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Review: Silicon Valley: Season Two
In the show, even the most progressive form of capitalism hinges on a want to sublimate personal feelings, desires, and opinions.3.0
In the season-two premiere of Silicon Valley, Peter Gregory, the tech genius played by the late Christopher Evan Welch, is found dead. The major angel investor in Pied Piper, the music program turned data-compression algorithm created by Richard Hendriks (Thomas Middleditch), Gregory acted as a mentor to Richard, and the implications of his death hang over the first episode, especially at Gregory's company, Raviga Capital. At one point, Gregory's successor, Laurie Bream (Suzanne Cryer), meets with Gregory's assistant, Monica (Amanda Crew), to discuss the future of Riviga's investment in Pied Piper, and struggles to express her feelings about Peter's death through her near-robotic disposition. Laurie says, "Peter Gregory is dead," a number of times in their discussion, but their talk is all about Riviga, less about how she feels about his death than how the passing has affected her profession and career. This exchange evokes a central satirical philosophy for co-creator Mike Judge and his King of the Hill cohorts John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky in regard to the titular West Coast tech hub: that even the most progressive form of capitalism hinges on a want to sublimate personal feelings, desires, and opinions.
A similar battle between volatile, personal emotions and manipulative, strategic business decisions is seen when Dinesh Chugtai (Kumail Nanjiani) attempts to sabotage Bro, a crowd-funded app created by his cousin, Aly (Aly Mawji). Dinesh uses technical know-how, business jargon, and fear of failure to push Aly to give up on Bro, but when Aly brings up doubts about Dinesh's place as the "cool cousin" in their family, the cousins begin speaking heatedly in their native language and familial rifts rise to the surface. Beyond his intellect and fiscal worth as a member of Pied Piper, Dinesh has an incessant need to debase those he deems intellectually inferior. This smugness may have given him the confidence to work and build Pied Piper alongside Richard, but it can't hide the scared, lonely nerd that Dinesh still is underneath the braggadocio—and as Judge sees it, no amount of money ever will either. The show's view of the generation that created Snapchat remains incisive, skewering everything from moronic apps to half-baked progressive politics to opportunistic philanthropy, but Judge is careful to not allow this cynical outlook to become his default position. For every time Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) compares the plight of tech billionaires to that of the Jews in Nazi Germany, there's also a warm, borderline sweet moment, such as when Dunn (Zach Woods) attempts to rally the Pied Piper team with his newfound usage of the word "bro."
The series has always shown a fascination with terminology and slang, and thankfully, Judge and his writers have a firm grip on technological parlance, and more than a passing familiarity with how tech-based companies are made. Gregory's passing sends Richard and Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller) on the hunt for new investors, and early into the round-robin, they realize that all the investors are "negging" them, a dating ploy repurposed to force Pied Piper's asking price down. Like Dinesh, Erlich has made money and intelligence his way of veiling a history of alienation and excusing his crassness, and when investors belittle his company and attempt to undermine him, his basest instincts lead him to whip out his testicles at one meeting. In contrast, Dunn is lured into a near-betrayal by the promise of sincere friendship with a would-be investor and respect via Bro, only to find out he was used so another company might pilfer the engineering work in Pied Piper that he, Dinesh, and Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) worked on.
Every time Miller's vulgar monster of privilege opens his mouth, one gets a clear sense of Judge's derision for millennials, but that's not his only agenda. For all his grotesque crudeness, Erlich comes off as weirdly empathetic, especially when he's faced with the emptiness of his reputation in front of Russ Hannerman (Chris Diamantopoulos), the obscene inventor of radio on the Internet and Pied Piper's latest investor. Judge's grimace can be similarly felt with the introduction of Hannerman, who is first seen ridiculing hybrid cars, calling passersby "lemmings," and blaring Limp Bizkit's "Nookie." For whatever his intensely off-putting persona, Russ is seemingly exactly the freakish attack dog that the team needs to take on Belson and Hooli. Russ and Richard couldn't be more different from one another, but business still makes strange bedfellows in Silicon Valley. The amiable, unlikely empathy and neuroses that separate the members of the Pied Piper family from the pack are the same elements that give this gleefully sardonic comedy its distinct, bittersweet tone.
Cast: Thomas Middleditch, T.J. Miller, Josh Brener, Martin Starr, Kumali Nanjiani, Amanda Crew, Zach Woods, Aly Mawji, Matt Ross Network: HBO, Sundays @ 10 p.m. Buy: Amazon
Review: Legion's Unhinged Final Season Plunges Us into an Unknowable Mind
The show's third and final season is a visual achievement, typified by imaginative flights of absurdism.3
After Legion's shocking second season finale, in which it was revealed that David (Dan Stevens) had sexually assaulted his girlfriend, Syd (Rachel Keller), the series enters its third and final season with a lingering ambiguity: Is David, the show's titular telepath and diagnosed schizophrenic, redeemable? Furthermore, to what extent is he responsible for his actions? Throughout season three, in which David is hunted by the Shadow King (Navid Negahban) and Division Three while he attempts to travel back in time to rectify his misdeeds, Legion struggles to answer these questions, which serve as the crux of the series.
Certainly, by framing David's efforts to alter the past as self-serving and expedient, Legion maintains one view of its protagonist as an egomaniac and probable sociopath. In conversations with a rightly unmoved Syd, David's protestations and glib promises to simply undo the past reflect his inability to grasp the gravity of his crime. And the character's first effort at time travel, in which he attempts to protect his infant self from the Shadow King, is tinged with both self-interest and an attempt to shift the blame for his actions.
From this perspective, Legion's depiction of David is a trenchant critique of toxic masculinity. But the series also suggests that David, while impurely motivated, might not be wrong to seek an excuse for his behavior. Nothing in the season dispels the notion that he could, by preserving his own innocence from the Shadow King's influence, prevent himself from becoming a manipulative and self-obsessed person—or one who would commit sexual assault.
This conflicted portrayal at least makes Legion extremely effective as a plunge into sheer narcissism. To engage with David, and the show's ever-shifting reality, is to experience the sensation of being gaslit firsthand. His passionate pleas when enlisting the help of a young time-traveling mutant, Switch (Lauren Tsai), are backed by rousing strings on the soundtrack, which imply virtue in his determination. Similarly, when David professes his love for Syd, Stevens strips David of his usual guile, offering an earnest portrayal of heartbroken regret. Such moments, which tempt us to empathize with David, and maintain the idea of him as the show's hero, are contrasted by deflating glimpses of his selfishness. When he thoughtlessly implores an exhausted, injured Switch to bring him back to the past after a failed attempt, the series punishes us for having trusted David to consider anything beyond his own self-interest.
Legion remains a visual achievement, typified by the imaginative settings and flights of absurdism which, at their most effective, serve to illuminate David's mental state. Season three finds David with a new cult of followers, who surround him in a ramshackle house that acts as both plot device and canvas for his volatile emotions. The house's exposed pipes, which resemble veins or synapses, glow neon blue with a substance revealed to be a sedative drug created by David. While the drugged cult evinces David's craving for any kind of admiration, the claustrophobic space is a realization of his addled mind. When the character is at one point consumed by rage, the pipes turn a foreboding shade of red, and his followers begin to froth at the mouth—an effectively unsettling metaphor for David's chaotic instability.
Some of the season's other oddball incursions are less thematically coherent or informative, especially as the series builds toward its ostensible conclusion. Series creator Noah Hawley has publicly cited David Lynch as an inspiration for the series, and while Legion does possess a Lynchian sense of unmooring suspense, the weirdness can also merely forestall whatever intelligible vision of David's arc the series is approaching. In one such instance, a confrontation between Switch and David pushes him toward self-assessment, but the conversation quickly evolves into the entire cast singing a melancholic version of "(What's So Funny 'bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?" In a series with so little peace, love, or understanding, the wry song choice is clearly meant to be ironic, but the whimsical indulgence serves no purpose except to reinforce David's already well-established inability to learn.
Season three includes more than one such musical number, which consistently resemble escapes from the character resolutions the series simultaneously inches toward and avoids. Surreal tangents once provided crucial insights into David's mind, yet now they just as often distract from the show's emerging assessment of the character. Legion alternately views the very act of telepathy as a violation, and David as a victim of his own abilities. Crucially, the series, by building toward a conventional showdown between David and the Shadow King, seems unsure as to which character is ultimately responsible for David's past actions.
As the season approaches its conclusion, Legion occasionally hints at offering elusive truths about David's nature, but just as often seems to be building toward an opaque conclusion for the character: one in which David, and his fragmented mind, simply might not be understandable in any conventional sense. Still, in its attempt to provide both character study and pure, unhinged abstraction, Legion has fashioned yet another visually distinct and uniquely bizarre season around a man's unknowable mind.
Cast: Dan Stevens, Aubrey Plaza, Rachel Keller, Jean Smart, Amber Midthunder, Bill Irwin, Jemaine Clement, Hamish Linklater, Navid Negahban Network: FX
Review: City on a Hill Is a Bonanza of Character Detail and Hammy Thrills
When the series isn't immersed in pulpy shenanigans, it aspires to be a sort of Bostonian The Wire.3
Not since Gerard Butler's riotous, bloody doughnut-eating turn in Christian Gudegast's Den of Thieves last year has an actor plumbed the scumbag depths quite like Kevin Bacon does as wayward F.B.I. agent Jackie Rohr in Showtime's City on a Hill. Everyone within the show's various layers of Boston law enforcement seems to know Rohr, and not a single person likes the guy—not the co-workers who bristle at his presence, not the people who return his greeting with an immediate "fuck off," and certainly not his mother-in-law, Rose (Catherine Wolf), who threatens to expose his serial infidelity by telling his wife, Jenny (Jill Hennessy), about his recent STD test. In retaliation, he grabs a model Red Baron plane—a memento from Rose's late husband—from the mantelpiece and makes like he's going to smash it. "You put me in the fucking doghouse," he growls in his hoarse Boston accent, "and I'm gonna be like Snoopy and blow your shit right the fuck out of the sky."
When City on a Hill isn't immersed in such pulpy shenanigans, which find the casually racist Rohr doing things like brandishing a fish at an angry old woman who calls him a "white devil," it aspires to be a sort of Bostonian The Wire. The series, set in the early '90s and based on an original idea by creator Chuck MacLean and executive producer Ben Affleck, constantly keeps one eye on the systems that contribute to the city's rot as it moves through a fictionalized account of the "Boston Miracle" police initiative that statistically reduced violence in the city. One-eyed District Attorney Decourcy Ward (Aldis Hodge) is an idealist beaten down by what he sees, given to statements such as "I like what my job should be" to justify why he thanklessly works to improve the system. He's black, so he gets the kind of scrutiny that doesn't afford him any goofy bad-cop antics, but Hodge dials up the searing intensity with a wide-eyed stare, the only window to the drive and the outrage bubbling beneath his no-nonsense exterior. Every so often, it leaks through with a shouted line like, "I'm not their boy."
Rohr and Ward fall into a mismatched partnership that's surprisingly absent any of the explosive confrontations that typically characterize odd-couple pairings in film and TV. Their hesitant camaraderie just sort of happens as they recognize their mutual interests; even if they don't like each other, they understand one another. And from there, the series unfolds the complications (of which there are many) and the key players (of which there are even more) that will figure into a wider arc that begins with a simple armored car robbery. Laying out all the different systems that figure into the story, though, makes the first few episodes somewhat slow-going; some scenes tend to devolve into a lot of bureaucratic jargon and off-the-cuff mentions of Boston locations that might lose anyone unfamiliar with the city.
Where the series excels, however, is in the level of detail it brings to its individual characters. Armored car robber Frankie Ryan (Jonathan Tucker), for example, works stocking a grocery store, and he's often seen doing lottery scratch cards as if constantly on the lookout for alternative cash flow. When he cuts himself putting up a bathroom cabinet, it figures into foreplay with his wife, Cathy (Amanda Clayton); he holds up his bandaged hand to say he's not afraid of a little blood while she goes to pull out a tampon "the size of a friggin' bus." And when Cathy suspects her screw-up brother-in-law, Jimmy (Mark O'Brien), of absconding with their money, she yanks the cabinet out of the wall to reveal the nook where they keep unlaundered cash. Here, Frankie's cut hand, bathroom cabinet, and working-class lifestyle converge to describe his relationship with Cathy and the exact degree of her complicity in his operation. Elsewhere, Rohr's menacing of the model plane neatly (and hilariously) outlines his living situation and the strained relationships that encompass it.
While it's true that none of these characters are particularly unique even within the setting (Affleck's own The Town features a similarly honorable robber stuck with a volatile sidekick), they feel dynamic enough that their familiarity ceases to matter. They all know their way around a punchy, profane turn of phrase, and they're usually good for some kind of amusing sight, whether it's Rohr's coked-up air-drumming to a Rush song or Jimmy driving to see his kids in a car filled with balloons, singing along to Marky Mark's "Good Vibrations" with a mouthful of Bubble Tape. Such a confident grasp of character goes a long way toward smoothing over the show's somewhat clumsier big-picture narrative, as City on a Hill proves itself as effective at small, interlocking details as it is at purely hammy thrills.
Cast: Kevin Bacon, Aldis Hodge, Jonathan Tucker, Mark O'Brien, Lauren E. Banks, Amanda Clayton, Jere Shea, Kevin Chapman, Jill Hennessy, Blake Baumgartner, Catherine Wolf Network: Showtime
Review: Years and Years Is a Captivating Dystopian Family Drama
The series manages to pile on the cataclysms without taking pleasure in the pain of its characters.3
In his memoir Self-Consciousness, John Updike describes his early adulthood by saying, "I turned thirty, then forty," and in doing so skips over a decade's worth of information unnecessary to the reader. Russell T Davies's miniseries Years and Years, which will launch on HBO following its run on BBC One, similarly makes economic use of time, but where Updike jumps into the future, the series sprints. Every so often throughout the four episodes made available to press, a searing montage pushes the world a few years forward, relaying key geopolitical developments—a landmark legal decision, a diplomatic falling out, an environmental crisis—before settling back down in a global order even shakier than before.
We experience these changes through the perspective of Britain's Lyons family, which includes tough but caring matriarch Muriel Deacon (Anne Reid) and her grandchildren: Stephen (Rory Kinnear), a banker; Daniel (Russell Tovey), a housing officer; Rosie (Ruth Madeley), a school cafeteria manager; and Edith (Jessica Hynes), an activist. The siblings, their partners, and their children are Years and Years's primary concern, and with each lurch into the future, their lives tend to get worse rather than better. All the while, Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson), a fear-mongering pseudo-populist, launches and advances her political career, deploring the world's degradation and promising to represent the true wishes of the British people.
At one point, the Lyons siblings hop on a conference call to react to one of Rook's appearances on the news. Rosie appreciates Rook's straightforwardness—the series opens with a shockingly candid and unempathetic on-air comment that Rook makes about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—Daniel is horrified by it, and others lie somewhere in between. Rook is more than a little Trumpian, a resonant representation of the crassness that he's made politically viable. And as Years and Years proceeds, this much becomes clear: Although it largely centers around the Lyonses, the series isn't really about them, but about Rook. It's about the potential for the world to operate in a way that enables Rook's ascent and leaves people like the Lyons family staring slack-jawed at her demagoguery and electoral swashbuckling.
As Rook, Thompson seems to multiply the minutes she gets on screen with the ferocity and sheer gravitational pull that the actress brings to the politician. When she's on television, Rook looks directly into the camera, at the Lyonses and at the viewer. And when she's participating in a local debate, she defiantly stands at the center of the stage, in the middle of the screen, her opponents surrounding her like planets stalled in orbit.
The rest of the cast's performances similarly ground the series's socio-political thought experiment in human experiences. Kinnear, as Stephen, realizes a soft stoicism, a resilience undergirded by subdued positivity. When that façade finally cracks, following a death in the family, we know that Stephen doesn't cry solely because of the loss; he's also grieving a financial crash along with his increasingly fraught marriage, which together contribute to the gulf separating what he thought his life would be and what it has become.
Though thoughtful and moving in its exploration of such suffering, both individual and collective, Years and Years occasionally stumbles by insufficiently using its characters to contextualize its political world-building. At Rook's debate, which Rosie and Edith attend, Rook wins over her detractors in the crowd with a swiftness that's jarring given the weakness of her argument, which essentially justifies authoritarianism as a bulwark against the proliferation of porn. Rook's victory feels artificial, like she manages to sway her doubters purely because the series needs her to in order to demonstrate the shortsightedness of voters. Rosie and Edith's presence should, in theory, render Rook's beguiling charm more believable, but the series fails to interrogate the reasons for the pair's attraction to her.
Two monologues that Daniel delivers encapsulate the series's sporadic inconsistency. In one, he holds Rosie's newborn baby while questioning, aloud and at length, if it's right to bring a child into a deteriorating world. As Daniel bemoans the banks and the corporations and fake news and more, he ceases to blink, his voice rising and quickening. He becomes a machine unleashing a diatribe that's too neat to be convincing, the character of Daniel giving way to a Daniel-shaped megaphone. Later, though, Daniel tells off a xenophobic visitor to the refugee camp he works at in his capacity as a housing officer. This scene, in contrast to the earlier one, doesn't burden Daniel with the weight of the world. Rather, it gives him the freedom to discuss what he's personally and passionately invested in: the idea that refugees deserve all—and more than—the help they receive. Here, Daniel's dialogue and Tovey's performance are vastly more organic, emerging from within the character as opposed to simply flowing through him.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of Years and Years is the compassion with which it considers its characters. It would be easy for a series filled with so many cataclysms, both global and personal—nuclear weapon launches, deaths, infidelities—to err on the side of sadism in its depiction of that turmoil. But it takes no pleasure in the pain of the Lyonses. Instead, Years and Years recognizes that pain is edifying as well as transient, and it accordingly gives the pain that it inflicts space to evolve: to form, to torment, and to pass, like each year that comes and goes, taking more and more away with it.
Cast: Emma Thompson, Rory Kinnear, T'Nia Miller, Russell Tovey, Jessica Hynes, Ruth Madeley, Anne Reid, Dino Fetscher, Lydia West, Jade Alleyne, Maxim Baldry, Sharon Duncan-Brewster Network: HBO
Review: Euphoria's Depiction of Teen Hedonism Is Both Frank and Lurid
Euphoria's central relationship is luminous, but the series struggles to develop its other characters.2.5
Sam Levinson's Euphoria announces its self-consciously provocative nature within its first minute, when Rue Bennett (Zendaya) says that she was happy once, over an image of the girl, in fetus form, about to be born. Airplane engines begin to howl alongside baby Rue's POV as she exits the birth canal, at which point the episode transitions to a shot of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center. She was born three days after 9/11. The juxtaposition here is loud and in-your-face, and though it's tonally similar to the deluge of ironic trigger warnings that open Levinson's film Assassination Nation, it has the benefit of some actual thematic coherence, for the way the open-with-a-literal-bang image acknowledges 9/11 as the unmistakable divide between Euphoria's teens and everyone else.
Rue characterizes the world she grew up in as a chaotic, aimless place devoid of much understanding for her people her age, which leaves her generation concerned mainly with wringing out as much enjoyment from it as they can. And the series, which is adapted from an Israeli drama of the same name, depicts such teenage hedonism in frank, explicit terms: a high school world awash in pills, sex, and nude photos thrown to the winds of social media. The nature of these occasionally graphic depictions is complicated by Levinson's consciously "attitude"-laden stylings: Are they graphic purely to shock, or to authentically portray what today's young people go through, or both? Regardless, the series finds its character-driven groove by turning an empathetic eye toward the inner lives of its principal teens, observing their listlessness and small moments of solace as much as their outward pain.
Rue, we learn, is a drug addict fresh out of rehab who's largely uninterested in getting clean. And while the show's other teens feel their way through seedy meet-ups with older men, pursue self-actualization through porn, and cope with invasions of privacy, Rue provides the perspective through which we view nearly everything and everyone else. She narrates even the events that don't involve her, lending them a general vibe of playful, sarcastic worldliness. She determines the flow of the action, freezing a sex scene outright for a digression on modern porn habits or summoning a cutaway gag, like a lecture on dick pics complete with projector slides. Zendaya plays Rue with a perpetual murmur and effortless remove, like an observer sitting on the sidelines watching the world go by, until she succumbs to a desperate, drug-seeking freak-out or one of the panic attacks those drugs are meant to distance her from.
The series tempers some of its heavier material with an often laidback atmosphere, a world of deep shadows drenched in multi-colored hues and dreamy hip-hop beats that belie the darkness in its corners. If the universe is falling apart around the characters' ears, the result is that Euphoria's characters see little reason to consider what encroaching adulthood will mean, to ruminate on what will come next when there might as well be no "next." There's only the all-encompassing "now." "The world is coming to an end," Rue says to justify her drug use, "and I haven't even graduated high school yet."
Euphoria's best scenes are its oases of joy and humor, particularly the luminous relationship between Rue and Jules (Hunter Schafer), the new-in-town trans girl whose sunny disposition contrasts Rue's overall remove yet masks a deeper restlessness. The chemistry between Zendaya and Schafer paints a believable portrait of a companionship only possible before adulthood, when you have as much free time as you have affection to distribute.
The two might have sustained the series by themselves, though Euphoria struggles to develop its other characters. Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), for example, is largely undefined beyond the sexual history she's trying to move beyond, while her boyfriend, Chris (Algee Smith), seems to exist only to express discomfort about that history. Beneath his football-playing façade, Nate (Jacob Elordi) has a streak of violent calculation that dances on the edge of caricature. Only Kat (Barbie Ferreira) seems to develop beyond her basic template of virginal angst, mainly because the series resolves the issue almost immediately before sending her down a Pornhub rabbit hole on an amusing journey of self-discovery; her burgeoning sexuality comes to encompass an attractive classmate as much as a man on Skype who wants to be her "cash pig."
The fourth episode only emphasizes the disparity between the show's development of the teens. As the camera glides between multiple perspectives at the same carnival event, Jules has a scary revelation about an older, married man, Cal (Eric Dane), she recently hooked up with, while a panicked Rue searches for her sister, Gia (Storm Reid), who's still reeling from Rue's overdose prior to the events of the series. However, the more half-sketched characters, such as Cassie and Nate's long-suffering girlfriend, Maddy (Alexa Demie), take drugs seemingly so they'll have something to do for the duration of the episode. While it's realistic that not all the characters would have intricate stories to engage in (Kat's storyline is also comparably low-stakes), sidelining Cassie and Maddy feels like a concession that the series isn't totally sure what to do with them beyond displaying their suffering.
The success of Euphoria's teen drama ultimately depends on which teen it focuses on at any given moment. With Rue and Jules at the center, you feel the exhilaration of their friendship as much as a real concern for their growing troubles. But with its less fully developed characters, the series can feel like little more than a lurid performance of teenage pain.
Cast: Zendaya, Maude Apatow, Angus Cloud, Eric Dane, Alexa Demie, Jacob Elordi, Barbie Ferreira, Nika King, Storm Reid, Hunter Schafer, Algee Smith, Sydney Sweeney, Austin Abrams, Alanna Ubach Network: HBO
Review: Hulu's Das Boot Forfeits the Telescoped Focus of Its Source Material
The series transforms a story that captured something of the experience of war into a familiar melodrama.1.5
One of the strengths of Wolfgang Petersen's classic submarine drama Das Boot, based on Lothar-Günther Buchheim's novel of the same name, is that it's no glorification of the German war machine. Indeed, its shocking ending underlines the absolute senselessness of war and the meaninglessness of heroism. Das Boot is a war film that could only be made in a country where virtually everyone had experienced the horror of war firsthand, whether it was on the frontlines or cowering in a bomb shelter. But it's also a story told strictly from the perspective of the gentile German sailor; women appear quite literally on the margins—at beginning and end, when the boat disembarks and returns—and non-gentiles are neither seen nor mentioned. War crimes are far from the film's purview, and its sailors are, for the most part, not terribly interested in Nazism.
Johannes W. Betz's new series solves this problem by flashing back and forth between the crew of a U-Boot captained by the young Captain Klaus Hoffmann (Rick Okon) and a plot of betrayal and subterfuge in the ship's port in La Rochelle, France, centered around German Navy translator Simone Strasser (Vicky Krieps). In doing so, however, Betz's Das Boot eschews much of what made the original film effective: the feeling that the viewer is stranded in the narrow gangways of the submarine on a mostly blind journey through treacherous waters.
Forfeiting the telescoped focus that keeps the film engrossing, the series substitutes hidden backstories and interpersonal melodrama that feels like it was pulled from the prestige-drama handbook. As the crew is assembled in the first episode, "New Paths," we learn that the long-serving First Officer Karl Tennstedt (August Wittgenstein), a familiar Nazi type who's been passed over for command of the ship in favor Hoffmann, is the son of a WWI hero. Tennstedt's simmering resentment plays out, over the course of the four episodes available for review, as an escalating crisis of authority, as he grows increasingly bold in his defiance of the noble-minded Hoffmann, and sways the minds of several (rather easily convinced) enlisted men.
Meanwhile, Simone arrives in La Rochelle, where she expects to live and work alongside her younger brother, Frank (Leonard Scheicher), a radio engineer. When an accident on board Hoffmann and Tennstedt's U-Boot damages the radio and seriously injures the ship's engineer, Tennstedt summarily decides to assign Frank to the vessel. With no choice in the matter and suddenly facing an uncertain fate, Frank hands over to Simone a cache of materials he was supposed to deliver in a post-curfew rendezvous later that night.
In the second episode, "Secret Missions," it's revealed that Frank's mission had something to do with a French girl he's been seeing, Natalie (Clara Ponsot), and with a mysterious American resistance fighter named Carla Monroe (Lizzy Caplan)—well, only "mysterious" inasmuch as the series clumsily cultivates an air of mystique around her, all oblique camera angles and vague dialogue. On the brink of explaining her intentions to Simone, Monroe stops herself, mostly, it seems, to extend the mystery for another episode or two. "Probably better if you don't know," she says, though she might as well be addressing the camera.
It's in this episode that the seams of Das Boot really begin to show—or, rather, its bulkheads start to crack. Almost every aspect of the shorebound storyline, which becomes the show's main focus, is an exaggerated contrivance. In a scenario painfully familiar from a dozen cable dramas that have pulled it off more convincingly (see The Americans, Breaking Bad, Barry), Simone conducts her illegal dealings with Monroe's resistance cell under the nose of Gestapo inspector Hagen Forster (Tom Wlaschiha). Forster has a professional relationship with Simone, and, he hopes, a burgeoning personal one. As he's drawn ever closer to her, Forster becomes increasingly blind to her traitorous activities—though, naturally, episode four, "Doubts," ends with him coming one step closer to discovering them.
This adaptation of Das Boot, which also incorporates elements from Buchheim's 1995 novel Die Festung, transforms a story that endeavored to capture something of the experience of war into an overly familiar melodrama of obscure motivations, hidden backstories, and broadly sketched interpersonal conflict. The series may try to address Nazi terror in a way Petersen's film leaves beyond its margins, but even its depiction of atrocity serves merely as a convenient motivator for familiar twists and turns. The sense of cheapness and naked commercialism that pervades the series makes its explicit depiction of disturbing violence—a death by firing squad, the gang rape of a Jewish woman by German sailors—feel unearned and, particularly in the latter case, completely irresponsible. The series can't be counted on to deliver any insights on history or war, but compelling drama may be even further beyond its capabilities.
Cast: Vicky Krieps, Tom Wlaschiha, Lizzy Caplan, Vincent Kartheiser, James D'Arcy, Thierry Frémont, August Wittgenstein, Rainer Bock, Rick Okon, Leonard Scheicher, Robert Stadlober, Franz Dinda, Stefan Konarske Network: Hulu
Review: Jessica Jones's Third and Final Season Feels Like an Afterthought
As it nears the end of its run, the series doesn't seem to have much more to say about trauma.2
The third and final season of Jessica Jones feels more like an afterthought than a farewell, an unevenly written retread that's uninterested in breaking out of a well-worn groove. Trauma is at the center of the Netflix show's world, with the eponymous superpowered private eye (Krysten Ritter) having conquered the lingering pain of sexual abuse and childhood domestic strife across the first two seasons. And it being a Marvel Comics property, Jessica Jones predictably scrutinizes such personal trauma through the lens of highly literal metaphor: In the first season, an evil ex-lover's telepathic powers represent the way that abusers get into our heads, and in the second, an abusive mother's super strength stands for the seemingly indominable power parents have over their children.
The new season saddles its hero with more trauma, both psychological and physical, but loses the real-life resonance of the show's previous themes, becoming an exercise in self-reflexivity. Jessica Jones now squares off against a serial killer, Gregory Salinger (Jeremy Bobb), who's the embodiment of misogynist male geekdom—which is to say, that corner of the internet that's predisposed to objecting to woman-driven action properties like Jessica Jones.
In the season's first episode, "A.K.A. The Perfect Burger," Jessica is taken by surprise when Salinger shows up at her apartment in the middle of the night, hunting her one-night stand, Erik (Benjamin Walker). The encounter leaves Jessica injured and newly traumatized, and Salinger psychotically obsessed with his incidental victim. Salinger resents Jones for being what real-world toxic nerds would call a "Mary Sue"—or, as Salinger puts it, for "cheating," for not appropriately earning her powers, and for being a "feminist vindicator."
This new season's use of allegory is a bit on the nose, which isn't the worst sin for a superhero property, but Jessica Jones clearly has aspirations to be a character-driven drama. It's an intent undermined by its characters' tendency to feel like little more than signposts directing us to the show's message. In contrast to David Tenant's chilling performance as misogynist villain Killgrave in season one, Bobb doesn't convey the menace or malicious seductiveness that might enliven Salinger's often blandly scripted rants against women's empowerment.
Salinger also targets Erik's wayward sister, Brianna (Jamie Neumann), a sex worker whom Jessica tries to protect by foisting her upon Malcolm (Eka Darville), Jessisca's neighbor and former assistant. This all intersects conveniently (and problematically) with Malcolm's subplot, which concerns his flirtation with moral corruption as he works as a fixer for Jeri Hogarth's (Carrie-Anne Moss) law firm. Brianna is stereotyped as an erratic, trashy prostitute who's sexually available to Malcolm simply because she's hiding out in his apartment. She's characterized as a nuisance who becomes a kind of punching bag for the other characters, who talk about her poor life decisions in front of her as if she isn't there.
Malcolm's is one of three major subplots that take up much of the run time of the eight episodes of the new season made available to press. In the others, both Jeri and Jessica's ex-bestie, Trish (Rachael Taylor), deal with their own moral transgressions. Of these, Trish's story is the strongest. Newly equipped with (vaguely defined) superpowers, she aims to join Jessica as a superhero on the streets of Hell's Kitchen, and she's given a satisfying and resonant origin story in episode two, the Ritter-directed "A.K.A You're Welcome."
Jeri's subplot, on the other hand, adds very little to a character already understood from previous seasons as self-serving and morally compromised. This arc, hardly more than filler, also features one of the season's most regrettable scenes: a painfully kitschy seduction that involves Jeri's former lover, Kith Lyonne (Sarita Choudhury), badly faking a cello performance as Jeri caresses her and the low-angle camera slowly tracks around them.
As for Jones herself, the series can't shake the feeling that its main character has simply become her outfit. The season's opening shot, which has her leather boot stomp into the frame in close-up against the unaccustomed environs of a sunny beach, even evokes the way her personality is summed up by tattered jeans and grimy leather. In the form of Salinger's initial attack, she's given a new trauma to work through, but after three seasons, this form of motivation seems more like an obligatory gesture than an exploration of character. By the time she's brutally besting Salinger in an amateur wrestling match in front of the pre-teen wrestling team he coaches in episode seven, "The Double Half-Woppinger," it's clear that, as it nears the end of its run, Jessica Jones doesn't have much more to say.
Cast: Krysten Ritter, Rachael Taylor, Eka Darville, Carrie-Anne Moss, Rebecca De Mornay, Jeremy Bobb, Benjamin Walker, Sarita Choudhury, Jamie Neumann Network: Netflix
Review: Pose Season Two Looks to the Future with Its Head Held High
The series empathetically attests to the agonies that queer people to this day often have no choice but to suffer in silence.2.5
One notable arc of the second season of Pose traces the success of Madonna's "Vogue," from the song premiering on radio in March 1990 to the moment it hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart less than two months later. The show understands the song's lucid appreciation of the ballroom as an aspirational space. Madonna's dance-pop anthem was like a lifeline to those in the house-ball community, and almost all of Pose's characters celebrate it without reservation. "Everything is about to change. I can see it clear as day!" says Blanca (Mj Rodriguez), emboldened by the song to chase after her dreams.
Which is to say that Pose doesn't bow before the altar of wokeism, at least not in the four episodes made available to press ahead of the new season's premiere, knowing that the conversation about the song erasing voguing's roots in a community's daily struggles wasn't one that many people were having in 1990. But the show does seem interested in the idea that the global success of "Vogue" was blinding to some in the drag-ball community. Can a queer person of color living on the fringes of society actually harness Madonna's blond ambition? And from the spectacle of drag emcee Pray Tell (Billy Porter) reading the riot act to Candy (Angelica Ross) for coming to one show as a simulacrum of Madonna, voguing while dressed as one of the singer's "Express Yourself" personas, the answer would seem to be a resounding no.
There's a sense that Pray is being rough on Candy because he recognizes what we've long known about her, and what the season's third episode makes sure that we don't forget: that she has no problem distinguishing fantasy from reality. Witten by Our Lady J and directed by Janet Mock, the episode splits its time between the budding romance between Angel (Indya Moore) and Lil Papi (Angel Bismark Curiel) and the aftermath of a client (Frank De Julio) dying during one of Elektra Abundance's (Dominique Jackson) shifts at the Hellfire Club. Tonally, the episode walks a high-wire act that's empowering—for the way it regards Angel and Lil Papi in their bliss as stars of a Hollywood melodrama that never was—and ballsy—for the way it unearths humor and pathos in equal measure from everything that leads up to Candy convincing Elektra to not report her client's death to the authorities.
The episode is perhaps too easily understood as an imagining of what must have led to one Paris Is Burning participant, drag performer and dressmaker Dorian Corey, possibly murdering and storing an ex-lover's dead body in a closest inside her apartment for approximately 15 years. (The man's mummified corpse was only discovered after Corey's AIDS-related death.) But the point of the episode, like some long-delayed eulogy, is to empathetically attest to the agonies that queer people to this day often have no choice but to suffer in silence. Too often, though, the series goes one step further by blaring that message out loud, with dialogue that suggests a kind of PSA speak. That isn't so much an issue in scenes that see the characters fighting the menace of AIDS, as Pose knows that the gay community raised awareness of the disease in the bluntest of ways, but in various scenarios, like Angel's pursuit of her modeling career, that are beholden to all manner of coming-of-age and aspirational clichés.
The cast list for the new season reveals that Charlayne Woodard, as Helena St. Rogers, will be returning at some point, which goes a long way toward explaining why it appears as if Damon (Ryan Jamaal Swain) and Ricky (Dyllon Burnside) are just hanging around in the background of the first four episodes as if they're waiting for something, anything, to bring them to the foreground. The stage may be lovingly ceded to Angel and Lil Papi, but after a while, it just feels as if the lovebirds are going through all the same soap-operatic motions that Damon and Ricky did in the first season: Angel is so desperate to be a star that she opens herself up to being exploited by a smarmy photographer (Alexander DiPersia), and after she and her friends hand him his ass in a proud show of unity, Angel gets her first break, which just so happens to occur at the exact moment of a date she has with Lil Papi.
Something, though, that we do know for sure by the end of the fourth episode is that Pose isn't concerned with putting any allies on blast. If you're in the know about the history of New York and the AIDS crisis, then you'll instantly recognize nurse and activist Judy Kubrak (Sandra Bernhard) and dog-toting real estate agent Frederica Norman (Patti LuPone) as stand-ins for Linda Laubenstein and Leona Helmsley, respectively. And if Judy, who joins Blanca in a crusade to get Pray Tell to start taking AZT, is celebrated for being a small-scale hero, Linda very easily invites the audience's scorn for threatening Blanca after discovering she's trans. But it's an invitation that feels too easy, too cartoonish, especially in the context of the show's almost Disney-fied—or Glee-ful—depiction of New York during this time period.
There's a disconnect between the show's aesthetics and its subject matter that feels especially apparent when one major character shows up dead in episode four. The moment certainly lacks the immediacy of the horrific moment from The Deuce's first season when a john throws Pernell Walker's Ruby out of a window like a piece of trash. Director Ryan Murphy knows that you can assert such a woman's humanity in more than one way, but the sentimentalized theater of this episode is the stuff of cognitive dissonance. Because the prior three episodes give the short shrift to the character's investment in changing ball culture, to tailoring it to her strengths, the moment that she's celebrated for influencing that culture feels unearned. If hers wasn't a dream that ever felt like it was her own, that's because it's the stuff of narrative convenience, a setup for a fall that, in the depiction of its aftermath, ironically links Pose to Madonna's "Vogue" by making reality seem a little less dark than it really is.
Review: Season Five of Black Mirror Regards Our Grim Future with a Smirk
The new season recalls the most human elements of past episodes while levying urgent indictments of the present.3.5
Season five of Black Mirror offers three new episodes that envision a predictably worrisome slate of side effects to humanity's technological reach outpacing its intellectual grasp. But in offering dystopian visions that hew closer to reality than they have in past seasons, these episodes exceed the show's promise of nightmarish hypotheticals. While the series has on occasion veered toward alienating, high-concept bleakness—as in season three's "Playtest" and season two's "White Bear"—season five maintains an empathetic focus on the characters struggling to navigate grim new worlds.
Series creator and writer Charlie Brooker employs a variety of familiar storytelling models to construct the season's overarching theme, which generally concerns the unforeseen fallout of our shifting media diets. In the melancholic "Striking Vipers," a marriage is endangered by the husband's new obsession with a virtual reality game. Brooker moves his focus to social media in "Smithereens," a claustrophobic hostage thriller, and to the music industry in the darkly comic caper "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too." Each episode envisions upheavals in a different social construct, from traditional masculinity to celebrity culture, but Brooker's consistent focus on media as the trigger for transformation lends the stories a foreboding thread.
The show's directors match Brooker's ingenuity, tailoring an immersive style for each episode. In "Striking Vipers," Owen Harris fixates on the alienation felt by Danny (Anthony Mackie), a man experiencing a crisis of conscience, by framing the character in wide shots set against drab backdrops and cityscapes; it's a pointed contrast to the colorful environments and dynamic camera movements Harris employs when Danny is gaming. In "Smithereens," which follows a distraught rideshare driver (Andrew Scott) who takes a customer hostage (Damson Idris), director James Hawes presents the driver either in tight close-up or from the far-away perspective of police and gawking onlookers, highlighting the gulf between how the world perceives the man—as a terrible curiosity—and his own intense sense of victimization.
The relationship between perspective and perception is similarly central in "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too," the episode with the most complicated premise of the season. Miley Cyrus stars as Ashley, a singer who wants to transition from glittery pop to more challenging material, much to the horror of her exploitative handlers. As the episode evolves into a scathing indictment of the celebrity industry (and offers a startling vision of artificial intelligence), "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too" fosters our genuine concern for Ashley's mental state—in part as a result of the savvy casting of Cyrus, a transformative pop star herself, but also, and more crucially, because the episode reveals much of what happens to Ashley from the relatable perspective of Rachel (Angourie Rice), a lonely and adoring teenage fan.
While none of these episodes are as nihilistic as the show's grimmest installments to date, they remain imbued with snarky, topical satire and dogged cynicism. "Smithereens" portrays a social media network that, with its scrolling newsfeed and reliance on hashtags, is unsubtly modeled after Twitter. Even less subtle is the character of the platform's man-bunned creator, Billy Bauer (Topher Grace), who's clearly a sketch of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Brooker doesn't veil his view of the real-life tech mogul: When Bauer's service ignites (and acts as a livestream of) an international hostage situation, he's pictured peacefully meditating in Utah, both figuratively and literally above the fray he helped create. When eventually called for help, the communications magnate is powerless, no longer able to grasp the magnitude of his creation, and reduced to speaking in platitudes.
By targeting forces (and people) who already exist in reality, Brooker couples the show's broad anxieties with a tinge of righteous anger. Coupled with the season's character-driven focus, the specificity of the show's grievances represents a welcome evolution. With stories that recall the most human elements of Black Mirror's past episodes, while levying urgent indictments of the present, the series that's always worked to imagine a dark future seems to be wondering if we haven't already crossed into the dystopian abyss.
Cast: Andrew Scott, Anthony Mackie, Miley Cyrus, Topher Grace, Damson Idris, Angourie Rice, Madison Davenport, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Network: Netflix
Review: Season Five of Luther Is Undermined by a Sense of Inevitability
As the series has continued, it's grown more outlandish, oppressive, and removed from the things that made it so captivating.1
Time has not been kind to John Luther (Idris Elba), the wool-coated supercop haunted by the horrors of all the things he's seen on the job. To be fair, what detective wouldn't be traumatized living and working in the version of London offered up by BBC's Luther? It's a concrete sprawl where every crack in every grimy back alley seems to conceal some ultraviolent psychosexual serial killer. This is a gloomy, frequently ridiculous series that survives on the back of Elba's staggering intensity as a volatile, obsessive detective more than willing to skirt the law as long as it catches him a killer. But as the series has continued, it's only grown more outlandish, more oppressive, and more removed from the things that made its inaugural season so captivating. And the show's belated fifth season, coming over three years after the two-part fourth season, hardly closes the distance.
It's not for lack of trying, of course. For the first time since the beginning of the series, Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson) returns to the center of the story to throw a wrench into Luther's professional and private life. Wilson is, expectedly, adept at selling her character's amusing sociopathy with every thin, dark smirk. Unfortunately, though, Alice's storyline entirely concerns her attempted revenge against East End gangster George Cornelius (Patrick Malahide), whose repetitive, nonsensical attempts to murder Luther were the most tiresome element of the prior season. With Luther now caught in the crossfire, the resulting feud is so central to the season that it all but pushes the season's murder investigation to the side in favor of various square-offs with Cornelius's gun-toting goons.
Luther has always worked best as a trashy mystery series because its main character's explosive, extralegal tendencies contrast most sharply with the show's depiction of a structured, by-the-book police world. The supporting characters, when they aren't being killed off with alarming frequency, marvel at Luther's alternately clever and outrageous attempts to flout the rules. However, writer and creator Neil Cross's growing reliance on action elements has come to mean abandoning the contrast between Luther's methods and expected police procedure in favor of throwing him into a murky criminal underworld. There's simply less dramatic intrigue and less of an audacious thrill when he's breaking out of his restraints to fight a room full of gangsters than when he's punching a murder suspect in the street to get a sample from the man's bloody nose in an absurd evidence-planting gambit.
Alice previously served a similar juxtaposing function. Despite her chemistry with Luther and their mutual attraction, her teasing, nihilistic amorality and even-more-extreme methods conflicted with his determination to protect life; their developing relationship threatened his job, his loved ones, and his own beliefs. But at this point, the two simply know each other too well for her wild-card antics to surprise Luther, and by extension the audience. Her ability to throw him off balance is muted since he mostly just seems tired of putting up with her rather than shocked at her insistent, ultimately predictable attempts to lash out at Cornelius.
That same sense of exhaustion and inevitability hangs over the entire season, undermining its usual attempts to shock us with plot twists that bring death and violence. The serial killer this time around, a surgeon (Enzo Cilenti) with a fetish for turning people into pincushions, may have strong visual iconography through the eerie combination of a clown mask and a glowing hood meant to fool CCTV, but his grisly compulsion is more of the same for a series that loves to plumb the depths of how gory a series can get. Once Cornelius becomes the umpteenth person to seriously threaten the lives of the supporting characters, you aren't surprised so much as left to ruminate on the diminishing returns, remembering just how many names have already been scratched out of the show's opening credits. The show's concept has long revolved around how everything Luther has been through has left him haunted, but now, in the fifth season, it does little more for viewers than leave them numb.
Cast: Idris Elba, Ruth Wilson, Dermot Crowley, Michael Smiley, Wunmi Mosaku, Enzo Cilenti, Hermione Norris, Patrick Malahide Network: BBC America
Review: Season Two of Big Little Lies Fails to Justify Its Existence
The series works best when it focuses on intimate, human moments rather than on broad social critiques.2
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée and adapted by David E. Kelley from Liane Moriarty's novel, the first season of Big Little Lies told a complete story, resolving the murder mystery that drove its primary storyline and successfully exploring the bleak underbelly of the affluent coastal city of Monterey, California. As such, the foremost question facing the show's second season—directed by Andrea Arnold and based on a story by Moriarty and Kelley—is an existential one: Is this follow-up really necessary? Though the three episodes made available to press are enjoyable enough, thanks largely to the cast's continued strong performances, they're weighed down by heavy-handed writing and an inchoate grasp of what powered the first season—namely, its subtlety, surprise, and emotional murkiness.
Season two begins about a year after the so-called Monterey Five conspired to cover up the circumstances of Perry Wright's (Alexander Skarsgård) death. Some of the group's members have fared better than others in the time since: Madeline Mackenzie (Reese Witherspoon) is thriving as a real estate agent, Jane Chapman (Shailene Woodley) has settled into a job at the aquarium, and corporate hotshot Renata Klein (Laura Dern) is being featured on magazine covers. But Bonnie Carlson (Zoë Kravitz), who pushed the abusive Perry down a flight of stairs to protect his wife, Celeste (Nicole Kidman), struggles with the guilt of her actions, while Celeste doesn't quite know how to grieve for the man she still loves.
Perry's mother, Mary Louise (Meryl Streep), has come to stay with Celeste and help her care for her twin sons (Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti). She also suspects that Perry's death wasn't a total accident and works to find out the truth. Mary Louise is a master of aggression, both passive and active, and Streep delivers the character's critiques of Madeline with a quiet monotone that's at once grandmotherly and acidic. Even among a cast as strong as the one assembled here, the veteran actress commands every scene she's in. But as Mary Louise resists Celeste's narrative of abuse—she wonders, for instance, why her Celeste didn't tell the police that Perry beat her—her dialogue grows so tired, so backward, as to feel purely mechanical. Mary Louise as an acerbic grandma is compelling, but Mary Louise as a Me Too bogeywoman is a bore, little more than a repository of eye-roll-inducing, reactionary pushback against abuse victims. Her symbolic significance comes at the cost of her personhood.
Which is to say that Big Little Lies works best when it focuses on intimate, human moments rather than on the social critiques that it clumsily handles. For one, watching Madeline and her husband, Ed (Adam Scott), face a personal reckoning is engaging because we care about these characters and understand the stakes of their conflict—and the series doesn't compromise their interiority by forcing them to represent a broader social issue. The poignancy of their disillusionment suggests that the season might, in fact, justify its own existence. But the series consistently undercuts that potential. Bonnie's mother, Elizabeth (Crystal Fox), accurately remarks that there aren't many black people in Monterey, but then it errs uneasily close to stereotype by giving her—one of only a small handful of black characters—possibly prophetic visions and an affinity for healing crystals and other talismans.
The show's themes of abuse and sexual violence are urgent and timely, which makes its shoddy treatment of them all the more disappointing. Big Little Lies also takes on matters of desire, wealth, and sexism, but does so with brute force and repetition. When Madeline rails against the unfairly different expectations people have for fathers and mothers, she offers no original perspective on that common double standard; in the end, it's as if the scene is relying solely on Madeline's zeal to hide its trite writing. Later, a young field-tripper at the aquarium asks Jane why pretty things tend to be dangerous. It's a lazy exchange that's similarly emblematic of the show's insistence on shouting its themes.
Save the occasional cinematographic flourish, the non-spoken tools of film and television have come to kneel before the power of the word in the second season of Big Little Lies. Even the show's soundtrack serves as a way to squeeze more words in: While the songs featured throughout these episodes are definitely capable of generating mood—as was the case last season—their lyrics regularly and agonizingly describe the drama that we're witnessing. The spectral cover of REO Speedwagon's "Keep on Loving You" that plays during a conversation about a crumbling marriage is haunting, but its beauty is shorn by how on the nose it is. The song, in this context, is exceptionally pretty but ultimately meaningless, a bunch of notes vanishing into the nearly hollow shell where Big Little Lies used to be.
Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Zoë Kravitz, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, Alexander Skarsgård, Adam Scott, James Tupper, Jeffrey Nordling, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Sokolovic, Crystal Fox, Iain Armitage, Darby Camp, Cameron Crovetti, Nicholas Crovetti, Ivy George, Chloe Coleman, Robin Weigert, Douglas Smith Network: HBO
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This article first appeared on Bikeradar.
Sadly, we now close out this year's North American Handmade Bicycle Show with one final gallery. We unfortunately didn't get to everyone this time around (sorry, guys!) but in total, we've posted more than 900 images from the show floor so if you weren't able to make it to the event, we hope this provided the next best thing.
Next year's NAHBS will make its way to Denver, Colorado – home to BikeRadar's US tech crew – so rest assured we'll bring the bigger guns in 2013. But in the meantime, stay tuned for more in-depth follow-up articles to come. NAHBS may be over but the trends spotted there are a sign of what's to come. For now, click on the gallery for our NAHBS image wrap-up.


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- 1. Follow the original LISA design as close as possible
- 2. Use the simular lead screw/anti-backlash nut but find a cheaper version of it(.5" 5 start)
- 3. Use the same firmware and slicer to keep implementation as simple as possible (if needed update firmware with custom code)
- 4. Detail/Quality is key, 5 foot construction will be used to print electric guitar bodies
- 5. Speed of printing is a second to Detail/Quality of print
- 6. Make frame and assembly as simple as possible (even a 10 year old could do it)
- 7. Print as many parts as possible (frame included)
- 8. Custom aluminum heatbed to meet custom design surface
- 9. Resizing Goals (quick resizing with as few modifications to design as possible):
- a. Adjustment to the vertical and horizontal aluminium 1" square tubing to gain desired print area
- b. Adjustment print arm size (arm from shoulder joint to elbow joint)
- c. Adjustment custom aluminum heatbed (change dimensions and number of heat resistors)
- d. NEMA23 KL23H256-20-6A stepper motors so the length/weight of lead screws will not be a concern when re-sizing (within reason, 10 foot lead screws are not in reason)
- e. Strong enough power supply 12V 30A so during re-sizing power consumption isn't an issue.
I am stuck on the arms. I'm looking for a simple equation to determine the optimal arm length.
So, any help in this matter would be much appreciated. In the meantime, my thought is to review the firmware to see if I can determine how it's calculating the coordinates. My guess is that the arm length will be important in these calculations.
Again, any help, comments, and/or concerns with my approach is appreciated,
Robert Fidler, Springfield, Missouri


text: David Reutimann, of Zephyrillis, Florida, is a race car driver in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. He drives the #00 Aaron's Dream Machine/Turns/Best Western Toyota Camry for Michael Waltrip Racing. Reutimann is the son of former driver Buzzie Reutimann. He was Rookie of the Year for Slim Jim All Pro Series in 1997 and for NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series in 2004. In 1998 he won the Slim Jim All Pro Series Sportsmanship Award.


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Wanted: Nekos for Second Life Machinima Nin9
Ever dreamed of starring in a Neko Machinima? This may be your lucky break…
The very talented machinima filmmaker Marx Catteneo (SL avatar name) is currently looking for talented Nekos to star in a serial killer murder mystery machinima series.
The tantalizing 9-episode series, called Nin9, will feature dark story themes with haunted influences (think Se7en, Twin Peaks, Hitchcock, Basic Instinct, and various European graphic novels). Stories will range from bloody crime scene investigations to sexy Neko dance and strip acts in seedy bar settings.
Just take a look at the Nin9 trailer to get a taste for what's in store…
Neko Characters Wanted:
9 female Neko strippers
1 female Neko bartender
1 male Neko club manager
Actor Requirements:
• Use of voice
• Ability to read and interpret filmscript and details
• Willing to participate in nudity and violence
• Fully modifiable hair and attachments; no full bright parts
• Flexible schedule to be on hand for numerous shooting appointments (Marx is on European Central Time and will try to plan most shootings during ECT daytime—i.e., morning hours on the East Coast U.S.)
• Plenty of patience—to achieve good quality, this machinima will take time
Shooting Location:
The Nin9 machinima series will be shot on the Second Life LEA sim, where Marx has been granted artistic space at no cost.
There is no monetary award for being an actor. However, actors' names will be prominently displayed in the machinima credits, where Marx anticipates maximum views on his video channel. Marx is creating this video all on his own dime, investing his personal time to make this as outstanding a machinima series as possible.
Calling all kittehs with stars in their eyes…
Still not scared away? 😉 Send an IM to Marx Catteneo in-world, or email him at firstname.lastname@example.com to obtain a synopsis and/or schedule a casting session.
Top photo by the dark and mysterious Bobby Yoshikawa
© Stacia Villota / Virtual Neko in Second Life – 2013
One Response to "Wanted: Nekos for Second Life Machinima Nin9"
MAKEUP!!! Where's my hairstylist!?!


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Here, you can talk about the Wiki and ways you want to improve it, policy changes or anything LOST Wiki related. Please remember that the Community Portal is for discussion of the wiki only; For discussion of the show itself, please see the designated Discussion pages for that particular article.
Please read the Help pages before asking any questions. If you have found any bugs or technical problems, please them on the LOST:Problems page and an administrator will try and sort out the problem.
Timestamp your posts by including four tildes at the end (~~~~) or by pressing the button on the editing toolbar.
Meta Pages Edit
Hi, I'm (finally) starting my meta pages project. I was wondering how come some of them have the prefix LOST and others have the prefix LOST Wiki? I'd just like to know so I can make them all consistent. Any other thoughts anyone had about this stuff would be welcome, too. Thanks! --StBacchus 10:01, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
- Answered my own question. ^_^ --StBacchus 15:33, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
Woo hoo 1,000 articles! Edit
Congrats! ----Jimbo Wales 14:34, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
A useful resource? Edit
Information on extrasEdit
I was curious, where did you guys find your information on the people who stand around in the background? Like Jerome and Craig? Thanks! --StBacchus 03:42, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
We Need More UsersEdit
Is there any way we can tell people about Lost Wiki? Like putting signs up on other Lost websites. I'm a user on wikipedia and I could make a sign on my user page. Because I really think we really need more people to update this site. --James S. 02:30, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
Go for it. On the main page, it even says: If you are a member of a LOST Message Board or Forum, please make sure to advertise the LOST Wiki!, so we don't mind if you tell people. --ChristianShephard 11:25, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
I am a frequent user of Lostpedia, and would gladly help out here, but I can't find a job list. Maybe that would help draw in people. Here's what I'm talking about. Also on Lostpedia I have categorized many images and would gladly do that here. Here is what the image categories are. --Mr. Crabby 21:24, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
Wikia BlogsEdit
This wiki is included in our new Wikia Blogs feature. To get involved, just add snippets of this wiki's best articles to MediaWiki:Blog snippet each day and that content will appear on the Wikia TV Blog. Please see Wiki to blog for an introduction and Wikia Blogs for a list of wikis involved in this. Angela talk 00:55, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
The IslandEdit
Just pointing this out, but do we even have a page about the Island? 'Cause if we don't I could whip one up in an hour or so.--James S. 03:20, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
We actually do not have an article on the island. --ChristianShephard 10:47, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Well never mind. I couldn't find it. --James S. 21:40, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
I'm a little confused. I said we didn't have an article on it. --ChristianShephard 22:58, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Oh, my bad. I didn't see the not in the sentence. So should we make an artical on it?--James S. 02:09, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Absolutely. --ChristianShephard 10:02, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
OK cool. I'll make a link to it on my page. If you don't mind putting pictures on it, that would be aswome. 'Cause there's something wrong with my computer, if I try to upload pics on the site, my computer freezes! So I'll get started right away! --James S. 19:42, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Lostpedia Edit
Hi. I've got some exciting news. Lostpedia is joining Wikia today. For a number of reasons, including different content licenses, the two wikis will be kept separate. This means the content on the Lost Wikia will not be affected and the wiki will continue to work as it does now. We're thrilled to have the two best sources of information on Lost be on Wikia and I hope you will accept that Lostpedia as a sister project to the Lost Wikia. I want to reassure you that the Lost.Wikia remains important to us, and that the fact Lostpedia is joining us does not affect that. If you have any questions, please let me know. Angela (talk) 15:56, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
- "Exciting". Do. Not. Want. --GentleBen 06:38, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
- At least the Dutch Lostpedia is not important to Wikia, because it has been dropped since I visited it last week. LostRiki 18:46, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
Switching to the new parserEdit
We are currently making preparations for the next wiki software upgrade. While we expect this to have little or no effect on most wikis, it may cause some pages on this wiki to render poorly. To help reduce or eliminate these issues, please see the Central Forums for more details.
Thanks - sannse (talk) 12:31, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
DHARMA stations Edit
Shouldn't The Orchid Station be merged into Station 6: The Orchid? Also, would a navigational template for all the stations be worthy of having? (i'm tired of using the category... and it includes neither Barracks nor Decoy.) -- Napoleon 9th 12:36, March 15, 2010 (UTC)


text:
this is a discussion within the Saints Community Forum; Bouman holds on to new position 15 players on the injured list; blackout is lifted Wednesday, August 11, 2004 By Brian Allee-Walsh Staff writer The Saints' three-man snap, place and kick team will have a new look this season. Backup ...
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: CRYSTAL BEACH TEXAS
Posts: 4,100
Camp news....
Bouman holds on to new position
15 players on the injured list; blackout is lifted
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
By Brian Allee-Walsh
Staff writer
The Saints' three-man snap, place and kick team will have a new look this season.
Backup quarterback Todd Bouman has replaced punter Mitch Berger as the holder for kicker John Carney on field goals and extra-point attempts.
Veteran Kevin Houser remains the short- and long-snapper.
"Right now, we think Todd (Bouman) is an upgrade," Saints special teams coach Al Everest said. "It's nothing against Mitch. He's a very competent holder. If he had to do it, we'd be very happy to go in that direction. But right now I think we got the best guy in that spot."
Berger held for kicker Gary Anderson at Minnesota, and Bouman served as the Vikings' backup holder.
"This was a decision by committee, with Al, Coach Haz (Jim Haslett) and myself," Carney said. "If things don't work with Todd, then certainly we'll go back to Mitch. Mitch held for Gary Anderson, who set a lot of records. So we're very comfortable with Mitch as well.
"Todd is very athletic and gives us the ability to run more fakes and put more pressure on defenses. Todd is real quick getting the ball down. We just felt it was a good opportunity to get him in the mix and see how things go."
BLACKOUT LIFTED: Friday night's home exhibition game against the New York Jets was declared a sellout and will be shown locally on UPN at 7 p.m. Season-ticket sales are closing in on 50,000, Saints executive vice president of administration Arnold Fielkow said.
INJURY REPORT: The list of injured players reached a camp-high 16 Tuesday, including quarterbacks Aaron Brooks (quadriceps), Todd Bouman (abdominal strain) and running back Deuce McAllister (knee). Saints coach Jim Haslett gave Brooks a "50-50 chance" of playing against the Jets. Haslett said McAllister is expected to play.
Veteran wide receiver Germane Crowell's comeback from reconstructive knee surgery may get short-circuited, Haslett said. Crowell, who missed all of last season with the Detroit Lions, has been sidelined the past week with an injured right knee. An MRI confirmed interior damage.
OWENS ON HORN: Philadelphia Eagles' wide receiver Terrell Owens is featured in the September issue of Playboy. Perhaps his funniest line came when he was asked to compare the touchdown celebrations of Cincinnati's Chad Johnson and New Orleans' Joe Horn last season. Owens said Johnson's sign plea was original, and Horn's cell phone call was a cheap imitation of Owens' famous Sharpie celebration.
"He (Johnson) knew what everybody was expecting, and he flipped the script, saying 'Please don't fine me,' " Owens said. "But Joe Horn was basically being a copycat; you can call him Kinko's."
CRACKIN' DOWN: The Saints' locker room has a different feel this season. Haslett has banned cell phones, CD players, boom boxes, card games and dominoes. Violators will be fined.
He has removed card tables and chairs. He also has eliminated the distribution of newspaper clips, and only tapes from past Saints games are shown on the TVs in the cafeteria.
FYI: Tonight's practice at the Superdome is open only to season-ticket holders. Gates open at 6:30 p.m. and practice starts at 7:30 p.m. The Saintsations will be available for autographs, and the Saints Experience interactive area will be open for kids. Season tickets are still available, including the $150 ticket. Call (504) 731-1700 for more information.
BY THE NUMBERS: 1,500 -- Char-broiled oysters, courtesy of Drago's restaurant, that were consumed by players, media and staff at Tuesday night's dinner.
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I am beginning to see improvement in Hazlett! I reserve the right to comment later if he does not follow through.
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|2008-12-22, 21:57
|Link #21
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Toronto, Canada
Age: 29
Haha, I just basically broke my back digging up tons and tons of snow outside. I was inside watching anime on the first day of Winter Break and didn't even notice it was piling up outside....you pay for your mistakes.
|2008-12-22, 22:01
|Link #22
Insane Fangirl
Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: Home of the 2010 Olympics
I heard there was a lot of snow in Toronto, and Montreal looked like a ghost town xD.
|2008-12-22, 22:02
|Link #23
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Vereinigte Staaten
Age: 27
The city I live in only gets snow for about two or three days per year and we have a lot of hills, so when it snows, school closes and the number of cars on the street is cut by 95%. I just had this last week off because we got like a foot and a half, which is like ten times the normal amount.
I'm pretty happy about that.
|2008-12-22, 22:04
|Link #24
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Monterrey N.L. Mexico
It almost never snows around here. As it stands, I can only remember one time several years ago where we had a few bits of it, but only high on top of the mountains.
Some people snapped back then and actually went climbing only for the once in a lifetime chance of actually building a snowman.
|2008-12-22, 23:19
|Link #26
Senior Member
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Singapore now, QLD next.
Age: 35
Yeah, I got snow here. In Snow City
Jokes aside, I just left Tokyo for Singapore on the 20th. So you get the idea. My annual sabbatical.
EDIT: I'm going back to Fukuoka this evening. In time for Xmas Eve. Still, no snow, just rain.
Last edited by kyon.haruhi.suzumiya; 2008-12-23 at 01:28.
|2008-12-23, 01:06
|Link #27
Ah, snow... such a bittersweet relationship I have with it. I was born in the Sunshine State, and thus lived my younger childhood without the knowledge of the existence of snow. When my family moved up to Wisconsin and I saw my first snowfall, I was dead scared of the stuff. I couldn't make heads or tails of the cold white stuff that turned to water when you touched it. Thanks to friends, I eventually learned the joys of snow: snowball fights, snowforts, snowmen.
Then I grew up. And I had to shovel said snow off the driveway every few days. I did the math; I've shovelled several thousand pounds of snow in my lifetime. I eventually learned an extreme hated for cold weather in and of itself. Every winter my sinuses were permanently stuffed or runny, and my lips were always chapped. I longed for the day I graduated from high school to go out on my own and leave the state for warmer pastures. Eventually it happened, and now I'm happily going about in college back in Florida, very much enjoying my 80 F degree weather mid-December.
...I probably typed too much on the subject, but it was too fun to type the monologue. My hatred for snow/winter became a rather popular subject for my family to joke about and associate with.
|2008-12-23, 01:10
|Link #28
I am about to leave again
Join Date: Dec 2008
Here in Indiana, it hasn't snowed for a week or so.....and down here we believe that if there's no snow.......there's no Christmas......so right now we have no snow......but we will get it soon, I hope.....
Last edited by Deso; 2008-12-23 at 01:25.
|2008-12-23, 01:32
|Link #30
Le fou, c'est moi
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Las Vegas, NV, USA
Age: 29
They say humans just want the things they don't have, and hate the things they have.
It's never more right with snow!
I was jumping for joy and could not sit still for ten minutes when the city I live in -- see my location? -- gets a snow shower a few days ago. I'm 19 and I was giddy as any child when I saw the pretty white things covering the street, and proud of it! Now of course, when I talk to some older people who actually get to live in places where the snow is permanent for months in a year, they usually really hate it because of the hassle with driving issues and clearing them out and all.
|2008-12-23, 01:40
|Link #31
Your Order ?
Graphic Designer
^ what You say is true .. I ever think that I want feel Snow .. but Someone told me that Snow just Annoying .. I don't know How People on other Climate think about Snow .. is that Interesting or Annoying ..
|2008-12-23, 02:58
|Link #32
Junior Member
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: MT, USA
I've grown up with snow all my life. I live in an area where 2 or 3 feet of snow is pretty normal during winter. Having lived with it this long, some people think i would pretty sick of it by now, but its just normal for us here in Montana.
I hear stories like Seattle pretty much shutting down after a skiff of snow, and i cant help but chuckle to myself. It snowed about a foot today, and no schools or businesses closed, the plows have had to run all day, but nobody missed work. It's almost like two different worlds.
The worst was when i lived in Wyoming for a year. At 6000 feet elevation and being mostly flat, the snow didn't stick, but the wind pushed into drifts that could get ridiculous, like 15+ feet in some areas. Sometimes the snow would drift up against your car and freeze solid, effectively grounding your vehicle unless you chipped it all away.
|2008-12-23, 03:59
|Link #33
I has a Civic
Join Date: May 2007
Location: Tennessee
Age: 31
We had a freak snow storm here recently. Usually we don't get a good snow here (if at all) until January but me and my friend were just sittin at work by ourselves and looked out the window and it started to come down pretty good. We even lost power for about half an hour. We just sat in the dining room (restaurant) and stared at the snow till the power came back on. We wound up closing early since obviously no one was gonna come in. Had to leave my Civic in the parking lot and ride home with him in his 4x4 Jeep.
|2008-12-23, 04:02
|Link #34
Youkai of Coincidence
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: The Border of Common Sense
Age: 29
Snow was always part of a normal Winter/Christmas here. Now, since this Global Warming thing began, we haven't seen snow since 2002. We -really- miss it, and we -really- yearn for snow, because we haven't had a White Christmas for years. For people, who was used to snow, these warm winters in the recent years was disappointing.
And while I mostly hated snow when I was a child, I miss it too now.
|2008-12-23, 04:34
|Link #35
Jag äter idioter
Graphic Designer
I, living in Colorado, get a fair share of snow every year. This year is pretty normal with snow storms every 5 days or so with snow over 6" deep. I love snow, by the way. Lived here for three years and have yet complained about having to shovel it.
Just another thing, if this Global Warming is real, how did Vegas get snowed on a few weeks ago? I lived there for five years and it never snowed. O_o;
|2008-12-23, 05:02
|Link #37
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: The Fields of High Attus
Age: 29
I'm rotting away in Bellevue, Washington right now, and have finally seen and touched snow for the first time in my entire life a few days ago
It turns out I'm lucky too, because apparently this part of Washington doesn't get that much snow most of the time. When I arrived there were only light coverings of it in some places, and that was awesome enough for me (OMG! My breath is condensing! I can step on white soft things!)
But last Thursday or so it snowed the whole day and it was fantastic because I could go stepping around in the snow and watching my foot go all the way in. Even slipped once. And day before yesterday it snowed further; this time it felt different because when you stepped it was harder and crunchier due to a layer of ice. Spent a good while childishly brushing snow off bushes (and helping my brother unstick his car :P)
I came rather ill-prepared though, under the impression that it doesn't snow so much - so I don't have proper shoes for walking in snow... I live with it though, no use getting expensive boots just for 4 weeks
tl;dr - snow quite literally rocks my socks. Speaking of which 3 pairs is disastrously few...
|2008-12-23, 05:11
|Link #38
(。☉౪ ⊙。)
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: In Maya world, where all is 3D and everything crashes
Age: 31
I don't know if we'll have snow this year it all depends on our kind of summer but perhaps we will because this year's summer was quite cool
last year we had mist instead of snow, so much that you couldn't see past 2 foot in front of you and it was on new years eve even (driving back home was a disaster that year ha ha)
I hope we get snow and not just wet snow like we usually have, but I also hope we don't cause I deliver mail as a side job and snow makes it a whole lot harder and less bearable, my dog would love the snow though she has only seen it once before in her life
|2008-12-23, 05:43
|Link #39
Join Date: Aug 2004
Age: 32
I live in the SF bay area, where it doesn't really snow. I used to love snow when I was kid and went on skiing trips with the family, etc, because it was so new and different. Nowadays, whenever I travel somewhere that snows, I just think of it like rain except it's really cold. Bonechilling cold is something I don't like to deal with.
|blizzard, snow, weather
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text:
Ruggiero Funeral Home, located in the Borough
of Pen Argyl, has been serving the families of the Slate
Belt and Lehigh Valley Areas for more than a century.
The Ruggiero Funeral Home is a full services funeral
home that offers families, traditional funerals, cremation
and pre-planning and servers all faiths. The funeral home is independently
owned by Stephen J. Ruggiero, who is a member of the National
Funeral Directors Association, Pennsylvania Funeral Directors
Association and Eastern Pennsylvania Funeral Directors Association.
It has been the goal of the Pullis', the Guerro's, andnow the Ruggiero's
to provide funeral services at a competitive and affordable
price and treating the families we serve with compassion.
For more information regarding any questions or concerns
you may have, please e-mail us directly at: email@example.com


text:
1080p H.264 Video
Download + Streaming
Running time: 36 minutes
The cost is $3.00.
To buy this thing, do this:
You can send gifts to any number of recipients. Enter an optional gift
message, then add as many emails as you like, and continue to payment.
Each recipient will be bought the show.
If you want to buy for yourself, do that separately. In this transaction
the show will ONLY be purchased for the people listed below.
Send it to these email addresses →
I'm going to be offering other things through this site. Would you like to hear about them?


text:
At Squarespace, we take pride in our commitment to great customer service. We provide Live Chat and 24/7 email help not just for customers, but for anyone that has a question about Squarespace products and services. Even though we always respond quickly (under an hour for email questions) we recognize that the fastest way to get help with Squarespace is to simply find the perfect guide that can visually explain what you're looking to do, and walk you through the steps you need with detailed explanations. Guides and videos are great to help you learn how to use Squarespace and they're there for you to refer back to anytime you need. Today, we're introducing a new Squarespace Help Site that will do an even better job of giving you the help you need.
In addition to an overall cleaner look, we've improved the search function of our Help Site so that you'll be able to find relevant articles more easily. You can also rate our articles, giving us valuable feedback on how we can improve our guides so you get the information you want to see. We've added an updated Workshops page to present you with comprehensive videos that walk you through setting up your site, and we'll be adding more Workshops for you in the coming months. Finally, we've made it more efficient for you to send us an email, recommending specific help articles along the way, but still making it easy to either send us a message or live chat with one of our team members.
We hope the new Squarespace Help Site can serve you better in creating your online identity with Squarespace. For anything that requires extra attention, our Customer Care Team is here to help.


text:
The Wooden Mass Is Located Centrally In The Village Of Bohinjska
Thinking of renovating your apartment? You might need to take a dive on this neat renovation crafted by Fixonic. The project named G Seven after the residence codename, situated in Braemar Hill. Yep, that's Hong Kong. And to be precise, it's at Hong Kong Island's North Point, the southern part of it.
Almost all areas are coated nicely with modern timber straight grain panels, olive ash, throughout the walls, floors which composing this uncluttered flow between each spaces along with its interiors. This timber-coating purposely covered also the home office and study area with its tidy desk that's built-in side by side with the storage space.
To differentiate the atmosphere, some of the spaces are divided with some white walls and simplistic yet contemporary white furnishings. It's in the living area, some part of the work office walls, and partial wall of the kitchen.
It's the mood that Fixonic deeply explored and brilliantly mixed here. The uncluttered flow of the wood grains, the partial plain white and simplistic interiors, and last but hold one of the ultimate factor of all, the cleverly indirect and concealed lighting. The warm and and serene ambiance, it's inevitable.
Read more »


text:
Adventure Productions and 10th Art Studio proudly announce their latest PC episodic adventure game, Shadows on The Vatican. The first act, named "Greed", will be available this fall for download. More info will be released in the next weeks.
A blood-red sky surrounds the city of Rome in a surreal, neverending twilight. Under the shadow of St. Peter, an American ex-priest investigates a series of events that exposes a deeper, more complex web of political and religious intrigue than he ever could have imagined.
Visiting Rome from Chicago, where he works as a doctor, ex-priest James Murphy answers a mysterious call for help from his friend Cristoforo.
The disappearance of a briefcase containing compromising documents is enough to convince James that his friend is a victim of something shady and sinister. The Vatican's involvement and some strange parallels with his own traumatic past inspire James to get to the bottom of this mystery.
Along this dangerous and disturbing path, James finds the most unlikely travelling companion who will question his deepest beliefs. And so the two characters begin both a physical journey in search of the truth, and a metaphysical exploration of the inner soul and the darkest secrets that everyone hides, even a "champion of the faith" like James.
Rome is the stage for this adventure – a city bathed in eternal twilight, its skies tinted the color of blood spilled in more than thirty years of intrigue: blood of innocents and guilty, unknown and famous victims alike.
- A thrilling new point-and-click adventure in 4 acts, inspired by real events in recent Italian history and freely adapted from David Yallop's bestseller "In God's Hand".
- Over 10 locations per episode with high resolution graphics (max resolution 1920x1080) directed by Lorenzo Ruggiero (Marvel/DC Comics)
- Realistic characters with hours of motion-capture animations
- Well integrated puzzles and several hours of gameplay
- Animated coloured comics by award winner Daniela di Matteo
- Fully dubbed in English
James Murphy is an ex-priest who decided to become a doctor after he cut all ties with the Catholic Church. 38 years old, handsome and with a slim build, James is as friendly as he is shy about any personal questions.
He can express himself forcefully against the religious institutions, but his faith, his sense of justice and his deepest respect for all people and life in general have never been in doubt. He's the head physician at a hospital in Chicago, where he now resides, but he can fluently speak Italian thanks to the many years he lived in Rome.


text:
New Jersey authorities have arrested 24 men and one juvenile in an investigation into the possession and distribution of child pornography.
Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa said Wednesday each of the men arrested was found with multiple sexually explicit videos of young children and made them available to others.
Most of the arrests took place from Feb. 18 to 22, and occurred in 25 towns across New Jersey. The juvenile was identified as a 17-year-old boy from Cherry Hill.
Authorities say the seized videos show both boys and girls and were distributed through emails and file-sharing networks.
Five of those arrested had direct contact with young children, including two who were regular baby sitters, officials said. One was a registered sex offender.
Each man is charged with second-degree distribution of child porn and fourth-degree possession of child porn.
"Everyone sitting in the seclusion of their darkened homes viewing child rape videos has victimized these innocents by creating the market for this disgusting material. There's no room for them to say, 'I haven't hurt anyone,'" the State Police superintendent, Col. Rick Fuentes, said in a written statement.
Four of the defendants are being detained as undocumented immigrants.
All of the videos seized are being examined by the New Jersey Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory in Hamilton. The lab is a partnership with the FBI and also handles evidence from surrounding states.


text:
Starkville-MSU Symphony Christmas concert Dec. 3
The Starkville-Mississippi State University Symphony Orchestra will perform music of the season during a Dec. 3 concert at the city's First Baptist Church.
Free and open to all, the 7:30 p.m. program will feature works by such composers as Bach, Handel and Mozart. Audience members will be invited to join in singing the traditional concluding chorus of "Hallelujah!" from Handel's "Messiah."
Assistant professor Gary Packwood, MSU's choral activities director, will lead the orchestra and the State Singers.
Anthony B. Kirkland and Jessica Banks will perform popular arrangements, while Jeanette Fontaine, Linda Glover, Peter Infanger, Tara Warfield and Adam West will lend vocal and instrumental stylings.
Like Packwood, all are affiliated with the MSU music department. Kirkland and Webb, assistant professors; Banks and Fontaine, lecturers; Glover, office associate; Infanger, a teacher; and Warfield, an associate professor. Infanger also is director of music ministries at Starkville's First United Methodist Church.
Senior vocal music education major Katherine L. "Katie" Morgan of Arlington, Tenn., also will be featured.
The concert is made possible by grants from the J.W. Criss Foundation. For more information, contact MSU music department head Michael Brown at 662-325-3070 or firstname.lastname@example.com.
Morgan Tubbs | Public Affairs


text:
|Fasteners and accessories
No hay traducciones disponibles.
Fasteners and accessories
Go smart is one of the two or three world leaders in the field of heavy-duty mechanical fasteners used for joining the underground belts thanks to our long experience in working with the most stringent mines in the world who were not only looking at the ease of installation of the fasteners, but also at the static and dynamic fastener holding as well as mechanical resistance to cope with the aggressive action of the cleaners and impact.
Today, Go smart has the widest range of products to offer our customers worldwide.
GO smart mechanical belt fastening system range for Installation on HEAVY DUTY conveyor belt
Table « Plate fastener »
For more details please consult the product brochures


text:
I used to love her.
I was eight when I met her little sister. We were playmates. She taught me so much. She was my partner in learning about BASIC programming, File IO and storage and plain old game playing. Those memories are still some of the fondest ones I have.
As time marched on, she and I spent less and less time together and grew apart.
When I was 15, I met her. She was beautiful. She had grace, style and sophistication. She wore beige. She was groundbreaking and trend-setting. Others imitated her style but were afraid to admit it. Others wanted to do well the things that she did well and not only did they fail, but they pretended that they were not trying to be like her. She was fast. She was powerful. At the time, she was almost perfect.
I learned even more from her than I learned from her sister. She and I had ever more fun. She made me into a gamer. We played flight sims and first person shooters. We wrote programs. We did homework. We did real-work. I loved her and she loved me. She accepted me for who I was and I accepted her for who she was. What I loved most about her was the fact that most other people didn't see, or couldn't recognize her beauty. It was like a nerdy girl in glasses that was still hot anyway. For nearly 10 years of my life, she was my absolute best friend.
Then things changed. Her father moved back to town. He convinced her that my love wasn't good enough, that she wasn't good enough. She had to change, whether she and I liked it or not. Instead of my love, she was to court the love of businessmen in suits. Instead of my acceptance, she was to seek the acceptance of journalists and purchasing managers who had never had a kind word to say about her.
In time, she changed. She was no longer the friend that I had known for a large portion of my life. She became pretentious, ostentatious and elitist. As much as it broke my heart, I had to turn my back on her because she had turned her back on me and never looked in my direction again.
If you too were a Mac user before the return of Steve Jobs and are currently not one, you know exactly what I'm talking about. The Macs that I knew and loved are now gone. Instead of doing things differently because it was better, Macs have become about doing things differently for the sake of being different.
Good-bye Macintosh, I'll miss you.