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hermitologist · 2 years

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My Favorite Records of 2022

Hi. I made another list.

First thing’s first. I apologize for the lack of music recommendations and runs on my Instagram this year. Thrice had a pretty busy touring schedule, and with the kids back in school the local virus carousel was BRUTAL. Seemed like we got to sample a new strain of the crud literally every other week. It’d rip its way through the house, we’d send the kids back to school, they’d bring a new batch of snot home a few days later, and it’d start up all over again. Rinse and repeat. It was hard to get out there and run with all that going on. Also: Blame where blame is due ... I got a little lazy when I wasn’t picking up goopy Kleenex or horking up some crud of my own. I”ll be back next year. (Hopefully.)

An-y-waaaaay ...

I did manage to listen to a lot of new music despite "the circumstances”, and I have compiled all of my favorites for you here. There's a pretty clear cut Top 5 this year based on play counts, but the rest of the list didn’t really make sense to rank because this shit’s really all subjective anyway. I broke the list into categories that made sense to me, at the time, for organization’s sake. Each record has link to the band/label’s Bandcamp or website, so please please PLEASE support the artists you love beyond just streaming their music.

Playlists with a song from each record are below. I know it’s a lot of music. I know it’s all over the place. I know you don’t have time to listen to five-and-a-half hours of music. At the very least, I’d suggest at needle-dropping through the entire thing and earmarking some stuff to check out. That’s how I find a good chunk of this stuff.

And please let me know what you dug this year and think I should check out!

Hope you all have a safe and happy holiday season. See you next year!

PLAYLISTS

My Favorites of 2022 Playlist (Spotify)

My Favorites of 2022 Playlist (Apple Music)

My Favorites of 2022 Playlist (Tidal)

THE TOP 5

Elder - Innate Passage

No contest here. This is a clear cut #1 for me. Fifty-four minutes of absolutely glorious, wholly transcendental, life-affirming, dreamy/heavy metal-adjacent prog. As a musician, I can tell you firsthand how hard it is to write a long song that doesn’t *feel* long. These fellas routinely crank out high-quality 10-minute-plus jams that you’ll hope never end. Queue this up and take it for a run, a long walk, or a long drive and you’ll see what I mean. It’s magical. And yes, it came out late in the year, but I haven’t been able to stop listening to it or thinking about it since, and I don’t see that changing for a long while.

Meshuggah - Immutable

It’s damn near impossible to find the right words for this band, let alone this record, but this is absolute wizardry, yet again, from the best metal band that has ever existed. Pure face-melting heaviness. They routinely reset the bar for what heavy music can and should be, and Immutable is no exception. It might even be my favorite Meshuggah record ever.

Museum of Light - Horizon

Ultra-heavy, sludgy, dynamic, meditative, push vs. pull, melody vs. dissonance post-rock in the vein of Kowloon Walled City, Shiner, Traindodge, and Torche. The songwriting is so clean and efficient, and the record as a whole is just a gorgeous, perfectly crafted arc. It’s perfect.

Holy Fawn - Dimensional Bleed

The heaviest, prettiest, most infectious batch of post-rock/metal I’ve heard in a long while. Dynamic shifts that are pure catharsis. A band that has the ability to give you euphoric chills one minute, and bring you to tears the next, headbanging all the while. Their first LP blew me away, and I wasn’t sure they could top it, but they totally have.

The Beths - Expert In A Dying Field

This record was an instant pick-me-up this year. A much-needed salve amidst all the stress and anxiety and depression the world can throw your way these days. Twelve preposterously hooky jams, that will put a smile on your face and a bounce in your step (even when the lyrical content dips into darker themes). It totally rules.

15 OTHER RECORDS THAT STAYED IN HEAVY ROTATION (in no order)

PLOSIVS - S/T

Drug Church - HYGIENE

Tvivler - Kilogram

Birds In Row - Gris Klein

gospel - The Loser

Cult of Luna - The Long Road North

Russian Circles - Gnosis

Conjurer - Pathos

Anxious - Green House

SPICE - Viv

PUP - The Unraveling of PUP The Band

The Smile - A Light For Attracting Attention

Pianos Become The Teeth - Drift

Cloakroom - Dissolution Wave

Stray From The Path - Euthanasia

OTHER RECORDS I ENJOYED (also in no order)

Architects - the classic symptoms of a broken spirit Pedro the Lion - Havasu And So I Watch You From Afar - Jettison Mass Worship - Portal Tombs Rival Consoles - Now Is Fleshwater - We’re Not Here To Be Loved Abraham - Debris de Mondes Perdus Norna - Star is way way is Eye Dan Mayo - Greenhouse Silvan Strauss - FACING Vein - This World is Going to Ruin You Author & Punisher - Krüller Black Thought/Dangermouse - Cheat Codes Cave In - Heavy Pendulum Square Peg Round Hole - Reservoir Kendrick Lamar - Mr. Morale and The Big Steppers Pete Rock - Petestrumentals 4 Pet Fox - A Face In Your Life Swami John Reis - Ride the Wild Night Heriot - Profound Morality Bastions - Majestic Desolation Wake - Thought Form Descent Inclination - Unaltered Perspective Momma - Household Name Hot Water Music - Feel The Void KEN Mode - NULL Animals As Leaders - Parrhesia Mark Giuliana - the sound of listening Meat Wave - Malign Hex Haunted Shores - Void Blessed - Circuitous Celeste - Assassine(s) Louis Cole - Quality Over Opinion Grivo - Omit Wonder Years - The Hum Goes on Forever A Hope For Home - Years Of Silicon Mountaineer - Giving Up The Ghost Norma Jean - Deathrattle Sing for Me Lamb Of God - Omens Psychonaut - Violate Consensus Reality Callous Daoboys - Celebrity Therapist Easy Prey - Unrest 84 Tigers - Time in the Lighthouse Codespeaker - S/T Colonial Wound - Easy Laugh Thousandaire - Ideal Conditions

THE NEW BOTCH SONG I LISTENED TO LIKE 247 TIMES IN 3 DAYS

Botch - One Twenty Two

10 FAVORITE EPs

Downward - The Brass Tax Cult Leader/End - Gather & Mourn Irist - Gloria Gleemer - Here at All GoGo Penguin - Between Two Waves Lockstep - Lockstep 2 Portico Quartet - Next Stop Be Well - Hello Sun Chamber - Carved In Stone Waldo’s Gift - Improvisations Vol. 2

1 RECORD FROM 2019 THAT DIDN’T “CLICK” UNTIL 2022

Car Bomb - Mordial

2 RECORDS THAT DIDN’T COME OUT IN 2022 BUT GOT A LOTTA SPINS

Low - Double Negative Pile - Green and Gray

3 PODCASTS THAT I COULDN’T LIVE WITHOUT

Office Hours - humor, music, pure joy The Distraction - sports and social commentary/humor Effectively Wild - baseball analysis/humor

#music #podcasts #albumsoftheyear #topalbumsof2022 #endoftheyearlists

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blazehedgehog · 4 years

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Sorry to ask this, but what are your thoughts on Dunky's "I'm Done Making Good Videos" with regards to content you aspire to author vs what the average joe actually searches for

I don’t know if I’m the best person to be asking this, really.

Let’s get fully inside baseball here. Let’s pull the curtain all the way back. Actually, let’s burn down the curtain. I’m going to overshare like hell right now. Get ready for the most stream-of-consciousness rambling ever, because a lot of this has been boiling in my head and dying to get out.

For the entirety of my Youtube channel, I’ve pretty much only ever done what I want to do. Very rarely do I chase trends, or do what’s hot, or even do what people want me to do. I do whatever I feel like doing.

I have paid the price for that. My Youtube channel is 15 years old as of this year, and only now am I slowly inching towards 25,000 subscribers. I am incredibly inconsistent. What’s my channel post? Well, a couple times a year, maybe I put together an edited essay/review for a game. But I also sometimes post random, unedited, uncommentated gameplay footage. Maybe it’s a fan game, maybe it’s a gameplay demo, maybe it’s Fortnite. Sometimes, I also post remastered video game music. Every Halloween, I dump a bunch of one-off horror Let’s Plays on to my channel. And then, there’s the podcast.

I know exactly what my problems are. I don’t specialize enough, and I don’t put content out fast enough. Because most Youtube channels are, like, “shows”, right. The Did You Know Gaming show. The Markiplier show. The Angry Video Game Nerd show. And you can point at those and say exactly what they are in two sentences or less.

Did You Know Gaming specializes in informative videos uncovering obscure facts you might not know about popular video games.

Markiplier is a Youtuber that does Let’s Play videos for video games, primarily horror games, but he also focuses on general comedy skits and things of that nature.

The Angry Video Game Nerd is about one guy’s over the top reactions to bad video games.

What does BlazeHedgehog do? Well, he does a lot of Sonic fan content, but sometimes he does horror let’s plays, and sometimes he does multiplayer compilation videos sort of like Criken, but he also does music, and sometimes he makes video games and puts out videos of that, and in general he’s really low energy and sometimes there will be three or four weeks between uploads. Also he sounds like Booger from Revenge of the Nerds Snot from Family Guy (apparently).

If you come to my channel for something specific, you have to put up with everything else I upload. I could start separate channels for that content, but the barrier to entry on Youtube is so massive now that I would effectively sending those channels to their death. Videos that get 200-500 views on my main channel would get 10 views or less if they were on their own self-contained alt-channel.

So I languish. I struggle. I suffer. Youtube shows me red down arrows to tell me just how much worse I’m doing now than my last flash-in-the-pan success.

I’ve tried to chase success. It just makes me sad. I have a sense of humor, but I don’t think I can make “funny videos” like some people can. My Sonic 06 glitch video did gangbusters ten years ago, but I don’t often like kicking games when they’re down. It was a struggle to make that Sonic Boom glitch montage and that’s the reason I never followed through with Part 2 like I said I would.

My only wish is that people appreciate honesty. My Youtube channel might be a scattered mess, but that’s who I am. And more than anything, I think that’s what Dunkey’s video was about. His whole joke was about switching from thoughtful or funny videos to becoming a content farm for whatever is currently popular.

I’ve brought it up a few times here and there over the last few months, but I’ve had several brushes with the Fortnite side of Youtube recently. And there are so many dudes over there who are what I would generously call “grifters.” I follow Hypex on Twitter and routinely check Firemonkey and ShiinaBR because they datamine future Fortnite updates and often have the scoop days, weeks or sometimes months in advance.

Near the end of season 3, all three of them mentioned they had datamined “the next season” but wouldn’t say what it was because they didn’t want to spoil what was coming (the marvel season). They mentioned there were “others out there” that were spoiling things, but wouldn’t say who. I wanted to spoil myself, so I turned to Youtube.

And Youtube was a nightmare. Over and over and over, I would encounter tons of people downright thriving on the same grift. It’s an open secret that Youtube prioritizes longer videos, so if your video is under ten minutes (or I think now 8 minutes), the algorithm isn’t going to be as nice to you and won’t promote your video as well, and you aren’t going to get as much advertising money because fewer people are going to sit through a video advertisement that’s a quarter of your video’s entire length. Longer videos are more profitable for Youtube, and by extension, for the user uploading them.

So it was video after video of these guys making big bold claims about how they had all the answers on what the next season of Fortnite was, and you’re thinking, “oh wow, it’s a 17 minute video, they’re going to spoil everything!”

You load the video up and it’s some guy in his streamer man cave, he’s got his webcam on, and he loads in to a match of Fortnite with his squad. Keep in mind, this video was pitched as a news report of sorts, a big spoiling of future content... and it’s just a guy playing Fortnite with a crew. In the few seconds between matches as he queues for the next one, he stops to deliver a single shred of information, most of which start with “Hypex said...”

The one thing you came to this video for and it’s scattered like breadcrumbs across a 17 minute video of a guy just playing normal matches Fortnite to fill time. It’s not information they acquired for themselves, they all just regurgitate what Hypex said, or what other channels reported Hypex saying. 17 minutes of padding for scraps of second-hand leaks. And I found dozens of these channels, all repeating the same format, all repeating the same specks of leaked information, and all of them had 150,000 to 200,000 views on each of their videos in less than 24 hours. That’s hundreds of dollars per video on a format to scam the system.

But that’s a content farm. Those dudes are vultures. I have a hard time believing their hearts are really in it. I know it’s not a term that’s really in vogue anymore, but I see that as “selling out.” They know what they are doing and it’s to make money, not to make a community better. I mean, one of those videos was a guy who was reading Marvel comic hero profiles off of Wikipedia because it sounded like he literally did not know who guys like Iron Man, Thor and Wolverine even were. How are you in touch enough with pop culture that you’re cranking out factory-fresh Fortnite content for Youtube but you don’t know who Thor is? Answer: because you don’t really care and you’re in it for the money. Gotta hit that 15 minute threshold and put in six mid-roll ad breaks.

I could be that guy. That’s kind of what I was hoping “This Kinda Sucks” would turn in to, which would be sort of a rant video series like The Jimquisition or something. But I did not have the interest or energy to keep that up. So you get a playlist with two videos on it.

I’m sure Dunkey was just funnin’ around. Dude has 6 million subscribers. But for me, like... what he said in the video is mostly true. Following your heart and making thoughtful content you are personally interested in won’t pay the bills. I mean, as I predicted, that Jurassic Park video launched to the sound of crickets chirping. My most hardcore fans and a few curious onlookers checked it out but that was it. I’ve been working on that video since August, and it’s something my viewer base did not care about. But I cared about it, and that’s important for the long-run, I think.

The other problem, sort of a disconnect, is that I’m lucky to be in the position I’m in. I think guys like Dunkey probably make all of their money from places like Youtube and Twitch and Patreon and that’s their career. That work pays all of their bills.

My work does not pay my bills. Or it does, but it’s not enough to pay all of my bills. I am lucky enough right now that I am in a living situation where I can make fractions of money in intermittent spurts. That won’t always be the case. But for now, I get to be honest, and I get to follow my heart in whatever random, chaotic direction it feels like going that particular day. Dunkey faces a different sort of pressure than I do.

All of this is to say I have no idea what I’m doing, I guess. I make the content I want to see.

That being said, I increasingly think about something I heard Woolie say early on when he went solo for his WoolieVS channel, and that was the idea of “One for you, one for me, one for us.”

Because I’ve had more than one friend burn out doing, like, Twitch streams and stuff. You hear about Youtubers who get sick of being shackled to new releases or whatever’s popular. At some point these people wake up and realize they’ve had this struggle, maybe made some money in the process, but they’re miserable because they don’t get to do what they want to do. They’re always being pushed forward by the fans that are behind them.

The “One for you, one for me, one for us” mantra does at least keep you a little more sane. Balance in all things, right? So that Jurassic Park video, it can flop. It’d be nice if it didn’t flop, given what time of the year it is, but it’s a video for me. I have other video ideas in the chamber that I know will be for my audience, or “for us.”

I just have to stay true to myself, and to my messy brain.

#questions #dunkey #youtube #inside baseball #behind the curtain #long posts #spilling my guts #Anonymous

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i-am-scarlet-corsair · 4 years

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Mun Life Update

Because the storms continue to rage, I am soaked to the skin and sinking fast.

This isn’t your regularly scheduled programming so I apologize for breaking the shadowy glimmer of my muse to vent some very real problems I’m coping with - and really all I’m asking for is some friendly encouragement, some positive vibes sent out into the universe for me, or a simple hello. Aside from feeling disconnected from everything after the decision to leave the Discord server the seas of life has remained consistently rocky and I am just....tired. I have doggedly tried to keep my queue buffed with nautical, pirate, corsair and sea based things yet I worry my energy will bottom out and I might fall off for a while.

I have no intent to desert my post but for any (if there are any) of you concerned from radio silence on my part I thought I would throw out a quick update.

In March of 2020 I became ill with Covid-19. Which very nearly required a hospitalization. Fortune had not entirely deserted me in that aspect so for that I am lucky. Being an immune-compromised individual, several doctors felt it more appropriate for me to attempt to weather this illness outside of a hospital with all my best efforts; which was a task itself. I was sent home with more medication than I wanted to manage myself as well as the very real possibility of my own demise outside of the hospital should I not realize I was actively dying (because, you see, I wasn’t dying *enough* to be admitted to the hospital but I already felt like I was.). Anyway, the fight against the infection was long, and somehow I managed to fend it off by week 8 - but we aren’t counting the damage left in my lungs.

In April 2020 I was the only employee terminated from my company due to the downturn in business brought on by the pandemic. For a long while I thought we were *all* out of work until I later learned they were still working - it was just that the boss couldn’t cover my salary. Picking up the box of my things from the office, my entire near decade career relegated to one small box of things, was a very surreal experience. One that was far more emotional than I care to admit.

Fear not, the government approved a one time stimulus payment and unemployment benefits were increased! Note the sarcasm here because those are all well over and gone now....

I managed to find another job which amidst a pandemic was a struggle and it is barely over 50% of what I was making at my last job. The office culture is less than ideal and it’s been a really big struggle trying to find my footing while surviving on half my income.

Just when I think I might have gotten myself aligned to begin to manage the storm...a rogue wave clips my stern and enter a cataclysmic capsize experience....

Something popped in my back. Often time I tell myself pain is a thing I process I live with. Extreme pain is a thing I process and live with (chronic illness + immune-compromised; you know, if you’re familiar at all...I often live my life on a pain scale of 6 or 7). So I tell myself “Okay, Captain, sleep it off; you’ll be fine.” There was no sleeping, there is no ‘fine’ just pain. Constant and burning pain that made me incapable of any mobility from the spot I happened to end up on the couch. I spent two full days in the hospital and it was a very unpleasant experience (and believe me, I’m compiling malpractice complaints). There are several disks out of place in my lumbar spine - that are bad, but not ‘bad enough’ to require surgery. So here I am again, stuck in bed. With another very long road to recovery...or rather...adequacy again.

Some of you know that around this time of year, I am working as a stunt and stage combat performer for local renaissance festivals. Many of which have been shut down due to Covid-19. The insult to that injury is the very real and very constraining back injury. My frustration is as limitless as the depths of the sea and attempting to process the PR nightmare surrounding my home festival has been no treat either. It’s bizarre to have so many parts of yourself removed or taken from you....I’m not real sure who I am anymore. A strange feeling to process, even worse to swallow.

That and my lease for my current dwelling is expiring soon and my other options are being rejected.

So, folks. I don’t know....the last few months have been a trip. I just wanted to get all of that out I guess. There’s a lot more but at risk of making this post too depressing I’ll probably just end it here.

Maybe the sea will swallow me. Maybe the storms will ease. Who can tell....

#mun update #mun thoughts #struggle bus #weather the storm

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dontshootmespence · 5 years

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An Arsenal of Cute

Summary: After a tough case involving kids, Penelope invites Kate over to drown their sorrows in wine and baby animal videos.

Words: 798

Warnings: FLUFFFFFFF

A/N: My next entry for @cmbingo 2020! This fulfills my s10 square.

A/N 2: On YouTube, you can look up the following videos for a pick-me-up! I would link but Tumblr can be an ass about that.

Eleven boxer pups in a litter by PlayShaRycky

Golden Retriever Puppies Newborn to 12 weeks time-lapse video by 8ball Pythons.

Top 10 Cutest Pug Puppy Clips on YouTube by TubeSpaghetti

Baby Elephants Want to be Lap Dogs by AnimalTube.TV

Cute Baby Ducks Compilation by Just Animal Videos

Penelope shrugged her blue sweater over the dress she wore, more than ready to get away from the icky-ness that was the images on her numerous screens. She threw her bag over her shoulder and walked toward the elevator, looking forward to the click-clack of her heels on the stairs instead of the tile floors of the Bureau.

After finishing their paperwork, most of the other team members had left for the night, but not Kate. There she was, sitting at her desk, looking every inch the beautiful, sad bombshell. Cases with kids were never easy, but especially for someone with a kid. “Hey,” Penelope said softly. “You okay?”

“Yea,” she replied, brushing her hair back from in front of her face. “Just, these cases...”

“I know. Icky icky gross. I can’t even imagine how you feel with that sweet little bean at home.”

Kate gave Penelope a half smile and stood up from her desk, slipping into her bomber jacket. “Not tonight. Tonight, I am a free agent. Chris is away on a business trip and Meg is at a friend’s for a sleepover.”

As they walked toward the elevator, Penelope’s face lit up. “Oh, oh, I know what you should do. Come over to my place and we’ll drink wine and watch cute animal videos.”

Kate’s mouth dropped open slightly. “That - That is an excellent idea, Penelope Garcia.”

The entire drive back to Penelope’s place consisted of a conversation about baby animals. Any and all of them. Especially puppies and kittens. “Every time we have a case involving kids, I watch puppy and kitten videos before going to sleep,” Penelope said as they got out of the car and walked up to her apartment. “I have lists on YouTube of all my favorites so that I can call upon my arsenal of cute whenever my brain needs a scrubbing.”

Laughing, Kate followed Penelope inside and plopped down on the couch. “It’s absolutely necessary if you ask me. You can’t do the type of work we do without having some kind of an outlet outside it, you know?”

“Exactly. You get me, Kate Callahan.” She excitedly poured two glasses of wine, handing one over before she sat down and pulled out her laptop. “Now, you drink as much as you want. You’re a mama. You deserve it. I have the pinnacle of pull-out couch mattresses here that you can use if you want to crash.”

“I think I might just have to do that. Thanks, Penelope.”

“For what?” She asked naively, making Kate laugh.

“People tend to forget about moms, you know? They always ask about the kids, and they should, obviously, but sometimes the moms like to know there’s someone there to vent to or distract them or whatever. Plus, I just joined the team recently and I thought I’d feel like the odd man out, but you’ve got a way of pulling people in.”

Penelope’s eyes were watering. “I might cry,” she replied, laughing it off. “I’m always here when you need me. Now, puppies or kitties?”

“Puppies,” Kate replied sheepishly. “If I wasn’t away so often, I’d want one at home.” “Same. Oh, what about this one?”

“Eleven boxer puppies in one litter? Gimme.”

A chorus of coos and baby talk echoed throughout the appointment. Puppies stepping over each other. Dying to get to mom, who honestly just needed a nap. Puppies stepping in their own poop. Even that was adorable. Kate tipped the glass back, taking a gulp. “This is what heaven is like to me. Just, give me all the puppies.”

“I wonder if I could get the Bureau to sanction a bring your dog to work day,” Penelope said deviously, making both a phone note and a mental note to bring it up. “I mean it’s for our mental health. Puppies make everything better.”

They didn’t even bother searching for another video; the next one in the queue was a time lapse video of a litter of golden retrievers over the course of 12 weeks. They were one of those dogs that no matter someone’s favorite dogs, goldens could get anyone to love them.

Kate finished her glass and leaned toward the laptop, searching for pug puppy videos, only to find a compilation of what were possibly the cutest pugs ever. Tiny little babies chewing on shoelaces, a little napper getting his belly tickled, a newborn making the cutest little noises in the world. “This is too cute. I need a puppy. I need all the puppies. Oh my god, have you seen videos of elephant calfs cuddling? They love cuddles.”

“Oh, I need it,” Penelope said excitedly, fingertips gliding across the keys like a bird on the water. “Stop! Look how cute.”

They wanted to be lap animals, but they were so not, and the elephants didn’t care. “We need to find a place where we can pet baby elephants. We’ll take Meg!” Penelope exclaimed.

For hours they cycled through all types of animal videos, specifically baby animals, ducks, kittens, puppies, elephants, goats - anything and everything to soothe the day’s troubles away.

After almost a bottle of wine a piece, they started falling asleep on the couch, the little quacks of baby ducks lulling them off to sleep. Cute animals made everything better.

#kate callahan #penelope garcia #penelope garcia fanfiction #kate callahan fanfiction #criminal minds #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds imagine #criminal minds fanfic #dontshootmespence #an arsenal of cute

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simsvip · 6 years

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The Sims 4: Mod Releases of the Week

Each week we compile a list of mods that have been released to make your gaming experience unique. Be sure to use The Sims 4 Mods Category Tag for future reference.

Please note that installing 3rd party content may cause problems with your game. It is a good idea to properly research the use of mods and custom content before putting them into your game.

While EA unofficially supports the modding community, they will not be held liable should any 3rd party content damage your PC or game.

This list is here for informational purposes only. SimsVIP does not assume any liability should 3rd party content damage your PC or game.

Always remember to remove mods and custom content before updating your game

• Female Waist and Hip Height Slider – Custom Slider for CAS

• Female Chest Depth and Width Slider – Custom Slider for CAS

• Breast Separation Slider – Custom Slider for CAS

• Nostril Definition Slider – Custom Slider for CAS

• Shoulder Height Slider – Custom Slider for CAS

• Enhanced Leg Sliders – Custom Slider for CAS

• Adoption for Teens – Allows Teens to Adopt children

• Motive Decay Mod – Makes changes to motive decay in the game

• Vampire Sun Immunity – Give vampires immunity from the sun at all times

• Longer Interaction Queue – Allows for more than 6 interactions in the queue

• Less Laundry Fires – Makes it so you only have a 10% chance of having a laundry fire instead of the default which was 55%

• No Temperature Deaths – Prevents Sims from dying due to extreme temperatures

• No Autonomous Watch TV – Prevents Sims from autonomously watching TV

• No Autonomous Computer – Prevents Sims from autonomously using the computer

• No Autonomous Disturb Bees – Prevents Sims from autonomously disturbing bees

• No Autonomous Cooking – Prevents Sims from autonomously cooking

• All Cheats Fix – Enables cheats that were removed with the latest patch

• Sims 4 Genie Mod – Adds a genie to the game

• Robots – Adds a robot to the game

• Throw Up for All Sims – Unlocks the “Throw Up” Interaction

• Invisible Fencing – Adds invisible fencing to the game so you can dictate walking paths for Sims

• Animated – Flamingo + Water Ripple Effect – Adds animated Flamingos and water ripple effects to the game

• Animated – Placeable Fish – Koi Fish Group – Unlocks placable Fish

• Purchas MySims Trophies – Allows Sims to purchase MySims Trophies

• Purchase Fireworks – Allows Sims to purchase various Fireworks

• Bad Parent Trait – Adds a custom trait to the game

• Grey Warden Trait – Adds a custom trait to the game

• Medium MOD Trait – Adds a custom trait to the game

• Well-Aligned Trait – Adds a custom trait to the game

• Whale Ate My Parents – Adds a custom trait to the game

• Misanthrope Trait – Adds a custom trait to the game

• Electromaniac Trait – Adds a custom trait to the game

• Insomnia Trait – Adds a custom trait to the game

• Vain Trait – Adds a custom trait to the game

• Nursing Career – Adds a custom career to the game

• Wedding Planner Career – Adds a custom career to the game

• Baker Career – Adds a custom career to the game

• Psychologist Career – Adds a custom career to the game

• Zookeeper Career – Adds a custom career to the game

• Graphic Designer Career – Adds a custom career to the game

• Actor/Actress Career – Adds a custom career to the game

• Slacker Career – Adds a custom trait to the game

• Ghost Hunter Career – Adds a custom career to the game

• Daycare Career (TS3 to TS4) – Adds a custom career to the game

• Corporate Gardener Career – Adds a custom career to the game

#ts4 #the sims 4 #sims 4 #sims 4 mods #ts4mods #ts4 cc

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edwardpotts · 5 years

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How We Scaled to Thousands of Sidekiq Workers

At Sensor Tower, we operate a fleet of thousands of background workers that execute various tasks to bring our data and product to our users. In this blog, we are sharing some of the tools and techniques that have enabled us to process billions of jobs a month with minimal cost.

Often times when you have a huge amount of data to process, it’s hard to make sure that you are operating at the highest productivity without overloading a particular subset of resources. For example, early on in the company’s history we realized that we needed to have more workers for processing data and we managed to ask AWS to provide us with additional servers. We thought this would solve our issues, but, after only a couple of hours, our database crashed because the increased number of workers had overloaded it. This was the first of many lessons that scaling taught us the hard way. Fast forward a few years and we have implemented many changes that allow us to process billions of jobs that interact with our databases hosting over 60 TB of data in over 90 billion documents.

Our Business

Sensor Tower’s products provide mobile app metrics. We supply crucial competitive insights into mobile app advertising, revenue, downloads, usage, and other aspects of the ecosystem. Our customers are from a wide range of business types such as app developers that want a read on the competition, financial institutions that make data-driven investment decisions, and media that cover current mobile trends.

With that, allow me to tell you a little bit more about our team. We are a global company with offices and employees on multiple continents. Our main office is in beautiful San Francisco. Over time, we have grown to a partially remote company and, in order to make this work, we make every effort to feel like one team—both by using modern technology to bring us closer, but also by regularly having the team come together at the same physical location.

When I was looking for a new job, I had a set of important characteristics I was looking for. After many years in the industry, I’ve come to the conclusion that the key characteristics I am looking for in business are:

Solving a real problem - This is core to having a healthy business.

A growing business - If business is good, most other problems can be solved.

Technical depth - Don’t settle for simple, copycat, or trivial. Solve unique, hard problems and challenge yourself. Ten years from now you will thank yourself.

Sensor Tower checked all the boxes for me. As a bonus, our organization has a truly great culture. I hope that everyone that starts working at Sensor Tower enjoys the same feeling of warmth I got throughout my interviewing, onboarding, and day-to-day work. People are literally smiling all the time. It’s infectious and I love it. I’m not going to ramble on about how great it is here, but if you’d like to know more please read about our values and also check out our open positions.

The Sensor Tower Stack

Our application stack is Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Knockout.js, MongoDB, Redis, and Sidekiq. Although we do use other languages for various things, in general it is our belief that keeping our current system from fragmenting too much is ideal for our size. It’s easier for engineers to move between products, encourages code reuse, results in cheaper tool maintenance costs, and delivers reduced security and stability risks.

Infrastructure and Tooling Overview

We are primarily an AWS shop and we manage our infrastructure using Ansible together with some home-baked scripts. The total number of EC2 instances we employ varies over time, but it normally hovers around 1,000 instances. Roughly half of the instances are used for Sidekiq workers.

For our CI pipeline we use Jenkins, which facilitates unit testing, integration testing, linting, docs, and the builds artifacts.

How We Look at Jobs

Our worker fleet executes a plethora of tasks:

Ingesting data from external sources

Data modeling

Data aggregation

Internal monitoring

A task is executed using one or many Sidekiq jobs. A Sidekiq job is a program (a Ruby class) that carries out a subset of a task, and larger tasks are normally broken down into many smaller jobs that can then be processed in parallel by a fleet of workers. An example of such a division could be a task that calculates something for each month in a year and updates a database. This task can be broken up into twelve pieces where each job is working on one month each.

Custom Solution: Sidekiq Throttled

Sidekiq Throttled is an open source, custom middleware for Sidekiq developed by Sensor Tower. We are huge open source nerds and we try to share what we can with the rest of the community.

The purpose of Sidekiq Throttled is to control maximum job concurrency. This can be critical to ensure that a large number of jobs queued does not overload a constrained resource that they access.

Sidekiq Throttled offers a lot of features and, if you want to learn more, please head over to its Github page.

Our Take on Queue and Instance Allocation

Sidekiq manages priority and throughput of tasks by assigning a weight to each queue that specifies how often a Sidekiq worker should pull a job from that queue. For a basic Sidekiq system, these weights are shared among all Sidekiq worker nodes. This makes configuration straightforward, but it lacks the flexibility needed when running a wide range of jobs with different characteristics, memory, and CPU requirements on a large fleet of workers over many different types of EC2 instances. What’s ideal is to make sure that jobs are run in priority order on the smallest (cheapest) instance that can execute the job, while at the same time keeping the total fleet at high utilization.

Our solution to this problem was to create a custom weights specification file for each of the EC2 instance types.

Our system uses a default queue weights file used as the base for most EC2 instance types and then an instance-specific file with the weights for that particular instance file. Below is an example of an instance type specific file:

--- :concurrency: 1 :uses_default_queues: true :exclude: - app_store_ranking - add_keyword :queues: - [ad_intel_deduplication, 30] - [custom_alerts, 1]

This file, together with the defaults, is compiled into the queue weights for each instance type.

The system allows us to run jobs on the appropriately sized EC2 instance that can’t handle the load and, at the same time, utilizing the larger instances for smaller jobs when they otherwise would have remained idle. By employing this strategy, we maximize resource utilization and therefore reduce our cost.

Job Issues We’ve Encountered Over Time

There are many pitfalls when designing jobs, weights, and managing a fleet of workers. Below is a list of issues we’ve encountered in the past:

Workers that idle because there are not enough jobs of the right type

Uneven worker load, for example during certain times of the day

Jobs in a different queues that use (and overload) the same database

Jobs not executing because a server dies or was killed

Jobs executing multiple times without being idempotent

Workers running old code due to worker code update issues

Workers dying due to external resource being unreliable during deploy, for example Github

Workers running out of memory

Jobs being paused manually but the operator forgetting to turn the back on

Instance Sources and Our Approach to Cost Management

Amazon provides three basic ways of acquiring instances.

Reserved instances are leased for a long time span (years) at a very discounted price compared to spot or on-demand instances. They can either be acquired directly or bought on the secondary market from companies reselling their old instances they don’t use anymore.

Spot instances are more temporary leases and are leased on the spot instance market.

Finally, there are the on-demand instances, which is the instance type a normal customer gets if they request a temporary EC2 node. They are the most flexible in terms of lease but also the most expensive.

In order to reduce cost, we utilize all three different means of acquiring instances. At times when our system is at normal load, we use mostly spot instances and reserved instances. When we are at high system load, we use on-demand instances. These are brought up using auto scaling or manual acquisition.

For us, it was a logical choice to create scripts that use Amazon’s API to periodically check the marketplace for both spot instances and reserved instances to be able to lease instances at discounted rates. This way, we can get the majority of the instances we need for normal load at a discounted price.

How We Handle Auto Scaling

Amazon’s Auto Scaling feature enables dynamic control of the size of the instance fleet. A set of user-defined rules dictates if the fleet should grow or shrink between a minimum number up to a maximum number of instances. This allows a customer to use custom logic to ensure adequate throughput at the right cost.

For certain instance types we have fixed number of instances, but for others we use Sidekiq queue size (the number of jobs in the queue) to govern if the number of instances should grow or shrink.

Closing Thoughts

Modern data-centric SaaS services are driven by scheduled events and are often interfacing with external systems. Load will vary across the day and week, it will be affected by customer activity, new feature rollouts, and, in general, fluctuate significantly. For early stage startups, over-provisioning is okay as a solution to this, since finding product and market fit is more important than revenue. However, as a business matures, the cost of background workers tends to scale with the business and the loss in profit margins due to resource waste will soon become significant. In addition to this robust deployment, monitoring and troubleshooting systems are important to ensure product quality, as problems tends to scale with the size of your platform.

In this blog, we have shown you some of the tools we use, some open source software, and general strategies to greatly reduce OPEX and robustness of your worker fleet. These are by no means the limit of what we think is possible in terms of optimizing our approach to these challenges. There are still many opportunities to explore and solutions to find. If you would like to join us in this and other projects, please take a look at our careers page and get in touch.

How We Scaled to Thousands of Sidekiq Workers published first on https://spyadvice.tumblr.com/

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elbowgreaserp · 6 years

Photo

My Sailor Moon loving heart doesn’t know how to process this right now, but to summarize, my childhood. MAKOTO KINO, ACCEPTED! Sailor Jupiter in the house, ya’ll.

OOC INFORMATION

NAME, AGE, TIMEZONE: Fate and I’m over 21.

ACTIVITY LEVEL: ooc? 8-9 via discord, ims etc for plotting, checking in, etc. ic? 6-7 due to having a job with an unpredictable schedule. but I can queue nongroup replies I spitfire owed group replies.

TRIGGER ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Yes, I understand.

ACTIVITY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: I realize the 6/7 may be off-putting, but I say that just in acknowledgment of my weird schedule.

NOTES: again please make sure gore visuals are tagged and lemme know what they are in case anyone missed that note on Johnny’s app

IC INFORMATION

NAME, AGE, SEXUALITY: Makoto Kino, 20, closeted bisexual

FANDOM: Sailor Moon

HOMETOWN: Tokyo, Japan (pre adoption), Colorado Springs (after adoption)

CLUBS, ORGANIZATIONS, OTHER: Boxing Club

CLUBS, ORGANIZATIONS, OTHER CREATION:

Paintball Club (Paintball Club) Paintball Club is the most adrenaline-pumping, exciting club that UCCS has to offer. In conjunction with SGA, members will be able to play paintball for free, with small exemptions. We will play in many areas across town, and will play any game-types and any major paintball variations.

FIVE POSITIVE TRAITS: List em!

Absolutely amazing cook, forget all that precanned crap you packed. Refuses to give up on things once she gets started. Is actually a big softie once you get to know her? Would bend over backwards to help a friend because she doesn’t have too many of those Doesn’t like cheating, unfair fights etc when it comes sports and competitions. Makes for a good moderator

FIVE NEGATIVE TRAITS: List em!

Impatient Literally has no chill. Is either totally into something or absolutely hates it. Spiteful! Did something to personally fuck her up? Guess who is waking up to a bucket of ice cold water she dragged up from the lake Doesn’t really know how to make friends aside from cooking or punching them; has zero social graces Absolutely does not want to be here at all, spends most of her time cooking for the other ‘kids’ so she doesn’t have to break a sweat

BIGGEST FEARS & PHOBIAS: Planes (mostly if she hears low flying ones). Crippling fear of heights. Dying alone.

SCARIEST EXPERIENCE: That would be having to go through TSA customs for the first time, wondering what all the machinery was and why the ‘police’ looked so scary. If she was never going to get to stay with her new family…. It’s been a pretty quiet life despite some more delinquent habits of hers, none of that has ever been scary.

DO THEY BELIEVE IN THE GHOSTS/PARANORMAL?: Nope

ANYTHING ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER WE SHOULD BE AWARE OF?:

Waited a semester after being failed by a professor to key their car, so that the suspicion would not immediately be cast on her. Seems to have gotten away with it. Brought her paintball gun equipment to mess around with anyone else from the club that came on the trip, but also to fuck with the rude rich kids. She makes a really shitty roommate, watching vine compilations with shitty come and go service every night before bed. Her parents died in a plane crash when she was a little kid. She was put into an orphanage shortly after, eventually getting adopted by an older couple in the United States. She’s been here since she was seven or so, and doesn’t really have much of an accent anymore.

No superpowers, alien stuff, etc

WRITING SAMPLE

1, 2

#eg accepted #eg makoto #fatesought

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