title: Student exchange program

text: Each state in Australia provides a different program of student exchange for secondary students. The programmes from each state are different for whether a student in Australia is looking to study internationally or a student from another country is looking to study in Australia. Student exchange in Australia, depending on the state, might be managed by registered exchange organisations or the school chosen for study must be registered. The countries that are most popular for Australian students to choose to study are, Japan, France, Germany, USA, Italy, Canada, Belgium, Spain and Argentina. The main purpose of student exchange in Australia is to allow students to study, engage and experience a new culture. International students who choose to study in Australia are given different opportunities through the programmes at set schools will learn about Australian culture, but also gain English language skills at a high school level.


title: Student exchange program

text: Exchange programs for university students to study abroad vary depending on the university campus offers. International student exchange programs for university students are aimed to enhance students' intercultural skills and knowledge. Student exchange programs for university students allow broadening their knowledge on their study of choice from a different country. This gives university students a chance to develop their work experience by seeing how their studying profession is practiced in another country. International exchange for tertiary students allows them to gain cultural experience in their studies and a chance to travel abroad while completing their degree.


title: Student exchange program

text: A series of studies conducted within the last decade found similar results in students studying abroad in Spain for a short-term and/or semester long program. These studies found that students can improve their speaking proficiency during one semester, there is a positive relationship between students' integrative motivation and interaction with second language culture, and student contact with the Spanish language has a great effect on their speaking improvement. It is especially apparent in students who live with host families during their program. Anne Reynolds-Case found improvements in understanding and usage of the "vosotros" form after studying in Spain. One study specifically studies culture perceptions of students studying abroad in Spain. Alan Meredith defines culture as consisting "of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts." Questionnaires were given to students living with host families during a two-month program in Spain. He studies how these groups perceive customs, such as concern for personal appearance, physical contact, cooking styles, politics, etc. The study found a variety of results depending the cultural custom. However, the US students' perceptions most closely aligned with the Young Spaniards (16–22 years old). At the same time, Angela George's study found little significance in the adoption of regional features during their semester abroad. Though most of these studies focused on students who came from America to study in Spain, the United States is not the only one sending their students. Brian Denman's article demonstrates an increase of Saudi student mobility for education, including locations such as Spain.


title: Student exchange program

text: Even though exchange students learn to improve themselves through the experience of studying and staying in another country, there are also many difficulties to be encountered. One of them is when exchange students are unable to adapt to pedagogy followed by the host country. Another is conflicts between the host family (who have provided accommodation) and the students, when it cannot be solved by communicating with each other and the student usually will be asked to stay with another host until they find a new match. This process, however, could take time while the students' duration of stay is limited. Even with preparation and knowledge about the new environment, they could still experience culture shock, which can affect them in different ways. Students from a completely different culture can also encounter homesickness for a longer period of time. Lack of transportation can also become a major problem, because the chances students buying a car during a short period of stay is less likely to happen. Moreover, students will find it hard to find a job, even part-time since most exchange visas do not allow students to work and it is difficult to obtain one that does. Another potential drawback is health issues that can occur during the stay in a foreign country. Students are advised to always have health insurance while traveling abroad, and carry emergency contact details of their local hosts and of multiple family members as well. Students participating in student exchange programs have sometimes been vulnerable to threats such as terrorism and other crimes. For example, in 1998 a number of US students traveling in Guatemala on a college sponsored trip were attacked, with five students being raped in Guatemala.


title: Thixotropy

text: Thixotropy is a time-dependent shear thinning property. Certain gels or fluids that are thick or viscous under static conditions will flow (become thinner, less viscous) over time when shaken, agitated, shear-stressed, or otherwise stressed (time-dependent viscosity). They then take a fixed time to return to a more viscous state.


title: Thixotropy

text: Some non-Newtonian pseudoplastic fluids show a time-dependent change in viscosity; the longer the fluid undergoes shear stress, the lower its viscosity. A thixotropic fluid is a fluid which takes a finite time to attain equilibrium viscosity when introduced to a steep change in shear rate. Some thixotropic fluids return to a gel state almost instantly, such as ketchup, and are called pseudoplastic fluids. Others such as yogurt take much longer and can become nearly solid. Many gels and colloids are thixotropic materials, exhibiting a stable form at rest but becoming fluid when agitated. Thixotropy arises because particles or structured solutes require time to organize. An overview of thixotropy has been provided by Mewis and Wagner.


title: Thixotropy

text: Some fluids are anti-thixotropic: constant shear stress for a time causes an increase in viscosity or even solidification. Fluids which exhibit this property are sometimes called rheopectic. Anti-thixotropic fluids are less well documented than thixotropic fluids.


title: Thixotropy

text: Some clays are thixotropic, with their behavior of great importance in structural and geotechnical engineering. Landslides, such as those common in the cliffs around Lyme Regis, Dorset and in the Aberfan spoil tip disaster in Wales are evidence of this phenomenon. Similarly, a lahar is a mass of earth liquefied by a volcanic event, which rapidly solidifies once coming to rest.


title: Thixotropy

text: Drilling muds used in geotechnical applications can be thixotropic. Honey from honey bees may also exhibit this property under certain conditions (such as heather honey or mānuka honey).


title: Thixotropy

text: Some clay deposits found in the process of exploring caves exhibit thixotropism: an initially solid-seeming mudbank will turn soupy and yield up moisture when dug into or otherwise disturbed. These clays were deposited in the past by low-velocity streams which tend to deposit fine-grained sediment.


title: Thixotropy

text: A thixotropic fluid is best visualised by an oar blade embedded in mud. Pressure on the oar often results in a highly viscous (more solid) thixotropic mud on the high pressure side of the blade, and low viscosity (very fluid) thixotropic mud on the low pressure side of the oar blade. Flow from the high pressure side to the low pressure side of the oar blade is non-Newtonian. (i.e., fluid velocity is not linearly proportional to the square root of the pressure differential over the oar blade).


title: Thixotropy

text: Many kinds of paints and inks—e.g., plastisols used in silkscreen textile printing—exhibit thixotropic qualities. In many cases it is desirable for the fluid to flow sufficiently to form a uniform layer, then to resist further flow, thereby preventing sagging on a vertical surface. Some other inks, such as those used in CMYK-type process printing, are designed to regain viscosity even faster, once they are applied, in order to protect the structure of the dots for accurate color reproduction.


title: Thixotropy

text: Thixotropic ink (along with a gas pressurized cartridge and special shearing ball design) is a key feature of the Fisher Space Pen, used for writing during zero gravity space flights by the US and Russian space programs.


title: Thixotropy

text: Thixotropy has been proposed as a scientific explanation of blood liquefaction miracles such as that of Saint Januarius in Naples.


title: Thixotropy

text: Semi-solid casting processes such as thixomoulding use the thixotropic property of some alloys (mostly light metals like magnesium). Within certain temperature ranges and with appropriate preparation, an alloy can be put into a semi-solid state, which can be injected with less shrinkage and better overall properties than by normal injection molding.


title: Thixotropy

text: Fumed silica is commonly used as a rheology agent to make otherwise low-viscous fluids thixotropic. Examples range from foods to epoxy resin in structural bonding applications like fillet joints.


title: Thixotropy

text: The word comes from Ancient Greek θίξις "thixis" 'touch' (from "thinganein" 'to touch') and "-tropy", "-tropous", from Ancient Greek -τρόπος "-tropos" 'of turning', from τρόπος "tropos" 'a turn', from τρέπειν "trepein", 'to turn'. It was invented by Herbert Freundlich originally for a sol-gel transformation.


title: Anycast

text: Anycast is a network addressing and routing methodology in which a single destination IP address is shared by devices (generally servers) in multiple locations. Routers direct packets addressed to this destination to the location nearest the sender, using their normal decision-making algorithms, typically the lowest number of BGP network hops. Anycast routing is widely used by content delivery networks such as web and DNS hosts, to bring their content closer to end users.


title: Anycast

text: The first documented use of anycast routing for topological load-balancing of Internet-connected services was in 1989, the technique was first formally documented in the IETF four years later in , and it was first applied to critical infrastructure in 2001 with the anycasting of the I-root nameserver.


title: Anycast

text: Early objections to the deployment of anycast routing centered on the perceived conflict between long-lived TCP connections and the volatility of the Internet's routed topology. In concept, a long-lived connection, such as an FTP file transfer (which might have taken hours to complete in the mid-1990s, when this issue was being debated) might be re-routed to a different anycast instance in mid-connection due to changes in network topology or routing, with the result that the server changes mid-connection, and the new server is not aware of the connection and does not possess the TCP connection state of the previous anycast instance.


title: Anycast

text: In practice, such problems were not observed, and these objections dissipated by the early 2000s. Many initial anycast deployments consisted of DNS servers, using principally UDP transport. Measurements of long-term anycast flows revealed very few failures due to mid-connection instance switches, far fewer (less than 0.017% or "less than one flow per ten thousand per hour of duration" according to various sources) than were attributed to other causes of failure. Numerous mechanisms were developed to efficiently share state between anycast instances. And some TCP-based protocols, notably HTTP, incorporated "redirect" mechanisms, whereby anycast service addresses could be used to locate the nearest instance of a service, whereupon a user would be redirected to that specific instance prior to the initiation of any long-lived stateful transaction.


title: Anycast

text: Anycast can be implemented via Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Multiple hosts (usually in different geographic areas) are given the same unicast IP address and different routes to the address are announced through BGP. Routers consider these to be alternative routes to the same destination, even though they are actually routes to different destinations with the same address. As usual, routers select a route by whatever distance metric is in use (the least cost, least congested, shortest). Selecting a route in this setup amounts to selecting a destination.


title: Anycast

text: Anycast is supported explicitly in IPv6. , which covers IPv6 addressing architecture, reserves Interface Identifier 0 within an IPv6 subnet as the "Subnet Router" anycast address. In addition, reserves a block of 128 Interface Identifiers within a subnet as anycast addresses.


title: Anycast

text: Most IPv6 routers on the path of an anycast packet through the network will not distinguish it from a unicast packet, but special handling is required from the routers near the destination (that is, within the scope of the anycast address) as they are required to route an anycast packet to the "nearest" interface within that scope which has the proper anycast address, according to whatever measure of distance (hops, cost, etc.) is being used.


title: Anycast

text: The method used in IPv4 of advertising multiple routes in BGP to multiply-assigned unicast addresses also still works in IPv6, and can be used to route packets to the nearest of several geographically dispersed hosts with the same address. This approach, which does not depend on anycast-aware routers, has the same use cases together with the same problems and limitations as in IPv4.


title: Anycast

text: With the growth of the Internet, network services increasingly have high-availability requirements. As a result, operation of anycast services () has grown in popularity among network operators.


title: Anycast

text: All Internet root nameservers are implemented as clusters of hosts using anycast addressing. All 13 root servers A–M exist in multiple locations, with 11 on multiple continents. (Root servers B and H exist in two U.S. locations.) The servers use anycast address announcements to provide a decentralized service. This has accelerated the deployment of physical (rather than logical) root servers outside the United States. documents the use of anycast addressing to provide authoritative DNS services. Many commercial DNS providers have switched to an IP anycast environment to increase query performance and redundancy, and to implement load balancing.


title: Anycast

text: In IPv4 to IPv6 transitioning, anycast addressing may be deployed to provide IPv6 compatibility to IPv4 hosts. This method, 6to4, uses a default gateway with the IP address 192.88.99.1, as described in . This allows multiple providers to implement 6to4 gateways without hosts having to know each individual provider's gateway addresses. This method has been deprecated in in response to native IPv6 becoming more prevalent.


title: Anycast

text: Content delivery networks may use anycast for actual HTTP connections to their distribution centers, or for DNS. Because most HTTP connections to such networks request static content such as images and style sheets, they are generally short-lived and stateless across subsequent TCP sessions. The general stability of routes and statelessness of connections makes anycast suitable for this application, even though it uses TCP.


title: Anycast

text: Anycast rendezvous point can be used in Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP) and its advantageous application as Anycast RP is an intra-domain feature that provides redundancy and load-sharing capabilities. If the multiple anycast rendezvous point is used, IP routing automatically will select the topologically closest rendezvous point for each source and receiver. It would provide a multicast network with the fault tolerance requirements.


title: Anycast

text: Anycast allows any operator whose routing information is accepted by an intermediate router to hijack any packets intended for the anycast address. While this at first sight appears insecure, it is no different from the routing of ordinary IP packets, and no more or less secure. As with conventional IP routing, careful filtering of who is and is not allowed to propagate route announcements is crucial to prevent man-in-the-middle or blackhole attacks. The former can also be prevented by encrypting and authenticating messages, such as using Transport Layer Security, while the latter can be frustrated by onion routing.


title: Anycast

text: Anycast is normally highly reliable, as it can provide automatic failover without adding complexity or new potential points of failure. Anycast applications typically feature external "heartbeat" monitoring of the server's function, and withdraw the route announcement if the server fails. In some cases this is done by the actual servers announcing the anycast prefix to the router over OSPF or another IGP. If the servers die, the router will automatically withdraw the announcement. "Heartbeat" functionality is important because, if the announcement continues for a failed server, the server will act as a "black hole" for nearby clients; this is the most serious mode of failure for an anycast system. Even in this event, this kind of failure will only cause a total failure for clients that are closer to this server than any other, and will not cause a global failure. However, even the automation necessary to implement "heartbeat" routing withdrawal can itself add a potential point of failure, as seen in the 2021 Facebook outage.


title: Anycast

text: In denial-of-service attacks, a rogue network host may advertise itself as an anycast server for a vital network service, to provide false information or simply block service. Anycast methodologies on the Internet may be exploited to distribute DDoS attacks and reduce their effectiveness: As traffic is routed to the closest node, a process over which the attacker has no control, the DDoS traffic flow will be distributed amongst the closest nodes. Thus, not all nodes might be affected. This may be a reason to deploy anycast addressing.


title: Anycast

text: The effectiveness of this technique depends upon maintaining the secrecy of any unicast addresses associated with anycast service nodes, however, since an attacker in possession of the unicast addresses of individual nodes can attack them from any location, bypassing anycast addressing methods.


title: Anycast

text: Some anycast deployments on the Internet distinguish between local and global nodes to benefit the local community, by addressing local nodes preferentially. An example is the Domain Name System. Local nodes are often announced with the no-export BGP community to prevent hosts from announcing them to their peers, i.e. the announcement is kept in the local area. Where both local and global nodes are deployed, the announcements from global nodes are often AS prepended (i.e. the AS is added a few more times) to make the path longer so that a local node announcement is preferred over a global node announcement.


title: Kunekune

text: The Kunekune or is a small breed of domestic pig from New Zealand. Kunekune are hairy with a rotund build, and may bear wattles hanging from their lower jaws. Their colour ranges from black and white, to ginger, cream, gold-tip, black, brown, and tricoloured. They have a docile, friendly nature, and can successfully be kept as pets.


title: Kunekune

text: The breed is believed to have descended from an Asian domestic breed introduced to New Zealand in the early 19th century by whalers or traders. They differ markedly from the feral pig of European origin known in New Zealand as a "Captain Cooker". The native Māori people of New Zealand adopted Kunekune; "kunekune" is a Māori word meaning "fat and round".


title: Kunekune

text: By the 1980s, only an estimated 50 purebred Kunekune remained. Michael Willis and John Simister, wildlife park owners, started a breeding recovery programme, which encouraged other recovery efforts. , the breed no longer faces extinction, with breed societies in both New Zealand and the United Kingdom. In 1993, two were imported into the United States from the UK.


title: Kunekune

text: In 2017, a report of "Science Daily" said the Kunekune has remarkable social learning with "astonishingly good memory".


title: Kunekune

text: The Kunekune is covered in hair which can be long or short, and straight or curly. Hair colours include black, brown, ginger, gold, cream, and spotted combinations. It has a medium to short, slightly upturned snout, often black, and either semilopped or pricked ears. It has a short, round body with short legs and may have two wattles (called "piri piri") under its chin. The Kunekune stands about tall. An adult Kunekune can weigh between , males being considerably heavier than females.


title: Lavender Town

text: Lavender Town is a village that can be visited in "Pokémon Red", "Green", "Blue", "Yellow", and sequels "Gold", "Silver", "Crystal", and the remakes thereof. A departure from the typical joyous tone of "Red", "Green", "Blue", and "Yellow", it is home to the "Pokémon Tower", a graveyard filled with mourning trainers and hundreds of tombstones for deceased Pokémon. There the player character can come across the ghost-type Pokémon Gastly and Haunter. The tower is the only place where they are available for capture. During the story of "Red", "Green", "Blue", and "Yellow", the player will utilise the item Silph Scope to deal with the ghost-type Pokémon. It is implied that the village is haunted by the spirit of dead Pokémon, in particular a Marowak, murdered by Team Rocket, searching for its orphaned-Cubone. This story is expanded on in the remake Lavender Town is the player's first encounter with the concept of Pokémon dying. It's one of a few towns in Kanto not to feature a gym.


title: Lavender Town

text: The Pokémon Tower was replaced by the "Kanto Radio Tower" in "Pokémon Gold" and "Silver". Lavender Town is also home to the "Name Rater", which allows players to change the nickname of their Pokémon, and a care home for abandoned Pokémon.


title: Lavender Town

text: The Pokémon Tower appears in the episode "The Tower of Terror", the 23rd episode from the of the "Pokémon" anime series, when Ash, Misty, and Brock search for ghost-type Pokémon for the gym battle against Sabrina. Lavender Town also appears in the "Pokémon Adventures" and "The Electric Tale of Pikachu" manga series. In the former, it is explicitly home to the graves of many Pokémon.


title: Lavender Town

text: The Pokémon Tower is also the main setting of the second episode in "Pokémon Origins", in which the story of the orphaned Cubone is shown.


title: Lavender Town

text: The chiptune background music of Lavender Town in "Pokémon Red", "Blue", "Green" and "Yellow" versions has garnered much interest due to some listeners finding it unsettling. Listing it as the second-most scary video game track in 2012, Brittany Vincent of "Bloody Disgusting" stated that Lavender Town's "deceptively calm ... tune ranks highly on most gamers' lists of terrifying childhood memories." Lavender Town's music, composed by Junichi Masuda, is deliberately atonal and combines sharp chiptune sounds with "a cavalcade of jarring chords" to create an eerie atmosphere. Shubhankar Parijat of GamingBolt included the song on their list of creepy soundtracks in non-horror games. Jay Hathaway of "Gawker" stated that leaving the music on loop may cause a "vague sense of dread". Kevin Knezevic of "GameSpot" called it "one of the area's most unforgettable features".


title: Lavender Town

text: In "Pokémon Gold, Silver" and "Crystal" versions (and in their remakes "Pokémon HeartGold" and "SoulSilver"), the Lavender Town theme music was recomposed to a happier tone as, per the game's storyline, the Pokémon Tower was demolished and replaced with the Kanto Radio Tower. On YouTube many remixes of the theme have been made. It was re-recorded for the 2017, 2019, and 2020 "Pokémon Go" Halloween event.


title: Lavender Town

text: A fabricated illness was dubbed "Lavender Town Syndrome" (as well as "Lavender Town Tone, Lavender Town Conspiracy, and Lavender Town Suicides") and the original story went viral after being spread on general interest websites such as 4chan. Various people have added details to make the story more convincing over time, such as photoshopping images of ghosts and the Pokémon Unown (spelling out the message "leave now") into spectrogram outputs of the Lavender Town music. Certain versions claim that the games’ director, Satoshi Tajiri, wanted the tone in the game to "annoy" children instead of cause harm, while others claim Nintendo was in collaboration with the Japanese government.


title: Lavender Town

text: Jessie Coello of "TheGamer" described it as "One of the creepiest and most infamous creepypastas in online fiction." Mark Hill of "Kill Screen" stated that the appeal of the Lavender Town Syndrome legend "comes from corrupting such an innocent symbol of childhood." Patricia Hernandez of "Kotaku" believed that one of the reasons why the Lavender Town creepypasta "is so effective" is that the theme tune is "genuinely creepy." She also noted that the suicides taking place in Japan was an important element in preserving the mystery as fact-checking would require proficiency in Japanese. Nadia Oxford of "Lifewire" drew comparisons with "Dennō Senshi Porygon", an episode of the "Pokémon" anime series that gave hundreds of Japanese viewers, most of them children, reactions similar to epilepsy symptoms and sent some into seizures, stating that its fallout "provides a solid bedrock for the Lavender Town myth." Scott Baird of TheGamer believed that the story was "clearly inspired" by the event. Matt Rooney of "IGN" selected it as one of the best video game urban legends.


title: Lavender Town

text: "Eurogamer" described Lavender Town as a "standout location" in the original "Pokémon" games, as it is one of the few locations in the franchise that deals with the fact that the "cute and cuddly" Pokémon could actually die. Rani Baker, writing for Grunge, speculated that this "revelation" is why so many were affected by it. Cian Maher of "Bloody Disgusting" called the setting "infamous" – "uncanny, weird, and deeply unsettling." He praised the reinvented take in . James Troughton of "TheGamer" called it "one of the darkest areas of the series" while Jessie Coello, stated that it "birthed some of the most disturbing lore tied to the franchise." Patricia Hernandez wrote that "I can’t think of a single thing in "Pokémon" more unsettling than Lavender Town." Caroline O’Donoghue of "The Guardian" singled out Lavender Town as an example of the Pokémon series unique, "half-written, euphemistic" style of story-telling.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that interactive fiction games were easily ported across all the popular platforms at the time, including CP/M (not known for gaming or strong graphics capabilities). The number of interactive fiction works is increasing steadily as new ones are produced by an online community, using freely available development systems.


title: Interactive fiction

text: The term can also be used to refer to analogue versions of literary works that are not read in a linear fashion, known as gamebooks, where the reader is instead given choices at different points in the text; these decisions determine the flow and outcome of the story. The most famous example of this form of printed fiction is the "Choose Your Own Adventure" book series, and the collaborative "" format has also been described as a form of interactive fiction. The term "interactive fiction" is sometimes used also to refer to visual novels, a type of interactive narrative software popular in Japan.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Text adventures are one of the oldest types of computer games and form a subset of the adventure genre. The player uses text input to control the game, and the game state is relayed to the player via text output. Interactive fiction usually relies on reading from a screen and on typing input, although text-to-speech synthesizers allow blind and visually impaired users to play interactive fiction titles as audio games.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Input is usually provided by the player in the form of simple sentences such as "get key" or "go east", which are interpreted by a text parser. Parsers may vary in sophistication; the first text adventure parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs. Later parsers, such as those built on ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), could understand complete sentences. Later parsers could handle increasing levels of complexity parsing sentences such as "open the red box with the green key then go north". This level of complexity is the standard for works of interactive fiction today.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Despite their lack of graphics, text adventures include a physical dimension where players move between rooms. Many text adventure games boasted their total number of rooms to indicate how much gameplay they offered. These games are unique in that they may create an "illogical space", where going north from area A takes you to area B, but going south from area B did not take you back to area A. This can create mazes that do not behave as players expect, and thus players must maintain their own map. These illogical spaces are much more rare in today's era of 3D gaming, and the Interactive Fiction community in general decries the use of mazes entirely, claiming that mazes have become arbitrary 'puzzles for the sake of puzzles' and that they can, in the hands of inexperienced designers, become immensely frustrating for players to navigate.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Interactive fiction shares much in common with Multi-User Dungeons ('MUDs'). MUDs, which became popular in the mid-1980s, rely on a textual exchange and accept similar commands from players as do works of IF; however, since interactive fiction is single player, and MUDs, by definition, have multiple players, they differ enormously in gameplay styles. MUDs often focus gameplay on activities that involve communities of players, simulated political systems, in-game trading, and other gameplay mechanics that are not possible in a single player environment.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Interactive fiction features two distinct modes of writing: the player input and the game output. As described above, player input is expected to be in simple command form (imperative sentences). A typical command may be:codice_1


title: Interactive fiction

text: The responses from the game are usually written from a second-person point of view, in present tense. This is because, unlike in most works of fiction, the main character is closely associated with the player, and the events are seen to be happening as the player plays. While older text adventures often identified the protagonist with the player directly, newer games tend to have specific, well-defined protagonists with separate identities from the player. The classic essay "Crimes Against Mimesis" discusses, among other IF issues, the nature of "You" in interactive fiction. A typical response might look something like this, the response to "look in tea chest" at the start of "Curses":


title: Interactive fiction

text: <samp>That was the first place you tried, hours and hours ago now, and there's nothing there but that boring old book. You pick it up anyway, bored as you are.</samp>


title: Interactive fiction

text: Many text adventures, particularly those designed for humour (such as "Zork", "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", and "Leather Goddesses of Phobos"), address the player with an informal tone, sometimes including sarcastic remarks (see the transcript from "Curses", above, for an example). The late Douglas Adams, in designing the IF version of his 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', created a unique solution to the final puzzle of the game: the game requires the one solitary item that the player "didn't" choose at the outset of play.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Some IF works dispense with second-person narrative entirely, opting for a first-person perspective ('I') or even placing the player in the position of an observer, rather than a direct participant. In some 'experimental' IF, the concept of self-identification is eliminated entirely, and the player instead takes the role of an inanimate object, a force of nature, or an abstract concept; experimental IF usually pushes the limits of the concept and challenges many assumptions about the medium.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Though neither program was developed as a narrative work, the software programs ELIZA (1964–1966) and SHRDLU (1968–1970) can formally be considered early examples of interactive fiction, as both programs used natural language processing to take input from their user and respond in a virtual and conversational manner. ELIZA simulated a psychotherapist that appeared to provide human-like responses to the user's input, while SHRDLU employed an artificial intelligence that could move virtual objects around an environment and respond to questions asked about the environment's shape. The development of effective natural language processing would become an essential part of interactive fiction development.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Around 1975, Will Crowther, a programmer and an amateur caver, wrote the first text adventure game, "Adventure" (originally called "ADVENT" because a filename could only be six characters long in the operating system he was using, and later named "Colossal Cave Adventure"). Having just gone through a divorce, he was looking for a way to connect with his two young children. Over the course of a few weekends, he wrote a text based cave exploration game that featured a sort of guide/narrator who talked in full sentences and who understood simple two-word commands that came close to natural English. Adventure was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10. Crowther's original version was an accurate simulation of part of the real Colossal Cave, but also included fantasy elements (such as axe-wielding dwarves and a magic bridge).


title: Interactive fiction

text: Stanford University graduate student Don Woods discovered "Adventure" while working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and in 1977 obtained and expanded Crowther's source code (with Crowther's permission). Woods's changes were reminiscent of the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, and included a troll, elves, and a volcano some claim is based on Mount Doom, but Woods says was not.


title: Interactive fiction

text: In early 1977, "Adventure" spread across ARPAnet, and has survived on the Internet to this day. The game has since been ported to many other operating systems, and was included with the floppy-disk distribution of Microsoft's MS-DOS 1.0 OS. "Adventure" is a cornerstone of the online IF community; there currently exist dozens of different independently programmed versions, with additional elements, such as new rooms or puzzles, and various scoring systems.


title: Interactive fiction

text: The popularity of "Adventure" led to the wide success of interactive fiction during the late 1970s, when home computers had little, if any, graphics capability. Many elements of the original game have survived into the present, such as the command 'xyzzy', which is now included as an Easter Egg in modern games, such as "Microsoft Minesweeper".


title: Interactive fiction

text: "Adventure" was also directly responsible for the founding of Sierra Online (later Sierra Entertainment); Ken and Roberta Williams played the game and decided to design one of their own, but with graphics.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Adventure International was founded by Scott Adams (not to be confused with the creator of "Dilbert"). In 1978, Adams wrote "Adventureland", which was loosely patterned after (the original) "Colossal Cave Adventure". He took out a small ad in a computer magazine in order to promote and sell "Adventureland", thus creating the first commercial adventure game. In 1979 he founded Adventure International, the first commercial publisher of interactive fiction. That same year, "Dog Star Adventure" was published in source code form in "SoftSide", spawning legions of similar games in BASIC.


title: Interactive fiction

text: The largest company producing works of interactive fiction was Infocom, which created the "Zork" series and many other titles, among them "Trinity", "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and "A Mind Forever Voyaging".


title: Interactive fiction

text: In June 1977, Marc Blank, Bruce K. Daniels, Tim Anderson, and Dave Lebling began writing the mainframe version of "Zork" (also known as "Dungeon"), at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, directly inspired by "Colossal Cave Adventure". The game was programmed in a computer language called MDL, a variant of LISP. The term Implementer was the self-given name of the creators of the text adventure series Zork. It is for this reason that game designers and programmers can be referred to as an implementer, often shortened to Imp, rather than a writer. In early 1979, the game was completed. Ten members of the "MIT Dynamics Modelling Group" went on to join Infocom when it was incorporated later that year. In order to make its games as portable as possible, Infocom developed the Z-machine, a custom virtual machine that could be implemented on a large number of platforms, and took standardized "story files" as input. In a non-technical sense, Infocom was responsible for developing the interactive style that would be emulated by many later interpreters. The Infocom parser was widely regarded as the best of its era. It accepted complex, complete sentence commands like "put the blue book on the writing desk" at a time when most of its competitors parsers were restricted to simple two-word verb-noun combinations such as "put book". The parser was actively upgraded with new features like undo and error correction, and later games would 'understand' multiple sentence input: 'pick up the gem and put it in my bag. take the newspaper clipping out of my bag then burn it with the book of matches'.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Infocom and other companies offered optional commercial feelies (physical props associated with a game). The tradition of 'feelies' (and the term itself) is believed to have originated with "Deadline" (1982), the third Infocom title after "Zork I" and "II". When writing this game, it was not possible to include all of the information in the limited (80KB) disk space, so Infocom created the first feelies for this game; extra items that gave more information than could be included within the digital game itself. These included police interviews, the coroner's findings, letters, crime scene evidence and photos of the murder scene.


title: Interactive fiction

text: These materials were very difficult for others to copy or otherwise reproduce, and many included information that was essential to completing the game. Seeing the potential benefits of both aiding game-play immersion and providing a measure of creative copy-protection, in addition to acting as a deterrent to software piracy, Infocom and later other companies began creating feelies for numerous titles. In 1987, Infocom released a special version of the first three "Zork" titles together with plot-specific coins and other trinkets. This concept would be expanded as time went on, such that later game feelies would contain passwords, coded instructions, page numbers, or other information that would be required to successfully complete the game.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Interactive fiction became a standard product for many software companies. By 1982 "Softline" wrote that "the demands of the market are weighted heavily toward hi-res graphics" in games like Sierra's "The Wizard and the Princess" and its imitators. Such graphic adventures became the dominant form of the genre on computers with graphics, like the Apple II. By 1982 Adventure International began releasing versions of its games with graphics. The company went bankrupt in 1985. Synapse Software and Acornsoft were also closed in 1985. Leaving Infocom as the leading company producing text-only adventure games on the Apple II with sophisticated parsers and writing, and still advertising its lack of graphics as a virtue. The company was bought by Activision in 1986 after the failure of "Cornerstone", Infocom's database software program, and stopped producing text adventures a few years later. Soon after Telaium/Trillium also closed.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Probably the first commercial work of interactive fiction produced outside the U.S. was the dungeon crawl game of "Acheton", produced in Cambridge, England, and first commercially released by Acornsoft (later expanded and reissued by Topologika). Other leading companies in the UK were Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 Computing. Also worthy of mention are Delta 4, Melbourne House, and the homebrew company Zenobi.


title: Interactive fiction

text: In the early 1980s Edu-Ware also produced interactive fiction for the Apple II as designated by the "if" graphic that was displayed on startup. Their titles included the "Prisoner" and "Empire" series ("Empire I: World Builders", "Empire II: Interstellar Sharks", "Empire III: Armageddon").


title: Interactive fiction

text: In 1981, CE Software published "SwordThrust" as a commercial successor to the "Eamon" gaming system for the Apple II. SwordThrust and Eamon were simple two-word parser games with many role-playing elements not available in other interactive fiction. While SwordThrust published seven different titles, it was vastly overshadowed by the non-commercial Eamon system which allowed private authors to publish their own titles in the series. By March 1984, there were 48 titles published for the Eamon system (and over 270 titles in total as of March 2013).


title: Interactive fiction

text: In Italy, interactive fiction games were mainly published and distributed through various magazines in included tapes. The largest number of games were published in the two magazines Viking and Explorer, with versions for the main 8-bit home computers (Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and MSX). The software house producing those games was Brainstorm Enterprise, and the most prolific IF author was Bonaventura Di Bello, who produced 70 games in the Italian language. The wave of interactive fiction in Italy lasted for a couple of years thanks to the various magazines promoting the genre, then faded and remains still today a topic of interest for a small group of fans and less known developers, celebrated on Web sites and in related newsgroups.


title: Interactive fiction

text: In Spain, interactive fiction was considered a minority genre, and was not very successful. The first Spanish interactive fiction commercially released was "Yenght" in 1983, by Dinamic Software, for the ZX Spectrum. Later on, in 1987, the same company produced an interactive fiction about "Don Quijote". After several other attempts, the company Aventuras AD, emerged from Dinamic, became the main interactive fiction publisher in Spain, including titles like a Spanish adaptation of "Colossal Cave Adventure", an adaptation of the Spanish comic "El Jabato", and mainly the "Ci-U-Than" trilogy, composed by "La diosa de Cozumel" (1990), "Los templos sagrados" (1991) and "Chichen Itzá" (1992). During this period, the Club de Aventuras AD (CAAD), the main Spanish speaking community around interactive fiction in the world, was founded, and after the end of Aventuras AD in 1992, the CAAD continued on its own, first with their own magazine, and then with the advent of Internet, with the launch of an active internet community that still produces interactive non-commercial fiction nowadays.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Legend Entertainment was founded by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu in 1989. It started out from the ashes of Infocom. The text adventures produced by Legend Entertainment used (high-resolution) graphics as well as sound. Some of their titles include "Eric the Unready", the "Spellcasting" series and "Gateway" (based on Frederik Pohl's novels).


title: Interactive fiction

text: The last text adventure created by Legend Entertainment was "Gateway II" (1992), while the last game ever created by Legend was "" (2003) – a well-known first-person shooter action game using the Unreal Engine for both impressive graphics and realistic physics. In 2004, Legend Entertainment was acquired by Atari, who published "Unreal II" and released for both Microsoft Windows and Microsoft's Xbox.


title: Interactive fiction

text: In 1991 and 1992, Activision released "The Lost Treasures of Infocom" in two volumes, a collection containing most of Infocom's games, followed in 1996 by "Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom".


title: Interactive fiction

text: After the decline of the commercial interactive fiction market in the 1990s, an online community eventually formed around the medium. In 1987, the Usenet newsgroup codice_2 was created, and was soon followed by codice_3. By custom, the topic of codice_2 is interactive fiction authorship and programming, while codice_3 encompasses topics related to playing interactive fiction games, such as hint requests and game reviews. As of late 2011, discussions between writers have mostly moved from codice_2 to the Interactive Fiction Community Forum.


title: Interactive fiction

text: One of the most important early developments was the reverse-engineering of Infocom's Z-Code format and Z-Machine virtual machine in 1987 by a group of enthusiasts called the InfoTaskForce and the subsequent development of an interpreter for Z-Code story files. As a result, it became possible to play Infocom's work on modern computers.


title: Interactive fiction

text: For years, amateurs with the IF community produced interactive fiction works of relatively limited scope using the Adventure Game Toolkit and similar tools.


title: Interactive fiction

text: The breakthrough that allowed the interactive fiction community to truly prosper, however, was the creation and distribution of two sophisticated development systems. In 1987, Michael J. Roberts released TADS, a programming language designed to produce works of interactive fiction. In 1993, Graham Nelson released Inform, a programming language and set of libraries which compiled to a Z-Code story file. Each of these systems allowed anyone with sufficient time and dedication to create a game, and caused a growth boom in the online interactive fiction community.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Despite the lack of commercial support, the availability of high quality tools allowed enthusiasts of the genre to develop new high quality games. Competitions such as the annual Interactive Fiction Competition for short works, the Spring Thing for longer works, and the XYZZY Awards, further helped to improve the quality and complexity of the games. Modern games go much further than the original "Adventure" style, improving upon Infocom games, which relied extensively on puzzle solving, and to a lesser extent on communication with non-player characters, to include experimentation with writing and story-telling techniques.


title: Interactive fiction

text: While the majority of modern interactive fiction that is developed is distributed for free, there are some commercial endeavors. In 1998, Michael Berlyn, a former Implementor at Infocom, started a new game company, Cascade Mountain Publishing, whose goals were to publish interactive fiction. Despite the Interactive Fiction community providing social and financial backing Cascade Mountain Publishing went out of business in 2000.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Other commercial endeavours include Peter Nepstad's "", several games by Howard Sherman published as Malinche Entertainment, The General Coffee Company's "Future Boy!," "Cypher", a graphically enhanced cyberpunk game and various titles by "Textfyre". Emily Short was commissioned to develop the game "City of Secrets" but the project fell through and she ended up releasing it herself.


title: Interactive fiction

text: The increased effectiveness of natural-language-generation in artificial intelligence (AI) has led to instances of interactive fiction which use AI to dynamically generate new, open-ended content, instead of being constrained to pre-written material. The most notable example of this is "AI Dungeon", released in 2019, which generates content using the GPT-3 (previously GPT-2) natural-language-generating neural network, created by OpenAI.


title: Interactive fiction

text: The original interactive fiction "Colossal Cave Adventure" was programmed in Fortran, originally developed by IBM. "Adventure"s parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Infocom's games of 1979–88, such as "Zork", were written using a LISP-like programming language called ZIL (Zork Implementation Language or Zork Interactive Language, it was referred to as both) that compiled into a byte code able to run on a standardized virtual machine called the Z-machine. As the games were text based and used variants of the same Z-machine interpreter, the interpreter only had to be ported to a computer once, rather than once each game. Each game file included a sophisticated parser which allowed the user to type complex instructions to the game. Unlike earlier works of interactive fiction which only understood commands of the form 'verb noun', Infocom's parser could understand a wider variety of sentences. For instance one might type "open the large door, then go west", or "go to the hall". With the Z-machine, Infocom was able to release most of their games for most popular home computers of the time simultaneously, including Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, IBM PC compatibles, Amstrad CPC/PCW (one disc worked on both machines), Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, Commodore 128, Kaypro CP/M, TI-99/4A, Macintosh, Atari ST, the Amiga and the Radio Shack TRS-80. Infocom was also known for shipping creative props, or "feelies" (and even "smellies"), with its games.


title: Interactive fiction

text: During the 1990s Interactive fiction was mainly written with C-like languages, such as TADS 2 and Inform 6. A number of systems for writing interactive fiction now exist. The most popular remain Inform, TADS, or ADRIFT, but they diverged in their approach to IF-writing during the 2000s, giving today's IF writers an objective choice. By 2006 IFComp, most games were written for Inform, with a strong minority of games for TADS and ADRIFT, followed by a small number of games for other systems.


title: Interactive fiction

text: While familiarity with a programming language leads many new authors to attempt to produce their own complete IF application, most established IF authors recommend use of a specialised IF language, arguing that such systems allow authors to avoid the technicalities of producing a full featured parser, while allowing broad community support. The choice of authoring system usually depends on the author's desired balance of ease of use versus power, and the portability of the final product.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Interpreters are the software used to play the works of interactive fiction created with a development system. Since they need to interact with the player, the "story files" created by development systems are programs in their own right. Rather than running directly on any one computer, they are programs run by Interpreters, or virtual machines, which are designed specially for IF. They may be part of the development system, or can be compiled together with the work of fiction as a standalone executable file.


title: Interactive fiction

text: The Z-machine was designed by the founders of Infocom, in 1979. They were influenced by the then-new idea of a virtual Pascal computer, but replaced P with Z for Zork, the celebrated adventure game of 1977–79. The Z-machine evolved during the 1980s but over 30 years later, it remains in use essentially unchanged. Glulx was designed by Andrew Plotkin in the late 1990s as a new-generation IF virtual machine. It overcomes the technical constraint on the Z-machine by being a 32-bit rather than 16-bit processor. Frotz is a modern Z-machine interpreter originally written in C (programming language) by Stefan Jokisch in 1995 for DOS. Over time it was ported to other platforms, such as Unix, RISC OS, Mac OS and most recently iOS. Modern Glulx interpreters are based on "Glulxe", by Andrew Plotkin, and "Git", by Iain Merrick. Other interpreters include Zoom for Mac OS X, or for Unix or Linux, maintained by Andrew Hunter, and Spatterlight for Mac OS X, maintained by Tor Andersson.


title: Interactive fiction

text: In addition to commercial distribution venues and individual websites, many works of free interactive fiction are distributed through community websites. These include the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDb), The Interactive Fiction Reviews Organization (IFRO), a game catalog and recommendation engine, and the Interactive Fiction Archive.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Works may be distributed for playing with in a separate interpreter. In which case they are often made available in the Blorb package format that many interpreters support. A filename ending .zblorb is a story file intended for a Z-machine in a Blorb wrapper, while a filename ending .gblorb is a story file intended for a Glulx in a Blorb wrapper. It is not common but IF files are sometimes also seen without a Blorb wrapping, though this usually means cover art, help files, and so forth are missing, like a book with the covers torn off. Z-machine story files usually have names ending .z5 or .z8, the number being a version number, and Glulx story files usually end .ulx.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Alternatively, works may be distributed for playing in a web browser. For example, the 'Parchment' project is for web browser-based IF Interpreter, for both Z-machine and Glulx files.


title: Interactive fiction

text: Some software such as Twine publishes directly to HTML, the standard language used to create web pages, reducing the requirement for an Interpreter or virtual machine.


title: Fern Sutherland

text: Fern Sutherland is a New Zealand actress, best known for her roles as Dawn in "The Almighty Johnsons", and Detective Sims in "The Brokenwood Mysteries".


title: Fern Sutherland

text: Starting her career as a lead artiste in short films produced by the UNITEC Performing Arts School, Sutherland pursued her acting work in theatre shows like Silo Theatre's Ensemble Project 08, the Auckland Theatre Company’s The Pohutakawa Tree (2009) and The End of the Golden Weather (2011), among others. Later, she ventured into television plays for South Pacific Pictures, doing small roles in "Go Girls" and "The Almighty Johnsons". Most recently Sutherland has shared top billing in the miniseries "The Brokenwood Mysteries".


title: Fern Sutherland

text: She has said of herself, "I get extreme stage fright and really bad anxiety, so by rights acting is probably the worst career choice for me, but the truth is I really love being able to create and bring characters to life."


title: Fern Sutherland

text: Sutherland received a nomination for best supporting actress at the 2011 Aotearoa Film and Television Awards (AFTAs) for her role in "The Almighty Johnsons".


title: Fern Sutherland

text: She moved to Canada at the end of 2018 shortly after filming of The Brokenwood Mysteries series ended.


title: Al-Gharafa SC

text: Al-Gharafa Sports Club () is a Qatari multisports club based in the Al Gharrafa district of Al Rayyan. It is best known for its football team, although it also has teams for other sports. It was established on 6 June 1979 as Al-Ittihad and later officially incorporated into the Qatar Football Association on 23 September of that same year. The club was officially renamed to its current form in 2004 to better represent the district of Al-Gharafa, of which the club belongs to. The club was most notably founded by Sheikh Mohammed bin Jassim Al-Thani, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al-Thani, Sheikh Hamad bin Faisal Al-Thani, Sheikh Ali bin Abdullah Al-Thani and Saad Mohammed Al-Rumaihi. In a documentary produced by Al Kass sports channel about the history of the club, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim mentioned that the idea was initially suggested by Saad Al-Rumaihi who was working as a sports journalist at the "Al Raya" newspaper.


title: Al-Gharafa SC

text: Al-Gharafa Sports Club was founded on 6 June 1979 and was formally created on 23 September 1979 as Al-Ittihad by the first president of the board of directors, Khalifa Bin Fahad Bin Mohammed Al-Thani (1979–1982) under resolution no. 9. Al-Gharafa was founded with the intent of creating sports facilities for the youth in the Al Gharrafa region. It did not occur to the leaders that Al-Gharafa would become as tremendously successful as it is today. The name ""Al-Ittihad"", which when translated into English, means "United", was chosen in the spirit of the brotherhood and solidarity that characterized the club and its leaders. Yellow and blue were selected as the club colors due to the founders' endearment towards the Brazil national team. Al-Gharafa owes much of its success in the early years to the financial and material support of its Sheikh leaders.


title: Al-Gharafa SC

text: As Al-Gharafa was established relatively late compared to other Qatari clubs at the time, it was sent to the Qatari 2nd Division. It dominated the league and won the title on its debut in the 1979/80 season with Egyptian coach Mahmoud Abu Rujaila, as well three more times, the second by defending the championship in the 1980/81 season, and the third in the 1983/84 season, which, subsequently, was the year that their youth team had also won the league. Their first foreign player was Faisal Hannan, a Sudanese footballer who agreed to a contract one year prior to the club's establishment. Additionally, they won the 1986/87 season of the 2nd Division, allowing them to play in the 1987–88 season of the Qatar Stars League. The club ended up winning its first Stars League title in 1991–92, breaking the 16-year deadlock between the three dominant Qatari clubs Al-Arabi, Al Sadd, and Al-Rayyan. Al-Gharafa's youth team also won the league a year later in the 1992/93 season. The club were runners-up in 1994 to Al-Arabi, before winning the Emir of Qatar Cup 4 times in a row, from 1995 to 1998, under coach Jamal Haji.


title: Al-Gharafa SC

text: The club won the league for the second time in the 1997/98 season with 32 points after they edged Al-Rayyan by a margin of 3 points. Al-Rayyan finished runners-up, with Al Sadd in third place. The very next year they finished runners-up to Al-Wakrah SC, however, Al-Gharafa had the best goal difference.


title: Al-Gharafa SC

text: On Friday, 28 April 2000, at Khalifa International Stadium, Al-Gharafa won their first Qatar Crown Prince Cup. The match had ended goalless before they beat Al-Rayyan 9–8 in a dramatic penalty shoot-out. They were led by Adel Khamis, the long-time captain of the team. Al-Gharafa also won the Crown Prince Cup in 2010 and 2011.


title: Al-Gharafa SC

text: They won the league championship in the 2000–01 season by defeating Al Sadd in their last game on 1 May 2001 by a scoreline of 1–0. After the match, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, then chairman of the olympic committee, delivered an award to Adel Khamis, as well as gold medals to the whole team and a sum of 500,000 Qatari riyals to the club. Rachid Amrane also won the league top goalscorer with a tally of 16 goals.


title: Al-Gharafa SC

text: The Qatar Stars League was revamped in the 2004/05 season, with many clubs changing their names (including Al-Gharafa), as well as changing the number of games played each season from 18 to 27. The club won the league this year, with only 1 loss from 27 games, bringing their point tally to 66, which was 14 more than the runners-up, Al-Rayyan. They also won their first Sheikh Jassem Cup that year, on 12 September 2005, after defeating Al Ahli 2–1, courtesy of goals from Rodrigo and Fahad Al Shammari.


title: Al-Gharafa SC

text: The next year they were unsuccessful in retaining the league championship, only finishing runners-up to Al Sadd. Although the next season, they won the league once more, besides scoring the highest number of goals in a season with 72 goals, mainly thanks to the efforts of Araújo, who scored 27 goals that season, shattering Gabriel Batistuta's record of 25.


title: Al-Gharafa SC

text: Al Gharafa plays its home games at Thani bin Jassim Stadium which is situated in the Al Gharafa suburb of Al Rayyan. The stadium holds 27,000 people and was built in 2003. The stadium hosted 2011 AFC Asian Cup and other international competitions. It is planned to expand the existing 27,000 capacity to 44,740 for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.


title: Al-Gharafa SC

text: Al Gharafa has one of the largest youth development programmes in the country. It recruits youth players for every age bracket available, and has produced national team players from its academy. They regularly visit local schools, as well as hold school tournaments, and offer students trials. Currently there are approximately 350 players in the club's youth ranks, with 100 players in its academy, and 240 players in grass roots. Break-up is as follows (as of 2013):


title: Al-Gharafa SC

text: "This list includes players whom have made significant contributions to their national team and to the club. At least 100 caps for the club or 70 caps for their national team is needed to be considered for inclusion. Updated 28 March 2016."


Al-Gharafa SC


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: The sixth season of the television series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" premiered on October 2, 2001, with a two-hour premiere on UPN and concluded its 22-episode season with a two-hour finale on May 21, 2002. It maintained its previous timeslot, airing Tuesdays at 8:00 pm ET. This season marked the series' network change from The WB to UPN.


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: After the gang struggle with using the Buffybot to patrol for vampires over the summer, Willow resurrects Buffy with a powerful spell. Although her friends believe that they have taken her out of Hell, Buffy had actually been in Heaven since her death – a fact that she initially only divulges to Spike and later reveals to her friends. She is therefore traumatized by her resurrection and this causes her to fall into a deep depression for most of the season. Dawn is happy to have her sister back, but Buffy's depression causes Dawn's feelings of alienation to lead to kleptomania.


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: Giles returns to England after realizing that Buffy has become too reliant on him, while Buffy takes up a fast-food job for money and develops a sexually passionate, but eventually dysfunctional, affair with Spike, who discovers that his chip can no longer harm him when he hits her. For different reasons, Buffy and Spike are both emotionally tormented by the affair, and Buffy hides it from her friends, only confiding to Tara who becomes supportive. Buffy later ends things with Spike, concluding that her using him to deal with her depression is in fact killing her. Tara becomes concerned about Willow's addiction to magic and challenges her to go a week without it, but Willow gives in to her addiction, causing Tara to leave her. Despite their separation, Tara is still devoted to helping Willow with her addiction, leading to their reconciliation.


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: On the wedding day of Xander and Anya, a magician, seeking his own vengeance against Anya, tricks Xander into calling off the wedding by showing him a false future where they are both miserable. Anya reverts to a vengeance demon once more. When Anya cannot find anyone who wishes vengeance on Xander, and after Buffy has broken up with Spike, Anya and Spike seek solace in a one night stand, making both Buffy and Xander furious at Spike, especially for revealing his affair with Buffy.


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: The gang also begin to deal with The Trio, a group of nerds led by Warren Mears who use their technological and magical proficiency to attempt to kill or neutralize Buffy and take over Sunnydale, a goal they had in mind since the beginning of the season. The Trio often use monsters such as vampires and demons to assist them. Warren is shown to be the only competent villain of the group, and his capacity for evil is demonstrated by the attempted rape of his ex-girlfriend, which leads to her death. After Buffy thwarts his plans multiple times and the Trio break apart, Warren then attacks Buffy with a gun but accidentally kills Tara with a stray bullet. Willow tries to resurrect Tara but fails.


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: Tara's death causes Willow to descend into darkness and unleash all of her dark magical powers. Willow hunts down and kills Warren in vengeance. Driven by grief, Willow fights and overpowers Buffy, who is forced to fight when she is unable to condone Willow's actions. Giles returns to help face Willow in battle and infuses her with light magic, tapping into her remaining humanity. This initially backfires when Willow feels the pain in everyone around the world and decides to destroy the world in order to end everyone's suffering. At the climax of the season, Xander prevents Willow from destroying the world by reminding her of their friendship and telling her that he loves her no matter what, the same way Tara did. She eventually breaks down, and the dark magic drains from her. Meanwhile, Buffy comes to terms with being alive again and promises to be there for her sister and friends.


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: At the end of the season, after attacking and attempting to rape Buffy, a remorseful and traumatized Spike leaves Sunnydale and travels to Africa to see a demon and asks him to "make him to what he used to be" so that he can "give Buffy what she deserves". The audience is led to believe that he was referring to the freedom to be evil (unrestrained by his punishment chip) and thus able to kill Buffy; however, after passing a series of tests, Spike is rewarded with the restoration of his soul.


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: Series creator Joss Whedon served as executive producer, but his role was diminished as he took a hiatus to write the musical episode, and later Fox ordered a new pilot from him, "Firefly". Whedon only ended up writing and directing one episode, the musical; this is also the only season where he didn't write and direct the season finale. Marti Noxon was promoted to executive producer and took over the duties of the showrunner and wrote three episodes. David Fury was promoted to co-executive producer and wrote four episodes, directing one of them, as well as writing the season finale. Jane Espenson was promoted to supervising producer and wrote or co-wrote four episodes. Douglas Petrie was promoted to producer, later to supervising producer midseason and wrote or co-wrote three episodes, including directing two of them. Steven S. DeKnight was promoted to story editor and wrote three episodes. Rebecca Rand Kirshner was promoted to story editor and wrote two episodes. New additions in the sixth season included Drew Z. Greenberg who wrote three episodes and Diego Gutierrez, who wrote a freelance episode after previously being an assistant to Whedon.


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: David Solomon (also producer) directed the highest number of episodes in the sixth season, directing five episodes. James A. Contner (also co-producer) and David Grossman each directed three.


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: The sixth season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" coincided with the third season of "Angel". With this season, "Buffy" switched networks from The WB to UPN, while "Angel" still remained on The WB. Because they were on competing networks, there were no official crossovers. At the time, WB Entertainment President Jordan Levin stated "There will be no crossovers between "Angel" and "Buffy". I think it's more important, in the long term, that "Angel" really establishes itself as a world that obviously comes from the same mythology, but operates with its own set of principles, guidelines and characters, and really establishes itself independently from "Buffy"." Although there are no distinct crossovers where characters appear on the other shows, there are moments where characters are mentioned or interactions between the two series' characters occur off screen.


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: At the end of the "Angel" episode "Carpe Noctem", Angel (David Boreanaz) receives a telephone call in which Willow tells him Buffy is alive. Buffy then receives a call from Angel at the end of "Flooded", and immediately leaves to meet with him. Although the phone call scenes happen on screen, neither Willow's side on "Angel" nor Angel's side on "Buffy" is shown. The scene between Buffy and Angel also happens off screen, but is described by them in the following episodes.


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: The series received four Primetime Emmy Award nominations, for Outstanding Hairstyling for a Series, Outstanding Makeup for a Series (Non-Prosthetic), and Outstanding Makeup for a Series (Prosthetic) for "Hell's Bells"; and Outstanding Music Direction for "Once More, with Feeling".


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, James Marsters, and Emma Caulfield were nominated for Satellite Awards for their performances.


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: The cast won a Special Achievement Award for Outstanding Television Ensemble at the Satellite Awards. The Futon Critic named "Life Serial" the 15th best episode of 2001, "Once More, with Feeling" the 3rd best episode of 2001 and "Normal Again" the 35th best episode of 2002.


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: Based on 21 reviews, Rotten Tomatoes gave season six a score of 67% with an average rating of 8.30 out of 10. The website's critics consensus states, ""Buffy" gets an A for effort, but a bleaker tone and some jarring plot twists make this penultimate season a series low."


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: "Once More, with Feeling" was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and for a Nebula Award for Best Script.


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: "Once More, with Feeling" received positive praise from media and critics when it aired, during overseas syndication, and in reminiscences of the best episodes of "Buffy" after the series ended. Although Salon.com writer Stephanie Zacharek states "(t)he songs were only half-memorable at best, and the singing ability of the show's regular cast ranged only from the fairly good to the not so great", she also asserts that it works "beautifully", paces itself gracefully, and is "clever and affecting". Tony Johnston in the "Herald Sun" writes that Gellar "struggles on some of her higher notes, but her dance routines are superb, Michelle Trachtenberg's Dawn reveals sensual dance moves way beyond her tender years, and James Marsters' Spike evokes a sort of Billy Idol yell to disguise his lack of vocal proficiency [...] The rest of the cast mix and match like ready-made Broadway troupers." Johnston counts "I'll Never Tell" as one of the episode's "standout moments". Connie Ogle in "The Miami Herald" calls the songs "better and far more clever than most of the ones you'll hear on Broadway these days".


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: Writers agree that the episode was risky and could have failed spectacularly. Jonathan Bernstein in the British newspaper "The Observer" writes "What could have been, at best, an eccentric diversion and, at worst, a shuddering embarrassment, succeeded on every level [...] It provided a startling demonstration that creator Joss Whedon has a facility with lyrics and melody equal to the one he's demonstrated for the past six seasons with dialogue, character and plot twists. Rather than adopt the 'Hey, wouldn't it be wacky if we suddenly burst into song?' approach practiced by "Ally McBeal", the "Buffy" musical was entirely organic to the series' labyrinthine progression." Steve Murray in "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution" characterizes the episode as "scary in a brand-new way", saying "Once More, with Feeling" is "as impressive as Whedon's milestone episodes 'Hush' and 'The Body; the episode is "often hilarious", according to Murray, and acts as "(b)oth spoof and homage, [parodying] the hokiness of musicals while also capturing the guilty pleasure and surges of feeling the genre inspires".


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: Scott Feschuk in Canada's "National Post" states that the episode "conveyed the same sense of rampant, runaway genius—the rare fusion of artful storytelling and ardent entertainment, a production capable of moving viewers to tears or to an awestruck rapture". Writing in the "Toronto Star", Vinay Menon calls "Once More, with Feeling" "dazzling" and writes of "Joss Whedon's inimitable genius"; he goes on to say "(f)or a show that already violates conventions and morphs between genres, its allegorical narrative zigging and zagging seamlessly across chatty comedy, drama and over-the-top horror, 'Once More, with Feeling' is a towering achievement [...] The show may be anchored by existential weightiness, it may be painted with broad, supernatural brushstrokes, but in the end, this coming-of-age story, filled with angst and alienation, is more real than any other so-called teen drama [...] So let's add another line of gushing praise: 'Once More, with Feeling' is rhapsodic, original, deeply affecting, and ultimately, transcendental. Quite simply, television at its best."


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: Season six of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is the most controversial amongst its ardent fandom because it was dramatically darker in tone than previous seasons; it has been called the show's "most hated season". Syfy Wire stated that the show's sixth season "has always been a thorn in its fandom's side. It was a little darker, a little meaner, and a little too different from what came before for the entrenched base to accept."


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: Joanna Robinson of "Vanity Fair" wrote on the 20th anniversary of the show's premiere that season 6, "a dark, unpopular chapter in the show's seven-year run...once its most hated - has become its most important." Robinson praised the introduction of the Evil Trio, the much-maligned "Big Bad" villains for season 6, as presaging the later trend of "entitled, misogynistic rhetoric that rose to the surface during the Gamergate culture wars of 2014, and has seemingly infiltrated everything since—the 2016 presidential election included." She concluded, positively, that "It may lack some of the trademark zip of the show in its prime, and critics of the Dark Willow storyline, in particular, are not wrong in their concerns. But with the luxury of historical context, Season 6 of Buffy carries more powerful resonance than any other moment in the show's history."


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: About the season's criticism, Joss Whedon says: "I love season 6. It’s really important. But it was a very stark thing to do. It wasn’t just putting Buffy in a very bad, abusive, weird relationship, it was some sort of an end to magic. For me because childhood is so rich with metaphor, a lot of it had to do with leaving that behind. Instead of a bigger than life villain, we had the nerd troika. Instead of drinking blood and doing spells as a sexual metaphor, we had sex. Things became very literal and they lost some of their loveliness. I still think that a lot of the best episodes we ever did were in season 6. I don’t agree with the detractors, but I understand it."


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: Acting as showrunner for season 6, Marti Noxon received the brunt of fan criticism, eventually stating in 2018 that she felt parts of season 6 "went too far." She elaborated that "We pushed into some categories that almost felt sadistic and that Buffy was volunteering for things that were beyond just “bad choices” and were almost irresponsible for the character. That may have to do with my own history...And I think that killing Tara was — in retrospect, of all the people, did she have to die?" She explained her rationale for taking "Buffy" in a darker direction, stating that "...I was really vocal about wanting Buffy to make some bad mistakes. My argument was that, when we become young women, especially if we're troubled or haunted by something, that can lead us to make some bad choices, especially in the area of romance."


title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6)

text: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer": The Complete Sixth Season was released on DVD in region 1 on May 25, 2004 on in region 2 on May 12, 2003. The DVD includes all 22 episodes on 6 discs presented in full frame 1.33:1 aspect ratio (region 1) and in anamorphic widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio (region 2 and 4); "Once More, with Feeling" is presented in letterbox widescreen on the region 1 release. Special features on the DVD include six commentary tracks—"Bargaining (Parts 1 & 2)" by writers Marti Noxon and David Fury; "Once More, with Feeling" by writer and director Joss Whedon; "Smashed" by writer Drew Z. Greenberg; "Hell's Bells" by writer Rebecca Rand Kirshner and director David Solomon; and "Grave" by writer David Fury and director James A. Contner. Episode-specific featurettes include a 30-minute documentary on the musical episode as well as karaoke music videos for several musical numbers. "Buffy Gets a Job" features several of the cast and crew members discussing their first jobs and dream jobs. Other featurettes include, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Panel Discussion with cast and crew members; ""Buffy the Vampire Slayer": Television with a Bite", a 43-minute A&E Network documentary from their "Biography" series that details its popularity and critical reception with interviews with cast and crew members; and "Life is the Big Bad – Season Six Overview", a 30-minute featurette where cast and crew members discuss the season. Also included are series outtakes and DVD-ROM content.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: Anti-personnel mines are a form of mine designed for use against humans, as opposed to anti-tank mines, which are designed for use against vehicles. Anti-personnel mines may be classified into blast mines or fragmentation mines; the latter may or may not be a bounding mine.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: The mines are often designed to injure, not kill, their victims to increase the logistical (mostly medical) support required by enemy forces that encounter them. Some types of anti-personnel mines can also damage the tracks on armoured vehicles or the tires of wheeled vehicles.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: The International Campaign to Ban Landmines has sought to ban mines culminating in the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, although this treaty has not yet been accepted by over 30 countries.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: Anti-personnel mines are used in a similar manner to anti-tank mines, in static "mine fields" along national borders or in defense of strategic positions as described in greater detail in the land mine article. What makes them different from most anti-tank mines, however, is their smaller size, which enables large numbers to be simultaneously deployed over a large area. This process can be done manually, via dispensers on land vehicles, or from helicopters or aircraft. Alternatively, they can be dispensed by cargo-carrying artillery shells.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: Other uses specific to anti-personnel mines are where they are deployed on an ad hoc basis in the following situations:


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: Typically, anti-personnel blast mines are triggered when the victim steps on them. Their primary purpose is to blow the victim's foot or leg off, disabling them. Injuring, rather than killing, the victim is viewed as preferable to increase the logistical (evacuation, medical) burden on the opposing force.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: When a person steps on a blast mine and activates it, the mine's main charge detonates, creating a blast shock wave consisting of hot gases travelling at extremely high velocity. The shock wave sends a huge compressive force upwards, ejecting the mine casing and any soil covering the mine along with it. When the blast wave hits the surface, it quickly transfers the force into the subject's footwear and foot. This results in a massive compression force being applied. In most cases, the victim's foot is blown off by the blast wave.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: The resulting injuries to a human body depend on the size of the mine's main charge, the depth, type of soil it was laid in and how the victim contacted it, e.g. stepping on the mine, using all or part of the foot. Different types of soil will result in different amounts of energy being transferred upward into the subject's foot, with saturated "clay-like" soil transferring the most. Larger main charges result in a release of significantly more energy, driving the blast wave further up a target's foot and leg and causing greater injury, in some cases even described as severe as traumatic amputation of the leg up to the knee.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: Secondary injuries from a blast mine are often caused by the material that has been torn loose by the mine's explosion. This consists of the soil and stones that were on top of the mine, parts of the victim's footwear and the small bones in the victim's foot. This debris creates wounds typical of similar secondary blast effects or fragmentation. Special footwear, including combat boots or so-called "blast boots", is only moderately protective against the destructive effects of blast mines, and the loss of a foot is a typical outcome.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: Blast mines have little effect on armoured vehicles, but can damage a wheeled vehicle if it runs directly over the mine. Small blast mines will severely damage a tire, rendering it irreparable while some types could also damage adjacent running gear.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: The mine casing houses the components of the mine and protects it from its environment. Early mines, such as the ones used in the World War II era, had casings made of steel or aluminium. However, by the middle of the conflict, the British Army was using the first, practical, portable metal detector – the Polish mine detector. The Germans responded with mines that had a wooden or glass casing to make detection harder.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: Wooden mines had been used by the Soviets in 1939, before the appearance of metal detectors, to save steel. Some, like the PP Mi-D mine, continued to be used into the 1980s as they were easy to make and hard to detect. Wood has the disadvantage of rotting and splitting, rendering the mine non-functional after a comparatively short time in the ground (or the advantage, in that the mine can be considered self-disabling, and will be less likely to cause unintended injuries years later).


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: Mines manufactured after the 1950s generally use plastic casings to hinder detection by electronic mine detectors. Some, referred to as minimum metal mines, are constructed with as little metal as possible – often around – to make them difficult to detect. Mines containing absolutely no metal have been produced, but are uncommon. By its nature, a mine without any metal components in it cannot be found using a metal detector.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: The fuze mechanism is designed to set off the detonator, either by striking it with a spring-loaded firing pin, compressing a friction sensitive pyrotechnic composition, or by passing an electric charge through it. Most mines employ a spring-loaded striker that hits a stab detonator when activated by the victim. Typically, the detonator contains a tiny pellet of lead azide. The fuze is the most complicated component in any mine, although the amount of effort required to design and manufacture a simple fuze mechanism is quite low, similar to the retraction mechanism in a ballpoint pen.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: More sophisticated examples, such as the Italian SB-33 mine, have a fuze mechanism that detonates the mine if subject to gradual, steady pressure, but locks the fuze if subject to a sudden shock. This defeats one of the main methods of clearing a path through a minefield – detonating the mines with explosive devices, such as mine-clearing line charges.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: The booster charge is a highly sensitive explosive that will activate easily when subjected to the shock of the detonator. Typically, a pea-sized pellet of RDX is used. The purpose of the booster is to amplify the shock of the detonator and initiate the main explosive charge.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: The main charge consists of a stable explosive that is detonated by the booster charge. This is necessary, because making a mine entirely out of a highly sensitive detonator or booster explosive would be more expensive, and make the device more sensitive and thereby susceptible to accidental detonation. In most AP blast mines TNT, Composition B or phlegmatized RDX are used. On a US M14 mine, 29 grams of tetryl is used, while 240 grams of TNT is used in a Russian PMN mine.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: Anti-personnel blast mines are the most common type and are typically deployed on the surface (hidden by leaves or rocks) or buried under soil at a depth of 10–15 cm. They are activated by pressure, i.e. when the victim steps on them, but it could also be a vehicle driving over them.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: They were designed for use as area denial weapons. Weapons of this type are supposed to deny opposing military forces access to a specific area.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: While blast mines are designed to cause severe injury to one person, fragmentation mines (such as the World War II era German S-mine) are designed to project fragments across a wide area, causing fragmentation wounds to nearby personnel.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: Fragmentation mines are generally much larger and heavier than blast mines, and contain a large amount (often several kilograms) of ferrous metal. As such, they are easy to detect if the environment is not too heavily contaminated with iron.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: These mines are deemed to be more efficient than purely "blast effect" mines, because the shrapnel covers a greater area, potentially injuring more combatants.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: The shrapnel from these mines can even disable some armoured vehicles, by puncturing their tires and—in the case of soft-skinned vehicles—also penetrating the skin and damaging internal components or injuring personnel. Because fragmentation mines generally contain a much larger charge than blast mines, they can cause severe damage to an unarmoured vehicle which runs directly over one.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: These mines (such as the Russian POMZ) are entirely above ground, having a fragmenting warhead mounted on a stake at a suitable height, concealed by vegetation or rubbish and triggered by one or more tripwires.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: Bounding mines have a small lifting charge that, when activated, launches the main body of the mine out of the ground before it detonates at around chest height. This produces a more lethal spray of shrapnel over a larger area. One such mine – the US M16 mine – can cause injuries up to away. The steel shrapnel makes bounding mines easy to detect, so they may be surrounded by minimum metal mines to make mine clearance harder.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: Directional fragmentation weapons (such as the M18 Claymore) differ from other types in that they are designed to direct their fragments only in a limited arc. They are placed so that the blast will be directed at the target area and away from friendly forces. This design also allows forces to protect themselves by placing these types of mines near their own positions, but facing the enemy. They are triggered in a conventional manner with either tripwire or command detonation. They are generally referred to as "claymore mines" from the US mine of this type.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: In the conflicts of the 21st century, anti-personnel improvised explosive devices (IED) have replaced conventional or military landmines as the source of injury to dismounted (pedestrian) soldiers and civilians. These injuries were recently reported in BMJ Open to be far worse than landmines, resulting in multiple limb amputations and lower body mutilation. This combination of injuries has been given the name "Dismounted Complex Blast Injury" and is thought to be the worst survivable injury ever seen in war.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: During World War II, flame mines known as the flame fougasse were produced by the British during the invasion crisis of 1940. Later, the Soviets produced a flame-mine, called the FOG-1. This was copied by the Germans to produce the Abwehrflammenwerfer 42, these devices were effectively disposable, trip-wire triggered flamethrowers.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: Chemical mines have also been made. They were made by Britain, the US and the Soviet Union during World War II, but never deployed. During the Cold War, the US produced the M23 chemical mine containing VX. A small explosive charge burst the mine open and dispersed the chemical when the mine was triggered.


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: Anti-personnel mines are a typical example of subject-matter excluded from patentability under the European Patent Convention, because the publication or exploitation of such inventions are contrary to the "ordre public" and/or morality ().


title: Anti-personnel mine

text: The author Rob Nixon has criticized the use of the adjective "anti-personnel" to describe mines, noting that the word "personnel" signifies people engaged in a particular organization, whereas in reality "four-fifths of mine casualties are civilians", in particular children. Thus, he argues, the name "flatters their accuracy by implying that they target an organization, military or otherwise."


title: Notorious (Duran Duran album)

text: Notorious is the fourth studio album by English new wave band Duran Duran, released on 21 November 1986 by EMI Records. The album peaked at number 16 on the UK Albums Chart and at number 12 on the US "Billboard" 200. Produced by the band with Nile Rodgers, the album showcased a new 'funk-pop' musical direction for the band, emphasizing bass and brass, as exemplified by the singles "Notorious" and "Skin Trade".


title: Notorious (Duran Duran album)

text: In 2010, EMI released a raft of material surrounding the "Notorious" reissue consisting of a two-disc set, a deluxe three-disc set, a digital only EP and a digital only live album. The box set also includes remixes, live tracks and the "Working for the Skin Trade" live video (for the first time on DVD).


title: Notorious (Duran Duran album)

text: After their extensive 1984 world tour Duran Duran took a break and eventually split into two different side projects, Arcadia and the Power Station. When they reconvened in 1986 to record a new studio album with Nile Rodgers the band faced several problems and conflicts. Drummer Roger Taylor was too exhausted to continue in the music business, and guitarist Andy Taylor soon also left the band after taking part in some early recording sessions for the album. The remaining three members continued as a trio, recruiting Missing Persons guitarist Warren Cuccurullo and drummer Steve Ferrone to play on the album.


title: Notorious (Duran Duran album)

text: In years to come, the band would refer to "Notorious" as their Alfred Hitchcock-inspired album. This is due to having a number of tracks titled after Hitchcock movies. In addition to the album and lead single named for the film "Notorious" (1946), there was also "Vertigo" (1958) and "Rope" (1948), the original title for "Hold Me".


title: Notorious (Duran Duran album)

text: The album's lead single "Notorious" was a commercial success, reaching number two in the United States and number seven in the United Kingdom. It was the first Duran Duran single to be released with a second remix 12-inch single, led off by a remix by The Latin Rascals.


title: Notorious (Duran Duran album)

text: "Skin Trade" was a Bowie-flavoured track notable for Le Bon singing in a Prince-like falsetto, as well as featuring the Borneo Horns quite heavily. Bassist John Taylor has since been quoted as saying that his disillusion with the charts began when "Skin Trade" failed to reach the UK top 20.


title: Notorious (Duran Duran album)

text: The sleeve to the "Skin Trade" single was banned in several countries, as it featured an airbrushed naked female buttock. In the UK and US, the single was released in a plain pink/red sleeve, though the original sleeve was released in Canada and France.


title: Notorious (Duran Duran album)

text: To commemorate the band's 1987 Strange Behaviour Tour, several promotional-only remixes were commissioned for "Skin Trade", including the "Parisian Mix" and the "S.O.S. Dub". These were initially released on a US-only promotional 12-inch single with mixes of "Meet El Presidente" on the flip-side.


title: Notorious (Duran Duran album)

text: ""Meet El Presidente"", released to coincide with the tour in April 1987, reached No. 24 in the UK. It was their first single to be released on CD (catalogue number CD TOUR 1), which featured all the tracks from the 12-inch vinyl single. In the US, the single was released under the title "The Presidential Suite".


title: Notorious (Duran Duran album)

text: "A Matter of Feeling" was released in January 1988 as a promotional single in Brazil. Prior to this it was included on the original soundtrack to the Brazilian telenovela "Mandala" (1987–1988), produced by Rede Globo.


title: Notorious (Duran Duran album)

text: To drum up further interest in the album, a collection of otherwise unavailable remixes was released on a promotional double 12-inch pack titled "Master Mixes" (1987) in the US and Hong Kong.


title: True Stories (Talking Heads album)

text: True Stories is the seventh studio album by American rock band Talking Heads. It was released on September 15, 1986, by Sire Records, preceding lead singer David Byrne's related film "True Stories".


title: True Stories (Talking Heads album)

text: The album includes only Talking Heads studio recordings of songs from the film; an original cast recording from the film was planned, but was not released at the time, although some actors' performances were featured on singles of songs drawn from the album. Later that year, Byrne released the album "Sounds from True Stories" containing incidental music from the soundtrack. In 2018, a complete film soundtrack album was finally released, combining cast performances from the film and tracks from the two previous albums; only those three performances by Talking Heads from the first "True Stories" album that are actually heard in the film were included.


title: True Stories (Talking Heads album)

text: The single "Wild Wild Life" became the most prominent hit from the album, accompanied by its video airplay on MTV. The "Wild Wild Life" video won two MTV Video Music Awards in 1987: "Best Group Video" and "Best Video from a Film" (the video is in fact an extended sequence lifted directly from the film itself). A video for "Love for Sale" was created for use in the film (during a sequence when a woman, played by Swoosie Kurtz, watches the video on TV), and an extended version was later released as a video in its own right.


title: True Stories (Talking Heads album)

text: In 2006, the album was re-released and remastered by Warner Music Group on their Warner Bros./Sire Records/Rhino Records labels in DualDisc format, with three bonus tracks on the CD side (an extended mix of "Wild Wild Life", "Papa Legba" with vocal by Pops Staples, and "Radio Head" with vocals by Tito Larriva). The DVD-Audio side includes both stereo and 5.1 surround high resolution (96 kHz/24bit) mixes, as well as a Dolby Digital version and the videos of "Wild Wild Life" and "Love for Sale". In Europe, it was released as a CD+DVDA two disc set rather than a single DualDisc. The reissue was produced by Andy Zax with Talking Heads.


title: True Stories (Talking Heads album)

text: From contemporary reviews, Ken Tucker of "The Philadelphia Inquirer" gave the album a three out of four stars rating, stating the album was "gently melodic pop, with little of the polyrhythmic aggressiveness that has characterized recent Talking Heads albums." Tucker found that "some of the songs verge on triteness or banality" but "Love for Sale" and "People Like Us" were "beautiful rock music."