Portal

Portal may refer to:

Computing

Gateways to information

Other

Entertainment

Portal (interactive novel)

Portal is a mix between a computerized novel and an interactive game. It was published for the Amiga in 1986 by Activision, written by Rob Swigart, produced by Brad Fregger, and programmed by Nexa Corporation. Versions for the Commodore 64, Apple II, and DOS were later released. Versions for the Macintosh and Atari ST were announced and developed, but never formally released. A unique game for its time, Portal was one part text-driven adventure (à la Zork or Planetfall) but with a graphical interface. It is unrelated to the game Portal (2007) by Valve Corporation.

Setting

The player, taking on the role of the unnamed astronaut protagonist, returns from a failed 100-year voyage to 61 Cygni to find the Earth devoid of humans. Cars are rusted and covered with moss, the streets are completely barren and everything appears as though the entire human race had just vanished suddenly. The player happens upon a barely functioning computer terminal that is tied into a storytelling mainframe, Homer. Through this interface, the player, assisted by Homer who attempts to weave the information into a coherent narrative, discovers information in order to piece together the occurrences leading to the disappearance of the human race. For instance, spending some time in the Medical Records section may unlock a piece of data in the Science section, and through these links the player can finish the game.

Portal (Australian band)

Portal is an Australian extreme metal band known for its unorthodox fusion of death metal with black metal. The band's hybrid musical style is characterised by heavily distorted guitar riffs, down-tuned rhythms, and vocals ranging from "menacing, echoing" sound effects to guttural grunts. Writing for Popmatters, Adrien Begrand noted that "death metal always pretends to be scary, but [...] it's all rather harmless. That said, however, I make no mistake in saying that the death metal peddled by Australia’s Portal is truly friggin' terrifying". Lead guitarist Horror Illogium has described Portal's intent as "to capture a cinematic horror scope".

Musical style

Portal's main musical influences were Morbid Angel, Beherit, and Immolation. Describing the band's style, Decibel magazine said: "If Morbid Angel and Gorguts had birthed a German Expressionist child, that unholy creature would be Portal." The band has been praised for its "hellish atmosphere" and "distant, obscure" interpretation of extreme metal. Denise Falzon, writing for Exclaim!, described Portal's 2004 EP, The Sweyy, as "extremely raw [...] with heavily distorted guitar riffs that aid in the album's overall chaotic and apocalyptic atmosphere". The band's style has also been described as oriented around "constant dissonance", "sporadic compositions", and "abstract themes". However, lead guitarist Horror Illogium has disputed the view that the band's songwriting lacks structure: "We are indeed making songs, although our structures are unusual. They are constructed with a great deal of artistic, obsessive scrutiny [...] An insane asylum is a structure; our songs can be viewed as structures housing insane elements".

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.

Poetry has a long history, dating back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Early poems evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively informative, prosaic forms of writing. From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more generally regarded as a fundamental creative act employing language.

Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretation to words, or to evoke emotive responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly figures of speech such as metaphor, simile and metonymy create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm.

Poetry (disambiguation)

Poetry is a form of literature.

Poetry may also refer to:

Poetry magazine

Poetry (founded as, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse), published in Chicago since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Don Share, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000, and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately 100,000 submissions. It is sometimes referred to as Poetry—Chicago.

Poetry has been financed since 2003 with a $200 million bequest from Ruth Lilly.

History

The magazine was founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, an author who was then working as an art critic for the Chicago Tribune. She wrote at that time:

"The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free from entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written. Nor will the magazine promise to limit its editorial comments to one set of opinions."