#early trade

[todayworldnews2k21]

Sensex, Nifty decline in early trade amid disappointing macroeconomic data

Representational image. File | Photo Credit: REUTERS Benchmark indices Sensex and Nifty declined in early trade on Monday (December 2, 2024) amid disappointing macroeconomic data and weak trends in frontline stocks, including Reliance Industries, HDFC Bank and Tata Consultancy Services. Foreign fund outflows also dented market sentiment. The BSE benchmark Sensex tanked 493.84 points to 79,308.95…

[thenewspr]

Markets bounce back in early trade after 6 days of fall - Times of India

MUMBAI: Equity benchmark indices rebounded in early trade on Friday after facing massive drubbing of late amid recovery in Asian markets.The 30-share BSE Sensex jumped 411.17 points to 63,559.32 in early trade. The Nifty climbed 115.9 points to 18,973.15.Among the Sensex firms, NTPC, Mahindra & Mahindra, State Bank of India, Infosys and Maruti were the major gainers.Asian Paints emerged as the…

[alwaysbewoke]

"...the first cowboys lived in Mexico and the Caribbean, and most of them were Black. That’s the conclusion of a recent analysis of DNA from 400-year-old cow bones excavated on the island of Hispaniola and at sites in Mexico. The work, published in Scientific Reports, also provides evidence that African cattle made it to the Americas at least a century earlier than historians realized. The timing of these African imports—to the early 1600s—suggests the growth of cattle herds may have been connected to the slave trade, says study author Nicolas Delsol, an archaeozoologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “It changes the whole perspective on the mythical figure of the cowboy, which has been whitewashed over the 20th century.”

x

[cryscendo]

Wipe off that angel face and go back to high school.

@giftober 2024 | day 5: angelic

[du-hjarta-skulblaka]

Got an itch to play Sunless Sea again and it's always such an odd experience because. Like.

I know this game. Any other game, the level if knowledge and research I have put into this would make me a confident fucking master. And yet.

I can be reading text I've read dozens of times before and i still feel...not clueless, but absolutely off the mark. It all feels so familiar and yet I've never seen a victory condition. I've at least started pretty much every storyline but I'll still see something new each time I sink some time into it. I have a fucking JOURNAL of TRADE ROUTES and REQUIRED ITEMS and somehow that's only mildly helpful

That and the fact Fallen London's lore is so fucking batshit and honestly kind of hard to research (thr wiki's are frustratingly structured for me and the browser game is just. A bit inaccessible for me) means I can have a pretty solid understanding of what's going on in each port and what each faction is about and still ZERO FUCKING GRASP ON LITERALLY ANY PLOT

[enbycrip]

So this meme about “spinster originally being a word for a woman so good at weaving she was financially independent” seems to have made it into pretty much every group I follow, so after the best part of a week biting my hands not correcting it so as not to undercut the broader point, I’ve now been *forced* to correct it (badly) and write a screed of additional context just for my own sanity.

“Spinster” is indeed a word for women who became financially independent through the cloth and garment-making trade, but by SPINNING, ie making thread from fibres, rather than by WEAVING, which is making cloth out of thread. You can tell by the title being SPINster, not WEAVEster!

The “-ster” suffix indicates that the title is feminine; you can see it in other surnames like “sangster” and “brewster”.

This actually points to one of the traditional points about female-dominated practices; while weaving within the household to make cloth for members of the household was traditionally almost entirely done by women in the house, when weaving became a well-paid trade regulated by guilds, men began doing it and rapidly pushed out the women weavesters or websters who had started the profession and originally trained most of the male weavers.

This never happened with spinsters because spinning was never as lucrative as weaving and thus it never became a guild-regulated profession; it remained a trade women in the household practiced to supplement household income.

Single women could habitually manage to support themselves on their earnings from it, including single women living in lodgings in urban centres as well as single women living in their own cottages in rural places, which was incredibly valuable to them.

This points to one of the ways trade unions, the more modern and proletarian-focused version of guilds, are not *simply by their existence* a solution for worker liberation. Trade unions, like guilds, have frequently enforced societal misogyny by favouring male and male-read workers over female and female-read workers, often actively undercutting the needs of female and female-read workers, because of the societal trope that “men were supporting a family” and “women were working for pocket money”. this kept on applying even when many female and female-read workers were primary wage earners.

Men, especially cis men, in trade union spaces have a responsibility to keep your union intersectionally-aware and actively seek female and nonbinary delegates, officers and activists to fill roles.

As everyone who is privileged in any axis - male, white, cishet, abled - has a responsibility to actively seek representation from marginalised folk, and to actively canvas marginalised folk you represent to make sure you are fighting for needs you may not perceive. It’s easily possible for instruments of liberation to end up marginalising and oppressing marginalised folks unless there is an ongoing commitment to inclusive and liberating practice in them.

[hisui-dreamer]

thinking about taisho era jade born into a merchant family and he's schemey and sly as usual but really he just loves purchasing strange flora and fungi from the west. and then he meets you, an orphan who makes a living by selling flowers that you grow by yourself, not knowing how difficult it actually for other people to grow said plants because you were born with an insane green thumb and so all plants thrive under your care hehehe. he's so intrigued by you he basically hires you as his greenhouse assistant and loves spoiling you with new flora and eventually accessories that remind him of your plants (giving someone a hairpiece = marriage proposal)

he's supposed to be marrying someone with a stronger family backing so he can increase his business relations but nope. he's dead set on marrying the person who made his heart bloom♡

more thoughts continuing here!✧Masterlist

[valdrift]

drew my shield team :)

[dittolicous]

I have bred over 600 fucking Fidough AND I STILL HAVENT GOTTEN A SHINY ONE

I EVEN FOUND *FIVE* WILD SHINIES WHILE HATCHING THEM BUT SIX H U N D R E D EGGS LATER AND STILL NO FUCKING SHINY FIDOUGH

I'M ABOUT TO START SCRAMBLING THESE DAMN DOG EGGS

[phoenixkaptain]

My favourite thing about Leia is how fucking soft she is.

Like she is a little lady. She speaks very gently. She cares so much. She’s protective and warm. She just smiles and looks so happy. With Luke. Like, only Luke.

In the movies, this is also the case, but it really is one of my favourite parts of the 2015 run of the comics. They’re like, Leia: “Luke is doing great” while Luke is in the background getting thrown through a wall.

Sana (I love Sana) says she’ll won’t take Leia to Nar Shaddaa (to Luke) for free and Leia immediately offers her credits. When Sana is like “nah, just give me Han” Leia immediately agrees, and like. It’s funny for a variety of reasons but my favourite one is that Leia is trading Han for the Chance of seeing Luke.

And like, the comics show Leia telling Luke that she supports him even though he has to leave and she is very sad about it. She’s super disappointed she doesn’t get to go on the long probably meant-to-be boring mission with him. She just wants to hang out with Luke and make sure he’s okay and try not to lose him in the first fifteen minutes (again) or fifteen minutes after finding him again (also again).

I mean, it isn’t just Leia, I fucking adore Chewbacca’s relationship with Luke because. “Who would be stupid enough to volunteer to go on a doomed rescue mission for Skywalker-“ and it’s Chewbacca, Chewbacca is stupid enough, Chewbacca has the ship idling in the hangar, Chewbacca has had a Luke Rescue Kit in the ship since Luke left a week ago, Chewbacca is so ready to go on a doomed, borderline suicidal rescue mission for Luke.

Chewbacca just beats up a bar full of people to get them to tell him where Luke is. Like, that’s amazing. It’s adorable. He makes C3PO come with him. A wonderful idea. Chewbacca eventually picks Luke up like Like is a big cat. My favourite panel of all time.

Chewbacca and Leia are both over there like “I’ve only had Luke for three and a half months and if anything happened to him, I would kill all of you to get enough blood to perform an ancient ritual to make him perfectly alright again and I would start with Han.”

Han, meanwhile, is over there like “rude. Understandable, but still. Super rude.”

And I just think how soft Leia is with Luke is really sweet and how soft Chewbacca is with Luke is really cute and how both of them are so sarcastic to Han for literally no reason other than that they Thrive with his annoyance-

It’s great. If nobody else gets the characters, the 2015 run comes the closest.

[paletapessoal]

Lamps by Victorian Trading Company, early 20th century

[acquired-stardust]

Game Spotlight #16: Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duel Stories (2000)

Just in time to celebrate its upcoming release as part of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Early Years compilation, Ash takes a look at the very first title in the series released in the west with Dark Duel Stories, a quirky little game that remains surprisingly playable to this day. Come take a quick look at the game to know what you're in for when The Early Years releases later this year!

Yu-Gi-Oh! is a series that Larsa and I have a lot of affection and nostalgia for. Once upon a time we were even avid players of the physical card game (Larsa to much greater competitive success than I), and we've kept up with the series in all its various forms for most of our lives now. Binging the notoriously campy and hilarious English dub of the anime together was one of the first things we did as a couple, and when we started Acquired-Stardust it was a no-brainer to create some content in tribute to the series. That content even went on to become some of our most popular posts, so the series holds a special place in our hearts as well as in the history of the blog.

It's a fascinating series that has taken on a lot of different forms throughout the years and you might be surprised to learn that the iconic physical card game, now mostly known for its incredibly long first-turn combo plays that determine who wins and loses before you're even able to do much playing, wasn't even the original hook of the series. Yu-Gi-Oh! began life as a manga by the late Kazuki Takahashi, the story of a high school boy possessed by an ancient spirit that would punish Domino City's many bullies and thugs through the power of Shadow Games, dishing out Twilight Zone-esque ironic punishments to them, with the signature card game the series is so synonymous with only being played a total of twice in the first 60 chapters before becoming the main focus with the Duelest Kingdom arc which the anime most western fans are familiar is based on. It was a shockingly dark and violent manga especially compared to the camp that the series is more well known for.

Just as well, the physical real-world card game itself has undergone radical shifts in mechanics and formats over the years since its 1999 introduction, and the result is a series that means something different to everyone. If you poll a hundred people, odds are they'll all have a different bit of the franchise as their favorite and consider a different era to be its peak. Larsa and I are personally most fond of the early years of the series, and so playing some of the video games set in that awkward 'wild west, anything goes' time when they were learning and experimenting with exactly what they wanted the card game to be was a pretty intriguing prospect.

And make no mistake about it - Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duel Stories is very much in that early feeling-out period. So early in fact it released a mere two days before the Playstation classic Forbidden Memories and eleven days after the debut of the physical card game in America. Dark Duel Stories may have been the first Yu-Gi-Oh! game released in the west, but it's actually the third game in a Gameboy-specific series of Yu-Gi-Oh! titles (and has had its name swapped with its predecessor - whereas Dark Duel Stories is the name of the second title in Japan, this game was originally titled Tri-Holy God Advent in Japan). This series follows what I'll be calling the Gameboy Format for the game for the purpose of this piece, and for the most part it faithfully recreates the base mechanics of the physical card game (which we're assuming you have at least some level of familiarity with, but if not actually playing Dark Duel Stories yourself is a fine way to learn) with a number of key differences.

The first important difference in the Gameboy Format is its de-emphasis, but not total elimination, of Effect Monsters, Traps and Magic cards. Decks consist of a mandatory total of 40 cards, each with their own cost and level limit associated with them. Monster cards will make up the bulk of decks due to their low costs compared to the very costly Magic and Trap cards, necessitating clever usage of the game's largely weak lineup of Monster cards. Facilitating this is the biggest key difference between the traditional physical card game and the Gameboy Format in the much larger emphasis it places on the elemental typing of Monster cards, more inspired by the original manga's version of the card game. Each monster card in the game has an element associated with it (a total of eleven elements exist in the game), with the elements following a rock-paper-scissors sort of mechanic not unlike Pokemon that sees elements strong against one another (such as Water being strong against Fire) be able to inflict increased damage on their opposing element. Unlike Pokemon however, Yu-Gi-Oh's Gameboy Format sees Monster cards of an element weak to its diametrically opposed element outright destroyed before inflicting any potential lifepoint damage to players.

While this can (and will) lead to asinine scenarios in which the iconic Blue Eyes White Dragon card is destroyed by the meager Kuriboh, it adds an interesting layer of strategy to the game that goes beyond simply loading decks with the most powerful cards obtainable. It also stands in stark contrast to the physical card game in which setting up unbeatable scenarios with very little counterplay outside of hyper-specific scenarios on the first turn has become a hallmark.

Another aspect of the Gameboy Format that differs from the physical card game is the lack of Polymerization, a Magic card that enables the fusion of Monsters into a new and more powerful creature. While the Polymerization card is missing the fusion mechanic itself remains, relegated to an entirely unexplained process in which the player can attempt to combine any two monsters to potentially result in a successful fusion with getting the formula incorrect resulting in the first card being replaced by the second. It's small touches like this and the unique elemental system that promote a lot of experimentation and make sure that every Monster card has a potential use regardless of how weak they are statistically.

Players are given a deck of cards to start with and tasked with defeating three tiers of opponents, all of whom being an iconic characters from the manga and anime, five times each. Defeating opponents will earn the player more cards and card parts (more on this in a moment), as well as raising the deck level and cost limitations imposed on the player slowly but surely. There are a total of 800 obtainable cards in the game which can also be acquired through the usage of the Password system that allows players to add one of each card to their collection through entering the corresponding password associated with them. The Password system also allows players to unlock the game's hidden bosses as well as enabling additional post-duel drops indefinitely.

The game's main hook is its allowing of the player to create custom cards through combination of obtained card parts, with players able to combine top and bottom halves of original Monster cards in all sorts of ways that change their attack and defense values, elements, names and appearances. It's a small gimmick that the player is not necessarily required to interact with by any means but does help immerse you in the series by allowing you to create your own unique signature cards.

The end result of Dark Duel Stories' gameplay loop and format is a game that is perfectly suited for its handheld platform in all the best and worst ways. Its small, almost bite-sized duels go by rather quickly and painlessly but obtaining cards without the use of Passwords is a grind-heavy experience that leaves the player completely at the mercy of random chance. The costs associated with constructing decks can feel stifling at first but forces you to engage with the game and appreciate some of its eccentricities like the elemental system, and makes finally being able to include higher-value cards feel like the major upgrade in power that it really is.

It's a perfect fit with the Gameboy Color that allows you to sink however much time you want into it, grinding away to raise your level and cost limits or obtain cards on long road trips or just spending a few minutes beating Joey Wheeler or Seto Kaiba one more time.

Another strong aspect of the game is its art, faithfully adapting 800 cards from the game's early era to the Gameboy Color with a lot of success. Opposing duelists are also particularly strongly adapted, including a lot of (but unfortunately not all) the iconic characters one would expect to find in the game in impressive detail all without an over-reliance on digitizing existing artwork from the manga's original artist. The beautiful pixel art splash screens after selecting an opponent hold up extremely well and have my vote for some of the best visuals on the platform.

Not quite as strong is the sound, with songs being inoffensive and not super memorable but certainly serviceable - you won't be muting the game to protect your ears or anything, but turning on your own music instead might help with some of the grind if you're wanting to invest bigger chunks of time into obtaining Dark Duel Stories' large amount of cards or raising the limits imposed on your deck.

A small touch I greatly appreciated was the lack of manual saving, with Dark Duel Stories featuring a reliable autosave that happens after every duel, making rematching or putting the game down both a painless experience. One particular annoyance is the lack of a search function in the card library, so it's helpful to keep a guide on hand to reference individual card numbers you might be looking for rather than having to scroll through 800 cards manually.

While it's not a perfect game by any means, Dark Duel Stories remains a very fun and addictive time capsule of an era of the game now decades past and comes at an extremely early point in the existence of the physical card game and series at large. There's a lot of charm and a deceptive amount of depth to hook new and old players alike, and the gameplay remains smooth and fast all these years later despite obvious platform limitations.

It even allows players to link two Gameboy systems to duel or trade, though this will be less attractive a feature to people playing the game via emulation on PC which typically lacks the capabilities necessary for multiplayer functions. Original manga author Kazuki Takahashi constantly designed little games that appeared in the backs of compiled volumes of the manga, most often played with dice, and it's not surprising that he'd also come up with a very fun card game too even if this wasn't exactly the format we'd come to know in the years after the release of Dark Duel Stories.

A gem hidden among the stones, Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duel Stories is undoubtedly stardust.

-- Ash

[veddabredda]

Icelandic Miku!

[vertigoartgore]

2000's Superman: They Saved Luthor's Brain ! tpb cover by penciller Stuart Immonen and inker José Marzan Jr.

[statementlou]

hello :) could you maybe explain a little bit how dan wootton blackmailed louis?

ugh sorry for taking a while to get to this. The problem is I feel like the only two ways to answer this are by spending a week and a half of full time labor sifting through old posts and evidence to get every detail right and lay out an airtight case, or to halfass something very serious, and so I felt a little stuck. So since I can't seem to find a good halfway point, apologies but here is the half assed version, if you want to get into it more I invite you to do your own deep dive or talk to other people, but here's how I remember things. Louis has almost never on video explicitly said things about Larry not being real and/or anything negative about fans and their theories (mostly the opposite), up until the last couple years when he obviously decided to make a major change he didn't talk about Freddie much at all let alone saying he was his kid, honestly not that much about Eleanor even; except for in two major interviews with Dan Wootton, each of which lined up with a serious traumatic Tomlinson family event that they managed to keep out of the tabloids until the very end (Jay's illness and Fizzy's struggles with substance abuse). After the fact of those events a lot of small things that didn't make sense at the time came together to look very much like Louis traded those interviews (and those answers) for having his family's private matters kept private. Story trading of this kind is a publicly known real thing that happens, and there were various clues that suggested he was being leaned on about those stories to lend legitimacy to the idea that it was something that happened in these cases. Given what we know about Dan Wootton and how he operates even before the recent flood of information and even more now, I think it's more than likely that he has been holding the threat of outing Louis (as he has done to many other public figures) over his head for over a decade, and has used his family's tragic struggles to get Louis to dance like a fucking puppet for him and I will REJOICE at his downfall when it comes whether it is now or 20 years from now... because someday it will, he has made too many enemies to stay above it forever

[oathkeeper-of-tarth]

Never thought I'd see the day.