Gaming the Publishing Industry: Exploring Diverse Open Scholarship Models in Digital Games Studies

The emergent field of digital game scholarship has developed along unique communicative lines, illuminating alternative models and diversified potentials for scholarly communication. Following the decline of print-based magazine journalism, the rise of moderated aggregator sites, such as Kotaku, Polygon, and Rock Paper Shotgun has exposed many independent voices to larger audiences. Much of the scholarship cited in current academic work can be found online at sites like Critical Distance (which uses “roundups, roundtables, podcasts, and critical compilations” to encourage dialogue between “developers, critics, educators and enthusiasts”), First Person Scholar, a middle-state publication that combines “the timeliness and succinctness of a blog, while retaining the rigor and context of a conventional journal article” (Hawreliak), highly polished and curated online zines such as Heterotopias, and from quality video bloggers such as Noah Caldwell Gervais and short-form documentary creators such as Gvmers. These heterogeneous alternatives collectively model a publishing plasticity and adaptiveness, establishing a culture of open scholarship practices, inclusive and diverse voices, and a rapid deployment of ideas and perspectives. This paper argues that emergent models of scholarly communication explored by the game studies community include but also moderate the reactive energies of social media and the toxicity of “gamer” culture.

Pakistan-Ukraine. Analogies in the Triangles of Regional Security Complexes

The paper deals with two countries – Pakistan and Ukraine – that are located at the center of the following two interest triangles: India-Pakistan-Afghanistan (South Asia) and Russia-Ukraine-Moldova (post-Soviet regional security complex). Despite their considerable differences, they have similar problems with their geopolitical neighbours in the context of territorial conflicts. Existing issues with neighbouring countries give Pakistan and Ukraine the status of a ‘middle state’, which is characterized by threatening its territorial integrity and becoming an object of ‘penetrating’ into its RSC (regional security complex) for the states from neighbouring regions.

SEMUT (TENSES VERB MUTER) AS A MEDIA TO UNDERSTAND BASIC ENGLISH (TENSES AND VERB) FOR STUDENTS IN PLUMPANG TUBAN 1 MIDDLE STATE

This study aims to determine the results of the development of the media SEMUT (Verb Muter Tenses) with a series of learning media ERTE MAP (Preparation of Verb Words and Tenses) and a module entitled "Learn Basic English (Tenses and Verb): Simple Present Tense, Simple Past Tense, Present Continuous Tense "that is to improve the English language skills of students and know students' responses to the use of the media. The research method used was one group pre-test post-test design. This method is carried out by giving students pre-test and post-test questions, as a qualitative method is carried out by interviewing several students who have participated in the implementation of the SEMUT Learning Media program (Verb Muter Tenses). The pre-test and post-test were distributed to 31 students of Plumpang 1 Public High School, Tuban to find out the values before and after the implementation of the SEMUT media. Meanwhile, the interview was conducted to determine the students' interest of SEMUT media.

A Small State between Two Major Powers: Nepal’s Foreign Policy Since 1816

Nepal is a small state situated in a geo-strategic location between two major powers—China and India, the former being a great state, and the latter a middle state. Nepal has asymmetric relations with both India and China in terms of national power. Nepalese psyche has been shaped by the very geostrategic situation since the time immemorial. However, Nepal as a modern state was born only in 1768, since then it has adopted different strategies for its survival according to the changes in international, regional and domestic power equations. During the initial phase (1768-1814), Nepal was called Gorkha empire and it had pursued a grand strategy of sub-regional hegemony while being mindful of the sensibilities of the big powers in the North and the South. Nepal made a transition from imperial grand strategy to small power diplomacy in 1816 when it was defeated in Anglo-Nepal War (1814-16). From 1848, when Jung Bahadur came to power, Nepal started to fully bandwagon with the British colonialists in India. After that, Nepal had followed strategies of ‘special relationship’ with its neighbors, non-alignment, balancing, balking, neutrality, equidistance, equiproximity and trilateral cooperation depending upon changes in domestic, and regional as well as international politics.

Utilizing Neutral Affective States in Research: Theory, Assessment, and Recommendations

Even though researchers regularly use neutral affect induction procedures (AIPs) as a control condition in their work, there is little consensus on what is neutral affect. This article reviews five approaches that researchers have used to operationalize neutral AIPs: to produce a(n) (a) minimal affective state, (b) in-the-middle state, (c) deactivated state, (d) typical state, or (e) indifferent state. For each view, the article delineates the theoretical basis for the neutral AIP, how to assess it, and provides recommendations for when and how to use it. The goal of the article is to encourage researchers to state their theoretical assumptions about neutral affect, to validate those assumptions, and to make appropriate conclusions based on them.

Hell and Its Rivals

The idea of punishment after death—whereby the souls of the wicked are consigned to hell—emerged out of beliefs found across the Mediterranean, from ancient Egypt to Zoroastrian Persia, and became fundamental to the Abrahamic religions. Once hell achieved doctrinal expression in the New Testament, the Talmud, and the Qur’ān, thinkers began to question hell’s eternity, and to consider possible alternatives—hell’s rivals. Some imagined outright escape, others periodic but temporary relief within the torments. One option, including Purgatory and, in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the Middle State, was to consider the punishments to be temporary and purifying. Despite these moral and theological hesitations, the idea of hell has remained a historical and theological force until the present. This book examines an array of sources from within and beyond the three Abrahamic faiths—including theology, chronicles, legal charters, edifying tales, and narratives of near-death experiences—to analyze the origins and evolution of belief in hell. Key social institutions, including slavery, capital punishment, and monarchy, also affected the afterlife beliefs of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Reflection on hell encouraged a stigmatization of “the other” that in turn emphasized the differences between these religions. Yet, despite these rivalries, each community proclaimed eternal punishment and answered related challenges to it in similar terms. For all that divided them, they agreed on the need for—and fact of—hell.

Optimal PRFs from Blockcipher Designs

Cryptographic modes built on top of a blockcipher usually rely on the assumption that this primitive behaves like a pseudorandom permutation (PRP). For many of these modes, including counter mode and GCM, stronger security guarantees could be derived if they were based on a PRF design. We propose a heuristic method of transforming a dedicated blockcipher design into a dedicated PRF design. Intuitively, the method consists of evaluating the blockcipher once, with one or more intermediate state values fed-forward. It shows strong resemblance with the optimally secure EDMD construction by Mennink and Neves (CRYPTO 2017), but the use of internal state values make their security analysis formally inapplicable. In support of its security, we give the rationale of relying on the EDMD function (as opposed to alternatives), and present analysis of simplified versions of our conversion method applied to the AES. We conjecture that our main proposal AES-PRF, AES with a feed-forward of the middle state, achieves close to optimal security. We apply the design to GCM and GCM-SIV, and demonstrate how it entails significant security improvements. We furthermore demonstrate how the technique extends to tweakable blockciphers and allows for security improvements in, for instance, PMAC1.

Diagnosing Soil and Coconut Root Existence in Lontang Plantation of Manado City

Province of North Sulawesi has been known as wave palm area (coconut). One of the plantations (coconut) potential become the farmer’s income and Locally-Generated Revenue (LGR). Therefore, it is important to maximize the soil function and root system of coconut. This research was aimed to diagnose a soil and coconut root existence in Lontang Plantation of Manado City. Soil observations were carried out on a single stretch of coconut plantations owned by community. The observation was done through the soil profile at a spacing of <1 m; 3 m and 5 m from the main tree of the coconut. The results showed that decreasing of C-Organic content in 1 m depth was not followed by enhancement of soil content weight, because C-Organic has spread equally in middle state and into the depth of >1 m on 3 and 5 m spacing profile from the main tree which categorized as low. Existence of total root length (Lrv) and dry root weight (Drv) shows that deeper soil will be more reduced of the root Lrv and Drv values along with the organic material in the bottom layer (> 1 m) lower than above it. The highest Lrv and Drv average value is located on the depth of 0 – 60 cm. Specrol existence on 1 - 3 m spacing profile have showed many soft roots which grow on these spacing. The soft root has a roles to absorb nutrient and water for the plant and direct contact with the soil.