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itsbenedict · 5 years

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Kingdoms and Koopas: Ep. 8

K&K is a Fate Accelerated campaign set in the Mario universe, which I’m running for three players:

Bee @thebeeskneesocks, playing Kandace Koopa

Jovian @jovian12, playing Cozmo Naut

Malky @sleepdepravity, playing Dr. Chevy Chain

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Previously on Kingdoms and Koopas, the party won a go-kart race on Rainbow Road, foiling Rawk Hawk and Dr. Moneybags’ nefarious plans to fix the competition. The problem was what happened immediately after their victory- the prize was brought out, and turned out not to be the Music Key they were after. Kandace then checked in the direction the real deal’s magical signature was coming from...

...and bumped into a giant invisible spaceship that promptly started invading the planet. Which they will now be infiltrating.

As soon as Opal dispels the UFO’s invisibility, a whole lot of things happen. First is, as mentioned previously, a bunch of people in the audience take off their Toad disguises, revealing themselves as alien bunnies and X-Nauts. Who start taking hostages. But then, well- the main thing they do with the hostages is force them to face the UFO, as if it weren’t attention-getting enough.

A screen shows up, broadcasting a swirly pattern, beginning to mass-hypnotize everyone. This could be quite bad, but thankfully, Princess Opal knows a spell to make people immune to hypnosis. Less thankfully, the spell takes the form of a cone that emits from her broom-staff-wand thing, and so she isn’t caught in the effect of her own spell. (Neither is Chevy, who’s still separated from the other two.)

Chevy, thankfully, makes a very good roll to resist- so good, in fact, that not only does she not get hypnotized, but she hears the orders being hypnotically transmitted to her, without having to obey them. (She’s supposed to report to the ship and assist “the wounded” somewhere on the ship, and has a codephrase, “Hail Tatanga”, to prove she’s brainwashed so she can get inside.)

Princess Opal, however, is caught in the hypnosis, and immediately flies into the ship, to be used for some nefarious purpose!

So, okay- in a rare fit of heroism, Chevy decides that, yes, she is going to actually get involved on purpose, taking advantage of the failed hypnotism to sneak aboard. The party works out and then executes on a plan.

While Chevy rides a handy-dandy X-Naut claw drone up to the ship (they’re being deployed everywhere to carry newly-hypnotized help on board), Cozmo and Kandace take a different route up. Cozmo, see, is already an X-Naut, so he doesn’t actually need a disguise or anything to get aboard. He pretends to take Kandace hostage, pretending to fly her broom up to the ship while Kandace secretly pilots the broom backwards. It’s a tricky roll, but they pull it off. Cozmo is able to bluff past the airlock security, and they’re in.

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The problem, is, they’re both “in” at two different points. Let me give you a rundown on the layout of this ship.

The Orbital Doom Casa is divided into eleven distinct sections- two floors of five rooms each, plus a lower floor containing a single chamber. The two floors are each laid out sort of like a Simon game. Like, uh, this:

Four rooms around the edge, plus a central hub. In this case, Chevy has been taken up to the lower floor’s Simon Yellow, and Kandace and Cozmo entered a different airlock at Simon Blue.

Kandace and Cozmo have arrived at Space Storage Space, a general-purpose supply depot for the ship. Everything’s locked behind alarmed glass cases, though, so they’ll need a passcode to get in. Cozmo might know the passcode, but it’s possible- indeed, likely- that they’ve changed it since the moon fortress days, and getting it wrong could set off an alarm. Since there’s nothing in there they need right now, they decide to go to the yellow area to meet up with Chevy.

Simon Yellow is the X-Production Chamber. Cozmo recognizes a lot of the equipment in the room- this is where new X-Nauts are decanted from mysterious chemical space soup. However, the X-Tubes are currently lying empty, and new equipment has been set up along the far wall (the same wall containing a door to Simon Green, marked “Bunny Ranch”.) This new equipment... it seems to be an array of brainwashing helmets, and a line of hypnotized racing fans are queuing up to be more permanently brainwashed. As victims come out from under the brainwashing helmets, they put on X-Naut uniforms and proceed to whatever their next task is.

Chevy has been taken to the back of the line, but like shell she’s gonna stick around to get helmeted. Instead, Cozmo and Kandace provide a distraction- Cozmo, after all, hasn’t been in the organization in years, and so the X-Scientists on duty have some pointed questions about where in the heck he’s been. This causes trouble for his lies- for instance, this ship doesn’t have brig (why would they need a brig when they have a brainwashing room?) and how come he doesn’t know that? He manages to string together some excuses about doing reconnaissance planetside, and he bluffs well enough that they forget the holes in his story.

The team, finally reunited, heads upstairs to the BarraX (a feat which is difficult but not impossible for Chevy, who is no fan of stairs.) There, they find “the wounded” Chevy was supposed to be treating- which amounts to one X-Naut (Wipe Naut, pronounced Wipe Nowt) who broke his leg skateboarding. Chevy plays it straight and attempts to set his leg using a skateboard as a splint, but, uh, fails. Because skateboards aren’t very good splints. As a stopgap measure to cover her failure, she uses a tongue depressor as a splint, which isn’t great but should at least stop the bone from setting wrong.

Anyway, they don’t have time to mess around with medicine- they need to find the Music Key and rescue Princess Opal! Kandace cajoles her shadow, Carbonado, into sneaking around and gathering some intel- apparently, the ship’s hypnotist is at the lowest level of the ship. Before they can do that, though... it’s getting tiresome having to bluff past every X-Naut they meet, so they decide to go downstairs and get some disguises.

Chevy acts as an obstruction for Kandace to hide behind as she filches an X-Naut uniform from the X-Production Chamber, and then the party is sent to the Space Storage Space to get some X-Naut logo stickers for Chevy- since, well, they don’t exactly have uniforms that fit chain chomps.

At the SSS, they meet the attendant on duty- one Nauti Naut, who both talks like a pirate and is very naughty. As Kandace fights Chevy to see how many stickers she can stick to her, Nauti interrogates Cozmo about where he’s been- Nauti, after all, is one of the old generation, moonbase survivors. Her thing was... constant attempts at mutiny. Which she’s still up to, not having yet been fired because she’s a decent employee when she’s not actively executing said ineffectual mutinies.

From Nauti, they learn that this ship is run by an alliance of three leaders: The Supreme Leader (that’s the severed head of Grodus, still up and kicking), the Supreme Master (some weirdo), and the Supreme Hypnotist (some mysterious weirdo)- plus the new supercomputer, TEC-CC, who’s helping coordinate them.

The plan, currently, is to track down the Supreme Hypnotist first, to cancel the hypnotism and release Princess Opal. The problem with that is that the Hypno-chamber is only accessible via an elevator from the bridge or the power core, and those two areas can only be accessed with a keycard. Their plan to get a keycard is to talk to (and bluff past) TEC-CC, who can print them.

So they head through the X-Production chamber, upstairs to the BarraX, and then into Simon-Green-2, the TEC-CC Server Room. And as they enter- and before they’re noticed- they overhear an incriminating conversation between TEC-CC and... someone. Someone with an unmistakable voice.

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This nefarious bowling pin is unsubtly plotting with TEC-CC to get rid of the Supreme Leader and Supreme Hypnotist, ensuring the spoils of the invasion are a two-way split instead of a four-way split.

Unfortunately, after this, Chevy crit-fails her stealth roll, and unstealth-rolls into a server rack, causing a loud noise that gets Orbulon’s attention.

Chevy, cornered, decides to come clean to Orbulon, mostly: they’re here to sabotage the Supreme Hypnotist and get rid of his influence, which is just fine by Orbulon. In fact, he gives them a codephrase they can use to command the Alien Bunnies on his authority, and a keycard they can use to access the power core (and through there, the hypno-chamber)!

The cost of this, of course, is that now Orbulon knows they’re there and it’ll make it that much harder to stop the entire invasion, even if they can deal with Grodus and whoever the hypnotist is.

Still! No matter! They head straight to the power core, where...

Well, there are several things in the power core.

There’s a couple Yux guards, for one thing- but there’s also the power core itself, which happens to be the Music Key! They’re using it to power the ship!

Princess Opal is also there. She’s there because she’s draped over the shoulder of a giant robot, being piloted by a small (and highly mysterious) purple spaceman.

Now, there’s no reason a fight needs to happen- after all, the party is there to obtain the Music Key, right? Tatanga is about to install the new, more powerful power core he just hypnotized, and he doesn’t need that old thing anymore. They can just have it! Wow, that was easy.

...But, yeah, no, they’re going to rescue the princess. FIGHT!

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Cozmo starts off by firing a firework at one of the Yux guards- but that just breaks its Mini-Yux shield, of course. Kandace follows up with a fireball to the Pagosu’s legs- yeah, it’s got legs now, it was inefficient to use flaming thruster jets to get about a spaceship with a limited oxygen supply and flammable components. It’s a good hit, but then the Pagosu fires a couple missiles that blast Kandace and Cozmo real good.

Conveniently, Nauti Naut is there and manages to finish off the undefended Yux, leaving just the one plus Tatanga. Chevy, meanwhile, anchors herself to the central stalactite-spike thingy of the power core, gearing up to start swinging around the room like a wrecking ball.

The remaining Yux attacks, but Kandace and Cozmo team up with another firework and one of them standard Magikoopa playstation-button blasts to clear it out of the way. It’s just the main boss, now! The party take a few more missile hits, but Chevy manages to huck a scalpel at one of the leg joints, restricting the Pagosu’s movement.

Cozmo tries to capitalize by firing a firework right at the cockpit- but Tatanga uses Opal as a human shield, and he’s forced to let the attack go wide. Kandace decides that’s enough of that- she weaves past his defenses and snags Opal right off his shoulder.

Unfortunately, Opal is still hypnotized. Tatanga simply orders her to return to his side, and she starts floating back to him. That said, he’s momentarily deprived of his meatshield, which gives Chevy an opening to set up a combo attack with Nauti Naut. Nauti throws an anchor up into the air, and Chevy smacks it full-force with her built-up momentum, straight into the Pagosu’s armor. It cracks it, leaving Tatanga off-balance.

Meanwhile, Cozmo is setting up- he’s running up the walls of this cool twisted-gravity chamber, and kicking off to do a flying drop-kick! He goes, not for Tatanga, but for the scalpel Chevy drove into his leg joint earlier!

With a successful kick, Cozmo severs the leg entirely, toppling the Pagosu.

Rather than attack, Kandace now tries to cure Opal. She just saw the spell Opal used to make her immune to hypnosis- surely, she can make it work! It’s a tough roll, and she spends all the boosts she can to make it work, and... she succeeds! She can now counter hypnosis! (With, as is specified in her magic-learning stunt, some kind of troublesome side-effect I have yet to inform anyone of.)

Finally, with Pagosu on the floor, Chevy lets loose, flinging herself off the spike and colliding with the cockpit full-force. The Pagosu is destroyed, and it doesn’t take much after that for the team to gang up on the mysterious spaceman within. He’s knocked right out!

So hey, they’re done, right? They rescued the princess, and the Music Key is right there, and...

...well, they’re still inside a spaceship that’s currently full of aliens invading the planet, and they can’t take the Music Key without making it fall out of the sky and crushing the innocents beneath, and Orbulon knows they’re there, and...

Yeah, this one’s gonna be tough.

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#kingdoms and koopas #mario #benedict art

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somar78 · 5 years

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The Volkswagen SP2 + The New (Almost) Production-Ready SP Concept Car

The Volkswagen SP2 is a car much loved in Brazil, but little known outside the South American country. The car is a small sport coupe that was designed and made in Brazil for the local market, using largely local VW components.

The styling of the car would have a strong influence on the VW/Porsche developed Porsche 924, and in recent years a team of automotive engineers have designed an all new SP. This turnkey design is currently waiting for a small volume automaker to put it into production, giving the SP an all new life in the 21st century.

Brazil: A Nation that Banned Imported Cars

Brazil was a nation that almost entirely banned the importation of motor vehicles during the 1960’s and 1970’s thus forcing car manufacturers to either set up vehicle production in Brazil or not have access to that market.

Volkswagen were one of the companies that set up manufacturing in the country and they finished up having a two thirds share of the Brazilian market: something that they were no doubt quite happy about, and something the Brazilians employed by Volkswagen do Brazil were quite happy about too.

The other dimension to this is that most car buyers are not the slightest bit interested in purchasing a sports car. Most people want comfortable, reliable and affordable transportation. Hence Volkswagens became the most popular cars in Brazil.

Brazilian Sports Cars

With the import ban in place it was a foregone conclusion that small scale specialist sports car builders would spring up. During the 1960’s a Brazilian company named Puma began making limited production sports cars using chassis of their own design with fiberglass bodywork and fitted with engines and mechanical components from DKW, Volkswagen, or General Motors.

Another sports car was the Willy’s Interlagos, which was a Renault Alpine A108 built locally. So there were sports cars being made in Brazil and they were in some ways quite like the British small volume specialist makers such as Lotus or TVR. They were cars that were fun, and affordable.

It was to be a conversation between one of the directors of Brazilian sports car maker Puma and the head of Volkswagen in Brasil that would precipitate the creation of the Volkswagen SP. The Puma director suggested that because Volkswagen Brazil did not have a stylish sports car that the pride of place on the Volkswagen stand at the 1969 Brazilian motor show should be a Puma (built on Volkswagen parts of course).

The head of Volkswagen Brazil, Rudolph Leiding, was probably not amused although I suspect he smiled politely even as he quietly began formulating a plan

Volkswagen’s Project X: A Car for the Ladies as well as for the Gentlemen

The stylish coupé that Volkswagen Brazil were making was the Karmann Ghia but this was due to be phased out and the head of Volkswagen Brazil, Rudolph Leiding, could see that there was a need for a suitable replacement in the form of a stylish sporting coupé.

Rudolph Leiding wisely had some discussions with his wife Helga in order to gauge what sort of stylish coupé would appeal to Brazilian women: women tend to look for different things in a car by comparison with men and Rudolph Leiding wanted the new car to appeal to both men and women.

Leiding made initial sketches of the car he envisioned and a Mr. Schiemann was appointed to head up “Project X” as the new initiative was called. Volkswagen Brazil’s in-house designer Marcio Piancastelli was briefed on the project and Leiding’s sketches handed over to him. The plan was to build the new sports coupé on the platform of the locally produced Volkswagen Type 3 “Variant” which featured typical Volkswagen torsion bar suspension and four cylinder horizontally opposed air-cooled engine.

For Marcio Piancastelli there was quite a bit of design inspiration available in the late 1960’s as he got to work. Jaguar’s E-Type had been called “The most beautiful car in the world” by none other than Enzo Ferrari and Japanese company Toyota had made everyone sit up and take notice when they unveiled their 2000GT.

Chevrolet’s C2 Corvette was also a real head turner. Piancastelli had done an internship with Ghia and was very capable of bringing Italian style to Project X despite the fact that it was to be based on the Volkswagen Type 3 platform. Could Piancastelli design something that looked like it should be a Porsche? He was about to prove that he could and in 1971 the concept car made its debut just as Rudolph Leiding was leaving Brazil with his wife Helga to take up his new position in charge of Volkswagen globally.

The Volkswagen Type 3 was actually a good foundation for a sporting coupé: it was much more sophisticated than the original Volkswagen Type 1 “Beetle” and this was especially true by 1968. By 1966 the Type 3 was made with a 1.6 liter (1,584 cc) version of the “pancake” (aka “suitcase”) four cylinder air-cooled engine. This engine had the cooling fan located at the end of the crankshaft to lower its height and was mounted on a separate sub-frame which also contained the rear suspension.

This unit was then mounted to the body using rubber mountings, a design that was highly effective in isolating vibration and road noise. In 1968 this engine was the first in a volume production car to be fitted with the Bosch D-Jetronic fuel injection system. Not only that but also in 1968 a three speed automatic version was made available.

The front suspension of the Type 3 was improved over the Type 1 also. The Type 1’s transverse leaf spring torsion bars were done away with and the Type 3 became the first fitted with transverse round torsion bars. For the front suspension the round torsion bar was located in the lower torsion bar tube while the upper one had the anti-roll bar attached to the upper trailing links on each side.

1968 saw another major advance with the old style swing axles replaced by a double jointed CV joint which kept the rear wheel camber consistent and eliminated the infamous handling vice of the Type 1 caused by the swing axles. The Type 3’s brakes were also upgraded to discs at the front and drums at the rear.

So the Type 3 platform that Marcio Piancastelli had to work with had a great deal of potential: with the right engine under the car it could almost have become a Brazilian Porsche (of sorts).

The Volkswagen SP Enters Production

The Volkswagen SP that Rudolph Leiding had sketched the concept for and Marcio Piancastelli had created entered production in 1973 and it proved to be a real head-turner. It had looks that seemed to combine a touch of Porsche with an Italian feel. The lines of the car were sleek, well proportioned, and flowing.

The interior was no disappointment either, unless you were over 6 feet tall that is in which case it would start becoming a tad snug. The dashboard was a purposeful design with a large tachometer and speedometer directly in front of the driver and four smaller gauges in the center; water temperature, oil pressure, fuel and clock. The interior was a quite brilliant blending of comfort with GT car instrumentation and controls.

The SP had a lot more going for it than its looks however. Piancastelli had design engineered it to be a car with impressive safety credentials. The steering column was collapsible, the brake hydraulics dual circuit, but the most interesting feature was the “collision belt”. The “collision belt” was comprised of “collision proof” structures that circled the perimeter of the car.

It included the bumpers which were spring loaded by being mounted on spring steel claws which would absorb impact, especially the 5 mph impact specified by US regulators, and side structures to protect against side collisions. The front, rear and side collision belt was covered in gloss painted rubber. It is very clear in the attention to engineering crash protection that Volkswagen do Brasil were intending to market the SP in the US and other world markets.

The SP was made in two models; the SP1 was the entry level model and the SP2 was the more up-market model. The SP1 featured quad headlights while on the more powerful SP2 the quad headlights were quartz iodine. The car was designed to provide excellent visibility and was fitted with front quarter vents to assist with ventilation along with opening rear quarter windows also.

Although the Volkswagen Type 3 in other markets was fitted with the Bosch D-Jetronic fuel injection system this was not the case for Brazil. In Brazil the quality of the fuel was quite low and so the compression ratio of the engines used and their state of tune had to be kept low. Two engines were used; the Volkswagen SP1 was fitted with the same 1.6 liter engine as the Type 3 but with twin Solex carburetors and producing 65 bhp (DIN).

The Volkswagen SP2 was fitted with a larger 1.8 liter engine also with twin Solex carburetors and producing 75 bhp (DIN). Performance of the more powerful SP2 was for a standing to 60 mph time around 16 seconds and a top speed of 100 mph. The SP1 was significantly slower and perhaps it could be said that it didn’t so much accelerate as “gain momentum”.

The SP1 was dropped from production by the time 88 cars had been made, leaving the SP2 as the sole model.

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The Volkswagen SP had a lot more luggage carrying space than is common in the majority of sports cars or GT coupés. Because of Volkswagen engine there was a good amount of boot space above the engine, much the same amount as one would find in a Jaguar E-Type for example.

But that was not all, in typical Volkswagen style there was also a good luggage area in the front of the car. The spare wheel was stored at the very front leaving a decent luggage area behind the front axle line. So as a practical coupé the SP was intelligently laid out.

The “SP” name had originally been intended to stand for “San Paolo”, where the car was designed and made. However Brazilians have a sense of humor and pretty soon the “SP” was said to stand for “Sem Potência” which translates as “without power”, or in English we might make that “Slow Poke”.

That being said those who owned the SP2 seem to have a great affection for them despite the lack of road burning horsepower. As a comfortable coupé for touring the power was seemingly enough and the car was enjoyable to own and to drive. The SP2 was kept in production for three years with the last cars rolling off the production line in 1976 after a fairly respectable 10,205 had been made.

Given that the SP2 was made on the Volkswagen Type 3 platform it would not have been rocket science to dramatically improve the car’s performance by fitting a larger and more powerful engine: Volkswagen certainly had a range of suitable engines that could have been chosen and which would have been easy to fit.

But by that stage of Volkswagen’s history it was moving away from the 1930’s vintage rear-mounted air-cooled four cylinder boxer engines and migrating to water-cooled front-mounted engines and front wheel drive. Rudolph Leiding had been instrumental in pushing for that change and it was he who directed Volkswagen away from a Porsche designed prototype for the new Volkswagen Golf that had a mid-mounted engine.

That was the EA266 which featured a mid-mounted in-line four cylinder liquid cooled 105hp engine laid horizontally and placed under the rear passenger seat.

Volkswagen do Brasil did consider a suitable solution to the “Slow Poke” problem which would have been called the SP3 and which would be fitted with a 1.8 liter water-cooled four cylinder engine as used in the Brazilian Volkswagen Passat TS.

That engine had a compression ratio of 8.5:1 and was fitted with twin carburetors which enabled it to produce 99 hp @ 6,000 rpm. A prototype was made by an independent Brazilian company called Dacon who offered conversion kits for SP1 and SP2 cars. Unfortunately the cost of the kits seems to have been too high and not many were sold.

A Porsche “Volkswagen SP”: The Porsche 924

The Volkswagen SP had garnered quite a bit of attention in Brazil and in Volkswagen/Porsche circles. Although the Volkswagen SP only remained in production in Brazil for three years the idea got Volkswagen in Germany thinking, helped along by Rudolph Leiding in his role at the head of Volkswagen internationally.

The idea for a Volkswagen sports car/coupé, that Leiding had instigated and developed in Brazil was embraced by Volkswagen in Germany and work began in cooperation with Porsche to create a suitable model, whose design was very much inspired by the Volkswagen SP.

The project was designated EA425 and it re-located the engine to the front of the car with a transaxle at the rear: this gave the car a 48/52 front to rear weight distribution.

With a successful and very affordable design largely complete the EA425 was ready to rock and roll off the assembly lines but the oil crisis of 1973 persuaded Volkswagen to stop work on the project and sell it back to Porsche while Volkswagen moved ahead with their Scirocco model. Porsche completed the car as a replacement for the Porsche 914 and introduced it as the Porsche 924 in 1976.

The VW SP2 is Re-Created For The 21st Century

The Volkswagen SP may have been nicknamed the “Sem Potência” but it carved a place for itself in many Brazilian hearts as their home grown sports coupé that was almost a Porsche, and which in reality had been transformed into the basis for the Porsche 924.

So it should come as no surprise that in this twenty-first century that a group of Mechanical Automotive Engineering students at the FEI College (Educational Foundation of Ignatius) in Brazil decided to base their course major project on it. Final year students in this course were required to design a vehicle and its major components as a major assignment.

Around the table a group comprising Rafael Tardelli, Sebastián Honbono, Flavio Koiti, Eduardo Samartino and Fernando Piaya, looked at various options and considered that there had been a move to recreate “retro” style cars, such as the Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro, Morris Mini and Fiat 500 “Bambino”.

So as the discussions progressed the group decided that they could create a new version of Brazil’s Volkswagen SP that had almost become a Brazilian Porsche.

The student’s professor of vehicular dynamics and suspension, Mr. Ricardo Bock, was also teaching the Car Design Course, at the FAAP College (Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation) and finding that the retro Volkswagen SP2 project to be a very interesting one brought students from the two colleges together.

Professor Bock’s idea was to have the engineering and design students work together to actually create a design that could be built. The meeting brought together not only students but professors who had been working in the Brazilian car industry during the 1960’s and including Brazilian designer Ari Rocha, who worked at Studio Fissore and at DKW. It was he who subsequently introduced the students to the designer of the Volkswagen SP2, Márcio Piancastelli, and also to José Vicente Novita Martins (Jota) who had designed a number of Volkswagen cars.

Armed with background drawings, photographs and time spent with original designers from the 1960’s and 1970’s, the students went to work to create the design for a new version of the Volkswagen SP2, and they designed it so it could be built and driven. They used a tubular space frame chassis as is common for small scale sports car producers. The 1020 steel tubing was to have an external diameter of 50.8mm with a wall thickness of 2.5mm.

Suspension was to be by unequal length wishbones, “A” arms at the front and “H” style at the rear. Brakes would be discs all around.

The choice of engine remained with a standard Volkswagen/Audi engine, and the students chose the 1,984 cc, turbocharged, TFSI (Turbo Fuel Stratified Injection) engine which produced 195 kW (262hp) @ 6400 rpm and torque of 350 Nm (358lb/ft) at 3500 rpm.

The design team decided that the engine was to be mounted in the center (i.e. mid-mounted) and so it would most likely be mated to a transaxle as used for a front wheel drive car, but with the unit in the mid-engine position driving the rear wheels, in a similar set-up to the Lamborghini Muira. The SP Concept design is 4,143.43 mm long, 1,810.00 mm wide, and 1,191.00 mm high.

Given that this new SP would have more than triple the engine power of the original SP2 there is no way that this car could be called “Sem Potência”, in fact “Super Performance” might be more apropos.

With a mid-mounted transverse four cylinder engine the SP Concept could potentially have decent luggage carrying capacity in the front and perhaps a small additional space in the rear: making it a very practical touring car. Weight distribution should also be close to an idea 50/50, especially with a spare wheel stored in the front, and potentially the battery fitted in the front also. From the concept pictures it would seem the radiator was planned to be front mounted

In computer simulated wind tunnel testing the SP Concept achieved a respectable drag coefficient of 0.34. Overall the design looks to provide great stability, including high speed highway stability, and with its fully independent suspension should also provide excellence in handling.

The students had a student named Rafael Reston create the 3D modeling of their car and created a 1:5 scale model which they presented at a college event in 2003. Their design was much admired, being awarded the “Best Car” of the event. This SP Concept was a fitting tribute to those who designed the original Volkswagen SP2, and also to the Brazilian automobile industry that had achieved some remarkable things in the period when importation of cars was almost totally banned.

Despite being labelled “Sem Potência” the Volkswagen SP2 was not only a successful touring coupé but it was also the car that gave us the Volkswagen EA425 concept and then from that the Porsche 924, which was a car that realized the potential in the Volkswagen SP design.

The college student’s SP Concept car demonstrates that the original vision is not dead, and perhaps there will be a small scale car manufacturer who takes a serious look at it with a view to making a new sports coupé.

Much of the hard design work is already done by a team of professional engineers, and the final car is a genuinely beautiful coupe that’s already winning the hearts and minds of those who see it.

If you’d like to get in touch with the design team with a view to building the car you can contact us here and we’ll put you in touch with them.

Photo Credits: Volkswagen, SP Concept Group

The post The Volkswagen SP2 + The New (Almost) Production-Ready SP Concept Car appeared first on Silodrome.

source https://silodrome.com/volkswagen-sp2/

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classyfoxdestiny · 3 years

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2021 Isuzu D-Max V-Cross BS6 Review: The Gentle Giant

What happens when you leave boys alone with something like the Isuzu D-Max V-Cross. Well! Most certainly your mother is not going to be happy about what all’s happening behind her back. And today I am sure my mother is going to cross her threshold of patience, after reading this very review. So, I thought it would be a good idea to apologise to her in advance! One just can’t help it with the V-Cross. After all, it belongs in the wild, doesn’t it?

Also Read: 2021 Isuzu D-Max V-Cross: All You Need To Know

Off-Road

The Isuzu D-Max V-Cross is phenomenal at off-roading, so much so that you won’t step back before throwing anything at it.

Yes! It’s off the road where the V-Cross is in its element, so much so that you won’t step back before throwing anything at it. Even I didn’t. The location we were headed to offers long highway stretches, twisties, sharp corners and dips in the Arawali range on the way, leading to this hard-core, natural off-road terrain, just the perfect course for the Isuzu D-Max V-Cross. And with us is the six-speed manual iteration mated to the new 1.9-litre BS6 engine, which we haven’t tested before.

Be it in 4H or 4L you just don’t worry about the momentum, there’s always enough of it.

This thing just glides over anything and everything. Be it in 4H or 4L you just don’t worry about the momentum, there’s enough of it. In 4L and it holds the revs nice and tight at 2,000 rpm giving you enough push, and I don’t really worry about the approach and departure angle because it goes over everything without breaking a sweat. The only thing that bothers me a bit is the mid-angle because it has got a big wheelbase, so that is something you have to look out for. But then, the SUV gets underbody protection, so it isn’t much of a hassle there.

Off-roading ability is phenomenal and if you plan to do it often, just pick this manual V-Cross.

Yes! It’s a cakewalk for the V-Cross on the rough. Off-roading ability is phenomenal and if you plan to do it often, just pick this manual over the range-topping automatic that we drove back in 2019. Don’t get me wrong, even the Automatic variant is no less of a hero, just that you feel more in command when driving the manual variant.

It can nearly go swimming with a water wading capability of over 500 mm and so we didn’t mind being a water child.

Even on our way here, 4H served pretty well on inclines, dips, slush, sand or whatever came under it. Nothing seems challenging. If anything, it sort of overwhelms you, going beyond your expectations and that’s quite reassuring. It’s like those solid woodland boots. Looks tough and stylish, and you barely feel the surface. Then, it can nearly go swimming with a water wading capability of over 500 mm and so we didn’t mind being a water child and having our share of fun splashing around.

Performance & Dynamics

The 1.9-litre, four-cylinder BS6 diesel mill mated to this six-speed manual transmission and we quite like how it delivers.

2021 Isuzu D-Max V-Cross BS6

Specifications

Displacement

1898 cc

Cylinders

In-Line 4

Maximum Output

160 bhp @ 3500 rpm

Peak Torque

360 Nm @ 2000 rpm

Transmission

6-Speed M/T

Transfer Case

Shift-On-Fly 4×4

Now manual coupled with this robust shift-on-fly four-wheel-drive system is more promising in even highway munching as it is off the road! The 1.9-litre, four-cylinder BS6 diesel mill mated to this six-speed manual transmission, belts out a healthy 160 bhp at 3,500 rpm and 360 Nm of peak torque accessible right from 2,000 rpm. And we quite like how it delivers.

The new V-Cross with this new 1.9-litre oil burner is more promising in even highway munching as it is off the road.

The meaty low-end torque is accessed nice and low at around 2,000 rpm in first and second gears which are short and give you instant access to that torque. And then in following gears, third, fourth and so on, you can push it higher up the rev band at around 4,000 rpm which is its happy zone and that makes it an effortless cruiser. The mid-range is really good. The top-end though is a bit flat and getting up to higher triple-digit speeds will take some time. But then it’s the V-Cross and we don’t want to hustle around with. It prefers being driven in a relaxed manner and you build up on speed gradually.

It feels more at ease than the 2.5-litre unit and you don’t need to work too much with the gears, very suitable for highway cruising.

In fact, this 1.9-litre oil burner feels more at ease than the 2.5-litre unit where getting momentum and instant low-end push was a constant struggle. Well! That engine has been axed down post BS6 regulations rollout. The best part here! You don’t need working with gears too much, again thanks to that low-end torque that allows you cruise in 4H or even 2H at lower speeds and higher gears. So even 40 kmph in top gear is feasible without much fuss, and you don’t really need to drop down speeds any further. Suspension brings it about for you.

Leaf springs at the rear is an aid when that bed is fully loaded at up to 215 kg which is the prescribed limit.

And speaking of suspension, there is high ride independent double wishbone coil spring upfront, tall enough for ample articulation and play, while soft ride leaf spring at the rear doesn’t make ride bumpy or too floaty and the leaf spring is an aid when that bed is fully loaded at up to 215 kg which is the prescribed limit. Well! That is a boon, especially on the road.

It’s proportions and weight is very evident behind the wheel.

It tips the scales at just less than 2 tonnes and stretches over 5.2 metres in length and all that mass and size is very evident behind the wheel. But that bulky SUV feel is what owners really want in something like this and still for the size it holds quite well around bends and corners and electronics do come to your advantage. You feel it even more with an unladen deck and a rear section that’s slide happy, even with a gentle shove on the pedal. The electronics do keep a check here.

The steering feels a bit cumbersome at lower speeds, but gives required heft and feedback when pushing hard.

The steering feels cumbersome at lower speeds but will give you required heft and feedback when pushing hard and the nose stays in right direction. Even sharp curves are easily dealt and while you do keep a check on speed while cornering hard, it behaves well and doesn’t float much on the highway. You do miss the three-blink lane departure function on the switch though.

Body rolls and lateral movements aren’t actually unnerving as the chassis is stable but passengers do feel it.

But then lateral movements even on small undulations and while changing lanes are inevitable, courtesy its tad soft sprung suspension. They actually aren’t unnerving as the chassis is stable but passengers do feel it. The ride quality though is plush and that slight soft edge in the suspension setup is helpful here. Even the sharpest of bumps don’t feel as sharp and it takes every terrain in its stride, simply gliding over those beaten tarmac, pebbly roads or potholes. The 18-inch wheels with adequately tall profile do add up as well.

Design

The next-generation V-Cross looks more angular, but this still looks truly handsome.

But what hasn’t changed at all is the way it looks and that’s not exactly a bad thing. Well because we have always loved its daunting and intimidating demeanour. Agreed! The next-generation V-Cross looks more angular and it’s on sale globally, will eventually come to India and you’ll like that even more. But this! It looks truly handsome and while I am not a big fan of chrome, but healthy dose of it on its face goes pretty well with this body colour – Black Mica. And our test car gets this additional chrome package. So around headlights you have got chrome, also on wing mirrors and doors and even at the rear, around taillights and boot lid. And as said, it doesn’t look flashy at all looks quite good in fact.

2021 Isuzu D-Max V-Cross

Dimensions

Length

5,295 mm

Width

1,860 mm

Height

1,840 mm

Wheelbase

3,095 mm

Interior

The lacklustre feel inside the cabin is very evident and it misses out heavily on creature comforts front.

That being said, where it most certainly should have got an upgrade is inside the cabin. All you get is a very functional 7.0-inch touchscreen with Bluetooth connectivity and stereo options. So no Apple CarPlay, Android Auto or even in-built navigation. Other things we sorely missed having were rear air-con vents, power adjustable seats, auto-dimming mirror and perhaps wee bit of soft-touch material at least at frequent touchpoints like centre and door armrests. Even leatherette seats and additional roof mounted speakers are available only on the top-end Z-Prestige Automatic variant. The manual with us is available only on the Z 4×4 trim, a lower variant.

No rear air-con vents at the rear and backrest angle could have been improved, offers decent thigh support though.

So in here, all you get are six-speakers, power adjustable and foldable wing mirrors auto climate control and of course power windows but with just single touch down operation for driver side. Well it does get parking sensors now that the BS4 model didn’t have in addition to the reverse camera, and it’s quite handy while parking or reversing this mammoth of an SUV. But quite honestly! You have all of these even in a premium hatchback nowadays.

Something that needs shelling out close to 24 lakh rupees, has to be up on the feel good quotient and offer few more creature comforts.

Safety Features

It gets six airbags, Electronic Stability Control, Traction Control, Hill Descent Control and Brake Override System among others.

On the safety side, you do get six airbags, Electronic Stability Control, Traction Control, Hill Descent Control and Brake Override System among others and they do support you as already mentioned. But disc brakes are there only on the front while you get standard drum at the rear. It would have been nice to have discs at all corners offering you a bit better bite, given its weight and size. Oh wow! That Rhymes.

Verdict

This 1.9-litre BS6 engine has upped its credentials both off-road and on the highway compared to the previous 2.5-litre engine.

Well the Isuzu D-Max V-Cross is not for everyone but still, it is no surprise why it has such a cult following. And hundreds of queries for the BS6 version on its fan pages across social media platforms will tell you the same. Have to say that this 1.9-litre BS6 version has upped its credentials both off-road and on the highway compared to the previous 2.5-litre engine. It’s like the Hulk from ‘Avengers End Game’. Still does the job quite handsomely when the going gets tough, but now remains poised and maintains its composure. And then, it’s still around ₹ 10 lakh less expensive than the 4×4 Endeavour and Fortuner.

It can be your second car for highway munching or to satisfy your adventurous or wanderer streak.

2021 Isuzu D-Max V-Cross

Prices

Isuzu D-Max Hi-Lander

₹ 16.98 lakh

Isuzu D-Max V-Cross Z A/T 2WD

₹ 19.98 lakh

Isuzu D-Max V-Cross Z M/T 4WD

₹ 20.98 lakh

Isuzu D-Max V-Cross Z-Prestige A/T 4WD

₹ 24.49 lakh

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For someone living in the hills, farms, countryside or where traffic doesn’t worry too much, it can be the one for your garage. And for city dwellers it can be your second car for highway munching or to satisfy your adventurous or wanderer streak.

For the latest auto news and reviews, follow carandbike.com on Twitter, Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

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pleaseload165 · 3 years

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Flash After Effects

Flash After Effects Tutorials

The Flash After Effects

Flash over after effect? Or After effects over flash? Just recently I have worked out how to animate sprites in after effects. Previously I would animate my sprite animations in flash then convert it into a video file and add the sound effect on after effects, and any other further effects. Here is something I created a few years back which I made in flash, then converted and edited in after effects.

Subscribe Now:More:light flashes on After Effects is.

Flash Player's end of life is December 31st, 2020. Please see the Flash Player EOL Information page for more details. This document lists the file formats which Adobe After Effects can import and export. You can add support for additional file formats to After Effects by installing a third-party plug-in.

Hello!Today I'll be showing you how to make black flashes in after effects, enjoy!If you have any questions, feel free to ask me in the comments! After months of waiting - It's time to learn how to use STRIKE the right way! Recreating Flash running in Adobe After Effects!Download it here: https://www.

But recently I worked out that sprite animation was possible in after effects. So i created this very short animation.

So this in mind, it got me thinking. What program was better for sprite animation?

In flash, sprite animation is easy because you can add all the images and take the character frames out of the original image then put into the work space. In after effects to get the frames for the animation, you have to key out the background to the sprite sheet, then mask out each picture frame that you want. It’s a slightly different way to flash, however in both pieces in software it is quite tedious and time consuming.

Flash is also very handy for creating animation loops, like walk loops. These are obvious where it comes in handy, but I have not found any way of making an animation loop in after effects for this sort of thing.

After effects however can produce better quality images compared to flash because you don’t have to convert any file, and because the software won’t mess up any of the images. You don’t have to change any of the options to get a better image, whereas in flash to view high quality animations you had to go into the JPEG option and increase the quality.

After effects is also handy with how you can manipulate the objects, as the rotation, scale, position and other aspects are split into their own sets on the timeline, in flash all the manipulation is on one timeline for each object, which means if you wanted to manipulate two different aspects of an image, but at different times, it may get a little more complicated and time consuming in flash, than it would in after effects.

After effects has a much more powerful and flexibly virtual camera. Flash on the other hands has an actionscripited camera that, don’t get me wrong works effectively. However cannot do 3D effect at all, whereas the camera in after effect has to be in 3D to work. This give it an edge because it means you can make more elaborate animation with foregrounds and backgrounds, and also make more than one angle, rather than it just being a platform.

Adding effects is also easier in after effects because you can add proper effects on to any file, whereas in flash you can only add effects onto movie files. After effects has an input motion blur which reacted to the movements of the file and adds the blur in relation to the movements. In flash you have to add them manually. Any blurred camera looks have to be manually done too, but after effects has it built in.

The last thing is that after effect allows you to animate in a 3D environment, this can also be done in flash, but is more complicated and time consuming as part of it has to be scripted to do it properly right. No scripting is involved in after effects.

Flash After Effects

Well-rounded and powerful program which enables you to create professional-looking photos, render 3D graphics and add motion to them

What's new in Adobe After Effects CC 2021 18.1:

Bugs Fixed:

Fixed an issue that could cause After Effects to crash when copying layers using Linear Color key.

Fixed an issue with 3D Scene Navigation that caused spring loaded “C” AND “V” keys to not work correctly.

Read the full changelog

Professional multimedia editors are already aware of the importance of their software, as the application they use needs to be both feature-packed and intuitive enough to allow users to easily locate each function with ease. Adobe After Effects is one of the most complex tools one can work with in regards to designing motion graphics or cinematic visual effects.

Time-consuming installation and a few tips

First and foremost, it needs to be mentioned that this software comes with a large installer, therefore it takes a while to download, go through the entire setup and load.

When first launching the software, the Welcome Screen comes in handy to beginners and pros alike, as it displays some tips meant to optimize the manner in which you operate Adobe After Effects.

Import images and take advantage of incorporated presets

When creating a new composition, users can customize it by adding text strings, solid colors, camera, lights, as well as new distinct layers. Alternatively, the composition can be viewed as a flowchart, to ensure smooth manipulation of its components.

The application also supports inserting common images or Photoshop-based ones, and users can apply effects such as stylize, distort, and shatter. All the elements can be combined, adjusted and edited so as to obtain a custom high-quality animation - presets can also be of use when looking for inspiration for a new project.

Includes a standalone animation tool that helps users bring characters to life

The Adobe Character Animator is deployed alongside Adobe After Effects, providing users with a powerful animation tool they can use to bring to life models created with Photoshop or Illustrator.

The great thing about Adobe Character Animator is that it can track facial expressions and motion using a simple webcam, and apply them to two-dimensional characters. Moreover, it can mimic mouth movement and enables users to use audio recording to become the voice of their characters, with worry-free lip-syncing.

Apply an array of effects and set up various parameters

Considering the numerous types of effects and layer actions (such as time-reverse, mask, blend, switch) supported by Adobe After Effects, it is best to experiment with them before applying them to your final creation.

Experts are bound to access the Preferences section when they want to adjust the amount of RAM that can be used by the software, or to configure the video preview and audio hardware settings.

Conclusion

It might burden your computer’s performance, yet you should know that all jobs are finalized in a fair amount of time without running into issues such as errors, crashes or bugs.

Although the interface might seem a bit overwhelming, it is quite professional and there are plenty of Help contents integrated. All in all Adobe After Effects is an efficient and reliable piece of software, which deserves all the credit it has been given over the years.

Filed under

Adobe After Effects was reviewed by Elena Opris

5.0/5

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5GB of available hard-disk space; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on removable flash storage devices)

Additional disk space for disk cache (10GB recommended)

1280x1080 display

Broadband internet connection and registration are necessary for required software activation, validation of subscriptions, and access to online services

Optional: Adobe-certified GPU card for GPU-accelerated ray-traced 3D renderer

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frankkjonestx · 4 years

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What the 1960s civil rights protests can teach us about fighting racism today

Day after day, protests have arisen in cities across America. The outrage was sparked by video of a white police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, even as the 46-year-old black man begged for breath. Floyd was arrested May 25 for allegedly trying to buy cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill and died after being pinned to the ground for eight minutes and 46 seconds by the Minneapolis officer’s knee.

That spark easily found both fresh and long-simmering fuel. Among recent events, white men killed a black jogger, a white woman called the police on a black birder in New York’s Central Park (SN: 6/4/20) and the pandemic has taken a disproportionate toll on black people (SN: 4/10/20). Those events underscore centuries of racism that has limited black people’s access to housing, health services, education and jobs.

The anger, anguish and calls for racial justice that first boiled over in Minneapolis quickly spread coast to coast. While many protests have been peaceful, some have turned violent — instigated sometimes by looters, sometimes by individuals among the protesters and sometimes by law enforcement using force to disperse crowds.

Whether these protests will help dismantle systemic racial inequities in the United States remains to be seen. But some lessons and parallels can be drawn from the civil rights protests in the 1960s, says Princeton University political scientist Omar Wasow. His research shows that the media covered civil rights protests in the ’60s in different ways depending on whether protestors were peaceful or violent. And that coverage shaped public opinion and behavior at the ballot box.

When protestors remained peaceful, particularly in the face of aggression and violence, the resulting images shocked a complacent nation into action. But when the protestors themselves turned violent, even in self-defense, the media message shifted from a framing around civil rights to one around the need for control, Wasow finds. For example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968, triggered a week of violent protests around the country. Those protests helped Republican candidate Richard Nixon, campaigning on law and order, prevail over Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, lead author of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in the November presidential election, Wasow reports May 21 in the American Political Science Review.

Princeton University political scientist Omar Wasow’s recent research on civil rights protests in the 1960s suggests that nonviolent protest, especially in the face of aggression, is the best tactic for advancing protesters’ cause.Willi Wong

“An ‘eye for an eye’ in response to violent repression may be moral, but this research suggests it may not be strategic,” he writes.

Science News talked with Wasow about his findings and how they apply to the current protests. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

SN: What was your big question about the protests of the 1960s?

Wasow: A large body of political science finds marginal groups have no influence. I wanted to see if protesters actually influence politics. I found that protests could be very influential through their effect on media. If you think about it, almost nobody directly observes a protest. The way a protest reaches us is through the news. That coverage varied if the protest was violent or nonviolent. A nonviolent protest [that made the news] predicted a front-page headline the next day that mentioned civil rights. When protests escalated to violence, that predicted a front-page headline with a word like “riot.”

So a protest influenced media coverage and that coverage influenced public opinion, or how people responded to survey questions such as: What is the most important problem in America today?

As protest activity mobilizes, the percentage of Americans who say civil rights is the most important problem in America increases. When protests turn violent, public opinion shifts to concerns about crime and riots.

SN: How did you evaluate the link between violent versus nonviolent protest and later voting?

Wasow: In the early part of the 1960s, most civil rights protests used nonviolent tactics even when met with police violence. Those events were followed [later in the decade] by a wave of protests that often escalated to protester-initiated violence, peaking when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968.[That coincides with] a big shift in public opinion. In the early part of the 1960s, survey respondents say the most important problem in America is civil rights. But in the late 1960s, we see a spike in concern for crime and riots. That’s a puzzle. Are those shifts at all associated with protest activities on the ground?

In political science, voting is a really important outcome, so that’s what I looked at. The basic framework is we have a county and it is “treated” or “not treated” by a protest. A county is [considered] treated if there is a protest within 100 miles and within two years of an election. I looked at two conditions. Under one, I compared counties treated with nonviolent protests to counties that experienced no nonviolent protests. In the other, I compared counties treated to violent protests to those with no violent protests. I wanted to know: Do the treated counties vote differently than the not treated counties?

In the primary models, I estimate the effect of protests on voting across the 1964, 1968 and 1972 presidential elections. These models compare each county to itself over time. In addition, to try and make better “apples to apples” comparisons, I also used a method called matching that only compares counties with and without protests that are very similar on variables such as percent black or percent foreign born. Another thing I looked at are counties that are 90 percent white. I find that counties close to nonviolent protest between 1960 and 1972 see increased Democratic vote share. Conversely, counties close to violent protest vote more for the Republican Party. That’s likely because, following the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Democrats tend to be seen as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party of law and order.

On March 7, 1965, protestors marched from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., to draw attention to black voting rights. Historical records show that the activists knew police might retaliate, but hoped that images juxtaposing peaceful protestors against violent police might shock the nation. Soon after this photo was taken, police teargassed and beat the protestors. That event and others helped precipitate passage of the Voting Rights Act.Spider Martin/National Archives photo/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

SN: Could something besides protests have influenced those election results?

Wasow: If we had godlike powers, we could randomly assign which counties to treat with violent or nonviolent protests and then see what happens in the November vote. Obviously we can’t do that, but we can look for possible natural experiments. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968 sparked many violent protests across the country, so I could compare what happens when counties did or did not experience violent protests.

What I do here, which builds on work by some economists, is use rainfall as something that might predict protest activity. There’s a lot of work that shows protest activity is sensitive to weather. More rainfall equals less likelihood of protest activity. Less rainfall equals more likelihood of protest activity.

Counties that experienced less rainfall were much more likely than those with more rainfall to experience protests following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. So there’s two steps in the process: rainfall’s effect on protest and protests’ effect on voting. If rainfall can predict voting, the only plausible path is through protest activity. There’s not another plausible explanation.

I also conducted a placebo test. That’s because rainfall is associated with geography, and geography is also associated with voting behavior. So I asked: Does rainfall before Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated influence voting in November? That’s a placebo, like a sugar pill, because we shouldn’t expect it to have any effect. I find that rainfall before King’s assassination does not predict voting in November. I also look in the last two weeks of that April after most violent protests ended. And again, the rainfall in that period doesn’t predict voting in November. It’s not just rainfall in April. It’s rainfall in one week of April that predicts voting in November. That allows me to say it’s not just geography, it’s not just the South is rainier. I make the case that experiencing a violent protest caused people to vote for order in November.

SN: What role do journalists play in shaping the narrative around protests?

Wasow: I scanned thousands of newspaper pages and created a corpus of articles about protests and then asked: If a protest had been categorized as nonviolent, what sorts of words are commonly used? And similarly, if a protest had been categorized as violent, what are some of the most common words?

Nonviolent protests seem to be covered as if they were traditional attempts to redress grievances, seek rights. So the words we see are “civil rights,” “demonstration,” “march,” words that suggest this is a legitimate claim for rights. When there were violent protests, the words that were commonly used were things like “riot” and police.”

The key idea here is people are protesting because they’re angry about some injustice, but the kinds of tactics employed will focus the media’s attention on that injustice or, in some cases, shift the focus away from that injustice. That’s why tactics matter so much. The approach tells the media what to pay attention to and by telling the media what to pay attention to, protestors are telling the country what to pay attention to. This finding was revelatory for me. I didn’t start out thinking this was a study of media.

SN: Do those findings apply to today, given the media has changed a lot since the ’60s?

Wasow: Media are much more fragmented than they were in the 1960s. Everybody has their own unique media feed. That’s going to mean that following the news may be a more siloed experience, where some people are very focused on activist violence while other people will be much more focused on police violence. Depending on which channel you watch, depending on who your friends are on social media, you may be getting very different narratives.

To be clear, that’s not entirely different from the ’60s. Most of the Southern media was pro-segregation, and media outside of the South tolerated Jim Crow and was not interested in the concerns of black people. The idea that there might be two different visions of what’s happening was not so unlike a black press that covered the concerns of black people and a white press that was indifferent or even hostile to those concerns.

SN: What kind of impact could violent protests have on the 2020 election?

Wasow: It’s hard for people to appreciate that there’s a set of voters who are open to concerns about racial equality, but it’s not their top priority. They also are very concerned about order. Think of somebody who might be an Obama-turned-Trump voter. In the ’60s, there were people who supported the Democratic candidate after the passage of the Civil Rights Act [in July 1964]. But they joined the law and order coalition after the period between 1964 and 1968 when there was a lot more violent protest. These voters are influential because they move between parties and because they are in swing states.

On the one hand, some whites today have become much more concerned about racial equality and center their conversation on the underlying injustice against George Floyd. But it might also be possible that more whites move toward the law and order coalition and support Trump. I think it’s too early to tell.

SN: Recently, newspapers have run images of the police taking a knee in solidarity with protestors. How do you think such imagery affects media attention?

Wasow: My model suggests that peaceful events don’t usually get as much press because they are less dramatic. But I had to simplify the model [for this study]. A slightly more complicated version of the model is that violence is just one way of creating drama. Seeing police behave in a counter-stereotypic way is dramatic. And consistent with my theory, nonviolent protest can be effective if it’s able to do something that captures the attention of the media. Violence is one way of creating spectacle, but it’s not the only way.

SN: Critics have said your study puts too much responsibility on protestors. What do you think?

Wasow: What’s important is the causal story I’m trying to tell. A story that says “this is all about white moderates” deprives the protesters of their agency. I want to begin the story with, despite overwhelming odds, this subordinate group at the margins of society has power. And the question is: How can they use that power to advance their interests most effectively?

SN: What is your advice to today’s protesters?

Wasow: There are two kinds of deep narratives in which we talk about protests: a rights-, or justice-, framed story or a crime story. That was true in the ’60s and that’s true now.

In the 1960s, leaders of the civil rights movement were incredibly focused on how to get their message out to the whole country and used protest as a means to gain influence. What they found was that large, peaceful demonstrations without conflict didn’t interest the press. A New York Times reporter covering a march in Mississippi said something along the lines of “no blood, no guts, no glory.” The key idea is that nonviolence was often not enough to generate the kind of attention that was necessary to create a national crisis.

To create a sense of crisis, it became necessary to engage in this very strategic kind of nonviolent protest, which was for protestors to become the object of state violence. Activists picked places like Birmingham and Selma because there were these police chiefs with a hair trigger for violence who would engage in brutal repression in front of cameras. That would shock the conscience of these otherwise indifferent or even hostile actors outside the South. It changed public opinion.

If you’re an activist on the ground thinking about and angry about this injustice against George Floyd and a long history of police violence in this country against African Americans, if you want to put that at the center of the national conversation, it’s important to be thinking about this: Is what we are doing on the ground elevating the justice frame or elevating the riots frame?

from Tips By Frank https://www.sciencenews.org/article/what-1960s-civil-rights-protests-teach-fighting-racism-today

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laraehrlich-blog · 5 years

Photo

Original content owned & copyrighted by Green Global Travel.

As the world nears the climate change tipping point, learning how to reduce carbon footprint is becoming increasingly important on both a personal and collective level.

While politicians wrestle with the question “ is climate change?” and debate the causes of climate change, most people can clearly see the harmful impact these changes are already having on the environment and seek out sensible solutions.

In the meantime, while we each strive to find ways to reduce our carbon footprint, the planet is getting hotter, its storms more severe, its record-breaking floods, devastating hurricanes, and brutally intense heat waves that drain the water supply and change insect life cycles.

Unless you’re a head-in-the-sand climate change denier, the impacts of climate change are pretty obvious. At this point, all you really need to do to see them is watch the weather report or note how global temperatures have risen dramatically in recent years.

Our search for climate change solutions leads us to two important questions: is carbon footprint, and how can you reduce your carbon footprint? Here we’ll help to answer both questions, providing actionable steps ranging from basic lifestyle changes to buying carbon offsets and creating a more READ MORE: Can the Maritime Forest Survive Climate Change?

HOW TO REDUCE CARBON FOOTPRINT (1 WAYS)

is Carbon Footprint?

to Reduce Carbon Footprint With Lifestyle Changes

Ways to Reduce Carbon Footprint at Home

to Use Carbon Offsets & Carbon Credits

youtube

is Carbon Footprint?

Calculating carbon footprint is a way of measuring the mark an event, organization, person, or product leaves on the environment. You do this by examining how much carbon each action releases, and quantifying it in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Some scientists define carbon footprint as “the measure of the total amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions of a defined population, system or activity, considering all relevant sources, sinks, and storage… Calculated as carbon dioxide equivalent using the relevant 100-year global warming potential (GWP100).”

Calculating this number (originally known as ecological footprint) is decidedly complex. For instance, when you

From the READ MORE: Ted Turner on Saving the World With Alternative Energy

to Reduce Carbon Footprint With Lifestyle Changes

“Plant-Based Dishes, Raw Food” by ella.o, licensed under CC BY 2.0

1. Reduce Your Food Carbon Footprint

The way we eat is having a dramatic impact on the climate. One of the worst offenders is mass-produced meat. Not only does keeping animals in factory farms make their lives miserable, but it has a horrendous effect on the environment.

When animals can’t roam freely, they’re unable to eat naturally by grazing. We now grow millions upon millions of acres of animal feed in order to raise these caged animals.

Even worse, we’re using water to grow the feed, water for the animals, gasoline to power CO2-emitting machines that plow and harvest the fields, and more gasoline to move the feed from the field to the factory farm.

Unfortunately, the list of negative environmental issues associated with factory farms grows longer. Forced into ridiculously close quarters, animals are more prone to disease, so they require antibiotics and other medications. Their waste, which carries all those drugs, is concentrated and ultimately READ MORE: A Guide to Ethical Eating When You Travel

2. Reduce Your Waste Footprint

Nearly a third of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States come from resource extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and disposal. This statistic includes packaging. When we lakes

, as well as using incredible amounts of fossil fuels to mine metals and minerals.

With each product we dispose of, we increase the amount of garbage, which inevitably finds its way to landfills that are releasing greenhouse gases. Then the new products we replace them with require packaging and shipping, thus using another collection of resources.

So in order to reduce our CO2 footprint, we must learn to value the things we buy. We have to buy READ MORE: 1 Ways to Reduce Waste

Consignment Shop by Hebi B. from Pixabay

3. Lower Carbon Footprint By Buying Secondhand

Once you learn to reduce waste in your own home, you can also work towards a lower carbon footprint for others.

Many people look at online shopping as an opportunity to get whatever they want whenever they want. But smart shoppers know it’s also a great way to buy things secondhand.

Secondhand products are a sensible choice for our budget as well as our carbon footprints. Not only does buying secondhand mean that we aren’t having to tap the planet for more resources, but we’re also avoiding the need for more packaging. That spells responsible shopping.

Many items are easy to find secondhand, at reduced prices and often higher quality than new products. FreeCycle. They’re also easy to find at thrift stores.

Shopping secondhand is a great way become more CO2 neutral. In times when everything is so easy to get with the click of a button, it’s easy to forget the price the planet pays for convenience. Learn to shop smarter, be patient, and find what you want without getting it brand new.

READ MORE: to Save Money for Travel by Buying Secondhand Gear

Electric Car by MikesPhotos from Pixabay

4. Reduce CO2 Emissions by Driving Smarter

In an ideal world, we’d all have access to reliable, affordable public transportation. But the fact is that most of us in the USA don’t. Unless we live in a large city, odds are we need a car for every adult in the house. That’s just the sad state of our national infrastructure.

Nevertheless, we still can reduce CO2 emissions by traveling more responsibly in and around town. Even if we can’t READ MORE: The World’s Best Road Trips

. Buy Carbon Offsets & Consider Slow Travel

If there’s one thing we understand here at Green Global Travel, it’s the insatiable urge to get out and see the world.

Of course there are countless ways we can air travel has an abysmal carbon footprint: Aviation accounts for 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. One round-trip flight from 4.3 billion people traveled by air in 2018– an increase of 38 million over 2017– which caused the overall demand for jet fuel to rise by 3% at a time when we’re desperately working on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In other words, READ MORE: is Ecotourism? The History/Principles of Responsible Travel

Ways to Reduce Carbon Footprint at Home

Bret & Mary’s Permaculture Garden

1. Grow Your Own Vegetables & Fruit

Growing food in your own home garden is as locally-sourced as it gets. When you plant and nurture your own herbs, fruits, and vegetables, you get affordable, organic, non-home garden has to be some sort of complicated or time-consuming thing.

We can grow fresh herbs on the kitchen windowsill. We can grow salad greens in pots on the patio. We can plant climate-appropriate fruit trees in the backyard. We can cultivate berry hedges along fences and, yes, we can READ MORE: Permaculture Design Principles (12 Steps to a Productive Garden)

Rain Barrel by ramboldheiner from Pixabay

2. Reduce Your Water Footprint

If you remember your high school chemistry, you know that water does not contain carbon. It’s H2O: two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. But getting water to our homes takes a tremendous amount of energy, and dealing with gray- and black-water requires even more.

When we turn on the tap and water flows effortlessly, it’s easy to forget how much effort went into getting it there. Water has to be sourced from somewhere, pumped to somewhere, filtered and sanitized, then moved along to our homes. Hot water on demand requires energy to heat.

Reducing our water footprint has been a common goal for decades. As a child in the ’80s, I was urged to turn off the tap while brushing my teeth. We knew back then what our rampant water waste was doing, and we know even better now that the planet is facing an increasingly urgent water crisis.

The real culprit behind the majority of home water waste isn’t dental cleansing. Toilets account for about a quarter of our household water consumption. Grass lawns are notably as bad, requiring copious irrigation to keep them green and growing. The plethora of appliances we now rely on (dishwashers, washing machines, etc.) account for a lot of waste as well.

Water conservation solutions are totally realistic. It’s a matter of buying low-flow taps and toilets, growing home gardens instead of lawns, choosing water-efficient appliances and using them responsibly, and making use of gray water—not fresh water—for things like irrigation. The trick lies in actually doing it!

READ MORE: Water.org Fights the Global Water Crisis

“Joe’s DIY Solar Panel Install Taken by Joe” by Dave Dugdale is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

3. Reduce Your Energy Footprint with Renewable Energy

As with water, we’ve become accustomed to flicking light switches, plugging in laptops, and having instant power. It’s been this way for so long now that we as a society have forgotten that electricity was a rare luxury less than 100 years ago.

Fossil fuels—coal, disastrous environmental impacts, and even cheaper than fossil fuels, and it’s a great way to do our part in fighting climate change.

The last couple of centuries have been a guiltless grab for power, but the next century is going to find us running out of fossil fuels and having done irreparable damage to the planet. So do us all a favor and switch to renewable energy however you can, as soon as you can.

READ MORE: Al Gore on Climate Change & Renewable Energy

Passive Cooling by Lars Eriksson from Pixabay

4. Use Passive Heating & Passive Cooling

First-world households (even “green” ones) often forego minimizing the amount of energy we need. In fact, heating and cooling our homes accounts for around 0% of the energy we use.

In truth, depending on where you live, the ambient temperature outside is generally comfortable for at least half the year. ever, we’ve become accustomed to controlling our indoor temperatures with extreme precision. Many of us no longer take advantage of pleasant days.

We don’t wear appropriate READ MORE: Arctic Activist Sebastian Copeland on Global Warming

Clothesline by Alina Kuptsova from Pixabay

. Create a More Energy Efficient Home

Many of us already own homes that we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to make them more energy-efficient.

There are many simple solutions for retrofitting homes that were not designed to be environmentally friendly, which can both conserve energy and save us money long-term.

Many of these fixes don’t even require major construction. Adding better insulation around leaky houses will keep the cool in during summer and out during winter. Installing Energy Star appliances (particularly water heaters) can also make a huge difference.

Many little inexpensive changes can compile to make a notable difference as well. Putting up a clothesline instead of using an energy-hogging dryer is good. Switching to energy-efficient LED light bulbs saves a lot of energy and money in the long run, particularly for an entire household.

Of course, we can also add solar panels where appropriate. There are a variety of programs that allow us to feed energy into the grid and get discounts, rather than trying to power the entire house with solar.

READ MORE: to Audit Your Home for Energy Efficiency

to Use Carbon Offsets & Carbon Credits

Farmer’s Market by Alina Kuptsova from Pixabay

1. Use an Ecological Footprint Calculator

The first step towards going carbon neutral is to use an ecological footprint calculator (a.k.a. carbon footprint calculator), which is available for free from numerous sources online.

These calculators take users through a series of questions that help them determine the approximate number of pounds of carbon they use each year. It’s both an eye-opening process as well as a means of getting a firm grasp on where to work on improving your personal efforts.

The questions typically cover several facets of life we’ve discussed here, including your automobiles, air travel, home energy use, waste production, and dietary habits.

Each of your answers helps provide the program with a rough guesstimate of the carbon emissions you create each year. Most of us who live in the industrialized world lead lifestyles that would require several Earths to support them.

Here are 10 different online ecological footprint calculators to try: Global Footprint Network, Terrapass, CarbonFootprint.com, EPA, The Nature Conservancy, Carbon Fund, Ecological Footprint, Earth Day, and READ MORE:

Carbon Offsets Infographic courtesy of Terrapass

2. Buy Carbon Offsets

Once they learn their carbon footprint, some people like to buy carbon offsets to balance out the amount of carbon they put into the atmosphere.

While it’s vitally important to take the aforementioned steps to reduce our individual carbon footprints, buying carbon offsets (or carbon credit, in the case of corporations) is way to ensure you’re truly living a carbon neutral life.

So what is carbon credit? Carbon credit is a consolidated way to make monetary investments to help with the reduction of carbon emissions on a global scale.

Carbon offset programs allow individuals, companies, and governments to purchase offsets that invest in renewable energies, energy efficiency, reforestation, and similar ventures in order to counteract their own carbon emissions.

It’s important to understand that a carbon tax is not the same thing. Carbon taxes are levied on companies that create an abundance of carbon, and are not optional. But, like carbon offsets, they help to thwart climate change by financing READ MORE: Eco-Friendly Initiatives That Will Change the World

3. Do Business with Eco Friendly Companies

Often we aren’t given green options when choosing the companies with which we do business. Large power companies in particular seem to have a monopoly, leaving little to no eco-friendly choices in the areas in which we live.

ever, that isn’t to say that we can’t make the effort. READ MORE: to Choose An Eco Hotel

4. Support Passionate NGOs

Finding NGOs focused on protecting the environment is easy, but narrowing down the ones you’d like to support can be hard.

Along with making changes at home, you can reduce your carbon footprint by supporting these organizations, whether it be with time, money, or promotion.

NGOs are working for the same reductions we’ve discussed here, but with a larger, collective ecological footprint. Supporting that work is almost as important as doing our own part at home.

If those of us who can afford the time and/or money each chose just one NGO to support, these organizations could do their work much faster and with more resources at their disposal. This work affects the entire planet, and time is increasingly of the essenece.

Here’s a list of 10 environmentally-focused NGOs to check out: The Climate Reality Project, Global Footprint Network, EarthShare, Environmental Defense Fund, Carbon Trust, Ceres, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and GreenBlue.

READ MORE: The 20 Best Environmental Charities & Animal Charities

. Live Carbon Neutral

Ultimately, with all of the information we have co;lected here, it’s possible to begin living carbon neutral today.

We can buy carbon credit to offset our less-than-green lifestyles as we transition ourselves into more responsible homes, cars, appliances, and energy production. We can invest in our future, both through direct action and through donations to envioronmental NGOs.

In other words, we already have the power to use less power.

We have the power to start making individual changes now. We have the power to set examples for our out-of-whack governments. We have the power to support companies that care about the planet as much as profit. We have the power (and tools) to hold ourselves accountable.

And it all starts at home, with the way each of uses power! –Jonathon Engels; video by Simpleshow via CC BY 3.0 license

The post to Reduce Carbon Footprint With Carbon Offsets, Carbon Credit, & More appeared first on Green Global Travel.

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dashfire2-blog · 5 years

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Single-Family Housing Upholds the Patriarchy and Hurts Moms

There’s one problem with the old saying, “It takes a village to raise a child”: in modern America, there’s no “village” anymore.

Read almost any current post across the mommy blogosphere and you’ll hear tales of moms who are raising kids isolated from friends and family — and always needing a car to find any community.

Few women specifically cite sprawl and single-family housing in their writing, and there are obviously many culprits for the lack of support modern mothers feel. But the strain of physical separation is often apparent just the same.

Mommy blogger Sara Burrows wrote on her blog Return to Now that she surveyed her stay-at-home mom friends and readers. One in four of them reported having zero interaction with other adults in the typical week. In her essay, notes that “having our closest friends within walking distance would make a huge difference.”

Then, she proposes a radically different living arrangement:

Our dream is to buy land with friends and have a dozen or so tiny houses, yurts, etc. along with a community garden and community kitchen, so our children have someone to play with every time they step outside and we adults have each other to talk to while we work, along with more time to play.

What type of housing is actually best for mothers? Not for children, but for their primary caregivers? For sexist reasons, we never seem to ask.

But in her book, The Design of Childhood, writer Alexandra Lange contemplates what type of living arrangements make raising children easiest. Lange says Burrows’ has stumbled onto something important, in her yurt community ideal.

“Both suburbs and cities needed to be replanned around the idea of connected space,” she told Streetsblog, “for there to be more communal facilities so socialization is built in.”

While it’s not tiny houses or yurts, Radburn, N.J., exemplifies a more mom-friendly model, much like what Burrows describes Lange says. A master-planned community built in 1928, Radburn is a lot like a traditional suburban cul-de-sac turned inside out. Rather than have houses front the street, they front a system of pedestrian paths and parks, with the cars parked along the outside.

In Radburn, New Jersey, houses front parks and paths, not streets. Photo: Themikebot/Flickr/CC

That arrangement gives children much more independence.

“Kids can walk to access everything they need without crossing the street,” Lange said. “The focus of the community is not this blacktop space, but this green lawn.”

Burrows also envisioned a community kitchen, where families could cook together and share meals. Early feminists during the last century pushed for just such a thing, in order to ease the burden for women being solely responsible for meal prep.

The book, The Grand Domestic Revolution, published in 1981, explored feminist challenges to the American domestic sphere. Author Delores Hayden writes that feminists for more than a century have railed against “the physical separation of the household space from public space,” and argued for the “feminist transformation of the home.”

Early feminists like Jane Addams in 1910, for example, helped establish cooperative houses, like the Hull House, which had a public kitchen where women could cook together and their families could share meals. Hayden wrote “a new approach to collective domestic life seemed to be merging” aimed at reducing the burden of domestic work on women by making it a shared activity.

But feminists failed at transforming houses for the benefit of women. And the prevailing form, single family houses — and even apartments each with their own kitchen — help make domestic labor which overwhelmingly falls on women, like cooking, isolating.

But in the 1925 book The Suburban Trend, author Paul Douglas pointed out the way yards and houses multiply private, unpaid domestic duties for families:

More domestic work takes place in the residential suburb than in the city. It moves the woman from the apartment house with its centralized heating plant, its elevator, laundry, incinerator, and janitor service, and with no premises outside of the house, to the single or double house with its independent equipment for each family and its grounds to look after. More work is necessary to make the process of consumption efficient and agreeable and to maintain esthetic standards under these circumstances.

Common spaces like the ones Douglas described in apartment buildings could provide an opportunity for stay-at-home moms to interact and share child supervision responsibilities.

So why don’t we see more communities like Radburn? More shared kitchens like the early feminists hoped?

Lange says, for one, it flies against the capitalist housing model. Building a community like Radburn requires a group of buyers that is committed to a more the cooperative model.

“It means you are giving up some of your private suburban space to the public good,” Lange said. “That hasn’t been the narrative of American family life. The idea has been that you get more of your own space for your money.”

Lange thinks that cultural notion can be hurtful.

“Actually more private space doesn’t make a better life-style,” she said. “Think about what you really want access to and how you want to spend your time.

“It’s more fun for kids to play together on a big lawn than alone on a little lawn.”

A more common version of the Radburn model you might see is a Californian Bungalow Court, where houses are situated around a central communal yard.

California’s Bungalow Courts — that put communal space at the center rather than streets — are a different more family friendly model, some experts say. Photo: MissingMiddleHousing.com

Unfortunately, modern zoning rules make this type of housing illegal practically everywhere in the United States. Many cities outlaw multi-family housing in all but very limited areas. Even in cosmopolitan Seattle, just 31 percent of land is zoned to allow any multi-family housing — apartments or row houses — at all.

Suburbs often have minimum lot sizes and rules about setbacks from the street. All sorts of ideas about the heteronormative ideal family life — and the role of women — have been codified in zoning laws. When they are challenged they are often met with intense resistance. For example, in cities like Portland and Seattle, movements to allow secondary dwelling units — “granny flats” — in single family neighborhoods have heated up in recent years, but they are often bitterly opposed by property owners in single-family neighborhoods.

As the name Granny Flats implies, however, this type of housing could allow for multi-generational family living — which might benefit mothers with young children the most.

Hat tip: Kate Matchett

Source: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/11/02/single-family-housing-upholds-the-patriarchy-and-hurts-moms/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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wasilewskitbfrostzn64insura-blog · 5 years

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dodge ram 5500 insurance

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SOURCES:

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dodge ram 5500 insurance

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sailorrrvenus · 5 years

Text

Three Seconds of Pleasant Geometry

Back in the day, a compelling photograph could be taken in a fraction of a second and considered for years, even decades. The small world of street photography was dominated by photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, who said, “Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.”

But today, while we may spend collectively a great deal of time taking shots, the time we take to consider their significance has been steadily whittled down, creating a vicious cycle of sorts not only in how photography is evaluated these days, but what kind of photography is made available for evaluation.

In the past, work that made it into the public consciousness came about due to the intent of a small, admittedly highly biased pool of individuals who had the opportunity and/or luck to gain access to a few select media. That state of affairs did change with the advent of the Internet, but rather than leveling the playing field as promised, it changed the channels through which this process could occur.

Instead of a select few, mainly straight white men of means in Western countries who were able to forego other employment and afford the expensive equipment necessary at the time, the promise was that anyone with any camera could play, and after the wide adoption of mobile phone cameras, that future seemed to be in sight.

Except that hasn’t quite happened. To be sure, more people have access to photographic tools and the ability to make it widely viewable than ever before. The floodgates opened, but we still can only view so many images in a day. Someone, or something, had to assume the task of filtering the flood.

And someone did; you could say everyone did, in the form of pressing the “Like” or “Fav” button on their phones. But in order to translate those billions of touches into a semblance of hierarchy, something more was needed: algorithms were employed to tell media outlets what kind of photos attracted the attention of the most people.

But the way we have been viewing these photos has resulted in a fundamental change in our tastes.

Viewing photographic prints has traditionally been seen as the best way to appreciate the full impact of a work. Then computers came into common usage, and though the first computer screens were woefully inadequate to the task, due to poor resolution, etc., they did get a great deal better. Looking at photos on a modern high-resolution, color-profiled screen became a joy, like a big, glowing print. As early as the mid-2000s, when people mostly viewed images on large computer screens, sites like Flickr were the place to view photography.

Theoretically, this should have been the pinnacle of photographic viewing experience to this point: large, highly detailed photographs with sumptuous colors and tones available at the touch of a button for our enjoyment. But even though it is possible to carry around a good-sized screen in the form of a tablet these days, that’s not what we’re doing.

Mobile phones have instead become the default media consumption tool; mobile sites like Instagram dominated the scene, trammeling website-based photography. As a result, most photos are viewed on small mobile phone screens in public settings. In this scenario, the details of a photo vanish into insignificance. You look down at your tiny phone screen in your hand, quickly sum up the general composition, the broad strokes of color, the heavy leading lines, and general contrast, because that’s all you can see.

Photo by Santeri Viinamäki and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

It’s like squinting at a print hung on a wall from across the room. There’s no real way to get close; intimacy evaporates. Phone screen resolution has become exquisitely detailed in recent years, but the size is limited to one that can fit comfortably in one hand, and after having exceeded the human eye’s capabilities, resolution becomes meaningless. Likewise, strong, contrasting colors beckon from such screens far more than they do at larger sizes.

What we see is supposedly the general gestalt of an image, but what happens when something that aims to be more than the sum of its parts sacrifices those parts to emphasize the whole? Is it worth the time, effort, and thought to make a photograph today that rewards the unlikely possibility of extended consideration beyond the mere facts of its geometry and colors, removing the end purpose of those factors in favor of their simple existence?

I can’t say which came first, the chicken of small-screen viewing or the egg of shorter attention spans. In any case, the audience of these tiny images is for the most part people with a bit of spare time, perhaps on our way to work or at lunch, spending a few seconds amid our other distractions glancing at photos on our phones, making a quick judgement before perhaps pressing the “Like” button, and then scrolling to the next one.

If we’re deeply impressed (or, more likely, if we want to impress the photographer), we might type a series of exclamation marks, or perhaps even a real comment. I am confident by this point that, if a user with thousands or more followers follows me, it is done, possibly by a bot, in the hope that I will automatically follow them back. The bot will then unfollow me the next day.

This explains why the parts are sacrificed for the benefit of the whole; the “whole” here is not the photography, but rather getting people to pay attention to us. Consideration and appreciation have largely been jettisoned because not only do we not have the time, they, along with their goal, i.e. deciphering the meaning of a photograph, have both become extraneous to the more desirable process of gathering attention. This is not a coincidence, for although one depends on the other, once one is removed, the other will follow.

The inevitable dismantling of the old structures of photographic appreciation left space open to whatever primal impulses drive the public narrative of the day, even if the veneer of the old structures persists in an attempt to retain their aura of legitimacy. Many photography competitions these days feature social media prizes, and even the ones that don’t are inordinately influenced by such factors. Thousands upon thousands of photographers hustle to get their shots onto various popular online platforms, in anticipation of a deluge of likes, but no thought is given to time spent considering the images in question or the results of such theoretical evaluation.

The shots we see are all pleasant to look at… strong leading lines, heavy contrast, enticing colors, perhaps a funny juxtaposition, and… not much else. They’re meant to impress, but only briefly. Once the button is clicked, their job is done.

This state of affairs is not Instagram’s doing, nor Facebook’s. In fact, not much has really changed in the grand scheme of things. Photography has never truly been the mass media phenomenon its use in service of social media made it seem. We are not drowning in a “photographic flood” because “everyone is a photographer now.” It is true that everyone has a camera now. Everyone looks at photos on their phone. Everyone has a shorter attention span. Everyone likes attention. Exposure is our currency.

Is that not the norm, however? And isn’t meaning a subject for each viewer to decide themselves? Photographs, even at their best, have never themselves told stories… rather, they inspire us to conjure up our own realizations of their meaning. But what happens to our thought processes when the majority of the images jostling for our attention have done away with need for meaning beyond well-placed arrays of elements? Like lines of well-separated people in the frame, like funny shadows, like random hands, feet, or heads in isolation from their owners, like pleasing combinations of primary colors, like, scroll, like, scroll.

How many of us even bother zooming in, if the app allows it, to take in the details of a shot, the expressions of the people, the relationships and connections within that reveal a deeper context? And does that even help us appreciate the details as part of the frame seen as a whole?

“Thinking too much” (AKA thinking) is looked down on more and more this era of snap judgement. Amid national and global emergencies real and imagined, cascades of memes rising and falling each second at speeds previously unimaginable, few have time for reasoned analysis, the benefits of which are falling by the wayside in the rush to dominate the lofty peaks of comments sections. Just as social media gave a false impression of vitality to photography, so has it also created a disingenuous impression of what “good” photography is, and the flying buttresses of this construction can be seen in the contests, promotions, Internet listicles, and features of the day.

Is it not possible, even preferable, for photographs to be arranged in a pleasant geometric fashion with lovely colors AND hold deeper levels of meaning? Absolutely, as long as the former is utilized in service of the latter. But are such compositions being noticed under the current state of affairs? And if not, where is the motivation for the majority of photographers to strive for such meaning in their work?

Cartier-Bresson once said, presciently:

The intensive use of photographs by mass media lays ever fresh responsibilities upon the photographer. We have to acknowledge the existence of a chasm between the economic needs of our consumer society and the requirements of those who bear witness to this epoch. This affects us all, particularly the younger generations of photographers. We must take greater care than ever not to allow ourselves to be separated from the real world and from humanity.

Interesting work is still being done, if you look for it. It is often found in the modern equivalent of a closet shelf or desk drawer, languishing on the individual websites nobody visits anymore, or perhaps in a smattering of zines nobody paid much attention to, or a project we didn’t bother with because the shots didn’t take advantage of the incredible color gamut of our iPhone screen.

The good stuff is out there, as it always has been, languishing in the musty back stacks of libraries’ photobook sections or in our grandparents’ old shoeboxes. Occasionally, even now, some of it comes to light.

For about three seconds.

About the author: TC Lin is a photographer based just outside Taipei, Taiwan, at the edge of the mountains. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Lin is an original member of the Burn My Eye photography collective (which can also be found on Instagram). You can find more of Lin’s work on his website, Flickr, and Instagram. This article was also published here.

source https://petapixel.com/2019/03/05/three-seconds-of-pleasant-geometry/

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pauldeckerus · 5 years

Text

Three Seconds of Pleasant Geometry

But the way we have been viewing these photos has resulted in a fundamental change in our tastes.

Photo by Santeri Viinamäki and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Cartier-Bresson once said, presciently:

For about three seconds.

from Photography News https://petapixel.com/2019/03/05/three-seconds-of-pleasant-geometry/

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