#keep trying to recharge my battery and its useless

[spicyprincezuko]

I wish I could take my brain out and pressure wash all the gunk off

#been so low energy since getting back from the bay #think I pushed myself too far with socializing #keep trying to recharge my battery and its useless #gonna go off the grid for a while again and give my friends a break from me #Steph talks

[ifixersblog]

5 Tips to Stop Your iPad from Shutting Down Randomly

The Apple iPad may be one of the best tablets in the world, but that doesn’t mean its okay. Rather, one of the most common problems iPad users are struggling with is that the tablet shuts down automatically. This can be one of the most frustrating things, especially when doing really interesting or important things on the iPad.

However, if your iPad shutdown unexpectedly and you don’t know the cause of the problem, try these 5 professional tips to prevent your iPad from shutting down randomly.

Why does my iPad keep shutting down?

There are several possible reasons why your iPad may shut down randomly. For example, the problem may be due to a software bug, memory overflow, or battery drain. Therefore, we provide a viable solution to address each aspect and solve the problem accordingly.

1. Hard Restart iPad

A hard reset may be required if the iPad powers off randomly while charging or playing games. A hard reset is useful if your computer shuts down automatically, or if the battery is draining rapidly due to malicious processes or cellular radiation. Also, there is no adverse effect after a hard reboot. It’s so easy that you can do it yourself by following the guide below.

iPad with Home button: Please hold the Home button and Power button till the Apple logo shows itself.

Other iPad models: Please press and then release the Volume Up button and Volume Down button respectively and fast. Then press the Top button till the Apple logo shows itself.

2. Update Your iPad

Outdated iPadOS will cause many problems. It is not strange that it makes your iPad turn on and off. Therefore, updating the iPad to the latest version of iOS can resolve the “iPad turns off automatically” issue. And you can easily find out the solution if yours is caused by this reason.

Step 1. Head to the Settings app.

Step 2. Choose the General option.

Step 3. Choose the Software Update button.

Step 4. Tap the Download & Install option.

3. Recharge

The problem might also be due to the improper functioning of the battery and related software that could be preventing the iPad from running smoothly. The best way to rule out such a scenario is to drain the battery completely. After it has lost all its charge, here is what you need to do.

Plug the iPad to the mains. Remember to always use an original Apple charger.

See if the device is charging normally. Let it charge completely in one go.

However, if the iPad does not seem to be charging as it should be, there might be some issues with the charging cable or the mains.

Or if you are charging via a USB port on a PC, try a different slot.

Once it has acquired full charge, disconnect and check if it is still restarting automatically.

If the issue persists, you can try the solutions given below.

4. Declutter Your iPad

If your iPad still keeps turning off, declutter the storage. If you haven’t cleaned up the storage for a while, there is a good chance that it would be cluttered. The huge pileup of unnecessary files, app cache, redundant screenshots, and useless videos may have hogged up a ton of storage space. Not just that, even the useless apps may be creating problems and causing the iPad to shut down frequently.

To resolve the issue, navigate to the Settings app on your iPad > General > iPad Storage. Now, iPadOS will show you a breakdown of how the storage has been consumed by each category, like photos, apps, media, and messages. Once you get a clear picture of the storage consumption, remove all the unnecessary files to retrieve plenty of precious space. With uncluttered storage, the iPad might finally get the better of the unexpected rebooting issue.

5. Factory Restore

If everything else fails, it is time to restore your iPad. However, make sure you have taken a backup of your device before factory restoring it to minimize the chances of data loss.

Connect your iPad to the PC or Mac. As before, make sure you have the latest version of iTunes installed on the PC or Mac (macOS Mojave or earlier). On Mac with macOS Catalina or later, make sure that the latest version of the macOS is running.

Go to iTunes/Finder and select your device.

Click on the Restore iPad option.

Follow on-screen instructions that appear.

When the process is complete, your iPad will be almost as good as new and will ensure there are no software or data corruption issues.

Remember to check if the iPad is functioning properly or if it is still shutting down on its own.

Contact the Pros

If none of the above tricks help fix the random reboot issue on your iPad, it’s likely that the issue is hardware related. And in this scenario, you need to consult an iPad expert as soon as possible.

With several years of expertise under our belt and backed by an experienced team of supertechies, iFixers is a well-known Apple device repair centre. So, contact us to help you fix your iPad perfectly, professionally and affordably.

by ifixers - Apple service center in Bangalore

#ios service center in bangalore #imac repair in bangalore #iwatch service centre in bangalore #apple phone services in bangalore #iPad repair in Bangalore #iPhone repair in Bangalore #imac service center in banglore #iPhone service center in Bangalore

[itweetmagazines]

The iPhone 12 🔵 📱

A masterpiece is an understatement when it comes to expressing my first impression of the new iPhone 12.

Apple has created a device that I no longer can live without and for many, this is a quote but for others, its insult. Especially those who are on a different platform such as, Android. That being said, I was never bias, I gave Android a good hands-on try out but sadly there is a major difference between Android and iOS and that is a lag when it comes to switching and using the phone. The phone I used was a great phone “Samsung A50” and it was one of the most beautiful screens I have ever seen when it comes to using a smartphone. There is a good saying in Arabic that translates as the following, “looking a picture of a glass of cold and crisp water will never crunch your thirst” and it’s true when it comes to owning an Android. Therefore, staying and continue to use iPhone iOS platform is my only option.

The iPhone 12 comes in many colors versus the iPhone Pro, which was one of the reasonings I decided to pick the iPhone 12 versus the iPhone 12 Pro. As I previously mentioned, I had a good experience using my iPhone 11 max Pro but it wasn’t worth the price differences I had to pay for the Pro versus the regular; which leads me to the 2nd reason for picking the iPhone 12 versus the iPhone 12 Pro is the price. And finally, my 3rd reason for picking the iPhone 12 versus the iPhone 12 Pro was simply not using nor need a 3rd camera. I have never used the 3rd camera on my iPhone 11 Pro which I found it to be useless. Again, keeping an open mind, as this is my opinion and best fits my life style when owning and using a smart phone.

Red/Blue/Green/White/Purple and Black are the options that are available to pick when buying an iPhone 12. I, got me the blue, its beautiful glossy back, and beautiful front resolution truly makes it a device you don’t want to put down. The 6.1 screen size seem like the best middle size between their 6.7 and the 5.4 size options when selecting your next and newest iPhone.

I had a series of issues owning the large iPhone screen before, which is why I thought switching to the smaller size was a good idea. Truly, my decision was right and which made it super easy to now hold. The lighter weight was also a good add-on feature versus the extremely heavy iPhone 11 Pro max. Its almost 1/2 the weight just by guessing. I’ll have all the facts about the iPhone 12 below.

Overall, the iPhone 12 Blue 128GB was well worth the investment. Factory unlocked due to overseas travel. I think I’ll continue buying the next awesome iPhone because its a chain of high demand that comes with high pleasure.

Features and Specifications

• Super Retina XDR display

6.1‑inch (diagonal) all‑screen OLED display

2532‑by‑1170-pixel resolution at 460 ppi

• Dual 12MP camera system: Ultra Wide and Wide cameras

4K video recording at 24 fps, 25 fps, 30 fps, or 60 fps

1080p HD video recording at 25 fps, 30 fps, or 60 fps

720p HD video recording at 30 fps

• Video playback

Up to 15 hours

Video playback (streamed):

Up to 10 hours

Audio playback:

Up to 50 hours

Video playback:

Up to 17 hours

Video playback (streamed):

Up to 11 hours

Audio playback:

Up to 65 hours

• Both models: (iPhone 12 mini, and iPhone 12)

Built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery

MagSafe wireless charging up to 15W9

Qi wireless charging up to 7.5W9

Charging via USB to computer system or power adapter

Fast-charge capable: Up to 50% charge in 30 minutes10 with 20W adapter or higher (sold separately)

Dual SIM (nano‑SIM and eSIM)11

iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini are not compatible with existing micro‑SIM cards.

---

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#Keyboard #BlueSwitch #Apple #iOS #iPhone12 #Mac #Macbook #Review #Technology #Charger #Code #WatchOS #BOSE700 #Headphones #iPhone12 #Blue

[sweetener-forever]

Kirishima’s Existential Crisis

Rating: T

Characters: Kirishima Eijirou, Bakugou Katsuki 

Tags: A little heavy of a topic on maybe not existing, not suicide related, but take care of yourselves

Summary: Sometimes a bro needs to unload his weird dilemma about existing to a bro wearing headphones.

AO3 Link

Study sessions with Bakugou are anything, but quiet for the most part. There is yelling back and forth from both parties, objects are occasionally thrown, and Bakugou is known for hitting him in the head with a rolled up notebook if he gets too frustrated (usually this is reserved for math). However, sometimes it can be completely silent. When Kirishima is turned loose to work on the dictated problems and Bakugou puts in his earbuds to discourage Kirishima from getting distracted and talking to him.

It works, for the most part, but Kirishima sometimes takes these opportunities, as few as they come, to talk more with a busy Bakugou that can't hear him and won't respond back.

"Hey, Bakugou? Can you hear me?" Kirishima isn't whispering by any means, but he also isn't going out of his way to be heard by his explosive blond friend.

When Bakugou doesn't so much as flick his eyes up and continues working on his own problems Kirishima finally relaxes. He makes short work of pretending to work on the problems so Bakugou won't yell at him for messing around and slowly begins talking.

"Do you ever just think about just not existing?" He pauses and looks up to watch Bakugou write for a few seconds before looking back down at his own paper.

"No...you probably don't, I've heard your life goals before, so you don't have time for stupid stuff like those kind of feelings." Kirishima writes out three numbers and then erases them again as he talks, eyes no longer lifting away from his paper as he does.

"Sometimes I do though. Not that I want to commit suicide or die or anything like that! I just mean that I kind of want to stop existing?" The words of the problem Bakugou had assigned him to work on aren't making any sense. They seem more like swimming jibberish the longer he stares down at his paper. And that is probably a pretty good metaphor for what is going on in his head right now.

"Dude, this is so hard to explain to someone like you, I hope you know that..." It's more of a mumble than an actual accusation, especially since Kirishima doesn't expect Bakugou to answer and really doesn't want him to hear this.

He can only imagine the kind of scoffing ridicule he would get, the thought so terrifying that he doesn't want to even dwell on it. The thought that if Bakugou knew deep down how weak he is that he wouldn't want to hang out with him like this anymore. It's scary, but he keeps talking.

"I mean that I don't want to stop existing completely and forever, but more like put my whole existence on pause?" No, that didn't make much sense either, not in Kirishima's head and certainly not when he says it out loud. He furiously scribbles away some of the useless doodles on the side of his paper.

"It doesn't happen all the time, or even that often anymore. I just sometimes get really tired." He pauses and thinks about his next words carefully as if he really were having this conversation with Bakugou instead of reflecting his own ideas off of someone that can't hear him.

"I like being around people a lot and helping out our friends if ever they need me! I'm always down to help anyone at any time, really! But sometimes I guess I get really tired while doing it?" A few frustrated taps against a number that is starting to look more like a letter with his pencil as he bites his lips and considered a better analogy.

"Oh, I got it! It's like when your phone battery starts to get really low..no, no that's stupid actually." A small huff and another scribble erased. Analogies are not his friend today and he knows it. "I don't get tired physically? I'm more tired emotionally and it starts to feel like a little too much." He doesn't want to say that it's something that he can't handle, not in front of someone as put together and focused as Bakugou. The guy seems like he never has any doubts (even if Kirishima knows that isn't true from first-hand experience, but traitorous thoughts always bleed in that maybe Bakugou has those figured out in the end as well).

"I just want people to stop talking to me and being around me, and I want to go lay down and listen to music or something. But the kind of music that doesn't have people talking. It's just some kind of white noise that blots out that I'm anywhere physical. Which is dumb because I'm training to be a hero, so I'm going to be around people all the time." This is a perfectly valid reason as to why Kirishima will never say any of this out loud to Bakugou in a situation where the blond can actually hear him. Appearing weak aside, he can't let anyone know and doubt how much he wants to become a hero.

"I know it's pretty unmanly, but it's just how I feel sometimes. Even though I know I shouldn't because it sounds super worrying when I say it out loud like this."

It takes Kirishima several seconds to realize he has stopped all movements of trying to pretend that he is working on his homework.

"I get overwhelmed by everything. It's not like I wouldn't trade my life for anything else because I am super grateful to be here with you all, but sometimes I feel like I need a break. From everything, even myself. I get really tired being me and trying to be happy all the time, but not thinking about how everything makes me worry." The only noise in the room is Bakugou's pencil gently moving across the paper.

Despite everything he is feeling and saying the noise is somehow soothing to the fatigued and frustrated parts of Kirishima's brain. He soaks it in while he can before Bakugou eventually notices that he isn't actually doing his work and tries to get all his thoughts back into a row.

"I'm really tired, and I don't know how to tell you without sounding like a jerk because I want to either be alone or just sit in silence with you. You're my best friend and I like the manly way you talk and scream death threats at me, but I really like moments like these too where we can just be quiet and be around each other." The irony is not lost on Kirishima that they could be doing just that if he would only shut up already.

"I think I'm just tired of being tired in general. So maybe that's why I want to stop existing for a little while, so I can recharge without having to feel tired?" That actually seemed like a satisfactory answer after all, and it makes Kirishima finally look up from his paper to grin over at Bakugou at having found an answer to what he is feeling.

Except Bakugou is no longer working on his problems.

He is staring at Kirishima, one earbud pulled out, and an unreadable expression on his face.

The muscular armed clock in his room ticks a little too loudly for comfort as they both sit without saying anything. Kirishima's brain stopping completely with the sheer overwhelming amount of panic and Bakugou with his blank expression and pondering thoughts.

"Oi, are you finished yet?" Is what Bakugou says when he finally speaks, pulling the other earbud out and turning off his phone.

Kirishima starts to breathe a little easier as his lungs fill up and then the air is blown out in a loud and awkward laugh.

"Uh, no, not yet, dude! I think I'm stuck on this one problem?" An understatement, he can't remember a single thing that Bakugou had said while he had been explaining the problem earlier. That and his paper looks like he has been trying to torture it for information instead of solving a math problem.

"Amazing. We'll pick this shit back up in an hour." That is not what Kirishima had been expecting and even less so when Bakugou closes their shared math book and pushes it aside.

Bakugou doesn't just take breaks, it isn't normal for him.

"Dude, are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure! Get up, hair for brains, or I'm going to make you work on the next five problems instead!" Bakugou's patience is at the end of its rope and Kirishima knows better than to test it any further. Scrambling to his feet and following Bakugou out of the room he feels a little relieved that he hadn't been caught rambling.

And if it makes him more comfortable to speak to a wall, then Bakugou would never tell him that his earbuds are broken.

#BNHA #My Hero Academia #Kirishima Eijirou #Bakugou Katsuki #My Fanfic

[greginda]

Powerstrips and Plugs and Traveling Every Day

One of the less glamorous aspects of our trip to Iceland was keeping everything charged and organized. We only had two night stays in two hotels on the trip. Every other stop was check in at night, check out in the morning.

I took “charge” of making sure we had fully charged batteries every night. Also had to power computers, ipads, charge phones. It could get to be a logistical nightmare. What you see in the photo is my Belkin travel powerstrip on the left. It has three regular outlets and two usb outlets. That is plugged into a two prong travel adapter that works through most of Europe. To the right is a Brookstone travel adapter that has adapters for every outlet in the world. It also has two USB outlets and one regular outlet.

Plugged in to everything are batteries for two camera systems, a drone, a battery pack for Lindsey’s heated vest, and my watch.

*quick aside, at one point the charger to the Fuji batteries stopped working. It was the only charger I brought for that camera system, and not being able to charge batteries would’ve rendered it useless. There are also only 3 stores in all of Iceland that might have carried that charger, and all were over 4 hours away… and no amazon prime available either. I did a deep dive on google and repaired it myself.

We were very lucky our luggage fit into the back of our rental car. Those bags were a tight fit every day, fortunately Lindsey did a great job reorganizing everything on our first day in Iceland, so we only ever needed to take one bag, or one bag plus a case. That made everything go a lot faster in the morning as we were trying to catch a sunrise or get to our destination on time.

This type of vacation came with a lot more logistics to navigate than a more relaxing type vacation. But Lindsey and I both thrive under that type of stress. It is its own type of fun.

In addition to setting up this charging station every night, i also had to transfer data from all the cameras to the computer so we’d have clear cards every morning. Some nights I would have that work overnight (because transfer rates could sometimes be over an hour with some of the larger video files we got). We actually had almost no time to review photos on the trip. Because so much time was spent transferring.

Suffice to say we relished the two nights we spent at the same hotel. It was our opportunity to recharge ourselves, enjoying a chance to sit and look out a window (like the window in the third photo!).

#Powerstrips #Travel

[phoenixagent003]

The Castle Campaign Diary 01

I have long, long thought that buried in the new X-COM games is the recipe for a great D&D campaign. Something about that core loop of base-building and going on missions feeding into each other, coupled with the ability to customize soldiers, is just so captivating, and the turn based, class based combat gave me the same kind of warm fuzzies D&D usually does. Except, you know, it was guns instead of swords, and aliens instead of monsters. And I actually really missed the swords and monsters after a few dozen playthroughs of X-COM.

So, a while ago, I started crafting some fairly simple systems centered around researching and crafting magic items, and some base building mechanics largely cribbed from the Artisan Followers section of Strongholds and Followers, and eventually I had enough of it built that I was ready to put it in front of the my longtime and long suffering friends and players. The result is a campaign I’m calling the Castle, which, with any luck, will be the campaign I run for my friends for a long time to come.

I started off the way I always do, floating the basic pitch of the campaign to my friends, and when they seemed receptive enough to the concept (Though, I think they just really wanted to play D&D and were willing to accept my weirdness as the price of admission) for me to float them a few documents to get them started with character creation, laying down the basic state of the world, starting level, and what races were most common to the world. And also clarifying that this was a standard fantasy setting, something we have to do in my group because we have played D&D with just about every kind of coat of paint you can image.

When I was first coming up with the campaign, I was more focused on the structure than story or setting, so I didn’t actually put too much thought into the broader world, but I did eventually decide that the campaign takes place in the distant past of the same world I created for my Glintchasers novels and shorts. I think that decision was mostly motivated by laziness, but the side effect is a nice bit of synchronicity in any future worldbuilding tidbits I come up with for the campaign. I’ve already used the game as an excuse to figure out the original names and origins of the gods. And it already came up in game! That shit was literally never going to come up in the books.

So, speaking of the game, how did it go?

Well, to be honest, it got off to a slightly rocky start. I began the campaign with the players traveling through the wilderness in search of the ruined castle that was going to become their home base, and that I think was a good decision. It was a very evocative starting point. But then I ruined it by trying to force the characters to roleplay too early. As part of the journey through the woods, I had each player roll on a Travel Events chart I crafted for the game, which is basically just a roleplay prompt chart, but the players were not yet super comfortable with their characters, and the prompts of the chart were a little too vague, so they kind of floundered a bit and it was a little awkward. Towards the end though, they did start getting into it. One of the players got the result of seeing a shooting star in the night, and he really hammed up how his character interpreted it as a sign from the gods that they were on the right path.

So maybe it wasn’t the players, maybe some of the prompts were just crap. I think I’ll get a better handle on that as we start using it more.

Eventually, the players arrived at the castle. The secondary characters, who would be like the extra soldiers or B-Team if this were an X-COM game, scouted out the grounds of the castle while the A-Team, everybody’s main characters, went inside the castle itself. And of course, after a bit of searching around where they found some rooms and tools that would become their downtime facilities, they found some bandits it in the process of ransacking this ruin for whatever its worth.

Given the premise of the world being that its basically post-apocalyptic, I wanted to be careful to not make these guys too sympathetic. This was supposed to be the first combat where the players try out their characters. And I was worried since the world has been set up to be a very scrappy, survival of the fittest place, that the players might feel bad cutting down people trying to look for resources. So I played the bandits up as assholes, who immediately mark the players as walking loot drops, and they refuse the players offers of peace and immediately charge in. Later on in the campaign, I’d be more than happy to introduce a greater degree of moral complexity to some of the encounters, but for now, it’s the tutorial fight, and the games about fighting monsters, I didn’t see the need to overcomplicate things.

And that was really all the excuse everybody needed to go ham. The poor bandits actually really didn’t stand a chance. The “main” party’s roster is

Tina Cox, Aasimar Paladin

Selena Caslana, Dragonborn-descended Sorcerer

Camden Wayne, Artificer

Bartholomew Knightengale, Human Paladin

Dominik Leoguard, Human Fighter

So yeah, with three high armor class, heavy hitting characters, the bandits didn’t really do much more than scratch a couple of the PCs. But they had a blast, and everyone actually did a really great job of roleplaying their character during combat, which is not something you always see in combats but on reflection, I actually think my group is pretty great at doing consistently. Dominik and Bartholomew’s players especially really enjoyed the fight, since they were playing comically proud, crusading knights and effortlessly deflecting the blows of these bandits really played into the fantasy of their characters.

Dominik really shined towards the end when the last few enemies were on elevated balconies, and he, a high strength polearm user, actually had just enough reach to stab at them with a running high jump. And because he took the Charger feat, he did a lot of damage (I know Charger is actually bad, and honestly the only reason Dominik’s player took it was because he’s new and doesn’t know its bad, but hey, he managed to get some good use out of it this combat).

The last bandit actually managed to survive like three attacks on him from everybody rolling consecutive super low rolls, which just added to the hilarity that was that fight. After a few rounds of just obliterating these bandits, it took like three people to finish off one guy.

After the fight was over, I announced that the characters officially had the run of the castle, and gave them the rest of the handouts they would need to keep track of the campaign’s metagame, and gave them handouts for “Mission Leads” which are the short, episodic little quests they’ll be embarking on from the castle. And actually the first couple of them take place on the castle grounds. They needed to clear out the surrounding land, and they needed to clear out the lower levels.

But this was the point where I had to remind the players that this campaign was using the Gritty Realism resting rules, which if you don’t know, are variant rules in the 5th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide that say a short rest is eight hours, and a long rest is week. And immediately the two paladins and sorcerer, who had burned literally all their spells were like “Oh God! We’re useless for a week?!”

And, you know, the thing about 5th Edition D&D is it’s supposedly balanced and designed around the party having like 6-8 medium-difficulty encounters between each long rest, but the way I run things (and this is a problem a lot of people seem to run into), it’s often atypical for the party to get into more than one or two fights a day, so when I decided to structure a campaign after X-COM, a game where if you soldier gets hit they can be out of commission for a good chunk of time, I figured this was the perfect opportunity to bust those rules out and see what the game looks like when the party has to pace themselves a little bit more.

I haven’t really seen much of that yet—so far the group’s standard operating procedure is still to long rest after a single encounter’s worth of fights, but that’s partly because they’re still at a stage where they can get away with that. There isn’t currently a ticking clock forcing them to consider their time wisely, but there will be soon. And for now, just the realization of the players that they needed to be more conservative with their resources or cop a week on the bench was enough sign to me that I think these rules are a move in the right direction.

And one thing the rules did immediately facilitate was the B-Team! The players realized “Hey, there’s all this stuff we have left to do to clear out the castle grounds, but we’re tapped for the day—let’s send our secondary characters to take care of this.” And just—yes! I could not have scripted it better. The players immediately latched on to the secondary characters as a strategic option to use when they were out of commission with zero prompting from me.

So, the players sent a B-Team out to clear the castle grounds while the A-Team recharged their batteries, and this encounter led to my favorite part of the whole session. For reference, the B-Team sent out was:

Emily Thomas, Tabaxi-descended rogue (Tina’s player)

Kyle Reiner, Human Fighter (Selena’s player)

Issac Scout, Human Ranger (Camden’s player)

Kale Vulpix (Bartholomew’s player)

While the B-Team was clearing the castle grounds, they ran into some bandits and some undead. And the undead killed the bandits, the B-Team killed some of the undead, grabbed the treasure the bandits had on them, and then retreated. Which was technically mission success, but then—again, with no prompting from me—Tina’s player did a write-up of Emily giving a mission report to Tina about what happened. And since the B-Team didn’t clear all the undead, Tina told Emily “If those undead aren’t cleared out by the end of my long rest, you are going to scrub the floors of this castle until you can eat off them.”

I loved that. That was basically everything I was hoping to get out of this campaign’s structure in one hit. There was a player reflecting on how the mission went, thinking about the consequences, roleplaying her downtime, and taking the initiative to essentially create her own quest. I immediately awarded inspiration for that, and then I gave inspiration to all the character who went with Emily to go clear out the undead, which ended up being Kyle and Issac again.

And them clearing out the undead was the end of the session. And overall, I thought things went really well, excepting of course the slightly awkward start. Immediately after things were over, all the players pretty much immediately told me that they liked the campaign’s whole shtick and were looking forward to more, which was music to my ears and I think a pretty good sign things are working as intended. Event the first bandit fight, which was kind of a cakewalk, was still fun, and it served as a proof of concept for a little extra ability I’d given them.

Thanks for checking out the campaign diary! I’ve been running D&D since 2015, and I’ve wanted to share my experiences with it for a while, but this campaign was sort of the first time I ever actually knuckled down and started writing about it while the experience was still fresh in my mind.

Huge thanks to my players for being as amazing as they are, and I’ll see you all in the next write up.

[scriptmedic]

The Next 3 Months of ScriptMedic

Hey all! I wanted to talk a bit about the next 3 months here on the ScriptMedic blog. 

As we all know, the last 3 months of the year are hectic for many of us, for a lot of reasons. We’ve got: 

October: Samhain/Halloween 

November: Thanksgiving 

December: Yule/Christmas/Hannukkah 

AKA: Holiday Stress 

But we writers have an entirely different set of challenges coming for us! 

October: NaNo Prep Month 

November: NaNoWriMo -- Write All the Words! 

December: Oh Gods All the Edits

Plus, for me personally, I have the anniversary of ScriptMedic (October 23rd -- my little baby has grown up so fast and she’s so big--) to fill me with proud joyful tears. 

I’m also launching a book in October (yes, Blood on the Page will be here in time for NaNo), and I have some fiction projects to work on. (More on this in a bit). 

So here’s how this blog is going to work for the next 3 months: 

Today

Storm of asks. I was particularly bad in September about answering asks, and so I’m trying to get some done before the inbox opens tonight. (I may open a bit early since I’m sick and I might go to bed early.)

Seriously, I need to stop spiking fevers. 

I give myself a little leeway, was sick, was feeling burnt out, and because I published my very first book (!!!!!!!!), but I’m trying to get back to the focus: you guys. 

October

The priority will be on asks that are for NaNo prep. I’ll try to keep a decent schedule this month but no promises. 

It will help if your asks are:  a) single questions, not multi-part b) relatively quick so that I can get to as many of you as possible  c) specifically for NaNo prep

I’ll also start posting some injury profiles, beginning as soon as I schedule them.

Remember when we said Blood on the Page was going to be blogged out in its entirety? There are a solid 40 chapters that are going to go out. I’ll try to post some good ones this month to help you with NaNo prep, and they’ll continue through the rest of the year to help you along. 

November 

Ask Frenzy. Emphasis will be quantity and rapidness over quality or depth of answers. This is to help those asking for their NaNo projects. 

Ask box will cycle EVERY WEEK in November. Asks will come in on a specific day or two of the week, likely a Monday-Tuesday set, and be purged at the end of the week to make room for more current asks. 

This is because NaNo projects move very quickly and tend to change, and what can help in Week 1 can be useless in Week 3. So like I said: rapid cycling, rapid asks. 

December 

Ask Box Will Be CLOSED in December. 

Yes, the whole month. No, I will not keep November asks into December.

(Yes, Patrons will still be able to ask questions, but turnaround might be a LONG time.) 

Frankly, I’ve been getting a little bit burned out with the pressure from the inbox, and I don’t expect that to be different following the rapid-fire work I’m going to try to get done in October and November. 

I’m also trying to finish at least one fiction book by the end of the year (current project: a lesbian Urban Fantasy/Mystery project, sort of Jessica Jones/Faith Lehane/Jack Reacher character gets blackmailed by angels into becoming a PI) and maybe even get it published by the holidays, though that part will remain to be seen. 

That means that on top of helping all of you, I’ll be doing my own NaNo project and also trying to get some personal things done. 

I’ll still be posting articles Monday/Wednesday/Friday throughout December, but a month off of asks will allow me to come back in the New Year fresh and mentally healthy, hopefully a successful Fiction Champion. 

I hope you all can understand that this blog (and your messages, reblogs, and kind “blog love” asks) means the world to me, and I’m not going anywhere, but between family stuff, full-time work, my own writing projects, and constantly feeling like I owe somebody something, I need the space to take a month off. 

The blog isn’t going anywhere, I’m just taking some space to recharge my batteries. 

Love you all, and start thinking of your awesome questions to send in! 

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

#ask box #ask box status

[arplis]

Arplis - News: 20 incredible products that are trending on Amazon right now

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Arplis - News source https://arplis.com/blogs/news/20-incredible-products-that-are-trending-on-amazon-right-now

[seasaltmemories]

Demons Chapter 11

Rating: T

Summary: There's nothing broken about you. We just need to allow ourselves the privilege to exist.

When Petra woke up, her head was pounding like a drum. It felt as if she had to carry concrete slabs with her pinky toe just to lift her eyelids. The closest thing to a coherent thought she could muster was regret over drinking whatever beverage it was that could cause a killer hang-over like this. Still as she slowly came to her senses, she realized this felt nothing like that. Whatever this was, it was worse, as if Life itself had picked her up and wrung every drop of energy from her body.

Then a set of bars came into focus, and immediately it was like none of that pain matter anymore. Petra sat up not only to find herself locked in a cell, but a blonde girl sitting across from her.

She looked to be no older than her mid-teens and even smaller than Petra herself, but that did nothing to ease her nerves. There was a dangerous aura to her, one of a soldier, someone trained in discipline. Despite this, she didn't even seem to regard Petra as more threatening than a fly. Somehow that was most frightening thing about the situation, someone holding so much power yet regarding it as nothing.

"Where am I..." As slurred and mumbled her words came out, the girl instantly turned to face her, cool blue eyes glaring at her. For a moment, Petra truly feared for her life, but slowly the girl answered her question.

"You have been detained and arrested by the Holy Legion."

At the sounds of those words, Petra's heart sank like a stone. Memories of Captain's last words came to the forefront of her mind.

Don't trust anyone or anything related to the Holy Legion, if you hear that name, run

And here she had gone and gotten herself captured by them instead.

After the jump, Captain had wanted to sleep for a week. Jumping from one created dimension to the next was nothing like he was used to. Even with his additional training, it still felt like running marathon in an hour. Usually he tried to take a break for a few days just to recharge his batteries.

But then one worry kept tugging at his mind from time to time, keeping him from relaxing fully. He knew Petra wasn't the type to look fondly on him getting a bit overprotective, but it felt wrong to leave her out there without a clue of what was going on. They had been doing this for decades while she was still so green behind the ears.

She could deck you in the face for this kind of behavior you know

And maybe he really deserved it. There was no no explanation for visiting her dorm at this hour that wouldn't paint him as a creep. Still at the very least he needed to rest his nerves. He'd be able to heal a lot faster without having to worry about her on top of everything else.

It was difficult getting into an area so densely populated by humans who had no sense when it came to their sleep schedules. Still stealth was his specialty, and he found himself inside soon enough. At first it seemed as if no one was there, but suddenly he heard a voice.

Quickly he hid as he tried to distinguish the source. It sounded like that girl he had seen hanging around Petra few times. Captain began to listen closely to the individual words she was saying.

"Hey Ian, Petra texted me saying she was gonna stay over with you. Apparently she had something going on today that was located near you and didn't want to make the trip here late at night."

Hearing that news was like having a weight lifted off his chest. He didn't think he had the right to thank God or anything else holy, but the desire to was raw and real. In his relief he almost didn't hear the last part of the conversation.

"What?! You're saying she didn't make it over there!?"

The worst part about being captured was the silence. Her jailer wasn't the chatty type, which left her alone to think about her failure over and over again. Her subconscious replayed the moments right before she was captured. Each time she remembered the it, it was like getting punched in the gut. No matter what she did it seemed her efforts were always useless.

At some point she was taken out of her cell to be read her "charges" for all her crimes by a mysterious

figure cloaked in white. As nice as it was to stretch her legs, it left her more confused than anything else.

"You are charged with collaborating with demonic forces." The figure announced. "Depending on how long and how far this relationship has gone, your sentence will be extended."

"So what does that mean from you weirdos? Do I get a time-out for not living up to whatever cult you run?"

"I suggest you not take the Holy Legion so lightly." Their voice took on a dangerous tone. "We're the only thing that stands between humanity and its destruction. Having infidels like you work together with such monsters makes it even harder to cleanse the world. If I were you I'd show some repentance. Those who don't beg for forgiveness are treated the same as a demon."

Something about those words set off a switch in Petra. Maybe she would have taken this better if she had already cut off contact with Captain and the gang and would have thought before she spoke. Maybe is she wasn't tired and scared out of her wits she would have tried to act pragmatically. Maybe if for a year now it hadn't felt like her life was being run by everyone but herself she would have known not to piss off those who held her life in their hands. Even so, she had grown already sick of whatever freakshow this was.

"Where were you my entire life then?" Her words were as sharp as a knife. "I spent my childhood convinced I was out of my fucking mind. Demons haunted my every move, but apparently they weren't important until I finally found some peace, and now you want to take it away?" Without thinking she raised her fist to strike them, when suddenly she was slammed to the floor by the blonde guard from before.

"Thank you, Ariel." The clocked figure bowed as she dug her heel deeper into Petra's back.

And so her brief stint out of the cell was ended. Looking back she would have taken more of those cryptic threats over this silence. She was still without a clue of what exactly this Holy Legion was up to. All she knew for sure was that she had damned herself in their eyes, and their road to redemption was unlikely to be one she'd like.

With a sigh, Petra raked a hand down her face. This is what she gets for trying to make sense of her madness, to try and find a purpose in her life.

What am I going to do?

At this point she wasn't even sure she could pray to anyone for help.

Faster and faster, Captain teleported himself through the streets of Sina. It was a crazy plan, one even Girly wouldn't have ever suggested. Still the Holy Legion would have to be blind not to notice him this way. Eventually, they'd come to attack him and that's when his search for Petra would really begin.

He knew Commander and Four-Eyes would never allow this sort of behavior to happen. He could practically hear their more logical arguments with each jump. How do you expect to take on the Holy Legion yourself? Do you expect to be able to fight demon hunters after exhausting yourself out? Who knows if they really have Petra. For all he knows she could already be dea-

Captain bit his tongue hard. No, he would not accept that. She was his partner for a good reason, brave as hell and even fiercer. If any human could survive them it was her. It had to be her. Even so he couldn't sit around just twiddling his thumbs while she was in danger.

"Wait for me Petra, I'm coming," He whispered to himself. He'd rescue her no matter what stood in the way.

It was hard to keep track of time. Even if Petra hadn't been busy wallowing her own self-pity, there was no windows or any other signs that could have helped her. So when she found a plate of food and a glass of water set before her, she couldn't help but look up in surprise.

"Eat." It was the first time her guard had spoken to her, making the situation all the more surreal.

Without even thinking, Petra said, "Thank you, Ariel..."

For some reason that made her freeze up. It was another first of hers, showing some emotion besides bland neutrality.

"Is that not what the other dude called you?"

"It is..." She brushed a few strands of hair behind her eye. "But it's not a name I expected to hear from a prisoner of all people."

"A name's a name. why does it matter who says it?" Petra pretended to be occupied with tearing a loaf of bread into smaller pieces. This might be her only opportunity to fish for information. The worst thing she could do would be to ruin it all because she got too eager.

"It's less a name and more a title. Your kind knows very well the power names have." There was a slight quirk to her lips that could be mistaken for a smirk.

Damn it, so she wasn't as subtle as she'd have prefer. Oh well at least Ariel seemed entertained by her antics.

"Did you get to choose it yourself? Because if it's supposed to be intimidating, all it does is remind me of the redhead mermaid from that one movie."

"The reference is more academic than that." She approached Petra's cell to sit across from her, movements effortless graceful as if belonging to a dancer. "The protagonist of Shakespeare's The Tempest, has two slaves: Ariel and Caliban. The former was obedient and well-loved, earning his freedom at the end for his good deeds. The latter was unruly and regarded as inhuman. While he does receive forgiveness in the end, his fate is unclear. The Holy Legion mirrors such behavior for sinners like us. If you act as an Ariel, you're one step closer to earning redemption. On the other hands, Calibans fates are more ambiguous." Even without having observed her quiet nature before, it was obvious that Ariel was not used to speaking this much. Her words came out stilted and awkward, like she was reading a script in a foreign language.

"So am I a Caliban in your eyes?" Petra leaned forward, no longer hiding her interest.

"Everyone starts out as Caliban before the Holy Legion recruits them. Very few are strong enough to dedicated themselves fully to eradicating demons from this world. However a Caliban can always change into an Ariel if they wish to. Your choice is simple. If the Holy Legion runs out of patience though, then soon your disobedience will be punished."

"What happened to that forgiveness?"

"It is always granted at first, but if it is not accepted by the recipient, judgment must be dealt."

"Why tell me this, though?"

"Because I'm tired of unnecessary violence." She gave a long sigh that sounded centuries old. "You seem smart enough to know when to fold your hand." While she tried to remain impersonal and detached, one ghost of an emotion still tainted her words. She seemed lonely, but that wasn't even the most surprising thing she found about her.

The more she looked at Ariel, the more she reminded reminded Petra of herself as a teen, someone who felt so alone and alien in her own world.

All this purple prose and odd behavior was making her head spin. So far what she knew about this Holy Legion was not adding up. Their job was to destroy demons and ones who associated with them like her, yet that was where they tried to recruit their workforce. They named their workers in a very demonic fashion based on if they earned redemption for some unknown sin or-

A thought came to Petra that was shocking, she had to keep from yelping at the revelation. Dear lord, if she was right...

"You're right. I'm not stupid. If that's the only way I can survive, then I'll join y'all." She waited for the right moment, when Ariel's body seemed to loosen up ever so slightly and her guard was let down for a half-second, and then she reached through the bars of her cell to grip her as fiercely as possible.

She fought and bit and screamed to get Petra off her, but her grip was unshakeable. It had to be here. She couldn't be wrong. Then suddenly it flashed before her eyes.

The key.

The crowd seemed to roar louder than any beast alive. One name kept getting chanted over and over again. Annie. Annie. However one quiet voice managed to impact her more than they ever could.

"You have to win this, Annie. You've come so far to make it to the championship. I will not accept failure from you. Do not let her beat you."

With that, Annie stepped into the ring to face her opponent. Already she felt a fraction of her resolve wavering. She looked hardly like a teen her age, more as if Athena herself had come down to Earth and had decided to take up boxing. Even so she tried to stay strong. Dad wouldn't accept failure.

Once the match started, it felt like it would go one forever. Again and again the two weaved around each other, not giving the other an inch. Ugh, they couldn't play this game forever. She had to strike now.

With all her strength, Annie lunged forward with a left hook; however, as she stepped forward, she found herself slipping in a puddle of sweat and hitting her head against her opponent's chair.

Then there was only darkness.

When Petra came back to the real world, she found the demon glowering at her. She looked like a feral animal, and somehow Petra knew if she didn't save her, Annie would decide to kill her.

"You're life has always been this way, Annie. Instead of making your own decisions, someone else has told you what you needed to do, and if you didn't live up to their expectations they beat you into the ground for it."

"You fucking bitch!" She snarled, pulling out a key from her pocket. "I'll-"

"To be honest I've suffered in the same way. First I tried living up to the expectations of human society and simply denying a part of myself, and then I started only valuing the part of me that could live in demon society."

She plunged the key to the lock and all but ripped open the door. This was it, there was no escape if Petra didn't act now.

"Things aren't going to get better for either of us, if we stop trying to be the person others want to be and just choose to be ourselves! It doesn't matter that you're a demon, Annie. There's nothing broken about you. We just need to allow ourselves the privilege to exist!"

Petra closed her eyes, waiting for a fist to connect with her face, but it never happened. When she dared to open her eyes again, she found Annie fading away right before her. For some reason she found her mouth trying to speak, to say something, anything about the situation, but the words wouldn't come. Even so, as she disappeared, a ghost of a whisper passed by Petra's ear.

"Thank you..."

For a beat, all Petra could do was shiver from the chills it sent down her spine. Had that all been intention on her part? Had Annie really wanted to be saved instead of a slave to those who condemned her? Whatever it didn't matter. She could think about such matters once she got out of here. Of course then there was that matter of Petra didn't know where exactly she was...

It was right then she heard a noise coming from the door. Someone was on their way to this room and were coming fast. Despite her lack of weapons or anything really to defend herself, Petra immediately fell into a fighting stance. If she were to die here, then she would go down with a fight.

The door flew open, but instead of eerie figures in white clocks, only one familiar person stood.

It was Captain.

A thousand emotions seemed to run counter to each other in Petra: relief, confusion, joy, fear. Captain though just stared and stared, like she was a miracle just for taking a breath. A part of herself screamed to shoved that inside the deepest dark vault inside her mind, to not let anything dangerous spill out.

Petra said screw that, and leaped into his arms with no regrets.

"Petra," He whispered her name like a prayer. His face was buried in her shoulder, his grip around her frame almost vicelike. All the adrenaline from before began to drain from her body, and suddenly all she wanted to do was collapse and just sob her heart out until there were no tears left. Instead of flinching from such display of vulnerability, Captain simply rubbed his hand in soothing circles and murmured gentle sounds.

"Come on, Girly. Let's get you home."

When Captain came to see her after she had settled down, she felt his presence more than anything else. Her attention had been fully occupied by a Greek shoreline, but at the familiar zap of teleportation, she knew he had returned. Without even turning her head, Petra greeted him.

"Anything you need."

"Just wanting to make sure you're ok after that phone call." He moved to sit next to her. Four Eyes had been the one to deal with most of the details of relocating. At this point it was just tying up the loose ends so she could disappear effectively. Who knew that would be so painful though?

"I'm not sure Dad was processing it. All the money just blew his mind, but then to hear about that witness protection story, it might have been just too much."

"I'm sorry you had to go through that." His words were awkward, but it was the intent that mattered.

"I appreciate it. Still I hope I don't have to leave Sina forever. Even if it's only for a little while I want to see Rico and Dad at least one more time."

"This isn't the first time we've had to move shop because of the Holy Legion. If they see your face in town, they'd jump you right away."

"And you think that would stop me?" She raised an eyebrow and shot him a cocky grin.

Captain smiled back. "No it wouldn't." For a beat the two of them just sat there, enjoying the other's company. But unfortunately nothing can last forever. It wasn't long before he was asking her another question.

"So what are your plans now? You want out?"

Petra licked her lips, trying to find the right words. "Not exactly. I think I'm going to start studying the connection between demons and history, specifically in portrayals of mythology. I told you I loved Greek mythology, didn't I? This is the perfect way to put that and my demon knowledge to use."

"But does that mean we're still partners?"

Hazel eyes met silver, so sharp and piercing and a million other things that made her inside do flips.

"Not necessarily. I may not be staying in the demon taming business, but things don't have to change that much."

"What do you mean?"

She took a deep breath. In. Out. Then slowly she laced their fingers together. "What exactly are we?" It was impossible to say who kissed who first, but it wasn't long before they were drinking each other completely in. As the two of them pulled back for air, a content sigh passed from her lips.

"...I have no idea how relationships like this even go, but do you want to give it a try?" It was strange seeing Captain bashful of all people. The tips of his ears were flushed red, and he seemed determined to look anywhere but her eyes.

Petra thought on the past year's trials and tribulations, of her revelation when captured by the Holy Legion, and all the other anxieties that had been gnawing at her core.

"I want you," she finally said. "I want to everything and anything my heart desires from now on."

Captain grinned. "Then let's get started."

A.N. After way longer than this story should have taken, it's done. It kinda feels unreal. On one hand this story is almost from a different time period in my life. I was 15 when I started this and still figuring out a lot about myself and now three years later and I'm heading for college in less than a week. I've changed so much as a person, I wondered if I was even telling the same story I started out as. Even so I glad to be able to finish this project once and for all. Thank you so much for your support. I love all my readers~

#rivetra #petra ral #levi #attack on titan #levi ackerman #my lame writing #otp: cold coffee #dead people everywhere #demon tamer au #it's done #it's finally done after three years

[tumbleon]

Go well, Celia

The first time I saw Celia Mancini was on celluloid. 

Three years ago, my flatmates and I headed out in the rain to catch a screening of Margaret Gordon’s documentary about the Christchurch band Into the Void at Alice’s, a theatre in the centre of town that holds about 30 people. 

Most of the documentary consisted of the band laughing about how they drank together far more often than they made music. 

But the atmosphere changed when a clip from King Loser’s ’76 Come Back Special video jumped off the screen. A presence appeared: a femme fatale with jet black hair and red lips. She sprinted in short heels through the streets of Auckland, picking off men with whatever she had lying around: a car, a rifle, a karate chop. 

King Loser, ‘76 Come Back Special 

“Wow,” I breathed. 

Onto the next one... Still from the ‘76 Come Back Special video. Get it, Celia. 

One of the people she murdered in the video was her bandmate Chris Heazlewood. Their personalities sparked when they met in Auckland in 1992. Celia spit venom, and Chris liked it. Celia liked him, too. King Loser was born shortly afterwards. 

King Loser press shot for Flying Nun Records. Left to right: Celia Mancini, Lance Strickland, Chris Heazlewood. Not pictured: Sean O’Reilly

“That whole video was all her idea!” he cried. “She’s got a real good eye for iconography. She was like, ‘I need to be in a black vinyl catsuit, and I need to be killing everybody, and I need to die at the end.’” 

Celia was larger than life. She was also still very much alive. Unlike the actual members of Into the Void, who were somewhat useless at remembering the finer details of their history, Celia had scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings. More than 20 years after the fact, she still had everything saved, as if she always knew that someone would need it one day. She was a rock star and an archivist. My heart glowed. As disparate as our lives seemed, I could relate to her in that one small way. 

Media is often talked about as if it is some evil, homogenous lump of globalised ephemera with no real connection to anything or anyone other than capitalism and corporate profits. But in New Zealand, people step out of celluloid and cross over from the screen into everyday life all the time. You just have to know where to look, and who to find.  

At one point in the documentary, Into the Void played in a gravel lot on High Street where their practise room used to be. One kid watched from the sidewalk, his hair bouncing. An hour after the screening, Mary and I were at the darkroom, and so was he. 

“We just saw your movie,” we crooned. “Loved your scene.” 

Though Celia first became known for her presence in Christchurch bands like The Stepford 5 and The Axel Grinders in the 80s, she didn’t live in Christchurch anymore. 

(You can hear one of The Stepford 5′s songs here). 

Although King Loser was born in Auckland, the band also lived in Dunedin for a bit. Part of that history included joining Peter Gutteridge in a reformed line-up of Snapper. The New Zealand poet David Merritt referred to their triumvirate as “an axis of good and evil”.

Self-portrait of Snapper, c. 1992 by Chris Heazlewood. Left to right: Peter Gutteridge, Celia Mancini, Chris Heazlewood. Not pictured: Mike Dooley. 

Though their relationship didn’t last, they remained close friends. 

Celia always used to introduce Chris to people with the line, “And this is my guitarist, Chris Heazlewood.” Photo courtesy of Chris Heazlewood, who said: “Note proprietary position of hand on shoulder.”

Celia’s and my paths first crossed two years ago in a bar on Karangahape Road in Auckland. Though I had killed a lot of time on K Road – I had written a novel there in another life, years before moving to the South Island – I had never seen Celia before. This time around, I was doing an oral history project on Peter Gutteridge. This time, I knew who I was looking for. 

Chris Heazlewood was playing at the Audio Foundation, though I missed it (what gig finishes by ten?). Apparently, Celia appeared with a drummer and demanded that they play. Chris conceded. They smashed it. 

After the show I ended up at Verona, and Celia was there too, in a black silk dress. Her arm was in a cast. One of her front teeth was chipped. The bar was loud and crowded. She talked with a drawl, and a bit under her breath. Her words rolled together like liquid and I couldn’t make out a thing she said. After a few moments she held up her cigarette and announced: “I’ll leave you for more conversation with this one.” She nodded to me. “Scintillating.” That I understood. I broke into a smile. I had just been insulted, but I didn’t care. She was funny. 

Later that night a boy at the bar leaned in my face when he heard I was writing about Peter Gutteridge. 

“Who?” the boy spat. 

“He’s a musician,” I replied. 

“Who?” he asked again, louder.

“Uh…” I tried to think of which band to mention first.  

“I know who he is,” the boy seethed. “He was a friend of mine. Do you think he would have wanted you to write about him?” 

He hit a nerve. I almost cried. 

Celia wasn’t like that at all upon learning I wanted to write about Peter.  

“I have no questions to ask you,” she said. “I’m just grateful.” She championed the project to several of their mutual friends, and put me in touch with all of them. 

We did her oral history on a sunny winter day in Auckland in 2015. Celia didn’t have a permanent address, so we met at her friend’s flat in Grey Lynn. 

Celia wanted food: she requested a pizza with anchovies, capers, and olives. I had a rockmelon. “Bring both if you can,” Celia said. Before I left, she doubled down. “I’m not joking about the rockmelon. I am half Indian, you know.” 

When I arrived, Celia was waiting in the backyard. 

“Hi!” I said as I approached. “I’m Hannah.” 

She smiled slow. “I know.” 

I had brought along the rockmelon, but by that point it had been long forgotten. 

Oral histories ought to be recorded somewhere quiet, but Celia wanted to go find some sun. 

“Lindsay, we need your keys,” Celia announced to her friend. “Hannah’s going to borrow your car.” It came off a bit abrupt, but Lindsay didn’t seem to mind. He tossed me his keys. I also needed power; he handed me eight rechargeable batteries and told me to keep them. 

Boxes of Celia’s archives formed towers around Lindsay’s toilet. Even though she didn’t have a home, she hadn’t lost them. Her friends seemed unusually patient and generous.  

As I drove, Celia drank. 

“I'm a bit confused lately because I don’t live in Auckland,” Celia said. “I really want to be going home. I’ve been trying for two years.”

“Where’s home?” I asked.

She looked as me as if I was blind. “Dunedin!” she cried. “Always.”

We ended up on a park bench near the lake in Western Springs, where ducks were basking in the late afternoon sun. 

Celia poured whiskey into a mug from her flask. “Would you like a drink, darling?” She doled out the word darling like candy. 

“I would, but I can’t,” I protested. “I drove us here. I need to drive us home!” 

Celia’s mind moved a mile a minute. As she talked, her words started to blur again, and I struggled to separate them, just like at the bar. My replies were flat. Most of the time I managed only a generic response once she had finished. “Oh. Hm.” I wondered if she was making any sense. 

Later, when I listened back and slowed down the recording, Celia was totally lucid, and I sounded like an idiot. She would go off on three separate tangents in the middle of a sentence – but at the end of every sentence, she offered up about seven ideas. 

Much of what Celia said blasted apart the two-dimensional statements that have been repeated so many times about rock music in New Zealand, they are often passed off as truisms. One is that the scene is full of amateurs who learned by the seat of their pants. 

Celia didn’t ascribe to any of that bullshit. She loved classical music, played ragtime and honky-tonk on the piano from the age of five, and was a brass player in several orchestras as a kid. 

And then she fucking rocked.

Another one of the two-dimensional truisms was that being on stage came with no pretence. Everyone wore street clothes. 

Celia didn’t give a fuck about precedents. The world was her stage, and she was going to own it.  

Celia and her band Mother Trucker performing ‘Eric Estrada’ in 1998. 

“People turned their back on the audience,” Roy Colbert told me over coffee. “Then, here comes Celia walking the stage like it’s a runway in a nightie. People had never seen anything like it before. Jaws were on the floor.” Roy laughed.

Celia and I reminisced about Peter and purred.

“I miss his tone of voice,” she said.

“So gentle,” I agreed.

She smiled. “So sweet.”

Although our first encounter was a bit acerbic, Celia treated me like gold ever since I wrote about Peter. She said my dissertation rendered her speechless. A rarity, one of her friends mused. Don’t worry, another chimed in. I’m sure it’ll wear off soon. Her reputation remained contentious, but she also remembered my birthday. 

About a year later, word spread that King Loser had started to play together again. Shows were scheduled across the islands for September. As the dates neared, rumours rumbled through Dunedin that communication in the band had started to break down. There was talk the band might not make it.

But they did—curiosity regarding their arrival turned into cries of lament from Port Chalmers that Celia had demanded the entire stage be moved at the last minute.

Danny and Nikolai of Elan Vital had been drinking at Mou to mourn its last day before being sold; a brief sojourn to pick them along the way turned into a two-hour detour.

“Have shots with us,” they pressed.

“I’ll have a beer; I can’t have shots though,” I said. “I really want us to make this show.”

That night outside the Tunnel Hotel, the atmosphere was giddy. Nikolai leapt at Danny and pulled down his pants. Renee was draped over the fence outside the hotel in a fur coat, eyes glistening and grin demented. King Loser was back.

Chris Heazlewood passed us on the street on the way in.

I lit up. “You made it!”

“Agh,” he muttered. “Dragged that bitch all the way from the top of the North Island to the bottom of the South...”

I smiled. “Well, we’re glad you did.”

The bar was packed. There were black leather miniskirts that looked like they had been dusted off from 20 years back.

There was no sign of Celia. Sometime after midnight, the band started to play without her. Eventually Celia stalked in an oversized fur coat from stage right. Her hair was teased and piled up a mile high over a white collared shirt buttoned up her neck and a black silk tie. 

If looks could kill... Celia at The Tunnel Hotel in Port Chalmers, September 2016. Photo by Esta de Jong

Celia threw her coat behind her over a lamp. Their drummer—Lance Strickland, aka Tribal Thunder—carefully removed it.

Once they started playing, it all came together. Chris and Celia taunted one another. Lance was on point. At one point Celia almost knocked the keyboard into the audience, but Lance leapt out and caught it. Elan Vital and Death and the Maiden threw themselves into each other in front of the band, manic.

“I love you Celia!” Renee crowed. 

“Another whiskey, please, somebody?” Celia posited to the audience.  

“Somebody get her a whiskey!” Renee hollered, carrying the decibel of the request over to the bar.

“Thought she wasn’t going to make it for a minute there,” I mused to Roy Colbert, who happened to be standing in front of me.

“Don’t be fooled,” he said. “Celia wanted all eyes on her. She loved it.”

Word of King Loser quieted down a bit again after the shows.  

The following summer I moved to North East Valley, and not long after that cycled past Chris Heazlewood walking a dog along North Road.

“King Loser is playing at the Crown this Sunday afternoon,” Chris said. “So, Celia’s down obviously.”

The cover charge was only five dollars. My whole flat came; those with a bit of extra money covered for the ones who couldn’t afford it.

By the time I arrived, Connie Benson was on her last song. Afterwards, King Loser were even tighter than before. There was no false starts, no long wait. The first song came like a bullet train. Wham! Celia introduced another. Wham! Then another came straight after, without any introduction. Wham!

King Loser kill it at The Crown Hotel in Dunedin, March 5, 2017. 

“Shall we have Connie Benson come up and play our last song with us?” Celia asked before the set ended.

The crowd cheered. Connie’s eyes widened.

“Come on, Connie.” Celia started a chant. “Connie! Connie!”

Connie slowly took her guitar out of the case.

Connie glanced between Celia and Chris as the band launched into a riff. She watched Chris’ fingers and slowly started to imitate them. Lance lifted his chin at Connie, encouraging her to go faster.

Celia stopped the song after about 30 seconds. ““All right, Connie,” Celia insisted until the beast ground to a halt, it’s E, F#, A...” Celia rattled off the notes they were playing.

I melted for the girl for being put on the spot to play a song that she didn’t know. Connie didn’t seem to mind, though.

“Isn’t she amazing?” Celia asked the audience at the end. “Connie Benson!” I couldn't tell whether Celia had been trying to humiliate her, or not. Celia ran over to Connie after the set.

Celia Mancini performing a matinee King Loser show at The Crown Hotel in Dunedin, New Zealand, March 2017. Photo by Jacque Ruston. 

“Man,” my flatmate Caitlin marvelled. “What do you think she is like in person?”

“I’ve met her a few times,” I said. “I think what you see is what you get.”

Caitlin wouldn’t have to wonder for long. That weekend, Celia turned up at our flatwarming in the valley with a small entourage round midnight.

Marcus apologised on her behalf. “You know Celia,” he said. “She wanted to make an entrance.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I smiled. “Come as you are, whenever you like.”

It was a great night. Celia insulted the music, the lighting, and everyone at the party straightaway. 

“What is this?” Celia’s head swiveled. “You’re living in some student flat?”

Yes. But it has a band room... 

Caitlin tried to tell her a joke. Celia didn’t let her finish. “I’ve got a joke!” she declared. Then she forgot the ending, and cracked herself up anyway.  

Caitlin stared. “I’m laughing. Your joke is really funny.”

“Cunt!” Celia crowed. 

Caitlin put an arm on her shoulder. “Celia. I’m glad you’re here. But this is my house…”

Celia had already moved onto the record player. I tried to apologise for Celia, but Caitlin didn’t care. “Oh, I think she decided I was all right in the end.”  

“What is this music?” Celia cried. My flatmates had put on something... electronic. “Change it!” she hollered. 

I was more hesitant. “Someone wanted to hear this...”

“Put something that you like on,” Celia insisted. “You have good taste.” 

She had no knowledge of my taste, but was charming enough to get people to go along in spite of how little what was said stacked up against facts. 

At one point she sallied up next to me as I messed around on the organ in our hall. “That’s really good,” she encouraged, her eyes locked onto mine. 

Immediately after I put on some rock and roll, a boy started dancing in our lounge with a broom. 

Celia smiled. “See?” She cranked up the volume. 

“We have to keep it down,” my flatmate Icky insisted. “Noise control already came. I don’t want my stereo taken away.”

“The neighbours only called noise control because of that shithouse music you were playing before,” Celia insisted. “They didn’t like the BASS. It has to do with FREQUENCY. This is a higher frequency, it’s fine.” She cranked the volume back up on her way out to the backyard. 

Icky stared after her. “I think I’m in love.” He turned it back down once she had left. 

“This lighting is awful,” Celia mused. “Lighting can make or break a party.” We turned a few lights off. “Better,” she insisted. 

“She wasn’t that bad,” my flatmate Jenny said later on. “She wasn’t causing drama for the sake of it. Everything she was saying was about trying to make the party better.” 

Celia was still putting records on when I slithered off to bed around two in the morning. The next day my flatmates told me that she was one of the last to leave. 

Our time together was so short when compared with those who loved her and spent decades by her side. Yet as her spirit drifts from the bottom of the South Island to the top of the North Island and flies out over Cape Reinga, it feels still like I ought to share the little that I knew. If there was a legacy to carry forwards from the short time I spent with Celia, it was to engage. Celia can be channeled anytime someone moves with a certain modus operandi: Pay no mind to precedents. Focus on making the music good. Improve the party. 

I have been lucky enough to find something in New Zealand, though I can’t quite yet describe it. If all of the people who had an impact on each other’s lives all over these islands could be seen at once, it would light up the night like rich constellations in a cloudless winter sky. But as time passes, clouds are forming. The brightest lights are slowly fading, and some are disappearing altogether from sight. 

Yesterday, another soft glowing star faded from the constellations that tell the story of a time and a place. 

Go well, Celia.

Celia Mancini by Brigid Grigg-Eyley            

#king loser #celia mancini #celia patel #flying nun #auckland #new zealand #music #legend #stepford 5 #the axel grinders #rip

[abutterflyobsession]

Doctor Who AU: Part 14

prelude/one/two/three/four/five/six/seven/eight/nine/ten/eleven/twelve/thirteen/ao3

“You see, humans are boring.”

The primrose pendant was a bright spot of rosy color in the sterile white of the circular room. It dangled from Roland's hand, looking even gaudier than usual when compared to his crisp neatness, straight lines of his clothing and carefully calculated curl of his hair.

“Fascinating,” Bog tried to wiggle his feet and hands, but he was caught fast and the wall had no give. The wall had swallowed him up to the waist and held his hands trapped above his head. Somewhere to Bog's left the Doctor was similarly trapped and muttering under her breath.

“Humans are boring, dull little creatures and almost entirely useless.”

“You're hurting my feelings.”

“What I need to unlock this,” Roland bounced the pendant up and down, “is more Cheem.”

“Sorry I couldn't have been more help.”

“No, you don't grasp what I'm saying. Not surprising. Your little trinket keeps you and your like mostly human, covering up anything non-human with a perception filter built into your genetic code. Without this you'd go full potted plant over the course of several years.”

“My family does tend to have a problem with dry skin when we get older.”

“Now, you managed to access the information contained in this, but you've failed to activate any of its other abilities. It's not just a passive receptacle of data, you know.”

The Doctor's muttering got louder and more annoyed.

The seed had been a battery, of sorts, Bog understood. It collected power from the sun and stored it so it could be used for any number of things. To manipulate the growth of the forest, to make ships, even to make the Cheem look human.

At least, it had been. Until something happened, four centuries ago, that ended with the primrose seed in pieces, its abilities crippled, patched together and held in place by the yellow gem in the center.

Roland dropped the pendant into a box.

“This is rather like what you were using earlier, to block the signal of the pendent,” Roland snapped the box shut and the lid fused to the box, the seam disappearing completely, “But far less makeshift and created specifically for the purpose of isolating the gems.”

“Obviously you don't want me setting the cloud of death on you.”

“Obviously. But it also serves the purpose of keeping the pendant from maintaining your human form. The gems have to send out a constant signal that fortify your genetic scaffolding, keep it from slipping into old habits. Like growing leaves instead of hair and bark instead of toenails.”

“Yeah, okay, so in like ten years I'll be a bit green around the gills. You've got my knees knocking, for sure. Is this wall going to ruin my jacket? Leather is hard to keep in condition, you know, and it's already got its share of rips and scuffs.”

“I'm so glad,” Roland tapped the box, a smug little smile on his face, “So glad you're taking this situation with the seriousness it commands. Darlin', would you like to explain to your pet philodendron what's going on?”

The Doctor's muttering cut off and she craned her head around to look at Bog, “He's going to expose you to the time vortex to try and speed up your personal time.”

“What?”

“Ten years will be like ten minutes and you'll be completely Cheem. At least, the remaining human DNA will be negligible.”

“What you're saying is that I'm going to lose my good looks.”

Roland shuddered at the idea of Bog and 'good looks' mentioned in the same sentence.

The Doctor's lips quirked up slightly.

“I need Cheem DNA to use as a basis to break the security on the pendant,” Roland continued, trying to refocus their attention back on him.

“Aren’t you even going to try, I don’t know, torture me or something? What if I just gave you access?”

“What would be the fun of that?”

Roland waved a had and the wall shifted, moving in a wave of cubes, setting Bog further back in the wall, blocking his view of the Doctor.

“Bog,” she called, straining to catch his eye before he was out of sight, “Bog, you're going to be fine. I'm going to get you out, okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” Bog replied, watching the Doctor's ruffled head disappear, panic rising up in his chest. He had only a rudimentary idea of what Roland was planning, but considering it was Roland . . . it was going to be bad.

“I swear, I'll get you out. I swear. I promise. You'll be walking out of here with that necklace in your hand and you can go back to grouching around and fiddling with your guitar like a moody teenager.”

“That's rich,” Bog couldn't help but laugh a little, “coming from the oldest moody teenager in all of time and space. That's a promise, huh? Tell you what, you've got to come to one of my gigs after we get out of this, to make up for it. And not the street corner weekend stuff, one of my actual paying gigs, with an audience and everything. I'll show you who 'plays decently'.”

“It's a date.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Buttercup,” Roland sauntered toward her, “you and I know exactly how much your promises are worth.”

Roland snapped his fingers, the wall closing over in front of Bog, sealing him in a small rectangle of space. Just before the last crack of light was blocked out he caught a glimpse of Roland's face twisted into a look of anger, contorted and ugly.

“Not even the breath you waste on them.”

Then there was only darkness.

“Okay, so we got a little lost!”

“Dawn, we just spent a week in the 1960s!”

“We had a good time, didn't we?”

“Okay, yeah. Encounters with blatant racism aside, it was kind of awesome. I mean, we met the Beatles! And Ray Charles! But when you said that this botax manipulator--”

“Vortex manipulator.”

“--lost power and needed a little time to recharge you failed to mention that 'a little time' actually means 'three days, possibly a week'.”

“Sorry, the manipulator is synced to the TARDIS and bounced us back to the last time we'd visited. I've turned off the connection and we should be able to make half a dozen jumps now that it isn't burning up energy searching for the TARDIS's signal.”

“Good. Great. Next time remember to turn it on airplane mode before we take off.”

“Noted. We're back within the same hour we left in, I just need to trace Roland's TARDIS and set the new coordinates.”

Sunny was suffering from whatever the time travel equivalent of jet lag was. But at the same time he was still exhilarated from actually traveling in time. And from spending a whole week running around 1960s American with Dawn.

The power to time travel may have bugged out but the vortex manipulator still acted as a handy teleporter and they had spent the week hopping from event to event, falling asleep in the backs of buses after concerts, holding hands in front of guys who started to make trouble about a white woman hanging around with a black man, then running around a corner and teleporting away.

Also there had been a small problem with an invasion of lizard aliens trying to broadcast a signal on radio waves, encoded into a recording of I Heard it Through the Grapevine, meant to mentally enslave everyone who heard it to the will of the lizard queen. That had been solved fairly quickly once Dawn convinced the FBI that she worked for them and got their help to alter the broadcast.

Sunny felt like he was just being dragged along for the ride.

He didn't even mind.

He was having the time of his life.

It was hard to pull his thoughts back to the present and remember that Dawn's sister and Bog had only just been abducted and probably needed help immediately.

It was especially hard to remember anything when after Dawn finished calculating the coordinates she kissed him.

“Okay, I need you to take this phone and stand in an open area. It will act as a homing beacon so I can find my way back. I may or may not be bringing Roland's TARDIS with me so find a nice big space. If the phone rings, answer it and that will activate the signal and let me lock on. I don't want to broadcasting indefinitely in case somebody else picks up the signal and decides to drop by for a quick afternoon invasion. Are you okay?”

“Uh, you handed me a phone and then everything went blank.”

“It was the kiss, wasn't it?”

“Mm, might have been.”

“Because I am a hugger and a kisser and I forget about boundaries so I might have done that without thinking because you're an extraordinarily lovely person and very cute. Can I do it again?”

“What?”

“Kiss you.”

“Yes! I mean, yeah. If you want to--”

Dawn wanted to.

An interlude of uncertain length passed before either of them remembered what they were supposed to be doing.

“Yes, phone!” Dawn made sure he was holding it, “Open space, answer when I call! I'll see you soon.”

She hit a button on the vortex manipulator and vanished.

Sunny was just dazedly making his way out of the TARDIS and heading in the general direction of some empty lots when Dawn reappeared, her hair slightly singed.

She laughed nervously, “I may have dropped a one in my calculations. I've fixed it now. Okay, bye!”

She bent down and kissed him quickly on the lips before vanishing again.

Sunny lingered where he was for about half a minute, but started walking again when it became clear she was not popping back again.

“Let's see how things are coming along!”

There was light again and Bog hurt.

A new pain stabbed in his arm and he cracked open his gritty eyes to see Roland sticking him with a needle. Roland drew some blood and held up the syringe to examine the color.

“Hardly even starting,” Roland frowned, tossing the syringe over his shoulder. It shattered somewhere behind him, “You haven't even begun to cook yet, tree man.”

It was dark again.

Bog's skin crawled.

Tingled like he'd stuck his finger in a light socket.

He could feel his skin pulling tight and starting to crack.

Light.

Another needle stabbed into his arm.

“Really, you have to stop dawdling, there's really only so much small talk you can make when the other person isn't talking to you. Isn't that right, sweetheart?”

Faintly, Bog heard the Doctor telling Roland to “drop dead” along with some other things he couldn't make out, but sounded colorful.

“What a way for a lady to talk!” Roland huffed, indignant, before closing Bog back into the dark.

Bog felt his bones twisting.

That what he thought it was, at least.

Anyway, it hurt.

There was a blur of light, needles stabbed in his arm, then dark again.

Bog counted it a mercy when he felt consciousness slip away

#strange magic #spread the lofe #butterfly bog #potionless #strange magic doctor who au #doctor who au #my writing #fanfic

[vrheadsets]

VR vs. Hitting The Bricks

Oh boy. Okay… erm… Where do we start with this?

You know exactly what I’m going to talk about don’t you? I don’t want to in the slightest of course, as I’m as fed up of writing about such catastrophes on VR vs. as you are of hearing about them; but I am kind of obliged to. Especially as I wrote one of the stories connected to what happened last week on the site and was the one up all night updating the first.  But before we go any further, let’s just take a moment to look back to January and my 2018 predictions article shall we?

“…in a refreshing change of pace, everything seems to be going quite smoothly for [Oculus] as it moves towards the release of its two new head mounted displays (HMDs) – the Oculus Go and the Santa Cruz.”

So, if you’ve been hiding in a cave for the last few days you might’ve missed what happened over at Oculus. Our old friend the security certificate came along – or rather, it went away. One attached to the Oculus Rift expired. It was no more. It ceased to be. As a result of which every Oculus Rift around the world – well all of them that were up to date in any case – stopped working.

Which was somewhat more unfortunate was that the process that Oculus used to make updates was connected to the expired certificate. Meaning that, quelle surprise, they couldn’t make any fixes to resolve the issue. The Oculus Rift CV1 was officially bricked.

In terms of things that could cause yet more bad publicity for the company, a world-wide failure of the product is pretty high-up the list. Oculus engineers woke up to a hornet nest of angry consumers and press discussion on the matter. Naturally, they got right on with trying to sort it all out, but the cert-Rift-icate didn’t exactly make things easy. Mainly because it was effectively doing its job. They did their best in try and keep people up to date, getting a mix of responses ranging from helpful suggestion as to by-passes and processes they could try and “I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU!” which was the ending of one user’s response.

I get the feeling he wasn’t that happy.

How could this happen in this day and age? Was the general tone of the conversation.  How could Oculus allow such a thing to happen? But of course, tech companies are not immune from minor oversights causing massive issues and when it comes to Oculus security certificates they’ve got some interesting company.  Let’s stick with those for now and look at two cases where certificates led to bricking, the first being an entirely different product but one that had the same sort of issue.

Let’s get back in our Ready Player One-endorsed DeLorean time machine and wind the clock back a couple of years. Almost twenty-three months to be precise. The idea of smart houses are very much at the fore and smart devices are becoming pretty commonplace. Step forward Wink. If you’ve never heard of Wink, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t, they provide smart home controllers. Allowing you to have things like your house lights, or your garage door, or the thermostat on your heating synced to a control app on your phone. Well, back in 2015 its hubs also found themselves no longer operational due to an expired certificate. If you were relying on the hub to close the garage door behind you when you left for work in the morning, then… oh dear.  As with Oculus they got right on to solve the issue but it still took a while.

Though not as long as it took Hypercom to fix a number of its payment terminals when its ten year security certificate expired in 2014.

Still the other side of that coin is where a tech company deliberately bricks their technology. Logitech revealed last year that owing to the expiry of the security license for their Harmony Link universal hub, the company made the decision that as of this coming Friday, March 16th 2018 the hub would not only look like a paperweight it’d act like one too. They’d be issuing a firmware update to render all the Harmony Links useless to prevent the expiration having effects “which may open the product up to potential security vulnerabilities”. After a subsequent, and frankly understandable backlash from customers about it, Logitech agreed to offer them free upgrades to a newer version of the tech.

When it comes to the losing track of time. Oculus obviously forgot to update their certificate, but there was a time that products of its rivals both lost an entire day too, quite literally, and suffered the consequences.

Let’s start by heading back even further with our borrowed tech time machine to the end of 2008 and the Microsoft Zune. Remember that?

No? Kind of?

It may be long gone now, but at the end of 2008 suddenly Zune owners, specifically those who owned the 2006 30GB version, were finding that their lovely music player no longer worked with no explanation. Actually, the clue is in the date this was happening: December 31st 2008. You see, 2008… was a leap year. The code for the internal clock chip made note of there being 365 days in a year. Having already had 365 as of December 30th, thanks to February 29th it was suddenly presented with a non-existent (as far as it was concerned) 366th day in 2008. Confused at the very concept of time being altered, the poor little gizmo decided it’d had enough, reset itself and then promptly refused to turn back on again.

The solution was a bit awkward, and only compounded the red faces at Microsoft. Not that this was even Microsoft’s fault but more the person who had licensed or created the code at Freescale.  The fix? In summary: ‘Well, if you let the battery run out completely then recharge it it’ll fix itself’. Amazing stuff. Who did the QA on this? You wouldn’t catch Sony’s products doing something so silly right? Right?

Wrong.

In 2010 the PlayStation 3 decided whilst the Zune didn’t want to recognise a leap year its internal clock, or rather that of the big old original model PS3’s, liked the idea so much it wanted another one. Specifically, that year – 2010. The bug reset the console date to January 1st 2000 (because of course it did) and prevented the PS3 from connecting to PlayStation Network that day. Whoops.

In summary: Yes, it’s embarrassing for Oculus – I mean, it just HAD to be Oculus out of everyone didn’t it? It just HAD to be. But when it comes to things like that, little oversights and things that end up blocking use for the day they’re not alone, and in some cases some pretty impressive company.

And also the Zune.

from VRFocus http://ift.tt/2tEJu0k

#VRFocus #vr #virtual reality #canada

[brianlichtig]

A deeper look at Samsung's Galaxy S8

The Samsung Galaxy S8 has redefined smartphones -- it's all curves, no bezels and truly one of a kind. Samsung needed to create a device that would make everyone forget about the Note 7's exploding batteries and it accomplished that. The S8 and S8+ are two of the best smartphones on the market. They aren't perfect, but Samsung came close.

What might be most exciting about the latest Galaxy flagships is that Samsung has made smartphones fun again. Smartphone design has grown tired, with every device featuring some version of a flat, bezeled display. Samsung was the first to get to the table with a innovative bezel-free design, and you can expect smartphone design to follow.

The Galaxy S8 is an Android device that finally values form just as much as function, something Apple figured out over a decade ago. The Galaxy S8 is a sleek, high-end device, and it's predicted that it will gain more traction in the enterprise than past Android devices.

Galaxy S8 design

The Galaxy S8 is beautifully designed with smooth, curved edges that complement the tapered OLED Infinity Display. It feels just as premium as it looks -- no plastic in sight with a body coated in Gorilla Glass 5. The design looks like it could be fragile, but I've dropped my own S8 more than once, with a slim case, and it's held up. I remember thinking the same about the iPhone 4 -- every new smartphone feels fragile until you're used it for a few months.

The display took over the physical home button, and instead Samsung included a pressure sensitive button beneath the display. I like the haptic feedback. It's not like the Apple iPhone 7, where it feels like you're pushing the actual display in. But it's better than your standard vibrating feedback, you feel like you can give it a decent push even when the display is asleep.

Of course, one of the biggest complaints about the home button is that Samsung didn't integrate a fingerprint scanner into the display. Instead, the fingerprint button is on the back of the device, next to the camera. This results in smudging the camera as you awkwardly reach around to find the scanner.

I went in with low expectations of the fingerprint reader, and I've mostly relied on other authentication methods. But after more than a week of use, I've gotten used to it. I always keep a case on my devices, and the cut out for the camera makes it easier to blindly feel for the reader. Overall, I don't think it's a deal breaker, but it will ultimately be your personal preference. Sometimes a new phone also means building new muscle memory, and after two weeks with the S8, I have no problem reaching my pointer finger up to the fingerprint scanner.

Just like past devices, the Galaxy S8 is IP68 water and dust resistant, with wireless charging and a 3.5mm headphone jack -- Samsung also included a USB Type-C charging port. The rear-facing dual-pixel camera is 12-megapixels -- same as the Galaxy Note 7 -- but the front-facing camera has been upgraded to a wide-angled lens with 8-megapixels.

Although the rear-facing camera is the same as last year's, Samsung has boosted software performance for higher-quality images. The camera works fantastic in low lighting and, as with all Samsung cameras, images feature a slight boost in contrast. Whether you like the boost in contrast and saturation is personal preference, but I found images sharp, clear and vibrant.

[ Related story: Enterprise showdown: 5 ways the iPhone beats the Galaxy S8 ]

Galaxy S8 Bixby button

This is technically part of the design, but the Bixby button deserves a section all to itself because it's also the worst part of the design. It was a bold move for Samsung to include a dedicated button for its new voice assistant, Bixby. It's especially bold when you consider Bixby is brand new, no one has ever used it before and most Android users are loyal to Google's voice assistant.

Initially, Samsung said the button would be remappable to another assistant or app -- which I was happy about. I use Siri and Google Assistant to do one thing -- set timers. A dedicated Bixby button felt excessive when I'm only going to use it to avoid forgetting laundry in my apartment's shared washers.

Samsung decided to remove the ability to remap the Bixby button. Not only is that change disheartening, the physical location of the Bixby button is frustrating -- it's exactly where you'd expect to find your volume down button. The app is useless in its current state. I couldn't even ask it to set a timer if I wanted to.

There's one silver lining to the Bixby button, depending on how much of an optimist you are. After my husband received his pre-order, he discovered at least one use for the Bixby button. If you delete every card and app from the Bixby screen, it becomes so glaringly bright white that you can use it as a flashlight.

If Samsung wants users to be loyal to Bixby, it needs to make the app so good that no one will want to remap the button. Customers don't spend over $700 on a smartphone just to be pushed into using any feature. This one feels like a clumsy nod to Apple's strategy, with Samsung slowly trying to entrench people into its ecosystem -- the exact thing most Android users are trying to avoid.

[ Related story: Samsung targets the enterprise with Galaxy S8 and S8+ ]

Galaxy S8 display

The 5.8-inch OLED display on the Galaxy S8 speaks for itself -- it's gorgeous, with a stunning resolution of 570 ppi. Not only is it unique, but the rounded edges of the Infinity Display create an immersive experience. Whether you're reading an article, watching a YouTube video or playing a mobile game, the edges of the device just melt away.

The curved edges are also practical.Tthe S8 looks large, but it doesn't feel that way when you hold it. I've found the iPhone 7 Plus, Pixel XL and past Galaxy flagship devices too wide for my hand, but the Galaxy S8 is the perfect size, even with a case.

The 18.5:9 aspect ratio is a little odd at first, but apps that aren't already optimized for the new ratio can be "cropped to fit," including YouTube videos. And with the growing trend of bezel-free displays, it's easy to imagine the S8's odd ratio will soon be common-place.

Another advantage to the tall display -- especially for business users -- is how effective it is for multitasking. You can float apps on the display in bubbles, quickly opening them to use a fully-functional, but scaled down version of one app without leaving another. On smaller displays, multi-window features always felt gimmicky rather than practical.

But the S8's tall display makes Android's multi-window function useful. I never had to switch out of another app to answer a text or browse my playlists like I did on my iPhone.

Galaxy S8 performance

If you purchase the device in the U.S., you'll get a Galaxy S8 with a Samsung Exynos processor. Outside of the U.S., the device features Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 processor. It comes equipped with 4GB of RAM and I found the combination of Samsung's processor and RAM perfect for regular use. The device ships with 64GB of on-board storage, and it's expandable up to 256GB with a MicroSD card.

It's tempting to compare performance of the Galaxy S8 to the iPhone 7 Plus -- and for good reason. They're two of the best devices you can currently buy. I think the iPhone will always come out on top when pushed to the limit -- for example, uploading or downloading large files.

Apple has fine-tuned its lightweight mobile OS to run seamlessly on its own hardware using a proprietary processing chip. Alternatively, Android has a lot more manufacturers and devices to please. That is, it needs to work across multiple devices, run widgets, allow for multi-window mode, support launchers and ROMs and offer users high-level customization.

When you consider all the things an Android device asks of its OS compared to an iPhone with iOS, the performance of the S8 is extra impressive. Coming from an iPhone 6, I expected a choppier performance on Android. But with the S8, it's been a seamless experience. I haven't experienced any lag or poor animations; performance has been smooth and snappy.

Galaxy S8 battery life

It's no surprise that Samsung played it safe with the S8's battery. The S8's 3,000mAh battery is smaller than the battery in the Galaxy S7 edge, but Samsung claims it has a longer lifespan, losing only 5 percent of its capacity over two years. I can't test this claim without a time machine, but if it holds true, that's exciting news.

In daily, average use, the battery is enough -- it's not great, but it's enough. Of course, it's going to depend on your settings, apps and general habits, and I find that in my first month with a new device I use it more often than I normally would.

Over the past two weeks, I've pushed the S8 to the limits. I've loaded the device up with well-known battery drainers like Snapchat and Facebook Messenger. I kept Bluetooth on all day and used the S8 as my main streaming device for YouTube and Spotify. With heavy use, the battery got me through an entire workday, with a recharge in the evening. On days with lighter, more typical use -- days when I went out and reached for my smartphone less -- the battery got me through the day, well into the evening.

The device charges insanely fast with Samsung's fast charge technology. It will display the amount of time you have until a full charge, which is useful if you're trying to get out the door. The fast charging made up for the average battery performance since I could quickly top the battery off.

I expect that once the honeymoon phase wears off I'll have no problem stretching the battery life further. But if battery life is truly important to you, you might want to look at the S8+, which has a 3,500mAh battery.

Bloatware

While Bixby's execution was a misstep, one area where Samsung finally got it right is with its proprietary preloaded software. My Verizon pre-order arrived with a handful of annoying Verizon apps and games pre-loaded onto the device, but I uninstalled most of them. My T-Mobile review unit had far less bloatware than the Verizon device, and again, most of it was from T-Mobile, not Samsung, and I could uninstall the apps.

Samsung no longer tries to force you into using its native apps. They come tucked away in a tidy folder on the app tray and most of them can be uninstalled -- not just hidden. With other apps, like reminders and the weather app, Samsung doesn't even include a home screen or app tray icon unless you enable the feature in the app's settings.

Galaxy S8 enterprise potential

If any Android device has the potential to edge out the iPhone in the enterprise, it's the Galaxy S8. The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus have more to offer businesses, but the Galaxy S8 presents a legitimate alternative for IT.

Enterprise adoption will also be pushed by BYOD -- the growing trend of employees using a personal device for work. The Galaxy S8 is primed for BYOD; Samsung Knox not only helps with EMM, it makes it easy for users to keep personal and business data separate. And with the Samsung Dex -- a docking station that lets you use the S8 or S8+ as a full desktop -- businesses will be more motivated than ever to embrace the S8.

Samsung has built a smartphone that sets a new standard for other manufacturers, it's a hit with consumers and its appeal could sway the enterprise. With more display real-estate, a high-end design and impressive performance, employees can truly be productive on this device. And with the potential of docking stations like DeX -- full review coming later -- Samsung might be on the cutting edge of consumer technology and business mobility.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

from CIO http://www.cio.com/article/3193466/smartphones/a-deeper-look-at-samsungs-galaxy-s8.html#tk.rss_all Baltimore IT Support

#Baltimore IT Support

[lesbianrewrites]

The Martian Chapter 7

*disclaimer* This is a project done for fun, and none of these characters/works belong to me. I do not claim to own any of the material on this page.

This is a Lesbian edit of The Martian by Andy Weir.

Chapters will be posted every day at 2pm EST.

Google doc version can be found here. The chapter can also be found under the cut. Enjoy!

CHAPTER VII

LOG ENTRY: SOL 63

I finished making water some time ago. I’m no longer in danger of blowing myself up. The potatoes are growing nicely. Nothing has conspired to kill me in weeks. And ‘70’s TV keeps me disturbingly more entertained than it should. Things are stable here on Mars.

It’s time to start thinking long term.

Even if I find a way to tell NASA I’m alive, there’s no guarantee they’ll be able to save me. I need to be proactive. I need to figure out how to get to Ares 4.

Won’t be easy.

Ares 4 will be landing at the Schiaparelli Crater, 3,200km away. In fact, their MAV is already there. I know because I watched Martinez land it.

It takes 18 months for the MAV to make its fuel, so it’s the first thing NASA sends along. Sending it 48 months early gives it plenty of extra time in case fuel reactions go slower than expected. But much more importantly, it means a precision soft-landing can be done remotely by a pilot in orbit. Direct remote operation from Houston isn’t an option; they’re anywhere from 4 to 20 light-minutes away.

Ares 4’s MAV spent 11 months getting to Mars. Using less fuel and taking a longer route, it got there around the same time as us. As expected, Martinez landed it beautifully. It was one of the last things we did before piling in to our MDV and heading to the surface. Ahh, the good old days, when I had a crew with me.

I’m lucky. 3,200km isn’t that bad. It could have been up to 10,000km away. And because I’m on the flattest part of Mars, the first 650km is nice, smooth terrain (Yay Acidalia Planitia!) but the rest of it is nasty, rugged, crater-pocked hell.

Obviously, I’ll have to use a rover. And guess what? They weren’t designed for massive overland journeys.

This is going to be a research effort, with a bunch of experimentation. I’ll have to become my own little NASA, figuring out how to explore far from the Hab. The good news is I have lots of time to figure it out. Almost 4 years.

Some stuff is obvious. I’ll need to use a rover. It’ll take a long time, so I’ll need to bring supplies. I’ll need to recharge en-route, and rovers don’t have solar cells. I’ll need to steal some from the Hab’s solar farm. During the trip I’ll need to breathe, eat, and drink.

Lucky for me, the tech specs for everything are right here in the computer.

I’ll need to trick out a rover. Basically it’ll have to be a mobile Hab. I’ll pick Rover 2 as my target. We have a certain bond, after I spent two days in it during the “Great Hydrogen Scare of Sol 37.”

There’s too much shit to think about all at once. So for now, I’ll just think about power.

Our mission had a 10km operational radius. Knowing we wouldn’t take straight-line paths, NASA designed the rovers to go 35km on a full charge. That presumes flat, reasonable terrain. Each rover has a 9000Wh battery.

Step one is to loot Rover 1’s battery and install it in Rover 2. Ta-daa! I just doubled my full-charge range.

There’s just one complication. Heating.

Part of the battery power goes to heating the rover. Mars is really cold. Normally, we were expected to do all EVAs in under 5 hours. But I’ll be living in it 24½ hours a day. According to the specs, the heating equipment soaks up 400W. Keeping it on would eat up 9800Wh per day. Over half my power supply, every day!

But I do have a free source of heat: Me. A couple million years of evolution gave me “warm blooded” technology. I can wear layers. The rover has good insulation, too. It’ll have to be enough; I need every bit of power.

And because I need to bundle up anyway, I can deactivate the heater outright and use all the power for motion (minus a negligible amount for computer, life support, etc.)

According to my boring math, moving the rover eats 200Wh of juice to go 1km, so using the full 18,000Wh gets me 90km of travel. Now we’re talkin’.

I’ll never actually get 90km on a single charge. I’ll have hills to deal with, and rough terrain, sand, etc. But it’s a good ballpark. It tells me that it would take at least 35 days of travel to get to Ares 4. It’ll probably be more like 50. But that’s plausible, at least.

At the rover’s blazing 25kph top speed, it’ll take me 3½ hours before I run the battery down. I’d like to charge the battery up during the rest of the day. I can drive in twilight, and save the sunny part of the day for charging. This time of year I get about 13 hours of light. How many solar cells will I have to pilfer from the Hab’s farm?

Thanks to the fine taxpayers of America, I have over 100 of square meters of the most expensive solar paneling ever made. It has an astounding 10.2% efficiency, which is good because Mars doesn’t get as much sunlight as Earth. Only 500 to 700 watts per square meter (Compared to the 1400 those spoiled Earthlings get).

Long story short: I need to bring 28 square meters of solar cell. That’s 14 panels.

I can put two stacks of 7 on the roof. They’ll stick out over the edges, but as long as they’re secure I’m happy. Every day, after driving, I’ll spread them out then… wait all day. Man it’ll be dull.

Well it’s a start. Tomorrow’s mission: transfer Rover 1’s battery to Rover 2.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 64

Sometimes things are easy, and sometimes they’re not. Getting the battery out of Rover 1 was easy. I removed two clamps on the undercarriage and it dropped right out. The cabling is easy to detach, too. It’s just a couple of complicated plugs.

Attaching it to Rover 2, however, is another story. There’s nowhere to put it!

The things is huge. I was barely able to drag it. And that’s in Mars gravity.

It’s just too big. There’s no room in the undercarriage for a second one. There’s no room on the roof, either. That’s where the solar cells will go. There’s no room inside the cabin, and it wouldn’t fit through the airlock anyway.

But fear not, I found a solution.

For emergencies completely unrelated to this one, NASA provided 6 square meters of Hab canvas, and some really impressive resin. The same kind of resin, in fact, that saved my life on Sol 6 (the patch kit I used on the hole in my suit).

In the event of a Hab breach, everyone would run to the airlocks. Procedure was to let it pop rather than die trying to prevent it. Then, we’d suit up and assess the damage. Once we found the breach, we’d seal it with the spare Hab canvas and resin. Then re-inflate and we’re good as new.

The 6 square meters of spare canvas was a convenient 1x6 meters. I cut 10cm wide strips, then used them to make a sort of harness.

I used the resin and straps to make two 10m circumference loops. Then I put a big patch of canvas on each end. I now had poor-man’s saddlebags for my rover.

This is getting more and more “Wagon Train” every day.

The resin sets almost instantly. But it gets stronger if you wait an hour. So I did. Then I suited up and headed out to the rover.

I dragged the battery to the side of the rover and looped one end of the harness around it. Then I threw the other end over the roof. On the other side, I filled it with rocks. When the two weights were roughly equal, I was able to pull the rocks down and bring the battery up.

Yay!

Unplugging Rover 2’s battery, I plugged in Rover 1’s. Then I went through the airlock to the rover and checked all systems. Everything was a-ok.

I drove the rover around a bit to make sure the harness was secure. I found a few large-ish rocks to drive over, just to shake things up. The harness held. Hell yeah.

For a short time, I wondered how to splice the second battery’s leads into the main power supply. My conclusion was “Fuck it.”

There’s no need to have a continuous power supply. When Battery 1 runs out, I can get out, unplug Battery 1 and plug in Battery 2. Why not? It’s a 10 minute EVA, once per day. I’d have to swap batteries again when charging, but again: so what?

I spent the rest of the day sweeping off the solar cell farm. Soon, I shall be looting it.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 65

The solar cells were a lot easier to manage than the battery.

They’re thin, light, and just laying around on the ground. And I had one additional bonus: I was the one who set them up In the first place.

Well, ok. It wasn’t just me. Vogel and I worked together on it. And boy did we drill on it. We spent almost an entire week drilling on the solar array alone. Then we drilled more whenever they figured we had spare time. It had been deemed mission critical. If we fucked it up and broke the cells or rendered them useless, the Hab wouldn’t be able to make power, and the mission would end.

You might wonder what the rest of the crew were doing. They were setting up the Hab. Remember, everything in my glorious kingdom came here in boxes. We had to set it up on Sols 1 and 2.

Each solar cell is on a lightweight lattice that holds it at a 14 degree angle. I’ll admit I don’t know why it’s a 14 degree angle. Something about maximizing solar energy. Anyway, removing the cells was simple. Then it was time to stack them on the rover.

I considered removing the rock sample container. It’s nothing more than a large canvas bag attached to the roof. Way too small to hold the solar cells. But after some thought I left it there, figuring It’ll provide a good cushion.

The cells stacked well (they were made to, for transport to Mars), and the two stacks sat nicely on the roof. They hung over the left and right edges, but I won’t be going through any tunnels so I don’t care.

With some more abuse of the emergency Hab material, I made straps and tied the cells down. The rover has external handles near the front and back. They’re there to help us load rocks on the roof. They made perfect anchor points for the straps.

I stood back and admired my work. Hey, I earned it. It wasn’t even noon and I was done.

I came back to the Hab, had some lunch, and worked on my crops for the rest of the sol. It's been 39 sols since I planted the potatoes (which is about 40 Earth days), and it was time to reap and re-sow.

They grew even better than I had expected. Mars has no insects, parasites, or blights to deal with, and the Hab maintains perfect growing temperature and moisture at all times.

They were small compared to the taters you'd usually eat, but that's fine. All I wanted was enough to support growing new plants.

I dug them up, being careful to leave their plants alive. Then I cut them up in to small pieces with one eye each, and re-seeded in to new dirt. If they keep growing this well, I'll be able to last a good long time here.

After all that physical labor, I deserved a break. I rifled through Johanssen’s computer today, and found an endless supply of digital books. Looks like she’s a big fan of Agatha Christie. Beatles, Christie… I guess Johanssen’s an anglophile or something.

I remember liking Hercule Poirot TV specials back when I was a kid. I’ll start with The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Looks like that’s the first one.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 66

The time has come (ominous musical crescendo) for some missions!

NASA gets to name their missions after gods and stuff, so why can’t I? Henceforth, rover experimental missions will be “Sirius” missions. Get it? Dogs? Well if you don’t, fuck you.

Sirius 1 will be tomorrow.

The mission: Starting with fully charged batteries, and having the solar cells on the roof, drive until I run out of power, and see how far I get.

I won’t be an idiot. I’m not driving directly away from the Hab. I’ll drive a half-kilometer stretch, back and forth. I’ll be within a short walk of home all times.

Tonight, I’ll charge up both batteries so I can be ready for a little test drive tomorrow. I estimate 3½ hours of driving, so I’ll need to bring fresh CO2 filters. And, with the heater off, I’ll wear three layers of clothes.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 67

Sirius 1 is complete!

More accurately, Sirius 1 was aborted after 1 hour. I guess you could call it a “failure” but I prefer the term “learning experience.”

Things started out fine. I drove to a nice flat spot a kilometer from the Hab, then started going back and forth over a 500m stretch.

I quickly realized this would be a crappy test. After a few laps, I had compressed the soil enough to have a solid path. Nice, hard ground, which makes for abnormally high energy efficiency. This is nothing like it would be on a long trip.

So I shook it up a bit. I drove around randomly, making sure to stay within a kilometer of the Hab. A much more realistic test.

After an hour, things started to get cold. And I mean really cold.

The rover’s always cold when you first get in it. When you haven’t disabled the heater it warms up right away. I expected it to be cold, but Jesus Christ!

I was fine for a while. My own body heat plus three layers of clothing kept me warm and the rover’s insulation is top-notch. The heat that escaped my body just warmed up the interior. But there’s no such thing as perfect insulation, and eventually the heat left to the great outdoors while I got colder and colder.

Within an hour, I was chattering and numb. Enough was enough. There’s no way I could do a long trip like this. The test was over.

Turning the heater on, I drove straight back to the Hab.

Once I got home, I sulked for a while. All my brilliant plans foiled by thermodynamics. Damn you, Entropy!

I’m in a bind. The damn heater will eat half my battery power every day. I could turn it down, I guess. Be a little cold but not freezing to death. Even then I’d still lose at least a quarter.

This will require some thought. I have to ask myself… what would Hercule Poirot do? I’ll have to put my “little gray cells” to work on the problem.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 68

Well shit.

I came up with a solution, but… remember when I burned rocket fuel in the Hab? This’ll be more dangerous.

I’m going to use the RTG.

The RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator) is a big box of Plutonium. But not the kind used in nuclear bombs. No, no. This Plutonium is way more dangerous!

Plutonium-238 is an incredibly unstable isotope. It’s so radioactive that it will get red hot all by itself. As you can imagine, a material that can literally fry an egg with radiation is kind of dangerous.

The RTG houses the Plutonium, catches the radiation in the form of heat, and turns it in to electricity. It’s not a reactor. The radiation can’t be increased or decreased. It’s a purely natural process happening at the atomic level.

As long ago as the 1960’s, NASA’s been using RTGs to power unmanned probes. It has lots of advantages over solar power. It’s not affected by storms; it works day or night; it’s entirely internal, so you don’t need delicate solar cells all over your probe.

But they never used large RTGs on manned missions until The Ares Program.

Why not? It should be pretty fucking obvious why not! They didn’t want to put astronauts next to a glowing hot ball of radioactive death!

I'm exaggerating a little. The Plutonium is inside a bunch of pellets, each one sealed and insulated to prevent radiation leakage even if the outer container is breached. So for the Ares Program, they took the risk.

An Ares mission is all about the MAV. It’s the single most important component. It’s one of the few systems that can’t be replaced or worked around. It’s the only component that causes a complete mission scrub if it’s not working.

Solar cells are great in the short-term, and they’re good for the long-term if you have humans around to clean them. But the MAV sits alone for years quietly making fuel, then just kind of hangs out until its crew arrives. Even doing nothing, it needs power, so NASA can monitor it remotely and run self checks.

The prospect of scrubbing a mission because a solar cell got dirty was unacceptable. They needed a more reliable source of power. So the MAV comes equipped with an RTG. It has 2.6kg of Plutonium-238, which makes almost 1500 Watts of heat. It can turn that in to 100 Watts of electricity. The MAV runs on that until the crew arrive.

100 Watts isn’t enough to keep the heater going, but I don’t care about the electrical output. I want the heat. A 1500 Watt heater is so warm I’ll have to tear insulation out of the rover to keep it from getting too hot.

As soon as the rovers were un-stowed and activated, Commander Lewis had the joy of  disposing of the RTG. She detached it from the MAV, drove 4 km away, and buried it. However safe it may be, it's still a radioactive core and NASA didn't want it too close to their astronauts.

The mission parameters don’t give a specific location to dump the RTG. Just “At least 4km away”. So I’ll have to find it.

I have two things working for me. First, I was assembling solar panels with Vogel when Commander Lewis drove off, and I saw she headed due south. Also, she planted a 3 meter pole with a bright green flag on it where she buried it. Green shows up extremely well against the Martian terrain. It’s made to ward us off, in case we get lost on a rover EVA later on.

So my plan is: Head south 4km, then search around till I see the green flag.

Having rendered Rover 1 unusable, I’ll have to use my Mutant Rover for the trip. I can make a useful test mission of it. I’ll see how well the battery harness holds up to a real journey, and how well the solar cells do strapped to the roof.

I’ll call it Sirius 2.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 69

Found the RTG.

It wasn’t hard to find. I drove 4km south and saw the flag right away.

Commander Lewis had buried it atop a small hill. She probably wanted to make sure everyone could see the flag, and it worked great! Except instead of avoiding it, I bee-lined to it and dug it up. Not exactly what she was going for.

It’s a large cylinder with heat-sinks all around it. I could feel the warmth it gave off even through my suit’s gloves. That’s really disconcerting. Especially when you know the root cause of the heat is radiation.

No point in putting it on the roof; my plan was to have it in the cabin anyway. So I brought it in with me, turned off the heater, then drove back to the Hab.

In the 10 minutes it took to get home, even with the heater off, the interior of the rover became an uncomfortably hot 37C. The RTG would definitely be able to keep me warm.

The trip also proved my rigging worked. The solar cells and extra battery stayed beautifully in place while traversing 8km of random terrain.

I declare Sirius 2 to be a successful mission!

I spent the rest of the day vandalizing the interior of the rover. The pressure compartment is made of metal. Just inside that is insulation, which is covered by hard plastic. I used a sophisticated method to remove sections of plastic (hammer), then carefully removed the solid foam insulation (hammer again).

After tearing out some insulation, I suited up and took the RTG outside. Soon, the rover cooled down again, and I brought it back in. I watched as the temperature rose slowly. Nowhere near as fast as it had on my trip back from the burial site.

I cautiously removed more insulation (hammer) and checked again. After a few more cycles of this, I had enough insulation torn out that the RTG could barely keep up with it. In fact, it was a losing battle. Over time, heat would slowly leech out. That’s fine. I can turn on the heater for short bursts when necessary.

I brought the insulation pieces with me back in to the Hab. Using advanced construction techniques (duct tape) I reassembled some of it into a square. I figure if things got really cold, I could tape that to a bare patch in the rover, and the RTG would be winning the “heat fight.”

Tomorrow, Sirius 3 (Which is just Sirius 1 again, but without freezing)

LOG ENTRY: SOL 70

Today, I write to you from the rover. I’m halfway-through Sirius 3 and things are going well.

I set out at first light and drove laps around the Hab, trying to stay on untouched ground. The first battery lasted just under two hours. After a quick EVA to switch the cables, I got back to driving. When all was said and done, I had driven 81km in 3 hours and 27 minutes.

That’s very good! Mind you, the land around the Hab is really flat, as is all of Acidalia Planitia. I have no idea what my efficiency would be on the nastier land en route to Ares 4.

I could have gone further, but I need life support while recharging. The CO2 gets absorbed through a chemical process, but if the fan that pushes it isn’t working, I’ll choke. The oxygen pump is also kind of important.

I set up the solar cells. It was hard work; last time I had Vogel’s help. They aren’t heavy, but they’re awkward. After setting up half of them, I figured out I could drag them rather than carry them and that sped things up.

Now I’m just waiting for the batteries to recharge. I’m bored, so I’m updating the log. I have all the Poirot books in my computer. That’ll help. It’s going to take 12 hours to recharge, after all.

What’s that, you say? 12 hours is wrong? I said 13 hours earlier? Well, my friend, let me set you straight.

The RTG is a generator. It’s a paltry amount of power, compared to what the rover consumes, but it’s not nothing. It’s 100 Watts. It’ll cut an hour off my total recharge time. Why not use it?

I wonder what NASA would think about me fucking with the RTG like this. They’d probably hide under their desks and cuddle their slide-rules for comfort.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 71 

c As predicted, it took 12 hours to charge the batteries to full. I came straight home.

Time to make plans for Sirius 4. And I think it’ll be a multi-day field trip.

Looks like power and battery recharging is solved. Food’s not a problem; there’s plenty of space to store things. Water’s even easier than food. I need 2L per day to be comfortable.

In the long term, I’ll need to bring the Oxygenator. But it’s big and I don’t want to screw with it right now. So I’ll rely on O2 and CO2 filters for Sirius 4.

CO2 isn’t a problem. I started this grand adventure with 1500 hours of CO2 filters, plus another 720 for emergency use. All systems use standard filters (Apollo 13 taught us important lessons). Since then, I’ve used 131 hours of filter on various EVAs. I have 2089 left. 87 days worth. Plenty.

The rover was designed to support 3 people for 2 days, plus some reserve for safety. So its O2 tanks can hold enough to last me 7 days. Not enough.

Mars has 1/90th Earth’s atmospheric pressure. The inside of the rover has 1 atmosphere. So the oxygen tanks are on the inside (less pressure differential to deal with). Why does that matter? It means I can bring along other oxygen tanks, and equalize them with the rover’s tanks without having to do an EVA.

So today, I detached one of the Hab’s two 25L oxygen tanks and brought it in to the rover. According to NASA, a human needs 588L of oxygen per day to live. Compressed liquid O2 is about 1000 times as dense as gaseous O2 in a comfortable atmosphere. Long story short: with the Hab tank, I have enough O2 to last 42 days. That’ll be plenty.

Sirius 4 will be a 20 day trip.

That may seem a bit long, but I have a specific goal in mind. Besides, my trip to Ares 4 will be at least 40 days. This is a good scale model.

While I’m away, the Hab can take care of itself, but the potatoes are an issue. I’ll  saturate the ground with most of the water I have. Then, I’ll deactivate the Atmospheric Regulator, so it doesn’t pull water out of the air. It’ll be humid as hell, and water will condense on every surface. That’ll keep the potatoes well watered while I’m away.

A bigger problem is CO2. The potatoes need to breathe. I know what you’re thinking. “Mark, old chap! YOU produce carbon dioxide! It’s all part of the majestic circle of nature!”

The problem is: Where will I put it? Sure, I exhale CO2 with every breath, but I don’t have any way to store it. I could turn off the Oxygenator and Atmospheric Regulator and just fill the Hab with my breath over time. But CO2 is deadly to me. I need to release a bunch at once and run away.

Remember the MAV fuel plant? It collects CO2 from the Martian atmosphere. My small crops aren’t nearly as needy as me, so a 10L tank of compressed liquid CO2, vented in to the Hab, will be enough CO2 to do the trick. That’ll take less than a day to create.

So that’s everything. Once I vent the CO2 in to the Hab, I’ll turn off the Atmospheric Regulator and Oxygenator, dump a ton of water on the crops, and head out.

Sirius 4. A huge step forward in my rover research. And I can start tomorrow.

#the martian #the martian andy weir #lesbian rewrites #lesbiansafe #lgbt

[arplis]

Arplis - News: 20 incredible products that are trending on Amazon right now

— Our editors review and recommend products to help you buy the stuff you need. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY’s newsroom and any business incentives. When I need a few things for my apartment, I head to Amazon knowing that even if I forget what I need, I’ll find something interesting worth checking out. But when I’m interested in discovering new products, or just seeing what’s new on the site, I usually head to Amazon’s Movers and Shakers page, which highlights all the largest gainers in sales rank over the last 24 hours. Since the page covers every product category on Amazon—from books to children’s toys to pet supplies and more—it gives you a real sense of what’s actually trending across the site so you can make more informed purchasing decisions. The one catch? Because the page is completely trend-based, there’s no way to tell whether these products are worth buying, or whether they’re, well, just useless knick knacks. Since we spend a lot of time here at Reviewed testing and analyzing products, we decided to take a closer look at the Movers and Shakers page. While the page updates hourly and some of these items might not be trending at this very second, these are the 20 best items we've seen on it over the last week or so that absolutely live up to the hype. 1. These Kindle e-readers that make it easy to read anywhere Credit: Reviewed / Michael Roorda These are our favorite Kindles for unlimited reading pleasure. Maybe you need to replace your old e-reader or you’ve just been procrastinating switching from the familiarity of hard copy to the more efficient digital medium (it’s okay—you’re not alone!). Our experts named these two Kindles as the best to own thanks to their comfortable feel, storage capacity, and Bluetooth compatibility, among other things. It’s a no-brainer that so many people continue to buy so many dang Kindles. Get the Kindle - 6" Glare-Free Display with Built-In Front Light for $89.99 Get the Kindle Paperwhite - 8 GB for $129.99 Get the Kindle Paperwhite - 32 GB for $159.99 2. A super-convenient dry shampoo that’ll save you time and water Credit: Not Your Mother’s Solve your oily hair woes with this $6 spray. Whether you have oily hair, or you just need to look presentable in a pinch, Not Your Mother’s has got you covered. We missed this product when we ranked our favorite dry shampoos of 2019, but $6 sounds like a steal when you see its 4.2-star rating on Amazon. Plus, reviewers rave about the volume and texture, light coconut scent, and lack of residue. Joelle writes, “This smells amazing! I love the texture it gave my hair as well. My hair is usually thin and hard to put into buns and this gave my hair volume which helped so much.” Get Not Your Mother’s Dry Shampoo for $5.98 3. A cold brew coffee maker that you can use all season long Credit: Takeya Get your cold brew fix for less. If you’re like me, you love coffee and likely just put up with the acidity. But no longer! This cold brew coffee maker boasts a brewing process that extracts only natural flavors—no oils or acids. And should you deem the weather too chilly for cold brew, you can also use this to prepare a hot cup of Joe. Once brewed, you can keep your coffee in the shatterproof, airtight container for up to two weeks. Get the Takeya Cold Brew Iced Coffee Maker for $16.99 4. This adorable, uber-efficient planner Credit: Panda Planner Keep organized with this undated planner. With over 250,000 units sold, the Panda Planner is a game changer if you want to add some structure to your life. The undated pages allow you to use the planner as often as you want, eliminating those passive-aggressive, paper-wasting guilt trips that dated planners put you through should you miss a day or several. In addition to the daily section, there are also weekly and monthly sections for your more long-term goals. Get the Panda Planner Daily Planner 2019-2020 for $24.97 5. Alexa’s favorite smart clock Credit: Amazon The perfect pair with your Echo speaker. Every household should have a clock or two. If you own an Echo speaker, you’ll want to keep Alexa busy with the Echo Wall Clock. It’s a must-have if you’ve got an Echo speaker, as you can sync them together and set timers, which will count down as illuminated LEDs on the clock’s face. Initial reviews for this product indicated that it killed batteries quickly, but Amazon deployed a fix, which has greatly reduced this issue. Get the Echo Wall Clock for $24.99 6. These doorbells that will answer the door for you Credit: Reviewed / Amazon This bundle is the ideal video doorbell surveillance system. Manage your home more effectively with Amazon’s Ring Video Doorbell bundles, which include a free Echo Show 5. Ring is our favorite smart doorbell and this combination lets you keep an eye on the front porch with motion-activated alerts, two-way talk, and an on-demand video feed without having to step away from your household projects. The Echo Show 5, meanwhile, is a great cooking companion or audio/video source for your favorite podcasts, TV shows, and other entertainment. Get the Ring Video Doorbell 2 with Echo Show 5 for $199 Get the Ring Video Doorbell Pro with Echo Show 5 for $249 7. These skincare products to keep your face feeling good Credit: LilyAna Naturals LilyAna Naturals are known to be good on all skin types. With autumn in full swing and winter approaching, everyone’s trying to keep their face looking fresh and vibrant. Whether you’re using these products for their anti-aging benefits or to keep acne at bay, these LilyAna Naturals moisturizers and serum are good on all skin types (including sensitive skin), free of parabens, and vegan friendly, making them some of the most popular skincare items on Amazon. Get the LilyAna Naturals Eye Cream Moisturizer for $19.99 Get the LilyAna Naturals Retinol Cream Moisturizer for $19.99 Get the LilyAna Naturals Vitamin C Serum with Hyaluronic Acid for Face and Eyes for $19.99 8. Your dentist’s favorite toothbrush Credit: Philips A toothbrush your dentist would be proud of. At my last dental checkup, my hygienist marveled at my oral health for the entirety of my cleaning and eventually asked my marital status. Was it appropriate? Not really. But I see it as a testament to the effectiveness of the Sonicare Essence electric toothbrush. I would recommend this to anyone looking to upgrade their brushing practice and maybe brighten someone else’s day. Get the Philips Sonicare Essence Sonic Rechargeable Toothbrush for $39.98 9. This underrated bathroom appliance Credit: OXO Good Grips The best assistant to clean your shower. Who doesn’t love a good squeegee? With a durable, flexible blade and non-slip handle, your cleaning job is sure to be free of any streaks or slips. Several reviewers also love how well the suction hook sticks to the shower wall, with Steven writing, “The large suction cup that holds this squeegee in the shower works perfectly. And unlike many metal squeegees, this one is very lightweight, so it will not pull itself off the wall.” That’s quite a bit of quality and convenience for $8. Get the OXO Good Grips All-Purpose Squeegee for $7.99 10. These curtain panels that’ll help you save money Credit: Sun Zero Keep the heat in and the sun out with these curtains. Give yourself some privacy while you save on your energy bill. These curtain panels help to block out both summer heat and winter chill while also reducing outside noise. One of our editors, Shayna Murphy, swears by these and says they look great. Need I say more? Get the Sun Zero Barrow Energy Efficient Grommet Curtain Panel starting at $6.37 11. These versatile microfiber cloths Credit: Amazon From cleaning spills to washing cars, these cloths are very versatile. My parents are so gung-ho about these, they stopped buying paper towels. I’m not quite as eccentric, but I love these microfiber cloths nonetheless. They’re terrific for cleaning up spills around the house, as they absorb up to eight times their weight. I set a couple of these below my dish drainer and use them to buff out my glass cooktop stove after cleaning, too. Get the AmazonBasics Blue and Yellow Microfiber Cleaning Cloths (24-Pack) for $12.81 12. A natural deodorant that actually works Credit: Reviewed / Jackson Ruckar Eliminate aluminum from your pits and still smell great. Imagine a natural deodorant, free of aluminum, parabens, sulfates, and other harsh irritants/unwanted ingredients, that actually keeps your underarms fresh. The Native brand has a cult following, which now appears to be trending toward the mainstream, given its uptick on the Movers & Shakers page. One of our experts recently reviewed this product and raved about the scent quality, natural feel, lack of white streaks on her clothing, and its durability throughout the day. However, be advised you may have to give your body a couple weeks to adjust from your old deodorant to Native. Get Native deodorant for $11.97 13. This leak-proof travel mug Credit: Contigo Sipping coffee on-the-go should be stylish and insulated. Few things make for a more satisfying commute than a travel mug that doesn’t leak. The earth angels at Contigo made this mug easy to drink from and super comfy to hold, quelling any fears you might have of dropping it on a crowded bus or subway. Additionally, its double wall vacuum insulation keeps your beverage hot for up to six hours or cold for up to 12 hours. Get the Contigo SnapSeal Byron Mug (16 oz) for $11.44 14. A yoga mat that’s got your back Credit: BalanceFrom This yoga mat is affordable and non-slip. This mat offers quarter-inch thickness, which provides much-needed cushioning for your spine, hips, knees, and elbows on hard floors. At just $13, this mat is also the top-selling yoga mat on Amazon. As someone who once pulled a hamstring in yoga class due to mat slippage, I can’t overstate the importance of slip prevention. However, while the mat will stay in place on the floor, you might slip if the surface gets too sweaty. Get the BalanceFrom GoYoga All Purpose Non-Slip Yoga Mat for $12.99 15. A more enjoyable and effective means of flossing Credit: Waterpik Finally get your dentist to stop asking if you've flossed. The late comedian Mitch Hedberg once joked that it’s just as hard to quit smoking as it is to start flossing. Sadly, he didn’t live to see the advent of the Waterpik. This water flosser is the only one on the market that has earned the American Dental Association Seal of Acceptance, which is huge. This product comes with five different tip attachments—including ones designed to work with braces, crowns, and implants—allowing you to floss in areas that are tough to reach with traditional floss. Get the Waterpik Water Flosser for $59.95 16. This comfy cushion that’ll save your back Credit: Everlasting Comfort Survive your 9-to-5 with a comfy cushion. Whether you’re at a 9-to-5 desk job or a road warrior, you’re bound to put undue strain on your back and backside. Fortunately, you can significantly reduce that stress—and improve your posture—with this orthopedist-recommended seat cushion from Everlasting Comfort. Made from memory foam, this cushion maintains its density and keeps its shape while supporting your tailbone, lower back, spine, and hips. Get the Everlasting Comfort Memory Foam Seat Cushion for $29.95 17. This mask and conditioner to restore and strengthen your hair’s health Credit: Arvazallia Add moisture to your hair with this affordable mask. You can keep your hair looking and feeling healthy with Amazon’s top-selling hair treatment mask. Argan oil is rich in compounds that moisturize and soften hair, making it a great supplement for medium to coarse hair types. Reviewers say this product significantly helped enhance their hair’s softness, texture, and overall manageability. This two-in-one mask is completely paraben- and sulfate-free and works on straight and curly hair. Get the Arvazallia Hydrating Argan Oil Hair Mask and Deep Conditioner for $12.95 18. This foam roller to optimize your workout Credit: LuxFit Roll out your achey muscles. Wish you could get more out of your workouts? You can with this durable, sweat-proof foam roller. This is a great tool for improving your balance and bodily coordination as well as for muscle relief before and after workouts. When you order this roller, you also receive an email with a link to free online instructional videos that demonstrate proper use. Get the LuxFit Foam Roller for $9.95 19. This warm and cozy throw blanket Credit: Bedsure There's nothing cozier than a fleece blanket. Be your coziest self with this fleece blanket. Whether you’re bingeing your favorite show on the couch or traveling somewhere, this throw blanket keeps you warm while still being breathable. Made from microfiber fabric, it weighs less and keeps its shape and color more effectively than cotton. Get the Bedsure Fleece Twin Throw Blanket for $19.99 20. A foot cream for everyone Credit: PurSources Heal your cracked and callused feet with this popular cream. While this cream is geared toward people who suffer from calluses and cracked feet, all feet stand to benefit from using it. The formula in this lotion nourishes and hydrates your skin, improving circulation and promoting new cell growth. This product comes with a free pumice stone and brush as well as an unlimited satisfaction guarantee—if you don’t get the results you want, PurSources will give you a full refund. Get PurSources Urea 40% Foot Cream 4 oz for $15.99 The product experts at Reviewed have all your shopping needs covered. Follow Reviewed on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for the latest deals, product reviews, and more. Prices were accurate at the time this article was published but may change over time.

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