title: South Dakota

text: As of 2005, South Dakota has the lowest per capita total state tax rate in the United States. The state does not levy personal or corporate income taxes, inheritance taxes, or taxes on intangible personal property. The state sales tax rate is 4.5 percent. Various localities have local levies so in some areas the rate is six percent. The state sales tax does not apply to sales to Indians on Indian reservations, but many reservations have a compact with the state. Businesses on the reservation collect the tax and the state refunds to the Indian Tribes the percentage of sales tax collections relating to the ratio of Indian population to total population in the county or area affected. Ad valorem property taxes are local taxes and are a large source of funding for school systems, counties, municipalities and other local government units. The South Dakota Special Tax Division regulates some taxes including cigarette and alcohol-related taxes.


title: South Dakota

text: South Dakota is represented at the federal level by Senator John Thune, Senator Mike Rounds, and Representative Dusty Johnson. All three are Republicans. South Dakota is one of seven states with only one seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In United States presidential elections, South Dakota is allotted three of 538 votes in the Electoral College. As in all other states except Maine and neighboring Nebraska, South Dakota's electoral votes are granted in a winner-take-all system.


title: South Dakota

text: South Dakota politics are generally dominated by the Republican Party. Since statehood, Republicans have carried the state's electoral votes in all but five presidential elections: 1896, 1912 (by Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party), 1932, 1936 and 1964. (Democrat George McGovern—a native South Dakotan—failed to carry his home state in 1972.) Only Alaska has been carried fewer times by a Democrat. Additionally, a Democrat has not won the governorship since 1974. As of 2016, Republicans hold a 15% voter registration advantage over Democrats and hold supermajorities in both the state House and the state Senate.


title: South Dakota

text: Despite the state's general Republican and conservative leanings, Democrats have found success in various statewide elections, most notably in those involving South Dakota's congressional representatives in Washington. American Indians have been becoming more active in state and county electoral politics. In the 2002 election, American Indian voting carried Tim Johnson as the Democratic candidate by a margin of 532 votes. Until his electoral defeat in 2004, Senator Tom Daschle was the Senate minority leader (and briefly its majority leader during Democratic control of the Senate in 2001–02). Other prominent South Dakota Democrats include former presidential nominees George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey.


title: South Dakota

text: In 2016, South Dakota voted for Republican nominee Donald Trump over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by a margin of 30%. In 2018, Republican congresswoman Kristi Noem defeated Democrat Billie Sutton in the gubernatorial election by a small margin, and Republican Dusty Johnson defeated Democrat Tim Bjorkman for the state's at-large seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Noem was sworn in on January 5, 2019, making her the first female governor of the state.


title: South Dakota

text: Contemporary political issues in South Dakota include the costs and benefits of the state lottery, South Dakota's relatively low rankings in education spending (particularly teacher pay—recently the State Sales Tax was increased from 4% to 4.5% to finance an increase in teacher pay), and recent legislative and electoral attempts to ban abortion in the state.


title: South Dakota

text: A Republican-supported bill passed in March 2019 requires that all public schools display "In God We Trust" in a prominent location.


title: South Dakota

text: South Dakota's culture reflects the state's American Indian, rural, Western, and European roots. A number of annual events celebrating the state's ethnic and historical heritage take place around the state, such as Days of '76 in Deadwood, Czech Days in Tabor, and the annual St. Patrick's Day and Cinco de Mayo festivities in Sioux Falls. The various tribes hold many annual pow wows at their reservations throughout the state, to which non-Native Americans are sometimes invited. Custer State Park holds an annual Buffalo Roundup, in which volunteers on horseback gather the park's herd of around 1,500 bison.


title: South Dakota

text: Black Elk (Lakota) was a medicine man and heyokha, whose life spanned the transition to reservations. His accounts of the 19th-century Indian Wars and Ghost Dance movement, and his deep thoughts on personal visions and Native American religion, form the basis of the book "Black Elk Speaks", first published in 1932. (Among several editions, a premier annotated edition was published in 2008.) Paul Goble, an award-winning children's book author and illustrator, was based in the Black Hills from 1977.


title: South Dakota

text: Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose semi-autobiographical books are based on her experiences as a child and young adult on the frontier, is one of South Dakota's best-known writers. She drew from her life growing up on a homestead near De Smet as the basis for five of her novels: "By the Shores of Silver Lake", "The Long Winter", "Little Town on the Prairie", "These Happy Golden Years", and "The First Four Years". These gained renewed popularity in the United States when "Little House on the Prairie" was adapted and produced as a television series in 1974. Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who became a well-known writer in her own right, was born near De Smet in 1886.


title: South Dakota

text: South Dakota has also produced several notable artists. Harvey Dunn grew up on a homestead near Manchester in the late 19th century. While Dunn worked most of his career as a commercial illustrator, his most famous works showed various scenes of frontier life; he completed these near the end of his career. Oscar Howe (Crow) was born on the Crow Creek Indian Reservation and won fame for his watercolor paintings. Howe was one of the first Native American painters to adopt techniques and style heavily influenced by the mid-20th century abstraction movement, rather than relying on traditional Native American styles. Terry Redlin, originally from Watertown, was an accomplished painter of rural and wildlife scenes. Many of his works are on display at the Redlin Art Center in Watertown.


title: South Dakota

text: The city, founded in 1856, is in the southeast corner of the state. Retail, finance, and healthcare have assumed greater importance in Sioux Falls, where the economy was originally centered on agri-business and quarrying.


title: South Dakota

text: Rapid City, with a 2020 population of 74,703, and a metropolitan area population of 144,558, is the second-largest city in the state. It is on the eastern edge of the Black Hills, and was founded in 1876. Rapid City's economy is largely based on tourism and defense spending, because of the proximity of many tourist attractions in the Black Hills and Ellsworth Air Force Base.


title: South Dakota

text: The next eight largest cities in the state, in order of descending 2010 population, are Aberdeen (28,495), Brookings (23,337), Watertown (22,655), Mitchell (15,660), Yankton (15,411), Huron (14,263), Pierre (14,091), and Spearfish (12,193). Pierre is the state capital, and Brookings and Vermillion are the locations of the state's two largest universities (South Dakota State University and University of South Dakota, respectively). With a population of about 14,000, Pierre is the second smallest state capital in the United States. Of the ten largest cities in the state, only Rapid City and Spearfish are west of the Missouri River.


title: South Dakota

text: South Dakota's first newspaper, the "Dakota Democrat", began publishing in Yankton in 1858. Today, the state's largest newspaper is the Sioux Falls "Argus Leader", with a Sunday circulation of 63,701 and a weekday circulation of 44,334. The "Rapid City Journal", with a Sunday circulation of 32,638 and a weekday circulation of 27,827, is South Dakota's second largest newspaper. The next four largest newspapers in the state are the Aberdeen "American News", the "Watertown Public Opinion", the "Huron Plainsman", and the "Brookings Register". In 1981, Tim Giago founded the "Lakota Times" as a newspaper for the local American Indian community on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The newspaper, now published in New York and known as "Indian Country Today", is available in every state in the country. The "Sioux City Journal" also covers parts of South Dakota.


title: South Dakota

text: There are nine television stations broadcasting in South Dakota; South Dakota Public Television broadcasts from a number of locations around the state, while the other stations broadcast from Sioux Falls or Rapid City. The two largest television media markets in South Dakota are Sioux Falls-Mitchell, with a viewership of 246,020, and Rapid City, with a viewership of 91,070. The two markets rank as 114th and 177th largest in the United States, respectively. The state's first television station, KELO-TV, began airing in Sioux Falls in 1953. Among KELO's early programs was "Captain 11", an afternoon children's program. "Captain 11" ran from 1955 until 1996, making it the nation's longest continuously running children's television program.


title: South Dakota

text: A number of South Dakotans are famous for their work in television and publishing. Former NBC Nightly News anchor and author Tom Brokaw is from Webster and Yankton, "USA Today" founder Al Neuharth was from Eureka and Alpena, gameshow host Bob Barker spent much of his childhood in Mission, and entertainment news hosts Pat O'Brien and Mary Hart are from Sioux Falls.


title: South Dakota

text: As of 2006, South Dakota has a total primary and secondary school enrollment of 136,872, with 120,278 of these students being educated in the public school system. There are 703 public schools in 168 school districts, giving South Dakota the highest number of schools per capita in the United States. The current high school graduation rate is 89.9%, and the average ACT score is 21.8, slightly above the national average of 21.1. 89.8% of the adult population has earned at least a high school diploma, and 25.8% has earned a bachelor's degree or higher. South Dakota's 2008 average public school teacher salary of $36,674 was the lowest in the nation (national average was $52,308). In 2007 South Dakota passed legislation modeled after Montana's Indian Education for All Act (1999), mandating education about Native American tribal history, culture, and heritage in all the schools, from pre-school through college, in an effort to increase knowledge and appreciation about Indian culture among all residents of the state, as well as to reinforce Indian students' understanding of their own cultures' contributions.


title: South Dakota

text: The South Dakota Board of Regents, whose members are appointed by the governor, controls the six public universities in the state. South Dakota State University (SDSU), in Brookings, is the state's largest university, with an enrollment of 12,831. The University of South Dakota (USD), in Vermillion, is the state's oldest university, and has South Dakota's only law school and medical school. South Dakota also has several private universities, the largest of which is Augustana University in Sioux Falls.


title: South Dakota

text: Because of its low population, South Dakota does not host any major league professional sports franchises. The state has minor league and independent league teams, all of which play in Sioux Falls or Rapid City. Sioux Falls is home to four teams: the Sioux Falls Canaries (baseball), the Sioux Falls Skyforce (basketball), the Sioux Falls Stampede (hockey), and the Sioux Falls Storm (indoor American football). The Canaries play in the American Association, and their home field is Sioux Falls Stadium. The Skyforce plays in the NBA G League and is owned by the NBA's Miami Heat. It plays at the Sanford Pentagon. The Stampede and Storm share the Denny Sanford Premier Center. The Stampede plays in the USHL, and the Storm plays in the IFL. Rapid City has a hockey team named the Rapid City Rush that plays in the ECHL. The Rush began its inaugural season in 2008 at the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center.


title: South Dakota

text: Universities in South Dakota host a variety of sports programs. For many years, South Dakota was one of the only states in the country without an NCAA DivisionI football or basketball team. However, the South Dakota State Jackrabbits decided to move their teams from DivisionII to DivisionI in 2007, a move followed by the South Dakota Coyotes in 2011. Other universities in the state compete at the NCAA's Division II or III levels, or in the NAIA.


title: South Dakota

text: Famous South Dakota athletes include Billy Mills, Mike Miller, Mark Ellis, Becky Hammon, Brock Lesnar, Chad Greenway, and Adam Vinatieri. Mills is from the town of Pine Ridge and competed at the 1964 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, becoming the only American to win a gold medal in the 10,000-meter event. Miller, of Mitchell, is a two-time NBA champion who played college basketball at the University of Florida, leading them to the 2000 NCAA Championship game his sophomore year, and won the 2001 NBA rookie of the year award. Ellis, of Rapid City, played for the University of Florida and four MLB teams before retiring in 2015. Hammon, of Rapid City, played for the WNBA's New York Liberty and San Antonio Silver Stars before becoming an assistant coach for the NBA's San Antonio Spurs in 2014. Lesnar, of Webster, is a former heavy-weight champion in the UFC and WWE. Vinatieri is an NFL placekicker who grew up in Rapid City and attended SDSU.


title: South Dakota

text: Fishing and hunting are popular outdoor activities in South Dakota. Fishing contributes over $224 million to South Dakota's economy, and hunting contributes over $303 million. In 2007, over 275,000 hunting licences and 175,000 fishing licences were sold in the state; around half of the hunting licences and over two-thirds of the fishing licences were purchased by South Dakotans. Popular species of game include pheasants, white-tailed deer, mule deer, and turkeys, as well as waterfowl such as Canada geese, snow geese, and mallards. Targets of anglers include walleye in the eastern glacial lakes and Missouri River reservoirs, Chinook salmon in Lake Oahe, and trout in the Black Hills.


title: South Dakota

text: Other sports, such as cycling and running, are also popular in the state. In 1991, the state opened the George S. Mickelson Trail, a rail trail in the Black Hills. Besides being used by cyclists, the trail is also the site of a portion of the annual Mount Rushmore marathon; the marathon's entire course is at an elevation of over 4,000 feet (1,200 m). Other events in the state include the Tour de Kota, a , six-day cycling event that covers much of eastern and central South Dakota, and the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which draws hundreds of thousands of participants from around the United States.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: John Jacob Astor IV (July 13, 1864 – April 15, 1912) was an American business magnate, real estate developer, investor, writer, lieutenant colonel in the Spanish–American War, and a prominent member of the Astor family. He died in the sinking of the RMS "Titanic" during the early hours of April 15, 1912. Astor was the richest passenger aboard the RMS "Titanic" and was thought to be among the richest people in the world at that time, with a net worth of roughly $87 million when he died (equivalent to $ billion in ).


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: John Jacob Astor IV was born on July 13, 1864, at his parents' country estate of Ferncliff in Rhinebeck, New York. He was the youngest of five children and only son of William Backhouse Astor Jr., a businessman, collector, and racehorse breeder/owner, and Caroline Webster "Lina" Schermerhorn, a Dutch-American socialite. His four elder sisters were Emily, Helen, Charlotte, and Caroline ("Carrie").


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: Jack was a great-grandson of German–American fur-trader John Jacob Astor and Sarah Cox Todd, whose fortune made the Astor family one of the wealthiest in the United States. Astor's paternal grandfather William Backhouse Astor Sr. was a prominent real estate businessman. Through his paternal grandmother, Margaret Alida Rebecca Armstrong, Astor was also a great-grandson of Senator John Armstrong Jr. and Alida Livingston of the Livingston family. His maternal grandparents were Abraham Schermerhorn, a wealthy merchant, and socialite Helen Van Courtlandt White. His sister Helen's husband was diplomat James Roosevelt "Rosey" Roosevelt, half-brother of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the Roosevelt family. Another sister, named Carrie, was a noted philanthropist and the wife of Marshall Orme Wilson (brother of banker Richard Thornton Wilson Jr. and socialite Grace (née Wilson) Vanderbilt). Astor was also a first cousin of William Waldorf Astor, 1st Viscount Astor, with whom his mother had a notorious feud resulting in William's removal to England.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: Astor attended St Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, and later attended Harvard College. He went by the name "Jack". His ungainly appearance and the perception that he was an aimless dilettante led one newspaper to give him the name "Jack Ass-tor".


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: Among Astor's accomplishments was "A Journey in Other Worlds" (1894), a science-fiction novel about life in the year 2000 on the planets Saturn and Jupiter. He also patented several inventions, including a bicycle brake in 1898, a "vibratory disintegrator" used to produce gas from peat moss, and a pneumatic road-improver, and he helped develop a turbine engine.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: Like generations of Astors before him, he also made millions in real estate. In 1897, Astor built the Astoria Hotel, "the world's most luxurious hotel", in New York City, adjoining the Waldorf Hotel owned by Astor's cousin and rival, William. The complex became known as the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The Waldorf-Astoria would later be the host location to the U.S. inquiries into the sinking of the RMS "Titanic", on which Astor died.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: From 1894 to 1896, he was a colonel on the military staff of New York Governor Levi P. Morton. Shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish–American War in 1898, Astor personally financed a volunteer artillery unit known as the "Astor Battery", which served in the Philippines. In May 1898, Astor was appointed a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Volunteers and served as an officer on the staff of Major General William Shafter in Cuba, during the Santiago Campaign. He was later given a brevet (war/temporary promotion) to colonel in recognition of his services. He was mustered out of the Volunteer Army in November 1898.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: During the war, he allowed his yacht "Nourmahal" to be used by the U.S. government. He appeared in the films "President McKinley's Inspection of Camp Wikoff" (1898) and "Col. John Jacob Astor, Staff and Veterans of the Spanish–American War" (1899). As a result of his military service, Astor was entitled to the Spanish Campaign Medal. After the war, Astor was often referred to as "Colonel Astor."


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: Astor was a member of several military and hereditary societies. He was an early member of the New York Society of Colonial Wars and was assigned membership number 138. He was also a member of the Military Order of Foreign Wars, Society of the Army of Santiago de Cuba, and the Society of the American Wars of the United States.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: On February 17, 1891, Astor married socialite Ava Lowle Willing, a daughter of Edward Shippen Willing and Alice Barton. The couple had two children:


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: Astor and Willing divorced in November 1909. Compounding the scandal of their divorce was Astor's announcement that he would remarry. At the age of 47, Astor married 18-year-old socialite Madeleine Talmage Force, the sister of real estate businesswoman and socialite Katherine Emmons Force. Their parents were William Hurlbut Force and Katherine Arvilla Talmage. Astor and Force were married in his mother's ballroom at Beechwood, the family's Newport, Rhode Island, mansion. There was also much controversy over their 29-year age difference. His son Vincent despised Force, yet he served as best man at his father's wedding. The couple took an extended honeymoon in Europe and Egypt to wait for the gossip to calm down. Among the few Americans who did not spurn him at this time was Margaret Brown, later fictionalized as "The Unsinkable Molly Brown". She accompanied the Astors to Egypt and France. After receiving a call to return to the United States, Brown accompanied the couple back home aboard .


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: Astor's country estate, Ferncliff, was north of the town center in Rhinebeck, New York, with of Hudson River frontage in the picturesque Lower Hudson River Valley. The land had been purchased piecemeal by his father during the mid 19th century. Astor was born there.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: His father's Italianate mansion of 1864 was partly rebuilt in 1904 to designs by Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White. The house retained its conservative exterior, and a separate sports pavilion in the Louis XVI style was built. This was Stanford White's last project before he died.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: The "Ferncliff Casino" sports pavilion (later called "Astor Courts") reportedly housed the first residential indoor swimming pool in the U.S., an indoor tennis court with vaulting of Guastavino tile, two squash courts, and guest bedrooms. On the lower level, there was a bowling alley and a shooting range.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: While traveling, Madeleine Force Astor became pregnant. Wanting the child born in the U.S., the Astors boarded "Titanic" on her maiden voyage to New York. They embarked in Cherbourg, France, in first class and were the wealthiest passengers aboard. Accompanying the Astors were Astor's valet, Victor Robbins; Mrs. Astor's maid, Rosalie Bidois; and her nurse, Caroline Louise Endres. They also took their pet Airedale, Kitty. The Astors were deeply fond of their dog and had come close to losing her on a previous trip when she went missing in Egypt. Kitty did not survive the sinking. Shortly after "Titanic" hit the iceberg, New York lawyer Isaac Frauenthal saw Captain Edward J. Smith advise Astor to awaken his wife, as they might have to take to the boats. Astor informed his wife of the collision but told her the damage did not appear to be serious. Some time later, as the ship's lifeboats for first class were being manned, Astor remained unperturbed; he and his wife played with the mechanical horses in the gymnasium. At some point Astor is thought to have sliced the lining of an extra lifebelt with a pen knife to show his wife its contents, either to prove they were not of use or to reassure her that they were. He even declared: "We are safer here than in that little boat."


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: When Second Officer Charles Lightoller later arrived on A Deck to finish loading Lifeboat 4, Astor helped his wife, with her maid and nurse, into it. He then asked if he might join his wife because she was in "a delicate condition;" however, Lightoller told him men were not to be allowed to board until all the women and children had been loaded. According to "Titanic" passenger Archibald Gracie IV, "She was lifted up through the window, and her husband helped her on the other side, and when she got in, her husband was on one side of this window and I was on the other side, at the next window. I heard Mr Astor ask the second officer whether he would not be allowed to go aboard this boat to protect his wife. He said, "No, sir, no man is allowed on this boat or any of the boats until the ladies are off." Mr. Astor then said (something to the effect of) "Well, tell me the number of this boat so I may find her afterwards" and was told "Number 4." A news article posted in the "Chicago Record Herald" tells of Astor placing his wife into the final lifeboat then ordering Ida Sophia Hippach and her 17-year-old daughter Jean Gertrude to take the final two places before the boat was lowered away.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: After Lifeboat 4 was lowered at 1:55 am, Astor is said to have stood alone while others tried to free the remaining collapsible boats; he was last seen alive on the starboard bridge wing, smoking a cigarette with Jacques Futrelle. A mere half hour later, the ship disappeared beneath the ocean. Madeleine Force Astor, her nurse, and her maid survived. Colonel Astor, his valet, Victor Robbins, Kitty, and Futrelle did not.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: In the aftermath, ships were sent out to retrieve the bodies from the site of the sinking; of the 1,517 passengers and crew who perished in the sinking, only 333 bodies were ever recovered. Astor's body was recovered on April 22 by the cable ship . Astor was identified by the initials sewn on the label of his jacket. Among the items found on him was a gold pocket watch, which his son Vincent claimed and wore the rest of his life.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: In his memoir, Gracie claimed that he heard Astor's body was in a crushed condition. This led to popular belief that Astor was killed by the first funnel falling from the ship. Other reports were inconsistent: Captain Richard Roberts, the commander of Astor's yacht, said that apart from some slight discolouration by water, Astor's features were unharmed; however, Gerald Ross, an electrician on the Mackay-Bennett, reported that Astor's "face was swollen, one jaw was injured." Survivor Philip Mock was quoted as claiming to have seen Astor in the water clinging to a raft with William Thomas Stead. "Their feet became frozen," said Mock, "and they were forced to release their hold. Both were drowned."


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: Astor was buried in Trinity Church Cemetery in Manhattan, New York City. Four months after "Titanic" sank, Madeleine Astor gave birth to his second son, John Jacob "Jakey" Astor VI.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: Astor left $69 million of his $85 million estate (equivalent to approximately $1.75 billion in 2017 dollars) to Vincent. This value included his Ferncliff country estate in Rhinebeck, New York, and his yacht, the "Noma".


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: To Madeleine Force Astor, he left $100,000 as an outright bequest, as well as a $5 million trust fund from which she was provided an income. Additionally, she was given the use of his New York City mansion (840 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan) and all its furnishings, his Newport mansion (Beechwood) and all its furnishings, the pick of whichever luxury limousine she wanted from his collection, and five of his prized horses—as long as she did not remarry.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: His daughter Ava (who lived with her mother, also named Ava) received a $10 million trust fund. Upon turning 21, John Jacob VI inherited the $3 million trust fund Astor had set aside for him.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: According to Walter Lord, "After [the "Titanic"] sank, the "New York American" broke the news on April 16 with a lead devoted almost entirely to John Jacob Astor; at the end it mentioned that 1800 others were also lost." Astor's prominence led to the creation of many exaggerated and unsubstantiated accounts about his actions during the sinking of the "Titanic". One story alleges that he opened the ship's kennel and released the dogs, including his own beloved Airedale, Kitty; in another, he placed a woman's hat on a boy to make sure the child was able to get into a lifeboat. Another legend claims that after the ship hit the iceberg, he quipped, "I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous." These stories appeared in newspapers, magazines, and even books about the sinking. In reality, none of the claims about Astor's actions were substantiated, as nobody who recognized him survived other than the women who boarded lifeboats relatively early on. Wade wrote that the ice joke is almost certainly apocryphal, as Astor was not known for making jokes, and that the story about the hat (like many other "survivor stories" published shortly after the sinking) may have been invented by the reporter.


title: John Jacob Astor IV

text: Astor's fame has made him a frequent character in media, literary, and stage works, especially in stories about the "Titanic". German actor Karl Schönböck played Astor in the 1943 Nazi propaganda film "Titanic". William Johnstone played Astor in the 1953 film "Titanic", and in the 1997 version of "Titanic" he was played by Eric Braeden. In the 1996 miniseries, he was played by Canadian-born actor Scott Hylands. Astor was also portrayed by David Janssen in the 1979 film "S.O.S. Titanic". Perennially, in the town of Astoria, Oregon (so named for Astor's patrilineal great-grandfather), he is portrayed by a local amateur actor in street corner vignettes. He was played by Miles Richardson in the 2012 "Titanic" miniseries. Astor was portrayed by his great-grandson Gregory Todd Astor in an April 2012 production of "Titanic: The Musical". Astor also makes a brief character appearance in a late episode of "The Alienist", a limited TNT/Netflix series (2018) based on the novel by Caleb Carr. The scene shows a pre-"Titanic" 'Jack Astor' greeting a principal character at an 1896 staging of Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni".


title: Gangs of London (TV series)

text: Gangs of London is a British crime drama television series produced by Pulse Films & Sister, following struggles between rival gangs and other criminal organisations in present-day London. The first series aired in the UK on 23 April 2020 on Sky Atlantic. The series was created by Gareth Evans, best known for "The Raid" action crime films, along with Matt Flannery. A second series was announced in June 2020, with AMC to take over US broadcast rights and co-produce. The second series premiered on 20 October 2022 in the UK and Germany and premiered on 17 November 2022 in the US. A third series was announced in November 2022.


title: Gangs of London (TV series)

text: London, one of the world's most dynamic and multicultural cities, is being torn apart by the turbulent power struggles of the international gangs that control it and the sudden power vacuum that's created when the head of London's most powerful crime family is assassinated.


title: Gangs of London (TV series)

text: For 20 years, Finn Wallace (Colm Meaney) was the most powerful criminal in London. Billions of pounds flowed through his organisation each year. But now he's dead, and nobody knows who ordered him killed. With rivals everywhere, it's up to the impulsive Sean Wallace (Joe Cole), with the help of the Dumani family headed by Ed Dumani (Lucian Msamati), to take his father's place. If the situation wasn't already dangerous enough, Sean's assumption of power causes ripples in the world of international crime within the streets of London, which consists of the Albanian Mafia headed by Luan Dushaj, as well as the Kurdish freedom fighters, Pakistani Drug Cartel, Welsh travellers and various other criminal elements.


title: Gangs of London (TV series)

text: In the middle of this is newcomer Elliot Finch (Sope Dirisu), an undercover policeman who has infiltrated the Wallace family organisation.


title: Gangs of London (TV series)

text: During filming production visited St Clere Estate in Kent to stage a Traveller site and Dartford to film a speed boat scene near Queen Elizabeth II Bridge. A driving scene was also featured on Pilgrim's Way. The show was confirmed for a second series premiering in 2022. In July 2021, production on the second series had been halted for 10 days following a crew member testing positive for COVID-19. Filming for the second series began on 31 May 2021 and wrapped in February 2022. The second series premiered on 20th October 2022.


title: Gangs of London (TV series)

text: The first season of the series was co-produced with American pay network Cinemax which was expected to air the programme alongside Sky. However, following an announcement in January 2020 by executives with parent company WarnerMedia that they would be winding down Cinemax's original programming, its producers began negotiating to move the series to another U.S. outlet, with Cinemax's blessing. AMC took over distribution, which started on October 1, 2020 through the AMC+ platform.


title: Gangs of London (TV series)

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the series holds an approval rating of 91% based on 33 reviews. The website's critics consensus reads, "A modern crime family masterpiece, "Gangs of London" builds its own empire atop tried and true mafia turf -- complete with engaging drama, exhilarating action, apart from some very dull acting." GQ said it is "a strong early contender to be the best show of the summer."


title: Gangs of London (TV series)

text: The series became Sky Atlantic's second-biggest original drama launch of all time, with a 7-day cumulative audience of 2.23 million viewers for the opening episode.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of China. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese (). Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language (or are only partially intelligible). Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly one billion).


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Mandarin is by far the largest of the seven or ten Chinese dialect groups; it is spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast. This is generally attributed to the greater ease of travel and communication in the North China Plain compared to the more mountainous south, combined with the relatively recent spread of Mandarin to frontier areas. The second most spoken is Yue ("Cantonese" because it includes the Cantonese variety).


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Most Mandarin varieties have four tones. The final stops of Middle Chinese have disappeared in most of these varieties, but some have merged them as a final glottal stop. Many Mandarin varieties, including the Beijing dialect, retain retroflex initial consonants, which have been lost in southern varieties of Chinese.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The Chinese capital has been within the Mandarin-speaking area for most of the last millennium, making these dialects very influential. Some form of Mandarin has served as a lingua franca for government officials and the courts since the 14th century. By the early 20th century, a standard form based on the Beijing dialect, with elements from other Mandarin dialects, was adopted as the national language. Standard Mandarin Chinese is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, as well as one of the four official languages of Singapore. It is also used as one of the official languages of the United Nations. Recent increased migration from Mandarin-speaking regions of China and Taiwan has now resulted in the language being one of the more frequently used varieties of Chinese among Chinese diaspora communities. It is also the most commonly taught Chinese variety.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The English word "mandarin" (from Portuguese "mandarim", from Malay "menteri", from Sanskrit "mantrī", "mantrin", meaning 'minister or counsellor') originally meant an official of the Ming and Qing empires.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Since their native varieties were often mutually unintelligible, these officials communicated using a Koiné language based on various northern varieties. When Jesuit missionaries learned this standard language in the 16th century, they called it "Mandarin", from its Chinese name "Guānhuà" () or 'language of the officials'.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: In everyday English, "Mandarin" refers to Standard Chinese, which is often called simply "Chinese". Standard Mandarin Chinese is based on Beijing dialect, with some lexical and syntactic influence from other Mandarin dialects. It is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan (Republic of China, ROC), as well as one of the four official languages of Singapore, and a high-prestige minority language in Malaysia. It also functions as the language of instruction in Mainland China and Taiwan. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, under the name "Chinese". Chinese speakers refer to the modern standard language as


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Linguists use the term "Mandarin" to refer to the diverse group of dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China, which Chinese linguists call "Guānhuà". The alternative term "Běifānghuà" () or "Northern dialects", is used less and less among Chinese linguists. By extension, the term "Old Mandarin" or "Early Mandarin" is used by linguists to refer to the northern dialects recorded in materials from the Yuan dynasty.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Native speakers who are not academic linguists may not recognize that the variants they speak are classified in linguistics as members of "Mandarin" (or so-called "Northern dialects") in a broader sense. Within Chinese social or cultural discourse, there is not a common "Mandarin" identity based on language; rather, there are strong regional identities centred on individual dialects because of the wide geographical distribution and cultural diversity of their speakers. Speakers of forms of Mandarin other than the standard typically refer to the variety they speak by a geographic name—for example the Sichuan dialect and the Hebei dialect or Northeastern dialect, all being regarded as distinct from the standard language, with which they may not share much mutual intelligibility.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The hundreds of modern local varieties of Chinese developed from regional variants of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese. Traditionally, seven major groups of dialects have been recognized. Aside from Mandarin, the other six are Wu, Gan, and Xiang in central China and Min, Hakka, and Yue on the southeast coast. The "Language Atlas of China" (1987) distinguishes three further groups: Jin (split from Mandarin), Huizhou in the Huizhou region of Anhui and Zhejiang, and Pinghua in Guangxi and Yunnan.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: After the fall of the Northern Song (959–1126) and during the reign of the Jin (1115–1234) and Yuan (Mongol) dynasties in northern China, a common form of speech developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital, a language referred to as Old Mandarin. New genres of vernacular literature were based on this language, including verse, drama and story forms, such as the "qu" and "sanqu" poetry.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The rhyming conventions of the new verse were codified in a rime dictionary called the "Zhongyuan Yinyun" (1324). A radical departure from the rime table tradition that had evolved over the previous centuries, this dictionary contains a wealth of information on the phonology of Old Mandarin. Further sources are the 'Phags-pa script based on the Tibetan alphabet, which was used to write several of the languages of the Mongol empire, including Chinese and the "Menggu Ziyun", a rime dictionary based on 'Phags-pa. The rime books differ in some details, but overall show many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects, such as the reduction and disappearance of final plosives and the reorganization of the Middle Chinese tones.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: In Middle Chinese, initial stops and affricates showed a three-way contrast between tenuis, voiceless aspirated and voiced consonants. There were four tones, with the fourth or "entering tone", a checked tone comprising syllables ending in plosives ("-p", "-t" or "-k"). Syllables with voiced initials tended to be pronounced with a lower pitch and by the late Tang dynasty, each of the tones had split into two registers conditioned by the initials. When voicing was lost in all languages except the Wu subfamily, this distinction became phonemic and the system of initials and tones was rearranged differently in each of the major groups.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The "Zhongyuan Yinyun" shows the typical Mandarin four-tone system resulting from a split of the "even" tone and loss of the entering tone, with its syllables distributed across the other tones (though their different origin is marked in the dictionary). Similarly, voiced plosives and affricates have become voiceless aspirates in the "even" tone and voiceless non-aspirates in others, another distinctive Mandarin development. However, the language still retained a final "-m", which has merged with "-n" in modern dialects and initial voiced fricatives. It also retained the distinction between velars and alveolar sibilants in palatal environments, which later merged in most Mandarin dialects to yield a palatal series (rendered "j-", "q-" and "x-" in pinyin).


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The flourishing vernacular literature of the period also shows distinctively Mandarin vocabulary and syntax, though some, such as the third-person pronoun "tā" (他), can be traced back to the Tang dynasty.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Until the early 20th century, formal writing and even much poetry and fiction was done in Literary Chinese, which was modeled on the classics of the Warring States period and the Han dynasty. Over time, the various spoken varieties diverged greatly from Literary Chinese, which was learned and composed as a special language. Preserved from the sound changes that affected the various spoken varieties, its economy of expression was greatly valued. For example, ("yì", "wing") is unambiguous in written Chinese, but has over 75 homophones in Standard Chinese.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The literary language was less appropriate for recording materials that were meant to be reproduced in oral presentations, materials such as plays and grist for the professional story-teller's mill. From at least the Yuan dynasty plays that recounted the subversive tales of China's Robin Hoods to the Ming dynasty novels such as "Water Margin", on down to the Qing dynasty novel "Dream of the Red Chamber" and beyond, there developed a literature in written vernacular Chinese (白話/白话, "báihuà"). In many cases, this written language reflected Mandarin varieties and since pronunciation differences were not conveyed in this written form, this tradition had a unifying force across all the Mandarin-speaking regions and beyond.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Hu Shih, a pivotal figure of the first half of the twentieth century, wrote an influential and perceptive study of this literary tradition, entitled "Báihuà Wénxuéshǐ" ("A History of Vernacular Literature").


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people living in many parts of South China spoke only their local variety. As a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as "Guānhuà". Knowledge of this language was thus essential for an official career, but it was never formally defined.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Officials varied widely in their pronunciation; in 1728, the Yongzheng Emperor, unable to understand the accents of officials from Guangdong and Fujian, issued a decree requiring the governors of those provinces to provide for the teaching of proper pronunciation. Although the resulting Academies for Correct Pronunciation () were short-lived, the decree did spawn a number of textbooks that give some insight into the ideal pronunciation. Common features included:


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: As the last two of these features indicate, this language was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. This form remained prestigious long after the capital moved to Beijing in 1421, though the speech of the new capital emerged as a rival standard. As late as 1815, Robert Morrison based the first English–Chinese dictionary on this koiné as the standard of the time, though he conceded that the Beijing dialect was gaining in influence. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The variant of Mandarin as spoken by educated classes in Beijing was made the official language of China by the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s and the successive Republican government. In the early years of the Republic of China, intellectuals of the New Culture Movement, such as Hu Shih and Chen Duxiu, successfully campaigned for the replacement of Literary Chinese as the written standard by written vernacular Chinese, which was based on northern dialects. A parallel priority was the definition of a standard national language (). After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, the National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic, founded in 1949, retained this standard, calling it "pǔtōnghuà" (). Some 54% of speakers of Mandarin varieties could understand the standard language in the early 1950s, rising to 91% in 1984. Nationally, the proportion understanding the standard rose from 41% to 90% over the same period.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: This standard language is now used in education, the media, and formal occasions in both Mainland China and Taiwan, as well as among the Chinese community of Singapore. However in other parts of the Chinese-speaking world, namely Hong Kong and Macau, the standard form of Chinese used in education, the media, formal speech, and everyday life remains the local Cantonese because of their colonial and linguistic history. While Standard Mandarin is now the medium of instruction in schools throughout China, it still has yet to gain traction as a common language among the local population in areas where Mandarin dialects are not native. In these regions, people may be either diglossic or speak the standard language with a notable accent. However since the 21st century, there has been an effort of mass education in Standard Mandarin Chinese and discouragement of local language usage by the Chinese government in order to erase these regional differences.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: From an official point of view, the mainland Chinese and the Taiwanese governments maintain their own forms of the standard under different names. Technically, both "Pǔtōnghuà" and "Guóyǔ" base their phonology on the Beijing accent, though "Pǔtōnghuà" also takes some elements from other sources. Comparison of dictionaries produced in the two areas will show that there are few substantial differences. However, both versions of "school-standard" Chinese are often quite different from the Mandarin varieties that are spoken in accordance with regional habits, and neither is wholly identical to the Beijing dialect. "Pǔtōnghuà" and "Guóyǔ" also have some differences from the Beijing dialect in vocabulary, grammar, and pragmatics.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The written forms of Standard Chinese are also essentially equivalent, although simplified characters are used in mainland China and Singapore, while traditional characters remain in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. Overseas communities also tend to use traditional Chinese characters, although younger generations in Malaysia increasingly use simplified characters due to influence from Singapore and mainland China.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Most Han Chinese living in northern and southwestern China are native speakers of a dialect of Mandarin. The North China Plain provided few barriers to migration, leading to relative linguistic homogeneity over a wide area in northern China. In contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China have spawned the other six major groups of Chinese varieties, with great internal diversity, particularly in Fujian.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: However, the varieties of Mandarin cover a huge area containing nearly a billion people. As a result, there are pronounced regional variations in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, and many Mandarin varieties are not mutually intelligible.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Most of northeast China, except for Liaoning, did not receive significant settlements by Han Chinese until the 18th century, and as a result the Northeastern Mandarin dialects spoken there differ little from the Beijing dialect. The Manchu people of the area now speak these dialects exclusively; their native language is only maintained in northwestern Xinjiang, where Xibe, a modern dialect, is spoken.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The frontier areas of northwest China were colonized by speakers of Mandarin dialects at the same time, and the dialects in those areas similarly closely resemble their relatives in the core Mandarin area. The Southwest was settled early, but the population fell dramatically for obscure reasons in the 13th century, and did not recover until the 17th century. The dialects in this area are now relatively uniform. However, long-established cities even very close to Beijing, such as Tianjin, Baoding, Shenyang, and Dalian, have markedly different dialects.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: While Standard Mandarin was adopted as China's official language in the early 1900s, local languages continued to be dominant in their respective regions until the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949 and its promotion of this standard variant. Starting in the Cultural Revolution and intensifying afterwards, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has adopted a language policy that pushes for the usage of Standard Mandarin at the expense of other Chinese varieties, including the prohibition of their use in most public settings. As a result, Mandarin is now widespread throughout the country, including in regions where the language is not native.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: This language policy has proven to be largely successful, with over 80% of the Chinese population being able to speak Standard Mandarin as of 2020. Nevertheless, despite active discouragement by the CCP, local Chinese and other ethnic languages continue to be the primary medium of communication in daily life in a handful of regions, most notably Guangdong (where Cantonese predominates) and Tibet. Elsewhere in China, Standard Mandarin has heavily influenced local languages through diglossia or in some cases, replaced them entirely (especially among younger generations in urban areas). The Chinese government's current goal is to have 85% of China speak Standard Mandarin by 2025 and for virtually the entire country to speak the language by 2035.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Unlike their compatriots on the southeast coast, few Mandarin speakers engaged in overseas emigration until the late 20th century, but there are now significant communities of them in cities across the world.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Standard Mandarin is the official language of Taiwan. The Taiwanese standard of Mandarin differs very little from that of mainland China, with differences largely in some technical vocabulary developed from the 1950s onwards.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Mandarin started to become widely spoken in Taiwan following the Kuomintang's relocation and influx of refugees from the mainland at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. At the time Taiwanese Hokkien, and to a lesser extent Hakka, were the Chinese languages used among the local Han Chinese population, while the Formosan languages were natively spoken by many Aboriginal populations. These languages were heavily discouraged from use throughout the martial law period from 1949 to 1987, resulting in Mandarin replacing Taiwanese as the lingua franca. Starting in the 2000s, the Taiwanese government has made efforts to recognize these local languages and they are now present in public spheres such as media and education, although Mandarin remains the common language.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: While the spoken standard of Taiwanese Mandarin is nearly identical to that of mainland China, the colloquial form has been heavily influenced by other local languages, especially Taiwanese. Notable differences include: the merger of retroflex sounds (zh, ch, sh, r) with the alveolar series (z, c, s), frequent mergers of the "neutral tone" with a word's original tone, and absence of erhua. Code-switching between Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkien is common, as the majority of the population continues to also speak the latter as a native language.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Mandarin is one of the four official languages of Singapore along with English, Malay, and Tamil. Historically, it was seldom used by the Chinese Singaporean community, which primarily spoke the Southern Chinese languages of Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, or Hakka. The launch of the Speak Mandarin Campaign in 1979 by the government prioritized the language over traditional vernaculars in an attempt to create a common ethnic language and foster closer connections to China. This has led to a significant increase and presence of Mandarin usage in the country, coupled with a strong decline in usage of other Chinese variants.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Standard Singaporean Mandarin is nearly identical to the standards of China and Taiwan, with minor vocabulary differences. It is the Mandarin variant used in education, media, and official settings. Meanwhile, a colloquial form called Singdarin is used in informal daily life and is heavily influenced in terms of both grammar and vocabulary by local languages such as Cantonese, Hokkien, and Malay. Instances of code-switching with English, Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay, or a combination of any of these is also common.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: In Malaysia, Mandarin has been adopted by local Chinese-language schools as the medium of instruction with the standard based on that of Singapore. However, it is not as widespread in daily life among the Malaysian Chinese community, as Hokkien speakers continue to form a plurality among the ethnic Chinese population and Cantonese serves as the common language (especially in commerce and local media). An exception is in the state of Johor, where Mandarin is increasingly used alongside Cantonese as a lingua franca in part due to Singaporean influence. As in Singapore, the local colloquial variant of Mandarin exhibits influences from Cantonese and Malay.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: In northern Myanmar, a Southwestern Mandarin variant close to the Yunnanese dialect is spoken by local Chinese and other ethnic groups. In some rebel group-controlled regions, Mandarin also serves as the lingua franca.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The classification of Chinese dialects evolved during the 20th century, and many points remain unsettled. Early classifications tended to follow provincial boundaries or major geographical features.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: In 1936, Wang Li produced the first classification based on phonetic criteria, principally the evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials. His Mandarin group included dialects of northern and southwestern China, as well as those of Hunan and northern Jiangxi.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Li Fang-Kuei's classification of 1937 distinguished the latter two groups as Xiang and Gan, while splitting the remaining Mandarin dialects between Northern, Lower Yangtze and Southwestern Mandarin groups.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The widely accepted seven-group classification of Yuan Jiahua in 1960 kept Xiang and Gan separate, with Mandarin divided into Northern, Northwestern, Southwestern and Jiang–Huai (Lower Yangtze) subgroups.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Of Yuan's four Mandarin subgroups, the Northwestern dialects are the most diverse, particularly in the province of Shanxi. The linguist Li Rong proposed that the northwestern dialects of Shanxi and neighbouring areas that retain a final glottal stop in the Middle Chinese entering tone (plosive-final) category should constitute a separate top-level group called Jin. He used this classification in the "Language Atlas of China" (1987). Many other linguists continue to include these dialects in the Mandarin group, pointing out that the Lower Yangtze dialects also retain the glottal stop.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The southern boundary of the Mandarin area, with the central Wu, Gan and Xiang groups, is weakly defined due to centuries of diffusion of northern features. Many border varieties have a mixture of features that make them difficult to classify.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The boundary between Southwestern Mandarin and Xiang is particularly weak, and in many early classifications the two were not separated. Zhou Zhenhe and You Rujie include the New Xiang dialects within Southwestern Mandarin, treating only the more conservative Old Xiang dialects as a separate group.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The Huizhou dialects have features of both Mandarin and Wu, and have been assigned to one or other of these groups or treated as separate by various authors. Li Rong and the "Language Atlas of China" treated it as a separate top-level group, but this remains controversial.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The "Language Atlas of China" calls the remainder of Mandarin a "supergroup", divided into eight dialect groups distinguished by their treatment of the Middle Chinese entering tone (see Tones below):


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The "Atlas" also includes several unclassified Mandarin dialects spoken in scattered pockets across southeastern China, such as Nanping in Fujian and Dongfang on Hainan.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Another Mandarin variety of uncertain classification is apparently Gyami, recorded in the 19th century in the Tibetan foothills, who the Chinese apparently did not recognize as Chinese.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: A syllable consists maximally of an initial consonant, a medial glide, a vowel, a coda, and tone. In the traditional analysis, the medial, vowel and coda are combined as a "final".


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Not all combinations occur. For example, Standard Chinese (based on the Beijing dialect) has about 1,200 distinct syllables.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The maximal inventory of initials of a Mandarin dialect is as follows, with bracketed pinyin spellings given for those present in the standard language:


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Most Mandarin dialects have three medial glides, , and (spelled "i", "u" and "ü" in pinyin), though their incidence varies.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Southwestern Mandarin also has in some words where the standard has "jie qie xie" . This is a stereotypical feature of southwestern Mandarin, since it is so easily noticeable. E.g. "hai" "shoe" for standard "xie", "gai" "street" for standard "jie".


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Mandarin dialects typically have relatively few vowels. Syllabic fricatives, as in standard "zi" and "zhi", are common in Mandarin dialects, though they also occur elsewhere.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The Middle Chinese off-glides and are generally preserved in Mandarin dialects, yielding several diphthongs and triphthongs in contrast to the larger sets of monophthongs common in other dialect groups (and some widely scattered Mandarin dialects).


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The Middle Chinese coda was still present in Old Mandarin, but has merged with in the modern dialects. In some areas (especially the southwest) final has also merged with . This is especially prevalent in the rhyme pairs "-en/-eng" and "-in/-ing" . As a result, "jīn" "gold" and "jīng" "capital" merge in those dialects.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The Middle Chinese final stops have undergone a variety of developments in different Mandarin dialects (see Tones below). In Lower Yangtze dialects and some north-western dialects they have merged as a final glottal stop. In other dialects they have been lost, with varying effects on the vowel. As a result, Beijing Mandarin and Northeastern Mandarin underwent more vowel mergers than many other varieties of Mandarin. For example:


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: R-coloring, a characteristic feature of Mandarin, works quite differently in the southwest. Whereas Beijing dialect generally removes only a final or when adding the rhotic final "-r" , in the southwest the "-r" replaces nearly the entire rhyme.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: In general, no two Mandarin-speaking areas have exactly the same set of tone values, but most Mandarin-speaking areas have very similar tone "distribution". For example, the dialects of Jinan, Chengdu, Xi'an and so on all have four tones that correspond quite well to the Beijing dialect tones of (55), (35), (214), and (51). The exception to this rule lies in the distribution of syllables formerly ending in a stop consonant, which are treated differently in different dialects of Mandarin.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Middle Chinese stops and affricates had a three-way distinction between tenuis, voiceless aspirate and voiced (or breathy voiced) consonants.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: In Mandarin dialects the voicing is generally lost, yielding voiceless aspirates in syllables with a Middle Chinese level tone and non-aspirates in other syllables.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Of the four tones of Middle Chinese, the level, rising and departing tones have also developed into four modern tones in a uniform way across Mandarin dialects; the Middle Chinese level tone has split into two registers, conditioned on voicing of the Middle Chinese initial, while rising tone syllables with voiced obstruent initials have shifted to the departing tone.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The following examples from the standard language illustrate the regular development common to Mandarin dialects (recall that pinyin "d" denotes a non-aspirate , while "t" denotes an aspirate ):


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: In traditional Chinese phonology, syllables that ended in a stop in Middle Chinese (i.e. /p/, /t/ or /k/) were considered to belong to a special category known as the "entering tone".


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: These final stops have disappeared in most Mandarin dialects, with the syllables distributed over the other four modern tones in different ways in the various Mandarin subgroups.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: In the Beijing dialect that underlies the standard language, syllables beginning with original voiceless consonants were redistributed across the four tones in a completely random pattern. For example, the three characters , all "tsjek" in Middle Chinese (William H. Baxter's transcription), are now pronounced "jī", "jǐ" and "jì" respectively. Older dictionaries such as "Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary" mark characters whose pronunciation formerly ended with a stop with a superscript 5; however, this tone number is more commonly used for syllables that always have a neutral tone (see below).


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: In Lower Yangtze dialects, a minority of Southwestern dialects (e.g. Minjiang) and Jin Chinese (sometimes considered non-Mandarin), former final stops were not deleted entirely, but were reduced to a glottal stop . (This includes the dialect of Nanjing on which the Postal Romanization was based; it transcribes the glottal stop as a trailing "h".) This development is shared with Wu Chinese and is thought to represent the pronunciation of Old Mandarin. In line with traditional Chinese phonology, dialects such as Lower Yangtze and Minjiang are thus said to have five tones instead of four. However, modern linguistics considers these syllables as having no phonemic tone at all.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Although the system of tones is common across Mandarin dialects, their realization as tone contours varies widely:


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: <nowiki>*</nowiki> Dialects in and around the Nantong area typically have many more than 4 tones, due to influence from the neighbouring Wu dialects.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Mandarin dialects frequently employ neutral tones in the second syllables of words, creating syllables whose tone contour is so short and light that it is difficult or impossible to discriminate. These atonal syllables also occur in non-Mandarin dialects, but in many southern dialects the tones of all syllables are made clear.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: There are more polysyllabic words in Mandarin than in all other major varieties of Chinese except Shanghainese. This is partly because Mandarin has undergone many more sound changes than have southern varieties of Chinese, and has needed to deal with many more homophones. New words have been formed by adding affixes such as "lao-" (), "-zi" (), "-(e)r" (/), and "-tou" (/), or by compounding, e.g. by combining two words of similar meaning as in "cōngmáng" (), made from elements meaning "hurried" and "busy".


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: A distinctive feature of southwestern Mandarin is its frequent use of noun reduplication, which is hardly used in Beijing. In Sichuan, one hears "bāobāo" () "handbag" where Beijing uses "bāor" ().


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: There are also a small number of words that have been polysyllabic since Old Chinese, such as () "butterfly".


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The singular pronouns in Mandarin are () "I", ( or ) "you", () "you (formal)", and (, or /) "he/she/it", with - (/) added for the plural. Further, there is a distinction between the plural first-person pronoun (/), which is inclusive of the listener, and (/), which may be exclusive of the listener. Dialects of Mandarin agree with each other quite consistently on these pronouns. While the first and second person singular pronouns are cognate with forms in other varieties of Chinese, the rest of the pronominal system is a Mandarin innovation (e.g., Shanghainese has "non" / "you" and "yi" "he/she").


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Because of contact with Mongolian and Manchurian peoples, Mandarin (especially the Northeastern varieties) has some loanwords from these languages not present in other varieties of Chinese, such as () "alley". Southern Chinese varieties have borrowed from Tai, Austroasiatic, and Austronesian languages.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: There are also many Chinese words which come from foreign languages such as () from "golf"; () from "bikini"; () from "hamburger".


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: In general, the greatest variation occurs in slang, in kinship terms, in names for common crops and domesticated animals, for common verbs and adjectives, and other such everyday terms. The least variation occurs in "formal" vocabulary—terms dealing with science, law, or government.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Chinese varieties of all periods are considered prime examples of analytic languages, relying on word order and particles instead of inflection or affixes to provide grammatical information such as person, number, tense, mood, or case.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Although modern varieties, including the Mandarin dialects, use a small number of particles in a similar fashion to suffixes, they are still strongly analytic.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: The basic word order of subject–verb–object is common across Chinese dialects, but there are variations in the order of the two objects of ditransitive sentences.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: In northern dialects the indirect object precedes the direct object (as in English), for example in the Standard Chinese sentence:


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: In southern dialects, as well as many southwestern and Lower Yangtze dialects, the objects occur in the reverse order.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Most Mandarin dialects use the particle "-le" (了) to indicate the perfective aspect and "-zhe" (着/著) for the progressive aspect.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Other Chinese varieties tend to use different particles, e.g. Cantonese "zo" 咗 and "gan" 紧/緊 respectively.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Some southern dialects, and a few Lower Yangtze dialects, preserve an older pattern of subordination without a marking particle, while in others a classifier fulfils the role of the Mandarin particle.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Especially in conversational Chinese, sentence-final particles alter the inherent meaning of a sentence. Like much vocabulary, particles can vary a great deal with regards to the locale. For example, the particle "ma" (嘛), which is used in most northern dialects to denote obviousness or contention, is replaced by "yo" (哟) in southern usage.


title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Some characters in Mandarin can be combined with others to indicate a particular meaning just like prefix and suffix in English. For example, the suffix -er which means the person who is doing the action, e.g. teacher, person who teaches. In Mandarin the character 師 has the same function, it is combined with 教, which means teach, to form the word teacher.


title: Celebrity sex tape

text: A celebrity sex tape is typically an amateur pornographic video recording involving one or more famous people which has, intentionally or unintentionally, been made available publicly. Such videos have often been released without the consent of their subjects and have damaged (or enhanced) celebrities' careers. In 1988, for example, a sex tape caused significant damage to Rob Lowe's career.


title: Celebrity sex tape

text: The surfacing of sex tapes has become so common that some are "leaked" as a marketing tool to advance or establish a media career. A celebrity can fight the release in court to maintain deniability while still enjoying the career benefits. Alternatively, a celebrity may take the route of openly releasing the tape and benefitting directly from royalties as well as indirectly from the publicity. The current public acceptance of celebrities with sex tapes is speculated by Joe Levy, executive editor of "Rolling Stone", to be due to the easy availability of pornography, as well as couples more commonly making their own tapes due to the prevalence of video cameras.


title: Celebrity sex tape

text: The following is an alphabetical list by surname of individuals known to have their sexual acts recorded and distributed:


title: Treasure Island

text: Treasure Island (originally titled The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys) is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, telling a story of "buccaneers and buried gold". It is considered a coming-of-age story and is noted for its atmosphere, characters, and action.


title: Treasure Island

text: The novel was originally serialised from 1881 to 1882 in the children's magazine "Young Folks", under the title Treasure Island or the Mutiny of the Hispaniola, credited to the pseudonym "Captain George North". It was first published as a book on 14 November 1883 by Cassell & Co. It has since become one of the most often dramatized and adapted of all novels, in numerous media.


title: Treasure Island

text: Since its publication, "Treasure Island" has had significant influence on depictions of pirates in popular culture, including elements such as deserted tropical islands, treasure maps marked with an "X", and one-legged seamen with parrots perched on their shoulders.


title: Treasure Island

text: The plot is set in the mid-18th century, when an old sailor who identifies himself as "The Captain" starts to lodge at the rural Admiral Benbow Inn on England's Bristol Channel. He tells the innkeeper's son, Jim Hawkins, to keep a lookout for "a one-legged seafaring man". A former shipmate named Black Dog confronts The Captain about a chart. They get into a violent fight, causing Black Dog to flee. The Captain, proper name Billy Bones, suffers a stroke. That night, Jim's father dies suddenly. A few days later, a blind beggar named Pew visits the inn, delivering a summons to Bones called "the black spot". Shortly thereafter, Bones suffers another stroke and dies. Pew and his accomplices attack the inn, but are routed by excise officers, and Pew is trampled to death. Jim and his mother escape with a mysterious packet from Bones' sea chest, which is found to contain a map of the island on which the infamous pirate Captain Flint hid his treasure. Jim shows the map to the local physician Dr. Livesey and the squire John Trelawney, and they decide to make an expedition to the island, with Jim serving as a cabin boy.


title: Treasure Island

text: They set sail on Trelawney's schooner, the "Hispaniola", under Captain Smollett and Jim forms a strong bond with the ship's one-legged cook, Long John Silver. The crew suffers tragedy when first mate Mr. Arrow, a drunkard, is washed overboard during a storm. While hidden in an apple-barrel, Jim overhears a conversation among the Hispaniola's crew which reveals that many of them are pirates who had served on Captain Flint's ship, the "Walrus", with Silver leading them. They plan to mutiny after the salvage of the treasure, and to murder the captain and the few remaining loyal crew.


title: Treasure Island

text: Arriving at the island, Jim joins the shore party and they begin to explore. He meets a marooned pirate named Ben Gunn, who is also a former member of Flint's crew. The mutineers arm themselves and take the ship while Smollett's loyal men take refuge in an abandoned stockade on the island. After a brief truce, the mutineers attack them, with casualties on both sides of the battle. Jim makes his way to the "Hispaniola" and cuts the ship from its anchor, drifting it along the ebb tide. He boards the ship and encounters the pirate Israel Hands, who had been injured in a drunken dispute with one of his companions. Hands helps Jim beach the schooner in the northern bay, then attempts to kill Jim with a knife, but Jim shoots him dead with two pistols.


title: Treasure Island

text: Jim goes ashore and returns to the stockade, where he is horrified to find only Silver and the pirates. Silver tells Jim that when everyone found the ship was gone, Captain Flint's party had agreed to a truce whereby they take the map and allow the besieged party to leave. In the morning, Livesey arrives to treat the wounded and sick pirates and tells Silver to look out for trouble once he's found the site of the treasure. After a dispute over leadership, Silver and the others set out with the map, taking Jim along as a hostage. They find a skeleton with its arms oriented toward the treasure, unnerving the party. Scaring the crew, Ben Gunn shouts Captain Flint's last words from the forest, making the pirates believe that Flint's ghost is haunting the island. They eventually find the treasure cache, but it is empty. The pirates prepare to kill Silver and Jim, but they are ambushed by the officers along with Gunn. Livesey explains that Gunn had already found the treasure and taken it to his cave long ago. The expedition members load a portion of the treasure onto the "Hispaniola" and depart the island, with Silver as a prisoner. At their first port, in Spanish America, Silver steals a bag of money and escapes. The rest of them sail back to Bristol and divide up the treasure. Still, Jim says that there is more left on the island, but he will not undertake another voyage to claim it.


title: Treasure Island

text: Stevenson conceived the idea for the novel based on a map of an imaginary, romantic island which he drew with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, during a holiday in Braemar, Scotland in the summer of 1881. He had clearly started work by 25 August, writing to a friend, "If this don't fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my day. Will you be surprised to learn that it is about Buccaneers, that it begins in the Admiral Benbow public house on the Devon coast, that it's all about a map and a treasure and a mutiny and a derelict ship... It's quite silly and horrid fun – and what I want is the "best" book about Buccaneers that can be had".


title: Treasure Island

text: Stevenson originally gave the book the title "The Sea Cook". One month after conceiving of the book, chapters began to appear in the pages of the "Young Folks" magazine. After completing fifteen or nineteen chapters rapidly, Stevenson was interrupted by illness; he left Scotland and continued working on the first draft near London, where he and his father discussed points of the tale, and his father suggested elements that he included. The novel eventually ran in seventeen weekly instalments from October 1, 1881, to January 28, 1882. The book was later republished as the novel "Treasure Island" and proved to be Stevenson's first financial and critical success. The Liberal politician William Ewart Gladstone, who served four terms as British Prime Minister between 1868 and 1894, was one of the book's biggest fans.


title: Treasure Island

text: Two general types of sea novels were popular during the 19th century: the navy yarn, which places a capable officer in adventurous situations amid realistic settings and historical events, and the desert island romance, which features shipwrecked or marooned characters confronted by treasure-seeking pirates or angry natives. Around 1815, the latter genre became one of the most popular fictional styles in Great Britain, perhaps because of the philosophical interest in Rousseau and Chateaubriand's "noble savage". "Treasure Island" was a climax of this development. The growth of the desert island genre can be traced back to 1719 when Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" was published. A century later, novels such as S. H. Burney's "The Shipwreck" (1816), and Sir Walter Scott's "The Pirate" (1822) continued to expand upon Defoe's classic. Other authors, in the mid-19th century, continued this trend, with works including James Fenimore Cooper's "" (1823). During the same period, Edgar Allan Poe wrote "MS Found in a Bottle" (1833) and "The Gold-Bug" (1843). All of these works influenced Stevenson's end product.


title: Treasure Island

text: Stevenson also consciously borrowed material from previous authors. In a July 1884 letter to Sidney Colvin, he wrote that ""Treasure Island" came out of Kingsley's "At Last", where I got the Dead Man's Chest—and that was the seed—and out of the great Captain Johnson's "History of the Notorious Pirates"". Stevenson also admits that he took the idea of Captain Flint's pointing skeleton from Poe's "The Gold-Bug" and he constructed Billy Bones' history from the "Money-Diggers" section ("Golden Dreams" in particular) of "Tales of a Traveller" by Washington Irving, one of his favorite writers.


title: Treasure Island

text: Half of Stevenson's manuscripts are lost, including those of "Treasure Island", "The Black Arrow", and "The Master of Ballantrae". Stevenson's heirs sold his papers during World War I; many of his documents were auctioned off in 1918.


title: Treasure Island

text: Among other minor characters whose names are not revealed are the four pirates who were killed in an attack on the stockade along with Job Anderson; the pirate killed by the honest men minus Jim Hawkins before the attack on the stockade; the pirate killed by Ben the night before the attack on the stockade; the pirate shot by Squire Trelawney when aiming at Israel Hands, who later died of his injuries; and the pirate marooned on the island along with Tom Morgan and Dick.


title: Treasure Island

text: Historian Luis Junco suggests that "Treasure Island" is a combination of the story of the murder of Captain George Glas on board the "Earl of Sandwich" in 1765 and the taking of the ship "Walrus" off the island of La Graciosa near Tenerife. The pirates of La Graciosa buried their treasure there, and were subsequently all killed in a bloody battle with the British navy; the treasure was never recovered.


title: Treasure Island

text: In his book "Pirates of the Carraigin", David Kelly deals with the piracy and murder of Captain Glas and others on board a ship travelling from Tenerife to London by the Ship's Cook and his gang. The perpetrators of this crime also buried the considerable treasure they had stolen but most of it was later recovered. They were all executed in Dublin in 1766. In his research, Kelly showed that Stevenson was a neighbour of the named victim in Edinburgh, and so was aware from an early age of these events, which had been a scandal at the time. Stevenson and his family were members of a church congregation set up by the victim's father. Although he never visited Ireland, Stevenson based at least two other books, "Kidnapped" and "Catriona" on real crimes that were perpetrated in Dublin; these crimes were all reported in detail in "The Gentleman's Magazine", published in Dublin and Edinburgh.


title: Treasure Island

text: In August 2022 the British Member of Parliament for Birkenhead, Mick Whitley, supported the findings of local historian John Lamb, that Robert Louis Stevenson had set his classic novel "Treasure Island" in the towns of Birkenhead and Wallasey on the Wirral Peninsula lying opposite Liverpool. This followed a previous announcement by Alan Evans of Wirral Borough Council that the French science fiction writer Jules Verne had also set his 1874 novel "The Mysterious Island" in Birkenhead. Their Letters of support for Mr Lamb's claims were posted on the "Jules Verne and the Heroes of Birkenhead" website in August 2022.


title: Treasure Island

text: Stevenson's "Treasure Island" spawned an enormous amount of literature based one way or another upon his original novel:


title: Treasure Island

text: There have been over 24 major stage adaptations made, though the number of minor adaptations remains countless. The story is also a popular plot and setting for a traditional pantomime wherein Mrs. Hawkins, Jim's mother is the dame.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: Dream (real name Clay; born August 12, 1999) is an American YouTuber and Twitch streamer who is known primarily for creating "Minecraft" content.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: Dream has been active online since 2014, but did not gain substantial popularity until 2019 and 2020. He is well known for his YouTube series "Minecraft Manhunt" and was also well known for his "Minecraft" speedruns, in which he was accused of cheating in late 2020. Dream later admitted to using game modifications, but maintained that he used them unintentionally during his single-player speedruns, intending for them to only apply during his multiplayer "challenge videos". Content created in the Dream SMP, Dream's invite-only survival multiplayer (SMP) "Minecraft" server that stars content creators engaged in roleplay, has also attracted considerable attention and a popular fandom.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: , his seven YouTube channels have collectively reached over million subscribers and over billion views, and his two Twitch channels have collectively gained million followers and million views. YouTube awarded Dream the Streamy Award for Gaming in both 2020 and 2021.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: Dream revealed his face for the first time on October 2, 2022, after six years of staying hidden in his videos.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: Dream created his YouTube account on February 8, 2014, and started to upload content regularly in July 2019. The oldest video on Dream's account that is still accessible involves him playing the game "Minecraft" poorly on purpose in order to "trigger" viewers. As of December 2022, the video has amassed 18 million views.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: In July 2019, Dream figured out the seed of a "Minecraft" world YouTuber PewDiePie was playing on by using reverse engineering techniques that Dream learned from online forums. In November 2019, Dream uploaded a viral video titled "Minecraft, But Item Drops Are Random And Multiplied…" that has amassed 49 million views as of January 2021. In January 2020, Dream uploaded a video in which he and another YouTuber, GeorgeNotFound, connected an Arduino board to an electric dog collar, which emitted an electric shock whenever a player lost health in "Minecraft".


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: In December 2020, in place of their annual "YouTube Rewind" series, YouTube released a list of their top-trending videos and creators. On the U.S. list, YouTube ranked Dream's "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters GRAND FINALE" video as the number seven "Top Trending Video", and ranked Dream as the number two "Top Creator" and number one "Breakout Creator". A livestream by Dream on YouTube in November 2020 with about 700,000 peak viewers was the 6th highest viewed gaming stream of all time as of January 2021. A December 2020 "Polygon" article stated that "2020 has been a tremendous year for Dream", describing him as "YouTube's biggest gaming channel of the moment".


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: In a January 2021 article, Steven Asarch of "Business Insider" attributed Dream's growth during 2019 and 2020 "to his understanding of the YouTube algorithm", noting that "[h]e puts his keywords in the right places, capitalizes on trends, and makes thumbnails that fans want to click on."


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: Dream is a member of the "Dream Team", along with fellow YouTubers Sapnap and GeorgeNotFound. The group frequently collaborate to create new content. Dream also had a friendly rivalry with fellow "Minecraft" YouTuber Technoblade before his death, as they each had a contested recognition for the title of "best "Minecraft" player".


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: Dream's most well-known and most-watched series is "Minecraft Manhunt". In Minecraft Manhunt, one player—usually Dream—attempts to finish the game as fast as possible without dying, while another player or team of players (the "Hunters") attempts to stop this player from beating the game by killing them. The hunters each possess a compass pointed towards the player's location and are allowed to respawn whenever they die. The hunters win the game if the player dies before beating the Ender Dragon.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: On December 26, 2019, Dream uploaded the first video in this series, titled "Beating Minecraft But My Friend Tries to Stop Me". Dream subsequently repeated this style of video on many occasions, increasing the number of Hunters over time. On February 26, 2022, Dream uploaded the final Minecraft Manhunt"," but he hinted at bringing back the series in the future. Dream also said that he and the hunters would do a real-life Minecraft Manhunt if the final video gets 2 million likes.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: Many of the Minecraft Manhunt videos have received tens of millions of views, with one of them ranking sixth in YouTube's Top Trending Videos of 2020. As of February 2022, the most-viewed in Dream's Minecraft Manhunt series has 108 million views.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: The series has received many positive reviews. Urian B. wrote in "Tech Times" that Minecraft Manhunt "requires not only mastery of the terrain but also the ability to think fast on your feet while different choices present themselves with only milliseconds of time for decision making. This is something that Dream is good at, split second decision making." Nicolas Perez from "Paste" described Minecraft Manhunt as "an experience that leaves me slack-jawed every time", stating that the format of Minecraft Manhunt "seems to guarantee the hunters come out on top. But more often than not, Dream pulls just enough aces out of his sleeve to narrowly beat the hunters, and eventually the game." Gonzalo Cardona, writing for Ginx TV, noted that Minecraft Manhunt had "inspired cult-like montages by fans". Nathan Grayson, writing for "Kotaku", said that Minecraft Manhunt had turned Dream "into a household name among "Minecraft" fans".


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: In April 2020, shortly after the release of Minecraft snapshot 20w17a, Dream and George created the Dream SMP, a private Survival Multiplayer (SMP) "Minecraft" server. Over time, other prominent Minecraft content creators outside of the "Dream Team" have been invited to the server, including TommyInnit, Technoblade, and Wilbur Soot.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: The Dream SMP has become very well-known. Its main draw, according to fans, is the roleplay, with major events being loosely scripted in advance and most other elements being improvisation, performed live on YouTube and Twitch. Cecilia D'Anastasio of "Wired" described the Dream SMP as a form of live theatre and as a "Machiavellian political drama". During January 2021, over 1 million people tuned into Dream SMP livestreams.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: Throughout 2020, Dream was a prominent participant in "Minecraft Championship", a monthly "Minecraft" competition organized by Noxcrew. He won first in both the 8th and 11th Minecraft Championships. In September 2020, during the 10th Minecraft Championship, he played for charity and raised around $3,400.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: On February 4, 2021, Dream released his first song, entitled "Roadtrip", in collaboration with PmBata, which garnered over 25 million views on YouTube. On May 20, 2021, Dream released his second song, entitled "Mask", which garnered over 24.7 million views on YouTube. An animated music video for "Mask" was released in June of the same year, though it was later deleted. The song and music video received criticism about the lyrics and animation, as well as the negative depiction of prescription drugs, labelled as "normal pills". On August 19, 2021, Dream released his third song, entitled "Change My Clothes", in collaboration with American singer-songwriter Alec Benjamin, which garnered over 8.3 million views on YouTube.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: On April 26, 2021, as a collaboration with Dream, fellow YouTuber MrBeast's fast-food restaurant chain MrBeast Burger released the Dream Burger as a limited-time addition to its menu.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: Dream is purported to be one of the most liked and disliked YouTubers on the platform, with a 2021 SurveyMonkey poll showing that 59.7% of respondents have a favorable view of him and 22.1% who have an unfavorable view. Dream and other members of the Dream SMP have inspired a popular fandom.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: On January 1, 2021, Dream was doxed. On January 7, Dream addressed the doxing and denied accusations made against him by his ex-girlfriend.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: On March 25, 2021, a clip resurfaced online from a now private video showing a "Minecraft" account with the username "Dream" saying the word "nigger". The clip garnered attention on Twitter and Reddit. Dream posted on Twitter in response, claiming that the person in the video is not him.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: In June 2021, Dream was criticized for announcing that all revenue generated by his streams in June would go to charity, with critics claiming he did not stream for more than a single day that month. Dream had streamed multiple times on different platforms during the month of June, including at least four streams on Discord, where he encouraged fans to subscribe and donate to his Twitch channel. On June 30, 2021, Dream announced that he had donated US$140,000 (US$90,000 from fan contributions and US$50,000 from the Dream Team) to The Trevor Project, an LGBT youth charity.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: In response to fellow YouTuber Technoblade's cancer diagnosis, Dream donated US$21,409 to cancer research in late August 2021.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: In October 2022, several grooming allegations against Dream were made, claiming that he had acted sexually towards a person when they were 17 years old and attempted to invite them over to his house. This resulted in the hashtag #dreamisafreak to trend. Dream has denied these allegations.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: During his career, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reached out to him about a "threat" against his life.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: In early October 2020, Dream livestreamed himself speedrunning "Minecraft", and submitted one of his times to speedrun.com. He was awarded with 5th place at the time in the "1.16+ random seed glitchless" category. Accusations of Dream cheating in these speedruns first arose on October 16, when another "Minecraft" speedrunner, in now-deleted Twitter posts, reported seeing higher drop rates for key items in one of the speedrunning attempts that Dream submitted. Dream responded on October 29 in now-deleted Twitter posts, arguing that he had no reason to cheat, that he did not possess the coding knowledge to raise drop rates, and that the data was cherry picked.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: On December 11, 2020, following a two-month investigation, speedrun.com's "Minecraft" verification team removed his submission from the leaderboards. The team published a report, along with a 14-minute video to YouTube, analyzing six archived livestreams of speedrunning sessions by Dream from around the time of the record. The team concluded that the game had been modified to make the chance of obtaining certain items needed to complete the game higher than normal; they argued the odds of obtaining the items in a legitimate way were 1 in 7.5 trillion. In response, Dream called the investigation clickbait and claimed that it was flawed enough that some members of speedrun.com's moderation team threatened to quit over it. Speedrun.com moderator Geosquare denied the accusation, saying: "All moderators voted unanimously in our decision and no one is threatening to leave in protest", and "From everything we know that [claim] is unsubstantiated or complete hyperbole."


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: In a YouTube video, Dream maintained that the accusations of his cheating were untrue. In response to the report by speedrun.com, Dream commissioned a report by an anonymous statistician, who Dream claimed was an astrophysicist, that argued the actual odds of Dream obtaining the items legitimately were 1 in 10 million. "Dot Esports" said that the report did not exonerate him, and "at most" suggested it was not impossible that he was lucky. The moderation team stood by their ruling and issued a rebuttal to Dream's report. In a Twitter post, Dream indicated that he would accept their decision without admitting fault. On February 4, 2021, Matt Parker, a YouTube personality and recreational mathematician, published a video on the controversy supporting the conclusions of the moderators.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: On May 30, 2021, in a written statement, Dream stated that he had in fact been using a "disallowed modification" that altered item drop probabilities, although he maintained that the addition of the modification was unintentional. According to him, this discrepancy was a result of an unknown change to a client mod written for his YouTube channel. In his statement, he said that the item modifications were changed by the developer of the mod, and said that he was unaware of the addition until February 2021. After becoming aware of the addition, he deleted his video response to the speedrun.com moderators. Dream explained that he did not mention his discovery of the addition publicly back then because he "felt like the community had been through enough drama and that it was pointless". He also "didn't want to be the center of controversy for the hundredth time" and that he figured "it would be a story I would tell in a few years when no one really cared."


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: In a 2021 interview with YouTuber Anthony Padilla, Dream said that he regretted his initial reaction to the cheating scandal, saying that "I handled the situation horribly. When it originally came out, my response was, "You guys are idiots, blah blah blah"." When asked by Padilla how he thought he should have handled the scandal, Dream said that "I should have shut off all my devices for a couple days and been like, "OK, let me not react with emotion"."


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: Having not revealed his face until 2022, Dream's real-life identity and many aspects of his personal life are unknown. An American, he was born with the first name "Clay" on August 12, 1999, and resides in Orlando, Florida, as of 2021. Dream has spoken publicly about his diagnosis with ADHD. His anonymous avatar was inspired by a picture his former girlfriend posted on Discord.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: On September 19, 2022, Dream stated that the next YouTube video he would upload would be him revealing his face to the public for the first time. He revealed his face in said YouTube video, titled "hi, I'm Dream.", thirteen days later, on October 2, 2022. Dream decided to do a face reveal because he wanted to meet up with friends, explore making new types of content, and do more work outside of his home. He also said that he would post "more IRL content", but does not "plan on adding a face cam" to his "Minecraft" videos. Dream's face reveal prompted both positive and negative comments online. His face reveal video garnered over 21.9 million views and 2.5 million likes in less than a day. the video has over 47.3 million views and over 4.1 million likes, making it the 18th-most-viewed video on Dream's YouTube channel.


title: Dream (YouTuber)

text: According to "Time" magazine, "Dream's anonymity has been one of the most alluring aspects of his persona online and that intrigue, paired with his vibrant personality, have helped him build a loyal following across social media platforms." In a 2021 interview with YouTuber Anthony Padilla, Dream said that, while he did not intend to be anonymous, it became too important a part of his online persona for him to abandon at the time.