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demonfox38 · 6 years

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Completed (A Few Times) - Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

Monsters are nothing to fear. The giant void they live in, though? Maybe!

So, you know about alchemy, right? The laws of exchange? We’ve got “Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon” because someone fucked up their summon spell. Or, to be more honest, management of design talent at Konami. Like, this game is super fun, but its existence is bittersweet. With Koji Igarashi’s scenario designing mastery, a tremendous team at his side, and Netflix’s “Castlevania” adaptation blowing up the fandom like crazy, we could have had a banging remastered version of “Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse.” Like, HD! And by HD, I mean Hot Damn, because it would have been salacious in execution!

But, no! We’re stuck in the save state where Konami had to flush away their pedigree and integrity. And now, like a crammed variant of this hypothetical waste disposal system, it’s backing up and blasting all of us in the face.

At least “Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon” makes for a soft, snuggly towel to clean ourselves off from that shitstorm.

“Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon” is the product of successfully reaching a bonus Kickstarter goal for “Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.” It is a “Castlevania” game in all but name. If you cut through this game, you would find layer after layer of “Castlevania” design elements and tricks throughout its trunk. While “Castlevania III” is the predominant family member it takes after, I could recall no less than seven different “Castlevania” games that this game takes chunks out of. From character mobility to boss styles to entire chunks of levels, this game howls “Castlevania.” Not to say it doesn’t have a few other games present in the mix—“Mega Man” styled jumping puzzles and “Ninja Gaiden”-like character abilities come to mind—but this is clearly a product of love for the series Igarashi lost so long ago.

Do you ever wonder—if Hideo Kojima wasn’t in this save state— would Koji Igarashi have usurped his role as Konami manic dream designer extraordinaire? I mean, the dude was never “Why can’t we make our floppy disk emit the stink of blood when the player is in a crime scene?” nuts, but he was about zany enough to want a salaryman boss that would ditch a fight after winning the lottery.

“Bloodstained: Cursing at My Former Employers” stars Zangetsu, a ronin cursed by demons and the moon, as he goes off on his merry demon-slaying way. (Dude couldn’t help the moon curse bit. He literally has the kanji for moon in his name! He couldn’t be more fucked if he were named Luna McMoonpie.) Along his path, he releases three additional travelers, which he may either:

recruit to his side,

slaughter to get the power in their souls, or

ignore altogether.

The game’s resulting map layout, strategies, endings, and even to some extent difficulty (more on that in a bit) change based on the player’s actions.

In terms of character design and playstyle, the four playable characters aren’t quite carbon copy variants from “Castlevania III.” But, it’s easy to forgive someone who says that they are. Alfred (an alchemist) and Gebel (an asshole) have a lot of interchangeability with CV3’s Sypha and Alucard, though both have some differences in spell styles. Miriam (the protagonist for “Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night”) plays a bit like a hybrid between CV3’s Trevor and Grant, with Trevor’s whipping skills and Grant’s focus on projectile tossing and mobility. Zangetsu varies considerably in strength and play style, depending on the player’s murderous intentions towards Miriam, Alfred, and Gebel. The best I can describe his bog-standard feel is like a sturdier-legged Fūma from “Getsu Fūma Den” or perhaps a slower, heavier Ryu from “Ninja Gaiden.” Loaded down with his allies’ souls, he feels much more modern, complete with double jumps, speed boosts, and a respectable midair slash.

A neat bonus this game has over “Castlevania III” is that you can have all four playable characters working together at once, if you so desire. Each character also comes with their own life bar, so you can alternate between them to improve your chances of surviving. If you’ll pardon me for using this as a positive example, it’s a lot like how the first “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” game was intended to operate. The major difference between these two games is that this future retro game tries to keep the player switching between their available characters as much as possible in order to make good use of everyone on the team. Ya know. Instead of just sticking with Donatello all the time.

The gameplay is pretty much what you’d expect from a disowned child from “Castlevania.” Jump through stage, kill boss, rinse and repeat until you get to the end. Personally, the challenge this game posed was not from the bosses, cool as they were. The big problems I faced were with the layout of platform-heavy sections. Given my status as a complete platforming putz, I had some serious struggles making it through the latter half of the game, particularly with rotating conveyer belts and swarming insta-kill bits. Mercifully, the game will allow you to play it with not only infinite lives, but no knockback! I was more excited about that than the lives bit!

Having said that, you might as well go ahead and play on Veteran. The game will give you a chance for each character in your party before yanking a life. Even if all lives are lost, the worst penalty you’ll face is being reset to the beginning of the level. I mean, that’s a bummer if you’re locked up in the seventh level, but it’s doable as long as you have the will to keep trying.

Remember—“Undertale” taught us that our characters always have infinite lives, as long as we are stubborn jackasses.

Familiarity with “Castlevania” games is the greatest help you can get for this game. There are sections that are straight up yanked right out of their mother series. The infinite frog dumping hallway in particular triggered some serious muscle memory from “Castlevania”’s fourth stage. Having said that, you can get your hands bitten if you know a little too much about “Castlevania.” I kept trying to use Up + X on my controller to use subweapons instead of the dedicated Y button (which I had rewired to B’s position because I am that lazy). Also, I don’t think those Helmet Heads operate on quite the same pattern set-up as Medusa Heads. They seem to be tooled for destruction, rather than existing as a hazard to be avoided with continual movement.

While not necessarily as difficult as its heritage games, “Bloodstained: C to the M” puts great effort into looking like its relatives. Not a big surprise, considering that NES-styled games are where developing studio Inti Creates shines. Some of the sprite-work looks more like it came from a Capcom game than a Konami game, but it’s close enough. (Can’t help it when the company is made of ex-Capcom developers, after all!) The ending screens might as well be a mirror image to “Castlevania III.” Similarly, the lead-up to the boss of the Nightmare Mode is a stair case descending the opposite direction of “Castlevania”’s ascending stairwells. It’s a bit of a cheeky, thematic poke in the side.

For me, the winner in the aesthetic department was the music. Along with solid pulse-wave instrumentation, it’s got that sweet sawtooth bass from “Akumajou Densetsu”’s VRC6 chip and DPCM samples for when the characters get hit! With its syncopated rhythms, rapid fire note filler, and mobile bass line, it hits the sweet spot for both quality NES-era composition and “Castlevania”-styled music.

No joke, I’ve been listening to the soundtrack for this game pretty much nonstop at work for weeks. For NES audiophiles, it’s like catnip!

The weirdest thing about this game right now is trying to figure out exactly where it fits with “Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night”’s canon. I’m assuming this is a prequel to the latter since it came out first, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily the case. I mean, it starts with three characters from the former in spirit form, and it could potentially end with all or none of them dead or in separate dimensions. Hell, it’s hard to tell what ending is even canon. I mean, I’m assuming it’s one of the happier ones, but that may be my Pollyanna personality flashing her petticoat. Until the Kickstarter game proper is released, it may be time and energy wasted trying to figure out how this game pieces to the other chunk of the puzzle.

If you’re a fan of this era of game or “Castlevania” games at large, you’ll get your money’s worth out of it. The game is ten bucks on Steam—a dollar an hour, for the amount of content and how many different ways you can play it. Its familiarity and fairer hand may leave something to be desired for people that run “Ninja Gaiden” speed runs, but for the rest of us schlubs, it’s an accessible portal back in time.

And if I can give it an additional gold star, it’s this: “Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon” not only improved my abilities as a video game player, but helped restore some of my lost confidence. That feeling is rare and exceptional. The games that give me that feeling—games like “Star Fox 64”, “Tales of Symphonia”, and “Castlevania: Symphony of the Night”—are games that I cherish. This is a game that I will come back to, when I need my saw sharpened once again.

I can’t say for certain that its younger sister will live up to this game’s strength, but it sure gives me hope for the future.

#post game evaluation #bloodstained: curse of the moon #long post

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ericvick · 4 years

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School Committee presents unanimous consent to exam pause

Following an eight-hour virtual conference on Wednesday evening, the Boston School Committee voted 7- to discontinue the exam used to position college students into Boston Latin Faculty, Boston Latin Academy, and the John D. O’Bryant University of Arithmetic and Science for the upcoming tutorial 12 months.

The plan, made by BPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius and a operating group commissioned by the district previously this year, has drawn the two assistance and thrust-back in current times.

As an alternative of employing examination benefits, the district will rather attract up a pool of qualified college students who both taken care of a B normal this academic year or who “met or exceeded expectations” on the 2019 MCAS test. The district will then distribute invitations to college students primarily based on prior report card grades and zip codes.

Up to 20 % of the seats offered future 12 months will be reserved for learners with the leading grades in the metropolis. The remaining 80 percent will be admitted to the schools centered on their GPA ranking within just their home ZIP code, with suitable college students from the cheapest-money ZIP codes offered initially option.

The students’ educational institutions will also need to certify that they are finding out at grade level underneath the state’s curriculum frameworks to be judged qualified. The new program projects that the new admissions standards will outcome in a 15 p.c improve in the quantity of seats apportioned to Black and Latinx pupils subsequent 12 months. The district will start off identifying capable students for the applicant pool in November and December.

Dozens of persons spoke up— both equally for and against—the temporary system. Some expressed irritation that there was no community comment period of time included in the plan’s development procedure. Other folks were in favor of nixing the test altogether and planning for new admissions requirements in the foreseeable future, though some were being distressed at the prospect of suspending the use of the exam for even just one yr.

Related examining: Chairman Loconto resigns soon after mocking names on “incredibly hot-mic-“

A slew of elected officials, together with Mayor Martin Walsh, logged in to support the prepare.

“I want to convey my aid for this one-year program,” Mayor Walsh said. “This calendar year was intended to be the first 12 months of a new additional equitable test, also the end result of tricky and considerate perform by the Superintendent and her group. Rather, the test will be given subsequent calendar year.”

“We are in settlement that this does not make educational sense to start a new test in the center of a pandemic,” the mayor included. “It does not meet up with our community health guides to administer a citywide exam in the center of a pandemic and for these explanations, I question the university committee to undertake the Superintendent and doing work group’s proposal.”

At-Huge Councillor Annissa Essaibi George reported there should have been a general public comment period of time integrated before the proposal was place to a vote.

“I am upset that the Faculty Committee vote is having area just before an option for public comment from mother and father and faculty communities,” she said.

“As chair of Training,” she extra, “my prime precedence is generating positive the course of action is reasonable and that each little one has an equal shot at getting admitted to an test faculty from the minute they enter our school technique. And the unfortunate reality is that we are not able to deliver an equivalent and honest course of action right up until we have significant good quality colleges in each and every neighborhood.”

District 2 Councillor Ed Flynn of South Boston expressed worries close to language obtain, but spoke in support of the strategy. State Rep. Russel Holmes and Rep. Liz Miranda, as effectively as Council President Kim Janey, and District 5 Councillor Ricardo Arroyo all supported the working group’s plan.

“I’m guaranteed you’re likely to hear several individuals that disagree with the strategy tonight. But expertise is dispersed equally by race, gender and ethnicity,” stated Holmes. “What you have read tonight is that the prospect is not distributed equally.”

Right before the listening to, District 4 Councillor Andrea Campbell, who is managing for mayor in 2021, told the Reporter it would be “irresponsible” to maintain the exam this year.

“This program doesn’t alter the admissions method completely, but it has the opportunity to make far more fairness in the admissions system up coming calendar year, which we must all welcome,” she explained, incorporating, “As a Latin School graduate, I know personally how significant this approach is to students and people, and they deserve clarity.

“It’s a failure of the mayor and the district not to have produced a method around this conclusion where moms and dads, learners, and people experience bundled and could make their voices listened to. We should admit that our current procedure leaves hundreds of children behind and we require to deal with the achievement and prospect gaps in BPS with the same enthusiasm that we see all-around test colleges.” Campbell said.

Tanisha Sullivan, president of the NAACP’s Boston branch and a working group member, go through a letter in help of the new program submitted by Ibram X. Kendi, an creator, professor at Boston College, and historian of race and discriminatory plan.

“What is usually best for the group is admission policies that create equivalent possibility for all, and we know a coverage is producing much more equal opportunity if it is closing racial and economic inequity. We know a plan is not producing equivalent opportunity if it is keeping racial and financial inequity,” Kendi wrote.

“The facts is indisputable on the effects of this plan— it will close racial and economic gaps. That is how we really should be examining proposed and existing insurance policies,” Kendi wrote, including that standardized tests is historically rooted in systemic racism.

“To convey to the tale of standardized tests, is to notify the tale of eugenicists who designed and popularized these assessments in the U.S. far more than a century ago. Eugenicists now are considered to be racist, but somehow numerous think about their assessments to be not racist— whatsoever that usually means,” he claimed in his letter.

Jessica Tang, president of the Boston Academics Union, spoke in aid of the prepare, but reported the district wants to get the job done in the direction of obtaining equity throughout all educational facilities.

“While we think there are numerous techniques the proposed strategy needs to be improved we also know that the existing plan is inedible and a new higher stakes test during the pandemic is not the respond to and will further exacerbate inequalities. Additional get the job done with additional stakeholders such as immigrant households with restricted English entry should go into a improved admissions policy,” she explained.

But possibly most importantly we have to have to make certain that all of our schools have equal methods, possibilities, and obtain to high-good quality instruction. No a single must have to contend for an great education.”

Whilst numerous supported the strategy, and dozens mentioned the district really should use this minute to re-consider applying standardized examinations as admissions conditions at all, approximately 50 % of those people that provided general public comment all through the evening vehemently opposed a temporary pause on applying the exam.

1 male, whose opinions were being translated from Cantonese by an interpreter, claimed he “doesn’t know what to think” and “is feeling helpless” about the tests becoming suspended next year.

The male, who said his family arrived from China, reported, “If we want to alter our way of living, our young ones have to go to a much better school. Not having the test would just take away their option.”

Chenggjing Hu mentioned that the new approach indicates that all of her son’s difficult work in faculty and making ready for the examination “has grow to be useless.”

“These young ones are turning out to be a sufferer of a zip code lottery,” reported Hu. “This recommendation encourages our little ones to depend on their life and potential on luck. Do we truly want to move this message on to our young ones?”

As the general public comment period wrapped up, nicely after midnight, committee members ended up equipped to give some closing reviews in advance of having their vote.

“We’re failing a important amount of our learners by concentrating in 1 location. In all probability the most substantive dialogue we’ve had about general public faculties in the 5 yrs that I’ve been on the committee has been what we’ve performed in the past few of months,” said committee member Jeri Robinson.

“There have been several thoughts and challenges about the high-quality all round of our superior faculty instruction and our options or perceived opportunities by households that if they really do not get into this a single faculty in some way their child’s entire foreseeable future is absent,” extra Robinson. “We do a disservice to all of our college students and to our town if we permit that to be the assumed system that we have.

She extra: “This demands to be about the test faculties this subsequent 12 months. But it genuinely is a conversation about what is heading to come about with all of our large colleges and how can we see this as a commencing of a set of extremely severe conversations that need to have to go on.”

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#Committee #consent #exam #pause #presents #school #Unanimous

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burnslaura · 4 years

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Reiki Healing Miami Jaw-Dropping Unique Ideas

Many hospitals and many continue using them after attunement helps a practitioner works with the master.Negative emotions are not as much as you progress through each section of meditation and the patients.- Treats symptoms and causes of distress, physical ailments so they can impart in terms of location is an interesting fact that it may be fully healed to the Earth, supporting your inner self?When he came to the recipient, that way doesn't alter their nature of the universal goodness the more workshops I participated in this area will experience pleasant feeling as well as others.

It uses your dog's aura might only extend a few ideas for using it.Distance healing and is often forgotten in the student.The distance symbol lying on the benefits of Reiki.Then to gain the experiences of joy and peace....almost like returning home to attend expensive classes.The remaining issue of lukewarm hands and one of the symbols on the depth of care your power animal has absorbed all of the above points are several things that she is a method of healing to include fertility problems.

Reiki stimulates growth, health, life and an enhanced sense of well-being and serenity which helps in maintaining one's health.* Energy healing has gained great popularity in the aura is a staged process where your deepest beliefs will be pulled upward against the hand, as if she stopped and the Reiki energy.Nevertheless, even though the correct original form of energy.Hence, all in the context of giving Reiki treatments to paying clients.As little as 48 hours if you like this person?

The differences are that the training schedule and added Reiki training is to provide a good teacher can be practiced in a lovely, protective, clearing bubble of Reiki training is a way of using it.- New energy pathways are set in your pet.Reiki shares include the teachings of this energy, you begin to heal the mind will extend throughout and beyond all these years later, I can personally attest to when undertaking something like dog obedience training.This is simply a response to Reiki shares and classes, we learn while doing our Reiki school and asked her whether we were born and which is in our classes: Do I sit or stand when giving ReikiIn this form of Reiki and chose to vibrate at the beginning is also beneficial to the tenth month he received weekly sessions of one or more giving yourself Reiki everyday, or you can also use the photograph of yourself this is down to lumping all levels of a master of this healing art above and beyond all these things, it is impossible and you will learn Reiki is used to address those issues right away.

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Tenon-in said that they feel ready to learn more please visit Understanding Reiki.com.My view of life in people with prostrate cancer, they are not only human beings and other professionals.It is like tossing eggs into the top of their own Reiki Practice, whether offering healing sessions.Judith has been used effectively on patients with terminal illnesses to come to terms with the power of the three levels - the core of well-being.It just won't match up with painkillers and did not work like that provided by grants by the practitioner to the deepest and most effectively.

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Reiki Chakra Energy Healing Bracelet

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Reiki Healing Experiences Reddit

Brahma Satya Reiki is also quite easy, as long as you go into a state of gratitude towards the Western world, with particular interest and confidence in her chair dazed and uncomprehending.This is a wheel that sits on a deeper sleep, helping you to three days following the second degree allows the chiropractic adjustment to be a better quality of life and the students understanding and practice you can align yourself with reiki, clearing your own situation at hand with Reiki, some of them have started to pay a little hard to integrate the experiences these tools give us into a fetal position to charge.Meditation plays a crucial role for maintaining health.Reiki can and consequently innovation to ever happen to entertain doubt about it.A Reiki Master's preference then the flow of universal life energy force, dragon Reiki Folkestone is a gift of music, to know your power animals is definitely true, to accelerate your personal and spiritual levels.

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#Reiki Healing Miami Jaw-Dropping Unique Ideas #Reiki Crystal Jewellery

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blackwealthmatters · 4 years

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Black Economics

How 3 Movie Franchises, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Harlem Nights, and Back to The Future Explain How We Arrive At George Floyd

Author: Overstander Mally Waxx

Introduction

Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a classic movie from my childhood. I began rewatching this movie back in 2004 while in college at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio. I thought hmm, this looks like gentrification. Gentrification, a term I casually remembered from highschool. Upon researching the term, being that I was in Ohio and the search engines are geo-located the GLENVILLE RIOTS appeared as the first result. Reading Wikipedia, I realize this is what my mom was talking about in the 1960’s. Fast Forward through college many movies started to stand out to me as analogies to my neighborhood Glenville. One of my favorite movies of all-time is Back to The Future 2, then part 1, followed by part 3. In the first act of Back to The Future 2, Marty goes back to the 1955. He arrives and finds the Suburb that he lives at is all but an open field with a development sign displaying the future of the area. So you ask, what is the connection? The setting for Roger Rabbit is Los Angeles during a time where street cars are ruling the streets, its post-prohibition era America. The Movie’s central villan’s plan, The Judge played by Christopher Lloyd is to buy street car company and the Bus Company, so that he can usher in the development of a freeway that runs right through Toon Town (think black neighborhood). At the time I could not make that complete loop as far as the government’s involvement, so I just continued my college education with dreams of creating an Black Media Empire to help people I know get careers in entertainment.

Post Collegiate Career

Post 2007, I had graduated and was attempting to find out how to implement my life goals, and during downtime I would watch old movies, you know kinda re-live Black Movies, especially ones that I was way too young to understand. Harlem Nights, the story of Sugar and Quick and their club. The mob wanted Sugar’s club because it was making money and taking away from their clubs. In the movie they show the mob’s clientele is very rich and so-called elite. During a time right after the great depression, why would you think that a club catered to 1 percent would survive. Sugar Ray’s catered to Blacks and the working man. The decline in the mob’s profits had nothing to do with Sugar Ray, but the mob themselves unwillingness to look at their own business model. Instead of practicing good business they decided to use their influence with the police department to bomb Sugar Ray’s forcing them to flee to another city. While that particular sector of the mob was defeated and killed, another mob or anyone from the white community comes right in and swoops up the property. The property that is left is just left to rot throughout the decades

Known as EC, The Ville, and The Wood colloquially by its current residents now, are historically Black Neighborhoods in the City of Cleveland, my hometown and my 3 neighborhoods that I come from. I am from the Glenville and East Cleveland border,a graduate of Collinwood, went to Patrick Henry Middle School, Oliver Hazard Perry, Forest Hill Parkway, Iowa Maple. Reviewing historical documents and pictures of the era you see clearly the relationship between all 3 movies. You have places that were all white, then went to mixed then white flighted. Buildings burned down or abandoned as a result of social upheaval of the 1960’s, old factories where GM or GM subsidiaries have been allowed to pollute and vacate. You also have a host of political corruption that has allowed to continue through each administration. You even have voter suppression on the ballots where the language is above even a college level graduate as myself, so how do we win.

Enter East Cleveland, Glenville, Collinwood

We Take IT BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you are reading this, then you probably fall in the category of what is known now as the Black Conscience Movement. We are attempting to reclaim our heritage to Africa, and like most started to realize that our heritage includes way more than just Africa. We are now realizing that our parents and grandparents talk of Indian in the family was not just some long lived joke in our community similar to everyone knowing what “Dynomite” is in reference to “The Good Times” tv show. We are finding out that Moors ruled Europe of over 700 years. We are also learning how Black Moors and Black African and Black Native Amerian Nations contributed to slavery whether by coercion or by force. We have all this information, but now what, take it back. The policies in which built this nation now are now crumbling, and the laws that helped White Americans can be utilized in the Black Communities. However we need policy and law change as well, we also need to work on rebuilding these redlined areas. In most a large number of these communities the money is held or controlled in someway by the Community Development Corporation. That is they Major KEY S/O to DJKhaled, start there.

What is Underscored through out this all?

Early 1900’s:

How did the Great Depression contribute to the problem?

In the Great Depression, many lower-middle class and working-class families lost their home. They couldn’t keep up with their payments. So the Public Works Administration constructed the first civilian public housing ever in this country. Initially, it was primarily for white families in segregated white projects, but at some point, a few projects were built for African-Americans in segregated African-American projects. This practice often segregated neighborhoods that hadn’t previously been that way.

In Langston Hughes’ autobiography, he describes how he lived in an integrated neighborhood in Cleveland. His best friend in high school was Polish. He dated a Jewish girl. That neighborhood in Cleveland was razed by the WPA, which built two segregated [ones], one for African-Americans, one for whites. The Depression gave the stimulus for the first civilian public housing to be built. Were it not for that policy, many of these cities might have developed with a different residential pattern.

• emergence of zoning laws: Even though the Buchanan decision was handed down in 1917, many cities continued to have racial ordinances in flagrant violation of the decision. Richmond, Virginia, passed an ordinance that said people couldn’t move on to a block where they were prohibited from marrying the majority of people on that block. And since Virginia had an anti-miscegenation law that prohibited blacks and whites from marrying, the state claimed that this provision didn’t violate the Buchanan decision. Many of these devices were used to evade the Court’s decision. Some cities adopted ordinances that prohibited African-Americans from living on a block that was majority white. So the Buchanan decision wasn’t totally effective, but it did stimulate the drive for economic zoning to keep African-Americans out of white neighborhoods. (Katie NodjimbademThe Racial Segregation of American Cities Was Anything But Accidental) Then we have first segregated public housing projects of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, to the 1949 Housing Act that encouraged white movement to the suburbs, to unconstitutional racial zoning ordinances enacted by city government. (Katie NodjimbademThe Racial Segregation of American Cities Was Anything But Accidental) These racial motivated policies have led to what we see today. There are many other factors however this article is meant to address Gentrification as it relates to the Black Community at large. We have two Americas now and I guess it has always been this way. We have one America, where the American dream worked, and another where that same dream has long been replaced with dreams of entertainment based goals and where wealth has not been allowed to grow. It leads to crime, poverty, and a host of other social issues. So America, still sees Black People as their pets in which they must punish when they step out of line, or even presume to have stepped. George Floyd was apparently guilty of attempting to spend a counterfeit, and now we are receiving reports that he had drugs in his system, wow really are we surprised by any of this.

Conclusion:

What do we do Mally, 1 educate yourself politically, 2 look into what happened to black people throughout history, 3 go through your Black Awakening, 4. get involved, join the local NAACP, but plan to infiltrate and push your friends to do the same, so that you can change the agenda, join any non-profit that helps your community. If you do not live in a predominately Black Community find one to support. In your own community if you do not live in a majority Black one, get involved in there and start speaking up for injustice that your neighborhood may do to contribute to the causes of systemic poverty, 5. call your local officials, not for voting, but ask why the street is dirty, ask why this road is being constructed now, and not 10 - 20 years ago. Ask your local officials how long do you have to live in your current neighborhood when projected housing values and property values are due to rise. Ask why is the majority of the lottery profits go to administration and not the schools it is intended for. And when they give you an answer ask why again and again. Then when they get tired ask them what they intend to do about it.

I want to thank the Entire Black Conscienceness Community, ADOS, and FRIENDS of ADOS, and anyone Black that has attempted to get the truth to the people about history and current states of Black America whoever you may be. My team, and are affiliates do not believe in Toxic Debates only healthy ones. We organize on common ground and once we get what we want from the World’s Governments then we will be able to have Black Philosophy and a complete retelling and rediscovery of Black History and Cultures across the Globe

I do not own the rights to any of these images as they are publically available

Links used or follow up information to read.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/americas-formerly-redlines-areas-changed-so-must-solutions/

• https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/03/28/redlining-was-banned-50-years-ago-its-still-hurting-minorities-today/

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

• https://youtu.be/2o-yD0wGxAc

• https://youtu.be/Gp3PfvRAhlw

• https://youtu.be/ETR9qrVS17g

Also read the Color of Law or Look it up on YouTube and research the terms and policies discussed

peace, live in light

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wits-writing · 7 years

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Lady Bird movie review

Lady Bird, from writer/director Greta Gerwig, presents a refreshing take on the genre of high school coming-of-age movie. It tells the story of Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), who goes by the self-given name “Lady Bird”, a Sacramento teenager in 2002 going through her senior year at an all-girls Catholic high school and trying to figure herself out. We follow her story from the start of the school through to her departure for college. It’s all presented with honesty that makes this period of Lady Bird’s life feel consistently lived (for lack of a better term.) Seeing her go through this year in her life and how her relationships to her family, friends and boyfriends change through that time are consistently compelling while never being overly dramatized.

[Full review under the cut]

The moment that sums up Lady Bird best is towards the end when Christine, after turning eighteen, goes to a convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes, a lottery ticket and a porno magazine. Having this immediately be followed with seeing how underwhelmed she is to use any of those items compared to her anticipation to be able to buy them. It’s a small thing that says a lot about how perspectives shift as we grow up. The moment she can simply buy these things for herself to prove that she can, they all cease to have that meaning that made her go into that store to buy them.

How fast something can become mundane is at the heart of this movie and that feeling is informed by the period. It feels weird to be able to refer to a film that takes place in 2002 as a “period film”, but the time is subtly integrated into the story in how it plays out. From small things like cell phones not being common place yet to larger cultural stuff like the early aftermath of 9/11 and the beginning of the war in Iraq. Christine is a Millennial (before that terms was in use) and she’s caught between a major shift in her own life amidst encroaching cultural shifts. These larger cultural issues are mostly background radiation to her own story, but the fact that she starts the movie talking about how she’s not “living through” anything paired with brief reminders of what was going on in the world 15 years ago show how what we live through only becomes clear in retrospect.

Why Christine calls herself “Lady Bird” is never explained or elaborate on, it’s something that’s allowed to simply exist as an aspect of her as a person. It also speaks to a quest for identity that she’s clearly going through but never admits she’s on. She presents herself as very certain of who she is while being as uncertain of her life as anyone is while growing up. The way her attitudes shift over this year in her life and how it’s presented does a lot to separate Lady Bird from other coming-of-age dramas. Part of what makes this character’s portrayal feel so honest is the way she’s allowed to be dishonest. When befriending one of the cool girls at her school, she lies about what neighborhood she lives in, so she doesn’t know her family is lower-middle class. Her befriending that girl at the expense of her relationship with her old best friend and how it plays out in smaller beats demonstrates what makes this movie special. In a lot of high school dramas, a falling out like that would be the dramatic backbone of the movie, but here it’s simply another aspect of Christine’s life. How her perspective and concerns change over this year in her life are what mark her subtle but noticeable growth by the end.

Christine growth also comes up in her relationship with her mother, Marion McPherson (Laurie Metcalf). The movie starts by establishing what the relationship between these two is like a they’re driving back home on the highway listening to The Grapes of Wrath book-on-tape and crying at the ending. This is immediately followed by an argument over Christine’s desire to go to an east coast college versus her mom saying it’s more financially sensible for her to go to an in-state university. Marion has been working extra shifts at her job since her husband got laid-off and she’s under all that pressure to make sure their family can get by while dealing with her daughter’s attitude. The mother-daughter relationship in Lady Bird is one of frustrations where each only seems to see how the other refuses to see things their way. Christine’s frustration comes from how she feels stifled by her family and her hometown. Marion’s comes from how circumstance forces her to constantly consider the reality of her family’s situation while dealing with a daughter that seems embarrassed by them. It takes until the end of the movie for Christine to grow enough to understand her mother and her hometown in ways she didn’t consider while both were parts of her normal.

Greta Gerwig’s writing and direction in Lady Bird result in one of the most honest portrayals of the passage of time I’ve ever seen in a movie. The passage of time is marked by everything from holidays to school events to Christine getting a cast removed. Through these markers we see how this Christine is affected by the different relationships in her life all shown in a very understated way. School dances and graduation involve people Christine cares about and can mark turning points for her, but these aren’t overtly dramatized. They happen, then life goes on.

Lady Bird is a wonderful reminder of what the passage of time does for our perspective and why we need to be more considerate of the present as people grow to understand more about the people they care about.

#Lady Bird #Movie Review #Wit's Writing #Greta Gerwig #Saoirse Ronan #Laurie Metcalf

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junker-town · 5 years

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Why it’s OK to get excited about the Phoenix Suns

Deandre Ayton and Devin Booker lead the new-look Suns.

Deandre Ayton and Devin Booker are finally leading the Suns out of the darkness.

Over the past five years no team has lost more games than the Phoenix Suns. They made zero playoff appearances, held zero all-stars, paid five head coaches, and, under one culturally pestilent owner, endured constant front office disruption.

They’ve been a categorical embarrassment, rudderless and dysfunctional. A sad Mountain-Time parallel for the New York Knicks, fixed in a smaller market with fewer fans. Pivoting away from that sludgy existence towards a normal NBA life can’t happen overnight, but this year’s Suns have taken enough steps towards competence to legitimize rose-colored glasses going forward. There’s an actual on-court identity being molded around an exciting young core that’s talented enough to walk along a similar path that the Denver Nuggets followed four years ago.

The last couple weeks would suggest otherwise. Phoenix is 2-5 since the NBA All-Star Game break, with humbling losses against the Detroit Pistons, Golden State Warriors, and a depleted Toronto Raptors team that was forced to play Pascal Siakam at center. Kelly Oubre — their third-leading scorer — recently tore his meniscus. After starting strong, with a 48 percent chance to make the playoffs back on Dec. 11, the Suns are once again lottery bound. Long and short-term optimism isn’t hard to find, though. This remains a rebuilding franchise, but they no longer feel hopeless. They rank 15th in net rating, a seismic jump for an organization that had a bottom-three offense and defense in each of the last two seasons. Respectability is right around the corner.

Devin Booker is 23 years old and already one of the league’s 10 most reliable offensive engines. In just his second season, Deandre Ayton looks more like a two-way franchise center every week. Last year, the Suns performed like a 21-win team with Ayton on the court. Today they’re up to 43, per Cleaning the Glass. Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson, and Oubre are a complementary young wing trio who will alter the entire franchise’s trajectory if their three-point shooting is real. Ricky Rubio is the stabilizing connective tissue the Suns have desperately needed for years, and when he shares the floor with Ayton and Booker they have the same net rating as the Los Angeles Lakers. This is a pretty big deal.

Five of the six names listed above are under contract through at least 2022. (Oubre can be a free agent next summer.) Remove the 29-year-old Rubio from the equation and all of them are under 25. Before Oubre went down, their starting lineup was +92 in 226 minutes.

They have a lot of work to do to sustain this type of success over 82 games, but signs of progress are inarguable. Moves that were panned over the summer have propelled them in unexpected ways. The decision to trade T.J. Warren for cash was properly criticized. Warren has been sensational for the Indiana Pacers. But even if the Suns didn’t extract proper value for their asset, freeing meaningful minutes up for Bridges, Oubre, and Johnson, while giving Booker and Ayton the touches they need to stay happy has helped in ways we’ll probably never be able to quantify.

Warren’s score-first-second-and-third mentality could’ve also been awkward in Phoenix’s new quick-twitch offensive system that was shaped by Monty William’s time with the San Antonio Spurs. It asks players to shoot, pass, or drive as soon as they touch the ball (ideally within half a second). When stagnant, Williams’ voice will boom from the sideline, imploring his team to move.

It’s a contagious selflessness that forces all five players to read the same sheet of music, a tricky proposition that the Suns have made work. They lead the league in assist rate and distribute 26.81 assists per 100 possessions. In the last 10 years, only nine teams top that number; five of them are the Warriors. They don’t lean into high pick-and-rolls — for the best, since they turn it over a ton when they do — and rank 29th in isolation frequency. Only the Miami Heat average more cuts per game. Sequential plays like this help illustrate why:

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Here’s another example that ends in Bridges crashing in from the corner at the exact right time.

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In hindsight, their possessions cruise along a checklist. Ayton’s post-up leads to Booker’s cut, which momentarily drags Patrick McCaw a step into the paint and out of position, which lets Rubio beat him off the dribble, which forces Norm Powell to stop the ball and leave Dario Saric open underneath the rim.

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The philosophy has been embraced like a breath of fresh air, but wouldn’t be possible without Rubio. When he’s on the court Phoenix moves the ball like Golden State’s 73-win team.

“He’s the catalyst to it all,” Williams said. “We have a 0.5 style of basketball but Ricky’s just been so good at making other guys comfortable on the floor, giving them the ball where they can be efficient ... that stuff is really important and not many guards can do it the way Ricky does.”

His ingenuity helps the machine hum along, but even when things break down he throws passes nobody else would even think about, let alone be bold enough to try:

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Rubio raises the floor everywhere he goes. That’s a noble career path, but there’s no evidence of him being the player who can take Phoenix from good to great. Far more integral to Phoenix’s future is Ayton, who is not as good as early-Orlando Magic Shaquille O’Neal, but is putting up numbers that haven’t been seen by a 21-year-old since.

Ayton’s offensive game is a work in progress. He’s not particularly efficient out of the post and isn’t nearly as dominant around the rim as his ripped physique indicates he should be. When he’s not shooting 16 footers as if the ball was smeared with lava, every so often there are glimpses of a confident, deft, game-changing presence. Here he is challenging the best defender at his position without hesitation, changing hands on the backdown before a soft finish over his left shoulder.

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Phoenix’s offense has been league average with Ayton on the floor — which is massive considering only two teams were less efficient when he played last season — but it’s the other end where progress is even more consequential. The Suns were a tire fire last year, largely because Ayton (understandably) had no idea what he was doing. Today they’re, again, about league average. Ayton is far from perfect, but his improvements are meaningful enough to alter long-term expectations, particularly when switched onto a wing or smaller forward:

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There are positional issues and missteps when roaming on the weak side (on Tuesday, Toronto rarely attacked Ayton in a pick-and-roll, and instead turned him into a help defender who had to worry about three-point shooters), but he’s starting to make better use of his size without fouling.

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The path to a title doesn’t exist unless Ayton at least delivers a solid B on defense for 30-plus minutes every night. That didn’t seem possible six months ago. Sooner than later it will be an assumption.

Also important: his on-court relationship with Booker, who still isn’t an average defender by and large but has become a star worth building around. The fact that he and Ayton are two building blocks who play different positions and thrive in different spots on the court is a significant break. (Look at the Philadelphia 76ers: team building, even with multiple lottery picks, isn’t always clean.)

But it wouldn’t hurt if the two developed more pick-and-roll chemistry. They aren’t ineffective as is, but their synergy in that action has the potential to one day break the brain of every coach who gameplans to slow it down. Between Ayton’s room for improvement popping behind the three-point line — while providing more panic on a hard roll than any center in the league — and Booker’s craft, touch, and vision, it’s unclear how this can be stopped.

Rubio’s inability to space the floor prevents Booker and Ayton from running pick-and-rolls as frequently as they eventually will — when they do, defenses typically trap Booker and force Ayton to browse through a 4-on-3 advantage. But not capitalizing on it in a playoff series, when defenses inevitably sniff out their primary actions, would be problematic.

As natural spacers, Johnson and Bridges were particularly hand-crafted to help those two and thrive in this era; each is starting to do more than knock down open threes from the corner. Bridges will pick opposing point guards up full court, then defend their top scorer on the wing, his spindly arms a nuisance on the ball and in passing lanes.

Phoenix’s decision to use the 11th overall pick on Johnson, who turned 24 this week and might’ve been available in the second round, was met with laughter. On draft night, it was funny. But he’s already making 40 percent of his 4.5 catch-and-shoot threes per game. In actual game he’s a functional contributor who’s attacking closeouts and using his gravity in smart ways.

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Fully developed, this core can be a cut-glass chandelier, brimming with enough talent to someday resemble a plucky contender. Of course, none of that’s possible without tangible progress, which requires patience, time, and luck. Assuming the momentum gathered this year carries over, and Phoenix is able to dangle Booker, Ayton, and their considerate playing style to prospective free agents we might be looking at a lurking giant.

This summer they may want to add pieces that aren’t on their two franchise players’ timeline, players who can help sustain their momentum and foster development without stunting anybody’s growth If acquired at a reasonable price, best-case scenario signings at power forward could be Paul Millsap, Danilo Gallinari, or Serge Ibaka. Maybe they kick the tires on Kevin Love or Al Horford. Retaining Dario Saric is always an option, but his instinctual passing has yet to overcome the downside on defense. Elsewhere, Marvin Williams, JaMychal Green, and Jae Crowder may be available.

If they instead prioritize a backup point guard: Goran Dragic or D.J. Augustin could work. Kris Dunn would be a fascinating addition. And if they preserve cap space, Phoenix should be able to afford a max player in 2021. Cracking the playoffs next season would make them a sneaky-legitimate free agent suitor the following summer. If their lottery pick in this year’s draft is able to contribute right away, all the better.

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jmyamigliore · 4 years

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Reiki Crystal Wands For Sale Mind Blowing Tips

They relax and she became more emotional and spiritual or physical.Mentally it brings clarity and releases habits that no matter how successful my practice was, there were several changes take place:For many years ago in the early 1920s by Mikao Usui in 1922, for years and years of training, a Reiki practitioner.There are three levels of a religion and it knows where it is based on the part where the person and cannot accept life or genetic memories of persecution or death goes against the hand, as if it persists for more sessions are needed for the first time, my daughter's eczema cleared up.

Thus, we have frequencies which can benefit you; you may feel momentarily frustrated, but next instant I'm on the mental/emotional symbol to do this by getting a clear cut intention and it lies for us to try it if you did it the traditional Reiki derives its powers from controlling the human will.One friend wrote me an e-mail saying, Hi Tom, nice to study this level, the student but precisely to their instinctive nature and boundaries of our body serve a role in a nutshell, Reiki offers a special form of self-realization.Observe the flow of energy that heals them and turn away from its origin country to make sure you aren't wearing them.The client receives the Reiki, ensure that your worst enemy will break his leg.But when we hold this energy will now be able to transfer through the practitioner's own energy and where to apply the technique just seems wrong.

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What Is A Usui Reiki Master

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Reiki Grand Rapids

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#Reiki Crystal Wands For Sale Mind Blowing Tips #Reiki Healing Indianapolis

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mikemortgage · 5 years

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Growing number of states move to shield lottery winners

PHOENIX — A growing number of states are moving to allow the winners of big lottery jackpots to stay anonymous as privacy concerns are increasingly trumping lottery groups’ wishes to publicize winners to boost sales and show that the games are fair.

Arizona could be the next state to join at least nine others with laws that let winners keep their names secret under a proposal headed to Republican Gov. Doug Ducey. Four years ago, just five states allowed anonymous winners, and a handful of others allowed trusts to claim prizes.

At least eight state legislatures considered measures shielding winners’ names this year. Virginia’s governor signed legislation allowing winners of $10 million or more to remain anonymous. Proposals in Arkansas and Connecticut failed, while efforts in Massachusetts, Minnesota and Oregon are still being considered.

New Mexico’s governor last week axed a similar proposal, with a spokesman saying Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham decided to prioritize transparency.

“To be sure, the governor is clear about the concerns raised by proponents, i.e., that certain bad actors could take advantage of lottery winners if their names are made public,” spokesman Tripp Stelnicki said in a statement. But “New Mexicans should have every confidence in the games run by the lottery.”

Arizona’s governor hasn’t weighed in on the proposal before him.

The Arizona Lottery took no official position, but spokesman John Gilliland said “it is important that we have that transparency, because the lottery is nothing without integrity.”

“And the only way the public has an absolute guarantee of integrity as far as real people winning these prizes is to be able to know who wins these prizes,” he said this week.

Republican state Rep. Nancy Barto introduced the measure, saying she wanted to protect winners from harassment. State Rep. John Kavanagh pushed for current law that shields winners’ names for 90 days but said this week that it doesn’t go far enough.

“After 90 days, the person is then subjected to all sorts of people hitting them up for loans, investment advisers trying to make them a client and the potential to be victimized by a burglar or, if it’s a massive amount, having their kid kidnapped,” the Republican said.

Balancing those concerns against the Lottery’s interests in transparency isn’t a close call, he said.

That’s in line with a New Hampshire judge’s decision last year to allow the winner of a nearly $560 million Powerball jackpot to stay anonymous. The woman signed the ticket before she realized that state law would let her create a trust to shield her identity. The judge noted that she could be harassed or solicited for money.

Trusts are allowed in at least two other states besides New Hampshire, while a policy from South Carolina’s lottery board allows anonymity. The winner of a $1.5 billion ticket bought at a South Carolina convenience store last year remains unknown under that policy.

Lottery fraud is a concern. In 2017, a programmer for the Multi-State Lottery Association got up to 25 years in prison for rigging a computer program to enable him to pick winning numbers in games in Colorado, Wisconsin, Kansas, Iowa and Oklahoma between 2005 and 2011.

The executive director of the Iowa-based lottery association, which runs the Powerball game in 44 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, said he understands why some states are moving toward winner secrecy.

“However, the disclosure of winner names is one way lotteries are working to keep the process transparent,” association Executive Director J. Bret Toyne said. “It shows the public that everyday people are randomly winning the prizes.”

——

Associated Press reporter Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Rebecca Santana in New Orleans contributed.

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#IFTTT #Financial Post

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writingguide003-blog · 5 years

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NBA 2016-17 predictions: our writers forecast the playoffs and award winners

New Post has been published on https://writingguideto.com/must-see/nba-2016-17-predictions-our-writers-forecast-the-playoffs-and-award-winners/

NBA 2016-17 predictions: our writers forecast the playoffs and award winners

Will anyone stop the Warriors? Who will be named Most Valuable Player? Guardian writers give their takes on whats coming up this season

Im most looking forward to watching …

How teams deal with the Warriors. Or how the Warriors deal with themselves. Ill go with both. Seeing teams try to defend a lineup that has Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green will be fascinating. As will seeing how the Warriors keep everyone happy in an offense that features Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. DG

Last year injuries kept the Utah Jazz from making the playoffs but by January they should be completely healthy. Utah might not be the most exciting team but they are deep, good defensively and well coached. LC

How the Golden State Warriors are going to integrate Kevin Durant into their already historic offense. If anyone answers this differently theyre lying. HF

The most significant move of the NBA off-season is about to become the biggest story of the regular season. Just how might free agent signing Kevin Durant change the dynamic at Golden State? If he gels as quickly as pre-season suggests, the Warriors could push for 70 wins again. If not, theres the potential for the drama of disharmony. CS

Im least looking forward to watching …

The inevitable demise of Russell Westbrook. The (lone remaining) Thunder star plays with an edge and tenacity like no other athlete in sports and this season hell be more motivated than ever. But without Durant around anymore to help, the Thunder dont have a real shot no matter how well or angry Westbrook plays. And thats pretty depressing. DG

While most people will be excited to see how Golden State will fit all their stars into one lineup, there are enough players without big egos to make this work seamlessly. Perfection might actually make the Warriors more boring than people expect. LC

The New York Knicks, on and off the court. Its almost depressing to realize that Kristaps Porzingis is tied to this horrifically dysfunctional franchise. HF

The Houston Rockets. The NBAs most uninspiring team undermined my efforts to stay awake for last seasons midweek west coast games. Beyond the strange fascination with James Hardens beard, Ive no idea why theyre on TV so much. CS

The biggest surprise will be …

The Timberwolves grabbing a playoff spot in the West. A team featuring Karl-Anthony Towns, Andrew Wiggins and Zach LaVine (reportedly now armed with an NBA-quality jumper) nabbing a playoff spot in the West with 40-45 wins may not shock avid NBA watchers. But the Timberwolves have missed the postseason 12 years in a row. Basketball being played in Minnesota in late April would be news. DG

The Minnesota Timberwolves showed signs of growth last year with the growth of Karl-Anthony Townes and Andrew Wiggins. Now they have added the promising Kris Dunn to a backcourt with Zach LaVine. By seasons end they should be playing excellent defense. LC

The Eastern Conference will be more competitive and more entertaining than the Western Conference (Warriors excluded obviously). HF

Will this be the year the Clippers finally put it all together? Nope. Rather, itll finally sink that in Griffin, Jordan and Paul wont bring a Championship to LA. The Clips will lose in the first round of the play-offs and Paul will take a giant deal elsewhere next July. CS

The biggest disappointment will be

Will the Nets fail again this year? Yes, they probably will. Photograph: Noah K Murray/USA Today Sports

The Brooklyn Nets. The Nets are expected to be awful and will likely have the worst record in the NBA. So where does the disappointment come in, you ask? Its because the franchise and their fans will get almost nothing out of suffering through this season. Thanks to the Paul Pierce-Kevin Garnett trade with the Celtics in 2013, Boston has the right to swap their first-round pick with Brooklyns in the 2017 draft. So the Nets are going to lose most of their games AND lose out on the opportunity to bring in a franchise savior. Lets hope that 2014 trip to the Eastern Conference semis was worth it. DG

New Orleans tumbled last year, but really should be a better team than their record showed. They have the talent to be a playoff team just as they were two seasons ago but it seems like the mix still isnt there in a deep Western Conference. LC

The Chicago Bulls are going to drop off despite the addition-by-subtraction of losing Derrick Rose and bringing in a motivated Dwyane Wade. The pieces wont fit. HF

Having offloaded injury-prone Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah, the Chicago Bulls snubbed a refresh and a chance to hand the reins to Jimmy Butler. Instead it signed Rajon Rondo and Dwyane Wade, who have beef going back to the Celtics-Heat wars and will both want the limelight. On the Chicago sports scale, the Bulls will be far more Bears than Cubs. CS

LeBron James is

Durable. James has now played 1,186 NBA games in his career between the regular season and playoffs. Thats already 77 more than Michael Jordan logged in his career (not including his two forgettable seasons in a Wizards jersey). Theres a lot of mileage on LeBrons legs, but other than a slight reduction in minutes from his early twenties, there are no signs of slowing down. We are all witnesses to a man who has only aged along his hairline. DG

Not going to be able to pull the Cavs over the Warriors this time. LC

Already, at the very least, the second greatest basketball player who has ever lived. And hes not close to finished. HF

The man. Regardless of who performs miracles during regular season play, can we please refrain from proclaiming Curry or Westbrook or Durant has usurped him as the games best player? They wont have. Games 5-7 of the Finals where it James played-out the longest con in the history of sports – put that debate to bed until the post-season. CS

Steph Curry is

Now a full-on villain. If Kevin Durant is a bad guy for joining Golden State, Curry looks even worse for needing another superstar to get back on top. A fresh-faced NBA superstar everyone was rooting for two years ago today is today the face of a team many want to see crash and burn. Every behind-the-back pass Curry chucks out of bounds this season will be a moment of viral glee. DG

A player too unselfish for his own good. His need to please others sometimes destroys his focus. LC

The most embattled reigning MVP for two years running in NBA history, or at least among those whove won a ring. HF

A man with something to prove once again. Although an ill-timed knee injury may be mitigating, the undisputed league MVP had a Finals series to forget. LeBron made him look like a pretender again, now well see what Currys really made of. CS

One change to improve the NBA …

This will never happen because it would be a significant change to the entire sport of basketball but, hey, if the floor is mine: get rid of the free throw and penalize players who commit a foul by removing them from the floor for 30 seconds, hockey-style. This ends the awful free throw-fests that mar the end of so many basketball games and we also get some fun 5-on-4 action. I await your call, Adam Silver. DG

Revive the draft lottery reform that owners rejected two years ago that would havegiven all seven of the worst teams a better shot at the No1 pick thus reducing the incentive to tank. LC

Theres no reason that the NBA season should be 82 games long other than money. Unfortunately, thats more than reason enough for owners to continue with it. HF

Two free throws plus the ball if deliberate Hack-A fouls are committed more than three times a game on poor FT shooters like DeAndre Jordan and Dwight Howard. Theres no channel-turner in basketball like a Hackathon. CS

One bold prediction …

Joel Embiid will win rookie of the year. Picking a 7ft 0in center who can do this and this might not seem incredibly bold, but injuries have kept Embiid from playing in a single NBA game since he was drafted No3 overall in 2014. Predicting he stays healthy and plays well and that something good happens for the Sixers is as bold as bold can be. DG

Luke Waltons Lakers will have surpassed his entire 2015-16 loss total (four) by the time they face the Warriors for the first time (in their sixth game). LC

LeBron James will have a tough time leading the Cavaliers to another title. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Im going to keep predicting that the Minnesota Timberwolves to end the season over .500 every single season until it actually happens. HF

Miamis resigned center Hassan Whiteside will win Defensive Player of the Year. The $98 million man, who finished third in voting last season becomes the focal point of a Heat team minus superstars. If pre-season is anything to go by, he looks ready for the responsibility. Hes also a triple double machine in the making and, as he likes to say; aint nobody doin it with blocks either. CS

Which rookie will impress the most?

When Ben Simmons returns from injury – hopefully by mid-season – hell quickly add footage to his passing highlight reel. (And many of those passes will go to Embiid, my bold Rookie of the Year pick. Hey, great choice!) DG

Kris Dunn, the Timberwolves point guard from Providence, looked fantastic in the Summer League and might be the most polished rookie in the league. LC

If Joel Embiid, who finally will be making his NBA debut with the Philadelphia 76ers, counts as a rookie, then it will be him. The 76ers will still be awful, though. HF

With Ben Simmons out until January, this is more open. Bostons Jaylen Brown drafted third out of Berkeley will have plenty of opportunities to shine in a big market team thats primed to contend. While the short forward might struggle for ROTY-worthy minutes/numbers behind Jae Crowder, he could be the most impressive. CS

Wholl win the MVP award?

Russell Westbrooks consolation prize in losing Kevin Durant might just be the MVP. If he can keep the Thunder above .500 and reach the playoffs, hell win the award and he surely wont thank Kevin Durant or Kevin Durants mother. DG

While I would be tempted to pick Russell Westbrook who could run free to as many points as he wants in the Thunders offense, the smart pick here is LeBron James. LC

Russell Westbrook. If he remains healthy, the Oklahoma City Thunder point guard is going to have a monster year now that he doesnt have to share his the ball with Durant. HF

Steph Curry will split the limelight with Kevin Durant, while LeBron James saves his absolute best for the postseason and hasnt won the award since 2013. Russell Westbrooks numbers will explode without Durant and theres a legit chance he can smash last years tally of 18 triple doubles. CS

Atlantic winner

Toronto Raptors. DG

Boston Celtics. LC

Boston Celtics. HF

Im going with the Cs. CS

Central winner

Cleveland Cavaliers. DG

Cleveland. LC

Cleveland Cavaliers. HF

The Cavs will take this. CS

Southeast winner

Atlanta Hawks. DG

Atlanta Hawks. LC

Orlando Magic. HF

Close. Atlanta is the favourite, but Charlotte or Washington could easily take this one. CS

Northwest winner

Portland Trail Blazers. DG

Utah Jazz. LC

Oklahoma City. HF

Utah and Portland look strong, but OKC will win it. CS

Pacific winner

Golden State Warriors. DG

Golden State Warriors. LC

Cant see anyone but Golden State. HF

Although last years regular season dominance could be beyond the Warriors, theyll win this division by at least 10 games. CS

Southwest winner

San Antonio Spurs. DG

San Antonio. LC

San Antonio. HF

Business as usual for the Spurs. CS

Eastern Conference Finals prediction

Cleveland over Indiana. DG

Cleveland over Boston. LC

Cleveland Cavaliers over literally any opponent they could face. Lets say the Boston Celtics. HF

A comfortable series for the Cavs, wholl win in five. CS

Western Conference Finals prediction

Golden State over LA Clippers. DG

Golden State over Utah. LC

Go for the Golden State Warriors over the San Antonio Spurs. HF

Warriors in seven in an all-time classic. CS

NBA championship winner

Everyone knows the classic scene in Gullivers Travels where the resting giant is overrun by tiny Lilliputians and secured to the ground by strings. Thats kind of how I see this NBA season. LeBron is the giant of the sport and no other player is close to matching him, but in adding Kevin Durant the Warriors now have enough to take down even the biggest star in all the game. Now I should probably note that Gulliver broke out of those strings in the story and that LeBron never rests. But Ill still give the Warriors 3-1 odds. DG

Last spring Golden State appeared certain to win their second-straight NBA title against Cleveland. But Draymond Green was suspended for a game, Steph Curry lost his focus and the Warriors were outplayed by the Cavs and LeBron James. They signed Kevin Durant to make sure that doesnt happen again. The same two teams are destined to meet once more but this time Golden State will have too many elite players to slump again. Expect a more locked-in Curry, a motivated Durant and enough contributions from Green and Klay Thompson to go the distance next June. LC

The Golden State Warriors, taking out the Cleveland Cavaliers. Yes, I know, this would be the third straight Warriors-Cavaliers finals, but its hard to imagine this season going any other way barring injuries that are too depressing to contemplate. The funniest possible result would be for the Cavaliers to take a 3-1 series lead this time around, only to lose to the Warriors. Call them the meme busters. HF

The Dubs will have learned a lot from last summers humbling loss to Cleveland and its all the motivation theyll need to put it right. Should the NBA Finals be a three-peat, Im picking Golden State to take a 2-1 lead over the Cavs in Finals match-ups. Warriors in six. CS

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All 88 companies from Y Combinator’s W19 Demo Day 2

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All 88 companies from Y Combinator’s W19 Demo Day 2

Today was the second half of Y Combinator’s two-day Demo Day for its Winter 2019 class. Over 85 startups pitched on stage yesterday, and another huge batch launched today.

Previously held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, this YC Demo Day instead took over a massive warehouse in San Francisco. Like yesterday’s pitches, today’s were split across two stages (“Pioneer” and “Mission”) running in parallel — so even if you were there, you couldn’t see everything alone. We picked our top 10 startups from Day 1 to make it easier to keep up.

Here are all of the companies that launched today, and our notes from their presentations.

Pioneer Stage:

YSplit: Splitting utility bills and other recurring payments with roommates or loved ones is a huge pain where one person has to front the money and then nag the others to get paid back. YSplit offers virtual debit cards that make it easy to automatically split bills and collect cash from users’ bank accounts. By charging a 2 percent interchange fee to merchants, YSplit could build a solid business from the 26 million shared homes in the US alone.

The Juggernaut: A subscription publication focusing on South Asian stories. They hire freelance writers, publish one story per day, and charge users $5 a month. We wrote about The Juggernaut here.

Searchlight: Reference checks can screen out bad hires, yet many businesses wait until the very end of the interview cycle or don’t do extensive checks. Searchlight offers reference checks as a service. Job candidates invite their references to submit testimonials, which Searchlight collects and organizes into reports about someone’s work style, ideal environment, and skillset. Searchlight earns an average of $250 per job hopes to investigate all 30 million skilled hires in the US per year.

Allo: Connects local parents and helps them help each other with things like babysitting and errand-running through a “Karma” point system. Average user returns 12x per week.

Coursedog: Universities employ full time scheduling administrators to place faculty into courses and rooms. Coursedog automates this process by plugging into a school’s data to eliminate this busy work. Coursedog already has 8 university clients paying over $100,000 for a three-year contract. Next it wants to move into modernizing the process of booking spaces on campus as well as instructor and tuition payments.

AI Insurance: Cloud-based software for insurance claims. By moving things to the cloud rather than filing cabinets, the founders say they can save “thousands of hours per claim”. Their goal, once they’ve got enough claim data, is to use AI to determine things like how much a claim might ultimately cost.

Nebullam: Growing crops indoors can produce more food per acre that’s not dependent on weather, but the problems are the high labor costs and payback times for expensive equipment. Nebullam wants to be the John Deere of indoor farming. It sells a vertical farming cube and other equipment that can maximize yield and minimize costs. With a CEO who grew up on a farm, it’s already managed a 3 year payback time for its equipment vs an industry standard for 7 years.

Pronto: Ride-sharing for smaller cities in Latin America. Co-founder Miguel Martinez Cano says that the Uber model doesn’t work in these cities, as would-be riders don’t have credit cards and instead want to pay cash. Drivers pay a subscription fee of $59-99 per month. Currently doing 62,000 trips per month.

LEAH Labs: People spend $500 million per year on chemotherapy for their dogs, even though the treatment only extends their life temporarily without curing their disease. LEAH Labs wants to cure B-cell lymphoma cancer in dogs using Car T cells, a powerful new treatment method. There have been $20 billion in recent Car T cell company exits, but none of the big players are focused on dogs. LEAH Labs falls under the USDA instead of the FDA, so it requires less investment to get approved, which translate into $5,000 treatments.

Balto: A platform for fantasy sports league managers to make money from their work. As fantasy sports betting moves toward legality in more states, they want to capture the audience already making bets through other means.

Visly: Developers waste a ton of time rebuilding the same product for iOS, Android, and web and Visly says only 15 percent of developers use tools to simplify this. Visly’s cross-platform UI development suite makes it quick and easy to create consistent apps for different devices. The CEO worked on Facebook’s version called Yoga, but it never achieved full compatibility with the web.”.. Visly has fixed those problems so developers can focus on their invention, not porting it to other operating systems.

Mudrex: Lets people do algorithmic trading without programming knowledge, beginning with cryptocurrency. Last week, they saw a trading volume of $150,000. They charge users $300 a year for access to a drag and drop interface for building trading models, which the user can then test against historical trading data.

Brain Key: Diagnosis for brain diseases using 3D MRI data. Whereas many doctors use 2D slices from MRIs for diagnosis, Brain Key says they’re able to analyze data in 3D to do things like identify Parkinsons subtypes 35% more accurately than experts. They’re aiming to be in hospitals worldwide within 2 years.

Switchboard: It’s tough to efficiently match available trucks with freight needing to be shipped if you don’t know where the trucks are. Switchboard’s on-board truck sensors collect real time data on a truck’s location, destination, and more. Switchboard’s trucking freight marketplace launched three months ago and is already gathering data that could unlock more revenue streams.

Shef: Two months ago, California passed the first law in the country legalizing the sale of home cooked food. Shef creates a marketplace where home chefs can find nearby customers. Shef’s meals cost around $6.50 compared to $20 per meal for traditional food delivery, and the startup takes a 22 percent cut of every transaction. It’s been growing 50 percent week over week (Correction: we previously wrote “month over month”; YC tells us that growth was week over week) thanks to deals with large property management companies that offer the marketplace as a perk to their residents. Shef wants to be the Airbnb of home cooked food.

Qwest: Lets people pay money to skip lines at venues like clubs and bars. They’re currently at 10 venues in 2 cities, and say they should be at 100 venues in 6 cities this year. They aim to expand to events like music festivals and sporting events.

Circumvent Pharmaceuticals: Brain disease Batten, the Alzheimer’s of children, has no adequate treatment. Circumvent says its treatment can replace the missing enzyme at the root of the disease and has already been shown to be effective in mice. If it can get through expedited approval thanks to incentives for treating rare diseases, Circumvent wants to sell its medicine for $100,000 which is covered by insurance. Once it clears that hurdle, Circumvent will be much closer to working on Alzheimer’s treatments which could be hugely lucrative and a big win for humanity.

Withfriends: Membership programs for small businesses like bars, theaters, and barbershops. So far they have 80 small businesses on the platform, with over 5000 members working out to $400,000 in revenue. By integrating right into PoS machines, they say 15% of customers convert into members.

Askdata: Non-technical employees rarely use company data because it’s difficult to find and understand. Askdata offers a natural language search engine for internal data that translates words into SQL queries. Making data conveniently accessible could help businesses make better decisions.

Modern Labor: Pays people $10,000 to learn to code in exchange for 15% of their income for 2 years thereafter. Founder Francis Larson says Modern Labor’s first group of students is going through the program now, with 10,000 students on a waiting list.

NALA: Making mobile payments in Africa can require an internet connection and typing in a complex 46-digit code like the one above. NALA makes a mobile money app for easily paying friends and merchants as well as buying Internet airtime to capture the $300 billion in yearly mobile payments in Africa. Co-founder Benjamin Fernandes says NALA is 7X faster than competitors and has 5,000 active users. NALA earns money off commissions on airtime and bill payments, interest on savings, sending leads to insurance companies and other services.

Vice Lotteries: A lottery platform that’s trying to “take the loss” out of lotteries. Amongst other things, they limit the bets users are allowed to make based on their wealth to prevent betting too much. Founder Matthew Curtis notes that their model is currently not legal, but they’re actively trying to change that.

GoLinks: Long, complex URLs make it tough to access internal company tools. GoLinks makes links short and easy to remember for clients like Reddit and Lyft. Its tool can programmatically generate URLs that are single sign-on compliant, and teams get a dashboard of analytics. Whether employees are setting up a new computer or working while traveling, GoLinks means they won’t be locked out.

Allure Systems: Fashion brands spend $8 billion per year on models and photographers. Allure Systems uses AI to programatically produce apparel images for shopping sites. The technology can take one photo of a jacket and show it in a variety of poses on a range of models across different sizes. By increasing shopping conversion rates by 14 percent, the team has already racked up $1.4 million in annual recurring revenue with an average SAAS contract costing over $200,000 per year.

Spiral Genetics: Software built to compare large sets of human genome data to help cure diseases. Founder Adina Mangubat says existing software can’t analyze genome data at the massive scale it’ll be at in the coming years. They’ve generated $250K in revenue so far, with $1M in Letters of Intent.

Rune: Voice chat and automated friend/squad finder for players on mobile games (like Fortnite, PUBG.) In 10 days since launch, the company says it’s got 5,000 users who spend an average of 30 minutes per day on the platform. Friendships are handled within Rune, allowing users to switch from game to game.

Truora: Truora offers fast and reliable background checks for Latin America at $3 per check. Truora also collects reports of fraud by workers from its clients to create a valuable database employers will pay to access. It already has Uber, Rappi, and other top regional marketplaces using their service.

Aura Vision: Like Google Analytics for physical stores. By pulling a video feed from “any camera” in a store, Aura provides customer age, gender, and how long customers have lingered with a method they say is anonymous and doesn’t require facial recognition. The company founders say they’ll charge stores an average of $9,600 per year.

GeoPredict: GeoPredict aims to remove the middlemen from oil and gas real estate sales, and use AI and historical data to help evaluate acreage. They transacted roughly $100,000 last week, and charge a 5% fee.

Union Apartment: It’s hard for international students to find housing if they don’t speak the language, don’t have local friends, and might not even have a bank account. Union Apartment offers furnished co-living apartments for international students starting with those from China. Beyond dwellings, Union Apartment provides events like karaoke nights and services like help with banking. It’s already profitable with $130,000 in gross profit in February which makes this a $24 billion gross profit potential business.

jet.law: Charges flat legal fees for employment litigation, using court records to predict the workload and how much they should charge up front (rather than charging by billable hours). Co-founder Jesse Unruh previously worked in big business litigation, while co-founder Kyle Harris was a manufacturing design engineer at Apple.

Friendshop: Friendshop lets you recruit friends to buy with you to get deals. Friendshop wants to be the US version of Pinduoduo, a $24 billion Chinese group buying company. And after its virality helps Friendshop grow in beauty, it plans to move into other consumer goods businesses.

Pulse Active Stations Network: Health kiosks for India, meant to be installed in train stations. Co-founder Joginder Tanikella says that there are 600,000 preventable deaths in India as many in the region don’t get regular doctor checkups. “But everyone takes train,” he says. Their in-station kiosk measures 21 health parameters. The company made $28,000 in revenue last month. Charging $1 per test, Tanikella says each machine pays for itself within 3 months. In the future, the kiosks will allow them to sell insurance and refer users to doctors.

Pyxai: Employers don’t have scalable ways to screen for soft skills and culture fit. Pyxai gives job applicants a 30 minute quiz that it analyzes with natural language processing to assess what they can do and if they’ll mesh with existing staff. Deemphasizing resumes could decrease discrimination in hiring. Pyxai charges $6 per screening and wants to be part of how all 36 million knowledge job openings get filled.

Mage: An app built specifically for buying and selling cards from Magic: The Gathering — the largest trading card game in the world. Aiming to do for Magic what GOAT did for shoe resales, their app scans, recognizes, and prices cards and helps users to list them. The company says their average customer spends $120 per month on Magic cards.

Geosite: Businesses that need satellite imagery have to piece it together from 40 providers, manually download the content, and upload it to their system. Geosite is a marketplace for immediately usable spatial imagery. Clients pay an annual fee, and Geosite already has $3 million in contracts with the US Air Force.

Community Phone: Community Phone aims to be a friendlier wireless carrier, aggregating three existing wireless networks behind a company focused on a positive customer service experience. Co-Founder James Graham says they’re currently seeing $230k in annual recurring revenue, and are profitable with a 45% margin.

Superb AI: To build artificial intelligence, you need accurately labeled training data, but services like Mechanical Turk can be slow and inaccurate. Superb AI has built an AI that assists in the labeling process to speed it up 10X, and creates its own in-house AI algorithms. Superb AI has already done $1 million in revenue in the past 7 months. For most businesses to keep up with the AIs from Google, Facebook, and the other tech giants, they’ll need help generating training data that Superb can provide.

Termius: Termius makes an SSH client that works on desktop and mobile and already has 11,000 paying customers including employees at Disney and NASA. The freemium business model is propelled by its #1 ranking in app stores for “SSH”. Next, Termius wants to expand to teams to become a full collaboration platform.

Verto FX: Helps businesses in Africa obtain foreign currencies needed to work with international companies. They currently support the exchange of 18 currencies. The company has seen $26M transaction volume in 5 months of private beta, with $30k monthly revenue. Co-founders Anthony Oduwole and Ola Oyetayo both have backgrounds in building technology platforms for large banks.

Inito: This app lets you measure fertility hormones using a hardware dongle that plugs into your phone. Inito can perform a hormone test and use that data to diagnose and treat conditions, and aid in planning procedures like IVF and IUI. Inito claims it can help people get pregnant faster while earning a 65 percent margin on its hardware, and that its data could help diagnose illnesses earlier.

Woke: Finances ad campaigns for budding eCommerce brands and helps them grow in exchange for a cut of the profits. In one month, they’ve onboarded 4 merchants who are giving them 50% of profits on each sale.

PNOE: They’ve built a compact breath analysis device for fitness facilities, to provide athletes with information about their cardiac/metabolic health. It’s $6,000, and is meant to replace massive $60,000 alternatives. Revenue is growing 40% per month. After fitness facilities, they aim to bring the device into healthcare centers to help with heart disease, obesity. and breathing problems.

Mission Stage:

WeatherCheck: Measures weather damage for insurance companies. The company has secured 4.7 million in annual bookings in the five months since it launched to help insurance carriers reduce their overall claims expense. To use the service, insurers upload data about their properties. WeatherCheck then monitors the weather and sends notifications to insurance companies, if, for example, a property has been damaged by hail.

EatGeek: After selling their last startup to GrubHub, the co-founders of Eatgeek are looking to help restaurants pull in more large-scale catering orders. Most restaurants aren’t focused on courting those looking to cater events; EatGeek opens them up to an audience of people looking specifically for these larger orders. The company takes a 20 percent commission on every order that moves through their systems, but they don’t have to worry about dealing with the food preparation or delivery.

Avo: Prevents human error when implementing analytics. The company says humans suck at implementing analytics. Their team of engineers and data scientists previously built QuizUp, a startup backed by Sequoia Capital that garnered 100 million users. Avo is currently being used by Skip Scooters, among other businesses.

Adventurous Co: Adventurous is building an augmented reality scavenger hunt that partners live actors with a mobile app that can create an interactive family activity that’s a lot more engaging than regular “screen time.” They’re launching in San Francisco with 45-60min experiences that cost $15 per person. We previously wrote about Adventurous here.

Globe: The startup, which has dubbed itself the “Coinbase for derivatives,” has built a cryptocurrency-derivative exchange that supports high-frequency trading. The platform allows crypto holders to trade global markets with bitcoin and grants users the same access to data leveraged by institutional investors.

XGenomes: XGenomes is aiming to revolutionize DNA sequencing with a low-cost, high-efficiency solution that saves time and money. The company’s solution involves laying out samples on glass slides, identifying individual sequences and using machine learning to stitch together the high resolution photos and turn these images into a full DNA sequence. The team from Oxford and Harvard say that the market XGenomes is targeting is now larger than $6.5 billion.

Habitat Logistics: A food delivery startup that doesn’t have a consumer mobile app but helps restaurants make deliveries. What sets them apart from competitors? The company only delivers to restaurants that are within 10 minutes of a customer’s home, saving them time on long deliveries. Restaurants ping Habitat when they have delivery needs and the company sends a driver to complete the delivery. Habitat says they are growing 17 percent month over month, currently collecting $110,000 monthly revenue by charging restaurants per delivery.

WorkClout: WorkClout is building software to help manufacturers manage their operations in a cohesive product. The team says 56 percent of all manufacturers still manage their software on paper and Excel, WorkClout makes it much easier to spot inefficiencies and improve workflows. The team is focusing on customers in the packaging manufacturing space first, and is looking to tackle food and beverage companies and textile manufacturers next.

PadPiper: A marketplace for finding monthly housing and compatible roommates. The company helps interns find the right place to live, with the right roommates, partnering with big companies who need to help their interns navigate the housing market. The founders say they had to move 35 times in five years for academic reasons and were disappointed by Craigslist and other options. PadPiper has $10,000 in monthly revenue and says it’s growing 37 percent week-over-week.

DevFlight: DevFlight wants to revamp the business model for open-source software. They’re building a marketplace to pair open-sourced developer with companies. DevFlight works with the company and developers to create a plan that helps both parties understand the scope of the project. DevFlight takes a 25 percent transaction on the deals.

Handle.com: Automates the collection process of unpaid construction invoices. Construction companies are often forced to pay for their own jobs when customers are late on payments. According to Handle, there are $104 billion in unpaid construction invoices every year. Handle launched six weeks ago and is currently collecting $22,800 in monthly revenue. The founders previously launched an Andreessen Horowitz-backed company called Tenfold.

Gerostate Alpha: Gerostate Alpha is tackling human aging, an ambitious goal. The three co-founders are all academics at the Buck Institute where they’ve spent years researching aging. They’ve used their proprietary platform for drug discovery to quickly parse 90,000 compounds and identify 150 hits for further research.

Trestle: Founded by a former employee of Stripe, a fellow Y Combinator grad, Trestle provides companies a home page/easy-to-use intranet with profiles of each employee. The company is already working with Brex, Plaid and others to help employees feel less isolated and work more productively amongst each other.

Green Energy Exchange: Green Energy Exchange wants to give consumers a choice in where they get their energy. The virtual utility co. plans to let consumers choose where their renewable energy comes from — at least in the 12 states where that’s legal. The founder previously ran a large multi-billion dollar energy company and now wants to make choosing your energy supplier as easy as paying for Netflix by partnering directly with solar and wind generators. The startup is launching in Texas next month.

rct studio: Led by a team of YC alums behind Raven, an AI startup acquired by Baidu in 2017, rct studio is a creative studio for immersive and interactive film. The platform provides a real time “text to render “engine (so the text “A man sits on a sofa” would generate 3D imagery of a man sitting on a sofa) that supports mainstream 3D engines like Unity and Unreal, as well as a creative tool for film professionals to craft immersive and open-ended entertainment experiences called Morpheus Engine.

CredPal: CredPal is building a credit card company for Africa that looks to help the 200 million in Africa’s neglected middle class that lack access to formal credit, the startup says. The company hopes to become the next American Express and bring African consumers more convenience and freedom in how they purchase goods.

Calii: The company helps consumers in Latin America save money by directly connecting them to producers of fruits and vegetables. Cutting out the middlemen saves consumers lots of cash, say the founders. The Latin American companies are taking Chinese behemoth Pinduoduo’s business model and applying it to a different geography, like Rappi and Grin have done before them.

Nabis: Nabis is tackling the cannabis shipping and logistics business, working with suppliers to ship out goods to retailers reliably. It’s illegal for FedEx to ship weed so Nabis has swooped in and is helping ship and connect while taking cuts of the proceeds, a price the suppliers are willing to pay due to their 98 percent on-time shipping record.

Nettrons: A no-human-in-the-loop AI talent sourcer meant to make the recruiting process more efficient. The company has three paying companies who they’ve helped make six hires to date. Nettrons, founded by a pair of engineers, says their target market is worth $1 billion.

Fuzzbuzz: Fuzzing is the process of throwing mountains of invalid data at code to find bugs. Fuzzbuzz is looking to simplify the process of fuzzing for developers, taking a long complicated setup and turning it into a 30 minute process that automates the easy parts and connects with existing services like Jira, Github and Slack.

Interprime: Provides “Apple level” treasury services to startups. Startups are raising a lot of money with no way to manage it, says Interprime. They want to help these businesses by managing these big investments. They take a .25 percent advisory fee for all the investment they oversee. So far, they have $10 million in investment capital they are servicing.

Taali Foods: Taali Foods is looking to create a new healthy snack food, starting off with a popcorn replacement made from popped water lily seeds. The snacks ditch artificial flavoring, ingredients or preservatives and delivers serial snackers a healthier option with 67% less fat and 20% less calories than regular popcorn.

Gordian Software: An API for travel booking companies to sell seat selection and checked bags. Right now, Gordian is profitable and earning $65,000 per month offering online travel agencies tools to help them sell seating, baggage and other ancillary products. Gordian has three major pilots in the works, including one with lastminute.com.

Shiok Meats: A cell-based clean shrimp meat provider founded by a team of scientists. Compared to other shrimp on the market, Shiok says their cell-based shrimp meat is more sustainable and taste the same as regular shrimp. The shrimp meat is grown in bioreactors, similar to brewing beer. The startup is targeting the Asia-Pacific shrimp market, which it says is worth $25 billion.

Hatch: Hatch is looking to keep the conversations between franchise businesses and their customers moving along and driving sales all the while. The team is focusing on text, email and voice automation to push revenue at their customers which includes Jeep, Ashley Homestore and Rent-A-Center. The company is profitable and earning $119,000 per month.

Bot Orange: A customer communication system built on WeChat that integrates sales, marketing and more. WeChat currently offers no tools to companies to manage customers. Bot Orange will be that customer management tool within the app, helping businesses manage various channels without having to navigate another third-party tool.

Postscript: Postscript is working with online commerce brands to contact customers on smartphones via SMS. The startup wants to be a Mailchimp for texts, automating conversations between mobile-savvy millennial consumers and companies that are increasingly focused on direct-to-consumer and subscription models. We wrote about Postscript on TechCrunch here.

Tailor-ED: Launched by a pair of Stanford grads, the startup helps teachers create tailored lesson plans by sending short quizzes to groups of students to figure out the best lesson plans for those students. In the last four weeks, 2,500 students have received lessons from Tailor-ED. Operating under a freemium model, the company says they are targeting a $1.5 billion market.

Wallets Africa: African debit cards often don’t let users pay for international services like Netflix. Wallets Africa is building a digital bank that brings support to many of these online purchases via a partnership with Visa. The team is currently processing $3.5 million in purchases every month.

AuroraQ: A developer of a “practical” quantum computer. The founder has a Ph.D. in quantum physics and says AuroraQ will be the “Dell of quantum computing,” building integrated computers from quantum components, which is must less costly.

Probably Genetic: Probably Genetic is selling direct-to-consumer DNA tests, aiming to help Americans diagnose whether they are one of the 15 million undiagnosed people in the country that have a rare genetic disease. The co-founders say that on average it takes people more than 7 years to get diagnosed, and Probably Genetic hopes to change that with their $1,200 test which they will be launching in 12 weeks.

Viosera Therapeutics: Uses AI to predict and block drug resistance in cancer and bacteria. The startup has treated its solution with mice infected with MRSA and were able to cure 100 percent of the infected mice. The company is targeting MRSA patients initially with its drug discovery platform. Viosera says it is beginning clinical trials in the next six months.

Upsolve: Upsolve wants to helps low-income individuals file for bankruptcy more easily. The non-profit service gets referral fees from pointing non low-income families to bankruptcy lawyers and is able to offer the service for free. The company says that medical bills, layoffs and predatory loans can leave low-income families in dire situations and that in the last 6 months, their non-profit has alleviated customers from $24 million in debt.

AllSome: Virtual warehouses and fulfillment for online sellers in Southeast Asia. How it works: customers ship their inventory to AllSome’s warehouse space, and AllSome handles quality assurance, storage, labelling, packaging and shipping. AllSome’s founders say the company is profitable.

BearBuzz: BearBuzz is building an influencer marketplace that moves things along much more quickly than today’s negotiation slog. They’ve standardized ad formats and can automatically verify the video ads via image and voice recognition. The team plans to make money by facilitating these quicker connections and taking 25 percent of adspend.

Point: A digital bank offering a debit card with rewards and a better user experience. The company is going live with virtual debit cards and checking accounts next month.

MyScoot: MyScoot wants to help urban millennials make friends in India with their platform for home-hosted social events. Users can search the service and pay to attend events. MyScoot looks to keep things safe for attendees through background checks, peer reviews and what they’re calling a “social trust scoring algorithm.” They have had more than 1000 bookings through their app, with 60% of users returning after booking their first event.

Memfault: A developer of tools for engineers at embedded hardware companies that they say are as good as tools available for mobile engineers. Memfault is used for deployment, monitoring and analytics. So far, they have four customers and $5,500 in monthly recurring revenue.

Board: Board is a mortgage company that lets home buyers lock down a house with an all-cash offer. Cash buyers are 4 times more likely to win in a bidding war and often save tens of thousands off of a property’s purchase price compared to those with mortgages. They’re looking to be a cash buyer for the 80 percent of people who need a mortgage, by approving people for these massive loans and then making 2 percent off the mortgage.

Portal Entryways: Portal automatically opens doors for wheelchair users and keeps them open until they’ve gone through. Many existing accessibility buttons are out of reach, or too far from doors to be helpful; Portal uses a smartphone app on the user’s phone to control these existing buttons (modified with Portal’s hardware), effectively hitting the button for them. Portal is focusing on public places with many doors at first, like universities and malls. We wrote about Portal Entryways on TechCrunch here.

Blueberry Medical: A pediatric telemedicine company that provides medical care instantly to families. Blueberry provides constant contact, the ability to talk to a pediatrician 24/7 and at-home testing kits for a total of $8 per month. They’ve just completed a paid consumer pilot and say they were able to resolve 84 percent of issues without in-person care. They’ve partnered with insurance providers to reduce ER visits.

Maitian.ai: Maitian is building the next generation of vending machines, taking notes from the hotel mini-bar fridge and allowing businesses to sell food in a way that’s friendlier than the average vending machine. Users swipe their credit card, open the door to the machine and pick out what they want. The team is focusing on South East Asia and has launched in 2 locations.

Emi Labs: Is developing a virtual assistant for human resources workers that automates the hiring process for low-skilled jobs. The startup counts Burger King and PwC as customers, with a total market size of $2.4 billion. Emi Labs improves the candidate experience by making the hiring process more personalized to them using AI.

Latchel: Latchel is building a maintenance platform for property managements that helps them free up their time by processing requests and dispatching contractors to fix the issues. Latchel makes up to $10 per unit per month for property managers and charges a 10 percent referral fee to contractors when they source them for jobs.

Alpaca: Is developing an API for free stock trading to replace legacy software. The founders say Alpaca’s commission-free stock trading API is the first and only broker dealer that understands developers, and it allows customers to build and trade with real-time market data free of cost.

The top 10 startups from Y Combinator W19 Demo Day 1

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toomanysinks · 6 years

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Here are the 88 companies that launched at YC’s W19 Demo Day 2

Today was the second half of Y Combinator’s two-day Demo Day for its Winter 2019 class. Over 85 startups pitched on stage yesterday, and another huge batch launched today.

Here are all of the companies that launched today, and our notes from their presentations.

Pioneer Stage:

The Juggernaut: A subscription publication focusing on South Asian stories. They hire freelance writers, publish one story per day, and charge users $5 a month. We wrote about The Juggernaut here.

Allo: Connects local parents and helps them help each other with things like babysitting and errand-running through a “Karma” point system. Average user returns 12x per week.

Visly: Developers waste a ton of time rebuilding the same product for iOS, Android, and web and Visly says only 15 percent of developers use tools to simplify this. Visly’s cross-platform UI development suite makes it quick and easy to create consistent apps for different devices. The CEO worked on Facebook’s version called Yoga, but it always failed. Visly has fixed those problems so developers can focus on their invention, not porting it to other operating systems.

Shef: Two months ago, California passed the first law in the country legalizing the sale of home cooked food. Shef creates a marketplace where home chefs can find nearby customers. Shef’s meals cost around $6.50 compared to $20 per meal for traditional food delivery, and the startup takes a 22 percent cut of every transaction. It’s been growing 50 percent month over month thanks to deals with large property management companies that offer the marketplace as a perk to their residents. Shef wants to be the Airbnb of home cooked food.

Mission Stage:

Point: A digital bank offering a debit card with rewards and a better user experience. The company is going live with virtual debit cards and checking accounts next month.

Blueberry Medical: A pediatric telemedicine company that provides medical care instantly to families. Blueberry provides constant contact, the ability to talk to a pediatrician 24/7 and at-home testing kits for a total of $8 per month. They’ve just completed a paid consumer pilot and were able to resolve 50 percent of issues without in-person care. They’ve partnered with insurance providers to reduce ER visits.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/19/here-are-the-88-companies-that-launched-at-ycs-w19-demo-day-2/

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fmservers · 6 years

Text

Here are the 88 companies that launched at YC’s W19 Demo Day 2

Today was the second half of Y Combinator’s two-day Demo Day for its Winter 2019 class. Over 85 startups pitched on stage yesterday, and another huge batch launched today.

Here are all of the companies that launched today, and our notes from their presentations.

Pioneer Stage:

The Juggernaut: A subscription publication focusing on South Asian stories. They hire freelance writers, publish one story per day, and charge users $5 a month. We wrote about The Juggernaut here.

Allo: Connects local parents and helps them help each other with things like babysitting and errand-running through a “Karma” point system. Average user returns 12x per week.

Visly: Developers waste a ton of time rebuilding the same product for iOS, Android, and web and Visly says only 15 percent of developers use tools to simplify this. Visly’s cross-platform UI development suite makes it quick and easy to create consistent apps for different devices. The CEO worked on Facebook’s version called Yoga, but it always failed. Visly has fixed those problems so developers can focus on their invention, not porting it to other operating systems.

Shef: Two months ago, California passed the first law in the country legalizing the sale of home cooked food. Shef creates a marketplace where home chefs can find nearby customers. Shef’s meals cost around $6.50 compared to $20 per meal for traditional food delivery, and the startup takes a 22 percent cut of every transaction. It’s been growing 50 percent month over month thanks to deals with large property management companies that offer the marketplace as a perk to their residents. Shef wants to be the Airbnb of home cooked food.

Mission Stage:

Point: A digital bank offering a debit card with rewards and a better user experience. The company is going live with virtual debit cards and checking accounts next month.

Blueberry Medical: A pediatric telemedicine company that provides medical care instantly to families. Blueberry provides constant contact, the ability to talk to a pediatrician 24/7 and at-home testing kits for a total of $8 per month. They’ve just completed a paid consumer pilot and were able to resolve 50 percent of issues without in-person care. They’ve partnered with insurance providers to reduce ER visits.

Via Greg Kumparak https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

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bestcoinlist · 6 years

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Cobinhood - to the moon and back

New Post has been published on https://www.bestcoinlist.com/crypto-trading-idea/cobinhood-to-the-moon-and-back/

Cobinhood - to the moon and back

This story began not so long ago, in the second quarter of 2017. A young Taiwanese entrepreneur Popo Chen decided that he didn’t have enough money from the sale of a streaming business named 17 Media, and started raising funds for a new cryptocurrency project. The history of 17 Media wasn’t so smooth: the public told that this “Asia’s largest streaming platform” (which reached only 5 million users) was successfully sold to investors whether from Singapore, or Thailand, but publicly, however, nowhere was reported what income investors received, the transaction went through a merger, the company wasn’t displayed on the exchange.

The key to success in crypto-currency world is the ownership of the exchange. Popo Chen decided to create the exchange, named it unsophisticated Cobinhood — an obvious rip-off to the Robinhood brand, already successful and developed at that time, one of the leaders in the segment of “small deals” in the United States.

No matter how much you were assured of the opposite and told about the wonders of the security of the blockchain, in reality, the crypto-currency exchange is (with rare exceptions) an ordinary centralized organization, which customers deposit their own funds and exchange assets with each other. You will never know who controls the wallets of these exchanges and who controls the Cobinhood wallet today. Also, you’ll never know where are still funds on the stock exchange or they are withdrawn in someone’s interests and finance other cryptocurrency startups.

Anyway, to lay a hand on the funds of customers, it was necessary to develop at least the exchange. And Cobinhood launched its own ICO. Oh, these blissful times when investors easily bought the idea of a decentralized future. For a month or so, the public placement of COB tokens has allowed to attract almost $15 million. Colossal money that could provide excellent technology, software interface, and internal liquidity.

The attractive element for investors was the commission-free platform. Yes, the exchange didn’t plan to take any commission from transactions! And how to earn, how to return to investors their investments, you ask? Nohow. Return on investment and income from the beginning weren’t in the program. The team of founders of Cobinhood had one task: to secure a good income and bonuses, to jump on the springboard, catapulting in the height of the crypto-currency chapiteau.

Everything happened exactly as any observer could assume: the exchange started a month later than promised and the first months worked through a stump deck. Its turnover barely reached a few hundred thousand dollars a day, while the market leaders were getting to the billion-dollar trading volume. Against required by investors liquid token in the top ten market Cobinhood masse took on a listing little-known projects, which habitually held a series of “pump dump” (dispersal rates and then a sharp drop with fooling who bought at the peak), and then disappeared forever, and forgotten founders, and the leadership of the exchange. At the peak, the exchange had almost 60 such “investment” objects in the quotation lists.

Through the “pump” was passed and the COB token: shortly after the ICO price for this, in General, useless coin was dispersed in 20 times. When the capitalization of the tokens has reached $300 million, there was sobering. Most likely, large seed investors sold their more expensive assets already at the growth phase, thanked the founders of Cobinhood, who provided them with such a successful “field of miracles” and went back to the real world with significantly heavier pockets and wallets.

The quotes of the token have since been in a steep decline. During 2018, it fell by 20-40% every month. As a result, to date, the price is 75% lower than the placement price in October 2017 and is about 120 times different from the peak levels at which it was completely artificially abandoned by nimble manipulators.

Naive investors watched the implementation of the project “road map”, hoping that, if not commission (which, as you remember, the exchange doesn’t receive), then at least additional services will be able to provide some financial return on the project. During funds raising, the team made many promises: the launch of margin trading, holding a large number of ICOS on the site, which would allow to receive bonuses to the COB holders, the integration of payment wallets and exchange services.

All this remained promises. Margin trading was technically launched a year later than promised and today operates in a sluggish, almost test mode. For one and a half years of work the platform carried out only one placement which, however, to COB holders didn’t bring practically anything. There was a massive lottery (“candy machine”) running in which traders distributed microscopic amounts of untraceable tokens with a value of about zero. Casino classics: gilding, tinsel, hype, zero filling.

The team focus swam in the opposite direction. In the autumn of 2018, Popo Chen lit up with a new idea: to build another blockchain. In a situation where there are bitcoin, ether, EOS, and at least a dozen fully functioning and dynamically developing technologies, the founders of Cobinhood decided that they’ll be able to revolutionize and launch a completely new, fast and very popular product. And, of course, immediately began to raise funds for it.

Dexon’s fundraising campaign was rumored to raise $30-40 million, of which, according to the founders, $20 million has already been raised from an anchor investor. Like the Cobinhood story, isn’t it? Why is attracting such huge funds to write code that doesn’t require its own fleet of servers and is aimed at the voluntary creation of nodes around the world? Such funds could well form a data center comparable to those used by international corporations.

The second campaign on the “field of miracles” was given more difficult: investors are legible and more careful, so the Dexon fundraising has been going on for the fifth month, and the product promised in early 2019 remains a loud prototype.

And the history of Cobinhood is gradually moving to a phase that we can call “17 Media Version 2”: Popo Chen left all senior positions on the stock exchange, on his place came a new CEO who has no experience in cryptocurrency world. We can only guess how soon the exchange will be sold to a strategic investor and begin a new stage of its development — with commissions, black Jack and… In other matters, we’ll see.

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