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800 University WaySpartanburg, SC 293031-864-503-5000
Ryan CornfieldTeam: Men's Golf
Lexi Shubert - 44Team: Softball
Celebrate Homecoming 2015 at our annual Tailgate. Then, cheer on the Spartans as they take on Stetson in the Hodge! Alumni Tailgate in the HodgeEvent date: January 24, 2015 Location: USC Upstate, Hodge
Arena Description: Tailgate with us on Saturday, January 24 from 12-2 p.m. Then, join us as the Spartans take on Stetson
at 2 p.m.). Tickets are $15 and include food, beverages and ticket to
the game. Children 12 and under are free.
Please click here to register.Questions?Contact the Alumni Office at 864-503-5240 or email Charlianne Nestlen, Alumni Relations Director
Contact Us
LaDarius ThompsonAssistant Director for Campus ProgramsPhone: 864-503-5509
Charlianne Wyatt NestlenDirector of Alumni RelationsPhone: 864-503-5240
Resources2015 Homecoming Guide
FormsYell Like Hell RegistrationVariety Show Registration
USC Upstate800 University WaySpartanburg, SC 29303Faculty/Staff Directory
The University of South Carolina Upstate is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges to award baccalaureate and masters degrees. Contact the Commission on Colleges at 1866 Southern Lane, Decatur, Georgia, 30033 or call 404-679-4500 for questions about the accreditation of USC Upstate. Comments or Complaints?


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31 year old woman | Rockford, IL, USA | Seeking men 28-38 within 50 miles
Looking for my Heart
I'm a country girl at heart living in the city :(. But I do what I have to do. I like to do anything and everything, I'll try anything once. I love to go camping and hiking, fishing and target shooting. I like to have a good time and laugh and I don't need any more drama in my life. I'm just a down to earth girl looking for a down to earth guy. I'm looking for that down to earth guy who will let me and my daughter be a part of his life. Someone who is active and likes to do things but at the same time is willing to stay in and cuddle up on the couch and watch movies. I want someone real, someone who is willing to go in for the long haul. If you want the same thing then come find me I'll be waiting.
Camping , Cooking , Fishing/Hunting , Gardening/Landscaping , Movies/Videos , Museums and art , Music and concerts , Playing cards
Billiards / Pool, Bowling, Swimming, Walking / Hiking
I don't exercise regularly.
I like Birds, Cats, Dogs, Exotic Pets, Fish, Horses
I don't mind if you have pets. I love dogs, cats, fish and all kinds of animals except snakes, spiders, scorpions and things of that nature. Those things are just creepy and should be left in nature where they belong and not be kept as pets.
i would dearly love to visit ireland and italy. although there are some places here in the states i would like to visit too.
I like all kinds of movies and music although I'm not really into horror movies and I really don't like rap. I don't really watch much tv and the stuff that i do watch are usually reruns. However I do like The Big Bang Theory
Well when I'm not home picking up after my little one we are usually at the park, or swimming somewhere or just going for a walk around the neighborhood. I like to watch movies or just chill at home. I like to read and write and listen to music too.
I haven't read anything new lately. But I love the author Neil Gaiman.
Z{{Cta}} {{#if HasMoreInfo}} ?{{CtaSecondary}} {{/if}}
|What she is looking for
|5'6" (167cms)
|3'0" (91cms) to 8'11" (271cms)
|Body type:
|No preference
|No preference
|Dark brown
|No preference
|No Way
|No Way
|Social Drinker
|Social Drinker
|Retail / Food services
|No preference
|I'll tell you later
|No preference
|Never Married
|Never Married, Widow / Widower, Divorced
|Have kids:
|Yes, and they live at home (1)
|No preference
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|No preference
|Spiritual but not religious
|No preference
|High school
|High school

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Rafael Nadal has been dumped out of Wimbledon in the second round after losing to qualifier Dustin Brown.
Diafra Sakho scored twice as West Ham eased past FC Lusitans 3-0 in the first qualifying round of the Europa League.
Roger Federer has joined Bethanie Mattek-Sands in criticising the Wimbledon dresscode, while Caroline Wozniacki has urged fashion creativity.
New West Ham boss Slaven Bilic has been accused of disrespecting Andorran side FC Lusitans.
Andy Murray powered into the third round at Wimbledon with a ruthless straight sets win over Robin Haase.
West Ham are close to signing Alex Song on a permanent deal, according to Sky sources.
An early look at Friday morning's papers with Man Utd set to offer Jonny Evans to Everton as part of a deal for Seamus Coleman.
Warrington were at their ruthless best as they beat Wigan 17-6 at Halliwell Jones Stadium on Thursday night
Formula 1
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After Andy Murray swept aside Robin Haase to reach the third round at Wimbledon, we take a look at five talking points.
Ahead of the British GP, we chart the good, the bad and the ugly of McLaren-Honda's troubled 2015 reunion so far.
Trevor Bayliss will face a familiar foe in the Ashes. Here are some other coaches who have switched sides...
There was an air of optimism at Upton Park as the Slaven Bilic era kicked off with a win.
Stephen Roche gives us his predictions ahead of the Tour de France - and its good news for Britain's finest.
In the latest installment of his Sky Sports column, Simon Yates outlines his goals for this year's Tour de France.
Nasser Hussain is positive England have the right head coach after Trevor Bayliss picked his Ashes squad.
Michael Atherton thinks Adil Rashid's inclusion in the Ashes squad gives England more options for the series.
Total Access takes an in-depth look at the latest names in the NFL's top 100 list, with a few surprises in store.
All you need to know ahead of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone as F1 returns to where it all began in 1950.
Keith will be celebrating the new river coarse fishing season with Duncan Charman as he pursues barbel and chub.
Eddie Hearn, Andy Lee and Anthony Crolla are just three big names in a stellar pod-cast discussing the big boxing issues.


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July 17, 2012 •
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The statue of former Penn State University head football coach Joe Paterno stands outside Beaver Stadium in State College, Pa., Friday, July 13, 2012. After an eight-month inquiry, former FBI director Louis Freeh's firm produced a 267-page report that concluded that Paterno and other top Penn State officials hushed up child sex abuse allegations...
July 16, 2012 •
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In this image provided by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Mr. & Mrs. Russell with car back in their Texas garage after it was delivered to Robert Russell 's home in Texas. Russell whose prized 1967 Austin Healy sports car was...
FILE – In this Dec. 14, 1995, file photo, Robert Wright, president and chief executive officer of NBC, speaks in New York with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, displayed on screen, speaks from Hong Kong, during a news conference announcing that NBC and...
In this Tuesday, July 10, 2012 photo, a photographer takes a picture of "Chain Reaction," a sculpture by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Paul Conrad, in Santa Monica, Calif. After years of erosion by the ocean's salt air, "Chain...
New York Knicks executive vice president and general manager Glen Grunwald poses for a photograph with Jason Kidd, one of the Knicks two newest additions, following a news conference at the team's training facility in Tarrytown, N.Y., Thursday, July 12,...
Joe DeGana, left and Laura Parsons, right, participate in a "weed dating" event at the Earthly Delights Farm in Boise, Idaho on Thursday, June 28, 2012. The farm is among a handful across the country offering this unconventional form of speed...
Smoke rises off Pier 17 and floats along the East River toward the Brooklyn Bridge as firefighters fight a three alarm blaze at the South Street Seaport, Saturday, July 14, 2012, in New York. About 140 firefighters and the U.S. Coast Guard responded to the...
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Lawn chair balloonist Kent Couch leans in for a kiss from a grandson before taking flight from his gas station with Iraqi adventurer Fareed Lafta, Saturday, July 14, 2012 in Bend, Ore.. The two men hoped to fly across Oregon, Idaho and into Montana. (AP...
Firefighters work to extinguish a fire at PIer 17 in New York on Saturday, July 14, 2012. Firefighters battled a three-alarm blaze at the South Street Seaport that created a large cloud of smoke over the East River. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer) NEW YORK (AP) —...
FILE – This May 19, 2004 file photo shows Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca during a tour of the Men's Central Jail in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has been accused of hiding details of deputy assaults on...
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Who will help shape McCain, Obama foreign policy?
Both candidates would likely draw from previous administrations to build their teams.
Carolyn Kaster/AP
After initially relying on some outside-the-box foreign-policy advisers, Barack Obama has surrounded himself with many well-known and longtime world-affairs practitioners. That suggests to some critics that his would be an orthodox foreign policy largely in the President Clinton mold – with an interventionist streak in times of humanitarian crisis.
John McCain lends an ear to some of the original neoconservative backers of the war in Iraq, but his team also includes Republican realists and internationalists of the George H.W. Bush tradition. That split between American idealism and pragmatism is raising questions about whether the bifurcated foreign policy of the outgoing President Bush might continue in a McCain White House.
When it comes to defining the foreign policy each would practice, the two candidates have given speeches and answered debate questions indicating where they might go. But the foreign-policy brain trusts assembled by each offer another set of clues as to how American diplomacy and power might be employed under two very different men.
"The split in the advisers to McCain attests to the somewhat bipolar nature of his world vision, this tension you sense in him between a realistic sense of the limits of American power and then the strains of idealism," says Michael Fullilove at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
"In Obama most of the names associated with him reflect above all a cautious approach to foreign policy after what are widely seen as the excesses of the Bush presidency," he adds. "But one question mark would be how much he would ultimately be influenced by other voices emphasizing priorities like human rights and humanitarian intervention."
Others say the size of each candidate's circle of foreign-policy advisers and the variety within it is a reflection of two different levels of experience and approaches to decisionmaking.
"McCain's spectrum would be different, he would rely on his own experiences and instincts more," says Thomas Henriksen at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif. "Obama would be more deliberative – he'd want to listen to people, even a lot of different people, before he did anything."
Obama draws on former official
Senator Obama has assembled a foreign-policy and national security team incorporating dozens of specialists, former State Department and Pentagon officials, and members of Congress. But the length of the list and many of the prominent names on it suggest a broad and exhaustive consultative process for foreign-policy making. Some critics see a cautious approach to the world and ultimately an orthodox Democratic foreign policy.
Among Obama's close advisers are Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of State for African affairs; Gregory Craig, a former State official who was President Clinton's impeachment lawyer; former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake; and former Navy secretary Richard Danzig – all of whom served in the Clinton administration.
Advisers with no Clinton administration connection included Samantha Power, the Harvard human rights scholar who resigned from Obama's team in March after suggesting Obama would readjust his Iraq withdrawal date after taking office; and Obama's national security coordinator, Denis McDonough, a foreign-policy adviser to former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle and a staunch advocate of the US taking a leadership role in global warming and energy issues.
But Obama appears to have shifted his foreign-policy outlook over recent months as he has expanded his advisory team to include high-profile Democrats and Republicans.
"The more interventionist advisers, like Susan Rice and that group, those people have really dropped off as prominent pragmatists have risen," says Douglas Foyle, an associate professor of government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. Citing a meeting Obama held last week to showcase his foreign-policy and national security team, Mr. Foyle notes that former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar were featured prominently. "It was a striking show of the rise of the realists in the Obama camp," he says.
During the primaries, Obama often mocked traditional foreign-policy experience while aides, including Ms. Rice, insisted foreign-policy experience comes in different forms, including living or studying abroad.
Hillary Clinton advisers involved
But as he secured the nomination – and, coincidentally or not, as he absorbed some of the top foreign-policy advisers of Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign – Obama began to speak more in the vein of traditional realist American foreign policy.
In June, Obama announced a national security working group including former secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher, former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Lee Hamilton, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former Deputy National Security Adviser Jim Steinberg.
Yet despite the grumblings of some Obama supporters who say those names suggest a Clinton foreign-policy redux, other observers say that's unlikely to happen if for no other reason than that the world has changed. "It's hard to see how the template of the Clinton years would fit. We've had 9/11 since then and have two wars going on," says Hoover's Mr. Henriksen.
Obama's advisory pool also suggests that even an otherwise cautious foreign-policy vision would by tested by pressure for a more interventionist approach on high-profile humanitarian and human rights crises.
Both Rice and Mr. Lake – who has written "we were wrong" evaluations of the Rwanda response – have called for issuing the Sudanese government an ultimatum over what President Bush has called "genocide" in Sudan's Darfur region: Either stop the violence or face US military intervention.
Citing the Clinton administration experience and the strength of human rights and other interest groups in the Democratic Party power base, Mr. Fullilove of the Brookings Institution says, "It's a question out there as to whether it's possible for any Democratic administration to be truly realist with a steady devotion to national interests, especially in the face of influential groups and party activists."
But if Obama would face conflicting foreign-policy pressures, McCain's apparent preference for the more idealist wing in his advisory trust suggests he may have already settled any conflicts.
When McCain described himself as a "realistic idealist" in a major foreign-
policy speech last March, the words were supplied by Robert Kagan, a proponent of a muscular US foreign policy that works more closely with allies of like values. Mr. Kagan is also one of the minds behind McCain's proposal for a "League of Democracies" using moral authority of the world's democracies in addressing international crises.
Other neoconservative forces on his team include his chief foreign-policy adviser Rany Scheunemann, a former Republican Senate aide who was a prominent early advocate of going to war to depose Saddam Hussein; and national security analyst Max Boot.
But McCain also turns to a list of prominent figures from the Republican pragmatist camp including Lawrence Eagleburger, Henry Kissinger, and former Navy secretary John Lehman. Also advising McCain are Sen. Lindsay Graham, who has won the respect of Senate Democrats; and Richard Williamson, a State Department veteran who has been Bush's special envoy to Sudan.
McCain's closeness to Senate independent Democrat Joseph Lieberman – whom he considered as his vice president pick before aides convinced him it would repel the Republican base – underscores a focus on the battle with Islamic extremism. Senator Lieberman would very likely be tapped for a high-level national security post in a McCain White House.
McCain cites years of experience
Some of McCain's aides, like Kagan, have said they do not foresee an ideological struggle in a McCain administration on the order of what occurred in the Bush administration because McCain's worldview is established after years of experience. Other analysts point out that McCain's quick and indeed harsh judgment of Russia after its summer invasion of Georgia exemplifies the kind of decisionmaker he would be.
"McCain feels very confident with making foreign-policy calls on his own; he doesn't feel he needs to rely on others a lot about what to do, and we saw that in his response to the Russia-Georgia conflict," says Wesleyan's Mr. Foyle.
Indeed, one reason the advisers the candidates choose is an important gauge is that they suggest the inclination that might prevail when the inevitable unexpected events strike. "People are a good indicator," says Henriksen, "because one thing we can be sure of is that in office, the candidates will do something different from what they said they would."


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Stamps for an email im working on.
Deleted the last shot as it had a wee type-o (doh)! Also had to hide the promo code :P (yes, i could have changed it but that would be more effort lol)
More Rich Smith
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When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"?
View Single Post
December 25 2009, 07:39 PM
Rear Admiral
Location: Ireland.
Re: When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"?
Brit wrote:
Never, because the basic trope of "Avatar" is as old as there have been story tellers gathered around campfires even before writing was invented.
It has different emphasis, though. We've had basically imperialist versions with the Kipling story The Man Who Would Be King, after all.
Arrqh wrote:
The thing is, I don't see "white guilt" in the movie at all. I see a movie about
There's that too. But that the film has reservations about advanced cultures stepping on more primitive ones is fairly obvious, and emphasized by Cameron himself in interviews.
It's not an either-or guilt; and indeed the film here frames the problem so they're identical: In Avatar, disturbing the ecology is actually exactly the same thing as disturbing the natives since they're quite literally in tune with the system.
That said I was talking about white guilt as a concept rather than its application in the movie.
'Spock is always right, even when he's wrong. It's the tone of voice, the supernatural reasonability; this is not a man like us; this is a god.'
- Philip K. Dick
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Written on: 06/08/2008
Good Points
Flexible Storage , 4 freezer Compartments , Energy rating A
Bad Points
Stopped working after 10 months , fridge space is to restrictive , non existent aftersales service
General Comments
Purchased in October of last year for £279.99. i hadn't heard of BEKO before and for good reason. when turned on it makes a droning sound and this is down to the fan in the freezer.
It worked up until the end of july but then when i got home from work one day there was no noise coming from it at all and the fridge food was getting soiled.
luckily my neighbour let me use their freezer so i didn't have to throw it all out.
very dissapointing and it just proves that choosing an unknown brand is a costly mistake!
As rated by our community of reviewers
" Disappointing " Read More
" Rip Off Service " Read More
" Worst appliance I've ever bought " Read More
Good Points
Good looking black side by side refrigerator with icema... " Read More
" Daft vegetable drawer " Read More


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|Reviews for Mixed With the Lightning of Slaughter
| anotamous chapter 15 . 6/4
Shame this is dead, it is one of my favorites.
| Chick1966 chapter 15 . 3/18
really wish you continued
| LadyOrange101a chapter 15 . 1/12
Sasuke just keeps digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole.
You are an absolute sadist with him.
I like.
He was a complete bastard in canon and he's kind of getting his due here. I dont necessarily think this is a smashing fic, but ot keeps Sasuke in character along wit a few smashes of bad luck.
Anyways, I Love it, please keep writing. :)
| MillenniumCount chapter 4 . 12/18/2014
Is the timeline gonna be different from canon, no that Sasuke's time traveled?
| floatingmangocake chapter 15 . 12/18/2014
Ah you're late. It's been over 2 years since last update, silly.
| In Memory Of Yesterday chapter 15 . 12/16/2014
this is like one of the best fics ever! :) thanks!
| HellLani chapter 15 . 11/21/2014
Is there any hope that this will be updated?
| Rebel S2 chapter 15 . 10/18/2014
You're right. This is the most unique Sasuke time-travel fic, or at least, that I've read. And I've read a lot.
I had never considered the possibility of having two different memories clash like it does here, and the way it was written seamlessly into the story was amazing. I still get confused, but a few lines later I see that it was from his psuedo-future. I find this really cool, actually. Really gives the reader the feeling that they're Sasuke himself, going through the same psychotic adjustment of sorts. If that makes sense xD
Another that I love here is the characterization of all the characters, Naruto and Sakura's determination and closeness to Sasuke, Kakashi's subtle protectiveness. But, most of all, I'm amazed how you've portrayed Sasuke himself. It doesn't pain him as some noble martyr of the Uchiha clan when in cannon he couldn't care less about the consequences of his actions. But at the same time, I like his skepticism over going with the Sound Four in light of his 'memories' of the future. And I like how he's STILL very rash with his actions.
That last chapter though, him eating Choji's pill...did not see that coming. So wow, wonder how he's going to survive that, if he is. I am slightly confused though: how is it that he actually has Mangekyo? I realize that this will follow the premise that Itachi is 'evil', but I'm still curious xD
Either way, I look forward to what happens next, how Naruto's own vengeful-ness in this chapter will play out, how Sasuke will turn out and how everyone else reacts. I see a lot of potential for this story and a lot of possibilities, and I'd love to read more.
Granted, I realize that this story hasn't been updated in a little over a year, but still...I'm willing to wait it out. Nice story, hope you keep writing, and sorry for the long review.
| F. Flotsam chapter 15 . 9/27/2014
I am in love - thank you, thank you, thank you for writing this brilliant fic! We're blessed to have it. :D
| paracuties chapter 15 . 9/21/2014
OH MY GOD THIS IS SO AMAZING. I'm sitting on the edge of my seat here, bouncing my leg like crazy, one hand gripping the table edge and the other squeezing the mouse - aghhh, but you can't stop here!
Your fights are so so amazingly intense. I mean, ALL of it is really intense. I'm sucked in and I can't get out now - I LOVE this, love this so so much and PLEASE write more.
You've got my adrenaline pumping with this. I love this, and I can't reiterate that enough. Honestly. It's way interesting how you've written it so that Sasuke's 17-year-old mind fights with his 12-year-old, and how memories mix together and it's super confusing - I once read a fic of Naruto time-traveling, and his 12-year-old mind was simply dominated but still there by Naruto's older mind. And then he talked his younger self later in his mindscape, when he realized that his younger self still existed.
But this. This is by far more interesting. The jarring writing is what I actually really like about this; it confuses the reader and really gives an authentic feeling to how Sasuke feels. You can really capture the emotions in here!
You really, really know how to write. Like, you understand this writing thing. You know it inside out, and because of that, this story is crazy awesome. PLEASE update. PLEASE keep writing this. It's too good to stop here!
| Another.Professional.Tragedist chapter 15 . 6/6/2014
This was awesome! Ahh please tell me you'll work at it again someday? omg
| Melodic Flow chapter 15 . 5/27/2014
This had a good pace, until about chapter 8 when it felt as if everything had too much detail.
| The King in White chapter 15 . 5/22/2014
This is one of the best fics I've ever read. The way you bring around Sasuke's mental dissonance is beautiful.
| BookShadow chapter 15 . 4/21/2014
AWESOME, thrilling, well written, unique, brilliant story! I love it! Please, do continue. :)
| Anonymous chapter 14 . 2/21/2014
updating infrequently is a tendency of yours? Good, then I can still have hope! The memory mumbu-jumbo is doing an awesome job of adding additional angs, in case you weren't sure.


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Honest and fun cleveland man looking for his best friend and lover
Hello all!...I am a fun, honest, outgoing, adventerous, witty, smart guy..I like sports (watching and playing), travel, movies, concerts, casino and going out with friends..I am looking for my best friend and lover..a smart , fun, witty and a good conversationalist..
Book club , Coffee and conversation , Dining out , Hobbies and crafts , Movies/Videos , Music and concerts , Nightclubs/Dancing , Playing cards , Playing sports , Shopping/Antiques , Travel/Sightseeing , Video games , Watching sports
Baseball, Billiards / Pool, Bowling, Golf, Other types of exercise
I don't exercise regularly.
I like Dogs, Fish
I love going to eat at different places that i have never tried before..I like traveling and taking weekend getaways..I love Vegas.
Favorite things huh..food wise I am a meat and seafood person..I like all musics except country(just cant get into it!!)..I love a person that is outgoing and can hold conversations..
Things I enjoy doing are things with my 10 yr. old son, sports, concerts, movies, dinners, go out with friends, casinos..I am open to just aout anything and love to try new things and have fun..Im very outgoing...
I am currently reading a book "The Chosen Prey"..Cant remember the author..its a serial killer book.
Z{{Cta}} {{#if HasMoreInfo}} ?{{CtaSecondary}} {{/if}}
|What he is looking for
|6'2" (187cms)
|3'0" (91cms) to 8'0" (243cms)
|Body type:
|A few extra pounds
|Slender, About average, Curvy, Athletic and toned, A few extra pounds
|No preference
|Light brown
|No preference
|No Way
|No preference
|Social Drinker
|No preference
|Labor / Construction
|No preference
|$35,001 to $50,000
|No preference
|Never Married
|No preference
|Have kids:
|Yes, and they live away from home (1)
|No preference
|Wants kids:
|No preference
|White / Caucasian
|White / Caucasian
|I'll tell you later
|No preference
|I'll tell you later
|No preference
|Some college
|No preference


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The Top 10 In Action Sports
01Brick By Brick: Camping Lego Style
02Booze and Bikes: 14 Tours That Let Combine Two of the Best Things in the World
03Who Needs Hollywood? These Incredible Videos Were All Filmed on the Simplest Cameras
04Sam Pilgrim vs. The World: The Champion Aiming To Reclaim His Crown In A New Era Of Biking
05Eccentric Adventures Episode 2: Britain's Most Brutal Illegal Event is All About Cheese
06A Journey Into Darkness: We Went Mountain Biking in the Abandoned Mines of Slovenia
07After the Apocalypse: Inside The World's Most Breathtaking Ghost Towns
08Debate: Let's Stop Hating On Parents Who Want To Raise Adventurous Kids
09Guns, Roses, And Eating Insects: Adventure Cycling in Vietnam
10From Intense Trails to Intensive Care: Dicing with Death In a Mountain Biking Paradise
Tent Shitty Teaser
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Sweet Skateboards and Perus Crew went on a ghetto camping trailer thrash outing through Denmark, Sweden and Finland in August. Two cars, two vans, 20 odd scumbags. And they're not drinking tea either. Here's the teaser, the article is dropping in the November issue of Kingpin, the full edit will be online on the 28.10.
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Free Speech Atheists
This group is all about the freedom of expression, from an Atheist point of view. As the nonbelieving minority in a quasi-theocracy, it is essential to all we hold dear that our voices never fall silent.
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One of our favorite projects mentioned in the AIA/COTE 2007 list of Top Ten Green Projects was perennial Inhabitat favorite Stephen Holl's Whitney Water Treatment Plant located in New Haven, CT. This project is fantastic in many ways, but the real beauty of it lies in the fact that the 30,000 square feet water treatment facility is sitting under the largest green roof in the state of Connecticut.
Read the rest of this entry »
Read the rest of this entry »
4 Comments
May 22, 2007 at 10:38 pm
OMG!! I live in New Haven, and I had no idea!
May 4, 2007 at 8:38 am
Cool design. No handrail on external staircase seems like a poblem, and code violation, however. An examination of the Steven Holl images page ( http://www.aiatopten.org/hpb/images.cfm?ProjectID=839 , click on 'watercolor')
shows that there's a semingly very green approach being used to treat this water. Does this facility also then add Chlorine, Alum and other chemicals as well ? This project seems to build on the pioneering work of Dr. John Todd and his 'living machines' water treatment systems ( http://www.oceanarks.org ). Is this an accurate observation ?
May 4, 2007 at 2:06 am
I took a look at the other 9 winners, and this has the most organic and natural looking shape.
"Inverse raindrop"? Looks more like "lightbulb" or "keyhole" shape to me. 😉
May 3, 2007 at 11:14 pm
This is right across the dam from my house. The neighborhood had no clue what was being built there… I didn't even know untill I happened upon the project in an exhibit. It's a really nice space and has several paths and benches for dog walkers and other people like that.


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FINDING NEMO DISCUSSION QUESTIONS VOCABULARY a. abiotic factors: b. biotic factors: c. mutualism: d. symbiosis: e. food chain: f. food web: g. vertebrate: h. invertebrate: i. population: j. community: k. niche: l. habitat: m. commensalism: n. parasitism: o. predator-prey relationship: p. autotrophs: q. heterotrophs: 1. Throughout the movie, list any ABIOTIC factors that you might see. 2. Throughout the movie, list any BIOTIC factors that you might see. 3. What is the relationship between Marlin and the home he picked out for his family? 4. Identify the relationship between the barracuda and Coral. 5. Nemo had a "lucky fin."which was smaller than the other. Of what might this be an example? What are some possible factors that may have contributed to this? 6. Why did Marlin consider the ocean unsafe? Why would it seem unsafe for small fishes like Nemo and Marlin? 7. What are some of the adaptations that Nemo's schoolmates have? Why are they important? 8. Throughout the movie, name some of the species of organisms that you recognize. 9. Give 3 examples of predators from the movie. 10. If it were really true that sharks didn't eat smaller fish, how would that affect the food chain? 11. Why did Bruce try to attack Dory and Marlin? 12. List any invertebrates that are featured in the movie. 13. List any vertebrates that are featured in the movie. 14. Give the common names any of the animals (that you can identify) Nemo met in the tank. 15. Which organisms would be considered autotrophs? 16. Create a food web or food chain based upon some of the organisms from the movie. 17. Why did the angler fish have a light on his head? How would he use it to get food? 18. What adaptations do jellyfish have to help them survive? How would that be helpful?
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This revision incorporates the many refinements to the translation of Utopia undertaken in 1995. George Logan has also updated the editorial commentary and introduction to take into account the scholarship published since the first Cambridge Texts edition of Utopia appeared in 1989. This edition is the most accessible and student-friendly version of Utopia currently available.
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Boxing goods manufacturer Everlast fights for more online market
In the next 17 months, it expects 10% of its B2B customers will be transacting on the web, an executive says.
Boxing goods manufacturer Everlast fights for more online market
In the next 17 months, it expects 10% of its B2B customers will be transacting on the web, an executive says.
Installment pay option resonates with Reverb.com
The online musical instruments marketplace offers up to one year of financing to buyers through an online payment service from Affirm.
Sign up for IRNewsLink and get daily reports delivery to your inbox. Sign Up Now
Sponsored by 2013 Social Media 300
Daily Grommet is looking to discover innovative new products it can sell online.
Boston has been experiencing a new kind of tech revolution. The days of Boston being known just as a software hub are in the past. The city's tech scene has been blooming with innovation in the form of ingenious devices and tools for home, office and beyond.
As a Boston-based , online marketplace that sells and supports undiscovered consumer products, Daily Grommet wants to show how creative inventors and makers from all over are knocking it out of the park.
On Tuesday, March 19th, Daily Grommet, along with Google Apps and Boston.com, is bringing ten teams of product creators to Fenway Park for an event called Home Plate to a Home Run. They will compete in several creative business challenges to win our consultative advice, professional assistance and guidance through the process of bringing a product to market.
They'll also gain huge exposure with not only Boston.com, but also a wealth of other media outlets.
After a month of planning and searching for new ideas and inventors, we had the unenviable challenge of picking ten finalists out of 150 entrants. Why bother investing time in people that don't even have a market-ready product yet? The answer is that, just like every product we hand select for our product launch platform, we believe in them.
We've proven it again and again for four years and we know which products have "legs" and which engage hearts and minds to create a different more creative definition of business and society. A 'grommet' is more than just a product that can be bought or sold. It has a larger purpose and a deeper meaning. It's rooted in our idea of "citizen commerce," which means supporting our creative sellers and the things that matter to them most, whether it's technical innovation, job creation, domestic manufacturing, or the preservation of craft.
The support won't end when the stadium lights go out and the winner is chosen.
Just like we do for the other products or 'grommets' we will continue to support them. We'll donate monthly to their Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, which entrepreneurs use to raise funds for grassroots projects, so we can follow these future Grommets closely.
And while we've seen outstanding results—90% of these campaigns get fully or over-funded—we know that's not where it ends. The next phase of manufacturing, distributing, and scaling is a tough, new phase and one where small companies need connections and guidance most.
Daily Grommet knows how hard it is for a worthy product to get noticed. Big retailers won't even take the time to consider you if you can't prove real market traction. By launching and selling on DailyGrommet.com, we provide early-stage companies that crucial market data they need to scale bigger.
We sorted through 145 entries in order to narrow it down to the ten finalists that will compete at Fenway. But those who don't win will still gain from the publicity and promotion around the event and the enthusiasm and joy that arises from a community of innovators and excited entrepreneurs.
UPDATE: The winner of the competition was Thinx, the developer and online retailer of high-tech (anti-microbial and moisture-wicking) underwear for women.--Internet Retailer
All personal data must be stored in Russia, and not in cloud servers elsewhere. Here ...
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If there's something you've bought offline that you weren't able to buy online, we're probably thinking about that."


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NBA tipped in deal with broadcasters for new online video service
If you find the limitations of traditional cable television subscriptions increasingly pointless, you're not the only one. Many consumers complement their cable subscription with online video streaming services and similar offerings, sometimes entirely dropping cable in favor of these alternatives. Access to sports content has been one of the biggest barriers to cable cutting for many, however, an issue that is being increasing addressed. According to sources that have spoken to the Wall Street Journal, NBA fans in particular might be in for some good news.


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BBC to film making of GTA TV show
The BBC is making a two-part drama based on the creation of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, to highlight British technology successes.
The boss of Rockstar's parent company has admitted he 'misspoke' when talking about Grand Theft Auto V's story DLC not having been announced.
Grand Theft Auto V has hit a new milestone, as Rockstar's parent company implies that plans for new story content have changed significantly.
GTA V won't be getting any new heists in a hurry but Rockstar has confirmed that it's not trying to ban PC mods that are single-player only.
The Furious 7 star is remembered via the medium of Grant Theft Auto V.
The PC version of Grand Theft Auto V is finally out today, but what has actually changed and is it really the definitive version?
Is your partner chained to their computer? This is for you.


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Christmas present
Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Christmas + present. Present is used as a postpositioned adjective. First popularized in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
Christmas present (countable and uncountable, plural Christmases present)
- Used other than as an idiom: see Christmas, present.
- Children believe that Santa Claus comes down the chimney to bring them Christmas presents.
- A contemporary Christmas.
1998 May 15, Janet Colsher Teitsort, Long-Distance Grandma: How to Stay Connected with Grandkids Far Away, Baker, ISBN 0801011655, page 145:
- Christmas past becomes Christmas present.
2012 May 3, Stella Duffy, chapter 13, Wavewalker, Profile Books, ISBN 1847655424, 5:
- Anita had been relieved to unload the burden of her Christmases Past following her Process but she certainly hasn't told Max any of the details of the Christmases present she'd be spending with John.


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Posts Tagged 'Pixar'
Totoro and I
A few months ago, in a post about the movies I've watched the most often, I made the following prediction about my daughter:
Once Beatrix is old enough, she'll start watching movies, too, and if she's anything like most kids I know, she'll want to watch the same videos over and over. I fully expect to see My Neighbor Totoro or the Toy Story films several hundred times over the next few years—at least if all goes according to plan.
As it turns out, I was half right. Extrapolating from recent trends, I'll definitely end up watching Totoro a hundred times or more—but it will only take a few months. I broke it out for the first time this week, as Beatrix and I were both getting over a cold, which, combined with a chilly week in Oak Park, kept both of us mostly inside. When I hit the play button, I wasn't sure how she'd respond. But she sat transfixed for eighty minutes. Since then, she's watched it at least ten times all the way through, to the point where I've had to negotiate a limit of one viewing per day. And although I couldn't be happier, and I can't imagine another movie I'd be more willing to watch over and over again, I occasionally stop to wonder what I've awakened.
Screen time for children can be a touchy subject, but after holding out for more than two years, we're finally allowing Beatrix to watch videos on a regular basis. Along with her daily Totoro fix, she'll spend half an hour on her mommy's phone in the morning, usually taking in Sesame Street or Frozen clips on YouTube. (As a parenting tip, I'd also recommend investing in an inexpensive portable DVD player, like the sturdy one I recently picked up by Sylvania. It's better than a phone, since it allows for a degree of parental control and resists restless skipping from one video to the next, and unlike a television, it can be tucked out of sight when you're done, which cuts down on the number of demands.) Whenever possible, I like to sit with her while we're watching, asking her to comment on the action or to tell me what she sees. And Totoro, in particular, has awakened her imagination: she's already pretending to gather acorns around the house, and she identifies strongly with the two little girls. For my part, I feel the same way about the father, who may be the best parent in any animated film, and whenever I find myself at a loss, I've started to ask myself: "What would the dad in Totoro do?"
And while it's possible that Beatrix would have latched onto whatever I decided to show her, I'd like to think that there's something about Totoro that makes it the right movie at the right time. As I've noted before, its appeal can be hard to explain. Pixar's brand of storytelling can be distilled into a set of rules—I've said elsewhere that its movies, as wonderful as they can be, feel like the work of a corporation willing itself into the mind of a child—and we've seen fine facsimiles in recent years from DreamWorks and Disney Animation. But Miyazaki remains indefinable. The wonder of Totoro is that Totoro himself only appears for maybe five minutes: the rest is a gentle, fundamentally realistic look at the lives of two small children, and up until the last act, whatever magic we see could easily be a daydream or fantasy. Yet it's riveting all the way through, and its attention to detail rewards multiple viewings. Every aspect of life in the satoyama, or the Japanese countryside, is lovingly rendered, and there are tiny touches in every frame to tickle a child's curiosity, or an adult's. It's a vision of the world that I want to believe, and it feels like a gift to my daughter, who I can only hope will grow up to be as brave as Mei and as kind as Satsuki.
Best of all, at a time when most children's movies are insistently busy, it provides plenty of room for the imagination to breathe. In fact, its plot is so minimal—there are maybe six story beats, generously spaced—that I'm tempted to define the totoro as the basic unit of meaningful narrative for children. A movie like Ponyo is about 1.5 totoros; Spirited Away is 2; and Frozen or most of the recent Pixar films push it all the way up to 3. There's nothing wrong with telling a complicated plot for kids, and one of the pleasures of the Toy Story films is how expertly they handle their dense storylines and enormous cast. But movement and color can also be used to cover up something hollow at the heart, until a film like Brave leaves you feeling as if you've been the victim of an elaborate confidence game. Totoro's simplicity leaves no room for error, and even Miyazaki, who is as great a filmmaker as ever lived, was only able to do it once. (I still think that his masterpiece is Spirited Away, but its logic is more visible, a riot of invention and incident that provides a counterpoint to Totoro's sublime serenity.) If other films entice you with their surfaces, Totoro is an invitation to come out and play. And its spell lingers long after you've put away the movie itself.
"You have a better chance than I do…"
Note: This post is the fifteenth installment in my author's commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 16. You can read the previous installments here.
Writers are often told that it's a mistake to build their stories around luck, particularly if it works to the hero's advantage. As Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats famously said: "Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating." And it seems intuitively true that a story, whenever possible, should arise out of decisions made by the protagonist and antagonist. Yet this is a genre convention in itself, and it isn't there, in spite of appearances, because it's more "realistic." Luck plays an enormous role in real life, and if exclude it from our plotting, it isn't for the sake of realism, but plausibility, which are two entirely different things. In Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman describes a hypothetical scene in which the hero, tasked with entering a heavily secured castle, simply blunders in without a plan. He climbs the wall within sight of the guards, who don't react; wanders around for a while in plain view; trips a few alarms without drawing any attention; and finally ends up, by accident, in the room he's trying to enter. If this were a movie, we'd throw tomatoes. But it's exactly how a man named Michael Fagan once broke into Buckingham Palace and ended up in the bedroom of the Queen.
If we rule out such moments of luck in fiction, it isn't because they can't happen, but because we feel that they take the writer and characters off the hook. It seems lazy, and worse, it pulls us out of the fictional dream by breaking an implied contract between author and reader, which states that events should emerge from the logical consequences of the characters' actions. But there's one interesting exception. Sometimes the master plan is so farfetched that only an absurdly omniscient protagonist could pull it off, anticipating every last detail with pinpoint precision. (Think, for instance, of the Saw movies, or even of the Joker's stratagems in The Dark Knight.) This can be even less believable than a plan that hinges on luck, so constructing the plot turns into a choice between implausibilities—or, better, as a balance between the two. You could see it as a problem of narrative engineering: a solution that depends solely on either luck or unerring foresight collapses under its own unlikelihood, but a combination of the two stands firm. The challenge lies in mixing these elements in the right proportions, with a little luck and a little cleverness, so that the reader or viewer doesn't regard the result as anything less than a natural development.
And whenever luck is involved, it's best to push it as far from the center of the story as possible, or to make it a fait accompli, so that it seems less like a stroke of fortune than a condition of the plot itself. Most movies about an impossible heist, for instance, hinge on elements of luck: there's always a convenient air duct, or a hallway without any security cameras, or a moment when the guards change shifts. A well-constructed story will introduce these elements as soon as it can. If Danny Ocean stumbles across an unsecured ventilation shaft during the heist, we cry foul; if he mentions it beforehand, we more or less accept it, although the element of luck is exactly the same. On a higher level, the villain's complicated plan in Vertigo depends on a single huge assumption, as Hitchcock himself admitted to François Truffaut:
The husband was planning to throw his wife down from the top of the tower. But how could he know that James Stewart wouldn't make it up those stairs? Because he became dizzy? How could he be sure of that!
Truffaut's response is revealingly pragmatic: "That's true, but I saw it as one of those assumptions you felt people would accept." Which we do—but only because it's there in the title of the movie itself, as a kind of anthropic principle on which the whole story depends. It's still luck, but in a form that can't be separated from the fabric of the overall movie.
I made good use of this principle in Eternal Empire, which includes more than its fair share of wild notions. Arguably the largest involves a plot point early in the novel: Maya Asthana, my unlikely mole, has to kill a man held in solitary confinement while avoiding all suspicion. At the very least, it was necessary that she be left alone with him without any security cameras—and here, already, were two big implausibilities. I "solved" the problem by putting it entirely out of her hands. Earlier in the novel, she and Wolfe visit Rogozin in detention, and it's Wolfe who asks that the cameras be turned off, supposedly to put the suspect at ease, but really to make it less glaring when Asthana makes the same request later on. Similarly, in Chapter 16, it's Wolfe who tells her to visit Rogozin, saying that she's under too much scrutiny to go herself, while unwittingly setting the stage for Asthana's plan. Clearly, from Asthana's point of view, these are two enormous strokes of luck. I was reasonably fine with this, though, because the alternative, in which Asthana arranges for an unobserved visit entirely on her own initiative, would be even less plausible. Like most good villains, Asthana knows how to play the hand she's been dealt. And if the deck has been stacked in her favor, hopefully the reader won't see this until after the trick is over…
The Toy Story of our lives
A few weeks ago, Pixar announced that Toy Story 4 is officially in production, with the dream team of John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Andrew Stanton advising the writing duo of Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. (I don't doubt the talents of the latter two, but I still smile a little at the thought of that meeting: I'd like to think that it consisted mostly of four big, nerdy guys in Hawaiian shirts being inexplicably charmed by Jones's pitch for the franchise.) Like many fans of what I've come to see as the best series of children's films ever made, I'm tickled, but cautious. It's not so much the fear that a mediocre fourth movie would undermine my feelings for the first three—heck, I've been through that process before. Rather, it's the fact that a perfectly fine arrangement already exists, in the form of the animated shorts about these characters that Pixar has continued to produce. I'm not sure I need to see Toy Story 4, but I'd happily accept a run of shorts that went on forever, if it means we get more miniature masterpieces along the lines of Partysaurus Rex.
The nice thing about the Toy Story shorts is that they meet a particular need while leaving our memories of the movies untouched. Much of the appeal of these films comes from their almost frightening emotional resonance, and while it's unfair to hold a short cartoon to the same standard, I love these characters so much that I'm glad just to be treated to a few brief vignettes of their lives. As we learned from Cars 2, cleverness alone can't sustain an entire feature, but it's more than enough to fill six minutes, and the format of the animated short allows Pixar to revel in a few crucial aspects of the franchise—its ingenuity and humor—while not having to strain for the intensity of feeling that the movies achieve. In that regard, it's revealing that the longer specials, Toy Story of Terror and last night's Toy Story That Time Forgot, tend to hit beats that we've seen before: the villain in the former feels more than a little like his counterpart in Toy Story 2, and the latter introduces an army of toys who don't know that they're toys, of which Buzz drily notes: "Incredible, isn't it?"
More than anything else, this is what gives me pause at the prospect of Toy Story 4. The first three movies seem almost inevitable in the emotional ground they cover: the series gradually became a meditation on growing up, and now that Andy has gone off to college, it's hard to envision what remains to be told. Still, I've been surprised before, and if anything, Toy Story That Time Forgot serves as a reminder of how much feeling can still be plumbed from these characters and their situations. For most of its length, it's a cute diversion, maybe a notch below the best of the shorts so far. (It lost me a little during its long middle section, which takes place entirely within the plastic world of the Battlesaurs: a lot of the fun of these stories arises from the element of scale, with the toys' adventures set against the baseboards and table legs of the larger everyday world, and we lose this when the action unfolds in artificial surroundings.) Yet by the end, I was unexpectedly touched by its message, like that of The Lego Movie, which implies that toys find their greatest meaning when they surrender to a child's imagination.
Obviously, it's hard to separate my response from my own experience as a father, which is a fairly recent development—my daughter wasn't even born when Toy Story 3 was released. And I see a lot of Bonnie in Beatrix. She's just arriving at the age when she starts to tell stories involving her toys that I couldn't have anticipated: she'll sling her Hello Kitty purse over her shoulder and announce that she's taking the train to work, or explain that Mr. Bear needs to have his diaper changed, and she's already beginning to spin private narratives using the figures in our plastic nativity set. And even if my feelings have been shaped by where I happen to be in my own life, I can't help but think that if there's one last region for the series to explore, it's here—in the strange closeness that emerges between a child, her toys, and her parents. (So far, the series has only given us hints of this, notably in the form of the intriguing clues, which can't be dismissed, that the little girl who gave away Jessie the Cowgirl grew up to be Andy's mom.) Toy Story has a lot to say about small children, but it's been oddly indifferent so far to families. That's the fourth movie I'd like to see, and I'll tell this to anyone who wants to listen, even if it means I have to take a meeting with Rashida Jones.
Blinn's Law and the paradox of efficiency
Note: I seem to have come down with a touch of whatever stomach bug my daughter had this week, so I'm taking the day off. This post was originally published, in a somewhat different form, on August 9, 2011.
As technology advances, rendering time remains constant.
—Blinn's Law
Why isn't writing easier? Looking at the resources that contemporary authors have at their disposal, it's easy to conclude that we should all be perfect writing machines. Word processing software, from WordStar to Scrivener, has made the physical process of writing more streamlined than ever; Google and Amazon have given us access to a world of information that would have been inconceivable even fifteen years ago; and research, editing, and revision have been made immeasurably more efficient. And yet writing itself doesn't seem all that much less difficult than before. The amount of time a professional novelist needs to spend writing each day—let's say three or four hours—hasn't decreased much since Trollope, and for most of us, it still takes a year or two to write a decent novel.
So what happened? In some ways, it's an example of the paradox of labor-saving devices: instead of taking advantage of our additional leisure time, we create more work for ourselves. It also reflects the fact that the real work of writing a novel is rarely connected to how fast you can type. But I prefer to think of it as a variation on Blinn's Law. As graphics pioneer James Blinn first pointed out, in animation, rendering time remains constant, even as computers get faster. An artist gets accustomed to waiting a certain number of hours for an image to render, so as hardware improves, instead of using it to save time, he employs it to render more complex graphics. This is why rendering time at Pixar has remained essentially constant over the past fifteen years. (Although the difference between Toy Story and Cars 2, or even Brave, is a reminder that rendering isn't everything.)
Similarly, whatever time I save by writing on a laptop rather than a manual typewriter is canceled out by the hours I spend making additional small changes and edits along the way. The Icon Thief probably went through eighteen substantial drafts before the final version was delivered to my publisher, an amount of revision and rewriting that would have been unthinkable without Word. Is the novel better as a result? On a purely technical level, yes. Is the underlying story more interesting than if I'd written it by hand? Probably not. Blinn's Law tells us that the leaves and grass in the background of a shot will look increasingly great, but it says nothing about the quality of storytelling. Which seems to imply that the countless tiny changes that a writer like me makes to each draft are only a waste of effort.
And yet here's the thing: I still needed all that time. No matter how efficient the physical side of the process becomes, it's still desirable for a writer to live with a novel, or a studio to live with a movie, for at least a year or so. (In the case of a film like Frozen, that gestational period can amount to a decade or more.) For most of us, there seems to be a fixed developmental period for decent art, a minimum amount of time that a story needs to simmer and evolve. The endless small revisions aren't the point: the point is that while you're altering a word or shifting a paragraph here or there, the story is growing in your head in unexpected ways. Even as you fiddle with the punctuation, seismic changes are taking place. But for this to happen, you need to be at your desk for a certain number of hours. So what do we do in the meantime? We do what Pixar does: we render. That's the wonderful paradox of efficiency: it allows us, as artists, to get the inefficiency we all need.
Toy Story of delight
Breaking Bad may be over, but last night, my wife and I watched what emphatically ranks as a close second in our most highly anticipated television events of the year: Toy Story of Terror, the first of what I hope will be many Pixar specials featuring the characters from my favorite animated franchise. Not surprisingly, I loved it, even if I'd rate it a notch below the sublime Partysaurus Rex. It's constructed in the usual shrewd, slightly busy Pixar manner, with complication piled on complication, and it packs a startling amount of plot into a runtime of slightly over twenty minutes. A big part of the appeal of the Toy Story franchise has always been its narrative density: these aren't long movies, but each installment, especially the latter two, is crammed with ideas, a tradition that the shorts have honored and maintained. And although it may not rank among the greatest holiday specials ever made, it gave me a hell of a lot of pleasure, mostly because I was delighted, as I always am, to see these characters again.
I've spoken frequently on this blog about the power of ensembles, which allow a television show to exploit different, surprising combinations of characters, but I don't think I've really delved into its importance in film, which operates under a different set of constraints. Instead of multiple seasons, you have, at best, a handful of installments, and often just one movie. A rich supporting cast can lead to many satisfactions in the moment—think of the ensembles in Seven Samurai, The Godfather, L.A. Confidential—but it also allows you to dream more urgently of what else might have taken place, both in the runtime of the movie itself and after the story ends. When a great ensemble movie is over, it leaves you with a sense of loss: you feel that the characters were doing other things beyond the edges of the frame, pairing off in unexpected ways, and you wish there were time for more. (It's no accident that the franchises that inspire the most devoted fanfic communities, from Harry Potter to Star Trek, are the ones that allow fans to play with the widest range of characters.)
And I don't think I've ever felt this so keenly as I have with the characters from Toy Story. Over the course of three films and a handful of shorts, the franchise has created dozens of memorable characters, and it's remarkable how vividly even briefly glimpsed figures—Wheezy, the Chatter Telephone—are drawn. Part of this is due to the fact that toys advertise their personalities to us at once, and you can mine a lot of material from either underlining or subverting that initial impression, as in the case of Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear, who stands as one of the most memorable movie villains of the last decade. But it's also thanks to some sensational writing, directing, and voice acting in the established Pixar style, as well as the ingenuity of the setting and premise itself. At its best, the franchise is an adventure series crossed with a workplace comedy, and much of its energy comes from the idea of these toys, literally from different worlds, thrown together into the same playroom. Andy's bedroom, or Bonnie's, or any child's, is a stage on which an endless number of stories can be told, and they don't need to be spectacular: I'd be happy just to watch these toys hanging out all day.
That's the mark of great storytelling, and as time goes on, I've begun to suspect that this may be the best movie trilogy I've ever seen. I've loved this series for a long time, but it wasn't until Toy Story 2 came out that it took up a permanent place in my heart. At the time, I was working as an online movie critic, and I was lucky enough to see it at a preview screening—I almost typed "screaming," which is a revealing typo—packed with kids. And I don't think any movie has ever left me feeling happier on leaving the theater, both because the film itself was a masterpiece, and because I knew that every child in the world was going to see it. Ten years later, Toy Story 3 provided the best possible conclusion to the central story, and I don't think I want any more movies, as much as I want to spend more time with these characters. But the decision to release additional shorts and specials was a masterstroke. For any other franchise, it might have seemed like a cash grab, but I can't help but read it as an act of generosity: it gives us a little more, but not too much, of what we need. And it makes me a little envious of my own daughter, who, if all goes according to plan, will grow up with Woody, Buzz, Rex, and the rest, not just as beloved characters, but as friends.
A writer's progress
Over the past few days, I've been engaged in a long conversation with my younger self, using what Stephen King has rightly called the only real form of time travel we have. Years ago, when I left my job in New York to become a professional writer, my first major project was a long novel about India. I spent two years writing and revising it in collaboration with an agent, only to abandon it unpublished in the end for reasons that I've described elsewhere. It was a bittersweet experience at best, one that taught me much of what I know about writing, while also leaving me with little to show for it, and as a result, I haven't gone back and read that novel in a long time—more than four years, in fact. Now that I've finished Eternal Empire, however, I've got some time on my hands, and one of the first things I wanted to do, since I no longer have a book under contract, is go back and look at that early effort to see whether there's anything there worth saving. And the prospect of reading this novel again after so long filled me with a lot of trepidation.
In some ways, I doubt I'll ever have this kind of experience again. This first novel represents the very best that I could do at that time in my career: I lavished everything I had on it for two years of my life, and so it would be surprising, at least to me, if there wasn't at least something worthwhile there. But I've changed a lot in the meantime, too. When I sat down to write my first book, it largely to prove to myself that I could do it at all: I'd never written an original novel before, unless you count the science-fiction epic I cranked out in the summer between seventh and eighth grade, and I'd suffered through several unfinished projects in the meantime. Today, the situation couldn't be more different: I have something like 350,000 words of professional work behind me, and I've gone through the process of writing, cutting, and revising a manuscript with an editor twice, with a third time just around the corner. I'm a better, smarter writer now, and this is probably the only chance I'll have to confront the best work of my early days with the detachment that four years of distance affords.
And while reading the novel again, I discovered something fascinating: this manuscript, which is the final version of a book that went through countless edits, revisions, and iterations, is basically as good as the first drafts I write today. It isn't a bad novel by any means: there's a lot of interesting material, some exciting scenes, and many extended passages of decent writing. But it's clearly the work of a novice. Most chapters go on for longer than they should; I spell out motivations and subtext rather than leaving them to the reader; and, much to my embarrassment, I even have long sections of backstory. At the time, this was the novel I wanted to write, and since then, my tastes have changed and developed in certain ways, which is precisely how it should be. Yet here's the funny thing: I still write chapters that are too long, spell things out too explicitly, and tell more than I should about a character's background. The difference now is that I cut it, usually before I've even printed out a copy to mark up with a red pencil. And whatever mistakes that remain tend to be made, and addressed, more quickly.
Which gets me to an important point about progress. There's no such thing as real progress in the arts, at least as far as storytelling is concerned, but there's certainly room for an individual author to grow and improve over time—and the best thing that a writer can learn, as they say at Pixar, is that you need to be wrong fast. Sometimes I'm wrong only in my own head, while I'm working out a scene in my mind's eye, and I've corrected the mistake long before I begin to type. More often, I need to write something out first and change it once I realize it isn't working. But the fact that my first drafts now are as good as my final drafts of a few years ago implies, if nothing else, that I've accelerated the process, which is about all a writer can ask. I'm still fundamentally the same person I was when I wrote my first novel, but a lot more efficient, and I'll be happy as long as I can continue in the same general direction. As David Belle, the founder of parkour, says: "First, do it. Second, do it well. Third, do it well and fast—that means you're a professional."
Flight, Wreck-It Ralph, and the triumph of the mainstream
At first glance, it's hard to imagine two movies more different than Flight and Wreck-It Ralph. The former is an emphatically R-rated message movie with a refreshing amount of nudity, drug and alcohol abuse, and what used to be known as adult situations, in the most literal sense of the term; the latter is a big, colorful family film that shrewdly joins the latest innovations in animation and digital effects to the best of classic Disney. On the surface, they appeal to two entirely separate audiences, and as a result, you'd expect them to coexist happily at the box office, which is precisely what happened: both debuted this weekend to numbers that exceeded even the most optimistic expectations. (This is, in fact, the first weekend in a long time when my wife and I went to the movies on two consecutive nights.) Yet these two films have more in common than first meets the eye, and in particular, they offer an encouraging snapshot of Hollywood's current potential for creating great popular entertainment. And even if their proximity is just a fluke of scheduling, it's one that should hearten a lot of mainstream moviegoers.
In fact, for all their dissimilarities, the creative team behind Flight would have been more than capable of making Wreck-It Ralph, and vice-versa, and under the right circumstances, they might well have done so. Flight is Robert Zemeckis's first live-action movie in years, after a long, self-imposed exile in the motion-capture wilderness, and the script is by John Gatins, who spent a decade trying to get it made, while also slaving away for two years on the screenplay for Real Steel. It's a handsome movie, old-fashioned in its insistence on big themes and complex characters, but it's also a product of the digital age: Zemeckis's Forrest Gump, whatever its other flaws, remains a landmark in the use of unobtrusive special effects to advance the story and fill in a movie's canvas, and their use here allowed Flight to be brought in on a startlingly low budget of $31 million. At his best, Zemeckis is one of the most technically gifted of mainstream directors, and in some ways, he's an important spiritual godfather for Wreck-It Ralph, whose true precursor isn't Toy Story, as many critics have assumed, but Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Similarly, Wreck-It Ralph is the product of a canny, often surprisingly mature set of sensibilities that only happens to have ended up in animation. Along with the usual stable of Pixar and Disney veterans, the creative team includes Rich Moore and Jim Reardon, a pair of directors whose work on The Simpsons collectively represents the best fusion of high and low art in my lifetime, and they've given us a movie that appeals to both adults and kids, and not just in the obvious ways. It's full of video game in-jokes that will fly over or under the heads of many viewers—a reference to Metal Gear Solid represents one of the few times a joke in a movie had the audience laughing while I was scratching my head—but this is really the least impressive aspect of the movie's sophistication. The script is very clever, with a number of genuinely ingenious surprises, and there are touches here that go well beyond nerd culture to something older and weirder, like Alan Tudyk's brilliant Ed Wynn impression as the villainous King Candy. (The cast, which includes John C. Reilly, Jack McBrayer, and Sarah Silverman, all of them wonderful, is a modern version of the Disney trick of recruiting old pros like Ed Wynn and Phil Harris to bring its characters to life.)
It's tempting to say that it all comes down to good storytelling, but there's something else going on here. Last year, I predicted that the incursion of Pixar talent into live-action movies would represent a seismic shift in popular filmmaking, and although John Carter was a bust, Brad Bird's work on Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol indicates that I wasn't entirely off the mark. This weekend's top two movies are a sign that, at its best, Hollywood is still capable of making solid movies for adults and children that come from essentially the same place—from good scripts, yes, but also from studios and creative teams that understand the potential of technology and draw on a similar pool of skilled professionals. This is how Hollywood should look: not a world neatly divided into summer tentpole pictures, Oscar contenders, and a lot of mediocrity, but a system capable of turning out mainstream entertainment for different audiences linked by a common respect for craft. The tools and the talent are there, led by directors like Zemeckis and backed up by studios like Pixar and Disney. This ought to be the future of moviemaking. And at least for one weekend, it's already here.


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Posted March 26, 2002 and updated on April 27, 2009
Why is K-PAX rated PG-13?
Official MPAA Rating: K-PAX is rated PG-13 for
Please read our content details for this movie to help determine if it is suitable for members of your family. We also encourage you to check our full review and our movie information page.


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Ownership of the Magic Tree, an independent bookstore in the western Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, is changing hands. MuggleNet held two "Harry Potter" book release parties in coordination with the Magic Tree and has compiled stories and details of the Magic Tree's impressive 30-year existence. Read More »
Tag Archives: diagon alley
WWoHP continues bringing in the Galleons for Comcast Corp
Comcast Corp attributes first-quarter success to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter! Read all about it, and discover some fun facts about the theme park, here! Read More »
"Alohomora!" Episode 131: "Slow Your Roll" – now available!
MuggleNet's global book club, "Alohomora!", continues its re-read of the "Harry Potter" series. It's time to return to Dumbledore's office for the second lesson involving the story of Yyoung Tom Riddle! Join Kat, Rosie, Eric, and special guest author Melinda Salisbury as they discuss Dumbledore's actions and meet the future Lord Voldemort for the first time, in a discussion covering Chapter 13 of "Half-Blood Prince", "The Secret Riddle." Read More »
Universal Orlando Diagon Alley to pick up Thea Award this weekend
You might remember a little while ago that we posted the exciting news that the Universal Orlando Wizarding World of Harry Potter is going to receive a Thea Award. The award will be given to the theme park by the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) as part of the annual TEA Summit this weekend. Read More »
"Alohomora!" Episode 124: "So Obvious" – now available!
MuggleNet's global book club, "Alohomora!", continues its reread of the "Harry Potter" series. Diagon Alley has become a pretty dark place, and Malfoy is up to no good, but one stop at Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, and we're in much better spirits! Join hosts Kat, Michael, and Alison, along with special returning guest host Laura Reilly, as they discuss chapter 6 of "Half-Blood Prince". Read More »
Role Call: Singing Snape and TWO new guests for Expo Patronum announced!
It's an exciting week for "Harry Potter" fans - we've got tons of new roles to announce including TWO new Special Guests for MuggleNet Live! 2015: Expo Patronum, a music video starring Snape (who knew he could carry a tune?), another villainous role for a previous Doctor, new clips and trailers, and a look at new art from Diagon Alley artist Michael Curry and his design team. All that and more in this week's Role Call! Read More »
Book Review: Intrepid Traveler's "Universal Orlando 2015″
If you've been to Universal Orlando, you know how amazing and overwhelming Islands of Adventure and Universal Studios can be. If you have yet to make your trip, you may be anxiously awaiting your first visit, desperately wanting to make the most out of your time there. In either case, you may want to consider purchasing a travel guide to help you plan your next visit. For those Ravenclaws who like itineraries and lists, Intrepid Traveler's "Universal Orlando 2015" by Kelly Monaghan may be a worthwhile investment! Read More »
Win tickets to a special social media meet-up in Universal's Diagon Alley!
Bummed out because you don't have tickets to Universal's Celebration of Harry Potter? A contest running this month will give you a chance to attend one day of the festivities plus a special social media meet-up! Read More »
Diagon Alley, "The Silkworm", and MuggleNet Live!: Expo Patronum – Our 2014 Year in Review
It's that time of year again! MuggleNet looks back at all the ups and downs of "Potter" fandom in 2014 with our annual Year in Review. Read More »
Universal Orlando presented with awards for Diagon Alley
All those long lines this summer in Orlando, Florida, were worth it. The attention to detail and the complete immersion into Harry Potter's world led to the theme park being awarded with one of the industry's highest honors. Read more here! Read More »
Fantastical Orlando giveaway winners explore Diagon Alley
Remember our Fantastical Orlando giveaway? Our winner, Bryan, and his wife Emily share their experience with us! Check it out here! Read More »
New "Fountain of Fair Fortune" show premieres at Universal Orlando!
Only this week, we posted an interview with designer Michael Curry in which a brand new "Beedle the Bard" show was hinted at. Now, "Attractions Magazine" has revealed that a brand new show, another of Beedle the Bard's tales, is now being performed at the park! Read More »
Exclusive! Production designer Michael Curry talks Diagon Alley's "Tale of the Three Brothers"
In an exclusive interview with MuggleNet, production designer and award-winning artist Michael Curry opens up about bringing "The Tale of the Three Brothers" to life for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter: Diagon Alley and hints at possible upcoming WWoHP projects. Read More »
Pottermore releases Celestina Warbeck information!
Ever wondered about the background of Molly Weasley's favorite singer, Celestina Warbeck? Well, now, Pottermore has released brand new information written by J.K. Rowling about the magical singer, including the fact that today is the singer's birthday! Read More »
Becoming Harry Potter: Joining your world #MyMagicalWorld
Once we discover our magic and believe in our magic, it is time to find our magical world. For Harry, that world lay beyond a brick wall on a street called Diagon Alley. Read More »
A Celebration of Harry Potter coming to Universal Orlando Resort in 2015!
Universal Orlando Resort announces that they will be hosting the second annual "A Celebration of Harry Potter" expo in 2015! Read More »
Behind-the-scenes photos from Diagon Alley!
There's been lots of buzz recently around the opening of Diagon Alley in Orlando at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The sculptor, Bryn Court, who worked on all the "Harry Potter" films, as well as countless other movies, worked as head sculptor on Diagon Alley,creating many of the sculptures that you see in the park today. Check out a selection of behind-the-scenes photos below! Read More »
Universal celebrated one millionth ride on the Hogwarts Express!
It's been almost exactly one month since the official opening of Diagon Alley at Universal Studios in Florida, but the park is already celebrating a major milestone! Read More »
MinaLima on bringing "Harry Potter" magic to Diagon Alley
"Harry Potter" fans know the design team MinaLima as the force behind all the wonderful designs and props in the "Harry Potter" films. For the newly opened Diagon Alley extension of the Orlando theme park, Universal used MinaLima to help bring the park to life. In a new interview, the MinaLima team, Miraphora Mina and Eduardo Lima, speak about their work on Diagon Alley. Read More »
Christmas in July
A double dose of magic. Read More »


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1979 Triumph Spitfire, I have owned this car since 1996. I have all receipts for it. It has a new engine, tires, carpet,... More
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1976 Eldorado Coupe with Power Sunroof. Brown Vinyl Top, Brown Vinyl Interior. 500 CI 4BL Carburetor. Nice tires with white and gold accent stripes,... More
1974 Mercedes-Benz 450SL, This car was shipped from high desert in California to it's new home in New Hampshire. Rewired sections of the car,... More
1976 MG Midget Classic..Only 29,450 Miles. Four cylinder. This car has always been garaged and is in perfect condition both inside and out. I spent over... More
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1974 Mazda Rotary1974 Mazda Rotary in mint conditionSable-Grey metallic exterior with a two-tone Black and Grey interiorEquipped with a 13B Rotary engine with a... More
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The sum of all the numbers on a roulette wheel is 666.
Here's an excerpt from the 1985 special It's Your 20th TV Anniversary, Charlie Brown. There are worse ways to spend six minutes this
A word ladder is the challenge for today's Wednesday Wordplay segment at the mentalfloss.com Brain Game.
How America turned poverty into a crime.
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??If you're from a town with a strong union presence, you know that if new commercial construction happens without union labor, protests often follow.
Eighty-one years ago today, Betty Boop made her debut on the big screen.
USS Monitor was the Union's first ironclad warship in the Civil War; it was built is response to Confederate construction of the ironclad Virginia (previously known as Merrimack when in wooden fo
Oldfangled, meaning old-fashioned, is a word. Overway, meaning something has gone on for too long, is not.
Stereoscopic GIFs alternate between the left and right images of a stereogram, capturing the same image from two different vantage points positioned inches apart.
Retracing the life of August Landmesser and his tragic family history.
Trained law enforcement officers and negotiators apprehend the vast majority of criminals. Sometimes, though, a civilian steps in and makes their job much easier.
The mentalfloss.com Brain Game presents: Tuesday Test Time.
Transplant patient Lyndon Baty can't attend school in person since his immune system shut down. So he controls a robot that attends classes for him.
I made $8 at my mom's garage sale last weekend. That wasn't a typo—I only made eight dollars, which put me in the hole about $79 when you factor in the speeding ticket I got on the way to her house.
An escaped peacock from New York's Central Park Zoo found perching on Fifth Avenue window ledges drew attention—and international headlines—from news crews, bird watchers and well wishers last week.
What to do with old tires? Well, we can use them to make wonderful parks for our children, if you recall this post I wrote on unusual playgrounds.