By Graham Smith on November 24th, 2014 at 10:00 am.
A quick search reveals that we’ve only written one post about venerable, free, turn-based strategy game Battle for Wesnoth. One! One. Burn down RPS right now. It’s Fantasy Battles by way of Advance Wars, it’s open source, it offers a vast selection of user-created campaigns and the latest update vastly improves the interface, the map editor, adds a new faction, and more. Let’s increase that post count by 100% right now.
For a free and open source game, Wesnoth is frighteningly well-maintained. It’s been fun to play for a decade, but it’s been slowly becoming more professional in presentation ever since, to the point now where it’s prettier (and better explained via its tutorial) than many paid-for counter-parts.
This new update improves the minimap, so it offers more useful information for players as they command their armies across hexagonal terrain. It also improves the add-on browser which is imperative, because while there are bundled official campaigns that come with the main game, most of your time is going to be spent playing on one of hundreds of user-created maps and campaigns, many of which have complete storylines to go with their battles.
The new faction is multiplayer only, but sounds interesting – a faction of humans which “lacks magic users, and instead specializes in using terrain features to coordinate attacks at dawn or dusk.” High-accuracy melee fighters and horse-riding archers with high-mobility stats.
Of course, if you’ve never played Wesnoth before, none of this matters much. All that matters is that this game is great, free, and now a bit better. There are download links at the bottom of the v1.12 page.
In the Otsuka Museum of Art, the fact that nothing in its entire collection of art is original is part of the charm. The museum in northeastern Japan houses over a thousand replicas of iconic art works: Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” all of Rembrandt’s self portraits, and a full-size reproduction of the Sistine Chapel.
Besides giving Japanese visitors a chance to see masterpieces too delicate to be transported abroad—like Picasso’s “Guernica” which never leaves the Museo Nacional in Madrid—Otsuka offers a certain kind of preservation. The paintings are reproduced, in original size and color, on ceramic panels that don’t fade over time.
“It is said, when it dies, a tiger leaves its skin behind; a human leaves his name,” the museum’s first director, Masahito Otsuka, said in a speech on the museum’s founding. “The humans who have been able to leave their name are extremely few, but anyone of us may certainly leave, forever, his image on a portrait ceramic boards.” Otsuka had the idea to recreate art on ceramic panels after seeing a faded photograph of Nikita Khrushchev on his grave in Russia.
While most museums in Japan are either free or cost around ¥700 (about $6), admission into the Otsuka fee is a steep ¥3,100, which visitors say is the most expensive admission ticket for any museum in Japan. But the price may be worth it. Visitors to the 29,000 square meter (312,000 sq. ft) exhibition space, Japan’s largest, full of small, dimly lit exhibition rooms and high ceilings, are able to get up close to the replicas and even touch them. Visitors also credit the tour guides—including a small Japanese-speaking robot guide—for offering a pleasant viewing experience. (See more photos here.)
It’s not surprising that a Japanese museum of imitated art would do well. Japan is known not just for its faithful imitations of western culture, but for improving upon them. It may be much the same for the art in the Otsuka museum—just don’t tell Leonardo da Vinci.
What’s odd about this reaction to the singer’s relationship with Pattinson is that jilted Twilight fans have all but completely retconned their feelings about his romance with Kristen Stewart. While Stewart was widely derided as a “cheating whore” and a “trampire” following their 2012 split (and details going public of Stewart’s affair with her Snow White and the Huntsman director, Rupert Sanders), tweets now refer to Stewart as a “goddess.” Twitter user @strongjawline thinksPattinson’s “taste in girls went from 100 to 0,” while @demiloverbitch concurs: “Kris is beautiful and @fkatwigs is boogeyman.”
As social life gets ever more digital, new coffee shops and bars encourage face-to-face interaction via the likes of Settlers of Catan and Connect Four.
You can tell Discworld is a fantasy series because the City Watch is committed to protecting and serving the people, to the extent where orders from the government are disobeyed and disregarded because they infringe on the peoples’ rights. The cops say “we’re officers of the law, not soldiers of the government” and mean it. During a revolution, the police fought against the government because the government was hurting the people. Also trolls and dwarves.
Tinder is fine, but isn’t meeting over a slice of lemon meringue at a giant party a much better story to tell your (prospective) children? That's why it's time to bring back the pie supper.
sciencehabit writes When it comes to small space rocks blowing up in Earth's atmosphere, not all days are created equal. Scientists have found that, contrary to what they thought, such events are not random, and these explosions may occur more frequently on certain days. Rather than random occurrences, many large airbursts might result from collisions between Earth and streams of debris associated with small asteroids or comets. The new findings may help astronomers narrow their search for objects in orbits that threaten Earth, the researchers suggest.
This is a working particle accelerator built using LEGO bricks. I call it the LBC (Large Brick Collider). It can accelerate a LEGO soccer ball to just over 12.5 kilometers per hour.
you know those things, when you were a kid, you felt were hurtful but you couldn’t quite figure out why they were hurtful and unfair and you couldn’t explain why the other person was wrong from doing them?
Police have arrested the parents of a 9-month-old girl who was hospitalized after she was accidentally shot inside her home in New York City.
Police say the father told officers he was cleaning his gun when it accidentally discharged.
“Waluigi is the ultimate example of the individual shaped by the signifier. Waluigi is a man seen only in mirror images; lost in a hall of mirrors he is a reflection of a reflection of a reflection. You start with Mario – the wholesome all Italian plumbing superman, you reflect him to create Luigi – the same thing but slightly less. You invert Mario to create Wario – Mario turned septic and libertarian – then you reflect the inversion in the reflection: you create a being who can only exist in reference to others. Waluigi is the true nowhere man, without the other characters he reflects, inverts and parodies he has no reason to exist. Waluigi’s identity only comes from what and who he isn’t - without a wider frame of reference he is nothing. He is not his own man. In a world where our identities are shaped by our warped relationships to brands and commerce we are all Waluigi.”
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I, We, Waluigi: a Post-Modern analysis of Waluigi by Franck Ribery (via tramampoline)
Ivan Kislov, a photographer based out of Magadan, Russia, has put together a gorgeous photo series that visually captures the the incredible and complicated beauty of the wild red fox that live in the remote Chukotka Peninsula in the north-eastern area of Russia. Ivan first came to Chukotka as a mining engineer and found that his hobby of photography and his fondness for “inaccessible places, raftings, just walking tours” gave him the perfect opportunity to shoot the wildlife in the area. In an interview with Bored Panda, Ivan explained why he focused mostly on foxes.
Though he takes pictures of everything from bears and reindeer to wolves and stoats, Kislov says the foxes are often very willing models: “Foxes are curious and can come very close, and I shoot with wide angle and telephoto lenses.”
HONG KONG—Seneng Mujiasih arrived in Hong Kong in December 2010, on a two-year domestic helper visa. When she was fired 13 months later, she “still owed money she had borrowed for arranging her employment and couldn’t afford to return home,” a friend in Indonesia told Bloomberg. She then stayed in Hong Kong picking up jobs that included working in Wan Chai bars, encouraging men to buy drinks. Three weeks ago, she was killed in a banker’s apartment in the neighborhood.
Mujiasih’s story is a tragic chapter in the tale played out around the world, as millions of women leave their homes every year and travel to urban centers, or even other countries, to become domestic helpers. While they leave because of the promise of higher wages, these women are often saddled with huge amounts of debt by a global network of fixers, placement agencies, and money lenders—much of it illegal, and all of it against global labor codes.
Now, a lawyer and ethics professor, an accountant, and a newly minted MBA grad hope to disrupt this system. Their start-up, Fair Employment Agency (FEA), is a Hong Kong-based company that places domestic workers without forcing them to pay placement fees. FEA is registered as a charity, but the founders’ goal is to turn the company’s placement operations into a sustainable business, allowing it to expand through Southeast Asia, then perhaps the Middle East and beyond.
“We see this as the largest women’s right issue in the world,” David Bishop, an attorney, social entrepreneur, and lecturer at Hong Kong University tells Quartz. On one hand, being able to hire domestic help at home allows many wealthier women to enter the workforce or get higher education, but on the other, it can trap poorer women from developing countries in crippling debt, making them vulnerable to abuse from their employers.
How the maid trade works
There are about 53 million domestic workers officially employed around the world, and the unofficial figures may be twice that, the International Labor Organization reports. Most are women:
Helpers can wind up with debts like Mujiasih’s through a process that starts in their home town, where recruiters find young women and offer them or their families signing bonuses for agreeing to work overseas. But then the recruiters and related agencies charge high fees for everything from training to photos to visa applications, and these are often capped with a massive “placement” fee—which the newly-recruited domestic helper sometimes doesn’t learn about until she arrives overseas. (Amnesty International has a comprehensive report called “Exploited for profit, failed by governments” on how this process works in Indonesia.)
It is, at its most basic, a “take from the poor, give to the rich” scenario—employment agencies offer cheap services to customers to get their business, and then charge the often-impoverished women looking to do the jobs a fee equivalent to several months wages for placing them in a wealthy home.
Making matters worse, activists and advocates say, employment agencies sometimes purposefully place domestic helpers in homes where they won’t work out, just so they can collect another placement fee when they are moved somewhere else. Or, when a domestic helper has finally paid off her huge debt, but before her contract is over, the agency will call her employer promising an even better helper—and then charge both helpers placement fees when they change jobs.
How FEA and other agencies could help
Bishop and FEA co-founder Tammy Baltz worked with Helpers for Domestic Helpers, a local charity in Hong Kong for employees who find themselves struggling with overwhelming debt, facing unemployment, or dealing with a host of other problems. It was during this time that they decided they could do more to change the system by starting a business that prevented these women from accumulating debt in the first place. Scott Stiles, the company’s general manager, studied the issue during an internship in Hong Kong.
Their “disruptive” idea is simple: form an accredited employment agency that doesn’t charge domestic helpers fees for placing them in jobs. Instead, the agency carefully matches employees with employers, and makes sure employers to pay all the costs, from medical tests to visa renewal fees, for a flat upfront fee of HK$7,500 (US$967) for a standard two-year contract. This ensures that a helper is a good match for their home and not saddled with debt, allowing her to send her full salary home.
Convincing Hong Kong’s heads-of-household to cough up fees that their domestic helpers are sometimes paying now isn’t going to be easy. The cut-throat industry includes hundreds of employment agencies licensed in Hong Kong alone, who compete on offering employers great deals—like “25% off of service charge” for a second maid, or varying costs for things like contract negotiation and visa processing. The entrenched industry of agents and money-lenders also isn’t likely to welcome a newcomer that’s trying to put them out of business.
The company plans to pursue Hong Kong’s biggest employers, multinational companies with constantly rotating pools of expat employees, and appeal to their Corporate Social Responsibility requirements.
FEA opened its doors in September, and has has since handled about 20 contracts. “We don’t aim to show it is a great business to be in, and I don’t think it is” Baltz, a former accountant and consultant, tells Quartz. The only reason the business is attracting so many players are the profit margins they make from the illegal fees, she said.
FEA has raised about $120,000 in charitable donations and low-interest loans, and is seeking additional funds. Because the business is a registered charity, any profit that it makes will be invested back into expansion, including potentially setting up training facilities and moving into other countries.
How widespread is the problem?
Numbers on the global maid trade are hard to come by, because of the geographic breadth and private nature of most of the companies involved. The Hong Kong government, for example, doesn’t track maid “churn” or monitor how often domestic helpers make it through a two-year contract. Most of the companies involved are privately run and the profits they make from domestic helpers often come through a far-flung networks of anonymous payment agencies, like 7-11.
In Hong Kong alone, FEA conservatively estimates that Indonesian and Filipino domestic helpers pay HK$712 million (US$91 Million) a year in placement fees. These fees often come in the form of high-interest loans that can grow to many times that amount.
“In 2013, 70% of our clients complained of being charged excessive placement fees,” according to Holly Allan, the founder of Helpers for Domestic Helpers. If these women can’t make a payment, their loans are sold off to aggressive debt collectors, who charge “penalty” fees that act like a balloon interest rate, she tells Quartz, even though such interest rates are illegal.
“If they can find a job without the fees it is partly a solution,” Allan says. “At least the FEA offers an alternative.”
Barely a year ago, news broke first on Twitter and then later across the media, that former Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal had allegedly raped a junior colleague of his at the magazine’s annual confab in Goa. Now, out on bail as the trial drags on, it looks like Tejpal is set to return to the convention circuit.
The Times of India Literary Carnival, set to be held in Mumbai in the first week of December, includes as part of its schedule a panel featuring the rape-accused journalist and author. The panel is titled, “The Tyranny of Power.” It will be Tejpal’s first public appearance since the scandal broke last year.
Tejpal was accused last year of raping a young female staffer in an elevator in a Goa hotel, an incident that he claimed in an internal email was a “lapse of judgment.” He was later arrested and put in judicial custody, before getting bail in the Supreme Court in July. Although he initially admitted to having been at fault— stepping away from Tehelka and claiming he would do the “penance that lacerates me”— in court his lawyers have claimed everything from a personal vendetta to a political conspiracy behind the case.
There’s no indication that the discussion at the Times of India’s Litfest, on December 6, will be about Tejpal’s alleged abuse of power himself, especially since that matter is sub judice. Alongside Tejpal on the panel are journalist and scriptwriter Basharat Peer, Congress politician Mani Shankar Aiyar and the moderator is journalist Manu Joseph.
Joseph has some history of dealing with the Tejpal case, having written a cover story for Outlook where he described the contents of CCTV tapes around the incident in Goa, which many criticised for the way in which it was written. The others, however, have no direct connection to the case and since the current description of the discussion has nothing other than the title, it could as easily end up being about prime minister Narendra Modi as about the Goa incident.
In an email message to Scroll, festival director Bachi Karkaria said that the panel is part of the event’s overarching theme of Power as Hero and Villain. “Tarun’s Masques deals precisely with this,” she explained. “The panel has nothing to do with his personal case. We are aware that this issue is sub judice, Tarun is not convicted and is out on bail. The case is not going to form any part of the discussion, and we have always found Tarun to be an articulate panelist.”
As to what subjects will be broached by the panel, she replied, “This will develop between the moderator and his panel. We do not dictate this, as indeed no litfest worth the name should. All we can say us that the case will not, cannot, be part of the discussion.”
Karkaria seems to have changed her position from last year, when she wrote a piece in the Times of India lamenting the need for modern conventions to have a “disreputable controversy” surrounding them. “L’affaire Tejpal has been behaving much like a Mumbai squatter, refusing to leave the headlines which it grabbed ever since its horny protagonist gave us all that bull about his ‘misreading of the situation’,” Karkaria wrote.
Karkaria in fact specifically wrote about worrying that “no father will allow his daughters to attend our litfest”. And, almost as if she knew what would be coming this year, Karkaria asked the audience reading her piece whether they would prefer more “sexed-up fare” than the literary discussions they were having.
“We do have a high-powered panel dissecting sexual predators, but are we expected to serve up a hot-blooded one, testosterone fully loaded?” she had written.
"I know from experience that relationship-building with clients is one of my greatest strengths." -- a reddit user
I am interested in moving to the Portland area in 2015. I am an experienced software professional who currently works in the special projects office of a well-known university. I also have years of experience in the world of human resources software services, with dozens of clients who have praised my abilities and approach. Another education credential is that I will have my masters in education by the time I move, and I also have completed several years of experience as a high school teacher that built the foundation for my approach to encouraging teamwork, process, and leadership.
I am especially interested in a software sales organization because I am positive I would be good at it. I know from experience that relationship-building with clients is one of my greatest strengths. I am also interested in seeking leadership positions interacting with higher education Enrollment, Human Resources, or Information Technology organizations.
Kindly just PM me if you would like to see a resume and testimonials page. Thanks for reading.
Super Opinionated.
