text:
#ifndef __BLOCK_H__
#define __BLOCK_H__

#include <stdint.h>
#include <cstddef>

class Block
{
public:

    virtual ~Block(void) {}
    /*
        Copy data into block object.
    */
    virtual void memcpy(std::size_t index, const void* source, std::size_t num) = 0;

    /*
        Copy data out from block object.
    */
    virtual void memcpy(void* destination, std::size_t index, std::size_t num) = 0;

    /*  Index access.
    */
    virtual uint8_t& operator[](const std::size_t index) = 0;
    virtual uint8_t& at(const std::size_t index) = 0;

    /*
        Accessors and mutators.
    */
    virtual uint32_t getMaxLength(void) const
    {
        return maxLength;
    }

    virtual uint32_t getLength(void) const
    {
        return length;
    }

    virtual uint32_t getOffset(void) const
    {
        return offset;
    }

    virtual void setLength(uint32_t _length)
    {
        length = _length;
    }

    virtual void setOffset(uint32_t _offset)
    {
        offset = _offset;
    }

protected:
    virtual void setMaxLength(uint32_t _maxLength)
    {
        maxLength = _maxLength;
    }

    uint32_t length;
    uint32_t offset;
    uint32_t maxLength;
};

#endif // __BLOCK_H__


I had problems with the drones when I tried to summarize a game started in version 9.0 in version 9.1.
They were two problems: one is the one that describes, the drones only appeared when I approached a lot of them, after they appeared, they worked normally. But it happened a few times.
The second, which occurred frequently, was that they did not move and did not explode after the hit points were over, "they were dead in the sky."
When I attacked the Drone Base, in which several drones are launched, the game crashed and fell to the desktop. After that I could not even carry it anymore, always drop to the desktop.
I did not have time to start a new game after this , so I do not know the current status of the drones.
Nicely done guys! I hope you will complete all this faction stuff, so factions can war between each other, capture POIs and planets maybe. Also guys, please don't lose your attention from playfield improvements (seas for example have nothing to do in them, caves and underground POIs would be great as hell!). I hope you will do this guys. Keep it up!
Letting the devs make bad decisions without saying anything doesn't help the game or fellow players. The devs didn't even follow their own standard procedure with the 9.0 release. Address the points I made don't just cry. If they aren't going to at least pretend to keep the stable branch stable it needs to be removed so there is no false expectation.
While you make some valid points, the tone of your posts undermines that. Whether you're right or not you won't be effective at communicating your opinion and convincing others to make the changes you want if you're insulting them. I think you're right that the main branch should be kept more stable so that people can actually have a decent experience playing the game rather than testing it.
The early access designation does serve as a sort of disclaimer that things like this can happen so they technically didn't do anything wrong but the reason I think they should keep things stable is because it's important for them to maintain and grow a community of supportive players so they stay funded and relevant. If things become too volatile in the main branch then people will get frustrated and rage quit. They won't come back and they'll steer others away in the future. Keep the brand spanking new stuff in experimental where the more tolerant players and those interested in testing can get to it but the more casual players won't see it until things have been more refined. This also prevents bad habits from developing in terms of release stability which will be more important when the game is actually released.
I would also advise them to make it the norm to retain a branch for the last full alpha every time and to make it available prior to a release. That would allow server admins to switch to this branch and not automatically receive the new release. Once people have time to prepare and major issues are sorted out, they can switch to the latest. Bugs will still be found and whatnot but there should be far fewer infuriating scenarios for players with this sort of release process in place.
Also, I'm curious if Eleon uses any sort of test framework to help prevent regressions and ease the human testing burden.
Sofianinho, Atola, Wellingtoon and 3 others like this.
I would also advise them to make it the norm to retain a branch for the last full alpha every time and to make it available prior to a release. That would allow server admins to switch to this branch and not automatically receive the new release. Once people have time to prepare and major issues are sorted out, they can switch to the latest.
Previous versions are available all the way back to Alpha 6, and there's even a significantly older version for nostalgia's sake.
Having previous versions available doesn't change the fact that most people will use the default release and base their feedback on that. If there are bugs, and known issues that were reported in experimental but not fixed before being pushed to the default version, then...well... no comment.
Seems 9.x is reaching a decent place now at least.
My contentions is that there have been ZERO fixes actually made to the game. The players on my server, myself included are seeing the same bugs today on 9.2.whatever 1/22/2019 as we did in mid december of 2018 on 9.0.4. I have submitted support tickets via email and also on their thread and have had no one address the issues. In Fact, Eleon just pushed out more junk and called it an update and said the issues were fixed.
I have hours of streamed evidence that so called fixed items are affecting the game still.
Since there was not even a form response to their support tickets I've ceased putting them in because they are not being dealt with anyway.
For the devs to not address player issues through their own support mechanism is not promising.
The game has potential and could make a fair bit of money for the studio if they had competent management.
Lol - I was just stating what is.
But yea, A9 was rushed.
If you want really really stable... use the Alpha 8 build. Its available from steam.
I'd advise players to check out some of the older versions to see what things were removed. There were some really good concepts back then that got the axe (that would work well in current builds now).
As I am currently on an involuntary Break from EGS - health wise - can you tell me an estimate when A9.3 will hit?
hm difficult to awnser but I take it around the end of the month.
TK85, Maverick241 and Germanicus like this.
Just my 2-bits about experimental and stable.
Firstly, IMO we are very lucky to have such regular and content filled updates. Not just the major updates but the bug fixing and random content changes, so thanks to the Devs for these.
I believe the drawback to having such regular releases is that this creates an sense of urgency to release the next update - big, small, content, bug fixing, etc - as long as something is released.
If you look at the major releases they come out every 6 months or so (sometimes longer), so we are lucky if we get 2 major updates in a year.
These updates are always followed by a stream of bug fixing and tweaking - a direct result of the major update being released. The public release of a stable version is important here as the experimental branch is a small sample group of the player base.
Stable release = more testers = more feedback = more bugs found and features refined.
A major update is released every 8 months.
Whatever the actual time periods are, the key point here is that items are not delayed or rushed. If a feature isn't ready for a major release then it is is pushed back to a stable.X release and the major update is released without it. If there are changes or bugs to fix then this waits for the weekly update. If an update or release is due but nothing is ready then whatever is ready is pushed out.
This way people will know, or can be told (and thus expectations managed) what to expect.
There are always expectations of course, like major game-stopping bugs that need quashing and the need to communicate other things.
These are of course only opinions I have formed and I have no idea how the specific development cycle or the developers work or the the pressures (self imposed or community driven, real or imagined) they have are under... and to be honest I doubt there are many on this forum that do.
Whatever happens, keep up the good work peeps!
vscuorzo and TK85 like this.
...experimental branch is a small sample group of the player base.
I don't care I only play experimental I have no horse in the experimental vs stable game other than the fact that everytime they rush a buggy build to stable it drives away players expecting Stable to be stable making it that much more likely the game will get bad reviews, people will not buy it anymore and development will stop.
Normal "alpha" terminology does not apply to a game that has been publicly accessible (and purchasable) for over 3 years. The expectations of the gaming lay-community are that the stable branch will be... stable. Skipping experimental branch to go straight to stable with the early versions of alpha 9 definitely was detrimental to the player experience, and thus to the player numbers. It was practically inexcusable. It should have stayed experimental much, much longer.
Too many devs try to have their cake and eat it too, when it comes to early access and "alpha" status (Space Engineers was particularly brazen about this, having anniversary launch parties while they were still "technically" in early access). Here's a hint - if you're already at the point in your business cycle where you have to offer 50% discounts during steam sales, you are definitely no longer in the "alpha" portion of your game's cycle - in fact, you're nearing the end of the game's life.
And that's my biggest fear for this game - that by the time it gets all the content that the devs and die-hard players want, it'll be dead. Everybody who will have ever wanted to buy the game will have already done so, played it, and moved on. All while it was in "alpha."
So, yes, maintaining the integrity of the "stable" branch is crucial if you want to maintain a playerbase.
Get off the "alpha this" "alpha that" nonsense. Its off topic, and beaten to death by people who have nothing better to do with their lives.
GoldDragon, TK85, malrose1 and 1 other person like this.
We will, as soon as fanboys stop hiding behind the Alpha shield to excuse bad development practices.
Yeah I've been encountering this, more so in 9.1 and 9.2. It's pretty easy to reproduce. When the 'base drone attack' warning is sounded, travel a decent distance away from the base (and not in the direction from where the drones spawn), waste enough time that the drones should be at your base (check your auto-miners, water gens, etc), and head back. As soon as you come into rendering distance of your base, the drones pop-in, and are doing damage. Normally, if I'm at the base during a drone attack, the drones don't get anywhere near the base, being taken out by the turrets at range. With the pop-in, the drones are on top of the base, doing damage and it takes a moment for the base to 'realize' that the drones are there and start defending the base. I now have to ensure I don't leave the base until after incoming drones have been taken out. In my current instance, the first time it happened I lost the whole side of my base, so it can certainly be disheartening, knowing I had the defenses, but they were afk lol.
As well as jackholes stop coming up with nonsense saying the development cycle of Early Access should be completely ignored.
Get off it. No one cares.
malrose1, Jawatraders, krazzykid2006 and 1 other person like this.
Kilndown and Itchy Stank like this.
@Archimedez - I've not actually triggered Drone attacks yet, I'm just encountering Drones in the wild that are constantly seem to spawn in right on top of me, yet actually appear to be there (and able to shoot me) but just not rendered.
Flying around in a squishy CV used to be fairly safe, as you could choose to avoid Drones. However, when said Drones aren't rendered yet can still shoot you, often the first you know about it is hearing the impacts on the hull. Sometimes it's possible to take a lot of damage as there's no sound cue to let you know you're being hit.
Not sure exactly when this Drone rendering issue was introduced though it may have been present in 9.0. I recall approaching a seemingly unguarded Titan Wreck section in my starting HV, parking near it and only then have Drones appear to spawn. However, they may well have just been unrendered but on the other side of the Titan so unable to shoot from a distance.
If I see no Drones, there are no Drones on the Radar nor are there the tell-tail red blips on the map screen, yet there are Drones actively shooting me...well, I'm sorta at a bit of a disadvantage there. I'm playing SP, so have now reloaded a couple of time due to taking excess damage from somewhere with no way to counter it.
This doesn't appear to be affecting everyone, so perhaps it's related to my game being started in a slightly earlier version - still 9.x though of course.
Note: it's not uncommon to have turrets firing at Drones a long way off that aren't rendered in yet - that's just the normal (too short IMO) render distance. However, having an invisible Drone up close and firing being ignored by turrets is a total pain. Problem is, turrets are often very slow to respond, so is it that I'm seeing when they don't fire, or another artefact of the Drone being unrendered? I really don't know.
mR_kAt, Archimedez and TK85 like this.


text:
Share this Story: Women helping drive Calgary's tech renaissance: Report
Women helping drive Calgary's tech renaissance: Report
Olivia Condon
Stream rises from the downtown skyline on another frigid start to the day in the city. Gavin Young/Postmedia
Women are helping drive a boom in Alberta's technology and innovation sector, launching or co-founding more than 30 per cent of tech startups, according to a new study.
Alberta's female entrepreneurs have doubled the national average in participation in technology according to the Alberta Enterprise Corp.'s 2018 Deal Flow study, which notes 70 per cent of the province's tech companies are generating revenue, with nearly a quarter bringing in more than $1 million annually.
Women helping drive Calgary's tech renaissance: Report Back to video
The study found 432 new technology startups have been established in Alberta since 2016 for a total of 1,238 tech companies headquartered across the province.
Calgary leads the way with 767 companies operating in the city, compared with Edmonton's 394.
In a news release, AEC president and CEO Kristina Williams said these new numbers show a promising future for the tech sector.
"The objective of this study is to provide stakeholders with a shared understanding of the strength and makeup of technology companies across sectors, stages and regions in Alberta," she said.
"I think the take-away is that creating a viable Alberta tech sector is a slow and steady process, but one that is paying dividends."
As the industry grows, the makeup of tech in the province has seen an evolution toward modernity, with 34 per cent of Alberta firms integrating artificial intelligence into their offerings and products.
Software companies make up the majority of the industry at 40 per cent, followed by life sciences at 13 per cent, clean sciences at 11 per cent, energy tech at 10 per cent, and industrial hardware and materials at nine per cent.
Of the study's 1,238 participants, AEC conducted a smaller survey with 208 respondents who said Alberta offers "significant early-stage opportunity for tech investors." Around 70 per cent of companies surveyed are currently looking for funding and 58 per cent are hoping to raise more than US$500,000 this year.
"Our growing tech sector is creating a more sustainable, diversified technology industry in Alberta: one where homegrown innovation is encouraged, and technology entrepreneurs have greater access to capital," Williams said.
"As a result, we're seeing more and more Alberta tech firms ready to take on the world."
ocondon@postmedia.com

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Ampedus balteatus est une espèce de taupins du genre Ampedus que l'on rencontre dans les forêts de pins de la Sibérie à l'Europe du Nord, jusqu'à la France et les Alpes en passant par le Caucase, les Carpathes et l'Europe centrale. Elle se rencontre aussi au pied des bouleaux et dans les landes de bruyères.

Cette espèce a été décrite par Carl von Linné dans son Systema naturae sous le nom d'Elater balteatus décrivant brièvement ses élytres comme elytris antice dimidiato-rubris (élytres faiblement rouges), puis comme elytris bicoloribus e fulvo & nigro (élytres bicolores de couleur fauve et noire).

Taxonomie
Synonymes
 Elater balteatus Linnaeus, 1758
 Elater flavescens Fourcroy, 1785
 Elater histrio Gmelin, 1790

Description
Cette espèce se présente avec un corps allongé et relativement plat d'environ , rétréci vers l'arrière. Son tégument est recouvert d'une pilosité noire sur le dessus et brunâtre sous le corps. La tête prognathe est encastrée dans le prothorax avec de petits yeux de chaque côté. Le prothorax est mobile (doté d'un mucron permettant le saut, comme tous les élatéridés) et d'un noir profond, comme la capsule céphalique. La partie postérieure du pronotum se termine par deux pointes postérieures.

Les élytres épais et chitineux de couleur fauve et noire recouvrent le mésothorax.

Notes et références

Liens externes

Bibliographie
  Klaus Koch, Die Käfer Mitteleuropas. Ökologie, 1. Auflage. 2, Goecke & Evers, Krefeld, 1989, p. 61

Espèce de Coléoptères (nom scientifique)
Elateridae

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
For Female Vets, a New Fight at Home
Women veterans four times as like to be homeless as men.
By LISA FLETCHER and FELICIA BIBERICA
March 14, 2010 — -- Mickiela Montoya served her country for seven years. A military policewoman in Iraq, she faced mortar attacks and gunfire But when she came home, her bravery and her skills were useless.
A single mother without a college degree, she found herself on the streets.
"I don't fit the typical stereotype of a homeless person or how a homeless person would be or look," said Montoya, an articulate and attractive 24-year-old.
Neither does Alicia Watkins. A veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, she wound up homeless while struggling to cope her physical and emotional wounds.
"Your family, they want the person that they sent off to the war. And they will never get that person back," Watkins said. "So it's just a matter of trying to get them to understand that I will never be the same."
There are an estimated 6,500 homeless female veterans on America's streets, double the number of a decade ago, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Women veterans are four times more likely than their male counterparts to wind up homeless.
Dr. Diane West runs one of the few programs in the country specifically designed for homeless women veterans at U.S. Vets in Long Beach, Calif.
"Right now we have a program for up to 30 women veterans and I have a waiting list all the time," West said. "The women are coming back and they're depressed. Some of them are suicidal. Some of them don't know how to parent at all and they can be abusive to their own children."
Women vets face all the same issues as their male counterparts: post traumatic stress, sleeplessness and battle injuries. But they face additional challenges unique to them.
Many, like Montoya, are single mothers.
Montoya said she had to leave the army because she had no one to take care of her 2-year-old daughter.
"I went to the VA to ask if they had any type of daycare help or resources and they said no, she's not a veteran, we have help for veterans," Montoya said.
Finding a good paying job with money for child care has been tough, she said.
"My friends went to college and now they have careers," she said. "I dedicated seven years of my life to the military and it's as if it were for nothing."
Homeless Female Veterans on America's Streets
West's program saved her from hitting bottom, Montoya said.
She called the program a miracle, but for Montoya's there, 49-year-old Carmen Black, the miracle almost came too late.
Black left the military struggling with issues including unresolved sexual abuse she suffered as a child, and fell into drug abuse and prostitution, she said.
"When I finally decided that I wanted to get clean and I went into the first rehab, it was all men, VA," Black said. "It's hard to share with a man about what I'm feeling about being raped."
That's the other unique challenge faced by many women vets. A VA study found one in three report they were raped or sexually assaulted while serving.
Montoya said a fellow soldier threatened to rape her in Iraq. She scared him off by telling him she had a knife.
"I think I can say confidently that every single woman in the military has dealt with sexual harassment at some time in their career," she said.
West says many of the women she has worked with came from chaotic families and joined the military because they believed it was a place where they would be protected.
They thought "they'd have a gun and nobody would mess with them again," West said.
"But there's a power structure in the military," she said. "So they're in the same situation and they gravitate towards the same types of people and they're at risk for being abused and having more trauma while they're in the military."
The U.S. Vets program helped get Black back on her feet. She said she is sober and has gone through the U.S. Vets Renew Program for women veterans with sexual trauma.
Black said she now has a good job at the VA hospital in Long Beach, has regained custody of her 12-year-old son and soon will leave U.S. Vets for her own place.
For now, all three women have a roof over their head. But thousands of other women vets are still in trouble.
"I thank god for the American public for wanting us home," Watkins said. "But when we get here, we need help."
Help they believe all veterans deserve.


text:
Q: Is There Any Way To Reduce Lag When Using The GLSL Shaders Mod? I have just installed the shaders mod to make a Minecraft Machinama, but the lag from all of the shader packs are terrible!  My FPS drops from 300 to 30 with almost every single one!  So I am wondering if there is any possible way to reduce the lag without having to lower my settings.  Thanks!

A: Asking to impove fps without reducing settings is a bit strange, optimisations usually require compromise. If your PC/Laptop doesn't have the hardware for the task there isn't much you can do about it.
If for some reason you haven't already installed optifine, this would be a good first step, after that reduce settings to a level where everything looks as good as it can without ruining framerate.
bear in mind that if you are attempting to record play with something like cam-studio or fraps, your frame rate will reduce significantly again while the recorder is in use
Good luck :)

A: Another thing you can do, if you have a Windows computer, is to go to Task Manager and set the priority of "javaw.exe" to High or Realtime.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Understanding T. C. Boyle
By Paul Gleason
Understanding T. C. Boyle is the first book-length study of one of contemporary America's most prolific, popular, and critically acclaimed fiction writers. The author of seven short story collections and eleven novels, T. C. Boyle has been honored with the 1988 PEN/Faulkner Award for World's End, the 1997 Prix Médicis Étranger for The Tortilla Curtain, the 1999 PEN/Malamud Award for T. C. Boyle: Stories, and a 2003 National Book Award nomination for Drop City. Boyle's 1993 novel, The Road to Wellville, was adapted into a feature film.
Paul Gleason begins his investigation of Boyle's work by exploring the biographical, historical, and literary contexts at play in the writer's fiction. Gleason maps the literary influences that shaped Boyle's "wise guy" style, among them Gabriel García Márquez, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and Samuel Beckett. The volume then features chapters on Boyle's short fiction and his novels of the past three decades. Gleason demonstrates Boyle's literary development as entertainer, absurdist, social commentator and critic, and historical novelist who chronicles the baby boomer generation while addressing a range of contemporary social issues, such as race relations, illegal immigration, and feminism.
Gleason shows how Boyle uses dark humor as a moral and satiric force for social commentary in the tradition of writers such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Though the entertainment value of Boyle's writing has much to do with his popularity, Gleason also sees him as an iconoclast who questions his generation's ideals, philosophies, and actions.
Paul Gleason is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Cardinal Stritch University. He has published essays on major modernist and postmodernist writers including Beckett, DeLillo, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, McElroy, Nabokov, and Vollmann.
Publisher University of South Carolina Press
Series Understanding Contemporary American Literature
LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General (331 Titles)
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures (96 Titles)
Other Titles from Understanding Contemporary American Literature
Understanding Philip Roth
Matthew A. Shipe
Apr 2022 - University of South Carolina Press
Understanding Jennifer Egan
Alexander Moran
Sep 2021 - University of South Carolina Press
Understanding Alice Walker
Thadious M. Davis
Aug 2021 - University of South Carolina Press
See All 96 Titles from Understanding Contemporary American Literature
Other Titles in LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General
Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature
Paul Douglass
Mar 2025 - University Press of Kentucky
Craft Class
The Writing Workshop in American Culture
Christopher Kempf
Mar 2022 - Johns Hopkins University Press
Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban
James W. Coleman
See All 331 Titles in LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General
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text:
Q: Declaring list with anonymous type I am trying to declare list which has anonymous type in it. I have tried to assign list value to null and also tried to assign list to new entity list but it shows error. Any pointers?
var finalEntries = new List<MyDbTableEntity>();

var groupedItemList = _context.MyDbTableEntity
                      .Select(k => new { name = k.name.ToString(), data = k.info.ToString() })
                      .GroupBy(k => k.name)
                      .ToList();

finalEntries.AddRange(groupedItemList);

Error
cannot convert from
'System.Collections.Generic.List<System.Linq.IGrouping<string, <anonymous type: string name, string data>>>'
to
'System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<MyDbTableEntity>'

A: It does not work because you have a typed list of MyDbTableEntity. You cannot add a different type on this typed list. Try to define the right type?
var finalEntries = new List<MyDbTableEntity>();

var groupedItemList = _context.MyDbTableEntity
                      .Select(k => new MyDbTableEntity { Name = k.name.ToString(), Data = k.info.ToString() })
                      .GroupBy(k => k.Name)
                      .ToList();

finalEntries.AddRange(groupedItemList);

or it or change it to a list of object.
var finalEntries = new List<object>();

// not sure about your type
var groupedItemList = _context.MyDbTableEntity
                      .Select(k => new { name = k.name.ToString(), data = k.info.ToString() })
                      .GroupBy(k => k.name)
                      .ToList();

finalEntries.AddRange(groupedItemList);

Importante: The problem of this is when you lose this scope you will not get a typed anonymous type, I mean, you will need to use some artifacts to read the properties, for sample: use reflection to convert the type into a dictionary.

A: In this example, Select().GroupBy().ToList() essentially returns a list of lists. The top level list contains all the groups created by GroupBy() while the second level lists contain the rows for each group returned from the Select() method. These are anonymous typed objects which are totally different from MyDbTableEntity
Neither the list of groups, nor the anonymous typed objects are convertable to your MyDbTableEntity type. To demonstrate what I mean, if you removed the Select() statement (and therefore the anonymous types) you could change the last line to the following and it would work:
foreach(var items in groupedItemList) finalEntries.AddRange(items);

Of course, this defeats the purpose of grouping in the first place but it does demonstrate one aspect of why the original code didn't work. The second aspect was demonstrated by the removal of the Select() statement
Here is an example of what I mean:
    class Person {
        public string FirstName;
        public string LastName;
        public Person(string firstName, string lastName) {
            FirstName = firstName;
            LastName = lastName;
        }
    }

    Person[] people = {
        new Person("Fred", "Bloggs"),
        new Person("Linda", "Bloggs"),
        new Person("Joe", "Bloe"),
        new Person("Jane", "Bloe"),
        new Person("Fred", "Flinstone")};

    public void Test() {
        List<Person> list = new List<Person>();

        // This works
        var peopleGroupedByLastName = people.GroupBy(k => k.LastName).ToList();
        foreach(var grp in peopleGroupedByLastName) {
            // The grp var holds a list of Person objects, each with the same last name
            list.AddRange(grp); // Pointless, but works
        }

        // The following will not even compile because the anonymous typed objects are
        // not compatible with Person objects, despite having exactly the same fields
        var peopleGroupedByLastName2 = people
            .Select(k => new { FirstName = k.FirstName, LastName = k.LastName })
            .GroupBy(k => k.LastName)
            .ToList();
        foreach(var grp in peopleGroupedByLastName2)
            list.AddRange(grp); // Not "Person" objects
    }

A: var finalEntries = Enumerable.Empty<MyDbTableEntity>()
                      .Select(k => new MyDbTableEntity { Name = k.name.ToString(), Data = k.info.ToString() })
                      .GroupBy(k => k.Name)
                      .ToList();

var groupedItemList = _context.MyDbTableEntity
                      .Select(k => new MyDbTableEntity { Name = k.name.ToString(), Data = k.info.ToString() })
                      .GroupBy(k => k.Name)
                      .ToList();

finalEntries.AddRange(groupedItemList);

http://rextester.com/KNLMR37736


Behind the Shrubbery is a dry, sandy area of my garden, where plants have to be extra tough, preferably a bit 'weedy', to survive. So I've let Periwinkle cover the ground, and in the space above there's a mini-forest of Genista (a hybrid exotic broom).
I bought two (bargains at one dollar each) of these shrubs some years ago. In New Zealand 'broom' is a noxious, undesirable shrub, but not so Genista x spachiana 'Yellow Imp'. However, my originals have produced masses of seedlings, which have in turn produced masses of seedlings. Hmm... The wild broom is obviously still in there, straining to escape!
'Genista x spachiana 'Yellow Imp' is a fast growing, tough exotic hybrid broom with small dark green trifoliate leaves. It produces for long periods during late spring and summer masses of small, fragrant, golden, pea shaped flowers on slender terminal racemes up to 10cm long. In New Zealand's conditions it has a lifespan of 5 to 10 years and will obtain a height of 3m and a width of 2m.
The size of the Genistas in this web-site's photographs are impressive - my own shrubs are sheltered by tall trees, and as a result rather more subdued. But the word 'dwarf' on Little Imp's plant label is a nonsense. 'Little Giant' might be a better variety name!


text:
Full CFP
Conference Archive
Literary London Society
Imagined/Remembered Londons
C. Bruna Mancini
In his famous essay The Image of the City (1960) Kevin Lynch asserts that writers have contributed to create the cities we inhabit, as their architects and builders. In fact, the image of the city — created by literature and painting, and perfected by the cinematographic language[1] — precedes the city itself; even better, it is through it that the traveller seems to be attracted into its texture/web of streets, buildings, monuments. For example, we can evoke the figure of Goethe irresistibly charmed by Rome, or Marco Polo anxious to reach the golden cities of Katai, or even Proust who, in his Recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927), can solemnly affirm that, in addition to – and prior to – being real cities, Florence and Venice are names full of dream and imagination.
The urban image, portrayed by the artists in their works, becomes an icon with a vigorous expressive meaning. It makes the city legible, memorable, imaginable. Close to every single real city, standing out in all its concreteness, there is an imaginary, remembered, narrated/narrative city;[2] or better, there are many different imagined cities born of dreams, utopic visions, haunting nightmares, disturbing contexts. Thus the urban text(ure) gives birth to powerful and inseparable "doubles" of itself: imagined, unreal, or even hyperreal cities whose magic and seductive images make them more real than "the" real.[3]
In the second chapter of La città postmoderna/The Postmodern City, Giandomenico Amendola writes that nowadays the boundary between reality and image is weak, labile, ephemeral: the lived city, the desired city and the imagined city tend to merge.[4] So the real city looks more and more like the imagined ones. The urban/architectonic space becomes a linguistic/poetical space, the space of imagination.[5] Through imagination and memory, the narrated/imagined cities cause the real world to be absorbed by an imaginary one, acquiring a powerful symbolic value.
Significant in this sense seems to be (the image of) London, a city which has always held a remarkable hold over the artistic imagination. Lawrence Phillips — in an editorial suggestively entitled "Literary London: An Old, New Subject?", in the first issue of Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London[6] — remembers "the biggest aggregation of human life, the most complete compendium of the world" described by Henry James at the end of the nineteenth century;[7] the London of Malcom Bradbury's "aesthetic realism"; the theatricality/simulation of Wordsworth's London; the topography bound to gender/genre in the cities of Fanny Burney and Charles Dickens; the London seen through the "alien" eyes of authors such as Krishnabhabini Das, Lee Kok Liang, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul. And again, I would add the grotesque, caricatural London portrayed by William Hogarth and Gustave Doré;[8] the dark and dangerous London of many detective and spy stories; the cataclysmatic London of the future predicted by the authors of the British New Wave.[9]
In the novel entitled City of the Mind (1991) Penepole Lively writes:
Everyone is talking, shouting. Language hangs in the night air and throbs in giant lettering above shops and theatres. A column of buses stands pulsing in a traffic jam: Gospel Oak, Putney Heath, Clapton Pond, Wood Green. Matthew and Alice pause on the pavement and he thinks of the city fung out all around, invisible and inviolate. He forgets, for an instant, his own concerns, and feels the power of the place, its resonances, its charge of life, its coded narrative. He reads the buses and sees that the words are the silt of all that has been here — hills and rivers, woods and fields, trade, worship, customs and events, and the unquenchable evidence of language. The city mutters still in Anglo-Saxon; it remembers the hills that have become Neasden and Islington and Hendon, the marshy islands of Bermondsey and Battersea. The ghost of another topography lingers; the uplands and the streams, the woodland and fords are inscribed still on the London Streetfinder, on the ubiquitous geometry of the nderground map, in the destinations of buses. The Fleet River, its last physical trickle locked away underground in a cast iron pipe, leaves its name defiant and untamed upon the surface. The whole place is one babble of allusions, all chronology subsumed into the distortions and mutations of today, so that in the end what is visible and what is uttered are complementary. The jumbled brick and stone of the city's landscape is a medley of style in which centuries and decades rub shoulders in a disorder that denies the sequence of time. Language takes up the theme, an arbitrary scatter of names that juxtaposes commerce and religion, battles and conquests, kings, queens and potentates, that reaches back a thousands years or ten, providing in the end a dictionary of reference for those who will listen. Cheapside, Temple, Trafalgar, Quebec, a profligacy of Victorias and Georges and Cumberands and Bedfords — there it all is, on a million pairs of lips every day, on and on, the imperishable clamour of those who have been here before.[10]
In this passage the real London transforms itself into a fantastic, hypnotic image full of historical/social references as well as of personal/mental visions. The urban topography becomes an infinite hypertext[11] encoding the whole (hi)story of the city, its citizens, its buildings, its streets, its monuments, the events that have happened and that still happen in it: fragments/links of a past and a present which take the form of unreal/phantasmal mental images. Years, centuries, millennia melt together as the remembered, imagined city overlaps the real one.
London is not only (no longer) a large metropolis but a powerful image, a symbol, the texture of our desires and/or of our fears; an "unreal city", like that appearing in The Waste Land (1922), which recalls urban images of the past and of the present (maybe of the future, too, if we observe it through the eyes of the old and blind Tiresias) giving them a mythical aura.[12] Fragments, memories, emblems of cities full of meaning which act as the vestiges of a noble tradition of culture, similar to the literary ruins which close the poem.[13]
Suitably, only in the streets of this infinite, uncanny urban text can Virginia Woolf survive her demon, getting lost in the crowd. In "Street Haunting: A London's Adventure" (1930), for example, she discovers the most secret sensations of her soul, becoming part of an endless army of anonymous pedestrians. And, again, in "Flying Over London", Woolf imagines herself hovering in an airplane over London. With a typically refined cinematographic visivity/vision, the earth falls down and the sky comes down. The airplane is immersed, swallowed in it. The domes, the roofs, the buildings, the tangle of streets vanish, fade away, crumble, fly, sucked far away:
Nothing more fantastic could be imagined. Houses, streets, banks, public buildings, and habits and mutton and brussels sprouts had been swept into long spirals and curves of pink and purple like that a wet brush makes when it sweeps mounds of paint together. One could see through the Bank of England; all the business houses were transparent; the River Thames was as the Romans saw it, as paleolithic man saw it, at dawn from a hill shaggy with wood, with the rhinoceros digging his horn into the roots of rhododendrous. So immortally fresh and virginal London looked and England was earth merely, merely the world. Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood kept his finger still on the lever which turns the plane downwards. A spark glinted on a greenhouse. There rose a dome, a spire, a factory chimney, a gasometer. Civilization in short emerged; … Now, however, there were often movements in the streets, as of sliding and stopping; and then gradually the vast creases of the stuff beneath began moving, and one saw in the creases millions of insects moving. In another second they became men, men of business, in the heart of the white city buildings. … There were blocks in the city of traffic sometimes almost a foot long; these had to be translated into eleven or twelve Rolls Royces in a row with city magnates waiting furious; and one had to add up the fury of the magnates; and say – even though it was all silent and the block was only a few inches in length, how scandalous the control of the traffic in the City of London. But with a turn of his wrist Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood flew over the poor quarters, and there through the Zeiss glasses one could see people looking up at the noise of the aeroplane, and could judge the expression of their faces. It was not one that one sees ordinarily. It was complex. "And I have to scrub the steps," it seemed to say grudgingly. At the same, they saluted, they sent us greeting; they were capable of flight.[14]
This image/representation of London remembers to me another view of the city, this time seen from a train running through a metamorphic landscape, which appears in Tono Bungay (1906) by H. G. Wells. At the end of the fourth chapter, George Ponderevo — protagonist and omniscient narrator with a backward perspective — comes to the city, on a dull and smoky day, by the South Eastern Railway. Stage by stage, George can observe the multiplication of houses, the diminishing interspaces of market garden and dingy grass, the big factories, the gasometers and the wide reeking swamps of little homes, more of them and more and more; to the east, he can see a queer, incongruous forest of masts and spars. He marvels at this boundless world of dingy people, whiffs of industrial smell, van-crowded streets, tall warehouses, grey water, crowded barges, broad banks of indescribable mud. Cannon Street Station appears to him as "a monstrous dirty cavern" with trains packed across its vast floor:[15]
I could fill a book, I think, with a more or less imaginary account of how I came to apprehend London, how first in one aspect and then another it grew in my mind. Each day my accumulating impressions were added to and qualified and brought into relationship with new ones, they fused inseparably with others that were purely personal and accidental. I find myself with a certain comprehensive perception of London, complex indeed, incurably indistinct in places and yet in some way a whole that began with my first visit and is still being mellowed and enriched.
London!
At first, no doubt, it was a chaos of streets and people and buildings and reasonless going to and fro. I do not remember that I ever struggled very steadily to understand it, or explored it with any but a personal and adventurous intention. Yet in time there has grown up in me a kind of theory of London; I do think I see lines of an ordered structure out of which it has grown, detected a process that is something more than a confusion of casual accidents, though indeed it may be no more than a process of disease.[16]
This impressive description/"imaginary account" of London outlines an endless, boundless landscape, an immense crowd of people going to and fro on a pavement always covered with mud, under a grey and hopeless sky. The city appears to George as a second-hand dress, slovenly, harsh and irresponsive. An image I instinctively connect with the tangle of streets, courts, and alleys plunged in the direst poverty which appear in some films interpreted and directed by Charlie Chaplin during the first two decades of the twentieth century: Easy Street (1916), Police (1915) and The Kid (1921), for example. In them the city defines itself as a dangerous place full of snares and traps, inhabited by thieves, cheats and poor wretches. The dark gorges, the decrepit buildings, the dirty lanes, the black basements transform themselves into an elastic, porous fabric; a sort of enormous circus scenography in which the famous clown/tramp, masterfully interpreted by Chaplin, uses every single element of the urban environment in a very paradoxical way. Thus the urban image undergoes a kind of ironic splitting — both tragic and comic — and the audience can easily decode it as a poetic reminder, a bitter and satiric reaction to the rude London he lived/survived during his childhood.[17]
But all these (urban) features also remind me of the black, dangerous, ambiguous London described in some of the films produced by Alfred Hitchcock in his "British period" – The Lodger. A Story of the London Fog (1926), Sabotage (1936), and The Thirty-nine Steps (1935), for example — in which the metropolis defines itself as the ideal place where thrill and suspense can develop, expand and grow; an enormous, broaden cobweb; an eyrie of murderers, spies, assassins, conspirators, and bloody monsters. After all, London is the city of Jack the Ripper and Mr Hyde, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and James Bond. Its Babel hugeness, the danger and mystery of its labyrinthine routes, its pubs shrouded in mist, the endless stream of people and vehicles in its streets are icons everybody can recognize, even before seeing/visiting it personally.
We all know London is a metropolis of sharp contrasts, anonymous areas, poor streets and green parks, transgressive acts and multicultural encounters; a "world city", or better, "The Great World of London" that Henry Mayhew observed from his fire balloon in 1862 and that Mario Maffi still describes in his book entitled Londra. Mappe, storie, labirinti (2000) as real or imaginary stratifications of past and present, of literary and cultural suggestions and cross-references which exercise a singular magnetism on the walker. The many, numberless narrative/narrated Londons melt into the real one, almost engulfing, absorbing, phagocytizing it. The image of London — portrayed, communicated and spread through the different media (literature, painting, cinema, television, music …) — transforms the city into a multifaceted symbol, the space of memory and imagination. To the point that there seems to be no more one (real) London but many (imagined/remembered) Londons: the product of our imagination, our (hi)story/imaginary, our dreams and/or nightmares, our inner space/landscape, our mind.
[1] See Giandomenico Amendola, La città postmoderna. Magie e paure della metropoli contemporanes, Bari, Laterza, 1997 (in particular pp. 115-6) and Marisa Galbiati "Proiezioni urbane. La realtà dell'immaginario" in Proiezioni urbane. La realtà dell'immaginario, a cura di Marisa Galbiati, Milano, Tranchida Editori, 1989 (in particular pp. 14-16). The city narrated/produced by the cinema creates a "secondary reality" which tends to prevail over the (primary /daily) "reality".
[2] See Cristina Giorcelli "Introduction" to Città reali e immaginarie del continente americano (a cura di C. Giorcelli, Camilla Cattarulla, Anna Scacchi, Roma, Edizioni Associate Editrice Internazionale, 1998) and Gianni Puglisi – Paolo Proietti, Le città di carta (Palermo, Sellerio, 2002).
[3] Compare Jean Baudrillard, Lo scambio simbolico e la morte (Milano, Feltrinelli, 1979) and Simulacri e impostura (Bologna, Cappelli, 1980) and Mario Perniola, La società dei simulacri (Bologna, Cappelli, 1980).
[4] "Il confine tra realtà ed immagine si fa oggi labile – ammesso che esso abbia ancora valore. Città vissuta, città immaginata e città desiderata tendono a fondersi. Si va verso la scomparsa del confine tra realtà ed immaginazione e il prevalere della seconda sulla prima in nome di un maggiore realismo. La città definita reale tende ad assomigliare sempre più a quella immaginata" (Ammendola 1997: 38).
[5] Gastone Bachelard talks about a power superior to nature which joins to the function of the real a seducing, charming, awakening function of the unreal (La poetica dello spazio, Bari, Edizioni Dedalo, 1975, pp. 24-25).
[6] Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London, Volume 1, Number 1, http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/london-journal/.
[7] In the short but intense London, written in 1888 and published in 1905 in the collection English Hours.
[8] In his famous engravings — Over London-By Rail (1872), Ludgate Hill (1872), London Bridge (1872), Docks (1872), Houndsditch (1872)- Gustave Doré showed everything the Victorian optimism wanted to hide: the noise, the uproar, the misery, the dirt, the crime, the despair, the vapour of a huge metropolis.
[9] See also my essay "Writing and Reading the Urban (Hyper)text of London" published in the review Prospero. Rivista di culture anglo-germaniche, X MMIII Dipartimento di Letterature e Civiltà Anglo-Germaniche della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell"Università degli Studi di Trieste.
[10] Penelope Lively, City of the Mind, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 65-67.
[11] See my essay "Writing and Reading the Urban (Hyper)Text of London", Prospero. Rivista di culture anglo-germaniche, X MMIII Dipartimento di Letterature e Civiltà Anglo-Germaniche della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell"Università degli Studi di Trieste, 2004.
[12] It's a mythical London, made unreal by the thick and brown fog of a winter dawn, half way between purgatory and hell, and yet a place of regeneration, rebirth; a London transformed into a symbol of desolation which: "What is the city over the mountains/Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air/Falling towers/Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/Vienna London/Unreal" (vv. 371-376).
[13] "I sat upon the shore/Fishing, with the arid plain behind me/Shall I set mu lands in order?/ London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down/Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina/Quando fiam uti chelidon — O swallow swallow/Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie/These fragments I have shored against my ruins/When the Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe/Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata./Shantih shantih shantih" (vv. 423-433).
[14] Viginia Woolf, "Flying Over London", in The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays, London, The Hogarth Press, 1950, pp. 107-108.
[15] "Factory chimneys smoke right over against Westminster with an air of carelessly not having permission, and the whole effect of industrial London and of all London east of Temple Bar and of the huge, dingy immensity of London port, is to me of something disproportionately large, something morbidly expanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward the clean, clear, social assurance of the West End. And south of this central London, south-east, south-west, far west, north-west, all round the northern hills, are similar disproportionate growths, endless streets of undistinguished houses, undistinguished industries, shabby families, second-rate shops, inexplicable people who in a once fashionable phrase do not 'exist'. All these aspects have suggested to my mind at times, do suggest to this day, the unorganised, abundant substance of some tumorous growth-process, a process which indeed bursts all the outlines of the affected carcass and protudes such masses as ignoble, comfortable Croydon, as tragic, impoverished West Ham" H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, with an Introduction by C. M. Joad, London & Glasgow, Collins, 1962, pp. 97-8.
[16] Ibid, 95.
[17] Also Mario Maffi, in his Londra. Mappe, storie, labirinti (Milano, Rizzoli, 2000), affirms that the urban background of New Cut, Lambeth Walk and Vauxhall Road — where Chaplin survived when he was a boy — acts as a powerful subtext of the films realized in that period of his career.
To Cite This Article:
C. Bruna Mancini, 'Imagined/Remembered Londons'. Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London, Volume 2 Number 2 (September 2004). Online at http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2004/mancini.html. Accessed on [date of access].
Simon Goulding, Senate House: Utopia, Dystopia in Charles Holden's Architecture and its Place as London Literary and Visual Landmark
Ann Tso, English History as Jack the Ripper Tells It: Psychogeography in Alan Moore's From Hell
2019 Conference – 'Neighbours of Ours': Cities, Communities, Networks
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Nicolas Tredell on Peter Ackroyd
Ken Worpole on Anna Cottrell
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As I tread the Globe....: Hotel The SeaRock, gone forever!
It was a surprised news in the Hindustan Times newspaper today. It showed an empty piece of land, photo taken after complete demolition of Hotel SeaRock, Bandra Bandstand.
This hotel was one of the victim of serial blasts of 1993. The blasts damaged the hotel to the extent that it could not be repaired without demolition. Perhaps this process got stuck in CRZ rules or whatever, but it remained closed and abandoned (in a way) till this year.
There is hardly any information beyond this on net, nor any photo of the hotel when it was in its peak glory. Not even after the blast occurred. I would like to copy-paste the entire article before the link goes defunct.
The landmark hotel in focus of reported takeover talks, has struggled to come to terms with the future since the bomb blast in 1993.
Some time after Jane Fonda and long before Shilpa Shetty cut a fitness tape, Bollywood star Rekha became the brand ambassador for fitness icon Rama Bans, who would knock her celebrity clients into shape at the health club at Welcomgroup SeaRock Sheraton at Bandra's Land's End. Smita Patil was another regular at the health club, Sangeeta Bijlani swam in its pool overlooking the Arabian Sea, Parveen Babi met journalists and producers here and not in her home, Jackie Shroff would mope in its coffee shop before the release of his blockbuster Hero, the party for which was hosted by director Subhash Ghai coincidentally at the same hotel.
The SeaRock was Bombay's first serious attempt to shift away from the Fort and Nariman Point to the suburbs, and viewed as a Johnnie-come-lately by stalwarts Taj and Oberoi, from whom it grabbed both eyeballs and business when it opened in 1978. The arrangement with Welcomgroup, as the ITC chain, then newly launched, was known initially, was for marketing and management, before the 400-room property was leased to the group.
In the early eighties, it introduced Bombay to several firsts, including a frontier restaurant called "The Earthen Oven", the rooftop revolving restaurant "The Palace of the West Empress", known for its Chinese cuisine, the popular coffee shop "The Oceanic" and a vegetarian restaurant "Vega". Its Playmate Club was a gathering place with a somewhat less salubrious reputation, but it was where the film fraternity and its financers — in those days the underworld — probably met. Several Welcomgroup hoteliers — Dammi Sabherwal, Channi Pantal, Anil Channa — cut their teeth managing the SeaRock.
The bomb blasts in the 1993 riots that crippled the property now seem out of an Arthur Hailey novel. The building was endangered, the lift well was skewed out of alignment, the revolving restaurant no longer revolved, the floors were damaged and considered dangerous. Remembers Welcomgroup old-timer Shona Adhikari, "Only the fourth floor remained functional with 10 to 12 rooms, and we had to climb the stairs to our rooms when we visited Bombay." Tea/coffee makers were provided in the rooms to tide over F&B crisis, though the coffee shop stayed open, at least notionally.
When in 2005, Suresh Nanda of Claridges Hotels and Resorts bought the SeaRock property for Rs 300 crore, it was assumed that they would bring down the building and replace it with a new one, though the headache was in dealing with city regulations that made fresh construction on the promontory overlooking the sea near-impossible. The delay since then might account for this, but in January this year the group signed an agreement with the Taj group (which has the Taj Lands End located diagonally across the road) to offer it technological and operational advice. Currently, though, with the Taj group not commenting on the takeover talks, it appears likely that it might end up with a majority stake in what was once its competitor. Whatever the outcome, one thing is for sure — both the landmark silhouette as well as its history seem consigned to the past.
If I could go back in time, this is surely a place I would like to visit in the past. I went there recently and took some photos of the remaining structure. The curiosity of the stucture again made me wonder. Hence News in HT today was a little surprise. The demolition happened quietly in a way or perhaps the abandoned structure was assumed to be there for few more years. Its disappearance was unexpected.
I could never step inside old Searock and probably would never do so in the new one. But the place would remain an icon in the heart, and a story to tell for sure.


A survey conducted by Education Next finds that support for the Common Core Standards is declining, following a national uprising against the standards from opponents on both sides of the political aisle.
Federal Race to the Top funding prompted 45 states to adopt the standards in 2011, but since then five states–all with conservative governors–have repealed or placed the standards under review. Virtually every aspect of the standards, from the federal government's role in promoting them to their educational merits, has come under fire.
53% of the general public supported the standards according to this year's poll, contrasted with 65% just one year ago. Opposition doubled from 13% to 26%, while 21% have not yet formed an opinion.
Opposition has grown the most among Republicans–37% oppose and 43% support the standards, while only 16% opposed and 57% supported them in 2013. But even Democrats have seen growing opposition: 17% now oppose the standards, while only 10% opposed them in 2013.
The drop in support among teachers is also noteworthy since teachers were found to more accurately perceive what the standards entail than the general public. Common Core supporters often argue that the public only opposes the standards because they misunderstand them.
Teachers unions have also balked at the standards, with one National Education Association affiliate revoking their support for the standards in New York.
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Planning a Kickstarter starts with a compelling idea for your film. For many filmmakers, our hometowns and their particular micro-cultures and institutions inspire many of the stories we'd like to tell. In our minds, we all want to be Mark Twain, sharing tales of our childhood on the banks of the mighty Mississippi.
For me, making movies was all about telling stories about the colorful "yinzers" I grew up around near Pittsburgh. And that's what inspired my Kickstarter campaign.
Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms have become part of the independent filmmaking process. And if you want to get your first indie feature made, odds are good that you'll have to run a crowdfunding campaign. Unfortunately we have all also heard the horror stories of failed crowdfunding campaigns.
If your film is authentic to where you grew up, or your film takes place in a location you passionately love… And if you meticulously plan your crowdfunding campaign, Kickstarter is a legitimate way to raise money and build buzz from a built-in hometown audience who might not be familiar with you or your work.
I learned a lot of lessons running a crowdfunding campaign for my micro-budget indie, Yinz. The film takes place in the small mill town near my hometown, Pittsburgh. Through careful planning and preparation, I was able to secure about $37,000 in backing with my Kickstarter campaign. And I also won some press in major Pittsburgh publications.
I have lived and worked in Los Angeles for eight years. Even if I feel like a Pittsburgh guy, the truth is that it's only my home in my heart. I want to shoot Yinz in early 2016. So about six months before that, I went and spent half of June 2015 in the Pittsburgh area.
Before arriving, I researched every person and organization I could find with ties to the film industry. You need to do the same. Email these people and groups two weeks before your trip, and tell them you'd like to meet with them. Be brief, explain that you're planning to make a film in the area, and let them know you only want fifteen minutes of their time.
Make sure you find any organizations that support local filmmakers. I found the Pittsburgh Film Office and the Steeltown Entertainment Project. They were both eager to meet and have been remarkably supportive. You want to look for individuals who work in film, commercials, and also who are involved with the tech community. Search Google, IMDB and look for producers and crew who worked on films shot in the area.
Another thing you'll want to do when you're spending time at the location is to take lots of high quality pictures. These picture will come in incredibly handy while you're making you're Kickstarter video and designing your page. Remember, a picture is worth… more money than words on Kickstarter. And the locals that you want to buy into your project will love seeing pictures of places they recognize.
Here's one I took in my hometown that I used for the Yinz campaign.
While it is great to make an authentic film about a place you love, it crosses the line if you simply wanna exploit the locals for a laugh. You better adore the place you're making a film about. Even if you're having fun with local culture (think of Fargo), it better come from a loving place.
When it comes to local promotion, what is the story behind your story?
Simply saying, I've always wanted to make a movie and now I'm doing so, isn't good enough. That's old hat at this point. What's special about your project? You need to find the meta narrative of your project.
Keep the narrative simple. This is what people will relate to, and it's how word of mouth will spread about your Kickstarter campaign.
Did you hear about the kid who's dad was a fisherman? And now he's spending the summer making a movie on a fishing boat in the Pacific?
For Yinz, the story behind the story is that I am going home to small town Western Pennsylvania, the place that inspired me to become a filmmaker in the first place, and making a movie about growing up there. It's not about the genre, or the filmmaking techniques, or the technology we're going to use.
Focus on the fact that you're making a movie about a place that you love and what's interesting about that place. If you love the place, someone else will, too. Your Kickstarter video should be about this meta narrative. The video's story needs to be about your love for the location and your journey there to make a film.
You can have the best Kickstarter video and film concept ever, but if no one goes to your Kickstarter page you won't raise money. You should spend about one month (yes, that's a lot of preparation) planning out how you're going to drive traffic to your campaign.
There are plenty of inefficient ways to try to drive traffic to your site. I have seen plenty of people with 100 Twitter followers craft witty lines for their Kickstarters to send out all day. You might reach those followers, but really it's a waste of time. We want to avoid all the inefficient ways to drive traffic and focus on big wins.
Email contacts you already have.
Forget about everything else. Period. You're going to be too busy and have too much on the line to waste time posting cutesy fliers or sending postcards to distant relatives.
"You can't manage what you can't measure." So goes the old business maxim by Peter Drucker.
The same is also true of your Kickstarter.
During your campaign, make sure you're always sharing and asking everyone else to share a bit.ly short link. You'll learn a lot more about your traffic sources this way.
See the image below. It details some of the statistics bit.ly offers for Blue Ruin's Kickstarter. Blue Ruin drove most of their traffic from Facebook. So do most other projects. Most likely yours will too.
Instead, they should have double down on asking their contacts to share their campaign on Facebook.
Kickstarter also offers Google Analytics integration. If you have used Google Analytics in the past, I recommend enabling it for your campaign. But if you're a newby, don't waste your time. It's probably overkill, and you need to focus on driving traffic, not learning another ecommerce platform.
Your personal contacts are the the most important source of traffic and funding for your Kickstarter campaign. I have seen a few numbers thrown around, but it is generally said that about 60% of an average crowdfunding campaign's backing comes from people who personally know the creator.
If you take into account the people who are two or three degrees away from you that will discover your project from your contacts posting on Facebook, it's fair to say the vast majority of your backing will be a ripple effect of reaching out to people you already know.
The best way to reach those people is through email. Email addresses you already have.
First, make sure all your contacts are in one place (these days, that means stored in only one digital Rolodex). Most likely, your contacts are split between some combination Google and Outlook and iCloud and the like. Choose one service to be your central database.
I personally utilize Google Contacts, but I don't think it matters very much which you choose. Just make sure all your email contacts are in one place. To do this, export any stray contacts from other services and import them into the one you choose.
Then go into your contacts service where all your contacts are stored.
Go through every single contact in your contact book, which will probably be over a thousand people, with a fine-toothed comb. You must decide who you'll put in either category.
Here's my guide: If someone invited you to their wedding or similar family function, or if you'd invite them to your wedding or housewarming party, put them in your FRIENDS AND FAMILY group.
If you would ask someone for a small favor, but wouldn't invite them to your wedding, put them in your MASS group. You should end up with about 150 people in your FRIENDS AND FAMILY contacts group.
If you don't actually know someone or wouldn't feel comfortable doing a small favor for him, don't put him in either group. Don't be a spammy. Aside from potentially violating spam laws, you don't need these people for a successful Kickstarter.
Once you have your list, your next step is to export both groups of contacts in .CSV spreadsheets that can be opened with Excel. You can use these spreadsheets to import your groups into Mailchimp or some other email marketing program to track who've you emailed.
Use TextExpander (see below) to craft a template, then personalize each email with your close contact's name and a friendly message. Use Boomerang (see below) to time each message to be sent the morning you launch your Kickstarter at just after the moment you plan to launch your campaign.
You'll create an email for the MASS GROUP that will be sent from Mailchimp (see below) the moment you plan to launch your campaign. These emails will be less personal, but they'll also be easy to unsubscribe from.
There are two reasons we're focusing on the first morning of Kickstarter.
First is because roughly 80% of projects that make 20% of their funding goal are successful. The other reason is that Kickstarter's sharing algorithm favors campaigns that have the most backers in the least amount of days. If you can get your campaign to 20% of of your goal within the first two days, you're mostly likely golden.
Keep it simple stupid. K.I.S.S. That's the key to the email you need to send to both groups of contacts on the first day of the campaign. Too many people ask for a million things in their Kickstarter emails. It's confusing and people who aren't as web-savvy get lost.
Ask that your friends go to your Kickstarter page and watch your video. If they want to back your campaign, they will.
Ask them to share your Kickstarter on Facebook.
Keep the email simple and don't mix messages.
Then make your two asks.
Keep your email short, be polite, and don't beg. Make sure you tell people that if they don't want you to reach out anymore, you'll stop doing so.
You don't want your best friends and family to be surprised when they hear about your Kickstarter.
Assuming your Friends and Family contact list is about one-hundred people long, there's probably no way you will be able to tell them all in person or over the phone that your campaign is starting soon. So before those personalized emails go out on the morning you launch, send an email to your Friends and Family list giving them a heads up.
You will want to craft an email to send to your Friends and Family contact list about five days before your campaign starts to let them know what you're up to. If your campaign starts on Monday – Wednesday (recommended), I suggest sending your "priming" email on the Thursday before.
Letting your friends and family know that you're running a Kickstarter is simply courteous. It also doesn't put people on the spot to act on the first day of your campaign without being able to think about how they want to contribute.
Most importantly, make sure you let your personal contacts know that they can opt out of the whole Kickstarter experience. Tell them that if they ask you not to contact them about the campaign, you will respect their wishes and won't begrudge them.
Here's a template that you can use to let your friends and family know about your campaign the week before it launches.
I wanted to give you a quick heads up that we will be running a Kickstarter campaign for my first feature film as a director, called YOUR TITLE, starting next week on DAY, DATE. The movie is about THEME in WHERE YOU GREW UP.
I thought you might be interested in the project, and I wanted to give you some advance notice so you don't hear about it out of the blue.
We'll send you a handful of emails about the campaign, and we hope you'll watch the Kickstarter video and share the project with friends.
We promise we won't be spammy or overwhelming! We'll have a ton more information coming in the Kickstarter video and on the Kickstarter page. I don't want to say too much now.
If you prefer for me not to email you about it, please just let me know. I completely understand and respect your time… No hard feelings at all!
Facebook's market capitalization is $267.4 billion as of August 1, 2015. By contrast, Twitter's is $20.3 billion. A simple explanation for that is Facebook is much better for sharing content you want discovered by others. And people and corporations are willing to pay for that.
Luckily, Facebook allows everyone to share for free. You don't have to promote any posts or pay for any advertising. All you need to do is drum up a frenzy of your friends sharing on Facebook.
Ask every person you email or speak with to share your campaign on Facebook. If someone doesn't back your campaign monetarily, the second most valuable thing they can do is share it on Facebook. This is how you're going to get strangers that are several degrees of separation away from you looking at your project.
Go here to create a Facebook share link to your Kickstarter page that you can include in all your emails.
Blogs are a big deal these days. Everyone knows that. But what you might not have realized is that bloggers are the best way for you to reach your local audiences. Bloggers also have easy-to-click links in their stories which make blog write-ups more valuable than articles in all but the largest newspapers.
To get started, you need to make a "hit list" of bloggers and other media members to contact in a Google Sheet. You'll be able to update it in real time. Here's a template media hit list you can save to your own Google Drive to work on. I've used an imaginary example on the top line.
Keep track of how many Facebook likes each blog's page has. Likewise, track how strong your relationship is with the person and your previous interaction with her. Writing down relevant information in your hit list will make it easy to craft specific emails to each blogger you'd like to work with.
We're independent filmmakers. Odds are we don't have personal assistants, interns, or the money to hire a virtual assistant, as recommended in other Kickstarter guides. You're going to have to do the legwork of finding what members of the media to pitch yourself. It's not that hard.
One suggestion I learned from the article Hacking Kickstarter: How to Raise $100,000 in 10 Days on Tim Ferriss's blog (a must read if you're going to run a Kickstarter) is to conduct a Google reverse image search.
Google will show you posts that featured that image.
Make a goal to find and email 20 bloggers who wrote about campaigns similar to yours. Start keeping track of those sites in the media hit list template.
Next, start researching bloggers who write about that area where you're making a film. Find bloggers who write about the local arts and films. You will find that many writers contribute to multiple sites and know each other. Ask for recommendations and introductions.
You will also find a ton of blogs that might work. However, keep track of how many Facebook fans the pages of those blogs have. Keep the top 20 most liked blogs on your hit list.
You will now have 40 blogs to pitch and you should be able to land stories in at least 10 of them. The majority of those will probably be local to the region of your film. If you haven't confirmed at least 10 stories before your launch, get in touch with smaller blogs.
Ask all the bloggers to launch their stories the first morning of your Kickstarter campaign and share those stories on Facebook when they come out. Be very kind to bloggers. Popular bloggers are busy and bombarded with requests to feature stories. Treat them kindly and make their lives easy.
You and the local blogosphere are scratching each others' backs. You're giving them something interesting to report to their audience, while they're helping you drive traffic to your Kickstarter campaign. However symbiotic the relationship is, keep in mind that bloggers are doing you a favor.
To help them you, you need to create a media/press kit for their convenience. A press kit has all the basic information a writer would need to tell the bare-bones of your story and some interesting pictures to accompany a story. You're doing the homework for them, and this makes them more likely to write a story.
In your press kit, you should include headshots and biographies of key crew and talent, a logline and short synopsis and high resolution logos for the project. You might also want to include some storyboards or location pictures. Make sure you keep text documents in easy to access formats like .txt and your images in .jpg.
I suggest putting all these files in a Dropbox folder (or similar cloud sharing service) for which you can easily share a link. You can take a look at the Yinz press kit as a template.
Another media outlet that you should look into is podcasts. In my opinion, podcasters are the evening news anchors of our generation. The audience just trusts them. That's why advertisers pay so much to get those annoying ads at the beginning of your favorite podcast.
You're not going to get on WTF with Marc Maron for your first film. So don't waste your time trying.
But go into iTunes and search the store for podcasts about the city or region where you're making your film. You will be able to find some interesting shows. Look up the hosts and add them to the hit list.
Be flexible with your scheduling to make it easy on the podcasters. Make sure you've thought about things you want to talk about in advance and share your press kit with the podcast host. I host a podcast, and I've ended up staying in touch with a number of our guests. I've already recorded an interview with a Pittsburgh arts podcast, and the wonderful host, Genevieve, introduced me to a local cinema blogger.
There are some key tools you'll need to help you save time during your campaign. If you're writing all your emails and updating social media in real time, your life is going to be a nightmare. The following tools will allow you to get most of the work you need to do for your campaign done before the campaign starts.
The number one pro tip I can give you is to use Boomerang with Gmail to schedule emails to be sent at a specific time in the future. I wrote over 150 personalized emails over the course of two weeks all to be sent the morning the Yinz Kickstarter campaign launched. If it weren't for Boomerang, I could have never sent personalized, meaningful emails that reached people at exactly the right moment.
Use TextExpander to save time typing, particularly when writing emails. You'll enter commonly used phrases and email templates into the utility, then enter a quick shortcut for long strings of text to appear. You'll save tens of hours as you write emails for you Kickstarter campaign. It's also great for saving numerous email signoffs and URLs you commonly go to (like your Kickstarter's!).
Use MailChimp or a similar service to send mass emails to your contact lists. You can time long in advance when these emails are sent. MailChimp has great guides and makes it easy to get started. Don't be spammy, and make it easy for people to unsubscribe to your lists!
Use Buffer to queue up social media updates. You don't need to be sitting on Twitter or Facebook to blast out your campaign. And, of course, use bit.ly to help keep track of how your links are being shared.
Wake up early and press the LAUNCH button on Kickstarter. At this point, assuming you automated your campaign, your contacts will be receiving emails and locals will be hearing about your movie made in their backyard.
As the money comes rolling in, you can think about promoting a status update on your movie's Kickstarter page. As you tell Facebook the audience for the status, use the closest big city to where you're shooting as your location target. Make sure you choose "movies" as an interest. Spend between $25-$50 to promote this post on the first (and last) day only.
If anyone gives a big donation, you should get on the phone to call that individual and thank them. It will mean a lot to them. Make sure you're responding to any emails that come back to you with questions or support. Update the FAQs on the Kickstarter page.
Once the first two days of the campaign are over, you should re-group. Catch up on your sleep. Fill your Buffer with status updates. More importantly, start this whole process over again for the last two days of your campaign when you need to make a final push to reach your goal.
Eventually, hardest of all, make a really awesome movie that does justice to the area that helped you raise money to produce it!
Jeremy Michael Cohen is a writer, director, and producer of films and other moving images.Additionally, he has produced and 1st A.D.ed millions of dollars of content, including seven feature films and tens of commercials for major brands, including Honda, Scion, and Reebok. His current project is a micro-budget feature film, Yinz.


The University of Arizona's Poetry Center in the Helen S. Schaefer Building, was opened to the public as well as writers, faculty and students in October 2007.
This building creates a landmark facility where the mission of providing an outstanding research collection, quite possibly the most outstanding collection of contemporary poetry in America, and meeting place for writers and readers of poetry can be fulfilled.
Founder Ruth Stephan's concept of accessibility and the connection between reader and poetry are overarching and drove the design for the building. Outdoor gathering and comfortable places of solitude and contemplation are an integral part of this project.
The program includes stacks, controlled rare book collection, archives, administration, space for the Humanities seminar program and areas for discourse in both small and large groups.
Integrated housing, one of the truly unique aspect of the center, is provided to honor and support the tradition of interaction among established poets and students as well as total immersion for those just emerging.


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St. Louis Public Radio Joins Report For America And Adds Metro East Reporter Eric Schmid
By Madison Siguenza • May 8, 2019
St. Louis Public Radio has been selected as a 2019 host newsroom for Report for America.
Report for America is a local news initiative whose mission is "to strengthen our communities and our democracy through local journalism that is truthful, fearless, fair and smart." Recently, 50 news reporters were placed in news organizations across the country to fill important gaps in journalism.
St. Louis Public Radio's Metro East reporter, Eric Schmid
As part of the program, STLPR has added Eric Schmid to our team of more than 27 journalists. Schmid has experience interning for Fox News Channel, AccuWeather and WSHU Public Radio. As a news fellow at WSHU's Long Island Bureau, he covered governments and environmental issues as well as other general assignments. He graduated summa cum laude from Stony Brook University last May and was one of the journalism school co-valedictorians.
Schmid will cover the Metro East area in Illinois to develop strong insights and knowledge about issues specific to the area, including economics, education and politics and be based at the Belleville News-Democrat.
He will produce radio reports, web features and multimedia reports specific to Metro East issues and news. For example, while St. Louis Public Radio has developed a strong reputation for providing important information about ballot issues in Missouri, it has never been able to develop a similar depth of coverage and knowledge for Illinois constituents. This will be an area of focus.
Schmid's impact will be immediate in expanding the current coverage of St. Louis' Metro East region. He will develop enterprise stories about issues the community holds dear but have gone overlooked. STLPR aims for him to be recognized as someone with an eye on the area and strengthen the coverage offered to community members.
Follow Eric on Twitter: @EricDSchmid
Inside St. Louis Public Radio
St. Louis Public Radio Wins 3 Regional Edward R. Murrow Awards
By Brendan Williams • Apr 23, 2019
Radio Television Digital News Association
St. Louis Public Radio has won three 2019 Regional Edward R. Murrow Awards from the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA). The RTDNA has been honoring outstanding achievements in electronic journalism with the Edward R. Murrow Awards since 1971.


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Village Global VC fund backed by major tech figureheads
Bill Gates, one of the Village Global backers. Image: JStone/Shutterstock
New early-stage firm Village Global is attracting tech leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg, Marissa Mayer and Bill Gates.
Village Global is a new seed and pre-seed venture capital fund that combines capital and mentorship.
The firm describes itself as a non-traditional VC fund, operating as a network to give businesses "connected capital".
In a blogpost, Village Global highlighted some of its key financial backers, and it reads like a who's who of Silicon Valley luminaries, from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and VMware's Diane Greene, to Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.
The emphasis on Village Global as a collaborative network is clear.
"To be sure, Village isn't just about successful people imparting pearls of wisdom. It's also about learning from one another in a community, and applying network intelligence to today's biggest entrepreneurial opportunities."
Village Global hopes to discover "hidden-gem entrepreneurs" with the help of network leaders such as former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, former Symantec CEO John Thompson, and a plethora of other tech and business experts.
The post also outlined the diversity of the people on its expert panel, from ethnicity and gender, to sector and geography.
The remit for applying to the fund is broad, with Village Global simply saying that it is looking for entrepreneurs using "software and IT to transform global industries".
Early investment is a key element of the company's structure. "We invest early. We love being the first money in. Pre-seed and seed stage are our sweet spots, then we're here to follow on and connect you with other investors as you grow."
In the works for several months
Co-founder of Village Global, Erik Torenberg, is an investor and former member of Product Hunt's founding team.
Rumblings around the Village Global story have been ongoing for months, with TechCrunch reporting that Torenberg and one of his partners, Ben Casnocha, were teaming up as early as April this year.
Competition among early-stage funds is fierce but, with Village Global's pedigree of mentors and leaders on its side, it could change the game for a lot of young tech companies.
Related: technology, funding and investment, Silicon Valley
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Arsene Wenger's Gunners picked up their eighth league win in nine outings with a 3-0 home result over the Hammers thanks to goals from Olivier Giroud, Aaron Ramsey and Mathieu Flamini to move within a point of second-placed Manchester City and seven of league leaders Chelsea. Reigning premiers City were dealt a massive title blow when losing 1-0 to relegation battlers Burnley at Turf Moor which came via a stunning strike from George Boyd in the 61st minute. Jordan Henderson struck in the 68th minute at the Liberty Stadium as Brendan Rodgers' men continued their march towards a Champions League spot.


Collaboration on the design of a family of icons for the mobility portal Qixxit launched by the German railways.
The icons are used in the Qixxit website and app, which allows the user to display alternative travelling itineraries and configure them individually by time, costs, means of transport und CO₂ emissions. Besides they are used as part of the corporate design for different marketing visuals.


Hayday is Atlantic City's coffee shop.
As the only independent coffee shop in Atlantic City we are about more than serving a great product – we are committed to creating a space for the community to gather, share stories, and contribute to the growth and success of our city. Join the Hayday team and become part of the future of Atlantic City!
Passionate about exceptional coffee, tea, and hospitality.
Enthusiastic about the renaissance of Atlantic City.
Hard-working, punctual, and positive with excellent communication skills and a keen attention to detail.
Comfortable in a constantly-changing start-up environment.
Happy to get their hands dirty!
Free coffee & tea! All members of the Hayday team get access to free hot coffee & tea during their shifts, along with one comp espresso, cold brew, or iced tea per shift.
Employee shift discount on other items.
Growth opportunities – employees will receive barista training, as well as learning about and participating in building a new business!


Whisper White: 5 1/2" x 1/2"; 4" x 5 1/4"
Score Coastal Cabana at 4 1/4"; fold to create card base.
Lightly rub Embossing Buddy over front of Granny Apple Green cardstock. Stamp Happy Birthday sentiment with Versamark ink slightly above straight edge of cardstock. Sprinkle generously with White Stampin' Emboss Powder; heat with Heat Tool. Punch with circle punch. (You will end up with an incomplete circle.) Adhere above banner with SNAIL Adhesive, matching straight edges.


JPJ licensing system and procedures to be tightened | Daily Express Online, Sabah, Malaysia.
Johor: PONTIAN: The Road Transport Department (JPJ) will be tightening the system and procedure of producing licence to ensure the issuance of driving licence not according to procedures will no recur.Its director-general Datuk Seri Shaharudin Khalid said the department had set up a special committee to study and monitor the overall mechanism and methodology of obtaining national and International licences.
He said this was a proactive measure taken following the arrest of 12 JPJ officers and employees since September by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) for abuse of power and corruption involving 14,000 illegal licence holders.
"We will review the licensing system and procedures as what had taken place was due to manipulation of JPJ system by irresponsible parties causing driving licences to be obtained from the system but not according to the procedures.
"We want to ensure there would be no space to manipulate system. What had happened now is that many invalid licences were based on converted licence or transfer from abroad meaning manipulating our system and we shall see how far we can tighten the system," he said.
He was speaking at a media conference after visiting a JPJ officer who was paralysed in a road accident in 2016 at Kampung Sawah Dalam here Monday.
According to him, JPJ will be taking taking follow-up actions by looking at the disciplinary action on all officers and personnel involved in abuse of power in the illegal issuance of licences.
"We will take all matters into consideration, similarly we will taking followed action against such illegal licence holders and they have been given two months to surrender.
"So far, some have come forward to surrender but maybe some holders are confused and are unsure if they were involved in committing the offence.


Spigen Liquid Air Armor Series TPU Case for Samsung Galaxy S9 (Black) – Sakurazz - Where Service Matters.
Premium look with everyday defense. The Liquid Air® is styled with its signature geo pattern with a matte finish leaving the surface extra clean and fingerprint-resistant. All corners are locked in with Air Cushion Technology® for absorb shock in every single impact. Every inch of the design ensures to keep the new Samsung Galaxy S9 protected and pocket-friendly.


The adidas Lineage Shorts keep it simple lending them their classic style that's equally at home at the pool or the beach.
These classic length Lineage Shorts are made with a soft and comfortable woven outer while an inner mesh brief provides support and quick-drying comfort. The elasticated waist features a drawcord so you can dial in the fit, locking them in place as you plunge into the water.
Spendera 114,63 kr ytterligare för att få gratis frakt.


The Beaverton Police Traffic Division is dedicated to the three "E's" of traffic safety: Education, Engineering, and Enforcement. If you have a traffic complaint and would like a member of the Traffic Division to address the problem, please complete this form.
It is useful for us to have some way of contacting you if we have additional questions concerning your complaint. By completing this form as fully as possible, the Traffic Supervisor can best address how to correct the complaint.
If you have questions or concerns about signs, speed bumps, or traffic patterns in Beaverton, please contact the Transportation Section of Public Works Department at (503) 526-3726.
Your name and contact information are optional but are required if you wish to access follow-up information or receive a response from the Traffic Division.


So long, readers. I've had fun.
It's been 12 years for the Chicago Journal, a journey I personally chronicled last week in the final edition of the weekly paper.
But there's one last thing CJ wants to do: say a right and proper goodbye at Donna's on Wednesday. From 7 to 9, come on over to the cafe at 13th and State. Have drinks on CJ. Chat it up. And say farewell.


Would you know what to do if you were stung by a jellyfish while in Hawaii? If not, you would probably "Google" how to ease the pain. BUT, WAIT! How do you know which "cures" are right — and which will make the pain even worse?
Turns out, two scientists recently refuted the claims of some of the most common Hawaii jellyfish sting "cures." And, those scientists came right from the University of Hawaii.
According to the Honolulu Star Advertiser, the researchers have determined that three of the most common remedies are actually wrong — really wrong! In fact, the researchers say the remedies will only exacerbate an already serious problem.
So, what are the three remedies mentioned in the research?
Experts say you should not put ice on a jelly sting because it will only preserve the toxin and make the sting worse.
The paper reports that "the researchers found that scraping tentacles with a credit card had disastrous results: It vastly increased the number of stinging cells discharged.
According to the Honolulu Star Advertiser, the researchers experimented with a wide range of treatments for box jelly stings. They included dousing with fresh water, seawater, vinegar or a baking soda slurry; applying ice or heat; scraping off tentacles with a plastic card or plucking them with tweezers; and using Sting No More spray and cream.
What did they find? The research shows that rinsing the sting area with vinegar and then applying hot water or a heat pack was the best solution in the field using readily available items.
One of the best ways to ease the pain of a jelly sting is to apply vinegar with hot water.
Yanagihara told the newspaper that first aid for box jellyfish stings requires a two-pronged strategy: First, the tentacles and their stinging cells, which she describes as "tiny ticking time bombs," must be inactivated and removed. Second, the venom that is already in the flesh must be treated.
Since the journal article reports that, worldwide, box jellyfish are responsible for more deaths than sharks each year, the research is of optimum importance.
"The increases in venom injection and activity we saw in our study from methods like scraping and applying ice could mean the difference between life and death in a serious box jelly sting," Yanagihara told the Honolulu Star Advertiser.
If you are allergic to Hawaii jellyfish stings, it's important you let your group leader know if you've booked any water related activities. That way, your guide can have a first aid kit on-site for any incidents.
Above all, know how to treat a Hawaii jellyfish sting that won't cause even more pain!