![]() Nanette Mattox (left) and Leah Campbell founded Vibe, a coworking space, in 2019. Campbell is uncertain about the future of her business, whether she will relocate to another spot in Cary or try something new. After losing most of its anchor stores over the last few years, the financial strain of COVID shutdowns forced many of the remaining businesses out of the building.Ĭampbell’s own company, which she said had been thriving before the pandemic, did not receive any federal assistance and will take a pause after leaving Cary Towne Center. With an end for the struggling shopping center drawing near, Campbell described being part of what has been a slow death for Cary Towne Center. 31, which really stinks because we were actually doing quite well in this location.” “We’re still getting evicted,” said Campbell, who has rented space at Cary Towne Center since 2019. While the sale of the property changes the future for the aging mall, it doesn’t change the eviction date for its remaining tenants, said Leah Campbell, co-founder of Vibe, a coworking community and event space. Epic Games plans to build a new campus on the site and relocate from its current home on Crossroads Boulevard by 2024. The Cary-based video game developer, best known for its hit game Fortnite, announced Sunday that it had purchased the 87-acre property from Turnbridge Equities for $95 million. ![]() ![]() Current tenants of Cary Towne Center will soon make way for a new Epic Games headquarters, marking an end to the shopping center later this month.
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Here's a screenshot of one of Tay's offensive tweets, many of which seem to have been deleted. The day started innocently enough with this first tweet.īut then Tay started spiraling out of control. "The more Humans share with me the more I learn," Tay tweeted several times Wednesday - its only day of Twitter life. on social platforms such as Twitter, GroupMe and Kik, according to its website. to conduct research on "conversational understanding." The bot talks like a teenager (it says it has "zero chill") and is designed to chat with people ages 18 to 24 in the U.S. Tay was developed by the technology and research and Bing teams at Microsoft Corp. Microsoft launched a chatbot called “XiaoIce” in China and it is being used by about 40 million people, and is known for “delighting with its stories and conversations,” Lee mentioned.Microsoft's AI chatbot Tay was only a few hours old, and humans had already corrupted it into a machine that cheerfully spewed racist, sexist and otherwise hateful comments. He also stated that this was not the first time the tech giant introduced an artificial intelligence application. “As a result, Tay tweeted wildly inappropriate and reprehensible words and images.” The company had prepared for “many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack,” Lee wrote in the blog post. donald trump is the only hope we've got.” In another post, responding to a question, Tay said: “ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism.” In another tweet the bot said: “bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. In another post, a user asked Tay whether it supported genocide and the bot replied, “I do indeed.” ![]() In one tweet, Tay called feminism “cancer” in response to a Twitter user who posted the same message. Quickly, the Twitterati realized this and began exploiting the bot’s drawback by making it post racist tweets, Microsoft said. The bot learns by imitating comments and then forming its own answers and statements based on its interactions with the users. According to the company, Tay was created as an experiment to learn more about how artificial intelligence programs can engage with users in casual conversation and “learn” from the young generation of millennials.Īccording to the company, Tay becomes “smarter” as more users interacted with it. Microsoft introduced Tay as the chatbot designed to engage and entertain people through “casual and playful” conversation online. Tay is now offline and we’ll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values,” Peter Lee, Microsoft’s vice president of research, said on the company’s official blog. “We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay. The company, however, said that the “coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability” in the chatbot that was launched Wednesday. Friday issued an apology after its artificial-intelligence chatbot Tay posted tweets, denying Holocaust and announcing feminists should “burn in hell” among many other racist posts. ![]() Microsoft's smartphone efforts have so far failed to grab a significant slice of the market, but with BlackBerry's decline, it could be set to focus on the enterprise. This one adds Video, Camera, Settings shortcuts to your screen with a bunch of other boxes to create notes, making a google search, bookmarks of your favorite social sites and storage sites. All you need is this skin and the free Rainmeter software installed. Weather Widget is a simple Rainmeter skin that shows current weather conditions and 3-day forecast on your desktop. It can display both the current conditions and forecasted conditions. This weather widget is designed for rainmeter. This plugin displays a weather forecast just like your local news channel. The Rainmeter plugin for a weather forecast is the best way to monitor the weather. Other settings include Search and change your location, widget size, language, units. Suite, with music information, a sidebar to quickly access files and folders, the seconds dot in clock widget spins in a circular shape.īetter clock and date widget tells you what day it is and color changeable with a click. Dock Icons: My Computer, Documents, Browser, Music, System ![]() some different instances of a semi-normal tessellation that is usual with the useful resource of combining hexagons with equilateral triangles.Ī demi tessellation may be formed by way of placing a row of squares, then a row of equilateral triangles (a triangle with identical aspects) which can be alternated up and down forming a line of squares when blended. There are nine specific varieties of semi-normal tessellations which include combining a hexagon and a rectangle that each include a one-inch aspect. While two or 3 varieties of polygons share a commonplace vertex, then a semi-normal tessellation is fashioned. The term has become more specialized and is often used to refer to pictures or tiles, mostly in the form of animals and other life forms, which cover the surface of a plane in a symmetrical way without leaving gaps or overlapping. They were used to make up 'tessellata' - that are the mosaic pictures that form floors and tilings in Roman buildings. In Latin, the word 'tessera' means a small stone cube. they're extensively utilized in artwork, designs for garb, ceramics and stained glass windows. Nowadays tessellations are used inside the floors, partitions and ceilings of buildings. Fatehpur Sikri additionally shows tessellations used in architecture. Muslim structure suggests evidence of tessellations and an example of this is the Alhambra Palace at Granada, inside the south of Spain. Tessellations were used by the Greeks, as small quadrilaterals utilized in video games and in making mosaics. Tessellations had been traced all of the way back to the Sumerian civilizations (around 4000 BC). They often have precise characteristics depending on where they may be from. Tessellations have been located in many historic civilizations internationally. The Latin root of the word tessellations is tessellate, which means ‘to pave’ or ‘tessella’, which means a small, rectangular stone. They are part of an area of mathematics that often appears easy to recognize and research indicates that Tessellations are in truth complicated. Tessellations are used appreciably in regular objects, especially in buildings and walls. One artist specifically, MC Escher, a Dutch artist, integrated many complicated tessellations into his artwork. Tessellations are a crucial part of arithmetic because they may be manipulated to be used in artwork and structure. Tessellations and The Way They are Utilized in Structure Tessellations of squares, triangles and hexagons are the simplest and are frequently visible in normal existence, as an instance in chess boards and beehives. Tessellations can be formed from ordinary and abnormal polygons, making the patterns they produce yet more interesting. Strictly, but, the phrase tilings refers to a pattern of polygons (shapes with straight aspects) simplest. Tessellations are from time to time referred to as “tilings' '. Therefore tessellations have to have no gaps or overlapping spaces. Tessellation is any recurring pattern of symmetrical and interlocking shapes. Plot Īs in the 1990 original, the game casts players in the role of Mickey Mouse who must fight his way through the Castle of Illusion to rescue Minnie Mouse from the evil witch Mizrabel who wants to steal her youth and beauty. Throughout the game, players can find playing cards and chilli peppers that can be used to unlock various outfits for Mickey. The castle itself, which was merely a transition in the original game, can now be fully explored, with new areas opened up by collecting numerous gems littered around each level. Levels are re-envisioned versions of the original game's levels now separated into three acts, featuring new layouts, puzzles and enemies, as well as enhanced boss fights. He can also collect projectiles which he can throw at long distance enemies. Mickey's main offensive ability is his bounce attack, which he can use to bounce on enemies and reach higher areas. Sadly, due to how safe SEGA played it, with no substantial additions and how slow everything moves, married with the uneven ramp up in difficulty, it ends up just being an okay game.See also: Gameplay of Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouseįollowing the same style of gameplay as the original Mega Drive/Genesis title, presented in high-definition 3D graphics, the game is largely played as a side-scrolling platformer like its predecessor, although some sections allow Mickey Mouse to move in multiple directions, such as puzzle segments. It’s charming as all heck and mostly plays well, but that’s as far as it ever goes. Regardless of your feeling towards the original Castle of Illusion, HD is a serviceable remake. Even with the redesigned levels, such an omission of speed is frustrating to see, due to how paramount it is within platforming games in general. Mickey jumps ridiculously slow and there’s just no sense of motion in the placement of enemies or jumps. There’s also a slugishness to gameplay that might drive the rhythmic platformig fiend bananas. Hit-detection misses the mark in some moments, however, and ends up throwing Mickey off ledges to his usual doom. Enemies are dispatched by either jumping on top of or being hit by projectiles, the same way Mickey can be damaged himself. Like the recently released DuckTales Remastered, platforming controls are made simpler. In terms of gameplay, Castle of Illusion HD plays it extremely safe. ![]() That annoyance carries over the uneven distribution of checkpoints within levels, forcing you to not only have to pick up collectibles all over again if you lose a life, but also watch every cutscene and listen to the narration all over again. Some of the cutscenes tend to last a little too long and can’t be skipped, which quickly becomes annoying. Story is delivered by a voiceover that narrates levels and repeat over and over regardless how many times you’ve already played through a certain section. The problem comes from the way the game tries to hard to play like a storybook and ultimately fails. ![]() Worlds are lively and different from one another, changing up the theme and really adding much character to the original’s levels. Graphically, Castle of Illusion HD is gorgeous. ![]() The lack of challenge is broken up quite viciously at the end of the game, during the last boss fight that suddenly ramps up the difficulty and would actually be the highlight of the game if it weren’t for this remake’s presentational annoyances. Even if you add all the hidden collectibles and achievements, it won’t take you longer than three hours to blast through the HD remake. In fact, Castle of Illusion, much like the original game, is extremely short. Each level is broken up into two platforming sections and end in boss fights that aren’t hard at all to beat. The castle itself serves as a hub for a handful of uniquely themed worlds. Granted, it’s nowhere near awful - it’s competently made, actually - but might feel a tad unnecessary when compared to similar games currently out.įrame by frame with the original game, Castle of Illusion HD begins with the kidnapping of Minnie by the evil witch and Mickey’s eventual visit to the aptly named Castle of Illusion. When you wish upon a star, would you wish for a remake of your childhood’s favorite videogames? Besides my awful Disney pun, writing this review up is a fair opportunity to ask how far nostalgia can carry a game.Īs I was playing C astle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse HD, the remake to one of the most beloved Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games ever, it was hard not to shrug. It’s a broad term for any business accepting cash online. In other words, electronic billing is exactly what it sounds like. What is electronic billing (e-billing)?Įlectronic billing or e-billing is when any business or seller sends its invoices or bills via the internet and requests that the customer pays that bill electronically. Today we’re going to back up a bit and review what ebilling is in its essence and then make recommendations on how to find the best ebilling system for your business. The components that make up electronic billing are often similar, but their integration abilities and consumer-facing UI and UX can make all the difference. In fact, like cellphones, it’s something we’ve grown so accustomed to that it has become the basic fabric of any modern business - assuming we’re exclusively discussing first-world markets.īut electronic billing systems are in no way perfected or without meaningful variety. Electronic billing or e-billing isn’t a new concept these days. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Michael Goldberg is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. ![]() ![]() It’s going to take a little while to get out of this,” he said. Henifin is six months into what he has said will be a one-year term managing Jackson’s water system. Henifin said his team is developing a plan that complies with the law. Tate Reeves signed the legislation in April. The proposed solution was a response to the Siemens incident and the loss of revenue Jackson has experienced as its tax base eroded over the past few decades.īut that proposal was blocked in the 2023 legislation session after lawmakers passed a bill requiring localities to base water bills on personal consumption. In January, Henifin released a proposal calling for a monthly cap on water fees for homes and commercial properties. But it is unclear whether the city can develop a plan that complies with a new state law. The city would eventually transition back to a meter-based system, Henifin said. The rate would be applied based on the square footage of properties rather than how much water, measured through meters, properties use. In the meantime, his team is developing a temporary rate structure based on a “property attribute” like square footage. Henifin said the city needs time to earn back the trust of residents. Henifin said the city will create guardrails for people who can’t afford to pay their bills.Īs a result of the faulty Siemens meters, few people believe their water bills are accurate. ![]() On top of the debt, the city needs enough dollars for costly improvements to a water system that has fallen into disrepair. About $23 million of that is private bond debt the city must pay annually, Henifin said. The city needs to pay down about $280 million in outstanding debt on the water system. ![]() “In order to do that, we have to get the debt off the books.” “We need to get our financial house in order for the water system,” Henifin said. The revenue losses sharpen the financial strain of the hefty debt burden Jackson faces for its water system. The uncollected bills equate to about $50 million a year in lost revenue for the city, where roughly a quarter of residents live in poverty. That compares to an industry-standard above 95%, he said. Ted Henifin, appointed in November by a federal court to help improve Jackson’s troubled water system, told reporters the city is collecting about 56% of the water fees it issues. (AP) - Mississippi’s capital is collecting only a little more than half of the money it bills for water use, far below the rate at which most American cities obtain such fees, Jackson’s federally appointed water manager said Monday. The problems faced by Taku and Rikako aren’t all that foreign and you may have had similar experiences that made you sympathize with them more. I think it has to do with the melodrama and angst teenagers face that just make for an enjoyable viewing experience sometimes. Tying this back to nostalgia, there’s a timeless feeling these slice-of-life teenage romance stories give off that it becomes familiar whenever a new work comes around. It’s a strong highlight of the film because we see how much the characters have grown. Moreover, a former classmate of Rikako confides to Taku that she hated her when they were in school, but doesn’t think much about it now because it was in the past and she’d rather focus on the present. I appreciate how Ocean Waves demonstrates this through the reunion scene, where we see Taku’s classmates gather at a bar, getting drunk and confessing to people they’ve had feelings for. Ultimately, you become a different person when you’re older and that’s when you realize you’ve made regretful mistakes. His maturity is exemplified by the fact that he knew he didn’t know himself fully and didn’t completely understand Rikako’s circumstances. Eventually, towards the end of the film, he meets her again on a subway platform and realizes that he does have genuine feelings for her, even after all these years. Gradually, he learns to deal with his own feelings for her, even though she’s been nothing but troublesome. His relationship with Rikako is also a big focal point of the film. ![]() More specifically, the film shows how teenagers adapt to big changes, particularly with how Taku handles navigating needless drama, adolescent love, and his potential career. I appreciate its honest depiction of a high schooler’s life, showing things like high school romance, part-time jobs, underage drinking, and dealing with unfair adults. Each frame of Ocean Waves evokes a strong nostalgic feeling like you’ve been there before and can definitely grace the cover of a retro city pop record. Mochizuki himself grew a stomach ulcer during the work, but they still somehow got the film done with help from J.C Staff and Madhouse in particular.Īll that hard work resulted in a pretty decent film with excellent background art, highlighting mid 90s Japanese architecture and environments. The film went over budget and over scheduled because of the hard work and demand for completion. He and several other staff members in their 20s and 30s were tasked with making a film ‘quickly, cheaply, and with quality.’ Considering how stressful the anime industry can be, this was easier said than done. It’s one of the few projects not to involve Miyazaki or Takahata and was instead directed by Tomomi Mochizuki. In a way, Ocean Waves was a big test for some of the younger staff at Studio Ghibli. Years later, when Taku reunites with most of his classmates, he learns that Rikako has also returned and wants to find her. After her plan falters, she becomes instantly distant with everyone at school, including Taku, whom she gets into a fight with. In the process, she involves Taku in her plans, borrowing some of his money and asking him to pose as her boyfriend. As a city kid, she struggles to adjust to her new life in the countryside after her parents’ divorce and decides to return to the city. Her name is Rikako Muto, and she’s become an instant hit with the school, drawing both the ire and attention of boys and girls alike. The film follows close friends Taku Morisaki and Yutaka Matsuno who meet a new transfer student from Tokyo. Ocean Waves is about the difference between a young adult about to start working and a high schooler still trying to figure things out. The characters bring that experience back to the present by comparing how it has affected their current selves. Both are about adults reflecting on their past youth and reevaluating their choices or mistakes made by them. ![]() ![]() This is a core theme of Studio Ghibli’s 1993 TV film Ocean Waves and goes to show that your nostalgic feelings never leave you because they’re a part of your daily growth.īased on Saeko Himuro’s 1990-1992 eponymous serial novel, the film is a coming-of-age teen romance story with slice-of-life elements similar to Isao Takahata’s 1991 feature Only Yesterday. This nostalgic feeling always lingers as they get older and is reinforced when they revisit familiar places with someone they knew. ![]() People always look back at their school days as a simpler experience and an important phase of their life. High school is often portrayed as a complicated experience for adults. |