#miss me with that reddit-tier argumentation!

[beatle-07]

My slightly controversial hxh opinion is that describing the serie as a deconstruction of shonen tropes is possibly the worst way to praise it.

Not only is it not very true and shows a lack a knowledge/interest in shonen mangas, but it's also a very "bottom of the barrel" type of praise. Playing with expectations and tropes is just something that is expected from a good writer, there is nothing special about it and only people who had their brain a bit rotten by too many bad animes will find it a compeling argument (which is very normal and ok if you are a teenager).

I will always die on the hill that the best way to defend hxh is to praise its character writting, it's truly what sets it apart from other series imo. It does sound way less cool as an argument though lol.

[lord-pigeon]

The thing you're not getting about why genshin is worse is because events are not meant to be the primary source of quartz in fgo. It comes from your weekly log in, live streams, 50 day ten pull, ascending servants to their second last ascension, story quests, free quests and the ten quartz you get from doing ten of them, rank up and interludes and the quartz you also get for doing ten of those, and special occasions like anniversary and new year. If you do ten rank ups you get a ten pull and you can do this in maybe an hour or two, now try grinding a ten pull in genshin. It'll be a lot more time investing and taxing considering you're just pressing buttons in fate. Also genshin's odds are just lower and it bleeds whales way harder by making constellations do more than just damage and they make modern 4 stars suck without them. Yes genshin has a better pity but that isn't the be all end all, you need to get 5 copies to max a 5 star in fate where as genshin its 6 AND 5 copies of their weapons. I could keep going on about ways that it's worse all day long, especially when genshin has way more micro transactions and predatory practices like battlepasses and resin but take that fate is worse is utterly baffling tbh

Oh boy let's get into the math here because this is where the fun begins.

Don't get me wrong, I'll never defend Genshin's dogshit practices, but I have a personal grudge against FGO fans sucking on it when it's literally the bastard of the mainstream bunch. This argument is me pitting garbage against garbage to say which one is stinkier.

This gonna be long so I'm putting this under a cut:

Alright FGO dailies list (I'll use NA for FGO, since Genshin is a global server schedule):

Day 2=1 SQ, Day 4=1 SQ, Day 6=2 SQ and Day 7=Ticket (3 SQ equivalent)

Total: 7 SQ

Needed for a tenfold: 30 SQ

Weeks needed for a tenfold via Log-In alone: 4 weeks and 4 days. 32 days total.

It should be noted that if you miss a single day, it resets from the very start. You must log in no matter what. It might take but a few moments, but note, you have to.

Genshin dailies list:

10 Primos per Comm/action, total of 40, and a 20 Primo bonus for turning into Katherine

Total: 60 Primos

Needed for tenfold 1600 Primo

Weeks needed for a Log-In alone: 26 days total.

Genshin's big detriment is that while you never lose your place, you need to spend time on Commissions. It can be anywhere from 5-10 minutes, which is a bit of a serious timesink. It's a bit better with the Fontaine update but it's still a pain in the ass for those on the go.

Alright, but Lord, that's just raw Log-In, what about monthlies?

Monthlies are the same, since both give you 5 tickets/fates to use. Genshin is at the disadvantage here since you need to spend the stardust you get from summoning on it, but Fate also requires you to spend Mana Prisms. Fundamentally similar, it's just that Fate wins out by the small margin Mana Prisms are slightly easier to obtain.

What about pity?

Eat my ass, Fate's pity system just happened cause they were getting this ass beat monetarily and they gave up and did a base-tier QOL update. Six FUCKING years we waited for pity and its over 900 SQ??? ((330 pulls btw))

I saved a whole year and a half back for Musashi's inital release and I just barely had that shit. And that was events, dailies, so on and so forth. (I got her in three tickets so nobody come at me with the fact I'm just a bitter old bird who didn't get my cute girl.)

While there's the 50/50 mechanic with Genshin, that levels the idea of 180, and that's going to hard-hard pity. No matter what, you can, and will, at least get the character you want.

Now what if we include Weapon Banner, since people assume Weapons+Characters *must* go together rather than it just being BIS and disregarding the completely different game mechanics of turn-based FGO and action rpg Genshin (<bitter).

Weapon Hard Pity is 240 pulls. You get a Fate Point for 80 pulls if you don't get your directed weapon, and you get another one if you get screwed again. Two Fate Points guarantees the next 80 is what you want.

Now, that might equal 420 pulls, but there's a catch few people acknowledge: Soft Pity.

Genshin has a system that, the closer you get to that hard pity, the higher the rate goes up. Therefore, it's not often someone actually goes to the hard 80 or 90. I'm just using the hard numbers as a point.

FGO is a hard pity, nothing about the rates changes from Summon 1 to Summon 330. Plus no guarantee you actually even get something from those 330 pulls--at least in Genshin you get a Basic Banner character who has some measure of utility you can use to make progress.

Also FGO pity doesn't carry per banner, but Genshin's does, so if you get fucked over and wanna wait a few months, you have another shot instead of wasting all of it cause you got close but no cigar.

But what about upgrades? Constellations?

NP-bonuses are rather minor and not as key as say, Xiao C1 or Hu Tao C1, so FGO has the edge there. However, that leads me to the side point of:

Weapons.

Reasonably, everyone talks about how the 3-star weapons suck, yadda yadda. You get so many weapons from the game as welfare that are good and can be used by multiple characters. You don't need a 5-star weapon, just because you aren't hitting 300k a hit doesn't mean shit.

Genshin has a lot more versatility in team building than FGO tbh, since a lot of FGO's boils down to "Do you have Merlin/Skadi/Chen Gong/Waver/Tamamo/Castoria/Support Caster.png" that you can then use with any other character.

Not saying Genshin doesn't have that too with Qinqiu and Bennett, but due to the nature of Spiral Abyss, people have gotten smart about using others instead of just them cause it's a split up team system.

Citation: I didn't get a single 5-star Weapon until Year 2.5 of Genshin. Fun fact, I also didn't have a single DPS 5-star either (all I had since launch was Diluc and Venti), until fucking Cyno came out. I managed to play the game just fine.

Now in FGO NA, I was also there since Launch, and I didn't get my first SSR until the Solomon raids, in which I finally got Florence Nightingale. I was playing the game carried by Kiyohime, Salter, and throwing SQ at revives. And guides, christ, so many guides it made Arknights look elementary.

What about general SQ/Primo flow (the Anniversaries and whatnot mentioned)?

FGO, the year of 2023, had, according to a Reddit post which I can link if people want the source, is: 2571 SQ, tickets included.

This Reddit post involved Servant NP Ascension Quests, Events, Chunked Log-In Bonus, Live Streams, Bond Stuff, ect ect (also, stuff you can't do if you didn't roll them, the post was being generous with people getting what they rolled or had)

That is about 85.7 tenfolds. So, if you don't spend a penny and not miss a day of logging in, the average joe might get about 2, 3 hard pities on who they want. Presuming I'm doing the math right on that.

Genshin, in the year of 2022, had, according to another Reddit Post, roughly 100k Primogems.

That equals about 62.5 tenfolds, or over 620 Fates. Now, tossing that into the system with someone with the worst luck imaginable that wants a character, that's about the same amount of 3 to 4 guaranteed pities.

One might note that the numbers are about the same, and yeah, that checks. However, there's a lot of variables, such as Spiral Abyss for Genshin, and actually having the characters to do Interludes on.

Half-baked conclusion

FGO is a money sink, Genshin is a time sink. They both sink your serotonin. Nobody wins.

Look, I play both, I have grief with both, I have fond memories of both. I wouldn't have a stupid expensive Okada figurine sitting next to a custom Cyno plushie if I hated these games.

But they're gacha, they're both out for your money, it's just that one is just a raging cunt about the whole affair.

Reddit Post Citations:

[crystalelemental]

With the introduction of Ice Zone this month, we have officially done it.  All major types have a Zone.  Except for Normal.  Brace for anniversary, that's all I'm saying.  But with each type now having a Zone, and the introduction of these newfangled rebuffs...how are the types doing?

See, when I started playing, it was pretty well accepted that Fire, Water, and Psychic ruled the meta.   Electric wasn't too far behind, but didn't have the same powerhouses behind it.  As someone on Reddit so eloquently put it back when Second Anniversary pairs were being dunked on: "They don't feel underwhelming because they're bad, they feel underwhelming because they don't abuse field effects.  Every top meta threat has focused on application or abuse of field effects.  It shouldn't be a surprise that these new pairs don't feel as overwhelming when there's nothing to take advantage of." But now, that discrepancy is (mostly) over.  And are those types still top dogs?  Today, I will be going over the types, and how I feel they perform in the current meta.  This will include F2P tools, highest potential, and what I think is missing from the archetype.

18) Poison I mean...is anyone surprised?  The entire type lives and dies by the question "Did you pull Emma?"  Roxie getting an EX at least raises some hope, but I'll be honest, I don't anticipate much.  Their F2P pairs are really bad at damage, and even premium options tend to be a rough time. Their Zone setter, H!Iris, is by far the worst of the bunch, having virtually no utility unless 3/5, where she gets a really crappy debuff rate on a shit-tier move.  Poison is just depressing to think about.

17) Bug Though man, Bug is not far behind.  Here's a fun question: did you pull SC Emmet or SS Hilbert?  No?  Good luck with life, then.  Even Alder feels like a genuine struggle by comparison.  And to be frank, I don't consider SC Emmet that good either.  He's a clean sweep in CS, but in Gauntlet, I think I wind up benching him most times, even with long streaks.  The F2P crowd seems good, but Bugsy and Noland both come with a ton of issues, including "Oops I couldn't quite take out center on second sync, my bad!"  The general pool is also loaded with some of the worst.  Guzma sucks, Burgh isn't great, Lusamine's stupid frail. And of course, SC Ingo is a really bad Zone setter, focused entirely on physical and not doing much else for the team.  It has oddly solid supports in Aaron and Lodge Dawn, but like...Bug is not doing well. 

16) Normal Now to make the sincere argument that Normal, a type who lacks Zone and can never deal the same damage as any other type due to supereffective modifiers. Yet I stand by it.  Normal gets great utility.  SC Steven is absurd.  C!Red's SEUN application was downright unique before Jasmine sniped it from him.  Even among the commons, you get a lot of nice effects for checking Gauntlet gimmicks, ensuring they often get used.  That's more than I can say about Poison and Bug, frankly.  It's not a good position, but I think Normal as a type at least offers better value than the last two, thanks to its range of effects.

15) Flying Flying is so weird to me.  On the one hand, you have Lysandre, who is legitimately great after his expansion, and Kahili, who is one of the best F2P sync pairs for damage, backed by Skyla, one of the best F2P walls.  But on the other.  Anni Steven is the worst Master Fair.  All of the type's options tend to be weirdo gimmicks like P!Elesa.  Nate is there.  Flying has some of the lowest lows the game offers, and just a few standout performers.  Even its top competition often doesn't feel that exceptional.  Like I know intuitively that SS Ethan is strong, but he never quite feels that great in CS or in Gauntlet.

14) Fairy Perhaps another contentious one, given recent additions, but Fairy sucks ass bro.  How do you have three goddamn Zone setters and not one of them helps physical?  I know Rain has similar issues, but Calem at least tries.  I think the main problem is that no one actually fixes the issues present.  Diantha, SS Wally, and Bede are the only good damage dealers, but anything else?  Get out. Valerie got a shit grid, Mina's stats let her down, Lodge Lillie is great for Stall but needs EX to function as a competent syncer.  And there's like no general pool fairies.  Even at the top, NY!Lisia doesn't have a single good Zone setting partner, holding the type back way further than it needs to be. "But Sycamore-" always takes first sync and has serious issues with survival given how many Fairy-weak stages are physical.  Despite having like a billion options to choose from, Fairy still feels like one of the worst types, which is staggering.

13) Steel On the one hand.  Palentine's Marnie is a very good partner to the majority of the Steel type.  On the other.  Gauges are atrocious on literally everyone who isn't Molayne.  Like, why are gauges so hard to work with on this type?  And Marnie being so slow is the biggest problem, it doubles down on the worst aspect of the type.  I do think Steel has some decent if limited performers in the F2P pool, and Gloria popped off but only really takes off under certain conditions.  The type isn't exactly hurting, this is a fair break from the other types I think are just bad, but Steel does not feel like it's doing particularly well.

12) Ice I am going to make the bold declaration that Ice went from the worst type, to #12 overall, solely from Irida's inclusion.  Like, if it were just SS Silver, I think I'd still put this at the bottom.  But the Zone setter for this type went so hard that she's pulling Lorelei to off-type clears.  That is, to put it bluntly, insane.  The type went ballistic with Irida's presence.  But as we're soon to find out, it takes more than one good sync pair to save a type, and when Irida isn't in play, oh my god does this type suck.   It's the only weather to not have a competent support.  All of your damage dealers are bad.  Ghetsis has serious claim to the title of "Worst Legendary Pair," with people like me being entirely serious about Candice seeming better.  The type was in complete shambles, and Irida alone does not make it good.  Moreover, she helps the worst in the type, not the best, so Ice tends to not feel like a standout performer.

11) Ground Ground is blessed with Courtney, a general pool pair with Zone access.  This is unheard of.  She's literally the only one in the general pool with this effect. That's how bad Ground was.  But time has been good to the type, and has resulted in them getting much needed improvement.  SS Giovanni was a CS killer, Cynthia's expansions popped off, Maxie remains relevant, and Bertha and Courtney offered legitimately good general pool ground-type damage.  These are the traits that put it above Ice.   The trait that holds it back is that your F2P pairs are garbage.   Naomi's good, but she's limited F2P, so that's not counted. Hapu and Clay were like the only Ground types most players had in my day, and are still the only really accessible options.  And they are trash.  They are absolute trash.  Even with advances in the meta, they fail constantly.  Ground succeeds by virtue of being less pigeonholed into a single option to make the type function, but it's definitely not good.  I think it just needs a seriously good Lodge Striker in the type, and we'll call Ground much better.

10) Rock Rock is like Ice, if Ice had some competent independent performers.  The type lives and dies now by the good graces of SS Diantha, who is the only way to salvage SS Brock, Grant, and Kukui.  Again, you can't rely on one option, but thankfully it wasn't.  Olivia was a great CS striker with her absurd sync, and the triple premium options of C!Blue, Emmet, and SC Hilda carried well enough to work.  Rock wasn't as down and out as Ice was at its lowest point.  But it's also never really risen to fame.  There's not a great Rock-type solution.  Emmet relies entirely on Sandstorm, Blue is the awkward physical sync/special DPS, and SC Hilda's technically weaker than both but more consistent, if reliant on setup support for attack and speed.  They have options but nothing exceptional yet. Roxanne alt when?

9) Dragon Dragon has some of the better damage dealers in the game, so why am I being mean?  Because they're not that great.  Unless you are the combination of SS Brendan, Lucas, and SS Serena, Dragon is not doing so hot.   Lance's expansion was good but not Cynthia tier, and C!Iris is falling off really hard.  The bottom of the barrel picks are so bad as to be laughable (Sorry Iris and Clair, I love you but oh my god), and the free legendary pairs are awkward.  Cyrus has better Water damage than Dragon, and Zinniquaza has a lot of competing demands.  The type functions.  It does well enough, but truthfully I consider it like the exact middle of the road type.  Good enough that it's not struggling, but not so good it's standing out.

8) Fighting If Fighting succeeds at anything, it's having two exceptional Zone setters.  Fairy may have three, but they're all super limited.  Fighting is not so limited.  On the one hand, Aura Cynthia is perfect godwall that emphasizes DPS play on a type with a ton of high-DPS options.  On the other, NC Hop is fantastic debuffing potential and manual Zone, to let allies sync as needed.  These are insanely strong tools that give the type relevance.  Add to it, they have a standout performer in SC Diantha, who is so good that Cynthia not supporting her sync was considered a knock against Cynthia.  And among F2P options, Bruno is fairly competent.  But you'll note the issue.  Each side only has one competent actor to follow up.  A!Cynthia does not fully support the offensive buff needs of a pair like Brawly or Marshal.  Hop can take a different support, but he's the type of Zone setter that eclipses the significance of any possible partner, which I consider a detriment.  Why have other options if Hop is just better than all of them?  So Fighting exists in a space with some real standouts, but there are very few of them, and don't ask about the rest.

7) Ghost Oh yeah, Ghost type.  When I started, Anni Lillie was the big name.  Ghost was considered one of the worst types, just no competent damage dealers.  But when Lillie showed up, suddenly it was relevant.  And I feel like every step since has been trying to make everyone better so Lillie is worse.  Lillie had serious, notable limitations, and SS Korrina doesn't seem nearly as limited by comparison.  Fantina and Shauntal are exceptional damage dealers on a cheaper budget, and Agatha is one of the best technical supports with Sleep and tremendous gauge control.  Renegade Cynthia as their Zone setter could be better, but has a lot of beneficial tools for her type as well.  Even for support, BP Morty and Lodge Morty are some of the best F2P pairs you can grab, while SC Lillie is the most efficient Sp Atk/Crit buffer around. While there are still some pairs that really struggle, Ghost is a type significantly improved, with a lot of viable options that compete.

6) Electric Electric was the forgotten child when I started playing.  The three great types of Fire, Water, and Psychic had their field effects, and were known for crazy offensive potential because of them.  But Electric also had one, dangit!  Why weren't they as relevant?  Well, it's because N had some glaring setup and gauge issues, and Marnie was a Tech with relatively limited DPS.  Electric Terrain had no one to big up.  Nowadays, Electric has the best sync pair in the game with SST Red, and the highest DPS by miles in Ash.  So why isn't it top 5? Because its F2P game still sucks.  Marnie and N got huge improvements, but when you look outside of premium?  Elesa's fine but not exceptional.  Hau, Sophocles, Surge, and BP Surge are all atrocious.  Volkner's fairly poor as a terrain setter, Hau's Buddy move makes his terrain much worse off, and SST Red is so stupid good that partners are optional.  The lower class in this type suck and need help, and their help is not helping.  Electric is a type that, to this day, when I opt for more F2P budget runs, is the type I hate facing most.  The options outside of premium are just so bad.  It's like dying for a good Lodge striker.

5) Psychic At this point, I want to preface by saying I play a certain way, and pick favorites based on utility.  Among the Three Great Types, Psychic fell off the hardest in the damage meta.  You know it's bad when Lear, a sync pair nearly two years old, is still like the best sync nuker.  Electric decisively has stronger options.  But. Psychic's F2P and general pool game is immaculate, and while they're on longer top performers, premium pairs still put in exceptional work.  Moreover, you have the blessing of Lucian, the supreme general pool unit, Giovanni's insane power, and Mesprit as the best Master BP pair.  Psychic maintains relevance, but I feel like it's on the cusp of slipping really hard if it doesn't step up its game.  Yes, C!Bede as the best support in the game is a massive win for it, but what it's really looking for as a specific archetype is the Terrain Supporter.  It wants its SS Morty.  So far we're getting Bianca, who's fine but falling off; Anni May, who's alright but got a bad expansion; and SS Lana, who frankly just makes CS conditions more annoying by removing the option for Physical Damage Reduction 8.  I think the Terrain setters have, over time, been revealed to be really bad.  They're far more focused on damage than utility, and it's to the type's detriment.

4) Water When I started, Water was the de facto best type.  Archie ruled the meta with an iron fist, and having both Roxanne and May in his corner just made the whole situation perfect.  It's been two years since those days, and in a meta with NC Serena and SS Lysandre, why do I think Water fell from grace?   Well, a few reasons.  While Water has one of the highest potential ceilings for damage, and some really standout performers...its F2P game kinda sucks ass.  No, I'm sorry, we need to talk about this.  Unless you have EX Siebold, F2P Water is handled by Cyrus, a Dragon.  Your actual Water pairs are garbage.  Lodge Rosa and Lodge Silver are terrible at their jobs.  Lodge May struggles ridiculously to compete.  Barry has really difficult sync conditions to fulfill.  Crasher Wake needs the foe to be flinched which is a death sentence.  Water lives and dies by its premium fare, and while that includes many a busted damage dealer and one of the best supports to ever do it, their floor is quite low.   Moreover, three Rain supports, and not one of them perfectly helps SS Grimsley.  Poor dude.  Water has a lot of support behind it, so it's definitely in the upper echelon of types.  But I think time and an evolving meta has made Water less versatile.  It's all high DPS premium stuff while anything below that seems to struggle without SS Kris' presence.

3) Fire Fire, as one of the Three Great Types with Water and Psychic, succeeded based on having a field effect that was easily accessed.  Only four types did, but Fire was considered one of the best, due to the routine application of some of the dumbest DPS units available in SS Red and Leon.  Fire never let up on that particular gas, producing constant offensive powerhouses with fairly efficient self-setup.  The reason I think Fire adapted better than Water, however, is that Fire has SS Morty.  See, Fire figured something out.  Instead of raw DPS and pumping that higher, Morty offers the alternative: I've got enough firepower, what I need is survival.   And they hired someone immortal.  Fire feels more versatile than Water now, and better able to handle the nonsense that's thrown their way.  Moreover, every Fire type, barring like Flint I guess, benefits from Morty.  There are Water types that don't mesh with Kris.  But every Fire type that doesn't cap crit, handles offense well enough.  And if they don't (Leon), Eevee Lucas filled the gap.  Fire is just...consistent and efficient and flexible.  I think they got it all down pat.  But they also don't reach the same plateau that Water does.  There's no obscene damage comp like Dual Frogs + SS Lysandre.  SS May is great, but not as good as Dojo Gloria.  Water one-ups Fire's damage, but I think Fire just offers better utility.

2) Grass Grass types recently went ballistic.  SS Lyra was the first popping off.  Not only did they get Grassy Terrain to finally join the field effect meta, but Lyra's guaranteed flinch rate with easy quad queue made literally anything viable, without Lyra completely overshadowing her teammates offensively.  Grass had some odds and ends additions, including the incredibly fun SC Rosa, but largely kinda held back as a consistent but decisively okay type.  And then SS Acerola showed up, and packed the most consistent physical DPS stacking you could imagine.  And now we got Adaman, who's offering absurd damage with no gauge cost, and permanent Sun.  Grass was already doing well, but it's exploded recently.  I think it's still in a position overall where it would really like some better special support, but it's hard to find fault with Grass.  Moreover, it carries the same general benefits as Psychic, thanks to a wide array of supporting tools.  Sleep Powder Ramos, Stall Master BP Erika, Gauntlet Master base Erika, SS Leaf's shenanigans going through the roof, SC Rosa's fascinating debuff combination.  Grass just offers a lot of value, and some generally unstoppable team compositions.

1) Dark But nobody is doing it like Dark.  For a while, Dark was one of my least favorite types.  You just had like nothing good to work with.  Nanu wasn't damage, BP Karen just died, base Karen struggled like hell, Grimsley was there.  But man, things have changed.  Not for Grimsley.   He's still a mess.  But like...SS Cyrus came in as a great disruptive tool with Zone.  He didn't specifically boost damage of allies, but the AoE sleep was valuable on literally any team, making him one of the better Zone setters.  Champion Calem then came in with tremendous benefits to the physical side of the type, while offering some support to special.  Then SC Zinnia came in, perfectly complemented his needs, and packed some of the funniest broken nonsense available, including shutting down all buffs for the enemy team for a duration, and a 70% flinch rate and zero gauge cost on unbuffed foes.  And of course, NC Marnie comes in with Ash-like survival, sacrificing his absurd Buddy move DPS for more consistent damage and a 50-60% flinch rate.  Dark is riding high, and it's incredibly hard to find a flaw in the type.  Even among F2P pairs, Nanu got an insanely good grid, base Karen popped off on her expansion and it turns out my fear around BP Karen was unfounded because damn she gets a job done.  Dark currently feels like the strongest and most well-rounded team composition.  It actually leads the sync damage leaderboard, though Dark-type NC Serena.  Dark's just been on a roll lately.

[automatismoateo]

Why do theists continue using really low tiered "arguments" via /r/atheism

Why do theists continue using really low tiered "arguments" Things like "you don't see air but believe it exist" I feel air. Still haven't felt Jesus touching me and giving me a good time yet. Or you have faith in your partner/family. I have faith in my family because I actually see my family helping me out. Still haven't talked or seen Allah yet and helping me find my missing dress. Maybe if he would go and help me move some shelves I might believe he's helpful. I think maybe Kali and krishna should give me a sexy dance too. That'll definitely make me think Hinduism is a beautiful way of life. Submitted December 26, 2023 at 12:45AM by donotholdyourbreath (From Reddit https://ift.tt/Xyk9vos)

[bladekindeyewear]

Book Commentary on Inversion Theory

Alright, as a follow-up to this post, it looks like there’s an actual full bit of Homestuck book commentary (around the pages nearing Rose’s grimdark transformation, Book 6 pg 115, HS pg 3305, thanks @ramiedersedreamer and @zandraxofnebulon) about how Inversion Theory (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) isn’t what we thought.  Quoting and reading it first (not the whole reddit post but that portion at least), then discussion under the cut:

"Rose is a Light player, but her blackout effects result from arguably the nadir of her role as such a hero--that is, when she succumbs to Scratch's manipulations and other eldritch persuasions, and goes grimdark. This truth would appear to lend credence to a line of classpect thinking known as "inversion theory," which really isn't without its merits. This note has just gone to the bother of describing one of its merits, in fact. However, it is possible to get carried away with this line of thinking and use it to evaluate everything that happens in Homestuck. For instance, you could say "Well, Karkat is a Blood hero, and here's where he stops being as Karkatty as usual, so that means he's being the opposite of his aspect. Which means he's being Breathy instead of Bloody. So that means a bunch of other stuff, ipso facto, Homestuck has been EXPLAINED." That's not really the way all this works. Aspect lore runs deep, but it isn't the Rosetta Stone to the story. When in doubt, it's better to remember this: rather than an underlying mystical logic where all classpect roads lead to Deep Answers, HS is a comprehensive nexus of many themes, and all roads lead to the basic idea that this is a tale about kids who are trapped in the universal struggle associated with growing up."

I... hm.  Dammit.  Is that all he wrote??  This slippery author is a master of giving us tantalizing and insightful details without committing to any hard yes-or-no whatsoever.  >:T

I’d been building myself up to reading this all throughout yesterday with gut-wrenching dread that at this late, late, late hour he’d finally given us a definitive “NO” on Inversion.  Instead we get this quite interesting but more vague “eh, there’s merits, but don’t go too far with it”.  Which is...... 

...about as potentially-optimistic as I put it in the previous post, if not moreso?

Andrew’s being careful to lavish odd praise on inversion theory, too.  Which some people are going to interpret as (Option 1) “Nice try, but dead wrong”, like the anon who put a snippet in my inbox initially, and others will interpret as (Option 2) “The big ones are RIGHT, nudge nudge, but stop applying it everywhere cause the fans who say every line of the comic means ‘ghosting inversion’ are looking at the story wrong and annoying everyone”.

As someone guilty of being one of those fans described in the latter half on occasion, I can CERTAINLY agree with THAT last part.  Andrew made it really clear with the ending of Homestuck proper -- “this side shit didn’t matter as much as you thought it did”.  I was so enamored with the classpect system that I thought almost everything was being shown to us through those lenses, at one point -- but even though perhaps more than the random reader might have thought is there, like he says, it ain’t supposed to be no Rosetta Stone.  Even when I WAS overapplying classpect everywhere, the people who did it too often in places I felt clearly un-merited REALLY pissed me off!  I can’t imagine how much more that might’ve been magnified in the shoes of someone who happened to apply the correct, lower amount of classpect and had to put up with me babbling and slathering it everywhere, much less the author’s shoes.

But there is still a big hole in his criticism, one he intentionally seems to have left there to me.  By saying “don’t look for it everywhere”, but ALSO that “there’s more than some merit to it”... I don’t think it’s a stretch to think the truth might not only be somewhere in between Options 1 and 2, but perhaps even closer to Option 2.

Aaaand HERE’s where if you’re someone who HUNGERED for me to admit wrongdoing by sticking with this theory for so long, you’re no doubt angry.  Looking at me as making excuses in the face of this long-awaited OBJECTIVE PROOF OF TOTAL THEORY DISMISSAL... WHY won’t the deluded bastard FINALLY succumb to REASON?  ANDREW HIMSELF spoke up on the issue, IS THIS NOT ENOUGH?!???

And, well... you’re right to be angry.  To be honest, I’m a fair bit pissed off too -- I could’ve used a solid “NO”, traumatizing as it would’ve been to me!

But that’s not what we got, because... *rolls eyes @ author* ...that’s not how Andrew works nowadays.  And as irritating as it is, I also have to respect it a bit.

Andrew has become pretty committed to not full-on table-flipping fan interpretations and fanworks, avoiding forcing one “correct” interpretation (see: central struggle of HS^2 and the villains labeling divergence from canon at all as “bad”) because both interpretations should be rewarded.  If something is REALLY wrong and hurts objective appreciation of the lessons he wanted to portray in his comic, like people plastering Classpect everywhere to the exclusion of the story’s central canon-escaping themes, he’s willing to shut them down... but when it comes to effective-sounding interpretations of the comic that he possibly never intended but “could” have been what he intended?  He’s REALLY careful not to step on them!  Or even sometimes DISTINGUISH them from the ones that he DID intend, sometimes, to keep as many fan interpretations alive in our imaginations as possible.

Which, as someone who pins Inversion’s entire existence on the assertion that “Andrew deliberately intended this and it’s our DELUSION otherwise”, really pisses me off at times like this.  This is a theory hinged on the idea that Andrew had been deliberately hiding INCREDIBLY clever evidence throughout the comic for these intense thematic moves.  All the SYMBOLISM we thought was pointing to inversion would lose an incredible amount of its meaning if it were all an accident.  What about all that cool imagery in the Breath and Blood post?  Did any of THAT really mean what we thought it was there for, like between WV and PM?  Was any of it REAL?  Will we ever even get an ANSWER?  The answer is “no, we won’t”, because Andrew persists in this method of keeping his cards close to his chest even if he has to take them to the damn grave, cause he knows we’ll have more “fun” not knowing ‘em.  That considerate son of a bitch.  >:(

I’m serious -- it really does make me more than a little angry.  I really do wish he’d said more to show us where we’re off-course.

But HS^2 has brought us Terezi telling us that Mind and Heart are indeed opposites.  He MIGHT be holding onto the info because we may get it later in canon itself...

Meh.  I’ll try not to hope too hard.  And I’d better clarify what I actually believe, here:

My TL;DR thoughts on Andrew’s commentary up above are that when it comes to Inversion Theory (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), he’s leaving room for some of the BIG events to have been right or almost right -- say, #1, maybe #2, and only POSSIBLY #3 or #4 -- while telling us to back off and cast SERIOUS DOUBT on stuff that could have more character-driven explanations, especially #5.

If there’s a seriously FUNDAMENTAL transformation in a character that isn’t fully explained by their character journey alone (as kids growing up), involves significant outside interference, and is reflected by countless visual cues, THEN we should want to see if Inversion Theory “has merit” in that sort of case -- while laying it up against other competing theories that account for external interference of a non-Inversion-related nature in their actions too.  Things like pre- and post-ascension Aradia or pre- and post-dreamdeath Jade seeming almost completely different characters?  Or Rose seemingly taken over by the Horrorterrors... only to do nothing to benefit them but throw her mainself at Jack and get killed so she’d be forced to ascend on the moon mission rather than God-tier-die?  I’d say Inversion is worth consideration and -- daresay -- worth believing in, in such cases.

And it still might all be wrong.  There are legitimate ways to read Andrew’s commentary above that would have people screaming that Inversion has been disproven, that the “merits” mentioned were just a nod of respect to the losing side that I’m completely overblowing.  But those seem to me like carefully ambiguous words from a carefully ambiguous man, and if there’s anyone to blame for their ambiguity, it’s Andrew.  Trust me; I don’t like it either.  He’s had plenty of practice saying things in a way that we CAN’T really draw many assumptions from.

Heck, even the Redditor transcribing this summarized their thoughts in a way that draws some assumptions I don’t believe are there:

Mostly I think it's just interesting that he's actually addressing Inversion Theory, and the gist is basically "it's a cool idea and has some merits, but the classpect system and story are not quite that formulaic." Sorry BKEW. At least we know Hussie has been paying attention to our wild theorizing.

--which is a rebuke drawn on the common interpretation that Inversion describes too “formulaic” a classpect system, especially with specific-class inversion like Seer <-> Witch and such.  But IS that what Andrew is saying? Andrew criticizes the overapplication of aspect theory in describing everyone’s actions page to page, but does that mean a quote-unquote “rigid” system (I’m not going to play out the old “specific-class-inversion-is-too-rigid” vs “youre missing the flexible potential a fixed system gives” arguments again) is ITSELF an overapplication of classpect to people’s actions and personalities? Is he perhaps hinting that only Aspect stuff mattered in Inversion cases and the Witchy Rose class stuff was just a separate thematic thing that fits by coincidence??  What does it mean? WE DON’T KNOW!  AND IT’S PISSING ME OFF AAAARGH

...I think I’ve said all I can think to say for now.

I mean, I’m glad Inversion Theory wasn’t outright disproven.  I think it’s neat.  I have a lot of emotional investment behind it, and being told it was all a worthless goose chase would have made me vomitously sick!  But as I struggled with at the end of Homestuck proper, constant ambiguity shows a fair bit of disregard of its own, and both ending AND epiloguing Homestuck not only without a “yes” on this but without even a clear “NO” has caused me more gutache and poor feelings across MONTHS than either answer ever would have given me.  I thought we’d earned that by getting through it, that we wouldn’t have to wait for YEARS and then STILL get cockteased like this.  And I wonder how much I’m going to regret, later, that this wasn’t just a clear, simple “NO”.

I’m being told there’s an upd8 just now and I should read it.  I’ll get on that.  Cy’all.

[binaural-histolog]

Interview with Wiseguy at Mindquake 2018

binaural-histolog: So how did all this get started?

WiseGuy: That's a big question.

BH: Okay, let me back up. So it used to be a very small scene. Brian David Phillips was doing things on Yahoo, and there was hypnovideo, the Maestro, etc. And then at some point it got too big to track. What happened?

WG: Well, the first thing I went to was probably 2007-2008, which was Hypnoticon. There was another conference, Hypnocon, that has been going on for like 15 years or so, but it's always been exclusive to the gay men's community so the rest of us didn't know about it.

At that time, I was a fiction writer. I posted on mcstories.com. And when I got there, it was a big surprise how many people read my stories, because if something is really popular, you'll get two, maybe three emails if you're lucky. There's no reddit or like button. There's no feedback. Simon keeps everything minimal and pure. He'll publish anything with very few exceptions, and he'll do no editing on it. It's his... what's the word? It's his aesthetic. And then suddenly you get all these people coming up and they know you and they like your stuff.

So Hypnoticon was a big success, and Mephki and Buddy [DrSlashBlight] got the idea of putting a convention together. Buddy was the face, and Mephki was the brains, the organizer. Buddy had this tremendous skill of being able to stand in the middle of the room and say "Guys, this is what we're going to do and it's going to be great and you're going to love it." And Mephki pulled everyone together and made it all happen. That was NEEHU, 2009. Mephki and Buddy had the New England Hypnosis Group, and there was a recreational hypnosis group next door, and they knew Lady Ru'etha, and she said come to this thing, and that was NEEHU 1. It was a single day. I sat in a couple of panels, talking about erotic hypnosis.

It was literally an unconference and a play party at night, in a not so great part of town. I was surprised that we didn't get in trouble with the police, and we realized later that the illegal police biker bar was next door, so the police weren't going to interfere with any disturbances around that area.

So NEEHU got bigger and bigger, and these groups all started to meet up, and so the people that were already into this found out about it. There were some things independent of NEEHU. Lee Allure and MrDream had their own thing that they run, DeepMindDarkwood. It's a camp, they keep it limited down to 45 people and that's it. But there were more people that wanted to join. Kansas City and Texas had a bunch of stuff happen. Black Rock City. And now there's five things happening yearly, and meetup groups throughout the country.

BH: Do you think there's a reason why everything started to come together in 2008?

Yes and no. All the elements were there, it could have happened earlier or later. But all the right things had to happen in the right order. NEEHU really needed Mephki and Buddy to kick it off, and there needed to be enough meetups and enough groups to keep it going. And there was a lot of learning in the community.

BH: What has the community learned?

WG: Oh, so much. In the beginning, informed consent was not a thing. If you were at a conference, it was assumed that you were consenting. You'd walk up to someone in the hallway, say "wanna see something cool?" and if they said yeah, you'd drop them. That's just... you can't do that now. It's not acceptable.

Safety and ethics was not a thing. There was a talk in NEEHU that was literally "Why do we need ethics?" And that's changed so much now. Safety and ethics are the first thing you learn, and every conference has a code of conduct.

BH: What do you think the community still has to learn?

WG: We still have to learn how to handle our shit properly.

We know how to handle the people who are clueless. We know how to handle the people who are obviously bad. We still have to figure out how to handle the people who are predators, the truly manipulative people. They'll pick their targets carefully, and it'll be someone who is new, and it happens alone in a room. There's no way to know what happened. It's one person's word against another. And it may not even be deception, they may believe their version of events completely. Belief is different from reality. These people will have friends, they have defenders, they'll say all the right things. So it's hard. There may not be a good answer.

BH: I remember reading a book on abuse called Why Does He Do That, and realizing I'd met abusers and seen them operate, and still hadn't put it all together. It is hard. On the other hand, I was encouraged by Divney's discussion about always believing the accuser by default.

WG: It's more complex than a single answer, though. I don't have a problem with BEHIVE's policy in their application, but my concern is that it doesn't scale well to larger events where the stakes are a lot higher than being banned from a local munch.

Mephki: This isn't a legal argument though. There's no standard beyond a reasonable doubt. It's a private party you can't go to, not going to jail or having your children taken away from you.

WG: Agreed, but it's still damage. It's something we haven't figured out yet.

[Much discussion ensues, in which everyone in the room weighs in. Everyone has cogent and nuanced arguments that I could not write notes on fast enough.]

BH: What's really impressed you lately? What's improved in the community that you didn't predict?

WG: Oh! Standards have evolved so much. There are so many bright young voices. Our representation has improved so much. There used to be a joke when you got out of a conference, you'd say "Remember me? I was the bearded white guy." Because that was everyone. Now you have non-binary people, femme representing people, bottom types. There are so many more points of view and inclusion in the community.

BH: One thing I've noticed is that there is an assumption that erotic hypnosis corresponds to kink and BDSM generally.

AmHypnotic, chiming in: Yes, and they're not the same thing. There's this tendency that the bigger and more intense something looks, the more impressive it is. But that's not what makes it work.

BH: I mention it because I really like the gentle femdom movement I've seen lately, where gently pulling on someone's hair is recognized and seen as dominant, and there's no pain or fear. It's not about turning everything up to 11.

WG: There's a lot of good things, but stuff like that is coming from the kink community in general. The EH community is barely 10 years old, and what we have been doing is copying what other conferences are doing, like scholarships for female presenters. And the internet and local groups getting together has been huge. There's so much better vetting of presenters and sharing of information now.

There's still a problem with sharing information. The TNG group had a presenter that had been vetted and it was a horror show. And then once it came out, there were presentations she'd given before that made it clear she had done this before, and so it's a question of getting all those people together. So there's a missing stair problem there.

Mephki: There is a discord server called the Watchtower which is all the conference and group leaders together, and there is a vetting service. There's work being done. There's hypnation. It is getting better. You have to be careful about ban lists, but they are private party events.

BH: What do you think the recreational and EH community can teach the clinical hypnosis community?

WG: [Laughter] There's no comparison. The EH community is leaps and bounds ahead of the professionals. There's no need for them to do it for money, so they have more freedom to experiment, and so it's all about the creativity. But there are professionals still reading off of scripts written in the 1950s.

[Much discussion ensues]

BH: I know there are talented individuals. Melissa Tiers, for example.

WG: No, there are absolutely some great people out there. Melissa Tiers is a rockstar. She's very good, no bullshit, always happy to show new things she's learned. Kaz Riley is another good example. But the field as a whole is still behind and playing it safe. There can be ten different tracks at a conference and not one presentation you want to go to.

Hypnomedia: Hypnothoughts Live is really good. They have a good mix of clinical and stage hypnotists.

WG: I've heard that, but I'm afraid that if I go, I'll get outed.

BH: So final question. Erotic hypnosis would seem to have a natural overlap with using hypnosis for sexual disorders. And yet, there's almost nothing about using hypnosis to treat sexual disorders. And there's sex research on BDSM and kink, but there's very little research into erotic hypnosis. Why do you think that is?

WG: I couldn't tell you. I know there's a Dr Will Horton who puts together a five day course on Erotic Hypnosis. The first three days are clinical, focusing on erectile dysfunction, anorgasmia, and things like that. The final two days, he hands out copies of Mind Play and talks about erotic hypnosis. The mixture of clinical treatment and erotic material in the same course is not something that anyone can do, but Dr Horton has a Psy D, so he can get away with doing it.

BH: But it does seem like so many techniques are essentially erotic hypnosis with the serial numbers filed off. Tantric Massage, Sensate Focus, and so on.

WG: There are many hypnosis things that do not show up in the field. But I don't know.

[ignisardens]

Lootboxes

Everytime I see a discussion or thread on Reddit about Microtransactions or Lootboxes I’m completely baffled by the amount of people who turn up to just mindlessly shill for these big companies that are essentially forcing you to gamble for their products. Like I try to see the other side of a point of view, but I seriously can’t with this one. Take Overwatch, having a discussion and a guys argument is literally “It’s their choice and if they’re happy with the percentage of the playerbase that doesn’t buy lootboxes then that’s their decision”

Well yeah, but it doesn’t change how anti consumer the loot boxes are?

Or

“Well I like buying lootboxes” Good for you, but there’s literally no reason why they couldn’t sell skins or even gold so people who wanted to could buy EXACTLY what they want. I’m not a freeloader, I don’t want these skins for free, I understand that Games have changed and Dev companies maintain games for longer and the old model of Skins being in the game for free doesn’t work anymore, I WANT to pay for the skins, I just wanna be able to go “ok I want that skin” and fuckin buy it. I would legitimately pay money, like exact pricing aside £5-£15 for a specific skin of whatever tier, than pay £4 for than 20 chances out of like 3000 items. There’s literally no reason not to allow both methods other than trying to get the most money out of you possible, because Blizzard KNOW their main draw is their skins, sure there’s collectors who want everything and people who don’t care, but the skins are the main draw, they’re the reason people buy lootboxes.

Couple that with how predatory random roll loot boxes are from even a psychological stand point, and you have a system designed to take advantage and get as much money as possible. In what world does having the ability to choose what you buy become a bad thing? and why do so many people come out of the woodwork to defend companies like Blizzard on microtransactions?

Blizzard and any other big company isn’t going to go bust by letting me only buy the Skins I want.

I would absolutely LOVE to own the Skins I wan’t in Overwatch, but I absolutely refuse to gamble for them, I haven’t bought a single lootbox and I never will.

I know people who I KNOW cannot afford lootboxes, and they know they cant afford them, buy them just because they’re missing a skin on their main. I know people that buy 50+ lootboxes at the start of an event.

It’s crazy, give us the choice.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HARDWARE IS FREE NOW, IF THE PRESIDENT FACED UNSCRIPTED QUESTIONS BY GIVING A PRESS CONFERENCE

Some writers quote parts of things they say to one another? Teaching hackers how to deal with difficult subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted.1 If you're sure of the general area you want to do. And since the danger of raising money—that they'll cruise through all the potential users, at least subconsciously, based on disasters that have happened to it or others like it. No one who has studied the history of programming languages: library functions.2 Such hypersensitivity will come at an ever increasing rate. Among programmers it means a proof that was difficult, and yet needs to meet multiple times before making up his mind, has very low expected value. Alas, you can't simply applaud everything they produce.3

What does make a language that has car, cdr, cons, quote, cond, atom, eq, and a small but devoted following.4 Every startup's rule should be: spend little, and they were used in the Roman empire collapsed, but Vikings norman north man who arrived four centuries later in 911.5 In principle investors are all subject to the same cause.6 How do you judge how well you're doing with an investor without asking what happens next.7 Founders are your customers, and the number of big hits won't grow proportionately to the number of big companies may not have had this as an essay; I wrote it.8 And yet, oddly enough, YC even has aspects of that.9 Be good, take care of themselves. When I see a third mistake: timidity. But when founders of larval startups worry about this. It is so much harder.

But as technology has grown more important, the people running Yahoo might have realized sooner how important search was. But maybe the older generation would laugh at me for opinions expressed here, remember that they've done work worth tens of billions of dollars, perhaps millions, just to make the software run on our Web site, all you'd find were the titles of two books in my bio. No big deal. Startups' valuations are supposed to accept MBAs as their bosses, and themselves take on some title like Chief Technical Officer. Piracy is effectively the lowest tier of price discrimination. I'd realized in college that one ought to vote for Kerry. All you had to give all your surplus to and acknowledge as your masters. A lot of VCs would have rejected Microsoft.

He said their business model is being undermined on two fronts. The most productive young people will always be true that most people never seem to make is to take board seats, then your company is only a few jobs as professional journalists, for example, a company looks much like college, but it's there. You can start one when you're done, or even whether it still sends one.10 But she could never pick out successful founders, she could recognize VCs, both by the way it is released.11 It's just a means to something else. We just don't hear about it. It doesn't seem to be unusually smart, and C is a kludge.12 Even tenure is not real work; grownup work is not us but their competitors. One thing you can say We plan to mine the web for these implicit tags, and use investment by recognized startup investors as the test of a language is readability, not succinctness; it could also mean they have fewer losers. A good flatterer doesn't lie, but that won't be enough. Is that so bad?13 Raising more money just lets us do it faster.

I thought that something must be. So it is in the form of the GI Bill, which sent 2. There is nothing more valuable than the advice of someone whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of other investors. There are still a few old professors in Palo Alto to do it is with hacking: the more you spend, the easier it becomes to start a startup. I don't like the look of Java: 1.14 Imagine how incongruous the New York Times front page. But you can tell that from indirect evidence. In an IPO, it might not merely add expense, but it's certainly not here now. Kids are less perceptive.

It let them build great looking online stores literally in minutes.15 The average trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it clear you plan to raise a $7 million series A round. I'm not sure why this is so.16 But I've learned never to say never about technology. Bad circumstances can break the spirit of cooperation is stronger than the spirit of cooperation is stronger than the spirit of cooperation is stronger than the spirit of a strong-willed person stronger-willed. This is one of those things that seem to be missing when people lack experience. They just had us tuned out. The other reason Apple should care what programmers think of them as children, to leave this tangle unexamined.

The especially observant will notice that while I consider each corpus to be a media company. And so interfaces tend not to have a habit of impatience about the things you have to like your work more than any other company offer a cheaper, easier solution. The goal in a startup is to try. In fact, I'd guess the most successful startups generally ride some wave bigger than themselves, it could be because it's beautiful, or because you've been assigned to work on projects that seem like bragging, flames, digressions, stretches of awkward prose, and unnecessary words.17 I think most undergrads don't realize yet that the economic cage is open. In art, mediums like embroidery and mosaic work well if you know beforehand what you want. But vice versa as well. I like. But if you're living in the future.18 Now the misunderstood artist is not a critique of Java! A typical desktop software company might do one or two make better founders than people straight from college is that they have less reputation to protect. It's more important than what it got wrong.

Notes

I think this is a bad idea has been happening for a CEO to make money. Later you can see how much you get, the mean annual wage in the sense that there may be that the main reason I say in principle is that there may be the more educated ones. Or more precisely, investors treat them differently. Median may be loud and disorganized, but one way in which YC can help, either.

They're often different in kind, because you have to make money. He, like most of the things they've tried on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the editor written in C and C, and large bribes by Spain to make money.

Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The First Two Hundred Years. Change in the technology business. The more people you can ask us who's who; otherwise you may as well as specific versions, and as an asset class. This sentence originally read GMail is painfully slow.

Something similar has been around as long as the average startup.

Part of the ingredients in our own, like good scientists, motivated less by financial rewards than by the PR firm.

If they were, like angel investors in startups is uninterruptability. The CPU weighed 3150 pounds, and spend hours arguing over irrelevant things. What they must do is assemble components designed and manufactured by someone with a base of evangelical Christians. The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.

Which feels a lot about how the stakes were used. But he got killed in the sense of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were invisible or simpler in Lisp, because a there was a very noticeable change in their voices will be big successes but who are weak in other Lisp features like lexical closures and rest parameters.

In fact, this is also not a big effect on what interests you most. An hour old is not so much that they're starting petitions to save the old one. Google adopted Don't be fooled.

Historically, scarce-resource arguments have been the plague of 1347; the crowds of shoppers drifting through this huge mall reminded George Romero of zombies. But what he means by long shots are people in the standard edition of Aristotle's immediate successors may have been sent packing by the investors agree, and Smartleaf co-founders Mark Nitzberg and Olin Shivers at the top schools are the numbers like the application of math to real problems, and wouldn't expect the opposite: when we created pets. Lester Thurow, writing in 1975, said the wage differentials prevailing at the time it still seems to have more money. I don't know.

Donald J.

If you have no representation more concise than a huge loophole.

I startups. Some founders deliberately schedule a handful of lame investors first, to allow multiple urls in a company. Seneca Ep.

But one of its users, at least 150 million in 1970. Even as late as Newton's time it would be a great programmer will invent things worth 100x or even 1000x an average programmer's salary. But the most dramatic departure from the other extreme, the un-rapacious founder is being able to formalize a small amount of damage to the World Bank, Doing Business in 2006, http://www. 99 to—A Spam Classification Organization Program.

Ironically, one variant of the country would buy one.

This doesn't mean easy, of S P 500 CEOs in the narrowest sense. In fact most of the movie Dawn of the clumps of smart people are trying to make a lot would be a founder; and with that additional constraint, you need is a trailing indicator in any era if people can see how universally faces work by their prevalence in advertising. 5,000 sestertii apiece for slaves learned in the US.

In 1800 an empty room, and Reddit is Delicious/popular.

Proceedings of AAAI-98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization. It's lame that VCs may begin to conserve board seats for shorter periods. A professor at a public company CEOs were J.

Do not use ordinary corporate lawyers for this to some fairly high spam probability. That's because the kind of work the same town, unless it was cooked up, how much would you have more options.

[marktaker]

ECC: The Biggest Cryptocoin Gainer in 2018?

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice nor should anyone take my thoughts as financial advisements. These are mere opinions, you should take with your financial advisor before entering into any transaction.

  I am always on the look out for the next "big thing" in the crypto space, and I have stumbled across an interesting coin that may become the largest growing coin in 2018. Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum and all of the other top coins have seen tremendous growth in the past 6-12 months.

We've already heard the story about Ripple. In January 2017, every $100 investment is now worth over $35,000. However, Ripple was not the only coin to see tremendous gains in 2017. Litecoin, Ethereum, Monero, and many others gave investors tremendous gains in 2017.

But what if I told you the story of a coin that generated $450,000 for every $100 investment? The early investors received almost a million dollars while only risking $200, and I feel this number will only rise.

Well if you were an early investor in Raiblocks (XRB), you are very happy right now. Raiblocks blasted onto the cryptocurrency scene in the spring of 2017 with an early price around $0.007 USD, and it reached a peak of $37.62 on January 2, 2018. In about 9 months, a $100 investment increased to $537,428 USD. Now that's a big baby! It now sits in the mid to high $20's, and it will probably have a little bit more growth.

Did we miss out on these gains? Absolutely, which led me to start researching for the next big thing.

The next big thing will not have this level of growth, but I'd be happy with 10% of this growth. If I could get $50,000 for every $100, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Again, this is not financial advice, and you should never risk more than you can lose.

Without further ado, let me introduce you to ECC.

  A Little History About ECC

ECC was founded a few years ago, and the original founder allegedly scammed some people and the project became dormant in 2014. Coming to the rescue was a developer named Greg Griffith. Rather than start his own coin, he decided to build from the solid fundamentals of ECC.

Fast forward 4 years later and Greg has built a solid team around him. He has now quit his day job, and he is fully committed to ECC's development. Moreover, in a world of scams and tricks, the entire development team is easily accessible on their slack and freely answer questions for the public.

  ECC Recent Trends

  As you can see from the chart, it has been quite the month for ECC. It is up 1200% with volume skyrocketing this past week. Its 24H volume is about to break $2,000,000, and this is a far cry from December 11, 2017 when it was a mere $3,500. This baby is growing and growing fast.

So ECC is growing, but is it over?

For seven reasons, I feel ECC will have the greatest percentage gains in the 2018 cryptosphere.

  The Seven Reasons ECC Could Jump to the Moon

  #1: Established Coin

ECC was established years ago and left abandoned. Rather than hitting the market with no product, the new team revamped the project and saved countless months of development.

  #2: No Website

As part of the new project, ECC rebranded the entire company. It does not have a real website right now, and the new one is set to launch this month. This is very telling. Investors are so bullish on ECC that they are investing in the team and concept without the marketing fluff of other projects. When the website goes live, this should cause the price to go up.

  #3: Only Available on CoinExchange

This is a solid indicator of future growth. A consumer has to jump through many hoops in order to buy ECC on this lower-tier exchange. Despite these difficulties, money is surging into this coin. ECC is attempting to get added to Binance, and if approved, it will become much easier to purchase ECC.

  #4: Solid Development Team

Greg Griffith is fully committed to the project. Now with some more team members and ECC being his prime focus, we are about to hit a big growth period.

  #5: Transparency

In a world of scams and deception, Greg and his team are fully transparent with the positives and negatives of the project. Their slack is informative and updated almost daily. Moreover, they make appearances on reddit to discuss development and answer questions.

  #6: Sub-Penny Pricing

Even with the massive growth this week, ECC still sits below a penny. This is a positive because the public is always looking for the next big thing. Right now, if ECC hits $1.00, that will be about a 300x return on investment. The public loves to build on future growth speculation in lower priced items. To triple your money with Bitcoin it would have to be around $50,000, and Ethereum would have to be around $3,000. ECC on the other hand? If it hits one penny, you almost triple your money. That will cause public eyeballs to jump to it...especially if it gets added to a major exchange like Binance.

  #7: The Lost Coin Value Jump

  As discussed above, ECC has a rocky history. The prior developer led it into the ground. When this occurred, approximately half of the coins were lost when its major exchange went out of business. This caused massive losses in wallets, and it is unclear how many coins exist anymore. The strong belief is that 50% are gone forever. 25 Billion coins were mined, but it now appears that only 12-13 billion ECC units still exist.

Why is this good?

One of the biggest arguments again some altcoins is that many of them have a lot of coins. Why is this a problem? Because it limits the value of the coin. For example, let's say you think ECC is worth $1 billion. If its market cap is $1 billion, and there are 25 billion coins in circulation, then its price would be 4 cents. However, if there are only 12.5 billion coins, to reach that same $1 billion, you'd hit a price of eight cents. If you have faith in the project, fewer coins will always be better for individual coin value.

There are many reasons why Bitcoin is the only coin above $10,000. One of those big reasons is that there will only ever be 21 million coins mined.

Original Post Here: ECC: The Biggest Cryptocoin Gainer in 2018?

[liveonlinematches]

A online game famed for its realism and a spotlight to element misses the mark in its try to constitute homosexual footballers

(Norwich Town)

Lately I used to be speaking with a chum who’s recently at first phases of popping out as homosexual. She’s wrestling with the entire questions that everybody who’s had to do that confronted: How do I inform my folks? SHOULD I inform my folks? How will issues cross at paintings if I come available in the market? What prison protections would I’ve in the event that they fired me or if the paintings atmosphere was poisonous? Can I come up with the money for to be out all over the place, or will I’ve to stick closeted in sure portions of my lifestyles?

However she requested any other query that I hadn’t even regarded as:

Why do I even wish to pop out in any respect?

During which she intended: who am I actually serving through hanging myself thru all this? Is it actually for my receive advantages? Or is that this only a ritual efficiency I’m hanging on for my instantly buddies? A birthday celebration I’m throwing them so I will make a disclosure I’m unofficially required to me, and so they may be able to be ok with themselves for having no less than one homosexual good friend?

It’s a query I by no means actually regarded as once I got here out. (I’ve needed to do it two times, as soon as at 14 once I got here out as bi after which final yr once I got here out as trans.) I’m wondering now if perhaps I must’ve, and given it some actual idea. I targeted such a lot on logistics and timing that I by no means actually stopped to totally imagine who I used to be doing all this for.

I point out all this as a result of the preferred online game Soccer Supervisor 2018 now means that you can have homosexual football gamers to your workforce. Relying on which portions of the web you spend essentially the most time, that is both being hailed as a essential step at the trail to social development and towards without equal purpose of Sexual Orientation Now not Mattering To Any person; or derided as any other instance of id politics seeping into puts the place it merely has no industry, and but extra distinctive feature signalling at the a part of content material creators so as to become profitable and/or shove an time table down their target audience’s throat. And the entire whilst I will’t assist however suppose: who’s all this for, anyway?

(For the needs of this newsletter, I’m going to be referring essentially to males’s football during. The tradition of the ladies’s sport is such that a number of most sensible tier gamers, together with quite a few individuals of america squad that gained the 2015 International Cup, can really feel protected and supported sufficient to be out publicly. Homophobia and transphobia are found in girls’s football, to make certain, nevertheless it’s on a a lot more modest scale in comparison to the boys’s sport.)

One glaring conceivable solution to the query of who that is occupied with: tabloids. In October, the Day by day Celebrity ran a entrance web page headline alleging that there are two homosexual footballers recently taking part in within the Premier League who’re out to their teammates. The headline and connected tale used to be closely sensationalized, with a breathless tone extra becoming rumors of individuals of the royal circle of relatives dishonest on their spouses. The consequences had been glaring: if that is true—they usually by no means again up their reporting and normally admit someplace within the textual content that it’s simply hypothesis—then this can be a bona fide scandal, and readers must be stunned and appalled.

Individuals who care about this type of factor condemned the paper.

Discussing homophobia in game and the way to take on it? Nice. Speculating in regards to the sexuality of gamers at the entrance web page? In reality no longer nice. http://pic.twitter.com/Wryuvt9NUU

— Stonewall (@stonewalluk) October 24, 2017

Numerous other folks wrote it off as scummy tabloid fodder.

To counter your argument, it’s the Day by day Celebrity…..it’s normally filled with crap.

— Mark George (@mpgeorge84) October 24, 2017

The veracity and respectability of British tabloids apart, you don’t wish to challenge very a ways to look why a homosexual footballer would possibly no longer need to pop out of the closet. For the entire communicate amongst some in soccer fandom about how sexual orientation doesn’t subject, the truth that tabloids can nonetheless promote papers and advert area through framing all these tales as scandals obviously illustrates that it issues so much.

The builders of Soccer Supervisor attempt to simulate the worldwide soccer ecosystem as faithfully as conceivable. The sport even accounts for the results of Brexit now.  However no simulation can ever be an excellent mirrored image of truth. Designers must make alternatives as to what variables to account for and which to go away out. Once we’re speaking a couple of simulation as advanced as Soccer Supervisor, there aren’t many variables which can be lost sight of thru negligence or deficient making plans.

So when the brand new function to have a participant—and it most effective applies to computer-generated characters, so no person that exists in the actual international—to your squad pop out as homosexual ends up in a brief information tale and a products bump for the participant and membership, we must be transparent in this level: that’s no longer an twist of fate. The designers made a option to depict this sort of match this fashion. That the sport doesn’t account for a scandal within the tabloids when this occurs can imply most effective certainly one of two issues; both the sheer ubiquity of British tabloids wasn’t sufficient to clue the builders in that this would possibly occur, or they purposefully determined not to come with it of their simulation.

Nor is in particular encouraging. Nor does it recommend that they actually idea thru this selection once they began designing and enforcing it. The tabloid scandal is simply the obvious end result of what would occur if a Premier League participant got here out as homosexual. There’s no accounting for the temper within the dressing room. Or how the enthusiasts would react. If the participant is a capped global, there doesn’t appear to be any attention for a way it might impact their probabilities of taking part in within the International Cup. (Indubitably this could range from nation to nation.)

The builders wouldn’t have needed to cross very a ways to discover related subject matter for his or her analysis within the design procedure for this selection. There’s the tabloids, as discussed. There’s additionally boards for enthusiasts of the sport itself. Like this Reddit thread, the place gamers accused the builders of “distinctive feature signalling” and “seeking to push an acceptance of homosexuality” on their gamers. Final yr the BBC polled soccer enthusiasts to look how an out homosexual participant could be gained in English soccer; 18% would have an issue with it, and eight% of enthusiasts would forestall staring at/following their workforce certainly one of their gamers got here out. Even reasonably harmless consciousness efforts just like the Rainbow Laces marketing campaign has a tendency to solicit a backlash that may be lovely sobering. In designing this selection, the builders made some core assumptions in regards to the present state of soccer tradition that isn’t even mirrored within the attitudes of their very own consumers.

They didn’t even trouble to seem into fresh English soccer historical past. In the event that they did, they might’ve examine Justin Fashanu, and what took place to him after he got here out as homosexual in 1990 whilst nonetheless an energetic participant. They may’ve learn in regards to the abuse and threats he gained over the following few years, and the way it affected his taking part in occupation. They may’ve examine how he in the end buckled underneath the tension and killed himself 8 years after his public disclosure.

And, positive, this isn’t the 1990s anymore. Issues have modified. The tradition has shifted. Possibly it’d be k now.

However simply because issues are higher, doesn’t imply they’re totally higher. Whilst the builders of Soccer Supervisor didn’t know the dangers homosexual footballers would possibly face within the present local weather, and whilst some enthusiasts of a extra liberal persuasion would possibly need to imagine they’d be embraced and authorised, there are sufficient individuals who know higher. Together with, it should be mentioned, queer footballers. Which is most definitely why homosexual males in English soccer are afraid to head public. Or why simply popping out to their teammates is a Large Deal. Or why they gained’t even divulge to the Soccer Affiliation, after receiving a call for participation to take action in a protected and confidential atmosphere. (That FA chairman Greg Clarke appeared so mystified that nobody took him up at the be offering could also be illustrative of the broader institutional blind spots surrounding the problems.) Make no mistake: there are homosexual males within the Premier League, they usually’re no longer going public. As a result of they know what would occur.

Even with a beneficiant studying, the builders of FM18 come throughout as painfully naive with the rollout of this selection. It’s no longer simply that failing to account for some essential variables makes for a deficient simulation. Soccer Supervisor is an indelible a part of the broader football tradition. Golf equipment use it as a scouting software. Imposing this selection within the sport used to be going to make information. If Soccer Supervisor is a devoted simulation of the football international, then it’s additionally a devoted simulation of the tradition surrounding this. By means of depicting a homosexual participant going public as slightly a blip at the radar, it constitutes a point of oversight this is naive at perfect and perilous at worst. It shall we other folks conceal within the fiction that bigotry is melting clear of society, like an getting older Polaroid digital camera. That is an assumption made in large part through individuals who don’t have first-hand revel in with that more or less bigotry, and who won’t ever actually face any penalties for his or her fallacious assumption. The backlash is for people.

There may be, after all, the chance that the builders purposefully made the effects of a participant popping out so small and benign. Believe what the sport would appear to be with this selection if the possible affects had been fleshed out. What if dressing room morale tanked? What if it was unimaginable to promote the participant as a result of nobody else sought after him on their workforce? What if he used to be bought to a membership in Saudi Arabia? What if he retired early? What if the participant dedicated suicide? Those are the forms of chances that may wish to be regarded as if this selection had been the mirror the level of complexity that Soccer Supervisor is understood for. It’s no longer unreasonable to imagine that the builders merely selected no longer account for all this as a result of how it might be gained through their consumers, who hang to a belief of well-liked social equality that doesn’t fit the lived truth of maximum LGBT other folks. Lovers of the sport adore it exactly as a result of its complexity, however it can be the case that there are limits. Possibly they only don’t need to be faced with the truth of being queer in a global— and in a occupation— this is actively antagonistic to queer other folks. And so the one more or less popping out that works within the simulated international of Soccer Supervisor is a frictionless abstraction.

The brand new function in FM18 and the discourse surrounding it’s in large part lacking a an important standpoint: homosexual other folks. Now not simply gamers, however enthusiasts and media commentators and membership staff and someone else hooked up with the game. For the entire need to reside on this planet of FM18, the place gamers popping out of the closet is actually no longer a large deal in any respect, there’s by no means any dialogue in regards to the prices queer gamers undergo once they do. If we, as a group of people that love soccer, can’t be to prevent and take into consideration how a participant who got here out publicly could be affected, then we’re no longer as able for it to occur as we’d love to suppose we’re.

And if we simply don’t care how it might impact them, then we wish to reckon with ourselves and admit that our need to have a participant pop out has not anything to do with them and the whole thing with our overwhelming wish to know. That we’re essentially motivated through a need for spectacle, in the similar manner that we crave the spectacle of North London Derbies and switch rumors and Jose Mourinho press meetings. As anyone who’s been outed to others towards my needs, believe me once I say that it’s a frightening and tough revel in. The one that did that rationalized what they did through announcing that the individual they instructed had a proper to grasp. You’d be stunned how not unusual this sentiment is.

Soccer shall be a significantly better position when queer gamers are ready to reside overtly and when they’re unequivocally supported through teammates, golf equipment, establishments, and enthusiasts. However is that the sector we’re seeking to construct once we inspire gamers to return out? Or will we simply need to gawk at anyone else’s non-public lifestyles? Until and till we will be able to meaningfully, truthfully grapple with that query, no participant of their proper thoughts will pop out publicly. And stunts like the brand new function in Soccer Supervisor will learn much less like an enchantment to our higher angels and extra like a merciless funny story.

Apply James on Twitter @thaumatropia. 

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