Edward Theodore "Ed" Gein (/ˈɡiːn/) (August 27, 1906 – July 26, 1984) was an American killer and body snatcher. His crimes, committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety after authorities discovered Gein had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin. Gein confessed to killing two women – tavern owner Mary Hogan on December 8, 1954, and a Plainfield hardware store owner, Bernice Worden, on November 16, 1957. Initially found unfit for trial, after confinement in a mental health facility, in 1968 Gein was found guilty but legally insane for the murder of Worden and was confined in psychiatric institutions. He died at Mendota Mental Health Institute of cancer-induced liver and respiratory failure on July 26, 1984. He is buried in the Plainfield Cemetery, in a now-unmarked grave.
Edward Theodore Gein was born in La Crosse County, Wisconsin, USA, on August 27, 1906, the second of two boys of George Philip (August 4, 1873 – April 1, 1940) and Augusta Wilhelmine (née Lehrke) Gein (July 21, 1878 – December 29, 1945.) Gein had an older brother, Henry George Gein (January 17, 1901 – May 16, 1944). Augusta despised her husband, and considered him a failure for being an alcoholic who was unable to keep a job; he had worked at various times as a carpenter, tanner, and insurance salesman. Augusta owned a local grocery shop and sold the location in 1914 for a farm to purposely live in isolation near Plainfield, Wisconsin, which became the Gein family's permanent residence.
Gein may refer to:
The fictional characters from the Rurouni Kenshin manga series were created by Nobuhiro Watsuki. Set in a fictional version of Japan during the Meiji period, several of the characters are real life people who interact with the fictional characters.
The story follows a pacifist wanderer named Himura Kenshin who was previously an assassin known as "Hitokiri Battōsai" (人斬り抜刀斎) working for the Isshin Shishi during the Bakumatsu period. After helping Kamiya Kaoru, the instructor of a kendo school in Tokyo called Kamiya Kasshin-ryū, in defeating a criminal he is invited by her to stay in her dojo. During his stay in Tokyo, Kenshin befriends new people including Myōjin Yahiko, a young child descendant from Samurai family starts training with Kaoru, Sagara Sanosuke, a former Sekihō who enjoys fighting, and Takani Megumi, a doctor previously involved with illegal drug trade. He also meets old and new enemies whose ambitions cause Kenshin's return to fight to protect the innocent people.
A weapon, arm, or armament is any device used with intent to inflict damage or harm to living beings, structures, or systems. Weapons are used to increase the efficacy and efficiency of activities such as crime, law enforcement, self-defense, and warfare. In a broader context, weapons may be construed to include anything used to gain a strategic, material or mental advantage over an adversary.
While just about any ordinary objects such as sticks, stones, cars, or pencils can be used as weapons, many are expressly designed for the purpose – ranging from simple implements such as clubs, swords and guns, and to complicated modern intercontinental ballistic missiles, biological and cyberweapons.
The use of objects as weapons has been observed among chimpanzees, leading to speculation that early hominids first began to use weapons as early as five million years ago. However, this can not be confirmed using physical evidence because wooden clubs, spears, and unshaped stones would not have left an unambiguous record. The earliest unambiguous weapons to be found are the Schöninger Speere: eight wooden throwing spears dated as being more than 300,000 years old. At the site of Nataruk in Turkana, Kenya, numerous human skeletons dating to 10,000 years ago have major traumatic injuries to the head, neck, ribs, knees and hands, including obsidian projectiles still embedded in the bones, that would have been caused by arrows and clubs in the context of conflict between two hunter-gatherer groups.
Although each installment of the Final Fantasy series is generally set in a different fictional world with separate storylines, there are several commonalities when it comes to character design, as certain design themes repeat themselves, as well as specific character names and classes. Within the main series, Yoshitaka Amano was the character designer for Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI, Tetsuya Nomura was the character designer for Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIII, Yoshitaka Amano created and did the concept art for the characters while Toshiyuki Itahana was the final character designer for Final Fantasy IX, and Akihiko Yoshida was the character designer for Final Fantasy XII.
The series has often featured male characters with slightly effeminate characteristics, as well as female characters with slightly tomboyish, but still feminine, characteristics. This trend has generally increased as the series evolved. These characters are usually teenagers, which some critics have interpreted as an effort on the part of the designers to ensure the players identify with them. At the same time, some female characters have been increasingly designed to wear very revealing outfits. Square Enix has stated that a more rugged looking hero had been considered for Final Fantasy XII but had ultimately been scrapped in favor of Vaan, another effeminate protagonist. The developers cited scenaristic reasons and target demographic considerations to explain their choice. For Final Fantasy XIII, Square Enix settled on a female main character, described as a "female version of Cloud from FFVII." This aspect of Final Fantasy can also be seen in Sora, the protagonist of Kingdom Hearts, a crossover series featuring Final Fantasy and Disney characters.
Weapon is a 1989 science fiction novel by Robert Mason. The book was Mason's first novel; he had previously written a memoir about his experiences in Vietnam titled Chickenhawk. The book is about an android, designed to kill, which experiences a crisis of conscience and runs away from its government masters to live in a Nicaraguan village.
The novel describes a new weapon system being developed for the US military, named Solo. A robot, Solo is designed to replace human soldiers in battle. It is humanoid in shape, in order to allow it to use all the military vehicles and equipment human soldiers do. Solo is capable of feats of great speed, strength and endurance.
Most importantly, Solo is governed by a neural network computer which is able to learn and think much as a human brain does. The robot's designer recognises that this could potentially make Solo as unpredictable and difficult to control as any human is; the military therefore insist that Solo be told a carefully edited version of world history and politics in which the United States are in all cases the unambiguously "good guys" and winners of all conflicts - for example Solo is told that the US won a clear victory in the Vietnam War.