The 18th- and 19th-century cultural landscape of Dresden Elbe Valley extends some 18 km along the river from Übigau Palace and Ostragehege fields in the north-west to the Pillnitz Palace and the Elbe River Island in the south-east. It features low meadows, and is crowned by the Pillnitz Palace and the centre of Dresden with its numerous monuments and parks from the 16th to 20th centuries. The landscape also features 19th- and 20th-century suburban villas and gardens and valuable natural features. Some terraced slopes along the river are still used for viticulture and some old villages have retained their historic structure and elements from the industrial revolution, notably the 147-m Blue Wonder steel bridge (1891–93), the single-rail suspension cable railway (1898–1901), and the funicular (1894–95). The passenger steamships (the oldest from 1879) and shipyard (c. 1900) are still in use.

Justification for Inscription

Criterion (ii): The Dresden Elbe Valley has been the crossroads in Europe, in culture, science and technology. Its art collections, architecture, gardens, and landscape features have been an important reference for Central European developments in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Criterion (iii): The Dresden Elbe Valley contains exceptional testimonies of court architecture and festivities, as well as renowned examples of middle-class architecture and industrial heritage representing European urban development into the modern industrial era.

Criterion (iv): The Dresden Elbe Valley is an outstanding cultural landscape, an ensemble that integrates the celebrated baroque setting and suburban garden city into an artistic whole within the river valley.

Criterion (v): The Dresden Elbe Valley is an outstanding example of land use, representing an exceptional development of a major Central-European city. The value of this cultural landscape has long been recognized, but it is now under new pressures for change.

Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story for the PS1, Tactics Advance for the GBA, and Final Fantasy XII for the PS2.

By far my most favourite post-apocalyptic novel, Emergence was written in 1981 and follows the life of Candidia Maria Smith-Foster, an eleven-year-old girl, who is unaware that she’s a Homo post hominem, mankind’s next evolutionary step. Hominems have higher IQs, they’re stronger, faster, more resistant to illness and trauma, and have quicker reflexes. Their eyesight, hearing, and sense of smell are superior as well.

By the time the narrative opens, Candy has acquired a high school education, some college, and learned karate, having achieved her Fifth Degree Black Belt from her neighbor, 73-year-old Soo Kim McDivott, who she is led to believe is merely a retired schoolteacher. McDivott, whom she calls “Teacher”, is actually the discoverer of the H. post hominem species, and has identified and continues to mentor and lead a group of them, the AAs. As part of her karate training, she has learned to release her hysterical strength, which permits brief bursts of nearly superhuman activity.

Emergence relies on epistolary retelling, unrealistically detailed at times, and pronoun/article deficient (shorthand). The style might annoy some readers, but you get used to it, and, actually, that cut away fat provides an ideal landing pad for Candy’s punchlines. Simple language = comedy gold.

Sentence structure throughout will have English teachers spinning in graves (those fortunate to have one)… English 60 percent flab, null symbols, waste. Suspect massive inefficiency stems from subconsciously recognized need to stall, give inferior intellects chance to collect thoughts into semblance of coherence (usually without success)… (p. 3).

Also, like good Hard SF, Palmer thinks of everything. Everything! And he manages the technical information in intense bursts, keeping it interesting without sacrificing character, and I loved the fact that the girl was really pro-active about her situation and did not dilly-dally about her surroundings like Ish from Earth Abides.

Started to go on way; stopped—had thought. Returned, bled air tanks as had seen Big Olly do. Had explained: Compression, expansion of air in tanks “made water” through condensation; accumulation bad for equipment. Found was starting to think terms of preserving everything potentially useful against future need. (Hope doesn’t develop into full-blown neurosis; maintaining whole world could cramp schedule.) (p. 29.)

Most Heinleinian is the way Emergence embraces controversy that sometimes feels disgusting, especially when the plucky eleven-year-old girl is regularly propositioned for sex. (Who are these men who can’t seem to keep it in their pants around a little girl just a few months after the apocalypse?) But more often, the controversy is subtle, insidious, until the end, when you realize you are essentially rooting for the extinction of humanity.

The book continues with Candy’s search for other humans, a potential mate that she could be with and when she finds a boy, she is happy but also put off by his insistence to be with her as man and woman. She does like him though, and he is a mechanical genius who is able to convert her car into a train/car in order to use the train tracks to travel as the roads would more than likely be closed off with cars.

Candy and her parrot develop a sort of a telepathic link which is awesome, considering that she goes missing shortly after getting a message of a space base. The rest of the super smarties are gathered together to build a rocket that will go into space to destroy a Russian bomb which is set to go off if no Russian agent enters the code. Having most of the Earth de-populated by the killer virus, there are no agents left and the bomb is slowly descending into the Earth’s atmosphere set to kill the Americans. (Yey!)

Candy gets to them in time and volunteers to be a pilot as she is small enough to fit in the bomb’s cokpit and de-activate it. As a surprise turn of events, one of their co-pilots was a Russian double-agent and he manages to almost destroy their mission. Candy is brave, Candy is a martial arts expert, Candy is a ruthless killer. I loved the ending and I was left wanting for more.

I was happy today when I found out that a sequel to Emergence, Tracking, was serialized in three parts, beginning in the July/August 2008 issue of Analog. Tracking was continued in the September issue and concluded in the October issue of the magazine.

I will find it and I will read it.

Back to the Future Trailer – Directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Michael J. Fox Christopher Lloyd Lea Thompson Crispin Glover and Thomas F. Wilson Eighties teenager Marty McFly is accidentally sent back in time to 1955, inadvertently disrupting his parents’ first meeting and attracting his mother’s romantic interest. Marty must repair the damage to history by rekindling his parents’ romance and – with the help of his eccentric inventor friend Doc Brown – returning to 1985.

Since my Samsung laptop, which was released in 2018, recently broke down, I’ve had to do without a computer for the last few weeks. I’m someone who takes good care of his belongings. I’ve never had a computer crash before. But it appears that the motherboard of my Notebook 7 Spin has ceased to function. So, while I’m waiting for a replacement motherboard to arrive in the mail, I have to adjust to life without my trusty laptop. I took out my old Acer Aspire 5750 laptop, which was released back in 2011. This laptop may be old but it still functions. There’s nothing stored on it, but at least I can use the internet on it. Because this laptop is a decade old, and because I used to use it every day, it wasn’t exactly in tip top shape. I had to open it up and clean the motherboard, the fan, and some of the other boards with alcohol. When I was using this laptop regularly I once accidentally spilled coffee with milk and sugar on it. This happened years ago, and back then I didn’t fix my electronic devices or clean the insides. Despite of this, the laptop continued to work. This time, however, I wiped away the dried coffee and all of the dust that appeared on the inside. I had to fix the DVD drive, which ceased to open. Fortunately, the DVD drive didn’t have to be replaced. The keyboard, however, has to be replaced because a few of the keys don’t work anymore. I ordered a replacement keyboard on Amazon, but it hasn’t arrived yet. Fortunately, I have an external keyboard and mouse. Other than these minor problems, my old and inexpensive Acer laptop still works fine, and it has been my most reliable laptop. It has only 4GB of RAM and it lacks bluetooth technology. So, I probably won’t be playing any games on it. All of my saved game files are on my broken Notebook 7 Spin. But even the Notebook 7 Spin isn’t exactly a beast. It has 8GB of RAM. In other words, it can play games from the PlayStation 3 generation just fine, but it can’t play games from the PlayStation 4 generation well at all. This is one of the reasons why I don’t play or post reviews of games from the eighth generation of video game consoles. I also don’t own a PS4. Still, I don’t feel like I’m missing out. In my opinion, few great video games got released after the PS3 was discontinued. I’d like to play Bloodborne, but I’m not going to lose sleep over the fact that I haven’t played this game yet. I’ve already played Dark Souls. This happened in the middle of 2021. It would have been most convenient if I had been able to play Dark Souls on my laptop, but my laptop isn’t powerful enough to play the version that’s available for purchase on Steam (Dark Souls: Remastered). Therefore, I had to use my PlayStation 3 Super Slim in order to play this game. Among gamers, many of whom are young men that don’t have a good education, this game is known for being hard. Is this the case? This depends on how you play Dark Souls. As in most other video games, you have the option of leveling up your character in Dark Souls. If you do this, instead of rushing into battles without gaining experience points, you will have a much easier time playing this game. The only problem is that leveling up in this game is more time consuming than in almost all other games. And even if you do make your character stronger by leveling up and finding better equipment, you still can’t blindly rush into most battles. Even low level enemies can do some serious damage to your character if you’re not careful. Therefore, you also have to get used to this game’s combat. The combat in this game consists mostly of conserving your stamina while fighting, blocking with your shield, and striking an enemy when the enemy isn’t blocking your attacks. This approach to combat doesn’t always work, however. In a few cases, different approaches are needed. As great and as memorable as Dark Souls is, I don’t think that the director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, is some genius. I think that Dark Souls was heavily influenced by the Diablo games. The big difference is that Diablo games feature an overhead viewpoint, but Dark Souls features a first-person viewpoint. In my opinion, the world of Dark Souls, the gameplay, the monsters, and the weapons are similar to those in the Diablo games. Still, I can easily say that Dark Souls is one of the best and most memorable games that I’ve ever played. It’s quite an experience.

Dark Souls II, the sequel to Dark Souls, can be a polarizing game. On the one hand, it retained most of the gameplay formula of the original, but it also introduced changes that can put off some fans of the original. First of all, in almost every aspect, Dark Souls II is a slight step down from Dark Souls. For example, the graphics aren’t as polished. This can seem like a turn off at the beginning of the game but it becomes insignificant as your progress in the game because many of the designs are still impressive. The combat is slightly different. I think that Dark Souls II is overall an easier game than Dark Souls. The world isn’t interconnected, like in Dark Souls. The game developers remedied this by giving players the ability to easily travel between bonfires even at the beginning of the game. The voice acting, however, is just as good as in Dark Souls. I also like the music, and the theme for Majula is one of my favorites. The more I played Dark Souls II, the more I liked it. It’s a very good game, and people simply have to remember that it’s not a copy of Dark Souls. Therefore, players have to adapt to the gameplay changes in Dark Souls II. I was still playing Dark Souls II when my laptop crashed. By then, I completed the main quest, but I had just started playing the Lost Crowns DLC. Therefore, my completion of the game hasn’t reached 100% yet. By the way, Dark Souls II can easily be purchased on Steam, and it plays just fine on a PC. I didn’t use a keyboard and mouse as controls. I used a bluetooth controller instead. Although I post reviews of the games that I’m playing or of the games that I’ve played, my blog hasn’t exactly been a gaming diary. Persona 5, a game that I finished playing a few months ago, is worth reviewing. After I finished playing Persona 4, which has become one of my favorite games, I naturally got the urge to play the other Persona games. Persona 5 became my first choice, and I began playing it on my PS3, having bought it before the PlayStation Store went out of service. Persona 5 can seem like an improvement over Persona 4 to some players, but this isn’t the case with me. I’ll admit that there’s more to do in Persona 5, and it certainly seems like a bigger game than Persona 4, but a few things prevent me from liking it as much as Persona 4. For the most part, Persona 5 features superb graphics and art, though its art style doesn’t appeal to me as much as the art style of Persona 4. The anime cutscenes that are featured in the game are not of a good quality at all, and they actually look somewhat worse than the anime cutscenes in Persona 4. The anime cutscenes in a game like Xenogears, which was released 18 years earlier, look better than the ones in Persona 5. The characters in Persona 5 also don’t appeal to me as much as the characters in Persona 4. For the most part, they’re somewhat modified copies of the characters from Persona 4. In Persona 4, I liked all of the characters in the protagonist’s group. In Persona 5, I liked only Haru and Makoto. In fact, some of the characters outside of the protagonist’s group, like Goro Akechi, Sadayo Kawakami, and Chihaya Mifune, are more appealing and interesting than the ones in the protagonist’s group. So, I would say that when it comes to story and characters, Persona 5 is slightly worse than Persona 4. When it comes to graphics, music, and features, Persona 5 is slightly better. Still, Persona 5 is a superb video game that’s definitely worth playing. It’s just not as great or as appealing as Persona 4, which is easily one of the greatest video games ever.