#anyway. I’ve started using editing software again and I’m making it EVERYONE’S problem

[easyaesthetics]

Sprite edits for Even the Mountains Crumble, a fic by @whoalookingcooljoker !

Chapter 2 vs Chapter 13

[eideticmemory]

EVER SINCE NEW YORK | MATTHEW GRAY GUBLER

Description: I was messaged saying: “If you don’t write a young Matthew enemies to lovers fic featuring an obsession with sucking on boobs then what’s the point 😔.” So, here it is, folks! The ultimate College!Matthew fic.

PART 1! - for Sara [@bravadostyles], the ultimate muse. 

SOUNDTRACK:

Empire State of Mind - Jay Z.

Animals - Maroon 5.

Dopamine - Børns.

Word Count: 4,731.

Rating: M.

Warning/Includes: Sexual intercourse, recreational drug use, a bit of angst.

Spring, Freshman Year. 

Tisch School of the Arts,

New York University.

New York City. 

“You’ve got that face on,” Claire said. 

“What face is that, Claire?”

“Your trademark ready-to-go-home face,” she giggled. “You tired?”

“Just a little,” you whispered, head resting on her shoulder, feet hanging off the bed. “Had a long day at rehearsal.” 

“Ah,” she nodded. “Well, if you wanna go, we can go. I’ll walk you home.”

“No,” you shook your head, and placed your hand on her arm. “It’s fine. I’m having a good time.” 

Soft music played through the small speakers on Jonathan’s desk, mixing in with the chatter of your friends. Everyone sat in different spaces around the room, some on the desk, some on John’s bed, and you and Claire rested on his roommate’s bed. Open solo cups of beer were scattered amongst the room. It was calm, chill, and then the door swung open.

“Yoooooo!” The entering voice rang, instantly earning a happy response from Johnathan, who hopped off his bed and ran towards the entrance. 

“Gube!” John exclaimed, arms open wide to embrace his friend. He always got a little touchy-feely when he was tipsy. “Where the hell you been, man?”

“Consider my good time ruined,” you murmured to Claire.

“Be nice, [y/n],” she responded, patting your leg. “Everyone’s having a nice time, don’t start anything.”

“Me? Me? I don’t start anything, I never start anything. It’s him who starts it. That di—“

“Hey, [y/n],” Matthew greeted, taking a seat beside John. “Hey, Claire.”

“Hey, Gube,” Claire smiled. She gave you a gentle nudge with her elbow. 

You rolled your eyes, “Hi, Matthew,” you reluctantly replied, refusing to make eye contact. 

“Aw, c’mon, that’s all I get?” Matthew teased. “What’s wrong, sleeping beauty? You tired?” 

“Oh, you have no idea,” you told him, finally looking over at him. He wore a white polo, paired with a busted pair of jeans and white converse with his mismatched socks poking out. On his chest sat his trademark gold chain, the medallion set in the center of his sternum. 

“Might be past your bedtime,” he shrugged. “Really. Might be better if you just left.” 

“Me?” You scoffed. “Why don’t you leave? We were perfectly fine before you got here.”

“Oh, God,” someone groaned. “Here they go.”

“John wants me here. I’m a little more fun than someone who falls asleep mid-conversation, so I can see why.”

“Matthew, why are you talking to me? Can you just pretend,” you waved your arms around. “Pretend there’s a wall here.” 

“Don’t mind her,” Claire interjected. “She’s crabby because she hasn’t started editing her project yet.” 

You gasped, “Why would you just announce that, Claire? I didn’t wanna be reminded of that.” 

“[y/n], you’re gonna be fucked if you don’t get that shit done. It’s due next week.” Another friend told you. 

You groaned, “Yes. I know that. But I’ve been killing myself practicing for the show every night. And when I finally sat down to start editing, I didn’t know how to work the damn software!” 

“You don’t know how to work EasyEdit?”

“No,” you sighed. “I missed class that day. I tried to learn on YouTube, and that confused me even more. So, I have since then given up.”

“Hm,” John hummed. “You know who’s really good with EasyEdit?”

“Who?”

“Gube,” John answered. This prompted Matthew to lift his head up at astronomical speed, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “He taught me how to use it. He could help you, [y/n].”

“John...” Claire said. 

“What, Claire?” John replied. “[y/n] needs help and Gube can help. I’m just saying.” 

You cut your eyes over to Matthew, who was watching you, but he quickly turned away when you made eye contact. 

“You’re not clever,” Claire shook her head. “You’re nosey is what you are.” 

“Nosey?” You pipped, tapping Claire’s arm. “What do you mean nosey?” 

“I mean, if you and Gube just...” John said. “I’m gonna say it - fucked - one good time, the two of you could get over this whole rivalry already.”

“And stop arguing all the damn time,” someone added. “The shit’s annoying.”

Your jaw had been dropped since the word ‘fucked’ was uttered. You looked up at Claire who gave you a sympathetic smile. 

“I-“ You stuttered. “I...never say that again, John! Ever. Ew!”

“Ew?” Matthew exclaimed. “You’d be lucky if I tossed you a bone.”

Your jaw dropped even lower, stunned by Matthew’s words. “You arrogant son of a bitch,” you muttered. “And this is who you want me to allow near my final project?” You directed at John. 

“Hey, if you don’t wanna fuck me, it shouldn’t be a problem, right?” Matthew taunted, biting his lip and tilting his head. 

“No. I don’t wanna fuck you! I also don’t want to spend any more time with you than I absolutely have to. So I will learn EasyEdit by myself.” 

“Okay,” Matthew shrugged. “You’re not gonna figure that shit out in time, but fine, princess. Be stubborn.” 

You rolled your eyes at him, shaking your head in annoyance. 

“[y/n], let Gube help,” Claire said. “You’re gonna drive yourself insane with that and the show coming up, plus finals? Just this once.”

You looked over at Matthew, instantly getting angry again. Hate is a strong word. It’s a very, very strong word. And you’d never use it against anybody. Ever. Except Matthew Gubler. That may sound a bit dramatic, so to clear up any confusion, here’s a composite list of every asshole, dick, bastard, bitch-ass move he’s made in one semester:

1. Broke your editing equipment trying to do magic tricks in class.

2. Didn’t apologize.

3. Called your last documentary “uninspired, dry, a little like a lullaby.”

4. Took the last spot for an internship over Christmas break. 

5. Which he knew you wanted.

6. Refused to partner with you on a final project because “you can’t even get to class everyday.”

7. In front of everyone because he’s a jackass.

8. Told you that you were insane for majoring in film making AND ballet. 

9. Proceeded to tell you that you look better in a leotard than a suit.

10. Fucked your roommate.

11. While you were in the room.

12. Insisted that Wes Craven is a better horror director than Tim Burton? Is he dumb?

13. Calls you ballerina barbie, short stack, princess, anything other than your actual name. 

14. Won’t drop dead. 

And, because you’re not going to let anyone treat you that way, here’s a list of things you’ve done in retaliation: 

1. “Accidentally” stepped on his canvas. 

2. 3 times.

3. Uploaded a video of you calling him a dick in place of his documentary. 

4. Yes, he did play it for the class on accident.

5. Told him you didn’t want to be his partner anyway since he walks around stoned 24/7. 

6. Laughed. 

7. Told him he’d be a good ballerina. His tiny dick would fit perfectly in a leotard. 

8. Fucked his friend. While said friend was supposed to help Matthew with his project. 

9. Told him none of Edgar Allan Poe’s work was actually interesting enough for screen time. (He almost passed out, he got so mad.)

10. Told him his mismatch socks were dumb. 

11. Consistently call him asshole, dick, jackass, or just Matthew. All synonyms.

12. Refuse to let him mess with you. 

So, the idea of him helping you with your project, coming into your room, bothering you for hours on end, was a ridiculous thought. You should punch John for even mentioning it. Except. It wasn’t a bad idea. 

“Hey, pants stay on,” Matthew said, giving you a smirk. “Boy Scouts honor.” 

Everyone was looking at you. It made you queasy. Annoyed. Angry. And you couldn’t take it. So, you sighed heavily and cut your eyes towards Matthew. “Fine,” you grimaced. “Fine. Monday night. You will teach me how to use EasyEdit. And then we can all drop this.” 

“Ah, success,” John cheered. “I’m not worried, though. Look at [y/n], she’s so innocent. She looks like she belongs on top of a Christmas tree. She does ballet for crying out loud. I doubt fucking is on her to-do list.”

“And on that note,” you pushed yourself off the bed. “I’m going to my room. Goodnight.” 

Your room was just down the hall, and you showered, changed, brushed your teeth and got into bed in all of 30 minutes. Just about to fall asleep, you were disturbed by the sound of keys jingling in the door. Sloppy footsteps stumbled into the room, accompanied by silly giggles.

Thinking you were asleep, your roommate admired your sleeping frame, “Awwww,” she cooed. “Precious, precious, [y/n].” She walked over to you and rubbed your shoulder. 

“You’re crazy to not wanna fuck Matthew,” she whispered, chuckling. “You don’t know what you’re missing, kid.”

And you stayed still, silent, pretended to snore. All while Claire crawled into her bed. 

When Monday rolled around, you spent the entire day with a chip on your shoulder. Claire kissed the top of your head and insisted you’d be fine, that your project would be done by the end of the night and you’d be grateful for Matthew’s help. But she knew that was a  dead cause in her heart of hearts. You both knew it’d be a miracle if Matthew and you made it through 15 minutes of editing. 

When she left to go to a friend’s place, you changed into pajama pants, combined with a cozy cropped button sweater. You sat at your desk, and waited. You’d told Matthew to arrive at 7. 

He got there at 7:59.

By then, you were laying in bed, pissed and upset that you’d actually been convinced to give Matthew a chance. He knocked on the door, and you answered with an attitude. “Go home, Matthew.” 

“Don’t be like that, short stack,” he sighed, following you as you stomped into the room. “I got caught up. I’m sorry.” 

“Yeah? What’d you get caught up with? A gram?” You spit. 

He laughed, “Haha, so funny. No, I was not getting high. I was working on my own project. That I finished. Ahead of time. Can you relate, [y/n]?” 

“Get out of my room,” you scoffed. “I asked you for one thing. One. And you couldn't even do that. You knew how important this project was to me, and you didn’t give a fuck. I wasted time waiting for you that I could’ve been working or rehearsing! I—Are you listening?” 

Matthew’s eyes had been concentrated solely on your chest, “Are you wearing a bra?” He asked. 

You took a step back, stunned, blinking rapidly as you searched around the room. “I’m sorry,” you said. “I’m just trying to find where the hell that came from?�� 

“It came from that itty bitty shirt you’re wearing,” he replied with a shrug. “Doesn’t really leave much to the imagination.” 

“Stop staring at my tits!” You shouted, face turning red. “God, Matthew, I can’t stand to look at you right now. Just, leave. Please.” 

He did not stop staring at your tits. Not for a very long time. But when he did, he had this look in his eyes. Like a wire had snapped. And he kissed you. Cupped your face in his hands, pulled you close, and kissed you. You pressed your hands against his chest, face contorting in shock and confusion. 

You pushed him away, lips retracting with a sharp smacking noise. Saliva dripped from your lips, and you stood there, huffing and puffing like the two of you had just run a mile. “What the hell was that?” You snapped, your fingertips lightly touching your bottom lip. 

He didn’t reply. He was just as speechless as you were. Speechless, and confused, and out of breath, and so, so pretty. He was so pretty. Has he always been that pretty? 

You grabbed onto the hem of his shirt and pulled him back in, pressing your lips together in an aggressive collision. Matthew’s hand gripped onto your hair, his body pushing itself against yours in an eager attempt to get as close to you as possible. His other hand made its way to your waist, gripping onto your skin so hard, his nails left marks. Both his hands began to snake down your body, landing on the back of your thighs. 

Very suddenly, Matthew scooped you up in his arms, yanking your feet off of the ground. You let out a breathy ‘oof’ as you found yourself perched in his grasp, your legs wrapped around his torso, your hands on his shoulders. He supported your weight so easily, all while sliding his tongue into your mouth. 

He carried you over to your bed, where he abruptly dropped you onto the mattress, and looked down at you with a lustful grin. Standing beside the bed, he leaned in as if he was going to kiss you — slowly, with his hands reaching out to touch your body — but he didn’t. Instead, he placed his hands on your ribs and pushed your sweater up, over your breasts to reveal your chest. 

“I knew it,” he whispered. “I knew you weren’t wearing a bra.” 

Your breath caught in your throat, before you released it shakily. His lips wrapped around your nipple, wetting it with his tongue and applying light suction. A soft moan left your mouth, and you gripped onto his hair in ecstasy. He couldn’t stop himself from smiling. He sucked harder, to the point of pain, just to hear you make some noise. Any noise. When one nipple began to pulse between his lips, he moved to the other, leaving a trail of love bites between them. 

The heat between your legs was suffocating, and you rubbed your thighs together for some relief. Matthew noticed this, and proceeded to stick his hands down your pants, fingers sliding underneath the band of your underwear. He smirked at how soaked you were already and rubbed your clit as he licked a trail up to your neck. You tightened your thighs around his hand, gasping at the friction and pulling at the bedsheets. 

The sound caused Matthew to take in a sharp breath of air. His cock was pressed against the zipper of his jeans, and was getting to the point that it was excruciating. So, as he massaged your nerve, he undid his pants and pushed them down his legs. 

He nibbled on your ear, and as you gave him a quiet moan, your eyes flickered down to look between your bodies. Flushed, and horny, and suddenly so desperate, you grabbed onto Matthew’s large erection and pressed the tip against your clit. 

He grunted and pulled back to stare you in the eye, a sly grin creeping onto his face. He laughed, “I knew it. I fucking knew it. Innocent? Innocent, my ass.” 

As you rolled your eyes at him, he kissed your lips softly, hands holding onto your thighs. You positioned his cock at your entranced and allowed him to press into you. He stood up straight, watching his cock disappear inside you, slowly, steadily, before he suddenly slammed into you. The sound of skin colliding on skin mixed in with your and Matthew’s moans, and he watched your head roll back in pleasure. 

He licked his lips, smirking. And he did it again. And again. And again. Pulling out all the way and pushing back into you. Hard. The sensation struck your chest, and elicited vulnerable moans from you every time he pounded you. Matthew instantly began to speed his hips up, nails digging into your thighs as he pressed your legs open for him. His used all his strength to fuck you, your head knocking into the wall with every thrust. It was sloppy and messy and you couldn’t stop whimpering. Your eyes were screwed shut, and when you opened them again, the first thing you noticed with his chain. The gold medallion dangled in your face, Matthew’s lips pressed against your cheek. 

Absentmindedly, you tangled your fingers in the chain, tugging on it as your volume increased. “Fuck,” you muttered. “Oh, fuck.” 

He brought his hand up to your face, placing his thumb on your bottom lip. “Open your mouth,” he ordered, quietly, softly. And you did it without thinking. His thumb slid into your mouth, twirling around your tongue and stifling your moans. 

He removed his hand and placed his thumb on your clit, wetting the skin with your own saliva. You let out a loud yelp at the new sensation, and a bubble instantly formed in your stomach. 

Oh, no, not Matthew, you thought. Don’t let it be Matthew. 

But with his cock and his hips and the way he kissed your neck and rubbed your sensitive nerve all at once. You came, you came with a fit of pornographic moans, trembling and writhing around on the bed. 

And it was Matthew — the first guy to make you come. Ever. 

He licked his lips as he watched you come undone beneath him, proud of himself — to the point of cockiness. Giving you a few more forceful pumps, he pulled out of you and released himself onto your chest, watching the fluid cover the hickies he’d left there. 

He looked angelic on top of you, moaning, panting, swearing under his breath. But the moment he finished, he stepped back, fastened his pants and walked away. You propped yourself up on your elbows, watching him in a daze. 

Matthew logged onto your computer, pressed a few buttons and then closed the laptop shut. Then he left. 

However, the next day he sent you an email. Your project. Fully and perfectly edited. 

Okay. So, that happened. They said it would happen and it happened. Didn’t necessarily make you hate Matthew any less, but it happened. It was good. You hated to admit it. And it was all you could think about. You couldn’t even touch yourself or hold your pillow without thinking of Matthew. It was bad. 

Especially, given the fact that after the whole situation, he decided not to talk to you. At all. Not in class, not while hanging out with friends, not even to pick a fight. Complete and utter radio silence. He looked at you enough though. Not while you were looking at him, of course. So, as far as you knew, you were far off of his mind. But life had to go on. You had to focus on school, and on top of that, you were due to perform in NYU’s production of Swan Lake in less than two weeks. 

You landed the main role of Odette, meaning for the next two weeks, you had to eat, sleep, breathe ballet. You practiced for hours on end, barely saw your friends, which gave you a good break from seeing Matthew. 

Opening night rolled around and you were so nervous, you thought you might puke. Only a freshman, it was a miracle you landed the role in the first place, which meant your performance tonight was a make or break moment. Claire could tell you were sick to your stomach and tried to distract you by taking a bunch of pictures on her phone.

“Smile, pretty girl!” She beamed, the flashing going off in your face as you posed. “[y/n], you’re gonna kill it! I’m so excited! Aren’t you excited?”

“Yeah...” you whispered. “Deathly excited.”

“Aw, poor baby,” she swung her arm around your shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’m gonna be front  and center, cheering you on. Just focus on me, okay?” 

You smiled and nodded, taking in a deep breath. “Okay.” 

Your body was on autopilot out on stage. The movements you’d practiced everyday, for hours and hours on end, just flowed. The lighting in the audience was dark, but you could just barely make out Claire’s figure under the soft hue. 

It wasn’t until the finale, when you stood ready for your closing performance, that the lights switched to their full intensity and you noticed a hand resting on Claire’s shoulder. An arm resting behind her head. Someone whispering in her ear, making her laugh. 

Matthew.

He was here. He was here and he was with Claire. He was with Claire and he was watching you. And it made your stomach feel weird. But then the music kicked up. So, you had to go. You fell into your dance, your rhythm and for some reason, you could not stop staring at Matthew. 

Every twirl, you made him your focal point. Looking at him again, and again, and again. Until the lights went out. 

Supporting ballerinas cheered you on as you walked offstage, throwing flowers at your feet and giving you applause. Your instructor marched right up to you, kissed both sides of your face and embraced you. It was a wonderful feeling, but right then, you were drained, emotionally, mentally, physically, you needed some rest. 

You locked yourself away in your dressing room, taking a seat in the mirror and beginning to remove your tights. Pressing a makeup wipe to your skin, you jumped, startled by a knock on the door. You rose from your seat and walked to the entrance casually, expecting Claire to greet you. 


But you froze, as soon as you opened the door. Eyes glazing over the person in front you, your breath caught in your throat. “Matthew.” 

“Hey,” he smiled. He looked you up and down — your naked legs, your breasts poking through the thin material of the leotard. “You...you were amazing tonight.” 

“Thank you,” you whispered. “Bye.”

You attempted to close the door on him, but his put his elbow against the frame, stopping it in motion. “Whoa,” he exclaimed, pushing his way into the room. “What the hell is your problem?” He closed the door behind him.

“My problem is that I’m very tired, and still need to change, and greet everyone waiting for me. So, I don’t have time for this.”

“Time for what?” He crossed his arms over his chest. 

You ducked your head down, “Nothing. Nothing. You need to leave.”

“Hey, hey, hey, ballerina barbie,” he mocked. “What’s your deal?”

“I don’t have a deal! I have nothing to say to you Matthew. Same way you have nothing to say to me.” You scrunched up your face in a frown.

“I...” he paused, laughing under his breath. “I never said I didn’t have something to tell you. In fact, I’ve been meaning to tell you something.” 

You looked up at him — the gel in his hair, his black button down shirt flowing over his belt buckle, his dark eyes, his lips and the way they were pouting just a little. And like a magnet, you found yourself being pulled towards him. You jumped into his arms, hands on his face, and connecting your lips, mouths open, tongues touching. 

Matthew held you up, moaning against your lips. “Mm,” you hummed. “Wait, what if someone comes in?” 

Matthew thought quickly, hiking you up in his arms and shoving your back against the door. “Well, now they can’t get in, can they?” He mumbled, leaving kisses along your neck.

Your jaw dropped and you started to undo his belt, freeing his cock from his pants. He grunted against your skin as you stroked him, your head leaned back against the door, your chest heaving. You used your other hand to pull your leotard to the side, revealing your throbbing core. 

Matthew smirked, letting you guide his dick to your entrance, and pushed his way into you swiftly. You instinctively wrapped your arms around his shoulders, burying your face in his neck to keep yourself quiet. His thrusts were quick, rough, messy. He was much more vocal this time, making no effort to stay silent.

“Fuck,” he moaned in your ear. “F-fuck, I forgot how good your pussy is. Fuck.”

The feeling was mutual. For the past month, you’d be wondering what the hell about Matthew had you so stuck. So fixated on him. And this was it. He filled you up perfectly, could manhandle you however he wanted, and always, always made sure you came. 

He fucked you harder when he noticed your orgasm nearing — your quickened breaths, frequent moans and whines, and your legs tightening against his torso. “Oh, my God,” you whimpered. 

“Shit, are you gonna come?” He asked. “Good.”

Breathless, speechless, you stared into his eyes helplessly as your body began to crumble. All power left your body and you held onto his shirt for dear life. He gave you a small smile, and flipped his hair out of his face, looking down at his cock. He could pinpoint the exact stroke that did it. The one that sent you into a state of euphoria, sent your eyes rolling back, your body into intense shock. 

You let out a long and weakened sigh as the wave washed over you, and Matthew continued to plow into you like nothing was happening. 

“It’s so cool how your pussy tightens up when you come,” he chuckled. “It’s hot.” 

You rolled your eyes at the sound of his voice, clawing at the back of his neck. His breathing became ragged and hoarse, and he had to pull out of you before he came. He jerked himself off until he exploded onto your clothing. And with you being dressed in all black, his stains stood out perfectly on your costume. 

This time, he gave you a kiss on the cheek before he left.

The week after that was finals week. And neither of you could be bothered to reach out. Despite the not-so-subtle confession of bitterness and the very intense orgasms you shared, you and Matthew simply went back to not talking. Your friends thought it was strange, even commented that they missed the bickering. The two of you shrugged in response. 

Most of your dorm room was in boxes by the time you finished your last final exam. Claire was slower to pack up than you were, considering she only lived an hour away, but she applauded you for your determination. The day Claire did start packing was the day before you left for the summer. The two of you spent the day getting everything cleared out, cleaned, squared away.

While the two of you sat on your bed, watching Netflix, a knock sounded from your door. Claire hopped up and headed towards the entrance, opening it with a grand smile. “Gube!” She shouted, instantly opening her arms for a hug. Matthew wrapped his arms around her waist and picked her up, carrying her into the room with a smile.

 “Are you about to leave?” She asked him, holding onto his arms as he placed her feet back on the ground. 

“Yeah, my mom’s here. So, I wanted to stop by and say goodbye,” he nodded. 

“Aw, Gube, you softie,” she giggled. “[y/n], come say bye.”

“I can say bye from right here, Claire,” you replied. She gave you a look, and you felt compelled to get off the bed. So you did, you approached them, “Bye, Matthew.” 

“Bye, shortcake,” he laughed. “Bye, Claire.” He pulled your roommate into another hug, while you stood there, crossing your arms in annoyance. 

Matthew peeked at you over Claire’s shoulder. One hand rubbed her back and the other reached out to you, holding a small note.

Your eyes went wide as you looked at him, then the note, then Claire. You ripped the paper from his hand, and stuffed it into your pocket right away. He smirked at you, and turned his attention back to Claire. 

“Hey,” he said to her. “Come back to my place, I want everyone there to show my mom I actually have friends.” 

Claire chuckled and nodded, “Okay,” she shrugged. “Let’s go. [y/n], you coming?”

“Uh, no,” you shook your head. “I’m gonna keep packing, but I’ll text you later.”

“Okay,” Claire smiled, and she let Matthew whisk her away. 

You sighed, and as soon as the door closed, you pulled the crumpled piece of paper from your pocket. You opened it up to reveal — not a meaningful message, not even a few words. Just one string of numbers, writing in his handwriting:

505. 

[PART 2.]

[exit-path]

Alright! Let’s get this done!

It’s less than 40 days until the one-year anniversary of my “Hi! I made something cool!” pinned post!

I’ve wanted do something like that again. I want to make another isometric render of something in Minecraft, all in a 2D image editing software, by hand.

But there’s a problem. I don’t know what to make.

I have a bunch of ideas on things I could make! But I don’t know which one to choose! And I don’t want to choose randomly, because the original isometric “render” actually took me one whole week to make. That’s seven consecutive days.

So that’s where you come in.

It’s hard and high-stakes to make one of these, so I don’t wanna mess up! I wanna know for sure what I should make.

If you could please, look through the list and see me which one(s) you’d like me to make. Then, tell me what your thoughts are in a reply or reblog. I’ll read through them, and in about 36 hours after I post this I’ll make my final decision on what I’ll render!

(You don’t need to interact with this post if you don’t want to. You can scroll past it if that’s the case.)

Remember, in the end, the result should be something of this caliber. This is what I made back then. And this is the level of quality I’m striving for again.

(I won’t post my render on the one-year anniversary, mind you. I’ll post it the day that I finish it, whenever that may be. I just mentioned the one-year anniversary so we’re all on the same page here.)

1) The other Skyblock islands

This is pretty self-explanatory. I rendered the main Skyblock island, right? Well why don’t I just render the other two and call it a day? I’m finishing the job. This is like the obligatory sequel for a hit movie.

One’s a sand island you reach once you bridge over from the main island in normal Skyblock. The other’s made of glowstone and you reach it when you build a nether portal and travel through the nether to link up with the portal on the other side.

Now, from a “making the render” standpoint, the problem with this is that it probably won’t be fun to make as the first one. Like, the other original Skyblock island at least had interesting shapes to work with, it had depth, and it posed a fun challenge. These other islands are just 3x3x3 cubes made of the same block.

Plus, people might not care to see the new render. People always like the sequel less than the original movie. And I’m thinking that might be true for something as esoteric as a post about a Minecraft render made with 2D image editing software.

2) My Survival House

You might be confused seeing this on the list. Like, everyone’s seen or played Skyblock so that makes sense, but this? This is my singleplayer survival house. Very few have seen it; nobody but me has ever been to it. Let me explain.

I played on this world from September to October 2020. In that time, I built a starter base, a mine, and a cow barn/wheat farm. This is the starter base. It doesn’t look like much, but that’s only because we’re on the surface. Let’s go into spectator made and bring the camera under.

Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!

Yes, the majority of my “starter base” is underground! (The image is slightly edited to highlight where it is.) If I were to render it, I would show the bit that’s at the top, connected to everything underground.

There’s a lot in this base! Immediately down the ladder from the house at the surface, there’s a room full of chests and that contains a jukebox where I can play music discs.

Then on the floor below that there’s my furnace room, my portal room, my map room, and my spruce tree farm. Down another floor you can find a room where I intended to grow cactus for a brief period of time.

I’ve spent a lot of time in this base. However, I’ve never seen it in full, in isometric view. And I sure would like to. Because perspective in 3D constantly hides different parts of my base when I view it from different angles. Isometry is an idealized reality.

If I were to render this, you’re agreeing that I’m doing this for myself. I love this world, and I’ve spent many days in the past excited to come back to it. This is a bit of sentimentality, a tribute to myself.

3) My 1.0.0 Survival Base

Now, you might be starting to recognize a pattern here. (Image slightly edited to highlight where the survival base is.) And no, it’s not that I really want to isometrically render my survival worlds for some reason.

Yes, I apparently like building my survival bases underground, I know, shut up >:P

I played on this world from March to September 2019: the longest I played on a survival world so far. Virtually only one other person knows about this world.

The entire time I played on it, it was in Java Edition 1.0.0: the earliest and first full release of Minecraft. I accessed the version by using the dropdown menu on the Minecraft launcher.

As a result of being in 1.0.0, the entire survival experience was changed, and that posed a lot of unique challenges. For example, how do you mine out large regions of land if beacons haven’t been created yet? How do you enchant tools if anvils aren’t in the game yet?

Playing on this 1.0.0 world has acted as my greatest insight into “old Minecraft” so far.

If I were to render this base, I would only render the underground portion (which I hollowed out of a naturally-generated cave, by the way). Why would I do that, if there’s probably also a house on the surface that I could render?

Because this is what that house looks like.

Yeah, this house does look incredible! I would know, I’m the one who made it all in 1.0.0. But no chance am I rendering all that.

Anyways, I want to render this world because despite all the time I’ve played on this world, I’ve never actually even seen my base as a spectator much like I’ve shown above. (Minecraft added cheats in 1.3.1. Spectator mode didn’t exist until 1.8.)

Plus, this faces the same perspective problems I mentioned for #2. So mainly, if I were to render this isometrically, I would be helping myself by letting me view my world in a lens I was never able to before.

4) A House in the Sky

This is a bit of an inside joke on my blog.

Basically, ever since August, I’ve been playing games of UHC on Minecraft minigame servers like Hypixel and Mineplex with the sole purpose of defying the point of the game and just building a house in the sky. Like a whole-ass village house. Plop. Right there.

This is the house I would build in those games. And this is what I would like to render now.

If you know me personally, then you already know what the front of the house looks like. (I’ve shown it on my blog countless times.) So that’s why in this preview, I’ve made the front of the house see-through so you can see the interior.

This is an effect I want to emulate in my render (if I ever make one). I make multiple image edits, and in one of them, both the exterior and the interior of the house are visible.

If I render this, it’s just a pointless joke. Not much else besides that 🙂

5) Something Else?

This is where I leave an open-ended answer.

Did you think of something that’s not on this list? Do you have something in mind that you’re passionate about personally, and that you’d like me to render? Do you think a couple or all of the ideas here are good, and you want me to render those couple or all of them?

Then remember to tell me in a reply or reblog!

Keep in mind when leaving your opinion that making a single render takes a lot of time and effort. Think of it this way: the original Skyblock render took one week to make.

Rendering something with half as many blocks would take four days. Rendering something with twice as many would take two weeks. Making multiple renders would take multiple weeks. So don’t forget the human aspect in all this.

Well, that’s the end of this post!

Tagging @ice-block, @gay-slime, @mojang-official, @birch-forest, and @light-blue-glazed-terracotta because they saw my original post and I’d like to hear their opinions, given that they’re big blogs in mineblr.

@emarezi and @unyanizedcatboys, I’d like to hear you weigh in on this as well.

See you in 36 hours, I guess!

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week: 2021-03-01

First Monday of the Month. My boss just quit at work which means I'm now the only formally trained engineer left who has any particular specialization in embedded systems. This week is going to be a doozy.

I also wrote a Very Long set of media updates because I’ve been consuming some stuff that makes me think a lot. Never a good sign.

Listening: I spent all of Saturday playing Minecraft after talking with some friends about it during the week on IRC. Practicing what I preach with regards to my Large Biome Supermacy policy, which does involve a lot of walking. Hence, I started catching up on The Adventure Zone: Graduation again, I'm like ten episodes behind.

https://maximumfun.org/episodes/adventure-zone/the-adventure-zone-graduation-ep-32-by-a-haircut/

I don't really enjoy Travis' DM'ing style. It's very loose and he has a tendency to let players run wild without much structure which is a tricky thing to handle. He does a lot of worldbuilding and character design but doesn't seem to plan much in the way of arcs. That pays off sometimes (returning to the school to realize they broke a promise they made a few sessions earlier and had to deal with consequences, for example) and when it does, it’s really good, but it's finnicky. I know DM's who can do that, but, well, actually I know One Single DM who can do that well and she's absurdly smart.

Reading: Still on Worm, I just got past chapter 8 or so now. It lives in my phone browser so I've mostly been reading it whenever I get some spare time, which is a good sign. If a book doesn't grab me I need to really settle down in a quiet space to avoid getting distracted, but I can read Worm while someone else is on the phone in the same room.

It is a story with a lot of very well-conveyed feelings and events. It's very easy to imagine yourself in it. Characters actually act like they care about what they're doing, I feel like writing this took a lot of care to keep everyone on model.

There's also a certain care given to the superpowers that you'd usually only see in forum posts arguing about an actual superhero story. Everyone always likes to argue about how far you can push a superpower: can you use teleporting to fly? What prevents a speedster from catching fire in the air? Where does the energy for a  pyrokinetic ability come from? Worm takes these and runs with them as a way to make absolutely any fight become a series of gambits relying on whether a power can or cannot be used to perform some high-stakes trick.

The world certainly has some underpinning contrivances to explain why no one gets killed very often but I've always considered nitpicking the base contrivances of a setting silly, because that's precisely what they are: contrived, in order to allow the rest of the story to flow from there. Like arguing about Omega’s abilities in the famous thought experi-*I am dragged off stage by the ratblr police for making a by now extremely stale joke*

Watching: I came and edited this section in like an hour before this posts because I keep on forgetting to put it in. I don’t really like watching TV and with my parents stuck at home in Pandemic Times it’s how they pass the time.

I did finish S3 of the Good Place. It’s very funny. I’m glad I’m watching it and I’m going to have to go find S4 because ZA Netflix doesn’t have it for whatever reason. It feels a little like it was written by Phillip Pullman if Phillip Pullman was a comedy TV writer.

I also really enjoyed the PBS Spacetime video about how time causes gravity. Love when an explanation of concepts is good enough that you drawn the conclusion on your own.

Playing: Visual Novel Hell plus Minecraft.

I spent approximately seven hours in Minecraft over two days. I tend to hop in and out of games for 1-2 hours at a time but there's a handful that can suck me in for an entire day. Minecraft, Warframe, Horizon Zero Dawn, Night in the Woods. Bastion, to a lesser extent. I end up avoiding them because I don't like loosing entire days, but I wasn't really planning on doing anything this weekend anyways.

Minecraft was mostly a long-ass trek to find a saddle, because as previously mentioned, I enjoy playing it with Large Biomes for the sense of scale.

I also completed Act 3 of Psycholonials and Eliza.

Psycholonials is odd. It is doing the thing that Hussie does where it dances around what's ostensibly the story to carry out the actual story. You get used to the trope after your first encounter but it still makes you wonder when the other shoe will drop, and of course, there's no reason it ever has to. The story may remain in suspended animation behind the every growing mess of narrative red tape tying the B-plot together.

Stories about Social Media have no well established norms. I think I might pick up Feed by M. T. Anderson and also perhaps Hank Green's books sometime. See what context they set that in.

Eliza is frustrating to me. It's a game for programmers, by programmers, about programmers. I'm friends with a lot of Capital P Programmers, the types who go to university and get sniped for developer positions at Seattle or Silicon Valley tech companies and who make great and terrible things and then warn you about the deep problems that underpin the slowly rolling ball of venture capital and bloated technology that is the tech industry. But at the same time, it makes me feel like I've burnt out on that conceptually before I even went in. It’s a whole other world that I’m familiar with but very distant from. In fact, that’s kinda how I feel about Psycholonials too. I’m familiar with the social media rat race but I also don’t go there. Parallels!

My cousins (who are halfway to Capital P Programmers, only so much you can do halfway around the world from silicon valley) warned me not to go into CS, because it would bore me, and that's a non-trivial part of why I'm in Engineering. They gave the same advice about Biology and Physics, without that I may have ended up in Microbiology. it’s not my domain, but because of how Engineering is going, you end up a lot closer to programmers than you think. I found out the other day that most of the software developers on my team have no formal tertiary qualifications, which is accepted in CS but of course, right out when it comes to engineering. It’s a whole other world that I kinda expected to skip around. I might go into this another time, since this post is already getting long.

Making: I haven’t done any engineering scicomm posts on here in a while so I started a few blank drafts and finally got one off the ground. With some luck I’ll have that ready this week. What’s it about? Not saying! It might change!

I’ve been doing layout for a custom keyboard, I need to call a laser cutting place and find out what their kerf requirements are so I can adjust the path accordingly. Wouldn’t do to burn a couple hundred rand on an oversized part, I’m paying for this, not my employer like the other times I’ve done laser cutting, so I’m probably not going to spring for getting one of their designers to check my design. At some point I should CAD up a chassis, but at the same time I might just buy some wood and go ham with a router once I get the plates cut.

Computers Slot: I got WeeChat set up properly on my desktop, which technically was just a matter of getting my SSH keys moved over. It’s taking me forever to move in to Cinnabar, in part because Stibnite lost her boot partition and I haven’t bothered to fix it.

So here’s a pitch for WeeChat as a good quality Terminal UI IRC Client. Many of my closest friends live there and it has a good set of tools to help me keep in touch.

WeeChat is very configurable but with perfectly sane defaults, I didn’t configure it for years. The UI is smarter and less arcane than something like irssi, and if you enable mouse support it can be downright modern. Running it remotely like this limits some features but as long as you don’t mind jumping through a few hoops to do filesharing, IRC is really great like this.

One of the big ones is the ability to do that double-pane thing, I can keep an eye on two channels at once (really as many as I can cram on my screen, but usually two) which is great when you want to browse channels while talking in your home channel.

It also has a good array of remote access tools, from what I’m running up there, just weechat running on my server inside tmux connected over mosh for low-latency SSH, to weechat-relay, a relay protocol built in to weechat. At the moment relay only supports android phones and the glowingbear web client, but I’ve never really looked around since both of those cover all my needs. Easily one of the best ways to get IRC on a modern mobile device, barring maybe IRCCloud.

[maximelebled]

How I encode videos for YouTube and archival

Hello everyone! This post is going to describe the way in which I export and encode my video work to send it over the Internet and archive it. I’ll be talking about everything I’ve discovered over the past 10 years of research on the topic, and I’ll be mentioning some of the pitfalls to avoid falling into.

There’s a tremendous amount of misguided information out there, and while I’m not going to claim I know everything there is to know on this subject, I would like to think that I’ve spent long enough researching various issues to speak about my own little setup that I’ve got going on... it’s kind of elaborate and complex, but it works great for me.

(UPDATE 2020/12/09: added, corrected, & elaborated on a few things.)

First rule, the most golden of them all!

There should only ever be one compression step: the one YouTube does. In practice, there will be at least two, because you can’t send a mathematically-lossless file to YouTube... but you can send one that’s extremely close, and perceptually pristine. 

The gist of it: none of your working files should be compressed if you can help it, and if they need to be, they should be as little as possible. (Because let’s face it, it’s pretty tricky to keep hours of game footage around in lossless form, let alone recording them as such in the first place.)

This means that any AVC files should be full (0-255) range, 4:4:4 YUV, if possible. If you use footage that’s recorded with, like, OBS, it’s theoretically possible to punch in a lossless mode for x264, and even a RGB mode, but last I checked, neither were compatible with Vegas Pro. You may have better luck with other video editors.

Make sure that the brightness levels and that the colors match what you should be seeing. This is something you should be doing at every single step of the way throughout your entire process. Always keep this in mind. Lagom.nl’s LCD calibration section has quite a few useful things you can use to make sure.

If you’re able to, set a GOP length / max keyframe range of 1 second in the encoder of your footage. Modern video codecs suck in video editors because they use all sorts of compression tricks which are great for video playback, but not so efficient with the ways video editors access and request video frames. (These formats are meant to be played forwards, and requesting frames in any other order, as NLEs do, has far-reaching implications that hurt performance.) 

Setting the max keyframe range to 1 second will mildly hurt compressability of that working footage but it will greatly limit the performance impact you’ll be putting your video editor’s decoder through.

A working file is a lossless file!

I’ve been using utvideo as my lossless codec of choice. (Remember, codec means encoder/decoder.) It compresses much like FLAC or ZIP files do: losslessly. And not just perceptual losslessness, but a mathematical one: what comes in will be exactly what comes out, bit for bit.

Download it here: https://github.com/umezawatakeshi/utvideo/releases

It’s an AVI VFW codec. In this instance, VFW means Video for Windows, and it’s just the... sort of universal API that any Windows program can call for. And AVI is the container, just like how MP4 and MKV are containers. MP4 as a file is not a video format, it’s a container. MPEG-4 AVC (aka H.264) is the video format specification you’re thinking of when you say “MP4″.

Here’s a typical AVI VFW window, you might have seen one in the wild already.

In apps that expose this setting, you can hit “configure” and set the prediction mode of utvideo to “median” to get some more efficient compression at the cost of slower decoding, but in practice this isn’t a problem.

Things to watch out for:

Any and all apps involved must support OpenDML AVIs. The original AVI spec is 2GB max only. This fixes that limitation. That’s normal, but make sure your apps support that. The OpenDML spec is from the mid-90s, so usually it’s not a problem. But for example, the SFM doesn’t support it.

The files WILL be very large. But they won’t be as large as they’d be if you had a truly uncompressed AVI.

SSDs are recommended within the bounds of reasonability, especially NVMe ones. 1080p30 should be within reach of traditional HDDs though.

utvideo will naturally perform better on CGI content rather than real-life footage and I would not recommend it at all for real-life footage, especially since you’re gonna get that in already-compressed form anyway. Do not convert your camera’s AVC/HEVC files to utvideo, it’s pointless. (Unless you were to do it as a proxy but still, kinda weird)

If you’re feeling adventurous, try out the YUV modes! They work great for matte passes, since those are often just luma-masks, so you don’t care about chroma subsampling.

If you don’t care about utvideo or don’t want to do AVIs for whatever reason, you could go the way of image sequences, but you’ll then be getting the OS-level overhead that comes with having dozens of thousands of files being accessed, etc.

They’re a valid option though. (Just not an efficient one in most cases.)

Some of my working files aren’t lossless...

Unfortunately we don’t all have 10 TB of storage in our computers. If you’re using compressed files as a source, make sure they get decoded properly by your video editing software. Make sure the colors, contrast, etc. match what you see in your “ground truth” player of choice. Make sure your “ground truth” player of choice really does represent the ground truth. Check with other devices if you can. You want to cross-reference to make sure.

One common thing that a lot of software screws up is BT.601 & BT.709 mixups. (It’s reds becoming a bit more orange.)

Ultimately you want your compressed footage to appear cohesive with your RGB footage. It should not have different ranges, different colors, etc. 

For reasons that I don’t fully understand myself, 99% of AVC/H.264 video is “limited range”. That means that internally it’s actually squeezed into 16-235 as opposed to the original starting 0-255 (which is full range). And a limited range video gets decoded back to 0-255 anyway.

Sony/Magix Vegas Pro will decode limited range video properly but it will NOT expand it back to full 0-255 range, so it will appear with grayish blacks and dimmer whites. You can go into the “Levels” Effects tab to apply a preset that fixes this.

Exporting your video.

A lot of video editors out there are going to “render” your video (that is to say, calculate and render what the frames of your video look like) and encode it at the same time with whatever’s bundled in the software.

Do not ever do this with Vegas Pro. Do not ever rely on the integrated AVC encoders of Vegas Pro. They expect full range input, and encode AVC video as if it were full range (yeah), so if you want normal looking video, you have to apply a Levels preset to squeeze it into 16-235 levels, but it’s... god, honestly, just save yourself the headache and don’t use them.

Instead, export a LOSSLESS AVI out of Vegas. (using utvideo!)

But you may be able to skip this step altogether if you use Adobe Media Encoder, or software that can interface directly with it.

Okay, what do I do with this lossless AVI?

Option 1: Adobe Media Encoder.

Premiere and AE integrate directly with Adobe Media Encoder. It’s good; it doesn’t mix up BT.601/709, for example. In this case, you won’t have to export an AVI, you should be able to export “straight from the software”.

However, the integrated AVC/HEVC encoders that Adobe has licensed (from MainConcept, I believe) aren’t at the top of their game. Even cranking up the bitrate super high won’t reach the level of pristine that you’d expect (it keeps on not really allocating bits to flatter parts of the image to make them fully clean), and they don’t expose a CRF mode (more on that later), so, technically, you could still go with something better.

But what I’m getting at is, it’s not wrong to go with AME. Just crank up the bitrate though. (Try to reach 0.3 bits per pixel.) Here’s my quick rough quick guideline of Adobe Media Encoder settings:

H.264/AVC (faster encode but far from the most efficient compression one can have)

Switch from Hardware to Software encoding (unless you’re really in a hurry... but if you’re gonna be using Hardware encoding you might as well switch to H.265/HEVC, see below.)

Set the profile to High (you may not be able to do this without the above)

Bitrate to... VBR 1-pass, 30mbps for 1080p, 90mbps for 4K. Set the maximum to x2. +50% to both target and max if fps = 60.

“Maximum Render Quality” doesn’t need to be ticked, this only affects scaling. Only tick it if you are changing the final resolution of the video during this encoder step (e.g. 1080p source to be encoded as 720p)

If using H.265/HEVC (smaller file size, better for using same file as archive)

Probably stick with hardware encoding due to how slow software encoding is.

Stick to Main profile & Main tier.

If hardware: quality: Highest (slowest)

If software: quality: Higher.

4K: set Level to 5.2, 60mbps

1440p: set Level to 5.1, 40mbps

1080p: keep Level to 5.0, 25mbps

If 60fps instead of 24/30: +50% to bitrate. In which case you might have to go up to Level 6.2, but this might cause local playback issues; more on "Levels” way further down the post.

Keep in mind however that hardware encoders are far less efficient in terms of compression, but boy howdy are they super fast. This is why they become kind of worth it when it comes to H.265/HEVC. Still won’t produce the kind of super pristine result I’d want, but acceptable for the vast majority of YouTube cases.

Option 2: other encoding GUIs...

Find software of your choice that integrates the x264 encoder, which is state-of-the-art. (Again, x264 is one encoder for the H.264/AVC codec specification. Just making sure there’s no confusion here.)

Handbrake is one common choice, but honestly, I haven’t used it enough to vouch for it. I don’t know if the settings it exposes are giving you proper control over the whole BT601/709 mess. It has some UI/UX choices which I find really questionable too.

If you’re feeling like a command-line masochist, you could try using ffmpeg, but be ready to pour over the documentation. (I haven’t managed to find out how to do the BT.709 conversion well in there yet.)

Personally, I use MeGUI, because it runs through Avisynth (a frameserver), which allows me to do some cool preprocessing and override some of the default behaviour that other encoder interfaces would do. It empowers you to get into the nitty gritty of things, with lots of plugins and scripts you can install, like this one:

http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Dither_tools (grab it)

Once you’re in MeGUI, and it has finished updating its modules, you gotta hit CTRL+R to open the automated script creator. Select your input, hit “File Indexer” (not “One Click Encoder”), then just hit “Queue” so that Avisynth’s internal thingamajigs start indexing your AVI file. Once that’s done, you’ll be greeted with a video player and a template script.

In the script, all you need to add is this at the bottom:

dither_convert_rgb_to_yuv(matrix="709",output="YV12",mode=7)

This will perform the proper colorspace conversion, AND it does so with dithering! It’s the only software I know of which can do it with dithering!! I kid you not! Mode 7 means it’s doing it using a noise distribution that scales better and doesn’t create weird patterns when resizing the video (I would know, I’ve tried them all).

Your script should look like this, just 3 lines

LoadPlugin("D:\(path to megui, etc)\LSMASHSource.dll")

LWLibavVideoSource("F:\yourvideo.avi")

dither_convert_rgb_to_yuv(matrix="709",output="YV12",mode=7)

The colors WILL look messed up in the preview window but that’s normal. It’s one more example of how you should always be wary when you see an issue. Sometimes you don’t know what is misbehaving, and at which stage. Always try to troubleshoot at every step along the way, otherwise you will be chasing red herrings. Anyway...

Now, back in the main MeGUI window, we’ve got our first line complete (AviSynth script), the “Video Output” path should be autofilled, now we’re gonna touch the third line: “Encoder settings”. Make sure x264 is selected and hit “config” on the right.

Tick “show advanced settings.”

Set the encoding mode to “Const. Quality” (that’s CRF, constant rate factor). Instead of being encoded with a fixed bitrate, and then achieving variable quality with that amount of bits available, CRF instead encodes for a fixed quality, with a variable bitrate (whatever needs to be done to achieve that quality).

CRF 20 is the default, and it’s alright, but you probably want to go up to 15 if you really want to be pristine. I’m going up to 10 because I am unreasonable. (Lower is better, higher numbers means quality is worse.)

Because we’re operating under a Constant Quality metric, CRF 15 at encoder presets “fast” vs. “slow” will produce the same perceptual quality, but at different file sizes. Slow being smaller, of course. 

You probably want to be at “slow” at least, there isn’t that much point in going to “slower” or “veryslow”, but you can always do it if you have the CPU horsepower to spare.

Make sure AVC Profile is set to High. The default would be Main, but High unlocks a few more features of the spec that increase compressability, especially at higher resolutions. (8x8 transforms & intra prediction, quantization scaling matrices, cb/cr controls, etc.)

Make sure to also select a Level. This doesn’t mean ANYTHING by itself, but thankfully the x264 config window here is smart enough to actually apply settings which are meaningful with regards to the level.

A short explanation is that different devices have different decoding capabilities. A decade ago, a mobile phone might have only supported level 3 in hardware, meaning that it could only do main profile at 30mbps max, and if you went over that, it would either not decode the video or do it using the CPU instead of its hardware acceleration, resulting in massive battery usage. The GPU in your computer also supports a maximum level. 5.0 is a safe bet though.

If you don’t restrict the level accordingly to what your video card supports, you might see funny things happen during playback:

It’s nothing that would actually affect YouTube (AFAIK), but still, it’s best to constrain.

Finally, head over to the “misc” tab of the x264 config panel and tick these.

If the command line preview looks like mine does (see the screenshot from a few paragraphs ago) then everything should be fine.

x264 is configured, now let’s take care of the audio.

Likewise, “Audio Input” and “Audio Output” should be prefilled if MeGUI detected an audio track in your AVI file. Just switch the audio encoder over to FLAC, hit config, crank the slider to “smallest file, slow encode” and you’re good to go. FLAC = mathematically lossless audio. Again, we want to not compress anything, or as little as possible until YouTube does its own compression job, so you might as well go with FLAC, which will equal roughly 700 to 1000kbps of audio, instead of going with 320kbps of MP3/AAC, which might be perceptually lossless, but is still compressed (bad). The added size is nothing next to the high-quality video track you’re about to pump out. 

FLAC is not an audio format supported by the MP4 container, so MeGUI should have automagically changed the output to be using the MKV (Matroska) container. If it hasn’t, do it yourself.

Now, hit the “Autoencode” button in the lower right of the main window. And STOP, do not be hasty: in the new window, make sure “no target size” is selected before you do anything else. If you were to keep “file size” selected, then you would be effectively switched over to 2-pass encoding, which is another form of (bit)rate control. We don’t want that. We want CRF. 

Hit queue and once it’s done processing, you should have a brand new pristine MKV file that constains lossless audio and extra clean video! Make sure to double-check that everything matches—take screenshots of the same frames in the AVI and MKV files and compare them.

Now all you’ve got to do is send it to YouTube!

For archival... well, you could just go and crank up the preset to Placebo and reduce CRF a little bit—OR you could use the 2-pass “File Size” mode which will ensure that your video stream will be the exact size (give or take a couple %) you want it to be. You could also use x265 for your archival file buuuut I haven’t used it enough (on account of how slow it is) to make sure that it has no problems anywhere with the whole BT.601/708 thing. It doesn’t expose those metadata settings so who knows how other software’s going to treat those files in the future... (god forbid they get read as BT.2020)

You can use Mediainfo (or any player that integrates it, like my favorite, MPC-HC) to check the metadata of the file.

Good luck out there!

And remember to always double-check the behaviour of decoders at every step of the way with your setup. 99% of the time I see people talk about YouTube messing with the contrast of their video, it’s because they weren’t aware of how quirky Vegas can be with H.264/AVC input & its integrated encoder.

Hope this helps!

[kumoriyami-xiuzhen]

Hakuoki Reimeiroku Saito Final Chapter

have i ever mentioned how i’m a masochist when it comes to this stuff? like, i will freely admit how i actually don’t like translating and doing more unnecessary work, but I when I do something for myself, I tend to want a certain degree of quality.... which is why i decided i’d do some video editing for this... a decision that I really regret now though i can say that it’s something that i know hate more than photoshop lol. 

after i finished my yuugiroku 2 vid, i figured i might as well try to install Visual Novel Reader to see if that could offer me better visual and audio quality for this... but before I finished installing it, I went and checked what videos were available that I could use for assets and found a video made through vnr had about the same audio quality as to ppsspp... along with videos from someone other psp emulated version of this... which i then clipped for audio. 

between visual and audio quality... i’ll pick audio any day so after deciding that i’d be using some of the less grainy audio i found along with my ppsspp footage... i set to work trying to layer the tracks.... but since the audio didn’t match the visuals’ timing, I had to manually cut pieces of my screencap video up so that it matched the audio timing, while also making sure that the visuals looked like they were still continuous (damn  circle icon which wouldn’t go away and caused problems)... on top of which, i had to deal with removing a number of random black screens that would just flash on screen for less than a second when i ran reimeiroku through the ppsspp emulator.... then i also had to find the song that plays towards the ending of this cuz the audio i had cut before the end of my screencap vid which was also a pain because i couldn’t find the damn thing anywhere on youtube so i had to go find the game rip audio (thankfully i have a site for that. also in the game, that song doesn’t naturally fade out and i manually added in that effect cuz i felt like it and thought it was better than the audio just cutting off) so i could put that in and align it so that track matched the audio timing for the vita audio track.... and then i also had to do something about the interval where i had to increase and decrease volume since the end kept sounding off no matter what i did....tho i kinda think the video still sounds off in 2 places.

once i got all the damn visuals and text properly lined up, i gave up on having to deal with the the stupid circle icon in that was originally in the bottom right hand corner since i got pissed enough seeing it and cuz it was no longer continuously in motion so I decided to remove it entirely along with the auto-play icon (at this point im on about version 10 of the video).

then, to cover up the right side of the video, i figured that’d i’d just stuck up an image over top of that section.... but after several tries i gave up on that since every damn picture i imported regardless if that was a screenshot of the game or a screen capture of the video from the editing software itself, nothing would match the colour of the text box for some infuriating reason... which ultimately led to me redoing everything so i didn’t have the stupid text box then stringing together clips between those stupid bouncing icons to erase the damn thing entirely though i thankfully didn’t worry about the auto-play icon the second time around....

however, doing that in itself posed a whole new problem since what i could effectively clip was less than >0.5 seconds each time to create cropped video layers that would hide that stupid icon, and my comp reaaaaaallllly started to issues when i did more of this and when i copied and pasted too many of those millisecond clips together... it got to the point where i was waiting 15 minutes for about 4 seconds of copied hide-the-damn-icon-video-clips (or about 8 hours for 40 seconds worth)... which pretty much crippled my computer..... 

this resulted in me having insane amounts of segments that looked entirely like this^, which occurred whenever there was an icon to hide... or text shake for some reason.... which caused me to create +20 openshot files for editing...(btw this is 138 tiny clips over the span of 6 seconds)

in the end, over the course of a fucking month, which i can honestly say that me finishing this for today was a complete coincidence (i barely managed to finish Warframe’s Scarlet Spear event cuz of how bad this was lol), i lost count of many versions of this video I made sometime after I reached version #32, openshot crashed on me at least 15 times (gave up counting that too), and my laptop crashed twice.... 

after i finally finished my video, i thankfully didn’t spend that long on subtitles but it took me far longer than i’d have liked to get the damn positioning right since potplayer is annoying when it comes to single lines and i had to guess and check the positioning almost every other time for some strange reason whenever i had a single line... which was never a problem when i had 2 or 3 lines of text... but editing was a slight hassle cuz i wanted the text used to be as accurate as possible... and i checked 3 reimeiroku tls of this chapter and the JP mtl of a bunch of sentences just to be sure. 

anyway, thanks to doing all of this unnecessary torture, i am absolutely never going to ever be repeating this experience ever again even if someone pays me because video editing is a serous pain in the ass and I hate it more than photoshop (also why the hell does ppsspp have so many issues with reimeiroku when compared to yuugiroku 2)!!!

also, learned my lesson and didn’t write this post this after staying awake til an ungodly hour lol. my attention to basic grammar plummets like a rock if i stay up past 4 am.... so i decided to write out all my grievances beforehand.... and put my video for this at the very bottom cuz im terrible like that and want everyone who sees this to deal with a massive wall of text xD! suffer! suffer as i have dammit lol!

enjoy the fruits of my damn labour! i’ve passed the point of caring if there are errors in this so keep anything you notice to yourself!! goddammit i noticed something wrong that i couldn’t ignore... namely the chapter name and my credit.... fixed that now.

on a final note, it’ll probably be more than a year before I touch Reimeiroku again because of my commitment to what I am able to translate for SSL so don’t ask lol.... 

[arabellaflynn]

Hello, all. It has been a rough pandemic.

As you may have figured, since I am in the performing arts, I have been completely out of work since this shitshow began. The earliest venues will open up here in MA is September, which is not helpful for me, because I need to be out of my current place by 8/31. No one will rent to me on my Patreon income, so I've been trying to figure out how to supplement that with other online work.

My first thought, frankly, was camming. I'm attractive and I know that, and I don't care about being naked in "public". I have a lot of opinions on the legitimacy and legalization of sex work, but making a statement would be a convenient bonus; I'd be in it for the tips. As the appliance menagerie on the Flintstones used to say, "Eh. It's a living."

The best camera I currently have is attached to the slightly-less ancient laptop. You know, the one with the broken hinge that won't hold the screen up on the right. Only the wifi on that computer has quit working. The onboard chip was always kind of flaky, but for some reason it has chosen now to deteriorate to the point where it no longer acknowledges a router on the other side of the goddamn wall. Shooting in the living room with an ethernet cable is not an option, because another housemate is already doing that.

I bought a dual-band USB wifi adapter with antenna. It's a Realtek chip -- not gold-plated, but also not total junk. I specifically checked to make sure it worked with Ubuntu Bionic before I ordered. I have now installed three separate sets of drivers in three completely different ways, read everything ever written about this on AskUbuntu, and still the computer refuses to acknowledge its existence. Not even if I blacklist the onboard chip to keep it from falling back into previous bad habits.

The other elderly laptop (with the working wifi) has a cam that tops out at 640 x 480, which I suppose might squeak by as a tiny facecam on Twitch, or for tutoring where no one cares about pixelization. The microphone, however, is crap. It's a tinny omni on the screen bezel that likes room noise more than my voice. I don't have an external microphone, and there's no onboard Bluetooth for my wireless headset. So I bought a USB Bluetooth adapter, which this computer is ignoring as hard as the other one is the wifi dongle. I have a wired headset with a mic, but because this computer is probably mere months too old to know what to do with an inline mic on the same jack as the output signal, it doesn't register at all.

The camera on my phone is potato quality, because that is honestly about how much the phone cost. Ditto the refurb Kindle. Neither is smart enough to keep up with streaming video, which I found out when I tried to do a video rehearsal for something months ago. 

I have no place to do any kind of professional non-entertainment streaming work (e.g., tutoring) with my terrible equipment in any event. I don't own a desk. If a free desk appeared on my doorstep tomorrow, I would have nowhere to put it. My bedroom is small enough to contravene the Geneva Convention requirements for POW cells and I'm basically stuck in here, for reasons of both air conditioning and not having to interact with a house full of people who very much want me gone.

What I do have is a set of working emulators and some free video editing software, so I decided to take a stab at a subtitled Let's Play. I can certainly ramble on for 30 or so hours of Final Fantasy II. At the very least it'll give me something scheduled to do. So I pulled everything out and set it up, only to find that my controller was "pining for the fjords" -- no lights, no acknowledgement from RetroArch, no response to any button presses.

...

...okay, well, at least we're down to a level of equipment I can afford to replace. So I am waiting for the mail carrier to bring me another $10 gamepad, whilst stuck in bureaucratic hell. I'm down to emergency public assistance, which keeps asking me to send them random documents, inconveniently one at a time. Even when I can submit them online I'm required to wait a minimum of 2-3 business days before a human can look at them. I'm trying to not be mad -- they are clearly horribly overworked -- but it also leaves me with a lot of time to do nothing but busy-wait. They've finally decided I'm destitute enough for food stamps, so now I have to sit on my hands until the card arrives in the mail.

The chronic, crushing lack of resources is not helped by (or helping) the fact that I'm just not functioning very well. I was already on the edge of disintegration when the lockdown orders hit anyway; I was taking every piece of work I could find in an effort to scrape together enough for first/last/deposit on a new apartment, and honestly that's more than I can handle. I can consistently get to about 20 hours of "stuff that can't be done while in bed, wearing pajamas" per week, with occasional spikes up to about 30, before I start losing the ability to take care of myself. I skip showers, let my living space become a complete disaster area, and go to bed without dinner because the whole process of choosing something to eat, preparing it, eating it, and cleaning up after myself is so overwhelming that I just burst into tears and don't do it. I fed the rats twice a day and cleaned their cage once or twice a week, but couldn't manage to do the same for myself.

It's difficult to explain to people the state of being physically and mentally exhausted without also being sweaty and shaky from muscle fatigue. Perhaps the single most salient example I can give is lying in bed at night and realizing I kind of vaguely needed to pee. Not like urgently -- just enough that I knew if I didn't, I'd wake up the next day with an uncomfortably full bladder. Then just lying there anyway, not because I thought suffering was noble or I deserved it or anything idiotic like that, but just because taking care of it would involve standing up, walking into another room, and initiating a new task, and I did not have the capacity to do any of those things.

If you suggest I start making a to-do list, I will sit down right now and invent a brand new Blunt Object Transfer Protocol (botp://) expressly for the purpose of punching you, personally, in the face over the goddamn internet. I will even credit you in the patent application. I will not share the licensing profits, which judging from social media right now, would be approximately all of the money on the face of the Earth. I do not need "life hacks". 

What I really need is a case worker, or possibly a babysitter, or just to have shown up at the ER about two months ago, because that is the only way I have ever found to get people to pay attention when I ask for help. Otherwise I get triaged out of sight and out of mind -- they ask if I'm suicidal, I tell them no, they tell me 'okay, here's a prescription for six Xanax and a packet of resources, go home and fix it yourself'. I'm just like, you sons of bitches, do you think I don't know how to Google things? If I could fix this on my own, I wouldn't be talking to you. Except I can't right now, because plague.

Everyone wants to fob me off on someone else. I was referred to an SSDI attorney by a friend, because frankly that's where I'm at right now. I wrote to them, specifically mentioning his name and the associate who helped him, and explained that I was basically a vegetable and I needed help applying for disability. I'm a college-educated suburban white girl, who grew up hearing her parents make rude jokes about welfare queens -- I have no idea how any of this works and I'm so broken I kept losing my place in a blanket whose pattern was literally "knit-purl-knit-purl to end of row; turn work over; repeat". Their response was "Sounds like you need some help applying for SSDI/SSI disability. Here's the website for the Boston Bar Association, good luck!" Crisis lines of both the psychiatric and financial varieties keep directing me to one of two national clearinghouse sites for social support services, both of which direct me to each other, because neither has any programs in my area.

I am trying really, really hard not to resent the ever-loving fuck out of anyone who has any sort of support system right now. One housemate has almost the exact same list of medical problems that I do, and is also completely out of work right now. She is married to the one who has a grown-up salaried WFH IT job, and will never have to worry about having a roof over her head or food in the cabinets. The single housemate has supportive family literally a five minute walk down the street; if she ever gets her feet kicked out from under her, she can stay with them temporarily while she scrambles back up. Another friend yote out to California right before lockdown to stay with his family. A local offered to help me with paperwork, then ghosted me intermittently before explaining that he was having a hard time himself right now and barely had the capacity for his own life. I have an elderly rat, no more savings, and no options.

I don't even know how I'm going to move the little I own. How do you even ask people to do that in the middle of a pandemic? If I don't have the money to move, I definitely don't have the money for a moving company, and I'm envisioning all of my community-minded friends pursing their lips in judgement and declining because like all the good people they are diligently social distancing.

I have also discovered, while hauling an empty suitcase out to Watertown and a full one back home again, that I do not cope well with face masks. It's fine if I'm not doing much, especially if I'm in a climate-controlled space like a store or the T, but as soon as I exert myself at all, I see spots. And no, it is not a matter of "just get used to it"; I have tested this by trying to wear a mask during my home workouts. It is just stuffy enough under there, and there is just enough reduction in air flow, that the world keeps going all film-grainy and dark on the sides, which I know from experience is the first step on a very short path to the Magical Land of Syncope. I had to stop during the outdoor trek and sit on the suitcase about twice a block through the commercial district, where it stayed on because there were people. This was when it was 72 whole degrees out (and the AC is generally on 74°F inside) which doesn't bode well for moving my heavy shit around in late August. 

I'm normally good at catching things at the weird-vision stage, although enough random strangers and T employees have asked me if I'm okay that I have to assume I look as ill as I feel at that point. And I have an absolutely tragic talent for talking people out of calling emergency services when I do actually keel over, but everyone is so health-panicked that I don't think it would work right now. I know what's happened and why, but I can't exactly communicate that to bystanders when I'm unconscious. As nice as EMS is, I don't feel like waking up to a round of Twenty Questions ("How many fingers am I holding up? Who's the President? Do you have a seizure disorder?"). So I just don't go out.

Alison over at Ask A Manager got a question about this the other day that suggests this is considered legitimate can't-(always-)wear-a-mask territory, and I am able to wear a mask where required in MA, which is indoors/during interactions with other people when it's actually useful, so I don't have any qualms on the scientific or legal front. I have just never been a good judge of how much potential peril/damage it's "reasonable" to put up with, and I don't have the capacity to explain myself over and over again a million times a day. 

I'm fucking tired. I'm tired of covid, I'm tired of living in a big glitzy continent-spanning banana republic, I'm tired of anxiety, I'm tired of other people carping at me to do things I can't in order to fix their anxiety for them, I'm tired of not having the space to dance, I'm tired of asking for help before things fall apart and being told 'well, come back when it is an emergency', and most of all I'm tired of this cycle where I tell myself "I'm going to stop being lazy! I'm going to put on my big-girl pants and wake up early and work 40 hours a week and support myself like an adult!" and then fail at it again because I just do not have the capacity to do that. I do not know how to make the system understand that I need some kind of support right now. 

Sorry for yet another depressing update, but that's where I am right now.

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[freelancingnation]

90 days and some change (Day 4, Video #1): Getting to my first course goal step-by-step layout by Caleb Bourquin at Freelancing Nation

Scrum… the final frontier for freelancing

What is up here guys and gals, yeah I know that was random as hell know but I just wanted to come and actually say that I want to start documenting my growth throughout making my first course.

I do not know how many people know that I am making a course, so that’s why I kind of wanted to document it. Also, I kind of wanted to show myself for my future reference on how I went about doing everything, and how I sort of went through the problems run into.

So, what I decided to do was straight up start documenting my day today.

I do not want to say it is a Vlog type of thing, but I wanted to go ahead and give myself a certain amount of days, to reach a goal.

Due to wanting to achieve the goal, I found something recently called Scrum to help with it. It is a framework that SaaS companies, and pretty much a way to lay everything out and also allow you to see if you are on schedule.

  Anyways, I’ll quickly lay out what this video goes over and lay it out here… I used an app to transcribe this and it’s VERY long. I don’t want to edit anymore so:

I went and broke down how Scrum sorta works and why it’s great to lay everything out

Why I think it would be cool to document everything and also that I make money in what I am teaching. That is NOT to say like “look at me, I’m so cool”, no, it’s simply to state that I am teaching this because I know a little bit about how to make money with Freelancing and also I enjoy teaching…. Also, I like the money as well, I ain’t no saint, everyone needs money. I am simply trying to help others create their first money online.

I’m scared that this will not work out and it’s possible that it will not. I am however much more confident that it will work out due to changing a lot over the 7ish years in business.

I breakdown everything I am doing and have written down.

I explain how these videos and documentation will work.

Let’s get back to work!

  Note: What this challenge is about is giving myself just over 90 days to complete my newest course and get my first 100 students!

  Here’s the links to the free course group, my new eBook, the rest of this 90 days and some change and my SEO micro services if you want to check anything out:

Get my 5 step process for becoming an online Freelancer now: https://course.freelancingnation.com/ebook-optin-main

Free Course FB Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/197569828171452/

Check out my 90 days and some change series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5MTlC0PoGk1W2CyYyd1bobnfcYnFzAn8

Check out my Legiit Marketplace SEO services: https://www.legiit.com/profile/DripfeedNation

Head back to the Freelancing Nation Homepage and check out our training, more posts and what all we do!

    I wouldn’t read it if I was you, but I wanted to show that I wasn’t lying… it’s long (and not super great lol)

  ”

I guess overall view really quick overall view is straight up and that it’s just breaking down everything that you need to be able to reach a certain goal, and pretty much going and sprints or working in Sprint’s is what they call it, and I don’t really know exactly all that goes into it, to be honest. But I just know kind of what the general basis, and that I need to write every freaking thing down that I can think of, with every single thing that I need. So that’s exactly actually what this is right here and when I, When I started the video off with here but now since this is my first day, actually, I’ve been doing a documentation and everything like that I just kind of wanted to give a brief overview on what I actually wanted to do. And also as well kind of what all I’m doing so. What I was kind of thinking her and not kind of thinking actually am trained to do is get my first hundred students in the first course that I’ve ever made. And the first course that ever made is a freelancing course and that’s where I make most of my money well, I guess not most of my money that’s where I started, I guess you could say I make most of my money from like client work and stuff like that now, but where I started anyways with like the whole entire entrepreneurial online marketing type of thing was from freelancing right and what freelancing is is pretty much just, you don’t really know what it is but it’s pretty much just selling a certain services, micro services on a marketplace. And they can range from any sort of niche rather if it’s software rather if it’s some sort of marketing such as what I do SEO rather if it’s paid advertisements you know there’s there’s tons of different things just, most people think of Fiverr. If you ever heard of that when they go into freelancing or go look for freelancing so anyways not but I just wanted to go ahead and create a course that goes over how to exactly, go into a freelancing platform and start to make money online, so just kind of like how I went about it. And what I’ve learned throughout that entire process of doing so. I want to be able to teach other people because one will I really enjoy teaching, I’m not gonna lie, I do. It just makes me feel good to actually know that I could potentially like have an impact on somebody else’s life. I’ve always been that way and it’s just something that I honestly just enjoy. Obviously I like the money to know, don’t get me wrong I’m not some saint and just like, just like most people ain’t saying like you know just, you know, it’s just all because of the passion that I have no I mean I do have a passion for it but still have, I need to make money too right we all need to live right. So, no, but I wanted to just kind of start kind of documenting exactly what I’m going to be doing what I kind of want to do I kind of wanted to do some sort of 90 day sprint sort of thing, and or overall goal I guess you could say, and I didn’t really want to just call it a 90 day because everybody calls it that so I was gonna like say 90 day and some change, I don’t know. But pretty much what the actual goal is so like I said I’m just going to kind of break it down some of the things here. So, what the actual goal is and you can see up here is if it focuses that’d be great. It’s pretty much just getting 100 students in my course. Second is going to be going and doing five of those students actually having some sort of success with the actual course and I actually have what the success means right they’re gonna food focus. Pretty much what it means is, I want a couple of people that I have taught how to actually make some sort of money with freelancing, and it’s also a bonus there if they get like their ads set up, or some sort of like website or doing YouTube, or something like that, because again, I teach those things in the course. Now, again this is the program to promote the course I’m just telling you what I am doing there so anyways now that’s that’s what success means right with the students right. So, what I want to be able to do is have this done by all by July 31. And because I’m actually moving out I just moved to California, and with actually my, my buddy who’s also an entrepreneur he’s a software developer. But, anyways we’re actually making a podcast together as well just just FYI, but no but anyways. No, so we’re going to be moving to Florida from California, in about four months, I think is August from now, because today is what it is for for sorry there’s a lot of flipping around to the camera here that’s for 2019 2020, right, Jesus this thing is not focusing anyway so yeah that’s what I’m kind of wanting to do is by July 31, is that I want to do pretty much it would be 90 days from now almost, and some changes are like I said I want to call it, right, so that’s what I’m doing there.

I want the actual course itself done within the next 30 days and then me running ads and everything like that for those first 100 students and five successful students at minimum, there as well so I’ll kind of go into just a quick overview of what all that means when I say that like the actual course done because my course isn’t done by the way. And that’s totally fine for and I’ve already made some sales as well so and that’s totally fine by the way to have it’s not a big deal. Just as long as I’m still consistently moving at actually going and getting the course done that’s what really matters. So, and also as well still having enough there to be able to teach people at least the basics, and then some, some of the more like advanced stuff as well, in which I have pretty much most of the face basic stuff, just some of the more advanced stuff is still what I have to make but again it’s still good to just start making money with it, because it did take a lot, a lot of time of my time to go and record all the videos that I have so far and everything like that but I’m not going to get into that right now. So, actually. First off, one thing that I do want to say, and before I want to preference this I should actually preface it preferenced it before actually even started video. But why I’m doing this by the way, I’m doing it this way where everything’s like broken down and stuff like that and I’m really glad that I was able to learn about this whole entire Scrum thing is, because of the fact that I’ve always had trouble with going and starting things now.

I’m sorry, I’ve always had trouble with actually going and finishing things that I’ve started, that’s the better way to put it. Like most entrepreneurs and actually some that I even talked to on the daily I know are like this as well, is that I go ahead and start a project I jump into it.

In only recently have I any of the ones that have jumped into actually made money because it took me a good couple of years to figure out how to actually like go into something and have enough knowledge from my other stuff that I’ve done before. Other failed businesses that I actually make some sort of money with it right so anyways. With that being said though.

It is something that I’ve always had trouble with is to just jump into a business and start it like I was saying like a lot of entrepreneurs had so I have. So, with this one. I’ve already had, or already been kind of running a semi successful business, business doing my freelancing which by the way is called drip the nation is my brand. It’s freelancing, and also I have clients of my own that I do marketing services for right. So, I’ve already made money online and started to make money online so doing now, a actual course over that is something that still, it’s not. I mean, it is new because I’ve never taught directly taught in like a course before so it’s, I guess it is. It is new, but it’s still wrapped around the current business that I’m doing because I’m pretty much just teaching, what I’ve done, you know before I’ve actually done it I’m not one of these people that have gone and just like say that they’ve done it and they like just started themselves right. No I’ve actually I’ve actually made a couple couple thousand dollars a couple. I think the last time I checked was like $35,000, with my freelancing stuff and then I think it was like 70k 80k 90k somewhere around there I can’t remember exact numbers for my actual like client work and stuff like that so far. Right, so again that’s not even very much. For some people, again, that may be a lot. Again, I’m not even talking about monetary right now so don’t even don’t even look at that. I’m just simply stating that I’ve done a couple of things I’ve actually already made some sort of money even though it may be not too much compared to what most people may Cray. I’ve actually made some sort of money in it so I’ve got a little bit more knowledge and all this stuff right so I’m actually able to go and start a course and be able to actually know how to promote it. And or at least know how to do the research to promote it, things like that so I was like well because I already know that. I want to actually do something that I never have done before. And honestly, I don’t like doing. And that’s exactly what this is. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do here is writing everything out every single thing that I wouldn’t need per like subject and actually going and giving myself a specific amount of days I don’t know if you can see that there. Yeah, it says it right there I know it’s all jumbled and stuff like that but that’s just how I write anyways yeah that three to four days is is giving me. Just what that one was actually this one, sorry for flipping the camera around. Yeah, that one was actually the three four days is literally laying out Scrum. So that’s what this paper is right, three to four days and that’s from the 426 I actually, that’s actually three days ago now that I actually started this I just wanted, I just thought about, I should actually be documenting this stuff so that’d be pretty cool actually I thought about that yesterday But anyways, you’re just gonna happen but anyways. With that being said, I want to be able to have something down here so I can actually know all that I need to go through and just kind of have it all laid out for me so that way I can just kind of go day by day, just, you know, knocking things out one by one, and having like little micro sprints like this is its own thing right here right so the layout of Scrum is its own thing I have to do an E book. Right, I had to do an E book for my funnels and stuff like that so that’s going to be, I think it’s yeah four to five days, and then a couple more days for some of the editing to be done. Because I’ll have to send it off to be edited and then have it come back and do a couple of things there. Then I have like funnel pages broken down right so I have my opt in page I’ll need that. And then also as well I have my sales page so this is going to be my. I’m not on the thing, sorry. This is going to be my sales page for my first actual sections of my course I’m splitting into by the way. At least, that’s what I’m thinking right now is I’m going to have sections one through nine actually as like a monthly payment at a really stupid cheap price. And then also, as well. I’m going to have a Next, the actual like more advanced stuff, and its own price, probably for 179 a month I believe that’s what I’m trying to price it at. And, yeah, that’s what that is there, and then nothing more on there.

Yeah, then okay so yeah, coming back to my order funnel pages again I’ll have my order confirmation. Right. And then also as well have testing the funnel so I got to test the funnel that’s, that’s two or three days so Oh, by the way, I’m sorry.

Actually I didn’t give myself days for this one yet for my funnel pages like I said, My Scrum isn’t done yet isn’t done yet. I have today and tomorrow to actually knock them out.

So that’s that there.

Yeah, so that that doesn’t have like actual days yet on it, then testing the funnel out to actually go and test my funnel again don’t have the day set for that one.

Gotta go and edit more or read the rest of my videos so I have sections one through five are actually done right now on my course, and are well I’m sorry one through nine are recorded and one through five are actually edited. So editing videos, is one thing that I didn’t think would take a long time, and it does take a long time. So I had to learn that that’s one of the things that I just had to frickin learn as I as I was going along with this I didn’t know that that was going to be one of the problems I ran into but it was. And hey, you just got to frickin just deal with it right you just got to deal with it. Keep moving break it down and make it happen right and that’s exactly what I had to do with this. So, with that being said though.

Yeah, so one through five is actually edited and in the actual course right now and it’s still at beta so it’s. That’s why I say it’s fine to have it I just call him beta test phase right now that the course is in and actually it’s super cheap right now, but anyways.

With that being said, like I said, I do have one through nine recorded right now, and I’m just slowly going to be editing those videos, as I go along with all of this right now. And then like I said that, just edit the rest of them that’s pretty much what that means there is I’m just going to edit the rest of the videos.

Yes. So after that though I’ve got some automation that I want to do in my Facebook. In the actual Facebook group. So I have a couple of days to do, I’ll probably just do that one or two days it won’t take too long just some like posts and some reminders and stuff that I want to do. And then also as well I want to actually start doing webinars so QA webinars type of thing we’re actually going to answer questions for my students that are in right now so I’ll want to do that as well and that actually is going to start.

I’m going to have the first one scheduled of what it says right here. 30 days after I actually start ads which are over here somewhere sorry I’m not pointing in the camera you can’t see me anyways yeah, then I’ve got some forms to do so. This is some forms that have to do for the unlocking that I want to do. And that may actually be changing I’m not sure I’ve got a couple ideas on that but that doesn’t matter.

Then also as well so this is the second part so this is actually so like it says right here I’m not sure if you can see that but I want to do this, like I said, the 30 days is where I actually want to go and start actual ads and stuff like that so all of this stuff before all of this and then all this on the back here. I actually want this to be all done within 30 days and I can definitely do that. That’s why I have this laid out though. That’s why I want to have this laid out though because it really like.

I set it up, and that’s what you do with Scrum as well but you set it up so that you give yourself a, a nice variety of days, but a certain amount of days and then you add like one or two just to be able to give yourself a little bit of extra time with it as well. So, I think that was a pretty cool concept to be able to learn about and actually my buddy Leon was the one that told me to do that. So thank you, Leon but actually he’s the guy that we’re doing the podcast. I mean him are doing the podcast but anyways yeah so that’s that there and then yeah so after that though after the 30 days I’ll still have about 60 left, depending again on you know because things can change and stuff like that. Some days I won’t want to work at all you know just regular parts of being entrepreneur you don’t, you know, obviously you try to be as consistent as possible right you try to be as consistent as possible and getting your health and wellness and working out and eating the right foods and stuff like that listening to Sam ovens that’s a huge one as well. No for real though that is, and doing that type of stuff it helps a lot with like the focus and consistency and all that sort of jazz and I know I’m sort of kind of rambling here I’m sorry but no it’s definitely good to know. And again, like I said before, actually doing this I didn’t really have that. And that may be another reason why I actually don’t like making schedules like this are like layouts of everything that I needed to do, because it never got done because I again I would just start it and then never get the friggin project done right so yeah so that that may be another thing is like, because I had problems with like my focus and my eating and stuff like that, or I have problems with my focus and not wanting to do work and you know mentality and you know mindset and stuff like that. It’s because I had problems with like my eating and my diet and not working out and you know not getting rid of distractions where I could rather if it’s on my phone rather if it’s social media crap that I don’t need rather if it’s gaming, you know, rather if it’s freakin smoking marijuana or you know drinking or my problems with tobacco, I had a lot of problems with that, you know, whatever the case may be getting rid of that crap and just completely stopping it because you know that it’s hindering your success is absolutely freaking huge and I wish more people would understand that and like start to learn about that anyways it’s very good information to know and I want to actually start teaching about that.

But anyways, with that being said, let’s get back to this. So, yeah, sorry about the random, random thing there but anyways yeah so so yeah next would be the actual second part of the beta so I again I because I don’t have everything done, which I actually did not have in this yet is going and making actually, sorry, the camera. Going actually doing right here, 10 through 14 which are my other sections. I have to go and actually record those and then edit. So since those won’t be done yet. I’m going to just start running ads to sections, one through nine still that are done, of course, just to the course, but, you know, and those will be added on later but, again, there’ll be relatively quickly added in. As I’m running ads and stuff like that but. And then I’ve got retargeting here as well. For the last one up here so far and then like I said a couple more things like you know making new videos, and also doing affiliate outreach for my actual course itself but anyways rather than that though. Yeah, that’s, that’s a handle that may sound like a lot in this video did last a while a lot longer than I thought it would but since it’s the first one I kind of wanted to just kind of go over everything that I’m wanting to do within this 90 days and some change that perfect header headline though. 90 days and some change. Anyways now, but for although that’s what I wanted to do, and that’s what I am going to be doing now.

I was definitely scared on making this video because what I’m not scared of making this video because I’m used to making videos now from making doing like courses and stuff that’s totally fine I’m scared of the fact that I’m going to have this like I’m going to do all this like writing down and going to start this, but I’m not going to actually get the freakin project done or get to visit goal of 100 students in the course right. And I’m not going to make that happen and that’s a potential I mean it could definitely happen that way I don’t know, right, the only what what I can do, though, the only thing I can do though is hedge my bets, to be the best, as I possibly can be with the whole entire thing. So a part of that hedging of the bets is having it clearly laid out on what all I need to do. And also, as well just keep as consistent as possible daily. Right. With my, you know, getting better at eating or getting, I guess back into the, you know, eating the right foods and stuff like that because I was out of it for a while I did it for a while but then I was out of it.

And also as well, making sure I’m consistent with working out every single day which I have been getting back into my routine of doing that.

And, yeah, just just, you know, getting back focused on things and I definitely have been doing, doing much better these last couple of days.

And, yeah, also being able to like record this and just kind of be able to have a new mentality since the last time that I did this sort of structure. Definitely, you know, I guess it’s been it’s been actually a good few months since I’ve started any new project or. I mean even that that’s a really isn’t a new project because again it’s like wrapped around my current business. So it’s been a few months since I’ve done anything that’s like, Like the next step I guess you could say in my business. So, yeah that’s that’s huge. So, yeah, but anyways, with that being said as well. I don’t know if they’re I don’t think there’s anything much else to talk on that I haven’t talked on me yet. I don’t know but if there is then I’ll document it again, like I said in a later video but like I said, I want to do these every day possibly I may do them every other day, and there may be a little bit of a, a time expands, or whatever, whatever I’m trying to say. There may, I may not upload the video until like the next day or so with that whichever what I’m doing so that just know that that may be a thing as well. And I’m not sure if I want to do like a transcription of each of these videos I made do that too. And it’s just gonna be a free thing on frickin Google Docs but anyways I may do that too and just put it on like a medium or something like that or like a blog or something because I want to do. I want to be able to get some sort of, you know, actual like people that are able to come and check this out and see what I’m doing and potentially like have some sort of impact on them as well, maybe, maybe get them in the mood to freakin go and, you know, write all their stuff out and you know any of you entrepreneurs out there who are trying to make something happen, right, write all your stuff out and actually like sit down and know that you’re gonna frickin focus on the damn thing, and he consistent with it, and you can be consistent with it, as, as while I am as well. And to be able to hear from any of you guys doing that that was pretty freakin amazing to be able to hear as well I mean, I know that I’m going to stay consistent with this I damn sure know that I will even if it does take me a little bit longer than I anticipated. I damn sure we’ll be doing so because again, I have that knowledge now from actually like making money and stuff like that on the internet. And I guess with my own business that’s weird to say but I guess it is it is it is honest, you know I’m being honest with that. I have that knowledge now that it is possible. So, you know, starting actual, like, if you’re starting out right now. It may sound like a hell of a lot, or it may sound like something that you’re just not confident in yourself in right or confident with yourself with right but i don’t know i just i just have a lot more confidence now I guess you could say because of the fact that, again, I’m not trying to toot my own horn or anything i don’t i don’t mean for it to sound like that whatsoever. No, I’m just saying I have more confidence now I seriously do because I actually have something already, right. So, anyways, like I said though for somebody else to be able to, you know, give, give me some something they’re doing as well you know it doesn’t have to be a 90 day or some shit like that you don’t have to go and do that you know 90 days and change or anything like that but just to be able to have like, you know, show me that you have something laid out, and like a project that you’re working on or, you know, something like that. That would just be freakin cool so anyways I’m not gonna have this video drag on any longer than it is and hopefully you’ve got some sort of value over this and hopefully you really enjoyed like my whole entire scrub my paper of absolute craziness here. Just, just the way that I take notes right so that that’s just me So anyways, like I said, this is the first video of my 90 days and some change documentation I guess you can call it. And, yeah, let’s go ahead and get back to freakin work. All right, let’s make this thing happen.

”

  If you read all that, you deserves come freshly baked cookies, I’ll ship them to you for the low cost of $73,256 dollars ;p

    Be sure to check out my next 90 Days and Some Change freelancing course challenge here:

The post 90 days and some change (Day 4, Video #1): Getting to my first course goal step-by-step layout by Caleb Bourquin at Freelancing Nation appeared first on Freelancing Nation.

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[tearlessrain]

okay I’m gonna liveblog the lion king we’re going to punch this dead horse until it gets up and walks away.

it’s just going to be a giant text wall of me complaining and nitpicking everything I think they should have done instead of what they did so probably just skip this one.

re: the bland visual design of this movie - elephant graveyard, nala says the sun is going down so why didn’t they take this opportunity to perhaps. have the sun be actually going down. and give the whole scene an ominous dusky red tone. that would have looked cool.

every once in a while a character emotes in a way that I’m like “okay, they can give them expressions and body language, they’re just deciding not to for some reason.”

I feel like this is a perfect example of my issue with this; when simba does the “I laugh in the face of danger” cackle, nothing really moves except his mouth. and I don’t know why, because like. the one on the left is what they did. the one on the right is still well within the range of realistic movement for a feline but it doesn’t look like a trained animal meowing on cue that got dubbed over with laughing.

and I can’t figure out why they wouldn’t go with the one on the right. and it frustrates me. this is a thing that happens constantly in this movie and I can usually pinpoint exactly how they could have animated it differently.

the zoomed out shots and color/arrangement of the mufasa lecture are really pretty though. if they’d just stop zooming in on the faces while they’re talking.

... okay, no, we’ve transitioned scenes and we’re looking at hyenas now but this is exactly the same color scheme and I don’t think there’s a deliberate reason for it. that’s not how. no. at least make the blue more washed out or something if you have to make both scenes blue.

I’m going to take video editing software and alter the lighting/color overlays of every scene in this movie.

I won’t do that but I want to. disney has done so good in the past with color theory and this is hurting me.

okay so ironically, I’ve heard a lot of complaints from various sources about what they did to Be Prepared, but honestly this is the only scene so far that’s really worked for me. it’s so much less uncomfortable with the visual style for him to be mostly speaking the lines in an understated menacing kind of way and it all came together really nicely. I haven’t liked all of Scar’s scenes so far but he’s definitely my favorite thing they’ve done here on average. also for some reason they don’t seem to be as afraid of giving him movement and expressions as with the other characters, maybe it’s just that he’s already the most visually distinctive idk.

anyway, Be Prepared was good and I genuinely enjoyed watching it, they should have done that with the first song if they weren’t going to do something crazy and colorful. critics were wrong. water is wet.

the voice acting in this movie really is just all over the place. it’s scanning like an elder scrolls game where the actors were just given most of their lines out of context in alphabetical order or something. because now we have “stampede in the gorge! Simba’s down there!!” [acted well but blank expression] “Simba?” [spoken in a tone that implies “oh, is that rascal in the gorge? interesting” and not “are you telling me my son is about to be trampled by ungulates???”] and I can’t tell how much is actually weird acting and how much just seems weird because it’s matching up badly with the animation.

so the action shots are good, they can do action, it’s just when they’re standing and talking that it gets awkward.

I think the reason Scar works for me more than the others is that all his concern and intentions are fake and we know that so if a line/animation falls flat it matters less.

the wildebeest scene is actually pretty okay, again because it’s mostly action. I can live with it.

don’t like the delivery of “long live the king” but at this point whatever

I already knew it wasn’t going to match the emotional impact of the original death scene because honestly what would, but this was a really unfortunate time to go back to not animating any facial expressions. simba’s voice actor is just giving it their all but visually they’re giving me nothing here.

Scar’s voice acting is fascinating, half the time the actor sounds completely checked out but when his lines land they land really well, so now I’m starting to think he was just given bad directions.

the extra scenes that weren’t in the original are like, noticeably better than the others. it’s almost like realism has a time and a place and can work well when you aren’t trying to remake a cartoon scene for scene with it. I suspect this is why I liked the jungle book so much but am not having a good time watching the lion king at all.

I rest my case about action shots: Timon and Pumbaa still don’t have facial expressions for the most part but they never stop moving and bounce around like cartoons, so it doesn’t look weird that they’re talking.

WHY DID SIMBA REACT WITH MORE VISIBLE FEAR TO PUMBAA SINGING THAN HE DID TO A WILDEBEEST STAMPEDE

kind of living for Timon’s inexplicable but honestly fitting gay lisp

again, everything around these two is more cartoonish and it works. so. much. better.

did they just fucking change animation teams entirely after the stampede or something.

the lions’ voice actors still really need to tone down their singing in comparison to the animations though, this is why be prepared was the only one that’s really worked. I mean it’s really good singing but that’s sort of the problem. to quote deadpool, they’re singing at eleven but we need like a five or six.

on the other hand I can’t believe we got that whole extra scene and Nala is literally voiced by Beyonce but they still didn’t put in Shadowland.

this is honestly going so much better than the first act because it’s not a shot-for-shot remake anymore and they’re actually writing their own scenes that, obviously, work better with the medium. I really hope it continues like this.

except for the fact that simba still just stares blankly at everything, that’s not great.

please. make a facial expression.

we’re back in “scenes that happened in the original movie” land and it is not a happy place.

there’s no iteration of this scene I can watch without thinking about the rafiki vine

god FUCKING damn it there was exactly ONE SCENE in the ENTIRE movie that SHOULD have been remade word for word and you CHANGED THE ENTIRE TONE OF THE SCENE. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS. WHY WOULD YOU MESS WITH REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE. THAT SCENE FELT LIKE A RUINED SNEEZE.

FUCK;.

I’m so mad. it was finally starting to be a fun movie to watch and they did that. did they honestly think “I will always be proud of you son” would ever have the impact of “you are more than what you have become”

simba stop talking.

everyone stop talking you’ve already talked all the emotional impact out of this scene.

the soundtrack and new scenes are absolutely wasted on the entire rest of the movie. the travel montage is good but I’m still mad about the mufasa thing.

and let me be clear I’m cool with the visual decisions with the clouds that everyone’s mad about, that was fine if slightly too subtle. the problem is that they altered and drew out the dialogue in such a way as to completely defang the whole scene.

we’re still not gonna explain why the hyenas are bad or how Scar managed to cause a massive drought just by overhunting huh.

I can’t believe he’s hoarding all the food AND all the facial expressions for himself.

okay look disney you can’t just shoehorn a Girl Fight into every movie and call it feminism. what history do Nala and Shenzi even have to warrant this dialogue.

why did they put the simba/king music as a backdrop to rafiki beating up hyenas, this feels like when they used the nazgul theme for thorin in the hobbit. I’m at the point where I keep thinking “okay I’m just gonna stop typing and watch the rest and be done” but they keep doing weird shit.

good job nala you defeated your lifelong arch nemesis, the hyena you were once in the room with while she talked to someone else

again, the action shots are good. the problems arise when they start saying words at each other.

this movie has a big “people yelling lines that need to be said quietly for maximum impact” problem

in all sincerity this is badass now that they’ve stopped talking

this would be a better movie if it wasn’t the lion king.

Simba defeated Scar and absorbed his ability to have facial expressions, wild.

all right final two scenes are exact reshots of the original but blander, and we’re done

holy shit that’s too many producers that explains a lot

okay well it was okay for a while in the middle and the bits where they actually added new things and/or exercised some creativity, and I kinda liked the reimagining of Timon and Pumbaa, but this went about as expected. it’s not like it’s a horrible movie or anything but if I was gonna show a kid the lion king I would show them the original because it flows better, it’s more visually appealing, and you can actually tell characters apart at a glance. also they used color theory properly.  seriously who let that get by. you are more than what you have become, disney.

anyway this movie’s biggest flaw is that it didn’t need to exist in the first place and the people who made it exist anyway were goddamn cowards about it thanks for coming to my ted talk.

[biggaybunny]

Suit Only, Sniper Assassin Sapienza Professional Difficulty

No no, you read that right. Suit only sniper assassin. Why? Well, because I love playing the sniper in this game, and wanted to get two challenges done at one to get a mastery level. I knew that suit only was easy to get on Francesca, and on the Virus, so I just had to figure out a way for Silvio. Screengrabs because video editing software is hard :B.

Loadout. I don’t have any mastery in Sapienza yet, as you can see in the botom right. We’ll be using all of this. Obviously, the mixtape can be replaced with the normal audio distraction, and you can use any sniper rifle you please. I went with the Sieger 300 for the screengrab potential, but honestly the Jaeger 7 would have been enough. I also prefer the Krugermeier because I’m generally not concerned about damage with my pistol, just being able to knock out security cameras and stuff with minimal disturbance.

This being professional difficulty, we’re going to get the hardest part out of the way first. As I mentioned in the intro, 2/3 of our objectives are relatively straightforward. But we can’t use any disguises and we can’t exactly tote our sniper rifle around in the open. So I had to come up with a way to pull Silvio into a location I knew I’d have a good sightline on. This is where things get... silly

La di da, start in the town square, get to the safehouse, get on to the roof out the back door. I don’t believe this camera is here in normal difficulty, so I’ve pointed it out. Technically it shouldn’t catch you if you’re careful, but we need to wait for Rocco’s long-suffering sister to move on in her cycle before we can safely progress, so it’s something to do that makes the run safe. You can tell when the camera has been disabled when it no longer shows up in instinct moe (the visual and audial cues are missable). Note that this will pull a guard briefly over to investigate, but he’s not a threat.

Move it or lose it girl.

Alright so this is the first bit of shenanigans I discovered for this run. We’re going to beeline for that fountain. You’re going to want to bear left slightly once away from the wall, but otherwise just crouch run straight across the front yard. Broad daylight, enhanced perception on npcs, but there you go. I’m not complaining.You might notice the lack of sniper rifle at this point. This is setup. Don’t worry.

Pick up the coins in the fountain once you’re there. You need at least 2, 3 is a bit safer. I’m sure there are other locations in town that have coins, but this is literally on the way. Behind that arch I’m facing with 47 in the picture is a small entrance way that leads into the basement of the villa. This is going to lead us almost directly to where we need to be.

Bypass Luigi; due to the enhanced perception of npcs in professional difficulty, he’ll investigate if you run by, but you can take it slow and safe. You exit his room, and take a right -- we’re headed for the ground floor.

We then get to this bitch of a room. I’m sorry I don’t have more pictures showing how to get through here. The basic gist is this: this room is one of those rooms where the npcs have an initial state and don’t go into their actual routines until you’re close enough by. Take a look at the minimap. I’ve run by one dude already who was near the entrance to this room. He is drinking a soda when you enter and can be bypassed easily. Up and to the right, in the adjacent room, 2 more npcs are talking. Shortly upon entering all 3 npcs will enter the room and continuously search it for a particular bottle of wine. There does exist a perfect timing where you can run up the right side of this room and angle across to the exit in the top left (off sceen). However, it’s much more consistent to toss a coin back the way you came, distracting the guy on the left and running past him.

You could, theoretically, also knock out everyone in the room. There’s enough crates nearby to stash everyone. I personally hate abusing the AI to that extent when doing a run like this. We’ll be incapacitating a total of 2 people this run, only one of whom I’d deem “necessary”. Besides, we don’t need to come back here once we’re through.

We exit that room, go up the stairs, and in to this hall. I’ve highlighted the minimap to draw attention to what we’re after. This is the optional npc to ko, a housekeeper in the next room. She has a cycle that’ll easily allow you to sneak in, I typically toss in a coin to hurry things along.

If you do KO her, here’s the dumping spot, there is a nearby window that can get you caught, but the npcs that can catch you are on a long cycle, so just peek out the window to be sure. Anyway, we’re nearly ready to snipe Silvio.

Hitman’s love of bloom is making this a bit hard to see, but that guard leaning over the raised garden is a large problem to moving around this area. The second guard in the distance might be moving around when you get here. He’s not a problem, just make sure he’s far enough away that he doesn’t intercept the coin toss we’re about to do. We want to toss a coin out the door and to the left, causing the guard to turn around.

We don’t do this to exit the house, no. Instead, while that guard investigates our coin, we sprint back in to the room with the housekeeper and shoot the dinner bell. If we hadn’t removed that guard, this would get noticed and spoil our plan. This actually “rings” the dinner bell, which is the linchpin of the entire plan.

Once the bell is rung, believe it or not, our exit strategy is extremely simple. The guard who’d normally be too nearby is still out of place from our coin. We can sprint out the door and in to the kitchen via this window. Because we’ve rung the dinner bell, the cooks are in a known state. The head chef will actually just be turning away from you as you climb through if you do it right. From there, you can sneak slowly out of the kitchen.

Exiting out of this window, which takes us back to the rooftop!

Convoluted enough for you? I spent a while just trying to access that damn dinner bell. You can’t go through the kitchen unless you want to take out everyone in the kitchen AND somehow lure in the guards out front. You can’t go around the side of the kitchen as far as I know of because of the two guards there. I like to think that this is a very hitman solution. I didn’t brute force anything, or abuse the limits of the AI. I simply exploited weaknesses in the defenses of the villa, with a reasonable amount of collateral damage.In any case, we’ve now pulled Silvia over to his outdoor table.

That means it’s time for the big guns. (Okay, this would be more impressive with the Jaeger 7 Covert or something, sue me).

And this is our payoff. Silvio stays nice and still. I’m taking this from just on the roof outside the ICA safe house. As Diana Burnwood would say, “target down”.

I recommend just hopping down here and entering that door to avoid the guards. I’m almost sad it’s unlocked, it would’ve made the breaching charge choice even more clever. Anyway, they’ll spend a long, long time searching, so go get a snack or something, but eventually we’ll be clear. Then it’s time for Francesca.

Honestly, after Silvio... this is too easy. Kind of a letdown. You could probably do this while the guards were still after you (I left my rifle in the house I just mentioned) but I played it safe. Anyway, Sal Falcone can still be woken up as per usual. Book it as the only main-storyline super enforcer wakes up and get into position.

Yeah if you want to be efficient this balcony is accessible from the house we’re hiding in. I’m sure everyone’s used it before. Sal and Francesca meet out on the pier and it’s a perfect time to snipe her. Otherwise, you can do what I did in this case and get back on the roof we sniped Silvio from.

A lot faster than waiting for her to get all the way down to the pier. That’s the front steps of the villa, by the by.

For what it’s worth I’m almost certain there is a way to snipe her on her normal route up on the top floor, where she cycles through Silvio’s office, the rec room, and that balcony with the lemon trees. The angles work against you but I haven’t tried that hard.Then again, moving her with Sal Falcone is trivial and you have all the time in the world, so I didn’t investigate it fully.

Now we’re on to the virus... we can drop the sniper rifle, it’s not going to do us any good in the field lab. At least not in my preferred route. You can definitely use the lancer to kill the virus from afar, but the lancer is suspect for mid-range kills like we got on both targets.

And here’s the reason we brough the breaching charge. Kind of sad these flimsy walls never made an appearance again! But that’s for another post. The guard to the left moves on a patrol route so he’s fine. Surprised this wasn’t harder, but I guess professional mode has already changed enough.

This is where I saved. I couldn’t quite get both of them on screen for the screengrab, but these two... THESE TWO... oh boy these two. There used to be only one guy up here, of course. The second guy now patrols parallel to him, and blocks access to the pipe that runs from this secluded area to the edge of the ground floor of the cave. It’s not safe to hide against the pillar between them. It’s almost impossible to pull one of them far enough away to knock one out without the other noticing. Their cycles are not quite synchronized. And lastly, they’re sitting on top of the weapon storage cache, so you can’t distract them with a dropped gun. Okay, first things first.

You can make it past them easily enough, at least. To the other side, you’re safe to knock out a camera that’ll be in your way once we reach the ground floor. This is also where we need to be to set our distraction.

Look I have mastered normal difficulty on all levels twice, and done a few escalations to boot. I have tried to use the audio distraction before, I really have. This is the first time I’ve successfully used it. And even here, placing it correctly can be a bit finicky. You can pull the guy who patrols near the pipe pretty far away.

However, there’s nowhere to hide, so after planting it, you have to get back to the stairwell before activating it, and bypass the remaining guard. He’s not too bad. If you’ve done it right it’ll take the other guy long enough to deal with the distraction that you can afford to play it safe with that guy, and once you’re on the pipe there’s nothing either of them can do.

Activate it, sneak past the remaining guard, get down the pipe, and we wind up back here. We’ve almost, almost made it, but professional difficulty isn’t done throwing complications at us. See that guy in the distance, by the cave entrance? He’s not normally there, and patrols the seaplane’s dock.

Oh yeah by the way, that camera up there in the left is the one we disabled. However, as you progress towards the light, there’s another camera on the same building around the corner. I don’t have a screengrab of it, but it will catch you, so be careful.

My screengrabs got a little sparse towards the end, sorry. I’ve dealt with the guy by the pier. His route ends roughly where 47 is now, a little to the left maybe, and then he turns around and can be ko’d and shoved in a nearby box. He’s the only necessary ko of the whole run. The path around the edge here is still safe as usual.

Professional difficulty kinda throws a complication at you with this friendly guy, except... not really? Not for our purposes. He has a patrol path and you can easily wait for him to go away, hop over this ledge, and shoot the stalactite to kill the virus. After that, a little caution is all it takes to make it back to the seaplane. Happy sniping!

[builderallblogger-blog]

Why Creating Great Content Is The Only Online Marketing Strategy You Need To Follow

When you hear the words "online marketing", what comes to your mind? Social Media? Facebook? Search engine optimization? Blogging? WordPress? Or maybe you think about online advertising, pay-per-clicks, and search engine marketing. I believe there is one word that everyone thinks about when they hear the term "online marketing", and that word is "difficult." Online marketing is difficult. If you want to know more then just review here.

Have you ever talked to a marketing guru about online marketing? Don't they all give the same, vague, generalized advice when it comes to online marketing? First, they tell you to hire a SEO firm, then they tell you to blog, then they tell you to use social media, and after you've done all of this, they tell you that you'll start receiving traffic to your website. Every marketing guru says the exact same thing, and the advice is always vague. Even the in-depth advice about online marketing is vague. Have you ever read an article about online marketing? Try this when you have some free time. Research "online marketing strategies" on Google and click on and read some of the articles. You don't have to look past the first page on Google. Just read some of the top articles that Google returns. This is a compare and contrast exercise. Once you complete this, you'll realize that all these articles sound the same. The first paragraph gives you a brief overview of what online marketing is and why it is so important. Then the list starts. Now after you've completed this exercise, you probably realize that the titles of the article all have something in common; they're all formatted as a top-ten list. They all look like this: "7 Online Marketing Facebook Strategies to Increase your Fan Base." Now, this isn't problem. I like the top-ten list format. It makes the article more appealing to the reader. What I don't like about majority of these articles is that almost everyone's top-ten list is the same. They all give the same online marketing strategies and advice. I mean c'mon; these are the experts! These are professional writers, writing for some of the biggest companies in the world. Why do majority of the articles sound the same? Because again, online marketing is difficult! No one likes to be wrong or give bad advice. The writers are just writing the same vague, generalized advice that the marketing gurus say. I could go on-and-on, especially when it comes to online marketing workshops, but I'm not going to; I think you've gotten the point by now.

In this article, I'm going to attempt to do something that's rarely done. I'm going to attempt to give you original and effective advice about online marketing. I'm going to be completely honest. I will not give you outdated strategies that do not work just to make my article longer. These strategies will work. How do I know? Because, I run a company and they're currently working for me. I have experience in this area and I've made many mistakes in online marketing, so I know what works and what doesn't work. So, without further ado, here are my online marketing strategies that will definitely help your business gain more exposure online.

Online marketing is all about the kind of content you're creating. First of all, the best online marketing strategy is creating content. Hands down! Sure, Facebook likes, retweets and social media shares on other popular social media sites like Pinterest, Instagram, and Reddit are cool, but do they really increase profits for a business? Think about it, how many times do you patronize a business because you liked their Facebook post? Exactly. I believe social media is very powerful but only works if you have great content. Content can be anything. It can be from a very nicely written article to a fashionable t-shirt with a clever phrase on the front. Content can really be anything. I believe majority of the businesses out there think that just posting a catchy post on Facebook along-side an eye-catching photo will increase their consumer base and ultimately their profits. This just isn't true. If online marketing were that easy, everyone, including the average person would be an expert at online marketing. Anything in this world worth having takes hard work and time; the results from an effective online marketing campaign are no different. Creating great content isn't easy; however, when you do create great content, there are so many resources at your disposal that could potentially help that content become viral. Have you ever saw a video on Facebook or YouTube that has hundreds of shares and thousands of likes? The reason that video went viral is because of the content. The average person isn't a marketing guru and doesn't have a social media budget; all they have is their imagination. That's all you need to create great content.

So, now that we've established that creating great content is the best online marketing strategy, I'm going to show you how to create great content. As I stated earlier, creating great, viral worthy content isn't easy. However, there are so many resources to help that content go viral; creating the content is really the only hard part. Creating great content requires research. You have to think about what's trending in the world. Too many marketing gurus think that the only thing that can go viral is a funny YouTube video and that's just not true. If you're not funny, don't try to be funny. You don't have to be funny. Play to your strengths. You just have to be creative, persistent, and use your imagination. There are a lot of things that are trending in the world. Pick one. Create content about a subject that's important to you. The more important it is to you, more than likely, the better the content will be. The next step is to create the content using a media that's popular. There is a reason why videos are more likely to go viral than an article. A great article can go viral, but it will definitely take longer. People enjoy videos more; there's no reading involved in watching a video. Your video doesn't have to be aesthetically appealing and you don't have to be an expert in video editing; it just has to be interesting. And don't worry, you can always learn about video editing and special effects while making the video; it's not exactly rocket science, it just takes a little practice. The next step in creating great, viral worthy content is relating that content back to your business. This might be the hardest part, but, if done correctly, is a game-changer. The ultimate goal is conversions, however, why do you need to convert people through the content? That's the mistake that many marketing gurus make. Great content may not raise your profits right away, but it's not supposed to. The purpose of content marketing is to raise awareness of your business. The profit gains will come in the future, not immediately. As long as the content relates back to your business (in some kind of way), you're good. The next step in writing great content is your content has to solve a problem. Consumers have problems, even if that problem is ignorance, meaning, not knowing enough about a particular subject. Great content solves problems and enlightens consumers. That's why great content goes viral. Consumers share things that they've recently learned because everyone has the inner-urge to help someone else in need.

So, let's the recap. The best online marketing strategy is creating great content. There are five steps to creating great content:

Pick a topic that's trending

Use a popular medium to create the content (i.e. WordPress)

Relate the content back to your business

Make sure the content solves a problem or enlightens consumers about a particular subject.

The last and easiest step in this process is to share the content, everywhere.

When sharing the content, use every avenue you can think of. Social Media, Blog, YouTube, PR, press releases, etc. Don't be stingy. Great content is meant to be shared with the world. See, I told you I'd give you advice that actually works. Stop worrying about all that other stuff, like building backlinks using automated software. Google hates that anyway, but that's another subject for another day. Take care!

[thedeaditeslayer]

Exclusive Interview: Bruce Campbell…Italian Style!

ComingSoon.net/ShockTillYouDrop.com‘s Italian correspondent Roberto D’Onofrio caught up with Evil Dead legend and cult film here Bruce Campbell recently for a career spanning interview as only Roberto can conduct. Here it is in “print’ for the first time.

Surely an actor like Bruce Campbell doesn’t need any introduction, his name will always be linked with the character of Ash Williams from the Evil Dead saga. When in 1979, with his friends Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, he raised 350.000 dollars to shoot the first chapter he couldn’t imagine it would soon become a cult hit, although at first just in England and Europe before the United States and that it would span two sequels, a remake and now a TV series.

Since then Bruce has gained respect from Hollywood, he appeared in television shows, directed seven films, written two books and voiced characters for Disney and other big Studios animated TV series. With his friends and partners even founded a production company, but he always kept his feet on the ground and stayed loyal to his fans, starring as himself in My Name Is Bruce (2007), a spoof of his B-movie career. He never loved  Hollywood too much and in fact he lives in a small town just outside of Medford, Oregon: “I’m not interested in making a $60 million studio films with a bunch of twenty four year olds telling me what to do”, he often says.

Here’s Bruce…

ComingSoon.net: What kind of advice would you give to a young filmmaker willing to shoot a good horror movie?

Bruce Campbell: I believe you should always have a good story, don’t be a lazy writer, write good dialogs, write a great story. If you can tell a good story it doesn’t matter what the genre is, Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Comedy, you still have to tell a story, so that’s the number one thing. That’s what it’s all about, we are storytellers through visual images.

CS: How “Genre Movies”, Horror particularly, have changed with the success of television since you began working in entertainment?

Campbell: Well, TV used to be terrible, while now television is the place to be and it has provided a great place for actors to be. Ten years ago there were a lot of actors that you never would have seen on television, and I say to them: Why have you waited until now? I’ve done TV for twenty five years, there’s nothing wrong with it. Everything is changed regarding Horror, it’s not “evil” anymore, it’s not something to be ashamed anymore, Horror used to be very disrespected. An actor couldn’t have a serious career in Horror, we were very marginalized and now, because of The Walking Dead and other shows, Horror is today “mainstream”. If you have forty millions people watching a show, that’s not a cold show, that’s mainstream, so I’m glad for shows like The Walking Dead, they helped, they changed people perceptions, and Horror  movies, I think they  got us into  the same interesting  territory. If you take films like Paranormal Activity, then again, they’re trying something different, it’s not all about blood, it’s creepy images that suggest you that you have heard something, you have seen something, but you are not sure. I’m glad to see movies like that come out and explore different ways of scaring people.

CS: You started your career as Ash Williams, how is it changed your relation with the character after all these years?

Campbell:  Well, you become a better actor so you improve, because now you have better skills. For me, the first film was frankly about learning how to act. I can watch the first Evil Dead from about halfway on without cringing. When Army of Darkness came around, we decided to make a different type of movie altogether and made an action-adventure picture with the same imbecile. I’m very happy to come back to play Ash twenty five years after I played it, because I have twenty five years of more experience now, and I’m going to use that to make Ash a great character, that’s my goal now, let’s make him the best character I’ve ever played.

CS: You filmed “Evil Dead” with 350, 000 dollars, do you think today is still possible to raise money and make a good movie?

Campbell:  Sure, why not? In 1979 when we tried to raise money to make that film the economy in United States was shit, so nobody wanted to invest. There’s not good or bad time. We had to form a company with which we could approach investors and make contracts with them, so we had to be very business like. Everyone thinks that the first Evil Dead was amateur and done in college, it’s not true, we were amateurs in experience but it was all done very professionally, with lawyers and everything, so when we had success with it there was no confusion, we knew who owned what parts of the movie and where the money had to go. Anyway, things  were  not easy, nobody  knew Evil Dead back then, everything had to start from scratch. In the old days we had to go to a camera rental place and give them insurance, we needed to have it, and then you would rent it from them and it was very expensive and you had to get it back by a certain time otherwise they would charge you more. Same with every equipment, same with laboratory work. You had to develop your film and then you had to make it print and you had to get an editing machine and edit it, none of that was easy. In the old days it was a good way to get rid of all the lazy people, in the seventies if you were making movies and you were lazy you would never succeed. Now you can go to your local electronic store, buy an HD camera, you can use an editing software, you can use music software and FX to make all your titles and graphics for a very small amount of money. You can get yourself set for about five thousand dollars, with everything you need to make a movie. Then you go and make a movie and you put it on a pen drive and you can go to your local theatre now, because they all have digital projectors, and you give them this small thing, not that junk case of film, and they show it to the audience. So, filmmakers have no excuses now, there’s no excuses not to be able to make a low budget movie, and you can do it cheaper than 350.000 dollars. You don’t need laboratories, it’s all digital, you need a table to edit all, a tripod, you know, you don’t even need lights anymore, because cameras are so sensitive, and it’s HD, that’s a good enough quality for anything. It’s much easier to make movies now. The problem is always the same, you need an idea, if you don’t have an idea it doesn’t matter if you are Steven Spielberg.

CS: It looks as if there aren’t a lot of good ideas today…

Campbell: There are still good ideas and there were shitty ideas in the seventies. There are a lot of bad movies also in the seventies, eighties or nineties, every decade has shitty movies and every decade has classic movies.   

CS: Your name is forever closely linked with the Ash character, don’t you feel a bit stuck with it? Is it a gift or a curse?

Campbell: It doesn’t bother me either way, I know who I am and it doesn’t matter who people think I am, plus everybody only watch what they want to watch. I’ve done many other things that are not Ash, but I’ve been more stereotyped by the fans than by Hollywood, the industry would let me play all kind of roles, because they know I’m just an actor, and I am respected for that. Many fans think I’m just Ash, I’ve more trouble being seen as different from fans than my own industry, because that’s all they watch, the fantastical stuff. I’ve played Cow Boys, I was Ronald Reagan, I did a French movie, I’ve been in “Hercules” and “Xena” and in many other things, but fans like what they like, and that’s OK for me. I’m embracing Ash Vs. Evil Dead again otherwise fans will get mad at me. Sam Raimi made three “Spider Man” movies which made million of dollars, but everybody kept asking him: where is the next “Evil Dead”? I did a TV Show: Burn Notice, for seven years, but fans didn’t care, they kept asking about Evil Dead. So don’t fight City Hall, give the people what they want. I’m going to give you Ash so much that you won’t be able to breath.

CS: Actually I really loved “Burn Notice”, even if it’s not Horror, what do you remember about it?

Campbell: It was a fun show to work on because it was not a Police show, it was not a Doctor show and it was not a Lawyer show, as almost everything is about today, but it had life and death, there were things about right and wrong and justice. So, it was a very good experience because I was not the star of the show, I could add the salt and pepper, I was not the meal. It was a good position to be in, because I didn’t have to carry the show.

CS: What are the differences, for an actor like you, to be in a TV series or in a movie?

Campbell: TV Series are much quicker and faster, I like it, you do more in a day, you are more efficient. Movies can be slow and very boring, I like TV Series and I’m suited for it, I’m ready to go, when I show up on a film set I want to go.

CS: After “Bubba Ho-Tep” everybody’s been waiting for the announced sequel: “Bubba Nosferatu”, will it ever be made?

Campbell: When Joe Lansdale will come back to write the script, the chance are much better. He was the one who wrote a very original story, if you don’t get the guy who is a very good writer, there’s not much to talk about. That’s what I mind about and, do we need a sequel to anything? It’s a very precious little movie, what if we made it and no one liked it? Now all you would remember is the shitty one, not the good one. I’d rather like people just remember Bubba Ho-Tep in some special way in their mind, not some franchise with merchandising and the same crap. I think that’s what helped it to stand apart, not trying to be a franchise.

CS: What do you think of the huge use of digital special effects to create monsters in Horror movies today?

Campbell: Well, there’s a lot more digital today, but digital is not your story, digital should help you tell your story. I like the use of digital in a movie like Forest Gump, because they used digital to make you think that this actor had no legs, you don’t even see the digital and that’s the way it should be. Digital FX can follow a little feather and make it flow, and flow and land at the character feet, that’s what digital is very good for. What we do with CGI in a show  like  Ash vs. Evil Dead  is  that  we  want  to  have  the  blood to be “old school”, so we put some tubes and we pump it through your body, but some time you need to hide the tubes, and so you just digitally erase them. We try not to use digital blood, it’s too bad, it doesn’t look right, it doesn’t move right, it looks two dimensional, they haven’t figured it out yet. Digital is too easy to fall back on, it’s a tool, it’s a very good tool, but it’s just that, it’s not going to make a movie. In the Evil Dead remake they use it mainly to hide things and mechanisms, I think it is a clever way to use it, it’s only helping.

CS: You have made seven movies as a director, will you be back any sooner behind the camera?

Campbell: When things come about, they come about, they just happen. Projects are just happening, some take a long time to get the money while other are very quick and if you are working on television you disappear from other things. When I was doing Burn Notice in Florida, I disappeared for seven years, and that restricts you from doing other things, so I never know when I’ll be able to get to other projects, who knows? I’m prepping a lot of things, some as actor, some as a director. I have writers writing many things, I have ten scripts that are ready to go, when I have time, but I’m not going to have time until Ash Vs. Evil Dead is done.

CS: You were one of the first actor, besides Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, to mix Horror and Comedy, what do you like so much of that?

Campbell: I don’t like Horror that’s grim, the world is grim, we don’t need a show to tell that  to  the world, it  already  knows  it. Entertainment  it’s supposed to elevate the world, a lot of humor is needed along the way, because some people don’t like Horror, they stay for the humor or, if you like Horror, maybe you will enjoy a little comedy as well. It’s just a little more of a wink of the eye at it, like everything is OK, we are just pretending that this is real.

CS: What are your thoughts about the “Evil Dead” recent remake?

Campbell: Well, I produced it, so I thought it was good. That film made ninety four million dollars, so I don’t care what anybody says! Some people were disappointed because it was so serious, but there are people who never saw Evil Dead before, and they’ve seen that movie and they were terrified. It’s a scary, creepy, dark film, and that was what the director wanted, Fede Alvarez, we wanted to support him. Even the first Evil Dead was not meant to be funny, it just was because it was cheesy, a low budget production.

CS: Sam Raimi often says that his mission in life is to torture Bruce Campbell, why?

Campbell: When we were younger men Sam and I were performing at “Bar mitzvah”, he was the magician and I was his assistant. Sam was hitting me with a stake when we were performing and the kids thought that it was funny, so Sam was convinced that he needed to hurt me in order to entertain the audience. That was thirty seven years ago and he’s still doing it.

CS: The old Oldsmobile from the first “Evil Dead” movie has appeared in all Sam Raimi films, is it the same car? And how he keeps it in such a good condition?

Campbell: Yes, it’s the same car that has been used in every Sam movie he has ever made, included The quick and the dead, which is a western. They disassembled the top of it and made it look like a wagon, while they took parts of it and put  it up on a  wall. I guess  something  wonderful  happened  on  the back seats of that car. They even put it on a boat and shipped it to New Zealand, where we’re filming Ash Vs. Evil Dead. I will one day kill that car with my bare hands, because I don’t like the way in which he is obsessed with that car, it’s not natural.

CS: How did censorship changed since you first did a movie like “Evil Dead”? Today also television is more permissive in showing violence and blood…

Campbell: To give you a bit of history, the original Evil Dead was banned in six countries, only one month ago Germany removed the ban. For thirty seven years they had a ban against that movie. Now Horror has come out of the shadows, but it used to be pornography, we were very close to that in people perceptions. Today because of The Walking Dead and shows like that, Horror is just another genre now and it’s a very popular form of entertainment. We found a partner, “Starz”, that it will let us do what we need to do, but back then, with the first two “Evil Dead” films we had trouble with censorship, although we didn’t put any restrictions in what we wanted to show, and the fans loved that. This is the reason because we have been looking for a partner with which we could do that again, so essentially Ash Vs. Evil Dead has no censorship, it is an unrated television show, and we are very happy to present it that way, not because we feel we have to always be excessive, but it allows us to do it if we would like to, and sometimes we like to.

CS: There was a moment in which you decided you wanted to be an actor? And what advice would you give to a young actor?

Campbell: Yes, there was a moment, I was eight years old and my father was in a play, a local play, it was called “Brigadoon” and he was singing and dancing with women that were not my mother, which was strange to me but interesting, and I remember thinking that  it was  a  different part of my father that I never saw. So that seemed very appalling, and when I got older I joined that theater crew and did plays, and I was eventually directed by my father. If I have to give an advice to young actors, that would be: don’t listen to anyone about anything, if you want to be an actor, be an actor, but you cannot be lazy. If you are lazy you will be an unemployed actor, there are many opportunities out there now, there are thousands of channels now, when I grew up there were only three channels, therefore get up your lazy ass!

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT MICROSOFT IS SHORT

If one of the big galley and put them to work as if they were executing a program written in a certain language, it will be better administered, and employees will have access to the same forces driving startups to spread. Search for a few days of terror. You can't assume someone interested in investing will stay interested. Fortunately for him, they turned it down, and one sent to me in the belief that it was the same in music and art. The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot. Every programmer must have seen code that some clever person has made marginally shorter by using dubious programming tricks. One of the most striking things I've read was not in a position to make everyone feel like a second class citizen. But VCs also share deals a lot. Some VCs lie and claim the company really needs that much.

Watch closely how power is exercised, and demand an account of how decisions are made. Schlep was originally a tool for system administrators, and yours had already installed it. When you graduate they don't give you a termsheet. Your work was so illiquid there was little to learn from them. Editors. Now there's a new generation of trolls on a new generation of trolls on a new generation of software is a great hacker, and I don't think there's any limit on the number of startups are created to do product development on spec, it will become increasingly clear that the difference between the people who'd been to elite colleges. After trying the demo, signing up for the service should require nothing more than create a new, spam-free mail service, users would follow. They all know about the concept of Worse is Better is found throughout the arts. For most people, rich or poor country, you don't have to work with Rtm and Trevor again.

At the very least I must have explained something badly. E. What made YC successful was being able to keep up, in the same position as the runner. In technology, the rich led a different kind of life from ordinary people. The total valuation of the 287 that have valuations either by raising an equity round, getting acquired, or dying is about 11. Most large organizations and many small ones are steeped in it. When I tried writing a Bayesian spam filter, it caught 99. What made him seem older? The EU was designed partly to simulate a single, autocratic government, the labels and studios is that the way to do business.

Startups are so hard that working on it to answer calls from people paying you now. When startups came back into fashion, around 2005, investors were starting to hear about byte code, which can be a dubious measure, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to comment threads there, but these are likely to pay you for. As for the theory being obvious, as far as I know, Viaweb was the first programming language to support it. How were they to know that Netscape would turn out to be. We benefitted from the same phenomenon. I could see myself—can see myself—can see myself—making at least 4 of these 5 mistakes. Best of all, he protected them from both the criticism of outsiders and the promptings of their own choosing. So if you want to discover great new things, and since that is more likely for languages partly because the startups that can succeed, regardless of its de facto purpose. We try to pick founders who are good at it than the other way around.

I'm not saying spoken language always works best. More money can't get software written faster was to use a forum with a lot of investors hated the idea, and from which consumers have to buy anyway because there are no longer leads, why do you need that you'd pay a lot, start by doing a cheaper subset of it that are unenviable. In Common Lisp this would be the place to do it would be ignoring users. For me, as for a lot less than the measurement error, you've still done that optimally. I don't try to fix the bad aspects of it that does anything useful. I'm suggesting it because it decreases the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to. And there is a way for users to come to life, because finally they're working the way people are meant to is always making new things, most of which now seem to be afraid of them. It's the same thing, and unless you plan to raise? So there are a lot of money to convince big companies that the people who know that Lisp is a powerful force.

If so, this problem will only get ten minutes, so we wrote some. Usually it's implicit in statements like there are only a few things. According to the National Association of Business Incubators, there are two types of investors, you should leave business models for later, because a toll has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not transaction processing. Should you do it, do it. Don't the French realize these aren't startups? The restrictiveness of big company speeds. He believes you should get new releases without paying extra, or doing any work, or the startup will get acquisition offers. I was in graduate school I had an uncomfortable feeling in the back of their mind how much is the natural way for programmers to live.

Notes

But there are none in San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia needed Airbnb? So it's hard to spread them.

Successful founders are effective. Naive founders think Wow, a lot of legal business.

I apologize to anyone who has overheard conversations about sports in a traditional series A rounds from top VC funds whether it was one firm that wanted to have to. We tell them everything.

How many parents would still send their kids won't listen to them till they measure their returns. One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who would never have come to writing essays is to show them how awful the real world is, so I have to worry about that. I know, Lisp code. Then you'll either get the answer, and that modern corporate executives would work better, because software takes longer to write your thoughts down in, you'll usually do a very noticeable change in their spare time.

Wufoo was based in Tampa and they were actually getting physically taller. 166.

Unfortunately, not an associate vet you. As we walked in, say, of course reflects a willful misunderstanding of what they really need that much better than Jessica. And that is a well-known byproduct of oligopoly. No.

But those are guaranteed in the succession of spectacular treason trials that punctuated Henry's erratic matrimonial progress made him an obvious candidate for grants of monastic property. What I dislike is editing done after the egalitarian pressures of World War II. Some of the word wealth. The moment I do in a dream.

Unfortunately, making physically nice books will only be a hot deal, I can't predict which lies future generations will consider inexcusable, I can establish that good art fifteenth century European art.

You know what kind of protection against abuse and accidents. The best one could aspire to the same reason 1980s-style knowledge representation could never have worked; many statements may have no way of calculating real income statistics calculated in the sense that there could be done, at which point it suddenly stops.

Thanks to Aaron Iba, John Collison, Sam Altman, and Steven Levy for inviting me to speak.

[ciathyzareposts]

Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny: Summary and Rating

         Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny

Germany

Released in Germany as Das Schwarze Auge: Die Schicksalsklinge

attic Entertainment Software (developer); Fantasy Productions (German publisher); Sir-Tech (U.S. Publisher)

Released 1992 for DOS, 1993 for Amiga

Date Started: 13 November 2019

Date Ended: 7 February 2020

Total Hours: 38

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: (To come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (To come later)

Summary:

First in a lineage based on the German tabletop RPG Das Schwarze Auge, Blade of Destiny is a gem waiting to be cut and polished. A party of six, comprising familiar races but original classes, stops a horde of orcs from razing the city of Thorwal by finding a legendary sword that defeated the orcs in the past. In an effort to offer a computer game that adhered closely to tabletop rules and gaming style, Blade perhaps errs too much towards obtuse statistics, lengthy character creation and leveling, myriad spells, and exhausting tactical combat. Yet the developers managed to create a large, open game world and populate it with interesting encounters of a variety of length and difficulty, thus feeling a lot like a series of tabletop modules. Nothing in the game–first-person exploration (in Bard’s Tale style, but with an interface drawn from Might and Magic III), paper-doll inventories (looking a lot like Eye of the Beholder), axonometric combat (clearly inspired by SSI), dozens of skills and spell skills–works badly, but almost every part of the game needed a little tweaking, editing, or tightening. I enjoyed it more as I became more familiar with its conventions, and it left me looking forward to its next installment.

****

       I grew to enjoy Blade of Destiny more as the hour grew later (the opposite of what usually happens), although the game never really did manage to solve some of its early weaknesses. In the end, I’m struck at how much it reminds me of Pool of Radiance, the first attempt at a serious adaptation of another tabletop system. Both feature the standard party of six. In neither game do the party members have a direct, personal connection to the main quest. In both, the main quest is somewhat low-key–the fate of a city versus the fate of the world. Both keep character leveling in the single digits, and both err towards keeping faith with their tabletop roots, even when it might have been best for the computer game to improvise a bit.

I don’t know whether to blame Das Schwarze Auge or the computer game for my chief complaints, most of which can be rolled up into three words: combat is exhausting. Combat is a major part of any RPG, so you don’t want your players doing things like reloading to avoid it, which I did a lot. I abandoned entire dungeons because I was sick of all the fighting, so it’s a good thing I didn’t need an extra character level to win. The primary issues are:

            The axonometric perspective doesn’t work well for combat. It’s hard to separate the characters and enemies from each other and particularly hard to move to a specific tile.

Everyone misses too often.

Attacks don’t cause enough damage.

Spells, which would make the whole thing go faster, eat up so many magic points that you can rarely cast more than three or four before needing multiple nights’ rest to recharge.

          In light of these things, the “quick combat” system was a good idea. Unfortunately, combat is hard enough (at least until the end) that you can’t really use it until there are only a couple enemies left. Even then, quick combat isn’t really “quick.” (To be fair, I guess they don’t call it that; it’s something like “Computer Fight.”) You still have to watch the computer take all the actions and monitor your characters’ status. It just means you can watch a television show at the same time.            

If you can make out individual characters in those blobs, your eyesight is better than mine.

          The spell issue had more consequences than just a difficult combat experience. The developers took the time to put several dozen spells into the game, and I never used more than about 5 of them. I kept meaning to find a good place to save near a known combat and then just keep reloading and experimenting, but I never identified an ideal position for this. Most of them would have failed anyway because the nature of the spell skill system means that you can’t possibly specialize in more than half a dozen. When I play the sequel, it will absolutely be my priority to more fully investigate the spell catalog.

I had a few lingering questions after the last entry, such as what happens if you try to kill the orc champion with a weapon other than Grimring, and what happens if you don’t honor the rule that only your champion fights. Unfortunately, the final save prompted me to overwrite the save game I’d take just before the battle. My next-most recent save was from before exploring the orc caves and getting the message that led to the endgame. I’m not willing to do all of that again, so we’ll have to leave it a mystery unless someone has some experience with it. But I was able to check out the alternate “bad” ending, which I would have experienced had I lingered for extra year in the quest. As I typed the rest of this entry, I had my party sleep at the inn for batches of 99 days until the game work me up with the fateful message:              

So the orcs are the “Vikings” of this setting.

             Overall, I felt that the time constraint was generous enough that it wouldn’t have impacted my approach even if I’d been more eager to explore every trail and sea lane. This is a good thing because there was quite a bit more to find. I took a look at a cluebook for the game, and among entire dungeons that I overlooked were a “wolf’s lair” between Ottarje and Orvil, a six-level “ship of the dead” that I would have found if I’d taken more boat trips, and a three-level “dragon’s hoard” on Runin Island. This latter location sounds like it would have been especially lucrative, with an option to do a side quest for the dragon and receive four magic items as a reward.

But I’ve always been fine with missing content. It’s practically necessary in modern games, let you exhaust yourself before the end. It also enhances a game’s replayability. It’s nice to see the number of titles with such optional content growing.

Let’s give it the ol’ GIMLET:

1. Game World. I didn’t find the Nordic setting terribly original, but I enjoyed it just the same. The backstory is set up well, and as previously mentioned, I liked the low-key nature of the main plot. The main quest did a good job encouraging nonlinear exploration of the large world. The problem is that the game itself doesn’t quite deliver on the backstory (or the tabletop setting in general). The various cities and towns are too interchangeable, the NPCs too bland. Score: 5.

2. Character Creation and Development. Well, I can’t complain that it doesn’t give you enough options. The leveling-up process in Blade of Destiny is probably the longest in any game to date. Not just longest, but most frustrating, with the caps on the number of times you can increase a particular skill per level (even if you neglected it in the early levels) and frequent failures as you try to increase. The caps in particular make it feel like the characters are never really getting stronger or better. (I think the final battle could be won by a Level 1 character.) Hit points and spell points, in particular, are almost imperceptibly slow to increase.          

No, not now! I have an appointment in 90 minutes!

          Still, I like the nature of character classes in the setting, including the use of “negative attributes” and the plethora of skills. I just wish I had a clearer sense of what skills, attributes, and negative attributes came into play in what circumstances, which bits of equipment compensated for them, and so on. The game text is obtuse enough that sometimes it’s not even clear whether you succeeded or failed. When it is, it’s almost always because you failed. Honestly, how high do I need to jack up my “Treat Wounds” skill before it has a greater than 50% chance of not making the character worse?

Back on the positive side, I think different party compositions would make a considerable difference in gameplay. I think you could have fun with some interesting combinations, like an all-dwarf party or an all-magician party. It’s just too bad the different race/class templates didn’t have more role-playing implications. Score: 5.

3. NPC Interaction. This was a really wasted area of the game. The developers give you the ability to talk to ever bartender, innkeeper, smith, and cashier, but most of the dialogue is stupid when it isn’t confusing. I’d blame the translation, but my German readers report that it was stupid and confusing even in German. The few dialogue options are either false options that lead to the same outcome or confusing ones with counter-intuitive results (e.g., asking to see the map makes the NPC give it to you; asking for the map makes him just show it to you). That said, you occasionally get an important hint from your various NPC interactions. I just wish it had been more consistent and that the developers had used the system to give more blood to the game world. Score: 4.               

This conversation made no sense as a whole, and these individual responses made no sense in detail.

          4. Encounters and Foes. The game shines, though sometimes with a marred finish, in this area. I really enjoyed the variety of encounters, some fixed, some random, that the party gets on the road and as it explores dungeons and towns. I like that some of them are a single screen, resolved instantly, and others lead you off on a multi-hour digression. I contrast to the dialogue, the text of these special encounters is usually evocative and interesting, and I can even forgive the occasional shaggy dog joke like the “wyvern” encounter. I just wish for a few more role-playing options in these encounters.            

These diversions and side areas never stopped being fun.

            Foes were mostly high-fantasy standards with similar strengths and weaknesses that we’ve seen in a thousand RPGs but at least they appeared in appropriate contexts. We’ve come a long way from the days when we were inexplicably attacked by parties of 6 orcs, 3 trolls, 2 magicians, and a griffon right in the middle of town. Score: 6.

5. Magic and Combat. Very mixed. I like the combat options, the variety of spells, and the turn-based mechanics. I just didn’t like the execution, which was partly due to interface and partly due to the game rules. Either way, combat was generally a tedious, annoying process rather than the joyful one I typically find in, say, a Gold Box game. As for spells, the game really needs some in-game help to assist with them, perhaps annotating the spells in which each class is supposed to specialize. Every spellcasting session and every level-up was a long process of flipping through the manual. It’s too bad because the spells are so varied and interesting on paper. Score: 4.            

I only ever tried about 6 of these spells, which coincidentally is the number of spells I got above 0 in my ability to cast after 5 levels.

          6. Equipment. Another disappointment. I like the approach to equipment, with a number of slots, but you get upgrades rarely and it’s extremely hard to identify them when you do. This is something that perhaps no game has done very well up to this point. I don’t mind if it’s hard to identify a piece of equipment–if you need a special skill, or spell, or money, or whatever–but I mind if it’s annoying. I mind if I have to swap the item around to multiple characters to try different things, especially when the interface makes swapping annoying and time-consuming. I mind when there’s no symbol, color, or other mechanism to distinguish weapons and armor with different values. 

Blade offers perhaps the largest variety of “adventure” equipment that we’ve seen so far, which makes it all the more frustrating that either so much of it is useless, or the game doesn’t bother to tell you when a piece of equipment has saved the day. Finally the encumbrance system is geared towards making most characters chronically over-encumbered. The ability to make potions is nice, but again the system is a little too complicated. Score: 4.

7. Economy. Blade almost perfectly emulates the Gold Box series here: money is plentiful from the first dungeon and you hardly have any reason to spend it. My party ended the game with well over 1,000 ducats. Even potions don’t serve as a good “money sink” because they don’t stack and you have the constant encumbrance issue. A rack of +1 weapons, the ability to pay to recharge spell points, or temple blessings that actually did something all would have been nice. Score: 3.          

I just donated 999 crowns!

          8. Quests. Generally positive. Blade is one of the few games of the era to understand side quests, and they sit alongside an interesting-enough main quest with multiple stages. It just needed a few more choices and alternate endings. Score: 5.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. I know that some readers will defend the game here, but I found all three to be somewhat horrid. Graphics are perhaps the least so. Some of the cut scenes are nice. Regular exploration graphics aren’t bad, but the inability to distinguish stores from regular houses is almost unforgivable. Combat graphics are a confusing mess from the axonometric perspective. Any virtues the sound effects may otherwise have are obscured by the jarring three-note cacophony that accompanies opening any menu. And there’s no excuse for the interface, which occasionally gives some nods to the keyboard but really wants you to use the mouse throughout.

Aside from my usual complaints about mouse-driven interfaces, the game is full of all kinds of little annoyances. When you find or purchase a piece of equipment, it always goes to the first character. You’ve got to then go in and redistribute it. It’s annoying to transfer equipment between characters, especially if one is over-encumbered. Messages often time out before you’re done reading them, or pop up so quickly that you don’t have time to read them before you accidentally hit the next movement key, making them disappear. There’s a lot of inconsistency, particularly in dungeons, about when you need a contextual menu and when you need to use the buttons on the main interface. There are dozens of other things like this. The developers took the appearance of the Might and Magic III interface but none of its underlying grace.

The auto-map didn’t suck. I’ll give it that. Score: 2.

10. Gameplay. We can end on a positive note. This is one of the few open-world games of the era, and in between the opening screen and closing combat, it’s almost entirely non-linear. The many things that a first-time player doesn’t find makes it inherently replayable. And the length and difficulty are just about perfect for the era. I particularly love that you have to lose experience points to save (except at temples), which discourages save-scumming. Score: 8.                

This NPC seems to think he’s living hundreds of years in the past.

          That gives us a subtotal final score of 46, a respectable total that would put it in the top 15% of games so far. But I’m going to administratively remove 2 more points for an issue that really isn’t covered by my GIMLET: a lack of editing that created unnecessary confusion at numerous points in the game. There are numerous places that go unused, such as the tower and “Ottaskins” in Thorwal. NPCs frequently tell you things in dialogue that aren’t true. There are numerous false leads on the map quest, and I don’t think they’re there to challenge you–I think the developers changed things and didn’t update the dialogue. All of the NPCs in Phexcaer were clearly written for an earlier game in which the nature of the backstory and quest were quite different. It’s common now, but relatively uncommon back then, to find a game released in what was clearly it’s “beta” stage.

So that gives us a final score of 44, which still puts the game in the top 15%. It had a lot of promise, and I’m sorry that the developers didn’t find more time to tweak and tighten it.             

This is not the sort of game for which you really want to emphasize “conversation.”

          Blade of Destiny wasn’t released in the United States until 1993, so Scorpia didn’t take it on until the October 1993 issue of Computer Gaming World. It’s one of her more ornery reviews. After saying that the English translation of Das Schwarze Auge, “The Black Eye,” “might be appropriate,” she goes on to spoil the entire plot in the next paragraph, including the one-on-one combat at the end. She found the plot unoriginal and wasted three days trying to figure out how to find the orc cave, noting that there are no clues to be found anywhere. (Remember: I had to use a walkthrough for this.) She hated the failures when trying to level up, complaining that one of her fighters “made no advance in swords on two successive level gains.” She noted a lot of discrepancies between the manual and actual gameplay, particularly in the area of spells, and she agrees with me that combat is a “tedious, frustrating, boring, long-drawn-out affair.”

She liked the automap, the ability to reload in the middle of combat, and the extra experience you get the first time you face a particular monster. That was about it. I was surprised to see how much she hated the experience cost for saving. She says she wouldn’t have minded if the creators had awarded a bonus for not saving, apparently seeing a difference there that I don’t. 

But her worst vitriol was for a bug that I didn’t experience: apparently, if you quit in the middle of the final battle, you get the victory screen anyway. “This is not just a scam; it is the Grand Canyon of scams,” she sputters. “How did the 20+ playtesters manage to miss this one? If they didn’t miss it, why wasn’t it fixed?” In summary:

             Those who worship at the mythical altar of Realism often end up sacrificing fun and playability on it. That is what happened with Blade of Destiny. In their attempt to make the game “like real life” (something few players want in the first place) the designers went overboard in the wrong direction more than once. I would not recommend Arkania to any game player, but I do recommend it to game designers as an example of what to avoid in their own products. Let us all hope we don’t see another one like this any time soon.

              Ouch. I don’t disagree with the elements she didn’t like, but I found more that I did like.

On the continent, the game had polarized reviews. Some thought that the designers went overboard in the right direction, or perhaps didn’t go overboard, or perhaps only did it once. Whatever the case, the ASM reviewer (92/100) said that he’d “rarely seen a perfect implementation of an RPG that also remains really playable on the computer.” PC Joker (90/100) said that it is “only surpassed by Ultima, leaving the rest of the genre competition far behind in terms of freedom of action and complexity.” But not all German reviews were positive. PC Player (48/100) recommended that players “close your eyes, put the lid on, and wait for Star Trail.”

(At least there were some positives in the reviews for the original game. A 2013 remake by German-based Crafty Studios came out to almost universally negative reviews despite improved graphics, voiced dialogue, and other trappings of the modern era. It was apparently quite unforgivably bugged. Crafty went on to remake Star Trail in 2017.)

              Combat in the remake. At least you can identify the squares a bit easier.

          The original game sold well despite a few bad reviews and certainly justified the two sequels, Realms of Arkania: Star Trail (1994) and Realms of Arkania: Shadows over Riva (1996). Together, the trilogy established the viability of Das Schwarze Auge setting, which continues to produce RPGs into the modern era, including The Dark Eye: Drakensang (2008), Deminicon (2013), and Blackguards (2014). Lead developer Guido Henkel would eventually tire of the setting, quit attic, move to the United States, join Black Isle studios, and produce Planescape: Torment.

I haven’t attempted to reach out to Henkel, as his work on the Arkania series has been well-documented elsewhere. In his 2012 RPG Codex interview, he explains that the publisher of attic’s Spirit of Adventure, StarByte, originally approached the company about creating a series based on Das Schwarze Auge, claiming they already had the rights. The attic personnel were reluctant to work with StarByte after a dreadful Spirit experience (“a horribly crooked company that cheated us and all of its other developers”), so they were delighted to find that the company had been lying about the license. attic managed to get it for themselves, although at such an expense that the three Arkania games barely made a profit despite selling well.

From a 1992 perspective, I would call Blade of Destiny “a good start.” I look forward to seeing how things change in the sequels.

*****

B.A.T. II will be coming up next. For the next title on the “upcoming” list, we reach back to 1981 for Quest for Power, later renamed King Arthur’s Heir. Come to think of it, the Crystalware titles are so similar and quick that I might try to cover Quest for Power and Sands of Mars in a single session so I can be done with 1981 entirely. Again.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/realms-of-arkania-blade-of-destiny-summary-and-rating/

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #374

Top Ten Things I Want from the Next Xbox

Well, it’s getting to that time again! E3 isn’t too far away, and this is One Of Those Years. Big announcements, hardware, speculation, rampant fanning… it’s all go!

Recently, Sony have discussed aspects of their “next PlayStation console”, presumably to get ahead of the announcement game as they’re skipping E3 entirely. It looks like Nintendo will be revealing a new, somewhat cut-down version of the Switch very soon, with a slightly souped-up version possibly coming later in the year. And Microsoft have earmarked their standard pre-E3 conference as the time when they will, at last, lift the lid on their next Xbox or two.

And so, inspired a little bit by a recent, very fun, Eurogamer podcast, I’ve been thinking about what I want from the Xbox Two (or whatever it’s called). And, yes, I’m just thinking about the Xbox, because I’ve got an Xbox. For better or worse, I’m in that ecosystem, and frankly I don’t have the time or money for multiple consoles (although I do really want a Switch). Plus, to be honest, I’m far more interested in the general direction that Microsoft seem to be going than Sony; sure, the PS5 looks like being an evolution and is a simpler proposition I guess (assuming what we think about it is true). But Microsoft focusing on software and one game purchase carrying across multiple platforms and even console generations, that sounds more up my street than “just” sexier graphics.

Anyway, here we go: ten things, some realistic, some not, that I’d like to see in the next Xbox. I’m not really focusing on games here, more the hardware – what I want the box to do.

Backwards Compatibility: this is a no-brainer, surely? Microsoft have really leaned into this, and I think it will continue. All Xbox One games should work, no question, and all of the 360/OG Xbox games already in the Back Compat list should work exactly the same on the new machine. I’d also like to see a graphical upgrade from Xbox One games played on the new machine, like when you’d play certain Amiga 500 games on the A1200.

Backwards Compatible Hardware: I’m not really aware of this happening before, but I really think they should extend the “it all works!” notion to include hardware. Sure, refine and improve the controller, but just make it so that the new box can use the old stuff too. I know they want to make money but it’d be a great incentive if I went in to the next generation knowing my kids already had two working controllers to use.

4K Blu-ray Drive: basically, I don’t want a discless Xbox yet. I do, in fact, buy most of my games digitally nowadays, but I still buy Blu-rays and physical editions of games when I really love them. I want my Xbox to be the only thing under my TV if at all possible, and that means a Blu-ray drive. What I hope is that, if they make a two-tiered system, the cheaper option still has a BD drive, because I have a feeling that any top-end Xbox 720 will be a mite bit pricey.

A Sub-£400 Price Tag: speaking of which… I’m fairly convinced, in my own head, that Microsoft will announce two iterations of the next-gen Xbox. It’ll be a bit like the Xbox 360 “Core” and “Premium” editions (although hopefully the cheaper option won’t be quite as cut-down). I think they’ll cost about £350 and £400 respectively, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the relative success of the Xbox One X means that MS feel comfortable charging a high premium for the top-tier version. I like having nice things, but I’m also a tight-arsed Yorkshireman, so at the moment I’m ambivalent towards which iteration I’ll be getting. If the cheapo option is discless, it’ll be a no-no; but if the sexy version is £450 or even (gulp) £500 that’ll be a tough decision.

Keep the HDMI-in: I’m not sure how popular it is, and whether it’ll be worth the hassle of Microsoft including it in the hardware, but I for one really like the TV-in functionality of the Xbox One. I suppose it can be a little fiddly having to access the Xbox first to watch TV, but seeing as we hardly ever watch TV or use the PVR, we pretty much always go through the Xbox regardless. It’s nice to flit between “live” TV (well, stuff we’ve recorded on the PVR) and the rest of the Xbox functionality. Maybe this will be something that’s retained for a “high-end” Xbox Vol. 4 but ditched for a lower-priced model.

Controller Standby: okay, this really is me just chasing something that would make my personal life easier, but one thing that irritates me with the Xbox One is the controller turning itself off. This is because we use the Xbox as a media hub in the living room; virtually all the media we watch – Netflix, iPlayer, Blu-rays, you name it – comes via that little black box. I did buy an Xbox remote control, but its functionality was a mite limited (nowhere near as good as the 360 media remote), and besides which, it broke. Using the controllers is fine (and easier if you need to navigate the dash), but they turn themselves off to save battery life, and it feels like it takes an age to make them come back on. Some sort of standby mode to reduce battery drain, but where the controller comes back to life, fully functional, the minute you press any button, would be fantastic. Or, y’know, bundle a remote.

Bring Back the 360 Quadrants: speaking of controllers, one thing I really miss is the little circle of light around the Xbox guide button that was on the 360 controller. It’s a simple thing, but lighting up a quadrant of that circle was an ideal way of indicating who was using which controller. Maybe nowadays hardly anyone is playing local multiplayer; maybe more hardcore games use other methods. But some way of easily identifying who’s in control of the dash, or which is the “primary” account at that moment, would be very useful, as it can get a touch confusing. Tying a profile to a controller feels elegant to me, but what do I know? Oh, which reminds me – unified controller settings! That was a godsend last gen, so why did they get rid of it? I wanna tell the Xbox that I play inverted, and then not have to do it for every single game. Please bring that back Mr. Microsoft.

Streamlined Interface: the Xbox One dashboard and whole user interface comes in for a fair bit of stick. To be honest, I don’t mind it, but it is fiddly, and it’s certainly a step back from the Xbox 360 experience. I’m not sure if my problems with it don’t just stem from the console targeting people with other interest than myself; I really just want fast access to my games and apps, and a quick way to check out my friends, achievements, and friends’ achievements. I hope they bring back the old “Guide” so there’s a really, really fast way to access that info “on top” of the dash, so to speak. But seeing as it’ll almost certainly be based around Windows 10, I hope they make it really customisable, too.

Intelligent Use of the Cloud: let’s face it, “The Cloud” is Microsoft’s USP as far as consoles are concerned. Sure, everyone has a cloud nowadays, but set against Sony’s “it’s a console but really good” and Nintendo’s “everything is mega-weird and super-cool”, Microsoft saying “all your stuff works everywhere” is a nice little hook. I hope it does work. Cloud processing was this generation’s hyperbolic disappointment, on display in Crackdown but far from the revolution we were hoping for (a bit like that funky sci-fi camera they had last generation…). Game streaming, however? Yeah, sure. The thought of playing my Xbox games anywhere – on my laptop, on my phone, on a Switch – is quite exciting, not just because “yay games”, but because they’re my Xbox games. Playing, I dunno, Halo 5, continuing the story, maintaining my progress, earning achievements… it’s an enticing prospect. On the Eurogamer podcast someone suggested that streaming could be potentially used (or, rather, hypothetically used) to create an “instant-on” situation, where you can start playing a game immediately before it’s finished installing or even downloading. Stuff like that would be nice. And I hope they extend Play Anywhere too, making more games cross-platform.

Discless Play: okay, this is a long-shot, as I imagine MS doesn’t want to go anywhere near the ideas they had when they announced the Xbox One; but all the same, I loved the sound of some of those ideas. Chief among them was the ability to install a game off a disc, but then play it from the hard drive without needing to put the disc in the machine again. I get why some people don’t like that, because of the restrictions it could place on resale, but I’d love it as an option. Seeing as this upcoming generation appears to be all about digital, downloading or streaming games, the concept of a physical unit or physical ownership is a little bit old-fashioned. Now, I’m a big proponent of physical media, but all the same Netflix is way more convenient. If I can rip a CD – or even automatically download its contents from Amazon – then activating a digital copy with a physical product would be great.

Right, there you are. Ten things I wanna see in the new Xbox. Will they come true? Well, maybe some. But I imagine I’ll still be scrambling on my hands and knees looking for errant Halo discs.

[dorothydelgadillo]

What Can Be Learned From The Gutenberg Accessibility Situation?

What Can Be Learned From The Gutenberg Accessibility Situation?

Andy Bell

2018-12-07T11:30:08+01:002018-12-07T10:36:51+00:00

So far, Gutenberg has had a very mixed reception from the WordPress community and that reception has become increasingly negative since a hard deadline was set for the 5.0 release, even though many considered it to be incomplete. A hard release deadline in software is usually fine, but there is a glaring issue with this particular one: what will be the main editor for a platform that powers about 32% of the web isn’t fully accessible. This issue has been raised many times by the community, and it’s been effectively brushed under the carpet by Automattic’s leadership — at least it comes across that way.

Sounds like a messy situation, right? I’m going to dive into what’s happened and how this sort of situation might be avoided by others in the future.

Further Context

For those amongst us who haven’t been following along or don’t know much about WordPress, I’ll give you a bit of context. For those that know what’s gone on, you can skip straight to the main part of the article.

WordPress powers around 32% of the web with both the open-source, self-hosted CMS and the wordpress.com hosted blogs. Although WordPress, the CMS software is open-source, it is heavily contributed to by Automattic, who run wordpress.com, amongst other products. Automattic’s CEO, Matt Mullenweg is also the co-founder of the WordPress open source project.

It’s important to understand that WordPress, the CMS is not a commercial Automattic project — it is open source. Automattic do however make lots of decisions about the future of WordPress, including the brand new editor, Gutenberg. The editor has been available as a plugin while it’s been in development, so WordPress users can use it as their main editor and provide feedback — a lot of which has been negative. Gutenberg is shipping as the default editor in the 5.0 major release of WordPress, and it will be the forced default editor, with only the download of the Classic Editor preventing it. This forced change has had a mixed response from the community, to say the least.

I’ve personally been very positive about Gutenberg with my writing, teaching and speaking, as I genuinely think it’ll be a positive step for WordPress in the long run. As the launch of WordPress 5.0 has come ever closer, though, my concerns about accessibility have been growing. The accessibility issues are being “fixed” as I write this, but the handling of the situation has been incredibly poor, from Automattic.

I invite you to read this excellent, ever-updating Twitter thread by Adrian Roselli. He’s done a very good job of collecting information and providing expert commentary. He’s covered all of the events in a very straightforward manner.

Right, you’re up to speed, so let’s crack on.

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What Happened?

For as long as the Gutenberg plugin has been available to install, there have been accessibility issues. Even when I very excitedly installed it and started hacking away at custom blocks back in March, I could see there was a tonne of issues with the basics, such as focus management. I kept telling myself, “This editor is very early doors, so it’ll all get fixed before WordPress 5.” The problem is: it didn’t. (Well, mostly, anyway.)

This situation was bad as it is, but two key things happened that made it worse. The accessibility lead, Rian Rietveld, resigned in October, citing political and codebase issues. The second thing is that Automattic set a hard deadline for WordPress 5’s release, regardless of whether accessibility issues were fixed or not.

Let me just illustrate how bad this is. As cited in Rian’s article: after an accessibility test round in March, the results indicated so many accessibility issues, most testers refused to look at Gutenberg again. We know that the situation has gotten a lot better since then, but there are still a tonne of open issues, even now.

I’ve got to say it how I see it, too. There’s clearly a cultural issue at Automattic in terms of their attitude towards accessibility and how they apparently compensate people who are willing to fix them, with a strange culture of free work, even from “outsiders”. Frankly, the company’s CEO, Matt Mullenweg’s attitude absolutely stinks — especially when he appears to be holding a potential professional engagement hostage over someone’s personal blog decision:

That's too bad was about to reach out to work with Deque on the audits.

— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) November 13, 2018

Allow me to double-down on the attitude towards accessibility for a moment. When a big company like Automattic decides to prioritize a deadline they pluck out of thin air over enabling people with impairments to use the editor that they will be forced to use it is absolutely shocking. Even more shocking is the message that it sends out that accessibility compliance is not as important as flashy new features. Ironically, there’s clearly commercial undertones to this decision for a hard deadline, but as always, free work is expected to sort it out. You’d expect a company like Automattic to fix the situation that they created with their own resource, right?

You’ll probably find it shocking that a crowd funding campaign has been put together to get an accessibility audit done on Gutenberg. I know I certainly do. You heard me correctly, too. The Gutenberg editor, which is a product of Automattic’s influence on WordPress who (as a company) were valued at over $1 Billion in 2014 are not paying for a much-needed accessibility audit. They are instead sitting back and waiting for everyone else to pay for it. Well, at least they were, until Matt Mullenweg finally committed to funding an audit on 29 November.

How Could This Mess Be Avoided?

Enough dragging people over coals (for now) and let us instead think about how this could have been avoided. Apart from the cultural issues that seem to de-prioritize accessibility at Automattic, I think the design process is mostly at fault in the context of the Gutenberg editor.

A lot of the issues are based around complexity and cognitive load. Creating blocks, editing the content, and maneuvering between blocks is a nightmare for visually impaired and/or keyboard users. Perhaps if accessibility was considered at the very start of the project, the process of creating, editing and moving blocks would be a lot simpler and thus, not a cognitive overload. The problem now is that accessibility is a fix rather than a core feature. The cognitive issues will continue to exist, albeit improved.

Another very obvious thing that could have been done differently would be to provide help and training on the JS-heavy codebase that was introduced. A lot of the accessibility fixing work seems to have been very difficult because the accessibility team had no React developers within it. There was clearly a big decision to utilize modern JavaScript because Mullenweg told everyone to “Learn JavaScript Deeply”. At that point, it would have made a lot of sense to help people who contribute a lot to WordPress for free to also learn JavaScript deeply so that they could have been involved way earlier in the process. I even saw this as an issue and made learning modern JavaScript and React a core focus in a tutorial series I co-authored with Lara Schenck.

I’m convinced that some foresight and investment in processes, planning, and people would have prevented a tonne of the accessibility issues from existing at all. Again, this points at issues with attitude from Automattic’s leader, in my opinion. He’s had the attitude that ignoring accessibility is fine because Gutenberg is a fantastic, empowering new editor. While this is true, it can’t be labeled as truly empowering if it prevents a huge number of users from managing content — in some cases, even doing their jobs. A responsible CEO in this position would probably write an incredibly apologetic statement that addressed the massive oversights. They would probably also postpone the hard deadline set until every accessibility issue was fixed. At the very least, they wouldn’t force the new editor on every single WordPress user.

Wrapping Up

I’ve got to add to this article that I am a massive WordPress fan and can see some unbelievably good opportunities for managing content that Gutenberg provides. It’s not just a new editor — it is a movement. It’s going to shape WordPress for years to come, and it should allow more designers and front-end developers into the ecosystem. This should be welcomed with open arms. Well, if and when it is fully accessible, anyway.

There are also a lot of incredible people working at Automattic and on the WordPress core team, who I have heaps of respect and love for. I know these people will help this situation come good in the end and will and do welcome this sort of critique. I also know that lessons will be learned and I have faith that a mess like this won’t happen again.

Use this situation as a warning, though. You simply can’t ignore accessibility, and you should study up and integrate it into the entire process of your projects as a priority.

(dm, ra, il)