#it was like 22 and now is 40 which isn't big numbers but it is for the fact i post only when i remember | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

the-nosy-neighbor · 7 months ago

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Wave Up High! You're the Most.

I have been curious about this one for a bit, and have seen a little discussion on it. Why does W's sign off in "News" change?

The different sign offs we have seen:

Happy New Year, neighbor! Now make like Barnaby and have a ball! (1/13/2023) Related to New Year's, "drop the ball"

Have a wonderful day! Show the world your best smile! (1/15/2023) Maybe we just haven't established it yet?

More information will arrive as we prepare for this exciting installation! Stay tuned and remember to wave up high! (2/25/2023) 1st instance of the phrase, "remember" isn't what I think when I think of this phrase. The first time I visited was in March of 2023. Maybe closer to April. I think the guest book was still open at that point.

So many guest signatures… So many of them are trying to communicate. What are you telling me for? Do you think I can answer. What are you trying to do to me. I’m closing that guest book, I’m not playing this game anymore. The ringing is enough. (Unknown) Too sad to sign off properly? W is pretty upset.

We believe that concludes everything our beautiful website has to offer in this most recent update! As always, thank you for your patience and have a wonderful day! Don’t forget to wave up high! (7/22/23) Here we go, that's the one we expect. This is the first big update I was here for.

Until then, have a happy Halloween! Don’t forget to wave down below! (10/13/2023) This just seems a twist on the phrase for Halloween? Demons and whatnot.

Don’t forget to wave up high! Ho ho ho! (12/25/2023 stated date, but actually between then and March 9. I think on the update, it was updated either immediately or the next day. Based on awayfrompryingeyes.net, it is in March 2024) Back to the general statement.

Please remember to wave! (3/9/2024) From the post "Mistake." They are thrown off in this one, having realized the date was wrong. Also, they blame someone else for the mistake. No, they refer to themself as a separate person. "I assumed it was still December." to "the individual posting this must not have been paying proper attention." Are they trying to duck the blame? Is there more than one person in their person? Or are they suggesting that someone else wrote it, they posted it, and neither of them knew it was March?

On Away From Prying Eyes:

Don’t forget to wave up high. (3/2024) On this post, they are back to the most common statement of the phrase.

This is a hard one. It is interesting that it starts with something else entirely. In my mind, it was always "don't forget to wave up high." I always assumed it was supposed to be some kind of slang from the time period, in the same way "you're the most" is.

This interesting theory believes it is a reference to puppeteers: https://www.reddit.com/r/WelcomeHomeARG/comments/15m4j5b/dont_forget_to_wave_up_high_and_wallys_eventual/

And that does make sense, given the orientation of the puppeteer--

(Got to love those bell bottoms. I wonder if those are adidas or k-swiss?) Any dancing of the puppet, and some dialog have to be a wave for the puppeteer. Henson was known for several kinds of puppetry, but this style here was often called a "Hand-rod muppet." For more information about muppeteering, visit: https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Puppetry_Techniques.

So, the important point is this: if it is a phrase that puppeteers would use, is W a puppeteer? Was that their original interaction with the material? I don't think it is referenced outside of the "News" section, or hasn't been so far.

The Most

I can't find a history of the phrase "the most" but it is agreed that it evolved in the beat subculture from the late 40's to the 50's. People in the movement were known at "beatniks." Based on a quick search, some consider them different movements. But a common representation of them are like so:

This is Danny Kaye in White Christmas doing the number "Choreography," which is a lighthearted jab at the new generation and their art movements rejecting tap for interpretive dance and popular music for jazz (though in truth, they were already exploiting the heck out of jazz during this period in mainstream entertainment).

Anyway, Audrey Hepburn famously played a beatnik at least once. The trappings are: black beret, turtlenecks, winged eyeliner, bongos, coffeehouses, smoking, jazz, snapping instead of clapping, cool cats you dig, and a general sense of being unwashed. This movement is a counterculture, darker way than the bright and happy hippies, that focuses on deep thought and creation of important art instead of common entertainment, most likely built on the model of the Parisian coffeehouse movement of the 18th century.

Far too much detail just to say that "the most" is an old term even for the run of the show, in the late 60's to early 70's. I wonder why Wally would make such an old term his phrase? Looking up slang from the show's period, we have such gems as "what it is?" (though, like a lot of slang that gets popular, it was originated in the African American community) "peace out," or "keep on steppin'." If he wanted to be current, then he'd go with "groovy."

I wonder if it isn't just that old slang doesn't anger parents, whereas old folks tend to judge the up and coming generations harshly.

I’m curious about other indicators of the time placement. Could Wally be an older puppet than the others?

#welcome home #welcome home theories #coffeehouse movement #beatnik #the most

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vaudeville-moggie · 6 months ago

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. (For the tmnt ask thing)

KELP THATS TOO MANY NUMBERS LEE

16.) Rise version of Casey, and her son are the coolest I think but I love them all they're my babies... The one from the 90s films is the hottest tho WHO SAID THAT

17.) I love 1987 shredder he's so sillies dad of two <3

18.) my favourite villain... Hmmmm 2003 had some really well-written villains I think? Baxter Stockman is one of my favs all-round maybe because he's abused a lot and he isn't really able to dig himself out of that... He gets really fucked up in 2003 but he kind of has a redemption in the future? Unfortunately 2003 didn't really explore that and I think it was more put in for laughs...

19.) my fav ally is probably Casey Jones or timothy (not including April because she's more like a main character, idk) or!! Carter, who appears in 1987 and then never again. I miss him 🥺

20.) theme song... I love them all... Rise's is objectionably the best but damn 2003 had some damn good bangers. I could listen to "back to the sewer" on repeat forever.

21.) favourite story arc? Like... Idk, one that appears a lot is the farmhouse arc (or country arc or rural arc whatever) that first appeared in the 90s movie (although it was probably in the comic first) and Leo or Raph is injured, and one sits by the other while they heal... It's a very soft moment for the brothers because they're usually fighting... If Rise gets renewed I'd love to see this arc again.

22.) I wasnt really a pizza eater before TMNT, it's not a big thing in Australia compared to NYC. I LOVE margherita!! Basil and tomato and boom, ya got yourself a pizza. I'll eat any pizza except any pizza with that horrid ham. Or anchovies. (Who does, wtf)

23.) fav TMNT fic dude idk I should read more... Uh tangledinink's teenage mutant what now?

Lots of TMNT fic recs on my side blog pinned post :3

27.) something I love to see in TMNT art/fics? Tails!! Hehe they deserve tails :3 also any references to sci-fi because that's very TMNT coded, it has a long history of star trek references

28.) what is one thing I'd like to see explored more in art/fics? uhmmm idk 🧍‍♂️as long as people are having fun idc... Maybe villain redemption? Like they did that in rise with draxum canonly so...

29.) what is one headcanon that I have? Uhmmm trans Leo I mean, always... Always.

30.) idk of any common headcanons that I reject... Every headcanon I've seen I've gone like, yeah, I can see that. Might not fully incorporate it into my headcanons but I've never blocked a headcanon or cringed at anything...

31.) one piece of TMNT canon that I dislike/ignore? Say it with me folks: Donnie's crush on April

32.) uhmm idk lol I think I got into it with rise so my first thing would be the thing I just redrew here the original being here

33.) my favourite thing I've made??? idk. I really like the pokemon au I haven't posted about at all and this!!:

only piece of my art on mah wall

34.) what character do i draw/write most often? it might... be mikey? idk... i think I draw them all evenly but i'd predict if you went through an actually counted out of the things I've posted, it would maybe be mikey.

35.) which character relationships are my fav to write/draw? idk I really like how mikey interracts with his brothers and sister(s) which is something I've found I enjoy playing with in my magic au... but I'm literally always drawing rise leo and yuichi usagi together in my tmnt sketchbook so

36.) which character I have the hardest time writing/drawing? Rise Raph for BOTH... sigh, I think I'm definitely better at drawing him than I was, but I've got a lot of practise to do. and in terms of writing, hes a very multi-faceted character and while he's the big brother and he has to responsible, he's also a kid and he can be silly and fun too...

37.) I write/draw multiple iterations of tmnt, but so far I've kind of only posted rise and 2012 drawings so...?

38.) Do you generally stick close to canon, or diverge from it?

my first instinct when writing fics is to make it canon-compliant... but I've made Aus too, so, both?

39.) Do you have any TMNT OCs?

ya, Jim (general tmnt sona or oc, and was my fursona for a bit) and this bat yokai oc I've only drawn like once, her name was ghost I think. I've also made an Usagi character for magic au 2012 leo... spoilers teehee

40.) Do you give the turtles tails? YES OFC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! unless I forget teehee

YAY!! happy 40 years TMNT!!!!

#tmnt #save rottmnt #rottmnt #tmnt 2012 #tmnt 2003 #magic au #meowtuals #meow #40 tmnt questions

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jsandrs · 10 months ago

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I'm not trying to be rude but how did you meet your boyfriend? Your age gap is a lot bigger than I'm used to seeing.

We are used to people asking this and similar things. Yes, we have a very large age gap. I'm almost 22, he is 40. He's almost double my age.

How we met was he was in a band and I started talking to him outside after a show. We really hit it off and I gave him my number. He thought I was older, and he also thought I was biologically male. After we casually spoke, and things started getting flirty, I let him know I was only 18, and he did take a step back at that time. Obviously we decided to move forward with a relationship but he wasn't totally on board initially because of that. I was really afraid it wasn't going to work because on top of the age gap, he still didn't know I was trans. We hadn't been physical or anything and we also hadn't sexted or anything, so my anatomy never came up. It wasn't that serious to start with because he lived in California and I was in New York, so it didn't seem practical. He flew to New York to see me a few months in and I told him I was trans, which he was so fucking cute about. He didn't care at all. He told me he wasn't even gay but he is bi so it made no difference to him. I was so scared and he immediately validated me. I come from an unaccepting family, who disowned me at a young age once I started HRT and they saw changes, so I wasn't even living at home at the time, but with a friend's family. After Ryan came out to visit, he went back to CA and I wanted to go with him. I didn't right away, but I needed somewhere to go long term and I wanted to be with him. So, a few weeks after he came to visit, I was planning to move out to CA with him. I did, and I guess the rest is history? We started discussing sexual preferences in depth about a year after I moved in with him and found that our kinks we felt some shame about were very closely related. that's really allowed us to make some dreams a reality for both of us<3

I think the age gap makes people think something nefarious happened. The reality is that I'm mature for my age and Ryan is a little immature for his age lol I was the one who pursued him, not vice versa. Our emotional bond and chemistry came first and foremost and literally everything that happened was what you could expect to happen between two people regardless of age. I know it's off putting for some but it really isn't a big thing for us. I didn't even have like a preference for older guys or anything, he just was so charming and fun, I immediately felt drawn to him and didn't want it to end.

Now we have our gorgeous girl Lily and her baby sibling on the way. He's seriously the love of my life and makes me so happy. He's the best daddy and his age honestly is almost never something on my mind. He's a goofball and is super silly. I think he acts more like he's a fun 30 year old and I am more like a 25 year old or something. It feels like our mental ages are closer than our actual ages.

#js talking #asks

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tuiyla · 2 years ago

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So I found someone who counted how much screentime each Glee character had during season 1A and season 4, please take a look: cometsweepandleonidsfly(.)tumblr(.)com/tagged/screen%20time

cometsweepandleonidsfly(.)tumblr(.)com/post/58969910312/screentime-on-glee-in-season-4 (make sure to change showthemwhat to cometsweepandleonidsfly in the episodes' links if you want to see the stats per episode)

Do you have any thoughts on these numbers?

✨Stats time!✨

Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention Anon, and thank you to @cometsweepandleonidsfly. Please read the OG posts for more info on their methodology, limitations and all that. Of course I have thoughts, all of which I will cover but first I'll do what tuiyla does best and take this dataset and turn it into something visual. Or at least try.

So to start us off, main characters' screentime in the OG 13 episodes:

I was surprised to see Will come in with over 40% of screentime and decidedly more than Finn or Rachel. Rachel "only" being third is a surprise in and of itself but the favouring of the three "pillars" is clear. The drop between Rachel and Quinn is not insignificant and it reminds me of how big the difference between singing stats often was. Quinn coming in ahead of Kurt and Puck is somewhat surprising, as is Emma and Sue being so low. But compared to a lot of the ND kids, they had significant roles in their scenes. All in all this deffo confirms my view that there was way too much Will early on and the show was too heavy on its three mains.

Season 4 is looking more evenly distributed even if there's quite the drop between Blaine and Marley. Blaine's lead might seem crazy, but he's in just over 29% of the season compared to Will's well over 40% for the first 13. We have more characters but only three more than what I counted for the previous chart so not too bad distribution wise. What's surprising is the newbies, at least the triangle being so high up and Tina and Artie lagging so far behind Sam. Rachel being in the middle is shocking, of course, but keep in mind she fully missed a few episodes and when she was in a scene chances are it focused solely on her. Kurt being after Kitty is more surprising to me, as is Santana being so far behind. Granted, she missed a lot of episodes but my heart weeps anyway. She's still far ahead of Sue and Emma and I'm once again astonished by the mark Jane Lynch and Jayma Mays leave. I wish we had the numbers for Quinn, Mercedes, Puck and Mike here but oh well.

I love that we have a Lima vs NYC stat because it really puts things into perspective:

Wow. Where's the "too much NYC crowd" now, huh. Of course, this explains why even Rachel is relatively low on the list and how the newbies had so much screentime.

What's interesting is the difference in distribution, i.e. season 4's being imo so much better. In many ways it had to be but still. I tried visualizing it via two pie charts of the percentages but they're not that obvious and so I cba to colour them properly.

Instead, I took those percentages and compared the season 1 characters with the season 4 ones. So the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and etc. characters compared would look like this:

That was a nonsensical sentence but what I mean is, red zone is OG 13 and green season 4. The closer the line is to 50% the more the two seasons are alike in how much they feature characters, and the line generally being over 50% in season 1's favour tells us that the main chs there had more screentime. Again this is partly because season 4 had a bigger cast overall; it featured characters not accounted for within the data. But I'd also argue it distributed the more or less same screentime more equally so that's why Blaine's lead isn't the same as Will's in the OG 13. By the way, ignore the names on the line google sheets just didn't let me delete the redundant labels.

Something hopefully a bit more demonstrative: I divided the OG 13 by, well, 13 and multiplied by 22 to "get a full season" from those stats (notably these are not the full season 1 numbers) and compared those minutes with the season 4 ones. This shows you the difference even better even if we only compare the top 5 characters of each season:

Again ignore the labels, they're the season 1 top 5. Will's screentime projected to 22 episodes is waaaay more than what Blaine got in season 4 and this gap really only starts to balance out once the season 1 drop happens with Quinn and Kurt. Even then, comparatively, they were better featured than their season 4 counterparts, Sam and Ryder. To be fair, I'd much rather watch Quinn and Kurt than Sam and Ryder.

And finally, what I love the most: singing stats and bubble charts! The most I could possibly bring to this conversation is adding singing into the mix and see how that compares to the characters' screentime.

See this reddit post for some background on my singing stats database. What you need to know for this is that I have a system for different types of songs not just the number of songs the given character was featured in, so I give point totals and hope it's a more accurate reflection of how much people sang. And how does that compare to their screentime? Well.

Note that this first chart is a character's OG13 screentime compared to their overall season 1 singing.

Rachel sang the most, unsurprisingly, so her and Finn singing that much more than Will while appearing less created this interesting contrast. All three are waaay ahead in screentime as this perhaps demonstrates better than previous charts, and we see that compared to her screentime Mercedes sang quite a bit. But the difference between our 1%-ers and the proletariat is clear and we see how little Kuinn's screentime mattered, in a sense. Sue and Emma are basically nonexistent on both fronts when compared to others, so much so that even Santana with her back 9 songs almost catches up to the crowd. Make of the rest of this what you will.

Since I realized while writing this that I should have probably looked at how much they sang in the OG 13, here's that chart:

Now this looks quite different and is perhaps the better chart to analyze. Finn is further behind Rachel and her lead in singing is undisputable, whereas Mercedes stays between Finn and Will with singing. Sue didn't get a song in the OG 13 and, sadly, neither did Santana so they're missing entirely. Emma is barely there with her one solo but still ahead of Kurt, who had the screentime but evidently not the songs. His sole entry is the Defying Gravity duet. Quinn had comparatively more in the first 13 and that elevates her above Puck and Tina but I still wouldn't exactly say it's proportionate to her screentime. It's quite all over the place, particularly when compared to season 4:

So season 4 follows more of a trend and what would be expected. Meening, no huuuuge outliers and less of an upper 1% feel, though Blaine is clearly "winning" in terms of both singing and screentime. Marley is second in both regards and we see a more or less clear pattern of singing and screentime collating. Tartie sing somewhat little compared to their screentime but most of it checks out as realistic. How the mighty have fallen with Will being last in terms of singing. But then, of course, we have Pezberry, the only two who I'd say are not following the established trend. Both sing more relative to their screentime than most characters, with Rachel almost being up there with Marley and yet being in the middle with her screentime. This isn't a huge shock or anything. But then we have Santana, who's well behind Will in terms of screentime and yet sings as much as Kurt and is in the same ballpark as the likes of Unique and Tina. This means Santana's time on screen in season 4 was well spent, with the likes of Girl on Fire, Nutbush, Cold Hearted and, of course, Mine. A stark difference to season 1.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

A bit baffled by the decision to include chs like Kent and Brad in the OG 13 post but not the alumni in season 4, but hey I'm not the one doing the research. I ignored non-mains for my OG 13 visualizations.

I would LOVE to see this done for the whole series but obviously it's not like it could ever be truly representative and it would take soooo much effort. I'm grateful for this glimpse at screentime distributions.

I know not all of this was super clear and detailed so please feel free to let me know if I should clarify anything. Like I told another Anon, you will be seeing more stats from me because I do love this sort of stuff and this was really fun to explore. Again much thanks that this dataset exists and I hope I could offer something new and interesting with it.

#glee asks #anon #glee singing statistics #glee screentime statistics #glee stats #this was fun to do i hope it's fun to read too #i need to put more effort into analysing bubble charts they tell SUCH a story

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vees-strangeworld-omniverse · 1 year ago

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ARGONUS INFO: the common size classification system (for planes)

(NOTE: description copy-pasted from DA where i normally post my works. any context that is missing here on tumblr can be found on my DA [linked here and on pinned post] )

because one day i decided to make this because worldbuilding. also, kinda wanna have this be a little short.

so, yes, in a world where the main inhabitants come in such a wide array of sizes, there needs to be some kind of system to differences between size classes.

now, contrary to what many would believe (and the discrimination people would pull off), the Common Size Classification system (CSC) is used to give the proper size-appropriate accommodations, such as housing, clothing, food, facilities, etc.. basically making it so that things aren't too small/big to the individuals.

the elkinets use the same exact measuring systems/units as we do, ie feet/meters. however, they have an extra unit of measurement, known as "hectors" (imperial) and "poles" (Metric). every 10ft is considered a Hector (Hecs), while 4 meters is considered a Pole (Pol). this is something that makes is easier and more convenient to measure an elkinet.

now, when it comes to the size of argonian aircraft, the primary factor is height, however things like length, weight, wingspan and whether the individual is a pygmy/dwarf, are also taken into consideration as well. even though they're listed by letter, they are also commonly listed by color for many of the non-English-speaking countries that don't use the English alphabet.

so, here are all size forms of size classes and some example so the aircraft that fit there. (also take note that this drawing isn't meant to be 100% accurate, this is just to get a general gist of things)

LARGE AIRCRAFT

A-class / red class (Giant) 190ft or more (58m+) the absolute largest size group. commonly called "giants", not many aircraft exist in this size group, however it is still a considerable large number. the most well-known of giants are the an-225 mriyas, c-5 galaxies, a380 and 747, however other aircraft of similar size are places here as well (h-4 hercules/spruce goose, an-124, stratolaunch, ect).

B-class / orange class (lesser giants) 120-170 ft (37-52m) just below A-class is B-class, where aircraft are definitely giant, but not quite as big as the former. while larger airlines are the type species for this group (777, a340, dc-10, ect), there are many other aircraft that comfterbly fit here. such aircraft would include many general cargo/transport aircraft (an-22, c-17 globemaster, ect) and some of the largest bomber species (B-52 stratofortress, xb-70 Valkyrie, b-36 peacemaker).

MEDIUM AIRCRAFT

C-class / yellow class (halfways) 80-110ft (24-34m) C-class as well as the next one down are considered "Mid-sized" aircraft, with C-class being considered "true middle". again, many aircraft fit into this category, with one of most notable aircraft of C-class are the c-130s. other aircraft, like the 707s, some mid-sized bombers, ect., are included here as well.

D-class / green class (greater commoner) 40-70ft (12-21m) the lower end of mid-sized aircraft. D-class aircraft contain larger business jets, larger fighter jets, and small bombers, but other aircraft fit here as well. interestingly enough, the U-2 dragonlady, despite having a mass more closer to that of a standard fighter jet, are usually placed on the mid-upper levels of D-class due to their lengthy legs giving them extra height.

SMALL AIRCRAFT

E-class / blue class (commoner) 20-30ft (6-9m) E-class aircraft are what non-argonian residents call the "Human-sized" of the planet, which checks out considering that the aircraft that are used as a human analog fit directly in this size class; most fighter jets, most small civilian aircraft, ect.

F-class / purple class (smainxian) 10ft or less (3m / less) the last and smallest end of the system, f-class citizens contain all of the smallest citizens on argonus. prior to the arrival of humans and other smaller sophonts, only the smainxian aircraft (smallest manned aircraft) and many drone species existed in this category, alongside some outliers as well. however, F-class nowadays is perhaps one of the most diverse size class, if one where to include the many other sophonts that live on modern argonus.

now some extra notes:

-pygmy elkinets are often put in the next lowest size class.

-mix-sizeclass housing (no surprise) does exist for multi-species families/groups/couples. these are just modifies homes, and sometimes kelxverns and other shifters will choose these instead of actual shifter-friendly homes because they're often cheaper to rent/buy.

-while on the topic of shifters, it's a bit of a mess when it comes to exactly what size class they're put in. most of the time they're considered a "multiclass" citizen, which means that all of their different forms/sizes are taken into consideration.

man, i'm smelling the G/t side of me coming out.

#aircraft #aviation #avigeek #airplane #worldbuilding #speculative fiction #worldbuilder #anthro airplane #living airplane #living aircraft #aeromorph #elkinet #planet argonus #argonus

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cathartes-aura-shitposting · 1 year ago

Text

ARGONUS INFO: the common size classification system (for planes)

(NOTE: description copy-pasted from DA where i normally post my works. any context that is missing here on tumblr can be found on my DA [linked here and on pinned post] )

because one day i decided to make this because worldbuilding. also, kinda wanna have this be a little short.

so, yes, in a world where the main inhabitants come in such a wide array of sizes, there needs to be some kind of system to differences between size classes.

LARGE AIRCRAFT

MEDIUM AIRCRAFT

SMALL AIRCRAFT

now some extra notes:

-pygmy elkinets are often put in the next lowest size class.

man, i'm smelling the G/t side of me coming out.

#aircraft #aviation #avigeek #airplane #worldbuilding #speculative fiction #worldbuilder #anthro airplane #living airplane #living aircraft #aeromorph #elkinet #planet argonus #argonus

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sportsminorityreport · 11 months ago

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Shit rolling downhill in college football...who has opportunities.

The world of college football went crazy this week. The Hatfields and the McCoys of college football (the Big Ten and SEC) decided to work together to solve all of the stupid problems paying players has created before it crushes the golden goose of college sports.

ESPN, Fox, and Warner Brothers announced a combined streaming service which may have just ended cable TV as we know it, when you take that in with Comcast's Peacock, Apple and Amazon streaming... In the very near future, cable companies may simply be internet providers because no one wants to pay for cable with next to no sports.

(I am going to pull some numbers out of my butt to explain conceptually what is about to happen. Where a cable company may charge you $40 for cable and I dunno $60 for TV over the cable, the trio might charge you say....$45. Now even splitting that in third, that is $15 each per subscriber where they might have been getting say $2-12 each from the cable companies. They will have more money to spend, very soon.)

In this crazy moment, I am going to point out who has opportunities today that they never had in the past ...and won't in the future.

I am going to be taking some shots because, well... shots need to be taken. I am going to be calling these parties foolish but that is only because most of them are absolutely not seeing the big picture. (but to be fair, that may not be the case with the SEC.)

Foolish party #1 - The Big Ten

Over the years, I have often said in college football realignment the other conferences are playing checkers while the Big Ten is playing chess. With the exception of their continuous pass on Pitt, which admittedly fails some criteria, I think they have killed it.

Not today. Today, the Big Ten is playing checkers like everyone else. The powers that be that are pulling the strings have advised Greg Flugar, College Football Expansion mouthpiece, that they plan to add Florida State as school 19 and Miami as school 20 and call it a day on expansion for now.

Well that's....ok...Florida is the 3rd largest state with 22M people, but it isn't a big picture plan.

The Big Ten is after Notre Dame. That is the big picture.

Now absolutely Notre Dame has lost clout with the implosion of the Pac and and the soon to be executed raid of the Atlantic Coast Conference.

The Big Ten and SEC are making plans for how college football should work without any input from Notre Dame. Notre Dame's network partner NBC is conspicuously out of the new streaming service.

So Notre Dame might be stuck on normal cable while cable dies!!!!??? Oh no!

...

When has poisoning the well ever worked with regards to forcing movement out of Notre Dame?

You have to give them what they want, and the simple reality is that you cannot do it with a 20 team conference.

Notre Dame wants to walk into the Big Ten holding Stanford's hand and they'll want their normal schedule.

That is it. Those are not unreasonable demands of the Big Ten at this point.

20 (or 22 members with Stanford and Notre Dame) is not going to deliver that.

24 or more could --- allowing 4 6 team divisions. 28 could for the same reason. 7 team divisions work.

Now remember when the Big Ten signed their contract there was an expansion clause that allowed them to add more schools with essentially a budget for 7 and a half more schools at that current pro rata amount?

The Big Ten has burned one share of that adding Washington (pop 8M)and Oregon (pop 4M) as the behest of Fox who wanted Oregon.

Now they plan to add FSU with Miami (Fox request) and it is likely they won't be spending more than another share and a half for FSU and Miami. (Flugar loudly hinted that FSU will get a normal share in essence for destabilizing the ACC. There is no indication Miami will get similar special treatment from day one. )

That means there will probably be enough cash left over for 5 more schools at the full Big Ten rate.

The Big Ten has a clause that allows funded expansion. In those scenarios conferences make expansion decisions with an understanding that if their network partners don't want the content, it will hurt their negotiations the next time around.

Now remember, the Big Ten has their own network that they co-own. They can add schools that the SEC might not want to add because their business model is different. State populations are a big factor of the network business, but so is fandom. A school like Clemson can make sense to the Big Ten.

Now Fox wants FSU and Miami, but likely wants to slam on the breaks after that so their new business partner ESPN can walk Virginia (9M) and North Carolina (11M) into the SEC, but what does NBC want?

I think the Big Ten may very well be rewarded if they see if NBC wants to sponsor Big Ten Expansion to 24 to grease the skids for Notre Dame ...and fuck over ESPN and the SEC.

But wait, you ask...why don't you just go to 22 and then add Notre Dame and Stanford for 24? Because 24 total with Stanford and Notre Dame included does not stop SEC expansion.

24 without them, does.

You may have the opportunity here to finally checkmate the SEC.

The Big Ten appears to have the assets in their expansion clause to add four schools then Notre Dame and Stanford come in. Notre Dame has their money and Stanford is rich enough to slide in for a couple years and humbled enough to know they might have to write their own check.

Frankly, I think a lot of Big Ten schools (Wisconsin, Northwestern, etc.) might take a haircut on their share to get Stanford into the conference.

So the Big Ten could technically offer 19 ) FSU, 20) Miami, 21) UNC, 22) UVA, 23) Georgia Tech, 24) Clemson.

Now UNC has been taken over by radicals from the GOP who view this a political struggle and want to be in the SEC. But this kind of offer where they could get FSU, Miami, UVA, Maryland, Georgia Tech, Clemson in their division... well, that is tough to walk away from.

But even if UNC still walks away, the entire landscape changes.

Georgia Tech may just be a solid #2 in Georgia, but they did win a national title in 1990. They have that potential. Plus Clemson is also big in Georgia (11M). Having two strong brands in Georgia could effectively turn Atlanta proper into Big Ten territory --- and that is the most important market in the SEC!

Such a move could say to southerners, "The Big Ten is just as important to Georgia and much of the deep south as the SEC AND they dominate the rest of the US."

It very much creates the narrative of a national conference and small, yokel, regional conference running the FBS world. It would be a crushing blow to the SEC. That is bad news for the SEC in the near future.

With no Clemson, the ACC is dead and the remains gets eaten by the Big 12.

There is no perfect SEC partner left for UNC. The SEC might consider doubling up in a state with Duke or NC State, but they don't like doing that. Maybe West Virginia (2M) is their solution. Making that decision is going to slow them down.

Now who would take UNC's spot in joining the Big Ten? I think the smart move is actually Missouri (6).

Missouri and Texas A&M were pissed when UT joined the SEC. The SEC lied to both schools for months. Missouri wanted to be in the Big Ten from the start and only settled for the SEC. Missouri isn't a preferred target for the Big Ten, but at 24 schools you are starting to enter the territory of "acceptable" targets.

Why Missou instead of an actually super smart play like Pitt? Honestly, because of what it does to the SEC.

If you pull Missou, the SEC likely adds UNC as their replacement and stops to ponder their next move. You want your rival conference scratching their heads while you win the realignment game.

Schools like UT are not going to want more expansion with lesser schools. There will be internal squabbles. Time will burn.

Missouri is also home to two SEC major recruiting hotbeds in St. Louis and Kansas City. Those used to be profitable recruiting grounds for Nebraska, which cannot recruit in the Big Ten. They are mid-sized state population-wise, making enough sense for the Big Ten network.

Missouri is a team you could partner with Nebraska in the west or in a central division with an annual neutral sight matchup with Nebraska alternating between St. Louis and KC.

If you gut the ACC, Notre Dame will come.

Not because the landscape is toxic --- but rather because you can offer Notre Dame what they have really wanted --- their schedule in the Big Ten.

Now at that point you have 26 teams.

Assuming FSU gets a full shares and the other 5 and Stanford get half shares, you are looking at one share left.

26 is an awkward number. Lets say you split that share and add AAU school Arizona State and Pitt to help your divisions.

ASU is the larger Arizona AAU school with the larger fanbase, located in the larger DMA in the largest population state (AZ -- 7M) in the Mountain timezone. USC and UCLA sponsored Arizona and ASU for the Pac back in the day. It seems very likely this would be the choice for a USC lead expansion.

Pitt has two big strikes against them. 1) The Big Ten already has in state carriage fees in Pennsylvania via Penn State's membership. 2) Penn State has been blocking them to ensure better recruiting.

But think about what Pitt is in the Big Ten. They are basically a slightly weaker in football version of Michigan State. A quality win for the elite. That is super valuable. Pitt will draw probably 10K more per football game in the Big Ten and Pitt is a very valuable basketball brand.

It would be once in a blue moon that Pitt ever was better than Penn State in football and the way the divisions lay out, Pitt wouldn't be in Penn State's division.

And Pitt is an astounding research power and they are lucky enough to have leadership with strong relations to the Big Ten powers today.

Kind of makes sense.

Now you are at 28 and you are basically the NFL of college football.

Now Stanford and Notre Dame are in the Big Ten.

The Big Ten will be irresistible to The University of Texas at that point.

A UT/OU move north would very much be under discussion. UT is not going to be happy in a second tier conference.

And the Big Ten would likely allow UT to carry their chosen assets with them. Adding UT +3 SEC schools would more than be paid for by the fan bases added.

UT and OU would jump. I think Arkansas would as well. Like Oklahoma, Arkansas is a national title contender with DFW recruiting, an also-ran without. They are not a school the Big Ten would want all that much, but they would rubberstamp it for Texas.

That would give you a contiguous path of states making the proposition an easier sell to UT and OU fans.... Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota... That division looks to have a nice balance of solid and good programs.

Once the trio jumps, the SEC can no longer match Big Ten payouts.

Texas A&M is 30/70 in that scenario. A&M likes top tier media money and they were absolutely humiliated by the SEC's actions adding UT, but the SEC is their culturally preferred home and the conference would be shedding UT...

So who gets the 32nd spot if not A&M? One would think growth states across the Sunbelt.

Depends on how the Big Ten wants to roll. The first call should be the University of Florida. Florida is AAU and they are self centered enough to realize that if they jump to the Big Ten, they essentially would limit SEC recruiting in Florida to whatever Georgia can pull. That is a net positive for UF and the Big Ten.

Another SEC target could be LSU. LSU is SEC to the core, but they are also smart enough to see the better home.

Vanderbilt could be a sensible add for the Big Ten. They are a strong AAU school that would bring Tennessee into the Big 12 network footprint. They are also a school that is SEC to the core, but that would be a very appealing slot. Vandy could be good in both revenue sports in the Big Ten and in a first class home for academics and research.

Colorado could get consideration due to their history with OU and Nebraska, but I think they would not have the votes on the west coast after their Pac-12 exit dickery.

Pac loyal Utah --- also a growth state --- could very well end up with the final slot.

This would drop the SEC down to a distant second tier conference.

Why is this such a desirable goal? Money and control.

With 24-32 teams in 4 regionally sensible divisions, the Big Ten can have the number 1 &2 teams play each other, the winners of each play in the rose bowl in LA (western champ) and the pinstripe bowl in NYC (eastern champ) and then play a Big Ten championship game in Chicago, before their champ plays the survivor of the rest of the FBS.

Imagine all three of the top 3 media markets focused on the Big Ten every year.

These divisions would allow the historic powers recruiting footprints that allow them to compete.... Imagine the Pacific division with USC, Washington, Utah, and Nebraska competing every year. Imagine the central division with UT, OU, and Arkansas dueling for the title every year. Imagine the eastern division with Michigan, OSU, Notre Dame and Miami fighting for the crown. Imagine FSU, Penn State, and Clemson fighting for the Atlantic title each year.

Who ISN'T going to watch that?

That is three rounds of playoffs in house....SOLELY owned by the Big Ten, while the SEC is playing the the CUSA and Sunbelt champ or some such in a much less valuable half of the playoffs..

Additionally it would give the Big Ten the lion's share of the power schools. They could once more go back to dictating the rules to the SEC.

If they SEC complains the Big Ten could break its schools into a Pacific and Atlantic conference all working under the Big Ten/CIC umbrella. Two power conferences dictating terms to a 3rd weaker conference.

Now I have been abusive to the Big Ten here. A lot of this has to play out. What happens if ESPN suddenly takes their streaming money and pays Clemson...? There are LOTS of what ifs here that could alter or even derail this, but it doesn't change the fact that just allowing the SEC to get to 18 or match at 20 schools is just dumb.

Foolish party #2 - The SEC

Disney does not want to pay for SEC expansion but I think they have come to realize that parity between the Big Ten and SEC is what will allow them to maintain college football dominance.

They have to go to 18 (or 20) so the SEC doesn't look inferior. UNC is laying out the carpet for ESPN and the ACC.

Virginia is not. Virginia and Va Tech appear to want to stay together in a solid ACC. That may not exist soon depending on the mood of Clemson.

Today it looks like the Big Ten is preparing to let the SEC partner UVA with UNC. That is a rare SEC expansion opportunity today that mostly pays for itself.

I think it is highly likely that ESPN then uses their new streaming revenue to fund an expansion to 20 with 2 of the following four schools to boost SEC basketball --- West Virginia, Baylor, Kansas, and Duke. West Virginia and Baylor could be very, very good football programs in the SEC... like top 10 programs ... but Kansas and Duke are true blueblood basketball brands and that may be what ESPN wants.

One can just imagine an expanded SEC footprint with WVU and KU in the SEC and see a cultural block of antagonistic, radical bullheadedness that quickly and permanently sets in those states.

There is a cultural aspect to this. Liberal thinking universities vs. close minded antagonistic people who despise academic open mindedness. One hopes the Big Ten sees that, as it is becoming apparent in North Carolina that the radical conservatives do see that.

The SEC is playing the waiting game because there is too much opportunity for lawsuits to push the ACC collapse. They haven't been foolish yet, but I think letting the Big Ten move first could be their downfall.

Foolish party #3 - Clemson

Clemson appears to not be appealing enough academically for the Big Ten and unwanted by SEC schools Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida who would recruit against them.

That would likely have Clemson making the rather unsatisfying move to the Big 12 just to give their fans some feeling that Clemson didn't LOSE this round of realignment.

That is wrong thinking.

The big 12 is arguably overvalued.

Clemson is in a conference that is FILLED with good academic schools in good media states in a travel friendly footprint.

Additionally the ACC with their markets is a wildly underpaid conference.

Clemson is in a dominant basketball conference. And Clemson can compete with anyone in football.

Consider for a second if Clemson says, "We are going to rebuild the ACC."

That is potentially huge.

The ACC can actually lose UNC and UVA and recover. They have Va Tech, Duke, NC State, and Wake Forest.

They can lose FSU and Miami. Because they have Clemson and Notre Dame and can add USF for Florida recruiting access.

They cannot lose Clemson.

If Clemson goes, Notre Dame goes and the whole thing collapses.

The ACC is getting slightly less than Big 12 money from ESPN.

If the ACC loses those 4 schools they could add Uconn (NYC DMA#1) and Temple (Philadelphia DMA #4) and probably get the same deal from ESPN or possibly more money from NBC to move the ACC content from ESPN to an NBC offering.

I think the argument is simple for Clemson.

"Every school gives up $4M out of their TV payout. That goes into a pot and is paid out like NCAA tourney money. The football champ gets 1/5 of the pot every year for the next 5 years. If Clemson wins the title every year --- which we should --- we get Big Ten level revenue --- with no talk of unfair revenue sharing."

Even if ESPN is paying them, Everyone else gets just a bit less than the Big 12 members, which for most would be tolerable just not to be in the Big 12.

If NBC is paying them, they could end up making more money than Big 12 schools, even with the Clemson money drop.

I think in that scenario, you could very well see the ACC poach WVU, UCF, and Cinci in a few years. Clemson just has to be on board.

Foolish party #4 - The Big 12

The Big 12 needs to be begging ESPN to let them add UConn and Gonzaga as Olympic-only members now. They need to be selling it to UConn with a scheduling agreement for football for now, with a promise of eventual full membership. It may be a very, very tough sell, but it is a sale that needs to be made.

They have made some smart moves, but I think this non-move may bite them in the butt in a couple years.

Foolish party #5 - The PAC 2

So... Starting this fall most of the sports content already sold could be viewed via streaming services, cutting out the cable providers.

You own a conference brand with an automatic berth that has the potential to add schools and be the cream of the second tier conferences.

Do you think the cable companies and their stations might now suddenly be in the market for sports content? That they might pay you a hell of a lot more than ESPN would?

The Pac should put in a call to Comcast and ask them if they would like to sponsor an FBS conference.... If they would like to give you a contract with a poaching budget like Fox gave to the Big Ten. Ask them if they want you to be their version of the ACC poaching conferences just like the ACC did at the direction of ESPN years ago.

The old PAC had issues with Comcast, but most of those schools are gone. It may now make sense for comcast to push more football onto NBC, Peacock, and Telemundo.

It seems like the opportunities out there are bigger than a reverse merger with the MWC.

#flugar

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redbeardace · 4 years ago

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Pagination is Hard

If you've been following along lately, you'll have seen that I'm working on a Choose Your Own Adventure style book. Primary writing is happening in Twine, which is a tool specifically for Interactive Fiction/Game Books/etc. But a Twine file is meant for a digital world, and I want a physical book.

More specifically, I want a physical look that looks like a CYOA book, acts like one, smells like one. I want people to pick it up and be teleported back to 1986. And so, there's a few style rules to follow. Some are simple, like the font, but others are more difficult, like pagination.

Twine has absolutely no concept of a page. Pages are irrelevant. It cares about Passages and only Passages. Its primary storage format is HTML, which also doesn't care about pages. Okay, so all you have to do is copy and paste it into Word, and now you have pages, right? Word cares about pages, doesn't it?

Word does not care about pages.

More specifically, Word docx files don't care about pages. Under the covers, they're not much different from an HTML file. (They're actually a zip package of a bunch of XML files, but that particular detail doesn't matter much.) There are tools and SDKs that let you create Word docs, but what you're creating are sections, paragraphs, and runs of text, but not pages.

Now, okay, Word itself does care about pages... Sort of. You can see the pages, you can print the pages, but they're sort of a calculated illusion. Whenever you open a Word doc, the rendering engine figures out how to pretend that the file is organized into pages, even when it's not. But because the pages aren't real, you can do something as simple as shuffle the pages around. That's largely fine, because in most cases, you don't want to shuffle pages around. In a normal document, the page break could come in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph. Reordering that would result in chaos.

Choose Your Own Adventure books are not normal.

Their whole thing is that all the pages are reordered randomly. Everything is centered around pages. Go on to the next page. Turn to page 73. The pages form an interconnected tree of decisions that make up a story. Pages pages pages.

So, in order to make a CYOA book, you have to be page-based, not passage-based. So, you just take all your passages, turn them into pages, set up links between them, and you're done!

But... Just what the hell is a page, anyway?

A page is a fixed-size panel of text, right? Easy enough concept. But... How much text? One of my passages is 400 words long. Is that more than a page or less than a page?

Trick question! Words don't matter. Pages are measured in lines. With known margins, font, size, spacing, etc., a page can hold a certain number of lines. For the style I'm using, let's say that a page is 25 lines.

So how many words are in a line, then?

Another trick question! Words in a line don't matter.

A cat in a hat ate a pie.

Several loquacious antidisestabilishmentarianistic sasquatches contemplated pseudoscientific philosophies belligerently.

Both of those sentences are eight words long. (So was that one.) But they're vastly different lengths. The first sentence has room to spare on its line, while the second one likely ends up spanning more than one line (depending on how you're reading this post.). So, it's clearly not word count that matters, it's the number of characters that counts. So, how many characters in a line?

Also a trick question! Some lines are short because the last word is a long one and doesn't fit. And letters are different sizes in most fonts.

You pretty much need a full layout engine to figure out how much text fits on a page, and that is not something I have.

But... Why do I care?

I care, because CYOA books are so centered around pages that you have to care about pages. Go grab one and open it up. (You obviously have one just lying around like I do, right?) What's the first thing you notice? Every page ends in one of two ways: The phrase "The End" or with "Turn To X Page" directives. That's the defining feature of the series.

But what else do you notice?

Almost every page ends with a bunch of whitespace. Because every page ends with a complete paragraph. Nothing runs on to the next page.

That's weird in a book.

(Okay, it's not every page. There does seem to be an exception to that rule and the "Turn To Page X" rule, which involves facing pages and a large illustration. It appears that mid-paragraph breaks are permitted in those rare circumstances. But anyway...)

They end with a complete paragraph because they have to. You can't suddenly have a "Turn To Page 37" in the middle of a sentence. No, the book has to pause, give you an instruction, then resume. These books would be irritating if

If you want me to finish the sentence, keep reading the next paragraph.

you were interrupted in the middle of every passage like that. So, in order to avoid that, I need to split the passages up, so that the right number of paragraphs are on each page, and in order to do that, I need to know how many paragraphs I can fit on a page. In order to do that, I need to know how much text can fit on a page and we've already been down that road.

So. What can I do about it?

I can fake it!

Faking things is a foundational principle in computer science. Some problems are too hard to solve the right way, so instead, we solve them the wrong way and make it look good.

You see, I don't really care exactly how much text can fit on a page, I care more about roughly how much text can fit on a page. That, give or take, is 22 lines, and a line is, give or take, 40 characters. And I didn't perform a complex layout calculation involving kerning and justification and whatever'n'th'hell an "em" is. No, I pasted a paragraph into Word with all the settings I wanted, let it do all that work, then I just counted letters. 40-45ish letters and 22-25ish lines, so go low for safety, and presto.

For each paragraph, get ceil(paragraph.length / 40.0) to get the line count for it, and repeat until there would be too many lines. Then put a page break and keep going.

And presto, now you have complete paragraphs and whitespace on every page!

Except for page 153, because fuck page 153:

Page 153 is a page number in the heading, followed by two "Turn to page X" choices and nothing else. What this means is that somewhere in my book, there's a directive to tell you to "Turn to page 153.", only for Page 153 to tell you to immediately go somewhere else.

And so you think, "Oh, well maybe that page is full of other paragraphs and there isn't any room left and maybe you can tweak a setting or add a feature that prevents such orphans. So you track down the page in question. Behold page 94:

WHAT THE HELL, PAGE 94‽

It's like 60% full! There's plenty of room for the choices there. Why are you doing this to me?

Anyway, that's all I wanted to say. I felt I had to write this big long thing just to name and shame Page 94, rather than spending that fixing Page 94, because you all need to know what Page 94 did.

#writing #cyoa #choose your own adventure #game book #choose your own adventure rules #pages 151 157 45 98 and 85 are also being problems #but don't get me started on them #or how is you have a paragraph that's like 20 lines long it screws everything up #let alone one that's 30 and can't even fit on a page #also in case you were wondering #it's grammar checking 'dragon' because it thinks it should be 'your badass dragon's name'#but no it's correct #you are a dragon and you need a badass dragon name #although if you had a badass dragon #your badass dragon would need a badass dragon name too

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brainclouded · 2 months ago

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I had a random growth of followers in bluesky for Sakuraoi I guess that drawing is just that good/hj

#it was like 22 and now is 40 which isn't big numbers but it is for the fact i post only when i remember

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ingek73 · 5 years ago

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Here Are 20 Headlines Comparing Meghan Markle To Kate Middleton That Might Show Why She And Prince Harry Are Cutting Off Royal Reporters

Over the years, Meghan has been shamed for the same things for which her sister-in-law, Kate, has been praised.

Ellie Hall

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Last updated on January 13, 2020, at 12:00 p.m. ET

Posted on January 13, 2020, at 10:40 a.m. ET

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex (aka Prince Harry and Meghan Markle) didn't just shockingly "step back" as senior members of the royal family this week — they gave the UK media a big "fuck-you" for years of what they said was biased and unfair coverage.

The couple's new website on breaking up with years of royal protocol laid out — among a lot of other things — their media strategy, stating that they will no longer participate in the traditional royal press system that grants exclusive access to a select group of UK outlets.

Britain’s royal correspondents, they said, are seen as reliable sources of information. "This misconception propels coverage that is often carried by other outlets around the world, amplifying frequent misreporting," they wrote. Removing themselves from "royal rota" coverage has sparked an outcry among UK media and drew a protest from the National Union of Journalists.

This isn't a new complaint from the royal couple — they just took an unprecedented step to do something about it. Harry and Meghan have said publicly that they believe they have been treated unfairly by the UK press since the moment news broke of their relationship — that they are bullied, that there are racist undertones to coverage of them, and that they have been held to a different standard than Harry's brother and sister-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (aka Prince William and Kate Middleton).

The UK media outlets that currently make up the royal rota are the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the Evening Standard, the Telegraph, the Times, and the Sun.

Here is a look at 20 stories from these outlets that appear to show a double standard between press coverage of Meghan and Kate. BuzzFeed News has reached out to all of the outlets featured below for comment.

Kate: "Bumping along nicely! The Duchess was seen placing a protective hand on her tummy as she exited the event." Daily Mail: March 22, 2018

Meghan: "Personally, I find the cradling a bit like those signs in the back of cars: Baby on Board. Virtue signaling, as though the rest of us barren harridans deserve to burn alive in our cars." Daily Mail: Jan. 26, 2019

Kate and William: "Prince William was given one of the green fruit – wrapped up in a bow – by a little boy who's mother is suffering during her pregnancy too... 'He said he'd take it to [Kate] and see what happens – and said good luck for [the boy's] mummy.'" Express: Sept. 14, 2017

Meghan: "The pregnant Duchess of Sussex and so-called 'avocado on toast whisperer' is wolfing down a fruit linked to water shortages, illegal deforestation and all round general environmental devastation." Express: Jan. 23, 2019

Kate: "Royal sources said yesterday that the Queen understood and endorsed William and Kate’s decision not to spend Christmas Day with her. One said: ‘Her Majesty understands that it is a dilemma that many young couples face and acknowledges how close Catherine’s relationship is with her family." Daily Mail: Dec. 16, 2016

Meghan: "The fact is the Queen expects to have the family around her for the festive season... to the Queen, for whom the tradition of the family gathering is a key date in her calendar, Harry and Meghan’s absence will be a matter of great sadness. It will also be a source of frustration." Daily Mail: Nov. 13, 2019

Kate and William: "Creating their own companies will allow William and Kate to bring out, should they ever chose to, myriad items of officially-endorsed merchandise from tea towels to coffee cups... Kensington Palace officials said they were doing the ‘sensible thing’ in protecting the couple’s rights." Daily Mail: Jan. 17, 2014

Meghan and Harry: "The Sussexes want to stamp their name on dozens of products including T-shirts, hoodies, journals and gloves for their newly-created foundation Sussex Royal... Experts said Harry and Meghan were actively preparing to quit the Royal Family months ago by filing trade mark applications to commercially protect their brand." Daily Mail: Jan. 9, 2020

Kate and William: "Prince William yesterday backed brother Harry’s brave admission of his mental anguish — and blasted the monarchy’s 'stiff upper lip' tradition... William said: 'There may be a time and a place for the ‘stiff upper lip’ but not at the expense of your health... '

"'Catherine and I are clear we want both George and Charlotte to grow up feeling able to talk about their emotions and feelings. Over the past year we have visited a number of schools together where we have been amazed listening to children talk about some quite difficult subjects in a clear and emotionally articulate way, something most adults would struggle with. Seeing this has really given me hope things are changing and there is a generation coming up who find it normal to talk openly about emotions.'” Sun: April 19, 2017

Meghan and Harry: "Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have bucked royal tradition once again with their latest TV interview — in which they claimed they were 'existing, not living.' The couple ditched the stiff upper lip of previous Royal Family generations and flew the flag for 'Generation Therapy' as they revealed their emotions to the world - but were they right to do so?

"What you make of 'fragile' Prince Harry and Meghan's comments may depend on your generation. Sun parents and kids reveal what they think of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex airing their emotions in public - and whether they have the right to moan in such positions of privilege..." Sun: Oct. 23, 2019

Kate: "It was reported that new Duchess of Cambridge requested her favorite scented candles and toiletries from luxury fragrance brand Jo Malone be delivered to scent the Abbey. A selection of candles, handwashes and lotions was requested, specifically in citrus spring scents including Orange Blossom, Grapefruit and the ever-popular Lime, Basil & Mandarin." Daily Mail: May 4, 2011

Meghan: "'Meghan wanted staff to go around with these atomizers, like spritzer guns, and spray the chapel with scent before anyone arrived. Royal Household staff stepped in and told her office politely, but firmly, that this was the queen's chapel and it simply wasn't appropriate. I don't believe they said no because they thought it could affect the chapel in any way. It was simply the principle of the thing. This is a place that has held royal weddings, funerals and even contains the royal vault. I don't believe a request of that nature had been made before.'" Daily Mail: Nov. 30, 2018

Kate: "As far as bridal bouquets go there was nothing particularly regal about Kate Middleton’s modest arrangement of simple, seasonal flowers. Like the bride herself the bouquet was effortlessly elegant and understated.

"Yet behind that modest posy lay a secret story. Kate, the commoner-turned-duchess, had painstakingly selected blooms with real meaning. She is evidently well-versed in the language of flowers, a little-known romantic relic from the 19th century.

"Hence the use of lilac in her bouquet, which signifies the first emotions of love, the lily of the valley meaning a return of happiness, hyacinth standing for constancy, myrtle meaning love and the ivy, which represents fidelity. Then of course there was the suitably named Sweet William, which is shorthand for gallantry." Express: Aug. 29, 2011

Meghan: "[Meghan Markle] was holding a wedding bouquet which flowers were replicated in Princess Charlotte and the other bridesmaids’ flower crowns. Express.co.uk can now reveal the children’ crowns were made of flowers that can be deadly, especially for children. Meghan’s bouquet was made of forget-me-nots as well as sweet peas, lily of the valley, astilbe, jasmine, and astrantia...

"Lily of the valley is a highly poisonous woodland flowering plant and ingestion could be deadly... As Meghan’s bridesmaids were so young, having this flower on their heads could be considered a dangerous decision. Other brides have also used this flowers including Kate Middleton, Princess Eugenie and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall." Express: Oct. 13, 2019

Kate and William: "The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh missed the small family affair. The decision is understood not to have been taken on health grounds, and to have been mutually agreed by the Queen and the Cambridges some time ago. The Queen, 92, has a busy week ahead, with high-profile celebrations in central London marking the centenary of the RAF on Tuesday, and a visit by US President Donald Trump in Windsor on Friday." Daily Mail: July 9, 2018

Meghan and Harry: "The situation has surprised some senior staff at Buckingham Palace, who feel that the duke and duchess should have planned the day better. ‘There is huge support for the couple in not wanting to conform to tradition. They are young, they are striking out on a different path from other members of the Royal Family and there is enormous goodwill for them. But they shouldn’t do that without regard for tradition,’ said one. ‘Her Majesty was already scheduled to be in Scotland for her annual Holyrood Week and had a prior engagement at the weekend. There is a feeling amongst some that they should have been more accommodating about the date.’" Daily Mail: July 4, 2019

Kate: "It is a fashion conundrum not many of us will ever face, but what exactly does one wear for tea with the Queen? The Duchess of Cambridge met this challenge head on yesterday by co-ordinating her outfit with the Queen’s powder blue ensemble... The Queen, on her first official event to mark her Diamond Jubilee, was dressed in a pastel hat and two-piece coat dress with military-style rows of gold buttons designed by Angela Kelly. Looking relaxed and elegant, her outfit was perfect for what looked like a fun official engagement with the girls." Mirror: Feb. 14, 2013

Meghan: "The Queen's aides had told [Meghan] she would be wearing a green hat as a mark of respect to those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire. The Queen is said to have been 'baffled' when Meghan turned up without a hat as she didn't realize she was supposed to wear one too. A senior aide said: 'I don't think the Duchess fully understood. This was not a request. Those are for others to make, not the Queen.' The Queen's staff are said to have noted the Duchess's mistake or 'lack of deference'" Mirror: Oct. 29, 2018

Kate: "We see a woman in her prime: stylish, confident and positively radiant, nailing outfit after outfit in the style stakes — and it’s a joy to witness... That old uniform of girlish dresses, tan tights and nude heels has been replaced by dazzling super-chic outfits to satisfy even the most exacting fashionista." Daily Mail: June 16, 2019

Meghan: "Proper royalty is about tradition and duty, self-effacing service and loyalty — year after year after year, season after season... That is not to say that a monarchy cannot or must not move with the times — simply that it has to resist the temptation to be buffeted by passing cultural trends. Fashion is the exact opposite. And as fashion’s most famous bible, Vogue exemplifies the transient nature of the beast." Daily Mail: July 29, 2019

#meghate #meghan markle #kate middleton #duchess of sussex #duchess of cambridge #double standards #brf #royal rota #tabloids #buzzfeed

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theofficefantasyfootball · 2 years ago

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WEEK 11 - Wrap Up

It's Me. Hi. I'm the Problem It's Me.

youtube

Yes, I am part of the problem. Not only did I buy Taylor Swift VIP tickets for my daughter's Spring Break trip to see Taylor the first weekend of the tour...but I also bought 6 tickets to the Atlanta show - and resold them all for 6 times the value to pay for the VIP tickets in Phoenix. So, yes I am part of the problem and I just thought that I would let everyone know and be honest with this group. Also, did you guys realize that next week is week 12! Normally that would mean just 2 weeks left in the regular season but with the increase in NFL games - we now go to week 14 before we move into playoffs. So, you have 3 more weeks to get your shit together and find your way into the playoffs.

MR AWESOME vs TREE HUGGERS

I see what's happening here. Scotty K on a 3 game winning streak and putting up big numbers. He's making a run! I just hope he didn't peak too early! Poor Gabe on the other hand. Ever since he told me how he's on a winning streak - he's done nothing but lose and this week he only put up 73. With Mahomes, Adams and Cooper - Scott could be one to watch over the next few weeks. Nice Win Scott and high point with 152! ($20)

LANAKILA vs TRADE WITH ME

Well, it happened! Brett won! He broke his 4 game losing streak and took down Lanakila. Both of these guys had players going into Monday night but with almost a 40 point lead it looks pretty promising that Brett will take the win. Cliff had a huge game from Pollard and a good game from Ekeler but not much more to stay competitive. Brett on the other hand had 27 from the Washington Commanders Defense, 22 from Herbert, 23 from Harris and 20 from T Higgins to seal the deal. Nice win Brett! It's nice to win isn't it!

BOOMER SOONER vs BACKDOOR BANDITS

Yes, it's sad but it's true - our good friend Stu Jones is in a losing slump. Now 3 weeks in a row he has taken the "L" and this time he lost to our friend from Arkansas - Kyle Allmendinger. Both of these guys are the kind of guys that expect to make the playoffs each year. Both now sit at 6-5. If I was a betting man - Which I am - I would put my money on Kyle to make the playoffs over Stu. Mainly because Stu tends to be a quitter and Kyle will find a way to sneak in. Congrats Kyle, way to take down the OU fanatic. He made it interesting with Kittle - 2 TDs and 20.40 points...just .50 short of the win. Painful!

TuPADRE vs LONG LEFT BALLERS

I couldn't tell if this guy was yawning or in awe...and I felt like it was perfect for this match up. Nothing major here...the score was 98 - 78...but Bebo did take down Gullahorn. Kind of a boring match up but both of these guys are sitting in that 2nd/3rd place range and they don't need losses going into the home stretch...so Bebo is the winner and puts himself in a little bit better position. Also, Gully will start Christmas tour stuff after next weekend which can be a great distraction going into the final weeks. Nice win Bebo!

KELCE LATELY vs MOOSES ON THE LOOSES

Such a fun week. It always is when the Moose and I match up. This week it was evident that he thought he had me. Very confident. And to be honest he did most of the weekend. Especially after Lamar let me down and my defense could only muster 1 point. But then SNF came around and my anchor player this year Travis Kelce put up 3 TDs and over 100 yards to give me a 30 point lead going into MNF. Mitch had James Connor and Rondale Moore still to play but I am going to go ahead and be the ghost of Christmas future and predict that he just couldn't get 30 out of those 2 guys and I went on to win! So fun Mitch! I only wish we had made our annual tequila bet!

FUNK GUY vs HOWARD

Well, and here we are - at the last match up of the night. Howard is done - he has a lack luster 84 points. Dana, well he has 56 points but still has Kenyan Drake, Christian McCaffrey and Garoppolo still to play. If Dana can't get 29 points out of those 3 guys then he doesn't deserve to win. I say Dana wins...right!?!?! Late update. Dana won! Big night Garoppolo with 32. Great win Dana!

CHEERLEADER OF THE WEEK

Guys, we are 11 weeks in...every week I have to google Hot NFL Cheerleaders. So now stuff like this just comes up on my searches. I might be searching Christmas lights and I'll get an ad like this - so she wins this week. She is a model for Cheerleader costumes. I feel like she has a great family and probably grew going to Wednesday night Bible Study. Seems like a winner to me.

#Youtube

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nftdawnio · 2 years ago

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Over the past 24 hours, GameStop NFT has made about $166,800 in sales. Since the platform only takes a 2.25 percent cut of NFT sales, this comes out to just $3,753 in revenue. Since GameStop's nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace opened in mid-July, daily sales have dropped to less than $4,000. This suggests that interest in the platform has dropped significantly. Data from DappRadar shows that GameStop NFT has made about $166,800 worth of sales in the last 24 hours. Since the platform only takes 2.25% of NFT sales as a fee, the amount equals just $3,753 in sales during that time. Only a small amount of information is available from DappRadar about GameStop, but it seems to confirm that trading volume has increased by 91.23% over the past day, bringing the price down to around $2000. The latest numbers show a big drop from July 13, which was the project's first full day of business. On that day, NFT sales totaled $1.98 million, which was worth about $44,500 in fees. At the time this was written, the HyperViciouZ project on GameStop had the most sales in 24 hours: 29.78 Ether (ETH), which is worth about $47,841. Pudgy Penguins, on the other hand, sold 860.8 ETH, or $1.37 million, more than any other project on OpenSea during that time. GameStop isn't the only NFT business that is having trouble right now. According to data from NFT Price Floor, the floor price of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) has dropped by a big 19% since the beginning of August. As of Aug. 22, the floor price of the Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) has dropped by 28.6% to 11.2 ETH, or $17,986. Since May and April, when the BAYC and MAYC hit their all-time high floor prices of 153.5 ETH and 41.2 ETH, respectively, the floors have fallen by 55% and 72%, respectively. Last week, NFT analysts warned that BendDAO could liquidate blue chip NFTs worth $55 million. Users can put their NFTs on the BendDAO platform and borrow ETH against the floor price of their assets. The loans add up to about 30–40% of the NFT floor price that was put down. But if the price drops so low that the loan is equal to 90% of the floor price, the depositor has 48 hours to pay down the loan or their NFT will be liquidated and sold at auction. This threshold is shown on the platform as a health indicator, and if the score falls below one, the NFT liquidation process starts. As of last week, there were at least 20 loans against BAYC NFTs with a health indicator below 1.01. There were also a lot more loans against Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs. As of the time this article was written, two BAYC NFTs had been liquidated and put up for auction, and ten were "playing with fire" with health indicators between 1.01 and 1.06. But that's only half as many as last week, which suggests that things are getting better. When it comes to loans against MAYC NFTs, there are 14 that are very close to going bankrupt, with health indicators between 1.01 and 1.03. There are also 13 items on BendDAO that have just been sold and are now up for auction. So far this month, the floor price for other top NFT projects like CryptoPunks has also dropped quite a bit. Even though the CryptoPunk floor went up from 68.3 ETH on August 1 to 77.4 ETH on August 4, it has since gone back down to 66.45 ETH, or $106,518. https://nftdawn.io/gamestop-nft-revenue-plunges-under-4k-daily-volume/?feed_id=1722&_unique_id=630334c396968

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tabloidtoc · 4 years ago

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National Examiner, May 3

You can buy a brand new copy of this issue without the mailing label for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Widow Queen Elizabeth suddenly alone at 95

Page 2: Holy Moly! Stars take on film roles of biblical proportions -- Willem Dafoe, Leelee Sobieski, Keanu Reeves, Charlton Heston, Ewan McGregor

Page 3: Jon Voight, Jim Caviezel, Ingrid Bergman, Christian Bale, Max von Sydow, Steve Carell, Milla Jovovich

Page 4: Garden of Delights -- floral fashion unfolds in spring -- Olivia Wilde, Mindy Kaling, Keira Knightley

Page 5: Sarah Paulson, Drew Barrymore, Tiffany Haddish, Penelope Cruz

Page 6: Brooke Shields has finally fought her way back after a nightmarish accident she was terrified would leave her paralyzed after she broke her right femur after falling off a balance board at her New York City gym -- Brooke said it felt like it was all in slow motion and then she just started screaming -- after two surgeries and a nearly three-week hospital stay, Brooke went home to her worried family, husband Chris Henchy and their daughters Rowan and Grier, but her nightmare wasn't over because a serious staph infection sent her back to the hospital for yet another surgery, saying for the first time in her life she thought she can't power through this and she can't even stand on her leg or go up a step and she needs to relearn how to even walk and she kept saying she could feel her toes because she was so afraid she would be paralyzed but if anything, she's a fighter -- now back at home and receiving physical therapy, Brooke feels like she's slowly on her way out of the woods and she knows she's got a long way to go, but she'll get there

Page 7: Do your pets suffer from mental illness? Humans aren't the only ones who can sink into depression or fall victim to stress and anxiety; household pets also have their share of mental illness, usually it's because there's something wrong in their environment and that means they probably don't need meds or a visit to the analyst's couch, just some sensitivity on your part and a little TLC and here's how to tell whether Fluffy, Fido or Tweety have problems you need to address -- dogs can have PTSD, birds get depressed, cats can have OCD, hamsters are hoarders

Page 9: Race Against COVID Mutants -- scientists scramble as virus variations gather strength

Page 10: In an incredible stroke of luck, and savvy cop intuition, a New York State Trooper saved a missing toddler from the top of a mountain

Page 11: 3 cheers for cherries -- it's cherry season again, and whether you like them sweet or tart, these deep red fruits pack a healthful punch

Page 12: After two years of dating and five years of marriage, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston split without children, then he went on to have six kids with Angelina Jolie, so if Brad wanted to have a great big family, why didn't he and Jennifer have children of their own? After suffering through a horrible public breakup, when her husband threw her over for Angie, poor Jennifer suffered even further indignation when she was raked over the coals for not giving Brad a baby, and vicious accusations began that it was her outright refusal to have a family that started their breakup and that made Jen furious, saying a man divorcing would never be accused of choosing career over family and she's never in her life said she didn't want to have children, and she did and she does want children and she will have them and the women who inspire her are the ones who have careers and children and she's always wanted to have children, and she would never give up that experience for a career and she wants to have it all -- in 2004, while Jennifer was finishing up with the ten-year run of her hit TV show Friends and Brad was doing the flick Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Jen was telling pals the time was finally right, and they were in a good place, ready to start a family and they were even preparing their home for a child by adding a playroom and a room for a nanny and they were definitely planning on having a kid but the plans were blown up when Mr. and Mrs. Smith was completed, and Brad left Jennifer for his co-star Angie, who already had a toddler and when she fell wildly in love with Brad, he also fell into the ready-made family and it turned out he liked being a dad so much, the couple have five more, three biological and two more adopted -- by the time Jennifer married Justin Theroux in 2015 and divorced two years later without a baby, she admitted that starting a family was a frightening prospect and that she had no regrets about her two marriages or remaining childless and she doesn't feel a void and her marriages have been very successful in her personal opinion, and she's sick of being beat up about it, saying there is a pressure on women to be mothers, and if they are not, then they're deemed damaged goods and maybe her purpose on this planet isn't to procreate; maybe she has other things she's supposed to do

Page 14: Dear Tony, America's Top Psychic Healer -- lying and dishonesty bring trouble to our world

Page 15: Sharon Stone starred in Basic Instinct and Casino and her life seemed to be glamorous, but behind the scenes it was a different story -- Sharon recently released her new memoir, in which she recalls the sexual abuse she and her sister Karen suffered as children and their mother's failure to protect them

Page 16: The shocking day Barry Manilow first discovered he had the heart condition AFib, he was alone and acted quickly to save his own life -- he was driving home and he felt his heart skip a beat, which doesn't sound like anything serious, so he didn't pay much attention to it and then it went blump-bla-bla-blump and it got crazier and crazier and he felt like there was a fish flopping around in his chest and it calmed down for a while, but later as he was watching TV, it started up again so he dialed his doctor, told him the problem and blurted what is this? He did what he was told and drove himself to the medical center in a panic to find out what was wrong with him and put a stop to it fast -- that first time was 25 years ago, but AFib is a lifetime problem that has to be monitored and battled consistently

Page 18: Here's some good news for fans of Don Johnson -- the actor says he's bringing one of his most beloved characters back to the small screen: Inspector Nash Bridges -- he confirmed during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show that's he's currently prepping a revival of the show that ran for six seasons from 1996 to 2000 and he said they're in heavy prep for a reboot of Nash Bridges and it's Nash some years later and Cheech Marin is going to come back, and Jeff Perry, and they've got a pretty exciting show that they're prepping in San Francisco right now

Page 19: Shaquille O'Neal was spreading the love when he overheard a man making a payment on his girlfriend's engagement ring and stepped in to buy it himself -- the generous moment took place in an Atlanta jewelry store, where Shaq says he just happened to be shopping for earrings and overheard the young kid, a hard-working guy asking to make a layaway payment on the ring and that's when Shaq said tell your girlfriend he's got it and promptly handed over his credit card and at first, the shocked guy tried to turn down the offer, but Shaq wouldn't hear of it -- Shaq said he's just trying to make people smile and the random acts of kindness make him happy

Page 20: Cover Story -- after 75 years with Prince Philip, the only man she has ever loved, widowed Queen Elizabeth has to find the strength to keep going

Page 22: Cool Uses for Cola -- pop open a can for cleaning, unclogging, cooking and more

Page 24: This little baby is the toughest survivor as she has already made it through COVID-19 and a liver transplant and you'd never know it to look at joyful Winter Moore, but she's been through more than many people endure in a lifetime, all before her first birthday

Page 25: Face Mask Mistakes -- here's how to do it right to protect your health

Page 26: When Irwin Allen's production of The Towering Inferno was released to stunned audiences in 1974, it represented the pinnacle disaster film and it was far and away the highest-grossing film of the year, with a whopping $203 million worldwide -- The Towering Inferno takes place on the opening night at the world's tallest skyscraper, where faulty wiring short-circuits start a fast-moving, out-of-control blaze that threatens the guests at the opening party on one of the top floors and to the rescue comes superstar Steve McQueen as larger-than-life Fire Chief Mike O'Hallorhan, and none other than the legendary Paul Newman as architect Doug Roberts -- here are some startling secrets from the flick: McQueen, Newman and William Holden all wanted top billing and Holden was turned down as McQueen and Newman had both become bigger stars so to provide dual top billing to both McQueen and Newman the credit were arranged diagonally with McQueen in the lower left and Newman in the upper right; Newman later regretted his decision to co-star with McQueen because of the rivalry between the two, created by Steve and as a result, the fireman role dominates Newman's architect; at McQueen's insistence, both characters have the same number of lines although McQueen's character doesn't appear until 43 minutes into the film and as a result, Newman had used almost half his lines before McQueen even enters; after seeing this film, novelist Roderick Thorp had a dream that same night about a man being chased through a skyscraper by gun-wielding assailants and this was the inspiration for his 1979 book Nothing Lasts Forever which eventually was made into another blockbuster film: Die Hard

Page 28: The Dashing Duke of Edinburgh -- Prince Philip was a study in elegance -- a look at Philip's long and amazing life

Page 40: Read Your Palm -- it holds your fate

Page 42: 10 things to know about Leonardo DiCaprio

Page 44: Eyes on the Stars -- Blue Bloods castmates Steve Schirripa and Vanessa Ray and Bridget Moynahan share a lighthearted moment behind the scenes on the Brooklyn set (picture), Hugh Grant and wife Anna hit the red carpet in London (picture), Henry Cavill is flying high with a new galpal reality TV's Natalie Viscuso of Super Sweet 16, there may be a silver lining to Kelly Clarkson's ugly divorce with estranged husband Brandon Blackstock as she says she's written 60 new songs since their split, Christie Brinkley has called aging "the last frontier" as the longtime model seeks to continue her career in front of the camera at 67, Salma Hayek says her pet owl Kering stays in her bedroom with her when husband Francois-Henri Pinault is out of town, Dolly Parton delivered a heartfelt goodbye to her dear uncle and mentor Bill Owens

Page 45: Jay Leno is ready to take a spin in L.A. in a vintage purple Barracuda (picture), Percy Gibson escorts wife Joan Collins to dinner in Hollywood (picture), Patrick Dempsey filming Devils in Italy (picture), Matthew Perry posted a behind-the-scenes shot that showed him getting prepped to appear on camera for the Friends special and the posted racked up 27,000 likes before it was deleted without comment from the actor's account, Jessica Springsteen who is the daughter of Bruce Springsteen and wife Patti Scialfa could represent America at the Olympic Games in Tokyo as a champion equestrian, Rosie Perez claims she's been snubbed by the Academy Awards for more than two decades since she was nominated as a Best Supporting Actress in 1994

Page 46: Online dating isn't just for the younger crowd as studies show older adults are the fastest growing group trying it out -- if you're considering looking for love online, here are some guidelines to help you stay safe while maximizing your chances

Page 47: Fear of Flying -- these jetsetters would rather drive -- William Shatner, Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck, Megan Fox, Sandra Bullock, Whoopi Goldberg, Kate Winslet

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fapangel · 7 years ago

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What is the difference between single carrier operations and multi carrier operations? Isn't it just exactly the same thing?

Hardly.

I’ve had several questions relating to the three aircraft carriers currently parked in the Pacific, conducting exercises close to North Korea, but this question here really neatly summarizes the general gist of all ‘of em. It’s an especially interesting question because our aircraft carriers are operating air wings of only 60 or so aircraft, due to budget cuts - despite them being designed to handle at least 100, and perhaps as many as 110, depending on what combination of aircraft are being used. Thus, two US carriers with 60 aircraft wings muster 120 aircraft... only 10-20 more than a single Nimitz is theoretically capable of mustering.

However, aircraft carriers are far, far, far more than just floating runways - aircraft carriers are huge, floating airbases. And airbase are fucking big. Airbases aren’t just places to park planes - they also service, maintain and repair them, so they’re equipped with big machine shops and tons of specialized equipment to enable that. They also store the munitions aircraft use; hundreds and hundreds of bombs, missiles, cannon shells, etc. And fuel, of course. Airbases - like civilian airports - have their own fire departments with trained personnel and fire engines, that train specifically for the requirements of fighting aircraft fires.

And then there’s the people that do all this shit - the service technicians, the firefighters, the ordinance techs - and then you have the people that support the operations, like air attack planners, intel officers, and other unfortunates that have to keep pilots in their goddamn chairs long enough to brief them. They need to eat, sleep, shit and shave, and that requires people to cook their food, sell them razors and even janitors to clean the bathrooms. A base has a PX store, showers, and even recreation facilities so all these people don’t go stark raving fucking mad and kill each other. Oh, speaking of, you’ll need MPs to handle things like that - basically, a big airbase is a small fucking city.

Now say you’re President of these GREAT UNITED STATES, and you wanna fuck up some mouthy faglourde over yonder. He’s too far away from the US, so you’ll need to build a new airbase in a conveniently-located ally nation to kick his shit in with.

All that shit above? ALL of it? Billions of dollars of equipment, thousand(s) of personnel, and a small city’s worth of buildings and concrete? You gotta build it. All of it. From scratch. Starting with a big field in a kinda sorta flat place somewhere. G’luck.

An aircraft carrier is all of that shit, but in a huge-ass boat that you can just sail around wherever you want. And that’s why they’re so goddamned expensive, valuable and powerful - it’s far easier to sail a carrier into an area on-demand than it is to build an entire new airbase (or significantly upgrade an existing one, or civilian airport), even after you account for a carrier being more expensive per-unit of everything due to the need to cram it all into a goddamn boat.

So with two carriers in the region, we’re basically operating the same number of aircraft as one carrier, but split between two different airfields. Twice the number of bomb handlers, service techs, machinists, system-checkers, gizmo-polishers and whizbang-whackers per aircraft. You could cram extra personnel into one carrier, but the productivity gains will be limited when nobody’s got enough room to turn around without dickslapping the clown behind them, you know?

And then there’s just the number of runways to use. An aircraft carrier equals one whole runway. That’s it. These days you can’t just line airplanes up on the deck from the halfway point, wave a flag, and let’em zoom off all at once - you have to line’em up, hook them to the catapults, and fire them off four at a time (assuming all four fucking cats are actually working.) That takes a goodly amount of time to get a strike package airborne, and the first guys up will be guzzling fuel, so you have to launch some Superbugs five-wet for buddy-tanking top-offs, and, and, and... and then there’s recovering the motherfuckers. Which you can only do one at a time. And since carrier landings are Very Hard, some of them will have to go around, and everyone might have to wait a bit while you turn into the wind to launch some alert-five fighters off the waist cats to check out a suspicious bogey... or more damn five-wet Superbugs to tank up people too low on gas because of waiting on all these fucking shenanigans. And you gotta get all these assholes back on board to turn them around for the next strike, and that’s basically playing one of those fuckin sliding-block puzzles but with F-18s in the hangar, being towed by aircraft tractors driven by 22-year olds you wouldn’t trust with a fucking tricycle on shore.

Air ops are hard. They are very hard. Handling the logistics of them is no easy matter. So if you can split that load between two carriers - or even better, three - you can maintain a much higher operational tempo. Say you need 40 aircraft for a strike - for one carrier, that’s pretty much every F-18 on board. It’ll take a long time to launch them, form them up, make sure everyone’s tanked up (which will take a few Superbugs out of the strike to do) and get them heading in the right direction. And it’ll take a while to recover them. And the first aircraft, being rapidly turned around, will have to wait for the aircraft that landed last to refuel and re-arm before they can sortie together again. And you’ll be interrupting this shit often to refuel your ASW helos, or because the Hawkeye has a funny sound in the engine and needs to swap off with the ready crew, or whatever the fuck. Ramirez, do fucking everything.

But if you split that load between three carriers, it goes a LOT faster and a lot smoother. One-third the load on each ship means a three-time longer duration of avgas, munitions, and crew morale, too.

And this is in the modern age. This also applies to WWII era operations, but in even greater degrees, because they didn’t have the angled decks that allow aircraft to land while others are taking off (the “waist cats” on the end of the angled deck, where landing aircraft won’t smack into their ass-end if they bolter.) As mentioned above, back then you could line up half the air wing on the deck and have them all take off at once - but the penalty was that lining up the other half of the air wing and launching them took a while, even if they were already prepped - you had to wait for the elevators to bring them up (30 seconds at least,) then push them into position, etc. This was/is called “deck spotting.” So unlike modern carriers - where you’re stuck with launching aircraft four at a time via the catapults, with the time it takes to hook’em up and prep the launch - the penalty of waiting for the “second half” of the strike package was much greater compared to just sending the first “deckload” off alone. So if you needed to get as many aircraft airborne as possible, launching two “deckload strikes” from two carriers would effectively put one whole carrier worth of aircraft into the air - but in a fraction of the time.

You didn’t have air-to-air tanking back then either, so protracted landing ops would often see returning aircraft too low on gas forced to ditch near the escorts. And without the ability to launch and recover at the same time, if enemy attacks found you while you were busy recovering aircraft, you were SOL. You also had your CAP fighters rotating in and out periodically, which could interrupt landing ops (and cost you aircraft low on gas) at awkward times as well. So having one carrier dedicated to defensive air ops while others launched/recovered strikes was very important - it could also recover stray aircraft that needed to land now due to low fuel state.

Now coordinating between multiple ships is pretty hard to do, because every ship - and their leadership, and crew - is often different. This was apparent at Midway, where the Japanese - which had been practicing multi-carrier ops for a while - were able to launch aircraft from four decks, all of them getting airborne within a few minutes of each other, and then form teams in the air with their own ship-specific squadrons merging seamlessly into larger formations, commanded by someone from a ship different than theirs, but still working together as a team. That’s not easy to do - units train together for a reason, and because of the nature of carriers, meeting up with a pilot from another carrier and forming a flight with him is like teaming up and working with another pilot stationed at another airbase, that you’ve never personally trained together with before. So your doctrine has to be great, and everyone has to be on the “same page.” You also have to train specifically for ops like this - which is exactly what our three carriers in the Pacific will soon be doing. At Midway, the less experienced crew/aircrew of Hornet fared rather worse than Enterprise and Yorktown in these regards - but the US also operated their carriers separately, which would prove to be a doctrinal/strategic error in employing multiple decks as well.

In sum, aircraft carriers are big. They’re floating airbases, with all the connotations that come with them - including the “residency” of units attached more or less permanently to them. Employing one carrier, you could probably call “tactics.” But when you bring multiple decks into a situation, you’re automatically talking about operational-level employment. It’s a whole new scale.

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brajeshupadhyay · 5 years ago

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India isn't flattening the COVID-19 curve; Health ministry must stop making this claim, test more, raise healthcare capacity

On 4 May, 2020, a day before India recorded the highest single-day jump in COVID-19 cases and deaths with 197 new fatalities and 3,900 infections, Lav Agarwal, Joint Secretary, Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare claimed during a press briefing that the “(COVID-19) curve is relatively flat as of now”. He went on to add that “If we work collectively in that direction, then the peak may never come.”

This large discrepancy between the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare assessment of the situation and the reality of the ongoing pandemic in terms of lives lost to the disease leads one to question: Is India really flattening the curve? Or is this a classic case of cherry-picking data to fit a particular narrative?

The answer to this question lies in the definition of the term: “Flattening the Curve”.

Definition of flattening the curve

In epidemiology, the curve (also called the epidemic or epi curve) refers to the projected number of new cases over a period of time.

Originally shared by Dr Drew A. Harris, a population health analyst at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia in the form of two epi curves, flattening the curve is a public health strategy to stagger the number of new cases over a more extended period. Flattening allows people to have better access to care, hospitals and vaccine-manufacturers to have more time to prepare, and healthcare workers and police to take a breather.

In the above graph, both curves show the number of new cases over time — one without any protective measures (the red one) and other with it (the blue one).

A steep curve (shown in red) indicates that the virus is spreading fast, and more people are seeking treatment at any given time. A steep fall often follows curves with a steep rise after the virus runs out of fresh hosts to infect. The catastrophic consequences of misinterpreting a false-positive result are all too evident in Italy, and indeed it represents a risk not worth taking. Not following a containment measure might result in a higher death toll alongside the risk of further loss of life caused by a health care system that is overloaded beyond its capacity.

On the other hand, a gentler curve (shown in blue) lower than the dotted line indicates that fewer people are infected with the virus, preventing a surge that will overwhelm the healthcare system.

Simply put, moving from the curve Red to Blue is flattening the curve. But to achieve that, we need to draw these two curves while keeping our local healthcare system capacity (the important dotted line) in mind.

So, is India "flattening the curve"?

The short answer is NO.

While the stringent containment measures implemented by the central government have certainly slowed down the growth of COVID-19 during the lockdown but is that growth rate manageable by our health care systems? The answer is no.

Let’s dive in to understand why.

First, let’s look at the rate of increase of COVID-19 cases in India, week by week. For the last two weeks (22 April- 5 May), the growth rate of COVID-19 cases in India is constant at 40 percent (compared to 250 percent the week before the Government of India ordered the lockdown on 25 March).

The decreasing rate of active cases alone doesn’t indicate that India is flattening the curve, although it definitely suggests that the growth has slowed down. To identify whether we have flattened the curve or not, we need to draw the two epi curves.

Let’s draw the blue curve first — an epi curve with protective measures like a lockdown, as we already have the data for this.

Drawing the red curve is trickier, as one needs to identify a projection model, in a hypothetical scenario if there was no lockdown or containment measure. Most of the COVID-19 projections are based on the ‘SEIR’ model, which tracks the flow of individuals through four stages: susceptible (S), exposed (E), infectious (I) and recovered (R).

Different models use different assumptions and techniques — which means that they give us different insights. However, since COVID-19 is still an unclear infectious disease, which means we can only obtain an accurate prediction AFTER the outbreak ends. Consequently, the multiplicity of unknown variables indicate that most projections currently employed at this moment are at best, a pure guess.

Despite this, for the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that the cases increase at the same rate as it was growing before the lockdown - meaning that it is doubling every three days. Based on this assumption, a straightforward statistical model, also used by Shamika Ravi, Former Member, Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, can be applied to create a projection curve.

In that case, here is how the graph looks like, with a projected number of around 38,83,316 cases on 5 May:

As of today, COVID-19 cases in India are doubling every 12 days (as compared to 3 days before the lockdown). But we still can’t say that we have flattened the curve because of three big reasons:

1. Low Testing 2. Lack of an efficient healthcare system 3. Unreliable data to determine how COVID-19 will shape up after the lockdown

Low Testing

This is no hidden fact that India is testing way less than most countries of the world — 1 test per thousand people (compared to Italy, which is conducting around 32 tests per thousand people).

But the most jarring fact is that India has also dropped testing rates as the number of cases in the country have increased. The testing rate has decreased from 150% (from 28 March - 3 April) to around 50 percent this week. So this could mean that the curve is not flattening and we are blindfolded by unreliable information about the COVID-19 cases in India.

Lack of an efficient healthcare system

Apart from the two epi curves, another critical component of the graph is the dotted line representing our Healthcare system capacity.

According to an estimation by The Center For Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, India has approximately 1.9 million hospital beds, 95,000 ICU beds, and 48,000 ventilators.

Even if we keep India under lockdown forever, with the current reproduction rate (R0 or R nought) — defined as the average number of people who get infected by an already-infected person — of 1.36, close to two million people will be infected in about 9 months when the peak arrives (analysis applied to one billion Indians below the age of 50).

We also don't know how the rate will fare when India removes the lockdown given that the virus has an approximately two-week incubation period.

So, without any information on how many people we can treat, how many doctors we are testing, and how many of them are affected, we cannot determine the load on our healthcare system and hence cannot say conclusively that we are flattening the curve.

If you’re still not convinced, here is an example from Kerala which shows precisely what flattening the curve looks like — when the number of active cases becomes equal or less than the number of recovered patients.

At this moment, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare should stop claiming every day that they have flattened the curve and focus on raising the line of healthcare system capacity and increasing the testing. That is because, even as we flatten the curve, there remains a dearth of testing kits, beds, ventilators, PPE Kits, in other words, the essentials needed to treat patients.

Now, is not the time for rhetoric, it is a time to save lives.

The author is a data scientist and researcher with Reuters

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