#omega strikers theories

[manipulatorkaleidoscope]

With Finii out and about, I can expertly say that now, I can calculate how each team queues up for their matches just like you and I do. It wasn’t that hard to do so, actually, so let’s run down the list

Frostfire:

Juliette: Foward

Estelle: Foward

Dubu: Goalie

Pretty straightforward. Although I can see both Estelle and Dubu queuing up as Flex ( because I played both Estelle goalie and Dubu forward and they are still amazing at their respective roles!!) I feel like giving the circumstances this is just more likely. Also, Juliette is only there to hit anything and anyone that comes her way

Ember Monnarchs

Kai: Flex

Era: Flex

X: Foward

Most of the time when you have a character from the Ember Monnarchs playing Goalie, It’s mostly Kai or Era and honestly I can see why ( well, I can see it a bit better with Kai than Era but ehh-). X goalie is just a dead sentence. Unless you know how to play him really well, the only thing you’re going to hit are going to be self goals

Maelstrom

Atlas: Flex

Rune: Flex

Drek’ar: Foward

As my best friend so kindly put it “this team is just two goalies and barely a forward” and she is kinda right. Usually when you queue up with an Atlas or a Rune, they are the goalie. Most people I feel wouldn’t play Atlas or Rune forward unless they are really good (I sometimes play Rune goalie… The only place I am at is extremely near the goal 🥺). Wouldn’t call Drek’ar barely a foward though. If you know how to use him, he’s a good forward 👍. Due to the inability of having two goalies, Atlas and Rune queue up a flex

SSR (or was it SRS??)

Asher: Flex

Luna: Flex

Juno: Flex

I’ve seen some great goalies and some great forwards for all of these characters above (heck I’ve seen too much of Juno for my lifetime 😵‍💫). This team, although being 66% children, Is probably the most adaptable team like ever ( Picture this: Juno playing goalie, X KOs her. Asher steps in and fills in for Juno. X KOs her too. Luna steps in and plays goalie herself. Just as X is about to KO her, she drops a tactical nuke on X and KOs him instead) Overall pretty well rounded team

Bite breakers

AiMi: Goalie

Zentaro: Foward

Finii: Foward

This team is out to get you. This team will kill you. I read Finii’s description and the first thing I thought was that “oh yeah you cannot play macht with Bite Breakers and not end up getting KOed at least once unless you have Atlas in your team”. Also, AiMi is goalie because she is the only one that can actually play goalie and not self goal ( plus I’ve seen some great AiMi goalies in my lifetime. Keep it up, AiMi goalies! 😊👍). Sometimes in dire circumstances, I had to play Zentaro goalie, but I suck so much that It makes me think “man, I should have queued up as Estelle instead” . The only good Finii ability that could actually help you assist in stopping the core is her primary honesty. He secondary, although it does hit the core, could be better reserved for hitting a hot spot where all the enemy team is crowding around. If you hesitated with her Special, you could end up self goaling instead. Anyways in summary they are children and they are out to get you.

Around this part I start to lose my certainty of things because well, the teams aren’t full yet.

Clarion corp.

Rasmus: Foward

I do not know were his other teamies will stand, but I have seen a Rasmus goalie like twice in my life. Rasmus is undoubtedly better forward imo

Demon Drive

Vyce: Flex or Goalie

Octavia: Foward

need to see what their other teammate could do, but, I’m for certain sure that Octavia is a complete foward. I have played Octavia Goalie like once and it was hard 🥲. Vyce on the other hand, has been played well Both as a Foward or a Goalie, it just depends on their other teamies goalie capabilities to see what she queues up as

[eadrey-the-iptscray]

WE. GOT. MORE. LORE.

A spoiler-filled review of “Pacific Rim: The Black” season 1, episode 1 (”From the Shadows”)

"Pacific Rim: The Black” got off to a good start, IMO, with the intro. We don’t get the classic protagonist narration, but we do get voiceovers that set up the world of the anime.

Pausing on the map of Australia—more than 30 hazard symbols presumably mark Breaches across the continent. (Side note, the blue seismic waves are a nice nod to the K-Watch system from the first movie.)

We don’t find out in season 1 how those Breaches opened. My theory is that the Precursors got some humans to do their dirty work, similar to how they influenced Newt to open Breaches via kaiju-jaeger hybrids in “Pacific Rim: Uprising.”

Ah, Acidquill, one of the recurring baddies in the anime. It likely gets its name from its two quill-like tendrils on its back. Combined with the barbed tail, those limbs are a force to be reckoned with.

This is the first time we see a version of this kaiju. Clones pop up frequently in the beginning of the episode, a clear callback to Newt’s comment about how the Precursors clone kaiju—clearly the creators did their research.

“IS THAT STRIKER EUREKA?” I screamed at my friend during this scene. No, as we find out later: This is Striker Berserker, presumably the next generation of the famous Australian jaeger. (And piloted by none other than Herc Hansen!)

Many of the new jaegers feature design elements (or in Striker Berserker’s case, an entire framework) from the movie mechs. I think it’s a neat way of adding to the fictional universe while rewarding longtime fans for their loyalty.

According to the Pacific Rim Wiki, Marauder Zeus (left) is said to be a near-identical copy of Valor Omega. (Personally, it initially reminded me of Obsidian Fury.)

Hunter Vertigo (right) takes after G. Danger with its single exposed reactor core. Fortunately for its pilots, Hunter features cryo cannons that they use to freeze a kaiju solid.

This is the kaiju Hunter faces first: A bipedal monstrosity with the ability to extend a third claw from its fists. We don’t know its name or category, only that it’s small enough for Hunter to take out alone.

Here’s a better look at Hunter fighting the kaiju. Much like the first movie, the anime uses saturated colors and kept the iconic Kaiju Blue hue. But more like the sequel, there are plenty of daytime fight scenes in subsequent episodes.

Skipping ahead a bit to Taylor and Hayley’s first drift: I love how the creators animated it. I’ve always envisioned the drift like a maelstrom, with a strong enough current to suck unsuspecting rookies down into their deepest, darkest memories. (I’m exploring this idea in my novel-length fanfiction, A Rare Thing, Indeed.) So it was cool to see the watery nature of the drift animated.

The episode culminates with a showdown against Copperhead (”codename: jaeger breaker”), a Category IV that was in the area. The creators did an excellent job making the kaiju look intimidating in the daytime.

Final thoughts

The anime might focus on teenagers, but the tone is anything but childish. Copperhead decimates the entire village, killing Hayley and Taylor’s close friends right in front of them. Now the siblings have to venture into a post-apocalyptic world to find their parents without drawing the attention of kaiju.

Needless to say, I’m excited to see where the series and the expanded lore goes.

[ghostgirlvii]

Ok first time doing this, but I need to take all of this out my system. I never did such thing before, but I really want to make some sort of review.

So, I was excited to know that we would have more Pacific Rim content after Uprising and I was really looking forward to it. I did not do much research about anything because I love to keep everything a surprise and of course when Netflix dropped the trailer, I didn’t watch it. Today I binged watch the first season of Pacific Rim The Black with only 7 episodes. It was… interesting. I’m kind of glad I didn’t hype myself too much for it. Don’t get me wrong it was good, but not exactly the best. The only + points I would give now are the animation/design and story. Music vibe with the Pacific Rim universe but not that much. Uprising did a better job at catching the ‘main theme’ vibe. This series have good soundtrack but doesn’t have the catchy theme that make you feel like every thing you do is in a jaeger and you can fight anything. Also, the story take place in Australia. The first movie was a bit a let down with actor not having a real Australian accent, but hey the Hansen are still my favorite! The Black has only 2 (two) characters with Australian accent and it’s two bad guys. Not even the main characters. I’m very disappointed by it.

I guess that was the less spoilers-y part of all that’s coming, so heads up spoilers coming next. I don’t want to describe each episode fully, mostly just talking about general stuff and spoilers come from moment that made me went ‘WTF’, so I won’t spoil everything but probably some major moments.

First episode opens with a jaeger that looks very much like Striker Eureka, which turn out to be Striker Berserker (because we all know what happened to the beautiful piece of metal was Eureka!) Thing happened and the PPDC initiates something big (later reveal to be some sort of protocol that everyone call The Black) We also get introduced to our main character, Taylor and Hayley. Isn’t very clear at the beginning when this take place, however a few episodes later it said that it takes place years after the Uprising war. For now, it is safe to assume 5 years has the story is 5 years after the event of the blackout. Kaiju seems very easy to kill also, then again some are only Cat. 3 so maybe? Even then, I’m not super comfortable with this when we saw how all other pilots always struggled to kill their kaiju. Breaches also seems to appear on land now!

After some events, episode two force Taylor and Hayley to wander off the safe place their parents told them to stay 5 years ago while they went looking for help with their jaeger (Yup Mom and Dad are pilots!) Taylor and Hayley end up in a weird city with dog like kaiju after them and found out an old PPDC lab/place. They found a boy (named ‘Boy’ all season long) in an experiment lab. Oh no is the PPDC the bad guys now?! Well, answer later. We also see a kaiju/jaeger hybrid kind of fully transformed/evolve. That is just so weird at first.

Remark on episode three are small, mostly the usual people selling kaiju part or jaeger part and that feels very normal, honestly that just normal stuff. Also imply some worshippers which is then again nothing new. What’s knew is interrogating someone via drift and store everything on ‘mermory drive’ ? Cool, I guess? I don’t know, drifting always feels more ‘intimate’ it’s weird to force yourself in someone mind to find the intel you want...

Episode four is the moment where I had to check back on info about Uprising, I only saw the movie once, so I had a lot of piece and bit missing. But at this point it sort of made sense that the world would be infested of kaiju because at the end of movie Newt says the Precursors will keep attacking over and over again. So okay at this point I made peace with the idea of the world, no excuse me, Australia being invaded by so many kaiju and left in a post-apocalyse place. Also, I forgot to mention that there’s one kaiju named Cooperhead who sort of is the main kaiju who always find Taylor, Hayley and their jaeger. Which come to the point that is seems like kaiju can hear from VERY far away. Maybe this was always a thing, but it never felt like it would be like 100 kilometers like the series make it feels like.

Fifth episode is by far my favorite for one reason only…. Herc Hansen baby! Yup he made a cameo, voiceless, struggling to fight a kaiju and very old. We learn this because Taylor need to learn solo drifting via ghost drifting (using the memory drive we talked earlier, how did they get his last memory??). Turn out he is the one, under the order of I don’t remember who of the PPDC to initiate the blackout protocol and it has to be in a dramatic way. He fought solo a kaiju while making sure he could succeed his mission. Oh they also included Raleigh and Stacker when they were looking for candidate. The one who survived, although technically Herc died? If this is really canon, yup no original pilots are alive anymore. We learn that trying to drift too much with failure can cause lose of memory and ghost drifting side effect is you gain memory of the pilot you drifted with. Yay, joy! Or not. Because this mean they can, with the help the ‘memory drive’ , change the memories of someone to the point they don’t remember who they are (guess what it happen to one of the side character!)

Episode 6 gave me a headache! It is the episode with the most inconsistency. Uprising was better. I mean this episode had inconsistency coming from both movies, hard to beat. But first may I point a breach open in the middle of ground and no kaiju come up? Ok… At some point, Taylor and Hayley found a cave with jaeger and kaiju remains. Oh, that looks interesting. Wrong. The graveyard it somewhere in Australia, on land, right? Well, here’s the three kaiju found; Leatherback, Slattern and Mutavore.

Mutavore was indeed killed on Australian ground by Striker Eureka, but that was in Sydney and this cave seems very far from any city. Leatherback attacked Hong Kong! How did he ended up always the way there? Slattern was killed near/in the breach by Gipsy Danger. Once again, how it finds the way in the cave?!

Unless we are talking about the ‘cloning’ theory of Newt and there are kaiju with the same DNA has those three but then maybe precise it?

Then our jaegers; Titan Redeemer, November Ajax and Omega Valor.

Omega Valor was damaged during the attack of the Moyulan Shatterdome, then the remaining part used to fix Bracer Phoenix. All of this also took place near Japan, very close to inland Australia. I suppose we could assume Bracer Phoenix had a fight in Australia at some point and when the AI scanned the part, she tought it was Omega Valor.

But then come Titan Redeemer. Taylor has now Herc’s memory because of ghost drifting and he is sure that he knew the pilot of Titan Redeemer and helped/took down Yamarachi. Wrong. Yamarashi was taken town by Gispy Danger aka the Beckett brother with another unknown jaeger. Herc was no part of this fight.

Also remember Boy and the kaiju/Jaeger? Well Boy and him sort of drifted and we learned that the K-J is actually a surviving drone from the uprising war who fully merged to become a actual biomecha. He also eats kaiju. But at this point, Boy feels very not normal for the kind of universe Pacific Rim is. Too ‘magical’ and ‘OP’.

And the final episode, where everything resolves, in away. The kaiju who have been following Taylor and Hayley since the beginning is finally defeated, they found clues about their parents whereabout and Boy turns into a kaiju that looks like a gremlin. Yay everyone happy. Hmmm hold on. Human found in PPDC lab who turn into a kaiju? Could it be that the Precursors found a way to introduce kaiju that look human in our world? That’s what implied at the end. The worshipper called ‘The Sisters’ are revealed too and they seems to have plan… for season 2!

 That’s it! Overall, it left very unfazed. I did not hook me up as much as I hope. A lot of elements feel too magical/fantasy for the world of Pacific Rim (that’s my opinion) and errors in episode 6 really threw me off. I know that there was already some inconsistency between some infos in the first movie and the (not canon) novelization. But there were small. Also, that whole thing of be able to change people memory, I didn’t knew I was in Total Recall. The characters are nice, the story is okay, just some classic tropes, but some stuff just don’t seems to fit. And then again, would it have been hard to find actor with Australian accent? Not everyone but at least for Taylor and Hayley and not just the big bad guy and his assistant, sort of not sure who he was but definitely not the big boss’s right arm. In the end, I would give this series a 6/10. It wasn’t bad but wasn’t not as good as it could have been. I’ll watch season 2, because of the story, I’m curious of those worshippers and their business.

[thousandmaths]

Miscellany from MCC 2017

Hey folks! If you’re new here, these “miscellany” posts are all about writing down all of the talks at a conference which I enjoyed, but for whatever reason my notes aren’t good enough to write full posts. Normally I do these as the last post of a conference but I’m breaking protocol this time because of reasons.

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Jia Huang, Nonassociativity of Some Binary Operations

Huang gave a very good talk, it’s just that I happen to have already written about it because of Hein’s presentation at the GPCC in 2016: they were collaborators on that paper.

One thing he addressed was some possible generalizations (including newer results they have about these). The prototypical example of a $k$-associative function is $a*b = \omega a + b$ for some primitive $k^\text{th}$ root of unity $\omega$. We can also ask about the operations $\omega a + \eta b$, or more generally, by extending to the ring $\Bbb C[x,y]/(x^{k+d}-x^d, y^{\ell+e}-y^e)$, the operation $xa+yb$.

(The latter seems... odd. For instance, $x$ is “basically” a $k^\text{th}$ root of unity, but tweaked so that for some reason the first $d$ powers “don’t count”. It’s not super clear to me what this is supposed to be modeling, although this sort of philosophy feels very much like the intuitive explanations I’ve heard for [higher] tangent spaces in algebraic geometry.)

Kyungyong Lee, A Conjectural Description for Real Roots of Acyclic Covers (collaborator: Kyu-Hwan Lee)

This was the only talk that appeared to be about cluster algebras (although I’m really not sure to what extent it was about cluster algebras). Given an acyclic quiver $Q$ and a module of the path algebra, we say that the corresponding dimension vector is a real Schur root if it has no nontrivial self-extensions, i.e. modules $E$ such that $0\to M\to E\to M\to 0$ is a short exact sequence. (This name does have something to do with root systems, but the details of this relationship are completely beyond me.)

The titular “conjectural description” is easiest to describe in type A, where there are admissible curves corresponding to the path algebra modules, (the link gives the flavor of what an admissible curve is, although the details are different in this setting). In this case, the conjecture is that lack of self-extensions corresponds in the modules happens exactly when the corresponding curve has no self-intersections.

Sheila Sundaram, Plethysm and Characters of $S_n$ Induced from Centralizers

So I keep hearing this word ‘plethysm’ recently and I’ve never really been sure what it means. In this talk I got the answer, if not much else: we define the plethysm of two functions $f[g]$ by treating them as $GL_n$-characters and composing them... so that’s a thing.

Another fun fact that I wasn’t aware of: the multilinear part of the free Lie algebra, considered as an $S_n$ representation, is actually the induced character $e^{2\pi i/n} \uparrow_{C_n}^{S_n}$, where $C_n$ is the cyclic group generated by the long cycle $(1 2 \cdots n)$.

Peter Tingley, Crystal Combinatorics from Lusztig’s PBW Bases

It was a 20 minute talk about crystals. There really wasn’t much chance that it was going to be comprehensible. 

But he did make some some effort to explain why we should care about Lustzig’s canonical basis: in addition to being a crystal basis (okay...), it also descends to a basis for the respectable subquotients of the universal enveloping algebra (okay...), and it it has positive structure constants in types A, D, and E (oh that’s nice).

Jessica Striker, Revisiting Promotion and Rowmotion, Revisited (collaborators: Williams,  Dilks, Vorland, Pechenik, others)

At the last MCC, Anna Stokke talked about promotion. The version that I discussed can be repackaged in the following way: given a standard Young tableau, if it is possible to swap 1 and 2 so that the result is still semistandard, do so. Then if it is possible to swap 2 and 3, do so. Then if it is possible— you get the point. This repackaging allows you to define promotion on arbitrary labelled ranked posets; I’ll leave out the details, but roughly speaking promotion goes “top to bottom”.

In “Promotion and Rowmotion”, Striker and Williams proved that this was (equivariantly) equivalent to rowmotion, which is the same procedure going “left to right”.

In “Promotion and Rowmotion, Revisited”, Striker and friends showed that repeating this idea [“increasing $i$ and decreasing $i+1$, if possible” replacing the swapping mechanism] for increasing tableaux (also discussed in Stokke’s talk), this says something about K-theory.

Finally, in the latest installment, “Revisiting Promotion and Rowmotion, Revisited” [see, it wasn’t a typo!], they showed that it’s actually possible to removed the ranked restriction. Defining promotion in this context is actually a little tricky, and involves a constructing an auxiliary poset that I didn’t really catch.

[manipulatorkaleidoscope]

So, as im sure that most people have seen the newest micro patch video, and you saw how it began, I am about to disperse my theories on what it meant

simple enough, just a clarion corp themed map. with like, corpses in it and stuff. idk.

new game mode that has to so *something* with clarion corp. Idk what. maybe some "Inlifritate the facilty" kind of thing?

A new visual novel that has to do something with Clarion corp, aswell as the other 5 charather's that briefly apeared in the intro (Era, Drek'ar, Atlas, Rune and Octavia). This one is probably the least likely duyre7ygfhr

Just new lore in general, problably something that has to do with how the 5 charathers mentioned avobe have a connection with Clarion Corp. Or like, it indicates that these 5 are the corporation's biggest targets. We'll (probably) never know.

The weirdest teaser ever for the next up and comming charather. Idk what they have to do with the 5 people that briegly apeared in the intro, but they might have some connection.

That is all. feel free to add into this, whenever that is a new theory or more facts to strengthen a given theory