Latest news with #TheLamb
Associated Press
14-05-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Waterfall Network Augments Web3 Tools with Cascadify and The Lamb
Zug, Switzerland , May 14, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Waterfall Network, a rapidly growing BlockDAG ecosystem focused on scalability and seamless user experience, today announced the launch of Cascadify and The Lamb, two new tools designed to enhance the Web3 builder experience. Built on the Waterfall Network, these two complementary platforms offer end-to-end support—from MVP development to secure, transparent fundraising. Together, they provide the technical infrastructure and launch support Web3 projects need to thrive. Cascadify and The Lamb benefit from Waterfall's toolkits, responsive developer support, and ecosystem momentum, helping them deploy faster, engage users efficiently, and reduce technical risk early in the product lifecycle. This powerful combination acts as a CTO-like resource for projects, allowing teams to go from idea to deployment to funding without building from scratch or relying on multiple fragmented services. 'In the fast-paced world of Web3, startups often face a tough challenge: how to quickly move from idea to product to fundraising, all without a full in-house technical team. That's where Cascadify and The Lamb come in,' said Sergii Grybniak, Head of Research at Waterfall Network. 'These two projects fill a critical gap in the builder's journey from MVP to community launch. Waterfall's high-speed DAG architecture and low fees enable them to scale fast and securely.' Cascadify is a modular Web3 framework that allows startups to quickly assemble and deploy dApps. Instead of rebuilding the same backend and frontend logic, Cascadify offers a flexible environment where teams can customize user flows, choose only the modules they need, deploy on their own infrastructure or in the cloud. This drastically reduces time-to-market, allowing developers to focus on growth, design, and user experience. The Lamb is a compliant OTC token investing platform that wraps allocations into NFTs. Each NFT contains structured vesting logic, giving investors a clear view of unlock schedules, timelines, and project information, all while maintaining decentralization and transparency. With built-in KYC, support for stablecoins and fiat, and monthly withdrawal options, The Lamb is built for serious builders and early supporters alike. One of the first projects launching on Cascadify and the Waterfall Network is Petami, a fresh take on traditional DeFi staking that transforms it into an emotional, gamified experience. Instead of passively blocking tokens, users feed and care for adorable NFT pets. These pets visibly respond to care and nurturing, evolving both emotionally and economically depending on the player's actions. It was Cascadify and its rich set of different mechanics that allowed for a quick transition into development and more time to focus on the idea and user experience. Waterfall Network, launched in 2024, is uniquely positioned to support ecosystem-level growth. Its DAG structure enables parallel processing across multiple levels, significantly increasing throughput while keeping costs low. With more than 20 projects already deployed or in progress, Waterfall is rapidly becoming a go-to network for developers seeking both performance and decentralization. For more information, please visit and or follow @waterfall_dag on X and other channels: Discord: Telegram: About Waterfall Waterfall is a leading layer one (L1) architecture aiming to provide a solution for scalability and decentralization to help dAPP developers change the world. Waterfall's Directed Acyclic Graph ('DAG') achieves and allows it to run a validator node from any device, including low-cost laptops and mobile phones in future. Waterfall is Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible, allowing for portability of decentralized applications (dAPPs), and has very low hardware requirements for the participants to become validators. Media contact:
The Guardian
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Femgore: why romcoms are out in women's fiction – and cannibalism is in
Name: Femgore. Age: Hot (off the press). And I'm thinking, from the name, that it might have something to do with women … As opposed to an obsession with thigh bones, correct. And blood? As opposed to Al Gore. Very good. And let's add murder, cannibalism, body horror, obsession, rage … Lovely. Are we talking about Friday night out in a town centre near you? Literary genre, mate. I thought it was all about romantasy these days? Sex'n'dragons? Romantasy's soooo 2024, keep up. What about Rebecca Yarros? True, the latest in her Empyrean series is breaking all sorts of records. Cosy crime, too. Correct – looking at you Richard 'Thursday Murder Club' Osman. And the return of the romcom. Also correct – looking at you Emily 'Funny Story' Henry. Femgore is more interesting though. Hardly new, though, is it? Women getting killed, yawn. No, this is where femgore is different. We're not talking about female victimhood, exploitation and fetishisation, but a reaction to that. Listening now. Go on. Publisher Romilly Morgan described to Cosmopolitan a world created by women 'in which they are the ones in control, playing with the exact mundane and everyday brutality they have been exposed to for decades'. Yay! Revenge! No, it's more interesting than that – not just about women getting back at the patriarchy but also 'the complicated relationships between ourselves, and our bodies and with other women, too.' Ooh. Examples please! So you've got The Lamb, by Lucy Rose, about a tricky mother and daughter relationship … A bit like Bernardine Evaristo's Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other then? Yeah, kinda, except they're both cannibals, and Mama picks up 'strays' and … well, eats them. The opening sentence is: 'On my fourth birthday, I plucked six severed fingers from the shower drain.' Mmm. Not a million miles away from Eliza Clark's Boy Parts, a trailblazer for the genre when it was published in 2020, about a woman who picks up men in Tesco and photographs them in compromising positions. Every little helps! Then coming out this month alone you've got Kylie Lee Baker's Bat Eater … Only bats! That's almost disappointing, after boy parts … Other wholesome titles include Emma Van Stratten's This Immaculate Body, Monika Kim's The Eyes are the Best Part and Virginia Feito's Victorian Psycho, which is also out this month … My favourite kind of psycho! Already a book of the year from our own Lucy Mangan, and it's only February. Do say: 'You'll find them on that shelf over there, between fairytales and cookbooks.' Don't say: 'Nah, you're all right. I'll take the latest in the Thursday Murder Club series instead, thanks.'
New York Times
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Mother and Daughter Stuck in the Woods, With Danger Everywhere
We expect so much from mothers. Even today, it can still be shocking to encounter a literary portrait of a woman who refuses to suppress her own appetites in favor of nurturing her child. Two authors fearlessly take on this taboo in new fairy-tale-inspired novels about ravenous, needy mothers with unusual hungers and their daughters who are trying to survive them. The Lamb THE LAMB (Harper, 328 pp., $27.99), the debut novel from the filmmaker Lucy Rose, makes maternal hunger literal, opening with a sentence no reader is likely to forget: 'On my fourth birthday, I plucked six severed fingers from the shower drain.' Our narrator is young Margot, and her beloved Mama is a cannibal. With a child's unflappability, Margot describes how the two of them live alone in a small house deep in the Cumbrian fells, an area where hikers routinely disappear. To Mama, such wanderers are 'strays,' whom she lures into her home, drugs, seduces, butchers and consumes. Sharing the meat with her daughter, she explains matter-of-factly: 'I was born this way.' Mama teaches Margot to see the devouring of strays as an inevitable and even loving act. Her horrific habits contrast with a more human and recognizable longing — Mama is lonely. (A Papa once shared their home, but he's long gone.) Though her preferred diet demands isolation, she still longs for company, and thus takes occasional lovers. When Margot is 11, a woman named Eden knocks on the door, and everything changes. Eden quickly becomes an eager partner in Mama's alternative lifestyle, cooking up human remains in flaky pastries and other dishes that Rose describes in disturbingly toothsome detail. For the first time, Margot finds herself facing a rival for her mother's love, even as she begins to question the grisly credos on which she's been raised. What makes this twist on 'Hansel and Gretel' particularly unsettling is the twilight world it occupies between the 'safe' remove of folk tale and the clinical glare of realism. Rose's incantatory prose eases us into Margot's skewed perspective as skillfully as Mama coaxes strays into her home. In the heightened language of fairy tales, Margot depicts herself as Mama's apprentice. Yet when she leaves Mama's charnel house, she rides the bus to a modern-day school and attracts the attention of the sympathetic driver, who sees her as we should see her — as Mama's victim. Rose's parable gradually winds toward a conclusion as hard to shake as its opening. While the title dares us to read 'The Lamb' as a Christ allegory, this dark, gorgeous concoction is layered with insights into the insidious perpetuation of family violence. As Margot grows up and learns to empathize with people beyond her hideous homestead, she grasps the very human disappointments at the root of her mother's cruelty. She can't forgive her monstrous parent, and neither can we, but that doesn't stop us from hearing Mama's lament: 'I've never understood why mamas are expected to be perfect. … Men are forever thought of as boys. But girls? Once we're mamas or once we're ripe, we can never be girls again.' Black Woods, Blue Sky BLACK WOODS, BLUE SKY (Random House, 306 pp., $29), by the Pulitzer Prize finalist Eowyn Ivey, features another mother who resents the expectation of perfection. A young single mom struggling to get by in rural Alaska, Birdie loves her 6-year-old daughter, Emaleen, but that doesn't make parenthood come easy. 'Motherhood had failed to transform her,' Ivey writes. 'She was the same person she'd always been, but now there was this tiny child, and it was as if one had to be sacrificed for the sake of the other.' She tries her best with Emaleen, but Birdie has always had a 'craving,' an insatiable hunger for the freedom of wild places. She knows she shouldn't leave her daughter alone but she does sometimes anyway, whether to grab a more lucrative night bartending shift or to sneak a blissful hour in the woods by herself. Then Birdie falls in love with Arthur Neilsen, a mountainside hermit with a scarred face. He may not be a conventional partner, but their physical chemistry is strong and Emaleen also adores the quiet man. Everyone else, though, has misgivings about their relationship, especially Arthur's adoptive father, a retired lawman who knows the whole truth about why Arthur lives most of the year in seclusion. But Birdie longs to experience the remote places Arthur has described to her, so she packs up her daughter and moves them into his rugged cabin, accessible only by plane. Ivey is an enthralling storyteller who paints the Alaskan landscape and its inhabitants with equal affection. Her empathy for her characters doesn't falter even as we realize that Birdie is in over her head and putting her daughter in harm's way. The danger that menaces them is both natural and supernatural, with its roots in fairy tales (in an author's note, Ivey cites 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' as inspirations). Like many before her who have sought the freedom of nature while underestimating its hazards, Birdie learns that 'the wilderness had the pull of a dangerous eddy.' And Arthur, whom she loves for his hunger that echoes her own, will reveal himself to be inseparable from that peril. One could quibble with Ivey's sometimes shaky integration of realistic and supernatural elements, and one vital transition is abrupt. Still, the author weaves the tapestry of her story so deftly, presenting the natural world with respect instead of romanticization, that later developments hit us with devastating force. The final word of this dark fable belongs to an adult Emaleen, who sees all too clearly how her mother failed her. But she's still able to find room in her heart for 'people like Birdie and Arthur, who tried and tried but never found their footing.' By accepting her mother's flawed humanity, she finds peace with her own.
Washington Post
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Once upon a time there lived a hungry girl and a monstrous mother
The best way — perhaps the only way — to read Lucy Rose's beautiful, terrifying first novel, 'The Lamb,' is as a modern fairy tale. Still, anyone expecting the anodyne comforts and familiar magical-realist trappings associated with that genre will be disappointed, if not outright horrified, by the novel. Despite its contemporary setting, Rose's story seems drawn directly from those collected by the Brothers Grimm.
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Lamb by Lucy Rose review – cannibalism comes to Cumbria
The Cumbrian tourist board might have grounds to sue this young author for defamation, were it not for the fact that her meaty but overripe debut is set in a north of the imagination, where cellphones don't work, basic child safeguarding doesn't apply, and no one seems to have breakdown cover. Margot lives with her deranged and embittered mother in an isolated house in the woods, which regularly attracts lost hikers, injured walkers and stranded motorists. The 'strays', as they call them, are then not just murdered but munched. Margot is more familiar with eating human fingers than the fishy variety, and when the alternative is boring pasta, the prospect of a roasted, rosemary-scented rump or thigh is irresistible. Margot has known nothing else in her short life: 'Mama didn't feed me from breast or bottle. She gave me blood.' Now, almost 12, she is allowed to go to the local school, on strict instructions not to make friends or draw attention. 'Papa disappeared' years previously, but what happened to him is not too much of a revelation. The only visitor is the local gamekeeper, who drops by occasionally for sex with Mama. But everything changes with the arrival of beautiful Eden, who transforms from prospective stray to enthusiastic member of the household. Despite the viscera, the jellied blood, peeled skins, torsos on hooks and slow-cooked muscle, all lip-lickingly described, The Lamb is in essence a dark fairytale about family secrets, the rites of passage of adolescence, and the regrettable tendency to neglect a child in the face of an overwhelming new passion. There is a nauseating specificity about what goes on the table: stock pots bubble, gelatinous fingers retain their nail polish, flesh chunks swim in creamy sauces under lids of pastry always described as 'buttery'. Margot retains fragmented memories of some of the strays: 'I remembered pieces of them: shapes, smells, mouths, chins, noses and eyes.' There is a ritual to food prep, and a rationalisation of the horror: 'Promise me she was happy … We can't eat them unless they're happy,' Margot pleads. Mama, seen in unflattering closeup through Margot's young eyes, is an ogre with yellowed teeth, yet possessed of an eerie sexual allure the child can only guess at. There are no books, no recreations, nothing but an unappeasable hunger in the house. Margot is so used to blood that her first period is as unremarkable as spilt milk. The gamekeeper is the father of Abbie, one of Margot's classmates, and as their forbidden friendship develops, Margot's deeply buried natural compassion begins to emerge. The realisation that other ways of living exist starts to break the shell of secrecy surrounding their cannibalistic lifestyle. Though she lacks the baroque, ornamental prose style of, say, Angela Carter – one of the publisher's points of comparison, along with Daisy Johnson and Sophie Mackintosh – Lucy Rose can certainly write. She has a flair for Grand Guignol and expert pacing, cranking up the tension as ever greater risks are taken and flesh is sourced dangerously close to home. Margot's relationship with the kindly driver of the school bus, the only adult who takes any interest in her wellbeing, is a welcome respite from the febrile atmosphere back at the house. The Lamb grips all the way to an unexpected denouement that is as comfortless as it is eerie. The Lamb by Lucy Rose is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
