Yaoi known as boys' love or BL, is a genre of fictional media originating in Japan that features homoerotic relationships between male characters. It is created by women for women and is distinct from homoerotic media marketed to gay and bisexual male audiences, such as bara, but it can attract male readers and male creators can produce it, it spans a wide range of media, including manga, drama CDs, novels and fan production. Boys love and its abbreviation BL are the generic terms for this kind of media in Japan and have, in recent years, become more used in English as well. However, yaoi remains more prevalent in English. A defining characteristic of yaoi is the practice of pairing characters in relationships according to the roles of seme, the sexual top or active pursuer, uke, the sexual bottom or passive pursued. Common themes in yaoi include forbidden relationships, depictions of rape and humor. Yaoi and BL stories cover a diverse range of genres such as high school love comedy, period drama, science fiction and fantasy, detective fiction, include sub-genres such as omegaverse and shotacon.

Yaoi finds its origins in commercial publishing. As James Welker has summarized, the term yaoi dates back to dōjinshi culture of the late 1970s to early 1980s where, as a portmanteau of "yamanashi ochinashi iminashi", it was a self-deprecating way to refer to amateur fan works that parodied mainstream manga and anime by depicting the male characters from popular series in vaguely or explicitly sexual situations and in the manga they are explicitly shown; the use of yaoi to refer to parody dōjinshi is still predominant in Japan. In commercial publishing, the genre can be traced back to shōnen'ai, a genre of beautiful boy manga that began to appear in shōjo manga magazines in the early 1970s. From the 1970s to 1980s, other terms such as tanbi and June emerged to refer to specific developments in the genre. In the early 1990s, these terms were eclipsed with the commercialization of male–male homoerotic media under the label of "boys' love". Yaoi has a robust global presence. Yaoi works are available across the continents in various languages both through international licensing and distribution and through circulation by fans.

Yaoi works and fandom have been studied and discussed by scholars and journalists worldwide. The genre known as Boy's Love, BL, or yaoi derives from two sources. Female authors writing for shōjo manga magazines in the early 1970s published stories featuring platonic relationships between young boys, which were known as tanbi or shōnen ai. In the late 1970s going into the 1980s, women and girls in the dōjinshi markets of Japan started to produce sexualized parodies of popular shōnen anime and manga stories in which the male characters were recast as gay lovers. By the end of the 1970s, magazines devoted to the nascent genre started to appear, in the 1990s the term boys' love or BL would be invented and would become the dominant term used for the genre in Japan. Although yaoi derives from girl's and women's manga and still targets the shōjo and josei demographics, it is considered a separate category. Keiko Takemiya's manga serial Kaze to Ki no Uta, first published in 1976, was groundbreaking in its depictions of "openly sexual relationships" between men, spurring the development of the boys' love genre in shōjo manga, as well as the development of sexually explicit amateur comics.

Another noted female manga author, Kaoru Kurimoto, wrote shōnen ai mono stories in the late 1970s that have been described as "the precursors of yaoi". The term yaoi is an acronym created in the late 1970s by Yasuko Sakata and Akiko Hatsu from the words Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi "No peak, no fall, no meaning"; this phrase was first used as a "euphemism for the content" and refers to how yaoi, as opposed to the "difficult to understand" shōnen-ai being produced by the Year 24 Group female manga authors, focused on "the yummy parts". The phrase parodies a classical style of plot structure. Kubota Mitsuyoshi says that Osamu Tezuka used yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi to dismiss poor quality manga, this was appropriated by the early yaoi authors; as of 1998, the term yaoi was considered "common knowledge to manga fans". A joking alternative yaoi acronym among fujoshi is oshiri ga itai. In the 1980s, the genre was presented in an anime format for the first time, including the works Patalliro! which showed a romance between two supporting characters, an adaptation of Kaze to Ki no Uta and Earthian, released in the original video animation format.

Prior to the popularization of the term yaoi, material in the nascent genre was called juné, a name derived from Juné, a magazine that published male–male tanbi romances which took its name from the homoerotic stories of the French writer Jean Genet. In China, the term danmei is used, derived from tanbi; the term bishōnen manga was used in the 1970s, but fell from favor in the 1990s when manga in this genre began to feature a broader range of protagonists beyond the traditional adolescent boys. In Japan, the term juné would die out in favor of boys' love, which remains the most common name in Japan. Mizoguchi suggests that publishers wishing to get a foothold in the juné market coined "boys' love" to disassociate the genre from the publisher of Juné. While yaoi has become an umbrella term in the West for women's manga or Japanese-influenced comics with male–ma

Gia Maisashvili was a Georgian economist and politician, a presidential candidate in the Georgian presidential election of 2008. Born in Tbilisi, Maisashvili graduated from the Tbilisi State University in 1985, he became involved in pro-independence movement against the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and placed himself at the forefront in the struggle for Georgian independence and democracy, achieved in 1991. In 1991–92, he became an instrumental figure in transitioning Georgia into the free-market economic system by founding the country's first commodity exchanges – Tbilisi Universal Exchange and Georgian Tea and Wine Exchange. Following the Georgian Civil War and the consequent overthrow of the country's first democratically elected government by the forces of Eduard Shevardnadze in 1992, Maisashvili was forced to flee the country and seek refuge abroad, he was granted political asylum by the United States. While living in the US, he earned an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1997 and that same year, became married to an American lawyer, Robin Lightner.

Soon after, he joined the Houston, Texas-based energy company Enron and served as the head of a risk analysis division until resigning from the company in 2001, shortly before the scandal. He returned to Georgia on the eve of the 2003 Rose Revolution and became a political mentor and an economic adviser to opposition leader Mikheil Saakashvili. Shortly after Saakashvili's ascend to power, Maisashvili became publicly critical of Saakashvili and distanced himself from the new president. In July 2007, he established his own political party – the Party of Future, he ran as a Presidential candidate for the early elections called on January 5, 2008. He made a major focus on economy and social solidarity, supported Georgia's bid to join NATO. On November 30, 2007, in what is now considered the critical blunder of his campaign, he stated that he would rather support Mikheil Saakashvili in the case of a second-round run-off against the oligarch Badri Patarkatsishvili; such a statement was exploited by his opponents and sensationalized by the media, resulting in significant drop in his poll numbers from which he never recovered.

In May 2008, he ran in the Georgian Parliamentary elections representing Tbilisi’s Saburtalo constituency on the Christian-Democratic Alliance ticket—The Alliance. On May 6, 2009, while attempting to arbitrate a peaceful outcome in a clash between a disorderly political demonstrators and the riot police, Maisashvili was shot in the head with a rubber bullet, he made a full recovery from his injuries. Following the incident, he shifted away from direct involvement in Georgian politics and instead focused on bringing about an ambitious bottom-up educational reform in Georgia through the expansion of his Leadership School, a venture he started in 2006 with his American friend and mentor Bob Spears; the declared aim was to rear "a new generation of skilled and courageous leaders of Georgia." In March 2015, Maisashvili was diagnosed with Glioblastoma - an aggressive form of brain cancer. After undergoing a successful surgery and a chemotherapy treatment, he seemed to have made a recovery - but it was short lived.

The cancer came back and Gia Maisashvili died on 26 February 2018. His body was flown from California to Georgia and his funeral held at the Sioni Cathedral in Tbilisi. Thousands of Georgians attended and paid their respects to the "Leader", he leaves behind his three children - Sophia and Anna. The Maisashvili campaign website

The North Dakota State Bison baseball team is the varsity intercollegiate baseball program of North Dakota State Bison in Fargo, North Dakota, United States. The program's first season was in 1909, it has been a member of the NCAA Division I Summit League since the start of the 2008 season, its home venue is Newman Outdoor Field, located on North Dakota State's campus. Tod Brown is the team's head coach starting in the 2008 season; the program has appeared in 2 NCAA Tournaments. It has won 1 regular season conference titles; as of the start of the 2018 Major League Baseball season, 1 former Bison has appeared in Major League Baseball. The program's first season of play was 1909. North Central Conference Independent Summit League The stadium contains the Maury Wills Museum in honor of the former Major League Baseball player who worked for the RedHawks as a coach and a radio analyst; the first number retired at the stadium was the #8 worn by hometown hero Roger Maris when he played for the Fargo-Moorhead Twins in the 1950s.

The outfield distances replicate those of Yankee stadium. In 2012, college baseball writer Eric Sorenson ranked the field the sixth most underrated venue in Division I baseball. North Dakota State's longest tenured head coach was Mitch McLeod, who coached the team from 1993–2007. Head coach – Tod Brown Associate Head Coach / Recruiting Coordinator – Tyler Oakes Assistant coach – David Pearson Volunteer assistant – Toran Shahidi Below is a list of notable former Bison and the seasons in which they played for North Dakota State. Neil Wagner List of NCAA Division I baseball programs Official website