#i also went back to the original panel i based the og on and based on that reference added extra blood lol

[autisticaradiamegido]

day 24

the tradition continues, my yearly day 24 redraw that happened for literally no reason!

[rottingsparrow]

Part 2 (redo) of Reading Lore Olympus

I am doing a test to see if more people see this if I only review ten episodes at a time. It makes sense, I wouldn’t wanna read that much either. So here’s episodes 11-20, I’ll be posting 21-30 shortly after. Here’s part one again

Ep 11

Touch count total: 7 lmao

Cat. kitty cat

Artemis jumps to conclusions so fast

Did artemis’ bangs grow

Ope and its short again

It would be different it it wasnt noticeable but like the style changes too

Why does artemis not have scissors

How is her hair perfect after a slice

It looks like she is pulling her skin when she is taking her clothes off

Is she wearing a bra?? Bc if she isnt her boobs shouldnt be sitting like that

Oh she is now

“Demeter is such a helicopter mom” i mean yeah but also i dont think the mortal realm has.. Yknow internet

Eros is pink now idk if i preferred him as a light purple

Maybe like a mixture thats cool

Ep 12

Artemis like true form looks cool but so normal yknow

Inside!

“No wings i just vacuumed” quick rachel how do wings work

I do like the cut out in the back of the shirt for the wings

Artemis feels like the mom that is like “put on pants ur uncle is coming over” like huh?? Persephone is just not wearing pants

Youre just soooo pretty persephone omg

Eros and persephones colors accidentally get so close ugh

“I dont” look at her face its so. Yeah

Is yoga for sex or

Is he holding a necklace i thought he was pulling tears and i was so confused when i originally read this

Ep 13

Did aphrodite get darker

She definitely did esp in the panel where she says “psyche”

I know they are family of love but i do worry about the possible emotional incest that could occur honestly. I dont think it happens but it gets close

Ok so he passes the underworld so it goes olympus- underworld- mortal realm or am i dumb

The pig is so cute

How did she not realize her veil thingy fell off

Was her family abusive in the og story or was this just so eros would fall even more for her

When did he get the bow and quiver dont just say magic

Ep 14

The little switches in time got me confused the first time i read it

Oh boy he got an apartment

If i were psyche i would be scared deadass

“The ugliest creature youve ever seen” ok thats cool its fun

Ep 15

Listen. How the hell did she adapt to this bc if i went to a diff realm and all of a sudden there was like. Indoor plumbing i would panic the hell out of my mind

Like shes even wearing modern clothes

“I'm certainly not the pig” hehe i like the pig

Why does he not hang out with her when he isnt busy like

Hookup count is 2 now

Ok ok this may be stupid but what if he just made her go by a diff name

Also your mother needs therapy

I would want to leave too

“Do you trust me?” thats kinda guilt tripping ngl

“Maybe i could have visitors” no they literally are from a different time now

Like i get the “i cant tell her no” but just explain the modern vs ancient world but maybe she could go visit them idk

Ep 16

Why are they not confused i feel like they are ignoring this whole thing rachel created

No her sisters have a point why did he not give her a name not even his real one

Dont hold the blade there is a handle girl

“How could you not trust me?” i wouldnt either gotta be honest

Eros is so melodramatic istg

Artemis and persephone are not having it and like mood

Artemis is lighter now

Yknow if she kept a color palette with just base colors and then did lighting it would work better but maybe im a lil lost

“Hey i got a phone” put ur name queen

Q&A 1

I wasnt gonna put anything for this but “i focus on details and seek out references for anatomy” girlie do you wanna. Start doing that again

Ep 17

Why is he just crying he can leave

“Woe is me” shut up Persephone

No it would suck to be sworn to maidenhood without her permission but also i dont think she understands what unrequited love is

“No one will ever love me like that” they might yall just cant do things

“And thats ok” is it??

“Little tart” good nickname tbh

Her eyes went blue but that will never happen again

Dont throw her list away eros

Emergency contacts you just got a phone??

“Im paying for everything so i get to pick” stfu eros

We will never see her wear this again

Do we ever see her wear the same outfit i cant remember

“Was he just humoring me” i mean hes also prolly busy

I know everyone says it but i hate that apollo is purple

Ep 18

Stop thinking of persephone like that its so weird hades

“As if she would want me to have her number” its not a business card made for you man

How do kings get banned genuinely like this is so wild rachel please show me the societal norm and class systems here

Haha so funny zeus is harassing someone -_-

What job would he give her honestly

How does the economy work you cant say that resell on gems is shit and not explain

Hades wow forcing them to accept a check youre so cool

This is locker room talk and i quite literally hate it

Ep 19

If hades doesnt want to discuss his sex life he is valid i wouldnt want to especially not to family

“Ok i can be a little bossy” this is a surprise tool thatll help up later

They are being good brothers here tho

Ew not the locker room talk again

Like even if she was his age or whatever its literally so gross

Hera!!!

Ep 20

Lil kore is so cute

I like their interactions

She has a point its disgusting

However, i hate, like loathe, the miscommunication plot device. Answer hades Hera so i dont have to deal with this

Also zeus shut up you dont speak for hades

Hera should know that she is getting angry at Zeus and then misdirecting her anger its so annoying

“Im well aware im a fool” can you guys just talk please

[felassan]

Highlights and insights from the MELE launch cast & crew reunion panel

[rewatch link] [highlights & insights from the N7 Day 2020 reunion]

In case a text format is better for anyone (in terms of accessibility for example). Cut for length.

Some paraphrasing.

If anyone’s interested in just the line-reading session, it starts at timestamp ~1:04:45.

In addition to the cast and crew from the N7 Day reunion, at this reunion also in attendance were: 

Mac Walters (Project Director for MELE, Lead Writer of the og MET)

Melanie Faulknor (Lead Producer for MELE)

Crystal McCord (Producer for MELE)

Fred Tatasciore (Saren)

Seth Green (Joker)

Kimberly Brooks (Ash)

Ash Sroka (Tali)

This was the biggest reunion / meetup of the cast so far, and some of the cast and crew were meeting for the first time here.

It’s been so long since the og MET that PW & KW are getting to watch their kids experience playing it for the first time

JHale doesn’t play but since MELE she’s been sneaking around Twitch jumping into peoples’ MELE livestreams to lurk, watch and comment a bit

What drew Seth to the character of Joker? The whole concept of the game. He likes games and MET’s mechanics (different trees of adventure, stacking reputation, choices carrying between games) at the time were the most sophisticated that he’d ever heard pitched. He thought this was new and exciting and wanted to be a part of it. For the character they cast him based on his personality traits (i.e. he sounds quite similar to Joker personality-wise)

Would Seth ever want to play Joker again if the opportunity presented itself? Sure, he loves the character, and if the writers ever had more things to explore/expand with Joker he’d be down for it. 

Seth said that it’s a different kind of fan that approach him about this project. The fans have spent many many hours in an intimate exchange with “him” that he hasn’t been a part of, but they experienced it nonetheless. “I’ve hugged a lot of strangers, you know what I’m saying? It’s great, you get an interaction with fans that you never get as a performer in any other experience”

Seth has been a space guy since he was little, it inspires him

With the state of the world the way it is now [covid, masks etc], does Ash think Tali’s story will be more impactful now than it was before? Ash hopes so, and that anything they do here will have a positive impact on a bigger level. Ultimately that’s why most of them do what they do, they want to reach people in deep ways. She hopes Tali is an inspiration in courage, bravery, standing up for what’s right and thinking about the greater good

The [MELE I think] dev team had a last team meeting with Greg Zeschuk, one of the founders of BioWare, who they had invited to it. He was regaling them with stories of the inception of Mass Effect. “You would imagine this sort of well-laid out, drawing boards everywhere... [but] it was basically just a napkin sketch in a Greek taverna with him and Casey going ‘We wanna do a space opera’, and then it took off”

The process of creating lore through development is very organic. A lot of it comes from character and story development. It builds up over the course of the game’s development. They did the codex entries at the end, the idea being that if they saved them for as late as they could, then they could pull from the story, characters and meaningful moments, and build them from there

PW wrote a bunch of the codex entries, elevator banter & lots of little bits of lore. They describe their time on the og MET as being a “baby writer”. They originally came in after Mac had back surgery and a junior writer was needed to fill in. “It was really fun, it was us sitting in a room together going ‘What do you think a hanar or a krogan thinks about this or that’?” For a first project for them this was an amazing experience - the world building itself creatively with all these awesome people

They tried to add multiplayer in every game but only got it to work in ME3

They had a lot of plots laid out in ME1 that they called “global plots”. These were outside the core critical path and would take players from planet to planet, and were sprawling stories. They pulled out a lot of really interesting concepts and ideas from these that did make it into the game, but all of the global plots ended up getting cut due to time. Mac still has old diagrams and spreadsheets which detailed how all of these would have come together

Q. If you all had to take a long-distance road-trip with two squadmates, who would you take and why? PW: “Jack and Mordin. Mordin because the drive would never lack for things to talk about at length quickly, Jack because you know you wouldn’t pay for the room. You wouldn’t know how you’d get the room, but you wouldn’t be paying for it.” Courtenay: “I’d take Mordin because there’d be singing, and FemShep just to have this thing - happen. In the room that I get for free.” JHale at this point fistpumped while saying “Yeess” [then I think what she said was “steaming hot”]

Seeing as asari are long-lived, how open is Ali to one day reprising her role as Liara? “She’s a character very close to my heart, it was such a great opportunity. In some games that we work on the character has already been created or voiced by someone else, but this was really a group effort. When I first went into the booth, the only thing I’d seen of her was a sort of like, rendering, and we slowly kind of came to her voice and presence. I would love to bring Liara back any time... hey, she can live a really long time guys. :D”

Caroline and people who do what she does (Creative Performance Director) are so critical to the quality of games. Caroline: “This group of people are extraordinary. We were lucky to have such an extraordinary cast. Every [recording] session was new and challenging. It was a labor of love. I’m tearing up right now thinking about it. I’m remembering my last session with Jen, she was the last session, just sobbing and sobbing”. When JHale was trying to say the lines of Shepard’s goodbye with Garrus, a line hit her like a tonne of bricks and she was in tears and was like “Shepard does not cry”. “It took me a second, I got it out and took another run at it, it was in there but stuffed down as it should have been, and I finished the line [and there was silence in the booth when usually Caroline would have been talking to give direction or instruction] Did we lose her? Did Skype crash?” and it transpired that what had happened was that Caroline was in floods of tears

ME was the first time Keythe had ever come across branching dialogue. “Normally when we work on a script and it’s from page 1 to 100. In this it was get to page 5, then go back to page 2 and play it a little differently. The skill and the fun and joy of it was to be able to go back and play a scene in a different way, with different writing, with different outcomes. This was not only a challenge but a real treat. So to all the writers who dreamed up how this build-your-own-adventure plays out, you have my undying respect. It was a real pleasure”

VEDA is a proprietary system that BW use to record the dialogue, which is the closest way of having it feel like having people in the booth together (it’s all digital and VAs get to hear the line someone else has done in that scene). Caroline really pushed for this because of the amount of time etc that was wasted due to lack of this sort of thing on ME1. William: “It was a god send for me, thank you, getting to hear a cue from Jen or Mark.” Ali: “Us being able to bounce off each other helps make it more real. This for me was the most real acting experience on a game I had ever had - the writing being so good, Caroline helping us through, being able to hear each other.” JHale was always early coming in to record relative to the others so only got to use VEDA a few times - a bit of Liara content and the scene with Anderson towards the end. “Those two times, oh my god it was amazing”. VEDA being a thing also helps from a scheduling standpoint

Seth and Tricia Helfer (EDI) only got to be in the booth actually together 1 time, to record/shoot a piece of promotional video. “We actually got to record a scene together and we were like ‘oh my god this is the best thing ever’. It was great, even though I had to stand on a stool. She’s the best”

Seth: “As an actor, the kind of opportunity to do this kind of material in games just didn’t exist.” Fred: “Oh, never! I had never had a villain part that was complicated like that. In a game? Never before, it was really interesting”

Raphael always goes back to the fact that ME brought more women into gaming than any other game before it. “The writing and the complexity of the relationships gave us so much ballast”. “This set this apart from running, shooting, gunning, looting”

JHale: “What I noticed in the times before when I got to be around fans, there was a huge hunger among women in the gaming world for something they could really jump into. They were starving for something which fed them what they deserved and needed”

Mac: “[praising Caroline] Caroline would often come to us as writers and challenge us and say, as an example, ‘Do we really need another male character to do this? Why are we writing another male character for this?’ She pushed that very early and to the betterment of everything we created”

PW: “Karin and Cookie and all of the editors across the trilogy, [were critical in] making sure that Shepard sounded consistent - [especially since] we had a large writing team, writers came and went, Mac is the only one with a significant writing contribution on each of the games”

PW: “[on game dev] It’s a process of getting hundreds of people pointed in the same direction, all believing that this is something worth doing”

Ash: “Having all the different possibilities and avenues, going back to play them all out in the different ways [really helped to round the character of Tali out and make her feel like a natural person]”.

VAs only get paid for the original recording sessions, not again (as in they don’t any royalties or anything from something like the remaster)

In MELE, they left all the original credits at the end of each game in

Fred: “It’s creating in five dimensions [because of all the outcomes and relationships etc]”. Seth: “The cool thing is that the audience feels that. They’re immediately struck by how dense, thought-out, prepared and planned the entire universe is”

How was it for the new MELE devs coming onto this? Crystal: “I knew it [the series and fans’ love for it] was big, but I didn’t know it was BIG! Working on MELE there was this infectious excitement. Being part of it was so exciting.” Melanie: “I came on at ME3, I had a 3 or 4 year honeymoon period with BioWare. Coming onto MELE, I’m getting really emotional. One of my first meetings originally was going into a cinematic review for an epic Tali scene in ME3”. Crystal: “On MELE, we had an hour or 2 every day where the team came together to play the game. In those reviews, a lot of the devs who worked on the original would tell all these stories. It was really fun to hear all the inside stories on ME’s creation and be a part of that”

DC: “Should this unit get vaccinated?” Ash: “Of course”

How do they think ME will be viewed in the next 10-20 years, what do they think its legacy will be? A piece of history, ground-breaking. It broke down some barriers and opened doors for people. It’s a powerful, powerful community. It’ll continue to age quite well and be enjoyed by a new generation, it’s original and evergreen and there’s a lot in it that people go back to. There’s a lot of universal things in it (personal experiences, like there will always be love, people fighting to belong, trying to make sense of their pasts etc)

JHale and Alix did the “I love you Shepard, now go save the world again” Shep-Sam exchange and both got teary. It was then Seth’s turn to line-read: “Jesus Christ, now that I’m good and choked up, fucking mess”. Ali was also actually crying from it

Seth: “It can’t be overstated, this community is so large and global, it is one of the most powerful fandoms that I’ve ever been greeted with. Thank you”. Ash: “It’s the most amazing group of fans ever. We’re all so grateful”

Some funny anecdotes/stories:

PW didn’t realize that Alix could do different accents. They remember a time when they were listening in the booth and an Alliance soldier was complaining about the gear had been given. They said “Wow that’s really good, who is that?” and the VO producer said “That’s Alix, Patrick”, “because she wasn’t doing her [normal British accent but was doing a Californian accent instead]. Alix roasted me later for not recognizing her voice and never let me heard the end of it”

Alix: “[on Sam’s toothbrush] Caroline’s like, ‘So then she pulls her toothbrush’ and I’m like ‘What? Sorry? A toothbrush?’ and obviously it’s funny now as everyone knows that Sam’s thing is her toothbrush. Caroline’s like ‘Yeah, you’ve gotta like, flirt, over the toothbrush’ and I’m like ‘Who wrote this - a frickin toothbrush, are you kidding me? Really guys?’ ANYWAY. I was wrong and it worked. :D”

Fred: “I remember a 12 year old kid coming up to me and being like [flat tone] ‘Oh yeah. I killed you’.”

Keythe: “The other assasin I play is Kellogg in Fallout 4. People come up to me like ‘Omg. I love you so much. And then I fucking KILLED you!’”

Courtenay once went out to dinner in NZ with a few prominent people from the Game of Thrones cast. “Everyone around was making a big deal out of it like ‘Omg, it’s so-and-so from GoT’. I was feeling a bit like ‘Hi, I’m here, just nobody’. And I looked around in the restaurant and there's one guy in the corner and he’s got an N7 shirt on and he’s just looking at me like [knowing look, does a peace sign]. And I’m like ‘I got one! I love you guys!’”

PW: “I have a question for the cast members, because I don’t know if JHale has done this to all of you or if she just does it to the devs. Show of hands if Jen has ever made you do push-ups.” JHale: “It’s just you guys”

Karin: “One of my favorite editing files that I ever had was a ME file. It was before Seth was coming in for a session. I opened it up and it was just 20, 25 lines with the word ‘Shit’, over and over again, and I was like, ‘This file is perfect, I don’t need to do anything to it, have fun!’”

Seth: “Didn’t we do a track that’s like 60 seconds of laughing? Escalating laughing? I don’t know about other actors but for me getting into a laughing fit is kind of like trying to get into a crying fit, it takes the same level of commitment, you start to follow a path until like you’re hysterically uncontrollably laughing. I remember looking through the glass, and I’m deep in it at this point, and I make eye contact, and I can see from the other side of the booth and they’re like [making ‘okay you can stop’ now gestures] - ‘Like that’s plenty, we got it’ and I was like ‘okay, okay [dying]’”

JHale: “The craziest thing Mark and I had to deal with was how many times we had to say ‘I should go’”. Mark: “We also, Caroline and I tended to use that as short hand when I needed to go to the bathroom”

The panel host: “The first time I interviewed Ali was a decade ago. She did the ‘I’ll flay you alive with my mind’ line halfway through, it was my first interview and I literally fell out of my seat [from being star-struck]”

Ash line-read Tali’s drunk omni-tattoo scene and in response DC said “I totally get why people wanna romanticize all these characters :D”. Karin: “We’ve had more than one person come up to us and show us actual tattoos that looked like that”

[source]

[bokunoheroanalysisforthefuture]

Alright, and I am back with another update! But first, some stuff a friend noticed in the first few pages and mentioned to me that I didn’t take in when I went over them on my own the first time:

The park they’re in as kids is pretty close to the apartment complex Izuku and his mom live in! Considering that said apartment complex is right there in the background. Which probably isn’t a huge thing, but a neat thing to note.

The age these kids manifest their quirks at seems to be more preteen / teenage years, though I don’t know whether that’s just because it is later activation or because there were (subtle) quirks before that, with the glowing baby just being the one that had people sit up and realize something was actually going on.

Endeavor ad! And it has the time of that event that day, too - 8:14 AM! I wonder what he’s advertising… or perhaps it’s a news report? An interview of some kind? It might just be a ‘breaking news, we got Endeavor on our channel’ sort of thing. The only part that I can read is the first three katakana for the biggest text, which is ‘E-n-de’ and matches the wiki’s katakana for ‘Endeavor’. If anyone can get a good enough look at the smaller text in order to tell me what the rest says, I would appreciate it!

Just a few things, but obviously I need to up my observation game if I want to catch all this stuff!

[No. 1 - Midoriya Izuku: Origin]

So now we’re at Aldera / Orudera Junior High, with Izuku’s class being in their last year before high school. Since Japan’s schools start on the second week of April, we know this has to be that first week of school, because Katsuki’s still 14 and his birthday is April 20th, which would almost always be the third week of April / second week of school. 

What is that writing stance. You are going to have an old man’s back by the time you graduate high school. I mean, I wouldn’t know anything about that personally, cough cough…

Anyways! We get a look at Izuku’s class and their quirks, and what a collection. Also, with an attitude like that, no wonder this school is seen as bad, like, what the fuck dude. Not exactly a competent homeroom teacher, are you?

The ones that I can see, from leftmost row to rightmost row, are [1] floating hair, stretchy fingers, dark matter, [2] smokey arms, spike fists, stretchy eyes, frog throat, some sort of flash/illumination quirk, [3] rocky body, ???, stretchy neck, flamethrower arms, extra arms, [4] sharp hair, big chompers, wedge face, [quirkless], mouth face (seen in the next panel and holy FUCK new sleep paralysis demon), [5] horns, telekinesis, [explosion], buff bod, ???, [6] wind control, ???

WHY.

But yeah, this also establishes the first rule of ‘don’t use quirks in school’ thing that… also gets promptly ignored the several other times we see stuff set in this school. Which, what a shock, people sort of sliding around inconvenient rules.

Anyways, Katsuki has proven that he hasn’t changed since those first few childhood panels way back (checks) ten pages ago. And Izuku is being… very shy and trying to avoid drawing attention. But no shaking, particularly, just… wallflower mode, more like.

But yeah, Katsuki is not exactly on great terms with the rest of the class, who are rightfully pissed off at him treating them rudely and calling them extras. Though honestly, I’m surprised that they’re surprised he’s aiming for UA, it’s not like he wouldn’t have been obvious about that for, like, years at this point. You’d think they’d all roll their eyes and be like ‘yeah yeah we’ve heard this spiel before’ or something. IDK.

Oh man, and Izuku already KNOWS what’s coming, look at how he’s hiding his face!

Katsuki is, of course, Fucking Extra and hops on his desk, and gets right into bragging, where, AGAIN, this should have been stuff this class has known about for ages, why are they so shocked?? And huh, interesting, he’s not only interested in surpassing All Might, but also in being one of the richest people in the world. Wow, I cannot even with him, especially knowing he lives in this house in particular:

Which, it should be clear, is an EXPENSIVE lifestyle when most families live in modest apartments because of space being so valuable in Japan. 

God this is a fantastic image. I wanna frame it on a wall somewhere. Hori managed to convey all the emotions in one face and I admire the man for it. 

With the whole class laughing, there’s a thing I want to note that fandom seems to not pay attention to: they note that Izuku gets good grades! I’ve seen fics that basically have him forced to sabotage his own grades to avoid getting backlash, but like… no, I don’t think that’s actually a thing. 

[Also an aside, we finally see one more class quirk, which seems to be some sort of bulked up arm? It looks a bit like mummy bandages, as far as I can tell.]

Izuku gets into defending himself, saying there’s no precedent, but he IS defending himself against them, so again, he’s not cowering as much as some people seem to think he does based on fics, and clearly he’s still willing to stand up for himself to some degree. 

...then of course, Katsuki blows up Izuku’s desk and sends Izuku sprawling. And is pissed that Izuku apparently thinks he, who is quirkless, can somehow be on the same level as Katsuki. Izuku swears up and down that it’s not about Katsuki, that he just really wants to try, and this somehow pisses Katsuki off even more. 

I want you all to remember this image - save it on your computers, bookmark this post, whatever you need to do. We’ll come back to it in, oh (checks watch) about 284 chapters. Or maybe sooner in a separate post where I can put it under read more and avoid spoiling people more than this does. Because DAMN can I gush on this moment.

Anyways, we have a change of scene, right after noon, with a thief with a sludge transformation and,,,,,,,, legs and pants,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Where the fuck did those pants go, sir. Sir. What the fuck, sir.

Also, we get our first meeting with the OG dad, the sunflower man himself, who blooms into 255 kilos of muscle in one panel. Also, man I forgot about the fucking giraffe neck Hori used to draw him with, holy heck, why are you so l o n g.

L O N G.

...right, anyways, back to the school, which is apparently over for the day. The rest of the class is heading out, and Izuku’s back to his chipper self, even humming a happy note as he grabs his notebook-

Before Katsuki nabs it from his hands. There are a few people who’ve hung back who notice the title and pick fun at izuku, so I guess Izuku actually… doesn’t talk about his desire to be a hero that much in middle school, if the others are all so surprised about it. He apparently doesn’t even make his notebooks obvious to them, since this is the first time any of them seem to be seeing it. Which I mean, it makes sense if the class will tease him for it, but like. Even with Katsuki stealing the book, Izuku’s not super panicked or having a nervous breakdown.

But yeah, Katsuki just blasts the book, but! It’s just the cover singed (and edges) when we know he could have demolished that book entirely. Again, he’s definitely being a bully and a jerk here, but he’s got way more self-control than fandom likes to assume. 

Izuku’s upset because of his damaged notebook, and Katsuki just huffs and throws it out the window while saying he’s gonna be the only kid from Aldera to go to UA. And Izuku, EVEN WHILE STRESSING, thinks of him as vain for thinking that way! That’s not the first thought of someone too terrified to do anything.

Edit: As pointed out to me in [this post], it was Katsuki’s crony who was thinking of him as vain, not Izuku. My bad!

Also note the lack of damage to Izuku’s school uniform. I know I’ve seen fics where there’s a hole made and a burn scar left that Izuku has to tend to, but Katsuki, again, has not directly used his quirk against Izuku. We’ve never seen it, just the smoke and flash used for intimidation. I’m getting more and more confident that Katsuki has never actually used his quirk against a person, which I’m probably gonna get a bit more into during the battle training in a few chapters.

But yeah, the cronies / extras basically call Izuku lame and that he can’t face reality. And then we get this scene:

That’s not the face of someone afraid. That’s Izuku’s determined face.

Izuku is about to stand up to Katsuki again. The way he always has, the way he always will. There has never been a point in the series where Izuku has NOT stood up to Katsuki when he feels it matters, and that’s part of the reason Katsuki is so pissed with him every time he does - because Izuku REFUSES to see his place! Not once!

(Please, for the love of god, respect the Izuku who didn’t need a quirk to stand up to others. Who isn’t ‘broken’ or ‘terrified’ of Katsuki or anything like that. He’s a stubborn kid and we Stan That.)

Izuku, however, is not confident enough in this situation to want to press the issue, so he relents and says nothing when Katsuki prods him to escalate things. And then we immediately get to the ‘you idiot, don’t fucking suicide bait!’ but you can tell it’s been a stressful few moments for him. 

So yeah, the summary of this section is ‘Izuku is not an uwu suffering babey, and Katsuki is way more restrained than people seem to think.’ 

I’m cutting it off here since, again, we got a lot of info and character examination, and honestly this whole chapter is a long ass one (55 pages!!!!) and it’s establishing the entire setting from the ground up. And honestly, I’m just vibing in being Right about how I’ve been viewing the characters at the start of the series… even if i am guilty of sometimes playing with fanon for my own means…

Still, this is fun! Hopefully y’all are having fun too!

[fluorescencefuture]

Homestuck^2: How I’d write the Omega Kids (and the Candy timeline villains)

I haven't reread Homestuck nor the epilogues in a while so correct me if I'm wrong with anything here. This was all in one go, too, so I probably missed something here or there. I'm also not a native English speaker so pardon some grammar errors.

In General

I’d give them a five-letter name scheme. Names of a group being the same length was a big deal in original HS (human first names had four letters, troll names had six, Ancestors had eight-letter titles, Cherubs had eight letters too, etc.), so it’s odd seeing this new group have names of varying length

I’d also give them all shirt symbols. It’s odd that something so iconic to Homestuck isn’t present in the new kids, either.

I'll write for both the canon post-canon with evil Jane and for my own version with different villains. Evil Jane happens because a highblood troll who hears of the old ways of Alternia attempts to kill her and take her crown, as she's technically the heiress. Jane wins, but she starts to see trolls and Alternian culture in a different light from then on. At first she was only trying to prevent the worst parts of Alternian culture from coming back, but over time grew to despise trolls, and ended up trying to force human culture onto Alternians.

The other Candy villains are a dangerous terrorist rebel group that wants to overthrow the creators and destroy them. They say the creators made the people, abandoned the people for years, then suddenly came back and decided they control the people. The group is made of humans, trolls, carapacians, and even consorts. The mysterious shadowed leader claims to be doing this for the people, but really, all they want is to have control for themselves, and they don't care if any innocents get in the way.

Harry Anderson

Has nothing to fix, he’s perfect as is

Okay but seriously, the guy is the kid with the least questionable things around him. He has no baggage from sharing the same name as an established character (ICP Harry Anderson doesn’t count), and he didn’t come from infidelity.

He also has actual color to his personality. He likes musicals and sewing. He has a good relationship with his dad. Like many kids with divorced parents, he wishes his parents were together again. What do the others have? Vrissy is just a slightly less aggressive Vriska. Tavros is just OG Tavros and Jake combined. Yiffy’s thing is being a dog girl named Yiffany Longstocking. The others could be fleshed out eventually, but with the slow pace and meandering plot we have right now, I doubt it.

If Jane's the villain, things would mostly go the same way. If Jane isn't the villain, it goes two ways: he decides to join Vrissy's guerilla anti-anti-creator group and fight because he wants to protect his parents, or he's just very anti-conflict and avoids the fight because he doesn't think he's up to it. He's frequently threatened but doesn't tell his parents about the threats. Eventually, he gets convinced to join and fight.

Vrissy

So Vrissy’s in relationships with guys who are technically her cousins. At first I was like “well, they’re not biologically related nor were they raised as family so it’s not weird”. But then Tavros called Kanaya “Aunt Kanaya” and now I’m thinking “oh god, that’s really weird”.

Now she’s just a troll girl from school. She's just close to Kanaya and Rose, but isn’t their kid. She isn’t related to anyone. Anyone except Vriska, who she was named after. Vrissy’s new nickname is just Vriss.

Alternatively, her name is something completely different. Honestly, it just seemed like a way to shoehorn in a Vriska for the story. Only for actual Vriska to come back anyway.

Uhh, Eshtha (from Jyeshtha, a Hindu nakshatra Scorpius is associated with)? Oriona (from Orion, the myth where Scorpius is mostly attributed to)? Naiaka (from Manaiakalani, as Hawaiians saw Scorpius as the demigod Maui’s fishhook)? Oh wait, I’ll have to make nicknames for those names too. Uh, Eshty, Riona, and Naiah.

Maybe have her have a personality that’s rather opposite to Vriska’s than have her as Vriska 2. She's more a perky goth, more cheerful and sweet. More "I knew you could do it!" than "So you can do something after all." A beast in battle, of course. She doesn't like to use her mind control powers, because she finds them disturbing.

If Vriska had to come back, the conflict would come from their conflicting personalities. Vriska would pretty much act the same way she did to (Vriska), but this time, Vriss doesn't take any of it and stands her ground.

Whether the villain is Jane or not, she's the one who decides to fight back, and she gets her friends and others to join her. The creators have been nothing but good to her, and she cares about them a lot, especially Rose and Kanaya. Not to mention they're also her friends' parents.

Tavros

Yeah, we’re gonna have to rename that kid. It never made sense to me why Jake and Jane named their kid after some guy they don’t know that well. I don’t remember everything from the Epilogues, but I’ll assume the reason was Gamzee or something. Also weird that Jane, who’s supposed to be racist to trolls, would just...let her kid be named after one.

Something old-ish would work. Flynn? Silas? Avery? Clyde? Niles? Louie?

He's moirails with this Vriss instead of kismeses. The Vrissy/Tavros kismesis also felt like re-hashing the kismesis that Vriska and OG Tavros kinda had.

If we went post-canon villain Jane, he'd be reluctant to join the rebellion and is more of a pacifist who would rather try to talk his mom out of it.

Alternatively, Jane and Jake are separated (but not divorced) and he lives with Jake. Because Jane was never terrible to him and Jake doesn't tell him how bad she's gotten, he disagrees with her but still tries to justify and rationalize that Jane's really doing it from a place of good intentions.

If the villain isn't Jane, then Jane and Jake have been hiding him away, and his friends can only see him when they visit him at his swanky home. You might say he's...housetrapped. He joins because his friends are in it, and doesn't quite grasp how serious things are until the rebels try to kill Jane (the rebels try to kill Jane first because you always kill the healer first).

He's in contact with a mysterious guide who's kinda spacy and a little terrifying at times. His friends think the guide might just be some creepy predator. It's revealed to be Candy Gamzee, out of the fridge and legitimately harmless, but untraceable and doing mysterious things behind the black. Again.

Come to think of it, Dirk's missing too...

Yiffany Longstocking

Yiffy is now the ectokid of Dave and Jade. She looks more like a DaveJade kid than JadeRose, really. Dave and Jade are also either happily married or coming close to an amicable divorce. Yeah, the toxic shit Jade did and the erasure of Dave's bisexuality also don't exist here. Jade, Dave, Karkat, and Terezi are backing Vrissy's anti-anti-creator group.

Her new name is something unisex. Riley? Logan? Robin? Sloan? Salem?

She spends a lot of time outside doing sports and doesn't talk much. She's not very close to the other three kids, but she's surprisingly pretty close to her Aunt Rose.

While Jade and Dave are out on a mission for Karkat (this is the mission Candy Dave dies), she gets kidnapped by the opposing force (Jane/the terrorists). She gets a shock collar forced on her, then is hidden away in a Boarding School for Inconvenient Girls, enrolled under the name "Yiffany Longstocking". Jade comes home to find that her family's been taken from her. Again.

Yiffy almost escapes, but she gets knocked out and taken back to base, where they lock her in a cage and treat her like a dog. She's still defiant to the end.

If Jane's the villain, Jake is inspired by Yiffy's defiance, grows some balls, exposes Yiffy's treatment to the press, and sets her free. She beats up the guards trying to stop her. Jake gets surrounded by more guards. In response, he pulls out his pistols and a one-liner, and bam, cliffhanger.

If it's the terrorist group, Terezi picks up on Yiffy's scent when they're in a base, and she's saved by the other three kids, where she immediately turns around and beats the crap out of the guards. They become proper friends from there.

The reunion panel still happens and this time it's her reuniting with her loving mother and aunt instead of...y'know.

BONUS: Sadstuck

Harry gets his own “im not a hero” speech after trying and “failing” to be the hero that John was

Vriss is eventually forced to use her mind control powers. It’s either a “Katara using bloodbending" situation, or she forces her friends to leave her behind when they want to stick by her.

Tavros finally witnesses his mother’s true nature when Jake defeats all the guards, but is stabbed from behind by Jane and killed. In the other version, it seems Jane is finally safe and able to come home to her son. Then she’s killed right in front of him.

After the big hug with Jade and Rose, Yiffy pulls away. She smiles, looks around behind them, and asks “Where’s Dad?”

So, please tell me what you think!

[kenkamishiro]

zakki:re translations Part 2, Vol. 3-5

Part 2 took a bit longer than usual because I had to finish the Ishida x TK interview (which you can read here). On to volumes 3-5, and hopefully I can start on Ishida’s Q&A’s simultaneously in the next couple days!

If you would like to start from the beginning, please click here.

Takizawa.

I was happy when I could finally show him like this since I've always wanted him in this form ever since OG. But I fumbled the timing of his entrance, plus I also had the idea of putting Amon first in the auction hall. Next to him are two Dobermans. I hope I’ll be able to draw animals better.

Weekly Young Jump 2015, Issue no. 17, Opening colour page

Little Kaneki.

I think this colour illustration was drawn well, considering my abilities back then. The thing he's carrying in his arms, is it a birdcage? Or possibly an urn?

Weekly Young Jump 2015, Issue no. 28, Opening colour page

[T/N: HQ scans provided by TG_Hub, thank you!]

The cover of :re volume 3 features Takizawa and Hinami. I like it because of how disturbing it looks. I drew this Takizawa nibbling on his fingers by underlying the drawing of him from the last page of :re volume 2. (...if I remember right!)

Auction x Audition The various squad members who appeared in the Auction Raid were recruited through a “Recruiting investigators!” type of project that the general public could apply for via collaboration with the part-time job magazine “an”. Originally I wanted to pick one person and have them appear for a bit before killing them off in the end. What ended up happening was that about six thousand-ish applied, though I looked at everyone and picked from there. Hairdressers seemed to have a high acceptance rate, might be because they’re good at styling themselves and taking pictures? Also Numa Jun-kun, who’s aiming to be a comedian, is being called onto T.V. every once in a while. He’s contacted me and asked me to watch his skits, though every time I see it I feel he’ll do just fine...yup, do your best.

Operation status (at the time of magazine publication) ...anyways, every week the squad members would get injured, and with Owl showing up the situation changed, creating a very hectic environment to develop the plot. At any rate I had to somehow make the 20 investigators from “an” appear in the story...now that I think about it I have no clue why I tried to do that. I was asked to write down a status report of the dead, injured, etc. I created a draft of the design every week, thought of what content to include...I thought making something like that would be interesting, so readers could look at it while reading the manga. But when the volume was being edited, rather than being omitted from the page it was relevant to, it appeared halfway through the chapter, and as a result it became even more confusing to follow. (As an aside, I tried to request that it be brought back in the digital version as the original, but I don’t know if it will?)

Side story JOKER At the end of volume 3 of :re there is a one-shot about Juuzou, who’s become an associate special class investigator, investigating together with Hanbee. This was published while I was drawing OG volumes 13 and 14, and oh! It was published by Shounen Jump. They asked if I could draw a one-shot for Jump. One Punch Man also did something similar and the survey results turned out well, so they thought it would be good for my series. “Makes sense,” I thought, but at the time I was very busy and had absolutely no interest in it since the one-shot would force me to not include any spoilers. If spoilers were allowed I would’ve agreed to draw it. But when I was talking to my editor a light bulb went off in my head and I came to the revelation: “What if I write about Juuzou in the future?” I was still in the stages of drawing OG, and I thought if Tokyo Ghoul readers read it they would think,” What’s this supposed to mean?” and Juuzou would be able to pique the interest of even first-time readers. I drew more than 30 pages of manuscripts while running a weekly series at the same time, wondering if I should’ve just called it quits even though I was the one who came up with the idea. Though the survey results didn’t turn out well at all.

2015, Volume 3, Cover

[T/N: Numa Jun is based off of Hiranuma Junya, whose Twitter you can visit here. He is also featured on the dust cover slip of volume 3, and funny enough Ishida apologized to Numa on his Twitter after killing him off.]

The cover of :re volume 4. Tsukiyama and Kanae. I also really like the illustration of these two. I was addicted to putting vivid pink on deathly pale skin. However, the characters’ complexions seem to slowly be getting worse and worse.

2015, Volume 4, Cover

Kanae vomiting roses. She looks deathly pale, doesn’t she?

Weekly Young Jump 2015, Issue no. 43, Opening colour page

The colour page found at the end of :re volume 5. There is no clean version of this illustration since it was combined with the text layer.

2015, Volume 5, End frontispiece

[T/N: The translation for the text, which is an excerpt from Takatsuki Sen’s “The Black Goat’s Egg”, can be found here.]

Kanae as a woman. An image of her ideal appearance.

2015, Volume 5, End frontispiece

Hairu. She had already been slaughtered at the time of drawing this illustration. And then, my unfulfilled love for Hairu began to simmer and boil over... Is this...the type of girl I like...?

2015, Volume 5, End frontispiece

The cover of :re volume 5. Haise with Eto by his side. Their complexions are deathly pale here too. I forget what I was trying to do here, but I was so busy those days that I couldn’t finish this illustration. I remember I had a difficult time drawing because I wasn’t in good condition. (Was that when I was working on JAIL by any chance?) Kijima’s death is depicted in this volume. I was eating cheese when I was drawing the “I want to eat cheese” panel. After hearing the amazing “I want to eat cheese” moment in the anime, it makes me glad I drew it. You can tell Furuta was drawn to look like a good person at first before his true character was revealed. There were a lot of panels I liked art-wise, such as the scene where Noro obliterated the investigators, and the two-page spread of Kanae playing the violin.

2015, Volume 5, Cover

previous || next

[lenin-it-to-win-it]

rabbit tour!

i just made a “shelf” so all my stuffed animals weren’t crowded on the windowsill and i used this as an opportunity to take pictures of all the ones i have with me so here we go!

this is artemis, a majestic and powerful silver rabbit with a very dramatic backstory

basically i was 5 hours away from home on a work trip and i saw her in the window of a shop BUT it hadn’t opened yet so i had to walk away not knowing if I would have time to get back to the shop before it closed, if someone else would buy the rabbit, or if i even had enough money to buy the rabbit in the first place 

the most I was willing to spend was $20, not because I don’t think this rabbit is a priceless artifact of beauty, but bc im a peasant and my job was technically volunteer work and paid less than minimum wage but ANYWAY i go on and on about this fucking rabbit to anyone who will listen, my coworkers are plotting ways to murder me that will look like an accident, but we get back to the store and the rabbits still there AND ITS ExACTLY $20 SO I IMMEDIATELY BUY IT WITH NO REGRETS BEST PURCHASE OF MY LIFE 

here are some little baby babies i have clipped to my backpack (can you tell i like rabbits???), the yellow one on top is bun might for obvious reasons

 the one in the middle is technically unnamed but i call him sergeant pez bc hes a pez dispenser and he was in one of my dads old military trunks for like a million years until he was cleaning them out and gave him to me 

the light green one is the newest addition, her name is mochi and shes so fucking soft you guys its like petting a delicate cloud 

these arent rabbits but theyre still valid so shut up, the black cat is named agugu (short for akutagawa) bc i was into bung/ou s/tray d/ogs at the time 

the panda in the middle was a gift from my roommate and her name is monochrome because i have another panda back home thats purple and her name is. purple. so i wanted to stick with the theme here

the white tiger is named at2shi after atsushi (from b/ungou st/ray d/ogs again) who can turn into a white tiger but also i already had ANOTHER non-white tiger that was named atsushi so this one is at2shi 

more wild thangs that arent rabbits!

the elephant is слон or “sloane”, слон means elephant in russian and it’s kind of pronounced like the name sloane so it’s a very deep complex and intellectual name, clearly. слон is a puppet that shrieks like the souls of the damned when you squeeze him and he was a gift from my high school russian teacher because i would be Blessed with the duty of making слон scream at students who were speaking english in class, he’s a good comrade 

the tiger is atsushi, im sure you can figure out his deal based on at2shi, i got him at the zoo and hes lovely

the red panda with the minnie ears might have had another name at some point but during my regrettable b/s/d phase i started calling him chuuya and it stuck, also now i put my minnie ears on him bc his head’s the perfect size so im more or less using him as a hat rack which is very on brand for chuuya actually

the purple sloth staring into the camera (and your soul) is gasloth leroux and i won him at dave and busters after re-reading phantom of the opera

(last batch of non-rabbits)

the bear in the snazzy tunic is radar, he was originally my mom’s as a baby and she gave him to me as a baby and since i dont intend on spawning im hoarding him forever #life hack 

yall better know who fucking kermit is 

aannnd we already went over слон in the last picture so! back to the rabbits!

welcome to the purple corner, friends!

the little all purple one in the back is sukie, and she is just baby, only little creacher, nothing can change that, she was a gift for easter i think two years ago now 

the purple and white rabbit with the pink nose laying next to the cardboard shapes is named violet and her fur is very soft and lovely but she has some kind of hard panel inside (she moves, maybe? idk) so not exactly optimized for cuddling, still shes a good girl

the hulking googly eyed purple yarn monstrosity is roundy blumbo and he was handmade by my terrible but talented sister @rattypants​

most of these are new arrivals because walgreens has easter rabbits out and some of them were literally only three dollars so yeah but anyway

the grey one with the pink bow is named toshi after all might (i got him about the same time as bun might so b/nha heavily owned my ass at the time) and hes absolutely perfect for cuddling, very soft and long

the blue one is named bluebell the second or “twobell”, when I was younger I had a really tiny blue stuffed rabbit named bluebell that i would take everywhere but one day i dropped it somewhere in or around a ymca and lost it forever and i literally did not stop crying for two whole days because of it, bluebell the second is a spiritual successor who hopefully wont get lost 

the one that looks just like bluebell the second but not blue is marshmallow, bluebell the seconds identical twin brother who was also 3 dollars because literally, THREE DOLLARS

the one with light brown fur and orange ears is named gingersnap carrot cake because I liked both names and couldnt decide and since i bought him around the same time as bluebell the second and marshmallow, he’s their mischievous older brother and together i guess that makes them the rabbit mcelroys 

now the round rabbit next to toshi with the floppy ears and a smaller rabbit with a green dress on its back is rose and bunnia, the larger one is rose, the mother, and bunnia is her daughter, they have a very close relationship as you can see

the small white and brown rabbit next to rose and bunnia is spenser, named after edmund spenser, creator of the spenserian sonnet, bc i bought her at a renn faire and thought she should have an old timey name, shes a literary icon 

now we’re getting into the old guard! all the rabbits in this picture (aside from carrot cake gingersnap whomst is a SLUT FOR ATTENTION) are all ones i got between the ages of 6-10, so theyre my day ones uwu

the brown rabbit with floppy ears is mocha, she was a christmas present when i was 9 years old and shes probably the most rabbit-shaped rabbit i have 

the rabbit with the bright pink scarf is beatrice (i dont have favorites except actually i do and its beatrice), I got her when i was 7 years old from goodwill and one of her arms was kind of loosely connected and started falling off which Horrified me and i tried to “take care of her” by using a bit of ribbon as a sling, eventually my grandma sewed her arm back on so then i used the ribbon as a scarf and ever since then beatrice has had a scarf of some kind  

the rabbit next to beatrice with the black button eye is wrinkly pinkly, who lost her eye in the warTM (it fell off years later but she claims to have lost it in the war anyway and shes old so everyone just goes along with it), shes very loose and as the name implies, VERY wrinkly which makes her fun to wiggle around 

the bright pink rabbit with the wide head is anna, beatrice’s mom and wrinkly pinkly’s sister, her husband griffy is back home so i dont have a picture of him but their story is very enemies-to-lovers (they were on opposite sides of The War) and shes a very ambitious and powerful figure in rabbitopia despite having hundreds of kids to raise #feminist icon 

the light pink rabbit with the yarn dress is madison, ironically named long before i even remotely knew that madison, wisconsin was a place that exists, and shes beatrice’s younger sister and shes very active and athletic but she also likes being pretty which is why i made her the yarn dress

cottontail (he doesnt actually have a tail) is the town drunk and a constant nuisance, his wife left him so now he’s always hoeing around and causing trouble for everyone (which is also what he did Before his wife left him), one of his legs is more filled than the other so he walks with a limp. his wife took most of the children except

darnell (the long pink rabbit lying down), who inherited her dad’s troublemaking tendencies and loves playing pranks and talking shit 

(last one, for all the zero people who are still reading at this point)

next to cottontail we have aminta in the green dress, i bought her at the airport and shes a very beautiful and distinguished young rabbit who madison is ABSOLUTELY gay for, she’s very proper and is being brought up by

hera nova (the white rabbit with the pink nose and floppy ears in the back) who is the oldest rabbit i have (Ive had her since i was at least 5, though she didn’t get a name until i was in my greek mythology phase a few years later), shes sort of a grandma to all the other rabbits and could absolutely destroy them all if she wanted to 

karoline (yes with a k, i didnt know the kardashians were a Thing back then) is the yellow rabbit with the basket, she works at rabbitopia’s most popular restaurant, the spinning carrot, and she is one of the three main chefs along with her sister 

bonnie, the pink rabbit with only one ear, she got torn up pretty badly over the years but shes still alive and still spinning those carrots!! (there was a third rabbit that worked with them named fritz who was white and holding an easter egg but i don’t remember what happened to her) 

so there we go! rabbits! lots of them! 

[weshallneverrevolt]

B&C Behind the Scenes: Retro Video Capture On a Budget

People who follow Bread and Circuses know that the blog is dedicated almost entirely to pop culture analysis. But people who are my friends also know that I’m a huge geek for computer hardware. So today, you’ll get you a man who can do both. This is my first behind the scenes feature, where I talk about crazy learning experiences in being a small-time YouTuber. This piece will be very technical, so I don’t blame you for skipping it.

The next project for Bread and Circuses is a full documentary and retrospective on Final Fantasy IX (2000, PlayStation), maybe the most important game in my life and one of the best RPGs ever made. Due to the scope of the video, I’m replaying all the original Final Fantasy games for the original PlayStation to jog my memory and give context for the less researchy parts. I am doing this on original hardware and a tube TV, without resorting to emulation or the re-releases. And I’ll be recording the entire game.

The choice for original hardware came for a few reasons. For one, the newer ports of Final Fantasy games are…mixed, at best. IX’s updated ports feature higher quality models and cutscenes, but the backgrounds are blurry, the new fonts and interface are hideous, and the overall “feel” of the original game is somewhat lost. As inspiration for writing the script, I also want the nostalgic experience of how I first experienced the game.

With that being said, I had a major hurdle to overcome: how do I record 50+ hours of gameplay from a 1995 console?

Step 1: Capture Setup

Most game capture these days is done in two ways: via the device playing the game, or via a capture card. The first method is quite easy on PC: you just fire up Open Broadcaster Suite, use a quick setup guide and you’re good to go. This is what I’ve done for all my videos thus far.

For modern consoles, you can use an HDMI capture card like the Elgato HD60. The cards aren’t exactly cheap, but they’re affordable enough for most streamers and let’s players.

But there’s one problem: both the original PlayStation and PlayStation 2 do not have HDMI output. The early model PS3s can play PS1 games and have native HDMI, but they are rare, expensive, and often break.

While you can buy HDMI adapters for the OG PlayStation, they are spotty in quality and present yet another challenge: such adapters often introduce noticeable input lag. Though FFIX is not a fast-paced game, the lag is still bothersome. They also don’t work with my tube TV, which is critical for my desired creative process.

That leaves me with two capture options: composite or S-Video. Composite video is the little yellow guy you used to plug into your tube TV. It looks decent on those, but when captured digitally, the blurriness and drab colors are immediately apparent. It’s for this reason that I purchased S-video cables; without going into boring technical detail, S-Video delivers far richer colors. Because the adapter includes both, I can output to my TV and computer at the same time with no additional equipment!

Speaking of adapters, the PS2 also has the option to output component video, arguably the best analog video available. While capture solutions exist for component video, my tube TV does not accept it. So to use component, I would need a system of complicated adapters and converters to both record on my computer and play on my TV at the same time. It’s too much hassle for not enough results.

So instead, I did some research and bought this little guy: the Hauppauge USB Live-2. There are many adapters like it, but Hauppauge has brand recognition in this area. This adapter also uses 4:2:2 chroma subsampling, meaning that it sacrifices very little in color depth compared to some cheaper models. It plugs into any USB port.

My tube TV only supports mono sound, which means it only needs one audio cable. I hooked up the left channel (white cable) to my TV, and the right channel (red cable) to my capture card. When outputting FFIX in mono mode, both devices receive the same sounds, and the music doesn’t suffer from missing stereo effects. Perfection.

Step 2: PS1 or PS2?

So as most people know, the PlayStation 2 is backwards compatible with original PlayStation games. The method by which this is done, however, differs based on the model.

Early PS2s have an actual PS1 processor on their motherboard. For the PS2 it’s used for sound and input/output, but when playing a PS1 game this CPU is instead, providing nearly perfect PS1 support. Sony actually did the same thing with the first PS3, but soon realized it was very expensive and scrapped it.

For later models of the PS2 – the slimlines – Sony switched to software emulation to save costs and space. The software emulation works very well, but it is just that: emulation. It is very rare for emulators to be literally perfect replications of the original experience, and Sony’s for the PS2 – called POPS – is not 100% accurate. I also don’t have a slim, so there’s that.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I first dug out my old PlayStation 1, purchased new in 1998. While the system itself still works shockingly well (despite some skipping during movies), I quickly ran into a problem: the PS1 outputs at 240p. For the uninitiated, video nomenclature like 240p refers to the number of lines in the image along with the scan type. So 240p means there are 240 lines of pixels in the image, and they are updated progressively, meaning all at once.

Older tube TVs can accept 240p input, but output it in interlaced form. This means that the TV quickly updates every other line of the image, rather than the entire image at once. It works pretty good for this type of TV, but on a modern monitor introduces some problems…which I’ll get to in a bit.

Image from dummies.com. Fitting.

However, this was a problem for me because my new capture card did not accept 240p input. I tried countless times to get it to accept PS1 video, and it just didn’t work. However, I noticed that my PS2 did. That’s because the PS2 outputs by default at 480i, an interlaced mode that my capture card accepted.

So I opted to use my “fat” PS2 instead, which is a SCPH-30001 model, purchased new in 2001. It includes the original PlayStation chip, and – to my enormous surprise – read my original Final Fantasy IX CDs perfectly. Because the PS2 accepts PS1 controllers and PS1 memory cards, it was an almost flawless version of the original PS1 experience. Awesome!

Step 3: Recording

With setup out of the way, I got to the final step of the project: actually recording digital video.

I use Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) for all my video and streaming projects. It’s free, powerful, and pretty fast. My capture device was immediately detected by OBS, but there was one immediate problem.

Remember the interlacing I mentioned earlier? When you display interlaced video on a progressive screen – AKA any modern flat-panel monitor – you get a horribly ugly effect where the video seems to be ripping itself apart. This is called combing, and it sucks. Thankfully, OBS supports native deinterlacing, so I was able to fix it right up.

That being said, let’s break down the different parts of recording with OBS:

Resolution: the PS2 outputs in 720x480 pixels, but my videos are at 1920x1080. However, recording at 1080p requires more hardware power, so I get more definition at the expense of less overall quality. I chose instead to record at 720p, which is closer to the PS2’s native resolution and allows me to capture better colors with less blur.

Framerate: this is where things got interesting. I master all of my videos at 60 frames per second. Very, very few PS1/2 games (FFIX included) hit 60fps, because the hardware of the time just wasn’t capable of rendering graphics that fast. However, they do output at a 60 hertz refresh rate, meaning that the image updates 60 times per second even if the console doesn’t actually produce new frames that fast. So if you record at under 60fps, you get noticeable judder in your footage. That being said, 60fps was a requirement.

Encoding: I wanted to get the highest possible quality picture. My computer has a Ryzen 5 1600 processor – a capable mid-range CPU – and is excellent at software video encoding. I used the OBS x264 encoder running at medium quality. Any higher than medium and I started experiencing skipping footage as my CPU went to 100% utilization. I gotta admit, it’s pretty cool hearing my computer fans kick into overdrive as the CPU is pushed to its limits.

Bitrate: I’m recording a lot of footage here, so while I needed high quality, I also have to keep storage limitations in mind. I did some experimenting and decided on a bitrate of 9000kbps, still above YouTube quality while also saving space. This also means that each hour of footage is about 4GB; given that FFIX is about 40 hours long, that means roughly 160GB of footage for the game. Not bad, considering.

Deinterlacing: OBS presents a slew of options for deinterlacing your footage, and the differences can be tough to spot. The only option that gave me zero trouble – no juddering or excessive blur – was Yasif 2x. I also increased the brightness and saturation to make up for some of the analog video deficiencies.

I’ve included sample footage below, along with pictures of my setup. If you’re an aspiring retro YouTuber or streamer, feel free to PM me with any questions. This stuff was kinda intimidating to figure out and I’m happy to help!

Until then, I’ll be in Gaia. Or Terra, once I hit Disc 3.

Jon

Full Setup

Cable Routing Detail

The TV inputs run through this old AV hub I dug up from my teenage bedroom. This lets me run the cables behind my desk to keep things a bit neater. I say a bit because you can still see the cables back there, but that’s showbiz, baby.

Sample Footage

[rottingsparrow]

Part 2 to my Lore Olympus ramblings, episodes 11-30

I also just remembered how many episodes there are so this is gonna take forever huh. Tw for sexual assault bc I do discuss the episode arc "Wolf in the Hen house". Also, here is part one if you wanna read that:

Ep 11

Touch count total: 7 lmao

Cat. kitty cat

Artemis jumps to conclusions so fast

Did artemis’ bangs grow

Ope and its short again

It would be different it it wasnt noticeable but like the style changes too

Why does artemis not have scissors

How is her hair perfect after a slice

It looks like she is pulling her skin when she is taking her clothes off

Is she wearing a bra?? Bc if she isnt her boobs shouldnt be sitting like that

Oh she is now

“Demeter is such a helicopter mom” i mean yeah but also i dont think the mortal realm has.. Yknow internet

Eros is pink now idk if i preferred him as a light purple

Maybe like a mixture thats cool

Ep 12

Artemis like true form looks cool but so normal yknow

Inside!

“No wings i just vacuumed” quick rachel how do wings work

I do like the cut out in the back of the shirt for the wings

Artemis feels like the mom that is like “put on pants ur uncle is coming over” like huh?? Persephone is just not wearing pants

Youre just soooo pretty persephone omg

Eros and persephones colors accidentally get so close ugh

“I dont” look at her face its so. Yeah

Is yoga for sex or

Is he holding a necklace i thought he was pulling tears and i was so confused when i originally read this

Ep 13

Did aphrodite get darker

She definitely did esp in the panel where she says “psyche”

I know they are family of love but i do worry about the possible emotional incest that could occur honestly. I dont think it happens but it gets close

Ok so he passes the underworld so it goes olympus- underworld- mortal realm or am i dumb

The pig is so cute

How did she not realize her veil thingy fell off

Was her family abusive in the og story or was this just so eros would fall even more for her

When did he get the bow and quiver dont just say magic

Ep 14

The little switches in time got me confused the first time i read it

Oh boy he got an apartment

If i were psyche i would be scared deadass

“The ugliest creature youve ever seen” ok thats cool its fun

Ep 15

Listen. How the hell did she adapt to this bc if i went to a diff realm and all of a sudden there was like. Indoor plumbing i would panic the hell out of my mind

Like shes even wearing modern clothes

“I'm certainly not the pig” hehe i like the pig

Why does he not hang out with her when he isnt busy like

Hookup count is 2 now

Ok ok this may be stupid but what if he just made her go by a diff name

Also your mother needs therapy

I would want to leave too

“Do you trust me?” thats kinda guilt tripping ngl

“Maybe i could have visitors” no they literally are from a different time now

Like i get the “i cant tell her no” but just explain the modern vs ancient world but maybe she could go visit them idk

Ep 16

Why are they not confused i feel like they are ignoring this whole thing rachel created

No her sisters have a point why did he not give her a name not even his real one

Dont hold the blade there is a handle girl

“How could you not trust me?” i wouldnt either gotta be honest

Eros is so melodramatic istg

Artemis and persephone are not having it and like mood

Artemis is lighter now

Yknow if she kept a color palette with just base colors and then did lighting it would work better but maybe im a lil lost

“Hey i got a phone” put ur name queen

Q&A 1

I wasnt gonna put anything for this but “i focus on details and seek out references for anatomy” girlie do you wanna. Start doing that again

Ep 17

Why is he just crying he can leave

“Woe is me” shut up Persephone

No it would suck to be sworn to maidenhood without her permission but also i dont think she understands what unrequited love is

“No one will ever love me like that” they might yall just cant do things

“And thats ok” is it??

“Little tart” good nickname tbh

Her eyes went blue but that will never happen again

Dont throw her list away eros

Emergency contacts you just got a phone??

“Im paying for everything so i get to pick” stfu eros

We will never see her wear this again

Do we ever see her wear the same outfit i cant remember

“Was he just humoring me” i mean hes also prolly busy

I know everyone says it but i hate that apollo is purple

Ep 18

Stop thinking of persephone like that its so weird hades

“As if she would want me to have her number” its not a business card made for you man

How do kings get banned genuinely like this is so wild rachel please show me the societal norm and class systems here

Haha so funny zeus is harassing someone -_-

What job would he give her honestly

How does the economy work you cant say that resell on gems is shit and not explain

Hades wow forcing them to accept a check youre so cool

This is locker room talk and i quite literally hate it

Ep 19

If hades doesnt want to discuss his sex life he is valid i wouldnt want to especially not to family

“Ok i can be a little bossy” this is a surprise tool thatll help up later

They are being good brothers here tho

Ew not the locker room talk again

Like even if she was his age or whatever its literally so gross

Hera!!!

Ep 20

Lil kore is so cute

I like their interactions

She has a point its disgusting

However, i hate, like loathe, the miscommunication plot device. Answer hades Hera so i dont have to deal with this

Also zeus shut up you dont speak for hades

Hera should know that she is getting angry at Zeus and then misdirecting her anger its so annoying

“Im well aware im a fool” can you guys just talk please

Ep 21

Hermes lets gooo

Look naked persephone just in case you forgot that shes gorgeous

“Demeter sends her a lot of letters” didnt they not live near each other if not together what

Why does apollo introduce himself like that- oh i know bc rachel cant organically make someone bad shes gotta kinda force it /lh

Apollo is being a dick just let her talk like interrupting is a dick move and what he said obv

“Let me help you” “no thanks” yeah i mean she doesnt need help

Plus youre being a dick like

Ep 22

“Hes my brother” i dont care shes uncomfortable

Quick apollo make a comment about your sisters body so we know how much of a dick you are

Also why does she slip with the knife we dont see her and then ope she has a cut i feel like it couldve been done better

“Alot of blood” did you stab yourself wtf

I know they are gods but shes also the goddess of the hunt she should have stuff lying around for her or maybe animals

See the thing with apollo is he doesnt ask to do anything he just assumes its fine which is one thing but it feels like rachel hammers home the point so violently

“ let me help you!” use ur words king

“I dont have great control of my moods” get a therapist bestie

Also he has no reason to be overprotective he just met her what is it with men and becoming immediately attached to persephone

Cause shes so gorgeous and sweet and naive or whatever

which i think we should discuss the portrayal of her being naive and how it is a part of p*dophilic culture

Ep 23

Haha! I know you dont like this man so i will joke about it

Why is one eye golden bc he used his powers or

Stop grabbing her she just forgave you

Ur so uncomfortable around this man so none of us will pay any attention to you guys together

Are they watching carrie

Why. honestly just why

Ep 24

Hey uh just tw for sexual assault bc its that epsiode

“What time is it” “i came to see you” thats not an answer

Once again the he doesnt ask he just does

“Youve been flirting with me all day” has? She?

Like its gross and apollo is in the wrong but can we ask why we needed to see it, even part of it. Thats so intense

And also, how does it help the story. Genuinely. Did Rachel just do this bc persephone needed to explore her darker side i find it uncomfortable

She handles the topic fine but why was it necessary, i know its smth that happens but it feels so. forced into the story

I guess to get her out of the maidenhood thing but wouldnt it have been so nice to watch her make the decision on her own as a form of growth

Im glad we stop having to see it

I know why the pictures are used later but right now, why does he take pictures

Also its so weird that hes like “keep it between you and me” there isnt any reason for that other than like. Hes bad

Ep 25

Why did his name change for Aidoneus to Hades i dont know the stories that well

The shiny rocks are nice i wish we got to see his connections to gems more

I wish the titans looked more diff than the gods i know they are related but it would be cool

Why did Gaia say that he would destroy them

Vore :/

Glad hades has a therapist

Dog

Ep 26

i do like the fact that this episode is a call its nice

Omg they said the title

“Im the king of the underworld” ok and?? Anyone could tell shes crying

I like the small talk i know it doesnt move the story but its realistic

Hades hears her crying and is like. Im gonna bully you for it

Yeah its teasing and its cute if she wasnt already sad yknow

“Persephone why did you stop talking? I just completely called you out while you are upset”

Ep 27

Why was he in the mortal realm with minthe im curious

“It was different” rachel then retcons that and says it was a one time thing

It does sound like hes making fun of her

Her face and hermes proportions in that one panel oml

“I dont like talking about it” is a valid response persephone hades doesnt make you speak you just are very vocal

“The balance of power should always be in my favor” thank you rachel for showing why it is an unhealthy relationship

“I owe you question” never. Brought up again

Ep 28

“You dont get personal boundaries do you?” neither do you tf

Why do demeter and hades not like each other other than plot

“Working with someone doesnt mean youre compatible” works with minthe(and later works with persephone)

Why was demeter so intense to make her join maidenhood i know to protect her but like if she kept her with her she could be protected too right

Aw they fell asleep on the phone together

How did their phones not die tho

Ep 29

Oh wait look we see one dog that isnt the main three lets go

And hes wearing glasses its actually nice to be wrong

Artemis’ bangs are not long enough to pull into a bun oml

Ill say it: i hate how rachel portrayed zeus and heras marriage. Like they love each other and there couldve been a better way to do this then them arguing all the time

I know ive said it plenty of times but the lack of color consistency is annoying same goes for body types

So if he commands someone they have to do it or

Shes right tho he does whatever he wants

Hebe is cute

I do like how hera dresses

Ep 30

Hebe is so smart but like why let her be 8

Also let me see the other kids who is her sister that she is getting out of bed

“How about a test!” thats a terrible idea

New outfit!

“Persephone has big boobs” we know shes like supposed to be perfect or whatever

Imagine stopping aging at 19 gross also how does their aging work

“ i think ur depressed bc u arent challenged” hera. Stfu up

Also you cant say job and then have her be an intern

Also i know its just so they can be close to each other but god its so dumb

[fmm85]

less than a 1% of the total suspicious activity reports filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network since 2013 were crypto-related.  

Speaking at a workshop on FATF’s Travel Rule, FinCEN Director Kenneth Blanco said the financial watchdog uses these reports to map out IP and wallet addresses that are linked to potential criminals. Other speakers pointed out such regulations may violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects against surveillance without cause. 

You’re reading blockchain Bites: Consensus Edition a twice daily roundup of all the notable news out of Consensus: Distributed. You can sign up for this, and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here.

The debate between privacy and transparency is likely to continue today, with two workshops dedicated to reading blockchain data. Stream the full day of events here. 

Here is what CoinDesk’s Head of Research Noelle Acheson looks forward to today: 

We’ve all heard the gentle warnings to pace ourselves at the beginning of a marathon. Yet, so many of us treat marathons like sprints anyway. Consensus: Distributed is no different, and there was so much going on over the first couple of days that “pacing ourselves” just wasn’t an appealing option.

Today, we have deep dives into token standardization, hosted by our content partners the IEEE, and into blockchain use cases, hosted by the World Economic Forum. Christine Kim and Galen Moore from CoinDesk Research host sessions on crypto metrics and market data. You think crypto charts are confusing? These talks will make them less so.

We also have insight from enterprise executives, consortium leaders and industry economists about the sector’s challenges and opportunities, and how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted efforts. And we’ll hear from our partners Huobi and Abu Dhabi Global Market on crypto market evolution and building digital financial services.

Keep your energy up – it’ll be worth it!

What To Watch

8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET Joining Forces on Token Standardization – Hosted by IEEE Figures from Microsoft, Securitize, R3 Corda, Hedera Hashgraph and Digital Asset, among others, will appear during this program dedicated to the wide world of token issuance.    9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Research Hub: Workshopping Famous Metrics Coin Metrics Nic Carter is joined by other data experts from Glassnodes, Amberdata and BurgerCrypto.com to discuss transparency and the metrics that rule the crypto economy.   11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Research Hub: How To Read Crypto Market Data Similar in theme to the program above, this panel will host Skew, Kaiko and Delphi Digital executives in a discussion about reading the ledgers.    12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Going Live: Vicarious Learning for blockchain Deployment – Hosted by World Economic Forum WEF’s Sheila Warren returns for another star-studded affair to discuss the World Economic Forum’s trials and errors with blockchain technology. Featuring notables from InBev, Deloitte and the Ethereum Foundation.    2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Enterprise blockchain: The Path to Monetization Enterprise blockchain isn’t dead. Salesforce, IBM, EY, ING Bank and Tradelens authorities will stream a discussion about their companies forays into capitalizing on distributive technologies. 

The CoinDesk 50

The CoinDesk 50 are the most innovative and influential organizations in the crypto and blockchain industry.

The CoinDesk 50 is an annual list celebrating the most important organizations in crypto. We’ve been announcing five nominees per day, and have highlighted binance, Cosmos, Brave, Bitmain, MakerDAO, Besu and the People’s Bank of China as particularly noteworthy. Today we honor Silvergate Bank. You can read the full list here. 

CoinDesk COVID Response

#NYBWGives CoinDesk has joined Gitcoin, The Giving Block and Ethereal Summit to support charities helping communities in difficult times. We’re raising $100,000 and giving you a voice through the quadratic funding model. Learn how it works and how to donate.

New York-based interpretive artist Mr. Star City created an original piece of artwork at Consensus: Distributed for auction to support COVID-19 relief.

In addition, New York-based abstract artist Mr. Star City created an original piece of artwork, shown above, as a part of Consensus: Distributed. The art, inspired by love, unity and technology, will be up for auction this week. Follow @coindesk on Twitter to find out how to bid — the proceeds will go to the same cause.

Consensus Magazine

Generation Crypto  Freelance journalist Jess Klein writes about an emerging psychographic of people who see the world through the lens of decentralization. In a series of eight profiles, Klein examines “Generation Crypto,” a diffuse grouping of people of all ages, races and sexes, bound together as “children of Satoshi.” 

SpankChain’s Ameen Soleimani is the subject of this excerpted profile. Read the full series here. 

It was only February when the founder of the blockchain sex worker platform SpankChain, Ameen Soleimani, helped throw a coronavirus-themed party at an Airbnb-ed church during the ETHDenver conference in Colorado – drinking Corona beers with his “shitcoin trading friends, protocol developers, and bitcoin OGs” – but it feels like a lifetime ago.

It was weeks before several of the conference’s attendees went on to EthCC in Paris and got infected with the coronavirus, and one week before Soleimani convinced his mom to take a mass shopping trip to Costco to prepare for a lockdown in California that hadn’t started yet. “I probably could have done more to raise awareness and make people take it seriously,” he says of the church party.

But still, he was prepared. In addition to the Costco trip, he stockpiled drugs including chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine – both under testing to see how effective they could be in treating COVID-19 patients, though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cautioned against using them at home – and even bought an oxygen tank. “On the off-chance my mom is dying of coronavirus … I’d rather have an oxygen concentrator than $400,” he reasons. 

A couple months out from moving out of the apartment he’d shared with SpankChain co-Founder Wills de Vogelaere in Los Angeles’s Venice Beach, Soleimani has been isolating at an Ethereum friend’s mansion in West Hollywood. The friend isn’t there – it’s just Soleimani, two other friends, a heated pool and a steam room. “I sort of hit the quarantine jackpot,” he says.

Like many others in his industry, Soleimani was able to prepare so thoroughly thanks to a combination of a global network and shared prepper mentalities. “I’ve been in a Telegram ‘Doomsday Prepper’ group for, like, a month and a half,” he says, where members share “raw feeds from doctors’ Twitters” and the like. “It turns out to be better intel, a lot of the time, than if you listen to the World Health Organization.”

Being a young entrepreneur in the crypto space generally means avoiding the establishment ethos for a more progressive outlook. For instance, Soleimani posted his first porn video to PornHub back in January. Starring him and SpankChain adviser/adult film star Brenna Sparks, it features the pair “role playing” as themselves (a boss hooking up with his sexy adviser). It took a year for Soleimani to muster the courage to post it online but he has no regrets – it’s helping normalize the stigmatized industry his company operates in, he figures. 

“The old guard is like: He’s ruined his career, he’s fucked, nobody will take him seriously,” says Soleimani. Meanwhile, younger people in the space found the move iconic and admirable.

Soleimani sees this divide as indicative of business culture moving forward, particularly in the crypto space. “Eventually the old people will die, the rules will go with them and newer generations will set the cultural norms,” he said in February. “As entrepreneurs, it’s part of our role to bring those new concepts into the world.” 

In light of the pandemic, this makes for an exceptionally bleak and insensitive take. But in a world where people are only dressing from the waist up for conference calls, rolling with changing cultural norms has become inevitable.

Money Reimagined

Is bitcoin the answer for a global monetary system not longer served by the dollar standard? Airing Friday, May 15, episode 3 of The Breakdown: Money Reimagined examines bitcoin and permissionless stablecoins, both of which are forcing the global monetary system to examine deeply ingrained beliefs.

The Breakdown: Money Reimagined is a podcast crossover micro-series exploring the battle for the future of money in the context of a post COVID-19 world. The four-part podcast features over a dozen voices including Consensus: Distributed speakers Niall Ferguson, Nic Carter and Michael Casey. New episodes air Fridays on the CoinDesk Podcast Network. Subscribe here.

How to Use Brella

To access all of the deeper cuts available through Consensus: Distributed, you’ll need to log in through Brella , our virtual conferencing platform. You can create an account through Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook or set one up manually on Brella. Your profile will be the way you match and network with others. As soon as you’re set up, you’ll be directed to a dashboard showing other registrants.

Brella is easy to use and has a number of features to help you through this virtual experience. There are multiple tracks of simultaneous programming happening inside Brella. You’ll also be able to browse the entire agenda, bookmark sessions and build your own schedule.

Brella is a great networking tool as well, be sure to check out some of the social features available in-page, and reach out to the people and organizations that pique your interest. Celo, for one, is hiring. So is IOV Labs.

Market Intel

Many Ether Whales Might Be Leaving for Bitcoin While ether’s (ETH) price has risen by nearly 50% this year, the number of addresses holding large amounts of the currency, popularly known as whales, has declined significantly. The seven-day average of the number of unique addresses holding 10,000 ethers or more fell to 1,050 on Tuesday. That’s the lowest level since January 2019, according to data provided by the blockchain intelligence firm Glassnode. 

Media Diet

Fund Manager Got NY BitLicense 11 Months After Hiring Its Architect Benjamin Lawsky, the former financial regulator who created New York’s BitLicense in 2015, joined New York Digital Investment Group Asset Advisory LLC (NYDIG) nearly a year before the bitcoin fund manager applied for, and received, that license.

Reddit Rolls Out ‘Community Points’ on Ethereum to Incentivize Positive Behavior The social platform has expanded its “community points” trial, offering users a way to earn a “piece of their favorite communities,” built on top of the Ethereum blockchain.

‘History Has Repeated’: F2Pool Explains Message in Last Block Before Bitcoin Halving Ushering in bitcoin’s third “halving,” mining pool F2Pool rooted a message into the blockchain that will now reside there forever. Preceded by a fish emoji signifying the company’s logo, the mining pool added the text to a headline from The New York Times: “NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed’s Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue,” echoing the message Satoshi Nakamoto left on Bitcoin’s genesis block.

Who Won #CryptoTwitter?

Subscribe to receive blockchain Bites in your inbox, every weekday.

Disclosure strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

Read More

The post Blockchain Bites: Capitalizing on Enterprise Blockchain and Reading Coin Metrics appeared first on Future Money Matters.

[robertkstone]

2019 Lamborghini Aventador LP 770-4 Superveloce Jota First Drive

I called the Aventador Superveloce Lamborghini’s “bloodiest axe” when I first drove it a little more than three years ago just outside Barcelona, Spain. Further exposure back in America to that 740-horsepower rolling weapon confirmed, if not strengthened, my thoughts and feelings. Going with that metaphor, the new Aventador LP 770-4 Superveloce Jota (SVJ for short) is the axe murderer, and oh look: He’s licking the blade. And grinning. I remember thinking that the then-ferocious SV version of Lamborghini’s mid-engine V-12 flagship was as wild and as crazed as supercars got—and frankly would ever get. What has two thumbs and was wrong? This guy! Friends, the lunatics are no longer running the asylum. They’ve burned it to the ground and have gone on to seek higher office.

Some technical details before we get to the drive impressions. The 6.5-liter V-12 makes more power and torque, as it ought to, for as R & D chief Maurizio Reggiani told me, “The story of Lamborghini is based on the V-12.” Reggiani’s team achieved these improvements a few ways. For one, the flywheel has been lightened, allowing the engine to rev more freely. Two, the intake valves are now made from titanium. They also open earlier and stay open longer. Third, a new, shortened exhaust system reduces backpressure. The result is 19 more horsepower (759, up from 740 hp), and the torque rises from 509 lb-ft to 531. More crucially, that torque is available lower in the rev range and for longer, nearly all of it arriving at 4,750 rpm and staying essentially flat until 6,750 rpm. Compare this to the SV, where peak torque arrived at 5,500 rpm. The reworked V-12 sounds angrier, as well. The ISR singe-clutch automated manual clutch remains, though it’s been retuned for even quicker shifts.

The SVJ was put on a diet, with mixed results. The following pieces are made from carbon fiber: front splitter, roof and pillars, monocoque itself, engine cover, rear diffuser, massive tri-post wing, rocker covers and wing mirrors, and large parts of the interior, such as the door panels. Should you opt for the sporty buckets, they are carbon, too. There’s even a lightweight set of wheels available (much simpler looking and in my opinion the ones to get). Oh, and the new exhaust weighs less, too. The issue is that Lamborghini has added some new tech to the SVJ, chiefly two-motor rear-wheel steering and the brand’s patented active aerodynamic system, called Aerodinamica Lamborghini Attiva, aka ALA, that’s been used to great effect on the Huracan Performante, the car that just won our 2018 Best Driver’s Car honors. Lamborghini claims that the SVJ and the old SV should weigh roughly the same. When we weighed an SV, it clocked in at 3,900 pounds even. That’s 209 pounds less than a 2012 Aventador and a few pounds less than a GT-R NISMO (3,904 pounds). Motor Trend has yet to weigh an Aventador S, which replaced the standard car in 2017.

Back to ALA for a second, or in this case ALA 2.0, Lamborghini claims that the system is 30 percent more affective on the SVJ than on the Performante. Why? The company has learned stuff. Functionally, on the Performante, wing-stalling air was channeled up two separate uprights, and the wing was stalled from the outside in. See that cute/weird-looking mustache on the front of the SVJ? Each flattened hexagon directs air over the car’s frunk lid and windshield into a center channel that feeds a duct in the rear wing’s central upright. There are two channels within this intake and a flap that opens and closes each. Going forward, the rear flaps (as well as a single front flap) open to stall the wing and reduce both drag and downforce. Hit the brakes, and the flaps close, activating the front and rear wings, providing both drag and downforce. Yup, the system functions as an airbrake. Turn the steering wheel, and one rear flap opens while one closes, providing downforce on one rear-wheel while allowing the other to rotate. The functional result as a driver is less steering input and increased high-speed stability.

Other tweaks to the SVJ over past Aventadors include reprogrammed magnetic dampers, a retuned all-wheel-drive system, super sticky, model-specific Pirelli Trofeo R tires (255/30ZR20 in front, 355/25ZR21 rear), and 20 percent stiffer anti-roll bars. Also, the reworked body panels are 40 percent more aerodynamic than the SV. Lamborghini claims a 0–62-mph launch in 2.8 seconds. However, when we tested the Superveloce, we saw 0–60 in 2.6 seconds. The SV was also able to run the quarter mile in 10.4 seconds at 134.7 mph. Expect this car to be quicker. Lamborghini still quotes the top speed as north of 217 mph.

The results of all the new stuff on the SVJ are undeniable. An orange, camouflaged car piloted by the fearless Marco Mapelli flew around the Nürburgring Nordschleife in 6:44.97, setting the new production car lap record—a record formerly held by the Porsche GT2 RS (6:47.25), a car that has set lap records on two tracks we regularly test on, Big Willow and Weathertech Raceway Laguna Seca. Perhaps more remarkably, the Aventador SV’s ’Ring lap was 6:59.73, meaning that Lamborghini was able to shave nearly 15 seconds off that car’s time. That’s more than 1 second per mile. That’s remarkable, though not quite as amazing as the jump from the OG Aventador (7:25.00) to the SV. However, when you consider the jump from the initial car to the Jota, we’re talking more than 40 seconds. Frankly, that borders on absurd. It also shows that (like we said) the original Aventador just wasn’t all that. Moving on!

Lamborghini was nice enough to fly me out to the Autodromo do Estoril racetack west of Lisbon, Portugal, to have a go in the SVJ. A funny thing happened, however, between when Lamborghini tested the SVJs on the track and we journo types showed up. Estoril got repaved. What does that mean? No grip. Like none, especially on the model-specific Pirelli Trofeo Rs the SVJ comes on/used to whoop butt on the ’Ring. What to do? Lamborghini removed the fancy shoes and replaced them with P Zero Corsas. The result? Still not very much traction. Oh dear.

What’s a 759-horsepower psychopath like on an unfamiliar racetrack? Quite the handful! The biggest improvement to me going from SV to SVJ is the engine’s increased torque. Not only is there more of it, but the extra twisting force also shows up earlier, as it’s very easy to keep the big V-12 over 4,500 rpm. Perhaps too easy. Previous Aventadors were always fast cars, but unless you were using Thrust mode—the brand’s hysterically named launch control—it took a few moments for the car to engage. Not anymore. Although not quite electric, the SVJ scoots. This proved to be quite a handful on what was the equivalent of a slick track. Does the SVJ oversteer? Understeer? Track true? Based on what I experienced at low speeds, all of the above. But again, the surface was awful.

High speeds are an entirely different matter. I’m lucky enough to have driven the Centenario LP 770-4, Lambo’s super-limited, $2.2 million big-downforce hypercar, which can and should be thought of as a predecessor to the SVJ. The Cent also produced 759 horsepower (though it got there more through exhaust rerouting), came with rear-wheel steering, used nostrils on the hood to divert air up and over the car, had underbody smoothing and a massive rear diffuser, and had active aerodynamics in the form of a massive, hydraulically controlled carbon-fiber rear wing. “Now,” I said of the Cenenario, “you have to learn to trust the car, to trust the aero. The quick steering and revised suspension allow you brazenly to toss the two-ton monster into a corner. Then, for a brief moment, the Centenario feels as if it’s going to continue sliding. However, in a beat the aero catches the car, and you find yourself glued. The aero in conjunction with rear-wheel steering is a game changer.” You can nearly apply that entire quotation to the Jota, with one big caveat.

Here’s the difference between the Centenario and the SVJ: The Jota’s active aero works much quicker. This sentence—“Then, for a brief moment, the Centenario feels as if it’s going to continue sliding”—does not apply. Entering the kink at speed that makes up Turn 5 at Estoril is a revelation. The SVJ doesn’t just feel stable. It feels battened down, rooted, anchored. Even on such a low-grip surface. To me, it’s a shocking sensation to experience in a street car. It’s instant, too. Even though you’re turning the wheel, the SVJ feels like it’s riding a roller coaster track.

The big bull does have a weakness, and it’s braking, specifically the feel of the brake pedal, as well as diminishing downforce as speeds decrease. In other words, the pedal is wooden and the rear end squirms around a tad too much, especially when you’re get the beast whoaed down from 177 mph in time for a second-gear right-hander that constitutes Estoril’s Turn 1. Part of the problem is ABS tuning, but the other part is Lamborghini’s insistence in keeping the brakes feeling like a street car despite the SVJ’s track prowess. Hey, no car is perfect, and the Jota’s high-speed stability more than makes up for the less than perfect brakes. The stability is incredible, actually.

Speaking of incredible, unlike every other American “journalist” who drove the Aventador SVJ in Portugal, I went a day later on a video wave. As a result, although I got about half the track time of everybody else, I got to drive the Jota around the not-so-mean streets of Cascais. After what seemed like hours of low-speed loafing along the coast, it was time to head back to the track. Two things you should know. The first is that Lamborghini stressed that they really, really (perhaps three reallys) wanted us back at the track by 3:30 pm. The second is that they assigned us a motorcycle cop to assist us with filming. Block traffic in roundabouts—that sort of thing.

Around 3, we wrapped up filming, and it was time to head back. The officer suddenly, just like that, took off. Like floored it. Gone, baby, gone. I could have stayed and waited for my video crew and Wazed back to the circuit. My other option was to do what I did. Hey man, I was sitting in a half-million-dollar Italian hypercar, bored silly from low-speed video nonsense, and simply said some profane iteration of, “Oh, why not?” I followed the cop. Within a minute I’m behind this freak of a bike cop, seeing 185 kilometers per hour (115 mph) on the speedo as we weave in and out of traffic. I know on one hand it’s wrong, but on the other hand, he’s the law! This guy’s so dedicated that he’s actually shooing other cars out of the way. Wish I had video! Rest assured, we made it back well before 3:30 pm. The most amazing part? I never said so much as a word to the officer. I did give him a thumbs-up once we were on the paddock, and he returned the gesture.

I bring this wonderful, admittedly less than smart anecdote because holy wow dude is the SVJ righteous on the street! With no traction issues whatsoever, the car just rocked, and rocked in a way that I’ve never experienced before. Confidence doesn’t even begin to describe it. I suddenly felt like a superhero, not only invincible but also with all this insane weaponry at my fingertips. What would Batman drive? The latest and greatest V-12 beastie from Sant’Agata, obviously. If I had a cape I would.

We recently named the Lamborghini Huracan Performante our 2018 Best Driver’s Car. Because both the Performante and the SVJ feature ALA and are extreme, reworked versions of the “base” cars, it’s reasonable to think that the Jota is just a big, V-12-powered Perf. Not even a little bit. The Performante is to some degree a fantastic sports car. Rewarding, neutral, balanced—all that stuff. The SVJ is something else entirely. It’s a 10,000-volt fist to the face, a flaming baseball bat to the skull, a bomb in bomb’s clothing. Does it have a shot at next year’s Best Driver’s Car? I dunno, as it’s a probably bit too big, a bit too blunt. The Aventador SVJ is, however, a lock to be voted car most likely to beat up the 2019 Best Driver’s Car. Sign me up.

Speculation: What we think we know about the next V-12 Lamborghini

The Lamborghini Aventador is approaching the end of its life. First launched in 2011 as the replacement for the Murcielago, the Aventador is the fourth iteration of the longitudinally mounted mid-engine V-12 Lambos. (Yes, the Miura had a V-12 behind the driver, but it was transverse.) The Murcieago was the first raging bull designed fully under the auspices of Audi, Lamborghini’s parent company ,and had a nine-year life span. If there’s one thing you can count on when it comes to Teutonic companies, it is predictability. As such, the Aventador has two more years to go before we its replacement goes on sale.

The next V-12 will be the first Lamborghini designed completely by the brand’s new, as of March 2016, chief designer, Mitja Borkert. Mitja (pronounced Meecha, like nice to meet ya) has of course been involved with cars released since he’s been on board—the Centenario Roadster was the first Lambo he did any work on, and of course the Urus has his fingerprints on it. Never forget, however, that designs are usually locked years before you see them. Speaking of seeing, every time I see Borkert, I implore him to make sure that when a young child sees the next V-12, said kid jumps in the air, waves his or her arms, and starts screaming. That’s known as the Countach effect. Luckily, Borkert has a young son, and he assures me that this will be the case. Additionally, Borkert has some real chops. While at Porsche he designed both the Panamera Sport Turismo and the Misson E Concept, now known as Taycan. Borkert’s Terzo Millennio Concept is pretty smoking hot, too.

One of the perennial complaints about the Aventador is the ISR single-clutch transmission. No matter what, the ISR isn’t great to drive at low speeds. Head of R&D Maurizio Regionni explained that when they began designing the Aventador back in 2008, dual-clutch transmissions were not so good, and those that could hope to handle the Aventador’s power and torque (like the Ricardo dual-clutch in the Bugatti Veyron) were prohibitively expensive (ahem—like the Ricardo dual-clutch in the Bugatti Veyron). You can’t just swap one out for the other—the ISR’s housing is long and skinny, whereas a dual-clutch box tends to be squat and fat. You can expect the next V-12 from PerformanceJunk WP Feed 3 https://ift.tt/2C5G2yA via IFTTT

[fmm85]

less than a 1% of the total suspicious activity reports filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network since 2013 were crypto-related.  

Speaking at a workshop on FATF’s Travel Rule, FinCEN Director Kenneth Blanco said the financial watchdog uses these reports to map out IP and wallet addresses that are linked to potential criminals. Other speakers pointed out such regulations may violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects against surveillance without cause. 

You’re reading blockchain Bites: Consensus Edition a twice daily roundup of all the notable news out of Consensus: Distributed. You can sign up for this, and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here.

The debate between privacy and transparency is likely to continue today, with two workshops dedicated to reading blockchain data. Stream the full day of events here. 

Here is what CoinDesk’s Head of Research Noelle Acheson looks forward to today: 

We’ve all heard the gentle warnings to pace ourselves at the beginning of a marathon. Yet, so many of us treat marathons like sprints anyway. Consensus: Distributed is no different, and there was so much going on over the first couple of days that “pacing ourselves” just wasn’t an appealing option.

Today, we have deep dives into token standardization, hosted by our content partners the IEEE, and into blockchain use cases, hosted by the World Economic Forum. Christine Kim and Galen Moore from CoinDesk Research host sessions on crypto metrics and market data. You think crypto charts are confusing? These talks will make them less so.

We also have insight from enterprise executives, consortium leaders and industry economists about the sector’s challenges and opportunities, and how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted efforts. And we’ll hear from our partners Huobi and Abu Dhabi Global Market on crypto market evolution and building digital financial services.

Keep your energy up – it’ll be worth it!

What To Watch

8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET Joining Forces on Token Standardization – Hosted by IEEE Figures from Microsoft, Securitize, R3 Corda, Hedera Hashgraph and Digital Asset, among others, will appear during this program dedicated to the wide world of token issuance.    9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Research Hub: Workshopping Famous Metrics Coin Metrics Nic Carter is joined by other data experts from Glassnodes, Amberdata and BurgerCrypto.com to discuss transparency and the metrics that rule the crypto economy.   11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Research Hub: How To Read Crypto Market Data Similar in theme to the program above, this panel will host Skew, Kaiko and Delphi Digital executives in a discussion about reading the ledgers.    12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Going Live: Vicarious Learning for blockchain Deployment – Hosted by World Economic Forum WEF’s Sheila Warren returns for another star-studded affair to discuss the World Economic Forum’s trials and errors with blockchain technology. Featuring notables from InBev, Deloitte and the Ethereum Foundation.    2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Enterprise blockchain: The Path to Monetization Enterprise blockchain isn’t dead. Salesforce, IBM, EY, ING Bank and Tradelens authorities will stream a discussion about their companies forays into capitalizing on distributive technologies. 

The CoinDesk 50

The CoinDesk 50 are the most innovative and influential organizations in the crypto and blockchain industry.

The CoinDesk 50 is an annual list celebrating the most important organizations in crypto. We’ve been announcing five nominees per day, and have highlighted binance, Cosmos, Brave, Bitmain, MakerDAO, Besu and the People’s Bank of China as particularly noteworthy. Today we honor Silvergate Bank. You can read the full list here. 

CoinDesk COVID Response

#NYBWGives CoinDesk has joined Gitcoin, The Giving Block and Ethereal Summit to support charities helping communities in difficult times. We’re raising $100,000 and giving you a voice through the quadratic funding model. Learn how it works and how to donate.

New York-based interpretive artist Mr. Star City created an original piece of artwork at Consensus: Distributed for auction to support COVID-19 relief.

In addition, New York-based abstract artist Mr. Star City created an original piece of artwork, shown above, as a part of Consensus: Distributed. The art, inspired by love, unity and technology, will be up for auction this week. Follow @coindesk on Twitter to find out how to bid — the proceeds will go to the same cause.

Consensus Magazine

Generation Crypto  Freelance journalist Jess Klein writes about an emerging psychographic of people who see the world through the lens of decentralization. In a series of eight profiles, Klein examines “Generation Crypto,” a diffuse grouping of people of all ages, races and sexes, bound together as “children of Satoshi.” 

SpankChain’s Ameen Soleimani is the subject of this excerpted profile. Read the full series here. 

It was only February when the founder of the blockchain sex worker platform SpankChain, Ameen Soleimani, helped throw a coronavirus-themed party at an Airbnb-ed church during the ETHDenver conference in Colorado – drinking Corona beers with his “shitcoin trading friends, protocol developers, and bitcoin OGs” – but it feels like a lifetime ago.

It was weeks before several of the conference’s attendees went on to EthCC in Paris and got infected with the coronavirus, and one week before Soleimani convinced his mom to take a mass shopping trip to Costco to prepare for a lockdown in California that hadn’t started yet. “I probably could have done more to raise awareness and make people take it seriously,” he says of the church party.

But still, he was prepared. In addition to the Costco trip, he stockpiled drugs including chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine – both under testing to see how effective they could be in treating COVID-19 patients, though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cautioned against using them at home – and even bought an oxygen tank. “On the off-chance my mom is dying of coronavirus … I’d rather have an oxygen concentrator than $400,” he reasons. 

A couple months out from moving out of the apartment he’d shared with SpankChain co-Founder Wills de Vogelaere in Los Angeles’s Venice Beach, Soleimani has been isolating at an Ethereum friend’s mansion in West Hollywood. The friend isn’t there – it’s just Soleimani, two other friends, a heated pool and a steam room. “I sort of hit the quarantine jackpot,” he says.

Like many others in his industry, Soleimani was able to prepare so thoroughly thanks to a combination of a global network and shared prepper mentalities. “I’ve been in a Telegram ‘Doomsday Prepper’ group for, like, a month and a half,” he says, where members share “raw feeds from doctors’ Twitters” and the like. “It turns out to be better intel, a lot of the time, than if you listen to the World Health Organization.”

Being a young entrepreneur in the crypto space generally means avoiding the establishment ethos for a more progressive outlook. For instance, Soleimani posted his first porn video to PornHub back in January. Starring him and SpankChain adviser/adult film star Brenna Sparks, it features the pair “role playing” as themselves (a boss hooking up with his sexy adviser). It took a year for Soleimani to muster the courage to post it online but he has no regrets – it’s helping normalize the stigmatized industry his company operates in, he figures. 

“The old guard is like: He’s ruined his career, he’s fucked, nobody will take him seriously,” says Soleimani. Meanwhile, younger people in the space found the move iconic and admirable.

Soleimani sees this divide as indicative of business culture moving forward, particularly in the crypto space. “Eventually the old people will die, the rules will go with them and newer generations will set the cultural norms,” he said in February. “As entrepreneurs, it’s part of our role to bring those new concepts into the world.” 

In light of the pandemic, this makes for an exceptionally bleak and insensitive take. But in a world where people are only dressing from the waist up for conference calls, rolling with changing cultural norms has become inevitable.

Money Reimagined

Is bitcoin the answer for a global monetary system not longer served by the dollar standard? Airing Friday, May 15, episode 3 of The Breakdown: Money Reimagined examines bitcoin and permissionless stablecoins, both of which are forcing the global monetary system to examine deeply ingrained beliefs.

The Breakdown: Money Reimagined is a podcast crossover micro-series exploring the battle for the future of money in the context of a post COVID-19 world. The four-part podcast features over a dozen voices including Consensus: Distributed speakers Niall Ferguson, Nic Carter and Michael Casey. New episodes air Fridays on the CoinDesk Podcast Network. Subscribe here.

How to Use Brella

To access all of the deeper cuts available through Consensus: Distributed, you’ll need to log in through Brella , our virtual conferencing platform. You can create an account through Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook or set one up manually on Brella. Your profile will be the way you match and network with others. As soon as you’re set up, you’ll be directed to a dashboard showing other registrants.

Brella is easy to use and has a number of features to help you through this virtual experience. There are multiple tracks of simultaneous programming happening inside Brella. You’ll also be able to browse the entire agenda, bookmark sessions and build your own schedule.

Brella is a great networking tool as well, be sure to check out some of the social features available in-page, and reach out to the people and organizations that pique your interest. Celo, for one, is hiring. So is IOV Labs.

Market Intel

Many Ether Whales Might Be Leaving for Bitcoin While ether’s (ETH) price has risen by nearly 50% this year, the number of addresses holding large amounts of the currency, popularly known as whales, has declined significantly. The seven-day average of the number of unique addresses holding 10,000 ethers or more fell to 1,050 on Tuesday. That’s the lowest level since January 2019, according to data provided by the blockchain intelligence firm Glassnode. 

Media Diet

Fund Manager Got NY BitLicense 11 Months After Hiring Its Architect Benjamin Lawsky, the former financial regulator who created New York’s BitLicense in 2015, joined New York Digital Investment Group Asset Advisory LLC (NYDIG) nearly a year before the bitcoin fund manager applied for, and received, that license.

Reddit Rolls Out ‘Community Points’ on Ethereum to Incentivize Positive Behavior The social platform has expanded its “community points” trial, offering users a way to earn a “piece of their favorite communities,” built on top of the Ethereum blockchain.

‘History Has Repeated’: F2Pool Explains Message in Last Block Before Bitcoin Halving Ushering in bitcoin’s third “halving,” mining pool F2Pool rooted a message into the blockchain that will now reside there forever. Preceded by a fish emoji signifying the company’s logo, the mining pool added the text to a headline from The New York Times: “NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed’s Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue,” echoing the message Satoshi Nakamoto left on Bitcoin’s genesis block.

Who Won #CryptoTwitter?

Subscribe to receive blockchain Bites in your inbox, every weekday.

Disclosure strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

Read More

The post Blockchain Bites: Capitalizing on Enterprise Blockchain and Reading Coin Metrics appeared first on Future Money Matters.

[fmm85]

less than a 1% of the total suspicious activity reports filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network since 2013 were crypto-related.  

Speaking at a workshop on FATF’s Travel Rule, FinCEN Director Kenneth Blanco said the financial watchdog uses these reports to map out IP and wallet addresses that are linked to potential criminals. Other speakers pointed out such regulations may violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects against surveillance without cause. 

You’re reading blockchain Bites: Consensus Edition a twice daily roundup of all the notable news out of Consensus: Distributed. You can sign up for this, and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here.

The debate between privacy and transparency is likely to continue today, with two workshops dedicated to reading blockchain data. Stream the full day of events here. 

Here is what CoinDesk’s Head of Research Noelle Acheson looks forward to today: 

We’ve all heard the gentle warnings to pace ourselves at the beginning of a marathon. Yet, so many of us treat marathons like sprints anyway. Consensus: Distributed is no different, and there was so much going on over the first couple of days that “pacing ourselves” just wasn’t an appealing option.

Today, we have deep dives into token standardization, hosted by our content partners the IEEE, and into blockchain use cases, hosted by the World Economic Forum. Christine Kim and Galen Moore from CoinDesk Research host sessions on crypto metrics and market data. You think crypto charts are confusing? These talks will make them less so.

We also have insight from enterprise executives, consortium leaders and industry economists about the sector’s challenges and opportunities, and how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted efforts. And we’ll hear from our partners Huobi and Abu Dhabi Global Market on crypto market evolution and building digital financial services.

Keep your energy up – it’ll be worth it!

What To Watch

8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET Joining Forces on Token Standardization – Hosted by IEEE Figures from Microsoft, Securitize, R3 Corda, Hedera Hashgraph and Digital Asset, among others, will appear during this program dedicated to the wide world of token issuance.    9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Research Hub: Workshopping Famous Metrics Coin Metrics Nic Carter is joined by other data experts from Glassnodes, Amberdata and BurgerCrypto.com to discuss transparency and the metrics that rule the crypto economy.   11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Research Hub: How To Read Crypto Market Data Similar in theme to the program above, this panel will host Skew, Kaiko and Delphi Digital executives in a discussion about reading the ledgers.    12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Going Live: Vicarious Learning for blockchain Deployment – Hosted by World Economic Forum WEF’s Sheila Warren returns for another star-studded affair to discuss the World Economic Forum’s trials and errors with blockchain technology. Featuring notables from InBev, Deloitte and the Ethereum Foundation.    2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Enterprise blockchain: The Path to Monetization Enterprise blockchain isn’t dead. Salesforce, IBM, EY, ING Bank and Tradelens authorities will stream a discussion about their companies forays into capitalizing on distributive technologies. 

The CoinDesk 50

The CoinDesk 50 are the most innovative and influential organizations in the crypto and blockchain industry.

The CoinDesk 50 is an annual list celebrating the most important organizations in crypto. We’ve been announcing five nominees per day, and have highlighted binance, Cosmos, Brave, Bitmain, MakerDAO, Besu and the People’s Bank of China as particularly noteworthy. Today we honor Silvergate Bank. You can read the full list here. 

CoinDesk COVID Response

#NYBWGives CoinDesk has joined Gitcoin, The Giving Block and Ethereal Summit to support charities helping communities in difficult times. We’re raising $100,000 and giving you a voice through the quadratic funding model. Learn how it works and how to donate.

New York-based interpretive artist Mr. Star City created an original piece of artwork at Consensus: Distributed for auction to support COVID-19 relief.

In addition, New York-based abstract artist Mr. Star City created an original piece of artwork, shown above, as a part of Consensus: Distributed. The art, inspired by love, unity and technology, will be up for auction this week. Follow @coindesk on Twitter to find out how to bid — the proceeds will go to the same cause.

Consensus Magazine

Generation Crypto  Freelance journalist Jess Klein writes about an emerging psychographic of people who see the world through the lens of decentralization. In a series of eight profiles, Klein examines “Generation Crypto,” a diffuse grouping of people of all ages, races and sexes, bound together as “children of Satoshi.” 

SpankChain’s Ameen Soleimani is the subject of this excerpted profile. Read the full series here. 

It was only February when the founder of the blockchain sex worker platform SpankChain, Ameen Soleimani, helped throw a coronavirus-themed party at an Airbnb-ed church during the ETHDenver conference in Colorado – drinking Corona beers with his “shitcoin trading friends, protocol developers, and bitcoin OGs” – but it feels like a lifetime ago.

It was weeks before several of the conference’s attendees went on to EthCC in Paris and got infected with the coronavirus, and one week before Soleimani convinced his mom to take a mass shopping trip to Costco to prepare for a lockdown in California that hadn’t started yet. “I probably could have done more to raise awareness and make people take it seriously,” he says of the church party.

But still, he was prepared. In addition to the Costco trip, he stockpiled drugs including chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine – both under testing to see how effective they could be in treating COVID-19 patients, though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cautioned against using them at home – and even bought an oxygen tank. “On the off-chance my mom is dying of coronavirus … I’d rather have an oxygen concentrator than $400,” he reasons. 

A couple months out from moving out of the apartment he’d shared with SpankChain co-Founder Wills de Vogelaere in Los Angeles’s Venice Beach, Soleimani has been isolating at an Ethereum friend’s mansion in West Hollywood. The friend isn’t there – it’s just Soleimani, two other friends, a heated pool and a steam room. “I sort of hit the quarantine jackpot,” he says.

Like many others in his industry, Soleimani was able to prepare so thoroughly thanks to a combination of a global network and shared prepper mentalities. “I’ve been in a Telegram ‘Doomsday Prepper’ group for, like, a month and a half,” he says, where members share “raw feeds from doctors’ Twitters” and the like. “It turns out to be better intel, a lot of the time, than if you listen to the World Health Organization.”

Being a young entrepreneur in the crypto space generally means avoiding the establishment ethos for a more progressive outlook. For instance, Soleimani posted his first porn video to PornHub back in January. Starring him and SpankChain adviser/adult film star Brenna Sparks, it features the pair “role playing” as themselves (a boss hooking up with his sexy adviser). It took a year for Soleimani to muster the courage to post it online but he has no regrets – it’s helping normalize the stigmatized industry his company operates in, he figures. 

“The old guard is like: He’s ruined his career, he’s fucked, nobody will take him seriously,” says Soleimani. Meanwhile, younger people in the space found the move iconic and admirable.

Soleimani sees this divide as indicative of business culture moving forward, particularly in the crypto space. “Eventually the old people will die, the rules will go with them and newer generations will set the cultural norms,” he said in February. “As entrepreneurs, it’s part of our role to bring those new concepts into the world.” 

In light of the pandemic, this makes for an exceptionally bleak and insensitive take. But in a world where people are only dressing from the waist up for conference calls, rolling with changing cultural norms has become inevitable.

Money Reimagined

Is bitcoin the answer for a global monetary system not longer served by the dollar standard? Airing Friday, May 15, episode 3 of The Breakdown: Money Reimagined examines bitcoin and permissionless stablecoins, both of which are forcing the global monetary system to examine deeply ingrained beliefs.

The Breakdown: Money Reimagined is a podcast crossover micro-series exploring the battle for the future of money in the context of a post COVID-19 world. The four-part podcast features over a dozen voices including Consensus: Distributed speakers Niall Ferguson, Nic Carter and Michael Casey. New episodes air Fridays on the CoinDesk Podcast Network. Subscribe here.

How to Use Brella

To access all of the deeper cuts available through Consensus: Distributed, you’ll need to log in through Brella , our virtual conferencing platform. You can create an account through Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook or set one up manually on Brella. Your profile will be the way you match and network with others. As soon as you’re set up, you’ll be directed to a dashboard showing other registrants.

Brella is easy to use and has a number of features to help you through this virtual experience. There are multiple tracks of simultaneous programming happening inside Brella. You’ll also be able to browse the entire agenda, bookmark sessions and build your own schedule.

Brella is a great networking tool as well, be sure to check out some of the social features available in-page, and reach out to the people and organizations that pique your interest. Celo, for one, is hiring. So is IOV Labs.

Market Intel

Many Ether Whales Might Be Leaving for Bitcoin While ether’s (ETH) price has risen by nearly 50% this year, the number of addresses holding large amounts of the currency, popularly known as whales, has declined significantly. The seven-day average of the number of unique addresses holding 10,000 ethers or more fell to 1,050 on Tuesday. That’s the lowest level since January 2019, according to data provided by the blockchain intelligence firm Glassnode. 

Media Diet

Fund Manager Got NY BitLicense 11 Months After Hiring Its Architect Benjamin Lawsky, the former financial regulator who created New York’s BitLicense in 2015, joined New York Digital Investment Group Asset Advisory LLC (NYDIG) nearly a year before the bitcoin fund manager applied for, and received, that license.

Reddit Rolls Out ‘Community Points’ on Ethereum to Incentivize Positive Behavior The social platform has expanded its “community points” trial, offering users a way to earn a “piece of their favorite communities,” built on top of the Ethereum blockchain.

‘History Has Repeated’: F2Pool Explains Message in Last Block Before Bitcoin Halving Ushering in bitcoin’s third “halving,” mining pool F2Pool rooted a message into the blockchain that will now reside there forever. Preceded by a fish emoji signifying the company’s logo, the mining pool added the text to a headline from The New York Times: “NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed’s Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue,” echoing the message Satoshi Nakamoto left on Bitcoin’s genesis block.

Who Won #CryptoTwitter?

Subscribe to receive blockchain Bites in your inbox, every weekday.

Disclosure strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

Read More

The post Blockchain Bites: Capitalizing on Enterprise Blockchain and Reading Coin Metrics appeared first on Future Money Matters.

[fmm85]

less than a 1% of the total suspicious activity reports filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network since 2013 were crypto-related.  

Speaking at a workshop on FATF’s Travel Rule, FinCEN Director Kenneth Blanco said the financial watchdog uses these reports to map out IP and wallet addresses that are linked to potential criminals. Other speakers pointed out such regulations may violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects against surveillance without cause. 

You’re reading blockchain Bites: Consensus Edition a twice daily roundup of all the notable news out of Consensus: Distributed. You can sign up for this, and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here.

The debate between privacy and transparency is likely to continue today, with two workshops dedicated to reading blockchain data. Stream the full day of events here. 

Here is what CoinDesk’s Head of Research Noelle Acheson looks forward to today: 

We’ve all heard the gentle warnings to pace ourselves at the beginning of a marathon. Yet, so many of us treat marathons like sprints anyway. Consensus: Distributed is no different, and there was so much going on over the first couple of days that “pacing ourselves” just wasn’t an appealing option.

Today, we have deep dives into token standardization, hosted by our content partners the IEEE, and into blockchain use cases, hosted by the World Economic Forum. Christine Kim and Galen Moore from CoinDesk Research host sessions on crypto metrics and market data. You think crypto charts are confusing? These talks will make them less so.

We also have insight from enterprise executives, consortium leaders and industry economists about the sector’s challenges and opportunities, and how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted efforts. And we’ll hear from our partners Huobi and Abu Dhabi Global Market on crypto market evolution and building digital financial services.

Keep your energy up – it’ll be worth it!

What To Watch

8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET Joining Forces on Token Standardization – Hosted by IEEE Figures from Microsoft, Securitize, R3 Corda, Hedera Hashgraph and Digital Asset, among others, will appear during this program dedicated to the wide world of token issuance.    9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Research Hub: Workshopping Famous Metrics Coin Metrics Nic Carter is joined by other data experts from Glassnodes, Amberdata and BurgerCrypto.com to discuss transparency and the metrics that rule the crypto economy.   11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Research Hub: How To Read Crypto Market Data Similar in theme to the program above, this panel will host Skew, Kaiko and Delphi Digital executives in a discussion about reading the ledgers.    12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Going Live: Vicarious Learning for blockchain Deployment – Hosted by World Economic Forum WEF’s Sheila Warren returns for another star-studded affair to discuss the World Economic Forum’s trials and errors with blockchain technology. Featuring notables from InBev, Deloitte and the Ethereum Foundation.    2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Enterprise blockchain: The Path to Monetization Enterprise blockchain isn’t dead. Salesforce, IBM, EY, ING Bank and Tradelens authorities will stream a discussion about their companies forays into capitalizing on distributive technologies. 

The CoinDesk 50

The CoinDesk 50 are the most innovative and influential organizations in the crypto and blockchain industry.

The CoinDesk 50 is an annual list celebrating the most important organizations in crypto. We’ve been announcing five nominees per day, and have highlighted binance, Cosmos, Brave, Bitmain, MakerDAO, Besu and the People’s Bank of China as particularly noteworthy. Today we honor Silvergate Bank. You can read the full list here. 

CoinDesk COVID Response

#NYBWGives CoinDesk has joined Gitcoin, The Giving Block and Ethereal Summit to support charities helping communities in difficult times. We’re raising $100,000 and giving you a voice through the quadratic funding model. Learn how it works and how to donate.

New York-based interpretive artist Mr. Star City created an original piece of artwork at Consensus: Distributed for auction to support COVID-19 relief.

In addition, New York-based abstract artist Mr. Star City created an original piece of artwork, shown above, as a part of Consensus: Distributed. The art, inspired by love, unity and technology, will be up for auction this week. Follow @coindesk on Twitter to find out how to bid — the proceeds will go to the same cause.

Consensus Magazine

Generation Crypto  Freelance journalist Jess Klein writes about an emerging psychographic of people who see the world through the lens of decentralization. In a series of eight profiles, Klein examines “Generation Crypto,” a diffuse grouping of people of all ages, races and sexes, bound together as “children of Satoshi.” 

SpankChain’s Ameen Soleimani is the subject of this excerpted profile. Read the full series here. 

It was only February when the founder of the blockchain sex worker platform SpankChain, Ameen Soleimani, helped throw a coronavirus-themed party at an Airbnb-ed church during the ETHDenver conference in Colorado – drinking Corona beers with his “shitcoin trading friends, protocol developers, and bitcoin OGs” – but it feels like a lifetime ago.

It was weeks before several of the conference’s attendees went on to EthCC in Paris and got infected with the coronavirus, and one week before Soleimani convinced his mom to take a mass shopping trip to Costco to prepare for a lockdown in California that hadn’t started yet. “I probably could have done more to raise awareness and make people take it seriously,” he says of the church party.

But still, he was prepared. In addition to the Costco trip, he stockpiled drugs including chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine – both under testing to see how effective they could be in treating COVID-19 patients, though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cautioned against using them at home – and even bought an oxygen tank. “On the off-chance my mom is dying of coronavirus … I’d rather have an oxygen concentrator than $400,” he reasons. 

A couple months out from moving out of the apartment he’d shared with SpankChain co-Founder Wills de Vogelaere in Los Angeles’s Venice Beach, Soleimani has been isolating at an Ethereum friend’s mansion in West Hollywood. The friend isn’t there – it’s just Soleimani, two other friends, a heated pool and a steam room. “I sort of hit the quarantine jackpot,” he says.

Like many others in his industry, Soleimani was able to prepare so thoroughly thanks to a combination of a global network and shared prepper mentalities. “I’ve been in a Telegram ‘Doomsday Prepper’ group for, like, a month and a half,” he says, where members share “raw feeds from doctors’ Twitters” and the like. “It turns out to be better intel, a lot of the time, than if you listen to the World Health Organization.”

Being a young entrepreneur in the crypto space generally means avoiding the establishment ethos for a more progressive outlook. For instance, Soleimani posted his first porn video to PornHub back in January. Starring him and SpankChain adviser/adult film star Brenna Sparks, it features the pair “role playing” as themselves (a boss hooking up with his sexy adviser). It took a year for Soleimani to muster the courage to post it online but he has no regrets – it’s helping normalize the stigmatized industry his company operates in, he figures. 

“The old guard is like: He’s ruined his career, he’s fucked, nobody will take him seriously,” says Soleimani. Meanwhile, younger people in the space found the move iconic and admirable.

Soleimani sees this divide as indicative of business culture moving forward, particularly in the crypto space. “Eventually the old people will die, the rules will go with them and newer generations will set the cultural norms,” he said in February. “As entrepreneurs, it’s part of our role to bring those new concepts into the world.” 

In light of the pandemic, this makes for an exceptionally bleak and insensitive take. But in a world where people are only dressing from the waist up for conference calls, rolling with changing cultural norms has become inevitable.

Money Reimagined

Is bitcoin the answer for a global monetary system not longer served by the dollar standard? Airing Friday, May 15, episode 3 of The Breakdown: Money Reimagined examines bitcoin and permissionless stablecoins, both of which are forcing the global monetary system to examine deeply ingrained beliefs.

The Breakdown: Money Reimagined is a podcast crossover micro-series exploring the battle for the future of money in the context of a post COVID-19 world. The four-part podcast features over a dozen voices including Consensus: Distributed speakers Niall Ferguson, Nic Carter and Michael Casey. New episodes air Fridays on the CoinDesk Podcast Network. Subscribe here.

How to Use Brella

To access all of the deeper cuts available through Consensus: Distributed, you’ll need to log in through Brella , our virtual conferencing platform. You can create an account through Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook or set one up manually on Brella. Your profile will be the way you match and network with others. As soon as you’re set up, you’ll be directed to a dashboard showing other registrants.

Brella is easy to use and has a number of features to help you through this virtual experience. There are multiple tracks of simultaneous programming happening inside Brella. You’ll also be able to browse the entire agenda, bookmark sessions and build your own schedule.

Brella is a great networking tool as well, be sure to check out some of the social features available in-page, and reach out to the people and organizations that pique your interest. Celo, for one, is hiring. So is IOV Labs.

Market Intel

Many Ether Whales Might Be Leaving for Bitcoin While ether’s (ETH) price has risen by nearly 50% this year, the number of addresses holding large amounts of the currency, popularly known as whales, has declined significantly. The seven-day average of the number of unique addresses holding 10,000 ethers or more fell to 1,050 on Tuesday. That’s the lowest level since January 2019, according to data provided by the blockchain intelligence firm Glassnode. 

Media Diet

Fund Manager Got NY BitLicense 11 Months After Hiring Its Architect Benjamin Lawsky, the former financial regulator who created New York’s BitLicense in 2015, joined New York Digital Investment Group Asset Advisory LLC (NYDIG) nearly a year before the bitcoin fund manager applied for, and received, that license.

Reddit Rolls Out ‘Community Points’ on Ethereum to Incentivize Positive Behavior The social platform has expanded its “community points” trial, offering users a way to earn a “piece of their favorite communities,” built on top of the Ethereum blockchain.

‘History Has Repeated’: F2Pool Explains Message in Last Block Before Bitcoin Halving Ushering in bitcoin’s third “halving,” mining pool F2Pool rooted a message into the blockchain that will now reside there forever. Preceded by a fish emoji signifying the company’s logo, the mining pool added the text to a headline from The New York Times: “NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed’s Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue,” echoing the message Satoshi Nakamoto left on Bitcoin’s genesis block.

Who Won #CryptoTwitter?

Subscribe to receive blockchain Bites in your inbox, every weekday.

Disclosure strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

Read More

The post Blockchain Bites: Capitalizing on Enterprise Blockchain and Reading Coin Metrics appeared first on Future Money Matters.

[fmm85]

less than a 1% of the total suspicious activity reports filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network since 2013 were crypto-related.  

Speaking at a workshop on FATF’s Travel Rule, FinCEN Director Kenneth Blanco said the financial watchdog uses these reports to map out IP and wallet addresses that are linked to potential criminals. Other speakers pointed out such regulations may violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects against surveillance without cause. 

You’re reading blockchain Bites: Consensus Edition a twice daily roundup of all the notable news out of Consensus: Distributed. You can sign up for this, and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here.

The debate between privacy and transparency is likely to continue today, with two workshops dedicated to reading blockchain data. Stream the full day of events here. 

Here is what CoinDesk’s Head of Research Noelle Acheson looks forward to today: 

We’ve all heard the gentle warnings to pace ourselves at the beginning of a marathon. Yet, so many of us treat marathons like sprints anyway. Consensus: Distributed is no different, and there was so much going on over the first couple of days that “pacing ourselves” just wasn’t an appealing option.

Today, we have deep dives into token standardization, hosted by our content partners the IEEE, and into blockchain use cases, hosted by the World Economic Forum. Christine Kim and Galen Moore from CoinDesk Research host sessions on crypto metrics and market data. You think crypto charts are confusing? These talks will make them less so.

We also have insight from enterprise executives, consortium leaders and industry economists about the sector’s challenges and opportunities, and how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted efforts. And we’ll hear from our partners Huobi and Abu Dhabi Global Market on crypto market evolution and building digital financial services.

Keep your energy up – it’ll be worth it!

What To Watch

8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET Joining Forces on Token Standardization – Hosted by IEEE Figures from Microsoft, Securitize, R3 Corda, Hedera Hashgraph and Digital Asset, among others, will appear during this program dedicated to the wide world of token issuance.    9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Research Hub: Workshopping Famous Metrics Coin Metrics Nic Carter is joined by other data experts from Glassnodes, Amberdata and BurgerCrypto.com to discuss transparency and the metrics that rule the crypto economy.   11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Research Hub: How To Read Crypto Market Data Similar in theme to the program above, this panel will host Skew, Kaiko and Delphi Digital executives in a discussion about reading the ledgers.    12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Going Live: Vicarious Learning for blockchain Deployment – Hosted by World Economic Forum WEF’s Sheila Warren returns for another star-studded affair to discuss the World Economic Forum’s trials and errors with blockchain technology. Featuring notables from InBev, Deloitte and the Ethereum Foundation.    2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Enterprise blockchain: The Path to Monetization Enterprise blockchain isn’t dead. Salesforce, IBM, EY, ING Bank and Tradelens authorities will stream a discussion about their companies forays into capitalizing on distributive technologies. 

The CoinDesk 50

The CoinDesk 50 are the most innovative and influential organizations in the crypto and blockchain industry.

The CoinDesk 50 is an annual list celebrating the most important organizations in crypto. We’ve been announcing five nominees per day, and have highlighted binance, Cosmos, Brave, Bitmain, MakerDAO, Besu and the People’s Bank of China as particularly noteworthy. Today we honor Silvergate Bank. You can read the full list here. 

CoinDesk COVID Response

#NYBWGives CoinDesk has joined Gitcoin, The Giving Block and Ethereal Summit to support charities helping communities in difficult times. We’re raising $100,000 and giving you a voice through the quadratic funding model. Learn how it works and how to donate.

New York-based interpretive artist Mr. Star City created an original piece of artwork at Consensus: Distributed for auction to support COVID-19 relief.

In addition, New York-based abstract artist Mr. Star City created an original piece of artwork, shown above, as a part of Consensus: Distributed. The art, inspired by love, unity and technology, will be up for auction this week. Follow @coindesk on Twitter to find out how to bid — the proceeds will go to the same cause.

Consensus Magazine

Generation Crypto  Freelance journalist Jess Klein writes about an emerging psychographic of people who see the world through the lens of decentralization. In a series of eight profiles, Klein examines “Generation Crypto,” a diffuse grouping of people of all ages, races and sexes, bound together as “children of Satoshi.” 

SpankChain’s Ameen Soleimani is the subject of this excerpted profile. Read the full series here. 

It was only February when the founder of the blockchain sex worker platform SpankChain, Ameen Soleimani, helped throw a coronavirus-themed party at an Airbnb-ed church during the ETHDenver conference in Colorado – drinking Corona beers with his “shitcoin trading friends, protocol developers, and bitcoin OGs” – but it feels like a lifetime ago.

It was weeks before several of the conference’s attendees went on to EthCC in Paris and got infected with the coronavirus, and one week before Soleimani convinced his mom to take a mass shopping trip to Costco to prepare for a lockdown in California that hadn’t started yet. “I probably could have done more to raise awareness and make people take it seriously,” he says of the church party.

But still, he was prepared. In addition to the Costco trip, he stockpiled drugs including chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine – both under testing to see how effective they could be in treating COVID-19 patients, though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cautioned against using them at home – and even bought an oxygen tank. “On the off-chance my mom is dying of coronavirus … I’d rather have an oxygen concentrator than $400,” he reasons. 

A couple months out from moving out of the apartment he’d shared with SpankChain co-Founder Wills de Vogelaere in Los Angeles’s Venice Beach, Soleimani has been isolating at an Ethereum friend’s mansion in West Hollywood. The friend isn’t there – it’s just Soleimani, two other friends, a heated pool and a steam room. “I sort of hit the quarantine jackpot,” he says.

Like many others in his industry, Soleimani was able to prepare so thoroughly thanks to a combination of a global network and shared prepper mentalities. “I’ve been in a Telegram ‘Doomsday Prepper’ group for, like, a month and a half,” he says, where members share “raw feeds from doctors’ Twitters” and the like. “It turns out to be better intel, a lot of the time, than if you listen to the World Health Organization.”

Being a young entrepreneur in the crypto space generally means avoiding the establishment ethos for a more progressive outlook. For instance, Soleimani posted his first porn video to PornHub back in January. Starring him and SpankChain adviser/adult film star Brenna Sparks, it features the pair “role playing” as themselves (a boss hooking up with his sexy adviser). It took a year for Soleimani to muster the courage to post it online but he has no regrets – it’s helping normalize the stigmatized industry his company operates in, he figures. 

“The old guard is like: He’s ruined his career, he’s fucked, nobody will take him seriously,” says Soleimani. Meanwhile, younger people in the space found the move iconic and admirable.

Soleimani sees this divide as indicative of business culture moving forward, particularly in the crypto space. “Eventually the old people will die, the rules will go with them and newer generations will set the cultural norms,” he said in February. “As entrepreneurs, it’s part of our role to bring those new concepts into the world.” 

In light of the pandemic, this makes for an exceptionally bleak and insensitive take. But in a world where people are only dressing from the waist up for conference calls, rolling with changing cultural norms has become inevitable.

Money Reimagined

Is bitcoin the answer for a global monetary system not longer served by the dollar standard? Airing Friday, May 15, episode 3 of The Breakdown: Money Reimagined examines bitcoin and permissionless stablecoins, both of which are forcing the global monetary system to examine deeply ingrained beliefs.

The Breakdown: Money Reimagined is a podcast crossover micro-series exploring the battle for the future of money in the context of a post COVID-19 world. The four-part podcast features over a dozen voices including Consensus: Distributed speakers Niall Ferguson, Nic Carter and Michael Casey. New episodes air Fridays on the CoinDesk Podcast Network. Subscribe here.

How to Use Brella

To access all of the deeper cuts available through Consensus: Distributed, you’ll need to log in through Brella , our virtual conferencing platform. You can create an account through Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook or set one up manually on Brella. Your profile will be the way you match and network with others. As soon as you’re set up, you’ll be directed to a dashboard showing other registrants.

Brella is easy to use and has a number of features to help you through this virtual experience. There are multiple tracks of simultaneous programming happening inside Brella. You’ll also be able to browse the entire agenda, bookmark sessions and build your own schedule.

Brella is a great networking tool as well, be sure to check out some of the social features available in-page, and reach out to the people and organizations that pique your interest. Celo, for one, is hiring. So is IOV Labs.

Market Intel

Many Ether Whales Might Be Leaving for Bitcoin While ether’s (ETH) price has risen by nearly 50% this year, the number of addresses holding large amounts of the currency, popularly known as whales, has declined significantly. The seven-day average of the number of unique addresses holding 10,000 ethers or more fell to 1,050 on Tuesday. That’s the lowest level since January 2019, according to data provided by the blockchain intelligence firm Glassnode. 

Media Diet

Fund Manager Got NY BitLicense 11 Months After Hiring Its Architect Benjamin Lawsky, the former financial regulator who created New York’s BitLicense in 2015, joined New York Digital Investment Group Asset Advisory LLC (NYDIG) nearly a year before the bitcoin fund manager applied for, and received, that license.

Reddit Rolls Out ‘Community Points’ on Ethereum to Incentivize Positive Behavior The social platform has expanded its “community points” trial, offering users a way to earn a “piece of their favorite communities,” built on top of the Ethereum blockchain.

‘History Has Repeated’: F2Pool Explains Message in Last Block Before Bitcoin Halving Ushering in bitcoin’s third “halving,” mining pool F2Pool rooted a message into the blockchain that will now reside there forever. Preceded by a fish emoji signifying the company’s logo, the mining pool added the text to a headline from The New York Times: “NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed’s Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue,” echoing the message Satoshi Nakamoto left on Bitcoin’s genesis block.

Who Won #CryptoTwitter?

Subscribe to receive blockchain Bites in your inbox, every weekday.

Disclosure strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

Read More

The post Blockchain Bites: Capitalizing on Enterprise Blockchain and Reading Coin Metrics appeared first on Future Money Matters.

[fmm85]

less than a 1% of the total suspicious activity reports filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network since 2013 were crypto-related.  

Speaking at a workshop on FATF’s Travel Rule, FinCEN Director Kenneth Blanco said the financial watchdog uses these reports to map out IP and wallet addresses that are linked to potential criminals. Other speakers pointed out such regulations may violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects against surveillance without cause. 

You’re reading blockchain Bites: Consensus Edition a twice daily roundup of all the notable news out of Consensus: Distributed. You can sign up for this, and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here.

The debate between privacy and transparency is likely to continue today, with two workshops dedicated to reading blockchain data. Stream the full day of events here. 

Here is what CoinDesk’s Head of Research Noelle Acheson looks forward to today: 

We’ve all heard the gentle warnings to pace ourselves at the beginning of a marathon. Yet, so many of us treat marathons like sprints anyway. Consensus: Distributed is no different, and there was so much going on over the first couple of days that “pacing ourselves” just wasn’t an appealing option.

Today, we have deep dives into token standardization, hosted by our content partners the IEEE, and into blockchain use cases, hosted by the World Economic Forum. Christine Kim and Galen Moore from CoinDesk Research host sessions on crypto metrics and market data. You think crypto charts are confusing? These talks will make them less so.

We also have insight from enterprise executives, consortium leaders and industry economists about the sector’s challenges and opportunities, and how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted efforts. And we’ll hear from our partners Huobi and Abu Dhabi Global Market on crypto market evolution and building digital financial services.

Keep your energy up – it’ll be worth it!

What To Watch

8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET Joining Forces on Token Standardization – Hosted by IEEE Figures from Microsoft, Securitize, R3 Corda, Hedera Hashgraph and Digital Asset, among others, will appear during this program dedicated to the wide world of token issuance.    9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Research Hub: Workshopping Famous Metrics Coin Metrics Nic Carter is joined by other data experts from Glassnodes, Amberdata and BurgerCrypto.com to discuss transparency and the metrics that rule the crypto economy.   11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Research Hub: How To Read Crypto Market Data Similar in theme to the program above, this panel will host Skew, Kaiko and Delphi Digital executives in a discussion about reading the ledgers.    12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Going Live: Vicarious Learning for blockchain Deployment – Hosted by World Economic Forum WEF’s Sheila Warren returns for another star-studded affair to discuss the World Economic Forum’s trials and errors with blockchain technology. Featuring notables from InBev, Deloitte and the Ethereum Foundation.    2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Enterprise blockchain: The Path to Monetization Enterprise blockchain isn’t dead. Salesforce, IBM, EY, ING Bank and Tradelens authorities will stream a discussion about their companies forays into capitalizing on distributive technologies. 

The CoinDesk 50

The CoinDesk 50 are the most innovative and influential organizations in the crypto and blockchain industry.

The CoinDesk 50 is an annual list celebrating the most important organizations in crypto. We’ve been announcing five nominees per day, and have highlighted binance, Cosmos, Brave, Bitmain, MakerDAO, Besu and the People’s Bank of China as particularly noteworthy. Today we honor Silvergate Bank. You can read the full list here. 

CoinDesk COVID Response

#NYBWGives CoinDesk has joined Gitcoin, The Giving Block and Ethereal Summit to support charities helping communities in difficult times. We’re raising $100,000 and giving you a voice through the quadratic funding model. Learn how it works and how to donate.

New York-based interpretive artist Mr. Star City created an original piece of artwork at Consensus: Distributed for auction to support COVID-19 relief.

In addition, New York-based abstract artist Mr. Star City created an original piece of artwork, shown above, as a part of Consensus: Distributed. The art, inspired by love, unity and technology, will be up for auction this week. Follow @coindesk on Twitter to find out how to bid — the proceeds will go to the same cause.

Consensus Magazine

Generation Crypto  Freelance journalist Jess Klein writes about an emerging psychographic of people who see the world through the lens of decentralization. In a series of eight profiles, Klein examines “Generation Crypto,” a diffuse grouping of people of all ages, races and sexes, bound together as “children of Satoshi.” 

SpankChain’s Ameen Soleimani is the subject of this excerpted profile. Read the full series here. 

It was only February when the founder of the blockchain sex worker platform SpankChain, Ameen Soleimani, helped throw a coronavirus-themed party at an Airbnb-ed church during the ETHDenver conference in Colorado – drinking Corona beers with his “shitcoin trading friends, protocol developers, and bitcoin OGs” – but it feels like a lifetime ago.

It was weeks before several of the conference’s attendees went on to EthCC in Paris and got infected with the coronavirus, and one week before Soleimani convinced his mom to take a mass shopping trip to Costco to prepare for a lockdown in California that hadn’t started yet. “I probably could have done more to raise awareness and make people take it seriously,” he says of the church party.

But still, he was prepared. In addition to the Costco trip, he stockpiled drugs including chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine – both under testing to see how effective they could be in treating COVID-19 patients, though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cautioned against using them at home – and even bought an oxygen tank. “On the off-chance my mom is dying of coronavirus … I’d rather have an oxygen concentrator than $400,” he reasons. 

A couple months out from moving out of the apartment he’d shared with SpankChain co-Founder Wills de Vogelaere in Los Angeles’s Venice Beach, Soleimani has been isolating at an Ethereum friend’s mansion in West Hollywood. The friend isn’t there – it’s just Soleimani, two other friends, a heated pool and a steam room. “I sort of hit the quarantine jackpot,” he says.

Like many others in his industry, Soleimani was able to prepare so thoroughly thanks to a combination of a global network and shared prepper mentalities. “I’ve been in a Telegram ‘Doomsday Prepper’ group for, like, a month and a half,” he says, where members share “raw feeds from doctors’ Twitters” and the like. “It turns out to be better intel, a lot of the time, than if you listen to the World Health Organization.”

Being a young entrepreneur in the crypto space generally means avoiding the establishment ethos for a more progressive outlook. For instance, Soleimani posted his first porn video to PornHub back in January. Starring him and SpankChain adviser/adult film star Brenna Sparks, it features the pair “role playing” as themselves (a boss hooking up with his sexy adviser). It took a year for Soleimani to muster the courage to post it online but he has no regrets – it’s helping normalize the stigmatized industry his company operates in, he figures. 

“The old guard is like: He’s ruined his career, he’s fucked, nobody will take him seriously,” says Soleimani. Meanwhile, younger people in the space found the move iconic and admirable.

Soleimani sees this divide as indicative of business culture moving forward, particularly in the crypto space. “Eventually the old people will die, the rules will go with them and newer generations will set the cultural norms,” he said in February. “As entrepreneurs, it’s part of our role to bring those new concepts into the world.” 

In light of the pandemic, this makes for an exceptionally bleak and insensitive take. But in a world where people are only dressing from the waist up for conference calls, rolling with changing cultural norms has become inevitable.

Money Reimagined

Is bitcoin the answer for a global monetary system not longer served by the dollar standard? Airing Friday, May 15, episode 3 of The Breakdown: Money Reimagined examines bitcoin and permissionless stablecoins, both of which are forcing the global monetary system to examine deeply ingrained beliefs.

The Breakdown: Money Reimagined is a podcast crossover micro-series exploring the battle for the future of money in the context of a post COVID-19 world. The four-part podcast features over a dozen voices including Consensus: Distributed speakers Niall Ferguson, Nic Carter and Michael Casey. New episodes air Fridays on the CoinDesk Podcast Network. Subscribe here.

How to Use Brella

To access all of the deeper cuts available through Consensus: Distributed, you’ll need to log in through Brella , our virtual conferencing platform. You can create an account through Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook or set one up manually on Brella. Your profile will be the way you match and network with others. As soon as you’re set up, you’ll be directed to a dashboard showing other registrants.

Brella is easy to use and has a number of features to help you through this virtual experience. There are multiple tracks of simultaneous programming happening inside Brella. You’ll also be able to browse the entire agenda, bookmark sessions and build your own schedule.

Brella is a great networking tool as well, be sure to check out some of the social features available in-page, and reach out to the people and organizations that pique your interest. Celo, for one, is hiring. So is IOV Labs.

Market Intel

Many Ether Whales Might Be Leaving for Bitcoin While ether’s (ETH) price has risen by nearly 50% this year, the number of addresses holding large amounts of the currency, popularly known as whales, has declined significantly. The seven-day average of the number of unique addresses holding 10,000 ethers or more fell to 1,050 on Tuesday. That’s the lowest level since January 2019, according to data provided by the blockchain intelligence firm Glassnode. 

Media Diet

Fund Manager Got NY BitLicense 11 Months After Hiring Its Architect Benjamin Lawsky, the former financial regulator who created New York’s BitLicense in 2015, joined New York Digital Investment Group Asset Advisory LLC (NYDIG) nearly a year before the bitcoin fund manager applied for, and received, that license.

Reddit Rolls Out ‘Community Points’ on Ethereum to Incentivize Positive Behavior The social platform has expanded its “community points” trial, offering users a way to earn a “piece of their favorite communities,” built on top of the Ethereum blockchain.

‘History Has Repeated’: F2Pool Explains Message in Last Block Before Bitcoin Halving Ushering in bitcoin’s third “halving,” mining pool F2Pool rooted a message into the blockchain that will now reside there forever. Preceded by a fish emoji signifying the company’s logo, the mining pool added the text to a headline from The New York Times: “NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed’s Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue,” echoing the message Satoshi Nakamoto left on Bitcoin’s genesis block.

Who Won #CryptoTwitter?

Subscribe to receive blockchain Bites in your inbox, every weekday.

Disclosure strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

Read More

The post Blockchain Bites: Capitalizing on Enterprise Blockchain and Reading Coin Metrics appeared first on Future Money Matters.