Cold Winter

Cold Winter is a 2005 first-person shooter video game developed by Swordfish Studios and published by Vivendi Universal Games for the PlayStation 2. Its story was written by Warren Ellis.

Plot

Andrew Sterling is a former British SAS soldier working for MI6, who has been captured in the People's Republic of China and jailed in Chang political prison; MI6 destroyed all files on Sterling to prevent an international incident. He is rescued the night before his execution by an old female acquaintance named Kim and a former fellow SAS soldier Daniel Parish. To repay his debt to Parish for saving his life Andrew agrees to work for his private security agency. Sterling then travels to Egypt to eliminate the leaders of an arms dealing cartel who possess a missile guidance system called Octopus. He completes his mission but at the cost of Kim's life.

The antagonist is John Grey (voiced by Tom Baker), who as a young man who enlisted in the RAF to defend Britain at the height of World War II. Horrified by nuclear weapons John Grey formed a secret society, "Greywings" inspired by the heroes of the H. G. Wells novel The Shape of Things to Come. Greywings sought out and destroyed nuclear threats but ultimately came to the conclusion that the only way to abolish nuclear warfare would be to create a nuclear winter leaving the survivors afraid of nuclear warfare. Greywings planned on initiating their plan codenamed Operation: Cold Winter by providing world powers with the Octopus guidance systems.

808s & Heartbreak

808s & Heartbreak is the fourth studio album by American recording artist Kanye West, released on November 24, 2008, by Roc-A-Fella Records. It was recorded during September and October 2008 at Glenwood Studios in Burbank, California and Avex Recording Studio in Honolulu, Hawaii, with the help of producers such as No I.D., and Jeff Bhasker.

Conceived in the wake of a series of distressing personal events, 808s & Heartbreak marked a major musical departure for West from his previous hip hop records. It featured electropop and R&B music and lyrics about personal loss, alienated fame, and heartache, sung by West using an Auto-Tune vocal processor. For the album's production, he eschewed conventional hip hop sounds in favor of a minimalist sonic palette, which included prominent use of Auto-Tune and the titular Roland TR-808 drum machine to create a distorted, electronic sound.

808s & Heartbreak debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, selling 450,145 copies in its first week. By 2013, it had sold 1.7 million copies in the United States. Four singles were released to promote the record, including the hit singles "Love Lockdown" and "Heartless". Despite varying responses from music audiences towards West's stylistic change, the album received positive reviews from most critics and was named one of 2008's best records in their year-end lists.

Winter

Winter is the coldest season of the year in polar and temperate climates, between autumn and spring. Winter is caused by the axis of the Earth in that hemisphere being oriented away from the Sun. Different cultures define different dates as the start of winter, and some use a definition based on weather. When it is winter in the Northern Hemisphere, it is summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and vice versa. In many regions, winter is associated with snow and freezing temperatures. The moment of winter solstice is when the sun's elevation with respect to the North or South Pole is at its most negative value (that is, the sun is at its farthest below the horizon as measured from the pole), meaning this day will have the shortest day and the longest night. The earliest sunset and latest sunrise dates outside the polar regions differ from the date of the winter solstice, however, and these depend on latitude, due to the variation in the solar day throughout the year caused by the Earth's elliptical orbit (see earliest and latest sunrise and sunset).