Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a visual novel and adventure video game developed by Chunsoft. It is the first installment in the "Zero Escape" series, and was released in Japan in 2009 and in North America in 2010 for the Nintendo DS. The story follows Junpei, a college student who is abducted along with eight other people and forced to play the "Nonary Game", which puts its participants in a life-or-death situation, to escape from a sinking cruise liner. The gameplay alternates between two types of sections: Escape sections, where the player completes puzzles in escape-the-room scenarios; and Novel sections, where the player reads the game's narrative and makes decisions that influence the story toward one of six different endings.
Development of the game began after Uchikoshi joined Chunsoft to write a visual novel for them that could reach a wider audience; Uchikoshi suggested adding puzzle elements that are integrated with the game's story. The inspiration for the story was the question of where inspiration comes from; while researching it, Uchikoshi came across Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance hypothesis, which became the main focus of the game's science fiction elements. The music was composed by Shinji Hosoe, while the characters were designed by Kinu Nishimura. The localization was handled by Aksys Games; they worked by the philosophy of keeping true to the spirit of the original Japanese version, aiming for natural-sounding English rather than following the original's exact wording.
"Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" was positively received, with reviewers praising the story, writing and puzzles, but criticizing the game's tone and how the player is required to re-do the puzzles every time they play through the game (which is necessary in order to obtain the true ending). While the Japanese release was a commercial failure, the game sold better than expected for the genre in the United States. Although "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" was developed as a stand-alone title, its unexpected critical success in North America prompted the continuation of the series.
The sequel, "", was released in 2012, which was followed by "Zero Time Dilemma", released in 2016. An updated version of "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors", with voice acting and higher resolution graphics, was released alongside a port of "Virtue's Last Reward" in the 2017 bundle, "Zero Escape: The Nonary Games". This bundle was released on Steam, the PlayStation Vita, and the PlayStation 4.
Gameplay.
"Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" is an adventure game in which the player assumes the role of a college student named Junpei. The gameplay is divided into two types of sections: Novel and Escape. In the Novel sections, the player progresses through the branching storyline and converses with non-playable characters through visual novel segments. These sections require little interaction from the player as they are spent reading the text that appears on the screen, which represents either dialogue between the various characters or Junpei's thoughts. During Novel sections, the player will sometimes be presented with decision options that affect the course of the game, resulting in one of six endings. The whole plot is not revealed in just one playthrough; the player needs to reach the "true" ending to get all the information behind the mystery, which in turn requires another specific ending to be reached beforehand. Some endings contain hints to how to reach further endings.
In between Novel sections are Escape sections, which occur when the player finds themselves in a room from which they need to find the means of escape. These are presented from a first-person perspective, with the player being able to move between different pre-determined positions in each room. To escape, the player is tasked with finding various items and solving puzzles, reminiscent of escape-the-room games. At some points, the player may need to combine objects with each other to create the necessary tool to complete a puzzle. The puzzles include various brain teasers, such as baccarat and magic squares. An in-game calculator is provided for math-related problems, and the player can ask characters for hints if they find an Escape room too difficult. All Escape sections are self-contained, with all items required to solve the puzzles being available within that section; items are not carried over between Escape sections. After finishing an Escape section, it becomes available to replay from the game's main menu.
Plot.
Characters and setting.
"Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" features nine main characters, who are forced to participate in the Nonary Game by an unknown person named Zero. The characters adopt code names to protect their identities due to the stakes of the Nonary Game. The player-controlled Junpei is joined by June, a nervous girl and an old friend of Junpei whom he knows as Akane; Lotus, a self-serving woman with unknown skills; Seven, a large and muscular man; Santa, a punk with a negative attitude; Ace, an older and wiser man; Snake, a blind man with a princely demeanor; Clover, a girl prone to mood swings and Snake's younger sister; and the 9th Man, a fidgety individual.
The events of the game occur within a cruise ship, though all of the external doors and windows have been sealed, and many of the internal doors are locked. The game's nine characters learn that they have been kidnapped and brought to the ship to play the Nonary Game, with the challenge to find the door marked with a "9" within nine hours before the ship sinks. To do this, they are forced to work in separate teams to make their way through the ship and solve puzzles to find this door. This is set in part by special locks on numbered doors that are based on digital roots; each player has a bracelet with a different digit on it, and only groups of three to five with the total of their bracelet's number with the same digital root as marked on the door can pass through.
Story.
Junpei wakes up in a cabin inside a cruise liner, wearing a bracelet displaying the number "5". He escapes the room, and encounters the eight other passengers. Zero announces over a loudspeaker that all nine are participants in the Nonary Game. Zero explains the rules, and states each carry an explosive in their stomach that will go off if they try to bypass the digital root door locks. The 9th Man still goes through a door by himself, and is killed. Fearing what harm might come to them, the group adopts code names, and splits up to explore the ship. The player has the option to select which group that Junpei travels with, which affects the story; several choices lead to Junpei's death. Through various choices, Junpei learns of a previous Nonary Game, played nine years earlier, and the connections of the other characters through that, as well as studies about morphic resonance and stories of the Egyptian priestess Alice, who is frozen in Ice IX.
In one ending, Junpei learns that the first Nonary Game was run by Cradle Pharmaceutical, of which Ace is the CEO. Zero was a participant of this game, and had set up the second Nonary Game as revenge towards Ace. The surviving players confront Ace and learn he manipulated the 9th Man to violate the rules and get himself killed in order to both cover his identity and obtain the 9th Man's bracelet. As they find the door with the 9, Akane becomes weak. Santa watches over her while the others enter the door, leading to an incinerator, where Ace grabs Lotus and holds her at gunpoint. Discovering the incinerator is about to activate, Snake tackles Ace, and Lotus and Seven pull Junpei out of the incinerator before it goes off, consuming Snake and Ace. Junpei returns to Akane, finding her nearly dead. Zero says over the loudspeakers that the game's loser has been determined; Junpei acts defiant, but Zero clarifies that he is referring to himself. Junpei investigates a nearby room, and returns to find Akane and Santa have disappeared, after which he is knocked out by a gas grenade. After the player views this ending, they can then access the "true" ending.
In the true ending, Junpei learns that the previous Nonary Game consisted of nine pairs of kidnapped siblings separated onto the ocean-bound "Gigantic" and in a mock-up in Building Q in a Nevada desert. The game was designed to explore morphic fields; the research anticipated that the stress of the game would activate the fields between siblings, allowing solutions solved by one to be sent via these fields to their counterpart at the other location. This research was to help Ace cure his prosopagnosia. This Nonary Game went awry: Akane and her brother Santa were placed at the same location instead of being separated, and Seven discovered the kidnappings and rescued the children from the ship. Ace grabbed Akane before they could escape, and forced her into the incinerator room, and threatened her with death were she unable to solve a puzzle. Unable to solve the puzzle, Akane was apparently burnt to death while the other children escaped with Seven.
Junpei and the others reach the incinerator; Akane disappears and Santa escapes with Ace hostage, trapping the others inside. It is then revealed that the portion of the game's narrative portrayed on the bottom screen of the Nintendo DS is presented from a 12-year-old Akane's point of view during the first Nonary Game (in the game's 2017 re-release, Akane's perspective is actually the "NVL Mode" that displays narrative text unlike the "ADV Mode"). Through morphic fields, she connected to Junpei in the future, witnessing several possible realities and directing Junpei to help him survive. Junpei then faces the same puzzle Akane did, and relays the solution back to Akane in the past, allowing her to escape with Seven and the other children. Junpei realizes that Akane was Zero and, with assistance from Santa, had recreated the game and all the events she had witnessed in order to ensure her survival and avoid a temporal paradox. As Junpei and the others escape, they discover that the game had taken place in Building Q the entire time, and that Akane and Santa have fled, leaving behind a car with Ace restrained in the trunk. In the game's epilogue, they drive away hoping to catch up to them and, shortly after, pick up a hitchhiker whom Junpei recognizes as Alice.
Development.
"Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" was developed by the Japanese game studio Chunsoft and directed by Kotaro Uchikoshi, and produced by Jiro Ishii. Chunsoft had made successful visual novels in the past, such as "Kamaitachi no Yoru" (1994), but wanted to create a new type of visual novel that could be received by a wider audience; they contacted Uchikoshi, who at the time was working on a mobile game based on "Kamaitachi no Yoru", and asked him to serve as a writer for the then upcoming visual novel "". Uchikoshi did not join the company in time to work on "428", but came up with the idea to include puzzles that are integrated within a story, and need to be solved for the player to make progress: he enjoyed playing browser-based escape-the-room games, but thought that they would be more interesting if they had a larger focus on telling a story. This idea served as the basis for "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors", and Uchikoshi was named director of the project.
Development of "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" began in 2008. The inspiration for the story was the question "where do mankind's inspirations come from?"; Uchikoshi researched it, and found the British biochemist Rupert Sheldrake's theories of morphogenetic fields, which became the main theme of the game. The theory is similar to telepathy, which answers the question of how organisms are able to simultaneously communicate ideas to each other, without physical or social interaction. Uchikoshi used the theory to develop the concept of esper characters, which are able to either transmit or receive information from another individual. Because of the vital role of the number 9 in the plot, each of the characters was based on one of the nine personality types from the Enneagram of Personality. Another source of inspiration was "Kamaitachi no Yoru", which, like "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors", begins with putting the characters in a state of discomfort.
Uchikoshi started writing the script by working on the ending first. From there, he would continue to work backwards, in order to not get confused when writing the plot. The game's setting, with characters who are trapped and try to escape, was meant to embody two of humanity's instinctive desires: the unconscious desire to return to one's mother's womb and shut oneself away, and the desire to escape and overcome one's current condition. This was a theme Uchikoshi had used before, when writing the visual novel "" (2002). The illustrations by character designer Kinu Nishimura influenced the script, as certain scenes were altered to match the character illustrations. Among scrapped story elements were the use of hands as a major part of the story; in the final stages of production, Uchikoshi's higher-ups did not accept this focus, forcing him to re-write the story. The characters were originally supposed to be handcuffed to each other as they try to escape, but the idea was scrapped as it was seen as overused, with appearances in light novels such as "Mahou Shoujo Riska" (2004).
The Escape sequences were created to appeal to players' innate desires: Uchikoshi wanted them to feel the instinctive pleasure that he described as "I found it!". For the puzzles, he would consider the details within the story, and the props and gimmicks found in the game; after deciding on them, they were integrated with the puzzles. He also used puzzle websites as reference. He did not design the puzzles himself, instead leaving the puzzle direction to other staff, while checking it multiple times.
Shinji Hosoe, the president of the game music production company SuperSweep, was chosen to compose the game's soundtrack for being skilled in a wide range of music genres, ensuring that he could compose music that would fit a lot of different types of moods and scenes. He described his work on the game as the most straightforward music project he had had, due to receiving concise reference material that answered all his questions about the game; he made a few test tracks, after which everything went smoothly. The music was written using the Nintendo DS's internal synth, and Hosoe worked together with fellow SuperSweep composer Yousuke Yasui to make this less obvious.
Localization.
The North American localization of the game was handled by Aksys Games; Chunsoft was introduced to Aksys by Spike while looking for a company that could publish the game in North America. When Aksys evaluated "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors", many at the company did not believe in its commercial viability and at first turned it down; as many of the people who evaluate games at Aksys do not speak Japanese, it was difficult for them to gauge whether a game was good or not. In the end they decided to localize it, which was considered a big risk for the company.
The localization was done by the philosophy of keeping true to the spirit of the original Japanese, making dialogue sound like what a native speaker of English would say instead of strictly adhering the original's exact wording. The localization editor, Ben Bateman, did this by looking at the writing from a wider view, line by line or scene by scene rather than word by word or sentence by sentence, and thinking about how to convey the same ideas in English. Most parts of the game that include a joke in the localization also have a joke in the Japanese version, but a different one; Bateman did however try to make similar types of jokes, with similar contents and ideas. The game's use of Japanese language puns led to problems, as many of them relied on Japanese dialects to function; for these, Bateman replaced them with new puns in English. He was given mostly free rein in what he could change or add, as long as it did not disrupt the plot.
During the localization, Bateman had to keep track of the numerous plot points throughout the game, as the script had not been written in chronological order due to the numerous endings. Localizing the game took roughly two months. Another challenge was getting the localization done in time: Nobara Nakayama, the game's translator, worked on it for 30 days, and the editing process took two months. Because of this, Bateman had to do most of the work "on the fly". Nakayama had started playing the game prior to starting work on the localization, but did not finish playing it until she was more than halfway through translating it; after learning that the plot hinged on a Japanese pun, they had to halt the localization to discuss it with Uchikoshi and come up with a solution, after which they went through the whole game to make sure that it still made sense. Another problem Bateman ran into was related to the game's first person narration. A plot twist regarding the narration relied on the use of gender-specific first person pronouns at specific points in the story. As this would not work in English, the narration was made to instead be in the third person, and the twist's effect was replicated by shifting from third to first person at a specific story point. However, Bateman admits that the twist is "more mindblowing in Japanese".
During a scene related to an abstract painting of a dog, one of the localized answers for what the painting depicts is "Funyarinpa", a nonsense word, and picking it prompts a humorous exchange between Junpei and Lotus. This became a highly popular meme within "Zero Escape" circles, to the point where the "Nonary Games" remaster included the joke in the Japanese dub.
Release.
"Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" was originally released in Japan by Spike on December 10, 2009, for the Nintendo DS. An American release followed on November 16, 2010. In the United States, a replica of the in-game bracelets was included with pre-orders at GameStop; due to low pre-orders, Aksys made these available on their website's shop, both separately and bundled with the game. Upon release, "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" became the eleventh Nintendo DS game to be rated M by the ESRB. It was a commercial failure in Japan, with 27,762 copies sold in 2009 and an additional 11,891 in 2010, reaching a total of 39,653 copies sold. Meanwhile, American sales were described as being strong; according to Uchikoshi, this was a surprise, as the visual novel genre was seen as being particular to Japan and unlikely to be accepted overseas.
In addition to the game, other "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" media was released. The game's soundtrack was published by SuperSweep on December 23, 2009. A novelization of the game, "Kyokugen Dasshutsu 9 Jikan 9 Nin 9 no Tobira Alterna", was written by Kenji Kuroda and released by Kodansha in 2010 in two volumes, titled "Ue" and "Shita". Coinciding with the release of the game's sequel, "" (2012), "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" was reprinted under the title "Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors", with new box art featuring the "Zero Escape" brand.
An iOS version of the game, "999: The Novel", was developed by Spike Chunsoft as the second entry in their "Smart Sound Novel" series. It was released in Japan on May 29, 2013, and worldwide in English on March 17, 2014. This version lacks the Escape sections of the Nintendo DS version, and features high resolution graphics and an added flowchart that helps players keep track of which narrative paths they have experienced; additionally, dialogue is presented through speech bubbles, and an extra ending is included. This version has since been removed from the App Store.
"Zero Escape: The Nonary Games", a bundle that contains remastered versions of "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" and "Virtue's Last Reward", was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita in the West on March 24, 2017. People who purchased the Windows version through Steam in its first week of release received a complimentary soundtrack, with songs from "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" and "Virtue's Last Reward". In Japan, the Microsoft Windows version launched on March 25 and the console versions on April 13. The European PlayStation Vita version was released on December 15. The "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" remaster retained most of the features from "The Novel", but the new ending was not included.
Reception.
"Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" was well received by critics, according to the review aggregator Metacritic. "Polygon" included it on a list of the best games of all time, crediting it with popularizing the visual novel genre in America.
Reviewers enjoyed the writing and narrative, with Andy Goergen of Nintendo World Report labeling it as "a strong argument for video games as a new medium of storytelling". Reviewers at "Famitsu" called the story enigmatic and thrilling. Carolyn Petit at GameSpot felt that the lengthy Novel sections amplified the fear and tension throughout the game, while Heidi Kemps of GamesRadar compared them to "high-quality thriller novels". Jason Schreier of Wired criticized the prose for being inconsistent, but said that the use of the narrator was clever and unusual. Susan Arendt at "The Escapist" called the story multi-layered and horrifying. Zach Kaplan at Nintendo Life liked the dialogue, but found the third-person narration to be dull and slow, with out-of-place or clichéd metaphors and similes. Both Chris Schilling at Eurogamer and Lucas M. Thomas at IGN felt that the urgency portrayed in the game's story sometimes was at odds with the tone or timing of the dialogue, such as lengthy conversations while trapped inside a freezer, or lighthearted dialogue and jokes. Thomas called the premise gripping, and said that the mythology, conspiracies and character backgrounds were engrossing. Tony Ponce at Destructoid said that the characters initially seemed like a "stock anime cast", but that the player discovers more complexity in them after moving past first impressions. Kaplan felt that each character was well developed, fleshed out and unique, and could pass for real people.
A "Famitsu" writer said that they enjoyed solving puzzles, and that it gave them a sense of accomplishment; similarly, Goergen, Petit, Schilling and Arendt called the puzzles satisfying to solve. Goergen found some puzzles to be cleverly done, but said that some were esoteric. Ponce and Petit liked that the puzzles never became "pixel hunts", and how everything is visible as long as the player looks carefully; because of this and the lack of red herrings, time limits and dead ends, Ponce found it to be better than other escape-the-room games. He applauded the large amount of content, saying that even someone only buying the game for the puzzles would be satisfied. Schilling and Thomas appreciated the puzzles, but found some solutions and hints to be too obvious or explanatory. Kemps found the puzzles excellently done and challenging, but disliked how difficult it was to reach the true ending. Kemps and Schreier appreciated how the puzzles felt logical, while they, along with Thomas and Arendt, criticized how the player has to re-do puzzle sequences upon subsequent playthroughs. Goergen, Schreier, Thomas and Arendt all appreciated the fast-forward function, as it made repeated playthroughs more bearable, but Thomas felt that it didn't go far enough in speeding up the process.
Goergen found the sound designs to be unmemorable, saying that the music does not add much and that players would be likely to mute the game after hearing the "beeping" sound effect used for dialogue for too long. Meanwhile, Ponce and Petit liked it: Ponce called the score "masterful" and said that it "gets under your skin at the right moments", while Petit said that she appreciated the sound, which she called atmospheric and "[sending] shivers up your spine". She was unimpressed with the environments, but said that they were clear and easy to look at. She liked the character portraits, calling them expressive and, paired with the dialogue, enough to make the player not care about the lack of voice acting. Ponce, too, felt that the game did not need voice acting. He felt that the way the game favored textual narration over animated cutscenes made it more immersive, allowing the player to imagine the scenes. Goergen said that the graphics were well done, but that they did not do much for the atmosphere. Kaplan called the presentation "awesome", saying that it looked great and that the artwork stood on its own despite the simplicity of the animations, and that the soundtrack was "fantastic".
"Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" received some awards from gaming publications, including: Best Story of 2010 from IGN, Best Graphic Adventure of 2010 on a Handheld System from RPGFan, and an Editor's Choice Award from Destructoid. Bob Mackey at "1UP.com" featured "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" on a list of "must-play" Nintendo DS visual novels, citing its story, themes and "zany narrative experimentation", and Jason Schreier at "Kotaku" included it on a list of "must-play" visual novels worth playing even for people who do not like anime tropes. RPGFan listed it as one of the thirty essential role-playing video games from the years 2010 to 2015.
Sequels.
"Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" is the first game in the "Zero Escape" series, and was originally intended to be a stand-alone game. The development for the sequel began after the first game got positive reviews. "", the successor to "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors", was announced in August 2011. Developed by Chunsoft for the Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita, the game was first released on February 16, 2012 in Japan, and later that year in North America and Europe. "Virtue's Last Reward" also follows a group of nine people, and focuses on game theory, specifically the prisoner's dilemma. "Zero Time Dilemma" is set between the events of the previous two games, and has morality as its main theme.


Sateen

Sateen is a fabric made using a satin weave structure but made with spun yarns instead of filament.
The sheen and softer feel of sateen is produced through the satin weave structure. Warp yarns are floated over weft yarns, for example four over and one under. (In a weft-faced satin or sateen, the weft yarns are floated over the warp yarns.) Standard plain weaves use a one-over, one-under structure. The long floats produce a surface that is smooth to the touch and reduces light scattering to increase shine. This weave structure is more susceptible to wear than other weaves.
In modern times cheaper rayon is often substituted for cotton. Better qualities are mercerized to give a higher sheen. Some are only calendered to produce the sheen, but this disappears with washing.


Rob MacKillop

Rob MacKillop (born 1959) is a Scottish composer and multi-instrumentalist, specializing in lute, theorbo, vihuela, banjo, ukulele and both classical and Russian guitar. He is an important performer of Early Music in Scotland. He is also a photographer.
Biography.
Rob MacKillop was born in Dundee, Scotland. After a youthful period of playing the ukulele, MacKillop started teaching himself guitar as a teenager, playing along to records of Muddy Waters and Johnny Winter. When 17 years old, he was asked by his brother-in-law, Angus McFarlane, to play slide guitar on what was claimed to be Scotland’s first punk single, though it was more in the style of pub rock with a Stones/New York Dolls influence. The single was re-released in 2017.
In 2001, he was awarded a Churchill Fellowship for his research into medieval Scottish music. In 2004, he was named Composer in Residence for Morgan Academy in Dundee, and in 2001 was Musician in Residence for Madras College, St Andrews. He also organized and directed the Dundee Summer Music Festival. He was formerly Musician In Residence at Queen Margaret University, Musselburgh near Edinburgh.
MacKillop recorded several compositions by Roman Turovsky on vihuela, lute and theorbo. Turovsky's Cantio Sarmatica CXI was dedicated to MacKillop.
Discography.
He has recorded seven CDs of music for various early plucked instruments, three of which reached the Number One position in the Scottish Classical Music Chart.
Family.
MacKillop's wife Susan Rennie is a writer who translated the "Adventures of Tintin" into Scots.
Bibliography.
MacKillop is an author of many didactic music scores published by Mel Bay.


Party Supplies

Party Supplies are an American record production and songwriting team, composed of Justin Nealis and Sean Mahon. On August 27, 2013, Justin Nealis and Sean Mahon released their first album as a group, titled "Tough Love", on Fool's Gold Records. "Rolling Stone" rated "Tough Love" as the 13th best dance album of 2013 and described the album as being "dance music for introverts."


Mitzie Collins

Mitzie Collins (born August 29, 1941) is an interpreter of traditional British and American vocal and instrumental music.
She has arranged songs, including Genesee County waltzes. Collins is a player of the dulcimer and other instruments, including the piano, organ, harpsichord, and banjo. As a recording and concert artist, she is best known for playing traditional music for the hammered dulcimer. She is also one of the directors of the Striking Strings Hammered Dulcimer Ensemble, a large ensemble consisting entirely of hammered dulcimerists, who perform around Western New York. Some of her many albums are "Ornaments—Music for Christmas", "Be Thou My Vision—Favorite Hymns for Dulcimer" and "St. Patrick's Day in the Morning—Music of Irish Inspiration".
For ten years, Collins hosted "Sounds Like Fun", a children's radio show on WXXI-FM in Rochester, New York. Collins is president of Sampler Records Ltd. in Rochester, New York. She is also on the faculty of the Eastman School of Music, and she teaches several classes, including hammered dulcimer classes, at the Eastman Community Music School.


Jacques Buus

Jacques Buus (also Jakob Buus, Jachet de Buus) ( – late August, 1565) was a Franco-Flemish composer and organist of the Renaissance, and an early member of the Venetian School. He was one of the earliest composers of the ricercar, the predecessor to the fugue, and he was also a skilled composer of chansons.
Life.
Buus was probably born in Ghent around 1500, though details of his early life, as is the case with most Renaissance composers, are scanty. Possibly he either studied or had his early career in France, and he maintained some connections there throughout his life. In 1538 he published his first chansons, in Lyon by the printer Jacques Moderne.
Three years later he went to Venice and auditioned for the post of second organist at St. Mark's, winning the job, and working alongside the existing organist, Frate Giovanni Armonio. This was during the tenure of Adrian Willaert, who built the musical forces at St. Mark's into one of the most impressive in Europe, second only in quality to the papal chapel in Rome. Buus stayed at St. Mark's until 1550, when he departed for France, ostensibly because he was unable to pay his debts; however it has been suggested that he left because he had become a Protestant. In 1543 he had dedicated a volume of chansons to the Calvinist Duchess of Ferrara, and in 1550 he sent a book of Protestant "chansons spirituelles" to the Protestant Archduke Ferdinand II in Vienna. Late in 1550 he went to Vienna to work at the Habsburg court, and he remained there for the rest of his life, ignoring entreaties from Venice to return.
Music and influence.
Buus was influential in the development of the instrumental ricercar; he wrote the longest ever composed, one of which has no less than 98 points of imitation. Another has 358 breves (equivalent to 716 bars of 4/4; at the typical "tactus" of the time - 60 to 80 minims, i.e. half-notes, to the minute - the piece would take 15-20 minutes to play). They are elaborately contrapuntal, making use of all the standard devices of Franco-Flemish polyphony, including augmentation, diminution, inversion, and so forth.
He also wrote sacred vocal music, including motets and "chansons spirituelles", a specifically Protestant form, although these were not for performance in Catholic Venice. The motets are similar in style to those of Nicolas Gombert, with dense textures, pervasive imitation, and free treatment of the source material.


Enchanted Scepters

Enchanted Scepters is a point-and-click adventure game, released in 1986 (with a 1984 copyright date on the box and floppy label).
The player must find the four fire, earth, air and water scepters hidden across the Kingdom, and return them to the Wizard. The gameplay is much like a text adventure game; the screen shows a picture of the room the player is currently in and to the right is a description of the room. The description mentions any items that can be used or picked up, but to do that the player must click on the item in the picture. The pictures change as the player moves to a new scene. There is no movement in the picture, but enemies are inserted when encountered, accompanied by sound effects. The player can then choose from a drop down menu whether to flee, and which way (north, south, east or west and occasionally up or down), or to fight, and with which weapon.
"Enchanted Scepters" was created with the World Builder adventure authoring system which was later released to consumers in 1986.
Legacy.
Perhaps due to confusion resulting from the back-dated copyright year on the box and disk label, "Enchanted Scepters" has been incorrectly reported as being the first Macintosh game released that used digitized sound—this was actually Silicon Beach Software's earlier release, "Airborne!" It has also been incorrectly described as the first adventure game to use a point-and-click interface, but in that regard it was preceded by (at least) Déjà Vu from ICOM Simulations, released in 1985.
In 1990, a fangame titled "Lost Crystal" was released that was also developed using the "World Builder" engine and that took up the plot of "Enchanted Scepters".


The Sky Crawlers (film)

 is a 2008 Japanese animated war film, directed by Mamoru Oshii. It is an adaptation of Hiroshi Mori's novel of the same name. It was released across Japanese theatres by Warner Bros. Japan on August 2, 2008. Animated by Production I.G, the film was written by Chihiro Itō, featuring character designs by Tetsuya Nishio and music by Kenji Kawai. The 3D CG animation for the movie was produced by the Polygon Pictures studio, who also produced the 3D CG for Oshii's previous film "".
Plot.
"The Sky Crawlers" is set in an alternative history timeline where although the world is at peace, in order to ease the tension of a populace accustomed to war and aggression, private corporations contract fighter pilots to engage in actual combat operations against each other. The film introduces a mystery involving characters called - humanoids genetically engineered in a way that enables them to live eternally in adolescence.
After the deaths of three pilots of the Rostock Corporation at the hands of a J2 Skyly piloted by the Lautern ace pilot 'Teacher', Yūichi Kannami is reassigned to Area 262. After meeting with the Chief Mechanic Towa Sasakura, he inquires as to the fate of the predecessor who had left the Sanka Mk.B pusher-prop assigned to him in pristine condition prior to his disappearance. Kannami is told to ask the base's CO Suito Kusanagi, who quickly dismisses him after informing him of a sortie that is to take place the following day. Shortly afterward, he meets the rest of the base's piloting corps: Aizu Yudagawa, Yuriyuki Shinota and Naofumi Tokino. After observing Yudagawa folding a newspaper in a certain way, Kannami learns that the fifth pilot in Area 262 is Kusanagi.
Tokino and Kannami embark upon a reconnaissance mission the following day, which is interrupted by three enemy fighters from the Lautern Corporation. The three pilots are quickly dispatched and the duo return to the base without incident. Once again, Kannami inquires as to the fate of his predecessor Kurita Jinroh, while questioning if Kusanagi is a Kildren as well. Less than willing to reveal the details of Jinroh's absence as well as information about her own nature, Kusanagi ignores Kannami's questions by dismissing him. Later that evening, Tokino and Kannami visit Danielle's Diner, where they are met shortly afterward by Kusumi and Fuuko - the latter of which Kannami has sex with. Fuuko informs Kannami of the relationship she had with Jinroh, while acknowledging that Kannami's existence must mean that Jinroh is no longer alive.
Returning from sortie early due to an oil leak, Kannami meets Mizuki Kusanagi, who introduces herself as Suito's younger sister, who inquires as to the nature of the Kildren. Tokino, returning later, reveals that Mizuki is not Suito's younger sister, but rather Suito's daughter. Discussing the matter with Suito, she wonders what will happen when Mizuki reaches Suito's age, revealing that Suito is indeed a Kildren. Speaking with Yudagawa later, he reveals that Kusanagi is always armed, and that she was the one who apparently shot Jinro.
A sponsor tour of the base is interrupted by the downing of a Rostock Sanka Mk.B from the neighbouring area. Arriving on the scene, Kusanagi berates a group of civilian observers for pitying the killed pilot before leaving the scene with Kannami. Later, Kannami visits the diner again, but his leave is cut short by the arrival of Lautern heavy bombers. Able to warn the base of the arriving bombers, Kusanagi sorties the pilots, taking Kannami's plane in his absence. The two visit theatre command, where they are met with an officer trying to bar them from meeting with Kusanagi's superior. The two later visit an isolated lodge, which, according to Kusanagi, "no-one visits twice". Kannami asks Kusanagi if the Yudagawa's story of Kusanagi killing Jinro is true, to which Kusanagi asks if Kannami "wants to be killed as well".
During a later sortie, Yudagawa and Kannami spot several Lautern bombers with fighter escorts. Rushing ahead to engage the enemy alone, Yudagawa is shot down by a J2 Skyly with a black jaguar painted on the side, the insignia of the Lautern ace known as "The Teacher". Discussing the matter with Tokino and Yuri, Kannami hears the rumour that the Teacher is not a Kildren, but a normal adult. Kusanagi orders all the remaining pilots sortie to hunt down the Teacher, taking Kannami's plane personally. Later, Tokino and Yuri return without Kusanagi, who rushed off alone after spotting the Teacher. Kannami's crashed Sanka is later found by Fūko, and the injured Kusanagi is brought back to base for treatment. Fūko reveals that Kusanagi once visited one of her clients, and had sex with him. Kannami asks Sasakura about Mizuki, but is, as always, unwilling to part with information easily.
The pilots are called to March-Hare base in preparation for a major Rostock operation against one of Lautern's major bases. Tokino and Kannami meet with Midori Mitsuya, March-Hare's ace pilot, who seeks out Kannami, having heard about his reputation. The pilots are briefed on the large operation, and are placed on escort for the fifty bombers. The collective pilots sortie, March-Hare's twin-engined heavy fighters pooled together with 262's Sanka-B's.
The operation commences, with Rostock's fighters refueling in mid-air. The pilots engage Lautern's fighters, but despite their best efforts, the Rostock forces lose several of their heavy bombers. The fighters are ordered to retreat and return to base, albeit without Yuri. 262 Squadron is reinforced by March-Hare's remaining pilots and their machines, Midori among them. During a debriefing session, Midori reports on the loss of two of March-Hare's pilots, describing the Teacher's aircraft and the exact way the Teacher shot them down at point-blank range.
Later that evening, Tokino, Kannami and Kusanagi go bowling together. After Tokino leaves, Kannami asks Kusanagi about the day she was shot down, and inquires as to her relation to the Teacher. Kusanagi reveals that the Teacher was not only once a member of Rostock, but her former superior officer. Kusanagi contemplates the nature of war, and how the perpetual existence of war mandates an undefeatable enemy, which exists in the form of the Teacher. Later, a heavily intoxicated Kusanagi puts a gun to Kannami's head before asking him to kill her, lest "nothing change" for them.
The pilots return to 262's base with the new March-Hare additions. Midori inquires about Mizuki, while Kannami encounters a new pilot, Aihara, who is a dead ringer for the late Yudagawa, right down to folding his newspaper in the same fashion. The base personnel settle into their familiar routines, while Midori begins to search for answers about Kusanagi. Sasakura reveals that Kusanagi, as such a skilled pilot, was one of the few Kildren who survived long enough to question their existence, while Midori expresses her lack of understanding of how the base personnel can be so complacent with the state of affairs.
Midori visits Kannami, questioning Kannami's memories and how he copes with his life. Theorising that Kannami copes by blurring his memories with the present, falling into an endless repetition of now. Midori reveals the nature of the Kildren's conception: they are an accidental by-product of Rostock's experiments with genetics, and as a result, they do not age, and cannot die unless killed. Midori suffers a nervous breakdown, questioning her own memories, wondering if she, too, is a Kildren, and crying about how she cannot recall anything of her childhood, questioning if she ever had one. She continues, revealing her conclusions: Kusanagi shot Jinro to end the perpetual repetition of the life of a Kildren, but he didn't die: he simply became Kannami, implanted with new memories to maintain his skills as a pilot.
Later that evening, Midori tries to shoot Kusanagi. Kannami, intervening at the sound of Midori's gunshot, proposes that he shoot Kusanagi, which appears to her as a "fine idea". As Kannami disarms Midori, she leaves, revealing that Kusanagi had Midori under her own gun the whole time. Kusanagi admits to killing Jinro on his own request, before asking Kannami to shoot her in turn. Kannami refuses to shoot Kusanagi, insisting that she must continue to live until she can change things.
The pilots leave on sortie, flying a patrol as Kannami contemplates how one can find new experiences even if one has travelled the same path before, and regains his memories as Jinro. Midori sights the Teacher's J2 Skyly, and Kannami engages the Lautern ace alone, resolving to "kill his father". After a brief dogfight, the Teacher executes his unique maneuver against Kannami's Sanka-B, and Kannami is killed in action. One by one, the base personnel accept that Kannami is not coming back.
Isamu Hiragi, Kannami's replacement, arrives at 262. His face is not seen, but his physical mannerisms in exiting his plane are identical to Kannami's, as is his lighting a cigarette, and the tone of his voice. As Sasakura looks on impassively from the hangar, as if she'd seen the scene play out many times before, the viewer is given a final strong hint that the Kildren may all be clones. Hiragi is greeted by Kusanagi in a much warmer fashion, telling him that she's "been waiting for him to arrive".
Aircraft.
Rostock
Lautern
Production.
Author Mori said he felt "The Sky Crawlers" was the "most difficult" of his works to adapt, and only consented to its filming after learning of Oshii's directorial involvement.
Soundtrack.
"All music by Kenji Kawai."
The song used in the end credits, "Konya mo Hoshi ni Dakarete", sung by Ayaka, was not included in the soundtrack.
Distribution.
"The Sky Crawlers" was distributed in Japan by Warner Bros. Japan. It was subsequently distributed internationally by Sony Pictures, who initially announced their plans on the film's North American premiere at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. They consequently sent this film as their entry for Best Animated Feature at the 81st Academy Awards.
The American release of the film differs from the Japanese release in that the song used during the ending credits of the Japanese version, "Konya mo Hoshi ni Dakarete", by Ayaka, is not used in the American release.
Reception.
The film was an official selection of the 65th Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Future Film Festival Digital Award, and the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. Later, the film competed officially at the famed Sitges - Catalan International Film Festival, where it won three separate awards: the Jose Luis Guarner Critic Award, Best Original Soundtrack (for Kenji Kawai) and an award given by the Carnet Jove Jury for "the best motion picture for a youth audience." The film was also in the official selection at the Helsinki International Film Festival and Stockholm International Film Festival. The International Press Academy nominated it for the Best Motion Picture. It won Best Animation Film at the 63rd Mainichi Film Awards.
The film received positive reviews from film critics. It holds a 80% approval rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 10 reviews with an average score of 6.86 out of 10. Anime News Network gave the film a B+.
Video game.
A video game based on the film, "", was released for the Wii in October 2008 in Japan. It was released in North America and Europe in early 2010. Both Mamoru Oshii and Hiroshi Mori were involved in consulting development for the game.


Robert F. Boyle

Robert Francis Boyle (October 10, 1909 – August 1, 2010) was an American film art director and production designer.
Born in Los Angeles, Boyle trained as an architect, graduating from the University of Southern California (USC). When he lost his job in that field during the Great Depression, Boyle found work in films as an extra. In 1933 he was hired as a draftsman in the Paramount Pictures art department, headed by supervising art director Hans Dreier. Beginning with Cecil B. DeMille's "The Plainsman", Boyle went on to work on a variety of pictures as a sketch artist, draftsman and assistant art director before becoming an art director at Universal Studios in the early 1940s.
Boyle collaborated several times with Alfred Hitchcock, first as an associate art director for "Saboteur" (1942) and later as a full-fledged production designer for "North by Northwest" (1959), "The Birds" (1963), and "Marnie" (1964). Denied permission to shoot footage on Mount Rushmore, Hitchcock turned to Boyle to create realistic replicas of the stone heads.
Boyle abseiled down the monument, photographing its contours in detail, before constructing "just enough to put the actors on so we could get down shots, up shots, side shots, whatever we needed." Almost two decades earlier, Boyle had delivered the Statue of Liberty reproduction that was used in the climactic scene of "Saboteur". For "The Birds", Boyle was put in charge of the title characters. He later recalled, "We needed to find out which birds we could use best, and finally settled on two types: sea gulls, which were very greedy beasts that would always fly toward the camera if there was a piece of meat, and crows, which had a strange sort of intelligence." Boyle described his relationship with Hitchcock: "It was a meeting of equals: the director who knew exactly what he wanted, and the art director who knew how to get it done."
When director Norman Jewison failed in his attempts to get the necessary submarine that was at the center of his "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming" storyline, Boyle built a working model from styrofoam and fiberglass.
Boyle's other credits include "It Came from Outer Space", "Cape Fear", "In Cold Blood", "Fiddler on the Roof", "Portnoy's Complaint", "Winter Kills", "W.C. Fields and Me", "The Shootist", "Private Benjamin", "Staying Alive", and "Troop Beverly Hills".
During the course of his career, Boyle was nominated four times for the Academy Award for Best Art Direction, but never won. In 1997 he received the Art Directors Guild's Lifetime Achievement Award, and he was voted an Honorary Academy Award by the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, "in recognition of one of cinema's great careers in art direction," which he received during the 80th Academy Awards ceremony on February 24, 2008.
At the age of 98, Boyle became the oldest winner ever of an Honorary Award in the history of the Academy Awards. In ill health and arriving to the ceremony in a wheelchair, Boyle insisted on walking onstage, alongside Nicole Kidman, to receive the honor. He was the subject of the Academy Award-nominated documentary short "The Man on Lincoln's Nose" (2000).
Personal life/death.
Boyle's wife, Bess Taffel, whose career began in the Yiddish theatre, was a Hollywood blacklistee, whose film career ended in 1951 after she was "named" by Leo Townsend, although her husband's career was apparently unharmed. They lived in a house that Bob designed and built in The Hollywood Hills, for their entire marriage.
Unable to have children of their own, they adopted two girls; Emily Rebecca Boyle, in 1956 and Susan Anne Boyle (Licon) in 1959. He also worked at the American Film Institute's Center for Advanced Film Study program in Los Angeles as the Production Design instructor.
A widower since 2000, Boyle died on August 1, 2010 in Los Angeles due to natural causes.


Cousin Emmy

Cynthia May Carver (March 14, 1903 – April 11, 1980), known professionally as Cousin Emmy, was a banjo player, fiddler and country singer who was one of the pioneering solo female stars in the country music industry. Although hit records eluded her, she proved to be a major name in personal appearances and on radio in the 1940s and 50s. In the 1960s she gained a new audience on the folk music circuit. Her song "Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man?" became a bluegrass standard after it was covered by the Osborne Brothers. She started out her career by playing with Frankie Moore's Log Cabin Boys. She influenced the playing of Grandpa Jones. She appeared in two films, "Swing in the Saddle" and "The Second Greatest Sex".
Early years.
Cousin Emmy was born into a family of sharecroppers, with six older siblings and one younger.
Career.
Cousin Emmy began performing as a small child. Playing five-string banjo, she performed with two Carver cousins in a band broadcast on WHB in Kansas City, Missouri. After developing a following in her native Barren County, Kentucky, she eventually attracted the attention of radio station WHAS in Louisville, where she became a featured act with Frankie Moore's Log Cabin Boys in 1935. Between her radio performances, she performed in live shows, often traveling as much as 500 miles in one day.
In 1935, she won the National Oldtime Fiddlers' Contest – the first woman to do so. By 1938, she had her own touring group and a radio program.
As her radio shows gained popularity, she moved on to larger markets at WNOX in Knoxville, Tennessee, at KMOX in St. Louis (beginning in 1941) and Chicago. Her KMOX broadcast attracted more than 2.5 million listeners "from Canada to Mexico." This popularity led to a recording contract at Decca Records. Although she recorded only one album for the label, this recording and her performances with Cousin Emmy and Her Kinfolk helped her develop a devoted fanbase.
In 1945, "Cousin Emmy ... Song Book" was published. It included photographs, a biographical sketch, and lyrics of nine songs.
Later, Cousin Emmy relocated to Los Angeles, where she appeared in the film, "Swing in the Saddle". She also appeared at local country music clubs while raising several adopted children.
After the Osborne Brothers heard Cousin Emmy and Her Kinfolk's recording of "Ruby Are You Mad?" on a jukebox, they recorded the song for MGM Records in 1956, and it remains one of their best known recordings. The song is perhaps best known today for its top five remake by Buck Owens in 1971. She also had an album, "Kentucky Mountain Ballads" in 1947 on the Decca label.
Cousin Emmy gained a new audience as a result of the folk revival of the 1960s. In 1961, while performing at a "Country & Western Night" show at Disneyland, she met the New Lost City Ramblers, one of several groups that had formed during that time. She appeared on "Rainbow Quest", a folk music series hosted by Pete Seeger. In 1967, the New Lost City Ramblers convinced Cousin Emmy to record with them on the album "The New Lost City Ramblers with Cousin Emmy". This led to an appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, excerpts of which were released on Vanguard, as part of an anthology collection and in "Festival", an Academy Award-nominated documentary.
An astute businesswoman, she retained the copyrights to her songs.
Death.
Carver died in Sherman Oaks, California on April 11, 1980, and is buried at the Eternal Valley Memorial Park in Newhall.


Gennady Myasnikov

Gennady Myasnikov (; 12 September 1919 – 1989) was a Soviet production designer. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction for his work on the epic film "War and Peace" (1967). He was born in Sosnovka (now Perm Krai).


Paul Sylbert

Paul Sylbert (April 16, 1928 – November 19, 2016) was an American Academy Award-winning production designer, art director, and set designer who directed on occasion.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a dressmaker, Sylbert grew up in the borough's Flatbush neighborhood and graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in 1946. He fought in the Korean War and attended the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania with his identical twin brother Richard. Early in their careers, they collaborated on "Baby Doll" and "A Face in the Crowd". Sylbert also attended the Hans Hoffman School of Art and The Actors Studio. He is a veteran of the United States Army and served in Korea. Sylbert was a member of the faculty at the Film and Media Arts department of Temple University in Philadelphia, PA where he taught courses in film studies. He also taught a course called Film: The Creative Process at Temple University in the Spring of 2014.
Sylbert died on November 19, 2016 at the age of 88.


Bill Dixon (game designer)

William R. Dixon is an American board game designer, who has four 18XX games published:
As of 2006, he is currently working on an expansion kit which will combine "1830", "1832", "1850", and "1870" into one large game covering the eastern half of the United States. The expansion kit will include the extra map pieces and components (ownership of all four games will be required), and be published, like "1832" and "1850," by Deep Thought Games.


Victoria Kovalchuk

Viktoria Kovalchuk (26 January 1954 – 4 April 2021) was a Ukrainian graphic artist, illustrator, designer, and writer.
Biography.
Born in 1954 in Kovel, Volyn region to an official and a doctor, Victoria Kovalchuk was interested in painting and writing since childhood and attended various art clubs and an evening art school. In school Kovalchuk took part in and won different regional and national literary contests. She has written a lot of fairy tales and short stories. Her articles on art and society are often published in Ukrainian newspapers.
During 1972-1978, Kovalchuk was studying at the Ukrainian Polygraph Institute. Upon graduating she worked as a head of book design department of the Ukrainian Polygraph Institute, the head of design at the publishing house The Highest School, the design editor of "Bricklager" publishing house, and a lecturer at the Ukrainian Design Academy.
Kovalchuk was an independent artist, who painted paintings and illustrated books. She has already completed about 200 books in various genres, among them more than thirty for children.
One of the greatest works is "ABC", which received the First Degree Diploma at the 2000 Ukrainian Art Books contest and was named the best book of the year. Specialists admit it's one of the best books on the alphabet in the world. "ABC" has been reprinted nine times for a total circulation of more than 200,000 copies.
Another book "Ukrainian folk clothing" contains her scientific research in the ethnography field. She worked on it for four years: from 1990 until 1994. A perfectly illustrated book, it was recognized as one of the best books of 2001.
Her children's book "The Golden Penguin" was published in the United Kingdom in 2004 and was presented in Covent Garden in London. Characters from the book were performed by the actors of the Covent Garden Theatre.
Kovalchuk has won a large number of other prizes in Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova. Her paintings have been shown at international exhibitions in Lviv, Kyiv, Koktebel, Moscow, and Volgograd. In 1999 Lviv State Television produced the film "Poetic Theatre of Victoria Kovalchuk" directed by Evgenij Bondarenko.
Creative work.
The creative motto of Victoria Kovalchuk is: "An artist is a herald, not the gardener of his own pride." A mythical realist, her work is greatly influenced by symbolism, futurism, and folk art. Since 2005 Kovalchuk has created her own line, called «prikolizm» (en: «fun-art»), a kind of protest against consumerism with decadent postmodernist decadence.
Living in Lviv, the town where various cultures cross, the artist tries to absorb the best traditions of Polish, Hebrew and Russian people that have lived in Galicia together for hundreds of years. Kovalchuk was also interested in life of the Carpathian Highlanders: their traditions, customs, and beliefs. Her pictures are full of love and tolerance.
Victoria Kovalchuk's artist works could be divided into several periods:
Death.
She died of complications caused by COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ukraine in Lviv on 4 April 2021.


Matthew Sernett

Matthew Lee Sernett is a game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games.
Career.
Matt Sernett was on the SCRAMJET team, led by Richard Baker, and including James Wyatt, Ed Stark, Michele Carter, Stacy Longstreet, and Chris Perkins; this team updated the setting and cosmology of "D&D" as the fourth edition was being developed.
His "D&D" design work includes the third edition "Fiend Folio" (2003), "Monster Manual III" (2004), "Races of Eberron" (2005), ' (2005), "Spell Compendium" (2005), the third edition "Tome of Magic" (2006), "Tome of Battle" (2006), ' (2007), and "" (2007). Additionally, he served as Editor-in-Chief of "Dragon" from February to December 2004.


Jazz shoe

A jazz shoe is a type of shoe worn by dancers. They are used in jazz dance and other styles of dance including acro dance, acrobatic rock'n'roll, and hip hop, and in other activities, such as aerobics.
Jazz shoes are available in a variety of styles, with varying features. They may be high-rise or low-rise, and may be slip-ons or lace-up Oxfords. Split-sole jazz shoes allow enhanced shoe flexibility, making it possible to flex the foot more easily. Most have rubber soles, which provide traction and also help to cushion the foot, and some have thicker heels for better shock-absorption. Jazz shoes typically come in a tan or black color. Some have a suede patch under the ball of the foot to facilitate turning.


Chinese Communist Party Provincial Standing Committee

Members of the standing committees of the Chinese Communist Party provincial-level committees, commonly referred to as "Shengwei Changwei" (), make up the top ranks of the provincial-level organizations of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In theory, the Standing Committee of a Party Committee manage the day-to-day party affairs of a provincial party organization, and are selected from the members of the provincial-level Party Committee at large. In practice, "Shengwei Changwei" is a position with significant political power, and their appointments are essentially directed by the central leadership through the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party.
Membership and rankings.
In each province, direct-controlled municipality, or autonomous region, membership in a Standing Committee ranges between 11 and 15 individuals. The leading members are ranked by the office they hold. The Party Secretary (or party chief) is ranked first, followed by the head of government (called a "governor" in provinces, but a "mayor" in municipalities and "chairman" in autonomous regions), always ranked second, and a "zhuanzhi" Deputy Party Secretary (that is, a "full-time" deputy party chief who oversees party affairs) is always ranked third. Often, but not always, a discipline inspection secretary is ranked fourth. Apart from these established ranking conventions, the remaining ranks of the Standing Committees are ordered by the date of advancement to the sub-provincial (vice-minister) level (among other things).
In general, the heads of the provincial-level Organization Department (in charge of human resources and personnel) and Propaganda Department (in charge of disseminating the party's agenda) earn "ex officio" seats on the provincial-level Standing Committee. Usually, the head of the "Zhengfawei" (i.e., Political and Legal Affairs Commission), the Secretary of Discipline Inspection, the party committee's Secretary-General, a representative from the military (usually, a commissar or a commanding officer of the local military district) and the first-ranked deputy head of government also have seats on the Standing Committee. In the provinces and autonomous regions, the party chiefs of the provincial capital also usually sits on the Standing Committee. The party chiefs of other large subdivisions may also sit on the Standing Committee, although this is not a strict rule. Occasionally, the head of the provincial-level United Front Department and the chair of the provincial Federation of Trade Unions organization also holds a seat on the Standing Committee.
"Shengwei Changwei" are considered sub-provincial-level ("fushengji") officials, meaning their ranks are equivalent to that of a deputy provincial governor or a vice minister of the state. Where both "Shengwei Changwei" and provincial vice-governors (who are not also "Shengwei Changwei") are present, the "Shengwei Changwei" ranks above the vice-governor. Provincial Standing Committee members are accorded "fushengji" rank if their concurrent post does not already afford them an equal or higher rank. For example, the party chief of Xining, capital of Qinghai province, would otherwise be considered a department-level ("tingjuji") official but the fact that he sits on the provincial Standing Committee makes him rank one level higher; in fact, he would actually rank higher than an ordinary provincial vice-governor who does not sit on the Standing Committee. Conversely, the party chief of Beijing is usually also a Politburo member, he therefore holds a sub-national rank by virtue of his Politburo membership, which is two ranks above a typical "Shengwei Changwei".
Qualifications and composition.
The gradual 'professionalization' of Communist Party cadres began in the 1990s, which meant that more emphasis was placed on candidate's educational background as well as seniority of experience. For example, many of those promoted from the turn of the century onward had master's or doctorate degrees in fields such as economics. By the time of the Xi Jinping years, having a master's degree had become essentially a "standard requirement" for promotion to a provincial Standing Committee, with some of those promoted having academic experiences at the world's top universities. The type of degrees varied; although Masters of Business Administration (MBAs) were common, others had engineering or medical backgrounds.
Age.
In terms of age, nearly all "Shengwei Changwei" who are not concurrently serving as party chief or head of government are between 45 and 60 years of age. It is general convention in the CCP that officials of sub-provincial (vice minister) rank retire at age 60. Unless they advance to full provincial rank, for example by becoming a Governor, a provincial party chief, or a minister of the state, they usually relinquish their posts at age 60. On the other hand, officials below 45 years of age have next to no chances on making it to this elite level of the party organization. For example, as of 2017, the youngest person with a seat on a provincial Standing Committee was the Secretary-General of the Shanghai party organization, Zhuge Yujie (born 1971), who was 46 years old at the time of his appointment. The effect of this is that "Shengwei Changwei" usually sit on the body for no more than three terms (each term is five years). The pace of turnover in membership is rapid: departures occur frequently as members reach retirement age or as individuals are transferred to another province or a ministerial post.
Since the 1990s, the majority of national leaders have extensive regional experience prior to their promotion to the top. Therefore, it is possible to discern who may be up for promotion to the national level from current provincial Standing Committee members simply by determining the age of the candidates; those in their late forties or early fifties are considered likely to earn promotion to the next level.
Regional profiles and ethnic minorities.
Unlike party chiefs and governors, who usually serve in a variety of locales during their careers, many "Shengwei Changwei" are "native" to the province in which they serve. There are notable exceptions to this, for example, in Shanxi province following the "earthquake" that shook its political establishment in 2014 when the majority of the provincial Standing Committee was rounded up for investigation, removed from the body, or transferred. The 'renewed' committee was made up of people mostly not native to Shanxi province. Since Xi Jinping's assuming the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in November 2012, many provinces have also seen Discipline Inspection chiefs being appointed by the centre and "parachuted" into their roles in the provinces.
Prior to the Xi Jinping years, ethnic minorities, with very rare exceptions, do not serve outside of their home region. Even within their home region, they often serve in 'token' positions - for example United Front chief, union leader, or in some cases no other position at all (essentially admitted to ensure ethnic balance on the body). However, since 2013, multiple ethnic minority officials have been transferred out of their home regions to take on positions in other provinces, including Ulan (Mongol), Erkenjen Turahom (Uyghur), and Liao Guoxun (Tujia).
Gender.
As of July 2017, 35 of the 375 "shengwei changwei" were female. Of the provinces, Hunan had the highest representation of female "shengwei changwei" in the country: three members on the Hunan standing committee were women. 80% of female "shengwei changwei" had previous experience as the party chief of prefecture-level cities or equivalent jurisdictions. The majority of female "shengwei changwei" served as the heads of provincial party departments, such as United Front, Propaganda, Organization, or as leaders of discipline inspection. As of 2018, three women, Bu Xiaolin, Shen Yiqin, and Xian Hui (curiously, all ethnic minorities), served as the heads of government; He Rong, Huang Lixin, Ulan, and Yu Hongqiu served as deputy party chiefs - a post with substantial clout.
Advancement.
Being a provincial-level standing committee member has evolved to become a "de facto" "prerequisite" for advancing to higher levels of the party and government. For example, every member of the 18th Politburo Standing Committee had at one point in their career been a provincial standing committee member. Most provincial-level governors and party chiefs also have prior experience as a member of a provincial-level standing committee.
Certain standing committee seats are seen as having more weight than others, solely due to promotion structure and conventions that have congealed over the years. The Deputy Party Secretary is the most prestigious sub-provincial level post - it is generally seen as the final 'training ground' prior to a promotion to governorship or a minister-level state position. The party chiefs of provincial capitals or other sub-provincial cities also often receive promotions; these are positions of substantive power as they oversee aspects of an area that would otherwise normally fall under provincial jurisdiction. Another closely watched position is the party committee secretary-general, perhaps due to the close proximity to the machinery of the party organizations they serve, and the youthful profile of many of its officeholders signalling promotion potential.
Standing Committees below provincial level.
Below the provincial-level, all administrative jurisdictions down to the county level all have their respective Party Standing Committees ( or 党委常委会 for short). Like their provincial counterparts, these committees serve as the "de facto" highest local leadership council of the Chinese Communist Party in any area of jurisdiction. The composition of the council can be compared to the Politburo Standing Committee, the "de facto" highest decision making body of the country, but is not exactly the same. Local Standing Committees function as the highest policy making body within the "party", but technically do not have executive powers of the "government" constitutionally.
The Standing Committee should not be confused with a "Party Committee" (), which is a distinct institution. A local Party Committee is a body composed of a much larger number of officials compared to the Party Standing Committee.
In general, the Party Standing Committee includes those concurrently holding the following positions:


Mary Jane Marcasiano

Mary Jane Marcasiano (born September 23, 1955) is an American fashion and costume designer, film producer, and social entrepreneur.
Early life and education.
Marcasiano was born in East Hanover Township, New Jersey and later attended Hanover Park High School, but left a year early to attend Montclair State University. After two years at the university, she left Montclair to attend Parsons The New School for Design.
While in still in art school, Marcasiano studied weaving and she started selling handwoven handbags, scarves, and accessories in New York.
Early career.
While attending Parsons, Marcasiano moved to the Soho area of Manhattan, a neighborhood that played an important role in her creative development and business approach. Recognized as one of the young downtown emerging designers she showed her first collection in 1979 at the Susan Caldwell Gallery in SoHo. In the early ‘80s Marcasiano became a member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America and was the awarded the Cartier, DuPont, Cutty Sark and Wool Knit Awards.
Creative aesthetic.
Marcasiano's design philosophy comes from a desire for comfort in her knitwear by using simple shapes. She would like her designs to be worn from the morning into the evening, in warm to cold weather, from sexy to serious. This comfort is achieved by combining Lycra-blend stretch fabrics into more traditional knitwear. Color chosen and matched for the type of yarn to enhance the impact of the color.
Marcasiano is currently inspired by Brazil and Africa, the countries she works with on her Made With Love Project. “I work in a lot of mediums these days,” says Marcasiano, “But the common thread for me is Brazil, a country and people which continually inspire me.”
Company.
Marcasiano formed her eponymous company in 1979 with her first womenswear collection and introduced a menswear line in 1980. In 1985 she licensed her name to shoes, furs and jewelry produced in Italy.
Marcasiano's business was purchased by Hampshire Designs in 1995 and was later acquired by Marisa Christina in 1998.
Marcasiano's designs have been sold in boutique, specialty and department stores around the globe and featured in Vogue, Harpers Bazaar and other fashion magazines.
Involvement in the arts.
Marcasiano has designed costumes for DanceBrazil, the New York City Ballet, RythMEK at Jacob’s Pillow, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, Michael Thomas Lab and for the short film “ Até Quando“. In 2009 Marcasiano collaborated with renowned artist Eric Fischl on costumes for his suite of sculptures titled “ Ten Breaths “ which was exhibited in Germany, Paris and New York. Marcasiano designed the costumes for the 2010/2011 world tour of Grammy award-winning singer Angelique Kidjo and was costume designer for the PBS Special "Angelique Kidjo and Friends: Spirit Rising". In 2013 Marcasiano designed costumes for the feature film “Reaching for the Moon” directed by Bruno Barreto.
In 2002, Marcasiano produced “Ginga”, a documentary film about Capoeira directed by Gustavo Moraes. She currently serves as Director of Development and Special Events Advisor to Cinema Tropical, a non-profit foundation that distributes and promotes Latin American cinema in the United States. She was the programmer for Cinema Tropical’s Music+Film series at 92YTribeca and directed their Brazilian film initiative Janeiro in New York.
Social entrepreneurship.
In 2007 Marcasiano created the "Made With Love Project", a non-profit global initiative dedicated to raising funds and awareness for NGOs aiding women and children in need. The project is supported through the production and sale of products that provide a fair income for women in Brazil, Africa and Haiti. Made With Love does their works through the Cygnet Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-for-profit public foundation.
Marcasiano also works with women's co-operatives in developing countries, particularly in Africa and South America, facilitating the sale and distribution of the products to a global market through web sales and strategic marketing alliances. The Made With Love Project directs the net proceeds received from the sale of those products to relevant children's charities in the region of the product’s origination.
Personal life.
Marcasiano lives in New York with her husband, photographer Ralph Gibson.


NASCAR Heat 3

NASCAR Heat 3 is a racing video game simulating the 2018 NASCAR Cup Series and feeder competitions. It was developed by Monster Games and published by 704Games. It is the sequel to "NASCAR Heat 2", and was released in North America and Europe on September 7, 2018 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Microsoft Windows via Steam. Hendrick Motorsports drivers Jimmie Johnson, Chase Elliott, Alex Bowman and William Byron are featured on the cover. The game features a new Xtreme Dirt series as part of an enhanced career mode.
Gameplay.
Career.
Like "NASCAR Heat 2", the career mode option for the game includes the option to play in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series, NASCAR Xfinity Series and NASCAR Camping World Truck Series. Additions for the third installment include a new Xtreme Dirt Tour and the option to manage your own team in NASCAR national series competition. The Xtreme Dirt Tour emulates the feel of local dirt track racing, with a variety of new tracks. Notable new tracks include a dirt version of Bristol Motor Speedway and tracks originally featured in "" that have received graphical updates. The Charlotte Motor Speedway road course is also available to play at in the Bank of America Roval 400 event.
Esports.
In 2019, NASCAR, the Race Team Alliance and 704Games created the eNASCAR Heat Pro League, an esports league for NH3. Interested players needed to qualify for a draft through a special set of online races. The draft was made up of teams owned by prominent NASCAR figures. Efforts were made to bring in nontraditional NASCAR demographics, such as shorter races.
Downloadable content.
As part of the cover deal, Hendrick Motorsports released free DLC packs after the game's release. Paid DLC packs were available from publisher 704Games.
Reception.
Awards.
The game was nominated for "Game, Franchise Racing" at the National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers Awards.


Microconsole

A microconsole is a small video game console. Many of them are low-cost Android-based devices that connect to a television set. One can then use the television to play video games downloaded from an application store, such as Google Play.
Origins.
In late 2010, cloud gaming startup OnLive released MicroConsole, a television adapter and wireless controller that connects the company's computer game streaming service to televisions. VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi described the device as representing the company founder's "vision to turn the video game industry upside down" as an inexpensive console providing "high-end games on low-end hardware" that could eliminate the cycle of regular consumer hardware upgrades. The MicroConsole TV adapter was produced at a loss. OnLive's MicroConsole made the company an early leader in the nascent microconsole field.
Amidst a "new war for TV" in the consumer electronics industry, an inexpensive and simple Android-based video game console designed for televisions called Ouya was announced for crowdfunding in July 2012. The Ouya was an overnight success and raised $8.5 million. Significant interest in low-cost Android console gaming followed Ouya's success, spurred by the mobile games industry growth. The industry began to refer to the resulting consoles as alternative consoles, or microconsoles.
"Polygon" reported that Android "consoles" were best-in-show at the January 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, citing devices like the MOGA Pro, Green Throttle Games Atlas controller, Nvidia Shield, and news of Valve's Steam Machine, a non-Android console. Following Ouya's success, other similar set-top Android gaming devices were announced as direct competitors, including the GameStick in early 2013, GamePop in May 2013, and Mad Catz's MOJO in June 2013. Forbes's Daniel Nye Griffiths referred to Ouya and GameStick's close release dates as the microconsole field's first "showdown". The GamePop and MOJO announcements in the early summer referred to the devices as "microconsoles".
The PlayStation TV (known in Asia as the PlayStation Vita TV) is a microconsole announced in September 2013 at a Sony Computer Entertainment Japan presentation. It was released in Japan on November 14, 2013 and in North America on October 14, 2014.
Reception.
Gamasutra called Ouya, GameStick, and GamePop "console alternatives" that represent "a potential new market space for developers". Tadhg Kelly, writing for "Edge", called 2013 "the year of the microconsole", citing less consumer need for traditional console power, the low price of microconsole manufacture, increased system compatibility for easier game development, and more developer freedom from console business interests. Microconsole promises of a less restrictive platform are expected to empower independent game developers. Kelly referred to the "deliberately small" microconsoles as "the netbooks of the console world", not intended to compete with big video game consoles. Other reviewers called the microconsoles competitors, though not a threat, and referred to a crowded "non-traditional console space" as a disadvantage. Kelly added that Ouya is heavily focused on the early adopter audience and its interests, and that Ouya's "natural advantage" of price has not been communicated effectively. "Edge" questioned possibilities of microconsole success due to competition within the field as well as from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft's new consoles.
The pre-release Ouya was panned by early reviewers. "The Verge" called it unfinished, and in a later review, "Eurogamer" questioned why consumers would purchase a console that duplicated the functionality of smartphones they already had.
The video game industry saw the digital media receiver on Apple's Apple TV as potential microconsole competition due to the company's experience in the mobile games market. "Polygon" reported in January 2013 that the Apple TV "continue[d] to be dangerously close to upending the mobile gaming space" and speculated that an Apple TV App Store could spark "a rush of games to the television".


John Peake (game designer)

John Peake is a game designer who has worked primarily on board games.
Career.
In early 1975, John Peake and his school friends – Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, who shared a flat in London's Shepherd's Bush with him – decided that they wanted to make games; they chose the name "Games Workshop" for their company because it reflected the fact that they would be crafting their games by hand. Peake was a craftsman and started out making backgammon games with inlaid mahogany and cherry veneer and soon expanded into crafting sets for mancala, nine men's morris, go, tower of Hanoi and other games. To support their newfound games business, Jackson, Livingstone and Peake started publishing a monthly newsletter, "Owl and Weasel" (1975–1977). In 1976, Peake, who had no interest in the new role-playing game industry, saw that Games Workshop was getting more involved with RPGs and decided to leave the company.


Space Quest 6

Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier is a point-and-click adventure game developed and published by Sierra On-Line in 1995. It is the sixth and final game in the "Space Quest" series.
Plot.
The game begins with Roger Wilco being court martialed for various humorous reasons (all of which Roger, being the idiot that he is, cannot defend properly). He is demoted back to his position as second class janitor aboard the SCS DeepShip 86 (a parody of "Deep Space 9"). Among the reasons for Roger being simply demoted and not expelled from StarCon is the "safe return of the SCS "Eureka"". This is a continuity error in that the "Eureka" was in fact destroyed in "Space Quest V".
Later, on the DeepShip, Commander Kielbasa (named after the kielbasa sausage and a parody of the Kilrathi from the "Wing Commander" series of video games) announces that, as reward for their excellence in "A Glitch In Time Saves Gamma Nine" (a parody of "a stitch in time saves nine"), they are to be given shore leave on the planet Polysorbate LX ("LX" pronounced "sixty", after the preservative). Meanwhile, an extremely old and wrinkled woman named Sharpei (after the dog breed of the same name, also noted for its wrinkles, and voiced by Lucille Bliss) is revealed to be plotting Roger's demise. It is later revealed that she is the subject of "Project Immortality", which was supposed to prolong life indefinitely.
Roger's adventures throughout the game have him dealing with a T-1000 like "endodroid" (a reference mostly to the replicants from "Blade Runner", including an "endodroid runner" giving Roger the assignment and speaking with a New York accent), entering cyberspace (mostly a desert canyon like area, an "office" resembling Windows 3.1, and a seemingly endless room of file cabinets known as the "file manager"), and venturing into Stellar Santiago's digestive system (for which humor is added through Gary Owens' narrations providing scientific detail of everything within each area, as if from a textbook).
Roger and Stellar develop a relationship that almost attracts Roger to the point of enamoration for her. This was designed as a way to potentially create another love interest for Roger. A running gag in the game is the inclusion of a rotting fish in Roger's inventory which he cannot seem to get rid of. It is revealed in an anti-climatic end that the fish is the only way to destroy Sharpei, who by the end of the game has become a virus infecting Stellar Santiago.
The game ends on a cliffhanger, with Stellar saying that Roger "is going to like his next mission". Despite this, "Space Quest 7" never came to fruition, and the cliffhanger was never resolved.
Development and release.
"Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in The Spinal Frontier" ran on the later SCI32 engine Rev 2.100.002. This allowed it to use Super VGA graphics with 256 colors at 640×480 resolution. Unlike other SCI games, it did not have the interface in a pull down bar at the top of the screen, but instead used a "verb bar" window along the bottom of the screen, similar to LucasArts' SCUMM engine. The graphics style was also more cartoonish than in previous games, as well as incorporating an ample amount of 3-D rendered images. Gary Owens served as narrator once again.
This game was the last to be released in the "Space Quest" series. Having defeated the diabolical pukoid mutants in "Space Quest V", Captain Roger Wilco triumphantly returns to StarCon headquarters - only to be court-martialed due to breaking StarCon regulations while saving the galaxy. The game's subtitle comes from the final portion, in which Roger has to undergo miniaturization and enter the body of a shipmate and romantic interest, a spoof of the 1987 movie "Innerspace". (This segment also provided the game's original subtitle, "Where in Corpsman Santiago is Roger Wilco?", which was not used due to legal threats from the makers of the "Carmen Sandiego" products.) The romantic interest provides a dilemma for Roger (unprecedented in the series) since she is a friend and someone other than the woman who bore Roger a son, according to the narrative in "Space Quest IV".
Josh Mandel designed the majority of "Space Quest 6" (with Scott Murphy on board in a "creative consultant" capacity) but had to leave the project shortly before completion due to internal strife with Sierra. Sierra asked Scott Murphy to complete the game, and then (reportedly against Murphy's wishes) promoted "SQ6" as if the former "Guy from Andromeda" was solely responsible for it. As an additional result of this change in designers, some puzzles—primarily in the later stages of the game—were poorly implemented due to lack of communication. In a 2006 interview, Mandel spoke candidly about his disappointment with the uneven puzzle design and implementation in the game, "One of the inventory items cut was a comic book CD in Nigel's room that was fully readable and had all the hints to the Datacorder puzzle. From a writing and design standpoint, it was fully finished, and I know that Barry Smith had started the artwork. I don't understand why it was cut. But the comic book content was something I'd worked on for months, and it was something that I was uncharacteristically proud of ... I think it would've been one of the greatest parody sequences in the SQ series. So not only was I very upset not to see it in the game, but the fact that they had to put the Datacorder hints in the manual, leading player to think it was meant to be copy protection, disturbed me greatly."
Sierra On-Line created a special CD-ROM version of "Space Quest 6"s demonstration game, which was distributed with Sierra's "Interaction Magazine", "PC Gamer" Disc 9 included with Volume 2, Issue 8 from August 1995, early pressings of "Phantasmagoria", and possibly other media. This self-contained demonstration featured an alternate story not related to the main game and is fully voiced by the "Space Quest 6" voice actors (early versions of the demo did not have full speech). The demo begins with Roger Wilco floating in space outside the bridge, washing the viewscreen while everyone else on the bridge is relaxing. Suddenly, out of nowhere, an Escher cube-shaped ship approaches the "Deepship 86" and beams aboard two toaster-headed mechanoids - the Bjorn (a parody of the Borg, with their cube being a parody of the Borg Cube, and named after tennis champion Björn Borg). They turn all of the crew into scoops of lemon sorbet (except Roger, who quickly ducked behind the viewscreen). Now it is up to Roger to find a way to restore his crewmates and drive off the Bjorn invaders.
Reception.
According to Sierra On-Line, combined sales of the "Space Quest" series surpassed 1.2 million units by the end of March 1996.
A critic for "Next Generation" dismissed "Space Quest 6" as being essentially identical to the previous five installments of the series aside from the specific puzzles. He gave the game three out of five stars, concluding, "If you liked the first five, you'll want this. If not, you probably aren't even reading this review." "PC Gamer US"s Gary Meredith wrote that it is "not the best of the "Space Quest" series", as it takes "a couple of steps backwards as far as the graphics and voice-overs are concerned". He criticized the game's narration, noting that he had disliked it in "Space Quest IV" as well. However, Meredith believed that "Space Quest 6" would appeal to fans of the series.
"Space Quest VI" tied for third place in "Computer Game Review"s 1995 "Adventure Game of the Year" award category. The editors noted its "good voice work" and "very nice animation", and praised its humor.


Mario Davignon

Mario Davignon is a Canadian costume designer, who won the Genie Award for Best Costume Design at the 25th Genie Awards in 2005 for the film "Head in the Clouds". He was a nominee for the award on five other occasions, at the 23rd Genie Awards in 2003 for "Savage Messiah", at the 27th Genie Awards in 2007 for "Tideland", at the 31st Genie Awards in 2011 for "The Trotsky", at the 5th Canadian Screen Awards in 2017 for "Race", and at the 6th Canadian Screen Awards in 2018 for "Hochelaga, Land of Souls (Hochelaga, terre des âmes)".
He won a Costume Designers Guild Award at the Costume Designers Guild Awards 2007, and was a finalist for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Costumes for a Miniseries, Movie, or Special, for his work on "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee".
In 2015, Davignon collaborated with clothing retailer Le Château to produce and sell a line of clothing based on his designs for the film "After the Ball".


Audrey Kitching

Audrey Lynn Kitching (born July 26, 1985) is an American fashion blogger, model, and fashion designer, known for her "pink hair and Lisa Frank vibe". Kitching dated Panic! at the Disco's lead vocalist Brendon Urie in 2005.
Kitching is the owner and founder of an online New Age store called Crystal Cactus. In February 2019, she became the centre of controversy when The Daily Dot detailed allegations of emotional abuse and fraud directed towards Kitching by a former employee.
Modeling.
Kitching was born in Collingswood, New Jersey. She began modeling at 14, after being discovered at a hair salon, initially appearing in newspaper ads. After obtaining a high school GED, she modeled for aspiring photographer friends, and started her blogging career by posting the images online. She often works as not only a model, but also art director for her photo shoots.
She has been a spokesmodel for designer Jared Gold, the British shoe company Irregular Choice, the Italian shoe brand Kerol D, and Kohl's Vera Wang. Kitching (who is mostly vegan, except for honey) has appeared in a national Peta2 "Fur Is Dead" campaign, and one of its public service announcement against animal testing in the personal care products industry. In 2013, she was selected to be Karmaloop's Miss KL of the Month, and in April 2014 she appeared in a campaign for a Ray Ban's collection, which was featured by "Elle Magazine". She has also appeared in "Vogue" "Italia".
Blogging.
Kitching was a style editor for SpinMedia's now-defunct social media and pop culture website Buzznet, working with the company for over 6 years since they first found her LiveJournal blog in 2006.
Design.
Kitching has designed several clothing lines and collections, including her own organic, fair trade luxury fashion brand called LUNA, which was inspired by astrology, positive thinking, ancient ideologies, and magic. She collaborated with Milan-based footwear company Kerol D Milano in 2014, designing a 12-piece vegan capsule footwear collection featured in Elle Italia.
In 2010, Kitching was one of the designers chosen to work with H&M for Designers Against AIDS. Coco de Coeur, Kitching's former clothing line, was described by Nylon as "astonishing," earning comparisons to designs by Meadham Kirchhoff and Jeremy Scott.
Energy healing and crystal work.
Kitching, the founder and CEO of Crystal Cactus, is a new age practitioner who does astrology reports, energy healing, crystal work, and readings for others. In early 2013, Kitching created Crystal Cactus, a line of new age crystal pendant jewelry, holistic spa treatments, and gifts sold in Urban Outfitters. Kitching also performs aura clearings and chakra and karma balancing.


Raid (video games)

In video games, a raid is a type of mission in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) where a number of people attempt to defeat either: (a) another number of people at player-vs-player (PVP), (b) a series of computer-controlled enemies (non-player characters; NPCs) in a player-vs-environment (PVE) battlefield, or (c) a very powerful boss (superboss). This type of objective usually occurs within an instance dungeon, a separate server instance from the other players in the game.
In military real-time strategy (RTS) games like "StarCraft", "raids" usually refer to the military tactic.
Origin.
The term itself stems from the military definition of 'a sudden attack and/or seizure of some objective'.
"Raiding" originated in the class of text MUDs known as DikuMUD, which in turn heavily influenced the 1999 MMORPG EverQuest, which brought the raiding concept into modern 3D MMORPGs. As of 2019, the largest and most popular game to feature "raiding" is Blizzard's 2004 MMORPG World of Warcraft.
Raid tactics.
The combat encounters comprising a raid usually require players to coordinate with one another while performing specific roles as members of a team. The roles of Tank, Healer, and Damage Dealer are known as the "Holy Trinity" of MMORPG group composition. Other common roles include Buffing, Crowd control, and Pulling (selectively choosing targets with which to initiate combat). A raid leader is often needed to direct the group efficiently, due to the complexities of keeping many players working well together.
Raid loot.
Raids are often very rewarding in terms of virtual treasure and items that are unique or that grant exceptional stats and abilities, thus giving players an incentive to participate. Often however, there is not enough treasure to reward individually every player who participates. Players have invented various systems, such as Dragon kill points to distribute loot fairly.
Raiding guilds.
Raiding is often done by associations of players called guilds or clans who maintain a consistent schedule and roster. There are two types of raiding guilds: casual guilds, defined as spending two to three days per week on average; and hardcore guilds, defined as spending four to seven days per week on average.
Health risks.
The fact that raids often require multiple consecutive hours of constant gameplay leads some to believe it is a physically unhealthy activity. A 2003 study by the National Institutes of Health found that playing MMORPGs for more than 20 hours per week correlates with obesity and nutritional imbalance as well as an increased propensity for bone loss and muscle atrophy. Due to these concerns, China has proposed national limits on how long people can play MMORPGs. The measures will impose penalties on people who play MMORPGs for more than 3 hours per day.
Game raids.
Game raids are commonly organized by digital influencers with the intent to protest against the company's behavior, their actions or simply for fun. They normally consist of players creating their characters with pre-discussed appearances, and stacking up the game servers until they have their demands meet, or they tire themselves out. A popular raider is QuackityHQ, who streams his raids on Twitch.


Charlemagne (songwriting team)

Charlemagne was a successful songwriting team made up of James Carmichael, Ronald Miller and Kathy Wakefield that worked for Motown in the 1970s. One of the many hits that were written by this team was “Glasshouse,” the last Top 40 Pop single by The Temptations.


Sarah Burton

Sarah Jane Burton (née Heard; born 1974) is an English fashion designer, currently creative director of fashion brand Alexander McQueen. She designed Catherine Middleton's wedding dress for her wedding to Prince William, Duke of Cambridge in April 2011. In 2012, she was named in Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world according to "Time".
Early life.
Burton was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, one of five children of Anthony and Diana Heard. She attended Withington Girls' School in Manchester. After completing an art foundation course at Manchester Polytechnic, and opting to pursue fashion over studies in fine art, she studied Print Fashion at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. During her third year she was interviewed for a year's placement at Alexander McQueen at the suggestion of her tutor Simon Ungless, a friend of McQueen's. She joined the company for a year as an intern, when the company was based in a tiny studio in Hoxton Square.
Fashion career.
On graduation in 1997, she joined the company full-time as McQueen's personal assistant. Burton was appointed Head of Womenswear in 2000, during which time she created dresses for Michelle Obama, Cate Blanchett, Lady Gaga and Gwyneth Paltrow. Following McQueen's death in February 2010, and after company owner Gucci confirmed that the brand would continue, Burton was named as the new creative director of Alexander McQueen in May 2010. In September 2010, Burton presented in Paris the first McQueen womenswear collection she had wholly created.
On 29 April 2011, it was revealed that Burton had designed the wedding dress of Catherine Middleton for her marriage that day to Prince William, Duke of Cambridge. Burton's work came to the attention of Middleton in 2005 when she attended the wedding of Tom Parker Bowles, the son of the Duchess of Cornwall, for whom McQueen had designed the wedding dress for his bride, fashion journalist Sara Buys. Made by the Royal School of Needlework, Burton said creating the royal wedding dress had been the "experience of a lifetime".
Burton also designed maid of honour Pippa Middleton's dress, and the dress that Kate Middleton wore to the wedding's evening festivities.
In 2011, Burton was named the British Fashion Council's Designer of the Year.
Personal life.
Burton lives in St John's Wood with her husband David Burton, a fashion photographer.
Honours.
On 28 November 2011 Sarah Burton won the Designer of the Year at the 2011 British Fashion Awards.
In July 2012, Burton received an honorary degree from Manchester Metropolitan University where she was a former student, becoming an honorary Doctor of Arts.
Burton was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to the British fashion industry.
In June 2019, Burton was awarded the Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti International Award by the Council of Fashion Designers of America. In November 2019, the British Fashion Council bestowed Burton with the Trailblazer Award.