text:
ALAN COE BUNCE (June 28, 1900[1] – April 27, 1965) was an American radio and television actor.

Bunce was best remembered for playing the role of Albert Arbuckle alongside Peg Lynch on the sitcom _Ethel and Albert_ from 1944-50 on radio and from 1953-1956 on television. Bunce was also remembered as the first actor to portray physician Jerry Malone on radio's _Young Doctor Malone_ in the early 1940s.

Early life

Alan Coe Bunce was born on June 28, 1900 in Westfield, New Jersey.[2] His year of birth had been the subject of dispute, with varying sources citing 1902,[3] 1903, and 1908.[4] However, according to the Bunce family papers which were published publicly in 2008 by Bunce's grandson Andrew Bunce, the Bunce family has found evidence and have accepted Bunce's birth date to be June 28, 1900.[5]

Bunce's year of birth is given as 1900 on his U.S. World War I Draft Registration Card (1917–18)[6] Bunce's age is given as 39 in the United States Census of 1940 (enumerated on April 27, 1940).[7]

Bunce the youngest of three children born to Theodore Dwight Bunce, an inventor, and Alice Edwards Bunce. His mother died when Bunce was a young boy. He graduated from a high school in Melrose, Massachusetts in 1918.

Career

Bunce's career began in the early 1930s with small roles in several films and guest appearances on several radio programs. Bunce did not get household recognition until 1939 when he began playing the role of Dr. Jerry Malone, the young physician who dispensed prescriptions and advice to the folks of Three Oaks on the medical drama _Young Doctor Malone_. He left the program in 1944.

The same year Bunce left _Young Doctor Malone_, he replaced film star Richard Widmark in the role of working-class man Albert Arbuckle, the male lead on Peg Lynch's _Ethel and Albert_.[8] Lynch played the female lead and Albert's wife Ethel Arbuckle. Bunce remained with the radio show for its entire six year run.

Bunce played New York State Governor Al Smith in “Sunrise at Campobello” about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's early battle with polio and return to public life during the 1924 Democratic convention where Roosevelt walked ten steps to the podium and stood for 45 minutes to nominate the Governor for president.[9]

Bunce broke into television in 1950 with a guest star appearance of the ABC anthology series _The Clock_. Bunce's “Albert Arbuckle” character also moved to television starting with appearances on _The Kate Smith Hour_ beginning in 1952. This led to the premiere of the televised version of _Ethel and Albert_ on NBC April 25, 1953. The show stayed on NBC until Christmas Day, 1954. It moved to CBS on June 20, 1955 and stayed there until September 26, 1955 serving as a summer replacement for _December Bride_ and ended its television life on ABC where it aired from October 14, 1955 – July 6, 1956.[10]

Bunce was a ranking officer in the American Federation of Radio Artists, formed in 1937, and in 1952 was elected the first president of the newly formed, American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, after merging that same year with the Television Authority, until 1954.[11] and [12]

In his later career, Bunce appeared on episodes of _Perry Mason_,[13] _The United States Steel Hour_, _The Patty Duke Show_ and _The Nurses_. His last appearance on television was on a 1965 episode of _The Defenders_.[14]

Family

Bunce married Ruth Elizabeth Nugent (ca. 1902-1978), an actress, in 1924. Nugent was born in Ohio and was the daughter of John Charles “J.C.” Nugent and Grace Mary (née Fertig). J.C. Nugent was the father of actor Elliott Nugent (1896-1980). Her father was an actor, as well as a playwright and commentator for _Variety_.[15] The Bunces had three children, J. Elliott Bunce (1936-2010), Alan Nugent Bunce (1933-2008), and Virginia Nugent “Jill” Bunce Thompson. Virginia" Jill" Bunce Thompson and Lawrence Emerson Thompson have two children, a son Lee Alan Thompson, and a daughter Jennifer Thompson Bergman. Alan N. Bunce, was a writer and editor for _The Christian Science Monitor_. Alan N. Bunce was born in New York and died in Massachusetts. He and his wife Joyce Elaine (née Trautwig) Bunce, had two children Alan Bunce and Andrew Bunce, who compiled much of the family history in August 2008.

Death

Bunce died on April 27, 1965 from an undisclosed cause at age 64. He is interred in Long Ridge Union Cemetery, Stamford, Connecticut.

Filmography

  Year   Title                     Role                   Notes
  ------ ------------------------- ---------------------- -------
  1930   _She's My Weakness_       Bernard Norton
  1959   _The Last Mile_           Warden Stone
  1960   _Sunrise at Campobello_   Gov. Alfred E. Smith
  1961   _Homicidal_               Doctor Jonas

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4] Cox, Jim. ''The Great Radio Soap Operas", p. 281. McFarland & Company (1999); ; accessed October 26, 2015. “Born on June 28, 1908, (sic) at Westfield, New Jersey, Bunce appeared in 35 stock productions and on Broadway.”

[5]

[6] [http://interactive.ancestrylibrary.com/6482/005216173_04204/17851378?backurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ancestrylibrary.com%2f%2fcgi-bin%2fsse.dll%3fgss%3dangs-g%26new%3d1%26rank%3d1%26msT%3d1%26gsfn%3dAlan%2bCoe%2b%26gsfn_x%3d0%26gsln%3dBunce%26gsln_x%3d0%26MSAV%3d0%26msbdy%3d1900%26catbucket%3drstp%26uidh%3d756%26pcat%3dROOT_CATEGORY%26h%3d17851378%26db%3dWW1draft%26indiv%3d1%26ml_rpos%3d1&ssrc=&backlabel=ReturnRecord Ancestry.com. U.S. World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2005. Original data: United States, Selective Service System. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration. M1509, 4,582 rolls. Imaged from Family History Library microfilm.

[7] [http://interactive.ancestrylibrary.com/2442/m-t0627-00496-00244/128428637?backurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ancestrylibrary.com%2f%2fcgi-bin%2fsse.dll%3fgss%3dangs-g%26new%3d1%26rank%3d1%26msT%3d1%26gsfn%3dAlan%2bCoe%2b%26gsfn_x%3d0%26gsln%3dBunce%26gsln_x%3d0%26MSAV%3d0%26msbdy%3d1900%26catbucket%3drstp%26uidh%3d756%26pcat%3dROOT_CATEGORY%26h%3d128428637%26db%3d1940usfedcen%26indiv%3d1%26ml_rpos%3d2&ssrc=&backlabel=ReturnRecord 1940 United States Census, enumerated April 27, 1940, Greenwich City, Fairfield County, Connecticut], ancestry.com; accessed December 5, 2015.

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

[13]

[14]

[15] J.C. Nugent profile, worldcat.org; accessed December 4, 2015.

title: Alan Bunce

question: Summarize the early life of Alan.

answer: Alan was born in Westfield, New Jersey in 1900. His year of birth, however, has been a subject of dispute. Alan was the youngest among his siblings and was born to Theodore Dwight Bunce, and Alice Edwards Bunce. His mother died when he was a young boy. He graduated from a high school in Melrose in 1918.

question: Summarize Alan's career.

answer: Alan's career began in 1930s with small roles in films and radio appearances. However, he shot to popularity with his role as Dr. Jerry Malone in Young Doctor Malone. He then replaced Richard Widmark in Peg Lynch's Ethel and Albert. He then played the role of Al Smith in Sunrise at Campobello. Alan finally broke into television in 1950 when he appeared in The Clock. He also had appearances in Ethel and Albert. Alan also served as a ranking officer in the American Federation of Radio Artists. Additionally, he was elected as the first president of American Federation of Radio and Television Artists. He appeared in numerous other shows before his last show — The Defenders — in 1965.

question: Summarize Alan's family life.

answer: Alan married Ruth Elizabeth Nugent in 1924. She was the daughter of JC Nugent and Grace Mary. Alan and Ruth had three children — J. Elliott Bunce, Alan Nugent Bunce, and Virginia Nugent "Jill" Bunce Thompson. Alan died in 1965 and was buried in Long Ridge Union Cemetery in Stamford, Connecticut.

question: Summarize the various affairs Alan had.


split: test

text:
CUBA is a Caribbean island country.

CUBA may also refer to:

Places

-   Cuba Palace, in Palermo, Italy
-   Cuba Street, Wellington, a street and a quarter in the Central Business District of Wellington, New Zealand
-   Cuba, Portugal, a municipality and town in the district of Beja
-   La Cuba, a municipality in Teruel, Aragon, Spain
-   Avon (county), a defunct county in the west of England, where CUBA is an acronym for the “County that Used to Be Avon”

United States

-   Cuba, Alabama
-   Cuba, California:
    -   Cuba, Lassen County, California
    -   Cuba, Merced County, California
    -   Cuba, former name of Iceland, California
-   Cuba, Georgia
-   Cuba, Illinois
-   Cuba, Indiana
-   Cuba, Owen County, Indiana
-   Cuba, Kansas
-   Cuba, Kentucky
-   Cuba, Minnesota
-   Cuba, Missouri, a city in Crawford County
-   Cuba, Lafayette County, Missouri, a ghost town
-   Cuba, New Mexico
-   Cuba (town), New York
    -   Cuba (village), New York, in the town of Cuba
-   Cuba, Clinton County, Ohio
-   Cuba, Putnam County, Ohio
-   Cuba, West Virginia
-   Cuba City, Wisconsin
-   Cuba Lake, a reservoir in New York
-   Cuba Township, Becker County, Minnesota
-   Cuba Township, Lake County, Illinois

People

-   Alberto Cuba (born 1962), a Cuban long-distance runner
-   Paul Cuba (1908–1990), an American football player
-   Cuba Gooding, Sr. (1944–2017), a soul singer
-   Cuba Gooding, Jr. (born 1968), a U.S. actor

Ships

-   _Cuba_, a New Zealand Company barque that brought surveyors to Wellington, New Zealand in 1840
-   SS Yorktown (1894), rebuilt in 1920 as the turbo-electric propelled passenger ship _Cuba_
-   SS _Cuba_ (1920), ex-German SS _Coblenz_ (1897) renamed SS _Cuba_ in 1920, which sank in 1923
-   , a British troopship sunk by German submarine U-1195 in 1945

Storms

-   1910 Cuba hurricane, a category four hurricane that stalled west of Cuba, causing devastating flooding
-   1924 Cuba hurricane, a category five hurricane that devastated western Cuba
-   1932 Cuba hurricane, a category five hurricane that devastated Cuba

Other uses

-   _Cuba_ (board game), see _Havana_
-   _Cuba_ (film), a 1979 film
-   Cuba (song), a Gibson Brothers song
-   _Cuba_, a 1987 album by the band The Silos
-   Chinese University Basketball Association, a basketball league
-   Club Universitario de Buenos Aires, a sports club
-   A common name for _Hemianthus callitrichoides_, an aquatic plant
-   A Roman goddess; see List of Roman birth and childhood deities
-   A synonym for the legume genus, _Tachigali_

title: Cuba (disambiguation)

question: Summarize all the different uses of the word "Cuba."

answer: Cuba can refer to the Caribbean country. There are also places named Cuba in Italy, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain and England. There are twenty-four locations named Cuba in the United States. There are four people named Cuba, and four ships. There are three hurricanes named Cuba. There is also a board game, a film, a song, an album, a basketball league, a sports club, an aquatic plant, a Roman goddess, and another name for the legume genus Tachigali, all named Cuba.


text:
“The Patriot” is a decent revenge narrative about a by the numbers good guy who was pushed too far. But for celebrating the Fourth of July, it’s trash. The Fourth of July shouldn’t be about celebrating warfare or revolution, it should be about celebrating exceptional American freedom.

The British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke never called what happened here in 1776 a revolution. His most appropriate designator was “civil war.” He was highly critical of the French revolution, as we all should be, as it was a terrifying failure.

What was different about America? Why are we the unicorn of political revolutions? It’s because we didn’t revolt and overthrow a government. We defended our English rights against English tyranny. We were self-governing and had outgrown rule from that little Island.

The author Os Guinness uses this classic example of Captain Levi Preston to demonstrate the point:

“Captain Preston, what made you go to the Concord fight?”

“What did I go for?”

“Were you oppressed by the Stamp Act?”

“I never saw any stamps, and I always understood that none were sold.”

“Well, what about the tea tax?”

“Tea tax? I never drank a drop of the stuff. The boys threw it all overboard.”

“I suppose you had been reading Harrington, Sidney, and Locke about the eternal principle of liberty?”

“I never heard of these men. The only books we had were the Bible, the catechism, the Psalms, Isaac Watts’ hymns, and the almanacs.”

“Well, then, why did you go out to fight?”

“Young man, what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: we always had been free, and we meant to be free always.”

The American Revolution was self-defense. We were free, and our English brothers were getting in the way. So rather than celebrating something that stirs up violent revolutionary sentiments that would make Jean Jacques Rousseau weep with envy, I propose these films as replacements for “The Patriot” during your July Fourth celebrating.

When you truly love something, you take it as it is, warts and all. Not every film on this list is happy. But all these films are America.

1. ‘12 Angry Men’

This film is proof-positive that ultimately great films are built on great scripts. More than that, this movie is about how American jurisprudence rests on “innocent before proven guilty.” English jurisprudence was built on “guilty before proven innocent.”

Innocence of a crime one didn’t commit is extremely hard to prove. Often, it’s impossible. There are too many people in our prisons, too many needlessly deprived of freedom. This film reminds us that isn’t ultimately the fault of a “system” but often the fault of 12 people.

Jury duty is an important part of our freedom. Let’s be better at it.

2. ‘American History X’

This film is brutal and not for everyone. It’s a tragic tale of a brilliant young man who turns to white supremacy to heal the wounds of losing his father. Sound relevant?

America is one of the least racist places in the world. I’m not trying to Howard Zinn this list. But “American History X” is about how America is an antidote to racism. The tag line—“some legacies must end”—says it all. America was built on principles in conflict with slavery.

Every society on Earth has been built upon slavery. But America said our pillars will reject that. We haven’t been consistent, we have failed. But we have the keys to freedom from racism and, like Martin Luther King Jr., we must grasp tighter to those keys, not looser.

We must become more fundamentalist about American exceptionalism in this regard, more convinced, more impassioned. We must set free the better angels of our nature and stop trying to solve our racial problems from without but look within. Constraints don’t make people good. Racism is ultimately a struggle of the soul, and our founding principles defeat hate every single day, whether we see it or not.

3. ‘Barbershop’

This film is pure Alexis de Tocqueville. The meditating communal institutions of America are what fundamentally facilitate freedom. It’s the governments’ job to remove constraints so that can happen.

In Greenville, North Carolina, there’s a program called “Cops and Barbers” for at-risk youth. It’s a network of men who are watching out for the kids of that community. American freedom resides in the people, but it’s unsustainable without community. This film celebrates that like none other.

4. ‘Brooklyn’

This wonderful film has really gone under the radar and should be essential viewing for the Fourth of July. Saorise Ronan beautifully portrays an Irish immigrant who is trying to make a life in Brooklyn. We are a nation of immigrants, and I wish the entire world could live here. I would have no problem with completely open borders if we abolished the welfare state and federal income tax.

But that won’t happen anytime soon, if ever. Conservatives want people to come here because we believe America is exceptional! We want people who want to be free to be able to be free. Here your heart can sing unhindered. This beautiful clip from the film really says it all:

5. ‘Field of Dreams’

Do I even need to defend this one? Baseball. Iowa. Anti-censorship. Unwavering faith. Corn fields. Conflicted relationships with fathers. James Earl Jones. Kevin Costner before “Waterworld.” It doesn’t get any more American than this! I don’t know why you aren’t watching this movie right now. This film is a celebration of everything we are as a nation.

6. ‘Friday’

This film is hilarious, but it’s also about fundamental American values. If marijuana and profanity makes you uncomfortable, you may want to skip this one (I’m not a fan but I still love this movie). But ultimately this film is about bullies and standing up to them. It’s about being a man and growing up. It’s about how communities are only as good as their people.

We decide what kind of communities we’ll have. We decide how free we are.

7. ‘The Iron Giant’

This is quite possibly the greatest animated film ever made. Like Brad Bird’s excellent Incredibles films, it’s jam-packed with American nostalgia. It has numerous virtues such as suspicion of power and the simple joys of being a young child running around in the woods.

But its message about appearances being deceptive is probably the most important. America is against pre-judgement. Prejudice kills the soul. “Look, it’s none of my business, but who cares what these creeps think of you? They don’t make you what you are, you do. You are who you choose to be.”

If you’ve never seen this film, you owe it to yourself to watch it this Fourth of July. If you don’t shed a tear at the end, well, then you’re the one made of iron.

8. ‘The Karate Kid’

I said everything I needed to say about this film here. In this article I’ll simply say if the Fourth is about patriotism, then it’s ultimately about fatherhood. “They carried in their souls the spirit of their fathers. The root of the word ‘patriot’ comes from the Greek word _patris_. _Patris_ means father.”

9. ‘The Last Unicorn’

This wonderful animated film is perfect for celebrating the Fourth of July because America is a unicorn. A unicorn is something that shouldn’t exist, something precious and unique. There has never been a country like this one: A country founded on principles in direct conflict with slavery. A country willing to fight a war over slavery. A country with no nationality or enforced religion. A country with no king. Even the soundtrack to this film was performed by America!

More importantly, this film is about finding things that are lost. And something is very lost in our country today. We need to go looking for it. The keys to freedom have been locked away somewhere and it’s going to require each of us to go on a soul-searching quest to find them.

The lyrics from the theme song are tremendous and oddly evoke our current predicament perfectly:

  When the first breath of winter through the flowers is icing
  And you look to the north and a pale moon is rising
  And it seems like all is dying and would leave the world to mourn
  In the distance hear the laughter of the last unicorn
  I’m alive, I’m alive.

America is the last unicorn, and she is still alive. We have to go find her and set her free again.

10. ‘Lincoln’

Fundamentally, this film is about the contradictions of the American founding. Slavery existed in the land of the free for a long time. But evil can’t be stamped out with a hammer. It takes wisdom, time, patience, and hard work.

The best line in the film demonstrates this beautifully: “A compass, I learned when I was surveying, it’ll… it’ll point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps, deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp… what’s the use of knowing true north?”

This film also tells a story about a functioning legislative branch. Nowadays, our representatives and senators are pundits. They’ve grown fat and lazy. Here we get to see what republican democracy is supposed to look like in all its nasty, raw beauty.

We deserve men like Thaddeus Stevens, who was willing to say things that made his heart break in order to free people. I pray for a Congress that calls each other reptiles again to break the shackles of tyranny.

11. ‘Miracle’

What conservatives want to conserve is not the bizarre caricature of rugged individualism and social darwinism that the Left says we represent. Jonah Goldberg put it very well: “The market system is so good at getting people—from all over the world—to work together that we barely notice how much we’re cooperating. Liberalism, meanwhile, by refusing to give people direction and meaning from above—as every ancient system did, and every modern totalitarianism does—depends on a healthy civil society to provide the sense of meaning and belonging we all crave. Civil society, as I explain later, is that vast social ecosystem—family, schools, churches, associations, sports, business, local communities, etc.—that mediates life between the state and the individual. It is a healthy civil society, not the state, that civilizes people.”

That is what this film represents. It’s Tocqueville versus Karl Marx. The USSR’s hockey team was the incarnation of Communism, and a bunch of college kids defeated it! If you don’t have time to read Goldberg’s “Suicide of the West,” then maybe just watch this film. They’re both about naturalistic miracles.

12. ‘Remember the Titans’

This movie is pure Americana, from the soundtrack to the morals. Sports save lives, sports breed forgiveness, because sports don’t really matter. The stakes are lower with sports, so we can enter into them more lightly. That’s how we discover each other.

This is why Robert Putnam titled his book “Bowling Alone.” You can can’t discover others by playing solitaire. This country is built upon an infinite string of individual relationships. It isn’t ultimately about what happens in DC. It’s about us and how well we can learn to live with each other.

13. ‘Steel Magnolias’

No one needs an excuse to watch this wonderful film, but the Fourth of July is a pretty good one. Our women have always made this country great. They are tough and beautiful, magnolias made of steel. “Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.” Enough said.

14. ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

“Now, gentlemen, in this country, our courts are the great levelers. In our courts, all men are created equal. I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and of our jury system – that’s no ideal to me. That is a living, working reality! Now I am confident that you gentlemen will review, without passion, the evidence that you have heard, come to a decision and restore this man to his family. In the name of God, do your duty. In the name of God, believe Tom Robinson.”

The members of this infamous jury in this famous American book didn’t believe the falsely accused Tom Robinson. Yet freedom requires better of us. It requires that we take responsibility for ourselves and our world.

The Fourth of July means nothing if it isn’t nested in what Thomas Sowell calls “the tragic vision of the world.” This sees that the world is cracked and broken and says we must go to the broken places without idealism, but with tragic conviction that our principles are true even when we fail to live up to them.

15.

This last one is blank. I’m several generations removed from Pacific Northwest Indians, but whenever I visit Oregon the land awakens the echoes in my soul. I pray that someday this spot could be filled by a film about Black Elk, a holy man of the Lakota.

He decided to follow Jesus, whom the Lakota call Wanikiya: “He who makes live.” He was a convert to Catholicism and is being considered for canonization by the Catholic Church. Someday he will be remembered as one of the great Americans, but unfortunately his Christianity runs against the grain of the racist identity politics of American leftism.

Black Elk was at the Wounded Knee massacre, but overcame tragedy with faith. The life blood of America has always been faith. The separation of church and state isn’t designed to protect atheists, it’s designed to protect faith from the state. Without faith there is no freedom, and therefore no America.

A.C. Gleason is a proud Biola University alum, where he met his wonderful wife. He earned his MA in philosophy of religion from Talbot. He co-hosts and co-produces The AK47 Podcast with fellow Talbot Alum Kyle Hendricks. You can find more of his writings on Medium and ricochet.com . Follow him on Twitter @ac_gleason and his podcast @aaronkyle47. He denies all accusations that Comrade Real Presence is his alter ego, although he hears that guy is awesome.

Copyright © 2020 The Federalist, a wholly independent division of FDRLST Media, All Rights Reserved.

question: Summarize why the author thinks "The Patriot" is "trash" in the way it celebrates the Fourth of July.

answer: The author believes that "The Patriot" does a poor job in the way it celebrates the Fourth of July. The author believes this as he thinks the Fourth of July shouldn't be about celebrating warfare or revolution, implying the movie does this. He notes that a British statesman and philosopher never called what happened in 1776 a revolution, he called it a "civil war". The author says that July Fourth was not about overthrowing a government, but America's defense of their English rights. He finds the movie should be celebrating exceptional American freedom.

question: What does the text say about "12 Angry Men"?

answer: "12 Angry Men" is a film about how American jurisprudence rests on "innocent before proven guilty", where English jurisprudence was built on "guilty before proven innocent". The author of this text sees this film as proof-positive that great films are built on great scripts. He also sees the movie as reminding people that it ultimately isn't the fault of the system that there are too many people in our prison but often the fault of the 12 people on a jury. He believes this film is representative of America and a great one to watch to celebrate the Fourth of July.

question: Summarize how the author feels about America versus England.

answer: The author sees America as having defended their English rights against English tyranny. He believes the Fourth of July should be a celebration of exceptional American freedom, and that that day in 1776 was self defense. He addresses movies that represent different aspects of America. He believes that "12 Angry Men" shows that American jurisprudence rests on "innocent before proven guilty", as opposed to England's "guilty before proven innocent". When referencing the film "Friday" he seems to allude to England as having been bullies in 1776, and that America stood up to them. Later in the article he praises America for being a country with no king.

question: What does the text say about current US presidents?


text:
The fire in the clearing burned brightly, flickering gently in the wind. Above it hung the largest, most beautifully succulent roast that either Jack or his brother Grum had ever seen. Of course, having spent the last twenty years of their life locked in a dungeon and eating nothing but stale bread and half-rotted cheese, that wasn’t saying much, but their stomachs rumbled with excitement all the same.

“Do you think anyone’s home?”

Jack tried his best to peer around the bushes the two of them were hiding behind. “It doesn’t *look* like it...”

“Maybe… maybe whoever lives here’s really nice? Maybe ‘e wouldn’t mind us having a taste?” Grum’s eyes were glued to the steaming roast. “Let’s go have a bite, yeh?”

“Right,” Jack said as he hit his brother on the back of the head, “and *maybe* they’re a blood-thirsty troll. Don’t be so *stupid*, Grum.”

Grum began to sniffle as he turned to face his brother. “M-mum said… mum said you’re not s’pposed to be mean to me no more!”

“Oh stow it Grum, you’re a grown man now, you should be able to handle yourself a spot of insult.”

At this, Grum’s face began to pucker up into the beginnings of a cry, something that was admittedly a strange site to see. Grum, as it was, did not really look very much like a man, but rather, more like a very large bear with slightly less fur and a slight capacity for human speech. Upon further inspection, one would even find that his immense muscular mass had so dominated his body, he appeared to even have an impressive amount surrounding the smallish lump that doubled as his head. Jack theorized many years ago that it was precisely because of this that Grum had such a poor tenacity at learning; the muscles would just squeeze any knowledge right out of his cranium as soon as it was put there. As Jack reflected on this, he came to the sudden realization that if he didn’t say *something* to raise his brother’s spirits right about now, the resulting wail would be loud enough to call every guard in the district straight to their location.

“Okay, okay! I’m sorry! Just… don’t cry. Look, you’re not stupid. You’re right, let’s… go get some food. But *first*, I’m going to sneak around to have a better look and make sure nobody is around. You stay here and keep watch, alright?”

Grum wiped away some snot from under his nose. “Yeah, okay.”

“And, if anything goes wrong, I’ll signal for you to come help, got it?”

“I wait here until you give the signal.”

“Right. Good. I’ll be right back then.”

Jack gave his brother a pat on the shoulder and began to slink towards what he hoped would soon be their dinner. Unlike Grum, Jack was actually quite clever. Not only that, he was quick and agile, and even stealthy when he needed to be. Bravery, on the other hand, was not one of his strong suites. As he sneaked around the camp under the dusk sky, the thought crept into his mind of an angry troll bashing his head in as punishment for getting too near his meal. Jack tried to push the idea from his thoughts, but it had already made itself at home, hogging the good couch and generally just making a mess of the place. He was only a few steps from the fire when a voice from behind him sent a chill down his spine.

“It appears I have a guest.”

The source of the deep, intimidating voice grabbed Jack firmly by the shoulder and began to forcefully turn him around so that they were face to face. Jack’s fear was actually subsided a little as he saw that the voice didn’t come from a troll at all, but from just another human. Of course, that fear came right back two-fold when he realized who exactly he was looking at…

“Y-you’re Harrod, the c-Crusher!”

“Oh! I have a fan. How nice.”

“P-please, don’t hurt me. I wasn’t gonna take nothing, I swear! I… I was just looking, see?”

Harrod put a finger to his lips. “Hush now. Be calm. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Y-you’re not?”

“Of course not, I could never hurt a fan.” Harrod allowed himself a smile as he grabbed Jack by the throat, lifting him with one arm. “*Your* death will be completely painless.”

Jack struggled against Harrod’s grasp. Barely able to speak, he managed to shout out, “Grum!...Now!...Help!”

“What? More guests? Show yourself so I can kill you as well!” Harrod said, tossing Jack aside to ready himself for a fight.

It should be said here, that Harrod, the Crusher was a very large man. He spent years building his strength by beating to death any man who dared to cross his path, eventually gaining his title through his trademark of crushing his victims’ heads with his bare hands. It is important to understand this then, because, as Harrod looked to the bushes where Grum was slowly rising from his hiding place, he saw what he could swear was a medium-sized mountain, wielding what appeared to be a tree trunk bluntly sharpened into a sort of spear. In the space of a second, the mountain hurled its tree trunk so quickly and forcefully that Harrod, in shock, didn’t even have time to question it when he heard the thing bellow, “**Mum said, keep Jack safe!**”

Now pinned firmly against a tree by the massive spear, the look of shock and sheer terror lingered on Harrods face for a few moments until his brain finally caught up with the action and realized that it was, in fact, already dead.

“Well,” Jack said as he got up and began brushing himself off, “that could have gone a lot worse, I think.”

“So… does this mean we can eat now?” Grum asked his brother, while poking the newly limp body of Harrod, the Crushed.

Jack was about to answer when the sound of clanking metal came rushing towards them through the trees. Before they had a chance to question it, a figure clad in brilliantly shining white steel burst through the foliage in a single, graceful bound, striking a pose that could only be described as annoyingly heroic.

“Fear not, citizens,” the glimmering knight sang, “for I am the great knight Solaire! Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

Jack, dumbfounded, looked to his brother and then back to Solaire. “Well… to be honest, we’ve been away for quite some time, so I’m afraid we do-”

“Alas!” Solaire interrupted, “I know you must be amazed and excited beyond words, but I’m afraid don’t have time for autographs at the moment. I’m currently on a quest, you see!” As he said this a gust of wind flowed past his head, parting his disgustingly perfect blonde hair. “So, my dear fellows, I must bid you farewell and be off, as I bravely make my way through- good god! Is that… It is! That’s Harrod the Crusher!” Solaire turned to face the two brothers. “How did this happen?”

“Well,” Jack said stepping forward, preparing to lie, “my brother and I were just minding our own business here at this camp, which is definitely ours, and this brigand here came and tried to steal our food away from us by force. We’re not ones to be unhospitable, but we are very protective of each other, my brother and I, and we were forced to take rash action when it was clear this Harrod fellow had evil intentions.”

“By the gods, that’s amazing!” Solaire lunged forward to vigorously shake Jack’s hand. “Harrod here has been evading capture for years! You two are truly noble warriors! A grand sight to behold! Bravo!”

“Right, um, thank you,” Jack said nervously.

“Say! Noble friends! Would you two care to join me on my quest? I’ve been searching for an ancient pendant said to bestow great evil power to its holder, and I think I have finally deduced its resting place!”

“We actually are fairly busy folk, unless… Is there a, you know, reward?"

“Absolutely! The reward is that, when we find the pendant, we can use our very hands and strength to destroy it, thereby preventing any evil to take it under their control ever again!”

Jack frowned. “I mean, in the form of, well, money.”

“Well, I suppose the pendant itself would be quite valuable to the right people, but nobody with a valiant heart like ourselves would ever dream of allowing that much evil to be released back into the world.”

“Oh of course, valiant hearts like ours would never dream of doing such a thing,” Jack lied, now smiling broadly. “I think we can most certainly form a grand partnership. Isn’t that right, Grum?”

Grum’s eyes had not left Solaire’s magnificent armor since the man appeared in the clearing. “Very shiny…”

Jack winced. “Erm, that’s right, Grum, our valor will shine, indeed. An alliance then,” he said, turning back to Solaire.

“Fantastic! Absolutely fantastic! We shall certainly stand unmatched! The denizens of the Temple of Death will be shaking in their boots when they see *us* at their front step!”

“The… Temple of Death?” Jack gulped.

“Where else would an evil pendant be kept? Onwards!” Solaire put his helmet back onto his head and began to stride out of the clearing with his sword drawn.

“Well,” Jack said, turning to his brother as he tore a large piece of roast to eat on the road, “It looks like we have quite a day ahead of us.” He lifted the entire remaining roast from the fire and handed it to Grum. “Come on, big guy, let’s go catch up before our paycheck gets away.”

..

Edit: a bit of bolding and italicizing

title: [FN][HM] The first steps of a long and interesting journey

question: What does the story say about sibling interaction?

answer: Siblings know each other well. In the case of Jack and Grum, they seem loyal to each other, in part out of respect for their mother's wishes. Siblings can irritate each other. Physical interaction, like pats on the back and looks that only each other can understand, may be another mark of sibling interaction. Siblings can cover for each other's weaknesses if they want to because they often know each other in a unique way.

question: What does the story say about emotions?

answer: The text mentions several emotions, explicitly and implicitly. Explicit emotions include excitement, anger, fear, shock and terror, and nervousness. Implicit emotions include sadness at being offended, sadness subsiding, surprise, and extreme fear.

question: What does the text say about Harrod the Crusher's eyes?


text:
[Article image]

_Could not load trending articles_

Monday, January 15, 2018 2:19 PM

The University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) appears to have cancelled a program that sought to pay students to fight “whiteness, privilege, and heteronormativity.”

The “Social Justice Advocates” program was first reported on by _Campus Reform_ last May, after UCLA posted a job listing seeking to hire 8-10 students to empower their peers by facilitating workshops about “systems of oppression” and how to fight “the status quo.”

[RELATED: UCLA paying students to fight ‘whiteness,’ ‘patriarchy’]

Students hired for the role would be remunerated with a quarterly stipend in exchange for working at least three hours per week hosting workshops such as “Social Justice Myths,” and “All Aboard The Struggle Bus,” according to the initial job posting.

Funding for the program was to come from the Bruin Excellence & Student Transformation Grant Program (BEST), a student-led initiative backed by taxpayer funding with the express purpose of promoting “social justice leadership among campus activists.”

However, UCLA no longer appears to be offering the program, as the Social Justice Advocates program’s Facebook page has been inactive for over a month, the program’s “workshop request” form is now defunct, and the UCLA website no longer maintains any active pages for the program.

In fact, UCLA gives no indication that it hired any students at all, which would make it the second public university to cancel a Social Justice Advocates program after the University of Arizona, where the program likewise disappeared following its exposure by _Campus Reform_.

[RELATED: U of Arizona to revise ‘Social Justice Advocates’ position]

_Campus Reform_ reached out to UCLA about the lack of communication concerning the Social Justice Advocates program, but spokespersons for the university have not responded to either confirm or deny that the program has been eliminated.

Meanwhile, Washington State University is the only school that still appears to pay students to fulfill a similar role. Although the school’s Social Justice Peer Educator program did face backlash after _Campus Reform_ reported on it last summer, it still remains active.

_FOLLOW THE AUTHOR OF THIS ARTICLE ON TWITTER: @TONI_AIRAKSINEN_

[Staff image]

What you stand for is what defines you

Conservative students on college campuses are marginalized, threatened, and silenced by threatening students who oppose their views, or radicalized liberal professors or administrators. Campus Reform—and readers like you—are pushing back. Progressives would rather threaten you with violence, silence your conservative views, or call for you to be "canceled" from our society if you oppose them. They say your views are dangerous, hateful, fearful, or racist.

They have it all wrong. What we stand for defines us—it always has.

WE CAN NO LONGER REMAIN SILENT. It is time for conservatives young and old to unite as a single voice to boldly proclaim what we stand for and oppose the mob.

Will you join with us, select the principles you stand for, and sign your name below?

I stand for the preservation of free speech all across our country—where I'm allowed to express my beliefs without fear of condemnation if my opinion differs from yours.

I stand for protections for conservative students who are illegally being threatened or silenced on college campuses all across our country.

I stand for the federal funding to be pulled from colleges and universities when they silence conservative views or students.

question: Summarize why UCLA cancelled the "Social Justice Advocates" program.

answer: UCLA cancelled a program that would pay students to fight "whiteness, privilege, and heteronormativity". The school gives no indication it hired any students at all, and has not responded to either confirm or deny that the program had been eliminated. However, it may be have been cancelled due to exposure-related backlash. A similar program was at a different university was cancelled after its exposure.

question: What does the text say about how the "Social Justice Advocates" program would work?

answer: The "Social Justice Advocates" program's goal was to pay students to fight "whiteness, privilege, and heteronormativity"  through facilitating workshops. These workshops would be run by 8-10 students and would be about "systems of oppression" and how to fight the "status quo". The students would be remunerated with a quarterly stipend for working at least three hours per week hosting the workshops. The program was supposed to funded by Bruin Excellence & Transformation Grant Program (BEST).

question: What does the text say about conservatism?

answer: Conservative students on college campuses believe they are marginalized, threatened, and silenced by students who oppose their views. They see those who oppose as possibly having been radicalized by liberal professors or administrators. It's suggested that their opponents see their views as dangerous, hateful, and fearful, and want to silence and "cancel" their conservative views. The text calls for conservatives of all ages to protect conservative students, make their voices heard, and oppose those who oppose them. Additionally, they call for funding to be pulled from universities and colleges who silence conservative voices.

question: What does the text say about Donald Trump?


text:
In my high school creative writing class we were assigned to write a short story on the "forgotten hero". I chose to write my short story on a Vietnam Veteran stuck in a nursing home who is suffering with PTSD and Alcoholism. I would really appreciate it if you could read this over and help me out with any area of my writing, which includes (but is not limited to): voice, tone, flow (fluidity?), style, vocab, etc.

Thanks in advance.

**M1911**

Daniel wakes up, his knuckles are white from clutching the bed sheets. He’s sweating. He turns on his side and checks the bedside clock. 2:17 AM. He reaches and pulls out the drawer that sits underneath the clock and blindly feels around in the dark, moving magazines and rags off of something concealed. His hand adjusts to the familiar touch of wood and cold metal. His pistol. It’s the same Colt M1911 that he survived with during three tours in the jungles of Vietnam. Content and relieved, he turns on his back and shuts his eyes, hoping that another flashback doesn’t prevent him from losing any more sleep.

A nurse enters room 34, the same room that holds Daniel captive. She’s carrying a tray of pills and a cup of water. Two pills of Prazosin and one pill of Acamprosate comprise the menu for Daniel each morning at 7:45. He drinks the water first, takes the pills second. Swallowing pills was a task previously practiced in the Marines.

As Daniel stands up, the nurse brings him his cane. He places it in his right hand and begins the prolonged and pondering walk to the cafeteria. He walks steadily, although his right leg has been giving him trouble after they removed a few pieces of shrapnel that had grown infectious. As he arrives in the cafeteria, he is greeted by the same dismal faces that put together The Arizona State Veteran Home. There are men with missing appendages with IV’s attached and following them like children, and there are others who appear to have nothing wrong with them. Or so it seems.

Daniel makes his way through the cafeteria and finds the same seat he claimed when he was 71, almost 6 years ago. Without asking, food is put down before Daniel and he is expected to eat it. He doesn’t though. He can never eat after a dream like he had last night.

Daniel checks his wrist watch. It’s 8:37. “Good,” he thinks, “only 8 more minutes in here with these people.” Daniel spends the remaining 8 minutes like he did the first 22, listening to the same small talk among the veterans concerning which board game they want to play or how beautiful the daisies are when they’re in season.

At 8:45 Daniel makes the trek back to his room. Of all the below average days Daniel has had, today seems incomparable to the rest. There’s just something about it. Unable to identify the disconcerting reason, Daniel somberly strolls back to his room in hopes of completing a 1000 piece puzzle that he’s been struggling with ever since Andrew stopped coming.

Andrew was a student at a local high school. He came to see Daniel on the weekdays usually around 3. Andrew would help Daniel with puzzles, bring him food or water, but most of the time they just sat and talked. Daniel enjoyed the company of someone so young and vibrant, juxtaposed to the men who lived with Daniel in this prison. Andrew was at the Veteran Home for a school project.

The project included serving 50 hours of community service and coming up with a final video as the culmination of his service project. Unbeknownst to Daniel, Andrew’s 50 hours were dwindling and soon Andrew was left with merely 2 hours and 4 weeks left of school to complete them. Being so diligent early on gave Andrew time to get away from the nursing home towards the end of the semester, however he had to return to finish his last 2 hours and film for his video project.

Daniel was sitting at the table which held the borders of his puzzle in place. He patiently picked up pieces, tried to fit them into certain positions, almost against their will. When he deduced that the piece would not fit, he simply put it down and moved on to the next one. Just as he found a piece which fit into two others, completing the rotor of the helicopter, a baby started crying. Daniel’s eyes became unfocused and he was immediately taken back to another place.

This place was a lot different than his room. There were trees, thick vegetation, and men in camouflaged green gear waving their rifles. The crying continued. He looked to his left and saw women and children running naked down the dirt path. The same men who were dressed in the jungle green gear whose task it was to help the citizens of My Lai, were pointing their guns and firing at the unarmed victims. Daniel was unable to shoot his gun, and only stood in shock. “How could people murder others so mercilessly?” he wondered, too afraid to speak out against this act of injustice.

Then the white walls started coming back in to focus. His hands were cramping. He looked down at them and the knuckles were the same bleach white they had been this morning as they clutched the end of the table. He looked at the puzzle, only to find the work completed in the last few days was ruined as a result of his death grip on the table. Daniel’s patience vanished, and he threw the puzzle box as best he could at his door. A nurse passing by witnessed this outbreak and decided it best to get Daniel some fresh air.

Daniel was positioned outside on a wooden bench. The nurse who witnessed his flashback brought him a glass of water and two more Prozasin pills. He used the same routine as he did earlier. As Daniel sat in the shade, he scornfully watched the other veterans whose family came to visit them. He watched as food and cake was brought to a gentleman named Emmett. It was Emmett’s 73rd birthday. The happiness portrayed in Emmett’s face while he interacted with family made Daniel sick with jealousy. To the right of Emmett, on another bench much like the one Daniel sits on, a daughter sits with her father Al who appears to be too skinny for his own his clothes. Her body language shows patience and caring, and she flashes a smile at Daniel as she catches him staring.

Daniel also has a daughter. Her name is Madison. Madison lives in New Mexico with her husband, Rick, on Canon Air Force Base. Madison and Rick have only visited Daniel once recently, and that was after his previous surgery, almost two years ago, just to check up on him. Madison has never once visited the nursing home where Daniel stays, and he believes if she saw this jail cell he has been living in for the past six years that she’d take him out of the institution immediately and let him live on his own. Remembering his daughter’s blatant lack of concern for him, Daniel retreats to the cafeteria, where lunch will be held shortly.

In the cafeteria sits down at the out of tune Grand piano. One of Emmett’s grandchildren sits down at the piano and begins to play “Happy Birthday.” Soon enough, the whole cafeteria, except for Daniel, is partaking in a raspy rendition of a song celebrating this man who is one year closer to his death. As the residents finish their lunch, pieces of chocolate cake are passed around. “My favorite!” says Daniel, as he is handed a piece by one of the grandchildren of Emmett, hoping to conjure up a smile from her delicate face. Daniel has always had a soft spot for children. They seem so innocent and naïve, hidden from the evil acts committed on March 16, 1968 by the troops in Daniel’s Battalion towards the citizens of My Lai.

Daniel waits for Emmett’s family to leave the nursing home before he goes back to Room 34. As he arrived in his room, Daniel’s heart was racing. He headed to the bathroom to pour himself a glass of mouthwash in hopes of calming his nerves. Daniel had been 8 years sober up until this point. Daniel finished the glass of mouthwash and headed towards his closet. There, he picked out the nicest pants and shirt he had and removed the Tommy Bahamas shirt, jeans, and baseball cap he normally wears. Daniel dressed himself and made his way towards his bed. He sat down on the bed and faced the bedside table. He jotted down a note and tucked it under his pillow. He got up, closed the door, and returned to the bed. He opened the bedside tables drawer, removed the same magazines and rags just as he had done earlier, and revealed his most prized possession. The M1911. He sat down on the bed and held it in his hands, feeling the grooves on the cold metal and the smoothness of the warm wood. He ejected the clip and checked to see if it was loaded, standard protocol for the Marines. The weapon had three bullets left. That was two more than he needed. He took two of them and placed them under the pillow next to the note. He inserted the clip back into the sidearm and cocked it, making sure to see the bullet enter the chamber. He turned the safety off and raised the gun to his head.

Daniel’s senses heightened. Everything in his room was silent, except for the constant ticking on the second hand of his wrist watch. He listened to it as it slowed down. Daniel’s eyes began to go out of focus again. He was taken back to a place of trees and thick vegetation. However, in this flashback there were no men dressed in camouflaged green gear. In fact, a familiar face was present with Daniel. It was his brother Tom. And they were running on their family’s farm in Indiana. Then Daniel’s eyes went out of focus again. This time, he didn’t return to the white walls of his room. He was walking across a stage, with a purple and gold gown on. He had a diploma in his hand and a smile on his face as the May sun beat down on his high school graduation ceremony. As he looked out in the crowd he found his family, and as he made eye contact with Tom, his eyesight began to fade again. When he was able to see, Daniel was aiming down the sight of an m16. He was at the shooting range at the base camp in Singapore. Daniel had won the marksman award for Private First Class and he had a keen eye. Just as he pulled the trigger of the m16, his eyes snapped Room 34 back into focus. Suddenly, darkness.

Daniel fell forward as a pool of blood formed around his head. Nurses rushed in and an ambulance was called. Daniel was deceased before he hit the floor. The M1911 that had once kept him safe in the jungle eventually ended his life.

After further examining the room, the note and two bullets were found. The note was addressed to Andrew. It read:

Dear Andrew,

Please do not blame yourself for this.

Thank you for spending time with me and impacting my life in a positive manner. Unfortunately, I have seen too much evil in this world and I should have done this a long time ago. I hope you aren’t disappointed in me.

Love,
Daniel Hawkins

title: High school student seeking criticism! Any advice would be great!

question: Summarize the emotions that Daniel goes through when Andrew is around?

answer: Daniel is rather happy when Andrew is around. He likes having someone young around him. Daniel enjoys Andrew's company and waits for him to visit. He is irritated when Andrew stops visiting him after his community project is over.

question: Summarize the negative events in the story.

answer: Daniel lives in a Veteran Home. His daughter and her husband do not visit Daniel at the nursing home which according to Daniel, is a good thing since she would take him out of the place immediately. The main negative event happens towards the end of the story when Daniel shoots himself with his M1911.


text:
[Korean Folk Town]

The fourth patch of the MapleStory Reboot update has been released, this time containing the newly reorganized KOREAN FOLK TOWN, as well as the new SPIEGELMANN’S GHOST PARK and some changes to Mu Lung Dojo.

There was also a teaser image released for the fifth and final patch which will feature the NEW 18-PLAYER RAID BOSS URUS! Check near the end of this post for more details.

[Korean Folk Town (1)][Korean Folk Town (2)][Korean Folk Town (3)]

The theme dungeon KOREAN FOLK TOWN has been updated and reopened! Korean Folk Town is a unique theme dungeon with classic Korean stories, and the goal of its reorganization was to keep the things that users loved about it. Several new elements have been added to Korean Folk Town. The starting level has been increased as well.

Nexon set up a cute little teaser site with news clips and illustrations for some of the stories, check it out!

[Korean Folk Town World Map]

VISIT KOREAN FOLK TOWN

-   You can access it through Helios Tower or Aquarium.
-   Korean Folk Town’s terrain and story have been partially changed.

[Yomi] [7 Jades]

KOREAN FOLK TOWN’S STORY HAS BEEN ADDED.

-   You can begin the quests at level 125 or higher.
-   Help prevent the collapse of Korean Folk Town by collecting the 7 jades!
-   As you complete the stories of the town, the characters and terrain will change accordingly.
-   Korean Folk town uses the following classic stories.
    -   Hongbu and Nolbu
    -   Sim Cheong
    -   The Good Brothers
    -   The Sun and the Moon
    -   Gold Axe, Silver Axe
    -   Kong Ji and Pat Ji

[Like the Clouds and Wind]

KOREAN FOLK TOWN’S REWARDS AFTER CLEARING THE STORY HAVE BEEN ADDED.

-   [MEDAL] LIKE THE CLOUDS AND THE WIND (7 all stats, 1 attack and magic attack, 200 HP and MP)
-   Korean Folk Town Fairy Tale: 7 Jades

[Hunting Signs]

FIELD QUESTS HAVE BEEN ADDED.

-   In Korean Folk Town hunting areas, signs have been posted.
-   By completing the signs’ conditions, you can receive rewards.
-   The field monsters are the following. You can see monster stats here.
    -   Moon Bunny
    -   Dark Axe Stump
    -   Hodori
    -   Hogul
    -   Samiho
    -   Blin
    -   Blue King Goblin
    -   Green King Goblin
    -   Yellow King Goblin

THE BACKGROUND ART HAS BEEN REORGANIZED.

-   Korean Folk Town’s art has been redrawn to create a new, unique, secluded area feeling.
-   A set of day and night backgrounds has been added.

Here is a tour of the area! I recorded a new version because the town (as compared to its test server version) now uses the new SKELETON ANIMATION SYSTEM! You can see the trees, bushes and flowers all sway as you walk past them and a very nice leaf blowing effect appears.

The area to the right of the town is what I’ll be talking about next.

[Spiegelmann's Ghost Park]

Ghost Park is new content which is being released along with the reorganization of Korean Folk Town. The biggest feature of Ghost Park is that you cannot use potion items, and when entering, you can customize the difficulty. The more difficult you choose to make it, the more experience you will receive!

GHOST PARK: TO PLAY

[Hunting in Ghost Park]

-   Spiegelmann has opened a new theme park called Ghost Park in Korean Folk Town.
-   You can access Ghost Park through the right portal in Korean Folk Town or through the Dimensional Mirror.

GHOST PARK’S BASIC RULES

-   You can participate in Ghost Park if you are level 125 or above.
-   Ghost Park’s monsters will scale based on the player’s level (up to level 145). Therefore, it is most efficient when you are between level 125~145.
-   You can enter Ghost Park 5 times per day.
-   In Ghost Park, you cannot use potion type items and the effects of recovery skills are extremely reduced. MP will be automatically recovered at regular intervals.
-   In Ghost Park, skills that consume HP will not consume HP when used.
-   You do not lose experience if you die inside Ghost Park.
-   You will have 10 minutes to hunt inside Ghost Park after entering.

GHOST PARK’S CHARM ENHANCEMENTS

[Ghost Park Charms]

-   Before entering, you can create disturbances by enhancing charms.
-   Each charm can be set up in 0-3 stages.
-   As a charm’s stage is increased, you will gain more bonus experience from hunting.
-   There are 7 different kinds of charms.
    -   CHARM OF WRATH: at certain intervals, a fire tornado will attack a random area
    -   CHARM OF REGRET: after monsters regenerate, their damage will be increased for a certain period of time
    -   CHARM OF GREED: after monsters regenerate, their size and health will increase over time
    -   CHARM OF SLOTH: characters who stand still for a certain period of time will take damage
    -   CHARM OF ENVY: an unkillable maiden ghost will chase a character
    -   CHARM OF GLUTTONY: the effects of recovery runes is decreased
    -   CHARM OF LUST: bullets will be randomly fired in all directions

GHOST PARK’S EXPERIENCE BONUS

[Experience Bonuses]

-   While hunting in Ghost Park, you can receive and stack bonus experience.
    -   CHARM ENHANCEMENT BONUS: based on the charms you enhanced, you will gain bonus experience
    -   CUMULATIVE HUNTING BONUS: as you hunt more monsters, you will gain bonus experience
    -   HP RISK BONUS: the lower your character’s HP, you will gain bonus experience

GHOST PARK’S REWARD ITEMS

[Bronze Mask] [Silver Mask] [Gold Mask]

-   Based on the number of times you have played, you’ll get the following items:
    -   [MEDAL] 얼씨구 좋구나 (4 all stats, 4 attack and magic attack) [play Ghost Park 10 times]
    -   [MEDAL] 풍악을 울려라 (8 all stats, 5 attack and magic attack) [play Ghost Park 100 times]
    -   [MEDAL] 닐리리야 니나노 (9 all stats, 6 attack and magic attack) [clear Ghost Park with all 21 charm enhancements]

[Rooster Charm] [Rat Charm] [Monkey Charm] [Snake Charm] [Dragon Charm] [Dog Charm] [Pig Charm]

-   Monsters inside of Ghost Park can drop the following items:
    -   [POCKET] ROOSTER CHARM (2 attack)
    -   [POCKET] RAT CHARM (2 magic attack)
    -   [POCKET] MONKEY CHARM (2 STR)
    -   [POCKET] SNAKE CHARM (2 INT)
    -   [POCKET] DRAGON CHARM (2 DEX)
    -   [POCKET] DOG CHARM (2 LUK)
    -   [POCKET] PIG CHARM (100 HP and MP)

[Seven Jade Charm]

-   You can trade in these 7 Charms to Spiegelmann to receive the [POCKET] SEVEN JADE CHARM (4 attack/magic attack, 4 all stats, 200 HP and MP)
-   For users who have not unlocked their Pocket slot yet, from today until September 6, monsters inside Ghost Park will be dropping Charm-increasing personality trait items.

Here’s a video of me hunting inside Ghost Park! Without the use of HP potions and recovery skills, it’s very difficult to stay alive! You have to make use of the Recovery Runes inside and try your best to avoid attacks.

There’s a large difference between having level 1 of all of the charms and level 3… too hard for me haha.

[Mu Lung Dojo]

1.  ENTER THE DRAGON: MU LUNG DOJO DAMAGE COMPENSATION
    -   Damage compensation will now be applied inside Mu Lung Dojo.
    -   After entering Mu Lung Dojo, your damage will be reduced to 1/10 of its regular amount.
    -   While your damage is reduced, the maximum damage limit remains unchanged.
    -   To match the damage compensation reduction, bosses’ HP have been lowered.
2.  ENTER THE DRAGON: MU LUNG DOJO STAGE CONFIGURATION CHANGES
    -   The order in which bosses appear on the 31st~39th floors has been changed.
    -   Just like the existing system, 2 of the boss will appear on floors 31, 32, 34, and 35, and 3 of the boss will appear on floor 37 and 38. By defeating all of the bosses, you can move on to the next floor.

[Boss Urus]

Here’s our first look at the new 18-person raid boss: URUS! It will be coming to the official server on August 20!

[Urs Size]

Urus will be one of the biggest bosses yet! I think only Hekaton and Gollux are larger, but those are multi-part bosses so I don’t think they count haha.

Urus will also be the first boss to use the new 2D skeleton animation system, creating a much more dynamic skill set and battle.

[Take Care of Petite's Wardrobe]

In the Cash Shop, the TAKE CARE OF PETITE’S WARDROBE event has begun, with a bunch of sales.

[Classic Package Sale]

The CLASSIC PACKAGE SALE has begun and will run until August 20. Many classic packages such as the Sachiel, Behemot, Janus, Rainbow, Royal Rainbow, and Happy Bluebird packages are on sale!

The Mercedes package has the highest discount, costing only 100 Cash! This package can only be bought once per account though.

[Effect Category 50% Sale]

All items in the EFFECT category of the Cash Shop are on sale for 50% until August 20.

[Separate Items On Sale]

The above items will also be on sale.

[Petite's Choice]

There’s also the OCEAN HAT PACKAGE and the 1ST SEASON PACKAGE which are on sale for 50% and 20% off respectively.

[Attendance Check Rewards]

A new ATTENDANCE CHECK event has begun and will run until August 19. Each day you must defeat 200 monsters around your level to participate. The prizes are:

1.  20 Pepe Coins
2.  10% Clean Slate Scroll (50 Elixirs for Reboot World)
3.  100 Scroll Traces
4.  Gold Potential Stamp
5.  30 Pepe Coins
6.  50% Positive Chaos Scroll (100 Elixirs for Reboot World)
7.  200 Scroll Traces
8.  50% Innocent Scroll (2 Mysterious Meso Bags for Reboot World)
9.  300 Scroll Traces
10. Meister’s Cube
11. 40 Pepe Coins
12. 50 Pepe Coins
13. Eternal Flame of Reincarnation
14. 400 Scroll Traces

[Pepe Coin Shop & Pepe Ice Box]

The PEPE COIN SHOP has had its buying limits reset and a few new items were added.

question: What does the text say about the new additions to the newly reorganized Korean folk town game?

answer: Korean Folk Town is a unique theme dungeon with classic Korean stories. Several new elements have been added to Korean Folk Town, and the starting level has also increased. New stories have also been added, and players can begin the quests at level 125 or higher and collect 7 jades by helping the collapse of Korean Folk Town. Also, as players complete the town's stories, the terrain and characters will change accordingly. Examples of the classic stories found in Korean Folk Town are; Hongbu and Nolbu, Sim Cheong, The Good Brothers, The Sun and The Moon, Gold Axe, Silver Axe, and Kong Ji and Pat Ji. Once players finish the stories, they receive rewards such as 7 jades of the Korean Folk Town Fairy Tale, a medal "Like the clouds and the wind" for 7 all-stats, 1 attack and magic attack, and 200 HP and MP.


text:
The Boyd Family’s dining room smelled sweet like wet oak. It was the room that Mrs. Dorothy Boyd had giddily daydreamed of dressing up ever since she realized as a girl that the dingy picnic table that wobbled in her family’s kitchen was of a significantly lower class of living than the tables in the pictures of Versailles she saw on television. Like the rest of her home, the dining room was neatly arranged and Victorian, both aware of its own opulence and, in the words of Mrs. Dorothy Boyd’s interior designer, “exquisitely inoffensive.” Its central showpiece was the China cabinet, which was filled with pale blue porcelain dishes propped up like museum artifacts on glass stands. When Dorothy, seven months pregnant with her only child, first brought the dishware home from a private seller she’d heard about at the country club, her eyes became like the plates--pale blue, glassy, serene. She felt, as she unwrapped it from its parchment paper, that the beautifully ornate dish set of huts and wooden boats had always been meant to reside in her home, had always been a vital organ in the body of her real self. She began to walk more daintily; at dinner parties, she delivered her compliments in hushed intonations and mannered pauses with the elegant precision of a duchess speaking to the press.

Now the China cabinet’s face was smashed into the side of the dining table, its contents exploded over the Persian rug. The initial boom of wood-to-wood and shattering glass echoed strangely when the table’s feet wailed as they were scraped across the hardwood floor. The top of the cabinet nicked the dangling glass chandelier as it fell, knocking the fixture onto the back of the cabinet before the broken bulbs slid down its smooth wood back and bashed into the wall.

Dorothy couldn’t shut her eyes any harder. Frantic, she writhed on the floor and mumbled about nightmares and cackled as she grinded her back into the broken glass. Dwight caught one look at her before bolting out the door and jumping into Caitlin’s already packed sedan. He hadn’t seen her like that since he was 10 and he was woken up by ambulance lights flooding his bedroom through the windows; his dad told him later she had gotten scared and forgot how to breath. Dwight saw her on the porch that night, murmuring that she couldn’t feel her hands as she shivered. It was the same tone she used a moment before she threw herself at the China, after Dwight told her that he was ditching his quest for a pre-law degree in order to finally “live an unmanufactured life” with the girl that had slowly been corrupting him. Dorothy’s face was still soaking with snot when Mr. Brian Boyd called his son from the other room.

“We can talk about this. Don’t leave your mom like this,” Brian squeezed his fist and pounded it on his desk. “You’re all right with leaving your mom like this?”

“I tried to reason with both of you. This is my only choice now. It didn’t have to be this way, goddamnit. I will see her again.”

“Thanks for leaving me to deal with this. After everything we’ve done for you. All the vacations and the piano lessons and the nice clothes. Did it all mean nothing?” Brian’s eyes were glued to a random date on his calendar. He had been cheated, he thought. Cheated out of a real son and given a loser instead, a lazy, pretentious drifter. After all of the hours he had put in. After the soccer practices and the days he picked him up from daycare. It was all, in retrospect, a series of obligations that only held as much inherent worth as the potential of the child being nurtured. He had produced a clunker, he thought, and he’d never forgive himself for it.

“I’m doing what I need to do, Dad. You guys should have added a caveat when you filled my head with ideas of ‘following my dreams’ that the only acceptable dreams were those that would make for an impressive dinner topic.” Dwight hung up the phone and walked out of the 7/11. Caitlin was wearing overalls and combat boots and no makeup (she refused to wear it). She smoked a cigarette by the ice machine and threw rocks across the barren highway.

“Where are we?” Dwight scratched his eyes and took out a stick of gum.

“Colorado. Not sure what the town’s called. We’ve got another day at least.”

“Have you ever been to San Francisco?”

“No. I’ve always loved Howl, though. The first place we should go is where it was published.”

Dwight smiled. “Were you right? Is your writer’s block fading now that we left?”

“Oh baby, my mind was running wild even while you were still in your house. I felt like what was happening was the event I would mark my life around. I felt like the event itself was a part of me.”  Caitlin stomped her cigarette butt, stepped into the driver’s seat. “And you?”

“I can’t think about writing. Their disappointment is consuming me.”

Caitlin jerked her head towards Dwight, slapped him in the face. “You can’t fucking do that to yourself. We’re brave for making this decision, and don’t let anyone in a button-up tell you otherwise, not even your dad. Respect your desire enough to accept the consequences of its fulfillment.”

Dwight checked on the bag in the trunk of the car. It was filled with $6000, two-thirds of which came from Caitlin’s workplace at the boutique clothing store; she had used her assistant-manager key to break in after hours and steal every bit of the money onsite. Afterward, Caitlin toyed with the bills stacked in her passenger seat, each its own little sliver of freedom. She decided that night that it was time to go somewhere better. She blocked out the look on her brother’s and father’s faces when they realized that she’d gone; she blocked out the way they wouldn’t argue with her but would instead helplessly try to mentally record every darting of her eyes and every twitching of her nose before she bolted. She pretended that she lived in a world where they were already dead. She showed up sobbing at Dwight’s apartment with the bag clutched between her arms. “I did it,” she had said. “We can go anywhere. We don’t have to live this life anymore, baby. We can finally own ourselves.”

Dwight stared at the money. The voice inside his head had screamed that night that he should kick her out, go back to work on his case briefs. He knew that money’s most dangerous power was the way it could reduce a Van Gogh into little more than a colorful receipt of the eight figure sum paid for it. But he also knew that without it he would be trapped indefinitely, forced to submerge his real self beneath his marketable self until a hazy late night conversation let it uneasily tease the surface. He and Caitlin didn’t need money like the kids across town needed money for shoes and vaccines, he thought; they needed it like a checkers player needed to say “King me” so that he could traverse the board with unmatched freedom. This unfairness constantly warred with Dwight’s artistic desire, made his ideas seem inconsequential, selfish, misguided. Yet he knew that the unfairness of his want did not make it cease. He almost instantly decided he would go, but he felt a lump in his throat form when he realized he couldn’t leave in good conscience without telling his permanently worry-sick mother.

“I’ve known for years that I would have to crush my parents if I was ever going to be happy,” Dwight said. “Now that it’s actually happened it feels fucking apocalyptic.”

Caitlin smiled a little and cracked her window, ashing a cigarette more frequently than ash was accumulating. “You’re a bastard for waiting this long to let them down. You spent nearly all of your teenage years inflating an ideal version of yourself, just to snatch it away at the last second.”

“Shut the fuck up. You don’t know what it was like to have that pressure. I love them for what they did for me, but I don’t owe them a miserable life. They just can’t see the whole picture.”

“Well that’s our problem, isn’t it?” Caitlin said. “We see the whole picture when they can see only a corner. That’s why we have to bust open the frame and rip up the picture into pieces and scatter them on the floor so that each portion becomes a whole picture itself. That’s the only way to live.”

“But what happens when we put the pieces back together again, and it’s the same picture?”

“Then we start over. But until then you’ve just got to believe a new one is waiting for us, and once we put the pieces back together the sight of it will lift us off the ground and into another world where things aren’t broken but they aren’t too fixed, either.”

A few hours later, as the sun inched across the Nevadan horizon, Caitlin perked up when she saw an exit for Reno. “My friend Edgar lives in Reno,” she said. “He owes me a favor. Let’s see if he has a couch we can pass out on until tomorrow.”

Edgar’s apartment complex was a refashioned motel. It was made of grimy aluminum, and it smelled like wet rust. “I stayed here once when I ran away from home when I was 16,” she said. “I wasn’t so brave then.”

They knocked on door number 5, but they heard no one stirring. Dwight, desperate for sleep, banged on the door like he had a search warrant until a stocky old woman undid the key latch and opened the door.

“Can I help you?” She rubbed her eyes.

“I’m sorry, we thought our friend Edgar lived here,” Dwight said.

“No, I’m afraid I took over his lease three or four years ago. You two come inside, though. I haven’t talked to anyone in weeks and you look like you could use some coffee. I’m Doris.”

The inside of the dimly lit room was filled with parchment paper covered in illegible scrawl. The only pieces of furniture were those remained from the room’s motel years: a two-seat round table, a dresser where a television used to sit, and a queen sized bed. Caitlin and Dwight sat at the table.

“Where are you kids headed?” Doris tried to portion out three cups of coffee, but her hands were shaking violently and the coffee dribbled on the carpet.

“San Francisco,” Caitlin said.

“I lived there once when I was about your age. An interesting place, if you have a strong stomach for bullshit.”

“I would say that we do,” Dwight smiled.

“Why San Francisco?”

Dwight grabbed the pot and poured the coffee. “Someplace else,” he shrugged, picking up a random piece of paper. “What is this supposed to say?”

“I knew at one point, darling,” she said. “I used to be the biggest poet in Nevada. I even turned down a screenwriting job to keep it that way. But at one point the money dried up, my arthritis destroyed the hand muscles I use to write, and everyone I knew either died or sold out. I woke up and found that my conviction was an antique.”

Caitlin’s phone rang. It was her father. “Excuse me for a minute,” she said, as Dwight began pressing Doris on her poetry.

“Daddy?” She said outside.

“Caitlin. Please come home. We need you.”

“I’m sorry. Really, I am. But I have to do this. You of all people should understand. You don’t like staying stagnant either, right? You travelled everywhere.”

“Staying moving doesn’t keep you from being stagnant.”

“Why are you trying to convince me so hard?”

“It’s your brother. He ate all of the Xanax you left. He’s on suicide watch. He told me he can’t keep going without you. He needs you. I need you.”

Caitlin’s vision blurred all around her; if her brother wanted to die she wished he had already gotten it done rather than holding her in the limbo of a “suicidal” relative. They needed her. They had always needed her.
Dwight walked out of Doris’s room. “Baby, if I told you how extraordinary Doris’s poetry was you wouldn’t believe me. You have to come inside.”

“Let’s go. I want to drive.”

“Go? No, you have to hear this. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

“My brother tried to kill himself last night. Says he can’t live without me.” Caitlin stared at her shoes. “I want to get out of here.”

“Caitlin. I wanted you to come in to hear because hearing it changed me. I can’t leave her here with no way to write. I have to stay. It’s all too perfect for me to pass it up. This was what I was meant to do. The real me is here, with her, helping her work.”

Caitlin’s eyes welled; she knew that trying to convince Dwight was as futile as trying to convince herself. She kissed him and grabbed his hand and followed him back into the room. Doris read her poetry, and they embraced each other on the bed as they listened. Soon, in the world that Doris constructed, they felt like they had found the place that let them become themselves. They unwrapped each word as reverently as Dorothy unwrapped China. They dozed off in a place that Doris weaved with her words, and in the morning Caitlin removed herself gingerly from the bed and didn’t turn around to see the faces she was leaving as she walked out the door. She put the bag of money in the passenger seat where Dwight had sat. The Nevada desert unrolled itself in front of her. As she started the car, she could think only of how soon the money in her bag would dissipate, of how soon the day would come that Dwight would wake up to Doris’s stiff, dead body.

title: Your New China Cabinet

question: Summarize Dwight's feelings about leaving his family and eloping with Caitlin.

answer: Dwight told his father that his only choice is to leave home after his explanations have fallen on deaf ears. He hung up the phone and entered a packed sedan with Caitlin inside. His parents' disappointment consumed him. He toyed with kicking out Caitlin, especially after he discovered that she stole money from her place of work so they could run away together. Dwight felt selfish and misguided as he knows both he and Caitlin do not really need that money. He concluded that he loved his parents for what they did not him but couldn't stand living a miserable life just to please them.

question: Why did Caitlin leave with the money?


text:
Until now, all the Android Wear watches you could buy were made by technology firms moonlighting as watchmakers, but now there's the Fossil Q Founder. This is the first widely available Android Wear smart watch designed by a company that makes regular watches. In some ways it looks more like a real watch than any of the others, but there are also some design concessions that remind you Fossil is new to the whole wearables thing.

Hardware And Design

The Fossil Q Founder shares a lot of design DNA with the company's non-smart watches. It has a stainless steel case and chamfered edge around the display. The lugs stand off from the body of the watch and are actually part of a second bottom section of the watch that attaches to the main housing. Overall, I think the Q Founder has a very nice look with a bit more style than the Moto 360 or Huawei Watch. If you look at those other watches, they have very minimalist design—which is fine, don't get me wrong. However, it seems apparent to me that both companies stuck with the cleaner unibody look to avoid making any mistakes by embellishing the body in a bizarre way. The shape of the Q Founder is more complex and attractive.

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The version I have for review came with a metal band, which is of very good quality compared to the one that comes with the more expensive Huawei Watch. I'm not terribly fond of metal bands personally, but the Q Founder has a standard 22mm band attachment and quick release spring bar. That's great, but I was only more impressed with the design when I took the stock band off. While the lugs are completely standard, Fossil's metal band has curved spacers at the connection point that sit right at the body of the watch to fill in the gap between it and the lugs. It gives the watch a more monolithic, premium look. There's also a solid button-release deployant clasp. If you like metal bands, this is the best implementation I've seen on a smart watch.

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Metal\ band\ removal\ and\ replacement\ leather\ band.

Again, standard bands of all types work just fine. I slapped a regular leather band on the watch and it fits well (the heavy metal band is really only good for larger wrists). That's good seeing as it's a larger watch than the small 2nd gen Moto 360, which is my favorite one as far as fit. The lugs extend downward from the body of the watch, allowing the band to connect closer to your wrist. This is good for those of us that have smaller wrists, but it's still a big watch. The screen on the Q Founder is 1.5-inches across, but I'll talk about that in more detail later.

Most of the Q Founder is metal, except for the underside. This isn't uncommon for smart watches, but there's something missing on the Fossil watch—there's no heart rate sensor. It's just a flat piece of matte plastic, which strikes me as a little weird. Some other watches lack a heart rate sensor, but at $300 for the Founder, I would have expected this basic feature.

There's a single button on the side of the Q Founder right at the 3 o'clock position. Motorola and Huawei placed the button at 2 o'clock so it doesn't rub against the wrist. This is a small concern with the Founder, but it hasn't bothered me too much. The button itself is great. Just the center part of the crown is the button with a solid piece of metal surrounding it. There's a nice tactile bump and a good amount of travel when you press it. It's like a softer version of the Moto 360's very clicky button (keyboard analogy: it's like the difference between Cherry MX Blues and Browns*).

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There are a few interesting things going on inside the Q Founder as well. This is the first watch to be released with an Intel SoC. The actual chip isn't listed in the specs, but according to a system info app, it's a 22nm Merrifield Atom chip with two cores clocked at 500MHz. I assume this is a tweaked version of the Z3460. It also has 1GB of RAM, whereas most (possibly all) Android Wear devices have 512MB.

The Flat Tire Lives

Motorola has been criticized for sticking with the flat tire LCD on this year's 360, and Fossil is doing much the same thing with its debut Android Wear device. The 1.5-inch diameter LCD has a strip missing at the very bottom where the display connectors are. This is also a convenient spot for the ambient light sensor, which is still a rarity on watches. Bonus points to Fossil for working it in.

I'm not happy with the flat tire when there are watches with completely round AMOLED panels. I almost want to give Fossil a pass because it's a watch company getting into a new market, but just on the merits of the product, the flat tire is a con. It's true what they say—you get used to a flat tire screen after a while, but there are still times you apply a new watch face and it's cut off in a really obnoxious way. You'll notice then.

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Q\ Founder\ and\ Huawei\ Watch

The resolution is 360 x 326, which is about the same as the larger Moto 360 (360x330) and lower than the Huawei Watch (400x400). The display looks sharp enough and gets very bright for use outdoors. It's more readable than the Huawei Watch outside, but still far short of the Sony watch with its transflective screen.

While the screen will remind you of the Moto 360, it does have one significant leg up on Motorola's device. The Q Founder does not go into low resolution mode when it's asleep. That means you can use watch faces with sharp lines and even colors without them looking busted. Motorola and a few other OEMs do this to save power, but I think most people would trade the modest savings for an ambient mode that looks better. That's what you get with the Q Founder.

Battery Life

There aren't many Android Wear devices that can reliably hit two days of use, so you're pretty much always going to be charging your wearable every night. As long as a watch can make it a full day, I consider that acceptable. Anything more is just gravy.

Google and Fossil claim the Q Founder and its 400mAh battery will last for a day and then some. My experience with the Q Founder hasn't been quite that good. I've been seeing 16-17 hours of battery life with what I would consider moderate usage. I have all the motion features turned on, ambient display, and a few email accounts syncing. So, despite having a larger battery than the small Moto 360, the battery life isn't as good. That watch gets a solid 24 hours of life. The Huawei watch with its slightly larger battery manages a few more hours on average. The Q Founder just isn't up to par yet.

Maybe with a few updates they'll sort things out with the Intel chip to make it last longer, but right now it's not great. It's just as likely that the battery will perform worse in a few months, and at that point I think you'll have trouble getting through the day.

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The charger that comes with the Q Founder is massive and kind of ugly. When I took the watch out of the box, I didn't know where the charger was at first. Turns out it's the cushioned plastic insert that holds the watch upright in the box. It's finicky and you have to lift the dock up to slip the watch band around it to line up the coils. There's a charging LED to help you know when it's aligned properly, but it's _under_ the watch, making it hard to see unless you are looking from the correct angle (the charging screen doesn't show up reliably). The watch also seems to have issues reaching 100% on the stock charger. It usually stops charging at about 95-97%.

One pleasant surprise is that the wireless charging is a standard Qi system. That means you can use third-party charging pads with the watch, and I think you're going to want to. Really, this is one of the worst stock chargers of any watch.

Software And Performance

OEMs don't have many opportunities to differentiate themselves on Android Wear, so what few chances they have must be capitalized upon. Fossil, to my dismay, has not done that very well. This watch is running the Lollipop version of Wear out of the box, so most everything that we've said about the OS in the past applies to this one. It's the little things that Fossil seems to be struggling with.

Having designed plenty of mechanical watch faces that look nice, I hoped Fossil would have really gone all out to make the watch face experience great. Instead, the included watch faces are boring and limited. There are six exclusive Fossil watch faces, but there are consistent implementation problems in them. For example, Fossil's complications (the extra data displays on the faces) are not very well thought out. Example: a few of the watch faces have a battery gauge, but there's no digit. It's just a tiny battery icon that empties as the battery drains. It's so small that there's not enough resolution to tell you much about the battery level. Similarly, there's a weather icon that's just an icon representing current conditions—no temperature.

[11] [22] [33]

The Classic watch face is probably the best (that's the one in the hero image up top), but even it has weird issues. The weather display is a dial, but it's tiny and all I can really tell is that the temperature is somewhere between 0 and 100... so thanks, Fossil? The layout also ignores that this watch has a flat tire LCD, thus the "6" is cut off at the bottom. It wouldn't have taken much to change that and not call attention to the missing pixels.

[44] [55] [66]

There's a Fossil app in the Play Store that adds a bit more configuration to the watch faces, but it's otherwise not very useful. It includes fitness tracking features for Fossil's other Q devices, most of which are not supported on the Founder. It also runs a persistent notification on the phone for some reason I cannot fathom. Even without the app, Fossil's watch faces have a few useful settings on the watch for things like background and number styling. This is one thing Fossil got right.

I feel very torn about the performance issue with this watch. On one hand, it's smooth and extremely responsive. Even the gesture scroll feature that can be sluggish on a lot of watches is lightning fast here. On the other hand, the Q Founder is also the buggiest Android Wear device I've used recently. The stock watch faces have frozen 3-4 times, and the entire watch has flat out crashed a couple times. It just hasn't been an awesome experience. I got a second unit to make sure the first one wasn't just a dud, and it seems _slightly_ better. It's still frozen a few times, though.

Wrapping Up

The Q Founder is an interesting device. Fossil's industrial design is slick and refined compared to most other smart watches. Even though the Q Founder is larger than devices like the Huawei Watch, it still fits pretty well. The metal band is very high quality and I really like the way it fills in space between the lugs, but allows for a more open look with a leather band. It's probably too bulky with a metal strap for those with small wrists, though.

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The screen looks nice, but there is that flat tire to contend with. It's lame that we're still putting up with this design quirk, but on the upside you get an ambient light sensor. So, I guess it's not all bad. You're either willing to tolerate this or you despise it.

Fossil dropped the ball with the software. The few exclusive faces included with this watch are mostly boring with strange design decisions, and the companion app is almost useless. The watch itself also has some bugs that need to be worked out. I don't expect a smart watch to necessarily be as stable as a mechanical one, but when I have to reboot because the time froze 30 minutes ago, that's a problem. The reboots certainly don't help the battery life, which is mediocre right now. If it gets any worse as the watch ages, then you'd probably have trouble making it through a full day away from the charger. The saving grace is Qi compatibility, so you can use a charger other than the lame stock one.

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The Fossil Q Founder starts at $275 for the leather version (which you can't buy yet) and $295 for the stainless steel one. These are competitive prices when you look at the hardware and specs. I suspect Intel is giving Fossil a sweet deal on the SoC in order to get its name out there. It does the same thing with other Android devices.

This isn't an awful watch, it's just not as good at the Huawei Watch or Moto 360 v2. I'd suggest you spend a few bucks more to get one of those. If a future software update fixes the issues with this watch, it might be a great purchase. Until then, I'm going to go with "no."

_*Hey, David gets to make car metaphors. I'm going to make keyboard switch metaphors. _

question: What does the text say about Casio?

question: Summarize the issue the author has with Android Wear watches.

answer: According to the author, all the Android Wear watches available were made by technology firms moonlighting as watchmakers. These watches often don't look like the real thing. Many Android Wear watches can't reliably hit two days of use and users need to charge the wearable every night. OEMs don't have many opportunities to differentiate themselves on Android Wear. The Fossil Q Founder is the only Android Wear watch designed by a company that makes regular watches.

question: What does the text say about the Fossil Q Founder's advantages over other Android Wear watches?

answer: The Fossil Q Founder is designed and made by Fossil, a legitimate player in the watchmaking business. It looks more like a real watch than other Android Wear watches. The Founder's design is complex, attractive, and has a premium look. It sports a 22nm Intel Merrifield Atom chip with two cores closed at 500MHz and 1GB of RAM. The founder comes with wireless charging.


text:
This story is from a recent car crash I was a part of and the events leading up to it.

**Car crash from last night, as I remember it.**

Two thirty-two ounce Jeremiah Reds and we still looked sharper than a butcher's knife. It takes a real man to order a bottle of red, and even more so to take them as effortlessly as we did. It was quite a sight for the regular crowd. Three manly men enjoying their drink and catching up on some sports down at the, always welcoming, BJ's brew house.

As it turns out, and although it may seem like it, not everything always goes our way. The home team lost a crucial playoff game, beers were running low, and I hadn't been offered sex all night. This combination of unfortunate mishaps started giving me an odd feeling. I needed to shake off this funk, but I was out of smokes. My good friend Mauri sensed my discomfort, that or my childish fidgeting from craving a smoke. Whatever the case, it worked. He spotted a friendly, slanted eyed, sports fan that headed out for an opium break. Lucky for us he happened to smoke regular stuff as well. Our type of stuff. Some quick witted banter later and we were three cigarettes richer. We took care of the first two immediately.

Mauri put away our third friend for a later puff. Normally he'll do it with such elegance, I swoon. This time though, it strangely grazed his slightly large, but still handsome, earlobe. What normally wouldn't affect a frail or even a wet cigarette, this time destroyed our last piece of lung candy. Things were happening. Bad vibes were definitely out tonight. I decided at this point, it was up to me to keep bad shit from happening. I didn't mention any of these strange occurrences to Mauri or Mikey, I had to keep my composure. Lead by example and example the lead. It works.

It was getting late and it began to feel as if we had overstayed our welcome, that or this one fat headed bartender felt threatened. He offered free beer in exchange for our absence. I'm no cheap man whore, but no man in their right mind would turn down free beer. As a matter of fact no man in any state of mind would. No man.

We left to resume our night. The feelings that manifested at the bar had followed to the parking lot. Maybe it just wasn't my night, maybe I was being a pussy, maybe fuck you reader, but I didn't even put up a fight for the front seat.

"Shotgun!" Mauri called enthusiastically.

I let out a quiet sigh, he rushed to the front. I'd usually sneak my way to passenger, tonight shotgun didn't appeal to me. I figured I should stop worrying and just enjoy my night. Mikey decided to play the classic sounds of our favorite trio, the Beastie Boys. With our last set of Reds in our hand and our heads boppin' he began to lay out the plan for the night.

"We're gonna head over to jack in the box to try that new jalapeno burger..." He said with such anticipation, and reassurance I had never heard from him. He was leading by example.

Just when I was starting to feel right for the night, my gut instinct struck again. I was nice and buzzed but these goddamn spidey senses were tingling. Before I knew it, everything slowed down. My senses were amplified. I had a moment of clarity in my drunken stupor. I looked around to see if the guys felt this moment of divine lucidity, but all I could make out was Mikey going on with the plans and Mauri trying to rap to the B-boys. I closed my eyes. This was it. Whatever bad energy that was following us, it was here and it was about to blow. It was up to me to try to decipher where it was going to come from. I presses my eyelids shut. And I knew.

"Holy shit!" Mauri yelled in the front.

I quickly fastened my seat belt and braced myself for impact. Some dumb bitch had made the roughest turn any of us had seen. Although alert Mikey reacted as fast as he cums, it wasn't fast enough for a clean escape. Mauri's glasses flew, Mikey's pride stung, and I had let them down. I should've said something. But men don't think in 'should'ves', we think for the moment and at that moment Mauri and I knew we had to dispose of any incriminating substance. We played the part.

"What the fuck?!" Mauri exclaimed as he stepped out.

"Ahh mah shoulder!" I played along.

"Are you guys ok?" A worried voice shouted from the other car. We had them.

I quickly grabbed my bottle of Red and made my way to some stairway away from the crash. Mauri followed, Mikey worked on damage control. Mauri and I did what we do best and chugged those big Reds until their last drop. No man wastes a free beer and we example by lead. I was clearly drunk after this. We found our way back to the mess. Scolded the girl on her driving skills, but there's only so much you can do for a woman driver, and I was glad the bad vibes ended with something so trivial as a car crash. We waited, smoked, took tourist pictures of the sight and decided it was as good moment as any to call it a night.

question: Why was the narrator not surprised by the crash?

answer: The narrator had a feeling of bad energy coming down on himself and his friends. He knew that something was coming but he did not mention it. When the crash came he was glad that the bad energy was simply something as mundane as a car crash.