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See, I am doing a new thing Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
edited April 2021 in Off-Topic Discussion

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_(video_game)
Ingress (or Ingress Prime) is an augmented reality (AR) mobile game developed and published by Niantic for Android and iOS devices. The game first released on December 14, 2013 for Android devices and then for iOS devices on July 14, 2014.[4] The game is free-to-play, uses a freemium business model, and supports in-app purchases for additional in-game items. The mobile app has been downloaded more than 20 million times worldwide as of November 2018

Ingress uses the mobile device GPS to locate and interact with "portals" which are in proximity to the player's real-world location. The portals are physical points of interest where "human creativity and ingenuity is expressed" often manifesting as public art such as statues and monuments, unique architecture, outdoor murals, historic buildings, local community hubs and other displays of human achievement.[5] The game uses the portals as elements of a science fiction backstory along with a continuous open narrative provided through various forms of media
Post edited by KingNaid on
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  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875

    An unknown, transdimensional force called Exotic Matter (XM) was discovered as a byproduct of the Higgs boson research (Large Hadron Collider) by a team of scientists at CERN in Switzerland.[8][9] This substance has been associated with the Shapers, a mysterious phenomenon or alien race.[10]

    Within the game, human reactions to this discovery fall into two factions known as the Enlightened and the Resistance. The Enlightened faction embrace the powers of XM to transcend mankind and believe their mission is to assist in the enlightenment of mankind by harnessing this energy. The Resistance faction see XM as a potential threat to humanity and believe their mission is to defend the human race by resisting the effects of those seeking to control others with XM.[9] These two factions are the opposing "sides" or "teams" in the game: the Resistance is represented in the game by the color blue and the Enlightened by green. Both teams have naturally tended to balance each other out in population.

    A player using their mobile device (or "scanner") is presented with a map representing the surrounding area. The map has a black background and is completely unmarked, except for buildings and roads which are outlined in grey but not labeled, and bodies of water. These geographical features are supplied by OpenStreetMap and formerly Google Maps. Visible on the map are portals, Exotic Matter, links, and control fields. Distances from the player to in-game locations are displayed in metric units.

  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
    Portals are typically associated with buildings and landmarks of historic or architectural significance — such as sculpturesmurals, and other public artlibrariespost officesmemorialsplaces of worshippublic transit hubsparks, and other recreational or tourist spaces, or with business locations.[18] Players may submit requests for the creation of new portals if they meet the level requirements.[19] It was thought upon at the game's launch that this would allow Google to generate data for its location-based services.[20] As of July 2016, 15 million portals had been submitted by the Ingress community, and five million of those had been included in the game.[21] At the time of Ingress Prime's release in November 2018, Niantic stated that "agents in more than 200+ countries have participated in more than 2,000 real-world events and visited more than 1.2 billion Portals".
  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875

  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
    edited April 2021
    https://mluce.ro/articles/the-yokai-roots-of-pokemon/#:~:text=To define yōkai is like,inanimate objects come to life

    m probably in a minority of Pokémon GO! players, in that I never watched the anime, or played the card game or the many video games while growing up. Only when the Niantic game came out in the summer of 2016 did I have my first real encounter with the world and mythology first created by a Tokyo game developer named Satoshi Tajiri in 1995.

    But it wasn’t my first encounter with a certain breed of ghosts and monsters unlike any found elsewhere in the world: yōkai, the supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore. 

    To define yōkai is like trying to reach out and grasp one: a slippery, ephemeral experience. They can be anything from ghosts to ogres, animal tricksters and shapeshifters, monsters to transformed humans, deities to diseases, even inanimate objects come to life. The folklore of yōkai is ancient, found in folktales and literature, in pop culture and old scrolls and woodblock prints. 

  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
    edited April 2021
    https://www.energy.gov/articles/particle-physics-you#:~:text=The particles we're made,that are essential for life.

    Fourteen billion years ago, when the hot, dense speck that was our universe quickly expanded, all of the matter and antimatter that existed should have annihilated and left us nothing but energy. And yet, a small amount of matter survived.

    We ended up with a world filled with particles. And not just any particles--particles whose masses and charges were just precise enough to allow human life. Here are a few facts about the particle physics of you that will get your electrons jumping.

    About 99 percent of your body is made up of atoms of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. You also contain much smaller amounts of the other elements that are essential for life.

    While most of the cells in your body regenerate every seven to 15 years, many of the particles that make up those cells have actually existed for millions of millennia. The hydrogen atoms in you were produced in the big bang, and the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms were made in burning stars. The very heavy elements in you were made in exploding stars.

    The size of an atom is governed by the average location of its electrons. Nuclei are around 100,000 times smaller than the atoms they’re housed in. If the nucleus were the size of a peanut, the atom would be about the size of a baseball stadium. If we lost all the dead space inside our atoms, we would each be able to fit into a particle of lead dust, and the entire human race would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.

    As you might guess, these spaced-out particles make up only a tiny portion of your mass. The protons and neutrons inside of an atom’s nucleus are each made up of three quarks. The mass of the quarks, which comes from their interaction with the Higgs field, accounts for just a few percent of the mass of a proton or neutron. Gluons, carriers of the strong nuclear force that holds these quarks together, are completely massless. 

    If your mass doesn’t come from the masses of these particles, where does it come from? Energy. Scientists believe that almost all of your body’s mass comes from the kinetic energy of the quarks and the binding energy of the gluons.

  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875

    The radioactivity born inside your body is only a fraction of the radiation you naturally (and harmlessly) come in contact with on an everyday basis. The average American receives a radiation dose of about 620 millirem every year. The food you eat, the house you live in and the rocks and soil you walk on all expose you to low levels of radioactivity. Just eating a Brazil nut or going to the dentist can up your radiation dose level by a few millirem. Smoking cigarettes can increase it up to 16,000 millirem. 

    Cosmic rays, high-energy radiation from outer space, constantly smack into our atmosphere. There, they collide with other nuclei and produce mesons, many of which decay into particles such as muons and neutrinos. All of these shower down on the surface of the Earth and pass through you at a rate of about 10 per second. They add about 27 millirem to your yearly dose of radiation. These cosmic particles can sometimes disrupt our genetics, causing subtle mutations, and may be a contributing factor in evolution. 

    In addition to bombarding us with photons that dictate the way we see the world around us, our sun also releases an onslaught of particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos are constant visitors in your body, zipping through at a rate of nearly 100 trillion every second. Aside from the sun, neutrinos stream out from other sources, including nuclear reactions in other stars and on our own planet. 

    Many neutrinos have been around since the first few seconds of the early universe, outdating even your own atoms. But these particles are so weakly interacting that they pass right through you, leaving no sign of their visit. 

    You are also likely facing a constant shower of particles of dark matter. Dark matter doesn’t emit, reflect or absorb light, making it quite hard to detect, yet scientists think it makes up about 80 percent of the matter in the universe. 

    Looking at the density of dark matter throughout the universe, scientists calculate that hundreds of thousands of these particles might be passing through you every second, colliding with your atoms about once a minute. But dark matter doesn’t interact very strongly with the matter you’re made of, so they are unlikely to have any noticeable effects on your body.

    The next time you’re wondering how particle physics applies to your life, just take a look inside yourself

  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875


  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875

  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
    https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Archaic_Greece_(English).jpg#mw-jump-to-license

    Map of "The archaic period in Greece (750 BC – 480 BC)"
    Date28 October 2007
    Source

    Own work data from

    AuthorUser:Megistias
  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Willows_(story)

    Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the River Danube. Throughout the story, Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment —river, sun, wind— with powerful and ultimately threatening characteristics. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows, which "moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible."

    Shortly after landing their canoe for the evening on a sandy island near Bratislava in the Dunajské luhy Protected Landscape Area of Austria-Hungary,[2] the narrator reflects on the river's potency, human qualities, and his own will:

    Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage.

    Blackwood also specifically characterizes the silvery, windblown willows as sinister:

    And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.

  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875

    At one point, the two men see a traveler in his "flat-bottomed boat". However, the man appears to be warning them and ultimately crosses himself before hurtling forward on the river, out of sight. During the night, mysterious forces emerge from within the forest, including dark shapes which seem to trace the narrator's consciousness, tapping sounds outside their tent, shifting gong-like noises, bizarre shadows, and the appearance that the willows have changed location. In the morning, the two realize that one of their paddles is missing, a slit in the canoe needs repair, and some of their food has disappeared. A hint of distrust arises between them. The howling wind dies down on the second day, and a humming calm ensues. During the second night, the second man, the Swede, attempts to hurl himself into the river as a "sacrifice". However, he is saved by the narrator. The next morning, the Swede claims that the mysterious forces have found another sacrifice which may save them. They discover the corpse of a peasant lodged in roots near the shore. When they touch the body, a flurry of living presence seems to rise from it and disappear into the sky. Later, they see the body is pockmarked with funnel shapes similar to the ones viewed across the island's coastline during their experience. These are "Their awful mark!" the Swede says. The body is swept away, resembling an "otter" they thought they had seen the previous day, and the story ends.

    The precise nature of the mysterious entities in "The Willows" is unclear, and they appear at times malevolent or treacherous, while at times simply mystical and almost divine: "a new order of experience, and in the true sense of the word unearthly," and a world "where great things go on unceasingly...vast purposes...that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with mere expressions of the soul." These forces are often contrasted with the natural beauty of the area, itself a vigorous dynamic. Overall, the story suggests that the landscape is actually an intersection, a point of contact with a "fourth dimension" — "on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows."

  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algernon_Blackwood

    Throughout his adult life, he was an occasional essayist for periodicals. In his late thirties, he moved back to England and started to write stories of the supernatural. He was successful, writing at least ten original collections of short stories and later telling them on radio and television. He also wrote 14 novels, several children's books and a number of plays, most of which were produced, but not published. He was an avid lover of nature and the outdoors, as many of his stories reflect. To satisfy his interest in the supernatural, he joined The Ghost Club. He never married; according to his friends he was a loner, but also cheerful company.[8]

    Jack Sullivan stated that "Blackwood's life parallels his work more neatly than perhaps that of any other ghost story writer. Like his lonely but fundamentally optimistic protagonists, he was a combination of mystic and outdoorsman; when he wasn't steeping himself in occultism, including Rosicrucianism, or Buddhism he was likely to be skiing or mountain climbing."[7] Blackwood was a member of one of the factions of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,[9] as was his contemporary Arthur Machen.[10] Cabalistic themes influence his novel The Human Chord.

  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875

    His two best-known stories are probably "The Willows" and "The Wendigo". He would also often write stories for newspapers at short notice, with the result that he was unsure exactly how many short stories he had written and there is no sure total. Though Blackwood wrote a number of horror stories, his most typical work seeks less to frighten than to induce a sense of awe. Good examples are the novels The Centaur, which reaches a climax with a traveller's sight of a herd of the mythical creatures; and Julius LeVallon and its sequel The Bright Messenger, which deal with reincarnation and the possibility of a new, mystical evolution of human consciousness. In correspondence with Peter Penzoldt, Blackwood wrote,[12]

    My fundamental interest, I suppose, is signs and proofs of other powers that lie hidden in us all; the extension, in other words, of human faculty. So many of my stories, therefore, deal with extension of consciousness; speculative and imaginative treatment of possibilities outside our normal range of consciousness.... Also, all that happens in our universe is natural; under Law; but an extension of our so limited normal consciousness can reveal new, extra-ordinary powers etc., and the word "supernatural" seems the best word for treating these in fiction. I believe it possible for our consciousness to change and grow, and that with this change we may become aware of a new universe. A "change" in consciousness, in its type, I mean, is something more than a mere extension of what we already possess and know.

    Blackwood wrote an autobiography of his early years, Episodes Before Thirty (1923), and there is a biography, Starlight Man, by Mike Ashley (ISBN 0-7867-0928-6).

    Blackwood died after several strokes. Officially his death on 10 December 1951 was from cerebral thrombosis, with arteriosclerosis as a contributing factor. He was cremated at Golders Green crematorium. A few weeks later his nephew took his ashes to Saanenmöser Pass in the Swiss Alps, and scattered them in the mountains that he had loved for more than forty years.

  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
    edited April 2021
    "Blackwood died after several strokes. Officially his death on 10 December 1951 was from cerebral thrombosis, with arteriosclerosis as a contributing factor"

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrombus
    thrombus, colloquially called a blood clot, is the final product of the blood coagulation step in hemostasis. There are two components to a thrombus: aggregated platelets and red blood cells that form a plug, and a mesh of cross-linked fibrin protein. The substance making up a thrombus is sometimes called cruor. A thrombus is a healthy response to injury intended to prevent bleeding

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arteriosclerosis
    Arteriosclerosis is the thickening, hardening, and loss of elasticity of the walls of arteries.[3] This process gradually restricts the blood flow to one's organs and tissues and can lead to severe health risks brought

    The signs and symptoms of arteriosclerosis may include sudden weakness, facial or lower limb numbness, confusion, difficulty understanding speech, and problems seeing
  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
    "Blackwood died after several strokes."
    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stroke

    Definition of stroke

     (Entry 1 of 3)

    transitive verb

    1: to rub gently in one directionalso : CARESS
    2: to flatter or pay attention to in a manner designed to reassure or persuade

    Definition of stroke (Entry 2 of 3)

    1: the act of strikingespecially : a blow with a weapon or implement
    2: a single unbroken movementespecially : one of a series of repeated or to-and-fro movements
    3a: a controlled swing intended to hit a ball or shuttlecockalso : a striking of the ball
    b: such a stroke charged to a player as a unit of scoring in golf
    4a: a sudden action or process producing an impacta stroke of lightning
    b: an unexpected resulta stroke of luckthe idea was a stroke of inspirationa master stroke of diplomacy
    5: sudden impairment or loss of consciousness, sensation, and voluntary motion that is caused by rupture or obstruction (as by a clot) of a blood vessel supplying the brain, and is accompanied by permanent damage of brain tissue

    NOTE: Symptoms of stroke include numbness or weakness on one side of the body or face, confusion, impaired speech or vision, loss of coordination or balance, trouble walking, or severe headache.

  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/caress

    SINCE 1828

    To save this word, you'll need to log in.

    ca·​ress | \ kə-ˈres  \
    caressed; caressing; caresses

    Definition of caress

     (Entry 1 of 2)

    transitive verb

    1: to treat with tokens of fondness, affection, or kindness : CHERISHthe regiment was fed and caressed at station after station— Stephen Crane
    2a: to touch or stroke lightly in a loving or endearing mannerShe caressed the baby's cheek.
    b: to touch or affect as if with a caressechoes that caress the ear

    caress

     noun

    Definition of caress (Entry 2 of 2)

    1: an act or expression of kindness or affection : ENDEARMENTwhen the gifts and caresses of mankind shall recompense the toils of study— Samuel Johnson
    2a: a light stroking, rubbing, or pattinga gentle caress of her shoulder
    b: KISSShe gave him a parting caress.



  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lee
    Lee died on July 20, 1973, at the age of 32. There was no visible external injury; however, according to autopsy reports, Lee's brain had swollen considerably. The autopsy found Equagesic in his system. When the doctors announced Lee's death, it was officially ruled a "death by misadventure"
  • KingNaidKingNaid Member UncommonPosts: 1,875
    Play "Simple & Clean"
    on Amazon Music Unlimited (ad)
    "Simple & Clean"
    (from "Kingdom Hearts" soundtrack)

    When you walk away
    You don't hear me say,
    "Please, oh baby, don't go."
    Simple and clean is the way that you're making me feel tonight
    It's hard to let it go

    You're giving me too many things
    Lately, you're all I need.
    You smiled at me and said,

    "Don't get me wrong, I love you,
    But does that mean I have to meet your father?"
    When we are older you'll understand
    What I meant when I said,
    "No, I don't think life is quite that simple."

    When you walk away
    You don't hear me say,
    "Please, oh baby, don't go."
    Simple and clean is the way that you're making me feel tonight
    It's hard to let it go

    So simple and clean

    The daily things
    (like this and that and what is what)
    That keep us all busy are confusing me
    That's when you came to me and said,

    "Wish I could prove I love you,
    But does that mean I have to walk on water?"
    When we are older you'll understand
    It's enough when I say so
    And maybe some things are that simple

    When you walk away
    You don't hear me say,
    "Please, oh baby, don't go."
    Simple and clean is the way that you're making me feel tonight
    It's hard to let it go

    Hold me
    Whatever lies beyond this morning
    Is a little later on
    Regardless of warnings the future doesn't scare me at all
    Nothing's like before

    When you walk away
    You don't hear me say,
    "Please, oh baby, don't go."
    Simple and clean is the way that you're making me feel tonight
    It's hard to let it go

    Hold me
    Whatever lies beyond this morning
    Is a little later on
    Regardless of warnings the future doesn't scare me at all
    Nothing's like before

    Hold me
    Whatever lies beyond this morning
    Is a little later on
    Regardless of warnings the future doesn't scare me at all
    Nothing's like before
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