An RPG game or role-playing game is a game in which players assume the role of characters in a fictional setting. Here are some of the top 10 RPG horror games, that have received overwhelming positive feedback. All of these are free to play & you can play them online.
Ib:The game fallows the story of Ib, a little girl who was visiting an art gallery with her parents. While observing the many exhibits, Ib suddenly realizes she is alone and trapped within a space where the exhibitions started to come back to life. Help Ib escape this horror-filled museum before the gallery traps her there forever.
Mad Father: Help our protagonist, Aya Drevis to save her father from the devilish creatures crawling through the mansion. Help her face the true nature of her beloved father and find what happened with her deceased mother.
The Crooked Man:There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile. He found a crooked sixpence (hey look my username) against a crooked stile. He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse. And they all lived together in a little crooked house.
The Sandman: The Sandman doesn’t like children who stays up, so he digs their eyes with a spoon and makes them into stew!
Mermaid Swamp:A simple road trip becomes a nightmare when four friends are stranded in a strange mansion by a swamp. But there’s a legend about the swamp outside the mansion.
Schuld:Hear the story of Aaron a man who finds himself trapped in an hostile world filled with death and decay. Find why have you brought here and who are you.
Paranoiac:A true horror adventure game with creepy atmosphere and great storyline. The story fallows Miki Takamura, a book writer, who just moved into her Aunt’s house. Her aunt died in this house three years ago and since then, the house has been empty. This game contains sudden surprises and harsh images. The weak of heart should not play.
Wait: And there I stand, fed and alone, my heart is heavy as a stone. My deeds changed nothing in the end, the inevitable truth cannot be bent.
Vorlorn:Far in the distance, amid the ocean, lies a massive citadel that rises out of the water every eon. It is said that deep inside of the structure is a place of magic where any wish is possible. If the legend is true, I know my wish. To see you again, even after death
The Wedding:The Wedding is a great horror adventure game with great story-line and gameplay. Fallow the story of Anima and her future brother as they adventure into the woods.
Enjoy! Some of these games may contain jumpscares & startling images as well as loud noises. Play at your own risk. Here’s a compilation of other online games I’ve mentioned on this blog
The Brain
Photo credit:
Drinks machine, via Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Depression is an astonishingly common mental disorder; it affects as many as 1 in 4 people during their lifetime, and between 5 and 10% of the population are suffering from the illness to some extent at any one time.
Philae, the probe that landed on a comet as part of the Rosetta mission, has detected organic molecules in the comet's atmosphere. We don't know exactly what the molecules are yet, but they could hold a key to early life on Earth. Hell, this is a big reason we sent Rosetta all the way to a lonely comet in the first place.
Senate Republicans, ratcheting up their rhetoric about the threat posed by the Islamic State, on Tuesday night sank the only significant legislative attempt to rein in the National Security Agency in the nearly year and a half since American citizens first learned they were being spied on by their own government.
The procedural vote to move forward on the USA Freedom Act required 60 votes. It received 58. All but one Democrat and four libertarian-leaning Republicans voted in favor of the bill. The rest of the Republicans — including libertarian firebrand Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — voted against, along with Florida Democrat Bill Nelson. (Here’s the rollcall of the vote.)
During a brief debate before the vote, Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss warned that members of the Islamic State “want people to walk the streets of New York… and start killing people.” And, displaying either a real or feigned ignorance of the extraordinary latitude the NSA will continue to enjoy when it comes to spying on international communications, he suggested that the bulk collection of domestic phone records was necessary to ferret out such plans. (Watch video of the debate.)
“God forbid we wake up tomorrow morning… to the news that a member of ISIL is in the United States and federal agents need to determine who this person is coordinating with to carry out a potential attack upon the homeland,” Florida Republican Marco Rubio said. “I promise you, if God forbid a horrifying event like that would happen, the first question that would be asked is why didn’t we know about it?”
Maine Republican Susan Collins asked: “Why would we weaken the ability of our intelligence community at a time when the threats against this country have never been greater?”
Supporters of the bill noted that bulk domestic surveillance had not served any identifiable intelligence purpose.
After the vote, Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, who wrote the bill, decried the “scare tactics” used by the opposition. “Fomenting fear stifles debate,” he said. “And doing it at the last minute is all the more regrettable.” (Watch the video.)
“This nation deserves more than that. This nation should not allow our liberties to be set aside by passing fears,” he said.
Looking around the chamber, Leahy concluded: “If we do not protect the Constitution, we do not deserve to be in this body.”
Supporters of the USA Freedom Act, including privacy groups and technology companies, had considered it an essential first step toward ending the NSA’s overreach. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell set the tone for the day in the morning, actively encouraging his caucus to block the measure, citing concerns that it would hurt the fight against such groups as the Islamic State. Republicans also took their cues from an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, in which former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden and former attorney general Michael Mukasey described the bill as NSA Reform That Only ISIS Could Love.
With Republicans taking control of the Senate in January, a vote during the current lame-duck session was widely considered the bill’s last, best shot.
The USA Freedom Act would have ended the government’s bulk collection of domestic phone records, forcing officials to make specific requests to phone companies. It would also have ended the law-enforcement monopoly on arguments before the secretive surveillance court by creating a role for a special advocate. And it would have required that significant court opinions be made public.
The arguments in favor of the bill on Tuesday night focused on the widespread support it enjoyed, real invasions of privacy, and the astonishing lack of any evidence that the bulk program had ever uncovered terror plots. “We learned that the bulk phone records collection program had not – as previously advertised – thwarted 54 terrorist plots, or even dozens, or even a few. In fact, we learned through our public hearings that the number was maybe one,” Leahy said.
“This is a carefully crafted bill that builds on the work of the House of Representatives, and has the unprecedented support of the Director of National Intelligence, the Attorney General, the Director of the NSA, American technology companies, and privacy and civil liberties groups across the political spectrum,” he said. “It is a reasonable and responsible compromise. There is no reason why we should not proceed to a debate.”
The Republican opponents indulged in dark fantasies about terror, and misunderstandings about the bulk surveillance program. “If this amendment ever becomes law,” Chambliss threatened, “all of a sudden, all of these telcoms are going to be holding this information, as opposed to the NSA holding it.” But the phone companies already hold the records.
Privacy advocates were dismayed. “Tonight the Senate voted to maintain a status quo that undermines American technology and consumer privacy and hampers innovation,” said Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “Though this vote is a setback, it will not stop the push for reform.”
Here are some tweets and earlier updates:
Glenn Greenwald’s prediction:
More tweets:
Dueling Floor Statements
YouTube video of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s floor statement this morning, saying the USA Freedom act would strip tools needed to fight the Islamic State:
Bill author and Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy then responded, citing widespread agreement that “bulk collection program has not been essential to keeping our country safe.”
– Dan Froomkin at 5:21 p.m. ET
Democrats Actually Appearing United
Not all Senate Democrats were a sure thing when it came to a vote in favor of the USA Freedom Act. There were rumblings that Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon — one of the most outspoken critics of the NSA in the Senate — might vote against it because it was too weak. There was a more distinct possibility that Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California — who as chair of the Senate intelligence committee has been a key enabler of the surveillance regime — would find it hypocritical to turn around and say the NSA had gone too far.
“I am going to vote for this bill,” Feinstein told reporters Tuesday. “The president wants it, the president has said that for several months, and the House, I believe—it doesn’t quite mimic their bill, but it’s very close to their bill.” Feinstein said she still prefers a reform bill she authored in her committee that would be more friendly to the NSA, but acknowledged that it wouldn’t pass the Senate or House…. “Let’s get started on this. I would characterize this bill as a beginning, but let’s get started,” Wyden said. “Tonight is the beginning of reform.”…
– Dan Froomkin, 4:00 p.m. ET
Contact Your Senator. The following groups all want to help you contact your senator – right now! – about the USA Freedom Act. Quiz question: Which of these is not like the other?
The Washington Post and New York Times editorial boards, which rarely see eye-to-eye on national security matters anymore, both endorsed the USA Freedom Act this morning.
The Times wrote that “the bill is a good way to begin restoring individual privacy that has been systematically violated by government spying, revealed through the leaks provided by Edward Snowden.” And, it pointed out: “If the bill doesn’t pass in the current lame-duck session of the Senate, still controlled by Democrats, it may never get past the 60-vote hurdle in the next session of Congress.”
The stridently hawkish Post hailed the bill’s “careful balance” and expressed relief that the NSA could “maintain its core, foreign-focused surveillance authorities without much change.”
The Los Angeles Times urged Congress – and Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein in particular — not to “succumb to specious arguments from defenders of the status quo.”
The Wall Street Journal, however, published a particularly toxic bromide by former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden and former attorney general Michael Mukasey, entitled: NSA Reform That Only ISIS Could Love.
After a brief debate, the Senate is expected to vote around 8 p.m. on whether to proceed with the bill. If it receives at least 60 votes, up to 30 hours of additional debate would follow, with another vote Thursday on whether to proceed. It would also require the votes of 60 of the 100 senators to pass.
If it passes, the Senate will take up the bill itself in December, when it returns from its Thanksgiving vacation. That process could be unpredictable, with potential amendments that could either make it go much further in imposing new limits on N.S.A. surveillance, or significantly weaken the provisions in the bill now. The revamped version would still need to pass the House before this Congress closes at the end of December.
In a coup for privacy advocates, strong end-to-end encryption is coming to Whatsapp, a cross-platform instant messaging app with more than 500 million installations on the Android platform alone.
Until now, most popular messaging apps for smartphones have offered woefully inadequate protections against eavesdropping. Whatsapp, which Facebook recently acquired for $19 billion, has itself been criticized for a series of crypto blunders only spooks in the National Security Agency would love. Most other mobile apps haven't done much better, as a recent scorecard of 39 apps compiled by the Electronic Frontier Foundation attests. Many fail to implement perfect forward secrecy, which uses a different key for each message or session to ensure that an adversary who intercepts a key can't use it to decrypt old messages. The notable exception among popular messaging apps is Apple's iMessage, but it's not available for Android handsets.
Enter Moxie Marlinspike, the highly regarded security researcher and principal developer of TextSecure, an SMS app for Android. Over the past three years, his team at Open Whisper Systems has developed a open encryption protocol for asynchronous messaging systems. That specification is now being incorporated into Whatsapp.
Oh my goodness. OH MY GOODNESS. Ron Gilbert, best known as the creator of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, just launched a Kickstarter for a brand new old-school point-and-click adventure game that looks just about incredible.
Last week, a man claimed to have been "delivered" from homosexuality.
"I'm not gay no more. I am delivered! I don't like mens no more," he actually roared in front of crowds at a church in St Louis. "I said I like women. Women, women, women, women!" The pastor then gave the man $100, saying, "God said he's going to bless you because of your commitment. Just to prove it, He just told me to give you $100."
Lucky bastard, eh? Thing is, someone should probably tell this benevolent pastor to hold onto his cash in future,
because new genetic research—recently published by the New Scientist—may have provided some of the strongest evidence yet that gay people are born gay.
Researchers analyzed 409 pairs of gay twins. In doing so, they found clear links between sexual orientation in men with "two regions of the human genome that have been implicated before, one on the X chromosome and one on chromosome 8." In layman's terms, scientists are saying this means that they've found a single gene in all of the twins that can only be attributed to sexual orientation. The findings are—according to study leader Alan Sanfers of the NorthShore Research Institute in Evanston, Illinois—an enormous contribution to the catalogue of evidence that "erodes the notion that sexual orientation is a choice."
Gene hunters had previously isolated the so-called "gay gene" back in 1993, with 40 pairs of twins. But this new study is far larger. Over five years, Sanders's team collected blood and saliva samples and looked at the locations of genetic markers called SNPs, or single nucleotide polymorphisms. These are, for those who don't speak genome, the difference of a single letter in our genetic code. The scientists then measured which SNPs were shared by the men.
In all 818 of them, being gay was the only shared trait. The twins were non-identical, see, so similar genetics in traits like height, intelligence, hair color, etc, differed between all sets of twins. So, the scientists reasoned, any SNPs found in the same genetic group—wherever it is in the world—would more than likely be aligned with sexual orientation.
Sanders still stresses that sexual orientation depends on both genetic and environmental factors, and that even if he has honed in on individual genes they may only have a small effect on their own. But this research is huge.
§
"This study knocks another nail into the coffin of the 'chosen lifestyle' theory of homosexuality," Simon LeVay—a neuroscientist who claimed in 1991 to have found that a particular region within the hypothalamus is smaller in gay men—told New Scientist. "Yes, we have a choice in life, to be ourselves or to conform to someone else's idea of normality, but being straight, bisexual or gay, or none of these, is a central part of who we are, thanks in part to the DNA we were born with."
But presenting religious fanatics with science—however unequivocal—can be a tough task. I know someone with born-again Christian parents who believe that dinosaur bones were buried in the Earth by Satanists to trick us. They said to me once, looking me dead in the eye, that London's National History Museum was "a farcical joke." (This is despite there being plenty of Biblical writings that sound pretty dinosaur-like to me. "The Book of Job," for example, in which Job writes: "Look at Behemoth, which I made along with you and which feeds on grass like an ox. What strength it has in its loins, what power in the muscles of its belly! Its tail sways like a cedar; the sinews of its thighs are close-knit. Its bones are tubes of bronze, its limbs like rods of iron. It ranks first among the works of God, yet its Maker can approach it with his sword.")
Interpretation is everything. You make your own reality from what you read. Written word—or, indeed, in the case of Sanders's research, empirical scientific evidence—might be black and white, but we all absorb information in different colors. And for the 79 countries around the world where homosexuality is illegal, beliefs surrounding same-sex relationships are often so deep-rooted—so born of a desperate fear of "other"—that you wonder what difference such a strong piece of scientific evidence will make.
It's 2014 and so many parts of our world aren't just living in the dark, but actively making the shadows bigger. It's now illegal to even advocate on the behalf of gay people in some countries, and, if you're young and gay in a country like Putin's Russia, you're completely cut off from any kind of legal support network. In some places—Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, Mauritiana, some parts of Nigeria and Somalia—they still murder people for being gay. In August, two adult men were hanged in Iran, supposedly for consensual sodomy.
The plasticity of the brain is widely acknowledged and accepted these days. We can change the way we think and, as a result, the physical structure of that grey blancmange we carry around with us. We are capable of eclipsing our own beliefs with more rational ones. "That's your responsibility as a person, as a human being—to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible," said Malcolm Gladwell recently. "And if you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking."
We can only hope (or pray, if that's your bag), then, that such hard science can make a dent in the terrified minds of those who believe that people who fall in love with those wielding similar genitals to their own should be punished for making such a "choice." Surely, as human beings, we're not that fucking stupid.
Was it funny in 1969 when Bill Cosby joked about his quest to procure some Spanish Fly to drug women for sex? I don't know, but it isn't funny now. This bit is from the unfortunately titled comedy LP, Bill Cosby: It's True! It's True.
"“He said it was sweet, like actually sugary-sweet,” she continued. “He also said every girl tasted different. Oh God, he's done period-sex taste tests. Oh God. Oh God.” As she mashed the keyboard to express her distress, I did my best to comfort her."
A few months ago, a friend told a juicy story about another friend’s hookup with a male pop star. “She said she was on her period, and he said he was into it. Like, it’s his thing.” The story involved period blood all over the musician’s face and the menstrual version of a shit-eating grin. “Ewwww,” I squealed in titillated terror as my friend added, “But that’s a thing, right? Guys who are intoperiods?” Not just okay with sex during menstruation, but actively seeking and looking forward to it.
At the time, I was skeptical. But after quizzing friends, strangers, and a few experts on the subject, I can now confirm that “into periods” is most definitely “a thing,” for men and women both. Some reasons are physical and hormonal; others practical; and many more are tied to erotic associations and pride in reveling in the uncensored female body. In men, such pride is a modern sort of machismo, one defined by hardcore connoisseurship — much like a chest-thumping dude-foodie who develops a taste for offal. Menstruation is, well, gross. It can irreparably damage your upholstery. It is made of a substance that causes people to faint on sight. Thus, menstrual sex is an advanced maneuver, available only to men and women with seasoned sexual palates and hangup-free psyches. As Louis C.K. put it in his famed mockery of menses-averse young men, “Fuck her in the period hole, you idiot, what’s the dilemma? I don’t give a shit, if you’re having your period, come on over. I’m 41, I’ll fuck the shit out of you, I’ll drink the blood, let’s party.”
My friend Daniela echoed this sentiment. “A real man goes down on you on your period. And loves it,” she wrote in an email. Sexual naifs fear encounters; those with experience cannot be fazed. “And you love it, too. The vag is much more sensitive when you’re menstruating,” Daniela continued.
For some, menstrual sex isn’t a dirty necessity for the desperately horny; it’s an activity to spend the whole month awaiting, with glee. Another female acquaintance described “an indie actor who would only fuck me on my period,” and “an art director who was obsessed with tampons as a prop.” The latter evokes an unfortunate echo of one model’s allegations against the photographer Terry Richardson: “I politely declined his offer to make tea out of my bloody cunt plug,” Jamie Peck wrote of Richardson’s request to “play with” her tampon during a photo shoot.
But period attraction is not only for perverse celebrities. A friend we'll call Maya once had a long-distance boyfriend, whom we'll call David, who begged her to schedule visits during her period. “David wasn’t even a hippie,” she reflected in a Gchat. “This is a dude who wears Patek Philippe casually.” The first time they had period sex was the week before David moved cross country. “I’d been putting off my period by skipping the period week in my birth control for like four months at this point, because I knew he was moving but was so enamored by his giant dick that I couldn’t bear missing out before he left. But of course the week before he went, THE FLOOD OF A THOUSAND PERIODS is unleashed. It just broke through, like a scene from The Ten Commandments.” To her surprise, David was into it from day one, proclaiming the situation “hot” even as he emerged from sex smeared from waist to thigh in menstrual blood. “He said ‘the musk’ turned him on,” she recalled, a sensory note that I heard from more than one man. “The upside is all in the smell,” one straight man wrote in an email that he followed immediately with two frantically backpedaling emails as he panicked about revealing too much. Such is the double-edged sword of embracing a primal desire: Uncontrollability means the potential for sexual glory is high, but so too is the potential for humiliation.
Maya continued: “He made me stay at his place for, like, the next three days to capitalize on all the period sex. Like a newly caged feral animal. He ate me out A LOT. No tampon. I was like, ‘Why can’t I just keep a small tampon in?’ And he goes, get this, ‘The string grosses me out.’” When I asked if David’s face got messy, she replied with a link to a picture of a zombie with a bloody mouth. She didn’t enjoy the menstrual romp as much as David did: “It made me feel gross and guilty.”
Her squeamishness was something of a relief; I had begun to worry that I was the only Old Testament–style prude who still finds period sex distasteful. (Leviticus: “If there is a man who lies with a menstruous woman and uncovers her nakedness ... both of them shall be cut off from among their people.” As one who tends to feels like a bloated wad of filth during her period, I mostly follow this rule.) But even period-sex enthusiasts, I discovered, can recoil from coagulated blood while reveling in menstruation’s sexual side effects. Daniela and several others spoke positively of menstrual cups and diaphragms, while others simply put up with ickiness in the name of hot sex. One blood-averse man described women who got very horny during their periods, and their arousal aroused him. The ability to trigger cascading orgasmic freak-outs, he said, was incentive enough to perform cunnilingus on vaginas that tasted “like very rare steak” and postcoital imagery he likened to “human carnage.” And though blood mixed with the fluids of sex can make a dramatically grim tableau, period sex need not require engagement with that much blood: “A standard sexual session for most couples is 5 to 15 minutes,” the sex therapist Vanessa Marin told me by email. “There's not a ton of menstrual fluid that comes out during that time, period.” Still, Marin argued, even on a heavy-flow day menstrual blood could serve as — brace yourselves, Leviticans — “a natural lubricant.”
“I had P sex last night!” a thirtysomething friend wrote by email. “OMG felt SO good.” She hadn’t attempted it in years, mostly owing to an aversion to unnecessary laundry. “We didn’t put a towel down. That felt too uncivilized,” she said of her gallant return to menstrual fucking. “We didn’t last long, maybe ten minutes. Everything just felt tighter, and like there was more pressure and like an intense heartbeat in that area. I was also really sensitive everywhere, from my nipples to my ass. My orgasm was amazing. It was like this this MAJOR release — everything clamped up really tight and then released really powerfully. I was shocked at how different it all felt from ‘normal’ sex. And it didn't make a mess at all. No blood on the dick even!”
Heightened female libido and pleasure, though not universal, is routinely associated with menstruation, Planned Parenthood medical spokeswoman Dr. Vanessa Cullins told me by phone. Increases in blood flow to the pelvic region could heighten pleasure, while surges in estrogen (at the start of the period) and lutenizing hormone (at the end) affect the sex drive. Additionally, a woman who thinks she can’t get pregnant may be “more relaxed.”
Though pregnancy is less likely during menstruation, the phenomenon is not unheard of. What’s more, the cervix is more open than usual during menstruation, which Cullins says means exposure to bacteria and STDs are more likely to develop into infection: “It’s very important to use a condom unless you’re supremely confident that you’re in a mutually monogamous relationship.”
Though Maya’s three days of menstrual good-bye sex were “really good,” she refused David’s request for menstrual visitation. The duo broke up a few months later, having never again had period sex. In retrospect, Maya believes her own insecurity held her back. She described her disgust at even acknowledging the word musk and the terror of seeing color-coded evidence of vaginal contact on the parts of his body he used to touch her. “The worst was when he’d text, ‘We haven’t had strawberries-and-cream sex in a while.’ DON’T RUIN DESSERT, DAVID.” Still, she wonders if she shouldn’t have held on to this man, the one who saw her in her messiest state and embraced it. The one who embraced the messiness of sex itself. “Really looked the gift-horse in his period-blood-covered mouth,” she said.
“He said it was sweet, like actually sugary-sweet,” she continued. “He also said every girl tasted different. Oh God, he's done period-sex taste tests. Oh God. Oh God.” As she mashed the keyboard to express her distress, I did my best to comfort her. Don’t feel bad, I advised, you gave it a try but it wasn’t for you. Revulsion, like attraction, is uncontrollable sometimes.
On October 23, about 20 activists whom police said belonged to the youth wing of India’s ruling, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) barged into a cafe in Kozhikode, a city in the southern Indian state of Kerala. The men smashed windows, overturned chairs, and destroyed a television. The cafe, in their view, was facilitating “immoral activities”: specifically, couples holding hands and kissing.
India’s “moral police”—informal neighborhood groups that enforce fundamentalist Hindu views by, for example, beating up couples engaging in public displays of affection—are nothing new. But what was striking about the vandalism in late October was that the nationalists who ransacked the place were young, in the same age group as the patrons they were taunting for their PDA.
And young Indians have been divided in their response to the incident. The attack, which was caught on film, broughturban studentsacross the country into the streets to stage what have been dubbed “Kiss of Love” protests. Demonstrators have gathered to openly kiss, caress, hug, and otherwise show affection from the city of Kochi in the south to New Delhi in the north, with the explicit aim of challenging the “moral police.” At the same time, student organizations across the political spectrum have spoken out against the protests as contrary to Indian values, and counter-protesters have shouted slogans against Western influence as embodied, for example, in public displays of affection.
The splits within India’s youth are emblematic of broader cultural tensions in India—ones that have in some respects become more prominent with the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the BJP, who captured a large proportion of the youth vote in India’s elections last May. “India has moved considerably in terms of its social attitudes over the past 20 to 25 years, particularly since economic liberalization took place,” conservative political commentator Swapan Dasguptatold the BBC last week. “And while public displays of affection are far more pronounced today than they were some time ago, I think the mores which operate, say, in Amsterdam or perhaps in parts of central London might not strictly be applicable in India.” (Ironically, as Atish Patel of The Wall Street Journalhas pointed out, anthropological evidence suggests India may have been the real birthplace of the potentially misnamed French kiss.)
Still, the taboo against kissing persists in some segments of Indian society. Section 294 of the Indian penal code outlaws “any obscene act in any public place,” a provision some have argued prohibits kissing in public, though Indian courts tend to disagree. Until relatively recently, Bollywood movies would not show couples kissing; instead, shots would jump from couples about to smooch to fluttering birds tipping their beaks toward each other or roses waving in the wind. Among adherents of Hindutva, a conservative ideology that equates Indian identity with Hindu values, kissing in public is anti-Hindu—and therefore, as one conservative former minister said on numerous occasions well before the current protests started, “Public kissing is just not Indian.”
But the Kiss of Love protests, and the opposition to them, make clear that the taboo against public displays of affection is not reserved for older generations that grew up before India’s 1990s-era economic liberalization. The result of this liberalization, according to the writer Akash Kapur, has been the “Americanization” of India—a trend that is visible in India’s cities, where people brandish the latest smartphones and young women wear shorts and T-shirts like Western college students.
The kissing controversy is just one example of young people’s complicated attitudes on the role of traditional values in modern India. A Hindustan Times survey of more than 5,000 18- to 25-year-olds in 15 major cities, whose results were released this summer, showed that 60 percent prayed regularly, and that less than 40 percent of men thought they should help women with housework. Only 4 percent of respondents said they would marry someone their parents objected to. And when it came to sexual norms specifically, 61 percent of those surveyed said premarital sex was no longer a big issue—but 63 percent said they expected their spouses to be virgins.
Young Indians certainly helped put the BJP in power in India’s recent election—and the BJP, in turn, embraces Hindutva as part of its philosophy. An astounding 150 million of 788 million eligible voters in India this year were first-time voters, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted ahead of the election. The same survey found that 66 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 favored the more conservative BJP, while only 19 percent of eligible voters in the same age group found the left-leaning and more secular Indian National Congress more to their liking.
Still, these young voters weren’t necessarily motivated by the BJP’s conservative Hinduism. Many Indian youth may have been more attracted to Modi’s success as chief minister of Gujarat, where smooth roads, modern factories, and lavish foreign investment made the western province a symbol of prosperity. Seventy-two percent of young Indians in Pew’s pre-election poll indicated that they craved a change from Modi’s predecessor, the former economist Manmohan Singh of the Congress party, who presided over a period of economic stagnation.
The debate over engaging in public displays of affection is also occurring amid growing awareness of sexual assault against women in India, a problem exacerbated in part by the longstanding marginalization of women in Indian society. A recent editorial in India’s Economic Times newspaper argued that the moral policing that Kiss of Love protesters are opposing has similar roots, including “the age-old social norm that women’s sexuality should be controlled, that their morals are not secure in their own hands and should be left in the care of others, particularly men. ... Moral policing is mostly about defending traditional control over women and not so much about public decency, whose limits change over time.” Kissing could be both a blessing and a curse for India’s women: Some have used the Kiss of Love protests to demand gender equality, but the demonstrations have also reportedly elicited online rape threats.
Modi himself has spoken out against rape and called for women to be valued more in Indian society, though he hasn’t commented on the Kiss of Love protests directly. But, again, his popularity among young people has less to do with women’s safety than with efficiency. “The young voter is a no-nonsense, delivery-focused voter,” pollster Yashwant Deshmukh of C-Voter, a statistical research group, told The Times of India. “For them, governance is a product, and proven governance is a proven product. Modi’s answers would always begin with what he had done in Gujarat. That image of the doer seems to have clicked big time with the youth.”
If the clash of the kissers shows anything clearly, it’s that with 65 percent of India’s population under age 35, it’s a mistake to think of Indian youth as a coherent political bloc. When it comes to their politics, not all of them kiss and tell.
Put down your Magic cards and doff your fedora to Oxford Dictionaries' 2014 word of the year: vape, the nerdier cousin of smoking favored by people who fancy themselves characters from The Matrix.Vape, the actual definition of which is to "inhale and exhale the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device," has really taken on a life ... More »
If you get Ebola, it turns out that the single best thing you can do is to drink a gallon of water a day. "I want sports personalities to be talking about it," says a doctor in Sierra Leone. "I want everybody to be talking about it." Spread the word!
Remember the 90s, when we had videos on VHS to teach us about this new thing called the internet? Lucky for us, Andy Baio (@waxpancake) has preserved those tapes for the YouTube generation.
An architecture review! And who says print journalism is dead?
Seaport Boulevard is a product of earlier city planners who were unsure of what the area should become.
Greater Boston has a history of creating complete new neighborhoods in relatively sudden splurges. The South End, the Back Bay, the abandoned landfill that became MIT. Even Beacon Hill was a profit-making spec development.
There’s another one now, in South Boston. It’s called the Innovation District — the late mayor, Thomas M. Menino, coined the name, hoping for an inventive mix of business and technology to rival Kendall Square — and it’s rising so fast that every time you visit, another building seems to be erupting out of the ground.
A lot has been written about the Innovation District from the point of view of business and real estate. Not as much has been said, though, about what it is like as an experience for the people who work and will live there. Dare we use the word charm? The Innovation District has all the charm of an office park in a suburb of Dallas.
If you cross the Moakley Bridge and walk east along Seaport Boulevard, with the harbor on your left, you’ll note a Silver Line T station, some humongous (but now shrinking) parking lots, and new high-rise buildings, with more under construction. At the eastern end, near the D Street corner, are the World Trade Center, the Seaport Boston Hotel, and a scattering of bars and restaurants.
The problem is that from a town planning perspective, good cities are made of good streets. As far as urban design is concerned, the buildings are there to shape the street space and energize its edges with interesting and useful things to see and do. The streets create the public world.
In the Innovation District, by contrast, there are too many isolated buildings on empty lots facing streets that are too wide to support a vigorous pedestrian life. This is a suburban world, just at the moment when center cities, with their street life and density, are coming back into favor.
One street epitomizes the problem. It’s Seaport Boulevard, the main drag. It should have been designed as a busy Main Street that would have sewed the district together. Instead, it looks like a misplaced fragment of the interstate highway system.
Some of the district’s problems are the result of a process that was out of sync. State highway engineers were laying out the streets of the future South Boston waterfront a generation ago, when nobody, including the city’s planners, had yet produced any clear idea of what they wanted this place to become. In the absence of guidance, highway engineers designed highways. Later planners and developers were stuck with the problem of fitting a human neighborhood into a world of industrial-sized parcels.
Most of the new architecture, too, feels wrong. The towers look about as interesting as up-ended packing crates. They’re stunted because they are not allowed to penetrate the flight path to and from Logan Airport. That rule limits most building heights in the Innovation District to around 250 feet. Such a limit could be a virtue. But it isn’t, because developers compensate by packing as much profitable space as possible into these crop-top edifices. They do it by making the floor areas as large as possible, in some cases as much as 30,000 square feet or more (that’s about three-quarters the area of a football field).
Short, fat buildings are the result. Standing on their separate parcels, they look like a row of isolated actors, each standing in lonely splendor on a different stage. Like teens with smartphones, I suppose the inhabitants of these buildings communicate electronically. In their sealed boxlike buildings, they certainly don’t get out much to meet one another, given the district’s barren lack of lively public space. Call it selfie architecture.
Other factors are at work. A building’s developer wants to maximize profit. One way to do that is to cut the cost of construction. That natural desire can lead to buildings that look like clones, as some do in the Innovation District.
All these forces, public and private, make it tough to get any interesting architecture. Architects give up and settle for tiny gestures. In the district, you might see a few stories of a building bumping forward, like a box hung on an otherwise flat facade. Or there may be a vertical slash of glass cut into a facade, like the leg slit in a fashion gown. This isn’t architecture. It’s accessorizing.
There are some bright spots in the Innovation District, and they speak of lessons learned. One is the four-story cluster of restaurants at Liberty Wharf, the most visible of which is Jerry Remy’s Sports Bar & Grill at Seaport. Here there’s sidewalk life, human scale, and a visible presence of the harbor. Liberty Wharf is the work of developer Ed Nardi of Cresset Development. And Eastport Park, at the corner of D Street and Seaport Boulevard, is a landscape gem that sits atop an underground garage. Thick foliage and well-positioned sculptures shape a variety of open spaces. The designer was Halvorson Design Partnership.
The best architectural move to date, though, is District Hall. It’s a one-story loft, built with both public and private funding. The hall is an attempt to supply what’s missing in the Innovation District. That fact makes it a visual diagnosis of the district’s maladies. Open 16 hours on weekdays, its purpose is to be a meeting place where people in the isolated towers can collide with one another and maybe spark creative ideas. There are leasable meeting rooms of different sizes and shapes, a bar, a cafe, an outdoor terrace, white walls you can mark up, an atmosphere of informality. The architect is David Hacin.
To be fair, not many new developments look good until the cranes go home. But after you’ve made all the allowances you can, you’re still stuck with the fact that the Innovation District is a serious failure of urban design.
As the district grows, we can hope for improvements. Soon there will be a lot of new housing. The new residents will populate the streets. They may even alleviate traffic congestion, because they will not need to be commuters. Many will choose to live where they work and walk or bike to the office. That’s the urban, as opposed to suburban, way to build a city.
Other kinds of diversity must happen. Diversity of new and older buildings. Of street widths and block sizes and parcels. Diversity of architects, instead of the tiny few who now get a lion’s share of big commercial jobs. Diversity of building materials, most of which, except for glass, are now often unidentifiable.
Where is the conservatory or experimental theater that will fill the streets with young people? The Institute of Contemporary Art is a start, but only that. Institutions such as Berklee and Emerson have rejuvenated neighborhoods. No school of any kind is planned for the entire South Boston Waterfront.
The Innovation District raises one central issue. In a competitive scrum of developers, lenders, officials, citizens, and architects, who holds out for better design? It’s the mayor’s voice that usually matters. Mayors should not let themselves be bamboozled by single-issue experts with fancy computer printouts. A mayor is a surrogate for the general public.
By better design, I don’t mean architectural “statements” by so-called starchitects. Good design for the Innovation District is architecture that supports public life, neither more nor less.
Can the Innovation District eventually become more of a Boston neighborhood and less of a Dallas office park? That will depend on whether we’ve learned the lessons the district has offered so far.
Boston in the past was pretty good at providing a public realm alongside new development. The owners and speculators who fashioned the Back Bay were building for themselves, just as we are today. But they cared just as much about creating a shared public world for future generations.
Robert Campbell, the Globe’s architecture critic, can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.
mikejuk writes The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) is tiny and only has 302 neurons. These have been completely mapped, and one of the founders of the OpenWorm project, Timothy Busbice, has taken the connectome and implemented an object oriented neuron program. The neurons communicate by sending UDP packets across the network. The software works with sensors and effectors provided by a simple LEGO robot. The sensors are sampled every 100ms. For example, the sonar sensor on the robot is wired as the worm's nose. If anything comes within 20cm of the 'nose' then UDP packets are sent to the sensory neurons in the network. The motor neurons are wired up to the left and right motors of the robot. It is claimed that the robot behaved in ways that are similar to observed C. elegans. Stimulation of the nose stopped forward motion. Touching the anterior and posterior touch sensors made the robot move forward and back accordingly. Stimulating the food sensor made the robot move forward. The key point is that there was no programming or learning involved to create the behaviors. The connectome of the worm was mapped and implemented as a software system and the behaviors emerge. Is the robot a C. elegans in a different body or is it something quite new? Is it alive? These are questions for philosophers, but it does suggest that the ghost in the machine is just the machine. The important question is does it scale?
