#it's like hard to repeat the same tags over and over again manually typing them in

[tmf-confessions]

confession #283

confession by @silver---stars

I don't actually like Jomiecule that much </3 do to hcs ofc, Would maybe ship it if like, my hcs were different

[hydrus]

Version 422

windows

zip

exe

macOS

app

linux

tar.gz

🎉🎉 It was hydrus's birthday this week! 🎉🎉

I had a great week. I mostly fixed bugs and improved quality of life.

tags

It looks like when I optimised tag autocomplete around v419, I accidentally broke the advanced 'character:*'-style lookups (which you can enable under tags->manage tag display and search. I regret this is not the first time these clever queries have been broken by accident. I have fixed them this week and added several sets of unit tests to ensure I do not repeat this mistake.

These expansive searches should also work faster, cancel faster, and there are a few new neat cache optimisations to check when an expensive search's results for 'char' or 'character:' can quickly provide results for a later 'character:samus'. Overall, these queries should be a bit better all around. Let me know if you have any more trouble.

The single-tag right-click menu now always shows sibling and parent data, and for all services. Each service stacks siblings/parents into tall submenus, but the tall menu feels better to me than nested, so we'll see how that works out IRL. You can click any sibling or parent to copy to clipboard, so I have retired the 'copy' menu's older and simpler 'siblings' submenu.

misc

Some websites have a 'redirect' optimisation where if a gallery page has only one file, it moves you straight to the post page for that file. This has been a problem for hydrus for some time, and particularly affected users who were doing md5: queries on certain sites, but I believe the downloader engine can now handle it correctly, forwarding the redirect URL to the file queue. This is working on some slightly shakey tech that I want to improve more in future, but let me know how you get on with it.

The UPnPc executables (miniupnp, here https://miniupnp.tuxfamily.org/) are no longer bundled in the 'bin' directory. These files were a common cause of anti-virus false positives every few months, and are only used by a few advanced users to set up servers and hit network->data->manage upnp, so I have decided that new users will have to install it themselves going forward. Trying to perform a UPnP operation when the exe cannot be found now gives a popup message talking about the situation and pointing to the new readme in the bin directory.

After working with a user, it seems that some clients may not have certain indices that speed up sibling and parent lookups. I am not totally sure if this was due to hard drive damage or broken update logic, but the database now looks for and heals this problem on every boot.

parsing (advanced)

String converters can now encode or decode by 'unicode escape characters' ('\u0394'-to-'Δ') and 'html entities' ('&'-to-'&'). Also, when you tell a json formula to fetch 'json' rather than 'string', it no longer escapes unicode.

The hydrus downloader system no longer needs the borked 'bytes' decode for a 'file hash' content parser! These content parsers now have a 'hex'/'base64' dropdown in their UI, and you just deliver that string. This ugly situation was a legacy artifact of python2, now finally cleared up. Existing string converters now treat 'hex' or 'base64' decode steps as a no-op, and existing 'file hash' content parsers should update correctly to 'hex' or 'base64' based on what their string converters were doing previously. The help is updated to reflect this. hex/base64 encodes are still in as they are used for file lookup script hash initialisation, but they will likely get similar treatment in future.

birthday

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

On December 14th, 2011, the first non-experimental beta of hydrus was released. This week marks nine years. It has been a lot of work and a lot of fun.

Looking back on 2020, we converted a regularly buggy and crashy new Qt build to something much faster and nicer than we ever had with wx. Along with that came mpv and smooth video and finally audio playing out of the client. The PTR grew to a billion mappings(!), and with that came many rounds of database optimisation, speeding up many complicated tag and file searches. You can now save and load those searches, and most recently, search predicates are now editable in-place. Siblings and parents were updated to completely undoable virtual systems, resulting in much faster boot time and thumbnail load and greatly improved tag relationship logic. Subscriptions were broken into smaller objects, meaning they load and edit much faster, and several CPU-heavy routines no longer interrupt or judder browsing. And the Client API expanded to allow browsing applications and easier login solutions for difficult sites.

There are still a couple thousand things I would like to do, so I hope to keep going into 2021. I deeply appreciate the feedback, help, and support over the years. Thank you!

If you would like to further support my work and are in a position to do so, my simple no-reward Patreon is here: https://www.patreon.com/hydrus_dev

full list

advanced tags:

fixed the search code for various 'total' autocomplete searches like '*' and 'namespace:*', which were broken around v419's optimised regular tag lookups. these search types also have a round of their own search optimisations and improved cancel latency. I am sorry for the trouble here

expanded the database autocomplete fetch unit tests to handle these total lookups so I do not accidentally kill them due to typo/ignorance again

updated the autocomplete result cache object to consult a search's advanced search options (as under _tags->manage tag display and search_) to test whether a search cache for 'char' or 'character:' is able to serve results for a later 'character:samus' input

optimised file and tag search code for cases where someone might somehow sneak an unoptimised raw '*:subtag' or 'namespace:*' search text in

updated and expanded the autocomplete result cache unit tests to handle the new tested options and the various 'total' tests, so they aren't disabled by accident again

cancelling a autocomplete query with a gigantic number of results should now cancel much quicker when you have a lot of siblings

the single-tag right-click menu now shows siblings and parents info for every service, and will work on taglists in the 'all known tags' domain. clicking on any item will copy it to clipboard. this might result in megatall submenus, but we'll see. tall seems easier to use than nested per-service for now

the more primitive 'siblings' submenu on the taglist 'copy' right-click menu is now removed

right-click should no longer raise an error on esoteric taglists (such as tag filters and namespace colours). you might get some funky copy strings, which is sort of fun too

the copy string for the special namespace predicate ('namespace:*anything*') is now 'namespace:*', making it easier to copy/paste this across pages

.

misc:

the thumbnail right-click 'copy/open known urls by url class' commands now exclude those urls that match a more specific url class (e.g. /post/123456 vs /post/123456/image.jpg)

miniupnpc is no longer bundled in the official builds. this executable is only used by a few advanced users and was a regular cause of anti-virus false positives, so I have decided new users will have to install it manually going forward.

the client now looks for miniupnpc in more places, including the system path. when missing, its error popups have better explanation, pointing users to a new readme in the bin directory

UPnP errors now have more explanation for 'No IGD UPnP Device' errortext

the database's boot-repair function now ensures indices are created for: non-sha256 hashes, sibling and parent lookups, storage tag cache, and display tag cache. some users may be missing indices here for unknown update logic or hard drive damage reasons, and this should speed them right back up. the boot-repair function now broadcasts 'checking database for faults' to the splash, which you will see if it needs some time to work

the duplicates page once again correctly updates the potential pairs count in the 'filter' tab when potential search finishes or filtering finishes

added the --boot_debug launch switch, which for now prints additional splash screen texts to the log

the global pixmaps object is no longer initialised in client model boot, but now on first request

fixed type of --db_synchronous_override launch parameter, which was throwing type errors

updated the client file readwrite lock logic and brushed up its unit tests

improved the error when the client database is asked for the id of an invalid tag that collapses to zero characters

the qss stylesheet directory is now mapped to the static dir in a way that will follow static directory redirects

.

downloaders and parsing (advanced):

started on better network redirection tech. if a post or gallery URL is 3XX redirected, hydrus now recognises this, and if the redirected url is the same type and parseable, the new url and parser are swapped in. if a gallery url is redirected to a non-gallery url, it will create a new file import object for that URL and say so in its gallery log note. this tentatively solves the 'booru redirects one-file gallery pages to post url' problem, but the whole thing is held together by prayer. I now have a plan to rejigger my pipelines to deal with this situation better, ultimately I will likely expose and log all redirects so we can always see better what is going on behind the scenes

added 'unicode escape characters' and 'html entities' string converter encode/decode types. the former does '\u0394'-to-'Δ', and the latter does '&'-to-'&'

improved my string converter unit tests and added the above to them

in the parsing system, decoding from 'hex' or 'base64' is no longer needed for a 'file hash' content type. these string conversions are now no-ops and can be deleted. they converted to a non-string type, an artifact of the old way python 2 used to handle unicode, and were a sore thumb for a long time in the python 3 parsing system. 'file hash' content types now have a 'hex'/'base64' dropdown, and do decoding to raw bytes at a layer above string parsing. on update, existing file hash content parsers will default to hex and attempt to figure out if they were a base64 (however if the hex fails, base64 will be attempted as well anyway, so it is not critically important here if this update detection is imperfect). the 'hex' and 'base64' _encode_ types remain as they are still used in file lookup script hash initialisation, but they will likely be replaced similarly in future. hex or base64 conversion will return in a purely string-based form as technically needed in future

updated the make-a-downloader help and some screenshots regarding the new hash decoding

when the json parsing formula is told to get the 'json' of a parsed node, this no longer encodes unicode with escape characters (\u0394 etc...)

duplicating or importing nested gallery url generators now refreshes all internal reference ids, which should reduce the liklihood of accidentally linking with related but differently named existing GUGs

importing GUGs or NGUGs through Lain easy import does the same, ensuring the new objects 'seem' fresh to a client and should not incorrectly link up with renamed versions of related NGUGs or GUGs

added unit tests for hex and base64 string converter encoding

next week

Last week of the year. I could not find time to do the network updates I wanted to this week, so that would be nice. Otherwise I will try and clean and fix little things before my week off over Christmas. The 'big thing to work on next' poll will go up next week with the 423 release posts.

[otayuriweek]

What hard work? Nothing has been done since 2017 and that was nothing but a lot of reblogging. Seriously how is that hard? A lot of people would like to participate in an OtaYuri week, if you're not willing to do something with this blog, delete it and let someone else pick it up. As of right now, you're just being selfish and petty for not allowing someone else to host the week. That's all it boils down too.

Did you even read the post? I will repeat what I said here: anyone is free to host their own Otayuri Week, and we would be happy to support them by reblogging their announcements on our blog provided that they’re being inclusive of all fans. 

Otayuri Week doesn’t have to be on this blog. In fact, anon, you’re the one being fairly selfish in telling me to delete it after I explained that the blog is currently serving as an archive for the works submitted to past events. The fact that you think that hosting an event is just “a lot of reblogging” really speaks volumes on how well such a theme week would go if hosted by someone like you.

Detailing it further for others that might be curious on how to host this sort of thing, this implies:

checking if there’s enough interest for the event to be viable through fandom contact, polls, fandom/ship activity in general, amount of creators active, while being aware that only a very small portion of the people claiming to be interested will actually participate

planning out a viable schedule while juggling together: 1) the availability of several mods, 2) the dates for all other fandom events, often gathered by hand and by asking people because most fandoms don’t have a comprehensive event calendar, 3) several other factors such as busy holiday/school/business times for participating fans, time needed to go through each phase with a good response without the fandom losing interest, etc

setting up the blog, themes, etc, involving code and graphic design and image editing, all of which can take a considerable amount of time (also applicable to the steps below)

drafting up banners and other initial graphics for the blog and announcement posts

drafting up the rules for the event as well as coherency rules for the mods, this not to mention extra information pages/posts such as faqs

drafting up an announcement post in a way that will be both informative and engaging

contacting other event blogs for affiliation advertising, spreading the word, answering asks, sending requests to be included on event calendars if they exist, etc, basically PR

setting up necessary media for themes submissions, several rounds of voting for themes, etc, and draft up graphics and announcement posts for ALL those things

process all the data between each phase, often manually, i.e.: go through each and every submitted theme, sort through them to make sure there are no duplicates, discuss with other mods how to handle similar themes, individually input them on the forms to be used for the voting rounds, etc

spread the word AGAIN for every new announcement that is made

create the final theme masterpost including graphics and announcement text, discuss theme placement within the timeframe according to how tired the fandom will be versus how versatile the themes are versus what will work well, etc etc etc

spread the word AGAIN, contact affiliates, more PR effort

figure out all the tags you’re going to use for the event, which can list all the characters involved, pairings present, themes, days, type of media, event date/year, etc so that fans can filter the participating works more easily, set up page on blog sorted by all these, make sure all mods are on the same page regarding tags to use

set up AO3 collection, figure out how that works for a multi-year event, make sure all mods know how to use it

THIS IS ALL BEFORE THE EVENT BEGINS. note that pretty much all of the steps described until now have to be cross-checked with the other mods, which might have conflicting opinions or low availability to confirm everything is up to standard and that we can continue with everyone’s agreement

event begins. there are hundreds of entries every day. you must keep track of which ones have already been reblogged, which ones have not, make sure all of them are tagged properly on the blog with all the tags I described above, cross-check with several other tags for the event because people will put their works even on tags that we supposedly aren’t tracking, or even not tag them at all and expect us to find them anyway. this takes HOURS, even if everything is in its proper place.

find all the works on AO3 for the event, most of which aren’t linked or tagged so that we can find them easily. add them to collection.

post all the submissions that have been sent anonymously for us to post, make sure to tag properly and check they show up on the tag.

if a mod doesn’t show up or doesn’t do their work? you need to go back and do it and have triple the work because you can’t be sure of what has been taken care of or what hasn’t, often by individually checking the notes of each post to make sure it has/hasn’t been reblogged because there are too many entries on our blog to find a single post easily. once again, this for HUNDREDS of posts every day. 

keep checking the tags and AO3 several weeks after the event is over for late entries.

Note that this is the condensed version! All this while juggling several mods with probably conflicting opinions on everything, a busy schedule and daily life for everyone, all the time it takes to draft up the posts and do the graphics and process the data, and then dealing with the hundreds of daily entries once the event itself arrives while keeping every single one of those steps on schedule? You can bet it’s hard work. 

Yes, we have not hosted Otayuri Week since 2017. You’ll be surprised to find that people with a large amount of responsibilities often don’t have the time and mental availability for this sort of workload, even without any added complications, and neither of the remaining mods is able to keep it up at the moment. I’ve already expressed my thoughts on adding new mods or handing over the event in my other post.

I will not answer anymore asks in the tone of anon above. I have already explained the reasons for this decision and stated my full support for anyone who wishes to host Otayuri Week in the future, and I’m more than happy to explain things further if anyone has more questions. However, I will not stand for the childish sort of personal attacks and disregard for people’s work as were used by anon in this ask, especially since anon chose to completely ignore what I actually said in my original reply.

–Mod Howl

[jooheongif]

it's theory anon,hi!!how are YOU?i'm really good rn thanks:)) thank you for your kindness again,i'm really happy i could somehow help to help you feel even a tiny bit better and hope you're doing well now,too(and it's ok to not rest on your day off but it's also ok to do so if that's what you feel is right for you atm!).about the mf(ilm), i thought the same thing, it felt like a parallel universe type of story!i also really love plotlines about friendship, (again cont.i'll try to be briefer!)

(i’m so sorry i wrote a rly long reply so i’m gonna put this under read more !!)

2. friendship is beautiful and i feel oftentimes underappreciated(but not mx!there they go again being amazing) so i love the concept. personally i like not knowing what exactly the producers were thinking because having my own interpretation of something and seeing other ppl have their own fills me with wonder,like,that's art!so many people think so many different things and no one's wrong i love it!!your thoughts about them appreciating everything they've done so far,you're absolutely right(cont) 3. i hope they are able to bc everything's so hectic for the.i get lost just looking at their official schedule,i don't know how they do it but i also hope they are aware of all these things bc those are all mindblowingly huge accomplishments in my opinion and i just want them to feel like their hard work is worth it,yknow?(is this comprehensible?)and i know they feel pressure because as you said the business is nasty but yea i hope at the end of the day they can feel like (cont.???again 4. everything they've put so much of themselves into is worth it,i love their energy and fierce determination and i just don't want them to lose it but maybe as you said feel less pressured..but then the only way would realistically be to make sure they get awarded in the Real World so we're all doing our best in the system&hating it as you said:/ they just mean so much to so many people i want them to feel that too!i try to contain myself but here i go again! sorry it's so long AND i have more(con 5. also!thank you for your big reply and sharing your thoughts i mostly just agreed with (but you're right so what else can i do),i don't have mbb friends to vent to and fanperson(is there a gender neutral term for fanboy/fangirl?) over mx with and this is really nice and fulfilling(again,if i'm boring you,you can just delete the messages and not reply!) so THANKS!it's great to strive to be a better person but i feel like one(you) should also acknowledge the good things they're already doing(cont?) 6. you showed such pure kindness and really melted someone's(my) heart and that's a Big Deal!djkghddgwe can agree that we both inspired each other :') also please i feel like you're such a wonderful soul and you really deserve every bit of gratitude and appreciation i managed to express(i feel a lot moreprobably) so!yeah!reminder that you're lovely and deserve to be appreciated and i'm also very,very happy you're here!you made my day brighter for the 2nd time now wow!thanks! i hope you and(cont.:() 7. your gorgeous heart are taking good care and enjoying your day/night! and this cb!i really like it i haven't had time to listen to the entire album but jealousy!is a bop honestly it's my type of jam and the choreo is stunning and so are their voices!iwas so skeptical about the lyrics(they could've been like hero or stuck and those made me a bit >:/ honestly) but i really should've known they wouldn't fail me in any way ever!i can't wait to hear the rest of the songs i hope you enjoy them too!bye

hi theory anon, it's nice to hear from u again ! firstly, i am so sorry for the slow reply to this ! but im rly glad to know that u are doing good :-) i'm doing ok too thank u !! how are u ? kfjjfdsjfdf sorry that u had to read my tags but thank u for saying that !! i just feel so guilty when i do nothing bc im absolutely terrified of time passing too quickly ? just the thought of letting a few minutes go to waste is overwhelming ? even though i know it's not rational to think like this but ??? theres just this constant feeling that im running out of time so i try to get rid of it by always doing smth ?? and feel bad when i dont ? idk ?? but anyway im working on it and ill be ok ! sorry..not to be dramatic and tmi and all that kjdfdj istg this blog gives me too much freedom to say...too much :( (hope the internet folks that collect metadata never read the garbage i write bc..yikes they aren't gonna hav the best time) anyway..yea. what a paragraph to start off this reply :( sorry for the honesty and saying so much all the time btw :( not that being honest is necessarily a bad thing but ! idk every time i write smth i suddenly feel extra self conscious and feel like deleting it bc im rly embarrassed and always end up having big regret later when i reread anything ive typed up !! but i just keep writing them anyway bc...idk ?? i'd rly hate it if someone got discouraged from sharing their thoughts/worries/feelings which i think is a rly important human thing :( so  yea im rly embarrassed w anything i write but i'll keep doing it anyway bc i'm all for that kind of stuff and sometimes i know its not easy and it takes someone a lot to share that and its a good thing and i dont ever want anyone to feel discouraged from doing that ! anyway i just felt like i rly needed to say all of this..but pls dont feel obliged to reply to this mess !! anyway back to mx ! you are right :( i also hope mx feel like what they've done is worth smth w/e their definition or standard of that is :( like.. all of the hard work they've put into being mx it certainly means so much to fans but i hope all the hard work they've put into being mx also means smth to them at the end of the day and they are happy w what they're doing and what they've achieved so far :( and yes we'd love mx to always be rewarded in the real world :( though we love them and we want to get them a win, i know that everyone has their commitments, means and different circumstances and we can only do so much :( but even if u think its just a small contribution, everything adds up and counts and i know that all mbb hav contributed in some way in helping them get another win for this cb ! there are some mbb who can't buy albums or streaming passes and things and i hope they don't feel bad for this :( even if all you can do is watch the mv once or twice, even if you could only vote, i hope you know that it all counts and matters !! abt mx's schedule, i get tired just by looking at their weekly one idk how they can even put up w it all ?? after this they'll hav their japanese album and things and then they'll have their concerts and on top of all that apparently [some of them are also studying] ????? they are so hardworking :( HOW do they do it !! just..thinking abt their schedule is overwhelming !!! also pls dont think that you're boring me or anything like that :( im so thankful for any msg i receive and the fact that u actually took the time to type out smth to send to me ?? im so grateful ?? u are never boring !! honestly even if u sent me a stainless steel dishwasher manual w the page length of like..23 bibles, i'd still love u for it and i'd prob read all of it :( btw thank u sm for saying all those kind things !!! receiving kindness for the 3rd time is rly !!!!!!! and once again i've done nothing to deserve it :( i dont even know what i can say to you that will ever be enough to thank u again or to top what u hav already said ! if there was like a...maslows hierarchy of kindness of smth, ur at the very top of that triangle and anything i say will never be as kind as what you have said !! for you, i can agree that we both inspired each other :-) but really thank u so much from the bottom of my heart :( i hope you know how kind and lovely u are too ! if nobody told u this today, i wanted to say that im rly grateful to know u and i'm happy that you're here !! thank u again for being so kind and thoughtful and for making me smile !! :( same, i havent properly listened to the whole album either bc ive just been letting it stream in the background (but i dont count that as a proper listen unless i listen w headphones tbh) ill give it a good listen one day ! also im a repeat 1 kind of garbage person until i feel the need to listen to a new song ?? and rn jealousy to me is a song that gets better w every listen ??? shes too powerful atm :( one day ill listen to another song but today is not that day ! Actually.....I think jealousy is my fav mx song ???? before this cb i didnt hav a fav bc i couldnt pick the song i liked most out of blue moon/blind/fighter/incomparable. i was just gonna base it off the one w the most play count out of those 4 but now i know its jealousy ! what are ur fav mx songs ?? btw i know im always saying that anything mx releases is always a masterpiece no matter what, but in all seriousness its ok if u didn't like smth they released. i don't think it makes u any less of a mbb if u didn't enjoy a certain release or if u only liked one aspect of a thing but not so much the rest of the thing. anyway not to sound so...stale and commonplace but for lack of a better word/sentence, at the end of the day your own reactions and feelings to a piece of art like music...it's all just subjective isnt it ?? not liking that thing doesnt mean that its not a masterpiece or its any less of a masterpiece to someone else either so !! it's ok !! anyway this is rly....ive written a lot and its all over the place and incoherent probably :( i'm sorry !! feel free to reply whenever u feel like it, or no pressure on never replying at all btw ! also feel free to disagree w anything i say ! thank u sm for talking to me abt mx bc ive also got no mbb friends so !!! thank you :( theres so many times where i rly want to start a conversation w someone but im too scared and also i've got no clue abt how to initiate conversation ! and the times when i do manage to...i get stuck on how to keep the conversation going ? but when i figure smth out then im coming for u @ friendship !! i hope u had a good weekend and that you got some rest and that ur doing ok wherever u are !! until next time, take care ❤️❤️❤️

[just-4-thrill]

She Might Be Right - 4

CHAPTER 3 / CHAPTER 2 HERE / CHAPTER 1 HERE

Fandoms: TLJ, Star Wars

Word Count: 1782

Characters: Paige Tico x Phasma (the slow burn ship literally no one asked for)

Summary: Paige Tico has been captured by The First Order when, much to Paige’s surprise, an officer named Captain Phasma releases her from the brig. Captain Phasma decides she will let Paige stay in her quarters where she can offer Paige protection while her wounds are treated. But why would Captain Phasma do this? Living in close quarters with the enemy puts both women in more danger than either of them could ever realize

Chapter Summary: Paige awakens from a feverish sleep to Hux telling Phasma that their ship has been boarded. As Paige attempts to follow Phasma unnoticed, trouble finds her in many forms but perhaps the hardest comes in the form of a choice Paige must make: will she save herself or help her enemies in their time of need?

A/N: this section is essentially a missing moments from towards the end of TLJ. There are some obvious variations. However, it contains a lot of MAJOR SPOILERS from TLJ.

  “Phasma?”

Paige Tico awoke to the sound of someone entering Phasma’s quarters.

“Phasma?” The voice vibrated with a dramatic growl Paige sensed was disguising its natural shrillness. “What are you doing out here? Why are you sleeping on the couch?”

A scuffle outside in the living room area of Phasma’s quarters alerted Paige that Phasma was startled by the intrusion.

“Prisoner r10354.” Phasma’s voice this time.

“Ah.” The other voice, which Paige guessed belonged to a young male spoke. “The interrogation experiment.”

A prickle ran across Paige’s arms, interrogation experiment?...like hell.

The man had been speaking and Paige picked up on his conversation. “Several Resistance fighters on board, including that girl who took out Ren in the forest… and the traitor previously known as FN2187.” A burst of noise as the pair hurried towards the door.  “The girl is with Ren and the Supreme Leader…” the voice disappeared as they entered the corridor.

Paige cursed. Rey and Finn. That’s who they must have been talking about. She was already clawing her way out of bed. Even if she might have been able to walk to the medchair, her foot caught on Phasma’s helmet and she tumbled to the floor – hard.

Her head buzzed as she felt the bile erupt – her stomach’s contents spilling onto the smooth floor. It would not surprise her if she was vomiting from sheer pain. She sensed her consciousness slip in and out. The meds, her eyes grazed the sleek nightstand where the medtech had left her a course of pain meds.

She cursed again like a battle cry as she kicked Phasma’s nightstand and a shot of medicine tumbled to the floor, rolling under the bed and just out of Paige’s reach. Force. Her consciousness slipped in and out again. Another round of heaving up the contents of her stomach onto the floor beside her. She wiped her mouth and reached up into the bed frame, yanking her body under the bed. A wave of dizziness rushed over her – she sensed she was not thinking clearly as she grabbed the shot and shoved it into her neck.

Immediately, the pain dulled, although the functionality in her body did not return. She flipped to her stomach and clawed her way out from under the bed and yanked her body into the medchair. Hitting a button on the panel, she manually rolled it over to Phasma’s unattended gear. She slipped the gear into the seat next to her and took a black blanket from the top of the bed, tucking it over the gear. She didn’t know why she took the time to grab Phasma’s spare gear. It just seemed like it might come in handy.

She clicked the menu button on the chair and it pulled up recent commands. /Track Phasma/ was the last command. Paige shrugged and pressed it. The chair sprung to life, rolling into Phasma’s living room and out into the corridor of the officer’s wing.

A woman in a black suit sprinted by her, buttoning up her jacket. Paige winced, but the woman didn’t notice (or didn’t care) that Paige was rolling about the officer’s wing. So she continued. The door at the end of the corridor opened for Paige as she neared. Same as the next one, and the ones after that as Paige’s chair kept navigating the corridors. She shivered from the exertion on her body, still woozy and lightheaded. Even with the officer-grade pain medicine, her body throbbed.  

As the chair turned a corner, a group of Stormtroopers took notice and twisted in her direction.

“State your purpose.” The lead trooper spoke.

“Uh.” Paige felt saliva build in her mouth preventing her lips from moving correctly.  

The trooper cocked her head at the lump next to Paige. “What are you transporting?”

“I am…uhh…under Captain Phasma’s protection.” Paige wondered if that statement was even true. “r10354.” Paige added, repeating the tag Phasma had said earlier.

“r10354?” The trooper asked. “That sequence indicates a high level war criminal.”

A trooper from the back stepped forward. “Murderous scum.” A glowing baton entered the trooper’s hand.

“Hang on just a second.” Paige lifter her hands. “Check the database. Surely there is something in there about my release.”

The lead trooper placed an arm across the one with the baton. “We will take her to Captain Phasma.”

Paige nodded. “Sure, that’s…acceptable.” I’ll think of a way to ditch them – or maybe I can convince Phasma to let me leave with Finn and Rey. That was clearly the dumbest thought that had ever entered her mind, and yet…

The lead trooper punched some commands into the keypad on Paige’s chair and Paige and her entourage marched forward. There were four of them Paige noticed – all surrounding her – as they stepped in unison. Great, Paige thought, but even as she thought it – something happened Paige did not expect.

A rumble shook the floor beneath the team and alarms sounded. Everything happened quickly and Paige could barely make sense of it, but a split second after the alarms – a violent eruption flung Paige’s body against the back of the medchair. Her neck strained with the sudden snap.

The chair seemed to have some sort of technology for bracing itself against this violent lurch of the ship and it had automatically deployed some type of harness to secure her in place. The corridor grew cold – freezing even and pressure yanked her to the side, but the chair kept her in place. There was an odd silence to the pressure – like people were screaming but she could not hear them.

The trooper next to her vanished into the air. Paige gasped. The trooper floated outside of the ship spinning away into the vacuum of space.

There is a hole in the ship.

She struggled for Phasma’s helmet and fought to put it on her head. With the helmet, the pressure normalized and the temperature increased around her head. She even felt like her breaths grew more stable. With each gasp, she gathered a soft waft of citrus and disinfectant. She didn’t recognize the fruit, but it was calming. Breathe slowly, she reminded herself, Assess the situation.

Only two of the entourage was left. The trooper behind her – the one who had called her a murderer – and the trooper to her right – the lead trooper – were clinging to her chair. The door to her front wasn’t too far away so she pressed her hands into the controls and manually moved it towards the door. It seemed to be laborious for the chair – eternity could have passed for all she knew. The troopers’ weight was clearly adding to the already heavy burden of fighting space, and she noticed the trooper behind her was losing his grip.

In what Paige can only describe as instinctual stupidity, she grabbed the trooper’s hand just as he slipped from the chair and flung into the air. This action dislocated Paige’s shoulder. It hurt, but those officer-grade pain killers were doing their job.

Paige gritted her teeth as she gripped the trooper, refusing to let go now. She used her remaining arm to maneuver to the door. When they reached it, the lead trooper leaned over and punched a few buttons. The door swung wide and some debris shot from behind it, missing the group as they pressed forward. As soon as the trooper attached to Paige’s hand cleared the door, the lead trooper shut it. With artificial gravity back, the other trooper crashed into the floor and wrenched Paige’s arm in a new and painful direction. Paige wheezed for new fresh air as her head spun in a woozy blur.

The trooper on the ground groaned. “You…saved me?” He questioned.

Paige leaned back against the chair, not sure how much more her body could take. “Just bring me to Phasma, now.” She demanded and her voice echoed from behind Phasma’s mask.

The troopers appeared startled for a moment before they both nodded. That’s where they were taking me anyway. The male scrambled to his feet. They flanked either side of Paige as she punched the command onto the control panel of the chair:

/Tracking Phasma/

The trio charged through the ship to Phasma’s position amidst blaring lights and sirens. Sparks shot out from all directions but still the commotion coming from the hanger was more prominent. When they turned the corner, the entire room was ablaze and crumbling. Paige gulped when she saw Phasma mid battle with… Finn? Was that Finn?

“Phasma!!!” She screamed, horror gripping her bones. “Stop!” But her screams carried little distance for all the noise.

Then a woman ran across the hanger deck – Rose, her sister. Her sister wouldn’t be here on the ship…and yet that is Rose. She punched the chair forward, and the male trooper next to her muttered a slight protest before chasing after her. Paige’s attention shifted back to the battle as Finn struck Phasma. Paige pushed hard against the manual controls of the chair urging them forward. Faster, but it was all happening too quickly.

Phasma tumbled into the fiery chasm where the ship floor had split. Paige wasn’t sure when or how or why, but her voice was screaming into the hanger – her throat burning from the effort – a long guttural scream.

Paige and the troopers reached the crevice – Phasma’s body was not visible. All she could see was a burning red. Dully she became aware of Rose sprinting to her left.

“Rose.” She whimpered and the chair rotated towards Rose.

The male trooper grabbed his baton.

“No.” Paige spoke again the sound of her voice synthesized through the mask. “There’s no time to fight.”

The trooper froze before holstering the baton while the chair beneath Paige continued to twist of its own volition. It rotated past Rose, and angled towards a small door off the back left of the hanger bay. The chair lurched forward – control panel on the armrest still blinking. Paige thrust the chair into full speed and as Rose climbed into a ship, Paige passed behind her. She wasn’t going with her sister today.

“May the force be with you, little sister.” She whispered as the chair reached the small door.

“Sir?” The lead trooper asked and then jerked as if realizing her mistake.

And Paige would have laughed at how Phasma’s training was so good that she’d trained out the troopers’ ability to think for themselves, but somehow Paige sensed that this pair wouldn’t be following her mask or no mask if their goals weren’t aligned. So, Paige simply pointed at the control panel on her armrest.

/Tracking Phasma/ it continued to blink.

Both troopers nodded and followed Paige out the door.

[pogueman]

iOS 11 review: 99 hits, 1 miss

Every year, Apple (AAPL) introduces a new iPhone model. That’s cool for anyone in the market for a new iPhone.

But every year, Apple also introduces a new iPhone operating system—the software you look at and tap on all day long. Today’s the day, and the new software is called iOS 11.

In general, it’s terrific. Apple’s coding elves have cleaned up a million annoyances, swept out a million cobwebs, and tightened up a million processes. The typography has become more unified across apps, too—you see a lot of this:

Apple’s various apps display more consistent typography.

As usual in the development of a mature operating system, there aren’t many big-ticket new features. But here’s what’s new in iOS 11.

The new Control Center

For such a tiny device, there are an awful lot of settings you can change—hundreds of them. That’s why Apple invented the Control Center: a panel that offers quick access to the controls you need the most.

In iOS 11, the Control Center has blossomed into the magnificence of adulthood. Now you decide which controls should appear on it, as you can on Android phones. Your list of available buttons is much longer than it ever was before. And you no longer have to hunt among multiple pages to find the one you want; the Control Center is once again a single screen. If you’re a true Control freak, it even scrolls.

The new Control Center is as tall as you want it to be (left, in an unrealistically full condition). You customize it in Settings (right).

In many more cases than before, you can hard-press or long-press one of these buttons to open a sub-panel that offers even more controls.

Here are the buttons that have always been there: Airplane Mode, WiFi, Bluetooth, Brightness, Volume, Rotation Lock, Do Not Disturb, Music playback, Airplay (send audio and video to an Apple TV), Flashlight, Camera, Calculator, Timer, and Airdrop (send files, pictures, and other data bits to another Mac or iPhone).

Now, though, there’s a much longer raft of options. You can choose which buttons you want to appear on the Control Center, and in which order. The first three in particular are incredibly useful:

Notes. This is a big, big deal. The idea is to give you immediate access to Notes, so you can jump in, no matter what you were doing, to write down something quickly: a phone number someone’s giving you, dosage instructions your doctor’s rattling off, or a brainstorm you’ve just had for a million-dollar product. In Settings, Apple has provided a bewildering array of controls over what access you (or a passing evildoer) has to your Notes when you open the Control Center from the Lock screen.

Screen Recording. So weird: It’s a Control Center button for a feature you can’t trigger in any other way. There’s no app, no Settings page that even mentions Screen Recording otherwise. The idea, of course, is to let you record videos of what’s happening on the iPhone screen—with narration, if you like. It’s fantastic as a teaching tool, if you want to capture some anomaly to send to tech support, or to demo your new app. You see a 3-2-1 countdown, which is intended for you to get out of the Control Center and get into whatever app you’re trying to record. The finished video winds up in your Photos app with all your other videos—with pristine quality and smooth motion, ready to send to your admirers. It’s awesome.

Do Not Disturb While Driving. This important new iOS feature prevents notifications, calls, or texts from lighting up your phone or making it ring whenever you’re behind the wheel and in motion. Usually, you’ll want it to turn on automatically when you’re driving; this button is primarily useful for turning DNDWD off—when you’re in the passenger seat.

Cellular Data on/off. Great if you’re worried about your monthly cap.

Stopwatch, Alarm. One-tap shortcuts to these modules of the Clock app.

Accessibility Shortcuts. Magnifier, Zoom, VoiceOver, AssistiveTouch, and so on.

Apple TV Remote. In case you’ve lost the physical one.

Guided Access. Opens the on/off switch for Guided Access, otherwise known as “kiosk mode.” It locks the phone into one particular app, so that (for example) your toddler can play around without wreaking any real havoc on your phone.

Low Power Mode. Here’s a one-touch way to manually switch on the battery-saving feature known as Low Power Mode.

Turns the entire phone into a powerful illuminated magnifying glass.

Text Size. There are all kinds of ways to make text bigger and more readable on the iPhone’s screen. But this new Control Center option gives you a more immediate way of making adjustment—say, when you suddenly find yourself on some web page done up in 3-point type. Tap to see a vertical slider, whose segments indicate increasingly larger type sizes.

Voice Memos. The Voice Memos app is handy for recording speeches, interviews, song ideas, and so on. What’s not handy is the long slog to get into the app and start recording. No more! Tap this button to open the Voice Memos app, where another tap begins the recording. Better yet, a hard-press on this Control Center button produces a menu that lists your three most recent recordings (for instant playback)—and a New Recording button.

Wallet. Here’s another way to jump into your Apple Wallet—usually because you want to pay for something with Apple Pay.

Storage Help

Another category of new features is designed to assist with the chronic problem of running out of room on the iPhone:

Camera app. iOS 11 invites you to adopt new file formats for photos (HEVC) and videos (H265), which look the same as they did before but consume only the half the space. (When you export to someone else, they convert to standard formats.)

Storage optimization. The idea: As your phone begins to run out of space, your oldest files are quietly and automatically stored online, leaving Download icons in their places on your phone, so that you can retrieve them if you need them.

Siri updates

Apple’s done some work on its voice assistant, too:

A new voice for Siri. Apple says that the new male and female voices sound more like actual people; to me, they just sound younger. Here’s a snippet of each.

Siri translates languages. Siri is trying to catch up to Google Assistant. For example, it can now translate phrases from English into Chinese, French, German, Italian, or Spanish. You can say, “How do you say ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ in French?” It works surprisingly well—she nails the accents.

Siri is now a polyglot! She can translate for you.

Siri understands followup questions. Siri now does better at understanding followup questions. (“Who won the World Series in 1980?” “The Tigers.” “Who was their coach?” “Roy Williams.”)

A lot of misc

The rest of iOS 11 falls into the category best called, “Everything else.” Little nips and tucks like these:

A file manager! A new app called Files lets you work with (and search) files and folders, just as you do on the Mac or PC. You can tag them, search them, sort them, view them as a list or as icons. The Files app shows the contents of your iCloud Drive, as well as your Box and Dropbox files (!!). You can select files (but, alas, not folders) to share with other people.

For the first time, iOS has a “Finder” or a “Windows Explorer.” Manage, file, sort, search, copy, and delete files here.

Redesigned apps drawer in Messages. All the stuff they added to Messages last year (stickers, apps, live drawing) cluttered up the design and wound up getting ignored by lots of people. The new design is cleaner, with only two icons eating up your text-typing space instead of three.

App Store. The App store gets a big redesign. One chief fix is breaking out Games into its own tab, so that game and non-game bestseller lists are kept separate.

One-handed typing. With a tap on the little globe key, you can opt for a narrower keyboard huddled against one side, for easier one-handed typing when you’re carrying coffee. (You can now zoom in Maps one-handed, too.)

Hiding among the keyboard choices (left) are new left- and right-hugging mini-keyboards (right).

Quicker transfer. When you get a new iPhone, you can import all your settings from the old one just by focusing the camera on the new phone on the old one’s screen.

Improvements to Photos. The Photos app offers smarter auto-slideshows (called Memories). Among other improvements, they now work even when you’re holding the phone upright.

Improvements to Live Photos. Live Photos are weird, three-second video clips, which Apple introduced in iOS 9. In iOS 11, you can now shorten one, or mute its audio, or extract a single frame from that clip to use as a still photo. The phone can also suggest a “boomerang” segment (bounces back and forth) or a loop (repeats over and over). And it has a new Slow Shutter filter, which (for example) blurs a babbling brook or stars moving across the sky, as though taken with a long exposure. (I still don’t really get Live Photos.)

Swipe the Lock screen back down. Confusingly enough, you used to see your notifications on two slightly different screens. There was your Lock screen, and there was the Notifications screen (swipe down from the top of the screen). Now, it’s all the same screen. Swiping down from the top brings back the identical list of missed notifications—and even the wallpaper and time—that you’d see on your Lock screen. Makes a ton of sense.

Smarter typing suggestions. When you’re typing, the auto-suggestions above the keyboard now offer movie names, song names, or place names that you’ve recently viewed in other apps. Auto-suggestions in Siri, too, include terms you’ve recently read. And if you book a flight or buy a ticket online, iOS offers to add it to your calendar.

AirPlay 2. If you buy speakers from Bose, Marantz, and a few other manufactures (unfortunately, not Sonos), you can use your phone to control multi-room audio. You can start the same song playing everywhere, or different songs in different rooms.

Shared “Up Next” playlist. If you’re an Apple Music subscriber, your party guests or buddies can throw their own “what song to play next” ideas into the ring.

Lane guidance. When you’re driving, Maps now lets you know which lane to be in for your next turn, just as Google Maps does.

Indoor Maps. The Maps app can now show you floor plans for a few malls and 30 airports.

iCloud file sharing. Finally, you can share files you’ve stored on your iCloud Drive with other people, just as you’ve been able to do with Dropbox for years.

iPad Exclusives

Many of the biggest changes in iOS 11 are available only on the iPad.

Mac features. In general, the big news here is the iPad behaves much more like a Mac. For example, you can drag-and-drop pictures and text between apps. The Dock is now extensible, available from within any app, and perfect for switching apps, just as on the Mac. There’s a new Mission Control-type feature, too, for seeing what’s in your open apps—even when you’ve split the screen between pairs of apps.

Punctuation and letters on the same keyboard. Now, punctuation symbols appear above the letter keys. You flick down on the key to “type” the punctuation—no more having to switch keyboard layouts.

Pencil features. If you’ve bought Apple’s stylus, you can tap the Lock screen and start taking notes right away. You can mark up PDFs just by starting to write on them. A new feature lets you snap a document with the iPad’s camera, which straightens and crops the page so that you can sign it or annotate it. Handwriting in the Notes app is now searchable, and you can make drawings within any Note or email message.

Coming this fall

Two major features didn’t make the cut in the initial release of iOS 11. They’re coming, Apple says, in an update later this fall:

Person-to-Person payment within the Messages app. Now, you can send payments directly to your friends—your share of the pizza bill, for example—right from within the Messages app, much as people do now with Venmo, PayPal, and their ilk. (Of course, this works only if your friends have iPhones, too.) When money comes to you, it accrues to a new, virtual Apple Pay Cash Card; from there, you can send it to your bank, buy things with it, or send it on to other people.

Messages in iCloud. Your entire text-message history gets auto-synced to all your new Apple devices. (In the old days, when you bought a new iPhone and opened Messages, it was empty.) This feature will also mean that that huge, multi-gigabyte hunk of Messages won’t have to sit on your phone, eating up space.

There are also dozens of improvements to the features for overseas iPhones (China, Russia, India, for example). And many, many enhancements to features for the disabled (spoken captions for videos and pictures, for example).

Hits 99; misses, 1

Almost all of these touchups are improvements, but one is decidedly not: If iOS sees you using dictation, it puts away the keyboard. It assumes that you’re going to want to keep dictating.

Well, guess what, dingbat? You always have to correct things that dictation misinterpreted. Always. And you can’t do that without the keyboard.

What this means is that after every round of dictation, you have to tap a tiny keyboard icon to bring back the keyboard. 1,000 times a day. They broke something that didn’t need fixing.

So what’s the overarching theme of the iOS 11 upgrade?

There isn’t one. It’s just a couple hundred little fine-tunings. All of them welcome—and all of them aimed to keep you trapped within Apple’s growing ecosystem.

More from David Pogue:

iPhone 8 reviewed: Nice, but nothing to buzz about

How Apple envisions life without a Home button

The $999, eyebrow-raising iPhone X: David Pogue’s hands-on review

iOS11 is about to arrive — here’s what’s in it 

MacOS High Sierra comes this fall—and brings these 23 features

T-Mobile COO: Why we make investments like free Netflix that ‘seem crazy’

How Apple’s iPhone has improved since its 2007 debut

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, is the author of “iPhone: The Missing Manual.” He welcomes nontoxic comments in the comments section below. On the web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. You can read all his articles here, or you can sign up to get his columns by email. 

[northwestofinsanity]

Tagged again!

Thanks @mccoys-killer-queen!

1. do you make your bed? Depends on the day, and where I am.  At home with my family, I make it up all the way most of the time with the decorative pillows outside, because I'm expected to.  In my school apartment, I just pull up and smooth the covers with the inside still accessible, unless I'm going to have visitors.  Back in the dorm, unless I untucked the sheets and bunched it all up, the loft bed made it too much of a hassle.

2. whats your favourite number? Anything that multiplies and divides easily.  Thought this through while stimming (tapping my forefinger and thumb together) as a kid.  I think multiples of five were my favorites, but anything on one hand, I had to repeat on the other the same amount of times to even it up.  So if I did my right hand forty-five times, I had to do it that many times with my left. (Overall, don't know if that makes my true favorite multiples of five, or ten).

3. what is your job? As a fresh college grad who is still in a job hunt: continuing job applications, volunteering at an animal shelter, and prepping for a second round of vet school applications.  Could be better, but could be a lot worse (will need to land a paying job soon, but at least I get more experience hours to help me on that next application -and it helped cure my winter depression this year.)

4. if you could go back to school would you? -Elementary?  Can't.  Torn down in 2017. -Middle?  HELL, no!  Toxic staff pretty much encouraged bullying, and I've heard it's only gotten worse. -High?  I do visit occasionally, because I have a family member who works there, so I know a lot of the staff, but a lot of my favorite teachers have left.  I don't miss the teachers who played favorites to suck-ups and having class start at 7:20 AM, and I would not relive junior year (more stressful than all of college) if you payed me. -College?  I'm enjoying experiencing a winter without schoolwork, but I wouldn't have minded staying this semester.  They have a limit to how many credit hours on your degree before they double your tuition, and I came in with so many AP credits... I kind of *had* to graduate a semester early.

5. can you parallel park? Yes.  If I can get over the fear, and the nerves I get if I have to make traffic stop for a second.  I still avoid really tight spaces, and I'll always take a space large enough to pull in head-first if it's available... but I do have a trick for backing in that works quite well

6. a job you had that would surprise people? Tutoring an ESL kid in Algebra.  The job might not be so surprising, but the reasons are.  Just the way the school staff had tried to teach and tutor this kid and didn't get why he couldn't understand anything.  You take a kid who can barely speak broken English, and when he says he doesn't know how to solve for x, and you keep telling him "isolate x".  Isolate?  When he barely understands English?  How about starting with "let's get x by itself?"

7. do you think aliens are real? With the size of the universe, it's likely.  I don't speculate on it often, but I won't be shocked if and when it's proven.

8. can you drive a manual? No.  After five years of driving, I still already have enough road paranoia without having to worry about a second pedal to work and having to take a hand off the wheel to constantly change gears... I probably won't try to learn unless I ever end up working a position that requires me to.

9. whats your guilty pleasure? Singing when I'm alone in the car and overdramatizing it to where it's bad on purpose,  or jumping around and mimicking Nancy Wilson's "Crazy On You" kick when I'm playing viola (not good enough to do that with the guitar yet).

10. tattoos? Don't have any.  My family has a long-held tradition of no tattoos, and while I don't have anything against them and might have been tempted to rebel (to which their rule is have it somewhere they'd never have to see it), there are so many people I know who have gotten tattoos (a lot of people who made my life a living hell in grade school -if the mean girls do it, I automatically don't want to), I'd almost rather not get one, because it's more unique not to.  But if I did get one, I'd just want a winged compass.  It ties to an old OC of mine from my earliest writing projects, and I think it would look cool.

11. favourite colour? Can't choose just one, really.  I like black, silver, red, and purple when in combination with each other, certain shades of blue and purple together, and I like blue and teal together or on their own.

12. favourite type of music? Most varieties of rock music from the late 60s through the 80s (classic, hard, AOR, prog, hair metal, some thrash metal, etc.)

13. things that people do that drive you crazy? When a group of friends walk next to each other on a narrow walkway so they take up the whole thing, and they don't move over when someone else is coming in the other direction, forcing that person to step down into the grass or the road (how many times this happened at college in the rain, and I had to get into deep puddles or mud...)  Oh, and not using turn signals at intersections without turn lanes, not picking up after dogs, and loudly crunching on food in class.

14. do you like doing puzzles? Depends on what kind of puzzle.  A word/logic puzzle, or the kind of puzzle you assemble in pieces?  I'm not so good at the former (unless it's a crossword tailored to my field of study), and I haven't done the latter since I was a kid (no time, or space to do it).

15. any phobias? Flying cockroaches, heights and steep overlooks, those "clover-leaf" off-ramps that go in a circle and up over the highway to put you off on the other side, anything wet dripping from a ceiling (especially if it's discolored and/or I can't get away from the splash), steep stairs and extra-long escalators, certain extra loud fire alarms, burglar alarms when they malfunction (have a few pet-sitting horror stories), the chance of having another autoimmune attack, having everything I say be misunderstood, and abandonment.

Yeah, I'm a nervous wreck XD

16. favourite childhood sport? Golf.  I play terribly aside from a pretty decent shot every now and then, but lots of good memories.

17. do you talk to yourself? When do I not?  Albeit, sometimes when I talk to myself, I imagine I'm talking to one of my OCs, or characters I'm writing fanfic with... that way, I have to think to imagine their response in their wording instead of my own.  (Growing up as an only child, outcast, and with no kids on my street, I didn't have much choice not to!)

18. what movie do you adore? I am CRAZY for Apollo 13.  Don't know why, but have been since I was ten.  When my parents used to have cable, it would come on AMC, and even though I knew what happened, if I caught it, I would get stuck watching three hours until the end through their hella long commercial breaks.

19. coffee or tea? Why not both?  ...Coffee in the morning, for sure (Italian family kicked that off, and college sealed the deal on it).  I'll have tea any other time of day, depending on my mood and what flavors I happen to have on hand.

20. first thing you wanted to be when you grew up? An ambulance driver for pets.  (I still wouldn't be opposed to it if I could live on it).

I tag... anyone following who wants to do it!

[ciathyzareposts]

Game 320: Xoru (1989)

Character selection occurs right on the main title screen.

         Xoru

United States

Castle Technologies (developer and publisher)

Several versions released between 1987 and 1989 for DOS

Date Started: 13 June 2018

Date Ended: 5 March 2019

Total Hours: 7

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)

         Xoru has taken me on a hell of a ride over the last 9 months. Last June, I played it for a few hours, got stuck, and decided I had enough grounds to reject it as an RPG. Then, in December, I got a long, impassioned letter from a fan who begged me to reconsider. I fired it up again and got stuck in roughly the same place. This time, I put out a call for help and commenters Zenic Reverie (“The RPG Consoler“) and D.P. got involved. They helped a bit but got stuck with the same puzzles that I did. Then I tracked down the author, Brian Sanders, and we exchanged several e-mails. Brian didn’t remember enough to help with my specific problem at first, but I must have put a bug in his ear, because a few weeks later wrote back with a map and hint guide that he’d “commissioned,” which suggests to me that I annoyed him so much that he paid someone to solve the game so I’d go away. On the same day he sent the hint guide, Zenic won it on his own and sent me his solution. In the end, I still don’t feel like it’s much of an RPG, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to write about it after all that.             

My Trizbort map of the dungeon.

         Written by San Diego-based developer Brian Sanders and released as shareware, Xoru is a text adventure-RPG hybrid that invites comparison with Beyond Zork (1987) in its mechanics, if not its attitude. The game went through several versions in the late 1980s and eventually acquired an “Advanced” tag (i.e., most sites have it as Advanced Xoru), but the main title didn’t change. There’s sort-of a subtitle–Descent into the Depths of the Ebon Titan–that appears far enough away from the main title that I’ve chosen to regard it more as flavor text than a true subtitle.

The backstory casts the character as a denizen of the modern world, abruptly wrenched by a cabal of wizards from a busy airport terminal, through a portal, and into a “pseudo-medieval fantasy world” in which he must explore a sprawling, multi-leveled dungeon for various reasons. In this, the game almost immediately clashes with its extremely brief character creation system in which you choose from among an unusual list of classes: paladin, necromancer, barbarian, zen-druid priest, and shadowy tracker. The implication is that each class will call upon special abilities and strengths to solve the game’s obstacles, in the manner Quest for Glory, but in practice it mostly means that some classes have an easier time in combat than others.

Gameplay for everyone begins in an “edifice ruin” at the top of the dungeon, each character finding items there appropriate to his class. The text window is accompanied by a mini-map that shows the directions the character can move, a clear Beyond Zork influence.         

The game begins. A little map tells you which ways you can go.

         The dungeon under the ruin consists of about 75 rooms arranged in three sections, logically-constructed and well-described. Xoru lacks most of Zork’s humor (which got a little too thick in Beyond, I thought) but it has the same attention to economical, vivid descriptions of rooms and events, at the best of times eliciting the sense of exploring a dangerous place with a good dungeon master. There isn’t much of a core “theme” to the dungeon, and like Zork the pseudo-medieval world has modern concepts like plumbing and elevators. Some examples of the experience:            

A trap door is on a high ceiling. You have to drag a bench from another room and stand on it to open the door. It takes you to an alchemist’s lab where you receive a couple of important items.

A hobbit sits in a room with nine cards, kind of like a Deck of Many Things. He invites you to draw as many cards as you would like, one of which will free him. But for each draw, he will take a random item from your inventory. This can result in a “walking dead” situation if he takes an important item, so you have to prepare by dropping anything vital and loading up on miscellaneous treasure and extra weapons. The cards have various positive and negative effects. One of them does free the hobbit, for which he gives you a necessary gold key, and another gives you an important clue to another room.

         The memorable hobbit encounter.

           The clue mentioned above is: “Make music with the giraffe, camel, elephant, and a pair of ferrets.” When you find a room with an organ, you therefore have to play GCEFF. The game has virtually no sound, but it does represent these tones faithfully. Playing the right sequence opens a secret door to an area with a vital key.

An area has enormous tanks full of water. You have to go to a pumping station and turn the controls to empty the tanks, at which point you can enter each tank, each of which holds a different puzzle piece. Putting them together gives you a sapphire cube that you need for the penultimate area.

             Was there a similar puzzle in one of the Zork games?

           There are a fair number of “red herrings” in the game, not just as objects but also areas that feel like they ought to serve a larger purpose because of the detail in which they’re described (e.g., the torture chamber) or how much trouble it took to get there. For instance, there’s a puzzle involving an elevator that leads you to something called an “Ant-E-Room” where you have to kill a giant ant. But despite a vivid description of the room, there’s nothing to accomplish there. There’s an entire sub-section full of one-way chutes and passages that seems to have no purpose except to challenge your ability to get out if you’re unlucky enough to blunder in.

Monsters pop up occasionally–ogres, gnolls, ghouls, bugbears, basilisks, and maybe one or two others I didn’t write down. Fighting them is generally a matter of typing KILL [MONSTER] WITH [WEAPON] and letting the action play out. Spellcasters are supposed to find scrolls that they can use in combat by typing CAST and the name of the scroll. I never found any spell scrolls beyond the one that the game starts you with, which seems to do nothing. The game tracks an strength statistic and a health statistic that deplete as you take hits. The fighting classes seem to have a easier time than the others, but nobody has a terribly hard time. There are potions and generic scrolls scattered around the dungeon that increase strength and restore health and armor protects you from harm.

              Trading blows with a basilisk.

           I spent a lot of time annotating the presence of monsters and items on my original map, only to discover on a replay that these locations are heavily randomized for each new game. Sometimes you meet monsters in practically every room; other times, you can make it through the entire game without fighting once. Sometimes, I had half a dozen weapons to choose between; other times, I never let go of my starting scimitar. Most of the time, I never found any armor. Playing a couple of times helps you determine which items are necessary, as they’re always found in the same locations for every game. There are a lot of unnecessary items (except perhaps as fodder for the hobbit’s card game), including lots of gems and valuables, but also things that sound like they ought to do something, like ropes and 10-foot poles.

The interpreter is adequate. It follows most of Infocom’s standards; for instance, the player can switch between VERBOSE, BRIEF, and SUPERBRIEF descriptions of places he’s already been, and hitting G is a shortcut for “again,” or repeat the previous action. Z passes time. Yes, it’s derivative, but on the other hand it’s nice for players not to have to learn a new set of conventions. Unfortunately, the interpreter tends to fail when given complex commands or compound sentences with propositions. The manual says that it supports actions like TAKE THE APPLE AND EAT IT, but I found that most of the time it would do the first part of the sentence and ignore the second part. I’ve never seen the advantage to using such complex sentences anyway, so it mostly didn’t bother me. A little more annoying was the tendency of the interpreter to confuse objects; for instance, if you have both the sapphire and the sapphire cube, trying to drop the sapphire will actually cause you to drop the cube.

           The parser gets a bit confused from compound sentences.

           There are a ton of commands I never found any use for, including TALK, JUMP, KNOCK, PULL, PUSH, and LISTEN. These plus the extra items and poor use of the classes suggests to me that Sanders meant to keep expanding the game, or perhaps offer additional modules with the engine.

The game has a time limit of 360 moves, but that’s pretty generous, especially considering that a lot of moves don’t count, such as waiting. Also, for some reason, drinking water in a particular room (you have to solve an inventory puzzle involving a well bucket crank first) increases the number of available moves while also (nonsensically) increasing your score every time you drink. But if you do wait out all the turns, you suffer an instant death as water comes bursting through a couple of previously-unopenable doors and floods the dungeon. There’s also a hunger and thirst system, but food and water are both plentiful, and anyway you could easily win the game before even noticing that you’re hungry or thirsty.

         Instant death when you run out the timer.

       When I got stuck, was about 80% of the way through the game, and in retrospect, I wasn’t really stuck. I was overthinking a solution to a particular puzzle that involved replacing a cracked jug on a statue with a new one. I didn’t realize from the room description that the room is basically in two halves, and that to approach the statue, you need to walk through an energy barrier, which you can only do if you have a sapphire cube in your possession. There were times I had the cube, but I never tried walking through the room with the cube in my possession, I guess.

          The room where I spent way too much time trying to throw things at the jug, and poke it with poles, and lasso it with a rope . .

          Once you solve this puzzle, you get a ruby prism, which reflects some laser beams coming out of the eyes of a couple of lion statues, allowing you to pass to the “Chamber of the Lake,” where you climb a statue and pry an emerald sphere out of one of its eyes. With sphere, cube, and prims in possession, you visit a room called the “Mirrored Room” and insert them in three appropriately-shaped holes. The floor drops out and you’re dumped into the final area, to confront the Ebon Titan.

           Reaching the endgame.

         This final area gives you an odd puzzle, a bit unsatisfying to me because I didn’t really figure it out. You find yourself on a grid of blue, green, red, and black (or “void”) squares, the colors shifting as you plot your moves. You’re represented as an asterisk, and the Ebon Titan is represented as an exclamation point. The only goal is to make it to the Titan’s square, but each of the colored squares (at least most of the time) has some kind of trap.

Earlier in the game, at a random location, a jester comes prancing through one of the rooms and gives you a clue about this area–just before he’s incinerated by a lightning bolt. The problem is that his clue (at least, to me) doesn’t really help because it indicates that any of the colored squares could have a trap.

         The jester tries to help but doesn’t tell me about any “safe” squares.

          It took me a couple of reloads, but I made it through by luck. I’d be really curious how I was supposed to deduce the right path here. Even the author of the hint file that Sanders commissioned wrote, “Look, I honestly don’t know where the traps are or what the colors mean. That is why you save.”

             Trying to make it through the final area.

           Once you reach the Titan’s square, he just dies with a pathetic “Nooooooooo . . .” The game congratulates you on having defeated “The Great Enslaver.” A sword that was embedded in the floor in front of the Titan–now named the Sword of Life–“quivers to life, leaping from the stone into the palm of your hand.” You’re teleported outside the dungeon, where the edifice collapses to reveal a gleaming diamond palace, and a wizard appears and congratulates you on becoming king. Not bad for a guy who was suffering from a flight delay just half an hour ago.

           Vanquishing the Ebon Titan.

          The game gives you a final score at the end which makes little sense. When I died, it said I had accomplished 100% of my goal, but when I beat the game having done all the same things, it said I was at 79%. Much like other text adventures, including Beyond Zork, once you know what you’re doing, a winning game is trivially short. You could win this one in 10 or 15 minutes.

           At 100%, I could have been a GOD.

          I’ll leave judgement as to its text adventure qualities to The Adventure Gamer, if they ever get to it. As an RPG, it barely qualifies. There is extremely minimal character development in the form of strength increases, and combat, simple as it is, does technically rely on attributes as well as equipment. In a GIMLET, I give it:

2 points for the game world. It’s not terribly thematic and could use a more compelling backstory. It would be nice to have heard something about the Ebon Titan and his status as an “enslaver” before actually meeting him.

1 point for character creation and development. There really is no point to the classes, particularly the thief-oriented “shadowy tracker.” It would have been cool if there had been class-oriented puzzles, for instance a door that a thief could pick, a barbarian could bash, and a magic user could open with a spell. Puzzles like the trap door could have easily been class-aspected rather than having everyone drag over a bench.

         Checking my inventory and stats.

        1 point for NPC interaction, and that’s very limited, consisting of basically the hobbit and a couple of optional encounters in random places with a jester and a hunter.

3 points for encounters and foes. The foes are unimaginative, and the puzzles are mostly simple inventory puzzles.

         At first, I thought there might be something more interesting to do with the hourglass, but no, the solution was to just BREAK it.

        1 point for magic and combat with no real options. I think maybe you can throw holy water at a ghoul, but otherwise your only “tactics” are KILL MONSTER WITH WEAPON.

2 points for equipment. There isn’t much in the traditional RPG style, and a lot of red herrings on the adventure side.

0 points for no economy. No, trading stuff to the hobbit doesn’t count.

2 points for the main quest.

2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. It gets most of this value for the quality of the text. The map images are mostly superfluous, the sound is extremely scant, and as we saw, the interpreter had some issues. I do like that you can move with the arrow keys instead of having to type NORTH and EAST all the time.

3 points for gameplay. I give it a little credit for some nonlinearity and replayability in the optional areas, although overall the dungeon is a bit too small and the puzzles (despite my getting stuck on one) are a bit too easy. It doesn’t drag, at least.

               That gives us a final score of 17, which is pretty low, but I’m not really rating it in its appropriate genre. Text adventure fans will probably enjoy it more than RPG fans.

Xoru was reviewed in the April 1993 issue of Red Herring, where the reviewer said that he could “highly recommend it,” although he’d only been exposed to the demo copy, which killed you after 80 moves. The 1997 issue of the British magazine SynTax provided a more thorough review, agreeing with me that the “text descriptions are very good: not flowery but straight to the point and informative,” but complaining about the simple puzzles. He also notes–and I would have to agree–that the $44.95 price tag was a bit steep for a game of such limited content.

The version I played was 5.94. From the release notes, the Version 5 series had one more dungeon area than earlier editions, and at least some previous versions didn’t even bring the game to an ending. While this was the last text version, it wasn’t the last version entirely: In 2014, Sanders–his company revived and re-christened Castlelore Studio–created a 3D graphical version of the game for the Mac. You can see it in action here and buy it here. The graphics are what you’d expect from an indie developer (it’s “really hard to do by yourself,” Sanders wrote me), but as the video played, I found myself easily recognizing the various rooms based on the text versions that I’d explored. Certainly, I got zapped by those lion-lasers plenty of times.

         The series of “gallery” rooms represented in the 3D engine.

           In e-mail correspondence with me, Brian Sanders said that he originally wrote the game while he was a junior in high school. His mother suggested the title, but after he found it listed once-too-often at the bottom of game lists and the ends of catalogs, he made “Advanced” part of the title. It was originally just a grid of rooms with randomized monsters and treasure–something like a text Wizard’s Castle–but grew from there. Sanders says he was inspired by the Infocom titles as well as Choose Your Own Adventure books.

I was an avid reader and I was enchanted and captivated by these computer programs which made stories exploratory and interactive. There was this exciting illusion that the games offered limitless possibilities for exploration–even if the world was clearly finite, you had no way of knowing how far it went, and you would have to use your own mind to get there.

That’s a good summary of the experience playing a lot of RPGs, but perhaps specifically adventure games. With most RPGs of this era, and their fixed grids of tiles, you generally get a sense of the dimensions of the maps and overall game world, and you know when your character is about to hit its edges. There isn’t quite the same sense of wonder as to what’s around the next bend. Adventure games mostly feature non-symmetrical layouts that can sprawl unannounced in any direction. Once you have the entirety of the game before you, it often seems simple and underwhelming, but when you’re playing live and you don’t know whether the locked door opens into a closet or an entire sub-dungeon, it can be exciting in ways that perhaps my GIMLET doesn’t capture. I’m sorry we won’t be seeing many more of these.

Thanks to Brian, Zenic, and D.P. for helping to clear this one, and to everyone for your patience in a slow week as I recovered from a lot of travel and work late in February. The rest of this month ought to be back-on-track and productive.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-320-xoru-1989/

[minnievirizarry]

YouTube Optimization: How to Score More Views & Subscribers

“Oh man, did you see that video? Let me pull it up for you.”

It only takes a few seconds of being online before you’re face-to-face with video content from YouTube. This rings true whether you’re scrolling through your Facebook feed or you’ve been sucked into a loop of trending viral videos.

Don’t let the cat videos and flavor-of-the-week challenge compilations fool you, though. YouTube’s reach of over one billion active users is nothing to scoff at from a marketing perspective. With video content poised to take over most of the Internet itself, more and more marketers continue to hop on the ever-growing video bandwagon.

Despite this boom in video content, many marketers overlook the fine details of YouTube optimization. Just as you’d optimize your social media posts or blog content, videos require the same attention to detail when it comes to ranking in YouTube, growing your subscriber count and scoring precious views.

What YouTube Optimization Means for Marketers

Chances are you’ve searched a “how-to” query in YouTube at some point, especially since educational content represents the bread and butter of YouTube marketers.  For example, here are the top results from a search on how to create a site using WordPress.

These top video results are no accident. At a glance, you can tell that these videos are optimized based on their titles, thumbnails and descriptions. Meanwhile, the lengths of these videos signal that they’re in-depth and comprehensive versus surface-level fluff.

Oh, and peek the like-ratio, subscriber and view-count of this particular video:

Seems in-line with Google and YouTube’s emphasis on quality content, right?

Don’t get it twisted—YouTube SEO isn’t about keyword stuffing or sacrificing the quality of your videos for the sake of optimization. Instead, it’s about focusing on the minor details of your videos that impact its potential to pop up in search results and reel in viewers.

The good news? YouTube optimization is relatively quick and straightforward. Below we’ve outlined some of the changes you can make to current and future videos to ensure that they’re search-friendly to your target audience.

1. Inserting Keywords and Phrases Into Your Titles

This crucial piece of YouTube optimization is perhaps the most obvious. Similar to an H1 or title tag in a blog post, keywords and phrases are essential to increasing your videos’ visibility via search engines and YouTube alike.

When crafting your headline, it’s a good idea to optimize for both YouTube and Google search results. That means being aware of the number of characters you include in your title.

Bear in mind that you have approximately 70 characters at your disposal before you run the risk of your title getting cut off in a Google search. This is a reasonable amount of real-estate to work with as long as you’re economical with your words (take note of the third result here for “photoshop transform perspective tutorial”):

If there are keywords you’re targeting on-site or throughout your social campaigns, make it a point to use them in your video titles. YouTube can pick up on related terms (think: “guide” versus “tutorial”) so don’t be afraid to switch it up rather than repeat the same title again and again.

This aspect of YouTube optimization may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s easy to overlook in an era of clickbait headlines. You obviously don’t want to bait and switch viewers. Still, there’s no denying that a slew of “how-to” or listicle-style (“7 Tips to…”) could grow stale.

As a remedy, consider ways you can integrate keywords and a bit of personality into your videos at a glance. Athlean X’s channel does a solid job of integrating fitness-related keywords alongside humorous quips and thumbnails that clarify the titles:

2. Incorporate Keywords in Your Descriptions

Descriptions definitely deserve your attention if you’re on the hunt for rankings.

At a glance, your video’s description may seem like little more than a spot to summarize your content. The reality is that in terms of YouTube optimization, descriptions are arguably the most important aspect of driving more traffic, while simultaneously scoring new leads.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to YouTube descriptions. In fact, most descriptions feel like a laundry list of social links and oftentimes don’t contain keywords at all:

Although there’s nothing inherently wrong with this description based on YouTube’s best practices, it’s not optimized for search.

You should treat YouTube descriptions similarly to how you might craft a meta description on a blog post in terms of keywords. With a massive 5,000 characters to work with, you have the opportunity to insert phrases naturally, while also giving a crystal clear overview of what your content is about.

But more importantly, descriptions are the ideal place to drop links which lead back to your site. Think of your descriptions as the launchpad from your YouTube channel to whatever CTA you might currently be promoting.

Check out this video based on a recent Sprout case study. Notice that the CTA for viewers to look into the study is front and center. Meanwhile, the brief but comprehensive description provides a place for relevant search terms.

There’s no need to fill your descriptions with spam when there’s plenty of room for links and keywords alike.

3. Fine-Tune Your Transcripts & Closed Captions

Fun fact: Google crawls transcripts and closed captions of YouTube videos, but if and only if they’re crafted and uploaded manually by their creator. Taking the time to optimize your transcripts and captions beyond the auto-generated options represents a massive opportunity for your YouTube SEO.

Google has specific instructions for uploading transcripts and captions based on your video’s content. There’s a bit of a catch that many creators overlook, though. You can’t simply stuff keywords or phrases into your videos after the fact, but rather actually ensure that they’re spoken throughout your video.

That’s why it’s ideal to plan your keyword-based videos in advance, if possible. Shoehorning keywords for the sake of YouTube optimization is risky business and could potentially backfire on you.

4. Spend Time on Your Tags

There’s debate concerning how much weight tags hold in terms of YouTube SEO in 2017, but conventional wisdom tells us that they’re especially useful for ensuring that your videos pop up in “related” searches.

Considering that YouTube provides a 500-word limit for tags, there’s a generous amount of space for you to insert relevant terms for your video. To stay aligned with YouTube’s best practices, refrain from stuffing and instead hone in on related and colloquial keywords related to your video.

Tags were formerly public but are now only visible if you look “under the hood” of any given video. When you land on a YouTube page, simply hit “CTRL+U” to open the video source, then hit “CTRL+F” and type “keyword” to see the tags on the video in question. For example, some of the tags for the following video include “how to change Ford Focus headlight” and “changing Ford focus headlamp.”

Pretty simple, right? You don’t necessarily need to obsess over tags, but even the smallest aspects of YouTube optimization can make a difference.

5. Spruce Up Your Thumbnail

Optimizing your thumbnails is an absolute must-do for YouTube creators. Even though thumbnails aren’t directly related to search engines themselves, an enticing or relevant thumbnail can be the difference between more subscribers and someone passing on your video.

Default thumbnails are rarely flattering and don’t do much to signal your video as “must click.”

On the flip side, custom thumbnails make your channel look much more polished, trustworthy and professional at a glance.

Some brands make a point to use a consistent color scheme throughout their thumbnails to make their videos more recognizable to repeat viewers:

You don’t need to be a graphic designer to create compelling thumbnails, either. Tools such as Canva allow you to make thumbnail graphics from scratch. Once you’re happy with a design that meshes with your brand, you can save it in Canva as a template and adjust it time and time again.

Attractive thumbnails are just another piece of driving clicks to your content. Even if you don’t use a dedicated thumbnail template, just make sure not to stick with whatever default, random snapshot that YouTube picks out.

And that sums up our essentials for YouTube optimization and SEO!

Sure, there are tons of variables that impact your views and subscriber count. By paying attention to these aspects of YouTube optimization that are totally in control, you know that you’re squeezing more potential out of each and every one of your videos.

What Does Your YouTube Optimization Strategy Look Like?

Beyond promoting and scheduling your video content, minding the seemingly minor details of YouTube is a critical piece of your overall marketing strategy. Think about it: if your competitors are sleeping on these elements of optimization, you increase your likelihood of outranking them and growing your audience.

If nothing else, there’s so much that goes into YouTube content between writing a script, editing your video and promoting to your followers. Given all that hard work, nobody should sabotage the potential of their videos. Considering how straightforward YouTube optimization its, every marketer working with video content should strive to reach as many viewers as possible.

So, which of these pieces of optimization do you think is most important? What aspect do you feel marketers totally tend to miss? Let us know in the comments below.

This post YouTube Optimization: How to Score More Views & Subscribers originally appeared on Sprout Social.

from SM Tips By Minnie https://sproutsocial.com/insights/youtube-optimization/