Huge wind turbines, solar, wave power, battery storage and a lot of electric cars—these remote Scottish islands may provide a glimpse of the future.

The diet appears to act on gut bacteria in a way that helps hinder physical frailty and reduce cognitive decline in older age, researchers find.

In Utah, birds plunge to their death after storms make parking lots look like ponds. Thwack. Another reason for less pavement?

This super easy recipe makes a plant-based pumpkin pudding that is rich, creamy, healthy, and delicious.

A British critic calls two green icons, rammed earth and Passivhaus, "architectural trickery at its most cynical."

So, last week approximately 7,500 songbirds flew into a giant flame and died. Maybe this is a good time to talk about the wastefulness and damage caused by natural gas flaring?

The U.S.’s top nutritional panel has recommended that Americans eat less meat, both for their health and to help protect the planet.

These foods can be used in many different recipes.

Social distancing and quarantines don't mean you have to live on canned soup alone.

Nothing exotic here, but it's all practical, versatile, and nutritious.

From knocking out fleas and ticks to fighting the havoc of hairballs, these simple, all-natural remedies are both planet and pet approved.

There are many special things about the home of Gennaro Brooks-Church, the director of the green building firm Eco Brooklyn.

If you thought that by quitting meat or at least going weekday vegetarian you were doing your part to avoid factory farming,

One way to get around many of the problems attributed to biofuel production (land use changes, effect on food prices, etc) is by using waste vegetable oil to produce biodiesel. Now it looks like New Haven, Connecticut will be

Some regular TreeHugger readers (and commenters, you know who you are...) are no doubt exclaiming that they being saying the same thing for years, that hemp makes great biofuel--if only the Feds would get out of the way. Well, researchers

"The labeling provision was eliminated from the bill due to fears that it opened the state up to a lawsuit. The attorneys for the leadership & Governor's office felt the Constitutional rights of Monsanto gave them the power to successfully sue the state."

The meat vs. veggies debate is a lot more complex than it seems at first glance.

A new paper compares eggs, dairy, poultry, beef and pork to determine which has the biggest environmental impact.

Recommendations to eat less meat for environmental reasons won’t be included in the final 2015 dietary guidelines.

Researchers at Stanford found a way to speed up the process of breaking down Styrofoam and other types of polystyrene, with help from mealworms.

It costs a lot more to run a suburb than it does to run a city.

The gains are even bigger when beef is targeted specifically.

The age of diesel and petrol cars is ending. It’s time to do the same for fossil fuel heating.

Swiss investigators followed the money through a sweatshirt's supply chain.

Shark liver oil is a common moisturizing agent in many beauty products. Stay away!

George Monbiot certainly thinks so, and sees this as a saving grace.

Various healthy diets are shown to ease symptoms of depression, and they work even better for women.

This woman-owned business is making some of the best chocolates on the planet, using Rainforest Alliance certified cocoa to craft a line of luxurious truffles and bars.

They should rename the town of Asbestos after this stuff.

A German study reveals that we're doing a poor job of keeping of safeguarding children's health when it comes to plastic.

It seems that when there is a car involved, it's the former rather than the latter.

Mercury Packing Party for Troops

#ChangeTheNumbers - Entdecken Sie die Ergebnisse der Studie

The way we're doing things clearly doesn't work.

Nuelle™ Chief Commercial Officer Lesa Musatto briefly shares why Fiera® was created, its benefits and how it works.

A new study reveals that murder rates of environmental defenders have spiked in recent years.

Global - No child should die of diabetes

Brad & Jenny Lost 400 lbs. Together

New York is investigating how Covid-19 impacts children after a 5-year-old boy in New York City died due to coronavirus-related complications, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday.

"San Diegans, just like others in California, do not want to give back the tremendous gains that we've made, the sacrifices that we've made over these last six weeks," Mayor Kevin Faulconer said.

Rock legend David Bowie, who changed the face of music, endured a long battle with cancer.

With the floor of the New York Stock Exchange closed as of Monday, trading will resume electronically.

Regulation Best Interest (Reg BI), the new rules passed by the SEC in September, may have raised the standard of care required of brokers making investment recommendations to their clients, but it didn't clear up the confusion about the differences between registered investment advisors and brokers.

Gilles Peterson and Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers pay tribute to the Fela Kuti collaborator, described by Brian Eno as ‘perhaps the greatest drummer who ever lived’

The Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, who is credited with creating Afrobeat along with his old bandmate Fela Kuti, died suddenly at the age of 79 in Paris on Thursday, his manager said. “We don’t know the exact cause of death,” Eric Trosset said, adding it was not linked to the coronavirus pandemic.

“He was in great shape,” said Trosset. “It was quite sudden. I spoke to him at 1pm then two hours later he was sick and taken to Pompidou hospital, where he died.”

Related: Tony Allen: Afrobeat’s master on Hugh Masekela, Damon Albarn and friction with Fela Kuti

The epic Tony Allen, the greatest drummer on earth has left us. What a wildman with a massive, kind and free heart and the deepest one-of-a-kind groove. Fela Kuti did not invent afrobeat, Fela and Tony birthed it… https://t.co/qXqMAP7QzT

RIP TONY ALLEN. THE GOAT AMONGST GOATS. DO YOUR RESEARCH. LEGENDS NEVER DIE. THE INVENTOR OF RHYTHM #Afrobeat

Merci Tony Allen....https://t.co/Oizisc8wWd

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San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer joins "Squawk Alley" to discuss the process of reopening cities and keeping infections down.

Fast-talking comedian and impressionist who was one half of the TV comic duo Little and Large

The beaming, ebullient, fast-talking comedian and impressionist Eddie Large, who has died aged 78, having contracted Covid-19 while being treated for heart failure, was half of a double-act that partially eclipsed Morecambe and Wise on British television in the late 1970s and early 80s.

After years of success with the BBC had turned them into a national institution, Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise were enticed to ITV in 1978, but through a combination of inferior scripts and Morecambe’s deteriorating health the switch proved to be a disappointment, and marked the decline of Britain’s top double-act.

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Date	08-May-2020

Coronavirus prompted an emergency operation to house rough sleepers in Travelodges and Holiday Inns. In many ways it has been a success – but what happens next?

To begin with, Clare Sutcliffe found the shift from sleeping in a doorway in Soho to a king-size bed in a central-London hotel very disorientating. After 15 months sleeping rough, she found it hard to relax and really believe she was in a safe space.

“The first couple of nights, I couldn’t sleep with the light off,” she says. “This might sound mad, but I was a bit scared. It was different; when you’re used to sleeping out in the open outside and then all of a sudden you’re in a bed, in a room, with a door that shuts.” When she arrived at the hotel five weeks ago, she was a skeletal six-and-a-half stone; since then, with three meals delivered to her room every day, her health has begun to improve.

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Today Kevin’s game, Starcom: Nexus, releases in Early Access on Steam. It’s a thing of beauty, and also a lot of fun. If you like games that take you into outer space where you get to explore mysterious worlds, build a powerful ship, and explode bad guys, you should buy it, and play it, and let your gamer friends know about it. Yes, I’m biased, but reviewers and streamers  - who are not his spouse  - also love it :o). (FYI those last two links go to youtube streaming vids.)

***

Conversation at the dinner table:

Kevin: How was your day?

Me: Okay, I guess. I still can’t figure out how to get this girl to accidentally set her house on fire, then cause an explosion and get stuck in a window grille.

Kevin: I believe in you.

Me: Thank you. How was your day?

Kevin: Okay. When my enemy ships get within a certain distance of each other, they spontaneously explode.

Me: Oh!

Kevin: It’s not supposed to happen. It’s a bug.

Me: Oh.

Kevin: I can’t figure it out.

Me: I believe in you!

***


There are a lot of similarities between the work Kevin and I do. We both create complicated worlds with characters and plots. We’re both entertainers.

Meet your commander.

We have some processes in common: for example, we both study the books/games we love, then try to learn from them. We both think about the things we don’t like in other books/games, then try to come up with alternatives we prefer. We both know how to wear the creator hat; then switch to the reader/gamer hat, reading/playing our own project with a critical eye; then go back to the creator hat to fix what isn’t working. We’re both extremely familiar with the phenomenon wherein you change one little thing, then a ripple effect passes through the entire work, complicating/breaking things in ways you didn’t anticipate.

Meet the Ulooquo, an underwater alien race.

We can also get similarly overwhelmed by our own projects. I’ve talked a lot on the blog about how a book has many parts, and writing a book involves many jobs. Well, a game has SO many parts. It has music and art, visual effects, numerous interfaces, plot and character, mysteries and rewards. It must be able to support and absorb the choices of individual gamers, over which the creator has no control. It has SO many (literally) moving parts!



We also both work by ourselves for years on self-directed projects… then put our creations out into the world, hoping they’ll find the people who will love them.

These similarities are deep. They help us to understand each other’s frustrations and joys, and support each other meaningfully. This is awesome. However, I want to talk a little bit about the differences, which are many.

For example, in my writing career, I have an agent. She connects me to an editor who helps me craft the right words. Then, my editor works with my publisher to create a beautiful physical book, publicize and market that book, and sell that book for me.

An indie game developer, on the other hand, does everything himself, in an extremely saturated market with a lot of roadblocks. He can hire other people to help. Kevin hired a composer and an artist, to help him with his music and his characters (like the Commander and the Ulooquo above). He hired a marketing consultant to do a few things too. But he worked closely with those people, because he knew exactly what he wanted. And everything else has been the work of his own hands. He’s done SO much marketing and publicity work on his own that’s made me appreciate my own marketing and publicity departments even more than I did before. Self-promotion in a saturated market is really, really hard. It’s also stressful for a guy who happens to be humble and was raised with the good-old New England ethos of not bragging about himself :o).

Here’s another big difference: Kevin can release his game while it’s still in production, then use the feedback from early players to shape it and make it better. He can write code into the game that allows him to see how long players play; where they decide to drop out of the game; which options are being chosen more often than others. (He receives this information anonymously, in case you’re starting to worry that he can actually tell what you’re doing inside his game!) As a writer, I definitely don’t know where someone decides to abandon my book. Nor do I want to know, because once people are reading my book, it’s final! If everyone is bailing at a certain point, there’s nothing I can do about it. The words in my book are not going to change. Kevin’s game is more of a living, growing creature, even after it releases, and based on player reactions.

Another big difference is that while I am a wordsmith, Kevin is a programmer. A lot of the time, when I step into his office, he’s working with programming language on his many screens, and I don’t understand the smallest bit of it. My readers read my actual words. His gamers play a game built on a framework of programming that looks and feels very different from the actual game. He also works with a lot of complicated software (like, for 3D modeling) and does a lot of math. He uses trigonometry to [I just asked him to explain it and he said something about spaceships shooting at each other, vectors, and cosines. ???]. I can come home and tell him practically everything I struggled with at work that day. A lot of what he does is too technical for me to understand—though he is really good at creating analogies and explaining things to me when I ask (and when I'm not rushing to finish a blog post!).

Another difference is that he is a visual artist. For example, he created Entarq's Citadel below, which is one of the worlds his gamers get to explore.


Here's another.


Another difference:  I can do my work anywhere. All I need is my notebook and a pen. Kevin needs his fancy computer and his big monitors. So he works from home. Home office and self-employed means he’s working most of the time. Most mornings, he’s working by the time I get out of bed. By the time I leave for my office, he’s put hours in. I come home and he’s making me dinner; after dinner, he works for a few more hours. I go away on trips without him; he works while I’m gone! I always thought I worked really hard. I have a new standard now.

And now his work has created this beautiful, fun game that’s getting really positive attention from gamers and streamers :o). Today, you can buy it in Early Access, and become one of the players who contributes to what it will ultimately become.

And that's my little explanation of what it's like to live with an indie game developer. Check out the links if you’re interested! The trailer is below.