High Score Studios

THEME: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAcDMHuC2E

 

Introducing my Self-MOC! This is actually the 12th version (12.4 to be exact) and a character reboot, though, and I have revamped the whole thing again since this version, too. I will post a picture showing some of the previous versions (I don't have pictures of pre-7th versions, except for the very first), just so you can get an idea of the evolution of the character.

 

---DESCRIPTION---

Nicknamed "Rahksha" due to her Makuta heritage, Nyctoria is somewhat of a Toa: the most accurate way to put it is, she's a protector...of sorts. She has a strong link with the Netherverse, enabling her to draw on its dark power to perform necromancy, as well as harvest souls and summon them as Netherwalkers (inhabitants of the Netherverse) with her scythe. She can also reanimate corpses to serve her by using seals on their Kanohi.

 

However, the power of the Netherverse always takes it toll, and the user's soul - and therefore body - will decay the more they use it. The only way to maintain oneself is to harvest the souls of others. Hence, Nyctoria hunts down villains to defeat and consume.

 

While Nyctoria does defend others from Makuta and other threats, she is not altrustic in her motives -- she will just as easily consume innocents if there is no other source available, and rarely helps others unless she perceives them or the target as useful in her quest for revenge against her "father", Teridax -- and by extension, her de facto creator, Mutran.

 

As an individual, Nyctoria is largely anti-social, apathetic and an on-off misanthrope - hardly surprising considering her origins. That being said, she is not without a sense of justice and empathy, although her concept of morality is nonexistent at worst and dubious at best.

 

---BIO---

NAME: Nyctoria

 

ALIASES: Rahksha, Daughter of Teridax, Destral's Shadowborne

 

SPECIES: Rahkshi/Toa (mutant; Kraata infused with energy from a Nui Stone)

 

GENDER: Female

 

KANOHI: N/A

 

ELEMENT: Shadow

 

WEAPON: Harvest Scythe - "Slayer's Slave"

 

Visiting the Cemetery this evening a sliver of sun shone through the clouds and lit up this fine strong dominating tree that towers the external back wall of the graveyard, like a super trooper.

 

It caught my eye and provoked some thoughts of life after death, hence this capture, posting to Flickr to archive the moment and enjoy time and again.

 

Resurrection

 

Resurrection is the concept of coming back to life after death. In a number of ancient religions, a dying-and-rising god is a deity which dies and resurrects. The death and resurrection of Jesus, an example of resurrection, is the central focus of Christianity.

 

As a religious concept, it is used in two distinct respects: a belief in the resurrection of individual souls that is current and ongoing (Christian idealism, realized eschatology), or else a belief in a singular resurrection of the dead at the end of the world. The resurrection of the dead is a standard eschatological belief in the Abrahamic religions.

 

Some believe the soul is the actual vehicle by which people are resurrected.

Christian theological debate ensues with regard to what kind of resurrection is factual – either a spiritual resurrection with a spirit body into Heaven, or a material resurrection with a restored human body. While most Christians believe Jesus' resurrection from the dead and ascension to Heaven was in a material body, a very small minority believe it was spiritual.

 

There are documented rare cases of the return to life of the clinically dead which are classified scientifically as examples of the Lazarus syndrome, a term originating from the Biblical story of the Resurrection of Lazarus.

 

Etymology

Resurrection, from the Latin noun resurrectio -onis, from the verb rego, "to make straight, rule" + preposition sub, "under", altered to subrigo and contracted to surgo, surrexi, surrectum + preposition re-, "again", thus literally "a straightening from under again".

 

Religion

 

Ancient religions in the Near East

 

See also: Dying-and-rising god

The concept of resurrection is found in the writings of some ancient non-Abrahamic religions in the Middle East. A few extant Egyptian and Canaanite writings allude to dying and rising gods such as Osiris and Baal. Sir James Frazer in his book The Golden Bough relates to these dying and rising gods, but many of his examples, according to various scholars, distort the sources. Taking a more positive position, Tryggve Mettinger argues in his recent book that the category of rise and return to life is significant for the following deities: Ugaritic Baal, Melqart, Adonis, Eshmun, Osiris and Dumuzi.

 

Ancient Greek religion

 

In ancient Greek religion a number of men and women were made physically immortal as they were resurrected from the dead. Asclepius was killed by Zeus, only to be resurrected and transformed into a major deity. Achilles, after being killed, was snatched from his funeral pyre by his divine mother Thetis and resurrected, brought to an immortal existence in either Leuce, Elysian plains or the Islands of the Blessed. Memnon, who was killed by Achilles, seems to have received a similar fate. Alcmene, Castor, Heracles, and Melicertes, were also among the figures sometimes considered to have been resurrected to physical immortality. According to Herodotus's Histories, the seventh century BC sage Aristeas of Proconnesus was first found dead, after which his body disappeared from a locked room. Later he found not only to have been resurrected but to have gained immortality.

 

Many other figures, like a great part of those who fought in the Trojan and Theban wars, Menelaus, and the historical pugilist Cleomedes of Astupalaea, were also believed to have been made physically immortal, but without having died in the first place. Indeed, in Greek religion, immortality originally always included an eternal union of body and soul. The philosophical idea of an immortal soul was a later invention, which, although influential, never had a breakthrough in the Greek world. As may be witnessed even into the Christian era, not least by the complaints of various philosophers over popular beliefs, traditional Greek believers maintained the conviction that certain individuals were resurrected from the dead and made physically immortal and that for the rest of us, we could only look forward to an existence as disembodied and dead souls.

 

This traditional religious belief in physical immortality was generally denied by the Greek philosophers. Writing his Lives of Illustrious Men (Parallel Lives) in the first century CE, the Middle Platonic philosopher Plutarch's chapter on Romulus gave an account of the mysterious disappearance and subsequent deification of this first king of Rome, comparing it to traditional Greek beliefs such as the resurrection and physical immortalization of Alcmene and Aristeas the Proconnesian, "for they say Aristeas died in a fuller's work-shop, and his friends coming to look for him, found his body vanished; and that some presently after, coming from abroad, said they met him traveling towards Croton." Plutarch openly scorned such beliefs held in traditional ancient Greek religion, writing, "many such improbabilities do your fabulous writers relate, deifying creatures naturally mortal."

 

The parallel between these traditional beliefs and the later resurrection of Jesus was not lost on the early Christians, as Justin Martyr argued: "when we say ... Jesus Christ, our teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propose nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you consider sons of Zeus." (1 Apol. 21). There is, however, no belief in a general resurrection in ancient Greek religion, as the Greeks held that not even the gods were able to recreate flesh that had been lost to decay, fire or consumption.

 

The notion of a general resurrection of the dead was therefore apparently quite preposterous to the Greeks. This is made clear in Paul's Areopagus discourse. After having first told about the resurrection of Jesus, which makes the Athenians interested to hear more, Paul goes on, relating how this event relates to a general resurrection of the dead:

 

"Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead." Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some began to sneer, but others said, `We shall hear you again concerning this."

 

Christianity

 

Resurrection of Jesus

 

In Christianity, resurrection most critically concerns the Resurrection of Jesus, but also includes the resurrection of Judgment Day known as the Resurrection of the Dead by those Christians who subscribe to the Nicene Creed (which is the majority or Mainstream Christianity), as well as the resurrection miracles done by Jesus and the prophets of the Old Testament. Some churches distinguish between raising the dead (a resumption of mortal life) and a resurrection (the beginning of an immortal life).

 

Resurrection of Jesus

Christians regard the resurrection of Jesus as the central doctrine in Christianity. Others take the Incarnation of Jesus to be more central; however, it is the miracles – and particularly his Resurrection – which provide validation of his incarnation. According to Paul, the entire Christian faith hinges upon the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus and the hope for a life after death. The Apostle Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians: If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

 

Resurrection

Miracles of Jesus § Resurrection of the dead

During the Ministry of Jesus on earth, before his death, Jesus commissioned his Twelve Apostles to, among other things, raise the dead. In the New Testament, Jesus is said to have raised several persons from death. These resurrections included the daughter of Jairus shortly after death, a young man in the midst of his own funeral procession, and Lazarus, who had been buried for four days. According to the Gospel of Matthew, after Jesus's resurrection, many of those previously dead came out of their tombs and entered Jerusalem, where they appeared to many.

 

Similar resurrections are credited to Christian apostles and saints. Peter allegedly raised a woman named Dorcas (called Tabitha), and Paul the Apostle revived a man named Eutychus who had fallen asleep and fell from a window to his death, according to the book of Acts. Proceeding the apostolic era, many saints were said to resurrect the dead, as recorded in Orthodox Christian hagiographies.[citation needed] St Columba supposedly raised a boy from the dead in the land of Picts .

 

Most Christians understand these miraculous resurrections to be of a different nature than the resurrection of Jesus and the future resurrection of the dead. The raising of Lazarus and others from the dead could also be called "resuscitations" or "reanimations", since the life given to them is presumably temporary in nature—there is no suggestion in the Bible or hagiographic traditions that these people became truly immortal. In contrast, the resurrection of Jesus and the future resurrection of the dead will abolish death once and for all (see Isaiah 25:8, 1 Corinthians 15:26, 2 Timothy 1:10, Revelation 21:4).

 

Resurrection of the Dead

 

Christianity started as a religious movement within 1st-century Judaism (late Second Temple Judaism), and it retains what the New Testament itself claims was the Pharisaic belief in the afterlife and Resurrection of the Dead. Whereas this belief was only one of many beliefs held about the World to Come in Second Temple Judaism, and was notably rejected by both the Sadducees and, according to Josephus, the Pharisees, this belief became dominant within Early Christianity and already in the Gospels of Luke and John included an insistence on the resurrection of the flesh. This was later rejected by gnostic teachings, which instead continued the Pauline insistence that flesh and bones had no place in heaven.

 

Most modern Christian churches continue to uphold the belief that there will be a final Resurrection of the Dead and World to Come, perhaps as prophesied by the Apostle Paul when he said: "...he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world..." (Acts 17:31 KJV) and "...there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust." (Acts 24:15 KJV).

 

Belief in the Resurrection of the Dead, and Jesus's role as judge, is codified in the Apostles' Creed, which is the fundamental creed of Christian baptismal faith. The Book of Revelation also makes many references about the Day of Judgment when the dead will be raised up.

 

Difference From Platonic philosophy

In Platonic philosophy and other Greek philosophical thought, at death the soul was said to leave the inferior body behind. The idea that Jesus was resurrected spiritually rather than physically even gained popularity among some Christian teachers, whom the author of 1 John declared to be antichrists. Similar beliefs appeared in the early church as Gnosticism. However, in Luke 24:39, the resurrected Jesus expressly states "behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Handle me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have."

 

Islam

Belief in the "Day of Resurrection", Yawm al-Qiyāmah (Arabic: ‫يوم القيامة‬‎‎) is also crucial for Muslims. They believe the time of Qiyāmah is preordained by God but unknown to man. The trials and tribulations preceding and during the Qiyāmah are described in the Qur'an and the hadith, and also in the commentaries of scholars. The Qur'an emphasizes bodily resurrection, a break from the pre-Islamic Arabian understanding of death.

 

Judaism and Samaritanism

There are three explicit examples in the Hebrew Bible of people being resurrected from the dead:

* The prophet Elijah prays and God raises a young boy from death (1 Kings 17:17-24)

* Elisha raises the son of the Shunammite woman (2 Kings 4:32-37); this was the very same child whose birth he previously foretold (2 Kings 4:8-16)

* A dead man's body that was thrown into the dead Elisha's tomb is resurrected when the body touches Elisha's bones (2 Kings 13:21)

 

During the period of the Second Temple, there developed a diversity of beliefs concerning the resurrection. The concept of resurrection of the physical body is found in 2 Maccabees, according to which it will happen through recreation of the flesh.[17] Resurrection of the dead also appears in detail in the extra-canonical books of Enoch,[18] in Apocalypse of Baruch, and 2 Esdras. According to the British scholar in ancient Judaism Philip R. Davies, there is “little or no clear reference … either to immortality or to resurrection from the dead” in the Dead Sea scrolls texts.

 

Both Josephus and the New Testament record that the Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife, but the sources vary on the beliefs of the Pharisees. The New Testament claims that the Pharisees believed in the resurrection, but does not specify whether this included the flesh or not. According to Josephus, who himself was a Pharisee, the Pharisees held that only the soul was immortal and the souls of good people will be reincarnated and “pass into other bodies,” while “the souls of the wicked will suffer eternal punishment.” Paul, who also was a Pharisee, said that at the resurrection what is "sown as a natural body is raised a spiritual body." Jubilees seems to refer to the resurrection of the soul only, or to a more general idea of an immortal soul.

 

According to Herbert C. Brichto, writing in Reform Judaism's Hebrew Union College Annual, the family tomb is the central concept in understanding biblical views of the afterlife. Brichto states that it is "not mere sentimental respect for the physical remains that is...the motivation for the practice, but rather an assumed connection between proper sepulture and the condition of happiness of the deceased in the afterlife".

 

According to Brichto, the early Israelites apparently believed that the graves of family, or tribe, united into one, and that this unified collectivity is to what the Biblical Hebrew term Sheol refers, the common Grave of humans. Although not well defined in the Tanakh, Sheol in this view was a subterranean underworld where the souls of the dead went after the body died. The Babylonians had a similar underworld called Aralu, and the Greeks had one known as Hades. For biblical references to Sheol see Genesis 42:38, Isaiah 14:11, Psalm 141:7, Daniel 12:2, Proverbs 7:27 and Job 10:21,22, and 17:16, among others. According to Brichto, other Biblical names for Sheol were: Abaddon (ruin), found in Psalm 88:11, Job 28:22 and Proverbs 15:11; Bor (the pit), found in Isaiah 14:15, 24:22, Ezekiel 26:20; and Shakhat (corruption), found in Isaiah 38:17, Ezekiel 28:8.

 

Zen Buddhism

There are stories in Buddhism where the power of resurrection was allegedly demonstrated in Chan or Zen tradition. One is the legend of Bodhidharma, the Indian master who brought the Ekayana school of India to China that subsequently became Chan Buddhism.

The other is the passing of Chinese Chan master Puhua (J., Fuke) and is recounted in the Record of Linji (J., Rinzai). Puhua was known for his unusual behavior and teaching style so it is no wonder that he is associated with an event that breaks the usual prohibition on displaying such powers. Here is the account from Irmgard Schloegl's "The Zen Teaching of Rinzai".

 

"One day at the street market Fuke was begging all and sundry to give him a robe. Everybody offered him one, but he did not want any of them. The master [Linji] made the superior buy a coffin, and when Fuke returned, said to him: "There, I had this robe made for you." Fuke shouldered the coffin, and went back to the street market, calling loudly: "Rinzai had this robe made for me! I am off to the East Gate to enter transformation" (to die)." The people of the market crowded after him, eager to look. Fuke said: "No, not today. Tomorrow, I shall go to the South Gate to enter transformation." And so for three days. Nobody believed it any longer. On the fourth day, and now without any spectators, Fuke went alone outside the city walls, and laid himself into the coffin. He asked a traveler who chanced by to nail down the lid.

 

The news spread at once, and the people of the market rushed there. On opening the coffin, they found that the body had vanished, but from high up in the sky they heard the ring of his hand bell."

 

Technological resurrection

Cryonics is the low-temperature preservation of humans who cannot be sustained by contemporary medicine, with the hope that healing and resuscitation may be possible in the future. Cryonics procedures ideally begin within minutes of cardiac arrest, and use cryoprotectants to prevent ice formation during cryopreservation.

 

However, the idea of cryonics also includes preservation of people long after death because of the possibility that brain encoding memory structure and personality may still persist or be inferable in the future. Whether sufficient brain information still exists for cryonics to successfully preserve may be intrinsically unprovable by present knowledge. Therefore, most proponents of cryonics see it as an intervention with prospects for success that vary widely depending on circumstances.

 

Russian Cosmist Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov advocated resurrection of the dead using scientific methods. Fedorov tried to plan specific actions for scientific research of the possibility of restoring life and making it infinite. His first project is connected with collecting and synthesizing decayed remains of dead based on "knowledge and control over all atoms and molecules of the world".

 

The second method described by Fedorov is genetic-hereditary. The revival could be done successively in the ancestral line: sons and daughters restore their fathers and mothers, they in turn restore their parents and so on. This means restoring the ancestors using the hereditary information that they passed on to their children. Using this genetic method it is only possible to create a genetic twin of the dead person. It is necessary to give back the revived person his old mind, his personality. Fedorov speculates about the idea of "radial images" that may contain the personalities of the people and survive after death. Nevertheless, Fedorov noted that even if a soul is destroyed after death, Man will learn to restore it whole by mastering the forces of decay and fragmentation.

 

In his 1994 book The Physics of Immortality, American physicist Frank J. Tipler, an expert on the general theory of relativity, presented his Omega Point Theory which outlines how a resurrection of the dead could take place at the end of the cosmos. He posits that humans will evolve into robots which will turn the entire cosmos into a supercomputer which will, shortly before the big crunch, perform the resurrection within its cyberspace, reconstructing formerly dead humans (from information captured by the supercomputer from the past light cone of the cosmos) as avatars within its metaverse.

 

David Deutsch, British physicist and pioneer in the field of quantum computing, agrees with Tipler's Omega Point cosmology and the idea of resurrecting deceased people with the help of quantum computer but he is critical of Tipler's theological views.

 

Italian physicist and computer scientist Giulio Prisco presents the idea of "quantum archaeology", "reconstructing the life, thoughts, memories, and feelings of any person in the past, up to any desired level of detail, and thus resurrecting the original person via 'copying to the future'".

 

In his book Mind Children, roboticist Hans Moravec proposed that a future supercomputer might be able to resurrect long-dead minds from the information that still survived. For example, this information can be in the form of memories, filmstrips, medical records, and DNA.

 

Ray Kurzweil, American inventor and futurist, believes that when his concept of singularity comes to pass, it will be possible to resurrect the dead by digital recreation.

 

In their science fiction novel The Light of Other Days, Sir Arthur Clarke and Stephen Baxter imagine a future civilization resurrecting the dead of past ages by reaching into the past, through micro wormholes and with nanorobots, to download full snapshots of brain states and memories.

 

Both the Church of Perpetual Life and the Terasem Movement consider themselves transreligions and advocate for the use of technology to indefinitely extend the human lifespan.

 

Zombies

A zombie (Haitian Creole: zonbi; North Mbundu: nzumbe) can be either a fictional undead monster or a person in an entranced state believed to be controlled by a bokor or wizard. These latter are the original zombies, occurring in the West African Vodun religion and its American offshoots Haitian Vodou and New Orleans Voodoo.

 

Zombies became a popular device in modern horror fiction, largely because of the success of George A. Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead and they have appeared as plot devices in various books, films and in television shows. Zombie fiction is now a sizable subgenre of horror, usually describing a breakdown of civilization occurring when most of the population become flesh-eating zombies – a zombie apocalypse. The monsters are usually hungry for human flesh, often specifically brains. Sometimes they are victims of a fictional pandemic illness causing the dead to reanimate or the living to behave this way, but often no cause is given in the story.

 

Disappearances (as distinct from resurrection)

As knowledge of different religions has grown, so have claims of bodily disappearance of some religious and mythological figures. In ancient Greek religion, this was a way the gods made some physically immortal, including such figures as Cleitus, Ganymede, Menelaus, and Tithonus. After his death, Cycnus was changed into a swan and vanished. In his chapter on Romulus from Parallel Lives, Plutarch criticises the continuous belief in such disappearances, referring to the allegedly miraculous disappearance of the historical figures Romulus, Cleomedes of Astypalaea, and Croesus. In ancient times, Greek and Roman pagan similarities were explained by the early Christian writers, such as Justin Martyr, as the work of demons, with the intention of leading Christians astray.

 

In somewhat recent years it has been learned that Gesar, the Savior of Tibet, at the end, chants on a mountain top and his clothes fall empty to the ground. The body of the first Guru of the Sikhs, Guru Nanak Dev, is said to have disappeared and flowers were left in place of his dead body.

 

Lord Raglan's Hero Pattern lists many religious figures whose bodies disappear, or have more than one sepulchre. B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, wrote that the Inca Virococha arrived at Cusco (in modern-day Peru) and the Pacific seacoast where he walked across the water and vanished.[46] It has been thought that teachings regarding the purity and incorruptibility of the hero's human body are linked to this phenomenon. Perhaps, this is also to deter the practice of disturbing and collecting the hero's remains. They are safely protected if they have disappeared.

 

The first such case mentioned in the Bible is that of Enoch (son of Jared, great-grandfather of Noah, and father of Methuselah). Enoch is said to have lived a life where he "walked with God", after which "he was not, for God took him" (Genesis 5:1–18).

 

In Deuteronomy (34:6) Moses is secretly buried. Elijah vanishes in a whirlwind 2 Kings (2:11). After hundreds of years these two earlier Biblical heroes suddenly reappear, and are seen walking with Jesus, then again vanish. Mark (9:2–8), Matthew (17:1–8) and Luke (9:28–33). The last time he is seen, Luke (24:51) alone tells of Jesus leaving his disciples by ascending into the sky.

  

St Machar's Cathedral (or, more formally, the Cathedral Church of St Machar) is a Church of Scotland church in Aberdeen, Scotland. It is located to the north of the city centre, in the former burgh of Old Aberdeen. Technically, St Machar's is no longer a cathedral but rather a high kirk, as it has not been the seat of a bishopsince 1690.

 

St Machar is said to have been a companion of St Columba on his journey to Iona. A fourteenth-century legend tells how God (or St Columba) told Machar to establish a church where a river bends into the shape of a bishop's crosier before flowing into the sea.

 

The River Don bends in this way just below where the Cathedral now stands. According to legend, St Machar founded a site of worship in Old Aberdeen in about 580. Machar's church was superseded by a Norman cathedral in 1131, shortly after David I transferred the See from Mortlach to Aberdeen.

 

Almost nothing of that original cathedral survives; a lozenge-decorated base for a capital supporting one of the architraves can be seen in the Charter Room in the present church.

 

After the execution of William Wallace in 1305, his body was cut up and sent to different corners of the country to warn other dissenters. His left quarter ended up in Aberdeen and is buried in the walls of the cathedral.

 

At the end of the thirteenth century Bishop Henry Cheyne decided to extend the church, but the work was interrupted by the Scottish Wars of Independence. Cheyne's progress included piers for an extended choir at the transept crossing. These pillars, with decorated capitals of red sandstone, are still visible at the east end of the present church.

 

Though worn by exposure to the elements after the collapse of the cathedral's central tower, these capitals are among the finest stone carvings of their date to survive in Scotland.

 

Bishop Alexander Kininmund II demolished the Norman cathedral in the late 14th century, and began the nave, including the granite columns and the towers at the western end. Bishop Henry Lichtoun completed the nave, the west front and the northern transept, and made a start on the central tower.

 

Bishop Ingram Lindsay completed the roof and the paving stones in the later part of the fifteenth century. Further work was done over the next fifty years by Thomas Spens, William Elphinstone and Gavin Dunbar; Dunbar is responsible for the heraldic ceiling and the two western spires.

 

The chancel was demolished in 1560 during the Scottish Reformation. The bells and lead from the roof were sent to be sold in Holland, but the ship sank near Girdle Ness.

 

The central tower and spire collapsed in 1688, in a storm, and this destroyed the choir and transepts. The west arch of the crossing was then filled in, and worship carried on in the nave only; the current church consists only of the nave and aisles of the earlier building.

 

The ruined transepts and crossing are under the care of Historic Scotland, and contain an important group of late medieval bishops' tombs, protected from the weather by modern canopies. The Cathedral is chiefly built of outlayer granite. On the unique flat panelled ceiling of the nave (first half of the 16th Century) are the heraldic shields of the contemporary kings of Europe, and the chief earls and bishops of Scotland.

 

The Cathedral is a fine example of a fortified kirk, with twin towers built in the fashion of fourteenth-century tower houses. Their walls have the strength to hold spiral staircases to the upper floors and battlements. The spires which presently crown the

 

Though worn by exposure to the elements after the collapse of the cathedral's central tower, these capitals are among the finest stone carvings of their date to survive in Scotland.

 

Bishop Alexander Kininmund II demolished the Norman cathedral in the late 14th century, and began the nave, including the granite columns and the towers at the western end. Bishop Henry Lichtoun completed the nave, the west front and the northern transept, and made a start on the central tower.

 

Bishop Ingram Lindsay completed the roof and the paving stones in the later part of the fifteenth century. Further work was done over the next fifty years by Thomas Spens, William Elphinstone and Gavin Dunbar; Dunbar is responsible for the heraldic ceiling and the two western spires.

 

The chancel was demolished in 1560 during the Scottish Reformation. The bells and lead from the roof were sent to be sold in Holland, but the ship sank near Girdle Ness.

 

The central tower and spire collapsed in 1688, in a storm, and this destroyed the choir and transepts. The west arch of the crossing was then filled in, and worship carried on in the nave only; the current church consists only of the nave and aisles of the earlier building.

 

The ruined transepts and crossing are under the care of Historic Scotland, and contain an important group of late medieval bishops' tombs, protected from the weather by modern canopies. The Cathedral is chiefly built of outlayer granite. On the unique flat panelled ceiling of the nave (first half of the 16th Century) are the heraldic shields of the contemporary kings of Europe, and the chief earls and bishops of Scotland.

 

Bishops Gavin Dunbar and Alexander Galloway built the western towers and installed the heraldic ceiling, featuring 48 coats of arms in three rows of sixteen. Among those shown are:

* Pope Leo X's coat of arms in the centre, followed in order of importance by those of the Scottish archbishops and bishops.

* the Prior of St Andrews, representing other Church orders.

* King's College, the westernmost shield.

* Henry VIII of England, James V of Scotland and multiple instances for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was also King of Spain, Aragon, Navarre and Sicily at the time the ceiling was created.

* St Margaret of Scotland, possibly as a stand-in for Margaret Tudor, James V's mother, whose own arms would have been the marshalled arms of England and Scotland.

* the arms of Aberdeen and of the families Gordon, Lindsay, Hay and Keith.

 

The ceiling is set off by a frieze which starts at the north-west corner of the nave and lists the bishops of the see from Nechtan in 1131 to William Gordon at the Reformation in 1560. This is followed by the Scottish monarchs from Máel Coluim II to Mary, Queen of Scots.

 

Notable figures buried in the cathedral cemetery include the author J.J. Bell, Robert Brough, Gavin Dunbar, Robert Laws, a missionary to Malawi and William Ogilvie of Pittensear—the ‘rebel professor’.

 

There has been considerable investment in recent years in restoration work and the improvement of the display of historic artefacts at the Cathedral.

 

The battlements of the western towers, incomplete for several centuries, have been renewed to their original height and design, greatly improving the appearance of the exterior. Meanwhile, within the building, a number of important stone monuments have been displayed to advantage.

 

These include a possibly 7th-8th century cross-slab from Seaton (the only surviving evidence from Aberdeen of Christianity at such an early date); a rare 12th century sanctuary cross-head; and several well-preserved late medieval effigies of Cathedral clergy, valuable for their detailed representation of contemporary dress.

 

A notable modern addition to the Cathedral's artistic treasures is a carved wooden triptych commemorating John Barbour, archdeacon of Aberdeen (d. 1395), author of The Brus.

recommended listening

 

360° gif in the first comment.

 

The idea behind Mech Monday was to post one model of a mech, robot or drone per week, each Monday of 2019. Markus did all 52 models last year. For personal reasons, I did only the first half. This year, I’m doing the remaining 26 weekly themes.

 

Join in on the fun in the Mech Monday group.

 

If you want a challenge or need inspiration, next week’s theme is “Alt-Build.”

 

See you next Monday!

Showing off the animation on this tentacle pipe I made for Innsmouth.

 

maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Innsmouth/144/223/38

I was excited to find my first Wood Frog over the weekend. These guys are amazing little animals. According to Smithsonian.com, "The wood frog of North America actually freezes in the winter and is reanimated in the spring. When temperatures fall, the wood frog’s body begins to shut down, and its breathing, heartbeat and muscle movements stop. The water in the frog’s cells freezes and is replaced with glucose and urea to keep cells from collapsing. When there’s a thaw, the frog’s warms up, its body functions resume and it hops off like nothing ever happened."

 

Parke County, Indiana, USA

Parrea was the Makuta of Lesovikk's homeland and a member of the Brotherhood of Makuta.

 

Parrea was responsible for the creation of several Rahi breeds to populate the Matoran Universe during her early life, most notable of which was the Fusa, a breed of mammal Rahi suited to desert landscapes. Displaying some talent in the area, Parrea never fully committed to the role of Rahi Creator, however, possessing more interest in other disciplines.

 

After the Matoran Civil War, Parrea was assigned to supervise Lesovikk's homeland by Makuta Miserix, who felt she was the least likely Makuta to interfere in the delicate affairs of the fledgling Matoran colony that was struggling to establish itself. Complying with her role as protector of the island, Parrea at first nurtured the Matoran under her charge and helped them establish civilization before a group of Toa set up an outpost on the island.

 

With a large desert biome occupying the western region of the island, Parrea was also known to have forcibly established large numbers of Fusa, to the extent where the central desert region is nicknamed the Fusa Plains.

 

Parrea wore a Kanohi Tryna, Great Mask of Reanimation, a Kanohi that enabled her to animate the corpses of dead beings, commanding them to perform basic tasks until she lost concentration.

 

Sporting a wide arsenal of Protosteel weaponry over the centuries, Parrea armed herself principally with a Rotating Razor Shield, which served as both a defensive and offensive tool capable of channeling her Shadow powers. Prior to the Invasion of Karda Nui, Parrea notably equipped herself with a Tridax Pod.

While doing my small bit to educate Texans on the counterproductive nature of the death penalty--or rather, while taking a break from this--I and a couple of my fellows wandered about the streets of San Antonio looking for a place to eat lunch and came across this restaurant. We ended up eating elsewhere, but would come back to eat dinner (the evening meal) here a few days later. It was fine, but not unusually so. It was pretty though.

 

My computer gave up the ghost three days ago. :-( I finally have its replacement up and running. Alas, the hard drive of the deceased is kaput. It died just as I was transferring some of my photos to my backup HD. Some things I was working on, and had finished working on (hundreds of such things), are gone--unless I bite the bullet and send off my old HD for some expensive reanimation. Grrrrrrrr.

after working late at night with the few remaining power crystals the Mage allows himself to drink a small jar of Her fermentation wine and a few puffs on his pipe he picked up from the second wizards habits, he was really gonna relax with reading an ancient book from a hinterland far away called the Krama Sputtra, but when he was sitting there puffing his old friend pipe the smell started him thinking of his old friend who so sadly perished after he turned to a bat-hybrid abomination...

 

Yes the Mad-Monk had told him trough the bat-mail that his friend had arrived at the winter palace but hideously twisted and so was his mind too, they had to kill him after he had attacked and eaten two Vikings and three Slavic Tribesmen...

 

...the though that he was part of this terrible faith of his friend plagued him, but really it was just curiosity that made him experiment on his friend, not bad will, not spite...

 

Or was it just that, was he envious at his former no dead friend, since he knew for many more elixirs than him, that he time after time improved his inventions in the workshop?

 

...or he had seen some of "his hordes of woman" look at him with a dirty look...

 

More was not thought by the mage before he fell in to a strange misty sulfur smelling half-sleep...

 

...again the undead, ghost and banshees hunted him, but was it a dream or reality?

 

...among the spooky unnatural geists and the reanimated corpses was a familiar face, an undead version of his mutated friend the second mage...

 

He said:

 

- Youuuo nasty old beard-monkey with hide like the cloaca of a dragon... Youuoo, you killed me...

 

- No I didn´t the Ras and his men did, you attacked his subjects...

 

- Noo, I didn´t kill anyone but you did... your actions lead to my disfiguration and my death, now I am deemed by the forces to walk the dead´s path in this ugly flesh, I will do all in my power to ruin your life from this realm...

 

- Hey You are not fair now, it was a mistake I didn´t believe that you would die, I just wanted to help you gain power...

 

- Oh and why did´t you drink it yourself? you like power, don´t you? but I will curse and damn you in the life of you flesh and when your time is to enter this realm, I will be waiting here to punish you severely...

 

- Ha, you can´t kill me when I am already dead, I am much wiser than you my former friend, I will never die, I will find the path to eternal life!

 

- Sooo, Old fool, you think their is no death after death, ha, ha, ha, you can´t even imagine what fates worse than death this world can offer... how much suffering... I will get you in the end...

 

one of the imps treads forwards and speaks:

 

- and hey nasty little human meekling, you still owns us gold... until you pay us we will support this undead batman in his cause of destroying your life...

 

The Wizard woke up, he was on fire the pipe had fallen in to his lap and started his clothing to burn, luckily his thick hide was some protection against the worst burns, he was fast and jumped out of a window, it was a thunderstorm outside and the rain stopped the fire, ok he fell 10 feet and broke his pinky and two ribs... but he was alive...

 

What were these strange dreams? were they really contacts with the other realms or just in his mind?

Found in a french paper factory

Even if she was under care, Mason Gardner's failure to guarantee the safety of his sister sent him on a downward spiral further. Plus his family wasn’t enough to be trusted, when most of them only cared about money and luxurious lifestyles. But Yvette mattered to him no matter what, she was his anchor, and so was him to hers. The sibling bond remained strong, to say the least.

 

He had multiple issues with the agency his mentor worked for—-and recently started hitting him hard. With the occurring attacks, Gardner couldn’t stop thinking how the public would question him. The combined weight of everything must have sped up his incurable condition, as so he thought, from the big stress.

 

It all started when a Paladin agent went out on a hunt, daringly, to take down the ES but got captured in the process. Nearly two weeks he endured torture and suffered most before finally breaking his spirit on the third. Then he spilled his guts and was eventually killed. Right in a slaughterhouse in Guatemala.

 

North eventually knew the secrets and used it to his own advantage. Blowing up bases....hitting the list....lots of actions causes dealt a big blow to the agency itself. The board was embarrassed and cut off all ties with many of their allies in case of whistleblowing and being doublecrossed. It would be a PR nightmare, risking their reputation going down a sinkhole.

 

Gardner feared it more every day the feeling came by.

 

***

As the agents silently conversed with one another, the more they went deeper into the compound. Wreckage contained tons of damaged electronics and the floor was muddy with water. Files were spread everywhere. It looked to them as if an abandoned asylum had come to life.

 

Jesse: “So that’s how it started. From that very moment a tip was passed....we should be lucky they never found us.”

Harry: “Nobody knows if there’s trackers around even with our tech. It’s surveillance we’re talking about.”

Gary: “Apparently so.....it killed a couple of my friends already. They did it.”

Jesse: “You tried to save them didn’t you?”

Gary: “Maybe.....maybe the chi could”

Harry: “But it doesn’t work every time.”

Gary: “It may not all the time, but at least it's under my control. Having these powers paved me a new life to improve after I started meditating.”

Jesse: “What if there’s corpses down here? Can you feel the aura throughout?”

Gary: “Maybe....more or less. I need to tap in and see.”

 

Even if flashlights could be used, it wouldn’t fare well in the deep darkness. Then Jesse decided to illuminate the environment up with a spark of electricity, enough to get them through securing the area long enough for Gary to meditate.

 

15 minutes passed as the walked further, and scans didn’t prove much evidence around. It was far beyond destroyed. Nothing but littered by a couple more dead, rotting bodies. Files proved useless.....until Harry discovered something.

 

Harry: “I think this is interesting. This corpse.....looks really familiar. Gary, do a retinal scan for real.”

Gary: “Hmm....I sense no heartbeat. Yet it’s somehow twitching. Unless they’ve got rodents lurking around somewhere.”

Jesse: “Hold on.....you’re telling me this is a reanimated corpse? At least it’s not the lower half.”

Harry: “Nah. Look closely. The uniform has a badge of the ES. I’ll send this to the team.”

Gary: “No. wait. Something’s wrong again. Get behind me. I’ll activate my field.”

 

The three rose their weapons in a defensive position as the ground began to rumble. Right in front it led them to a door. A small one, about the size of the entrapped submarine doors.

 

Harry: “It’s getting darker. Charge up your powers, gentlemen. I’m going to render my invisibility.”

Jesse: “Copy.”

Gary: “Do your thing. I can try opening it.....hmm.”

Harry: “Shh....”

Jesse: “Lowering frequency. Voices down. Team, you seeing this? I hope you do.”

Gary: “There we go....slowly....my dagger should be able to lock-pick it.”

 

And it opened. The sight of bleak darkness opened up to the three agents. They went in one by one, slowly and carefully. Unlike the surrounding outside, the room wasn’t filled with the stench and odours, yet it looked as filthy with grease and rusting machinery. It was a room filled with clean files and a few advanced computer. Harry was the first to dig in, scrapping through the documents while Jesse lightened up the room further as Gary kept his dagger and aura in tow.

 

It took them much time they needed as the images were continuously sent. Then suddenly a flash of a shadow passed by, which Gary witnessed, as his instinct told him to throw a dagger at the wall. The other two looked up in surprise as the unknown shadow started to fire.

 

Jesse: “Take cover! I’ll see if I can fry this bastard.”

Harry: “I got a clean shot. Not sure if the tables do any good cover but ok.”

Gary: “Use the chairs!”

Harry: *keeps firing*: Hold on....I recognise that mask somehow...I can see it. Isn’t that Knifenight?”

Knifenight: *appears* Yes. You guessed correctly. Knifenight is here. Knifenight is here and would be pleased to end you Ghostforge.”

Harry: “The hell is going on?! How’d you get in here?”

Knifenight: “Knifenight survived the onslaught. Knifenight almost drowned but he found a way.”

Jesse: “Ok, lower your weapons for now....you’re telling me you were in this compound? For how long?”

Knifenight: “Knifenight stayed for 3 weeks. Knifenight can survive on his own. Knifenight needs no food nor water.”

Gary: “Ok....I’ve heard about you as well....you might wanna elaborate on that further.”

 

The confused trio stared at their enemy as they waited for answers. He eventually started explaining, as he had gone on a mission to deal with some black market dealers in the currently abandoned base. And then it started flooding. People started drowning, including the Spectres, but Knifenight was the lucky one, managing to get out in time, hiding himself in an abandoned room. Despite limited contact to call his boss/hirer, it went to no avail, so he believed, may have intentionally been on purpose to send him to die, condemned without help. Yet he managed to survive on his own....

 

Jesse: “Ok, I don’t care about your third person act or shit, but I still don’t trust you. You could have laid a trap on us like back then in Tokyo or whatever.”

Harry: “The main question is, why. Did he leave you to die as a sacrificial pawn to get rid of you? Weren’t you always loyal?”

Gary: “The threads in this is too suspicious. You gotta spill because I can see that tongue lying.”

Knifenight: “Ok....ok....Knifenight knows. Knifenight let the cat out of the bag. Because....it was a deal. It went wrong. Knifenight saw them Spectres gun down the dealers. North probably asked them to. I for my life have not witnessed him like this....as brutal and ruthless as he was. And....here, this info might serve critical. Knifenight can only do so many.”

Harry: “Can we trust you with this?”

Knifenight: “Yes. Knifenight is sure. Knifenight isn’t lying. Read more and you’ll see....Knifenight is no longer a part of North’s cabal. So, bye for now.”

 

***

 

Jesse: “And then he runs away. Just like that. Seriously, disappearing again without a trace. Not because we let him go, but just quitting in the most ninja way as possible. However, given our shared history....I really doubt it.”

Harry: “But at what cost....is critical to matter?”

Gary: “Nobody knows, but it somehow proved I can sense the good in them. Their aura. No, I’m not joking. I really can. You should try it someday.”

Jesse: “Y’know what? I’m on the verge of my post breakup with the dude....I could tell you more over green tea. This meditation thing sounds like fun.”

Gary: “Mhmm I could tell you about my ex. He was a great guy as well....”

 

And with that, Harry decided to call his team. They were slowly getting ahead. Maybe a chance to fight back....just maybe.

This light painting image was created while Oviedo Light Art Congress & V LPWA exhibition nights :)

www.lightpainters.com/archive/lpwa/event/94.html

With a kind help of my wife Natalia :)

Share your emotions - You are acting crazy

React to the treatment - She must be crazy

Let them see a single tear - He is crazy

 

What will it take?

 

Give no reaction - They sound crazy

Hide away from the world - The whispers are crazy

Listen to them all and let the voices say; do; exist.

 

Allow me to show you crazy.

 

___________________

Blogging

 

Dirty Rat - Bunk Bed

7 LI

 

Wasteland Event

Event Closing Date: February 18, 2025

 

maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mount%20Amore/201/42/2172

____________________

 

Decor:

 

DRD

Trailer Park - Meemaw Dont Play - Red Chair

Trailer Park - Meemaw Dont Play

GG - Emergency Teepee big pack

Boho Loft - Side Table - Aztec

GG - Pitchfork 1 (add)

The Reanimator - Mrs. Stein's Arm

Tiny droid

GG - Post Apoc Radio/Receiver - Yellow

gg rug 60s

 

Duplexity

Prefab CyberHome

 

[La Baguette]

Voodoo doll (deco)

Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky (Russian: Владимир Семёнович Высоцкий, IPA: [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr sʲɪˈmʲɵnəvʲɪtɕ vɨˈsotskʲɪj]; 25 January 1938 – 25 July 1980), was a Soviet singer-songwriter, poet, and actor who had an immense and enduring effect on Soviet culture. He became widely known for his unique singing style and for his lyrics, which featured social and political commentary in often humorous street-jargon. He was also a prominent stage- and screen-actor. Though the official Soviet cultural establishment largely ignored his work, he was remarkably popular during his lifetime, and to this day exerts significant influence on many of Russia's musicians and actors.

 

Vysotsky was born in Moscow at the 3rd Meshchanskaya St. (61/2) maternity hospital. His father, Semyon Volfovich (Vladimirovich) (1915–1997), was a colonel in the Soviet army, originally from Kiev. Vladimir's mother, Nina Maksimovna, (née Seryogina, 1912–2003) was Russian, and worked as a German language translator.[3] Vysotsky's family lived in a Moscow communal flat in harsh conditions, and had serious financial difficulties. When Vladimir was 10 months old, Nina had to return to her office in the Transcript bureau of the Soviet Ministry of Geodesy and Cartography (engaged in making German maps available for the Soviet military) so as to help her husband earn their family's living.

 

Vladimir's theatrical inclinations became obvious at an early age, and were supported by his paternal grandmother Dora Bronshteyn, a theater fan. The boy used to recite poems, standing on a chair and "flinging hair backwards, like a real poet," often using in his public speeches expressions he could hardly have heard at home. Once, at the age of two, when he had tired of the family's guests' poetry requests, he, according to his mother, sat himself under the New-year tree with a frustrated air about him and sighed: "You silly tossers! Give a child some respite!" His sense of humor was extraordinary, but often baffling for people around him. A three-year-old could jeer his father in a bathroom with unexpected poetic improvisation ("Now look what's here before us / Our goat's to shave himself!") or appall unwanted guests with some street folk song, promptly steering them away. Vysotsky remembered those first three years of his life in the autobiographical Ballad of Childhood (Баллада о детстве, 1975), one of his best-known songs.

 

As World War II broke out, Semyon Vysotsky, a military reserve officer, joined the Soviet army and went to fight the Nazis. Nina and Vladimir were evacuated to the village of Vorontsovka, in Orenburg Oblast where the boy had to spend six days a week in a kindergarten and his mother worked for twelve hours a day in a chemical factory. In 1943, both returned to their Moscow apartment at 1st Meschanskaya St., 126. In September 1945, Vladimir joined the 1st class of the 273rd Moscow Rostokino region School.

 

In December 1946, Vysotsky's parents divorced. From 1947 to 1949, Vladimir lived with Semyon Vladimirovich (then an army Major) and his Armenian wife, Yevgenya Stepanovna Liholatova, whom the boy called "aunt Zhenya", at a military base in Eberswalde in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany (later East Germany). "We decided that our son would stay with me. Vladimir came to stay with me in January 1947, and my second wife, Yevgenia, became Vladimir's second mother for many years to come. They had much in common and liked each other, which made me really happy," Semyon Vysotsky later remembered. Here living conditions, compared to those of Nina's communal Moscow flat, were infinitely better; the family occupied the whole floor of a two-storeyed house, and the boy had a room to himself for the first time in his life. In 1949 along with his stepmother Vladimir returned to Moscow. There he joined the 5th class of the Moscow 128th School and settled at Bolshoy Karetny [ru], 15 (where they had to themselves two rooms of a four-roomed flat), with "auntie Zhenya" (who was just 28 at the time), a woman of great kindness and warmth whom he later remembered as his second mother. In 1953 Vysotsky, now much interested in theater and cinema, joined the Drama courses led by Vladimir Bogomolov.[7] "No one in my family has had anything to do with arts, no actors or directors were there among them. But my mother admired theater and from the earliest age... each and every Saturday I've been taken up with her to watch one play or the other. And all of this, it probably stayed with me," he later reminisced. The same year he received his first ever guitar, a birthday present from Nina Maksimovna; a close friend, bard and a future well-known Soviet pop lyricist Igor Kokhanovsky taught him basic chords. In 1955 Vladimir re-settled into his mother's new home at 1st Meshchanskaya, 76. In June of the same year he graduated from school with five A's.

 

In 1955, Vladimir enrolled into the Moscow State University of Civil Engineering, but dropped out after just one semester to pursue an acting career. In June 1956 he joined Boris Vershilov's class at the Moscow Art Theatre Studio-Institute. It was there that he met the 3rd course student Iza Zhukova who four years later became his wife; soon the two lovers settled at the 1st Meschanskaya flat, in a common room, shielded off by a folding screen. It was also in the Studio that Vysotsky met Bulat Okudzhava for the first time, an already popular underground bard. He was even more impressed by his Russian literature teacher Andrey Sinyavsky who along with his wife often invited students to his home to stage improvised disputes and concerts. In 1958 Vysotsky's got his first Moscow Art Theatre role: that of Porfiry Petrovich in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. In 1959 he was cast in his first cinema role, that of student Petya in Vasily Ordynsky's The Yearlings (Сверстницы). On 20 June 1960, Vysotsky graduated from the MAT theater institute and joined the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre (led by Boris Ravenskikh at the time) where he spent (with intervals) almost three troubled years. These were marred by numerous administrative sanctions, due to "lack of discipline" and occasional drunken sprees which were a reaction, mainly, to the lack of serious roles and his inability to realise his artistic potential. A short stint in 1962 at the Moscow Theater of Miniatures (administered at the time by Vladimir Polyakov) ended with him being fired, officially "for a total lack of sense of humour."

 

Vysotsky's second and third films, Dima Gorin's Career and 713 Requests Permission to Land, were interesting only for the fact that in both he had to be beaten up (in the first case by Aleksandr Demyanenko). "That was the way cinema greeted me," he later jokingly remarked. In 1961, Vysotsky wrote his first ever proper song, called "Tattoo" (Татуировка), which started a long and colourful cycle of artfully stylized criminal underworld romantic stories, full of undercurrents and witty social comments. In June 1963, while shooting Penalty Kick (directed by Veniamin Dorman and starring Mikhail Pugovkin), Vysotsky used the Gorky Film Studio to record an hour-long reel-to-reel cassette of his own songs; copies of it quickly spread and the author's name became known in Moscow and elsewhere (although many of these songs were often being referred to as either "traditional" or "anonymous"). Just several months later Riga-based chess grandmaster Mikhail Tal was heard praising the author of "Bolshoy Karetny" (Большой Каретный) and Anna Akhmatova (in a conversation with Joseph Brodsky) was quoting Vysotsky's number "I was the soul of a bad company..." taking it apparently for some brilliant piece of anonymous street folklore. In October 1964 Vysotsky recorded in chronological order 48 of his own songs, his first self-made Complete works of... compilation, which boosted his popularity as a new Moscow folk underground star.

 

In 1964, director Yuri Lyubimov invited Vysotsky to join the newly created Taganka Theatre. "'I've written some songs of my own. Won't you listen?' – he asked. I agreed to listen to just one of them, expecting our meeting to last for no more than five minutes. Instead I ended up listening to him for an entire 1.5 hours," Lyubimov remembered years later of this first audition. On 19 September 1964, Vysotsky debuted in Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan as the Second God (not to count two minor roles). A month later he came on stage as a dragoon captain (Bela's father) in Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. It was in Taganka that Vysotsky started to sing on stage; the War theme becoming prominent in his musical repertoire. In 1965 Vysotsky appeared in the experimental Poet and Theater (Поэт и Театр, February) show, based on Andrey Voznesensky's work and then Ten Days that Shook the World (after John Reed's book, April) and was commissioned by Lyubimov to write songs exclusively for Taganka's new World War II play. The Fallen and the Living (Павшие и Живые), premiered in October 1965, featured Vysotsky's "Stars" (Звёзды), "The Soldiers of Heeresgruppe Mitte" (Солдаты группы "Центр") and "Penal Battalions" (Штрафные батальоны), the striking examples of a completely new kind of a war song, never heard in his country before. As veteran screenwriter Nikolay Erdman put it (in conversation with Lyubimov), "Professionally, I can well understand how Mayakovsky or Seryozha Yesenin were doing it. How Volodya Vysotsky does it is totally beyond me." With his songs – in effect, miniature theatrical dramatizations (usually with a protagonist and full of dialogues), Vysotsky instantly achieved such level of credibility that real life former prisoners, war veterans, boxers, footballers refused to believe that the author himself had never served his time in prisons and labor camps, or fought in the War, or been a boxing/football professional. After the second of the two concerts at the Leningrad Molecular Physics institute (that was his actual debut as a solo musical performer) Vysotsky left a note for his fans in a journal which ended with words: "Now that you've heard all these songs, please, don't you make a mistake of mixing me with my characters, I am not like them at all. With love, Vysotsky, 20 April 1965, XX c." Excuses of this kind he had to make throughout his performing career. At least one of Vysotsky's song themes – that of alcoholic abuse – was worryingly autobiographical, though. By the time his breakthrough came in 1967, he'd suffered several physical breakdowns and once was sent (by Taganka's boss) to a rehabilitation clinic, a visit he on several occasions repeated since.

 

Brecht's Life of Galileo (premiered on 17 May 1966), transformed by Lyubimov into a powerful allegory of Soviet intelligentsia's set of moral and intellectual dilemmas, brought Vysotsky his first leading theater role (along with some fitness lessons: he had to perform numerous acrobatic tricks on stage). Press reaction was mixed, some reviewers disliked the actor's overt emotionalism, but it was for the first time ever that Vysotsky's name appeared in Soviet papers. Film directors now were treating him with respect. Viktor Turov's war film I Come from the Childhood where Vysotsky got his first ever "serious" (neither comical, nor villainous) role in cinema, featured two of his songs: a spontaneous piece called "When It's Cold" (Холода) and a dark, Unknown soldier theme-inspired classic "Common Graves" (На братских могилах), sung behind the screen by the legendary Mark Bernes.

 

Stanislav Govorukhin and Boris Durov's The Vertical (1967), a mountain climbing drama, starring Vysotsky (as Volodya the radioman), brought him all-round recognition and fame. Four of the numbers used in the film (including "Song of a Friend [fi]" (Песня о друге), released in 1968 by the Soviet recording industry monopolist Melodiya disc to become an unofficial hit) were written literally on the spot, nearby Elbrus, inspired by professional climbers' tales and one curious hotel bar conversation with a German guest who 25 years ago happened to climb these very mountains in a capacity of an Edelweiss division fighter. Another 1967 film, Kira Muratova's Brief Encounters featured Vysotsky as the geologist Maxim (paste-bearded again) with a now trademark off-the-cuff musical piece, a melancholy improvisation called "Things to Do" (Дела). All the while Vysotsky continued working hard at Taganka, with another important role under his belt (that of Mayakovsky or, rather one of the latter character's five different versions) in the experimental piece called Listen! (Послушайте!), and now regularly gave semi-official concerts where audiences greeted him as a cult hero.

 

In the end of 1967 Vysotsky got another pivotal theater role, that of Khlopusha [ru] in Pugachov (a play based on a poem by Sergei Yesenin), often described as one of Taganka's finest. "He put into his performance all the things that he excelled at and, on the other hand, it was Pugachyov that made him discover his own potential," – Soviet critic Natalya Krymova wrote years later. Several weeks after the premiere, infuriated by the actor's increasing unreliability triggered by worsening drinking problems, Lyubimov fired him – only to let him back again several months later (and thus begin the humiliating sacked-then-pardoned routine which continued for years). In June 1968 a Vysotsky-slagging campaign was launched in the Soviet press. First Sovetskaya Rossiya commented on the "epidemic spread of immoral, smutty songs," allegedly promoting "criminal world values, alcoholism, vice and immorality" and condemned their author for "sowing seeds of evil." Then Komsomolskaya Pravda linked Vysotsky with black market dealers selling his tapes somewhere in Siberia. Composer Dmitry Kabalevsky speaking from the Union of Soviet Composers' Committee tribune criticised the Soviet radio for giving an ideologically dubious, "low-life product" like "Song of a Friend" (Песня о друге) an unwarranted airplay. Playwright Alexander Stein who in his Last Parade play used several of Vysotsky's songs, was chastised by a Ministry of Culture official for "providing a tribune for this anti-Soviet scum." The phraseology prompted commentators in the West to make parallels between Vysotsky and Mikhail Zoschenko, another Soviet author who'd been officially labeled "scum" some 20 years ago.

 

Two of Vysotsky's 1968 films, Gennady Poloka's Intervention (premiered in May 1987) where he was cast as Brodsky, a dodgy even if highly artistic character, and Yevgeny Karelov's Two Comrades Were Serving (a gun-toting White Army officer Brusentsov who in the course of the film shoots his friend, his horse, Oleg Yankovsky's good guy character and, finally himself) – were severely censored, first of them shelved for twenty years. At least four of Vysotsky's 1968 songs, "Save Our Souls" (Спасите наши души), "The Wolfhunt" (Охота на волков), "Gypsy Variations" (Моя цыганская) and "The Steam-bath in White" (Банька по-белому), were hailed later as masterpieces. It was at this point that 'proper' love songs started to appear in Vysotsky's repertoire, documenting the beginning of his passionate love affair with French actress Marina Vlady.

 

In 1969 Vysotsky starred in two films: The Master of Taiga where he played a villainous Siberian timber-floating brigadier, and more entertaining Dangerous Tour. The latter was criticized in the Soviet press for taking a farcical approach to the subject of the Bolshevik underground activities but for a wider Soviet audience this was an important opportunity to enjoy the charismatic actor's presence on big screen. In 1970, after visiting the dislodged Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at his dacha and having a lengthy conversation with him, Vysotsky embarked on a massive and by Soviet standards dangerously commercial concert tour in Soviet Central Asia and then brought Marina Vlady to director Viktor Turov's place so as to investigate her Belarusian roots. The pair finally wed on 1 December 1970 (causing furore among the Moscow cultural and political elite) and spent a honeymoon in Georgia. This was the highly productive period for Vysotsky, resulting in numerous new songs, including the anthemic "I Hate" (Я не люблю), sentimental "Lyricale" (Лирическая) and dramatic war epics "He Didn't Return from the Battle" (Он не вернулся из боя) and "The Earth Song" (Песня о Земле) among many others.

 

In 1971 a drinking spree-related nervous breakdown brought Vysotsky to the Moscow Kashchenko clinic [ru]. By this time he has been suffering from alcoholism. Many of his songs from this period deal, either directly or metaphorically, with alcoholism and insanity. Partially recovered (due to the encouraging presence of Marina Vladi), Vysotsky embarked on a successful Ukrainian concert tour and wrote a cluster of new songs. On 29 November 1971 Taganka's Hamlet premiered, a groundbreaking Lyubimov's production with Vysotsky in the leading role, that of a lone intellectual rebel, rising to fight the cruel state machine.

 

Also in 1971 Vysotsky was invited to play the lead in The Sannikov Land, the screen adaptation of Vladimir Obruchev's science fiction,[47] which he wrote several songs for, but was suddenly dropped for the reason of his face "being too scandalously recognisable" as a state official put it. One of the songs written for the film, a doom-laden epic allegory "Capricious Horses" (Кони привередливые), became one of the singer's signature tunes. Two of Vysotsky's 1972 film roles were somewhat meditative: an anonymous American journalist in The Fourth One and the "righteous guy" von Koren in The Bad Good Man (based on Anton Chekov's Duel). The latter brought Vysotsky the Best Male Role prize at the V Taormina Film Fest. This philosophical slant rubbed off onto some of his new works of the time: "A Singer at the Microphone" (Певец у микрофона), "The Tightrope Walker" (Канатоходец), two new war songs ("We Spin the Earth", "Black Pea-Coats") and "The Grief" (Беда), a folkish girl's lament, later recorded by Marina Vladi and subsequently covered by several female performers. Popular proved to be his 1972 humorous songs: "Mishka Shifman" (Мишка Шифман), satirizing the leaving-for-Israel routine, "Victim of the Television" which ridiculed the concept of "political consciousness," and "The Honour of the Chess Crown" (Честь шахматной короны) about an ever-fearless "simple Soviet man" challenging the much feared American champion Bobby Fischer to a match.

 

In 1972 he stepped up in Soviet Estonian TV where he presented his songs and gave an interview. The name of the show was "Young Man from Taganka" (Noormees Tagankalt).

 

In April 1973 Vysotsky visited Poland and France. Predictable problems concerning the official permission were sorted after the French Communist Party leader Georges Marchais made a personal phone call to Leonid Brezhnev who, according to Marina Vlady's memoirs, rather sympathized with the stellar couple. Having found on return a potentially dangerous lawsuit brought against him (concerning some unsanctioned concerts in Siberia the year before), Vysotsky wrote a defiant letter to the Minister of Culture Pyotr Demichev. As a result, he was granted the status of a philharmonic artist, 11.5 roubles per concert now guaranteed. Still the 900 rubles fine had to be paid according to the court verdict, which was a substantial sum, considering his monthly salary at the theater was 110 rubles. That year Vysotsky wrote some thirty songs for "Alice in Wonderland," an audioplay where he himself has been given several minor roles. His best known songs of 1973 included "The Others' Track" (Чужая колея), "The Flight Interrupted" (Прерванный полёт) and "The Monument", all pondering on his achievements and legacy.

 

In 1974 Melodiya released the 7" EP, featuring four of Vysotsky's war songs ("He Never Returned From the Battle", "The New Times Song", "Common Graves", and "The Earth Song") which represented a tiny portion of his creative work, owned by millions on tape. In September of that year Vysotsky received his first state award, the Honorary Diploma of the Uzbek SSR following a tour with fellow actors from the Taganka Theatre in Uzbekistan. A year later he was granted the USSR Union of Cinematographers' membership. This meant he was not an "anti-Soviet scum" now, rather an unlikely link between the official Soviet cinema elite and the "progressive-thinking artists of the West." More films followed, among them The Only Road (a Soviet-Yugoslav joint venture, premiered on 10 January 1975 in Belgrade) and a science fiction movie The Flight of Mr. McKinley (1975). Out of nine ballads that he wrote for the latter only two have made it into the soundtrack. This was the height of his popularity, when, as described in Vlady's book about her husband, walking down the street on a summer night, one could hear Vysotsky's recognizable voice coming literally from every open window. Among the songs written at the time, were humorous "The Instruction before the Trip Abroad", lyrical "Of the Dead Pilot" and philosophical "The Strange House". In 1975 Vysotsky made his third trip to France where he rather riskily visited his former tutor (and now a celebrated dissident emigre) Andrey Sinyavsky. Artist Mikhail Shemyakin, his new Paris friend (or a "bottle-sharer", in Vladi's terms), recorded Vysotsky in his home studio. After a brief stay in England Vysotsky crossed the ocean and made his first Mexican concerts in April. Back in Moscow, there were changes at Taganka: Lyubimov went to Milan's La Scala on a contract and Anatoly Efros has been brought in, a director of radically different approach. His project, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, caused a sensation. Critics praised Alla Demidova (as Ranevskaya) and Vysotsky (as Lopakhin) powerful interplay, some describing it as one of the most dazzling in the history of the Soviet theater. Lyubimov, who disliked the piece, accused Efros of giving his actors "the stardom malaise." The 1976 Taganka's visit to Bulgaria resulted in Vysotskys's interview there being filmed and 15 songs recorded by Balkanton record label. On return Lyubimov made a move which many thought outrageous: declaring himself "unable to work with this Mr. Vysotsky anymore" he gave the role of Hamlet to Valery Zolotukhin, the latter's best friend. That was the time, reportedly, when stressed out Vysotsky started taking amphetamines.

 

Another Belorussian voyage completed, Marina and Vladimir went for France and from there (without any official permission given, or asked for) flew to the North America. In New York Vysotsky met, among other people, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Joseph Brodsky. In a televised one-hour interview with Dan Rather he stressed he was "not a dissident, just an artist, who's never had any intentions to leave his country where people loved him and his songs." At home this unauthorized venture into the Western world bore no repercussions: by this time Soviet authorities were divided as regards the "Vysotsky controversy" up to the highest level; while Mikhail Suslov detested the bard, Brezhnev loved him to such an extent that once, while in hospital, asked him to perform live in his daughter Galina's home, listening to this concert on the telephone. In 1976 appeared "The Domes", "The Rope" and the "Medieval" cycle, including "The Ballad of Love".

 

In September Vysotsky with Taganka made a trip to Yugoslavia where Hamlet won the annual BITEF festival's first prize, and then to Hungary for a two-week concert tour. Back in Moscow Lyubimov's production of The Master & Margarita featured Vysotsky as Ivan Bezdomny; a modest role, somewhat recompensed by an important Svidrigailov slot in Yury Karyakin's take on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Vysotsky's new songs of this period include "The History of Illness" cycle concerning his health problems, humorous "Why Did the Savages Eat Captain Cook", the metaphorical "Ballad of the Truth and the Lie", as well as "Two Fates", the chilling story of a self-absorbed alcoholic hunted by two malevolent witches, his two-faced destiny. In 1977 Vysotsky's health deteriorated (heart, kidneys, liver failures, jaw infection and nervous breakdown) to such an extent that in April he found himself in Moscow clinic's reanimation center in the state of physical and mental collapse.

 

In 1977 Vysotsky made an unlikely appearance in New York City on the American television show 60 Minutes, which falsely stated that Vysotsky had spent time in the Soviet prison system, the Gulag. That year saw the release of three Vysotsky's LPs in France (including the one that had been recorded by RCA in Canada the previous year); arranged and accompanied by guitarist Kostya Kazansky, the singer for the first time ever enjoyed the relatively sophisticated musical background. In August he performed in Hollywood before members of New York City film cast and (according to Vladi) was greeted warmly by the likes of Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro. Some more concerts in Los Angeles were followed by the appearance at the French Communist paper L’Humanité annual event. In December Taganka left for France, its Hamlet (Vysotsky back in the lead) gaining fine reviews.

 

1978 started with the March–April series of concerts in Moscow and Ukraine. In May Vysotsky embarked upon a new major film project: The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (Место встречи изменить нельзя) about two detectives fighting crime in late 1940s Russia, directed by Stanislav Govorukhin. The film (premiered on 11 November 1978 on the Soviet Central TV) presented Vysotsky as Zheglov, a ruthless and charismatic cop teaching his milder partner Sharapov (actor Vladimir Konkin) his art of crime-solving. Vysotsky also became engaged in Taganka's Genre-seeking show (performing some of his own songs) and played Aleksander Blok in Anatoly Efros' The Lady Stranger (Незнакомка) radio play (premiered on air on 10 July 1979 and later released as a double LP).

 

In November 1978 Vysotsky took part in the underground censorship-defying literary project Metropolis, inspired and organized by Vasily Aksenov. In January 1979 Vysotsky again visited America with highly successful series of concerts. That was the point (according to biographer Vladimir Novikov) when a glimpse of new, clean life of a respectable international actor and performer all but made Vysotsky seriously reconsider his priorities. What followed though, was a return to the self-destructive theater and concert tours schedule, personal doctor Anatoly Fedotov now not only his companion, but part of Taganka's crew. "Who was this Anatoly? Just a man who in every possible situation would try to provide drugs. And he did provide. In such moments Volodya trusted him totally," Oksana Afanasyeva, Vysotsky's Moscow girlfriend (who was near him for most of the last year of his life and, on occasion, herself served as a drug courier) remembered. In July 1979, after a series of Central Asia concerts, Vysotsky collapsed, experienced clinical death and was resuscitated by Fedotov (who injected caffeine into the heart directly), colleague and close friend Vsevolod Abdulov helping with heart massage. In January 1980 Vysotsky asked Lyubimov for a year's leave. "Up to you, but on condition that Hamlet is yours," was the answer. The songwriting showed signs of slowing down, as Vysotsky began switching from songs to more conventional poetry. Still, of nearly 800 poems by Vysotsky only one has been published in the Soviet Union while he was alive. Not a single performance or interview was broadcast by the Soviet television in his lifetime.

 

In May 1979, being in a practice studio of the MSU Faculty of Journalism, Vysotsky recorded a video letter to American actor and film producer Warren Beatty, looking for both a personal meeting with Beatty and an opportunity to get a role in Reds film, to be produced and directed by the latter. While recording, Vysotsky made a few attempts to speak English, trying to overcome the language barrier. This video letter never reached Beatty. It was broadcast for the first time more than three decades later, on the night of 24 January 2013 (local time) by Rossiya 1 channel, along with records of TV channels of Italy, Mexico, Poland, USA and from private collections, in Vladimir Vysotsky. A letter to Warren Beatty film by Alexander Kovanovsky and Igor Rakhmanov. While recording this video, Vysotsky had a rare opportunity to perform for a camera, being still unable to do it with Soviet television.

 

On 22 January 1980, Vysotsky entered the Moscow Ostankino TV Center to record his one and only studio concert for the Soviet television. What proved to be an exhausting affair (his concentration lacking, he had to plod through several takes for each song) was premiered on the Soviet TV eight years later. The last six months of his life saw Vysotsky appearing on stage sporadically, fueled by heavy dosages of drugs and alcohol. His performances were often erratic. Occasionally Vysotsky paid visits to Sklifosofsky [ru] institute's ER unit, but would not hear of Marina Vlady's suggestions for him to take long-term rehabilitation course in a Western clinic. Yet he kept writing, mostly poetry and even prose, but songs as well. The last song he performed was the agonizing "My Sorrow, My Anguish" and his final poem, written one week prior to his death was "A Letter to Marina": "I'm less than fifty, but the time is short / By you and God protected, life and limb / I have a song or two to sing before the Lord / I have a way to make my peace with him."

 

Although several theories of the ultimate cause of the singer's death persist to this day, given what is now known about cardiovascular disease, it seems likely that by the time of his death Vysotsky had an advanced coronary condition brought about by years of tobacco, alcohol and drug abuse, as well as his grueling work schedule and the stress of the constant harassment by the government. Towards the end, most of Vysotsky's closest friends had become aware of the ominous signs and were convinced that his demise was only a matter of time. Clear evidence of this can be seen in a video ostensibly shot by the Japanese NHK channel only months before Vysotsky's death, where he appears visibly unwell, breathing heavily and slurring his speech. Accounts by Vysotsky's close friends and colleagues concerning his last hours were compiled in the book by V. Perevozchikov.

 

Vysotsky suffered from alcoholism for most of his life. Sometime around 1977, he started using amphetamines and other prescription narcotics in an attempt to counteract the debilitating hangovers and eventually to rid himself of alcohol addiction. While these attempts were partially successful, he ended up trading alcoholism for a severe drug dependency that was fast spiralling out of control. He was reduced to begging some of his close friends in the medical profession for supplies of drugs, often using his acting skills to collapse in a medical office and imitate a seizure or some other condition requiring a painkiller injection. On 25 July 1979 (a year to the day before his death) he suffered a cardiac arrest and was clinically dead for several minutes during a concert tour of Soviet Uzbekistan, after injecting himself with a wrong kind of painkiller he had previously obtained from a dentist's office.

 

Fully aware of the dangers of his condition, Vysotsky made several attempts to cure himself of his addiction. He underwent an experimental (and ultimately discredited) blood purification procedure offered by a leading drug rehabilitation specialist in Moscow. He also went to an isolated retreat in France with his wife Marina in the spring of 1980 as a way of forcefully depriving himself of any access to drugs. After these attempts failed, Vysotsky returned to Moscow to find his life in an increasingly stressful state of disarray. He had been a defendant in two criminal trials, one for a car wreck he had caused some months earlier, and one for an alleged conspiracy to sell unauthorized concert tickets (he eventually received a suspended sentence and a probation in the first case, and the charges in the second were dismissed, although several of his co-defendants were found guilty). He also unsuccessfully fought the film studio authorities for the rights to direct a movie called The Green Phaeton. Relations with his wife Marina were deteriorating, and he was torn between his loyalty to her and his love for his mistress Oksana Afanasyeva. He had also developed severe inflammation in one of his legs, making his concert performances extremely challenging.

 

In a final desperate attempt to overcome his drug addiction, partially prompted by his inability to obtain drugs through his usual channels (the authorities had imposed a strict monitoring of the medical institutions to prevent illicit drug distribution during the 1980 Olympics), he relapsed into alcohol and went on a prolonged drinking binge (apparently consuming copious amounts of champagne due to a prevalent misconception at the time that it was better than vodka at countering the effects of drug withdrawal).

 

On 3 July 1980, Vysotsky gave a performance at a suburban Moscow concert hall. One of the stage managers recalls that he looked visibly unhealthy ("gray-faced", as she puts it) and complained of not feeling too good, while another says she was surprised by his request for champagne before the start of the show, as he had always been known for completely abstaining from drink before his concerts. On 16 July Vysotsky gave his last public concert in Kaliningrad. On 18 July, Vysotsky played Hamlet for the last time at the Taganka Theatre. From around 21 July, several of his close friends were on a round-the-clock watch at his apartment, carefully monitoring his alcohol intake and hoping against all odds that his drug dependency would soon be overcome and they would then be able to bring him back from the brink. The effects of drug withdrawal were clearly getting the better of him, as he got increasingly restless, moaned and screamed in pain, and at times fell into memory lapses, failing to recognize at first some of his visitors, including his son Arkadiy. At one point, Vysotsky's personal physician A. Fedotov (the same doctor who had brought him back from clinical death a year earlier in Uzbekistan) attempted to sedate him, inadvertently causing asphyxiation from which he was barely saved. On 24 July, Vysotsky told his mother that he thought he was going to die that day, and then made similar remarks to a few of the friends present at the apartment, who begged him to stop such talk and keep his spirits up. But soon thereafter, Oksana Afanasyeva saw him clench his chest several times, which led her to suspect that he was genuinely suffering from a cardiovascular condition. She informed Fedotov of this but was told not to worry, as he was going to monitor Vysotsky's condition all night. In the evening, after drinking relatively small amounts of alcohol, the moaning and groaning Vysotsky was sedated by Fedotov, who then sat down on the couch next to him but fell asleep. Fedotov awoke in the early hours of 25 July to an unusual silence and found Vysotsky dead in his bed with his eyes wide open, apparently of a myocardial infarction, as he later certified. This was contradicted by Fedotov's colleagues, Sklifosovsky Emergency Medical Institute physicians L. Sul'povar and S. Scherbakov (who had demanded the actor's immediate hospitalization on 23 July but were allegedly rebuffed by Fedotov), who insisted that Fedotov's incompetent sedation combined with alcohol was what killed Vysotsky. An autopsy was prevented by Vysotsky's parents (who were eager to have their son's drug addiction remain secret), so the true cause of death remains unknown.

 

No official announcement of the actor's death was made, only a brief obituary appeared in the Moscow newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva, and a note informing of Vysotsky's death and cancellation of the Hamlet performance was put out at the entrance to the Taganka Theatre (the story goes that not a single ticket holder took advantage of the refund offer). Despite this, by the end of the day, millions had learned of Vysotsky's death. On 28 July, he lay in state at the Taganka Theatre. After a mourning ceremony involving an unauthorized mass gathering of unprecedented scale, Vysotsky was buried at the Vagankovskoye Cemetery in Moscow. The attendance at the Olympic events dropped noticeably on that day, as scores of spectators left to attend the funeral. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets to catch a glimpse of his coffin.

 

According to author Valery Perevozchikov part of the blame for his death lay with the group of associates who surrounded him in the last years of his life. This inner circle were all people under the influence of his strong character, combined with a material interest in the large sums of money his concerts earned. This list included Valerii Yankelovich, manager of the Taganka Theatre and prime organiser of his non-sanctioned concerts; Anatoly Fedotov, his personal doctor; Vadim Tumanov, gold prospector (and personal friend) from Siberia; Oksana Afanasyeva (later Yarmolnik), his mistress the last three years of his life; Ivan Bortnik, a fellow actor; and Leonid Sul'povar, a department head at the Sklifosovski hospital who was responsible for much of the supply of drugs.

 

Vysotsky's associates had all put in efforts to supply his drug habit, which kept him going in the last years of his life. Under their influence, he was able to continue to perform all over the country, up to a week before his death. Due to illegal (i.e. non-state-sanctioned) sales of tickets and other underground methods, these concerts pulled in sums of money unimaginable in Soviet times, when almost everyone received nearly the same small salary. The payouts and gathering of money were a constant source of danger, and Yankelovich and others were needed to organise them.

 

Some money went to Vysotsky, the rest was distributed amongst this circle. At first this was a reasonable return on their efforts; however, as his addiction progressed and his body developed resistance, the frequency and amount of drugs needed to keep Vysotsky going became unmanageable. This culminated at the time of the Moscow Olympics which coincided with the last days of his life, when supplies of drugs were monitored more strictly than usual, and some of the doctors involved in supplying Vysotsky were already behind bars (normally the doctors had to account for every ampule, thus drugs were transferred to an empty container, while the patients received a substitute or placebo instead). In the last few days Vysotsky became uncontrollable, his shouting could be heard all over the apartment building on Malaya Gruzinskaya St. where he lived amongst VIP's. Several days before his death, in a state of stupor he went on a high speed drive around Moscow in an attempt to obtain drugs and alcohol – when many high-ranking people saw him. This increased the likelihood of him being forcibly admitted to the hospital, and the consequent danger to the circle supplying his habit. As his state of health declined, and it became obvious that he might die, his associates gathered to decide what to do with him. They came up with no firm decision. They did not want him admitted officially, as his drug addiction would become public and they would fall under suspicion, although some of them admitted that any ordinary person in his condition would have been admitted immediately.

 

On Vysotsky's death his associates and relatives put in much effort to prevent a post-mortem being carried out. This despite the fairly unusual circumstances: he died aged 42 under heavy sedation with an improvised cocktail of sedatives and stimulants, including the toxic chloral hydrate, provided by his personal doctor who had been supplying him with narcotics the previous three years. This doctor, being the only one present at his side when death occurred, had a few days earlier been seen to display elementary negligence in treating the sedated Vysotsky. On the night of his death, Arkadii Vysotsky (his son), who tried to visit his father in his apartment, was rudely refused entry by Yankelovich, even though there was a lack of people able to care for him. Subsequently, the Soviet police commenced a manslaughter investigation which was dropped due to the absence of evidence taken at the time of death.

 

Vysotsky's first wife was Iza Zhukova. They met in 1956, being both MAT theater institute students, lived for some time at Vysotsky's mother's flat in Moscow, after her graduation (Iza was 2 years older) spent months in different cities (her – in Kiev, then Rostov) and finally married on 25 April 1960.

 

He met his second wife Lyudmila Abramova in 1961, while shooting the film 713 Requests Permission to Land. They married in 1965 and had two sons, Arkady (born 1962) and Nikita (born 1964).

 

While still married to Lyudmila Abramova, Vysotsky began a romantic relationship with Tatyana Ivanenko, a Taganka actress, then, in 1967 fell in love with Marina Vlady, a French actress of Russian descent, who was working at Mosfilm on a joint Soviet-French production at that time. Marina had been married before and had three children, while Vladimir had two. They were married in 1969. For 10 years the two maintained a long-distance relationship as Marina compromised her career in France to spend more time in Moscow, and Vladimir's friends pulled strings for him to be allowed to travel abroad to stay with his wife. Marina eventually joined the Communist Party of France, which essentially gave her an unlimited-entry visa into the Soviet Union, and provided Vladimir with some immunity against prosecution by the government, which was becoming weary of his covertly anti-Soviet lyrics and his odds-defying popularity with the masses. The problems of his long-distance relationship with Vlady inspired several of Vysotsky's songs.

 

In the autumn of 1981 Vysotsky's first collection of poetry was officially published in the USSR, called The Nerve (Нерв). Its first edition (25,000 copies) was sold out instantly. In 1982 the second one followed (100,000), then the 3rd (1988, 200,000), followed in the 1990s by several more. The material for it was compiled by Robert Rozhdestvensky, an officially laurelled Soviet poet. Also in 1981 Yuri Lyubimov staged at Taganka a new music and poetry production called Vladimir Vysotsky which was promptly banned and officially premiered on 25 January 1989.

 

In 1982 the motion picture The Ballad of the Valiant Knight Ivanhoe was produced in the Soviet Union and in 1983 the movie was released to the public. Four songs by Vysotsky were featured in the film.

 

In 1986 the official Vysotsky poetic heritage committee was formed (with Robert Rozhdestvensky at the helm, theater critic Natalya Krymova being both the instigator and the organizer). Despite some opposition from the conservatives (Yegor Ligachev was the latter's political leader, Stanislav Kunyaev of Nash Sovremennik represented its literary flank) Vysotsky was rewarded posthumously with the USSR State Prize. The official formula – "for creating the character of Zheglov and artistic achievements as a singer-songwriter" was much derided from both the left and the right. In 1988 the Selected Works of... (edited by N. Krymova) compilation was published, preceded by I Will Surely Return... (Я, конечно, вернусь...) book of fellow actors' memoirs and Vysotsky's verses, some published for the first time. In 1990 two volumes of extensive The Works of... were published, financed by the late poet's father Semyon Vysotsky. Even more ambitious publication series, self-proclaimed "the first ever academical edition" (the latter assertion being dismissed by sceptics) compiled and edited by Sergey Zhiltsov, were published in Tula (1994–1998, 5 volumes), Germany (1994, 7 volumes) and Moscow (1997, 4 volumes).

 

In 1989 the official Vysotsky Museum opened in Moscow, with the magazine of its own called Vagant (edited by Sergey Zaitsev) devoted entirely to Vysotsky's legacy. In 1996 it became an independent publication and was closed in 2002.

 

In the years to come, Vysotsky's grave became a site of pilgrimage for several generations of his fans, the youngest of whom were born after his death. His tombstone also became the subject of controversy, as his widow had wished for a simple abstract slab, while his parents insisted on a realistic gilded statue. Although probably too solemn to have inspired Vysotsky himself, the statue is believed by some to be full of metaphors and symbols reminiscent of the singer's life.

 

In 1995 in Moscow the Vysotsky monument was officially opened at Strastnoy Boulevard, by the Petrovsky Gates. Among those present were the bard's parents, two of his sons, first wife Iza, renown poets Yevtushenko and Voznesensky. "Vysotsky had always been telling the truth. Only once he was wrong when he sang in one of his songs: 'They will never erect me a monument in a square like that by Petrovskye Vorota'", Mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov said in his speech.[95] A further monument to Vysotsky was erected in 2014 at Rostov-on-Don.

 

In October 2004, a monument to Vysotsky was erected in the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica, near the Millennium Bridge. His son, Nikita Vysotsky, attended the unveiling. The statue was designed by Russian sculptor Alexander Taratinov, who also designed a monument to Alexander Pushkin in Podgorica. The bronze statue shows Vysotsky standing on a pedestal, with his one hand raised and the other holding a guitar. Next to the figure lies a bronze skull – a reference to Vysotsky's monumental lead performances in Shakespeare's Hamlet. On the pedestal the last lines from a poem of Vysotsky's, dedicated to Montenegro, are carved.

 

The Vysotsky business center & semi-skyscraper was officially opened in Yekaterinburg, in 2011. It is the tallest building in Russia outside of Moscow, has 54 floors, total height: 188.3 m (618 ft). On the third floor of the business center is the Vysotsky Museum. Behind the building is a bronze sculpture of Vladimir Vysotsky and his third wife, a French actress Marina Vlady.

 

In 2011 a controversial movie Vysotsky. Thank You For Being Alive was released, script written by his son, Nikita Vysotsky. The actor Sergey Bezrukov portrayed Vysotsky, using a combination of a mask and CGI effects. The film tells about Vysotsky's illegal underground performances, problems with KGB and drugs, and subsequent clinical death in 1979.

 

Shortly after Vysotsky's death, many Russian bards started writing songs and poems about his life and death. The best known are Yuri Vizbor's "Letter to Vysotsky" (1982) and Bulat Okudzhava's "About Volodya Vysotsky" (1980). In Poland, Jacek Kaczmarski based some of his songs on those of Vysotsky, such as his first song (1977) was based on "The Wolfhunt", and dedicated to his memory the song "Epitafium dla Włodzimierza Wysockiego" ("Epitaph for Vladimir Vysotsky").

 

Every year on Vysotsky's birthday festivals are held throughout Russia and in many communities throughout the world, especially in Europe. Vysotsky's impact in Russia is often compared to that of Wolf Biermann in Germany, Bob Dylan in America, or Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel in France.

 

The asteroid 2374 Vladvysotskij, discovered by Lyudmila Zhuravleva, was named after Vysotsky.

 

During the Annual Q&A Event Direct Line with Vladimir Putin, Alexey Venediktov asked Putin to name a street in Moscow after the singer Vladimir Vysotsky, who, though considered one of the greatest Russian artists, has no street named after him in Moscow almost 30 years after his death. Venediktov stated a Russian law that allowed the President to do so and promote a law suggestion to name a street by decree. Putin answered that he would talk to Mayor of Moscow and would solve this problem. In July 2015 former Upper and Lower Tagansky Dead-ends (Верхний и Нижний Таганские тупики) in Moscow were reorganized into Vladimir Vysotsky Street.

 

The Sata Kieli Cultural Association, [Finland], organizes the annual International Vladimir Vysotsky Festival (Vysotski Fest), where Vysotsky's singers from different countries perform in Helsinki and other Finnish cities. They sing Vysotsky in different languages and in different arrangements.

 

Two brothers and singers from Finland, Mika and Turkka Mali, over the course of their more than 30-year musical career, have translated into Finnish, recorded and on numerous occasions publicly performed songs of Vladimir Vysotsky.

 

Throughout his lengthy musical career, Jaromír Nohavica, a famed Czech singer, translated and performed numerous songs of Vladimir Vysotsky, most notably Песня о друге (Píseň o příteli – Song about a friend).

 

The Museum of Vladimir Vysotsky in Koszalin dedicated to Vladimir Vysotsky was founded by Marlena Zimna (1969–2016) in May 1994, in her apartment, in the city of Koszalin, in Poland. Since then the museum has collected over 19,500 exhibits from different countries and currently holds Vladimir Vysotsky' personal items, autographs, drawings, letters, photographs and a large library containing unique film footage, vinyl records, CDs and DVDs. A special place in the collection holds a Vladimir Vysotsky's guitar, on which he played at a concert in Casablanca in April 1976. Vladimir Vysotsky presented this guitar to Moroccan journalist Hassan El-Sayed together with an autograph (an extract from Vladimir Vysotsky's song "What Happened in Africa"), written in Russian right on the guitar.

 

In January 2023, a monument to the outstanding actor, singer and poet Vladimir Vysotsky was unveiled in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, in the square near the Rodina House of Culture. Author Vladimir Chebotarev.

 

After her husband's death, urged by her friend Simone Signoret, Marina Vlady wrote a book called The Aborted Flight about her years together with Vysotsky. The book paid tribute to Vladimir's talent and rich persona, yet was uncompromising in its depiction of his addictions and the problems that they caused in their marriage. Written in French (and published in France in 1987), it was translated into Russian in tandem by Vlady and a professional translator and came out in 1989 in the USSR. Totally credible from the specialists' point of view, the book caused controversy, among other things, by shocking revelations about the difficult father-and-son relationship (or rather, the lack of any), implying that Vysotsky-senior (while his son was alive) was deeply ashamed of him and his songs which he deemed "anti-Soviet" and reported his own son to the KGB. Also in 1989 another important book of memoirs was published in the USSR, providing a bulk of priceless material for the host of future biographers, Alla Demidova's Vladimir Vysotsky, the One I Know and Love. Among other publications of note were Valery Zolotukhin's Vysotsky's Secret (2000), a series of Valery Perevozchikov's books (His Dying Hour, The Unknown Vysotsky and others) containing detailed accounts and interviews dealing with the bard's life's major controversies (the mystery surrounding his death, the truth behind Vysotsky Sr.'s alleged KGB reports, the true nature of Vladimir Vysotsky's relations with his mother Nina's second husband Georgy Bartosh etc.), Iza Zhukova's Short Happiness for a Lifetime and the late bard's sister-in-law Irena Vysotskaya's My Brother Vysotsky. The Beginnings (both 2005).

 

A group of enthusiasts has created a non-profit project – the mobile application "Vysotsky"

 

The multifaceted talent of Vysotsky is often described by the term "bard" (бард) that Vysotsky has never been enthusiastic about. He thought of himself mainly as an actor and poet rather than a singer, and once remarked, "I do not belong to what people call bards or minstrels or whatever." With the advent of portable tape-recorders in the Soviet Union, Vysotsky's music became available to the masses in the form of home-made reel-to-reel audio tape recordings (later on cassette tapes).

 

Vysotsky accompanied himself on a Russian seven-string guitar, with a raspy voice singing ballads of love, peace, war, everyday Soviet life and of the human condition. He was largely perceived as the voice of honesty, at times sarcastically jabbing at the Soviet government, which made him a target for surveillance and threats. In France, he has been compared with Georges Brassens; in Russia, however, he was more frequently compared with Joe Dassin, partly because they were the same age and died in the same year, although their ideologies, biographies, and musical styles are very different. Vysotsky's lyrics and style greatly influenced Jacek Kaczmarski, a Polish songwriter and singer who touched on similar themes.

 

The songs – over 600 of them – were written about almost any imaginable theme. The earliest were blatnaya pesnya ("outlaw songs"). These songs were based either on the life of the common people in Moscow or on life in the crime people, sometimes in Gulag. Vysotsky slowly grew out of this phase and started singing more serious, though often satirical, songs. Many of these songs were about war. These war songs were not written to glorify war, but rather to expose the listener to the emotions of those in extreme, life-threatening situations. Most Soviet veterans would say that Vysotsky's war songs described the truth of war far more accurately than more official "patriotic" songs.

 

Nearly all of Vysotsky's songs are in the first person, although he is almost never the narrator. When singing his criminal songs, he would adopt the accent and intonation of a Moscow thief, and when singing war songs, he would sing from the point of view of a soldier. In many of his philosophical songs, he adopted the role of inanimate objects. This created some confusion about Vysotsky's background, especially during the early years when information could not be passed around very easily. Using his acting talent, the poet played his role so well that until told otherwise, many of his fans believed that he was, indeed, a criminal or war veteran. Vysotsky's father said that "War veterans thought the author of the songs to be one of them, as if he had participated in the war together with them." The same could be said about mountain climbers; on multiple occasions, Vysotsky was sent pictures of mountain climbers' graves with quotes from his lyrics etched on the tombstones.

 

Not being officially recognized as a poet and singer, Vysotsky performed wherever and whenever he could – in the theater (where he worked), at universities, in private apartments, village clubs, and in the open air. It was not unusual for him to give several concerts in one day. He used to sleep little, using the night hours to write. With few exceptions, he wasn't allowed to publish his recordings with "Melodiya", which held a monopoly on the Soviet music industry. His songs were passed on through amateur, fairly low quality recordings on vinyl discs and magnetic tape, resulting in his immense popularity. Cosmonauts even took his music on cassette into orbit.

 

Musically, virtually all of Vysotsky's songs were written in a minor key, and tended to employ from three to seven chords. Vysotsky composed his songs and played them exclusively on the Russian seven string guitar, often tuned a tone or a tone-and-a-half below the traditional Russian "Open G major" tuning. This guitar, with its specific Russian tuning, makes a slight yet notable difference in chord voicings than the standard tuned six string Spanish (classical) guitar, and it became a staple of his sound. Because Vysotsky tuned down a tone and a half, his strings had less tension, which also colored the sound.

 

His earliest songs were usually written in C minor (with the guitar tuned a tone down from DGBDGBD to CFACFAC)

 

Songs written in this key include "Stars" (Zvyozdy), "My friend left for Magadan" (Moy drug uyekhal v Magadan), and most of his "outlaw songs".

 

At around 1970, Vysotsky began writing and playing exclusively in A minor (guitar tuned to CFACFAC), which he continued doing until his death.

 

Vysotsky used his fingers instead of a pick to pluck and strum, as was the tradition with Russian guitar playing. He used a variety of finger picking and strumming techniques. One of his favorite was to play an alternating bass with his thumb as he plucked or strummed with his other fingers.

 

Often, Vysotsky would neglect to check the tuning of his guitar, which is particularly noticeable on earlier recordings. According to some accounts, Vysotsky would get upset when friends would attempt to tune his guitar, leading some to believe that he preferred to play slightly out of tune as a stylistic choice. Much of this is also attributable to the fact that a guitar that is tuned down more than 1 whole step (Vysotsky would sometimes tune as much as 2 and a half steps down) is prone to intonation problems.

 

Vysotsky had a unique singing style. He had an unusual habit of elongating consonants instead of vowels in his songs. So when a syllable is sung for a prolonged period of time, he would elongate the consonant instead of the vowel in that syllable.

Modèle / Model : Mitsubishi Pajero IV

Affectation / Assignment : Société Nationale de Sauvetage en Mer (SNSM), Centre de Formation et d'Intervention (CFI) de Vendée / National Society of Sea Rescue, Center of Training and Intervention of Vendée

Ancienne affectation / Former assignment : Service d'Aide Médicale Urgente des Yvelines (SAMU 78), Structure Mobile d'Urgence et de Réanimation (SMUR), Centre Hospitalier de Versailles / Emergency Medical Service of Yvelines, Mobile Emergency and Intensive Care Structure, Hospital Center of Versailles

Fonction / Function : Véhicule léger tout-terrain / Light all-terrain vehicle

Ancienne fonction / Former function : Unité Mobile Hospitalière (UMH), Véhicule Léger Médicalisé (VLM) / Hospitable Mobile Unit, Medical Light Vehicle

Mise en service / Commissioning : Février 2010 / February 2010

Not the sharpest photo, but not bad for a 'point and shoot' from my front door!

 

The Snow Moon is the full moon in February, named after the snow on the ground. Some North American tribes named it the Hunger Moon due to the scarce food sources and hard hunting conditions during mid-winter, while others named it the Storm Moon.

 

This is symbolic of renewal, reanimation and embracing the new light of spring. Embracing that new light is symbolic for humans too! It implies the Snow Moon is a time to arise, emerge, and return to the light of promise.

 

Let's hope it heralds the beginning of the end for lockdown, so we can all get back to going out and taking photos!!

SMUR: Service mobile d`urgence et Reanimation

English translation : Mobile services of emergency and reanimation

Ambulance belong to health ministry

Mason Gardner stumbled across his desk. He had just received unstable thoughts while drifting off at the meeting. To avoid such an embarrassing moment, he made up the best excuse possible. Maybe, it really was.

 

He quickly contacted his only friend at this current moment—-only possible in the washroom, like how he tried to call Sam, was the exact same tactic that spies did. Sociably the best way of contact......as they spoke.

 

And Edens’ image came flickering on. He decided to give his mentor’s team his own mission:

 

File retrieving.

 

And that’s how the slew of investigative missions started.

 

***

Nightfall. Tokyo, way past midnight:

 

Ghostforge raised his pistol at the monitor towards him, having heard the sounds which taunted and challenged him. Then Harry pulled the trigger at the mainframe, aimed with two bullets. He realised it was still talking, like how the unconscious body that Knifenight was.

 

Slightly annoyed, he waited and walked through the wires, which he felt....slippery. The visor had showed him the sight of water and wire alike, connected to the giant machines surrounding him.

 

Unknown voice: ”Had enough yet? I still have more to come. Admit your defeat, ghost. I would be more than happy to see your downfall.”

Harry: ”You talk too much. Maybe focus on your own weakness before planning your next move. My friend, about a while ago, decoded what was supposed to be here.”

Voice: ”It isn’t finished. You lack the expertise of a programmer. Insufficient.”

Harry: ”And what if I had already stole it from your pocket when you weren’t looking?”

Voice: ”Hahahahahah......no.....there isn’t. Too late, agent. You will never discover the secret of the powers! I could even bring forth reanimated corpses to life!”

Harry: ”Bullsh*t. You oughta know A.I.s talk better than this. Meet my friends who did the work first.

 

With the quick snap of his thumbs, the lights came on. Standing around the shadows were the assembled team of Avalon Squad. Despite the grizzled and injured looks, Blades drawn, guns loaded. Their stances were more than ready.

 

Voice: ”Impossible....I sent more Yakuza after your leader! How could they not have killed him?!

Tyrone: ”Not if I’ve been contacted by the ally button and a quick blood transfusion. Even without the blood, I can heal fast.”

Sam: ”With the apple from the doctor. Give it up, Everest. You know you won’t win.”

Erin: ”That was a good show, thanks to my holographic disks. And you gotta take credit, Nightedge, Sabershift and Dusksmoke as well.”

Voice: Imbeciles! Take them down now.... Protocol is activated.

 

And with the other half of the room’s lights coming to life, a bunch of armoured ninjas, clad in the same black yet silver with their swords, readied the own positions. The team looked at each other and grinned—-eyes glaring with the elements of their abilities, with the glaring energy, shadows, electricity, smoke...activated.

 

Like a spectacle of things dancing around the room, they fought, bathed under the multitude of colours...

 

***

(5 hours later)

 

Edens looked up at the council. Raze was not pleased with the current “mischievous” acts he and his team had committed. The whole committee did look stern

 

Edens: ”I see you summoned me again, Madame. Trust is the most concern, isn’t it?”

Raze: ”For your behaviour shown, it is unacceptable. These people need discipline and proper training. They don’t even know how to take orders. When I say a mission gets cancelled, it gets cancelled.”

Edens: ”Not without the proper protocol and permits....you didn't manage to override it yet, madam.”

Raze: ”Are you refusing my commands, Edens?!”

Edens: ”I’d rather be thinking of the bigger situation than be sitting here and discussing my actions like politics. The time the command done could have been so much better.”

 

With his message, it took the board long enough to have their mutual discussion, as a chair popped up behind Edens. He grabbed a seat as the robot offered him a cup of coffee, silently listening. He blinked and through his eyes, Gardner nodded to him.

 

The mission....was truly a success. They had won Tokyo. Doors behind the doctor burst open, alerting the guards who were battle ready, raising their rifles. A bunch of smoky, battered looking group of 5 people appeared. It was Avalon Squad.

 

Tyrone: ”Wait up before you judge, and spare us a minute.”

Jesse: ”Sorry to interrupt the party, but it took us more than enough. I said two days, when investigation took us one week. We’re right on time, not due yet behind schedule.”

Sam: ”We promised the files. North has lost his partial conquest to gain access to so much things. We should let Mason Gardner do the explaining.”

 

***

 

Gardner (hologram): ”It is my well-being that I sent this team on their mission to redemption. I, under full intent, knew that they had guilt and regret over a previous mission. And so they accepted this offer. To me, it was personal as well. But they foresaw the bigger thing coming, because North is dangerous. Let’s say my days are limited....and I needed my friends who I could trust on a fight, a crusade. What you’re seeing are the evidence of multiple files containing the powers of everyone on earth. We might have the labs, but....”

Edens: ”Not enough to surprise them. Multiple setbacks. Which is why I approved as well. I spent 5 hours wasted talking with you—-the superior board, while I could have used it to spend more quality time on researching. And helping others.”

Erin: ”Because of the mainframe, an A.I. set up by North, called E.V.E.R.E.S.T. It was designed to trap us in case we found out the locations....”

Tyrone: ”Provoked by the Yakuzas, which a quarter of them were mentally controlled....and we fought Everest’s own ninjas in the server room as well. Anything to say left goes through the box. You guys approving this now?”

 

The committee looked at each other again. Raze’s face glittered with signs of anger and embarrassment. It was like the halftime basketball game where the coach had the explaining to do. And the coach was exactly Edens, who put a smile on his face. Gardner simply nodded his head and explained the remaining details to board.

 

Moments later the team went into celebration, having their reputation rebuilt on the foundation they had started around the agency.

 

Edens: ”Commencement, squad? Whatcha guys feeling ”

Ty: ”Yeah, it’s dope doc....am I glad everyone did so much of the good work. It’s painful , but I guess that’s what agents are for eh?”

Erin: ”Couldn’t have been said better, agent boy.”

Ty: ”You did a fine job as well, shadow-hackergirl. Just like old times.”

Erin: *knocks Ty’s elbow playfully* ”Hey...! I mean....yeah, that was my name in elementary for being such a nerd.”

Ty: ”Wasn’t there an award for that? Most gorgeous, hottest hacker of the year?”

Jesse: ”I thought your dad said that was true, Erin. Wasn’t it? Haha.....how about a chat over coffee about high school experiences?”

 

And then Jesse did the same thing, knocking Sam’s elbow and grinning at Harry as well. He held a very sly smirk.

 

Sam: “J....you gotta be....no.”

Jesse: ”I smell more than just coffee, right, Harry?”

Harry: ”I almost lost it after the just like old times part. Can someone remind me in Greek instead?”

Edens: ”Very much like the old times. Way to go team. So, I have this new assignment on the status in Texas. Recon military mission. Who’s with me?”

 

*dead silence*

 

Edens: ”Over coffee, and beer, and dinner’s on me. Say yes, please? Guys?”

Everyone: ”Hell yeah!

Edens: ”And here we go.....”

 

****

 

(Sometime after the Tokyo incident, 3 days later, Hokkaido:)

 

Dusksmoke wandered around the remains of the base. His footsteps had led him here thanks to destroying EVEREST and his robot cohorts. Preoccupied with discovering the mysterious sources that had led him here, his ear buzzed. The holographic image of the businessman known as Mason Gardner appeared.

 

Dusksmoke: ”Just as I expected. I know who they are now....”

Gardner: ”Before you ask, I’m not here to offer money, not anything. They’re having their victory. They deserved it. It’s always good to establish friendships.”

Dusksmoke: ”At least I kept him safe and sound, so that’s good for now. The white ninja and the talkative one named Knifenight are jailed. By the way, how are you doing?”

Gardner: ”Feeling fine, temporarily. I’m still having these nightmares. I don’t know how long can I even stay alive....maybe a year. That’s what Edens said. They’re working on a cure.”

Dusksmoke: ”Good to know. We may not know each other, but you have gained my respect for this....you gotta stay strong. Health comes first. Whatever will come, will come.”

Gardner: ”Maybe, I will. But then again, missions are important. I still need to fight against them. And him--North. Only with the big plans we’ve got, it’s basically a game of chess....and a game of gambling death. I need Paladin as a long running partnership.”

 

(1 week later. Canberra, Australia, deep sea base:)

 

The hurried sounds of the man ran past the hallway. He had a knack for tripping the expensive antiques over. But this time he didn’t. He managed to stumble upon the room in front of him, made from rich gold. And he knocked.

 

Man: ”Come in, soldier.”

Soldier: ”Status update, Mr. North. Are you willing to hear it?”

North: ”Report.”

Soldier: ”The event the enemy agency caused in Tokyo...has dealt sizeable damages to our plans. We’ve lost more than a quarter of planning, of resources...they’ve won this time. It is like inching one step closer to a open war to be engaged.”

North: ”And my good....henchmen? My loyal and faithful servants?”

Soldier: ”They could be freed, eventually. Maybe, more or less. We always can have the army prepared, reactivating the Exiled Spectres. They haven’t been used in the last 2 months. So what is your move, sir? Shall I carry the orders out?”

Mr North: *turns chair around, revealing the armoured, creepy look* “Yes, do it as usual. Proceed with what it’s supposed to be done. The breakout will commence at the prison, as the usual drill. My niece would be more than happy do to so, since she is in this room as well. We may have failed....but we still have other plans for our friends over there......this time, it will be the game of checkers. A game to gamble life....and I will control destiny as I can shape it when I want it to be.”

Soldier: ”Order is heard, my lord. Ship boating, now?”

North: ”Yes.”

365 Project Day 9

 

Sheffield Fright Night. There was still some daylight left at this point and there was still enough room between the people to swing a cat.

Ononoki Yotsugi and her trademark phrase. She arrived this weekend and I had to make a picture of her right away.

 

Ononoki is a supernatural being: a reanimated object (tsukumogami) and a summoned spirit (shikagami).

 

Last night I finished customizing my zombie girl, Kaiju.

I overdid the freckles... but otherwise I'm pretty happy. I loved doing the lip carving this time, so much fun!!

 

She was born of a defective RBL eyemech.

Then came the wobbly Licca.

Then the gorgeous lime mohair scalp that doesn't really fit a normal dome.

Then the green and black lashes sent to me by accident.

Then the broken SBL faceplate I got from Jackie (thanks so much!!) with the flaw in the lower lip to practice carving on.

 

Put them together, and wham!! I really, really like her.

 

From ZOMBIEWALK HELSINKI 2012 - Survival of the Sickest

Setup: Ranger Quadra + ECO ringflash & white shoot through brolly camera left. Triggered with rotten triggers. Setup photo

On the 5th of July 2014, the government agreed to fund the project entitled: Project Rejuvenate. The base of this project is to turn dead matter into living matter. By the 12th, the private company who is leading this project announced the breakthrough they have undergone. Two government officials were sent to their lab to watch how their investment was going. This following tape is a recorded conversation between the officials and the owner of the project:

``Alfred we will not fund you any more, we`ve already invested 50,000 dollars in this project that is more than enough for such an outrageous claim!``

``But Sir, we are so close to achieving our goal all we need is ten thousand more dollars!``

``No we have funded you enough, I would like to be taken home this instant!``

``Please Sirs, take a look at our expiriment going on right now``

``What is that thing it`s a-----------------------

I finally felt compelled to post something so here is my entry Roaglaan's first challenge. This was very hard to photograph because of the 2 sections that make it up.

Check out the lab view here: www.flickr.com/photos/63127047@N04/6800422890/in/photostr...

  

Inspired by Tayasuune and Atin

8th Annual Toronto Zombie Walk.

Canon 40D body,

Mpe65mm lens,

Ikea jansjö*2 continuous light,

A paper picnic cup as diffuser,

70 frames taken and stacked at zerene stacker. Mostly dmap method used.

f5,6--iso125-3,2sec

Note that it has lost front right leg before i found it.

 

Batman: Damned (2018-) # 2

As Batman’s descent into the madness of Gotham City’s decadent underbelly continues, he must try to exorcise some of his demons…and who better to help than the Demon, Etrigan himself. And where there’s demons, there’s also a Deadman, a Spectre, an Enchantress and a host of other supernatural friends and foes—it’s a veritable Grand Guignol!

 

Saban's Go Go Power Rangers # 15

Trini is the new Red Ranger and Jason is the new Yellow Ranger. And…there might be some other complications too.

 

Spawn Kills Everyone Too # 2

IF YOU THOUGHT ISSUE ONE HAD A LOT OF BLOOD AND GUTS... WAIT 'TIL YOU SEE ISSUE TWO!!

 

MORE CUTENESS, AND EVEN MORE KILLING THAN BEFORE!

 

The Batman Who Laughs (2018-) # 1

“A Batman who laughs is a Batman who always wins.”

 

Left rattled by the events of DARK NIGHTS: METAL, Bruce Wayne must come face to face with the nightmares spawned from the Dark Multiverse. But even though evil devoured evil in the collapse of Challengers Mountain, the Dark Knight still has his doubts. He discovers that the Batman Who Laughs not only survived the fight with The Joker at the end of METAL, but now he is enacting a sinister plan across the Multiverse—something both terrifying and oddly familiar. But when Bruce Wayne realizes the only way to stop this madman is to kill him, he must consider violating the very rule Batman won’t break…the same rule that created this insatiable villain—the Batman Who Laughs!

 

Vampirella vs. Reanimator # 1

It’s the big question of 2018: How could Vampirella and the Reanimator not have met before now?!!?! Herbert West--the Reanimator--has long sought the secret to perfecting his reagent and break death’s hold on mankind once and for all. The key to his success lies in only one place--the forbidden tomb of the Aztec god of death! But disturbing sleeping gods is as troubling (to put it mildly) as raising the uncontrollable, murderous dead... especially when this deity is an ancient enemy of Vampirella of Drakulon! It's vampire versus mad scientist in a battle that threatens to tear the gates of the underworld asunder!

 

Spider-Force (2018) # 3 (of 3)

A SPIDER-GEDDON TIE-IN! Spider-Force is falling, one member at a time. The Inheritor Verna will stop at nothing to get the Solus Crystal to bring her father back to life—and killing all of Spider-Force would be icing on the cake. Will Jessica sacrifice everything to save the Multiverse?

 

Uncanny X-Men (2018-) # 5

Psylocke vs. Angel?!

 

Miles Morales: Spider-Man (2018-) # 1

Balancing his normal life, school, parents, etc…and super-heroing has never been easy, but when the Rhino and a cadre of mysterious criminals start plaguing Brooklyn, things take a dark turn. And Miles doesn’t even know the half of it yet. Eisner Award-winner Saladin Ahmed (BLACK BOLT) and Young Gun Javier Garrón (ANT-MAN & THE WASP) bring you the latest incarnation of the coolest character in the Marvel Universe!

 

X-23 (2018-) # 7

AN ALL-NEW ARC BEGINS! A series of gruesome murders. A killer who disappears without a trace. Laura and Gabby are on the hunt. But when Laura comes face-to-face with the mysterious X-Assassin, nothing is as it seems…

 

True Believers: Fantastic Four - Super-Skrull (2018) # 1

Published:

December 12, 2018

Reprinting Fantastic Four (1961) #18!

Service Mobile d'Urgence et de Réanimation ( SMUR ) | Service d'aide médicale urgente ( SAMU ) | Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu | Assistance publique – Hôpitaux de Paris ( AP-HP ) | Quai Saint-Michel / Place Saint-Michel / Boulevard Saint-Michel | 6e arrondissement | Arrondissement Luxembourg | Paris | Île-de-France | France | Medecin | Fiat Ducato | 1990 | EJ-574-WM

 

© Boss-19 - unauthorised use of this image is strictly prohibited

 

Tweets by @BossEmergency | Instagram @boss19_emergency

Modèle / Model : Toyota Land Cruiser XI

Affectation / Assignment : Unité Mobile de Premiers Secours (UMPS) / Mobile Unit of First Aids

Ancienne affectation / Former assignment : Service d'Aide Médicale Urgente des Yvelines (SAMU 78), Structure Mobile d'Urgence et de Réanimation (SMUR), Centre Hospitalier Intercommunal (CHI) de Poissy/Saint Germain-en-Laye / Emergency Medical Service of Yvelines, Mobile Emergency and Intensive Care Structure, Intermunicipal Hospital Center of Poissy/Saint Germain-en-Laye

Fonction / Function : Véhicule de Commandement Hors Route (VCHR) / Vehicle of Command Off-Road

Ancienne fonction / Former function : Unité Mobile Hospitalière (UMH), Véhicule Léger Médicalisé (VLM) / Hospitable Mobile Unit, Medical Light Vehicle

Mise en service / Commissioning : 2009

Ré-immatriculation / Re-registration : Mars 2013 / March 2013

Équipementier / Maker : TIB (Tolerie Industrielle de Brezolles) / TIB (Industrial Sheet Metal Workshop of Brezolles)

Indicatif / Indicative : VCHR 028

 

This decaying flesh is coming back to life

reanimate me

give me a chance and I’ll be right here where the sun hits the sea

watching these waves wash the pain away

and it will radiate so brilliantly that we can keep pushing on and get on with life

cause we deserve it

now I know that the worst part is behind us now onward and upward

we take flight on bruised and battered wings

we soar above our clouded thoughts

never looking back

we can regain a sense of balance that’s been gone so long

this decaying flesh is coming back to life

reanimate me

give me a chance to reason with the odds

to pick myself back up

regain a balance that's been gone so long

now I know that the worst part is behind us now

now I know that we will get on with life

cause we deserve it

 

lyrics by Darkest Hour.

The January photo for the 2021 "Home Video Horrors" Cult VHS Calendar.

 

Featured in this month is the VHS box for Re-Animator (1985).

 

Calendar available now @ www.homevideohorrors.com

 

Infos : véhicule situations sanitaires exceptionnelles (SSE), SAMU 59.

Mise en service : 2020

 

Infos : exceptional health situations, SAMU 59.

Delivering : 2020

I literally hid behind the rocks.

 

Actually, I'm trying to compose a photo wherein the edge of this rock could 'touch' the edge of the sun. It was excruciatingly painful to the eye as the sun is included in the composition.

 

When my eyes are a bit watery, I held back and closed my eyes. When I opened it, I saw this beautiful scene and had to capture it.

 

I think, sometimes, it's good to stop by and just observe at what is happening on your surroundings. Good photos are just there, waiting to be discovered. In this case, just a few steps back could pull the trick.

"The last thing you see is those lights... before they come at you and tear your chest open."

 

A husk of a toa reanimated and mutated by so many souls that it may as well have none. Blind and driven only by hunger for life. Senses souls. Appears to live in the Keep of the Leech, from where it ventures out, but avoids the Sanctum of the Divided due to Nor's presence.

 

The cataclysm had shown to mess with life. Many were unable to die, while others were unable to live. In the chaos the most desperate grasping for life became monsters.

 

----------------------------------------

 

There was no particular motivation for this moc. I had recently traded with a pal for some teal parts, so I challenged myself to make a teal and purple moc with the limited piece amount I had in those colors. For extra flare I threw some glow-in-the-dark in. Also to act as fingers, since black nor silver were an option.

 

I managed to discover some neat techniques while building this, but I was also left a bit disappointed with the crotch. I didn't really have the right parts to make it adequate.

Modèle / Model : Renault Master III

Affectation / Assignment : Service d'Aide Médicale Urgente de l'Oise (SAMU 60), Structure Mobile d'Urgence et de Réanimation (SMUR), Centre Hospitalier de Compiègne-Noyon / Emergency Medical Service of Oise, Mobile Emergency and Intensive Care Structure, Hospital Center of Compiègne-Noyon

Fonction / Function : Unité Mobile Hospitalière (UMH), Ambulance de Réanimation (AR) / Hospitable Mobile Unit, Ambulance of Resuscitation

Mise en service / Commissioning : Août 2011 / August 2011

Équipementier / Maker : TIB (Tolerie Industrielle de Brezolles) / TIB (Industrial Sheet Metal Workshop of Brezolles)

Indicatif / Indicative : UMH 3

....is the last doll my son saw before he passed away.....i finished her just a few hours before ......he died in my arms on 15th of September, was reanimated and in coma until he died on 19th.....so she will be my guardian angel from now on.....and my son, of course, who is with me all the time....

Infos : unité mobile hospitalière (UMH), SMUR Avicenne, SAMU 93.

Mise en service : 2017

 

Infos : ambulance (UMH), SMUR Avicenne, SAMU 93.

Delivering : 2017

The best way to use your newly found reanimation as one of the undead? To dance of course!

 

So the other day I was bemoning that I didn't manage to pick up the free Juliet mesh body from Altamura at the eBento event. Lo and behold someone mentioned in a group chat that it was still available as a group gift if you joined the Altamura group (which is only L$ to join)! So off I toddled and snagged myself a real bargain. I thought it was fair to have a few more group gifts in this post. My new Altamura body is teamed with a few group gifts from CURELESS [+] and a group gift (skin) from Go&See. Check out my style guide including details of those things which are group gifts on my blog here:

 

slbliss.wordpress.com/2019/02/22/reanimation/

Modèle / Model : Renault Master III

Affectation / Assignment : Service d'Aide Médicale Urgente de l'Oise (SAMU 60), Structure Mobile d'Urgence et de Réanimation (SMUR) de Senlis / Emergency Medical Service of Oise, Mobile Emergency and Intensive Care Structure of Senlis

Groupe hospitalier / Hospital Group : Groupe Hospitalier Public du Sud de l’Oise (GHPSO) / Public Hospital Group of the South of the Oise

Fonction / Function : Unité Mobile Hospitalière (UMH), Ambulance de Réanimation (AR) / Hospitable Mobile Unit, Ambulance of Resuscitation

Mise en service / Commissioning : Juin 2014 / June 2014

Équipementier / Maker : TIB (Tolerie Industrielle de Brezolles) / TIB (Industrial Sheet Metal Workshop of Brezolles)

SPAWN SERIES 12

RE-ANIMATED SPAWN

P1003233 copy

Aufgenommen mit der Voigtländer Vito B auf einem Film, über den ich mich schon hier ausgelassen habe.

So, uh, I've been making a lot of Halo content lately. ;o

 

I could say that this is "concept art" for one of the characters in a Halo Combat Evolved mod map I'm making, except that character is already established as a regular generic Sangheili Minor, so there's nothing that I've added/changed besides giving him a name. I didn't really do this piece for any specific reason, I just wanted to draw an Elite and gain a good understanding of their body type, weight balance, etc.

 

I plan on reanimating the Halo CE Elites (and all characters, actually,) because the elites used in 2001 seem awfully outdated and don't give the bipeds their needed charisma.

Well, I guess I'm more the fan and he's more like the poor guy who gets corralled into doing a shoot like this. All in all, it was fun to set up this shot, but a pain to shoot in such dark conditions. This shot was probably the best of the bunch.

 

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Zombies are undead creatures, typically depicted as mindless, reanimated human corpses with a hunger for human flesh. Zombies are most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore (Haitian French: zombi, Haitian Creole: zonbi) where a zombie is a dead body animated by magic. Modern depictions of zombies do not necessarily involve magic but invoke other methods such as a virus.

Infos : véhicule léger, SAMU 93.

Mise en service : 2019

 

Infos : light weight vehicle, emergency service of Seine Saint Denis (SAMU 93).

Delivering : 2019