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Magic Knight Rayearth

Magic Knight Rayearth (レイアース) is a Japanese manga series created by CLAMP. Appearing as a serial in the manga magazine Nakayoshi from the November 1993 issue to the February 1995 issue, the chapters of Magic Knight Rayearth were collected into three bound volumes by Kodansha. They were published from July 1994 to March 1995. A sequel was serialized in the same manga magazine from the March 1995 issue to the April 1996 issue. It was published by Kodansha in three bound volumes from July 1995 to April 1996.

The series follows three eighth-grade girls who find themselves transported from modern-day Japan into a magical world, where they are tasked with rescuing a princess. Rayearth combines elements from the magical girl and mecha anime genres with parallel world fantasy. The manga was adapted into two anime series in 1994 and an original video animation (OVA) in 1997. A new anime project has been announced.

Plot

Magic Knight Rayearth focuses on three eighth-grade girls: the tomboyish, headstrong but short Hikaru Shidou (獅堂 光); the quick-tempered and no-nonsense only child Umi Ryuuzaki (龍咲 海); and the intelligent and ladylike Fuu Hououji (鳳凰寺 風). While on a field trip to the Tokyo Tower with their respective schools, the girls find themselves drawn into another world, Cephiro. There they learn that Cephiro is influenced by one's will and that the Pillar maintains Cephiro through prayer. The girls are then tasked with rescuing the current Pillar, Princess Emeraude, from her abductor, the high priest and antagonist Zagato, after which they will be returned to Tokyo.

Guided by the creature Mokona on their quest, the girls discover their respective element-based magic and awaken the three Rune-Gods (魔神), creatures who can take the form of giant robots that the girls must pilot. As the girls progress on their journey, they overcome their differences, learning how to work together and accept each other as friends. After the girls find Zagato, they fight and are able to destroy him. After this, they finally reach where Emeraude is imprisoned, but the three learn that she had fallen in love with Zagato, which had hindered her ability to pray solely for Cephiro's well-being. Feeling responsible for her actions, she had imprisoned herself, and eventually summoned the Magic Knights to kill her, as no one from Cephiro could harm the Pillar. Her dark side then takes over, seeking to destroy the Magic Knights for killing her love. After a short defensive fight against Princess Emeraude, the Magic Knights have no choice but to kill her. They then find themselves transported back to Tokyo.

The second part of the series deals with the complications caused by Princess Emeraude's death. Set a year later, it opens with the three protagonists struggling with their guilt and despair over their role in her death. Meeting again at Tokyo Tower, they find themselves transported mysteriously to Cephiro again, and discover that only a single piece of Cephiro remains, which holds a castle where the survivors gather to take refuge. With the Pillar gone, Cephiro is, for the most part, defenseless, and the girls are saddened to learn that a new Pillar must be chosen by the Pillar system before the whole planet is destroyed. Not only that, three warring planets have begun their attempts to conquer the Pillar-less Cephiro: Autozam, a technologically advanced world which intends to use the Pillar system to remove the pollution in its air; Fahren, whose childish ruler Lady Aska plans to use it to turn Cephiro into a world of her whims; and Chizeta, an overpopulated world whose sibling rulers Tatra and Tarta plan to use it to make Cephiro into a colony.

As the Magic Knights help defend the castle, they each agree that the fate of the planet should not be the responsibility of only one person which, like Princess Emeraude, effectively prevents that person from ever being able to live and love freely. What's more, there is a mostly unspoken risk that when a new Pillar is chosen, something may eventually hinder them from praying solely for Cephiro's well-being, cause them to summon new Magic Knights to kill them, and bring Cephiro to near-destruction again until a new Pillar is chosen, causing the cycle of events to continue endlessly. As such, Lantis, a powerful magic swordsman and Zagato's younger brother, wishes to end the Pillar system for those reasons.

Eventually, Mokona narrows the candidates down to two: Hikaru and the sickly Eagle Vision of Autozam, who is friends with Lantis and, as such, wishes to end the Pillar system for him with his eternal sleep. As the two undergo the test to become the new Pillar in a recreation of Tokyo, Mokona reveals itself to be the creator of Cephiro and its laws, both of which it had created after sadly witnessing the violence and destructive nature of the people on its earlier creation, Earth. It was responsible for bringing the three girls back to Cephiro. In the end, Hikaru becomes the new Pillar of Cephiro, and brings Eagle Vision back to Cephiro from the Tokyo recreation with the help of Fuu and Umi, against Mokona's insistence that only one may return. Hikaru then rejects the Pillar system, decreeing once and for all the fate of the planet should not be the responsibility of one person. Mokona accepts their decision and leaves with the three Mashin. The manga concludes with the three girls' returning to a new Cephiro to visit their loved ones, as they work with the rulers of the other planets to solve their planets' problems, and contemplate Mokona's wish to allow the three protagonists to bring change to Cephiro.

Development
During the celebration of the publication of the Soryuden novels, which Clamp had illustrated, the group was asked by Hideki Yamaguchi, editor for the Japanese shōjo (targeted towards girls) manga magazine Nakayoshi, to do a series for the magazine. The editor-in-chief wanted a story that could appeal to elementary readers and older, while Clamp wished to bring in younger fans. Without direction from the editors, the group decided on a series combining robots, as they were fond of robot anime; role-playing games (RPGs), which saw popularity in Japan at the time; and fantasy, to counterbalance the robots, which they thought alone would be off-putting to their target audience. According to Ohkawa, the magazine's success with the magical girl manga Sailor Moon (1991–97) made it possible for the group to pitch a serial with robots to its editors.

A friend of Clamp, illustrator Takeshi Okazaki, created the "Rayearth" part of the title, while Ohkawa thought of the rest. At that point, Clamp had completed a "basic" idea of the plot. For the names of the characters, they drew on car names, feeling that they would be interesting and memorable for children, who might otherwise have difficulty learning the names of characters in katakana. The inclusion of giant robots gave the artists some difficulty, as the massive scale of the robots made it impossible to depict the characters and robots in the same frame. The artists also omitted the cockpit of the robots, to show their faces instead. Greatly anticipating the ending to the first part of the series, Clamp found the protagonists' initial adventures in Cephiro "really easy" to create. Ohkawa noted that, had their target audience been older or male, they would have considered stopping the series with the conclusion of part one. The second part, however, proved difficult for the group to create, as they felt as if they had "written [them]selves into a corner".

Magic Knight Rayearth explores "fate, grim destiny, and sacrifice," as do many of Clamp's works. According to Ohkawa, who believes in choosing one's fate, humanity's fate is caused by one's actions; Cephiro is merely an exaggeration of Earth.

Manga
Written and illustrated by Clamp, Magic Knight Rayearth appeared as a serial in the Japanese magazine Nakayoshi from November 1993 to February 1995. Kodansha collected the chapters in three tankōbon volumes. The first was published on July 22, 1994; the last was released on March 6, 1995. The sequel also appeared in Nakayoshi from March 1995 to April 1996.

In 1997, Tokyopop licensed Magic Knight Rayearth for an English-language translation in North America, and serialized it in its manga magazine MixxZine. The English version of the manga was at first issued in a flipped left to right format, but was re-released in the original right to left format in later editions. The English version of the manga also at first continued the volume numbering through the two series, such that Magic Knight Rayearth II volumes #1–3 were numbered as volumes "#4–6" (i.e., the 2000/2001 release of Magic Knight Rayearth volume 4 has the same content as the 2003/2004 re-release's Magic Knight Rayearth II volume 1).

It would appear that Tokyopop has lost their license for the series, as Dark Horse Comics announced at their San Diego Comic-Con 2009 panel that they would be publishing the series in a new omnibus edition in honor of Clamp's 20th anniversary. Dark Horse published the omnibus editions from July 6, 2011 to April 12, 2012.

After Dark Horse Comics' license expired, Kodansha Comics licensed it and began releasing the series in two hardcover box sets containing three volumes each in honor of the manga's 25th anniversary in 2019. At Anime NYC 2022, Kodansha USA announced that they would release a paperback edition for Fall 2023.

The series is also licensed in French by Pika Édition.

Anime
The anime series aired first on Japan's Yomiuri TV and on NNS in Tokyo on October 17, 1994, and ended on November 27, 1995. It was directed by Toshihiro Hirano and co-produced by Yomiuri TV and Tokyo Movie Shinsha (now TMS Entertainment). The anime had 2 seasons, lasting 49 episodes altogether.

The TV series was licensed in the U.S. twice, first by The Ocean Group, which was supposed to air on Fox Kids in a test pilot run in the 1990s, and second by Media Blasters and was dubbed by Bang Zoom! Entertainment from 1999 to 2000.

The anime series was also aired on the Philippine television network ABS-CBN in 1996, dubbed in Tagalog and airing every Sunday at 9:00 am for the first season and 10:30 am for the second season in 1997. It was popular with Filipino female children and became one of the Philippines' highest-rated anime series of the 20th century, helping to revitalize Filipino interest in anime. It was later aired on GMA Network on November 26, 2001, but on a weekday basis and with a Tagalog dub produced by Telesuccess Productions.

It was released on both VHS and DVD. Discotek Media re-released the series on DVD and Blu-ray on January 31, 2017. Anime Limited announced that they had acquired the series for release in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

A new anime project was announced to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the anime series on July 2, 2024.

OVA
A three-part OVA was released in Japan a few years after the end of the manga and the TV series (July 25, September 26, and December 10, 1997). The OVA was named simply Rayearth, and its story was quite different from the original. The characters are all the same, but the relationships, places and events changed radically.

In the OVA, Hikaru, Umi and Fuu are already friends who go to the same school and will soon be leaving for high school. Suddenly, a strange fairy (which turns out to be Mokona, the creature from the original series) appears in front of them. At the same time, strange monsters and wizards start to appear in the city of Tokyo. One of them is Clef, who tries to guide the three girls in order to let them become the Magic Knights, awaken their Mashin and fight against the evil wizards from Cephiro, who are trying to invade the human world. In this version, Ferio, who is a sorcerer under Princess Emeraude's command, is not her brother. Eagle Vision fills that role instead, as well as being the main antagonist after he tricked Zagato to commit suicide in order to bring upon a false balance to Cephiro. His ties to Autozam are non-existent in this version, as he is a citizen of Cephiro from the start. He would put a spell on Emeraude to convince her that Zagato is still alive, so that the sorcerers of Cephiro can continue to exist on Earth as the two worlds would soon merge and each sorcerer would battle against the Magic Knights. Lantis is also introduced right away as being an ally to the Magic Knights and against Eagle's plans. The only other characters that are in the OVA are Ascot and Alcyone, with none of the other characters are featured.

The OVA is licensed in the U.S. by Manga Entertainment, who opted to use a different New York-based voice cast for its English release, which was produced by Skypilot Entertainment.

Theme songs

 * Opening themes

Three opening themes were used in the series and one in the OVA Rayearth:

Magic Knight Rayearth:
 * Episodes 1–20: "Unyielding Wish" (｢ゆずれない願い｣) by Naomi Tamura

Magic Knight Rayearth 2:
 * Episodes 1–22: "I Can't Hate You" (｢キライになれない｣) by Ayumi Nakamura (中村あゆみ)
 * Episodes 23–29: "Still Embracing Light and Darkness" (｢光と影を抱きしめたまま｣) by Naomi Tamura

Media Blasters' early English DVD release used "Still Embracing Light and Darkness" as the opening for Magic Knight Rayearth 2 episodes 1–22, due to licensing issues. The original openings from episodes 1–22 were included as an extra on the early DVDs, and was only in Japanese, however this isn't the case with the remastered sets, in which the dubbed openings were removed, meaning all three openings are left intact.

 * Ending themes

Three ending themes were used:

Magic Knight Rayearth:
 * Episodes 1–20: "The Courage Leading to Tomorrow" (｢明日への勇気｣) by Keiko Yoshinari (吉成 圭子)

Magic Knight Rayearth 2:
 * Episodes 1–22: "Lullaby - Let me embrace you tenderly -" (｢ら·ら·ば·い〜優しく抱かせて〜｣) by Minako Honda (本田 美奈子)
 * Episodes 23–29: "It Will Shine Someday" (｢いつか輝く｣) by Keiko Yoshinari

Media Blasters' early English DVD release used "Lullaby ~ Yasashiku Dakasete ~" as the ending for Magic Knight Rayearth 2 episodes 23-29, due to licensing issues. The original ending from episodes 23-29 was included as an extra on the early DVDs, and was only in Japanese, this again was eventually rectified in the remastered sets, in which, like the openings the dubbed endings were removed meaning all three endings were left intact.

In the early English releases of the TV series, Sandy Fox sang both the available opening and ending themes in the English dubbed version.

Rayearth:
 * OVA: "All You Need Is Love" by Naomi Tamura

Video games
A number of video games have been released that are based on Magic Knight Rayearth. Magic Knight Rayearth, an adventure role-playing game (RPG) set in the first TV season, was released for the Sega Saturn. It was the last officially released game for the console in the North America. All other games based on the manga are Japan-only releases, including a Super Famicom RPG, a Sega Pico title called Magic Knight Tanjou, two short RPGs for Game Boy (the second one titled Magic Knight Rayearth 2nd: The Missing Colors), a raising sim, and another RPG for Sega Game Gear.

The series appears in the Super Robot Wars T game, released in 2019, as well as 2021's Super Robot Wars 30.

Reception
Magic Knight Rayearth has been well received by English-language readers. According to Dark Horse Comics, almost 200,000 copies of the series have been sold in the United States. The first volume of Tokyopop's re-release of Magic Knight Rayearth II placed 44th on the list of the top 100 bestselling graphic novels for February 2004, with an estimated 1,446 copies sold. The first volume of Dark Horse's omnibus edition appeared at the 83rd place of the list of the top 300 bestselling graphic novels for July 2011, with an estimated 1,069 copies sold. The second volume placed 109th on the list for April 2012, with an estimated 942 copies sold.

title: Magic Knight Rayearth


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Golden Gloves

The Golden Gloves of America is an organization that promotes annual competitions of amateur boxing in the United States, in which winners are awarded a belt and a ring, and the title of national champion. The organization currently owns 30 franchises. Hundreds of administrators, coaches, trainers and counselors participate, involving gyms and programs in local and regional tournaments throughout the United States and in a National Tournament of Champions each year. The Golden Gloves is a term used to refer to the National Golden Gloves competition, but can also represent several other amateur tournaments, including regional and state tournaments, such as the Chicago Golden Gloves, and the New York Golden Gloves, and the Rocky Mountain Golden Gloves.

History
Arch Ward, sports editor of the Chicago Tribune, came up with the idea of a citywide, Chicago amateur boxing tournament in 1923, and gained sponsorship from the Tribune in 1927. An annual tournament was held between Chicago and New York. In later years the idea was taken up by other cities, and a national tournament was held. Along with the New York Golden Gloves, the Chicago tournament was viewed as one of the two elite Golden Gloves Championships in the United States. Winners from selected states and regions headed to Chicago to meet in the Chicago Golden Gloves, while winners from other sections of the U.S. faced each other in the New York Golden Gloves tournaments. Champions from the Chicago tournament went on to face champions from the New York tournament in the Intercity Golden Gloves tournament, and thus the Intercity Golden Gloves served as the National Tournament of Champions held in the Square Garden Chicago and Chicago Stadium. The Intercity Golden Gloves tournament ran from 1928 to 1961, with the event being held at famed venues including the Chicago Coliseum.

The National Golden Gloves contest began in 1962 and continues to be the most highly regarded amateur boxing tournament in the United States. It is sponsored and controlled by the Golden Gloves Association of America, Inc. Winners from 32 regional Golden Gloves competitions, coming up in regional teams of all weight classes, compete in the national competition, called the Golden Gloves Tournament of Champions. This is held once a year, and a new tournament site is selected annually. The U.S. Golden Gloves program is currently organized on a territorial basis to give all sections of the country representation. All tournaments are planned, promoted and directed by the Golden Gloves Charities and within the limits of the amateur boxing code. Many amateur Golden Gloves participants went on to become professional boxers, including Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Barney Ross and Iran Barkley.

The Golden Gloves are open to all athletes aged 19–40. Citizens and non-citizens alike may compete in the tournament series. There is also a Silver Gloves tournament, for boxers aged 10 to 15.

Hierarchy
To compete nationally, a contender must pass through the following levels:
 * Sub-Franchise (Local/State) Golden Gloves
 * Franchise (Regional) Golden Gloves
 * National Golden Gloves

Golden Gloves amateur competition began in 1923 prior to the formation of Golden Gloves of America as a corporation. No unification had been undertook for a long time, as part of a tradition, different states historically had various weight class margins (171 to 178 for light heavyweight upper limit, 200 to 201 for heavyweight limit).

USA franchises

 * Buffalo Golden Gloves
 * California Golden Gloves
 * Chicago Golden Gloves
 * Cincinnati Golden Gloves
 * Cleveland Golden Gloves
 * Colorado-New Mexico Golden Gloves
 * Detroit Golden Gloves
 * Florida Golden Gloves
 * Hawaii Golden Gloves
 * Indiana Golden Gloves
 * Iowa Golden Gloves
 * Kansas City Golden Gloves
 * Kansas-Oklahoma Golden Gloves
 * Michigan Golden Gloves
 * Mid-South Golden Gloves
 * Nevada Golden Gloves
 * New England Golden Gloves
 * New Jersey Golden Gloves
 * New York Metro Golden Gloves
 * Omaha Golden Gloves
 * Pennsylvania Golden Gloves
 * Rocky Mountain Golden Gloves
 * Southeast Golden Gloves
 * St. Louis Golden Gloves
 * Texas Golden Gloves
 * Toledo Golden Gloves
 * Tri-State Golden Gloves
 * Upper Midwest Golden Gloves
 * Washington, D.C. Golden Gloves
 * Wisconsin Golden Gloves

Around the world
Other countries have similar amateur boxing awards, such as Mexico's Guantes De Oro (literally "Gloves of Gold" in Spanish).

Diamond Belt
In the past, certain amateur tournaments would award the victor with a Diamond Belt as recognition of their amateur championship status. These tournaments were sponsored by various organizations and newspapers in the United States, with The Philadelphia Inquirer being one of the more notable. Notable Diamond Belt winners include George Foreman, Bobby Chacon, Jimmy McCarter, Logan McElroy, and Lou Brooks. Steven Conway

BC Golden Gloves
The annual Golden Gloves tournament in British Columbia, Canada, has been a regular event since 1939. The first BC Golden Gloves champions were Alan Dunn, Bob Hickey, Travis Lepine, Eric Burnell, Henry Devine, Kenny Lindsay, Phil Vickery and Wayne Morris.

Regional and special tournaments
From time to time, there have been special tournaments or regional Golden Gloves tournaments. One that operated from 1954 to the early Sixties was the Vancouver Island Golden Gloves. The first Vancouver Island Golden Boy was Victoria's Bert Wilkinson in 1954. Some of the history was documented in various issues of the Vancouver Island Boxing News in 1983, and the BC Amateur Boxing News between November 1983 and January 1986. A poster of the 1954 tournament and a photo of Bert Wilkinson were recently used in a video for the induction ceremony of the Greater Victoria Hall of Fame.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Golden Gloves


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Birdwatching

Birdwatching, or birding, is the observing of birds, either as a recreational activity or as a form of citizen science. A birdwatcher may observe by using their naked eye, by using a visual enhancement device such as binoculars or a telescope, by listening for bird sounds, watching public webcams, or by viewing smart bird feeder cameras.

Most birdwatchers pursue this activity for recreational or social reasons, unlike ornithologists, who engage in the study of birds using formal scientific methods.

Birding, birdwatching, and twitching
The first recorded use of the term birdwatcher was in 1712 by William Oldsworth. The term birding was also used for the practice of fowling or hunting with firearms as in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602): "She laments sir... her husband goes this morning a-birding." The terms birding and birdwatching are today used by some interchangeably, although some participants prefer birding, partly because it includes the auditory aspects of enjoying birds.

In North America, many birders differentiate themselves from birdwatchers, and the term birder is unfamiliar to most lay people. At the most basic level, the distinction is perceived as one of dedication or intensity, though this is a subjective differentiation. Generally, self-described birders perceive themselves to be more versed in minutiae such as identification (aural and visual), molt, distribution, migration timing, and habitat usage. Whereas these dedicated birders may often travel specifically in search of birds, birdwatchers have been described by some enthusiasts as having a more limited scope, perhaps not venturing far from their own yards or local parks to view birds. Indeed, in 1969 a Birding Glossary appeared in Birding magazine which gave the following definitions: "Birder. The acceptable term used to describe the person who seriously pursues the hobby of birding. May be professional or amateur.

Birding. A hobby in which individuals enjoy the challenge of bird study, listing, or other general activities involving bird life.

Bird-watcher. A rather ambiguous term used to describe the person who watches birds for any reason at all, and should not be used to refer to the serious birder."

- Birding

Twitching is a British term used to mean "the pursuit of a previously located rare bird." In North America, it is more often called chasing. The term twitcher, sometimes misapplied as a synonym for birder, is reserved for those who travel long distances to see a rare bird that would then be ticked, or counted on a list. The term originated in the 1950s, when it was used to describe the nervous behaviour of Howard Medhurst, a British birdwatcher. Earlier terms for those who chased rarities were pot-hunter, tally-hunter, or tick-hunter. The main goal of twitching is often to accumulate species on one's lists. Some birders engage in competition to accumulate the longest species list. The act of the pursuit itself is referred to as a twitch or a chase. A rare bird that stays long enough for people to see it is twitchable or chaseable.

Twitching is highly developed in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, Finland and Sweden. The size of these countries makes it possible to travel throughout them quickly and with relative ease. The most popular twitches in the UK have drawn large crowds; for example, approximately 2,500 people travelled to Kent, to view a golden-winged warbler (Vermivora chrysoptera), which is native to North America. Twitchers have developed their own vocabulary. For example, a twitcher who fails to see a rare bird has dipped out; if other twitchers do see the bird, they may feel gripped off. Suppression is the act of concealing news of a rare bird from other twitchers.

Many birders maintain a life list, that is, a list of all of the species they have seen in their life, usually with details about the sighting such as date and location. The American Birding Association has specific rules about how a bird species may be documented and recorded in such a list if it is submitted to the ABA; however, the criteria for the personal recording of these lists are very subjective. Some birders "count" species they have identified audibly, while others only record species that they have identified visually. Some also maintain a country list, state list, county list, yard list, year list, or any combination of these.

The history of birdwatching
The early interest in observing birds for their aesthetic rather than utilitarian (mainly food) value is traced to the late 18th century in the works of Gilbert White, Thomas Bewick, George Montagu and John Clare. The study of birds, and of natural history in general, became increasingly prevalent in Britain during the Victorian Era, often associated with collection, eggs and later skins being the artifacts of interest. Wealthy collectors made use of their contacts in the colonies to obtain specimens from around the world. It was only in the late 19th century that the call for bird protection led to the rising popularity of observations of living birds. The Audubon Society was started to protect birds from the growing trade in feathers in the United States while the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds began in Britain.

The phrase "bird watching" appeared for the first time as the title of the book Bird Watching by Edmund Selous in 1901. In North America, the identification of birds, once thought possible only by shooting, was made possible by the emergence of optics and field identification guides. The earliest field guide in the US was Birds through an Opera Glass (1889) by Florence Bailey.

Birding in North America was focused in the early and mid-20th century in the eastern seaboard region, and was influenced by the works of Ludlow Griscom and later Roger Tory Peterson. Bird Neighbors (1897) by Neltje Blanchan, an early birding book, sold over 250,000 copies. It was illustrated with color photographs of stuffed birds.

The organization and networking of those interested in birds began through organizations like the Audubon Society, which was against the killing of birds, and the American Ornithologists' Union (AOU). The rising popularity of the car increased the mobility of birdwatchers and this made new locations accessible. Networks of birdwatchers in the UK began to form in the late 1930s under the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO). The BTO saw the potential to produce scientific results through the networks, unlike the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) which like the Audubon Society originated from the bird protection movement.

Like the AOU in North America, the BOU had a focus mainly on collection-based taxonomy. The BOU changed focus to ecology and behaviour only in the 1940s. The BTO movement towards 'organized birdwatching' was opposed by the RSPB, which claimed that the 'scientification' of the pastime was 'undesirable'. This stand was to change only in 1936 when the RSPB was taken over by Tom Harrisson and others. Harrisson was instrumental in the organization of pioneering surveys of the great crested grebe.

Increased mobility of birdwatchers ensured that books like Where to Watch Birds by John Gooders became best-sellers. By the 1960s air travel became feasible and long-distance holiday destinations opened up. By 1965, Britain's first birding tour company, Ornitholidays had been started by Lawrence Holloway. Travelling far away also led to problems in name usage: British birds such as "wheatear", "heron" and "swallow" needed adjectives to differentiate them in places where there were several related species. The falling cost of air travel made flying to remote birding destinations a possibility for a large number of people towards the 1980s. The need for global guides to birds increased, and one of the biggest resulting projects was the Handbook of the Birds of the World, begun in the 1990s by Josep del Hoyo, Jordi Sargatal, David A. Christie, and ornithologist Andy Elliott.

Initially, birdwatching was largely restricted to developed countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Since the second half of the 20th century an increasing number of people in developing countries have engaged in this activity, such as in the Degua Tembien district of Ethiopia. Transnational birding has played an important role in this, as birders in developing countries usually take up the pastime under the influence of foreign cultures with a history of birding. A majority of transnational birders are middle-aged, male, affluent, and belong to the Anglophone countries or Scandinavia.

Economic and environmental impact
In the 20th century, most of the birding activity in North America was done on the east coast. The publication of Roger Tory Peterson's field guide in 1934 led to the initial increase in birding. Binoculars, an essential piece of birding equipment, became more easily available after World War II, making the hobby more accessible. The practice of travelling long distances to see rare bird species was aided by the rising popularity of cars.

About 4% of North Americans were interested in birding in the 1970s, and in the mid-1980s at least 11% were found to watch birds at least 20 days of the year. The number of birders was estimated at 61 million in the late 1980s. The income level of birders has been found to be well above average.

The Sibley Guide to Birds, published in 2000, had sold 500,000 copies by 2002. It was found that the number of birdwatchers rose, but there appeared to be a drop in birdwatching in the backyard.

According to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service study, birders contributed $36 billion to the US economy in 2006, and one fifth (20%) of all Americans are identified as birdwatchers. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2016, over 45 million Americans consider themselves birders.

North American birders were estimated to have spent as much as US$32 billion in 2001. The spending is on the rise around the world. Kuşcenneti National Park (KNP) at Lake Manyas, a Ramsar site in Turkey, was estimated to attract birders who spent as much as US$103,320,074 annually. Guided bird tours have become a major business, with at least 127 companies offering tours worldwide. An average trip to a less-developed country costs $4,000 per person and includes about 12 participants for each of 150 trips a year. It has been suggested that this economic potential needs to be tapped for conservation.

Birdwatching tourism is considered to be one of the fastest-growing nature-based tourism sectors in the world, often involving well-educated or wealthy travelers with specific interests in the places they visit. In addition to this, birdwatching tourism is considered a niche market of nature-based tourism. Birdwatching and other niche tourism markets are good for market diversification and mitigating the impacts of seasonality in a tourism market as well as bringing economic resources to remote communities, thus diversifying their economies and contributing to biodiversity conservation. It is estimated that birdwatching ecotourism contributes $41 billion per year to the U.S. economy. The large funds generated by birdwatching ecotourism have been suggested as a replacement for tax revenue generated by bird hunting which has dropped to its lowest levels in decades.

Birding ecotourism companies are also making contributions to conservation. Birding Ecotours, which runs both international and domestic trips, donates a minimum of 10% of its net profits to bird conservation and communities it operates in. Another tour operator, Hardy Boat, has donated $200,000 to Project Puffin to conserve puffin populations off the Atlantic Coast.

One of the expectations of ecotourism is that the travels of birders to a place will contribute to the improvement of the local economy, ensuring that the environment is valued and protected. Birdwatchers contribute to conservation, helping build and disseminate environmental knowledge by participating in citizen science. However, birding can bring about an increased penetration of ecosystem services that are perceived as birdwatchers' indispensable attributes. By their presence and obstinacy, birdwatchers affect the attractiveness of the breeding migration or roosting sites for birds, flush birds, and otherwise increase the pressure on birds and their habitats (e.g., luring birds out of their hideouts and stressing them by playing their calls or exposing birds and their nests to predators). Furthermore, other impacts include disturbance to birds, the environment, local cultures and the economy. Methods to reduce negative impact and improve the value of conservation are the subject of research.

Activities
Many birders occupy themselves with observing local species (birding in their "local patch" ), but may also make specific trips to observe birds in other locales. The most active times of the year for birding in temperate zones are during the spring or fall migrations when the greatest variety of birds may be seen. On these occasions, large numbers of birds travel north or south to wintering or nesting locations. Early mornings are typically better as the birds are more active and vocal making them easier to spot.

Certain locations such as a local patch of forest, wetland and coast may be favoured according to the location and season. Seawatching, or pelagic birding, is a type of birding where observers based at a coastal watch point, such as a headland, watch birds flying over the sea. This is one form of pelagic birding, though birders also seek pelagic species from seagoing vessels.

Weather plays an important role in the occurrence of rare birds. In Britain, suitable wind conditions may lead to drift migration, and an influx of birds from the east. In North America, birds caught in the tail-end of a hurricane may be blown inland.

Monitoring
Birders may take part in censuses of bird populations and migratory patterns which are sometimes specific to individual species. These birdwatchers may also count all birds in a given area, as in the Christmas Bird Count, or follow carefully designed study protocols. This kind of citizen science can assist in identifying environmental threats to the well-being of birds or, conversely, in assessing outcomes of environmental management initiatives intended to ensure the survival of at-risk species or to encourage the breeding of species for aesthetic or ecological reasons.

This more scientific side of the hobby is an aspect of ornithology, coordinated in the UK by the British Trust for Ornithology. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology hosts many citizen-science projects to track the number and distribution of bird species across North America. These surveys help scientists note major changes from year to year which may occur as a result of climate change, disease, predation, and other factors.

Environmental education
Because of their accessibility and ubiquity, birds are a useful tool for environmental education and awareness of environmental issues. Birdwatching can increase respect for nature and awareness of the fragility of ecosystems.

Competition
Birding as a competitive event is organized in some parts of the world. Such competitions encourage individuals or teams to accumulate large numbers of species within a specified time or area with special rules. Some birdwatchers will also compete by attempting to increase their life list, national list, state list, provincial list, county list, or year list. The American Birding Association was originally started as a club for "listers", but it now serves a much broader audience. Still, the ABA continues to publish an official annual report of North American list standings.

Competitive birdwatching events include:
 * Big Day: teams have 24 hours to identify as many species as possible.
 * Big Year: like a big day, but contestants are individuals, and need to be prepared to invest a great deal of time and money.
 * Big Sit or Big Stay: birdwatchers must see birds from a circle of prescribed diameter (e.g.: 17 feet ). Once birds are spotted, birdwatchers can leave the circle to confirm the identity, but new birds seen may not be counted.
 * Christmas Bird Count: See as many birds as possible between December 14 and January 5.
 * World Series of Birding: An annual birding competition organised by the New Jersey Audubon Society. Teams compete to identify the greatest number of bird species in a 24-hour period.
 * Migration Madness: A month-long festival celebrating bird migration. Migration Madness features a Birdathon. The Birdathon is a competition at any time during May 2024. The goal is to spot as many bird species as you can.

Networking and organization
Prominent national and continental organizations concerned with birding include the British Trust for Ornithology and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the United Kingdom, and the American Birding Association and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in North America. Many statewide or local Audubon organizations are also active in the United States, as are many provincial and local organizations in Canada. BirdLife International is an important global alliance of bird conservation organizations. Many countries and smaller regions (states/provinces) have "rarities committees" to check, accept or reject reports of rare birds made by birders.

Equipment and technology

Equipment commonly used for birding includes binoculars, a spotting scope with tripod, a smartphone, a notepad, and one or more field guides. Hides (known as blinds in North America) or observation towers are often used to conceal the observers from birds, and/or to improve viewing conditions. Virtually all optics manufacturers offer specific binoculars for birding, and some have even geared their whole brand to birders.

Sound equipment
Recognition of bird vocalizations is an important part of a birder's toolkit. Sound information can assist in the locating, watching, identification, and sometimes sexing of birds. Recent developments in audio technology have seen recording and reproduction devices shrink in both size and price, making them accessible to a greater portion of the birding community.

The non-linear nature of digital audio technology has also made selecting and accessing the required recordings much more flexible than tape-based models. It is now possible to take a recording of every bird call you are likely to encounter in a given area out into the field stored on a device that will slip into your pocket and to retrieve calls for playback and comparison in any order you choose.

As the technology continues to improve, researchers and hobby birders have started using convolutional neural networks to mine sound recordings to identify and track specific bird calls.

Photography
Photography has always been a part of birding, but in the past the cost of cameras with super-telephoto lenses made this a minority, often semi-professional, interest. The advent of affordable digital cameras, which can be used in conjunction with a spotting scope or binoculars (using the technique of afocal photography, referred to by the neologism "digiscoping" or sometimes digibinning for binoculars), have made this a much more widespread aspect of the hobby.

Videography
As with the arrival of affordable digital cameras, the development of more compact and affordable digital video cameras has made them more attractive and accessible to the birding community. Cross-over, non-linear digital models now exist that take high-quality stills at acceptable resolutions, as well as being able to record and play audio and video. The ability to capture and reproduce not only the visual characteristics of a bird, but also its patterns of movement and its sound, has wide applications for birders in the field.

Portable media players
This class of product includes devices that can play (and in some cases record) a range of digital media, typically video, audio and still image files. Many modern digital cameras, mobile phones, and camcorders can be classified as portable media players. With the ability to store and play large quantities of information, pocket-sized devices allow a full birding multimedia library to be taken into the field and mobile Internet access makes obtaining and transmitting information possible in near real time.

Remote birdwatching
New technologies are allowing birdwatching activities to take place over the Internet, using robotic camera installations and mobile phones set up in remote wildlife areas. Projects such as CONE allow users to observe and photograph birds over the web; similarly, robotic cameras set up in largely inhospitable areas are being used to attempt the first photographs of the rare ivory-billed woodpecker. These systems represent new technologies in the birdwatcher's toolkit.

Communication
In the early 1950s, the only way of communicating new bird sightings was through the postal system and it was generally too late for the recipients to act on the information. In 1953 James Ferguson-Lees began broadcasting rare bird news on the radio in Eric Simms' Countryside program but this did not catch on. In the 1960s people began using the telephone and some people became hubs for communication. In the 1970s some cafés, such as that in Cley, Norfolk run by Nancy Gull, became centers for meeting and communication. This was replaced by telephone hotline services such as "Birdline" and "Bird Information Service".

With the advent of the World Wide Web, birders have been using the Internet to convey information; this can be via mailing lists, forums, bulletin-boards, web-based databases and other social media. While most birding lists are geographic in scope, there are special-interest lists that cater to bird-identification, 'twitchers', seabirds and raptor enthusiasts to name but a few. Messages can range from the serious to trivial, notifying others of rarities, questioning the taxonomy or identification of a species, discussing field guides and other resources, asking for advice and guidance, or organizing groups to help save habitats.

Occasional postings are mentioned in academic journals and therefore can be a valuable resource for professional and amateur birders alike. One of the oldest, Birdchat (based in the US), probably has the most subscribers, followed by the English-language fork of Eurobirdnet, Birding-Aus from Australia, SABirdnet from South Africa and Orientalbirding.

Mobile applications
The increasing availability of mobile devices in the 2010s allowed the smartphone to become a useful tool for birding. Mobile apps can be used as replacements for physical birding field guides, such as the digital version of the Sibley Guide to Birds and the official Audubon Society app. Other apps utilize machine learning to automatically identifying birds from photographs and audio recordings, such as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Merlin Bird ID application and iNaturalist.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology's eBird database is a popular tool used by birders to document their sightings. In addition to serving as a citizen science project used by ornithologists to document trends in bird populations, it allows birders see recent reports by other birders and search by species and location. Some species, including endangered species and others likely to be disrupted by increased human activity, are designated "sensitive species" by eBird and have locations of sightings hidden from the general public.

Code of conduct
As the numbers of birdwatchers increases, there is growing concern about the impact of birdwatching on the birds and their habitat. Birdwatching etiquette is evolving in response to this concern. Some examples of birdwatching etiquette include promoting the welfare of birds and their environment, limiting use of photography, pishing and playback devices to mitigate stress caused to birds, maintaining a distance away from nests and nesting colonies, and respecting private property.

The lack of definite evidence, except arguably in the form of photographs, makes birding records difficult to prove but birdwatchers strive to build trust in their identification. One of the few major disputes was the case of the Hastings Rarities.

Socio-psychology
Ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen considers birdwatching to be an expression of the male hunting instinct, while Simon Baron-Cohen links it with a male tendency for "systemizing". There have been suggestions that identification of birds may be a form of gaining status which has been compared with Kula valuables noted in Papua New Guinean cultures.

A study of the motivations for birdwatching in New York concluded that initial motivations were largely similar in males and females, but males who participate actively in birding are more motivated by "sharing knowledge" with others, and active female birders are more motivated by their "intellectual" interest in studying birds, and by the "challenge" of identifying new and rare birds and improving their skills. Another study suggested that males lean towards competitive birding, while females prefer recreational birdwatching. While the representation of women has always been low, it has been pointed out that nearly 90% of all birdwatchers in the United States are white, with only a few African Americans. Other minority groups have formed organizations to support fellow birders, such as the Gay Birders Club and Birding For All, formerly the Disabled Birders Association.

The study of birdwatching has been of interest to students of the sociology of science. People who have nature-based experiences report better well-being and lower psychological distress than those who do not, and birdwatching in particular was found to have higher gains in subjective well-being and more reduction in distress than more generic nature exposure, such as walks.

Famous birdwatchers
There are about 10,000 species of bird and only a small number of people have seen more than 7,000. Many birdwatchers have spent their entire lives trying to see all the bird species of the world. The first person who started this is said to be Stuart Keith.

Birders have been known to go to great lengths and some have lost their lives in the process. Phoebe Snetsinger spent her family inheritance travelling to various parts of the world while suffering from a malignant melanoma, surviving an attack and rape in New Guinea before dying in a road accident in Madagascar. She saw as many as 8,400 species. The birdwatcher David Hunt who was leading a bird tour in Corbett National Park was killed by a tiger in February 1985. In 1971, Ted Parker (who later died in an air crash in Ecuador) travelled around North America and saw 626 species. This record was beaten by Kenn Kaufman in 1973 who travelled 69,000 miles and saw 671 species and spent less than a thousand dollars.

In 2012, Tom Gullick, an Englishman who lives in Spain, became the first birdwatcher to log over 9,000 species. In 2008, two British birders, Alan Davies and Ruth Miller, gave up their jobs, sold their home and put everything they owned into a year-long global birdwatching adventure about which they a wrote a book called The Biggest Twitch. They logged their 4,341st species on 31 December 2008, in Ecuador. Noah Strycker recorded 6,042 species during 2015, overtaking Davies and Miller. In 2016, Arjan Dwarshuis became the world-record holder for most species seen during the span of one year, logging 6,852 bird species in 40 countries.

In early February of 2024, Peter Kaestner became the first birder to log over 10,000 species, a record surrounded by much controversy as he was initially claimed to be beaten by Jason Mann who later conceded defeated.

Birdwatching literature, field guides and television programs have been popularized by birders such as Pete Dunne and Bill Oddie.

In media
The 2011 film The Big Year depicted three birders competing in an American Birding Association Area big year, and the 2019 film Birders is a short documentary.

title: Birdwatching


text:
Avestan

Avestan is an umbrella term for two Old Iranian languages, Old Avestan (spoken in the 2nd to 1st millennium BC) and Younger Avestan (spoken in the 1st millennium BC). They are known only from their conjoined use as the scriptural language of Zoroastrianism; the Avesta serves as their namesake. Both are early Eastern Iranian languages within the Indo-Iranian language branch of the Indo-European language family. Its immediate ancestor was the Proto-Iranian language, a sister language to the Proto-Indo-Aryan language, with both having developed from the earlier Proto-Indo-Iranian language; as such, Old Avestan is quite close in both grammar and lexicon to Vedic Sanskrit, the oldest preserved Indo-Aryan language.

The Avestan text corpus was composed in the ancient Iranian satrapies of Arachosia, Aria, Bactria, and Margiana, corresponding to the entirety of present-day Afghanistan as well as parts of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The Yaz culture of Bactria–Margiana has been regarded as a likely archaeological reflection of the early "Eastern Iranian" culture that is described in the Zoroastrian Avesta.

Genealogy
Avestan and Old Persian are the two attested languages comprising Old Iranian, and while Avestan was localized in the northeastern parts of Greater Iran according to (1921), other scholars have favored regarding Avestan as originating in eastern parts.

Scholars traditionally classify Iranian languages as "old", "middle" and "new" according to their age, and as "eastern" or "western" according to geography, and within this framework Avestan is classified as Eastern Old Iranian. But the east–west distinction is of limited meaning for Avestan, as the linguistic developments that later distinguish Eastern from Western Iranian had not yet occurred. Avestan does not display some typical (South-)Western Iranian innovations already visible in Old Persian, and so in this sense, "eastern" only means "non-western".

Old Avestan is closely related to Old Persian and largely agrees morphologically with Vedic Sanskrit.

Forms and stages of development
The Avestan language is attested in roughly two forms, known as "Old Avestan" (or "Gathic Avestan") and "Younger Avestan". Younger Avestan did not evolve from Old Avestan; the two differ not only in time, but they are also different dialects. Every Avestan text, regardless of whether originally composed in Old or Younger Avestan, underwent several transformations. Karl Hoffmann traced the following stages for Avestan as found in the extant texts. In roughly chronological order: Many phonetic features cannot be ascribed with certainty to a particular stage since there may be more than one possibility. Every phonetic form that can be ascribed to the Sasanian archetype on the basis of critical assessment of the manuscript evidence must have gone through the stages mentioned above so that "Old Avestan" and "Young Avestan" really mean no more than "Old Avestan and Young Avestan of the Sasanian period".
 * The natural language of the composers of the Gathas, the Yasna Haptanghaiti, the four sacred prayers (Y. 27 and 54).
 * Changes precipitated by slow chanting
 * Changes to Old Avestan due to transmission by native speakers of Younger Avestan
 * The natural language of the scribes who wrote grammatically correct Younger Avestan texts
 * Deliberate changes introduced through "standardization"
 * Changes introduced by transfer to regions where Avestan was not spoken
 * Adaptions/translations of portions of texts from other regions
 * Composition of ungrammatical late Avestan texts
 * Phonetic notation of the Avestan texts in the Sasanian archetype
 * Post-Sasanian deterioration of the written transmission due to incorrect pronunciation
 * Errors and corruptions introduced during copying

Dating
The Avestan language is only known from the Avesta and otherwise unattested. As a result, there is no external evidence on which to base the time frame during which the Avestan language was spoken and all attempts have to rely on internal evidence. Such attempts were often based on the life of Zarathustra as the most distinct event in the Avestan period.[citation needed] Zarathustra was traditionally based in the 6th century BC meaning that Old Avestan would have been spoken during the early Achaemenid period. Given that a substantial time must have passed between Old Avestan and Young Avestan, the latter would have been spoken somewhere during the Hellenistic or the Parthian period of Iranian history.

However, more recent scholarship has increasingly shifted to an earlier dating. The literature presents a number of reasons for this shift, based on both the Old Avestan and the Young Avestan material. As regards Old Avestan, the Gathas show strong linguistic and cultural similarities with the Rigveda, which in turn is assumed to represent the second half of the second millennium BC. As regards Young Avestan, texts like the Yashts and the Vendidad are situated in the eastern parts of Greater Iran and lack any discernible Persian or Median influence from Western Iran. This is interpreted such that the bulk of this material, which has been produced several centuries after Zarathustra, must still predate the sixth century BC. As a result, more recent scholarship often assumes that the major parts of the Young Avestan texts mainly reflect the first half of the first millennia BC,  whereas the Old Avestan texts of Zarathustra may have been composed around 1000 BC    or even as early as 1500 BC.

Alphabet
The script used for writing Avestan developed during the 3rd or 4th century AD. By then the language had been extinct for many centuries, and remained in use only as a liturgical language of the Avesta canon. As is still the case today, the liturgies were memorized by the priesthood and recited by rote.

The script devised to render Avestan was natively known as Din dabireh "religion writing". It has 53 distinct characters and is written right-to-left. Among the 53 characters are about 30 letters that are – through the addition of various loops and flourishes – variations of the 13 graphemes of the cursive Pahlavi script (i.e. "Book" Pahlavi) that is known from the post-Sassanian texts of Zoroastrian tradition. These symbols, like those of all the Pahlavi scripts, are in turn based on Aramaic script symbols. Avestan also incorporates several letters from other writing systems, most notably the vowels, which are mostly derived from Greek minuscules. A few letters were free inventions, as were also the symbols used for punctuation. Also, the Avestan alphabet has one letter that has no corresponding sound in the Avestan language; the character for (a sound that Avestan does not have) was added to write Pazend texts.

The Avestan script is alphabetic, and the large number of letters suggests that its design was due to the need to render the orally recited texts with high phonetic precision. The correct enunciation of the liturgies was (and still is) considered necessary for the prayers to be effective.

The Zoroastrians of India, who represent one of the largest surviving Zoroastrian communities worldwide, also transcribe Avestan in Brahmi-based scripts. This is a relatively recent development first seen in the c. 12th century texts of Neryosang Dhaval and other Parsi Sanskritist theologians of that era, which are roughly contemporary with the oldest surviving manuscripts in Avestan script. Today, Avestan is most commonly typeset in the Gujarati script (Gujarati being the traditional language of the Indian Zoroastrians). Some Avestan letters with no corresponding symbol are synthesized with additional diacritical marks, for example, the in zaraθuštra is written with j with a dot below.

Phonology
Avestan has retained voiced sibilants, and has fricative rather than aspirate series. There are various conventions for transliteration of the Avestan alphabet, the one adopted for this article being:

Vowels:
 * a ā ə ə̄ e ē o ō å ą i ī u ū

Consonants:
 * k g γ x xʷ č ǰ t d δ θ t̰ p b β f
 * ŋ ŋʷ ṇ ń n m y w r s z š ṣ̌ ž h

The glides y and w are often transcribed as  and . The letter transcribed  indicates an allophone of with no audible release at the end of a word and before certain obstruents.

Consonants
According to Beekes, and  are allophones of  and  respectively (in Old Avestan).

Example phrases
The following phrases were phonetically transcribed from Avestan:

title: Avestan


text:
Christopher McQuarrie

Christopher McQuarrie (born October 25, 1968) is an American filmmaker. He received the BAFTA Award, Independent Spirit Award, and Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the neo-noir mystery film The Usual Suspects (1995).

He made his directorial debut with the crime thriller film The Way of the Gun (2000). He is a frequent collaborator with Tom Cruise, having written and directed the action films Jack Reacher (2012), Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015), Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018), Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), and an untitled eighth Mission: Impossible film (2025). He was also a part of the writing and/or producing team on the films Valkyrie (2008), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016), The Mummy (2017), and Top Gun: Maverick (2022), the last of which received Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture.

Early life
McQuarrie was born in Princeton, New Jersey. After graduating from West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South in 1986, he worked as an assistant at Christ Church Grammar School in Perth, Western Australia, recalling in 2013, “I was offered an Interim program ... I picked a place out of a hat and ended up at Christ Church Grammar School. I lived at the school and worked at the boarding school, though I did very little work". Fired after nine months, "I hitchhiked for three months, came home, knocked around for about a month and then immediately started working for this detective agency.... [It] was actually a glorified security-guard position. I think in the four years I worked there I did about six investigations."

Career
McQuarrie's first feature film was the 1993 thriller Public Access, directed by Bryan Singer. It won the Critics Award at the Deauville American Film Festival and shared the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize. It was not released theatrically in the United States. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, it received an approval rating of 58%.

McQuarrie wrote The Usual Suspects (1995), for which he received Best Screenplay awards from the British and American Academy Awards, as well as from Premiere Magazine, the Texas Board of Review, and the Chicago Critics, as well as the Edgar Award and Independent Spirit Award. It was later included on the New York Times list of the 1000 greatest films ever made, and the character Verbal Kint was included on AFI's list of the 100 greatest Heroes and Villains of all time. In 2006, the Writers Guild of America voted The Usual Suspects #35 on their list of 101 Greatest Screenplays. In his third collaboration with Singer, McQuarrie did an extensive rewrite on X-Men, but ultimately removed his name from the project.

In 2000, McQuarrie made his directorial debut with The Way of the Gun, a modern-day Western for which he also wrote the script. It starred Benicio del Toro, Ryan Phillippe, Taye Diggs, and James Caan. The film, budgeted at US$8.5 million, received mixed reviews and grossed US$13 million worldwide.

Eight years later, McQuarrie co-wrote (with Nathan Alexander) and co-produced Valkyrie, which opened on December 25, 2008, and is based on the real-life July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. While researching the screenplay, the writers had access to members of the Stauffenberg family; consulted a book written by Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a conspirator who survived; and spoke with Hitler's surviving bodyguard. The film, starring Tom Cruise and directed by Bryan Singer, received the BMI Film Music Award and the Bambi Award for Courage. In 2009, McQuarrie was hired to pen the script for the then-untitled The Wolverine.

McQuarrie co-wrote the 2010 film The Tourist with Julian Fellowes, Jeffrey Nachmanoff and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. It starred Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie and grossed US$278 million worldwide. It received three Golden Globe Award nominations and several other awards, among them the Redbox Movie Award for the most rented drama of 2011. McQuarrie then provided uncredited rewrites on the 2011 action spy film Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol during the film's production. In 2011, McQuarrie directed his second feature, Jack Reacher, an adaptation of One Shot, the ninth in the series of 21 Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child. Filming began in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area on October 3, 2011, and continued through the end of January 2012. The movie was released in December 2012 by Paramount Pictures. In 2012, McQuarrie stepped in to rewrite the script for World War Z after Drew Goddard and Damon Lindelof left the film.

2013 saw the release of McQuarrie's fourth collaboration with Singer, Jack the Giant Slayer, co-written by McQuarrie. Critical reviews were mixed, and it was a box office failure, grossing only US$198 million against an estimated US$240 million budget (excluding promotion). McQuarrie co-wrote the 2014 science fiction action thriller Edge of Tomorrow with Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, based on the Japanese novel All You Need Is Kill. While the film underperformed at the box office on its opening weekend, earning only US$28.8 million, it received strong reviews and became a word-of-mouth hit, grossing just over US$100 million at the domestic box office.

McQuarrie completed his third feature as director in 2015. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, the fifth entry in the Mission: Impossible film series, which he co-wrote with Drew Pearce. It received strong reviews, grossed over US$195 million at the North American box office, and won a Golden Tomato for Best Action-Adventure Movie of 2015.

By October 2015, McQuarrie completed a rewrite of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and spent two weeks "tightening up the story". McQuarrie and screenwriter Dylan Kussman were commissioned by Tom Cruise to write a new script for The Mummy.

In November 2015, McQuarrie confirmed he would return to write and direct the sixth Mission: Impossible film, his third directing collaboration with Tom Cruise. The film, titled Mission: Impossible - Fallout, was released in the United States on July 27, 2018. It received strong reviews from critics, and grossed over $791 million worldwide, becoming the franchise's highest-grossing title.

McQuarrie and Cruise collaborated again on Top Gun: Maverick, for which McQuarrie co-wrote the screenplay and produced the film.

Initially hesitant to return to the franchise, McQuarrie finalized a deal to write and direct Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and an eighth film in January 2019. Part One was released on July 12, 2023, while the eighth film is scheduled to be released on May 23, 2025.

Upcoming projects
In February 2011, McQuarrie was hired by Skydance Media to write and produce a feature film adaptation of the 1970s animated television series Star Blazers (itself an adaptation of anime Space Battleship Yamato). In 2013, he was selected to direct the project, with Zach Dean being hired to write a new draft of the script in 2017. McQuarrie has also signed on to direct thrillers Ice Station Zebra, based on the 1963 novel and its 1968 film adaptation, Three to Kill, based on the novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, and The Chameleon, based on a New Yorker article by David Grann about Frédéric Bourdin.

In August 2022, McQuarrie announced on the Light the Fuse podcast that he was developing a new project with Tom Cruise, to be co-written by Erik Jendresen, which he claimed would be "gnarlier" than the Mission: Impossible films and described as being "something we've talked about for a really long time. It's way outside of what you're used to seeing Tom do." A few days later, it was announced he and Cruise were also developing an original musical as a star vehicle for Cruise, as well as eyeing a potential project for Cruise to reprise the role of Les Grossman from Tropic Thunder, though it was unknown if Grossman would receive his own film or be included in the other films.

Although the Reacher franchise has migrated to television, McQuarrie and Cruise are continuing to develop a Reacher-like thriller film.

Film
Uncredited writing work
 * Batman & Robin (1997)
 * X-Men (2000)
 * Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)
 * World War Z (2013)
 * The Wolverine (2013)
 * Rogue One (2016)

title: Christopher McQuarrie


text:
Romance of the Three Kingdoms (video game series)

Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國志) is a series of turn-based tactical role-playing simulation grand strategy wargames produced by Koei. Originating from Japan in 1985, fourteen installments of the game have been published in Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea and North America to date. While the game's title as it was released in English refers to the 14th century historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義) by Luo Guanzhong, the title as it was released in Japan and Chinese regions refers to the 3rd century historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms (三國志) by Chen Shou.

Overview
The series are based on the romanticized Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel and the historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms, the storyline takes place during the Han dynasty in China with many warring factions that included the Shu Han, Cao Wei and Eastern Wu kingdoms. Gameplay revolves around managing numerical statistics, each representing an attribute of a city or a character. A city is described by statistics such as stored grain supplies, vulnerability to disasters such as floods and earthquakes, treasury funds, domestic affairs and populace loyalty. Characters are numerically characterized by their leadership abilities, melee prowess, intellects and loyalty, as well as special traits or even magical abilities that can be called upon whether during wartime, diplomacy or domestic affairs. Players can increase these numbers before waging war on neighbouring territories or intending diplomatic efforts.

While generally presented as a turn-based strategy game, the seventh, eighth and tenth editions offer role-playing features, allowing the player to play as a rank-and-file character instead of leading a kingdom.

Several spin-offs based on the series include the tactical action hack and slash video game series Dynasty Warriors, Dynasty Tactics which is a hybrid of Dynasty Warriors and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, as well as the three tactical role-playing games Sangokushi Eiketsuden (Liu Bei), Sangokushi Koumeiden (Zhuge Liang), and Sangokushi Sousouden (Cao Cao). Kessen II is a real-time tactics game on PS2.

Another spin-off is the mobile game Three Kingdoms Tactics, based on Koei Tecmo's series. It was published by Chinese company Alibaba Group in September 2019. It has grossed US$1.2 billion worldwide, making it Alibaba's most successful mobile game.

List of games in the series
The release dates provided are for original Japanese releases.

Main series

 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms (1985, PC-88) – Also available on Amiga, MS-DOS, PC-98, MSX, NES (1988), FM-7, Sharp X1, Sharp X68000, WonderSwan, Windows (2003), mobile phones.
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms II (1989, PC-88) – Also available on Amiga, MS-DOS, MSX2, NES, SNES, Mega Drive (1989), Sharp X68000, WonderSwan, Windows (2000), mobile phones
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms III: Dragon of Destiny (1992, PC-98) – Also available on MS-DOS, SNES, Mega Drive (1992), Windows (2001), NDS (2006)
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire (1994, PC-98) – Also available on SNES, Sega 32X, MS-DOS, Sega Saturn, PlayStation (1994), Game Boy Advance, Windows (2001), NDS (2007)
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms V (1995, PC-98) – Also available on Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Windows (1995), PlayStation Portable (2005), NDS (2010), 3DS (2013)
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms VI: Awakening of the Dragon (1996, Windows) – Also available on PlayStation, Dreamcast (1999), PlayStation Portable (2005)
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII (2000, Windows) – Also available on PlayStation, PlayStation 2 (2000), PlayStation Portable (2006)
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms VIII (2001, Windows) – Also available on PlayStation 2 (2002), PlayStation Portable (2007)
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms IX (2003, Windows) – Also available on PlayStation 2 (2004), PlayStation Portable (2011)
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms X (2004, Windows) – Also available on PlayStation 2 (2005)
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI (2006, Windows) – Also available on PlayStation 2 (2006), Wii (2007)
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms XII (2012, Windows) – Also available on PlayStation 3, Wii U (2012), PlayStation Vita (2013)
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII (2016, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows) – Also available on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation Vita (2017)
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIV (2020, Windows, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch)

Other games

 * Super Sangokushi (SNES)
 * Sangokushi Eiketsuden (SNES)
 * Sangokushi Koumeiden
 * Sangokushi Sousouden
 * Sangokushi Internet (1999, Windows) - Koei's first online video game of the series, developed by Koei Taiwan.
 * Kessen II (2001, PS2)
 * Dynasty Tactics (2002, PS2)
 * Sangokushi Battlefield (2002, Windows)
 * Dynasty Tactics 2 (2003, PS2)
 * Sangokushi Online (2007, Windows )
 * Yo-kai Sangokushi (2015, Nintendo 3DS) - Crossover with Level-5's Yo-Kai Watch series
 * Sangokushi Mobile (Mobile phones)
 * Sangokushi Mobile 2 (Mobile phones)
 * Sangokushi Mobile 3 (Mobile phones)
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms Touch (2009, iOS)
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms 2 (2010, iOS)

Reception
Sangokushi received positive critical reception in North America when it was released there in 1988.

As of 2020, the main series has shipped more than 9 million copies worldwide.


text:
Playfair cipher

The Playfair cipher or Playfair square or Wheatstone–Playfair cipher is a manual symmetric encryption technique and was the first literal digram substitution cipher. The scheme was invented in 1854 by Charles Wheatstone, but bears the name of Lord Playfair for promoting its use.

The technique encrypts pairs of letters (bigrams or digrams), instead of single letters as in the simple substitution cipher and rather more complex Vigenère cipher systems then in use. The Playfair cipher is thus significantly harder to break since the frequency analysis used for simple substitution ciphers does not work with it. The frequency analysis of bigrams is possible, but considerably more difficult. With 600 possible bigrams rather than the 26 possible monograms (single symbols, usually letters in this context), a considerably larger cipher text is required in order to be useful.

History
The Playfair cipher was the first cipher to encrypt pairs of letters in cryptologic history. Wheatstone invented the cipher for secrecy in telegraphy, but it carries the name of his friend Lord Playfair, first Baron Playfair of St. Andrews, who promoted its use. The first recorded description of the Playfair cipher was in a document signed by Wheatstone on 26 March 1854.

It was initially rejected by the British Foreign Office when it was developed because of its perceived complexity. Wheatstone offered to demonstrate that three out of four boys in a nearby school could learn to use it in 15 minutes, but the Under Secretary of the Foreign Office responded, "That is very possible, but you could never teach it to attachés."

It was however later used for tactical purposes by British forces in the Second Boer War and in World War I and for the same purpose by the British and Australians during World War II. This was because Playfair is reasonably fast to use and requires no special equipment - just a pencil and some paper. A typical scenario for Playfair use was to protect important but non-critical secrets during actual combat e.g. the fact that an artillery barrage of smoke shells would commence within 30 minutes to cover soldiers' advance towards the next objective. By the time enemy cryptanalysts could decode such messages hours later, such information would be useless to them because it was no longer relevant.

During World War II, the Government of New Zealand used it for communication among New Zealand, the Chatham Islands, and the coastwatchers in the Pacific Islands. Coastwatchers established by Royal Australian Navy Intelligence also used this cipher.

Superseded
Playfair is no longer used by military forces because of known insecurities and of the advent of automated encryption devices. This cipher is regarded as insecure since before World War I.

The first published solution of the Playfair cipher was described in a 19-page pamphlet by Lieutenant Joseph O. Mauborgne, published in 1914. William Friedman described it in 1942 as providing very little security.

Description
The Playfair cipher uses a 5 * 5 table containing a key word or phrase. Memorization of the keyword and 4 simple rules was all that was required to create the 5 by 5 table and use the cipher.

To generate the key table, one would first fill in the spaces in the table (a modified Polybius square) with the letters of the keyword (dropping any duplicate letters), then fill the remaining spaces with the rest of the letters of the alphabet in order (usually omitting "J" or "Q" to reduce the alphabet to fit; other versions put both "I" and "J" in the same space). The key can be written in the top rows of the table, from left to right, or in some other pattern, such as a spiral beginning in the upper-left-hand corner and ending in the center. The keyword together with the conventions for filling in the 5 by 5 table constitute the cipher key.

To encrypt a message, one would break the message into digrams (groups of 2 letters) such that, for example, "HelloWorld" becomes "HE LL OW OR LD". These digrams will be substituted using the key table. Since encryption requires pairs of letters, messages with an odd number of characters usually append an uncommon letter, such as "X", to complete the final digram. The two letters of the digram are considered opposite corners of a rectangle in the key table. To perform the substitution, apply the following 4 rules, in order, to each pair of letters in the plaintext:

 * 1) If both letters are the same (or only one letter is left), add an "X" after the first letter. Encrypt the new pair and continue. Some variants of Playfair use "Q" instead of "X", but any letter, itself uncommon as a repeated pair, will do.
 * 2) If the letters appear on the same row of your table, replace them with the letters to their immediate right respectively (wrapping around to the left side of the row if a letter in the original pair was on the right side of the row).
 * 3) If the letters appear on the same column of your table, replace them with the letters immediately below respectively (wrapping around to the top side of the column if a letter in the original pair was on the bottom side of the column).
 * 4) If the letters are not on the same row or column, replace them with the letters on the same row respectively but at the other pair of corners of the rectangle defined by the original pair. The order is important – the first letter of the encrypted pair is the one that lies on the same row as the first letter of the plaintext pair.

To decrypt, use the inverse (opposite) of the two shift rules, selecting the letter to the left or upwards as appropriate. The last rule remains unchanged, as the transformation switches the selected letters of the rectangle to the opposite diagonal, and a repeat of the transformation returns the selection to its original state. The first rule can only be reversed by dropping any extra instances of the chosen insert letter — generally "X"s or "Q"s — that do not make sense in the final message when finished.

There are several minor variations of the original Playfair cipher.

Example
Using "playfair example" as the key (assuming that I and J are interchangeable), the table becomes (omitted letters in red):

The first step of encrypting the message "hide the gold in the tree stump" is to convert it to the pairs of letters "HI DE TH EG OL DI NT HE TR EX ES TU MP" (with the null "X" used to separate the repeated "E"s). Then:

Thus the message "hide the gold in the tree stump" becomes "BM OD ZB XD NA BE KU DM UI XM MO UV IF", which may be restructured as "BMODZ BXDNA BEKUD MUIXM MOUVI F" for ease of reading the cipher text.

Clarification with picture
Assume one wants to encrypt the digram OR. There are five general cases:

Cryptanalysis
Like most classical ciphers, the Playfair cipher can be easily cracked if there is enough text. Obtaining the key is relatively straightforward if both plaintext and ciphertext are known. When only the ciphertext is known, brute force cryptanalysis of the cipher involves searching through the key space for matches between the frequency of occurrence of digrams (pairs of letters) and the known frequency of occurrence of digrams in the assumed language of the original message.

Cryptanalysis of Playfair is similar to that of four-square and two-square ciphers, though the relative simplicity of the Playfair system makes identifying candidate plaintext strings easier. Most notably, a Playfair digraph and its reverse (e.g. AB and BA) will decrypt to the same letter pattern in the plaintext (e.g. RE and ER). In English, there are many words which contain these reversed digraphs such as REceivER and DEpartED. Identifying nearby reversed digraphs in the ciphertext and matching the pattern to a list of known plaintext words containing the pattern is an easy way to generate possible plaintext strings with which to begin constructing the key.

A different approach to tackling a Playfair cipher is the shotgun hill climbing method. This starts with a random square of letters. Then minor changes are introduced (i.e. switching letters, rows, or reflecting the entire square) to see if the candidate plaintext is more like standard plaintext than before the change (perhaps by comparing the digrams to a known frequency chart). If the new square is deemed to be an improvement, then it is adopted and then further mutated to find an even better candidate. Eventually, the plaintext or something very close is found to achieve a maximal score by whatever grading method is chosen. This is obviously beyond the range of typical human patience, but computers can adopt this algorithm to crack Playfair ciphers with a relatively small amount of text.

Another aspect of Playfair that separates it from four-square and two-square ciphers is the fact that it will never contain a double-letter digram, e.g. EE. If there are no double letter digrams in the ciphertext and the length of the message is long enough to make this statistically significant, it is very likely that the method of encryption is Playfair.

A good tutorial on reconstructing the key for a Playfair cipher can be found in chapter 7, "Solution to Polygraphic Substitution Systems," of Field Manual 34-40-2, produced by the United States Army. Another cryptanalysis of a Playfair cipher can be found in Chapter XXI of Helen Fouché Gaines' Cryptanalysis / a study of ciphers and their solutions.

A detailed cryptanalysis of Playfair is undertaken in chapter 28 of Dorothy L. Sayers' mystery novel Have His Carcase. In this story, a Playfair message is demonstrated to be cryptographically weak, as the detective is able to solve for the entire key making only a few guesses as to the formatting of the message (in this case, that the message starts with the name of a city and then a date). Sayers' book includes a detailed description of the mechanics of Playfair encryption, as well as a step-by-step account of manual cryptanalysis.

The German Army, Air Force and Police used the Double Playfair cipher as a medium-grade cipher in WWII, based on the British Playfair cipher they had broken early in WWI. They adapted it by introducing a second square from which the second letter of each bigram was selected, and dispensed with the keyword, placing the letters in random order. But with the German fondness for pro forma messages, they were broken at Bletchley Park. Messages were preceded by a sequential number, and numbers were spelled out. As the German numbers 1 (eins) to twelve (zwölf) contain all but eight of the letters in the Double Playfair squares, pro forma traffic was relatively easy to break (Smith, page 74-75)

Use in modern crosswords
Advanced thematic cryptic crosswords like The Listener Crossword (published in the Saturday edition of the British newspaper The Times) occasionally incorporate Playfair ciphers. Normally between four and six answers have to be entered into the grid in code, and the Playfair keyphrase is thematically significant to the final solution.

The cipher lends itself well to crossword puzzles, because the plaintext is found by solving one set of clues, while the ciphertext is found by solving others. Solvers can then construct the key table by pairing the digrams (it is sometimes possible to guess the keyword, but never necessary).

Use of the Playfair cipher is generally explained as part of the preamble to the crossword. This levels the playing field for those solvers who have not come across the cipher previously. But the way the cipher is used is always the same. The 25-letter alphabet used always contains Q and has I and J coinciding. The key table is always filled row by row.

In popular culture

 * The novel Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers gives a blow-by-blow account of the cracking of a Playfair cipher.
 * The World War 2 thriller The Trojan Horse by Hammond Innes conceals the formula for a new high-strength metal alloy using the Playfair cipher.
 * In the film National Treasure: Book of Secrets, a treasure hunt clue is encoded as a Playfair cipher.
 * In the audio book Rogue Angel : God of Thunder, a Playfair cipher clue is used to send Anja Creed to Venice.
 * In the novel York: The Map of Stars (part three of a trilogy for children) by Laura Ruby, a clue to solving the Morningstarr cipher is encrypted using the Playfair cipher.
 * The Playfair cipher serves as a plot device in a season 2 episode of the 2019 Batwoman (TV series).
 * In the novel S. (Dorst novel), a Playfair cipher is discovered in the footnotes of the story.

title: Playfair cipher