#and yes i had ps opened and i am staling with this from working on a drawing

[hawkstincan]

◣ TAG GAME ◥

Four characters that make you go "my man, my man, my man"

tagged by @nixie-deangel

i have no idea how to *internal screaming* okay i'm not this obsessed with too many characters righty? RIGHT?

Tagging: @starstruckpurpledragon, @holycafe, @mommalosthermind, @madsteacup, @thing2dani, @softboydepot and whoever else would like to

[chalantness]

fic: Meet Me Under the Spotlight - Part II

Rating: PG-13 Word Count: ~5800 Characters: Steve/Natasha and the ensemble Summary: A continuation of that celebrity social media au no one asked for.

A/N: I hesitated about revisiting this story because the format was so unique and it flowed incredibly well and I wasn’t sure if I could replicate that. Also, in terms of the universe itself, I wasn’t sure what story I wanted to tell next that would still be fun to read through social media. With that said, I thought about it a lot and had so many things I wanted to add and other characters I wanted to include. I just planned on revisiting this ‘verse through headcanons or blurbs for you darlings, but I took another crack at it instead, and I had just as much fun writing it this time as I did the first time!

By the way, I’ve officially dubbed this ‘verse the Marvelous ‘verse. Because I will be coming back to it.

Read On: [ ao3 ]

‘Marvelous’ Season Finale Recap: “How the Mighty Fall”

May 25, 2017. 8:12 AM PST

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains plot details from the Marvelous season three finale, episode twenty-two, “How the Mighty Fall,” below.

Let’s start by getting this out there: no, we’re still not over it. And with three whole months between now and when Marvelous is scheduled to start filming Season 4, we’re sure the tears won’t stop flowing for a while.

Last night’s episode was the culmination of every heartbreaking fight we had to endure between our heroes, and every hasty action they took came back full circle with a sucker punch to our hearts! This was the lowest point the series has come to yet, and even after watching an entire season of everything falling apart, we still didn’t expect it to happen in such a spectacular fashion.

We’ll be back to get into the gory details soon, but in case you were too caught up in your tears to follow every minute of the finale, here are the highlights:

Black Widow’s betrayal that sent fans into a rage at the end of last week’s episode - episode twenty-one, “A Butterfly in a Web” - turned out to be for good reasons. Which we never doubted, but did you have to take such a hard shot at the Captain to do it?

Evidently, yes. Because not only did the Captain realize too little too late that she was protecting him, but his initial abandonment of her after their fallout ended in grave consequences. He barely makes it to her in time before she can bleed out to death, and when she wakes up, she has no recollection of anything. Not of what happened to her, not of betraying him, and not of anything that has to do with the Team at all. We’re not sure exactly how far this memory loss goes, but it was very clear from her confused and shaken expression when she wakes up that it’s pretty grim. And now that she’s without her memories, the Captain is more lost than ever. Guess it takes temporarily (hopefully temporarily?) losing every precious moment together to put things into perspective.

The escalating tension between Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch is irony at its finest: Quicksilver has spent the entire season as the overprotective older brother to Scarlet Witch, which unfortunately meant that Scarlet Witch has spent the entire season feeling sheltered and suffocated. She finally gets what she wants - a chance to put her newfound control over her powers to work, without Quicksilver hovering over her shoulder - and that left her open to being kidnapped. Understandably, Scarlet Witch could have avoided this with her eyes closed and both hands tied, but she had a little something else to deal with:

The Winter Soldier and Falcon, who have had no love lost between them this season, are quite literally at each other’s throats when they join Scarlet Witch to investigate a lead that takes them into the mountains to sniff out a secret bunker. Their fight last night had been the biggest and ugliest yet, and as expected, they don’t realize how gravely it would cost them until Scarlet Witch - too wrapped up in trying to keep them from killing each other - is snatched from under their noses. And no, it wasn’t the thing they needed to come to some kind of truce. If anything, it only made things worse.

Hawkeye and Thor had left in the previous episode to follow a lead of their own, and as expected, they also run into a nasty baddie of their own. And the blowout was far more fatal than you could imagine. When Agent 13 and Agent Hill were finally able to find them and bring them back to the safety of the Facility, they realized that Thor’s powers were completely gone - so it looks as if healing his eye isn’t something that will happen soon - and Hawkeye is in a coma.

Looks like we’ll need to stock up on tissues for now, because with no indication about how things will end up for another few months, we’re left with broken heroes and even more broken hearts.

What scene was the biggest tearjerker for you? Let us know in the comments below!

Related Articles:

Here’s Every Tweet from the Cast and Crew of ‘Marvelous’ During the Season Finale

‘Marvelous’ Season 4 Scheduled to Begin Filming in August

On the Air with Phil Coulson: ‘Marvelous’ Co-Stars Natasha Romanoff and Steve Rogers Talk Season Finale and Summer Plans

[Image Caption: Natasha Romanoff standing under a floral arch, smiling to someone out of shot. She’s holding a blue and white bouquet and wearing a white dress with a crystal bodice and tulle skirt, a veil attached to her headpiece.]

912,518 likes

carters13 Just got back to set and @nataliaromanov already has the best wardrobe! Glad to see some things never change.

View all 1,402 comments

AUGUST 14, 2017

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[Image Caption: Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, Sam Wilson, Tony Stark, and Thor Odinson standing in a row, looking in different directions. They are all wearing tuxedos with matching navy blue ties and blue iris boutonnieres.]

813,320 likes

ohsnapwilson First day of filming and none of us know what’s going on. Gonna be a long season. (PS. We paid attention during the table read. Mostly.)

View all 1,840 comments

AUGUST 14, 2017

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[Image Caption: Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff sitting down between takes. Steve is wearing a tuxedo with a navy blue tie and blue boutonniere, and Natasha Romanoff is seated on his lap in her wedding dress, the both of them laughing.]

925,556 likes

MarvelousOfficial #Marvelous Season 4 is officially back in business, and we’re so excited about it that we’re getting a jump start on our #MarvelousSneakPeeks!

View all 1,934 comments

AUGUST 14, 2017

The Late Night Show with Peter Quill @PeterQuillTonight -- September 28     Hey #Marvels did you know @therussianprincessnat is stopping by tonight? I hope she brings me a present

Marvelous @MarvelousCW -- September 28     #Marvels be sure to tune into @PeterQuillTonight and show @therussianprincessnat some love. Retweet if you’re watching!

Wanda Maximoff @littlewandamaximoff -- September 28      want to help a girl out #Marvels? @theothermaximoff says there’s no such thing as a @PeterQuillTonight viewing party :(

Sam Wilson @snapwilson -- September 28      so #Marvels got any plans tonight? mine include @PeterQuillTonight, a cramped apartment, and stale beer

Pepper Potts @twopeasinapott  -- September 28      hey #Marvels, the @MarvelousCW gang is back to watch @therussianprincessnat on @PeterQuillTonight! Wish you were here <3

Steve Rogers @stevefrombrooklyn -- September 28      Better get ready @PeterQuillTonight because @therussianprincessnat is a lethal charmer. You won’t know what hit you.

Just In: ‘Marvelous’ star Natasha Romanoff appears on The Late Night Show, drops exclusive Season 4 teaser trailer (September 28, 2017)

Everything You Need to Know About the ‘Marvelous’ Season 4 Teaser Trailer

September 29, 2017. 12:55 AM PST

Last week the Marvelous official Twitter announced that the show’s teaser trailer would not be included in the CW sizzle reel due to “production complications”, much to the disappointment of us Marvels everywhere. Little did we know that not only were we still getting that teaser, but we were getting it an entire week early!

When Natasha Romanoff dropped by The Late Night Show last night, it seemed like a typical guest appearance. But we should have known something was up when, just hours before airtime, the Marvelous cast and crew posted tweets upon tweets encouraging fans to tune in, then took to Instagram to post photos of the entire gang gathered in Nick Fury’s penthouse apartment to watch the show. We know this cast and crew love to show their support for each other, but all this seemed like a lot of fuss over a simple talk show appearance, right?

So. Wrong.

“I was so sure I’d get her to dish about her trip,” Peter Quill shared after the show, referring to the Hawaiian vacation where Natasha Romanoff and co-star Steve Rogers seemed to be closer and cozier than ever. Photos of the couple out and about across the islands had made fans swoon over their screens, but not nearly as much as the incredibly intimate photo the pair had posted to Twitter themselves! But if we thought that Peter Quill would finally get the scoop we all wanted, we were mistaken. “I was prepared for every trick Nat could’ve thrown my way except for this one!” Quill had laughed. “I still want answers, but, come on! How could you top that surprise?”

In case you’ve been living under a rock -- or if you want to watch it a few dozen more times like we have -- then here’s the Marvelous Season 4 Teaser Trailer that Natasha surprised the world with last night.

...Couldn’t get the video to load? Don’t worry, we’ve got all 1:15 minutes of it broken down:

We start with a black screen, and the Captain narrating: “When I woke up, they told us we’d won. That the war was over.”

Flashes of scenes in quick succession: Hawkeye in an infirmary bed connected to tubes, bandaging wrapped around his eyes; Scarlet Witch screaming, hands pressed to her head; the Winter Soldier and Falcon on a snowy mountain, both doubled over, blood on the snow; Agent 13 throwing Iron Man’s helmet across the room, nearly hitting Agent Hill’s head as it cracks against the wall.

Black Widow standing in her room, her back to the camera as she reaches for something on the desk, fading into a shot of the Captain watching her from the doorway as his narration continues: “But they didn’t tell me what we’d lost.”

Thor and Quicksilver in the training room, Quicksilver grabbing Thor’s arm and yanking him back as he says, “We have to go after her!” with Thor curtly replying, “If we do, she’s as good as dead.”

Scarlet Witch gathering her energy between her palms, her eyes glowing as men in the foreground aim their rifles; a quick second of nothing, then a shot of a bunker in the snowy mountains erupting into a red explosion, fading into a scene of Falcon and Winter Soldier watching it collapse from afar.

Agent Hill, Agent 13, and Hawkeye (his eyes still wrapped in bandaging) standing over a holographic table as Agent 13, clearly distraught, asks, “All that sacrifice and we only put a Band-Aid on the problem?” Agent Hill answers with, “Maybe, and it’s going to be for nothing if we can’t fix this,” to which Hawkeye scoffs and replies, “Look at us. We can’t even fix ourselves.”

An ominous shot of the cube-like form of energy used to seal Thor’s powers within it, currents of electricity sparking out from its core; then Thor wincing in pain before hurling a weight across the training room.

Black Widow and the Captain standing close together as she hesitantly reaches up to touch his face; then the Captain sitting on his bed, head down, as Black Widow kneels in front of him and asks, “Tell me what to do to help,” to which the Captain replies in a strained voice, “I don’t know.”

Scarlet Witch in the snow, surrounded by the debris of the exploded laboratory, and then the Winter Soldier lifting her into his arms as she tucks her face into his chest, her entire body shaking.

Falcon pressing a kiss to Agent 13′s hair as she closes her eyes, his voice playing over the scene: “So how do we do this?”

Then Falcon and Agent 13 startling as someone enters the room, Iron Man emerging from the doorway with his arm in a sling and a bruise on his cheek. A quick cut to Agent 13 crying as she throws her arms around Iron Man, his voice playing over the scene: “We start with my least favorite thing to do.”

Cut to black, with Iron Man finishing his dialogue: “We ask for help.”

Then a close-up shot of purple light passing over someone’s skin and dissolving into a black, textured material as it spreads. This figure turns around, revealing a complete shot of his high-tech, full-bodied, cat-like suit; then he glances up at the ceiling as another figure -- slighter and smaller in stature, in a blue-and-red suit with a spider across his chest -- repels from the ceiling, landing on his feet.

Best. Teaser. EVER.

And with Marvelous not returning until December, it’ a good thing that we Marvels know how to keep ourselves busy. Bring on the theories!

What did YOU think of the teaser trailer? Let us know in the comments below!

Related Articles:

Favorite ‘Marvelous’ Fan Theories for the Upcoming Season

WATCH: Can the Cast of ‘Marvelous’ Sum Up the Entire Series in Thirty Seconds?

WATCH: Peter Parker Almost Missed His ‘Marvelous’ Callback

Maria Hill @aproblemlikemaria -- October 10      you know you’ve been filming too long when @therussianprincessnat and @stevefrombrooklyn turn into an old married couple

Thor Odinson @corethor -- October 10      apparently on hour 16 of filming @therussianprincessnat and @stevefrombrooklyn start arguing in latin. about latin? idk

Peter B. Parker @pbandparker -- October 10     @therussianprincessnat just looked at @stevefrombrooklyn and said “get me donuts” and HE DID. pretty sure she’s a jedi

T’challa T’chaka @ttchalla -- October 10      @therussianprincessnat just jumps onto @stevefrombrooklyn’s back when she’s tired of standing. Think I might try it out.

Clint Barton @cbarton -- October 10      @stevefrombrooklyn went MIA. turns out @therussianprincessnat fell asleep on him and he didn’t want to wake her

Clint Barton @cbarton -- October 10      update: @stevefrombrooklyn and @therussianprincessnat held up filming for 15m and @nickfurry just SHRUGGED. i’m suing

Natasha A. Romanoff @therussianprincessnat -- October 10      @stevefrombrooklyn we need new friends

Steve Rogers @stevefrombrooklyn -- October 10      @therussianprincessnat i think you need another nap

[Image Caption: Natasha Romanoff and Peter Parker in their Black Widow and Spider-Man suits, with Peter resting his elbow on Natasha’s head.]

1,057,583 likes

nataliaromanov @peterbenjiparker us spiders have to stick together, right?

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OCTOBER 22, 2017

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[Image Caption: Steve Rogers kissing Natasha Romanoff’s cheek as she laughs, holding a melting cup of ice-cream.]

1,002,318 likes

stevenrogers I knew I couldn’t compete with @peterbenjipaker’s natural charm so I brought her ice-cream instead. #latenightshoots

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OCTOBER 22, 2017

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[Image Caption: Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff between takes on the training room set. Steve stands behind Natasha with his arms around her, leaning forward as Natasha whispers into his ear.]

842,102 likes

peterbenjiparker Have you ever eaten something so sweet that it gives you a sugar rush and sugar crash at the same time? That’s what it’s like to watch @stevenrogers and @nataliaromanov on and off camera

View all 911 comments

OCTOBER 23, 2017

Just In: Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff spotted filming in a downtown Toronto shopping mall, pose for pictures with fans between takes; when asked if the ring on her finger was important to the scene, Natasha coyly responds, “what do you think?” (October 27, 2017)

Happy Halloween! ‘Marvelous’ Treats Fans with More Insight on Upcoming Season

October 31, 2017. 8:25 AM PST.

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains on-set stills from Season 4 of Marvelous.

When we were kids, we gorged on candy for Halloween. Now, we gorge on spoilers!

(But candy would still be appreciated.)

This morning, the Marvelous official Twitter announced that they had a little something special for us Marvels on the show’s official site, and they did not disappoint! Not only were we treated to on-set photos -- confirmed to have been from the start of filming back in August -- but we were also given the official synopses of the first three episodes!

Bonus: none of scenes shown seem to be related to the scenes teased in the trailer.

Can you say, “more spoilers”?

[Image Caption: Steve Rogers in a tuxedo and Natasha Romanoff in a wedding dress, Natasha’s hand tucked into Steve’s elbow as they smile at each other. The seats behind them are filled with the main and recurring cast, dressed for the occasion.]

[Image Caption: Sam Wilson, Bucky Barnes, and Wanda Maximoff driving through a snowy mountain in a jeep. Sam is at the wheel as Wanda and Bucky are shown talking in the back seat, Wanda wearing the Winter Soldier’s jacket.]

[Image Caption: Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff standing in the infirmary. Steve is holding onto Natasha’s arm, his eyes closed as he kisses her forehead.]

[Image Caption: Thor Odinson and Maria Hill sitting on a couch together with a mostly-emptied bottle of whiskey on the table. They’re both holding tumblers of scotch and angled toward each other as they speak.]

[Image Caption: Sharon Carter and Tony Stark in the infirmary set, Sharon seated at Tony’s bedside with a hand in her hair and her face wet with tears.]

[Image Caption: Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff in the gym, a punching bag hanging between them. Natasha has a hand on the bag, her expression concerned as she looks at Steve, whose fist lingers on the punching bag as he angles himself away from her.]

[Image Caption: Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff in the kitchen of a suburban house. Natasha is sitting on the kitchen island next to bags of groceries, her arms draped around Steve’s neck as he’s smiling at her.]

But wait: there’s MORE!

IN SOMNIS VERITAS - Season 4, Episode 1

As the Captain (Steve Rogers) struggles to deal with Black Widow’s (Natasha Romanoff) memories being lost, Agent Hill (Maria Hill) tries to pick up the pieces of the Team’s latest fallout, especially as Thor (Thor Odinson) starts to spiral without his powers and Hawkeye (Clint Barton) remains in a coma. Meanwhile, the Winter Soldier (Bucky Barnes) and Falcon (Sam Wilson) fear that their time to rescue Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff) may be running out.

THE DARKEST NIGHT - Season 4, Episode 2

Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff) realizes that her powers are fluctuating due to the experiments performed by her still-unnamed abductor (guest star Edwin Jarvis), which she fears will have catastrophic side effects. Elsewhere, as extraterrestrial weapons continue to move between counties, Agent 13 (Sharon Carter) urges the Team to take action. Realizing the distress she’s causing the Captain (Steve Rogers), Black Widow (Natasha Romanoff) asks him to help jog her memories.

BEFORE DAWN - Season 4, Episode 3

With the Captain (Steve Rogers) opening up to her and the Team reunited once more, Black Widow (Natasha Romanoff) starts to get flashes of what she believes are her lost memories, though she hesitates to tell anyone. Meanwhile, the return of the Director (writer/producer, guest star Nick Fury) gives Agent Hill (Maria Hill) a new push to rally and regroup, while the arrival of Black Panther (T’challa T’chaka) and Spider-Man (Peter Parker) gives the Team the motivation to move forward.

While we now have a little insight on what to expect from the start of the season, we’re still wondering about those wedding photos posted by the cast back in August. Is it a dream? An illusion? A flash-forward?

Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!

Related Articles:

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Peggy Carter Expected to Direct ‘Marvelous’ Mid-Season Finale

‘Marvelous’ Newcomer T’challa T’chaka Scheduled to Appear on The Late Night Show

[Image Caption: Natasha Romanoff standing with her back to the camera. She’s wearing a Dodgers jersey and baseball cap, pointing over her shoulder with her thumb at the “ROGERS” stitched across the back of the jersey.]

1,085,340 likes

nataliaromanov Told @stevenrogers that this was my funniest Halloween costume yet.

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OCTOBER 31, 2017

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[Image Caption: Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff on set, laughing with their arms around each other. Steve is in his Captain suit while Natasha is wearing Steve’s Dodgers baseball cap and personalized jersey.]

1,072,342 likes

stevenrogers @nataliaromanov dressed up as me and then started hugging everyone on set. Don’t know whether to be flattered or offended.

View all 1,003 comments

OCTOBER 31, 2017

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[Image Caption: Steve Rogers dressed in his Captain suit and Natasha Romanoff dressed in Steve’s Dodgers baseball cap and personalized jersey. They’re sitting on their set chairs with their backs to the cameras as they talk.]

914,134 likes

iambuckybarnes dude wouldn’t let me try on his precious jersey when he got it, yet Nat steals it from his closet and prances around in it and he’s fine #messagereceived

View all 1,236 comments

OCTOBER 31, 2017

Just In: ‘Marvelous’ writer/producer Nick Fury tweets on-set photo of Natasha Romanoff, Maria Hill, and Sharon Carter sharing a warm drink between takes, and fans are quick to notice the diamond ring on Romanoff’s left hand; when his Twitter is flooded with questions, Fury responds with a cryptic, “you’ll see” (November 4, 2017)

The Official Twitter of Access Entertainment @accessentertainment -- November 13      Only one month left until the #Marvelous Season 4 premiere, but of course you #Marvels already know that.

The Official Twitter of Access Entertainment @accessentertainment -- November 13      To celebrate, we asked the cast what their favorite lines of the season are so far #MarvelousLineswithAE

James Buchanan Barnes @iambuckybarnes -- November 13      #MarvelousLineswithAE “It’s not about the fear. It’s about how you react to it. That’s what you taught me.”

Wanda Maximoff @littlewandamaximoff -- November 13      #MarvelousLineswithAE “Unlike you, I can still tell the difference between saving the world and destroying it.”

Sharon Carter @sharoncarter -- November 13      #MarvelousLineswithAE “I used to think that love got in the way of duty. But maybe love is our greatest duty.”

Sam Wilson @snapwilson -- November 13      #MarvelousLineswithAE “If I focus less on the blame and more on the hurt, it makes it easier to heal.”

Steve Rogers @stevefrombrooklyn -- November 13      #MarvelousLineswithAE “There’s nothing and no one that could take your place in my life.”

Natasha A. Romanoff @therussianprincessnat -- November 13      #MarvelousLineswithAE “That isn’t something I have to remember. That’s something I just know.”

Nick Fury @nickfurry -- November 13      #MarvelousLineswithAE “Please say yes.”

Natasha A. Romanoff @therussianprincessnat -- November 13      @nickfurry you sap                Natasha A. Romanoff Retweeted                @nickfurry #MarvelousLineswithAE “Please say yes.”

AE! Exclusive: Spoilers Straight from the Cast of ‘Marvelous’

November 14, 2017. 8:02 AM PST

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains plot details from the season premiere of Marvelous.

(If any of you Marvels successfully resisted the urge to continue reading, know that we are incredibly impressed.)

That’s right, Marvels. With the Season 4 premiere just a month away, Access Entertainment! received an exclusive invitation to visit the set. And while we were there, we sat down with some of the cast and crew to squeeze out juicy details on what to expect from the upcoming premiere.

(WATCH: Access Entertainment’s Entire First Look from the Set of ‘Marvelous’)

Ready for the spoilers? Yeah, neither were we.

1. The premiere will center around the theme of dreams, and Steve Rogers (playing the Captain) shares that the entire episode should be an emotional roller-coaster. Ready your tissues, Marvels.

STEVE ROGERS: There’s a very blurred line between dreams and nightmares and that’s something the premiere really plays on. We shot two or three, sometimes even four versions of the same dream scenes that were so tonally different from each other. There are really low points but there are really high points, too, and it’s just one of those things you know will have that punch and then keep on punching.

ACCESS ENTERTAINMENT: And we’re guessing one of the Captain’s dreams must involve Natasha [Romanoff, playing Black Widow] in that gorgeous wedding dress all over Instagram?

ROGERS: [laughs] That was actually the very first scene we shot of the season. We read the script together, so we knew it was coming, just not when. But it’s the first day, and we’re all in tuxes and gowns and they’ve got us in this beautiful church set. And I didn’t even see Nat in her dress until we started filming. Nick [Fury, the show’s writer/producer] still won’t admit it but I’m sure that was intentional.

ACCESS ENTERTAINMENT: How romantic!

ROGERS: Yeah, don’t let the guy fool you. He’s just a big softie.

2. We’ll pick up right where the finale left off. Which means throwing salt onto all those wounds that still haven’t healed; their wounds AND ours.

SHARON CARTER [playing Agent 13]: You can watch the finale and then the premiere back-to-back and it’ll sort of be one extended episode. That’s the idea. We put these characters through every circle of hell and back and we don’t want to just jump forward and make you fill in the gaps. We take you with us every step of their emotional journey like we always have, and I can’t share anything, of course, but it doesn’t take long for them to start bouncing back. It’s sort of our way of saying, ‘Hey, we broke your hearts and made you wait half a year because we suck but now you’ll reap the rewards.’

3. After watching an entire season of our heroes falling apart, we can look forward to them coming back together stronger than ever. It’s no secret that watching episode after episode of our heroes fighting among each other was heartbreaking. But Wanda [Maximoff, playing Scarlet Witch] dished that this won’t be the case for the upcoming season.

WANDA MAXIMOFF: You won’t have to worry about us being at each other’s throats nearly as much anymore. When you hit rock bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up!

ACCESS ENTERTAINMENT: Thank goodness!

MAXIMOFF: I know! [laughs] It’s always fun to play those kinds of scenes, you know? They’re very raw and real, and it’s cathartic but in a very safe way to channel all your emotions and let them out. But it’s still draining. We were all so tired from “fighting” with each other by the time we wrapped. We looked forward to having a little fun again and Nick absolutely gave us that

ACCESS ENTERTAINMENT: So we can expect a lot more smiles this season? Maybe even a few laughs?

MAXIMOFF: Absolutely! The first few episodes will deal with the aftermath of the finale, of course. You don’t just sweep that under the rug. But everyone has suffered so much individually, this season you’ll see them lean on each other to heal. At the core, they have a bond you can’t really fit into one type of mold and it’ll be what helps them turn things around.

4. This season will explore the dynamics between our characters in ways we thought we could only dream of. Which means, yes, Marvels. They are in fact listening.

MAXIMOFF: You’ll see characters share scenes together that didn’t have much interaction outside of the group before, and you’ll see relationships in new lights. Iron Man [played by Tony Stark] and Quicksilver [played by Pietro Maximoff] got off to a rocky start, and they’re in a civil place now, but you’ll see them develop a genuine friendship. Iron Man will really pull through for Quicksilver and that finally gives them some common ground. Agent Hill [played by Maria Hill] and Thor [played by Thor Odinson] have always butt heads here or there because they’re just so different. They’re almost the last duo you’d expect to come together and that’s the beauty of it. They end up leaning on each other and it’s beautiful. All of these odd, new dynamics will get their own spotlights and it’s so much fun.

There’s even some role reversal in key relationships. Like with Hawkeye [played by Clint Barton]. He was an important mentor to Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, and now with his condition he’ll turn to them for guidance. And with Black Widow, she really built up Scarlet Witch and helped her become confident in her abilities and now Scarlet Witch will get to return the favor. She’ll be there to help Black Widow get back on her feet. She becomes Black Widow’s biggest confidant, and that will be such a strong thing for Scarlet Witch, who is in a dark place at the start of the season. These more intimate moments - they’ve been my favorite to film so far.

5. Newcomers Black Panther (played by T’challa T’chaka) and Spider-Man (played by Peter Parker) won’t take long to join the fray. We learned that we won’t be seeing them in the premiere, but at least we won’t have to wait much longer! It’s confirmed that Black Panther and Spider-Man will make their debuts before the end of the second episode.

T’CHALLA T’CHAKA: I was surprised to learn during the table read that Nick wasted no time introducing us. He had us involved from the very first day of filming, even though Peter and I would traditionally not have been called to  the set just yet. We were very much included between takes. You would think coming onto a show of this magnitude, joining a cast so established - that would be an intimidating thing, you’d think. But as soon as I got the part everyone reached out to me on their own. We talked, not always about the show. I felt a fast connection. So when Peter and I were watching that first scene being filmed, when Natasha and Steve recited those vows, we were hit just as hard as everyone else. I choked up. I don’t mind sharing that, I’m not heartless. [laughs]

6. There’s a very good chance that every (well, ALMOST every) character that has crossed our heroes’ paths will make a reappearance before the end of the season. At least, it seems that way.

SAM WILSON [playing Falcon]: I’m just making guesses here, but with the way these last three months have gone, it’s probably a good guess. I think we’re somewhere between episodes nine and ten right now and we’ve already brought so many faces back. Sometimes we’ll walk onto a set or get rewrites, and we’ve brought back someone we thought had been written off definitively, and in these cool twists you won’t expect.

ACCESS ENTERTAINMENT: Any names you can hint at?

WILSON: Nah! No, don’t get me in trouble. [laughs] I can’t even hint at anything, but - trust me, it’ll be good. Fans will be excited to revisit these characters and see these shout-outs to old subplots. Some of it will be tying up loose ends, some of it’s just plain fun. Nick’s even got plans to have every guest director come back for an episode if scheduling works out. Don’t worry, I was allowed to share that. I asked. But Peggy [Carter] is already coming back for the mid-season finale and I think they’ve talked about her having a bigger hand in the second half of the season.

ACCESS ENTERTAINMENT: Oh, that’s exactly what we wanted to hear. She’s been involved in those episodes that make me swoon every time!

WILSON: Yeah, she knows how to tug on those heart-strings. She and Nick sat down, I think it was the middle of Season 2. But she and Nick sat us all down and we went around and said where we thought our characters would be in a few seasons and what we wanted for them. And it was all domestic. [laughs] No matter how crazy the world is, those same basic dreams are at our core, you know? And those are Peggy’s favorite stories to tell. Old romantics will be very happy with the intimate moments we fit into these episodes. It’ll be good. Real good.

7. Speaking of intimate: “It’s a very romantic season,” Bucky [Barnes, playing the Winter Soldier] shares. Cue squeals!

BARNES: Obviously the tone of the series will still be there, we don’t deviate into some kind of romantic drama. But you’ve seen the highs and lows of all these relationships, you’ve seen these characters go through so much and now they’ve earned this happiness. It’s a big turning point for our favorite couples, and rather than “will they, won’t they” you get to see them as a unit. That’s kind of the theme of this whole season, “us against the world,” whether it’s couples or friendships or the Team. It’s a great message.

ACCESS ENTERTAINMENT: Can you give us any hints?

BARNES: I wish I could, I really do. We just - we’re all having such a hard time biting our tongues. Each script is better and better and we want to share that with everyone, we want them to be excited with us. But I promise you, if you’ve sat through the last three years with your fingers crossed it’ll pay off. We almost jump the gun in a sense, because it goes from this slow burn to just diving head-first and it’s so satisfying. Even for myself, as a fan of this story and these characters, I see how far everything has come and I just get all tingly. [laughs] It’s great.

Well, there you have it!

It seems like this season will be the most emotional one yet, and luckily for us it sounds like it won’t be of the heart-breaking variety. Hopefully.

What are YOU most excited about for the upcoming season? Let us know in the comments below!

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[Image Caption: Close-up of Natasha Romanoff and Steve Rogers at night. Steve is kissing her hair, and Natasha is smiling softly with her hand on her cheek, showing off a glittering diamond ring - different from the ring she had been seen wearing in an on-set photo that writer/producer Nick Fury tweeted.]

1,056,813 likes

stevenrogers my favorite present has always been you

View all 1,965 comments

NOVEMBER 22, 2017

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[Image Caption: Natasha Romanoff and Steve Rogers on the set of Marvelous, kissing, her glittering diamond ring resting against his cheek as he dips her. The cast and crew can be seen out of focus in the background, cheering.]

1,195,381 likes

nataliaromanov I said yes

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NOVEMBER 22, 2017

[globalmediacampaign]

Aurora multi-Primary first impression

For what reason should I use a real multi-Primary setup? To be clear, not a multi-writer solution where any node can become the active writer in case of needs, as for PXC or PS-Group_replication. No, we are talking about a multi-Primary setup where I can write at the same time on multiple nodes. I want to insist on this “why?”. After having excluded the possible solutions mentioned above, both covering the famous 99,995% availability, which is 26.30 minutes downtime in a year, what is left? Disaster Recovery? Well that is something I would love to have, but to be a real DR solution we need to put several kilometers (miles for imperial) in the middle.  And we know (see here and here) that aside some misleading advertising, we cannot have a tightly coupled cluster solution across geographical regions. So, what is left? I may need more HA, ok that is a valid reason. Or I may need to scale the number of writes, ok that is a valid reason as well. This means, at the end, that I am looking to a multi-Primary because: Scale writes (more nodes more writes) Consistent reads (what I write on A must be visible on B) Gives me 0 (zero) downtime, or close to that (5 nines is a maximum downtime of 864 milliseconds per day!!) Allow me to shift the writer pointer at any time from A to B and vice versa, consistently.    Now, keeping myself bound to the MySQL ecosystem, my natural choice would be MySQL NDB cluster. But my (virtual) boss was at AWS re-invent and someone mentioned to him that Aurora Multi-Primary does what I was looking for. This (long) article is my voyage in discovering if that is true or … not. Given I am focused on the behaviour first, and NOT interested in absolute numbers to shock the audience with millions of QPS, I will use low level Aurora instances. And will perform tests from two EC2 in the same VPC/region of the nodes. You can find the details about the tests on GitHub here Finally I will test: Connection speed Stale read Write single node for baseline Write on both node: Scaling splitting the load by schema Scaling same schema  Tests results Let us start to have some real fun. The first test is …  Connection Speed The purpose of this test is to evaluate the time taken in opening a new connection and time taken to close it. The action of open/close connection can be a very expensive operation especially if applications do not use a connection pool mechanism. As we can see ProxySQL results to be the most efficient way to deal with opening connections, which was expected given the way it is designed to reuse open connections towards the backend.  Different is the close connection operation in which ProxySQL seems to take a little bit longer.  As global observation we can say that using ProxySQL we have more consistent behaviour. Of course this test is a simplistic one, and we are not checking the scalability (from 1 to N connections) but it is good enough to give us the initial feeling. Specific connection tests will be the focus of the next blog on Aurora MM.  Stale Reads Aurora MultiPrimary use the same mechanism of the default Aurora to update the buffer pool: Using the Page Cache update, just doing both ways. This means that the Buffer Pool of Node2 is updated with the modification performed in Node1 and vice versa. To verify if an application would be really able to have consistent reads, I have run this test. This test is meant to measure if, and how many, stale reads we will have when writing on a node and reading from the other. Amazon Aurora multi Primary has 2 consistency model: As an interesting fact the result was that with the default consistency model (INSTANCE_RAW), we got 100% stale read. Given that I focused on identifying the level of the cost that exists when using the other consistency model (REGIONAL_RAW) that allows an application to have consistent reads. The results indicate an increase of the 44% in total execution time, and of the 95% (22 time slower) in write execution.  It is interesting to note that the time taken is in some way predictable and consistent between the two consistency models.  The graph below shows in yellow how long the application must wait to see the correct data on the reader node. While in blue is the amount of time the application waits to get back the same consistent read because it must wait for the commit on the writer.    As you can see the two are more or less aligned. Given the performance cost imposed by using REGIONAL_RAW,  all the other tests are done the defaut INSTANCE_RAW, unless explicitly stated. Writing tests All tests run in this section were done using sysbench-tpcc with the following settings: sysbench ./tpcc.lua --mysql-host= --mysql-port=3306 --mysql-user= --mysql-password= --mysql-db=tpcc --time=300 --threads=32 --report-interval=1 --tables=10 --scale=15  --mysql_table_options=" CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin"  --db-driver=mysql prepare sysbench /opt/tools/sysbench-tpcc/tpcc.lua --mysql-host=$mysqlhost --mysql-port=$port --mysql-user= --mysql-password= --mysql-db=tpcc --db-driver=mysql --tables=10 --scale=15 --time=$time  --rand-type=zipfian --rand-zipfian-exp=0 --report-interval=1 --mysql-ignore-errors=all --histogram  --report_csv=yes --stats_format=csv --db-ps-mode=disable --threads=$threads run Write Single node (Baseline) Before starting the comparative analysis, I was looking to define what was the “limit” of traffic/load for this platform.  From the graph above, we can see that this setup scales up to 128 threads after that, the performance remains more or less steady.  Amazon claims that we can mainly double the performance when using both nodes in write mode and use a different schema to avoid conflict.   Once more remember I am not interested in the absolute numbers here, but I am expecting the same behaviour Given that our expectation is to see: Write on both nodes different schemas So AWS recommend this as the scaling solution: And I diligently follow the advice. I used 2 EC2 nodes in the same subnet of the Aurora Node, writing to a different schema (tpcc & tpcc2).  Overview Let us make it short and go straight to the point. Did we get the expected scalability? Well no: We just had 26% increase, quite far to be the expected 100% Let us see what happened in detail (if not interested just skip and go to the next test). Node 1 Node 2 As you can see Node1 was (more or less) keeping up with the expectations and being close to the expected performance. But Node2 was just not keeping up, performances there were just terrible.  The graphs below show what happened. While Node1 was (again more or less) scaling up to the baseline expectations (128 threads), Node2 collapsed on its knees at 16 threads. Node2 was never able to scale up. Reads Node 1 Node1 is scaling the reads as expected also if here and there we can see performance deterioration. Node 2 Node2 is not scaling Reads at all.  Writes Node 1 Same as Read Node 2 Same as read Now someone may think I was making a mistake and I was writing on the same schema. I assure you I was not. Check the next test to see what happened if using the same schema.   Write on both nodes same schema Overview Now, now Marco, this is unfair. You know this will cause contention. Yes I do! But nonetheless I was curious to see what was going to happen and how the platform would deal with that level of contention.  My expectations were to have a lot of performance degradation and increased number of locks. About conflict I was not wrong, node2 after the test reported: +-------------+---------+-------------------------+ | table | index | PHYSICAL_CONFLICTS_HIST | +-------------+---------+-------------------------+ | district9 | PRIMARY | 3450 | | district6 | PRIMARY | 3361 | | district2 | PRIMARY | 3356 | | district8 | PRIMARY | 3271 | | district4 | PRIMARY | 3237 | | district10 | PRIMARY | 3237 | | district7 | PRIMARY | 3237 | | district3 | PRIMARY | 3217 | | district5 | PRIMARY | 3156 | | district1 | PRIMARY | 3072 | | warehouse2 | PRIMARY | 1867 | | warehouse10 | PRIMARY | 1850 | | warehouse6 | PRIMARY | 1808 | | warehouse5 | PRIMARY | 1781 | | warehouse3 | PRIMARY | 1773 | | warehouse9 | PRIMARY | 1769 | | warehouse4 | PRIMARY | 1745 | | warehouse7 | PRIMARY | 1736 | | warehouse1 | PRIMARY | 1735 | | warehouse8 | PRIMARY | 1635 | +-------------+---------+-------------------------+ Which is obviously a strong indication something was not working right. In terms of performance gain, if we compare ONLY the result with the 128 Threads : Also with the high level of conflict we still have 12% of performance gain. The problem is that in general we have the two nodes behave quite badly. If you check the graph below you can see that the level of conflict is such to prevent the nodes not only to scale but to act consistently. Node 1 Node 2 Reads In the following graphs we can see how node1 had issues and it actually crashed 3 times, during tests with 32/64/512 treads. Node2 was always up but the performances were very low.  Node 1 Node 2 Writes Node 1 Node 2 Recovery from crashed Node About recovery time reading the AWS documentation and listening to presentations, I often heard that Aurora Multi Primary is a 0 downtime solution. Or other statements like: “in applications where you can't afford even brief downtime for database write operations, a multi-master cluster can help to avoid an outage when a writer instance becomes unavailable. The multi-master cluster doesn't use the failover mechanism, because it doesn't need to promote another DB instance to have read/write capability” To achieve this the suggestion I found, was to have applications pointing directly to the Nodes endpoint and not use the Cluster endpoint. In this context the solution pointing to the Nodes should be able to failover within a seconds or so, while the cluster endpoint: Personally I think that designing an architecture where the application is responsible for the connection to the database and failover is some kind of refuse from 2001. But if you feel this is the way, well go for it. What I did for testing is to use ProxySQL, as plain as possible, with nothing else then the basic monitor coming from the native monitor. I then compare the results with the tests using the Cluster endpoint. In this way I adopt the advice of pointing directly at the nodes, but I was doing things in our time.   The results are below and they confirm (more or less) the data coming from Amazon. A downtime of 7 seconds is quite a long time nowadays, especially if I am targeting the 5 nines solution that I want to remember is 864 ms downtime per day. Using ProxySQL is going closer to that, still too long to be called 0 (zero) downtime. I also have fail-back issues when using the AWS cluster endpoint. Given it was not able to move the connection to the joining node seamlessly.  Last but not least when using the consistency level INSTANCE_RAW, I had some data issue as well as PK conflict: FATAL: mysql_drv_query() returned error 1062 (Duplicate entry '18828082' for key 'PRIMARY')    Conclusions As state the beginning of this long blog the reasons expectations to go for a multi Primary solution were: Scale writes (more nodes more writes) Gives me 0 (zero) downtime, or close to that (5 nines is a maximum downtime of 864 milliseconds per day!!) Allow me to shift the writer pointer at any time from A to B and vice versa, consistently.    Honestly I feel we have completely failed the scaling point. Probably if I use the largest Aurora I will get much better absolute numbers, and it will take me more to encounter the same issues, but I will. In any case if the Multi muster solution is designed to provide that scalability, it should do that with any version. I did not have zero downtime, but I was able to failover pretty quickly with ProxySQL. Finally, unless the consistency model is REGIONAL_RAW, shifting from one node to the other is not prone to possible negative effects like stale reads. Because that I consider this requirement not satisfied in full.  Given all the above, I think this solution could eventually be valid only for High Availability (close to be 5 nines), but given it comes with some limitations I do not feel comfortable in preferring it over others just for HA, at the end default Aurora is already good enough as a High available solution.  references https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0C0jakzYuc https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/aurora-multi-master.html https://www.slideshare.net/marcotusa/improving-enterprises-ha-and-disaster-recovery-solutions-reviewed https://www.slideshare.net/marcotusa/robust-ha-solutions-with-proxysql https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/aurora-multi-master.html#aurora-multi-master-limitations   http://www.tusacentral.com/joomla/index.php/mysql-blogs/225-aurora-multi-primary-first-impression

[brothermouzongaming]

Games I’m excited about for 2018

Spider-man (PS4 exclusive): This list is in no way ranked. That being said this is my most anticipated game of 2018. I have been waiting for a Spider-man game to grab me since Spider-man 2. When I was at E3 the gameplay looked really promising and showed that the developers knew what made the good games good. From what I can see they even were able to pull some of the things that made the bad games good a la “Web of Shadows”. I’m not going to say much else for fear of this whole post turning into a Spider-man rant. Don’t let me down Insomniac. Do not.

Dragon Ball FighterZ: This game looks SHIT HOT and I’m excited to have a fighter I really want to get into from this generation. Smooth seamless combat at breakneck speeds and so much source material it was probably daunting. DBZ is special to me and many people like me, the guys at Arc Systems have their work cut out for them and I’m excited. My fighting games thus far have been Soul Calibur 3, MvC 2, and the little I dabbled in Injustice 2 ....yeah as you can see fighting games aren’t my thing. This, however, this is gonna be something I commit to. Come January 28th these hands will be on sale, come and get it

Days Gone (PS4 exclusive): 28 Days Later-esque pandemic centered in a rich yet frightening wilderness with survival mechanics? Single Player based?Yes please and thank you I will be having all of it. The gameplay looks great and just as importantly, the story seems engaging. Yes, it’s the same Last of Us scenario we’ve encountered time and time again in both games and movies. This time I think that may have been taken into account. There’s a somber yet rooted tone that though again has been done before, really seems to hold up even in the brief cutscenes available online. Am I worried that the developers have really only accomplished the Syphon Filter series (dating myself here which is a scary thought), two PS Vita Uncharted games, one unremarkable Resistance game, and Bubsy 3D in ‘96.... NOPE fuck it cause it’s almost promised to be free of micro-transactions and actually be an enjoyable and enthralling experience.

Monster Hunter World: The beta was fun, combat felt a little empty at times but once it gets going there is no stopping this game. Something about hunting a Slug Fish creature in a swamp, turning a corner only to see some unholy being vaguely reminiscent of a T Rex fused with an Armadillo. At that point I realized that we may be the monster hunters but holy shitfuck we better come correct. Really really really deep equipment and tools settings. Your main weapon is just the beginning with perks, buffs both passive and active, as well as a few other key tools also being at your disposal. I got a buddy to join me and the two of us dragged each other through that ordeal but it was hard because it was new, I was still having a good time. I’m excited to see what Capcom brings to their first console rendition in 11 years for a franchise that is as highly acclaimed as this one. 

Far Cry 5: This is a series that has always done an amazing job at the whole “Hunter v Hunted” aesthetic. I always feel so powerful and dangerous when I play Far Cry and 3 was a huge step in the right direction. 4 had a lot of things that I enjoyed, the gunplay, vehicles, and characters were really good. It did, however, fall a little short story-wise as well as some worn game mechanics with this being the fourth in the series. I did not get to play FC5 at E3 because that line was absurd. That being said, from the gameplay available on Youtube and various interviews it does seem that Ubisoft is aware of the potential stale twinge Far Cry has developed over the years. I’m looking forward to cutting down zealot cultists in the open Montana landscapes. March 27.

Anthem: This game is important, after the fuck-shit-stack that was Battlefront 2 and the cacophony of backlash that came with it; EA have to get this right. This loot box based online shooter, the “Destiny-killer” it’s being called. How does one kill what is already dead? Fuck if I know but I am interested IF they can do it right. That being said, my hopes aren’t high, but this game will be a barometer. This will show whether EA is willing to bend at all on their plans for monetization. They know a BF2 scenario is totally on the table now, and if they misstep, there will be more backlash. Either way, we win, either we get a good game or EA get put on another stake to burn.

Vampyr: From the developer that brought us Life is Strange and Remember Me comes a new game set in London 1918 during the Spanish Flu pandemic. We will play a vampire (sigh prime journalism over here folks) in town with a set number of NPCs and each death will have consequences for both you and the city. Semi-open world with an RPG and combat focus, I’m so down and I really hope this game can do new things. Q2 (Jan., Feb., Mar.) 2018

Soul Calibur 6: My fighting game is back and this is going to be a weird year for me with not one but two fighting games that will find my focus this year. Mitsurugi, Sophitia, and around 20+ are back to beat the everloving snot out of each other. I’m excited because this is supposedly a “reboot” of the franchise which means a lot of the original characters will be back (Nightmare, Maxi, Ivy, Taki, Kilik, etc). Things like armor breaking are both interesting and worrisome. I suspect Taki, Ivy, and the other unreasonably busty women of the series will be left awfully vulnerable sans armor by the mid/end of a battle. Regardless, this revamp maybe what the fighting franchise needs to enter the ring against the big boys of this generation. 

Death Stranding: DEATH MOTHER FUCKING STRANDVXIRJORWTMDNGHF  Let me tell you something, Kojima is going to save us all. I’m serious he is going to take all our hands and walk us into the sunlight of gaming where there are no microtransactions, the singleplayer is an epic odyssey, the multiplayer is fun but unnecessary, and the gaming experience is not only unique but has a lasting impression on every gamer brave enough to hold a controller. This game is going to test us, change us, and maybe most importantly: make people rethink the way games are made/designed. The third person sci-fi nightmare adventure will be here before we know it and great Scott am I ready to dive in. 

Red Dead Redemption 2: Had you asked me about RDD2 and it’s hypothetical production about 3 years ago; I would’ve said something along the lines of  “Fuck yes yippie kai yay mfs where mah horse at���. After Take-Two (parent company of 2k and Rockstar) came out and essentially supported EA’s usage of loot boxes. The CEO stated that “Recurrent consumer spending was the way of the future,” which is concerning to say the very least. I’m worried my West World sim is gonna turn into well...something more like West World. “Oh what’s that want a new hat? 5 bucks. New horse? 10 doll hairs plz. New gun? 15 smackers and the skin off your respective genitalia. Thank you come again.” My once resounding and honestly strange response is definitely more tepid and cautious. GTAV is lending itself quite nicely to the ways of the microtransaction and I can just see little buckets of gold nuggets or some dumb shit like that hinging in front of me or at the local shop. If so may there be backlash, and lots of it. 

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Greedfall: Developed by Spiders, a team with an... interesting track record in gaming (Sherlock Holmes v Jack the Ripper, Bound by Flame, and Technomancer [yikes]). On paper, this game sounds like it might be worth a damn and this is the most publicity any of their games have gotten so that does peak my interest. That and the publisher is Focus Home Interactive, makers of games like Divinity 2 and The Surge as well as my highly anticipated Call of Cthulhu and Vampyr. Who knows, this team up might just work. An open world RPG with online mechanics sounds fun.

God of War: I have never played a God of War game all the way through. With this being my first PlayStation that does make sense. That being said, I’m very excited to sit down and try my hand at this rebooted series. Given the reputation and clear influence a game like GoW has had, it does lead my expectations up rather than down. Santa Monica is developing, Ready at Dawn for some reason isn’t but it’s good to see the original team getting another crack at the Spartan. This time Greco-Roman gods are put aside for a more Nordic feel. The chain blades replaced with a hefty ax as well as a few other tools from what I’ve read/heard. Another interesting single player experience for those turned off by multiplayer and microtransactions. Not to say it won't have them just look at Shadow of War. It does, however, make it considerably less likely.

BioMutant: Traverse an open and changing world as an also everchanging bio-genetic mutant. Supposedly going to have big rpg mechanics involving the fact that your character’s schtick is evolving and changing. Brought to you by THQ Nordic the people that brought us the highs of the Darksiders series, Painkiller: Hell and Damnation, and Red Faction (2001). As well as some lows like the recently imploded Elex, Alan Wake, and the classic Spynx and the Cursed Mummy. I really don’t know what to make of this resume let alone what to expect. I am however excited for something new in the third person adventure genre. 

[fortheloveofpearlet]

Shea phoning a phone sex line, hearing Sasha's voice, and falling for Sasha instantly! 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍 (PS I can't ship Shea and Sasha without including Sasha's amazing voice!!!))

Leanne I think you’ve hit your prompt limit now 😂 obvs I’m kidding, send me as many as you like (preferably more of these Sashea prompts cos I am LIVING for them!)

Send me sentence prompts and drag race pairings and I’ll write you a little drabble!

Jaren was lonely. There was no way two ways about it. He’d been single for several months now after his ex had cheated on him and shattered his heart into a million pieces. He’d been out a few times trying to hook up but he didn’t seem to get the attention he used to. He swore to god the whole time he was with his ex men were hanging off him; he practically had them queuing out the door. But since the break up he’d had no attention what so ever. And as a result, he was lonely.

His friends had told him to try online dating which he had and it had gone horribly. He seemed to only attract trade, all men so painfully far in the closet they may as well have been in Narnia and Jaren wasn’t here for that. Then his friends told him to get a hooker, jokingly at first but over time they became more adamant about him getting laid. Of course he hadn’t stooped that low, but he was getting desperate.

One of his friends told him about this sex line he’d used. You called up and a guy would talk dirty to you or whatever you were into while you got your rocks off. Jaren wanted someone to physically touch him though. But he supposed being that there was a lack of options, he’d try it. If anything it would be a slightly more creative way for him to masturbate, because even that was becoming stale these days.

His hand was shaking a little as he dialled the number on the card his friend gave him. It rang a few times before someone answered and Jaren found himself holding his breath.‘Hi, you’re through to C.L.A.T. You’re speaking with Sasha.’ The voice floated down the phone as if on a cloud. Jaren’s mouth went dry and he felt his heart skip several beats. He had never heard a voice quite like that before. It was deep and it melted in his ears like chocolate. It also sent vibrations through his body, making his dick already start to harden.'Uhm…hi.’ Jaren croaked, he had no idea how this worked.'What’s your name?’ Sasha breathed down the phone, a smirk in his voice. He has the most mesmerising voice I’ve ever heard in my entire life.'Jaren.’ He croaked again. He wanted to fuck Sasha’s voice, was that weird? He didn’t even need this guy to talk dirty to him, he thought he’d probably be able to come listening to Sasha recite the alphabet.'Hmmm sexy.’ Sasha hummed. 'I bet you’re real sexy Jaren, you sound sexy.’The way Sasha said his name made his head spin. His cock was rock hard and he freed it from his pants.'I sound sexy? Damn can you hear yourself?’ He wrapped his hand around his shaft. Sasha chuckled and my god Jaren had never heard a better sound in his entire life. He swore it vibrated down the phone right to his dick.'Well it does kind of help in my line of business.’ Sasha was still chuckling. 'So Jaren, what do you like?’'Like?’ Jaren started stroking himself. 'You. I like you. Just talk to me. Please talk to me forever.’ He was moaning a little as spoke. Sasha chuckled again and Jaren really didn’t think he was going to be able to last long if he kept that up. He took the phone away from his ear and put it on speaker.'You’re already touching yourself aren’t you?’ Sasha’s voice had a hint of a smirk to it. It made Jaren harder.'Uh…yeah.’ He couldn’t lie.'I like that.’ Sasha spoke. 'Close your eyes Jaren, picture me there talking in your ear while you touch yourself.’Jaren closed his eyes and pictured a mysterious figure at his side whispering in his ear. He imagined the person sliding their hand down his torso and into his pants. He felt a bead of pre-come on his hand.'I wish you were here. I want you to fuck me.’ Jaren panted.'Just close your eyes and imagine it. Imagine my hands running over your body, my tongue licking your tight hole. Picture my hard dick slamming into you.’ Sasha spoke in hushed tones and it was so incredibly powerful. Jaren didn’t even need to know what he looked like. The idea of this stranger and his oh so magnificent voice fucking him was making him light headed.'Make me come.’ Jaren panted again.'Oh I intend to.’ The smirk was back in Sasha’s voice. 'Are you picturing me there Jaren? Can you feel my breath on your neck? Can you feel my dick pounding into you again and again? Can you feel my hand snaking around your waist and taking hold of your dick and pumping you? Are you close Jaren? I want you to come for me.’ Sasha’s voice was just too much. Jaren moaned loudly and then he came all over his hand and t-shirt.'Holy fucking shit.’ He panted. With his clean hand he picked the phone back up, took it off speaker and and put it to his ear. 'Thats embarrassing. I don’t usually come so quick.’ He felt himself blushing. Sasha chuckled again and Jaren was sure he could get hard again.'I have that effect on people.’ He told Jaren.'I need to speak to you again.’There was silence on the end of the phone for a second and Jaren was worried Sasha had hung up. Then he spoke.'I’m not supposed to do this but I have an extension. If you dial 348 at the end of the number it comes straight through to me.’ His voice was quiet as though he didn’t want anyone to hear. Jaren guessed he was breaking all kinds of rules.'Thank you.’ Jaren smiled to himself.'I’ll talk to you real soon sexy.’ Sasha blew him a kiss down the phone and then the line went dead.

Jaren called Sasha everyday for the next few weeks. At first it was all about Sasha’s voice getting him off but Jaren soon wanted more. He was falling for that deep, melodic voice and it was killing him not to be able to touch him or have Sasha touch him for real.

One night he asked the one question he knew he shouldn’t ask. It came out before he’d meant it to.'Sasha?’'Yes Jaren?’'I know this is probably all kinds of wrong but can I meet you?’ He’d expected to be hung up on or at the very least have Sasha laugh at him and tell him where to go. But to his surprise nothing like that happened.'Yes.’ Sasha breathed. 'I thought you’d never ask.’

Two days later Jaren nervously paced his living room as he waited for Sasha to show up. He has absolutely no idea what to expect and he had no idea what Sasha’s reaction would be when he saw Jaren. What if he doesn’t like what he sees? What if he just turns and walks away? He didn’t have a lot of time for thoughts like this as suddenly there was a knock on the door. Jaren took a few deep breaths before he opened it with a shaky hand. Staring back a him was a tall, slim bald man with large eyes hidden under thick rimmed glasses. Jaren bit his lip.'Sasha?’'Yeah it’s me.’ Sasha smiled and Jaren would know that voice anywhere.'Wow.’ Jaren breathed and then they fell into each other’s arms. It was hard to say who moved in for the kiss first as lips just suddenly meshed together in the most passionate kiss either of them had ever had. Jaren pulled him into the apartment and Sasha kicked the door shut.'I need you so badly.’ Jaren panted.'Oh god, you have no idea.’ Sasha smirked at him, the smirk Jaren had heard in his voice on the phone so many times before. As Sasha led him to the couch Jaren couldn’t believe this was happening. He’d fallen in love with Sasha’s voice on the other end of the phone and now here he was, in his apartment kissing him. And nothing had ever felt so right.

[mikazukikannagisjourney]

Last Chance to Make New Year’s Resolutions Come to Fruition: Spring Equinox Message!

Abstract: Spring Equinox this year also coincides with the coming of Aries season and the astrological new year. Thus, making new beginnings and commitments have much more momentum right now. Make the changes you wanted in your life, the universe supports your goal!

With all the crazy and chaotic energies happening in the world, don’t we all want our lives to move forward? Yes, it can be quite frustrating to be stuck somewhere all day, especially when we have been used to having a lot of activities outside. But instead of thinking that cabin fever sucks, why not use this chance to make lasting changes? Especially with the Spring Equinox coming tomorrow, March 20, 2020 (equal day and night time that signals the move towards spring and summer), this is a great opportunity to make and keep new year goals and resolutions that seem to be evasive since the Gregorian year started. And by Gregorian year I mean the start of 2020.

It is also very important to note that not only is tomorrow the earth starts shifting towards longer days and shorter nights here in the Northern Hemisphere, and longer nights and shorter days in the Southern Hemisphere (showering love to everyone through inclusion), but tomorrow also coincides with the beginning of the new Astrological Year as well as Aries season, so that’s quite a double dose of energies that can push forward the major bulldozing and removal of everything that no longer works, relationships that have grown stale, previous ideas and beliefs that feel so alien because these no longer reflect the wonderful person you have grown into, and all the things, material or non-material that have been sucking your high vibrational energies dry and have been causing you so much unnecessary stress. Seriously, despite the disease scare** across the world, getting even more stressed will only affect the immune system even more negatively by reducing the production of White Blood Cells (imagine: Less Macrophage waifus in your body. Or if you like Killer T’s or our good old pal Neutrophil-sempai yeah sure. Lol I love Cells at Work - Hataraku Saibou so yeah, I am doing my best to make things light here) so might as well take precautions on the personal level because that’s the only thing each person can have almost 100% control over.  Other than that, I think this is a great opportunity to revamp our lives in however ways we want. But if you feel like it’s already too late to start anew and go over your January goals...

YOU’RE STILL FINE, LET’S DO IT!! We still have a big push to start this thing!

So ditch the guilt for not starting early enough, you’re gonna be OK because for the next 5 days the Equinox energies are here to help all of us (believers or not) move forward to our new life chapters as well as into the new decade. And it’s a great wave that we can all catch and reap the benefits as well as the rewards from.

But hoooow?

Well, I am glad you asked. What is wonderful about these energies is that aside from helping us move forward with what we want, we can also better align with the higher vibrational versions of our selves aka HIGHEST SELF so that we not only can make personal goals that we absolutely want to happen, but also next-level goals, the divinely-guided ones that can steer us into the person we were supposed to be. These are the goals that can shape and transform us and our inner world. And spoiler alert: these are not all earthly goals. Some of these can be goals that you never expected to even think of dreaming to achieve. So you might wanna think about that too.

Thus the next 5 days starting from the equinox is  a great way to start meditating (if you haven’t already) and asking the universe, source, god, friendly star entities, whoever and whatever you consider your higher power to provide you guidance on what you need to do to grow into the person who shines their light in these dark and tumultuous times. And be open-minded on what answers will pop up. Ponder and meditate on those too. Just feel free to play with whatever you pick up while you meditate: visions; smells; sounds; textures; tastes; the whole gamut of feelings available.

But what if I don’t have any unfulfilled goals right now? I started them all and finished more than half before January ended.

Then you are amazing! Honestly. And what better way to celebrate than making a fresh new inner self, because that part of you that already achieved your goals is for sure wanting to set new ones, maybe more flexible and chillax visions of you. So you still would benefit from getting an inner-self revamp and goal revamping or revisiting.

How to do this?

Also simple. Here are some suggested steps:

List all of your new year goals 

Tick the ones that you accomplished 

Write your feelings when you accomplished them 

See if it’s a goal that can get better through an upgrade (eg. saved x amount of cash. next goal can be save 2x amount of cash), and lastly,

Ask yourself: Is this goal worth upgrading or is it worth making new goals?

If you feel deep within your heart that upleveling your goal is worth it because you know 100% that you’ll feel so happy and fulfilled doing it, then please do, by all means! Any and all forms of growth and development are wonderful, and that’s also going to improve your skills in the long run. Who knows, you can grow into an expert in that field too. So yeah, I support you!

But.. What if a considerable chunk of what you did and accomplished didn’t give you the amount of satisfaction that you were expecting to receive? Or, you felt drained?

Don’t despair, my friend, because all of those activities ARE NOT IN VAIN. These are not a waste of time. Why? Because at the very least, they’re great lessons made especially for you. It just means that your inner self just wants to get more out of life, and you’re starting to yearn for bigger goals. Maybe goals that you haven’t thought of doing yet, or goals that you kept shoving in the back of the oven. Or it is also possible that you just need to expand your comfort zone, or do stuff you haven’t done before but were always chilling at the corner of your mind. It is also possible that you just need to do something new, just to feel alive.

Whatever the case, a breath of fresh air is what the doctor recommends. And you can definitely benefit by harnessing the incoming Equinox energies! Aside from asking the higher dimensional realms for extra guidance and support. I mean, any form of support and cheering is better than none so why not take this chance as well? What is there to lose?

If you’ll ask me, you can only gain newer perspectives. Newer ways of solving things. Newer ways of looking at things. Once you’ve crossed that path, you can only go forward, because neural networks get rewired each time you CHOOSE to change and EMBRACE everything that goes with it. Basically BECOMING the identity instead of just seeing yourself as someone who does things is a better goal because by BECOMING, it becomes who you are as your own personal choice. For me, my personal identity is a life-long learner who learns to improve my personal life and other people’s too. Yeah I got this idea from Vishen Lakhiani, it makes so much sense to me because I was already doing identity shifting even before he coined the term. Fun 13 years that was, and counting. So it’s both borrowed and personal, I couldn’t care any less lol

OK past this point are personal ramblings. You can end your reading here =) Thank you and be blessed always!

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Of course, changing things just when things are getting settled can be very, very unsettling. For me, even if I am open to changes, it can still get really annoying. I already started going out of my comfort zone as advised by my higher self since November last year, and it’s not as easy as I wanted it to be, because I had to purge so much stuff, more than my body could ever handle. I also started to purge inherited emotions, ideas, patterns, karmas, and all that garbage that I have been holding onto energetically, because aside from not being for my highest good, these things have held me back because deep down, I KNOW that I can do more and be more. I am B-MO lol but really, aren’t we all B-MO? =D

I wish I wasn’t kidding when I kept saying that it wasn’t easy making changes. Honestly, it wasn’t. We’re hardwired to be habitual creatures, it’s in our DNA, and by going against our instincts and relying more on intuition can feel like swimming upstream, up a waterfall. Also, I have a stubborn streak (a Saturnian gift which I am doing my best to be happy with), which can really get in the way of instilling new habits and schedules, especially just implementing a weekly Kundalini meditation to clear off energies and learning new stuff. Another thing that is tripping me up right now is adding my paypal donation link below each post, which is pretty much divinely-guided and right now I am hoping that some magic can happen, one way or another. It felt uncomfortable but I also chose to do it, even if a tiny part of me, the fearful one who wants me to stay in poverty consciousness is guilt-tripping me even until now. If I could just obliterate that part of me so that I can let abundance come in, I will do it in a heartbeat. And right now I am still in that process so wish me luck to succeed.

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Well, this turned out to be longer than I intended it to be. But still, I hope it helps others a lot, even just one person. Of course, if it helps more then the better it is to have this posted. 

One last thing: An Energy-infused photo to support you with the incoming Spring Equinox energies:

If you reached this part of the post, seriously thank you so much. You can have all my hugs, my UwUs, and uhm.. Everything else in between. UwU

Be blessed by the Divine Realm always, and may you become the healing you deserve.

Mikazuki

PS. If you found the information in this post to be very helpful, insightful, and of great value to you and your own personal journey, please feel free to reblog, share and heart/like, or if you feel super-generous, energetic exchanges are welcomed! Please click here and use this email address: may_chan_otaku@yahoo.com 

Thank you so much and be blessed!

More personal rants under the slash lol no need to read unless you want to get triggered lol

----Trigger warnings: ranting--------

**  I personally believe that the “pandemic” is nothing more than a scare tactic instigated by uhm, “you know who” (Voldemort? Sauron? lol) because based on some of the statistics which I have been doing my best to read, the disease only affects susceptible members of the population aka people with weak or compromised immune systems, especially people around the age of 60 years and above. Also I am miffed that many reports kept focusing on number of deaths instead of adding very pertinent info such as total number of cases, demographics of suspected and infected individuals and number of deaths versus total number of cases with full age demographic of the entire population of infected individuals as well as the entire population structure of each country. I am basically saying that a lot of things should be considered before making rational or irrational choices or procedures, because any incomplete info or analysis can affect decision-making and make matters worse. I believe it’s called looking at all options including past events and how these were mitigated and assesing all possible ways to create solutions. Seriously, deciding out of hightened emotions and under fear can create more horrible events. Try deciding from a place of confidence, peace, love, and gobbling a lot of information and regurgitating that information to create BETTER solutions. Sheesh.

As with most of the diseases out there, proper hygiene and personal responsibility are still the most important things each person can do to control ALL COMMUNICABLE DISEASES. And in my own, personal opinion, some other viral and parasitic diseases have more lethal effects because ALL members of the entire population demographic can readily die from it without proper detection and care. Think HIV, Dengue fever, trypanosome diseases, malaria, etc.. Just my two cents on this whole thing. But if you disagree then it’s fine. I still love you OK? I guess I am a lot more passionate than I should be because I love studying epidemiology and pathogens and how these things can be controlled, plus some background on cell signalling and formation of cells helps a lot. I wasn’t kidding when I said I learn and apply what I learned to help myself and other people, that’s a large part of my personal identity. =)

[globalmediacampaign]

Amazon Aurora Multi-Primary First Impression

For what reason should I use a real multi-primary setup? To be clear, not a multi-writer solution where any node can become the active writer in case of needs, as for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) or Percona Server for MySQL using Group_replication. No, we are talking about a multi-primary setup where I can write at the same time on multiple nodes. I want to insist on this “why?”. After having excluded the possible solutions mentioned above, both covering the famous 99.995% availability, which is 26.30 minutes of downtime in a year, what is left? Disaster Recovery? Well, that is something I would love to have, but to be a real DR solution we need to put several kilometers (miles for imperial) in the middle. And we know (see here and here) that aside from some misleading advertising, we cannot have a tightly coupled cluster solution across geographical regions. So, what is left? I may need more HA, ok, that is a valid reason. Or I may need to scale the number of writes, which is a valid reason as well. This means, in the end, that I am looking to a multi-primary because: Scale writes (more nodes more writes) Consistent reads (what I write on A must be visible on B) Gives me 0 (zero) downtime, or close to that (5 nines is a maximum downtime of 864 milliseconds per day!!) Allow me to shift the writer pointer at any time from A to B and vice versa, consistently. Now, keeping myself bound to the MySQL ecosystem, my natural choice would be MySQL NDB cluster. But my (virtual) boss was at AWS re-invent and someone mentioned to him that Aurora Multi-Primary does what I was looking for. This (long) article is my voyage in discovering if that is true or … not. Given I am focused on the behavior first, and NOT interested in absolute numbers to shock the audience with millions of QPS, I will use low-level Aurora instances. And will perform tests from two EC2 in the same VPC/region of the nodes. You can find the details about the tests on GitHub here. Finally, I will test: Connection speed Stale read Write single node for baseline Write on both node: Scaling splitting the load by schema Scaling same schema Test Results Let us start to have some real fun. The first test is … Connection Speed The purpose of this test is to evaluate the time taken in opening a new connection and time taken to close it. The action of the open/close connection can be a very expensive operation, especially if applications do not use a connection pool mechanism. As we can see, ProxySQL results to be the most efficient way to deal with opening connections, which was expected given the way it is designed to reuse open connections towards the backend. Different is the close connection operation, in which ProxySQL seems to take a little bit longer. As a global observation, we can say that by using ProxySQL we have more consistent behavior. Of course, this test is a simplistic one, and we are not checking the scalability (from 1 to N connections) but it is good enough to give us the initial feeling. Specific connection tests will be the focus of the next blog on Aurora MM. Stale Reads Aurora multi-primary uses the same mechanism of the default Aurora to update the buffer pool: Using the Page Cache update, just doing both ways. This means that the Buffer Pool of Node2 is updated with the modification performed in Node1 and vice versa. To verify if an application would be really able to have consistent reads, I have run this test. This test is meant to measure if, and how many, stale reads we will have when writing on a node and reading from the other. Amazon Aurora multi-primary has two consistency models: As an interesting fact, the result was that with the default consistency model (INSTANCE_RAW), we got a 100% stale read. Given that I focused on identifying the level of the cost that exists when using the other consistency model (REGIONAL_RAW), that allows an application to have consistent reads. The results indicate an increase of 44% in total execution time, and of 95% (22 times slower) in write execution. It is interesting to note that the time taken is in some way predictable and consistent between the two consistency models. The graph below shows in yellow how long the application must wait to see the correct data on the reader node. In blue is the amount of time the application waits to get back the same consistent read because it must wait for the commit on the writer. As you can see, the two are more or less aligned. Given the performance cost imposed by using REGIONAL_RAW,  all the other tests are done with the default INSTANCE_RAW, unless explicitly stated. Writing Tests All tests run in this section were done using sysbench-tpcc with the following settings: sysbench ./tpcc.lua --mysql-host= --mysql-port=3306 --mysql-user= --mysql-password= --mysql-db=tpcc --time=300 --threads=32 --report-interval=1 --tables=10 --scale=15  --mysql_table_options=" CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin"  --db-driver=mysql prepare  sysbench /opt/tools/sysbench-tpcc/tpcc.lua --mysql-host=$mysqlhost --mysql-port=$port --mysql-user= --mysql-password= --mysql-db=tpcc --db-driver=mysql --tables=10 --scale=15 --time=$time  --rand-type=zipfian --rand-zipfian-exp=0 --report-interval=1 --mysql-ignore-errors=all --histogram  --report_csv=yes --stats_format=csv --db-ps-mode=disable --threads=$threads run Write Single Node (Baseline) Before starting the comparative analysis, I was looking to define what was the “limit” of traffic/load for this platform. From the graph above, we can see that this setup scales up to 128 threads and after that, the performance remains more or less steady. Amazon claims that we can mainly double the performance when using both nodes in write mode and use a different schema to avoid conflict. Once more, remember I am not interested in the absolute numbers here, but I am expecting the same behavior. Given that, our expectation is to see: Write on Both Nodes, Different Schemas So AWS recommend this as the scaling solution: And I diligently follow the advice. I used two EC2 nodes in the same subnet of the Aurora Node, writing to a different schema (tpcc & tpcc2). Overview Let us make it short and go straight to the point. Did we get the expected scalability? Well, no: We just had a 26% increase, quite far to be the expected 100% Let us see what happened in detail (if not interested just skip and go to the next test). Node 1 Node 2As you can see, Node1 was (more or less) keeping up with the expectations and being close to the expected performance. But Node2 was just not keeping up, and performances there were just terrible. The graphs below show what happened.While Node1 was (again more or less) scaling up to the baseline expectations (128 threads), Node2 collapsed on its knees at 16 threads. Node2 was never able to scale up. Reads Node 1Node1 is scaling the reads as expected, but also here and there we can see performance deterioration. Node 2Node2 is not scaling Reads at all. Writes Node 1Same as Read. Node 2Same as read. Now someone may think I was making a mistake and I was writing on the same schema. I assure you I was not. Check the next test to see what happened if using the same schema. Write on Both Nodes,  Same Schema Overview Now, now, Marco, this is unfair. You know this will cause contention. Yes, I do! But nonetheless, I was curious to see what was going to happen and how the platform would deal with that level of contention. My expectations were to have a lot of performance degradation and an increased number of locks. About conflict I was not wrong, node2 after the test reported: +-------------+---------+-------------------------+ | table | index | PHYSICAL_CONFLICTS_HIST | +-------------+---------+-------------------------+ | district9 | PRIMARY | 3450 | | district6 | PRIMARY | 3361 | | district2 | PRIMARY | 3356 | | district8 | PRIMARY | 3271 | | district4 | PRIMARY | 3237 | | district10 | PRIMARY | 3237 | | district7 | PRIMARY | 3237 | | district3 | PRIMARY | 3217 | | district5 | PRIMARY | 3156 | | district1 | PRIMARY | 3072 | | warehouse2 | PRIMARY | 1867 | | warehouse10 | PRIMARY | 1850 | | warehouse6 | PRIMARY | 1808 | | warehouse5 | PRIMARY | 1781 | | warehouse3 | PRIMARY | 1773 | | warehouse9 | PRIMARY | 1769 | | warehouse4 | PRIMARY | 1745 | | warehouse7 | PRIMARY | 1736 | | warehouse1 | PRIMARY | 1735 | | warehouse8 | PRIMARY | 1635 | +-------------+---------+-------------------------+ Which is obviously a strong indication something was not working right. In terms of performance gain, if we compare ONLY the result with the 128 Threads:Also with the high level of conflict, we still have 12% of performance gain. The problem is that in general, we have the two nodes behaving quite badly. If you check the graph below you can see that the level of conflict is such to prevent the nodes not only to scale but to act consistently.Node 1 Node 2 Reads In the following graphs, we can see how node1 had issues and it actually crashed three times, during tests with 32/64/512 threads. Node2 was always up but the performances were very low. Node 1 Node 2 Writes Node 1 Node 2 Recovery From Crashed Node About recovery time, reading the AWS documentation and listening to presentations, I often heard that Aurora Multi-Primary is a 0 downtime solution. Or other statements like: “in applications where you can’t afford even brief downtime for database write operations, a multi-master cluster can help to avoid an outage when a writer instance becomes unavailable. The multi-master cluster doesn’t use the failover mechanism, because it doesn’t need to promote another DB instance to have read/write capability” To achieve this the suggestion, the solution I found was to have applications pointing directly to the Nodes endpoint and not use the Cluster endpoint. In this context, the solution pointing to the Nodes should be able to failover within a second or so, while the cluster endpoint: Personally, I think that designing an architecture where the application is responsible for the connection to the database and failover is some kind of refuse from 2001. But if you feel this is the way, well, go for it. What I did for testing is to use ProxySQL, as plain as possible with nothing else, and the basic monitor coming from the native monitor. I then compared the results with the tests using the Cluster endpoint. In this way, I adopt the advice of pointing directly at the nodes, but I was doing things in our time. The results are below and they confirm (more or less) the data coming from Amazon. A downtime of seven seconds is quite a long time nowadays, especially if I am targeting the 5 nines solution that I want to remember is 864 ms downtime per day. Using ProxySQL is going closer to that, but still too long to be called zero downtime. I also have fail-back issues when using the AWS cluster endpoint, given it was not able to move the connection to the joining node seamlessly. Last but not least, when using the consistency level INSTANCE_RAW, I had some data issue as well as PK conflict:FATAL: mysql_drv_query() returned error 1062 (Duplicate entry ‘18828082’ for key ‘PRIMARY’)  Conclusions As state at the beginning of this long blog, the reasonable expectations to go for a multi-primary solution were: Scale writes (more nodes more writes) Gives me zero downtime, or close to that (5 nines is a maximum downtime of 864 milliseconds per day!!) Allow me to shift the writer pointer at any time from A to B and vice versa, consistently. Honestly, I feel we have completely failed the scaling point. Probably if I use the largest Aurora I will get much better absolute numbers, and it will take me more to encounter the same issues, but I will. In any case, if the multi-primary solution is designed to provide that scalability, and it should do that with any version. I did not have zero downtime, but I was able to failover pretty quickly with ProxySQL. Finally, unless the consistency model is REGIONAL_RAW, shifting from one node to the other is not prone to possible negative effects like stale reads. Given that I consider this requirement not satisfied in full. Given all the above, I think this solution could eventually be valid only for High Availability (close to being 5 nines), but given it comes with some limitations I do not feel comfortable in preferring it over others just for that, at the end default Aurora is already good enough as a High available solution. References AWS re:Invent 2019: Amazon Aurora Multi-Master: Scaling out database write performance Working with Aurora multi-master clusters Improving enterprises ha and disaster recovery solutions reviewed Robust ha solutions with proxysql Limitations of multi-master clusters https://www.percona.com/blog/2020/10/09/amazon-aurora-multi-primary-first-impression/