text:
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Miniatures are Old School
There are, I think, several factors at work here but two are critical. The first is that a lot of us have latched on to the very miniatures-heavy nature of the WotC editions of Dungeons & Dragons as a cause rather than a symptom of what we think is wrong with those games. Since they promote the use of minis and we don't like those games, minis have become, by extension, emblematic of all we dislike. To my mind, this is no more logical than disliking polyhedral dice for similar reasons but, for good or for ill, a lot of us have chosen to fixate on minis as the issue, not the design of the games themselves.
The second factor has to do with when most of us entered the hobby and the circumstances under which we did so. I was a mere lad of 10 in 1979 and was not a wargamer, miniatures or otherwise. Consequently, I had no prior history using minis as aids to adjudicate combat (or anything else). Certainly I saw lots of minis for sale -- I was particularly entranced by the large glass case of them at What's Your Game? in Harborplace -- but they mostly seemed like cool props or toys rather than something integral to play. I suspect this attitude is even more prevalent among gamers who entered the hobby a few years after I did, with Moldvay or Mentzer, when phrases like "products of your imagination" became popular as a marketing ploy. Thus, for gamers of a certain vintage, miniatures are not just optional, they're outside their experience.
There are other factors too, such as the time and expense necessary to buy and paint minis, as well as their relative impracticality if you have to cart boxes of them to your meeting place week after week. I also think that many of us in the old school movement have convinced ourselves that "old school = rules light" and further that miniatures are somehow contrary to being rules light. Leaving aside the error of equating rules lightness with old school -- a post for another day perhaps -- the use or rejection of minis is to my mind a separate question entirely. Likewise, I've sometimes seen, perhaps echoing TSR's catchphrase, the claim made that minis are somehow an impediment to one's imagination, or at least that they're a crutch for unimaginative players, although I doubt this is a widespread view.
I think, in the end, what we must acknowledge, as Rob does in his post, is that miniatures are simply a tool, like referee's screens or adventure modules. Their use or rejection has little to no bearing on whether a game is or is not "old school." It's true that Gary Gygax famously didn't use miniatures in his home campaign, as equally famously Dave Arneson did. I am sure, if you did a survey of first generation gamers, you'd find no consensus on the topic and that's fine. None of us should use or reject miniatures on the basis of what Gary or Dave did or didn't do, but I do think it behooves us all to remember that this hobby arose out of miniatures wargaming and many early gamers profitably used miniatures in their campaigns. Far from being contrary to old school gaming, miniatures are very much a part of it, even if many of us choose not to follow suit today for reasons of our own.
66 comments:
I Really think the cost of minis plays a role. Some of us who struggle to find any time at all to game also don't have tons of currency sitting around to buy a new mini every time a character dies, we change class, or the game collapses and a new one rises from the ashes. I think they are greatly useful, but also problematic. I think better use of printed or cardboard markers could alleviate some of this monetary stress, but I've noticed that they don't seem to have much popularity. The key may be to continue to hammer on how useful physical representations of a combat space can be and reinforce that these representations need not be cast in pewter to be informative.
ReplyDelete- AnonymousApril 13, 2010 at 1:45 PM
Mini's make the game easy and visually applicable. It's a bajillion times easier explaining a situation by drawing it out or using cutouts/mock-ups (See Dwimmermount's blog). I can describe a setting or encounter but in less than than that I can plop down miniatures, scribble on a board, and say "This is what you see."
Tangibles bring new life to the game with scope. That Big Red Dragon looks damn scary when it takes up nearly 6 inches on the table next to the little halfling. I spent my formative childhood gaming years at the local game shop, so mini's (which we always called "figures" at Aero Hobbies) were a given. If you didn't have a mini for a game there, owner Gary would paint a little stone or piece of wood with a face on it, and you'd have to use that in the game (sort of his version of the dunce cap). I amassed quite a collection before I was even 17 years old. It was and remains an important part of my gaming experience.
A lot of people who don't use mini's say "they take away from the imagination" and I call total bullshit on that. They are missing out on a key element of the hobby that goes back to Chainmail.
If just used for placement, or well-painted to represent what a PC/NPC looks like, either way they are a huge part of the enjoyment. If I had to make a choice of getting rid of dice or getting rid of mini's, we'd be pulling random numbers out of a hat.We used them early on but ended up using carboard chits with hand drawn pictures and finally just the characters' initials.
I had fun buying them and painting them (still love Grenadier's "Gnome King" and Halfling Lookouts") but in the end they cost too much money and time to be worth it. The chits were just easier to carry around and utterly disposable.A few of my main objections to miniatures that don't bear directly on the whether or not they're "true old-school" elements or encourage rules-heavy play:
a) They can be quite expensive in any sort of quantity. As can the materials to prep and paint them.
b) A pain to transport in quantity? Definitely.
c) On the subject of painting, I haven't a shred of artistic talent.
d) Time spent arranging and fiddling around with them can easily slow a combat as much, if not more, than the visual reference they provide might speed it up.
e) For some, minis help them visualize a scene. For others, like me, a bunch of little pewter statuettes are much inferior to my own "mind's eye" renderings of a scene. For me, they only serve to constrain the imagination.
DM: "The towering arch-demon lord looks like this." *plunks down mini*
Me: "Oh, is that all?"
f) In my experience, they can exert a negative influence on the surprise and variety within a campaign. Simply put: The DM often feels subtly (perhaps even unconsciously) disinclined to use monsters and NPCs that he doesn't own minis of!To not acknowledge the simple fact that D&D has its roots in miniatures war-games is historically disingenuous.
Sorry folks. That's where it started.
Either way, if you like 'em or not, it really doesn't matter.
I use them for combat. mostly paper minis for monsters . I tend to shy away from mapping the whole damn dungeon/castle/whatever. Takes too much time.
Other than that, I like to collect and paint minis for my PCs when I play. Kind of therapeutic in a way.
the Zen of minis painting?I never used minis, in the day. But I agree that it doesn't mean minis were never used, nor that minis are unsuitable for old-school gaming.
I have a rather large collection of minis now, and would love to get some use out of them at the game table.
Besides, i'm a much better fig painter now, than when I was 12.
Will, its time for you to pick up a brush, and overcome your well-known fear of minis. ;D"I find that rather odd, because, back in the day, minis were one of things nearly every article, report, or dramatization of roleplaying games included, even highlighted."
As you probably know, I see the facts on this issue going in the other direction.
My main criticism is neither of your two critical factors -- It's that the minis scale just fundamentally doesn't work in either OD&D or AD&D or any TSR-era game. The fact that Gygax didn't use minis allows me to make sense of why this was the case.
I did use minis last Saturday night while running G1 to make sense of the all-out clusterf*** of 7 high-level adventurers running from the Great Hall fighting against 40 or so assorted giants and ogres, but I have to use my fixes to scale and time to make that work.
I've actually been meaning to ask you: In your OD&D games using miniatures, what do you use for the ground scale?blackstone: "To not acknowledge the simple fact that D&D has its roots in miniatures war-games is historically disingenuous. Sorry folks. That's where it started."
It would be equally true to say something like: "You must acknowledge that the birth of D&D came on the day that Gygax decided to eliminate miniatures from his prior wargaming play.">DM: "The towering arch-demon lord looks like this." *plunks down mini*
Me: "Oh, is that all?"<
Not many mini users have a representative for every monster, demon, or diety encountered. Most of us go with the descriptive element in that case, rather than search for a mini to represent Xiombarg the Chaos Goddess or whatever. You can have the best of both worlds - some things to represent (especially characters, which are the easiest to obtain and paint) and somethings that come straight from the imagination. I personally only tend to have figures to perfectly represent foes about 25% of the time. In that case, I use description and often images I find. I'm creative and imaginative enough to make it all work, and I have a greater overall experience for it.
I will admit that now that I am getting older I have less time to paint (and trying to paint now proves to me I should get glasses), and bearing a case of mini's can be a drag, especially if I want to ride my bike to the session. But overall I find it worth it, mostly because my group likes to use minis.f) In my experience, they can exert a negative influence on the surprise and variety within a campaign. Simply put: The DM often feels subtly (perhaps even unconsciously) disinclined to use monsters and NPCs that he doesn't own minis of!
That's a danger, I suppose, but it's never been one for us in the Dwimmermount campaign. I regularly say things like, "Pretend these orcs are werewolves" or whatever and no one seems to mind.- AnonymousApril 13, 2010 at 2:59 PM
"I can describe a setting or encounter but in less than than that I can plop down miniatures, scribble on a board, and say "This is what you see.""
Wow, I have to say, my experience has pretty much been the exact opposite of this. I find it far faster to describe in vivid detail the surroundings of the players and their enemies than to try and fish out miniatures and draw on a board. What's more, it infuses the scene with so much more nuanced detail that I personally think it's much more immersive.
It's my belief that the presence of miniatures makes all players (DM included) more prone to move the miniature about, say "I swing my sword", roll, and declare damage or miss. When everything's verbal, players are more inclined to put details and flourishes into their actions that just make it that much more exciting and interesting for everyone at the table. To not acknowledge the simple fact that D&D has its roots in miniatures war-games is historically disingenuous.
I got into RPGs via Choose Your Own Adventures not Miniature Wargames. So my hobby rather than "the history of D&D" didn't come from a background with minis.
I like making and painting minis, but I don't feel compelled to use them because of their being "more old school" or anything. :)It would be equally true to say something like: "You must acknowledge that the birth of D&D came on the day that Gygax decided to eliminate miniatures from his prior wargaming play."
Absolutely. I'd never deny that. My point is only that I don't really get all the anti-minis talk I keep seeing, much of which seems to imply it's somehow wrong and contrary to old school principles to use minis. I'd never fault anyone for not using minis, as there are innumerable good reasons for rejecting them, from personal taste to arguments such as the ones you raise about scale and so forth, but I just don't get all the hate for minis in the old school community. It's as if people have forgotten the history of the hobby.It's my belief that the presence of miniatures makes all players (DM included) more prone to move the miniature about, say "I swing my sword", roll, and declare damage or miss. When everything's verbal, players are more inclined to put details and flourishes into their actions that just make it that much more exciting and interesting for everyone at the table.
See, I don't find this as a universal problem, both because some people find the minis help provide a context for adding verbal details and because some just don't care about those details. They want combat to be quick and easy to adjudicate rather than "immersive." I don't think either approach is wrong or superior to the other; I think it comes down to a matter of personal taste, as it should. My only purpose in making this post is to point out that miniatures are no more or less old school than any other option.Perhaps Gygax didn't play with miniatures, but, while my first few games of D&D didn't feature minis, I started using them pretty quickly, and used them quite heavily once I started gaming at MIT. In the 1979-1981 time frame at MIT, most everyone I saw playing D&D used minis, and that included the older folks who pushed for more "role playing" as opposed to "hack 'n slash." And when I got to college (and thus started playing with a very different community), the people who played with me weren't shocked at the use of miniatures (though I did also start migrating to counters).
Oh, and I used to lug 25lbs worth of books and miniatures on the bus and subway until I started having the use of the car, and I had to walk 1 mile to get to the bus... Even with the car, I still had to lug all that stuff a hundred yards or so.
I'm also curious if Gygax really didn't use miniatures, or if there's a bit of revisionist history going on.
Now what might be pointed out as a difference between D&D 3.0 and later and the early use of minis is the fact that D&D 3.0 makes a much more formalized system, which in fact, feels more board game like than miniatures like to me.
As to description vs. laying out a battle - all I can say is that as a visual person rather than a verbal person, I often feel lost without visuals. Non-visual setups can work in some cases (Dogs in the Vinyard works pretty well for me for example), but I could never play D&D without any miniatures.
When I did go back to OD&D, I did decide to lose the battlemat, but we still used miniatures. I layed out dice and pencils and such on the table top to show the relevant walls. The placement of the miniatures was relevant, but we weren't slaves to counting squares.
I respect that folks who came to the game from other backgrounds may not feel miniatures are important, but everything I experienced was that miniatures were solidly part of early RPG play.
FrankIf you started with the "Red Box" this is what it said on the cover:
"This game requires no gameboard because the action takes place in the player's imagination with dungeon adventures that includes monsters, treasure and magic."
The single-player instructional tutorial was also a Choose Your Own Adventure / Fighting Fantasy type adventure.My love for minis is one of the things that got me back into the hobby. I remember getting the boxed set of Grenedier's Tomb of Spells as a birthday present that became a seminal moment for my love of all things fantasy.
We didn't always use them back in the day, but I have to admit that there is a certain boyish "come over to my house and let's play with Star Wars figures" quality to the fun these little hunks of paint and plastic invoke.
Now I pick up mostly WOTC prepaints on ebay because I'd rather spend my limited time playing than painting. Transporting them in tackle boxes is easier with plastic minis than with metal.
We swap out minis often, where an orc could be a werewolf on our battle grids drawn with dry erase pens.
My experience has been that they help the game come alive for some people, making it feel more grounded in reality, more tangible, substantive, and less ephemeral. I think they can actually save time because a picture is worth a thousand words and there's less speculation as to what is where, especially when adjudicating things like missile range and movement.
The biggest problem I'm finding is tracking multiple minis' hit points when you have several that are all the same. For example, having ten bugbears that all look the same.
I've tried painting the bases different colors, and we used to write right on the battle mat the hit points lost, but there has to be an easier way.- AnonymousApril 13, 2010 at 3:48 PM
I had been a wargamer for several years before being introduced to D&D in '81.
We played without minis, and I think one reason for that was the make-up of our group. From the very beginning it was at least 50% women (wives, girlfriends, friends). (We had to have an "out plan" once because our DM was pregnant, and VERY late! )
The ladies were used to putting up with us arguing over the range of a panzerfaust or how many hexes a tiger tank could move after making an opportunity fire attack. But they wouldn't tolerate us turning D&D into a war game.
And because we'd finally found something we could all do together, the guys didn't pursue the idea of minis. I think the most salient points have already been made. Let me just add, that most of what is exciting me now about adventure gaming is the DIY aspect.
Come cheap 3d printers and I bet people with be all over designing their own models of pig-nosed orcs and hirelings and sharing with each other."This game requires no gameboard because the action takes place in the player's imagination with dungeon adventures that includes monsters, treasure and magic."
Sure, but notice it says "requires no gameboard," not that gameboards are disallowed. I don't have a copy of Mentzer anymore, but I'll bet it includes a section or two in the rules discussing the option of using minis. I know that the Rules Cyclopedia, which draws substantially on Mentzer's rules, does have such a section, complete with a discussion of using a ruler to determine distances and it was published in 1991.
My point remains only that miniatures are an ancient tradition of the hobby. Individual players can use them or not, as they wish, but it's not as if WotC introduced their use to D&D.Sure, but notice it says "requires no gameboard," not that gameboards are disallowed.
I guess it doesn't say a Wet Banana or any number of other things is disallowed either. Picking up that box I wouldn't think to go get my swim trunks on before playing the game. :)
an ancient tradition of the hobby
...I've got cupboard full of miniatures (mostly unpainted) that I collected throughout the 80's. As a DM I found myself tracking down figures for monsters I wanted to put in the game. This often resulted in the adventure not happening the way I wanted because they didn't make an X or I couldn't afford 20 of Y. Also whenever I'd pick up a module and see something like 30 giant rats I knew we'd end up using dice to represent them on the tabletop.
Now we use some figures for the PCs (they don't really match the characters but we generally know which is which). Then we have about half a dozen orcs and skeletons. Just about everything else gets a cardboard standup or counter.
We also use a monitor flat on the table as a gaming surface. Some photos here:
Certainly very different to how we did things 30 years ago but not out of place in the OSR.It's nice to have a mix of both in a game and especially when it comes to the more physical aspects of the game like melees and explorations. But I do understand the appeal of not using mini which is all the reason why I like using a battle matt because drawing the floorplans allows the players to both have an idea of the layout as well and "fill in the blanks" to the textures and details with their own imagination. Even with minis I like them to be minimal and for the longest time i would use how ever many pennies I would need and place a sticker on it with the name of the monster or NPC.
ReplyDeleteI always wished I could afford more figures when I was a kid. I never had enough cash. Now, as a so-called adult, I have more disposable income and access to eBay and I've been able to buy a bunch. I buy MageKnight figs and pre-paints. I only paint figures that I particularly like or for my PC's, important NPC's or for friends.
In the early days of my RPG experience, we used them mostly for marching order. Once there was a thing called a Battlemat, we used them for battles.
I have no philosophy on the issue except that I like them. That's good enough for me.
I've built a pretty cool 3D board and my players like it too. (See my blog if you are interested -- I have pics).
Hauling them around is a drag, so when I go to a friends house, I bring my Cardboard Heroes. When people come over to my house, I use the 3D board and all the minis.We never used them during Gary's games, but that doesn't mean anything to me. It's all a personal preference - nothing more, nothing less.
I think minis/figures are cool! Did we use them all the time? Nah. Were they necessary for most things? Nah. Are they cool! Hell, yeah!
You can take them or leave if you want. Minis are definitely fall into the "Old School" realm. We used them in 1979/80.Way back when, I had a gazillion minis, and used them. I wasn't the greatest painter in the world, but at least I could roughly follow the contours of the clothing and such.
Although for some reason most of my elf figures ended up being drow.
I ended up losing all those miniatures back when I was moving all over the place, usually only after a few months. It just wasn't worth hauling them around at the time. Of course, now I bemoan their loss something fierce (along with most of my SPI/AH wargame collection).
I don't think minis are definitive one way or the other when it comes to old-schooledness; it just comes down to personal preference. Some of us used them back in the day, some of us didn't (and/or played without them sometimes even though we had them), and in my personal experience it didn't matter one way or the other.When I began playing in the seventies (Holmes edition), I started out not using minis, but rapidly came to several conclusions:
1. Minis and positioning solve arguments quickly.
2. Minis provide a heavy personal investment on the part of players in their characters.
3. Minis are handy for giving players an idea of size of the opponent, facing, and so on.
As a puppy kid, particularly one who lived way the hell and gone out in the boonies, I could not obtain miniatures freely -- if it wasn't cost, it was availability by mail. I eventually solved this problem by using cardboard minis, when they became available.
I don't care what EGG said, when I see a rule that dictates human and humanoid and horse movement in "inches," that system is DERIVED from minis, even if you don't use them.
The idea that to use them is somehow wrong or contrary to "old school" beliefs strikes me as kind of silly. What, I can't use a computer to build dungeons? Seems pretty arbitrary to me.There's nothing more deliciously D&D than those Grenadier boxes, filled with partitioned blue foam and lumps of lead that vaguely resemble adventurers and monsters. I love minis, associate them with even my earliest days gaming, and can't imagine playing the game without some kind of physical representation on the table. It doesn't have to be the exact figure and it usually isn't, and my players and I are fortunate to have strong enough imaginations to get past any discrepencies. In fact, it doesn't even have to be a figure: it can be a die, an eraser, the top hat from monopoly, a cigarette lighter: whatever. Just as long as I can look at the table at a glance and tell who is going to set off the unseen trap, who is getting flanked by the gnoll and who is getting clipped by the fireball. Being able to whip out a pack of Otherworld Minis pig-faced orcs is cool, but in the end its nothing but bragging rights and a handful of pennies (with a nickel for the leader)does the same job.
ReplyDeleteOddly enough it was a well developed miniature collection which spelled the end of our D&D group back in the day. Our group would dabble in tabletop miniatures from time to time (Sword and the Flame, mainly) but after the 1st edition of Warhammer was released, we quickly realized that we had amassed enough D & D minis to form rather impressive armies. This was back in the days before army composition and balance was a point of emphasis, so we'd have eclectic armies of heroes and bad guys fighting each other on the kitchen table using Warhammer rules. Unfortunately, D&D was dropped by the wayside, although we did play a little WFRP from time to time. From there we got into Napoleonics and Pike & Shot - some *serious* minis indeed.
ReplyDeleteAs the instigator of these series of posts on miniatures I can attest that this divide is an old old old dispute in gaming. I was noted for being a miniatures DM from the get go. Toting around my foam filled box sets of grenadier figures.
My mom had these wooden milk crates (which I still have and use) that made carrying books and miniatures with and without a car doable.Yeah, but only asking, "Does it work for me," puts a dampener on the banner-waving that the echo chamber likes to do. Anyone who has read the DMG can figure out for themselves that AD&D is derived from a miniatures game (inches), irrespective of whether the author of said tome actually used them. All that's left is creating another tempest in a teapot. Sure, miniatures are "old school." Equally true is that arguing (or even discussing) whether miniatures are old school is just plain boring.
ReplyDeleteWhat's funny is that as a kid I remember the minis being part of the entire D&D RPG experience. The game completely consumed my brother and my imaginations and minis that we painted ourselves were just another manifestation of how much we had vested in those characters and the game itself. I had a bard and a blue phraint I was particularly attached to.
The few times I DMed as a kid I remember building adventures around some awesome monster mini that I lovingly painted and the moment when I dropped that cool sucker right in the middle of the map and heard the players whistle.In my case it was definitely financial. I couldn't afford both the miniatures and all the new games so I never got in the habit of using them. Besides I was the kid in a wargames club, so ended up embarrassed at having so few figures amongst those people with whole armies of exquisitely painted wargames minatures from various periods.
There was also the side effect that I tended to be very discerning on the quality of the miniatures (to the level of following the production of specific sculptors), and kind of went overboard on painting the miniatures I did have (which means they were not really suitable for gaming), but did look quite good. But painting each individual scale of a giant snake ... not reccomended.
When we later went TFT mad, we generally relied on counters, at least until Steve Jackson got Dennis Loubet to draw the first Cardboard Heroes, at which point they became standard for the game.
[And this is the reason why I consider TFT and 4e to be boardgames rather than role-playing games, because the essential focus is the godlike maneuvering of the characters by the players, rather than a player identification with the character it raises the players above the battlefield.]I agree with James, in that I don't understand the anti-mini sentiment either. It makes no sense. You can play however you like, but to say it's wrong to use minis? Nope... I've got a great imagination, and minis and terrain only reinforce that, and make it more fun.
Also, like many have said it solves arguments. "No! I was no where near that orc!"
I remember once we needed a lot of skeletons, so we took a bag of large white lima beans and drew skeletons on them. They were great, and very cost effective, and light weight.
That being said I've done it both ways. My first Traveller campaign was mini-free, and it worked great.
I just really wonder why so many in the OSR are anti-mini. It's just odd. Just because EGG didn't use them doesn't make it into some kind of glorious edict that must be obeyed. Get real. Game like you want to, but don't criticize how others play. Old school is old school, minis or not...Here's the resistance to minis, in a nutshell, even though it is not specifically OSR related:
That said, I think the advantages and disadvantages have been well hashed out in this thread. I never used minis when I played back in the day--I simply couldn't afford them. And now that I am getting back into the hobby, I still can't afford them.
Remember, too, that minis are merely representations of the characters--so there is no real need for them to actually resemble the characters. They are tokens, nothing more, nothing less.
I like Aquatic Environment's mention of using chess pieces as minis--the analogy to chess pieces is actually quite good. In a chess set, it doesn't matter what the piece looks like, it matters what it represents in terms of abilities and for individual identification. That's why chess sets can be all fancy-schmancy and actually be iconic representation of the pieces, or be officially licensed products ala the Star Trek or Star Wars or Simpsons chess sets, or be fairly generic in nature. You can teach a kid to play chess without actual chess pieces but using various other representations. Heck, I've seen blog posts where people discuss teaching their kids to play RPGs using action figures and/or toddler toys as minis on a portable whiteboard used as a Battlemat.
Minis aren't a "requirement." They don't make the game "more authentic." If you want to be authentic, pick up H.G. Wells' Floor Games and Little Wars and a whole bunch of lead or tin soldiers.
So let's leave it at this: minis are an option--and it is always good to have options. If you enjoy using minis, great, good for you. But let's recognize that they aren't a requirement for play. Because they aren't, just like playing absolutely BTB isn't a requirement.
Or, as Bill Maher would say:
New House Rule: No more saying "playing the way I play makes me more old school."Lead figures weren't that expensive, in most cases. Only the superduper big figures, or the real specialty ones, were pricey. Buying huge numbers of them, sure, that would set you back. But people were always giving other people figures they had no use for. Also, I knew people who molded their own in lead, not too expensively.
Sigh. Pewter and plastic just aren't the same.
But I'm still annoyed at how freakin' sexist, impracticable, and fashion-victim the figures of women characters were. You had to pore over those bags and boxes to even find a few decent ones. Or you ended up having to paint the half-naked ones as being dressed in tight fitting underblouses and hose, since miniskirts and wilderness don't mix.
"Ooh, you just lost two hit points from that thorn bush smacking you in some tender places."
That's one good thing about those plastic figures -- you can find a lot more fully dressed warrior ladies these days.JDJarvis: "AD&D measured everything in " for a reason."
Honestly, I have to disagree with that. AD&D measured things in inches for legacy reasons only; they'd been developed in Chainmail and copy-and-pasted forward; the inches presented were not (by the book) used in play, and were a dummy unit only.
Test question: A totally unburdened PC miniature would move how many inches on the tabletop? (By the book, AD&D) Think carefully!Maybe what is really objectionable from the old school point of view is not the minis, but the grid system of 3rd and 4th edition D&D.
D&D used minis and inches, but was based on free-placement tabletop wargaming systems. Now, gridless wargame combat famously leads to disagreements about base contact, putting "english" on movement and facing, line of sight, etc. - one of the reasons gridded wargames came to be so popular. But gridless skirmish combat rules are also a lot more adaptable to improvised or imagined situations. It's clear that people hold a variety of opinions on how to represent the players, dungeon and monsters in D&D, but a grid system - and worse yet, rules and abilities dependent on that system - forces a single solution.
Of course, gridded fantasy skirmishes are also as "old school" as Melee, Wizard and The Fantasy Trip. But it's my impression that those proto-Gurps systems were more admired by designers as a tour de force, than embraced by players.The only thing I've ever used minis for in my RPGs is to show marching order. This is pretty much how all the groups in my area did D&D in the 1970s and 1980s. The only groups that used minis and battlemats to fight out combats were those who made combat the central feature of the game -- turning the game into more of a wargame than a roleplaying game.
I played Ancients minis and lots of AH/SPI wargames before I got into D&D in 1975. One of the reasons I liked D&D was it did not require players to have a lot of small unit tactics skills to play and enjoy the game. I was -- and still am -- awful at small unit tactics (grand tactical and strategic level wargames are another matter). So I really have no interest in having a small unit tactical minis game (or board game) for every combat in my RPGs. Most of the people I've played with over the last 35 years or so have felt the same.
Minis were an optional -- and, in mt experience, seldom used for anything but marching order -- back in the day. One of the major things that turns me away from post Skills and Powers D&D is that minis and battlemats became almost required to play and combat ability went from something the character needed to something the player needed, which reduced the pool of players to those who enjoyed (and were good at) tactical minis battles. If later versions of D&D had good with the GURPS method of including a "basic" combat system that need not use counters/minis and battlemats and an "advanced/detailed" combat system that did, both minis-lovers and minis-haters could have been supported.Matthew W. Schmeer said: But let's recognize that they aren't a requirement for play.
James Maliszewski said: I don't think anyone here has come close to suggesting they are, honestly. Rather, it's the opposite notion, that minis aren't part of the hobby, that's being resisted.
Agreed--as you wrote in your original post. But when I read comments like "There's nothing more deliciously D&D than those Grenadier boxes," then I can see the writing is on the wall for dogmatism to creep in.
So, call what I wrote a preemptive strike. You just know somebody is going to come out and try to write a mini-use subsection into their own OSR manifesto, now that a lot of old school bloggers are turning their attention to mini use.I started getting minis around the same time I got into D&D --- we had a chalk board with squares on it or used grease pencil on the formica table top.
For monsters we often ended up using whatever we had --- I had Airfix 1/72 Romans, Gauls, knights, etc, that we used as goblins, soldiers, etc., and we would use stuff like dice, rubber monsters, etc. I had a rubber alligator that I used for years as dragons, a hydra, etc. My "Britains" crusaders and Saracens (which are about 2 inches tall) were used as giants.
I remember that the 'Bullette' and the 'Rust Monster' were inspired by plastic critters that Gygax bought from the Dime Store. He got these wierd looking creatures in a bag of dinosaurs and decided to make up monsters to go with them.
My only objection is the bulk and fragility of my lead minis... these days I keep my older leads at home. I have a few of the wotc plastics for 'go' games and admire their near indestructibility.
I'm not opposed to playing without them, but always found it fun... providing there is some compromise between square-counting / bonus whoring by the more competitive minded and expediency.
One of the ideas I found interesting from a game I sat in on years ago was that the DM had a table with no grid on it... and when the player cast a spell like fireball, he had to state the range (I want it to burst 12 inches from my position) and THEN the DM would get out a tape measure and measure it... so sometimes it landed a little too close or far away.limpey: "One of the ideas I found interesting from a game I sat in on years ago was that the DM had a table with no grid on it... and when the player cast a spell like fireball, he had to state the range (I want it to burst 12 inches from my position) and THEN the DM would get out a tape measure and measure it... so sometimes it landed a little too close or far away."
That's directly from the original Chainmail game. I still use it, too.Sorry to be coming late to the party; I tried commenting yesterday morning, but it didn't seem to take...
1) Gary once told me that he stopped using his collection of 40mm medieval Elastolin figures once D&D got 'popular', as they were too fragile and expensive to replace when the ham-handed gamers got a hold of them. He also had problems with 'shrinkage', which happened when gamers wanted True Relict of their games with Gary. I asked him about the new 25mm metal figures, and he told me that he didn't like painting them, and he didn't feel like paying somebody to paint them for him.
2) We always used miniatures in the original Thursday Night Group at Prof. Barker's; it was the custom of the house that anyone coming into the game would get a personality figure that I'd do up specifically for their character. Prof. Barker, of course, had been hand-carving his own 54mm wooden figures since the 1940's. 'Shrinkage' was a problem for us as well, as there were a few folks who also wanted Authentic Relics of their games with Phil.
3) You don't need miniatures per se for the game; it's a handy way to mark things out, but coins, chess pieces, glass marbles, and dice have all been used, and I still use them that way today.
4) I agree with the poster who remarked on the grid-based combat systems; it just didn't seem like an RPG, using that method.
yours, ChirineWe (AD&D) "use" minis. That is, we have a box of them (now another box as my sister found one of my boxes from when I was a kid and sent them up) and my players use them for their characters. I find it's great for them. They take knowing the PHB seriously since it's their book, and with minis they can plan their moves out in combat and feel like they're putting in their best effort. When a character dies, the player just finds another mini in the box for the next one. No one worries too much about verisimilitude or gets attached to the mini--it's a tool to do a job. For monsters, I use a bunch of keys pried off a computer keyboard (pretty good range of sizes there). Which means it's still imagination supplying the details.
I do remember though, that a $1-$3 mini was the kind of thing I could afford at Sword of the Phoenix when I was a kid. It was often in price or begging range. So I ended up with them, and they were a part of the game for me. It was nice to see that old box and my terrible painting jobs again.
CAPTCHA: eyslyp. The dryad pours something in the wine and passes you the goblet. An aroma of flowers and dying time fills the tree . . .Necro-comment....I enjoy this blog, even if missing the discussion. The question of "what is old school?" is one that certainly has layers. In general, "old school" means simply whatever the generation or two before the current one did. I don't think it actually pertains to a given time. But with RPG gaming, we do have a fixed point with 1974, when Ziggy played guitar, and D&D was born.
So, while it is fair to ascribe old school RPG gaming as 1974-1984 or so, and I appreciate the gold/silver/bronze ages in regard to the game's development/publishing, it does seem that far and away, those qualities described as "old school gaming" have nothing to do with the 70s and early 80s. No one seems to equate the flavor of those times with OSG, so much as the experience. Hence we are able to still enjoy it today.
I'd even go a step further, and say that OSG is not defined by edition or rules set, even as we trace this hobby's lineage. We tend to remember it as the good times of youth. Minis, no minis, OD&D, 2nd edition, even on up to that other game, 4E. Wherever a group of mostly kids are, in a basement, playing one of these games, eating pizza...that is old school. In just a few years, all those kids will look back on it as such. They just don't know it yet.
I am mixing terms here a lot, but as I said, it is a layered thing. There is OSG in terms of D&D chronology, and there is simply the experience, which is not tied to game system or time. Which is a fortunate thing.


text:
One of the highest-profile political matchups of the season is playing out in Virginia, where two former governors with powerful friends and big-money backing are battling to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Jim Webb.
The dead-heat matchup pits Democrat Tim Kaine, 54, a favorite of President Obama and a former Democratic National Committee chairman, against George Allen, 60, namesake of his legendary Washington Redskins football coach father and a U.S. senator until undone in a re-election bid by what has become known as his "macaca moment."
The race is seen as a test of the changing politics of Virginia, where, in 2008, Obama became the first Democrat to win the state in 44 years. It is one of nine swing states targeted by Obama, who in early polls is running slightly ahead of expected GOP nominee Mitt Romney in the Old Dominion.
Here's a comparison of the candidates:
Gubernatorial Legacy
Allen: Overhaul of state welfare system; sentencing law that barred parole in the state for violent felons.
Kaine: Transportation initiative to help congested Northern Virginia roads; biggest higher-education bond issue in state history.
Elective Office
Allen: Virginia House of Delegates, 1982-1991; U.S. House, 1991-1993; Virginia governor, 1994-1998; U.S. Senate, 2001-2007
Kaine: Richmond, Va., City Council, 1994-1998; Richmond mayor, 1998-2000; Virginia lieutenant governor, 2002-2006; Virginia governor, 2006-2010
Dumb Move
Allen: Poorly executed 2006 Senate re-election campaign marked by calling a Democratic operative the derisive "macaca" — and welcoming the Virginia native of Indian descent "to America and the real world of Virginia."
Kaine: While Richmond mayor, spent $6,000 of public money on buses to the Million Mom March promoting gun restrictions; paid it back with privately raised money after backlash.
2012 Money Race
Allen: $6.13 million raised, $3.52 million spent as of March 31, with 13 percent coming from political action committees
Kaine: $7.43 million raised, $2.9 million spent as of March 31, with 7 percent coming from political action committees
Allen: Opposes abortion. Believes life begins at conception and advocates overturn of Roe v. Wade. Has 100 percent rating from National Right to Life group.
Kaine: Personally opposes abortion, based on his faith, but supports Roe v. Wade.
Allen: Endorsed by NRA. Voted against renewal of assault weapons ban. Was an original sponsor of act to repeal Washington, D.C.'s gun ban. Introduced legislation that would allow national park visitors to carry concealed weapons.
Kaine: Supports gun owners' rights. After the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, as governor he advocated gun limits, including preventing felons and the mentally ill from purchasing weapons.
Death Penalty
Allen: Supports capital punishment. Presided over 24 executions as governor.
Kaine: Opposes capital punishment, citing his faith, but presided over 11 executions as governor; has supported moratorium on executions.
Allen: Married twice; three children with second wife, Susan Brown. They met at a horse racing event in Charlottesville, Va., in the mid-1980s.
Kaine: Three children with wife, Anne Holton. They met in law school; she's the daughter of former Virginia Gov. Linwood Holton, a Republican.
Allen: Presbyterian. During the 2006 Senate campaign, learned from his mother that she had been raised Jewish while growing up in North Africa.
Kaine: Roman Catholic. During a break from law school, taught with Jesuits in Honduras, where he became fluent in Spanish.
Higher Ed
Allen: Bachelor's degree in history and law degree, both from University of Virginia.
Kaine: Bachelor's degree in economics, University of Missouri, and law degree from Harvard University.
Private Sector
Allen: After serving as governor, worked as a lawyer specializing in business expansion and relocation. Served on board of directors at three high-tech government contractors.
Kaine: Before becoming governor, worked as lawyer specializing in civil rights and fair housing cases. Chairman of Democratic National Committee, 2009 to 2011.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Mum used to tell me that when someone leaves our world, their souls touch the sky and they become stars shining bright. At the same time when a shooting star fires across our skies, it carries a precious new soul ready to enter our world. Over the years I hung on to this tale and even today I put my belief in the stars above.
It's easy for me to imagine that my grandparents are shining down on me, sprinkling their stardust whenever I need the extra love or an extra shove. On a clear, crisp night, sitting outside on the porch, looking at the black night scattered with thousands of sparkling diamonds, I know there is one for my nani and one for my nana. It gives me strength and takes away some of the remorse of losing someone so close.
There is a new star in the heavens now. A star for Barbara and I bet you if you go out and look for it, it'll be shining yellow!
I thought long and hard about how to write this post. I never realized it would be so hard. Truth be told, my thoughts are not only with the loss of Barbara but emotions of losing both my grandparents seems to still sit within me. My thoughts and feelings are jumbled.
Funny thing is when I thought yellow, it helped me find a ray of light out of the mixed dark feelings I was experiencing.
In her own special way Barbara has found a way to help me find ground even in her absence. I just think yellow:
- Yellow is the color of sunshine and brightness, stimulating and energizing
- Yellow is the color of celebrating Spring and the birth of new life
- Yellow is psychologically the happiest color in the color spectrum
- Yellow invokes a feeling of fun and optimism as well as stirring up related memories from past summers
- Yellow symbolizes hope
- Yellow daffodils, crocus, tulips and sunflowers make me smile when my vases are full
- Yellow, vibrant fields full of ripe crops such as wheat, corn or rape
- Yellow is a color which can be used on its own, but blending it with other colors it enriches them
- Yellow Submarine by the Beatles makes me sing out loud
- Yellow saffron adding a divine and vibrant color to all that it is infused with
- Yellow – is a Taste of Yellow, bringing us all together to share our stories and our food
- Yellow is Barbara's star
Thank you for being a friend.
When thinking of what I would make for Barbara I knew up front I would want to treat her to a dessert with saffron. I also wanted to treat her to my experience in food, bringing both the flavors of the east and west together. It's what I love doing when I am experimenting in the kitchen and love presenting well known dishes with a slight twist to my guests.
The Eton Mess is an exceptional and delightful dessert, bringing ripe and juicy fruit together. It is Britain's best loved summer dessert, a sublime combination of crumbled crisp meringue, softly whipped vanilla flavored cream and sweetly marinated strawberries.
In my version I add a generous pinch of saffron, gently coloring the cream a sunny yellow. Adding a slight substance is the quark, which I incorporate into the cream, which highlights with its slightly tangy flavor. Finally, I use a mixture of sweet raspberries and white red currants to round off the dessert.
I think Barbara would have liked this.
Printable version of recipe here
Prep Time: 35 minutes
Total Time: 50 minutes(plus cooling, standing)
Serves: 10
- 700g Raspberries
- 110g muscovado sugar
- 200ml whipping cream, lightly whisked
- 125g quark
- 55g icing sugar, sieved
- good pinch saffron
- 125g white currants
- 100g pistachios, chopped
For the meringues
- 100g egg whites (about 3 eggs)
- 100g fine sugar
- 100g icing sugar, sieved
- 15g cornflour
- To make the meringues, preheat the oven to 120 degrees C. Line two baking trays with baking paper. Whisk the egg whites until stiff peaks form, approx 4 minutes. Gradually add the fine sugar, while whisking continuously, until thick and glossy. This will take a further 2 to 3 minutes.
- Sieve the icing sugar and cornflour over the egg white mixture, fold to combine, then either spoon small mounds onto the trays or transfer the meringue mixture into a piping bag and pipe about 20-30 meringues.
- Bake for 45 to 50 minutes, until meringues lift easily from trays and are crisp but not colored, then turn off oven and cool completely in oven.
- Take about 2 teaspoons of the cream and sprinkle the saffron. Allow to steep for 10 minutes. In the meantime sprinkle the muscovado sugar over the raspberries and very gently toss, making sure the raspberries do not become mushy. Set aside for approx. 20 minutes until the juices begin to seep.
- Whisk cream, quark (or crème fraîche), icing sugar and the saffron cream together in a separate large bowl until soft peaks form.
- Scatter a quarter of the raspberries in the base of a serving bowl, spread with a quarter of the cream mixture, and coarsely crumble a quarter of the meringue over the top. Repeat layering with remaining ingredients. Alternatively layer in individual dessert glasses. Scatter with the white currents and sprinkle with the chopped pistachios and serve immediately.
You will find detailed tips and tricks to make the perfect meringues in the meringue 101 (Pavlova recipe).
If you are unable to find quark in your area you can substitute it with crème fraiche or follow my recipe to make your own homemade quark.
The raspberry embodies indulgence and health almost ideally. You will find all you wanted to know about raspberries in my Food Guide.
Saffron is the queen of spices and besides giving a vivid yellow color it provides a sublime flavor to everything it is added to. More about the queen of spice Saffron.
This post is dedicated to the memory of Barbara Harris. Barbara hosted the Taste of Yellow event on her blog to coincide with Lance Armstrong's LIVEstrong day. She brought the food community together to help raise awareness about cancer. My Saffron Raspberry and White Currant Eton Mess is especially for this month's Monthly Mingle which is "A Taste of Yellow, a Tribute to Barbara Harris" being hosted over at Jeanne's of Cooksister.
I've been reading a few of the submissions already gone in and feel so happy to be a part of such a strong and friendly community. Your posts are touching, thoughtful and heartwarming. I hope you will join us painting the food blogs yellow this summer as a tribute to Barbara. Details of how you can join are here.
More tastes of YELLOW from WFLH:Yellow Bell Pepper and Fava Bean Soup | Passionfruit Curd | Apricot and Pistachio Frangipane Tart |
All photographs and written content on What's For Lunch, Honey? © 2006-2012 Meeta Khurana Wolff unless otherwise indicated. | All rights reserved | Please Ask First


text:
By Karthik Krishnamurthy, Vice President, Enterprise Information Management, Cognizant
Banking is a massive, complex industry with many facets—retail banks, credit card lenders, managed investing, risk management—all of whom approach fraud detection and prevention differently. Credit card fraud makes up around 40% of the total problem. According to Consumer Sentinel Network, U.S. Department of Justice, the total amount of credit card fraud worldwide is $5.55 billion and on the rise.
The sheer volume of loss attributed to fraud is pressuring financial services companies to devise solutions to prevent and identify fraud, while continuing to provide a positive and customized experience for an increasingly sophisticated customer.
In order to achieve a more accurate and less intrusive fraud detection system, banks and financial service institutions are increasingly investing to perfect the algorithms and data analytics technology used to spot and combat fraud. This technology uses large volumes of data being generated at a high velocity to increase confidence and accuracy in fraud detection.
Increasing Accuracy in Fraud Detection
As a highly customer-centric industry, banks and financial service providers need to make sure they are attacking fraud strategically and not disrupting their customers' banking experience. The key to accurate and non-disruptive fraud detection is to implement emerging technology that allows banks to gain a holistic view of its customers.
This view of fraud detection uses data available from a variety of sources—mobile data, along with social data from Facebook and Twitter—and uses it to distinguish fraudulent activity from normal activity. For example, if a credit card customer fails to alert her card lender of her travel plans, a strategically implemented fraud detection system can enable the lender to automatically gain insight from mobile and social data that the customer is travelling and thereby reduce the incidence of false positives. With this additional insight, the lender's algorithm may determine that the likelihood of fraudulent activity is very low, and the customer's card activity should be allowed to proceed.
Using social data to 'cluster' information is another innovative approach. For example, if the cardholder's social media contacts are tagged as co-workers and their social profiles indicate their current geographical disposition, a bank can use this information again to correlate recent charges incurred by the cardholder.
Machine Learning
An emerging and powerful aspect of big data and fraud detection is machine learning. In a nutshell, machine learning takes place when agile systems are configured to learn from one another. It discovers the patterns buried in data and learns from it to deliver higher quality insights, helping detect fraud in real time and adapting its systems to more quickly identify fraud in the future. This technology is revolutionary in fraud detection and banks and financial service companies implementing it are gaining a significant competitive advantage.
Machine learning models are increasingly being used to screen financial transactions for fraud. Text mining and machine learning technologies are effectively used to combine data from suspicious transactions with related extracts from other internal and external sources (such as social networks). One immediate benefit, as discussed earlier, is to effectively reduce the amount of false positive hits thrown out by the existing surveillance systems, thereby reducing the costs of manual inspection and making fraud detection more relevant and accurate.
Best Practices for Implementing Big Data
Banking and financial services institutions are increasingly aware of the benefits of leveraging big data in fraud detection, but often struggle with where to get started. The following best practices should be considered when developing a strategy:
- Start with small and specific uses for big data: The first thing organizations should do is identify one or two business problems that can be resolved by improving fraud detection, and then dedicate the R&D resources to develop solutions. This type of 'outcome-based thinking' will ensure the business success of the initiative.
- Ensure you're working with high quality data: Take the time on the back end to ensure you are collecting the proper data and are separating the signal from the noise to allow for proper data analysis.
- Know your regulatory environment: Understand the boundaries for using customer data and the relevant privacy laws. This will continue to be a challenge for organizations, but can be managed with the right approach.
- Ensure IT and business units are collaborating: Implementing big data systems can be disruptive to an organization. Adopt destination-driven thinking where you and your team articulate and agree upon clear goals, and then evangelize your big data strategy across the organization to gain broad buy-in. These clear objectives will motivate teams to work through inevitable friction.
Looking Ahead
The beauty of big data is that it presents a new realm of possibilities for the financial services industry and, more importantly, will help organizations run differently. Technology will continue to advance and offer new strategies for optimizing fraud detection. Financial services organizations should ensure their internal teams are informed about trends and developments, or are partnering with experts who effectively help them stay ahead of the technology curve.
Big Data allows financial services firms to greatly enhance the speed of fraud detection and prediction using massive amounts of data from a hybrid of sources: point of sale, social media, customer databases, and external sources from data vendors. The analytic results from this data are growing into a collective "fraud database" for the financial services industry, which is driving new analytical models.
In the future however, Big Data will help deal with the globalization of fraud itself. On a global scale criminals are developing fraud tactics and scenarios driven by data and analytics. They use data to probe for weaknesses and monitor the "success" of fraud programs they initiate. As computing resources become cheaper and faster in an internet world where a "location" is very much a virtual presence, criminal enterprises can move operations in a borderless digital world.
The challenges that the financial services industry faces with fraud have an enormous impact on customer service and the fight to lower fraud loss. Real-time analytics and machine learning built on top of a Big Data repository represent the solution platform for fraud detection and predictive/preventable fraud while maintaining a highly level of customer satisfaction.
Top Stories4 days ago
Dollar mostly flat as market mulls inflation outlook
Top Stories4 days ago
Stocks inch up as timing of US rate cuts weighed; copper jumps
Top Stories4 days ago
European shares end lower on rate cut jitters; Richemont shines
Finance1 day ago
Navigating the future: emerging technologies reshaping global finance


text:
Peaches are in season and I have been enjoying snacking on them. I was thinking that a peach bread would make for a nice breakfast this week. I was envisioning a bread with nice large chunks of peaches in it. I had really enjoyed the blueberry maple oatmeal muffins with pecan streusel and I thought that the recipe would make for a nice bread. I pretty much just took the blueberry muffin recipe and replaced the blueberries with peaches and made it in a loaf pan instead of a muffin pan. The peach bread turned out really well. It was nice and light and moist and full of peach goodness. I tried serving the peach bread with a maple peach sauce.
Peach Bread
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1/4 cup maple syrup
- 3/4 cup vanilla yogurt
- 1 over ripe banana (mashed)
- 1/4 cup butter (melted)
- 1 egg
- 3/4 cup rolled oats
- 1 cup flour
- 3/4 cup whole wheat flour
- 2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 2 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup peaches (stoned, peeled and cut into bite sized pieces)
- 1/4 cup pecans
- 1/4 cup flour
- pinch cinnamon
- 1/4 cup dark brown sugar
- 2 tablespoon unsalted butter
- Mix the brown sugar, maple syrup, yogurt, banana, butter, egg and rolled oats in a bowl and let it sit for 10 minutes.
- Mix the flours, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt in a bowl.
- Mix the wet and dry ingredients along with the peaches until just mixed.
- Spoon the mixture into a greased 9×5 inch loaf pan.
- Mix the pecans, flour, cinnamon, brown sugar and butter until they form crumbs.
- Spoon the streusel over the bread.
- Bake in a preheated 375F/190C oven until a toothpick pushed into the center comes out clean, about 40 minutes.


text:
Phone: 8807000695
Our ConSupport Home appliances service center in Choolaimedu provides service for Washing machine, Refrigerator, Air condition and Microwave Oven. We have best service technicians who have lots of years of experience. They will diagnose the issue in quick time and will estimate the cost to the customers. The service is done in very quick time. The home appliances such as washing machine, fridge, ac and microwave oven is used on regular basis and that is why customers want to get repairing work done in quick time. What you need to do is to call our ConSupport Home appliances service center in Choolaimedu and you will get a callback from the service technician. The quality of the work will be high and the customer support is also very good. If there is a requirement of the spare then we use good durable spares so that the functioning of the products is long. With many years of experience in this field we know what has to be done for the working of the products and what has to be done for achieving customer support. Also contact our Home Appliances Service Center in Chromepet for service in that area. We provide service for multi brands such as Bajaj, Bosch, BPL, Electrolux, Godrej, Haier, IFB, Kelvinator, LG, Lloyd, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sansui, Seimens, Singer, TCL, Videocon, Voltas, Whirlpool, Etc.
Ph: 8807000695
General Enquiry
Ph: 8807000695
Experienced Technicians
Any Issues Service Done.
Quality Service
Immediate Response and Service.
Excellent Customer Support
Customer Support At Its Best.


text:
Our investigative reporting colleagues at the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) continue their look at the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of toxic pollution with a new report scrutinizing the agency's delay in announcing that "even a small amount of a chemical compound commonly found in tap water may cause cancer."
CPI reporters David Heath and Ronnie Greene found that in 2011, the EPA "was poised to cite evidence of cancer risks in hexavalent chromium, a chemical compound found in tap water — likely presaging stricter drinking water standards."
Hexavalent chromium is the same chemical featured in the successful environmental battle waged against Pacific Gas and Electric by citizen activist Erin Brockovich in Hinkley, Ca., in the 1990s. The case resulted in a $333 million payment to the town's 600 residents, who claimed the company poisoned their water with the chemical for over 30 years.
CPI reports that EPA reversed a decision by the agency's chemical-assessment program chief and delayed the release of its findings for at least four more years. Instead, EPA deferred to a panel of scientists who were supposed to be providing an unbiased review. But, as CPI found, "several of the panelists had worked on behalf of PG&E to defend the company in the Brockovich lawsuits."
EPA administrator Lisa Jackson and the agency's chemical-assessment officials "declined requests for on-the-record interviews," CPI reports. "But an EPA official acknowledged privately that the agency was not fully aware of the chromium (VI) peer reviewers' ties to PG&E."
Update at 5:43 p.m. ET. Exploring Public Review:
EPA responded to NPR's post about the CPI story with a statement.
"The agency is currently working to improve the IRIS contract-managed peer review process and reduce any potential conflict of interest by increasing transparency and public input," writes assistant EPA press secretary Andra Belknap. "We are exploring the best ways to provide for public review of contract-managed peer review panels and ensure that contractors are held accountable for their assessment of any conflicts of interest."
Belknap declined to explain why EPA did not provide any agency officials for on-the-record interviews during CPI's reporting of its story.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


text:
What we're about
Hello! I am Lucian Gerardi and recently became the Organizer of Boston Volunteers to prevent it from shutting down. This group going forward will focus on volunteering, but I need your help to find opportunities for us to help out around Boston! Please feel free to reach out me with any questions or suggestions for future volunteering events.
Below is the original Description, I will update this more thoroughly at a later date but for now keeping it:
They said it was impossible. They said it couldn't be done. Create a way to organize and empowers thousands of caring people to help fellow Bostonians in need? And do it in a no-hassle, no commitment way where folks can easily choose where and how they want to help?
When we started the Boston Volunteers, we bucked all the trends. No mandatory training sessions for new people. No large corporate structures or high costs. Simply a bunch of good-natured and hard working people wanting to make our little corner of the world a better place. Why?
Because we believe in better.
With nothing more than word-of-mouth reputation, Meetup.com as a springboard, and a knack for gathering some of the coolest people around, the Boston Volunteers have experienced exponential and geometric growth. Who would have imagined that in three years we'd have more than forty seven hundred good-hearted Boston Volunteers standing up and fighting for better? Not us, for sure!
While we are so incredibly grateful for all the volunteers who are already part of our community, there are still countless people in our neighborhood who find themselves in need. That's why we need you. All you need is a caring heart and a willingness to share a little bit of your valuable time.
Join us and spend an evening in a Boston soup kitchen; help tutor a single, local mom so she can earn her GED; rebuild your neighborhood playground so kids can play safely; kayak and clean the Charles to better our environment; build a home for a local family; spend time with the elderly. The variety is endless and refreshing. You choose where and when. There will be a convenient volunteer celebration for you. Don't miss this easy opportunity to build community.
While the Boston Volunteers have a well-earned reputation for having hard working and dependable folks, we're also known to have a pretty good time doing so. Beyond having fun while helping others, we also celebrate a variety of social events in your neighborhood where we simply spend a little time relaxing and getting to know each other.
Volunteer enough and you will make some meaningful and lasting friendships with some truly great people. I've build a growing and meaningful community. We often see each other at community volunteer events and frequently go to museums together. Please know that since day one, we have been an open and inclusive nonprofit community, where every volunteer- regardless of superficial differences is valued, respected and needed. Not only can you choose where and when you would like to volunteer, but also you are encouraged to bring new ideas and new volunteer opportunities to our attention. And if you have a passion and there's a need, we'll get you set up to lead your own volunteer event. We revere the can-do spirit.
Can you think of how we can better help people? Please share.
We are determinedly pursuing perfection.
Are you ready to partner with a community our like-minded folks as we help our neighbors in need? Set-out to make our city a better place for us all?
Learn more about our popular nonprofit, take a peek at upcoming celebrations, sign up when there's a space, and start making a difference! If you ever have questions, feel free to email any of the assistant organizers. We are here for you.
Welcome to THE BOSTON VOLUNTEER FAMILY! We anticipate volunteering with you!
Entrepreneur of The Boston Volunteers
Learn more about the Boston Volunteers: www.BostonVolunteer.org
P.S. Learn more about our popular community where we use tech for good: https://www.meetup.com/python/
The Boston Volunteers Big enough to deliver, small enough to care
Learn more: www.BostonVolunteer.org


text:
An instructive week after Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip tested Israel on the battlefield, the pacifist politicians who govern the West Bank notched a significant diplomatic win without much of a fight at all. Just before 5 p.m. New York time, the U.N. General Assembly voted 138 to 9 to bring Palestine aboard as a "nonmember state." Another 41 nations abstained. Assured of passage by a whopping majority, Israel and the U.S. noted their objections mildly and mostly for the record, their effort to limit the fallout for the Jewish state itself limited in the wake of Gaza.
The status of "nonmember state" — emphasis on the "state" puts Palestine on the same level of diplomatic recognition as the Vatican, which is technically a sovereign entity. The Holy See has its own ambassadors but, for a few, may be better known for its busy post office off St. Peter's Square, where tourists queue for what quiet thrills are afforded by a Vatican stamp canceled with the Pope's postmark.
Palestine already has post offices. The particular marker of sovereignty it sought from the U.N. is even more bureaucratic: access to international organizations, especially the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Experts on international law say that, armed with the mass diplomatic recognition of the 150 or so nations it counts as supporters, Palestine will be in a position to bring cases against Israel, which has occupied the land defined as Palestine — the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — since 1967.
(MORE: U.N. Recognition of Palestine: What Does It Mean for the Peace Process?)
The ICC, as it's known, is on record as inclined to regard Israel's more than 100 residential settlements on the West Bank as a crime of war. (The Jewish state pulled its settlers and soldiers out of Gaza in 2005 and argues that it no longer qualifies as its "occupier" under international law. Critics argue otherwise.) The physical presence of the settlements in other words would give Palestine a ready-made case to drag Israel before the court — or to threaten dragging it before the court. In the dynamics of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the real power lies in the threat. But in his last U.N. address, in September, Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas began to lay the foundation for charges based not on the settlements but on the violent behavior of some individual settlers, who attack Palestinian neighbors and vandalize property and mosques. Settler attacks have skyrocketed in the past two years, according to U.N. monitors, and now account for the majority of the political violence on the West Bank, despite the lingering popular impression of Palestinian terrorism dating back decades. On the West Bank, at least, the reality has changed.
"If you were in my place, what would you do?" Abbas asked TIME in a recent interview. "We will not use force against the settlers. I can use the court, but it's better for the Israelis not to push us to go to the court. They should put an end to these acts committed by the settlers." His address to the General Assembly in advance of the vote on Thursday made the stakes plain enough: Abbas blasted Israel for "the perpetration of war crimes" and "its contention that it is above international law."
Abbas' effort actually got an unlikely boost from Israel's eight-day offensive in Gaza. Operation Pillar of Defense focused on attacking Hamas, the militant Islamist group that has governed Gaza since 2007. Hamas, and more radical groups also operating in Gaza, lost scores of fighters and rocket launchers to Israeli air strikes. But by standing up to overwhelming Israeli military power for more than a week — and sending missiles toward major cities previously left untouched — the militants stirred a defiant pride and solidarity across the Palestinian community.
"The armed resistance of Hamas in Gaza gave the people hope and the impressions that this is the only way to fight against the ongoing occupation," Majed Ladadwah, 46, told TIME 0n a Ramallah street, in the West Bank. "I can't say they won," said Ladadwah, speaking before Thursday's balloting, "but they surely gained a lot of points for Hamas in the streets of Palestine."
(MORE: After the Cease-Fire in Gaza, Will the Cyberwar Continue?)
That logic was pointed out to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she visited Jerusalem to coax him toward a cease-fire. In the days that followed, Netanyahu's government stopped threatening to punish Abbas for going to the U.N., a move Israel has called a threat to the peace process, which has been stalled for at least four years.
At the same time, European nations rallied around Abbas, intent on shoring up a leader who is secular, moderate — and already at political risk for cooperating with Israel to suppress armed resistance even before Gaza seized the world's attention. Many of the "marquee" countries of Western Europe that Netanyahu had hoped to vote against Palestine statehood, like France, instead lined up behind Abbas. Others, including Britain, abstained, after seeking assurances that Palestine will not to go the ICC, or that negotiations with Israel will resume. Abbas has already promised the latter. Thursday morning brought news that Israel had lost Germany, a stalwart ally in the wake of the Holocaust, to the abstention column. "If there is a poor turnout, a poor vote, the radicals gain," India's U.N. Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri told reporters.
For their part, Palestinians overwhelmingly back the measure, despite an assortment of disappointments with Abbas — for wasting a year trying to get full U.N. membership in 2011 and for not visiting Gaza during the fighting, as foreign diplomats did. "We are for the U.N. bid because we anticipate this will help us legally to pursue our struggles and gain our rights," said Ladadwah, the bank employee who spoke admiringly of Hamas' stand in Gaza. Hamas itself said it backs the diplomatic effort, as do other factions.
"This is called resistance, whether armed resistance or peaceful resistance," said Mahmoud Khames, 34, an unemployed West Bank resident, in advance of the vote. "It's not a soccer match that someone has to win. Resistance is a matter of freeing one's self and his people from the Israeli occupation."
In downtown Ramallah, the crowd watching on an outdoor TV screen on Thursday night was large and festive despite the late November chill. Celebratory gunfire — fired by exultant uniformed police and soldiers — rent the night as the vote came in just before midnight local time. "I expect many things from this but the most important is the reconciliation of the two factions, Hamas and Fatah," said Mohammad Abdel Moute, 40, a government employee who lives in a local refugee camp. "And now hopefully we'll be able to address the world with our problems, and hopefully the world will be able to help us in obtaining our rights, to be able to live like normal human beings." Nearby, Layla Jammal, 70, praised the strategy of putting the question of statehood to the General Assembly instead of to the U.N. Security Council, where the U.S. routinely vetoes measures opposed by Israel.
"We heard threats from Netanyahu this evening before the voting, saying that a Palestinian state at the U.N. is unilateral, one-sided," Jammal said. "And we laugh, because the wall that they built is one-sided! They didn't ask us. From here it makes us a state against another state."
— With reporting by Rami Nazzal / Rama
MORE: The Gaza Problem


text:
Really really want this once my hair grows out. I mean, just think of what a different kind of person this would make me! Faded-hair Chick ain't scared o nuttin. She doesn't think "but what if a face pops up in one of the windows?" when having to get something from downstairs late at night. She doesn't imagine that, when she turns on the light in her bedroom, a dead animal and ransom note are lying on her pillow. She doesn't imagine that when she goes to sleep after accidentally killing a spider, a multitude of his little friends will crawl all over her face, chanting You kiiiillled Timmyyyy.
She can wear the boringest outfit but still feel slightly alive and accomplished because, I mean, her hair is blue and white!
So..maybe none of the first traits would change but I can pretend. Hair, I command you to grow.


text:
Project Member
- Lea Brown
Documentation of Nias
The project aimed to collect data to answer questions that arose from Brown's doctoral thesis on the language of Nias Selatan (2001), the southernmost variety of the language spoken on the island of Nias, off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, as well as to collect data from other varieties of Nias in order to complete a more comprehensive grammar of the language.
Nias has unusual case marking which makes use of alternations in initial segments of noun phrases, similar to consonant mutation in nouns familiar from Celtic languages. Nias is also typologically unusual in having a morphologically marked absolutive case, while the ergative case is morphologically unmarked. In terms of argument indexing on verbs, the southern variety differs from the other varieties in two ways. The first is that it makes a morphological distinction between realis and irrealis argument prefixes (as well as having distinct verb forms); the second is that whereas first and second person S and P arguments take the form of independent pronouns in the south, in other varieties first and second person S and P arguments take the form of suffixes.
Data archive
- 18 sound files (wav, mp3)
Contact: lingarchive@[>>> Please remove the text! <<<]eva.mpg.de


text:
Some patients refuse to see nurses of different race
DETROIT (AP) - It's been called one of medicine's 'open secrets'— allowing patients to refuse treatment by a doctor or nurse of another race...
DETROIT (AP) — It's been called one of medicine's "open secrets" — allowing patients to refuse treatment by a doctor or nurse of another race.
In the latest example, a white man with a swastika tattoo insisted that black nurses not be allowed to touch his newborn. Now two black nurses are suing the hospital, claiming it bowed to his illegal demands.
The Michigan cases are among several lawsuits filed in recent years that highlight this seldom-discussed issue, which quietly persists almost 60 years after the start of the civil rights movement.
The American Medical Association's ethics code bars doctors from refusing to treat people based on race, gender and other criteria, but there are no specific policies for handling race-based requests from patients.
"In general, I don't think honoring prejudicial preferences … is morally justifiable" for a health care organization, said Dr. Susan Goold, a University of Michigan professor of internal medicine and public health. "That said, you can't cure bigotry … There may be times when grudgingly acceding to a patient's strongly held preferences is morally OK."
Those times could include patients who have been so traumatized — by rape or combat, for instance — that accommodating their request would be preferable to forcing on them a caregiver whose mere presence might aggravate the situation, she said.
Tonya Battle, a veteran nurse at Flint's Hurley Medical Center, filed the first complaint against the hospital and a nursing manager, claiming a note posted on an assignment clipboard read, "No African-American nurse to take care of baby." She says the note was later removed but black nurses weren't assigned to care for the baby for about a month because of their race.
That case is now a federal lawsuit. In a statement earlier this week, Hurley President Melany Gavulic denied Battle's claim, saying the father was told that his request could not be granted. Gavulic said the swastika tattoo "created anger and outrage in our staff," and supervisors raised safety concerns.
Hospital officials said they planned to make a statement about the matter Friday evening but offered no details.
Multiple email and phone messages left for Battle through her attorney were unreturned, and a listed number for her had been disconnected. She told the Detroit Free Press she "didn't even know how to react" when she learned of her employer's actions following her interaction with the father.
She said she introduced herself to the man and he said, "I need to see your supervisor." That supervisor, Battle said, told her that the father, who was white, didn't want African-Americans to care for his child and had rolled up his sleeve to expose the swastika.
"I just was really dumbfounded," Battle said. "I couldn't believe that's why he was so angry (and) that's why he was requesting my (supervisory) nurse."
Attorney Tom Pabst, who is representing nurse Carlotta Armstrong in a second lawsuit, said the hospital's actions left nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit "in a ball of confusion."
"She said, 'You know what really bothered me? I didn't know what to do if the baby was choking or dying. Am I going to get fired if I go over there?'" Pabst said.
The Michigan cases follow a 2010 decision by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that the federal Civil Rights Act prohibits nursing homes from making staffing decisions for nursing assistants based on residents' racial preferences. The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed by a black nursing assistant who sued her employer for racial discrimination.
In another federal lawsuit filed in 2005, three black employees of Abington Memorial Hospital near Philadelphia claimed they were prevented from treating a pregnant white woman by her male partner, who was a member of a white supremacist group. The man used a racial slur when forbidding any care by any African-Americans.
The complaint alleged that supervisors honored the man's request. The case was settled confidentially before going to trial, and the hospital admitted no liability. Frank Finch III, the attorney for the employees, said hospital officials also cited employee safety in their defense.
"That defense doesn't fly under the anti-discrimination law," Finch said. "Hospitals cannot use that as a defense in nonemergency situations."
He said every hospital has a policy against discrimination and "undoubtedly acquiescing to such a demand is a violation of a written, internal policy in addition to being a violation of the law."
Fordham University law professor Kimani Paul-Emile said she suspects nurses file more discrimination suits than doctors.
"With nurses and other sorts of staff, the hospital is telling them they can or cannot do something," she said. "That might go to why you might see more lawsuits brought by nurses."
She wrote an article last year in the UCLA Law Review titled "Patients' Racial Preferences and the Medical Culture of Accommodation." It was the source of the "open secrets" phrase.
Paul-Emile's research cited a 2007 study at the University of Michigan Health System and others on how physicians respond to patients' requests to be assigned providers of the same gender, race or religion.
The survey of emergency physicians found patients often make such requests, and they are routinely accommodated. A third of doctors who responded said they felt patients perceive better care from providers of shared demographics, with racial matches considered more important than gender or religion.
"The notion of white patients rejecting minority physicians for bigoted reasons in emergency departments and other hospital settings is deeply troubling and uncomfortably reminiscent of the type of discrimination that the civil rights statutes were designed to eliminate," Paul-Emile wrote in her article.
Another study she cited found that patient requests for care by a physician are most often accommodated when made by racial minority patients.
Lance Gable, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, said he believes such requests "are made more often than we'd like to think about" even if they aren't frequently agreed to by hospital management. He suspects a supervisor might honor them but not say anything explicit to employees and only in rare instances would signs be posted as alleged in the Flint case.
"Maybe their explanation is an accurate description of what happened — the supervisor was scared of the father of this patient and made a decision that was ill-advised," Gable said. "It might have been the right thing to do for the safety of the staff, and it still might be a violation of anti-discrimination laws."
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.


text:
Voltaire — To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Hispanic politician employed a Hispanic illegal alien who was also a sex offender
Sen. Robert Menendez employed as an unpaid intern in his Senate office an illegal immigrant who was a registered sex offender, now under arrest by immigration authorities. The Homeland Security Department instructed federal agents not to arrest him until after Election Day 2012, a U.S. official involved in the case said. A Homeland Security spokesman, Peter Boogaard, said that it was "categorically false" that the department delayed the arrest of Luis Abrahan Sanchez Zavaleta, 18, until after the election. Sanchez, an immigrant from Peru, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in front of his home in New Jersey on December 6, 2012. Sanchez, who entered the country on a now-expired visitor visa from Peru, is facing deportation and remains in custody. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of Sanchez's immigration case. Menendez, D-N.J., who advocates aggressively for pro-immigration policies, was re-elected in November 2012 with 58% of the vote. The prosecutor's office in Hudson County, N.J., said that Sanchez was found to have violated the law in 2010 and subsequently required to register as a sex offender. The exact charge was unclear because Sanchez was prosecuted as a juvenile and those court records are not publicly accessible. The prosecutor's office has confirmed that Sanchez registered as a sex offender, although his name does not appear on the public registry. Authorities in Hudson County notified ICE agents in early October 2012 that they suspected Sanchez was an illegal immigrant who was a registered sex offender and who may be eligible to be deported. ICE agents in New Jersey notified superiors at the Homeland Security Department because they considered it a potentially high profile arrest, and DHS instructed them not to arrest Sanchez until after the November election, one U.S. official said. ICE officials complained that the delay was inappropriate, but DHS directed them several times not to act, the official said. It was not immediately clear why federal immigration authorities would not have been notified sooner about Sanchez's status. During discussions about when and where to arrest Sanchez, the U.S. reviewed Sanchez's application for permission to stay in the country as part of Barack Obama's policy to allow up to 1.7 million young illegal immigrants avoid deportation and get permission to work for up to two years. As a sex offender, he would not have been eligible. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which oversees the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, notified Sanchez of that shortly before his arrest, one official said. During the final weeks of President George W. Bush's administration, ICE was criticized for delaying the arrest of Barack Obama's aunt, who had ignored an immigration judge's order to leave the country several years earlier after her asylum claim was denied. She subsequently won the right to stay in the United States after an earlier deportation order. In that case, the Homeland Security Department had imposed an unusual directive days before the 2008 election requiring high-level approval before federal agents nationwide could arrest fugitive immigrants including Zeituni Onyango, the half-sister of Obama's late father. The directive from ICE expressed concerns about "negative media or congressional interest," according to a copy of that directive. The department lifted the immigration order weeks later.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)


text:
Although Apple has a reputation for revolutionary products, they don't appear out of thin air. Usually, when the company enters a new market, it first looks at all the competition and figures out why it hasn't become popular. Only then does Apple make a big leap forward, as it did with the iPod, iPhone and iPad.
We may see this happen again with smartwatches, a still-nascent category of gadgets that can do a lot more than tell time.
By connecting with our phones, smartwatches can alert us to incoming messages, tell us the weather, give us a glimpse at news headlines or act as remote controls — all without ever making us reach into our pockets. According to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Apple is now testing a smartwatch of its own.
It's not clear when an Apple smartwatch would materialize, if ever, and both reports are hazy on what its capabilities might be. But you can learn a lot just by looking at the competition and evaluating its strengths and weaknesses.
Here's a look at other attempts at the smartwatch, both past and present:
Key Features: Connects with the iPhone or Android phones to display incoming calls, e-mails, text messages, calendar alerts, weather alerts, alarms and social network notifications. Third-party apps (such as fitness trackers) extend functionality. It has a 1.3-inch "E-Paper" screen for week-long battery life, and is waterproof.
Price and Availability: $150, up for pre-order now (and shipping to Kickstarter backers)
What Reviewers Say: Reviewers generally enjoyed the Pebble — especially being able to glance at notifications without taking out your phone — but are hoping for more functionality and polish from the software. The Verge notes that Pebble's iPhone support is a bit messy, while Android is limited to whatever app support Pebble builds in on its own. In other words, neither operating system is really designed to support a smartwatch right now.
Sony SmartWatch
Key Features: 1.5-inch color OLED touch screen. Pairs with Android phones to display e-mail, messages, calendar notifications and social network updates. Additional apps available through Google Play.
Price and Availability: It costs $130, and is available now.
What Reviewers Say: The Sony SmartWatch earned some praise for its looks and its unique app selection, but got dinged for its finicky software and the fact that it barely functions when it's not paired to a phone. Gizmodo, amusingly, called it "maybe the worst thing Sony has ever made."
Key Features: LCD display can be customized with "widgets" for weather, stocks and calendar, and can show notifications for e-mail, text messages and incoming calls, with support for iPhone and Android. Built-in apps include a running and cycling monitor, music control and an alarm. The phone is waterproof and lasts for five to seven days on a charge.
Price and Availability: $179 and up, available now.
What Reviewers Say: AppleInsider thinks the Metawatch has real potential, though the platform has some bugs to squash and unfinished features to implement. Droid Life seems happy with the watch but hasn't rendered a final verdict yet.
i'm Watch
Key Features: 1.5-inch color touch screen, 4 GB of built-in storage, built-in speaker, aluminum design. Has its own Android-based operating system and app store, and relies on Bluetooth Internet tethering to pull in data.
Price and Availability: It's officially $449, but the price is down to $399 until the end of February.
What Reviewers Say: Laptop Mag and Trusted Reviews both praised the design and the generous amount of built-in storage, but complained about wonky Bluetooth pairing, weak battery life and a deeply-flawed speakerphone function. The need for a Bluetooth tethering smartphone plan was also a letdown, especially since the watch is already much pricier than the competition.
WIMM One
Key Features: 1.4-inch color touch screen with grayscale mode to save battery life. Pairs with Android phones to show text messages and voice calls. Third-party apps extend functionality and allow users to toggle phone settings, such as volume. Watch module detaches, allowing for replacement wrist bands or other uses.
Price and Availability: A "Developer Preview" previously cost $199, but is no longer available. WIMM's website now shows an intriguing message: "During the summer of 2012, WIMM Labs entered into an exclusive, confidential relationship for our technology and ceased sales of the Developer Preview Kit. "
What Reviewers Say: I reviewed the WIMM One and thought that while the concept showed promise, the shortage of apps and chunkiness of the hardware made it tough to recommend.
What's Missing
There's a common thread running through the reviews for these devices: not enough features, and not enough polish. Also, all of these smartwatches look a bit clunky, even the ones with slick designs.
So it's not hard to see how Apple could step in and make a hit product. Apple is known for slick software, and it can offer tighter integration between watch and iPhone than any existing product. Also, the one solid detail in the Times' report was the supposed use of curved glass, which would allow for a thinner, more durable piece of hardware. Just like Apple didn't invent the MP3 player, smartphone or tablet, it clearly hasn't invented the smartwatch. But there's still plenty of room to get it right — and that's exactly what the company is good at.