Board games aren’t always very good at themes. Actual themes, as in underlying messages, not “themes,” the settings that appear in a game’s artwork. One of the hobby’s essential exceptions was Sol: Last Days of a Star. Set in some distant future, players were asked to harvest their dying star’s last embers to propel an ark into the great beyond, only to realize that their efforts were hastening the same solar death they were striving to outrun. Part climate change parable, part meditation on thermodynamics, Sol was not only playable, it was a genuine effort at using gameplay to tell a worthwhile story. Now Ryan Spangler, one of Sol’s three creators, is back with Organism. Where Sol propelled itself outward, Organism utilizes the smallest possible lens to zoom all the way down. In a way, its diminutive subject matter is even more meaningful than Sol’s space opera. I’m speaking, of course, about the building blocks of life. My goopy guys versus your goopy gals. What are the smallest components that are necessary for something to constitute “life”? When I interviewed Spangler for Senet Magazine, that’s the question that led to Organism. Here players become… not even cells, really. Cells and their constituent components. Organelles. Nuclei and ribosomes and flagella. Grasping, uh, mouth-parts. Can you tell I was never very good at biology? Fortunately, Organism drills down onto some simple terminology. To constitute an organism, there are three parts. These are your cellular building blocks. Without any one of them, the organism will die. With many of them, it becomes a lurching thing capable of doing more work. Maybe more importantly, it might split into two separate bodies altogether. Those three building blocks are as follows. There’s the Eater, which is how your organism takes in nutrients; the Grower, which allows your organism to sprout new components; and the Mover, which allows it to shuffle around the petri dish or hydrothermal vent that is the game’s playground. At the game’s beginning, everybody begins with one of each. That’s your organism: Eater, Grower, Mover. The life cycle of life. Turns consist of selecting a single action for your organism. (Actually, you could select a different action for each organism, but now I’m putting the flagellum before the pili.) Those actions correspond with your organelles, with the crucial detail that you get to take as many actions as you have cellular bits. Want to absorb food? Choose Eat. Now every Eater in your organism gets to chow down on ambient soup, pulling food discs into your body. Want to expand your cell? Growers spend food to add new structures in adjacent spaces. Move? Look, you know what Move does. Except you probably don’t! Organism, it turns out, is about grappling with your own lumbering body as much as it is about the smallest possible components of life. It isn’t all elegance and skater-like gliding down there. Sometimes your body is a malformed, asymmetrical blob, only capable of pushing around its parts on one side, or maybe wedged into a corner because your limbs are tucked against the edge of the board rather than putting their best foot forward. As someone who recently had both legs fall dead asleep because I was sitting too hard on my bum — normal sitting posture, just sorta wedged into a cushion — I’m in this picture and I don’t like it. What I’m trying to say is that turns are two things at once. There’s raw potential here. Provided you have a solid handful of Movers in your body, you can rearrange yourself quite quickly, scooting your little organs all over the place. But when those Movers are in the wrong spot or few in number, movement becomes a chore. The same goes for Eating and Growing. With enough mouths and, ahem, reproducing bits, your organism gains the advantage of scale. Without them, you might soon find yourself dead in the water. Even the scoring track is cool. Literally dead, in fact. Organism is cutthroat. When two rival organisms move into contact with another, there’s a quick-and-dirty rock-paper-scissors check where Eaters destroy Growers, Growers smoosh Movers, and Movers circle around to strangle Eaters. This destroys the organelle on the receiving end of the circle of life and deposits an extra morsel of food in its wake. What’s more, if the recipient of this microscopic violence no longer has all the necessary components to sustain life, the whole thing is reduced to a pile of mushy calories. And this is tied directly to how victory functions. There are two ways to win. Either you rack up five points by occupying the nutrient-dense space at the center of the board and destroying body parts — which can be done surprisingly swiftly if a surgical strike eliminates an entire hostile organism — or you outrun your rivals by dividing into three separate bodies. These are roughly analogous to aggressive versus turtle playstyles, although the game’s open-ended nature means it’s an imperfect comparison. More often, Organism allows both approaches simultaneously. Having two bodies is better than one in terms of diversification, since now you can take two separate actions per turn. But mitosis is not a decision to undertake lightly, leaving your newly separated organisms open to attack and liable to grouse at each other for lack of sleep. [Note: Insert parenting joke.] What this really does for Organism is make every decision matter, both in the micro sense and the larger conflict. It isn’t uncommon to look at your bloated cell and realize you optimized it poorly a half-dozen turns ago and the bill is only coming due now that you can’t figure out how to move it into battle with a rival organism without sacrificing two appendages. Mutations introduce all sorts of complications. Speaking purely mechanically, Organism is an abstract game — obviously — but one with its own internal coherence. After that awkward learning phase, which has as much to do with the game’s novelty as anything else, one can look at the board and read the slow-motion topography of its microcosmic battleground, like skilled eyes reading tectonic plates or a football match. And as an abstract game, it’s entirely distinct from anything else out there. Like Chess, it’s sometimes elegant and sometimes ungainly; like Go, it’s possible to read the state many turns into the future only to find oneself blindsided by a clever turn. But it’s also wholly unlike either of those benchmarks. One of its biggest departures is that it’s also only a starting point. I’ve been exploring a handful of the game’s mutations, discs that introduce special rules. It’s a similar approach to what Spangler did with Sol, letting these little powers alter the progression of the game without undermining the rules wholesale. Except, well, sometimes the rules do get undermined wholesale. Such as when a mutation introduces “fields,” little discs that function as sub-systems within a cell. Some foster aggression, others lean into the optimization puzzle, and still more transform the game into something else entirely. Under a microscope. No matter how it transforms, though, Organism remains truly exciting. There have been some excellent games about evolution over the years, in particular the North Star titles Evolution, Oceans, and Nature. Organism takes an entirely different tack from those games’ recombinant traits. In a sense, it recalls those games but with only three cards and a whole lot of careful positioning. But there’s a certain thematic overlap, an arms race that never lets up. That it works not only with two players, but as many as six, is nothing short of astonishing. I’ve played with four, and while the session took longer than lower counts, it was a wonderful experience, full of little feints and flankings. Anyway. That’s Organism. As a parable, its ambitions are narrower than Sol, but also given the focus of an electron microscope. I can’t wait to push around its tendrils, mouth-parts, and weird jiggling udders for years to come. It’s on Kickstarter right now. A prototype of Organism was provided by the publisher. (If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

Stephen King once wrote: "I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud." It seems like plenty of horror filmmakers followed suit, but went straight for the gross out as this gallery of GIF's will attest.Here you will see a collection of some the weirdest, sickest and yes, grossest monster heads ever concocted for the screen. My twisted sense of humor found most of them to be hilarious. I'll let you be the judge.

WOD: White 5 rounds for time of: 3 Rope Climbs, 15 ft 10 Toes-to-bars 21 Plate Overhead Walking Lunges, 45/25 lbs Run, 400 m U.S. Army 1st Lt. Ashley White, 24, of Alliance, Ohio, assigned to the 230th Brigade Support Battalion, 30th Heavy Brigade Combat Team, North Carolina National Guard, based in Goldsboro, North Carolina, died on Oct. 22, 2011, in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, from wounds suffered when insurgents attacked her unit with an improvised explosive device. She is survived by her husband, Capt. Jason Stumpf; parents, Robert and Deborah; brother, Josh; and sister, Brittney.

I've been having a hard time dating, and honestly, it's reached a point where I've started questioning whether I even want a romantic relationship at all. A little about me: I'm 26, based in Iran, currently finishing law school while working as an executive manager at a respected law firm. I started working young, and by most measures I'd call myself successful for my age. I take responsibility seriously — professionally and personally — and I've never had a problem carrying weight when it's needed. Before I get into it, I want to admit something. Writing this wasn't easy. I think most men find it difficult to talk openly about rejection, about the moments that stung, about fear or sadness or feeling like you weren't enough. We're not really given the vocabulary for it growing up. But I decided this was worth doing anyway — partly because I think the question underneath it matters, and partly because I wanted to understand myself better by putting it into words. Here's the pattern I keep running into. At some point, almost every conversation I have with a woman here eventually turns to relationships, marriage, and how responsibility gets divided. When I say I'm independent and that I'd want a partner who's independent and capable too — someone I can genuinely build a life with, not just be provided for by — I've had women tell me, sometimes directly, sometimes not, that they don't see themselves as responsible for building or financially supporting a shared life. The unspoken expectation seems to be: the man provides. He's financially responsible, protective, always has an answer, always knows what to do, where to go, what to decide. He carries the relationship. Two conversations stayed with me. On one date, with a 32-year-old lawyer, this exact topic came up. She told me, plainly: "My income is mine. Your income is ours. Don't count on me for the financial side of a shared life." I asked why I should agree to that. She said she didn't want the stress of financial responsibility. So I asked her directly — did she expect me to carry all of that stress while she carried none of it? She said, half-joking, that apparently that's what a "powerful man" does, and that I was "acting like a princess." Later in the same conversation, she told me, without much hesitation, that men who want shared responsibility are a turn-off for her. Another time, I was on a date with a 28-year-old brand manager at a pharmaceutical company. Same underlying theme, but with a twist. She told me she wanted her partner to be more professionally accomplished than she was. When I asked what she meant, she said: "You're a COO right now. I'd want my partner to be a CEO." What struck me was that, on paper, my position was already more senior than hers. I found myself wondering — what exactly is she looking for that she doesn't already have in herself? I could list more stories, but I don't want this to turn into a highlight reel of bad dates. That's not the point. At first, I assumed I was simply meeting the wrong people. So I widened the search — dated women my age, then older. The pattern kept resurfacing in different forms. Eventually I started wondering if this is more structural than I'd assumed. Maybe a lot of women genuinely aren't looking for an equal partner in the way I picture one. Maybe what's wanted is a man who leads and carries most of the weight — and maybe, paradoxically, a man who explicitly asks for shared responsibility becomes less desirable for it. Here's the strange part: I am capable of being the sole provider. I've done exactly that for my own family when it was needed, and I'd do it again without resentment. But if I'm choosing who to build my own family with, I don't understand why I'd knowingly walk into a relationship where I end up more alone under the full weight of everything. For a while, I turned the question on myself. Maybe men, stripped of the provider role, simply aren't as lovable. Maybe we're conditioned to be valued for what we produce and protect — and the moment we stop performing that, we become less wanted as partners. And then a darker thought followed it: who actually shows up for a man when he's sad? When he's facing something alone? When he's scared, or tired, or just wants someone to help carry the weight instead of carrying it all himself? Sometimes it feels like men are valued mainly for output — for what we provide — rather than for who we are underneath that. I know that conclusion is probably too broad to be the whole truth, and I'm not trying to turn this into "men vs. women." I don't think every woman I've met reflects some universal rule. I suspect there's a better explanation than the one I've landed on — and that's genuinely what I'm here to ask about. Maybe I'm misreading the situation. Maybe I've been noticing certain things while missing others entirely. Maybe the culture around relationships here is shifting, and I've just kept running into a particular type of person along the way. So I'm asking, honestly: how do you see the question of responsibility between men and women in a relationship today? Do traditional roles still hold up? Should responsibility generally be shared — even if not perfectly 50/50? Or is there something in all this I'm still missing? And if you don't have a theory, that's fine too. I'd be just as interested in hearing how this lands for you. submitted by /u/Omidteimoori [link] [comments]

I am a 30 year old female. I am average looking, with brown hair and eyes. I am taller than most women (6’1) and I am 180lbs. I do have a belly and some meat to my bones but I am very athletic, in fact my job is in athletics. I know these stats realistically shouldn’t matter, and the right person will find me attractive regardless, but part of me thinks that’s wishful thinking. So I’ve included my height and weight because I do think it factors in here. I have never had a real relationship. I have had hookups, a few situationships, the longest one being 9 months and I felt devastated when it ended. I am healed now but we ended things when I was 27 and I am now 30. I haven’t had a situationship or even really talked to someone consistently in 3 years. I give this backstory for a few reasons, mainly being, to point out, I have never really known what to look for in dating. Trying to date now that I am comfortable putting myself back out there, feels like an impossible task. It seems like every person interested in me lacks substance and the ability to banter. When I do find someone who is interested in me, they are usually younger and/or only interested in getting me into the bedroom. The latter being most common but I don’t feel too bad, I know this is fairly common. The issue I am experiencing most and I guess seeking advice on is, the guys I am actually interested in are the ones who ghost. Does anyone know why? Am I showing too much interest in these men? I am usually more attracted to the persons personality more than I am looks, and the guys who I can have interesting conversations with and banter with always end up just up and disappearing. I keep asking myself what is wrong with me? Is it my height? My weight? My age? Is it that I go too far with the bantering? Is my personality too much? I’m not asking these men for marriage just conversation and I feel like I’m doing even that wrong. Does anyone have any advice or perspective on this? Because all I can keep thinking I am the problem 24/7. (Side note; sorry for the messy composition of this post. I know I could’ve written it better, but I hope my main point makes sense.) submitted by /u/CryptographerAny1437 [link] [comments]

Hamilton is bringing another Call of Duty-inspired watch to market. This time, it is recreating Captain Price’s wristwatch from Modern Warfare 4 as a 38 mm hand-wound Khaki Field Mechanical special edition.

CALGARY, Alberta, Sept. 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Jura Energy Corporation (“Jura” or the “Company”) provides clarification regarding a news article published by a Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, on September 13, 2026, which reported the possible revocation of petroleum rights held by the Company’s subsidiaries, Spud Energy Pty Limited (“SEPL”) and Frontier Holdings Limited (“FHL”), in Pakistan.

We should abandon the term "nature immunity." Professor Christopher Halkides came up with a wise replacement. The post “There is No Such Thing as Natural Immunity; There is Survivor Immunity.” first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

The Rolling Stones’ concert documentary, Gimme Shelter, named after the band’s hit song, was filmed and released in the heart of the cinema counterculture movement. Society’s perception of both cinema and rock and roll at the time coalesced in a film that inevitably builds towards a haunting tragedy that changed culture forever. Let’s discuss its history and its impact.Production of the Film The film subverted traditional documentary techniques of the time, with co-directors Charlotte Zwerin and the Maysles brothers opting to capture the vast majority of the events of the film as they were happening without any intervention. The film’s lack of reliance on pre-planned, semi-scripted interviews is considered a prime example of the cinematic counterculture movement of the time. The Stones’ tour manager, Ronnie Schnieder, selected the filmmakers to follow the band around to document the behind-the-scenes process of the ill-fated Altamont concert. The original plan was just to have between a half hour and 45 minutes of footage to eventually be played as a TV movie, but as the band extended their tour to appear at a festival in West Palm Beach, the project evolved further. Murder at the Altamont Concert ‘Gimme Shelter’Credit: The Criterion CollectionThe film eventually became far more centered around the 1969 concert the Stones put on at the Altamont Speedway, which had its security provided by the Hells Angels Motorcycle Gang. Throughout the day, tensions got more and more intense, both with the Angels clashing with attendees and attendees getting physical with other acts performing at the concert. Marty Balin was knocked out cold by a Hells Angel in the middle of the show, and when Mick Jagger touched down in his helicopter before their set, he was also punched in the face by a riled-up member of the crowd. Tensions rose to a dramatic peak when the Stones began their performance of their classic song, “Under My Thumb”. 18-year-old fan Meredith Hunter attempted to storm the stage with a group of people, but was restrained by one of the Angels working security. After he was thrown off the stage, he drew a gun on the Angel restraining him. As a result, he was shoved off again and stabbed multiple times in the back, killing him. The killing itself was captured by the cameramen for the concert, and was eventually included in the final cut of the film. The Unsettling Power of Our Favorite Performers If you were to sit down and watch Gimme Shelter without having a preconceived idea about what wound up happening at the Altamont Speedway, and how much of an ethics firestorm it ignited for decades, I would bet that you would be absolutely enraptured by the spiritual machismo oozing from Mick Jagger and the rest of the Stones. I say this because, even now, when I watch Gimme Shelter, after having seen it before and having more than an elementary understanding of what happened, it’s hard to not forget about it the moment Jagger enters the frame. While the Stones are performing, Jagger is infamously lit and shot with such a romantic, haunting intensity against deep-red backlighting that can only be described as Satanic in nature. Whether or not this was intentional is still up for debate to this day. But one thing that can’t be denied, which I’ll echo from the legendary Pauline Kael’s analysis of the film, is that “the Maysles brothers hit the cinema verité jackpot.” It’s understandable that, at the time, the film was met with such passionate abhorrence, but when viewed from a modern lens, while still disturbing, I think it serves as a timeless statement on the power of idolized performers and the dangers they present. What it Tells Us About Our Current Landscape ‘Gimme Shelter’Credit: The Criterion CollectionIn the past decade, we’ve seen concerts bombed, more attendees murdered, and more performers scrutinized on such devastating levels that a moment in time like this, if simply described verbally and not viewed at all through the documentary lens, may only seem like a blip on people’s radar that they forget about minutes after being told. This is really what gets to the root of what makes Gimme Shelter still so powerful today. It’s hard not to watch the film and not feel your stomach cave in on itself completely as the titled song plays over the end credits. You feel by the end as if you contributed in some way to the mania that resulted in the violence that occurred. And yet, in the modern landscape, where tragedies like this happen on the world stage far more often, since art isn’t always being made about them, our landscape is designed for us to move on too quickly. And we shouldn’t. Yes, the film is a deeply unsettling sign of that time. But I think it’s an even more disturbing sign of our time that we cannot empathize with tragedies of this sort far beyond their initial commitment because of how conditioned we’ve become to expect another one, maybe as soon as next week.

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Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, Volume 83, Issue , Page 1-17, January 2026. Atlantic Mackerel (Scomber scombrus) in Canadian waters have declined severely, yet limited understanding of predation risk and post-spawning movements constrains management and rebuilding efforts. We used >200 acoustic receivers across the Bay of Fundy and Passamaquoddy Bay (PB), Canada to track post-spawning behaviour of 70 tagged mackerel. Sixty-eight were detected, and six were confirmed predated based on transmitter temperature signatures > 30 °C, consistent with endothermic predators (pinnipeds, whales). No predation by mesothermic predators (e.g., sharks, tuna) was observed, and events occurred exclusively in outer PB during late summer, yielding a minimum natural mortality estimate of 0.09. Generalized additive models indicated strong residency and persistent use of inner PB into fall. Network analyses identified key corridors linking Deer and Campobello islands and Deer Island with St. Andrews, New Brunswick. Most individuals departed the Bay by early November, with some moving into U.S. waters as far south as Cape Cod, potentially exposing northern contingent fish to U.S. fisheries operating during this period. These results demonstrate basin-scale telemetry's value for resolving survival, movement, and connectivity, informing assessment and rebuilding of this collapsed stock.

Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, Volume 83, Issue , Page 1-23, January 2026. An assessment of the impacts of mobile bottom-contacting gears (MBCG) on eight previously identified epibenthic communities off Nova Scotia, Canada, is presented using risk-based indicators of relative Benthic status (RBS). Indices of both existing biomass relative to carrying capacity of the whole epibenthic community (RBStot), and that of the 10% most sensitive fauna (RBSsen), were quantified and mapped. Substantial regional and habitat-related differences in RBS were identified. Most of the eastern Scotian Shelf, where five benthic community types are recognized, showed low fishing intensity and high seabed status. In contrast, a community characterized by long-lived individuals of echinoderms, sponges, and cnidarians on eastern Georges Bank and in the Inner Bay of Fundy, was severely impacted. RBStot for that community was in good status on only 48% of the area of the habitat, while RBSsen met that threshold on only 35% of the area. Our approach allows for the large-scale evaluation of the impacts of MBCG on the benthic communities as a whole and enables evaluation of management scenarios aimed at reducing its environmental effects.

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I don’t understand the purpose or why someone would put themselves in that position if they’re seeing someone? submitted by /u/nietherherenorthere_ [link] [comments]