#socs round 1 poll

[sapphanimates]

Trace was my first real Sonic Original Character. Originally created in 2020, I've constantly worked to develop her story and help her grow into the character she is today. I plan to make many posts regarding her and all the other characters in my AU series ("Project Alacrity") over the course of this campaign, and I would greatly appreciate it if you voted for her. I'm grateful to have this amazing opportunity. Thank you, and see you all soon.

@sonic-oc-showdown

ROUND 1

Trace belongs to @sapphanimates

Sapphire Aurora belongs to @spiritgenie

Find out more about them below!

Trace the Tasmanian Devil:

Trace is a brown furred Tasmanian Devil wearing long red gloves, boots, and a purple cape. Her most defining feature is the metallic muzzler that covers her face, preventing her from speaking. Despite this she is the proud leader of her own secret militia, the Daybreak's Angels, commanding them through sign language. They respect her, not only for her previous experience fighting in a war against the Jackal clan, but for her perseverance and sense of justice. She deserves everyone deserves a second chance, if they are willing to work for it.

Sapphire Aurora:

she is from silvers time, and before she met silver, she spent a lot of time fighting to survive on her own, so she has gotten a lot of survival instincts, and puts up a tough girl act to look intimidating

when she was young her parents died while trying to save her, but all she knows is that they went away and never came back so she feels they abandoned her and now has a ton of abandonment issues so she tries not making friends

until she meets silver that is

she has winter themed powers, she can create and control snow, ice, cold, etc. which she sometimes uses to make statues as she like to do art when shes alone ot try and cheer her up

she's basicaly silvers "tails" and sees him as a big bro, though she does bite him a lot, silver learned the hard way not to surprise or sneak up on her.

due to iblis, silver sees her as blaze a lot, which doesn't help that she has some similarities to blaze

shes also just a scared little girl on the inside, a side she doesnt show many people, even silver has only seen it a few times

she is the host for the 3rd part of solaris(the soul) who gives her fire resistence and keeps her from dying

[ungodly-amounts-of-godly-trauma]

wotw round 1

propaganda under the cut!

wylan van eck:

Everyone turns him into a baby due to sheer ableism. He can't read, so they turn him into an uwu crybaby. Literally what the fuck. He's a fucking wizard at math and chemistry and he's literally a ball of spitfire behind a sophisticated upbringing. Guy runs on subtle spite. But since he's gay and disabled... He'S bAbY. ugh. also bonus points for everyone using him as an excuse to be racist. They'll make him cry and blame it on an Kuwei (Asian kid) and then say racist shit bc of it. Literally in canon Wylan was just annoyed about what actually happened. And mostly not even at Kuwei. No crying involved.

Listen. Wylan maybe isn’t as experienced at crime as Kaz or the others but he literally makes bombs for a living. His response to not wanting to kill unconscious men is ‘We could wake them up’. His father tried to murder him. Wylan is a badass be gay do criminal, not some cinnamon roll (is it because he’s dyslexic? Is it because he’s the white one in an interracial m/m ship? Is the fandom just bad at reading?)

wylan is unhinged her makes books bombs and loves explosives. he amazing at chemistry and math and music. he is NOT a soft uwu baby that needs saving from Jesper or kaz he can do it by himself

agent 8:

Was a child soldier, lost their memory and got trapped in an underground testing facility, had to complete a bunch of tests BY THEMSELF and collect four thangs, almost got blended after assembling said thangs, and then had to escape the facility, defeat a mind-controlled version of your character from the first game, and save the world, where if you get splatted, unlike the rest of the game, you canonically die. Yet people reduce them to "too pure for this world, needs protected." they are NOT helpless they literally have military training. It's less common now but it was a very common sentiment back when Octo Expansion came out.

[yafantasywifetournament]

ROUND 1: Vin Venture (Mistborn) vs Nina Zenik (Six of Crows)

[sapphanimates]

YOOOO SHE LOOKS SO COOL!

YES YES VOTE! VOTE! VOTE NOW! VOTE TRACE!

Vote for either Trace or Sapphire in the Sonic OC Showdown!

Trace belongs to @sapphanimates

Sapphire belongs to @spiritgenie

[captainsvscaptains]

Round 1 Part 5 Poll 3

Propaganda

No propaganda for Inej Ghafa yet

No propaganda for the Captain of the Demeter yet

[badgrishaverseaus]

ROUND ONE MATCHUPS FOR THE TOURNAMENT ARE OUT NOW!

The polls will last for a week and can be found under the "round 1" and "bgatournament" tags on my profile!

Vote however you like but please be kind to each other! Don't take this tournament too seriously it's mostly just for the giggles!!

Reblogs are greatly appreciated! Spread the word!!

[c0ngatime]

Sasha slacks off on the job to check out Eggify's new "least listened" page, and Sharp makes her pay

Vote for Sasha or Sharp in the Sonic OC Showdown

Sasha belongs to me

Sharp belongs to @sege-h

i wish i could color this in but i don't have the time :(

[l0cina]

Drew one of my favourites from the @sonic-oc-showdown :)

Zest the Rat by @dreaminginmysoup

Just loved their scrancliness if you know what I mean

[soldierpoetkingtrios]

Round 1

art by @anubhasierra

[deadguydeathmatch]

Dead Guy Death Match Round 1: Poll 52

[sonic-oc-showdown]

ROUND 1

Fibula belongs to @son1c

Foxglove belongs to @sonboygemerl

Find out more about them below!

Fibula the Hedgehog:

(art by @/starrjoy)

oops! looks like this guy died. but wait, what's that? eggman?! and he's suddenly got a taste for necromancy? well, can't really blame him; it IS pretty cool. so, now this hedgehog's got a second chance at life--as a zombie! he's powered by chaos energy, and can sniff it out like a bloodhound, which makes him useful to the empire since he can hunt down the chaos emeralds with his nose. he's bold, brash, and can flip a bus with his bare hands. he's not bothered by the whole "undead" thing, in fact, he's actually pretty silly about it.

Foxglove the Porcupine:

She's a creation of Dr.Starline, made to be a copy of Amy, in the same way Surge & Kit were made to reflect Sonic & Tails.

While the original Amy Rose can be described as a happy energetic person, Foxglove at a first glance couldn't be more different than her.

Unlike the original, Foxglove is not a very 'emotive' person herself, her face often staying stuck in a tired bored expression no matter the circumstances surrounding her.

In the end, the things that she does share with the original are her super strength, a high sense empathy towards others (but zero to no sympathy to anyone that isn't Kit or Surge.), and a need to protect those close to her while completely disregarding her own safety in the process.

A perfect way to describe her would be: "someone with low sympathy but high empathy."; "Someone who cares a lot but is very picky about who they care"

On a less serious side she's also a big fan of horoscopes, modifying her own dolls, and causing twitter drama

[theenchantress36]

Tumblr's Favourite Character

Hello ^~^! To determine Tumblr's Favourite Grishaverse Character, I've decided to create a little competition. Feel free to vote if you want! Polls will last one week btw, and rounds will be weekly as well. <3 I've mostly picked characters from the SoC and KoS duologies

[digitalblocksinc09]

AXI DMA Scatter Gather and Its Features

The direct memory access (DMA) controller grants a hardware subsystem to access the main memory with nominal supervision from the central processing unit (CPU). This reduces CPU workload when the system transmits vast amounts of memory multiple times. The DMA Controller core provides a system to transfer data between memory and AXI4-stream interface using direct mode or scatter-gather mode.

Characteristics

Memory interface in AXI4 full-duplex or AXI3 half-duplex

Programmable memory interface width

Control and status register with APB3 interface

Up to 8 channels of AXI4-stream interface

Programmable stream interface width

Enhance bandwidth with hardware read and write queue

Priority-weighted round-robin scheduling

Backups scatter-gather mode

Includes example design targeting the Trion® T120 BGA576 Development Board

AXI DMA Scatter Gather allows the application to specify a list of transactions in memory that the hardware will action without more application interference. During this time, the application can add more work to keep the Hardware busy.

User can confirm the completion of transactions through polling the hardware, or interrupts. AXI DMA Scatter Gather processes complete packets. A packet refers a series of data bytes that represent a message. AXI DMA Scatter Gather allows a packet of data to be scattered into one or more transactions. For instance, take an Ethernet IP packet that comprises of a 14 byte header followed by a 1 or more bytes of payload. With SGDMA, the application may point a BD to the header and another BD to the payload, and then transmit them as a single message. This tactic can make a TCP/IP stack well-organized by allowing it to keep packet header and data in separate memory regions instead of gathering packets into the closest blocks of memory. 

Digital Blocks provides semiconductor Intellectual Property (IP) cores for ASSP, ASIC, System-on-Chip (SoC), and FPGA designers. For more information, visit https://www.digitalblocks.com/

[josephlrushing]

‘Easy Break Pixel’ Caps off a Month of Self-Induced Failures by Google

Perhaps you have heard about this – the new Google Pixel 4 bends and breaks unlike any midrange or flagship phone since the 2014 iPhone 6 … which aside from causing embarrassment for Apple, also caused a shift in testing, design, and materials of construction across the industry.

Perhaps Google didn’t get the memo – or maybe they did polling and found that a significant amount of people didn’t care if their phone was easily broken. Either way, this is just the latest in a series of failures of Google’s own doing that has occurred over the last several weeks. I wanted to round some of them up because I feel they have been either overlooked or downplayed in much of the tech media.

Image from CNet.

Pixel 4 Atrocious Battery Life: This is the #1 complaint about the new line. Bottom line is that the Pixel 4XL has about 50% worse battery life compared to other flagships … and the Pixel 4 has ~20% shorter battery life than the previous generation – which itself was criticized for poor battery life. We will dig into this more in our upcoming review of the Pixel 4 series, but suffice to say that it has already become a punchline – and deservedly so.

Pixel 4 Inexplicably Poor Performance: Another area the Pixel 4/XL lags is performance. Apple’s $100 cheaper iPhone 11 is TWICE as fast across a half dozen real and synthetic benchmarks. But what is worse for me is how it compares to other phones using the same SnapDragon 855 chipset – the Pixel 4 ends up ~15 – 25% below other phones such as the Galaxy Note 10+ using the same processor SoC. That performance lag is not explained by the RAM difference, so it points to poorly optimized OS software or fundamental design problems. Or – slowing the processor to save battery life.

Dim Screen Capped for Battery Life: After learning that the 90Hz display needs to come with a big asterisk due to the conditions that must all be in play to enable it, yet another thing we learned this week was that the gorgeous OLED panel is intentionally dimmed to ~450nits compared to the >900 on the iPhone 11 and Galaxy Note 10+. Again – it is obvious, and also appears to be something done to play for more battery life.

Other Outcomes of ‘Design By Survey’: There is a famous Steve Jobs reworking of a Henry Ford quote “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” And yet companies do it all the time – and it shows. It certainly shows on the Pixel 4/XL in more than a few ways: – Adding a telephoto lens but not a wide-angle lens. Look for a wide-angle lens in the Pixel 5. – Missing several popular video modes (literally a “surveys said” decision) – Unfinished FaceID clone with security holes which is lacking buy-in from banks and others

Tech Looking for a Home: People have criticized the large ‘forehead’ on the Pixel 4 correctly, which brings me to another Steve Jobs quote “You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where can I sell it.” The forehead on the Pixel 4/XL is large despite losing a camera this year because it picked up FaceID – and also the Motion Sense radar sensor that … um, lets you wave your hand to change songs like something that would have seemed cool in the late 90s. Maybe ‘Project Soli’ will be useful someday for something. But right now all it does is decrease the screen to phone ratio for no apparent reason.

Google Stadia ‘Negative Latency’ Kerfuffle: One of my core arguments about Stadia has been that the math between normal latency and promised frame rates don’t converge. Last week we finally got some insight from Google that they plan to limit the devices and control schemes to minimize issues, but also that they are implementing predictive analytics to smooth over intermittent lag. While it won’t help with persistent bad connections, it could be what is needed to make server-based solutions actually sustainable. But for many, it is an admission that they can’t eliminate latency so will simulate gameplay and ‘push the button for you’ instead. Reality? Too early to tell.

No Earbuds for You: Not news, but I have seen more people complaining about the lack of earbuds based on many of the other shortcomings of the Pixel 4/XL. In other words, while they don’t as much care about the lack of earbuds, given the price of the phone compared to the various shortcomings, suddenly the lack of earbuds seems like another way Google has ‘cheaped out’ on users.

Late to Your Own Party: One of the key selling points for the Pixel (and Nexus before that) is that it offers a ‘pure Android experience’ similar to the control Apple has with the iPhone. We have already seen that despite this, the Android implementation on every Pixel phone has been quite buggy on release and taken a while to stabilize while performing better on existing phones. Now Google has slipped even further, most Pixel 4/XL phones have not seen the November 1st update that has been delivered to phones from pretty much every other vendor including Samsung – heck, even my Galaxy Tab S6 has gotten the update! So much for that selling point!

Holiday Coal for Pixel 4/XL Early Adopters: Stop me if you have heard this one before — a company introduces a new product and people rush out to buy it, only to see it on sale a few weeks later for a significant discount, and then they get upset that someone else got a better deal. Google’s Pixel 4/XL Black Friday deals have been revealed – and many people aren’t happy. Honestly, early adopters should know better by now!

Pixel 3 Joins the “Yes, in Fact, Your Battery IS Dead” Crowd: Joining yet another inauspicious iPhone 6 club, Since getting Android 10 Pixel 3 users have been reporting that the already short Pixel 3 battery life has been made worse as the phone has started shutting down without warning with the 30-40% battery remaining. Again, this is very likely the result of over-aggressive battery life management as it was with the iPhone 6 years ago, but given how poor the battery life already is on the Pixel 3, this is really adding insult to injury! The only upside is it isn’t happening to Pixel 4 users!

All Your Health Data Are Belong to US! This one emerged even as I was compiling this list – Google has been working with health care provider Ascension, the second-largest provider in the US. In the deal, Google has had access to the health records of millions of patients across 21 states … without their knowledge. While this is all *legal*, having someone who makes their money turning personal internet data into targeted advertising suddenly having access to health records for those same ‘advertising targets’ is at least somewhat disconcerting.

All 50 State Attorney’s General Expanding Anti-Trust Investigations to Include Android and Search Google is somewhat of an over-achiever here, having received the largest fines and punishments in history based on privacy violations and anti-competitive behavior amongst other things. Their advertising business has attracted extensive global scrutiny due to concerns of anti-competitive practices, and now based on those investigations, it appears that Google has been leveraging their monopolies in anti-competitive ways that include Android and Search.

Bottom Line: How do you feel about these? Do they mostly feel pretty small to you? I mean, sure – we are getting a pretty clear picture that the Pixel 4/XL is a disappointment that suffers from some of the most common failure modes that have occurred across pretty much every major company ever.

Google is a company that has tremendous goodwill even among cynics and skeptics such as myself – if for no other reason than I know that they are better than anyone at keeping that massive trove of data they collect about all of us secure. However, Google has also paid more fines than any tech company in history — due to invading user privacy and using data without permission repeatedly. At a time when governments are becoming increasingly wary of the power held by tech giants, these sorts of self-induced issues can leave a lasting impact.

What do you think? Any other things I might have missed?

from Joseph Rushing https://geardiary.com/2019/11/15/easy-break-pixel-caps-off-a-month-of-self-induced-failures-by-google/

[yafantasywifetournament]

4 days left to vote!

ROUND 1: Inej Ghafa (Six of Crows) vs Wu Zetian (Iron Widow)

[mariemary1]

8 Fun Things to Try on Instagram You Probably Haven’t Thought of Before

One of the things we love about social media is how quickly it evolves.

Products change fast, new features are added regularly, and before you know it, there are dozens — hundreds maybe — of different ways to express yourself online.

This becomes particularly exciting for marketers because we have an opportunity to express our brands in new and unique ways and to reach more customers.

The only hard part is keeping up.

It’s hard to stay on top of the latest news for everything that’s coming to social media. We’d love to help you. This post takes a dive into Instagram marketing with a look at eight little-known features that you can try today.

We want to ensure you get maximum exposure for your brand on Insta. These tips may be just the thing to help you stand out.

We’re going to focus today on some under-the-radar Instagram features. You might have heard of some of these already. We’re hopeful that one or two will be new to you.

Let us know any of your personal favorites or picks in the comments!

8 Fresh Instagram Tips You Might Not Have Tried Before

1. Experiment with the Instagram Stories countdown sticker

When you add the countdown sticker to your Stories, you can set a future date and time, and the sticker will count down for you. We’ve seen some really cool use cases with the countdown timer already. Things like

Using it for the countdown to a new product release that’s happening soon

Using it for a countdown before a live video

Or, using it as a countdown to tease an announcement or piece of content on Instagram

The countdown sticker follows a trend that has really paid off for marketers. Interactive elements in Instagram Stories are highly effective. 60% of businesses on Instagram Stories use an interactive element in their story. This could be stickers, hashtags, @mentions polls – you name it.

So that leads us right into our second fun thing to try on Instagram …

2. Try an Instagram Stories poll sticker on your next ad

The polling sticker was one of the first interactive elements to get added to Instagram’s ad studio. If you’re not familiar with the sticker, it’s a simple two-option poll that shows its results as soon as someone picks one of the options. As of March, you are able to add this sticker to the Stories ads that you create for Instagram.

And the early results have been really positive. In the beta launch for this new ad functionality, some advertisers had as much as 20% lower cost-per-view and up to 40% more app installs.

Further proof that these interactive elements are working!

3. Create a custom, branded AR filter

Image courtesy of Bustle

If you’re not familiar with AR filters, the AR stands for Augmented Reality. These filters add layers and masks to the world around you. For instance, if you’ve ever seen the filters that put a dog nose and ears on your face — that’s an AR filter.

And now it’s possible to make some of these for your brand!

It will take a bit of heavy lifting to create, but the team at Facebook and Instagram have provided the tools. If you want to get started, you can check out all the resources at their Spark AR website.

We can’t wait to see what you might build.

There’ve already been some intrepid brands trying out these AR features. The Later blog did a great job rounding up some top examples. They include:

Kylie Cosmetics made a filter to try on different shades of lipsticks

Adidas made one that turns the screen into grainy, VHS footage in order to promote its vintage sneakers

The NBA created a filter that adds a player dunking a basketball onto any of your videos

4. Add alt text to your Instagram photos

Alt text is metadata that helps computers recognize what an image is all about. This might seem like a smaller feature, but we believe it has a huge impact.

It’s particularly useful for accessibility as it tells the screen reader what to say when it comes across an image. Without alt text, it’s as if the image isn’t even there — which doesn’t prove very useful on an image-rich medium like Instagram!

Fortunately, Instagram bakes alt text right into the publishing flow. When you’re posting an image to Instagram, you can tap on Advanced Settings and choose Write Alt Text. You can also caption Stories and video content on Instagram.

In Buffer, we’ve added an alt text option to Twitter content planning, and we’re keen to bring this to other networks as the APIs allow.

For the time being, the native Instagram setting works great. Adding alt text is a great step for marketers to add to their flow. It’s vital for accessibility … and it could one day play a role in the discoverability of Instagram content through search.

5. Try out the “close friend” list

Image courtesy of Wired

These lists might go unnoticed by a lot of marketers. The lists are definitely a useful tool for everyday users of the Instagram app … but for brands and businesses?

It requires a bit of creativity, but yes, we think the lists can be handy.

For instance, lists can be used to share and communicate with a group of VIP customers or a special community of users.

If you have specific content that you want to share with early adopters, say, you could consider using a list to keep the content private but easily viewed by those who need to know.

If you have a store in a physical location, you can add local customers to make them aware of in-store deals.

The close friend list is available on any Instagram Stories content. You can create your friend list and add/remove people at any time. No notifications are sent when you add or remove.

We’d love to hear how you end up using this feature and any other creative ideas you have.

6. Explore branded content (and influencer marketing)

Branded content has new functionality with Instagram — now businesses can take content posted by their brand influencers and use it as part of the business’s ad mix.

So, let’s say that Kiera Knightly posts to Instagram about some fab new Allbirds shoes. Then Allbirds could take that post and put advertising dollars behind it, paying to help it reach new audiences. There’re only two steps to get set up:

The creators enable the promotion via the creator’s advanced settings, and

The business sees the post in their Ads Manager and can run campaigns with the post as an ad in the feed or Stories.

We covered influencers back in October on the podcast, and the strategy might be going even stronger today. Instagram reports that 68% of people say they come to Instagram to see and talk to the so-called“creators” on the platform.

7. Hide your hashtags in the feed and in Stories

This next tip is a two-pack: advice for hashtags on your posts and in your Stories.

So, you’re probably well aware of the power of hashtags for discoverability. Hashtags are the way that content is categorized on Instagram and other social networks, and it is one of the key ways that new content gets found. You want to be using hashtags … and lots of‘em!

But it might be the case that you also strive to keep a clean and tidy caption on your posts. This is where the“first comment” trick comes in.

If you’ve spent much time on Instagram, you’ve probably noticed this: Instead of posting hashtags in the caption itself, savvy Instagrammers will put a block of hashtags in the first comment.

That way, you get a clean caption that speaks to your message and only your message. Yet the post is still categorized with all the hashtags you want. Win-win!

We’ve seen this strategy used so often with brands and businesses that we built this first comment functionality into Buffer. When you plan your Instagram content with Buffer, you can plan your hashtags, too, and set them to post as a first comment along with the post itself.

Similar to the feed, hashtags in your Stories will help your content get found. You can add hashtags by using the hashtags sticker — right alongside all those other great stickers we mentioned earlier in the post.

Many creators and brands like to maintain a certain aesthetic with their Stories content. Sometimes, hashtags don’t work with the vibe.

In these cases, people have taken to hiding their hashtags behind other stickers or behind color swipes or story elements. Basically, if you start with the hashtags, you can layer everything else on top so that the hashtags are not even visible.

This way, you get all the power of hashtags in Stories without sacrificing on the look you’re going for.

8. Give back with the donation sticker

Instagram is serious about its stickers. We’ve talked about countdown timers and polls and hashtags. There are also stickers for adding a quiz to your Stories, for adding background music and lyrics, as well as selfies, time, and weather.

But did you know? There is a nonprofit donation sticker?

When you choose the donation sticker, Instagram will give you a list of nonprofits to choose from. There are options like the St. Jude Children’s Hospital, the American Cancer Society, and Autism Speaks, and many more.

Once you select a nonprofit, you can customize the name of your fundraiser, and then the people viewing your story will be able to tap the Donate button to give.

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

Heather-Mae on Twitter

Dave on Twitter

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

—

About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

Thank 8 Fun Things to Try on Instagram You Probably Haven’t Thought of Before for first publishing this post.