In Nintendo’s ongoing effort to make adult fans of the Pokémon video game series feel old, the gaming giant has released a revamped version of the third generation of its ridiculously popular handheld RPG series. Following the 2004 remake of the original Red/Blue as FireRed/LeafGreenfor the Game Boy Advance and the 2009 remake of Gold/Silver as HeartGold/SoulSilverfor the DS, Pokémon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire continues the trend of updating older games in the series to fill time between newer releases. But is Hoennworth revisiting? 

The original Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire is now—brace yourselves—12 years old. Pokémon games have always been some of the absolute best of Nintendo’s handheld offerings, even the best among the RPG genre regardless of publisher or platform, with gameplay that can be as simple or as complex as you want it and hundreds of hours of “endgame” breeding, leveling, and Legendary-hunting. But after the incredible Gold/Silver, which introduced a boatload of new features and even included the entire original game’s map after you completed the new one, Ruby/Sapphire felt lackluster. It was merely really good. 

When you think of Antarctica, you probably picture ice, snow and penguins. You don’t normally think of people, other than the odd intrepid explorer driving his dogsled across a frozen landscape.  

And yet a few thousand human beings do work in bases spread across Antarctica during what passes for the continent’s summer. And nearly 700 stay through the winter, when the sun never rises, the winds blow fiercely and the temperature dips far, far below zero.  

Anthony Powell’s documentary Antarctica: A Year on Ice shows what it’s like to be one of those rare individuals who dare to spend 12 months on the continent at the bottom of the world. It’s fascinating both visually and psychologically.   

Who are these folks? Scientists, of course, but New Zealander Powell trains his camera on what one visitor refers to as “normal people”: firefighters, mechanics, shopkeepers.  

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me

Pastor Martin Niemoller, speaking about Nazi Germany

First, they’ve come for the people of color.  

America’s police forces increasingly serve as a a private corporate army, beyond the reach of the law.  

But our nation is distracted by race.  And millions of white Americans are under the illusion that what was done to Michael Brown and Eric Garner can’t happen to them.

These un-prosecuted killings of African-American men go way beyond racial prejudice.

They are the calling card of an Orwellian state:

All the original "starving hysterical naked" beatniks, cool cats, flower children, hippies and freaks are now advancing into their senior years or dead.

But their innocence and experience -- and complex experiments with words and ideals, and celebration of life -- is still available here across hilly and chilly San Francisco.

Guide books and maps will help, but you don't really need those to discover the remains of "the scene" if you keep your eyes open while wandering the city.

In the sanitized, unaware 1950s when it all began, America lacked what later became known as a mass "youth culture," which quickly branched into a deeper "counterculture."

In January 1967, the social changes engulfed San Francisco's Golden Gate Park at "The Human Be-In, A Gathering of the Tribes."

There, an invisible baton passed from revered beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg to the hippies' ex-Harvard psychedelic psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary.

Today, on nearby Haight Street, you can buy a copy of the luminescent poster of that beatific event which soon spawned a "Summer of Love."

In the wake of the failure of a grand jury proceeding to indict Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson Missouri, President Obama has finally taken a material rather than rhetorical step on the issue. The widespread unrest sparked by public anger at the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, who witnesses testified had his hands up surrendering to Wilson, could not be ignored by the Whitehouse any longer. Purportedly to institute policy changes to prevent more Ferguson situations, and return the nation to a modicum of normalcy in the wake of widespread domestic unrest, the President has appointed a commission to recommend national policing reforms.

That commission, rather than being stacked with civil libertarians, seems to be built around a handful of national policing figures with little regard for human rights. Some figures involved in this new process have a long history of suppressing domestic dissent. Their long history of violent repression, and the solutions they and the White House have already made, may lead to a vast expansion of police presence and domestic surveillance.