Five Star Stories - A Japanese Manga Running since 1986... for Kanji Study

The Five Star Stories is a manga that has been running for decades. We have the first 10 volumes,  each some 177 pages.  All in Japanese of course.

I bought the first 4 volumes many years ago when living in Japan,  with the intent of reading them "some time".  My daughter read all those, then bought the next 6 volumes in the last 10 years or so, then read them too.

The way things go with working in Japan, and I was there for 15 years,  meant that I never got around to being fluent enough in written Japanese to read them ( It just wasn't something the company I worked for needed me to do).  These don't have the furigana (phonetic hiragana) along side the Kanji to help young readers as many Shonen (boys) manga do. 

So it has come the time to actually study enough new Kanji to be able to read them.  Current computer based dictionaries and just the front end Japanese processor in Windows makes looking up and entering the printed Japanese  much easier than when I first started learning Japanese.

I also have all the tools for comic development.... so doing some as translated pages is something I'm playing with.   As the current fashion is to retain the right to left reading format when translating Japanese manga, I don't need to swap all the images horizontally.  It does mean in my translations I've added arrows for panel order, starting at top right of each page, and numbers on the speech balloons for reading order within the panel..

I have done my own cartoons, such as Heavy Metal Garage and the comics Terraform.  Been using Photoshop, CorelDraw and recently Clip Studio Paint. Fonts are from Blambot. For the experiments here, I've used CorelDraw to make the balloon plus text overlay.

For me, Japanese has been a thing I've been committed to for a very long time.  But it is just now that written Japanese is something I can devote the effort to.

I do know a few Kanji, and don't have a problem with hiragana or katakana. It is really encouraging to be able to type a balloon from the manga  directly into the editor.  I am working from the printed page, so I am first converting that into a text file.

I then hit a Kanji or two I don't know and have to look them up via radicals. Radical are the bits of characters it is made up from, and the stroke count. I do know how to count strokes, and probably the order a kanji should be drawn, even if I don't know it.

Sometimes getting the right Kanji is fast.... but other times I currently pick the wrong radical to start from, and it isn't in the character list with the stoke count it has.  But this is why I'm doing this exercise, so I get faster at it, and know more so I don't have to look them up.  I keep another file with the kanja, hiragana and meaning, to use in revision.  My "script" file looks like:

It is then I type in what it could be in English.   I put "Aaa, that is probably MORTAHEAD fighting",  but the Japanese is closer to " Aaaa, most likely, the sound of  MORTAHEAD fighting".
The "sound" seemed irrelevant as the question was what is that noise in the previous balloon.

The more I revise, the less the spaces breaking up words is needed and I streamline how I am doing this.

This text script of the manga, and the Kanji study file is my actual goal.  The comic in English above is just "a bit of fun, because I can"  and isn't for distribution , as that violates copyright.

Yes I do know Google Translate. It is just monumentally bad with Japanese! Turning most sentences into meaningless junk. 

Now I have read that there is an English version of Five Star Stores now, but that doesn't help me in my language studies. I can always ask my wife or kids if I get really stuck, but haven't done that yet.

Five Star Stories itself is in the Japanese tradition of the huge powered suits similar to Gundam. But there are twists to that.  The machines are one off bespoke Knights, rather than the mass produced tanks of Gundam.

Not all about giant machines though, this much later page I did as a standalone with a bit of colour shows.

There are also many colourful characters and settings. Just two being:

Their names are actually Ladios Sopp  and Chrome Ballanche, but I haven't updated the above graphic.

The thing about the manga is that the vocabulary isn't exactly the kind of thing you use at the Japanese post office or bank.  But either is the dialogue in Star Trek, Babylon 5 or Dark Matter.
That is one of the attractions and things that makes it interesting to use for study.

DREAM - Not A Pop Song

Our Dream track kind of sounds like a pop/rock song. About the most pop thing I have done.  It is however far removed from the structure of a standard pop song.  Billions of people are writing those, and so I don't need too and play around with structure a lot in all recent works

I think that it sounds like a pop song is kind of from the expectation of the instrument arrangement and sounds.  The pop vocal treatment probably helps too.

It does have some words in it, but they aren't organized as verses or anything like pop lyrics.  They are just another instrument sound.

It does have a musical chorus, but that is organized more around a heavy rock riff structure.  All of my tracks are based around Riffs. The synth equivalent is a sequenced pattern. And like Tangerine Dream, I try to have such a pattern running throughout a track. It is something I like. Does anyone notice? No idea!

The actual tracks:

The Dream VERSE/CHORUS is basically 3 parallel repeating Riffs, that are slightly changed in prominence to give the effect of a Verse Chorus structure. 

There is no Guitar solo. The 2 synth lead line melodies are the closest it gets to solos.

So the Not a pop song track.

The Continuing Saga of our Studio Amp Electrolytics

We previously covered building a great sounding Studio Amplifier from very affordable modules from eBay. We also covered the poor quality of the Electrolytic capacitors from China, despite what brand they may have on them.

Opening up the Amplifier again today shows that all of the Chinese supplied capacitors are failing, and the single good nichinon I replaced the worst one with last time is fine.

So we are ordering more nichinon  10,000uF 50V capacitors and will replaced the bulging ones when they come in from RS-Components.

Digital Manga and Comixology

Have known about Comixology comic app and store for a long time, but only installed and used it for the first time last week.  Have been a Kindle fan for novels many years now, but not being a hard core Comic fan meant it hadn't been relevant.

I needed it to check out Andy Clift's self published Captain Cosmic , and to get the 2017 Valerian Shougouzo inc . The show runner for Dark Matter recommended the Silver Age styled Captain Cosmic and had gotten Andy to do some comic Dark Matter illustrations for a possible Dark Matter comic book to follow on from the 3 TV seasons.  I now know Comixology does have stuff for me.

When I was in Japan in May 2018, it seems that half the young people riding on the train were reading Manga on their phones. Don't know what App or site they were using, but it seems to be everywhere. Saw the same manga on a phone in Sydney on the train last week.  The typical very small page size of a black and white manga translates to a small phone screen without much trouble. The text is not too small to see relative to the page size.   An American comic is more trouble with the larger page, and a European Album (like Valerian) is not actually readable on a phone. 

Maybe the manga format works better as it is also more about what the characters are feeling rather than what they are doing? Maybe.

I used Comixology on a 10" Samsung Tab3.  I prefer to use it in landscape mode and have the page expended to fit that width, so I can read the text.  Perfect Viewer for my own CBR files works ok that way too. 

But Comixology has an extra mode, where instead of showing the whole page, it will pan and zoom each panel to be full screen when you tap the screen to go to the next panel.

This makes reading much easier for me.  But I wonder how that impacts people that are really into traditional comics, where the panel relationships and relative sizes are significant?   All panels may as well be all the same size if this is they way they are being read, which would seem to impact the culture of the comic book. Except, it does animate the zooming of your eye on the page, so you don't loose the panels layout.  Interesting.

Both Captain Cosmic , and  Valerian Shougouzo inc  are complete standalone stories.  I have to say that Valerian is more to my taste and carries on what I think comics do very well.

Depending on what the art in a book is, having the paper version can be far better. But when space is a problem, the digital approach is a winner, very portable, and saves travelling to a store with limited lines anyway.

My own 3 Terraform Stories can be read for free online here.

A Movie Poster...

... in this case it is a Movie Poster for a Comic Series, our Terraform.

But how about this?

Or maybe this?

Always thought Poster and Album art was very cool.  But in the world of Streaming, that has had a great impact on these art forms.

A vinyl album was a large package where photos and art were to be seen and in all subsequent media the photos and art have gotten small and smaller.  There is much less to look at and probably isn't the influence on how you felt about an artist any more. You may follow their Twitter feed instead.

Well we are on twitter too: @megacurve

The "but he is famous" Factor

Miyazaki Hayao is known for hugely popular films from Studio Ghibli such as Totoro. A very talented artist and director.

What probably isn’t so widely known are his one man water color manga that were published as a few pages in the  monthly Japanese plastic model magazine Model Graphix. These were on his pet subjects focused on WW1 era plane, tank and ship technology and the characters accompanying these were usually pig people.
The right side of the above image is a 1920 Italian double tri-plane seaplane design in his hobby manga of "The Wind Rises" publised this way.

They have since been collected and published as 2 stand alone books.
I bought the first one with the tanks and what not over 20 years ago, and the other at a Studio Ghibli Exhibition at the Hyogo Prefecture Art Museum last week.

They are roughly drawn and hand lettered in pencil and usually have some educational aspect relaying technical details of the devices. Can have a fantasy element incorporated as well as the pig men.

I have done some similar cartoons over the years, but have mostly kept them to myself. I have a few videos on my YouTube Channel with some of this content that haven't received many views either.

I have a feeling that these other Miyazaki works were published because of his existing reputation and the overlap with the modellers subjects, and not on the merits of these works themselves.

"The Wind Rises" movie was his love letter to the Zero and its designer and is an expanded version of the hobby manga. It was still in a similar vein to the other Model Graphix manga....

I guess he has earned the right to do what he wants and have people let him do it.

Wouldn't it be great if everyone was given the same opportunities!

Living In Japan...

I lived in Japan for almost 15 years from 1987 till 2001.  I've now lived in Australia for 18 years, so quite some time has passed. It does put a different perspective on it all.

If you google "Living in Japan" you will mostly find articles from young single Americans who went there as an English teacher for a company like NOVA.  And that probably impacts how they are seen and expected to behave when there.

I went as an Electronics Engineer who had already done something quite famous, the Fairlight Instruments CMI II and Series III.  I also had a Japanese wife and a young son, that meant I didn't need to be looked after the same way by the company.  I also went to work for The Roland Corporation in Hamamatsu Japan, an electronic musical instrument company. The field I was already in.  Roland was also the company that's gear I personally bought and used and always considered them to have a great ability to come up with mostly the right thing at a great price. What I wanted to be involved with.

I also went when Japan was on a roll and doing great, a year or so before Australia fell into a economic hole, so I was in the right place and the right time.

Others will talk about discrimination, but you get both positive and negative treatment because of not being Japanese.   It isn't all bad at all.

Canadians and Australians probably have an easier time with Japanese culture than Americans, just due to their own cultural upbringing.   We all bring good and bad baggage to the gig.

I could go on at length with many anecdotes,   but I will keep this short.

There was an economic decline in Japan over the time I was there, that made some people in the company become less agreeable to the extent I decided I needed to leave the company.  I didn't actually want to leave Japan though.  Ended up that just being the easiest solution with a family to come back to Australia. Made my kids learn to speak English, and see another side of life.

Coming back to Australia after all those years makes you see where you are from in a completely different light too.  I mean was service of any kind always so poor?  Why don't stores actually carry anything I want?  Nobody turns up on time! You mean nobody here does any electronics and software development, or practically any other field, now?

We are now on the Australian NBN so our Internet now fails about once an hour for 5 minutes, as does the telephone.  And the complaints about the system are breaking records.  A pity that isn't fixing it though.  THAT wouldn't happen in Japan!

In Japan, in everything there was always an air of "I will do my best".  I really miss that, but it is also a source of pressure on everyone.

So working in a Japanese company isn't easy. People have died of over work, and there are new laws being introduced in 2018 in an attempt to reduce these deaths and wrecked families.  But it completely opened up my work life with the yearly overseas conference and other business trips I was involved with.  There was real career development for me.

General life in Japan is very good, it is the corporate side that makes it tough.

If I was someone that loved sailing or went to the beach and surfing, then Japan wouldn't be the place for me at all. I am not that person though.

If I didn't have to work other than do my own freelance illustration thing anymore would I live in Japan? Yes!  I was in Japan when I got my first freelance gig, and the Internet has just made all that even easier over the years.

Maybe more at some other time...

SF2D&I - Science Fiction Design & Implementation

From 1995 till 2001, I built and maintained my first presence on the Internet:

" SF2D&I is a gallery of original science fiction fantasy concept art, illustration, miniatures, sculptures, special effects, soundtrack music, computer graphics, movies, animation, how it was done material, and other aspects of original Desktop Production, Pre-production and design.

Original designs are inspired by the works of Ron Cobb, Syd Mead, Jim Burns, Chris Foss, Jeff Burg and countless others involved in everything from 2001, Babylon 5, Star Trek, the worlds of Gerry Anderson , George Lucas and the designers at ILM. There is also material of a wider application than just the SF genre. "

I also published a series of related articles in magazines, the UK's: Science Fiction and Fantasy Modeller, and the Australian Science Fiction Modeller, even though, at the time I was living in Shizuoka Japan.

Through those efforts, I got in contact with quite a few different people in various countries around the world that had similar interests, and it was a great distraction from the daily grind at the time.

It was also a very creative time for myself in the new field of Computer based video production.

All of these years later, as I rapidly approach 60, and most of the planet is on the Internet, and there is a YouTube video on just about anything,  I haven't found the same sense of community I got with the letters and emails as there should be with Facebook or other sites.

I could just be getting old...

The comic/ manga I'm working on Terraform, is a return to that period for me in many ways.  Nostalgic feelings,  Natsukashi, as you say in Japanese, for SF production.  Manga do offer most of what you can do with cinema, and I want to continue to explore that.

We can be contacted at: Art & Technology

My Process, Designing stuff - From Scribble to a Thing

A visual representation of something is more useful to me than a slab of text.  Others are the opposite, and I would think for others again, nothing helps ☺

So when I'm working on something I usually scribble notes and symbols on paper. This isn't something that means anything to anybody else, even if they can read it.  I have just naturally done this as a way of building up the design of something in my own mind and the 2D representation helps my own understanding.

Done it this way for electronics, illustrations and most things. My Process also involves roughly sketching out things, then coming back multiple times to flesh out and refine the details.

The above is a sketch out of the notebook I used designing the 16bit Digital and Analog back end electronics of the Fairlight CMI III .

When I make my music, I don't write anything down, but do make sketches, "my riffs and melodies" into my DAW then rearrange things, then come back when something takes shape and add details, or redo bits that would be more appropriate. In Reaper, my units of music are blocks that can be moved around in 2D space and rearranged.  My Process doesn't change.

And this track here is Dream ... something with actual words in it... which isn't what I usually do.

So far, working on my manga, my process has been the same too. The term mangaka can describe some one single handidly making a manga, and that is what I'm learning by doing. As this is the project I am currently working on, I will flesh out some more examples of My Process I've seen so far.

The above shows my note book full of scribble, and how a finished page ended up made in Clip Studio Paint. There were a few more steps in it though.

Like I had to come up with what the characters were to look like in this story, such as this guy

And I do that with Copic markers and pen.

The first Terraform 16 page story was all put together in CorelDraw. I had scribbled panel ideas, but when it came to the actual text, I was using CorelDraw for Visual Scripting

The above shows early planning of the last 3 pages of Terraform . I needed to do this to get the flow of text, and how much space it took up on a Panel, before I could draw the final panels. I can move things around in 2D, and it fits My Process.

I just made up this approach as I went along, as it seemed natural to do, as the comic fonts take up variable amounts of space, and you can trade off text for what is actually in the image. As much as possible you want to show and not tell, in a comic. And you can not just move text around in a notebook the way I can change a scribble.

The books of Scott McCloud, particularly "Making Comics" have been very useful, but he doesn't mention this Visual Scripting approach I started using some 5 months or so ago.  I discovered the,  Jessica Abel  blog a couple of days ago talking about it.

This  re-enforces my belief that most inventions, "ideas", really are "a dime a dozen" and someone somewhere will come up with the same thing when the need arises. It is just far more difficult than Sales Guys think..... but that is for a different blog..

What I haven't had great amounts of experience with as a process has been writing and finishing fiction. And just like most other new things I do, I've had to go off and do research and study the field.  I have had Syd Fields "The Screen Writer's Workbook" since the early 1990s.  But I want to write/draw a series of short stories that join together to form a larger whole.

For this longer serialized story, specifically how you do a long running manga series, I've recently read  "Write! Shonen Manga: Your Complete Guide to the Secrets of Japanese Comic Book Storytelling"  and "Manga in Theory and Practice: The Craft of Creating Manga"

The reason I've read those last two is my last manga,  Terraform - The Sales Call  has a few issues I want to address. And the serial story aspects were not covered in "Making Comics".   

I found both of the writing manga books useful for what I am trying to achieve and now have a strategy and a format, a variation of the Battle Manga, and the areas of character motivation and story structure to move forward with.  Still have to work out the actual story points though.

"Write! Shonen Manga" also introduced me to an inexpensive Writers tool, called Scrivener, that  works the way with stories that fits My Process.

The above shows the script for Terraform - The Sales Call as it stands now.  I've entered it into Scrivener to learn the way it works.
The Green and Pink cards on the corkboard are bits of the story, and Scrivener allows you to move these around, and work with scribbled ideas. Colors can be assigned to metrics.  It actually allows you to bring in a scan of a scribbled idea as part of your research. Even audio and tools to transcribe it. It gives you a view into a longer work you don't get with just a word processor like Word.   It is here I will focus on correcting our Protagonist, Antagonist and Ally's interactions and story structure.
It will not replace the Visual Scripting or the note book in producing the manga though.

Interestingly, Scrivener is structured just like a software developers IDE. You even Compile you text fragments into a finished document.  That isn't the way the developers present it, but what makes it very familiar to me.

Though Terraform is Sci-Fi, a longer term goal is multi page Car-toon Magazine stuff.

As the last example of My Process, here is a recent early stage of an illustration:

The first quick sketch, and a later vector wire frame with some of the rendering for a simple (as in not highly detailed, time consuming and so not expensive to the customer)  car caricature.

Not that I'm saying that any of this is original.  Just that starting with something very rough is the first step in the journey to a finished thing.  Probably like this Blog Post.

We can be contacted at Art & Technology

The Vanishing Magazines

I used to always check out what new magazines were at the newsagent/bookstores and there was always something new to get involved with.

At one point as a kid I found "Model Car Science" and "Model Car" magazines. Later it become Autosport , Road & Track  and a things like HOT ROD,  Custom Car and Drag Racing. Later again Hi-Fi, Electronics, Audio, Mix, Keyboard, Electronic Musician, Electronics & Music Maker, Home Studio Recording, BYTE, Guitar and music equipment and music production things like Sound On Sound.

Things are very different now. The magazine sections of most Newsagents have been  reduced to a very small selection at the back somewhere. Many magazines have gone out of business completely.

In fact I stopped buying the last 2 monthly magazines "I had to have each month"  the later half of last year.  I now don't miss them.

The Internet has had a lot to do with that. Much of the interesting content that you could only find in the magazines I liked is now self published on websites, forums and blogs directly by the authors. I've done that myself. Advertisers also have many avenues on the focused sites or forums as well.

The magazines with reviews eventually become irrelevant to me, as a magazines income comes from their own advertisers, and the stuff they will review. The aim of the magazine is to sell stuff. Independent opinion from knowledgeable and not paid in anyway by the supplier of the thing is much more useful if you are actually after something.

Over the last few years I've been throwing out many of the magazines I collected for decades. They were once  the only way to get the news or practical knowledge you needed to do a whole raft of things. Some still have nostalgic value as they made a contribution to who I am now, but many don't  in the current world. I have to ask myself, "have I looked at this in the last 15 years, and would I in the future?".

I'm getting to the stage I don't need all the bookshelves I have.  The magazines ARE vanishing...

Have also been getting rid of "technical work" related books. Some of these could have value on eBay, but because we are in Australia, and not a "technical" place, postage make most of them more trouble than they are worth to sell. I bought most of them overseas or from Amazon.

DARK MATTER - from Comic to TV Screen

If you have read this blog before you will have noticed recent comic book related posts.

Particularly my own Comic. And this is the trailer:

Earlier today I've put finishing touches on story 3 in that universe. This one being a short 6 page Manga (black with tone) styled side/sub story done in Clip Studio Paint.  As much to learn CSP and maybe focus more on the longer manga style comic. Having now tried black only and tone, it does dramatically reduce the time to do a page with reasonable detail.

So I recently discovered the TV Series DARK MATTER. It lasted 3 seasons before it was cancelled, and so I didn't notice it till it after it was cancelled, and the DVD boxed set arrived at a local store.

I like it and in finding out about the show and the creators behind it see they have been influenced by a lot of things I like. It was made by people that brought the world the TV STARGATE. Now TV is a conservative place, where it is difficult to sell new, unknown characters and settings, so these guys did the first scripts as a 4 issue Dark Horse comic book to have "established IP" before starting the TV pitches.

Well it seemed to have worked.

So I've also  read in the last 2 weeks DARK MATTER: Rebirth.  The story is a little different from what they did years latter for the TV series, but pretty much the same thing with the same attraction.  My only comment will be the artwork is sketchy and looks very rushed to me.... characters in the background will have no detail... like faces for example!

The other thing about the TV Series Dark Matter I really appreciate is the soundtrack music. That music stuff being another interest as you may have noticed.   Mostly rhythmic, sequenced synth  riff based  rock...   I could do more the Comic + Synth Rock Music thing... what do you think?

Anyway, DARK MATTER reminds my of Firefly and a few other things and I think it is worth checking out.

Dream - The Music and The Video

 After making 2 comics in our Terraform world, we have made a song inspired by the endeavor.

Dream is about building and entering a world, with the aim of improving the world.  It is one of the first tracks we have done with actual singing in it, and has the theme of "dreaming can set us free".

Dreaming to escape your daily drudgery most find ourselves in, but more importantly to Dream the solutions and then actually change the world for the better.

My vocals were recorded with a Audio Technica AT2020 condenser mic. These were processed with their own separate inline, compressor and reverb plugins.  It isn't your standard Verse Chorus repeat twice, bridge another Verse Chorus then finish.  Even though it has lots of guitar, I also didn't put a guitar solo in it and tried to move that to the synths and use "unusual" not pop synth  sounds.  Just trying to be different from what I would naturally do.....  even though someone I played it to immediately said something like ... another of my stuck in the 80s tracks. So be it. 😅

Along with the song we have made a video using our very old Android phone as a video camera with scenes of making the music track and the comic, and the short story after it. The video images are no where near as good as the still images though so haven't as yet uploaded it to our YouTube channel with the current edit.

The Reaper track and plugins...

The inked blue pencil panels that were scanned and colored...

The droid puppet used in the short story...

The black only A5 printed comic short...

The comics can be found at Art and Technology.

The song Dream, and others, can be found at Megacurve on SoundCloud

Imposition for Printing and a Small Rpi File Server

In our end of year break, we completed a couple of short comics and setup a small Rpi Samba file server with an Apache web server with php to help out.

We have been involved with Rpi development for some months but hadn't actually made an SD Card from scratch. So to have that complete Raspberry Pi experience we made a Raspbian-Jessie Lite SD Card. We wanted it to be headless, so we turned on SSH, then used the Advanced IP Scanner tool to find it on my local network, change the password, and set up the other tools.

The problem I'm very aware of is SD Card corruption. The way to stop  that is to execute the command  shutdown before removing power in a Rpi system. Means you need battery back up. SD Cards need to have power maintained for 4 seconds (it is in the SD Card spec no one has bothered to read but me) after a write to avoid corruption, and Linux is always writing log files for everything....all the time.

Doing anything with a Rpi involves Googling how to do it then follow the instructions.  It is an educational toy, so all the standards are covered.

For the comic I used a desktop system for the actual development, but to print it like a 'Zine', I used a laptop I have a Lazer printer connected to. The Samba directory just shows up on both machines in the Network, and dropping and dragging files is faster than using Web based Drive (and we hate the Drive tool that copies everything locally), or accessing the 'Public' folders on each machine which also duplicates the files.

The Rpi File Server was Fast and simple enough, but it isn't the master file copy in this case.... don't trust the SD Card it is on.

I do have an older WD 500MB drive I could use with the Rpi. The Rpi can support the NTFS file system and have Samba directories on it.  But it needs more power than the Rpi USB can provide, and getting a powered USB hub is a bit much.   The easiest solution for me would be to hack the short USB drive cable, so that the USB power isn't coming from the Rpi USB connector, but from the +5VDC and GND on the HAT connector.   Haven't bothered to do this yet.

Now the real technical issue is Imposition for Printing.  I designed these comics to be printed as A5 books. This is one of the larger Japanese styled formats.  So print double sided A4, so when the pages are folded in half and stapled,  you get the typical A5 'Zine' as in the photo above.

So I had to do the double sided printing manually, get the right A5 page number on the right section of each A4 sheet, and take into account the printers boarder, and that we would not be using the bleed and printing to the page edges. 

A small dummy 1/4 size book cut from a single sheet of A4 with all the file numbers on each page helped to get everything in the right place for the 16 page Terraform main story.

So for the 16 page Terraform, we made 8, A4 pages, each containing the correct 2 A5 pages, so that when we printed the first 4 pages, put them back in the paper tray, then printed the last 4 pages, we had everything printed double sided and in the correct order for folding and stapling.   

But the reason for doing it at all, is thinking there is something worth saying..... on issues that impact us all.

The online versions on these comics can be found at Art and Technology.