List of Buffy the Vampire Slayer characters

This article lists the major and recurring fictional characters created by Joss Whedon for the television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For detailed descriptions, see individual character pages.

Main characters

The following characters were featured in the opening credits of the program.

The show's titular protagonist, Buffy is "The Slayer", one in a long line of young girls chosen by fate to battle evil forces in the form of vampires and demons. The Slayer has no jurisdiction over human crime. This calling mystically endows her with a limited degree of clairvoyance, usually in the form of prophetic dreams, as well as dramatically increased physical strength, endurance, agility, intuition, and speed and ease of healing. There traditionally has been only one Slayer alive at any given moment, with a new one called upon the event of her death.

Xander is a close friend of Buffy. Possessing no supernatural skills, Xander provides comic relief as well as a grounded, everyman perspective in the supernatural Buffyverse. In another departure from the usual conventions of television, Xander is notable for being an insecure and subordinate male in a world dominated by powerful females.

Master (naval)

The master, or sailing master, was a historic term for a naval officer trained in and responsible for the navigation of a sailing vessel. The rank can be equated to a professional seaman and specialist in navigation, rather than as a military commander.

In the British Royal Navy, the master was originally a warrant officer who ranked with, but after, the lieutenants. The rank became a commissioned officer rank and was renamed to navigating lieutenant in 1867; the rank gradually fell out of use from around c1890 since all lieutenants were required to pass the same exams.

When the United States Navy was formed in 1794, master was listed as one of the warrant officer ranks and ranked between midshipmen and lieutenants. The rank was also a commissioned officer rank from 1837 until it was replaced with the current rank of lieutenant, junior grade in 1883.

Royal Navy

In the Middle Ages, when 'warships' were typically merchant vessels hired by the crown, the man in charge of the ship and its mariners, as with all ships and indeed most endeavours ashore, was termed the Master; the company of embarked soldiers was commanded by their own Captain.

Power!

Power! (known as Critical Mass in Europe) is a computer game developed by Simon Francis in 1985 for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.

Plot

The player operates a rocket-powered hovercraft whose mission is to destroy an enemy transfer beam that is protected not only by long-distance enemy raiders and mines, but also molecular disorientation that sucks the energy from the player's attack craft.

Gameplay

The player may control the hovercraft in either a normal joystick operational mode or with vectored movement. When the player pushes forward on the joystick, the hovercraft accelerates, and when pulling back on the joystick, speed decreases.

Reception

In 1988, Dragon reviewed Power!, and gave the game 4 out of 5 stars.

References

External links

PoweredUSB

PoweredUSB, also known as Retail USB, USB PlusPower, and USB +Power, is an addition to the Universal Serial Bus standard that allows for higher-power devices to obtain power through their USB host instead of requiring an independent power supply or external AC adapter. It is mostly used in point-of-sale equipment, such as receipt printers and barcode readers.

History

PoweredUSB, as a proprietary variant of USB, was developed and proposed by IBM, Berg (now FCI), NCR and Microsoft between 1998 and 1999, with the last revision (0.8g) issued in 2004. The specification is not endorsed by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF). IBM, who owns patents to PoweredUSB, charges a licensing fee for its use.

PoweredUSB was licensed by Hewlett-Packard, Cyberdata, Fujitsu, Wincor and others.

Implementation

PoweredUSB uses a more complex connector than standard USB, maintaining the standard USB 1.x/2.0 interface for data communications and adding a second connector for power. Physically, it is essentially two connectors stacked such that the bottom connector accepts a standard USB plug and the top connector takes a power plug.

Power (KMFDM song)

"Power" is the first track on the KMFDM album Xtort. It was used to promote the album before its release in the summer of 1996. It was released in two limited edition vinyl pressings and as a CD single.

Background

KMFDM was preparing to release their ninth studio album Xtort. TVT Records was heavily promoting its release, and used "Power" as the single to help spread awareness of the upcoming album. "Power" was featured on the "Wax Trax! Summer Swindle", a cassette sampler included with 45,000 issues of the July 1996 issue of Alternative Press. Another 50,000 copies of the sampler were handed out at summer college and beach events and given away to radio stations.

Release

"Power" was released as a 12" vinyl pressing of 3000 individually numbered copies on August 15, 1996. The A-side contained the track, while the B-side had an etched KMFDM logo. A CD single was also released containing an edited version of the track.

On August 1, 2009, the single was released as a 7" vinyl pressing of 250 copies. This release included the track "Dogma" as a B-side.