. He keeps this mindset and energy throughout the whole movie.

He gets sent up a building to save people on the roof and meets a terrorist group called the Mad Burnish. There aren’t many of them out now, but the top generals and the leader are still at large.

(This was the first and only image I saw from this movie and I was so confused I had to see it... months later)

After a tense fight with the generals (Both noting that Galo is an idiot) he defeats them and takes on their leader. The leader isn’t so easy to defeat, not backing down easily and even pinning Galo, but ultimetly he was taken down by the whole Burning Rescue squad. Their leader is actually a very small young man who goes by the name of Lio Fotia.

(I specifically wanted this scene so I looked hard for it)

Lio, who was mistaken for a child, is shown to be one of the strongest Burnish alive and takes pride in it. Wanting nothing but rights for his people and will never stop fighting for that.

He’s actually a good foil to Galo for many reasons and why I like them being the protagonists for the story. Galo is loud, over the top, and loves to show off his skills. While Lio is more on the quiet side, and doesn’t really show off, more on the reserved side.

But the two are very alike. Both feel the need to protect their people (Galo with humans and Lio with Burnish), but they don’t hate the other. Galo wants Burnish rights while Lio vows to never kill humans. They also share a god damn brain cell and 90% of the time neither of them have it.

So yeah, Galo gets a medal from his hero, Governer Kray, impressive prison break and all that. We cut to Galo and Aina having a moment, which Galo realizes the Burnish had escaped prison. He finds them in a cave and thus we learn more about the Burnish from their very leader, Lio, who remembers Galo, but Galo forgot him.

(Fire go pew)

Lio explains to Galo that the Burnish are people too, even showing how disgusted he is by Galo thinking otherwise (some very racist viewpoints). There Galo witnesses the death of a Burnish, turning her to ash. Lio explains to Galo that the Burnish can hear the flames, they speak to them, wanting to burn more. He also learns that his hero, Kray, was using the Burnish for human experiments, and calls Galo an idiot and to believe what he wants. Then the Burnish run away and leave Galo tied up...

Galo’s whole view changes on the Burnish and see that Kray is conducting human experiments on the Burnish, even though they’re people like them. The reason being that the Earth is gonna become a dead planet and everything is going to shit. So Kray is going to take 10,000 humans to another planet and use the Burnish as fuel. (Fucked up).

Galo goes against this and gets arrested. Meanwhile Lio and the other Burnish are found and taken as fuel, but Lio’s loyal generals get him to safety (much to Lio’s disagreement).

Lio goes into a full on rage and uses his full power to attack the city and Kray. Telling him to free the Burnish, or watch the city burn.

He takes the form of a dragon and damn near destroys the whole city. He almost succeeds too, getting to Kray. But of course Galo cuts in and fights Lio in an effort to calm him down. Aina decides to drop them off by the frozen lake to “cool off” and discover a lab under all the ice.

They meet Professor Deus, the man responsible for all the cooling gear. He wanted to help the Burnish, but was killed by Kray for disagreeing with him and his viewpoints. Deus, who is now a living computer, tells Galo, Lio, and Aina about the “Promare”, A group of aliens from another dimension who connected with a human, Burnish. However the Promare feel what their human host feels, even extreme pain. If Kray’s plan succeeds, then the Earth is gonna blow up due to all the pain the Promare feel.

It’s up to Galo and Lio to stop Kray from his evil plans (cause they happened to be there) by piloting the Deus X Machina. Later on the suit gets a name change, Lio de Galon.

A suit powered by a firefighter and a Burnish. Both Galo and Lio work together to stop Kray. Along with their allies they succeed in stopping the ship, but Kray was not finished. He reveals himself to also be a Burnish, and kidnaps Lio, saying he was going to be the new core to the ship. He then attacks Galo and sends him flying in flames. But Galo was saved last minute by Lio’s flames, and now he plans to save Lio, with the help of his team, and goes into the core to save his new friend.

He makes it, stopping the ship a second time, and sees Lio is dying, turning to ash right before him. Kray was ready to fight, but could not harm Galo due to Lio’s flame. Galo punches Kray and says he’s gonna save Lio, stop the magma, and even save him. Then we get the scene. The scene.

The “Kiss of Life” some like to call it, or just CPR. Either way, it’s a pretty romantic scene. Galo brings Lio to life and the two have a new plan. Save the Earth. Lio says the Promare want to burn out, so with the help of Galo, and all the Burnish, they create Galo de Lion

This behemoth of a mech saves the Earth and everyone on it. As well as burning out the Promare, sending them home. The movie ends with everyone being okay and the end of the Burnish. Thus the next plan, to clean up the mess they all made. The End

Longer than I thought, sorry... So what’s my thoughts?

Well let’s start with the animation. It was done by Trigger (if it wasn’t obvious just by looking at it), and they go ALL out on it. Everything is stylized and looks gorgeous. The colors just pop out at you, nothing in this movie looks dull. Action scenes are very fast pace and intense, and their calmer moments are beautiful and let you relax with the gorgeous scenery, everything is gorgeous in the movie.

The characers are pretty good, one complaint is that we don’t get to know some of them well, like some of the Burning Rescue. We only get to know Aina out of the Burning Rescue team. Plus a few other side characters, like the two Generals, Meis and Gueira, don’t get enough screentime, but I guess they weren’t the focus.

Galo and Lio, again, were really good main characters, who play off each other well. They both open each other’s eyes and see things in a different light, especially Lio who showed Galo what the Burnish are really like. They do tend to argue and seem to disagree, but they are an amazing team. We see that when they pilot Lio de Galon and together create Galo de Lion. I do believe they fell for one another in the end, but I cannot say it’s canon since I don’t know for sure.

Voice acting was also great. I watched it dub, don’t kill me, and I actually think the dub was better than the sub, and this is coming from someone who watches subs more and is very biased. Billy Kametz played Galo well, just giving off so much energy and really selling his performance. I’ve heard people not liking Johnny Yong Bosch playing Lio, but he was perfect for the role. Enough sass and emotion for Lio, I don’t think anyone could have done it better. Everyone else did a great job as well, Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld as Aina, Crispin Freeman as Kray, and Steven Blum as Ignis. Just... everyone did amazing.

Do I need to say anything about the soundtrack? It’s beautiful and I love every song in this movie, I am listening to is as I type this review. From upbeat songs like Inferno, to the saddest like Ashes. Each song that plays puts the whole scene together, music makes the scene after all. Gallant Ones is the most memorable example (plays during the scene) and it really sets the mood on how the characters feel about one another. Ashes is really good in my opinion since it plays during the death of a Burnish. But they all are good, if you haven’t seen the movie and don’t plan on watching it, go listen to the soundtrack, it’s worth it.

Overall I adore this movie, it’s over the top and super entertaining, keeping my attention the whole time. It has helped me relax during this pretty scary time for me ^^; I highly recommend this movie. It’s got way too many good points that I dare say it’s one of my favorites. It sold me on the plot and I stayed for the great and entertaining characters. If you haven’t seen it (which I would be surprised) then go check it out. If you want to see the sub then it’s on Youtube, but if I sold you on the dub then it’s on Amazon Prime, (you’ll have to pay for both and I’m too lazy to find it for free).

That’s all, thanks for reading my overly long review of this movie.

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ashleyjouharphotowords · 4 years

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In a revealing interview for the Image Source Picture Library, I talked to Miles Aldridge about his early influences, 90’s fashion photography and how at the moment of news-stand success he headed off in a radically different creative direction.

Miles Aldridge shoots sexy, glamorous women in opulent settings. But all is not what it seems in his pictures. Scratch the surface and a common thread runs through the imagery – the strange ominous unease of the dreamworld. Film-maker David Lynch wrote, “Miles sees a colour coordinated, graphically pure, hard-edged reality”. Artist Glenn O’Brien says Aldridge, “uses impeccable instinct in crafting something like ‘stills’ from the fractured narratives that we normally experience nocturnally and unconsciously.”

Aldridge talked to me about his influences and traced the rich visual journey he took from being a graphic design and illustration student, through music promos, to being a photographer who has shaped and stretched the idea of the fashion photograph.

Ashley Jouhar: What was your background to taking the kinds of photographs you take now and what was it that kick started your career in photography?

Miles Aldridge: Well, my father [Alan Aldridge] was a famous illustrator and art director so I grew up around quite surreal, psychedelic and sometimes shocking imagery – and it seemed clear to me I would go into the arts and follow my father. So I went to art school to study illustration, which was incredibly liberating – because I had been at Grammar School and none of my fellow students were interested in art. Being at Central St Martin’s around 1983 – surrounded by a lot of like-minded and talented people – the teachers, the studies and the classes were very good and I immersed myself in everything for the first year and then specialised in Graphic Design with an illustration bias.

Ashley Jouhar: So at that point you were exposing yourself to all the disciplines – life drawing, filmmaking, illustration, graphic design – the whole lot?

Miles Aldridge: I was also getting exposed to cinema, taking girlfriends on dates to see art movies, not blockbusters. I was seeing David Lynch films and it broadened my horizons immensely.

I did become an illustrator when I graduated from art school but I found it quite boring and I wasn’t anything like my father who was a sort of psychedelic whizz kid right in the middle of swinging London, working with everyone from David Bailey to The Stones and The Beatles. So he was really tapping into the zeitgeist. But I didn’t find the work very challenging and I was still very young so I started making enquiries about pop videos. It seemed to me that the film directors I liked were artists, packaging their thoughts and point of view of the world into hour and a half statements.

Ashley Jouhar: A little like you are now doing with your current imagery, except in a photograph?

Miles Aldridge: Yeah, but at that time I had no film training, apart from a couple of days at art so it was all quite new to me. But I bought a Super 8 camera and started shooting films. Then I bumped into Derek Jarman in Soho, who was often drinking tea in the same café I used to hang out in called Maison Bertaux. He was interested in me because I was a good-looking young man and I was interested in him because he was a famous film maker and so we had a few conversations. He was very enthusiastic and encouraging and through this naïve enthusiasm I started to make films. Another person who came into my life then was Sophie Muller, a well known video director who pretty well invented the form, shooting videos for The Eurythmics and many others.

Ashley Jouhar: MTV was exploding at this time so it was perfect timing for you, in the right place at the right time?

Miles Aldridge: Yeah, yeah, exactly and actually because of people like Derek Jarman and other like-minded artists were doing Super 8 presentations to music because of its relatively low cost it was very much the film medium for the 80s. You don’t need masses of finance to make a film on Super 8 – the idea is translated quickly to images. So I started making pop videos for a while.

Ashley Jouhar: Were you coming up with the concepts for these videos – were they very much ideas-driven shoots?

Miles Aldridge: Yes, very much so and I was good at coming up with the ideas but I wasn’t very good with the music! I would come up with an idea that might be loosely based on something from the universe of Hitchcock, Lynch or Godard and I was aware of cinematic tricks and conceits and would play with those. Like for instance, The Shining – I would do a pop video based on a long corridor with different weird things happening in different rooms but I didn’t really know how to put it all together with the edit. During this time I suppose I would have been known as a middling pop video director and therefore lived in a council flat, didn’t have any overheads as such so was very happy doing the odd pop video and hanging out with my girlfriend, who it transpired wanted to be a model. That’s when I took these photographs of her because she looked very much like the kind of girl of the moment – that sort of grungy, heroin chic sort of look of the time.

Ashley Jouhar: I remember it well – the bed-sits and anti-fashion poses.

Miles Aldridge: Yes, and the pictures of her were very well received at Vogue and they asked who had taken them and it was explained that it was this girl’s boyfriend. I was then called in to Vogue to meet them and I had this amazing realisation that instead of all this hard work involved in making videos – starting at five in the morning and ending at five in the morning, horrible food and no money to do anything, I could possibly become a fashion photographer.

Ashley Jouhar: So those original pictures, did you imbue them with something that we would recognise now in your work?

Miles Aldridge: No, I shot them all in black and white on Hampstead Heath on a Nikon and the film was dropped into Snappy Snaps… and picked up two hours later and pasted into her portfolio! They were really, to all intents and purposes, a boyfriend photographing his girlfriend. I mean she wasn’t styled and there was no hair and make up and she wasn’t trying to sell any fashion. Because that was what was happening with London photography then, when fashion photography almost slipped into Reportage.

Ashley Jouhar: Yes, it was very pared down compared to what had gone before.

Miles Aldridge: Yes, very much so and the heroes of that period were people like Robert Frank and Bruce Davidson and also Richard Avedon’s book ‘In the American West’ was kind of like a bible for that kind of styling.

There was this idea of real people rather than glamorous people being pushed to the forefront and being shown as something heroic and wonderful. So I moved from illustration to video to photography in the space of about six years, I think. I really enjoyed the photography and the early work was really about being locked in studios with very beautiful creatures and trying to think how to photograph them. I didn’t come with any technical knowledge – all I had was an eye that still serves me very well today and those pictures were almost a repetition of the boyfriend/girlfriend pictures earlier where in my imagination, these models who were now wearing fashion clothes and hair and make up were, for that six or seven hours in my studio, my girlfriend. Interestingly, when the hair and make-up and styling was being done and I wasn’t paying any attention at all, I left that up to them. In a way, I liked to rendezvous with the model on the white background and see her there for the first time with my camera.

Ashley Jouhar: So at this point your shoots were very spontaneous with what was happening, there were no storyboards planned out or themes?

Miles Aldridge: Yes, it was very spontaneous, it was about having a good time, listening to loud music and being swept up in the energy of a pre-9/11 fashion shoot and I mention 9/11 because after that, the whole world and especially fashion became much more gloomy and serious. Up until that point it was a big party. There was so much energy and money sloshing around and I enjoyed the decadence of it.

Ashley Jouhar: When did you start shooting in a more ‘David Lynch-ian’ way with these very considered, choreographed images and sets?

Miles Aldridge: Well, literally all I was shooting was white background pictures for magazines like W and British Vogue. Those pictures were about energy and shapes and in a way my talent was in trying to find graphic shapes on the flat two-dimensional page. I was successful with that kind of work straight away and sort of fell into it but at a certain point I looked at all this work and I remember I was at a magazine store in New York and saw a cover for W magazine, a cover for British Vogue and a cover for a magazine called Vibe – three white background covers, all by me. One could feel really good about oneself with that but for some reason, seeing them all there together I kind of loathed it and wondered where I’d got lost. Because back when I was an art student and even doing pop videos I was much more interested in darker and stranger things and the books I grew up with were books on Hieronymus Bosch and Breugel. The complete opposite of what I was producing, which I thought was trash. I felt really uncomfortable about that, even though my pockets were full of dollars.

Ashley Jouhar: So this was the turning point?

Miles Aldridge: I realised that when you get into a photo studio as a photographer, even if you said nothing and were dumb, the picture would still get taken because there is the momentum the stylist, the hair and make up artist and the model bring to the shoot that creates the energy for these pictures to occur. Instead of giving myself up to the madness and the freedom of the shoot, I wanted to put the brakes on it – to divert that energy and create a picture you really want to do in advance.

In part 2 Miles tells us how he creates the ‘fantastic’ images that have become his signature pieces…

#fashion photography #miles aldridge #vogue italia #british vogue #art photography #art #ashleyjouhar #pop art #david lynch

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lechevaliermalfet · 6 years

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Rise, and Escape – A Long Look at Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter

Quick note: This deep dive write-up was originally posted elsewhere in May of 2015. I’m polishing it for reposting here. In addition, for those interested, a while back I recorded a podcast-type thing for a project called Pause Menu Monologues, which was being done by an acquaintance of mine. Said monologue was derived from a cut-down version of this effortpost. For those interested, you can listen to that here. Now, on to the main event.

As I prepare to leave my current job for another with far better opportunities, it feels tremendously appropriate to talk yet again about a game premised almost entirely on the idea of escape.

I’ve written about Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter before, but it was requested that I write about it again. It was @squeemcsquee making the request, so I listened more than usual. I’m sure I’ll probably wind up saying a lot of the same things I said on the first go-‘round, but who knows?

Well, here’s something I didn’t say before this writing: When I first introduced her to Dragon Quarter, she got into it. Really into it. Given her relative inexperience with Japanese role-playing games, this was surprising to me; it’s so different from the usual run of JRPGs, especially as the genre stood in about 2003 or so when the game first came out. Contrarian that I am (at times), that’s part of what endeared it to me. But as she pointed out, the things that made it seem out of the ordinary to me meant very little to her. She didn’t have much “ordinary” to compare it against.

Unfortunately, watching her play it made me want to play it also. Part of this is the natural (and deeply unfortunate) backseat-driving instinct I have whenever I’m watching someone do something that I’m familiar with, but feel they could be doing better, and in fact, if they’d just let me have the controller for a few minutes, I could show them exactly how… But part of it was also just that seeing the game played really made me want to be playing it myself. This presented a problem, what with us having only the one copy. It led to arguments. Not, like, real arguments, but not exactly cutesy fun arguments, either. We did, at the time, have both a working PlayStation 2 and a backward-compatible PlaySation 3, so it was only owning just the one copy of the game that was really a problem. So the solution was pretty simple.

That’s how good it is. Dragon Quarter: The game so nice, we bought it twice.

Technically, we only bought the game once. I bought it when it first came out, back in early 2003. I played it for a while, and while it was pretty to look at, and it had good music, and the setting was interesting, it just didn’t come together for me. Despite this, I had no desire to trade it in. I had the feeling I was onto something good, though I couldn’t quite grasp it at the time.

I hadn’t had much experience with the Breath of Fire series then. I owned a copy of Breath of Fire IV, which was really the first game in the series that I even tried to tackle seriously. Having unwillingly skipped over the 16-bit generation (owning a TurboGrafx-16 and five games hardly counts), my impression of the series at that time could basically be described as “like Final Fantasy, only not quite as inventive”. It perhaps wasn’t a fair assessment, but I was basing this on the opinions of friends and acquaintances; I was unable to draw my own conclusions. Still, I liked Breath of Fire IV well enough, even outside of some positive personal associations, so I hung on to Dragon Quarter, feeling relatively certain that one day, I would get the itch to try it again.

As it happened, I did, a couple years down the line. The story and the characters were calling to me, and this time, everything finally clicked.

It probably helped that, around that time, I was beginning to become aware that JRPGs as a genre were becoming (or more likely, always had been) deeply conservative in terms of design, as well as character and story archetypes. Realistically, this has probably been the case since the days of the original Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Phantasy Star. But I got into these types of games in late 1998 with Final Fantasy VII; I was new to the genre in those days, so even things that were rote and by-the-numbers were fresh and new to me then. And in fairness, I’ve enjoyed a number of these types of games. But by this time, I found myself wanting games in the genre to branch out and do something new. So many of the mechanical mainstays of the genre, the “traditions” of JRPG design, began life as frankly clunky workarounds for technology that wasn’t really up to giving us a less abstract simulation of the expected features of a fantasy adventure: travel, exploration, fighting monsters, finding treasure, getting new and more powerful gear, and saving the world and any number of princesses. If you wanted to simulate all of these things on older hardware, you had to have a certain amount of abstraction. So you had your turn-based battles, your random encounters, and so on, and so forth.

By the PS2 era, the technology was rapidly growing beyond the need to adhere to these ancient abstractions for any reason other than nostalgia’s sake. It had been doing this for some time – Chrono Trigger jettisoned random encounters back in the mid-90s, but despite the universal acclaim that game received, no one seemed terribly interested in implementing any of its innovations elsewhere. Developers were, by and large, unwilling to grow out of those old ways. In part this might be down to the reluctance of their audience (or at least a very vocal portion of it) to part ways with those same traditions. But whatever the reason, the result was the same: stagnation. Or so it felt to me.

I wanted something that was different from the JRPGs I’d played before. Something that still offered the thought and planning that went into playing an RPG of any kind, something with a good story and interesting characters, but which went off the beaten path and did something different.

And so, in late 2004 or maybe early 2005, two years after I originally bought it, tried it, and hung it up for the foreseeable future, I started playing Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter again.

It’s an odd beast, this game, even when you look at it in the context of its own series. All the more so, really. The earliest Breath of Fire games got compared to the 8- and 16-bit Final Fantasy games, at least by most of the people I knew back then. Really, a more apt comparison would be to Dragon Quest, but I hadn’t played any of those games, and I was part of a group of friends who oddly lacked much experience with that series, so maybe nobody was in a position to make that particular comparison. With most of my friends, Dragon Quest (then known as Dragon Warrior due to trademark issues; I feel so old sometimes) was always “That game where you grind for hours and hours and then you finally say ‘fuck this!’ and go do something else, maybe play Final Fantasy or go outside or something, I dunno”.

Anyway, the whole series up to this point had been pretty standard high-fantasy fare, with the unique selling point being the main character’s ability to transform into a dragon. Most of the game mechanics beyond this were pretty straightforward. My experience with the series at large was pretty much limited to some time spent on the fourth game, and some time spent goofing off with ROMs of the first two out of idle and quickly satisfied curiosity.

One other consistent feature of the series is that the main character, the aforementioned dragon-transforming person, is always a young blue-haired swordsman named Ryu, and there is always a blonde, winged young lady named Nina who typically focuses on magic. Additional characters tend to be of all shapes, sizes, and species.

Dragon Quarter, by contrast, occurs in a future dystopia where humankind, having pretty much destroyed the environment through the use of biologically engineered weapons called dragons, has retreated to a single subterranean dwelling called Sheldar. There, they survive as best they can.

In this society, everyone is given a rank, called a D-ratio. On the surface of things, this ratio is a measure of one’s current ability and future potential, and places limits on their social standing, the kinds of jobs they can hold, places they can live, and overall determining just exactly how high they can rise in the world, figuratively and literally.

“Low-Ds”, that is, people with low D-ratios, live further down in this habitat. The air is worse, people’s lifespans are shorter, and there are occasionally monsters called genics that roam around down there. The people with high D-ratios live closer to the surface where the air is better and things are generally less dangerous. A nice touch is that, especially in cut scenes, the game is literally more hazy and grimy, visually, the further down you are. As you go up, the environments gradually become clearer and brighter. It happens bit by bit, so you may not notice it the first time through, but if you finish the game and start over again, the difference stands out.

One of the few story beats to be preserved is our hero: Ryu. Here, he’s a low-D ranger, whose job mainly seems to involve security and hunting down genics. His D-ratio is abysmally low: 1/8,192. His current job is the very highest he can hope to achieve. He’s partnered with another young man named Bosch, D-ratio 1/64. While Ryu is effectively at the very limit of how far he can rise in the world, Bosch is only at the beginning. A D-ratio as high as his means he can potentially qualify to become a Regent, one of the four rulers of this underground world. Bosch is basically just paying his dues here. He’s friendly enough to Ryu, in a condescending sort of way, which Ryu mostly just shrugs off. What else is he going to do?

While reporting for an assignment with Bosch, Ryu succumbs to a brief fugue, in which he has a vision. He sees the decaying remains of a giant dragon spiked to a wall. Despite clearly being dead, the dragon seems to talk to Ryu, mind-to-mind, though what it says to him makes virtually no sense at the time. Not long after, Ryu comes across the real thing, though it is very visibly dead and inanimate.

A terrorist attack splits up Ryu and Bosch, and shortly thereafter, Ryu runs into this game’s version of Nina, as well as a member of the resistance movement Trinity, named Lin. She seeks Nina for her own – or rather Trinity’s – purposes. The three form an unlikely but highly effective team. But allying himself with these two has its consequences, and by the time Ryu and Bosch reunite, circumstances have made them into enemies. Bosch is a good fighter, and he has plenty of allies with him, but Ryu refuses to betray his new comrades. Thankfully, his encounter with the dragon was no mere dream or hallucination. Unbeknownst to him, it has bestowed him with awesome power… and a deadline.

With every passing moment, the monstrous dragon power lurking within Ryu grows more prominent, threatening to overcome him. While Ryu is in control, he can transform into a bestial form capable of slaughtering even bosses within just a couple of rounds of combat. But drawing on that power accelerates its progress in overtaking him.

And so, with all hands turned against him, Ryu, Lin, and Nina have ultimately just a single option: Escape.

One of the things that I like about Dragon Quarter – one of many, many things – is the way that the game’s more prominent mechanics and its story are so closely intertwined.

The dragon power bestowed upon Ryu early into the game isn’t just a narrative device or story element, coming out only when dramatically convenient. It’s also a game mechanic, in the form of what the game calls a D-counter. This is a number, a percentage, that appears in the corner of the screen. As you play, it slowly ticks up toward 100 in intervals of a hundredth of a percent. Everything you do in the game causes it to increase. Everything. Every 24 or 25 steps will cause it to increase by one interval. Later in the game, this happens every dozen steps or so. Ryu’s special D-dash ability, which allows him to avoid enemy combat, causes it to tick up faster. Transforming, all by itself, raises the counter, and any actions taken while transformed increase it by whole-number percentages. It is literally overpowered. What I mentioned about crushing bosses in just a couple of turns was not hyperbole. I’ve done it. It’s basically my end-game strategy.

There is no way to drop the counter. Ever. There are no items, no spells, no techniques which will allow you to reset it or undo any of its progress. It just sits up there in the corner, slowly increasing and glowing ever more furiously as the number grows. The tension between the temptation to use it whenever you’re in a bind and the punishing consequences of that use can be exquisite.

When I first heard Dragon Quarter described as a survival-horror RPG, it didn’t make sense to me. But that’s mainly because I associated the mechanical elements of most of the survival-horror games I’d played with the more thematic elements of horror. And there are horrific moments and images in Dragon Quarter; the world of the game is not a happy place, and its maintenance is not easily or cleanly done. But that horror is mainly a consequence of the world-building; it’s not the point of the game.

The key here, I think, is the word “survival”. You might more accurately call Dragon Quarter a survival-RPG, except it’s basically the only one of its kind that I know of. It’s kind of hard to wrangle a whole genre out of that.

At their heart, survival-horror games generally “work” based on two principles.

The first is the fragility of the player character relative to other types of games, and relative to the enemies within the game. You are not the hero of a more action-oriented game, who can take maybe a dozen sword strokes straight to the face and just keep going, or who can withstand a hail of gunfire and duck behind cover for a few seconds while your shields recharge. Here, the player is reduced to a much more even footing with the enemies. Every bit of damage taken is a significant setback that needs to be planned around, either to prevent it or to deal with it when it happens. Every attack must be calculated. This is because of the second principle, which is resource management.

The in-game resources, both those which you use to preserve yourself and those you use to eliminate your enemies, are finite. So they must be spent wisely, frugally. Because of this, you are constantly required to take a measured, careful approach to any situation. You can never just blithely wander around; to do so invites disaster twice over. In the short term, you risk serious harm, leaving yourself vulnerable to future threats. In the long term, if you come out of the situation relatively unscathed, it’s generally at some expense of resources, leaving you ill-prepared for future encounters. Carelessness becomes indistinguishable from suicide.

This puts pressure on the player to play extremely well at all times by punishing mistakes immediately and brutally. As a result, some of the typical elements of JRPGs are missing.

There are no healing spells or techniques. All healing – whether restoring health or curing negative status effects – is accomplished by way of expendable (and frequently pricey) items. And you have to consider how often (if at all) you’ll be using some of these items, because inventory space is limited, and multiple items of a single type don’t “stack” very much before requiring another inventory slot. And, naturally, the usual economics of JRPGs are in full effect. Whatever you get for selling an item is a pitiful fraction of what it costs you to buy.

The game offers you the ability to use bait and traps to lure enemies into a position of compromise and get the drop on them, but even these need to be used sparingly. There’s hardly enough for every encounter.

Interestingly, the game knows exactly how difficult it is, and gives you something of a way around the problem.

As with most RPGs of any kind, Japanese or otherwise, you earn experience points, new equipment, and new abilities as you go through the game. In addition, Dragon Quarter also gives you what’s called Party XP. Basically, this is experience you can dole out to party members as you like to boost their levels.

Should you find yourself in a situation where you can’t progress without either having your party wiped or running the D-counter up to 100% (which, if it hasn’t become obvious by now, is an instant Game Over), you have the option to do what’s called a SOL Restart. This restarts the game from the beginning, but lets you keep all the equipment and skills you’ve learned, as well as any Party XP you still have. This gives you get a fresh start while retaining your improved gear, and the Party XP lets you give yourself a boost in the early stretches.

There’s also an option to restore a previous hard save along these same lines. Dragon Quarter allows “soft” saves anywhere, but these are temporary by design. Once loaded, these saves disappear. There are only a few “hard” save points, from which you can restore at will, and to which you will be returned with a SOL Restore.

If this sounds ridiculous for what is typically a long-form type of game, it may help to understand that Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is only about eight to ten hours long from start to finish on a single play through, once you know what you’re doing. Even with a couple of full-blown restarts, you’ll be spending no more time on Dragon Quarter than any other game from the same time period. Less, probably.

Writing this now, I just about want to say that Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter was Dark Souls before Dark Souls really existed. There’s a certain similarity in that both games are more difficult than usual while still being relatively fair, and in the expectation that you will die, probably more than once, and that rather than being a tragedy, it’s simply an instructive part of the experience. Or in the case of Dragon Quarter, you’ll experience (probably more than once) a situation in which death is basically a given should you continue, and the smart thing would be to cut your losses and restart.

Dragon Quarter’s infliction of pressure extends even to the representation of the game’s characters and world.

Most characters have a skinny, almost emaciated appearance. Part of this is simple stylization, of course, but it still contributes to the overall effect. These people live a thin and narrow existence, it says, devoid of the expansive pleasures humankind was meant to enjoy. There is a grimness and a quiet desperation underlying it all.

The world itself is a fucking hole. Corridors in the lower areas are littered with random junk and debris; it’s best not to think what it might all actually be. The air is hazy and grimy, and things have a sort of cobbled-together look that just makes the whole place look cramped and dingy and uncomfortable. In these lower areas, everything looks like it’s about one stern look away from falling right apart. The upper areas are cleaner, more solid, but can seem so sterile and strictly designed as to be hostile. Dragon Quarter does a wonderful job of creating a world you want to get the hell out of as soon as you can.

It’s ironic, really. Most games, I play to escape from the troubles and stresses in my life. And most games oblige this desire. Even the ones that take place in barren wastelands tend to take place in gorgeously rendered barren wastelands that encourage you to examine every carefully tailored nook and cranny. They’re an invitation to exploration and adventure, and are “barren” or “waste” only as a matter of aesthetics.

But limitation and escape are the central themes in this game, and a world in which such themes are explored must be more than a background or a prop.

The world is limited in its size; an RPG with little to no detectable exploration, comprised mainly of tunnels and rooms, and a single clear direction and objective at all times. The player's inventory of supplies is likewise limited, in keeping with the surival horror influence. The player is frequently required to prioritize, and ditch whatever they aren't likely to use based on their play style. Care must be taken by the player to work within these limits.

Narratively speaking, the story also explores the idea of limitations. Ryu himself embodies these limits. His D-ratio is among the lowest of the low. His place in society, the ways in which he can define and express himself, how he can live – all of these things have strict limits placed on them. And this dragon entity, Odjn… As much as it much as it appears to be the key to his salvation, as much as it empowers him to break all barriers and overcome or destroy all opposition, it limits him as well. It puts a countdown on his life, ticking down the hours he has left until... well, until whatever horrific thing might happen when Odjn gains total control and breaks free.

And in the end, the characters decide to break free of these limits placed on them by the world by breaking free of the world itself, to smash through the ceiling of it and see once and for all what lies beyond its narrow, choking confines.

Dragon Quarter is a game about escape.

Ultimately, this is a large part of what interests me about the story of Dragon Quarter, what keeps me coming back. Rather than a big, trampling save-the-world epic, it’s about a group of characters who just want out. This is a smaller story, a “tiny tale of time”, as the game itself tells us in its opening narration. It’s huge in its implications for its world and its characters. It’s great in the scope of the ideas it asks its characters to contemplate. (It flirts with Gnosticism, which immediately grabs my interest). It that sense, at least, it does involve the end of the world, in one way or another. But the scale is smaller, and the characters strike me as being more real because of it.

Ryu, Lin, and Nina don’t want to fight anybody. There’s at least one memorable occasion where Ryu, surrounded by enemies, asks why they can’t just let him and his friends go. The character animations in Dragon Quarter aren’t spectacular, but they get the job done here. There’s something about the way that Ryu asks his question that seems to have layers. On one layer, he seems mentally, psychologically exhausted from the strain of all the fighting, and the toll all the deaths he’s dealt out has taken on him. On yet a deeper layer, he seems equally exhausted from fighting the thing inside him that threatens to take over and destroy him.

They aren’t trying to harm anybody. And it seems reasonable just to let them go, on the one hand. But on the other, there is the major problem that letting Ryu and company out of this subterranean pit will completely upend the social order – will end this idea of the world – purely as a side-effect of his escape. Because the underlying problem with Ryu’s world is a variant on the same problem that keeps people in dead-end jobs and abusive relationships long beyond the point when, logically, they should be getting out.

Fear.

The world of Dragon Quarter is, as previously stated, an absolute, utter shithole in purely objective terms. Even the people in charge don’t seem to be enjoying themselves much. And it’s because everyone seems to be in unspoken agreement that even if the current circumstances are awful, at least they’re familiar awful circumstances. It’s possible that things are better on the surface, but it’s just as possible that they aren’t. It’s just as possible that they’re far worse. This, at least, is the devil we know.

Even one of the main villains, the ruler of this subterranean nightmare, is ruled by fear. A thousand years before the story proper, he was given the opportunity to open this world to the surface. But he backed down. In his fear that the world above might still be the barren wasteland people left ages ago, he turned back at the final moment, sentencing himself and everyone in the underground to remain in it indefinitely.

There’s an anime I like quite a bit – it’s probably my favorite, really – called Revolutionary Girl Utena, and in it there is a bit of dialogue that is recited so often it’s practically a ritual. It goes like this:

“If it cannot break out of its shell, the chick will die without ever being born. We are the chick. The world is our egg. If we don’t crack the world’s shell, we will die without ever truly being born. Smash the shell, for the world revolution.”

This is actually a paraphrase from the Hermann Hesse novel Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth (usually just known as Demian), in which it’s put this way:

“The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is a world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird then flies to God. That god’s name is Abraxas.”

To go up, to go out, to rise, to escape: This is an act of tremendous faith.

#breath of fire dragon quarter #breath of fire #dragon quarter #rpg #jrpg #video game #deep dive #effortpost #longpost #gnosticism-lite

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homeeguide · 4 years

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How long does a washing machine last?

Today's washing machines last an average of 10 to 15 years . More expensive washing machines of better build quality and more durable materials last about 15 to 20 years. The lifespan is also extended if you properly maintain your washing machine.

What is the lifespan of a washing machine?

Washing machines used to last longer than today. More durable materials were used. Nowadays there is more demand for cheaper washing machines and the manufacturer has responded by making washing machines from less durable material: cheaper materials that last less time.

A big advantage of this is that washing machines are now available in all price ranges .

Build quality and durability of the washing machine

In general, a more expensive washing machine will last longer than a cheaper washing machine. Brands such as Miele are known for their quality and you pay for that.

My parents have had the same washing machine for 22 years: a Miele. In the meantime, the ball bearings and the drum have been replaced, but the machine still delivers good results.

I myself started with a cheaper Beko. Nothing wrong with that and it worked properly. After about eight years, these started to leave brown stains on my clothing: the ball bearings needed to be replaced. At that point, you have to ask yourself whether it is worth repairing, or whether it is cheaper to buy a new washing machine.

I chose the latter . I was almost able to buy a new washing machine to repair the washing machine. The Beko has done its job well in the past eight years, and it suited my small budget at the time. Now that I have a family, I have higher standards and can invest in a more expensive washing machine.

So you see: different washing machines in different price ranges are not surprising at all: my parents are still satisfied with their (at the time) expensive Miele, and I was happy with my cheap washing machine.

Frequency of use

Manufacturers give you an average lifespan, but what is average ? In this case, average means that you use the washing machine three times a week. My average, as a family of two adults and three young children, is not below average. I was about five to six times a week - almost double that.

This means that my washing machine will not last as long . If, like me, you wash more than three times a week, it might be worth investing in a washer of a better build quality so that it lasts longer. This is of course a personal choice and also depends on your budget.

Maintenance of your washing machine

Your washing machine, like most other machines, needs maintenance . Detergent can build up on the parts of the washing machine. This is especially the case with washing powder .

Washing powder becomes liquid at higher temperatures: if you wash mainly at low temperatures, washing powder can accumulate in the washing machine and also remain on your laundry. If you want to read more about liquid detergent compared to washing powder, read this blog .

To remove soap scum and other accumulations of dirt (also called grease lice), wash once a month at a temperature of 90 degrees Celsius. In addition, you also clean the rubber edge around the drum: water can remain in it, causing mold to form : you don't want this on your clothes.

How do I extend the life of my washing machine?

Of course, you want to use your washing machine for as long as possible. There are a number of ways to extend the life of your washing machine, and most of them involve maintenance.

Clean regularly

As described in detail above, you can clean your washing machine by regularly running a hot wash. This removes soap residues and other dirt. You also prevent unpleasant odors.

Descaling the washing machine

Where there is water, lime is formed . In a washing machine, the lime mainly accumulates on the heating element . As a result, the machine has to work harder and harder to get the water to the right temperature. This costs a lot of energy and is not good for the environment and your energy bill. The harder your water, the faster lime will form.

You descale your washing machine again by running your (empty) washing machine at 90c degrees together with natural vinegar or using a special product such as Bosch Washing Machine Descaler .

It is also a good idea to wash regularly with vinegar , this is not only beneficial, but also better for your machine and the environment.

Replace water drain hose

Replace the water drain hose at least every five years. After five years, all kinds of dirt will have accumulated, which will cause blockage or delayed drainage . This can adversely affect the washing results. Incidentally, it is a good idea to rinse this hose now and then.

Clean filter

The filter is normally located at the bottom, in the right corner. Often it is a large rotary knob. Have some towels ready to collect water and loosen the knob. The filter is attached to the button : you rinse it under the tap. I always find things here like hairstyles, change and the occasional kids sock.

Check that the machine is level

You may not think about this very quickly, but if your washing machine is not level, your drum or other parts can be damaged. Less vibration is always better for the washing machine's motor. Check this once a year.

Conclusion

How long your washing machine will last depends not only on maintenance, but also on the number of washes you run per week. In addition, more expensive machines often last longer, because the manufacturers have used durable materials.

Hopefully I have answered your question correctly!

Thank you for reading!

#washing machine #cheap washing machine

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enetproperty-blog · 6 years

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Buying a New Boiler

Buying a New Boiler David Lawrenson of LettingFocus.com looks at the things you should consider when buying a new gas boiler. So, it’s cold right now, very cold. And naturally enough, this is just the sort of time your boiler breaks down. (Machines tend to break when they are being used most intensively). As a landlord, in winter time especially, you really have to swing into action to ensure your tenants are not left in a freezing cold house. These days, tenants have the reasonable expectation that they shouldn’t be left to be cold for a long time. (We always have some electric fan heaters to give them tide them over for heating for a day or three whilst we get a boiler fixed or replaced. It’s also good if your heating system has an immersion heater and/ or if you have an electric shower so they can at least have a warm shower too.) If you have followed my advice in the past, you will have already developed a good relationship with a competent gas safe certified contractor, (who ideally can look after plumbing matters too). Someone you can trust to tell the truth when he or she tells you that maybe your old boiler has seen better times and it’s now time to get a new one. Over the years I have come to realise that when certain big things go wrong with boilers or when they need new parts more than once a year, that is probably the time to admit you need a new machine. Fixing it repeatedly is usually just not worth it, the time has come to get a new boiler. The good news is that in real terms, the cost of new boilers has gone down significantly in the 30 odd years I have been a landlord. And, (so we are told), the boilers are far more efficient in terms of how good they are at transferring fuel into heat than they were back in the old pre-condensing boiler days. That’s probably true, though many older experienced boiler fitters tell me that the models today simply do not last as long as the old ones did – a fact which they put down to the larger number of parts the newer machines have, which in turn means there is simply more things that can go wrong. (Some experts think the more efficient combi boilers of today have a shorter life expectancy, because the burners are always being fired on and off, as required to heat up water, on demand). Getting hard and fast information on boiler efficiency is difficult, not least because the industry as a whole has a vested interest in pushing the fact that the new boilers that they are marketing are so much better in terms of efficiency (and hence lower carbon footprint) than old ones. But some of my gas fitter guys and girls question just how much more efficient the new classes of boiler are and I often consider their comments in the light of the Volkswagen car emissions scandal, (where low emissions rates were being faked by the car firms own tests), and adopt a very skeptical view as to the manufacturers claims. Until some trustworthy and neutral organisation tests the claims of the boiler manufacturers, we will never know the real truth. I think they are undoubtedly more efficient than old boilers but I suspect the government is probably being hoodwinked by the boiler makers as to how efficient they really are. Boilers of The Old Days What I can say, from experience, is that the boilers we have in our properties that were installed from 15-20 years ago have not lasted as long as the ones that were fitted between 20 and 40 years ago. In our portfolio, we still have one boiler, (a non-combi), which is at least 25 years old and which is still running just fine and continues to neatly heat our sole one bedroom flat. I will say more about this particular boiler later, but it is worth commenting that it certainly appears to be extremely efficient if the heating bills of my tenants over the 20 odd years I have owned the property are anything to go by. (They seem to spend less than £50 a month for heating and lighting the one bed flat). There is no doubt that the larger the portfolio of properties you have and the more work you have given to the same heating (and plumbing) contractors, the nearer the front of the queue you will be to get the work done quickly (and at a reasonable cost). If you are just starting off as a landlord or if you have properties all over the country and not more than one in any location, it can be harder to get to the front of the queue. 90% of our properties are within 20 miles of each other, which helps and we give all our landlords gas certificate work and plumbing call outs to just one or two local tradesmen. They get a regular flow of call out maintenance work from us, (which can be as profitable as fitting new boilers for those fitters who are on call to many clients and can thus generate a lot of work covering the whole of their working days). You should note that I will only work with fitters who are prepared to look after ALL my plumbing and boiler needs – both the maintenance AND the fitting of new boilers. One reason for this is that I want to be able to give the tenants the tradesman’s phone number and email for them to contact the tradesman directly, so I’m not involved. I’m a landlord, not a plumber or gas fitter! Trust the Boiler Fitters So I trust to the experts to make the “right calls” on the works to be done. And because I give them a lot of work, I don’t expect them to rip me off with unnecessary work. In fact, the fitter only needs to call me to discuss the job, if there is a decision to be made – such as whether to spend £200 fixing an old boiler, or whether the time has come to get a new boiler. These are the types of things that are “my call” and they will need my authorization on. In summary, I try to set clear guideless and they follow them. It works for the tenants, it works for the fitter and, most of all it works for me. You will of course, be aware that the likes of British Gas, (advert tagline, “Looking After Your World), are very keen to get the business of landlords and to fit and maintain new boilers for them. They have a heavy advertising presence, marketing extensively on TV and other media. They, and a wide variety of other companies like them, sell a variety of service contracts to landlords and other homeowners in which they promise to maintain a variety of household appliances, look after plumbing and drainage etc., for an annual fee. But from what I have seen, it is simply not worth getting the likes of British Gas to come and fit your new boiler (nor to assess if your old one is possibly kaput – see more on this below!). Their fees are always higher than a local independent gas safe fitter would charge you. Sure, you have the reassurance that if anything goes really badly wrong, you could always write to the Chief Executive of British Gas and threaten to write to the Daily Telegraph etc., and things will get fixed. However, if you opt to use an experienced local independent local fitter, (and avoid the big corporation), you will find not only will you pay less, but that many fitters will be able to give you up to a ten year part and labour guarantee anyway on certain models. It’s not the fitter that is giving the guarantee, it is the manufacturers, who are also big companies with reputations to protect. Both Worcester Bosch and Vaillant, two of the biggest players, offer such long term guarantees, provided the machine qualifies, (many machines will come with at least a seven year guarantee), and provided also it has been fitted by selected tradespeople who have built up a track record with them and who are fitting a certain, minimum number of boilers each year. So, check with the fitter if they qualify with the manufacturer to give you the longer guarantees. And get all this in writing before you commission the work. Invoking Boiler Guarantees And if you have a really long guarantee, you won’t need a service contract either, because if the boiler fails, all you need to do is call Worcester Bosch or Vaillant (or whichever manufacturer it is) and they will come and fix the machine, no problem. When you have a good machine backed by a long term part and labour guarantee of this type, who needs a service contract from British Gas or Homeserve, or some other such service company? As far as we are aware, the big manufacturers are usually pretty prompt at coming out and fixing boilers that have broken but which are under guarantee, though it may take a few days in the middle of winter, when breakdowns tend to peak. (British Gas and other providers offer no hard and fast guarantees either, it should be noted) And, of course, there is no charge for the call out or the work to fix the machine if it is still under guarantee. To continue to qualify for the guarantee, you will need to boiler to be serviced annually by a qualified gas safe registered fitter, so don’t forget this and make sure to record the service in the log book that comes with the boiler. In practice, of course, the machines rarely breakdown within the guarantee period. We always buy the machines with the longest guarantee period, so we usually have ten years’ worry free on our boilers. It works for us. Just a comment on British Gas. Back in 2004, the same one bed flat where my old boiler of 25 years + happily chugs along to this day, was being let under a housing association lease scheme to a London-based housing association. The housing association took the property off my hands for four years, paying a guaranteed rent. Within their contract they looked after most repairs, and for the boiler they had entered into a service contract with British Gas. The contract with the housing association stated that their contract with British Gas covered most things but not major breakdowns that would require a new boiler. Boilers and British Gas I was then contacted by the housing association to say the boiler had broken down and that British Gas had told them it could not be fixed and a new boiler was needed – and it would cost in the region of £2,500. I said I would have my own fitter look at it. He came around and fixed it for a fee of £80. It is still working 14 years later! At around that time, many people had said that British Gas workmen were very keen to condemn old boilers in order, it was alleged, so they could get the profitable business / commission from installing a new boiler along with the usual service contract that they can often upsell along with it. This was a number of years ago and it is possible that British Gas have since improved their service. Do write and tell me of your experiences. For now, I am keen to give my business to my local small contractors. They do a good job for me. Unfortunately, one of my excellent plumbers says he finds the profit margins from fitting boilers is too small, so has since stopped doing it. (Generally, a fitter has to do a certain number of jobs a year to be able to maintain membership of the gas safe register, qualify for the manufacturers’ discounts and to be able to offer the manufacturer’s long term guarantees on the machines they fit). This does point out that one must pay a fair price for tradespeople’s work. Economy 7 Boilers One of our properties has Economy 7 boilers – in which storage heaters can be used to heat storage units overnight (on a lower night electricity tariff) and then pump heat out in the day. These are also very efficient, if my tenants’ bills are anything to go by. In the long years I have had this property, I have only had to once call out for a repair to the boiler. Plus, you do not need an annual gas safe check, thus saving around £60 a year, nor have to worry about carbon monoxide detectors. I’m a big fan and I wish more of my properties were Economy 7. I hope you have found this blog of interest. I would be very keen to hear what experiences you have had and will happily publish any useful tips. ABOUT LETTINGFOCUS Services for Private Landlords We help landlords and property investors by showing them how to make money in the private rented sector using ways which are fair to tenants and which involve minimal risk. Our advice is completely independent. We take don’t commission payments or fees from anyone, ever. Services to Businesses and the Public Sector We advise a range of organisations including banks, building societies, local authorities, social housing providers, institutional investors and insurers. We help them develop and improve their services and products for private landlords. 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Click Here to Buy It. BOOK FOR TENANTS: Kids going off and renting for the first time? My Book for Tenants is also Available TO JOIN OUR FREE NEWSLETTER MAILER which goes to over 3,950 people (as at Jan 2017) just send an email to [email protected] We do not send spam or sell our mailing list to advertisers, though we occasionally mail landlords about good products from third parties. Please put us on your “white list” to ensure you receive our emails. OFFERS ON PRODUCTS FOR LANDLORDS and TO ADVERTISE YOUR PRODUCTS to LANDLORDS: Landlords Resources PERUSE LAST TEN BLOGS BY GETTING THE RSS FEED: Click Here NEXT ANNUAL SEMINAR EVENT FOR LANDLORDS: Landlord and Property Letting Seminar TWITTER PAGE My thoughts on property, personal finance, plus a lot of other random things: Twitter Copyright of Blog: David Lawrenson 2018. Please link to us here or quote us. We actively pursue copyright infringements. The blog is updated roughly every two weeks. 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#Boilers #British Gas

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