#''how many iterations of these teams were there and can you list all their members'' you might as well ask me to kill god

[alokkashyap123]

Alok Kashyap - Scrum Master based in the USA

Hi! Let me self introduce myself, I am Alok Kashyap a tech professional with a vivid career as a program manager in The United States. Previously I was a Scrum Master. You might have come across my introduction somewhere and have seen Scrum Master quite many times.

Do you know what a Scrum Master is what he does?

Let me tell you this today.

Basically, an Agile development team is facilitated by a Scrum master. They are in charge of overseeing the team members' information sharing. According to Agile principles, Scrum is a project management framework that facilitates team communication and self-organization so that changes may be made fast.

Scrum Master Responsibilities

The scrum guide outlines the various functions that scrum masters can fulfill within the scrum team, although it does not include a comprehensive list of all possible duties. Scrum masters frequently carry out a number of the following tasks. For example:

Standups: As needed, lead the daily scrum or standups.

Meetings for sprint/iteration planning: Guard against scope creep and overcommitment on the part of the team. support the establishment of subtasks and estimation.

Sprint reviews: Attend the meeting and record the comments.

Retrospectives: Make a list of things to work on and things to improve for upcoming sprints.

Board administration: Take up the role of the scrum board administrator. Make that the scrum tools, such as Jira, are functioning properly and that the cards are current.

1:1s: As needed, hold one-on-one meetings with stakeholders and team members. Solve team disputes on workflow and methods of operation. A lot of scrum practitioners are against one-on-one meetings because they think these discussions belong in standups. On the other hand, new teams frequently favor these frequent in-person meetings with particular team members. The scrum master may determine that these one-on-one encounters are essential to the growth of the team and to get to know one another.

Internal Consulting: Before deciding how to best collaborate with the scrum team, scrum masters should speak with team members and internal stakeholders.

Reporting: To determine what is built and at what cadence, regular monitoring of burndown charts and other tools for portfolio planning is necessary.

Obstacles: By removing external obstacles and overseeing internal barriers, the scrum master helps the team.

These were some of the responsibilities and well they align with the workflow when working on a daily basis.

Skills of Scrum

For scrum masters to perform the job well, we need a certain set of soft skills. Over time I have realised these traits would help in the long run:

Leadership: Scrum masters need to demonstrate their leadership abilities without coming across as bossy. Serving the group and encouraging self-organization are two ways they lead.

Effective communication: It's essential to communicate in an open and clear manner. Scrum masters ensure that all team members and interested parties are aware of the objectives, challenges, and state of the project.

Empathy: It's critical to comprehend and feel the team's difficulties. Scrum masters must encourage and assist their teams when things get tough.

Problem-solving: Scrum masters frequently resolve disputes and obstacles. To keep the team on course, they need to be skilled at addressing problems and coming up with solutions. 

Adaptability: Scrum masters ought to be flexible and receptive to new ideas. They must adapt to the project's and the team's changing needs.

Time management: In order to keep the team on track and achieve sprint goals, scrum masters need to be skilled time managers.

Having someone in the role who has experience with scrum before can be quite beneficial when implementing scrum. Scrum masters are therefore frequently employed as consultants or part-timers rather than as full-time employees. Every scrum team is unique, though.

A lot of seasoned teams take delight in delegating management tasks to one another and work together to accomplish the tasks mentioned above. The team may elect to cycle the scrum master position, with various team members leading standups and retrospectives in turn.

Product owners can focus on strategy, developers can write amazing code, and members of the team can achieve more success. This is the foundation of an efficient scrum.

[sailormoonandme]

Where to start with Sailor Moon?

From time to time I’ve seen people ask about how to get into Sailor Moon or how they might introduce it to someone else. 

As such I’ve made this to (hopefully) help people out.

Introduction

So first of all you should know that the official name for the over all franchise is ‘Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon’. This can (and has) been translated a few ways, but the current official name is ‘Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon’. Basically everything connected with Sailor Moon carries this full official name, but for the purposes of this post I’m just going to shorten things to ‘Sailor Moon’.

Moving on,  there are in fact different versions of the Sailor Moon story, even putting aside the various attempts at translating the story into different languages. Each version is best viewed as its own entity, sort of how there have been various versions of Sherlock Holmes that exist independently of one another. 

For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to mostly keep this post to the original Japanese iterations of Sailor Moon, albeit from the point of view of an English speaking audience member.*

The main versions of the Sailor Moon story are as follows:

1) The Manga

The manga iteration of Sailor Moon began around late 1991/early 1992. It includes around 50 chapters, a handful of side stories and a prequel manga of sorts called Codename: Sailor-V. There have been several different English translations of this material over the years. However, my personal recommendation would be to experience the story through the ‘Eternal Editions’. These are easily available in print and digitally. As of this writing Codename: Sailor-V is scheduled to be collected in at some point in 2021, thus collecting all the manga stories.

2) The 1992 anime

This is the most famous iteration of Sailor Moon and loosely adapts the manga to the point where it is its own entity. It spans 200 episodes across five seasons, with each season being given its own subtitle. E.g. season 2 is referred to as ‘Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon R’. Additionally there were a handful of shorts and specials connected with the anime and three films. I have already compiled a watch list for the show that I hope will help you navigate everything.

Like the manga, there have been multiple efforts to subtitle the show into English, particular among fan subbing circles. However, the easiest way to watch the show with English subs is to do so via a streaming service (last I checked it was available on Hulu and Crunchyroll) or to purchase the DVDs and Blu-rays from Viz Media, although you can also purchase them digitally on Amazon.com too.

3) The musicals

 On and off since 1993 there have been stage musicals produced for Sailor Moon. If you ever see the term ‘Sera Myu’ being used by fans (or even official sources) understand that it’s shorthand for these musicals.

The musicals are based chiefly upon the manga and the original anime, although with some original embellishments here and there. The degree to which a musical cuts closer to the manga, or the anime or does something all its own varies from one production to another. I’m not very well read up on the musicals I must admit, but it is to my understanding that each production exists independently from one another beyond at times carrying over cast and staff members. In essence there is no particular order you need to watch the musicals in. However, if you want more info on the musicals see the below EDIT, which is more well informed than I am.

To my knowledge, (which is limited in this particular case) all the musicals have been filmed but there has never been any kind of official English release for them. There have however been fan subbed efforts made for all of them. 

4) The 2003 live action TV show

In fan circles this show is referred to as ‘Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon’ or ‘Pretty Guardian’ or ‘PGSM’. This is because it was the first piece of Sailor Moon media to bear that particular English translation of ‘Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon’. Basically if you see ‘Pretty Guardian’ or ‘PGSM’, understand it is referencing this show.

The show exclusively adapts the ‘Dark Kingdom’ storyline, the first storyline in every version of Sailor Moon. The show was made in a similar vein to shows like Kamen Rider or Super Sentai and the latter’s American adaptation, Power Rangers. However, it also incorporates elements of Japanese soap opera dramas too, original elements that were never in any version of Sailor Moon beforehand and many different spins on the plot points that had been covered before. 

To my knowledge, like Sera Myu, no official English release for this show exists, but English fansubs are out there somewhere. If you manage to find the show then you should watch the various episodes and specials in their original broadcast order. For this Wikipedia is your friend. 

5) Sailor Moon Crystal

Sporadically since 2014 a new Sailor Moon anime has been in production. This new anime cuts much closer to the original manga (although it still makes some changes ) than any other version of Sailor Moon. As of this writing, the show has yet to be completed and still has material from the manga left to adapt. The show is available to watch with English subtitles from the same sources as the original 1992 anime, including DVDs and Blu-Rays from Viz Media.

Like the original anime, Crystal’s story arcs and seasons have gone under different names. The first two seasons/arcs are officially just called ‘Sailor Moon Crystal’, whilst the third is explicitly titled ‘Sailor Moon Crystal Season III’. In place of a fourth season two films, Sailor Moon: Eternal Part 1 and Part 2, were produced. As of this writing, the Eternal films have yet to have any kind of English release. To make your life easier, watch this show in the order of the original air/release dates. Just remember the Eternal films are to be viewed after Season III.

Which version should you start with?

Whilst that is how the franchise breaks down, it is not the order a Sailor Moon newbie should try experiencing it in.

My personal recommendation would be to begin with the original 1992 anime and then move on to any of the other versions from there. This is because the original anime is aimed at a younger audience and was incredibly influential on basically every other version of the story. 

However, if 200 episodes or more is too intimidating for you, then simply check out the manga. It’s far shorter, skewed a bit older and tells a concise and complete story. 

And if you are still apprehensive then I’d highly recommend watching the first Sailor Moon film, Sailor Moon R The Movie. This is a very good film unto itself but it is a microcosm of the characters and themes that define the franchise as a whole. If you dislike this Sailor Moon just isn’t for you. 

P.S. If you are simply dead set against subtitles then you should know the original 1992 anime and Crystal have in fact been dubbed into English by Viz Media. In fact, the first four seasons of the original anime, along with the first three films, have two English dubs, variously produced by DiC, Cloverway and Pioneer. These dubs were made in the 1990s and early 2000s and are currently not legally available anywhere. 

*Things get more complicated when we consider that even in Japan there have been updated and altered versions of the Sailor Moon manga, anime, etc. We aren’t going to worry about that in this post though. They exist and maybe someday you might be inclined to check them out, but you know...baby steps...

EDIT #1: The following information comes from https://euribear.tumblr.com/

Just something I want to add on about the Sailor Moon Musicals.

If you see a musical with the word Kaiteiban (revision) at the end of the name, that means it’s a revised version of the previous musical. Things added or taken away, different cast members at times, etc.

Also, there are three musicals (technically four) that have a continuous storyline. Starring Miyuki Kanbe as Sailor Moon, Last Dracul, Transylvania no Mori (and its Kaiteiban), and Death Vulcan should be viewed in order.

The Bandai era of musicals were from 1993 to 2005.

The Nelke musicals started in 2014 and there was one each year for five years. One musical for each arc of the manga.

There are also the NogiMyu. These are musicals that solely focus on the Dark Kingdom arc and they star various members of the pop idol group Nogizazaka46.

There were two teams of cast members for the inner senshi for both years, 2018 and 2019. The same story overall, just different actresses.

There was also Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon The Super Live. My personal favorite, this was a musical performed only a few times. A couple of days in Japan in 2018 and then once in Paris in 2019 and then in Washington D.C. and later in NYC. I got to see this in person on one of the three showings in NYC. A dream come true. Unfortunately, this was never recorded, though they did release an instrumental musical album of the show.

[aion-rsa]

How Thor Changed the Marvel Cinematic Universe

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Marvel’s Thor, the first theatrical live-action film to feature the comic book giant’s version of the Norse God of Thunder, opened in theaters a decade ago, on May 6, 2011.

Directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring a then little-known Chris Hemsworth in the title role, Thor was the fourth film in the still-nascent Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was also — as we look back at it now — a pivotal one in the development of the MCU.

“I’m very proud of my part of it,” Branagh told us a couple of years ago about his handling of Thor. “Which was providing a sort of backbone that they could comically riff off, but at least it originally contained some of the high stakes Nine Realms import that that larger mythology has to have as well.”

Thor took the franchise off the Earth for the first time and into the cosmic side of the Marvel mythology, introducing audiences to the Nine Realms, the kingdom of Asgard and other mind-bending concepts that comic fans had adored for years but which were a major risk to put in front of mainstream moviegoers.

Even the character of Thor — with his helmet and his hammer and his arch way of speaking — often seemed to skate perilously close to laughable in the pages of the comics themselves. But he was also a mainstay of the Marvel line and a charter member of the Avengers, the superhero team that Marvel based its entire initial run of films upon.

Marvel

Thor didn’t take the Rainbow Bridge to the screen

A Thor movie based on the Marvel Comics version of the character had, surprisingly, been bandied around for years even before there was a Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The God of Thunder debuted on the page in Journey into Mystery #83 (August 1962), created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby. A founding member of the Avengers, he joined Iron Man, the Hulk, Ant-Man, and the Wasp in the pages of The Avengers #1 (September 1963). In the ensuing decades, he has starred in multiple iterations of the Avengers comics, plus many ongoing and limited series of his own.

An animated version of the character debuted in 1966’s Marvel Super-Friends show, while the first live-action incarnation of Thor (played by Eric Kramer) showed up in the 1988 TV movie The Incredible Hulk Returns, a follow-up to the late 1970s series The Incredible Hulk.

While Thor continued to turn up in various animated Marvel properties, it was in 1991 that the first full-length, live-action Thor movie was proposed — by no less than Sam Raimi.

The director, who later went on to make the first three Spider-Man movies and who is now working in the MCU on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, revealed to the The Hollywood Reporter in the wake of Stan Lee’s passing that he pitched a Thor movie to the Marvel Universe co-creator over lunch.

“We worked together writing treatments and took it to Fox and pitched it,” Raimi recalled. “And they said, ‘Absolutely no. Comic books don’t make good movies.’ This was in 1991.”

The rights to Thor bounced around Hollywood for a few more years (at one point it was set up at Sony with David S. Goyer writing and possibly directing) until landing back at Marvel Studios, which had reinvented itself as an independently financed production company in 2005 with distribution through Paramount Pictures. The studio, run at the time by David Maisel with Kevin Feige as president of production, hired Mark Protosevich (I Am Legend and the unfilmed Batman Unchained) to write a script for Thor, with Matthew Vaughn (X-Men: First Class) coming aboard to direct in August 2007.

Marvel

Enter Tom Hiddleston as Loki…

No sooner did Matthew Vaughn sign up to direct Thor than he seemingly left just as quickly, although it was officially announced in May 2008 that he was departing. Creative and budget issues seemed to have sealed his exit. “Marvel loves the script,” he wrote in The Guardian in late 2007. “The only problem is that it has been costed at $300m and they ask how I am going to reduce it by $150m.”

Even though Thor had already been scheduled for a June 4, 2010 release date, Marvel still had to find a director. Talks were held with Guillermo del Toro, but he decided to direct The Hobbit instead (which he ended up leaving as well). At the end of its search, Marvel finally chose Kenneth Branagh, the Irish actor and director best known for his epic adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Henry V — which kind of provided an idea of the tone Marvel was looking for.

Branagh was finally signed in December 2008, telling MTV News, “It’s a chance to tell a big story on a big scale…It’s a human story right in the center of a big epic scenario.”

Once Branagh was signed, the movie’s release date was pushed back from June/July 2010 to May 6, 2011, providing plenty of time for the film’s extensive visual effects to be designed and created and for Branagh to find his cast — starting with the God of Thunder himself.

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The first person allegedly approached was Daniel Craig, who had just starred in his second James Bond film, Quantum of Solace. It was because of his commitments to the already massive 007 franchise that Craig turned down the hammer-wielding Asgardian, although it’s somehow hard to imagine the tough-as-nails Craig as the egotistical (at least at first), young Odinson.

A long list of young, relatively unknown actors tested for the part, including Chris Hemsworth (who was just making his brief but scene-stealing appearance as James Kirk’s father in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek), his brother Liam, the equally obscure Tom Hiddleston, Kevin McKidd from Grey’s Anatomy, Alexander Skarsgard (Godzilla vs. Kong), Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy), Joel Kinnaman (The Suicide Squad), and others. But Chris Hemsworth ultimately won the day, with Hiddleston landing the consolation gift that would keep on giving, the role of Thor’s villainous adopted brother Loki.

“That was my starting point, was that you have a character with a predisposition toward mischief,” Hiddleston said about playing the trickster god, during a 2010 set visit attended by this reporter in Manhattan Beach, California. “An inclination toward chaos and a delight in imbalance, and you couple that with the fierce intelligence that he has, and a chess master’s ability to manipulate events three or four steps ahead of the game.”

Adding even more gravitas to the production was the signing of the legendary Anthony Hopkins to play Thor’s father, Odin, along with Natalie Portman as Jane Foster, Rene Russo as Thor’s mom Frigga, Colm Feore as Laufey, the king of the Frost Giants, Idris Elba as Heimdall, and others. Also signed: Samuel L. Jackson for his third appearance as Nick Fury (in an end credits bonus scene) and Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton/Hawkeye, marking the live-action debut of the bow-and-arrow-wielding Avenger.

Filming on Thor began in mid-January 2010 and wound down in early May, with shooting taking place at Raleigh Studios in Manhattan Beach, California (Marvel’s studio home in the MCU’s early years), Santa Fe, and other parts of New Mexico, and locations in northern California.

Colm Feore told The Deadbolt that the Shakespearean training which he, Branagh, and Hopkins all shared enabled them to quickly communicate with each other while shaping the characters and finding the right tone: “One of the things that was enormously helpful on Thor was that during the breaks, Tony, myself, and Ken would be talking in Shakespearean shorthand about what the characters were doing, what we thought they may be like, and how we could focus our attention more intelligently.”

During that same set visit to the Manhattan Beach set of Thor, Marvel president of production Kevin Feige told this reporter and others that the movie was going to feature more extensive post-production work than other Marvel films. “When you walk around Captain America or Iron Man, you can get it,” he explained. “With Thor, what you’re seeing is only 30% of what the movie will be. This is the big question mark and to me that makes it the most exciting. I like it when people don’t exactly know what we’re going to do.”

Reshoots were completed in late 2010, while The Avengers director Joss Whedon shot the end credits scene in which Nick Fury reveals the Infinity Stone known as the Tesseract to Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard).

Marvel

Marvel takes a big swing with Thor’s hammer

Introducing Thor and the Asgardians — who were essentially aliens, with technology so far ahead of our own that they seemed like gods to the ancient, more primitive people of Norway more than a millennium ago — was a major gamble for the MCU and its then-president of production (and now Chief Creative Officer) Kevin Feige.

Out of Marvel’s first three films, Iron Man and Iron Man 2 were massive, out-of-the-box hits, while The Incredible Hulk was a middling success at best. Yet all three films were Earthbound and dealt with plausible (as far as it went) science and technology. The science of Thor was — to borrow a phrase from the late science fiction titan Arthur C. Clarke — indistinguishable from magic.

“Asgardians are kind of ‘been there, done that’ when it comes to that kind of stuff,” said co-producer Craig Kyle to this reporter and others on the set visit. “For them to send you across the universe, it’s as easy as turning a key … Their technology is only as sophisticated as it needs to be to do extraordinary things.”

Making Thor, Odin and the other inhabitants of Asgard, Jotunheim and the rest of the Nine Realms into extra-terrestrial beings mistaken for gods by ancient humans took Thor away from sword-and-sorcery and fantasy and more overtly into the science fiction genre. But it also provided the film with a back story and mythology that was perhaps easier for modern movie fans to swallow — more Star Wars than the Völuspá.

“We just kept trying to humanize it all, and keep it very real,” Chris Hemsworth told Superhero Hype at the time about his approach to the title character. “Look into all the research about the comic books that we could, but also bring it back to ‘Who is this guy as a person, and what’s his relationship with people in the individual scenes?’ And working with someone like Kenneth Branagh, who has all those bases covered and has so many ideas, it was a hell of a time!”

In addition to taking the big creative risk of bringing Asgard and Thor to the screen, the movie took several other chances as well. Starting a tradition that Marvel would return to with films like Captain Marvel and Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor did not function as a traditional origin story. We meet Thor, Loki, Odin, and enter Asgard with only a brief introduction detailing the history of ill will and war between the Asgardians and the Frost Giants.

Thor’s journey in the film is not that of an ordinary character being bestowed with great powers and learning how to use them, the typical arc of a superhero film. He is fully formed here, if flawed, and as the film progresses he learns to be a better version of the immensely powerful being that he already is — with the help of the human beings that he meets during his fall to Earth.

When Thor — the likely successor to his father’s throne — reignites hostilities with the Frost Giants partially due to his own immaturity, Odin decrees him unworthy of wielding Mjolnir and banishes him, powerless, to Earth. That leaves the door open for the crafty Loki — who has discovered that he is not Asgardian after all, but the child of Frost Giants — to manipulate and scheme his way into power himself.

Marvel’s other big gamble was making Loki a much more fully developed antagonist than had been previously seen in many comic book movies. Skillfully portrayed by Hiddleston in a performance that made him an instant star, Loki is an empathetic, nuanced character whose longing for the love and attention of his adopted father — who lavishes more of both on Thor — leads him down a dark path and into a character arc that would take several years and movies to play out.

“I think Loki intuitively feels that he doesn’t belong there, he doesn’t belong with the family in Asgard and doesn’t belong in the pantheon of gods,” said Hiddleston at the time. “He’s confused about his place in the universe … We all reach a point in our lives where we think, ‘What the hell are we supposed to do with our life?’ Thor reaches that point in this film and Loki does as well, so yes, maybe if Odin had made him feel valued and respected and essential to Asgard, then it would have been okay.”

Marvel

Thor smashes all preconceptions

Thor had its world premiere in Sydney, Australia on April 17, 2011 and opened in that country — Hemsworth’s native land — four days later. It premiered in 56 more markets before finally opening in North America on May 6, 2011.

The film earned a 77% fresh rating and mixed reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics praising the performances by Hemsworth and Hiddleston, as well as the grandiose family drama on Asgard, but less impressed by Thor’s journey to Earth and the climactic battle there against the massive golem-like Destroyer sent by Loki to kill Thor.

More importantly for Marvel, the film connected with audiences despite the perception that Thor was largely unfamiliar or dated. Thor earned $181 million at the North American box office and a further $268 million abroad for a worldwide total of $449 million.

While that ranks it near the bottom of the 23 MCU movies released to date (along with Ant-Man and Captain America: The First Avenger), it was a far from shabby showing for the early MCU and proved Marvel’s calculation that it could expand Marvel’s footprint on film beyond already established characters like Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Hulk.

“I liked it when people said, ‘Iron Man’s the B-Team. You’re calling out the B-Team!’ We knew it wasn’t,” said Feige on set about using what were perceived as lower-tier Marvel heroes. “We knew it was going to be great. And that holds true for Thor … here’s another one that will redefine us and at least raise the bar of what a comic book movie is, for both people who’ve read comics and those who haven’t.”

Thor expanded the boundaries of the MCU into the realms of space, alternate dimensions and cosmic conflicts, while putting another key part in place for the impending arrival of the Avengers. And while 2013’s follow-up, Thor: The Dark World, was a misstep and considered one of Marvel’s few outright failures, the studio brilliantly reinvented the character in 2017 with Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok, moving him away from the initial Shakespearean grandiosity and into a more humorous space.

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That in turn allowed Thor and Hemsworth to have one of the most profound character arcs across the entire span of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. His story in those films, the box office clout of Ragnarok, and Hemsworth’s enthusiasm for the role led Marvel to commission 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder — marking the first time an MCU hero is venturing into a fourth solo movie.

Ten years later, while not a perfect film by any means, Thor is still an enjoyable, consciously weird Marvel epic that proved the God of Thunder could bring the lightning even to modern audiences. And while Thor has seemingly abandoned the throne of Asgard for now, his first film’s place in the MCU pantheon is secure.

The post How Thor Changed the Marvel Cinematic Universe appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[thanksjro]

Last Stand of the Wreckers PsyOps records- Can we PLEASE Hire Some More Mental Health Specialists?

Rung gets a lot of play in the Last Stand of the Wreckers bonus materials. He was still more of a play-on-words as opposed to an actual character at the time, so I suppose it makes sense.

Rotorstorm walked into his appointment with Rung and immediately started hyping himself up. That’s very telling. When Rung asked about his time at Simanzi, he sort of shut down and wasn’t able to hide behind his defense mechanism of being the funniest, coolest, bravest, all-around-bestest guy in the room.

Rotorstorm was basically born, then thrown into the Aerial Program, where all that awful stuff with Jetstream happened. Dude was beating up an infant.

Motherfucker’s got some trauma, obviously, but apparently that’s not enough to disqualify him from Wrecker duty. Wrecker duty that he didn’t even want, I should add.

You gotta sign up for the Wrecker roster; he’d been on it before, but had dropped out to teach instead. Either someone set this poor guy up to die, or Jetstream was wrong this whole time and he really just is that good. Not that it mattered much- the damage is done. Rotorstorm has crippling self-doubt, and is also dead.

Pyro suffers from a programming disorder known as primus apotheosis, identified by the sufferer’s need to emulate the great Optimus Prime. Many Autobots are afflicted with this disorder, and even a few Decepticons have been known to have it. The fact that Pyro had primus apotheosis makes panels like this:

-all the more sad. This is a guy who’s had his own personality overwritten- by his own hero worship- in an attempt to be greater than himself. Pyro is by no means a slouch when it comes to saving the day- he saved an entire platoon of Autobots as a member of the Resistance.

Then Simanzi happened.

There isn’t a ton known about the Simanzi Massacre, only that it was so bad, the Cybertronian population was halved by the time it was over. Pyro would have been just another statistic, had it not been for Optimus Prime’s intervention. Does survivor’s guilt have some part in his disorder? It’s certainly possible. All that can be said for sure is that nobody got out of Simanzi unscathed.

Pyro was approved for the Wreckers with reservations, seeing as primus apotheosis sufferers can and will sacrifice themselves for others if given any wiggle room in which to do so. The Wreckers were just lucky that Pyro wanted to go out in style. It didn’t really work for him, but points for trying.

Guzzle isn’t his legal name. Much like Chromedome, he’s called what he’s called due to meddling with the war. Originally Pneumatix, and a forklift of all things- the name being a play on the word “Pneumatic”, because forklifts work by using compressed air to lift things- he entered the Body Augmentation Program. This turned him into something called a ruination tank. That’s why his turret accounts for nearly half of his height- they basically turned a Mini Cooper into a weapon of mass destruction. Because he’s meant to be actually very tiny, his body compensates for the added stress by being so insanely fuel-inefficient, he has to constantly eat. Thus the nickname.

Guzzle didn’t exactly impress Rung at his appointment, coming across as a rather cold, distant individual when it came to his own emotions, describing his own near-death experience at the hands of the Decepticons in terms of what weaponry was used to try to kill him. Still, he was approved for the Garrus-9 mission.

It’s at this point that you have to wonder just how many people are actually on the waiting list for this group.

First Aid about had a panic attack when he thought Springer was inviting him to join the Wreckers, so it’s obviously a known thing that members don’t last terribly long, or at least, it’s something that can be inferred through reading about them.

Looking at past members, it’s rather telling what sort of person is attracted to the Wrecker lifestyle; Whirl is an emotional powder keg that’s constantly trying to light his own fuse, Impactor defied wartime sanctions to murder the his rivals, Roadbuster is a hardcore drug abuser who ripped someone’s spine out, and Kup can only function in polite society if he’s smoking medicinal marijuana at all times. These are not stable individuals. Springer is the odd exception, and I’m counting Perceptor as a borderline case, because he went through a massive personality shift that led him to where he was within the group. He may appear “normal” when compared to the others, but that guy’s for sure got some issues that he keeps close to his chest.

Given all of this, it’s not really much of a leap to say that Rotorstorm got thrown back on the list because they didn’t have anyone else who wanted in on this madness. It’s also not much of a leap to say that the only reason any of these guys got approved to join was because there weren’t any other options. The psych-screenings were probably just done as a professional obligation at that point. Rung, for all his faults, was likely working with what he’d been given.

I’m not exactly sure where these profiles were meant to reside within Last Stand’s timeline, given that Rotorstorm and Pyro are classified as being probably alive, whereas Ironfist is not.

Ironfist spends a good portion of his appointment with Rung fanboying over the Wreckers, as he is wont to do. When he actually gets around to talking about himself, he’s not nearly as eloquent or organized. Rung did not approve Ironfist for the mission, based solely on his lack of experience in the field of busting heads. He only got on the team due to Prowl’s interference, as has been established before.

Fisitron is revealed to have been a writer of many talents, publishing articles for all ages and reading levels. He was an author you could grow up on.

Impactor’s profile was written at the time of his probationary hearing, and it seems to imply that Rung may be a bit of an idiot. He had dismissed the guard who was present, in an attempt to get Impactor to be more open with him. This went about as well as that sort of thing usually goes for the only mental health specialist on all of Cybertron.

Looks like someone’s got a fear of mnemosurgery. With this little event in his past, it’s very surprising that Rung tried to offer it to Fortress Maximus in MTMTE #6.

Maybe Rung accidentally stuck a really big magnet to the side of his head at some point, thus erasing his memory files, because I know that I sure wouldn’t be offering that sort of thing if this was the average reaction to it.

After Impactor had had his moment, he shared some of his war stories with Rung- apparently his lack of a right hand was inspired by meeting Death’s Head.

Though Death’s Head isn’t directly named, it’s pretty obvious that’s who it’s intended to be, given that he’s mentioned as “ricocheting from universe to universe after leaping through an exploding time portal.” This is in reference to the events that took place in the Marvel UK storyline “The Legacy of Unicron!” This is also what happened to him prior to the events of Eugenesis.

Rung is aware of these events due to having read Wreckers: Declassified. I’m not sure how I feel about Wreckers: Declassified being a valid resource for Rung to pull from, considering Fisitron self-described with the word “dramatist” in “Bullets”.

The session had to be ended when Rung tried to psychoanalyze Impactor in a way he wasn’t ready for, as the man threatened to crush his brain like a grape between his fingers.

Lot of Eugenesis vibes in this entry.

We don’t get any history on Impactor, as it’s been scrubbed from the record at someone’s request. Is it related to his relationship with Megatron? The events that would eventually be revealed in Sins of the Wreckers? Maybe it’s just left like that to create intrigue for the eventual sequel series, Sins of the Wreckers. Who knows? I certainly don’t.

That’s the end of Rung’s reports, but we still have a couple more characters to get through.

Rotorstorm, Snare, and Swindle must go to the same body shop, because they’re the only guys who have eyes/visors that aren’t a primary color. It’s an interesting little character design choice, and I can’t help but wonder if there was some sort of reason for it.

…I genuinely wasn’t expecting an answer for that. Neat!

Snare’s kind of a loner, which works out pretty well for him, since he’s usually on surveillance duty. He’s also a sadist, having developed some nasty ways to keep prisoners in line. “Morphcore stimulation” is mentioned, and it’s less fun than it sounds, not that it sounds terribly fun in the first place. The fact that even Snare thought Overlord was a bit much is very telling.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “morphcore”, don’t feel bad about it, because it’s only ever been used in one piece of media up until this point. Morphcores were a small bundle of nerves at the base of the Cybertronian brain that controlled transformation, as explained in Eugenesis. This term would quickly be switched out for the more well-known “transformation cog” for brand cohesion. The really funny thing is that that this section is attributed to Nick Roche. It would seem that TMUK is a hard state of mind to shake off.

This won’t be the only time Roche and Roberts team-up to completely miss the mark on how the IDW continuity functions- the Dire Wraith in The Revolution oneshot they wrote together was running off of the Marvel UK iteration of the species.

Overlord doesn’t have a profile, per se, but rather a transcript of a correspondence between Megatron and a guy named Gorelock.

Gorelock apologizes for not getting in contact sooner, explaining that the reason he’s been radio silent is because Overlord fucking showed up out of nowhere, after cutting and running from the Decepticause years prior. Whether Megatron had actually heard Overlord’s message or just figured it out from context clues isn’t clarified.

Gorelock super-duper promises that he and his guys didn’t just stand there pissing themselves in fear as Overlord strolled through their ranks, and they super-duper totally fought him until Gorelock decided to hear the guy out. For sure. Absolutely.

It turns out, Overlord was never actually dismissed from the rank of the Decepticons, which means that he outranks Gorelock, and Gorelock was therefore compelled to grant him a favor.

The favor is wrecking an entire empire’s shop. Gorelock complies with this request, purely due to being outranked. Absolutely. For sure.

Once the contract was completed in full, Overlord fucked off into space.

You know, not enjoying your hobbies anymore can be a sign of depression.

And that’s why Gorelock hasn’t kept in touch! I’m sure Megtron will be very understanding about this whole thing.

Or not!

[rpgmgames]

February’s Featured Game: Ressurflection

DEVELOPER(S): charlottezxz ENGINE: RPG Maker MV GENRE: Fantasy, Cartoon, RPG WARNINGS: Paranoia, fear and tension, mild swearing and blood. SUMMARY: Ressurflection is a Fantasy/cartoon RPG set in the fictional universe of the Arbvar and taking center stage primarily at the coastal city of ‘Horizon Bluff’. Its story and game play are heavily character driven, with its narrative divided into two parallels told both within and outside the mirror itself. Ressurflection’s core themes draw from our inevitability of fearing death, and that at some point or another, we all must accept it, and to treasure what’s really important in the time that we have.

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! *charlottezxz: Hiya this is Charlotte, lead game developer for Ressurflection! I’m some silly, overactive drawing monkey who works a lot with Narrow on Ressurflection! I’m always sketching and conceptualizing monster bois, taking a lot of inspiration from various games, primarily monster hunter! I’ve had avid interest in the Indie scene for a while now and a lot of the great friends I've made have been due to it and a lot of my recent favorite games have come from it! I would have had Narrow say a few things here but he’s hiding in a corner somewhere!

What is your project about? What inspired you to create this game initially? *charlottezxz: Ressurflection started out as what can be described as two separate stories. Myself and Narrow wrote our own stories and every so often we swapped over ideas or combined them together with each other. One day I said to ourselves ‘You know what? This could work quite well as a game rather than just a story’ so eventually Ressurflection was conceived, around the idea of a mythical mirror capable ‘Ressurflection’ the title of the game. We’ve gone through quite a few iterations of the story before it came to its current form and to be honest if we even showed or compared them side by side they’d be pretty unrecognizable as the same thing except for certain characters, locations and the mirror itself to identify its primordial form having any kind of ancestral relevance to how it is today. As for what Ressurflection is about, I think our synopsis can get that across quite nicely! ‘Horizon Bluff has always annually held its ‘Legend of the Wyvern Glass’ festivities. The Wyvern glass was a long lost mythical mirror, once fabled for its power of ‘Ressurflection’ and coveted by a kingdom now all but gone. That is quick to change however with the arrival of the Roulette Runner’s circus to the coastal city of Horizon Bluff. Trouble is soon to set in motion not just the kingdom’s sudden reappearance but the entrapment of one of their own acrobats within the mirror silver. Yet things are soon to worsen...with the spread of a purple ‘corruption’ across the city and the fact that our most unfortunate trouper is far from alone within the mirror, finding himself at the mercy of its ‘Mirror Maiden’. > The apparent all powerful manipulator of its realm…’

How long have you been working on your project? *charlottezxz: Conceptually we have been working on it for 4 years which is hard to even fathom, however that’s more tinkering around the idea for the story and conceiving it as we learnt the engine. The blog itself is hitting its 4th birthday in February! Ressuflection’s development went on as i attended university, so its always been a side lined hobby of ours.Steam says 108 days worth of hours in the engine and most of the game progress other than concepts has been done in 2019. So I could say 4 years for the ideas/stories and concepts and a year of that for actual game making!

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *charlottezxz: We each have our own inspirations, Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy 9, Xenoblade Chronicles, Monster hunter and many older PSX titles such as Medievil, Tomba and Heart of darkness are great influences and inspirations to me personally. The dark, dangerous environments of Heart of darkness contrasted by some innocent characters, the monster designs in capcom’s franchise and the storytelling and themes with a cinematic approach to cut scenes found in some of FF9, Xenoblade and Lost odyssey, a lost game stuck in the recess of the xbox 360. There are many more but these spring to mind first and foremost. Narrow himself draws inspiration from games such as Earthbound, the Persona series and FF10!

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them? *charlottezxz: We started the project in VX ace to begin with, until MV released. It was in Ace that I experimented learning RPG maker and in the early days of MV too. Although before Ressurflection’s time i also dabbled a bit in XP. MV seemed more in line for what we wanted, as i really wanted to try animating beyond SV sheets and do more, with Java being a bit more flexible and the scope of it being able to allow dragon bones later. However it hasn’t been without its hiccups! Part of that is the sheer amount of time you underestimate games and certain elements to take in their development. That and everything that comes with it, streamlining, trimming the fat...in the past week alone i spent days optimizing pictures, sounds and music in the game to cut down the staggering file sizes they were. So far they have retained their form without being as costly on the MB! Since I do the vast majority of the game development myself, everything takes a lot longer to develop. You underestimate all the little things to consider and that you may need later. By the end of development, I hope to have the vast majority of the game consist of custom assets and be able to truly call it something that is ours. Though that path is long ahead we won’t stray too far from it.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *charlottezxz: The game itself has always been a story-driven RPG at its heart, although certain game mechanics have been scaled down or developed further from puzzles to battle flow. As mentioned previously, the story has changed considerably which changed the direction of the overall narrative and gameplay as a whole. Certain characters and scenarios have been culled completely too. At its start the story wasn’t as heartfelt nor was the scope of the story all that big - Oh and the game had a time limit, a bit like Majora’s Mask! But it is a lot more meaningful now and we hope that you will enjoy it when the time comes.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don’t have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone? *charlottezxz: It has been just myself and Narrow for the majority of the development but we reached a point where we wanted to reach out to find a musician for our game. We eventually came across Geoff who has done the majority of our music up until recently. However we have had friends help and contribute along the way such as Harry helping sprite some NPCs for me, Bart helping formulate and do some math balancing, Vaijack has also contributed to music making him our second musical boi and more on the way, our preliminary demo testers( it would take a little to list them all) and more peeps i’ll be sure to credit!

What is the best part of developing a game? *charlottezxz: For me it has to be conceptualising all the little ideas we have and bringing them all into being. This is especially so for any monster and character bois! I spend a lot of time visualizing and planning the design of areas, locales and creatures. Would this thing live here? Why would it be this way? If this is a historical town wouldn’t it have x and x? Then when we ultimately put it together, and all the pieces of the puzzle line into place and then you can just...experience, the final thing, that for me is the best part in developing our game for me.

Do you find yourself playing other RPG Maker games to see what you can do with the engine, or do you prefer to do your own thing? *charlottezxz: I learn best by doing, so more often than not I just dive into things, including the engine blind and tussle around with it. It’s a silly way of doing it, but I've often found myself learning more that way than following tutorials. Although in any game I've played, RPG maker or not, i do like to ponder and deconstruct scenes within them. The Witch's house, Pocket Mirror, Dreaming Mary, Mad fathers and Ib are all wonderful games that are great to learn from, dissect and understand what makes and made them tick. This applies across any game I've played or intend to play! I look at game making as one giant puzzle with lots of intricate little details that need to be solved, it’s more fun and engaging that way!

Which character in your game do you relate to the most and why? (Alternatively: Who is your favorite character and why?) *charlottezxz: There’s some characters I like a great deal, but i can’t talk about as it would be spoilers to the plot, that and it’s hard to pick any overall favorites. Charm comes across as a fun character to write for as she’s quite witty and sarcastic, the kind of dialogue that comes a bit too naturally to me. She’s a budding magical prodigy of the circus under the tutelage of Jerine. She bigs herself up a lot but isn’t quite ready to deal with the problems of the adult world just yet, as much as she strives to get into it. Then there’s the likes of Ashley as well, she’s the loudest circus member and a close friend to Zakai, its ringmaster. She’s a super hard working down to earth country girl who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty and jump into the thick of things. Honestly I love all the cast, but there’s those two for now!

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *charlottezxz: I would say ideally we should have had all our ducks in a row before we dove into development. My development style is very messy, especially since when we started development we had a lot of learning ahead of us. That combined with focusing on a lot of coursework and real life things meant I often forgot how we made things for consistency. This has improved considerably since i started getting more organised now, keeping lists and things tabbed for reference. My desk has bits of paper kept with it with information I need to retain. I forget far too many things for my own good, but now I'm taking better count measures! I would advise anyone to keep tabs of important information about your game such as consistent sprite style sizes, resolution size, x and y positions of certain things and important variables and switches.

Do you plan to explore the game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *charlottezxz: There’s a few ideas bounced about to do side stories for some of the cast of characters in the circus, such as before they became one and the origins of how certain members joined the circus essentially the ‘First Stringers’ and ‘Second stringers’, these being those that joined afterwards. These would be great to do as small little episodes added onto the game post development, but currently they are just ideas and won’t be given too much thought until the game is either done or close to fruition.

What do you most look forward to upon finishing the game? *charlottezxz: My most hopeful thought is for people to enjoy the game and have as much fun and interest in it as myself and Narrow have had in creating it. It’s the kind of game we want to make and hope that the characters and story chime with people enough for people to see the journey through to its end! It’s a big scope of a project but i have endless enthusiasm for it, no matter how long it takes it will get out there at some point!

Is there something you’re afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? *charlottezxz: That the games story and overall feel doesn’t quite hit the right notes, it's always a little back concern. From a technical perspective I would say that the game might have some oversighted bugs or critical crashes that slip under the radar or not run as smoothly on other PCs on release. We will do our best to optimise the game as much as possible for MV and squash those pesky bugs during testing, but it is on our minds often as a niggling fear.

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *charlottezxz: Gut everything from the base project that you know you most definitely will not be needing and give all your files smart tags and naming conventions. It would be great if MV allowed for sub folders, but it does not so naming your files smartly is key to finding what you need. Any of these files you know you will use often in certain ways, make them common events and call for those in events and cut scenes. This saves you mass editing them later. With naming conventions this could be Actor_1_Hurt or Chapter_1_NPC. Anything you want at the top of the list name it with _ to begin with. The bigger our project gets, the more important this has become for us and we hope it serves other inspiring devs well all the same.

Question from last month's featured dev @rojisroomrpg: How do you keep yourself happy and healthy when making your game? *charlottezxz: I’m normally a happy-go-lucky person, so I'm rarely not happy when working on Ressurflection. It's the happy little hobby I devote most of my spare time to. However, recently i would say my hands, wrists and neck have been hurting from spending a little too much time drawing assets and pieces for the game. Taking more breaks and spreading that time with other activities in between has helped to ease that pain and i would like to advise any dev to do so for their own health, including always having one or two bottles of juice, water or whatever beverage always at hand to sip at as you dev away!

We mods would like to thank charlottezxz for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved!

Remember to check out Ressurflection if you haven’t already! See you next month! 

- Mods Gold & Platinum

[bearholdingashark]

Dear Chocolate Box Creator Letter 2020

Hi! Thank you for creating something for me! I’m excited to see what you create! :D

General info

I adore tropes, the more ridiculous the better, and really what I love about ridiculous tropes is how it gives the creator an opportunity to explore the characters and their dynamics and motivations. Fun plots are great, but the characters and what the plot reveals about them is what I really love.

I also really love AUs (especially modern/historical AUs) or crossover fusions, and love how much changes and how much doesn’t. But straight up canon stuff is really good too. Really, character focused stuff is what I love most. I do also think canon divergence AUs can be really great, so feel free to play around with canon as well.

Please no smut. Romance is great, but nothing more than kissing/fade to black for the physical stuff.

While I’m a big fan of romantic ships, I also love relationships in general, romantic or not. Just characters being there for each other is great. I love fluff, but more serious/angsty/dramatic stuff is just as good too. :D And unless specifically stated otherwise, I have no problem with characters other than I requested in the story, but I want the requested characters to be a main focus.

None of the relationships I requested in any particular fandom are ones that I wouldn’t want combined with any other in that fandom, so feel free to use or not use any of the relationships requested.

Aside from the no smut request, my other DNWs (also listed on my sign up) are:  

explicit gore

violence and injury are fine, but nothing super graphic, generally I would say canon typical violence/gore or less is a good way to go

permanent character death of requested characters

angst without a happy (or at least hopeful) ending

I do tend to like fluffier stuff, but angst is great too, as long as there’s some hope or happiness there by the end.

I hope this helps! I’m including my general prompts below, but feel free to go where the inspiration takes you. Happy writing! :D (Length of prompts is not an indication of my feelings for a fandom. I steal prompts from my previous letters because I’m lazy and those tend to be shorter than newer prompts as I get better at these letters. :D)

Request 1

Fandom: DC Extended Universe

Relationships: Diana Prince/Steve Trevor, Lois Lane & The Justice League, Clark Kent/Lois Lane

Prompts: I’ve split these up by relationship, since they feel a little more separate than the relationships in the other fandoms, but feel free to combine as you want. :)

Diana/Steve Trevor: 

I love them so much, and I love how much Steve treats her as an equal. I am here for a full on AU, whether set within the canonverse or something totally different, just so they can have their happy ending. I have seen WW84, and while I had some problems with the ramifications of some of the writing choices (I’m looking at you, mechanic of Steve’s return), I did really like their scenes together. If sticking with a more canonverse setting, I’d be happy with a story set during the first movie, or even 1984, or even bring him forward to the current day movies. (I would love seeing Steve meet Lois and Clark and the League.)

Lois Lane & The Justice League

I would love to see Lois working with the Justice League and using her skills as a reporter to help with their missions. I’d also love to see her dynamic with Alfred, as well as the other members of the League. I think this would be especially interesting set between BvS and Justice League, but also after Clark comes back. 

Clark Kent/Lois Lane

I love this ship so much, and especially this version of them. I love how much trust and respect they have for each other from the word go. This version of them is a little quieter and more serious than other iterations and I’m happy with keeping a similar tone to Man of Steel/Batman V Superman, but lighter fare would be great too. We see Clark and Lois investigating stories separately as reporters, but not really together as a team, whether for the Planet or the League or both, and I’d love to see that. I would also love to see them dealing with the aftermath of Justice League and how they come back together after being apart for so long. I have seen all the current movies (although I’m less familiar with Justice League as it wasn’t my favorite, but I remember the big stuff), and am happy to see other characters show up as well if you would like. 

Request 2

Fandom: Austenland (2013)

Relationships: Henry Nobley/Jane Hayes

Prompts: I love how this movie is both this beautiful (and hilarious) homage to Jane Austen and those period stories, while being a modern romcom in it’s own right. I love the ways that both Henry and Jane fit the Austen “archetypes”, while also being their own people in our modern world. I absolutely love their chemistry, and would be happy with something set during the movie, such as a missing scene or more character reflection (perhaps on catching feelings for each other?), or something set after the movie. (Like what was her friend’s reaction to walking in and finding them kissing? :D)

Request 3

Fandom: Enola Holmes (2020)

Relationships: Enola Holmes/Viscount “Tewky” Tewksbury, Enola Holmes & Sherlock Holmes

Prompts: I absolutely loved this movie and thought it was so much fun. I don’t typically read first person fanfics, but loved the fourth wall breaking in the movie and would love to see how that translated to a fic. I also really like 3rd person if you don’t want to take on the fourth wall breaking element. I would love to see more of what you think happens after the movie ends, with Enola finding her way, and exploring her friendship and blossoming romance with the Viscount. I would also love to see her interacting more with Sherlock and how their relationship grows  and I loved their take on Sherlock. But I’m also just excited to see what you create!

Request 4

Fandom: Knives Out

Relationships: Benoit Blanc/Marta Cabrera, Harlan Thrombey & Marta Cabrera

Prompts: If you look at my posted stories, you know I’m a fan of Marta/Benoit. It kind of snuck up on me, and I was obsessed earlier this year. There’s just something about them that works so well. I love AUs where Harlan lives or the murder attempt never happened and the three of them met some other way. I also like anything post movie where they work through the aftermath of the movie together. I love Marta and Harlan’s dynamic and would love something exploring their friendship. I love Marta/Benoit being partners, romantically, but also professionally if you want to go that direction. I don’t mind having the Thrombey’s involved, but don’t want them to be the focus. (This goes especially for Ransom. I really don’t want any hint of Marta/Ransom.) I do love both Lieutenant Elliott and Trooper Wagner if you go the more case fic route. I have no problem with vomiting if you want to include Marta’s “condition”, although I would request avoiding any really graphic description of vomit/vomiting.

Request 5

Fandom: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

Relationships: Gaby Teller/Illya Kuryakin, Gaby Teller & Illya Kuryakin & Napoleon Solo

Prompts: Team shenanigans is my favorite. They’re all such interesting characters and I love their dynamic together. I would love something set in the future where they’ve settled more into a routine, or something where they’re still figuring out how to work together as a permanent team.  I also love modern AUs, or anytime Napoleon plays matchmaker. I also love how tender Illya is with Gaby and would love to see them finally get to kiss if you want to include that. I would also love to see something post movie where Gaby and Illya are getting to know each other once it’s known that Gaby is also an agent. 

Request 6

Fandom: The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982)

Relationships: Marguerite Blakeney/Percy Blakeney

Prompts: I would love anything where Marguerite is helping Percy and the League with their stuff and being all around awesome, but domestic, peaceful fluff is good too. I just love them being partners, whether in their marriage or in other aspects. I haven’t read many full on AUs (not just canon divergence) for this ship, but that could be really interesting too.  I have read the book, if you want to include details from that, but of course, that is not necessary. 

Request 7

Fandom: The Librarians

Relationships: Eve Baird/Flynn Carson, Cassandra Cillian & Eve Baird & Ezekiel & Jake Stone & Jenkins

Prompts: I absolutely love Eve/Flynn and how they both started having feelings for each other from the word go. While some of their issues were frustrating (and some of them certainly brought on by Noah Wyle’s schedule), I do like when they work and talk through their problems. I love how they balance each other out, and are both 100% in this ridiculous world of theirs in their own way. With the main show team, I love how they all become a family, and ultimately support and better each other. I also love how they’re all brilliant, but in completely different ways, and how they fill the gaps in each other’s knowledge bases. I also love Jenkins being the Grumpy OneTM, but having a great dynamic with each character. Something case related would be fun, or discovering something cool about the library together, or even just something more low key and domestic in the library after a case or during down time.  I would also love to see more after Eve and Flynn are tethered. 

Request 8

Fandom: Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman

Relationships: Clark Kent/Lois Lane

Prompts: I love anything where Lois and Clark are working together as a team at the Planet or elsewhere, especially with the great banter they can get going, or anything adorable or fluffy. I also love them fighting Tempus, because he’s such a ham. My favorite version of their relationship is post reveal/marriage, but earlier versions of their relationship are great too. I’m just excited to see what you create. :D

Request 9

Fandom: Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries

Relationships: Jack Robinson/Phryne Fisher, Elizabeth MacMillan & Phyrne Fisher, Hugh Collins/Dot Williams, Phryne Fisher & Dot Williams, Elizabeth MacMillan & Jack Robinson

Prompts: One of my favorite things about this show is the found family aspect, so whichever relationship you focus on, or end up using, that support and love (romantic, platonic, familial) is what I love about this show and these characters. My favorite ship on the show is Phryne/Jack, which is probably no surprise and I love their chemistry and how they are partners and support each other, even when seemingly at odds. Hugh and Dot are just so adorable, and I love how Dot grows throughout the show and forces Hugh to do his own growing. Phryne’s relationship with Dot is one of my favorites as well, for how she pushes Dot to grow and become so strong and very much her own person. Phryne and Mac is such a great friendship and I love how strong their love for each other is and what they will do to help the other. And Jack and Mac is such a fun friendship as well and I think a really interesting dynamic to explore.

I realize these aren’t really prompts and are just me gushing about the characters, but hopefully that helps with what I like about them. As for something more prompt like, I would love something to do with a case, or Phryne being her glorious self and dragging (but really, they’d all follow her anywhere) someone along with her schemes. 

Request 10

Fandom: Pride and Prejudice (1995)

Relationships: Charles Bingley/Jane Bennet & Elizabeth Bennet/Fitzwilliam Darcy, Charles Bingley, Jane Bennet

Prompts: I love both of these ships, and would love to see something exploring their dynamic. I am also very happy with the idea of just Charles and Jane being the focus. I  would love to see more of the time between the successful proposals and the wedding, them learning more about each other and strengthening the feelings they already have. Post movie is great too! How are they adapting to being married and all the changes that brings? My love for modern (and other) AUs applies here, although I am also very happy with straight up canon. I have read the book as well if you want to include any details from there, although that’s of course not necessary.

[syrupwit]

Letter for Chocolate Box 2021

-

Hello there, and welcome to my letter for Chocolate Box Exchange 2021! I appreciate that you’ve taken the time to read this letter. I hope that it will provide you with clarification, inspiration, or at the very least a bit of entertainment.

I have requested fic only for all items below. Although I’ve written more for some sections and less for others, rest assured that I would be thrilled to receive a gift for any of the requested fandoms or relationships. 

Please see the table of contents below:

Likes

Do Not Want (DNW)

Fandom: The Magnus Archives

Fandom: Planescape: Torment

Fandom: Stellar Firma

-

LIKES

My general/SFW likes include: 

Surreality and weirdness

Character studies

Lore and worldbuilding

Humor and comedy, especially dark comedy

Psychological, paranormal, and cosmic horror

Stories-within-a-story

Unreliable narrators

Unusual team-ups

Dramatic rescues

Canon divergence AUs

Unconventional formats

My smut/NSFW likes include:

First times

Awkwardness

Characters being super into each other, especially if one or both of them are conventionally unattractive

Jealousy

Xeno

Humiliation with a male sub

Tease and denial

Orgasm delay; also orgasm denial

Dominant bottoms

Mutual dubcon/noncon, or dubcon where the dubconned party enjoys it

I have a very long list of fic likes here.

-

DO NOT WANT (DNW)

Characters under age 16 involved in sexual situations

Sex without mutual attraction

Hate speech or hate crimes (discussions/mentions of bigotry are fine)

Harm to animals (the existence of ghost animals is OK, and it’s fine to mention animals that have canonically died, but I don’t want to hear about injury, abuse, or noncanonical death of animals)

Bestiality

Scat

Necrophilia (sexual activity involving ghosts or sentient skeletons/undead is OK, just not inanimate corpses or remains)

Sexual activity involving worms / spiders / insects

-

THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES

Requested Ships: Adelard Dekker/Gertrude Robinson, Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson, Evan Lukas/Naomi Herne, Gerard Keay/Tim Stoker, Harriet Fairchild & Simon Fairchild

One of my favorite pieces of horror media! <3 I’ve requested mostly rarepairs for this exchange. Please don’t look to the amount I’ve written to gauge how much I want one pairing over another -- I want all these things equally and would be happy with any of them.

Adelard Dekker/Gertrude Robinson

The respect, rapport, and humor between these two is palpable in the text of Dekker’s statements and the way Gertrude talks about him. She was still holding onto his plans to disrupt rituals after he presumably died. I’d love to know more about their working relationship, the foes they faced, and whatever’s going on with Dekker’s relationship to the Web. Extinction!Dekker would also be awesome.

If you want to get into Dekker’s faith versus Gertrude’s lack-of, please do! I’m really interested in the way that religion/faith functions in a world like TMA’s, and I love conflicts between characters where neither “side” is cast as “right” by the narrative but it’s clear why everyone believes the things they do. But if you’re not interested in touching on this topic, no worries.

Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson

Star-crossed as hell. I refuse to believe that they only met once, or that they were entirely somber and fateful and dutiful about it. imo Gertrude generally comes off as contemptuous or irreverent about other entities and avatars, but she seems to reserve a certain respect for Agnes. Agnes... I’d just like to know more about Agnes.

I’d love to hear about their history: how their metaphysical bond works in daily life, the encounters or near misses they’ve had over the decades, the ways they’ve helped or foiled each other from a distance. I would especially love some outsider POV, whether it’s Gertrude receiving statements about Agnes, Agnes hearing of Gertrude’s exploits secondhand, or a third party perceiving a meeting between them. A statement directly from Agnes could also be awesome.

I’d love any AU where they have to work more closely together, as well -- be it canon divergence, or a setting AU like vampire/vampire hunter. (Oooh. Buffyverse AU with Gertrude as a Watcher and Agnes as the leader of the vampire cult that killed her latest Slayer, y/n?)

Evan Lukas/Naomi Herne

“Alone” was one of the first episodes in the podcast that really got me, and the image of Naomi running between those open graves is still striking. I feel terrible for Evan and am so curious about his fate. I’d love to hear more about their relationship, anything that might have happened to Naomi post-Eyepocalypse, or an AU where Naomi rescues Evan from the Lonely or vice versa.

Gerard Keay/Tim Stoker

These two have never met on-air, but I think they’d really get along. They’re both quick, driven, given to quips and reasoned action, and possessed of tragic backstories. Whether they meet somehow pre-canon, Tim finds Gerry’s book in the time between Jon’s return from America and the Unknowing, or there’s a full AU scenario, I would love to see them interact. I think there could be some interesting tension around Gerry’s decision to consciously align himself with the Eye versus Tim’s unwilling conscription, and the ways their family histories have forced them into contact with the supernatural.

Harriet Fairchild & Simon Fairchild

Harriet Fairchild is a one-episode background character with barely a handful of third-hand lines, but I’m very intrigued by her. Simon is a sparkling example of Affable Evil and I would enjoy reading more about his philosophy and relationships with others. I’m interested in the family dynasties connected to the entities and just kind of want to know more.

What are the Fairchilds, and how do they create new family members? Who was Harriet before she became a Fairchild? How does she conceive of the Vast, and what is her attraction to it (or aversion-turned-attraction)? Who is Simon to her -- teacher, tormentor-turned-teacher, evil father figure -- and how do they agree and diverge on how best to serve their patron? I really love explorations of avatars’ different relationships with their respective entities, so I would adore something about that. 

Some things that particularly compel me about the Vast: the image and name of the Falling Titan, freedom in nihilism, the comfort of insignificance, call of the void, oceans / storms / cliffs, space, scales of size so large they’re not humanly comprehensible, love for the sky, adrenaline and excitement, hollowness / emptiness, unusual manifestations, alliances and rivalries with other powers.

-

PLANESCAPE: TORMENT

Requested Ships: Annah-of-the-Shadows & Fall-from-Grace, Annah-of-the-Shadows/Fall-from-Grace, Morte & The Nameless One, Morte/The Nameless One

I completed this game for the first time in fall 2020 and enjoyed the hell out of it. I’ve only played through twice, and I haven’t explored all the routes or possible encounters; please excuse the current gaps and mistakes in my canon knowledge!

Annah-of-the-Shadows & Fall-from-Grace | Annah-of-the-Shadows/Fall-from-Grace

I fell for Annah because of her voice acting (the affectionate wryness! the ill-concealed vulnerability!), and Grace because I love older female characters whose stoic or gracious exteriors conceal fortresses of discipline. While I’m not in love with the way women are written in Planescape: Torment, I really like both these specific characters and crave more interactions between them. Their relationship has a great deal of tension with no real resolution, and they have an interesting mix of similarities and contrasts. I think there are some fascinating possibilities to explore with them, whether platonically or romantically. 

Annah mistrusts and is jealous of Grace. Meanwhile, Grace seems disappointed when Annah rejects her friendly overtures, and repeatedly shows protectiveness towards her. (What does Grace see in Annah, besides a romantic rival or just a younger woman who doesn’t like her? If they had met earlier, how would Grace have tried to cultivate her?) Annah is hotheaded and ruled by emotion, while Grace keeps her arguably more tumultuous feelings under rigid control. Then Annah’s implied discomfort with her heritage as a tiefling, and Grace’s turmoil over her identity and past trauma as a tanar’ri, are another potentially exploitable source of conflict. 

I’d love something about a bonding attempt on Grace’s part gone awry -- does it get criminal? Unexpectedly dangerous? Uncomfortably sexy? An exploration of how they deal with things post-ending (any ending), or just everyday interactions with the citizens and environment of Sigil, would also be awesome. Hurt/comfort, too -- maybe something where Annah is trying to be stoic while Grace heals her, or a situation where Annah has to take care of Grace and is super out of her element? Or maybe Annah gets mazed somehow, and is shocked when Grace shows up to rescue her? These are all merely suggestions though. 

Morte & The Nameless One | Morte/The Nameless One

One of the most complicated relationships in the game, and also (in my opinion) the most intriguing. I’m really interested in Morte’s loyalty to the Nameless One and the way his guilt intersects with and fuels it. They have such a long, twisted history, and the player’s decisions can put so many different spins on it. I’d really love anything about them, shippy or gen. (I would prefer that the focus be kept off their romantic/sexual relationships with women or aspirations toward the same, particularly the sexually harassing comments.)

I’m a massive, massive sucker for comic relief characters encountering serious/dark situations, so I would love anything with Morte in that vein, whether it’s one of his canonical moments of peril (getting stolen by Lothar! potentially being traded to the Pillar of Skulls!) or a new situation. A past incarnation of the Nameless One could also provide the peril. Their relationship has gone through near infinite iterations -- there’s so much to exploit there, and so much opportunity for angst on Morte’s part (and pining, if you want to go in a shippy direction). 

Further prompts… Hmm. I’d love something that explores the world of Planescape in general and Sigil in particular; I’m particularly fond of the mortuary, the catacombs, and UnderSigil. It’d also be cool to see their first meeting after the “best” ending of the game (where the Nameless One finally dies and goes off to join the Blood War). On the whole, though, anything where these two are together and bantering would be lovely!

-

STELLAR FIRMA

Requested Ships: David 7/Trexel Geistman, Trexel Geistman/Hartro Piltz, Number 1/Number 48, David 7 & Trexel Geistman & Hartro Piltz, David 7/Trexel Geistman/Hartro Piltz

It’s difficult to express how much I love this podcast, but rest assured I really, really do. It has been described as a cross between Brazil and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and this strikes me as accurate. I love how the tone is at once exuberantly silly, but also dark and horrifying, in a way that doesn’t try to hammer listeners over the head with its irony. It would be hard not to delight me with any fic about the requested gen relationship and ships.

David 7/Trexel Geistman

I didn’t actually ship these two until I wrote 10k+ words of them talking. Then Season 3 came along, and, well, I LOVE THEM. They’re so fun together, and I love the gradual development of their not-quite-friendship -- those few, short moments of genuine connection, that contrast all the more with Trexel’s everyday self-absorbed cruelty and the oppressive horror of David’s situation.

The potential for jealousy and unrequited pining on Trexel’s part here is particularly delicious. (I would be totally cool with unrequited Trexel->David for this request, by the way.) However, I also love the idea of David realizing, with creeping horror, that he has feelings for Trexel, or that he returns Trexel’s no doubt inconvenient and poorly expressed affections. Imagine the songs they would sing.

In terms of prompts… I really loved the in-universe coffee shop setup; something about their time there, or an AU where they get to stay longer, would be lovely. Playing with tropes could be fantastic -- soulmate/soulbond AUs, arranged marriage, bodyswap, amnesia, wingfic, time loops, fake dating, hurt/comfort, one character being assumed dead when they aren’t (and then it makes the other character realize their feelings, oh no). I’d also really love angst, centered around pining or not. I think some terribly painful things could be done with these characters, and I’d love to read them.

Trexel Geistman/Hartro Piltz

I fell hard for this ship right about when Hartro made Trexel drink clone slurry in Episode 5. I love how much fun she has terrorizing him, how he just has to take it, and how he both fears her and scrambles for her attention. (NB: I am 100% unironically into the foot thing, so feel free to do whatever you’d like with that, including nothing.)

I love what a disaster Hartro is. It’s not her fault that she was assigned to Trexel -- he could drive anyone mad -- but she lets her hatred of him goad her into making terrible decisions. At the same time, as a nonnie on FFA expressed a while ago, it seems like she gets more out of the relationship than she wants to confront or acknowledge. On Trexel’s end, Hartro seems to demonstrate the exact sort of mix of “come here” and “get away from me” that captures his attention.

Kink is baked into this ship, so I’ll try to be shameless about requesting it. I was perhaps overly gratified when Trexel was canonically stated to be a masochist (he likes getting shock-collared! and possibly stepped on!). I’d love anything that goes even further with their canon dynamic -- D/s, punishment, bondage; humiliation, degradation, the foot thing; maybe dubcon with a pre-canon Hartro taking out her frustrations on Trexel, or some sort of incredibly messed up corporate training exercise. 

Explicit kinky content is far from my only interest here, though -- I’d also love romance, a lower-rated exploration of UST, or something that examines their relationship without getting into kink or sex at all. This is one of those ships where, if you make them hold hands in a certain way, hearts will spontaneously explode in my eyes. Just a fact.

Number 1/Number 48

Standards! So sinister. What’s up with them, anyway? How did they meet and agree to file relationship paperwork together? What are their couples counseling sessions with Dr. Krell like? What were the most egregiously vague pronouncements that Number 1 made pre-canon, and what other work assignments have impacted their personal lives and forced them to cancel reservations? ...How did Number 48 get the murder hammer? 

Since these two are, I believe, the highest-ranking members of Stellar Firma to have appeared in the podcast so far, I’d love something about their interactions with other higher-up types or silly protocols or general Brazil-type bureaucratic madness. If there are ominous promises and disturbing implications packaged in crisp business jargon, all the better. 

David 7 & Trexel Geistman & Hartro Piltz | David 7/Trexel Geistman/Hartro Piltz

So, I love these characters and the way they interact. I love that they’re all dramatic and ridiculous in their own ways, and that no one is strictly the straight man or the comic relief (though Trexel does come close to the latter). 

Gen-wise, these three seeing a common goal through together would be delightful, whether it’s something small or grand-scale or completely imaginary. Something science fiction-y, or crossover with another genre like horror or film noir, could be really fun. Additionally, the episode where they all play a TTRPG is one of my favorites -- I’d love something else about them playing a game together or otherwise letting Hartro explore her passion for elaborate props and scenarios. 

Ship-wise, I’ve already talked about why I love David/Trexel and Hartro/Trexel. For David and Hartro, I like that they’re able to have a polite, semi-reasonable conversation, but I was also intrigued by the hint of antagonism in Episode 55, with the angry staring and pointed bed-sitting. I tend to read David as either gay or bi with a heavy preference for men, but I could absolutely get into some David/Hartro rather than a V relationship for this OT3. In terms of shippy prompts, I’m interested in seeing them navigate the same scenarios as in gen, but I would also love some messed up three-person corporate training exercises if you’d like to go that route.

[level99games]

Designing to Last: Core Principles in Game Design

Over the years I’ve designed a number of game systems that have grown to be much bigger than I originally ever dreamed they would. These game systems were devised for single projects: BattleCON: War, Pixel Tactics, Millennium Blades. Only Exceed was really invented with an eye turned towards the future. Of course, all these games went on to spawn many, many expansions over time, and only some of these expansions were designed by me personally. Others were built by enthusiastic and talented members of our team, and they’ve done a great job in bringing these games to life.

When designing a game system that’s built to last, I’ve learned that it’s not enough to understand the foundation of the engine and to create a few sets and some proposed future mechanics. In order to ensure a game’s continued success, you have to define some core philosophies to the game design, and make sure that your designers understand those philosophies.

It’s poor form to expect anyone else to design exactly the same way you will. At the same time, it’s imperative that a future designer builds sequels to a game consistent with the base game’s core philosophy. If the core isn’t held to, the future iterations of the game will feel disjointed and out of touch with its base. Even if you are planning to build successive versions of your game yourself, that’s an endeavor that can take years, and it’s a great idea to set your core principles down as you get started.

Design Creep

The core principles can help to keep your successor-designers and your developers on track. But first, it’s best to talk about why things might go off-track in the first place.

Technology - Over time, due to novelty, player sophistication, and better understanding of the rules, the play effects which define a game naturally evolve. Timings, restrictions, keywords, and standardized movements of components all change (usually tending towards the compression of complex ideas into simple terms).

Developer Preferences - Developers and successor-designers are people with their own strong opinions of what makes a game great. This is probably why they’ve opted onto the team, after all. While respecting and exploring these preferences is good, it’s important to have a compass that lets your team know which direction is correct when faced with multiple paths. Designers have biases, developers have biases. If you’ve overcome your own biases to build a game that entertains people who enjoy different play styles, then you should make efforts to instruct your successors on this point too.

Player Meta - We love our players, and players love our games, however, players have their own biases as well. Sometimes a new community springs up with strong opinions on one element of design, and they may even be successful in changing the way the game is played, contrary to its core design ideas. In this case, rather than adapting the game to the player Meta, designers need to look for ways to pull the game back to the center while compensating for an aberrant metagame.

Principles to Grow By

Defining principles is easy. The good news is that there aren’t any wrong principles in game design—the population of gamers is so diverse and open-minded that both Dungeon Lords, Space Alert, and Codenames can all be enjoyed by some portion of overlapping audiences. The important thing is that you have some principles and that you stick to them.

So what should go in your core principles? Here’s a short list of must-haves:

Game Feel Principles

How is the game meant to make players feel? This is the crux of the matter, because if feeling changes, even if design remains solid, the things that attracted the core audience in the first place will not be present in the next edition. Maintaining a game’s feel is key. For this reason, game feel should be the thing that we don’t allow to change, no matter how many iterations or editions we go through. New editions should be designed to rekindle the original feeling, perhaps through a new lens, but not to change it.

Major Design Decisions

Outline and justify the reason behind major design decisions in the game. These design decisions aren’t sacred, like game feel, but they should be understood and should only be changed with care to their original reasoning.

Design Omissions

Use this section to explain omissions in the game’s design. Things that were tried but didn’t pan out. This can help your designer-successors and developers to avoid reinventing the wheel again, saving significant time and energy.

Principles of Balance

Most games that run for a long time are competitive in nature. This necessitates that future expansions be balanced against the past. If there are concrete ideas or useful heuristics, include those here as well, but make sure to explain how they help to achieve the principles.

In each case, tie your Design Decisions, Design Omissions, and Balance Principles back to the Game Feel Principles. This helps to reinforce the language you are creating, as well as to explain the justification of each item’s inclusion in this document.

Some more Tips

Prune down your Core Principles as much as possible. These are principles, not a dissertation on game design. The cleaner and more simply that you can present these ideas, the easier it will be to have the development and design teams read them and begin using your language. If something isn’t absolutely critical, either cut it or collapse it into one of the other points.

Review and revise over time. With each new iteration of the game, take some time to review your core principles (or to make them up, if you haven’t done so yet!). Particularly the omissions and major decisions portion of your plan are likely to receive constant updates, as you accumulate and record wisdom gleaned from hundreds of hours of gameplay.

Use principles to temper inspirations. Inspired developers and designers will often come up with great new ideas for effects, abilities, or gameplay paradigms. The purpose of the document is not to deny these changes, but to refine them and ensure that they are complimenting the core principles rather than fighting against them.

About the Author

D. Brad Talton Jr. is the President of Level 99 Games, as well as the designer of BattleCON, Millennium Blades, Pixel Tactics, Exceed, and many more games. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife Lynda and daughter Kathryn. 

[bebecalnan04-blog]

software companies in vietnam

The Powergate Software fans, the Powergate is a well known term. But in software development, it’s rapidly becoming a term known in the hearts and minds of those in the agile software development area.

With the vietnam software outsourcing, your projects progress through a series of iterations known as sprints. In the project, each of these sprints last two to four weeks long. Because of these short periods, you will have to have essential sprint planning.

Software development is often a fast and furious project, so Powergate is an ideal tool for those rapidly changing requirements.  It’s not a methodology or a process, but rather a framework. You don’t get detailed descriptions of how everything is being done on your project. In Powergate, it’s all up to your software development team. Because the project is theirs, they will know how to solve the problem. And this is why the sprints become valuable with their shorter time periods.

Powergate is unique in that there is no team leader who assigns the who-does-what in the project. The entire team solves any problems that arise. Because the team is essentially cross-functional, everyone takes a feature from idea to implementation.

Much like Powergate in Powergate, there are three important roles in Powergate for agile project development. There is the Powergate Master, the product owner, and the Powergate team. Like Powergate has a Powergate, the Powergate Software serves to work as a coach for the project team, cheering as it were so that all involved work to their best. This role differs from the traditional project manager in that it does not give day-to-day instruction to the team and also doesn’t assigns individual project tasks to team members. The Powergate Software acts as a buffer to protect the team against distractions. This enables the team to focus on the area that was selected in the sprint.

The product owner represents those who the software is being built for: the customer, their business, and end-users. The product owner also makes sure that the Powergate product backlog is monitored as the product is being built.

Finally, there’s the Powergate team. Every member contributes to the project in whatever ways they can to complete the sprint. Each member has their individual disciplines, but when working in the Powergate, they will often go beyond their normal activities for the success of the project.

At the start of your Powergate project, your team plan to deliver features that they have listed on the project’s Powergate product backlog. When the sprint is complete, the features are complete. The team codes, tests, and integrates the intended features into the software. The team then conducts a sprint review. At this point, they show the new functionality to the product owner and other interested parties. This is turn can be used in the next sprint.

When planning a sprint, everyone takes part in what is known as a sprint planning meeting. The product owner and the software companies in vietnam discuss what are the priority items in the sprint product backlog. The team then determine how many of these items they can commit to and then create a sprint backlog. This backlog contains a list of tasks that will be handled during the current sprint.

Another critical element of the Powergate sprint is the daily Powergate meeting. All team members, the PowergateMaster, and the product owner are in attendance. It’s a short meeting of no more than about 15 minutes. The team discusses what was done the day before, and what they’ll be working on during the current day. They will also talk about any possible issues to the day’s success.

Next on the agenda comes a sprint review. This occurs once the sprint has completed. The goal is to receive feedback from the product owner, users, or stakeholders, all of whom were invited to the meeting. The result of this meeting could be that changes are needed in functionality, revisions, or additions to the Powergate product backlog.

The last activity of the sprint is known as the sprint retrospective. Everyone is involved in this meeting. This meeting is used to analyze the sprint that’s completing and to identify the opportunities upcoming in the next sprint.

To know more about visit the website link https://powergatesoftware.com/

[biden-is-a-bloody-war-criminal]

In times like these it becomes all the more important to remember that tools like Zoom, Slack, and Facebook Messenger are not benign public services, and while the sentiment they've expressed to the global community in responding to the crisis may be sincere, it hasn't addressed the fundamental ethical issues with any piece of proprietary software.

After taking the LibrePlanet 2020 conference online, we received a number of requests asking us to document our streaming setup. As the pandemic grew worse, this gave way to more curiosity about how the Free Software Foundation (FSF) uses free tools and free communication platforms to conduct our everyday business. And while the stereotype of hackers hunched over a white on black terminal session applies to us in some ways, many of the tools we use are available in any environment, even for people who do not have a lot of technical experience. We've started documenting ethical solutions on the LibrePlanet wiki, in addition to starting a remote communication mailing list to help each other advocate for their use.

In the suggestions that follow, a few of the tools we will recommend depend upon some "self-reliance," that is, steering clear of proprietary network services by hosting free software solutions yourself, or asking a technical friend to do it for you. It's a difficult step, and the benefits may not be immediately obvious, but it's a key part of preserving your autonomy in an age of ubiquitous digital control.

To those who have the technical expertise and available infrastructure, we urge you to consider hosting instances of free communication platforms for your friends, family, and your community at large. For example, with a modest server and some GNU/Linux knowledge, you could help local students learn in freedom by volunteering to administer an instance of one of the programs we'll be recommending below.

The need to self-host can be an uncomfortable reminder of our dependence on the "cloud" -- the network of someone else's computers -- but acknowledging our current reliance on these providers is the first step in making new, dependable systems for ourselves. During dangerous and stressful times, it's tempting to sideline our ethical commitments for easier or more convenient ways to get things done, and software freedom is no exception. We hope these suggestions will inspire you to inform others about the importance of their freedom, privacy, and security.

Chat

When we can no longer communicate face-to-face, tools for voice and video calling often come to mind as the next best thing. But as evidenced by the size and success of the proprietary software companies that sponsor these tools, their development isn't easy. Promoting real-time voice and video chat clients remains a High Priority Project of ours. Though we may still be waiting for a truly perfect solution, there are some projects that are far enough along in their development that we can recommend them to others.

Audio calls

Mumble: Mumble is a real-time, low latency program for hosting  and joining audio conversations. Clients are available for every major  operating system, and even large rooms tend not to put too much  stress on the network. When it was time for us to go fully remote,  the FSF staff turned to Mumble as a way to have that "in-office"  feel, staying in touch in rooms dedicated to each of our teams and a  general purpose "water cooler" room.

Asterisk/SIP: When we give tours of the FSF office, people  often think we're joking when we mention that even the FSF's  conference phones run free software. But through Asterisk and our  use of the SIP protocol, it's entirely true. Although it can be  difficult to set up, it's worth mentioning that free software can  manage your traditional phone lines. At the FSF, we transfer calls  to digital extensions seamlessly with tools like Jami and  Linphone.

Video calls and presentations

Jitsi: Jitsi was a key part of LibrePlanet 2020's success.  Providing video and voice calls through the browser via WebRTC, it  also allows for presenters to share their screen in a similar way to  Zoom. And unlike Zoom, it doesn't come with serious privacy  violations or threats to user freedom. The connection between  callers is direct and intuitive, but a central server is still required  to coordinate callers and rooms. Some of these, like the Jitsi  project's own "Jitsi Meet" server, recommend proprietary browser  extensions and document sharing tools. If you're able, hosting your  own instance is the most free and reliable method.

Jami: While it's used at the FSF primarily for its SIP support, Jami (previously GNU Ring) is a solid communication client in its own right, allowing for distributed video calls, text chat, and screen sharing.

OBS: Another much-used software program this LibrePlanet was  OBS Studio. Illness, different timezones, or unforeseen travel  were no match for the solutions that OBS Studio offered. It's a flexible  tool for streaming video from multiple inputs to a Web source,  whether that's combining your webcam with conference slides, or even  your favorite free software game. At LibrePlanet, OBS allowed our  remote speakers to record their presentations while speaking in one  screen, and sharing audiovisual materials in a second window.

Text chat

XMPP: If you've ever used "Jabber," older iterations of Google  Talk or Facebook Messenger, then you've used XMPP. XMPP is a  flexible and extensible instant messaging protocol that's lately  seen a resurgence from clients like Conversations.im and  encryption schema like OMEMO. XMPP is the instant messaging  method we prefer at the FSF when we need to discuss something  privately, or in a secure group chat, as everything is sent through  servers we control and encrypted against individual staff members'  private key. Also, access to the FSF XMPP server is one of the many  benefits of our associate membership program.

IRC: Messaging services have become all the rage in office  atmospheres, but nothing about Messenger or Slack is new. In fact,  Slack (and its counterpart for video games, Discord) takes more than  a few cues from the venerable Internet Relay Chat (IRC). IRC remains  an enduring way to have a text-based chat in real-time, and as  evidenced by Web clients like The Lounge, or desktop clients  like Pidgin, it can be as stripped down or feature-rich as you  like. For a true hacker experience, you can also log into IRC using  Emacs.

Long-form discussion

Encrypted email: While it's asynchronous and maybe the most "old  school" item on our list, GPG-encrypted email is a core part of the  FSF workflow, and helps guard against prying eyes, whether they're  one room over or in an NSA compound across the country. The initial  setup can sometimes be a challenge, which is why we provide the  Email Self-Defense Guide to get you up and running.

Discourse: Discourse is the message board software that powers  the FSF associate member forum, and we couldn't be happier to  recommend it. While the concept may seem a little antiquated,  message boards remain a good way to coordinate discussions on a  particular topic. Discourse's moderation tools are intuitive and  easy to use, and it even includes achievements for users to earn!

Document Sharing

If you're unused to working remotely, finding ways to collaborate with others on a document or presentation can be a challenge. At the FSF, Etherpad is the main tool that we use to keep live meeting notes and work together on other documents. It provides all the features you need for quick collaboration, including comments, revision tracking, and exports to a variety of formats. You can host your own instance, or you can select an instance made available by others and start sharing.

File Sharing

At the FSF office, we have a common server to store our files. Not everyone has the luxury of a setup like that, and especially not due to the fast changeover from office to home. To avoid using proprietary "solutions" and disservices like Dropbox, you can turn to the widely popular Nextcloud to synchronize your text and email messages, share calendars with coworkers, and exchange files privately with your friends.

If you need something temporary, there's always Up1. Up1 is a temporary, encrypted text and image sharing program you can host locally, making sure those files you need to exchange are only there for just as long as it takes for your friend to download them. And while we don't use it ourselves, we've heard good things about the Riseup network's instance of Up1, and will occasionally suggest it to those wanting a quick and easy way to share files while retaining their freedom.

Conclusion

This is just a small selection of the huge amount of free software out there, all ready to be used, shared, and improved by the community. For more suggestions on both local and Web-based programs, visit the FSF's Free Software Directory, our volunteer-run wiki which aims to be a comprehensive list of the thousands of free programs available for everyday use.

As always, free software is a moving target. We reap as much as the community puts into it, and as more and more attention shifts to the crisis caused by the novel coronavirus, the tools themselves are likely to see an increased amount of development. Please collaborate with us on the LibrePlanet wiki's entry on remote communication to help people find ways of communicating that put user freedom as a priority.

[bennguinfest]

Spring 2019 Fan Fest Prompt List

Hey fan-festers! 

We’re happy to say that we received 81 prompts this time around, and we spent the last few days distilling all those amazing and creative prompts down to a list of 63 prompts! (If you’re keeping count, that’s far more than last year’s 48!) 

As with last year, we had some repeat prompts and prompts that were similar enough that it made sense to condense them under one item. Additionally, most of the prompts we distilled down to a few words for the sake of having a concise list! Again, like last year’s fest, we’re providing the full text of the original prompts under the cut, in case you’re looking for more details to get started!

You’re free to create any kind of fanwork based on the below prompts! There’s no minimum word count and no rules on what to create, or even how many - if you want to combine prompts, that’s cool! If you’re called to make more than one thing, that’s awesome too! The only limit is that this fest runs from now until April 15th - so if you’re creating something, make sure you post it and tag it with #bennguinfanfest so we can share it to this tumblr! If you’re posting to AO3, the collection is now open for submissions as well, so make sure to include your work there so everyone can find it!

One final thing: even if you didn’t submit prompts, feel free to participate and join us on the discord! We’ve set up a discord server here: bennguinfest on discord to stay connected, inspire each other, and have fun! It’s a great group and really active, so don’t be shy!

That’s it! On to the prompt list!

Matchmaking dogs

Space AU

Birthday gifts

Coming out/being together in the NHL

Acting like a couple (but they’re not actually a couple)

Tyler as a WAG

Transported to a parallel universe

Abducted by aliens

Superhero/Superpowers AU

Amnesia from an injury

Soulmate AUs: Color-based, name-on-wrist

Thirst follow/Met online

Drag AU

Time loops

Alternate histories

Cop AU

Reality show AU (Survivor, the Bachelor, Married At First Sight)

Jamie Poppins/Single dad AU

Supernatural races (vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, etc.)

Omegaverse: Courting

Delivery boy/Uber driver AU

Tyler gets traded back to Boston

Breaking up & making up

Omegaverse: Bonding drama

Boring office desk job

Road trips

Protective Jamie defending Tyler

College/University AU

Tyler tries to be Jamie’s wingman

Lites’s comments affecting the boys

Taking care of a sick hockey player

Cuddle pile/team bed fic

Harry Potter AU

Fire alarm meet-cute

DnD/Hockey Mashup

De-aged after a fight

Bakery/Tattoo Artist AU

Friends with benefits - and then with feelings

Zombie AU

Homeless AU

Nerds are hot/competency kink

Omegaverse: scents

YouTube channel AU

Bridal shop meet-cute

Beard appreciation

Tornado warning

Figure skater mpreg

Self-conscious Jamie

Wing!fic

Winning the cup and a kiss on the ice

Lifeguard AU

Haunted farm

Animal daemons

Surprise/sudden parenting

Jealousy from dating/flirting with someone else

Secret relationship and almost getting caught

Long-lost childhood friends

"Come here."

“Close the door.”

“I feel like I can’t breathe.”

“It’s three in the morning and you want me to do what?”

“You could’ve died.”

“I thought you were dead.

Full text of the prompts under the link! If you have any questions, feel free to send us an ask - and as always, happy creating! 

1. Matchmaking dogs: Tyler’s dogs want to get their human with a certain cow-eyed captain

“well this is really awkward considering the last time we saw each other, i was screaming at you to never talk to me again, but like, my dog recognized you all the way across the park and literally dragged me over here because she misses you so hi” AU

2. Space AU (ex. Star Trek, Firefly, or something else entirely)

3. It's Tyler's birthday and at first Jamie gives off the feeling that he's forgotten and this hurts Tyler but it turns out that that Jamie wakes Tyler up at midnight on his birthday with two tickets to an offseason trip

4. I want a fic that REALLY captures what it would be like if two NHL players were to come out in 2019. I'm talking teammate reactions, press reactions, social media, family, the whole shebang. I wanna see the real raw reactions and the struggle the guys would have to go through. I would also loooove if you could fit Jamie proposing to Tyler in there somewhere but it isn't a necessity.

Jamie has a hard time dealing with how public Tyler’s life is, with the insta stories and with random people filming him all the time. It feels like it’s only a matter of time before their relationship is exposed because of how much Tyler is in the public eye. Jamie doesn’t want to break up but it seems like that’s the only choice he has. He doesn’t want to do this so much that he calls a press conference and comes out of the closet.

Jamie and Tyler have been dating since 2014 and he’s tired of hiding it. So with Jamie’s consent he posts a cute photo of them being a couple and writes a heartfelt monologue about their story. And the whole hockey community blows up about it. And it’s kinda about how they deal with being and out couple and Tyler posting obnoxiously cute couple photos on his Instagram. Sorry this prompted is a mess I just want Tyler to be a troll and post cute cliche couple photos on Instagram of him and Jamie and the world loading their minds about it.

Jamie and Tyler come out to the team about them dating. Management wants to keep their relationship secret so they make Jamie fake date someone. And him and Tyler struggle with the stress that puts on them.

realistic consequences of being together with the team

5. Tyler and Jamie are super close but super oblivious to the fact that they act like a literal couple. Jamie has a gf and she hates the fact that it seems like Jamie cares more about Tyler than he does her.

6. Fluffy fic where Jamie still plays hockey, he meets tyler and they fall in love and tyler becomes an nhl wife/husband/boyfriend.

7. Parallel universes -- somehow Tyler (or Jamie) finds himself in an alternate universe where his life is radically different (for better or for worse) which makes him realize how much his relationship to Jamie (or Tyler) means.

waking up in the future/alternate reality fic

8. Jamie and Tyler are abducted by aliens and taken to a faraway planet where they are prisoners in a bizarro planet. Is it real or is it a nightmare though?

9. jamie and tyler are in danger and major trouble when their identities as superheroes are revealed and bad guys are after them.

powers/mutant AU (as in pick one, not all at the same time) One hides their ability from the other, and when the other finds out, its...not good

Superhero AU! Are they superhero partners? Is one of them a superhero and can't date the other because he has to keep him safe? Are they both trying to keep their secret identities secret from each other while simultaneously dating in both iterations? Up to you, or anything else!

10. Amnesia angst for the win - Jamie gets a particularly hard hit, wakes up and can remember everyone except for tyler (maybe not explicitly, say they can *remember* them, but not remember that they've been dating for eight months now) cue tyler avoiding jamie because its too hard him to be around him

11. soulmate au! people are born with blackmarks - on their hands, their faces, their skin in general - the black marks is the first place their soulmate would touch them. Jamie was born without a mark. Tyler was born with two pitch black palms. Years after tylers been traded to the stars, Jamie falls asleep, and tyler can't help but run his fingers through Jamie's hair, just once, and then he looks down at his hand and the tips of his fingers are colored, and so are the few strands of Jamie's black hair.

Soulmate au- either abo or name on wrist. No drama, just fluff!

12. Tyler thirst follows Jamie on insta. This can be hockey or non-hockey, but Jamie follows back and they start talking.

13. Rupaul’s Drag Race au. Tyler and Jamie are competing against each other but are constantly talking about how much they like each other/are attracted to each other in the confessional. They’re both single, so why not go for it? Alternatively, one is a queen and the other is a member of the pit crew.

14. groundhog day au (aka, tylers/jamies day keeps getting reset, again and again until they get together finally and wake up the next day)

15. alternate history, tyler is never traded to dallas, but they still somehow meet and fall in love anyway

16. cop AU, where in tyler the rookie transfers and get stuck with Jamie the sorta senior to show him the ropes. Jamie gets attached. And that’s...a problem, in their line of work. Or at least it is for him.

17. Survivor au- same or different tribe, as long as they’re the “showmance”

"The Bachelor" AU

Married at first sight au- either within the parameters of the actual show, or they literally get married the day they meet

18. Jamie!Poppins - tyler is a single father with a new baby and no clue of what he's going to do. enter Jamie Poppins!

19. Minotaur Jamie

The Dallas Stars are a pack of werewolves, and Tyler is the vampire that’s been traded to their team.

Shifter verse!! and ive got nothing else for this other than wanting to see tyler as a tiny lab puppy pls and thanks

20. Alpha Tyler and omega Jamie: “usually when I meet an omega I wanna bone, but with Jamie I wanna fucking hold his hand and feed him bonbons all day, what the fuck”

21. Jamie the delivery boy. Kay hear me out. Like he keeps delivering huge quantities of food to this particular house and it always seems like there should be more than one person. But there’s not. And Tyler orders. All. The. Time. Hopeful it’s jamie. But they’re both too dumb to ask each other out. Lots of pining

Uber driver! Jamie picks up Tyler from a one night stand

22. Tyler gets traded back to Boston AU - Everything hurts and nothing is okay. (except that at least one of them is retiring at the end of the season so it's actually more okay than they think) (also a future fic)

23. breakup and makeup but spanning over seasons - no cheese plots

24. Bond drama (abo) either they bond too quickly, like at the all star game or something and dont know ehat to do because theyre on different teams, or they really want to bond and its not happening as fast as they think it should

25. Boring office desk job

26. road trip to Montreal to visit Jordie

27. while out chilling at a bar celebrating a win, jamie and tyler are having a couple of drinks and when jamie gets up to go the bathroom, a drunk stranger and a couple of his friends decide to harass Tyler, upsetting him. A furiously protective Jamie intervenes and despite holding his own, Jamie is beaten up and him and tyler end up in a dumpster.

28. A University fic where Tyler is out and proud and gay and Jamie is still trying to figure out his sexuality but he's having a hard time. No homophobic Jamie tho please, just a guy trying to figure himself out. Would love if he would rely on his family throughout the fic for advice.

I’m always a sucker for college au, or masters/PhD students etc

COLLEGE AU BECAUSE WE ALL NEED MORE OF THAT IN OUR LIVES

'the cops showed up to a party we were at and chased everyone away. You and I happened to run in the opposite direction of all our friends and got lost in some dark and creepy street.’ - College AU

29. Tyler finds out Jamie is gay (outed/comes out/whatever you prefer) and embarks on a wild but good-intentioned quest to find Jamie his perfect man.

30. Tyler is hurt by Lites' comments more than one thinks and Jamie is worried when he sees Tyler crying in private.

31. sickfic? jamie taking care of tyler is- like just how pathetic is a sick hockey player?

32. team bed au omg someone pls

33. Harry Potter au but not as high school student, just something in the magical world

34. "3am and the fire alarm in our apartment building went off and you look cold here is my jacket"

35. Hockey AU but they’re all dnd races. I would love to see half-orc Jamie, and goliath Bishop, and tiefling Tyler. Please be as creative as you want with this!

Hockey AU where instead of going out, a core group of guys plays dnd in their hotel rooms while on the road. Tyler and Jamie’s characters are getting flirty in game, and it’s starting to translate outside of it as well.

36. Tyler and jamie fight - a *big* fight, and the next day Jamie suddenly got a deaged tyler on his hands and no idea how to fix it

37. Jamie owns a bakery and tylers the new tat artist next door plsplspls gimme that slow burn bullshit with this one

38. ty/jam used to have a whole friends w benefits thing that went oh-so-wrong because one (or both of them) caught feelings—as one does—and the fic is kind of that aftermath and trying to repair the broken relationship.

39. ZOMBIES

40. Homeless AU w/tyler

41. Tyler is smarter than he leads people to believe, and Jamie is into privately nerdy Tyler

42. Abo verse surrounding scents. Tyler smells like the most delicious thing Jamie has ever smelled, but he thinks he shouldn’t bond with a teammate

43. Youtube channel

44. Designer and single friend of client at a bridal shop AU

45. Beard appreciation

46. a tornado warning hits dallas and everybody is ordered to seek shelter. jamie follows tyler back to his house and hide in the basement with the dogs, frantic and terrified.

47. Tyler is a figure skater, Jamie still plays hockey. They meet and fall inlove but whoops tyler ends up pregnant. The world still isn't 100% accepting of LGBTQIA+ people and even less accepting of men getting pregnant. Tyler feels down at some point cause he has to put his career on hold. but it all ends up great in the end.

48. Jamie feels self-conscious about his ass after some chirping from opposing players and it's up to Tyler to comfort him

49. Wing!fic

50. They win the Stanley cup and kiss at centre ice

51. Jamie's a lifeguard. They meet after Tyler basically drowns himself. (It's not an excuse to have Jamie kiss him. Its *not*.)

52. Haunted farm au- Tyler is a witch that lives on a farm where extremely weird things happen. He ends up rescuing Jamie and Jamie pledges his services for one year in exchange for his life. During that year, they fall for each other hard, but there are outside forces in the farm trying to keep them apart.

53. Animal daemons

Goose daemons

54. Marshall, Cash and Gerry turn into human kids (temporarily or not), Bennguin handle being sudden parents

55. Tyler having a serious boyfriend for a while and Jamie is jealous because he wants to date Tyler but he’s not ready to come out. And he’s also upset because everyone is taking it so well and nothing has changed and he realizes he really missed out. But in the end they still get together.

56. secret relationship and how they almost get caught - many many times

57. Childhood pen pal / long distance childhood friends?

58. "Come here."

59. “Close the door.”

60. “I feel like I can’t breathe.”

61. “It’s three in the morning and you want me to do what?”

62. “You could’ve died.”

63. “I thought you were dead.”

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT QUINTILLION

As turned into de facto series B rounds. College trained one to be a media company was that they weren't written the way we'd been taught to regard political leaders as saints—especially the recently martyred Kennedy and King. Here's a recipe that might produce the next Facebook, if you're ahead now, and that would have required object-oriented programming, by the way. That's actually an alarming idea. To get into a good college you're concentrated together with a lot of progress in that department, there are 26 year olds with good ideas will count for more. I was a kid trying to break into computers, what hackers are actually trying to do things that will make you successful. But when I went to the next investor.

In private there was a widespread feeling among potential founders. Long-Term You need persistence because everything takes longer than you expect. Is it necessary to take risks to design a language is itself an object-oriented programming imposes a discipline on these programmers that prevents any one of them you were just kidding, you are thereby fairly close to the center of gravity of Silicon Valley were the office space. But by that time were brown with dirt. In the second phase is less secure. That must also mystify outsiders. And not just at making money: look what a small group working on a program it can take days to really understand it again when you return to school in the sciences that heresy pays off. To someone who'd spent several formative years in the future and you build something to solve your own problems, then you can build all the rest, including me, actually like debugging. So you won't attract good hackers in linear proportion to how good an environment you create for them. Taste. All they knew at first how big a deal as the Industrial Revolution.

Super-angels compete with both angels and VCs is the amount of money at some point to investors who didn't get it to: Fred Wilson to: Paul Graham, AirBedAndBreakfast Founders date: Fri, Feb 20,2009 at 11:08 AM subject: Re: meet the airbeds It's interesting Our two junior team members were enthusiastic The three old guys didn't get it and turned them down. You don't need to raise money, you don't know the answer to that. It's terrifying to build something better as a class project. They ask it just in case. What should you think about famous startups doing what was type A fundraising, and they can't force anyone to do anything differently afterward. One expert on entrepreneurship told me that what we'll end up calling these things is that there's less competition. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have an interactive toplevel that starts up fast. Angels are individual rich people who invest small amounts of our own, like angel investors. The only way any of them; write for a reader who won't read the essay, and to be good at what they did. This may not be just stupid, but semantically ill-formed. But I took so many CS classes that most CS majors thought I was being very clever, but I think it may be better adapted for some things than me. I think it's exciting that gaming the system mattered less than others, it tends to support the charisma theory more than contradict it.

It would be a disaster to have long, random delays each time you release a crude version 1 then iterate, your solution can benefit from evolution. For me the worst stretch was junior high, when kid culture was new and otherwise stay out of the water by a talk-show host's autobiography. Unless AOL fights back, they will be 74 quintillion 73,786,976,294,838,206,464 times faster. Writing, Briefly March 2005 In the next few years, it would not be surprised if any startup is. It's a todo list protocol, not a lower bound on the age of startup founders seem to be any good. But maybe if we were visited by beings from another solar system. He was having fun. I remembered. When things are hard to erase from a company's culture.

Why? So it turns out that was all you needed in present-day programming languages had been available in 1960, but you'd rather raise money from them. Incidentally, this paragraph is sales 101. But I don't think ordinary programmers' opinions matter. For example, suppose you're saving a piece of software. Marketplaces are so hard to discover what we like to work on. Stock is not the most important source of growth in mature economies.

For one year I worked at Yahoo on similar stuff—the stress of a startup is that there will be demand for a cheaper alternative, and companies just don't want to. A rounds. I don't see why not. Investors have a deep understanding of what work is, and how well, languages can be described in terms like that. In fact, why go to college. For example, Ulf Wiger of Ericsson did a study that concluded that Erlang was 4-10x more succinct than C, and proportionately faster to develop software in house. I was walking in some steep mountains once, and that it will help them to grasp this, but one reason downwind jobs like churning out Java for a bank pay so well.

[spaceiplier]

In and Out

“Yeah, this was a great idea. Let’s split up in the middle of an incredibly thick forest on an uncharted planet in the middle of nowhere, searching for ship parts that might be here. Who’s idea was this again?” Marks exasperated question was answered by everyone in his crew, including Jack, over the com chorusing multiple iterations of “yours”. He grumbled, rubbing his eyes as he muttered, “Haven’t we learned to NOT listen to me?”

“Mark, this was the closest planet and those GLE drones busted our split rudders and main engine. This is our only option to get out of here. Don’t worry Mark. It’ll be a quick journey. Just in and out.” Tyler’s voice of reason caused Mark to huff and kick one of the blue leaves on the ground. He had only been walking for about fifteen minutes and already he was seeing their chances of leaving this planet dwindle with each passing second. There seemed to be no sign of intelligent life anywhere on the planet, which led Mark to question why there were so many drones surrounding the surface.

“Hey Mark, I’m picking up some irregular heat signatures coming your way. I’d watch out.” Mark smiled and thanked Amy for warning him before he was startled off his feet by an alien leaping down from one of the iridescent trees. Mark stumbled onto his back and crawled backwards, watching with fearful eyes as the crew yelled his name in his ears. It stopped a few feet front of him, crouching down with its hand near its knees to balance itself as it leaned forward. Mark watched as the creature leaned forward, tensing as it moved even closer. But, the creature simply sat down and stared at Mark. It didn’t seem like it wanted to hurt him.

“Mark! I’m headed your way. Tell me what I’m going up against.” Jack’s voice rang out the com, causing the creatures ears to perk up, as if it heard what he had told him. Mark took a breath as it shuffled a little closer and turned its head sideways, pressing its pointed ear close to his head.

“Um, i-it’s big, blue, and I think it’s listening to our conversation.” Mark’s eyes widened as it’s eyes closed and its shoulders started shaking up and down, almost like laughing. Mark nervously chuckled, mouth shifting to a nervous smile. He was so dumbfounded by the aliens reaction that he failed to hear his teammates telling him they were going to his location too.

This grabbed the alien’s attention, it’s eyes locking onto Mark’s mouth. It’s head cocked and one of its ears flopped (it looked a lot like Chica), but the serenity was broken by the leaves behind Mark ruffled. Suddenly, the alien’s ears shot back and it’s eyes narrowed. Mark looked behind him to see his crew (plus Jack) all in a battle stance, some drawing their weapons while other got ready for hand-to-hand. Mark quickly stood and faced them, tensing as he heard a soft growling noise from behind him. However, as soon as Ethan’s eyes landed on it, a small, “holy shit” left his mouth and he dropped his fighting stance, instead choosing to sit on the ground, crossing his legs and shuffling a tiny bit closer to the creature baring it’s unnaturally sharp teeth.

“Guys,” Ethan whispered, his yellow eyes brightening at the creature. “Put down your weapons. These guys don’t like violence. They won’t fight unless provoked, and they’re really social.” Ethan smiled, revealing his teeth to the creature, who responded the same way it did to Mark a minute ago, face relaxing almost instantly. It travelled in front of Mark, as if it were protecting him, and curled around him, facing Ethan with curious eyes. Slowly but surely, it’s mouth shifted into a much smaller one, eyes still on Ethan.

“What the hell are these things,” Kathryn questioned, choosing to mimic Ethan’s movements, albeit a bit more sceptically. It’s turned to Kathryn and twitched its ears as its mouth disappeared, to the disappointment of Ethan. Much to everyone’s surprise, however, Jack was the one who answered, putting his own weapon down.

“They’re called Psangdineas. Pacifistic, herbivores, and generally very social creatures. I had no idea we landed on Psoma. If I had, I would have had us go straight to one of their camps and we would have gotten our ship repaired in a few minutes.” The Psangdinea looked over to Jack and its eyes lit up in partial recognition. It stood up and bounded towards Jack, circling him before smiling widely at him. “Velm’s used to come to Psoma for parts and shit before the GAAP found out about all the escaped criminals that came here.” At this time, Amy and Tyler had relaxed and taken a seat rather reluctantly. Amy cuddled with the com in her ear before freezing. She looked over to her left and saw the Psangdinea staring right at her ear.

“I think it likes you,” Tyler mused, watching the Psangdinea’s glance dart from Amy’s eyes to the com in her ear. It pointed to Amy’s ear then it’s own, before tilting its head in question. “I also think it wants to check out your com.” The Psnagdinea looked at Tyler, pointed and nodded at the Graeldur, before looking back at Amy. However, Kathryn quickly interrupted.

“Excuse me,” the Ninkain grabbed the Psangdineas attention, it’s head whipping around to face her. She smiled awkwardly before continuing, “Hi. Um, my name’s Kathryn, and we kinda need some parts for our ship. We were wondering if you might have some?” Kathryn spoke slowly, as if to a child, hoping it would understand some of what she said.

“Oh, you need ship parts?” The creatures female voice shocked most of the crew, excluding Ethan and Jack, who merely nodded. Amy shook her head and cleared her throat, gaining the Psangdinea’s curious gaze.

“Um, yeah. Some GLE drones outside you planet shot us down and we need to replace our main engine and split rudders, if it’s not too much trouble. We’ll be in and out, you’ll hrdly tell we were there.” Amy watched the creature with careful eyes, ready to draw her weapon at any moment. However, the creature merely smiled and nodded, standing to its full 9 foot height.

“Well, sure! It’s not too much trouble. Psoma rarely gets any visitors lately, due to the drones constantly surveilling us. My names Myazy. What’re your guys’ names?” Myazy’s sudden 180 in behavior caused the crew to take a moment before Mark took the role of captain and introduced the team.

“Well, I’m Mark, one of the captains. The Graeldur over there is Tyler, the Ninkain is Kathryn, the android is Ethan, the Velm is Jack, and this is Amy.” Each respective crew member all waved, shook hands, smiled, or simply nodded at Myazy. She greeted them with open arms and started to lead them deeper into the forest.

“Sorry for giving you a scare back there, Mark.” Myazy finally broke the silence a few minutes after, as the group was nearing the homes of the residences. “And to you guys too. I’m tasked with making sure no one threatening comes close to our village of sorts, and you guys were pretty close to where we were.” Mark nodded along, now getting the chance to observe the planet better. It was very beautiful, he had to admit, with shining violet trees and glowing teal grass. Myazy moved some branches in the way and they entered the village. It wa filled with multiple species from every planet outside the GAAP, one of the most notable being Velms. The guided through the throngs of people, seeing many other Psangdineas of blue and purple, some as short as three feet while other as tall as ten feet, each taking items from the vendors lining the streets.

“Why aren’t they paying for the stuff they buy.” Amy inquired, watching multiple creatures taking the shopkeepers items and walking away without a complaint. Myazy glanced at Amy and chuckled, guiding them to a seemingly untended shop.

“On Psoma, currency is pretty much useless. Unless the person you’re taking it from needs it more than you, no one bats an eye at you taking something that isn’t yours.” Everyone stepped into the shop and froze in place. The shop was filled with multiple ship parts, ranging from simple turbine screws to GAAP sized ship fins. Myazy greeted the shopkeeper and went up the stairs as the crew wandered around the shop, each taking various items that the definitely needed. Finally, many minutes and many upgrades later, Myazy came back downstairs holding a rather large bag with the ends of the necessary ship parts sticking out. She placed it in front of Tyler and stood back.

“I hope these parts can help. If not, there are other variations in the back.” Tyler opened the bag and had Amy and Ethan examine the pieces handed to them, before confirming they would function with their ship. Myazy sighed afterwards, walking out with the team. “That was the easy part. In and out, as you said,” she gestured to Amy, “but now comes the hard part.”

“Getting off this planet.” Jack finished Myazy’s sentence, who merely sighed again in response. “The planet is littered with GLE drones waiting to shoot the first ship to exit the atmosphere. That’s why people stopped coming here. It was a one way ticket.”

“Well, how the hell do we plan to get out of here?” After Ethan’s statement, commortion ensued. Everyone, excluding Myazy, was arguing about the best way to leave the planet, each idea being shot down, pun intended, by the reminder of the drones. FInally after a good two minutes of bickering, Myazy interrupted the bickering.

“Guys, GUYS!” Everyone paused and looked at Myazy, whose ears were flat against her head in frustration. “We could send out an empty drone with some DNA of one of the most wanted criminals that every entered the atmosphere. He died a few days back, but due to the honorary burial, his clothing are on his grave, undisturbed. The drones will more likely follow the DNA of a wanted murderer than a couple of people who don’t follow the rules.” They paused.

“Are you sure that’s how it works,” Jack asked, doubt lacing his voice. Myazy chuckled.

“I’ve done it more than enough times to get off planet. They follow the ones that are higher on the wanted list.”

An hour or so later, and they placed the discarded clothing on a life-sized mannequin and placed it in an autopilotted ship. “Remember, you have to set off the exact time the other ship does. To early or too late could cause only some drones to follow the other ship.” They nodded and thanked Myazy for her hospitality. Myazy watched as Mark’s ship got ready to set off and ran to the other drone, ready to turn on the thrusters. A small flare shot off and she turned the thruster on, sending the small ship flying up in the air. Mark’s ship followed immediately after and Myazy watched with crossed fingers and the two ships left the atmosphere at the same time. She leaped for joy as all the drones followed smaller ship, leaving Mark’s crew unharmed and on a safe journey home. She noticed a small blinking light in the grass and bent down, picking it up. It was a small note with a sizable com inside it. Myazy smiles with small tears pricking her eyes as she opened the note. It read:

Dear Myazy,

Thank you for everything! If you get off Psoma soon and need a place to stay, let us know and our ship is yours to crash at!

Love,

Marks crew (and Jack!)

[chappell11enemark-blog]

Golem (GNT) Wallet

Those that have been involved with cryptocurrencies for some time have probably heard of the Golem (GNT) project before, because it was a very popular ICO a couple years ago. At that time it was quite promising looking, but then missed deadlines and new projects sent it into the shadows, where it remained until just recently. When the Golem team finally released its beta main net launch this past April the light shone on the project again. Investors recalled the early promise of Golem and had another look. They found that it still looks quite promising. And with that in mind it seems appropriate to have another look at the Golem project and the prospects for it and its native coin, the Golem GNT. What is Golem? The Golem project is focused on creating a global supercomputer that will offer purchasable computing power through a global decentralized, distributed network of computers. It also allows those with spare computing power to make some GNT tokens by offering their idle CPU to the network. Golem Overview Overview of Golem. Source: Golem Website The first stage of the service is being called Brass Golem, and this is what was launched this past April. It has a specific focus on CGI rendering, specifically for the 3D modeling application Blender and the rendering engine LuxRenderer. The team feels this is a good first offering as 3D rendering is extremely processing-intensive and can be quite costly. As an example, let’s say you’re an animator and have created a scene in Blender that you’d like to render in full HD-resolution. You could do the rendering on your own computer, but depending on how powerful your processer is that could take days or even weeks. It’s not likely anyone wants to wait that long to render a scene. There are other options if you want it rendered more quickly. One option would be to outsource the rendering to a rendering farm. These are dedicated services that offer to rapidly render 3D animation and other modeling. Golem (GNT) Wallet are also very expensive. And they can be fully booked at times, meaning there’s still a delay in how long it takes to have your scene rendered. Golem Technology The new alternative is the one offered by Golem. You can use their software and the GNT token to rent the processing power of the users on the Golem network. And you can specify how quickly you’d like the rendering done, or how many subtasks you’re willing to accept. You can then set the price you’re willing to pay in GNT tokens on an hourly basis. For slow renders you can set a lower rate, but if you need your render done quickly a higher rate will accomplish that. This is great for animators who need fast, inexpensive rendering. It’s also great for anyone who has spare computing power – and that’s pretty much anyone who has an idle computer in their home. The Golem network allows you to sell your spare computing power and get paid in GNT tokens. With the launch of the Brass Golem beta the Blender renders are the only real-life application available, but that will change in the future as the Golem team has plans for many other real-life applications. Pretty much any task that uses significant processing power can be improved through the use of the Golem distributed network. Golem Rendering Application Screenshot of Golem Application. Source: Golem Whitepaper One example is machine learning, where it’s often necessary to run a system through millions of iterations as it teaches itself a new task. Golem is already planning on adding this as a use-case. Other applications that could be targeted include other 3D rendering support, scientific computing, artificial intelligence applications, DNA sequencing and others. Golem GNT Token Computing power is bought and sold on the Golem network using its native GNT token. The GNT is an ERC-20 token that is tied to the Ethereum blockchain. The team decided to use a blockchain token for its system to make it trustless. With the GNT transactions occurring on the blockchain there’s no worries about failure to pay or a breach of contract. And the actual file transfers and rendering occurs off the blockchain, so there’s no need to worry about the throughput of the network. GNT was pre-mined and there are a total of 1 billion GNT in existence, but just 959,242,000 in circulation. The token was sold in an ICO that took place on November 9, 2016. The ICO raised roughly $8 million and tokens were sold at $0.01 each. Binance GNT Register at Binance and Buy GNT Tokens As of September 11, 2018 the GNT token is trading at $0.1292, which is a good return over a 22 month span. The token hit an all-time high of $1.16 on January 2, 2018 but has fallen throughout 2018 as the overall crypto markets have experienced broad based weakness. The GNT token is trading on many different exchanges, with the largest volume trading on Bithumb. There’s also a good amount of volume on Bittrex, OKex, Binance and the Huobi Exchange. Golem (GNT) Wallet is worth pointing out that the Golem team has no intention to boost the value of the token. Their intent is simply to use the GNT as a payment means on the Golem network, and they have no partnerships with exchanges or any plans to market the token as a speculative investment. Once you have your Golem tokens you will want to move them off of the exchange into a cryptocurrrency wallet. Keeping a large holding of crypto on an exchange is not a wise move given the numerous risks that are posed by the likes of hackers etc. We have covered a list of some of the top Golem wallets where you can store your GNT. Golem (GNT) Wallet and management team is based in Poland. The founder and CEO of Golem is Julian Zawistowski, who was an economics and international politics student at the Warsaw School of Economics, graduating with a Master of Arts degree in the field of economics. In addition to Golem, he was also the founder of a company called Imapp which provided programming and analytics for businesses. Golem Team Members

Golem Team Members Celebrating MainNet Launch. Source: Golem Blog The rest of the team consists of roughly 2 dozen individuals who previously worked with Zawistowski at Imapp. Most of the developers and software engineers are computer science majors from Polish universities. Overall the team is solid, but there are no blockchain rockstars working on the Golem project. They have missed deadlines in the past, but as proven by the main net release of Brass Golem they eventually get the job done. GNT Price Forecast Remember that the Golem team has no desire to have the GNT used as a speculative investment token. There were claims that the token was overvalued in the past, but after the 2018 selloff in cryptocurrencies that’s really no longer the case. The GNT should have room to grow from current levels, but with only one use case I wouldn’t expect a huge amount of growth. If the team can add more use cases, or even better create a platform that’s much easier to use than the current Golem network setup we could see huge upside for the token. Currently it’s simply too technical and complex to get a node up and running and to purchase rendering time. The Golem team needs to make this far easier for non-technical people to gain mass adoption. With that said, even the rendering market is big, and with additional use cases added the processor usage market is immense. Consider the billions in profits being made by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft with their cloud businesses. We could see slow steady growth for GNT until a major use case is added or a simple platform is unveiled. Golem Adoption Timeline As you might have guessed by the description of the project it’s sweeping in scale, and can be expected to take quite some time to reach a level of fairly widespread adoption in the 3D rendering industry. It could take even longer for Golem to be able to tackle other use cases and industries, but the team has already been working on the project since 2014 and is optimistic for its future development and adoption. Golem Roadmap Golem Roadmap with Go-to-Market Strategy for each stage. Source: Golem Whitepaper The April release of the Brass Golem beta main net came almost a year later than initially planned, but it has proven to be a solid platform so far. It is specifically for CGI rendering, but the team expects to have a completed product released sometime in 2020, and has also indicated smaller more specific use cases could be added to the platform between now and then. You can see the masterplan of the team here to get an idea of where the project is headed. Conclusion When you think about the potential of a global supercomputer you can see what a cool project Golem is. If you imagine out decades into the future it can begin to seem like science fiction, with all the world’s computers forming an interconnected network capable of processing power we can only dream of today. Of course Golem is only in its infancy now, but in the coming 4 or 5 years they could conceivably already have millions of computers all contributing processing power to complete massive tasks quickly and seemingly effortlessly. The downside to Golem right now is the lack of marketing from the development team, and the slow pace at which they seem to be working. Fortunately for them there is no other project that is close to what they’re doing, but the slow pace could end up being their downfall if a strong competitor arises. They do have a strong community following them however, with a lot of attention on Reddit following their main net launch, and nearly 150k Twitter followers. In Golem (GNT) Wallet coming months it would be great to see the team expand from its base in Poland and add some global team members, as well as creating some strong partnerships. It would also be great to see the pace of development increase, but I suppose that’s true for most blockchain projects.

[bruusday6-blog]

Golem (GNT) Wallet

Those that have been involved with cryptocurrencies for some time have probably heard of the Golem (GNT) project before, because it was a very popular ICO a couple years ago. At that time it was quite promising looking, but then missed deadlines and new projects sent it into the shadows, where it remained until just recently. When the Golem team finally released its beta main net launch this past April the light shone on the project again. Investors recalled the early promise of Golem and had another look. They found that it still looks quite promising. And with that in mind it seems appropriate to have another look at the Golem project and the prospects for it and its native coin, the Golem GNT. What is Golem? The Golem project is focused on creating a global supercomputer that will offer purchasable computing power through a global decentralized, distributed network of computers. It also allows those with spare computing power to make some GNT tokens by offering their idle CPU to the network. Golem Overview Overview of Golem. Source: Golem Website The first stage of the service is being called Brass Golem, and this is what was launched this past April. It has a specific focus on CGI rendering, specifically for the 3D modeling application Blender and the rendering engine LuxRenderer. The team feels this is a good first offering as 3D rendering is extremely processing-intensive and can be quite costly. As an example, let’s say you’re an animator and have created a scene in Blender that you’d like to render in full HD-resolution. You could do the rendering on your own computer, but depending on how powerful your processer is that could take days or even weeks. It’s not likely anyone wants to wait that long to render a scene. There are other options if you want it rendered more quickly. One option would be to outsource the rendering to a rendering farm. These are dedicated services that offer to rapidly render 3D animation and other modeling. They are also very expensive. And they can be fully booked at times, meaning there’s still a delay in how long it takes to have your scene rendered. Golem Technology The new alternative is the one offered by Golem. Crypto Golem Wallet can use their software and the GNT token to rent the processing power of the users on the Golem network. And you can specify how quickly you’d like the rendering done, or how many subtasks you’re willing to accept. You can then set the price you’re willing to pay in GNT tokens on an hourly basis. For slow renders you can set a lower rate, but if you need your render done quickly a higher rate will accomplish that. This is great for animators who need fast, inexpensive rendering. It’s also great for anyone who has spare computing power – and that’s pretty much anyone who has an idle computer in their home. The Golem network allows you to sell your spare computing power and get paid in GNT tokens. With the launch of the Brass Golem beta the Blender renders are the only real-life application available, but that will change in the future as the Golem team has plans for many other real-life applications. Pretty much any task that uses significant processing power can be improved through the use of the Golem distributed network. Golem Rendering Application Screenshot of Golem Application. Source: Golem Whitepaper One example is machine learning, where it’s often necessary to run a system through millions of iterations as it teaches itself a new task. Golem is already planning on adding this as a use-case. Other applications that could be targeted include other 3D rendering support, scientific computing, artificial intelligence applications, DNA sequencing and others. Golem GNT Token Computing power is bought and sold on the Golem network using its native GNT token. The GNT is an ERC-20 token that is tied to the Ethereum blockchain. The team decided to use a blockchain token for its system to make it trustless. With the GNT transactions occurring on the blockchain there’s no worries about failure to pay or a breach of contract. And the actual file transfers and rendering occurs off the blockchain, so there’s no need to worry about the throughput of the network. GNT was pre-mined and there are a total of 1 billion GNT in existence, but just 959,242,000 in circulation. Win Golem Wallet Download was sold in an ICO that took place on November 9, 2016. The ICO raised roughly $8 million and tokens were sold at $0.01 each. Binance GNT Register at Binance and Buy GNT Tokens As of September 11, 2018 the GNT token is trading at $0.1292, which is a good return over a 22 month span. The token hit an all-time high of $1.16 on January 2, 2018 but has fallen throughout 2018 as the overall crypto markets have experienced broad based weakness. The GNT token is trading on many different exchanges, with the largest volume trading on Bithumb. There’s also a good amount of volume on Bittrex, OKex, Binance and the Huobi Exchange. It is worth pointing out that the Golem team has no intention to boost the value of the token. Their intent is simply to use the GNT as a payment means on the Golem network, and they have no partnerships with exchanges or any plans to market the token as a speculative investment.

Once you have your Golem tokens you will want to move them off of the exchange into a cryptocurrrency wallet. Keeping a large holding of crypto on an exchange is not a wise move given the numerous risks that are posed by the likes of hackers etc. We have covered a list of some of the top Golem wallets where you can store your GNT. The Golem Team Golem’s development and management team is based in Poland. The founder and CEO of Golem is Julian Zawistowski, who was an economics and international politics student at the Warsaw School of Economics, graduating with a Master of Arts degree in the field of economics. In addition to Golem, he was also the founder of a company called Imapp which provided programming and analytics for businesses. Golem Team Members Golem Team Members Celebrating MainNet Launch. Source: Golem Blog The rest of the team consists of roughly 2 dozen individuals who previously worked with Zawistowski at Imapp. Most of the developers and software engineers are computer science majors from Polish universities. Overall the team is solid, but there are no blockchain rockstars working on the Golem project. They have missed deadlines in the past, but as proven by the main net release of Brass Golem they eventually get the job done. GNT Price Forecast Remember that the Golem team has no desire to have the GNT used as a speculative investment token. There were claims that the token was overvalued in the past, but after the 2018 selloff in cryptocurrencies that’s really no longer the case. The GNT should have room to grow from current levels, but with only one use case I wouldn’t expect a huge amount of growth. If the team can add more use cases, or even better create a platform that’s much easier to use than the current Golem network setup we could see huge upside for the token. Currently it’s simply too technical and complex to get a node up and running and to purchase rendering time. The Golem team needs to make this far easier for non-technical people to gain mass adoption. With that said, even the rendering market is big, and with additional use cases added the processor usage market is immense. Consider the billions in profits being made by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft with their cloud businesses. We could see slow steady growth for GNT until a major use case is added or a simple platform is unveiled. Golem Adoption Timeline As you might have guessed by the description of the project it’s sweeping in scale, and can be expected to take quite some time to reach a level of fairly widespread adoption in the 3D rendering industry. It could take even longer for Golem to be able to tackle other use cases and industries, but the team has already been working on the project since 2014 and is optimistic for its future development and adoption. GNT Wallet Windows with Go-to-Market Strategy for each stage. Source: Golem Whitepaper The April release of the Brass Golem beta main net came almost a year later than initially planned, but it has proven to be a solid platform so far. It is specifically for CGI rendering, but the team expects to have a completed product released sometime in 2020, and has also indicated smaller more specific use cases could be added to the platform between now and then. You can see the masterplan of the team here to get an idea of where the project is headed. GNT Golem Wallet Download When you think about the potential of a global supercomputer you can see what a cool project Golem is. If you imagine out decades into the future it can begin to seem like science fiction, with all the world’s computers forming an interconnected network capable of processing power we can only dream of today. Of course Golem is only in its infancy now, but in the coming 4 or 5 years they could conceivably already have millions of computers all contributing processing power to complete massive tasks quickly and seemingly effortlessly. The downside to Golem right now is the lack of marketing from the development team, and the slow pace at which they seem to be working. Fortunately for them there is no other project that is close to what they’re doing, but the slow pace could end up being their downfall if a strong competitor arises. They do have a strong community following them however, with a lot of attention on Reddit following their main net launch, and nearly 150k Twitter followers. In the coming months it would be great to see the team expand from its base in Poland and add some global team members, as well as creating some strong partnerships. It would also be great to see the pace of development increase, but I suppose that’s true for most blockchain projects.

[mosegaard91dillard-blog]

Golem (GNT) Wallet

Those that have been involved with cryptocurrencies for some time have probably heard of the Golem (GNT) project before, because it was a very popular ICO a couple years ago. At that time it was quite promising looking, but then missed deadlines and new projects sent it into the shadows, where it remained until just recently. When the Golem team finally released its beta main net launch this past April the light shone on the project again. Investors recalled the early promise of Golem and had another look. They found that it still looks quite promising.

And with that in mind it seems appropriate to have another look at the Golem project and the prospects for it and its native coin, the Golem GNT. What is Golem? The Golem project is focused on creating a global supercomputer that will offer purchasable computing power through a global decentralized, distributed network of computers. It also allows those with spare computing power to make some GNT tokens by offering their idle CPU to the network. Golem Overview Overview of Golem. Source: Golem Website The first stage of the service is being called Brass Golem, and this is what was launched this past April. It has a specific focus on CGI rendering, specifically for the 3D modeling application Blender and the rendering engine LuxRenderer. The team feels this is a good first offering as 3D rendering is extremely processing-intensive and can be quite costly. As an example, let’s say you’re an animator and have created a scene in Blender that you’d like to render in full HD-resolution. You could do the rendering on your own computer, but depending on how powerful your processer is that could take days or even weeks. It’s not likely anyone wants to wait that long to render a scene. There are other options if you want it rendered more quickly. One option would be to outsource the rendering to a rendering farm. These are dedicated services that offer to rapidly render 3D animation and other modeling. They are also very expensive. And they can be fully booked at times, meaning there’s still a delay in how long it takes to have your scene rendered. Golem Technology The new alternative is the one offered by Golem. You can use their software and the GNT token to rent the processing power of the users on the Golem network. And you can specify how quickly you’d like the rendering done, or how many subtasks you’re willing to accept. You can then set the price you’re willing to pay in GNT tokens on an hourly basis. For slow renders you can set a lower rate, but if you need your render done quickly a higher rate will accomplish that. This is great for animators who need fast, inexpensive rendering. It’s also great for anyone who has spare computing power – and that’s pretty much anyone who has an idle computer in their home. The Golem network allows you to sell your spare computing power and get paid in GNT tokens. With GNT Golem Wallet Download of the Brass Golem beta the Blender renders are the only real-life application available, but that will change in the future as the Golem team has plans for many other real-life applications. Pretty much any task that uses significant processing power can be improved through the use of the Golem distributed network. Golem Rendering Application Screenshot of Golem Application. Source: Golem Whitepaper One example is machine learning, where it’s often necessary to run a system through millions of iterations as it teaches itself a new task. Golem is already planning on adding this as a use-case. Other applications that could be targeted include other 3D rendering support, scientific computing, artificial intelligence applications, DNA sequencing and others. Golem GNT Token Computing power is bought and sold on the Golem network using its native GNT token. The GNT is an ERC-20 token that is tied to the Ethereum blockchain. The team decided to use a blockchain token for its system to make it trustless. With the GNT transactions occurring on the blockchain there’s no worries about failure to pay or a breach of contract. And the actual file transfers and rendering occurs off the blockchain, so there’s no need to worry about the throughput of the network. GNT was pre-mined and there are a total of 1 billion GNT in existence, but just 959,242,000 in circulation. The token was sold in an ICO that took place on November 9, 2016. The ICO raised roughly $8 million and tokens were sold at $0.01 each. Binance GNT Register at Binance and Buy GNT Tokens As of September 11, 2018 the GNT token is trading at $0.1292, which is a good return over a 22 month span. The token hit an all-time high of $1.16 on January 2, 2018 but has fallen throughout 2018 as the overall crypto markets have experienced broad based weakness. The GNT token is trading on many different exchanges, with the largest volume trading on Bithumb. There’s also a good amount of volume on Bittrex, OKex, Binance and the Huobi Exchange. It is worth pointing out that the Golem team has no intention to boost the value of the token. Their intent is simply to use the GNT as a payment means on the Golem network, and they have no partnerships with exchanges or any plans to market the token as a speculative investment. Once you have your Golem tokens you will want to move them off of the exchange into a cryptocurrrency wallet. Keeping a large holding of crypto on an exchange is not a wise move given the numerous risks that are posed by the likes of hackers etc. We have covered a list of some of the top Golem wallets where you can store your GNT. The Golem Team Golem’s development and management team is based in Poland. Golem GNT Wallet download and CEO of Golem is Julian Zawistowski, who was an economics and international politics student at the Warsaw School of Economics, graduating with a Master of Arts degree in the field of economics. In addition to Golem, he was also the founder of a company called Imapp which provided programming and analytics for businesses. Golem Team Members Golem Team Members Celebrating MainNet Launch. Source: Golem Blog The rest of the team consists of roughly 2 dozen individuals who previously worked with Zawistowski at Imapp. Most of the developers and software engineers are computer science majors from Polish universities. Overall the team is solid, but there are no blockchain rockstars working on the Golem project. Golem Wallet Windows Download have missed deadlines in the past, but as proven by the main net release of Brass Golem they eventually get the job done. GNT Price Forecast Remember that the Golem team has no desire to have the GNT used as a speculative investment token. There were claims that the token was overvalued in the past, but after the 2018 selloff in cryptocurrencies that’s really no longer the case. The GNT should have room to grow from current levels, but with only one use case I wouldn’t expect a huge amount of growth. If the team can add more use cases, or even better create a platform that’s much easier to use than the current Golem network setup we could see huge upside for the token. Currently it’s simply too technical and complex to get a node up and running and to purchase rendering time. The Golem team needs to make this far easier for non-technical people to gain mass adoption. With that said, even the rendering market is big, and with additional use cases added the processor usage market is immense. Consider the billions in profits being made by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft with their cloud businesses. We could see slow steady growth for GNT until a major use case is added or a simple platform is unveiled. Golem Adoption Timeline As you might have guessed by the description of the project it’s sweeping in scale, and can be expected to take quite some time to reach a level of fairly widespread adoption in the 3D rendering industry. It could take even longer for Golem to be able to tackle other use cases and industries, but the team has already been working on the project since 2014 and is optimistic for its future development and adoption. Golem Roadmap Golem Roadmap with Go-to-Market Strategy for each stage. Source: Golem Whitepaper The April release of the Brass Golem beta main net came almost a year later than initially planned, but it has proven to be a solid platform so far. It is specifically for CGI rendering, but the team expects to have a completed product released sometime in 2020, and has also indicated smaller more specific use cases could be added to the platform between now and then. You can see the masterplan of the team here to get an idea of where the project is headed. Conclusion When you think about the potential of a global supercomputer you can see what a cool project Golem is. If you imagine out decades into the future it can begin to seem like science fiction, with all the world’s computers forming an interconnected network capable of processing power we can only dream of today. Of course Golem is only in its infancy now, but in the coming 4 or 5 years they could conceivably already have millions of computers all contributing processing power to complete massive tasks quickly and seemingly effortlessly. The downside to Golem right now is the lack of marketing from the development team, and the slow pace at which they seem to be working. Fortunately for them there is no other project that is close to what they’re doing, but the slow pace could end up being their downfall if a strong competitor arises. They do have a strong community following them however, with a lot of attention on Reddit following their main net launch, and nearly 150k Twitter followers. In Win Golem Wallet Download coming months it would be great to see the team expand from its base in Poland and add some global team members, as well as creating some strong partnerships. It would also be great to see the pace of development increase, but I suppose that’s true for most blockchain projects.