Panther

Panther may refer to:

Large cats

Exalted

Exalted is a role-playing game published by White Wolf Publishing. The game is classified as high fantasy and it was inspired by a mixture of world mythologies as well as Japanese Anime. The third edition of the game is currently in development. First Edition was originally created by Robert Hatch, Justin Achilli and Stephan Wieck. The original core rulebook was published in July 2001.

Influences

The setting is strongly influenced by Tanith Lee's Tales from the Flat Earth, Michael Moorcock's Hawkmoon, Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegana and Yoshiaki Kawajiri's Ninja Scroll. Other influences include Glen Cook's The Black Company; Sean Stewart's Resurrection Man, The Night Watch, and Galveston; Homer's Odyssey, the Bible, and Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West.

System

The game uses ten-sided dice and a variation of the Storyteller System to arbitrate the action, and, as with many other RPGs, requires little beyond the rulebooks themselves, dice, pencil, and paper. The Exalted version of the rules were derived from the trilogy of White Wolf Publishing games Aeon(Trinity), Aberrant, and Adventure where the idea of a fixed target number of 7 or higher was first introduced.

Panther (1975 video game)

Panther, a battle tank-driving simulation named after the Panther tank, was one of a handful of early first-person computer games developed by John Edo Haefeli and Nelson Bridwell in 1975 at Northwestern University. The game was developed for the multi-user interactive computer-based education PLATO system and programmed in the TUTOR programming language and utilized scalable vector graphics called linesets. A 1977 development of Panther, with more refined graphics, was named Panzer, the German word for armour and tank.

Nelson contributed the original concept of a tank combat game, which was inspired by Brand Fortner's Airfight, Jim Bowery's Spasim, and an unfinished tank game effort of Derek Ward. Nelson also provided the Panther tank artwork, the vehicle motion, view, and damage equations, and a significant fraction of the original code. John was a highly capable TUTOR IV programmer who created the overall game framework, providing key features such as team selection and messaging that turned the concept into a working game, later adding a number of refinements.

Nyx

Nyx (English /ˈnɪks/;Ancient Greek: Νύξ, "Night";Latin: Nox) is the Greek goddess (or personification) of the night. A shadowy figure, Nyx stood at or near the beginning of creation, and mothered other personified deities such as Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death), with Erebus (Darkness). Her appearances are sparse in surviving mythology, but reveal her as a figure of such exceptional power and beauty, that she is feared by Zeus himself.

Mythology and literature

Hesiod

In Hesiod's Theogony, Nyx is born of Chaos. With Erebus (Darkness), Nyx gives birth to Aether (Brightness) and Hemera (Day). Later, on her own, Nyx gives birth to Moros (Doom, Destiny), Ker (Destruction, Death), Thanatos (Death), Hypnos (Sleep), the Oneiroi (Dreams), Momus (Blame), Oizys (Pain, Distress), the Hesperides, the Moirai (Fates), the Keres, Nemesis (Indignation, Retribution), Apate (Deceit), Philotes (Friendship), Geras (Old Age), and Eris (Strife).

In his description of Tartarus, Hesiod locates there the home of Nyx, and the homes of her children Hypnos and Thanatos. Hesiod says further that Nyx's daughter Hemera (Day) left Tartarus just as Nyx (Night) entered it; continuing cyclicly, when Hemera returned, Nyx left. This mirrors the portrayal of Ratri (night) in the Rigveda, where she works in close cooperation but also tension with her sister Ushas (dawn).

Night (book)

Night (1960) is a work by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–45, at the height of the Holocaust toward the end of the Second World War. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, reflected in the inversion of the parent–child relationship as his father declines to a helpless state and Wiesel becomes his resentful teenage caregiver. "If only I could get rid of this dead weight ... Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever." In Night everything is inverted, every value destroyed. "Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends," a Kapo tells him. "Everyone lives and dies for himself alone."

Wiesel was 16 when Buchenwald was liberated by the United States Army in April 1945, too late for his father, who died after a beating while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above for fear of being beaten too. He moved to Paris after the war, and in 1954 completed an 862-page manuscript in Yiddish about his experiences, published in Argentina as the 245-page Un di velt hot geshvign ("And the World Remained Silent"). The novelist François Mauriac helped him find a French publisher. Les Éditions de Minuit published 178 pages as La Nuit in 1958, and in 1960 Hill & Wang in New York published a 116-page translation as Night.

Gazpacho (band)

Gazpacho are an art rock band from Oslo, Norway. The original core band of Jan-Henrik Ohme (vocals), Jon-Arne Vilbo (guitars) and Thomas Andersen (keyboards, programming, producer) started making music together in 1996 and the band has since expanded with Mikael Krømer (violin, co-producer), Lars Erik Asp (drums) and Kristian Torp (bass).

Gazpacho's music has been described by one critic as being "classical post ambient nocturnal atmospheric neo-progressive folk world rock". The music has been compared to A-ha, Radiohead, Marillion and Porcupine Tree.

Without the backing of a major label, Gazpacho is one of many bands now using the Internet to promote their music, specifically their own website and its forum, online shopping and MySpace. This allows the band to hold down full-time jobs, yet still manage to release an album a year with total artistic control over their compositions and distribution.

History

The Early Years (1996–2001)

Childhood friends Jon-Arne Vilbo and Thomas Andersen had played together in a band called Delerium before, which in their own words "whittled away." After several years of separation, the two friends met again and started making music together again. Andersen had met Jan-Henrik Ohme through his work as radio commercial producer and brought him into the jam sessions, which laid the foundation for Gazpacho as it exists today.