#the algorithm behaves itself pretty well actually

[clouds-of-wings]

It's really funny how Americans would rather learn Chinese than switch to YT Shorts if they can't have TikTok. Google definitely deserves no better, it's just funny. Like YT is right there, everybody knows it, it's in English. It's the obvious choice. And yet.

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

I think what's happening with Taylor and her fanbase is most interesting for what it says about her marketing strategy more broadly and its consequences, even more broadly. I think part of the reason that Taylor Swift has such an intensely parasocial fanbase is because she's encouraged it throughout her career. Franchesca Ramsey has an interesting tiktok about it (that I don't totally agree with, but I think makes the point well). Taylor has always done things to blur boundaries with her fans, like the secret sessions she used to do where she invited them to her home, her team (and even her mom) would choose fans at shows to bring to the VIP box or to meet her backstage (though admittedly I don't know if she's doing that at Eras tour, she's done it in the past), she will periodically like and comment on random tiktoks about her, she jokes on stage that she knows what fans/fandom are saying and references her own fandom jokes. It has obviously served her well in terms of making her career massively successful, but it also clearly has some weird and not great impacts on her fanbase. There's an almost panopticon-like sense that at any given moment Taylor might be watching, and so if fans perform fanhood well enough, they might be "chosen" by her or get her attention. Which is unsettling enough on its own for the ways that it makes what's ultimately a one-sided parasocial relationship feel like it might at any moment actually be two-sided, but I think it also helps explain why her fans are out here putting out statements about her dating Matty Healy, because I think it leads fans to think their random tweet or tiktok might actually reach or impact Taylor, the way it might've if they'd posted an Eras tour outfit that she liked.

Obviously none of that justifies fan behavior or makes it any less troubling. I agree with you that I think if people behave this way parasocially, it suggests something about the way they behave in their actual social lives, and I think it also contributes to the ways that celebrities have a difficult time just existing as people in ways that are undeniably harmful to them as humans (like the crowds following Taylor around NYC). But there's something troubling to me about the asymmetry of it - boundary blurring good when it's for financial benefit, bad when it's strangers having public takes on a celeb's dating life. I think the asymmetry is in part natural, because of course fans can only control their own behavior and response and not the way that Taylor chooses to market her music, but I still just feel pretty icky about it, especially because it's largely operating on an unconscious level. I don't think a fan sees Taylor Swift comment on another random fan's concert video and goes, oh, this is a marketing tactic designed to boost engagement with the artist and encourage the creation of Eras tour content to keep it viral. I think a random fan, especially a young person, sees that and goes, oh, that could've been my tiktok, that could be me, Taylor might notice me and think I'm cute or funny or whatever. There are obviously a lot of differences, but it does in some ways remind me of the conversations around the impact of algorithmic content and its unconscious impact on our brains, like whether even people who are intellectually aware that they're being served more content that makes them feel angry, because that gets the most engagement, are still impacted by seeing that content. I don't think it necessarily lends itself to an actual answer, but I do think it's extra unsettling as more artists use similar marketing tactics to engage their fanbase on social media.

I've seen this argument before and while I think there might be points that are worth considering - I completely and utterly reject the idea that it has any relevance to fans response to Taylor being in a relationship. In fact the idea that Taylor's engagement with fans might be relevant to the fact that fans engage her relationships to me crosses boundaries.

To me the key question is: Do you think that everyone who you invite to your house gets a say on your relationships? (Or even more precisely - do you think everyone who you invited to your house 4 years ago gets a say on your relationships now?) I sure hope the answer is no - and if the answer is no for you - then what the fuck could the fact that some fans were invited to Taylor's house have to do that some fans (probably not the same people) think they have a say on her relationship.

There is an argument that the fact that Taylor responds to social media content and sometimes references internet communications contributes to people's belief that they can communicate to her through internet content like an open letter. But my problem with the open letter is not that people are trying to communicate with Taylor. It's that the letter shows a belief that fans get a say over Taylor's life.

I also want to push back a bit at your idea that there's an asymmetry in how boundaries being blurred are being judged. Your model seems to be that there is a set of boundaries that should exist an artist and a fan and that any depature from that from either side is crossing boundaries.

That's not how I think boundaries work. I don't think Taylor was crossing any boundaries when she invited people to her house four years ago. Anymore than I was crossing boundaries when I invited someone to my house today. That's the whole point of boundaries - we get to decide who comes to our personal space.

Likewise "strangers having public takes on a celeb's dating life" isn't a problem and has nothing to do with boundaries. Having opinions publicly about someone doesn't cross any boundaries - we're not entitled to control what everyone says about us. There's a huge difference between having opinions about someone in public - and making those opinions the person's problem. Fans are entitled to say whatever they like about Taylor's relationship - and change their behaviour in any way. But to make demands about what she should do about fans feelings - that's very different.

I do think there are useful and interesting conversations that can be had about Taylor's actions towards her fans - the personal element, the marketing element, and the impact on her fandom. I just don't think boundaries is a useful model for that discussion, or that it has any place in the discussion of fans' entitlement over Taylor's relationships.

[back-and-totheleft]

“I’m not sure I’ve modified my thinking”

“It’s a strange place, England,” Oliver Stone informs me at the start of our Zoom call. “You’ve managed to make it worse than it was,” he says, speaking from his home in Los Angeles. “You’ve turned it into World War Two with your attitudes over there. The English love punishment, it’s part of their make-up.”

You sure know how to break the ice, Mr Stone. It’s a slightly galling accusation, given that he has hitched his wagon to Russia, hardly a paragon of enlightenment. The New York-born writer-director has never shied from ruffling feathers, though. Stone has taken on the American establishment to thrilling effect in his movies, from Platoon to Born on the Fourth of July, JFK to W, Salvador to Snowden, and still emerged with three Oscars. And he has admiringly interviewed a string of figures whose relations with Uncle Sam have rarely been cosy, including Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez and Vladimir Putin. Those had more mixed receptions, as has his support for Julian Assange.

Yet at 74 he is still a thorn in the side of the military-industrial complex and is set to remain one for some time, having just had his second shot of Covid vaccine. This being Stone, he got his jab in Russia. A recent trial showed the Sputnik V vaccine he was given to have 92 per cent efficacy and he’s palpably delighted. Angry too, of course. “It’s strange how the US ignores that. It’s a strange bias they have against all things Russian,” he says. “I do believe it’s your best vaccine on the market, actually,” he adds, sounding weirdly Trump-like.

If his bullishness is still intact, Stone reveals a more vulnerable side in his recent memoir, Chasing the Light. The book, which he discusses in an online Q&A tonight, goes a long way to explaining his distrust of government, society and, well, pretty much everything. There are visceral accounts of him fighting in Vietnam, and fighting to get Salvador and Platoon made. “The war was lodged away in a compartment, and I made films about it,” he says. “Sometimes I have a dream that I’ve been drafted and sent back there.”

The crucial event in the book, though, is his parents’ divorce when he was 15. Stone realises now that his conservative Jewish-American father and glamorous French mother were ill-suited. Both had affairs. What really stung was the way he was told about their split: over the phone by a family friend while he was at boarding school. “It was very cold, very English,” he says. “I say English because everything about boarding school invokes the old England.” He’s really got it in for us today.

With no siblings, he says, “I had no family after that divorce. It was over. The three of us split up.” His world view stemmed from his parents being in denial about their incompatibility, he writes in the book: “Children like me are born out of that original lie. And nobody can ever be trusted again.”

That disillusionment took a few years to show itself. “All of a sudden, I just had a collapse,” Stone says. He had been admitted to Yale University but his father’s alma mater suddenly felt like part of the problem. He felt suicidal and sidestepped those thoughts by enlisting to fight in Vietnam, putting the choice of him dying into other hands.

The Stone in the book was described by one reviewer as his most sympathetic character. “It’s true probably because it’s a novel,” he says. Well, technically it’s an autobiography, but it’s a telling mistake. Fact and fiction can blur in his work, from the demonisation of Turks in Midnight Express (he wrote the screenplay) to the conspiracy theories in JFK.

Writing the book allowed him to put himself into the story, something he says he’s never been able to do in his films. He has tried. He wrote a screenplay, White Lies, in which a child of divorce repeats his parents’ mistakes, as Stone has. “I had two divorces in my life [from the Lebanese-born Najwa Sarkis and Elizabeth Burkit Cox, who worked as a “spiritual advisor” on his films] and I’m on my third marriage, which I’m very happy in.” He and Sun-jung Jung, who is from South Korea, have been together for more than 25 years. They have a grown-up daughter, Tara, and he has two sons, Sean and Michael, from his marriage to Cox.

White Lies is on ice for now. “It’s hard to get those kinds of things done,” Stone says wearily. Will he make another feature? It’s been documentaries recently, the last two on the Ukraine. “I don’t know. It’s a question of energy. In the old days, there would be a studio you’d have a relationship with, and they’d have to trust you to a certain degree. And that doesn’t exist any more.”

He thinks back to the big beasts of his early years. Alan Parker, who directed Midnight Express; John Daly, who produced Salvador and Platoon; Robert Bolt, who taught him about screenwriting. “Those three Englishmen had a lot to do with my successes,” he says. I think he feels bad about all the limey bashing. “John was a tough cockney, but I liked him a lot.” He liked him more than Parker, whom he describes as “cold” with a “serious chip on his shoulder.” He smiles. “Sure. Alan did a good job with Midnight Express, though.”

You wonder if Netflix could come to Stone’s rescue. They have given generous backing to big-name directors, from David Fincher to Martin Scorsese, Stone’s old tutor at NYU film school. Surely they would welcome him? “Well, that’s why you’re not in charge! Netflix is very engineering driven. Subject matter such as [White Lies] might register low on a demographic.”

Isn’t he also working on a JFK documentary, Destiny Betrayed? That could do better with the Netflix algorithms. “I’m having problems with that too. Americans were so concerned with Trump, I don’t know that they wanted to hear about some of the facts behind the Kennedy killing. They don’t recognise that there’s a connection between 1963 and now, that pretty much all the screws came loose when they did that in ’63.” He smiles. “I know you think I’m nuts.”

Well no, but you do wonder at his unwavering conviction that there was a conspiracy to murder Kennedy, probably involving the CIA. JFK is a big reason why a majority of Americans believe in a conspiracy and, according to Stone, led to the establishment of the Assassination Records Review Board, which he claims is “the only piece of legislation in this country that ever came out of a film.”

Yet several serious studies, including a 1,600-page book, Reclaiming History, by the former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. That book accused Stone of committing a “cultural crime” by distorting facts in JFK. “I feel like I’m in the dock with Bugliosi. I didn’t like his book at all,” Stone says. “Believe me, you cannot walk out of [his forthcoming documentary] and say Oswald did it alone. If you do, I think you’re on mushrooms.”

Stone knows whereof he speaks regarding psychedelics. On returning from Vietnam he was “a little bit radical” in his behaviour, he says: drugs, womanising, hellraising. He recently took LSD for the first time in years. “It was wonderful,” he says. He hallucinated that he was “moving from island to island on a little boat”.

What was radical in the Seventies can be problematic now. He has been accused of inappropriate behaviour by the model Carrie Stevens and the actresses Patricia Arquette and Melissa Gilbert. “As far as I know I never forced anyone to do anything they didn’t want to do,” he says. Has he modified the way he behaves around women? “Oh sure, no question.”

At the same time, he is disturbed by “the scolding going on, the shaming culture. I don’t agree with any of that. It’s like the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It scares the shit out of me. I do think the politically correct point of view will never be mine.”

He’s not a slavish follower of conspiracy theories — QAnon “sounds like nonsense”, he says, as was the theory that Donald Trump was “a Manchurian candidate for the Russians. That was a horrible thing to do and it hurt that presidency a lot. I’m not an admirer of Trump by any means, but he was picked on from day one.”

What does he make of Joe Biden? “I voted for him, not because I liked him, but as an alternative to Trump’s disasters. He’s got a far more merciful humanitarian side. But he also has a history of warmongering.” Fake news, he says, has “always happened”, in the east and west, on the left and the right. “I mean, back in the Cold War, the US was saying Russia was lying and Russia was saying the US was lying. Each one of these wars the US has been involved in was based on lies.”

It sounds as if Stone has been on the Russian Kool-Aid himself. He is making a documentary, A Bright Future, about climate change that advocates pursuing nuclear power in the short term, and has visited some Russian nuclear plants. They are “very state-of-the-art,” he says. “The US is not really pursuing the big plants, the way Russia and China are. I believe in renewables, but they’re not going to be able to handle the capacity when India and Africa and all these countries come online wanting electricity.”

Putin liked the interviews Stone did with him in 2017, he says. “I think they contributed to his election numbers.” Wasn’t he too easy on the Russian leader? “That’s what some say. But I got his ire up. I did ask him some tough questions about succession. ‘I think you should leave’ — that kind of stuff. The pressure that Russia is under from both England and the US is enormous,” he adds. “Unless you’re there I don’t know that you understand that. Because you take the English point of view, and they have been very anti-Soviet since 1920. You talk about fake news — I feel that way about MI5 and MI6.”

You can’t help but admire Stone’s conviction. If he’s modified his behaviour that’s probably a good thing, but as he says, “I’m not so sure I’ve modified my thinking. I express myself freely. I don’t want to feel muzzled.” Whatever you think of him, be grateful he hasn’t been.

-Ed Potton, “You talk about fake news. I feel that way about MI5 and MI6,” The Times of London, Feb 8 2021 [x]

[ninamontagutbordas]

HOW CAN I KNOW WHO I AM IF SOCIAL MEDIA DICTATES WHO I SHOULD BE?

The first time I joined Facebook, I was thirteen years old. It was 2008 at the time and none of the existing social media platforms were a big thing in Spain yet. I had a total of seven facebook friends and I only used it to talk to my sister, who introduced me to the social network, while she was away during the summer. Actually, facebook was just a great solution to connect with people traveling or living abroad.

I didn’t understand the power of social media then and, to be honest, it’s still difficult for me to have an accurate understanding of how its power can affect people. It sure has affected me countless times to the point where social media was controlling the way I felt and, it still controls me sometimes.

I am about to turn twenty-five and I am very happy with who I’ve become this past decade. Obviously, I had to go through all the faces the majority of kids go through between the ages of fifteen and the mid-twenties (hopefully I’m not the only one!): I was a stupid teenager at times (to be fair, sometimes still am), there were moments were I behaved as a bad daughter, a bad sister, a bad friend, a bad girlfriend and as a bad “all the roles that a human being can possibly be”, but, still, I am very happy with who I am today and I have forgiven myself for all the damage I may have made.

During this past decade, I’ve managed to create different abilities that helped me understand a bit more how to navigate the awkward early twenties, such as pushing away toxicity, standing up for myself, accepting constructive criticism, and facing mistakes as soon as possible.

BUT, what if social media is dictating what’s toxic and what’s not, when do I need to stand up for myself and when I don’t, which criticism is constructive and which is not and which are the things I should see as mistakes and which are not?

It got me thinking.

I feel like the power of this digital “era” we are living in (is it even an era anymore or at this point is just our reality?) has brought us a lot of good, but also a lot of bad. There have been moments in my life where I found social media was actually very dangerous for me and reflecting on it now, I think my experience may be helpful to some of you as well.  

At the beginning of this crazy 2020, I was in a very bad place. I had just quitted a job that was very damaging for me, I wasn’t comfortable with the way I looked, and I felt very isolated from the important things in life. I have suffered from severe anxiety since I was twelve and had to learn to manage that at a very early stage in my life, but it had never been as bad as it was in January. First world problems? Indeed. I totally agree, but it was a very dark period of time for myself and there was nothing I could do to feel better -or at least I thought so-.

I have the most amazing parents and the most amazing family, a great group of friends who have always supported me no matter what and I had a great loving boyfriend who not once made me feel non-deserving of a happiness that seemed impossible to reach at the time. My support system wasn’t the problem.

SO, why wasn’t I happy?

I knew I had to stop complaining and start doing things that would make me feel better, which would make me heel. Had I known at the time social media was a key element to get there, it would have been a lot easier.  

My body had changed a lot during the past few years, I wasn’t exercising, and I handled my anxiety by eating literally my feelings. My pants didn’t fit, my body was way different than my friend’s bodies (yeah, I know, “don’t compare yourself to others” and “all bodies are beautiful” but still, we all know how it works) and I felt very insecure in general. I never have had the patience or the strength before to beat my laziness and it’s safe to say I had zero trust in myself then, but again, it was time. I had to do something.

I decided to start a severe diet.

If you know me, you know I have had a terrible habit in the past where I start things and never finish them, so of course, I didn’t think I was going to go through with an entire diet. I didn’t see myself capable.

It took me six months and nine days to finally feel healthy and good again, but I did it. (Two out of six months I was quarantined at home, which was not great neither mentally nor physically for the process I was going through). I discovered a lot of myself during that time though.

However, not everything I discovered was actually good, believe it or not. I discovered a lot of bad stuff and not necessarily was I aware of all the negative inputs I was receiving from the internet. One of those things was the social media strategies to engage with users in the wrong way and how that can control a person’s feelings. I was a victim of social media.

During the lockdown, I had to beat my anxiety in different ways so that none of them lead me up to interrupting the diet-plan my doctor had provided me. I had a commitment to myself and the more I proved myself wrong, the better I felt. I’m not a quitter and I wasn’t a quitter back then, but I just didn’t know it yet.

One of the ways to beat my anxiety, strangely enough, was sitting home to my computer and lose myself on social media, as many of us did during the quarantine. Without even noticing it, I ended up falling into a rabbit hole: Instagram food accounts.

Isn’t it so paradoxical? I was doing a diet but still, I was spending my hours looking at thousands of videos of people baking cakes, cooking pasta, and reading recipes I know I couldn’t have as long as I wanted to keep doing this.

Some said I should be proud of myself - being able to look at these videos and not once cheat or interrupt my diet is a great way “to train my strength”. I fully disagree. To me, this was not about strength, to me this was about how the channels in my brain had been educated to think this was normal behavior. It was not. Social media was tempting me.

What I’ve realized through this process is that, it wasn’t actually my choice whether to stop looking at them or not. The less I wanted to see, the more videos I had access to because of the complexity of the social media algorithms. They decided I needed to see that kind of content.

Social media was proving myself and it became an interesting yet dangerous dynamic for me, which is why I find myself writing down this essay. For months, I’ve been having conversations with my parents and my friends about the danger of social media.

BUT, where is the real danger?

In the months that followed, I was starting to feel better. Actually, I was feeling pretty good. Not just physically, but also mentally. I was better than ever and people around me started noticing the inside glow I was feeling.

The problem is that feeling good and being in charge of your own life are two very different things. I was happy but my life was not under control, quite the opposite. I wasn’t in control. Social media algorithms were controlling me.

That’s when it got tricky for me – How could I be the happiest I’ve ever been but feel so frustrated? Was I really happy? Was I pretending to be happy because everyone else seemed so happy? Was I really being myself or was I just pretending to be somebody who I wasn’t? Was social media training myself to think I was happy? Was social media LYING to me?

All of these questions were hunting me, and I just did not know what to do. I was back in shape yet all the pictures I saw on Instagram of these beautiful women in their amazing bikinis during their amazing vacations made me feel self-conscious about myself.

Why did I do this diet? Did I do it for myself or for the benefit of a social network that had thousands of pictures of myself where I could prove to people graphically I had lost a lot of weight?

Social media has an interesting way to make people feel bad and create this interesting millennial feeling of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) – the problem is, we only share 10% of what’s really going on with us. That’s why it was important to me to share this story – I wanted to use social media in a different way. Maybe I’m oversharing, but at least I’m oversharing in a true and authentic way, not in an unrealistic scenario.

A while ago, I decided I would delete all the pictures on my Instagram page and I was only going to leave there the ones that captured the moments where I was really happy and really present. From around 600 pictures I had posted over the years, I chose around 20. They could stay. Twenty-something pictures that reminded me of the important things in life, at least the important things to me. But then I said to myself: “Did I just chose when I felt happy because I deleted some Instagram pictures? This makes me so sad”.

Going through these old pictures, I could clearly tell how my body has changed “for the better” this past nine months but I realized very quickly something very unexpected - I was really happy back then. For sure I had that puffy face and a bigger body, but I was really happy and really secure. And that’s when I realized, social media was dictating what should I do and who I should be. Not because I decided to, but because I allowed it to. 

The thing is that I don’t feel threatened by social media itself. I feel threatened by the way we consume digital content without even thinking of the impact this can have not only on ourselves but on others. 

We get carried away because we don’t use social media in a smart way. We use it to compare ourselves and our life with others, directly or indirectly, whether we like it or not. We don’t consume media to complete ourselves with information and use it for our own profits. We consume media to fill the blanks we are missing in our journeys. 

I’m scared of how fast the world is evolving and how fast digital progress is happening. Let’s see where my relationship with the internet stands in five years when my twenties are over. Until then, I’ll try to use social media for the benefit of the people around me. I feel like we all have a responsibility and, I’m going to commit to it.  

The question is, are you?

[retrauxpunk]

sv 6.06

recap post of the penultimate episode of silicon valley under the cut (with spoilers as usual)

this miiiight be a downer post so if you want to avoid that ... this is your warning

...

...

... i think this is the first episode recap post i’m writing that doesn’t start with ‘what the fuck’ because honestly i think i found this episode a bit weird and not ................that good? and MAYBE it’s just because i’ve had a shitty couple days? i’m not totally sure.

but.

I dunno.

I’ll try do this chronologically.

it was a good point of yikes with richard not actually having secured the AT&T deal and just telling his employees that he had because like, that’s a good potential source of conflict. i’m down for that.

i liked when he was talking to AT&T guy and then there’s a cut to dinesh and gilfoyle standing their like shocked parents. dinesh’s expression of ‘WHAT’ ... yeah i like that. also gilfoyle looked especially fine as hell, particularly the hands.

okay.

i 

... gilfoyle using THE AI TO DEBUG CODE? i think this broke my suspension of disbelief. this seems wildly stupid and implausible given, like, gilfoyle’s WHOLE CHARACTER? i don’t really buy that someone who’s as security-conscious and conscientious as he is would, um, DO THIS? please feel free to present counterarguments if you disagree with this (or any other points in this post tbh) because i’m honestly open to hearing them, in fact i would welcome anything that made this episode feel more sense-making and less ‘what the fuck did the show just decide to fire all their tech consultants and throw character out the window?’

LIKE. it’s partly the fact that this seems a bit farfetched on the technological realism front but it’s MORE SO the fact that it just seems so NOT GILFOYLE.

GIVEN THAT FIVE EPISODES AGO HE GOT MAD AT DINESH FOR LETTING THE TWO AIs TALK. HE’S CLEARLY AWARE OF THE RISKS.

and he acts like this cavalier dont give a fuck asshole but i DO NOT BELIEVE that he would risk ALL OF PIED PIPER’S CODE with his AI?????? FUCK what is this!!...?

..............????

okay.

i’m  ............ upset that they seem to have COMPLETELY DITCHED this whole jarrich thing they were building up. i’m NOT saying i’m mad that they’re not canonically a romantic couple. i’m saying that -- shipper goggles completely not in the picture -- the first four episodes built up so much stuff for them, there was SO MUCH about their relationship, and with 6.05 and 6.06 there was just fucking NOTHING. and it just. feels like kinda shitty writing? UNLESS?? in the final episode there’s a lot of richard and jared content to make up for it?

like the first four episodes had so MUCH content about their relationship (jared’s whole generally lovelorn thing, accidentally driving to the hacker hostel, quitting, richard throwing a fit when he quit and watching with this cocktail of sadness and bitterness and anger as jared leaves, their fight at the hacker hostel, JARED BRIEFLY FORGETTING TO BE MAD AT RICHARD AND SMILING DURING THE WHOLE BUYING HOOLI THING, richard apologising and telling jared he missed him, JARED FUCKING CRYING) and then there’s just NOTHING? what the FUCK? IS THIS? it HONESTLY feels like the writers were building up to a big richard and jared moment (whether romantic or platonic, either works) but then that storyline got axed by an executive and they got forced into dropping or something, or they just fucking collectively FORGOT about this whole arc seriously WHAT. IS THIS?????

this is the first time in my life i’ve gotten this level of upset about any tv and i guess, well, whatever they do with the finale, it can’t be as bad as what they did with game of thrones!! (i don’t watch game of thrones or read asoiaf, but it was pretty impossible not to catch wind of that whole clusterfuck) that’s gonna be my source of ......... solace.

so yeah.

for FUCK’s sake. all of jared’s talking about gwart, i just. if that’s meant to be sincere i don’t fucking buy it because no fucking way did jared imprint so hard on a person who was fundamentally a rebound

I’M STILL MAD ABOUT THE LACK OF JARRICH STORYLINE WHAT THE FUCK this is not even a queerbaiting issue THEY HAD A FUCKING STORYLINE TOGETHER AND NOW IT’S VANISHED INTO FUCKING SMOKE WHAT THE FUCK

ALSO DID THEY SERIOUSLY JUST WIPE OUT HOLDEN OFF-SCREEN ARE WE REALLY MEANT TO JUST IMAGINE THAT IN THE GAP BETWEEN EPISODES JARED JUST CONTINUOUSLY EMOTIONALLY ABUSED/HARRASSED HOLDEN INTO QUITTING WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK

honestly when i set out to write this recap i was just like ‘this prob won’t be a long post because all i really have feelings about and want to talk about is the ending of the episode’ but clearly ... that has turned out not to be the case

okay anyway, yeah, i mean, it’s definitely plausible that if richard and jared were to real life people that jared would rejoin pied piper and they’d just simply never address their falling out, right, i mean people are plausibly that emotionally constipated sometimes and don’t communicate in situations where you’d expect them to.

BUT THIS ISN’T REAL LIFE IT’S FUCKING TV and it appears to me rather much like shitty screenwriting when you set up a relationship conflict that’s fucking PACKED with juicy emotional moments and then it DISAPPEARS INTO THIN AIR what the FUCK

jesus christ

okay

anyway.

russfest.

honestly when jared was seeing gwart around i was a bit like, okay if this meant to be a legit hallucination it’s a bit Much because, really, jared being that genuinely devoted to gwart that the breakup with her cut him that much? i’m not buying it 

so i’m glad it turned out to be Not a hallucination

i liked the twist that actually yaonet wasn’t throttling pied piper, pied piper itself just wasn’t good enough. i liked richard breaking down over it. tbh on a subjectively level i found it a bit painful to watch because he really did behave like a toddler and that was a bit, like, second-hand-embarrassment. but i don’t like object to it or anything.

WHY IS THIS SEASON ONLY SEVEN EPISODES.

the fucking speed with which richard breaks down and then magically finds a solution honestly feels way too rushed and unearned.

U N E A R N E D

that is how i feel about the resolution of this episode. like.

okay so if i remember/understand this correctly, richard’s [extremely hand-wavey solution] was to apply his compression algorithm to son of anton which allowed it to become more intelligent and learn faster/better? and that basically FIXED PIED PIPER? he used gilfoyle’s [a tad unrealistically] bitching AI to like ... have pied piper fix itself? 

i barely understand it.

and it’s not like i demand a fully fleshed-out solution, right, like with the middle-out jerkoff epiphany, that wasn’t fleshed out but there was enough detail for it to feel believable. whereas with this ... it did not feel like that. 

yeah the whole thing felt way too rushed.

what even was it? like, gilfoyle was using son of anton on pipernet to debug things ... whereas richard first used his compression algorithm on son of anton, then set son of anton loose on pied piper? okay that makes, like, enough sense that if they poured more time and detail into this, then i’d probably be totally happy accepting this in the storyline and my suspension of disbelief wouldn’t have been fucking skullfucked

but this, just. this pacing. i did not like it. it felt massively unearned because there were, what, a very small number of minutes between when richard finds out his tech is inadequate to when he finds a solution?

GOD THEY COULD’VE MADE THIS SO MUCH BETTER IF THEY’D PUT AN EPISODE BETWEEN PROBLEM AND SOLUTION INSTEAD OF JUST LIKE TWO FUCKING MINUTES

this makes me SO MAD IT GIVES ME THE CONFIDENCE TO THINK I COULD WRITE A BETTER STORY THEN THEY DID? FUCK???????

???

okay like yeah totally possible the writers had constraints outside of their control and they did the best they could. but. i’m still not ... happy with the result lol

anyway yeah i’m fucking cheesed off about how richard gets skullfucked with the inadequacy of his own tech, has a breakdown, and then MERE MINUTES OF SCREENTIME LATER, he has a wild solution that works!

and sure, they had it appear to fail first, which was good. but then it magically was back up and running! and yeah i liked how russ said ‘lights!’ and it turned out that this magical new pied piper had gotten so awesome that it build this new feature for itself or whatever, but, honestly, it happened way too quickly to feel believable or satisfying and i’m mad.

because this show has set a pretty high standard in the past and now it’s been a fucking let-down with this episode. god.

what the fuck is this pacing? it was so good at the beginning of this season!! WHAT IS THIS???

AND IF THE PROBLEM IS TIME

THEN WHY THE FUCK DID THEY HAVE SO MANY PLOTLINES WITH FILLER? THE WHOLE ETHAN CONFLICT. GILFOYLE AND MONICA VS TRACY. GAVIN FUCKING BELSON’S STUPID BOOK DEAL. can you imagine how much better this russfest plotline would’ve been if they’d had MORE TIME from not doing those ultimately unimportant subplots? fuck

i have legitimately worked myself into a rage writing this post. i did not expect to have this many feelings, to this level of intensity.

and it’s fucking frustrating because the bones of an awesome arc are here! the moment when the AT&T guy sees the giant hologram from the plane, that could’ve been actually epic rather than a feeling of ‘i know this is meant to be epic but it just feels totally hollow because they completely fucking compressed the biggest part of this whole episode into five fucking minutes’

and richard’s breakdown where he’s jumping on the laptop, screaming about ‘six years’? god that point would’ve been amazing if there’d been more time to explore it!

on a lighter note, i was amused when richard said he had gilfoyle’s laptop because i was like ‘oh okay it’s nice to know that richard is a l33t enough hax0r that he can get through gilfoyle’s undoubtedly Strong laptop security with [presumably] relative ease’ ... and then it turns out it’s dinesh’s laptop and i’m like, ah, okay, less impressive then XD

...there’s no way that the girls in jian-yang’s ‘coding class’ were stupid enough to believe that writing fake amazon reviews constitutes ‘coding’. not in fucking 2019.

i’m mad.

god this has lowered my expectations of the series finale SO MUCH which i guess may be a good thing because, y’know, there’s less capacity for disappointment now.

IT’S OKAY.

IT’S OKAY.

EVEN IF THE SERIES ENDS ON A SHIT NOTE, WE HAD FIVE AND A HALF SEASONS OF SHOW THAT RANGED FROM FUCKING AMAZING TO NOT AS GOOD BUT STILL ALRIGHT.

and i have a whole imagination’s worth of potential fan content to be created once the show’s over. i don’t know how long this sv love affair will last but i sure fucking intend to keep it alive as long as i can.

on the topic of fan content, if you’re interested in making sv fan stuff and receiving it as a christmas/holiday gift, please consider signing up for the silicon valley secret santa/gift exchange that i’m running :))) the official blog for it is @svexchange2k19 and the sign-up form is here

[comp6841]

Tutorial - Week 2

One of the first activities we did in the tutorial was another cryptogram puzzle - unfortunately I had got to uni early and already did the puzzle before the class started. I feel like I’m getting pretty decent at these, however I’m not sure how well I would fair in the situation where I don’t even know where the spaces are. I think this was given actually as a past midterm question, however it was a permutation cipher I think.

Case Study - Houdini

We were presented a theoretical scenario in how we could use Houdini to determine which mediums are legitimate. Basically the situation involves a medium who would be speaking to the spirit of Houdini, and his widow would need to determine the legitimacy of mediums from the messages they provide to her.

One of our initial ideas as a group was to use a characteristic message that Houdini would tell his wife he would say after his death. However, we decided it would be more secure for him to encrypt all his messages with a key that he tells his wife before his death. However we ran into an issue with this approach - it was still vulnerable to a replay attack. If in theory, some mediums are legitimate, then how could we tell which ones are? They could just repeat decoded messages of other mediums. The solution to this is pretty simple - you can just include a timestamp or pick a really large random number (a nonce) and increment 1 every time you send a message. (inside the encryption, of course). Some of other solutions suggested were interesting too - for example, you could just use a hash to verify the integrity of the sender and data.

MACs

In practice we use these hashes in message authentication codes (MACs) for ensuring data integrity across network transmissions. Basically a hash function is applied to the message to produce the MAC; then this is transmitted alongside the message to the receiver. The receiver then computes the hash of the message and compares it to the MAC - if they are the same we have data integrity. A timestamp or sequence number is usually included in the message itself in order to prevent replay attacks.

Social Engineering

There was basically a lengthy discussion regarding how we can trust no-one. I would argue the fact that trust is key element involved here - it is our misplaced trust in a system, group or individual which leads to our complacency and vulnerability to social engineering. For example, consider the case of identity theft which may not necessarily sound like it falls under this subcategory. In order for your information to be stolen you must have misplaced your trust in a system, whether it be a company which stores your data or the security of your own home office. 

Some more complex (by that I mean lengthy) cases of social engineering were discussed such as “deep state agents” planted in other countries for surveillance. The question was posed, how do we ensure they remain loyal to their cause? This links back to the human condition again; what is it that drives as individuals. I would argue the best way to approach this problem is to provide both incentives for completion of a task and deterrents for non-compliance. These rewards and punishments should closely link to our ability to achieve our own personal ambitions.

Surveillance State

One of the cases posed to us was how would we proceed with the surveillance of an individual walking towards a four-way intersection. How do we achieve our goal without ‘spooking’ the individual? The main idea was to make sure everyone watching would be blending in perfectly with the surroundings. Consider the case in which a spy is following him; the man stops, what must you do? In order to appear normal to the man, he must keep walking (and past him) even though he may no longer be able to watch the individual. This doesn’t mean he can go out of character as soon as he is out of view - he needs to appear as a normal citizen to every other person who may come in contact with the individual. Otherwise it may compromise the operation - it is almost like a chain reaction; for example if person B witnesses person A behaving strangely, it may change the behaviour of B around the individual which may spook him.

I think one of the ideas to take from this study is that you always need to be thinking multiple steps ahead. You need to have a broader view when it comes to security and think of the bigger picture - could making a small change to an algorithm in one location throw the security out of line in another section? I could also just be doing my 1am round of overthinking things - I guess you could argue that it could also be an analogy to malware as well. How do you detect malicious software without it realising your trying to find out how to disable it?

Threat Modelling

I’ve been advised that this will be discussed in lectures soon but we briefly did a bit of threat modelling. Basically the idea behind this process is as follows:

Identify all your important assets

Identify the actors which may want to access / take the assets

Determine methods the actors could use to access / take control of your assets and devise methods to defend against these

For example, let’s say my browsing history on 4chan is a very valuable asset to me and I’m “unreasonably” paranoid that government security agencies desperately want this information from me. I think we can agree that fully protecting against this threat is probably impossible, but one step we could take is to divert traffic through a number of proxy servers.

[alexchristin]

A Different Approach to Difficulty

The problem of difficulty in games has been debated to great depths for a long time. Various alternatives to the traditional approach with different difficulty modes at the beginning of a particular game have been proposed, analyzed and implemented. And yet, as much as they patch up the errors of the traditional approach, within them arise numerous inherent problems and difficulties. As such, I would like to propose another alternative–not so much a mechanical solution that requires implementation, but rather a different approach to difficulty design.

One thing I’d like to stress is that, this has been applied in various games quite successfully before, and I’ll mention them later on, but not to the extent to which it can deservedly become a central design philosophy, in my opinion. This I presume is due to a lack of a rather clear and deliberate approach to difficulty design.

But first, let me attempt to briefly summarize a few popular criticisms of the traditional difficulty modes approach and its alternative.

Problems with Difficulty Modes

Picture yourself coming into a brand new game, only to be asked to choose a difficulty mode that’s suitable for yourself, and presented with a number of different menu options. And frankly, they don’t do that good of a job at giving you sufficient information to make such an important decision. This is how many games in our history have done difficulty, and it continues to be fairly prevalent among modern games.

Here are its common criticisms:

Asking the player to make such a decision right at the beginning is not exactly a good idea. To select a difficulty mode before the game even starts is to make a major commitment based on very little information available (e.g. a short description). Once the player has selected a difficulty, they are probably going to live with it for the entire playthrough.

Even if the game allows the player to change the difficulty mode later on, it is, in itself, still not a very good idea. For one, explicitly selecting a difficulty mode in a menu-based manner is certainly not an interesting choice that games strive to offer their players. They do not have to weigh anything against anything. They do not have to analyze the risks and rewards coming as a result of each option. And generally speaking, players are not going to be good at weighting short-term convenience against long-term enjoyment. They just do not know the game enough.

Such approach would defeat the entire point of progression through unlocking higher and better tools to enhance and assist with gameplay. It would go against the intended gameplay experience from the game designer. And most importantly, it would make the player feel judged for not choosing a higher difficulty.

There have been several solutions to negate these issues, of which Mark Brown has gone into depths in one of his videos. However, not one of them was able to solve them all and still maintain immersion.

Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment

The idea of Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (or DDA) hinges on the theory of the player’s Flow State, in which the player is completely immersed, and the game’s difficulty feels just right. Any more difficulty will cause frustration and break immersion. Any less difficulty and the player will quickly find boredom, and you guessed it, lose immersion. Therefore, as designer Andrew Glassner put it in his book Interactive Storytelling, games “should not ask players to select a difficulty level. Games should adapt themselves during gameplay to offer the player a consistent degree of challenge based on his changing abilities at different tasks.” Or in other words, games should be implemented with a performance evaluation system as well as a dynamic difficulty adjustment system in order to adjust itself to accommodate the infinitely different and ever-changing characteristics of players. More on the technical details of DDA can be found in Robin Hunicke’s 2005 paper The Case for Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in Games.

However, while the Flow State theory admittedly has its merits, the DDA approach doesn’t go without its numerous downsides:

Some players, when they find out about DDA, hate it. Especially when DDA cannot be turned off, the player ends up feeling patronized, and not respected by the game as an adult, capable of taking on challenges and improving him/herself.

Players can, and will, learn to exploit DDA by pretending to be worse at playing than they actually are. And oftentimes, a DDA system will require some sort of break time in order to avoid revealing itself to the player, thus not able to quickly adapt itself to the player’s ostensible skill level.

DDA inhibits the player’s ability to learn and improve. As soon as the player improves, the difficulty ramps up to match their skill level, thus eliminating the possibility of positive results. If the player cannot see some sort of feedback from the game regarding their performance, they cannot know whether any changes in their approach to gameplay were effective.

DDA may create absurdities. One of the popular example of DDA going awry is the rubber-band effect in racing games, where opponents speed up and slow down seemingly for no reason in order to adapt to the player’s performance.

DDA is incompatible with some forms of challenge. If the challenge in question is numerically-based, then DDA can work easily. However, when the challenge is symbolical, with pre-designed elements that are nakedly visible to the player, often having only one or a few intended solutions, then DDA cannot work.

There are many interesting and nuanced approaches to DDA that I won’t mention since that’s beyond the scope of this segment. While I imagine there are going to be a lot of way to make DDA functional and sufficiently inscrutable through clever algorithms and implementation, I am rather discussing the fundamentals.

Organic Difficulty in Games

There seems to be a number of different terms to address this approach, but just for this article I’m going to use the term “Organic Difficulty.” This is something that has been tossed around in the last decade or so.

The basic idea of Organic Difficulty is that the game does not ask the players to select or adjust their preferred difficulty via GUI-based commands, nor does it automatically adapt itself to match with the player’s performance and progress. But rather, the game allows the player to interact with it in certain ways to make it easier, or harder, for themselves. These take the form of tools, approaches, strategies, input sequences or methods, etc. which should often come with some sort of trade-off.

This is something that has been implemented in a number of games including From Software’s Dark Souls, which Extra Credits has dedicated an entire episode to, and which everyone should take a look.

In Metal Gear Solid V, for every mission the player has completed, there’s a score rating system which provides a rough overview of the player’s performance based on a number of factors such as stealth, lethality, accuracy, completion speed, whether the player has completed any mission tasks, and what tools they used. While the player does get minus points for mistakes such as getting detected, raising enemy alert, taking hits, etc. some other factors are not as clear-cut as to how they constitute minus points aside from narrative reasons. The player can always go on a lethal rampage, tossing grenades at everybody in sight, or calling a support helicopter to airstrike the entire enemy base. The player is provided the tools to do exactly all of those, and they’re always just a few buttons away, and the worst they get is a C rank, provided they completed the mission, and a slight dip in their earnings.

Another example of this can be found XCOM: Enemy Within. There’s a “cheesy” tactic in the game that can almost ensure victory, which is to have a unit with the Mimetic Skin ability to safely spot the enemies, thus enabling a squadsight-sniper from across the entire map to pick them off one-by-one safely without any real repercussion. This strategy is extremely effective in virtually every mechanical aspect of combat, with the only risk being that the spotter must not be flanked for they would instantly lose invisibility. The actual problem with this strategy is that it’s incredibly boring: your snipers just simply shoot every turn, and you can only take a few shots every turn, not to mention reloading. This strategy is best suited for beginners and people who have made mistakes and want to get out of the downward spiral. While on the other end of the spectrum, there are players who understand how the game and the AI of every alien unit in the game work, so they are more confident about moving up close and personal with enemies with minimal armor. Because for them, it’s not about defending against the enemies, but about manipulating, “nudging” the enemies into behaving the way these players want them to (e.g. nobody needs armor when enemies are only going to attack the tank; nobody needs to take good cover when enemies are too scared to move to flank in front of an Opportunist-overwatch unit; etc.)

The above examples seem to imply a few important points regarding difficulty:

Difficulty should not only be designed around the mechanics of a game. It should also take into account the aesthetics or elegance of those very mechanics.

Punishment does not always have to be tangible or significant, as long as it is enough to indicate to players that they are straying off the intended experience. A good analogy would be physical pain. The pain itself is not what’s causing harm to your body. The physical wound is. Pain is merely a bodily signal to let you know that what’s happening right now is pretty bad and you probably shouldn’t let what just happened happen again. But remember, the choice is ultimately yours!

It may not be a good idea to put people on the linear graph of “gaming skill” where some people are simply “softcore, not-so-good at video games” and some other are “hardcore and always challenge-seeking.” The idea alone is absurd, because players on such a graph would move up and down constantly, even during a single playthrough. Some people pick things up faster than a game can predict with its tutorials’ pacing. Some people due to real life reasons have to abandon the game for some time, and they lose a bit of their touch when they come back to it.

Instead of judging the player’s skill and trying to accommodate every possibility, games should be judging player interactions instead, using a spectrum between Effectiveness and Aesthetics of Play (or what I shall humbly name Ludoaesthetics).

The Effectiveness-Ludoaesthetics Spectrum (ELS)

On the Effectiveness-Ludoaesthetics Spectrum (ELS), difficulty exists only at the lowest technical level. Each end of the ELS represents what each player wants at a certain point in the game with certain conditions. On this spectrum, games are designed with the player’s interactions, approaches and strategies in mind, each with its own degree of effectiveness and ludoaesthetics. These are not solely defined by mechanics or the player’s skill level, but rather the way in which they are experienced and perceived by the player.

Effectiveness refers to how well the player can progress and achieve their goals in a game using the set of tools they’re given and the strategies they’re allowed to formulate. How easy those tools are to use, and how good they are at helping the player progress towards the game’s intended goals, primarily constitute Effectiveness. Players who aim towards and stay on this end primarily look for the most effective ways to achieve the intended goals of the game (which of course include playing the game the easy way).

Ludoaesthetics refers to the perceivable aesthetic appeals of the aforementioned set of tools and strategies given to the players. Players who aim towards this end do not necessarily look for the most effective ways to achieve the intended goals. But rather they tend to look for the added intrinsic benefits derived from unconventional play. These benefits include:

Superficial Attractiveness: Visual and auditory appeal of using the subject matter or the subject matter itself. It can be represented by any entity the player can recognize in the game such as a character with great visual design, a badass-looking weapon with satisfying visual and sound effects, etc.

Competitiveness: a.k.a. bragging rights. This is rather self-explanatory. There is always that portion of players who keep seeking greater and greater challenges to prove themselves to the world. They may even go as far as handicapping themselves with arbitrary limitations to heighten the challenge.

Greater sense of satisfaction derived from greater challenges that may go beyond the goals intended by the game. People who have been through heights of overwhelming odds know about, and may expect, the immense amount of satisfaction that comes with them.

Narrative Fantasy: Players may look for things that may not be effective or productive in terms of gameplay because they would align with the narrative better (in games that understandably contain some degree of ludonarrative dissonance), or they would add an extra layer of depth and intensity to the narrative and thereby enhancing it. Essentially, they’re sacrificing gameplay optimality to elevate their narrative fantasy.

Design for Ludoaesthetics

The point of designing for ludoaesthetics is NOT to create increasingly harder challenges in order to accommodate the player’s increasing skills (though that is not to say such approach has no merits whatsoever). But rather, it is actually to encourage players to strive for aesthetics in their gameplay and to lean more towards the right side of the spectrum.

Here are a few suggestions on how to go about it.

Creating more depth

Depth refers to the amount of space the player is allowed to make interesting choices using the set of tools they’re given by a game. For a more detailed explanation of what Depth is in comparison to Complexity, you can take a look at Extra Credits’ episode on Depth vs. Complexity.

Essentially, Complexity is the amount of constituent elements that make up a game, and Depth is the degree of interactivity between those elements. The very nature of ludoaesthetics has to do with the deviation from the default, intended approach (a.k.a. Playing “by-the-book.”) Therefore, the more those elements “talk” to one another, the better chance it is for ludoaesthetics to emerge, because then the player will be able to find more different ways to control or manipulate each element.

[Also read: Design for Theorycrafting]

Depth is pretty much the prerequisite for ludoaesthetics even as a concept to exist. Without a lot of depth, the window of opportunities for ludoaesthetics get significantly lower or completely non-existent.

Creating patterns suggesting the possibility of gameplay aesthetics

Adding more depth is not only about simply adding more stuff in a game and making them as obscure as they possibly can be. It is also about leaving breadcrumbs to suggest that there is more than meets the eye, therefore encouraging players to explore further possibilities. What kind of depth to even add? And how does one go about communicating it?

Below is a conceptual representation of a set of challenges typically found in video games.

Each challenge is represented by a window of failure and a window of success. These windows can be spatial, temporal, symbolic, strategic, or a combination of all. They are the spaces in which the player enters by behaving in a certain expected way. Secondly, the black line represents the player’s interactive maneuvers: where to get across and which direction to turn to next, in order to overcome the set of challenges without stumbling into the windows of failure.

For example, say we have a situation in a 3D platformer game where the player is facing a pit, and across the pit leaning towards the right side there is a narrow platform. In such a scenario, we can assume that the window of failure includes any and all sets of behaviors that lead the player plummeting down the pit, and the window of failure includes those that lead the player to landing on the platform across the pit safely.

Now consider the same representation of challenge above, but this time with a slight deliberate arrangement.

As you can see, the sizes of the windows of failure and the windows of success stay exactly the same, but the positions of the windows of success have been altered so that they align somewhat (but not exactly aligned to the point of being too obvious). You can see that nested within the windows of success is a narrower window where the amount of the player’s maneuvers stays extremely minimal. Stepping into this window offers the opportunity for a non-disrupted gameplay flow, where a deliberate and guided set of behaviors will let the player “breeze” through the challenges seemingly almost with ease. This window is where ludoaesthetics occur.

Of course, the downsides of it are aplenty: it can be extremely difficult to realize such a window exists in a real scenario. And in order to stay inside such a narrow window, the player has to be extremely precise and/or smart in their gameplay. You can think of this window of non-disrupted flow as an intended “weak point” of the challenge, where a single and concentrated attack will break the whole thing apart in one fell swoop. But the process of identifying such a weak point, and delivering the finishing blow with great accuracy may require a lot of trials and errors, and can be extremely tedious and/or difficult.

An Example from Master Spy

A common manifestation of ludoaesthetics comes in the form of speedrunning. Finishing with speed is, for the majority of games, not the primary intended goal. Games are rarely ever designed to be speedrun, and most players do not have to finish any games at high speed in order to not miss anything. So speedrunning has always been a sort of arbitrary self-imposed challenge by those who seek greater sense of enjoyment from their favorite games.

However, there are a few exceptions. And you can find the above mentioned window of non-disrupted flow in levels like this one from Master Spy by Kris Truitt.

In this game you play the role of the Master Spy, to infiltrate ridiculously well-guarded buildings, palaces and fortresses with a huge number of different enemies, hazards and contraptions standing in your way. And you are given no tools whatsoever but an invisibility cloak that can help you sneak past the eyesight of certain enemies while halving your movement speed.

In the example above, your goal is to retrieve the keycard on the other side of the wall slightly to the right of your starting point, and then to escape through the white door right above your starting point safely. And while your cloak can get you past the eyesight of the guards, it is of no use whatsoever against the dogs, who can smell you even when you’re cloaked and will sprint forwards to attack you at horrendous speed as soon as you’re on the same ground as them.

So what you have to do as a sequence of actions in this level is first to cloak yourself, then drop down from the first ledge past the the first guard, then quickly decloak to regain speed as the cloak is useless against the incoming dogs. Then before the first dog reaches you, move forward to the right, then quickly jump up. Keep jumping to retrieve the keycard while avoiding the second and third dog. Cloak up, then get on the ledge with the three moving guards. Finally, jump to the left to reach your destination.

However, as you can see from the footage above (courtesy of a speedrunner nicknamed Obidobi), as soon as the player reaches the ledge with the three moving guards on the right, the guards turn to the other side and begin moving away from where the player is, effectively freeing the player from having to cloak and having their movement speed halved. And then right before the player reaches for the white door, the guard on the far right is about to touch the wall and thereby turning back to the left. This is such a tiny window of success that should the player not have begun moving right after they start the level and stayed uncloaked at the end, they would have failed. The level is designed in such a way that it can be completely solved without wasting any moment and action.

Is it significantly more difficult to play this way? Yes. Was this arrangement absolutely necessary? Not really. But the designer made the level with the expectation that people are going to speedrun the game and will be looking to optimize their timing with each level. Thus, the levels in Master Spy are designed so that should the player start looking to speedrun the game, they will easily recognize that sweet, sweet window of non-disrupted flow. It is an immensely satisfying experience to discover it.

Ensure Usability

As usual, it is easy to get too extremely logical about design and forget all about the equilibrium, which is almost always what design is about.

In this case, it is important that designers must ensure that whatever tools they’re making for their players to achieve ludoaesthetics, MUST have at least some sort of usability, even if it’s incredibly niche or extremely difficult to pull off. Things that serve nothing and mean nothing are NOT aesthetic. Say you have an RPG, and one of your players goes out of their way in order to build an unconventional character because they see some sort of future potential from this build, only to find out later that when they’re finished with the build, the meta of the game has changed and the window of opportunity for such a build has long passed. This means that the entire amount of depth you added, and the ludoaesthetics you might have intended by allowing that player to go in such away, is utterly useless and entirely wasted. So always remember to ensure usability for everything you add in your game.

Conclusion

Organic Difficulty and the ELS are not only, and not necessarily, an alternative solution to the whole difficulty problem. But rather, they represent an entire paradigm shift away from the idea that games should find more and more complex ways to serve players with different skill levels, and towards a design philosophy where players are given integrated tools within the context of games to set their own difficulty at any point without breaking immersion and perhaps the extra baggage of shame. It is not enough to have your players stay at the same level of difficulty throughout the game, or dynamically adjust the difficulty on the fly to suit them. It is best, in my opinion, to let your players cook to their palate. Just make sure that the process of cooking and the game itself are one and the same.

[sholiofic]

Supergirl, Brainy finding out about Winn's family/what Winn's dad did by accident

Combined with a different prompt from an anon that worked perfectly with this one: Alex coming back to the DEO to find Brainy and Winn arguing with each other again.

Also on Ao3: Supervillain Family Values. About 1500 words, gen.

–

As if it wasn’t bad enough that they’d been out all night searching the city for a deranged genius before he killed someone with booby-trapped stuffed bunnies and cymbal-clashing monkeys, Alex had to come back to what some of the DEO techs had started calling the Winn and Brainiac show. In her current angry and sleep-deprived state, she found herself with little patience for it, especially since she could see how tired and stressed both of them were. Winn in particular; he looked like he was running on the ragged tightrope of too much caffeine and no sleep. He’d been on edge ever since his father escaped from prison for the second time, but she couldn’t help noticing how worn down he was getting, as the hours slipped by and the Toyman continued to evade capture.

“If you’re so smart, then,” Winn snapped, “why don’t you just fix all our problems for us? War, disease, famine? That should be easy for you, right, with that twelfth-level intellect you keep bragging about? But then, talk’s what you’re good at, as opposed to coming up with actual, practical solutions.”

“It’s not bragging,” Brainy shot back, “it’s simply stating facts. All any of you have to offer are these – these toys!” He flung one of the DEO’s sensor devices, a recent development of Winn’s that could detect life signs and identify species up to 200 yards, onto Winn’s desk. “Perhaps you should go play with the Toyman; at least he has some ability to innovate. He might teach you something.”

Winn’s face went white and still; he got up and left the room without speaking.

“Brainy,” Alex said. She gestured to him. “Could you take a walk with me, please?”

“I know what you’re going to say,” Brainy said as soon as they started climbing the stairs. “I let my temper get the better of me. It’s a bad habit of mine, really unbefitting a superior intellect –”

“It’s not that. Well, not precisely that.” She stopped him with a hand. “Do you know why Winn reacted that way?”

“Possibly because the truth hurts,” Brainy said sharply. He paused then, and took a deep breath. “All right, I realize I was being insensitive – again –”

“It’s because his father is the Toyman, Brainy,” Alex said. “The man we’re having a citywide manhunt for.” When Brainy simply looked blankly at her, she said, “You didn’t know that, did you?”

“No,” he said softly. “No, I did not.”

***

Mon-El had told Querl that when Winn wanted to be alone, he could usually be found in the DEO labs. And indeed, all it took was a quick life-sign scan in the labyrinthine depths of the DEO building (perhaps the little device was good for something after all) before he stumbled on Winn soldering an object that Querl recognized at a glance as one of the DEO’s primitive incapacitation weapons.

“Come to mock some more?” Winn asked sharply.

Querl opened his mouth, and then closed it. He wasn’t good at people. He’d never been good at people. He was all too aware of it.

But … there were times when he wanted to be.

“Alex told me some things,” he said. “About – why you reacted the way you did. Throughout this entire – that is to say, when I called your device a toy … I didn’t realize you were related to him.”

Winn looked up sharply from the object he was working on. “Seriously? You didn’t think it’s a slight clue, just maybe, that his name is Winn Schott and my name is also Winn Schott?”

“I’m from the 31st century and the planet Colu. For all I know, it’s an incredibly common name here. Like your planet’s version of Zimple or Skax.”

“I … okay, you know what, I don’t actually want you to elaborate on that.” Winn shook his head and looked down at his work. “I, okay, look, I know in your own weird way you’re trying to apologize. So yeah. Apology accepted. We’re all tired and stressed out. I just want to be alone for awhile.”

“My ancestor and namesake was the greatest criminal who ever lived on Colu.”

That got Winn’s attention. He looked up, startled. “Say what now?”

“The first of the Brainiacs. He’s long dead in my time.” Querl looked away; it was strange explaining this to someone who didn’t know. The last person he’d run into who didn’t know his family history was Mon-El, and Imra was the one who had eventually told him. “One of the reasons why I have the mental prowess that I do is because I chose to learn all I could learn of his accomplishments. I reasoned that science itself is neutral, neither good nor evil, and even if the original Brainiac – my many-greats grandfather – chose to devote himself to evil and eventually gave up his humanity completely, it didn’t mean his inventions were inherently evil. Some of my mental augmentations …”

He hesitated, aware of Winn listening very intently.

“– are derived from Brainiac’s original technology. I was also able to adapt some of his inventions to improve the lot of all Coluans, improving our crop yield, for example, and fixing some of the damage that we’d done to our ecosystem – using technology that Brainiac had used in his attempts to blow up planets and to turn whole worlds to deserts.”

“Well, that sounds like a better thing to do with it, for sure,” Winn said, his voice hushed.

“I thought so too. In the end, though, I became unwelcome on my home planet. Not explicitly banned. Simply distrusted. My people see me as Brainiac’s successor.” He touched his forehead, the visible technology there. “There are those who say that the enhancement tech I’ve used on myself will inevitably have the same effect on me that it did on him. It doesn’t help that other Brainiacs have also gone mad and tried to kill people.”

“Yeah, we kinda ran into one of those.”

“Really?” Querl asked, looking up in surprise.

“Yeah. Brainiac 8. When we were first going to wake you up from hypersleep to save Kara, there was a pretty intensive debate once Mon-El told us who you were. Mon-El said he trusted you, and we figured the risk wasn’t too bad and was totally worth it anyway. I mean, Kara did defeat the other Brainiac. We figured we could do it again if we had to.” Now it was Winn’s turn to hesitate. “You didn’t know any of that, did you?”

“No,” Querl said softly. If the 21st-century humans had behaved oddly around him when he’d first come out of hypersleep, he hadn’t noticed. In truth, he had paid little attention to them. They were all dust in his own time anyway. Aside from Kara, he’d had little concern for what they thought of him at all.

And then he’d begun to experience the thrill of working together with Kara and J'onn in the field, arguing with Winn, Alex’s wariness starting to shade into respect …

He liked them. He wanted them to like him. He wasn’t sure if he’d cared this much what other people thought of him since, well … since the Legion.

“Yeah, so,” Winn said abruptly. He kicked another stool, rolling it out from under the worktable. “Welcome to your lifetime membership in the exclusive ‘I come from a family of supervillains and everyone thinks I’m going to turn into one eventually too’ club. Except that’s way too long to fit on a button. We need some kind of pithy club motto. The 'not as evil as we could be’ club?”

Querl couldn’t help smiling. “It still lacks a certain panache.”

“Mon-El’s a member too, you know. One more and we’ll have a barbershop quartet.” Winn nudged the stool with his foot. “C'mere and show me why this stungun won’t shoot.”

“Aside from the fact that your technology is so dated that you might as well send your agents out in the field armed with rocks and sticks, and the best thing you could do for that t– that piece of junk is melt it down for scrap?”

“Yes,” Winn said, with dignity. “Apart from that.”

“In that case, let me see if there’s something I can do for it.” Querl took the offered seat, and Winn flashed him a quick grin as he handed the gun over.

“Hey, is that one of my life sign detectors you’ve got there?”

There were times when Winn was actually too sharp for his own good. Querl tucked it into his pocket. “It’s mine; I’ve claimed it for study.”

“Haha, so you want to study it. Think you could actually learn something from our 'primitive’ technology?”

Querl could think of 143 different clever comebacks to that statement – or those that seemed clever in the moment, anyway; one thing he was learning was that his algorithms were not much use at predicting actual, lasting cleverness. On Colu he’d tried to be the consummate genius they recognized him as, knowing that to show weakness was to call into question every one of his past decisions that his people had ever questioned. He could only survive through perfection. Here … perhaps he didn’t have to. Perhaps it was all right to question and to doubt.

“Only a fool,” Querl said, “thinks he has no more to learn,” and Winn grinned at him.

[shirlleycoyle]

Apple Defends Its Anti-Child Abuse Imagery Tech After Claims of ‘Hash Collisions’

Researchers claim they have probed a particular part of Apple's new system to detect and flag child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, and were able to trick it into saying two images that were clearly different shared the same cryptographic fingerprint. But Apple says this part of its system is not supposed to be secret, that the overall system is designed to account for this to happen in general, and that the analyzed code is not the final implementation that will be used with the CSAM system itself and is instead a generic version.

On Wednesday, GitHub user AsuharietYgvar published details of what they claim is an implementation of NeuralHash, a hashing technology in the anti-CSAM system announced by Apple at the beginning of August. Hours later, someone else claimed to have been able to create a collision, meaning he tricked the system into giving two different images the same hash. Ordinarily, hash collisions mean that one file could appear to be another to a system. For example, perhaps a piece of malware shares a hash with an innocuous file, so an anti-virus system flags the banal file thinking it poses a threat to the user.  

In a whitepaper, Apple explained that its CSAM detection technology will work on a user's device, as opposed to on the company's cloud, as other companies like Google and Microsoft do. The system relies on a database of hashes—cryptographic representations of images—of known CSAM photos provided by National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and other child protection organizations. Apple's system will scan photos a user uploads to iCloud to see if any match the hashes, and if there's more than 30 matches, it will flag the user to an Apple team which will review the images. If Apple finds they are CSAM, it will report the user to law enforcement. 

In a document describing the new system, Apple says "The hashing technology, called NeuralHash, analyzes an image and converts it to a unique number specific to that image."

Apple however told Motherboard in an email that that version analyzed by users on GitHub is a generic version, and not the one final version that will be used for iCloud Photos CSAM detection. Apple said that it also made the algorithm public.

"The NeuralHash algorithm [… is] included as part of the code of the signed operating system [and] security researchers can verify that it behaves as described," one of Apple's pieces of documentation reads. Apple also said that after a user passes the 30 match threshold, a second non-public algorithm that runs on Apple's servers will check the results.

"This independent hash is chosen to reject the unlikely possibility that the match threshold was exceeded due to non-CSAM images that were adversarially perturbed to cause false NeuralHash matches against the on-device encrypted CSAM database," the documentation reads.

"If collisions exist for this function I expect they’ll exist in the system Apple eventually activates," Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, told Motherboard in an online chat. "Of course it’s possible that they will re-spin the hash function before they deploy. But as a proof of concept this is definitely valid," he added, referring to the research on GitHub.

Apple's new system is not just a technical one, though. Humans will also review images once the system marks a device as suspicious after a certain threshold of offending pictures are identified. These people will verify that the images do actually contain CSAM.

"Apple actually designed this system so the hash function doesn't need to remain secret, as the only thing you can do with 'non-CSAM that hashes as CSAM' is annoy Apple's response team with some garbage images until they implement a filter to eliminate those garbage false positives in their analysis pipeline," Nicholas Weaver, senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, told Motherboard in an online chat.

Ryan Duff, the director of cyber products at SIXGEN, and a researcher who has focused on the iPhone for years, said that it looks like Apple's algorithm "is pretty susceptible to preimage attacks."

"You could argue how risky that is. It means that the odds of any of your images matching CSAM are essentially nil," Duff said in an online chat. "But someone may be able to send you an image that registers as CSAM according to the NeuralHash algorithm."

Since Apple announced its new anti-CSAM system, privacy and security experts, as well as the general public, have raised concerns about how the system could be abused. The company has tried to address these concerns by publishing several technical whitepapers and organizing calls with journalists, but the attention researchers got today shows there's still a lot of interest in understanding how the system will work. 

Subscribe to our cybersecurity podcast, CYBER.

Apple Defends Its Anti-Child Abuse Imagery Tech After Claims of ‘Hash Collisions’ syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[blogvan883]

Kjaerhus For Mac

Nomad Factory Blueverb DRV2080 • Kjaerhus Audio MPL1 Pro • Voxengo Marquis • Chandler EMI TG12413

Kjaerhus For Macbook Air

Kjaerhus For Mac Os

Kjaerhus Mac

Kjaerhus For Macbook

Kjaerhus For Macbook Pro

Nomad Factory Blueverb DRV2080

Add a touch of vintage flair to your tracks with a plug-in that's part time machine. IZotope's Vinyl uses advanced filtering, modeling and resampling to create an authentic 'vinyl' simulation, as if the audio was a record being played on a. Classic Reverb is a nice and smooth reverb that does a good job on almost any instrument: - Smooth stereo reverb effect - Ajustable roomsize and damping - Low cut filter - Host Synchronization - Presets. Download the Best Free Audio Plugins. Synths, Reverbs, Compressors.and much more. Just click and download.

Formats: PC VST & RTAS, Mac VST, RTAS & AU

Mac users often leave their computers running 24/7, putting them to sleep after use rather than fully shutting them down. Pc games of 2012.

The world got very excited about convolution reverbs for a couple of years, but it seems that more traditional algorithmic designs are making a comeback. After all, convolution processors are still pretty CPU-hungry, so in situations where you want three or four reverbs in a mix, they can be impractical. Moreover, they don't tend to offer as much flexibility as their older brethren, and although they provide unsurpassed realism, it turns out that real doesn't always mean better, at least in your average pop mix.

The Industry's Best Workflow. Created by musicians, for musicians, Mixcraft is unrivaled in the industry for its ease-of-use and raw power. Record and mix your tracks to perfection, in record time, with Mixcraft's incredibly intuitive interface, lightning-fast sound engine, reality-defying pitch-shifting and time-stretching technology, and nearly-universal support for third-party plug-ins.

Kjaerhus For Macbook Air

The latest entry in the retro reverb stakes comes from Nomad Factory, whose Blueverb DRV2080 is allegedly 'intended to recreate the warm qualities of vintage-style digital reverbs from the '80s'. And this is pretty much exactly what it does. It's not the sort of plug-in that offers endless potential for tinkering; instead, it provides just a few basic controls, enabling you to get a sound fast, without crippling your PC in the process. Control over the reverb itself is limited to seven familiar parameters, all of which do pretty much what you'd expect, and the output can be shaped by a simple two-band EQ.

It's the sound that counts, and to my ears, DRV2080 does a decent job. Although there appears to be only one reverb algorithm, it's flexible enough to deliver smooth long halls and some fairly recognisable plates, as well as more subtle ambiences. None of them is exactly convincing as an emulation of a real acoustic space, but they can work very well on vocals and other sources within a mix. I particularly liked the plate presets, though I found that their usefulness on vocals was limited by a strong tendency to exaggerate sibilants, which the basic two-band EQ didn't really help with. Overall, however, this is a surprisingly versatile plug-in with a likeable, rich sound that's a lot more dense than that of many algorithmic reverbs. CPU load is minimal, and if you're looking for something that will provide an affordable step up from the reverbs bundled with DAWs like Cubase or Pro Tools, this is well worth considering. Sam Inglis

£99 including VAT.

Time & Space Distribution +44 (0)1837 55200.

+44 (0)1837 840080.

Kjaerhus Audio MPL1 Pro

Formats: PC VST

There are quite a lot of high-quality mastering limiters around these days, and it seems that if you want to stand out from the crowd, you have to offer something a bit out of the ordinary. Thus, Sony's Oxford Limiter has its unique Enhance function, while Waves have developed the clever multi-band technology used in their L3.

At first glance, Kjaerhus Audio's MPL1 seems to lack a comparable USP, but closer inspection reveals some very interesting and innovative design features. It's a wide-band, stereo plug-in, and offers all the luxuries you'd expect from a high-end limiter. It uses a look-ahead algorithm and oversamples the incoming audio, enabling it to detect and limit inter-sample peaks. There's excellent level metering, which displays both peak and RMS output levels, and the Pro version includes some helpful additions, such as an input gain control (I know we should all be paying more attention to gain structure in our DAW mixes, but sometimes it's just easier to attenuate the gain on the master channel than to bring every track in your mix down by 3dB!). In terms of the features on offer, the only thing that might be a negative point for some is the relative lack of output dithering options. It's TPDF noise shaping or nothing; I confess I'm unlikely to lose any sleep over that, but the golden-eared might.

So what makes MPL1 special? Two things, as far as I can see. The first is its unusually flexible and musically sympathetic way of setting the limiter release times. There's a manual Release control, but you can also introduce a programme dependent release algorithm. If you do so, the Release control then sets a maximum release time for the programme dependent algorithm, so you can combine the benefits of programme dependent release with the control of a manual system. This isn't so unusual in its own right, but the Pro version goes further. An additional PDR Amount control allows you to introduce a variable amount of programme dependence into the release, while a PDR Time parameter modifies 'the time factor used to identify peaks in the music', and you can also adjust Compression Smoothing, which controls the shape of the transition between hard limiting and the release phase.

The second out of the ordinary feature is, as far as I know, unique to the Pro edition of MPL1, and Kjaerhus say they've applied for a patent to protect it. We're used to being told that stereo linking is essential when using any dynamics process across a stereo mix, in order to prevent the image from wandering, but MPL1 's design challenges this dogma. The idea seems to be that when limiting is triggered by transient peaks in one channel, the audible side-effects of reducing gain in both channels can be noticeable, but that within a short enough time-frame, the disturbance to the stereo image is not. So, what MPL1 Pro allows you to do is, in effect, to set an attack time for stereo linking. This can be varied from 0 to 100 milliseconds. At the former extreme, MPL1 Pro behaves like any other limiter. At the latter, the level in the left channel would need to exceed the threshold for a tenth of a second before limiting in the right channel is triggered.

You’ll be able to race everything from front wheel drive subcompacts to roaring ’60s era muscle cars by the time you’re done, with a few supercar exotics thrown in for good measure.As you impress the locals, you’ll build your own racing gang or team; each additional character actually races along side you and can help you out in a pinch. Wins also net you cash, which you can turn over into seemingly endless varieties of car customization or new vehicles that you’ll be able to unlock as your influence and your list of winning races increases. And of course, there’s straight-up slaloms through busy city streets with a pack of opponents on your tail (or in front of you, depending on how good you are).Each race you win will earn prestige, not only for you but for your little racing club and its control of territory. https://blogvan883.tumblr.com/post/652771639720886272/download-need-for-speed-carbon-for-mac.

As you'd expect, higher attack times for stereo linking can tend to make the stereo image unstable, but used with moderation, I think the results bear out the designers' reasoning: momentary limiting in one channel only didn't disrupt overall imaging, even on headphones. That said, on my test material the benefits were pretty subtle — rather more so, for instance, than those of the Enhance function in Sony's Oxford Limiter. Likewise, the effect of the Smooth control is often hard to notice, though in most respects, the flexible release settings provide clear benefits. In general, MPL1 performs flawlessly, and it's one of the most flexible wide-band mastering limiters I've used. At barely $100 for the basic version and under $150 for the Pro version, it's also excellent value for money. Sam Inglis

Standard edition $102.08; Pro edition $136.88. Prices include VAT.

Voxengo Marquis

Format: PC VST

The basic EQs, compressors and effects included in your average DAW program can do a yeoman job, but they often lack flavour while they are doing it. So if you yearn for more upscale effects, but the cash (or credit) is lacking, you could do worse than checking out Voxengo's range. Their Marquis compressor is a step up from the native compressors I've dealt with, even the higher-end versions such as Sonar 's Sonitus Compressor. Voxengo call it a universal compressor since it can be used on individual tracks during mixing, on a buss or, in a pinch, pressed into service as a mastering plug-in. Preset management follows the VST standard, while the right-hand side of the compressor looks and acts like most others, with knobs for Threshold, Ratio, Knee, Attack and Release.

Things get interesting, or at least complex, with the more unusual controls. These include Force, which mixes in a compressed signal with zero release time, and Dry, which allows you to mix the uncompressed signal with the compressed signal to achieve 'parallel' compression. There are also a number of ways to modify the detection and compression algorithms. For instance, the former can be switched between Classic and Round modes, while the plug-in can emulate both a conventional 'feed-forward' design and an optical compressor circuit. You can choose from three different attack and release behaviours, while optional Soft and Sharp modes introduce different varieties of harmonic coloration. You can also engage a phase-linear mode for mastering and other sensitive applications. Switching any single button won't always have a dramatic effect on the sound, but in combination, they are sure to.

Another nice feature is side-chain filtering, with a spectrum analyser to view the results and the ability to listen to the filtered side-chain signal. You can click and drag four breakpoints on a graphical EQ curve, with the Shift, Ctrl and Alt keys providing variable control over the dragging.

Finally, not only does Marquis offer a programme dependent release option, but it allows you to edit the programme dependent 'release contour' in detail. In programme dependent mode, the release time you set manually is treated as a minimum, and the 'release contour' provides three knobs for altering the amount by which the programme-dependence can extend that release time. Raising the values produces a steeper slope, meaning less variation in the release time, while lowering the number straightens the green line to the horizontal, permitting more variation (and hence, on average, a longer release time).

The detailed editing available means that tweakheads can burn up lots of time trying to emulate the sound of their favourite hardware compressors, but for those who want to adjust and move on, there are enough presets and big-picture sculpting tools to get on to the next project quickly. Although Marquis can sound transparent, it can do 'vintage', too, without breaking into a sweat. The drum buss collection provides good starting points, and any preset with 'movement' in the name does just that. They can turn your mild-mannered loop into a seething, pumping thing. Of course, you don't have to mangle sound, and it is easy to add a little glue, sparkle or bass to individual tracks or entire mixes. It is easier to hear it working (in a good way!) than most native DAW compressors, since it doesn't sound like it is straining to affect the sound. Despite its complexity, Marquis manages to stay CPU-friendly, too. This is a plug-in that covers a lot of sonic ground, yet is fairly inexpensive for the quality it provides. Alan Tubbs

Kjaerhus For Mac Os

$89.95.

Kjaerhus Mac

Chandler EMI TG12413

Formats: Mac & PC TDM & RTAS

The best-known studios of the '60s and '70s all had their own, identifiable sound, and none more so than Abbey Road. Lots of factors contributed to the unique sonic fingerprint of EMI's in-house studio, from its engineering practices to the shape of the recording rooms and their lush reverb chambers. Among those factors were the numerous pieces of equipment that were custom-built or extensively modified by EMI staff, and of those, the TG-series desks introduced in the late '60s hold pride of place.

Chandler already make hardware compressors, limiters, preamps and channel strips based on the TG-series design, but TG12413 is their first plug-in. Available for Pro Tools LE and TDM on Mac and PC, it emulates the compressor/limiter built into every channel on the TG-series mixers. It's authorised to an iLok key, and installed by the slightly clunky but effective method of copying two DPM-format files into your Pro Tools plug-ins folder.

One glance at the interface tells you that controllability isn't the prime reason for this plug-in's existence. There are only four controls, all of which are stepped and can be moved either by clicking and dragging, or simply by clicking the appropriate number on the scale. The most basic control is a switch that sets whether the plug-in should act as a compressor or a limiter. These modes have fixed attack times of 44 and eight milliseconds respectively, while release time is adjustable using a six-position Recovery switch. In limiter mode, the fastest release available is 50ms and the slowest two seconds, and switching to compressor mode scales these up by about five times.

As is the case in many vintage dynamics processors, there's no Threshold setting. To get more compression, you simply up the input gain to drive the unit harder. On the original unit, the input gain control was rather unconventional and not especially intuitive, and sensibly, Chandler have provided two versions of the plug-in. One is faithful to the original, while the other has a conventional gain control. And, apart from an output gain control, that's it. A retro-style VU meter displays gain reduction: it's not the most helpful visual feedback, but this isn't the sort of processor you'd use in situations where you need absolute precision. Its raison d'être is to add character to your tracks, and boy, does it do that.

I can't ever recall testing a plug-in compressor that can match TG12413 for sheer punchiness. In compressor mode, it can pump like a nodding donkey in an oil field, but I found I used it more in limiter mode, where the snappier time constants seemed to work for almost everything. The attack is just slow enough to let transients through, so it can add substance to a drum track without losing the initial 'crack' of the snare. Alternatively, it can nail a vocal to the front of the mix without sucking the life from it. Buying TG12413 alone won't turn your mixes into Dark Side Of The Moon, but you may well experience moments when it really does seem to bring a little slice of Abbey Road into your life. Sam Inglis

One method uses PowerShell (or the Command Prompt), the other a free, third-party tool. Format fat32 windows 10. We’re going to show you two ways to format larger USB drives with FAT32.

TDM version £417; RTAS version £293. Prices include VAT.

Unity Audio +44 (0)1440 785843.

Kjaerhus For Macbook

+44 (0)1440 785845.

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Kjaerhus For Macbook Pro

Published January 2007

[floralkittygambler]

I think probably people don’t tag Huskerdust because it’s not really offensive to anyone else. I’ve never seen anyone else upset by it. I understand if you are but maybe message the people you’re seeing it from and ask that they tag it or unfollow them, that’s the only thing I can think of.

Hey there,

Forgive me for the miscommunication. I didn’t call it offensive. I referred to it as triggerin (due to personal issues it touches on that always seem to be taken far too lightly. Add strangers sending rape and death threats and you get the classic Pariah mix). And I know I’m not the only one triggered by the issues SpindleHorse seems to dance around in terms of their m x m ships (to make this clear towards anyone who sees this, I am not homophobic. That is the least of my concerns). I’ve explained it many times in many posts (some which I need to refine). It’s a very complex manner, much like the Stolitz one, which is only marginally easier to avoid.

By tagging, Sweet I meant is the hashtag itself. Not tw with it. Many do (to reach those interested in the ship) however since there’s no feature to block anything with such terms in without hash tagging, it’s bombarded everywhere to the point it’s harder for someone with genuine triggers to enjoy the fandom -  as much as I wish to (that does NOT exclude it from criticism).  Now, I’m possibly wrong, but I’ve heard a screenshot of one of my posts is going around. If it’s my thoughts on HD, I’d be inclined to assume there’s also much garnishing and twisting of my words. Bare in mind, I am not the best at phrasing nor is this anyone else’s blog but my own to do with as I will, and from those I’ve been harassed from here in the past, they’ve been extremely toxic in ideals, behaviours, and post history. The kids to start drama for the sake of some entertainment rather than being civil. Regardless, my post history is open and there is nothing to hide. There’s no ‘tea’ here. And it’s certainly a waste of time to behave in such manner (you aren’t btw Anon, but nowadays yer gotta explain as though everyone shares a brain cell :/ ). likewise, I expect false words and twisting, as well as ““block this person for this!”” - which is completely ones choice! If you wish to block, go for it! Though I’m indifferent to the hate my way, what I will say is I won’t tolerate anything false stated. I won’t indulge idiots into feeding their cravings for being an arse, and I won’t be tryna beg people to pick a side. If you don’t like what I post, then block or unfollow or do your thing as long as it’s CIVIL and honest. People can judge for themselves and do not need someone parenting them in such a manner. If people want to paint their own narrative on half stories or bias and whatnot... let em. Just don’t be hateful. And be honest (look, I don’t condone bullshit but if you’re that desperate just don’t make up serious lies- I ain’t your mama, I’m too old for this). Blardy blah

NOW! With that being said: Anon, you are not the target of that last paragraph. I’m just making a formal statement before the hate comments as I’m pretty much used to that for having different opinions ^^; And experiences, for that matter- (didn’t know people police such things-). I felt it was a necessity. I hope you’re able to forgive me if I came across brash, I’m not too great with digital tone. And excuse me for the length of such a response. I’d rather answer authentically and as helpful as possible.

However, I want to thank you for what I’m guessing is politeness? At the very least, you seem civil and decent. I genuinely appreciate that. I do unfollow and block certain terms however algorithms aren’t the most reliable, especially if you’re in a fandom and like one thing yet can’t be exposed to another (esp one so favoured). Rest assured, I do my upmost whilst actively trying to focus on healthy things. Again, I appreciate the sentiment! Those I follow actually are a little TOO aware lol - some even knowing the why aspect - and are very respectful in that sense. However on other sites, the algorithm feeds different things that those you follow interact with, and sometimes you don’t get to shit that off. Even then, it’s a flawed system and I don’t want to force others to not post what they enjoy, but just to respect others. Honestly, this ship has caused me some nasty threats from others that even if I didn’t have my past traumas, I certainly have enough hate against me to further back up why I’m content avoiding it! If anyone believes I seek out this stuff, trust me I go above and beyond to keep it well away! (My rants and analysis’s being the times I refer to it but even then, don’t be deceived to think I actually seek it out).

Forgive the fuckin novella there, however I hope that clears things up. Again, I appreciate your courtesy and suggestions, though I’m already trying my best. Cant have your cake and eat it all, I suppose ^^; 

[talysalankil]

what happened with laci gr/een?

okay so i have an incomplete timeline at best because i don’t exactly follow her assiduously so i only became aware of it recently when she posted a video about it but

from what i’ve been able to reconstruct, and not necessarily in chronological order

the dating thing

she started dating an a/nti-s/jw & al/t-ri/ght guy, this guy. which…I guess is fine in and of itself? like I agree she gets to pick who she dates. it only becomes relevant when it gets pretty clear she didn’t date him in spite of that in hindsight. but it gets really obnoxious when people telling her “hey, you’re…dating a member of one of the worst political movements ever, did you consider what message that was sending re: your feminist activism” and she went “how dare you shame me for who i’m dating you’re clearly all fake feminists and hypocrites!” [note: i’m obviously paraphrasing]

the stream thing

she did a stream with another notable an/ti-s/jw (she literally labels herself “an/tifem/inist” in the description of that stream’s vod). now, I don’t really have 2.5 hours to spend watching that, but considering everyone who has said that la/ci gre/en herself said a bunch of things that are used by people to justify things like tra/nsmis/ogyny. This argument in particular is important because it seems credible considering her own history and what comes next.

the first video

in may, she posted a video with an intentionally provocative title, and…well, the title is an exaggeration. at least from her pov. she mostly means she’s anouncing that she will engage with an/tis more regularly because she feels it’s a healthy way to advance the debate. sounds legit, right?

Yeah…that’s only if you pay attention to the message and not the phrasing. I’m going to use my own comment on that video as reference bc i don’t feel like rewatching it so…

"What's the goal? Is it that only a specific perspective can be heard?"

See, she paints it as a “two equally valid sides of the issue” debate, which…is basically playing into one side’s hands. You know, the side whose “valid opinion” is that women don’t deserve equal rights, that other genders are fake, and trans people are either mentally ill or lying.

This message bleeds throughout her entire statement, and lo and behold, who felt empowered to run amuk in her comments but actual na/zis? Literally the top comment thread at the time I watched was people “joking” about how they couldn’t like that comment anymore because it had 1/48/8 likes and that’s a literal ne/o-na/zi symbol.

the backlash

naturally, people (read: femi/nists) didn’t like that. some voiced that more publicly than others.

la/ci’s reactions amounted to “it’s MY choice to engage”, which…it is. But no one told her not to do that. Basically she was missing the point of the criticism aimed at her…which is a common an/ti-s/jw tactic, but then again, it’s also one she herself has used a lot in the past, so i’m not really sure who’s to blame here.

very shortly afterwards she tweeted she wouldn’t listen to any criticism anymore (i assume from the s/jw side, and yes, she literally used that acronym as a pejorative).

the second video

because ofc it didn’t stop there. her followup is arguably worse, since now she’s acting like “s/jw” (again, using that term/phrase) are an unreasonable extreme who don’t understand “real femi/nism” and make all femi/nists look bad.

oh, instead of say, apologizing for her tran/sphobia (something she has kind of done in the past, but looking at this video, didn’t mean a word of), she came up with her own version of the “down with cis” bus story about some tra/ns activists harassing/assaulting her at a convention. which i won’t claim is false, because 1) no victim of assault deserves to live in a world where any assault is ever doubted as the default reaction and I actually hold to my femi/nist principles and 2) it’s not really an argument to say she doesn’t need to apologize for transp/hobia?

speaking of which, in this video she also acts like she was “forced” to “bend science” in her sex ed videos by acting like male and female are valid scientific terms and not…you know, an outdated binary model that doesn’t work on top of being inherently tran/sphobic. literally she acts like she was doing “s/jw” a favor by not equating male with penis and female with vagina.

the last few days

this is all pretty recent and i wanted to just go from memory but then i figured “hey let’s just go through her twitter feed at this point” (which you shouldn’t do if you like not being angry)

she compared this whole story with leaving morm/onism, which…wow, way to claim you’re still a femi/nist if you’re comparing femi/nism with that fucking church AND comparing this experience with LEAVING that church

she also literally compared femi/nists to the villains from 1984

she reached out to te/rfs (she said ra/dfems but as lind/say el/lis pointed out not all ra/dfems are te/rfs, yet that’s the definition la/ci seems to use) and is now using distinctly ter/f-ish language. also she said a “really interesting” question from that thread was “what does it mean to be a woman without using gender roles” which is literally te/rf rhetoric 101. (to be fair, she did say in other tweets on that thread that non-ra/dfems were allowed to chime in, but since it was in a reply to someone it’s not even likely to reach most people so…good job on asking for a non-biased sample, ms “i love science”)

still on that topic, about a cana/dian bill (c/16 if you want to look it up) that would grant tra/ns people rights, she went “lol tumblr genders” and supported the american use of psycholo/gists as “experts”, which totally never resulted in the abuse of tra/ns people (this one is kinda unrelated to the whole story but since every time i bring up her tran/sphobia people tell me “bitch where” i figured i’d stash this one receipt here, and this is just from the past couple of weeks)

she also reached out to an/tifemi/nists for “summer reading”

she claims s/jw are making out “everyone they disagree with” to be na/zis or al/t-ri/ght (even when there’s evidence) which is exactly the strategy of those groups

and then in general, she made about a million comments about how this was a long time coming, and she’s long been hesitant to “call out” all the wrongs of femi/nism but was “afraid” to speak out. i guess all it took was finding out the goldmine that was the an/ti-s/jw crowd to comfort her?

finally, someone do/xed her, and she immediately claimed (without proof beyond being “pretty sure”) it was someone from the “s/jw” side. i don’t condone that, but at the same time, way to be mature about that reaction.

(and speaking of mature reactions, the an/ti-s/jw who usually revel in femi/nists being do/xed cf ani/ta sark/eesian were here all commiserative and “curse those s/jw” like they don’t use the exact same tactics, but clearly we’re the hypocrites)

tl;dr

I don’t support harassing her but outside of the doxing, most of the “abuse” i’ve seen were people 1) telling her she was not behaving like a femi/nists (which she’s not) and/or that she was empowering the worst of the worst (which she is) and 2) on the subject of her boyfriend, that she was dating a pretty bad person. which she decided to phrase as “reduce [her] opinion to ‘money’ and ‘dick’” even though i haven’t seen anyone say that.

personally…honestly i don’t even think her bf “converted” her. and i doubt money had anything to do with it. i think, looking at the evidence (not just all this but her long, long history of nonsense) that she just finally realized for herself that the femi/nist community wasn’t for her because, aside from a belief in sexual and reproductive agency for (cis) women, she doesn’t have all that much in common with us. but instead of just leaving gracefully, she has to smear all of femi/nist activism past what she agrees with (i.e. most of third wave) just so she appears to be on the right side, mostly because she’s siding with the wrong side.

Okay hopefully I did the tumblr voodoo slashes thing regularly enough that tumblr’s cursed algorithms will not send people my way to harass me again, but if not…come at me, I’ll just block you all like the previous couple of times.

[tamboradventure]

5 Myths About Booking a Flight that You Need to Ignore

Posted: 6/1/2020 | June 1st, 2020

Let’s talk about cheap flights. We all know airlines are out to screw us over — and no one wants to be the person who gets stuck paying the highest fare. That’s why we spend hours upon hours in front of the computer, researching articles on airfare, and trying to game the system like we’re attempting to outsmart a used car salesman.

I’ve written about finding a cheap flight before — and even my process for booking a flight — but today I want to talk about some persistent and inaccurate myths about booking a flight that have stuck around through simple inertia and lazy journalism.

There’s a lot of articles out there that will list “secret hacks” that will save you thousands. “If you book a flight on a Tuesday during a blood moon while standing on one leg, you’ll get the cheapest flight possible!” Ok, that’s an exaggeration but I read a lot of articles that are straight-up inaccurate and outdated that, today, I want to explain which “rules” are straight-up lies so you don’t follow them, save hours of time, and still end up with a cheap flight!  

MYTH #1: You Should Search Incognito

This is the worst myth of them all. It makes sense. We all know that every company in the world uses cookies to track our online habits. So why wouldn’t airlines track us? There’s a belief that airlines are watching our browsing habits and then raising ticket prices when they see us looking at the same route(s) over and over again.

Lots of websites will tell you to use a browser’s “incognito mode” to avoid this. Turn them off, stop being tracked, and trick the system, right?

Except this is not true at all.

There’s no evidence that airlines behave that way and numerous studies by booking companies have shown there is no variance in pricing when you use incognito mode.

And, typically, when you abandon your cart, businesses discount prices to get you to complete your purchase not raise them higher.

According to Scott of Scott’s Cheap Flights, one of the most popular bargain-flight websites,

“There’s no evidence that airlines are showing you a different price based on your cookies. We are mistaking airfare volatility for a Truman Show–esque interpretation that the airlines are out to raise fares on us. Airfare is constantly changing, often by the hour if not by the minute these days. When a flight you’re looking at goes up in price, there’s a temptation to think that it’s because of your cookies, but Occam’s razor is that the price went up because airfare is constantly changing.”

They searched the same Denver to London flight 100 times in a row, and on the first search and the hundredth search, the price stayed exactly the same.

Another study by CheapAir found the same thing.

The average economy fare changes 61 times each day. Airlines use sophisticated software to change prices based on demand. Additionally, they put their inventory not just on their own website but also on hundreds of third-party websites so millions of people are looking at the same flights at any given moment. The system is constantly updating itself based on ticket sales and demand.

After all, there are only so many seats on a plane. You just can’t add more!

That’s why prices change.

Searching in incognito mode is simply not going to help you find a cheaper flight.

MYTH #2: It’s Better to Book on a Tuesday

Back in the day, most airlines used to drop flight deals on Tuesdays and that would lead to other airlines following suit. Thus the old adage to book on Tuesdays.

But Hopper, a popular cheap-flight app, analyzed the data and found that only 1.6% of flights were cheaper on a Tuesday.

These days, as I mentioned above, airlines use dynamic pricing and artificial intelligence to constantly change their pricing. The algorithms consider a variety of factors: historical and current demand, seasons, weather, particular events, etc.

According to Scott,

“Some websites still claim there is a single predictable time each week when fares are cheapest. When airfare was first sold online, airlines and online travel agencies would often load their fares just once a week, say, Tuesday at 2pm. There were a limited number of the cheapest fares available, and so if you were one of the first people to book right after the new fares were loaded, you really could get a great deal. Nowadays airfare is changing by the hour if not by the minute, driven less by humans plugging in fares each week and more by complex computer algorithms.”

So there’s no “best day to book.” Waiting for a Tuesday likely won’t save you any money.

Book your flight on whatever day you want.  

Myth #3: There is a Perfect Time to Book

Airfares don’t actually change that dramatically. Until about 21 days before a flight, they are pretty steady. I remember talking to the Google Flights team once and they found there’s only typically a $50 difference between the highest and lowest price point.

That doesn’t mean it couldn’t swing more radically. As I said, airlines change prices based on a lot of factors. Sometimes that $50 swing could be $100 or $200 — but, barring an event that drives up demand, airfares tend to be in a narrow range up to 21 days before a flight.

After that, thanks to antiquated rules, the system thinks that a “last-minute” flight — three weeks away or less — must mean a business traveler and so fares rise. (So never book less than 21 days before leaving!)

Generally speaking, the best time to book a flight is about 2-3 months ahead. Why?

Most people book about 2-3 months before they go away. If you’re a family going on vacation, you don’t just do it on a whim. You take time off work and plan months in advance. So airlines know that and about 2-3 months before a trip is generally when prices reach equilibrium between supply and demand.

  MYTH #4: Websites Can Predict Prices

Websites that predict prices are just taking an educated guess based on historical pricing. Don’t put too much stock in these predictions. The past is not prologue and a spike in demand or a concert or other event can change the price of a ticket outside its historical range.

I like the price meter on Google Flights because it lets me know the general historic price range of this fare. But any website that says “wait to book because prices are going to go down” is full of shit.

Airfare is incredibly volatile. There are a limited number of seats on planes and dozens of variables — from overall economic conditions to the price of oil to competition from new budget airlines to the difficulty of predicting travel interest for a specific flight 11 months from now. No one knows what the future holds. The recent pandemic is proof that modeling the future doesn’t work.

These websites have no idea what future airfare will be and are just guessing.

As Scott echoes:

“It’s important to distinguish between when is cheapest to travel and when is cheapest to book. We know a lot about when it’s typically cheapest to travel: January through March and September through November. That’s not to say there are never cheap flights in June. Think of it like an NBA game: just because one team is favored doesn’t mean there’s never an upset. This is all to say that anyone who claims to have cracked the code and be able to predict with certainty whether a flight six months from now will go up or down in price is doing you a disservice.”

  MYTH #5: There is One Best Booking Website

Why do you see prices vary from website to website? Third-party websites often buy tickets in bulk and the prices depend a lot on what booking class they’ve purchased (usually they buy the cheapest and most restive fares which is why those flights are always unchangeable). Plus, again, thousands of people could be booking at once and so as the cheaper seats go, the prices go up!

That’s why, while I love Skyscanner and Momondo, I check lots of other websites before I actually book.

But, while I love them, remember: there is no single best website out there for flights.

Prices vary among all these platforms. That’s why you have to search multiple websites and meta-search engines.

There’s no single best booking website, only the best one at the time of booking.  

***

Any article that claims to show you the “secret” to cheap airfare is probably too good to be true — because if it worked so well, airlines would have put an end to it a long time ago. You can’t outsmart the airlines. You can only bend the system to your advantage.

There’s simply no magic bullet to finding cheap airfare.

As much as we all want there to be one.

Book Your Trip: Logistical Tips and Tricks

Book Your Flight Find a cheap flight by using Skyscanner or Momondo. They are my two favorite search engines, because they search websites and airlines around the globe so you always know no stone is being left unturned.

Book Your Accommodation You can book your hostel with Hostelworld as they have the largest inventory. If you want to stay somewhere other than a hostel, use Booking.com, as they consistently return the cheapest rates for guesthouses and hotels. I use them all the time.

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance Travel insurance will protect you against illness, injury, theft, and cancellations. It’s comprehensive protection in case anything goes wrong. I never go on a trip without it, as I’ve had to use it many times in the past. I’ve been using World Nomads for ten years. My favorite companies that offer the best service and value are:

World Nomads (for everyone below 70)

Insure My Trip (for those 70 and over)

Looking for the best companies to save money with? Check out my resource page for the best companies to use when you travel! I list all those I use — and they’ll save you time and money too!

The post 5 Myths About Booking a Flight that You Need to Ignore appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

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[entergamingxp]

Amazon’s £23 mechanical gaming keyboard • Eurogamer.net

Mechanical keyboards used to be super expensive. When Twitch and esports rose to prominence at the start of the last decade, kicking off a wave of interest in these mechanical marvels, the only options out there were Japanese imports built around German-made Cherry MX switches. These boards delivered a rock-solid typing and gaming experience, but even the cheapest examples cost upwards of £100 here in the UK. That’s a ton of money to spend on a peripheral, but the high cost of each mechanical switch – around £1, with 105 keys needed – meant that manufacturers and retailers alike only made a tiny profit on each unit sold.

Since then, the original Cherry switches have been joined by a sea of imitators working to similar blueprints, bringing down the cost of mechanical keyboards at a rapid pace. Today we reach a new standard of affordability, as Amazon’s Basics line has expanded to include a genuine full-fat, full-size mechanical keyboard that changes its price regularly, but at its lowest retails for just over £20. This is our review of the Amazon Basics Programmable Mechanical Gaming Keyboard – and after a week, we’re impressed.

At £22.67 including shipping, the Amazon Basics keyboard cost me about £100 less than the first mechanical keyboard I ever bought, a Japanese-made Filco Majestouch-2. That Filco was built like an absolute tank and felt fantastic to type on after a life of mushy membrane keyboards, but it had a pretty short feature list – just 105 mechanical, plate-mounted switches beneath tasteful plastic keycaps, with nary a secondary function or RGB backlight in sight.

The Amazon keyboard, by contrast, includes 110 mechanical keys – thanks to the addition of five macro keys along the left side – plus individual RGB backlighting, media controls via a Function layer, a gaming mode and a palm rest. That would be a respectable feature list for a rubber dome keyboard that costs far less to produce, but for a mechanical keyboard at this price point it’s nothing short of incredible.

Of course, a good mechanical keyboard isn’t defined by its number of features. For me, the critical ingredient is a good typing feel, characterised by snappy, consistent feedback from each key press, with a hard-wearing and non-slippery keycap. Surprisingly, the Amazon Basics keyboard actually does pretty well here too. The blue Outemu switches deliver a satisfying click and tactile bump near the point of actuation, giving plenty of feedback – plus that signature mechanical clatter that definitely attracts the attention of your work colleagues. The amount of force required to push down each key does vary as you travel across the board – a common issue with budget mechanicals – but it’s not something you’re likely to notice outside of a head-to-head comparison.

The keycaps are reasonable too. They’re ABS plastic, so they’ll likely wear away over time and become a little too slick and shiny to be comfortable after years of use, but the entirely standard layout and standard MX switches mean you can swap them out for other keycap sets with ease. The chassis itself feels right too – there’s a metal plate beneath the ‘floating’ keys, making it extremely resistant to deck flex and giving it a reassuring heft. Mechanical keyboards should last for decades if treated right, and this one shows no sign of weakness.

Backlighting is another clear point of differentiation between mechanical keyboards, especially at the budget end of the market. The Amazon Basics started promisingly, with the board cycling through several colours when you first connect it to show off its RGB credentials. However, once this chromatic parade is complete, the keyboard goes to a boring Razer green. Examining the keyboard, you’ll find a way to adjust the backlight brightness, but there’s no key to switch to a new effect or a new colour. For that functionality, you’ll need to install the Amazon Basics gaming software, included on CD (!) in the box or available for download on the Amazon product page. That’s a little disappointing, but the software does at least install quickly and it’s very easy to use. As well as changing the backlighting, you can choose which keys are disabled in game mode (alt+tab, alt+f4 and the Windows key are all possible) and what each of the five macro keys do (sadly, the remainder of the keys aren’t programmable).

It would have been nice to see more customisation possible on the keyboard itself, without the need for software, but this is largely a matter of taste. Unfortunately, that’s not the only issue with the backlighting. We noticed that after changing the backlight colour from solid green to solid teal, the keyboard started behaving very oddly.

Every 30 seconds or so, the keyboard’s lights would dim, change rapidly between different colours and then returning to teal. During that brief colour cycle, the keyboard would stop responding, almost as if its controller was locked up for those moments – and that means, out of a sentence, you’d often be missing a letter or two. When typing, that’s annoying, but when gaming, that’s rage-inducing – especially when your Counter-Strike matchmaking rank is on the line. Suddenly, that reload you wanted to pull off before that next enemy came around the corner just wouldn’t happen – or that grenade you wanted to pull out remained in your back pocket, and instead of pulling the pin you were firing your weapon into a wall, uselessly.

In the end, the issue did work out to be fixable. While changing the effects and closing the software did nothing, turning down the backlight’s brightness just one level solved the issue. I’m happy to have found a solution, but it’s still a perplexing issue – and perhaps emblematic of the kind of corners that get cut in order to deliver a certain feature set at the lowest possible price.

Despite the brightness bug, I still found myself using the Basics keyboard for far longer than the review period required. Typing on those crunchy MX Blue switches is just satisfying, especially when you’ve got the house to yourself and you can create a joyous racket without worry. The full-size layout is convenient for a wide range of games, and the macro keys even came in handy for testing a few automation scripts. This is still a damn fine mechanical keyboard – and if you look on Amazon, by far the best option at the £20 price bracket.

There are strong alternatives that cost a little more from the likes of Tecknet, Havit and Qisan, but none of these offer a full UK layout, a wrist rest, macro keys and per-key RGB backlighting at the same low price that the Amazon Basics board does.

Unfortunately, that sub-£25 price point for this board is far from a given, with historical data showing that the keyboard has retailed for as little as £22 and as much as £60. You can certainly see the invisible hand of an algorithm in the price history graph, with characteristic ladders that show more-or-less daily price reductions to around £23 and then a sharp jump back to the £60 mark soon thereafter.

So – the Amazon Basics Mechanical Keyboard is definitely one to bookmark and check regularly, and if you’re lucky you’ll be able to catch it at that sub-£25 mark where it becomes exceptionally good value. As a risk-free introduction to mechanical keyboards, you won’t find much better – just don’t turn the brightness up all the way.

Got a little more to spend than £20? Check out our guides to the best gaming keyboards and the best mechanical keyboards. And if you want the absolutely least valuable item we’ve reviewed, check out I bought Puma’s £80 esports shoes so you don’t have to.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/04/amazons-23-mechanical-gaming-keyboard-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=amazons-23-mechanical-gaming-keyboard-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[endenogatai]

Femtech startup Inne takes the wraps off a hormone tracker and $8.8M in funding

Berlin-based femtech startup Inne is coming out of stealth to announce an €8 million (~$8.8M) Series A and give the first glimpse of a hormone-tracking subscription product for fertility-tracking and natural contraception that’s slated for launch in Q1 next year.

The Series A is led by led by Blossom Capital, with early Inne backer Monkfish Equity also participating, along with a number of angel investors — including Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of TransferWise; Tom Stafford, managing partner at DST; and Trivago co-founder Rolf Schromgens.

Women’s health apps have been having a tech-fuelled moment in recent years, with the rise of a femtech category. There are now all sorts of apps for tracking periods and the menstrual cycle, such as Clue and Flo.

Some also try to predict which days a women is fertile and which they’re not — offering digital tools to help women track bodily signals if they’re following a natural family planning method of contraception, or indeed trying to conceive a baby.

Others — such as Natural Cycles — have gone further down that path, branding their approach “digital contraception” and claiming greater sophistication vs traditional natural family planning by applying learning algorithms to cycle data augmented with additional information (typically a daily body temperature measurement). Although there has also been some controversy around aggressive and even misleading marketing tactics targeting young women.

A multi-month investigation by the medical device regulator in Natural Cycles’ home market, instigated after a number of women fell pregnant while using its method, found rates of failure were in line with its small-print promises but concluded with the company agreeing to clarify the risk of the product failing.

At issue is that the notion of “digital contraception” may present as simple and effortless — arriving in handy app form, often boosted by a flotilla of seductive social media lifestyle ads. Yet the reality for the user is the opposite of effortless. Because in fact they are personally taking on all of the risk.

For these products to work the user needs a high level of dedication to stick at it, be consistent and pay close attention to key details in order to achieve the promised rate of protection.

Natural contraception is also what Inne is touting, dangling another enticing promise of hormone-free contraception — its website calls the product “a tool of radical self-knowledge” and claims it “protect[s]… from invasive contraceptive methods”. It’s twist is it’s not using temperature to track fertility; its focus is on hormone-tracking as a fertility measure.

Inne says it’s developed a saliva-based test to measure hormone levels, along with an in vitro diagnostic device (pictured above) that allows data to be extracted from the disposable tests at home and wirelessly logged in the companion app.

Founder Eirini Rapti describes the product as a “mini lab” — saying it’s small and portable enough to fit in a pocket. Her team has been doing the R&D on it since 2017, preferring, she says, to focus on getting the biochemistry right rather than shouting about launching the startup. (It took in seed funding prior to this round but isn’t disclosing how much.)

At this stage Inne has applied for and gained European certification as a medical device. Though it’s not yet been formally announced.

The first product, a natural contraception for adult women — billed as best suited for women aged 28-40, i.e. at a steady relationship time-of-life — will be launching in select European markets (starting in Scandinavia) next year, though initially as a closed beta style launch as they work on iterating the product based on user feedback.

“It basically has three parts,” Rapti says of the proposition. “It has a small reader… It has what we call a little mouth opening in the front. It always gives you a smile. That’s the hardware part of it, so it recognizes the intensity of your hormones. And then there’s a disposable saliva test. You basically collect your saliva by putting it in your mouth for 30 seconds. And then you insert it in the reader and then you go about your day.

“The reader is connected to your phone, either via BlueTooth or wifi, depending on where you are taking the test daily… It takes the reading and it sends it over to your phone. In your phone you can do a couple of things. First of all you look at your hormonal data and you look at how those change throughout the menstrual cycle. So you can see how they grow, how they fall. What that means about your ovulation or your overall female health — like we measure progesterone; that tells you a lot about your lining etc. And then you can also track your fluids… We teach you how to track them, how to understand what they mean.”

As well as a contraception use-case, the fertility tracking element naturally means it could also be used by women wanting to get pregnant.

“This product is not a tracker. We’re not looking to gather your data and then tell you next month what you should be feeling — at all,” she adds. “It’s more designed to track your hormones and tell you look this is the most basic change that happens in your body and because of those changes you will feel certain things. So do you feel them or not — and if you don’t, what does it mean? Or if you do what does it mean?

“It builds your own hormonal baseline — so you start measuring your hormones and we go okay so this is your baseline and now let’s look at things that go out of your baseline. And what do they mean?”

Of course the key question is how accurate is a saliva-based test for hormones as a method for predicting fertility? On this Rapti says Inne isn’t ready to share data about the product’s efficacy — but claims it will be publishing details of the various studies it conducted as part of the CE marking process in the next few weeks.

“A couple more weeks and all the hardcore numbers will be out there,” she says.

In terms of how it works in general the hormone measurement is “a combination of a biochemical reaction and the read out of it”, as she puts it — with the test itself being pure chemistry but algorithms then being applied to interpret the hormonal reading, looping in other signals such as the user’s cycle length, age and the time of day of the test.

She claims the biochemical hormone test the product relies on as its baseline for predicting fertility is based on similar principles to standard pregnancy tests — such as those that involve peeing on a stick to get a binary ‘pregnant’ or ‘not pregnant’ result. “We are focused on specifically fertility hormones,” she says.

“Our device is a medical device. It’s CE-certified in Europe and to do that you have to do all kinds of verification and performance evaluation studies. They will be published pretty soon. I cannot tell you too much in detail but to develop something like that we had to do verification studies, performance evaluation studies, so all of that is done.”

While it developed and “validated” the approach in-house, Rapti notes that it also worked with a number of external diagnostic companies to “optimize” the test.

“The science behind it is pretty straightforward,” she adds. “Your hormones behave in a specific way — they go from a low to a high to a low again, and what you’re looking for is building that trend… What we are building is an individual curve per user. The starting and the ending point in terms of values can be different but it is the same across the cycle for one user.”

“When you enter a field like biochemistry as an outsider a lot of the academics will tell you about the incredible things you could do in the future. And there are plenty,” she adds. “But I think what has made a difference to us is we always had this manufacturability in mind. So if you ask me there’s plenty of ways you can detect hormones that are spectacular but need about ten years of development let alone being able to manufacture it at scale. So it was important to me to find a technology that would allow us to do it effectively, repeatedly but also manufacture it at a low cost — so not reinventing the whole wheel.”

Rapti says Inne is controlling for variability in the testing process by controlling when users take the measurement (although that’s clearly not directly within its control, even if it can send an in-app reminder); controlling how much saliva is extracted per test; and controlling how much of the sample is tested — saying “that’s all done mechanically; you don’t do that”.

“The beauty about hormones is they do not get influenced by lack of sleep, they do not get influenced by getting out of your bed — and this is the reason why I wanted to opt to actually measure them,” she adds, saying she came up with the idea for the product as a user of natural contraception searching for a better experience. (Rapti is not herself trained in medical or life sciences.)

“When I started the company I was using the temperature method [of natural contraception] and I thought it cannot be that I have to take this measurement from my bed otherwise my measurement’s invalid,” she adds.

However there are other types of usage restrictions Inne users will need to observe in order to avoid negatively affecting the hormonal measurements.

Firstly they must take the test in the same time window each time — either in the morning or the evening but sticking to one of those choices for good.

They also need to stick to daily testing for at least a full menstrual cycle. Plus there are certain days in the month when testing will always be essential, per Rapti, even as she suggests a “learning element” might allow for the odd missed test day later on, i.e. once enough data has been inputted.

Users also have to avoid drinking and eating for 30 minutes before taking the test. She further specifies this half hour pre-test restriction includes not having oral sex — “because that also affects the measurements”.

“There’s a few indications around it,” she concedes, adding: “The product is super easy to use but it is not for women who want to not think ever about contraception or their bodies. I believe that for these women the IUD would be the perfect solution because they never have to think about it. This product is for women who consciously do not want to take hormones and don’t want invasive devices — either because they’ve been in pain or they’re interested in being natural and not taking hormones.”

At this stage Inne hasn’t performed any comparative studies vs established contraception methods such as the pill. So unless or until it does users won’t be able to assess the relative risk of falling pregnant while using it against more tried and tested contraception methods.

Rapti says the plan is to run more clinical studies in the coming year, helped by the new funding. But these will be more focused on what additional insights can be extracted from the test to feed the product proposition — rather than on further efficacy (or any comparative) tests.

They’ve also started the process of applying for FDA certification to be able to enter the US market in future.

Beyond natural contraception and fertility tracking, Inne is thinking about wider applications for its approach to hormone tracking — such as providing women with information about the menopause, based on longer term tracking of their hormone levels. Or to help manage conditions such as endometriosis, which is one of the areas where it wants to do further research.

The intent is to be the opposite of binary, she suggests, by providing adult women with a versatile tool to help them get closer to and understand changes in their bodies for a range of individual needs and purposes.

“I want to shift the way people perceive our female bodies to be binary,” she adds. “Our bodies are not binary, they change around the month. So maybe this month you want to avoid getting pregnant and maybe next month you actually want to get pregnant. It’s the same body that you need to understand to help you do that.”

Commenting on the Series A in a supporting statement, Louise Samet, partner at Blossom Capital, said: “Inne has a winning combination of scientific validity plus usability that can enable women to better understand their bodies at all stages in their lives. What really impressed us is the team’s meticulous focus on design and easy-of-use together with the scientific validity and clear ambition to impact women all over the world.”

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The nightmare videos of childrens' YouTube ? and what's wrong with the internet today | James Bridle

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The nightmare videos of childrens' YouTube ? and what's wrong with the internet today | James Bridle

I’m James. I’m a writer and artist, and that i make work about technology. I do matters like draw existence-dimension outlines of army drones in city streets around the world, in order that individuals can to suppose and get their heads around these relatively rather tough-to-see and tough-to-consider-about applied sciences. I make matters like neural networks that predict the outcome of elections centered on weather reviews, when you consider that i am intrigued about what the exact prospects of those bizarre new technologies are.Last year, I built my own self-using auto. However when you consider that i don’t quite believe science, I also designed a lure for it. (Laughter) and i do these matters most of the time for the reason that I to find them thoroughly exciting, but in addition for the reason that I think when we talk about science, we’re generally speaking about ourselves and the best way that we realize the world. So this is a story about science. This can be a "surprise egg" video. It can be sincerely a video of any person opening up a variety of chocolate eggs and showing the toys inside to the viewer. That’s it. That is all it does for seven lengthy minutes.And i want you to detect two matters about this. First of all, this video has 30 million views. (Laughter) And the other factor is, it comes from a channel that has 6.3 million subscribers, that has a whole of eight billion views, and it is all simply extra movies like this — 30 million men and women gazing a man opening up these eggs. It sounds beautiful weird, but should you search for "shock eggs" on YouTube, it is going to tell you there is 10 million of those movies, and i think that’s an undercount. I suppose there is means, way more of these. In case you preserve looking, they are endless. There is hundreds of thousands and millions of these movies in increasingly baroque mixtures of brands and materials, and there may be increasingly of them being uploaded day-after-day. Like, this can be a strange world. Proper? However the thing is, it can be no longer adults who are staring at these videos.It’s kids, babies. These videos are like crack for sons and daughters. There may be something concerning the repetition, the consistent little dopamine hit of the reveal, that totally hooks them in. And little kids watch these videos over and time and again, they usually do it for hours and hours and hours. And if you try and take the display faraway from them, they are going to scream and scream and scream. For those who do not consider me — and i have already visible humans in the viewers nodding — should you do not feel me, to find anybody with small children and ask them, and they will comprehend in regards to the shock egg movies. So this is where we start. It can be 2018, and someone, or plenty of folks, are making use of the same mechanism that, like, facebook and Instagram are making use of to get you to preserve checking that app, and they’re utilizing it on YouTube to hack the brains of very babies in return for promoting sales. At the least, i hope that’s what they’re doing. I am hoping that is what they may be doing it for, on the grounds that there is less complicated approaches of making ad earnings on YouTube.That you could just make stuff up or steal stuff. So if you happen to seek for relatively widespread kids’ cartoons like "Peppa Pig" or "Paw Patrol," you’ll to find there may be millions and thousands of these on-line as well. Of direction, most of them don’t seem to be posted through the usual content material creators. They arrive from masses and loads of exceptional random money owed, and it’s unimaginable to grasp who’s posting them or what their factors probably. Does that sound variety of acquainted? For the reason that it’s precisely the same mechanism that’s taking place throughout most of our digital offerings, where it is unimaginable to understand the place this understanding is coming from.It’s in actual fact false information for kids, and we’re coaching them from delivery to click on on the very first link that comes along, regardless of what the supply is. That’s doesn’t appear like a very excellent suggestion. Here’s one other thing that’s really gigantic on kids’ YouTube. This is referred to as the "Finger loved ones track." I simply heard any individual groan within the viewers. That is the "Finger loved ones tune." that is the very first one I might to find. It is from 2007, and it only has 200,000 views, which is, like, nothing in this sport. But it surely has this insanely earwormy tune, which i’m not going to play to you, seeing that it is going to sear itself into your mind within the same approach that it seared itself into mine, and i’m now not going to do this to you. But just like the shock eggs, it’s got inside youngsters’ heads and addicted them to it.So within a few years, these finger loved ones movies start showing everywhere, and also you get versions in extraordinary languages with popular kids’ cartoons making use of food or, frankly, using anything sort of animation factors you appear to have lying around. And as soon as once more, there are millions and millions and millions of those movies to be had on-line in all of those kind of insane combos. And the extra time you start to spend with them, the crazier and crazier you to think that you might be. And that is where I style of launched into this, that feeling of deep strangeness and deep lack of knowledge of how this factor used to be constructed that appears to be offered around me. In view that it can be unattainable to grasp where these matters are coming from. Like, who’s making them? Some of them show up to be product of groups of respectable animators. Some of them are simply randomly assembled by using software. Some of them are particularly healthful-looking younger kids’ entertainers. And a few of them are from folks who particularly clearly just isn’t around youngsters in any respect.(Laughter) And once again, this impossibility of deciding who’s making this stuff — like, it is a bot? Is this a character? Is that this a troll? What does it imply that we can not tell the difference between these matters anymore? And once more, doesn’t that uncertainty consider type of familiar correct now? So the fundamental approach individuals get views on their videos — and bear in mind, views imply cash — is that they stuff the titles of those movies with these general terms. So you are taking, like, "surprise eggs" and then you definitely add "Paw Patrol," "Easter egg," or whatever these things are, all of these phrases from other popular videos into your title, except you come to be with this variety of meaningless mash of language that does not make sense to people in any respect. Considering the fact that of direction it is best particularly tiny kids who are staring at your video, and what the hell do they understand? Your actual viewers for this stuff is application. It can be the algorithms. It can be the software that YouTube uses to decide on which movies are like other videos, to make them popular, to make them endorsed. And that’s why you become with this form of completely meaningless mash, each of title and of content.However the factor is, you have got to recollect, there relatively are still persons within this algorithmically optimized system, persons who are variety of increasingly forced to act out these increasingly bizarre combos of words, like a determined improvisation artist responding to the combined screams of a million children directly. There are actual individuals trapped inside these methods, and that’s the opposite deeply unusual thing about this algorithmically driven tradition, when you consider that even supposing you’re human, you have to turn out to be behaving like a desktop just to outlive. And also, on the other part of the screen, there still are these sons and daughters watching these things, caught, their full awareness grabbed with the aid of these bizarre mechanisms. And most of these kids are too small to even use a internet site. They’re simply type of hammering on the monitor with their little arms. And so there is autoplay, the place it simply continues taking part in these movies time and again and over in a loop, forever for hours and hours at a time.And there is a lot weirdness within the procedure now that autoplay takes you to a few pretty unusual places. That is how, inside a dozen steps, that you may go from a cute video of a counting coach to masturbating Mickey Mouse. Yeah. I am sorry about that. This does worsen. That is what happens when all of those extraordinary keyword phrases, all these specific pieces of attention, this determined generation of content, all comes collectively right into a single place. This is the place all these deeply bizarre key terms come home to roost. You go-breed the finger loved ones video with some live-action superhero stuff, you add in some bizarre, trollish in-jokes or something, and suddenly, you come to an awfully weird location certainly.The stuff that tends to upset mothers and fathers is the stuff that has form of violent or sexual content material, proper? Kid’s cartoons getting assaulted, getting killed, weird pranks that definitely honestly terrify children. What you’ve got is application pulling in all of those exclusive influences to mechanically generate children’ worst nightmares. And this stuff really, particularly does have an effect on small children. Mom and dad report their kids being traumatized, fitting fearful of the dark, fitting fearful of their favorite caricature characters. If you happen to take one thing away from this, it’s that when you have young children, preserve them the hell away from YouTube. (Applause) however the thing more, the article that fairly will get to me about this, is that i’m now not definite we even rather recognize how we obtained to this point. We have now taken all of this affect, all of those things, and munged them collectively in a method that no person relatively supposed. And yet, that is additionally the way in which that we’re building the entire world. We’re taking all of this knowledge, a lot of it bad knowledge, a lot of ancient knowledge full of prejudice, filled with all of our worst impulses of historical past, and we’re building that into giant data units after which we’re automating it.And we’re munging it together into things like credit experiences, into coverage premiums, into matters like predictive policing techniques, into sentencing recommendations. That is the best way we’re really developing the arena in these days out of this information. And that i have no idea what’s worse, that we constructed a method that seems to be totally optimized for absolutely the worst aspects of human conduct, or that we look to have performed it accidentally, without even realizing that we were doing it, in view that we did not fairly realize the systems that we have been building, and we did not quite have an understanding of the best way to do something another way with it.There is a few things I consider that quite seem to be riding this most thoroughly on YouTube, and the primary of these is promoting, which is the monetization of awareness without any real different variables at work, any care for the individuals who’re truly constructing this content, the centralization of the power, the separation of those matters. And i think nonetheless you believe about the use of advertising to style of support stuff, the sight of grown guys in diapers rolling around in the sand in the hope that an algorithm that they do not rather appreciate will provide them cash for it suggests that this usually isn’t the item that we should be basing our society and culture upon, and the way in which in which we should be funding it.And the other factor that is sort of the essential driver of that is automation, which is the deployment of all of this technological know-how as quickly because it arrives, with none form of oversight, after which as soon as it can be available in the market, type of throwing up our fingers and going, "hey, it’s no longer us, it can be the technological know-how." Like, "We’re now not worried in it." that is no longer rather excellent adequate, when you consider that this stuff is not only algorithmically ruled, it’s also algorithmically policed. When YouTube first started to pay attention to this, the very first thing they mentioned they’d do about it used to be that they’d deploy better computer studying algorithms to average the content material. Well, desktop finding out, as any expert in it’ll inform you, is sincerely what we’ve began to call application that we do not rather have an understanding of how it works.And i suppose we have sufficient of that already. We is just not leaving this stuff as much as AI to come to a decision what’s proper or now not, in view that we all know what happens. It will censoring other things. It’s going to censoring queer content material. It’s going to begin censoring reliable public speech. What’s allowed in these discourses, it is just not anything that’s left as much as unaccountable programs. It can be part of a discussion everybody must be having. But i’d depart a reminder that the alternative isn’t very quality, both. YouTube also announced recently that they’re going to unlock a version of their kids’ app that will be wholly moderated by people. Fb — Zuckerberg said so much the identical thing at Congress, when pressed about how they have been going to reasonable their stuff.He said they’d have humans doing it. And what that quite method is, rather of having tots being the primary man or woman to see these items, you’re going to have underpaid, precarious contract workers without appropriate mental wellness support being damaged by way of it as well. (Laughter) and that i consider we are able to all do particularly much better than that. (Applause) The proposal, I believe, that brings those two things together, rather, for me, is agency. It is like, how a lot can we rather comprehend — by way of company, I imply: how we know how to act in our possess first-rate pursuits. Which — it is virtually impossible to do in these techniques that we don’t really wholly understand.Inequality of energy continually leads to violence. And we are able to see inside these methods that inequality of working out does the identical factor. If there’s one factor that we are able to do to start to strengthen these systems, it’s to make them more legible to the people who use them, so that all of us have a common figuring out of what is truly going on right here. The object, although, I consider most about these methods is that this isn’t, as i’m hoping I’ve explained, rather about YouTube.It is about the whole thing. These problems of accountability and agency, of opacity and complexity, of the violence and exploitation that inherently results from the attention of power in a number of palms — these are a lot, a lot bigger disorders. And they’re problems now not simply of YouTube and now not just of technological know-how mostly, and they’re no longer even new. They’ve been with us for a long time. However we in the end developed this method, this global system, the web, that’s certainly showing them to us on this wonderful means, making them undeniable. Technological know-how has this extraordinary capacity to both instantiate and proceed all of our most exclusive, most of the time hidden wants and biases and encoding them into the sector, but it additionally writes them down so that we will see them, in order that we cannot faux they do not exist anymore. We have got to discontinue occupied with technological know-how as a strategy to all of our problems, but believe of it as a guide to what those issues in reality are, so that it will start fascinated by them adequately and start to handle them. Thanks very much. (Applause) thanks. (Applause) Helen Walters: James, thanks for coming and giving us that talk.So it is intriguing: when you feel concerning the movies where the robotic overlords take over, it’s all a bit extra glamorous than what you’re describing. But i’m wondering — in those movies, you will have the resistance mounting. Is there a resistance mounting closer to this stuff? Do you see any positive indicators, inexperienced shoots of resistance? James Bridle: I do not know about direct resistance, given that I think these things is tremendous long-time period.I feel it can be baked into tradition in fairly deep methods. A pal of mine, Eleanor Saitta, perpetually says that any technological problems of ample scale and scope are political problems to start with. So all of these things we’re working to deal with inside this aren’t going to be addressed simply via building the technological know-how better, but certainly through altering the society that’s producing these technologies. So no, right now, I suppose we’ve got bought a hell of a long strategy to go. However as I mentioned, I think via unpacking them, with the aid of explaining them, by means of speaking about them super honestly, we will truly begin to as a minimum that process.HW: And so when you speak about legibility and digital literacy, I to find it intricate to think that we must place the burden of digital literacy on customers themselves. But whose responsibility is schooling on this new world? JB: once more, I consider this responsibility is variety of as much as every body, that the whole lot we do, the whole lot we construct, the whole thing we make, wants to be made in a consensual dialogue with every person who’s fending off it; that we’re no longer building programs meant to trick and surprise individuals into doing the right thing, however that they may be genuinely involved in every step in educating them, considering the fact that each of these methods is educational. That’s what i am hopeful about, about even this relatively grim stuff, that if that you can take it and appear at it thoroughly, it can be really in itself a bit of education that permits you to begin seeing how complex methods come together and work and might be be equipped to apply that capabilities in different places in the world.HW: James, it’s such an major dialogue, and i do know many persons here are rather open and all set to have it, so thanks for establishing off our morning. JB: Thanks very much. Cheers. (Applause) .