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ailtrahq · 1 year ago

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XRP token (XRP) has been among the best-performing and most trending cryptocurrencies, dominating the fifth rank by market cap. Also scoring high in leading indicators for the cryptocurrency market, such as positioning itself in the top 5 builders on GitHub. Recently, XRP derivatives volume massively increased by 180%, while the exchanged volume doubled up in 24 hours, showing a growing interest by crypto traders in Ripple’s flagship product. However, Ripple’s monthly token unlocks create extra selling pressure on XRP holders, which requires a constantly increased demand to overcome the inflating supply. This directly affects XRP’s ability to reward its investors in the long run, as previously reported by Finbold regarding the digital asset price projection in case XRP reaches its all-time high market cap. In this context, while considering general expectations regarding the Bitcoin (BTC) halving in 2024, and the next bull run, Finbold turned to ChatGPT-4 to understand how the massive amount of data collected by the artificial intelligence feels about a supposed bullish 2024 for XRP. Will there be an XRP bull run in 2024? The first question we asked ChatGPT was: “Will there be an XRP bull run in 2024?” In which the AI answered: “It’s unfeasible to assure with complete certainty whether there will be a bull run for XRP in 2024. Many variables, such as overall market trends, technological advancements, regulations, and adoption rates, could impact future performance. However, given XRP’s role in facilitating global money transfers, we could potentially see positive growth in the longer term.” — ChatGPT-4 Following that, OpenAI’s flagship product was commanded to assume it was an experienced cryptocurrency value investor being interviewed. ChatGPT addressed other related topics, as follows. ChatGPT-4 answers to questions related to the XRP bull run in 2024. Sources: ChatGPT and Finbold What investors should expect regarding XRP in 2024? “Investors in XRP for 2024 should stay informed about developments in technology, shifting regulatory landscapes, and macro-economic trends. Adoption of Ripple’s technology by financial institutions and the resolution of Ripple’s legal issues may also influence XRP’s performance.” — ChatGPT-4 Will the Bitcoin halving have any meaningful impact on XRP price? “The Bitcoin halving – the event that reduces the reward for mining Bitcoin blocks by 50%, is a significant event in the cryptocurrency market. However, its direct impact on the price of XRP is likely limited given that they operate on disparate underlying principles and technologies. That being said, the broader market sentiment and trends triggered by the halving might impact all cryptocurrencies, including XRP.” — ChatGPT-4 Will XRP token inflation by Ripple unlocks have any negative influence on an expected XRP bull run in 2024? “The inflation of XRP tokens due to Ripple’s periodic releases may affect the value of XRP in unexpected ways. An oversupply of the token can depress prices. However, if these releases are balanced with a rise in demand for the token, prices might not be negatively affected. The prospective bull run in 2024 for XRP will be dictated by a complex interplay of these factors along with the wider market dynamics.” — ChatGPT-4 Conclusion As usual, the ChatGPT has provided its responses considering both negative and positive outcomes. Nevertheless, the AI looks slightly biased toward a bull run for XRP in the coming year — which is still highly dependent on Ripple’s actions, and the ability of the company and the community to create enough demand to overcome one of the highest supply inflations in the industry. The content on this site should not be considered investment advice. Investing is speculative. When investing, your capital is at risk.

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tomreview · 1 year ago

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Prompt Selling Stay Ahead of the Curve

It is simple to experiment with basic prompts, but you are only using 10% of ChatGPT's capabilities. It's amazing how much you can accomplish by simply adding key information to the prompts. Furthermore, it's perfect for you, yet additionally for your clients if you need to sell prompts at significant expenses.

These are the drawbacks of a poor or straightforward prompt for those in need of assistance.

Inadequate Specificity: ChatGPT may provide generic responses in response to generic or ambiguous prompts. The generated output may not match the desired result if the prompt does not provide clear instructions or context.

Insufficient Engagement: Basic prompts might neglect to catch ChatGPT's consideration or flash its imagination. This can result in responses that are uninteresting or bland and fail to effectively engage the user or accomplish their goals.

Personalization is limited: The generated content may not appear to be tailored to the needs of the target audience if prompts are not customizable. Generic prompts may not be able to provide a compelling user experience because they lack customization.

Opportunities missed: Users may miss out on utilizing ChatGPT's vast capabilities if they do not take advantage of its potential. Modifying prompts permits you to investigate various points, mentioning explicit subtleties, or provoking ChatGPT to create content in a specific style, improving the general quality and worth of the result.

Discord in the voice of the brand: The generated content may not reflect the desired tone or voice of the brand if the prompts are not customized. This could have an effect on the image of the brand as a whole and make it harder to communicate consistently, which is important for creating a strong brand identity.

Reduced Satisfaction from Users: Nonexclusive prompts frequently yield conventional reactions, which can prompt a dull client experience. It could make users feel like they are getting information that is the same for everyone or isn't very helpful, which could make them less satisfied and make it less likely that they will do business with you again or convert.

Ineffective solutions to problems: ChatGPT may have trouble comprehending the issue at hand or coming up with meaningful solutions if the prompts do not provide sufficient context or specific information. The issue can be clearly articulated thanks to customization, which results in responses that are more pertinent and effective.

As you can see, custom prompt creation is a great way to make money and is becoming the job of the future. To start off right, though, you need the right information.

Well…

Would You Be Intrigued Assuming I Let you know That You Would be able

Turn into a Brief Designer Today, And With next to no Pressure?

It's great for newcomers as well as experienced ChatGPT users.

The significance of artificial intelligence (AI) has never been greater in a digital landscape that is rapidly changing. An in-depth understanding of AI prompts—a crucial component of future job markets—is provided in our course, "Prompt Selling Empire," which equips you with the most crucial skills to navigate this transformation. You could be at the forefront of this technological revolution by mastering the art of prompt creation and selling as AI increasingly becomes the backbone of various industries.

Systems like ChatGPT, which are able to generate text that is human-like based on prompts, demonstrate AI's progress toward becoming more sophisticated and user-friendly. Because it directly affects the quality of AI outputs, the skill of crafting effective prompts has become highly sought after. From deciphering the language of AI to personalizing prompts for different audiences and even successfully selling them, this course provides a comprehensive overview of prompt creation.

Change is inevitable, and the rapid advancement of AI is troubling. The apparently solid positions of today might all around become outdated soon, as man-made intelligence assumes control over routine errands. It will be essential to be able to adjust to these changes and acquire new skills, such as prompt creation. By equipping you with a thorough understanding of AI and prompt creation, "Prompt Selling Empire" aims to secure your career for the future.

AI's rise is not simply a trend; It's a change that will change the way we work and use technology. You will learn more than just a new skill when you enroll in the "Prompt Selling Empire" course; You're making an investment in a promising future in a highly sought-after field. You will be able to use AI technology effectively with the knowledge and skills you learn in this course, keeping you ahead of the competition in the job market.

At this point, if you have the right information, you can make better ChatGPT prompts and sell your knowledge as ready-to-use prompts.

Many individuals and organizations are getting on board with the ChatGPT fleeting trend consistently. The issue is that they require assistance in creating the required prompt.

So they search on the web, and they will find a great deal of futile series of prompts for deals, similar to the 1,000 or 10,000 brief bundles that make much more trouble and time misfortune. And in the end, they will search for the best prompt on one of the two platforms I present to you in this course. Also, you will be there, sitting tight for your offers.

The "Prompts Selling Empire" is now available!

This information is different from what you have previously seen, and I can assure you that you will be among the first to correctly identify the "prompt engineering" trend.

Yes, ChatGPT prompts are already in use by all, but the problem is that they are always difficult to create, require too many variables, and cannot be found online.

Even in this scenario, AI will be your ally and provide you with everything you need to generate stunning prompts upon request. You will learn the three best ways to create prompts and what to include in them to make them unique in this course.

By creating simple prompts to sell, this course transforms you into a real prompt engineer, transforming a difficult concept into something simple for which you can earn a daily income. This is genuine passive income. Upload your prompts and put them away.

What Kind of Projects Can Be Expected From Us?

(This is merely a fundamental illustration to demonstrate a quick task.)

The same old prompt, just a regular one, like:

"Make a cultivating article."

Your Super Prompt: One of the Course's Secret Prompts is this one.

Title: The Garden's Fun: A Concise Guide to Plant Growing

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artschoolkapurbawadi · 1 year ago

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Crafted with Care: Handmade Customized Gifts in Thane

Introduction: In the age of mass-produced goods and generic gifts, there is something truly special about receiving a handmade customized gift. Thane, a city known for its rich cultural heritage and craftsmanship, offers a treasure trove of unique and personalized gift options. From exquisite handcrafted jewelry to intricately designed home decor items, Thane is a hub for those seeking one-of-a-kind presents. In this article, we will explore the charm and significance of handmade customized gifts in Thane, and delve into the thriving community of artisans and craftsmen who bring these creations to life.

Preserving Traditions: Thane has a long-standing tradition of skilled artisans who have honed their craft over generations. These artisans, often working in small workshops or studios, meticulously create handmade gifts that reflect the cultural heritage of the region. From traditional Warli art to intricate woodwork and pottery, these artisans pour their heart and soul into every piece they create. By choosing handmade customized gifts, you not only support these artisans but also help preserve ancient art forms and traditional techniques.

Unique Personalization: What sets handmade customized gifts apart is the personal touch they offer. Each item is carefully crafted with the recipient in mind, making it a truly meaningful and unique present. Whether it's a personalized name necklace, a hand-painted portrait, or a customized wooden photo frame, these gifts go beyond the ordinary and express a deep sense of thoughtfulness and affection. Thane is home to talented artisans who excel in the art of personalization, ensuring that every gift is tailored to the individual's preferences, making it a cherished keepsake.

Diverse Range of Handmade Gifts: Thane boasts a diverse range of handmade customized gifts to suit every occasion and taste. If you're looking for jewelry, you'll find an array of options such as intricately designed silver earrings, personalized charm bracelets, or hand-stamped rings. For home decor enthusiasts, Thane offers hand-painted pottery, embroidered wall hangings, and beautifully carved wooden showpieces. If you're in search of something unique for a wedding or anniversary, you can explore customized artwork, personalized photo albums, or even bespoke clothing and accessories.

The Joy of Supporting Local Artisans: By choosing handmade customized gifts from Thane, you contribute to the local economy and support the livelihoods of skilled artisans. These craftsmen often work in close-knit communities, passing down their expertise from one generation to another. Your purchase not only helps sustain their craft but also encourages the continuation of these art forms for future generations to appreciate and enjoy.

Finding Handmade Customized Gifts in Thane: To find these exquisite handmade customized gifts in Thane, you can explore local craft markets, artisan fairs, and specialized boutiques. Thane is known for its vibrant street markets like the Wagle Estate Market and Kopri Market, where you can find a plethora of handmade products. Additionally, various online platforms and social media pages connect you directly with the artisans, making it convenient to browse and purchase their creations.

Conclusion: Handmade customized gifts from Thane are a testament to the skill and creativity of local artisans. They offer a delightful alternative to mass-produced presents, infusing a personal touch and heartfelt sentiment into every piece. Whether it's for a birthday, anniversary, or any special occasion, these unique gifts will surely make a lasting impression. So, the next time you're looking for a thoughtful and meaningful present, consider exploring the world of handmade customized gifts in Thane and be part of the rich artistic heritage that this city has to offer.

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n7punk · 1 year ago

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(vote before reading, and reblog the version without this to avoid influencing lol) okay my opinion:

In interviews/on twitter, Nate said two important things related to this. First, the crew slipped in that mention of the next ball being Scorpia's there, implying that was them telling the fandom "hey here's a fanfiction prompt!" and then setting us loose. So that part is kind of canon, but it seems like the host of the ball just rotates (or is maybe voted on), so even Adora in canon could have known Scorpia's turn was coming, or it could be a reflection of Adora's desire for unity and she then proposes it later when princess prom does come around again. It also could just be a logical conclusion that Scorpia would host this time because again, unity.

However, Nate also said the dress Adora wears represents vulnerability. To me, that implies it is not the Literal Dress she is wearing in the Literal Future, but rather a manifestation of her inner feelings, thus making the entire scene a manifestation by extension.

There's also the fact that a vision of the future would have to come from somewhere and I don't think the Crystal Castle or She-ra is capable of foresight.

Basically, I don't think it's an actual moment in time that will come to pass. I think it's supposed to be what Adora always wanted - the four of them together, friends, living a peaceful life with parties rather than war - but that she was always too afraid to consider because she never thought she would have a future. Seeing it might shape some of her future actions, but I don't think that exact moment will ever play out - directly before the ball, anyway. I can totally see Glimmer chasing Catra down with a brush even the day after the war and giving Adora deja vu.

Of course, Nate drew that art of princess prom where they wear the same outfits. Maybe his version includes them picking out the exact same thing to actualize that vision - or maybe he just didn't want to design something new for it. Despite my interpretation, I do think it would seem kind of contradictory to canon on the surface if he had drawn them in something else. Them wearing the same outfits doesn't automatically make it a vision of the future, because Adora could have just sketched them out for a tailor or something as a way of reclaiming her vision/future, thus the outfits being a result of the vision and not something that would exist without it. Or the art itself could be nonliteral and just a general representation of the event, meaning details like their outfits don't matter. I think you can draw them in anything for the next prom and it still makes sense.

Honestly, it being time travel would lessen its impact to me. That scene (again, to me) is Adora finally accepting and embracing the fact that she wants to live, she wants anything, and she wants Catra. That scene is so important for Adora's growth. She finally accepts that she wants to be more than a sacrifice. Making it just be a flash forward and her realizing "oh, that's a future i want to see" feels less meaningful to me than closing her eyes and finally letting herself picture the dream she pushed down because she thought she would die in the war. It's something more visceral and raw if it's a manifestation of her desires with all the small implications that comes with (stuff like Catra wearing her pin because Adora wants to marry her, Adora's hair being down and Catra wearing shoes because they don't have to fight/be ready anymore, Adora accepting She-ra as a part of herself by wearing her colors rather than a duty she has to carry out at the expense of herself, etc). That's just me, though.

TLDR; my version is it was just a "dream" and the scene won't ever play out, but it will affect some of Adora's choices going forward.

Now here's a question: was Horde Prime actually in there and saw it, or was she just hallucinating that part?

hang on i've got something i've always wondered

i'd love to hear your reasoning/elaborations in the tags

#self rb #i always knew there were some people who thought it was an actual vision of the future by im surprised by how many lol #the horde prime thing tho.... really depends on how you took the mara vision ig #like i dont know how he would be in there unless it was the crystal castle with catra completely unaware and he hacked in #but somehow i just always assumed he was really there #my gut says its real despite Logic XD

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qwanderer · 3 years ago

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Loki in the Hall of Mirrors

This story is complicated. Not, like, as a plot, not particularly, but philosophically and thematically. It's got that great play of hero against villain that I love about the Loki story in general and that makes it all so divisive and messy. And I love it even more than I did on first watch.

The first time I watched the desert landing scene, I was like, "Wait? What happened to Allspeak?" because the people who live there don't seem to understand him. But on the second watch, I realized it could be a lack of context, rather than a break in translation. These people probably have an even chance of knowing nothing about Norse myth. Like, what if an alien came up to you and said "I am Boogle of Bofgar, I carry a burden"? You would still have questions like "What the hell is a boogle and why are you carrying your shit here?" So the basic dynamic of Allspeak is probably still functioning, and Loki probably understood their questions, but he was still trying to figure out how to answer when he got distracted by the TVA people.

It could even be an innate psychic ability rather than a magical one, as he seems to understand everyone in the TVA, including the man who can't be fluent in all languages like the field agents because he has never heard of a fish and the seemingly nonverbal robot. (Which of course makes me want Loki talking with Dum-E and the other shop bots! But I digress.)

Okay. I want to start talking about the next-level manipulation shit the TVA are pulling on Loki here. Time, as they say, moves differently in the TVA, and one might even assume that they can avoid having to deal with more variants at once than they can handle. And yet we see them dealing with exactly two other troublemakers during Loki's onboarding.

The first, I'm going to call little echo man.

Little echo man is incredibly annoying to Loki, because he does and says everything Loki might find himself inclined to do and say if he wanted to be difficult. Little echo man does these things in little annoying undignified ways, making them look silly and petulant. Little echo man protests and questions and pushes back, in his business suit and his long dark hair and pale skin, and clearly thinks everyone should treat him as important even though every indication is that he is an annoyance and an afterthought.

Perhaps he's a plant, and perhaps he's just a variant of an annoying but predictable regular they see who they lined up at the same time on purpose. But he is on purpose. Everything he does screams directly at Loki, "Don't do this."

We'll get to the second convenient intersection later.

The most obvious layer of manipulation is simply the beraucracy. They put him up against a series of obstacles which he needs to deal with to get anywhere else, and nothing he does can get him past those obstacles except compliance. All of these obstacles have personality, but they are not personable. They treat Loki like a bag of trash they have been tasked with taking to the curb. Annoying, distasteful, but ultimately routine. His silver tongue isn't going to get him anywhere because these people simply don't care.

I think a lot of these he just goes along with to see where it gets him, since at this point he still believes he has his magic in reserve. But the fact that he steps through the robot fryer even though he thinks he might be a robot without knowing (as others have pointed out, he spent thousands of years as a frost giant without knowing it, and he's recently spent time in the control of the being who shaped Nebula) is a testament to how deep they've already got their hooks in him.

They treat the robot fryer like it's routine, but come the next obstacle, they kill little echo man like it's routine, too. Because he didn't comply.

Loki is slowly being ironed flat to thread into their compliance mill.

And then - I love this, because it reminds me of one of my favorites among the multiplicity of Lokis, GoS!Loki - they put this line in as punctuation between the impersonal, compliance, don't phase of their manipulation and everything that comes after it.

When he's set before the judge, someone actually paying some attention to him, this is his chance to use his silver tongue on someone who will listen. But, although the judge listens, she treats him the same as all the other obstacles have - like listening is a distasteful chore she would like to be done with.

So it seems like the perfect moment for a dramatic escape. Except his magic is gone.

"It's not your story," the judge says. "It never was."

That hammers in all the worst things Loki has ever believed about himself - that he stands in the shadows of others, that he will never have the central place he was raised to desire, that he is, and always will be, a villain to be vanquished rather than a person with choices and agency.

Enter Mobius.

Mobius is a big echo.

He draws all the attention in a room. He is everything that Loki wishes to be - he is powerful, informed, prepared, in control. Capable of charming the judge. And most importantly, he is actively interested in Loki.

At this point in Loki's journey - both in the show and in his life - that has to be irresistible.

So Mobius is in a perfect position to wrap Loki right around his pinky finger.

He listens to Loki without shutting him down, the way all the obstacles have. When Loki tells Mobius he's going to burn down the TVA, Mobius suggests a couple of places he might want to start. One concrete, small, mischievous. One an indication that he's open to Loki doing larger, more significant things here in the future.

He shows Loki his own past and future - but carefully edited, to paint a particular picture.

So many echoes, so many reflections - Loki is in a house of mirrors. Lost, disoriented. Distorted one way, then the other. Magnified and examined.

Loki snarks, and Mobius comments, "Makes you sound smart." Affirms Loki for that little mischievous bit of personality.

Mobius shows Loki some of the most terrible things he's done, and questions them. Pushes Loki away from them. Then changes direction before he can get too heavy-handed, to basically fangirl over the DB Cooper adventure. That's mischief. That's good. I like that.

Punishes him for a small infraction, just to remind him who is in control and that even looking threatening could be seen as a problem.

I think it was at about this point that I got hard reminded of the dynamics of the show White Collar. It's a buddy cop show on a basic level and sometimes the relationship can be very sweet, but sometimes Peter spends one too many times reminding Neal that he can send him back to prison any time he wants and the power dynamic shows its messed up edges.

Mobius is part of the machine, and the machine is doing terrible things to Loki, but I have at least a sliver of hope that the relationship could gain more balance - more genuine balance, not based on the faux freedom that Loki has gained by the end of the episode. There's something to be said for making changes to a system from within that system, but for that to be meaningful change, Mobius would have to change as a person.

Anyway, this current nastily powerful Mobius pushes Loki as hard as he can, and then is conveniently interrupted by the actions of another variant, leaving Loki alone with his remote.

It could easily have been on purpose. The only thing Loki learns by escaping that room is that the TVA is more powerful than any force in the universe, in his experience.

Let's talk about the other Loki variant for a minute. It took me until the second viewing to realize the symbolism of leaving a small child the only survivor in a place of worship, then giving her something to turn her blue.

Odin said he found Loki in a temple, in the aftermath of a battle.

It's actually frighteningly easy to imagine how a distraught Loki could get to a place where he feels the need to genuinely burn down the TVA, and kill every agent in it. Because the TVA put certain clips in his little future show, focusing on the death of his mother, the way his own actions affected it, and the futility and brutality of his own death at the hands of Thanos.

They don't show him the destruction of Asgard, his own role in helping save the evacuees, and the way Thanos decimated the population of that transport before it could even reach Earth. They don't show him the devastation of his home or his capacity to do good.

A Loki who knows that the power of the TVA exists and that he has the capacity to be Asgard's heroic savior would do anything to get that power and save his people.

But we haven't met that Loki yet. I'm sure we will, and it's going to be exhilarating.

This Loki is being taught the importance of control over little things, and so when he gets his collar off and onto that guard, he toys with her, just to see that he can. They have been toying with him and it's oh so satisfying to turn the tables. But it's still compliance in its own way, the petty little mischief that Mobius has been steering him towards.

Loki has been given just enough freedom, just enough choices, that it seems like his own choice to watch the rest of the slide show and come to the obvious conclusion - there's no "out" to go to. His life has gone on without him, and ended. And there's really no point in his trying to fix it. No putting things back the way they were.

So he admits to Mobius - the person who has listened hardest, probably, besides his mother - he admits that he is small and scared and lashing out. That he doesn't know what to do.

Of course, this is when Mobius introduces the task the TVA has for Loki - to take down his other self.

Oh, I can't wait for the next episode! I want to know where this is going.

(I've popped in some panels from Loki: Agent of Asgard because it's my favorite and the show is giving me feelings about it.)

#the loki show #the loki series #agent mobius #loki #loki meta #spoilers #loki spoilers #loki show spoilers #aoa #gos!loki #marvel

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Resident Evil Timeline in Chronological Order

https://ift.tt/2LT7hUc

The reveal of Resident Evil Village‘s release date and gameplay brings us that much closer to another entry into one of the more complicated (and sometimes confusing) timelines in video game history.

Granted, the Resident Evil timeline doesn’t stray too far from the release order of the games themselves, but subtle shifts in the storyline created by the occasional odd entry mean that it’s easy to lose track of how we got here. That’s why we’re going to try to help chart the Resident Evil timeline as it stands today.

For the purposes of this discussion, please note that we’re only talking about the Resident Evil games and not the live-action or animated movies. Furthermore, we’ve included some spinoffs but are ignoring games that are either largely irrelevant to the timeline (such as Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D) or have been removed from or avoided in the canon (Resident Evil Gaiden). That said, let us know if we missed any important entries in the comments below.

Resident Evil Zero

Release Year: 2002

Timeline Date: July, 1998

While Resident Evil’s naming conventions create plenty of chronological confusion, the appropriately named Resident Evil Zero is where you want to start if you want to play through the major Resident Evil games in order.

Released six years after the first Resident Evil game, Resident Evil Zero tells the story of officer Rebecca Chambers and a criminal named Billy Coen who battle through the aftermath of a train wreck that helped kick off Racoon City’s zombie problems.

While it’s nice that this game tells us a little more about Rebecca, the highlight of this story is undoubtedly how it sets up Albert Wesker, William Birkin, and other key members of the Umbrella Corporation. Zero directly leads into the first Resident Evil game and its revelations about Umbrella would echo throughout the rest of the franchise.

Resident Evil

Release Year: 1996

Timeline Date: July, 1998

The first Resident Evil game is thankfully located fairly close to the beginning of the Resident Evil timeline. Honestly, it’s surprising Capcom hasn’t made more Resident Evil games that occur before this one.

Regardless, you probably know what Resident Evil is all about by this point. As the story of S.T.A.R.S. officers forced to investigate the Spencer Mansion following several attacks/disappearances, Resident Evil brilliantly set-up this series’ grander mythology while telling a compelling standalone story.

If you’re working your way through the Resident Evil series in chronological order, be sure to play the all-time great remake of the original Resident Evil that was first released for GameCube.

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (First Half)

Release Year: 1999

Timeline Date: September, 1998

Ok, here’s where the timeline is going to get weird.

Resident Evil 3’s opening sequences occur 24 hours before the start of Resident Evil 2. While there are some obvious plotline ties to Resident Evil 2 in those early segments, much of the beginning of this game is really a side story designed to shed some light on what happened to Jill Valentine after Resident Evil.

Its spot on this list is largely a technicality, but for the sake of accuracy, Resident Evil 3 does technically help bridge the first and second games.

Resident Evil 2

Release Year: 1998

Timeline Date: September, 1998

The legendary Resident Evil 2 elevated the Resident Evil franchise and set up many of the narrative pieces that would come into play later on.

This is the game that introduced us to Leon Kennedy, Claire Redfield, Sherry Birkin, Racoon City, and so much more. It’s also the game that told us a little more about Umbrella, their various viruses, and the zombie outbreak, which really helped explain this universe a bit more clearly before Resident Evil Zero filled in more of the missing pieces.

Most importantly, Resident Evil 2’s ending helps set-up the extent of Umbrella’s mistakes/intentions and how they will turn what started near Racoon City into a series of events that would affect multiple parts of the world.

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (Second Half)

Release Year: 1999

Timeline Date: October, 1998

The second half of Resident Evil 3 takes place two days after the events of Resident Evil 2, which technically necessitates the somewhat strange split on this timeline.

By and large, though, the most important takeaways from the second half of Resident Evil 3 from a chronological standpoint are the destruction of Racoon City and the fate of Jill Valentine who would go on to play an important role in upcoming series events.

The original game also featured some still-frame ending sequences that revealed a little more about what happened to characters such as HUNK, Ada Wong, and Barry Burton, but Resident Evil 3 was designed as something of a side story and it largely serves as a side story to this day.

Resident Evil Survivor

Release Year: 2000

Timeline Date: November, 1998

The largely forgettable light gun shooter Resident Evil Survivor manages to work its way into the Resident Evil timeline by virtue of how it somewhat helps answer questions left by the previous games.

Resident Evil Survivor takes place after the destruction of Racoon City at the end of Resident Evil 3. While it takes place on a small island that hosts an Umbrella facility, the game served as an early indication that Umbrella’s experiments absolutely could not be contained regardless of the extreme measures that were enacted to do so.

More importantly, this game introduced us to Ark Thompson: an associate of Leon Kennedy whose presence verifies that Kennedy has continued to investigate and combat Umbrella following the end of Resident Evil 2.

Resident Evil Code: Veronica

Release Year: 2000

Timeline Date: December, 1998

While Code: Veronica’s strange name and Dreamcast exclusive release have long made it something of an oddity, it does fit into the Resident Evil timeline fairly cleanly.

This is the game that finally reunited Claire Redfield with her brother Chris. For that matter, it’s also the game that finally showed us what Chris Redfield was up to following the events of the first title. It even establishes a professional dynamic between Chris, Claire, and Leon that would come into play later as the trio settled into their future careers.

More importantly, this is the game that brought Albert Wesker back into play and confirmed that he has acquired superhuman abilities. His decision to take Steve Burnside’s corpse at the end of the game would also affect what comes next.

Games

Resident Evil Games Ranked from Worst to Best

By Chris Freiberg

Games

Resident Evil Director Triggers Debate Over the Appeal of Classic Resident Evil Games

By Matthew Byrd

Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles

Release Year: 2009

Timeline Date: 2002

This somewhat obscure Nintendo Wii game would have been easy to leave off the timeline (it even retells events of the previous games) were it not for one interesting way that it helps tie Veronica to Resident Evil 4.

The game’s early “Operation Javier” scenario takes place four years after Resident Evil 2 and sees Leon Kennedy enter a South American village in search of a powerful drug lord named Javier Hidalgo. Try not to be surprised, but it turns out the village is overrun by zombies.

It also turns out that Hidalgo actually purchased a sample of the virus that Wesker took from Steve Burnside’s corpse and used it to save his dying daughter. It’s a small plot beat, but again, it does help connect Veronica to Resident Evil 4, Leon Kennedy, and the rest of the franchise.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles

Release Year: 2007

Timeline Date: February, 2003

While much of what happens in Umbrella Chronicles largely recaps the events of previous games, this title’s final scenario does feature a few new plot points.

Most notably, the game ends with Albert Wesker infiltrating a secret Umbrella facility and stealing classified files. From there, we learn that the evidence in these files is enough to convince the U.S. government to aggressively pursue legal recourse against Umbrella and its executives.

Wesker’s actions in this moment would create a power vacuum that helped influence many events to come.

Resident Evil 4

Release Year: 2005

Timeline Date: 2004

It’s one of the scariest, most important, and greatest games of all-time, but when Resident Evil 4 was promoted, most people just wanted to know how this game fit into the previously established Resident Evil mythology.

Early in the game, we learn that Leon Kennedy has been sent to a village in Spain to rescue the President of the United States’ daughter. More importantly, we learn that the zombie-like residents of this village are infected with a previously unknown virus known as Las Plagas.

Las Plagas is interesting in its own right, but from a chronological standpoint, its biggest immediate impact was the way it helped reintroduce Ada Wong following her debut in Resident Evil 2 and tied Wong to legendary series villain Albert Wesker. That relationship (and their interest in acquiring Las Plagas) would set up much of what comes next.

Resident Evil: Revelations

Release Year: 2012

Timeline Date: 2004/2005

It’s not generally considered part of the “main” Resident Evil series, but Resident Evil: Revelations does a tremendous job of showcasing some of the changes that were only referenced in Resident Evil 5.

The big revelation in this game (I know, I know) is that a new group called the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance (BSAA) has been formed in response to an increase in bioterrorism across the globe. Both Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield have joined the group as agents.

While some of the events featured in Revelations weren’t expanded upon in a meaningful way, seeing the earlier days of BSAA (as well as Chris and Jill’s involvement with the organization) does help to add a little weight to what happens in Resident Evil 5.

Revelations also makes it a little easier to process some of the global intrigue surrounding the creation and distribution of the multiple viruses that will become a much bigger part of the next few games in the series.

Resident Evil 5

Release Year: 2009

Timeline Date: 2006

Perhaps rightfully criticized for trying to do too much with the Resident Evil mythology, Resident Evil 5 does make a little more sense if you play it in chronological order along with some of the supplementary releases.

In short, Resident Evil 5 sees BSAA member Chris Redfield pursue a bioterrorist named Ricardo Irving. A strange series of events results in Chris discovering that Tricell (the company that funds the BSAA) is not only advancing Umbrella’s research but has partnered with Albert Wesker in the hopes of utilizing his expertise on the viruses. Speaking of Wesker, we also learn that he is actually an Umbrella creation who is trying to spread viruses as a means of wiping out humans not “strong enough” to survive.

This game offers a lot to take in, but it essentially wraps up the main part of the Wesker plotline (for now), ties Plagas into the Umbrella mythos a little more cleanly, and furthers the global growth of the chronology’s core concepts.

Resident Evil: Revelations 2

Release Year: 2015

Timeline Date: 2011

The somewhat underrated Revelations series comes through yet again by helping to cleanly connect major Resident Evil titles.

The game’s biggest contribution is the way that it reintroduces Claire into the franchise after she spent quite a few years away from the spotlight. We learn that she’s working with the biohazard prevention agency TerraSave and that she’s even in contact with Barry Burton and his family.

Granted, the standalone storytelling in this game is more substantial than the chronological connections, but it’s nice to have an idea of what Claire has been up to after all these years.

Umbrella Corps

Release Year: 2016

Timeline Date: 2012

It’s nearly impossible to recommend Umbrella Corps on the basis of its gameplay, but as a piece of the Resident Evil canon, Resident Evil answers some important questions.

Some of this game’s plot details are heavily disputed, but Umbrella Corps essentially reveals that Umbrella was reformed/reworked over the years following the events of the original games. They’re now more focused on cleaning up the mess that Umbrella helped create, and they’re even working with organizations like the BSAA in pursuit of that goal.

While this game also heavily implies that Albert Wesker is still alive, certain questions regarding how much of this title is going to carry over into future installments remain something of a mystery. It’s also worth noting that the game’s multiplayer mode takes place after Resident Evil 6, but again, questions remain regarding its long-term impact.

Resident Evil 6

Release Year: 2012

Timeline Date: 2012

We’ve spoken before about Resident Evil 6’s gameplay shortcomings and other bad decisions, but it’s worth noting again that Resident Evil 6’s often convoluted plot has long confused players who didn’t keep up with every timeline development up until this point.

As a globetrotting story that features most of the major Resident Evil characters (except, strangely, Claire) in prominent roles, Resident Evil 6 focuses on the C-Virus and the various attempts to spread and stop it.

There’s, quite a lot that happens, but from a timeline standpoint the most important takeaways are that Chris Redfield stays with the BSAA in charge of a new squad, Jake Muller (son of Albert Wesker) has become an operative, and characters such as Leon Kennedy, Sherry Birkin, and Ada Wong are all alive and operational. How much of that will be used in subsequent Resident Evil games remains to be seen.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Release Year: 2017

Timeline Date: 2014

While serious questions remain regarding Resident Evil 7’s role in the series, all evidence suggests that it does take place after the events of Resident Evil 6 and that even some of its seemingly unrelated events connect to the series’ bigger timeline.

The biggest tie-in to the rest of the franchise, though, has to be the appearance of Chris Redfield at the end of the game. Even though he looks different (which Capcom says is a result of new technology they use to scan actors), Redfield’s presence, the appearance of a Blue Umbrella helicopter, and hidden references to the BSAA all strongly suggest that Resident Evil 7 is at least honoring most of the major events that occurred until this point.

What remains to be seen is whether some other loose threads from previous games are addressed.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Resident Evil Village

Release Year: 2021

Timeline Date: 2014

Capcom continues to conceal the finer points of Resident Evil Village‘s plot, but we can at least confirm that it takes place after the events of Resident Evil 7.

The continuing adventures of Ethan Winters are exciting enough, but we’d be lying if we told you we weren’t curious to see if other major Resident Evil characters and events will appear in the game. We’re also waiting to see whether or not the creatures we’ve seen in early trailers are still the product of some bioengineered threat or if Capcom is starting to dive deeper into the supernatural.

The post Resident Evil Timeline in Chronological Order appeared first on Den of Geek.

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stevenuniversallyreviews · 5 years ago

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Episode 138: Kevin Party

“Did you guys break up? Can seven-year-olds even do that?”

Remember Doug Out?

The 125th episode of Steven Universe is a small but very fun story about Steven Universe and Connie Maheswaran, two best friends who work as a team to solve a mystery. Steven is already a teenager, and if Connie isn’t thirteen yet she’s awful close (she’s twelve and three quarters on Steven’s midsummer birthday, and school has been in session since Mindful Education), but this feels like a pair of children on an adventure. They’re chaperoned by Connie’s dad, they wear silly disguises and use sillier aliases, and they outright say that their goal is to “ruin some teen’s night.”

Doug Out ends in a cliffhanger, which leads directly to Steven’s abduction, which leads directly to Steven’s journey to and escape from Homeworld, which leads directly to the Breakup Arc, which ends here. That’s fourteen consecutive episodes telling one long story, which happens to be the same number of episodes between Catch and Release kicks off Peridot’s conversion and Hit the Diamond ends our barn adventure. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Act II and Act III of Steven Universe have similar sweeping midpoint storylines: both see a radical change occur, and while our middle act’s is more obvious (two new Gems join our crew and Steven saves the dang planet), Act III has the more important development for Steven himself. Because at the beginning of its sweep, Steven and Connie are kids, and at the end, they’re teenagers.

Granted, I see anyone under the age of 25 as a “kid,” but Kevin Party is a distinctly adolescent episode. The Breakup Arc as a whole covers new ground that a typical kid’s show wouldn’t, and even the one episode without much angst for Steven is about a bunch of teens starting a band. But it’s a whole new step to set an episode at a high school party, complete with drinking (age-appropriate drinks, I’m sure) and no adult supervision.

After five episodes watching Steven either stressing about Connie or working his way through his guilt, it’s wonderful and devastating that when we finally see her again, she's having a blast. Her new look is one thing, but her effortless mingling with strangers is my favorite thing about Kevin Party. This isn’t a new aspect of her personality. She’s probably been like this for a while. But it’s the first time we’re seeing it, because it’s the first time Steven is seeing it.

In Bubble Buddies, Connie started out so shy that she feared dying without making a single friend, while Steven was so gregarious that he couldn’t help befriending everyone he met. Now he’s the awkward one, reduced to asking the likes of Kevin for advice, and she’s bloomed out of that social anxiety. And it’s not just a matter of her friendship with Steven changing her, even though that’s a major inciting incident: after he helps her come out of her shell, she’s able to practice interacting with peers on a regular basis in a scenario that’s way more helpful in understanding normal human interactions than anything in Steven’s life, because Connie goes to school.

There’s an unstated and uncomfortable truth that Connie needs Steven to have access to his magical world, creating an uneven power dynamic that’s easy to ignore because it fits into the general role of how a main character and side character work on a show like this. But Kevin Party‘s biggest reveal is that just because she needs him if she wants to have cosmic adventures, she doesn’t need him to have a fulfilling life, and she doesn’t need his friendship to be happy.

Thank. Goodness.

Codependency isn’t something to aspire to, and while Steven isn’t intentionally possessive of Connie (yet), their fight boils down to him treating her like a sidekick, someone who gets to do magic stuff with him under his terms. We don’t get to see what she was up to during the Breakup Arc, but I’m so glad her laughter here isn’t performative. She has enough self-worth to not define herself by the boy she likes or the adventures they share, and even if she’s upset that they’re in a fight, we know from our first look at her that she’d be okay if they never ended up reconciling. And that makes her choice to reconcile so much stronger than just shoving them back together because they’ve been apart long enough and the status quo demands it. She doesn’t need Steven in her life, but she wants him in her life, and that’s the difference between an episode about Connie remaining a sidekick in Steven’s mind and an episode about Connie establishing herself as an equal.

Steven and Connie’s affection has always bounced between platonic and romantic, and I love that even now we keep it ambiguous. Steven wears the shirt Connie got him in Steven’s Birthday, which is a gesture of friendship but occurs in an episode that dances around their mutual crush (complete with actual dancing). The moment of seeing each other again is shot like running into an ex, with time slowing down to let the absolute horror set in as the rest of the party fades, but Steven still refers to her only as his best friend. Kevin makes some of the subtext text through his confusion over the status of their relationship, but even if they’re teens now, these two are still young enough that don’t know how to express their deeper feelings.

Sadie Killer gets our guard down just long enough that Kevin Party’s new surge of drama hits like a truck: this is the original show’s most direct predecessor to the tone of Steven Universe Future’s latter half, where the anguish of watching Steven flounder in his relationship with Connie comes to a head. He makes the same mistake here that he’ll make in Together Forever: he’s so desperate for advice that he doesn’t question its source. Which is doubly frustrating because Greg Universe, who has told several stories on-screen about navigating a new relationship, is just a phone call away! I’m not saying I wish Steven actually called him, because all teens make mistakes and there’s any number of reasons he wouldn’t want to ask his dad in the moment, but it speaks to Steven’s inability to think straight when it comes to Connie.

In his final appearance, Kevin shows the closest thing he’s got to depth by helping Steven the only way he knows how. And unlike Beach City Drift, where he makes up a tragic backstory just to be a troll, it’s clear that the mysterious Sabine did a number on Delmarva’s biggest jerk. But I’ve got no patience for the notion that this episode is anything near redemptive for a guy whose idea of being helpful involves emotionally manipulating a vulnerable fourteen-year-old boy into emotionally manipulating a vulnerable thirteen-year-old girl.

Here more than ever, Kevin contrasts Steven’s self-destructive selflessness by being a black hole of self-importance. He only cares about Steven inasmuch as Steven can help him be more popular, not even bothering to ask for his name until it serves his needs. He’s so oblivious to his surroundings that he confuses Lion for a dog (saying that he’s allergic to dogs is a somewhat funny joke, but talking up Connie’s new life by saying she has a dog now is hilarious), and goes out of his way to antagonize his guests. To Steven, other people exist to be helped, which has noble roots but is catastrophic for his self-image. To Kevin, other people exist to admire Kevin.

“Psychopath” is a strong word, and I don’t wanna exaggerate Kevin’s villainy because that takes away from what makes him so insidious: unlike the Final Boss feel of the Diamonds, there’s an abundance of regular people who do the same awful stuff that Kevin does, and acting like he’s some extreme case detracts from the mundanity of everyday evils. Moreover, I remain unqualified to be an armchair psychologist, and the Hare Psychopathy Checklist has plenty of valid criticism, so take any diagnosis using it (or really any psych profile that involves a checklist you can do from home) with a grain of salt. But with all that said, I’ll just leave a link to it right here and let y’all do what you will with it.

The Big Talk gets five and a half episodes of buildup, and it doesn’t disappoint. It’s so perfect that Connie’s reaction to negging is to do what she always does when she sees someone behaving badly: she gets mad and calls it out. Steven’s typical approach to unkind behavior is to double down on his friendliness, but Connie will always put her foot down and demand kindness, whether you’re her best friend or a galactic tyrant. New hair aside, Connie isn’t the one that changes over the course of the Breakup Arc: it begins with her making it clear that she’s hurt while Steven ignores her, and it ends with her making it clear that she’s hurt while Steven listens.

I love that Connie requires no prompting to explain why she didn’t text Steven back, because Full Disclosure shows that she understands how much it hurts to try and connect with a friend who won’t respond. I love that she did go back to talk with him in person while he was on vacation (meaning all of this could’ve been worked through way sooner) because adolescence is suffering and we needed one last little twist of the knife in this arc. And I love that Steven is wise enough to just admit what he did instead of try and defend himself, because their whole fight hinged on his refusal to acknowledge the gravity of his actions, both to Connie and to himself. He doesn’t say the word “sorry” until the very end of his admission, because he means it and wants to provide context for the apology rather than just say “I’m sorry” a bunch.

And it’s so perfect that they don’t end up forming Stevonnie during their reconciliation, and not just because that would’ve given Kevin a win. They make up, but it still takes time to let the lingering pain go away, and it makes Stevonnie’s reappearance in our next episode way more meaningful. After one last display of their fundamental contrast—Steven expresses sympathy for Kevin’s situation with Sabine, while Connie shrugs it off because having a backstory doesn’t mean it’s okay to be a toxic douche—they leave the world of teen parties behind, at least for now. They’ll go back to more adventures right away, traveling to space in Lars of the Stars and Jungle Moon, but they’ll never truly be the same.

Thank goodness.

I’ve never been to this…how do you say…school?

I love that Stevonnie’s disdain for Kevin is here for us even when Stevonnie doesn’t show up in the episode.

We’re the one, we’re the ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!

It’s not just the catharsis factor that gets this in my Top 25. Kevin Party is incredible at capturing the dread I associate with this type of teen party as someone who often felt like Steven as a kid (three traits that don’t work well with teen parties, even if like me you were a fairly social teenager: clinical depression, teetotalism due to the double whammy of that depression and family history of addiction, and having a bad ear that makes it impossible to hear people talk when the music gets loud enough). Beyond the personal connection, we also get one last look at the show’s greatest villain, and an episode that respects Connie so much more than a normal cartoon would. This is how you end an arc, folks.

Top Twenty-Five

Steven and the Stevens

Hit the Diamond

Mirror Gem

Lion 3: Straight to Video

Alone Together

Last One Out of Beach City

The Return

Jailbreak

The Answer

Mindful Education

Sworn to the Sword

Rose’s Scabbard

Earthlings

Mr. Greg

Coach Steven

Giant Woman

Beach City Drift

Winter Forecast

Bismuth

Back to the Kindergarten

Steven’s Dream

Kevin Party

When It Rains

The Good Lars

Lars’s Head

Love ‘em

Laser Light Cannon

Bubble Buddies

Tiger Millionaire

Lion 2: The Movie

Rose’s Room

An Indirect Kiss

Ocean Gem

Space Race

Garnet’s Universe

Warp Tour

The Test

Future Vision

On the Run

Maximum Capacity

Marble Madness

Political Power

Full Disclosure

Joy Ride

Keeping It Together

We Need to Talk

Chille Tid

Cry for Help

Keystone Motel

Catch and Release

Back to the Barn

Steven’s Birthday

It Could’ve Been Great

Message Received

Log Date 7 15 2

Same Old World

The New Lars

Monster Reunion

Alone at Sea

Crack the Whip

Beta

Back to the Moon

Kindergarten Kid

Buddy’s Book

Gem Harvest

Three Gems and a Baby

That Will Be All

The New Crystal Gems

Storm in the Room

Room for Ruby

Lion 4: Alternate Ending

Doug Out

Are You My Dad?

I Am My Mom

Stuck Together

The Trial

Off Colors

Gemcation

Raising the Barn

Sadie Killer

Like ‘em

Gem Glow

Frybo

Arcade Mania

So Many Birthdays

Lars and the Cool Kids

Onion Trade

Steven the Sword Fighter

Beach Party

Monster Buddies

Keep Beach City Weird

Watermelon Steven

The Message

Open Book

Story for Steven

Shirt Club

Love Letters

Reformed

Rising Tides, Crashing Tides

Onion Friend

Historical Friction

Friend Ship

Nightmare Hospital

Too Far

Barn Mates

Steven Floats

Drop Beat Dad

Too Short to Ride

Restaurant Wars

Kiki’s Pizza Delivery Service

Greg the Babysitter

Gem Hunt

Steven vs. Amethyst

Bubbled

Adventures in Light Distortion

Gem Heist

The Zoo

Rocknaldo

Dewey Wins

Enh

Cheeseburger Backpack

Together Breakfast

Cat Fingers

Serious Steven

Steven’s Lion

Joking Victim

Secret Team

Say Uncle

Super Watermelon Island

Gem Drill

Know Your Fusion

Future Boy Zoltron

Tiger Philanthropist

No Thanks!

6. Horror Club 5. Fusion Cuisine 4. House Guest 3. Onion Gang 2. Sadie’s Song 1. Island Adventure

#kevin party #steven universe #su #steven universally #review

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petewentzworld · 5 years ago

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Dear Past Self: Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz Interviewed

Why looking back once in a while is integral to embracing the future...

Pete Wentz is driving around LA, speaking to me over the phone about his newly-launched range of jewellery and apparel, Ronin.

As far as rock star business enterprises go, it’s certainly extravagant, and the website’s description of the rings, pendants and hoodies held therein – “born out of the idea of wandering, a samurai without a master, and the free dreams that accompany facing the world on your own” – adds to the initial sense that Wentz’s professional career may have ballooned into parody, the kind of project Connor 4 Real from Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping might have signed off on.

“We would go and sample products in the jewellery district in downtown LA, learning why one gold looks more yellow than the other,” he tells me when I ask about it. “It’s been a really interesting learning experience.”

But then Pete Wentz, to borrow Lana Del Rey’s favourite American poet Walt Whitman, is large; he contains multitudes, and some of those multitudes just happen to involve samurai-themed lockets. Among other projects, he owns a clothing company, a film production company, a nightclub, and a minority share in American USL soccer team Phoenix Rising.

“It scares me sometimes, watching him,” Patrick Stump once joked. “The two seconds you're not with that dude he's made 30 decisions that are going to affect our band for the rest of the year.”

Ah yes: he’s also, you may recall, the bassist in Fall Out Boy.

The band recently released a new single, ‘Dear Future Self (Hands Up)’, to accompany the release of their second career-spanning retrospective, ‘Greatest Hits: Believers Never Die – Volume Two’.

Such records are inevitably a time for bands to take stock of what they’ve already achieved and what value they might continue to offer the world, and the single seems to acknowledge that duality: “Dear future self, I hope it's going well / I'm drunk on cheap whiskey in an airport hotel,” Stump reflects on the new track. Like Janus, the Greek god of beginnings, endings, and Wyclef Jean collaborations, Wentz finds himself gazing in all directions.

In the near future lies a reminder of the past. Despite the fact that all three bands have new albums coming out, it’s perhaps an easy take to view next year’s ‘Hella Mega Tour’ – Green Day, Weezer, and Fall Out Boy performing at a number of stadium dates together on a triple-headliner bill – as a nostalgia trip.

Is it something Wentz worries about?

“I think about that for sure,” he says. “There’s a danger that, once you become known as one thing, the world knows you as that thing forever. When you’ve been doing art for 15 or 20 years you do have to think about your legacy, but it’s really important to remember why you did it in the first place.”

However cynical your view, it’s hard to argue that the band don’t deserve a victory lap with two of the most influential acts in pop-punk history. “It would be insane for us to turn this tour down because we grew up on ‘Dookie’ and the ‘Buddy Holly’ video – those things were super influential on the early years of our band. So this is wish fulfilment in that way. But then I think that’s why it’s important that we did the Wiz Khalifa tour, that we do remix albums, you know? We wanna do both.”

On musical terms, at least, Fall Out Boy have often done just that. Their first two albums, ‘Take This to Your Grave’ and 2005’s breakout ‘From Under the Cork Tree’, are perhaps their most straightforward in genre terms – but even then, ‘Dance Dance’ was arguably more playful and inventive than anything the cross-sections of pop, emo and punk had served up in the preceding decade. By the time 2007’s ‘This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race’ hit number two in the Billboard charts – their commercial peak to date – the band were already steadfastly toying with hip hop and R&B in both their production values and collaborators.

“I think that there was a time when we were doing that and people were scratching their heads a little bit,” Wentz says. As he rightly points out, the days of cultural tribalism in listener habits are all but dead now in the Spotify age. “I think genre has broken down so much more now, the way people listen to music, that people are more open to it.”

‘Make America Psycho Again’ is a fine example, a collection of remixed tracks from 2015’s ‘American Beauty/American Psycho’ featuring guest appearances from Azealia Banks, Migos and Big K.R.I.T. among others. The title, of course, is a direct reference to the campaign slogan Donald Trump was using in his Presidential election campaign at the time. I ask whether the band are cautious about straying into political territory.

“I don’t think you can avoid it anymore,” he tells me, picking back up after the signal drops on our international call. “We live in a time of super inauthenticity – people taking pictures of food that you don’t even know if they eat, people having fear of missing out – and so I think, in a weird way, to cut through you have to be super authentic. Which is, to me, what people like Lana Del Rey, Billie Eilish, Skrillex, Kanye, and whatever do. You just gotta be who you are and cut through all the noise. And I think people are… maybe not more forgiving, but more appreciative of you being honest about that stuff.”

There was a period in the 00s when Wentz was unavoidable; the video for ‘This Ain’t a Scene…’ hilariously parodied the bassist’s newfound gossip-mag status – later compounded by his marriage to Ashley Simpson in 2008, and subsequent divorce less than three years later – but inevitably, it wasn’t always something he could brush off. In February 2005, Wentz attempted suicide by taking an overdose of the anxiety medication Ativan, and ended up spending a week in hospital recovering.

Today he still finds the pace of modern life extremely deleterious to mental health, not least dealing with the quagmire of social media on a daily basis. “Every day you wake up and there’s a new take, and it’s kind of relentless,” he says with a sigh. “It can get a little numbing when you look out across social media. It can feel really lonely.

“I think that now, more than ever, who you are and what you project into the world will inform your politics, how you interact with people, how you feel when you wake up in the morning. I just want to craft things that are important to Fall Out Boy, to insert something meaningful into people’s lives. That’s really, really what’s important.”

For all the extracurricular projects, it’s clear that Wentz’s heart still beats faster for Fall Out Boy. He’s ready to keep taking the band forward, he tells me. “But it’s got to be something interesting. It’s got to have a perspective. There’s something exciting about Quentin Tarantino being like, ‘I’m just doing 10 or 12 movies and that’s it’. It’s exciting because it makes every movie have meaning. So to me, whatever it is, the next thing has to have perspective, has to have meaning, has to have feeling.”

And what might that look like?

“Maybe it’s scoring a movie, I don’t know. It’s got to be something a little bit different, I don’t think it can be a straight-up album from us.”

Beyond the nightclubs and bling, Wentz is a remarkable philanthropist – a term which has perhaps been sullied in recent times for its application in sanitising billionaires, but which feels appropriate given Wentz’s personal history, and the fact that his work directly supports those who suffer from the same mental health issues that he’s battled over the years. His work as a spokesperson for The Jed Foundation’s ‘Half of Us’ campaign, a program aimed at lowering the rate of teenage suicide, has been invaluable. It’s the kind of supported he could have used 15, 20, 25 years ago.

“I think we live in a time where there is less of a stigma around mental health, and I hope the next generation will feel even more open to speak about it,” he tells me. “Knowing that you’re not alone and other people are going through similar things is so important for our culture to move ahead. So many times when I was younger I thought: am I the only person who feels this way? I think it can be less isolating to know that, hey, Jay-Z feels that way sometimes too.”

For Wentz, who now has three children, the idea of young people today facing those problems alone is terrifying: “I’m raising kids in this world, and I think it’s important for them to know that talking about this doesn’t mean you’re weak or alone. None of it’s weird, none of it’s you by yourself. Young people need to feel that they’re part of the community as a whole.”

Across such an extraordinary life and career, I wonder if he carries any regrets. There’s a brief silence on the line, one that transcends the usual delay carried between the pink-sunset streets of LA and the Cardiff Travelodge I’m calling home for the night.

“In my twenties I felt lots of anxiety and lots of stress about every decision that we made, instead of just living life. I’ve realised that sometimes you’ve just got to live life and trust that you’ll make it from A to B to C. Live through the ups and downs. I think that’s something important that we don’t always impart on young people.”

Spoken like a man who knows real gold when he sees it.

#pete wentz #fall out boy #interview

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dahniwitchoflight · 6 years ago

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Alrighty, So I got through the beginning prologue of the epilogue and through the first 5 pages of Meat.

Even though I did stream my stream of conciousness on twitch, im probbaly not gonna be posting that on youtube

Instead what I’ll be doing is writing down my thoughts and notes on tumblr after I stream each time

Speaking of, the next time I will be streaming is tomorrow April 29 at about 8pm EST for about an Hour again here: https://www.twitch.tv/dahnimae

the way my life schedule is now is I can probably do this for about an hour a day after work, so I think I can get through the epilogues quickly in nice digestible chunks

At least for Monday and Tuesday anyway, after that Ill have to make sure im not doing anything else

but anyways, here are the rough thoughts I had during the epilogue, up to the first 5 Pages of Meat:

First off, I got some thoughts from Rose about how the Heroic versus Just death system for immortals is apparently derived from an emotional value of what is “Good” or “Bad”, what is good or what is bad ultimately being derived from what someone or something “feels” is good or bad, so theres some subjectivity in that judgement, which makes sense considering how individuals are able to affect that judgement in homestuck canon, Aranea proposing her own individual morality onto the clock, as well as Caliborn just destroying the clock/idea of dividing things into good or bad

because Rose describes the system of describing what is canon or not canon or outside canon as being less emotional in nature than that of the of the god tier death clock

her exact words are “Good and bad are words that don’t mean anything, beyond a certain threshold of mortal consideration.” its not said outright but its basically implied

Speaking of, so Canon is made up of three “Pillars”

Truth

Relevance

Essentiality

now, truth is easy to distinguish from the other two, it’s the idea of reality. If something is true, that means it really happened. If something is a lie, that means it didn’t happen, or it wouldn’t happen, it does not exist.

Basically an idea of Hope versus Rage

Relevance and Essentiality are a little harder to seperate, and Rose doesn’t do much to seperate them either

but Relevance is tied to an idea of Context, it’s something that has meaning or importance to what is “currently” happening, the idea of the present conversation one is having, the current thoughts someone is thinking about, the object they are currently looking at or viewing, or just the exact point of focus of the current moment in time

something that is irrelevant is something were not looking at currently, something were not focusing on, or something that’s just not improtant or meaningful right now

basically an idea of Light versus Void

Essentiality is then an idea of a “must”, and idea, no matter when or where or how it happened. It Must have happened or it Must happen in the future. Its the one most closely tied to an idea of destiny, fate, or prerequisites for a more down to earth definition. In order to grow a plant, you MUST plant the seed.

The planting of the seed is essential to the plant ever growing in that spot, if no one plants the seed, the seed will never grow, and the plant will never exist. The plant’s entire existence depends upon that seed being planted.

something that is non essential, can still be true and relevant, the plant is a rosebush, or a tree with apples, or has green leaves versus purple leaves etc but if that exact property were to change into a different one, the core requisites of it’s existence does not change, it’s seed was still planted, it still grew into a plant. (within reason of course, but how essential something is does depend upon the context for why its essential, if its essential because its roots hold the ground together in the future allowing another event to happen, then it must be a plant with strong and deep earth fastening roots, what it is and why, is relevant to its essentiality, so the two are interwoven in a sense)

Basically an idea of Time and Space, but Rose doesn’t seperate them as neatly from Light and Void (she could have easily glossed them over into a single “importance” factor, but she didn’t)

it may be that the distinction itself is needed, but not necessarily a requisite to getting John to understand what she meant.

Essential, but not entirely Relevant to her current circumstances :)

but then she goes onto describe the different combinations of those three pillars and what they are and do

Inside Canon = It is True, it is somewhat Relevant, It is somewhat Essential

Relevance and Essentiality being treated as like percentages from 0-100%, inside canon requiring nonzero amounts for both, while Truth is more black or white, it either is True or is not True

Outside Canon = True

so the amount of relevance and essentiality can be nothing, or essentiality zero, but is must be True

and then Not Canon sort of overlaps what might have been two other categories, I guess the distinction of which doesn’t really matter for now, since were dealing with what is canon, not what isn’t canon

Not Canon = Untrue, with varying percentages of essentiality/relevance

I have my own ideas of what happens to other combos within the Homestuck mythos, theyre not complete but basically as follows:

True, Essential, Relevant (Canon Homestuck)

True, Not Essential, Relevant (Paradox Space Comics)

True, Essential, Not Relevant (Hiveswap)

True, Not Essential, Not Relevant (Outside of Canon)

Not True, Essential, Relevant (”Not Canon” = The Epilogues)

Not True, Not Essential, Relevant (”Not Canon” = Fanfiction/Audience Generated Content)

Not True, Essential, Not Relevant (”Not Canon” = FriendSims)

Not True, Not Essential, Not Relevant (Not Homestuck)

That’s basically how I’m divvying up the majority of distinguishable homestuck aligned content into those three pillars anyway

Rose did also Call Truth the foundation for which Relevance and Essentiality can do their thing, and that did go into how in order for the Friendsims to flip from being not canon to really canon (Hiveswap) it just needs to flip the switch into True

same for Fanfiction of Homestuck/Audience generated content in general, flipping the switch into True makes the Paradox Space content, which is essentially ascended Fanfiction content

and then for things Outside of Canon, they have a tenuous position, because while as long as they remain True, they are still Canon, their Truth value remains conditional upon their values of Relevance and Essentiality, since the closer they dip into zero or negative values, the closer they drag True from flipping to Untrue.

To remain true, or better yet, to integrate into Canon proper, they need to prop up their Relevance and Essentiality values

They need to become the centre of attention, the point of current focus, and they need to have some impact on events in other parts of canon

and all who understand this also understand that characters inside the story don’t get to decide directly how relevant or essential they are to the story, the Audience (and the Author) do

Rose has the idea that the answer lies in the Audience and their expectations, and the audience’s expectations for any story boils down to: the Hero must defeat the Villain.

John is the Hero, Lord English is the Villain. John must defeat Lord English for those outside of Canon to become Canon once again. It’s self explanatory in both ways.

sidenote though, the way John must defeat Lord English is also hilariously self explanatory in both ways.

John will use the cursor Juju to defeat Lord English since it is the only thing that can defeat him. John won’t have to think about how to use it or when or where. Since the cursor Juju is essentially just a plot hole that John fills suddenly out of nowhere perfectly and with ease and immediately will solve the problem no real effort needed.

John will defeat Lord English using the power of a literal Deus Ex Machina. (but a Deux Ex Machina that’s been symbolically hinted at being the secret weapon all along and which the audience is entirely aware will be the thing used to defeat LE it was more a matter of when then How, making it actually a Chekov’s Deus Ex Machina. And I guess the opposite nature of those two things equals out pretty nicely, The Deus Ex Machina is exactly that, an easy and simply solution to all of canon’s ills, but it feels earned instead of handed out randomly like a Chekov’s Gun would feel earned, while simply losing the difficulty of properly using a well set up Checkov’s Gun. Best of both worlds, worst of none)

But,

Different characters seem to have different thoughts on how best to solve the problem. Characters like Dirk it seems

Dirk seems to be operating under a sort of opposite position to Rose, that instead of propping up the audience’s expectations of the Hero, Dirk wants to prop up expectations of a Villain.

Though I’ve only gotten to page 5 of Meat, it seems pretty clear that Dirk’s intentions are to make either himself or Jane a Villainous character.

The reason being is because he may be aware that people can stick to stories for various reasons, including, either liking the villain a lot, or wanting the villain to Go Down.

lots of people like Game of Thrones because of how much they hated Joffrey, I know I was that.

and so far, Lord English hasn’t actually been that much of passionately hated villain? Like that’s pretty clear to the story and characters themselves, why even go fight him? Oh because its technically necessary okay fine whatever I guess

Meanwhile, we have a figure in Homestuck that’s already a pretty untapped source of Passionate Villainy, that covers quite a lot of the bases of canon and not canon, Paradox Space, Hiveswap, Homestuck, Fanfiction, Friendsims (and I wouldn’t be passed saying probably these epilogues as well)

Doc Scratch.

And Doc Scratch is pretty much a parallel of villainy of Lord English

Because where Lord English seems to physically embody certain characters, Doc Scratch seems to mentally embody them.

Caliborn, Equius, Gamzee and Dirk.

and with all this talk of Ultimate Selves already happening, what happens when one small part of your ultimate self is tainted by this kind of existence? This being, this apparent ultimate villain, tainted by villainous desires, something you know should be rejected

Do you embrace it fully, and see no difference between this being and yourself, internally incorporating it into your ultimate self (Caliborn)

Do you submit that part of yourself to it? Essentially, “giving up” that part of yourself, excizing that slice of your ultimate self as “someone else’s ultimate self” and therefore cutting off it’s influence “Here have it, it’s yours if you want it”? (Equius)

Does your Soul get torn through it’s middle, split like a broken piece of glass? Half on one side, half on the other. A mirthful broken pair of ultimates. Dissociated from eachother enough to be considered seperate yet two halves of the whole, inseperable yet divided. (Gamzee)

Or do you allow “yourself” to be entirely overwritten by the other? Does one bad apple spoil the bunch? Does it infest and infect, slowly, piece by piece, cell by cell, like a virus spreading, changing, overlapping, until everything that was You, your ultimate self, your essential Being, is no longer what is was.

Will your Heart be Broken Dirk?

You make jokes about cutting pieces off yourself before it’s too late, like it’s the only solution. That piece of you is gone, it’s rotting, and it’s spreading fast.

But you need someone else to do it for you now. Somehow, right now, you’re not building up the resolve to cut off your own head like you might have done before. Have their insidious roots taken hold in you that deeply?

Destroy “Yourself” or be Destroyed by Yourself Dirk

But I guess it’s different when you’re just cutting off a piece of flesh representing “you”

Are you more hesitant to cultivate or destroy your ultimate self itself? To suddenly force yourself to decide what kind of person you are? How does a computer program itself while it’s running?

Ignorant of that fact that everyone is constantly doing that to themselves all the time with the choices they make, what they choose to do, or the kinds of people they decide to be?

People decide who they ultimately are with their own choices, they may not have access to directly fiddle with their ultimate selves as if it were a physical being under a microscope, but what most people do or what Dirk has the ability to do are functionally identical. He’s just overthinking it and getting too caught up in the pretentious philosophy of it all

#Homestuck #Meat or Candy #Epilogues #UPD8 #Dirk Strider

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talkagency · 5 years ago

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SEO TIPS FOR YOUTUBE MARKETING 2019

YouTube is huge. Understanding YouTube’s algorithm is crucial for success.

70% of the time people spend watching videos is the result of clever AI-driven recommendations.

Google’s YouTube algorithm differs quite a bit from their search engine algorithm, which is something that marketers need to acknowledge if they want to create YouTube video content that will do well.

https://www.talkagency.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Youtube-Marketing.mp4

It is often said that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine.

People don’t just watch YouTube videos for entertainment.

There are countless product reviews and educational videos on YouTube, and with good knowledge of the platform, you too could benefit from some extra exposure.

We’ve done the research so that you don’t have to.

Keep reading to learn more about the best SEO tips for YouTube marketing.

Find out everything you need to know about Google’s complex video platform today!

Don’t Ignore Metadata

Correct Metadata and user input is crucial for SEO on Youtube.

Although Google’s clever bots may be able to extract information even from videos that have no or very poor metadata; a video is much more likely to do well if accurate info about it is provided.

Every metadata field should be filled with the correct information.

A YouTube marketing campaign will have more chances to succeed if videos included have accurate and effective:

Titles

You should always try to include your target keyword in the video title, but make sure that you effectively grab your viewer’s attention too.

Clickbait is great on YouTube since the algorithm itself places more emphasis on recommendations than search results.

You want to intrigue people with your titles, but don’t try too hard—You don’t want them to click away as soon as the video loads!

Descriptions

Your description should use your keyword at least twice and be at least 250 words long.

It may sound like a lot (it probably is), but if you include a lot of information, YouTube will be able to recommend your video to audiences that are more likely to engage with it.

Introduce your topic and list the covered topics by adding timestamps next to them (users love those).

Try to use descriptions that relate to other relevant videos.

Doing so will make it easier for your video to turn up in the recommendations for those videos.

Tags

The meta keyword function for search engines may be defunct, but it still plays a big role in YouTube’s algorithm.

You should always include your primary keyword and other related topics in the tags section.

If you mention other videos or content creators, make sure you tag them too.

Thumbnails

Thumbnails are an art form.

Yeah, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but YouTube users do (and you do too, stop lying).

When you play the game of clicks, you either win or die trying.

Choose a picture that stands out and don’t forget to add a little bit (seriously, just a little bit!) of text to go along with it.

Many experts recommend that you include a human face to establish an emotional connection with your audience (plus everybody likes a pretty face).

Closed Captions

Yeah, yeah, transcription’s boring, especially if your video is long.

YouTube’s automated caption feature is getting better but is still not quite there.

To avoid any misinterpretations of your words, it’s always a good idea to provide YouTube with a full transcript (which you may already have anyway).

Include your primary keyword in your filename too and don’t forget to recommend your own playlists at the end of your video.

Consider Video Data

You may be wondering: What does the actual video have to do with SEO? Well, YouTube marketing and YouTube video SEO isn’t just about words.

Google actually analyses the video’s audio to generate automated transcripts, which means that just including your keywords in the metadata is not enough; you have to mention them in the video as well!

You don’t need to spell out the keywords or sound like a robot.

Don’t force anything but make sure you clearly state what the video is about; mention any relevant YouTube channel or video (for example, if you’re reacting or responding to something) to help appear in their video recommendations.

Google’s Cloud Video Intelligence API can identify objects in a video. YouTube can easily tell what the video is about using advanced machine learning technology.

Use this to your advantage: include images, videos and visuals that directly (or indirectly) reference your keywords.

For example, if you’re talking about YouTube marketing, it might be a good idea to actually include some relevant footage of YouTube promotional videos.

We’re still not sure about the actual function of the API (and whether it’s as accurate as Google claims it is), but it’s always good to be prepared for the future.

Encourage Engagement

We may not be able to control what users do, but we can begin to understand how the recommendation engine works and how user data affects it.

User data is divided into two distinct categories:

Explicit user data refers to data that’s based on users’ immediate actions (e.g. liking a video or subscribing to a channel, sharing a video on social media).

Implicit user data refers to data that’s the result of users watching or interacting with videos (e.g. watch time, whether the video was skipped or how many times it was paused).

As a content creator, you can encourage explicit interactions but make sure you don’t go overboard. You can remind people to like your video and subscribe to your channel at the end of the video, but that’s probably enough.

Receiving likes and subscribers is great but audience retention is probably more important. YouTube loves videos that people want to keep watching.

Your video may have thousands of views, but if it has a retention rate of 10%, YouTube will not want to recommend it to other users.

The first few seconds are the most important, so make sure you hook your viewer with interesting visuals.

You could perhaps offer a short preview of something interesting that is said or done midway through.

Make sure you make use of Google’s own audience retention report.

It will tell you exactly when people got bored and started clicking away and you can use that information to see exactly what you’re doing wrong (and what you’re doing right).

Understand Co-Visitation

YouTube’s recommendation engine attempts to map videos to sets of other ‘similar’ videos.

Google explains that similar doesn’t always equal relevant.

The recommendation engine promotes videos that it thinks the user is more likely to watch and enjoy, rather than just promoting videos with similar content.

Google calls this technique ‘co-visitation.’ Co-visitation is a method used to identify and calculate the relatedness of pairs of videos watched in a given session (usually 24 hours).

If a user watches a video whose co-visitation count with another video is high, YouTube will likely recommend that they watch the second video as well.

What does all that mean for you? Well, if you want your video to appear on people’s recommendations, then you need to create links with other relevant videos that you think your viewers may have recently watched.

How do you do that?

Target specific keywords that are related to a certain video or group of videos.

Create videos that target a specific channel or YouTuber.

Include links of your other videos and encourage your viewers to watch them.

Create and publish response videos as fast as possible.

Collaborate with other content creators to exchange traffic and establish strong links between your channels.

Rank High

Co-visitation and a high relatedness score are important but ultimately, your video’s ranking is determined by other factors.

To set up a successful YouTube marketing campaign, you’ll need to focus on video quality, user specificity and diversification: YouTube’s holy trinity.

Video Quality

In turn, a video’s quality is determined based on:

Like/ dislike ratio

Views

Number of comments which indicates engagement

Sharing

Favouriting

User Specificity

YouTube rewards and boosts videos that are a good match based on the user’s viewing history.

It’s basically a relatedness score that takes into account the user’s viewing history, rather than just calculating co-visitation counts with other videos on the platform as a whole.

Diversity

If you want to rank high, you’ll have to provide users with fresh and meaningful content.

YouTube marketing is like any other form of marketing in that originality and creativity are always valued highly.

Don’t be afraid to think out of the box or to try out new things.

Bonus Tips & YouTube Infographic

Always include a clear CTA in both the actual video and the description. May sound obvious, but you need to make sure people know where to go if they’re interested in what you’ve got. Don’t just assume they’ll click on your links or use Google search to find your website.

Don’t try too hard. This is true for all video content, but such a crucial piece of advice with regards to YouTube Marketing. Promote your product in a clever and sophisticated way. You don’t want your promotion to sound like an ad. People don’t go on YouTube to watch ads.

Your videos shouldn’t be too long (but not too short either). For maximum engagement, you should aim for the ten-minute mark. Shorter videos can bring traffic too but videos that are too short may be filtered out by YouTube’s algorithm as low-value content (YouTube wants you to pay to create short video ads and advertise your products on the platform that way instead).

That’s all we got for today!

If you’re looking for more SEO tips to help you rank higher, make sure you check out our Simple Google Ranking Guide for 2019!

Article first published here: SEO TIPS FOR YOUTUBE MARKETING 2019

#seo #internet marketing

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bootlegdharma · 6 years ago

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Navigating Flirtations and Loneliness without Facebook

Around the Philz Coffee in Rockridge, I encountered a cute beary guy ... I think we were flirting with each other, but it is not entirely clear to me now, except in retrospect as the “Yes” ...

...it is strange to lean into this “yes”, only insofar as I am allowing a sense of my own emerging embodiment, having played with Yumi + (bootlegged) Vajrayana envisionment, to really inhabit the sensitivity to attractions, that is as much about my own libidinal stuff as it is about an energetic attunement to the principle of magnetism, in that intuitive witchey sense, between peoples, between ideas, ideologies, in terms of crowds and spaces, etc. etc.

...and also between me and this cute beary man in the red shirt.

The sense in my self also as I was sensitive to my own gender presentation (non-binary femme, but visibly ‘male’, and potentially just ‘pretty-boy’-ish or flamboyant-pretty?)...

In allowing for this sensitivity, which is also non-binary with my own attraction to this man, I could feel the dance between us, and not rush to escape it with facebook, as I might ordinarily once have, where there is more clear dopaminergic feedback about whether one’s person/presence is being seen, noted, or affirmed, and where the affect of being in dialogical connection is immediately more clear (e.g. when people quite quickly respond to my posts with “Likes” and “Comments”, etc.)

So, in the meanwhile... I am learning new social skills (learning how atrophied mine are, as both a generational thing, as well as a post-colonising habit, and one that has been conditioned by the disembodied poetics of online socialising through Facebook (which breeds a subtle-body, for me and over the long term, of angst-insecurity, even as it also provides tentative short-term respite from the very same...)

***

Before I even got to Philz, I had just finished a nap at my brother’s place, and then gone out for a walk to feel the body as a Body in Time/Space, and was noting the immensity of Loneliness as an affect... I called my friend Greg and spoke to him on the phone, and realised more and more how much I need, sometimes, to just pick up and call, and not rely on Facebook as my source of social life, given that it is mostly nutritionally vacuous sugared candy-cone of communal inter-activity.

By asking myself about the quality of the life I’ve been living, assessing the overall sense of purpose, depth, meaningness, and compassionate contribution of this life as it has involved and been significantly made/re-made via social media... It becomes ever clearer to me how Facebook has played a role in becoming increasingly lazy about friendship... substituting interactive one-on-one, non-performative vocal contact with distracted insta-messaged/newsfed dilutions...

...I am learning to pick up the phone again.

This loneliness, after all, was no longer anything I could immediately scratch away with the affirmations of Facebook. This is again, not to deny the value of the scratch (nor indeed am I making any comment about whether some scratched may well lead to longer term relief...), only to affirm the value of also attending directly to bodies-in-space, and the whole mandala of my immediate environs as also containing its implicit network-opportunities, through perhaps my ability, maybe, next time, to approach someone and just say more directly,

“Hello... You look like someone I’d like to say hello to.”

or, as my brother’s partner also put it, “Hello... You look like someone I’ve just said hello to.”

That future could’ve-been me is so cute.

#World #Facebook #Deleted #Social Media #LifeWithoutFacebook #Buddhism #Phone #Telephone #Hello #Loneliness #Flirtation #Oakland

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juniperpublishers-agriculture · 3 years ago

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Are Cross-National Empirical Studies of Sustainability, Agriculture and the Environment Cumulating Forward or Erring in an About Face?- Juniper Publishers

I have had the privilege of being a senior (or “full”) professor since 1991, who has served as a department head at three different universities and edited, guest edited, or associate edited nine journals in sociology, agriculture, political and military sociology, statistics, food, and technology. I recently found that in the last two years I have been cited by about 1200 scholars in over 80 countries, in about 50 different subject areas. Broadened scholarly communication networks have given all of us a greatly expanded opportunity to consider the theories and methodologies adopted by authors from around the world and across a considerable number of disciplines. Regrettably, while we, as members of a curious time, have been given the potential opportunity for tremendous increases in output or scholarly “yield,” I am afraid the quality of theory and methodological applications have been waylaid, and cumulative knowledge in cross-national, quantitative research has been compromised. As an illustration, a lead corporation in the “citations business” notified me recently that there are over 7,000 published articles on the Kuznet’s curve, sustainability (including industrial agriculture) and environmental damage, written disproportionately by authors in the developing world examining their own countries. Recall the hypothesis: Economic growth creates ever more environmental damage through carbon production and agricultural toxins, among other related causes, until a nation becomes sufficiently wealthy that technology and environmental awareness turn the slope of the environmental damage curve around. I gave up after reading 10 sampled articles on the Kuznet’s curve, again drawn primarily from a sample of developing country authors. The obvious question is why all these researchers would be checking on the validity of this hypothesis for their own country and others like it, which are not wealthy now, nor will they likely be close to being “rich” in the foreseeable future. Perhaps the authors never read the original theory on this dynamic, which requires the national attainment of substantial wealth, commonly measured by GNP/c.

A general goal of scientific inquiry is to accumulate knowledge for its own sake and for it to be applied to societal problematics so that the quality of global life may be sustained and improved upon. An initial step in the pursuit of scientific knowledge is to conceptualize the “order of things” (from Foucault). This requires care in the identification and definition of concepts such as “sustainability,” “ecological footprint” and the nature of each of their “causes.” Errors here are fundamental, and, unfortunately, frequent. I will not mention the specifics of the 10 articles I have just read. I will focus instead on a well-cited study by US authors (hereafter XYZ) that have a substantial and well-deserved readership, but one of their most respected articles reports some questionable procedures that serve as a counter example of the optimal conduct of inquiry. The article appeared in the American Sociological Review (ASR), and investigated the empirical veracity of different theorizations about “sustainability,” or perhaps the “ecological footprint.” It is very difficult to discern which of these concepts the authors intended to address. While the footprint and sustainability are very different concepts, they are used interchangeably throughout the XYZ article. Sustainability is accurately captured by the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations in 1987 (Our Common Future). There are three sustainability forms and only one of them directly reflects an environmental dynamic. Further discussion of the construction of the ecological footprint concept is provided in the pioneering work of Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees. Both of these conceptualizations were available long before the XYZ article was printed by the ASR. As an early step in the research process, exacting conceptualization is a requisite and it is hoped that researchers in developing and developed countries alike adopt this conventional procedure.

With regard to causes of the ecological footprint (and not, of course, social, economic, and environmental “sustainability”) one key causal force introduced in the ASR article is inspired by worldsystem theory (Wallerstein; see also Portes, Chase-Dunn and Snyder and Kick). The theory posits nations’ different positions in the world system determine variations in their internal attributes. For instance, national dominance in international trade, military power, cultural dominance, and political surveillance, the multiple networks as used by Snyder and Kick, have been shown to affect everything from national economic growth and inequality to food insecurity and environmental degradation. To my amazement, the XYZ paper chose “foreign debt” to conceptualize and measure world-system position, instead of the multiple international linkages measure empirically derived by Snyder and Kick, which is the industry standard. It has been cited and used frequently in this type of situation (Snyder and Kick; Kick et al.,). Unsurprisingly, debt was found to have no impact whatsoever on the ecological footprint (sustainability?) variable by XYZ. However, the Snyder and Kick selection, or a more recent proxy of it, have been found to be causally associated with a variety of outcomes, including a number of environmental ones, such as the ecological footprint. XYZ recognize this frailty in the appropriate choice of the independent variable in their footnote 17, introducing Snyder and Kick’s alternative at some length, but they never explain WHY they chose the conceptually inferior “debt” variable in the first place. Again, the lesson is exacting conceptualization.

After exacting conceptualization, “measurement” or variable construction from concepts is the next critical step for crossnational researchers in this area. Yes, I know it is tedious to check each of the possible data values. The lesson for researchers is to make absolutely certain there are no out-of-range or anomalous scores in the data array of all the variables in the data. Ask, is every value in this range reasonable? Some will remember that a number of years ago a researcher presented blockbuster findings that started a theoretical sea change in an important area of sociological research. Fortunately for many of my colleagues, who felt the blockbuster findings had led to the premature end of their careers, one of my colleagues in graduate school at Indiana University, Dr. Glenn Firebaugh, then at Vanderbilt, was unable to replicate the blockbuster findings. However, when he purposively left missing value cases out of the analysis, the results changed dramatically. It seemed that Blockbuster’s program inadvertently kept the cases in the analysis even with missing values of -9. That was the reason Blockbuster’s findings were so anomalous! When reproduced with “missing cases” in the analysis, Firebaugh reproduced Blockbuster’ results, and when he took the missing cases and scores out of the data he found that Blockbuster’s results were grossly off the mark—a seemingly small but momentous mistake. Normal science could resume without fear dominant interpretations were inaccurate. It is just conjecture, but what would have happened if Firebaugh had not caught the mistake or had not attended a demanding graduate department that made all of us hand calculate solutions to factor and regression analyses?

In some of the papers I have read in cross-national research the sample is not large enough to generalize to the population. There are 195 countries in the world, and a sample of 40 of them (which was the case base in one of the papers I examined recently is not adequate to generalize to that population of 195. As an analogue, it is laughable that the quantitative scores my students assign to me every semester are actually a reflection of the population of students in my class. If your class is sized 25, a sample of 12 students (a fairly typical “response rate”) will not be large enough to generalize to the class population. In fact, you need all 25. Similarly for 50 students, where the population and sample size must be close in size for the mean scores given each item to be meaningful. In all likelihood your department Head will be using an unrepresentative sample size in reaching his or her conclusions about your teaching and that of your colleagues! Check to see—your teaching results may not be generalizable due to the sample size, and this may be true every semester you have been evaluated. For me that would be around 100 semesters. Apart from that, in cross-national research determine what population you are generalizing to—any “country” even if it is owned by another (such as Tasmania)? Is your cut-off a population size of 500,000 or more? Are you using “countries,” “nations,” “states,” or ‘nation-states” as both your population and sample? The lesson pertains to sample sizes and issues of conceptualization as well. Researchers often use these concepts interchangeably, much to the confusion of the readership.

I feel cheated as a reviewer or reader of a manuscript if the authors do not offer a correlation matrix showing bivariate statistical associations among all their dependent and independent variables, as well as the relevant summary statistics (means, standard variations among all variables and the residuals). Just as some newsreaders immediately go to the sports section, the frontpage headlines, or the comics when they open a newspaper, I go to the correlations matrix, means and standard deviations, and then, the abstract in the manuscript. Any correlation of .80 or greater among the pool of regressors (independent variables) is suspect and immediately draws my attention. If several correlations of this magnitude are found, there is a probability of multicollinearity, which will affect the inferences reached in the article. In the broad scholarly area of national development, when so many indicators of development or modernization are candidates for use as independent (or dependent) variables, there is a good chance that any two variables a researcher picks will be highly correlated with one another. Different software programs offer different tests for multicollinearity, but you can be sure you have this problem if any of the beta coefficients (not Bs) in your results are greater than 1.00 or greater negative than -1.00. Researchers from the discipline of economics commonly report what I refer to as “impossible metrics” (“‘beta,” “standardized”) coefficients of 2 or 3. I encourage strict tests for muticollinearity in lieu of tests that deviate from the conventional, and are not thickly explained (e.g., XYZ). I admit sympathetic reviewers and editors may pass favorably on manuscripts that are riddled with errors for many reasons, including the “halo effect” of a theory, an author set, or both (Merton). However, to aid cumulative science I would strongly suggest cross-national quantitative researchers report: 1. means, 2.standard deviations (realizing their importance in ratio form in the error term), 3.correlation matrices, 4.unstandardized and standardized coefficients, 5.the countries used in the analysis (and why they were retained), 6.the countries dismissed from analysis (and why they were dismissed), and 7. recognize the problems with regressors that are redundant with one another. When multicollinearity is present, coefficients can swing wildly, are very sensitive to small changes in the model, and one may not be able to trust the p-values used to identify independent variables that are statistically significant. As just one example, you may find a beta coefficient that is moderately high in magnitude but is not statistically significant, or variables that seemingly have switched signs compared with the results in the correlation matrix, or redundant variables that appear to push each other in different directions (one toward stronger and positive, and the other toward the negative). These signals become rather transparent in data researchers have worked with for 40 years, but even then the strict usage of multicollinearity tests in the software program are recommended.

I have focused on XYZ in part because they note, in reference to the standard test for multicollinearity (the VIF), that the VIF score they achieved of 8.55 suggests to them “problems with multicollinearity are not dramatic.” I have seen blogs that mention 10 as the absolute cutoff point. On the other hand I have seen even more statistics textbooks or journal articles that argue for a value of 2 or 4 (Hair et al). For the sake of advancing cumulative research I suggest in well-established areas such as sustainability or the ecological footprint that, all else equal, we adopt more rigorous standards. In completely unexplored areas we should accept relatively higher VIF levels and less demanding levels of statistical significance for the testing of coefficients. There has been a notable change in this research area in the last two decades or more of reporting B (unstandardized) coefficients instead of beta (standardized) coefficients and also the deletion of correlation matrices. There may be an excellent reason for this such as greater interest in the application of results to public policy, and less interest in adjudicating competing theories. However, in the absence of betas, descriptive statistics and correlation coefficients, it becomes more difficult without built-in tests in the software to detect problems with multicollinearity.. The VIF remains, but it is apparent that test levels are unacceptably controversial. For the sake, once again, of cumulative knowledge, I think it best that we report all the statistics mentioned above, and in their conventional as well as contemporary forms. In fact, for the sake of positive movement in science, I request that all Editors require the routine publication of both Bs and betas as well as means, standard deviations, and correlations for all crossnational multiple regression studies. If Editors themselves do not begin requiring these in the immediate future, I hope the norms of science empower reviewers and researchers to do so. When we know why the cumulative body of research on one question is huge but inconclusive, we had better begin considering the methodological choices of the body of researchers in the area.

It would be possible to continue itemizing a number of other concerns in cross-national analyses. Some suggested topics include heteroscedasticity (residuals vary with the magnitudes of regressors), time-series (evaluation of X and Y over time, with other regressors placed in the error term), identifying and analyzing outlying cases (cases lying far off the best fitted line that, if not eliminated ,will pull the line in their direction), proper identification of models, use of network analyses to identify a unit’s position among other units, skewed distributions, log transformations, autocorrelation, dummy and proxy variables, type I and type II errors, Poisson regression and count data, instrumental variables in reciprocal causation, and so on.

Here we have just discussed some of the more pernicious conditions that cause research to stumble, often fall backwards, and fail to cumulate knowledge in both the short and longerruns. These are not the more dramatic events Kuhn has treated so famously in his discussion of anomalies, revolutionary science, and paradigmatic changes. Unfortunately, the errors considered here, if they are repeated into the future, may instead culminate in another 7,000 studies of the same phenomenon, which fail despite their abundance to converge on the same empirical understandings.

Some Reasons Why Cross-National Empirical Studies of Sustainability, Agriculture and the Environment May Not be Cumulating Forward, But Instead Erring in an About Face *

*I wish to thank Drs. Thomas Burns, Jeffrey Kentor, and Andrew Jorgenson for past discussions of the issues appearing in this manuscript. They are not in any way responsible for the content of the current manuscript. This work was supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Hatch projects 1002045.

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Will The Last of Us PS5 Remake Change the Game’s Story?

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An otherwise quiet week for gaming was rocked by a Bloomberg report that reveals, among other things, that a shift in the PlayStation team’s creative direction may have left Naughty Dog working on a PS5 remake of The Last of Us.

I highly recommend reading that report if you haven’t already as it sheds some light on Sony’s long-term plans and has already triggered a heated debate over the changing nature of the Triple-A video game industry. For now, though, let’s focus on that rumored remake of The Last of Us and try to answer the question “Why would Naughty Dog be interested in remaking that game?”

As that report reveals, the most likely answer to that question is “money,” but what’s really interesting is that the report seems to strongly suggest that the project is being referred to as a remake rather than a remaster. That distinction could be significant, as modern video game remakes tend to be major investments on-par with a new Triple-A title. If pressed to guess, I’d suspect that Sony wouldn’t continue with this project if they weren’t sure this remake was going to inspire people to buy the game for the first time or, more importantly, yet again. It will certainly feature better graphics, it will certainly feature PS5 controller integration, but if we’re talking about a modern remake, then there’s a good chance the project may even alter the original game in other notable ways.

On the surface, it would seem that The Last of Us‘ story should be untouchable in any remake. The Last of Us is defined by its story which many consider one of the best in video game history. Even if there are some who don’t consider it to be so sacred, the fact that we just played The Last of Us Part 2, which obviously follows in the footsteps of that story, would seemingly eliminate any chance that Naughty Dog would ever drastically alter the original game’s plot.

The thing you have to consider, though, is that the remake may not have to significantly alter that story to fundamentally change it in ways that will at least be perceived as “major” by many fans. It’s when you start looking at it from that perspective that you start to see how tempting making minor changes might be.

First off, you’ve got to consider that this remake will almost certainly be released alongside (or close to) the debut of The Last of Us HBO series. We’ve already learned that the HBO series will deviate from the original game through new sequences, dialog differences, and all of the other changes you might expect when you’re taking a story from one medium to another.

While it’s unlikely a remake would change the original story in such a way that directly follows the events of the series, you certainly see where there’s room (and maybe even a bit of temptation) for the remake to feature a few new sequences, a couple of dialog changes, or even just a handful of little things designed to catch those familiar with the game off-guard.

It could all be relatively harmless, but when you’re talking about a story that many consider pitch-perfect, any change to any of those beats or any additional scenes that potentially interrupt the flow of the narrative could end up being significantly more impactful than they’d otherwise be. Even just a change in tone or delivery that affects how we perceive a character’s intentions could greatly impact how we read the events of the first game and how those events impact the second title (and any future installments).

That’s the other thing about this remake. To be blunt, the reactions to The Last of Us Part 2 show that there are some fans of the original game who have an interpretation of that game’s events that don’t necessarily gel with what happened in the sequel. Those differences fueled one of the most heated debates over a game’s plot in years. As those vocal (and sadly sometimes hostile) detractors point out, The Last of Us‘ ambiguous ending did suggest a few different paths forward and whichever one Naughty Dog committed to was almost always going to upset those who read the final moments of the game and the implications of what came next a bit differently.

On some level, Naughty Dog must be tempted to alter The Last of Us‘ most meaningful moments in perhaps minor ways that more clearly lead into what eventually happens. If that proves to be the case, there will always be questions regarding whether or not those changes were made as a kind of attempt to bring everyone “on board” and eliminate any confusion over what direction this story is going in and how the events of the first game should be interpreted. We already saw hints of that in the sequel, and those hints were not taken well by some fans.

There is certainly a section of The Last of Us‘ fanbase that makes unreasonable and simply hateful demands in regards to the game’s story and content, but as the Star Wars re-releases showed us, any differences can result in lasting blowback due to the general agreement that once a popular piece of entertainment has entered the public consciousness, it’s pretty hard to justify changing it in even well-meaning ways without doing some kind of damage.

We’ll see when (and if) we get a PS5 remake of The Last of Us and just how different it proves to be. One thing that’s becoming increasingly clear, though, is that The Last of Us is becoming a contentious series and that the implications of this remake and how it represents Sony’s apparent change in creative direction will make its very existence more contentious than it already would have been.

That leaves the team working on this remake in the unfortunate position of producing a pretty “by the books” remake of The Last of Us and needing to answer questions over why this project got funded over new properties or changing the game in more noticeable ways and having to deal with the fallout from those who feel that any changes to The Last of Us are inherently unjustified.

Games like Demon Souls‘ and even the upcoming Diablo 2: Resurrected show that you can remake great games and do justice to them while bringing them into a new era. However, the circumstances surrounding The Last of Us‘ reported PS5 remake remind us that the conversation over the cultural and industrial value of these remakes may never go away no matter how good remakes become.

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kalico-to-the-letter · 7 years ago

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REVIEW: RWBY – Vol. 5, Ch. 14: “HAVEN’S FATE”

The end is here.

This week gave us: Winning, family therapy, losing, and team bonding.

Spoilers – you know they’ll be mad when you see Cinder looking shocked.

In “Haven’s Fate”, RWBY wraps up its fifth season with a solid finale. There is enough here that makes it a very fine episode. The ending provides the battle-scars I am talking about, with all four of the RWBY girls finally coming back together and sharing a silent, meaningful embrace in reunion – truly, a moment of beauty. The plot is in no great hurry, with the antagonists dispatched and the fighting all but over. This episode is devoted mostly to wrapping up the ramifications of the previous one, and the pace is consistent throughout because of it.

For this finale, I find myself casting the mind back to the premiere of this season. That was not a particularly great episode; it had a specific set of goals it needed to fulfil, and it did so with a general level of competence. There was not a strong theme or hook to the premiere – it just was. And this finale feels similar, for the most part. It tries to have a hook, but heavy hands fumble it and we’re just left with a decent episode that perhaps could have been great.

Look, finales are always tricky. The chances of screwing them up are astronomical, but RWBY has a track record of decent endings under its belt. Volume 3’s finale was a standout piece of brilliance, while the others have all sat on a scale between good and very good – including this one.

I feel that a great season or series finale should carry the weight of the story that has preceded it, and magnify all those affected emotions – the weariness, the relief, the tension. We won’t be returning to this story or visiting the next part of the story anytime soon, so the cathartic feeling that we come away with should hang around for longer than it would after a typical episode.

There is ambition here, an attempt to deliver this feeling at its utmost. The episode tries to push the Yang/Raven confrontation as the central story of the episode, taking the opportunity to flesh out something, anything, of Ravens’ character, while also encapsulating the breadth and depth of Yang’s growth over the years. And I certainly felt something when Yang finally got through to her mother.

But overall, the execution of this angle leaves something to be desired. It gets plenty of time, but as has always been the case with Raven, there’s a hollowness to it all. It’s a shame, too, because this is the first time that we’ve see Raven truly open up and display her full range of emotions. By the end, she realises that Yang has turned her own words against her, stretched her philosophy to the point of contradiction, and, importantly, she’s letting her pain show. For a moment, one gets the sense that she truly regrets not having been there for her daughter, and when she actually starts crying, she wishes that she had the emotional strength to trade places with Yang, to take the physical and symbolic burden of that Relic upon her own shoulders.

Yeah, something doesn’t click here.

This sudden vulnerability from Raven is clearly supposed to be a surprise. But the surprise is a misplaced one – Raven has given us nothing this season, and I mean that. Her character has been a consistent letdown this season, and this episode tries to reverse that. Sure, one could say that everything until now has been a mask (beneath the actual mask, if you will), and she only ever kept it on to keep her focused – and that Yang’s constant reappearances in her life have been destabilising for her – but no. In the course of her story in this finale alone, Raven’s emotions flit all over the spectrum. And while they provide some insight into her honest feelings, this just feels too late. Before, she was bland. But this performance has rendered her formless to the point of my own frustration. It’s impossible for me to fully invest in her emotions in this episode, because everything that came before it seemed so determined to mute all traces of her personality.

Her story needed heft, and for the seeds of her inner turmoil to be glimpsed and foreshadowed properly. Simply flicking the switch because the moment requires it isn’t enough.

At least Yang is there to salvage it. All I can say is that she has emerged from her trauma-coloured obscurity in Volume 4 to become a real boss in Volume 5. Seeing her emerge from the Vault in this finale just nailed down how important she has become to the fabric of the show. And she’s not the only one – Blake had rough patches in Menagerie, but ultimately has come out of it looking super strong, and like a proper hero as far as her people are concerned. Weiss was quickly relegated to being on the edges of everything this season, but still managed to be an absolute show-stealer almost anytime she was around. With Atlas all but stated to be a focal point of Volume 6, expect her and her family drama to return to the forefront of the story.

Only Ruby didn’t end up doing much, and that’s something that will hopefully be taken into account for Volume 6. She doesn’t need to claim her prophesied mantle now, but it’s imperative that she takes quicker steps toward it from here on out.

These main characters have shown tremendous growth in their two-year separation, and now that they have finally come back together, the anticipation now lies in seeing how that individual growth affects the function of the team as their next set of challenges approach.

Additional Observations:

- Hopefully, what we saw from Raven in this episode is a prototype for her future. She seemingly took Yang’s words to heart before fleeing in shame, so perhaps all of this will prompt an actual character evolution for her.

- Hah! They did the “Checkmate” thing again!

- I’m sure I said weeks ago that Raven’s little Relic Insurance Gambit didn’t make a whole lot of sense. She said back then that she wanted the relic to buy free reign for her tribe, even though it made more sense that Raven would just hunt her down for it. Odd that someone as clever as her would not have been aware of this possibility. (Or more likely a logic gap in the writing.)

- At last, Leo took his final L. The rest of the the antagonists are living to take another. Except Cinder. Who knows when next we’ll see her? Her quest for ultimate megalomania and revenge was thwarted rather soundly, after all.

- Emerald’s Salem illusion was mad. Not as terrifying as the first glimpse of the Nuckelavee from last season, but hey, scary is scary as far as I’m concerned.

- I like Sun nudging Blake towards her former teammates. Also, Blake and Yang shared a number of looks in this episode which should be criminalised for directly hurting my heart. Also also, Weiss was the first to open her arms to Blake for the group hug. Chill.

Grade: B+

Final Thoughts: “Haven’s Fate” is a very good episode for RWBY to close out Volume 5. It provides the necessary closure to the season’s events, whilst allowing respite for the vanquished antagonists, suggesting that the road for the triumphant heroes may yet climb a few notches in difficulty next time around. Yang and Blake are stars of the episode, both separately and, briefly, with each other. Raven continues to be a troublesome character to invest in despite sharing an emotional scene with Yang, which hurts the episode.

It is quite fitting that the reunion of the complete Team RWBY is, first and foremost, a healing moment – before they even get into the stories of how this even came to pass, these young women can, without a word, share their pain and joy with each other, and understand it. This enduring feeling and image is a fine way to end this chapter of the story.

Final Thoughts on Volume 5:

If Volume 4 was a muted and experimental indie film, then Volume 5 was a reprise of original programming – the big-budget action-drama in the multiplex.

This season was certainly not consistent. Much of it was a great episode being followed up by a weaker effort, and following that pattern week-by-week. There was very little hesitation in gambling with episode direction – sometimes this paid off, like making an episode all about Blake or the antagonists, and sometimes it didn’t, like making an episode all about the dry Menagerie politics and Raven’s grating dullness. Nonetheless, this season was not one that lacked for ambition and intent, and I appreciate the continued willingness to take these stories in bold directions, even if it doesn’t always work out.

Ultimately, I would say that this has been a very good season. Team RWBY is back, and it feels like we’re getting started again.. – Kallie

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