When you’re pregnant, everyday activities take on an extra layer of difficulty. You can’t sleep in a comfortable position or go from sitting to standing with anything resembling grace. Working—whether you’re on your feet all day or trapped at a desk for eight straight hours—can be trying. And commuting to and from…
Prosciutto crisps, which I fondly call “pork chips,” can function as a fancy snack, highfalutin’ bacon bit, or—in the case of one cocktail I had one time—unexpected drink garnish. Usually the paper-thin slices require at least 15 minutes in an oven to get them nice and crisp, but you can speed up the process c…
We’re excited to announce a public preview of the ‘new look’ for Power BI service. We’re refreshing the user interface to provide a modern experience that’s simpler and builds on customers’ familiarity with Microsoft products. Simplified action bar, vertical navigation, metadata – read on to learn more about how we’re simplifying navigation and making Power BI easier to use and accessible to many more.
Even permanent residents and naturalized citizens report avoiding activities like driving, visiting a doctor, or talking with teachers.
Two weekends ago, the threat of highly publicized Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids spread anxiety and apprehension among immigrant communities in several cities across the United States. Families reportedly didn't leave their houses, instead closing windows and turning off lights, and streets were completely empty. The fear, experts said, was the point. While the operation originally targeted around 2,000 families with deportation orders, ICE arrested a total of 35 people.
Immigration-related fear, however, extends far beyond the latest round of raids. In a climate of heightened immigration enforcement and increasingly aggressive policies, it isn't surprising that immigrants feel unsafe. Victims of domestic violence are discouraged from reporting crimes to law enforcement, and even participating in public assistance programs imposes its own set of risks—particularly for undocumented immigrants.
But a new report released on Wednesday shows just how pervasive the chilling effect of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown is, even for legal permanent residents and naturalized citizens.
According to the Urban Institute's study, which is based on surveys conducted in December of 2018 with around 2,000 non-elderly adults in immigrant families, one in six respondents reported that they or someone in their family avoided engaging in activities that could expose them to questions about citizenship status. The most-avoided activities were those that involved the risk of interaction with the police or a public authority, such as driving, renewing, or applying for a driver's license, and reporting a crime. Those surveyed also mentioned reluctance to go to the park or stores, use public transportation, or see a doctor.
Hispanic adults seemed to be more affected than non-Hispanic white adults, with almost 15 percent reporting avoiding driving a car and nearly 13 percent avoiding talking to the police or reporting a crime.
In cases where at least one of the family members didn't have a green card or citizenship, adults were three times more likely to report avoiding at least one activity than those in families with less vulnerable status. But for Hamutal Bernstein, co-author of the report and senior research associate in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, the fact that more than one in nine adults "in relatively secure families" also reported that behavior is still striking.
"If green card holders and naturalized citizens are also experiencing this kind of insecurity and fear, it shows the ripple effects of immigration policies and the generalized fear in immigrant communities," Bernstein says.
The study also suggests that adults in immigrant families who avoided at least one activity were more likely to report serious psychological distress. Researchers can't draw conclusions about the causality because the data is limited, but Bernstein says that the correlation might suggest that the current immigration climate is affecting people beyond just changes to their daily routines.
"These things are important to consider not just for the potential well-being and health consequences for these immigrant families, but for the broader communities that they live in," Bernstein says. "Community members, whether they have immigrants in their families or not, really do benefit from all residents having their basic needs met, being able to go to work, and being able to report crimes for public safety."
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) have been taking Facebook to task regarding its recent privacy blunders, including the company’s failure to comply with a 2012 FTC ruling over how Facebook handles its users’ data.
The holidays aren’t happy for everyone. Whether you don’t get along with your family, are far from home, or are missing a loved one, there are ways to turn the holidays into a special time. Here’s what we mean.
Buying a new mattress is not fun. You have to head to a mattress store, lay around on mattresses for longer than you’d like, haggle with a salesperson about an aggressively overpriced mattress, then wait for a delivery guy to show up weeks later. I ordered my last mattress online. It seems crazy, but it worked out well... mostly.
Windows: Microsoft offers free 30-day trials of Office 365 and Office 2013. After your free month is over, you won't be able to use some major features of these office suites. One little-known secret, however, is you can actually extend your trial five times, for total of 180 days of use.
The How-To Geek offers the instructions to extend your test drive using a built-in tool provided with Microsoft Office, OSPPREARM.exe. You'll need to repeat this process every 30 days if you want to keep "rearming" the trial, but this gives you nearly half a year of Microsoft Office access for free. Hit up the link below for the simple instructions.
How to Extend Your Office 2013/365 Trial to 180 Days | How-To Geek
This is not going to be a particularly cogent post.
It will, however, be a spoiler-filled one.
So, warning: when you bite into this donut, SPOILER JELLY GONNA COME OUT.
That’s also what I call my semen, by the way. Spoiler Jelly. When we conceived of our son, I yelled to my wife, “Spoiler Alert: YOU’RE PREGNANT!” Then I did the Konami Contra Code and flew away on a rocketship made of Pac-Man corpses.
I’m lying about all that.
Still, I think I’ve given enough space, but once more for good measure:
SPOILER.
WARNING.
Okay.
Let’s get into it.
So, you know by now there’s this game. Bioshock: Infinite. It’s a sequel (not really, which will soon be apparent) to what is certainly one of my favorite games of all time: Bioshock.
I finished it last night.
My head’s still twerkin’ it against the walls of my skull.
I mean, I think I know what happened. The game ends up being a lot more about quantum mechanics and alternate realities and — in a way, the very nature of experiencing story and narrative through the particular and peculiar lens of playing a game — than you’d think. On the surface it seems like a game that’s about racism and nationalism, about prejudice and religious zealotry. And it is. In part.
But all that’s just a ruse.
It’s a game about choices.
Those choices are expressed by the obvious decisions you make as a player inhabiting a character and also as the myriad realities (which are just a shift from the reality you begin with) opened and explored by Elizabeth, your “ward” through the story.
For a long time I played the game looking for what I hoped were literal connections to the narrative of Bioshock: you find all these little moments and aspects reminiscent of that first game, and to a degree, the second. Elizabeth has the vibe of a Little Sister, and of course has her own version of the Big Daddy in the form of the very fucking big Songbird until you soon start to realize that in a sense you’re her Big Daddy (B.D. = Booker DeWitt), a thought evoked even more during moments like when you help Elizabeth scamper up into a vent (in that case to kill Daisy). Further, it becomes all the more clear when you realize hey, you’re her real Daddy, not just her protector (but give it a minute, we’ll get into that).
You’ll find other things, too: the falling/fallen city above the world instead of below it. Tonics and automated security and vigors and Plasmids and on and on. Plus, the protagonist of Bioshock is a child seemingly created out of Andrew Ryan’s genetic structure and Elizabeth is seemingly a child created from the genetic structure of Comstock and both are “special” and are potentially secretly controlled at the outset. Further, in Bioshock 2 Sofia Lamb has a daughter, Eleanor Lamb, who helps the Big Daddy protagonist of that game (albeit at a distance), not unlike how Elizabeth (also called The Lamb) helps Booker DeWitt inside Infinite.
So, my head was spinning: is Elizabeth somehow connected to the Big Daddy program? Does she change her name and go on to be a part of Rapture? Is she Sofia? How does it connect?
Then you find out: it doesn’t connect. Not in a straight narrative line.
You get to the end and realize not only is Elizabeth your daughter but that all these narrative hooks you’re finding aren’t literal connections but rather thematic bridges — constants in the quantum game of “constants and variables” — that show you these games are connected not so much by plot chronology so much as by the abstraction of multiple realities. Realities expressed by choices. Realities where things change less than you’d think, even though the trappings are different. Where the constants outweigh the variables.
And that’s what’s fucked up. That’s what’s got my head all goofy like a kinked-up garden hose. Bioshock is about choice: the Ayn Randian individualist genius-fed ethic versus the collectivist altruism of, say, Sofia Lamb. The protagonist, Jack, has the choice of how to deal with the Little Sisters (which is admittedly a little blunt and obvious, one of those classic videogame moral choices of “Feed the orphan or kick him to death”), and those choices add up to a different ending depending on how you played.
Infinite has no alternate endings.
And it has no real choice.
And at first, that’s frustrating. (From a gameplay perspective, it still is.) Narratively, though, it adds up: all the choices Booker DeWitt thinks he has — and you think you have as a player — are hollow. It all goes the same way. You always become Comstock in one reality and, as Comstock, always go to your other weaker self in another reality to buy your own daughter back so she can become the Lamb. And though there exists the razzle-dazzle of infinite lighthouses and myriad realities, you see that it always goes down the same way, a way expressed by Sofia Lamb way back in Bioshock 2:
“For every choice, there is an echo. With each act, we change the world. One man chose a city, free of law and God. But others chose corruption. And so the city fell. If the world were reborn in your image, would it be paradise, or perdition?“
Choices and echoes of choices. Choice and change still goes the same way: cities fall. Machine men still walk. Men still augment with tonics and Plasmids and Vigors. Paradise becomes perdition. Opposing forces still clash. Men are still revealed to be selfish and blood-thirsty.
Power corrupts. Mankind is lost.
And so choice is revealed to be an illusion.
At the end of the game you even have a scene where Elizabeth stands over her own crib as the Lutece “brother” (not actually a brother but an alternate world version of the Lutece “sister”) and tells you, essentially, that no matter what you think you’re going to do, at the end of the day you have no choice: like in nearly any video game you’re on rails, you poor motherfucker, and you’re going to hand the baby over because otherwise the game won’t progress.
(There’s even an earlier conversation with the Luteces at the start and the end of the game about how you, the protagonist, “doesn’t row,” which one wonders if that’s because you don’t have the ability as a video game character to row. Or maybe I’m just reading too much into it.)
The very, very end of the game is a knife in the ribs, really — as opposed to the ending of the first Bioshock, which literally had me cheering and tearing up — where you realize that there may be one last choice to make and that choice is to kill Comstock at the time of his birth, and that’s when you realize that his “birth” was the literal “born again” moment of a baptism where the persona Booker DeWitt is washed away and Comstock emerges. (This is one point of the game that I don’t quite understand — all the quantum dickery afoot tends to be explained by machines and theory and sci-fi wizardry, but the seemingly literal rebirth of the baptismal moment must be entirely mystical. Unless it’s less literal than I had imagined?)
So, there at the end the one choice is to kill yourself.
Or, to die by the hands of Many Elizabeths, all of whom drown you together and then disappear one by one until only one remains (and there I’m left to wonder if even that one Elizabeth flickers out of existence). It is again evocative of the endings of the previous two games: potential death, several Little Sisters, the culmination of a journey, the aspect of water. (There’s a scene after the credits that maybe confuses this a little, or maybe instead just suggests it’s all going to replay again and again and even death cannot stop the snake eating his own tail.)
Tricky stuff.
Great game.
Amazing story. Strong acting. Killer writing.
Art direction was profound and perhaps the prettiest I’d ever seen in a game. Though sometimes a lack of interactivity (can’t crack glass with your Sky Hook, if you step in front of a lit projector it shows no shadow, etc) were a bit puzzling surprising how incredible the scenery was.
Gameplay felt incredibly well balanced, if a little old-school. Greater variety in how to approach enemies would’ve been welcome, I think.
The “bad guy motivations” of racism and nationalism and religious zealotry got a little muddy and obvious — it’s on par with making the Nazis the bad guy, though then that gets appropriately and wonderfully more complicated as the downtrodden rise up and become as bad as the oppressors. (Though that may be making a controversial statement, one that could be interpreted poorly though it’s certainly bound up with the themes of the game.)
(Also a tiny part of me wonders what the game would look like without the violence. Still first-person, but driven more by mystery and adventure, not “kill these dudes.”)
The lack of choice is wildly appropriate given the story, but just the same I felt like Infinite was missing that kind of player assertion, if only from a “personal satisfaction” standpoint. As a player inhabiting a character, you want to feel like what you do matters, and the first two games had alternate endings and this one, ennh, didn’t. Again, appropriate to the story they’re telling and thematically on-point, but that’s not always satisfying. If we are to assume that there are constants and variables I would’ve liked to have seen these variables still be a… well, a constant. (The first two games focus on mercy as the choice and I miss that here.)
So, that’s that.
Love to hear your thoughts if you got ‘em.
A lot of success advice centers around the idea of "being honest with yourself about the things you're good at, and pursuing those things relentlessly." We're told that all successful people can be boiled down to a paragraph which states their chosen field and the personal style they brought to it which allowed them to be successful. More » 
