Attention please, let us have a moment of silence for our fallen comrade…Yes it is true, Cyanogen Inc. has officially shut down its open source development project and all other related services to its main product.
On December 23rd, a spokesperson from Cyanogen Inc. had this to say on the company’s blog:
As part of the ongoing consolidation of Cyanogen, all services and Cyanogen-supported nightly builds will be discontinued no later than 12/31/16. The open source project and source code will remain available for anyone who wants to build CyanogenMod personally.
This is a clear fall from grace for the popular OS modding company- it was only two years ago it declined an acquisition offer by Google, saying it was “still growing as a company.” Clearly that growth never came to pass, as rumors have been spreading for some months now about a possible shutting down of the open sourced project.
All is not lost however- on December the 24th, a small group of CyanogenMod contributors announced on the CyanogenMod blog that they would be “forking” the OS and move to continue its development. To add more drama to the flame, shortly after the post went up, Cyanogen Inc. had the DNS for cyanogenmod.org shut down. Before that happened however, the post was saved in Google’s cache:
CM has always been more than the name and more than the infrastructure. CM has been a success based on the spirit, ingenuity and effort of its individual contributors…Embracing that spirit, we the community of developers, designers, device maintainers and translators have taken the steps necessary to produce a fork of the CM source code and pending patches. This is more than just a ‘rebrand’. This fork will return to the grassroots community effort that used to define CM while maintaining the professional quality and reliability you have come to expect more recently. We will take pride in our Lineage as we move forward and continue to build on its legacy.
We will keep abreast of the situation as it unfolds.
It’s makeover week! The most anticipated episode of every cycle of America’s Next Top Model. Especially for the breakdowns. Aside from the transformations themselves, it’s always awesome to see who loses their confidence and who gains more. And this season’s make over episode did not disappoint. I do miss the days of the contestants not knowing what they would get until they were actually sitting in the chair, though.
Tash got one of my favourite makeovers this cycle, along with Kyle and Paige. I don’t like Courtney’s makeover at all; it ages her considerably. Krislian, Marissa and Giah don’t look like models, they look very basic; Krislian and Marissa look like video girls and Giah looks like, as the judges said, an R&B singer. India’s makeover confuses me; the hair colour doesn’t really add anything to her look, but I love the way that it’s styled. The other girls’ makeovers are kind of meh.
And to show off these brand new looks, the girls had a nude photo shoot. Nude – and semi-nude – photo shoots always present a problem. There is always one girl who is not comfortable posing naked. And this cycle it was India. Ultimately she did do the shoot, but I’m not quite clear why she was hesitant to do it in the first place. Insecurity with her body? Moral or ethical disagreement? Shyness and discomfort with disrobing in front of others (that can’t be it, being backstage at a fashion show means flashing everyone and she did a fashion show already)?
I was very disappointed in the Sheriff for listening to Hap and not immediately arresting him and taking him down to the police station. I get it, his wife is gravely ill and dying and Hap offered him a cure. It’s totally understandable why he decided to make the deal with Hap. I was hoping he would get his wife healed and then turn Hap in anyway and not be so selfish and cold as to leave Prairie and the others trapped. But of course that never happened because as soon as Prairie and Homer healed his wife, Hap shot them both.
A good thing she did too because, surprise, the Sheriff’s wife had the fifth movement and gave it to them. It makes me wonder what the point of Rachel was if she was never going to be the recipient of the fifth movement. Arguably, Khatun gave it to someone else to give them so that Hap wouldn’t get it. But that was decades ago. Unless Khatun, knowing the future, gave it to her then to prevent Hap from getting it. But if she knew the future, she would see that Hap got it anyway? I don’t know.
I was so happy that Steven and Alfonso were being proactive about finding proof that Prairie’s story was real. That they were really trying to help her out. And I was so hopeful that they would find proof and finally Nancy and Abel would understand everything that’s been happening to her since she was a child and believe her. That their parents and everyone else who crashed their session would see the truth. Then they run off and save Homer and the others and everyone lives happily ever after.
Because Alfonso found books that point directly to Prairire having made up the entire thing, under her bed. I was wrong in my recap of episode two; all of it being a lie and Prairie just being crazy was not as impactful – or satisfying – as if it were all real. Not because I didn’t get the ending I had wanted, just because it felt like a slap in the face.
The school shooting felt very, very random and out place in this narrative. Again, this was something that upon doing some reading I found that there were, in fact, hints to it scattered throughout the show but those maybe have been a tad too subtle. Although, I did know there was going to be a school shooting the second Prairie told Abel she knew what her premonition meant. Not sure why. Perhaps those hints subliminally planted the idea in my mind so that I would make the connection later. Because those hints were not obvious to me at all.
First, we had Steve getting kidnapped by a couple of goons; his father finally made good on his promise to send him to reform school. Am I the only one that thought those men didn’t look like they came from a school? They even accepted a bribe. How reputable could this institution be?
Having Betty save him was such a triumphant moment. Not just because of Steven being saved which meant Prairie still had her five, but because of where Betty and Steve started out in the season. Their student/teacher relationship has improved tremendously. If this had been the beginning of the season, she would have driven by with a look of glee on her face.
Before we get to that though, Nancy was being overbearingly overprotective of Prairie from the beginning of the episode. I understand that I think that because, as a viewer, I’m seeing things from Prairie’s perspective and I don’t want anything to impede her from achieving her goals. Nancy’s insistence that Abel should have been walking Prairie right to the door when he took her to see her therapist was perfectly reasonable. As far as Nancy can see, her daughter is – and always has been – mentally unstable. Hence why she’s so quick to medicate her.
I wholeheartedly agreed with her about making the random girl delete the selfie she took with Prairie. She was totally out of line. Not only did she force her way into their dinner by refusing to leave or accept no for answer when they politely refused her, she did not even wait for an answer from Prairie before taking the photo. She just slid right into the seat next to Prairie in the booth and took it without Prairie’s consent. That was infuriating and I was right there with Nancy in her anger.
Points to Alfonso for abandoning work to help his friend. It likely wasn’t the best thing to do, but it was sweet of him. He was right about them being her parents. They’re the only ones she’s known for the majority of her life. They were by no means perfect and its easy to see why she resents them, but they are, and always have been, trying to do what they thing is best for Prairie.
I was unsure of whether or not Leon knew about the specifics of Hap’s experiment. It wasn’t made clear right away – not for me at least – and I thought Hap may have been speaking in non-specific terms just so he wouldn’t give away that he’d kidnapped people and was holding them captive in his basement. But Leon knew and was even more callous and unscrupulous about Prairie and the other’s than Hap was. Hell, in general; he tried to kill Hap for his information. At least Hap cared enough to be resentful of their closeness.
Given that Hap and Leon have known each other for a while – Leon said he trained Hap – then I would’ve thought that Hap would know not to tell him anything about what Prairie and the others seemed to be uncovering. Just the look on his face when he urged Hap to tell him of his competing theory was enough to deduce that he could not be trusted. It was obvious that he was luring Hap into a trap.
Hap was caught in such an unassuming, unexpected and irresponsible way. Why was his door even unlocked? I think Hap is going to find a way out of this situation. Maybe even involving killing the Sheriff. Based on what Prairie has said, the others are still in captivity. That means that whatever the Sheriff does next did not stop Hap, nor did it result in them being saved. So this little ray of hope doesn’t mean much.
I knew Scott wasn’t dead! He couldn’t have been. They needed five and now that they had five there was no way he was going to be out of the equation. I knew the movements would bring him back. I only wish Rachel had joined in. And now because Renata witnessed his resurrection they don’t need to waste time trying to convince her of anything.
I’m a little more sympathetic to Alfonso’s mother now. She surprised me by actually acting like a mother who loves and cares about her child, really believes in him and is proud of him. I still don’t think there’s really anything wrong with her, at least physically. It looks like she went through some things and just gave up on life. I thought that scene would turn out differently and she would cause a scene and do something to embarrass Alfonso and ruin the relationship he established with his benefactors. Although I do wish he didn’t have to suck up to these people.
But that one glimmer of humanity in him doesn’t make me hate him any less. It was so evil of him to use Homer to trap someone else for his experiment. To force him to put someone else through an experience that has been nothing but pain and trauma for him. The second he said he wanted Homer’s help with something I knew that was what he planned to do given that Renata had rejected him.