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Illusions of life. We are programmed to recognise creatures. More specifically, are we born to see a symmetrical form as a threat of sorts in a similar way to bees that recognise (respond to) symmetrical flowers as food sources.
Put another way: are we naturally likely, as infants, to interpret a complex bilaterally symmetrical pattern as a life form. There may be some evolutionary advantage attached to such an inborn ability. Unknown life forms can be life threatening.
The image panels were made from a complex image by simple reflection about a vertical line. The image on the right is the same as the one on the left, flipped 180º.
Annual Celebration to mark the anniversary of the first performance of Handel's Messiah in Fishamble Street Dublin in 1742.
Diabolical Messiah
Chilean Division Death Metal
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Annual Celebration to mark the anniversary of the first performance of Handel's Messiah in Fishamble Street Dublin in 1742.
Diabolical Messiah
Chilean Division Death Metal
www.instagram.com/diabolical_messiah_oficial/
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Title: Dune Messiah.
Author: Frank Herbert.
Publisher: New English Library.
Date: 1982.
Artist: Bruce Pennington.
I found the serie a little boring but thanks to this fascinating actor, I could see it until the end.
...Can I get myself out from underneath
This guilt that will crush me?
And in the choir I saw our sad Messiah.
He was bored and tired of my laments.
Said, "I died for you one time, but never again."
Lyrics from Limousine, by Brand New.
I was listening to Limousine the other day, a song I have listed to many times before, and these poetic lyrics caught my attention in a way they never had. The words immediately created an image in my head, and a few weeks later, TrevorWayne helped me bring my photo to life. On a side note, he had to walk quite far to get to the shoot; he is a very dedicated model :)
I have started a campaign to raise funds for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research! There is a desperate need for more answers about the disease. From now until August 31s, 50% of all profits from print sales and my online self-discovery-through-photography course Introspective will be donated to the CFIDS; an organization actively doing research into CFS. You can also donate directly to the CFIDS, of course. Please help spread the word about this; the more people this reaches, the better!
the former emporer of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I (god incarnate to the rastafarians) is majestically painted in blue tones on a disintegrating wall at the masonic temple on the south side of chicago. unfortunetly, the famous african king of the 20th century was defaced with some gang graffiti, commonly found at abandonments throughout the city.
YOUR COMMENT IS THE GREATEST "AWARD" YOU COULD GIVE -- No graphics please.
THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR ANY COMMENTS!!!
Annual Celebration to mark the anniversary of the first performance of Handel's Messiah in Fishamble Street Dublin in 1742.
We had the opportunity to experience Handel's Messiah performed at the University of Chicago's Chapel. Every aspect of the performance exceeded our expectations.
Our 355 cu in Chevy, it never let us down, never broke and pulled 10,000 rpm for maximum power and torque.
Resurrection of Christ in the Tapestry Gallery
Vatican Museum
Vatican City
Italy
John 20:1-9
On the first day of the week,
Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning,
while it was still dark,
and saw the stone removed from the tomb.
So she ran and went to Simon Peter
and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them,
“They have taken the Lord from the tomb,
and we don’t know where they put him.”
So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb.
They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter
and arrived at the tomb first;
he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in.
When Simon Peter arrived after him,
he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there,
and the cloth that had covered his head,
not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place.
Then the other disciple also went in,
the one who had arrived at the tomb first,
and he saw and believed.
For they did not yet understand the Scripture
that he had to rise from the dead.
Annual Celebration to mark the anniversary of the first performance of Handel's Messiah in Fishamble Street Dublin in 1742.
Sacred Heart University hosted Handel's Messiah on December 14, 2018, in Chapel of the Holy Spirit at Sacred Heart University, performed by the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and Christ Church Choir. Alumna Allegra De Vita ’11 returned as alto soloist along with soprano Leah Brzyski, tenor John Chongyoon Noh and baritone Edward Vogel. The concert was sponsored by Sacred Heart University, the Knights of Columbus, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and WSHU Public Radio. Photo by Tracy Deer-Mirek
Turner & Hercules #103 starts up later today (I'll upload a cover as with the other 2), but for now have a game review.
So recently I bought a bunch of Might & Magic games since I’ve always wanted to try them out. Or, more accurately, I bought the first pack I saw on Steam, which was HoM&M5 + Expansion Packs along with this odd little game Dark Messiah.
For those not in the know, Might & Magic is a game where you play as some stooge in armor and go around gathering up a preposterously massive force of other stooges in armor and beat the crap out of the red stooges in armor. The fun in these games generally stems from finding the perfect combination of stooges to obliterate your opponents, while simultaneously decking yourself out in magic bling (artifacts) to be a better stooge in armor. Best I can tell, the Heroes of Might & Magic games make you play as their pre-built characters in campaigns while the old-school ones let you pick a hero and go on a big open world murderfest to kill a dragon or something.
Dark Messiah does away with the stooge management simulations altogether, placing you in the shoes of Sareth, a bland, uninteresting, and presumably bestubbled simpleton who is working for a totally-not-evil wizard as an apprentice or something. Obviously, you are very quickly sent off to run an errand for your mentor, who bestows you with a totally-not-an-evil-seductress-demon sidekick that does nothing but make innuendos and ‘witty’ one-liners. Your mission is to bring a crystal of totally-not-evil to a totally-not-evil wizard’s giant castle city so he can use it to get the totally-not-evil black dragon skull.
Bla-de-bla, several meaningless meandering wanderings later, it turns out you’re the Dark Messiah, prophesied to herald the return of demons to the world and thus doom it to utter destruction, you have the standard “moral choice” of being an asshole and getting the demon lady and the asshole ending or not being an asshole and getting the other girl (I think her name is Leanna, Sareth only says it 50 times) and the nice ending. At least I assume those are the endings, based on the fact that I can’t compel myself to finish what appears to be the last 2 levels of the game, wherein you are immediately assaulted by a pack of ghouls (who are tough, speedy little bastards).
Obviously, my interest in this game has nothing to do with its garbage storyline and level design, but the combat system. Sort of. In Dark Messiah, combat goes beyond the standard FPRPG fare of block-attack-block. No, in this game the entire level is your weapon. You can pick up just about anything that isn’t nailed down to throw at enemies, kick them through railings and off of bridges and high ledges and even into spikes (which while being cool, begs the question of why the hell there are spikes just set up on walls at random), and set fire to frigging everything. The first few levels were a blast, as they designed the levels to cater to this, with lots of guardrails and storage rooms where I’m pretty sure I killed more orcs, goblins, and necromancers by kicking them around like abused factory workers than by actually using my weapons. If you could combine the environmental combat in this game with the directional swordplay from Mount & Blade, I’m pretty sure you would have the greatest medieval fighting system in the world, no joke.
The problems come when you no longer have the available resources to fight this way. Towards the end, you find yourself in a necromancer city, where the only interior decorations are mummified cats and gruesomely disfigured bodies spiked to the walls (some still alive, somehow). Suddenly, you find yourself no longer able to enter a room by kicking down the door and hurling a barrel into the face of the nearest unfortunate. Instead, you must cope with the awful, awful melee combat. Dark Messiah offers you options for magic, bows, and sneaky-stabby fighting, but the fact of the matter is that no matter how sneaky-stabby you are, when you kill one man in a room full of his buddies, you’re going to become a man pretty fast. The melee is, of course, the block-slash-block system. Only instead of at least allowing you to flail about slashing wildly as with most such systems, your enemies are all, in fact, Neo, being able to parry every single one of your fast attacks perfectly regardless of whether you have the perk that lets your wild flailing break blocks. No, instead you must use “power strikes” in order to “vary your attacks” and break through the blocks and parries.
This sounds almost Mount & Blade-esque at first, and seems to make sense. However, in Mount & Blade, you move at the speed of a regular human being, as well as being allowed a third person view to better see what is going on around you. You also aren’t fighting opponents that scurry around like rodents in pitch-black corridors, either. In Dark Messiah, your character darts around like a ferret in every direction except the most important one for tactical swordplay: backwards. Backwards, you become a crippled old man, hobbling backwards slowly trying to make room for a swing while the enemy darts in and out of your reach like they’re being suspended from the ceiling on strings and pulleys. This isn’t so much of a problem fighting one foe at a time; It’s when the entire Necromancer City Guard is on your ass that it suddenly becomes a big hindrance to try and block-slash-block in three directions at once, particularly considering every action you take leaves your foes a huge window to soften your precious flesh.
I will give it one thing though: The game does severed limbs well. It’s not Skyrim or Fallout, where a feather falling on a dead torso will express-mail their spleen to Ashenvale. Cutting off a limb feels like a major accomplishment and actually requires effort on your part. My favorite melee encounter was fighting a random orc in a blacksmith’s forge, where we were knocking things off tables, smashing oil jars around and setting fire to everything, and then I finally pulled off whatever random prerequisites there were for a Star Wars style contest of strength. My rapid clicking prevailed, sending his sword flying out of his hand into the furnace, as another swing sliced through his torso and removed his hand. He then fell backwards into a water tub, making for the most cinematic of ragdoll deaths I’ve seen in a long time.
As for the level design, you ever play, say, Skyrim, and get stuck in a cave where the exit is so clearly in sight, and you wonder “why can’t I just tie one of these stupid ropes lying around all over the place to an arrow and climb right up there?” Well this game answers that question for you.
You can’t do that because if you could the game designers would make that the SOLUTION TO FREAKING EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE EVEN WHEN IT WOULD MAKE NO BLOODY SENSE. Early in, you will find the “rope bow”, an arrow that drops a rope for you to climb so long as it hits a wooden surface. Which sounds pretty cool, and it is, until you get to the levels where the only method of getting around is shooting ropes all over the place until every rafter and signpost in the level is draped with ropes, which you must jump between with the terrible first-person jumping combined with the rope/chain climbing controls, which snap you to everything you can cling onto regardless of whether it’s the direction you’re facing or not. I had to restart so many levels simply because I got caught between ropes and was completely unable to dislodge myself from the web of doom, the web I had crafted for myself.
The rope bow also leads right into the bad level design, since once you introduce a creative, unorthodox method to traverse levels, you should use it ALL THE TIME EVERYWHERE. Before the rope bow ruined my life, the levels were roads, dungeons, and cities, all of which made it clear at all times where you were meant to go. Once you get the rope bow, things go completely mad. While the main rooms where you fight baddies are pretty well-designed, probably for the intent of showing off their combat, there are very flimsy connections between these areas as you head towards your goal. Also, when it is pitch black and your ‘night vision’ spell makes everything snow white, there is no freaking way I should just guess that I was supposed to climb a pile of rocks that looks the exact same as other decorative piles of rocks, shoot three rope arrows at one obscure board leaning overhead, tarzan across those ropes to a single broken step, then jump to an extremely far pillar and then hop over into a small room to open a gate then reverse my steps to get to it before it shuts.
I’m not sure I would recommend buying it full price, since I still need to get around to sludging through the last missions, but if you can find it at a discount or in some old lady’s yard sale I would say you should get it just to try the awesome environmental combat.
The Screaming Blue Messiahs, ‘Gun Shy’ 1986. This band were a phenomenal live beast. Vinyl couldn’t quite capture it but there’s some crunchy fun here. Main man Bill Carter played his axe like Wilko Johnson. Helluva noise for a trio. Rockabilly from hell with punk attack. Lots of dirty blues riffs and licks, Cramps-ian drums, rumble bass. ‘Wide Blue Yonder’ is stomping tribal drums and keyboard wash with juicy axe waxing. ‘Holiday Head’ reverb, big chords, big bass. ‘Smash The Market Place’ suffers from too much 80s production but the guitar slashes away happily. ‘Just For Fun’ fast throbbing drums and twanged guitar. ‘Let’s Go Down to The Woods’ is funk slap with singalong chorus, and guitars. ‘Talking Doll’ big drums and more demented twang and riff. ‘Twin Cadillac Valentine’ fast shuffle beat and guitar atmospherics. ‘President Kennedy’s Mile’ Countryfied rockabilly slap. ‘Clear View’ a chunky fast R&B riff. ‘Killer Born Man’ slow and moody. Nasty. Like I said, this stuff was blistering live, especially compared to bedwetting Indy bands like the Lemondrops and Gigolo Aunts. They shoulda been contenders…