The Formative Years

John Rosatti was born in the diverse city of Brooklyn, New York to his loving parents Edward John Rosatti and Angeline Rosatti. His father worked for the city while his mother made extra money for the family by working as a seamstress. John also had an older sister named Dorothy with whom he lived with his parents in a small, basement apartment in Brooklyn. From a young age, John exhibited a keen understanding of the world around him and was very considered very intelligent for a child. As did most Italian children in the neighborhood, John and his sister attended Catholic schools growing up.

Influence

John grew up in the Italian-American atmosphere. He regularly attended large Italian family meals where they were gather around the meal table and tell stories. John was very close to his grandfather John Adam Basset who was a decorated Naval Officer. John Basset, who changed his name from Rosatti during World War II, to prevent discrimination, served valiantly for the United States. In the book “Force Mulberry: The Planning and Installation of the Artificial Harbor of U.S. Normandy Beaches in WWII” which was published by Whitehead Press his accomplishments are greatly recounted. He instilled in John Rosatti his courageousness and hard work.

Work Ethic

John learned from a young age the importance of working with your hands from his father, who he regularly went to work with at the local boat docks. There, he acquired many mechanical skills that would eventually lead him to a successful career in the automobile industry. At the age of 21, John married his first wife, Joann, and opened his first car dealership. The dealership he bought in 1978 was located in Flatbush, NY and sold Oldsmobiles. This venture turned out to be very successful and his dealership was regularly named as a “Top 100” dealership by Ward’s Automotive. John went on to form a group of dealerships labeled the Plaza Auto Mall. This allowed him to expand his business outside of New York, and into New Jersey, Nevada and Florida.

Personal Life

After 18 years of marriage, John and Joann made the mutual decision to get a divorce. However, the two remain friends to this day. After a few more years of hard work expanding his empire, John met and married his second wife, Bonni. They were married on the island of St. Thomas, surrounded by friends and family, and moved to Brooklyn to start a family. They had three children together, who grew up attending church and Catholic schools in the Brooklyn area. In 1997, John lost his father in a horrible car accident. Three years later, John also lost his beloved wife, Bonni, to a serious car accident. Left with three young children to care for, John began spending more time at home raising the kids, while also running his many business ventures.

After moving his family to South Florida John met his now long time dedicated girlfriend Dawn. Together with his children they have forged ahead in both personal success and business ventures. Despite the tragedies suffered John was able to fulfil his life aspirations including buying a plane as well as starting a yacht business. John’s story is the American dream. Born and raised in Brooklyn by blue collar parents he rose to the top and became a successful businessman with many business ventures. He is a man that should be looked to with admiration for his perseverance, fortitude, and work ethic.

Caleb Kozlowski is a Design Director working at Hybrid Design in San Francisco. He created a great series of sport posters following a long tradition of minimalist information design. Playing with simple geometric shapes and colors to get a nice vintage feeling.

Partfaliaz

Passport Needs

As anyone who has ever traveled internationally before knows, passport are essential travel documents. Without a valid United States passport, you will not be allowed to leave the country. Also, if you are already overseas, and you lose your passport, you will not be allowed to return until you obtain a replacement passport. Adding extra passport pages is easy with the help of online passport agencies. They will be able to make sure that you have all of your passport needs taken care of before you need to leave for your overseas trip.

Venezuela

These mountain ranges have been a scientific hot spot for many years. Scientists love studying these unique and impressive mountains and all the secrets they hold. A lot of scientists believe that the mountains of this range may be about two billion years old from the Precambrian period which would make them some of the oldest geological structures on the planet.Mount Roraima can be found in the southeastern portion of the Canaima National Park in Venezuela. It is the highest peak Of the Guyana Highland Range and is home to some of the best hiking in the world. There are many hiking companies that you can hire before you go on your trip that will be able to show you around the mountain ranges so that you get the most out of your experience.

Mountain Range

The locals in the region consider the mountain range to be an incredibly important part of their heritage and local culture. It is important that if you take a trip to Venezuela to visit these regions that you are respectful of the locals and their customs. Over the years, these mountains have drawn in some of the most famous adventurers the world has ever known. The mountain range has also been the inspiration for many different things in popular culture over the years. For example, it was the inspiration for the documentary the Real Lost World, and some think that that the mountain range was also the inspiration behind Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous work The Lost World. Pixar’s incredibly popular movie UP is also believed to have gotten inspiration from Mount Roraima. Before the European explorers got to the region and told the rest of the world about the scenic and gorgeous mountain range, the mountain had long been cherished by the native people of the area.

Visiting Mount Roraima

There are a number of different options when it comes to climbing Mount Roraima. Whether you choose to go it alone or go with a group, be certain to do your homework and know what to expect when you go. There are a number of tour companies that offer tours and hikes through the mountain range. There are many attractions at the summit of the Roraima that are worth seeing and exploring. If you are going to be taking a trip to these amazing mountains, you would be wise to look into reservations for any of these attractions so that you will know exactly where to go and what to do when you get there. You will be left in awe when you first arrive in Venezuela and set your sights on these amazing mountains. By doing your homework before you go on a trip to see these mountains, you will be able to carefully lay out your itinerary so that you are getting the most out of your experience in Venezuela.

For those who enjoy backpacking and hiking, Mount Roraima offers a beautiful mountain range with much culture and history. It offers flora and fauna not found anywhere else in the world and is truly a life changing experience. It is truly an experience to climb such a revered mountain with much history and lore surrounding it. So grab your passport and venture to the triple point where the borders of Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana meet. Consider adding extra pasport pages so you can take advantage of the close proximity to other nations. It will be a trip of a lifetime.

Peter Lippmann is an American photographer based in Paris. He produced “Women of history”, a great series for shoemaker Christian Louboutin. Directly inspired by famous classical paintings from Georges de La Tour, François Clouet or James Whistler, photographer Peter Lippmann re-created this masterpieces including pieces of the new Louboutin Collection. In a series called “Paradise Parking” he shows images of old cars slowly disappearing surrounded by nature… The “Noble ? Rot” series shows rotten grapes in a very original and beautiful way…
Peter Lippmann has worked for prestigious magazines like Marie Claire 2, Cartier Art, Vogue Italy, Angeline Magazine, New-York Times style magazine and major advertising agencies worldwide.

Partfaliaz

Jackson Alves is a graphic and type designer, but also illustrator and teacher based in Curitiba, in the south of Brazil. He creates lettering for identity, T-shirt or advertising, mixing callygraphy with computer drawing and shares his creative process, his techniques, and great results.

Partfaliaz

Writer Patrick Sullivan contributes this mini-review of the new movie based on Edgar Rice Burrough’s books:

I saw a sneak of John Carter recently and I say go see it. Really, ignore the horrible marketing and lackluster trailers Disney have done for the film, and give it a shot. It is breezy, accessible, swashbuckling fun that never takes itself too seriously, just serious enough to deliver the story earnestly without any kind of postmodern nudge nudge, wink wink.

It is definitely a “boy’s story”* in that there’s essentially only two female characters** (one red and one thark) but the screenwriters (including Michael Chabon) did decent work at giving Deja Thoris real motivation and elevating her above being just a mere damsel in distress. The only clunky bits for me were Taylor Kitsch’s dreadful delivery of several lines.

I’m glad this film survived the post-production hell it languished in for a bit.

* Well, it was a proto-pulp adventure written in 1912, how could it not be?
** Though if you look closely at the extras, you’ll see that there are a fair number of female soldiers serving in the Heliumite and Zodangan armies.

game writer central

Tumblr-er Flutiebear starts us off with this excellent two part series applying Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s Heroine’s Journey to Disney’s Tangled and Bioware’s Dragon Age 2. These analyses come highly recommended.

From there, we pay a visit to GayGamer where newest writer EccentricTomboy writes on seeing sexism in competitive gaming from two sides:

See, back before transition I would have been that guy: amused by the girl trying to play a man’s game and trying to give her a good experience. It’s the same reflex that prompts my friends to introduce me as a female gamer who is “actually really good at games,” as if this is something that just isn’t possible in our normal gaming life.

Meanwhile, The Mary Sue’s Becky Chambers sits down with Rachel Weil, founder of FEMICOM, “a collection of twentieth century games for girls”:

[I]nstead of passing the site by, my eyes lingered over that tagline: The feminine computer museum. “All right, FEMICOM,” I thought, clicking through the links. “Just how are you defining ‘feminine’? Feminine according to who?”

As it turns out, this is exactly the question that FEMICOM wants you to be asking. Failing to explore this site would have been a big mistake on my part. Not only did it lead to one of the most thought-provoking conversations I’ve had about gender roles in games, but it made me put my own gaming preferences under the microscope.

On the subject of curation, Venturebeat’s Jeff DiOrio has a fantastic interview up with Jon-Paul Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games.

Speaking of history, this week Split-Screen’s Alan Williamson poked fun at developers’ creating a false impression of it through those infamous “Game of the Year” repackagings. As Williamson observes, “Special editions aren’t about specialty. They are mere upselling.”

Quality was also on the mind of Sean Sands at Gamers With Jobs this week, as he reminds readers that all these successfully funded Kickstarter games are still hypothetical:

What if the new Wasteland game is released and it’s just kind of crappy?

I feel like there is a lot of pressure on these first rounds of high-profile Kickstarted games to actually do well in release and in the public eye. It’s great that there’s been so much enthusiasm for giving money directly to creators of content, but now the onus is on them to deliver on some of these very big promises they’ve made. To be honest, I think the future of Kickstarter itself actually lies with them.

GUS MASTRAPA, whose name I occasionally write in all-caps just for emphasis, had two articles of note this week. First is his repost of his Kill Screen piece on games and heavy metal. Next, the latest in his Pretension +1 column for Unwinnable is a (rather charming and empathetic, in Mastrapa’s usual fashion) reflection on how games will be the death of him:

Part of my problem is that I let myself get derailed. I’ll make some good habits and frequent the gym for a month or two. And then something like E3 will come up and throw me off. I’ll come back exhausted and start the spiral again. For a while I tried to use videogames as a carrot, but my World of Warcraft workout was short-lived. When I made exercise a requirement for playing the game, I just wound up playing less. That was the path of least resistance. For a while I used Foursquare to kind of gamify gym attendance, but that didn’t work either. Some asshole named Pierre kept snaking me for the mayor prize. I was sure he was cheating somehow.

Josh Bycer has a list of five ways to bring the survival horror genre back from the dead. And Nightmare Mode’s Dylan Holmes appears to find games fatal in another way– namely, the unlock strategies of certain multiplayer games, and how these break the game.

Further on the subject of first-person shooters, Dan Nosowitz expresses his concerns for Sniper Elite V2’s hyperrealistic “KillCam”. Thirdly, and a chief contender for article of the week, is Paolo Pedercini’s editorial for Kotaku on how franchises such as Call of Duty: Black Ops valorize a particularly frightening kind of warfare:

In the Ramboesque universe of Call of Duty, black ops are presented as an elite force type of operations, carried out in secrecy by modern ninjas. But in reality, what makes certain operations “black” is not that they go undetected by enemy forces—after all, most of military engagements are meant to surprise or deceive the opponent. The peculiarity of black operations is of being untraceable and deniable by the very institutions which finance and conduct them. This secrecy is desirable whenever the operations, if done overtly, would cause popular uproar, diplomatic crisis or legal troubles. It allows the perpetrators to bypass public scrutiny, democratic oversight and the Laws of War, a complex system of liability under which the “proper” military must operate.

Real-world black operations are often indistinguishable from terrorism.

Also at Kotaku this week, Mark Serrels takes aim at Ubisoft’s advertising practices and asks “Why are we so willing to become conduits for marketing?” Taking the longer view, Simon Parkin posts his interview with Ubisoft Toronto’s Jade Raymond and the nuances entering into Raymond’s particular high profile in the industry.

From AAA to smaller development, Dennis of Superlevel attempts to put a finer point on the definition of “indie game.” Meanwhile, Unwinnable’s Tim Mucci offers tabletop gamemasters (but really, all game developers) some tips for writing better NPCs.

Another recurring theme this week was the role of difficulty in design practices. First up, and perhaps most controversially among the dev readership, Taekwan Kim takes the position that costing users time through user-unfriendly design is about equivalent with paid unlocking schemes:

Let’s be blunt. Time costs are real. So isn’t it just as manipulative to exploit the fact that the more time you spend, the more expensive and valuable the object necessarily becomes? Is a game that refrains from selling “I win” consumables any less dubious if it forces players to spend inflationary amounts of time? And what else can you call no respec, permadeath, etc. but devices that inflate time costs? More troublesomely, is that actually even a bad thing?

On the player side of the equation, Chris Waldron writes favorably of player-developed, voluntary hardcore challenges in their ability to change the experience of play:

Take, for example, the ‘Nuzlocke Challenge’ of the Pokemon RPGs. In the standard game, Pokemon faint once their hit points are depleted; in a Nuzlocke run, they die, and therefore must be instantly released, never to be seen again; if your whole team falls then I’m afraid it’s game over. [...] the Poke-universe takes on a whole new air of morbidity. It stands to reason that if your Pokemon die upon fainting then, surely, so do your opponent’s. Therefore, hundreds of Pokemon must die in order for yours to prosper, adding a layer of moral ambiguity to an otherwise light-hearted game.

Marcus Pettersson is likewise in favor of more punishing gameplay experiences, though here he argues for harder games on the design level– or in his words, developers need to “design games like a bastard“.

As a little nightcap for you all, several of our readers wrote in this week with some fantastic new/obscure blogs for your perusal: Charlie Wheeler’s The Rules on the Field, focusing on sports and game design, and Pathologistics, a blog dedicated to mapping Russian cult game Pathologic. Both are recommended, although perhaps not the latter if you’re just about to go to bed.

Join us next week for more of the best game critique and commentary across the web! And as always, we welcome your tweets and emails!

Critical Distance

Cocaine

In today’s society, cocaine use has become more and more common. We see it on television and in the movies all the time. This has led to many young kids experimenting with the drug. What is so unsettling about this is that this can lead to long term addiction. If an individual abuses cocaine for long enough they can end up doing irreversible damage to their health.

Research

Research shows that the development of binging behavior in the specimens altered their brain physiology which therefore left them open to a drug addiction. The research ultimately lead to the assertion that about 20% of rats are likely to develop a drug addiction when exposed to cocaine, but if a history of binge eating is present than that likelihood of addiction will jump to 50%.

Findings

This study and conclusion is further indication that those suffering from eating disorders as well as addictions need to seek treatment immediately. It also means that those in treatment programs need to focus on groups that not only outline the causes, effects, and coping tools to deal with eating disorders and drugs, but also, how to prevent a relapse as well as an addiction to another substance.

Finding Help

Often former addicts and eating disordered patients will fall into another co-morbid disorder. That is why education is so important when it comes to relapse prevention. So, when a former binge eater is working with their aftercare team, they can be made aware that due to their predisposition they are more likely to develop a cocaine addiction. Giving them the tools necessary to avoid such an addiction is imperative to a successful recovery. This should be true for anyone in recovery from drugs, alcohol, or an eating disorder. By educating them on the likelihood of forming another compulsion or addiction, they will be better equipped to stay in recovery.

The best places to get help for an addiction to drugs are detox centers Florida and California detox programs. It is imperative if you are struggling with a cocaine addiction to get medical help as soon as possible. By checking yourself into a rehabilitation center, you will prevent doing any serious damage to your body. In treatment, you will be able to learn about addiction and talk with others who are struggling with similar problems. Also, you will be able to get medical supervision to help you through the initial detoxification period. This is why it is so important for people with an addiction to drugs to get help.

Peter Lippmann is an American photographer based in Paris. He produced “Women of history”, a great series for shoemaker Christian Louboutin. Directly inspired by famous classical paintings from Georges de La Tour, François Clouet or James Whistler, photographer Peter Lippmann re-created this masterpieces including pieces of the new Louboutin Collection. In a series called “Paradise Parking” he shows images of old cars slowly disappearing surrounded by nature… The “Noble ? Rot” series shows rotten grapes in a very original and beautiful way…
Peter Lippmann has worked for prestigious magazines like Marie Claire 2, Cartier Art, Vogue Italy, Angeline Magazine, New-York Times style magazine and major advertising agencies worldwide.

Partfaliaz

Cocaine Use

Cocaine also refered to as benzoylmethylecgonine and is known as a highly addictive substance. It is garnered from the leaves of coca plants; it is a stimulant that directly affects the central nervous system. It is also a serotonin reuptake inhibitor and is a very addictive substance due to it’s affect on the mesolimbic reward pathway.

Cocaine Side Effects

There are many negative effects associated with cocaine use. Cardiac arrest, seizures, and respiratory failure are common causes of death for those who abuse cocaine. However recently a more startling side effect was revealed, research has shown that gray matter within the brain shrinks at a much fast rate in those dependent on cocaine as opposed to those who aren’t.

Research

Recently reports from Cambridge University stated that cocaine abuse shrinks the brain. The report indicated that cocaine abuse accelerates the normal aging process which is what leads to a gradual loss of brain volume which parallels with a decline in cognitive function. By using brain imagine equipment researches were able to compare the gray matter volume of 120 individuals. The people’s ages ranged from 18-50. Half of these individuals were dependent on cocaine. Both groups should the anticipated decline in gray matter that was caused by age, however in those who were dependent on cocaine, their brains atrophied at twice the normal rate. These results are staggering; due to the low volume of the test population more studies will need to be conducted.

Getting Help

It is incredibly important to go to a medically supervised facility for detox. After the body has successfully gotten cocaine out of its system, rehabilitation can begin. This is when counseling, therapy, and group work gives the former addict to tools and mechanisms needed to overcome their addiction and live a life addiction and substance free. Most rehab centers have detox facilities associated with them or even on the property.

It is imperative if you are struggling with a cocaine addiction to get medical help as soon as possible. By checking yourself into a rehabilitation center, you will prevent doing any serious damage to your body. In treatment, you will be able to learn about addiction and talk with others who are struggling with similar problems. Also, you will be able to get medical supervision to help you through the initial detoxification period. This is why it is so important for people with an addiction to drugs to get help. A detox rehabilitation center will be able to help an individual with a drug addiction take back control of their life.