Grass (Animal Collective song)

"Grass" is the first single from Animal Collective's 2005 album, Feels. Upon its release, it was showered with critical praise for its delicate balance of melodic pop sensibilities and discordant yelping. Pitchfork Media listed the song at #31 on its list of Top 50 Singles of 2005, claiming it is "as infectious as anything on the pop charts this year, and lots more fun to scream along with". The song was subsequently placed at #73 in the same publication's list of "Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s". Stylus also placed it in its Top 50 Singles of 2005 (this time at #44), praising the band's ability to "play tug of war between typical pop dynamics and the skewed perspective of experimental music". The title track was included in the 2008 book The Pitchfork 500.

The single was released in the United Kingdom on both CD and 7" vinyl. On March 21, 2006, it was released in the U.S. and Canada (July 3, 2006 worldwide) with a bonus DVD; the DVD contains music videos for "Grass", "Who Could Win a Rabbit" and "Fickle Cycle", as well as a video and sound collage, "Lake Damage", made by Brian DeGaw of Gang Gang Dance.

Grass (1999 film)

Grass: History of Marijuana is a 1999 Canadian documentary film directed by Ron Mann, premiered in Toronto Film Festival, about the history of the United States government's war on marijuana in the 20th century. The film was narrated by actor Woody Harrelson.

Overview

The film follows the history of US federal policies and social attitudes towards marijuana, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century. The history presented is broken up into parts, approximately the length of a decade, each of which is introduced by paraphrasing the official attitude towards marijuana at the time (e.g. "Marijuana will make you insane" or "Marijuana will make you addicted to heroin"), and closed by providing a figure for the amount of money spent during that period on the "war on marijuana."

The film places much of the blame for marijuana criminalization on Harry Anslinger (the first American drug czar) who promoted false information about marijuana to the American public as a means towards abolition. It later shows how the federal approach to criminalization became more firmly entrenched after Richard Nixon declared a "War on Drugs" and created the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973, and even more so a decade later and on, as First Lady Nancy Reagan introduced the "Just Say No" campaign and President George H.W. Bush accelerated the War on Drugs. The film ends during the Bill Clinton administration, which had accelerated spending even further on the War on Drugs.

Grass (novel)

Grass is a 1989 science fiction novel by Sheri S. Tepper. Nominated for both the Hugo and Locus awards in 1990, in 2002 it was included in the SF Masterworks collection. It is the first novel in Tepper's Arbai trilogy.

Plot summary

Chief protagonist Marjorie Westriding-Yrarier juggles family issues and her conflicting religious beliefs as her family is sent to the little-understood world of Grass to seek a cure for the mysterious alien plague afflicting all of mankind. The first stage of this search will be to befriend the human aristocracy of the planet who have seemingly become obsessed with a localised variant of fox hunting using the planet’s native fauna in place of the horses, hounds and foxes found on Earth.

Background

In the distant future Terra (Earth) has become massively over-populated and its resources overstretched. Partially as a result of this, the human race has spread out across the galaxy and populated new worlds. One such world is the eponymous Grass, so named because almost its entire surface is covered in multi-coloured prairie.

Betrayal

Betrayal is the breaking or violation of a presumptive contract, trust, or confidence that produces moral and psychological conflict within a relationship amongst individuals, between organizations or between individuals and organizations. Often betrayal is the act of supporting a rival group, or it is a complete break from previously decided upon or presumed norms by one party from the others. Someone who betrays others is commonly called a traitor or betrayer. Betrayal is also a commonly used literary element and is often associated with or used as a plot twist.

Definition

Rodger L. Jackson, author of the article, The Sense and Sensibility of Betrayal: Discovering the Meaning of Treachery Through Jane Austen, writes that "there has been surprisingly little written about what we even mean by the term". In psychology, practitioners describe betrayal as the breaking of a social contract; however, critics of this approach claim that the term social contract does not accurately reflect the conditions and motivations for, and effects of, betrayal. Philosophers Judith Shklar and Peter Johnson, authors of The Ambiguities of Betrayal and Frames of Deceit respectively, contend that while no clear definition of betrayal is available, betrayal is more effectively understood through literature.

Betrayer (video game)

Betrayer is a first-person action-adventure video game developed by Blackpowder Games. The game was released on the Steam platform for the PC on March 24, 2014. Set in colonial Virginia in the 17th century, the game includes stealth elements, with players stalking their enemies and using colonial weaponry to defeat them.

Gameplay

Betrayer is a stealth horror action-adventure played from a first-person perspective. It uses a monochrome art style that Eurogamer's Dan Whitehead described as "undeniably striking". The game has no clear missions or markers for quest objectives, aiming to initially perplex players by not providing a defined sense of direction. Sound plays a central role in exploring the game world, as it is used to lead the player to clues and other points of interest. While progressing, any clues found are meticulously documented in the inventory windows. Similar to The Elder Scrolls series, players can quickly navigate from one location to another by clicking a point-of-interest icon on the game's map.

Foreigner universe

The Foreigner universe is a fictional universe created by science fiction and fantasy author C. J. Cherryh. The series centers on the descendants of a ship lost in transit from Earth en route to found a new space station. It consists of six semi-encapsulated trilogy arcs (or sequences) that focus on the life of Bren Cameron, the human paidhi, a translator-diplomat to the court of the ruling Aiji of the atevi aishidi'tat. Currently sixteen of the eighteen novels have been published between 1994 and 2015. Cherryh has also self-published two ebook short story prequels to the series, "Deliberations" (October 2012) and "Invitations" (August 2013).

Cherryh calls the series "First Contact."

Works