p> 7. Press Play. Minecraft will install and launch - depending on your headset mannequin, it might take up to 1-three minutes for the three loading dots to disappear and the game to start out. You may press the button once more to return to the unique view. Edit: To see if you are impacted, you should use our computerized scanning software. There are several rare ones from Avengers to Mario which you could strive searching for. However an experienced participant can work by way of all the possibilities of the sport in about 10 hours. Q. Do bedrock skins work on Java? You've got a 20-minute day (10 minutes of daylight, 10 of darkness) during which it is best to work feverishly to find meals and build a shelter to protect yourself from the spiders, witches, creepers, and endermen (two-legged creatures who're peaceful until you look them in the eye) that could steal your possessions or result in your demise in the course of the night time.

 Mathematical ideas which are able to be modelled with the sport to be used in the classroom. This replace created a constant experience across all supported platforms, including the ability to make use of cheats. Since 2013, the small Polycraft crew of devoted volunteer school and students has added over 4000 items, together with 118 polymers, 325 compounds, 26 distinctive inventories (e.g., distillation column, steam cracker, and injection molder), and 84 custom objects (comparable to jetpacks, ham radios, and operating sneakers), together with most metals within the periodic table. And, if Walter Voit and his Polycraft World staff have something to say about it, you will be taught so much about materials science along the best way. “Using the compelling underlying game mechanism of Minecraft actually helps to teach people about supplies science. Because of recent mods, we don’t at all times acknowledge all the things we see, and HWYLA helps us determine new mods. Daily, newer and more thrilling mods are being created and shared with the Minecraft group.

 3. https://squareblogs.net/duckharp10/three-questions-its-worthwhile-to-ask-about-minecraft-server Extract the zip files and replica the web.kdt.pojavlaunch.debug folder (in its entirety) to the same location (in the Android/data folder, where different purposes are saved) on your Quest filesystem utilizing the SideQuest? file browser. You may just review every little thing on the mini-map or on an external internet browser. You can also try signing out and then signing in back to your Microsoft Retailer account to fix the error. In case the error is triggered attributable to some short-term issues, it can be resolved by a easy restart. Q. Where can I get Minecraft skins from? First we'll explain precisely the place to go to put in them plus easy methods to get them working, then we'll depart you with our prime 10 picks for the best Minecraft PE mods! Download the JAR files for each, and transfer them to the mods folder on your Quest filesystem (Android/knowledge/net.kdt.pojavlaunch.debug/information/.minecraft/mods). 4. Go to unknown sources in your Quest and open PojavLauncher?.

 Whenever you open the launcher on Quest, you’ll be prompted to log in to a Mojang or Microsoft account that owns the Java Edition. A series of intricately nicely-constructed missions award you with rewards that further open your alternatives. Tomorrow you would possibly suppose about discovering some iron ore and building a furnace so you may make a sword and armor to defend yourself against these monsters. Minecraft enables you to discover a virtual world, mine iron ore, construct a furnace to melt the ore to make weapons, shovels, and pickaxes, amongst many other activities. Minecraft incorporates just over 600 distinctive blocks and gadgets resembling wood, rock, iron ore, and diamonds. Splashing the potion will make you and any surrounding mobs invisible, however is not going to have an effect on your armor or any objects you happen to be carrying. Beginning with Minecraft also gave the staff the fundamental mechanism for constructing new, helpful items and storing them in a player’s stock.

Last-modified: 2022-03-20 (日) 17:35:47 (200d)


SmartPort #7
SmartPort Subtype Codes

Written by Matt Deatherage (November 1988)

This Technical Note clarifies information about SmartPort subtype codes.

Following is a definition of the SmartPort subtype code as given in the Apple IIGS Firmware Reference:

|     |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |
|     |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |
   |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |
   |     |     |     |_____|_____|_____|_____|___ Reserved
   |     |     |_________________________________ 0 = Removable Media
   |     |_______________________________________ 1 = Supports disk-switched
   |                                                  errors
   |_____________________________________________ 1 = Supports Extended

                      Figure 1 - SmartPort Subtype Byte

Note that the value for subtype is defined for certain characteristics of the device; it is not assigned to the device as with Smartport device types (see SmartPort Technical Note #4, SmartPort Device Types for a complete list).

Attempting to distinguish different kinds of the same device by the subtype field can be confusing. For example, the Apple IIc Plus has an internal 3.5" disk drive. This drive does not support disk-switched errors nor does it support Extended SmartPort, and it has removable media. This combination of features gives it a subtype definition of $00. However, this is the same subtype returned for a UniDisk 3.5. Any program which finds type $01 (3.5" Disk) and subtype $00 and assumes the drive is a UniDisk 3.5 will be misled by any other 3.5" drive matching the characteristics of the UniDisk 3.5.

Some Apple technical manuals state that the subtype byte may be used for identification purposes, but this cannot be supported if more than one variety of a specific device has the same characteristics and subtype.

To determine if a particular device type is the subtype you want, you may examine the name returned in the Device Information Block (DIB) from a STATUS call with statcode = 3. For 3.5" drives, however, this is not too helpful (both a UniDisk 3.5 and an Apple 3.5 Drive return DISK 3.5).

Because the subtype can not conclusively identify different flavors of 3.5" drives (and perhaps other individual device types), applications must look for errors on device specific calls and respond appropriately. Typical errors returned from making a device-specific call to the wrong device are $21 (BADCTL) and $22 (BADCTLPARM), although these are not the only ones. Also note that error codes in the range $20 - $2F are duplicated as $60 - $6F, the difference being that codes in the latter range are returned if the error was a soft error -- a non-fatal error returned when the operation is completed successfully but an abnormal condition is detected.

The Reserved fields in the SmartPort subtype byte are reserved for future expansion. Present peripherals must have them set to zero so that they will not appear to support future features which are not presently defined. For this reason, programs checking the status of bits in the subtype byte should do so on a bit-by-bit basis only. For example, if you need to know if a device supports Extended Smartport, mask off all bits except bit 7 in the subtype byte before doing any comparisons. Blindly comparing to existing common subtype values (like $00 and $C0) will cause comparisons to fail when future bits in the subtype byte are defined.

Further Reference

This and all of the other Apple II Technical Notes have been converted to HTML by Aaron Heiss as a public service to the Apple II community, with permission by Apple Computer, Inc. Any and all trademarks, registered and otherwise, are properties of their owners.


Series of 102 drawings / rubbings, charcoal and graphite on Arches Johannot paper, 35,5 x 28 cm (each)

Since 2019, in the course of his urban wanderings, Batniji has been making rubbings of the footprints of unknown passers-by directly from the ground. By rubbing his pencil over the paper, he meticulously picks up the inverted trace of the soles of their shoes incrusted in the asphalt of the pavements. In the texture of the dark grey, a form appears.

Traces of a fleeting presence, images preserved from disappearance, these drawings are captures, acts of witness located between appearance and disappearance. They reveal a movement, a person walking, a life that came this way.


Dora is an AI engineer, with a focus on AI Ethics, at Sony AI. She began her work at Sony AI as a research intern on the AI Ethics team, where she worked on using synthetic methods to balance datasets. Prior to joining Sony AI, Dora received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Materials Science & Engineering (MSE), with a focus on Computer Science, at Princeton University. Her research interests span computer vision and machine learning fairness as well as human-computer interaction.

Shape the Future of AI with Sony AI

to shape the future of AI.


The importance of free speech and the danger of censorship

“Official-government-sponsored-covid-and-covid-vaccine-plus-no-early-treatment-science” was pure shit and proves censorship does nothing good for our society and never will. The ignorant and tragic dominance of covid shit pseudoscience from a historical and philosophical perspective should end forevermore the argument that the public cannot deal with real information or that they have to be led by their betters or that what they see and hear must be curated. Voices that support any of that nonsense are not your friends and do not have your good in mind. The lesson from covid is UNIVERSAL for all subjects: censorship is bad and is always going to be bad. Hail the First Amendment in All Its Glory & Wisdom.

I cite covid shit science because the contrast is so glaring and immediate and felt deeply by all of us. The universality of the lessons we learned from covid censorship should never be forgotten but etched in stone. Our power and capacity to speak and listen freely must never be abridged. ABN

Consciousness as reality itself

In Buddhism the idea that consciousness is reality and reality is conscious is called “mind only” or Yogachara.

David Ray Griffin, a process theologian, has come to similar conclusions—that reality is fundamentally conscious.

As has Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at UC Irvine.

Hoffman came at this subject from a mathematical angle, but arrived at a similar conclusion to Yogachara Buddhism. Hoffman says:

As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. (The Case Against Reality)

I tend to reach similar conclusions when I think about everything in terms of signals.

The advantage of thinking in terms of signals is we get a good picture of “reality” without needing to say what is real beyond the signal itself.

This kind of thinking is helpful for metaphysics but it is also extremely practical when it comes to human psychology.

Rather than posit personality types and what goes wrong or right with them, we analyze how people send and receive signals instead.

In thinking along these lines, I have come to the conclusion that most psychology as most people understand it uses “arms-length” language, the language of meso and macro signals rather than the much more precise language of the micro signals that actually comprise our shared “realities.”

The difference can be illustrated in this way: Rather than explain your most recent signal (sent or received) in terms of personality, explain it by accessing the micro-signals of short-term memory to find its true antecedents.

If you do this again and again by using a game such as FIML, you will probably come to conclusions similar to the above—that there is no deeper substance to psychological reality than your consciousness of it.

first posted 08/05/17

Perdocent – Opposite of the Autodidact

The perdocent exploits the claim of not having been taught how to do something, as a means of not understanding, of taking control, or to avoid doing any actual work. As a management professional, no matter their appeal to credential, never let a perdocent take control. Always seek to maintain familiarity with the perdocent’s tactics of ego, laziness, and cleverly concealed dishonesty.

Covid has proved conclusively that uncontrolled information triumphs over controlled information

Controlled covid information is and was information promoted by the US government, US mainstream media, mainstream science, mainstream academia, Big Pharma, most state governments, school systems, etc.

Uncontrolled covid information is and was all the information that disagreed with the above and sometimes agreed with the above.

Everyone—all of us—had skin in the game. The debate between controlled and uncontrolled information has been waging since early 2020 and continues today.

It is very important and significant that today we can say that uncontrolled information won the debate conclusively. We beat the crap out of controlled information. The nudgers lost very badly.

I bring this up and emphasize it because it is important that we all reflect on this and seal it in our minds. Uncontrolled—anarchic—information is the path to truth, justice, and the American way. We winnowed out the bullshit, considered many ideas that did not pan out, were afraid of no thoughts whatever, yet rarely if ever supported or promoted anything that was not sound information.

Covid is the single best example in our lifetimes of the power and brilliance of the free exchange of uncensored information. Compared to the controlled and restricted information demanded by the parties described in paragraph one above, uncensored information has won the debate decisively and been on the winning side for the duration of the argument.

I believe this very large example involving the entire world can serve as an example for all kinds of information and all kinds of debates.

Clearly, we must work very hard to ensure free speech, free information, no censorship, no governmental control of information. There is no single issue that is more important and covid has proved it. ABN

A perfect moral, dramatic, pragmatic, linguistic, psychological, spiritual, and emotional act…

…is a proper FIML query.

It is perfect (in no special order) morally because it seeks truth and goodness between two people; dramatically because it uses our innate dramatic instinct to question our own deep sense of live drama in the moment; pragmatically because it is eminently practical; linguistically because it is an extremely good use of language, possibly the best use; psychologically because it benefits both the self and other in profound ways while also revealing deep behavioral patterns painlessly; spiritually because it stimulates the spirit and spiritual metacognition, bringing both partners closer to their ideals; and emotionally because it forestalls false negative and destructive emotional responses, replacing them with joyful understanding. FIML is a pursuit of truth shared by two people. It is a technique, a method, that can be used in any religion, philosophy, world-view, or lifestyle. In the beginning, FIML does not even depend on scrupulous truthfulness because the practice itself will reveal the value of truthfulness, which ultimately will require almost no effort. Truthfulness is an instinct or inkling of deepest consciousness. Once seen, it calls forth itself.

first posted NOVEMBER 5, 2021

Statement on the Ethical Principles of Public Health, on behalf of Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom, Washington D.C., August 23, 2022

During the SARS2 coronavirus pandemic, fundamental principles of public health were ignored, and trust in public health has been damaged. As experts in public health, medical science, ethics, and health policy, we propose the following ten principles to guide public health officials and scientists, in order to ensure the credibility of public health recommendations and to help restore public trust.

Ethical Principles of Public Health

1.   All public health advice should consider the impact on overall health, rather than solely be concerned with a single disease. It should always consider both benefits and harms from public health measures and weigh short-term gains against long-term harms.

2.   Public health is about everyone. Any public health policy must first and foremost protect society’s most vulnerable, including children, low-income families, persons with disabilities and the elderly. It should never shift the burden of disease from the affluent to the less affluent.

3.   Public health advice should be adapted to the needs of each population, within cultural, religious, geographic, and other contexts.

4.   Public health is about comparative risk evaluations, risk reduction, and reducing uncertainties using the best available evidence, since risk usually cannot be entirely eliminated.

5.   Public health requires public trust. Public health recommendations should present facts as the basis for guidance, and never employ fear or shame to sway or manipulate the public.

6.   Medical interventions should not be forced or coerced upon a population, but rather should be voluntary and based on informed consent.  Public health officials are advisors, not rule setters, and provide information and resources for individuals to make informed decisions.

7.   Public health authorities must be honest and transparent, both with what is known and what is not known. Advice should be evidence-based and explained by data, and authorities must acknowledge errors or changes in advice as soon as they are made aware of them.

8.   Public health scientists and practitioners should avoid conflicts-of-interest, and any unavoidable conflicts-of-interest must be clearly stated.

9.   In public health, open civilized debate is profoundly important. It is unacceptable for public health professionals to censor, silence or intimidate members of the public or other public health scientists or practitioners.

10. It is critical for public health scientists and practitioners to always listen to the public, who are living the public health consequences of public health decisions, and to adapt appropriately.

link to original with signee names and more

[Red emphases mine. The above is the complete statement with secondary info available at the above link. ABN]

Anarchic information has won the debate: The people can handle uncontrolled information and triumph

One beautiful thing about our time is we can clearly see that anarchic information—information that is not controlled—is good and better than controlled information. For ages there has been a philosophical fear that if information is not controlled (“curated” in current parlance), people will be misled and chaos will ensue. The opposite has clearly happened with all things covid. It has been the anarchic information streams that have consistently provided the best information and consistently weeded out bad information. Information coming from blogs like this one, Rumble, Bitchute, Odysee, Substack, TruthSocial, Telegram, and the edges of Twitter has proved to be better by far than information coming from the CDC, NIH, WH, Congress, NYT, WaPo, MSNDC, etc. “Mainstream information” has been so bad during covid, it has even swallowed up science, scientific debate, normal clinical medical practice, and more. Contrast Vlaardingerbroek with Bourla, or Peter McCullough with Tony Fauci, the Ethical Skeptic with the Bill Gates. During covid, vast streams of uncontrolled, anarchic information have very beautifully won possibly for all time the argument that “the masses” cannot handle raw information, that it must be controlled. It is clearer today than ever in history that controlling information is synonymous with the people in power controlling their own power and nothing more. The example of covid can legitimately be extrapolated to all other public issues. ABN

Animism (from Latinanima, ‘breathspiritlife‘)[1][2] is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence.[3][4][5][6] Potentially, animism perceives all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork, and perhaps even words—as animated and alive. Animism is used in the anthropology of religion, as a term for the belief system of many Indigenous peoples,[7] especially in contrast to the relatively more recent development of organised religions.[8] Animism focuses on the metaphysical universe, with specific focus on the concept of the immaterial soul.[9]

Easy and hard problems in Western civilization and how to solve them

First the easy ones:

  1. Global warming. The earth is warming somewhat, CO2 may be involved, so might other factors like deep ocean warming. Solution for CO2 is build many more nuclear reactors.
  2. Immigration. Should be much less.
  3. Transgender surgeries for children should be banned. Trans drugs for children probably should be banned. I am not sure even adults should be allowed trans surgeries.
  4. Teaching sex stuff to young children; having drag queens perform in schools should be banned. Teachers who engage in this should be fired and lose licenses if offense is egregious.
  5. Critical race theory in K-12 schools either practiced or taught should be banned, teachers fired as above.
  6. Oil and gas in USA—drill as much as needed until nuclear can easily take over.

Most people can more or less agree on the above, even stated as bluntly as that. These and other simple issues are purposely made complex or stated as ideals to confuse people so advocates/activists can rake in the money.

The hard problems:

  1. General religious agreement. The West is not going to be saved by Christianity. The West should be open to all good religions, including atheism.
  2. General political agreement. The West has a long tradition of individualism and law-based social controls. This is an excellent core for Western civilization.

These two hard problems are difficult because they involve highest level beliefs/values. My proposal for these is put them together. The result will be a Western “religion” or “culture” that accepts individual rights in a law based social system that respects all religions that can accept this synthesis.

Humanity must learn to think in terms of complex systems, not ‘define problem, calculate answer’ zombies any longer

I highly recommend his linked essay: The Climate Change Alternative We Ignore (to Our Peril). The many problems in government reasoning during covid—including gross overemphasis on computer models—should be enough for discerning minds to see that much of the “reasoning” supporting climate change policy is every bit as bad. ABN


Buchis on a Boat

I’ve just completed a Marine Weather course, which I found very interesting and I’d definitely recommend it even if you aren’t dependent on the wind to get where you’re going. In addition to teaching you how to read Weather Maps, you also learn: weather and wave predictions, passage planning and storm avoidance all based on various indicators such as cloud formations and barometric pressure and air temperature trends, wind direction and shifts etc etc.

If you are interested in this subject that affects everyone read on. I’ve copied my notes below for future generations of brain cells.

The wind velocity is often described with the Beaufort scale and  is a function of many factors. There are belts of High (areas of high pressure) and Low (areas of low pressure) pressure systems that circle the globe. The Highs are roughly located at the poles and +/- 30 to 40° latitude (“Horse Latitudes”)…

Ver o post original 1.483 mais palavras


Back to blog homepage

IBC Preview [2022]: 5 Minutes with… Sophie Light-Wilkinson

All roads lead to IBC, in our latest blog series, we spent 5 minutes with some of the Bitmovin team to get their thoughts on why IBC is important and tips enjoying the show.

Say hello to Sophie Light-Wilkinson, our SVP Marketing who oversees Bitmovin’s marketing department with the primary purpose of maximizing brand awareness. She is an experienced marketer who has worked in start-ups through IPO, large corporations, and agencies for both B2C and B2B marketing.

Discover her tips for maximizing ROI on events and why she’s looking forward to IBC 2022.

ibc - Bitmovin

Why is it important to have events like IBC as part of a go-to-market strategy?

Events like IBC serve as an excellent forcing function for the entire organization. We use IBC as a deadline for go-to-market activities, whether announcing a new product or launching a hero piece of content. It helps focus efforts because we’re all working towards the same goal.

Big events like IBC also help create a lot of buzz around the brand during and in the lead-up to an event, which is exciting when you get to the show and see you have one of the busiest stands in your hall.

Tips for maximizing ROI from tradeshows?

It’s essential to set clear goals before beginning any activities. You need to know how many meetings you want to book and the pipeline you want to be generated and closed. These goals must be communicated to internal stakeholders because events require a significant budget and resources, so be transparent about the level of investment and expected return on investment.

Marketing also needs to be closely aligned with the sales team to maxmize the chances of success, including weekly check-ins to track the number of meetings booked. I also cannot emphasize enough the importance of post-event follow-ups because timely follow-ups make the difference between a prospect picking you or your competitor.

One thing that’s hard to measure is brand impact. Making a splash at a big industry event can maximize brand visibility and create a buzz about your company. It’s not a tangible result, but it is important.

IBC coincides with your first anniversary at Bitmovin. What have been your biggest highlights and learnings over the past year?

A highlight for me has been developing the marketing team, including retaining and upskilling team members, identifying talent gaps, and bringing new people onboard. I also expanded the function of the marketing function to include product marketing so we could have a closer alignment between sales and product. We usually meet monthly because in-person interactions are meaningful and help keep team spirit high.

Another big highlight for me has been our digital transformation project. We’ve completely overhauled our digital marketing processes and seen an increase in quality traffic, trial sign-ups, active trial users and new logos. Seeing the impact is fantastic and will remain a significant focus next year.

A key learning for me was a reminder about the importance of goal setting. The marketing team worked together to define our objectives and strategy and clarify our goals. We have a lot of spinning plates, and it’s all too easy to try and do and be everything. As a team, we’ve learnt to identify what’s essential and what’s “nice to have”, i.e. not urgent.

Last but not least! I have learnt the importance of downtime and self-care. What we do is important, but we aren’t saving lives, so there’s no reason for work to take priority over our health and wellbeing. I exercise daily, have a good night’s sleep (even as a mother to a young son!) and fully unplug at the end of each day by not checking emails and Slack.

What tips would you give to marketers doing their first big event?

As the adage goes, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail”. Make sure the leadership team is aligned on the goals and purpose of the event, and then create a plan and timeline that can be shared with the broader team. Setting deadlines is essential because event dates creep up fast, so avoid last-minute rushes.

Return on investment should be top of mind. Everyone attending the event should have clear roles and responsibilities. Nobody should be on the stand twiddling their thumbs. After the event, make time to debrief everyone and share feedback on what went well and the areas for improvement. Being transparent about the event’s success will improve results in the future because the team will know where the weaknesses were previously.

What are you most looking forward to about IBC?

It’s my first IBC, so I’m looking forward to meeting customers and partners in person. Nothing beats human interaction when it comes to networking. It will also be great to see everyone’s work come to fruition because I know how hard the team has worked, and I will also enjoy spending time with everyone.

I will also be watching some conference sessions to ensure I am on top of current and future industry trends.

Spread the word!

SVP Marketing - An experienced marketer who has worked in start-ups through IPO, large corporations, and agencies for both B2C and B2B marketing.

Ready for the future of video streaming?


What are the main issues related to climate change and their relation to human rights?

It is now beyond dispute that climate change caused by human activity has negative impacts on the full enjoyment of human rights. Climate change has profound impacts on a wide variety of human rights, including the rights to life, self-determination, development, food, health, water and sanitation and housing.

Why is climate change an issue related to human rights?

Climate change isn’t simply a political or economic issue. It’s a human rights issue, perhaps the biggest one in human history. If we continue spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we not only destroy ecosystems and drive species to extinction, we indirectly violate human rights.

What are the issues related to climate change?

What rights are affected by climate change?

Environmental quality, including a safe and healthy working environment, impacts the right to life, health and adequate living standards, property, freedom of movement, and education can contribute to modern slavery issues. The enjoyment of many human rights can also contribute to adverse impacts on the environment.

IT IS AMAZING:  What happens to clothes taken to recycling Centres?

Who is most affected by climate change?

While everyone around the world feels the effects of climate change, the most vulnerable are people living in the world’s poorest countries, like Haiti and Timor-Leste, who have limited financial resources to cope with disasters, as well as the world’s 2.5 billion smallholder farmers, herders and fisheries who depend …

How does climate change affect human health?

What are the 5 effects of climate change?

What are the effects of climate change and global warming?

  • rising maximum temperatures.
  • rising minimum temperatures.
  • rising sea levels.
  • higher ocean temperatures.
  • an increase in heavy precipitation (heavy rain and hail)
  • shrinking glaciers.
  • thawing permafrost.

What is climate change and human adaptation?

What are some human rights issues today?

10 Human Rights Issues Of The Future

  • Human trafficking. Human trafficking is growing around the world. …
  • Refugee crises. …
  • Worker rights. …
  • Gender equality. …
  • LGBTQ+ rights. …
  • Human rights and technology. …
  • Nationalism. …
  • Attacks on journalists and the spread of misinformation.

When did climate change become an issue?

June 23, 1988 marked the date on which climate change became a national issue. In landmark testimony before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Dr.

IT IS AMAZING:  Is tide an abiotic factor?


N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015)

M. Keith Booker, University of Arkansas

After decades of domination by white men, science fiction in the twenty-first century has featured dramatically expanded contributions from women, especially women of color. Writers such as the African American Nisi Shawl, the Nigerian American Nnedi Okorafor, and Jamaican-born Canadian Nalo Hopkinson have taken science fiction in exciting new directions, often mixing it with fantasy, but in ways that are powerfully relevant to real-world problems concerning race, gender, colonialism, and other loci of oppression and domination. The most successful of all of such writers is the African American women writer N. K. Jemisin (1972– ), who won the prestigious Hugo Award for Best Novel for all three novels in her “Broken Earth” trilogy (2015–2017), thus becoming the first African American author to win that award at all, and the first author ever to win the Best Novel Hugo in three consecutive years, as well as the first to win for all three novels in a trilogy. All of the novels of this trilogy mix science fiction with fantasy to explore a number of important themes, with the most obvious of those being related to environmentalism and climate change, themes that are already well established in the first novel of the sequence, The Fifth Season (2015), which also anticipates the rest of the trilogy in its exploration of themes related to race and gender, as well.

The Fifth Season provides a crucial introduction to the trilogy, not only because it introduces the trilogy’s central themes and makes clear its generic orientation, but also (and more importantly) because it performs the heavy lifting of the impressive world-building that is so crucial to the sequence. This first volume introduces readers of the sequence to a planet whose inhabitants call it “earth,” though it is most assuredly not the earth we all know, even if it is very clearly designed to comment on our earth and on the damage human beings have done to it. Because of irresponsible management of the planet’s natural resources in the distant past, the earth of the trilogy is a harsh and hostile place, regarded by its inhabitants as evil and as an enemy to resist, rather than a nurturing home, a characterization that is perhaps indicated in the way they consistently refer to the planet as “Father Earth,” rather than the “Mother Earth” designation to which we have all become accustomed. Meanwhile, this earth is inhabited by a variety of races of “ordinary” humans who seem completely unconcerned with their own racial differences from one another in favor of an all-encompassing racist fear and hatred of the “orogenes,” a race of gifted mutants who are the central focus through most of the trilogy[1].

The Basic Planetary Scenario

The Fifth Season takes place on a planet with one giant continent, known as the “stillness,” which can be relatively habitable for long stretches of time, even though the seismic activity that is such a crucial characteristic of this planet always makes life precarious. Then, in occasional outbursts of increased seismic activity and radical climate change, bitter hardship—accompanied by widespread death and destruction—is visited upon the planet, often for many years at a time. These dark periods are known as “fifth seasons,” which can last for many years during which life is devoted mostly just to the attempt to survive. Even in between fifth seasons, much of the life on this earth is devoted primarily to the preparation for the next fifth season, which is sure to come.

In its emphasis on the unique properties of this particular planet, The Fifth Season and the trilogy that it begins clearly participate in the traditional science fiction subgenre of planetary romance, in which the cultures and ecologies of entire alien planets are described. Early examples of the planetary romance include Jack Vance’s Big Planet (1952), Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity (1954), and Poul Anderson’s The Man Who Counts (1958). Frank Herbert’s sf classic Dune (1965) is one of the best-known planetary romances, though its numerous sequels expand into the galactic scale more typical of the space opera proper. Among numerous later examples of the planetary romance, Brian Aldiss’s sequence Helliconia Spring (1982), Helliconia Summer (1983),and Helliconia Winter (1985) stands out as a particular high point that is particularly forward-looking in tis emphasis on the impact of climate change. One particularly unusual example of the planetary romance (mixed, in this case, with other genres) is the 1968 film Planet of the Apes (based on Pierre Boulle’s 1963 French novel La Planète des singes), famed for its ending plot twist in which the planet of the title turns out to be a future version of our own earth, made nearly unrecognizable by nuclear devastation.

The Fifth Season employs a version of this same conceit. Thus, obvious deviations from any concept of realism aside, it is possible to see the hostile earth of The Fifth Season as a sort of far-future, post-apocalyptic version of our own planet, irretrievably changed by humanity’s own actions. Three quarters of the way through the novel, we are introduced to a story from the planet’s folklore (“stonelore”) which suggests that Father Earth was once far more nurturing and hospitable to life—until humans damaged the planet so extensively that they became thought of as the planet’s enemies.

It is not at all clear what is exactly meant by this legendary memory of the orogenes destroying the only child of Father Earth, but it is easy to see, in context, that this element of the legend might simply be a racist addition, somewhat along the lines of the antisemitic characterization of Jews as the killers of Christ. It is certainly clear that this distant, almost Edenic time is not well remembered, or even described in any reliable historical records. It is more the stuff of legend, and poorly understood legend at that. And, while it is tempting from such passages to read those who damaged the earlier, more hospitable earth as analogous to the people of our own era, with the broken earth occurring in our future, there are also ways in which any attempt to parallel the history of the novel’s earth to that of our own earth force us to locate the action of the novel far back in geological time, before even the creation of the earth’s moon, which possibly occurs at the end of The Fifth Season as part of the attempt of the powerful orogene Alabaster to quell the seismic violence of earth once and for all (though it ultimately becomes clear that Alabaster has more likely just disturbed the moon’s orbit in a way that is designed to cause it to collide with the earth). Indeed, the ending of the novel seems to suggest that Alabaster has used his immense powers to initiate one last cataclysmic sequence of seismic events that will lead to the final erasure of all that humans have wrought, thus placing the action of the novel in the ancient geological past if one wants to read this earth as analogous to ours—something that clearly shouldn’t be done too literally.

The Basic “Racial” Scenario

One of the central themes of The Fifth Season is racism, and one of the central social facts of life on its earth is the way in which individuals of different races are perceived and treated differently. Like many fantasy and science fiction novels, The Fifth Season features a number of different sentient groups, including what seem to be relatively “ordinary” humans like the ones that populate our own world, as well as decidedly non-human sentient species, such as the “stone eaters,” who have immense power and can travel as easy through stone as humans can travel through air. The ordinary humans, meanwhile, are themselves divided in various ways, the most basic of which is perhaps the division between those who are members of “comms” (communities) and those who are “commless,” wandering about without a permanent home. Those in comms, meanwhile, are divided according to professions that become a key part of their identities (and even names). These professional groupings, known as “castes,” are rather hierarchical and are analogous to class differences in our own world. For example, the “strongbacks” who serve essentially as manual laborers, are less valued than other castes, and might even be expelled from comms when food shortages arise. There is also a special group of humans known as Guardians, who have a special ability (the nature of which is a closely guarded secret) to turn the powers of orogenes against them and are tasked with keeping the orogenes under control. They oversee the Fulcrum, the institution that is tasked with training the orogenes and putting them into service in the interest of humans.

The orogenes are quite widely despised and regarded as not being fully human, though the “ordinary” humans of this planet are perfectly willing—in a situation that quite directly comments upon the legacy of slavery—to take advantage of the capabilities of the orogenes in pursuit of their own ends. As Kim Wickham notes, the Broken Earth trilogy can be considered a slavery narrative of sorts that pursues a “project of not only remembering but also piecing together a self that has been fragmented by the trauma of slavery” (396). In The Fifth Season and the rest of the trilogy, Jemisin effectively describes an entire world-system built on the forced exploitation of the labor of orogenes, who are hated and feared by “ordinary” humans partly because they are so powerful but also because those humans know (and resent) just how necessary orogene labor is to their own existence.

It should be noted that, while the orogenes seem to serve as a fairly straightforward sort of allegorization of the experience of African Americans, the allegory is abstract enough to have significantly broader applicability as well. Thus, Sanchez-Taylor argues that Jemison’s trilogy ultimately “becomes an allegory for many colonized peoples of color, who are forced to survive in Eurowestern-dominated societies that justify their enslavement or class status through themes of genetic essentialism and scientific racism” (68). Meanwhile, one of the most striking aspects of the world of the Broken Earth trilogy is that, however familiar the racial fear and hatred directed at the orogenes might seem to Jemisin’s readers, it is unfamiliar in the sense that it is based on a genetic variation that has nothing to do with skin color or other easily observable physical characteristics of the kind that we, in our world, are accustomed to thinking of as markers of racial difference. This motif has been used before, as when it provides a central premise of the X-Men comics franchise, in which mutants of various kinds become the objects of racism because of their differences from ordinary humans.In this way, Jemisin defamiliarizes the notion of racial difference and asks us to view it with different eyes, while also broadening and generalizing the significance of her allegory. Moreover, she arguably does so in a way that is far more effective than the similar strategy pursued in the X-Men comics and films, partly because she does a more compelling job of linking the oppression of orogenes to slavery and other parallels in our own world.

One particularly effective strategy used by Jemisin is to provide (as any novelist might) details concerning things such as the hair and skin color of her characters but to do so in an offhand way that makes clear the fact that the people on this earth, no matter how racist they might be, do not tend to judge people according to characteristics such as skin color or to think of such superficial physical differences as primary in defining the identities of individuals. Thus, in most of the narrative, it is very difficult to even remember what the skin colors of the characters are—and if one does remember, it doesn’t really seem particularly relevant to the narrative. In so doing, Jemisin is able subtly to place characters of color in crucial positions of agency and authority within the narrative in ways that make it seem simply normal to do so, while at the same time making important points about the arbitrariness and irrationality of racism, which causes people to have such strong feelings about issues that really shouldn’t matter at all.

In addition, one of the most important contributions of Jemisin’s work is the clear way in which the basic geological scenario of her trilogy and the basic racial scenario of the novels are closely intertwined. As María Ferrández San Miguel suggests,

“the main issues at play in the Broken Earth trilogy are the representation of structural oppression against a marginalised minority, on the one hand, and the foregrounding of the possible consequences of extreme exploitation of the environment, on the other. It is my contention that Jemisin’s work draws a connection between the subjugation and exploitation of certain groups (racism and coloniality) and of nature (the Anthropocene), framing both as traumatic phenomena. Yet, the story allows for a possibility of regeneration in the figuration of the posthuman being and the promotion of a posthuman form of ethics. In short, as this article attempts to prove, the Broken Earth series considers the past, interprets the present and offers a cautionary tale about the future that makes a strong case for the hopeful practice of posthuman ethics” (473–74).

This notion of a structural parallel between the racist exploitation of specific groups of people and the environmentally damaging exploitation of the natural world, both of which are based on an ideology of oppression and domination built on lack of respect for the Other, is one of the trilogy’s most important messages. Ultimately, then, the political critique that is integral to the trilogy is aimed not just at environmental irresponsibility and racism but at the general ideological structures that make these things possible.

The Characters of The Fifth Season

Given the sweeping epic scope of The Fifth Season, the novel actually focuses on a relatively small number of characters, most of whom remain major characters throughout the trilogy. But it focuses on these characters quite powerfully, making them come alive with a vividness that characters in science fiction have seldom done. Through most of its length, the novel appears to consist of three different plots strands, which appear to be taking place under different conditions and thus during time periods relative to the fifth season of the title. Each of these plot strands also features a seemingly separate protagonist, each of whom dominates her plot sequence. These characters include the following:

Damaya is a young girl whose horrified parents discover that she is an orogene and send her away to receive training at the Fulcrum, after first locking her in their barn like an animal. Damaya has considerable promise but is also something of a free spirit, a quality that is strongly frowned upon by at the Fulcrum and that could potentially lead to an undesirable assignment or even to extermination. The Fulcrum treats its charges less like people than like tools, or weapons, as Damaya tends to think of it, and weapons that cannot be effectively wielded tend to be destroyed to prevent them from doing harm.

Syenite is a young orogene woman of considerable talent in service to the Fulcrum. She has achieved four rings and seems fated to achieve more, given her talents. (Rings are assigned to mark levels of achievement, with ten rings being the highest level ever achieved.) Early in her segment of the story, she is assigned to a ten-ring orogene by the name of Alabaster, who is to serve as her mentor—and with whom she also understands that she is to mate as part of the Fulcrum’s program of producing gifted orogenes they can control from infancy.

Essun is an older orogene, approaching middle age. She has retired from service to the Fulcrum and has taken refuge in the “little nothing town of Tirimo” (19), where, as the book opens, she has lived for ten years, working as a teacher and marrying a man called Jija, while passing for human, even to her husband. In the book’s shocking beginning, Jija has murdered their small son Uche, having discovered that Uche was an orogene. He has absconded with their daughter Nassun, who is also an orogene, though it is not clear whether he realizes that Nassun is an orogene. (Their story will be continued in The Obelisk Gate, in which Nassun eventually uses her orogene powers to turn her father to stone, given his vicious hatred of orogenes.) Essun leaves Tiromo to search for Jija and Nassun, on the way acquiring the fellow travelers Hoa (seemingly a young boy, who turns out to be a powerful stone eater) and Tonkee (seemingly an old woman who turns out to be a transgender “geomest,” essentially a scientist). Hoa will turn out to be extremely important in the subsequent volumes and eventually emerges as the apparent narrator of the entire sequence.

The second volume of the trilogy, The Obelisk Gate (2016), advances the story of Essun and Nassun as they attempt to negotiate the apocalyptic fifth season initiated by Alabaster. In The Stone Sky (2017), a number of twists and turns illuminate and clarify the previous volumes, including the apparent identification of Hoa as the narrator of the entire trilogy, with Essun, eventually reborn as a stone eater herself, as the intended audience. As the trilogy ends, Hoa and Essun set off to use their stone-eater powers in an attempt to save the planet.

Note that the plot of The Fifth Season relies on one central “twist,” in which we eventually discover that Damaya, Syenite, and Essun are all the same person, presented to us during different phases of her life. This development, however, is far more than a gimmick. In particular, it makes important points about identity and about how each of us can occupy different identities over the course of a lifetime, especially if we find ourselves living in dramatically changed circumstances.

Essun’s narrative is related in second person, which highlights the question of identity that is so central to her narrative, though it will ultimately be revealed by the third volume of the trilogy that this mode of narration comes about primarily because Hoa is speaking to Essun as he tells the story[2]. This rhetorical situation, however, does not negate the other significance that can be attached to this second-person narration, highlighted in passages which Hoa addresses the question of identity directly: “You’re still trying to decide who to be. The self you’ve been lately doesn’t make sense anymore; that woman died with Uche. She’s not useful, unobtrusive as she is, quiet as she is, ordinary as she is. Not when such extraordinary things have happened” (38).

The Genre of The Fifth Season

In order to understand The Fifth Season properly, it is useful to understand the multiple genres in which it participates. The most obvious of these are the science fictional planetary romance and the planetary fantasy, as I have already mentioned. This mixture of science fiction and fantasy follows important recent trends, while also breaking significant new ground. To understand these trends, it is useful to look back to the 1970s, when theoretically sophisticated criticism of science fiction received a big boost from the insights of Darko Suvin, who employed a fundamentally Marxist perspective (with a dash of structuralist methodology) in developing a serious theorization of the genre. Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, published in 1979, compiles and summarizes his work of the decade. For Suvin, science fiction is “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment (7-8). In short, science fiction places readers in a world different from their own (made so by specifically identifiable drivers of change, or “novums,” such as technological advance) and then challenges them to examine and critically analyze those differences. Crucially, for Suvin, this cognitive process has a potentially powerful political impact in that it encourages readers to reexamine assumptions about their world and to realize that even the most fundamental things about their world might have been different. Science fiction thus emerges for Suvin as a key utopian form that helps readers to formulate challenges to the status quo and to imagine the possibility of alternatives.

Suvin’s notion of cognitive estrangement in science fiction, derived from the Russian formalist notion of defamiliarization via the Marxist theories of Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch, would have numerous important implications going forward, including giving the genre of science fiction a privileged place in Marxist discussions of cultural politics. Meanwhile, Suvin’s work appeared even as American Marxist criticism itself was awakening from a decades-long slumber caused by the repressively anticommunist climate that prevailed in the United States during the peak years of the Cold War. It could, therefore, be argued that Suvin’s comments on science fiction directly contributed to the re-emergence of American Marxist criticism by giving Marxist critics a topic on which to focus that was, at the time, not taken very seriously by others in the academy, making Marxist commentary on it seem relatively unthreatening. However, Suvin provided a theoretical framework for the analysis and discussion of science fiction that played a founding role in the growth of a body of sophisticated academic criticism on that genre even among non-Marxist critics, criticism that almost invariably appeals to his notion of cognitive estrangement as a crucial principle.

On the other hand, if Suvin’s elaboration of this principle served as an important impetus for serious critical consideration of science fiction as a genre, his corresponding dismissal of fantasy had a chilling effect on the critical exploration of that genre, especially in Marxist criticism. Indeed, Suvin uses fantasy as a sort of straw man to help clarify his vision of cognitive estrangement in science fiction, characterizing fantasy as a genre that creates estrangement of a noncognitive sort by placing its readers in unfamiliar situations but not asking them to think critically about the differences between the world of the fantasy and the readers’ own worlds. For Suvin, then, fantasy is essentially the political opposite of science fiction, a genre that is apolitical at best and reactionary at worst, with the specter of J.R.R. Tolkien’s notoriously conservative Lord of the Rings (1954-55) looming over the genre to prove his point.

Perhaps Suvin’s most important direct influence was on the work of Fredric Jameson, who, as the 1980s arrived, was already beginning to formulate his now-famous notion of the loss of utopian energy in postmodernist culture while at the same time suggesting that science fiction may be an exception that retains a vital utopian power, even if it is only through a demonstration of our waning ability to imagine a genuine utopian alternative in the postmodern era (“Progress” 153). In the meantime, Jameson published The Political Unconscious (1981), one of the most influential works of literary theory of the latter half of the twentieth century. This work, a vigorous defense of the power of Marxist theory for the analysis of literary texts, also marked the beginning of the emphasis on the importance of utopian thought that would characterize Jameson’s career from that point forward. This emphasis culminated in the publication of Archaeologies of the Future (2007), which includes a long theoretical rumination on the topic of utopia, with a focus on its relevance to science fiction, as well as an extensive collection of his earlier essays on science fiction, primarily from the 1980s.

One crucial chapter of The Political Unconscious addresses the topic of “magical narratives,” otherwise generally referred to in the chapter as “romances,” but also closely related to what I am here calling fantasy. In this chapter, Jameson asks the question of why, in our modern, rationalized, high-tech world, such narratives continue to retain a certain popularity. Jameson here notes Northrop Frye’s vision of romance as, in Jameson’s words, a “Utopian fantasy which aims at the transfiguration of the world of everyday life in such a way as to restore the conditions of some lost Eden, or to anticipate a future realm from which the old mortality and imperfections will have been effaced” (Political 110). Ultimately, though, Jameson concludes that the most important function of modern romance, and the key to its ongoing appeal, is a negative one. The “most authentic vocation” of romance, then, is “its capacity, by absence and by the silence of the form itself, to express that ideology of desacralization by which modern thinkers from Max Weber to the Frankfurt School have sought to convey their sense of the radical impoverishment and constriction of modern life” (135).

Despite this suggestion that fantasy is rooted in utopian longings for a richness in life that is denied by modern capitalism, Jameson remained among those most dismissive of the political potential of fantasy through the next decades, though by the time of Archaeologies of the Future, he was basing his rejection less on fantasy’s difference from science fiction in terms of estrangement and more on the reactionary implications of such structural features as “the organization of fantasy around the ethical binary of good and evil, and the fundamental role it assigns to magic (Archaeologies 58). There is no doubt that this good-bad binary comes about largely because the genre of fantasy, through the second half of the twentieth century, was dominated by the conservative Christian fantasies of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, though that domination was broken at the end of the twentieth century by radical British novelists such as Philip Pullman and China Miêville, who have used of fantasy as a progressive political genre.

The three volumes of Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy (originally published in 1995, 1997, and 2000) feature an anticlerical presentation of the church as an oppressive, dystopian force in the alternative world that dominates the first volume and challenge the ideology of Christianity throughout, using John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) as its most crucial subtext. Even more powerful a challenge to the supremacy of the Tolkien tradition in fantasy fiction was the publication of Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), the first volume of his “Bas-Lag” trilogy, which would ultimately also include The Scar (2002) and The Iron Council (2004). In this astonishing and spectacular sequence, Miéville employs a wide range of generic currents to produce a powerful, politically charged fantasy world that for many, such as Freedman (“Speculative”), feels more like science fiction than like fantasy.

This kind of generic uncertainty is a key characteristic of Miéville’s work, which includes a healthy dose of horror and other genres as well as fantasy and science fiction, sometimes residing most clearly in one genre or another but always drawing upon other generic traditions as well. Miéville’s fiction has played a leading role in the recent extensive critical reevaluation of the political potential of fantasy, with Jameson himself (inspired by the work of Miéville) leading the way by declaring that works such as Perdido Street Station suggest the possibility of “radical” or “materialist” fantasy, of a fantasy form “capable of registering systemic change and of relating superstructural symptoms to infrastructural shifts and modifications” (Radical” 280).

Miéville has remained perhaps the key figure in this reevaluation of fantasy, partly because of the sheer literary quality and intellectual complexity of his fiction and partly because he himself has become an important critic and commentator, as well as fiction writer. Miéville, a sophisticated Marxist theorist in his own right, has become perhaps the leading critic of the Marxist tradition of seeing fantasy as the feeble other of science fiction, at least in a political sense. For example, in his essay “Cognition and Ideology,” which serves as the afterword to the collection Red Planets (2009), co-edited with Mark Bould, Miéville directly addresses Suvin’s influence on the Marxist reception of fantasy fiction, arguing that science fiction and fantasy are actually quite similar genres that can both produce cognitive estrangement in useful ways.

Jemisin’s work extends Miéville’s fusion of science fiction and fantasy in important new directions, employing both genres in the interest of an environmentalist narrative of a kind to which some readers might be unaccustomed[3]. To understand this aspect of The Fifth Season, it is important to understand the important environmentalist concept of the “Anthropocene,” a term that essentially indicates the geological period in which humans have been earth’s dominate species, ultimately remaking the planet to fit their agenda. Bould, in a fascinating study that seeks to demonstrate that Western fiction has long been informed by an awareness (often unconscious) that human domination of the earth is a fairly recent (and possibly temporary, due to human-initiated climate change) phenomenon, provides a very helpful summation of the notion of the “Anthropocene”:

“The Anthropocene is derived from Anthropos (‘human’) and cene (‘recent’, as in the current geological era, the Cenozoic, dating from 66 million years ago, and its several epochs: Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene). It describes the period in which human activity has disrupted significant geological conditions and processes, and/or in which traces of human activity can be discerned in the geological record. The term is usually attributed to either the biologist Eugene Stermer, who used it in the 1980s, or more commonly to the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who independently re-coined it in the late 1990s” (16).

Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, then, can be read as a sort of post-Anthropocene (or possibly pre-Anthropocene) narrative set in a time when humans do not dominate their planet, possibly because human activity has so damaged the earth of the trilogy that it has been made inhospitable to humans in ways that are beyond their control. It then serves as a cautionary tale that warns us of the potential disastrous consequences of the damage currently being done by humans to our own planet, asking us to imagine the trauma of living on a planet that is as inhospitable to human life as the one in the trilogy. To the extent that this tale relies on actual possible consequences of real-world human activity, the trilogy can be read as science fiction. To the extent that Jemisin’s vision goes beyond scientific verisimilitude in order to make its cautionary points more powerfully, it can be read as fantasy. In Jemison’s case (as in Miéville’s), though, the two genres are inextricably fused, so it is never really a case of choosing one of the other.

Meanwhile, it is also useful to consider some of the secondary genres in which the Broken Earth trilogy participates. For example, Jemisin’s portrayal of Father Earth essentially as an agent that takes active revenge on humans for the damage they have done to the natural environment in the past participates in the so-called revenge of nature narrative that has, in recent decades, become an important element of modern culture, acting as a subgenre, in some ways, of science fiction, but functioning even more prominently as a subgenre of horror. Evenge-of-nature films have included some extremely prominent examples, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), both of which feature animals turning on humans. There are also films—such as Carter Smith’s The Ruins (2008)—that feature killer plants turning against humans, while some films—such as M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008)—feature a sort of generalized warning that all of nature is fed up of with being ravaged by humans. And finally, other films, such as Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004) adopt a disaster film format that partly captures the violent and traumatic nature of the climate upheavals that are central to Jemisin’s trilogy.

Reading The Fifth Season alongside such films is useful partly because it calls attention to the element of horror that permeates the world of this text—in ways that go well beyond the typical revenge-of-nature theme (and in ways that are again reminiscent of the fiction of Miéville). Indeed, one of the crucial themes of Jemisin’s work has to do with the trauma of living on a planet made hostile by human abuse of nature, and she drives home this trauma theme in a number of ways (in addition to the basic hostile-planet motif)[4]. For example, The Fifth Season begins with the gruesome murder of Essun’s son Uche at the hands of his own father, who has only just discovered that the boy is an orogene, thus demonstrating the tremendous depth of the racial hatred that the “ordinary” humans of this world feel toward orogenes. The battered body of this innocent young boy looms over the rest of his mother’s life, as well as the rest of the narrative of this novel.

Perhaps the most visually striking horror image of this novel, meanwhile, also involves the horrific abuse of orogene children. The Fulcrum maintains a network of “node stations” in various locations, where orogene children are assigned the task of helping to keep down local seismic activity. What is not generally known, however, is the truly monstrous nature of these assignments, which Syenite discovers in the course of her travels with Alabaster. Entering one of the stations, she and Alabaster come upon a wire chair holding the orogene child (apparently Alabaster’s own child, produced as part of the Fulcrum’s breeding program) assigned there, and the scene they encounter is a grotesque one that would be very much at home in the genre of horror (perhaps especially in horror film, given its highly visual nature:

“The body in the node maintainer’s chair is small, and naked. Thin, its limbs atrophied. Hairless. There are things—tubes and pipes and things, she has no words for them—going into the stick-arms, down the goggle-throat, across the narrow crotch. There’s a flexible bag on the corpse’s belly, attached to its belly somehow, and it’s full of—ugh. The bag needs to be changed” (104).

As horrible as this image might be, the text also indicates that these unfortunate children suffer even more abuse than is encompassed by this image. Rendered helpless and immobile, for example, they are systematically abused by the local humans, including sexually. As Sanchez-Taylor notes, this complete control and exploitation of the physical bodies of these children can be read as one of Jemisin’s key echoes of the treatment of the bodies of slaves: “The node maintainer description takes the concept of slavery to its most extreme level. The orogene in the chair becomes a living battery, a body with no autonomy whatsoever” (71).

Finally, it should be noted that Jemisin’s work has recently been read by some within the context of the “New Weird,” a genre of which Miéville and such figures as M. John Harrison and Jeff VanderMeer have been identified as leading practitioners. Indeed, the term “new weird” seems to have first been used by Harrison in his introduction to Miéville’s 2002 novella The Tain.The New Weird (as distinguished from the “Old Weird,” a genre typically seen as dominated by H. P. Lovecraft). VanderMeeer and his wife Ann provide a capsule definition (or at least characterization) of the genre in their introduction to the anthology The New Weird, the genre is “a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping-off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy.” Indeed, the multigeneric nature of the New Weird is one of its crucial characteristics, while the genre of horror should also be added to science fiction and fantasy as genres that typically inform the New Weird. Another key feature of the New Weird is that its sometimes extravagant imaginative constructions are always related to the real world in identifiable ways that make the fiction relevant to real world issues and concerns.

N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (and the other novels in the trilogy it initiates) is an impressive effort at imaginative world-building, though the environmentally damaged fictional world it imagines bears very real and important parallels to our own world. To an extent, the trilogy functions primarily as a cautionary allegorical tale that warns us just how inhospitable our planet might become if we continue to damage it in irresponsible ways. Importantly, though, Jemisin also delivers a second important layer of allegory concerning racism and slavery. This aaspect of her narrative also has obvious implications for our world, both because of our own racist legacies and because of the subtle way Jemisin builds her narrative in ways that suggest that the same kind of lack of respect of the Other that fuels racism also fuels the irresponsible and disrespectful treatment of nature. Moreover, Jemisin makes a powerful case that mistreatment of racial Others and of the natural environment is ultimately damaging not only to the mistreated but to the mistreaters.

Works Cited

Bould, Mark. The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture. Verso, 2021.

Bould, Mark, and China Miéville, eds. Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2009.

Ferrández San Miguel, María. “Ethics in the Anthropocene: Traumatic Exhaustion and Posthuman Regeneration in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy.” English Studies, vol. 101, no. 4, August 2020, pp. 471–86.

Freedman, Carl. “Speculative Fiction and International Law: The Marxism of China Miéville.” Socialism and Democracy, vol. 20, no. 3, 2006, pp. 25–39.

Ingwersen, Moritz. “Geological Insurrections: Politics of Planetary Weirding from China Miéville to N. K. Jemisin.” Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities. Edited by Julius Greve, Florian Zappe, and Robert T. Tally, Jr., Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 73-92.

Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso, 2007.

University Press, 1981.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.

Jameson, Fredric. “Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 1982, pp. 147–58.

Jameson, Fredric. “Radical Fantasy.” Historical Materialism, vol. 10, no. 4, 2003, pp. 273–80.

Jemisin, N. K. The Fifth Season. Orbit, 2015.

Miéville, China. “Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory.” Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. Edited by Mark Bould and China Miéville, Wesleyan University Press, 2009, pp. 231–48.

Sanchez-Taylor, Joy. Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color. Ohio State University Press, 2021.

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale University Press, 1979.

VanderMeer, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. The New Weird. Tachyon, 2008.

Wickham, Kim. “Identity, Memory, Slavery: Second-Person Narration in N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 30, no. 3, 2019, pp. 392-411.

[1] The label “orogenes” is derived from a real geological phenomenon. Though it differs somewhat from the orogeny of the book, “orogeny” on our own earth refers to the process of formation of mountains when moving tectonic plates collide, causing the material at the interface to be pressed upward.

[2] See Wickham for a discussion of the ways in which this second-person narration contributes to a project of “transformative identity formation” of a kind that is frequently pursued in fantasy narratives featuring traditionally marginalized groups (392).

[3] Critics are just beginning to explore the points of contact between the work of Miéville and that of Jemisin. See, for example, Ingwersen.

[4] For more on the trauma theme, see Ferrández San Miguel, María.


Latest News Editor's Choice

Opinion / Columnist

Mnangagwa officially recognises Matabeleland independence cause, talks about it daily

11 Jul 2022 at 09:19hrs | Views
Just imagine UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, threatening to shorten the lives of all Scottish people who are calling for the independence of Scotland from UK or Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sanchez threatening to kill all Catalonians for advocating for the independence of Catalonia from Spain. It is unheard of. But in Zimbabwe Mr Mnangagwa, obviously not presidential material and fit to be addressed by us as President, has issued more than three chilling statements this year alone in which he threatened to terminate the lives of all Mthwakazi (Matabele) peacefully campaigning for the breakaway of Matabeleland from Zimbabwe.

In the face of Mnangagwa's threats Matabeleland Liberation Organisation, MLO led by Cde Paul Siwela is justified to assemble more than 30 000 Matabele army to protect over 4 million unarmed Matabele civilians without fear, without regret and without apologising.

What makes Mnangagwa and his fellow Shona supremacist think that innocent Matabele blood can be spilt wantonly without consequences?

That the majority of people who live in Matabeleland came from South Africa a long time ago is a fact not a crime just like the shonas  came all the way from Burundi after being chased away for witchcraft and stealing.

That the people of Matabeleland, those who were found in Matabeleland and those who came from South Africa, collectively known as Matabele or uMthwakazi are calling for the restoration of Matabeleland state is not a crime but a God given right that all people of Matabeleland must exercise without fear. No amount of threat from Mnangagwa will stop us from demanding the restoration of Matabeleland. The only time we will stop talking about Matabeleland break- away is when the independent and sovereign Republic of Matabeleland is established.

We always hear misguided Shona leaders and their Shona supporters using such words like "we will crush Matabeles" or "I will shorten the lives of Matabeles", by Mr Mnangagwa himself. We remind them that being majority does not matter in a war. It is the skill, determination and bravery that counts.

We refer the uninformed and shallow minded Shona supremacist to Rwanda. The world heard this kind of language like "we will crush you" or "we will obliterate you from the face of earth". Of course it was coming from Majority Hutus that make 80% of Rwanda's population directed at Tutsis that make about 20%.  At the time the Hutus were in control of the government and all military and security apparatus and murdering innocent unarmed  Tutsis just like Shonas are doing to the Matebeles in Zimbabwe. But when the real war came, both  sides were armed, the majority Hutus received a shocking and humiliating defeat from Tutsis just like Shonas would be humiliated if war would break out.

Coming back home in Matabeleland. His Majesty, King Mzilikazi, the founder of Matabele nation assembled a small number of about 500 warriors that conqured millions of enemy soldiers and warriors and successfully built and defended Matabele nation that exists even now. The sons and daughters of the warriors live in Matabeleland.

We strongly warn the blood and bloody Hutu relatives in Mashonaland against reading too much into this majority thing. When push comes to shove it would be real men that will come out victorious. Cowards will run for their dear lives and cry for dear mothers.

As Mr Mnangagwa is busy issuing threats to kill Matabeles and making it a crime for one to be from South Africa, is he aware that Shonas, disabled, blind, able bodied, educated and uneducated are now found in the streets, robots and every South African city? Some of them are working, some are beggars and  some thieves a trade that is popular with Shona people. Should the South African government deploy SA army to wipe out these Shonas or should the President of South Africa organise rallies and make threats to kill all the Shonas because they are from Zimbabwe?

That will be shocking but that is what is happening in Zimbabwe on a daily basis where Members of parliament, Ministers and even the president take turns in reminding Matabeles that they are from South Africa and that they deserve to be crushed forgetting that they came from  Burundi.

Mnangagwa's threats expose him as a cruel, irresponsible and very unwise leader who lacks presidential depth and a misfit who does not consider the negative impact of his utterances in the present and in the future. It exposes him as someone who cannot even learn from his own bloody history an unremorseful and unrepentant genocidist.

While the Hutus in Burundi are popular for committing genocide against minorities in the Great Lakes region, their blood and blood thirst relatives from Mashonaland who were chased away from Burundi for engaging in witch craft are known for slaughtering innocent unarmed Matabele civilians in Zimbabwe.  This makes the Shona people the only cruel black people in Southern Africa who have committed genocide against black minorities post colonial era.

To the people of Matabeleland we say stay put and fear not. We have nothing to lose in engaging in a war with Zimbabwe but a lot to gain. We are talking about being free from Shona tribal oppression, being free from the fear of being killed through genocide and threats of second genocide, being free from abuse, humiliation, demonisation tribal segregation and tribal domination.

We are proud to further inform Matabeles that the minute Matabeleland would be announced as the independent and sovereign state, the following jobs would be immediately available and guaranteed:

The Republic of Matabeleland Defence forces would need 30 000 young men and women to work in the army and airforce

Matabeleland Republic Police would employ 10 000 young men and women as police officers.

Department of Home Affairs will employ over 3000 to work in the Home Affairs offices and ports of entry in Matabeleland

5 000 young people would be employed as correctional service officers

5 000 would be employed intelligence officials

20 000 Matabeles would be employed in the health department as nurses and doctors

70 000 will be employed as teachers in education department

More Matabeles would be absorbed in the private sector, banking, tourism, hospitality, manufacturing, farming, mining to name just a few. All these jobs will be occupied by Matabeles who will enjoy the sweetness of freedom for the first time after many years of oppression.

There will be enough for everyone. So the fence sitters must chose between oppressive Zimbabwe which caters for the interests of Shonas only and The Republic of Matabeleland which they will run and build themselves and accommodate everyone who lives in it.
Do you want to be a permanent Shona slave in Zimbabwe or a free citizen of The Republic of Matabeleland with the full right to life, employment, education, participation in economics, politics and free to practice your culture and speak your own language?

To Mr Mnangagwa and his followers we say only one bullet from the Zimbabwe army or Matabeleland Liberation army will mark the beginning of Matabeleland independence campaign and the official split of Zimbabwe into two states, The Republic of Matabeleland and Zimbabwe.

Izenzo kungemazwi!

Israel Dube

MLO Secretary for Information and Public Affairs

Source - Israel Dube


Microsoft warns of Nobelium hackers using FoggyWeb backdoor

Microsoft has warned of a new FoggyWeb backdoor being used by Nobelium, the same state-sponsored hacking group believed to be responsible for SolarWinds supply-chain attacks.

According to Microsoft, the notorious attacker group Nobelium is using a never-before-seen post-exploitation backdoor that can steal sensitive data from a compromised AD FS (Active Directory Federation Services) server.

Read more…


Muscle Building Techniques

Muscle Building Techniques

However there are a lot of muscle building methods, I’m introducing you some fundamental muscle-building procedures, to be followed rigorously by each muscle manufacturer. These are examined as follows:

Perform biceps and rear arm muscles works out. The explanation is that such muscle building strategies can incredibly expand your bulk. Then, at that point, obviously you would require an expertise for playing out the weighty undertakings. Goodness yes this is your psyche desensitizing strength, how truly you will lift the significant burdens in the rec center!

You ought to play out those where to buy sarms online activities which are the most ideal to your body type. For instance, seat squeezing is the well known work out. It can immensely assemble your chest muscle. Correspondingly assuming you are feeling to further develop your leg muscle you can have bunches of decisions like, squats, rushes, employs, and heel raises, and so on.

Try not to be smug in light of the fact that it profoundly requires your excitement, inspiration, and a sheer difficult work. In the event that you don’t lift the significant burdens in the rec center, then, at that point, you can’t turn into a well-looking and hot muscle manufacturer. This is the very thing that I would not joke about this!

What really is going on while doing the undertakings of weight training in the exercise center – – – The absence of dexterity and reasonableness? Regardless of anything you are doing, take a taste of water while performing muscle building practices reps by reps in the rec center. This is something tiny which most muscle developers really do frequently neglect.

Begin following cardio methods like, 30 minutes lively strolling, , running, running, swimming, yoga, and extending, and so on. The explanation is that such heart stimulating exercise are considered otherworldly situated methods, gives you a sheer mental calm, self-satisfaction, and significant enchantment!

To wrap things up is to foster brain and center that you are truly going to turn into a special jock. Assuming that you have made such like speculation in your psyche – – performing practices in the exercise center practically. Then nobody could stop you of turned into a sheer muscle head!


Koodo Community

Text messages from Koodo when in US

  • 22 September 2022
  • 3 replies

I live in a border community and so I frequently travel into the US for a few hours.  Sometimes I forget to put my phone on airplane mode, and then I get 2 text messages from Koodo welcoming me to the US and suggesting I sign up for Easy Roam (which I don’t want).  These text messages from Koodo, which I don’t even want, cost me $12 every time it happens.  Is there any way to stop these text messages from coming?

3 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +4

Incoming text messages are free and don’t trigger roaming charges.

The likely culprit if you’re not actively making or answering phone calls or responding to texts is your phone using data.

Nope, the charges are for 2 incoming texts from Koodo while in the US.  This happens every time I go to the US and forget to go to airplane mode.

Userlevel 7
Badge +4

@Carolyn Cybulski

We were unable to identify your account based on your community profile.

Please use the “Log in via self serve” option from the login community page and let us know here.


Risk Exchange Platforms for Reinsurance Gain Prominence

The future of reinsurance (RI) markets is being reshaped by new technology, alternative capital and reinsurers bundling value-added services with reinsurance. These forces are leading to new trends, in a backdrop of changing RI buying patterns, emerging risks and the realities of ever changing regulation. Placement processes have evolved at a slow pace while acquisition costs are on the rise. The reinsurance placement process includes discovering RI prices, agreeing to contract terms and conditions, and allocating limits among several reinsurers. It is a complex, slow and expensive process that involves face-to-face meetings with numerous handovers. The ensuing inefficiency and opacity makes this market ripe for more automation.

The technology to automate complex processes that require intermediation by trusted parties has advanced in the past few years. Helping with the uptick are participants like the Lloyd’s market who have mandated electronic placement. However, several RI contracts are distinctive enough that automated placement is impractical due to the complexity. Property and casualty RI programs being straightforward, lend themselves to more automated placement. Insurtechs such as Tremor saw this opportunity and began in this part of the market.

Auction site Tremor improves price discovery for risks, making transactions more cost efficient. It has found success with more traditional cat reinsurance. Tremor launched a weekly Industry Loss Warranty (ILW) auction in the middle of the COVID-19 disruption to keep delivering liquidity through any potential market dislocation. It provides key marketplace management information making it an effective risk trading platform to draw both reinsurance buyers and sellers.

Features include quoting tools that allow cedents and reinsurers to more precisely express their terms, aggregate reports that offer insight into transactions and the wider market, and a portal enabling brokers to leverage the marketplace on behalf of clients. Reinsurers can add subjectivities after expressing supply curves and capacity limitations. With subjectivities, one layer subsidizes another to maximize a reinsurer’s allocation while ensuring the aggregate price still meets the company’s needs.

Tremor Technologies’ risk transfer marketplace counts 33 Lloyd’s of London syndicates among the risk capacity providers signed up, representing over $33 billion of capacity. Nearly a fifth of companies signed up to provide capacity are ILS funds.

Akinova allows brokers to list risks with accompanying documentation and conduct auctions with specific capacity providers or the marketplace as a whole. Taking RI online and logging trades electronically is a substantial step forward compared to the current shuffling of papers. The auction functionality combined with market intelligence ensures a more efficient market. Chat and news functionality adds a community building touch.

Vested interests in the current system can be strong, making any change a challenging endeavor. Incumbent underwriters and brokers with profitable, multi-year relationships are likely to resist changes. Established culture and ways of working may block change to entrenched processes. One major reinsurer declined because underwriting was worried about revealing pricing.

B3i is an interesting industry initiative, which has eighteen shareholders including many of Europe’s largest groups including Ageas, Allianz, AXA, Generali, Hannover Re, Liberty Mutual, Munich Re, SCOR, Swiss Re and Zurich. Its Cat XoL is is built on distributed ledger technology. The application supports end-to-end digitization of the placement process from cedent to reinsurer. Parties can negotiate terms, agree rates and complete placements.

Given the rapid and drastic shift to remote working, it was just a matter of time before the reinsurance market would break free from many of its person-to-person interactions. Automated placement is a positive for distribution platforms and insurers. Platforms gain market power, insurers would see rates fail, from lower distribution costs and lower pricing as platforms increase competition among reinsurers. For reinsurers, the implication is more nuanced. Access to risk expands, but so does competition.

Cover Image

Start the conversation at Daily Fintech Conversations


How to display and scroll set of images in horizontal, when clicked on the scatter plot? Example below

from bokeh.plotting import ColumnDataSource, figure, output_file, show
from bokeh.models.callbacks import CustomJS

def interactive(Y,imgList,dataset,tc):
    output_file("Scatter Plot Images over the Image Error distribution of Dataset {} {} .html".format(dataset,tc))

    source = ColumnDataSource(data=dict(
        x = Y,

    TOOLTIPS = """
                    src="@imgs" height="200" alt="@imgs" width="200"
                    style="float: left; margin: 0px 15px 15px 0px;"
    p = figure(plot_width=1440, plot_height=800, tooltips=TOOLTIPS,
               title="{} {}".format(dataset,tc))'x', 'y', size=5, source=source)
# execute a callback whenever the plot canvas is tapped

This does the work, but the images are shown vertically all once. I wish to show few images, and should be scroll able on horizontal axis.
Please do let me know how to achieve this.

should be scroll able on horizontal axis.

The entire tooltip itself always moves to exactly follow the mouse. It is not possible to ever have the mouse “inside” the tooltip, so it will not be possible to scroll anything inside the tooltip.

A better approach is probably to allow users to click the points (generating a “selection”) and then having a selection callback update content in a Div outside the plot.


What Marvel Movie Is After Age Of Ultron?

The next Marvel movie after Age of Ultron will be Captain America: Civil War. This has been confirmed by Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios.

Checkout this video:

Upcoming Marvel movies

The Avengers: Age of Ultron is the latest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it won’t be the last. Here’s a look at the upcoming slate of Marvel movies:

Captain America: Civil War (May 6, 2016)
The first movie on Marvel’s Phase Three slate, Captain America: Civil War will see the Avengers divided over the issue of government control. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) will support government oversight, while Captain America (Chris Evans) will oppose it. The conflict will eventually escalate into an all-out war between the two factions, with Spider-Man (Tom Holland) caught in the middle.

Doctor Strange (November 4, 2016)
Marvel’s first foray into the world of sorcery, Doctor Strange will tell the story of Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), a former surgeon who turns to magic after a car accident robs him of his livelihood. Tilda Swinton, Rachel McAdams, and Chiwetel Ejiofor will also star.

Marvel’s band of cosmic misfits returns for another adventure in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Not much is known about the plot at this point, but we do know that Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, and Vin Diesel will all be back as Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, and Groot respectively. Kurt Russell is also on board as Ego — yes, that’s his character’s name — Star-Lord’s long-lost father.

Thor: Ragnarok (November 3 , 2017)
Thor: Ragnarok will pick up after Avengers: Infinity War and see Thor (Chris Hemsworth) teaming up with his fellow Avenger Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) to stop Ragnarok — aka the end of Asgardian civilization — from coming to pass. Tom Hiddleston is also set to return as Loki

The Avengers: Age of Ultron

The Russo Brothers

The Russo Brothers, who directed Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War, are returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe to direct Avengers: Infinity War Parts 1 & 2.

The Infinity War

After the events of Age of Ultron, the Avengers are split up into two teams. One team goes after Thanos himself, while the other team sets out to stop his lieutenants from collecting the Infinity Stones. The movie culminates in a massive battle on Earth, as well as in space and on another planet. The movie is set to be released in 2018.

The Endgame

The next Marvel movie after Avengers: Age of Ultron is Avengers: Endgame. This is the final installment in the Avengers series, and it is scheduled to be released on April 26, 2019.

Kevin Feige

Kevin Feige, the head of Marvel Studios, has said that the sequel to “Age of Ultron” will be “different than anything that’s come before--audiences should expect the unexpected.” He also hinted that the film will focus on more than one superhero.

Stan Lee

The answer is Stan Lee, who is set to make a cameo appearance in the film. He is marketing chief of Marvel Entertainment and publisher of its comic books.

Marvel Studios

Marvel Studios is an American film studio that is a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, which is a part of The Walt Disney Company. The studio is best known for its multi-billion dollar superhero franchise, which includes some of the most popular characters in the world, such as Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Scarlet Witch.

Marvel Studios’ first film was Iron Man (2008), which was followed by The Incredible Hulk (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010), Thor (2011), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Marvel’s The Avengers (2012), Iron Man 3 (2013), Thor: The Dark World (2013), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Ant-Man (2015), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Doctor Strange (2016), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Thor: Ragnarok(2017), Black Panther(2018) , Avengers: Infinity War(2018) , Ant-Man and the Wasp(2018) , Captain Marvel(2019) , Avengers: Endgame(2019) , Spider-Man: Far From Home(2019).

Walt Disney Studios

Walt Disney Studios has announced the release date for the next Marvel movie after “Age of Ultron.” The untitled film will open in theaters on May 1, 2015. This will be the first Marvel movie to be released under the Walt Disney Studios banner. Previously, all Marvel movies were released under the Buena Vista banner.

DC Comics

DC Comics has been on the big screen for just as long as Marvel, but their movies have never been as popular. This is likely because DC’s most popular characters, such as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, have already been done justice in previous movies. Marvel, on the other hand, is still able to release new and interesting films with each new movie. DC’s answer to this is the Justice League, which will be released in 2017.

Scroll to Top


Friends of Europe

Friends of Europe is an independent think tank with a difference. With 20 years’ experience, we have a unique toolbox at our disposal to connect stakeholders, foster debates and trigger the change needed to create a more inclusive, sustainable and forward-looking world. We aim to be a catalyst for change and believe that real solutions come from transforming mindsets through the confrontation of ideas and the breaking down of silos between policymakers, business leaders, and civil society representatives.

The focus of our peace, security and defence programme is the resilience of our institutions, societies, and democracy.  By building on our previous recommendations and proposed solutions to global security challenges, we seek to formulate and identify innovative means of reducing both internal and global tensions and countering the shift away from democracy and stability in an era of systemic shocks. This includes unique public-private tabletop exercises, whole-of-society dialogue to counter disinformation narratives, and providing EU leaders with innovative solutions to counter hybrid threats, promote democracy, and achieve a sustainable future for Europe.

Contact Information

Shopping Basket


The big dish chicken in Xinjiang is well known. The first choice for meat eaters. We eat a large plate of chicken here, which can be matched with many things, such as belt noodles, Nang, strip pulling, etc. we can add whatever we like. Anyway, it is the integration of food and food. This is our eating habit here. Today, this is also a large plate chicken, but the method has changed the matching ingredients in the past and added konjac in it. The method is the same as the large plate chicken. The taste is beyond your imagination. Now many stores also have this dish konjac large plate chicken. This matching is really great. A new way to eat large plate chicken. This collocation is a match made in heaven. The meat is fragrant and the spicy skin is gone.

800g three yellow chicken
400g konjac
Appropriate amount of vegetable oil
Proper amount of salt
Moderate spicy skin
Proper amount of ginger
1 green onion
2G pepper granules
1 grass fruit
Proper amount of sugar

Step 1
Clean up the three yellow chicken and cut it into pieces

Step 2
Bring the pot under cold water to a boil and remove it

Step 3
Cut the konjac into pieces, add konjac in the boiling water of the soup pot, add salt, cook in water for 10 minutes, pick it up, wash and pick it up in cold water, wash and cut the onion and ginger into sections or slices, peel the garlic, bubble the spicy skin, wash and cut the green pepper into pieces

Step 4
Cool the oil in a hot pot, heat the oil by 60%, and fry it into small brown bubbles with white sugar

Step 5
Stir fry the chicken nuggets and color them evenly until the chicken feet smell and the skin has small bubbles

Step 6
Add ginger, prickly ash, grass fruit and spicy skin to stir fry until fragrant

Step 7
Add water and bring to a boil. Turn to medium heat for about 20 minutes

Step 8
Add konjac and salt, stir fry evenly, and then continue to burn for about 20 minutes

Step 9
Add scallion, green pepper and garlic and stir fry until fragrant