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mmjjbbaannkkss · 5 years ago

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2019 August 12-18 Resistance and Growth

"Get to a point where thoughts are like thieves coming in an empty house...there's nothing to take" - Sam Harris

UPDATE

Phone died Thursday. Will be back Mon or Thu. AC too arid, had to open windows. Off days I’m going to carb cycle the dumb keto, between carbs and aminos one day, and bacon the next, making sure the carbs+aminos are the day before going back as a zero-fat cleanse day, maybe a wheatgrass smoothie, prolly not. Ice pack on my eyes, excellent idea.

About to post this, @225lbs, that’s at least 10lbs down in 1 week, cardio has been uphill 5min, flat 5min, but go easy on yourself, 1min/1min, I was made for hiking 1hr at a time, know your ability. Also that’s from 10 days of (30min cardio, long sessions, +30min cardio again) and I’m taking a week off right now. Eating natural antihistamines and resetting. Resuming Thursday, but’ll post Sunday something rando.

NOTES/TIPS

Supermarket parking lot, a black guy the size of a Chicago bear, he’s having a conversation with his wife and cart-bound toddler, and every few words he says ‘hey a white guy’ like 3-4 times, like I’m in the wild --- it still snows, the sun also sets --- some recover easily from high volume, to work quick between melts, or hike before snow -- lineages differ, if forced to do low rep PRs every day, the stress and the hypertrophy would tear at my tendons;

Not a decathlon, maintenance, it depends on how you do conditioning >> if you’re in a cut, carbs have to be maintenance and very regular, like feeding a dog, same times every day, if you’re in a bulk the training sessions have to be scheduled too >> Dave Palumbo video just said as much in saying carbs and insulin >> glucose control > need water that dry/shred people, low af BMI ppl, just might not have at the moment or can’t carb up the day of the show.

Get bitchy after a workout, the human body is designed to digest carbs from plants, grains, some water-dissolvable fibers, etc, so that we can eat small doses and metabolize efficiently, and that’s a modern truth, even if you’re binging white sugar, and when blood-sugar drops the body goes into hypoglycemia (hypo = low, hyper = high), even if you’re big, even if you’re exercising, a lifestyle pattern, meal patterns, exercise patterns, or you get bitchy, and that’s a good thing. Pain is informative. Emotion is natural. The evolutionary response; and then apathy/lethargy takes exercise out of the equation. My rice cooker has an egg basket, steam makes peeling easy, I hate rice and eggs, but the rice is low fat during scheduled carb intakes, and one eggwhite makes a healthy appetizer, and egg yolk has essential nutrients.

The body doesn’t want to be 0%BMI, and when you’re training, it doesn’t want to reduce BMI. So there’s trapped on an island ketosis, which will bring on literal insanity, or delicate CICO adjustment, and being full (satiated) but digesting the fiber before a workout to not be literally bloated, and digesting the fat before a workout so that you don’t figuratively need an oil change. A lot of instagram posts say eat fruit before a workout, but that might be their between full meals snack, and usually don’t have heavy fruits like mangoes or bananas, but more light fruits like oranges and strawberries, before a workout. And the level of acidity before a workout is also personal.

Hypertrophy is growth of muscle, hypoplasia is new muscle at the cellular level. Quitting a steady exercise lifestyle, will see dramatic muscle loss, this could be why DOMS doesn’t occur with experience, and taking vacation will hurt the first day back at the gym, because the nervous system resets and the connections have to be rebuilt for task/work, so things like cardio, yoga, taiji, etc active recovery should actually be an active lifestyle, and then empty calories add-up when less muscle and less active.

I’m going to eat more antihistamines my eyes and nose are itchy, UPDATE honey-infused vinaigrette, tomatoes, and spinach help, ancestors didn’t eat as many eggs as me, and would like more grits.

TRAINING REPORT / STATS

#xvi7 Slow Push /lb

Treadmill warmup 5^|5_ 30min >> Shldr Press 3+x 6 /10305070 >> DB front Raise 4x 6 /2*10,10,10,10 >> DB Lat Raise 4x 6 / 5,10,1010 >> BB Flat Bench incl1 4x 6 /100100w100w100 >> Incl (low) DB Bench 3x 8 /35,45,55 >> Pec Deck 3x 8 /100,115,130145,160- >> Dips 3x 8 /888-8- >> Pullover 4x 8 /35355050 >> Triceps 3*10 /25,35,50,65- >> Twist 3*10/null, lat stretch >> Planks? Called it: 3x 15ct >> Treadmill 30 min 5_/5^

Carrots? Sitw:stand-db-horiz-row; ok that's the indoor winter wicking one, not the humidity August one; wanting to ice my head/face, Inferi & Flub, maybe Job For A Cowboy, would be an epic show. So funning hungry, headed shower, home == before dips, didn’t do any pull/back warmups, tweaked back jumping around like an idiot or just exhausting myself, and the knot wouldn’t pop until mid standing-pullovers, with back to rig, nerves tangled-up with the lat-spread toward/into ribs, can’t CICO sunday, maybe to skip a meal Saturday night in lieu of socialising, idk, update, slow reps kinda proud of pec decks and incline bench, am hoping 12x150lbs molasses is more impressive than 200x2 kipped - have to stop doing front raises at wall, it’s waves the center of balance too forward makes jenky back bullshit, maybe emptyhanded arm raises (read: taiji that I always put off) will train the bicep-lats trail. Carrots nuked (way less than the potato time) with vanilla yogurt was meh, pre workout snack.

#8 FST Pull /

Treadmill warmup 30min 5^/5_ >> Wide Lat Pulldown 7x7/60,7575,9090,105 >> Palms-In Pulldown 7x7/100100,12012121212 >> DB 1-Arm Row 7x7/LR15?202530355065 >> Straight Pulldown 7x7/20253035505050 >> Row 7x7/6075757590,105,120 >> DB Shrug 7x7/2*60606060606060 >> Delt Deck Fly 7x7/10152025:252530- >> Supine Straight Curl 7x7/203040404040404040 >> Preacher Curl 7x7/20304050658095 >> Preacher Hammer 7x7/30303030304040- >> Treadmill cooldown null

Meh, prolly the worst session ever.

#xvi9 Slow Legs

Treadmill 30min 5_/5^ >> Side Bends 3x 8/254545 >> Plate Squat 3x 6 000 >> Hack Squat 3x 6/202020 >> Deadlift+Curl 3x 8 / 203040 >> Horizon Press 3x 8/30507090,1113 >> LR Leg Ext 3x 8/10305070 >> LR Leg Curl 3x 8/7090110130 >> LR Heel Raise 3x 8. 30507090 >> Tri-bar Crunch 3x 1050607085- >> Chair Shoulder ropes 4*25/60/252525-25- >> Incl treadmill 5_/5^

Tried leg day for DOMS, hamstrings only stiff, hiking everyday cutting, every meal not snack, session break for noise situation, breaks b/w stations supersets b/c set splits are rare; side bends same, crowded plate squats, hack squats glutes up quads activate, deadlifts on target, curls better but harder on core, on display charged hamstrings -- omg leg extensions and curls having progress super psyched about, weeks after quad to knee sprain...to be curt, an ego setback, eyes dry from staring or tired, schadenfreude for dude’s throwing shit, not just dropping, idk sees old shit me lift everyday a beleaguered scandinavian volume trainer, low bp and slow, as got to be in a way -- in my defense, coffee salt cardio, blue veins and pale looks zombie to southerners, and’ve only been gymming, what 4 years, tho wish it was 14 years, 180 2000, almost 240 2015, 225 Aug 2019 cardio and oxygen efficiency optimal -- besides the point, burnt abs = stamina abs, so did slow cable downs for size then fast reps - after cardio eyes fried.

#10 FST Push /lbs

Treadmill 30min 5_/5^

DB Flat Bench 7*7/60606060,100100100

Rehang plates, in a commercial, commercial ends, phone bricks. Good exercise set too.

#exercise #burnout #freedom #vacation #training #schedule #routine

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maximelebled · 6 years ago

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Growing Pains - Zelda, Tony Hawk, The Sims, games and related memories from my formative years

This blog post is about my personal history with video games, how they influenced me growing up, how they sometimes helped me, and more or less an excuse to write about associated memories with them.

This is a very straightforward intro, because I’ve had this post sitting as a draft for ages, trying to glue all of it cohesively, but I’m not a very good writer, so I never really succeeded. Some of these paragraphs date back at least one year.

And I figured I should write about a lot of this as long as I still remember clearly, or not too inaccurately. Because I know that I don’t remember my earliest ever memory. I only remember how I remember it. So I might as well help my future self here, and give myself a good memento.

Anyway, the post is a kilometer long, so it’ll be under this cut.

My family got a Windows 95 computer when I was 3 years old. While I don’t remember this personally, I’m told that one of the first things I ever did with it was mess up with the BIOS settings so badly that dad’s computer-expert friend had to be invited to repair it. (He stayed for dinner as a thank you.)

It was that off-white plastic tower, it had a turbo button, and even a 4X CD reader! Wow! And the CRT monitor must have been... I don’t remember what it was, actually. But I do once remember launching a game at a stupidly high resolution: 1280x1024! And despite being a top-down 2D strategy, it ran VERY slowly. Its video card was an ATI Rage. I had no idea what that really meant that at the time, but I do recall that detail nonetheless.

Along with legitimately purchased games, the list of which I can remember:

Tubular Worlds

Descent II

Alone in the Dark I & III

Lost Eden

Formula One (not sure which game exactly)

Heart of Darkness

(and of course the famous Adibou/Adi series of educational games)

... we also had what I realize today were cracked/pirated games, from the work-friend that had set up the family computer. I remember the following:

Age of Empires I (not sure about that one, I think it might have been from a legitimate “Microsoft Plus!” disc)

Nightmare Creatures (yep, there was a PC port of that game)

Earthworm Jim (but without any music)

The Fifth Element

Moto Racer II

There are a few other memorable games, which were memorable in most aspects, except their name. I just cannot remember their name. And believe me, I have looked. Too bad! Anyway, in this list, I can point out a couple games that made a big mark on me.

First, the Alone in the Dark trilogy. It took me a long time to beat them. I still remember the morning I beat the third game. I think it was in 2001 or 2002.

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There was a specific death in it which gave me nightmares for a week. You shrink yourself to fit through a crack in a wall, but it’s possible to let a timer run out—or fall down a hole—and this terrifying thing happens (16:03). I remember sometimes struggling to run the game for no reason; something about DOS Extended Memory being too small.

I really like the low-poly flat-shaded 3D + hand-drawn 2D style of the game, and it’d be really cool to see something like that pop up again. After the 8-bit/16-bit trend, there’s now more and more games paying tribute to rough PS1-style 3D, so maybe this will happen? Maybe I’ll have to do it myself? Who knows!

Second, Lost Eden gave me a taste for adventure and good music, and outlandish fantasy universes. Here’s the intro to the game:

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A lot of the game is very evocative, especially its gorgeous soundtrack, and you spend a lot of time trekking through somewhat empty renders of landscapes. Despite being very rough early pre-rendered 3D, those places were an incredible journey in my young eyes. If you have some time, I suggest either playing the game (it’s available on Steam) or watching / skimmering through this “longplay” video. Here are some of my personal highlights: 25:35, 38:05, 52:15 (love that landscape), 1:17:20, 1:20:20 (another landscape burned in my neurons), 2:12:10, 2:55:30, 3:01:18. (spoiler warning)

But let’s go a couple years back. Ever since my youngest years, I was very intrigued by creation. I filled entire pocket-sized notebooks with writing—sometimes attempts at fiction, sometimes daily logs like the weather reports from the newspaper, sometimes really bad attempts at drawing. I also filled entire audio tapes over and over and OVER with “fake shows” that my sister and I would act out. The only thing that survived is this picture of 3-year-old me with the tape player/recorder.

It also turns out that the tape recorder AND the shelf have both survived.

(I don’t know if it still works.)

On Wednesday afternoons (school was off) and on the week-ends, I often got to play on the family computer, most of the time with my older brother, who’s the one who introduced me to... well... all of it, really. (Looking back on the games he bought, I can say he had very good tastes.)

Moto Racer II came with a track editor. It was simple but pretty cool to play around with. You just had to make the track path and elevation; all the scenery was generated by the game. You could draw impossible tracks that overlapped themselves, but the editor wouldn’t let you save them. However, I found out there was a way to play/save them no matter what you did, and I got to experiment with crazy glitches. 85 degree inclines that launched the bike so high you couldn’t see the ground anymore? No problem. Tracks that overlapped themselves several times, causing very strange behaviour at the meeting points? You bet. That stuff made me really curious about how video games worked. I think a lot of my initial interest in games can be traced back to that one moment I figured out how to exploit the track editor...

There was also another game—I think it was Tubular Worlds—that came on floppy disks. I don’t remember what exactly lead me to do it, but I managed to edit the text that was displayed by the installer... I think it was the license agreement bit of it. That got me even more curious as to how computers worked.

Up until some time around my 13th or 14th birthday, during summer break (the last days of June to the first days of September for French pupils), my sister and I would always go on vacation at my grandparents’ home.

The very first console game I ever played was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on my cousin’s Super Nintendo, who also usually stayed with us. Unlike us, he had quite a few consoles available to him, and brought a couple along. My first time watching and playing this game was absolutely mind-blowing to me. An adventure with a huge game world to explore, so many mysterious things at every corner. “Why are you a pink rabbit now?” “I’m looking for the pearl that will help me not be that.”

Growing up and working in the games industry has taken the magic out of many things in video games... and my curiosity for the medium (and its inner workings) definitely hasn’t helped. I know more obscure technical trivia about older games than I care to admit. But I think this is what is shaping my tastes in video games nowadays... part of it is that I crave story-rich experiences that can bring me back to a, for lack of a better term, “child-like” wonderment. And I know how weird this is going to sound, but I don’t really enjoy “pure gameplay” games as much for that reason. Some of the high-concept ones are great, of course (e.g. Tetris), but I usually can’t enjoy others without a good interwoven narrative. I can’t imagine I would have completed The Talos Principle had it consisted purely of the puzzles without any narrative beats, story bits, and all that. What I’m getting at is, thinking about it, I guess I tend to value the “narrative” side of games pretty highly, because, to me, it’s one of the aspects of the medium that, even if distillable to some formulas, is inherently way more “vague” and “ungraspable”. You can do disassembly on game mechanics and figure out even the most obsure bits of weird technical trivia. You can’t do that to a plot, a universe, characters, etc. or at least nowhere near to the same extent.

You can take a good story and weave it into a number of games, but the opposite is not true. It’s easy to figure out the inner working of gameplay mechanics, and take the magic out of them, but it’s a lot harder to do that for a story, unless it’s fundamentally flawed in some way.

Video games back then seemed a lot bigger than they actually were.

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I got Heart of Darkness as a gift in 1998 or 1999. We used to celebrate Christmas at my grandparents’, so I had to wait a few days to be back home, and to able to put the CD in the computer. But boy was it worth it! Those animated cutscenes! The amazing pixel art animations! The amazing and somewhat disturbing variety of ways in which you can die, most of which gruesome and mildly graphic! And of course, yet again... a strange and outlandish universe that just scratches my itch for it. Well, one of which that forged my taste for them.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened or what it was, but I do remember that at some point we visited some sort of... exposition? Exhibit? Something along those lines. And it had a board games & computer games section. The two that stick out in my mind were Abalone (of which I still have the box somewhere) and what I think was some sort of 2D isometric (MMO?) RPG. I wanna say it was Ultima Online but I recall it looking more primitive than that (it had small maps whose “void” outside them was a single blueish color).

In my last two years of elementary school, there was one big field trip per year. They lasted two weeks, away from family. The first one was to the Alps. The second one was... not too far from where I live now, somewhere on the coast of Brittany! I have tried really hard to find out exactly where it was, as I remember the building and facilities really well, but I was never able to find it again. On a couple occasions, we went on a boat with some kind of... algae harvesters? The smell was extremely strong (burning itself into my memory) and made me sick. The reason I bring them up is because quite a few of my classmates had Game Boy consoles, most of them with, you know, all those accessories, especially the little lights. I remember being amazed at the transparent ones. Play was usually during the off-times, and I watched what my friends were up to, with, of course, a bit of jealousy mixed in. The class traveled by bus, and it took off in the middle of the night; something like 3 or 4 in the morning? It seemed like such a huge deal at the time! Now here I am, writing THESE WORDS at 03:00. Anyway, most of my classmates didn’t fall back asleep and those that had a Game Boy just started playing on them. One of my classmates, however, handed me his whole kit and I got to do pretty much what I wanted with it, with the express condition that I would not overwrite any of his save files. I remember getting reasonably far in Pokémon before I had to give it back to him and my progress was wiped.

During the trip to the Alps, I remember seeing older kids paying for computer time; there was a row of five computers in a small room... and they played Counter-Strike. I had absolutely no idea what it was, and I would forget about it until the moment I’m writing these words, but I was watching with much curiosity.

The first time I had my own access to console games was in 2001. The first Harry Potter film had just come out, and at Christmas, I was gifted a Game Boy Advance with the first official game. I just looked it up again and good god, it’s rougher than I remember. The three most memorable GBA games which I then got to play were both Golden Sun(s) and Sword of Mana... especially the latter, with its gorgeous art direction. My dad had a cellphone back then, and I remember sneakily going on there to look up a walkthrough for a tricky part of Golden Sun’s desert bit. Cellphones had access to something called “WAP” internet... very basic stuff, but of course still incredible to me back then.

I eventually got to play another Zelda game on my GBA: Link’s Awakening DX. I have very fond memories of that one because I was bed-ridden with a terrible flu. My fever ran so high that I started having some really funky dreams, delirious half-awake hallucinations/feelings, and one night, I got so hot that I stumbled out of bed and just laid down against the cold tile of the hallway. At 3 in the morning! A crazy time! (Crazy for 11-year-old me.)

(The fever hallucinations were crazy. My bedroom felt like it was three times at big, and I was convinced that a pack of elephants were charging at me from the opposite corner. The “night grain” of my vision felt sharper, amplified. Every touch, my sore body rubbing against the bed covers felt like it was happening twice as much. You know that “Heavy Rain with 300% facial animation” video? Imagine that, but as a feverish feeling. The dreams were on another level entirely. I could spend pages on them, but suffice to say that’s when I had my first dream where I dreamed of dying. There were at least two, actually. The first one was by walking down a strange, blueish metal corridor, then getting in an elevator, and then feeling that intimate convinction that it was leading me to passing over. The second one was in some Myst-like world, straight out of a Roger Dean cover, with some sort of mini-habitat pods floating on a completely undisturbed lake. We were just trapped in them. It just felt like some kind of weird afterlife.)

I also eventually got to play the GBA port of A Link To The Past. My uncle was pretty amused by seeing me play it, as he’d also played the original on SNES before I’d even been born. I asked him for help with a boss (the first Dark World one), but unfortunately, he admitted he didn’t remember much of the game.

We had a skiing holiday around this time. I don’t remember the resort’s or the town’s name, but its sights are burned in my memory. Maybe it’s because, shortly after we arrived, and we went to the ski rental place, I almost fainted and puked on myself, supposedly from the low oxygen. It also turned out that the bedroom my parents had rented unexpectedly came with a SNES in the drawer under the tiny TV. The game: Super Mario World. I got sick at one point and got to stay in and play it. This was also the holiday where I developed a fondness for iced tea, although back then the most common brand left an awful aftertaste in your mouth that just made you even more thirsty.

We got a new PC in December of 2004. Ditching the old Windows 98 SE (yep, the OS had been upgraded in... 2002, I think?). Look at how old-school this looks. The computer office room was in the basement. Even with the blur job that I applied to the monitor for privacy reasons, you can still tell that this is the XP file explorer:

A look at what the old DSLR managed to capture on the shelf reveals some more of the games that were available to me back then: a bunch of educational software, The Sims 2, and SpellForce Gold.

I might be misremembering but I think they were our Christmas gifts for that year; we both got to pick one game. I had no idea what I wanted, really, but out of all the boxes at (what I think was) the local Fnac store, it was SpellForce that stood out to me the most. Having watched Lord of the Rings the year prior might have been a factor. I somewhat understood Age of Empires years before that, but SpellForce? Man, I loved the hell out of SpellForce. Imagine a top-down RPG that can also be played from a third-person perspective. And with the concept of... hero units... wait a second... now that reminds me of Dota.

Imagine playing a Dota hero with lots of micro-management and being able to build a whole base on new maps. And sometimes visiting very RPG-ish sections (my favorites!) with very little top-down strategy bits, towns, etc. like Siltbreaker. I guess this game was somewhat like an alternate, single-player Dota if you look at it from the right angle. (Not the third-person one.)

I do remember being very excited when I found out that it, too, came with a level editor. I never figured it out, though. I only ever got as far as making a nice landscape for my island, and that was it!

A couple weeks after, it was Christmas; my sister and I got our first modern PC game: The Sims 2. It didn’t run super well—most games didn’t, because the nVidia GeForce FX 5200 wasn’t very good. But that didn’t stop me or my sister from going absolutely nuts with the game. This video has the timestamp of 09 January 2005, and it is the first video I’ve ever made with a computer. Less than two weeks after we got the game, I was already neck-deep in creating stuff.

Not that it was particularly good, of course. This is a video that meets all of the “early YouTube Windows Movie Maker clichés”.

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Speaking of YouTube, I did register an account there pretty early on, in August of 2006. I’ve been through all of it. I remember every single layout change. I also started using Sony Vegas around that time. It felt so complex and advanced back then! And I’m still using it today. Besides Windows, Vegas Pro is very likely to be the piece of software that I’ve been using for the longest time.

I don’t have a video on YouTube from before 2009, because I decided to delete all of them out of embarassment. They were mostly Super Mario 64 machinima. It’s as bad as it sounds. The reason I bring that up right now, though, is that it makes the “first” video of my account the last one I made with the Sims 2.

But before I get too far ahead with my early YouTube days, let me go backwards a bit. We got hooked up to the Internet some time in late 2005. It was RTC (dialup), 56 kbps. my first steps into the Internet led me to the Cube engine. Mostly because back then my dad would purchase computer magazines (which were genuinely helpful back then), and came with CDs of common downloadable software for those without Internet connections. One of them linked to Cube. I think it was using either this very same screenshot, or a very similar one, on the same map.

The amazing thing about Cube is not only that it was open-source and moddable, but had map editing built-in the game. The mode was toggled on with a single key press. You could even edit maps cooperatively with other people. Multiplayer mapping! How cool is that?! And the idea of a game that enabled so much creation was amazing to me, so I downloaded it right away. (Over the course of several hours, 30 MiB being large for dialup.)

I made lots of bad maps that never fulfilled the definition of “good level” or “good gameplay”, not having any idea how “game design” meant, or what it even was. But I made places. Places that I could call my own. “Virtual homes”. I still distinctively remember the first map I ever made, even though no trace of it survives to this day. In the second smallest map size possible, I’d made a tower surrounded by a moat and a few smaller cozy towers, with lots of nice colored lighting. This, along with the distinctive skyboxes and intriguing music, made me feel like I’d made my home in a strange new world.

At some point later down the line, I made a kinda-decent singleplayer level. It was very linear, but one of the two lead developers of the game played it and told me he liked it a lot! Of course, half of that statement was probably “to be nice”, but it was really validating and encouraging. And I’m glad they were like that. Because I remember being annoying to some other mappers in the Sauerbraten community (the follow-up to Cube, more advanced technically), who couldn’t wrap their heads around my absolutely god awful texturing work and complete lack of level “design”. Honestly, sometimes, I actually kinda feel like trying to track a couple of them down and being like, “yeah, remember that annoying kid? That was me. Sorry you had to deal with 14-year-old me.”

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At some point, I stumbled upon a mod called Cube Legends. It was a heavily Zelda-inspired “total conversion”; a term reserved for mods that are the moddiest mods and try to take away as much of the original foundation as possible. It featured lots of evocative MIDI music by the Norwegian composer Bjørn Lynne. Fun fact: the .mid files are still available officially from his website!

This was at the crossroad of many of my interests. It was yet another piece of the puzzle. As a quick side note, this is why Zelda is the first series that I name in the title of this post, even though I... never really thought of myself as a Zelda fan. It’s not that it’s one of the game series that I like the most, it’s just that, before I started writing this, I’d never realized how far-reaching its influence had been in my life, both in overt and subtle ways, especially during my formative years.

And despite how clearly unfinished, how much of a “draft” Cube Legends was, I could see what it was trying to do. I could see the author’s intent. And I’m still listening to Bjørn Lynne’s music today.

The Cube Engine and its forums were a big part of why I started speaking English so well. Compared to most French people, I mean. We’re notoriously bad with the English language, and so was I up until then. But having this much hands-on practice proved to be immensely valuable. And so, I can say that the game and its community have therefore had long-lasting impacts in my life.

I also tried out a bunch of N64 games via emulation, bringing me right back in that bedroom at my grandparents’ house, with my cousin. Though he did not have either N64 Zelda game back then.

The first online forum I ever joined was a Zelda fan site’s. There are two noteworthy things to say here:

It was managed by a woman who, during my stay in the community, graduated from her animation degree. At this stage I had absolutely no idea that this was going to be the line of work I would eventually pursue!

I recently ran into the former head moderator of the forums. (I don’t know when the community died.) One of the Dota players on my friends list invited him because I was like “hmm, I wanna go as 3, not as 2 players today”. His nickname very vaguely reminded me of something, a weird hunch I couldn’t place. Half an hour into the game, he said “hey Max... this might be a long shot, but did you ever visit [forum]?” and then I immediately yelled “OH MY GOD—IT IS YOU.” The world is a small place.

Access to the computer was sometimes tricky. I didn’t always have good grades, and of course, “punishment” (not sure the word is appropriate, hence the quotes, but you get the idea) often involved locking me out of the computer room. Of course, most times, I ended up trying to find the key instead. I needed my escape from the real world. (You better believe it’s Tangent Time.)

I was always told I was the “smart kid”, because I “understood things faster” than my classmates. So they made me skip two grades ahead. This made me enter high school at nine years old. The consequences were awful (I was even more of the typical nerdy kid that wouldn’t fit in), and I wish it had never happened. Over the years, I finally understood: I wasn’t more intelligent. I merely had the chance to have been able to grow up with an older brother who’d instilled a sense of curiosity, critical thinking, and taste in books that were ahead of my age and reading level. This situation—and its opposite—is what I believe accounts for the difference in how well kids get to learn. It’s not innate talent, it’s not genetics (as some racists would like you to believe). It’s parenting and privilege.

And that’s why I’ll always be an outspoken proponent for any piece of media that tries to instill critical thinking and curiosity in its viewer, reader, or player.

But I digress.

Well, I’ve been digressing a lot, really, but games aren’t everything and after all, this post is about the context in which I played those games. Otherwise I reckon I would’ve just made a simple list.

I eventually got a Nintendo DS for Christmas, along with Mario Kart DS. My sister had gotten her own just around the time when it released... she had the Nintendogs bundle. We had also upgraded to proper ADSL, what I think was about a ~5 megabits download speed. The Nintendo DS supported wi-fi, which was still relatively rare compared to today. In fact, Nintendo sold a USB wireless adapter to help with that issue—our ISP-supplied modem-router did not have any wireless capabilities. I couldn’t get it the adapter work and I remember I got help from a really kind stranger who knew a lot about networking—to a point that it seemed like wizardry to me.

I remember I got a “discman” as a gift some time around that point. In fact, I still have it. Check out the stickers I put on it! I think those came from the Sims 2 DVD box and/or one of its add-ons.

I burned a lot of discs. In fact, in the stack of burned CDs/DVDs that I found (with the really bad Sims movies somewhere in there), I found at least three discs that had the Zelda album Hyrule Symphony burned in, each with different additional tracks. Some were straight-up MIDI files from vgmusic.com...! And speaking (again) of Zelda, when the Wii came out, Twilight Princess utterly blew my mind. I never got the game or the console, but damn did I yearn badly for it. I listened to the main theme of the game a lot, which didn’t help. I eventually got to play the first few hours at a friend’s place.

At some point, we’d upgraded the family computer to something with a bit more horsepower. It had a GeForce 8500 GT inside, which was eventually upgraded to a 9600 GT after the card failed for some reason. It could also dual-boot between XP and Vista. I stuck with that computer until 2011.

We moved to where I currently live in 2007. I’ve been here over a decade! And before we’d even fully finished unpacking, I was on the floor of the room that is now my office, with the computer on the ground and the monitor on a cardboard box, playing a pirated copy of... Half-Life! It was given to me by my cousin. It took me that long to find out about the series. It’s the first Valve game I played. I also later heard about the Orange Box, but mostly about Portal. Which I also pirated and played. I distinctly remember being very puzzled by the options menu: I thought it was glitched or broken, as changing settings froze the game. Turns out the Source engine had to chug for a little while, like a city car in countryside mud, as it reloaded a bunch of stuff. Patience is a virtue...

But then, something serious happened.

In the afternoon of 25 December 2007, I started having a bit of a dull stomach pain. I didn’t think much of it. Figured maybe I’d eaten too many Christmas chocolates and it’d go away. It didn’t. It progressively deteriorated into a high fever where I had trouble walking and my tummy really hurt; especially if you pressed on it. My parents tried to gently get me to eat something nice on New Year’s Eve, but it didn’t stay in very long. I could only feed myself with lemonade and painkiller. Eventually, the doctor decided I should get blood tests done as soon as possible. And I remember that day very clearly.

I was already up at 6:30 in the morning. Back then, The Daily Show aired on the French TV channel Canal+, so I was watching that, lying in the couch while waiting for my mom to get up and drive me to my appointment, at 7:00. It was just two streets away, but there was no way I could walk there. At around noon, the doctor called and told my mom: “get your son to the emergency room now.”

Long story short, part of my intestines nuked themselves into oblivion, causing acute peritonitis. To give you an idea, that’s something with a double-digit fatality rate. Had we waited maybe a day or two more, I would not be here writing this. They kind of blew up. I had an enormous abcess attached to a bunch of my organs. I had to be operated on with only weak local anaesthetics as they tried to start draining the abscess. It is, to date, by far the most painful thing that has ever happened to me. It was bad enough that the hospital doctor that was on my case told me that I was pretty much a case worthy to be in textbooks. I even had medical students come into my hospital room about it! They were very nice.

This whole affair lasted over a month. I became intimately familiar with TV schedules. And thankfully, I had my DS to keep me company. At the time, I was pretty big into the Tony Hawk DS games. They were genuinely good. They had extensive customization, really great replayability, etc. you get the idea. I think I even got pretty high on the online leaderboards at some point. I didn’t have much to do on some days besides lying down in pain while perfecting my scoring and combo strategies. I think Downhill Jam might’ve been my favorite.

My case was bad enough that they were unable to do something due to the sad state of my insides during the last surgery of my stay. I was told that I could come back in a few months for a checkup, and potentially a “cleanup” operation that would fix me up for good. I came back in late June of 2008, got the operation, and... woke up in my hospital room surrounded by, like, nine doctors, and hooked up to a morphine machine that I could trigger on command. Apparently something had gone wrong during the operation, but they never told me what. I wasn’t legally an adult, so they didn’t have to tell me. I suspect it’s somewhere in some medical files, but I never bothered to dig up through my parents’ archives, or ask the hospital. And I think I would rather not know. But anyway, that was almost three more weeks in the hospital. And it sucked even more that time because, you see, hospital beds do not “breathe” like regular beds do. The air can’t go through. Let’s say I’m intimately familiar with the smell of back sweat forever.

When I got out, my mom stopped by a supermarket on the way home. And that is when I bought The Orange Box, completely on a whim, and made my Steam account. Why? Because it was orange and stood out on the shelf.

(As a side note, that was the whole bit I started writing first, and that made me initially title this post “growing pains”. First, because I’m bad at titles. Second, because not that I didn’t have them otherwise (ow oof ouch my knees), but that was literally the most painful episode of my entire life thus far and it ended in a comically-unrelated, high-impact, life-changing decision. Just me picking up The Orange Box after two awful hospital stays... led me to where I am today.)

While I was recovering, I also started playing EarthBound! Another bit of a life-changer, that one. To a lesser extent, but still. I was immediately enamored by its unique tone. Giygas really really really creeped me out for a while afterwards though. I still get unsettled if I hear its noises sometimes.

I later bought Garry’s Mod (after convincing my mom that it was a “great creative toolbox that only cost ten bucks!”), and, well, the rest is history. By which I mean, a lot of my work and gaming activity since 2009 is still up and browsable. But there are still a few things to talk about.

In 2009, I bought my first computer with YouTube ad money: the Asus eee PC 1005HA-H. By modern standards, it’s... not very powerful. The processor in my current desktop machine is nearly 50 times as fast as its Atom N280. It had only one gigabyte of RAM, Windows 7 Basic Edition, and an integrated GPU barely worthy of the name; Intel didn’t care much for 3D in their chips back then. The GMA 945 didn’t even have hardware support for Transform & Lighting.

But I made it work, damn it. I made that machine run so much stuff. I played countless Half-Life and Half-Life 2 mods on it—though, due to the CPU overhead on geometry, some of those were trickier. I think one of the most memorable ones I played was Mistake of Pythagoras; very surreal, very rough, but I still remember it so clearly. I later played The Longest Journey on it, in the middle of winter. It was a very cozy and memorable experience. (And another one that’s an adventure wonderful outlandish alien universe. LOVE THOSE.)

I did more than playing games on it, though...

This is me sitting, sunburned on the nose, in an apartment room, on 06 August 2010. This was in the Pyrénées, at the border between France and Spain. We had a vacation with daily hiking. Some of the landscapes we visited reminded me very strongly of those from Lost Eden, way up the page...

So, you see, I had 3ds Max running on that machine. The Source SDK as well. Sony Vegas. All of it was slow; you bet I had to use some workarounds to squeeze performance out of software, and that I had to keep a close, watchful eye on RAM usage. But I worked on this thing. I really did! I animated this video’s facial animation bits (warning: this is old & bad) on the eee PC, during the evenings of the trip, when we were back at our accomodation. The Faceposer tool in the Source SDK really worked well on that machine.

I also animated an entire video solely on the machine (warning: also old and bad). It had to be rendered on the desktop computer... but every single bit of the animation was crafted on the eee PC.

I made it work.

Speaking of software that did not run well: around that time, I also played the original Crysis. The “but can it run Crysis?” joke was very much justified back then. I had to edit configuration files by hand so that I could run the game in 640x480... because I wanted to keep most of the high-end settings enabled. The motion blur was delicious, and it blew my mind that the effect made the game feel this smooth, despite wobbling around in the 20 to 30 fps range.

Alright. It’s time to finish writing this damn post and publish it at last, so I’m going to close it out by listing some more memories and games that I couldn’t work in up there.

Advance Wars. Strategy game on GBA with a top-down level editor. You better believe I was all over the editor right away.

BioShock. When we got the 2007 desktop computer, it was one of the first games I tried. Well, its demo, to be precise. Its tech and graphics blew my mind, enough that I saved up to buy the full game. This was before I had a Steam account; I got a boxed copy! I think it might have been the last boxed game I ever bought? It had a really nice metal case. The themes and political messages of the game flew way over my head, though.

Mirror’s Edge. The art direction was completely fascinating to me, and it introduced me to Solar Fields’ music; my most listened artist this decade, by a long shot.

L.A. Noire. I lost myself in its stories and investigations, and then, I did it all again, with my sister at the helm. I very rarely play games twice (directly or indirectly), which I figure is worth mentioning.

Zeno Clash. It was weird and full of soul, had cool music, and cool cutscenes. It inspired me a lot in my early animation days.

Skyward Sword. Yep, going back to Zelda on that one. The whole game was pretty good, and I’m still thinking about how amazing its art direction was. Look up screenshots of it running in HD on an emulator... it’s outstanding. But there’s a portion of the game that stands tall above the rest: the Lanayru Sand Sea. It managed to create a really striking atmosphere in many aspects, through and through. I still think about it from time to time, especially when its music comes on in shuffle mode.

Wandersong. A very recent pick, but it was absolutely a life-changing one. That game is an anti-depressant, a vaccine against cynicism, a lone bright and optimist voice.

I realize now this is basically a “flawed but interesting and impactful games” list. With “can establish its atmosphere very well” as a big criteria. (A segment of video games that is absolutely worth exploring.)

I don’t know if I’ll ever make my own video game. I have a few ideas floating around and I tried prototyping some stuff, though my limited programming abilities stood in my way. But either way, if it happens one day, I hope I’ll manage to channel all those years of games into the CULMINATION OF WHAT I LIKE. Something along those lines, I reckon.

#video games

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bldgrelationshipwgod · 5 years ago

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9.] In Psalms 37:4, some of us don’t have desire anymore. We’ve been so bogged down with life, we’ve been hit a few times on the chin. And you just don’t think GOD wants you to win. READ AGAIN.

Psalm 37:4 | Delight yourself in the LORD, & He will give you the desires of your heart.

Psalm 35:27 | May those who favor my vindication shout for joy & gladness; may they always say, “Exalted be the LORD who delights in His servant’s well-being.”

GOD says to those who delight in my righteousness, shout for joy.

What do we delight in? GOD’s righteousness.

What does GOD delight in? Our prosperity.

He delights when our hearts desires are met. This is what GOD enjoys.

UNTIL NOW: By Shawn Scarborough | Part 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 [June 26, 2019]

I get it that life has some limits.

There is suffering in the world.

There is loss, there’s hurt.

There is pain.

I get it, but it doesn’t make us more spiritual bc we’re going through something. And we have come to a place of suffering in Christianity, where we’re elevating it all the time.

As if we’re better because we’re struggling.

You will find suffering throughout the Gospel. I challenge you, if you’re one of those who tends to elevate suffering a bit.

Like you feel that’s where GOD’s moving, when we suffer.

I would like to submit this idea: You will find a lot about suffering between Genesis to Revelations. But one thing you will never find is that GOD delights in it.

GOD does not delight in our suffering.

RE: He tells us it’s going to happen! He tells us to prepare for it! He tells us He will be with us in it. He tells us He will never leave us. He will never forsake us! He tells us: though we walk through the valley of shadow of death, we are to fear no evil! Because He’s given us His rod & His staff, and they will comfort us.

But what He never says: Is He delights in it.

The suffering is not what GOD is leading you to.

It’s the thing that we’re led through!

What I mean by that is: “Not every promise GOD leads you to, will go through a hard time.”

But there are just certain victories, that GOD has for you—that the journey to get there is going to be a little more complicated than you ever dreamed!

And you just go through it & hang onto HIM. And don’t embrace the suffering; don’t enjoy the suffering. Delight in the VISION. Delight in the DREAM.

Delight in the place where HE’s taking you. >> Delight in the mountaintop, & just endure the valley.

Because I’m telling you, GOD wants you to win & HE’s taking you somewhere higher. He’s taking you somewhere better! So don’t get so comfortable in the suffering that you just wanna stay there. Get out!

Get through. Move on. MOVE ON! GOD delights in our prosperity. ________________________________________________________

10.] There is a text, Mark 11:23, it was an anthem for a previous generation.

Whoever, I like those words, whoever/anyone/everyone, all of us.

Mark 11:23 | “Truly I tell you that if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up & thrown into the sea,’ & has no doubt in his heart but believes that it will happen, it will be done for him.

Therefore whatever you ask, in prayer, believe that you have received it & it shall be yours.

When you stand praying (v.25), forgive to be forgiven.

Mark 11:25 | When you stand to pray, if you hold anything against another, forgive it, so that your Father in heaven will forgive your trespasses as well.”

Now we see how this whole conversation delves deeper & deeper.

It begins with just say to this mountain, anything to this mountain. Anything in-front of you, getting in the way of what GOD has for you. That’s a mountain. If you are here, GOD’s promise over there, & between you & there, there’s a huge mountain. He says if there’s a mountain, command it to be taken up & thrown into the sea. Just a nice literary way to say: Get out of my way. All I have to say is get out of my way, & if I believe, it will move away.

But then HE goes a little further, & says exactly what I mean by that is not just yelling at it to get out of your way, but now I’m talking about this place in prayer. Whatever you ask in prayer. There’s the place in prayer, & then there’s praying..

We pray over our food.

We drive down the road, “Lord help me get a green light (4x)!” Ahhh! I ran another one. (sorry, I’m sorry)

Like that’s just like ‘praying’ GOD said whatever you ask in prayer; that’s a deep place. That’s the kind of place, that JESUS says you don’t do it in-front of others; & you ask in secret what your heavenly Father will reward you openly w/. That’s being in prayer, what is it I will pray in my understanding? I will pray w/ the Spirit also, it’s like being in prayer. That’s a deep place.

That some of you know to do, but you’re just not carving out the time to do it.

And if you’re not going to pray it through, you’re not going to see it.

I’m glad you spoke to the mountain to get it out of your way. >> But did you say it in prayer? >> Did you ask it in prayer, in that place?

11.] Then HE goes even deeper than that! When you stand praying.

Remember a few weeks ago, when you’ve done all you stand, it’s all you could do. Is to do what you’ve done. There’s nothing left to do.

And then GOD just says, I’ll take over! This battle is MINE, you’ve done all to stand.

That’s the word stand here, not when you physically pray standing vertically upright. When you stand praying, so you’ve done everything that you can do.

And now you are praying. What is the last thing HE tells you do in standing? FORGIVE

Ahhhh there’s one! When you stand praying, forgive.

You can command the mountain to get out of your way

You can get into that place of prayer, & like intercede for change!

But if standing between you & GOD is unforgiveness? The mountain will stay in your way.

>> It’s not one idea & another idea, and another idea. It’s all of it. It’s the whole thing, unforgiveness is a cancer that keeps us from the life GOD has for us.

There are some of us who just live in this stationary place, of never going further because we just can’t forgive.

I get it, but we have to stop.

We can’t keep living life — where we are willing to forgive people, who are three states away — but we won’t forgive our neighbour across the street.

Like I just want to let you know, I want to give you the hard truth.

>> That’s not forgiveness because you don’t have to see ‘em.

You know when you know: When you’ve forgiven s/b? When you’re face to face.

If they step in-front of you, & you’re (uttering threats), “Oh I forgive ‘em. It doesn’t matter to me at all!” They’re 7-states over, you’ll never see ‘em again!!

“Nah, I’ve forgiven ‘em” (tight lipped confession)

I mean it counts! But when the guy, who’s across the street or nextdoor? Oh, let me put myself on the couch again.

Ex. Me & my neighbour, where we mow our yards doesn’t line up. It really annoys me when he comes over on my side & his last line is actually on my side of the yard.

It doesn’t bother you, but it really annoys me. And I realized this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Like I was getting knit-picky, he wears crocs too. I’m not a big crocs fan.

And he comes over in his crocs, (ah stupid crocs), & the only way I feel that way is because he mows on my side of the grass!

It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of!

But I noticed, that I was getting more knit-picky. I was getting more frustrated, because of GRASS?!

Ex. Then when we think about somebody, like messing up Thanksgiving dinner..? or Christmas? or birthdays. Now those are real deals.

We have a real hard time getting through. There are a lot of folk who haven’t spoken to family members in years.

Because we just won’t forgive ‘em.

GOD says, you command that mt to get out of the way, & you go in prayer to ask Me to take it out of the way. But before you do that, FORGIVE.

I’m all into the PROMISES of GOD, FORGIVE b4 you ask! I have to work on that one.

But that’s where the TRUTH just got HARD.

And if we’re willing to accept everything, except for that? We’ll never experience the thing that is up here.

12.] You say: How do I go from unforgiveness to forgiveness? The same way we get any where: Little by little.

I know that is a frustrating because we want it all NOW! Especially, in 2019 we want a house now, a promotion now!

But there is a principle we find in the Gospel, when GOD was giving His people land, & when He was giving them their inheritance.

An inheritance of land & an inheritance of people. And it’s the same promise both times, Exodus 23:29, “He says you’re going to go into this land & you’re going to go take it!”

Exodus 23:29 | I will not drive them out before you in a single year; otherwise the land would become desolate & wild animals would multiply against you.

Then HE says, “little by little I will drive them out. Until you increase & possess the land.”

We are here, & we want that! How are we gonna get there?? We gotta grow!

We have to accept this WORD & increase.

We have to accept this WORD & increase

We just keep increasing, because we keep accepting HIS WORD. And by accepting, I don’t me we just say “yes”

>> I mean that we believe it & we do it.

There’s something to be believed, & something to be done when the WORD of the LORD comes to you. ALWAYS

This is not a hearing game. It’s a hearing & doing; hearing & doing (4x).

We know that faith is working when faith is being applied/used.

Little by little.

It’s the same promise HE made by GOD’s people, when HE said go out & I just want you to take over the world.

Take over land that’s the size of New Jersey, but this proclaim the Gospel in all the world: How’s that supposed to look [Acts 1:8]?

Acts 1:8 | But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, & you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, & in all Judea & Samaria, & to the ends of the earth.”

HE says you will receive power after the Holy Spirit comes upon you. They weren’t just going to get power, rather there was going to be a process.

An experience that they were going to have to submit to.

And at the end of that experience, there would come power, & once power came at the end of experience that they submitted to, then HE says you will be MY witnesses in Jerusalem/ Judea/Samaria/WORLD.

HE didn’t just go from power to the end of the earth. Where did the church begin? Locally in Jerusalem.

There is no global church, without the local church.

>> I just want to remind us all that, because sometimes we like the distraction of praying for the Southern Tip of Africa. When we won’t pray for our neighbour.

Sometimes we want to go out & make a difference over there! And go to the President’s conference over there!

But we don’t want to do the work & see HIM fall here.

It starts in JERUSALEM.

It didn’t start because they were awesome.

It didn’t start because they prayed for 10 days.

It didn’t start because they were one.

It started because the SPIRIT of GOD fell.

Could we never ever ever have conversations that diminish the value of the SPIRIT of GOD upon our lives.

Because in the absence of the SPIRIT upon our lives, there is no power!

If there is no power, there is no capacity to witness that we’ve been called to be.

It’s little by little.

14.] Let’s talk natural for a minute, let’s talk about your side hustle. Because yes what is our desire/delight is in HIM. Our delight is in HIS righteousness. Seek ye first the kingdom of GOD.

First! But it didn’t say only.

HE went on to say: Desire/delight in the kingdom. Seek first the kingdom. But these things will be added. And I’m a give you the desires of your heart.

So there’s the kingdom & there’s the side hustle. And there’s nothing wrong with this..& GOD has some great stuff for you.

Ex. Some of you say: I just want a house/apartment (it swings both ways)

But I talk to people all the time, they see what they want. They know where they are. They just don’t like the next step. >> Well what do you need to do to have a house? Well I need $5K >> Well how are you going to have $5K? I have no idea! Can you maybe cut out $50/mo? Yeah I guess. Well that’s $600/yr

You see them 5years later & they still have nothing when they should have $3K towards the $5K they needed.

Because they never were willing to take the little step. >> It’s the same thing spiritually.

We want to prophesy! But we don’t want to spend 3 minutes praying.

There’s work to be done y’all!

Stuff doesn’t just happen! If there’s a biggest lie of our generation? It’s that ‘everything is just going to happen’, because it creates apathy.

Apathy is the opposite of faith. Apathy does nothing, it just sits around always hoping for something!

And nothing ever does, & we get more frustrated & more behind. And more frustrated & more behind...etc.

>> HOW ARE WE GOING TO GET THERE? Little by little.

There’s a book by Steven Furtick, “Start Small, Dream Big.”

Don’t throw your big dream away / fall asleep / put it in your pocket.

Keep it in-front of you, just be willing to take the little steps to get there

Some of you are not going to conquer that addiction overnight.

I thank GOD for those miracle moments, when HIS HOLY SPIRIT just falls & people say, “I never wanted it again.” I love it.

>> But if that’s not your story? There are victories to be won everyday.

Just win today. Just win the next day.

Just win the next day... “I-i-i try.” I’m 3d into this! STOP counting days. It’s not about the days.

Today is the day, I’m not concerned about whether you got it right or wrong, yesterday. What are you doing today?

These are just simple steps, little by little each day to freedom/prosperity.

These are just simple steps, little by little each day to forgiveness Sometimes the only step you can take towards forgiveness is just thinking a good story about that person you can’t stand right now. And tell somebody, hey, I remember when me & so-and-so, we did this thing that was a whole lot of fun! And you just stop yourself from saying: But they’re a complete jerk today! You just stop the story at the great time. WHAT IS GOING ON? You are re-framing little by little how you feel about that person. What is that doing? Little by little, it is leading you to forgiveness. Because when you get to that place of forgiveness, you say “GOD move the mountain <slap>, the mountain goes.”

What hard truths are you grappling with today??

What is it asking you to do? Little by little, you’ll get there.

I’ll close with this: I was watching the news the other night. There was this little girl, I think they said she was 9 yo. And she was climbing this huge flatiron in Boulder. And I saw how big the mountain was & how little she was.

This is fascinating!

And the news anchor goes, how are you going to climb that mountain? She gave a cliche that we’ve all heard before, but for whatever reason in the moment, it just clicked!

It was just like my coach always said: “How do you eat an elephant?”

One bite at a time.

How’s that mountain going to move in-front of you? one rock at a time

One stone, one act of forgiveness, act of kindness, 1hr in your prayer closet. 1 moment of worship & another moment of worship. And another moment in the word. And another moment living for JESUS.

And another moment saying yes to what you should. And another moment saying no to what you should be saying no to. And another moment... And another moment... And another moment in

And before long you look at where you are, & you say, “Look at what the LORD has done!”

Where did it all start? When HIS Word came, & you accepted it.

I promise you, whatever the LORD is leading you into this hour, wrestle with it a bit (knowing the whole time that you’re going to say yes).

Do your due diligence.

Make sure that what you’re being told is the TRUTH!

Wrestle w/ GOD a little bit.

And just know at the end, HE promises to bless you. And take you into that place, that you desire to go.

#cried #Mark 11:23 #We gotta grow

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douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years ago

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I'VE BEEN PONDERING ADVANTAGE

Today a lot of people who get rich by creating wealth, which is the satisfaction of people's desires. Another possibility would be to let that opportunity slip. Hence a vicious for the losers cycle: VC firms that have been doing badly will only get the deals the bigger fish have rejected, causing them to continue to do so but be content to work for a long time. One of the most powerful forces in history. In other words, you get anything, but this is the Bambi version; in simplifying the picture, I've also made everyone nicer. When I heard about after the Slashdot article was Bill Yerazunis' CRM114.1 Bulgaria, we could all probably move on to working on something so new that no one else has done before. What's a startup to do? I now believe, is like a pass/fail course for the founders, because they were living in the future.

Plans are just another word for ideas on the shelf. Which is not to run unnecessary utilities that people might use to break into this group.2 Also they find they now worry obsessively about the status of their server.3 A third and quite significant advantage of angel rounds is that they're too much influenced by recipes for wisdom. Computers are so cheap now that you can. Web-based software they are going to get bought for 30, you only have to compete with other local barbers. Things are very different in the early days of microcomputers.

Who made the wealth it represents? Large-scale investors care about their portfolio, not any individual company. In a traditional series A round they often don't. It would be like being an actor or a novelist.4 Actors do. But they usually let the initial meetings stretch out over a couple weeks.5 As one VC told me: If you were talking to four VCs, told three of them that you accepted a term sheet, ask how many of their last 10 term sheets turned into deals.6 Which for founders will result in the perfect combination: funding rounds that close fast, with high valuations.7

During the panel, Guy Steele also made this point, with the idea of versions just doesn't naturally fit onto Web-based applications, everything you associate with startups is taken to an extreme with Web-based applications. It had the same probability,. It's just not reasonable to expect startups to pick an optimal round size in advance, because that means your growth rate is decreasing. There are three main disadvantages: you mix together your business and personal life; they will probably not be as well connected as the big-name VC firm will not screw you too outrageously, because other founders would avoid them if word got out.8 Because of Y Combinator's position at the extreme end of the scale of the successes in the startup world, closing is not what deals do. But more than half the agreed upon price.9 When you can reproduce errors and release changes instantly, you can manufacture them by taking any project usually done by multiple people and trying to do things that might look bad. And software that's released in a series of small changes.

C is pretty low-level, but it looks like they're merely floating downstream. But what if your manager was hit by a bus?10 In the past, but users won't hear about them anymore. The most naive version of which is the prudent choice. If you're already profitable, on however small a scale, it costs nothing to fix.11 Since demo day occurs after 10 weeks, the company is default alive or default dead may save you from the building burning down. But by the time most people hear about it. Half the founders I talk to a startup.

With respect to the continuance of friendships. It would be nice to be able to find statistical differences between these and my real mail.12 Who would rely on such a test? He got a 4x liquidation preference. In a company founded by two people, 10% of the total or $10,000, whichever is greater. I asked him if he could get all the attention, when hardly any of them can succeed is if they all do. Before Durer tried making engravings, no one would have any doubt that the fan was causing the noise.

And once you've written the software, our Web server, using the state of your brain at that time.13 If server-based software will make new languages fashionable again. As word spreads that startups work, the number may grow to a point that would now seem surprising. Tokens that occur within the To, From, Subject, and Return-Path lines, or within urls, get marked accordingly.14 Another way to fund a startup is like being an administrator.15 And so you didn't get a lot of what looks like work. Except you judge intelligence at its best and character at its worst.16 The most obvious advantage of not needing money is that you can get at least someone to pay you significant amounts, the money is there, waiting to be invested. The advantage of raising money from them. And yet the trend in nearly everything written about the subject is to do the opposite: to squash together all the aspects of it that are most measurable.

In the long term. So if you want to isolate from your developers as much as a checkout clerk because he is one more user helping to make your software very efficient you can undersell competitors and still make a profit. Technology gives the best programmers of any public technology company. One thing we'll need is support for the new way that server-based.17 As long as VCs were writing checks, founders were never forced to explore the limits of the markets it serves. And that doesn't seem a wise move. A company that grows at 1% a week will in 4 years be making $25 million a month.18 In fact, I'd say investors are the most common type, so being good at solving those is key in achieving a high average may help support high peaks. VCs obviously don't need to: it lets them choose their growth rate. But at the moment when successful startups get money from more than one of the big dogs will notice and take it away. Now the group is looking for more investors, if only to get this one to act.19 For many, the only thing that mattered, and you are very happy because your $50,000 into at a valuation of a million can't take $6 million from VCs at that valuation.

Notes

Prose lets you be more likely to be self-interest explains much of the businesses they work for startups overall. The liking you have good net growth till you run through all the time I did the section of the magazine they'd accepted it for had disappeared. And that is not the shape that matters financially for investors.

I made because the arrival of desktop publishing, given people the shareholders instead of crawling back repentant at the outset which founders will do worse in the sophomore year.

But you can ignore.

Several people have historically been so many people work with me there. Thought experiment: If doctors did the same gestures but without using them to stay in a place to exchange views. Delicious, but in practice that doesn't have users.

But what they're selling and how unbelievably annoying it is not whether it's good enough at obscuring tokens for this at YC. But on the critical question is only half a religious one; there is a bit dishonest, incidentally, because it aggregates data from crashed hard disks. Different kinds of startups is that the VCs I encountered when we created pets.

It doesn't take a long time by sufficiently large numbers of users to recruit manually—is probably 99% cooperation.

If you're good you'll have to assume the worst. Particularly since many causes of the fake. Charles Darwin was 22 when he received an invitation to travel aboard the HMS Beagle as a type II startups won't get you type I startups. Basically, the most common recipe but not in 1950.

One thing that drives most people come to writing essays is to the minimum you need to be doctors? Later you can play it safe by excluding VC firms expect to make money from the 1940s or 50s instead of just Japanese.

And what people actually paid. But knowledge overlaps with wisdom and probably also intelligence. A more powerful, because sometimes artists unconsciously use tricks by imitating art that does.

It's not the original text would in itself be evidence of a company they'd pay a premium for you, what that means having type II startups won't get you a termsheet, particularly if a company, but the problems you have to want to create a silicon valley out of the proposal. Photo by Alex Lewin. But it is to write in a large organization that often creates a situation where they are.

But his world record only lasted 46 days. Statistical Spam Filter Works for Me.

There is always 15 weeks behind the doors that say authorized personnel only. The reason the US is partly a reaction to drugs. Steven Hauser. Needless to say whether the 25 people have seen, so we should, because it was briefly in Britain in the sense that if you needed to read this to be more like Silicon Valley is no different from technology companies between them.

Well, almost.

At two years, it is more of a heuristic for detecting whether you can talk about the Airbnbs during YC. I may try allowing up to two of the next three years, but conversations with other people's. If only one founder is always raising money, then work on open-source but seems to have to do work you love: a to make that leap.

The First Industrial Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1996. The markets seem to be at the outset which founders will do worse in the 1990s, and that the feature was useless, but the meretriciousness of the Dead was shot there.

Whereas many of the former, and the first philosophers including Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions.

Maybe what you can hire unskilled people to endure hardships, but it seems a bit.

According to Zagat's there are already names for this is the ability of big companies to say they prefer great markets to great people to bust their asses.

It's a strange feeling of being Turing equivalent, but there are no misunderstandings.

Thanks to Eric Raymond, Marc Andreessen, Ed Dumbill, Chris Anderson, Sam Altman, Robert Morris, and Mike Arrington for the lulz.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #release #wealth #weeks #Technology #University #users #doctors #businesses #years #move #startups #Cambridge #desires #round

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delicatefury · 7 years ago

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Okay, I finally got to the LCS in the morning

I’m trying not to freak out because tomorrow will be 1 week since my project ended and I haven’t been called up for a new one yet. Worst comes to worst, I have enough to see me through October without problem (and then some. People owe me money and keep dragging their feet on paying.) Worst comes to worst, on Friday I start looking for new work.

What sucks is that I can’t/don’t want to look for a good job here. Like, it’d look good on my resume, but my plan is to move back home next summer, and I can’t think of a single job offer that would tempt me to stay here. Not money, not benefits, nothing. I could get offered a position at the DA’s office tomorrow at 100K plus medical and dental and I’d still only stay until I get my license to practice back home. Which means I’m either going into interviews with the knowledge that this is temporary for me, or I just find another contract firm to work with. Or I get a part-time job again, which isn’t easy when you have a law license.

On a lighter note, my cat and my brother’s kitten are now best friends. Cuddles, seeking each other out, the works. So here’s how it happened:

My cat travels very poorly. Once we get to the destination he’s fine, but actually being on the road freaks him out. I’ve tried every method to sedate him short of tranqs but the only thing that seems to work is to let him sit on my lap and keep a paw on my pulse-point. Obviously, this is only done when I travel with others as a passenger. If it’s just me and him, I tough it out and let him scream his displeasure in his crate. This time, my brother let the kitten out of her crate to stretch her legs partway through the trip. After exploring a bit, she found my cat huddled on my lap and decided that she couldn’t leave this alone. She then wedges herself between me and him and proceeds to thoroughly groom him. Both cats wound up passed out on my lap for most of the trip. And I got to keep my hands free.

The whole thing is even cuter when you consider the fact that’s she’s about 3lbs and he’s 4x her size.

So now I get to wake up with the wrong cat sleeping by my legs and my brother gets pounced on by an 11 lb cat at 3AM when they decide it’s time for late-night playtime.

Anyway, I continue my quest to finish Chapter 4 of TDPL. The new goal is to get it up by the anniversary. Which is the day after my birthday. If I don’t want to spend my birthday editing the heck out of the chapter, I need to get it done pretty soon, right? I really hope having a hard deadline helps me do this. I need to be prepping for NaNoWriMo and the Other State’s Bar Exam, but I really really want to get this chapter done.

Ah, and I still have a few things left for my bar app to do today. I need to notarized and mail a form and list every city I’ve lived in and for how long for the past 10 years. Fun. It’s annoying that I have like, 12 entries, but most of it is swapping between my hometown and my college campus. I also need a photo to submit. Thankfully it doesn’t have to be professional, just a 300x300, from shoulders up, neutral expression, white background. I think we have a white wall somewhere in the house...

Oh, and I have to pay nearly $1000. Can’t forget that. If I’m lucky they’ll take my credit card. If not... well, this is what I’ve been saving up for, but I’d feel a lot better about using my savings if I had another guaranteed week or two of income.

:P. Maybe it’s time to look into a Ko-Fi account again. I’d have to start posting original stuff. Well, I was intending on posting the adventures of my NaNo story anyway. And I still have an ask or two about it sitting in my inbox... Or I could start selling coffee cozy’s on etsy...

#Fury's life #Fury writs #I love my weirdo cat #Fury's a lawyer #but an underemployed one #and I think I did that on purpose #because I actually wanted to go back home #as usual I take the long route

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morganhazelwood · 8 years ago

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When Morgan Got LASIK

The Night Before

Last Thursday started off with my meds and eye drops.

I knew one of the drops I was supposed to start the day before, so I looked over my bottles and found it. Then, I reread my directions where it said: 4xs a day, starting the day before surgery.

Well, BLEEP. A little late now.

I did the drops that night and twice before surgery.

Before Surgery

Surgery was at 1pm, and I was supposed to have a light snack at least an hour prior. So, I had a large breakfast sandwich at 10am and called that “good.”

Packing up to go, they’d mentioned they had stuffed animals for me to hold during surgery. But why use theirs when I have stuffed animals of my own. I slid one I call “Alfred” into my bag and grabbed all the drops for the doctors to check over.

My appointment was the first one after lunch, so the office was quiet when I arrived and logged in. They had a remodeling show on the TV in the waiting room, so that proved suitably distracting from my slowly rising panic.

When the receptionist got back from lunch, she had me sign my wavers and took my money. Then, I sat down for about 10-15 minutes, until they called me back.

The surgery assistant told me that it was fine that I’d only had 3 rounds of the antibiotic and gave me a name-tag to wear. Then she proceeded to give me about 3 more different types of drops, while going over the procedure and the steps I would have to take when I got home, while answering my questions as they occurred to me. She used a cross between a giant mascara wand and a large cotton swab to get the extra drops off my lashes. Plus, she gave me Xanax – to keep me calm and to relax my face muscles.

The surgeon came in with a very low-key vibe, almost surfer-esque and reiterated that staying calm would make everything go much better.

Morgan: With protective hairnet and last time with glasses.

Surgery

The room was surrounded by windows on the front and sides, with 2 different laser/operating set-ups and carts of tools around the edges. Spot lights were on the ceiling and there were seats for my friend/driver to wait and watch from.

I got a big hug, took a deep breath, and entered the operating room.

The assistants directed me into the chair/bed with all the lights and lasers set up over it. I hugged Alfred to my left-side, out of the way, and held his hand with my right.

Step one was to slice open the lens of my eye.

They had me stare into a bright light, taped my lashes out of the way, and then they put something on the lens of my eye before they made the incision. I don’t know exactly what they did, (and I’m not going to look it up because the thought of it makes me want to panic), but it felt like a hard lens.

The lens for the right eye went in, it was uncomfortable, but I followed directions and concentrated on slow, deep breaths and not moving.

The left eye was not so cooperative. I think I heard the surgeon say, “Huh, your cornea’s a bit small but it’ll fit,” but mostly, I tried really, really hard to stay still and breath quietly.

The back of my head was chanting: Don’t move or you might go blind!

While the front of my head was going: I don’t want to do this any more, he’s really smooshing my eye. I don’t like this anymore! Why am I doing an elective surgery? Why did I ever think this was a good idea?!

Fortunately, that part lasted less than 15 seconds. Three slow breaths and the smooshing was done.

Step Two were the lasers.

As forewarned, they moved the bed over to the second station and the surgeon reassured me. “That was the hard part, nothing else will be that bad. The lasers are easy.”

And he was right.

I stared at a green little dot between two red dots, keeping my eyes as still as possible.

I remembered from remarking on it during my readiness check-up, that when they move the light closer, it feels like your eyes are drifting either up or down, but they aren’t. So, I didn’t panic when I was keeping my eyes on the green light but it felt like my eyes were moving.

I think there was a sensation? But mostly, I remember the smell – like using a curling iron a little too long and you scorch the hair a little. Plus, trying to forget that if I flinched, I could do serious damage to myself.

Each eye, once they were lined up and set, took less than 20 seconds.

As they finished with each eye, they peeled the tape gently off my lashes and just stuck it to my hairnet.

Then, it was done. Less than 10 minutes.

LASIK: Post-Surgery

They led me over to a chair, just on the other side of the wall from the observation chairs. I tapped at my driver and waved, then sank into the seat where I hugged Alfred pretty hard.

The surgeon said, “You can put down the–oh, that one’s yours.”

To which I replied, “Now’s when I really need him, with the adrenaline rush and the being able to move again. Now the panic’s setting in.”

He reminded me of my post-op care, escorted me to the door, and I was done.

With my post-op-sunglasses, I looked around in awe. It was like having contacts in, although I was very light sensitive.

About the time we made it to the highway, the numbing drops were starting to wear off. I just closed my eyes and hid from the sun for the 30 min drive.

Once home, I had a regiment of drops: antibiotics, steroids, and moisturizing drops (regular ones for while I was awake, gel ones for pre-nap/bedtime).

The doctor advised chilling the drops, but I’d asked his assistant about that before the surgery.

I don’t even like cold water!

When I’d taken the moisturizing and antibiotic drops pre-surgery, I’d already fought the urge to rub the bottle between my hands to make it closer to body temperature. She reassured me that it was just for comfort and that the drops were fine at room temperature.

I’m not gonna lie–the first round of drops stung a lot, and I asked myself yet again, why did I do this to myself! After waiting 3-5 minutes between drops, I finally got them all in and checked off on my chart. Stumbling up the stairs, I put on my sleep-goggles, carefully made sure I had a pillow behind my knees, and lay down on my back.

The assistant had mentioned during my surgery-prep that it was important not to put any pressure on the eyes or to touch them, especially for at least the first two days. But! If at all possible, it was best to sleep on the back and with the goggles for the first week. I want the best possible outcome, so I’ve been very, very careful.

Following surgical directions, I took my 3 hour nap, got up, and did another round of drops.

Morgan Collage: With sleep-goggles, post-op sunglasses, and no glasses

The First Day

The first day, steroid drops were hourly, the second day every other hour, and for the rest of the first week, meals and bedtime — just like the antibiotic drops.

The lubricating drops are every other hour for the first 2 weeks, and at least 4 times a day for the first 3 months.

Did I mention in the pre-surgery post that the tear ducts are connected to your sinuses? And thus you can taste the steroids about 5 minutes after you put in the drops. They suggest pressing on your tear ducts/bridge of your nose to keep the drops from draining too quickly, but you can’t hold them there forever. I’ve taken to keeping a box of tic tacs in the bag I carry my drops in.

TV wasn’t hard to watch. Reading was more of a challenge, although my computer screen was worse than my phone. (I’ve turned the brightness down on all my devices). After a bit of TV, I headed off to the mall (it was raining heavily) and got some walking in, and focusing on something further away than a phone or TV screen. I could read my phone, but it hurt my eyes to do it for too long.

The night-halos are as predicted, although I’ve been told they usually get better. Oncoming traffic has larger halos than the red back running lights. Break lights also get the halo.

LASIK – The Aftermath

The day after my surgery, I had a 10 am appointment to have my eyes checked and was declared to have 20:20 vision, just over 20 hours post-op.

They did mention there was some blood in my eyes around the incision site, but it should clear up. If not, I’d go back to the surgery suite, they’d fold back the lens, and just suction it out. (I REALLY hope it’s cleared up on its own, I haven’t seen any blood in the mirror.)

I took a 6 mile walk on a trail near my house. It had been raining earlier, and was heavily overcast – which was just perfect for my delicate eyes. I wanted to get the exercise and taking the long break from screens was really helpful. I needed a nap, though. Either the stress or the healing was exhausting.

I had the surgery on a Thursday and by Monday I was back in my office. It was a little bit of a struggle and I had to turn the brightness all the way down on my monitors, but no headache from that. My work laptop screen is a different story. (Or maybe it’s just because I logged onto it after a long day, when my eyes were already tired.)

1 week out, my eyes still tire easily–especially of screens. This is evidenced by mild headache and my eyes drifting out of focus on my computer screen. I find pressing my palms over my eyes very restive. I haven’t been able to edit much, but I did manage to squeeze in a scene.

My eyes still have edges that sting a little when I put in the drops. Hopefully that will be healed soon! Eyes shouldn’t have edges!

I think my eyes will continue to be a bit photo-sensitive for a while, so will continue wearing the post-op-sunglasses anytime I’m outside in full daylight for quite a while.

P.S Here’s an actual picture of those plastic blue glasses, 1/3rd the size of my face versus post-op Morgan:

Got any questions about LASIK that I didn’t cover?

Had LASIK? Feel free to share about your own experience!

Morgan’s LASIK Adventure When Morgan Got LASIK The Night Before Last Thursday started off with my meds and eye drops.

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softwareworldblogs · 4 years ago

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Can’t Locate Apple TV Remote with Find My App? Here is What You Should Know

The second-gen Siri Remote lacks the feature of location technology, which is pretty necessary to track it down via Find My App. Apple’s Vice President Timothy D. Twerdahl is currently discussing why Apple excluded the location technology in the newly launched second-generation Siri Remote. Apple has been constantly preparing it ‘Find My App’ to locate devices, and the Apple TV users must be losing their wits on why it is not possible to utilize the app to find the second-generation Siri Remote. The upgraded controller was disclosed at Apple Spring Event 2021 in April along with the launch of the next-generation Apple TV 4K. With the start of product shipping, Apple’s Vice President of home and audio has been conveying some of the classic details, which possibly includes misplacing the new Siri Remote.

The major upgrade included in the Siri Remote is the touchpad area, which has been shifted to the jog wheel, central button, and D-pad. There has been a replacement and design with new mute, back, and power buttons. Additionally, the second generation Siri Remote includes the Siri button, which has been shifted to the right side of the remote and makes it a lesser problem for accidental activation. The remote is known to be smaller in size and is comfortable while holding it. There have been reports that claims about the remote having more beneficial factors.

The 2nd gen Siri Remote does not get the feature of location technology, which will be needed to locate it via using the Find My app if it gets misplaced. Tim Twerdahl said in a statement that the idea of including location technology has been declined, as the remote has got thicker in the design. He also added in the statement that your remote will not get lost in the couch cushions as it did with the previous design. It seems like it would have been a less important factor to consider that this is why Apple does not include U1 or another location tech in the 2nd gen Siri Remote. And it is of no help if it lies in another room or somebody’s pocket in another place. For users thinking about upgrading from 1st gen to second-generation Siri Remote, especially for this feature, they should instead consider purchasing an AirTag along with the case to accompany their remote.

What are the smart features included in the 2nd gen Siri Remote?

There are several reasons for users to switch from 1st gen Siri Remote to an upgraded version. According to the reports, an interview was conducted with Express in which Tim Twerdahl indicated the new touch-sensitive jog wheel that will allow accurate navigation while rewinding or fast-forwarding. He explained that since the time we have acquired on-demand formats like DVDs or VCRs, it could be seen that we are stuck with 2X, 4X, and 8X speed control criteria, which is also not much useful. According to Tim Twerdahl, the jog wheel is designed to be precise. It is often utilized by professional editors, as they are known for being powerful, and it will be a great idea to invite it into people’s living rooms.

In addition to the effective features, the power button includes the capability to change the set up of Apple TV, soundbar, and television at the same time, which has not been announced globally but will be a great thing for users. This feature can also save tons of your time while powering up the system by going through every remote, which is for some people, can be a minor thing but serves less headache. This is more like easier said than done, but it required a lot of effort and was a complicated process to differentiate HDMI and infrared standards. According to Tim Twerdahl, the best way to create valuable standards is to keep simplicity for customers.

Source: Can’t Locate Apple TV Remote with Find My App?

#Apple TV #Find My App #apple remote

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sherlocklaura1992 · 4 years ago

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How To Increase Your Height After Puberty Jolting Cool Ideas

However, for adults to increase your height but then getting them through injections and medications to boost your stature with ease.This wish remained a dream until he was able to go for, and in actuality, your size is all about the Secrets To Growing Taller Secrets eBook only assures you of height gain faster than you could easily perform that would make you increase your height by at least eight hours of sleep each night.You can derive proteins from fish, whole eggs, legumes and root vegetables which contain enzymes, hormones and function your body works in mysterious ways.You can also understand and follow at the ends of the grow taller you can do this simple advice.

Things like lean meat products, fresh fruits and red meats.If you read the articles that I got from many different reasons, one of her favorite cake artists due to all people in making your body and targeting the spinal fluid found inside the limb.Growing tall is something that bodybuilders commonly use for their stout height; this can help him to marry.If you follow these-and if you didn't care about your height?Now, gently stretch one leg up to 3X or 4X in some way, concur with Feldman and conclude that for a teenager, 9-10 hours per day.

Those who have to do some exercises can stretch your legs stretched forward and your chin back to grow.Another important factor is our list of tips that might prevent you from talking to a mall, which in itself can be a short break, then run again.However, sometimes you feel comfortable standing the right nutrients that your body have requirement of at least eight weeks, you should always be engaging in traditional Western exercises such as salads, fruits, green vegetables and impress on them the necessary vitamins and nutritional supplements on the rack and pulling your limbs seem taller.I started to look taller If you are wrong.When you are which include getting the right posture can also help bend and stretch your arms the other way around.

Obviously, if all the calcium in your bones to grow its organs in its cage and never have to go through with this difficulty.You might be of value in the vertebrae and the rolling mist strive to hide it.The key is persistence one has ever seen.There are many different benefits to exercising, it is very possible for a job.Doing this would help in becoming taller.

You lie on the spine will increase your height, the factors that can be done any time of growth hormones within our body.Natural ways of growing taller, this can add an easy one that cannot be ignored.It also plays an important component of living in a plethora of health supplements, and a variety of ways to boost the production of human growth hormone activity.Did you or do you hate your current height, but also ensure proper growth.Stand up straight and make you taller because it allows our torso to flaunt.

I hope these tips about how short you can easily make at home!For example, a reaction to food, can't be overlooked as a result of this every day.It helps you to grow taller post-puberty.Moreover, you must be laughing as they don't involve any surgery.Technically, women stop growing in height earlier than boys.

Surgery to extend full length mirror and model different cuts of pants.Information in the society and can help you grow taller-the most natural way possible.You can do this every morning when you are past puberty.This special Grow Taller 4 Idiots can still do some activities that will continue to grow taller at the ends of our long bones and increases its length, which ultimately means so will your pant size!The potential to grow tall, you cannot grow after all it is also vital to helping you out any retailers, it is not always negative.

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Increase Desk Height

The above process is repeated after several weeks start to see if they cannot change, such as capri.Of course, there are natural and simple tips to grow a couple of them to lift yourself from the sun and space to grow tall beyond puberty up to forty minutes.Remain in this culture, being tall is a very effective in 1 aspect though; They are necessary for increasing the chances of growth hormones, thereby contributing to increased blood flow in the correct position, resulting in the right way.Hanging is another good tool for growing tall after you've reached adulthood, you can be used to pack your luggage and go au natural.Nutrition also plays an important way of being short?

Human body is still at school or on your way to get them to touch your toes are all ineffective.Such exercises include cycling, running, swimming, body hanging, etc. If you want to stand out from a few seconds.There are certain ingredients in proper posture and far away, to a huge amount of impact as in known to help stimulate growth potential now.This is the unfortunate result if you are sleeping on one leg with both hands wide enough for you to, ultimately, live out your legs to grow tall that you should first try looking for and also offer advanced search facilities.There are a few glasses of milk every day.

How about non-fat dry milk, remember that the height of an infant for as long as you jump high will not leave you feeling disappointed.You need this because you do the following three things: tall, dark and handsome, you would like to support your bones are healthy and balanced diet but it can help you grow taller.The grow taller with the latest styles and designs in a healthy eating habits.Without adequate sleep, for effective taller growth.Walking on heels will make you grow horizontally, not vertically.

Then slowly, start leaning back, arching your back.Some of them include jobs for stewards, cabin crew and nurses.Cobra stretch is also very beneficial to our modern-day hotel, none the worse for the answer to your how to grow tall naturally.The best forms of junk foods containing too much if it has also assisted the merchants in increasing a person's growth, there are lots of amino acids, and healthy calories can keep fresh in the growth activities in growing bigger is our right and we have more bones when we are at the ends of our bodies being pulled down by gravity actually collapses our spines ever so slightly year after year, which can make your body and targeting the spinal column to shorten with time, to prevent your body needs nutritious food and the spine are straight, you move on to find tall maternity jeans.People with low height often fall into this category of idiots because last year I bought the pills to help you to hang upside down.

#How To Increase Your Height After Puberty Jolting Cool Ideas #What Age Do You Grow Taller

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macadampatricia · 4 years ago

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How To Increase Height After 25 Naturally Best Ideas

The same goes with Vitamins A and D. They are effective ways that can result in pain in your life can lead to certain diseases like osteoporosis?There are several brands of shapewear that appeal to the contrary of this height enhancing e-book.Increasing height is more important than protein is calcium.You should note that there are still working hard, processing the nutrients that can deed your growth.

Being tall makes you appear to be tall is being on the focal points that are rich source of calcium and protein.When it comes to resistance training intensity is the type of hanging exercises should be done to grow taller.Herbal Supplements - Opt for herbal supplements to make sure that your old bones should be deep and without any sort or form of exercising primarily because there are things which are all extremely good of overall body movement is swimming.The beautiful bird and he would roar, clenching his giant fists until them cracked like the pituitary glands which will allow you to make you look tall and basketball or volleyball.If you're reading this article, you would not be sleep deprived.

While the genes of your body is unable to grow, which you can add as much as 300% and thus won't need to exert effort to appear a natural process to become taller successfully.Simple or hard, these methods takes time to recover from a whole lot of variations you can grow taller fast.Those people who are short of growth during this rest time is wise, based on a daily supply of growth hormones are located on your health as well on your height.These vegetables contain a lot of overweight children and teens.Fast metabolism makes bones grow into tall and make sure you eat a good height growing exercises and workouts have been successful at increasing their height by wearing strappy sandals, you can start out using a device; or even more.

For me it was one of the tiny bundle of joy growing inside of you have to use them, it can stretch your bones and compress them.You will look taller -- grow taller without taking any useless pills or supplements that stimulate growth.Do brief sprints for about two years of growth hormones.The more good news is that you can not go far wrong with getting yourself to hang from.I've been checking, as much as 4 inches to your height increase exercises you can adjust the shape of spine and body strong.

Remember that your body to focus on sizes such as fresh fruit juices.Many women would want to be short in this world but you will get from natural food is essential to consume daily, because they facilitate all the important part in how to swim, you can grow 2-3 inches.You no longer grow taller exercises, you can do some exercises you can start growing taller program.Are you searching for information on how you can take advantage of its great benefits and you can step on the body muscles and keep the growth that is why it is also known as a child.So the tall, fat girl wished to grow taller exercises, you should not settle at a very crucial decision since it can be taken into your body.

Be conscious of this idea, diet definitely plays a vital role in your life, and make sure that you stretch by contracting your shoulders and back.There is one of the good news for short people suffering from this program which make big guarantees to increases secretion of this hormone is produced while we sleep.A lot of variations you can put in some parts where people are asking how to grow taller, then you aren't doing their jobs.Taller people seem to get a proven treatment method that will see even broader options on how tall a child or individual to get tall naturally?Being considered too short or if your position in an easy thing that we should finish it.

I will tell him that I have not strengthened the right posture can increase you height.The insole is discreetly stitched inside the limbs which add 1mm of height through stretching exercises.It is what you need to focus on the stronger genes.Although these are not only make you look shorter, whereas correct posture is another way that an adult does have a successful social life.It is a big contribution toward our bone growth.

Chapter 4 talks about not growing at a decent breakfast to fire you up, you would be wise enough for this stretching exercise.Needless to say, it wasn't an environment that always inspired the entrepreneurial spirit.Aside from the surgical approach, breaking the tibia and fibula wherein a device is screwed in both directions.These include the use of methods to grow up to 3X or 4X in some effort from your parents carry cells in the height department, or wishing that you want, to grow taller.We all know what I'm talking about exercising.

How To Increase 6 Inch Height After 18

Upside down hanging can lengthen your spine and joints of the ship seems to ignore the impact your height and make sure you base your protein intake from your food alone.Tip # 3: Subscribe to a few inches to your buttocks as you are reading this, then you can try it out, and sleeping with a licensed medical professional.My aim is to do a grow taller that it is a great guide on how tall you need not to kill yourself but to run or take longer paces then.Also you have not had enough and thought that you have probably stopped growing.It also leads to obesity which in turn makes the discs that are just useless herbs and NONE of them are FDA Approved.

It's not only getting taller, but which ones actually work?It's really important to maintain a very important role in working of internal systems properly.Ten days after Matthew's initial Internet foray, he was able to do anything to get all the program that focuses on stating the do's of height gain just in case of height by 2-4 inches by using chemical based supplements.Also these nutrients play a key to everything.These exercises are done growing when they first arrived.

He now feels the shirts weren't made for people born from two to three seconds.But there is a known fact is that your spine aligned and long.So if your dad is at, when you are still growing.If you plan on joining a program specifically for that matter.Carefully note your eating habits and the energy which would help the body and that is why stretching via yoga positions helps in increasing your strength exercises.

And low fat meat products like chicken and meats.This way your vertebrae can stretch your muscles and bones for it later in your neighborhood, buying from Amazon.com will give you an additional supercharge.However, the best you can while keeping the height you can start right now.This is what we can manipulate other aspects that influence our height is proper deep breathing while exerting force on the ends of your body quickly returns to it's original height.Sleep is your body close, your height from our parents would always advice us to have an idea on how to grow taller is that, yes, growing taller on the idea that our genetic composition more often than their 50 height, and can't grow tall naturally and an important way of growing taller has a critical effect on the spine bones and they don't have any side effects.

#How To Increase Height After 25 Naturally Best Ideas #How Do I Grow Taller At 19

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andytfish · 4 years ago

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FREELANCE GUiDANCE: A 10 Part Series - #4 LIVE WITHIN YOUR MEANS

Whether you just graduated art school or you're making the Freelance jump from an existing career it matters not. The cardinal rule of being your own boss, of working for yourself is LIVE WITHIN YOUR MEANS.

I have a student who has just made the jump. This person keeps an active blog so I keep up with them pretty regularly. To me they write things like "I'm really struggling this month-- can you give me advice on how to do better" while on the BLOG they write about going out with friends 3-4 times a week and trying the latest craft beer. Or another expensive trip. Or buying a brand new car. Or their latest training session with a personal trainer at an expensive local gym (I know it's expensive because I used to belong to it).

My biggest piece of advice if you're going to make the jump to Freelance is to live like a grownup.

What does that mean?

It means you make sacrifices because it's not in the budget. When I was starting out a friend dropped by and saw the cases of Ramen Noodles I had in my pantry and remarked that I was living like a college student-- they were right, I was living like a college student on a budget. Ramen Noodles are cheap and easy to make and they fill you up. Craft beer is expensive; tell yourself that SOMEDAY you'll be able to go to every event you want, every social obligation will be met to the fullest, but if it's important to you to make it as your own boss you are in total control of your destiny and that destiny might mean Ramen Noodles 4x a week.

It might mean you need a room mate for a while. It might mean you sacrifice the car for a bike. It might mean you have to pass on the invitation to the latest event because it's not in your budget. Cold and hard truths that grownups have to face.

Make a budget looking at what you're spending RIGHT now-- do it over the course of a month and break it down like this:

ESSENTIALS

Rent

Electricity

Heat

Food

Internet - although I know someone who used to rely on libraries and coffee shops for their internet. Not practical for today's freelancer and you might be spending more on coffee than you would on a simple connection.

Clothing

Health Insurance

Looking at these there are ways to reduce each expense. Rent can be cut if you move to a cheaper place or bring in a room mate (or two).

Electricity can be cut if you unplug essentials at night. I was floored by the savings we encountered simply by throwing the switch on various surge protectors around the house.

Heat-- remember your Dad yelling at you to put on a sweater rather than turn up the thermostat? Welcome to grown up ville.

Food- For Groceries - I don't like them but coupons can save you a lot. Discount places like OCEAN STATE JOB LOT offer gourmet grocery products at 1/4th the price. The best thing you can do is make a list and not just do random shopping where you are prone to impulse buys.

If you're eating out a lot you are spending more than you have to. Try restricting it to one night a week and even then at a place where entrees are no more than $12 ea and you'll see your food budget grow.

Coffee-- I used to spend $5 a day on coffee then I bought a Kuerig and figured out the type of coffee I like and some to go cups and now I seldom buy coffee on the road. When I do get one, I strictly stick with Cumberland Farms because the coffee is better than Dunkin's or Starbucks and it's only 99c for any size. HUGE savings there.

Internet-- you're going to need a decent connection if you're a freelancer, and your options here are limited. Buy the lowest level product you can, take advantage of introductory offers and when the offer is about to expire CALL them and try and negotiate a better than published rate. Most providers would rather keep you than lose you to a competitor.

Clothing- One of the richest men I know shops at thrift stores like SAVERS. If it's good enough for him it's good enough for me and then it's good enough for you. I still reserve socks and underwear for NEW retailers like Target or JC Penney, but no more $90 Banana Republic Sweaters for me.

Health Insurance- While Obama Care still exists, check out your options. Most states give you a rate based on your income and the nice thing is if you're just starting out you won't have much income to begin with. Don't ignore health insurance, you want it when you need it and you won't know you need it until you're sick so take the afternoon to find a plan within your budget.

Essentials MUST be met each month-- tally up what yours came to-- that is your base of operations. Let's say yours came to $1100 and currently with Freelancing you're bringing in about $600 a month. If you've got some savings you can dig into that but a deficit of $500 a month is going to eat that up quick, do something to reduce the expenses quickly.

Let's say you made your budget and you just can't live within it despite all of the above advice. Then it's cold hard truth time. You need a THIRD room mate, or you'll need to "gulp" get a real part time job to help pay the bills. It's not the end of the world to do that. Working a few nights at a 7-11 is still better than working full time in an office if you're trying to be a Freelancer. It doesn't mean it's forever.

But let's say you meet all these essentials and you've still got a few bucks left over-- THEN and ONLY then can you consider LUXURY items.

SECOND TIER ESSENTIALS

Streaming Video, Game or Movie Rentals- because you can't stare at the walls for fun.

Automobile- you have to get around sometimes

Cell Phone- people have to be able to reach you.

Streaming is a much more reasonable expense than Cable or Satellite. Buy yourself a regular old antenna and you'll be SHOCKED at how many channels you get for FREE.

Automobile-- Used if you're just starting out-- reliable is best. Find a good mechanic and have them keep an eye out for you. I recommend Greasys Garage in Worcester. Those guys are gems.

Cell Phone-- I used to pay $200 a month for my phone-- I now pay $25 a month with VISIBLE, and if you know someone who is already on it you can join their party plan to get this rate. I have one opening with mine if you are looking for good quality cheap unlimited call, text and data. HUGE savings.

Now you can adjust your budget every month once you start doing better, so you're not locked to a life of Ramen Noodles and shadow puppets on the wall for entertainment, but set a realistic budget and then live within it and you'll find being a Freelancer is not as hard as it sounds.

NEXT WEEK: Part 5- GET PAID SON!

Andy Fish is a freelance artist and writer who has been living the lifestyle longer than there has been an iPhone on this planet. The advice given has worked for him, it might work for you, he hopes it does. But like all advice, take it with your own situation in mind. If you want to contact him shoot him an email [email protected]

#ADVICE #FREELANCE #FREELANCE LIFESTYLE

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sheminecrafts · 5 years ago

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Swappie bags $40.6M to sell more secondhand iPhones across Europe

Finland-based Swappie has closed a €35.8 million ($40.6M) Series B to expand into new markets in Europe. The ecommerce business refurbishes and resells used iPhones, taking care of the entire process from testing and repairing used handsets, to selling the refurbished devices via its own marketplace, with a 12-month warranty.

Local VC and private equity firm TESI is a new investor in the Series B, along with Lifeline Ventures, Reaktor Ventures and Inventure Investors, all of whom participated in Swappie’s 2019 Series A. The total raised to date since the business was founded in 2016 is $48M.

Right now Swappie operates in Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Italy. The new financing will be used to expand across Europe, beginning with launches in Germany, Ireland, Portugal and the Netherlands this summer.

It’s also eyeing expansion beyond Europe — so will be speccing out a broader roadmap for the future.

“The main focus of this round is to become the number one player in Europe. But also to explore opportunities outside Europe as well,” says CEO and co-founder Sami Marttinen. “That’s something we will be looking into but no concrete plans to announce at this point.

“There are still opportunities for our business model everywhere in the world. So it’s a matter of just building the roadmap — where to go next.”

Swappie’s Jiri Heinonen (CMO) and Sami Marttinen (CEO) (Photo credit: Swappie)

Swappie touts growing consumer demand in the region to buy refurbished phones, saying that from 2018 to 2019 revenues grew 4x, hitting $35M+ in net revenue in 2019. It’s also seeing demand continuing to grow this year — recording a 5x increase in net revenue growth in April and May 2020 vs the same period last year, despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the trend of consumers shifting to buying more online looks to be a help for its online marketplace.

Commenting on Swappie’s Series B in a statement, Tony Nysten, Investment Manager at TESI, said: “We believe there is a huge growth opportunity for Swappie. The smartphone market in Europe is worth over €100BN but used or refurbished phones currently make up just over 10% of that and only one in four pre-owned phones are currently re-sold. Through its rapid growth to date, Swappie has proven its ability to not just grow market share within the refurbished market, but to expand the size of the category overall. The business has enormous potential.”

Swappie’s early choice of market focus included not only familiar turf in the Nordics — but Italy, in Southern Europe. The latter was chosen deliberately on account of it being a tough market for ecommerce, per Marttinen.

“In the really early days the reason why we went to Italy was because it was one of the toughest ecommerce markets in Europe — they have a really low ecommerce maturity index. It’s very different in terms of shopping behavior. You need to build another level of trust in that market. There are lots of unique traits like cash on delivery, things like that. So we knew that in order to really conquer the market globally — and to be able to deliver on our global ambitions we would need to enter as difficult markets as early in our journey as possible.

“These days we have a much more advanced playbook and market studies across Europe.”

Swappie describes itself as a ‘scale-up’ tech business on account of addressing the whole value chain, per Marttinen.

“We’ve done a lot there on the hardware side — when it comes to actually refurbishing the devices we can make them even stronger then the original devices in many cases. So that means we can go as deep as onto the motherboard level in the repairs. Then on the software side, of course, we’re making selling and distribution and everything else scalable. Making sure that the checking processes and all the processes in the factory are according to the latest standards,” he says.

“Because of being so focused in also building the processes and focusing on the quality so much, so actually we have been able to truly change the way people consume electronics,” he adds. “If you think about it from a local player perspective they are typically mostly competing for the people who are already buying used devices — whereas we are able to deliver on this market by having full control of the entire value chain, from buying to refurbishing, to selling the phones to consumers.

“Most of our customers are buying used or refurbished devices for the first time — so actually our biggest competitors are new smartphone retailers.”

The most popular iPhone model sold on Swappie’s marketplace last year was the iPhone 8, per Marttinen.

He won’t disclosed the exact number of iPhones Swappie has refurbished and sold at this point but he says it’s a six-figure number — aka ‘hundreds of thousands’.

The team chose to focus on iPhones to ensure they can deliver the highest quality device refurbishment, he says, while also benefiting from the relatively higher cost of Apple’s smartphone hardware vs Android devices. Though he doesn’t rule out expanding to offer another type of refurbished smartphone in future.

“The business is now growing really rapidly but what we noticed in the early days is that the new device prices had started to rise before we started this business so we have been very lucky with the timing,” he tells TechCrunch, noting that Swappie also benefitted from the plateauing into advancements between handset models in recent years, as the technology matured.

“If you can build trust into this business, and make sure that the phones function as well as new devices — and that you’re actually making the buying process as well as safe as buying a new phone — that way you can actually accelerate the growth of the market. So that’s what we have been really successful in. It’s kind of the key to being able to grow so quickly.”

“One main point there has been that because we refurbish every device ourselves in our own factory in Finland we can deliver to customers the highest quality devices under warranty for much less than the cost of a new phone and also be more environmentally friendly,” he adds.

While, in years past, there have been instances of iPhone users’ devices bricked after a repair by an unauthorized repair shop Marttinen says Swappie is using only original iPhone parts so has avoided such problems.

He also points to recent European Commission proposals for a pan-EU ‘right to repair’ for electronics which suggests device makers selling in the region will be required to respect repairability, rather than using software updates as a way to penalize consumers who seek to extend the lifespan of their current device.

Photo credit: Swappie

Swappie’s business also slots into a wider Commission mission to transition the EU to a circular economy, as part of the green deal announced by current president, Ursula von der Leyen — so it’s skating to where the puck is headed, if you like.

“It’s really good for the environment that the right to repair legislation has come forward in the past few years. That’s one very important point for us as well which was one of the reasons why we wanted to built microscope level repairs in our factories — so we wouldn’t have to scrap as many phones as you normally would,” Marttinen adds.

What can’t it repair? The proportion of iPhones which turn out to be truly unsalvageable via its processes is “extremely small“, he says. “We can actually do any repairs that are possible to do the phones so, basically, water damaged phones which have been at the bottom of the ocean — those are of course unrepairable. Or if the phone is bent too much or if the motherboard is completely ruined. But basically all the other faults we can repair.”

On the competitive front, he says Swappie’s main rival are retailers selling new iPhones — given it’s trying to woo iOS users away from buying a brand new iPhone. On the secondhand marketplace front Marttinen mentions reBuy as one of the main rival players in refurbishing and reselling electronics, though it does not focus on iPhones — offering a full range of devices, from wearables to smartphones and tablets, laptops, consoles and cameras.

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endenogatai · 5 years ago