#This design is 90% calculated from canon

[keferon]

Heeey Transformers fandom. Will you accept my humble offering?

[queercodedvillains]

If you can I’d love to hear the outline/tldr of your Claire’s AU because the posts under that tag are always so funny to me

So the claires au tag started because I wanted to collect all my modern au inspo posts in one place. Since it all gravitates around my beloved little terrorist Deidara, and I think he'd do great at a dead end low effort retail job with a bonus perk of bullying giving piercings to tweens and a sick employee discount, the claire's au was born. In hindsight, I wish I had called it the mallrats au, but since the fics came after the tag, we're stuck with the consequences of my choices smh.

It's expanded significantly, to the point that its sooo hard to summarize, but I'm gonna try my best here!!

My general goal is to transcribe everything we know from canon as closely/creatively as I can to a modern/90s setting. Tbh this started because I just was not emotionally prepared to handle canon!akatsuki levels of fucked up war criminals and I just wanted to put them in low stakes shenanigans that keeps the core of their characters without all the murder and angst and action (I hate writing action. Horror is fun and dandy, but spin kicks and explosions and puppets are beyond me for now).

So in the claires au/mallrats cinematic universe, the Akatsuki are just a gang of queers doing your run of the mill criminal activity. Drug dealing, car stealing, chop shopping, gun running, book cooking, you name it. They all ended up kicked out of society for one reason or another, banded together, and became mundane villains of polite society.

For example, Sasori is always depicted as tinkering with his puppets. So I decided that tendency to methodically pull someone apart and back together, that special calculating mindset that it takes to look at a body and come up with twelve different secret weapons to hide in their limbs, would make the perfect fodder for a chop shop mechanic. Stolen cars instead of stolen corpses. He seems like he got the obsessing-over-cars brand of autism and I love him for it. He's weird and reclusive and pretentious and insufferable and genius.

Deidara likes explosives, duh, but guns are so boring imo so I wanted to dig deeper into his love of temporary beauty, and how that meshes perfectly with drugs. They're ephemeral, transient experiences that fade quickly but leave a lasting impact on a person, changing their life, etc. He's also. Super fucking pretentious about it. Don't let him corner you at a party. Sasori might be the chemist but Deidara is the real brains behind the operation, and also the very willing test subject. I see him as a club kid, always on one in the middle of the crowd, and entirely responsible for the Akatsuki's branding. He designed the clouds and the patented pressed pills (we got blue teslas, they got white owls, etc) and also is solely responsible for word of mouth advertising. He's always got a can of spray paint and/or a black business card with nothing but a phone number and a red cloud. He's always bright and loud and shiny and looking for attention in seedy places, always in the middle of the mosh pit or the dance floor or some sketchy back alley or the skate park (skating is kinda like riding a giant flying bird, right?) Either way, everyone wants whatever the fuck he's on.

Together they're a power couple. Absolutely nasty, insufferable to talk to, impossible to be around unless you're just as pretentious as them about their very specific interests AND willing to listen to them bicker endlessly about their arts. Naturally, they only have two friends. Kakuzu and Hidan.

I want to dig into their backstories and relationships later, narratively, but the barest bones of it is that Hidan is Deidara's childhood friend and professional pain in the ass. Class clowns in detention together, bullying the local nerds, weirdo queer kids with serious mental issues from broken homes, a scrappy sort of friendship born out of desperation for someone Like Them etc. I mean Hidan's got a nasty sadomasochistic streak, a propensity for self harm, and an obsession with the occult so don't get me started on him as your local satanic bad influence. Their whole thing could be its own post tbh.

Kakuzu and Sasori are like crotchety old men on the porch. They like to sit in some booth at the club talking shit and looking menacing while Deidara and Hidan are busy 'advertising'. I also see Kakuzu as a bit of a mentor to Sasori, being a bit older and wiser and seeing Sasori get dragged into the Akatsuki after dropping out of med school and being disowned by his grandmother (a whole other post as well) and spiraling into shitty coping mechanisms (alcohol, mostly). Kakuzu smacked some sense into him and got him sobered up because he loves that sad pathetic wet cat of a man they got money to make!!

If and when Sasori and Deidara split up to work, I see them pairing up with Kakuzu and Hidan, respectively. Every artsy twink needs their burly body guard, yknow?

I'm maintaining their age differences to some degree, although pinched closer. At the time Mallrats is set, Deidara is 25, Hidan is 26, Sasori is 32, Kakuzu is 40. Itachi and Kisame are also mid 20s, Konan and Pain and Zetsu and Tobi are in their 30s.

Deidara centric timeline wise (and trying to stick to canon as closely as realistically possible) he gets kicked out of his house for being fruity at 14, ends up couch surfing with Hidan (having 'sleep overs', or sneaking into his room when Hidan's mom said no but didn't care enough think to look under his bed/the closet/that pile of laundry) and when he can't pull that off, staying in the mall til after closing and posting up in there all night. After a while, someone in the Akatsuki notices him kicking rocks in a parking lot and realizes they need some scrappy kid to run a backpack from one end of town to the other without getting noticed. One thing leads to another and he ends up catching Konan's attention. She (30s, forgery and embezzling specialist, dyke and mother of the house) shuffles some papers, gets him his own apartment on the condition that he works for her and the money goes from their business associates to him to her to his landlord.

I have a soft spot for Konan doing this for anyone she can. Queer kids in the 80s and 90s didn't exactly have resources, and she did what she could with what she had, handing them a way to earn their own money and a safe place to live, even if its seedy and illegal. Beats the streets! Most of them were runners for a few years and aged out, she signed their SRO apartments off to them at 18 and they moved on with their lives. There's a whole host of people who only know her as Lady Angel (winknod to canon again) because she did what she could to save em. Deidara just happened to be too good at his job and got pulled higher and higher, until he landed in Sasori's shop.

That's about caught up to what I've gotten so far in Mallrats and The Waiting Room (with so much more to go. My muse is wildly overactive for the amount of time and attention span I got). I got head canons on like all the main characters from Konoha/Suna, all the Akatsuki, and the Sanin. Where they work, how they interact, how their relationships translate to mallrat/clubrat shenanigans, etc.

Every detail Sasori and Deidara falling in love? DUH. But also........... A complete dossier on everyone's kinks? Hidan and Deidara's gay awakening? Sasori's history with Orochimaru? The absolute fuckery that is any of their home life before the Akatsuki? Brazilian Kakuzu? Jashinism in a neopagan satanic context? Kakuzu and Hidan's perfectly vicious relationship? Konan as Lady Angel? Itachi darling son of the police chief working for the mob to spite his homophobic dad? Kisame... well, idk about Kisame, but if you care enough to develop it with me I could be convinced to!! The list goes ON.

I could go into heavier detail about so much more but this is already so long T^T. If you read this far thank u ilysm and I would be so delighted to get into more if you're interested!! The ask box is always open and I am foaming at the mouth over them at the drop of a hat <3

[ghostflowerhotpotch]

My take on Miles and Gwen's future kid

Meet Charlotte Samantha Angelica "Angie" Morales-Stacy

Sadly, my art skills aren't nothing to go crazy, MUCH LESS with people, somehow creatures I draw much better.

Regardless for awhile I had been wanting to take this design out of my head, and if I get to commission someone to bring this real life, thought it would be good to try to do a reference.

A few fun facts about her!

Just like her canon equivalent, she is oldest. Also spoiled rotten by EVERYONE around her.

That scar under her eye? She was playing with the webs-shooters with her brother, he threw something at her direction and BARELY missed her eye. The use of web-shooters at home has been banned ever since.

She has three piercings, one clear crystal on her nose, ring piercing on her lower lip and ball in her tongue, those last two are in rainbow titanium.

Lives for the spectacle, she actually likes to do "shows" in the air, accompanied by her own music that resonate in the webs as she do tricks in the air at the rhythm of the song.

She has left messes around the city and scaring the living shit out of her parents more than once with her daredevil tricks.

More under the cut + some art notes!

Her name, Angelica, is because is a very common Spanish name, but is also the name of punk-rock all-girl band from the 90s, that I hc Gwen was fan of.

The name was appropriate because she loves punk-rock music just like her mom; Hobie is her favourite "uncle" for this reason.

Black eyeliner is a MUST, those triangles at the beginning of her eyes are part of her signature look, so she refused to go out of the house without at least that.

I am leaning towards her either keeping her blonde hair, or deciding to dye it herself.

(If she dyes it, the reason behind was to look more like her mom. Growing up people constantly didn't think they could be related because Angelica's dark skin + black traits. So she got fed up.)

A lot of her teachers still hate her because she is the type of student you can tell isn't paying attention, but then the Math teacher calls her to resolve a problem and does it in record time; so they can't say anything to her.

Exceptionally good with numbers and physics; you wouldn't believe it when she is in the air but a lot of times she is calculating more or less where she would end.

"A show needs a choreography, but I also like to improvise, so I need to do make sure nothing goes off-course, no biggie" <- Says with a poker face as if doing calculations in real time isn't that impressive.

Can be absolutely charismatic when putting on a show, but is actually pretty awkward when interacting with people she isn't familiar with. Unless she is in her hero persona.

Miles and Gwen are kind of annoyed at her about it too; she is brilliant but she does the minimum required for school because she honestly doesn't care and thinks the school system is bullshit anyway.

(Yep that had to do with Hobie, Gwen gave him an earful for that one.)

Still likes to help people and do what she can, but she can't say is something she wants to focus her life on.

Okay that's enough notes from her for now, now some art notes.

The shape of her head and face, eyes and eyebrows are actually from Gwen.

The nose and lips are from Miles, though you can tell Miles got that nose from his dad.

The is buzz cut on the sides, but it goes longer on the top. It may not had worked, but I tried my best to imitate Rio's hair texture.

[emotionally-charged-arson]

2am Transitus thoughts since I can’t do fanart right now.

I am THE number one Lavinia apologist, idk what exactly Arjen was doing with her but her being desperate and going to Henry because she wanted the screaming ghosts in her head to stop and Daniel happened to have this dickhead for a brother makes a lot of sense to me.

On the flip side, I have no idea why they threw the “also I’m totally cool with killing my daughter for monetary gain” motivation in there. I’m sorry it makes zero sense to me and I hate the Wicked Stepmother trope as it is.

Why is she married to Abraham in the first place then? What solid reason do Abby and her have to hate each other when Abraham seems like a grounded, reasonable human being he who knows an evil white lady when he sees one? Why does Lavinia, in a conversation WITH HERSELF, say that she regrets what she did to Abby and should go and comfort her after Message From Beyond? Why is the character designed to resemble the “”Gypsy”” archetype a greedy and untrustworthy troublemaker for no genuine reason??

Last point notwithstanding, her motivation in canon just confuses the hell out of me. Through the entire second act she oscillates between a desperate, suffering woman who just wants Daniel to leave her alone that Henry takes advantage of, and a calculating evil witch character that’s just as shitty as Henry himself. Pick a lane, lady.

I have this pile of retcons and headcanons where I just completely got rid of the inheritance-chasing fortune teller persona and made Lavinia’s ability to see Daniel completely spontaneous (though she does have some backstory it makes a little sense for that I completely made up out of thin air, may talk about that later but we’ll see how this post does). The short version is that she’s the same as everyone else. A normal person loves their family, who endures a horrible experience, whose horrible experience is only amplified by their low socioeconomic status, and who is brutally taken advantage of by Henry to a violent end. She did some awful shit but ultimately it comes down to Henry being a manipulative asshole. Lovely.

…but then my aunt bought me this little aesthetic pack of tarot cards last nigtt he and I started reading about the history of this occult stuff in Western countries. And it got me thinking about another way she could be characterized.

I’m not gonna go into a tangent about this but the point is all that divination stuff like tarot cards, ouija, crystal balls etc became popular as novelty in the 1880s and 90s, especially in England and the United States. There were of course occultists who took it seriously but in widespread terms it was sold as what it was today. A harmless little game.

I dunno. Maybe Lavinia got really into that stuff as a hobby and that’s why it’s not weird that Abraham is married to a “”witch.”” Maybe she has it in the back of her head that none of it is real, just a way to kill time and a quirk of her personality.

Then Daniel dies, and she starts seeing spirits. With no genuine explanation. In desperation she associates it with her stuff and tries to talk to him that way, but it’s like Ayreon and his visions. He doesn’t know about Time Telepathy and she doesn’t know about the “crossroads” world Daniel is spending an unusual amount of time in. Little pointless explanations of something far bigger than they can envision.

Abraham doesn’t believe her and thinks it’s just her being way too serious about her occult stuff while he’s busy trying to keep his daughter from regressing any further than she has.

Henry is the only one who will talk to her and go along with her terrified ramblings, not because he believes her but he sees an opportunity in a clearly hysterical woman and she’ll be more cooperative if he pretends all of it is real.

Then she dies, and through it is forcefully disillusioned from her little games even though they’re all she could hold onto for an explanation.

I dunno.

[usafphantom2]

The F-35 fighter, the most expensive weapons program in the world, has just become more expensive

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 10/04/22023 - 08:11am Military

The most expensive weapons program in the world - the U.S. F-35 fighter - has become even more expensive, according to a recent Pentagon report.

The program to develop and acquire the plane will cost a total of US$ 438 billion, an increase of US$ 26 billion over the last estimate a year ago, according to the new F-35 Selected Acquisition Report (RAE) released on Monday.

The 6.5% increase is actually relatively modest given the program's standards, which originally was $233 billion when Lockheed Martin Corp. won the contract in 2001.

"The cost data in question were determined after accounting for inflation" and the readjustment of the production plans of the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, which extend from 2044 to 2049, the program office said in a statement. The new estimate does not change the total number of planned aircraft, which includes 14 jets in development and 2,456 production models for the US, he said.

The so-called "unit cost of program acquisition" per jet, which includes development and production dollars when calculated in what budget analysts call inflation-adjusted "year" dollars, increased to US$ 179 million per jet, from US$ 166 million last year, according to the RAE.

The $26 billion increase is equivalent to what Congress allocated under Ukraine's Security Assistance Initiative to support Kiev's fight against Russia's invasion. It is also approximately equivalent to this year's budget request for NASA, the space agency.

Separately, the Pentagon said that the F-35, which faced several delays, surpassed an important milestone last month when it completed testing in an advanced Pentagon simulator, spokesman Russell Goemaere said in a statement. The simulations were designed to determine whether the plane is up to the task of fighting the main Russian and Chinese air defenses and fighters, and their results counted on 42% of the evaluation required for an approval grade.

The test is part of the legally required evaluation before Lockheed, based in Bethesda, Maryland, can proceed with full production. Of a potential fleet of 3,000 or more F-35s to the U.S. and international customers, at least 965 were delivered. Many of them may need to be adapted based on the test results.

The F-35 was supposed to carry out the exercise of 64 missions in 2017, but was postponed for years due to unresolved technical problems in the installation of tests of the "Joint Simulation Environment", aggravated by the COVID pandemic. The Pentagon testing office plans to deliver its test report no later than 90 days after completion, but does not plan to publish an unclassified summary, it said.

Source: Bloomberg

Tags: Military AviationF-35 Lightning IILockheed Martin

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Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Daytona Airshow and FIDAE. He has work published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. Uses Canon equipment during his photographic work throughout the world of aviation.

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[thekaijudude]

The Reaprea vs the entirety of the Ultraman canon.

Btw, the Reaprea is ridiculous. None of its abilities have really been described yet, but I do have some of its feats.

First, a mere extension of the Reaprea, which was 7% to 10% of the Reaprea’s full form’s power, managed to kill Father of Ultra, the Leo Brothers, all of the first six Ultra Brothers (with the exception of Ultraseven and Ultraman Adam (OG Ultraman, to refresh your memory)), and hundreds of Intergalactic Defense Force rookies in a battle where it was fighting them all simultaneously.

Second, after the previously mentioned feat, the same extension nearly killed Ultraman King.

Third, after Noa joined King’s side in said battle, the extension was giving both of them a hard time in battle.

Fourth, the Reaprea’s full form is responsible for creating the Dark Lords.

[Side note, the Dark Lords consist of a heck of a lot of characters (most are not named or mentioned, just know the Reaprea has created between 90 and 100), but here’s the main Dark Lords: the First Empera (long story short, this is a version of Alien Empera that not only predated the version Mebius and FoU fought, but was also thousands of times more powerful), Gatanozoa, the Guar Siblings, Rayblood, and Zarkran (a hybrid/soul-fusion of every previous Dark Lord’s powers and energies, but enhanced to godlike status).]

Fifth, the Reaprea’s full form was able to stop King from reviving the Ultras it’s extension had killed with his Childhood Radiation. Btw, this was done by canceling the effects of King’s Childhood Radiation, not by stopping King from releasing it. Either way, this left King in a state similar to the one he was in throughout Geed’s series.

[Side note, King could not and did not return until after the Reaprea’s destruction, which was over 6,000 years later.]

[Last side note, the Reaprea’s full form / true form was sealed away in another dimension, but its extension wasn’t. Basically, the seal had weakened, allowing the Reaprea to not only start creating Dark Lords and extensions of itself in other dimensions, but also allowing it to use its powers to affect dimensions it’s not even currently in.]

Anyway, with all that information on the Reaprea’s feats, how far does it get in the canon Ultra Series?

iirc yr scaling was UB = 10 NG

Referring to this handy lookup table I posted:

Which is basically 100 times weaker than in canon, or 1 000 times weaker if u wanna scale them with Taro

Imma say that yr OC can defeat Noa (highball), so he's basically around 10^102 - 10^103 NG

Which only canon Noa is above him, at 10^105 NG

Other than Ultras, you're probably looking at the Absolutian Lord, Reiblood, or potentially Legend otherwise if u want to take into account the other possibilities of the whole canon, albeit we have no idea how strong they are

Or to take a step further and using this as reference:

If I wanna argue for powerscaling beyond the established canon and say that as the current "ultimate state" of ultras' existence depends on just how active they are after taking on a formless existence, potentially the Absolutian Lord, VoL, Plasma Spark, Ultra Mind, DoL etc would theoretically be stronger than Noa via this line of reasoning thanks to the Decker movie

In fact in terms of the highest postulated power (assuming my method of scaling is correct, even tho it's arbitrary at this point):

1. Dimension of Light (DoL)

Entire pantheons of Ultras have come from it, not to mention its confirmed to be still active even after 30 million years

Just for fun, if we assume the DoL is 30 million years old, his power level would be 10^9000 NG, or equivalent to a 8998-way 1 NG fusion, or literally 10^8895 times stronger than Noa

Ridiculous I know, but we need to remember that it's probably the oldest thing we know in the entire multiverse

2. Absolutian Lord

Powers the entire planet of The Kingdom, which Absolutians are very significantly stronger than your average M78 Ultra (Assumption going based off dialogue from UGF3, can't mathematically conclude until we get the official ages of the Absolutians for a fair comparison)

3. Plasma Spark Ultra

(Entire Planet of fully sized Ultra warriors)

Of course I'm assuming it isn't even as aspect of King in the first place as pointed out in the second linked post

4. Ultra Mind

While only ever granted the full Ultra powers to 9 Ultras, it still enables an entire planet of beings to access the lesser, Ultra Humanoid forms

5. Voice of Light (VoL)

We see that it grants the full access of Ultras and Kaiju to whoever scales the Warrior's Peak. And in UGF2, Fuma hinted that there's more O50 Ultras that we have not seen yet

But I think it's safe to say it isn't an entire planet's worth of successful candidates

6. Reiblood

His reionyx genes have spread across multiple universes at this point, but each reionyx aside from Rei and Belial are very weak ngl

But due to the sheer scale of his influence is not yet well understood till this day, he could potentially even be 2nd place if he could, for example, turn every single Absolutian into a Reionyx

7. Radical Destruction Bringer / Delaxion

Placed them here because they are VERY active even after taking on non-physical forms

But we just don't know yet about the intricacies of how they exactly interact with their proxies to be able to say any further beyond this

Might be on the same tier as Noa for all we know

8. Noa / King

King might potentially be placed lower than Noa as the former has not been seen forsaking his form yet (aside from Crisis Impact, since it was by circumstance rather than choice)

While for Noa, we have seen that he has the ability to switch between form and formless existences

But both have granted powers to Ultras before, but only powerups so I'll just group them together

9. Legend

Have not been observed to grant anyone powers, still exists as Cosmos and Justice as physical forms

-

Note that I didn't include the Eternity Core or the Victorium Core here because tbh I doubt that they're transcended, energy-based ultras since they don't really "interact" with beings, and their power seems to only be transfered via an external device without showing any form of sentience thus far (Which is why the Plasma Spark is up there if u forgot) despite the former being also at least 30 million years old

So I kinda went above and beyond "established canon" to give you a far more interesting answer, or else the answer would just be Noa, which would be short and boring lol

Thanks for the question!

[ravenadottir]

hi there!

a few days ago i made a post about the boys' heights all compared on a graph table (?), just so we could see the differences among them, most specifically gary and jakub, 'cause that to me is still fucking histerical. here's the post if you haven't seen it.

now, @mingkittish asked me to do one for the girls and casa guys, and i'm nothing but a clown with a hyper fixation on making graph tables lately so why the fuck not? request it and you shall receive!

future vena here... this is long as hell lmao. after i finished the entire damn post, i found a picture that didn't change a lot, but one fucking boy damned the entire graphic and i- i'm pissed! notice how carl is very close to gary in terms of height here? he might even seem a little taller since he's about two steps behind crane boy...

well, i had to redo the WHOLE THING. carl, bud, i need you to cooperate with me my guy, for fuck's sake.

this is all to say the post is gonna be based off this picture, which is nowhere to be found in the website, only on art station of one of the artists who worked on s2 design, but i digress.

as you can see... i was right about henrik and rahim being closer to noah's height, and noah being less than an inch from jakub. in this post i did say graham is taller than both of them, and it seems like a solid inch (2,5 cm, but i'm rounding it up to 3 cm), so that makes him 189 cm... he's huge, that's a solid foot taller than me, fuck.

but carl???? carl is not a short king. at least not as short as @justtuesdays and i thought. AND, during the playthrough, this is how carl comes across:

that's the canon i'm taking, because his knee and waist line do allign with gary in the previous pic, and in this one there's not much of a difference in the forehead alignment comparing them both. if you remove carl's hair (PLEASE DON'T, THAT WOULD BE NIGHTMARE FUEL), then carl would be roughly bobby's height, but he does look a bit taller, by probably 1 cm, so that places him slightly above bobby and gary, with 176 cm.

felix! he's a good few inches below lottie, but lottie has heels on in this pic so she's shorter than that because of them (i calculated hers just so i could do felix' and it's 168 cm), which might place blue hair boy on a solid 169 cm.

NOW... comparing the boys in casa amor, in the following pictures, and taking carl's recently discovered height under consideration, we can get kassam's, arjun's and elijah's.

on pic. 1, kassam seems to be just as tall as carl, based off everything. the three of them are folding their knee a bit, but it's the same amount. arjun though, seems to be a bit taller based off the shoulder and forehead line, so i'm giving him 178 cm and kassam 176 cm.

on pic. 2, i'll just have to estimate the difference between arjun and eliajh, who seems to be 1 cm taller than arjun, and if the dog groomer is 178 cm, that makes elijah 179 cm, at least the proportion seems to be that.

graham, right in the back and next to jakub (who i have calculated to be 186 cm previously), seems to be taller by 3 cm, just a little over an inch, so i'm putting him on 189 cm.

which makes the casa amor line up complete!!! (it took me like 90 minutes to do this, so just... celebrate with me, ok?)

so in conclusion... EVERYONE was looking up when talking to graham, weren't they? felix though? he looks like a lost toddler searching his parent and all he could find was graham.

also, may i remind you, gary also barked to graham at some point, and fish boy is even taller than jakub, so... I LOVE GARY'S BALLSY ATTITUDE. boy really doesn't give a fuck.

now, onto the girls!!

TRICKY. we have no reference except marisol being the shortest in casa amor, so definitely the shortest among the og's and chelsea.

BUT, if you consider the previous picture canon, which i am, then lottie is just as tall as gary, however! her foot is always arched even when out of heels, which looks like 3 inches (7,5 cm). doing the math using the relative height between them, you just have to subtract the 3 inches from the 175 cm, which is roughly 168 cm, or 5'6''.

with lottie's height out of th way, it's possible to draw a parallel between her and marisol. based off the images i gathered, marisol's and lottie's foreheads don't line up, and proportionally, it looks like a at least 3 cm of a difference between them. if lottie is 168 cm, then that makes marisol 165.

now, accounting for the heels, and comparing the line up, chelsea next to bobby looks just 1 cm shorter, but her heels seem to be 3 inches as well, which if you do the math it would be 175 cm minus 8 cm (1 cm shorter and 3 inches of heels, which makes her 167 cm. i'm not considering fifths and quarters of inches because they're not as relevant.

shannon's heels are significantly shorter, according to her sparkly intro, and look an inch smaller than lottie's, so they're 5 cm high (2 inches), which places her 4 cm taller than chelsea, which makes her 171 cm (?)... oh my god, hold on!

shannon's forehead lines up with lottie's, however, her heels are 2,5 cm shorter, which makes shannon 170,5 cm. let's round up to 171 cm. wow... i feel a little dizzy, that took me forever.

then we have hope, whose forehead lines up perfectly with marisol's, but i noticed her heels are shorter by at least 1 inch, so that's 2,5 cm, which places hope in at between 167 and 168 cm. the one thing that's throwing off is how much hope is actually arching to the side, and the fact that next to lottie, she looks shorter.

let's consider hope's arching to be 3-4 cm, because of the height of her shoulders. they match lottie's when side by side, even when her body is inclined, so that tells me she's closer to lottie's height, but she's taller, by just an inch, but she is, which makes her 170 cm!

moving on to priya! (i'm slowly losing my mind here). priya does seem to reach the same height as lottie when in comparison, but next to bobby, she's the same height as him minus 1 cm. considering her heels to be 2 inches high (5 cm), i'm placing her on 169 cm, which checks out with the lottie line up!

elisa. her heels do look like 3 inches, proportionally to her dimensions, and she looks lined up with lottie perfectly, so i guess they are the same height, 168 cm.

these girls are tall, man... alright, moving on!

jo. her heels are tall as shit, it could be 4 inches high (10 cm), and she's close to marisol when side by side, but apart from what it looks like 2 cm up, so i'm putting her on 168 cm because of the shoulder lining.

ok, now blake. considering she's arched, to what it seems like 3 inches, and her forehead seems to be 1 cm above marisol's, that would put her 8 cm above marisol. BUT, her heels are shorter by 1 inch, which makes her 10 cm taller than marisol. HOLY SHIT, THE GIRL IS A MONSTER.

in her line up with lucas, who's canonically 182 cm, she seems very close to his height, and if we consider her heels to be 4 inches, minus 1 inch of a difference to lucas' height, then yeah, she's towering every girl in the villa! that would make her roughly 174 cm.

so... the lineup is ridiculous, and repetitive!

so, just to recap, and keep all the heightsin one same place, from shortest to tallest:

marisol - 165 cm/~5'4''

chelsea - 167cm/5'5''

elisa, jo, lottie - 168 cm/5'6.1''

priya, felix - 169 cm/~5'6.4''

hope - 170 cm/~5'6.9''

shannon 171 cm/5'7''

blake - 174 cm/5'8''

bobby/gary - 175 cm/5'9''

carl/kassam - 176 cm/5'9.2

arjun - 178 cm/5'10''

elijah - 179 cm/5'10.4

rocco/lucas - 182 cm/6'0

ibrahim - 183 cm/~6'0

henrik - 184 cm/6'0.4''

noah - 185 cm/'6.'08''

jakub - 186 cm/6'1''

graham - 189/6'2

i hate the ft+in measurement, i truly do. but anyway, there you go, everyone in season 2 with their heights accounted for.

in case you're interested in the graph table maker i used, here's the link, it was really easy to use.

after this post i'm gonna lie down. this thing consumed all the brain i had left, which wasn't a lot. also, the post only allows ten pictures so i had to make it work. it might look a little messy but hopefully understandable.

anyway, i'm sleeping until next year, good bye!

[xenoblademisadventures]

I feel like talking about how the dodge tank characters have evolved over the course of the series since I think it’s interesting. The category feels uniquely Xenoblade. Not because the idea of a character who primarily survives by evading hits doesn’t exist in other RPGs, but the way its executed in this game series is unique. It’s also my favorite class of characters. 

Overall

The characters I’m considering as dodge tanks are Dunban, Elma, Morag, and Mio. It’s not that other characters are incapable of also fulfilling this role in their games, but these are the ones who I feel are the main abusers of evasion builds. Generally speaking, these tanks have low HP and defense stats but decent ether defense in exchange for having a high agility and a decent damage output. 

Dunban - Xenoblade 1

Hot take, Dunban’s design is shit. I mean kit wise. Basically, the idea seemed to be for him to be able to be built tank or glass canon with an emphasis on auras. There’s a few problems here. 

First major issue is that tank Dunban is just way better than glass canon Dunban. The main reason for this is how Xenoblade 1′s agility stat work. It’s the strongest stat in the game because it impacts both accuracy and evasion. These stats are calculated additively, which means it is possible to get Dunban’s agility so high that he just has a 100% evasion rate. I remember doing a playthrough of Xenoblade 1 where I was not allowed to equip armor and I managed to get Dunban’s dodge rate up to around 90% before unlocking the 30% evasion boost while naked ability. That’s partially because Xenoblade 1 lets you equip agility gems into both weapon and armor slots. Light gear is typically meant for DPS, exchanging defense stats for more gem slots and more agility typically, but 1 doesn’t really have a ton of damage multiplying gems or anything stopping the player from just giving Dunban multiple agility gems (until he reaches the cap). The other reason why tank Dunban is better than DPS Dunban is that all of his damage abilities are tied to him using Gale Slash. While that ability doesn’t have a long cooldown per say, it does mean his uptime is going to be worse than building damage on Shulk, Riki, or Seven. That said, because of how strong the agility stat is, usually it’s possible to build Dunban for both evasion and damage because agility is also your accuracy stat, which is useful for DPS. 

The characters in Xenoblade 1 all have a main gimmick that they’re designed around. Shulk’s is that his Talent Gauge gives him a second Arts pallet and that he has no customizability in his main pallet, for example. Dunban’s main gimmick is that he has a fuck-ton of auras. In games where they appear, auras are major self buff, but you can only have one active at a time. There’s two major issues with how Dunban’s kit handles auras: the first issue is that his auras tend to have an on-activation effect and a lingering effect but usually each aura is designed to have only one of those two be significant, the second issue is just that he has so fucking many auras and he really doesn’t need that many. He has six aura arts, that’s almost enough to fill his entire arts bar. But functionally, some of these auras are really good general purpose while others have very niche usage. For example, Peerless cures the party of confusion, draws aggro, and gives him a buff to his strength stat. The most noteworthy part, curing a specific status effect, sounds completely useless outside of one specific boss fight while he has other ways of drawing aggro and I can’t see the strength up being significantly useful, meanwhile Jaws of Death revives him if his HP gets below zero during its duration. One of these is better than the other. The issue with the on-activation vs lingering effects is that I think the idea was that the player would have to make a trade off, but there’s no real reason why you can’t just use one aura and then immediately use the next one. Maybe Dunban could’ve been designed so that using one aura puts all of the others on cooldown? But in general, I don’t think the auras were well implemented for him. 

Overall, I get the impression that Dunban’s status as a dodge-tank was an accident as he’s able to achieve that by acting as the best exploiter of 1′s broken agility stat. His main mechanic of juggling aruras was also weakly implemented. As far as I can tell he’s meant to be a tank character who could also be built for damage, but because of how broken agility is, there’s no reason to build defense on him, so the player can just get the best of both worlds.

Elma - Xenoblade X

While I’d say that Dunban was a character who was primarily a tank that could also build damage, Elma is primarily a DPS character who can be built evasion. Because X divided its accuracy and evasion stat and it has more options for DPS augments, building Elma full evasion isn’t as obvious. The main reason why dodge-tank Elma works is because of her tension overdrive builds, where she spam Ghost Factory, which are arguably more broken than anything else in the series, especially in the post-game where the player character can get access to this build plus an status effect stasis art on the same weapon. So technically the dodge tank class would be dual gunners, but it’s done primarily by using Elma’s signature art.

Elma is the first character in the series to introduce the idea of an art that guarantees evasion for a duration. The way X handles this is through its decoy status effect, which guarantees evasion for a certain number of hits. Elma’s signature art is a tension art that spreads decoy to the entire party, so an evasive Elma build ideally wants to enter overdrive with a tension build so that she can spam this art. Overdrive also applies damage multipliers and other benefits, so giving Elma this build allows her to effective solo fights that she shouldn’t be allowed to take, I had to ban overdrive from my playthrough after figuring out this build because it made the game too easy. But even without overdrive, Ghost Factory is still the strongest art in the game arguably due to the high presence of AoE attacks in the game. 

I don’t think Elma is often seen as a dodge-tank by the community because dodge-tank Elma isn’t her standard build and X does such a poor job at communicating its mechanics that most players getting through the game might not have grasped those mechanics well enough to try something creative. 

Side note: I couldn’t find any detailed information about how Xenoblade X calculates its dodge chances. I think the wiki is implying that its additive based on accuracy vs evasion, but either there’s a difference in stat spread or calculations between 1 and X because X doesn’t have the same deal 1 had where its characters can reach below 50% hit rates against higher level enemies that they otherwise probably could have taken.

Basically, this is all stuff related to her dual guns weapons, which are designed around being evasive and landing crits. The best dodge tank build possible in the game would be to use other talent arts from dual guns characters in conjunction to Ghost Factory. Typically Cross builds that use dual guns post-game don’t use dual swords because they provide nothing of value to dodge-tanking. This just means that when Cross gets access to Ghost Factory, they can just combine the weapon with all of the dodge tanking capabilities with a better melee weapon. If I remember correctly, dual guns + greatsword is considered to be the most broken weapon combination due to dual guns having a monopoly on the most busted status effect while greatsword has the best DPS out of any weapon because of Nagi’s talent arts. 

But ignoring post-game builds that combine classes, Elma’s really just a dps character who happens to have access to the most broken buffing move in the game. Like, outside of Ghost Factory, nothing in her kit suggests building dodge tank, which makes me think that Ghost Factory was meant to be a supportive ability rather than a tanking one. Unfortunately, it’s just so fucking strong that her playstyle can be shifted around it. 

We’re still in the area where dodge tanks are really just questionably designed DPS characters. But I think Elma did introduce the most interesting part of Xenoblade dodge-tanks, which are player-actions that guarantee evasion. 

Brighid and Mythra- Xenoblade 2

I’m going to be honest and say that I haven’t really used Brighid much. My main issue with her is that her arts felt like they took a long time to charge, especially against enemies that block her auto attacks. But she is the first instance of a recognizable evasion tank. Brighid’s whip sword is the first instance of an art that’s primary function is to provide guaranteed evasion during its animation. 2 also has other forms of i frames that the player can trigger, such as when completing a blade combo, performing a level 4 blade art, and when activating a chain attack. When combining this with other things, it is possible to defeat the game’s superbosses solo level 1. I like this approach because the player should ideally be holding their evasion art and other key abilities and saving them for when the enemy uses a major art. This is a better approach than Ghost Factory because it makes fighting optimally more reactive and varied. Morag is also the first dodge tank where she is fully mean to be a tank rather than a hybrid between tank and dps. 

The biggest problem is Morag is probably that most of the game’s forms of i frames can be replicated better using other characters, especially Mythra. Mythra is a dps character who happens to synergize with the game’s systems in a such a way that she can act as a drain tank or a dodge tank on par with Brighid while still doing a bunch of damage. The reason for this is that Mythra can recharge arts on crit and her passive evasion buff. Her ability to recharge arts on crit has multiple implications. First there’s crit heal Mythra, which turns her into a drain tank that frequently has chain attack and her level 4 art up. This build allows Mythra to solo most superbosses while underleveled (the exception being the guy in a building because she can’t use level 4 arts while indoors). The second build is max evasion Mythra, where you play the fight on 1HP but it doesn’t matter because you can stack her high affinity evasion buff with low health evasion buffs, which also synergizes with her level 3 Blade Art, which deals double damage when below 30% HP. Basically, Mythra is in the same position Elma had in X, where she was clearly intended to be a dps character, but she has a spread evasion ability that increases her evasion so much that she can be built dodge tank without compromising on her damage output. That said, Mythra is less offensive than Elma because the game-breaking extent of these builds only really shows up after the player has completed her affinity tree, which is typically post-game. But I wanted to bring her up because many of the game’s longest form of i frame is exploitable by Mythra. And that’s before taking into account that the player cannot die while Pneuma is active.

I think 2 did an amazing job at establishing a ground-work for what a dodge-tank should look like with Brighid, while Mythra is a lot more like the older dodge-tanks in the series, which I don’t think are well designed. The main difference between the two is that Brighid’s gameplay loop is centered around identifying key enemy attacks and deciding when the best time to use her key abilities are, while Mythra achieves her status as a dodge tank by exploiting multiple systems in the game while also having an in-built spread evasion buff. Basically, Brighid is about deciding when to best use her abilities while Mythra is more about keeping her abilities up as often as possible. Overall, I’d say that both characters are better designed than previous iterations of dodge-tanks due to both of them having an element of player reaction.

Xenoblade 3 - Mio, Ashera, and Gray

3 hasn’t been out as long as the other games and I haven’t yet looked into post-game strats. But Mio, Ashera, and Gray are all representatives of the classes based off previous iterations of dodge-tank characters.

Mio’s class is mostly similar to Brighid. She’s also got my favorite class in the game. Her class has the highest amount of built-in evasion. Which means Zephyr class is the fastest one the player will have where they can get evasion on every single ability. That said, I imagine that the class itself falls off post-game because its strongest attributes can be spread to other classes and the length of her animations are quite short. She plays sort of similar to Brighid and Mythra where her dodge abilities have a short cooldown but the player still needs to manage when to use the dodge. Part of what makes Mio’s class so engaging to me is that she really doesn’t have the stats to back up being a tank, but the innate attributes of her arts make up for it. But a systemic change to 3 that nerfs this type of class is that the player can swap between characters mid battle. This is a nerf because the AI cannot be trusted to use Mio’s abilities intelligently and it’s a huge opportunity cost to only stick to one character. Overall, I do think Mio is the best designed Evasion tank in the series tho. I also want to bring up that 3 changes how systemic death prevention works over 2. Now chain attacks and manually entering Ouroboros will leave otherwise dead characters at 1HP and there doesn’t seem to be as many drain tank options as in 2, which means other party members will have to heal them (tho in chain attacks, this usually isn’t an issue). But these systems work better in 3 than they do in 2 because of how sparingly they can be used, which makes them good ways to secure safety of non-dodge tank party memebers without turning them into dodge tanks (I could be mistaken tho, especially with post-game builds).

Ashera is more based around Dunban’s concept of being a damage-tank. She has weaker tank stats than her counterparts but she deals more damage and has low cooldowns. I imagine her class is mostly broken during the post-game because her long animations with short cooldowns could probably result in a character who is just untargettable the majority of the time. I can’t give a strong opinion here. Right now, my biggest issue with the class is that it isn’t particularly usable late-game hard mode due to it lacking any arts that specifically make the class tankier. Basically, I’m left at a loss for how to build the class before post-game, but I can see the potential for it to be the strongest class in the game. Especially depending on whether life-stealing effects exist. Her class is definitely built around the concept of becoming powerful by abusing the game’s systems, which is probably most obvious when you look at Ashera’s actual arts pallet compared to what’s available to her class (as the Hero herself can’t exactly abuse the stuff that the class wants to abuse).

Gray is definitely based on Elma mechanically, where he’s a DPS class with some evasive abilities. Because he doesn’t have a Ghost-Factory ability, saying “fuck it” and building his class as a tank isn’t as viable during the main game, but I can still very easily see his class being built dodge-tank post-game because it can take advantage of the game’s systems. Like, since he’s not technically a tank, making him the tank would allow for everyone to build the augment that gives them lower cooldowns when a non-tank is targeted. Because Jaguar has long animations, giving it secondary evasion abilities would give this class the longest period of invulnerability available. Still, I’d say that this is the best execution of a dps class with mild amounts of evasion so far since I don’t see the broken evasion being doable until post-game where you can transfer the necessary arts over. Alongside that, I like that the class is primarily AoE damage, so the evasion is more meant to stall out the time it takes for tank characters to regain aggro. His evasion ability is also very strong on tank characters due to having bonus damage from the front. 

Overall, I just haven’t really seen the extent that these classes can break the game, so I can’t really judge them on that. But I can say that the way 3 handles its classes is that each of the main 6 characters represents a very broad archetype while the hero classes expand on more flavorful versions of that type. Cuz I feel like listing them: Noah represents auto attack crit focused DPS, Senna is ability spam DPS, Mio is dodge tank, Lanz is damage sponge tank, Eunie is healer support, and Taion is buff support. The hero classes all expand on or play with these concepts. Mio’s concept is the most unique of the bunch because her class plays almost like an action game due to functionally having a dodge button, though Gray and Ashera are both expansions of the concept. 

Conclusion

The dodge-tank characters in this series are always interesting. I’d say that they’re typically the most broken class in the series because they often will exploit some system in the game to maximize their effectiveness, which also makes them usually high skill classes to use effectively. Also, since I haven’t really talked about it in the retrospective, breaking the game isn’t offensive in a single player game if doing so is fun. Which I’d say that each iteration of the evasion tank has progressively gotten more fun to use because they’ve been getting increasingly interactive. I think the reason why this class feels so unique to Xenoblade is that the devs keep finding exploits in old games and implementing them as mechanics in new games, and this class was originally more or less started out as major exploits in 1 and X. 

[the-mercurial-star-o-vesper]

1, 2, 3, 4, and Jaaaam~!

As time of writing, I’ve faced off and beaten 1010 on Normal. Wooo~!

So, more 1010 stuffz!

Either through updates or I've merely been watching play throughs with turned down graphics; Having now played the section, the 1010 battle and cutscene sprites now have their eyes the proper matching color. However, at this point, I ain't gonna discount or discourage the "White Eyes Synch" HC.

   Turns out, according to Kliff’s brief, Neon J had been a Captain of the Cruiser. Now I don’t know about the time frames of the Royal Malaysian Navy, but for US Navy, it takes a collective of 21-23 years (at an estimate) to get to rank of Captain [No idea if this means starting at the rank of Seaman Recruit or starting as an O1; either way this dude was a full eagle].    Means, Neon J was in the military for a loooong time.

   So, when you destroy a member of 1010, they leave remains behind that can be transformed to face off against other members of 1010 or as something benefitial for the PCs.    Fanfic Writers, do with this as you may.

So only White (Rin) and Red (Zimelu) have parry attacks. Meaning they're the guys our PCs are more likely to go after first (The designated Leader; and the persumed more combative or warlike 1010 member / Bad Boy).

   Barraca Mansion also has those five colored portraits.

   The section of Metro Division leading up to the Boss Fight is just covered in dance-dance games.

According to the NSR-Post, type 4 Battledroids are still in service, and do in fact have background memories to hold in combat. In a previous post, I've already speculated that 1010 may have Neon J's memories...

Consider what it took to actually get to the boss fight. That's not just one limo, that's an entire floating fuckin escort with god damn canons. And not all of them were cars, half of em were akin to the Battleship Limo. Basically, Neon J didn't just command one ship, he had an entire fuckin Fleet.

   Part of Neon J’s voicelines do call 1010 “robots”.

I know the section was mean to play for laughs, as a break from the character driven plot, but really reeeeally look at this level: - When you defeat a body of 1010, you can transform the remains to go against the other members. - You are actively being photographed / recorded fighting and doing all this damage to 1010. - The fact that Neon J acknowledge Yinu and had an entire escort, means he already knew you were coming and was actively preparing to face you - Which is probably why he had his factory out. Let's face it, 1010 are Battledroids with weapons included, and most folks don't even come to their stomachs in height. Unless a fan is wearing full Halo MJOLNIR power armor and wielding a Fallout Fatman, you don't need to break out an entire robot factory if anything happens. Plus, shields. Neon J knew that BBJ were coming, and prepared accordingly, hell, 1010 was actively waiting on you (even though none of it was enough) - Consider everything. Neon J was a captain who faced what might've been some pretty historically bloody and brutal wars, and while he did break out weapons... ... None of these weapons do ANY personal or permanent harm to you / BBJ. Not even the sawblades or the missiles. ... Hell, consider the jump over. Nearly none of the other boss security levels have flash when you fall off edges, you just sorta pop back up, but 1010's? There's a red flash that pops up when you fall off, as if something was actively teleporting you back on to the car platforms. ... Think there might be a chance that, while Neon J knew you were arriving, he might have had more sympathies for BBJ than previously considered? ... Consider 1010. A Mohawk (Red) is, after all, a very Rock based Hairstyle. And Yellow? Its a pompadour, a "Rockabilly" hairstyle. How bout Blue's Lennon Specs (The Beatles were a Rock Band)... And the biggest boy bands of the 60s were Rock Band. ... Neon J goes over the top with his loyalties to NSR, like, uber over the top. And even the game acknowledges that he's paranoid. Its almost like he's playing a Role...

Time.    According to descriptions found by playing Zuke, NSR (at least) takes place after the 90s.    While for Neon J, he has fought since the 60s (68; It sounds like he might’ve just gotten out of basic training, the way he talks).    This leaves a 30-40 year time frame to consider.    Take into consideration, however, that this world has flying battleship cars, robots, a virtual idol that isn’t holographic glass, and folks have duper supernatural powers.    This could be in the 2100s or more for all we know.

A Change of Pace, HEADCANON TIME!

White is the Default Droid. Not so much in 1010, but in battledroid standards. You program in what you want the bot to be or do after the fact, and the color will indicate such. All battledroids have combative abilities, but their out of combat jobs are: - Red    - Maintenance. (Believe it or not, a saw is pretty useful on a ship) - Blue   - Parade (?). I mean, batons? - Green  - Grenadier is kinda hard to find outside of the niche combat, but consider Fallout GOAT. Probably does a lot of background jobs, like laundry. - Yellow - Missiles. Probably a Bridge stationed bot, and does a lot of calculations. Missiles are a calculated effort to aim and launch. They're not Grenades where you pull the pin, and hope that it only goes off at the designated 5 seconds (and not sooner). - White  - Default, and as we've seen with Rin, probably the kind that commands or acts as VIs (Virtual Intelligence, basically a smart interface).

1010 = Superhero fighting squad Oh please, a bunch of "young men" with color coded appearances and color coded weaponry, lead by a Captain with a Factory that actively replaces their bodies? And you're telling me they're ONLY a boy band? These dudes are fighting crimes like the god damn Power Rangers with all that equipment.

Neon J supported BBJ Consider all the above suggested. The Dude knew full feckin well that NSR wasn't the greatest of the great, and half the 1010 level proved that he was pretty much prepared for your arrival, and possible his own defeat. Let's face it, the dude was a Captain for a long damn time, and like commanded a small fleet in that time (not unlike the 1010 Level). You don't do stuff like that without some major strategy and awareness, ESPECIALLY, if you've survived entire wars and terrifying / inhuman conditions.  Plus consider his over exaggerated speech. With all the evidence in mind, and all the visuals, the dude was definitely playing up his NSR schtick. There was nothing stopping him from just unleashing an entire army of invulnerable and shielded 1010 bots to root you out and stomp on you mercilessly. Believe me, this dude had the resources, the weapons, and the experience, to put out two brat indie bandmates.

He threw the fuckin fight.

... Though I'm pretty sure he didn't like the Breaking Yinu's Piano Part. At least for everyone else it was either a justified humiliation or just... unplugging stuff, not outright destroying priceless heirlooms. Notice how that's the only thing he mentions, and he's the only Megastar to take into account another Megastar (and that's excluding Tatiana).

1010 Memories The dance, the shared voice, the synchronization; oh yeah, 1010 probably had a share of Neon J's memories (though likely not all of them).

This goes hand in hand with the popular Fanon that 1010 were based on former Squadmates of Neon J's.

ITS CYAN Sorry, but we've seen the direct difference in Sayu's fight with the Glowsticks and we see Purl-Hew's bright cyan blue next to an actual neon Blue. Purl-Hew is Bright Cyan Blue, he's not Regular Blue. ... So you see, I like color theory and have a set and unbreakable idea of color patterns.

Rin's weapons I believe Rin's capabilities is Synchronization with his bandmates, and the capacity to use Shields. Remember that there is no Rin phase for the Factory, and the shields fall out of the fight immediately after Rin is perma-defeated. Plus, the quasi-Purple-Magenta color matches Rin's poster seen in both the fight and on Barraca Mansion.

[bitmex-official]

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If you are marked as a Spam Account: Orders below 0.0025 XBT in value will automatically become hidden orders. Hidden orders do not show in the orderbook and always pay the taker fee. Post-Only spam orders will be Rejected instead of being hidden. Too many spam orders may be grounds to temporarily ban an account from trading. Spam Account designations are re-evaluated and lifted automatically every 24 hours if user behavior has changed. WebSocket Limits WebSocket Limits are documented on the WebSocket API page. Behaviour BitMEX monitors the behaviour of accounts on the platform, including those using the API. Efficiency Accounts that consistently make a disproportionate number of order-management API requests per notional of XBT executed place unnecessary load on the system and may be banned. For example, if your account is making thousands of new/amend/cancel order API requests each day, yet not trading at all, your account may be banned. As a general guideline, you should target to make no more than 300 order management API requests per 1 XBT notional executed. To help keep your trading activity efficient, you may: Switch off the automated system that is using the API. Increase traded volume, by tightening your quotes or crossing the spread if necessary. Reduce the number of requests made. HTTP Keep-Alive BitMEX does not support placing or canceling orders via WebSocket, only via HTTP. Our servers support HTTP Keep-Alive and cache SSL sessions. If you keep a connection alive, you will get websocket-like latency, obviating the need to use the websocket for transactional communication. Our Keep-Alive timeout is 90 seconds. Overload Due to growth in the crypto space, BitMEX is currently under extremely high load. To help improve responsiveness during high-load periods, the BitMEX trading engine will begin load-shedding when requests reach a critical queue depth. When this happens, you will quickly receive a 503 status code with the message "The system is currently overloaded. Please try again later." The request will not have reached the engine, and you should retry after at least 500 milliseconds. We will keep clients updated as we improve peak capacity on the trading engine. Filtering Many table endpoints take a filter parameter. This is expected to be JSON. For example, the filter query {"side":"Buy"} can be url-encoded and sent to the trade endpoint (click to run). Most values can only be filtered by simple equality. Timestamps, which are all UTC, can be queried in many ways: Timestamp Filters The following fields can be passed in the "filter" param as JSON key/value pairs: Key Description Example Example Description "startTime" Start timestamp. "2014-12-26 11:00" On or after 11:00am on 26 December 2014. "endTime" End timestamp. "2014-12-26 13:00" On or before 1:00pm on 26 December 2014. "timestamp" Exact timestamp. "2014-12-26 12:00" Exactly noon on 26 December 2014. "timestamp.date" Exact day. "2014-12-26" The entire day of 26 December 2014. "timestamp.month" Exact month. "2014-12" The entire month of December 2014. "timestamp.year" Exact year. 2014 The entire year of 2014. "timestamp.mm" Month of year. 12 December of each year. "timestamp.dd" Day of month. 26 26th of each month. "timestamp.ww" Day of week. 6 Friday of each week. 0 = Sat, 1 = Sun "timestamp.time" Exact time. "12:00:00.000" Exactly noon of each day. "timestamp.second" Exact second. "12:00:00" The entire second from noon of each day. "timestamp.minute" Exact minute. "12:00" The entire minute from noon of each day. "timestamp.hh" Hour of day. 12 12th hour of each day. (i.e. noon) "timestamp.uu" Minute of hour. 30 30th minute of each hour. "timestamp.ss" Second of minute. 15 15th second of each minute. For example, the .BVOL7D index is calculated and published on the trade feed every 5 minutes. To filter to just noon on Fridays, send the payload: {"symbol": ".BVOL7D", "filter": {"timestamp.time":"12:00", "timestamp.ww":6}} (Click to run) OrderBookL2 A special note on the orderBookL2 table, which is the canonical table for orderbook updates and the only way to retrieve all levels: This orderbook is keyed by a unique ID, not price, so that all levels are unique across all symbols. This may be unintuitive at first but ensures that each level across the entire system is uniquely keyed. Therefore, when you retrieve an orderBookL2 update, it may look like this: {"table":"orderBookL2","action":"update","data":[{"symbol":"XBTUSD","id":8798952400,"side":"Sell","size":8003}]} Notice that this does not include the price, which you should already have set on the level. The process for handling updates, inserts, deletes, and partials on this stream is exactly the same as any other stream and requires no special handling. However, some tooling may make assumptions about book entries, like keying them by price. In that case, there are a few ways to handle this: Keep a local hashmap of ids you’ve seen to their price. When you receive an update or delete, look up the price in this map. This is simple but will consume some memory. Use the following formula to reverse-engineer the ID: ID = (100000000 * symbolIdx) - (price / instrumentTickSize) price = ((100000000 * symbolIdx) - ID) * instrumentTickSize Definitions: symbolIdx is the index of the instrument in the list of instruments instrumentTickSize as the instrument’s tickSize property. Due to in-flight changes of tickSize on some XBT contracts, an override may need to be applied. See below. This can be written as: // This is a compatibility change as the tick sizes of live instruments changed in-flight. If you are listing // these instruments, you must use their original tick as part of your calculations. If not, this can be ignored, // and you can use `instrument.tickSize` directly. const LEGACY_TICKS = {"XBTUSD":0.01}; function instrumentTickSize(instrument) { return legacyTicks[instrument.symbol] || instrument.tickSize; } // You should have a copy of the full instruments list on startup. // Fetch from: https://www.bitmex.com/api/v1/instrument?columns=symbol,tickSize&start=0&count=500 const instrumentsList = fetchInstrumentsFromBitMEX(); function getInstrumentAndIdx(symbol) { const instrument = instrumentsList.find((i) => i.symbol === symbol); const instrumentIdx = instrumentsList.indexOf(instrument); return [instrument, instrumentIdx]; } // To get a price from an ID: export function priceFromID(id, symbol) { const [instrument, instrumentIdx] = getInstrumentAndIdx(symbol); return ((100000000 * instrumentIdx) - id) * instrumentTickSize(instrument); } // And reversed: export function IDFromPrice(price, symbol) { const [instrument, instrumentIdx] = getInstrumentAndIdx(symbol); return (100000000 * instrumentIdx) - (price / instrumentTickSize(instrument)); } Applied to our update above, where the ID was 8798952400, you should get a resulting price of 10476: price = ((1e8 * symbolIdx) - ID) * instrumentTickSize 10476 = ((100000000 * 88) - 8798952400) * 0.01

[pumpkins-s]

Stormbreaker / Coffinmaker

Read On AO3 Here

When Pidge is offered the spot as communications officer for the Kerberos Mission, to accompany her father, and her friend and former classmate Shiro, she’s expecting eight months of quiet, beautiful cosmos, ice samples, and—if she’s lucky—some broadcast signals to support her alien life theories.

She is not expecting to end up the prisoner of a fascistic race of alien cat-lizards hellbent on apparently reenacting the ugliest parts of the Roman empire, down to the massive enslavement and expansion effort and the gladiators as entertainment shtick.

But, if she’s going down, she figures she might as well go down swinging.

(Or, in which Pidge is the third Kerberos member, is decidedly not a damsel in distress who needs protection—thank you very much Shiro—is very much done with this crap, and fully intends to make it home to her little brother, no matter what it takes.)

Fandom: Voltron: Legendary Defender

Relationships: platonic Pidge & Shiro, Pidge & Matt, Pidge & Sam Holt

Characters: Pidge, Shiro, Sam Holt, Matt Holt, Thace, Ulaz

Rating + Warnings: Rated Teen; trigger warnings include graphic violence, blood, combat, murder, and systematic transphobia on the part of the Galra. I recommend checking AO3, or in my author’s notes under the cut, for a more extensive list.

Stormbreaker was written for the @pidgebigbang, and is accompanied by art from @anime7otaku7artist7. 

Chapter 1: Willow

((Author’s Note: 

Hello, hello! Welcome to Stormbreaker / Coffinmaker, my fic for the Pidge Big Bang. Developing the concept and storyline for this fic was the work of months (even if I wrote 90% of it in the last two weeks before it was due shhhh), and I'm so pleased to finally be able to share it. I love Pidge and the friendship she holds with Shiro, and I really wanted a chance to explore that in a setting where they were closer to being peers, as well as what her relationship to Matt would be like if she were the older sibling, and hence that (+ my desire to just see Pidge kicking ass as a gladiator) is how Stormbreaker was born.

As always, music played a big part in my writing, and I'd like to take a moment to credit that: I wrote and outlined this fic largely to the work of Barns Courtney and Florence + The Machine, particularly his  The Attractions of Youth album and her How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful album, respectively, and the influence of both is definitely there in how the story turned out. The title of this fic was chosen as a nod to two songs that pushed the concept and development of Stormbreaker by leaps and bounds. Of Monster And Men's Winter Sound, and Florence + The Machine's My Boy Builds Coffins. And of course, I can't not mention the song that played the original inspiration for this fic: No Doubt's Just A Girl.

For your listening enjoyment while you read, there's also an actual playlist for this fic (with more than just those previously mentioned couple of artists in it, promise). You can find the tumblr post for it here, with art by the wonderful corpus--corvus, or jump straight to the Spotify or Youtube link.

Before you read, a final warning for the content -- this is a gladiator fic, boys & girls & nonbinary pals. That means violence, blood, injury (Shiro's probably an obvious indication but people do lose limbs), fight to the death scenarios, and murder. People die in this story, and not all of them necessarily deserve it, though rest assured Pidge and Shiro themselves stay (relatively) intact. There's also the presence of underage drinking in a flashback scene, some mentions of the sexual abuse and forced prostitution of slaves within the Empire, and swearing. So much fucking swearing. Additionally, while all relationships are written to be strictly platonic, Shiro and Pidge's longer friendship and view of each other as closer to peers does mean their friendship has an emotional intimacy that wouldn't necessarily be seen in their canon counterparts. They lean on each other for support, quite literally, so if any of that would be a personal squick to you for whatever reason, please look away now.

That's about it! Enormous thanks to the Pidge Big Bang mods for putting this all together, and to my artist, anime7otaku7artist7, for their phenomenal work. Their art is embedded in the story, and you can also find a link to it here.

Stormbreaker is split into eight sections, with the entirety already written out pre posting. Chapters range from about 4-10 thousand words, with the first one being the shortest. It will update every day until its completion (so long as everything with editing and posting goes smoothly on my end, at least. Here's hoping). Enjoy!))

(( Author’s Note [Cont.]:

Willow: Forsaken

The gorgeous title art opening this chapter, while not provided by my official artist for the Pidge Big Bang, is provided by the wonderful corpus--corvus, who put up with months of my ranting about Stormbreaker!Pidge, and generously provided me with both this title art, and coverart for this fic's playlist. Thank you Logan you're a peach.))

Oh I'm just a girl, living in captivity

Your rule of thumb

Make me worry some

Oh I'm just a girl, what's my destiny?

- "Just a Girl", No Doubt

“Careful,” is the first thing Pidge’s father says to her, and she sighs, blowing errant bangs out of her eyes—she knew she should have pinned them back when they were suiting up—as she steadies her arms and inches the ice sample out of the extraction drill.

“Yeah, Pidge, careful,” Shiro says with a grin she can only classify as shit-eating, leaning over the back of the drill with his forearms resting on top.

“I am careful,” she snaps, fully removing the sample and hefting it between her arms. The weight is less than that of Earthen ice of the same mass—which is expected, given the gravity on Kerberos is much lesser than that on Earth. It’s a lucky thing their suits are specially designed and weighted to model Earth’s gravity on their interior, Pidge wouldn’t want to be hopping and stumbling around like the astronauts of her grandparents’ generation.

She hands the sample over to her father carefully, his eyes bright as he studies it. “Extraordinary.”

Pidge glances over at Shiro, who is doing his best to look anything more than politely interested, and smirks. “What? Not impressed?”

Shiro looks down at her, and shrugs ungainly against the bulk of his suit. “You guys get…a little more excited about ice samples than I do. I understand their value, but it’s not exactly my area.”

“Yeah, yeah, motorboy.” Pidge rolls her eyes. “I get it, you’re only interested in things with an engine and that go really fast.”

“That’s—“ Shiro makes a face. “Ok, that’s only partially true. I also like…uh…” He trails off, brows furrowed, and Pidge grins. “…What do I like?” he finally asks, looking to Pidge in askance.

“Uh. Reading? Fixing Keith’s bike?” Pidge counts off on her fingers, squinting down at them. “That’s…you’re really bad at having non-work-related hobbies, dude.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Oh! Me!” Pidge holds up a third finger triumphantly. “You like me!”

Shiro groans. “You’re my best friend, that’s a given—“

“You know what I like?” Pidge says, and then continues on before Shiro has the chance to respond. “I’ll tell you what I like. Motherfucking aliens, that’s what I like, Shiro.”

“And here we go again—“

“And that—“ Pidge points at the ice sample, “could be the key to finally proving their existence, right Dad?”

“Well,” her father says, looking quietly amused as he shifts the sample in his hands. “We certainly can’t rule anything out, all the way out here. And I’d hardly complain if one of these ice samples wanted to come along and solve my life’s—“ There’s a rumble all around them, rock vibrating slightly beneath their feet, and he pauses. “…What was that?”

“Earthquake?” Pidge asks as another rumble starts up, stronger than the last.

“Kerberos-quake?” Shiro mutters behind her, and she turns to tell him just how terrible that was, before the strongest shake yet occurs, throwing her off balance, and she yelps, falling forward.

“Pidge!” She catches herself on Shiro’s outstretched arm. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” She shakes her head, trying to dispel the hair blocking her vision and the vague sense of dizziness she feels. “We should get back to the—“ She stops, caught up in the feeling of something suddenly here, large and looming and right behind her, and slowly turns around as a ship comes into view.

For once, all her knowledge—all her calculations, her observations, her vast vocabulary, abandon her, and she is left with one thought, and one thought only.

That isn’t one of their ships.

“It can’t be…” She hears her father say, but it’s distant, muffled, as if he was underwater, and then all she can focus on is Shiro grabbing desperately at her arm, yanking her along.

“Run. Run!”

She runs.

It’s a rush of sudden sound, sudden movement that seems at odds with the serene stillness expected of space. All she can hear is the roaring noise of whatever is behind them, Shiro’s shouts, her own heavy breathing as she stumbles along in her suit, the previously steadying weight suddenly cumbersome.

There’s a sudden pull behind them, around them, everything lit up purple, and Pidge screams as her feet suddenly leave the ground, flying up into the void of black above them. She hears both of the others yell her name, and she reaches out blindly for something, anything—her father’s blurry form, the outstretched hand she knows is Shiro’s, only to find nothing.

Tractor beam, a detached, scientific part of her mind supplies for her. I’m the smallest, so it’s natural I’d be the first picked up.

Sure enough, one of them—she thinks her father—flies up a moment after, Shiro caught up off the ground last.

They’re both shouting in panic, and Pidge thinks she should be screaming, too. Might already be screaming, or perhaps she’s forgotten to altogether, it’s impossible to tell, right now. She is not in control of the motion of her own body, of her senses.

Debris off the ground, caught up in the beam with them, catches on the side of Shiro’s helmet, scraping along, and she can only pray it hasn’t knocked it loose, hasn’t stolen his oxygen, before another rock slams into her own head.

The last thing she hears as it all goes black is the sound of her own voice tapering off, dying in her throat like a person hanged, condemned and left to die.

…Oh, so she had been screaming.

The night Shiro gets offered the position of pilot for the Kerberos mission, Pidge drags him out drinking.

“Shots!” she announces loudly, placing them down on the bar, and Shiro winces. He’s the one person she knows who gets a headache just from being in a bar. Normally, Pidge would have sympathy, as prone to migraines brought on from stress and lack of sleep as she is, but over time she’s come to accept this is an inevitability of taking Shiro out anywhere fun that isn’t space or flight themed. Luckily, the more alcohol Shiro gets in him, the more he seems to forget about his headache, or his apathy towards bars in general—enough to be willing to repeat the same cycle of misery, ecstasy, and then mild hangovers, occasionally, every few weeks, at least.

“What are those?” He picks one up cautiously, sniffing at it. “Whiskey?”

“Mhmm,” Pidge hums happily, sliding into the stool next to his. “Good brand, too.”

“I think I’ll just order one of those fruity cocktails,” Shiro says with an air of quiet distaste, sliding the shot glass back across to Pidge.

“Weak.” She downs them both, hers first and then Shiro’s, slamming the second empty glass down to the background of his horrified face.

“I don’t know how you do that,” he says, and she sticks her tongue out at him.

Drinking is just one of the many things they do together, but in very different ways. Shiro—perhaps still trying to live down the keg-stand days of his barely-twenties that Pidge remembers sneaking into at seventeen or so all too fondly—doesn’t like anything strong, anything that leaves too much of a burn behind. He finds his preferences in what is sweet, where the alcohol is masked by some more agreeable mix-in.

Pidge, meanwhile, relishes the burn. Chases the chemistry reacting in her own body, the poison her brain somehow just barely sustains, with fascination. Drinking is stupid, objectively. So naturally that only leads to the urge to categorize it, sample every flavor until she understands every urge and every predilection.

She watches Shiro order his cocktail in amusement, and waves her hand when the bartender looks to her. They both know how to take care of themselves—and each other, if they find it necessary. Shiro will sip his fruity drinks, and Pidge will knock back a couple shots before giving it a break and then nursing a beer or some watered down vodka-and-schnapps concoction for the rest of the night.

She’s an experimenter, not an idiot. If she takes it too far, makes herself too sick or poisons herself too permanently, she won’t be able to carry out the next test. She’s the extent of her own sample size, which means she has to make herself last.

“Remember when we were young,” she says languidly, swinging around on her stool and leaning on the bar, head tilting up to watch the ceiling, then Shiro. “And we’d party like the sun wouldn’t come up?”

“I remember going through a bottle of Advil every two months, yeah,” Shiro says dryly. “Besides you’re—I love the way you say that, when we were young. You’re not even legal to drink yet.”

“Shhh.” Pidge waves a hand. “Keep your voice down or you’ll get us kicked out. I worked hard on that I.D., Matt helped me pick the picture.”

“And what a great picture it is,” Shiro offers sarcastically, and Pidge levels a threatening eye at his drink. He pointedly moves it out of her reach, and after a moment, continues. “I still don’t get why you like bars so much. You’re you—I can barely get you out of your room to go to the dining hall.”

“Are you kidding me?” She waves a hand. “Bars are the one place where I can get social stimulus without having to actually talk to or acknowledge anyone beyond the wonderful person providing my drink. It’s an observational heaven. At the Garrison I actually have to make conversation.” She shudders, and Shiro snorts.

“…It still feels weird being out here, with your parents knowing where we go.”

“Joys of being second-gen American,” Pidge says proudly. “Just enough Italian left over where a twenty-one plus drinking age seems like the dumbest thing in the world.”

“I guess.” Shiro wrinkles his nose. “Still just feels weird when my commanding officer knows I go out drinking with his daughter.”

“Shiro, you practically live in our house. You’re in Matt’s elementary school graduation picture, for crying out loud. Bit late for worrying about that sort of thing.” Shiro winces, and Pidge laughs, patting him on the shoulder. “Man. Kerberos. I can’t believe you’ll be locked up with only my dad and some poor communications officer for eight months.” She pauses, and at Shiro’s faintly proud, but still somber look, she grins. “Maybe I should suggest to Dad he bring his zero-gravity specialized Scrabble board along.”

“Oh god,” Shiro groans, dropping his face into his elbow against the bar. “Please, don’t.”

“Doing it,” Pidge says happily. After a long moment, she looks over to Shiro, curling her arms into a pillow on the bar for her to drop her head onto, sighing. “…It’ll be weird, without you here. It was going to be strange enough not having Dad around that long, but at least I’m used to him disappearing off for missions.” Shiro grunts morosely, and she hums. “Always got Matt, I suppose. And Mom. I’ll just spend more time around the house or something. Lucky we live so close.”

Shiro says nothing, stealing the discarded beer bottle of some other long-departed patron, and peeling habitually at the label in one of his little-seen nervous gestures. “It will be weird.” There’s silence again, and Pidge is just starting to wonder if she’s expected to say something, before he continues, quiet and unsure. “You know they haven’t decided on a communications officer yet. You could always…throw your hat in the ring. They’re already worried about team compatibility—with a mission this long, and this important—and everyone knows we work well together.”

“Me?” Pidge snorts. “Please. Even if I wanted to—and I’m not saying I do—they’d never take me. I’m still a cadet.”

“Only while you finish up the last of your engineering credits.” Shiro points out sullenly, still not meeting her eyes. “You’ve been an officially marked communications officer for the better part of a year at this point. And there’s no one better at the job.”

Pidge blinks, surprised at the blunt honesty in his tone. “…You…really want me to apply, don’t you?”

Shiro shrugs, glaring down at the decimated bottle label. “It’d just be—it’d feel weird without you, alright? Like something was missing.”

Almost unconsciously, Pidge reaches across, snatching up the balled-up wrapper, freeing it from Shiro’s wrath and contemplating it, as if it might suddenly give her an answer to this new puzzle.

Of course, looking for solutions in beer bottle wrappers is neither scientific nor logical, so Pidge isn’t very surprised when it offers her none.

“…I guess we do do most everything together, don’t we?” she offers softly. Shiro just shrugs again, avoiding both the answer and her eyes as he sits up and sips awkwardly at his drink. He doesn’t want to pressure her, to suggest her into something she doesn’t want to do. He also doesn’t want to go without her.

He’s always been stupidly good at expressly not talking about his worries, especially when he thinks he’s burdening someone else with them. Luckily for him, while Pidge is no feelings expert, she is a Shiro expert at this point, and very good at determining the logical end point to a problem.

“Yeah, okay,” she says unthinkingly. “Why not?” Shiro turns to look at her, still all kinds of conflicted mixed in with his hope, and she steals his drink easily, downing back the last of it, and when she slams it onto the bar next to the empty shot glasses, it sounds like a promise.

Kerberos. What could go wrong?

It’ll give her an amusing story to tell Matt when she gets rejected, at least.

…We come from a peaceful planet…

Pidge comes to with a quiet gasp and a rush of aching pain along her left temple. She startles just ever so slightly—everything blurry and her suit feeling far, far too heavy for either Kerberos or the conditions of their ship—before the weight of strong hands holding her arms behind her back, and Shiro’s muffled voice pleading somewhere off to her left, come to her attention, and she tenses, stills.

It doesn’t all come back so much in a rush as in a trickle of images, feeding into her brain like a lagging video on a bad connection as her quick, panicked breaths fog up the inside of her visor. The ship, the tractor beam, being dragged up and up and away from Shiro and her father, the sudden crunch of the rock against her skull, all sliding through her mind and clicking into place.

For the first time in a long, long time, Pidge feels true panic grip her, staring down into the abyss of the unknown. She’d come close, in their attempt to flee the inevitable on Kerberos, but had been too caught up in the immediacy of the situation. That was instinctive panic, raw and something close to animal.

This is a panic of exercised consideration. Of weighing up her circumstances and what little information she has available to her and ultimately coming up short—short of a plan, short of an idea, short of even a clue. She has no idea where she is—beyond somewhere she never was supposed to be—who has her, or what is going to happen.

Based on her position and her mode of capture, Pidge can only assume herself and the others are being held captives by a hostile extraterrestrial power. Which is not, she thinks a little hysterically, even remotely fucking close to something the Garrison had prepared them for.

For Pidge, sorting all this out amongst the overwhelmed screeching in her head and the dull throb of pain above her eyes that signals either an impending migraine or a concussion feels like the work of hours. But it must only be moments, because one second Shiro is talking, stammering out a few desperate phrases on their behalf, before there’s a shuffle of movement, and Shiro’s cut-off yelp of pain as something strikes him.

At that she does stir, almost involuntarily jerking against the hold on her to turn and observe, check on Shiro’s condition—he was speaking, which means at least he hadn’t sustained any major head injuries, surely. In response there’s a tightening of the grip on her arms, an increase on the weight pressing down on her back, a boot maybe, and she buckles instinctively, head bowing to the ground and her whole body going taut but unmoving.

Eventually, after some further exchanges of words she can’t muddle out in the confused space of her brain beyond the disbelieving fact that it’s definitely English, the grip holding Pidge shifts, moving as something like handcuffs with a rigid bar between them is shackled onto her wrists. Something takes hold of the bar, and begins to drag her backwards, assumedly out of the room. Rough sliding noises on her left and right are the only indication she has that the same is being done to her father and Shiro, she doesn’t dare look to confirm.

It’s not until they’re moving along some hallway, and the other dragging noises move past and ahead of her, that Pidge dares to tilt her head just slightly up, trying to catch sight of something beyond her own feet scraping along a metal floor.

She can only get glimpses, between long stretches of endless chrome and the shine of purple lighting coming from some undeterminable source. Flashes in windows of huge containment systems, layers upon layers of prisoners crammed into cages and moved about as if building blocks directed by a child. She sees whispers of floors upon floors of moving figures, all discernable only in the same shades of grey and purple, with splashes of red, outsizing any operation she’s ever seen at the Garrison.

She sees torture. She sees order. She sees cruelty. She sees control.

There’s the bark of voices above her head, and she yelps as she is dragged around a corner roughly, the quick turn putting a strain on her arms. But she doesn’t dare fight back, not at the risk of suffering the same fate as Shiro.

Observation is her greatest—her only strength, right now. She must do what she does best, as she does at officer meetings, in Garrison dining halls and classrooms, even in shitty, dim-lit desert town bars.

Pidge watches. She grasps at every piece of data, commits to memory every variable she can spot, and above it all she is left with only one question, buzzing in the back of her dizzied, overwhelmed mind.

Where the hell are we?

[rahiwatching]

So there actually is one image I could find that shows the Red Star that isn’t in via the telescope, and that’s this shot from the very end of MNOG:

And the thing is, if you compare it to the view from the telescope and compare the sizes of the constellations, you find that the view from the telescope isn’t zoomed in at all. Everything is the same size, its just got the telescope display over it. Which makes sense from a game designer perspective, why change the zoom on the star field you already have for just this shot?

But that meant that if the view from the telescope didn’t have a zoom issue, I could use it to figure out the angular size of the Red Star after all! One thing from my original calculations that I am sure of is the orbital position of the Red Star, as explained there, the orbital distance I calculated was the only one it could exist in and still have the required characteristics from canon, so that parameter doesn’t change. meaning if I could work out the angular size here, I could use the equation above to work out a new, more accurate size for the Red Star itself!

So that’s what I did.

By stitching multiple telescope views together, I got the below composite image:

A diagram in the bottom left of the telescope display shows 1/4 of a circle, or 90 degrees. This is demonstrating how far up and down you can move the telescope - a full 90 degrees from the horizon to directly above the telescope (the Zenith), and this is backed up by the actual movements you are allowed in the game. That meant that this composite image represents a full 90 degrees of arc. Given that the image from the horizon to the zenith point is 1433 pixels long, that meant that each pixel represented 226.1 seconds of arc.

The Red Star in this image was a little hard to measure due to the tail coming off of it, but I measured it to be 23 pixels in diameter. This converted into 1.44 degrees of arc, which is actually slightly bigger than my original calculation!! (1.17 degrees).

That was a major surprise, but I’ve triple checked the maths, its right as far as I can tell. In fact, given the potential margin for error inherent in pixel measures, I am happy to take this as a confirmation of my original size calculation for the Red Star.

Keeping that in mind, I decided to make the below - a full sky map of Aqua Magna, including the Red Star, Bara Magna and the rings/dust clouds that surround them all:

The sizes and positions of the Red Star and Bara Magna are correct here as per my calculations, with Bota Magna being perpetually hidden behind Bara Magna, as already covered. The position of the rings/dust cloud is correct, but the thickness is not something I have calculated before, and so is just a rough estimate. However, this view is from the equator, so seeing them as just a thin line is the correct view. The normal stars are not based on MNOG, but are just random here.

The question remained though: why does the Red Star feel so small in these images, when the mathematics say the size depiction is correct? I think that is due to a few different factors.

The sky map shows the sky as a full sphere, a view that we could never see with our eyes, making everything feel smaller in the image. Our own mental image of how big our Moon really is is also likely skewed to make it seem bigger in our heads than it actually is, as most of the time that we look at the Moon we are looking at it while our view is under the effects of the Moon Illusion.

I just read the summary of "The Science of the Spherus Magna System" (fantastic work btw) and now I'm wondering what the sky would look like on Bara Magna, how big the moons would be, and the same for Aqua Magna. Have any insights there?

Excellent question!

As described in my Science of Spherus Magna document, both Aqua Magna and Bota Magna are in a stationary orbit around Bara Magna, meaning that they complete one orbit in the same time as it takes Bara Magna to spin around once on its axis (one day). Therefore, from the ground the moons would appear to hang unmoving in the sky, going through a full set of phases through the course of the 36-hour day. Due to their positions on opposite sides of their orbit from one another, you would never be able to see both moons at the same time from a position on the ground of Bara Magna, as one would always be on the opposite side of the planet. But to work out the apparent size the moons would appear in the sky, we will need to do some more mathematics.

Here on Earth, astronomers use something called angular measure to describe the apparent size of an object in the sky. The whole sky is divided up into 360 degrees, however as the ground technically blocks half the sky from view, therefore from horizon to horizon is measured as 180 degrees. One degree is further divided into 60 arc-minutes (or 60’ for short) with an arc-minute being further broken down into 60 arc-seconds (or 60”).

To work out the angular size of an object in the sky (measured in arc-seconds), you need to know two things:

The linear size of the object (this is another way of saying its true size, measured in meters)

The distance to the object (again, measured in meters)

If you know those two things, you can plug them into this equation to find out the angular size of the object in question:

Let’s say we have an Agori looking up at the sky from the equator of Bara Magna, on the side of the planet that is facing Aqua Magna. What would they see?

From my previous investigations, we know that the linear size of Aqua Magna is its diameter measurement, which is equal to 7,220.47km (or 7,220,470 meters). We also know that the distance between Aqua Magna and Bara Magna is 87,548.16km. However, this measure is from the centre of Bara Magna to the centre of Aqua Magna, so for the purposes of this investigation we will need to remove the radius of Bara Magna from that so that the measure is starting from its surface, where our Agori observer is. The radius of Bara Magna is 10,830.70km, so taking that away from the distance measure gives us a distance from the surface of Bara Magna to Aqua Magna of 76,717.46km (or 76,717,460 meters).

Plugging both of those numbers into the equation above gives us an angular size of Aqua Magna for our Agori observer of 19413.19 arc-seconds, or 5.39 degrees. Given the symmetry of Aqua Magna and Bota Magna in their orbits, this is also the size of Bota Magna that the Agori would see if they travelled to the other side of the planet where Bota Magna is visible.

To put that into context, from the surface of the Earth, our Moon has an angular size of around 0.5 degrees, so to our Agori astronomer, Aqua Magna would appear to be 10.78 times larger than the Moon appears in the sky here on Earth – like this:

Given that I stated that Aqua Magna was tidally locked to Bara Magna, meaning that only one side of the moon ever faces the planet (the same as how only one side of our Moon ever faces the Earth), there would be no land on the side facing the planet to be able to see it, as I assumed that the GSR landed on the side facing away as an explanation of why the Matoran of Mata-Nui and Voya-Nui never mentioned seeing the planet when they looked to the sky. But let’s say that a very adventurous Ga-Matoran set away on a quest to circumnavigate Aqua Magna – how big would Bara Magna appear in the sky to her once she sailed to the other side of the moon?

The diameter of Bara Magna is 21,661.40km (or 21,661,400 meters) and the distance from the surface of Aqua Magna to Bara Magna is 83,937.93km (or 83,937,930 meters). Plugging those numbers into the equation again, we get an angular size for Bara Magna when viewed from Aqua Magna of 53,229.67 arc-seconds, or 14.79 degrees.

Comparing that size to our Moon again, to our Ga-Matoran sailor Bara Magna would appear to be 29.58 times larger than the Moon appears to human astronomers – like the below image:

 While you didn’t ask it in your question, I also worked out the apparent size of the Red Star when viewed from the surface of Aqua Magna. Its diameter is 350km (or 350,000 meters) and its distance from the surface of Aqua Magna is 17,149.73km (or 17,149,730 meters), meaning its angular size would be 4,209.56 arc-seconds, or 1.17 degrees, which is 2.34 times larger than the Moon appears to us – see the below comparison again:

One thing I forgot to mention in my Science of Spherus Magna paper was that given the Red Star is also in a stationary orbit around Aqua Magna, it would act much in the same way as a full Moon here does at night on Earth for the side of Aqua Magna facing it, only appearing larger in the sky than our Moon does. Nocturnal Rahi on the islands of Mata-Nui and Voya-Nui would be able to use its light during the night to see by, though because it produces its own light of a specific colour, everything would be bathed in a deep red glow.

[digitalcraftsin]

How to improve ecommerce Seo Traffic ?

1. Let Search Engines Read Reviews 

One approach to pull in new clients and increment your perceivability is with one of a kind, educational substance on your item pages. On the off chance that you have several item pages, you may have the transfer speed to continually make new substance. One alternative for building up a constant flow of new substance is with item suggestions and audits. Your clients submit surveys and fill in as salesmen to persuade others to change over. 

Practically 90% of clients trust online audits as much as close to home suggestions from companions or relatives, which implies a couple of surveys can go far to support your transformation rate. 

Featuring these surveys on your site is extraordinary for clients, yet additionally for your eCommerce SEO endeavors. Content-rich audits give new updates to your pages, something Google rewards, and upgrade the setting required by crawlers to comprehend why they should show your item in an output rather than one of your rivals. 

Shockingly, the absolute most famous item survey apparatuses show this rich, significant substance in a way web indexes can't peruse. With these devices, audits are infused into your page through JavaScript and the genuine survey text is absent inside the source code. While Google is improving at understanding this intricate coding, it's not great. On the off chance that search crawlers experience issues understanding your JavaScript, at that point it will be disregarded altogether. 

When working out an audit stage, pick one that inserts the survey content straightforwardly into the HTML of your site. This ensures the two clients and web indexes can peruse these supports, improving your long-tail watchword posting and expanding your certified traffic leads. 

2. Make Dynamic Meta Descriptions 

The meta depiction shows up straightforwardly under a page title in the SERPs. Google doesn't peruse what you write in the meta portrayal, however your clients do. Notwithstanding the title and the URL, it's the main data they have on your site before they choose whether or not you get their snap. 

For eCommerce locales that offer a huge number of items that regularly get supplanted occasionally, figuring out how to compose connecting with meta depictions at scale is a test. A few organizations contribute the time making a remarkable portrayal for each page, yet that is not attainable in case you're an independent company or significant retail establishment retailer. 

Brilliant SEOs use "Link constructions" and set up a lot of rules to robotize meta portrayal creation while producing one of a kind substance. This is a little bit of code that utilizes a foreordained arrangement of rules to compose pertinent depictions consequently. 

For instance, the accompanying standard could be composed for photography retailer B&H Photo: 

Shop for PRODUCT NAME at BRAND. BRAND gives SUBCATEGORY and CATEGORY to all photography and hardware fans. 

In real life, the item portrayal resembles this: 

Shop for Canon EOS Rebel at B&H Photo. B&H Photo gives DSLR Cameras and Digital Cameras for all photography and hardware fans. 

Rather than taking days or weeks to refresh a class, this construction permits you to refresh your whole site naturally. With a bit of testing, you ought to have the option to discover a portrayal that improves your natural navigate rates. 

3. Keep Your Product Descriptions Unique 

Alongside meta portrayals, you need to ensure your item depictions are interesting also. 

One of a kind substance turned into a need after Google delivered its Panda calculation, which centers around advancing excellent substance that is applicable to clients. The objective was likewise to punish copy content that was rejected from different pages. 

One of the initial steps to support your eCommerce SEO endeavors is to recognize any substance on your item pages that contain copied duplicate, especially pages that have similar portrayal as items offered by contenders or makers. 

When you distinguish copied content, revamp it without any preparation. This makes your substance remarkable contrasted with your rivals, and elegantly composed portrayals furnish Google with extra setting around what you're selling, improving the probability that they'll show your item for pertinent hunts. 

In the event that you have to organize your substance and have an apparently perpetual rundown of item depictions in front of you, make content for your most elevated edge and top rated items first. At that point build up a procedure to supplant copied portrayals in stages, or as new items get added to your arrangement. Inevitably, you will change your whole site over to the new depictions. 

In the event that you sell your items through different commercial centers, similar to Amazon or eBay, utilize the producer's depictions so your interesting substance isn't shared over the web. 

web based business web optimization item page 

4.Only Index One Version Of Your Domain 

Talking about copy content, you need to ensure there is just one duplicate of some random page on your area. Shockingly, it's normal for organizations, even huge ones, to have their whole site copied. This is typically happening when a site has a functioning "www" and "non-www rendition," like a page that begins with "http". 

At the point when you have different copied locales, your pages go up against one another in search, and contenders with just one page for a given item will outrank you. 

Copy pages frequently happen when subdomains aren't hindered by Robots.txt records, gated behind a secret word ensured sign in divider, or diverted to the fundamental www page. Web index crawlers locate the copy pages and split values between in the rankings. Rather than one page getting 100% of the worth, two pages get half. 

There are numerous means you can take to recognize in the event that you have various variants of your area recorded: 

Slither on your site page utilizing a device like Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, or SEMRush 

Audit Google Analytics information for natural presentation pages to check whether undesirable subdomains show up. 

Search Google's file of your site by utilizing progresses modifiers, for example, "site:mysite.com - inurl:www" to show all filed pages on your site that are not situated in the www subdomain. 

Preferably, you will hinder any copy pages before making them, yet in the event that you notice them in your record, make certain to refresh your robots.txt as fast as could reasonably be expected. 

5. Add Pagination Elements to Category Pages 

On class pages with a huge number of items, the exact opposite thing you need is to compel clients to stack everything simultaneously and afterward look through postings until they discover something they need. Most eCommerce sites illuminate this by separating the class into effectively edible pages with only a part of the postings, ordinarily with 25-50 things for every page. 

While this is incredible for client experience, it can negatively affect your eCommerce SEO as Google isn't sure which class page to show for clients in indexed lists. Including SEO pagination components with "rel=next" and "rel=prev" labels tells Google and other web crawlers how pages are identified with each other. 

Brilliant web designers will likewise give clients the alternative to see the entirety of the postings on one page. On the off chance that you choose to add the alternative to your eCommerce pages, ensure you adhere to the accepted standards delineated by Google to forestall disarray and punishments by the hunt crawlers. 

6. Grasp Schematic Markup 

Schematic markup is one of the best, however underutilized, devices for SEO eCommerce. These little pieces of code improve your outcomes by putting star appraisals and sticker prices straightforwardly in Google list items. While schematic information is definitely not an immediate positioning variable, these outwardly satisfying augmentations give setting to expected clients and can expand your active clicking factor. 

As per an examination via Search Engine Land in 2014, organized markup shows up in 36% of query items, however short of what one percent of all sites have it on their pages. 

Executing organized markup on your site implies adding code to your page layouts from Schema.org. We've expounded on the advantages of Schema previously, yet it bears rehashing: this is an amazing asset for any business ready to set it up. 

When appropriately coordinated into your code, this Schema information empowers Google to deliver more powerful indexed lists and can emphatically impact active visitor clicking percentage

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[anbu-legacy]

SCIENCE

@kaminoko-x: (not an ask so I can link stuff) I was rereading through character asks because I finished Hard Came the Rain (there was much fluff induced screaming) and was hungry for more ANBU Legacy things (as usual). Ended up giggling about this x. As someone who worked with kids for a part time job, I just really appreciated Ogata’s insane level of kid wrangling, she is a master and a queen and I would like to be her someday (don’t we all).

I also found this x and then went on a giant squeeing spree about world building and science in ANBU Legacy because biochem is my uni major and I’m a nerd. SCIIEEENNNCE

Like, to my knowledge and googling, sarin isn’t a naturally occurring chemical species so Konoha has to have chemical and biochemical analysis, synthesis, and purification techniques to produce it. And people to research what exactly sarin does biochemically (bc Genma’s commentary indicates they probably do know exactly how it works) and streamline production methods so it could be used enough that it’s well known among ninja/medical profession as a useful potent poison. HOW BIG IS KONOHA’S SCIENCE RESEARCH DIVISION AND WHO GETS TO BE IN IT. ARE THERE ANY CIVILIANS. ARE THERE ANY NINJA-SCIENTISTS (other than Orochimaru, but does his stuff even count as actual science if it’s not peer reviewed), IS THAT A THING

Genma’s comment about using a less potent organophosphate shows his chemical and biochemical theory is at least irl uni level- I’m like 99% sure it’s from med-nin training. But it does make me wonder if you’d have science classes available if you aren’t headed into medicine. Are there basic science classes at the Academy? How far in theory do they go? What about post-academy, are they available like officer classes? Would you have to pay for them, are there any pre-reqs? I have so many questions.

It’s not at all the first time there have been sciencey worldbuilding details in ANBU Legacy. There’s been a ton of medical details in particular, and anaesthetics and drugs and soldier pills are a thing. And that one village medic had salve from the war described as good for chemical burns in Suffering Fools and Kakashi mentions gas as part of the war in Worth the Pain, so chemical weapon development is a thing too (is that how sarin was developed?). Idk this one just particularly caught my eye and set me off ahahhaa

——

When we got this, Ki and DK both said, “This is yours to answer, Nezu.” Probably because I’m 90% the one who throws overly detailed science and medicine into our worldbuilding. And I have been sitting on answering this for approximately ever, not because I didn’t want to, but because I wanted to do it RIGHT and then pretty much paralyzed myself into inaction. But that’s no way to honor what might be my favorite ask EVER. So, @kaminoko-x and any other science nerds in our tiny fandom, here goes…

Disclaimer #1: Answers to character asks aren’t canon. It’s possible that I overstepped in choosing sarin as my example, and should have chosen a more easily synthesized neurotoxin like strychnine. 

Disclaimer #2: I’m an avid student of medicine and science, and a skilled researcher, but I’m not a medical professional and I don’t have a science degree. I made a left-hand turn partway through university and transferred from a science program to a theatre program. And then worked for many years in user experience design for computer software. But if I had both infinite lifetimes and health, I’d totally be a scientist in several different fields. And a doctor and a veterinarian. And of course, a writer.

BUT ANYWAY… Let’s get to it!

The world that Kishimoto handed us is full of contradictions that we writers do a lot of contortions to make work. They have computers, which implies plastics, semi-conductors, microchips, clean rooms, micro-machining, and a whole lot of basic chemistry and physics. They have video cameras and CCTV. And they have chakra that can cause explosions, create water dragons, and heal what ought to be life-ending traumatic chest injuries using the patient’s hair. They notably don’t have gunpowder or projectile weapons, which real Japan had in the 1500s. They go everywhere on foot because who ever heard of the wheel or horses, let alone an internal combustion engine? Except wait, don’t they have trains? And wasn’t that a motorboat they took to get to the Land of Waves in Naruto’s first big mission? Yeah, so there’s that.

So here’s OUR canon: they DO have technology and scientific research. And they do have a basic understanding of a lot of the science we have. Even if we gave them only pre-industrial-revolution tech, they’d be able to do sophisticated chemistry, and as we’ve already seen, they have much more modern tech than that.

Continuing education for ninja is for all ninja, not just ANBU and not just officers. It’s a requirement, whether it be classes in practical skills like map-reading, sword combat, cryptography, field use of poisons, first aid, etc, or academic studies like history, literature, medicine, poison synthesis, engineering, and other less obviously ninja-y skills. the more academically inclined can take classes above and beyond the requirements. And those looking to specialize, like Ryouma taking medical training, obviously have a whole series of classes tailored to those specialties.

So yes, Academy kids do get science classes, although they are probably couched in ninja terms. It’s not physics, it’s calculating the trajectory of your arrow. It’s not biochemistry, it’s synthesizing ricin from castor beans. Even if they only go as far as elementary education, they’d have to have some basic math literacy.

There also has to be an army of civilian workers who do things like keep the power plants running, dispose of the garbage, grow the crops and raise the livestock, slaughter and butcher the meat, weave and dye the fabric, etc. And an associated army of merchants and traders, bankers and investors, restaurant workers and chefs, and all the other people who make a society function. And some of those people have to have scientific and engineering knowledge, or there wouldn’t be television for Naruto to watch Captain Seaweed on.

I’ve always believed there are peer-reviewed journals and academic institutions in this world. Konoha isn’t a university town, but that doesn’t mean there are no universities in Fire Country or any of the other countries. And our ninja would have access to at least some of those journals, etc.

There are definitely chemical weapons, and probably biological ones as well, if even only the crudest, medieval forms, like throwing diseased corpses into a city’s water supply. (Human history is appalling.) And there is not gunpowder. Maybe development in that line is actively suppressed. Or maybe there’s some reason that it doesn’t work, because chakra. Either way, ninja wouldn’t want civilians getting their hands on weapons that could take down the ninja’s position of absolute military supremacy.

Ninja scientists absolutely do research and development. That’s how soldier pills came about and continue to be refined and improved. That’s how new poisons and chemical weapons come about. And you bet your sweet ass the ninja want to keep control of that research and development. Just like the military runs weapons research in our world.

Sarin, in particular, was probably too modern an example, though. I should have gone with strychnine or curare or some other neurotoxin that has been known and used for centuries. But sarin is the ultimate organophosphate poison, and I’m a giant nerd who researched organophosphate poisoning for my very first ever fic (which is embarrassingly bad to my much-improved writer eyes), and it’s a great class of poison for storytelling. Plus it’s believable in the semi-tech world of Naruto. Also I have an illness that is caused by a neuromuscular junction dysfunction, and the medication I take for it, pyridostigmine, acts a lot like a weak organophosphate poison, and would make a person without my disease quite unhappy.

Um… I feel I may have wandered into the weeds a little. The point being, yes, there is science and technology in our world. Yes, Academy students get a basic science education. Yes, there is continuing education, and there are both ninja and civilian researchers. And yes, I would love to sit down with you and talk about your many questions, Worldbuilding is my one of my favorite things, and so is science and medicine. 

But of course my REAL favorite thing is thoughtful, engaged readers who ask fantastic questions.

<3 and SCIENCE, Nezu

ps: I completely agree, Ogata is a paragon. Ki’s AMAZING at writing kids and their minders.

[buttonholedlife]

The techno-utopian eyesights of Google and Facebook are lifeless. What comes next?

Simply previously this month, while fulfilling with Our lawmakers to cover electronic personal privacy, blackout, and also transparency, Republican Politician Josh Hawley talked to Facebook's Sign Zuckerberg to unload of WhatsApp as well as Instagram. (You can possibly reckon Zuckerberg's action.) Part of Hawley's objection of Facebook was actually the fact that the firm regularly relocates personal data coming from WhatsApp and also Instagram to the core Facebook platform. This should happen as not a surprise to individuals-- never ever neglect you're the product-- yet it's simply another tip that the technology leviathans to whom our company've gifted our personal information have actually taken calculating much past what we originally desired it to become.

This is certainly not the techno-utopia I presumed our experts will create. Our experts've gone coming from imagining gigantic leaps for humanity to combating hate speech, Russian false information, and also political leaders who utilize innovation to warp public discourse with deceptions and hostility. In the very early 1990s, the techno-utopian principle developed breathlessly, assuring a new world that was cleared coming from the cruft of the worn out, old constructs that were actually unjust, top-down, and regulated by a highly effective as well as affluent best. Modern technology would certainly transform how our team corresponded, carried out company, found out, and discussed updates. It would certainly supply power to the individual, free of charge from human prejudice. Those developing the brand new technician and those captivated along with the promise really did not quit to assume regarding what would happen next. So our experts unintentionally delegated a little handful of technology providers to develop this endure brand new world: Google.com, Facebook, Twitter, and also others.

They launched completely brand-new social and interactions frameworks out of thin air without the clean understanding that the present social systems they were actually displacing took hundreds, occasionally thousands of years to put in place. Technology on its own is actually certainly not the issue. It's your business model that steers a number of the biggest systems.

The choice to spend for these services with our exclusive data is actually what produced the monster. Social networking site firms are actually cashed through advertising, and advertisers are their real clients. They possess no certain interest in our well-being, various other than the threat it gives to their business. They may not be particularly heinous, but as a system they are actually obsessed in the profiteering of our attention. Too considerably of our daily adventure is today controlled by systems that are actually extracting our information and also our opportunity to obtain our company to get factors.

The egalitarian sight of a techno-utopia lost its own way. Enormous wide range and also energy has been actually given on a couple of events presently responsible of our computer future. Our experts turned over our future to a couple of billionaire kids in Silicon Valley. Also as they make billions coming from units that are actually efficiency fools and also spreading exists that are damaging our democracy, our experts experience powerless to their prevalent existence and also influence.

The reaction is actually creating, with somebodies utilizing their platforms to overcome. As is a neo-Luddite motion, where the spontaneous response is to refute any type of location for technology. Our experts obviously need a brand-new perspective to help our team consider innovation's duty in our lives.

Back in the late '90s, Mark Weiser, the CTO of proving ground Xerox PARC, created the phrase "common processing," describing a set of guidelines that consisted of an unbelievably simple, great suggestion: "The function of a pc is actually to assist you do another thing." We must put that concept to work today with a new feeling of purpose: a movement centered around what I phone "techno-pragmatism," devoted to assisting the planet step beyond the vanity, false information, hyper-commercialization, and also distractions of today's design.

This isn't a blindly positive worldview. It acknowledges that today's dour take on modern technology is certainly not since it's naturally negative, but considering that it has actually pertained through criminals and also petty reasons. Modern technology may be a power for honest truth, awareness, openness, individuality, and also social excellent, if our company hold it to those requirements-- certainly not perfect, yet pragmatic.

The primary canons of techno-pragmatism are actually rooted in generating market value for folks as opposed to shareholders:

The purpose of technology is to improve lifestyle, to obtain from Weiser.

New technology is actually certainly not automatically a much better solution.

Social habits emerging coming from new modern technology must combine with social norms, or even typically illustrate measurable social advantages. In a similar way, brand-new technologies must be actually evaluated for social value prior to embracing.

Our team are not the product. Technology ought to provide the private and also certainly not marketers.

Technology is a magnifying glass that is going to drastically size both good and negative individual interactions as well as intent.

If these concepts come to be top-of-mind for federal government, press, individuals, and also the business they select to assist, our company can save the tech industry from itself and also initiate a new period for exactly how it suits our lives.

The social networking sites sweets and also advertising giants of the very early aughts took off in scale, yet have actually degenerated right into dumpster fires. Thus what comes next for all of them? It may not be actually merely much more customers, more advertisements, far better protocols, as well as a deeper dip our lives. They must evolve beyond flowery pep talks and also evasive testament. Our team are actually trembling almost an internet bad, through which the world would arguably be much better without them. What we, our authorities, the press, and also the firms our team employ along with can possibly do is judge our adoption of innovation via a sharper lens, one without out of breath positive outlook or the cynicism we're presently leaning into. The contrast of "relocation fast as well as damage things": An additional practical, determined, well thought-out strategy developed to suit and also create a better world.

The truth is actually that as well numerous these days's technologies are actually certainly not focused on advancing the human condition. It is actually certainly not as well late to alter program.

Sign Rolston is the main artistic policeman of Argodesign.

This content was originally published here.

[updatedc-blog]

New Post has been published on https://www.updatedc.com/2019/01/04/rotolight-anova-pro-2-hands-on-review/

Rotolight Anova Pro 2 Hands-On Review

Rotolight’s Anova Pro 2, is a bi-color (a daylight only version is also available) LED fixture that is color temperature changeable from 3150K to 6300K. The light is also flicker free at any output and is a good option for anyone who does both photography and video. I reviewed the original Anova Pro back in 2016 so it will be interesting to see if the sequel is better than the original.

How is it different from the original Anova Pro?

The Anova Pro 2 is the follow up to the companies Anova Pro. At first glance the lights look to be identical, so what has changed? Most of the changes are under the hood and are related to increased output, but there are also plenty of other new features. Rotolight claims that the Anova Pro 2 has 70% more power output than its predecessor. To get this power increase the light now draws 72W compared to the 48W of the original Anova Pro. The Anova Pro 2 can also flash at 250% of its maximum continuous output when used in Flash Sync Mode. This is up from the 150% that the original Anova Pro was capable of.

A lot of this increased output has to do with the fact that Rotolight is now using 960 LEDs instead of the 576 that are in the original Anova Pro.

There is also more special lighting effects, 14 in total, including a ‘chase’ mode which uses DMX to control a line of lights to simulate a moving light source such as streetlights. There is also a new Exposure Effects (X-FX) mode that lets you create a stroboscopic effect for creating multiple exposure images.

Speaking of DMX, the light now includes DMX which can be used to control up to 512 wireless slaves from one Anova Pro 2. There is also an RJ45 DMX (in/out) socket and an Auto set-up function for quickly configuring channel settings when you are using large numbers of lights.

A few other nice new features in the Anova Pro 2 are:

TECH menu/FINE dimming mode – allows perfect smooth dimming to 0% across the color range

CNTL menu / BASE / AUTO – auto setup mode, allowing you to set up ANOVA / NEO2 and AEOS slaves with one button push

CNTL menu / BASE / AUTO / NEXT- auto DMX addressing mode, allowing you to set an individual DMX address on each ANOVA / NEO2 and AEOS slave with one button push

CNTL menu / BASE / AUTO / LOCK- prevents accidental over-writing of configured ANOVA / NEO2 and AEOS slaves with one button push

If it ain’t broke then don’t fix it. Despite all of these new additions, I like that Rotolight hasn’t tinkered too much with the Anova Pro 2. It still retains every feature that I originally liked about the original Anova Pro, but addresses my biggest complaint, which was output.

According to Rotolight, the design philosophy with the Anova Pro 2 was to “Deliver a light that out of the box produces a very flattering, soft light source that almost gives the effect of a naturally diffused light.” The rationale for making the light round is to create a catchlight effect in the eye, and to give it a flattering ‘wrapping light quality’.

It’s not hip to be square

I’ve never quite understood why so many companies continue to make a square or rectangular light. In my opinion, it makes a lot more sense to actually use a circular-shaped light, especially for interviews or when shooting faces. Our heads aren’t square, either are our eyes. A lot of softboxes are also round, so why not make a light that is also round. I have found from prior experience that the circular Rotolight fixtures create really nice catch lights in peoples eyes.

It’s nice to see that Rotolight has continued to keep their lights round, especially since most lighting companies continue to pursue making 1×1 or square/rectangular LED fixtures.

Different versions

The Anova Pro 2 is available in several configurations. There is a bi-color version that is available with a 50-degree beam angle, or you can choose to get the 110-degree beam angle model. There is also a daylight only (5600K) version available. The LEDs used on all of the models are carefully spaced to ensure that each individual LED beam overlaps. The benefit of doing this is that the hundreds of individual LED elements give the appearance of coming from one source, to deliver one single uniform shadow. The problem with a lot of LED lights with a wide beam angle (over 90 degrees) is that the individual LEDs end up creating weird shadows.

The light I will be reviewing is the 50-degree version.

CineSFX

The light has a built-in set of CineSFX lighting effects that allow you to recreate effects that normally would require specialist equipment. These include Strobe, Lightning, Fire, Cycle, Throb, Police, TV, Spin, Weld, Spark, Film, Neon, Roto, Gunshot, Film, Paparazzi, and Chase. While some of the effects are the same that can be found in the original Anova Pro, not only has the company added a few more options, but they have also given users the ability to further fine-tune their parameters.

These CineSFX can be remotely triggered using either a wired DMX trigger or wirelessly triggerable using the PC sync port on the back of the light. There is also a feature called FX slave which allows the Anova Pro 2 to act as a DMX master controller for not only previous generation Rotolights but also third-party light sources with DMX inputs. This eliminates the need for additional DMX controllers or expensive flicker boxes on set. Rotolight says you can control up to 512 channels in a single DMX universe. The CineSFX effects really are impressive, and they can come in very handy for creating lighting situations in the field that would otherwise be very difficult to replicate. Rotolight was arguably the first company to offer special effects in a portable LED light, and since that time many other manufacturers have followed suit.

Along with the CineSFX, there are also True Aperture Dimming and Designer Fade effects. True Aperture Dimming calculates and displays the correct aperture (F-Stop) for your subject at a given distance. In theory, this eliminates the need for using a light meter in certain situations. You can also adjust your brightness level, to coincide with your desired aperture (F-Stop). It is unfortunate that it doesn’t also show T-stops for those using the light with proper cinema lenses. The Designer Fade effect lets you dial in preset times for custom fade up / fade downs which can be handy for certain projects.

There is also Exposure Effects (X-FX) mode for stroboscopic effects for creating multiple exposure images. This is primarily for use for photographers.

Great for photography and video

If those features weren’t enough, the Anova PRO 2, just like the original Anova Pro, are the only bi-color LED lights in the world that has a built-in flash sync port. This means that for a stills photographer, you can replace your strobe (in certain situations) and it does so with no recycle time with high-speed sync capability. When in flash sync mode, the light is able to flash at 250% of its maximum continuous output. This is up from the 150% that the original Anova Pro was capable of.

Unlike the original Anova Pro, the Anova Pro 2 has a built-in Elinchrom Skyport receiver that provides wireless triggering plus brightness and color adjustments at distances up to 656′. You can control up to 10 lights in 4 groups.

Rotolight recommends the following triggers: Rotolight HSS Transmitter (Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Panasonic) Elinchrom HS Transmitter Plus (Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Panasonic) Godox X1T (use with Godox X1R receiver) Pixel King Pro (Sony, Canon, Nikon) Flashpoint R2 Phottix ODIN II  (HSS) (canon, Sony, Panasonic) PocketWizard (HSS) Cactus VI II (HSS) (Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Pentax, Panasonic, Olympus)

For those who are shooting both stills and video, this product eliminates the need for two separate purchases and removes many of the constant downsides of shooting with strobe (e.g. your flash not firing because of recycle time). If your job calls for both stills and video, or you’re working in multimedia, this function alone should put the Anova Pro 2 right at the top of your list of lights to look at.

I’m not going to do any in-depth testing of the photography features of this light as Newsshooter is primarily aimed at video shooters. There are plenty of examples online if you are interested in seeing how the light performs specifically for photography use.

What do you get?

The Anova Pro 2 comes with a LEE 6 piece filter set (3 x diffusion, 3 x magenta). This is nice to have and gives you a lot of creative freedom for making subtle adjustments to the light. You also get a built-in V-lock battery plate, built-in Elinchrom Skyport receiver, built-in DMX, and a 110-240V power supply unit. I was reviewing the Masters Kit, which comes with everything I just mentioned, plus the addition of a hard flight case and barn doors.

I also like that Rotolight includes a proper manual with the light. Too often these days companies don’t include a manual. It’s really nice to have an actual paper reference for a product and not have to go searching for one online.

Build Quality

The overall build quality of the Anova Pro is very good. It is certainly well made and feels like a professional product that would stand the test of time. The light is as well made as other Rotolight products and doesn’t have the cheap plasticky feel of so many other lights on the market. The dials and switches have been well designed and feel solid to use.

My only gripe is that I didn’t feel like the yolk angle adjustment knobs tightened sufficiently enough. No matter how hard I tried to tighten them I could still always move the light. This is something that shouldn’t happen with a light of this quality.

The barn doors attach via four heavy duty locking knobs so there is no chance of them rattling around or falling off.

The light weighs in at 3.34 kg/ 7.36 lb (Including Yoke). As a comparison, the Litepanels Astra Bi-color weighs 3.4kg (7.6lb), and the KinoFlo Celeb 200 weighs 6.8kg (15lb). The Lupo Superpanel 1×1 Full Color 30 RGBW weighs 3.7kg (8.15lb), and the Luxli Timpani 1×1 RGBAW tips the scales at 3.15 kg (6.96lb)

Filters

Rotolight uses a nice quick solution for installing and securing filters. A wire ring with six inward-facing metal rods holds the filters in place. A small removable pin on the latches allows for the ring to be lifted and a filter inserted. Once the filter is in place you just push the frame down and secure the pins. I found from using the light I only had to remove one pin to put a filter in. This makes it very quick and convenient for swapping filters in and out.

The nice thing about the filters is that you can easily stack multiple filters together if you need to. The filters themselves are very thin and quite fragile. While they do the job they are supposed to do, you need to take care when handling or transporting them. If you do happen to rip or tear any of them Rotolight does sell replacements.

No RGB

With so many manufacturers now moving towards making RGB LED lights I wondered why Rotolight hadn’t decided to go down that route. When I asked Rotolight about this they told me “Rotolight is currently developing other products around the latest RGB technology. We have made so many improvements to the Anova Pro 2, and its user base like the characteristics of the light (Naturally soft light output, round catchlight, exceptional CRI, etc). This is now the 4th generation Anova, and we have been selling them for 5 years now, so we have kept the initial design philosophy, added much to it, improved the output and the color reproduction.”

Whether you actually need an RGB light really depends on the type of work you do, but most of the current offerings feature a host of additional features such as +/- green correction as well as an increased Kelvin color temperature range.

Having the ability to control green and magenta is huge. Being able to match other fixtures as well as getting rid of any green or magenta that you may see when using the light is a very handy real-world feature that I personally use a lot.

As far as the RGB color and effects modes go, while they are great to have available, I don’t tend to use those features that much in my line of work. In saying that, being able to generate different colors is handy for lighting up backdrops or creating color separation during interviews. It’s also nice to be able to use the light to help illuminate green screens very easily.

These are features that you won’t find on the Rotolight Anova Pro 2.

No smartphone/tablet control (yet)

Rotolight used to have an IOS app called Magic Eye that gave you wireless control over your light. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to exist any longer, so the Anova Pro 2 can’t be controlled via an app. This is a real pity as so many of the lights that are now on the market can. I would have liked to have seen an app for controlling the Anova Pro 2. As the light has so many features, it would have been nice to be able to control them and make adjustments without having to physically keep walking back to the light.

In saying that, now that all the Rotolight products have an Elinchrom Skyport chip built in, you can use the Rotolight transmitter to wirelessly control color temperature, brightness, trigger SFX and fades (and get a real-time display of those colors and brightness levels), set up groups etc, which somewhat negates the actual need for the app.

When I asked Rotolight about why there wasn’t an app, I was told “The Magic Eye APP worked with ANOVA V1 and V2, using 802.11b wifi from an iOS controller. In iOS 8.1 Apple broke the rules and changed the way iOS devices negotiate with third-party devices, their system handshakes a couple of identifiers at 802.11b and for no good reason then starts talking only at 12Ghz, which was beyond the range of the wifi chip we used. The exciting news is that we are working on a revised version of the APP which we hope to launch early in the new year, and this will be able to control any of our products wirelessly with a range of 200 meters, as well as third-party products using wired DMX via a nifty Basestation called ‘The Magic Box’. The APP will be a free download.”

Low power draw

The low power draw of the Anova Pro 2 is perhaps its most impressive feature. The light draws just 72W watts at 100% output, which gives it a huge advantage over most other battery-powered-capable lights on the market. As a comparison, the Litepanels Astra Bi-color 1×1 draws 110W, the KinoFlo Celeb 200 draws 100W, the Lupo Superpanel 1×1 Full Color 30 RGBW draws 200W, and the Luxli Timpani 1×1 RGBAW draws 120W. This low power draw allows you to run the Anova Pro 2 at full power for a considerable amount of time using a 95Wh battery. This makes the light a very good proposition for news and documentary shooters who often need to set up lights in remote places and run them off camera batteries. Knowing that you can power the light and get sustained runtime gives you piece of mind if you’re shooting live crosses or long interviews.

Rotolight also makes their own 95Wh v-lock batteries with cells sourced from Japan. The battery weighs in at 725g (25.77oz), and has a built-in d-tap output that can also be used to charge the battery. A single battery costs $314.16 USD and a d-tap travel charger can be bought for $64.99 USD. If you buy the masters kit, which includes barn doors and a flight case, there is a nice cutout spot to keep a battery and the charger.

Output

A big factor for a lot of people when buying a light is how much output it can produce. I tested the lights output at 3200K and 5600K using a Sekonic C-700 at a distance of 1m (3.28ft) in a controlled environment; you can see the results below.

Rotolight Anova Pro 2 output at 3200K

At 3200K the Anova Pro 2 (50-degree version) recorded an output of 4480lx at a distance of 1 meter. This was a pretty good output. The original Anova Pro (50-degree beam angle) version that I tested put out 3790lx at the same distance and Kelvin color temperature setting. Rotolight claims that the Anova Pro 2 light is 70% brighter than the original, but from my testing, I found that when used at 3200K, the Anova Pro 2 was only 18.2% brighter than the original 50-degree version that I reviewed.

  Rotolight Anova Pro 2 output at 5600K

At 5600K it recorded 4600lx, which was a 2.67%% increase over what the light outputs when used at 3200K.  Again, this was a pretty good output for a LED light that can be powered off a camera battery. The original Anova Pro (50-degree beam angle) version that I tested put out 3400lx at the same distance and Kelvin color temperature setting. I found that the output of the Anova Pro 2 (50-degree beam angle) was 35.3% higher than that of the original when used at 5600K. The light’s output at 5600K was impressive given its size and low power consumption.

Rotolight Anova Pro 2 output at 4110K

As the Anova Pro 2 uses a combination of daylight and tungsten LED’s, the lights maximum brightness is obtained when it is set at 4110K. Above you can see that when I tested it at 4110K it produced an output of 7580lx. This is certainly a very impressive output for a light this size, but again you need to keep in mind that this sort of output is only available at this Kelvin color temperature. In saying that, you can still get a similar output if you use the light within a few hundred Kelvin degrees of 4110K. Rotolight claims that the lights output at 4110K when measured at a distance of 3ft. / 0.9m is 10,700lx. When I measured the light at the same distance I found it had an output of 10,000lx.

So how does the output at 3200k and 5600K compare to other competition? Well, below you can see.

3200K Rotolight Anova Pro Bi-colour 50 degree: 3,790lx Rotolight Anova Pro 2 Bi-colour 50 degree: 4,480lx Litepanels Bi-Color Soft 1×1 (90 degree): 2,200lx KinoFlo Diva Lite 200 (90 degree): 2,980lx Luxli Timpani 1×1 RGBAW (72 degree): 3,560lx Lupo Superpanel 1×1 Full Color 30 RGBW (115 degree): 4,150lx

5600K

Rotolight Anova Pro Bi-colour 50 degree: 3,400lx Rotolight Anova Pro 2 Bi-colour 50 degree: 4,600lx Litepanels Bi-Color Soft 1×1 (90 degree): 3,000lx KinoFlo Diva Lite 200 (90 degree): 3,060lx Luxli Timpani 1×1 RGBAW (72 degree): 3,380lx Lupo Superpanel 1×1 Full Color 30 RGBW (115 degree): 4,380lx

As you can see, the Rotolight Anova Pro 2 output at both 3200K and 5600K is very impressive. The light even manages to top the high output of the Lupo Superpanel 1×1 Full Color 30 RGBW. In saying that, it is important to note that the Lupo Superpanel 1×1 Full Color 30 RGBW, Litepanels Bi-Color Soft 1×1, and the KinoFlo Diva Lite 200 have built-in diffusion panels and a lot wider beam angle than the Rotolight.

Kelvin Color Temperature Accuracy

As far as color temperature accuracy is concerned, the Anova Pro at 5600K gave me a kelvin reading of 5696K and a ⊿uv (the value to show how much this light is away from being an ideal light source) of -0.0028. At 3200K it recorded 3256K and a ⊿uv of -0.0043. These are excellent results and give you peace of mind that when you set the light at a certain color temperature, that’s the color temperature you’re actually going to get.

Color Rendering

After testing the output and color temperature accuracy I then wanted to test the Anova Pro 2 for color accuracy. Has color accuracy been compromised to deliver more output? Below you can see the results for the light at 3200K.

Rotologht Anova Pro 2 color rendering scores at 3200K

At 3200K the light recorded an average CRI (R1-R8) of 95.6 and an extended CRI (R1-R15) of 93.1. As far as replicating accurate skin tones the Anova Pro recorded 89.3 for R9 (red), 98.4 for R13 (closest to caucasian skin tones), and 98.4 for R15 (closest to Asian skin tones). The score for R12 (blue) was a little lower than I would have expected, but the overall results for proper skin tone reproduction were very good.

Rotologht Anova PRO color rendering scores at 3200K

So how does this compare to the original Anova Pro? Above you can see the results. At 3200K the light recorded an average CRI (R1-R8) of 93.0 and an extended CRI (R1-R15) of 92.09. As far as replicating accurate skin tones the Anova Pro recorded 76.4 for R9 (red), 95 for R13 (closest to caucasian skin tones), and 94.3 for R15 (closest to Asian skin tones). The Anova Pro 2 has a slightly better extended CRI that that of the original, but most importantly, the scores for R9, R13, and R15 have all improved. It’s good to see that Rotolight has been able to improve the color rendering from the original and also increase the power.

Rotologht Anova Pro 2 color rendering scores at 5600K

When I tested the light at 5600K the scores were almost identical to those at 3200K. At 5600K it had an average CRI (R1-R8) of 94.6, and an extended CRI (R1-R15) of 91.9. For replicating accurate skin tones it recorded 97.3 for R9 (red), 98.6 for R13 (closest to caucasian skin tones), and 95.4 for R15 (closest to Asian skin tones). These were excellent results, but again, the light seems to have a problem with R12 (blue), scoring just 61.2. To be fair to Rotolight, the KinoFlo Diva Lite 2000 also struggles with R12 (blue), recording just 72.6. In saying that, I tested the light by shooting a color checker chart and didn’t find that this low score for R12 didn’t make any noticeable difference at all.

Rotologht Anova PRO color rendering scores at 5600K

So how does this compare to the original Anova Pro? Above you can see the results. At 5600K it had an average CRI (R1-R8) of 94.7, and an extended CRI (R1-R15) of 92.09. For replicating accurate skin tones it recorded 97.7 for R9 (red), 98.4 for R13 (closest to caucasian skin tones), and 95.7 for R15 (closest to Asian skin tones). At 5600K the Anova Pro and Anova Pro2’s results are almost identical.

Below you can see a head to head comparison of color accuracy between the Rotolight Anova Pro, Rotolight Anova Pro 2, Litepanels Bi-Color Soft 1×1, Kinoflo Diva Lite 200, Luxli Timpani, and Superpanel 1×1′ Full Color 30 RGBW.

3200K

Rotolight Anova Pro Bi-colour 50 degree Average CRI (R1-R8) – 93 Extended CRI (R1-R15) – 89.66 R9 (red) – 76.4 R13- (closest to caucasian skin tones) – 95 R15- (closest to asian skin tones) – 94.3

Rotolight Anova Pro 2 Bi-colour 50 degree Average CRI (R1-R8) – 95.6 Extended CRI (R1-R15) – 93.1 R9 (red) – 89.3 R13- (closest to caucasian skin tones) – 98.4 R15- (closest to asian skin tones) – 98.4

Litepanels Bi-Color Soft 1×1 CRI (R1-R8) – 98.6 Extended CRI (R1-R15) – 97.32 R9- (red) – 95.5 R13- (closest to caucasian skin) – 99.5 R15- (closest to asian skin tones) – 98.4

KinoFlo Diva Lite 200 CRI (R1-R8) – 96.8 Extended CRI (R1-R15) – 95.22 R9- (red) – 91.6 R13- (closest to caucasian skin) – 96.1 R15- (closest to asian skin tones) – 98.5

Luxli Timpani 1×1 RGBAW  CRI (R1-R8) – 96.5 Extended CRI (R1-R15) – 95.45 R9- (red) – 92.6 R13- (closest to caucasian skin) – 96.1 R15- (closest to asian skin tones) – 96.3

Lupo Superpanel 1×1′ Full Color 30 RGBW CRI (R1-R8) – 94.3 Extended CRI (R1-R15) – 91.86 R9- (red) – 76.3 R13- (closest to caucasian skin) – 95.1 R15- (closest to asian skin tones) – 93.4

5600K

Rotolight Anova Pro Bi-colour 50 degree Average CRI (R1-R8) – 94.7 Extended CRI (R1-R15) – 92.09 R9 (red) – 97.9 R13- (closest to caucasian skin tones) – 98.4 R15- (closest to asian skin tones) – 95.7

Rotolight Anova Pro 2 Bi-colour 50 degree Average CRI (R1-R8) – 94.6 Extended CRI (R1-R15) – 91.9 R9 (red) – 97.3 R13- (closest to caucasian skin tones) – 98.6 R15- (closest to asian skin tones) – 95.4

Litepanels Bi-Color Soft 1×1 CRI (R1-R8) – 94.7 Extended CRI (R1-R15) – 92.51 R9 (red) – 86.9 R13 (closest to caucasian skin) – 95.8 R15 (closest to asian skin tones) – 95.8

KinoFlo Diva Lite 200 CRI (R1-R8) – 96.1 Extended CRI (R1-R15) – 93.09 R9- (red) – 89.7 R13- (closest to caucasian skin) – 94.7 R15- (closest to asian skin tones) – 92.6

Luxli Timpani 1×1 RGBAW  CRI (R1-R8) – 97.8 Extended CRI (R1-R15) – 96.2 R9- (red) – 97.9 R13- (closest to caucasian skin) – 99.6 R15- (closest to asian skin tones) – 97.0

Lupo Superpanel 1×1 Full Color 30 RGBW CRI (R1-R8) – 95.3 Extended CRI (R1-R15) – 93.4 R9- (red) – 86.2 R13- (closest to caucasian skin) – 97.3 R15- (closest to asian skin tones) – 94.4

If you look at the data from the head-to-head comparisons, the Rotolight performs extremely well at 5600K when it comes to reproducing accurate skin tones, despite its overall color reproduction numbers being slightly lower than the other lights. Any numbers over 90+ are truly excellent and you would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between any light that has average scores in the 90s.

At 3200K the Anova Pro 2 is very comparable to the other lights in this group, and it’s good to see that the lights scores at both 3200K and 5600K are very close. This tells me that the lights overall color rendering performance remains very consistent no matter what Kelvin color temperature you are using.

Spectral distribution

  Above you can see the Rotolight Anova Pro 2’s spectral distribution when used at 3200K. While the light does have a nice full spectrum it certainly has a slight push towards green.

Above you can see the Rotolight Anova Pro 2’s spectral distribution when used at 5600K. The light has a push towards green as you can see.

Just as a comparison lets look at the Luxli Timpani 1×1 RGBAW light that I recently reviewed. Above you can see its spectral distribution when used at 3200K. Its color spectrum isn’t as full as the Rotolight, but it is a bit more linear.

Above is the Luxli’s spectral distribution when used at 5600K. As you can see the Luxli has a far fuller spectrum at 5600K than the Rotolight and it’s not missing nearly as much information around the 460-500 nm wavelength. The Rotologht’s inability to reproduce information at these wavelengths is evident when you look at both the lights color rendering scores and spectral distribution. Again, as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t find this affected the lights real-world performance in any way.

REAL WORLD PERFORMANCE AND QUALITY OF LIGHT

As I always say, photometric scores only tell you part of the story. So do the scores from the Rotolight Anova Pro 2 translate into real-world performance?

In the example footage that you can see above, I simulated an interview style set up. The Rotolight Anova Pro 2 was used as the key light with the Lupo Superpanel Full Color 30 being used as the backlight. A white poly board was also used on the right-hand side to add some fill. I then filmed the exact same scene with the Luxli Timpani 1×1 RGBAW and the Lupo Superpanel 1×1 Full Color 30 RGBW. I chose the Luxli Timpani as I firmly believe it is one of the best value portable LED lights on the market. I also wanted to see how the Rotolight faired against the Lupo.

For my tests, I kept all the lights in the exact same position, height and distance from my subject. I set all three lights at 5600K and then set the camera to a preset 5600K white balance. I also manually balanced all three lights to see what differences there were. The output of the lights was adjusted accordingly to get the correct exposure.

Even though all three lights looked good, they all had different looks. The Luxli was a little warmer than the Rotolight and the Lupo was a little colder. Technically if you want to go off scopes, the Rotolight was the most neutral of the three. I found that all three lights produced nice results and the skin tones all looked good. With a few minor tweaks, I’m pretty sure even the most novice of colorists could get all three images to match. In saying that, both the Lupo and Luxli offer +/- green adjustment so you could easily make minor adjustments to correct any color casts.

I liked the catch light that you get when using the Rotolight. Being a circular source helps in this regard and I found the catch light looked just a little bit bigger and more pleasing compared to the Lupo and Luxli.

I also did a test where all of the lights were set to their maximum brightness at 5600K so you could see the differences. The Lupo has a much wider beam angle than the Rotolight and the Luxli so it was no real surprise that it was capable of lighting up more of the room.

The Anova Pro 2 does produce a really nice quality of light, but as it doesn’t feature any in-built diffusion, so do you need to use a softbox to create flattering light? I found that even without using a softbox it was very capable of producing nice results. The Lupo Superpanel Full Color 30 has a built-in diffusion panel, and the Luxli Timpani only has a very light diffusion screen (which is there for getting rid of the individual shadows caused by using multiple LEDs).

I tried out Rotolight’s own Anova Softbox Kit with the light and it worked really well. The softbox is nice and large and it creates a really nice source of light that wraps around your subjects face. Unlike most other softbox solutions that are available for 1×1 style panel lights, the Rotolight softbox has a nice amount of depth. This means it is able to create a softer source because of the distance from where the front of the diffusion that goes on the softbox to the actual light source is quite deep.

The softbox comes with both diffusion and frost, as well as an egg crate. I like that Rotolight gives you two different types of diffusion and that the softbox kit is very reasonably priced at $157.49 USD. This is considerably cheaper than a lot of other softboxes that are available on the market.

I did some measurements with the Sekonic C-700 to see how much output the light could produce with the softbox being used. With the frost on and the Anova Pro 2 set at 100% output (5600K) it recorded 2990lx at a distance of 1 meter from the front of the softbox. That’s a 35% decrease in output over using the light with no softbox and the frost. With the diffusion on under the same conditions, it recorded an output of 1830lx, which is 60% less than if used without. Both the frost and the diffusion produce really nice, soft light. I found that the frost was probably the better way to go if you are using the Anova Pro 2 for interviews. The diffusion cuts the output so significantly that you would need to have the light fairly close to your subject in most scenarios.

There are, however, two downsides to the softbox. The first is you need to purchase the optional barn doors to be able to use it.

The second is that I found it difficult to put on as it needs to fit over the top of the barn doors and its a very tight fit. This is not a quick or easy process and I don’t like wasting valuable time mucking around trying to get a softbox to fit. Putting on a softbox should be a quick and easy process and if takes longer than a minute to do then there is something wrong with the design.

If you don’t have a high enough output to begin with, and then attempt to heavily diffuse that lighting source, often the brightness of that light is reduced to a point where it’s only usable when placed very close to a subject. If you do use the Anova Pro 2 in this way you will have to have to have it a little closer to your subject, but I still found it had enough output that I didn’t have to put it as close as say the Luxli Timpani. The output of the Anova Pro 2 is pretty impressive for a portable LED solution, especially one that only has a power draw of 72W.

The Anova Pro 2 is a little on the heavy side, but it’s not so heavy that you should rule it out if you are a solo operator or traveling cameraman or woman who needs a light that is quick to set up and can be powered remotely in the field from a camera battery. The lights 50-degree beam angle does make it suitable to use for interviews without the light source spilling everywhere. From my experience using the light, I would still recommend going with a softbox if you are using the fixture for interviews. The beam spread of 50-degrees is a lot narrower than the 115-degrees of the Lupo Superpanel Full Color 30, and the 72-degree beam angle of the Luxli Timpani. I’m not the biggest fan of panel lights with narrow beam angles, I much prefer to have lights that have a wider beam spread, as I find them more versatile.

The Anova Pro 2 also looks also looks like it could be used effectively for news crews doing live crosses as the fixture can be run off a camera battery and it’s powerful enough (as long as you aren’t trying to match a bright background) to provide a nice amount of fill. If you are trying to match a bright background there are better solutions available.

Usability

As I have mentioned in other lighting reviews, the numbers only tell part of the story. You can have the most color accurate light in the world, but if it is difficult to use and operate then you are going to leave it at home. Thankfully, the Anova Pro 2 is very quick and easy to use. I love lights that you can take out of a case, throw a battery on the back and turn on. If you are a solo operator time is always crucial. There is nothing worse than taking 5-10 minutes to set up a light before you can turn it on.

As far as using the lights controls, making changes to the output and color temperature are very straightforward and the LCD display lets you accurately monitor and see any changes that you make.

If you are familiar with any of Rotolight’s other offerings, you will know that the physical design and layout of the controls is standard across all of their models. This is not such a bad thing as you can jump from one model to the next and know exactly how to use and control the light. If you haven’t used a Rotolight before, the control over color temperature and output are easy, but it may take you a little bit of time to get used to using the light’s more advanced features.

Changing filters is quick and hassle-free and the built-in v-lock battery plate and low power consumption allows you to run the light off a camera battery for long periods of time. This also makes it easy to move the light around, as you’re not having to look for power outlets and run long extension cables across the floor.

Getting into the menu is straightforward but I still struggle sometimes with remembering how to make changes to the SFX features. In fairness, this is probably something that could be overcome by using the light on a more regular basis, and news and documentary shooters are unlikely to be using these features that often. This is where a dedicated iOS app would come in very handy.

The light can be adjusted from 3150K up to 6300K in increments of 10. You can also hold the dial down and move it if you need to do it quicker. The light can also be dimmed from 100% to 1% in 1% increments. Again if you hold down the dial and move it does it a lot quicker.

The additional barn doors are nice, but they can’t be moved in a circular rotation around the light as they are locked down. I also found that because there are six doors, instead of the usual four, they can be a little fiddly and awkward to use. The barn doors do tend to end up hitting each other when you start closing them down to control the light. The other minor downside of the barn doors is that if you are using them, they end up hitting the light’s yolk frame if you try and angle the light down. I found this very frustrating when trying to use the light to illuminate something that was lower than the height of the light. The only way to overcome this is to use a light stand where you can place a spigot horizontally and not vertically.

The flight case that comes as part of the Masters Kit is beautifully designed and made. It is a great option for transporting the light around. The only slight negative is that the case is quite large and weighs around 11.5kg with the light inside. Some shooters may find that not to be a problem, but again it really depends on what you’re used to traveling with and how much kit you normally take. The nice thing about the flight case is it actually makes for a nice platform if you need to get you reporter a little higher off the ground for a live cross or piece to camera.

If you want to go lighter, Rotolight does make a Travel Kit that consists of barn doors and a soft bag for $292.49 USD.

Competition

When the original Anova Pro came onto the market it had a host of features that other lights didn’t have, but the industry has changed a lot since that time. There is now a host of lights on the market that offer features not found on the latest Anova Pro 2. While the Anova Pro 2 is still the only light to feature an HSS mode, just about everyone else now offers special effects. A lot of the current crop of lights are now RGB, and some such as the Luxli Timpani offer inbuilt filters, color picking technology, +/- green adjustment, and very clever iOS apps for controlling the lights features. The Anova Pro 2’s main competition is from lights such as the Litepanels Astra series, KinoFlo Celeb 200, KinoFlo Diva Lite 200, Lupo Superpanels, and the Luxli Timpani.

Price and availability

The Anova Pro 2 ($1,799 USD) is around $500 US more than the original Anova Pro. This makes it quite expensive, especially compared to some of the competition. I asked Rotolight why the price had increased so much and was told, “I think that the extra 384 LEDs , extra beefy PSU, and built-in Elinchrom Skyport HSS receiver are fairly good value. You also need to bear in mind that the UK£ dropped in value from $1.55 down to $1.30 against the $USD during the Anova Pro 2’s development making many of our components 16% more expensive.”

As I mentioned earlier, the Anova Pro 2 comes in three different versions. There is a standard Bi-colour 110- degree beam spread, which is the one I have been testing, a Bi-colour 50-degree beam version, and a 5600K fixed daylight version. All three of the lights can be purchased separately and there are various accessories that are also available. These include barn doors, flight case, soft case, v-lock batteries, softbox kit, rain cover, and a diffuser. The 50-degree Bi-color, 110-degree Bi-color, and 5600K only versions are all $1799 USD. The Masters Kit is an additional $433.87 USD.

Rotolight also makes a light stand that has a maximum load carrying capacity of >15KG and a height capacity of 285cm. At $71.99 USD it makes for a nice option for the Anova Pro 2.

As a price comparison, the Litepanels Astra Bi-color Soft 1×1 is now available for $999 USD  (it was $1350 US). The Litepanels Astra Bi-color Soft 1×1  doesn’t come with an inbuilt V-lock battery plate, that is extra. The Kinoflo Celeb 200 retails for $2373 US, and barn doors are $398.50. The Luxli Timpani retails for $999 USD, and the Lupo Superpanel 1×1′ Full Color 30 RGBW is $1,598 USD.

Conclusion

The Anova Pro 2 certainly does offer a lot of functionality, but it is considerably more expensive than the original. The build quality is superb, and the power output is exceptionally good given the light’s small power draw. For news and documentary shooters, the ability to run the Anova Pro 2 off camera batteries that are under 100Wh for long periods of time is a huge selling point.

The light isn’t RGB like a lot of other 1×1 panel options that are now on the market, and that is something you have to carefully consider these days when making a purchase. The Anova Pro was ahead of its time, but now there are plenty of other lights on the market that offer a lot of features that the Anova Pro 2 has to compete against.

The light is color accurate and very good at replicating skin tones correctly. It is also excellent at reproducing the correct color temperature across its 3150-6300K range. It’s good to see a company not follow the market trends and stick to creating a good old fashioned light that is color accurate, has good output and is reliable and robust. Not everyone needs an RGB light. The only downside for me is the price. At $1,799 USD it is expensive considering that lights such as the Luxli Timpani are almost half of the price.

Despite the increased competition from other lights that are now on the market, I still like the Anova Pro 2. The low power draw and high output are both killer features that should make the light a very popular choice with news and documentary shooters. It’s also a very good option if you are doing a lot of multimedia work where both stills and video are required.

With good functionality, color accuracy, and a strong output, the Anova Pro 2 is a light that is worth considering if you are looking for a portable LED solution that can be run off smaller, travel safe v-lock batteries.